Free Speech Groups Sound Alarm on “Red Scare” Repression of ICE Watch Activists

Advocates asked a court to unseal more details on Trump’s surveillance of churches, schools, and libraries in Minnesota.

By Mike Ludwig , 

Truthout

August 29, 2026

Several thousand people march for democracy at the call of several organizations and associations, demanding ICE out of Minnesota immediately, and justice and accountability for Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all victims of ICE in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on February 16, 2026.Jerome Gilles / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Free speech groups across the country are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s surveillance of social movements in Minnesota and the prosecution of the Minnesota 15, a group of activists from Minneapolis-St. Paul who face federal conspiracy charges after organizing protests against brutal immigration sweeps earlier this year.

President Donald Trump and his allies in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice Department have targeted the First Amendment-protected expression of protesters, civil society groups, journalists, universities, and the lawyers representing them at a scale that has “not been seen since the Second Red Scare,” according to an amicus brief filed with a federal court in Minnesota on August 25 by Protect Democracy and other groups.

Documents recently released in court filings show that DHS agents spied on churches, schools, and libraries to gather information on labor unions, nonprofits, and community groups large and small. In June, the Minnesota 15 were arrested and charged with conspiracy to stalk, impede, and assault immigration officers under a section of federal law the Trump administration has used to arrest anti-ICE protesters across the country.

Instead of attempting to tie the Minnesota 15 to one specific incident, prosecutors filed conspiracy charges linking the defendants to rapid response groups that coordinated to alert people about ICE raids and send volunteers into the streets in response — a loose set of tactics that became a model for anti-ICE organizers elsewhere.

Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan group that defends speech across the political spectrum, compared Trump’s crackdown on Minnesota to the worst civil liberties abuses during the McCarthy era and COINTELPRO in the mid-20th century. At the time, paranoia about communism ran high on the right, and civil rights organizers, gay federal employees, and anti-war activists were targeted for surveillance, arrest, and interrogation due to perceived disloyalty to the United States or for holding pro-peace, anti-racist, and left-wing political beliefs.

“The idea is to stoke a culture of fear and have folks keep quiet rather than disagree with those in power,” Creeley told Truthout. “But the First Amendment is designed to protect just that kind of disagreement.”

However, by prosecuting the Minnesota 15 for political activism, the Trump administration has been forced through the legal discovery process to reveal details about the federal surveillance of protests against Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown in Minnesota announced by Trump in December.

Documents released by a defense attorney earlier this month show that undercover agents with ICE’s investigative unit infiltrated multiple left-leaning groups in Minneapolis as part of an investigation called “Operation Puppet Master,” four days after a group of federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, the nurse who died while attempting to shield another protester from the agents on January 24.

In addition to killing Pretti and protester Renee Good, federal immigration agents terrorized tight-knit neighborhoods in the Twin Cities and across Minnesota in what Human Rights Watch calls a “manufactured crisis.” Protests and mutual aid efforts erupted as videos of violent arrests and confrontations between federal agents and residents went viral, resulting in dozens of arrests.

FIRE, the left-leaning Protect Democracy, the right-leaning Society for the Rule of Law, and the libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief on August 25 in support of a request by a defense attorney representing the Minnesota 15 defendants for the government to hand over more documents and records related to its surveillance of activist groups, including any correspondence between the White House and prosecutors. The coalition reflects growing bipartisan frustration over Trump’s excesses and power grabs.

The groups want additional documents from prosecutors made public to further understand the scope of government surveillance under the controversial NSPM-7 directive, a memo issued by Trump in 2025 that conflates “anti-Americanism” and “anti-Christianity” views with political violence. The NSPM-7 also orders the Joint Terrorism Task Force to target anti-fascist activism, which the administration wrongly conflates with terrorism.

In a hearing on August 27, defense attorney Kevin Riach said additional discovery is needed to determine whether DHS selectively or vindictively targeted the Minnesota 15 based on their political beliefs. Riach represents Isaac Sant, one of the Minnesota 15 facing conspiracy charges. U.S. District Judge David Schultz said he would issue an order as soon as possible but did not provide a timeline, according to the Minnesota Reformer.

“The purpose of this prosecution is to chill the conduct of the defendants and others and to squash dissent in this district,” Riach said.

While Trump’s crackdown brought trauma and heartbreak to Minnesota — which appears to be one of the administration’s unspoken goals in a bastion of Democratic voters, activists say — images of neighbors gathering to confront agents in freezing weather and organize meals and carpools to sustain immigrant families became a potent symbol of resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the rest of the nation.

The Trump administration halted Operation Metro Surge — which it had billed as the largest immigration sting in U.S. history — on February 12 amid widespread public backlash. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol officer leading Operation Metro Surge, was forced to step down. Trump fired former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem amid a flurry of scandal on March 5.

“For myself, I’ve received nothing but support here,” said Cameron Kennedy, one of the Minnesota 15 defendants, in an August 12 interview with Truthout. “My neighbors have offered to help my partner and I any way they can, donating money and food. People recognize me on the street and thank me for the work I’m alleged to have done.”

Truthout has spoken to mutual aid activists in Minnesota who say they are taking precautions about speaking publicly but not backing down. Elianne Farhat, co-executive director of TakeAction Minnesota, said members of her organization — public school families, performers, and neighbors from across the state — have already proved they cannot be bullied after schools became a target during Operation Metro Surge.

“Instead, we stay calm, speak up, save the evidence, and stick with our friends — basic playground rules,” Farhat told Truthout in an email. “Public schools are a common good and the cornerstone of a multiracial, thriving democracy. And as our networks of care proved during the terror of Operation Metro Surge, they are vital hubs for community resilience and survival.”

FIRE’s Creeley said he believes that intimidating Minnesotans was part of a broader Trump administration strategy to send a clear message to the rest of the U.S. public — standing up to ICE and Trump has consequences for the public regardless of what the Constitution says about the right to assemble freely and criticize public officials.

“I think when you have a drumbeat of news stories about the executive branch infiltrating peaceful protest groups, demanding information from nonprofits and unions, and even sneaking into churches; yeah, I think the average American notices that and even thinks twice before speaking out and exercising their First Amendment rights,” Creeley said.

Indeed, ICE has created a nationwide web of surveillance. Civil rights groups recently sued ICE to challenge the mass surveillance of immigrants with ankle and wrist monitors equipped with GPS. In July, a nonprofit and three U.S. citizens who worked as legal observers during ICE raids in Minnesota filed a lawsuit alleging DHS agents have been using “facial recognition technology, license plate readers, body cameras and other methods” to stifle their efforts, in violation of the First Amendment and privacy law.

“They are 100 percent acting like constitutional restrictions on government do not apply to them; they’re flying in the face of established First Amendment law,” Creeley said of Trump administration officials.

This week FIRE and the Dartmouth Polarization Research Lab released a quarterly survey showing that only 28 percent of U.S. residents feel “very comfortable” discussing ICE operations without fear of reprimand. Respondents who identified as “very liberal” (41 percent) or “very conservative” (57 percent) were more likely to feel “very comfortable” discussing the mass deportation campaign, but Creeley said the data is evidence that the prosecutions and brutality seen in Minnesota are having a nationwide repressive impact on freedom of speech.

Particularly after the killings of Good and Pretti, those standing up to ICE and Trump must live with the implicit threat of state violence. However, the Minnesota 15 and other Twin Cities activists — including the many rapid response groups that quickly formed in the Twin Cities to confront ICE agents attempting to kidnap their neighbors — refuse to be intimidated.

“Take responsibility, take risks, take care of each other, and never rely on the very state that is ripping our communities apart and murdering our people to solve the problem that both political parties created,” Kennedy told Truthout.

Creeley said courts should find that the First Amendment also stands in the way of Trump’s authoritarian power grab.

“Secret visits from government agents and knocks on the door for statements critical of the country’s leaders — I have a feeling those are the exact kind of abuses that the founding generation fought against,” Creeley said.

 

Faith Leaders, US Justice Department Meet To Push For Stronger Protections For Houses Of Worship

 August 29, 2026

EWTN News

By Tessa Gervasini

Key Takeaways:

• On Aug. 27 the Justice Department and the Appeal of Conscience Foundation met with faith leaders, including the Vatican’s U.S. nuncio, to discuss attacks on houses of worship.
• Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the Civil Rights Division will investigate and prosecute religiously targeted violence; participants asked for stronger laws and a standing interfaith body to track threats.
• The meeting fell on the anniversary of the 2025 Annunciation Church shooting in Minneapolis; U.S. Catholic bishops also want more Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding, noting fewer than half of applicants get awards.

Religious leaders met at the U.S. Department of Justice to discuss strengthening efforts to protect places of worship across the nation.

The DOJ and the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, a religious freedom advocacy group, held the meeting in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 27 to address the rise in attacks against houses of worship and faith-based communities.

Participants consisted of leaders from diverse faith backgrounds, including Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, apostolic nuncio to the United States.

The leaders spoke with Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ, and Karen Schneier Dresbach, executive vice president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation — a coalition of business and religious leaders working worldwide on behalf of religious freedom, human rights, and the protection of houses of worship.

“No American should ever fear violence for simply practicing their faith,” Dhillon said in a statement.

“The Department of Justiceʼs Civil Rights Division has zero tolerance for attacks on houses of worship, and we will continue to investigate and prosecute those who target Americans because of their religion,” Dhillon said.

“Iʼm grateful to the Appeal of Conscience Foundation and the faith leaders gathered here today for their partnership in this work. Protecting religious liberty is a fundamental American value, and this Department will keep fighting to defend it,” Dhillon said in a statement.

The event also included a panel discussion among leaders and the presentation of a statement by participating groups read by Serbian Orthodox Bishop of Eastern America Irinej Dobrijevic and Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, according to a press release.

The statement called for stronger legislation to protect houses of worship and for the establishment of an ongoing body of religious leaders to monitor threats. The leaders asked that the DOJ work in tandem with the groups to help ensure that people of faith can worship safely.

The gathering comes amid rising concerns over attacks against houses of worship across the U.S. The meeting was held on Aug. 27, the first anniversary of the fatal shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in which two children were killed.

Bishops’ concern about religiously motivated violence continues

In 2026, “the Committee for Religious Liberty continues to be concerned about politically and religiously motivated violence,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said.

The U.S. bishops previously laid out “areas of critical concern” in their 2026 religious liberty report, including threats of political and anti-religious violence.

“In recent years, the USCCB has expressed concern about politically motivated violence. The polarization that has long been the subject of commentary by religious leaders appears to be devolving into a cycle of attack and retribution,” the bishops said in the report.

“Polarization is not simply a phenomenon ‘out there.’ It names a tendency within many people to turn away from truth in order to remain loyal to their political tribe. But Catholics are called to be conformed to Christ, not to partisan political leaders, media personalities, and social media influencers,” they said.

The bishops called for expanded federal support for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program,which funds security upgrades for houses of worship. They said funding is insufficient because fewer than half of applicants receive grants, despite rising threats.

About EWTN News

EWTN News is the rebranding of the Catholic News Agency (CNA), following the decision by EWTN — which was launched as a Catholic television network in 1981 by Mother Angelica, PCPA — that brings CNA and its affiliated ACI international outlets under a single, unified identity. Previous CNA articles may be foundby clicking here

 

Joint Statement Highlights ‘Shared Convictions’ In First Catholic-Confucian Conference

 August 22, 2026

By EWTN News

By Tyler Arnold and Hannah Brockhaus

Key Takeaways:

• Catholic and Confucian scholars held their first formal joint conference in Seoul (Aug. 4–5), organized by the Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea, and the Sungkyunkwan Confucian Academy.
• A joint statement highlighted shared convictions on human flourishing through virtue and compassion, moral leadership, care for the vulnerable and the environment, and ethical guidance of technologies such as AI, while acknowledging differing foundations.
• Participants linked the Christian vision of a “new heaven and new earth” with the Confucian ideal of Datong (great harmony), and further dialogue is planned for Indonesia in 2028 and Hong Kong in 2030.

Catholic officials concluded their first-ever conference with Confucian thinkers this month, with both traditions coming together to spotlight their “shared convictions” for humanity in spite of the stark differences in their historical developments.

The Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea teamed up with the Sungkyunkwan Confucian Academy to hold the event at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, on Aug. 4–5.

A joint statement, approved by Catholic and Confucian scholars, recognized “our traditions arise from different religious and philosophical foundations” but that “our dialogue revealed important shared convictions.”

Both traditions expressed agreement that “human flourishing begins with the formation of virtuous, compassionate, and responsible individuals.” The statement added: “Personal transformation, ethical living, and care for others are the foundations of healthy families, communities, and societies.”

Scholars in both traditions agreed “a just and peaceful society depends on leadership rooted in integrity, humility, service, and concern for the common good” and “good institutions matter, but they can truly serve society only when guided by moral wisdom and public responsibility.”

There was also agreement that “care for the vulnerable, future generations, and our common home is both a moral and spiritual responsibility,” people are called toward solidarity, and hope requires people to “work together through the trials and imperfections of the present.”

With the growth of artificial intelligence, the scholars found similarities in the Confucian spirit of benevolence and the Christian value of love, which both point toward ensuring “all technological progress actively [enhances] human dignity and ethical values.”

Confucianism, rooted in the philosophy of fifth-century B.C. Chinese thinker Confucius, is a philosophical and ethical system focused on benevolence and harmony with an emphasis on living virtuously, adhering to tradition, and respecting one’s parents and ancestors, among other ideals.

Adherents often engage in ritual honor of their ancestors. Confucius discusses deities but focuses more heavily on the way one should live. His philosophy is influential in many East Asian countries. Many adherents follow other traditions as well, such as Buddhism or local religious traditions.

Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, has grown in some countries heavily influenced by Confucian thought in recent decades, particularly South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

‘Datong’ and new heaven

Father Paulin Batairwa Kubuya, SX, who serves as the undersecretary for the dicastery, told EWTN News that Catholic dialogue with Confucianism is growing, although it is still not one of the religions that is technically under the dicastery’s jurisdiction for outreach. He said the need for dialogue is emphasized in the Second Vatican Council documents.

“But the idea behind the document Nostra Aetate is one of greater openness toward religious realities, and so this dialogue marks a moment when the conditions for officially beginning talks with the Confucians had matured,” he said. “And so we went there to Korea, one of the countries that still bears the marks of these religions.”

He said the theme of the conference was based on the Christian belief expressed in the Book of Revelation about the new heaven and the new earth and the Confucian idea of “Datong” — the “great unity” or “great harmony.”

“These describe an ideal state where everyone lives together in a society organized to care for the weak and the orphans — a place where everything is so beautiful,” Kubuya said.

“It is a city where the gates are never locked because there is security,” he said. “It’s the same as what is said about the New Jerusalem. There is no more death; there is openness — so there was that similarity between these two visions of these two religions. And those were the starting points, the reflections: so, as a society, how can we bring that vision to life?”

Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, prefect of the dicastery, discussed the two concepts in his opening speech at the conference, according to Vatican News. He said Catholicism and Confucianism both emphasize a similar human aspiration.

“That our common life may be in harmony with a Way that is truly good and beautiful; an ethical justice lived in the warmth of friendship and mutual care; a peace that recognizes and promotes the dignity of every person and every community; a harmony born from differences, like the notes of music blending into a single melody or people from different places becoming one community,” he said.

Batairwa told EWTN News that during the conference, participants visited various religious sites, including a Buddhist temple that is influenced by Confucianism, a Confucian academy, and sites of Christian martyrdom.

The joint statement recognized that the two traditions view the ultimate reality, human fulfillment, and the transformation of society differently, but “these differences are not barriers to friendship; rather, they invite deeper listening, mutual learning, humility, and continued dialogue.”

Scholars in both traditions renewed commitments to deepen friendship and dialogue; to promote societies rooted in compassion, justice, harmony, and shared responsibility; and to work toward the flourishing of humanity together.

The conference had about 150 participants from more than a dozen countries. The groups are planning two additional conferences over the next four years: Indonesia in 2028 and Hong Kong in 2030.

About EWTN News

EWTN News is the rebranding of the Catholic News Agency (CNA), following the decision by EWTN — which was launched as a Catholic television network in 1981 by Mother Angelica, PCPA — that brings CNA and its affiliated ACI international outlets under a single, unified identity. Previous CNA articles may be found

by clicking here

Remains At Home – OpEd

August 24, 2026

THE CONVERSATION

By Sabina Cveček, Timothy Earle, Carol R. Ember, Gary M. Feinman and William A. Parkinson

Key Takeaways

:Residential burial (interring the dead in or near houses and settlements) keeps ancestors as ongoing participants in daily life, reinforcing kinship, memory, inheritance, and claims to place; yet systematic comparison shows this practice is far more common in archaeological samples than in ethnographic ones.
Ethnographic records, drawn mainly from the 20th century, under-represent residential burial because many societies shifted away from it—often under the influence of monotheistic religions or colonial policies that mandated cemeteries—while the archaeological record preserves a wider historical range of the practice.
Rather than relying solely on ethnographic analogy to interpret past mortuary behavior, archaeological patterns of residential burial can be used alongside ethnography to refine theories of permanent residence, kinship-making, and social organization, revealing a long-term global decline in burying the dead at home.
Why Residential Burial?

Through burial practice, it is believed that the living create, affirm, and transform social relationships with those who have passed. Interring the dead in settlements, sometimes even below house floors, makes ancestors enduring participants in daily life. Residential burial practices establish continuity between generations, anchor memory in place, and inscribe kinship, power, inheritance, and ritual within spaces where the living are situated. Residential burials do not mark biological death as an end to social bonds but indicate their reconfiguration, tying households and communities to both histories and futures in the making. Why, then, do some people bury their dead in or near residences and others do not? How can ethnography guide or obscure our interpretation of these intimate contexts in the archaeological record? These questions formed the starting point for our inquiry into residential burial on a global scale, in the ethnographic and archaeological records.

To address these questions, we used information from 60 ethnographically documented cultures in the Probability Sample Files in the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures database. The aim was to examine residential burial practices across these cases. However, given the limited occurrence of residential burial in the 60 case studies, we soon realized that the ethnographic record did not mirror patterns familiar to archaeologists. Ethnographic descriptions tend to highlight changes in burial practice, often linked with the spread of monotheistic religions. As a result, our questions and interests shifted to how a systematic cross-cultural study of residential burial based on the ethnographic record compared to the archaeological record.

We then asked whether an archaeological sample would differ significantly from the ethnographic sample. The coding of residential burial in 49 cultures formed part of a simple random sample from eHRAF Archaeology. A comparison of these two datasets revealed that residential burials were more prevalent in archaeological than in ethnographic contexts. These findings have important implications for using ethnographic analogy when the aim is to understand mortuary (or other related) practices in the archaeological record.


While ethnographic descriptions can help us understand reasons for change in mortuary placement, the ethnographic record does not fully capture the more frequent occurrence of residential burial, which is apparent in the archaeological record. Therefore, instead of the more conventional use of ethnographic analogy for archaeological interpretation (i.e., formulating hypotheses), our study illustrates how archaeological insights can be used in conjunction with ethnography to develop and test sociocultural theories of permanent residence, kinship, and social structure. The ethnographic studies in our dataset, which derive mainly from the 20th century, have only a small percentage of cases with residential burials. The more frequent occurrence of this practice in archaeological samples indicates that the archaeological record represents a broader array of different burial behavior than those represented in the ethnographic record. While contemporary people rarely bury ancestors at home, in the past, houses, huts, and settlements were much more often spaces where both the living and the dead coexisted—and felt at home.

As we reported in American Antiquity, from which this article is excerpted, we first discuss how traditions of funerary placement can be used to model social organization and reflect diachronic changes. Then, we discuss the role of ethnographic analogy in archaeological explanation and present results from the two datasets on residential burial, based on 60 ethnographic and 49 archaeological cases. These cases suggest a decline in residential burial at different points in the past while also highlighting a more recent global shift away from this practice. These findings underscore the value of archaeological evidence, which can illuminate a diversity of burial practices that have decreased significantly in the ethnographic present but not fully disappeared. Our results have implications not only for our understanding of cross-cultural burial patterns and how they changed in response to other societal changes but also (more generally) for how archaeologists employ ethnographic data and analogy when interpreting the archaeological record.

Why Are Burials So Important?

Funerary practice is ideal for cross-cultural, anthropological studies that combine ethnographic and archaeological data. It is visible and broadly recorded in both research databases. These ritual practices document how social organizations are created and materialized. Burial is a socially and emotionally dramatic moment in individual life cycles—a moment of making, showing, and reaffirming relationships. Arguably, funerary rituals establish kinship between the living and the dead and the memory of the event, while the spatial placement of the dead and the physical markers (memorials) help those kinship relationships to endure. A combination of emotion, social ceremony, and reaffirmation, funerary practices are critical to institutional formation.

Moreover, the relationship between settlement continuity and intramural interments aligns with the view of other scholars who suggest that residential burial does not merely tie the living to their ancestors but also links them to a dwelling and the land it sits on. In many contexts, connections were affirmed and reaffirmed through the sequential reuse of mortuary contexts and ritual activities conducted adjacent to them.

Necrogeography

The use of the dead to structure, mark, and reinforce the taskscapes of the living has been an integral aspect of both prehuman and human practices for thousands of years. The spatial relationship between the living and the dead can, however, also become a matter of political intervention. In the late 19th-century Ghanaian Gold Coast, colonial British law was revised six times to mandate and enforce the transition from residential interments to community cemeteries. Moving the resting place for ancestors to locations outside the house has implications beyond the spiritual: “the colonial state enforced cemetery burial because they realized Gold Coast people would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders; cemeteries were therefore a crucial tool in the transformation of land into private property for state dispossession,” stated a 2022 article published in the Journal of Social History. Consequentially, the movement of the deceased to community cemeteries led to changes in interpersonal networks and community relationships with the supernatural, their ancestors, and property. Even after some converted to Christianity, colonial-era Ghanaians initially resisted moving burial locations. Funerary customs can be a core extension of personal identity and connection to places, so they are not easy to change. Although the factors and circumstances that prompted householders to shift their funerary practices and reposition their ancestors outside their houses varied from one historical case to another, the behavioral ramifications in most contexts likely extended well beyond the spiritual to social networks and material possessions.


This connection between burial location and broader social organization has long been explored in anthropological and archaeological studies of kinship and descent groups. In particular, cross-cultural research suggests that formal cemeteries frequently emerge where corporate groups use burial places to legitimize claims to land and resources. However, kinship studies have a long history in anthropology with particular salience for British social anthropologists who examined variability in structural forms governing broader social practices. Implicit in understanding kinship is that the organization it implies is essential to group and individual operations and survival. The British social anthropology approach was fundamentally that of social science, looking for systematic patterning affecting group reproduction. Although criticized for the functionalist logic of the social body, the approach can and should be reconceptualized as social networks in which active participants form kinship through blood or other means as well as break kinship ties for historical and strategic goals. This is captured by the concept of kinship-making that recognizes dynamic ways in which different individuals, households, and larger social networks can coexist and evolve.

Using the HRAF Collection of Ethnography, substantial comparative studies seek to understand variation in kinship patterns, and we hope that by looking at funerary practice, we can document dynamic moments when kinship is formed, given degrees of permanence, or reconstituted through memories and material marking. This is the basis of our comparative study, where we look for regular patterns with implied causal relationships between burial practice and the degree of permanent residence. While cross-cultural comparison in this article focuses exclusively on the link between residence permanence and residential burial, a follow-up study could explore the link between kinship and residential burial practices.

Caring for the Dead

Why do the living care deeply about the dead and choose to place the dead systematically according to specific cultural practices? In some cases, they appear not to; in others, it is highly variable, and often follows specific cultural rules. Humans deal with the dead in ways that vary across time and space, and reasonably, this important moment in the life cycle engages both continuity and change in social relations, especially manifest in kinship reflected in the funerary placement of the dead. Thinking materially (which is so basic to social science reasoning), people care about the dead, especially because of inheritance—the social roles that the living take from the dead and the access it gives them to particular resources, including land and its productive potential.


Credit Line: 

Excerpted from “Funerary Placement in the Past and Present: Uses of Ethnographic Analogy for Archaeological Interpretation” by Sabina Cveček, Timothy Earle, Carol R. Ember, Gary M. Feinman, and William A. Parkinson. Copyright © The Authors 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for American Archaeology. 

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). This article was distributed by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.


About Sabina Cveček

Sabina Cveček is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History and a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on prehistoric kinship, households, and social organization in the eastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe.

View all posts by Sabina Cveček →



About Timothy Earle

Timothy Earle is professor emeritus and former chair of anthropology at Northwestern University, known for comparative research on political economy, leadership, chiefdoms, and the development of social complexity.

View all posts by Timothy Earle →



About Carol R. Ember

Carol R. Ember is a cultural anthropologist and the president of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University whose work uses cross-cultural research to examine human societies, including warfare, kinship, gender, and cultural evolution.

View all posts by Carol R. Ember →



About Gary M. Feinman

Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center.

View all posts by Gary M. Feinman →



About William A. Parkinson

William A. Parkinson is a curator and associate director of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, as well as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work focuses on European prehistory, particularly social organization, migration, interaction, and the emergence of complex societies.

Interview

Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” says Gil Durán.

By Kelly Hayes 

Truthout

August 20, 2026

LONG READ

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” Gil Durán says. In this episode of Movement Memos, Durán and host Kelly Hayes discuss the bizarre fixations and political fantasies of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and how those ideas are being translated into real-world governance. Durán and Hayes also discuss Silicon Valley’s Christian cosplay, and how traditional Christian ideas are being used as wrapping paper for the pursuit of AI-first, corporate fiefdoms.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Music: Son Monarcas and Dusty Decks

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about how the cults of Silicon Valley have seized vast amounts of institutional and political power, and how tech billionaires like Peter Thiel are seeking to remake the world — while repackaging some of their most radical, anti-democratic ideas in the language of Christianity. We’ll be hearing from Gil Durán, author of the new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

The growing public animus toward data centers and AI presents us with an opportunity right now to unmask these billionaires and explain their bizarre ambitions and political fantasies to our friends and neighbors in plain terms. I believe that kind of narrative work is a moral and strategic imperative. With Gil’s help, we’ll talk about how Silicon Valley capitalists developed their ideas, the threat they pose to our communities, the forces we will need to defeat their projects, and why we must fight back.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.

Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

Kelly Hayes: Gil Durán, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Gil Durán: Thank you for having me.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today?

Gil Durán: Pretty good. Staying busy. Lots of interest in the book, so I’m doing a lot of talking about these ideas these days.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I can understand why there’s a lot of interest. It’s a really fascinating read. Can you tell our audience a bit about your work?

Gil Durán: Well, I’m a journalist who got the journalism bug at a very young age in the fifth grade and went into journalism after college after working on my college paper and doing a lot of internships. But after a few years in journalism, the industry started collapsing (the newspaper industry), and I ended up spending, unexpectedly, 17 years working in politics as a spokesman and communication strategist for a host of California Democratic elected officials like [Governor] Jerry Brown and [Senator] Dianne Feinstein and Attorney General Kamala Harris at the time. And then, in 2018, I got the chance to return to journalism, and I jumped on it. I’d always felt there was something missing. It was this feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, not wearing a suit and being in government and consulting and such.

So I returned to journalism in 2018 and was the editorial page editor of both The Sacramento Bee and then the San Francisco Examiner where I stumbled into the thicket of extremist tech politics in 2022. And this led to the next few years of my life where I burned through tremendous amounts of my own money in order to self-fund my research, and it unexpectedly has resulted in a book.

Kelly Hayes: A lot of the story you tell begins with The Sovereign Individual, a relatively obscure 1997 book that imagined technology weakening governments, destroying jobs, and allowing a wealthy cognitive elite to escape taxes, regulation, and democratic control. Peter Thiel seems to have taken that book extremely seriously. What did he find in it, and how much of the political project you describe can be traced back to that vision?

Gil Durán: I believe Peter Thiel found his entire worldview in The Sovereign Individual. He was already pretty right-wing as a young man and in college, but The Sovereign Individual provided a futuristic framework for how, in the 21st century, democracy in nation states would collapse, and we would witness the rise of these wealthy individuals who would be able to float around the world as sovereigns unto themselves, unbeholden to democracy rules, regulations, or laws. And what Peter Thiel subsequently did was build a cult of Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism, a group of billionaires who believe technology will make democracy obsolete in the 21st century, and that indeed it is their destiny to hasten and accelerate the process of this democratic collapse and specifically, The Sovereign Individual, which was written by two guys who wrote a lot of kooky conspiracy theory stuff. These were not intellectuals or respectable, credible writers or journalists by the time they did this work.

The Sovereign Individual predicted that two technologies would play a key role in the 21st-century attack on democracy. One was called cybercurrency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow the wealthy to exfiltrate their wealth from democratic nations. We would call that crypto today. And the other was advanced automation, which The Sovereign Individual predicted would kill most employment and jobs, thereby leading to an economic collapse that would hasten the democratic collapse. And this book was so influential on Peter Thiel that he’s named it as part of his inspiration for starting PayPal, which was an effort to get ahead of this predicted digital currency. It didn’t quite result in a digital currency. It became a pretty basic payments app. And by the way, Peter Thiel and Co. no longer own PayPal. They sold it a long time ago, but it did make him a multimillionaire and provide the basis for the fortune that would eventually make him a billionaire and make him one of the most powerful and influential people in the world.

So basically, Peter Thiel, who has said he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible and that government is fundamentally evil, was totally turned out by this very weird and kooky and scary apocalyptic conspiracy theory book, and we are currently living with the ramifications, I believe.

Kelly Hayes: And I want to talk more about Peter Thiel, but first, you describe Silicon Valley as a landscape of overlapping cults and quasi-religious movements, including the constellation of ideas known as the TESCREAL bundle. Why has the tech industry produced these totalizing belief systems and what political work do those beliefs do for the people who hold them?

Gil Durán: Well, it was Dr. Emile Torres and Dr. Timnit Gebru who came up with TESCREAL as an acronym that bundles these strange beliefs: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. And at the heart of these very weird ideas, which I won’t explain every single one of them because that could take all day and it’d be better if one of them explained it, is this idea that technology is about to fundamentally transform everything, how the world works, how politics works, how money works, how human beings work, how life works. They believe that they’re going to create this sort of AI God that will allow for eternal life or multiplanetary colonization and for humans to merge with machines and become godlike creatures.

And much of the AI discussion these days from the industry is based on these ideas that AI is not just a tool that will make certain parts of life better or make a better spell checker or recipe generator, but to fundamentally transform what it means to be human and to fundamentally shift the economy by getting rid of jobs and turning us into a society where somehow we have a superabundance that allows us all to live happily though we have no meaning and no work in our lives. This is the narrative coming out of the AI industry or else a technology that could possibly, in addition to killing all jobs, wipe humanity from the face of the earth because it will be so powerful and magical that it’s like this big monster we’re creating. But the only way to stop the monster from being created and killing us is to pour trillions and trillions of dollars into the pockets of a small handful of Silicon Valley billionaires so they can stop it from doing the bad thing and make it do the good thing.

Now, that’s a lot to say there, but it’s not too hard to understand why this religious narrative of AI has spawned some cult religions like transhumanism, like longtermism, like cosmism. The idea is that AI will be the savior and liberator of these people, and all we have to do is burn up the earth and maximize compute and acceleration in order to create our new God. I know this sounds really kooky if you haven’t heard of it, but they’re pretty explicit about this stuff. They talk openly about things like creating the thermodynamic god, which is this mysterious boom loop that will appear if we only burn enough fossil fuels to create the mega super AI, which by the way may not even be possible or realistic in any way. That’s part of the mythology is that this is actual intelligence that will create some superintelligence. But I think it’s important because the question is why do the most successful and wealthy people in our society seek to destroy the country and the society and the system that allowed them to achieve such success?

And that’s where you get into this idea of technological accelerationism. They feel that they are on the cusp of this magical, mystical, religious breakthrough to defeat death and to create a new kind of god in their own words. Many of them say this explicitly. But the only thing standing in the way of this unfettered expansion and acceleration of AI is democracy, is law, is regulation, is the needs and wants and desires of regular people. And so one of the reasons, maybe the core reason why they need to destroy democracy is in order to enable this unfettered acceleration. They call it effective accelerationism, this acceleration into the future. So there’s a religious basis underlying this desire to destroy our democratic system because otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense. Why would you want to destroy the exploitative capitalist machine with nuclear bombs that has created and enabled your success? No one has less of a reason to complain about our system than the billionaires do. They’re the ones winning.

So it doesn’t make any rational sense for them to adopt this extremist political viewpoint, except that they are animated by a sort of religious idea of what technology will enable them to achieve. A lot of them are also afraid to die, and they think AI is going to save them. So they’re preaching this sort of apocalypse, and that’s why I call this Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism. They’re not promising to create new widgets and devices that make us happy and more connected like it was in the past 20 years. This is about, “Hey, we’re creating the thing that’s going to kill everybody maybe. So just sit back and hope that we cut you off a piece of our abundance later, and everything will be okay.” And that’s a very strange message and it’s no wonder now that people are rising up against data centers and AI and starting to hate billionaires in larger and larger numbers.

Kelly Hayes: We had Émile Torres on the show back in 2023 to talk about TESCREAL and longtermism, and I love Émile — they’re just so incredibly insightful, and I’m so grateful for their analysis. But I remember some friends feeling like they didn’t quite know what to do with that episode. They thought, sure, these people who are prioritizing the well-being of trillions of theoretical, future digital people over the billions of people alive today sound absolutely bananas, but what are they gonna do with that ideology? You can’t sell that to the masses. So, how dangerous could these people and their cults really be?

But what I was seeing, and what I was trying to convey to people, was that the people building power around these ideas had already consolidated an enormous amount of economic, political, and institutional power. If we look at the decades-long political project that brought some of the objectives of Christian nationalism to fruition in recent years, with TESCREAL, we’re talking about something that’s advanced much more quickly. Because while these tech power players haven’t necessarily been marketing these ideologies to the masses, over the last few decades, they have been marketing products that have sort of containerized and redefined modern life, and they’ve translated that wealth and that industrial and institutional capture into a whole lot of political power.

Now, a few years after Émile and I had that conversation, these tech-right ideologies have a shocking level of influence inside the federal government and over AI and crypto policy. They’re devouring some of the inner workings of government, in a similar manner to how they’ve devoured industries. And they’re also doing something else — they’re sort of repackaging these fringe ideas of theirs in more marketable, palatable ways. Which brings us to Christianity. Let’s talk about Peter Thiel’s fixation on the Antichrist, which is one of the stranger threads in the book, but you argue that it has real political significance. What is Thiel actually saying when he talks about the Antichrist? And how does that kind of apocalyptic thinking shape the way he understands political enemies, technology, and power?

Gil Durán: When Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, he’s confessing. He’s confessing his worldview. He believes we are in an existential battle over the future. And on one side is the billionaires and accelerationism, and on the other side is democracy and the majority of people in the world. He often throws communism in there as one of his demonized enemies, but he’s really talking about democracy if you look more deeply into it because they’re the ones aligned behind Trump and this authoritarian leadership. So when Peter Thiel describes the Antichrist, he describes this mysterious force or figure that will rise up suddenly to seize massive amounts of power and seize total control over the world by preaching peace and safety. None of this comes from the Bible, by the way. This is all his weird interpretation of the Bible.

But when he describes Silicon Valley, which he has also said it would be a religion of technicity that seeks to create an artificial world where people can no longer distinguish their real lives from the lives that are artificially being created for them, he said this in an essay back in 2007, he’s describing Silicon Valley, but I don’t know that he knows that he’s doing that, or else he’s doing it on purpose. It’s a double entendre. So the framework of the Antichrist is this idea that we’re in an existential battle, which we are. It’s a war of the billionaires against everyone else. But he uses it to try to scapegoat all of his enemies. It’s Greta Thunberg, it’s AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], it’s democracy, it’s AI regulation, it’s anybody who opposes tech acceleration. Anybody Peter Thiel doesn’t like is the Antichrist in Peter Thiel’s Antichrist spiel. And by the way, theologians have completely rejected, mocked, and scorned all of his gobbledygook. This is a DIY theology from a guy who, as far as I can tell, isn’t even really Christian, Christian in name only.

Thiel has himself said that he’s religious but not spiritual, which means he likes the order and hierarchy and rules of religion without the mystery and spirit of religion. Usually, people say the opposite. They say they’re spiritual, but not religious. Thiel likes to reverse things a lot. I call it “Thiellian inversion.” He takes something and does the reverse of it. So it’s strange that he’s talking about the Antichrist because he’s, like, a terrible spokesman for Christianity. But I think the other thing he’s doing that relates to what we just talked about with the TESCREAL bundle is Thiel is trying to put a Christian mask on these TESCREAL ideas. And I think he’s trying to hush the louder voices in the TESCREAL movement and encourage them to adopt a Christian pose because that’s essential to this alliance they’ve made with the Republican right and the evangelical base of Trump’s MAGA fascist movement, which is so important because there’s a tension where the evangelicals in Trump’s base are very suspicious of the tech guys and understand that they’re a bunch of godless weirdo heathens.

And so, there’s been this news recently where, oh, there’s this Christian revival in Silicon Valley and it’s led by none other than Peter Thiel, where they’re having these meetings to talk about how basically, I don’t know, Christ would be a VC [venture capitalist] if he returned to earth. It’s total bullshit, but I think it’s got multi-layers. One is Thiel confessing his worldview that we’re in an existential crisis and everyone he doesn’t like is the Antichrist. The other is that, “hey, guys, let’s act like we’re Christians and speak in Christian terms while essentially pursuing acceleration TESCREAL goals.” And if you look at the TESCREAL bundle of beliefs, what are they promising through AI? They’re promising salvation, the creation of God, eternal life, escape from earth, transcendence into the heavens, the stars, multiplanetary life, paradise, an abundance that comes after we overcome our enemies and achieve the new paradisical realm that will be created by AI.

Their ideas literally map directly onto Christianity in this perverse anti-human way, which some might say is very much like what the Antichrist would do. Now, I don’t believe in the Antichrist. I’m not a Bible-thumping Christian. I was raised in Catholicism, but I don’t obsess over these ideas. I don’t go to church. But the very idea that Peter Thiel’s talking about the Antichrist so much is in itself a signal of the kind of emergency that we’re in. And I believe that it’s an example of this billionaire psychosis that gets created when people have too much money, too much power, and no one around them to tell them to sit down and shut up and stop sounding weird. So it’s a saving grace that he’s sounding an alarm. Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist. We should be very afraid given his proximity to power and the number of people he influences directly.

Kelly Hayes: That quote about him being religious but not spiritual was one of my favorites in the book because it is so sitcom-silly. It sounds like something a character on Parks and Rec would say. But it also feels revealing, because what seems useful to these guys about religion isn’t necessarily faith. It’s authority. It’s hierarchy. It’s having a set of simple ideas that people are supposed to defer to. That way, nothing is interrogated.

I’m thinking about Elon Musk calling himself a “cultural Christian” and making these very utilitarian comments about Christianity — maybe religion is good, maybe it keeps people from being sad. There’s something so instrumental about that. And I think it connects to a much broader hostility toward the Enlightenment and toward critical thought that runs through these politics. Because at the same time that they’re repackaging themselves in this language of faith and tradition, they’re building technologies that encourage us to outsource more and more of our own thinking and judgment. Sam Altman talks about intelligence becoming a utility that people pay for. And I keep thinking about what kind of political subject that vision creates — people who are increasingly de-skilled and dependent on systems controlled by a handful of enormously powerful people.

And while these politics are strategically dehumanizing, toward all of us who aren’t billionaires or major players in the tech world, they’re also really insulting to people of faith, because what we’re talking about is a kind of perverse form of religious cosplay.

Gil Durán: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s really a touchy thing for billionaires to try to claim Christianity. Jesus Christ, who was known for his message of love and peace, one of the only groups he really shat upon was rich people who he said the camel had an easier chance of getting through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven. So it’s very strange and it’s very fraught with danger when billionaires try to embrace Christianity. And that’s what is happening though. This idea that the people who really need Jesus Christ or who are the most important in Christianity are the people in Silicon Valley today. This is something that Peter Thiel says in one of his Antichrist lectures in San Francisco. The people in this room, the people listening to his Antichrist spiel in San Francisco are doing the most important Christian work in the world today, which would be news to the Jesuits out in some poor, starving village full of poverty and misery trying to eke out some kind of salvation for people there.

This is a very arrogant and solipsistic claim to make. But I think one of the strangest things about this whole religious fervor is that JD Vance is pretending to be a Catholic largely because of Peter Thiel. And he has said that it was Thiel’s ideas that inspired his conversion to Catholicism. And similarly, if you look at Vance’s past interviews around the Hillbilly Elegy time, he described religion as a cultural tchotchke where he grew up. He was raised in a culture of Protestant evangelism, but he’s described it as something where you didn’t really have it. You didn’t go to church. It’s just that what’s part of your identity. Obviously, you believe in Jesus and there’s a picture on the wall. And he later becomes an atheist before converting to Catholicism at the age of 35. Apparently, he did that mostly in order to argue against the authority of the Pope, which he has infamously done for the past few years.

But you see this everywhere you look, this idea that religion has an important role to play in the lives of men who are essentially the opposite of Christianity. And that’s sort of scary because I think one thing Peter Thiel understands is the power of religion and apocalyptic language to motivate people to be a powerful force in politics. And that’s pretty much the same thing Elon Musk is saying. A cultural Christian is what JD Vance is describing as his upbringing, a cultural tchotchke. So they’re not seeding religion. They’re trying to claim religion as their motivation to give them this mask of familiar morality that obscures their true beliefs and their true aims and goals.

Kelly Hayes: Absolutely. And I appreciate you naming JD Vance’s role. I learned new things about Vance reading your book, including how mediocre he really was as a player in the VC world. But the role he now plays as a bridge between the Christian right and the tech right feels really important. Christianity offers these tech agendas a familiar moral language and a kind of traditional posture that can obscure how fringe and radical some of the underlying politics actually are.

And that repackaging makes me think about a broader shift in how Silicon Valley presents itself. A few years ago, I talked with Brian Merchant about the way the industry’s pitch to the public had changed. Tech companies once sold us the idea that technology would create a better world for everyone. Increasingly, billionaires seem to be selling us the idea that we’re already living in a dystopia, and that we should buy up every apocalyptic advantage we can. There’s also this strange tendency to invoke dystopian science fiction almost aspirationally — to take worlds that were imagined as warnings about alienation, social collapse, and technological domination and treat them as models for a future we’re supposed to adapt ourselves to. The pitch is no longer that technology will deliver a better tomorrow. It’s that upheaval is inevitable, their technologies will be at the center of it, and our best hope is to buy in. Is that shift part of what you call “apocalypse capitalism”?

Gil Durán: Most definitely, and they’re overtly selling it now, especially with the rise of AI. One of the major selling points has been that if we don’t invest in these guys so that they can develop this thing the right way, it will destroy us all. We have to align it with human needs. But they’re the only ones saying that, “Oh, this is going to be this supermonster that can kill us.” And if that were the case, why would we leave it to the private sector to develop such a dangerous technology? Would we allow corporations to independently develop big new weapons that could destroy the entire planet? No. So there’s this idea that they’re creating an apocalyptic technology that’s going to change everything and be the last invention. And fortunately for us, they’ve gone around saying that, which has created this popular rejection of AI and data centers and billionaires. So I definitely think that that’s a part of it.

The other part of it, I think, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it “end times fascism,” is this merger with the apocalyptic politics of MAGA, which also have a religious framework in which Trump is this figure sent from God as an instrument of vengeance and power to achieve some sort of return of Jesus through the coming of the apocalypse, the wars in Israel, et cetera. There’s a real crazy apocalyptic belief at the core of the MAGA movement as well. And it’s completely delusional and deranged. How could anyone see Trump as an expression or an ally of Jesus Christ? I mean, he literally posted a photo of himself as Jesus Christ and has multiple times compared himself to Christ with him being more favorable and better than Jesus Christ. This is not something that a real Christian, a real believer in Christianity would ever do.

So I think there’s that melding as well that makes it a fascist movement. On one basic level, the tech billionaires are fascist because they have aligned with the fascist movement. And at the core of that is this movement that melds government power with corporate power with religious power into one unified monopolistic authoritarian entity. And so, that religious element is very important because it’s totalizing. It’s all of your life. It’s not just your money or your political beliefs. It’s your moral and spiritual belief system. And so, that’s where the apocalypse capitalism gets a bit even more dangerous is because the tech fascists have become a parasite on the MAGA movement. They’re sucking its power in order to achieve their goals. Now, if you look deeper into what these guys say, they don’t really have respect for your average red hat Trump voter.

Those people are just temporary allies who help to fuel their own designs for power under a president who is raking in crypto corruption, creating a tower of political corruption so unprecedented and massive that it’s even hard to explain with words. So yeah, apocalypse capitalism. Yeah, I think we’ve seen it more fully develop in the past couple of years, especially under the return to Trump, the fact that we’re now speaking about this demonic communist threat. And when Charlie Kirk was shot, for a day or two on X, there was this trending idea that this was the work of demonic forces and we have to rise up against these demons who are basically Democrats and liberals. And so, you see this bubbling up, this idea that, again, we’re in this existential battle and we’re coming to the final moment here where we’re going to know the future. It’s going to be decided in some kind of terrible, violent upheaval where the world is completely different after that, whether we have democracy or where we don’t have democracy. And we’re still very much in the middle of this struggle.

Kelly Hayes: And these anti-democratic elites also have a vision for what comes next as democracy is demolished. What is the network state, and why do you see it as such an important part of the tech elites’ long-term political vision?

Gil Durán: The network state is this cult ideology which argues that democracy should be replaced by corporate-run tech city states, essentially, new startup nations that will replace existing nations and therefore replace democracy, for the most part. And the network state is important because even though it sounds like a fringe kooky thing… There was a book written by a guy named Balaji Srinivasan in 2022 called The Network State: How to Start a New Country, and you can read it for free online. You can find it with any search engine. And there’s a one-sentence version, a one-paragraph version, a one-page version, and then a 400-page version of this idea that the United States is collapsing and it’s going to be replaced by these new corporate-run fiefdoms, essentially, these corporate-run territories. And as crazy as that sounds, you got to keep in mind that Balaji Srinivasan is, of course, a protege of Peter Thiel.

And there’s a company called Pronomos Capital, a venture capital company that is brought into existence to fund these projects all over the world. In addition, we’re already seeing this idea being tried in Honduras where there’s a tech-funded wannabe city territory called Prospera. And Trump, in his 2024 campaign plan, called for the creation of 10 new Freedom Cities in the United States. There’s talk of building one of these cities in Greenland. That’s been part of Trump’s whole argument for stealing Greenland. You’ve got these tech guys pushing to build a new tech dystopia network state city there. And there’s even a proposal to build a new network state freedom city on the ruins of Gaza. I mean, the Wall Street Journal wrote about this. And it’s like Jared Kushner’s involved, and Trump tweeted out an AI-created video that showed a Trump hotel and casino on the beach at Gaza with money raining from the sky and Elon Musk sunning himself.

So somehow this idea of creating these new billionaire-owned private territories has gone from being this weird niche cult in Silicon Valley with a self-published book that’s free online to becoming something that the Trump administration, at least on a superficial level, has been pushing as potential policy. Now, Trump hasn’t really mentioned the Freedom Cities in a while. There’s been a lobbying effort that Wired wrote about in Washington to get these things enabled. Kind of hard to do. But what’s interesting to me is that while Trump has called for these Freedom Cities and there’s a whole billionaire-funded lobbying effort to create them, the media has mentioned this idea a couple of times, but no one has explained what these things are, why we need them, or where the idea comes from. And I feel like if Kamala Harris had become president, The New York Times would do a full investigation of what the hell’s a Freedom City and does it come from this weird ass book written by a Peter Thiel protege. But instead, we have this weird silence around this idea.

And I think another key to understanding the Freedom City is that, as I write in the book, Balaji Srinivasan didn’t come up with the idea of the network state on his own. He got it from Curtis Yarvin who wrote a long essay in the 2000s called “Patchwork” in which he proposed a future in which the United States would be dissolved. And instead, we would have the rise of these corporate-run autocracies. And he used as an example, something he called Frisk Corp, a future San Francisco where there would be absolute total surveillance by an authoritarian corporate government that would be so powerful that it even had the power to execute its citizens for no reason and no cause. And he suggested that in this future Frisk Corp, unproductive people could be turned into biodiesel to fuel the city’s Muni buses.

But he said, “Oh, well, I’m just kidding. Instead we need to have a humane alternative to genocide,” and then suggested that we lock unproductive people, meaning the poor, into these individual cells where they would spend their whole lives in these basic virtual reality prisons and not be on the street. And that’s horrifying for many reasons, especially since it would be much cheaper to give them housing and health care and food instead of locking them in virtual reality prisons, which sounds pretty expensive. But this idea of creating these new patchworks comes from Yarvin. And what Balaji Srinivasan does in The Network State is strip out all of Yarvin’s crazy genocidal ideas and try to present the idea as this startup-friendly concept that now has a venture capital fund (Balaji Srinivasan is an advisor to Pronomos Capital) that is trying to build these things all over the world.

So it’s this dystopian idea from science fiction. A lot of people bring up Neal Stephenson. Quinn Slobodian, who’s a Boston University historian, wrote a whole book called Crack-Up Capitalism about the long history of the dream of building these new territories where the usual rules don’t apply to some wealthy group of capitalists. You could trace it back to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where these wealthy industrialists hide out in their little private zone and wait for the world to fall apart. It’s basically a vision in which democracy no longer exists, and the wealthy are now the monarchs and the dictators of the world.

Kelly Hayes: Trump went from calling Bitcoin “a scam” to becoming deeply financially entangled with crypto as he returned to the White House. You write that crypto’s real political innovation turned out to be its ability to capture government through money and corruption. How important has crypto been to the tech right’s seizure of political power?

Gil Durán: Crypto was long envisioned as a way that anarcho-capitalists would be able to escape government authority and move around the world without being under government surveillance. It was seen as this liberatory tool that would be against government power, that would undermine government power. What has actually happened now is quite different. Crypto has become a major force in seizing government power and putting government in the hands of crypto billionaires. Donald Trump spent years deriding crypto as a scam and as a ripoff and as something that wasn’t even real money. And on the day he returned to the White House in 2025, Donald Trump became a crypto billionaire and subsequently became the crypto bro-in-chief, the main evangelist for crypto in the entire world. And it turns out that crypto is not an anti-government tool. Crypto is a tool for seizing government power because we have a system where you can buy government power.

And crypto, which wasn’t even a player in politics 10 years ago, is now suddenly in the last five years, the top monied force in American politics. Hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into our elections to take out politicians who are unfriendly to crypto and to install politicians who are basically owned by the crypto industry. It’s grown so enormously fast that it’s terrifying when you look at a chart, and it’s bigger than all of the other industries who have played in this game. And now, AI is following the crypto playbook of flooding their money into our political system. And I call crypto a weapon of mass corruption because that’s what’s happening. I mean, the Trump family has gained billions of dollars in wealth via crypto in the last two years openly, transparently. This is written about in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, you name it.

People are buying Trump’s crypto in order to curry favor with him. They’re losing their money through this mechanism. So crypto is just a form of political corruption. They finally found a use case besides terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, and gambling. It’s political corruption. And so, this, again, is delivering on one of the prophecies of The Sovereign Individual that crypto would be a massive tool for undermining government. And look at what they’ve been able to achieve so far. “DOGE,” even though it, at least in its first incarnation, didn’t last very long, has caused tremendous damage to the American government and to the country’s standing in the world. Millions of people are predicted to die in poor countries because of the cuts to USAID. And in my book, I call that a “Silicon Valley genocide.” The richest people in the world delivering a targeted hit to the poorest people in the world, causing massive amounts of unnecessary preventable deaths.

And it didn’t even save money, by the way. DOGE cost money. It added to the deficit. And the most chilling thing about DOGE, and this was written about actually in the Washington Post surprisingly and even in The New York Times, is that that idea was first written up by Curtis Yarvin in his blog in the 2000s where he said that a future president acting like a dictator should install a CEO and purge the federal government of federal employees and cut international aid programs and completely disrupt America’s diplomatic standing around the world. And he called this idea “RAGE,” retire all government employees, and this eventually becomes DOGE.

And what’s even more scary about this is that in 2021 when he was running for Senate, JD Vance gave an interview in which he quoted Yarvin’s idea specifically for purging the federal government. And Vance predicted that in 2024, that Trump would return to power and that he should do all of the things he is currently doing. And what we didn’t know at the time was that JD Vance would also be the vice president to Donald Trump, a man he once referred to as an “opioid of the masses,” as “cultural heroin,” and as “America’s Hitler.” But that’s the power of billionaire money and Peter Thiel, and that’s the corrupting power of crypto.

Kelly Hayes: The book also shows that these tech projects can be surprisingly vulnerable. You describe how, in Solano County, California, a group of tech billionaires spent nearly a billion dollars buying land for a planned new city, only to run into overwhelming local opposition and abandon their ballot measure. What does that fight tell us about the limits of billionaire power? And where else do you see vulnerabilities that organized people can exploit?

Gil Durán: Unfortunately, the California Forever story is not over. Now, the billionaires are going directly to Governor Gavin Newsom to try to get a state law to impose their city on the people of Solano County. They couldn’t win a ballot measure. They needed a ballot measure with the majority of people voting to create this new city on land that they had secretly bought up for five years. And 70 percent of the voters in the polls were opposed to this idea, including large amounts of Republicans. In fact, I think Republican voters were even more opposed to the tech billionaire city than the Democratic voters, but independents were also against it. So they abandoned the ballot measure. But it was clear early on that they weren’t done because they had hired up a lot of Newsom’s political advisors as their consultants. And lo and behold, they are now working to get last minute legislation passed this month in secrecy that would basically exempt their city from laws and allow them to build it there.

So we’re going to see what Newsom does on that. His Office of Economic Development put out a memo supporting the project, which pretty much means that Newsom supports the project. And the main lobbyist California Forever has hired is a guy named Jason Kinney, who’s a close friend of Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom’s favorite lobbyist. In fact, when Newsom got in trouble a few years ago for having that fancy dinner at The French Laundry during the pandemic lockdowns, it was Jason Kinney’s birthday party, the lobbyist’s birthday party. So California Forever is playing the Sacramento game now of hiring up people and trying to get the bill through. At the same time, everywhere these people go, they’re hated. Whether it’s trying to build a tech billionaire city and getting rejected by Republicans and Democrats alike or trying to put these data centers everywhere, people are pushing back, and that’s something that gives me hope.

People are also organizing against Flock. There’s the Purge Palantir campaign, which is getting lots of attention and helping make people aware of the degree to which Palantir is burrowing into every aspect of our government and needs to be rejected. I think there’s been a lack of focus on it from establishment politicians and from the establishment media. So the word is not getting out there as much as it should, but I think people are primed to organize against billionaire power. They’re already doing it. What we need is it to get loud enough so that even the mainstream politicians like Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla are out there talking about pushing back directly on billionaire power. There’s this weird silence coming out of the establishment, which is readily criticizing Donald Trump, who’s this doddering, old, crypto corrupt fool, but they’re very hesitant to say anything directly about the billionaires of Silicon Valley.

A lot of this stuff is coming out of California, and it’s strange the degree to which Gavin Newsom and none of our top elected officials will name that. That’s somewhere they could be effective actually, naming and shaming and pushing back on these billionaires behind Trump who live in our state, but they won’t do it. Why? Because they either are afraid of the billionaire money coming after them, or worse, they want the billionaire money funding their future campaigns. So I think we’re still on the fence in terms of how this ends up, but there are promising signs because people who aren’t even normally activists are organizing against billionaire power as it manifests in their communities via data centers. In fact, I was really heartened recently. A relative of mine who has never shown any interest in politics posting and urging her friends on Instagram to come to this data center protest in our hometown. And I thought, “Wow, even they’re getting engaged in this stuff now.” That’s how much the anti-data center movement has penetrated.

But I think what we need to help the public understand is that it’s not just the data centers that are invading our lives and our communities. It’s the crypto corruption. It’s the tech fascism on even the much higher level that has captured Washington, D.C. and is currently wielding a tremendous and dangerous amount of power in our system.

Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate that point, and I appreciate the point you make in the book that this threat extends so far beyond Trump. These forces are so deeply enmeshed with this administration that I think it can be easy to understand them as simply part of the Trumpian threat we’re up against right now. But even if Trump were removed from the equation, we’d still be contending with billionaire power, the tech right, and these anti-democratic projects. And the Democratic Party does not exist in opposition to those forces. So if we want anyone to actually constrain this power, we’re going to have to build a hell of a lot more political momentum around doing that.

Given that our audience is largely composed of activists and organizers, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people can talk about these issues in their own communities. When Émile Torres and I discussed TESCREAL a few years ago, part of the difficulty was simply explaining why these bizarre, cultish ideas were actually important and threatening. Now we’re in a different moment. People are organizing against data centers. Workers are pushing back against AI. Communities are confronting surveillance technologies and seeing how these systems affect their lives in really material ways. Those struggles give people something concrete to organize around.

But we’ve also been talking today about the larger political project behind some of this — the corruption, the cultish ideologies, the attack on democracy, the aspiration to replace liberal democracy with corporate dictatorships. Given your background in both politics and journalism, how do you think people should talk about those larger projects in their communities? What language or framing helps people understand what they’re actually up against?

Gil Durán: This is a battle of billionaires versus freedom. It’s a fight to defend ourselves against an unprecedented existential threat. We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both. And ours is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And right now, we have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. And that’s not all Donald Trump’s fault, by the way. The Democrats were doing this, too. The billionaires just acted a little more normal and polite when the Democrats were in power. But if we do not crush billionaire power in our time, the billionaires are going to crush us.

And right now, we have a situation where a lot of people are living in fear as the richest people in the world ally with Donald Trump to destroy the country and to terrorize the population. We’ve got masked goons with guns roaming around kidnapping people in the streets. And in a democracy, the people should not be afraid of the billionaires. The billionaires should be afraid of the people. So I think a message people understand, and you can see it in the polls, is that this is about the role of the billionaires in our lives. This is about whether we’re going to have… We cannot have a democracy if we continue to escalate and accelerate this massive inequality, and that’s exactly what AI and crypto are doing right now. In fact, I would say that’s what they are designed to do. And now, they have become completely enmeshed in our government, and our government power is being used to increase the already amazing and massive power of the wealthiest people in the world.

So I would say you have to name the enemy. You have to name the person who is doing this. The power that is most responsible for what is happening to us today. And Donald Trump’s an 80-something-year-old man. He won’t be around for long. But this is not really about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a heat shield for these guys. Donald Trump is just the figurehead of what is actually a regime, and it’s a regime of billionaires, and it’s us or them. And there are only about 1,000 billionaires in the United States and 3,000 in the whole world. There are 8.3 billion people. We’ve got the numbers. And I’d say once we fully wake up to the threat that the billionaires pose to human life in general, not to mention jobs, the economy, our futures, the billionaires will be running for cover.

That’s why they’re building all these bunkers, by the way. The people promising to create abundance are also building bunkers and buying islands to hide out. What’s that all about? Well, that’s what they really think is going to happen in the future. And so, I think we need to start talking about billionaire accountability. And I think it’s important to do that because right now, they feel like they can do anything, and we need to make them aware that there’s a good chance of consequences in the future, and that consequences for billionaires will be a popular issue to run on in the next few years.

Kelly Hayes: I certainly hope so. Well, as we wind things down is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

Gil Durán: I’d say stay hopeful and stay positive. They haven’t won yet, and they haven’t thought of everything. They aren’t expecting the degree of pushback they’re going to get. And so, fascism thrives on fear, on making people afraid to speak out or to imagine a better future. And right now, the billionaires are monopolizing our visions of the future. And if they can imagine a world without us, we can imagine a world without them.

Kelly Hayes: Well, thank you so much for those insights. I’m really grateful for this conversation and I hope everyone will check out Gil’s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. You can also hear more from Gil by checking out his newsletter, The Nerd Reich, which you can find at thenerdreich.com. Gil Durán, thanks for your work and thanks so much for joining me today.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Kelly Hayes: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Kelly Hayes
Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator and photographer. She is the host of Truthout‘s podcast Movement Memos, and the creator of Organizing My Thoughts, a weekly newsletter about politics and justice work. She is co-author of the book Let This Radicalize You, with Mariame Kaba, and editor of the upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. Kelly’s written work can also be found in Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post, Yes! Magazine, Pacific Standard, The Appeal and numerous anthologies. Her movement photography is featured in the “Freedom and Resistance” exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.