Gil Duran (The Nerd Reich) & Amy Westervelt (Brought to You By)
Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy; and Amy Westervelt, author or Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, in conversation.
Gil Durán was born in Tulare, California, in 1976. The grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, he got his first taste of work in the fields, but took an interest in journalism after winning the local newspaper’s “My Mom Is the Best” contest in the fifth grade. In the tenth grade, his family moved from California to Kentucky, where he dropped out of high school for a year, then returned and befriended an English teacher who encouraged him to apply to college. He graduated DePauw University in 1998 and started his journalism career at the San Jose Mercury News. As the newspaper industry hit turbulence, he pivoted to politics and spent ten years as an advisor to politicians including Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. In 2018, he returned to journalism as California opinion editor of The Sacramento Bee, and then became editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Now an independent journalist, he publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich, focused on extremist tech politics, and FrameLab, focused on political language.
A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.
When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.
Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.
The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order. The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative print and audio journalist. In 2015, she received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism for her role in creating a women-only climate journalism group syndicating longform climate reporting to The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Economist, and many more outlets. In 2017, she founded the independent podcast production company Critical Frequency, which specializes in reported narrative podcasts that The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic have described as “fascinating,” “rigorously reported,” and “the best.” Westervelt has received an ONA award for excellence in audio storytelling, multiple Covering Climate Now awards for climate reporting, a Wilbur award for excellence in religion reporting, two Peabody nominations, and was named a 2023 Covering Climate Now “Journalist of the Year.” A 20-year veteran investigative journalist, Westervelt’s earlier work for NPR, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Inside Climate News, and various other outlets earned her Edward R. Murrow, ONA, and Folio awards as well, and is often cited as amongst the earliest examples of accountability reporting on climate. Her book “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War,” is just out from Bloomsbury.
A gripping account of the corporate propaganda that has invaded our media, our democracy, and now the very nature of truth itself-from investigative reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt.
Whether it’s the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?
In Brought to You By, Amy Westervelt exposes the plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth along the way.
With her signature wit and incisiveness, Westervelt shows how the masterminds of corporate misinformation-people like Herb Schmertz, the public relations pioneer who made Mobil “the thinking man’s oil company,” Richard Edelman, the PR guy who helped the dairy industry vilify oat milk, and David Petraeus, the disgraced spy chief using counter- insurgency tactics to discredit climate science, have ushered in an era of unprecedented corporate control.
Only by exposing this well-oiled machine can we begin to repair the social contract; reclaim truth and democracy; and redraw the lines between corporate speech and individual speech, a lie and an opinion, a dollar and a word.