San Francisco is central to the ‘major story of our time.’ It’s a tragedy.

Speaking truth to power, specifically how major tech leaders closely tied to San Francisco have swung toward fascist ideologies, is taking a visible toll on journalist Gil Durán. 

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Seated outside Cafe Réveille near Duboce Park last week, the Bay Area-based author revealed between sips of sparkling water that the past few years documenting the attack on democracy from local billionaires has turned his beard gray. 

At least the laborious reporting on Silicon Valley fascism hasn’t gone unnoticed. Durán’s new book — “The Nerd Reich” — is a New York Times bestseller, propelling him to engagements around the country and onstage at the Berlin Freedom Conference next month. It’s also ruffling feathers. He recently fended off threats to delete his YouTube channel, and earlier this year, his account on X was suspended for the second time in his career after he called the CEO of Palantir’s manifesto “fascism.” 

“The Nerd Reich” is a humorous title, but the laugh gets stuck in the throat when you begin to consider just how percipient it truly is. Prominent tech figures are not subtle about their authoritarian tendencies. All that Durán does with the book is quote them verbatim. In 2009, Peter Thiel famously admitted that, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk fashioned a Nazi salute during a post-inauguration celebration for President Donald Trump in 2025. 

As for Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in so many Bay Area companies that its portfolio page appears like the billboards along Highway 101, the major investor brazenly celebrates the architect of Italian fascism. In his self-published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from 2023, Andreessen calls Filippo Tommaso Marinetti a “patron saint” and paraphrases a quote validating tech’s “violent assault” upon mankind. The line is from an essay that Marinetti published in 1909, before he went on to co-author the “Fascist Manifesto” that helped launch Benito Mussolini.

When Durán and I met, there was barely a table available at Cafe Réveille. I chose the cafe intentionally since it’s a noted hub for employees in the industry. I assume many of them work for companies led by these men who extol how democracy is outdated and the only path forward is a reboot, which not only enriches their companies but consolidates their power. 

Durán arrived first, and I found him typing away at a laptop. I chuckled at how seamlessly he fit in among this crowd. But instead of Allbirds and a hoodie, Durán wore a brown Modelo beer hat.

While the words he writes may appear like the ranting of a madman shouting from a soapbox, Durán has only taken the time to listen and repeat what the richest men in the city are saying and perpetuating with their fortunes.

“It was all true, right? No one’s ever said anything that I’ve written is not true. There’s not one correction,” Durán said. “But it’s a matter of whether you want to acknowledge that what they have been saying is what they are also doing. I think that’s become the major story of our time: Silicon Valley becoming the government, while the Trump regime becomes Silicon Valley. So that’s why I think it came from San Francisco.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

SFGATE: I’d like to begin broadly about the role San Francisco played in generating a far-right movement underneath our noses. I chose this cafe because these folks are working for those companies. And if you’re working for the Facebook, you’re working for Mark Zuckerberg, who’s working for Donald Trump.

Gil Durán: The attack on American democracy is a project of venture capital and a project of technology companies. What do venture capitalists do? They bet on disruption. They bet on new technologies that have the promise of returning an outsized profit of some kind. Having run out of, you know, burrito delivery apps and legacy industries like taxis and hotels to disrupt, they’ve come for government. They’ve come for politics. 

At least that’s how Garry Tan put it at the Network State Conference in 2023, which is when I really started paying attention to what they were saying.

SFGATE: Local tech leaders started to change around 2023?

Durán: There was something I didn’t understand. Like, how are they saying they’re Democrats, but all their talking points and policies are right-wing? And why are they teaming up with a Republican billionaire to oust four politicians, portraying the city as an apocalyptic mess, which it was not, in order to create this moral panic and seize power? That’s what really caught my interest. And so I think that concentration of money being used now as political power is the whole recipe there. And what Garry Tan said, which I think was true, was a confession: If we can do it here, we can do it everywhere.

SFGATE: I’m personally fascinated by the strategy outlined in pandemic, what we’ve shorthanded as the “doom loop,” to portray San Francisco as a failed city.

Durán:The doom loop went away, and now it’s the “boom loop,” right? But we had a bunch of recent shootings. A guy was killed on Market Street. Someone walked around town stabbing people and got arrested. I was on BART yesterday. There’s people doing the fentanyl fold. But there’s not a bunch of people with phones whose job it is to film that and put it on social media, where the Daily Mail and Fox News and Newsmax pick it up and make it the big story. Right? That all went away, and now it’s the “boom loop.” Everything’s great. Everything’s fine, and there are no complaints.

At the same time, what do we have in the mayor? A mayor whose whole shtick is to cozy up with the billionaires, expand surveillance, right? I think having the mayor of a city like San Francisco, who’s not a voice against fascism in politics, is a major win for them. You know, Donald Trump just offered up LA and San Diego as sacrifices to Iran. He didn’t mention San Francisco, which, as you know, for decades has been depicted as Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific.

SFGATE: You mention a few times in the book how many of us in journalism missed this as it was happening in our city.

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Durán: I think that a lot of political reporters don’t actually understand politics. Thinking about it as someone who’s been a communications director and press secretary, a lot of political reporting is the metaphor of a dog chasing the ball. You get a ball, you throw it, the dogs chase it. Here’s the quote. Here’s the story of the day. What do you get spoon-fed? What’s the scoop? A scoop is always something usually designed by someone to give you a story that they want told. 

SFGATE: What is it that I heard you say once about “access journalism”?

Durán:Access journalism is ass-kiss journalism. So I think that a lot of political journalists end up becoming very cozy. And when a new narrative emerges, one that’s a little complicated, a little strange at first, you’re taught to avoid anything that looks like that. That’s why I think one of the biggest stories in American political history came out, slithered out of San Francisco, and most people completely missed it

SFGATE: The central person in the “The Nerd Reich” is Peter Thiel. You shared how you reached out to him and exhausted all your opportunities for an interview. If you had a sit-down interview with him, what are the questions you’d be most eager to ask?

Durán:How is this working out for you? This doesn’t seem like it’s popular, right? It’s sinking. Crypto markets have suffered greatly. The open corruption, you know, how is this in any way superior to having a Democrat in power? That’d be one. I would ask him about the meaning of his Antichrist fixation. The Antichrist as he describes it sounds a lot like Silicon Valley, like a venture capitalist. He says the Antichrist would be defined by velocity and an effort to control the world. That seems a lot like what’s happening right now. I would call it anti-Christianity, especially when you look at what Silicon Valley is investing in: warfare, surveillance, the destruction of creativity and art through AI.

Another question I’d ask him is that you know you’re going to die, right? Because I don’t think he knows he’s going to die.

SFGATE: Well, his head is going to be preserved like in “Futurama.”

Durán: When you have wealth, you want power. When you have power, you want wealth. When you have both, you want to live forever and be God. That’s when you’re f—ked.

SFGATE: An important person connected to Thiel is the vice president.

Durán:You know, JD Vance is also part of the San Francisco story, right? He went to law school, and while at Yale, he met Peter Thiel. After hearing Thiel speak, he decides not to be a lawyer after all and comes out to San Francisco to become a venture capitalist at Mithril Capital. And then after a little while here, he begins his Peter Thiel-funded political journey. 

SFGATE: No other city has been better for Donald Trump and MAGA than San Francisco because of the amount of money that’s fueled Trump 2.0. There’s a fair argument to be made that Bernal Heights [his old neighborhood] made JD Vance more than Appalachia.

Durán:He’s not a hillbilly, he’s a Thiel-billy. There was this big fundraiser for Trump, I think he raised $12 million here in San Francisco at David Sacks’ house. That’s apparently where they all said it’s got to be Vance [for vice president]. The degree to which San Francisco has played a role in creating this regime is audacious because San Francisco is supposed to be this blue city on the coast.

SFGATE: We pride ourselves as being a city of educated, hardworking people, and yet, all around us, this was happening.

Durán:A new politics has been created here. I don’t think in “1984” we ever found out how they got Big Brother. But apparently, they voted for it.

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SFGATE: I feel like so many of your conversations always have to end with this look towards optimism. Is there anybody local or any organization that you feel comfortable pointing to and saying, “Hey, they’re actually not full of it”?

Durán: I think there are a lot of voters and people in San Francisco who are really aware of what’s going on, and I think that they are trying to find their path forward. I had an event last week at Club Fugazi. There were 300 people there. Last night, I was at a packed bookstore in Glen Park. It seems like people are really aware, and they’re aware of how it’s connected to San Francisco and the venture capitalists. So that gives me hope. 

I think that you’ve got people in the city pushing back on. We got the data center moratorium for 45 days. People are really radicalized against Flock, against Palantir, against the data center. 

I think San Francisco would be a perfect place in the future, maybe the old Westfield mall, for the site of the Museum of American Fascism. And how venture capital fused with an apocalyptic right-wing movement to attempt to destroy American democracy in the first quarter of the 21st century. Tell the story of it here, you know. I don’t want to let the city off the hook.

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