"The Nerd Reich": Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.” Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Anjali Kamat. ANJALI KAMAT: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. That’s the name of a new book by our next guest, the journalist Gil Durán. The book looks at how tech billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are pushing what Durán calls “tech fascism.” Gil Durán also documents how Thiel had played a pivotal role in JD Vance’s rise to power. Durán writes, quote, “Vance is almost entirely a creation of Thiel who bankrolled his brief stint as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and United States senator. With Vance at Trump’s side — Silicon Valley had one of their own in the White House — a tech venture capitalist one heartbeat away from the presidency.” AMY GOODMAN: Gil Durán joins us here in New York. He’s the former opinion editor of The Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He now publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich and FrameLab. Welcome to Democracy Now! So, let’s start with the title, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Why’d you choose it? GIL DURÁN: Well, in 2024, I wrote a series for The New Republic about the extremist ideological beliefs coming out of Silicon Valley. And after I’d written a story that went really viral and got me under attack by one of these guys, someone reached out to me from the crypto world and said, “You know, we’ve been calling these guys 'the Nerd Reich' for years.” And that blew my mind. And I saw that no one was really using that title, and so I rebranded my newsletter, which had some boring other name, as The Nerd Reich, and that became the main message of it. But I thought it was amazing that from within their own community, this was a label that was applied to them. People understood it was fascist and was echoing Nazism in nature. AMY GOODMAN: But I want to just say the billionaire tech bros, as they are known, another name for them, haven’t always been the way they are now, in fact, when Trump was first coming into office. Talk about how they have changed. GIL DURÁN: During the first Trump administration, we saw something called Tech Against Trump, where there were all these tech companies standing up to Trump, filing lawsuits, opposing his crackdowns on immigration. This time around, it’s completely different. AMY GOODMAN: He was removed from X. GIL DURÁN: Yeah, removed from X. Facebook banned him. Now we see the opposite happening. I think what happened is that Trump was able to tap into some undercurrents in Silicon Valley with his return to power. Billionaires had become radicalized by things like the #MeToo movement, by Occupy, by the Black Lives Matter movement, and then by the pandemic. And so, when Trump is able to return to power, they are now in a very different mentality. They’ve made billions and billions of more dollars. They’re even more against taxes and government, even though government is generally the basis for many of their fortunes. And so, now we see a complete alignment behind Trump. In fact, Trump is being funded and supported by Silicon Valley. He wouldn’t be able to do the things he’s doing without the billions of dollars he’s raking in in open crypto corruption. ANJALI KAMAT: You know, in the epigraph to your book, you quote Peter Thiel from 2010. So, in a way, they’ve changed, but this also goes back and has a longer history. And the end of that quote is “technology is this incredible alternative to politics.” Can you talk about what he meant by that and what that means in terms of the kind of influence Peter Thiel has? AMY GOODMAN: And who he is? GIL DURÁN: Yeah. Some billionaires appear to have changed, but Peter Thiel hasn’t really changed. He’s been right-wing for a very long time. Peter Thiel was born in Germany, came to the United States as a child, went to Stanford, became a lawyer, studied philosophy, and then got very lucky to be in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s as things were about to take off. In 1997, he read a book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted that in the 21st century technology would overthrow democracy, specifically something called cybercurrency, or what we would today call crypto, which would undermine government authority, and advanced automation, which we would call AI, which would collapse the economy by destroying most jobs and concentrating wealth in the hands of a savvy few that were called the “sovereign individual.” And Peter Thiel has credited this crazy book with being the inspiration for PayPal, which he saw — which he says was an effort to get ahead of this digital currency. It didn’t quite work out that way, but it made him a billionaire, eventually, because it provided the basis for his fortune, and he’s been able to use his money to grow this influential cult of right-wing ideas in Silicon Valley, which, by the way, they were always there, this libertarian, it was called, vibe coming out of Silicon Valley in the '80s and the ’90s. There were a handful of writers who wrote about it then. But what we've learned is these guys were never libertarians. They just wanted to be in charge of the government. They weren’t against the government, unless they don’t get to be the government. So, now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians. ANJALI KAMAT: You know, you tell this story in the book, a remarkable story, of a group of these billionaire tech bros. It’s not just Peter Thiel; it’s several other men. Can you talk about some of these other characters that you talk about? And what is their crusade against democracy? GIL DURÁN: They have this idea, largely stemming from this Sovereign Individual book, that technology means democracy is an obsolete software system, that the United States is an obsolete country, that it won’t survive the 21st century. And I want to say, I know this sounds crazy to people, but much of my book is told in the words of these men, from — in podcasts, in interviews, in long essays, they write about it. And their problem with democracy is that they don’t get to have all the power. ANJALI KAMAT: So, you didn’t have to get secret documents. I mean, you have some remarkable statements in this book. You have Balaji Srinivasan and also Curtis Yarvin, and Curtis Yarvin, I believe, talking about, in an early blog post perhaps, talking about San Francisco and what to do with the poor? GIL DURÁN: Yeah. So, this idea is that they’ve got — some call it the network state. Curtis Yarvin called it “patchworks.” Part of their apocalyptic vision for the future is that the country will be broken up. It will no longer be one country. It’ll be broken up into these sort of corporate zones or fiefdoms called patchworks or network states. And the new governing structure will be these autocratic, dictator-like corporations that will have total power over their citizens. Yarvin wrote that they could even turn unproductive people into biodiesel to fuel city buses. But he said he was just kidding about that, but that what we really need for the poor is a humane alternative to genocide. So, these are the kinds of ideas you see. And what’s disturbing is that Balaji Srinivasan, another Peter Thiel protégé, because Curtis Yarvin is funded by Peter Thiel — that’s the only reason anyone’s ever heard of him — goes on to create this idea called the network state, which is a more startup-friendly version of this, that corporations and billionaires should fund their own cities and countries. And we’re seeing that grow. AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Curtis Yarvin in his own words at the Institute of Art and Ideas, where he explained why he supports monarchical system of government. CURTIS YARVIN: Let’s debunk this concept of liberal democracy. There’s actually no such thing. Democracy in today’s world just means a good or legitimate government. It means a claim to a legitimate government. Just because you call yourself a democracy doesn’t mean anything. North Korea calls itself the DPRK, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That is three euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it’s a monarchy. … Anything that works is a monarchy. So, for example, if you take your your iPhone and you look at the box that your iPhone comes in, it says, “Designed by Apple in California, manufactured in China.” So, that is two monarchies — Apple has a CEO, and China has a dictator — and one oligarchy, which is the government of California, which is, by the way, basically a single-party state. There are no longer competitive elections in California. So, when you try to imagine the state of California, in which I live, trying to build an iPhone or design an iPhone, the concept is ridiculous. AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to 2021, when JD Vance, then a candidate in Ohio for U.S. Senate, appeared on the conservative Jack Murphy Live podcast. Murphy asked Vance how to root out so-called wokeism from American institutions. JD VANCE: There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who’s written about some of these things. And so, one is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself, right? … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need — we need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokeification program in the United States, right? AMY GOODMAN: So, that was JD Vance back in 2021. The latest news, this out of The Washington Post, that President Donald Trump recently told donors in private that he wants to see his vice president, JD Vance, win the 2028 presidential election, a sign that he’s open to publicly backing JD Vance. There’s been this kind of war between JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. But talk about the significance of this and, as you said, JD Vance being a creation of Peter Thiel. GIL DURÁN: JD Vance is a dangerous extremist who embraces a set of ideas that should put a chill down the spine of every American. He went on in that interview to say that Donald Trump would likely win the 2024 election, and that when he did, he should purge the federal government, just like Yarvin had recommended, and, in fact, he should defy the courts and the law and challenge the Supreme Court justices to force him to follow their dictates. It’s pretty amazing that you have a man on the political stage in the White House a heartbeat away from the presidency, who has espoused such radically anti-American ideas. And I think people need to understand the degree to which he is so closely related to Peter Thiel. We wouldn’t have a JD Vance without a Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is even the reason that JD Vance converted to Catholicism. He’s the reason JD Vance became a venture capitalist and a millionaire. He’s — AMY GOODMAN: How did they hook up? GIL DURÁN: Peter Thiel likes to go around speaking to schools and graduate schools. And in 2011, he went to Yale Law School and gave a speech. And JD Vance said it was one of the most significant moments of his life and that Peter Thiel was one of the most intelligent people he’d ever heard. And basically, that speech convinced him to not be a lawyer, and instead to become a venture capitalist. And at every step of JD Vance’s life since then, it has been Peter Thiel who has made him who he is, who has essentially created him whole cloth. ANJALI KAMAT: And it’s not just JD Vance, right? I mean, it’s — Bloomberg, I think, reported that 16 people connected to Thiel are in the Trump administration. Can you talk about, you know, what kind of effect this has had in terms of policies? Like, you know, when we hear these ideas, they sound a little outlandish, to say the least. It’s hard to see them being translated into policy. But then, what we’ve been living over the past two years, you’re seeing a lot of this coming to fruition. So, can you talk about, you know, DOGE, for example, or the, you know, mass layoffs at federal jobs, what happened to USAID, and where those ideas came from? GIL DURÁN: The main argument of Curtis Yarvin for a long time has been that a president should act as a dictator. And one of the ways to cement this dictator’s power is to purge the federal government of anyone who is unwilling to follow the orders of the dictator, basically to destroy the civil service. In addition — this is 15, almost 20 years ago — he recommended that the United States pretty much destroy its diplomatic standing in the world and eliminate international aid programs. We saw all of that happen during DOGE. In fact, Yarvin had updated his idea to say that it should be a CEO who the president should install as a dictator to run rampant over the federal government. And DOGE was an almost perfect expression of that. So, these ideas that used to be — ANJALI KAMAT: And what did Curtis call it? RAGE? GIL DURÁN: He called it RAGE — “Retire All Government Employees.” So, even the four-letter, all-caps acronym is an echo of Yarvin. And these are ideas that were on an anonymous, weird blog, marginal in Silicon Valley 15 years ago, and have now become policy under the Trump administration, because when you’re a billionaire, you have the power to impose these crazy ideas on everyone else. And that’s what’s happening. Peter Thiel’s entire inner circle has infiltrated government at the same time that the Trump family is now becoming tech venture capitalists and crypto cartel moguls. There’s this joining of forces. The corporate is becoming the state, and both of it’s combined with apocalyptic religious movements. And that is the heart of fascism. AMY GOODMAN: Where does Elon Musk fit into this picture? GIL DURÁN: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel go way back to PayPal. They started it together. They’ve had some tensions. AMY GOODMAN: The so-called PayPal Mafia? GIL DURÁN: The so-called PayPal Mafia. But you’ll note that Peter Thiel is considered the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, even though Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. Musk is certainly aware of these ideas, and when he was thinking of starting his own political party after he left DOGE, he consulted with Curtis Yarvin about how to do that and what the party should say. So, here’s Yarvin, who knows nothing about anything, but he’s considered a genius by these billionaires, largely because he tells them what they want to hear. So, Elon Musk is clearly radicalized, is clearly open to these ideas. I’m not sure that he reads a lot about these things as much as he just believes the basic idea behind this, which is that wealthy, white technologists should be the ruler of the world, and then the galaxy and the universe. This is the cosmology coming out of Silicon Valley these days. AMY GOODMAN: Where do women and people of color fit into this picture? GIL DURÁN: At the bottom of the hierarchy, if they exist at all. Look at what’s happening with the USAID cuts: a targeted hit delivered against the poorest people in the world by the richest man in the world, with millions of people projected to die. These billionaires who promise abundance because of AI, well, we already have abundance, and we’re not sharing it. Look at what they’re doing to the poorest people today. And if you listen to the apocalyptic visions that AI will kill all jobs and transform everything, they say that, “Well, don’t worry. Everyone will get a share of the extreme universal wealth that’s created.” But that’s not what we’re seeing today, and we can’t really believe that when they say that. Fascism is about imposing a hierarchy, a moral order. And white, wealthy, Western men are at the top of that moral order in fascism. AMY GOODMAN: Gil Durán is author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. If you have time, we’re going to do Part 2 of this discussion, and then we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. Again, the book, The Nerd Reich. I’ll be speaking after the screening of Steal This Story, Please! in Middlebury, Vermont, on August 28th. Check our website at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Anjali Kamat. Media Options