- There's this idea that we're on the cusp of a massive transformation of the world due to AI and that things like living forever and becoming multi-planetary and becoming part cyborg are going to be reality very soon.

But the only thing holding back this unmitigated acceleration into this tremendously sort of apocalyptic future is democracy.

They want to rid the world of democracy, but I think they see that as a small obstacle on the way to this glorious cosmic destiny.

- Hey everyone.

From KQED in San Francisco, this is Political Breakdown.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

Today on The Breakdown are Silicon Valley's most rich and powerful technologists trying to end democracy in favor of a corporate run authoritarian world order.

Journalist Gil Duran makes that case in a new book detailing what he dubs tech fascism.

It focuses on well-known figures like Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, as well as some less familiar names.

A former political advisor to heavyweights, including Diane Feinstein and Jerry Brown.

Duran's new book is called The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

Gil, welcome back to Political Breakdown.

Thanks - For having me.

- Well, you've had a lot of careers.

I've known you through a lot of them as well.

And I'm curious, you know, after leaving working for politicians, you worked at the SAC B, the San Francisco Examiner.

What made you turn to this?

You launched a newsletter and, and now this book really focusing on what you describe as the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley plutocrats.

- I really became aware of this stuff during the recall campaigns here in San Francisco in 2022 when there was something I had never really witnessed before in all of my career, which it was San Francisco venture capitalists who claimed to be Democrats, partnering up with a Republican billionaire to oust four progressive politicians from office.

Successful recalls are very rare Because they take a lot of money and generally people have to be very upset.

And usually they're reserved for crimes or corruption, something like that, none of which happened here.

And so while covering those recalls, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was uniquely wrong about the situation.

But I was curious and even after the recalls, I kept thinking about it and started delving deeper into the strange ideologies and belief systems emerging out of Silicon Valley here in the 21st century.

And that was really where my journey began.

- Yeah.

So what is tech fascism?

What do you mean by that?

- Tech fascism is in many ways like normal fascism.

It is a cult of grievance and self-victimization that seeks to purge its demonized minority group enemies from power and influence, relying on surreal propaganda that highlights tensions and exploits anxieties over things like gender and sexuality and law and order in order to establish a permanent hierarchy on society, a sort of master race situation where it's men over women, it's whites over non-whites, it's the rich over the poor, and on and on and on.

And I call them fascists for two reasons.

One, because in every way they check every box of fascism.

But even if it weren't for that, they have aligned behind a fascist movement, which is Donald Trump's MAGA movement.

They are the key source of power and money funding Trump's fascism today.

And so the shoe fits.

- Yeah.

I mean, some people might hear that and feel like it's a little histrionic.

I wonder, like as you dug back into this, you say you kind of became aware of this movement a few years ago.

But in the book you talk about sort of how this has been in the making for decades.

And I'm curious we'll talk about that, but like, do you see this as about technology, money, power, ideology?

Like is there a sort of through line there in terms of why you have these billionaires who are really aligned in this, you know, essentially ideology?

- I think it's all of the above.

A lot of these guys are venture capitalists and what do venture capitalists do?

They bet on disruption.

They bet that they can find some product or some idea that will become massive and yield outsized returns.

And I think what they're doing right now is betting against American democracy because Donald Trump is a technology for destroying democracy.

You know, some people say, well, it's not fascism or it's not that bad, but if you're Latino in this country, there are masked armed goons roaming around right now, snatching our people off the streets.

Maybe we just live in the future, but it's definitely fascist.

At the same time, we're witnessing unprecedented corruption in Washington.

The Trump family is raking in billions of dollars in crypto openly.

Donald Trump, who spent years calling crypto a scam, became a crypto billionaire the day he returned to office.

And crypto is a technology for undermining government authority.

But in this case, it is buying government authority and influence.

So I think things are much, much worse than most people realize.

The richest people in our nation are betraying our nation by aligning behind a would be authoritarian.

And they're paying him billions of dollars to do the things he's doing.

- Do you think they care about like his sort of policy platform per se?

Or is this more a marriage of convenience in your eyes?

Like obviously you, you say that they're aligning on these like authoritarian tendencies and, and this sort of oppression of people broadly, but like, you know, historically the Republican Party has also really cared about abortion and things like that.

Like do you, do you see overlap there or is it more about just sort of like that, that he's a convenient figure that they can use essentially?

- They see him as a, as a tool, as a weapon, right?

He has found a way to return to power after attempting to overthrow democracy on January 6th.

Somehow he returns to power.

There's no one else like this in American politics.

And so they're investing in him because he has the unique power to disrupt our entire system.

In fact, he already has.

And so I think there are places where they disagree with the Republican - Platform.

Platform.

They don't really care about things like abortion, but there are other places where they have a lot of overlap.

White supremacy is one of those places.

Elon Musk is out there ginning up white supremacist hatred on X almost every day.

They believe that the wealthy should not be taxed or regulated.

So it's this system of hierarchy that they share in common.

You know, they don't necessarily believe in all the things that some MAGA evangelical believes, but neither do the MAGA evangelicals really think that Donald Trump's a Christian.

But to the evangelicals, Trump has been this useful tool for getting what they want.

And he's serving much the same purpose for the tech fascists.

- I want to dig into some of these individual figures in a minute, but one thing that kind of struck me reading this, and, and I've, I feel like in general watching like the rise of Musk and some of these other folks, it always just makes me wonder like, what are they so mad about?

I mean, these are people that have amassed an unprecedented amount of wealth.

It's one thing if you're being like oppressed by a government, but largely we haven't regulated these industries.

We, you know, they've been able to build these massive fortunes without, you know, being taxed out of it.

Like what's the grievance?

- They have all the money and all the power and it's still not enough apparently.

No one should be happier with American democracy than these immigrants who came here and became multi-billionaires and part-time trillionaires.

Yet they're so angry.

And that goes back to fascism is always a cult of grievance.

Powerful people who claim to be the victims in order to justify their victimization of others.

And so it's not clear.

You know, some people say, "Well, this is just about taxes and regulations and normal stuff."

It's not though.

These guys already have a tremendous amount of power, right?

You become a trillionaire.

You can't really complain that something is keeping you down.

In fact, Musk largely owes his fortune to government contracts.

He's a, he's a federal welfare king more than anything else.

And so that's where you realize that it's not about taxes and money alone.

This is about power.

And really for people in Silicon Valley, if you look at the strange beliefs coming out of Silicon Valley, there's this idea that we're on the cusp of a massive transformation of the world due to AI.

And that things like living forever and becoming multi-planetary and becoming part cyborg are going to be reality very soon.

But the only thing holding back this unmitigated acceleration into this tremendously sort of apocalyptic future is democracy.

Our regulations.

Our rules is a society where the needs of billionaires don't necessarily always come first.

And they want to rid the world of democracy, but I think they see that as a small obstacle on the way to this glorious cosmic destiny that they talk very openly about and no one seems to question it.

For instance, human beings cannot live on Mars.

There's no science that proves that.

Yet everyone acts like Elon Musk is going to colonize Mars.

Right.

It's a, it's a massive outbreak of billionaire psychosis coupled with establishment stupidity.

All - Right.

Well, let's talk about some of the, the characters that you detail in this book.

Peter Thiel is really central to both your story and what you say is this like overall push.

And you talk about how one particular book helped shape his worldview.

Talk about the book's thesis and why it influenced Thiel so strongly.

- In 1997, there was a book published called The Sovereign Individual by William Reese Mog and James Dale Davidson.

Two guys who ran a sort of kooky conspiracy theory newsletter that it was always predicting imminent economic decline, but here are the things you can buy to somehow profit from the decline.

And the sovereign individual was their magnum opus, and its thesis was pretty simple.

That in the 21st century, technology would result in the collapse of democratic nation states like the United States.

Specifically two technologies.

One, something they called cyber currency, which we would call crypto today, this new digital money that would exist to undermine government authority and suck out revenue and collapse the federal system.

And the other was advanced automation, which would quickly replace all jobs and lead to economic collapse and violence and chaos, which would require savvy investors, so-called sovereign individuals or cognitive elites to collect multiple passports and then travel around the world to different jurisdictions that would now cater to these special billionaire class and give them whatever they wanted essentially.

And it sounded like a crazy apocalyptic book back in 1997.

It was very poorly reviewed and panned.

But the book was so influential on Peter Thiel that he has credited it with being an inspiration for why he started PayPal as an effort to get ahead of the digital money.

And when this crazy book was reissued in 2020, he wrote the introduction.

So a lot of what we see is an effort to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And a lot of people in Silicon Valley, because of Thiel, have come to believe that this is the future.

That crypto and AI are the transformative technologies and that the United States is an outdated software system that needs to be replaced.

- So in this philosophy, like which you, you dubbed libertarian fantasy in which civilizations collapse as a feature, not a bug.

What happens to the rest of us?

- It's not good.

I think we're either servants or surfs or worse, dead.

I would say look at what's happening to the poorest people in the world who are dying because of the USAID cuts, right?

That will be the majority of people on the planet in 20 years.

Carried out by Elon Musk when he was - Carried out by Elon Musk.

Yeah.

Which didn't even save money, by the way.

But what we hear a lot from the AI industry is that AI will kill all of our jobs, but that will, it will also create this super abundance.

And we'll all somehow get a share of the universal extreme wealth, to use Sam Altman's phrase, that will be created.

The problem with that is that we already have abundance and it's not being fairly or rationally or logically distributed.

So there's no reason to believe that that will be the case if AI can even do the things they say it's going to do.

I'm not saying that I buy into that idea that AI has to replace everything.

But the same billionaires who are promising abundance all tend to be building bunkers around the world and buying islands and creating new hideouts.

They think the future's going to be very dark.

And I think what Peter Thiel's been able to do is create a cult of apocalypse capitalism that sees the end of civilization coming and hopes to find some way to profit from it and thrive in some fantastical science fiction future where the rest of us aren't really on the map.

- So you, you describe well, you talked about how PayPal is sort of part of this like hedging into this digital currency.

Obviously that's gone way further with crypto.

But I, I wonder you, you also describe his investment in now Vice President JD Vance as similar to how he invested in the venture capital world.

Talk about that because he's kind of in a patron of Vance, right?

- I would say he's the creator of JD Vance.

My chapter on JD Vance is called the Unicorn.

And in venture capital terms, a unicorn is a billion dollar company.

You make an investment in something and it becomes worth a billion dollars eventually.

At every step of JD Vance's adult career, it's been Peter Thiel guiding the way, promoting him and funding him.

JD Vance left law school and decided not to be a lawyer because of Peter Thiel, went to San Francisco and became a venture capitalist at a venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel.

Went back to Ohio, started his own venture capital firm with funding from Thiel, even though Vance was a mediocre venture capitalist.

Ran for Senate.

Peter Thiel spent $15 million setting a record for individuals spending in a Senate race up to that time.

And then he helped get Vance on the ticket with Donald Trump, even though Vance had previously called Trump a cultural opioid, an opioid of the masses, and America's Hitler.

So it's really I think a, a Senate candidate in Michigan again recently called JD Vance Peter Thiel's boy.

And that's a very apt description.

And now he's a heartbeat away from the presidency.

- And do you think he shares Thiel's belief that like basically freedom and democracy are incompatible?

- Without a doubt.

In fact, during his 2021 Senate race, he was quoting Curtis Yarvin.

JD Vance was quoting Curtis Jarvin.

Oh, another character I would - Love you to introduce - Us to.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.This fascist political guru who is also funded and supported and promoted by Peter Thiel.

And specifically Vance said during this 2021 interview that he believed Donald Trump would return to the White House in 2024.

And that when he did, he should purge the federal government.

And he should defy the law and challenge the courts to force him to do anything.

And he was right.

Donald Trump did return to office and do all those things.

And he did it with JD Vance by his side.

Yeah.

- Talk a little bit more about Curtis Yarvin.

Who is this guy?

And like what is his role in this kind of broader ideology?

- Curtis Yarvin is this mediocre computer programmer from San Francisco who dropped a tremendous amount of acid in the 1990s in the early 2000s, and then wrote a fantasy version of fascism for the 21st century while living off of his wife and his mother.

And he had this sort of pseudonymous blog where he wrote as Mitchus Moldbug.

And this came to the attention of people in Silicon Valley, and Peter Thiel became a, a big fan and supporter.

And the basic thesis of Yarvin is that democracy is dumb.

American democracy should be replaced with a dictatorship led by a CEO.

And the country should be broken up into these little corporate fiefdoms he called patchworks that would be run by authoritarian corporations that even had the power to execute their citizens for no reason and where everyone would be under constant and total surveillance at all times.

- Wow.

That is dark and - There's - More, but we don't need to go into it right now.

- We have time for everything.

- That's a taste.

- So that kind of though segues into one of the bigger, more like concrete things that you talk about that, that is part of this philosophy, which is the idea of network states.

Talk about that and who's kind of been the main proponent of that.

Like what is a network state?

It's kind of what you were just alluding to, right?

- Yeah.

The network state is a cult that's an offshoot of these ideas we've been talking about.

The idea that tech founders and billionaires and corporations should be the new governing power of the world.

And the idea is that you buy a piece of land and you form your own country, or that you use your money and influence to take over an existing country or government, local government, state government, and then turn that government inside out and make it serve your needs.

And the main proponent of the network state is a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who's another protege of drum roll please, Peter Thiel.

Peter Teal.

And who in 2022 released a book called The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which predicts that the United States will soon collapse in a civil war between the red tribe and the blue tribe, the Republicans and the Democrats.

And out of that will emerge this new gray tribe, this tech power in politics that will break the country into pieces and the world into pieces and replace the world's governments today with hundreds or thousands of new tech corporate governments that will then become the ruling class of the planet and beyond.

I mean, - Again, like not to say you're sounding crazy, but it sounds a little nuts - Definitely.

- What - You're talking about.

And yet you really detail how there are efforts to do this happening right now.

- There's a whole venture capital firm, Pronomos Capital, that exists to fund these projects around the world.

There's a prototype in Honduras called Prospera, where they've got their own rules and regulations and they were able to carve out a piece of an island off of Honduras to do this.

And the Honduran government has been trying to eject them for years and the billionaires behind Prospera are suing the Honduran government for almost $11 billion.

Donald Trump's been threatening to take Greenland.

And there are tech bros with a plan to build a new tech utopia, dystopia city on Greenland.

There's an, a plan to build a new tech zone in the ruins of Gaza.

And other tech billionaires have proposed building new cities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Venezuela.

And in 2024, when Trump ran for president, he had this unusual idea in his platform.

10 new freedom cities that would be built on federal land after a competition where companies would vie to build their own new city.

And while there was reporting on this idea that Trump wanted to build these Freedom Cities, it was very superficial.

To this day, no one has explained what is a Freedom City?

Why do we need Freedom Cities?

And where does the idea come from?

This idea comes from the Network State Book, which by the way, was Balaji Srinivasan repackaging Yarvin's patchwork idea.

Got it.

Trying to make it more startup friendly.

So it's all the same ideas.

And look, these are insane ideas.

These are insane people.

None of this should matter.

But when billionaires decide to create a cult that believes in weird stuff, their money gives them the power to impose these ideas on it, on us.

All - Right.

Well, let's talk about how this is like playing out in real time in Washington DC.

You know, Trump came back into office with, I think, unprecedented amounts of crypto money backing both Republican candidates for Congress and his campaign.

What do you see as the, like the nexus between his reelection and this group of folks?

I mean, we, we all saw them obviously at his inauguration lining up behind him.

And, and I think you kind of talk about, like, there was this sense that they were bending the knee, but you kind of seeing it a little differently.

- Oh, definitely.

They made an investment and it paid off.

Not all of them.

Elon Musk definitely made a massive investment spending $291 million in the 2024 election after saying he was going to stay out of the election.

Crypto, which 10 years ago was not even a player in politics, is now the largest player in terms of donations in our political system, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into 2024, and with hundreds of millions of dollars on hand for the midterms.

And this is a product that, according to Pew, only like 14% of Americans use.

So why are they the biggest, most dominant player in our politics?

What's happening here is that these billionaires are trying to buy the system in order to break the system.

And if you look at a chart of crypto spending, it's terrifying how fast this has grown.

Nothing grows this fast except for cancer.

And that's what crypto is.

It's a cancer in the heart of democracy.

And the fact that Donald Trump is raking in billions of dollars in crypto money while nobody can do anything about it.

The corruption is so staggering and massive that it's almost hard to explain in words.

- Yeah.

I mean, you talk about a number of ways his family has earned these billions.

You know, he, he pardoned the Binance founder who was in federal prison.

There's been pump and dump schemes.

He issued an executive order to create a Bitcoin reserve, which is sort of like ironic because the whole point of crypto is to challenge our normal monetary system, right?

So I mean, it is too big to sort of explain, but like how in general is Trump and his family benefiting off of this?

They're, they've created their own crypto companies.

They're - Their - Own cryptocurrencies.

Their own crypto companies.

Even Melania had a crypto coin scam going.

A Bitcoin mining company.

Jared Kushner is now a co-founder of an AI company, Trump's son-in-law.

They're becoming venture capitalists.

And Silicon Valley has now merged with the Trump family.

You know, Silicon Valley executives going into the government as the Trump family goes into Silicon Valley investment, et cetera.

What do the Trumps know about any of this stuff?

Nothing.

And you've got foreign governments buying up Trump's fake coins just to curry favor.

We've never seen anything like this.

People like to say, you know, Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm.

And these guys are just openly selling off the country.

Yeah.

And it's not clear why any Democrat is voting for crypto bills and taking money from the crypto industry.

Yeah.

- I mean, that's a great pivot.

I want to look forward and, and talk about that.

Because as you say, I mean, the amount of money that has flown into our political system from crypto is staggering, you know, outpacing.

We talk a lot about APAC spending.

I mean, they're, they're just dwarfing that type of spending, right?

In these races.

And it's worked.

I mean, Katie Porter, I think you could argue, really got taken down in her Senate race against Adam Schiff by the crypto industry.

Ohio Senator Sharrod Brown lost in 2024.

And yet I've heard you say like you don't think that people should be scared of this money.

Like a politician should be scared of it.

Why, why is that?

Like what's your.

Why are you so bullish on, on the fact that this could be defeated?

- I think we need leaders who aren't afraid of these people.

And I think if people told the voters what's really happening and how crypto, this weapon of mass corruption is a gun to the head of our democracy, I think people would be willing to overlook crypto's attacks.

You got to find a way to defang their power, which is their money.

As we've seen before in California, being the billionaire doesn't always mean you win.

People are suspicious of billionaires.

People don't like billionaires, and people are starting to hate billionaires.

So I think it's important for Democrats to realize that the politics of the future is a war against billionaires.

And by the way, it's a war the billionaires started against all of us.

We can have billionaires or we can have democracy.

We cannot have both.

Any Democrat who doesn't understand that is playing for the wrong team.

- I mean, you point out in the book that there's a couple, few thousand billionaires, you know, worldwide.

About - 3,062, according to Forbes.

- Okay.

I mean, compared to obviously hundreds of millions of people, billions of people.

- Billions of people.

8.3 billion, I think, on earth total.

- So is that where the power lies, just that there's so many more of us that are not billionaires?

Like how are you.

What, what, what is your kind of call to action for, for average people here?

- The billionaires see a future without us, so we have to start imagining a future without them.

I don't have a direct prescription for how we get there, hopefully through policy.

But the billionaires are preparing for a dark future where they're going to use technology and weapons and drones to somehow keep the global order while everyone else is poor and starving and they're hiding in their digital fortresses of super abundance.

So before we reach that point, we have to make this stop.

And we have to realize that we cannot have this vast inequality that allows a tiny handful of men to exert tyrannical power over the rest of us.

Even the ancient Greeks knew this was not a sustainable course.

They're the ones who named oligarchy.

Oligarchy always ends in destruction and violence.

And so we have to get off this track.

And I think what the billionaires are doing right now is providing us with a reality check and an early alarm.

Some might say it's a late alarm, that we have to stop this thing in its tracks or it will destroy us all.

- I mean, I wonder how you think, you know, I, I hear you saying Democrats need to stand up to this.

I think it seems like at least within the MAGA movement, there's a lot of sort of synergy between these folks.

I mean, do you think that there's hope on both sides of the political aisle to kind of push back?

Because I think populism is, is not sort of a partisan war cry in some ways.

- Even on the right, you see people suspicious of billionaire power.

I'm given a lot of hope by what's happening in Solano County where these billionaires are trying to build this weird, very network state-like city thing in Solano County.

And 70% - They call California - Forever.

- California Forever.

Which some call California for never.

But 70% of the voters in Solano County oppose it, including Republicans and Democrats and Independents.

In fact, Republicans are more opposed to the billionaire city than the Democrats are, the last poll I saw.

And so I think you see that with the data centers, and you see that reflected in the polls.

People believe the billionaires have too much power.

And that's really the core problem we face right now in our society, in our planet, which by the way, before the tech billionaires came along, we were already destroying the planet to enrich a f - a handful of fossil fuel billionaire companies, right?

So this idea that we have to destroy everything so the billionaires can get richer, even though the money only makes them crazy and doesn't make them happy, is the simple problem we have to solve in our time.

Gil - Duran, thank you so much.

Thank you.

- Appreciate your - Time.

That is going to be a wrap for political breakdown.

We're a production of KQED.

Our engineer today is Christopher Beal.

Our producer is Emiko Oda.

Our video team includes Jim McKee, Derek Larto, Kate Lapenski, and Vivian Morales.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

We'll see you next time.