Advice for smart, right-leaning Zoomers
Some bills on the sidewalk
The following is a section of my brief viatext interview with The Lion and the fox. Read the whole thing there.
When Peter Thiel was at Stanford, everyone knows that he started the Stanford Review. But people forget that he got money for this from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—an org started by one William Frank Buckley. This still exists, and they still give those right-wing student newspapers grants.
To strive in this greater right-wing internet nexus (and a lot of the rest of the world) is to learn to live in spiraling networks of mentors and mentees, minnows organizing themselves around whales like Thiel, the Red Scare girls, and Cowen. I’ve spent some time here, and I have lived well enough. Of course, I’ve missed a lot of opportunities, but—in the spirit of Patrick Collison and Nabeel Qureshi—here are some of the things I’ve found helpful:
Send more cold emails—this is probably the best advice I can give you. Most people should be sending 10x more. Aspire not to have a single living hero you haven’t met.
Have a general idea of what is going on where (SF—Yarvin + most Twitter people, NYC—Sovereign House, DC—GMU), and try to spend as much time as you can in all those places. Agglomeration effects are no joke.
Go to more conferences and parties. At least at good colleges, there’s usually a lot of money available for undergrads to go to conferences. Use this enthusiastically. If any of you reading this are ever in New York and want to get into Sovereign House, DM me on Twitter.
Going to right wing parties is very synergistic with reading blogs and being into Twitter discourse. If you regularly read a lot of blogs, you’ll have a lot to talk about with the people who write those blogs. In fact, you’ll find that the only people you’ll have anything to say to at these parties are the “microcelebrities”—the successful bloggers and big Twitter accounts—so you’ll naturally talk to them.
Don’t worry about bothering microcelebrities. They aren’t actually famous. And even people at Sovereign House have read them much less than you think.
Avoid “networking.” Make friends with people you actually like. It’s especially rewarding to have same-age friends you grow alongside: Theo Jaffee, who I’ve known since the first grade, is a strong example of that for me.
Still, it’s not a sin to be strategic about mentorships: To pat myself on the back, Curtis has gotten ≈3x as famous as he was when I first went to work for him.
And if you do “network,” it’s classier to do it on behalf of others. Typically, you know someone who could benefit from a meeting or job more than you can. Repay such favors.
Again, Hanania called rationalism, “The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.” I’d encourage a lot of you guys to apply this lens to the “normal”/cathedral institutions. Ofc they suck in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean they would suck for *you*. Don’t not try to go to Harvard just because you understand how evil they are. It’s far worse for Harvard if you’re there! Be the only kid at Harvard willing to talk on Fox News or testify in front of Congress about how much they suck—it’s a good niche.
On basically the same note: Have a realistic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream media. Reflect carefully on Scott Alexander’s “The Media Very Rarely Lies” and Hanania’s “The Media is Honest and Good.”
Take every opportunity to make public appearances.
Make a Manifold account and use it to practice your epistemic habits.
Apply for an Emergent Ventures Grant. Tyler Cowen personally interviews everyone, and if you’re younger than 21 and understand his perspective, you can generally get an “Early Career Support” grant of ≈5k. If you’re under 21 or not, though, look through the list of winners to get a feel for the kinds of things they fund, and consider what you could try that’s like that.
In preparation for applying, sign up for emails from Tyler Cowen’s blog (perhaps the most influential in the world) so you know what’s on his mind.
Getting a grant is just the first step. Once you have the grant, you’re part of the network. EV will fly you to their yearly conferences, and you’ll be added to the group chat. Make a good impression on Tyler Cowen. He can write you letters of recommendation.
Strongly consider transferring colleges—you very probably aren’t considering it strongly enough. Our generation was excluded from the finest institutions of higher education by overt, illegal bias. There is now some indication things have changed for the better. Cornell and Columbia tend to have relatively high transfer acceptance rates. And Columbia, in particular, is a really promising place for a right wing kid because of its law school1, proximity to Sovereign House, and program General Studies.
Take gap years. Many forget you can do this strategically to get extra cycles for transfer applications!
Try to take classes with professors you actually like, and take them to lunch. Being right wing in the American educational system has downsides, of course, but there are also some upsides. You’ve probably noticed that it’s extremely rare for young Americans to be authentically interested in and engaged with ideas. Every year in college application essays, millions ape this to lesser and greater degrees. We don’t have to ape. Right wing teenagers actually have read books by professors from Chicago and Harvard, and truly have ambitions to study things at Yale you can’t study elsewhere. You can use this to your advantage.
Generally, you won’t get graded down by professors for being right wing at American universities. They’ll usually be happy that someone actually cares.
Do summer programs like Hudson Institute’s and Hertog’s. Just look at Nick Whitaker’s LinkedIn and try to emulate that.
If you’re more into labor markets, consider dropping out of college or even high school. Apply for a Thiel Fellowship—this is an IRL place where online clout is useful. You always have to be looking for situations like that.
Build online clout—and at this point Twitter is the only social networking that really matters for the Western right. In most situations, it’s best—as much as possible—to leave open the possibility of writing under your real name.
Remember that there are kinds of status (broadly construed) that are illegible in most contexts but are nonetheless extremely valuable. Like remember the Time 100 most influential people in AI list? Obviously, Dwarkesh Patel should be on there, as should Leopold Aschenbrenner and regrettably even Beff Jezos. But they’d never be on the list, even though they’re—in the truest possible sense of the word—extremely influential. Still, generally endeavor to find ways to translate less legible status into more legible status.
Write an article for Stripe’s Works In Progress magazine or Palantir’s The Republic. This is excellent because of the synergy: not only is it a very honest signal you have expertise on some important issue, but it can also temper your scattered knowledge and ambition into real expertise!
Or if you’re not into that sort of thing, at least win a Passage Prize.
Try playing quizbowl. Steve Sailer was one of the best players of all time, and I, Curtis Yarvin, Cremieux, Pericles Abassi, Nemets, Greg Cochrane and surely others I’m not aware of all played the game; the overrepresentation is immense. At least 5/30 of the most influential voices on Right Wing Twitter played the game!
Strongly consider going to law school. This is the only cranny of American education where it is net helpful to be right wing2, and admission generally comes down to a highly g-loaded test. Last year, I spent like a week hanging out at Yale Law Fed Soc—I think this place is our Neorxnawang.
If you’re thinking of doing this, try publishing a law review article while you’re in undergrad.
If you’re female, read J. Sanilac and follow his advice dogmatically. It wouldn’t be unjustified to make an Anki.
If you’re male, don’t obsess over PUA shit. Just increase your standards for hygiene and wardrobe, and try to increase your status. This generally will solve your women problem. But even if it doesn’t, at least you got higher status!
Memorize some poems.
If you can have an impact on someone, give as much advice as you have to. Drag them out of the hole. It’s worth it.
Be right wing. There is something special about what we are doing. It’s the most interesting, the most fun, the most underrated, and perhaps the most rewarding place in a generally gray contemporary world. And almost all of the promise remains in the future.
Any university with a good law school is going to have a relatively strong right wing subculture because of the Federalist Society.
The basic model as to why: school quality is based on clerkship placements, and 50% of federal judges are Republicans, while 1% of good law students are.
Point 22 is a special case of the general point that one should build an online presence. The particular optimal website varies over time and depends on the type of discourse that matches one's strengths and interests: it could be Twitter, Substack, Wikipedia (!), or a combination thereof. What does not change is that the most interesting people live on the Internet, and contributing online content puts out breadcrumbs for them to find you.
"Crimieux" That should be 'Cremieux.'