Earlier this year, I was invited to appear at Web Summit Vancouver, an annual conference that brings together CEOs, venture capitalists, journalists and other figures from the tech world.

There was a catch: they wanted me to appear onstage with Curtis Yarvin, the Peter Thiel guru who preaches the merits of dictatorship and monarchy.

That did not interest me. First of all, I have no interest in legitimizing Yarvin, who wears his racism like a badge of honor. Just as I would not share a stage with a KKK grand wizard or a neo-Nazi, I would not wish to appear with Peter Thiel’s anti-democracy guru who is so addicted to the N-word that he trained his AI chatbot to use it.

Second, Yarvin had refused to grant an interview for my book, so it did not make sense for me to participate with him in a public circus. (As the Book of Proverbs counsels: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him.”)

While he would not grant me an interview, he did go back and forth with me on email for a few days last year. He is as long-winded in that format as he is in every other. Yarvin did not say much of interest, but he did attempt to insult me in a way that—in my view—amounts to a compliment. Here’s what he said:

You have one of the kinds of mindsets that is rare in historical power structures: (relatively) open Machiavellianism. You know it is an evil world, everyone in it is evil, and when you're fighting for the good (La Lucha Continua! Venceremos!) you gotta not be out-eviled. This is a big, big big truth which you probably latched onto as a young person. While I would prefer not to see the world through the light of this truth, I do respect it, and indeed have often gotten fucked for not respecting it enough.