Thinking About the ‘Tech Fascists’ and What to Do About Them

A review of Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (Avid Reader Press, 2026) and Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism (HarperCollins, 2026).

Do we really need more books explicating the philosophies of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and their technology mogul brethren?

Their views and rise to prominence have been widely and deeply documented in multiple volumes, substantial magazine articles, first-person essays and endless social media posts. Thiel sees freedom as incompatible with democracy. Musk preaches sovereignty via technology but whips up nativist furor and throws neo-Nazi salutes. Maybe we know enough about these guys.

And yet, along with some of their Silicon Valley contemporaries, these are among the most influential figures in American public life. Musk was the top Republican campaign financier in 2024, injecting at least $291 million for Donald Trump and other MAGA candidates; he is expected to spend another $100 million to try to fend off a Democratic comeback in this year’s midterms. Thiel bankrolled the political career of Vice President J.D. Vance, the frontrunner to succeed Trump as Republican standard-bearer in 2028 (assuming Trump doesn’t seek an unconstitutional third term).

Their corporate heft is equally impressive. Much of the US space and satellite program is outsourced to Musk’s SpaceX and its StarLink subsidiary. Palantir, which Thiel co-founded, does surveillance and data-mining for corporate and government clients in the US, Israel, and other nations. This kind of sway over public- and private-sector affairs demands continued analysis of the ideas held by the billionaire tech bros. Given their extraordinary leverage over our lives, we need to understand their truly twisted motives.

Two recently published books — The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by journalist and former Democratic political adviser Gil Durán, and Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff — offer accessible accounts of their subjects’ thinking.

Crackpots and bigots

The Nerd Reich, while marketed as addressing Silicon Valley at large, is mostly about Thiel, his affinity for authoritarianism, and his increasingly incoherent fascination with eschatological musing about the Antichrist. I already knew that Thiel drew ideas from, and promoted, the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), who advocates displacing democracy with corporate dictatorship and has been thoroughly profiled elsewhere. I did not know that Thiel took seriously the conspiracy theories of a pair of get-rich-quick investment newsletter writers who produced a doomsday book called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. A lot less discussion of the ridiculous-sounding Sovereign Individual would still have gone a long way. The point is that Thiel admires crackpots and despises the necessary messiness of pluralistic society.

Durán helpfully emphasizes Thiel’s brittle intolerance of “politics in all its forms” and his juvenile yearning for “escape” from real life — escape onto the internet, into outer space or maybe to self-governing communities floating in the middle of the ocean, harkening back to Jules Verne’s Propeller Island, a novel published in 1895 about plutocrats who flee to a giant ship in the Pacific Ocean. It’s worth noting that Thiel hasn’t quite abandoned all politics, as he contributes millions to causes like trying to defeat California’s proposed billionaire tax and protect Republicans’ congressional majority.

Muskism is a more compact monograph on the “system” its subject embodies.The most valuable insight is its comparison of Muskism to Fordism. Henry Ford, an earlier automotive tycoon, confected a modernization project that shaped much of the 20th century. While a virulent antisemite and conspiracy theorist, much admired by Hitler for those qualities, Ford, in the words of Slobodian and Tarnoff, also “rewrote the social contract with a promise of rising living standards for all: cars in every garage, fridges in every kitchen, wages climbing with productivity.”

Muskism, the authors argue, offers Americans a different arrangement for the 21st century: that “in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into [Musk’s] infrastructures.” The Pentagon and NASA increasingly depend on SpaceX. Soldiers rely on Starlink. X and Grok define reality for many in the MAGA-sphere. Unlike Fordism, though, Muskism doesn’t seek to spread economic and social benefits broadly. It promises autonomy for some but excludes migrants, supposed DEI dependents, and what Musk calls their “woke mind virus” liberal enablers.

Henry Ford had a thing about Jews. Musk has a thing about everyone outside his culturally purified, genetically white, European-descended, technology-gated community. “If tolerance means the end of Western Civilization,” he posted to his 225 million X followers in August 2025, “then we cannot be tolerant.”

These, then, are the ideas men like Musk and Thiel are seeking to see enacted by men like Trump and Vance. They are not alone in their arrogant belief that their wealth validates their every passing notion. On the same day last month, The New York Times and Washington Post published thorough dispatches on how billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, one of Thiel’s Palantir co-founders, has helped push Trump-era federal and state homelessness policies making it a crime worthy of imprisonment to sleep on the street.

The alliance between MAGA political forces and the tech moguls — whose Trump-enabling ranks also include, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the leaders of Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce, and OpenAI — deserves ongoing attention. Excursions into the ideological weeds like Muskism and The Nerd Reich are part of that process. After putting down these volumes, however, the reader may conclude we have reached the moment when analytical energy should shift from intellectual and psychological diagnosis to more tangible resistance.

Having observed Trump 1.0 with ambivalence and at times revulsion — recall how Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter suspended Trump for inciting more violence in the wake of the January 6 insurrection — the technology industry capitulated en masse to Trump 2.0 even before he returned to the White House. The industry, in other words, is facilitating the fascist movement seeking to exert a stranglehold on US society. It is time for action.

Examples of tech activism

And gratifyingly, we are seeing action. Residents of red states and blue states alike are rising up against resource-sucking AI data center construction projects. School boards and superintendents are restricting student use of smart phones that may undermine the mental health of some young people and without a doubt distract many of them from learning and valuable in-person socializing. The recent Meta court settlement of state-initiated litigation, while imperfect, could further protect younger users by limiting how and when and for how long they are scrolling rather than sleeping, reading a book, or riding a bike.

Sadly, this incremental push-back on tech domination is unlikely to lead to earnest introspection or self-regulation in Silicon Valley, let alone deter MAGA’s authoritarian agenda. To face down Trump and his tech industry backers will require overwhelming voter turnout, courage in the face of voter intimidation, reform of lax campaign finance laws, an overhaul of a broken immigration system, and many other efforts to repair and defend damaged democratic institutions and norms.

Tech is far from the whole story. But it’s a major part of the story. Understanding how the industry’s powerful leaders have contributed to our current predicament is necessary but not sufficient, as the authors of these worthy books doubtless would acknowledge.