Silicon Valley’s Fake Christianity Enables Tech Genocide
‘There's also a human-shaped hole in many of their lives.’
I recently joined Paris Marx on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. We discussed how Peter Thiel is putting a Christian mask on tech accelerationist ideas, why Silicon Valley is trying to claim the mantle of Christianity while violating everything for which Christ stood, and how tech billionaires are like an alien invasion that poses an existential threat to humankind.
Some highlights:
On tech’s search for God:
They seem to be trying to solve for what they call a god-shaped hole in their lives. But I'd argue that there's also a human-shaped hole in many of their lives.
On Elon Musk’s cutting of USAID:
The USAID cuts are Silicon Valley genocide. If 14 million people die, which is what the Lancet projects, that's more than double what Hitler killed in the Holocaust. And it's being done through policy, unnecessary policy, unwise policy.
On the need to ban and stigmatize crypto:
The crypto thing is a real problem, and I think a thing that needs to happen is we need to stigmatize crypto very strongly. It must become unacceptable for Democrats to accept crypto money. If a Democrat is accepting crypto money, they are buying into a dark, anti-American, anti-democratic vision of the future. And if you don't believe me, well then ask them: exactly what is crypto for, Senator? Exactly what is crypto for, Representative? Can you explain to me why anybody needs this? To hedge against the failure of the dollar? Well, isn't it your job to make sure the dollar doesn't fail?
On the real Antichrist:
If there is an Antichrist, the Antichrist is very clearly Silicon Valley in the 21st century. They are in every way against the words and the teachings of Christ.
Click below to listen to listen to our entire conversation (full transcript below):
Transcript: Is Peter Thiel The Real Antichrist?
Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.
Gil Duran [intro excerpt]: Thiel believes we're headed toward a massive scapegoating of some kind and he has a terror that Silicon Valley billionaires are going to be the scapegoats—probably because they're not actually the scapegoats, they actually are to blame for a lot of our problems today—and what he's trying to do is manipulate or manufacture a case for placing the blame elsewhere.
Paris Marx: Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host Paris Marx, and this week my guest is Gil Duran. Gil writes the Nerd Reich newsletter and is currently working on his first book which is called The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. I believe it will come out later this year. Gil is also a former opinion editor at the Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor for the San Francisco Examiner.
Now, as you probably heard, Peter Thiel likes to talk about the Antichrist, and he gave a series of lectures earlier this year—in September, I believe—where he discussed his ideas for the Antichrist, what it is, the significance that it has for us today, and of course how it fits into his broader fascist political project and how he is trying to use this concept to basically advance his political aims, to protect his power, to increase his power and that of his other Silicon Valley billionaire friends.
I wanted to talk about this at the time, but I figured it might be best to wait to see how things percolate after he gave those lectures, so that we can discuss the bigger picture and actually understand what he's trying to do here, how this fits into the broader Silicon Valley project. And Gil is great at giving that insight because he has been looking into the ideologies of these Silicon Valley billionaires for quite some time.
So through this conversation, we don't just discuss the lectures that Peter Thiel gave, but we connect it to ideas from people like Marc Andreessen or Balaji Srinivasan and this broader ideology that we hear these Silicon Valley billionaires spouting as they try to defend their interests, as they try to advance their political project.
And that means not just working with the Republican Party and Donald Trump, but as Gil talks about in this episode, trying to buy influence with the Democratic Party as well. And Gil has a lot of critical things to say about how the Democratic Party has been too close to Silicon Valley, to Silicon Valley billionaires, and right now isn't offering an inspiring, hopeful message that can actually bring people in, that could try to bridge political divides and build a broader constituency by going after not just Donald Trump but these tech billionaires as well and the things that they are doing not just to the United States but so many different parts of the world.
So ultimately I think this was a fascinating conversation. There's some great insight in here about the worldviews of these tech billionaires that of course we talk about on the show a lot, but that this discussion about the Antichrist and the religion behind these things really helps to add another dimension to through this conversation.
So with that said, if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.
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Paris Marx: Gil, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.
Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.
Paris Marx: Absolutely. Really happy to talk to you in the past to learn about your insights on Silicon Valley and what all these billionaires are up to. But as I think many listeners of the show will know, Peter Thiel has recently done this series of lectures on the Antichrist. I guess it's a couple months ago now, but I kind of wanted to sit and see how these lectures hit the public and what the discussion was going to be, and so I'm happy you can join me now so we can dig into it.
And maybe I would start by just asking: were you surprised to see Peter Thiel give a series of four lectures on the Antichrist when this was announced and when it became clear that he was doing this? Or is this kind of something that he has been discussing for a while at this point?
Gil Duran: It is something he'd been discussing for a while. I was surprised to see him do it in San Francisco. He must have known there would be a reaction, that it would get more attention and negative attention than his previous talks. This is something he's been talking about for a few years—it's an obsession of his—but he seems to be now refining it and trying to come to some kind of final point.
And when I saw that he was going to do it, my worry was that nobody would pay attention. So I started a bit of a drama campaign to hype it, to make sure people understood how weird this was. And the media did end up covering it quite a lot. It was not unusual for him to speak about the Antichrist in terms of that's something he often does, but he seems to be escalating what is this very kinky pseudo-intellectual obsession. And I don't think it went very well for him this time around.
Paris Marx: Gotcha. Yeah, he's certainly a guy who likes to think of himself as like this real intellectual of Silicon Valley, right? That he understands these concepts so much deeper, that he has done this kind of extensive reading, that he sees himself as kind of a tech philosopher in a sense, right? It's really how it comes across.
Gil Duran: He fancies himself that way, and others flatter him as that. But I find his intellect to be very hollow. He only focuses on a few things that are his obsessions, and those things aren't really worthy of such intense focus for somebody who's not really religious.
If you look at—I interviewed an Antichrist historian about this stuff and it was just laughable. He's acting like a snake handler in Kentucky. That's the level of his discourse. I grew up in the Catholic religion. I grew up in a very apocalyptic, doomsday framework, and I remember being a kid worried about this stuff. And you get older and you're like, "Okay, well there's more to the Bible than just the doom talk."
Not only that, but the Antichrist only appears in a couple of places, and he's conflating it with the Beast of Revelation, which some religious people do, but there's no evidence that those two things are the same. And Antichrist is not necessarily some figure—it could be anybody who's against Christ, all of the people who are against Christ. And in any case, it's a very strange subject for a billionaire who most fits the description of Antichrist to be lecturing everybody else on it. And it's really curious as to why he is so insistent on making everybody think about this particular subject.
Paris Marx: Truly. And I want to dig into that further. So in your view, why is he so obsessed with this concept of the Antichrist? Why is this something that he has fixated on for so long?
Gil Duran: Thiel is obsessed with the idea of scapegoating. His obsession comes from René Girard, who was a professor he was fascinated with at Stanford who wrote that humans have a tendency in societies to find scapegoats for their problems and to punish those scapegoats in order to try to alleviate the anxiety and tension in society.
Thiel believes we're headed toward a massive scapegoating of some kind, and he has a terror that Silicon Valley billionaires are going to be the scapegoats—probably because they're not actually the scapegoats, they actually are to blame for a lot of our problems today—and what he's trying to do is manipulate or manufacture a case for placing the blame elsewhere: on Greta Thunberg, on government, on regulation, on anything but Silicon Valley.
It's a weird form of projection and effort to escape the blame while also making it entirely clear who should be blamed. And it's strange because I can't think of a worse spokesperson for Christianity than Peter Thiel, right? On so many levels he would be rejected by actual doomsday Christians, mostly because he's a gay man—which I don't have a problem with—but a lot of the people whose language he's trying to speak do have a problem with that.
I mean, I grew up hearing people say that gay people are going to go to hell. I'm sure Peter Thiel grew up hearing that too, and obviously he internalized this in some kind of bizarre, traumatic way. And he's now spouting this, but I think at the heart of it is an understanding that we are coming to a breaking point soon, and the most likely target of our collective anger is going to be the people who have stolen everything from us and are now trying to steal even the future.
Paris Marx: Yeah, I think you put that really well. And as I listen to you describe it, it really brings to mind—as I guess someone who's writing, I'm more familiar with stuff that Marc Andreessen has been writing the past few years as well, going back to his Techno-Optimist Manifesto that seemed very much not just based around holding up and arguing for the tech industry and the tech billionaires and what they're doing, but again trying to identify those enemies and those people for the supporters of this vision of technology that someone like Marc Andreessen would want to see, to kind of go after, right? The elites and the communists and all this kind of stuff that he was calling out there and saying that tech ethics was like a great enemy. This seems very much aligned with some of the things that Thiel is kind of pointing out as a potential form of the Antichrist, I guess, based on reading some of what you've written.
Gil Duran: Yeah. It's “good to be bad and it's bad to be good” seems to be their motto, which sounds a lot like something the Antichrist would say.
The Techno-Optimism Manifesto from Andreessen—which quotes fascist philosophers, by the way—Thiel's Antichrist lectures quote fascist philosophy. He's obsessed with Carl Schmitt as well as René Girard. Carl Schmitt was this Nazi jurist and philosopher whose main idea was that politics is an existential battle between friend and enemy, often using religious symbols in a political fashion towards some state of emergency where the rules are suspended and power is seized by a leader. And that's very much at the heart of his Antichrist lecture.
They're very concerned with who has power in the future, who owns the future, as Jaron Lanier put it. They're obsessed with that. And so they're trying out different flavors of this. There's the Antichrist brand, there's the Techno-Optimist brand, there's the Elon ketamine space travel brand, there's the Bryan Johnson live-forever brand. Silicon Valley is in the middle of a psychotic break, an existential crisis, and they are looking for God and they are looking for eternity and they're looking for trillions of dollars, and they are trying to drag the rest of us along into this with them.
Because Silicon Valley does have a lot of power to influence what's happening in politics, in media, and in the world. And that's why I decided to write so much about the Antichrist and Peter Thiel. People were like, "Why do you keep writing about this?" Well, I'm trying to expose what they're doing, because I think there's power in exposing propaganda techniques. This is memetic warfare, that's what they call it. This is hyperstition—they're attempting to manifest a reality. And I want to show people: this is what they're doing.
Like when you see a magic trick video on TikTok and then someone shows you how the trick worked—before you couldn't see it and now you can see that there's a cup in the cup or whatever—that's what I'm trying to do, is do the TikTok video where we bust the magicians. And that's not hard to do if you look at what they're doing and if you put that in the context of what they're after and who they're quoting: fascists.
Who mixes fascism and Jesus? The Nazis did.
Paris Marx: I just saw an interview the other day with Alex Karp—of course, the CEO of Palantir—where again he was saying, "Oh, he's not a Nazi, but he talks to Nazis all the time" and doesn't understand why they get such a bad rap or something. And it's just wild to see them so kind of explicitly making these allusions and connections to Nazis when their politics seem so clearly aligned with a fascist project. It just blows my mind how open they seem to be able to be about it.
Gil Duran: Yeah, to me they're making a big mistake of overexposing themselves, which is good. I think the more they talk, the more they show their craziness, the less people will feel any sympathy or compatibility with their worldview.
A good case in point is Curtis Yarvin, who started giving all these interviews after being this mysterious dark elf or whatever, and he's a completely long-winded, boring, charmless dork who laughs at his own jokes through most of his talking and filibusters constantly. And he went all the way to getting a New Yorker profile—that was pretty much the end of Curtis Yarvin's aura. He was completely exposed as an out-of-control, weeping bore.
And I told Curtis Yarvin this—we were corresponding, I was trying to get him to do an interview with me. We were bantering and I was trying to get him to keep talking, and he did, in email anyway. Before I came back to journalism, I did PR for many years for politicians. I was like, "You're breaking a cardinal rule here. You're way overexposed. You're just yammering on, taking any debate. You've sort of become a circus act for any kind of mid-tier, low-tier intellectual who needs a little juice on social media: go debate Curtis Yarvin."
He wanted to debate me, actually. I was like, "That would reduce my value to be seen on stage with you, so no. Go debate someone at Harvard."
But they're all doing this, and the more they talk—Karp, I didn't really know what his deal was, and seeing him walk around talking about his Nazi friends in his stupid vest—this just ruins their image and shows you how weak they are, how thin their thinking is, and how imminently defeatable they will be once people wake up to what these people have in mind.
They are way vulnerable to actual pushback, which is why it's sad that the Democratic Party has no spine and no brain, because we should be hitting these people hard already.
Paris Marx: I want to come back to that point just a little bit later after we dig into this stuff a bit more. I've talked to a number of people on this show about this in the past, about kind of how we see more and more—I feel like—these tech billionaires and people in the tech industry embracing religion and embracing faith in a way that I feel like we haven't seen for a long time. And it seems to be ascendant in a way that seems a bit surprising, especially when, as you've been discussing, we see the ways that they're trying to use religion, use these concepts of the Antichrist.
How do you see these tech billionaires kind of justifying or explaining their religious belief, and how do you see them using that toward their own ends, I guess?
Gil Duran: They seem to be trying to solve for what they call a god-shaped hole in their lives. But I'd argue that there's also a human-shaped hole in many of their lives. And this could be a little unfair, but I largely see their public professions of newfound Christianity as entirely fabricated, as sort of an op.
They understand—and if you listen to them and you read what they have been talking about for years—they understand the power of religion, the power of religious narratives to motivate movements, to motivate action. Why would anybody follow you or believe you should be in control of the world unless they believe you are a divine or moral authority? So if you're into authoritarianism, you need this idea of the divine order. You need this idea of a belief that goes beyond the earthly plane. And so I think that's a part of it—they are glomming on to this because it's the most accessible narrative.
But if you look at the Silicon Valley version of Christianity, who does it center? It centers Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires. Peter Thiel actually said during his Antichrist lecture that the people in that room—because it was this new tech Christian organization called ACTS 17, Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society, started by the Anduril guy's wife, Trae Stephens's wife, who says, "I'm an arms dealer and a Christian"—this is his message. And he said the people in this room gathering to hear him speak are doing more important work than any Christians anywhere else in the world.
And that seems to be their mentality: Christianity is another way for them to be special and to be important and to be more important than everyone else. And again, having grown up in Christianity and having a deep appreciation for the words of Jesus Christ—if there is an Antichrist, and I'm not saying there is because again I'm not religious and I don't think it's a particularly helpful framework—if there is an Antichrist, the Antichrist is very clearly Silicon Valley in the 21st century. They are in every way against the words and the teachings of Christ.
Elon Musk's cuts to US aid at DOGE, based on the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, who was funded and supported solely by Peter Thiel, has already killed—those DOGE cuts have already killed 600,000 people and are projected to kill 14 million people by 2030, and many of those will be children. So what would Jesus do about US aid?
These people are not Christian in my book. They are manipulating religious symbols in an effort to gain power. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are trying to merge with the MAGA movement, which has a base of religious extremists who are its most powerful component. And so in a way what they're trying to do is be like, "Hello, fellow Christians." But I don't think people are really buying it. When you hear them talk about religion, they are way too flowery and animated and self-righteous. It seems like a bit.
Again, I wouldn't pretend to be a pious Christian. I haven't been to mass in a long time. I don't really claim to be the religion of my birth. But I think there's a guy in the Bible who says you're not supposed to pray out in public like the hypocrites do, that you're supposed to do it quietly, and that the real meaning of it all is to be as Christ was, and that even a godless person who helps the poor is more Christian than the holiest man in the temple who—who was it who said all that? I forget. Maybe someone in Silicon Valley can remind me.
Paris Marx: And even when I hear you say that, and I want to pick up on what you were saying about how they're trying to get in with this MAGA movement, but like, the idea that you would kill one person and that should be—you should be sent to prison and you should be held to account for doing something like that—like obviously this is deemed to be one of the worst possible crimes that you can commit in our society, right? But you can make a decision as someone like Elon Musk does to pull this funding for aid, for food to starving people, for medications for people who need those medications to be able to survive, to live a good life. And as you're saying, you can not just kill but severely impact millions of people around the world and just move on, live your life. No one's really going to try to hold you to account for having done that.
It's hard to wrap your head around, really, when you think about it. When you talk about Elon Musk and the US aid cuts and the kind of devastating human toll that that has, it's hard to see how someone like him can just go on living in the world and continue to have so much power, to continue to control these companies, potentially become a trillionaire now as we're seeing. I don't know, it's hard for me to really grapple with that.
Gil Duran: Well, the USAID cuts are Silicon Valley genocide. If 14 million people die, which is what the Lancet projects, that's more than double what Hitler killed in the Holocaust. And it's being done through policy, unnecessary policy, unwise policy. US aid isn't just about helping poor people. It's about American power around the world. It's how we gain and curry favor. It's how we make people think we're good and show that we care about more than just invading and extracting.
And there's a lot of critiques of US aid and the way it's been used to further US interests, but if you're running the federal government, you're supposed to be furthering US interests. So in two ways, this is a very bad, suspicious policy. I would be in favor of feeding and helping people survive anyway. And by the way, these are people who are so worried about the decline in the human population, allegedly, and feel like we don't have enough people—then why are you killing 14 million of them?
And that gets to the heart of the matter, which is that these are not white people. The people they want on earth are white people. So I think there's going to have to be accountability at some point for all of this, and we can't take anything they say at face value, whether it's claiming to be Christian or claiming to worry about the world population, because everything they do is the opposite of what they say they want to do. And it really exposes the rotten heart of what's going on in Silicon Valley.
It has gone so much farther than it should have. Literally, this policy will kill 600,000 people, and the reward for that is becoming a trillionaire.
Paris Marx: Yeah, it's disgusting. It truly is. It turns your stomach just to think about it.
You mentioned before we got onto this subject how these people are kind of using Christianity, it seems, rather than really deeply believing in what it says, what you would imagine actually comes along with believing in a faith like this. And of course we can clearly see even the pope himself, if you're a Catholic or if you follow that, increasingly calling out the tech industry and what these people are doing, the effects of their worldviews and their actions.
But one of the things that you mentioned there was obviously you have this MAGA movement, this National Conservative movement that has aligned itself with Donald Trump, and that it feels like a number of these tech billionaires who have also embraced Donald Trump are trying to get in with. But that relationship seems to have some clear tensions between these National Conservatives and these supposedly Christian Silicon Valley folks. What do you see in the tensions between these two groups, and what's your read on what's going on there?
Gil Duran: I think for all their flaws, and for all the ways in which I disagree with the religious conservatives, I think they are smart enough to understand that these tech billionaires are not like the rest of us, and what they want is not what any of us want.
I have a very different conception of the future than my MAGA ex-brother-in-law, but if I were to tell him, "We should destroy the United States," he would be very upset by that. And by the way, so would I. And I know all the flaws of this country, all the terrible things it's done—it's still my country, and you're taught to love your country and that you want to make your country better. Somehow we have different definitions of what that is.
These guys don't believe in this country. These tech billionaires, they want a post-America future, a post-democracy future. They think the Founding Fathers were cucks. They think the Constitution is toilet paper. It's analog. They're going to go into their blockchain smart contract future, and all of this is dumb. And part of it is that they don't want to live in a world where they don't get to found the country. Why should these old dead guys in wigs get to be the ones who are the founders? We are the founders. That's the special magic word in Silicon Valley, is to be the founder.
And if you read Balaji, he says all of this just as much. It's all there in a convoluted form.
So I do think there are some tensions. The right wing, the MAGAs, are also very suspicious of AI, which is talking people into suicide and doing all kinds of terrible things and threatening to replace everyone's jobs, which will cause massive upheaval—which, by the way, is the whole point. That's the point of it: to cause this massive upheaval and to take all the jobs and all the value and give it up to the handful of billionaires and trillionaires, which will then deprive the economy of any kind of money and lead to some kind of great collapse.
I mean, in many ways, I think these guys are trying to be fascists, but I think they're the most avowed Marxists out there, because they're trying to prove Marx right in every way. And I'm not a Marxist—I'm just like, but they're starting to convince me. Let's just put it that way. Like, hey, he said this and you guys are doing it. But they're hyperstitioning Marxist reality.
The other thing I've noticed in dealing with the Network State issue, where they're trying to build these cities here in California—these tech cities—is that some of the loudest critics are MAGA Republicans. And part of that is because they think these are liberal billionaires and that these are 15-minute cities and have something to do with climate change. And I don't want to disabuse anybody of their rationale for opposing Silicon Valley, as a recovering propagandist myself, if you're motivated by your own narrative there...but I've had some talks with these people, and I've said, "Well, you know, I come from a Democratic background. We probably disagree on a lot. But just so you know, these people are not Democrats, and they're not Republicans. They're their own thing. They're closer to you than they are to me, but they'll use anything they can. They'll use Ro Khanna and Elissa Slotkin and Gavin Newsom, and they'll use Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and JD Vance. Any way they can win, they'll do it."
And what we have to realize—this is the metaphor I've been testing out—is that this is not about red versus blue right now. We'll get to that later. We'll never be done with that one. This is about an alien invasion by a species of strange human being that doesn't even want to be human anymore, that doesn't even want to live on Earth anymore, and that doesn't believe in God—that thinks it's God. And this is an existential threat to our country, to our future, to the planet, and we have to fight against that.
And they don't quite agree with me, but they're thinking about it. They understand what I'm saying. They would normally despise me as a Democratic spokesman, someone who worked for Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown. But they see what I'm writing, and that we're against a common enemy. And so to go back to René Girard and Peter Thiel, we are in a crisis in our society. We do need to solve it, and we do need to unite people in some way. The way we unite those people may be unorthodox. It may not make sense right now. But I think the key is to unite the majority of people in the country and in the world against this alien species of billionaires. They are the enemy.
Paris Marx: That's really fascinating to hear. And it brings to mind, in a sense, thinking about the commonalities and finding that kind of common enemy or common program that brings people together even if they have very different politics. And it brings to mind to a certain degree some of the things that Bernie Sanders used to do in the way that there would be people who would be conservatives, but the type of way that he was talking about politics, he would get them to consider these more liberal or progressive ideas because he was speaking to them and he was speaking about the issues that they felt mattered. And talking about how the tech industry and these Silicon Valley billionaires are a common enemy to so many people and to our way of life and to our ability to kind of live in this world is something that I think increasingly brings a lot of people together, as you're saying.
I'm happy that you started to redirect our conversation back to Peter Thiel, because that's where I wanted to take it as well. And I wanted to ask you: when Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, how does he position the Antichrist? What is the Antichrist in his view? Who is he trying to say is the Antichrist? And then based on something that you were saying earlier, as he's describing that, what does it sound like the Antichrist really is if this is how we're supposed to understand this concept?
Gil Duran: Well, I'll start with the end of that. The Antichrist, I think, is whoever wins total world power. And he has this fantasy that somehow that's what the left wants or what the left is doing, what the liberals are doing, and that therefore justifies what he's trying to do and what the right's trying to do. It's politics as an existential crisis—one side has to win over the other.
And the reason the Antichrist framework is so powerful is because it completely dehumanizes your opponent. They're no longer a person with a different opinion. They are evil incarnate, the servants of Satan, against all life, against God, against Christ, against all of it. And therefore nothing you do to them is out of bounds. They do not deserve mercy. They do not deserve law. They do not deserve democracy. That's why it's such a dangerous trope to use.
And he tries to put the label on Greta Thunberg for being a climate activist—the idea that all of us getting together to save our planet and stop burning fossil fuels is somehow going to lead to a totalitarian government. He says that communism was the Antichrist of the 20th century—communism, which I didn't know there were multiple Antichrists in multiple centuries, but again, it's not one person. So for him it's either one person or it's a movement. It just shifts to be whoever his enemy is.
Taxes, regulations is another possible Antichrist. But he also defines—and this is the most interesting part of all—he defines the Antichrist as someone who would rise to power by talking constantly about apocalypse and Armageddon, and as someone who would be highly interested in surveillance and total control. And the person who most fits the bill in the entire world right now is Peter Thiel, who is a co-founder of Palantir, which is wrapping its tentacles around every government in the world that it can get a hold of. And Peter Thiel is traveling the world talking about the Antichrist, the apocalypse, and Armageddon non-stop.
Not only that, but he's created this wave in Silicon Valley, which I call Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism, where they're all starting to talk this way. Silicon Valley is obsessed with apocalypse and the end times.
So the thing about the Antichrist narrative—and this came from the historian Robert Fuller, who wrote a book called Naming the Antichrist back in the '90s—is that the people who accuse others of being the Antichrist very often, it can be reversed. They meet all the characteristics they're laying out. So in a way, the Antichrist is a mirror. It's a mirror image. And that's why I say it's really about who is on the outside when the majority unites.
And what Peter Thiel is saying is: we have to find a way to engineer so that our enemies—the climate activists, the liberals, the left—are the scapegoat, because otherwise it's going to be us. And that's because he knows that's the most logical conclusion, is that they are the ones to blame.
And it doesn't have to be that way, by the way. I don't believe we have to have an apocalypse. I believe we could save the planet. I believe we could solve our problems democratically. I believe that people could have their needs met on a planet where trillionaires are possible, being part of a species that can envision going to Mars and beyond. We can solve the problems on this earth and start by helping the poor, helping the sick—which, by the way, is what Jesus fucking said we should do. And they claim to be on the side of Jesus, but they don't want to do that. They want to kick off. They're against the creation itself.
So the Antichrist thing is a mirror. And I really think that Thiel—Peter, if you're listening—really need to de-escalate from that. Because, you know, 20 years ago I read a book called The Pursuit of the Millennium by a Cambridge scholar named Norman Cohn. It's all about the history of this eschatological apocalypse thinking through European history. European history is full of movements that were into the world movements and ended up in violent revolutions and pilgrimages and all kinds of things like that. And some revolutions were worthwhile, but a lot of them were weird and bad.
This never ends well. The apocalypse mentality is headed toward violence always, in every case. And Norman Cohn saw the rise of the Nazis as the most recent example and manifestation of that. He wrote his book in the early '60s. So this is some dangerous stuff to play with. It's a dangerous thing to hyperstition.
And I think we need to use hyperstition—this power of imagining the future—to imagine a future where we don't have a bunch of billionaires threatening us with apocalypse and where we don't have any billionaires at all who have this power to completely take over our country and reshape our lives. What Silicon Valley is trying to do is basically acquire and liquidate our country, and that should not be possible. We have a hole in the Constitution that has somehow allowed this to happen.
And, you know, I was always against people saying, "Well, we need to amend Citizens United." I'm like, "How the hell are we going to do that? Washington's all locked up." We need to think beyond what exists today. We need to think what the future looks like when people realize who the enemy really is and what they've tried to do to our country. And so I'm becoming a lot more optimistic these days. I'm a techno-optimist too, just in a very different way.
Paris Marx: I wanted to pick up on a few things that you said earlier and then maybe pick up on some of the later parts of what you were saying after that. But when you're talking about identifying the enemy, as we talked about earlier, obviously I see a lot of that in Marc Andreessen. They need to find the enemy to basically direct the anger of a lot of the public in a different direction from themselves, as you're saying. And you can also understand then why they're so determined to attack democracy, as you have been talking about, because they don't want us to be able to use the levers of power against them. They want to take away the ability for us to really start to rein them in and to ensure that they don't have the power that they do.
But when you're talking about really taking aim at the people who say Peter Thiel would identify as the Antichrist, that also speaks to me—you brought up Balaji Srinivasan earlier—some of the stuff that he has talked about about identifying the reds and the blues in these different cities of the future or whatever, and really trying to basically make them non-humans. You can do anything to them. You can exclude them. You can kick them out. You need to identify them in the way that you can think in the past of how the Nazis were identifying the Jews, making them wear clear markers, these sorts of things coming up again and again.
And it's a really dangerous vision for what a future could be and how they really do just try to find their enemies and say, "We are going to identify these people clearly. These people are not human. These people can be attacked. It doesn't matter what you do to them. But join our side and we can kind of take these people on together," sort of a thing.
Gil Duran: Yeah, they know that much of history, but I think there's a lot they're missing. They don't realize how unappealing they are. Having worked in politics, it's an unfair world, but you got to have charisma to lead people. You got to have something that animates them, that makes them want to believe in you. All they have is money. And that's why they get all of these insufferable dorks and like five girls to show up and clap and go to their conference or whatever. Those people are just trying to get their stupid startups funded.
You know, having been in political power before, there's all these people who show up when you're in a suit and you're important. And the minute you don't have it anymore, you have three friends. You find out who your friends were. That's how it is with these guys too. They don't realize that they're actually not popular. They're just rich. It's the pork chop around your neck, bro. It's not anything you're saying, anything you're doing.
And the thing is that the people in Silicon Valley, these young people, they're not very smart—maybe about computers or coding or something—but not about humanities, not about politics certainly. And that's something to me that's been interesting as someone who's an expert on politics, who's done city hall, who's done campaigns, the Capitol, the Statehouse. They're so damn green. Like, I could have looked at California Forever early on—I did early on—like, that shit ain't passing a vote in Solano County. Everybody knew that. It's not like I had a magical power. Anybody who knows politics knows that's not going to happen. You're picking a huge fight. Nobody knows who you are. Your spokesman's from the Czech Republic—that's your CEO. You at least got to get a local to pretend this was their homespun dream, man. You don't know how to tell a story in politics. Come on.
So there's some things they don't understand. They don't get it. I don't want to say what all those things are because I don't want them to get smart about it. They have started to hire Democratic operatives here in California, and they're hiring up all of them. Most of the people working for venture capitalists right now in their political ventures in California are the advisors to Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. People don't really talk about that because we have a political press that largely protects these people so that they give them little scoops now and then. And there's like a "don't bite"—wolf does not bite wolf—game being played. But I'm working on that. My book will have some information in it.
Because my fear is that what these guys are going to do is buy off the Democratic Party as well, and that just means they're on a slower boat to the tech fascist future. If you think about it, they could give $10 million to everybody in Congress and make it all back in a crypto scam next week. How much of Congress could they buy with that? Probably a lot.
So I think we have to act before they get that kind of brazen power. And with Trump getting rid of all shame in politics, like in 10 years people might be like, "Yeah, I'm becoming a congressman so I can just get rich and do what tech wants me to do." And that's what Balaji says in his weird screeds. Like, we'll pay the police, we'll ally with the police and give them free food and give jobs to their family members. He identifies bribery and—he calls it "merging the networks." We got to merge the networks.
So to me, that's the bigger danger, and I think it needs to be called out. I think a lot of these folks—some of these consultants I came up with them in politics, I've known them for years—they just want the big check. They don't really think about what they're getting into. Some of them have started to realize it because of my work. Some of them text me links sometimes. Like, "Did you see this thing?" And I'm like, "Wait, oh, so you're paying attention now? Are you still on the payroll?"
But again, the venture capitalists—even the people who work on their political campaigns are just doing it for money. That's a problem they have to confront. Again, in their fantasy of the future where they rule everything, they're not factoring in the fact that their guards are going to murder them the first chance they get. Because historically, violence is what makes you king. Why would you sit around guarding some trillionaire in his digital castle when you can just put a hole in his head and be the king?
So they will come to appreciate the charms of liberal democracy too late, I fear. And again, one thing they don't factor in is that the reason we have the system of government we have through all of Greece and Rome and all of history is because we tried everything else. Nothing has been tried more than tyranny and authoritarianism.
While they were getting all hyped up on fascist philosophy during the pandemic, I strangely fell into a rabbit hole of the French Revolution and read a lot of books about that. Fascinating stuff. And they should do that as well. I would say get off the fascism for a minute. I'll read the fascism, you read the French Revolution, and let's catch up in 2028.
Paris Marx: You and Peter Thiel can have a discussion then once you've caught up on some different literature.
Gil Duran: Anytime, Peter.
Paris Marx: But when you're talking about the political campaigns and the political spending, I feel like the crypto industry has really showed how effective you can be at deploying that money in order to try to, in their case, kind of buy policies that are favorable to them. But it feels like they have kind of set an example for then other folks in the tech industry to want to follow if they want to try to pursue similar ends in kind of future campaigns, which is kind of concerning.
Gil Duran: Well, there's some tension growing. I just saw a story today that they also have an AI PAC now, and apparently MAGA is upset about that. They're trying to claim too much power too quickly. That's another rookie mistake they're making.
If you read The Art of War, change should not be rapid and massive. It should be slow change, but never too much at once, or otherwise you get revolt. They're getting revolt because they're moving too fast and they're just going for everything. And people have big concerns about AI. And so I think they are in this narrow time frame of needing to bully everyone to get their way, to get their lack of regulation locked in. But I think they're meeting some resistance, and they're probably upset because the Trump family's gotten like $5 billion in crypto wealth over the past 10 months. And hell, how much do you need to give us everything we want? Well, you made a deal with the devil, and he's never going to give you everything you want. He's terrified. He knows you want him gone.
But the crypto thing is a real problem, and I think a thing that needs to happen is we need to stigmatize crypto very strongly. It must become unacceptable for Democrats to accept crypto money. If a Democrat is accepting crypto money, they are buying into a dark, anti-American, anti-democratic vision of the future. And if you don't believe me, well then ask them: exactly what is crypto for, Senator? Exactly what is crypto for, Representative? Can you explain to me why anybody needs this? "To hedge against the failure of the dollar"—well, isn't it your job to make sure the dollar doesn't fail?
I mean, this is insane that you even have to have this conversation. But I think we need to start regarding anybody who is pro-crypto or who accepts crypto money as deeply suspicious, as on the other side. And then you can take away—it has to be that even when they spend billions of dollars or millions of dollars in campaigns, that it only works against them. We've seen that in California when billionaires try to buy office. Their spending turns everyone off and turns against them. When I worked in politics, I saw many focus groups that show an immediate drop in support when it's a rich person trying to fund the whole thing.
So it's not something that's going to work 100% of the time, but we need to make it clear that whoever takes the crypto is the Antichrist.
Paris Marx: Yeah, a good way to put it given this conversation. But totally with you on the war on crypto and making that completely unacceptable. If you touch it, you're persona non grata. You've taken the mark of the beast. We'll just go full Thiel here.
Another thing I wanted to ask you—you've brought up this concept of hyperstition several times throughout the conversation. I was wondering if you could flesh that out a little bit more for us. Tell us what this actually is, where this concept comes from, and how you see it being deployed by these folks in the tech industry to try to serve their ends.
Gil Duran: Hyperstition comes from Nick Land, who's like the father of accelerationism and also a big part of the Dark Enlightenment movement with Curtis Yarvin. He had a lot of these ideas about leaving behind humanity, and a lot of them are very drug-addled, hard to read. I spent way too much time this summer trying to read Nick Land and realized that I didn't have to go through every single piece of it. I could get the gist, and there are some key parts of it.
So hyperstition is a portmanteau, combined word of "hype" and "superstition." And the idea is that you can manifest reality through telling stories. And you tell stories that spread, and you repeat them until people believe them, until they become real.
In a way, in the '90s there was a book called The Secret that even Oprah was pushing, about "if you just—here's how you manifest the life you want." And even before that, in like the '40s or '30s, Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking—that through positive thinking you can make things happen. And there's some truth to that: being positive, going after what—being motivated.
But they call it hyperstition. And what they mean by that—the other word for that is basically propaganda. How do you tell a narrative? How do you tell a story that shapes reality? And there's a lot of words for that. Propaganda is one of those words. Strategic communications is one of those words. Another word they like to use is "memetic warfare." And memetic warfare is a tactic or strategy of hyperstition.
And we largely see that happening today with a lot of things they're doing: with the apocalypse, with AI. They just try to have a story that people believe, and that then generates money for them. Venture capital is pretty much based on hyperstition—imagining something and then making that thing happen.
And Katherine Boyle, who started off with an internship that Peter Thiel got her at Founders Fund, who's now at Andreessen Horowitz pushing something she calls American Dynamism—which is sort of a pitch deck version of white nationalism militarism, literally fusing religion, the state, and capitalism; I think Mussolini had a word for that one—but she says, "Meme it and we will be it."
So that's what hyperstition is. Let's create a meme, an idea, get everybody talking about it: "Oh, Silicon Valley is the agent of Christ," or "We don't need Earth anymore, we're going to live on Mars," or "AI is God, and don't worry, there will be jobs."
By the way, when they talk about AI eliminating all the jobs—which is their big dream; I'm not sure if that's true or not, but that's their stated result—they talk about, "Well, we're all going to get paid by this somehow. We're all going to have a profit." Isn't that Silicon Valley socialism?
Again, I'm telling you, they're trying to prove Marx here. Like, if I were running the Democratic Party, I would be explaining to all the people in MAGA land how they're going to put socialism on you with the AI. And instead of having socialism with the AI, we should have healthcare and jobs and nobody should ever be homeless. No socialism—let's just have all of our needs met. Let's just use a different term for it.
Paris Marx: Well, yeah, what are they talking about?
Gil Duran: Well, if you look at The Sovereign Individual, which is this book that inspired Peter Thiel's thinking, AI was going to lead to the complete collapse of society and massive violence because of the lack of jobs. People don't have food, they don't have money, they're going to steal, they're going to fight, they're going to kill. So then why do you have all these billionaires so crying about crime and wanting cameras everywhere and wanting mass incarceration if your entire stated plan is to collapse the economy and create a violent criminal future?
A lot of internal contradictions in this particular capitalization that seemed to be destined to lead to its complete collapse at some point. But anyway, that's a conversation for another day.
Paris Marx: Definitely, definitely. And I'm sure you'll be back on to talk about it. But when you talk about the notion of hyperstition and hearing you describe it, to me it kind of echoes basically what the tech industry does. It kind of makes up this story constantly that this new technology or this new product or whatever it's going to be is the next big thing that's going to transform our lives in so many different ways. It's going to be incredible. It's going to create so much wealth and prosperity and what have you. And then we see all the valuations of the companies and stuff that are working on that particular product explode for a while. And then give it two or three years, and all the claims that they supposedly made don't seem to come to fruition, and things come back down to earth just in time for them to come up with a new thing that is going to change the world in so many different ways.
It feels like it's very much part of the way that they work. But now instead of just using it to try to kind of hype up a particular product and try to make money off the market and share values and company values and things like that, it seems like they're now weaponizing it much more to try to affect the way that we see the future, the political system, to try to affect a much broader swath of reality than what they tried to seize and to control in the past.
Gil Duran: Oh, definitely. They've run out of unicorns, so they need a new mythical creature to hunt. And that creature is godlike AI or the Antichrist or getting rid of the United States and having Network States or getting rid of the Earth and going to Mars. It's end-stage venture capital. They're having an existential crisis, and they want to impose that on the rest of us because they feel like that's where the trillion-dollar opportunities are.
How do we liquidate all of the work and the blood and the sweat and the tears that went into this country and make sure a handful of men get rich and powerful off of it? Venture capital is all about exit—how do you leave a company at a point where everyone sees its peak value, take yours, and get on to the next thing?
They're trying to exit democracy. They're trying to exit Earth. They're trying to exit mortality. And they're trying to—no, they're not trying to—they're literally exiting reality. And it's time to put a stop to that.
We have to be like, "Yeah, no. If we can give Elon Musk a trillion dollars, we can have daycare and healthcare and all these other things." And so while they have shown the power of hyperstition, it's a technology that's also available to us. We can dream too. We can also imagine a future, and I think we need to do more of that.
I think lately in the States anyway, there's been a lot of fear: "Oh, it's a fascist country now. It's not a democracy." Like, shut up. Please go hide your face in your pillow and scream all your fear there. We need to be brave. We need to be strong. And we need to make it clear that the future is not going to belong to these handful of people in any circumstances, even if not all of us are there in that future. We have to be that brave because this is an existential crisis—it's one being forced on us by Silicon Valley.
Paris Marx: Even hearing you say that—we'll see how he actually is able to govern as mayor of New York City—but it felt like Zohran Mamdani kind of used, when you're talking about building a reality, making people see the world in a different way, different possibilities, and what you can actually do with power, it seemed like he was really effective in doing that in a way that we don't typically see of more liberal and progressive politicians in the United States.
Gil Duran: Well, people are pushed off of that. You have to only live in the narrow confines of reality of what's possible by appealing to a centrist platform and if the votes exist for it right now. And look, a few years ago I would have completely told you the same thing, because I come from party school, real city hall and legislative politics. I know how it works. Yeah, the left always wants some crazy shit. They don't got the votes, whatever. Give them something good enough and drag two or three of their votes onto it and win.
But I think we need to change our mentality. And I'd say one thing that inspires me—because you should always find inspiration from your enemies; I think Sun Tzu said that too—is that they are showing us what's possible. Donald Trump is showing us what's possible. Anything's possible. The president can send the troops into cities. The president can make $5 billion off of crypto in plain sight. The president can tear down an entire section of the White House and build an Epstein ballroom. Elon Musk can give a Hitler salute at the inauguration and get a trillion dollars. Peter Thiel, the most likely candidate for Antichrist, can go around the world calling everyone else the Antichrist.
We can do that too. And we can do that for good, not for evil. In all the stories in the Bible, in Lord of the Rings, and science fiction, there's a good side and there's a bad side of the same energy. So let's understand the power, the force of hyperstition, and let's start putting it to use sooner rather than later. And I think the more that people do that and understand it, the better it will be, because anything is possible now. And if we don't wake up and start acting, then they will be the only ones on the field, and that's where they are right now.
But it's falling apart. Curtis Yarvin is panicked and wants to flee the country. Steve Bannon last week said, "We're all going to go to prison if the Democrats win the midterms"—which says there's going to be midterms. And if there's midterms, we're going to win them.
So they are scared. They're way out there. I would much rather be in our shoes than theirs, because believe me, there's a lot of things I would do, but overthrow the government of the United States of America in plain sight? Not advisable. High penalty for this particular crime.
So I think we have to be hopeful. We have to be active. We have to be motivated. And we have to be optimistic about what the future's going to bring to Silicon Valley.
Paris Marx: Absolutely. I used to joke earlier—what was it, earlier in this tenure of Trump—they were talking about reopening Alcatraz, and I said, "Yeah, let's reopen Alcatraz and let's stick all the tech billionaires in it."
Gil Duran: Yeah.
Paris Marx: As we start to wrap up this conversation, I'm wondering: obviously we've talked about these lectures that Peter Thiel did, all of his rambling about the Antichrist. What have you made of the response to it? Have you been hopeful seeing how people generally have responded to just the crazy things that he is saying?
Gil Duran: When you get roasted on South Park and Joe Rogan, you're done. This was a real flop on Thiel's part. And I don't know who's advising him, but he needs to fire them, get a new therapist. I don't know.
The fact that it went this far—actually, Tim Dillon said this on the Joe Rogan podcast—there's nobody around him who said no. Four lectures on the Antichrist? Maybe no lectures on the Antichrist.
I think it woke some people up to what the hell's going on with this guy. I was actually in a public place recently, and I heard someone explaining Peter Thiel Antichrist and the JD Vance connection to someone on the phone. And I was like, my heart was so warmed. Like, he has really broken through with this. And I think it's a warning sign for people of how crazy it's getting.
This is a guy who's behind Trump, who has a $10 billion contract with the US Army to consolidate all of its contracts, whose company is busy plugging into data all over the world from governments. There's a federal database being created of information on every American, and this is what he's doing. If I were him, I'd be quiet. People wouldn't know my name. That's another way to do things.
So I'm glad in a way that he's doing what he's doing. He's advertising the crisis and raising awareness of the problem—so the problem being him. So yeah, I think it was a massive mistake. It's nothing you would ever advise anybody to do. But again, these guys think they're so smart and they're not.
My mom used to tell me when I was a kid, "You know, you're so smart you're stupid," because there were things that I really was good at and things I was really, really bad at. And that was the way she put it. And it reminds me of these guys now. What madness would possess you to go around talking about the goddamn Antichrist right now in the middle of all of this? Not the time.
But in a way, the perfect time, because people need to understand: this is where we are. Yo, Peter Thiel Antichrist lecture series—that's the point in history we've reached.
Paris Marx: I think maybe my final question would be: when we think about Peter Thiel, I feel like we often had this narrative of him that he was often kind of operating behind the scenes. He had his levers on the power, but you couldn't often see it. He was this kind of mastermind in how he was pulling the levers and the strings and all these sorts of things. He was obviously someone who got behind Trump early back in the 2016 campaign, kind of put his head out there and made it easier, I guess, for a lot more of these tech people to justify getting behind him in the years that came later.
And I wonder, seeing how he has progressed over the past number of years, do you think he still has that influence behind the scenes that he used to have? You mentioned someone like Katherine Boyle who had this relationship to him. He has a number of kind of acolytes out there, it seems. Or do you feel like it's kind of reaching the point where he might have had this influence in the past—maybe that was even exaggerated to a certain degree—but do you feel like that is waning? Do you feel like his influence is harder to see? Or does it feel like he is just kind of increasingly losing it and we're all just kind of watching his spiral?
Gil Duran: I think he's at the height of his power. A lot of what's happening now came from his brain. He's been thinking about this for a long time. But I think he's blowing it. I don't think he had it all figured out. And the fact that he's out there talking about the Antichrist shows the degree to which this is not motivated by logical strategy—it's motivated by something more akin to religion, to religious delusion in particular.
And we see that in a lot of Silicon Valley—a religious delusion. Some of them, I'm not sure about Thiel. Some of them definitely doing drugs. I mean, a lot of the Yarvin stuff comes out of LSD abuse. He tells the story himself if you look carefully enough at his podcasts and stuff. He wants you to know that was a big inspiration for him.
And the problem is, when you're just telling these little fantasies and fairy tales and you're disregarding history and the experience of other people who are more directly involved in matters like politics, there's a lot you don't understand. Like the fact that just firing a bunch of people from the government willy-nilly will lead to problems that force you to hire a lot of those people back.
I have a lot of criticism for the people in charge of things, but there's a lot of expertise in government that if you don't have it and you just take something out, there's a reason that thing was created over time. And it's not a perfect system. There's never a perfect system. I don't believe in perfect systems. But these people, the tech people, do, and that's a big flaw that they have.
You're never going to have a world without crime. You're never going to have a world where there's no addiction or dysfunction. But you create systems that avoid those, create systems that don't create more crime—like not having poverty, you'll have less people hungry, stealing, needing to do crime. But they want to create perfect systems through control and coercion and surveillance and through getting rid of government. But that was just a massive fail. You can't just do that.
So they don't have it all figured out, and I don't think they have a plan for what happens when everybody is really, really angry at what the billionaires tried to do to us.
Paris Marx: Yeah, it definitely seems that way. Gil, it's always great to get your insights into all this. I'm really looking forward to the book once it's ready and out there, because I'm sure there's going to be some fantastic stuff in there. I really appreciate you taking the time to come back on the show. Thanks so much.
Gil Duran: Yeah, and you got to come on my podcast too.
Paris Marx: Happy to do it. Happy to do it.
Gil Duran writes the Nerd Reich newsletter and is working on his first book which shares the same title. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marx. Production is by Kyla Houston.
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