Tech fascism may finally be getting the attention it deserves.

This weekend, the New York Times featured two major pieces on the subject. It’s validating to see the mainstream media catching up to the alarm I sounded in 2024—an alarm I expanded on in The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, which experienced another surge in sales over the weekend.

Up first, this interview with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about their forthcoming book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World (publishes Sept. 15).

Says Taylor:

It’s important to note that far-right ideology has a long history in Silicon Valley. It didn’t start at the second inauguration.

A figure like Peter Thiel has been cultivating that worldview alongside David Sacks by investing in promoting a certain philosophical paradigm. In 2009, he wrote an article that is pretty famous for good reason, that basically says democracy and freedom are incompatible, staking his claim that if he has to choose between democracy and capitalism, he’d choose the latter.

We talk in the book about a conference that Thiel’s venture capital firm hosted just before the election in 2024 that was called Hereticon, “a conference for thought crime.” And the tagline was: “Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough.” We’ve been wrestling with how to talk about what they say because some of it is so nuts that you sound a little kooky quoting them. Read the entire interview at this gift link: “Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Say the End of the World Is Now on the Table.”