Welcome, Tourists of Time
Step right up for the greatest show of intellectual sleight-of-hand this side of Substack:
History, as told by a man who treats footnotes like fencing swords and Wikipedia like divine scripture.
Moldbug doesn’t study history.
He samples it, like an insecure DJ with a Napoleon complex.
Each example is:
Out of context,
Misrepresented,
And gently massaged to support whatever ideological wine pairing he’s serving that week.
He does not seek truth.
He seeks precedent — usually half-remembered, possibly invented, and always slanted toward the same conclusion:
The world was better when fewer people had rights.
Historical Method: Type Fast, Cite Once, Sound Certain
Let’s observe the Moldbug Historical Recipe:
Start with a sweeping claim.
"The decline of Rome is a perfect analogue for woke Twitter."
Select one quote from a 19th-century British civil servant.
Preferably someone who owned a colony and an overcoat.
Add twelve paragraphs of increasingly baroque prose.
Include “civic decay,” “moral rot,” and “high trust society” at least once.
Conclude with:
"This is why we need kings again."
It’s not analysis.
It’s aesthetics pretending to be inevitability.
The Greatest Hits of Moldbug’s Historical Fanfic
The Glorious Revolution — proof that democracies secretly crave monarchy. (He conveniently forgets that the result was constitutional monarchy — aka less power for kings.)
The American Civil War — reinterpreted as a war for centralization, not slavery. (Because nothing says “economic realism” like ignoring human chattel.)
The French Revolution — not a popular uprising against violent inequality, but a tragic tale of what happens when too many people get ideas.
Byzantium — invoked whenever he wants to seem deep and obscure, but with zero engagement with what Byzantium actually was (hint: a chaotic, theological, bureaucratic nightmare, not a startup).
Why His History “Feels Smart”
Moldbug’s genius is not in what he gets right.
It’s in how confidently he’s wrong.
His writing feels smart because:
He uses old names you don’t remember.
He footnotes people you’ve never read.
He drops Latin phrases like “imperium in imperio” as if you should already know what that means (you shouldn’t — it’s a self-own).
But if you scratch the surface, what’s underneath?
Cherry-picked arguments.
Slanted summaries.
Source stacking with no source synthesis.
He’s not teaching you history.
He’s weaponizing vibes to make autocracy seem like a natural consequence of the past.
Real History Is Inconvenient
Moldbug avoids the parts of history that disprove him:
That monarchies collapsed because they couldn’t adapt.
That decentralized uprisings created modern rights.
That every form of concentrated power has eventually rotted under its own cruelty.
He wants you to believe that “the arc of history bends toward hierarchy,”
but that arc was built by those who defied it.
Real history is messy, multi-authored, and unfinished.
Moldbug wants it narrated, top-down, and sealed.
Because a closed past justifies a closed future.
TL;DR
Moldbug’s “history” is cosplay in citation form.
He weaponizes aesthetics to pass off authority.
His timeline is a loop: "Once, there were kings. Everything since then has been a mistake."
He is not a historian. He is a fantasy writer with delusions of geopolitics.