Silicon Valley billionaires’ war on democracy

This is fresh air. I'm Tonya Mosley. For 20 years, Silicon Valley's unofficial slogan has been to move fast and break things, the breaking, the price of progress. But my guess today says what's being broken right now is American democracy. In his new book, journalist Gilderan argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place. As the outgoing president Joe Biden gave a similar warning against what he called the rise of a tech industrial complex. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation and able to abuse the power. The free press is crumbling. Others are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies, toll for power and for profit. We must hold the social platform accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequence of technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risk for our economy and our security, our society. It's a very, for humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation. Five days after that speech, at President Trump's inauguration and the seat's closest to the president, the ones normally reserved for family and former presidents, sat some of the most powerful men in tech, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pachai. And later that day, Musk stood behind the presidential seal and made a gesture much of the world red as a Nazi salute. Durant's new book, The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, argues that the men behind the president that day were not there to celebrate him. Their presence was proof that 30 years of patient well-funded work had finally paid off. He writes that some of them were inspired by a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted digital money would dissolve countries. And with a blogger named Curtis Yarvan, who argued America should be run like a corporation by a CEO with the powers of a dictator. Gilderan began his career at the San Jose Mercury News, then spent 15 years in California politics, working with Diane Feinstein, Jerry Brown, and Kamala Harris. He returned to journalism in 2018, running the opinion pages at the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner. He now writes the newsletter The Nerd Reich. Gild, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. There was a time when a book like this, arguing that tech billionaires are unmasking themselves, and they have this plan to end American democracy and replace it with things like corporate city states. It would have been shelved as a bunch of different conspiracy theories, but a lot of what you write about you didn't have to uncover. You didn't have to unmask. You built the case out of their own writings and speeches and interviews, because basically they have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years. I think we were witnessing the unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics. They finally were comfortable to reveal their full selves to everyone. I think for many years their democratic alignment was mostly self-interest, because we had democratic presidents who had important contracts, government contracts, who had power. They needed to get along with whoever had power. Now that Trump was returning to power, they saw an opportunity to align with him and to try to realign the country's politics to something more to their liking. I think it's grown quietly as we've seen many of these people become billionaires and multi-billionaires and even one temporarily become a trillionaire. Once you have people who have so much wealth amassed, then they want power. But for some people in Silicon Valley, specifically Peter Teal, this idea of using technology to amass wealth and then turn that into monopolistic political power is something that was not accidental. It was something that was carefully cultivated over many decades. As you said, none of my book came from secret documents or it's not guessing. This is stuff that these guys have been saying on the record very explicitly for decades. Let's break this down a little bit more because I mean, most people might assume that if democracy breaks under all of this tech money and power, it's collateral damage because these are rich men chasing profit and the country suffers along the way. Part of a big part of what you are also arguing is the opposite of that, that the breaking actually is the goal. Definitely. My book is about a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that in the 21st century technology will make democracy obsolete. And it goes back a few decades. In 1997, if you want to know the full root of it, there was a book that came out called the Sovereign Individual that predicted that in the 21st century, technology would result in the end of democracy and nation states like the United States. Specifically, the book said that two technologies, one something called cyber currency, which we would today consider crypto, and another called Advanced Automation, which is basically AI, would collapse the economy and thereby the government itself and would lead to the rise of a new cognitive elite. These Sovereign individuals, wealthy individuals, who by making the right investments and the right moves, would be able to profit from the destruction of the United States and other democratic nation states. And the book was very poorly reviewed and sounded like a conspiracy cookbook to most people, but it had such a profound effect on Peter Teal that he has credited it for being one of the reasons why he started PayPal as an effort to get ahead of this predicted cyber currency that would transform politics in the 21st century. Right, Peter Teal read it, he grabbed onto it. He, as you mentioned, is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and he's a major funder of Facebook, which made him a billionaire. You know, in particular, when we talk about Teal in the past, it has always been that some of his ideas around democracy and politics were strange and fringe. He'd written among other things that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were, were compatible. And part of what you're saying here is this book, the Sovereign Individual had a huge impact on his belief system, but how did that form his desires and aspirations? Well, in the decades after the Sovereign Individual was published, you see Teal continue to make moves that are clearly based on the book. But of course, you have to know the book in order to know that, and most people were not familiar with the book, because while it became a cult hit in Silicon Valley later, at the time, it was sort of an obscure book that many reviewers dismissed as Kooky Conspiracy Theory apocalyptic. Yeah, right, the United States is going to be collapsing in the 21st century. This seemed like a joke back in the good old days of 1997. But in the subsequent years, Teal goes on to give speeches and write essays where he talks about the rise of a digital currency that's coming, and then we'll subvert everything and cannot be stopped by Washington, which will have zero idea of what it's really about. In 2010, he gives a speech where he says that government is fundamentally evil. And this is weird, because at the time, he's a co-founder of Palantir, which was started with investment from the CIA, and which is a major government contractor. So you'd usually don't see government contractors calling the government fundamentally evil in public forums, and he goes on to become somebody who spreads these ideas to other important figures in Silicon Valley, like Mark and Dreson, like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. And in his book, Zero to One, which is about startups and how to succeed in Silicon Valley in business, Peter Teal says it's important to start a business that runs like a cult, because cults are organizations of total dedication, where people care about them more than anything else. And this is the way to really get things done, is to start your own cult. And I would say that what Peter Teal is able to do is take his fringe interest in these ideas and sort of start a cult where he spread them to other important people who are now mostly billionaires and who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our election and are aligned behind Trump. And if you look at what Trump is doing, a lot of the ideas that he's pursuing our ideas that were first thought of. and promoted by Peter Till and these billionaires. >> Till's protégé is the vice president, JD Vance, his surveillance company, as you said, holds the ICE contract. Sixteen of his people work inside the administration. So this has gone beyond occult within Silicon Valley, and now it touches government. With JD Vance in particular, you write that he is essentially Till's investment. He helped Vance get his first job in tech, his conversion to Catholicism. He funded his Senate seat, walk us through how that relationship carried Vance to the White House. >> Vance first met Till at Yale Law School in 2011, when Till gave a speech there. And Till invited him to come out to California someday. Within a couple of years, Vance's in Silicon Valley, working for a venture capital fund that was co-founded by Till. Then when Vance goes back to Ohio, decides to start his own venture fund, it's with money from Peter Till, Mark Andrews, Senate and others. When Vance decides to run for Senate, it's with $15 million from Peter Till, which was the most money any single individual had ever spent to get someone elected to the US Senate. And when Vance was being considered for Vice President, it was Till who made the piece between Vance and Trump, because Vance had previously, when he was anti-Trump, referred to Trump as America's Hitler. So at every step of the way, it's Peter Till who's clearing the way for JD Vance, who, after being an anti-Trump Republican, goes on to become a full-throated Trump supporter and pro-Trump attack dog, and who during his Senate campaign was quoting Curtis Yarvan, this tech fascist philosopher, who has openly stated that the United States needs to get rid of democracy and replace it with a monarch, a king or a dictator. And so you see the total effect of Peter Till in completely shifting Vance's political identity. And it's shocking that so quickly Vance got into the White House. And that's when I thought, this is really going beyond what I thought it would. When I started looking at this stuff a few years ago, I knew it was dangerous, but I didn't think it would be a danger to the country until five or ten years from now. When Vance got on the ticket, it became clear these ideas are going directly into the White House. And what was shocking to me is that very few people mentioned the till relationship, the depth of the till relationship, or the extremism of the ideas behind it. Now I want to talk about one of the other men you write about. Bology Strenovasen, he's a venture capitalist who writes among other things about replacing countries with privately owned startup societies, which we'll talk about at length a little later. But Strenovasen in 2023 goes on a podcast and describes how tech is taking over San Francisco. You reported that out and the piece went viral. And there's something very specific that he talked about regarding strategy with the red and the blues and then the grays that he describes the tech world as. Can you explain that? Certainly. So Bology Strenovasen is a protégé of Peter Till, who was turned on to the book, the sovereign individual by Peter Till and considers it prescient, an important document that tells us where we're going. And in 2013 he gave a speech in which he said that tech needed to succeed essentially from the United States. That it was time for Silicon Valley to move out of this country, get away from democracy and develop its own new political systems, which raised some eyebrows at the time, but sort of seemed, I think, silly and eccentric to most people. Not like a, it wasn't a serious idea. It wasn't taken seriously, at least. By 2023, Strenovasen had updated his idea to a new political strategy by which something called the gray tribe, which he defined as the tech people in politics, who were a rising force in US politics, the CEOs, the founders, the billionaires, would form this tech gray tribe. And this gray tribe would partner with the red tribe, the Republicans, to basically oust and purge the blue tribe, the Democrats, from the city of San Francisco. He was using San Francisco as a test case. And this idea of the reds and the grays teaming up against the blues very much seems to be the strategy that's being pursued in Silicon Valley. In fact, in 2024 there was a conference in San Francisco where there was a conference where was basically the Heritage Foundation, the right wing Heritage Foundation, and the venture capitalists of San Francisco meeting to compare notes and share the stage. And the title of the conference was reboot, the new reality. And the website for this conference said the new reality is already here. It's just not visible yet. And basically argued that tech was waking up to politics. And we were about to see this new power unleashed. And that new reality ended up being very much what Serena Vossen spelled out, combining behind the Trump administration to create an unprecedented disruption and attack on American democracy. And what Trump is getting out of it is to be funded. So more power. But I'm just, what do you know about his relationship with some of these powerful guys, specifically the men that you write about, which come to be around like six or so men who hold an extraordinary amount of power through their wealth? The way to understand Trump's relationship with Silicon Valley is through crypto. Trump used to hate crypto. He called crypto a scam. And they basically said that there was, it was in a real currency. Only the dollar is real currency. He was the number one hater of crypto when he was president the first time. And on the day he returned to the White House in 2025, he became a crypto billionaire because billions of dollars are being funneled to the Trump family and his into their coffers through crypto. And crypto basically is a weapon of mass corruption. It's a way that Silicon Valley can funnel massive amounts of money into the political system. And for some reason, the corruption is so massive that it's even hard for people to explain. The Trump family has a mass billions through crypto and it's normal. It's just become business as usual now in Washington. You know, when you reported about the reds and the grays and the use of the reds to gain power for the grays, what you reported went viral. And Srinivasan actually came after you and that's when somebody inside the crypto world actually sent you a message that gave you the title of this book because it is a provocative book using Reich in the title. Yes. People give me credit for the title of the nerd Reich, but I did not come up with that. It was after I wrote about Srinivasan and it went viral and I was under attack for several days with people threatening me with lawsuits claiming I had made the entire story up even though everything was hyperlinked, you could go see the videos for yourself and some people even sending scarier threats than that. Someone from the crypto world reached out to me in a direct message and said, you know, we've been calling these guys the nerd Reich for years. And that was surprising to me. It was shocking and I looked and no one was using that title for anything so I grabbed it and rebranded it as the nerd Reich. But I think it's important to note that this is not an aim I came up with. This is their own peers. These are people who largely agree with them on matters of technology and even on some political stuff, but consider them so extreme and hard-edged that they were comparing them to the third Reich via the name the nerd Reich. What's it been like for you, you know, in reading this book, it's really clear to me you've got lots of footnotes here and sources here, other media sources, these guys own writings and their interviews and speeches and private folks that have talked to you that want to remain anonymous. What have your efforts been like to talk to these guys directly, particularly Teal, Serena Vassan? I put in interview requests to all of them and most of them did not reply. Except Yarvan did reply. He wouldn't give me an interview, but we went back and forth and he wrote me many, many long emails, some of them flattering, some of them insulting, attempting to draw me into some kind of public debate instead of an interview. Finally, he realized that all the emails were the interview and stopped writing. But they mostly don't want to talk about this stuff. I think their goal is to hope that people don't read this book, that it just sort of fades away, nobody cares, nobody's interested in this deeper story of what's happening with Silicon Valley. But so far over the past year, it seems like people are really tuning in to what's happening. And people are looking for answers of why has Silicon Valley aligned with Trump? Why does this all seem so extreme? Why aren't there any billionaire standing up and saying, hey, this stuff is wrong. The president shouldn't be raking in crypto, wealth, and destroying the Constitution. I don't think their strategy of silence is going to last for long. I think they're going to have to answer for some of these things. Our guest today is journalist Gildaran. short break, we'll hear more about the blogger Curtis Yarvan. I'm Tonya Mosley and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley and my guest today is journalist Gildaran. His new book, The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy makes the case that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires has come to see democracy as an obstacle and has spent the last 30 years building the argument and the machinery to get around it. Durand is a former newspaper reporter who spent 15 years working in democratic politics with Diane Feinstein, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris before returning to journalism. I just want to spend just a little bit of time on Curtis Yarvan. He was a blogger. It was like the 2000s where he began writing under a pin name and he was arguing even back then that democracy had failed that America should be run by a CEO who was essentially a dictator and that the entire federal workforce should be fired. And for years, the only people who really read him were kind of in certain corners of the internet. So how did he and Teal find each other? In April 2009, Peter Teal wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote mark the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy. At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about. Well, this caused a lot of outcry and criticism of Teal who had to go back and say I didn't mean to say I'm not saying that women shouldn't have the vote, etc. But one of the people who publicly defended Peter Teal at that time was Curtis Yarvan who was writing at the time under the name of Minches Moldbug. And sometime after Yarvan's public defense of Teal, the two met up and Teal becomes an important promoter and funder of Yarvan's work, which is very unusual because Curtis Yarvan is this computer programmer and he writes these anonymous blogs where he calls basically for the end of the United States and the end of democracy and the installation of a monarch or a dictator and the purging of the federal government under a future administration where a president would act as an authoritarian. And no one should have ever heard of Curtis Yarvan's name. But through Teal, he meets people like Mark Andreessen who helps fund his company. He has this company trying to remake the internet from scratch. Hasn't quite worked out, but Curtis Yarvan becomes a millionaire and becomes an important voice in what's known as the tech right. And over time, his word spreads through Silicon Valley and even JD Vance is quoting him before he runs for Senate in podcasts, quoting his ideas specifically for a future president to take power and start acting like a dictator, starting with purging the government of massive amounts of federal employees. Right, this is where I want to slow down because he writes all of this stuff many, many years ago. But then now we are here, Gil, this idea of rage, which you were just about to talk about, the retire all government employees. And 10 years later, Doge actually fires hundreds of thousands of federal workers. And you write that it isn't, it's not even clear that Trump has ever heard of Curtis Yarvan. So how does a bloggers idea become a federal policy? Through the Silicon Valley donors, they brought those ideas to Washington. Clearly, JD Vance helped bring those ideas to Washington. And that was one of those points, too, when I think even the establishment press finally realized the New York Times and others wrote about this, that the idea we came to know as Doge, where Elon Musk was installed basically as the CEO of the federal government to cut and purge and destroy as much of it as possible, came from Curtis Yarvan's idea of rage, retire all government employees. And that's in early 2025, Curtis Yarvan becomes an international celebrity because it's so clear that he's the guy behind Doge. In fact, the Washington Post had a story saying that this is the guy behind the Doge idea, rage, and that even people in the Trump administration had said they'd all read Curtis Yarvan. So these crazy ideas move from the margins of society, from these random anonymous weirdo blogs on the internet to federal policy under Donald Trump. Now Doge didn't really last very long and it ended up collapsing. You really can't have a CEO ego challenging the presidency go, but that wasn't the only idea that Yarvan had. He had also suggested that the United States should completely undo its diplomatic standing in the world, stop being the defender of freedom and democracy, and specifically should cut international aid programs. And we saw that happen as well with the USAID cuts, which are predicted to cause millions of unnecessary preventable deaths in the poorest countries in the world. So that's why I think it's important to realize that the weird stuff these guys say in their blogs or in their speeches is not just eccentric fluff because they have so much money, they can turn these weird ideas into policy and cause tremendous damage. And I believe that that's what we're seeing now is the execution of these bizarre and dangerous ideas on a scale that even I didn't think was imaginable when all this first started. I think that's the thing. It's kind of hard when there's so many ideas out there because I went looking for some of Yarvan's writings and it's really hard to tell where his arguments end and really essentially where his trolling begins. For instance, you actually write about an essay where he imagines San Francisco's government replaced by a corporation and then wonders whether the people it deems unproductive in society could then be converted into fuel for city buses. And then he says he's kidding, but you have decided that these jokes aren't really jokes because it sounds completely astounding and ridiculous on the face of it. Well, what he says after he says he's kidding is that the idea is that we need a humane alternative to genocide for the poor. And I suppose that's what we're seeing in the USAID cuts where we're just going to let disease and starvation take away people and in their lives. And so part of what they do is they tell the truth in these long-winded absurd ways. They tell their truths. They speak their true message, but they slightly disguise it as satire. But now it's become very clear that Yarvan's not joking and that the billionaires who support Kurdish-Jarvan are not joking. They see their chance to strip away the federal bureaucracy and regulations to end international aid programs and to really undermine the very constitutional basis of our government by exerting their authority through crypto and all the things that they say or the things that they do. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist and author Gil Doran. His new book is called The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. We'll be back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mooseley and my guest is journalist Gil Doran. His new book is The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. I want to break down this fascination with the idea of the network state and what we're actually talking about here. So what is a network state? What does daily life inside of one look like? Well, the most basic definition of a network state, according to St. Abbasin, is a community that forms online of like-minded people who then decide to go and crowdfund a new territory somewhere and start their own country. And what does life look like in a network state? We don't really have an answer to that because not many people will spend much time in them. But the idea has manifested in two ways. One could say that the tech take over of our current government, its alignment with Trump, is an attempt at the network state idea using their money and influence to take over an existing government and turn it to their purposes. But we also see some projects around the world where they are trying to create new nations. One of them is in Honduras called Prospera, where a group of tech billionaires have funded a new settlement that has like an office building and a hotel and some residences which they're trying to develop into a new sovereign territory where the regular- usual regulations and laws don't apply. And Teal has funded this as well as a few others like Sam Altman and Srinivasan. And Mark Andreessen. Through a company called Pronomous Capital, they have a whole company, a venture capital company that's dedicated to funding these projects around the world. And this is very unpopular in Honduras where the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and the legislature passed a law saying that these kinds of projects are actually not allowed. So that's one example. There's another example called Praxis, which is a proposed city also funded by Pronomous Capital and a bunch of tech billionaires that was originally going to build a new city somewhere in the Mediterranean. But after a not finding anybody who wanted this tech city in the Mediterranean, decided it would be built in Greenland. And this coincided with Trump threatening to take Greenland. In fact, some of these guys went over there and toured Greenland and we're making a lot of noise about how if we take Greenland, we're going to build this the city here. So Trump also has this idea that he proposed in 2023 to build what he calls Freedom Cities on federal land. Basically have a competition to see who wants to build a new city and somebody wins the competition, they get federal land to build a new city. So there's this idea that billionaires need to fund the creation of their own cities so that they can govern them as they wish. We've also seen some efforts that seem very similar here in California. California forever is this proposed city in Salano County near San Francisco where a group of billionaires secretly spent $900 million to buy up 60,000 acres of land in a place with no water, no infrastructure, no roads, and a law that specifically prevents these kinds of projects from being built there. And now they're trying to impose it on the people of Salano County where 70% of voters oppose the project. And some people say, well, that's not really a network state, but the question is why do billionaires suddenly need to build a bunch of cities everywhere? That is the question. And also, if these cities get built, who gets to live in them and who gets to who gets excluded? What is the world that they're trying to build? A world that they fully control. A world where no one can question their authority. And a world where they can exclude anyone they don't want they don't like or they don't have anything in common with. They are trying to build new territories from scratch. And this is not a new idea. It's occurred throughout history, people trying to build new zones and territories where they can escape the regular rules, regular tax, et cetera. The difference is that now instead of just trying to escape taxes or certain laws, they want to build zones to escape democracy altogether. And it's amazing the degree to which this is openly discussed to the point that there's even a company that's funding these projects and an annual conference, the network state conference, which anyone can look up on YouTube, where they talk about their plans to create this new world of tech-controlled cities. The president in particular, you talked about those freedom cities that he was proposing. There were 10 freedom cities built from scratch on federal land. As you mentioned, a contest for the best designs. And he never really explained why the country needs these new cities instead of investing in the ones we already have. And you make this point that the press that covered the announcement didn't really ask the questions. This idea has kind of moved on. But the president has even talked about this is a possibility for Gaza. Definitely. One of the places this popped up in the most absurd and shocking way was in Gaza. Where President Trump posted a video, an AI-generated video of Trump casino in Gaza on the beach with money raining down and Elon Musk and this sort of fantasy of a future techno-utopia Gaza. And there's a proposal to actually build this thing in Gaza. And everywhere you look, you're seeing this idea that things will be replaced with new tech billionaire cities. In fact, there's Gaza. Some tech billionaires have proposed building a new freedom city at Guad-Tonnamo Bay in Cuba when the United States invaded Venezuela and arrested President Maduro. Someone chimed in and said it's time to build a freedom city in Venezuela. So this idea of freedom cities, which are network states, keeps recurring. And it's not clear whether Trump will actually pull it off. We haven't heard a lot about the 10 freedom cities on federal land. So I think that would be a disaster when he's running out of time to do it. But you do see some of the most powerful men in the world calling for the creation of these new cities. Gaza, Greenland, Guad-Tonnamo, you name it. And that's where I think it becomes most clear that they're serious about this. These guys, not all of them are exactly happy with the Trump administration. You write about Curtis Yarvan in particular who says the second revolution is failing and that he has told his allies, he plans to leave the country. Other tech billionaires also have homes and lands and trying to build other cities, as you said, like in other places. What does that tell us if the architects are also considering packing and leaving the country? Curtis Yarvan is definitely panicking. And saying it's time to leave the country. But if you look at what he's saying underneath that, it's that Trump needs to go further. That Trump needs to be full authoritarian, full fascist and make it clear that this is no longer a democracy and that he won't be letting go of power. And that if he doesn't do that, there will be great punishment later for everyone who is involved in this. So it's an argument for being more extreme. In the meantime, Peter Tiel appears to be taking his advice. He recently bought a $12 million mansion in Argentina, which and he seems to be spending time there now with his family. He was there for two months. Now he's returned for another visit. So in a weird way, you can always see Tiel pointing the direction to where things are going. And if Trump doesn't go full authoritarian and sees power and keep it, then I think a lot of billionaires who participated in this are going to be nervous and fearful of the possibility of real accountability and might seek to escape elsewhere. Bollinger's Renovasen, the network state guy has fled to Singapore and is now planning to start his new nation in Kazakhstan, which is an authoritarian country. So they might end up this handful of billionaires floating out there looking for something besides the United States. What is it like for you to be immersed in this world? Be writing about it to the degree that you're writing about it, both on your blog and in this book and you're sitting in some dark things. And it sounds like conspiracies to many people who may not be steeped in it. It was tough at first. I felt like some people looked at me like I had three heads, including some of my friends. A lot of my colleagues and journals and people have known for decades who knew me when I was the press secretary for every important person in California. Didn't even mention to me when I'd be going viral, but I feel like I was just a little bit ahead of the curve and other people are now all there and everyone understands what I'm talking about. They're hearing it in other places too. And so I just think that I did what I set out to do as a journalist. Every journalist's dream is to find a story that isn't being told and to tell it in time, to tell it urgently, but I think there's power and hope in being able to explain to people what is happening and give them the tools and the understanding they need to fight back and to explain it to others. Guilderan, thank you for this conversation. Thank you. Guilderan's new book is The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. After a short break, rock critic Kintucker celebrates the 50th anniversary of the soundtrack to the film Sparkle, produced by Curtis Mayfield and sung by Aretha Franklin. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Sparkle is a 1976 movie about a girl group loosely based on the Supremes. The film wasn't a huge hit, but it has a devoted cult following and rock critic Kintucker says its soundtrack is an eclectic classic. Aretha Franklin sings all of the songs on the album, which was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield. Kint thinks it includes some of Franklin's finest performances, and now on its 50th anniversary, he offers a fresh appreciation of Sparkle. The movie Sparkle follows the troubles and triumphs of a trio of singers trying to make it in the soul music world of the 1960s. Released in 1976, Sparkle was the film debut of Irene Cara, who'd become a big star four years later in the movie Fame. The movie was only a modest success, and what now seems most impressive about Sparkle are Curtis Mayfield's songs, as sung by Aretha Franklin. The movie Sparkle is a classic classic, and what now seems most impressive are the rock critic Kintucker. ♪ I got the car so bright ♪ ♪ When I'm pumped, there was nothing less ♪ ♪ I do believe I found myself ♪ ♪ And I won't give it to your baby ♪ ♪ Oh yeah ♪ - That's looking to your heart, a dreamy ballad powered by Arita's passionate singing. As is true of every song here, Franklin is holding nothing back. She's pouring as much of herself into these Curtis Mayfield compositions, as she did in the staggeringly great series of hits singles she made for Atlantic records in the late 60s. Mayfield was of course familiar with the ways of Hollywood movie music as the man who gave us the theme from the Blacksploitation film classic Shaft in 1972. For me, Sparkle's high point is Mayfield's five minute production of "Hooked on Your Love." It begins as a smooth medium tempo tune with Arita's vocal gliding atop a glittering string section and backup vocals by the Kitty Haywood singers. ♪ Your sad and smart gives me happy thoughts of you ♪ ♪ Baby, you got me so close to the dreams ♪ ♪ Now they have to come true ♪ ♪ Oh baby, nothing to be shopping ♪ ♪ Nothing we have left ♪ ♪ Oh loving you, don't confuse you ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪ Then deeper into it, Franklin gives a demonstration of the song's title. How being "Hooked," addicted to love, becomes an intense craving. Arita's gospel-rooted passionate shouting turns out to be the perfect way to convey this ecstatic obsession. ♪ What can I do with this feeling ♪ ♪ Yeah, happy now ♪ ♪ What can I do? ♪ ♪ Yeah, baby ♪ ♪ Oh, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ What can I do? ♪ ♪ Who may? ♪ ♪ With this feeling ♪ ♪ Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me ♪ Arita gives another fantastic performance on the album's first single, a moody, sexy number called "Something He Can Feel." The song went to number one on the R&B chart, but stalled at 28 on the Billboard pop chart. The album itself barely cracked the top 20 and only briefly at that. This is what I mean about sparkle being such an underrated achievement for both Franklin and Mayfield. ♪ Minisee, the time to your ♪ ♪ To let you know this where I come from ♪ ♪ Oh, but you will see ♪ ♪ There's just a matter of time ♪ ♪ My love is sure to make you mine ♪ ♪ Oh, give it a try ♪ ♪ Get a life ♪ ♪ Everybody around seems so time ♪ ♪ My life is wrong ♪ ♪ It's all right ♪ ♪ But my man, my man ♪ ♪ I like the kinds of ways we have our fun ♪ ♪ 'Cause loving ways send me ♪ ♪ Oh, you know ♪ ♪ Yeah, heaven, my man ♪ ♪ People I may get understand ♪ ♪ I'm giving it something here and here ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ To let him know this love ♪ ♪ My love is here ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ I'm giving it something here and here ♪ As I said earlier, sparkle wasn't a smash in 1976, but it developed an intense cult following that has reverberations. I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that Dreamgirl's a far bigger success in 1981 bears a striking resemblance to sparkle. Sparkle was remade in 2012, starring Jordan Sparks and Whitney Houston, and was a modest hit. But the collaboration between Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield transcends the movie. It stands on its own as a rich, risk-taking collection that deserves a re-evaluation in 20th century pop music history. Ken Tucker looked back at the 50th anniversary of the sparkle soundtrack sung by Aretha Franklin. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretan, his new film Spider-Man, Brand New Day, just had the biggest opening weekend in movie history. But before Marvel, he worked in a group home for at-risk teens, an experience that shaped everything he's made since then, and became the movie short-term 12. I hope you can join us. [MUSIC PLAYING] Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishevsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Enmari Baldonado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Baya Chaliner, Anna Balman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper, Susan Nakhindi, directed today's show, with Terry Gross, I'm Tony Musley. [MUSIC PLAYING] ♪ Jump, we're going to hear ♪