Mencius Moldrake
 | |
| Era | Tweeter Is Not Real Life (cast) |
|---|---|
| Age | 50-65 |
| Home | Bay Area, CA |
| Demographic | tech-adjacent blogger, white, neoreactionary |
| Lean | Strong Republican |
| Race | white |
He is a pseudonymous Bay Area blogger who argues that democratic elections are the fundamental flaw in government. Read by a small circle of technology founders, he is the cast's theorist of government run by a single chief executive.
Who they stand for
He stands for the tech right. This is a bloc of company founders, venture capital investors and engineers based mainly in San Francisco and Austin. It is small in number of votes but large in money, and it moved from the libertarianism of the Obama era to supporting Donald Trump in 2024. Its ideas were first circulated in neoreactionary blogging in the late 2000s. These ideas hold that the universities and the established press run the country as a self-selecting elite, and that a state should instead be run like a company, by a founder who cannot be removed by an election. In 2025 this argument became government policy. The government-efficiency purge of the civil service, the Schedule F reclassification of federal employees, and the closing of federal agencies by executive order were all part of its programme. Tucker Carlington wants ordinary people to defeat the existing elite, while Mencius wants to replace it with a better elite. Bronze Age Deviant admires personal strength, while Mencius admires effective administration. A dispute over H-1B visas in December 2024 showed how little the two strands of the political right actually have in common.
Playing to them
He responds to executive power exercised without apology, including civil servants dismissed, federal agencies closed, a court ruling ignored, Congress bypassed, and a government reorganised as though it were an acquired company. He also rewards the deregulation of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. He opposes deference to the universities and the press, bipartisan commissions, and any president who consults widely before acting. A strongman president of either party earns his interest, and a president who seeks consensus, of either party, earns his contempt.
Winning his support costs nearly the whole liberal centre of the cast. Every action that pleases him alarms Simon Harrisson, William Maha, Barbara Wise, Gary Greenwall and Michael Tabbi, because their politics is built on opposing exactly that kind of president. It is also unlikely to please Tucker Carlington or Nick Guttierez, who distrust company founders as much as they distrust professors. Only Bronze Age Deviant tends to support the same things he does.