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The far-right thinker Curtis Yarvin joined University Professor Danielle Allen for a debate Monday evening, where Yarvin in turn derided Harvard as “an essentially oligarchic institution” and suggested a reformed University could lie at the foundation of a new political order.

Yarvin, a Substack blogger who reportedly holds sway with Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is best known for his radical plan to replace American democracy with a monarchy modeled after a Silicon Valley start-up.

But with the election of President Donald Trump, Yarvin’s once-fringe ideas have gone mainstream. In the span of a month, Yarvin appeared at a glamorous pre-inauguration gala and went on a whirlwind media tour — including a nearly hour long interview with The New York Times.

He can now add an appearance at Harvard to his star turn.

Although the debate — organized by Passage Publishing with the help of the undergraduate John Adams Society — was explicitly unsanctioned by the University, it was hosted at Harvard’s faculty club. At least five Harvard University Police Department officers circled the building.

Eighty attendees filled every seat in the club’s main dining room for the hour-long debate, which was bookended by mingling over drinks and charcuterie.

John Adams Society chairman Charles S. DeMatteo ’26 said as he left the event that Yarvin’s appearance was a boon for discourse at Harvard, noting that “you aren’t really going to hear Yarvin’s ideas from any professor here.”

“I mean, the Harvard administration, obviously, is supporting it to some extent,” DeMatteo said. “They didn’t sponsor it, but they could have shut it down if they wanted.”

The debate between Yarvin and Allen focused on two questions: an argument over whether democratic institutions or concentrated executive authority were more effective governance structures, and a secondary contest over whether Harvard’s role in shaping the American elite was compatible with democracy.

In his characteristically digressive mode — veering, at points, into the Salem Witch Trials, the trial of 20th-century fascist thinker Julius Evola, and a mix of debated and conspiracist claims on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic — Yarvin made the case that American democracy had turned oligarchic and opaque.

“Those institutions are quite unaccountable,” Yarvin said. “Nobody elected Anthony Fauci when he basically supervised the program to invent Covid. Nobody elected Anthony Fauci when he covered it up.”

Allen, a political philosopher who holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank, conceded that the American political system was “not functioning to the standard of democracy” but objected to Yarvin’s burn-it-all-down solution.

“The divergence is in whether the question is regime change to unaccountable CEO monarchs — Trump and Musk — or renovating our democracy,” Allen said.

Likewise, Allen and Yarvin agreed that elite institutions like Harvard needed reform of some sort, but disagreed from there.

Allen called for a new “social contract” to reconnect expertise to on-the-ground realities. Yarvin doubled down on his claim that elites and intellectuals — from Harvard and other institutions — were setting “unaccountable public policy.”

But Yarvin, who wrote in a 2021 Substack post that achieving “regime change” would require that “all accredited universities be both physically and economically liquidated,” seemed to rein in his most apocalyptic criticisms of Harvard at the Monday event.

Instead, he said Harvard should be remade, not destroyed, arguing that universities would be foundational to his reimagined political system. The authoritarian populism of the Trump administration, he argued, remained hollow and fragile “without a backbone of prestige, without a backbone of aristocracy, without institutions.”

In an interview after the event, Yarvin said, “Harvard matters. Harvard’s ideals matter. Veritas matters.”

“The idea of Mar-a-Lago being where America’s best scientists gather, or America’s best poets gather — in the court of Donald Trump — is, I’m afraid, somewhat comical,” he added. “And actually getting past that is really the challenge of authoritarian populism today.”

Yarvin and Allen sparred in the faculty club as Harvard stared down the start of its second month at the epicenter of Trump’s war on elite universities. Thirty minutes before the debate began, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the federal government would cut off grants to Harvard.

During the debate, Yarvin suggested that it could take intervention from the outside to purge Harvard of decay. But afterward, he said he disagreed with Trump’s onslaught of attacks against the University, claiming the administration’s demands were counterproductive and left Harvard with no choice but to fight back.

“The things that the Trump administration were asking for were, in many ways, things that they couldn’t give without compromising their mission,” Yarvin said.

“If the Trump administration found a way to ask of Harvard things that were entirely concordant with Harvard’s mission of Veritas, I think Harvard would have a tough time saying no,” he added.

At a reception following the talk, Martin Blelajac ’25, a John Adams Society member who coordinated the debate and recruited Allen, said he thought people at Harvard “are desperate to hear something new.”

“They feel like a lot of ideas at Harvard are stale,” he added. “There’s not a lot of conversation going on. I think that’s why the John Adams Society is so popular at the moment.”

Allen wrote in a statement prior to the event that she accepted the invitation to help students grapple with the ideas they encountered.

“To be honest, I have also been surprised by the degree of influence Mr. Yarvin has had, even among Harvard College students (one of our undergraduates was one of the first employees at DOGE),” Allen wrote.

“I think people do need to understand Yarvin’s argument, both what people are experiencing as attractions of it and its errors—which are profound. The stakes are very high,” she added.

DeMatteo said the talk with Yarvin and events like it helped reestablish Harvard as a hub of serious intellectual activity.

“His ideas are in the mainstream now,” DeMatteo said. “And I think Harvard should be a place where the most prominent, the smartest, most important people all come to be.”

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.