Nerd Reich
How do we fight back against the broligarchs? Journalist Gil Durán, of the must-read newsletters Nerd Reich and FrameLab, shows the way, in this week’s Gaslit Nation.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people,” from his play No Exit, written in Nazi-occupied France, captured a grievance that mirrored the era’s ideological clashes—fascism, communism, and isolationism, often overlapping and competing, fueling Stalin’s genocides, the Holocaust, and World War II. The solution to sharing society with others, it seemed, was elimination: kill them.
This is why democracies rely on tolerance—you don’t have to like my existence, but you must let me exist in peace. Yet today’s tech oligarchs, having amassed unimaginable wealth, would rather invest billions in creating tech colonies and new religions to justify mass murder, enslavement, and C.E.O. king fiefdoms than address world hunger, provide free education, and strengthen social safety nets. Their vision isn’t coexistence—they’re building an anti-empathy billionaire bunker cult.
Gil Durán, a San Francisco journalist and former editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee and The San Francisco Examiner, has a front-row view of the rise of the broligarchs, analyzing their fascist justifications for cruelty in his popular newsletter, Nerd Reich. Durán spent over a decade in California politics, serving as chief communications strategist for Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Attorney General Kamala Harris. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Esquire, and PBS. He co-founded Framelab, a newsletter on politics, language, and the brain, with Dr. George Lakoff. Most importantly we discuss: how do we defeat the Nerd Reich and the Vichy Democrats?
This week’s bonus for our Patreon subscribers at the Truth-teller level and higher continues with Gil Durán of Nerd Reich, examining Democratic leaders as controlled opposition—public allies secretly serving the oligarchs.
Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!
Download Transcript
Show Notes
The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán https://www.thenerdreich.com/
FrameLab https://www.theframelab.org/
Trump on Charter Cities: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-a-new-quantum-leap-to-revolutionize-the-american-standard-of-living
One of Peter Thiel’s favorite book: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780684810072
Find a Tesla Takedown Protest near you: https://www.teslatakedown.com/
Download/print fliers made by Rise and Resist:
Clip: Elon Musk realizes he might lose his empire: https://bsky.app/profile/internetceleb.bsky.social/post/3lk2rd73f422n
Robert Reich on Twitter: “When Trump was sworn in, Elon Musk's corporations were under more than 32 investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies. Most of the cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the federal agencies are being defanged by DOGE. Funny how that works, huh?” https://x.com/RBReich/status/1898780869092884808
Andrea on Bluesky: “Start building a case for Trump and Musk to be arrested by the International Criminal Court” https://bsky.app/profile/andreachalupa.bsky.social/post/3lk47dkixgs2k
EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:
March 17 4pm ET – Dr. Lisa Corrigan joins our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss America’s private prison crisis in an age of fascist scapegoating
March 31 4pm ET – Gaslit Nation Book Club: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond
NEW! April 7 4pm ET – Security Committee Presents at the Gaslit Nation Salon. Don’t miss it!
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
Transcript
Advertisement (00:01):
Brian Dean Wright here, former CIA operations officer and host of a Daily News podcast called The Right Report like the Wright Brothers. Each morning at 5:00 AM Eastern, I take you with me around America and around the world for news that you need to know. But here's what's different about the Wright Report. I use news sources from the left, like M-S-N-B-C, and from the right, like Fox News. I present that to you before I then make clear that I'm pivoting to my analysis and opinion of what to make of it all. And that's important, separating facts and data from analysis and opinion. In fact, that is exactly how a good Intel officer does it. We're trained to provide global secrets and assessments to the White House in what is called the President's Daily Brief, and that is why my podcast is so very different. So join me in thousands of my listeners each and every day on the right report. You'll find it Monday through Friday at 5:00 AM Eastern on all major podcast platforms. Once again, I'm Brian Dean Wright. I sure hope to see you tomorrow morning with your daily presidential brief on the right report.
Advertisement (01:00):
Hey, I am Ryan Reynolds at Mint Mobile. We like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mint mobile.com/switch.
(01:24):
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details.
Donald Trump (01:31):
Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier. They transformed American life with the interstate highway system, magnificent it was, and they launched a vast network of satellites into orbit all around the earth. But today, our country has lost its boldness. Under my leadership, we will get it back in a very big way. If you look at just three years ago, what we were doing was unthinkable, how good it was, how great it was for our country. Our objective will be a quantum leap in the American standard of living. That's what will happen here at just a few of the ways we can do it. Almost one third of the landmass of the United States is owned by the federal government with just a very, very small portion of that land, just a fraction. One half of 1%. Would you believe that we should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development? In other words, we'll actually build new cities in our country. Again, these Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact the American Dream.
Andrea Chalupa (03:17):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film, the Kremlin and its allies in the White House don't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. Our opening clip was convicted felon and traitor Donald Trump talking about this Quantum Leap Ponzi scheme to build 10, at least 10 charter cities. What are charter cities when we've already got cities that need investment? Well, today's guest is Gil Duran, a San Francisco journalist and former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner. He is going to walk us through his years of research that went into his brilliant must read newsletter, the Nerd Reich, all about the oligarch Nazis like Elon Musk, who is trying to destroy our democracy from within and establish CEO King fiefdoms.
(04:29):
We're going to talk all about that as well as what the hell are the Democrats doing going along with this ride and why Duran spent over a decade in California politics serving as chief communication strategist for Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Diane Feinstein and Attorney General Kamala Harris. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Esquire and PBS Duran co-founded Frame Lab, a newsletter on politics, language, and the brain with the great Dr. George Lakoff. Most importantly, we're going to discuss how do we defeat the nerd reich. Now, before we get to the interview, I want to play this clip of Elon Musk who is right now trying to steal from our social security, basically having a meltdown over the Tesla protests across this country that are destroying his brand globally. Well, he's destroying his brand that are bringing down the stock prices, bringing down his overall wealth, and here is his reaction on Fox News.
Larry Kudlow (05:41):
How are you running your other businesses?
Elon Musk (05:42):
With great difficulty? Yeah, I mean...
Larry Kudlow (05:52):
But there's no turning back you're saying?
Elon Musk (05:58):
I am just here trying to make government more efficient, eliminate waste and fraud. And so far we're making good progress.
Andrea Chalupa (06:16):
Did you see Trump's latest video about Operation Quantum Leap where the Trump White House is going to invest in 10 charter cities?
Gil Duran (06:29):
I didn't see the video. No, but this sounds very familiar, this idea to create these new tech fascist cities around the nation and the world. So I'm not totally surprised. I'm surprised by how rapidly this is all developing. I thought it would take a little more time to get around to the tyranny town portion of the program.
Andrea Chalupa (06:52):
It is such animal farm. I've been following your work for a while now, and you were an early alarm on the fact that these broligarchs aren't just about overthrowing democracy, establishing dictatorship. They want to burn it all down, ethnic cleanse, mass murder, enslave us and established tech CEO fiefdoms. What's their ultimate driving ideology, would you say?
Gil Duran (07:17):
I think you have to look at the origins of their ideas and see that they have a deep belief that we're headed toward doom. In some ways you can see this is sort of a high tech version of doism or preps on steroids. They believe that the apocalypse is nigh, things are coming to a crashing end.
Andrea Chalupa (07:35):
But that's because of them.
Gil Duran (07:37):
They leave that part out of the story, but they believe they have to prepare for the next world. They have to prepare for the post democracy, post national world in which they will fill the void of leadership. And they are actively trying to bring that world about. They believe basically that nation states like the United States are going to decline and that we're going to see the rise of smaller corporate governed territories ruled by a cognitive elite who will then become the rulers of the 21st century in a very decentralized multipolar world. Meaning there's no more of the superpowers that we've had for the past couple of centuries that it will be now a decentralized world where everybody will have their own little corporate fiefdom that is if you're a billionaire or maybe a sent millionaire. And there are different ways to describe this particular ideology, but one of the main brands that has emerged in recent years is what I've been writing about, which is called the network state.
Andrea Chalupa (08:31):
And what are some upstart examples of this? You've written about Solano County, California right near where I was born and raised in Davis, California. This is happening in my hometown's backyard. Could you tell us a bit about Solano County, California, what's happening there as well as in Honduras where they're pissing off the elected leader of Honduras?
Gil Duran (08:51):
Well, in the network state ideology, the idea is to create these corporate governed territories that would be run outside of the rules of democracy and different rules, different laws, applying high surveillance to guarantee your security, et cetera. And there are two ways to create network states. One is called exit. Exit is when you leave a city or a state or a nation and you create your own new sovereign territory elsewhere. When I first started writing about this, I started looking at the exit angle of it because suddenly there was this new city that these billionaires were trying to build 60 miles northeast of San Francisco, and there was a lot of press coverage of it because the community was really against it. There was a lot of public popular opposition to suddenly plopping down a 60,000 acre 400,000 person city in the middle of a rural county.
(09:42):
I wasn't paying that close attention, but then I ran across a book called Crackup Capitalism by a historian named Quinn Slab Bodian. This showed that all over the world for decades, different groups of rich people have been trying to create some semblance of this, a way to exit, escape from regular society, democracy, taxation laws and rules, and create their own territories. When I realized the connections between that kind of thinking and the investors behind California forever, one of whom for example is Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, I started taking a deeper look at the entire ideology, and I wrote a piece last January or January 24, about California forever, which is this proposed city in Solano County. And I very much saw it as an example of trying to bring one of these cities into being not only in the United States but not too far from where I live and have spent most of my adult life. And by looking at California forever, its investors and supporters and what they've been talking about over the past few years, I was able to write a whole series of stories about this emerging ideology, which basically holds that tech people have to create their own new sovereign countries and rule them because everything else is about to go to shit.
Andrea Chalupa (10:58):
So it's basically billionaire bunkers.
Gil Duran (11:01):
Yeah, bunker societies who wants to live in a bunker? A lot of rich people, if you know any rich people, and there's been stories about too already, you're preparing for something that most people don't seem to be preparing for. They have their food stored away, they have their hidden place in the country. There's been this kind of growing fear that there's going to be some kind of collapse, and this is like people who are not totally crazy, but there's been this trend to be prepared for something to happen. Of course, the pandemic happened and for a lot of people that showed, wow, something very disruptive can suddenly happen with no warning and you want to be able to get away from everybody and hide out or whatever. But I think it's evolved to be that no one wants to be hidden all by themselves in some bunker for years.
(11:40):
So if you create a bigger territory, you crowdfunded or buy it with a group of investors and create your own little mini society within it, that's a superior alternative to having to hide under the ground or in a cabin in the woods or So it is very much an advanced and hyper paranoid version of the DOR prepper thing or kind of another version of the nuclear bunkers of the 1950s and sixties, right, to be prepared for the collapse. But these guys want to be super prepared, but they're not totally going to wait for the collapse. The other part of the network state philosophy, so you have exit, which is leave and form your own country. Then you have voice, which is stay and use your power and your wealth and your technology to take over existing governments. And that's very much what we see now unfolding in Washington. And last year I spent most of the year writing about this stuff and writing about this same cast of characters, these same ideas that we now see unfolding in Washington and potentially across the nation if Trump tries to build these sort of tech fascist enclaves all over, which apparently he's completely on board with doing.
Andrea Chalupa (12:46):
Yeah, with his Quantum Leap proposal of 10 charter cities, like charter schools that compete for resources with starved public schools already. So they're doing the whole Charter city thing now, which are basically going to be gated community for the super rich. The names behind this, it's famous names, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, south Africans with their own historical grievance with the collapse of apartheid. So they want to get back at all of us woke folks that were against apartheid like the US government. And then you have Mark Andreesen who's a mainstream investor. What are some of the companies that he is known for?
Gil Duran (13:23):
I mean, Andreesen Horowitz invests in a tremendous amount of things. I think one of the things that comes first to mind is Substack. They have a major stake in Substack. That's not clear to me why every lefty liberal writer in the country is giving 10% of their proceeds to that company when you can just go set up a newsletter on any platform they've got a nonprofit platform goes that I use. So they're everywhere. It's hard to use anything without putting money in the pockets of these guys. And for a long time they didn't seem to have a very sharp political profile, but in the last few years, we've seen this aggressive emergence of these guys with these angry screeds kind of using biblical doom language to talk about the future and position themselves as the saviors of humanity if only all of the dumb people, which is kind of the majority of people in the world would get out of the way.
(14:14):
And so now we see a full mask off with people who weren't even involved before, like Zuckerberg and others, all kind of network state pilling and coming out as aggressively pro maga and ready for some new change. When Trump talks about a quantum leap, well, that's the language of this idea called accelerationism. The idea that we're just going to throw a lot of money into the tech moguls pockets and let them do is they please and will somehow come out on the other side of that in a better high tech world where all of our problems are solved. But I don't think that's what's going to happen. I don't think that's what they have in mind. I think what they have in mind is breaking down the United States and forming new kinds of government. That's pretty much what they talk about in podcast books manifestos.
(15:01):
And there's even a network state conference where once a year they go and talk all day about their plans to create this new post democracy world. So it's interesting to me that Trump is so on board with it. He put out this plan for these cities last year in his campaign plan, and it was mentioned in multiple mainstream outlets. Nobody tried to explain what it meant though. Nobody did like an explainer of what is a freedom city, why does the United States need charter cities? Why are we going to build these specialized tech enclaves all over the country, especially at a moment when Trump seems Trump and President Musk, I should say, seemed determined to drive the United States economy off of a cliff. None of this makes sense unless you've been paying attention to the network state ideology, which is counting on some kind of rapid collapse to guarantee its own ascendants in the world. And I know that sounds a little conspiratorial, but everything I wrote about last year sounded a little conspiratorial. Now you can turn on the news and see what I was talking about.
Andrea Chalupa (16:00):
Yeah, a hundred percent. So the numbers that we're talking, I believe from your research I read that the California Forever Project, they wanted to spend half a billion dollars on buying up farmland for it in Solano County, half a billion dollars in just one experiment. Why do you think these oligarchs aren't investing their billions of dollars into strengthening the cities that already exist, providing free schools, free higher education, investing in innovation and all that stuff? Why can't they just strengthen the country that already exists?
Gil Duran (16:38):
Because that would mean having to say that democracy is the system of governance we're going to remain under, and that's not part of the network state plan, right? When you go into a city, you have to deal with the city council, you have to deal with the mayor, you have to deal with the voters, you have to deal with rules and regulations, and they don't want all of that. They want to be the government, they want to be the rules, they want to be the law. And I think that's the very simple reason why we're not seeing them try to add on to cities. It'd be one thing for a president to say, we're going to invest in 10 American cities and make them great Again. That's not what he's saying. No one has explained why we need entirely new entities that don't function according to the rules and laws of the United States in order to make progress.
(17:19):
No one has explained how that's going to somehow help the country instead of suck resources out of it. And unfortunately, our very low IQ political press, including at papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, seem to have very little curiosity for asking these questions. And I've become convinced that they're going to wait until it's too late to ask them, or we're going to get a flavor of coverage that's along the lines of, Hey, our cities are failing. Maybe these new cities will help. That's literally what they're going to do at this point. I'm not sure what these people think they're doing. I guess they think fascism is going to be fun for journalists. I don't think they're familiar with fascism.
Andrea Chalupa (17:51):
They're trying to hitch a ride through their access journalism. They're trying to save a spot for themselves and the billionaire bunkers. When you see Elon Musk going to war against Social Security, which Americans are paying into, that's our money that we're saving for our retirement. What is he thinking? Where is he coming from in terms of stealing our money from us, from Social Security and Medicaid and other programs? Why is he aggressively trying to cut these life saving programs that the people created by funding? He's gaslighting by saying it's all about the debt. He doesn't give a shit about the debt, but what is the real end game? Is he just lining his pockets to pay for these new fiefdoms?
Gil Duran (18:34):
That seems to be the case. I think a large part of this is redirecting public money into private coffers,
Andrea Chalupa (18:39):
Stealing,
Gil Duran (18:40):
Yeah. Balaji Vasan, who's the main network state evangelist who wrote a book called The Network State, talks about government as the only trillionaire in the world. So you can have all these tech billionaires, but government's a trillionaire and it has all this money coming through constantly. And the key to real power is to get control of that spigot, to get control of the government's money. And that's what they're doing now. That's what they're trying to do permanently. And it's amazing to me. One of the more shocking developments of this administration is the degree to which Elon Musk is jumping on the third rails. We're going to do something about social security. We're going to destroy it. We're going to, he's doing a lot of very unpopular things, firing veterans. And in February, 2025, you already had Republicans showing up angry to their town halls for their congressmen.
(19:27):
As someone who spent most of my career in politics as a strategist and communicator, I do not understand why anybody would do something like that. In fact, it would be a lot more scary to me if they were somehow quietly seeming very sane, while slowly moving people in this direction. They seem to think they have to do it all very quickly, and they don't seem to be very concerned about any consequences, which gives me some pause. Now, it could be that Elon Musk is just an adult hubristic narcissistic person who is unable to deal with reality and doesn't see that it's all going to come crashing down very quickly. But at the same time, we see the Democrats basically hiding under a rock and not fighting back and not framing the case for people. And so these guys are getting a lot farther than they should because there's been a complete lack of a functional opposition party for the past few months.
Andrea Chalupa (20:12):
Oh, absolutely. In terms of Elon Musk's own personal history, his family in Canada, of course, was heavily involved in the forefathers of this movement, which is cracy, right? It was like this belief in a government of technocrats, which caught on in popularity for a time in the United States and Canada until one of the leaders gave a speech that was straight up authoritarian at a time of Hitler, and they were just like, oh, nevermind. And then ever since then, Elon was, I believe, after a character from this movement or a sci-fi novel inspired by this movement, he's given his kids weird names that are along this theme. His family moved from Canada to South Africa because of their Nazi sympathies that's on his mother's side according to Elon's father. And so it seems like a lot of his personal history and his personal identity given the names of his children, is wrapped up in this movement.
Gil Duran (21:14):
Oh, definitely. This is not the first time this sort of idea has been tried. As you mentioned, technocracy in the thirties was this idea that we should replace politics with engineers and with these scientific calculations that would then decide everything perfectly. It fell apart largely because as with the network state idea, it was very pseudo intellectual. It didn't really all add up. And the main leader behind it turned out to have completely fudged his academic credentials and was basically a sort of a huckster con man who realized that if you get into a room and tell people something that sounds smart, you can grow a bigger and bigger room everywhere you go. And it finally all fell apart when he gave this live speech to 400 people that was covered by the radio and went on and on and droned on and went to some dark places, and it all fell apart from there.
Andrea Chalupa (21:59):
But they're doing that now, and it's building a movement.
Gil Duran (22:03):
Well, it's cyclical. And if you go back through all of Western history, it's a constant struggle of Arian groups, which is groups who believe the world's about to end and who believe they are the chosen ones, and who believe they must prepare for the next world. And they must lead a revolution usually in the name of Christ or Jesus to bring about this rapture, the return. And although this has roots in Christianity and the idea that Christ would return and there'd be judgment, a lot of the cults who were behind this get a bit off track and into their own weird stuff. The Nazis were a version of this, the thousand year Rike, which will now rise up and create a different world order. Charles Manson and his group were part of this. They thought the world was about to end, society would collapse and that they would be ruling over the world after a big race war called helter skelter, which didn't happen even though they tried to make it happen by killing a bunch of people up in the Hollywood Hills
Andrea Chalupa (22:58):
And blaming it on the Black Panthers.
Gil Duran (23:00):
Yeah, you've seen it over and over again through our history, including recent history, a lot of cults that believe the end is coming and they do something crazy. Jonestown, here's Jim Jones out of San Francisco, has a church, becomes a cult, basically a dangerous cult. They're no longer able to function in the United States because everyone's catching onto them. What do they do? Jim Jones goes and buys a big plot of land in South America and starts a new city called Jonestown. Maybe I would call Jonestown, to be the first network state of modern times. And what happens at Jonestown, Jim Jones goes crazy, starts herding and torturing people and keeping them prisoner. And when Congress comes to investigate, everybody gets killed. Over 900 people die drinking poisoned flavor aid and a few of who are shot. So we see this constantly recurring idea, a small group of people who think they're chosen, that they have to change the world, that they understand the new rule that has to be imposed.
(23:53):
And I think we're very much seeing that in the form of these tech bros now. I mean, I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, and the thing that most stood out to me is that Elon Musk sees himself as a messianic figure. Elon Musk thinks he's the most important human being who has ever lived. Elon Musk thinks it's up to him and him alone to save humanity and ensure that we become multi-planetary and live for billions of years into the future and merge with technology. And in fact, one of the only things that makes him emotional is when he thinks about these sorts of things in the book, he kind of tears up thinking about his own importance. This is some dangerous kind of thinking, especially when as the Wall Street Journal has suggested, has exposed Elon's doing a lot of drugs. You also see this kind of thinking coming out of people who do a lot of psychotropic psychedelic drugs.
(24:40):
Now, most of them are not the richest man in the world who own one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. So their little messianic trips are not widely known. But I remember being in my twenties and seeing people do acid or shrooms and thinking they had all the answers in the world too, but they had to go to work at the restaurant the next day, and that probably disabused them of the notion that they were the Messiah, not so if you have billions of billions of dollars and are surrounded by people whose job is just to kiss your ass all day. So I think it's very dangerous because I do see it kind of moving toward this sort of religiosity with the way that some of them speak about it. And there's this whole movement now in tech to emerge as a Christian and return to your Christian roots.
(25:19):
And there's this weird thing going on where they're trying to show alliance and allegiance with the religious right in the United States largely by adopting their language and this very thinly layered so-called Christianity that seems to be really about justifying their own greed and their own view of themselves as the saviors of the world. But they don't seem to realize that basically the one group that Jesus Christ condemned was the rich, and he said it easier for a camel to get to the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, but in their gospel, no, you have to get super rich and accelerate because you're the most important people in the world and the only ones who can save it. So there's some really twisted stuff going on if you look at it through the lens of history and religion. And really, I came at this through, I was trying to write a book about a cult two years ago, but the more I tried to research it, a cult from history, the more I kept saying, this is like a cult though. And this seemed more urgent to me, which is why I decided to focus on it and go really deep on it in my stories for the New Republic. It's a lot there, but you get a lot of my raw thinking on the origins of this and how it rhymes with things in history.
Andrea Chalupa (26:28):
No, absolutely. And we can even go deeper on that in terms of the religiosity, which I think finds so incredibly fascinating for a number of reasons, because for one, the tech revolution came out of Northern California with this idea of the whole Earth catalog humanity coming together, the age of Aquarius, the hippie movement, the counterculture movement. We are the pirates of Silicon Valley. We're going to take on our parents' generation's, IBM, and that was what California was supposed to be. It was supposed to be this giant beating heartbeat, moral compass, far more progressive and radical than the rest of the country. That's something that as a born and raised northern Californian, we took pride in that cultural identity, and you see remnants of it still in Oakland today. But what ended up happening instead was the tech revolution that was supposed to make everything equal and speak truth to power and put power in the hands of everyday people, which it certainly did.
(27:28):
Obviously we've seen that with social media, with the Arab Spring and countless examples, and all these filmmakers sprouting up things to their phones and independent journalists like us being able to keep doing what we're doing without having to work in a major mainstream media company. But Wall Street eventually took over venture capitalists vultures, they set up shop there, and of course you had defense industry at Stanford University, and so on and on and on and on. It goes where these guys became the enemy that they were originally railing against, and the whole Earth Festival, uc, Davis that I grew up going to, which is like a hippie mecca, what became even larger that overshadowed, it was the Las Vegas out in the desert, which is Burning Man. I remember doing a story for Connie Nass portfolio interviewing CEOs, wall Street executives that swore by Burning Man, that Burning Man made them better human beings. One executive couldn't wait to go to Burning Man, but as soon as he got back, he had a meeting with Rupert Murdoch, they became the man that they claimed to be burning or whatever. What are your thoughts on that?
Gil Duran (28:36):
Yeah, I think there was a period where some of the tech world coded as countercultural. Steve Jobs said that it was LSD that gave him the breakthroughs that allowed him to do what he did. But I think what happened was technology, which was supposed to free us, which might've drawn some innovative thinkers, instead made a handful of men very, very, very rich. And I think we're increasingly learning that when people become very, very, very rich, they become very, very, very insane as well. And so I think that they started to have these fantasies. Once you have all the money, what do you want next? You want power. So now they're after the power. Well, when you have money and you have power, what do you want after that? Well, you want to live forever now. They're trying to live forever. There's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley circles about these longevity things, and there's one guy, Brian Johnson, who's going around saying he's not going to die, and that he's developed some algorithm for his body to cheat death, and
Andrea Chalupa (29:29):
He's injecting the blood of his son into his body.
Gil Duran (29:34):
Well, he tried that. I guess it didn't work. It's getting kind weird. And again, out of the sixties, out of the seventies, out of psychedelic drugs played a role in the rise of some of this tech stuff. But I think as Malcolm Harris captures in Palo Alto, there were always some right wing roots coming out of Stanford University. There was always sort of a history of sorting the population of separating the best in the brightest and breeding them toward the future. And so the seeds were always there, but there was a period where it did seem that technology was just going to make life fun, make life freer. You don't have to pay a phone company. You can have Google Voy, all of these things. But it turned out to just be a massive surveillance model with a subscription required and possibly the need to forfeit democracy at some point because the rich dudes aren't happy anymore. You have a group of people who have benefited the most from the system, the most privileged and wealthy men in the history of the world, and all they can do is complain that the world is not being fair to them and that they shouldn't have to live by the rules of democracy. It's pretty stunning, and I think that we're learning that, as Louis Brandeis said, you can either have vast concentrations of wealth in this country, or you can have democracy, but you can have both.
Andrea Chalupa (30:48):
Yep, absolutely. Tell us about where AI fits into this. I'm really interested in how they want to accelerate AI to basically create God, which is very much what the mother of science fiction Mary Shelley warned us about. Could you speak a little bit about the Frankenstein monster of these assholes trying to create God?
Gil Duran (31:13):
Yeah. Brian Johnson, the multimillionaire that I mentioned, who's trying to live forever, had a weird quote recently about We're going to create God in the form of super intelligence and God will be created in our own image, which would probably No thanks. Yeah, which would probably horrify any actual Evangelical Christian who heard that. There's a lot of tensions in this group, and unfortunately no one's out there exploiting them except for Steve Bannon. But there's this idea that AI is going to be the great advancement of our time, and that they intend to use that advancement to get everything they want, including their own version of God and their own permanent form of government. What we can see Elon Musk doing in Washington behind the scenes apparently is firing a bunch of people and unleashing his AI on our government to make decisions to completely vacuum up all the data and give him really a super powerful information weapon going forward.
(32:08):
I think that's the subtext here of what he's doing. There's a lot of opacity. We can't see it all, but what we do see is him getting rid of people installing ai. There's a military analyst named John Rob who's very respected in some circles, and he wrote an essay recently about basically saying that this is a network state prototype that Musk is trying to pull off. And by the way, John Rob is a supporter of the network state and believes that it's the future. So unlike me who's a critic of it, this is an analyst who supports it. And he basically said, yeah, we're trying to install this AI system to take over governance because humans aren't fast enough for the government of the future. And perhaps there's some arguments that could be made for computerizing more stuff, I guess. But no one voted to have AI take over the government.
(32:53):
No one voted for Elon Musk to be in there firing veterans and destroying the public institutions that were built by generations and generations of Americans. So some of them speak very openly about what's happening, but then they don't seem to realize how anti-democratic it is to admit that you're doing something that nobody's even heard of. I mean, the newspapers still won't mention the network state. They won't talk about the underlying ideological ideas here that have led to this. Some of them have interviewed Curtis Jarvin finally. I mean, the New York Times got around to it a few days before the inauguration. I wrote about Jarvin in July and I was late. So there's been this real allergy to talking about the organized nature of this. It seems that people want to talk about the symptoms, but nobody wants to talk about the disease. And I think that's a problem.
(33:42):
I'm not sure how people are supposed to know what's happening if nobody will tell them, except for the people who support this, who kind of villains in a cartoon are like, ha, ha ha. Yeah, it's the prototype of the network state. The good news is that John Robb, who is the military analyst, thinks it's going to fail because it's going too fast and it's too chaotic and that there's going to be a massive pushback and that this iteration at least will fail. Now these guys have a lot of money. They can come back and try again. I've also noticed recently that Curtis Jarvin seems to be pretty miserable, and he thinks it's all being mishandled and that it should be done very differently, more authoritarian it seems, is what he would prefer. So there does seem to be a degree to which the guys who have been talking about supporting this don't think Elon's doing a great job of handling it.
(34:24):
Elon's a part of it, but he's not the main part of it. As with everything, Elon didn't invent this. He just jumps on the last minute and tries to get all the credit for it. You really have to look at like Peter thi and Andreessen, Peter Thiel's been talking about this stuff since 1998. There was a book called The Sovereign Individual that came out and said there would be the rise of cyber currencies in the 21st century, and these would allow people to undermine government and star of revenue, and the nation states would decline and the cognitive elite would rise. And this book had such a profound impact on Peter Thiel that in 2020 when it was reissued, he wrote the preface. You can go look that up yourself. Right? There's a preface by Peter Thiel on the Sovereign Individual, which is about the collapse of nations in the 21st century. And I encourage anybody to read that book. It's not a hard read. It's kind of thick, but it's quick. And then you will completely understand what the hell's going on right now.
Andrea Chalupa (35:14):
What's the name of the book again?
Gil Duran (35:15):
The Sovereign Individual. And the subtitle is How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. They changed it to a different subtitle a few years later because that one was a little too dark, but that subtitle is exactly what they're talking about. And by welfare state, they basically mean modern democracy, social security, all of these things. A big motivator here is these guys do not want to pay taxes and don't want to be responsible for anybody else. They think they created all their wealth in their own, which we all know is not true. Elon would be nowhere without the government. He's probably the biggest welfare queen in history, and they want to detach now that they've sucked the value out of the society and they want to create new societies, and they want to kick our foundations out from under us as they go. So I think that's really the story of the moment, the story of our time. It could be the most important story in American history if they succeed
Andrea Chalupa (36:03):
The robber barons of days of old, even the Koch brothers, they would put their names on hospitals, institutions, the Met and give out so much money back into society, nevermind that they're also poisoning us with coal and all that. But these guys seem proud of being anti-empathy.
Gil Duran (36:28):
Definitely. They see empathy as a weakness, and that explains a lot about why they despise democracy. You need empathy for democracy. This is something that George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist often says, democracy is based on empathy. It's based on people caring about other people, people caring about how other people feel. Why else would you live in a society where people have to vote and they get a say, an equal say in things? And so they don't believe that's the way things should work. They believe that they should make the decisions that they are smarter and richer than everyone else, and they are almost divinely entitled to rule, which is why they love people like Curtis Jarvin who has a fetish for monarchs and dictators, and they enjoy this sort of pseudo intellectual rewriting of history to say that actually democracy is bad and tyranny is good, and things were better during slavery. All this kind of weird stuff they get into that's very easily disproven by anybody with a brain. But they've developed this whole philosophy in which the villains of history are the heroes and the villains of science fiction are exactly who they want to be, and now they're trying to sort of engineer an ideology and a government that gets them there.
Andrea Chalupa (37:38):
Is it fair to say that Curtis Yarvin was a central ideological driving force of this? Or where does he fit in?
Advertisement (37:46):
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds at Mint Mobile. We like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mint mobile.com/switch.
(38:09):
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra speeds, lower above 40 gigabytes of detail.
Gil Duran (38:16):
I view Yarvin more as sort of a court jester who says things aloud that other people were afraid to say and said them early on. He's derivative. If you look at Yarvin, go back to the sovereign individual. That's really, I think, where the story begins for people like Peter Thiel. I think Yarvin tapped into that found ways, apply it in different essays to extend the thinking, to get more detailed about how the corporate cities would work. And after him comes Balaji Nava with the network state, which is largely derivative of Yarvin and the sovereign individual, but puts this new sort of corporate skin on it to make it sort of seem like a very logical, rational idea. And the book is written with this, again, a pseudo intellectual history of the world where they just cherry pick all these facts, distort everything, and make it seem like their conclusions are completely inevitable.
(39:11):
These guys are not scholars at all. They don't get peer review. They only get claps. They only get pets from their billionaire masters. They're not looking for the contrary example that proves them wrong. You could say that most of history actually is a group of tyrannical wealthy people trying to oppress the masses until there's a great revolution usually of violent one that overthrows that order. You could say our system of democratic governance, a democratic republic, which can be frustrating at times, was designed to prevent these dynamics from getting out of control, to give people a vent, to give people a chance to change their government, but not to change everything to rapidly. They don't seem to have any appreciation for that. They think the founding fathers were cucks. Jarvin says in one of his videos that you can go into a bar now and say that, Hey, I think England should have won the Revolutionary War.
(39:59):
And people will say, yeah, that's cool. I'm not clear on what bar you would go into and have that conversation, but I guess there's a bunch of Yarvin and maybe, I dunno, Dime Square, whatever the hell they call that thing, the sovereign house. I guess that's the kind of talks they're having there. But they even think that the founding fathers are stupid and had a bad idea. And that's the thing is if you really expose these guys for what they are, I think that their popularity would be in the toilet. I mean, these are some strange ideas. I mean, I've been a Democrat or at least a Democratic voter most of my life and further to the left than any of these guys. But when I grew up, you didn't talk about the United States of America in this way. I come from a family also with a strong military tradition. People enlist just because it's an honorable thing to do. And the way these guys talk about the United States of America, it's some faded peso that needs to be cashed in is really shocking. And I don't think MAGA Republicans want to hear that kind of talk. And I think that's a main schism that needs to be exploited within these people is that these people don't believe America's the greatest country. They believe America is on the decline and they intend to profit from that decline. And...
Andrea Chalupa (41:02):
I think accelerate it, make it happen,
Gil Duran (41:03):
Accelerate it, accelerate it. And I think if people knew that, and I think they're starting to get an inkling with all these firings and even veterans don't matter, right?
Andrea Chalupa (41:10):
Nine 11 first responders just had their medical support cut by Elon Musk.
Gil Duran (41:16):
Well, those people only matter if you think that America matters. Veterans only matter if you think that serving United States matters. If you don't believe in all that, well, then they're just like anybody else. But veterans have usually been sacrosanct in politics. You can't harm veterans. You have to do stuff for veterans. We have to honor our veterans. And with these guys, they don't really give a damn about our veterans. Kind of like as Trump said, who cares about these losers who served their country and died, right? So I think that he has some company there in Silicon Valley.
Andrea Chalupa (41:46):
The other week I went to Bard College in Ryan Cliff, New York. There was a screening of my film, Mr. Jones. There. They put me up in the Beekman arms, which is the oldest hotel in the United States. George Washington stayed there, Alexander Hamilton. So of course I arrived saying, okay, I need to commune with the ghosts of our founding fathers and get some advice on how to fight these traitors. And that night, I kid you not that night, I had a dream. I've never had a dream like this. I had a dream where Elon Musk, thank God this is the first and only time he entered my dreams. Elon Musk kept turning into a mouse. He kept turning into a mouse, and I said, look, he's just a mouse. We can capture him. We can contain him. He's just a mouse. I'm a spiritual person. I believe that this was a message from the spirits on high that made our country great. FDR hung out at this hotel a lot. And so I feel like they're just saying, wake up America. Elon Musk is just a mouse. You're bigger than him, you're stronger than him, and you can overcome him.
Gil Duran (42:51):
Well, there are certainly a lot more of us than there are of them. And that's why I would encourage people not to feel defeated or afraid. I mean, I think this is going to take millions of people in the streets at some point to send the message that we're not going to just give up our country without a fight. And I think these people are cowardly, they're sheltered. They're not used to having pushback. And that's why I think the Democratic Party establishment has made a catastrophic mistake by laying down on the job and hiding under a rock. I think people are looking for answers. People are looking for leadership right now. And all the people who supposedly cared, all the people who are the leaders of the party are just nowhere to be found. And what are they doing waiting for a poll to show that you should save the country?
(43:31):
It's just stupidity and cowardice. And look, don't underestimate the degree to which a lot of the democratic establishment, including the consulting classes tied in with some of these guys as well. There's a lot of people, Democrat or Republican, who only care about making as much money as possible while they can. And so I think there are people who are not as alarmed as they should be because it's in their best economic interest or so they think to go along with it. We've seen a lot of Democrats being bought off by crypto. I've seen a lot of Democratic consultants that I know suddenly in league with all these tech guys in some way or another on their projects, right? It's very clever to go out and buy up the opposition smartest people and put them in your own employee and make sure they're conflicted out from working against you.
(44:16):
Then look at what the Democratic party's doing now, trying to put up people like Alyssa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego as the future Crypto Democrats. Basically, people who owe their ascendancy to crypto. The same crypto pact that took out Sherrod Brown and spent money to destroy Democrats all over the country, puts these two Democrats in office. And what do they do? They sound like Republicans. And we saw this in San Francisco. There's this whole idea that you create a new kind of Democrat who's basically a Republican with a D next to their name, and that's the new politics. So it's a way of winning without even having to fight there. You just kind of plant your own people. They've tried to redefine moderate to basically mean what a Republican would've been 20 years ago, and that's what a Democrat is supposed to be now. And I think it's, again, this is the kind of thinking that democratic establishment types tend to lap up and fall for every time.
(45:06):
But if you notice, the middle always seems to be moving further to the right. I think if we keep going this way in 10 years, Democrats will have to be giving Hitler salutes just to be considered moderate. And they'll probably do that if it comes to that. So I think it's getting pretty ridiculous, but I think things are going to change. I think with the economy starting to go south, I think that even the most cowardly Democrats will remember their basic political instincts to pounce at things like that. I mean, if this were happening under Kamala Harris, what would the news look like today? What would be happening all over tv? It would be constant, nonstop. The editorial boards would all be demanding her resignation, but instead, Trump has normalized dysfunction, chaos, and corruption. And so everyone's just sort of paralyzed and unable to act or has to treat it like it's normal.
(45:53):
So I do have hope, and part of what I do in writing this stuff is to provide some real clarity to people on what's happening. But I do believe there'll be some accountability at some point for the things that are happening today. But only if we decide that there will be accountability. And I think people need to understand how much power we really have. We've already seen it, people taking down Tesla, and these things aren't organized by Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. It's just people taking the initiative. And I think that's where the real leadership is going to come from. I think we're going to see a new generation of leaders come out of this because it's become very clear that our old leaders aren't up to the task. And I think that's a good thing. I think the Democratic Party needs to accelerate past its inertia and its sclerotic approach. And the same thing for the media. The media just was asleep at the will and let this happen and refuse to in any way allow it to even be talked about. I pitched different newspapers on, can I do an op-ed just warning about this thing? And there was zero interest.
(46:56):
You can't, no one's told me that I'm wrong. No one's corrected anything I've written. And it's not based on anything. I guess it's all what these guys have said, have written, have put in podcasts and books and conferences, and it's just not clear to me why there's such an allergy to just saying that. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the stuff they've been talking about for decades is what they seem to be doing now. But I feel like we should at least tell people that coincidentally, they've written all these books and manifestos and videos and podcasts and conferences on the subject, and here's what they say, and here's how it matches what's happening now. Maybe just a coincidence, right? I've often wondered if there's a memo or something that went out that said, you shouldn't talk about this stuff. And if there is anybody listening, please send it to me. I'm a reasonable, rational person. If there's a reason I should shut up, I'm willing to consider it. But I'm not aware of that. And like you said, I didn't even see yet. There's some video out now about this stuff. Every day there's something new and you watch everybody cover it, not at all mention that there's something called the Network State Movement that calls for the creation of these charter cities all over the world. They're just not going to give that context. And it's not clear why, but I have faith that we'll get there.
Andrea Chalupa (48:07):
Want to join the conversation. Shape the show by becoming a member of Gaslit Nation on Patreon. Join our community of listeners for exclusive q and a sessions. Bonus shows. Get all episodes ad free invites to live events and more. Most importantly, connect with other listeners in our group chat and committees, planting Seeds of change. Sign up at patreon.com/gaslit. Gaslit Nation hosts resilience political salons every Monday at 4:00 PM Eastern Can't make it live. Recordings are available to our community on Patreon. Salons are your space to vent, ask questions, and connect with other listeners who also really, really hate Nazis to help Ukraine with urgently needed humanitarian aid. Join me in donating to razomforukraine@razomforukraine.org to help refugees and conflict zones donate to Doctors Without borders@doctorswithoutborders.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan project@theorangutanproject.org.
(49:14):
Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our editing wizard is Nicholas Torres, and our associate producer is Carlin Daigle. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon. It keeps us going. Original music and Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Berg, Nick Farr, Damian Arga, and Carlin Daigle. Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smite of the New York Based Firm order. Thank you so much. Hamish Gaslin Nation would like to thank our supporters at the producer level on Patreon and hire Abby Zavos. Ice Bear is defiant. Todd Dan Milo and Cubby Ruth. Ann Harish. Lily Wachowski, TB 9 2 6 6 6 because we're fighting the Antichrist. Sherry Escobar. Sidney Davies. Work for Better Prep For Tre. John Schoen. Thaler. Ellen McGirt. Larry Gossan, Ann Bertino, David East Mark. Mark, Sean Berg, Kristen Custer, Kevin Gannon, Sandra Colemans, Katie Urus, James D. Leonard. He writes his name and caps. Leo Chalupa. Carol Goad. Marcus j Trent, Joe Darcy. Diehl. S Sinfield. Nicole Spear Abby Road. Jans, SRAP. Rasmussen. Mark. Mark. Again, Sarah Gray, Diana Gallagher, Leah Campbell, Jared Lombardo, and Marshall and Tanya Chalupa. Thank you all so much for your support. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you.