Writing as Mencius Moldbug on the blog Unqualified Reservations (2007-2013), Curtis Yarvin defined the Cathedral as the decentralized system of elite universities and prestige media that, in his telling, sets the boundaries of respectable opinion and effectively governs the United States. In 'A Formalist Manifesto' (2007) and subsequent posts he argued for replacing democracy with joint-stock corporate government accountable to shareholders, an ideology its adherents called neoreaction or the Dark Enlightenment, after Nick Land's 2012 essay sequence of that name.
Online, 'the Cathedral' became an all-purpose label for any mainstream consensus, and Yarvin became a shorthand villain or prophet depending on the feed. The meme retains the suspicion and drops the formalist architecture that made the original argument specific.
The deeper claim is structural: rule in modern states is exercised by whoever trains the rulers and writes the record, so sovereignty has migrated from offices to institutions of sense-making. Whether or not one accepts Yarvin's remedy, the question he posed, who actually manufactures belief, is the same one this archive keeps asking.
If the manufacture of consent is the real government, what would a coup against it even look like?