Tech Authoritarian Doomsayers

Not long after this fateful gathering, Trump tapped Vance — who counts billionaire tech baron Peter Thiel as his consigliere and patron — to be his vice presidential nominee. Following Trump’s election, Sacks was named as the administration’s ​“crypto and AI czar,” in charge of unleashing the industry at full force. Today, whatever guardrails had previously been placed on Big Tech have been effectively removed, and the CEOs that infamously sat behind Trump during his inauguration last year are now in full control of our economy — and increasingly our entire political future.

The story of that Trump fundraiser is recounted in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s illuminating new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, wherein the authors, both revelatory thinkers and writers on the Left, explain how the inciters of our current crises are benefiting from the chaos they’ve wrought while plotting their own escape, whether via the underground or another celestial realm.

In the book, Klein and Taylor define their subject of ​“end times fascism” as:

A fascism embedded in an understanding that something immense is ending, and it responds to this discomfiting truth with accelerationist zeal. Rather than alter the human-created economic and social systems driving crisis and collapse, its progenitors insist that it is the human story itself that has hit a wall and that only a small, deserving group of humans will survive the coming cataclysm — whether in their bunkered city in the sky or their bunkered corporate city or their bunkered nation-state, fortressed against alien invaders. … It is a story rooted in that old seductive dream of the chosen few ascending to a gated paradise, while the rest of us are abandoned to the floods and fires of the damned.

The purveyors of this dynamic, according to Klein and Taylor, believe that summoning a digital superintelligence through AI justifies abandoning environmental sustainability, so long as they are in turn handed the reins to decision-making power over an unruly public that might have other ideas about how to arrange society. 

Thiel, for his part, wrote back in 2009: ​“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The co-founder of tech giant Palantir — which contracts with the Trump administration to surveil immigrants, supports U.S. military weapons systems and aids the Israeli Defense Forces — is also deeply entrenched with Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist with newfound purchase in the White House who believes in fully eliminating the corporate regulatory state and calls himself an ​“effective accelerationist” for an AI-driven destiny. 

These tech authoritarians didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, they’ve been incubating their plans for domination over decades, as journalist Gil Durán recounts in his new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. While long perceived simply as governmentally suspicious ​“libertarians,” Durán explains that, in fact, the class of Silicon Valley extremists to which Thiel and Andreessen belong aims to take the reins of governmental power to serve their own ends, a process we are seeing play out seemingly every day under the second Trump administration, from Elon Musk’s mass firing of federal workers under the former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to the rapid shrinking of government agencies. As Durán writes:

Tech fascism bundles powerful technologies — AI, crypto, defense tech, social media platforms, surveillance systems — toward authoritarian goals. These technologies are bound together under the control of a small, interconnected group of oligarchs who, simultaneously integrated into the highest levels of government, are creating an authoritarian infrastructure with boundless power. Its goal, like MAGA’s, is to privatize the public and eliminate democracy.

Not content with sporting the full backing of Trump and his allies, this hyper-rich doomsayer set is splurging to make sure their party goes unspoiled after the November midterm elections. The Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz (yes, co-run by that Marc Andreessen) has already spent more than $115 million this cycle — making it the biggest known spender this campaign season. That includes more than $10 million to MAGA Inc., Trump’s Super PAC, as well as many millions more to other PACs aiming to curb any oversight of AI or cryptocurrency. Thiel, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into defeating a billionaire wealth tax proposal in California, and millions more linked to the tech billionaire are being funneled through dark money expenditures.

A completely broken campaign finance system has made this kind of interference in our political system routine. But it also speaks to a deeper reality: the public doesn’t want the future these rich losers are selling, so they’re being forced to burn parts of their fortunes to fend off any democratic control.

Far from a gilded status quo pockmarked by data centers and unaffordable groceries, voters are displaying an appetite for getting behind a different vision — one where the working-class majority takes the front seat, and the tech bros and their corporate benefactors step aside.

More than 70% of Americans say that tech companies currently have too much power, and nearly the same level say they support using antitrust laws to go after them. When it comes to overseeing the development of AI, fewer than one in five U.S. residents say they trust Big Tech.

Meanwhile, democratic socialists and outspoken progressives keep winning primaries, promising to materially benefit people who work for a living through enhanced social programs funded by stripping wealth away from the real parasites of society — the super rich. From Angie Nixon in Florida, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who won the Democratic primary for Senate, to Donavan McKinney in Michigan, a DSA-endorsed candidate who won the primary for a Detroit U.S. House seat, voters are showing a willingness to back campaigns seeking to rearrange society fully in the interests of the working class.

The end-time fascists and tech authoritarians want to scare us into believing that a catastrophic dystopia is all that can await us, so it’s best to just go along with their prophetic hypercapitalist scheme. The truth is that we all control our collective future. There’s no better time than now to make that known.

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Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 2026.

Gil Durán, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Avid Reader Press, Aug. 2026.