Nick Land (YouTube still)

It is quite something to discover, a quarter of a century too late, that your old PhD supervisor is satan. I was a 24-year-old research student at Warwick when I met Nick Land. He was just four years older and brilliant, if remarkably immature even by my twenty-something standards. He disappeared around the turn of the century, landing in Shanghai, and I heard nothing more of him for years. I never expected him to resurface as one of a select group of bloggers who informs the worldview of Steve Bannon—profiled in this month’s Prospect—and the direction of the Donald Trump White House. An article in the Atlantic in February traced the evolution of the alt-right back to a circle known as NRx, or neo-reactionaries, that includes Nick alongside others with spooky death metal handles like Mencius Moldbug.

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