Don’t Look Now, but the Tech Bros Are Losing

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Bros Are Losing Despite warnings about techno-fascism, Silicon Valley’s right wing isn’t new, and its alliance with MAGA is faltering. The Nerd Reich Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán Avid Reader, 352 pp., $30 IT WAS HARD TO MISS the American tech elite’s MAGA makeover. Tech CEOs poured money into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and later his inauguration. Elon Musk alone spent a staggering $288 million to help elect Trump and downballot Republicans. A who’s who of tech CEOs flanked Trump at his second inauguration in January 2025, with better seats than most of his cabinet picks. But the evidence extended far beyond CEOs palling around with MAGA world. As tanks rolled down Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. last June to celebrate the Army’s 250th birthday and Trump’s 79th year on the earth, onlookers could hardly miss the logos and branding of Coinbase, Palantir, and Oracle, only a few of the companies that underwrote the fête. And when the East Wing of the White House was torn down to made way for a gilded ballroom priced at $400 million, the leaders of America’s tech elite once again lined up to please the Boss. Like capos palming envelopes to the Don on the day of his daughter’s wedding in the plush mangroves of Mar-a-Lago, Apple, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir have all helped finance the Family’s vanities. But when Elon Musk performed what looked an awful lot like a Nazi salute behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal, many observers started to wonder if tech’s transformation was something more than ingratiation: a window into a profound ideological shift with dire consequences for American life. On some level, Big Tech’s eager-beaver appeasement of Trump seemed like a surprise. Weren’t Silicon Valley elites steadfast allies of the Democratic party? During the 2010s, their money flowed into progressive coffers, while the gadgets they sold, and the networks that wove us together online, were widely understood as the technological manifestation of Obama-era optimism. Tech’s Trump-era coalitional volte-face seemed unthinkable. For those watching closely, though, there had been signs: long-simmering frustrations with progressive culture, the influence of an insurgent online right, and tech leaders’ outspoken rejection of COVID-era lockdowns. Nevertheless, in the head-spinning search to make sense of tech’s realignment, commentators reached for old explanations of media-fueled authoritarianism made new, while arguing that the central role tech played in America’s imperial project might have boomeranged domestically, auguring a tyrannical “techno-feudalism” or “techno-authoritarianism.” ENTER JOURNALIST GIL DURÁN, whose first book, The Nerd Reich, is a not-so-subtle contribution to a related diagnosis of tech politics today: “techno-fascism.” Beginning in 2025, critics revived the heated “fascism debate” from Trump’s first term, in which historians and political theorists argued about how to characterize MAGA, by opening a new front. Kyle Chayka suggested in the New Yorker that the speed and ruthless efficiency of DOGE, premised on an engineers-know-best mentality, sounded the dawn of an American techno-fascism. The Russian chess champion turned democracy advocate Garry Kasparov wondered in the Atlantic whether AI was hurtling the United States toward the same fate as his home country, a “dystopian society where the few in charge of massive data will make election results predictable and bend them to their favor.” Durán is no greenhorn on the tech beat. From the late 2000s through the mid-2010s—the height of Big Tech’s Golden Child status in American culture—he held a string of posts directing communications for Democratic politicians in California, including Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, and Kamala Harris. Later Durán edited the opinion pages at the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, well-situated to curate commentary on the industry shaping California’s future. And for the past three years, his newsletter, also punningly titled Nerd Reich, has chronicled Silicon Valley’s political transmogrifications. Following in the footsteps of other recent studies of the right-wing politics that shape our present moment, Durán turns to the 1990s for answers. There he finds The Sovereign Individual, an apocalyptic tract from 1997 that he treats as the poisonous origin of tech’s right-wing politics. Written by the financial-newsletter impresario James Dale Davidson and the former Times of London editor William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual sketched a future in which nations dissolved in the bitstream, jobs evaporated, and a stateless elite rose from the ashes to strut through the wreckage. In Durán’s narrative, a copy of the eldritch tome fell fatefully into the hands of a Stanford graduate named Peter Thiel, whom Durán examines as a key node of radical tech politics. “To understand the right-wing radicalization of Silicon Valley politics, you must understand Peter Thiel,” Durán writes in the book’s opening. “To understand Thiel, you must understand the formative role the book The Sovereign Individual . . . played in shaping his political outlook.” Durán sets out to track Thiel’s relationship to the Sovereign Individual and map a small but powerful cohort of entrepreneurs, technologists, writers, and politicians also in its thrall. Among this cabal are neoreactionary blog-philosopher Curtis Yarvin, crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, and Vice President JD Vance. DURÁN MAKES IT HIS MISSION to “learn what is happening and spread the word to everyone they know. As a journalist, that’s my role: to tell the story.” What he uncovers leads him to propose banning crypto, breaking up the platforms, regulating AI, abolishing billionaires by unspecified means, and building a Museum of American Fascism. For Durán, the defining feature of techno-fascism is its alliance with Trumpism: “On the most basic level, Thiel’s ideology is fascist because it has fully aligned itself with the MAGA movement.” Although light on theory, Durán develops the idea of techno-fascism as a strange brew of nationalism and futurism. “Where analog fascism promises a return to a mythical glorious past, tech fascism promises to engineer an abundant and immortal future.” And, garbling the contrast with historical fascism, “Where traditional fascism asserts a natural hierarchy derived from God, tech fascism cements hierarchy through bogus race science and code.” For Durán, however, modern technologies are entirely novel tools: ones that threaten old political and social orders, and promise the reconstruction of new ones premised on imagined futures. Italian fascism combined religion, the military, corporations, and media under state authority. Technofascism innovates on this model through technology. . . . Tech fascism bundles powerful technologies—AI, crypto, defense tech, social media platforms, surveillance systems—toward authoritarian goals. These technologies are bound together under the control of a small, interconnected group of oligarchs who, simultaneously integrated into the highest levels of government, are creating an authoritarian infrastructure with boundless power. Its goal, like MAGA’s, is to privatize the public and eliminate democracy. The clearest candidates for Durán’s tech fascists might be the national defense tech startups broadly aligned with the Trump administration, including Palantir and Anduril. “Under the banner of ‘patriotic tech,’” Durán quotes the Authoritarian Stack research project led by Prof. Francesca Bria, “this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack.” Durán diligently tracks how cash flows into this defense-tech complex, a figure that grew from roughly $3 billion in 2024 to $7.7 billion in 2025. He reports, for example, on the Army’s decision to fold seventy-five separate technology contracts, worth as much as $10 billion, into a single award to Palantir. He highlights the $30 million Palantir took from ICE to build ImmigrationOS, a platform “designed to identify targets for deportation,” as an example of the tech stack’s deployment by modern-day fascisti. Durán has an ear for incriminating quotations, such as when Anduril’s cofounder Trae Stephens described himself to a Christian tech audience as “literally an arms dealer.” But Durán and others concerned with the rise of techno-authoritarian practices would benefit from situating the newfangled military contractors alongside our classic defense companies. Doing so reveals that the moral vocabulary of “patriotism” and “kill chains” that makes the tech right sound like a new political animal turns out to be the house style of the arms industry. Take this Northrop Grumman infographic cleared for public release in 2020 that crows about how “Northrop Grumman provides solutions across the entire kill chain.” Or note that Lockheed Martin trademarked the phrase “Cyber Kill Chain.” At a convention in July, one Lockheed vice president introduced a microwave weapon built to fry drone swarms by advertising “a high kill rate while keeping the cost per kill low.” America’s history of techno-nationalism is long. Palantir is just the opening act of the latest chapter. A bit of recent history would also dispel the novelty and power of “techno-fascism,” too. “The term ‘fascist’ is highly charged and, according to some, overused—most likely its incidence has skyrocketed because fascism is resurgent in the twenty-first century,” Durán notes. “But,” he warns, “fascists excel at deflecting the accusation.” Well, sure. But this is a well-trod debate. In the fight over whether “fascism” best described Trump and MAGA in the late 2010s, Udi Greenberg observed that the antagonists—who became quite embittered—really agreed on nearly everything of consequence. They all condemned the right’s racism and plutocracy, they all advocated for greater wealth redistribution, and they all invoked history to expose the type of illiberal rhetoric liberal democracies had long tolerated. What divided these camps was “their approach to polemic and its value for both intellectual exploration and political mobilization.” This gulf made the fight over a word a fight about “the role of language and history in shaping political agendas.” Jason Stanley, the prominent academic formerly of Yale, used the term deliberately, choosing it because it sounded excessive, since “the goalposts for the legitimate use of ‘extreme’ terminology continually move.” Peter E. Gordon, a professor of modern European intellectual history at Harvard, called the refusal to use it “a game of privilege” on the grounds that “those who would burn the whole house are not the ones who will feel the flames.” But the ever-contrarian Yale law professor Samuel Moyn replied that “abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes,” seemingly attacking the MAGA-as-fascism school from the left. “[O]ur politics of comparison doesn’t do the work we hoped it would.” But Durán is not primarily concerned with the intricacies of the fascism debate. His purpose is polemical—and the book is compelling. I worry, though, that serving up clickbaity analysis of tech’s alliance with MAGA as a flashy-fashy “Nerd Reich” will lead readers to doom-spiraling and #resisting online, when the real-world landscape of electoral politics already suggests fractures in the MAGA/tech alliance. In an article titled “This Is America,” the historian Daniel Bessner argues that MAGA 2.0’s reactionary politics are thoroughly homegrown. Moral panics about fascism, he adds, have historically produced a technocratic, elite-managed response that is poorly suited to answering the arguments of insurgent right-wing authoritarians. Think Hillary Clinton talking about a basket of deplorables or Olaf Scholz’s ineffective tenure as chancellor of Germany. Worse, Bessner suggests, hyperventilating about fascism distracts from ongoing debates about how to reform antidemocratic elements in America’s political machinery—the type of elements that fuel populist resentment and blunt the efficacy of big-tent alliances of pragmatic liberals, broadly defined. And most importantly, construing tech elites as techno-fascists can lead readers to forget that we still live in a democratic republic—and that the tech bros are losing. Support our growing coverage of books, arts, movies, ideas, and culture—sign up for a Bulwark+ membership: IN THE LAST CHAPTER, “Billionaires or Democracy,” Durán’s doomsaying starts to read almost as perverse wishful thinking—“techno-fascism” seems to be the fleeting hope of an insular few megalomaniacs, and a marketable term for academics and journalists competing for clicks. Outside, there are signs of the tech-MAGA alliance unraveling everywhere. Yarvin, one of Durán’s doyens of techno-fascism, has pronounced the second Trump term a failure, wept in interviews, and advised his allies to leave the country. Thiel bought a $12 million house in Argentina, while Zuckerberg acquired a 196-year-old Gothic castle in Ireland, as preparation for a (perhaps literal) retreat to the parapets. The growing backlash over AI data centers is another indicator that the public is souring on a tech-dominated future, while Big Tech companies that donated heavily to Trump are reportedly “writing big checks for Democrats ahead of the midterms” and strengthening ties with Democrats more broadly. And Trump himself, in Durán’s own assessment, “is failing to go full fascist authoritarian, to do The Thing,” while the looming midterms represent “the semblance of a plausible system of democratic governance” remaining in place. In making these concessions, Durán has done more than bury the lede. Not only has the thousand-year Nerd Reich apparently lasted less than one presidential term; the would-be Reichsteknoführers have realized that their putsch has plotzed. What gives? There’s a logic to a media landscape that rewards those willing to analogize our current predicament with the Reichstag Fire. As the political scientist Henry Farrell noted in 2013, modern-day tech critics, or “tech intellectuals,” “work within the same economy of attention as the people they want to argue against, and labor under many of the same intellectual burdens.” In these conditions, the tech critic’s “obligation to gather attention undermines their purported goals.” Likewise, Katherine Kelaidis, writing this summer about the transformation of historians into resistance pundits, described the general appeal of writers who spin a narrative “that rarely challenges their audience.” Underlying the techno-fascists’ will-to-power, Durán writes, is a pathological salesmanship: Tech fascism is the product of a venture capital system that has run out of unicorns and must now hunt Antichrists to meet its unquenchable thirst for acceleration. Artificial intelligence companies hype the coming of a “godlike” force capable of wiping out most jobs and, perhaps, all of humanity. Crypto companies peddle fantasies of digital salvation, shilling tokenized scams supposedly designed to survive the impending collapse of the US dollar and the liberal democratic order. Elon Musk, declaring Earth obsolete, hallucinates a new promised land on the dead waste of Mars. . . . The quickest way to scale a multibillion-dollar bonanza is to collapse existing systems—taxis, hotels, media—or escape into new ones: AI, Mars, digital immortality, network states. The ending of worlds has become the business model. But, ironically, enterprising members of the commentariat are subject to some of the same perverse pressures. For journalists like Durán, chronicling the authoritarian tendencies of MAGA’s techno-fascist elites operates according to a similar logic: emerging markets for attention have weakened legacy media’s command over American eyeballs. Journalists are caught between political obsolescence or making use of an ever-escalating set of adjectives and historical analogies to gain wider attention and, often, paid support for their independent newsletters. Techno-fascism’s alarmists are are responding to these same incentives, and I worry that these pressures might compromise the analyses being offered for a coalition that briefly cohered but soon after began a slow-motion self-lobotomy in full public view. Durán is right that “there is no middle ground between freedom and fascism.” He urges readers to recall that “the ‘centrist’ playbook leads only to ruin in these circumstances.” But I can’t shake the sense that readers of The Nerd Reich are not being asked to do more than stay tuned, subscribe, retweet, and to keep #resisting.