Understanding the New Reactionary Order
A decade ago, the Dark Enlightenment was an obscure online subculture; a handful of techno-futurists dreaming of monarchies run by CEOs and algorithms. Today, its ideas are shaping governments, influencing billionaires, and sanctifying the marriage of technology and theology.
This eleven-part series traces how a philosophy of hierarchy and control has become a moral creed for modern power. It follows the Dark Enlightenment’s migration from philosophy blogs to Silicon Valley boardrooms, from academic nihilism to Christian nationalism, and from the internet’s underworld to the corridors of state.
Each essay can be read on its own but when read together, they reveal a coherent story: how faith, wealth, and ideology combine to justify domination, and call it order. To help you make a start, we have given a brief overview of each essay’s topic and made suggestions of groups to read through.
As we write new essays connected to these themes, we will link them here.
1. The Dark Enlightenment Lens: Understanding the Slow Strangulation of Democracy
The opening essay introduces the Dark Enlightenment as more than an internet curiosity. It explores its central ideas - hierarchy over equality, order over liberty, control over consensus - and shows how they infiltrate democratic systems from within.
2. The Shadow of Christian Nationalism: J.D. Vance, the Vice Presidency, and the Threat to Pluralism
This chapter explores how Christian nationalism merges with anti-egalitarian thought. It examines J.D. Vance as a political vessel for reactionary theology, a figure who transforms religious moralism into a blueprint for exclusionary power.
3. Silicon Valley’s Unholy Alliance: How Tech Wealth Powers the New Religious Right
Here we follow the money. Silicon Valley billionaires, venture capitalists, and crypto evangelists bankroll movements that seek to fuse capitalism with faith and hierarchy. The result is a moral economy in which profit becomes virtue.
4. From Heidegger to Here: The Philosophical Roots of America’s Alt-Right
This essay traces the philosophical lineage from Heidegger and Nietzsche to the pseudo-intellectual foundations of the Alt-Right and NRx. It shows how existentialism, romantic nationalism, and nihilism were repurposed for reactionary politics.
5. Accelerating Toward Autocracy: Nick Land’s Vision and Its Implementation
Nick Land’s “accelerationism” imagined capitalism pushed to its limits until democracy collapsed under its own contradictions. This piece follows how those ideas escaped the confines of academia and began to shape elite thinking about progress and control.
6. The Silicon Valley Kingmaker: Neocameralism’s Corporate Takeover and the CEO-Ruler
Neocameralism reframes the state as a corporation and citizens as shareholders without rights. This essay examines how this model seduces Silicon Valley and reshapes governance around data, profit, and executive decree.
7. The Hyperstition President: How Trump Became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Trump, as a hyperstitional figure, turned political fantasy into reality through belief alone. This essay explores how myth, meme, and mass psychology merged to make him the living embodiment of reactionary accelerationism.
8. The Palantir’s Gaze: How Peter Thiel’s Anti-Democratic Vision Shapes Trump’s Surveillance State
Peter Thiel’s companies, especially Palantir, embody the Dark Enlightenment’s dream of total oversight. This part follows how surveillance capitalism, data warfare, and elite ideology merge in the machinery of modern governance.
9. The Billionaire Prophet: How Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Theology Justifies Dismantling Democracy
Thiel’s self-appointed role as prophet of collapse blends Christian eschatology with libertarian capitalism. We explore how his apocalyptic faith rationalises inequality and gives spiritual cover to authoritarian ambition.
10. The Architect of American Fascism: How Stephen Miller Is Building the Authoritarian State
Stephen Miller’s policies are the Dark Enlightenment made real; bureaucracy turned weapon. This essay shows how ideas that began in online manifestos have found a home in the administrative state.
11. Carl Schmitt: How a Nazi Theorist Became the Prophet of Modern Authoritarianism
Carl Schmitt’s ideas about sovereignty, the “state of exception,” and the friend–enemy divide underpin modern authoritarianism. His work still informs technocrats, nationalists, and political theologians seeking to legitimise rule through crisis.
Suggested Reading Pathways
You don’t have to read all eleven parts in order. Taken together, they reveal the full architecture of the modern reactionary mind.
1. The Complete Arc (Parts 1–11)
For readers who want the entire story, from philosophy to policy, myth to machinery.
Best for: scholars, journalists, and readers following the long arc of power.
2. The Techno-Political Thread (Parts 3, 5, 6, 8, 9)
If you’re drawn to Silicon Valley, AI, and the fusion of capitalism and control, start here.
Best for: readers focused on technology, data, and governance.
3. The Theological and Moral Thread (Parts 2, 7, 9, 11)
This path follows how religion, morality, and myth legitimise domination, from Christian nationalism to Schmitt’s political theology.
Best for: readers exploring faith, ethics, and authoritarianism.
4. The Cultural–Mythic Thread (Parts 1, 4, 7, 10, 11)
This pathway examines how fascist ideology operates through culture, myth, and emotion rather than law or policy. It focuses on the aesthetic and psychological foundations of power.
Best for: readers interested in art, propaganda, gender, nationalism, and the emotional logic of authoritarianism.
You Decide the Order
Each essay stands alone, but together they tell a deeper truth: how a reactionary worldview, once dismissed as fringe, now shapes the moral and political logic of our age.
Read one or read them all. What matters is seeing the pattern.
From Series to Book
The Dark Enlightenment: The Gospel According to Power will form the basis of our first full-length book - an expanded investigation into the new reactionary order.
The book will draw together the essays in this series with new chapters on myth-making, class politics, digital control, and the weaponisation of morality. It will connect the philosophical and theological roots of the Dark Enlightenment to its lived consequences: the politics of fear, inequality, and faith in the West.
At its heart, this project asks a single question: How did power learn to disguise itself as virtue?
Subscribers to Notes From Plague Island will receive updates as we develop the manuscript - drafts, research notes, and early chapters - in the months ahead.