We’re conducting a health check on American democracy. In a new section that we’re calling “How Bad Is It?” we’ll be taking stock of the latest threats to civic life, with context from our experts—starting with Ronan Farrow on Elon Musk’s alleged drug use. But, first, how the blogger Curtis Yarvin became one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers. Plus: • The fight for guns in Lebanon • Riding the Knicks rollercoaster • The nineteenth-century enemy of marriage Staff writer The frantic search to identify the draftsmen behind the Trump Administration’s intellectual blueprint can often seem like a fool’s errand—not least because the President is driven by whim and vendetta. Those around him, however, take ideas seriously, including the radical proposals of the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin. Nearly two decades ago, Yarvin began composing a sprawling apologia for an authoritarian takeover of the United States on his self-described “anti-democracy blog,” where he called for “liquidating” the government, abolishing the press, and putting a C.E.O.-king in charge of the country. In 2022, he presciently outlined a plan for Donald Trump to appoint a strike force of “ninjas” to parachute into government agencies and shut them down. But this mission would not be limited to D.C., Yarvin said. The organs of civil society—Harvard, the Times, N.G.O.s—would also need to be destroyed. When I first heard about Yarvin, around 2015, from my roommate (a programmer who enjoyed reading political theory as a hobby; he has since become a historian), the blogger’s ideas seemed far-fetched, even comical. Now Vice-President J. D. Vance, the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen are among his most prominent fans. For a piece in this week’s issue, I spent dozens of hours in the past six months interviewing Yarvin—along with his family, friends, exes, former classmates, colleagues, and interlocutors—to better understand how a crankish software engineer, posting under the nom de internet Mencius Moldbug, became one of the country’s most influential illiberal thinkers. Yarvin often performs a pantomime of thinking, stitching his arguments together in a Trumpian fashion and jumping to conclusions that he proclaims as self-evident. A few weeks ago, he told me that “the right way for the international community to respond to Kim Jung Un” would be for Silicon Valley to buy North Korea for a hundred billion dollars—a deal that would be “done in a week, what an amazing property, it’s obvious when you think about it.” Given the embrace of his ideas by some of the country’s most powerful figures, I expected to find Yarvin in triumphant spirits when I met him the weekend before Trump’s Inauguration. Instead, I was struck by the dismissive, almost contemptuous tone in which he spoke of the new Administration, as though a cult band he’d been following for years had suddenly gone mainstream. What many Americans view as a constitutional crisis, Yarvin regards as weak tea. Trump, he contends, has not gone nearly far enough. Read “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America” » Elon Musk was “using drugs far more intensely than previously known,” as he was working closely with Trump’s Presidential campaign last year, the Times reported on Friday. Sources allege that Musk was using ketamine, Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, and Adderall. (“To be clear, I am NOT taking drugs!” Musk wrote this weekend on X.) Musk recently left the Trump Administration, stepping away from his role as the head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency. How bad is it? We reached out to Ronan Farrow, whose reporting, on how the U.S. government came to rely on Musk, included some of the earliest explicit reporting about what people around Musk described as excessive drug use, going beyond a recreational context and prompting concerns about his state of mind at work. “It’s very bad, but not in the way you might think,” he told us. “The bigger story isn’t about Musk or his psychopharmacology. It’s about the model of power we’ve built around him, and how public institutions are increasingly being replaced by private individuals operating without accountability. We’re seeing how that can put key functions of the state in the hands of individuals with erratic judgment. “The current Administration essentially designed DOGE to outsource government functions to billionaires,” he continued. “It has also granted Peter Thiel’s Palantir expanded access to personal data, raising surveillance concerns. It is trying to deepen the government’s reliance on private prison companies. We’re not just tolerating this model—we’re designing systems that rely on it.” Israeli forces continue to occupy five hilltops in southern Lebanon, in violation of the ceasefire agreement, and have been destroying entire villages in the country. Rania Abouzeid reports on how the Lebanese Army is trying to assert its authority. Read the story » Vinson Cunningham on the New York Knicks James Marcus on how Margaret Fuller set minds on fire From 2024: Luke Mogelson on battling under a canopy of drones in Ukraine Today’s Crossword Puzzle: It appears many times in Christian Marclay’s art film “The Clock”—six letters. Laugh Lines No. 22: Heaven. Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons. P.S. In 1970, Anthony Hiss sent a dispatch from New York City’s first pride parade. “Would you believe it! It looks like an invading army. It’s a gay Woodstock,” one marcher exclaimed, adding, “And after all those years I spent in psychotherapy!” 🌈 Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.