Nerd Reich: The Sequel to Revenge of the Nerds That No One Wanted | Part Two

Letters to the Housed | September 1, 2026 | By Paul Asplund | Second Grace LA

Fascism rarely announces itself. It arrives as a line item, a no-bid contract, a "freedom city" with no room for the people who need housing most. Our future is still in our hands. | image by Ivan S. of Pexels

Curtis Yarvin's own words on who counts as disposable, and how the same ideology now reaches Palantir's federal contracts and California's billionaire-backed megacity.

Hello Neighbors,

I’m still reading and digesting Gil Durán’s Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy and since he’s a better writer than me, and I’ll never be able to cover it fully here, I recommend you get your own copy at bookshop.org (they don’t pay me anything to send you there). That way, you can dig into this story yourself and see how these ideas have shaped current policy. I’m just touching on the highlights and how they affect housing policy, and here’s what I found this week.

Curtis Yarvin, the blogger whose ideas I wrote about last week, responding to a journalist's article about him, wrote that the state homeless budget might as well be spent on cyanide. He called it cheaper. In his own words, he considered it the more humane option.

Yarvin has written much about who counts as productive and what should happen to people who don't. Here’s a glimpse. I think it explains more about the last two years of federal housing policy than any budget document I've read.

Who Is Curtis Yarvin, and Why Does He Matter

Yarvin is a former software developer who spent years blogging under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, arguing that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced with something closer to a monarchy, a country run by a CEO instead of citizens. Back in 2008, writing about how a corporate-run San Francisco should handle people he called unproductive, he floated turning them into biodiesel to power city buses. He said he was joking. Then he kept writing, and concluded that the real goal was what he called a humane alternative to genocide: permanent isolation instead of death.

Last week I sketched the throughline from Yarvin to Thiel to Vance, but there's a piece worth updating rather than repeating, because Palantir hasn't slowed down. In April, the company posted a 22-point manifesto from CEO Alex Karp arguing for AI weapons, a return to military conscription, and what he called the West's innate superiority. British Members of Parliament called it the ramblings of a supervillain. Gil Durán responded to it on X with two words: "TLDR: Fascism." Within days, X banned his account, and it has never been reinstated. No explanation was given, and X has a documented pattern of pushing users toward right-wing content regardless of their own political leanings.

The government's reliance on Palantir kept growing the entire time. DHS extended the company's ICE surveillance contract through 2026 at a value topping $139 million. This month, ICE moved to fold LexisNexis's identity-resolution data directly into Palantir's systems, and the Pentagon quietly authorized up to $244 million more for Palantir through 2027, without competitive bidding and without specifying what the money is for. This is the company Peter Thiel co-founded and still shapes. It isn't a fringe internet character funding abstract philosophy anymore. It's the intellectual water a sitting vice president has been swimming in for over a decade, and it's still expanding, one federal contract at a time.

Turning Their Backs On The 99%

Strip away the shock value and there's a coherent philosophy underneath, one that Balaji Srinivasan, another Thiel associate, laid out plainly in his book The Network State. Nation-states are obsolete, the argument goes. The future belongs to corporately-run enclaves, each one functioning as its own country, with no democratic vote required. Trace it back one more layer and you land on The Sovereign Individual, a 1999 book Thiel has cited as formative, which predicted that the wealthy would detach entirely from national governments and from the obligations that come with them: taxes, regulation, and the safety net most of us rely on.

In plain language: the goal was never a better government. The goal is exit from government, for people who can afford to leave the rest of us behind.

Last week I quoted Louis Brandeis, warning a century ago that we could have democracy or we could have wealth concentrated in a few hands, but not both. Gil Durán picks up that same warning in his own words.

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.” – Gil Durán

The Billionaires Are At The Gate

California Forever is a Silicon Valley-backed effort to build a new 400,000-person city in rural Solano County, funded by a group of billionaires who spent $900 million quietly buying up nearly 60,000 acres of land. It's directly aligned with the network state movement. In 2024, the project tried to get voter approval through a ballot measure, then abandoned that plan after polling showed roughly 70% of voters opposed, Democrats and Republicans alike.

As of this summer, Gov. Newsom’s office had been working to push the project through Sacramento instead, bypassing the voters who already said no. California Forever spent at least $330,000 lobbying the state legislature and the governor’s office since 2024, according to CalMatters, and hired a lobbying firm co-founded by one of Newsom’s closest friends. On August 25, Solano County’s Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to oppose the state legislation that would have fast-tracked the project, killing the maneuver for this year. Democracy said no a second time. When it does, this movement doesn’t accept the answer. It just looks for the next venue to ask the question again.

Trump has taken the same idea national, rebranding it "Freedom Cities," zones on federal land exempt from standard federal oversight, now being drafted into actual legislation.

What the movement's own materials don't answer, and that I haven't seen them answer anywhere else: what happens to affordable housing obligations, tenant protections, and homelessness services inside a zone built from the ground up to have as little regulation as possible? The answers I’ve written about before are likely the opposite of theirs: shared ownership, community land trusts, and housing decided by the people who live in it, not exit from the people who need it.

None of this is hidden anymore. When Trump held a military parade for his 79th birthday last June, Coinbase and Palantir helped sponsor it, and the Palantir logo flashed on screens behind him.

Next week: tracing the story from Yarvin to HUD’s funding notice for LA County, and what it's already cost us.

More soon.
Paul

Letters to the Housed, Housing Policy, Politics & PowerPaul AsplundNerd Reich, Silicon Valley, Curtis Yarvin, Gil Durán, Peter Thiel, Palantir, California Forever, network state, Freedom Cities, HUD, housing policy, homelessness, tech authoritarianism, Second Grace LA, Letters to the HousedComment