🚀 Nazis built NASA (Will NASA build Nazis???) ✠⚡️⚡️✠

Theo-Techno-Fascism for All!

Here’s a fun brain teaser:

What do all these revered companies have in common?

• Allianz Insurance

• Bayer

• Hugo Boss

• VW

• Siemens

• Krupp

• Mercedes

• Bosch

• BASF

• BMW

Answer: they’re all German companies that profited handsomely from the Nazi war effort (and were able to whitewash their reputations after the fact).

You know, all those brilliantly engineered Panzer tanks, ferocious Messerschmitt 109 fighters, V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the Blitz, or the Zyklon B gas that so efficiently fumigated Auschwitz?

All built by the best and brightest, the most industrious industrialists, exemplars of the genius of German Engineering!

Galvanized by a fervor for a mystical Third Reich and a healthy dose of nazionalism.

(plus some good ol’ fashioned wartime profiteering).

These industrialists didn’t start out or end up as jack booted thugs. But in the messy middle of their history, their ingenuity got bent to darker ends.

And for those of you spending more time than is healthy in the recesses of Telegram, Twitter and Youtube, you’re probably already familiar with what happened next–Operation Paperclip!

That sneaky program where U.S. agents handed out “Get Out of Nuremberg FREE!” cards and smuggled the best and brightest Nazi rocket scientists (who hadn’t opted for a sunny retirement in Argentina) out of Europe.

So they could stand up NASA and win us a space race against our new frenemies enemies the Russians.

You know, good ol’ Wernher von Braun and his crew.

Brimming with practical hands on know-how from bombing Britain into rubble, converted straight into Apollo moon landings* and Tom Hanks movies.

*alleged

So while it’s one of the worst kept secrets in US history that real-life Nazis built NASA, it’s one of our best kept secrets that NASA (or more accurately, its increasingly powerful private sector cousins) might be building Nazis right now.

Or building for Nazis.

Or at the very least, building their all-seeing, all-knowing Overlord and awaiting fuhrer instructions.

It’s getting hard to tell at this point just exactly what the fuck is going on.

#godwinagain

To state the Big Idea of this essay plainly:

In the same way that the best and brightest German minds got swept up in the mythical national war effort of the Nazis (with disastrous effect), a similar movement is happening right now in Silicon Valley.

And it’s not just the fact that technologists are working with the government that’s noteworthy. That’s always been the rule more than the exception.

It’s the rise of a potentially apocalyptic ideology that threatens to link unchecked militarized development with the deepest currents of Christian Nationalism.

All turbocharged by Artificial Intelligence and the very best whizz-bang tech our very best techies can dream up.

Let’s unpack this argument in three steps:

Step One: noting Silicon Valley’s turn from “move fast, break things” to “move fast, nuke things”

Step Two: noting Silicon Valley’s turn from godless hyper rationalism to God-fearing hyper devotionalism

Step Three: noting it’s exactly the same players in Silicon Valley that are getting Jesus at the same time they’re getting multi-billion dollar defense contracts, with outcomes that should concern us all.

And while all these roads might eventually lead to Rome, first they gotta go through Peter Thiel.

***

A quick confession before we get to him.

Right around the November election I wrote a piece Curse of the Clever intended for the large number of smart friends and colleagues who weren’t voting for Trump so much as against all the excesses of The Cathedral/Blue Church/Deep State/Establishment.

I pointed out the extremely unlikely MAGA/MAHA/DOGE coalition of Jihadis for Jeezus (the Project 2025/Heritage crew) the Populist Accelerationists (Bannon et al) and the Tech Bros (Musk, Andreessen et al).

My point (which I thought was a savvy bit of persuading at the time) was “hey! you might be voting against all that’s fucked up and needs change, but you’ll also be voting in a bunch of utter wingnuts beside you—and you don’t want that, do you?”

Back in the simpler days of last Autumn, I could see an inevitable clash coming between the secular tech titan billionaires, Bannon’s blue collar MAGA faithful, and the theocrats finally getting their chance to re-Jesus ‘Merica.

As James Carville, the increasingly unintelligible Cajun fixer to Billy Clinton suggested recently, the Resistance should just “play possum” and let this unholy alliance devour itself from within.

There was simply no way that once their mutual enemy was defeated, that they would stay friends.

Except it looks like I was wrong.

Dead wrong.

It seemed utterly unimaginable that Bannon and the Billionaires would ever find common ground after storming the Cathedral together.

And to be fair, they haven’t.

Bannon’s been chafing at Musk’s influence, and confidently asserting that his grassroots MAGA pitchfork crew will rise up in populist solidarity soon enough.

But he’s probably wrong too. Trump will always defer to money and power and Elon’s got oodles of both.

The MAGA base loves DJT like an over-kicked puppy does. Alternately wincing and wagging to secure their master’s affections. Trump can keep them onside by cult of personality and Stockholm Syndrome alone.

But the other option on the table–Silicon Valley rationalists finding common cause with the Evangelicals?

Seemed even less likely.

What on earth did Effective Accelerationist, Rationalist, Atheist coders and Sand Hill Road VCs possibly have in common with the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 folks?

(At least Bannon had worked at Goldman and gone to Harvard Business School–the guy knows his way around a cap table).

But the evangelicals convinced they’re fighting demons and ushering in Armageddon via a war to end all wars in Israel?

How on earth could they find common cause with “the Singularity is Nigh” California hot tubs and microdose crew?

Which is where Peter Thiel comes back into the story.

Let’s take a look at a second list of companies and see what they all have in common:

Palantir (panopticon surveillance and battlefield AI by Thiel’s Stanford Law buddy Alex Karp)

Anduril (weaponized drones and AI by a Thiel protege Palmer Luckey)

Founders Fund (Paypal mafia, Thiel led investment group)

Y-Combinator (most famous startup incubator now led by Thiel protege and Christian leader)

SpaceX (precision guided warheads and satellite comms) guided by Thiel acolyte You Know Who

Bonus Round…

Open AI (Altman et al gunning for fully accelerated Artificial General Intelligence/Silicon God)

Oracle (future surveillance and China-like social credit scores championed by founder Ellison)

A16z VC (led by Bearded Humpty Marc Andreessen who’s been positively frothing to unleash AI and American patriotism since his Techno-Optimist Manifesto came out)

(and to lesser extents, all the tech giant who have bent the knee and licked the boots of the Mar-a-Drago. They won’t have to be ideologically onboard with this new Techno-Theocracy to transactionally get in line, the critical mass is already in place)

***

So Step One:

Silicon Valley morphs from “making the world a better place” to “making the world a deadlier place.”

If you think back a few years ago to when Google employees were boycotting making facial recognition technology for the government, protesting censorship in China (and launching cringe-inducingly woke AI products), it seems impossible to conceive that Silicon Valley could abandon its progressive cred so quickly and so thoroughly.

But really, it’s a return to form, not a deviation from it.

The notion that humanitarian, TED-talky Silicon Valley was in any way opposed to the military industrial complex was a polite fiction that PR agents of the 2010s were too happy to share.

From those Operation Paperclip days in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s to the MK ULTRA psychedelic studies that kicked off Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at Stanford in the ‘60’s, to ARPANet and the origins of the internet in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, to DAPRA/IARPA funding and the strange overlap between Burning Man and intelligence agencies in the ‘90’s, all the way to today’s rush for AI…

Silicon Valley has always been the public facing branch of the military industrial complex!

They’re not separate. At all.

We get the peace dividends, like streaming Netflix, having ChatGPT do our homework, and following GPS on our phones.

But the military has always had first dibs on the really good stuff.

What did Palantir founder Alex Karp (student of brainiac Christian apologist Rene Girard and longtime Stanford law school pal of Peter Thiel) have to say about this realignment in his recent manifesto Why Silicon Valley Lost Its Patriotism ?

All the quiet parts. Not quite loud enough for everyone to hear. But if you listened closely, the message was clear:

• Silicon Valley has become a bunch of snowflakes and cucks making bitch ass apps that do nothing.

• America needs us to step up and Build Boldly Again ™️

• (But!) the “wisdom of crowds” AKA democracy, is highly overrated.

• “If you ask people want they want they’d ask for a better buggy whip”–Henry Ford

• So…

• A small (dare we say) revolutionary vanguard needs to brush off the resistance and concerns of the sheeple, and Build Bombs Boldly.

• For Freedom, of course.

Tl;DR. You’re dumb and unimaginative. We’re smarter than you. And more powerful. And we’re gonna go all in on building out the militarized surveillance state you didn’t know you wanted. But you’ll be glad you got.

Honestly can’t believe the Atlantic printed Karp’s essay without context, rebuttal or at the least a few WTF hottakes on a podcast. But there it stood. Seemingly reasonable on the surface.

Utterly terrifying in its implications.

And we’re not talking about AR-15s and kevlar vests-to-keep-the-beer-bellies-in.

#spanxforbubbas

That’s for the flyover states and their hopelessly analogue militia boys.

Silicon Valley militarism is all about incredibly high-tech, AI enabled, utterly impersonal (and lethal) surveillance and weaponry.

Drones. Lasers. Battle Satellites. Quantum code breaking. Facial recognition from space.

Set-it-and-forget-it instant annihilation of your enemies. (foreign and domestic)

And Artificial Super Intelligence to oversee it all.

(plus the aforementioned Jesus. Whom we’ll get back to shortly).

from VF

Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted, and along with them, a factory-fresh founder prototype emerged. It used to be that the 20-something whiz kid who coded a viral game and dropped out of Stanford was a venture capitalist darling. “VCs used to throw money at that guy,” said a woman who manages communications at a top-tier venture firm.

“Now if someone comes in and says, ‘I love my parents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work ethic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’ ”

“No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” said that same venture capital communications exec. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’ ”

Androgynous blue hair and “I live in a polycule co-housing situation in the East Bay” wanna look at the CAD drawing for my next Burning Man art project? (or hear about my grammatically inconsistent pronoun preferences?)”

OUT.

High and tight haircut with a gold cross around my neck, a wedding band on my finger, “wanna look at satellite images of my enhanced targeting software? (or check pics of my trad wife and five kids?)”

IN.

Way in.

***

Now let’s move on to Step Two.

Silicon Valley is going for God, not just Guns and Guts.

Suffice it to say, the “vibe shift” in D.C. has made it’s way to the Left Coast.

from a recent Vanity Fair article “Christianity was Borderline Illegal in Silicon Valley: Now It’s the New Religion”

Maybe you know this person, or maybe you are this person, because it’s a personality that, while largely original to the Bay Area, has saturated mainstream consciousness so thoroughly as to become stripped of all its original subversion.

Go to most any party of millennials in Los Angeles or New York and you’ll find the same iridescent-sheathed package of psilocybin-studded chocolate being passed around.

What was once radical is now mundane: Burning Man is slouching toward Coachella, Richard Dawkins is a farce, and an uneasy realization is dawning that, while we all thought we were locked arm in arm in humanity’s cheerful march toward progress, we were only wandering into swift-approaching regression.

Even hard-nosed progressives had begun to sense that something rotten was simmering in the tepid cultural waters.

Could it be that what society needed was a return to an ethical framework that had survived throughout millennia?

And into the void that atheistic, hedonistic “make the world a better place” secularism has left, something else is creeping in…

Jesus.

Only this time there’s “no turn the other cheek.”

This time, he’s packing heat.

(there were so, so many of these pics to choose from)

And what’s really interesting is how this newly muscular Christianity is getting socialized.

A couple of the key apostles who’ve founded ACTS 17 (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), are Garry Tan, CEO of Y-Combinator, and Trae Stephens (Anduril, Founders’ Fund).

For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”

Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding.

And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful.

One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel.

Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness.

While using the Bible to justify VC investing seems a bit of a stretch, consider it more of a warmup. They can do backbends to justify what they were looking to do anyway.

Or consider this smirking admission at one of their Christian gatherings…

“I’m literally an arms dealer,” Trae Stephens said at one point, prompting laughter from the crowd of roughly 200 people, which included Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. “I don’t think all of you should be arms dealers, but that’s a pretty unique calling.”

This particular blend of Silicon Valley optimism, opportunism and trend chasing is sweeping the peninsula. It only needed a handful of true believers and powerful backers to start trending.

For the rest, it’s simply expedience.

“It’s surface. It’s a fad,” one Valley insider said. “I think they are trying to replace ESG”—the socially conscious investing principle that prioritizes environmental, social, and governance issues—“with Christianity.”

“I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told me, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Even the Silicon Valley badge of neuro-divergent belonging is getting upstaged by Jesus.

When Thiel said in 2015 that many of Silicon Valley’s successful entrepreneurs seem to have a mild form of Asperger’s, overnight “kids started putting on an autism effect to seem smarter,” one entrepreneur recalled. “Like, you’re not on the spectrum, you’re just socially awkward and you’re trying to seem smart.”

These days, he argued, the same effect that engendered a class of people putting on neurodivergence is cultivating a new bent toward biblical altruism.

The ‘tism is out.

Baptism is in.

But if this move to social Christianity was just trend-chasing, today’s equivalent of getting into SoHo House twenty years ago, it wouldn’t have such significance.

It’s the ideological fervor that underpins it and the ideological alliances it supports that make it truly concerning.

Check out what went down at Thiel’s Hereticon Conference last fall.

Another idea gaining steam among some of the Silicon Valley faithful is the notion that tech is not an inherent evil. Rather, tech produced by bad thinking—and by extension secular thinking—is.

This was the general theory floated by entrepreneur Reggie James in October at Hereticon, a Founders Fund–backed conference for “creative dissidents.”

(During its apocalypse-themed Miami gathering, Thiel spoke about the coming of the Antichrist.)

There, James introduced the idea of “SecuTech,” or “secular technology” designed from a secular perspective. His primary example is social media, which, he told me over the phone, engenders “the postmodernist values of fighting over identity and representation.

Everyone on social media is going through an identity crisis and some kind of disinformation campaign. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature of postmodern design.”

So if “SecuTech” according to Reggie James is postmodernist and doomed to fail, and “SacredTech” is, by his and Palantir’s Alex Karp’s suggestion, lethal weapons of high-tech war, coded as patriotic defense of Western Civilization and Christian values…

The only thing to do is get the tools of technology out of the hands of secularists (who poison everything they build with their godlessness) and into the hands of true believers (who sanctify everything they build with their righteousness).

All just in time to unite with the Project 2025 militant Evangelicals in preparation to defeat Thiel’s coming Antichrist.

Israel’s got their Iron Dome of missile defense and attack. Trump’s already dreaming of his “big, beautiful” Golden Dome.

Diplomacy and detente are out.

Apocalyptic Accelerationism is in.

And Thiel and his acolytes are locked, loaded (and funded) to deliver on the messianic vision.

I mean, what could go wrong?

***

So after that rather wild and wooly survey of the intersection of Technology and Christianity, let’s boil it down to three key takeaways:

One–Christianity is somehow getting yoked to unchecked AI, Surveillance and Weaponry development.

For believers, this provides blanket ethical justification and political endorsement for things that will certainly violate the Geneva Conventions, common sense, and possibly human existence.

As much as the MAGA/QAnon crowd love to crow about getting red and black pilled, we’re ushering in an age of Skynet and the Matrix, lickety split.

On their watch.

By the time we cross these lines it will be too late to backtrack.

Two–Thiel’s Silicon Valley Theology is, like a snowbridge that spans a crevasse on a mountain, connecting all the wealth, power and creative/destructive potential of the TechBros with the Christian nationalism of the Project 2025 crowd who are hell bent on ushering in a fundamentalist theocracy.

This was totally unanticipated, and creates an alliance that may well find common cause and be incredibly hard to defeat.

Unless/Until

Three–the TechBros achieve Artificial General Intelligence and the Screaming Abyss opens wide. Then the Christians are going to have to decide whether they’ve birthed the Anti-Christ or the Silicon Coming of their own digital messiah.

It all gets so confusing when you blend nationalism, ungodly profits, and apocalyptic mythologies together.

(Just ask the volk at Mercedes and BMW).

Next Week: we will conclude our rambling survey of American Religiosity circa 2025 with a deep dive into AI religion itself. So we can really see how this whole whacky thing might play out!