I’ve been reading Durán on socials for a while and pre-ordered The Nerd Reich as soon as that was possible.

It is an incredible bummer that a few thousand weirdos have accumulated so much, and even more of a bummer, for lack of sufficient invectives, curses, and scenes of pianos and ACME safes and potted flowers falling on their heads one after the other just before they light an exploding cigar only to get get hit by a speeding locomotive and then run over by a municipal bus full of commuters, that a pile of them are fascists. That they beclown themselves so thoroughly is at least a hopeful preview of their future demise but in the meantime, here we are.

And so of course they merit another book by and for the left detailing all of the material power they’ve marshaled for the right, and why.

I have friends who enjoy hate reads. We have learned to make them hide the links they posts to each other so that the rest of us don’t accidentally follow. This book is not a hate read, but if you are like me, you will not exactly enjoy reading it. This kind of read renews my enthusiasm for not extending libertarians any generosity whatsoever, a limitless enthusiasm that needs no renewal. And so it takes me a while to get through because I have to treat this kind of nonsense like an assignment to myself, which I keep putting down saying things like “god damn it” and “what an asshole” and so on.

Durán includes dozens of pages of citations. This is great because it made for a happy surprise when I finished the final chapter with plenty of paper left in my right hand.

I haven’t used these citations to look up any of the more frustrating claims Durán makes, and I need to be cause I winced near the end of the penultimate chapter, Antichrist, when Durán cites a poll that found that 44% of American christians support a specific weird set of principles the book has presented. This is of course plausible (that said poll exists and concludes such a thing) but the conclusion it comes to, to me, is not. I’m not a christian and so who am I to know what’s going on with American christians lately but I don’t think it is plausible that many of them share even basic beliefs about what their own religion is all about. I winced similarly when reading a Good Naomi (Klein) book’s story about some beclowning of their own that SFO Airport officials got up to, I think in The Shock Doctrine, which I happened to have just read a bunch about, when her telling of the same tale was fine but a little off.

I winced because I like to think I’m reading stuff like this from the high ground, and not also mad and titled by and like the subjects being described but of course I am mad and tilted, and I don’t know how anyone can write bout this stuff without feeling similarly and maybe allowing a little of that frustration to bend their analysis. It’s fine, whatever.

A great gift for the tech executives in your life, or if you like tilting your actual friends, them too I guess. I really hope a bunch of people read it and come to the obvious conclusions Durán has come to, and so it is nice to see it and Durán get the attention it merits. I would much rather that hard line dogmatic poll-driven pluralistic better-things-are-worse-actually aw shucks there is no such thing as neoliberalism third-way Atlantic reading capital D democrats read it. Haha, just kidding… unless?