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California writer. Ida Tarbell stan. Beat: tech fascism, billionaire extremism, network state, crypto cartels. Writing a book: “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy.” The Nerd Reich: http://www.thenerdreich.com
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this is why they are accusing everyone else of being the devil
"Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil." Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" (1951)
Vance follows a coterie of online Nazis on X, has described Curtis Yarvin as a major intellectual influence, and openly attacks immigrants in blood and soil terms. The response of most of the political press? "Doesn't look like anything to me."
I'm giving a talk in one exactly week's time. QR for Zoom info. It's 15:00 NZ time, that's like a west coast tip off for EST people.
I had people get enraged at me over the weekend because I said the dead Trump rumors were dumb. Welcome back to reality, folks! Please log off for a few days and see if your MAGA brain symptoms subside. apnews.com/article/spac...
Trump to make announcement about Department of Defense www.yahoo.com/news/article...
NEW from me: The propagandists and cowards insisting Democrats acquiesce to Donald Trump's military occupation of American cities are wrong about public opinion, wrong about basic politics, and most importantly wrong about what the moment demands of patriots: www.findinggravity.net/trumps-milit...
Everything is a twisted upside-down reversal with these folks
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." - Hannah Arendt, 1951
But they get very mad when you point out that this is the same drug the MAGAs are on. So far we have: ✅president is non-functional! ✅stolen election! ✅plotting VP!
Total brain rot, unfortunately. I've seen people I know—especially older ones—breathlessly clinging to these conspiracy theories. But there's a whole subculture of libs with low critical thinking skills and a great desire to take cheap pleasure in AI-driven meme conspiracies.
Don't raise your kids to be conspiracy theorists. Bye!
Reading comprehension, dude: "He returned to his club on Sunday — posting an undated photo of himself seated in a golf cart during a matchup with former football coach-turned-Barstool Sports personality Jon Gruden — and again Monday."
No, this photo shows him with his grandchildren on Saturday.
Oh, I worked in politics for 15 years. I have canvassed. It's mandatory. Even better, I've worked countless focus groups and polls, and was communications director for quite a few Democratic electeds. But I'm sure you already knew that.
Donald Trump was golfing on Saturday. This is CNN. This is Getty Images. You are losing your mind to the internet. www.cnn.com/2025/08/30/p...
Occam's Razor
Moral Politics, which explained what is happening today around 30 years ago. Written by George Lakoff, one of the top 10 most cited scholars at UC Berkeley. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Read four books.
Bonus! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
a perfectly rational guess
archive.org/details/viol...
Certainly! www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-politi...
He'll need to project virility and capitalize on violence over weekend.
My guess is troops in Chicago.
Read two books.
see: mimetic rivalry
Read a book
It’s MAGA mimicry
That is the knee-jerk response, but look up "mimetic rivalry" (Thiel's other favorite topic)
Blaze(right-wing outlet) not buying Peter Thiel's Antichrist schtick. "It's interesting and maybe questionable that someone who makes a lot of money through technology would say that stopping technological innovation is actually going to...usher in the Antichrist.” www.theblaze.com/shows/relata...
He doesn’t say it’s only American. But it is particularly American.
It's a fascinating and compelling read that, unfortunately, is more relevant than ever. I knew tech fascism was seeking to manipulate religious symbols, but this escalation to Naming the Antichrist is especially concerning.
Today I'm talking to Dr. Robert Fuller, author of "Naming the Antichrist: The History of An American Obsession." The 1995 book outlines how the concept of "Antichrist" has been used throughout history to demonize and dehumanize political opponents. Questions for him? bookshop.org/p/books/nami...
Going live with @wajali.bsky.social at about 10:10 a.m. PST. thelefthook.substack.com
There needs to be journalism focused explicitly on tech politics, but this flies right over the head of establishment journalism.
It is insane to me that the richest man in the world is using his global megaphone to call for millions of British people to be rounded up and deported (including my family) and somehow this isn’t even news.
🎯
At what point does everyone realize they are doing talking points now?
Thanks for boosting! So nice when people care.
Interesting, see -- but that is what they want. "Mimetic rivalry." So, the proper strategy is to avoid the reflexive response, which traps you into a oppositional maze where they wish to play.
Because you do
Despicable and criminal.
People need to realize that “the walls are closing in” and “Trump is dying” are similar in that they are speculation and a distraction from the realities of fascism in America and it’s accelerating intensification.
"Describing herself as a “newbie” to demonology, she cited a 17th century book of magic to offer a possible explanation for Burning Man’s allegedly demonic influences..."
that's why she is doing it, yo
You do
This is dealt with in the piece
There are some nice musical interludes built in for this purpose
The best argument against billionaires existing is pretty much any of their opinions.
This is the way. Mark abductions like graves.
A Silicon Valley billionaire just declared Burning Man “demonic.” This is a heavy concept to drop on people who are currently tripping balls at the annual festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Get ready for “Satanic Panic,” Silicon Valley style. www.thenerdreich.com/demonic-sili...
No, the press won’t mention it
The Washington Post is not allowed to mention the concept of the Network State. But I wrote about how Trump's Gaza fantasy is a pure expression the Network State ideology, as is the lust for stealing Greenland. www.techpolicy.press/trumps-gaza-...
Here comes the Gaza Network State. A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resort gift link: wapo.st/4g2eATo
Not only is our new acting director of the CDC NOT a scientist, but he also has deep ties to Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopia movement. One epidemiologist compared Jim O’Neill’s appointment to “making Elon Musk head of the FAA.”
If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.
I always get a laugh seeing this photo of Peter Thiel because it’s a crypto conference in April 2022. He said crypto was replacing fiat currency. He was then in the process of selling $1.8 billion of crypto before the crash of late 2022. We only learned about the timing of his sales much later.
I'll tell you what is Anti-Christ: drug-loving tech zillionaires shutting down harm reduction for their poorest brethren. Why hasn't that story been written?
not even kamala is pretending that
One of the ways they cheat...is by using science!
"In a hotel-turned-campus on a reclaimed island in Malaysia, crypto and tech entrepreneurs are building software, chomping down Australian prime ribeye, hitting the gym — and getting schooled in a radical blueprint for creating new sovereign states from scratch." 🎁 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
That's a key point. Thiel and Co were mind-blown by this particular book, but it was derived from scifi and cypherpunk thought, mixed in with paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory.
Check your facts.
Oh, I don't think Girard would approve of Thiel. His hope was that, by understanding these concepts, we could learn to avoid them. Thiel weaponizes them.
The Financial Times published my letter about Peter Thiel, "The Sovereign Individual," and the nation-destroying aspirations of crypto. on.ft.com/47mldxs
Re René Girard (Peter Thiel's professor) on.ft.com/4mJ81HQ
That’s literally the opposite of how brains work. This is the Enlightenment Reason fallacy.
There is plenty of wealth on the blue side.
Yes, people believed it.
Yes, they want a race to the bottom. And they get their opponents to want it, too. That is the mimetic theory in a nutshell!
Oh, but it is real. Gavin is surging in 2028 polls.
They aren’t — yet. But that is a fight they are trying to pick.
the structure of the media scape is a function of the differences between the two parties.
Good comparison
It has a point!
Everyone is rotting before our eyes.
Yes, I’m choosing to talk about how people choose what is talked about.
Trump doesnt mean it, either. His supporters also feel themselves to be in on the joke. He is a comedian.
Notice how the Trump death hoax/Vance plot rumors are largely just a mirror of what Republicans said about Biden/Kamala. Republicans call the tune and their opponents dance to it.
The first clue: it’s not about reason or logic. This is what Lakoff calls “the Enlightenment Reason Fallacy.” I’d recommend “The Political Mind” or “Don’t Think of An Elephant.”
Many claim they have read it, but they tend to misinterpret it as a game of "magic words."
That's not a difference, that's part of the strategy. Once you understand the crucial role of communication, you understand the crucial role of creating a full range of institutions. They have done that.
It's all part of the same strategy, and part of Lakoff's critique. Republicans invest in this stuff because they understand its importance. They started decades ago.
Now you can understand what the MAGAs love about Trump. He's been doing this for years.
Another term for schismogenesis. Thiel took it from Girard, whose mimetic theory converges with Bateson at multiple points, as my book notes. While our field endlessly argues whether there is such thing as 'systems', neocon accelerationists have been putting it in practice for over a decade now.
What's the book!?
That is, indeed, another major problem
Yes, as Lakoff has argued for decades, this infrastructure and understanding should have been built long ago.
I would argue that establishment Democrats view things mostly through Republican frames. Their definition of "middle" is to move toward Republican positions. (simpler version of what you're saying, I think)
Democrats also helped defeat the Sanders/AOC measures ... by mimicking Republicans. The establishment Democratic response is typically to side with Republicans against the left, which tends to be the only part of the Dem spectrum proposing new ideas.
Everything the fascists are doing today is what George Lakoff tried for years to warn about. They even call Trump "daddy"—a nod to the importance of the family metaphor in politics. So convinced are they of Democratic ineptitude that they proclaim exactly what they're doing as they are doing it
I learned this...writing headlines.
A major complication today is that social media algorithms reward mimetic rivalry. If Trump says "the moon is green cheese," the algorithm will reward responses that mimic his language. This is why newspapers always put the lie in the headline.
Some in the Network State movement call it "Fifth Generation Warfare." Now, there's a rabbit hole for ya.
This is not to pick on any one person. The bigger point: The brains behind tech fascism view themselves as practitioners of "mimetics." They sees themselves as controlling discourse. And it's important to understand what that means, because flailing instinctive reactions are what they want from us.
By accepting the frames constructed by our opponents, we neglect to create our own. That is how they win. It's not that Democrats can't frame—they have before. It's that, as a group, they fail to understand the need for constant and systematic framing. ...And the need to STOP TAKING THE BAIT.
All this to say: My upcoming work on Thiel's Antichrist obsession will necessarily double as a lesson on framing/mimetics. Expose the meaning rather than accepting it Whether we know it or not, these concepts wield tremendous force in our lives. We are surrounded by them—especially on social media.
What's next, storm the Capitol in red hats? To break the cycle, it's important to understand how this stuff works. And there lies the problem: Democrats generally lack an interest in how it works. When it comes to communication, they are science deniers.
