The Nerd Reich

Getting banned from Elon Musk’s X for pointing out Palantir’s fascism has created more interest in my work.

Last week, I spoke with Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report about the Palantir manifesto and the company’s role in Trump’s fascist regime. You can watch the full interview below.

I also spoke with Cydney Hayes of the SF Gazetteer, one of the few journalists to write about my baseless suspension from X, for her piece on Palantir.

“Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most hated companies in the world, due to its open complicity with an authoritarian regime,” I told her. “They have a major public relations crisis.”

Here’s a gift link to read her story.

Reading Palantir: Why the defense tech giant’s manifesto may signal panic inside the companyThe war tech firm is suffering from a lethal combo of stock price superinflation and midterms anxietyGazetteer SFCydney Hayes

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, often as a generic term for authoritarian or dictatorial. But it has a more specific meaning. I’m currently writing a piece that will explain why the Palantir manifesto is a clear expression of fascism. (Makena Kelly of Wired reports that “Palantir Employees Are Starting To Wonder If They’re The Bad Guys.” Spoiler Alert: Obviously.)

In the meantime, I explain some of my thinking in the Majority Report interview (transcript below).

Prefer audio?

• Listen to the Majority Report on Apple Podcasts
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Full transcript below

The Palantir Manifesto | The Majority Report with Sam Seder|Gil Duran Interviewed By Emma Vigeland

Transcripts may contain errors.

Emma Vigeland: We are back, and we are joined now by Gil Durán, publisher of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. Gil, welcome back to the show.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Emma Vigeland: Of course. So earlier this week, Palantir took out a full-page ad in the New York Times — or was it the Wall Street Journal? I forget which paper — about how they "stand with Israel." We knew that already. But they also published this so-called manifesto on social media, and I want to get to that in a second. Before we do, can you explain to people what Palantir is? It's talked about all the time — it's kind of this boogeyman — but its origin story, how it came to be, and really what role it's currently playing in American politics and in our economy.

Gil Durán: Sure. Palantir came into being after 9/11, when there was a lot of concern about national security, fears of terrorism, and the need for vastly increased surveillance of everything in the United States and internationally as well. It was funded partly with an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, but most of the funding came from Peter Thiel and his venture capital funds. He's a co-founder along with several other people, like Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp, who was Thiel's law school buddy and is now the CEO and has been a part of it a long time too.

What Palantir does — they keep the whole thing kind of opaque, so it's hard to explain — but they're a surveillance technology giant with software that helps governments sort through, collect, and organize large troves of information on whatever their chosen targets are. It's a program that sits on top of other systems and helps them have more of an all-seeing-eye effect. That's why they chose the name Palantir. The name comes from The Lord of the Rings, and it's that little orb the evil wizard uses to see what's going on with the hobbits as he tries to take over the world. So they literally named it after a technology wielded by an evil, corrupted wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Think of it that way: it's the little all-seeing orb. That's what they want you to think of.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And their insistence on portraying themselves in this braggadociously evil, mendacious manner is unique. It's manifest in this manifesto, if you will. Let's pull it up here. From what I understand, it's basically a summary of Alex Karp's book — Karp being the CEO of Palantir, who we've played on the show before, a very manic and bizarre individual. A lot of this is just summarized from what he's previously written. But this is what they say the new Palantir manifesto is — their role in the United States.

The first plank: Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible, and they have an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. Number two — rebelling against the iPhone apps — that seems a little less consequential. Number three: free email is not enough; the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. Whatever. But one and four seem to link together. Number four: the limits of soft power or soaring rhetoric alone have been exposed; the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal — it requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

We'll come back to this in a second, but those two seem to connect. And the fifth plank is about how AI needs to be used to develop weapons and military and national security technology. So this is them announcing publicly: one, we shouldn't be bound by morality, and yet Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to contribute to the national defense via surveillance; and also, we're going to use AI weapons. Are they going to do that for free, or are they going to take government contracts? I think we know the answer.

Gil Durán: Yeah. What's interesting about that first point is that the greatest threat to our nation right now is from the Trump regime, which is attempting to destroy the country from the inside — and Palantir is a major conspirator in that project. They are reaping billions in contracts, expanding their footprint like never before. To be clear, Palantir has thrived under Democratic and Republican administrations — something that really needs to change. But the country they're talking about defending is not the country we think of as the United States of America. It's this new authoritarian regime that's being brought into being by Trump, and which they plan to defend with their software violence.

The important thing to understand about this Palantir manifesto — which, as you said, comes from Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic — is that it rings all the bells of classic fascism. It is a call to arms for a group of chosen Silicon Valley elites to merge with the military-industrial complex, on a moral imperative to defend against an existential threat to Western civilization posed by inferior cultures that are invading us and weakening us, along with liberal elite decadence. This is fascism.

In addition, they call for Silicon Valley to get engaged with law and order and fighting violent crime to save lives — fascists always try to exacerbate fears around crime. And they call for a new respect for religion and the fusing of corporations with government. That's pretty much what Mussolini did when he created fascism: you fuse corporate, state, and religion. So without saying the f-word, they're winking and nodding and saying it other ways.

The thing is, this is what many of these venture-capital-funded tech companies are doing right now. Everyone's issuing some kind of manifesto about acceleration, about the need for more warfare and technology — and this is basically classic fascist rhetoric. They're all competing to be the new Mussolini, essentially. It should terrify Americans, and it should radicalize Americans, that these people are becoming so completely extreme while living off our taxpayer dollars.

Emma Vigeland: And it is notable that Palantir's technology has been integrated with ICE activities. You mentioned how Palantir started after 9/11, and that the CIA's venture arm invested in it. ICE is also an outgrowth of 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security is an outgrowth of 9/11. And viewing Palantir and its growth as an extension of the national security state that came out of 9/11 — many leftists, many people, warned that eventually these technologies and the rollback of our civil liberties would result in this being used on American citizens. It feels like Palantir is central in that project, as is its work with ICE specifically.

Gil Durán: Oh, definitely. It's part of the immigration machine. It's part of the war machine. It is completely bought in. Its entire fate depends on this increased surveillance model. They're also doing stuff in hospitals, like monitoring the work schedules of nurses. There's a large level of buy-in to this company right now.

One of the big problems is that the United States government is creating a company that now feels entitled to rival government power — to start issuing its own political manifestos. It's the hazards of privatization unfolding in real time. If the government needs some of these technologies, it should own those technologies. It should not have a company that now decides what the new political structure of the country is going to be.

Why aren't the CEOs of Lockheed or Raytheon issuing manifestos? I'm not saying those companies are good, but for the most part, in the past, you didn't have government contractors out there pushing radical political ideas of their own. Their job is to do what the president and Congress decide. They are contractors. So you have contractors acting like they're the CEOs of government, and this is very much the idea they have in mind: a privatization of government and a seizure of power through surveillance and military might. It's important to be aware of that. It has to become a political goal of all of us to destroy this company and disentangle it from our government.

Emma Vigeland: We had Rana Dasgupta on a few weeks ago to discuss his book After Nations, and he compared Silicon Valley and the growth of the tech industry to the East India Company historically — a private entity acting alongside and in conjunction with the imperial power of the time, but privatized, with its own incentives, and so powerful at this point that it can have more sway than even the most powerful nation states that supposedly have some sort of democratic input.

Gil Durán: And they talk about that very openly. Balaji Srinivasan uses the Dutch East India Company as a framework — returning to a world where these sort of corporate guilds have a tremendous amount of power. A big idea I've talked about on your show before is what they call the Network State: the creation of a new power source that is not national, that is not based on democracy or government power, that's based on pure corporate power. They explicitly talk about that, and everywhere we look we can see examples of them doing it.

I should say, too, that meanwhile, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has been traveling the globe talking about the Antichrist, saying the Antichrist will seek to establish a one-world rule through technology under the slogan of "peace and safety" — which sounds a lot like what Palantir is doing, as people have pointed out.

Emma Vigeland: Isn't he saying Greta Thunberg is the one ushering it in?

Gil Durán: He throws in a lot of words like that, but those are distractions. What he's really saying, if you read the whole speech, is that the United States is the cradle of the Antichrist, apparently because it's the cradle of what we call democracy — and that Silicon Valley should not help the United States spread democracy, but should find a way to decentralize this power. Basically what Karp is saying: make it privatized, and reverse what the country has traditionally stood for.

A lot of what these guys are afraid of is the fact that this is going to become a minority-majority country, and they fear what will happen to white supremacy when that happens. So that's the thread: these expressions of public political psychosis coming out of Silicon Valley. It's extremely concerning.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And as Matt just said off-mic — what a coincidence that these are all white South Africans who seem very obsessed with demographics. I just want to return quickly to what you said about crime — Silicon Valley coming out of San Francisco, where there has been this large-scale panic about homelessness and crime, and the insistence that crime was out of control when we saw a temporary spike during COVID and now have seen precipitous declines. The network state concept you've written about is about the privatization of government, as you say. They made those efforts within different cities — they funded an effort to recall Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But it feels like their ambitions for the privatized surveillance state to combat crime aren't just limited to the cities where they were making billions. It's now about expanding that to the entire United States.

Gil Durán: Crime is a tried-and-true way to create anxiety about poor people, about poverty, to create racial anxiety. This goes back many decades. They're not creating anything new there. They're just saying they've got to supercharge it. That's what we saw in San Francisco at a time when crime was declining and crime rates were generally at historic lows across California, including in San Francisco, which is a very safe city. They created a moral panic around crime and were able to achieve their political aims by doing so.

I definitely think they want to deploy that strategy at a larger scale. Again, everywhere you look, this is the extreme right-wing fascist playbook being played out: creation of fear of the other, a need to centralize elites and wealthy people around a goal of purging the enemy. They speak about inferior cultures that don't contribute to the country. It's all very transparent, but they put it in this pseudo-intellectual format that makes it seem like they have some kind of high-minded philosophy, when it's really some of the ugliest stuff in our politics.

Emma Vigeland: My last question: how seriously should we take it? How much is this Alex Karp branding himself? How much is a way to attract investors by overstating their power? How concerned should we be about a manifesto like this? Is it PR? Is it bluster? Is it a mix of all of the scary things?

Gil Durán: I think it's a mix of all of them. And I would say, too, I think Palantir is starting to panic a little bit, because they're becoming one of the most hated companies in the world. People are now associating them with some of the worst abuses of the genocide in Gaza. So they have a massive public relations problem, and I think they thought this would somehow assuage that, but it seems to have only made it worse.

What we have to do is take it very seriously. These people mean what they say. They do mean to destroy our country and our democracy, and we have to organize against them in order to purge Palantir from our government, and from the planet, really.

Emma Vigeland: I really appreciate your time today, Gil Durán. You can read The Nerd Reich newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley — it's essential reading these days. Thanks so much.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Last year, tech fascist guru Curtis Yarvin warned that Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters should prepare to flee the United States in case Democrats retake power. Now, one of Yarvin’s key followers—Palantir co-founder and Antichrist enthusiast Peter Thiel—appears to be heeding his advice.

Thiel has purchased a new mansion in an affluent section of Buenos Aires, according to the New York Post. The billionaire plans an extended stay in Argentina, according to the Buenos Aires Herald, and he met with Argentine President Javier Milei this week.

“Thiel, the 58-year-old founder of online payments processor PayPal and AI company Palantir, is reportedly planning to stay in the country for two months,” reported the Herald on April 23. “He is mostly in a US$12 million house he bought in Barrio Parque, an affluent suburb in Buenos Aires City, local media reported. Thiel and his husband, Matt Danzeisen, saw Milei in Casa Rosada at 2 p.m., together with the country’s Foreign Minister, Pablo Quirno.”

The Herald notes the German-born billionaire’s extremist politics: “The ideology he champions is called the ‘Dark Enlightenment’—a proposed alliance between autocrats and AI accelerationists to manage societies as if they were corporations.”

American tech fascists have rallied in support of Milei, a chainsaw-waving anarcho-capitalist zealot who is known for claiming to communicate with the ghost of a dead dog, as well as for imposing disastrous policies on the country’s economy. Milei claims credit for reducing inflation, but his popularity has dropped to 36% as people struggle to survive.

“[T]he drop in inflation is certainly not a victory for Argentine productivity,” writes political economist Can Cinar. “It’s a byproduct of a deliberate and engineered collapse in people’s wages. Milei hasn't fixed the engine of Argentina's economy, he has simply turned it off.”

Things are going so badly under the libertarian economist’s leadership that, late last year, the Trump administration authorized a $20 billion lifeline for Milei’s flailing administration. There was a catch, however: Trump’s offer required Argentina’s voters to support Milei’s party in the country's midterm elections (they did).

Thiel’s decision to establish a beachhead in Buenos Aires comes as Trump sinks to record-low popularity and the Republican Party heads toward a likely defeat in U.S. midterm elections. It’s the latest move for Silicon Valley's most prominent apocalypse enthusiast, who seems to be wandering the earth anxiously in search of refuge. Over the past few years, he has drifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Miami. His plans to create some kind of doomsday estate in New Zealand appear to have fizzled.

(Argentina has a peculiar history as a refuge for rootless fascists. After World War II, it became a primary destination for Nazi war criminals fleeing prosecution via the so-called “ratlines.”)

Thiel believes that the United States—and most nation-states—will experience a dramatic collapse in the 21st century as technological advances create widespread economic and political chaos. His beliefs were largely inspired by The Sovereign Individual: How To Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, a 1997 book which predicted that crypto and AI would collapse the existing world order. It advised savvy investors—a new class of so-called “cognitive elites”—to prepare for this reality by acquiring extra passports and exiting the USA for remote parts of the world.

“Thinly populated regions with temperate climates, and a large endowment of arable land per head, like New Zealand and Argentina, will also enjoy a comparative advantage because they enjoy high standards of public health and are low-cost producers of foods and renewable products,” wrote James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual.

“A good marker for the viability of cities is whether those living at the core of the city are richer than those on its periphery,” they wrote. “Buenos Aires, London, and Paris will remain inviting places to live and do business long after the last good restaurant closes in South Bend, Louisville, and Philadelphia.”

Davidson and Rees-Mogg made many failed doomsday predictions. But this did not harm their standing with Thiel. When The Sovereign Individual was republished in 2020, he wrote the foreword. He appears to still be following the book’s advice.

“Buenos Aires is only the latest square on what amounts to a meticulously constructed global hedge,” reported the New York Post. “Thiel has spent years assembling a portfolio of residences, passports, and legal presences across multiple continents. In New Zealand, he secured citizenship—a process that drew considerable scrutiny given how rapidly it was granted—and with it, residency access across the Pacific corridor including Australia.” 

In addition: “Thiel subsequently acquired a Maltese passport, granting him full freedom of movement across the European Union.”

News of Thiel’s latest home comes as Palantir faces massive public blowback for publishing a 22-point fascist manifesto. In addition, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a Thiel protégé who keeps promising that AI will destroy most jobs—recently had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his mansion in San Francisco.

The Sovereign Individual predicted a violent backlash against socially destructive technologies, which may explain why Thiel and his friends are so obsessed with doomsday preparations. In 2016, Altman told the New Yorker he was stockpiling guns, gold and gas masks in Big Sur, and also had plans to flee with Thiel to New Zealand.

If history is any indicator, Thiel will not find happiness in Argentina and will continue touring the globe to preach his own personal brand of apocalypse. But his decision to publicly decamp to Latin America at the height of his power suggests that he, like Yarvin, lacks confidence in the Trump regime.

The Nerd Reich Is Coming!

This is only a taste of what you’ll learn in my forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. It details how a cult of venture capitalists—led by Thiel—are pushing a self-fulfilling prophecy of societal collapse. If you can, please pre-order it today!

Click this link to support independent bookstores and this newsletter.

Here’s what some amazing writers are saying about The Nerd Reich:

“A clear and compelling account of the threats posed by technofascism to democracies everywhere.” —Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Reader take note: Gil Durán is a deep, thoughtful, and expansive observer of events that shape the current and future of our American democracy.” —George Lakoff, author of The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“Gil Durán is an essential voice on this technofascist moment—where it comes from and where we are going.” —Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, The Nerve

“The Nerd Reich is a clarion warning about the rise of techno-fascist sociopaths who seek to profit off of our collective misery. In clear, compelling and meticulously-researched detail, Gil Durán sounds the alarm about this incestuous cabal of broligarchs. He brings the receipts and the righteous rage.” —Wajahat Ali, The Left Hook

After months of furious writing, my book is advancing toward publication. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy will arrive on August 18, 2026. So far, it will also be published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland.

Writing my first book has been an amazing (and challenging) experience. Sitting in front of the computer for fourteen to sixteen hours a day was not very fun. The tight deadline required me to orient my entire life around the project. This meant abandoning any semblance of a social life and devoting all my time to deep research on fascism, venture capital, genocide, and the significance of the Antichrist, etc. I became a prisoner of the book, but there was no other way.

The payoff: Through the magical processes of reporting, thinking and writing, I produced hundreds of pages of a shocking and painstakingly detailed story that will soon go out into the world—a clarifying and terrifying tale about the radicalization of Silicon Valley. It feels good to be on the other side of so much work. Soon, I can return to aimless walks and drinks with friends. I will also be picking up the pace on this newsletter, which has suffered due to my focus on the book. (Thank you to our paid subscribers for keeping us afloat!)

It has been a year since my book deal was announced, and it’s still mind-blowing to me that this little newsletter has come so far. The Nerd Reich started as a blog where I planned to catalogue the extremist politics of Silicon Valley. At the time, very few people seemed interested, so I didn’t expect much of an audience. Unfortunately, tech fascism has quickly become an open, obvious, and existential threat to democracy. Every day I reckon with the fact that my success means terrible things are happening! 

But there is power in words and stories. My hope is that the book will help people understand what’s happening to our world—and move them toward solutions. We must understand the dire urgency of our situation to see clearly what must be done about it.

And here’s what you can do right now: please pre-order the book! Early sales make a big difference.

• Click here to pre-order The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy (USA)
• UK readers please click here.

This is going to be an interesting year. I’m already banned from Elon Musk’s X, and the book hasn’t even been published yet.

Dreaming Against The Machine with Adam Becker

Last year, I interviewed astrophysicist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Among other things, Becker explained why Elon Musk’s Mars fantasies are total BS (and that episode is still the most-downloaded episode of the Nerd Reich podcast).

Now, Adam has his own podcast, “Dreaming Against The Machine”:

 Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

 If you read the Nerd Reich newsletter, you’ll love “Dreaming Against the Machine.” Adam is brilliant and funny, and he finds hope in the darkest of places. Please give him a listen and support his work!