Strange Women Lying in Ponds

Jenny McBurney was among hundreds of people around the world who sprang into action last year when the Trump administration started deleting government datasets and webpages because they included information about “gender ideology”, environmental justice or diversity, equity and inclusion.

McBurney, a government publications librarian at the University of Minnesota, joined the Data Rescue Project, a group that mobilizes volunteers to archive critical government datasets that are at risk of deletion by the Trump administration.

While McBurney was working to archive censored datasets last spring, the Trump administration launched a sweeping campaign to censor American history and science in the National Park Service. National Park Service (NPS) rangers were instructed to flag and remove signs about slavery, Indigenous history and the climate crisis at national parks and historic sites around the country if they “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or advance a “corrosive ideology”.

McBurney realized that just like government datasets, national park signs also contained public information that was funded by public taxpayer dollars. Why not mobilize people to archive the information at risk of removal on national park signs too?

Last July, McBurney and several colleagues at the University of Minnesota libraries launched Save Our Signs: a crowdsourced project that aims to document every sign in the more than 400 national parks and historic sites across the country before the Trump administration removes them.

“One goal, of course, is to take pictures of the signs before they’re removed so we have a record of them,” McBurney said. “But a second goal is that we want to engage the public and make sure that people know that this is happening and ask them: What do you think about this? Is this OK with you? What do you think our American history story should be?”

Hundreds of volunteers, many of whom are anonymous, have submitted photos of national signage to the digital archive. As of 3 August, the site has compiled 17,236 photos, including at least one in nearly every national park and historic site in the country.

“The number of submissions we’ve gotten really demonstrates how much people do care about this – it’s not just an obscure little problem,” McBurney said.

For many, contributing to Save Our Signs has also become an important outlet for pushing back against the administration.

“In a lot of helpless moments, we look for control and look for something to put our hands into,” said Isabelle Boelter, a library assistant in the government publications department at the University of Minnesota. “Save Our Signs is that opportunity and chance: it allows us to face the history that the administration is trying to remove and disappear, and instead, we’re able to help protect it.”

Charlene Forsythe is one of the group’s most prolific contributors, having submitted more than 2,000 photos. She and her mom Karen Smith have visited 53 parks and historic sites together in the past four years, from Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico all the way to Independence national historic park in Philadelphia.

When Forsythe learned that the Trump administration was ordering the removal of national park signs, she knew she had to do something about it – so she sent her trove of photos to Save Our Signs.

“It just really irked me,” Forsythe said. “The truth is the truth, and we did bad things in our history as a nation and those things should be acknowledged in our national parks.”

Volunteers with Save Our Signs have documented the “before” photos of signs at several national parks where signs have been confirmed to have been removed or altered, including at Acadia national park, Cape Cod national seashore, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie national historic park, Gateway national park, Independence national park, Muir Woods national monument, the National Mall and the Virgin Islands national park.

Every six months, Boelter helps Save Our Signs volunteers review every photo submission to crop out identifying people or images and check for issues like glare that make it hard to read the text in the images.

For now, the future of the national park signs is still uncertain.

The removals have been part of an ongoing legal battle that began earlier this year when a group of national park advocacy groups sued the Department of Interior to try to block the removal of signs.

In June, a Massachusetts district judge ruled the Trump administration had to put back all the signs they removed, but the administration appealed and in July, an appeals judge reversed the lower court’s decision and ruled that the interior department no longer needs to reinstate all removed signs.

Regardless of what happens in court, McBurney hopes that the Save Our Signs project will exist as a resource and archive not just of the signs themselves, but of the public pushback against the Trump administration’s actions.

In April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk’s X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22‑point “technological manifesto”, which praised American “hard power”, western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: “TLDR: Fascism” (TLDR is short for “too long, didn’t read”).

Durán didn’t break any of X’s written rules, he points out over a video call from San Francisco – so much for Musk’s “free-speech absolutism”. His ban might just have had something to do with his preceding tweet, showing the cover of his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. The book’s central argument is that big tech is no longer our friend, as many of its billionaire owners have seized economic and political control and are steering the fate of the planet towards their own bizarre, apocalyptic visions.

Fascism is no exaggeration, Durán asserts. He researched multiple definitions – by Umberto Eco, Robert Paxton, Jason Stanley – and decided that Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement ticks all the boxes. “It’s a cult of grievance that seeks to purge its enemies by demonising them through absurd and surreal propaganda that exploits fears over law and order and gender and sexuality in order to seize power and install a permanent hierarchy that fascists consider the moral order of the world and the universe. In addition, you also have this sort of nationalistic, militaristic vibe.”

By extension, he says, Silicon Valley is fascist “because they have wholly aligned with a fascist movement. That’s their vehicle for gaining power.” Few could dispute this alignment after seeing the bosses of Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and OpenAI line up behind Trump at his second inauguration, or Musk’s now shuttered “department of government efficiency” (Doge) being given free rein to conduct mass firings of federal employees, or Palantir’s AI-driven surveillance technology enabling deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s a cosy relationship, Durán says: the tech titans have helped Trump and his family become billionaires through cryptocurrency and have been given government contracts and freedom from regulation or oversight.

In addition, Durán believes, “Silicon Valley has gone fascist because they have adopted an extreme ideology of tech supremacy.” While Maga promises a return to a mythical glorious past, he says, the “technofascists” are promising a mythical glorious future: “We’re going to be in the stars. We’re going to be in space. And all we need is to get rid of anybody who stands in our way as we seek to accelerate technology toward this speedy, violent, God-like transcendence that we will achieve if we can only burn enough energy and enough compute to bring our boom loop into existence.”

It sounds almost like a conspiracy theory, but Durán is not short of evidence. Musk making an apparent Nazi salute and describing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation”. Palantir’s Peter Thiel writing in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and giving a lecture series suggesting Greta Thunberg could be the antichrist. Marc Andreessen, the CEO of the tech investment company Andreessen Horowitz, paraphrasing Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the co-author of Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto, in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”: “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

Durán, a journalist and former political adviser, lays out the narrative in exacting detail, outlining the connections between these men (and it is all men) and the origins of their often deeply weird beliefs, many of which view everyone outside their circle or opposed to their agenda as expendable.

Unpacking all their overlapping philosophies would take some time, but TLDR: “It’s the idea that what matters more is the billions or trillions of people yet unborn in the future. And the only way they’re going to get to be born is if this elite group of white tech figures and gazillionaires makes the right decisions to make the human race transhuman and multiplanetary through AI and technology,” says Durán. “By becoming a billionaire, they all have this idea that they’re superior to everyone else. They are susceptible to this kind of thinking.”

Durán’s book traces the roots of this movement to two important sources. One is the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, written by the American investor James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, the former Times editor and BBC grandee (and father of Jacob). Their book prophesied how digital tools such as the internet and cryptocurrency would pave the way for a privatised, corporatised, unregulated, post-democratic future ruled by rich, powerful, unaccountable individuals. Two decades later, this led to the idea of “network states” – digital realms beyond the jurisdiction of nation states – as popularised by Balaji Srinivasan, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

The other source is Curtis Yarvin, a former software developer and armchair philosopher with a penchant for psychedelics, sometimes referred to as the godfather of the “dark enlightenment”. In pseudonymous blogs in the late 2000s, Yarvin outlined a worldview in which liberal democracy had failed to deliver progress, partly because institutions such as education and the media had been captured by what he called “the Cathedral”.

His proposed solution was a mass firing of government employees (he coined the acronym “Rage”, “retire all government employees”) and the installation of a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator”. Yarvin also mused about a “humane alternative to genocide” to deal with unproductive citizens and has had to deny accusations that he is a white supremacist or supports racist ideologies. Scratch the surface, Durán suggests, and Yarvin’s ideas have much in common with Nazi ideologies, “but updated as rightwing dogma for the blogging age”.

Both of these sources might have languished in obscurity had it not been for Thiel, the man at the heart of Silicon Valley’s rightward lurch. He has amassed enormous wealth through a series of investments in tech startups – first PayPal, then Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, Palantir and OpenAI, among others. He was the first major tech figure to back Donald Trump, in July 2016, and persuaded others to follow, including Andreessen, who said he spent half his time at Mar-a-Lago in the month after Trump won the 2024 election.

Thiel liked The Sovereign Individual so much that he wrote a new introduction when it was reprinted in 2020. He has also made steps to found his own network state – first via the ill-fated “seasteading” movement (establishing floating countries in international waters) then via Próspera, a “special economic zone” on an island in Honduras. Incorporated in 2017 with permission from the Honduran government and reportedly co-funded by Srinivasan, Andreessen and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Próspera has sought to attract digital startups with loose regulations (appealing to longevity researchers), low taxes and a crypto-friendly economy.

Other similar projects have sprung up. In 2021, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, hailed the mooted creation of a “Bitcoin City”. In 2023, Trump announced plans to build 10 “Freedom Cities” on government land across the US, with input from Próspera representatives. In 2024, Srinivasan founded a “Network School” in Johor, Malaysia.

Thiel also began to absorb Yarvin’s theories about how the political order was preventing progress. In the 2009 essay in which Thiel declared the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, he also said “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” made capitalist democracy impossible, which did not win him many mainstream supporters. But Yarvin backed up Thiel and the two became friends and allies. “While The Sovereign Individual provided the foundation for the billionaire’s political vision, Yarvin created a blueprint for turning that vision into reality,” Durán writes.

Thiel was instrumental in injecting these ideas, and people, into the US government – not least JD Vance, whom Durán describes as “almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel”. It was Thiel who set up Vance as a venture capitalist, giving him a role at his firm Mithril Capital, then investing in Vance’s own fund, Narya Capital (Tolkien-derived names are a theme with these people). It was Thiel who backed Vance’s move into politics, where he went from condemning Trump as “America’s Hitler” to supporting him and parroting Yarvin’s ideas. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance told the podcaster Jack Murphy in 2021.

Durán had observed this Silicon Valley takeover developing and began writing about it in 2024. “I thought this would be a problem in five to 10 years, but when JD Vance got on the ticket, it suddenly took on a new urgency,” he says. Now, it almost feels too late. In 2025, Bloomberg reported that at least 16 men connected to Thiel and his companies occupied positions of power in the Trump administration, including David Sacks, who is now a special adviser for AI and crypto. Musk’s Doge has swung its chainsaw at the government, crypto and AI regulation has all but disappeared, the Trump family are now billionaires and the tech oligarchs have become the Republicans’ largest donors.