Democracy for Sale

06/04/2025

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about cryptocurrency. I’ve been speaking with people who know far more about it than I do, and reading writers like Zeke Faux, whose recent book Number Go Up lays bare what he calls the “$3 trillion delusion.”

But then a couple of things happened last week that made me really pay attention. First, the news broke that the Trump family’s media company—yes, the former U.S. president’s private business—plans to raise $2.5 billion to buy cryptocurrencies.

The second was Nigel Farage’s announcement that Reform UK will now be accepting donations in Bitcoin.

What jumped out wasn’t just that Farage is openly soliciting donations in a medium long favoured by drug dealers and money launderers. It was where he was saying it: at a massive cryptocurrency conference in Las Vegas, where Farage appeared on the same bill as JD Vance.

New York Times journalist Ezra Klein—borrowing a phrase from Steve Bannon—recently described crypto as “muzzle velocity for corruption”: huge sums, from opaque sources, moving so fast they’re almost impossible to trace.

So I decided to dig into what’s happening—and to ask how and why a Silicon Valley elite is trying to ‘disrupt’ democracy with a vision of the future in which the many are stripped of rights, and the few become, in the words of William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob), “Sovereign Individuals.”

To explore this, I spoke with Amy Westervelt—award-winning investigative journalist, podcast producer, and founder of the independent media outlet Critical Frequency and the brilliant Drilled podcast. Her latest series, released this week, delves into the SLAPP lawsuit trying to silence Greenpeace in the US.

Amy has written extensively on the rise of what she calls ‘techno-fascism’—including a recent, must-read piece that maps out the connections between figures like Palantir’s Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the eschatologies of the Christian Right.

In our conversation, we discussed the tech-libertarian dream of a ‘network state,’ why Trump really wants Greenland, and how a private ‘start-up city’ backed by Thiel is now suing the Government of Honduras for $11 billion. If that sounds like a dystopian nightmare—it pretty much is.

What really stayed with me from our discussion was Amy’s warning that many of the same anti-democratic forces at work in the U.S. are already mobilising here in the UK.