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In our November 5 issue, Sue Halpern writes about “the political project pursued and abetted by a confederacy of Silicon Valley elites”:

Their goal is nothing less than to destroy liberal democracy. Their money, in tandem with a Republican Party establishment that shares many of their objectives and a president with an insatiable lust for riches, has pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called technofascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.

These captains of latter-day industry—among others, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy—have poured money into President Trump’s vicinity and demolished “the federal bureaucracy and its pesky regulatory regime.” However, as Ramaswamy once described an effort to take over San Francisco city politics, the idea is more than just destruction: “Gut it, purge it, and harvest its power.”

Below, alongside Halpern’s essay, are five articles from our archives about the fascist dorks who are trying to take over the world.

Sue Halpern
The Plot to Delete Democracy

In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.

Mark O’Connell
Space Oddity

To exist in this time is to be forced to think, whether you like it or not, about Elon Musk.

And yet for God’s sake, just look at the man—at his dispiriting attempts at humor, his weirdly off-putting outfits, his incessant posting of banalities and faux profundities and extreme-right disinformation on social media.

—July 23, 2026

Anne Diebel
The Dungeon Master

His interest in youth is manifold. At PayPal, Peter Thiel offered cryogenics as part of the employee benefits package and declared in a 2009 essay that he stood against “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” In 2016 Gawker published a rumor that Thiel “spends $40,000 per quarter to get an infusion of blood from an 18-year-old,” which in turn served as the basis for an episode of the HBO satire Silicon Valley in which a CEO contracts the services of a “blood boy.”

—February 10, 2022

Suzanne Schneider
From the Cesspool to the Mainstream

With billions of dollars in additional funding earmarked for detention centers, ICE agents, and the military, and corresponding cuts to food stamps, Medicare, and housing support, all financed by a deficit-boosting tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, we have arrived not at the minimalist state of libertarian dreams but at a fully militarized one instead.

—October 23, 2025

Ben Tarnoff
Venture-Backed Trumpism

Silicon Valley is home to more than $14 trillion worth of publicly traded companies, four of which are the largest on earth. It also includes some number of people who think Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States.

—September 19, 2024

Daniel Immerwahr
Zoning Out

The global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.

—November 23, 2023

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