Special Little Lords

Medievalist nationalist fantasy, inheritance as ideology, and the neo-feudal dreams of the tech right

On January 6, 2021, a crowd attempted to overturn the results of the US presidential election by force. They breached the Capitol, assaulted police, and moved through the building searching for terrified lawmakers. Some carried zip ties and wore tactical gear. But others dressed themselves in a more medieval story, with furs, horns, and runes.

To the unfamiliar, these costumes and props probably registered as some oddball theatrical flourish, or childish attention-seeking behaviour. While that’s technically not too far off the mark, the particulars of these choices are worth noticing. The medieval references visible during the insurrection had been circulating for years in far-right organising spaces, both online and in person. Crusader slogans appeared at rallies in Charlottesville in 2017. Norse runes and Viking imagery have been common in white nationalist fitness circles and mixed martial arts clubs (and their merchandise ecosystems) well before 2021. We even see the idea of an ancient Britain being invoked by racists intent on stoking tensions about immigration, sometimes boiling over into physical violence. On January 6 it functioned as in-group signalling: a way to recognise comrades inside the riot, and to place yourself inside a mythic narrative of siege and redemption. By the time the Capitol was breached, this symbolic repertoire was already familiar to those using it, and to those who research those using it.

One such researcher, Dr. Helen Young, describes how “medievalist references littered the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th.” Early media coverage struggled to describe what it was seeing, often treating the medieval imagery as a weird eccentric spectacle. Young refuses that framing. In her account, these references functioned as signals, intelligible to an audience already steeped in far-right mythologies of civilisational decline and beguiled by the promises of their ‘rightful’ (racial) inheritance.

Invoking Crusader imagery attempts to condense a long and complex history into a single moral claim: a white, heterosexual Christian Europe is under attack by outside invaders, and requires violence to protect it. This is another example of the wider Restorative Past Fantasy, and it’s one the right-wing project uses to justify violence as a defensive manoeuvre.

Any claim to inherited authority depends on lineage. Lineage, in turn, requires the regulation of sex, reproduction, and heritage, with heterosexual marriage positioned as the mechanism through which continuity is secured and legitimised. This is how a selectively-remembered past is engineered to police the present.

The hetconning at work here begins by engineering a uniformly heterosexual past, one organised around biology and inheritance, then flattening and whitening that history until genealogical lineage can be treated as a form of property. Once that sense of entitlement is in place, the present is recast as a dispute over rightful ownership of an ancestral inheritance.

Since the Nazi elevation of a mythologised “Germanic” past in the service of white supremacy, medieval material, particularly Scandinavian myth and legend, has repeatedly been pressed into service as evidence of a supposedly pure, pre-contact white Europe. This framing persists despite extensive historical evidence of cultural exchange, migration, trade, and intermarriage between ancient and medieval societies across Europe.

Medievalist scholars (and even re-enactors) have been warning for years that white nationalists have been deliberately appropriating medieval aesthetics. Sierra Lomuto stresses the responsibility the academy has during these appropriation attempts, noting “When white nationalists turn to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for whiteness—to seek validation for their claims of white supremacy—and they do not find resistance from the scholars of that past; when this quest is celebrated and given space within our academic community, our complacency becomes complicity.” Taking this responsibility seriously in her own practice, she adds, “If we have a Richard Spencer in one of our classes, we can be sure he will not leave better equipped and more justified to spread his white supremacist hate.”

The mistake, structurally, is to treat the medievalism on display on January 6th as either (a) a juvenile aesthetic or (b) a sincere love of history. The “Q Shaman” (also known as Jake Angeli, but whose real name is Jacob Anthony Chansley) put his historical ignorance on full display when, as Richard Fahey writes, “his caricature more closely resembles the ahistorical symbol of the Minnesota Vikings’ football team than anything remotely resembling what a medieval Viking might have looked like.” This aesthetic is engineered for circulation.

Which begs the question, what work does that circulation perform, and who benefits from it? It smuggles in a set of assumptions about how power ought to be organised, particularly advocating for a return to feudalism. On paper, removed from its dirt and shit and disease, a system of medieval kings, lords, vassals, and subjects offers a world that feels ordered, hierarchical, and calm, especially to alienated people.

No one has been more explicit about turning this medieval fantasy into a theory of modern governance than Curtis Yarvin, who also writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the kind of man whose presence makes you instinctively cover your drink. His ideology is often described as “edgy” or “provocative”, despite not saying much to differentiate him from the “devil’s advocate guy” from every early 2000s vBulletin forum. A gormless dork of a man seemingly intent on trying to make “The Dark Enlightenment” happen¹, Curtis Yarvin has spent years arguing that democracy should be abolished and replaced with a CEO monarchy, where the state is run more like a company, and its populace become its customers. Political disagreement can then be reclassified merely as consumer dissatisfaction, where if you don’t like how things are run, you can take your business elsewhere. A (dull) child’s understanding of how things should be run, where authority flows downward, and loyalty must flow upward, to him, the King. The special boy.

In his “Patchwork” writings², Yarvin outlines a vision of fragmented sovereignty organised through private ownership. He proposes replacing existing states with “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries,” each governed by “its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” “A Patchwork realm is governed by a Delegate,” he writes, “who is the proxy of the proprietors.” He cannot resist adding an antisemitic aside in the same breath: “(The Delegate is always Jewish.)” Even when he is sketching his new clean corporate monarchy, he goes out of his way to smuggle in a tired old trope. Treating him as a cultural curiosity or eccentric blogger is another form of organised forgetting.

Paternal authority can promise relief from complexity³. Tech culture’s desire to eliminate friction maps neatly onto feudal logic, and governance can become similar to a software problem. If the current system is buggy, roll back to an earlier version. Even if it involves going all the way back to the Middle Ages. Inheritance operates quietly throughout this model. Authority persists because ownership persists. Someone inherits the realm. Someone inherits the firm.

The centuries of migration, revolt, religious fragmentation, and administrative failures that actually defined medieval Europe need to be ignored in order to sustain this fantasy. Queer kinship disappears. Non-productive lines disappear. Religious deviation disappears. Women’s labour (outside inheritance) disappears. There are no succession crises. No assassinations. No rebellions. No famines. No paranoid courts or collapsing dynasties. The medieval ruler appears as a calm white-collar administrator, optimising his territory.

When medievalist aesthetics on the street coincide with neo-feudal governance proposals circulating among the elites, the quiet part starts to get louder. Many of the men who mobilise Norse imagery and claims of a ‘pure’ white lineage appear to assume embodying this fantasy would position them as rulers rather than subjects⁴. Given Yarvin’s outsized influence on the billionaire class and his proximity to figures in the current US government, it is far more likely they would find themselves positioned as subjects rather than lords.

What looks at first glance like a shared fascination with medieval symbols is better understood as a convergence of interests. Neo-feudal reactionaries want to roll back democracy and reinstall hierarchical governance. White nationalists want a story that reframes violence as a necessary part of collecting their rightful inheritance. Medievalism supplies both. It offers elites a language for privatised rule and unaccountable power, while offering foot soldiers a sense of belonging within a mythic past that flatters them as heirs and special little boys.

Dorothy Kim’s analysis is useful here precisely because she identifies the possible harms (and stakes at play) here. “Almost all the major nodes” of the alt-right, she writes, “are attached to specific iterations of the medieval past,” and the message is not symbolic: it is “intended to incite violent racism, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.” Medievalism is doing political work, persuading people to fight for a world in which they will never rule, only serve.

As for how we can be useful pushing back against this disenfranchisement, Kim concludes in that same piece, “Our old-style position that objectivist neutrality is where medievalists should be no longer works.” We need to shirk this pressure to be cold and objective and lean more heavily on human narratives when telling our histories. The more we tell stories about queer life in medieval times, stories about dissent and pluralism and mavericks and schisms and complications and ever-so-modern and relatable messiness, the more we can fight back against the people who want to dismantle democracy and return us to the dark ages.

- Leena

1. More like the Dork Enlightenment, amirite.

2. I’m not linking his stuff directly, because I can’t stomach it.

3. If you have a child’s understanding of the world.

4. lol. lmao.