Yesterday, at Vancouver Websummit — a tech conference here in British Columbia featuring a surprisingly large roster of political commentators — I saw Curtis Yarvin speak. Yarvin is this far-right character who has become a bit of a media darling lately, repeatedly profiled in the prestige press and subject to much of the same dark titillation that characterizes how the liberal intelligentsia so often thinks about right-wing celebrities these days. His big, naughty idea is that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, and this apparently has some currency with both tech CEOs and the Vance-ite wing of MAGA.

At Websummit, Yarvin’s talk was structured as a debate between himself and Ramesh Srinivasan, moderated by Cenk Uygur. Srinivasan was not a particularly good advocate for democracy; he seems like a nice guy but was way too deep in a certain pit of lefty malaise to spring to the defense of American institutions. It’s hard to defend democracy when you don’t believe America even is one, as he at one point claimed. Whatever points he tried to make were mushy and unfocused.

You’d think this would give Yarvin, who has such a reputation for being this ferocious character, a clear advantage, but it didn’t. I imagine most of the audience filling the main auditorium of the convention center left thinking they had wasted time on one of the conference’s more mediocre events.

I was taken aback by how dull and uncharismatic Yarvin is, and how shallow and undeveloped his arguments are. Despite his reputation as the “bad boy philosopher,” I found he comes off as neither.

He is a flat speaker with little stage presence. He’s not animated or funny or charming or sassy or wild. He has a slumped posture and very dark eyes that peer from beneath downward-pointing black eyebrows, giving him a fixed expression that’s less menacing than gloomy. Coupled with his curtains of parted dark hair, he has an uncanny resemblance to Snape from the Harry Potter films. He came out wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt for reasons I’m sure he was eager to explain, but never did.

I didn’t think Yarvin’s talents as a speaker or thinker came anywhere close to meeting his obvious desire to be a serious provocateur. His most interesting defense of dictatorship was an observation that there are many well-functioning institutions in American life that are run as dictatorships, even hereditary monarchies — mainly corporations — and no one seems to find fault with those. It was unclear how seriously he believed this, however, for he’d also often cite, in a more sneering way, examples of liberals governing as dictators, including Dr. Fauci and LBJ, who he clearly thought made America worse by virtue of their authoritarian style. When Cenk asked him about checks and balances, he similarly seemed fine with conceding that effective dictators require a cabinet with impeachment power and so forth, which, as my friend SoyPill noted in a video takedown of Yarvin, quickly just winds up reinventing liberal democracy. Overall, he spoke more like a college student making a half-assed defense of a challenging position in debate club than someone who’d thought particularly deeply about his supposed signature issue.

I think people can have bad politics and still be engaging. I wrote a while ago about Slavoj Zizek, whose politics I think are comparably shallow and vague but is undeniably a funny and compelling performer. Many people on the far right, from Ann Coulter to Alex Jones, have a flamboyant stage presence that makes them hard to turn away from. The degree that political commentary has become entertainment is not an uncomplicated good, but charisma is part of the art of effective communication, and can be used to compensate for a lack of weak ideas. Yarvin strikes me as the worst of both worlds; a guy with little to say who doesn’t seem to be having fun saying it.

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There is something strangely fascinating about listening to modern communists condemn the economy.

Not because their conclusions are persuasive, but because their complaints often contain the seeds of an argument they refuse to recognize.

Listen carefully to what they attack.

They rage against bailouts.

Against politically connected corporations.

Against regulatory capture.

Against monopolies protected by the state.

Against subsidies, favoritism, lobbying, central banking distortions, corporate welfare, and the revolving door between business and government.

And in describing these things, they unknowingly describe not capitalism, but the corruption of markets through political privilege.

Yet somehow, after accurately identifying the disease, they prescribe a larger dose of the poison that created it.

That is the comedy at the center of the modern socialist mind.

If a businessman becomes wealthy through voluntary trade by offering products people willingly buy, he is denounced as exploitative. But if that same businessman becomes wealthy through state contracts, bailouts, tariff protections, licensing barriers, subsidies, or regulatory manipulation, the communist still calls it capitalism.

The distinction between wealth earned through production and wealth extracted through political favoritism disappears entirely.

This is because many socialists do not actually oppose coercive power. They oppose not being the ones directing it.

They speak endlessly about “corporate greed,” but rarely stop to ask why corporations spend billions influencing governments in the first place. The answer is obvious: because governments possess enormous discretionary power over markets.

When the state can grant favors, suppress competitors, print money, guarantee loans, control licensing, shape regulations, and socialize losses while privatizing political influence, businesses will inevitably compete for political access.

That is not a free market problem. That is a political power problem.

The true irony is that genuine capitalism leaves far less room for the kind of corruption socialists condemn.

Under actual free exchange: • Businesses cannot force customers to buy from them

• Failure is punished instead of subsidized

• Political connections matter less than consumer satisfaction

• Profits depend on delivering value voluntarily

• Losses cannot simply be transferred onto taxpayers indefinitely

But the socialist cannot acknowledge this without undermining his own worldview. So every abuse committed through state intervention is relabeled “capitalism,” even when the mechanism involved is plainly political coercion rather than voluntary trade.

It becomes a rhetorical shell game: Government intervention that fails is capitalism.

Corporate privilege is capitalism.

Inflation caused by monetary policy is capitalism.

Bailouts are capitalism.

Cronyism is capitalism.

Protectionism is capitalism.

Anything involving money, hierarchy, inequality, or corporations is simply placed under the same label regardless of whether the underlying mechanism is voluntary exchange or state privilege.

And so the communist spends his days passionately condemning the consequences of concentrated political power while simultaneously demanding that even more economic power be concentrated politically.

It is like watching a man complain that gasoline causes fires while pouring it onto his own house.

The truly amusing part is that if one stripped away the labels and simply described the principles involved, many communists would accidentally endorse large portions of capitalism before realizing what they had agreed to.

A system where: • No corporation receives special legal privilege

• No business is bailed out

• Politicians cannot manipulate markets for allies

• Consumers choose freely

• Competition disciplines producers

• Failure is allowed

• Transactions are voluntary

That sounds suspiciously close to the thing they claim to oppose.

But admitting this would require acknowledging a difficult truth:

Much of what modern socialists hate is not capitalism at all. It is the predictable result of mixing political power with economic favoritism while still calling the outcome “the market.”

And once that distinction becomes clear, the entire moral narrative begins to wobble.

During my extensive dive into crossword history in preparation for my Braille Crosswords post, I encountered all sorts of curious tidbits and trivia about crosswords. I tucked many of them away at the time, looking forward to digging into them properly later once the piece was completed.

So, with that post done and dusted, I had some time to pour through those tidbits and trivia for blog post ideas. And I knew I had to start with this snippet from The Omaha World-Herald on Sunday, July 22nd, 1979:

Portland: February 23, 1959. Two Oregon daily papers cry “Doublecross!” Charging that their crossword contests are being “fixed” by a “nation-wide ring” headquartered in Detroit, they discontinue the contests and call in the FBI

A criminal crossword ring? Tell me more about these cruciverbalist ne’er-do-wells!

I mean, we’ve discussed criminal activity and crosswords in previous posts, but those were strictly of the fictional variety. This story, on the other hand, is an honest-to-Shortz crossword criminal conspiracy, concocted nearly 70 years ago.

Our story begins in Oregon, where publisher William W. Knight of The Oregon Journal shared his suspicions in a front-page editorial piece on February 23rd, 1959.

The Oregon Journal and The Portland Oregonian were just two of the many newspapers around the United States who ran crossword contests with cash prizes. Subscribers would send their solutions to the paper in the hopes of being the first correct solver (or sometimes, the correct solver chosen at random) and winning some money.

But Mr. Knight reported that his sources at The Oregon Journal had uncovered something peculiar. They had learned about two previous Portland winners who only kept part of their money, the rest being forwarded to an intermediary, and after that to the suspected ringleader in Detroit, Michigan.

One woman won $2600 but retained only $300. $150 went to the intermediary, and $2150 to Detroit. Another winner received $2950 but he only kept $950 and sent the rest to a “tipster” in Detroit. (Geez, even when committing the same crimes, women are still getting paid less than men!)

Knight referred to this conspiracy as a “fix and tipping” scheme.

“Fix” in this case means illegally rigging the outcome of the crossword contest, and “tipping” means that someone was informing the “contestants” of the solution in order to guarantee a win.

But the two primary distributing syndicates — Superior Features Syndicate, Inc. and General Features Syndicate — claimed this was impossible, calling their precautions “foolproof.”

These “foolproof” precautions basically meant that the puzzle grid and clues went to subscribing newspapers, but the puzzle solution went to an associated bank “or some other unimpeachable agency.” That bank/agency would hold the solution until the contest submission deadline had passed, and then release it to the subscribing newspapers.

(This is obviously pretty foreign to modern solvers, who are accustomed to seeing the previous day’s solution published alongside today’s new puzzle.)

Despite the reassurances of the distribution syndicates, Knight had already reached out to the FBI with his suspicions, and declared that The Oregon Journal would no longer be participating in crossword puzzle contests.

His editorial went out on February 23rd, and the next day, other papers began reporting on Knight’s alleged criminal crossword conspiracy.

But the Crossword Ring’s reign of terror would be short-lived.

One month to the day that Knight’s accusations hit the front page, J. Edgar Hoover himself announced the arrest of those responsible for the Crossword Ring conspiracy.

The headline in The New York Times the following morning read “12 SEIZED BY F.B.I. IN CONTEST FRAUD; 2 in Canada Also Accused of Being in a Ring That Got Puzzle Answers.“

Knight’s suspicions were correct, but the conspiracy ranged far wider than Portland and Detroit. The actual ringleaders were based in Ontario, Canada, and they telephoned answers to agents in Chicago, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Minneapolis as well.

So, how did the ringleaders get around those “foolproof” precautions we heard about before?

In staggeringly simple fashion.

The scam worked like this:

Step One: Set up a fictitious bank, Middlesex Trust Co., complete with a fake mailing address.

Step Two: Subscribe to the puzzle distributors in the name of a nonexistent newspaper company, Suburban Publishers, Ltd.

Step Three: Receive the puzzle solutions from the Syndicate via the fictitious bank’s P.O. Box, then contact agents in the United States to submit perfect solutions to their local papers before most other newspapers would’ve even published the contest puzzle.

All it took to circumvent the “foolproof” precautions was Step One.

The Crossword Ring had raked in $45,000, which is equivalent to over half a million dollars in 2026. And the FBI operation to arrest them all took only 86 minutes.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the end of crossword contests in the United States.

Despite further allegations of wrongdoing throughout the 1960s — including bribery and extortion — the contests remained popular, and prize amounts collected by contest entrants kept rising. One New York contest winner received a cash prize of $44,000, nearly the same amount that the Crossword Ring had scammed from newspapers over the course of weeks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my brand-new newspaper venture, The PuzzCulture Tribune Gazette Times-Herald-Daily. More about our crossword contests soon! *a-wink*

So, fellow puzzler, what’s your favorite crossword crime, fictional or otherwise? Let us know in the comment section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Here, I explain why I support job-destroying technologies such as AI and robots.

1. The Naive Concern

Nearly any beneficial technology can be attacked for “destroying jobs.” The latest suspect: AI. Many are now worried that computers will destroy white collar jobs. I, on the other hand, am only worried that it might not be good enough to destroy many jobs…

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