A Shocking New Book Reveals Why JD Vance Might Be Even More Dangerous for America Than We Thought

6 min readThe redoubtable Digby points us toward a truly scarifying analysis of the tech-bro culture and its grand designs for the human race. And, as was said in a more innocent time, something’s off about them boys.The walking nightmares come courtesy of a book titled The Nerd Reich, by journalist Gil Duran. (Props to whoever came up with that title.) Duran gets inside the heads of our potential overlords and finds that they're full of spiders, snakes, and poison toads. From The San Francisco Standard:Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship. ... Hitler makes a few appearances. So do JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and the big bad of tech plutocrats, Peter Thiel. The book can veer polemic, but Duran girds his argument with plenty of direct quotes from his subjects’ conference speeches, publications, and podcast appearances. In the interview in the SFS, Duran designates a San Francisco plutocrat named Balaji Srinivasan as the activist intellectual behind all the grandiose scheming. Srinivasan came onto Duran radar as the man—and the money—behind an attempt to take over the San Francisco school system. In an earlier piece for The New Republic, Duran laid out Balaji's philosophy and it's a real doozy.Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent."The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.So he should probably stay away from the track, but Balaji and his merry band of extremely wealthy vandals are playing for a larger stake, which is why Duran points us to an appearance Balaji made on a podcast.“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over. “Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”It gets wilder.In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk ha d run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building’s exterior. But in Balaji’s dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together.Every authoritarian yahoo needs victims, and Balaji has a good idea of who his will be. You will be shocked when I tell you who that might be.“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation. ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. … You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones. …”Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).So far, for all of his Mad Libs uber alles talk, Balaji has hit a few snags on the road to world domination. Just this past week, for example he and his people got thrown out of Malaysia, where he had been running what Fortune called a “nomadic education community.” So Balaji was encouraged to nomad his keister out of Malaysia. He has since turned up in Kazakhstan, where the government seems willing to let him operate on his own hook.Duran explains that the usual gang of oligarchical crackpots are involved here, including Peter Thiel and the incredibly weird Curtis Yarvin. Their separate streams of interplanetary bafflegab come together in the mighty torrent of unprincipled yahooism that is ... J. Divan Vance.There was Michael Kratsios, a Thiel deputy who’s now high up in the Trump administration, and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, along with a keynote by Garry Tan. To me, you would have to look really hard not to see that the idea was that Silicon Valley money, partnered with right-wing money and infrastructure, is a weapon for undermining democratic rule. I didn’t think this would be an immediate problem for the rest of the country. I thought maybe in five or 10 years this is really going to be a problem. It wasn’t until JD Vance got on the ticket that I thought, wait, this is accelerating far more quickly than I thought....Yarvin is this guy who was really good at math and skipped a bunch of grades, and then he did a tremendous amount of psychedelic drugs and wrote a new ideology while living off his wife and his mother. The importance of Yarvin is that if you want to know who Peter Thiel is, if you want to know who Marc Andreessen is, read Curtis Yarvin, or watch one of his interviews where he compares Africans to cattle and talks about making sure they don’t breed too much. This is someone these people regard as worth listening to, and who they’ve promoted to the point that even the vice president of the United States has quoted him....And with Vance you have a man whose entire career was bankrolled and promoted by Peter Thiel sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency. This was the guy quoting Curtis Yarvin’s specific ideas: purging the federal government, and a president who defies the law. Those come from Yarvin, which in turn come largely from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher Vance has also talked about. Maybe we should send them all to Kazakhstan.