Contra Trump
China Heritage has featured Gil Durán and his newsletter The Nerd Reich as part of our Contra Trump series since early 2025. Published in August 2026, Durán’s book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy became an instant New York Times best-seller. Then, on 31 August, the singer songwriter Jesse Welles released a song titled The Nerd Reich, which was inspired by Durán’s work. The YouTube version of Welles’s song is featured in this chapter. (For a previous appearance of Welles and There’s a Hole, a song he released in July 2026, in Contra Trump, see Doom Polling — Late-stage Trumpism? Or Copium Masquerading as Hopium?)
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Gil Durán tells his readers that:
… my work is largely a survey of what these powerful tech billionaires have been reading, thinking and saying for many years. They have been very loud and proud about this stuff, but very few people have taken them seriously. Given our current predicament, I believe we must remedy this oversight with great urgency.
If we can understand what they believe, we can understand where they want to take us. We must expose the structure of their ideology and increase public awareness of the horrifying vision they seek to thrust upon the people of the world.
I would suggest that, over the years, I have made a similar case regarding the ideas and writings that informed the Chinese party-state and its elites from the late 1970s, much of which was ignored by governments, economists and a panoply of observers until, that is, the shock of 1989, and then again after the rise of Xi Jinping 2012.
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The cod philosophers of the Dark Enlightenment, who feature in Gil Durán’s work, have made also made a number of appearances in Contra Trump. They are part of a heavily capitalised intellectual current that advocates, and agitates, for the radical privatisation of the public good in the name of ‘individual sovereignty’. See, for example:
- Triumph of the Cod Philosophers and their Dark Enlightenment;
- Ready Player One — the Narrenschiff of American Gods; and,
- Edgelords & Besserwissers.
We have also noted that their project shares a number of traits in common with China’s now century old Dark Enlightenment. Xi Jinping’s revanchist autocracy favours stifling top-down state control and a collectivism that ultimately benefits the nomeklatura. Like the cod philosophers and their billionaire founders, China’s neo-reactionaries further entrench special interests, hidden manipulation, cyber surveillance and populist agitprop.
As I have previously observed, the two are spoken of in terms of AI (favoured by China’s party-state) and Crypto (the province of America’s tech-buccaneers). For all the talk of a future techno-utopia, both America and China’s Dark Enlightenments have the hallmarks of a Great Leap Backward.
I recommend Gil Durán’s book and his website, The Nerd Reich.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
2 September 2026
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