Nerd Reich: The sequel to Revenge of the Nerds that no one wanted

The quiet part, painted on a dead wall. The blogger behind this ideology — Curtis Yarvin — spent two decades saying the same thing in longer words. | image by Alfo Medeiros

Letters to the Housed · August 25, 2026 · By Paul Asplund · Second Grace LA

Hello Neighbors,

I wish I lived in a world where this book didn't have to exist. But unfortunately it does, and it's important.

Last week, I heard an interview with Gil Durán talking about his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. He talked about a group of Silicon Valley billionaires, a decades-old plan to hollow out the federal government, and what he said draws a straight line from that plan to the HUD funding fights I've been writing about all year.

Most of what I've laid out below comes from years of reporting by Durán, who has covered this network since it was still confined to San Francisco politics. His book came out last Tuesday from Simon and Schuster (you can order a copy through bookshop.org which splits the proceeds with independent bookstores instead of routing everything to Amazon).

Days before the book's release, YouTube moved to ban Durán's podcast and pull his videos, according to Durán's own account on his newsletter.

This is the most explicitly political piece I've ever written for LTTH. I'm writing it because the housing and homelessness policy I cover every week doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes from somewhere. And the people we serve are living out the consequences of decisions that were made, in some cases, decades before any of us knew their names.

In his final address from the Oval Office in January 2025, outgoing President Biden warned about what he called a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people. He was already on his way out of office when he said it so it was lost in the noise. But, he was naming the same forces behind the HUD fight that is decimating Los Angeles homelessness services.

A Plan Fifty Years in the Making

Project 2025, the policy blueprint that's shaped so much of what we've seen out of Washington this year, gets talked about like it appeared out of nowhere in 2023. It didn't.

It's the ninth version of something called Mandate for Leadership, first written for Ronald Reagan in 1981 by the Heritage Foundation. The goal hasn't changed but the methods have been updated every few years: shrink the federal government down to whatever conservative ideology says it should be, and staff what's left with loyalists.

One piece of that plan matters more than any other for what I cover here. It's called Schedule F, and it strips civil service protections from federal employees so they can be fired at will. Project 2025 calls for using it to remove an estimated 50,000 federal workers.

A Second Track, Coming From Our Own Back Yard

At the same time this institutional plan was maturing inside a Washington think tank, a different current was building in Silicon Valley. A blogger named Curtis Yarvin, writing under the name Mencius Moldbug, spent years arguing that democracy itself is the problem: too slow, too accountable, too easily captured by people he didn't like. His proposed fix was a government run more like a corporation, with a CEO instead of a citizenry. He gave his version of Schedule F its own name: RAGE, for Retire All Government Employees.

Yarvin found an audience among a small circle of tech billionaires, chief among them Peter Thiel. Thiel funded Yarvin's work, and by most credible accounts treats him as something close to a house philosopher. Thiel also mentored a young venture capitalist named J.D. Vance, starting at a talk Thiel gave at Yale Law School in 2011. Thiel later hired Vance, backed his venture fund, backed his Senate campaign, and introduced him to Donald Trump. Vance has quoted Yarvin's ideas in his own speeches.

RAGE was never only about federal employees. Yarvin has spent close to two decades writing about who counts as a productive member of society and what should happen to people who don't. I'm not going to get into what he's said here. It's ugly enough that it deserves its own piece, not a paragraph.

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

– Attributed to Louis Brandeis (earliest documented source: Raymond Lonergan, 1941)

When Two Bad Ideas Come Together

RAGE became DOGE. DOGE proposed cutting 84% of the staff in the HUD office that administers homelessness assistance grants, and 77% of the staff who enforce fair housing law. The Continuum of Care funding fight I've covered for months is still working its way through federal court.

On August 7, a federal judge in Rhode Island vacated HUD's FY2026 Continuum of Care funding notice, ruling the agency skipped the public notice-and-comment process required by law. At the center of it was a $1.3 billion set-aside that would have pulled money away from permanent housing and toward transitional housing and services, along with new eligibility conditions. It's the second time this year the same judge has ruled against HUD on this program.

That fight, like the staffing cuts before it, is downstream of an idea that started as a blog post about firing everyone who works for the government.

More to Come

I'm still reading Durán's book so this is part one of a short series. Next week: what Yarvin actually believes should happen to people society decides are unproductive, in his own words, and where that worldview is already showing up on a map. The week after: what happened when that worldview led to a funding notice for LA County, and what we do about it.

Naming this system is about knowing what you're actually up against, so the community-led solutions I write about in this newsletter can be built with clear eyes about the forces working against them.

More soon.
Paul

Sources

Production by Delux Multimedia · deluxmultimedia.com

Housing Justice, Federal Policy, HomelessnessPaul McSheahousing justice, homelessness, HUD, Continuum of Care, Housing First, Project 2025, Schedule F, tech policy, federal funding, Second Grace LAComment