# Curtis Yarvin — "RAGE: Retire All Government Employees" > [!quote] "RAGE: Retire All Government Employees." > — Curtis Yarvin (as "[[Mencius Moldbug]]"), BIL Conference, 2012-02-25 ## Context Yarvin introduced the RAGE acronym during a presentation at the BIL Conference in February 2012, an unconference held alongside TED in Long Beach, California. Writing under the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug" on his [[Unqualified Reservations]] blog at the time, Yarvin laid out his prescription for "rebooting" the American government: fire the entire career federal workforce and replace them with loyalists to a single executive authority. The concept recurred across his writing throughout the 2010s and re-entered mainstream discourse after he launched the Gray Mirror Substack in 2020 and appeared on [[Tucker Carlson]] Tonight on September 8, 2021 — Yarvin's first major cable-TV platform. By 2022 the program had been effectively adopted as policy framework: the [[Heritage Foundation]] [[Project 2025]] architecture, [[Russell Vought]]'s [[Center for Renewing America]], and the second Trump administration's [[Schedule F]] reclassification all descend from the RAGE logic. ## Why this matters RAGE is the **bridge** between Dark Enlightenment theory and operational Trump-era governance. It is the single clearest instance of a Yarvin coinage becoming US federal policy — not adjacent to policy, not an influence on policy, but the explicit model for Schedule F (first issued October 2020, reinstated 2025) and the [[DOGE Ecosystem]] workforce-reduction campaign. Three pattern-level throughlines: 1. **From fringe blogger to policy framework in ~12 years.** This is the canonical case study for how neoreactionary ideas laundered through Thiel-adjacent tech circles became executive orders. Cite whenever you're tracking the Yarvin → Thiel → Vance → administration pipeline. 2. **The "replace with loyalists" logic.** RAGE is not merely about firing civil servants. The second half — replacement with loyalists selected by a single executive — is what distinguishes it from conventional conservative deregulation. Trump's appointment of [[Kash Patel]] at FBI, the purge of inspectors general, and DOGE's embedding of private-sector operatives into agencies all execute this half of the plan. 3. **Tech-right self-disclosure.** Yarvin's program is explicit and on the record. Citing RAGE is how you demonstrate that the anti-administrative-state project is not a drift or an accident but a doctrine with an author. ## Verification - **Origin:** 2012 BIL Conference presentation, Long Beach, CA, February 25, 2012. Confirmed in Yarvin's Wikipedia article and multiple secondary sources (CNN 2025, Time 2025, The Nerd Reich 2025). - **Note on attribution style:** RAGE is a coined acronym Yarvin has used across presentations, essays, and interviews rather than a single quotable sentence. For receipts use, either (a) cite the BIL 2012 talk as origin and a later restatement (Tucker 2021, Gray Mirror essays) as mainstreaming, or (b) cite the acronym with its expansion as the canonical form, as done here. Both are defensible. - **Existing vault reference:** [[Curtis Yarvin]] Person page already summarizes RAGE at its core-ideas section — this Quote file is the atomic, linkable receipt that page should backlink to. ## Related quotes - [[Peter Thiel - freedom and democracy compatible]] - [[Marc Andreessen - Techno-Optimist enemies list]] ## Part of collections - [[Post-Democratic Tech-Right]] - [[Might Makes Right Doctrine]]