How Establishments Respond to Dissident Upstarts

A few years ago I met Curtis Yarvin, the founder of the neoreactionary movement. Yarvin is a hardcore atheist materialist, but also a very smart software developer. I would never take his advice on designing a society, but he does have some interesting takes on how the modern world works.

As a dissident thinker with some extreme ideas, he’s obviously interested in how mainstream institutions, especially the media, respond to people like him.

He used a magical fantasy metaphor to describe their strategies, saying that the media has two “spells” that they will cast at dissident thinkers: Cone of Silence and Two-Minute Hate.

The initial strategy is Cone of Silence (a name taken from the old TV comedy show Get Smart). That is, they simply studiously ignore anything dissidents say and refuse to engage with them or their ideas at all.