It looks like YouTube has backed down from its threat to delete The Nerd Reich’s YouTube channel.

The channel remains up today—with over 2000 new subscribers. Alex Shultz of Hard Reset Media reports that the company has no plans to disable the account. In addition, the mysterious campaign of false complaints against our channel has vanished just as quickly as it appeared.

Last week, YouTube sent a message threatening to disable the Nerd Reich channel by today. But it’s still up—and with a new episode.

This time, I’m in the guest chair being interviewed by Jean Guerrero, a New York Times contributing opinion writer and author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Click here to watch the full episode on YouTube.

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.

On August 19, I posted a short, blunt assessment to X: that Mykhailo Fedorov — Ukraine’s founding Minister of Digital Transformation, and briefly its defense minister — looked to me like someone who had been drawn into the Musk and Thiel technology-influence network, and that this, rather than anything else, was the likeliest reason President Zelensky removed him. It traveled further than I expected, and it drew the objection it deserved to draw: recruited is a strong word and deserves some explanation.

The Ukrainian outlet Guildhall asked me to discuss this, on the record. The resulting interview ran in Ukrainian on August 20th. What follows is the English version, with my thanks to Guildhall — their questions were insightful and captured nuances not easy to convey on social media.

It’s official: This morning, YouTube announced it will delete The Nerd Reich podcast next week—the same week my book comes out.

YouTube’s reasons are silly. Over the last few weeks, someone has targeted the Nerd Reich channel with a campaign of false and frivolous complaints. After 1.5 years on YouTube with no problems, we’re suddenly being hit with multiple, almost-daily complaints—just in time for my book launch this Tuesday.

And YouTube’s ridiculous policy is to delete our videos—and now our channel.

We’ve fought back against these false complaints, but the sheer volume is overwhelming. Someone is obsessed with deleting our channel. YouTube is playing along.

This follows a familiar pattern.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I was banned for eight months. Last year, Facebook banned The Nerd Reich newsletter from being posted there (a policy they reversed after media attention). In April, Musk permanently banned me from X for posting about fascism. And now, our YouTube channel—with 26,000 subscribers—will be disabled just in time for my book launch.

It’s great publicity! But I’d rather have the channel, which reaches a global audience with videos that have received 818,000 views so far. In fact, our number of YouTube subscribers is larger than our number of newsletter subscribers.

One way or another, we’ll persevere. But it’s clear that someone is very upset about my work, and they have succeeded in deplatforming me from YouTube.

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.”

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”

In April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk’s X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22‑point “technological manifesto”, which praised American “hard power”, western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: “TLDR: Fascism” (TLDR is short for “too long, didn’t read”).

Durán didn’t break any of X’s written rules, he points out over a video call from San Francisco – so much for Musk’s “free-speech absolutism”. His ban might just have had something to do with his preceding tweet, showing the cover of his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. The book’s central argument is that big tech is no longer our friend, as many of its billionaire owners have seized economic and political control and are steering the fate of the planet towards their own bizarre, apocalyptic visions.

It’s been a while since I wrote about California Forever, the billionaire-funded effort to build a new 400,000-person “tech utopia” city in rural Solano County. The project is aligned with the Network State, a Silicon Valley movement that seeks to build new billionaire-owned cities all over the world.

California Forever was supposed to seek voter approval via a ballot measure in 2024, but it abandoned the plan after polls showed it headed for massive defeat. One poll showed 70% of voters opposed to the project, including both Democrats and Republicans.

But that wasn’t the end of the project. As the ballot effort flopped, I predicted that California Forever would try to bypass local voters and get the state government to impose the project against the will of the people.

“They could dream up some convoluted scheme to try to use the courts or state power to force Solano County to allow them to build their tech dystopia,” I wrote in April 2024. That is exactly what’s happening, and the project appears to have a powerful new champion: Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Gov. Gavin Newsom has been quietly whipping support for California’s billionaire-backed megacity as it faces the loss of a key tenant,” reports the New York Post. “While staying publicly mum on the controversial megaproject, Newsom privately met with California Forever's CEO this spring before launching a behind the scenes push to win support for the project during his final months in office—with his staff even telling lawmakers the project may be a matter of national security.”

Malaysian officials have ordered Network School to shut down operations. The so-called school, run by Network State cult leader (and Peter Thiel protégé) Balaji Srinivasan, had claimed to be creating a new nation on Malaysian soil. The Network State is a cult ideology that seeks to replace existing nations with new nations run by tech corporations.

“The State Government and Local Authorities will not compromise on any breach of laws or matters that could affect national security, sovereignty, and interests,” wrote Onn Hafiz Ghazi, chief minister of the Malaysian state of Johor, in a media statement that said Network School’s business license had been revoked.

The Network School ran afoul of Malaysian authorities after reports that it had allowed Israelis to participate in violation of Malaysian law, which bars Israeli citizens from entering Malaysia. Investigators did not find any Israeli passports at Network School, but the controversy put Srinivasan’s cult compound under scrutiny.

The Network State’s Zionism-inspired colonial ambitions did not go over well in the formerly colonized Muslim-majority country. Neither did Srinivasan’s equally wrong-headed response to the scandal.

Srinivasan had demanded a meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, threatening a major withdrawal of tech investment if his demands weren’t met. This led some Malaysians to charge him with “arrogance” and demand his expulsion.

Axel Springer, the German company that owns Politico and Business Insider, has awarded its top prize to ... Antichrist lecturer Peter Thiel.

The Axel Springer Award—previously bestowed on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman—will go to the Palantir billionaire at a ceremony in Berlin on September 24. CBS News boss Bari Weiss will deliver laudatory remarks.

CEO Mathias Döpfner extolled Thiel’s “courage and non-conformity,” and the press release states that Thiel has “shaped the public debate on innovation, freedom, and the future of Western societies.”

But Thiel is literally the guy who said: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also famously hates journalism.

The announcement left out another important fact: Thiel reportedly made a $50 million investment in a new venture capital fund started by the son of Mathias Döpfner, Axel Springer's co-owner and CEO. The son, Moritz, is known as—get this—the “German JD Vance.” Moritz previously worked as chief of staff at Thiel Capital.

This is a glaring and unethical omission. How did no one at a newspaper company think to mention this obvious conflict? (Critics also noted that Axel Springer used a flattering, decades-old photo of Thiel that makes the mortality-phobic billionaire look fresh and young.)

Last year, I wrote about Politico’s $50 million Thiel problem. Perhaps it explains why that outlet has been so oblivious—or nonchalant—about tech fascism. Politico’s coverage of Thiel and his gang, who are a major force inside the Trump administration, has been woefully inadequate. The radical politics of Silicon Valley are lightly mentioned, a background noise, even as their most bizarre ideas are put into practice.

In 2024, former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan opened something called Network School in Forest City, a mostly empty man-made island off the coast of Johor, Malaysia. The idea behind Network School is simple: it’s a camp to indoctrinate wannabe tech entrepreneurs into his Network State cult, which seeks to replace existing nations with micro-countries run by tech companies.

Network School participants attend “classes,” do group workouts and eat “bunny food” designed by Bryan Johnson, the longevity influencer (and Network State cult member) who has spent millions trying not to die.

Balaji, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who generally goes by his first name, has described his ideology as “tech Zionism.” The New York-born millionaire, now based in Singapore, is a radical figure with a burning hatred for so-called “legacy” governments. In 2024, I exposed his bizarre vision of the future: a fascistic nightmare in which a “gray tribe” of techies don gray uniforms and purge all “blues”—Democrats—from San Francisco.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Balaji finds himself embroiled in controversy in Malaysia, where the government has launched an investigation into Network School. As we’ll see, it is investigating the wrong threat.

Authorities descended on Network School to check whether it had allowed Israeli citizens to attend. Malaysia, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel, bans Israelis from entering the country without special permission. Questions arose after a pseudonymous account on X spread rumors that Israeli citizens were attending Network School in the Malaysian state of Johor using passports from other countries.

Donald Trump and his MAGA fascist party have a desperate new strategy for the midterm elections: a fake hysteria over “communists.”

Trump is screeching about the imaginary threat he calls more dangerous than “World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9-11.” He invoked “communism” 81 times between June 23 and July 6, according to Reuters. On July 13, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the fray, declaring that “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE” and the nation is poised to “GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM.”

This dangerously unhinged propaganda comes from Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), a genocide-themed 2024 book that depicts liberals as bloodthirsty demons hellbent on murder. Steve Bannon wrote the book’s foreword and JD Vance gave the book a ringing endorsement. Unhumans lays out a blueprint for demonizing Democrats as communists in order to seize power.

Here’s what I wrote about Unhumans in August 2024:

Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

The 283-page screed reads like an effort to incite a civil war. It strains to create a sense of urgent terror in its readers. On nearly every page, it demonizes and dehumanizes “the left”– a vaguely defined group that apparently includes journalists (“the unhuman-occupied media”) and people who believe in things like diversity, equity, social justice and the rule of law. The definition is so broad that it seems most Democrats would qualify as unhumans.

The playbook is simple: frame the opposition as demonic “unhumans,” thus rendering them undeserving of human rights. The equation: Democrats=Communists=Unhumans. The book, a New York Times bestseller, is an insane specimen of propaganda. But now it’s become talking points for the White House.

Bryan Johnson, the tech millionaire spending heavily in a quixotic effort to avoid death, has received yet another stark reminder of his terminal mortality.

Last week, Johnson announced he has been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, an incurable disease that causes the immune system to attack healthy stomach cells. “My stomach is eating itself,” he wrote.

Normally, such a diagnosis would be no laughing matter. But we can make an exception for Johnson, one of the more ridiculous characters to emerge during Silicon Valley’s pivot to AI psychosis. Johnson, who claims he will not die, has started a cult movement called Don’t Die, which is based on convincing gullible people that death is optional (and getting them to buy the health supplements Johnson sells).

Johnson has even announced the creation of his own Network State—with plans for a private country called Don’t Die. When asked to state his goals during a 2024 interview, Johnson said:

One is start a company. Two is start a country. Three is start a religion. Four: Don't Die. Five: Become God.

Unfortunately for Johnson, it appears God—or Nature—will have the last laugh. His diagnosis isn’t terminal, but it’s a reminder that he is mortal, and will remain so no matter how much Snake Oil he swallows or teenagers he drains. He will not be God, or even see God.----

Every week, the Kremlin tells the world what's on its mind. The Security Council of the Russian Federation (the SCRF, or “Sovbez”) publishes a substantial Russian-language digest — its Weekly Information Bulletin — with play-by-play reviews of the latest security developments, as seen from Moscow. These reports are useful analytical artifacts not because they accurately portray world events, but because they reflect the stories that the Kremlin tells itself and its network of allies to sustain a war that most Western observers see as a disastrous folly.

However, these narratives should not be dismissed, as they telegraph clues about how the Kremlin will behave in the weeks, years, and decades ahead. And while it's tempting to think of Putin as a singular or rogue actor, he is merely a manifestation of a durable Russian worldview that will persist long after he is gone.

We collected SCRF reports from the last three months and analyzed them to extract common topics and themes — and the Kremlin's takes are so misaligned with Western perspectives as to seem ludicrous. But it is precisely this misalignment that leads to gaps in our strategic response. When we fail to understand the worldview of our adversary, we will fail to anticipate their behavior.

Every day brings fresh evidence that American democracy is fraying — not only at the level of institutions, but in the connective tissue between citizens. On the newest episode of Dave Troy Presents, presidential historian Scott Reich makes a case that is at once old-fashioned and urgent: that a renewed ethos of national service may be one of the few real antidotes to that unraveling.

Reich — a board member of the JFK Library Foundation and author of The Power of Citizenship — recently took the stage at TED Democracy in Philadelphia to propose a modern “GI Bill for civic service”: a year of service for young Americans, not necessarily military, rewarded with real benefits and phased in over a decade so no single generation feels singled out. But the mechanics matter less than the premise beneath them. Citizenship, Reich argues, is not only a bundle of rights; it carries obligations we have largely stopped naming — let alone teaching.

The conversation ranges from the citizen-training of ancient Athens to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone; from the commoditization of youth sports to a half-forgotten 1917 baseball benefit game that Reich resurrects in his forthcoming book. Running through all of it is a single idea — that social mixing across background, region, and class is how a democracy rebuilds trust, and that we have spent fifty years disinvesting in it.

For readers of America 2.0, the throughline will be familiar. Dave frames national service not as feel-good civics but as information-resilience infrastructure: an atomized, mutually suspicious society is a soft target for exactly the kind of information warfare we have documented here for years. Rebuilding the habit of gathering in person — of encountering people unlike ourselves — is a national-security question as much as a moral one, and it will matter enormously heading into the 2026 midterms.

Peter Thiel is funding a plan to build privatized city-states everywhere from Gaza and Venezuela to small towns in California.

The goal is to replace governments with for-profit companies.

We investigated how Thiel's scheme is already reshaping democracy across the world.

I was taught from an early age that there are two sources of power in politics. On the one side you have organized people, and on the other you have organized money. This was, and is, a fair approximation of the state of play, at least within the reform-oriented social movement/civil society circles in which I travel.

You want to stop a data center from being built? You’re going to need to organize enough people to create counterforce against the voice of organized money. You want to change zoning rules to allow more mixed-use development in your city? Organize people. This is what we do. It is, as the old saying goes, what democracy looks like.

Right now there’s a ballot initiative in California to pass a billionaire’s tax — a one-time, 5% levy on the state’s 200 billionaires. The SEIU (organized people) has spearheaded the effort. The billionaires, as you might imagine, are not exactly being cool about the whole thing. They started a Signal chat to coordinate their response. Emily Shugerman of the SFStandard got a look at the chatlogs, and shared the details in an article titled “the 5% freakout: Inside tech’s madcap war against the California billionaire tax.”

This has been one of the defining trends of the past decade. Organized money has gotten frisky and creative. Wealth concentration, plus owning multiple branches of the government, has left them with few limits and fewer scruples. There aren’t many obstacles that they cannot just buy.

Last week, Elon Musk threatened Rep. Ro Khanna for saying that an estimated 4.5 million children will die as a result of Musk feeding USAID “into the woodchipper.”

But the statement hurts because it’s true. By January, over 700,000 people had already died preventable deaths due to the USAID cuts, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota:

One year after the Trump administration began its dismantling of USAID, a model that tracks the impact of USAID funding cuts on global disease prevention programs estimates that more than 762,000 people have died as a result of those cuts, including more than 500,000 children.

These deaths are the inevitable outcome of slashing life-saving aid programs. With the wave of a chainsaw, the richest man in the world condemned the poorest people in the world to death. Then he became a “trillionaire.”

This is like a 21st-century version of a Greek myth. Either Elon Musk is doomed—or humanity is. Musk’s legacy won’t be electric cars, spaceships or satellites. Musk’s legacy is dead children.

Rumors are swirling after a list of Dialog’s attendees and members leaked to the public. It includes journalists, politicians, tech figures, academics, and corporate leaders.

The revelation inspired a massive outcry because Dialog is an off-the-record conference of elites—a detail which led some to liken it to a Jeffrey Epstein-like conspiracy. That’s an understandable response when people hear that a creepy Epstein-connected billionaire is quietly convening influential figures on both the political left and right to discuss topics like how to prepare for World War III and how to “Build-a-Cult.”

Such a ridiculous format makes an easy target for conspiracy narratives and mockery. But what is Dialog, really?

My take: Participation in Dialog certainly raises some questions—especially for journalists who either paid $16,000 to attend an off-the-record conference or else received discounts, which is potentially more problematic (given journalism ethics rules). Now that the guest list has leaked, the promise of discretion that made Dialog attractive is exactly what’s working against everyone on it. The next time someone gets an invitation to a mysterious off-the-record retreat, they’ll likely do some research first.

Dialog provides a window into the process of how wealthy elites like Thiel and his cronies build quiet networks of influence at various levels. While viral Instagram memes comparing Dialog to an Epstein-style scandal went overboard, they show the degree to which Thiel has become a universal boogeyman who symbolizes elite conspiracies for global control. But the reality is more complex—and alarming—than one snotty private dork conference.

Recent reporting has cast Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the Silicon Valley investors Auren Hoffman and Peter Thiel, as a secret society of global elites directed by Thiel. A Byline Times investigation finds something more consequential, if less sensational: a long-running influence network, run by Hoffman and built around light-touch social engineering, that trades on Thiel’s name while operating at arm’s length from him.

Thiel himself is barely there – no hand in running Dialog, rarely present – and the network sits at the loose end of a wider web he backs. Others in that web, working far more directly to place allies in positions of power, have drawn little of the scrutiny now falling on it.

Byline Times contacted multiple former participants and obtained copies of emails sent to invitees. Each contained long lists of names intended to encourage attendance at a range of events, including regular retreats, local dinners, one-off gatherings, and online discussions.

Importantly, while the conference itself is billed as off-the-record, none of those who spoke to Byline Times suggested that attendees were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, marketing emails sent to prospective participants (which contained detailed information about participants and programming) carried no explicit expectation of secrecy. While invitations are clearly denoted as non-transferable, Dialog seems to rely on an aura of exclusivity and mutual respect to keep its gatherings on the down-low.