Silicon Valley billionaires’ war on democracy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tonya Mosley** (0:18)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. For 20 years, Silicon Valley's unofficial slogan has been to move fast and break things, the breaking, the price of progress.
But my guest today says what's being broken right now is American democracy. In his new book, journalist Gil Durán argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place. As the outgoing president, Joe Biden gave a similar warning against what he called the rise of a tech industrial complex.

**Joe Biden** (0:57)
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking.
The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy and our security, our society, for humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:09)
Five days after that speech, at President Trump's inauguration, and the seats closest to the president, the ones normally reserved for family and former presidents, sat some of the most powerful men in tech, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai.
And later that day, Musk stood behind the presidential seal and made a gesture much of the world read as a Nazi salute.
Durán's new book, The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, argues that the men behind the president that day were not there to celebrate him. Their presence was proof that 30 years of patient well-funded work had finally paid off. He writes that some of them were inspired by a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted digital money would dissolve countries. And with a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who argued America should be run like a corporation by a CEO with the powers of a dictator. Gil Durán began his career at the San Jose Mercury News, then spent 15 years in California politics, working with Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris. He returned to journalism in 2018, running the opinion pages at the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner. He now writes the newsletter, The Nerd Reich. Gil, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Gil Durán** (3:36)
Thanks for having me.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:38)
There was a time when a book like this arguing that tech billionaires are unmasking themselves and they have this plan to end American democracy and replace it with things like corporate city-states.
It would have been shelved as a bunch of different conspiracy theories, but a lot of what you write about, you didn't have to uncover. You didn't have to unmask. You built the case out of their own writings and speeches and interviews because basically they have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.

**Gil Durán** (4:15)
I think we were witnessing the unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics.
They finally were comfortable to reveal their full selves to everyone. And I think for many years, their democratic alignment was mostly self-interest because we had democratic presidents who had important contracts, government contracts, who had power. And so they needed to get along with whoever had power.
And now that Trump was returning to power, they saw an opportunity to align with him and to try to realign the country's politics to something more to their liking. I think it's grown quietly as we've seen many of these people become billionaires and multi-billionaires, and even one temporarily become a trillionaire. Once you have people who have so much wealth amassed, then they want power. But for some people in Silicon Valley, specifically Peter Thiel, this idea of using technology to amass wealth and then turn that into monopolistic political power is something that was not accidental. It was something that was carefully cultivated over many decades. As you said, none of my book came from secret documents or it's not guessing.