Hey, Ava, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

You just finished spending a bunch of time with Curtis Yarvin. Is there a specific experience that you had with Yarvin?

Or is there a specific thing that he said that you just can't get out of your mind?

Like, what's keeping you up at night after reporting this story?

That's such a great question.

To me and everyone else I've been talking to and the news reports I've been reading, you know, it seems like we're living in a constitutional crisis.

And again and again, I was really struck by

how disappointed Yarvin was about the current Trump administration's actions. In our conversations,

Yarvan kept emphasizing that he felt like the actions that the administration were taking were

kind of baby steps or weak tea.

There was almost this kind of contemptuous or wounded tone that he took when talking about the administration,

as though he'd kind of been betrayed by the kind of half measures of autocratic takeover that had happened so far.

That was a theme we kept returning to and that I think has kind of continued to

kind of stay with me, this idea that actually, for some people, what's happening might not be

enough at all. So the kind of question for the piece and the reason to do the piece was to wonder

how the Overton window shifted and how these ideas that seemed so far out there were now

becoming part of the mainstream.

And part of that is through some of the kind of powerful figures that have created this vibe shift on the tech right for a more candid and troubling embrace of authoritarian rule.

That's Ava Kaufman. She's a staff writer for the New Yorker, and she just finished profiling Curtis Jarvin,

one of the most polarizing figures in the far-right ecosystem.

Yarvin's a computer scientist turned blogger, who's been calling for an American monarchy,

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