The New York Review of Books just published an amazing review of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Writes Sue Halpern:

Durán, the former editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner, has taken a tremendous amount of previously reported information that, on its own, might have looked like dots on a pointillist’s canvas, and created a haunting picture of the political project pursued and abetted by a confederacy of Silicon Valley elites. Their goal is nothing less than to destroy liberal democracy. Their money, in tandem with a Republican Party establishment that shares many of their objectives and a president with an insatiable lust for riches, has pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called technofascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.

Click here for a gift link to read “The Plot to Delete Democracy” in The New York Review of Books.

Last week, I traveled to New York City for an interview with Jennifer Welch on the I’ve Had It Weekend podcast. We discussed Peter Thiel’s obsessions with the Antichrist and JD Vance—who Welch calls “America’s top prostitute—purchased by Peter Thiel.”

It’s a serious conversation, but with plenty of laughs. Click here to watch on YouTube.

How to defeat tech billionaire power? Look no further than Solano County, California, where local citizens have stalled a billionaire Goliath in its tracks. Their struggle holds crucial lessons for the fight ahead as Americans wake up to the threat of rampant billionaire power.

In 2023, a gang of tech billionaires invaded Solano County with plans to build a sprawling “tech utopia” city called California Forever. In response, Democrats and Republicans banded together to fight back. I called it the “Miracle in Solano” because, in these politically polarized times, the billionaires found a way to unite Solano County residents—against their weird city project.

In a triumph of local democracy, the citizens of Solano County have mostly staved off the project ... for now. Not even Gov. Gavin Newsom—who tried to help the billionaires with a last-minute bill in the legislature—could overpower the will of the people.

California Forever is a bizarre project. A group of billionaires handed $900 million to a guy with zero real estate experience to quietly buy up 60,000 acres of land—in an area that has no water, roads, or basic infrastructure...but does have a host of endangered species, an active air base, and rules specifically designed to prevent this exact kind of mega project. They promised to win over the county’s voters and, when that failed, they tried to do an end-run around democracy with a sneaky last-minute bill. It didn’t work.

In one week of October, President Trump eased sanctions on Russian diesel, said it was “time for Ukraine to get a new president,” and demanded that Kyiv “damn well stop” striking Russian refineries. Then Kyiv received no warning from the US before two nights of Russian missile strikes, and Starshield military satellite service was restricted without notice. Reuters now reports that the order to slow it came from inside the White House.

Many readers are asking the same question: has Washington decided to abandon Ukraine? A wave of posts says it already has. Others insist nothing has changed. Neither side is waiting for the evidence.

So we built a live tracker, Is the US Cutting Ukraine Off? It follows the specific indicators that would show an explicit decision to cut off support, and separates what has actually happened from what is being threatened or claimed.

Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.

The staggering amount of money makes Mr. Musk, the richest person in the world, by far the largest known donor in the midterms. Representatives for Mr. Musk supplied the previously unreported figures on his political giving to The New York Times before a federal filing deadline on Thursday.

In an effort to save Republicans’ Senate majority, he gave a total of $158 million this summer to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the party’s candidates for the chamber, according to his team. In sum, that is one of the largest political donations in American history, and more than the group’s Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter.

Over the last 72 hours, the Internet has been overwhelmed with reports of something miraculous: that “Russian social media activity” had dropped dramatically following Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers.

It is true that Ukrainian drones knocked out three of Yandex’s data centers, in a solid blow to Russia’s economy and information processing capacity — at Sasovo on October 8, Kaluga on October 9 and Vladimir on October 11.

But then people started sharing charts that alleged that Russian “bot traffic” had collapsed to almost nothing. The trolls on social media, they claimed, had finally been unplugged.

It was a great story. The only problem? It isn’t true — or at least there is no quantifiable evidence (yet) that supports the claim. As we did last week following reports of plague in Irkutsk (remember that?), we built a live tracker to sort out facts from fiction. And we’ve made every effort to test the claims beyond the vibes. Those efforts have, so far, failed to produce any claims or data that support the “Russian Bot Miracle of 2026.” Here’s what we did find.

Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin aren’t doing Vice President JD Vance any favors as the 2028 presidential election looms. The duo—both mentors to Vance—appear to be having a contest to see who can be more outrageous and shocking in public.

Thiel, who has embarked on a new career as the world’s premier Antichrist enthusiast, ignited a firestorm of controversy last month by praising the virtues of evil. During an interview in his native Germany, the Palantir billionaire said being evil is … “maybe kind of good.”

“So I'm going to get in trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think we moralize...way too much,” said Thiel in an interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of media giant Axel Springer SE. “And there's always a question I like to ask: what is the antonym of good? The moral antonym is evil; the functional antonym is bad. A Ferrari is an ‘evil’ car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. A Trabi is a ‘bad’ car—it works, it's less good than a golf cart, you know, the former East German car.”

“And so, if you're evil, you're at least competent,” said Thiel. “And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore you’re actually maybe kind of good, because you’re at least getting something done.”

Four weeks out from Election Day, many Americans are asking some version of the same question: will the 2026 midterms be stolen, cancelled, or turn violent? It’s a fair question. This year the federal government has taken unusual steps aimed at how Americans vote and count. But with an avalanche of information online, much of it designed to spark outrage or fear, many readers end up doomscrolling, leading to anxiety and an unclear picture.

So we built a live tracker, the America 2.0 Election 2026 Risk Report. It follows the real pressures on the midterms from Election Day on November 3 through counting, certification, and the seating of the new Congress on January 3, 2027. Its job is simple: separate what has actually happened from what people say might happen. We won’t play risks down, and we won’t play them up.

You've seen the stories: Russian media reported that a lab technician at a Siberian anti-plague institute died around October 2. Within days, the story had set off a global wave of alarm, with cable bookings, viral “BREAKING” posts and a White House statement. As of today there is no laboratory confirmation that she had plague, no case outside Russia, and the World Health Organization rates the risk as low. Nearly every alarming detail in circulation, from FSB escorts to “five hospitals quarantined” to a broken test tube, traces back to a single anonymous source inside Russia.

At present, we assess that this story is more about how information spreads and serves the goals of warfare than one about disease itself. So we built a live tracker which we will keep updated as this story either develops further — or, in our estimation right now — burns out.

“The corruption is the point,” writes Casey Michel in United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy.

The book exposes the staggering corruption of the Trump regime and how dictators and oligarchs around the world are betting on Trump—and betting against democracy. In the latest episode of The Nerd Reich podcast, I interview Michel about how oligarchy took control of the United States, and what we can do about it.

“An expert on money laundering, tax evasion, and other financial crimes, Michel offers a blistering account of how a full-blown oligarchy has formed in the United States,” wrote Foreign Affairs of his book.

Michel is a writer, journalist and director of the Combating Kleptocracy program at the Human Rights Foundation. He’s also the author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History and Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.

Click here to watch our conversation on YouTube.

The Network State cult has made a rare cameo appearance in the New York Times.

Praxis, a proposed tech utopia supposedly backed by a slew of interconnected tech billionaires, now claims to have found a location in Uruguay. The announcement comes after years of fruitless searching, along with previous announcements that Praxis would be built somewhere on the Mediterranean, in Greenland, in California, and in outer space.

For years, Praxis was one of the world’s most well-publicized Network State projects. The Network State movement calls for tech billionaires to create their own sovereign mini-nations—or else use their wealth and influence to take over existing governments–in preparation for the collapse of the global order.

Praxis once boasted of having over $500 million in financing and the backing of billionaires including Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. But the project struggled to find any country interested in hosting a bizarre new billionaire city.

Then, in the summer of 2025, Praxis’s founder and CEO had a dramatic public meltdown during Pride Month in New York City. After witnessing Pride celebrations, the Praxis CEO—a 30-year-old college dropout named Dryden Brown—predicted that NYC would face “biblical punishment” and “God’s wrath” due to allowing Pride festivities.

As I wrote at the time, this seemed like the end of Praxis, since some of its most celebrated supporters were gay venture capitalists, including Altman and Thiel. Soon, Praxis disappeared from the official Network State dashboard, which lists 38 supposed sovereign tech projects around the globe. Praxis, which had once billed itself as the world’s “first Network State,” also scrubbed all mention of Network State from its website.

Praxis may have lost the gays, but Brown now claims to have a location in Uruguay, just a stone’s throw from Argentina, where Network State aficionado and renowned Antichrist lecturer Thiel has taken up part-time residence. (Though often linked to Praxis in news stories, Thiel has disavowed any relationship to it.)

As one of the few journalists in the world paying attention to the Network State cult, I’m not sure Brown’s latest announcement is any more real than the previous ones. He keeps making dramatic announcements about his imaginary city, and major legacy media outlets keep writing somewhat credulous stories about his project.

Imagine a courtroom where the jurors ran for office, raised campaign money, and met privately with the prosecution. Terry Bouricius argues that is a fair description of how we make our laws — and that choosing lawmakers by lottery, as Athens did, is one possible fix.

Terry Bouricius has spent two decades pointing out that this is a fair description of how we make our laws. He would know, after having spent twenty years as an elected lawmaker in Vermont, then a decade at FairVote working to advance ideas like (the very sensible) ranked-choice voting.

But then he had an experience that had him question whether improving elections was the only way to improve democracy. In 2004, he testified before British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly — barkeepers, teachers and engineers chosen by lottery to redesign the province’s voting system. They met for months and produced a proposal. “A light bulb went off over my head,” he told me. “Wait a second. This is what democracy looks like.”

MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell talks to Gil Durán, author of the book "The Nerd Reich," about the recent whistleblower concerns about the risks artificial intelligence poses and how Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress refuse to implement the necessary safeguards.

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.”

Last year, I wrote about Paulina Borsook, a rare writer/journalist who—early on— warned about the rising danger of Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic tendencies.

Next week, Paulina’s masterpiece—Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech—will be republished with a new foreword by me.

With permission, I am publishing that foreword below. Next month, I’ll host a live online Q&A with Paulina. So, please buy her book so we can discuss it!

Why are the crypto cartels trying to eat our democracy whole?

This scammy digital hustle was once derided as a tool for criminals, drug traffickers, terrorists, and pariah states like North Korea. Now its true purpose has been revealed: crypto is a weapon of mass corruption. Very few Americans use crypto, but crypto billionaires are pouring obscene amounts of money into our elections. And the Trump family is raking in billions in ill-gotten crypto wealth.

We’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s a gun to the head of democracy.

On this week’s episode of The Nerd Reich, I talk to tech researcher and writer Molly White, creator of the Citation Needed newsletter. Her essential project, Tech Influence Watch, exposes how tech oligarchs are flooding hundreds of millions of dollars through deceptively named super PACs to decapitate dissenters, capture federal regulators, and line Donald Trump’s pockets.

This is Silicon Valley’s hostile takeover of the USA. It’s happening in broad daylight. Click here to take a look at the receipts.

“Don’t get too excited about Hunter Biden’s new social media persona,” I wrote on June 5. “Looks like another nepo baby crypto grift is afoot...”

Today, Hunter Biden—son of former President Joe Biden—made it official. In a sign that crypto is entering a new phase of its death spiral, Hunter announced plans to launch his own meme coin. From the Wall Street Journal:

The son of former President Joe Biden is launching a meme coin that takes aim at his family’s nemesis, Donald Trump. And he’s naming it for the most-infamous personal computer in American political history.

Yes, Hunter Biden’s laptop will live on. At least on the blockchain.

Biden’s token will trade under the ticker, $LAPTOP, and launch Sept. 9 on Base, a digital ledger built by Coinbase Global ... the largest U.S. crypto exchange, people familiar with the matter said.

That’s right. Hunter Biden—a convicted felon whose criminal record was wiped clean by a pardon from his daddy, the president—is going full crypto bro. It makes sense. A meme coin is generally a method of siphoning money from people by convincing them to buy fake digital joke money.

“Meme coins carry no intrinsic value, and most tumble in price within days or even hours after their launch,” reports the WSJ.

While many of you are reading my book, I’m reading The United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by Casey Michel.

The book is a compelling history of oligarchy—rule by the wealthy few—in the United States and around the world.

“At its core is a search for a grand unified theory of how oligarchs both foreign and domestic began to work in tandem to dismantle American democracy,” writes Michel in the book’s introduction. “This book does not revolve around a single character, but rather a single story: how oligarchic forces in the U.S., aided by dictatorships abroad, are attempting to mount an antidemocratic assault on the U.S. like we’ve never seen before, trying to destroy the last, best bulwark against not only oligarchy, but tyranny itself.”

Our books complement one another, and Michel’s book includes some of the characters I focus on in The Nerd Reich, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Curtis Yarvin.

But he also zooms in on oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to show how wealthy criminals and tyrants around the world are plotting against democracy. And Michel highlights Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s failson-in-law, who has become a key vector of oligarch power in the U.S.

I highly recommend The United States of Oligarchy. Michel is a writer and investigative journalist who also serves as director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation.

This week, I’ll interview him for the podcast. Got questions? Leave them in the comments or reply to this message.

For years, billionaire Peter Thiel has traveled the world preaching about apocalypse and the Antichrist. Now, his most successful protégé—Vice President JD Vance—is flirting with similar themes.

During an appearance on an evangelical podcast, Vance was asked whether he thought we were living in the “end times.”

From NBC News:

Vice President JD Vance warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence Tuesday and said he wouldn’t be “shocked” if we were living in the “end times” and the Antichrist was walking the Earth.

Vance made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview on faith with the popular Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford. During the hourlong sit-down, Crawford asked Vance his perspective on whether the end times are coming — or here.

“Do I think that we’re in the end times? I don’t know, and I think that it’s probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it, because there are, like, things you got to do. I got to be good to my wife. I got to be good to my kids. I have to be, you know, as good of a leader as I can for the United States of America,” Vance replied.

“I think that there are, like, things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us. But again, I try not to focus too much on it,” he said.

“While I wouldn’t be shocked if we are living in the end times, what I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, OK,” Vance said.

Vance went on to say that if his work “leads to the end times, OK, and if that leads to … us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great, too.”

Last month, I warned that Donald Trump was adopting the dangerous strategy laid out in a 2024 book called Unhumans. The extremist book calls on MAGA voters to view Democrats and liberals as demonic creatures unworthy of life.

Today, Trump made it official. In a post on social media, he gave a full-throated endorsement of “Unhumans” and urged his followers to buy it.

“‘Unhumans’ is a fantastic book — Get your copy today!” wrote the president of the United States, invoking his fake panic over imaginary “communists”

This brief essay was highlighted by historian Heather Cox Richardson and NPR’s On The Media. But, so far, most of the mainstream media appears content to ignore the president’s unhinged rhetorical strategy, which has roots in this extremist book.

Now that Trump has admitted what he’s up to, perhaps it’s time for Beltway journalists to do their job and tell people what the president is planning. Unhumans is a quick read.