Some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley dream of a dystopia: one in which democracies are dead and CEOs rule over the rest of us. A few of them muse openly about this. Yet their plans have received little attention in the mainstream media. Now, a new book is dragging them into the light.

In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, the journalist Gil Durán, a grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, traces a line from obscure philosophers and anti-human subcultures to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance. He shows how the darkest fantasies of aggrieved, antisocial nerds came to serve as the blueprint for Trump’s second term.