Some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley dream of a dystopia: one in which democracies are dead and CEOs rule over the rest of us. A few of them muse openly about this. Yet their plans have received little attention in the mainstream media. Now, a new book is dragging them into the light.

In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, the journalist Gil Durán, a grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, traces a line from obscure philosophers and anti-human subcultures to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance. He shows how the darkest fantasies of aggrieved, antisocial nerds came to serve as the blueprint for Trump’s second term.

I interviewed Durán as the guest host of “The Nerd Reich” show on YouTube, amid a campaign to ban him from the platform. We talked about Thiel’s influence on JD Vance, how immigrants are a testing ground for tech fascism, how technology is becoming a religion, and more — including how people can fight back. “We have to find a way to envision a world without billionaires, because the billionaires are envisioning a world without us,” Durán told me.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. The episode was produced, edited and announced by R.R. Robbins.

JEAN GUERRERO

Thank you for sitting in the guest chair with me today and letting me talk about the book with you.

GIL DURÁN

Thanks for hosting.

JEAN GUERRERO

As soon as I heard this book was coming, I reached out to ask for an early copy. I’ve been following the tech fascists for a while, but I’ve never seen anyone so succinctly capture what they’re trying to do. I read it in one sitting and instantly recognized it as one of the most important books of our time. You trace how the tech elites are openly plotting to destroy democracy here and across the world. So much of the political discourse on the left is focused on the evils of Trump. But people have to realize that Trump is not the main villain. As you observe, he’s a tool of the tech fascists. So for people who are new to all of this, can you talk a little bit about what he is a tool for?

GIL DURÁN

Donald Trump is a tool for disrupting democracy. And he’s been that way for over 10 years. He sort of came off of Twitter, using the algorithms of social media to become more powerful than any other political figure in the country and to some degree in the world. If you think about what happened before Twitter, Trump had run for president before and he had flirted with the idea, and he gained no traction because the media, the Beltway media, still had sway over who would be taken seriously and who wouldn’t. Social media disrupted that, and Trump was an early adopter.

And so when Trump returns to power in 2024 ... the first time around there were people in tech who opposed Trump. There was something called Tech Against Trump. A lot of these companies made visible efforts to oppose his agenda of deportations and brutality and racism and terror. This time around it’s very different. What’s different about it is that a lot of these billionaires have aligned behind Trump. They have decided that instead of opposing this disruptive, democracy-destroying technology, they’re going to invest in it. Because what do venture capitalists do?

They invest in disruptive technologies, and Donald Trump is a technology for destroying democracy.

JEAN GUERRERO

There is a further alignment between him and the tech fascists, in that they’re all influenced by eugenics, by this idea of a genetic hierarchy. Many of them believe that there are certain people who are superior, specifically the rich and the powerful, often the white, and that they’re the ones who should inherit the world.

Can you talk about this relationship you explore in the book between tech fascism and eugenics, this desire to breed a kind of master race of humanity?

GIL DURÁN

White supremacy is Donald Trump’s superpower. That’s what he really tapped into to get his core base revved up. This idea that white people are under threat from the rising demographic tide of people of color who will become a majority of the country in this century. He’s been able to create this cult of grievance that sees itself as the ultimate victim of society, and he promises them a return to greatness, if only they can purge their hated enemies and return to their former status of glory, which obviously is a myth and never really existed. What Trump shares with the tech right wing is this idea that they are superior.

I’ve done a lot of work over the years with George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist, who I feel did the best job of categorizing how politics really works, and I haven’t really found his method to have any flaws. If you look at what right wing thought revolves around, it’s a hierarchy, a very systematic hierarchy that is considered the moral order of the world. And the hierarchy is God over man, men over women, whites over non-whites, Western cultures over non-Western cultures, Christianity over other religions, rich over poor, strong over the weak, straight over the LGBTQ, and on and on and on.

They see that there has to be this hierarchy enforced in the world or the moral order is out of balance. Make America Great Again is a classic fascist movement because it seeks to restore that hierarchy by demonizing and purging its opponents. And the tech right very much shares this idea.

Mostly because of their ability to make money, occasionally because they have some kind of technical knowledge that has unlocked some sort of product that’s useful. But they’re taking that to the extreme degree of now thinking that they should be the rulers of the earth, not just of the boardroom or of their companies. Their idea seems to be that they are the best, the smartest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, and that they should be the rulers of the earth.

And it didn’t take very long for this kind of thinking to merge with basic off-the-shelf white supremacist thinking. That’s how you get Elon Musk, who formerly seemed like this sort of humble, self-effacing, quasi-liberal guy who wanted to save the world from climate change with electric vehicles, into the white supremacist in chief, using the social media platform he bought to foment racial strife and polarization and hatred all over the world. They view themselves as cognitive elites. What we’re seeing here is an effort by this handful of very wealthy people to seize power and control the future.

JEAN GUERRERO

Nerds who are supposed to be, you know, brilliant. But these ideas are based on pseudoscience, on this fundamental misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas of evolution and this whole notion of the survival of the fittest, where they think that the most violent, the most powerful are those who are worthy to survive, when in fact nature shows that so much of fitness is about collaboration and cooperation within species.

But what’s interesting is also that Trump has long posed as a nationalist, as a guy who wants to, quote, make America great again. As you show in your book, the tech elites who are behind him are publicly conspiring to accelerate the decline of nation states, including the United States. They do not believe in borders or nations, and in fact are in the process of violating the sovereignty of nations across the world. So how does an alleged nationalist like Trump, who used to claim to hate globalist elites, come to be so helpful to these transnational elites? You talk about this marriage between Silicon Valley and the Trump family. Tell us a little bit about that.

GIL DURÁN

Trump’s beliefs and morals are extremely flexible based on who’s paying him. So he played to this sort of nationalist, overwrought American eagle with long talons, Trump as muscular Uncle Sam image, when that was to his benefit with the MAGA base early on. We’re seeing a very different Trump in this term.

First of all, everything about MAGA and Trump now is an assault on American values and American ideals. The entire basis of our system of government is under attack from these people. In addition, one of the key planks of American power in the world for the past century or so has been our foreign policy of being involved in other countries, of being a world superpower. Donald Trump has really worked hard to erode that, to withdraw the United States from its role on the global stage and to pretty much make us a laughing stock … a joke with nuclear weapons.

Unsurprisingly, his stance on American power in the world has also changed. So he is trying to withdraw American power and allow basically Russia and China to fill the gap. Trump is actively weakening the United States. If you look at that through the crypto lens, crypto is essentially a tool for undermining government authority. The entire prophecy of crypto is that it will replace the dollar. And not only will it replace the monetary power the United States has, it will also replace and undermine the political power of the United States.

So since shifting over to crypto billionaire, Trump is a lot more aligned with this idea that the United States has had its day and must now decline into just one little sliver of the world that it bullies and controls, while letting our geopolitical adversaries fill in the gap and take over. This is a thing called multipolarity. It’s very much favored by Russia and Saudi Arabia and North Korea and China. And now it’s also favored by the president of the United States.

JEAN GUERRERO

In the book, you dive into the central role that Peter Thiel plays in all of this, in the spread of tech fascism. Thiel, for those who don’t know, is one of the most powerful men in the world, who co-founded the surveillance company Palantir, and PayPal as well. He’s someone who, when asked in an interview if the human species should survive, hesitated for a long time and had a hard time answering the question. So can you tell us about the role of Peter Thiel in the spread of tech fascism, and the world that he is trying to build.

GIL DURÁN

Well, he hesitated for eighteen seconds, and I know that because I counted it twice just to make sure. He stammered and finally said yes, but it wasn’t a convincing yes that the human race should survive.

Peter Thiel is a tech billionaire who was born in Germany and spent part of his childhood in Namibia and South Africa before spending the rest of his teenage years in California, just south of San Francisco. He went to Stanford and he got a degree in philosophy and a degree in law. But he was a mediocre lawyer. Then he went to hedge funds and he was a mediocre hedge fund guy. But he found more luck in Silicon Valley. He was in the right place at the right time. Everything was just about to explode in Silicon Valley. And Thiel, by hanging around Stanford after he had graduated already, was able to come into contact with some people who would go on to become very successful in tech. As an investor, he reaped the benefits of that.

People don’t realize that Thiel’s not a technology guy. He’s not a coder, he’s not a computer guy. He’s a lawyer, a wannabe philosopher, and an investor.

In nineteen ninety-seven, Peter Thiel read a book called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. This was an apocalyptic, strange book that predicted that in the 21st century, technology would undermine and collapse democratic nations like the United States and the UK. The two technologies in particular that would do this would be something called cybercurrency, which we would call crypto, this new form of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow wealthy people to exfiltrate their money from the system without detection. The other was advanced automation, which we would today call AI, which was going to replace most workers and lead to an eventual economic collapse that would result in chaos and violence.

And the proper role for the so-called sovereign individuals, the heroes of this kooky, crazy, apocalyptic book, would be to gather up multiple passports and travel to different countries that would now desperately cater to the needs of these wealthy individuals. That would be the New World Order, these sovereign individuals roaming the earth as everything else collapsed. Thiel saw it as a work of prophecy.

JEAN GUERRERO

And he was excited about this.

GIL DURÁN

He has said that it helped inspire his decision to co-found PayPal as an effort to get ahead of this digital currency that was supposedly prophesied. Now it’s important to say that dumb people in Silicon Valley think that The Sovereign Individual predicted crypto. That’s not the case. The idea of some kind of cryptocurrency was floating around for decades before this. What the authors of The Sovereign Individual did was scrape together a bunch of futurist ideas into this kooky, dark, apocalyptic thesis. So there’s nothing intellectual or academic or solid about the book. It’s just a really distressing and destructive prophecy. But when this book was reissued in twenty twenty, Peter Thiel, now a billionaire, wrote the foreword. And if you look back at the last few decades, he has spent a lot of time trying to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy and pursuing the dystopian dream of the sovereign individual.

JEAN GUERRERO

And he believes fundamentally, or seems to believe, in unregulated technological expansion, no matter the cost. But tell us about Thiel’s relationship with JD Vance, because I think that really illustrates how deeply Silicon Valley has infiltrated our politics.

GIL DURÁN

Yeah, that’s probably the most disturbing part of all this.

JEAN GUERRERO

I agree.

GIL DURÁN

It’s not a secret that [Vance] and Thiel have a relationship. Vance recently wrote a memoir, his second one, called Communion, about his religious conversion. And the book largely erased Peter Thiel’s role in his life. This is a book that covers him going from being a lawyer in law school to becoming vice president of the United States.

And strangely, he doesn’t mention the fact that it was Peter Thiel who convinced him not to be a lawyer, and instead to go to Silicon Valley and become a venture capitalist. That he became a venture capitalist at Mithril Capital, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel. He was a mediocre venture capitalist, and when he went back to Ohio to do his own thing and start a venture fund, it was with millions of dollars from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. When he decided to run for Senate, it was with fifteen million dollars from Thiel, which set a record as the largest amount of money any individual had ever spent in a Senate race. And then when he decided to become vice president, it was Thiel who made the peace between Vance and Trump, who played a role in bridging this gap, because Vance had previously been a Never Trump guy and had called Trump America’s Hitler and cultural heroin. They make the peace and Vance becomes the vice president of the United States.

I mentioned Vance’s memoir because he does say in the book that Peter Thiel played the key role in his conversion to Catholicism. It was the ideas of Thiel that inspired Vance, an atheist, to convert to Catholicism, even though, by the way, Peter Thiel’s not a Catholic. And he couldn’t hide that, because in his previous essays he’d written about his conversion, he gave credit to Thiel.

And now he’s one heartbeat away from the presidency, and that’s distressing, because he shares a lot of these very dangerous extremist ideas.

JEAN GUERRERO

That’s extremely distressing. I mean, considering that these people seem to want to accelerate the evolution of humanity in a way where it might mean the death of so many people. And they have no qualms about this, and seem to have qualms only with the idea of morality and compassion.

I want to talk a little bit about the war on immigrants, because it has been ground zero for the development of tech fascism in many ways. They’ve been using the border as a testing ground for their dystopian technologies for some time now. We’ve seen how the border has been invading the US under Trump 2.0, with Border Patrol agents operating deep inside the country and shooting people dead in the streets, citizens and non-citizens alike. This thing that was supposed to be targeting immigrants has started to seep into the everyday lives of so many Americans. Immigrant rights activists have for years warned about how the war on immigrants was a Trojan horse for a war on civil rights and the rights of all people in this country. Can you talk about how the Nerd Reich, as you describe it, has taken advantage of Trump’s war on immigrants as a kind of Trojan horse for their agenda.

GIL DURÁN

Earlier, when I was talking about The Sovereign Individual, I mentioned that the other word for the sovereign individuals was cognitive elites. That term, cognitive elite, came from a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, which was a very controversial book that argued essentially that whites were more intelligent than everyone else. The very idea of this new tech sovereignty rising out of Silicon Valley, it has deep semantic roots, even with this idea of eugenics and white supremacy.

The tech fascists see the immigration issue as something they can exploit for power and to create fear. They certainly know that the people making the DoorDash deliveries and driving the Ubers and Lyfts are immigrants. They certainly understand that our entire economy is dependent on immigrant labor. But this is one of the tools they can use to create fear. And remember, they’re in this strange alliance with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump has made hatred of immigrants, specifically Haitians and Latinos, one of the key parts of his entire fascist program.

Every president does deportations. What’s different about this is that it’s an overt terror campaign as well. They’re doing it in the most violent and distressing and scary way possible, to send the message that this is the way things work now. These armed, masked goons doing these crimes in the open, killing people, immigrants and non-immigrants alike. And while immigrants are bearing the brunt of that, it’s a message to all of us that this is now possible, that this is what can happen. The lists tend to get longer and longer under fascism of who can be targeted.

We are seeing immigration as a testing ground, the use of surveillance, the use of brutal tactics. Now they’re unleashing these electrocution gloves. It’s sort of the Guernica, the village where the fascists tested out their weapons during the Spanish Civil War.

Since you do not see any Silicon Valley billionaires, even the ones who are supposed to be the good ones, speaking out against this. I think that’s the biggest sign. There are some people like, well, Apple and Tim Cook are not, or Google’s not, or this. But where are all the billionaires speaking out against these horrors? As they were, by the way, during the first Trump administration. Something changed.

Maybe people are a little more afraid now. But maybe people are a little more fascist now, and open to being a part of this as long as it wins. So Latinos and immigrants are the canaries in the coal mine. I’ve had some clashes with some people who’ve said, well, it’s not really fascism because we don’t have a paramilitary force on the streets enforcing the terror. I’m like, well, maybe we’re just in the future, but Latinos definitely have that. Immigrants definitely have that. We’re living in fascism, and fascism is coming for everyone else as well.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly. And I really don’t think it’s an accident that you were the person who wrote this book, Gil. As a son of Mexican immigrant farm workers, it makes sense to me why you would be able to see what’s going on before a lot of people. So can you talk about how your background influenced your decision to pursue this project, and your ability to connect the dots?

GIL DURÁN

Without a doubt. Growing up poor, growing up Latino. I’ve been able to largely escape the challenges of my background, but I’ve never forgotten where I come from.

When I returned to journalism, I did so largely because I felt I wanted to do something meaningful, something more in public service. I was tired of being in government and politics and that whole game, which is a rat race that can be very unhealthy in some ways, and you never quite end up doing the things you set out to do, because politics dictates that you do all of these other things and you can find yourself far afield of where you thought you were heading when you got into the political game. But I went back to journalism because I felt like I could be of use to the public more.

I was always looking for ways to write about the struggles of regular people. Before this all popped up, I was writing about the plight of homeless people in the pandemic, writing about injustices in the Capitol, where powerful forces were able to defeat the public good by spreading their money around. I was always looking to pick a fight with the big bullies. And I never expected a situation quite like this to emerge. This is sort of a nightmare scenario. And actually, while it’s exciting to have a book that’s getting so much buzz, it’s also very distressing to me that the only reason I’m successful is because we’ve been taken over by a fascist regime. Without that, I’d probably have drifted out of journalism by now and be doing something else for a lot more money.

I don’t think I had any other choice. I felt like I was uniquely able to see it, not only because of my background as a Latino, as someone working class, but also as someone who had so much experience in politics, not only in the tactics and strategies but in the theory that I studied with George Lakoff. I felt like I was able to see the emerging extremism of Silicon Valley, where we were headed. I think that’s why I caught the signal early. So in a very strange way, it all added up.

But I’ve been thinking a lot too about my grandfather, who has been gone now twenty five years. He always felt I was gonna be a writer and always felt I was gonna do something important, even when I was a little boy and it didn’t make any sense to say that. And I guess we’re finding out that he was right.

JEAN GUERRERO

That’s really sweet. And the thing is, it starts with immigrants, as you’ve shown and as you’ve experienced. But at the end of the day, they’re not going to restrict themselves to immigrant communities, to Latino communities. These are just the guinea pigs, the canaries in the coal mine, as you say. But they believe that so many people are genetically inferior to them. I would say the vast majority of humanity, in the minds of so many of these billionaires whose stories you tell in this book.

One thing that struck me while I was reading is that there were so many interesting parallels between the origin stories of some of the characters in The Nerd Reich and the origin story of Stephen Miller, who I wrote my book Hatemonger about, who was Trump’s immigration policy architect. He, just like Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and other individuals who you delve into, they’re all these antisocial, aggrieved people early in their lives. Why do you think tech fascism appeals to people with those kinds of backgrounds? And also, why do you think Peter Thiel seems to see people like that as allies? He seems to gravitate to those aggrieved antisocial nerds.

GIL DURÁN

Well, birds of a feather flock together. Dime con quién andas. That’s kinda how the world works. It’s their affinity group.

A lot of us don’t fit in at some point in our lives. A lot of us deal with things like bullying. I certainly did. But at a certain point in life you overcome that, and you don’t make it your bitter mission for the rest of your life to get revenge on everybody and to keep that chip on your shoulder. You gotta let it go at a certain point and try to do better, and make sure you don’t do that kind of thing to other people, maybe.

What’s amazing about a lot of these guys, though, is that not only have they overcome whatever challenges or awkwardness they had growing up, but they have become some of the most successful and powerful people in society, if not in the world.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly.

GIL DURÁN

And so rather than realize, hey, I can let that go and try to be a better person, they regress into this sort of revenge mentality, seeking revenge on the entire world because they were not celebrated or accepted when they were at a younger phase of their lives.

I think that’s one of the things that is most shocking about what’s happening. We’re being betrayed by the most successful people in our society, the people who have benefited the most, not only from capitalism but from the public investment we made.

And I think it’s important to realize that this idea that they are the victims and deserve their vengeance is an important part of fascism. Remember, fascism is always a cult of grievance, where you claim to be the victim of others in order to justify your victimization of others. I would also point out that while we’re going after immigrants and demonizing immigrants, the men playing the key role in this destruction of our country are immigrants as well. And they’re the immigrants we should be deporting. Not the people doing the work to make this country better, but those who hate our values despite benefiting more than anyone from everything that our forefathers and foremothers built in this country.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. And Elon Musk is a really interesting case study in this because, as you pointed out, he owes his wealth to government contracts, and at the same time he’s spewing hatred against the government. He seems to despise everything that made him who he is, including his body. He’s talked about how humans need to ditch our bodies, which he describes as sacks of meat, become robots. But some of the most cutting edge science on consciousness shows that consciousness is deeply rooted in biological bodies and is in fact inseparable from them, that it arises from this meat that Elon Musk so despises. And yet they are so convinced that they can upload their minds, their souls, their identities into computers.

I bring this up because I’m concerned that as crazy as those ideas sound to most people, there are a lot of people who find them seductive. In particular, I’m worried about their ideas resonating with marginalized communities who have a history of corporate exploitation and oppression, and this desire to transcend that condition. I know as a younger woman myself, I fantasized about eternal life as an algorithm. I found these kinds of ideas, these transhumanist ideas, seductive. So how do you reckon with this fact that while on the one hand their ideas sound crazy, there are people who find them seductive.

GIL DURÁN

Religion is always seductive. That’s why it’s still around after thousands of years. Technology is extremely seductive as well.

Dr. Émile Torres and Dr. Timnit Gebru call this TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. A lot of words that basically add up to tech’s new AI-based religious ideas.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly.

GIL DURÁN

And I think that religious element is important, because it’s key to understand that the reason these guys want to get rid of democracy and law and regulation is not just to get richer.

I think it’s important to keep an eye on that religious aspect, because the reason they’ve become so interested in religion, the other part of it, as you definitely know, Peter Thiel has been traveling the world preaching about the Antichrist for the past couple of years, putting a Christian mask on these tech religious ideas. And the key here is that he sees religion as an important technology for controlling and inspiring the behavior of human beings.

It’s not enough to believe in a product or a material ambition. You have to have a totalizing belief that makes you commit to a movement. Religion is a technology for doing that, for marshalling human behavior into one unified body.

JEAN GUERRERO

Right. But in their vision, it’s not everyone who subscribes to these ideas who’s gonna be able to become this transhuman, this superhuman. It’s them. They want the cognitive elites to get this world.

I think a good demonstration of that is Próspera in Honduras, because I wanted to ask you about network states, which you explore in the book. You explore this idea of network states, which they piloted in many places, but including in Honduras on the island of Roatán, this startup city called Próspera, which the Honduran Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. I wrote last year about how Trump interfered in the Honduras election to save Próspera by reinstating a party that’s known for its corruption and its ties to violent drug cartels. I interviewed people in Honduras who are fighting displacement by this project that was backed by Peter Thiel, which is now also threatening to bankrupt the country, as you pointed out, because of a lawsuit by these tech elites.

This is something that they want to bring to the United States in the form of what they call Freedom Cities. And essentially what they are, are these corporate run cities, where they create the law and they can do whatever they want. But tell me a little bit more about this idea of a network state and where it comes from, and how the Freedom City is tied to this idea of the network state.

GIL DURÁN

The network state is this cult idea founded by Balaji Srinivasan, who’s a protégé of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel invested in his first company, they became close, and Peter Thiel turned Srinivasan on to The Sovereign Individual book.

The idea of the network state is that democracies are going to collapse in the 21st century. Sounds familiar by now, right? And that they will be replaced by these corporate territories or kingdoms or fiefdoms called network states, where basically corporations will found their own nations. Instead of being a citizen of the country, you’ll be a consumer who can pick among different countries if you have the income and the ability to belong to one of these things. Otherwise you’ll be out there in the chaotic, violent wasteland, the no person’s land where you will belong if you can’t afford a network state.

The important thing to understand about Balaji Srinivasan’s network state idea is that he got it from Curtis Yarvin, who’s another tech fascist philosopher, another Peter Thiel friend who Peter Thiel funded, sort of Peter Thiel’s political alter ego or guru. Yarvin called the idea patchwork. Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with dictatorship, and he had written that the United States should be replaced with a patchwork of territories, basically corporate authoritarian territories that could even kill their citizens for no reason, and where everybody would be under constant surveillance. What Srinivasan did was try to update this into a more startup-friendly idea that you could wear a suit and talk about in public.

JEAN GUERRERO

Digestible.

GIL DURÁN

More digestible. More cleaned up. He cleansed it of the Yarvinism, though later he would dirty it again with these extremist ideas.

And what’s important about the network state is that there is a venture capital fund, Pronomos Capital, that exists to fund these things around the world. All around the world right now, you’re seeing this idea of billionaire-funded new cities pop up. There’s Próspera in Honduras, which has its own regulatory statutes and where they allow all these experimental therapies that are not allowed in other countries. There’s an idea to build-

JEAN GUERRERO

Longevity therapy.

GIL DURÁN

Longevity therapy, so it kind of reconnects back to this desire to live forever. There’s a proposal to build one in Greenland if Trump is able to steal Greenland from Denmark. There’s a proposal to build a new billionaire tech utopia, dystopia city in the ruins of Gaza. Other billionaires have proposed building them in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Venezuela. There’s one supposedly underway right now in Northern California, California Forever. They deny they’re a network state project, but Balaji Srinivasan himself said that they are, and one of their funders is Marc Andreessen, who’s a central figure along with Thiel in all of these ideas.

The most interesting thing, though, is that in his 2024 campaign, Trump proposed an idea to build 10 new Freedom Cities on federal land, and said it would be a competition. Sort of a reality TV competition for corporations to pitch their new cities, and then he would choose 10 and they would get federal land on which to build. The interesting thing about the Freedom Cities is that though it was reported on in a very superficial way, Politico and others reported that Trump has this idea for Freedom Cities. To this day, no one has said, what is a Freedom City? Why do we need new Freedom Cities instead of investing in existing cities? And where does the idea come from? Well, that idea comes from the network state.

There’s a whole lobbying effort in Washington to get these things built. It’s not clear if Trump’s gonna follow through on building the USA Freedom Cities. He hasn’t mentioned it in a while and he’s running out of time to get these things started. But many people consider this a very serious effort and idea. So keep an eye out for all these weird billionaire funded cities that suddenly need to pop up everywhere.

There’s nothing more expensive than building a city from scratch. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, if your only goal is housing or jobs, to build an entire city from scratch that has no roads, no infrastructure, no water pipes. That’s very, very, very weird. People sometimes say it sounds conspiratorial to say these things are weird network state cities. I think it sounds conspiratorial to say that billionaires are so dumb they don’t know how real estate works. Clearly there’s something wrong with these projects. They don’t make any sense in a classic real estate sense.

JEAN GUERRERO

Right. And you mentioned Curtis Yarvin, so I wanna return to him, because he has this whole idea of the Dark Enlightenment, which you delve into in the book, and he talks about how certain races are more suitable for slavery, all kinds of horrible ideas that Srinivasan made a little bit more palatable. But we saw Curtis Yarvin having an impact already in Trump’s second term in terms of DOGE. Can you talk about how that was connected to some of his proposals? Just DOGE and how that came about.

GIL DURÁN

That’s a great question, because I think it points exactly to why I wrote my book and why I consider this stuff so important. While I was working on this over the past few years, I could feel sometimes a bit of judgment from my peers in journalism, who wondered why I was going so far down this rabbit hole. DOGE is one of the examples I think I can point to of why this mattered.

Curtis Yarvin for many years seemed like this obscure, eccentric racist troll online. Some people didn’t understand, why is this guy important? Why should anybody listen to what he says?

In the late 2000s, he wrote that a future president, acting more like a dictator than a president, should conduct a massive purge of the federal government in order to eliminate basically the believers in liberal democracy, and install a regime where every member of the civil service would answer to the president and follow whatever dictates this president handed down. As part of that idea, Yarvin suggested also destroying the United States’s diplomatic status around the world and eliminating international aid programs. In 2012, he did a new version of this idea, which he called RAGE, Retire All Government Employees, suggesting that the federal bureaucracy should be purged by this future dictatorial president. And in 2022, he updated it again to say that if Trump returned to power in 2024, he should install a CEO to act as a dictator and purge the federal government.

And that’s exactly what happened when Trump got re-elected. He immediately announced the creation of DOGE and put Elon Musk, CEO of several companies, in charge of it. And the first thing they did was set about purging the federal government, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and slashing aid programs like USAID, which according to studies will result in the death of millions of people, many of them children.

That’s one of the things we’ve seen happen. And actually the Washington Post did a story about DOGE’s connection to Yarvin, that DOGE was inspired by Yarvin, in April of 2025. That was one of those moments, I think, when people saw that this crazy stuff Gil’s been talking about for a few years was kind of important after all.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. And for a crazy conspiracy theorist, Gil, it seems like you’ve ruffled some of the feathers of these people in Silicon Valley, because you have been repeatedly banned from social media platforms, and I guess also most recently YouTube. To me, that’s evidence that these tech fascists are afraid of your book and the truth that you are exposing. What has that been like?

GIL DURÁN

Well, it’s not a theory if it’s on the record. A lot of my book is told in their words, and I think that’s what they’re afraid of. I’ve often wondered why they say so much of this stuff out loud. They write it down. They want people to know. I think part of the rationale there is that they’re trying to evangelize. They’re trying to create a movement and pull in other people.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yes.

GIL DURÁN

And on some level they understand that the things they say are so extreme that the Washington establishment media is gonna ignore that stuff, is not gonna take it seriously. And so in a way, the radical nature of the ideas is a cloak that protects them from scrutiny. Until now.

It’s funny, because in April of 2024 I wrote a piece on Balaji Srinivasan and I uncovered some of the craziest things he said in these six hour long podcast interviews he does. He gave one where he called his idea tech Zionism, and spelled out this whole idea for the Red Tribe, Republicans, to make war against the Blue Tribe, the Democrats, by partnering with the Gray Tribe, this new tech power that was going to rise up. And then they would purge the Democrats and they would wear gray uniforms with corporate logos, all this crazy stuff. He said they’d have a gray pride parade with drones flying overhead. He unleashed this really bizarre fantasy. And I wrote it all down. It was verbatim, word for word. I had the hyperlinks to the video, time-stamped sections.

Srinivasan went insane for like two days, denying that this was true, saying I was making it all up, saying it was fabulism. And literally there was never a correction on my story. It was unimpeachable that I had the facts there. But I think he was embarrassed to find out how he sounded to a sane person. Because these guys are so wealthy that wherever they go, on these silly fascist podcasts, in rooms with young people who are hoping to get an investment or be a big deal in Silicon Valley someday, I think people just nod along and no one tells you that you’re stupid or you sound crazy. And so to actually come up against somebody who could very succinctly and incisively show everybody how crazy you are, he couldn’t really handle that. I got all kinds of weird threats, and for two days I was just under assault on social media. Then it all went away and quieted down. And he has since then had a policy of never responding to anything that I do.

The only response I’ve had in the past few years has been Elon Musk banning me from Twitter, first when he first bought the platform, for eight months. Then last year Meta wouldn’t allow links to my newsletter to be put on Facebook. When I reached out to customer service about it, it was the weirdest thing, because the guy straight up told me that it was because I write about the network state and I criticize tech figures, and so this was being flagged as controversial. And I’m so thankful, Ray, that you were honest about that, because it blew my mind.

I thought surely, people kept telling me they couldn’t post links, and I thought, maybe I’ve got something wrong with my website. I have to configure something differently, because I had kind of set it up myself and had had a few problems. And no, here comes Ray from Meta customer support to tell me that it’s because of what I write about. Once that got some media attention, Meta backed off. And you can’t really post links on Meta anyway, they throttle links. So you have to find other creative ways to share things there.

In April on four twenty I was permanently banned from Twitter for posting about Palantir’s manifesto, which I referred to as fascist. It was surprising even to me. People assured me it was probably just a mass reporting thing that triggered the algorithm, and if you appeal it, they’re gonna lift it. I appealed it twice. No luck, I’m permanently banned. And I think it’s really clear why. By the way, I wasn’t even a big deal on X. I had 30,000 followers. I’d occasionally have a viral tweet. But increasingly lately my audience was getting bigger as my book came nearer. And suddenly, boom, I’m not there. If you look at X, there’s very little discussion of my book, which is being talked about on other platforms. They kind of did a good job of making sure I’m not a player on X, which is fine with me, by the way.

And now YouTube. This may very well be our last episode of the Nerd Reich podcast, because YouTube has announced they’re gonna disable our channel on Saturday, because someone is running a campaign of false copyright strikes against our channel. There’s this new thing where you can pay some people and they’ll just keep filing copyright strikes until you get taken down. And YouTube has zero way for anybody to reach out to a human and explain what’s happening. So every day we wake up to more copyright strikes. We’ve been fighting them the best we can.

We’re gonna get the message out one way or the other. But I take it as a compliment that somebody really, really, really wants me deplatformed from everywhere, even though, by the way, I have never broken any rules.

JEAN GUERRERO

Exactly. Well, so Gil, what can people do? You talk a little bit about this in your book. What is the way forward? How do we fight back against these people with these crazy ideas that they’ve somehow turned into self-fulfilling prophecies? How do we create a different world, when some of the most powerful people on this planet are intent on creating this world that you describe, that’s so horrifying.

GIL DURÁN

We need to remember the old saying that money is the root of all evil. And we have to realize that billionaires are the root of all of our problems today.

We’re in a terrible situation where the economic inequality has meant that there’s this tiny class of billionaires, some of them part-time trillionaires, deciding that it is their destiny to rule over us, as they have enough money to buy power in a political system that is very vulnerable to corruption, especially through crypto, which has become a weapon of mass corruption in the second Trump era. And in fighting billionaire power, we find the key to all of our problems, because even before the tech fascists, somehow everything has been stacked in favor of a tiny few so that they can get richer. But the money only makes them crazier and it doesn’t make them happier.

So we have to find a way to envision a world without billionaires, because the billionaires are envisioning a world without us.

JEAN GUERRERO

Yeah. I heard you say on a different interview that the politics of the future is a war against billionaires. And by the way, it’s a war that they started. I think that’s so key, because as we’re seeing the rise of democratic socialists across the country presenting a different kind of politics, there’s still this stubbornness within Democratic Party leaders to not wanna call it out for what it is, which is that the billionaires are the ones who are making everybody’s lives miserable. And particularly this movement that is determined to create a world without us, or at least with extreme inequality.

Anyway, I just want to thank you for writing this book, because I think it’s such an important step in getting everybody educated, understanding what’s happening, so they can start to push for regulation and whatever else we need to rein in these billionaires.

GIL DURÁN

Unfortunately, the only people as addicted to billionaire money as Republicans are Democrats. It’s funny to see the establishment Democrats getting so angry at the democratic socialists and the left for winning elections. The democratic socialists and the people on the left are the ones who are fighting. And the Democratic Party’s own polls show that people want fighters.

JEAN GUERRERO

They do.

GIL DURÁN

The establishment doesn’t want to give the people what they want, because they want to maintain relations with the billionaires. So I do think we’re going to need a bit of a civil war in the Democratic Party.

And we need to fight on the side of people who are willing to name the problem as billionaire power, and who are willing to fight against that without any fear of the ramifications. I hate to use the war metaphor, it’s a destructive one. There’s no other way to put what’s happening right now. The billionaires have declared war on us and we need to realize that that’s going on. And anybody who thinks we can somehow just make nice and go back to the status quo, there is no status quo under tech fascism.

JEAN GUERRERO

One hundred percent. Well, thank you so much, Gil, for this conversation and for this book, and I wish you the best with it.

GIL DURÁN

Thanks, and thanks for hosting the possibly final episode of the Nerd Reich podcast on YouTube, though we’ll still be on all audio platforms, and we’ll find somewhere else to put the videos where we’re allowed to talk about these issues. And thanks so much for participating in this.

My great-great grandmother was known as “La Adivina,” Spanish for “The Diviner.” She left her sons in Tlaltenango de Sánchez Román, Zacatecas to fight in the Mexican revolution (1910-1920), an uprising against the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who had sold much of Mexico to American investors. The conflict ended a feudal hacienda system that had kept millions, including my ancestors, in effective bondage, but it fell short of achieving land justice. When La Adivina returned from the battlefield, she made a living as a clairvoyant. People traveled from near and far to ask her questions. She would allegedly divine the truth by entering a trance, blindfolded in candlelight.

When I lived in Mexico in my 20s, strangers called me “Juanita” because “Jean” is hard to pronounce in Spanish. I later learned Juanita was La Adivina’s name, and that we were born on the same calendar day. My occult-trained cousin Eddie insisted that I was her reincarnation. This was silly; I had no powers to divine truth, only to uncover pieces of it through the tools of journalism: cultivating sources, scouring documents, fact-checking claims. Still, in 2017, he convinced me to travel to Zacatecas with him to find the ruins of a place where Juanita once lived. He said I would recognize the landscape and know instinctively where to go. When my reporting leads ran dry, I felt possessed by a sudden familiarity with our desert surroundings. I led us to the ruins. It was one of the most eerie experiences of my life, documented in my first book Crux.

After I moved back to the U.S. more than a decade ago, I rarely thought about La Adivina or the magic I’d experienced in Mexico. I was busy working as a journalist amid the distortion of reality by an American demagogue, and grew all the more reluctant to engage with the non-empirical. But recently, prominent right-wing figures are becoming preoccupied with the occult. Gregg Phillips, the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, claimed he was teleported; former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who broke with President Trump over the war in Iran, has been interviewing people about demons on his podcast since he was allegedly attacked by a demon. Last month, in an episode of The New York Times “The Interview” with co-host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Carlson described the president this way:

“There is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true.”

I remembered the first time I saw Trump in person, in April 2019, when he was visiting a Border Patrol station in Calexico for a roundtable. I had always thought Trump looked like an orange clown when I saw him on TV and on computer screens, and I couldn’t understand why people idolized him. But when he strode into the room a few feet from where I stood on the press platform, I felt spellbound against my will.

Early historians of the Spanish conquest claimed the Mexica saw Hernán Cortés as a deity, an idea that has been challenged as a racist fiction originating with his chaplain Francisco López de Gómara. But in that fluorescent-lit federal office, I felt something like what he attributed to the Mexica. Trump’s presence bent the room toward him. I felt the black-hole gravity of Trump’s grandiosity, and had to actively resist it. I’d met celebrities before; I knew the thrill of being starstruck. This was not that. This was a gust of wind threatening to topple me. A palpable command to prostrate ourselves.

Listening to Carlson describe Trump’s “spellbinding” quality, I felt chills. I knew he was mythologizing him, as the chaplain did with Cortés. Trump is neither a god nor a sorcerer. He has no supernatural powers. But as I type those words, a voice deep inside me objects. ¿Cómo que no? Tu misma lo sentiste. It is an echo of La Adivina, possessing me. I want to ignore her. I am a journalist. I value the verifiable. I reject superstition and the unfalsifiable. But as Trump and his techno-fascist allies continue to bend the world toward them, despite the best work of independent journalists, I find myself desperate. For the first time in years, I turn toward La Adivina. I engage with the voice inside of me, and ask what it wants to tell me. You’re neutering yourself, like most journalists have neutered themselves, by closing the door to the other side, it says. My vocation and yours are not incompatible. Find the intersection to open the door.

*

As a child, I often entered trances in which I felt I was merging the infinite, induced by repeatedly asking myself, “What is nothingness?” Raised Catholic, I was skeptical of Heaven and Hell and wanted to prepare myself for the possibility of non-existence. Pondering nothingness, I reliably entered an altered state. I described it in Crux:

“I felt the whole universe rush in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light. I felt the heat of stars flooding my veins, moons bombing my eye sockets, the pink fog of nebulae exploding in my lungs, and black holes blowing my heart to smithereens. And then, suddenly, I was infinite. I was everything and nothing at once. I was not only conversing with God … I was God. I was his black blood, his milky way fluids, his fiery guts and his omniscience.

… I had perceived Nothingness as the most fertile ground in the universe: the seed of life and creation. Death could never prevail; its sowing reaps forever.”

The experience was ecstatic. I routinely entered my bedroom to induce it. But the meditation stopped working when I went through puberty. As a teenager, I declared myself Wiccan, casting many amateur spells, such as spells of strength to open jars (Strength of day, strength of night, give me strength beyond my sight) or spells for good grades (On this test I take today, I shall reserve no less than ‘A.’). Sometimes the spells worked; other times they did not. Eventually, I became agnostic, as I remain.

Today, I value my ability to admit uncertainty, to know nothing better than the limits of my knowledge. I am less fascinated by the occult than by nature and the night sky and the heartbeat in my French bulldog’s chest; those seem to me the most magical things of all. There is so much about our world that remains mysterious. Those mysteries inspire in me the same reverence that magic once did.

Mystery comes from the Greek word mystes (”a secret”). Trump and the tech oligarchs have no respect for secrets, unleashing technologies for mass surveillance and social control. Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, the man behind the spy tech company Palantir who just fled to Argentina, is a transhumanist, like many of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who are sabotaging our democracy. Transhumanists dream of reaching what some of them call “technological maturity,” at any cost, even the cost of the living Earth. That is why Thiel says the Anti-Christ will be an ally of the Earth, an enemy of Big Tech — someone like Greta Thunberg, he says. “The word ‘nature’ does not occur once in the Old Testament,” Thiel told The Times last summer. “The way I understand the Judeo-Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature.”

I have been thinking a lot about the transhumanists because their ideology was shaped at the University of Southern California, my alma mater, where I recently started as a professor and where two philosophy students in the 1980s created the Extropy Institute and a listserv that attracted some of today’s most prominent Big Tech thinkers, including Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil. The Extropians argued, with religiosity, that humans could conquer death. That we could outdo nature. That it was our destiny to leave our bodies and to become immortal machines.

There was a time when their ideas appealed to me. But I no longer want to be a machine. The ephemeral nature of life is what makes it so precious to me. And I believe there is a fundamental mystery to life that will forever elude these men. For example, Elon Musk, Sam Altman et al claim to have created “Artificial Intelligence” as intelligence remains an enigma to cognitive scientists. Nobody can accurately describe intelligence, let alone duplicate it. But their propaganda works, and is causing us to surrender our greatest gift: our ability to commune with mystes. As Douglas Rushkoff, the digital theorist and author of Team Human, told me once:

One of my writing mentors, Suzannah Lessard, who recently passed away, taught me that the most powerful nonfiction emerges from the in-between spaces. It dwells in uncertainty: illuminating it, interrogating it, caressing its contours. It strips the self of convictions and plunges into unknowing. In that languorous process of intimacy with mystes, truth arrives. I realize, in retrospect, that it’s not unlike what La Adivina did while blindfolded: spending time in a liminal place until revelations came.

Perhaps this is the intersection – the place where my vocation and my tatarabuela’s meet, where the known meets the unknown, becoming magic to some and mystery to others. It is the place transhumanists can’t conquer: the threshold where the world stops responding to their inquiries, spurning their intellects and refusing their senses.

*

It was my curiosity about that threshold, and the possibilities of subversion within it, that inspired me to organize an occult ritual last month.

It was an experiment in celebration of my new professorship. I wanted to mark the milestone through ritual and witness. Something like a wedding or a quinceañera, but original to me and my friends. A symbolic event that would enable us to explore the power of the liminal to counter oligarchic control of our bodies and minds.

Threats I’d received the day after the 2024 election had put my nervous system into an enduring state of fear. And monitoring the regime’s endless cruelty had trapped me in the tyranny of the present. I wondered if La Adivina could crack open a window to the future. I sent my closest friends invitations to a bruja circle, asking them to bring a spell, ritual, offering or symbolic act to help me cross into this new phase of life and let go of fear. My friends all have diverse backgrounds and interests; I wanted them to contribute whatever felt true to them, a melting pot of brujería.

My friend Lotem, an intuitive somatic teacher, started us off with a sound bath, meditation and cacao ceremony to connect us to our childhood selves, to give us permission to play and make believe. Lightened, we gathered in a candlelit circle that Lotem had decorated with flowers. I instructed everyone to open gift bags I’d made, each containing palo santo, a stick of selenite, a Tarot card and a vial of sand that I had gathered in Chicxulúb, a village in the Yucatán, in 2014. I explained:

“Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the earth in Chicxulúb … killing off the dinosaurs, the rulers of the earth for over 100 million years. Back then, mammals were small and hidden. They lived in the cracks and in the margins, in the shadows of predators that were louder and larger and reptilian. The mammals survived by being quiet and hyper-vigilant, by burrowing underground. When the asteroid hit — when the old world ended — those small, warm, tenacious creatures came out of hiding. They became Whales. Wolves. Elephants. Us. This sand is a symbol of what is possible when the conditions that were keeping us small finally end.”

Then I pulled out a silk white scarf to wrap over my eyes.

“I would like to open this circle by invoking the Caxcans. They are my ancestors: warriors who fought the Spanish conquistadores. They lived in harmony with the Earth before the Conquest. I am opening this circle as their descendant, and as the great-great granddaughter of La Adivina. Tonight, I am going to do what Juanita did. I am going to find what has been lost … the versions of ourselves who did not yet believe they had to shrink to survive … who knew our bodies were sacred. Who trusted our intuition. Who spoke without permission. Who understood ourselves not as separate from the universe, but as expressions of its full power.”

I tied the white silk over my face. Blindfolded, I blessed my friends with water I’d left in a glass vial under the full moon a few nights before. Afterward, my best friend Sam began the spellcasting. She read aloud the poem “Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed
or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Sam’s voice shook as she read. Several of us broke into tears. I’d encountered the poem before and found it moving. But spoken by a chosen sister in the candelit circle, it became more than a poem. It became a gust of wind, lifting us upward.

My other friends shared rituals, stories, blessings and offerings. I won’t describe it all. Eddie warned me that spellwork can lose its potency when translated into writing. As a journalist, I have always valued transparency. Now I see that secrecy can be radical, too: a way of preserving agency in a surveillance state. Of honoring the mystes.

In the spirit of straddling the in-between, I have shared fragments of the bruja circle, which left me awake to my five senses while cocooned in love and safety. To live in fear is to live dissociated: to live without fully tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling. By clearing the static, my friends gave me back the world.

Trump and the techno-fascists want us alienated from our bodies, from one another’s bodies, from our capacity to feel and think and conspire. They want us to think they’re gods to whom we should submit. At times, they are convincing as sorcerers: conjuring parallel worlds, trapping millions of people in echo chambers, wielding technologies to control our thoughts and behaviors. But they are not creators. They are doublers. They co-opt our power, and compel us to forget that magic is inherent to life.

What happened in the circle is that I remembered how to take my power back. I had known since childhood, when I asked myself about nothingness and felt the universe answer from inside my chest. Nothingness can never prevail; its sowing reaps forever. All I had to do was unclench, drop into the dark, and look into the abyss.

My friends showed me that fantasy isn’t always incompatible with truth. It can be a doorway to a new reality. We have ceded the powers of creation to men hell-bent on destruction. We are deep in a matrix of their making. We can’t escape it until we do as La Adivina did: drop into the dark, into the not-knowing, and dream our way to truth.

Subscribe now

Share

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider subscribing. (I am offering a 20% discount.) Your support sustains my independent journalism and makes essays like these possible.

At the time, I warned of what was coming:

Within days, I jumped at an opportunity to create a bootcamp to counter the exclusion and erasure of diverse voices in the news media at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab, whose co-founder Sonja Diaz approached me to collaborate. Our idea was to create a pipeline of public intellectuals who actually look and sound like the American people. “Our Unsilencing” was born. After the inaugural bootcamp, “Our Unsilencing” has been held at USC Annenberg in partnership with Diaz’s new organization Unseen.

The “Our Unsilencing” bootcamp provides training in opinion commentary across platforms: print, radio, TV and social media. Our students have already published in Time Magazine, The New Republic, Teen Vogue, the Sacramento Bee, Golden State, the Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic, CalMatters and The Latino Newsletter.

Watch the video for a look at the Fall 2025 “Our Unsilencing” at Annenberg, with some of the young women who are re-shaping the public imagination:

The Fall 2025 bootcamp featured collaborators such as the bestselling authors Reyna Grande and Julissa Arce; the content creators Becca Guzman and Lupe Llerenas; the community journalist Janette Villafana; and the opinion editor Laura Castañeda.

The MAGA right has long understood the power of cultivating voices early, using it to very different ends. David Horowitz — a long-time mentor of Stephen Miller, the subject of my book Hatemonger — empowered a generation of young conservatives by offering them mentorship, media platforms and connections, training them to pit people against one another. “Our Unsilencing” aims to reverse-engineer some of that work by uplifting voices who are determined to bring people together.

Read more about the bootcamp at this Q&A that I did for USC Annenberg.

The candidates in the lead are California’s former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the philanthropist and climate activist Tom Steyer and the pro-Trump media pundit Steve Hilton. The top two will proceed to the November midterm elections.

California hasn’t elected a Latino governor since 1875. In some ways, Becerra’s candidacy felt overdue to me and many people. He held the line against the first Trump administration, suing it more than 100 times, and winning at the Supreme Court to defend DACA. He beat back Stephen Miller’s public charge rule, the one designed to block low-income immigrants from getting green cards. He stopped Trump from rigging the census with a citizenship question. I covered all of it as it happened, and I knew what it meant for the people whose lives hung in the balance.

So when Becerra got into this race, I wanted in my bones to believe he was the one. But as a writer, I pay very close attention to the words leaders use. Words have power. Trump and Miller understand this; it’s how they reshaped the national conversation about immigrants. California needs a governor who can fight back on this issue, which corporate elites have used as a Trojan horse to wage war on our civil rights.

Unfortunately, the gubernatorial debate I moderated in April left me disappointed. What I saw from Becerra — and what I’ve kept seeing since — is a lot of caution, signaling that he feels constrained by the Democratic Party establishment. While many candidates on the stage called for abolishing ICE, he did not.

Following criticism, including my own, Becerra started saying we need to abolish “Trump’s ICE,” arguing that Trump created a “very different ICE.” But I’ve reported on immigration since the Obama years. The problems with ICE and immigration enforcement are structural and bipartisan. Californians deserve a governor who is honest about that — who will open the eyes of all Americans to how immigrant rights are inseparable from workers’ rights and the due process protections of us all.

Becerra is still focused on Trump as the enemy, which is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for the past 10 years whenever it wants to avoid accountability.

Meanwhile, Steyer sees and names what’s happening: a war between corporate elites and everyone else. He doesn’t hesitate to call for abolishing ICE. He told me in a recent Q&A that he believes Border Patrol agents should be held accountable for their crimes, too. For this interview with The Left Hook, I elaborated on my opinions about this race. Listen, comment and share your thoughts.

Get more from UNSILENCING by Jean Guerrero in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

California’s next governor will have the opportunity not only to make this state affordable, but also to play a central role in protecting American democracy — by rewriting the national narrative on immigration, President Trump’s No. 1 weapon.

The only candidate who seems to understand this is Tom Steyer.

The billionaire philanthropist and environmental activist has repeatedly called for abolishing ICE, a position that the frontrunner Xavier Becerra has avoided. Following criticism, including my own, Mr. Becerra started saying we need to abolish “Trump’s ICE,” arguing that the president created a “very different ICE.” But as someone who has reported on immigration since the Obama years, and has seen the Democratic Party reinforce the structural abuses of ICE and Border Patrol, I believe Californians deserve a governor who is bolder on this issue — and honest about how immigration enforcement is a Trojan horse for a war on labor and civil rights by corporate elites.

Immigration may not be the most important issue for Californians voting in the primary election on Tuesday, June 2. But it’s a priority for residents, who understand that attacks on immigrants are attacks on public safety and prosperity. The issue is inseparable from the affordability crisis, as Trump’s raids cause labor shortages on farms, construction sites and more. Our state has long been a leader on immigrant rights, from sanctuary laws to Medi-Cal eligibility. Mr. Becerra played a key role in defending those rights as California’s Attorney General during the first Trump presidency. Mr. Steyer protected immigrants during that time as well, investing millions of dollars through his organization NextGen America in immigrant legal aid.

Of these two candidates, the leading Democrats in this race, I believe Mr. Steyer is the one who has best demonstrated that he won’t be constrained by his party’s cowardice on this issue, which can make or break our democracy. I asked Mr. Steyer to elaborate on his views on immigrant rights, so that voters can better understand his plans and why he is willing to break with the establishment.

Here is my Q&A with Mr. Steyer.

Jean Guerrero: What inspired you to take such a bold stance on immigration?

Tom Steyer: My father prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg. He taught us a strong sense of right and wrong, and I refuse to stand by as Trump and his allies round up immigrants and terrorize our neighbors. Immigrants are the heart and soul of California. Our state is truly a rainbow coalition of races, backgrounds, and religions. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. That’s why when Trump was elected in 2016, I partnered with immigration rights groups to defend communities from deportations. I could not stand by as Trump and his allies ripped families apart. A decade later, ICE is behaving like a criminal organization, and as governor, I’ll treat them as such. We need to fight fire with fire. It’s that simple.

As governor, what specific actions would you take to protect immigrants in California, particularly in areas where state government has meaningful authority?

It’s not enough to simply engage in rhetoric, and “stand” against ICE or Trump. California must build a system that fights back. As governor, I will seek legislation to prohibit law enforcement from profiling Californians. Building on existing California law, I will seek legislation to outlaw law enforcement from profiling Californians based on their race, ethnicity, language, occupation, or location. I will also seek legislation to grant the California Attorney General the authority to hold ICE agents accountable for violent, illegal conduct on the job, including criminal liability for ICE agents and their leadership up to Stephen Miller. In addition, I will create a special investigative unit to monitor and investigate ICE’s activities in California, including conditions at detention facilities. To protect Californians from Trump’s abuse of power, I will also strengthen California’s legal defense infrastructure—funding for more attorneys, investigators, and accredited representatives, as well as legal aid and law school programs—to assist those who have been wrongfully imprisoned without due process. We also will create a statewide “know your rights” campaign so every Californian knows their legal rights.

You have called for abolishing ICE, even though that decision ultimately rests with the federal government. Why do you believe it is important for a gubernatorial candidate to advocate for that position?

We have a moral obligation to speak out against--what is very clearly--fascism. The true test of a leader is not who they disparage and attack, but who they defend and uplift. Donald Trump attacks and robs the most vulnerable in our society, while protecting and enriching the most powerful. I’ve made it clear: ICE must be abolished. ICE is acting like a criminal organization, carrying out indiscriminate racial profiling and using violence, intimidation, terrorism, and the murder of Americans to extend Trump’s rule by fear.

Some of the most aggressive recent immigration enforcement actions have been carried out by Border Patrol. How do you view the agency’s role, and what concerns, if any, do you have about its current practices?

Trump and his allies are using every tool at their disposal to terrorize immigrant communities. Every federal agent who abuses their power needs to be held accountable. Period. If they break the law, they should be prosecuted. Federal agents don’t have the right to terrorize California--no matter the patch on their shoulder.

What role should California’s governor play in shaping the national conversation on immigration?

The governor of California has the ability to pass laws to fight back against ICE’s reign of terror, and the laws California passes can serve as a model for the rest of the country. The governor also has a tremendous bully pulpit to call attention to the Trump Administration’s abuses. As governor, I will do everything in my power to protect immigrant communities and hold ICE accountable.

Two decades ago, when I was a freshman at the University of Southern California, I would often lie on a tree-lined grassy knoll near my dormitory. Sun warming my face, I closed my eyes and imagined that I could be the author of my destiny.

I will work as a foreign correspondent.

I will publish critically-acclaimed books.

I will become a professor.

These were wild dreams — delusional, even. I was majoring in “print journalism” as the digital economy swallowed newspapers whole. My professors at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism gently warned students not to get our hopes up about our job prospects. They described mass layoffs in the news business, amid plummeting readership and ad revenue. It seemed like the worst time to pursue a career in journalism. But my hopes could not be subdued.

I’d grown up hooked on K.A. Applegate’s The Animorphs and Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth book series, in which protagonists battle evil slugs and sorcerers who seek to control humanity. I saw journalism as a way to combat those villains in real life, and I clung to the improbable vision I’d nurtured on that grassy knoll: reporting from the far-away edges of American empire, writing books that drag tyrants into the light, and returning to a university as a professor with something worth teaching.

One day, I shared my ambitions with my then-boyfriend, a white fellow Annenberg student, who aspired to be a presidential speechwriter. His opinion mattered to me; I saw him as more knowledgeable than me because he read the print version of The New York Times every day. He rolled his eyes and said: “Good luck.”

Sometimes, I feared he was right to dismiss me. I was surrounded by students like him, who’d grown reading the Times or religiously watching CNN; I grew up on fantasy novels and my friends’ Livejournals and Xangas. The fast-changing headlines on news sites confused me. The detached language of news anchors bored me. But I was the daughter of a Boricua who had refused to let her working-class roots be a barrier to her dreams, who became a physician by joining the National Health Service Corps. Whenever I felt lost, I would return to that grassy knoll and dream.

Today, I have accomplished all of the dreams I nurtured there. I worked as a foreign correspondent, wrote two acclaimed books (including a biography of Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller) and as of last month, am an Associate Professor of Journalism at Annenberg, with tenure. The latter is the blessing of a lifetime. A homecoming. It offers a level of security I have never known, especially since I became a target of the administration’s allies, who have threatened me with litigation and violence.

This milestone would not have been possible without a small but mighty circle of allies: educators, editors and friends whose support offset discouragement along the way and repeatedly helped me turn setbacks into successes. That includes many USC professors who pushed me outside of my comfort zone as a student.

Since I learned of my appointment last month, I’ve been reflecting on everything that made my journey possible, in search of insights for my students as they enter a field still in crisis. I see them struggling with the fear and impostor syndrome I felt, as the mediocre men behind authoritarianism and anti-human “AI” remain supremely confident in themselves. How can the next generation of journalists achieve the seemingly far-fetched dream of defending truth and humanity?

I tell my students to find their co-conspirators: mentors and allies who believe in them, who are interested in journalism not as a corporate enterprise but as a public service — one that can restore agency to the people. The techno-fascists and oligarchs need us isolated to control us. It will be crucial to build community and to produce journalism that facilitates coalition-building. But that won’t be enough.

What served me the most in the years since I graduated from Annenberg in 2010, aside from support and hard work, was my willingness to bend the rules and trust my judgement as an outsider. I never allowed a news organization to box me in or blunt my vision. As a commodities correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in Mexico City, I was expected to write for a News Corp audience, such as futures traders interested in coffee prices. I did that work, but I also reported on Indigenous activists struggling against corporate colonialism.

At the same time, I ignored the conventional wisdom that memoirs are to be written by famous and accomplished people. In my mid 20s, I wrote an experimental memoir called Crux that won a PEN Literary Award and was praised by the L.A. Review of Books as “the kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre.”

Later, as an investigative reporter at the NPR and PBS affiliate in San Diego, I wrote my biography of Miller and called it Hatemonger against the advice of my news director, an ally who observed that the title violated the NPR Code of Ethics rules on impartiality, and could impede my ability to return to the newsroom after my book leave. I believed my responsibility to the facts was greater than my responsibility to those rules. So I lost my job in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic.

It wasn't a setback. It was a door. I had spent my career leaving my opinions out of my reporting, including Hatemonger, a fact-checked work of investigative reporting. Now, I began to understand how impartiality can serve concentrated power. I began writing opinion essays, defying my training to be neutral. A few months later, I was recruited as a columnist to The Los Angeles Times — their only Latina opinion columnist. When I was laid off in 2024, I became a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

As billionaire-backed media mergers consolidate more and more power over what the population sees and believes, it will be the journalists who insist on doing things differently — who remain faithful to truth and humanity — who stand a chance at defining not only their own destinies, but also the future of journalism.

At Annenberg, I am teaching “unbordered reporting,” a journalism that refuses to be constrained by geography, time, propaganda or preconceptions. I encourage my students to read far beyond current events. I want them to become obsessed with geology, biology, history, physics, poetry, neuroscience, mythology, fantasy and science fiction. The people engineering our obedience need our minds narrow. They want us hyper-specialized and incurious — useful as instruments, not as thinkers. A journalist forever plugged into the news cycle is easy to contain. But a mind that has wandered through deep time, enchanted wastelands and the physics of light — that mind sees what the algorithm can't predict. That mind cannot be subjugated.

As humans, we are all here thanks to cyanobacteria: microscopic creatures that emerged on the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and improvised a way to do something that had never been done before: split the sea. The blue-green algae harnessed the sun’s power to break the once-unbreakable bind between hydrogen and oxygen in the water around them. This produced free oxygen, and ultimately the air we breathe.

Those small and resourceful beings are, in a way, our creators. I learned about them from Laura Poppick’s gorgeous new book Strata: Stories From Deep Time, about the truths written into the Earth. To me, the cyanobacteria are a reminder that world-altering transformations can begin in small, overlooked corners — in creatures too tiny to see, in girls lying on grassy knolls nurturing impossible dreams.

So the next time you feel powerless, remember the cyanobacteria.

For years, Reyna Grande believed her writing was inseparable from pain. Trauma was the raw material of her memoirs and public talks.

In her new book, Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget, the bestselling author (who happens to be a dear friend) interrogates what it means to build a literary career from the wounds that once threatened to consume you — and what happens when you no longer want pain to be the center of your creative life.

The result is her most searching and philosophically rich work yet. Across essays about migration, motherhood, menopause, boundaries and more, Grande wrestles with questions that feel especially urgent for Latina artists: What happens when vulnerability is both connection and a commodity? How do writers distinguish between self-reflection and self-exploitation? And what does it mean to seek joy, rest and privacy in a culture and industry that rewards us for bleeding publicly?

In one of the book’s most powerful essays, “The Menopausal Gardener’s Almanac,” Grande sees a metaphor for her exhaustion in her garden. She writes about a peach tree she neglected to prune, allowing it to overproduce until its branches began to bend and crack. “Heavy with fruit, the tree sags, its branches bearing the weight of its abundance, looking utterly, beautifully tired,” she writes. “I recognize that look.”

Grande has long been one of the most important chroniclers of the immigrant experience in America, but Migrant Heart feels distinct from her previous work. There is a new softness to her essays, a deliberate turning toward joy, leisure and the wisdom of middle age. The book does not offer easy resolutions. It lingers honestly inside contradiction: the guilt of wanting boundaries, the fear that happiness might extinguish artistic fire, the simultaneous needs to remember and to let go.

In our conversation, we spoke about the publishing industry’s appetite for trauma narratives from women of color, the line between self-reflection and self-exploitation, gardening as resistance to extraction, and why she’s beginning to imagine a creative life no longer rooted in anguish. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

As Latina writers, we’re often expected to write from places of pain and trauma. Did writing Migrant Heart feel in any way like resisting those expectations?

More than a form of resistance, it was a form of reframing. I am the first to admit that I do write a lot about trauma. My work is inspired by my trauma. And that’s what I explore in the book, especially in the essay, “The Queen of Misery,” where I say that my writing has been tied to my trauma since I first started writing at 13.

But the way I started to reframe that was, first of all, [to acknowledge that] writing about our trauma, it's really important for our mental health. We are able to sit with it and examine it and try to understand these experiences that we've had and what they've meant. It's kind of like a form of exorcism, you know? Confronting the ghosts of our past that continue to hurt us, as a way of liberating ourselves from them.

You try to look at what you learned from these experiences — not just the negative, but the positive. That's what I tried to do with this book. Each essay revisits a very traumatic moment in my life, but then I start to work my way toward the positivity.

What did I learn from this experience? What good things did it give me? Where's the joy in these painful moments? How can I hold onto that joy? How can I get myself to a place of gratitude so that I'm not just bitter about those moments?

You write about trying to find the line between self-reflection and self-exploitation. Can you talk about your struggle to determine how vulnerable to be?

I’m really intrigued by conversations I’ve been seeing on social media where people are talking about how writers of color, especially, are expected to be writing about our trauma and our pain. And the publishing industry has in some ways commodified that. So it forced me to take a look at what I have been writing about and why.

Where does that come from? Have I been forced to write about my trauma? Is there anything else that I can write about that is not tied to my trauma? So right now I’m starting to take my writing in a different direction, and I do want to start exploring what my writing can become when it’s not tied to my traumatic experiences.

That’s why I’m so intrigued by that conversation, because I’m wondering — was I [self-exploiting] without being fully conscious of it? Because I hear other people talk about that, and I also hear about another thing I’m intrigued by: decolonizing our minds, decolonizing our writing. And then I ask myself, where does my writing aesthetic come from? Obviously it has been shaped by a Western aesthetic — my creative writing programs, it was a white aesthetic. And so that’s another thing that I’ve been curious about in terms of my own writing: how has it been shaped, what forces have shaped my writing style? What would it look like if I decolonized my writing?

You’ve started doing that in this book by leaning into joy — the joys of gardening, of your marriage. You’re also embracing boundaries as a writer. Your essay “As Much As I’m Willing” is about learning to put limits on how much you’re disclosing about your intimate life. It feels like it should be required reading for aspiring memoirists, particularly women of color who are disproportionately pressured to divulge their most traumatic memories. Why did you decide to write that essay?

When I first started writing memoir, I just thought you’re supposed to write about everything — everything and everyone — and be as completely open as possible and allow your readers into your life in every way. That’s kind of what I thought. I read Anne Lamott, who talks about how there’s a contract with the reader for you to give and give and give, to be as honest and open as possible. And I saw that in my own reading tastes — I love memoirs where I felt the writer is being honest and letting me into their lives. Whereas there were memoirs I read where I felt the writer was being too guarded, keeping me at arm’s length, dancing around certain things and not writing openly about them, and I’d get really frustrated and say, ‘what’s the point?’

Anyway, my approach to memoir was: I’m just going to invite the reader into my home and let them roam at will, go into all the rooms, even my bedroom. But then when you and I were at the Texas Book Festival [in 2018] with [the author] Jose Antonio Vargas and you asked him that question about his mom, he flat-out said no, he didn’t want to talk about it … When I approached him afterwards and asked him why he didn’t want to talk about his mom more, he said, “I’ve given as much as I’m willing to give.” Which is the opposite of what Anne Lamott says, because she says you’re gonna have to give and give and give, and he says, I’ll give you as much as I’m willing. It was that “as much as I’m willing” that shocked me.

And obviously he did. He was very good at setting those boundaries. So it forced me to then reconsider how I was approaching it.

And yes, I wrote it to encourage boundaries, because that is something I have seen with younger people — they are starting to push back and be more intentional about setting boundaries, and also to be more aware of their mental health and protect it in a way that older generations weren’t openly talking about. Mental health in the Latino community continues to be a taboo topic. So for young Latinas, it’s definitely important to have that permission to set boundaries, even with their families.

There’s a powerful thread throughout the collection about the body — the female body specifically: menopause, illness, exhaustion, aging. Did writing these essays change the way you think about embodiment or self-care?

I think that is something that I’m grappling with as a middle-aged woman — looking at society’s expectations of women, where we get to a certain age and then face all these pressures because aging in women is so frowned upon.

Those essays at the end — the Menopausal Gardener’s Almanac — I was asked to write them for an anthology on menopause. This happened a few years ago. When I got the email asking me to contribute to an anthology on menopause, my first reaction was, ‘oh my god, I’m old enough to be asked to write about menopause.’

And that was a moment where I had to just sit with that and say, ‘ok, well that’s the stage I’m in now. So let’s embrace it.’ So I had a lot of fun writing those essays because I had been wanting to write about my garden and what I had learned from it about womanhood, about fertility, about aging, and about productivity.

Writing that essay helped me to sit with that. What did I learn from my peach tree about motherhood? And about society’s expectations on mothers, and forcing us to carry more than we should carry? And how had I internalized that — that I then forced my peach tree to carry more than it should? Watching it start to break from the weight of it was quite a shock, but it also helped me learn more about how I had internalized society’s expectations and put myself through that burden of carrying more than I should.

It seems like part of the process of unburdening yourself is in gardening itself, and in the other joyful activities you’ve started to partake in for simple pleasure.

I had to give myself permission to do things for my own enjoyment, where not every hour of my day has to go towards being productive or making money or bringing in income. I could do things just for the joy of it, things that just give me pleasure, that don’t necessarily mean I’m going to make any money off of them.

I think that difficulty in giving yourself permission to do things for yourself is very relatable to many people, particularly Latinas. While reading your book I thought of the children’s book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Have you read it?

I don’t believe in book burning, but that’s one book I would burn: The Giving Tree. I hated that book with all my heart when I read it, because it’s just such a distorted viewpoint of what motherhood is and what the role of a mom should be.

For that tree to give everything of herself away to her children, where there’s nothing left of you but a stump — it was a horrible message. I was in my mid-20s when I read it. I was teaching middle school, for English language learners. I would give them children’s books … since they were easier to read. I stumbled upon The Giving Tree and read it and thought, this is horrible.

But we internalize that message anyway, don’t we?

Yeah because that’s the cultural expectation — la mamá que sacrifica todo por sus hijos. And that’s what’s valued in the Latino community. In a way … what [my mother] did model for me was saying, forget that. I won’t sacrifice everything for my children. She went the opposite way. So then I had to figure out how to find the balance.

I’ve tried to fight for my independence as a mother, pushing back and saying motherhood is not going to define who I am — it’s just part of my story.

At the same time, I do feel guilty sometimes — ‘oh my god, I’m becoming my mother, I’m just thinking about myself and not my kids.’ This happens when I’m traveling, when I’m not home and I’m going around the country presenting on my books instead of being home with my kids. And then I feel guilty and there’s a voice in my head saying, ‘you’re just like your mom, you’re leaving your kids.’ I have to remind myself that I am not my mother. And I’m also modeling for my daughter that if she ever chooses to become a mom, she can also continue to be a woman with her own dreams.

Your book arrives at a moment when Latinos are facing unprecedented attacks by the federal government. Your writing, as always, insists on the full, complicated, interior life of a person who crossed a border — the grief, the creativity, the love, the ambivalence. How do you see your role in countering dehumanization?

When I write, I get more personal than political, because I feel that’s one way to counter it. For me, what is the stronger way to counter a political point of view? Go as human as possible, as personal as possible.

When I write about my experiences, I’m not writing about the thousands or millions of immigrant families — I’m just writing about mine. But in doing that, in writing about just one family, I feel that I am writing about immigrant families in a way that a reader who learns just a little bit about my family can understand what other families go through. It’s kind of like what I was telling the students at [your] bootcamp: the bigger the issue, the smaller you go … For example, when I was writing The Distance Between Us, I’m not going to write about the DREAM Act, I’m not going to write about this big issue for Dreamers — I’m going to write about me and what it was like for me to be an undocumented youth. Instead of telling you about an issue, I’m showing you what it feels like. And that is really powerful.

The book is subtitled Essays About Things I Can’t Forget. But reading it, I kept thinking it’s also about things you’re letting go of. What did it help you to release?

I think the book was helping me to arrive at this stage of my life. Because when I wrote the other memoirs, they were written from the point of view of my younger self. Whereas with this one I really wanted to embrace the voice of the middle-aged woman that I am, and revisit some of these moments that I had already written about, but from this point of view. I did that deliberately — I wanted to make space for my adult self in a way that I didn’t with the other two memoirs.

Sandra Cisneros texted me two days ago — she had just finished reading the book — and she said, “Loved your book … You are on your camino sagrado.” That’s kind of what I was also trying to do with this book, from this point of view of my older self — what she calls the camino sagrado, how we come to a point in our lives where we start walking on that holy path toward embracing the wisdom these years have given us.

Society makes us believe that getting older is something to dread. But now that I’m here in my 50s, I was dreading it, and now that I’m here I’m like, wait a minute — this is going to be my best decade yet. Because my mind has finally started to gain that wisdom that I didn’t have in my younger years. I’m starting to not get hung up on things that in younger years had more importance, and now I’m like, oh, whatever, I’m just going to go with the flow. Being more patient, being more generous, being more loving — all of that. I feel like I’m going to enjoy this stage of my life a lot.

The billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer stood out in the California gubernatorial debate on Wednesday as the most aggressive defender of immigrants, once again calling for “abolishing ICE” and even suggesting that he’d go after Stephen Miller.

“We should be prosecuting ICE agents for racial profiling,” he said, when asked about state sanctuary laws. “It’s illegal in the state of California. We should be prosecuting them for violence against Californians. It’s illegal, and we should go up the chain to the people who ask them to commit violence, including Stephen Miller.”

Steyer has previously called for arresting Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies with their focus on rounding up non-criminal immigrants. Miller, the subject of my biography Hatemonger, reportedly urged federal agents to “force confrontations” with anti-ICE protestors in Minneapolis before ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot.

Other Democratic candidates called for defending California’s sanctuary laws and protecting immigrants, but their rhetoric failed to meet the moment on a stage with Republican candidates who want to welcome ICE into the state with open arms. Both Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco and pro-Trump media personality Steve Hilton have called for eliminating California’s sanctuary policies.

Xavier Becerra invoked his record of fighting for immigrants as California’s attorney general, including in lawsuits against the first Trump administration, as he has in previous debates. But his rhetoric was more cautious than Steyer’s.

One of the most revealing exchanges was between Bianco and Katie Porter.

Porter called for enforcing California’s sanctuary laws statewide, “so we don’t have crazy cowboys taking the law into their own hands.” Bianco responded with one of a line straight from the MAGA playbook. “Tell that to a crazy mother who lost her child,” he said, invoking the specter of immigrant criminality that Trump Republicans have used for years to rationalize mass deportation and aggressive enforcement.

“Sir, I don’t need any lectures from you about being a mother,” Porter shot back.

“You might,” Bianco replied.

The exchange crystallized the broader dynamic of the debate on immigration. Republicans came armed with the usual scapegoating. Democrats mostly responded defensively — treating immigrant communities as constituencies to protect rather than human beings whose rights and dignity deserve unapologetic affirmation.

Steyer, whatever one thinks of his billionaire status or political ambitions, was the only candidate who seemed willing to fully confront the violence underlying the current immigration system. He did not speak about ICE as a neutral institution that occasionally makes mistakes. He called it a “criminal organization” and named Stephen Miller as a central figure in its violent unleashing against Californians.

California’s next governor will have the opportunity to shape the moral language Democrats use to talk about immigration in the Trump and post-Trump era. On Wednesday night, most candidates sounded like they were still catching up.

The Republican candidates for California governor are already scapegoating immigrants, revealing that they have nothing of substance to offer the people of this state. But the response of their Democratic opponents leaves much to be desired.

During a televised debate Wednesday, the pro-Trump media personality Steve Hilton — the frontrunner, according to polls — turned to the playbook of Stephen Miller, Trump’s most powerful anti-immigrant crusader: casting immigrants as a public safety threat. “It is completely ridiculous that we have people driving on our roads who can’t understand road signs and can’t speak English,” he said.

Hilton told the story of a girl who was seriously injured after a car accident involving an “illegal immigrant.” Trump and Miller have long told stories of people who’ve died in car accidents and other incidents with people who lacked legal immigration status, framing immigrants as dangerous, even though data consistently shows they’re less likely to commit violent crimes than citizens. The scapegoating is a way of distracting voters from real problems and protecting the status quo. Hilton said that as governor, he would not issue commercial driver’s licenses to people who are in the U.S. illegally.

RELATED: I Moderated A Debate For California Governor. The Candidates Left Me Wanting More.

His comments were responding to a question about the Trump administration’s withholding of more than $40 million from California for failing to comply with Trump’s new English proficiency rules for truck drivers. “Should the CHP be giving English proficiency tests to drivers, and if not, would you as governor push back against the Trump administration on this policy?” asked moderator Nikki Laurenzo.

To frame the question, the debate moderators played a video of a commercial truck driver struggling to explain traffic signs to a California Highway Patrol officer, presenting it as an “exclusive,” as if it was valuable investigative reporting. (It’s worth noting that the debate was hosted by NewsNation and Nexstar). Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, another Trump loyalist, conjured “horrific accidents that were attributed to people that did not understand English.”

Xavier Becerra, California’s former Attorney General, observed that the driver in the video seemed like he may have understood the signs but was struggling to put his understanding into English words. “I understood a little bit of what that individual was trying to say,” Becerra said. “I couldn’t see the sign, but it certainly sounded like he was trying to describe what that particular sign was trying to represent.”

He added: “We have to be careful that we’re not profiling consumers in California, drivers in California — it is against the law,” he said.

I’ve written previously about Becerra’s campaign and the potential he is showing, and why I believe he should be bolder on his immigrant rights rhetoric. In this debate, just as in the one I moderated last week, it was the billionaire activist and philanthropist Tom Steyer who came across as the boldest defender of immigrants.

In response to the question about the truck drivers, Steyer said: “Racial profiling is illegal. And in fact, picking on people based on the color of their skin in the state of California is illegal.” He described his plans to prosecute ICE officers for racial profiling and violence against Californians, and to establish a legal defense fund for immigrants who are “kidnapped” by federal agents and a Know Your Rights campaign.

Although Steyer called for “abolishing ICE” in last week’s campaign, nobody said those words in this debate. It was disappointing, to say the least, at a time when 50% of Americans support abolishing the agency.

Immigration is one of the central narratives through which power is organized in this country. The right understands this; that’s why it’s Trump’s signature issue and why the Republicans in this race are turning to it. By casting immigrants as threats, they keep workers divided and exploited— a system that benefits employers who rely on cheap, precarious labor while deflecting blame for rising costs and declining security. When Democrats avoid the issue, they reinforce that frame.

If they want to lead, they need to tell a different story — one that links immigrant rights to workers’ rights, and both to the broader struggle against concentrated wealth and corporate power. They need to say clearly that the criminalization of immigrants is an attack on labor itself: a way of lowering standards for everyone, citizen and noncitizen alike. And they need to expose opposition to immigrant inclusion for what it is — not populism, but an elite strategy to preserve inequality.

California has the chance to redefine this debate for the nation. But that requires Democrats who are willing not just to defend immigrants, but to reframe them as central to a shared fight for dignity, stability and power on the job and beyond.

The last time I wrote about a gubernatorial race in California, I was sounding the alarm about Larry Elder, a pro-Trump media personality who was the Republican frontrunner in the 2021 recall effort against Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Early polls showed he had a real chance of taking over the governor’s mansion. But then journalists exposed the threat he posed to many Californians. For example, I reported on his long-time mentorship of anti-immigrant crusader Stephen Miller and on Elder’s opposition to sanctuary laws. In the end, his bid for governor collapsed, with voters rejecting the recall by nearly 24 points. Elder blamed the news media.

Once again, California faces a threat from a pro-Trump media personality who wants to be governor: this time, Steve Hilton. The crowded field of Democrats could spread the blue vote thin, enabling Hilton and another Trump loyalist, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, to win June’s primary. A MAGA takeover of the state could reverse decades of progress on environmental justice, immigrant rights and more.

California is in desperate need of a stand-out candidate on the left. Many voters are disillusioned with Democrats’ failure to make this state affordable for the people who built it, or to deliver on housing, healthcare and protections from the federal agents disappearing our neighbors. Some are turning to third-party candidates, hungry for a leader who challenges the status quo, and seeing the Democrats as more of the same.

When I sat down last week to co-moderate a debate with Telemundo 33 reporter Lupita Baltazar in Sacramento, I was anxious to see if any of the candidates would break from the pack. Those who accepted the organizers’ invitation to participate and who showed up were all Democrats: Xavier Becerra, Matt Mahan, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Tony Thurmond, Antonio Villaraigosa and Betty Yee. The debate, “Nuestra Voz 2026,” focused on Latino and immigrant communities and was organized by the California Immigrant Policy Center, ACLU Cal Action and the Latino Caucus.

The clear favorite of the candidates on stage — judging by the room’s cheers and applause — was Becerra, the former California Attorney General who sued Trump 120 times during his first term, often successfully. Becerra had just been endorsed by the CHIRLA Action Fund, whose representatives were in the room.

A new survey by Gudelunas Strategies on Monday showed the race tightening but the danger very much alive: Hilton leads with 20% of likely voters, with Steyer and Becerra tied at 15%. An Emerson College/Inside California Politics poll released last week showed Hilton with 17% of likely voters, Bianco and Steyer each at 14%, and Becerra surging from 3% to 10% in a month, after a formerly more popular candidate, Eric Swalwell, was accused of sexual misconduct and resigned from Congress. Young content creators have been bolstering Becerra’s campaign on social media.

Under President Biden, Becerra was Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), one of the federal government’s largest departments, where he says he made sure everyone received a Covid vaccine regardless of immigration status. But his tenure was also marked by controversy: his push to rapidly release migrant children from HHS custody coincided with oversight failures that critics say left many vulnerable to exploitation, according to a 2021 investigation in The New York Times. At the time, a spokeswoman for HHS said they moved children quickly for their well-being.

Nevertheless, Becerra positioned himself as the most capable candidate in the race: one with a record of protecting Dreamers and Californians of all backgrounds.

Becerra could face an uphill battle in persuading voters that he offers a break from the status quo, given his decades within the Democratic establishment. But of all the Democratic candidates, he arguably has the strongest claim to outsider credibility as the son of immigrants, and the first in his family to graduate from a university.

The second favorite candidate on stage last week, judging also by cheers, was Steyer, a billionaire activist and philanthropist who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020. Steyer was the most unabashedly anti-ICE candidate; he called for abolishing it. “I’m for abolishing ICE — it’s a criminal organization. It absolutely doesn’t deserve to exist,” he said. He admitted that he can’t abolish a federal agency, but promised that as governor he would prosecute federal agents who “commit violence against Californians, including the people who send them to commit violence.”

Steyer also appeared to be the most openly antagonistic toward the AI companies taking people’s jobs, repeatedly proposing a tax on them. “We need to tax AI for every calculation and use that for job re-training,” Steyer said.

Of all the candidates on stage, Steyer offered what struck me as the most concrete, creative proposals for generating revenue and addressing the affordability crisis. For example, he said that on day one, he’d hold a special election to close a corporate real estate tax loophole worth more than $20 billion to help pay for the social safety net.

However, it’s unclear that a billionaire can be trusted to take on other billionaires. After all, Trump promised to drain the swamp and stocked his cabinet with it. Bezos and other moguls took over newspapers to save democracy, then bent the knee to Trump. When the moment comes, would Steyer pull the trigger on his own class? He carries his own baggage: while he now champions racial and economic justice, he once held investments in private prison companies, according to prior reporting.

So, who is the strongest candidate? I’m still not sure. I covered Becerra when he was building a reputation for challenging Trump in court and winning. That history matters. So does the fact that California has not elected a Latino governor since 1875. It makes his candidacy feel, in some ways, overdue. I want to believe he’s the best choice. His record is substantial. His roots are real. But I’m not yet convinced.

During a February interview on KQED’s “Political Breakdown,” Becerra wouldn’t say if he’d accept money from companies that cooperate with ICE, such as Palantir and Google. “Would you not take money from those companies?” host Scott Shafer asked. Becerra replied: “I’m not going out there to search for their money.”

“If they handed you a check, would you take it?”

“I doubt they’re going to hand me a check, I was one of the guys that was suing on some of these activities.”

When I reached out to Becerra’s campaign for clarification on Becerra’s position on taking money from these companies, his senior advisor Michael Bustamante said the campaign had not yet received any such money and that data sharing with ICE by these companies is “very concerning” to his boss, and that Becerra would address it as governor. “It’s immoral and easily could be illegal,” Bustamante said.

I asked him about Becerra’s position on abolishing ICE. Bustamante pointed to Becerra’s record of successfully stopping Trump’s effort to compel cooperation between California law enforcement agencies and ICE.

In a race where Democratic voters are looking for urgency as much as credibility, caution can read less like seriousness and more like reluctance to confront the full scope of the problem. Becerra needs to convince Californians that they can trust him to resist not only Trump, but also the corporations that profit from surveilling, detaining and deporting people. That means embracing positions that signal independence from the party. He should call for abolishing ICE—not as a literal promise of what he can deliver, but as a declaration of where he stands: against a system that has fused immigration enforcement with profit and abuse.

The next governor of California will have a rare, historic opening to fill the narrative vacuum that Democrats have left on immigration—to articulate a counter-story that is not reactive but defining. He will have the opportunity to unite immigrant rights and workers’ rights in the public discourse, and reframe opposition to citizenship access as an elite position that entrenches inequality and serves the powerful at our expense.

He needs to promise to fight for citizenship for the long-time undocumented people who power this state, even if only from the bully pulpit, and for the right of people across the Americas to stay on their lands and not be displaced by neocolonialism. He needs to challenge the tech companies extracting from us every day without our full consent or compensation and exploiting people in the Global South. He will have the opportunity to lead nationally and internationally on workers’ rights, immigrant rights and climate change — and expose how all three are inseparable.

Becerra has the biography. He has fought and won high-profile battles. What he has not yet shown is the willingness to redraw the political boundaries that have constrained Democrats for decades. The governor of California is not just a state leader; he is a national and hemispheric one, with the power to shape how millions understand belonging, labor and power. That requires naming the forces at stake, rejecting their influence, and building a cross-border coalition large enough to change what California means. Becerra may be that person. He has not yet proven it.

When I was a child, I learned that I shared a birthday, March 31, with César Chávez, the most famous Latino leader in U.S. history. My mother had bought me a certificate citing major historical events on my birth date. “A great day to be born! Astrologists say you are an Aries; a leader, sociable, likely to excel,” the certificate began, listing celebrities with the same birthday, including Chávez, the only Latino on the list.

I was proud to have been born on the same calendar day as the labor icon, who secured landmark contracts for farmworkers and improved working conditions for them. I woke up every morning to the certificate, which my mother had framed and hung near my bed. It was a daily reminder that I was part of a legacy of struggle for the marginalized. As a little girl, I liked to imagine that Chávez’s ghost lived on in me.

A recent New York Times investigation into alleged rape and sexual abuse by Chávez, including of girls as young as 12 and 15, has destroyed the pride I and countless other Latinos felt in the Chicano leader. The allegations are heartbreaking and infuriating. They come from Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas, Esmeralda Lopez and Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and is also a labor icon. Huerta revealed that Chávez had raped her, impregnating her twice.

Many people are confused about how to process the revelations at a time when President Trump is terrorizing vulnerable communities here and across the world, and distracting from his ever-multiplying, monstrous crimes by demonizing Latinos. It is painful to lose another Chicano leader, even though many of us already knew he was flawed. (By embracing anti-immigrant rhetoric, he failed to unite the American labor and immigrant rights movements, a necessary step for collective liberation.)

But the unsilencing of Latina survivors has created space for a retelling of history, one that grapples with the movement’s failures and the unseen Chicanas who were central to its victories. It has opened the door to collective healing. Already, the story is inspiring a reckoning with patriarchal violence in communities of color and among organizers — a digital movement that grapples with how Latinas, particularly those raised Catholic, too often endure violence in silence to protect loved ones, offering compassion to hurt men who hurt us while withholding it from ourselves.

By speaking up, she and the other survivors are unlocking an opportunity for Latinas and organizers across the country to desahogarnos. The Spanish word refers to a life-giving confession of sorts, an unburdening. Literally, it means to undrown ourselves.

Trump’s firehose of chaos and cruelty is mean to drown us, to choke us on terror, to kill hope. By pursuing justice and accountability amid a breakdown in law and order, Huerta and the other survivors are cracking something open. As I read their stories, I wept; I hadn’t wept in a long time. Weeping requires breathing; it requires life. The survivors and sensitivity of the reporting had let oxygen back into the news cycle. They’d created space to breathe again, to grieve, to imagine repair. They had freed us from the tyranny of the present, and given us back the past and the future.

This reimagining of U.S. history — turning a myth of male saviors into a truthful account of people sacrificing and struggling for each other, such as by renaming César Chávez as Farm Worker Day — invites a reimagining of our own family histories.

While reflecting on the revelations, I thought of all the times I excused or minimized misconduct by men in my family, including my father, the subject of my first book Crux. I omitted the worst of his abuses from those pages; I feared they would render him unsympathetic to readers in a society that demonizes flawed men from Latin America while sending white felons to the White House. I wanted to challenge the imbalance by writing from a place of compassion. My father is a survivor; he deserves love. But there is a difference between love and the silence that protects men at the expense of women and children. For most of my life, I was in denial about the harm my father’s mostly verbal abuse caused and was still causing me until I set boundaries a couple of years ago — which prompted him to stop contacting me.

For years, I maintained relationships with troubled, abusive men, such as the Latino teenager who raped me when I was 15, who told me he had been sexually abused. I stayed with him, my first boyfriend, for about a year after the rape, and remained friendly with him through much of my 20s. I felt for him and wanted to understand him. One evening after the 2016 elections, I expressed my grief about Trump’s victory to him. He told me he admired Trump, but not as much as Hitler — for the power, the command, the dominion over others. I wasn’t surprised. Unacknowledged trauma doesn’t heal; it transforms into a need to dominate, to possess, to destroy. It was in me, too, in my impulse to grasp such men — a form of self-destruction.

The day the Chávez story broke, Yari Mendez-Zamora, a contributor to Latina Rebels and an organizer, found herself thinking about the harms we forgive in our families. “I think about the men who are still allowed at our dinner tables, even when the stories have been circulating for decades about what they’ve done,” she wrote on Instagram.

She told me she hopes the Chávez story inspires long-overdue conversations among Latinos within our families. “What we see at home, we eventually replicate in other spaces, we allow in other spaces,” she said, adding that abuse in organizing spaces stems from failures to address abuse at home.

Other Latinas took to social media and other parts of the Internet to express solidarity with the survivors and share experiences of abuse — a community desahogo. “As a survivor I know the great weight of keeping a secret for what you believe to be the greater good,” wrote Aida Rodriguez, the Latina activist behind the HBO Max comedy special “Aida Rodriguez: Fighting Words” and author of “Legitimate Kid.”

Another user: “I went to college with boys that were hella involved in ‘community advocacy’ and treated women like shit + were shady af. It’s a pattern with men in these spaces. And we think they’re special because their public voice feels revolutionary and we care so deeply about the movement moving forward. Se aprovechan.”

Latino men also went online to share observations. In a viral video on Instagram, the content creator @cailegueyyy called on Latino men to speak up when other Latino men say and do inappropriate things. “Sometimes young Latinas are told to watch what they wear because va venir tu tío, y ya sabes como te mira,” he said, referring to a hypothetical uncle’s lustful stares. His reference sent chills of recognition through me. “That young girl is being blamed and policed rather than the person that is exhibiting creeper and weirdo behavior … that behavior should be called out and addressed.”

It’s unclear whether the collective grief, catharsis and calls to action will lead to healing. The #metoo movement during the first Trump administration failed to stop MAGA; some men argue that it pushed them farther into the manosphere, where their resentment curdled into something worse. But a reckoning that stays close to home — that moves from TikTok to the kitchen table, from public condemnation to private conversation — might achieve something more durable than a news cycle.

What would such a reckoning look like? Huerta told Hinojosa in her interview on LatinoUSA that we need to stop the problem of sexual abuse and violence toward girls and boys alike, saying it’s “more prevalent and widespread than we think.” Stopping it will likely require an interrogation of the way we see and interact with children.

Leslie Priscilla, the author of the forthcoming book Chancla: Healing Our Families, Ourselves and Our Culture Through Nonviolent Parenting, has spent years arguing that cycles of abuse begin in the home, in corporal punishment and other types of abuse that are still too common across racial and ethnic populations in the U.S.; as recently as the 1990s, about 90% of American parents reported spanking their children. That figure has since plummeted to about a third. But we still have a long way to go toward healing; many of us are still dealing with inherited trauma from parents who faced discrimination due to gender, race, nationality or simply their status as children. Priscilla believes that nonviolent parenting will be key to interrupting those cycles.

She points to bell hooks, who wrote in her 2004 book The Will To Change:

The dominator model, according to hooks, sees power as power over others. It is the root cause of misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia and other bigotries, including childism, which sees children as inferior and as the property of adults.

In a way, I was right as a child when I imagined that a ghost lived in me. But it wasn’t Chávez’s. It was the ghost of my father’s traumas, of the many ancestral traumas I inherited from the dominator model. Those wounds became my compass, pulling me toward people I felt compelled to understand, to fix, to redeem, regardless of the cost to my body and spirit. It took years to learn that compassion without boundaries is not love; it is self-erasure. Some mornings, I still feel that ghost reaching for me.

The question Chávez’s survivors are asking us — the question Huerta answered after 60 years of silence — is whether we will keep feeding that cycle of self-abandonment or finally break it. The movement is the hero, Lopez said. But the movement is only as healthy as the people inside it. That means us. All of us. Starting now.

It was the most powerful moment of Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday. Gazing at a football in his hands, he said: “God bless America!” Then he walked toward the camera while naming every country in the Americas.

As millions watched from across the globe, the Puerto Rican singer transmuted that phrase, widening its borders until it meant something new and beautiful. Behind him were a sea of flags and a billboard with a line from his recent acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Related: How Bad Bunny Became America’s Most Dangerous Artist.

President Trump immediately called the show “one of the worst, EVER!” Other conservative pundits complained about it being in Spanish. (It was the first halftime show almost entirely in Spanish.) What the MAGA movement found intolerable was the vision of America it presented: multilingual, multiracial, and irreducibly shared. The real America. It exposed the smallness of Trump’s delusions. And it was gorgeous.

It was a visually arresting celebration of Latin America and Puerto Rico specifically: the coco vendors, the piragua stand, the dominoes, the boxers. La Marqueta and the barber shop. The beautiful brown women perreando in their power. (Trump called the dancing “disgusting.”) My eyes filled with tears as a special guest, the Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin, sang Bad Bunny’s “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii.” Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa. Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya.

He was educating the world about the colonization of Puerto Rico that forced most Puerto Ricans, including my mother and most my maternal relatives, to leave the island. Today, most Puerto Ricans are diaspora in the mainland United States. Ricky Martin urged Puerto Ricans not to let go of their flag or forget their traditions.

The show featured some of Bad Bunny’s most anti-colonial songs, including “El Apagón,” about the blackouts that are common in Puerto Rico due to chronic neglect by the U.S. government and the U.S. corporations that occupy the island. Meanwhile, we saw jíbaros climbing and dancing on dilapidated powerline poles.

It was a breathtaking visualization of a reality that Trump and his allies are hiding behind nationalist rhetoric. I’ve previously written that Trump’s nationalism is a farce. He’s in league with transnational elites who want to extract and exploit the Americas, including the U.S., with impunity. That’s what his meddling in Honduras, Venezuela and elsewhere is about: an experiment in neocolonialism he wants to eventually bring to our cities. The proponents of this neocolonialism do not believe in nations or borders. In fact, they’re working to accelerate the global decline of nation states.

RELATED: Trump Is Not A Nationalist. He’s Something Worse.

Bad Bunny shows us that the fates of Americans across the Americas are entwined. His music asks us to resist the colonization of our minds and communities. Even the party songs he performed were political: centering brown joy in defiance of the federal agents who are detaining, deporting and shooting brown people dead.

One of the most powerful ways Bad Bunny is amplifying joy as resistance is by repopularizing salsa dancing and other Latin street dances. Those dances are radical because they create a strong sense of in-person community across race and class. And they’ve long been used in political resistance across the Americas, including in Puerto Rico. In my inaugural essay for Unsilencing, I wrote about rediscovering these dances thanks to Bad Bunny and how they helped me cultivate resilience.

As Bad Bunny danced salsa at the halftime show, I danced with my mother. It was the moment I’d most anticipated. His choice to dance “El Baile Inolvidable” with Lady Gaga, rather than a Latina artist, surprised me — but then I realized it was a deliberate choice in keeping with Bad Bunny’s vision of connection across difference, with his refusal to let love be constrained by nationality, language or race.

But the most radical message came in the first few seconds of his show. Its significance was likely lost on most viewers, but I want to bring it to your attention: before he even stepped on stage, he placed us in a maze of sugarcane fields, tended by laborers. It was a haunting image of Puerto Rico’s plantation economy shaped first by Spain, then by U.S. corporations — concentrating wealth off the island.

Later, the plantation economy morphed into a “special economic zone,” a rapidly multiplying form of territory with its own corporate-friendly laws, like looser environmental and labor regulations. (It’s what Trump brokered for Gaza in its cease-fire with Israel.) These tax havens, first tested in Puerto Rico, are where Trump and his Silicon Valley enablers want to build semi-autonomous cities run by corporations. (Trump’s recent pardon of a famous drug trafficker in Honduras is all about saving a semi-autonomous city there).

The political economist Patrick Neveling calls these zones the successors of the global plantation complex. Bad Bunny’s choice to start his show with visuals of that complex, and the cutters who endured grueling, underpaid work, was audacious. As a journalist who started her career as a commodities correspondent in Mexico and Central America, interviewing campesinos fighting displacement, I find it frustrating that I never hear mainstream public figures on either side of the political aisle acknowledge the ties between industrial-scale corporate extraction and migration. People shouldn’t be displaced, and shouldn’t have their land taken; I’ve advocated for the immigration debate to recognize not only the right to migrate but the right to stay. The concept was introduced to me by Miriam Miranda, a Honduran activist for the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna.

“It’s true that we have the right to migrate, but we also have the right to stay,” she told me. “Why does nobody ever talk about the right we have to stay?”

The reason we don’t hear about the “right to stay” in the immigration debate is, I suspect, because elites in both parties benefit from a manufactured underclass. That’s why Trump is creating the conditions in Latin America to fuel new long-term waves of vulnerable immigrants, at the same time as he’s deporting the immigrants who’ve accumulated some power in the form of U.S.-citizen children, homes and jobs.

The right to stay is far more radical than the notion of open borders embraced by some progressives. As I wrote in The New York Times, “A politics that celebrates movement while ignoring displacement serves capital, not people. Its logical endpoint is a world where we all become migrants — where communities everywhere are hollowed out again and again so that extraction can continue uninterrupted.” You don’t hear Democratic or Republican politicians advocating for the right to stay because it would require acknowledging the harms of U.S. corporate extraction.

At the halftime show, he powerfully asserted that right. It was in the strength of his stance on the stage, despite calls for his deportation and disparagement. It was in the flags, the dancers, the full weight of Latin America and Puerto Rico claiming their space in the world. As he whispered at the camera for us to believe in our power, “vales más de lo que piensas,” he was also saying: you have a right to stay. We have a right to stay. “Seguimos aquí,” he said at the end of the performance. We are still here.

Then he held out a football. On it were the words: TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to Unsilencing.

I published my first Substack essay, “How Bad Bunny Became America’s Most Dangerous Artist,” yesterday after some friends urged me to go for it. They knew I’d poured my heart into the essay and convinced me to self-publish it. And suddenly thousands of you are here. Subscribing. Sharing. Writing the most heartfelt messages.

Thank you. I’m a little stunned, very grateful, and deeply energized by your response.

Unsilencing is where you will find the kind of journalism and political analysis that doesn’t perform neutrality as entire communities are terrorized and erased — the kind that takes Latino and immigrant stories seriously as central to America.

My work embraces nuance, uncertainty and the in-between spaces. But I’m not impartial. My journalism is deeply partial to human rights and dignity.

Unsilencing is a platform for dissident opinions and unheard perspectives, with a focus on joy and hope and the unseen power of the resistance.

And you all showed up for that.

So I want to celebrate.

🐰 A Bad Bunny welcome gift: 20% off

For the rest of the month, I’m offering 20% off subscriptions for anyone who wants to join as a paid subscriber.

If you came here because of Bad Bunny, this is your Bad Bunny celebration discount.

Also: I lowered the price

I’m deeply grateful for all of you who have shown your committment to supporting independent journalists, at a moment when the industry is in turmoil and democracy is under attack. I want anyone who subscribes to be able to subscribe to others, too, and to be part of this effort long-term. I realized after launching that $8/month felt too high to me for those goals. So I’ve lowered the subscription price to $5/month.

If you already subscribed at $8 and want to cancel and re-subscribe at the new price, please do. I won’t be offended — I actually want you to. I want this to be accessible, sustainable, and something you feel good about being part of.

Who am I?

For those who don’t know me, I’m Jean Guerrero – the author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda, the acclaimed investigative biography of Mr. Miller. I also wrote Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, a PEN Literary Award winner and one of NPR’s Best Books and a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

I’m a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and a visiting professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

A fronteriza perspective, born of growing up on the border and reporting across them, permeates all of my work, which strives always to center our common humanity.

A head’s up: commentary on MSNOW

I’ll be on MSNOW a few minutes before the Super Bowl halftime show, talking about what Bad Bunny represents to the world — and why MAGA is so terrified of him.

Feel free to tune in.

After that, I’ll be dancing, and I hope you’ll be dancing, too!

Warmly,

Jean Guerrero

The most-streamed artist on Spotify globally, the Puerto Rican singer just made history by winning Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards with the first Spanish-language album to win that prize. Today, he’s performing at the Super Bowl half-time show, an American cultural institution and the most-watched TV event each year.

As I wrote in my inaugural Unsilencing essay, Bad Bunny is not just a cultural icon. His music is political and defiantly anti-colonial. President Trump and his allies are attacking his music not only because he sings unapologetically in Spanish and in celebration of Puerto Rico, but because he’s educating millions of people worldwide about the exploitation of the archipelago, the testing ground for the neocolonialism that Trump is pursuing across Latin America in service of a global pillaging class.

Bad Bunny, or Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is not an immigrant, a foreigner, or from a Latin American country. Although conservative media pundits cast him as an outsider, he’s an American citizen born and raised in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. He’s the apex of an American success story: a citizen who went from bagging groceries and uploading tracks to SoundCloud to global superstardom in a decade—all while raising awareness about Puerto Rico’s plight.

Puerto Ricans serve and die in the U.S. military, but they can’t vote in our national elections if they live on the island. Over 3,000 people died when Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, and Trump’s response was to throw paper towels into a crowd of Puerto Ricans on the island. He repeatedly blocked disaster aid to the island. In 2024, Puerto Rico was the butt of a hack comedian’s racist jokes at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, who described it as a “floating island of garbage.”

The MAGA world can’t seem to accept that someone from Puerto Rico could achieve Bad Bunny’s level of success. Trump called him a “terrible choice” for the Super Bowl, and Turning Point USA is trying to distract people with an alternate half-time show featuring Kid Rock, who once sang about his predilection for underage girls.

Their fear of Bad Bunny is justified. His music is the antithesis to Trump’s politics of hatemongering. First, his embrace of his history and language has inspired people across the world to rediscover their roots and reject the toxic rigidity of assimilation and Whiteness. Second, his lyrics are often direct calls to resistance; for example, his “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” urges Puerto Ricans to hold onto their flag as elites try to take the island’s rivers and beaches. Third, he’s re-popularizing traditions and cultural practices that are fundamentally radical, such as salsa and other Latin social dances, which create a strong sense of mutual care and intimacy across race and class.

At the Grammys, Bad Bunny began his acceptance speech by saying, “ICE out,” and urging people around the world to reject hate and embrace love. As federal agents continue to terrorize communities across the country, his half-time show arrives like a counterspell to the politics of fear—a mass ritual of joy, memory, and belonging.

I joined The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali to break down how Bad Bunny’s celebratory music is a cultural insurgency that cuts directly against Trump’s nativist, exclusionary project and exposes the limits of his vision for the Americas.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from UNSILENCING by Jean Guerrero in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I encountered Bad Bunny on my last day in Puerto Rico, while walking back to my hotel room in Old San Juan from a nearby café. He was in the humid courtyard of The Gallery Inn, weeks after he was announced as the headliner for the Super Bowl halftime show. The hotel is known for its macaws, a cockatoo and an African Gray that roam the art-filled rooms. The Puerto Rican singer sat at a table near a royal blue hyacinth macaw, eating breakfast with a small entourage.

I stopped in my tracks, stunned to see my favorite musician. I’d arrived in Puerto Rico in October, heartbroken to have just missed his historic residency, “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí,” or “I Don’t Want To Leave Here.” The concert series had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the U.S. territory, which most Puerto Ricans, including nearly all of my maternal relatives, left after the U.S. government turned it into a neocolonial experiment for corporate exploitation. Work had kept me away that summer. But my connection to the island ran deeper than my love for his music. I’d come to enjoy Puerto Rico at my own pace, after the crowds: dancing salsa, eating the fritters of my childhood and swimming in the warm Caribbean.

One approached and insisted on escorting me to my room, saying the courtyard was now off limits. Bad Bunny hadn’t yet noticed me. I considered sharing that I was a journalist, not a groupie, but I wasn’t sure that would put anyone at ease. I’d requested a late checkout that day to linger in the hotel; I grew up with parrots, and I love them. Instead, I gathered my suitcases to leave. As I stood at the front desk to check out, Bad Bunny entered from the courtyard. We locked eyes. I smiled and waved uncertainly. He smiled and waved uncertainly back. His curly hair was perfectly gelled and his skin glowed, but I thought I saw a glint of exhaustion in his eyes.

President Trump and other right-wing media personalities were attacking his upcoming halftime show, seeing his Puerto Rican pride and anti-colonial activism as a threat. I wanted to tell him that his music had changed my life. Unbeknownst to him, he’d helped save my career as a journalist covering authoritarianism by re-introducing me to the Latin social dances, which gave me the resilience to keep reporting amid health issues and right-wing harassment. But I didn’t want to come off as the unhinged fan his entourage imagined me to be. And perhaps he wanted to spend a morning in peace. So I let the moment come and go, then left the hotel.

For months afterward, I regretted my silence. Serendipity had brought us together, and I hadn’t offered a word of solidarity. I’d let the machinery around him define the experience, seeing him not as a man who could use a moment of genuine connection but as a celebrity and a myth I couldn’t touch.

That is the source of his power, and what makes him so dangerous to demagogues who pit us against ourselves. It’s the power he’s about to wield on the biggest stage in America, in spite of the right’s efforts to distract people with an alternate halftime show and calls for his deportation. I realized the least I could do was meet him there, in print, with the public voice he’d helped me keep.

*

The first time I heard his voice on a road trip with two friends, time broke open. I heard the voice of my long-dead Abuelito telling me about the coquí. I heard the voice of my young mother comforting me as I cried. In my home state of California, less than one percent of the population is Puerto Rican; I rarely heard the Boricua dialect. My Abuelito had died when I was young, and my mother and Abuela had long ago lost the music of their accents and peculiarity of their island vocabularies, absorbing the sharper-edged sounds of Mexican Americans who are a majority of the state’s Latinos.

The U.S.-citizen child of a Mexican man and a Puerto Rican woman, I grew up mostly with my Mexican cousins and Mexican American classmates; my maternal relatives were scattered diaspora, largely strangers to me.

Later, I renounced my native language altogether as demographic change sparked waves of anti-Latino hate in 1990s California, which made English the official language of the state long before Trump did the same for the nation.

It was inevitable, though, that the land of my ancestors would beckon me. Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” and other books I read as a young woman opened my eyes to the U.S. pillaging of the region. After college, I moved to Mexico to work as a correspondent. There, I relearned Spanish and listened to the Puerto Rican band Calle 13, whose Residente mentored Bad Bunny. The Calle 13 song, “Latinoamérica,” a paean to the land against corporate extraction, filled me with pride for the parts of myself that I’d learned to devalue. After returning to the U.S. to cover immigration years later, I heard Bad Bunny, whose music fused Latin trap and reggaeton. His song “El Apagón,” an anti-colonial celebration of Puerto Rico, inspired me to do a deep dive into Puerto Rico’s history and my maternal roots.

Today, countless young Americans are discovering the history of Puerto Rico thanks to Bad Bunny, according to Vanessa Diaz, co-creator with Petra Rivera-Rideau of The Bad Bunny Syllabus, an educational resource, and co-author of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.” She and other professors across the U.S. have been offering Bad Bunny-related classes that use his popularity to lure students into learning about Puerto Rico’s past, present and future.

Similarly, many of his fans have begun learning Puerto Rican Spanish because of him, such as by attending Boricua slang workshops or studying the pronunciation of Bad Bunny’s lyrics in viral videos. Some started their education in earnest after Bad Bunny appeared on Saturday Night Live to discuss his halftime show and tell viewers that if they didn’t understand him, they had “four months to learn.”

It was Bad Bunny’s tasteful middle finger to the MAGA personalities who treat multilingualism as a poison in America’s bloodstream. His non-English is particularly egregious to their worldview because it is Puerto Rican Spanish, a language that turns rivers into breath, and sentences are puelta’ abielta’. It’s a language that refuses the border between body and earth. To speak it is to protest the pillaging of our world.

*

The first time I saw Bad Bunny perform live, at Coachella in April 2023, he was already unsettling the Trump order, which performs patriotism and stokes hatred to distract us while transnational elites rob us blind. He was about to make history as the first-ever Latino music act to headline the Southern California music festival. He’d already made history many times with Spanish-language albums topping the charts. I’d come with two of my best friends. Determined to see him up close, we waited for hours in a claustrophobic tangle of bodies near the stage. Near midnight, the crowd erupted in ecstasy as his voice washed over us. “De tantas y tantos, nunca antes hubo uno como yo,” he said, to screams. There has never before been anyone like me.

As he sang “Tití Me Preguntó,” it seemed as if all of Coachella, tens of thousands of people, was singing with him—a sea of Spanish in the desert. Later, Benito stopped and turned to us. “I wanna know something before I keep going with my show,” he said in English. “What do you prefer? Me talkin’ in English o hablando en español?”

The crowd roared its answer. I looked around at the faces illuminated by stage lights: tearstained, radiant, unguarded. I wondered: How many had long ago swallowed the language with which they’d learned to comprehend the earth, to make themselves smaller, more palatable, more “American”? Here we were screaming ourselves back into existence. Bad Bunny was performing more than a show. He was performing an exorcism, casting out shame. He was calling us back to ourselves.

But he wasn’t done. Suddenly, the screens played a video montage about the history of salsa music, paying tribute to Caribbean icons such as Celia Cruz and Héctor Lavoe. As dancers erupted on stage like fireworks, I was hypnotized. A first-generation American, I’d never learned to salsa dance. I had no flow or rhythm. I saw myself as a mind more than a body, which I contorted and confined for intellectual pursuits.

I’d been struggling with health issues since finishing my 2020 biography of Stephen Miller, when my immune system began attacking my thyroid. I felt fatigued and on fire. My heart pounded randomly, without provocation. I knew about the role of stress in auto-immune diseases because my mother had lupus, which disproportionately affects Latinas. I knew I had to change my lifestyle. I started swimming and doing yoga. I taught myself to longboard. These new activities brought joy and relief. But my symptoms returned whenever I plugged back into the news cycle. Burnt out, I felt literally ablaze.

By the time I went to Coachella in 2023, I feared I’d have to leave journalism. At the time I was the only Latina opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times; the social media harassment and frequent attacks on Fox News were diesel on the slow-motion detonation in my body. I didn’t realize I’d left the Bad Bunny’s concert with a road map to recovery.

Inspired by his ode to salsa, I visited Third Street Dance, an L.A. dance school featured in “Dancing with the Stars,” for beginner classes in salsa and other Latin social dances. The studio had wooden floors and mirrored walls, and students of all ages and ethnicities. The instructors led us in the basic step: right-left-right-pause and left-right-left-pause. “One, two, three … five six seven ...” It was challenging but fun. We danced in rotation, practicing the basics with a simple spin. When the lights dimmed for the dance party, or “social,” around 10:30 p.m. – my bedtime – I watched for a moment from a corner of the salsa room, entranced by the twirling couples.

Suddenly, an older Mexican man asked me to dance. I figured I’d dance one song with him and then go. He was sturdy and confident. I felt safe. He kept it simple at first, sensing that I was a newbie. But after a minute or two, he led a double spin. I was able to stay in sync with him by keeping the basic step. He gave a satisfied smile. “Muy bien,” he said. Slowly, he increased the energy and momentum of our dance. I couldn’t believe what my body was capable of in his arms. He harnessed my primitive grasp of the basics to unfurl me into a seemingly endless array of exhilarating movements.

I’d abused my body in service of my ambitions for so long, I’d forgotten the pleasure of raw sentience. I rediscovered it in a rush: the rapture of my animality. I was not my books or accolades. I was not the automaton I’d been striving to become. I was my heartbeat, my hip bones, my blood. Before I knew it, it was 2 a.m. I hadn’t stayed out that late in years, but I wasn’t tired. I’d never felt so awake and aware and alive.

I began to take Latin social dance classes multiple times a week. For months, then years, I felt better. My immune system stopped attacking me. I felt stronger and healthier than ever. The dances erased the toll of the first Trump presidency on my body. When he won again in 2024, I felt that on-fire feeling again and feared I’d relapse. But I went out dancing and the fear evaporated. I’d found a magic I’d been cultured to forget: one that could sustain me in the fight against the strongman.

*

Bad Bunny’s 2025 album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” which recently became the first Spanish-language album to win a Grammy for best album of the year, was his most overt celebration of salsa to date. In the music video for “BAILE InoLVIDABLE,” he attends a salsa dancing class; the album has inspired a surge in salsa dancing. Rauw Alejandro, Karol G and other artists have also contributed to its revival.

Long stigmatized as hypersexual, salsa and the other Latin social dances, such as bachata and cumbia, are corrosive to the politics of division. Also known as Latin street dances, they fuse diverse strangers in bars, restaurants and plazas. They bring together construction workers, gardeners, housekeepers, filmmakers, bankers, lawyers and writers. On the dance floor, I’ve seen a Trump supporter in ecstatic harmony with a prison abolitionist. In our divided and isolated world, these dances create a strong sense of community, inspiring mutual care and intimacy across race and class.

The Latin street dances have long been used for political resistance, too. In 2019 in Puerto Rico, street protests that revolved around “perreo,” the most scorned and structureless of these dances (twerking in English), forced the resignation of the island’s governor Ricardo Rosselló. Bad Bunny participated alongside Residente.

Many activists are dancing salsa for resilience in the fight against authoritarianism today. Nick Barili, creator of “De La Calle,” a docuseries on the evolution of Latin music, started taking salsa classes after learning of the dance’s roots in race and class struggle. “Salsa is survival on so many levels,” he told me. “It has given me an outlet to keep my sanity when our communities are under attack.” He argues that Bad Bunny’s music is a threat to authoritarians because “the beat and the rhythm is infectious.” Once the beat pulls people in, Barili adds, they start listening to the lyrics.

In “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” Bad Bunny mourns a Puerto Rico altered by emigration. In the song “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawai’i,” he calls on Puerto Ricans not to let go of their flag and traditions, even as foreigners try to take their land. In the title track, he wishes he had taken more photos and given more kisses and hugs.

Bad Bunny’s global rise has coincided with the spread of neocolonialism posing as nationalism across the planet, and of the English-only movement in this country. That seeming contradiction is consistent with history. Gloria Estefan performed at the Super Bowl twice in the 1990s, when Pat Buchanan ran for president on a platform similar to Trump’s. Periods of visibility for marginalized communities often intensify rather than diffuse backlash. But as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963, “There is a type of constructive nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” The civil rights movement didn’t emerge despite conflict, but through it: from the lunch counter sit-ins to the marches that met fire hoses and police dogs.

In his Grammy acceptance speech, Bad Bunny condemned the masked agents of the administration violently detaining people based on their brown skin or Spanish language. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. At the same time, he called on the American people not to be contaminated by hate. “The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that’s more powerful than hate is love, so, please, we need to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love.”

The message is in Benito’s name. In Puerto Rico, it is common to say “dito” as an expression of empathy; short for “bendito,” meaning blessed one—like Benito’s name. “Dito” is an echo of ditto: I feel what you feel. Your body is my body. Your pain is mine. It’s a radical insistence on feeling with and for one another. As conservative pundits crusade against compassion, treating empathy as weakness and connection as contagion, Bad Bunny offers a path back to ourselves and one another.

This Sunday, on the world’s most American stage, he will perform in a language Trump wants erased, celebrate the island they’ve long abused and embody the sensuality they try to shame. He will move his hips to rhythms born of struggle. In the process, he will offer the nation a choice: remain colonized by fear and hate, or finally, for once, choose freedom—the freedom that comes from feeling ourselves, from remembering that before we are red or blue, citizen or immigrant, we are bodies that bleed and sweat and dance. We are hearts that break and heal. We are human, which is to say: we come from the earth, and we are always capable of coming back alive.