If two things go terribly wrong, Gil Duran may be covering the biggest political story in US history.
A few tech billionaires with a worldview that imagines themselves as the bad guys in almost every dystopian sci-fi story have handpicked the Republican vice presidential nominee. And that nominee’s running mate is, in case you haven’t heard, old. Like almost Joe Biden old, and possibly already embalmed.
JD Vance wasn’t installed as Donald Trump’s possible successor for charm and charisma, for JD has neither. He wasn’t picked because he underperformed the GOP ticket in Ohio by 9% the one time he sought elective office. He wasn’t picked because he seems like a guy who might lust after the crevasses in upholstery.
JD Vance was in the position to become a vice presidential candidate because of the patronage of one billionaire, Peter Thiel.
When Gil Duran, a former Editorial Page Editor of The San Francisco Examiner who currently publishes Nerd Reich and the FrameLab newsletter with the legendary Dr. George Lakoff, first wrote about tech authoritarianism for The New Republic, it seemed like a wacky curiosity. Almost fun. Like HBO’s Silicon Valley without the punchlines.
Now, it’s on the verge of having delivered America one of the most corrupt bargains in our history. And we all need to know what that could mean. That's why everyone needs to follow Gil Duran's work—because you never know where it, or we, could go next.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
If you want to be a supporter of this podcast, please join us here at the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Gil Duran, why are tech billionaires converging with the Republican Party?
Gil Duran: I think the Republicans under Trump and some tech billionaires in Silicon Valley see American democracy as ripe for disruption and overthrow. And so they have united behind the idea that now is a good time to seize the of power in this country and convert the United States into something that is more like a dictatorship. That serves the interests of the wealthy and the white. and the male over everyone else. And that's pretty much, I'd say the heart of it.
A lot of people look at it and say, "Oh, this is just about rich people, not wanting to pay taxes or not wanting regulations on their industries." And that's part of the story. Certainly. But in the research I've been doing, I think it goes a lot further than taxes and regulations. And I think we're witnessing the development of a weird new cult ideology out of Silicon Valley that in many ways has elements of a cult religion.
Jason Sattler: What is the Network State?
Gil Duran: In a nutshell, the Network State is the idea that we have to prepare for a post-democracy world in which the United States and countries like it, traditional nations will no longer matter. And Network States will be smaller geographical territories that are ruled by corporate governments answering to basically tech billionaires. And it sounds nutty, it sounds conspiratorial, it sounds like some kind of niche cult interest, but there are some pretty powerful people in Silicon Valley who are pushing this idea and not only pushing the idea, but funding the idea, trying to actually make it happen, trying to buy territories and start new Network State territories around the world.
And so this year I've been really digging into that story, that cult, and it started off I wasn't looking to write about tech. I was actually looking to work on a whole different project this year. And I stumbled into it through being a political journalist in San Francisco.
Jason Sattler: That, to me, is the most surprising thing. This stuff is also much more ridiculous than the show Silicon Valley.
Peter Gregory from HBO's Silicon Valley: Have any of you ever eaten at Burger King? Yes. Why? Well, I was just driven past one. And while I know their market cap is 7 billion dollars plus, I realize I am unfamiliar with their offerings. Okay. Fine. But what does that have to do Is it popular among your peers? Is it enjoyed?
People seem to like it. That's okay. And their selection consists solely of these burgers, of which they are presumably king.
Jason Sattler: And I think it's started to dawn really, as that show ended, which was, about four or five years ago. Now there's a new kind of weirdness that would probably be too weird to even for Mike Judge to cover at this point.
How is this manifesting actually in the city of San Francisco? What does it look like on the ground?
Gil Duran: I first became interested in it during the recall campaign against district attorney, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. When I got here, there were rumors that there would be a recall. He seemed to be under constant attack. And to be honest, I don't know. I wasn't sure whether or not that was deserved. I thought maybe the guy really is bad at his job and people are upset at him for legitimate reasons. And as a journalist, as the editorial page editor of the San Francisco examiner, I set out to figure out the facts of the case. And to be honest, I fully expected to find that maybe I would also support the recall. I wasn't necessarily against it. I didn't have enough information, but the more I dug into it, the more I found that Chesa Boudin was really the target of a, of an organized smear campaign designed to put all the fault for decades of dysfunction and failure in San Francisco government on him. And I became an opponent of the recall mostly because I don't like things that are based on disinformation. It seemed like a very dishonest campaign. I didn't think. That Boudin was necessarily a great politician. He was a very honest politician, which can unfortunately be problematic in politics. In looking at that campaign, it seemed that there was something going on that I hadn't noticed before in politics.
I spent most of my life and career in the Bay area. I started off in. Politics working for mayor Jerry Brown, when he was the mayor of Oakland in the Bay Area. And for some reason, the politics here seemed
more aggressively polarized than I'd ever seen them before. And people who were nominally Democrats were sounding a lot like republicans, and you had all of these online voices speaking nonsense, but getting huge amounts of amplification. And at one point you even had this bot network pop up that was spouting these very right wing talking points, but supposedly representing angry Democrats who are tired of failure. And at the time I didn't quite put my finger on it, but there were other people on social media saying, this is organized. This is like tech people. Someone is funding this. And it sounded a bit. Like a bit of a rabbit hole. And I didn't pay close attention at the time. It was only later after I left the paper and was doing some freelance writing, but I had the time to sit down and read some books and look at some very long podcasts and figure it out.
Jason Sattler: What did you figure out?
Gil Duran: There is this Network State ideology very much at play in San Francisco, Gary Tan, the head of the famed Y Combinator tech accelerator, and a bunch of people like him have decided that they want to take over San Francisco City Hall and that they want to have Total political control here. And right now they are funding a whole slate of candidates to replace the current board of supervisors. They're trying to exert control over who the next mayor is. And the more I dug into it, the more I found that, wow, this isn't some accident or some happenstance where there's frustrated Democrats deciding to change government. They have this whole plan they've laid out to do exactly this. And what I discovered is that Gary Tan, the Y Combinator CEO, very much identifies as part of the Network State movement. And I should mention that in addition to creating new territories where tech can rule over, there's another less preferred, but still optional possibility of using your power to take over existing governments and convert them into tools for the tech power. So when you leave and start your own country or sovereign city, that's called the exit strategy. When you stay and you use your voice to try to take over the current political structure, that's called voice. And so in doing the research on this, I read a book called Crack-Up Capitalism by a historian named Quinn Slobodian, and that led me to a bunch of other books where I basically learned that there's this whole plan, this whole ideology that involves a future in which the United States and countries like it no longer exist or at least no longer matter the degree to the degree that they do now and they will be replaced by a different form of governance ruled by billionaire basically plutocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, whatever you want to call it.
Some call it Tech Authoritarianism. Others call it tech fascism. They have this idea in their heads. They speak about that. They write about that they're very proud of that does not involve a future that's very democratic. And small D democratic, not to mention large D democratic.
Jason Sattler: The Network State or the people behind the Network State now have an actual representative, if I'm correct, on the Republican national ticket. What is JD Vance's connection to the Network State?
Gil Duran: There's no time in the past decade where you don't look at JD Vance's life and not see the hands of Peter Thiel guiding him along, funding him, pushing him.
The PayPal billionaire and longtime associate of Elon Musk, who has become a major force in right wing politics in the United States today. And JD Vance basically got his start in business and in politics with the assistance of Peter Thiel.
Welcome to the Peter Gregory Foundation's fourth annual Orgy of Caring. The first three were fine. I hope. Enjoy the party There is a second bar in back Where the line is much shorter? Thank you. I'm finished
Gil Duran: Peter Thiel got Donald Trump to endorse JD Vance during his Senate race, even though JD Vance had compared Trump to Hitler. So this has been a pretty solid, established relationship.
Well, Peter Thiel and people around him, Mark Andreessen like a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who I also wrote about, a former Andreessen partner, like Elon Musk, like Gary Tan, who was the ninth employee at Palantir, one of Peter Thiel's companies, you have this very connected cabal of tech guys who are pushing this ideology, and JD Vance comes out of that milieu, has been funded by that milieu, and now is on the ticket with Trump.
There's this sort of convergence going on. Where the crypto tech billionaire set sees Donald Trump as the best vehicle for getting what they want in terms of the undermining of American democracy. Because obviously Trump's Republican party is also willing to throw out democracy in order to get what it wants.
And maybe the best way to explain it is, I've done a series of four stories so far for the New Republic. The first one was about the Network State and this plan to build a new tech city called California Forever in Solano County, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The second story was about Gary Tan and Y Combinator and his plan to take over San Francisco city government and make it serve techs interest was called the tech plutocrats dreaming of a right wing San Francisco. The third story was about Balaji Srinivasan. Who's the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner and his idea to have the techies in San Francisco form a so called "gray tribe," where they dress in gray uniforms and partner with the police department to quote, purge Democrats out of San Francisco. Pretty insane idea, given that like 85 percent of San Francisco is Democratic. And then the fourth story was about JD Vance and how he's a part of all of this San Francisco tech authoritarian milieu and has been deeply influenced by a guy named Curtis Yarvin...
is monarchy fair?
Is it fair to say this as the press has been saying that you're in favor of a monarchy? Yes, it's definitely fair.
Gil Duran: Curtis Yarvin who also preaches a gospel of dictatorship is better than democracy, and we have to replace nation states with these smaller territories, which he calls patchworks or realms that will then replace our current forms of government. He refers to San Francisco as an imaginary "Frisc Corp.". And in Frisc Corp, this corporate dictatorship, the government, the corporate government can even chop off your hands for no reason.
And there's nothing you can do about it where it can convert. Unproductive people in the underclass to quote biodiesel to fuel the muni buses or else lock them in virtual reality prisons so that they are kept out of the way. Very crazy ideas. And having worked in politics for a long time, it is utterly bizarre and terrifying to me that someone like JD Vance would go and cite the thinking of Curtis Yarvin as he has multiple times over the including since entering politics.
Again, I know this can sound like bit of a conspiracy theory, weird thing at first, but the reason I'm writing about it is that these guys are talking about it very loudly, very proudly, and not only are they talking about it, they're trying to make it happen. They're buying land to create these new cities, and they've got a guy on the ticket with Trump. Trying to get into the White House, so I've been trying to raise the alarm in my writing, and the good thing is that some other journalists are also tuning in and starting to write about this stuff, and that's been my whole goal. There are people who've written about it in the past, but I think that my timing is good, and I've been able to string together the narrative in a way that makes a lot of sense to people.
I've been able to frame What the story is and why it's important. And I, and it's been booming and I won't say too much, but I'm working on another piece right now that I think will have equal explosive power.
Jason Sattler: And you also have the most amazing name for your blog, which easily could be the title of a book, The Nerd Reich which I think explodes the idea in your brain. It is such a great frame to connect two kind of very disparate ideas in our head and make it really clear.
In Peter Thiel and Trump, I didn't get the Freedom Cities connection. I feel like when you identified that in Trump, it's the proof of in Project 2025 where they talk about windmills and then he says, this is not for Donald Trump. That's a Donald Trump obsession.
Donald Trump, even before he was putting JD Vance on the ticket, had Freedom Cities on his website. What does that tell you?
Gil Duran: For those who don't know in. Trump's 2024 campaign agenda, he has the idea of something called Freedom Cities, these new cities that we built on federal land where apparently, I don't know, they'll work differently than regular cities. I think we have freedom American cities right now.
It's not clear why Freedom Cities would be different, but I wrote a piece recently about if you look at the Freedom Cities idea, it very much matches what these guys are talking about when they talk about these Network State territories. It's obviously a nod to that idea. And I think what we see on the part of both parties, obviously Republicans to a greater extent, is an effort to court the crypto tech support because it does come with so much money and power and influence in terms of the amassed power these guys have over all of the platforms and technologies that we use, not to mention that they have gazillions of dollars to in elections. And so I think because of the money, which is the mother's milk of politics they've been able to get an audience and people want to find a way to either serve their purposes and join with them or else at the very least, not offend them in compromise, which seems to be more of the Kamala Harris approach is they want to reset with crypto. Crypto currently has, I think the largest pack in the 2024 race, $200 million targeting anybody who questions the legitimacy of crypto. If you read any books on crypto, which I've in the middle of reading every one of them that's been written so far, you'll be hard pressed to say anything other than that it's some kind of spot gigantic Ponzi scheme that's liable to fall apart at any moment, but these guys need to keep going and getting bigger and get legitimacy from the government in order to win power. It is very much a situation where you have these wannabe robber barons have amassed a tremendous amount of wealth buying power in politics, which unfortunately in our system is possible and not only are Republicans for sale, Democrats are for sale too.
Jason Sattler: You mentioned Harris's kind of pander or outreach to crypto. Schumer as well. And it just seems like there's too much money not to.
What would be your case for Democrats to not be the party of crypto, to take what would have to be a bold stand because there's a lot of money against you?
Do you think that's something that Democrats should do?
Gil Duran: You have to look at what is it that crypto really wants why is it that crypto exists at all? Why does anybody need crypto? It seems like the biggest beneficiaries have been drug traffickers and other people up to illegal businesses who were trying to move money around without being detected by governments. And if you look deeper into it, and I won't go too far here because it's the subject of my current research, but at the heart, especially of the Bitcoin idea is the idea that crypto will replace the dollar. And instead of having the United States government or the federal reserve exert power over our monetary system, that power will be held in private hands by crypto billionaires. And so it's very much an idea of undermining the current system, just as they have created new currencies to challenge the dollar, right? Just out of the ether, create a new coin. If enough people buy it, then it somehow has a value. That value may suddenly collapse, as many of them have because there's really nothing there in the end to, to guarantee its value. But just as if they, just as they have been able to create these new currencies, they now seek to create new forms of governance. And so at the heart of crypto is very much an idea of supplanting the government's role and replacing that with the power of billionaires and gazillionaires. And I think once a democratic party official reads the material and understands that it becomes very hard to not have an oppositional relationship with crypto. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to play with crypto currencies and have little projects. My nieces and nephews are all into robux on roblox and we've got our Starbucks Cash and there's different forms of money out there. But should we allow some form of currency that seeks to overthrow American hegemony rise to the top with the support of the very politicians whose power will be undermined and supplanted if this thing succeeds? That's the question I think Democrats have to ask themselves. And the deeper you look into crypto and its politics, the more you see that it is not about democracy and not about freedom and not about privacy, it's about amassing power in the hands of a wealthy few. And that's not even in dispute.
Jason Sattler: You can't have America leading the world if America doesn't have the dollar leading the world. Is that correct?
Gil Duran: I'd say so. And also just in general, people have overtly stated it's about undermining the power of centralized states in general. Again, it goes back to the idea of a post-democracy world where countries don't exist anymore, or at least don't have the power that they have now. And who knows, maybe that's a good idea that people will like. But I think we ought to talk about it. And understand clearly what the proposition is before our low IQ democratic politicians go head over heels for some stupid idea they don't understand because there's a campaign check at the end of it.
Jason Sattler: This is being pushed by so-called "America First" people. No one cares about hypocrisy, but Thiel is now again threatening to move to New Zealand.
And he is now the most Influential, the single Republican donor. I see this all through cybersecurity. I think they see vulnerabilities and they say, this is their, this is how they attack democracy. They don't see this as anything other than a network to infiltrate.
The idea that this is "American First" is the biggest farce of it. That makes it so we can't have any real conversation about it.
Gil Duran: His whole MAGA act has been one giant cosplay that he somehow cares about working people. This is a man who's never paid his vendors. There are so many levels of falsity and ridiculousness. Yeah, this is not about "America First." This is about a handful of wealthy people cashing out, turning the United States into a kleptocracy, selling it off for scrap and parts, and then moving on into a new world where they'll be in complete control of their environments and the rest of us will be left struggling in a sort of apocalyptic future where civil society has been gutted and broken down and there's nothing in its place except to answer to some corporate dictatorship authority. And it seems to me, cause again, I know how crazy sounds. One thing that comes up a lot is that these guys appear to have read all the science fiction books and drawn the lesson that it's good to be the bad guys in the future, right? Because every time I write about this, people were like that's the plot of Parable of the Sower or that's the plot of Dune, or that's the plot of...
I'm like, yeah, it's the plot of all of them, right? You have this sort of villainous power that has become an authoritarian government and it's left to the real humans who still remember what it was like to have freedom and democracy to fight against it. And so I think what part of what I'm trying to do is show people that the model they're using here and again, these things wouldn't matter if these were just some nerds on the internet having a fantasy, which is what it was back in 2003, 2008, whenever. But some of these people have a tremendous amount of money and they're actually trying to do the thing and that's where it stops being just a mental exercise and become something that we need to be worried about and that we certainly need to be talking about.
And that's been the point of me raising the issue and focusing on it is that it seemed to me strange That no one else in the Bay Area was writing about the underlying ideology behind these takeovers of our city governments. And I thought they would use Northern California as a testing ground and then go national. But suddenly it's all scaling to the level with JD Vance in 2024 because the opportunity is there, the vulnerability. Is there right? If Trump can make it, fortunately, Kamala Harris seems to be doing pretty well. And I think, Thiel's talking about New Zealand again, because he doesn't want to live here if Trump loses.
And it's looking that's a possibility at the very least. I don't like to get too optimistic because optimism in politics as a way of coming back to bite you. But they certainly get the sense that this could not go their way. And they've played a hell of a lot of their cards. Who converts to Donald Trump supporter in 2024? Post January 6th, post two impeachments, post his defeat, post thirty four felony convictions. This is some extreme behavior, and some of the, quote, smartest people in Silicon Valley have now pledged their loyalty to Trump over the past few months. It's very bizarre, and if Kamala Harris wins, expect a lot of these guys to scatter like roaches under a spotlight.
Jason Sattler: I want to be pessimistic for a moment because I do think that there's good luck in being pessimistic in politics. As you said, the opposite is true. We're not talking enough about Donald Trump being very old. The New York times had a whole Old Desk and I know you're not a New York Times Hater, but they were very fixated on Joe Biden that he was 81 years old. Suddenly if you're 78, it's not as big an issue. Donald Trump
Jason: is
Jason Sattler: a coin flip for being the president .
Jason: And then, JD Vance is a few heartbeats from being the president
Jason Sattler: If this ideology reached the top of the U. S. government, how would that look different than Donald Trump?
Gil Duran: It has a lot in common with Project 2025. The idea is that you have to, once you get control of government, forget democracy, forget any kind of moderation. Seize the tools of government and use it to destroy government and turn government into something that furthers right wing tech authoritarian power. We see that in Project 2025. We see that in the Network State ideology, in the things that JD Vance has talked about, Curtis Yarvin, the guy who wants to create dictatorships in places like San Francisco calls it RAGE. R A G E, retire all government employees. You get in there and you gut the civil service and replace it with loyalists.
That's pretty much in Project 2025 written down. So we see a lot of parallels here and it would seem to me. That there's been some work done on this between these groups privately prior to 2025 becoming a thing. I don't think this alliance just popped out of nowhere. I think it's been under the works for some time and you did see. These tech guys like Musk, try all these different Republicans to get them to win, because I think they knew the risk with Trump was that he is unstable and unpredictable. So if they were able to get in there and if Trump is president and he doesn't make it through a full term, you will have a handpicked Elon Musk, Peter Thiel agent in the White House as the president. And I think we will, we'll see see a real struggle to retain our democratic republic at that point.
Jason Sattler: The U. S. would be the difference between like old Twitter and new Twitter. He would basically run the United States the way that Elon has run Twitter.
That's how it seems. Is there a connection that people should know about between Elon and J. D. beyond the obvious? How invested is he in getting Trump into office?
Gil Duran: If you look at Elon and Trump have essentially become one in the same at this point Elon is clearly mimicking donald trump and trying to be the biggest nastiest voice on twitter. He even bought twitter For that purpose donald trump showed people the degree to which tweeting or just posting on a social media outlet Could make you the most powerful person in the world. And I think that very much had to do with why Elon bought it.
And we've seen him mimic all of Trump's tactics nonstop for the past two years, like Trump, he is driving this business toward bankruptcy. A story today came out, the banks are screwed. The ones that lent. Musk the money to buy it. So I think all of these guys see their fortunes as tied together. The only way they're going to get out of this predicament is by getting out of democracy and by controlling the United States. And they think we're at a point where their money can buy it. And hopefully that won't be the case. But and if it's not, we can't rest on our laurels because they will definitely try again. And again Democrats are susceptible to lighter forms of bribery. And maybe lulled into thinking they can compromise and negotiate with these guys and somehow be the party of crypto and the party of AI and all of these other things. That is very dangerous and naive thinking. And anybody who talks that way has not done the reading and is only paying attention to spreadsheets of donations. And if Harris wins, we have to stay vigilant in making sure they don't bow down to these guys because four years we'll come very quickly. And over time, they're still pretty bad at politics.
Like I said, imagine being behind Trump. This is your vision of the future. This is the great minds of Silicon Valley think that's the best candidate. But they may get better and they may have better agents who are able to, not seem completely insane to most Americans. And that will be the more dangerous form. We've been very lucky in that Trump is terrible and bombastic and ridiculous that. Look at you, as you said, that everyone kicked Biden out of the race because he's old and fumbles his sentences. Trump is speaking absolute gobbledygook at any given moment. Everything he says is a lie or weird or untrue.
His utter ridiculousness and corruption have almost become a form of media inoculation. Like nothing hits him because everyone is bored by the story of his corruption and his insanity. And that's a problem because other people are held to a much higher standard.
If Kamala flubs one sentence, the narrative will be that, "Oh, now the race has changed again." And there's, I think it's obvious that's what everyone is looking for, some kind of gotcha to change the race. That can't really happen to Trump because even if he, two weeks ago, there was a story about the possibility that he may have taken a 10 million bribe from Egypt. And. We didn't really see that story in many places, it disappeared if there had been any hint of that on the part of Kamala Harris, it would be all we'd be talking about. She'd be forced to step down, Democrats in disarray, you name it. So I do think that Trump's ridiculousness has made his corruption an old story and made journalists less interested in it. At the same time, that cuts against him because the new story is the rise of Kamala Harris. She's putting on the better show. It's more exciting. It's more clicks, right? She's become the audience grabber. And maybe to some degree, Trump being old news works in our favor. Although again, the name of the game now becomes how do we create a more exciting story?
Let's find a way to trip up the Kamala campaign and make sure it's we're scared again, and then it's not sure what's going to happen. And I hate to speak that way about the media, but I really think we have to examine the role to which the audience algorithms are dictating some unfortunate strategies to chase clicks and chase clout. And I don't think they're really serving democracy. This shouldn't even be a contest. But unfortunately we still don't know who will win.
Jason Sattler: I would make the argument that it was a pretty good bet a month ago, or two months ago. They actually had the right guy. Trump's bet on destroying the Bidens through, all these BS investigations was paying off. The idea of framing him as a beta, they really had the right guy. Democracy on the ropes.
Now I think it's back to being a coin flip. Being in Michigan, we won the trifecta, but by a few hundred votes, so I don't ever get too confident about the way that it looks, but I do get scared when I see that how much money there is behind this.
Now you've someone who's been a political consultant your whole life. The amount of money that could rain down in the unaccountable amount of money? We have you know, elon putting tens of billions of dollars to try to elect trump through Twitter. It's not the only reason about Twitter, but it's a huge reason about twitter.
There's all this other kind of money where could where would do you think that they could rain money down in the last days that could really change the state of the race or is that even
possible? I
Gil Duran: Oh, I think they're certainly going to try. They'll massive ad buys in Swing States. I think we're going to see some kind of terrible attempt at an October surprise, probably involving Twitter. Probably involving AI. We've already seen some little tests of that fake pictures floating around on both sides there've been a few fake rumors that have really taken off on the democratic side, like the JD Vance couch thing, which was funny.
But it gave me some fear because this is very much the next phase of our political struggle here is going to be the degree to which. Everyone believes a completely false story, but it has an impact and I can certainly see them putting some kind of false story or false video or false picture out there that is designed to delegitimize Kamala Harris in the crucial places during the most crucial parts of the race. So I think that we're going to see an unprecedented use of money and technology to try to. Affect the outcome of the 2024 election. And we have to be very vigilant about that because it could work. We don't know yet. It's a close race and I think it's going to be close all the way. The good thing is that there is some momentum. Democrats seem to be framing a case based on values that's resonating with people surprise. And I think they just have to keep the narrative moving and stay one step ahead of the Republicans. It's clear that Trump is on his back foot. He does, he's flailing. He doesn't know how to handle this. And but you've got to stay ahead of that and make sure that the narrative doesn't change, that there's not a lull or an error that could just completely shift the perception and the trajectory.
Jason Sattler: Yes, someone who has worked at FrameLab and worked with Dr George Lakoff, the idea that freedom has become the buzzword of 2024 has to be exciting. You've written really eloquently about why this matters and why this is a great idea. Do you want to can you talk a little bit about that? And are there next steps and kind of ways that she can expand beyond it so as not to lose momentum?
Gil Duran: Yeah, for decades, Dr. George Lakoff, with whom I work on FrameLab newsletter and FrameLab podcast has been saying that Democrats need to focus on a values-based message and that the most important value in American policy is freedom. But for too long, Republicans have been allowed to own the freedom frame.
Democrats don't really talk about freedom. They talk about lists of policies and other things. But in this race, Democrats are framing freedom and started with Biden. He adopted the freedom frame, talking about democratic ideas and policies through the framework of how they increase a citizen's freedom. Harris has made freedom the theme of her campaign. Her first campaign ad was called freedom and that's all very good. I do think the thing that Democrats need to remember though, is that repetition is what's key. You have to keep saying it. It can't be one speech. It can't be one ad. And what tends to happen is Democrats do an ad or announce a theme and then they're on all these other different issues without ever mentioning the freedom word again.
It's not just a one time thing. It's not an ad or a speech. It's a constant repetition of that frame and connecting your ideas in the brains of voters. Your idea is a freedom idea. Your idea increases freedom, protects freedom, you name it. That repetition is what's going to do all the work. Very good that Harris has adopted the freedom frame in a nominal sense. We got to hear her saying it more, every time she talks. And if we don't do that, then you aren't really framing freedom. You framed a freedom ad. And so I think it's ,important. You hear Republicans go on TV, radio, whatever, they're constantly using their buzzwords and their values.
Freedom is guns, freedom is the freedom to impose your beliefs on others, you name it. So we got to hear Democrats talking about it more and that's really not something they have a lot of practice with. So hopefully they will repeat. If you don't repeat it, it's not working. You got to get sick of hearing it yourself. Kind of like me talking about these issues with you. I've done so many interviews on this stuff that I'm tired of hearing myself talk about it. But that means it's breaking through to people. Every time I post something about this, people like, "Oh my God, I've never heard of this." And so you've got to stay on it and repeat it in order to defeat it.
Jason Sattler: Another question I have is about the strict father worldview. How do you see the Network State fitting into that?
Gil Duran: Democrats believe in rationality. They believe in logic, they believe in facts, and they think that if you just tell people what the policies are, they'll figure out what the values are behind those policies. Doesn't work that way and. What you find from Lakoff and from David Fenton, another known progressive PR guy who pioneered the art of progressive PR, is that Democrats and progressives tend to find public relations manipulative. They don't want to repeat. They don't want to change brains. They want to just put out policy points. And so Republicans have a more business background, often understand advertising. When you study advertising, you understand how the brain works and why repetition is important. They have no compunction about using the techniques of cognitive science. I get this again and again. I gave a presentation recently to a group of activists and they were like we don't want to be manipulating people's brains.
We don't want to, I'm like do you want to lose? Because that's the that's other option.
And I think that there are some in Democratic politics who definitely understand it, but I think we're at a point after seeing the power Trump has had to do evil the tools themselves are not good or bad. It's the ends to which you use them. It is the way things work, right? It's the reason we buy the brand of soap. We buy why we buy the brand of clothes. We buy why we probably have the car. We buy, we're surrounded by messages that convince us to do certain things. Convincing people to believe in freedom and democracy is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. So that's one part of it in terms of the strict father ideology and how it relates to the Network State. Actually, George Lakoff and I are in the midst of putting together the gray or tech authoritarian hierarchy because it is different in certain ways.
Another example is, for listeners who don't know Lakoff's hierarchy, it's basically the way conservatives think is a hierarchical list of God over man over nature, men over women, whites over other races, Christians over other religions, Western culture over other cultures, straights over gays, lesbians, bisexual, et cetera, adults over hierarchical worldview of how the world works. And the tech guys, they don't really believe in God. They believe they are God with their tech, where tech is God. There's a thing to work out. Is tech God or are the founders of tech companies God? I'd say probably the latter. They go toward a messianical view themselves. Elon Musk believes he's the only person who can save If you read Walter Isaacson's book, which I did comes through very clearly. And so again, and they don't believe in America over other countries, they believe in tech controlled countries over other countries. So we're going to go through maybe the next few weeks and publish this primary analysis of how the tech authoritarian hierarchy works.
And I think that'll help people see why they're aligned with the MAGA movement at this time. But also how they're in different from the traditional Republican base that is also very hierarchical.
Jason Sattler: And explain to people the risk of then JD Vance possibly becoming president. I think that's a great idea and I huge fan of what you've been doing. It's amazing to see it develop. It does feel like, you've been covering a startup that all of a sudden has become the biggest company or the second biggest company in America.
Gil Duran: That's a good point. It's a kind of a startup cult ideology. And the question is whether it gets past its seed funding round and can scale. And it's very dangerous. And so I think we have to be aware of it, keep an eye on it and push back against it at every step.
"JD Vance, Nerd Führer?" with Gil Duran