Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy.