{"id":1566,"date":"2026-08-20T16:39:49","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T16:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1566"},"modified":"2026-08-20T16:39:49","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T16:39:49","slug":"silicon-valleys-billionaire-cults-are-coming-for-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1566","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley\u2019s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Part of the Series<\/h4>\n<\/header>\n
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Movement Memos<\/h5>\n<\/article>\n<\/section>\n
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Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with <\/span><\/i>a donation<\/span><\/i> of any size.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Read more Union-Busters Are Using ICE to Intimidate California Wine Industry Workers<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWe can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,\u201d Gil Dur\u00e1n says. In this episode of Movement Memos<\/em>, Dur\u00e1n and host Kelly Hayes discuss the bizarre fixations and political fantasies of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and how those ideas are being translated into real-world governance. Dur\u00e1n and Hayes also discuss Silicon Valley\u2019s Christian cosplay, and how traditional Christian ideas are being used as wrapping paper for the pursuit of AI-first, corporate fiefdoms.<\/p>\n

TRANSCRIPT<\/h2>\n

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.<\/em><\/p>\n

Music: Son Monarcas and Dusty Decks<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>Welcome to \u201cMovement Memos,\u201d a Truthout<\/em> podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I\u2019m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about how the cults of Silicon Valley have seized vast amounts of institutional and political power, and how tech billionaires like Peter Thiel are seeking to remake the world \u2014 while repackaging some of their most radical, anti-democratic ideas in the language of Christianity. We\u2019ll be hearing from Gil Dur\u00e1n, author of the new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.<\/em><\/p>\n

The growing public animus toward data centers and AI presents us with an opportunity right now to unmask these billionaires and explain their bizarre ambitions and political fantasies to our friends and neighbors in plain terms. I believe that kind of narrative work is a moral and strategic imperative. With Gil\u2019s help, we\u2019ll talk about how Silicon Valley capitalists developed their ideas, the threat they pose to our communities, the forces we will need to defeat their projects, and why we must fight back.<\/p>\n

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support \u201cMovement Memos,\u201d you can subscribe to Truthout<\/em>\u2019s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to \u201cMovement Memos\u201d on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.<\/p>\n

Truthout<\/em> is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won\u2019t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.<\/p>\n

[musical interlude]<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes:<\/strong> Gil Dur\u00e1n, welcome to \u201cMovement Memos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Thank you for having me.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>How are you doing today?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n:<\/strong> Pretty good. Staying busy. Lots of interest in the book, so I\u2019m doing a lot of talking about these ideas these days.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes:<\/strong> Well, I can understand why there\u2019s a lot of interest. It\u2019s a really fascinating read. Can you tell our audience a bit about your work?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Well, I\u2019m a journalist who got the journalism bug at a very young age in the fifth grade and went into journalism after college after working on my college paper and doing a lot of internships. But after a few years in journalism, the industry started collapsing (the newspaper industry), and I ended up spending, unexpectedly, 17 years working in politics as a spokesman and communication strategist for a host of California Democratic elected officials like [Governor] Jerry Brown and [Senator] Dianne Feinstein and Attorney General Kamala Harris at the time. And then, in 2018, I got the chance to return to journalism, and I jumped on it. I\u2019d always felt there was something missing. It was this feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, not wearing a suit and being in government and consulting and such.<\/p>\n

So I returned to journalism in 2018 and was the editorial page editor of both The Sacramento Bee<\/em> and then the San Francisco Examiner <\/em>where I stumbled into the thicket of extremist tech politics in 2022. And this led to the next few years of my life where I burned through tremendous amounts of my own money in order to self-fund my research, and it unexpectedly has resulted in a book. <\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes<\/strong>: A lot of the story you tell begins with The Sovereign Individual<\/em>, a relatively obscure 1997 book that imagined technology weakening governments, destroying jobs, and allowing a wealthy cognitive elite to escape taxes, regulation, and democratic control. Peter Thiel seems to have taken that book extremely seriously. What did he find in it, and how much of the political project you describe can be traced back to that vision?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n:<\/strong> I believe Peter Thiel found his entire worldview in The Sovereign Individual<\/em>. He was already pretty right-wing as a young man and in college, but The Sovereign Individual <\/em>provided a futuristic framework for how, in the 21st century, democracy in nation states would collapse, and we would witness the rise of these wealthy individuals who would be able to float around the world as sovereigns unto themselves, unbeholden to democracy rules, regulations, or laws. And what Peter Thiel subsequently did was build a cult of Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism, a group of billionaires who believe technology will make democracy obsolete in the 21st century, and that indeed it is their destiny to hasten and accelerate the process of this democratic collapse and specifically, The Sovereign Individual<\/em>, which was written by two guys who wrote a lot of kooky conspiracy theory stuff. These were not intellectuals or respectable, credible writers or journalists by the time they did this work.<\/p>\n

The Sovereign Individual <\/em>predicted that two technologies would play a key role in the 21st-century attack on democracy. One was called cybercurrency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow the wealthy to exfiltrate their wealth from democratic nations. We would call that crypto today. And the other was advanced automation, which The Sovereign Individual<\/em> predicted would kill most employment and jobs, thereby leading to an economic collapse that would hasten the democratic collapse. And this book was so influential on Peter Thiel that he\u2019s named it as part of his inspiration for starting PayPal, which was an effort to get ahead of this predicted digital currency. It didn\u2019t quite result in a digital currency. It became a pretty basic payments app. And by the way, Peter Thiel and Co. no longer own PayPal. They sold it a long time ago, but it did make him a multimillionaire and provide the basis for the fortune that would eventually make him a billionaire and make him one of the most powerful and influential people in the world.<\/p>\n

So basically, Peter Thiel, who has said he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible and that government is fundamentally evil, was totally turned out by this very weird and kooky and scary apocalyptic conspiracy theory book, and we are currently living with the ramifications, I believe.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes:<\/strong> And I want to talk more about Peter Thiel, but first, you describe Silicon Valley as a landscape of overlapping cults and quasi-religious movements, including the constellation of ideas known as the TESCREAL bundle. Why has the tech industry produced these totalizing belief systems and what political work do those beliefs do for the people who hold them?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Well, it was Dr. Emile Torres and Dr. Timnit Gebru who came up with TESCREAL as an acronym that bundles these strange beliefs: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. And at the heart of these very weird ideas, which I won\u2019t explain every single one of them because that could take all day and it\u2019d be better if one of them explained it, is this idea that technology is about to fundamentally transform everything, how the world works, how politics works, how money works, how human beings work, how life works. They believe that they\u2019re going to create this sort of AI God that will allow for eternal life or multiplanetary colonization and for humans to merge with machines and become godlike creatures.<\/p>\n

And much of the AI discussion these days from the industry is based on these ideas that AI is not just a tool that will make certain parts of life better or make a better spell checker or recipe generator, but to fundamentally transform what it means to be human and to fundamentally shift the economy by getting rid of jobs and turning us into a society where somehow we have a superabundance that allows us all to live happily though we have no meaning and no work in our lives. This is the narrative coming out of the AI industry or else a technology that could possibly, in addition to killing all jobs, wipe humanity from the face of the earth because it will be so powerful and magical that it\u2019s like this big monster we\u2019re creating. But the only way to stop the monster from being created and killing us is to pour trillions and trillions of dollars into the pockets of a small handful of Silicon Valley billionaires so they can stop it from doing the bad thing and make it do the good thing.<\/p>\n

Now, that\u2019s a lot to say there, but it\u2019s not too hard to understand why this religious narrative of AI has spawned some cult religions like transhumanism, like longtermism, like cosmism. The idea is that AI will be the savior and liberator of these people, and all we have to do is burn up the earth and maximize compute and acceleration in order to create our new God. I know this sounds really kooky if you haven\u2019t heard of it, but they\u2019re pretty explicit about this stuff. They talk openly about things like creating the thermodynamic god, which is this mysterious boom loop that will appear if we only burn enough fossil fuels to create the mega super AI, which by the way may not even be possible or realistic in any way. That\u2019s part of the mythology is that this is actual intelligence that will create some superintelligence. But I think it\u2019s important because the question is why do the most successful and wealthy people in our society seek to destroy the country and the society and the system that allowed them to achieve such success?<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where you get into this idea of technological accelerationism. They feel that they are on the cusp of this magical, mystical, religious breakthrough to defeat death and to create a new kind of god in their own words. Many of them say this explicitly. But the only thing standing in the way of this unfettered expansion and acceleration of AI is democracy, is law, is regulation, is the needs and wants and desires of regular people. And so one of the reasons, maybe the core reason why they need to destroy democracy is in order to enable this unfettered acceleration. They call it effective accelerationism, this acceleration into the future. So there\u2019s a religious basis underlying this desire to destroy our democratic system because otherwise, it doesn\u2019t make much sense. Why would you want to destroy the exploitative capitalist machine with nuclear bombs that has created and enabled your success? No one has less of a reason to complain about our system than the billionaires do. They\u2019re the ones winning.<\/p>\n

So it doesn\u2019t make any rational sense for them to adopt this extremist political viewpoint, except that they are animated by a sort of religious idea of what technology will enable them to achieve. A lot of them are also afraid to die, and they think AI is going to save them. So they\u2019re preaching this sort of apocalypse, and that\u2019s why I call this Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism. They\u2019re not promising to create new widgets and devices that make us happy and more connected like it was in the past 20 years. This is about, \u201cHey, we\u2019re creating the thing that\u2019s going to kill everybody maybe. So just sit back and hope that we cut you off a piece of our abundance later, and everything will be okay.\u201d And that\u2019s a very strange message and it\u2019s no wonder now that people are rising up against data centers and AI and starting to hate billionaires in larger and larger numbers.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>We had \u00c9mile Torres on the show back in 2023 to talk about TESCREAL and longtermism, and I love \u00c9mile \u2014 they\u2019re just so incredibly insightful, and I\u2019m so grateful for their analysis. But I remember some friends feeling like they didn\u2019t quite know what to do with that episode. They thought, sure, these people who are prioritizing the well-being of trillions of theoretical, future digital people over the billions of people alive today sound absolutely bananas, but what are they gonna do with that ideology? You can\u2019t sell that to the masses. So, how dangerous could these people and their cults really be?<\/p>\n

But what I was seeing, and what I was trying to convey to people, was that the people building power around these ideas had already consolidated an enormous amount of economic, political, and institutional power. If we look at the decades-long political project that brought some of the objectives of Christian nationalism to fruition in recent years, with TESCREAL, we\u2019re talking about something that\u2019s advanced much more quickly. Because while these tech power players haven\u2019t necessarily been marketing these ideologies to the masses, over the last few decades, they have been marketing products that have sort of containerized and redefined modern life, and they\u2019ve translated that wealth and that industrial and institutional capture into a whole lot of political power.<\/p>\n

Now, a few years after \u00c9mile and I had that conversation, these tech-right ideologies have a shocking level of influence inside the federal government and over AI and crypto policy. They\u2019re devouring some of the inner workings of government, in a similar manner to how they\u2019ve devoured industries. And they\u2019re also doing something else \u2014 they\u2019re sort of repackaging these fringe ideas of theirs in more marketable, palatable ways. Which brings us to Christianity. Let\u2019s talk about Peter Thiel\u2019s fixation on the Antichrist, which is one of the stranger threads in the book, but you argue that it has real political significance. What is Thiel actually saying when he talks about the Antichrist? And how does that kind of apocalyptic thinking shape the way he understands political enemies, technology, and power?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>When Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, he\u2019s confessing. He\u2019s confessing his worldview. He believes we are in an existential battle over the future. And on one side is the billionaires and accelerationism, and on the other side is democracy and the majority of people in the world. He often throws communism in there as one of his demonized enemies, but he\u2019s really talking about democracy if you look more deeply into it because they\u2019re the ones aligned behind Trump and this authoritarian leadership. So when Peter Thiel describes the Antichrist, he describes this mysterious force or figure that will rise up suddenly to seize massive amounts of power and seize total control over the world by preaching peace and safety. None of this comes from the Bible, by the way. This is all his weird interpretation of the Bible.<\/p>\n

But when he describes Silicon Valley, which he has also said it would be a religion of technicity that seeks to create an artificial world where people can no longer distinguish their real lives from the lives that are artificially being created for them, he said this in an essay back in 2007, he\u2019s describing Silicon Valley, but I don\u2019t know that he knows that he\u2019s doing that, or else he\u2019s doing it on purpose. It\u2019s a double entendre. So the framework of the Antichrist is this idea that we\u2019re in an existential battle, which we are. It\u2019s a war of the billionaires against everyone else. But he uses it to try to scapegoat all of his enemies. It\u2019s Greta Thunberg, it\u2019s AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], it\u2019s democracy, it\u2019s AI regulation, it\u2019s anybody who opposes tech acceleration. Anybody Peter Thiel doesn\u2019t like is the Antichrist in Peter Thiel\u2019s Antichrist spiel. And by the way, theologians have completely rejected, mocked, and scorned all of his gobbledygook. This is a DIY theology from a guy who, as far as I can tell, isn\u2019t even really Christian, Christian in name only.<\/p>\n

Thiel has himself said that he\u2019s religious but not spiritual, which means he likes the order and hierarchy and rules of religion without the mystery and spirit of religion. Usually, people say the opposite. They say they\u2019re spiritual, but not religious. Thiel likes to reverse things a lot. I call it \u201cThiellian inversion.\u201d He takes something and does the reverse of it. So it\u2019s strange that he\u2019s talking about the Antichrist because he\u2019s, like, a terrible spokesman for Christianity. But I think the other thing he\u2019s doing that relates to what we just talked about with the TESCREAL bundle is Thiel is trying to put a Christian mask on these TESCREAL ideas. And I think he\u2019s trying to hush the louder voices in the TESCREAL movement and encourage them to adopt a Christian pose because that\u2019s essential to this alliance they\u2019ve made with the Republican right and the evangelical base of Trump\u2019s MAGA fascist movement, which is so important because there\u2019s a tension where the evangelicals in Trump\u2019s base are very suspicious of the tech guys and understand that they\u2019re a bunch of godless weirdo heathens.<\/p>\n

And so, there\u2019s been this news recently where, oh, there\u2019s this Christian revival in Silicon Valley and it\u2019s led by none other than Peter Thiel, where they\u2019re having these meetings to talk about how basically, I don\u2019t know, Christ would be a VC [venture capitalist] if he returned to earth. It\u2019s total bullshit, but I think it\u2019s got multi-layers. One is Thiel confessing his worldview that we\u2019re in an existential crisis and everyone he doesn\u2019t like is the Antichrist. The other is that, \u201chey, guys, let\u2019s act like we\u2019re Christians and speak in Christian terms while essentially pursuing acceleration TESCREAL goals.\u201d And if you look at the TESCREAL bundle of beliefs, what are they promising through AI? They\u2019re promising salvation, the creation of God, eternal life, escape from earth, transcendence into the heavens, the stars, multiplanetary life, paradise, an abundance that comes after we overcome our enemies and achieve the new paradisical realm that will be created by AI.<\/p>\n

Their ideas literally map directly onto Christianity in this perverse anti-human way, which some might say is very much like what the Antichrist would do. Now, I don\u2019t believe in the Antichrist. I\u2019m not a Bible-thumping Christian. I was raised in Catholicism, but I don\u2019t obsess over these ideas. I don\u2019t go to church. But the very idea that Peter Thiel\u2019s talking about the Antichrist so much is in itself a signal of the kind of emergency that we\u2019re in. And I believe that it\u2019s an example of this billionaire psychosis that gets created when people have too much money, too much power, and no one around them to tell them to sit down and shut up and stop sounding weird. So it\u2019s a saving grace that he\u2019s sounding an alarm. Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist. We should be very afraid given his proximity to power and the number of people he influences directly.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes:<\/strong> That quote about him being religious but not spiritual was one of my favorites in the book because it is so sitcom-silly. It sounds like something a character on Parks and Rec<\/em> would say. But it also feels revealing, because what seems useful to these guys about religion isn\u2019t necessarily faith. It\u2019s authority. It\u2019s hierarchy. It\u2019s having a set of simple ideas that people are supposed to defer to. That way, nothing is interrogated.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking about Elon Musk calling himself a \u201ccultural Christian\u201d and making these very utilitarian comments about Christianity \u2014 maybe religion is good, maybe it keeps people from being sad. There\u2019s something so instrumental about that. And I think it connects to a much broader hostility toward the Enlightenment and toward critical thought that runs through these politics. Because at the same time that they\u2019re repackaging themselves in this language of faith and tradition, they\u2019re building technologies that encourage us to outsource more and more of our own thinking and judgment. Sam Altman talks about intelligence becoming a utility that people pay for. And I keep thinking about what kind of political subject that vision creates \u2014 people who are increasingly de-skilled and dependent on systems controlled by a handful of enormously powerful people.<\/p>\n

And while these politics are strategically dehumanizing, toward all of us who aren\u2019t billionaires or major players in the tech world, they\u2019re also really insulting to people of faith, because what we\u2019re talking about is a kind of perverse form of religious cosplay.<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s weird. It\u2019s really a touchy thing for billionaires to try to claim Christianity. Jesus Christ, who was known for his message of love and peace, one of the only groups he really shat upon was rich people who he said the camel had an easier chance of getting through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven. So it\u2019s very strange and it\u2019s very fraught with danger when billionaires try to embrace Christianity. And that\u2019s what is happening though. This idea that the people who really need Jesus Christ or who are the most important in Christianity are the people in Silicon Valley today. This is something that Peter Thiel says in one of his Antichrist lectures in San Francisco. The people in this room, the people listening to his Antichrist spiel in San Francisco are doing the most important Christian work in the world today, which would be news to the Jesuits out in some poor, starving village full of poverty and misery trying to eke out some kind of salvation for people there. <\/p>\n

This is a very arrogant and solipsistic claim to make. But I think one of the strangest things about this whole religious fervor is that JD Vance is pretending to be a Catholic largely because of Peter Thiel. And he has said that it was Thiel\u2019s ideas that inspired his conversion to Catholicism. And similarly, if you look at Vance\u2019s past interviews around the Hillbilly Elegy<\/em> time, he described religion as a cultural tchotchke where he grew up. He was raised in a culture of Protestant evangelism, but he\u2019s described it as something where you didn\u2019t really have it. You didn\u2019t go to church. It\u2019s just that what\u2019s part of your identity. Obviously, you believe in Jesus and there\u2019s a picture on the wall. And he later becomes an atheist before converting to Catholicism at the age of 35. Apparently, he did that mostly in order to argue against the authority of the Pope, which he has infamously done for the past few years.<\/p>\n

But you see this everywhere you look, this idea that religion has an important role to play in the lives of men who are essentially the opposite of Christianity. And that\u2019s sort of scary because I think one thing Peter Thiel understands is the power of religion and apocalyptic language to motivate people to be a powerful force in politics. And that\u2019s pretty much the same thing Elon Musk is saying. A cultural Christian is what JD Vance is describing as his upbringing, a cultural tchotchke. So they\u2019re not seeding religion. They\u2019re trying to claim religion as their motivation to give them this mask of familiar morality that obscures their true beliefs and their true aims and goals.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>Absolutely. And I appreciate you naming JD Vance\u2019s role. I learned new things about Vance reading your book, including how mediocre he really was as a player in the VC world. But the role he now plays as a bridge between the Christian right and the tech right feels really important. Christianity offers these tech agendas a familiar moral language and a kind of traditional posture that can obscure how fringe and radical some of the underlying politics actually are.<\/p>\n

Read more What DeFlock? A Week of Action Confronts the AI Surveillance State<\/a><\/p>\n

And that repackaging makes me think about a broader shift in how Silicon Valley presents itself. A few years ago, I talked with Brian Merchant about the way the industry\u2019s pitch to the public had changed. Tech companies once sold us the idea that technology would create a better world for everyone. Increasingly, billionaires seem to be selling us the idea that we\u2019re already living in a dystopia, and that we should buy up every apocalyptic advantage we can. There\u2019s also this strange tendency to invoke dystopian science fiction almost aspirationally \u2014 to take worlds that were imagined as warnings about alienation, social collapse, and technological domination and treat them as models for a future we\u2019re supposed to adapt ourselves to. The pitch is no longer that technology will deliver a better tomorrow. It\u2019s that upheaval is inevitable, their technologies will be at the center of it, and our best hope is to buy in. Is that shift part of what you call \u201capocalypse capitalism\u201d?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Most definitely, and they\u2019re overtly selling it now, especially with the rise of AI. One of the major selling points has been that if we don\u2019t invest in these guys so that they can develop this thing the right way, it will destroy us all. We have to align it with human needs. But they\u2019re the only ones saying that, \u201cOh, this is going to be this supermonster that can kill us.\u201d And if that were the case, why would we leave it to the private sector to develop such a dangerous technology? Would we allow corporations to independently develop big new weapons that could destroy the entire planet? No. So there\u2019s this idea that they\u2019re creating an apocalyptic technology that\u2019s going to change everything and be the last invention. And fortunately for us, they\u2019ve gone around saying that, which has created this popular rejection of AI and data centers and billionaires. So I definitely think that that\u2019s a part of it.<\/p>\n

The other part of it, I think, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it \u201cend times fascism,\u201d is this merger with the apocalyptic politics of MAGA, which also have a religious framework in which Trump is this figure sent from God as an instrument of vengeance and power to achieve some sort of return of Jesus through the coming of the apocalypse, the wars in Israel, et cetera. There\u2019s a real crazy apocalyptic belief at the core of the MAGA movement as well. And it\u2019s completely delusional and deranged. How could anyone see Trump as an expression or an ally of Jesus Christ? I mean, he literally posted a photo of himself as Jesus Christ and has multiple times compared himself to Christ with him being more favorable and better than Jesus Christ. This is not something that a real Christian, a real believer in Christianity would ever do.<\/p>\n

So I think there\u2019s that melding as well that makes it a fascist movement. On one basic level, the tech billionaires are fascist because they have aligned with the fascist movement. And at the core of that is this movement that melds government power with corporate power with religious power into one unified monopolistic authoritarian entity. And so, that religious element is very important because it\u2019s totalizing. It\u2019s all of your life. It\u2019s not just your money or your political beliefs. It\u2019s your moral and spiritual belief system. And so, that\u2019s where the apocalypse capitalism gets a bit even more dangerous is because the tech fascists have become a parasite on the MAGA movement. They\u2019re sucking its power in order to achieve their goals. Now, if you look deeper into what these guys say, they don\u2019t really have respect for your average red hat Trump voter.<\/p>\n

Those people are just temporary allies who help to fuel their own designs for power under a president who is raking in crypto corruption, creating a tower of political corruption so unprecedented and massive that it\u2019s even hard to explain with words. So yeah, apocalypse capitalism. Yeah, I think we\u2019ve seen it more fully develop in the past couple of years, especially under the return to Trump, the fact that we\u2019re now speaking about this demonic communist threat. And when Charlie Kirk was shot, for a day or two on X, there was this trending idea that this was the work of demonic forces and we have to rise up against these demons who are basically Democrats and liberals. And so, you see this bubbling up, this idea that, again, we\u2019re in this existential battle and we\u2019re coming to the final moment here where we\u2019re going to know the future. It\u2019s going to be decided in some kind of terrible, violent upheaval where the world is completely different after that, whether we have democracy or where we don\u2019t have democracy. And we\u2019re still very much in the middle of this struggle.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>And these anti-democratic elites also have a vision for what comes next as democracy is demolished. What is the network state, and why do you see it as such an important part of the tech elites\u2019 long-term political vision?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>The network state is this cult ideology which argues that democracy should be replaced by corporate-run tech city states, essentially, new startup nations that will replace existing nations and therefore replace democracy, for the most part. And the network state is important because even though it sounds like a fringe kooky thing\u2026 There was a book written by a guy named Balaji Srinivasan in 2022 called The Network State: How to Start a New Country<\/em>, and you can read it for free online. You can find it with any search engine. And there\u2019s a one-sentence version, a one-paragraph version, a one-page version, and then a 400-page version of this idea that the United States is collapsing and it\u2019s going to be replaced by these new corporate-run fiefdoms, essentially, these corporate-run territories. And as crazy as that sounds, you got to keep in mind that Balaji Srinivasan is, of course, a protege of Peter Thiel.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a company called Pronomos Capital, a venture capital company that is brought into existence to fund these projects all over the world. In addition, we\u2019re already seeing this idea being tried in Honduras where there\u2019s a tech-funded wannabe city territory called Prospera. And Trump, in his 2024 campaign plan, called for the creation of 10 new Freedom Cities in the United States. There\u2019s talk of building one of these cities in Greenland. That\u2019s been part of Trump\u2019s whole argument for stealing Greenland. You\u2019ve got these tech guys pushing to build a new tech dystopia network state city there. And there\u2019s even a proposal to build a new network state freedom city on the ruins of Gaza. I mean, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> wrote about this. And it\u2019s like Jared Kushner\u2019s involved, and Trump tweeted out an AI-created video that showed a Trump hotel and casino on the beach at Gaza with money raining from the sky and Elon Musk sunning himself.<\/p>\n

So somehow this idea of creating these new billionaire-owned private territories has gone from being this weird niche cult in Silicon Valley with a self-published book that\u2019s free online to becoming something that the Trump administration, at least on a superficial level, has been pushing as potential policy. Now, Trump hasn\u2019t really mentioned the Freedom Cities in a while. There\u2019s been a lobbying effort that Wired<\/em> wrote about in Washington to get these things enabled. Kind of hard to do. But what\u2019s interesting to me is that while Trump has called for these Freedom Cities and there\u2019s a whole billionaire-funded lobbying effort to create them, the media has mentioned this idea a couple of times, but no one has explained what these things are, why we need them, or where the idea comes from. And I feel like if Kamala Harris had become president, The New York Times<\/em> would do a full investigation of what the hell\u2019s a Freedom City and does it come from this weird ass book written by a Peter Thiel protege. But instead, we have this weird silence around this idea.<\/p>\n

And I think another key to understanding the Freedom City is that, as I write in the book, Balaji Srinivasan didn\u2019t come up with the idea of the network state on his own. He got it from Curtis Yarvin who wrote a long essay in the 2000s called \u201cPatchwork\u201d in which he proposed a future in which the United States would be dissolved. And instead, we would have the rise of these corporate-run autocracies. And he used as an example, something he called Frisk Corp, a future San Francisco where there would be absolute total surveillance by an authoritarian corporate government that would be so powerful that it even had the power to execute its citizens for no reason and no cause. And he suggested that in this future Frisk Corp, unproductive people could be turned into biodiesel to fuel the city\u2019s Muni buses.<\/p>\n

But he said, \u201cOh, well, I\u2019m just kidding. Instead we need to have a humane alternative to genocide,\u201d and then suggested that we lock unproductive people, meaning the poor, into these individual cells where they would spend their whole lives in these basic virtual reality prisons and not be on the street. And that\u2019s horrifying for many reasons, especially since it would be much cheaper to give them housing and health care and food instead of locking them in virtual reality prisons, which sounds pretty expensive. But this idea of creating these new patchworks comes from Yarvin. And what Balaji Srinivasan does in The Network State<\/em> is strip out all of Yarvin\u2019s crazy genocidal ideas and try to present the idea as this startup-friendly concept that now has a venture capital fund (Balaji Srinivasan is an advisor to Pronomos Capital) that is trying to build these things all over the world.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s this dystopian idea from science fiction. A lot of people bring up Neal Stephenson. Quinn Slobodian, who\u2019s a Boston University historian, wrote a whole book called Crack-Up Capitalism<\/em> about the long history of the dream of building these new territories where the usual rules don\u2019t apply to some wealthy group of capitalists. You could trace it back to Ayn Rand\u2019s Atlas Shrugged<\/em> where these wealthy industrialists hide out in their little private zone and wait for the world to fall apart. It\u2019s basically a vision in which democracy no longer exists, and the wealthy are now the monarchs and the dictators of the world. <\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>Trump went from calling Bitcoin \u201ca scam\u201d to becoming deeply financially entangled with crypto as he returned to the White House. You write that crypto\u2019s real political innovation turned out to be its ability to capture government through money and corruption. How important has crypto been to the tech right\u2019s seizure of political power?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Crypto was long envisioned as a way that anarcho-capitalists would be able to escape government authority and move around the world without being under government surveillance. It was seen as this liberatory tool that would be against government power, that would undermine government power. What has actually happened now is quite different. Crypto has become a major force in seizing government power and putting government in the hands of crypto billionaires. Donald Trump spent years deriding crypto as a scam and as a ripoff and as something that wasn\u2019t even real money. And on the day he returned to the White House in 2025, Donald Trump became a crypto billionaire and subsequently became the crypto bro-in-chief, the main evangelist for crypto in the entire world. And it turns out that crypto is not an anti-government tool. Crypto is a tool for seizing government power because we have a system where you can buy government power.<\/p>\n

And crypto, which wasn\u2019t even a player in politics 10 years ago, is now suddenly in the last five years, the top monied force in American politics. Hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into our elections to take out politicians who are unfriendly to crypto and to install politicians who are basically owned by the crypto industry. It\u2019s grown so enormously fast that it\u2019s terrifying when you look at a chart, and it\u2019s bigger than all of the other industries who have played in this game. And now, AI is following the crypto playbook of flooding their money into our political system. And I call crypto a weapon of mass corruption because that\u2019s what\u2019s happening. I mean, the Trump family has gained billions of dollars in wealth via crypto in the last two years openly, transparently. This is written about in the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, you name it.<\/p>\n

People are buying Trump\u2019s crypto in order to curry favor with him. They\u2019re losing their money through this mechanism. So crypto is just a form of political corruption. They finally found a use case besides terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, and gambling. It\u2019s political corruption. And so, this, again, is delivering on one of the prophecies of The Sovereign Individual<\/em> that crypto would be a massive tool for undermining government. And look at what they\u2019ve been able to achieve so far. \u201cDOGE,\u201d even though it, at least in its first incarnation, didn\u2019t last very long, has caused tremendous damage to the American government and to the country\u2019s standing in the world. Millions of people are predicted to die in poor countries because of the cuts to USAID. And in my book, I call that a \u201cSilicon Valley genocide.\u201d The richest people in the world delivering a targeted hit to the poorest people in the world, causing massive amounts of unnecessary preventable deaths.<\/p>\n

And it didn\u2019t even save money, by the way. DOGE cost money. It added to the deficit. And the most chilling thing about DOGE, and this was written about actually in the Washington Post<\/em> surprisingly and even in The New York Times<\/em>, is that that idea was first written up by Curtis Yarvin in his blog in the 2000s where he said that a future president acting like a dictator should install a CEO and purge the federal government of federal employees and cut international aid programs and completely disrupt America\u2019s diplomatic standing around the world. And he called this idea \u201cRAGE,\u201d retire all government employees, and this eventually becomes DOGE.<\/p>\n

And what\u2019s even more scary about this is that in 2021 when he was running for Senate, JD Vance gave an interview in which he quoted Yarvin\u2019s idea specifically for purging the federal government. And Vance predicted that in 2024, that Trump would return to power and that he should do all of the things he is currently doing. And what we didn\u2019t know at the time was that JD Vance would also be the vice president to Donald Trump, a man he once referred to as an \u201copioid of the masses,\u201d as \u201ccultural heroin,\u201d and as \u201cAmerica\u2019s Hitler.\u201d But that\u2019s the power of billionaire money and Peter Thiel, and that\u2019s the corrupting power of crypto.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>The book also shows that these tech projects can be surprisingly vulnerable. You describe how, in Solano County, California, a group of tech billionaires spent nearly a billion dollars buying land for a planned new city, only to run into overwhelming local opposition and abandon their ballot measure. What does that fight tell us about the limits of billionaire power? And where else do you see vulnerabilities that organized people can exploit?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>Unfortunately, the California Forever story is not over. Now, the billionaires are going directly to Governor Gavin Newsom to try to get a state law to impose their city on the people of Solano County. They couldn\u2019t win a ballot measure. They needed a ballot measure with the majority of people voting to create this new city on land that they had secretly bought up for five years. And 70 percent of the voters in the polls were opposed to this idea, including large amounts of Republicans. In fact, I think Republican voters were even more opposed to the tech billionaire city than the Democratic voters, but independents were also against it. So they abandoned the ballot measure. But it was clear early on that they weren\u2019t done because they had hired up a lot of Newsom\u2019s political advisors as their consultants. And lo and behold, they are now working to get last minute legislation passed this month in secrecy that would basically exempt their city from laws and allow them to build it there.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re going to see what Newsom does on that. His Office of Economic Development put out a memo supporting the project, which pretty much means that Newsom supports the project. And the main lobbyist California Forever has hired is a guy named Jason Kinney, who\u2019s a close friend of Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom\u2019s favorite lobbyist. In fact, when Newsom got in trouble a few years ago for having that fancy dinner at The French Laundry during the pandemic lockdowns, it was Jason Kinney\u2019s birthday party, the lobbyist\u2019s birthday party. So California Forever is playing the Sacramento game now of hiring up people and trying to get the bill through. At the same time, everywhere these people go, they\u2019re hated. Whether it\u2019s trying to build a tech billionaire city and getting rejected by Republicans and Democrats alike or trying to put these data centers everywhere, people are pushing back, and that\u2019s something that gives me hope.<\/p>\n

People are also organizing against Flock. There\u2019s the Purge Palantir campaign, which is getting lots of attention and helping make people aware of the degree to which Palantir is burrowing into every aspect of our government and needs to be rejected. I think there\u2019s been a lack of focus on it from establishment politicians and from the establishment media. So the word is not getting out there as much as it should, but I think people are primed to organize against billionaire power. They\u2019re already doing it. What we need is it to get loud enough so that even the mainstream politicians like Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla are out there talking about pushing back directly on billionaire power. There\u2019s this weird silence coming out of the establishment, which is readily criticizing Donald Trump, who\u2019s this doddering, old, crypto corrupt fool, but they\u2019re very hesitant to say anything directly about the billionaires of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

A lot of this stuff is coming out of California, and it\u2019s strange the degree to which Gavin Newsom and none of our top elected officials will name that. That\u2019s somewhere they could be effective actually, naming and shaming and pushing back on these billionaires behind Trump who live in our state, but they won\u2019t do it. Why? Because they either are afraid of the billionaire money coming after them, or worse, they want the billionaire money funding their future campaigns. So I think we\u2019re still on the fence in terms of how this ends up, but there are promising signs because people who aren\u2019t even normally activists are organizing against billionaire power as it manifests in their communities via data centers. In fact, I was really heartened recently. A relative of mine who has never shown any interest in politics posting and urging her friends on Instagram to come to this data center protest in our hometown. And I thought, \u201cWow, even they\u2019re getting engaged in this stuff now.\u201d That\u2019s how much the anti-data center movement has penetrated.<\/p>\n

But I think what we need to help the public understand is that it\u2019s not just the data centers that are invading our lives and our communities. It\u2019s the crypto corruption. It\u2019s the tech fascism on even the much higher level that has captured Washington, D.C. and is currently wielding a tremendous and dangerous amount of power in our system.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>I really appreciate that point, and I appreciate the point you make in the book that this threat extends so far beyond Trump. These forces are so deeply enmeshed with this administration that I think it can be easy to understand them as simply part of the Trumpian threat we\u2019re up against right now. But even if Trump were removed from the equation, we\u2019d still be contending with billionaire power, the tech right, and these anti-democratic projects. And the Democratic Party does not exist in opposition to those forces. So if we want anyone to actually constrain this power, we\u2019re going to have to build a hell of a lot more political momentum around doing that.<\/p>\n

Given that our audience is largely composed of activists and organizers, I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about how people can talk about these issues in their own communities. When \u00c9mile Torres and I discussed TESCREAL a few years ago, part of the difficulty was simply explaining why these bizarre, cultish ideas were actually important and threatening. Now we\u2019re in a different moment. People are organizing against data centers. Workers are pushing back against AI. Communities are confronting surveillance technologies and seeing how these systems affect their lives in really material ways. Those struggles give people something concrete to organize around.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ve also been talking today about the larger political project behind some of this \u2014 the corruption, the cultish ideologies, the attack on democracy, the aspiration to replace liberal democracy with corporate dictatorships. Given your background in both politics and journalism, how do you think people should talk about those larger projects in their communities? What language or framing helps people understand what they\u2019re actually up against?<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n: <\/strong>This is a battle of billionaires versus freedom. It\u2019s a fight to defend ourselves against an unprecedented existential threat. We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both. And ours is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And right now, we have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. And that\u2019s not all Donald Trump\u2019s fault, by the way. The Democrats were doing this, too. The billionaires just acted a little more normal and polite when the Democrats were in power. But if we do not crush billionaire power in our time, the billionaires are going to crush us. <\/p>\n

And right now, we have a situation where a lot of people are living in fear as the richest people in the world ally with Donald Trump to destroy the country and to terrorize the population. We\u2019ve got masked goons with guns roaming around kidnapping people in the streets. And in a democracy, the people should not be afraid of the billionaires. The billionaires should be afraid of the people. So I think a message people understand, and you can see it in the polls, is that this is about the role of the billionaires in our lives. This is about whether we\u2019re going to have\u2026 We cannot have a democracy if we continue to escalate and accelerate this massive inequality, and that\u2019s exactly what AI and crypto are doing right now. In fact, I would say that\u2019s what they are designed to do. And now, they have become completely enmeshed in our government, and our government power is being used to increase the already amazing and massive power of the wealthiest people in the world.<\/p>\n

So I would say you have to name the enemy. You have to name the person who is doing this. The power that is most responsible for what is happening to us today. And Donald Trump\u2019s an 80-something-year-old man. He won\u2019t be around for long. But this is not really about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a heat shield for these guys. Donald Trump is just the figurehead of what is actually a regime, and it\u2019s a regime of billionaires, and it\u2019s us or them. And there are only about 1,000 billionaires in the United States and 3,000 in the whole world. There are 8.3 billion people. We\u2019ve got the numbers. And I\u2019d say once we fully wake up to the threat that the billionaires pose to human life in general, not to mention jobs, the economy, our futures, the billionaires will be running for cover.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why they\u2019re building all these bunkers, by the way. The people promising to create abundance are also building bunkers and buying islands to hide out. What\u2019s that all about? Well, that\u2019s what they really think is going to happen in the future. And so, I think we need to start talking about billionaire accountability. And I think it\u2019s important to do that because right now, they feel like they can do anything, and we need to make them aware that there\u2019s a good chance of consequences in the future, and that consequences for billionaires will be a popular issue to run on in the next few years.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>I certainly hope so. Well, as we wind things down is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today? <\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n:<\/strong> I\u2019d say stay hopeful and stay positive. They haven\u2019t won yet, and they haven\u2019t thought of everything. They aren\u2019t expecting the degree of pushback they\u2019re going to get. And so, fascism thrives on fear, on making people afraid to speak out or to imagine a better future. And right now, the billionaires are monopolizing our visions of the future. And if they can imagine a world without us, we can imagine a world without them.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes: <\/strong>Well, thank you so much for those insights. I\u2019m really grateful for this conversation and I hope everyone will check out Gil\u2019s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy<\/em>. You can also hear more from Gil by checking out his newsletter, The Nerd Reich, which you can find at thenerdreich.com. Gil Dur\u00e1n, thanks for your work and thanks so much for joining me today.<\/p>\n

Gil Dur\u00e1n:<\/strong> Thanks for having me.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hayes:<\/strong> I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I\u2019ll see you in the streets. <\/p>\n

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