Peter Thiel's Approaching Eschaton

Angel Au-Yeung, "Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About the Antichrist"

During appearances, the billionaire has offered his analysis on technology, government and a biblical perspective on the end times

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense and weapons development technology companies, wants everyone to think more about the end of the world.

For about a year now, Thiel has been publicly laying out his understanding of biblical prophecies and the potential for the rapid advance of technology to bring about an apocalyptic future.

In a lecture Monday, he encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.

A devout Christian, Thiel is expanding on a number of speeches and public interviews he has given about the Antichrist in a closed, four-part lecture series this month in San Francisco. The second lecture happened on Monday, and the series will end in early October.

He is among a number of Silicon Valley figures who have recently spoken more openly about their faith, a contrast to the cultural milieu of the epicenter of the tech world, which is mostly secular.

This is how Thiel says the end of the world might happen, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his recent lectures. Existential risks will present themselves in the form of nuclear war, environmental disaster, dangerously engineered bioweapons and even autonomous killer robots guided by AI.

As humans race toward a last battle—the Armageddon—a one-world government will form, promising peace and safety. In Thiel’s reckoning, this totalitarian authoritarian regime, with real teeth and real power, will be the coming of the modern-day Antichrist, a figure defined in Christian teachings as the personal opponent of God who will appear before the world ends.

Not ‘defeatist’

The point of these talks is “not to be defeatist,” Thiel said last October in an interview series produced by the Hoover Institution. In driving people to think more about the Armageddon or the Antichrist, his hope is that human society can find a third way and avoid both outcomes. “I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it’s actually more hopeful,” he said.

The AI arms race gripping Silicon Valley has prompted more spiritual reflection by many tech luminaries, including those who have called for Christian concepts to inform the advance of the technology. Pope Leo XIV has begun to speak about the threats posed by AI, even choosing his papal name in a nod to technological revolution in the past.

“In the last two years, with AI, it definitely feels like we’ve unleashed more of a high-stakes conversation on all fronts,” said Jonathan Gundlach, an ordained minister and attorney who is attending the lecture series and counts tech workers among his parishioners. “There’s a heightened sense of spirituality because it feels like we’re dealing with a new form of being that has infinite potential. It’s kind of like a God,” said Gundlach. He said Thiel occasionally attended a church where Gundlach was formerly a minister.

Former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger gave a lecture this summer about his Christianity. Garry Tan, chief executive of startup incubator Y Combinator, also has hosted fireside chats discussing how religion fits in with science and technology. Elon Musk, who has extolled the virtues of Christianity in recent public remarks, quoted from a scripture in the New Testament Sunday on X.

According to a review of his past lectures, Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power needed to regulate the existential risks from science and technology.

Jay Kim, the lead pastor at WestGate Church in the Bay Area, who has had a front-row seat to the new attention to Christianity emerging in Silicon Valley, said Thiel’s focus on the Antichrist is misplaced.

“My best understanding is that the New Testament writers focus very little, if at all, on pointing followers of Jesus towards spending their energy on accurately identifying the Antichrist,” he said. “To give all your energy into thinking about all that, to me, feels like a pretty futile endeavor.”

Thiel’s speaker series is hosted by ACTS 17, a San Francisco-based nonprofit co-founded by Michelle Stephens, an executive at a healthcare software startup. Her husband is Trae Stephens, an investor at Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril Industries, one of the few privately held tech companies to land contracts with the Defense Department. The couple does Bible study with Thiel, she said.

In an interview, Michelle Stephens said she started ACTS 17 in part because of the questions she and her husband faced as practicing Christians working in tech. “Trae was building his own tech company and really facing hostility around what he was building, why he was building unmanned defense systems with Anduril,” she said.

ACTS 17, an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” aims to create a community of Christians and non-Christians to talk about many topics, including religion and Jesus.

Stephens said she has faced questions on whether they are seemingly “tending to the rich” with ACTS 17’s work rather than giving back to the poor. She pushes back on that criticism. “Christians actually don’t do a very good job of ministering to the wealthy, who can think that they’re basically gods themselves which can be very dangerous,” she said.

A charismatic Antichrist

The twin concepts of the Armageddon and the Antichrist have been the subject of intense scrutiny and attention for generations, especially interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which includes vivid imagery as it describes the conditions that lead to a final battle between good and evil.

At one recent lecture, an audience member asked Thiel if a certain world leader was the Antichrist. Thiel said the leader wasn’t “charismatic enough,” according to Nestor Tkachenko, a startup CEO who is attending the lectures. In the past, Thiel has named certain left-leaning political figures as analogues for what the Antichrist could be.

This month’s lectures appear to build on Thiel’s two-hour interview with Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and host of “Uncommon Knowledge,” a show by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

The two discussed Thiel’s sourcing for his theories on Armageddon and the Antichrist, which include biblical texts like the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, and fictional books such as “Lord of the World,” a dystopian science-fiction novel written by a Catholic priest in 1907.

At one point in the conversation, Robinson asked Thiel why he believed in texts that much of contemporary society has ignored. “One can take it seriously without taking it completely literally,” Thiel responded.

“The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, it’s redistributive, it’s an extremely great philanthropist as an effective altruist,” Thiel said. “And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong.”

Thiel also draws heavily from theories and personal conversations with René Girard, a French historian who taught at Stanford University. For his San Francisco lecture series, Thiel has added new sources, including Renaissance paintings from the Italian artist Luca Signorelli to Japanese comic books, also known as manga, according to people in attendance.

“In some sense, the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do in a world in which they have ever more powerful technologies in which there are no sacred limits on the use of these technologies,” said Thiel in past talks.

Technofeudalists Conquer the National Science Foundation (NSF)?

from Google AI:

The NSF Tech Labs initiative is a newly launched program by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). It is designed to create a new generation of independent research organizations that focus on solving complex technical bottlenecks that traditional academic or industry labs cannot easily address. 

Key Features of the Initiative

• Targeted Teams: The program funds full-time, interdisciplinary teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers rather than individual principal investigators or isolated projects.
• Operational Autonomy: Selected teams operate with a high degree of independence from existing academic and industry constraints to pursue breakthroughs at "breakneck speed".
• Significant Funding: NSF anticipates making large, multi-year awards in Fiscal Year 2026, with funding for high-performing teams expected to range from $10 million to $50 million per year.
• Milestone-Based Model: Unlike traditional annual grants, funding is tied to demonstrating technical progress toward commercially viable platforms.
• Phased Implementation:

Selection Process: A 90-day initial selection period.

Phase 0: A nine-month planning phase for concept refinement and team building.

Phase 1: A two-year period for scaling operations and pushing for real-world impact.

Phase 2: Extended support for high-performing teams to transition innovations to market. 

Strategic Goals

The initiative aims to bridge the "valley of death" between foundational research and commercialization. It draws inspiration from models like Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and the Janelia Research Campus, focusing on platform technologies that can reshape entire sectors like AI, quantum technology, and biotechnology.

Companion Program

NSF TIP also introduced the Tech Accelerators Initiative as a companion effort. While it shares core principles with Tech Labs, it provides wider entry points for teams specifically focused on technology translation in key national priority areas. 

Would you like more details on the Request for Information (RFI) process or specific eligibility requirements for these awards

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Michael Gibson, "How to Break America’s Great Scientific Stagnation"

President Trump’s selection of Jim O’Neill to head the National Science Foundation could open the next great chapter of discovery.

The biggest factor holding back an American revolution in science is not money but talent identification. For more than half a century, risk-averse bureaucracies and universities have let bold ideas and promising discoveries wither on the vine under the guise of credentialed expertise and the virtues of peer-reviewed incrementalism.

The evidence for this Great Scientific Stagnation is substantial. Research productivity is declining sharply across many domains. Federal R&D spending is more than 30 times what it was in 1956, and more scientists are trained and more papers published than ever. Yet revolutionary breakthroughs are becoming rarer. Many peer-reviewed findings fail to replicate, and a high probability exists that the vast majority of papers (which no one reads) are full of false conclusions. Accusations of fraud in science are on the rise.

America must break through this chokepoint by focusing on its greatest resource: talent. It matters how, and to whom, we award grants. We should be working toward tapping the energy at the heart of the sun and hanging our achievements in the balance of the stars. Instead, federal science funding has often drifted elsewhere: on promoting insects as human food ($2.5 million), watching monkeys gamble ($3.7 million), observing brain-damaged cats walk on treadmills ($549,000), and sending cash to DEI bird watching clubs ($288,563).

Fortunately, American science may soon get a lot more exciting—faster, wilder, and even more rigorous. On March 2, President Trump nominated Silicon Valley financier Jim O’Neill as director of the National Science Foundation. O’Neill served most recently as Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With a budget of nearly $9 billion, the NSF determines which nonmedical scientists receive funding, which university labs are supported, and which frontiers advance. With O’Neill at the helm, the old slow-drip model of incremental, consensus-driven funding would get a much-needed shake-up.

But O’Neill must first clear the Senate confirmation process, and the opposition is already sharpening its knives. California Representative Zoe Lofgren, the leading Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, told Science that O’Neill isn’t fit for the office. “[G]iven his track record at HHS and CDC under [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.], Mr. O’Neill seems like a bad choice to lead the National Science Foundation, our nation’s premier scientific agency.”

Science ran a second article featuring scientists skeptical of O’Neill. Neal Lane, a former NSF director under President Bill Clinton and a physicist at Rice University, said, “I think it’s unfair to ask him to do the job”—largely because O’Neill lacks an advanced science degree. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, added that he sees O’Neill and the Trump administration’s direction as overly commercial and “shortsighted.”

Full disclosure: I owe O’Neill a great deal personally. In 2010, he introduced me to Peter Thiel, for whom he then worked as head of the Thiel Foundation and a research lead at his hedge fund. On my first day, September 27, 2010, we launched the Thiel Fellowship, which awarded 20 young people a year $100,000 grants—with two notable conditions: applicants had to be under 19 and agree to drop out of college.

Critics torched the Thiel Fellowship from the start. My favorite was Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, who called our program the “single most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.” Today, however, the fellowship is a strong predictor of future billionaires. Its grantees have generated more than $500 billion in value since the program began. Its hit rate—the share of fellows who start tech companies that reach $1 billion in market cap—exceeds that of top accelerators like Y Combinator and institutions like Harvard Business School.

What I learned running the fellowship with O’Neill, Thiel, and others during its first three years is that America has lost sight of what it takes to produce new inventions and discoveries. That failure has led those who run major institutions to misjudge talent. The people running Harvard or the NSF—the architects of the “Great Scientific Stagnation”—think in terms of buying prestige: the number of papers published, the status of the journals in which they appear, citation counts, the reputations of endorsing professors, prior grants, grant size, university affiliation, and Ph.D. pedigree.

If you’re head of the NSF, responsible for managing more than $10 billion in federal spending to advance science, your goal should be to buy discoveries, not prestige. And to buy discoveries, you need to find and fund creative genius, wherever it turns up.

When I see universities like Johns Hopkins or the University of Pennsylvania collecting billions in grants each year, I see evidence of a flawed understanding of where discoveries come from. True, their scientists produce solid work and, at times, important theories, but are they worth the billions the government sends them? If the “Great Scientific Stagnation” thesis is right—and the evidence suggests it is—the answer is no.

Why aren’t Americans getting a better bang for their science buck? Grant-makers often overlook talent because of perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality, among others. The supposed defects of Thiel Fellows were their youth and lack of a college degree, yet those attributes proved irrelevant. Our job was to predict outcomes and take big risks; the results speak for themselves.

When O’Neill got the nod to lead the NSF, I texted to ask how I could help. “Send me your ideas,” he replied. Here are five.

First, the NSF should adopt the Thiel Fellowship model (or develop its own) for identifying young, overlooked, and therefore undervalued talent. The central challenge is improving selection while relying on less evidence. At the Thiel Fellowship, we built models that assessed the raw character of an engineer or scientist and translated it into an estimate of strengths and likely success.

I emphasize “young” because creativity is perishable. As with athletes, there is a prime age range when the mind is most fecund and sharp. One of American science’s key chokepoints is that institutions don’t trust younger researchers to do great work. The average age of first-time grant recipients is about 40 to 45; that should drop by two decades.

The economist Benjamin Jones’s research, spanning the past century, shows that innovators are reaching their greatest achievements at increasingly older ages. That might be fine if creativity and productivity remained constant over a lifetime—but they do not. Late starts mean shorter careers, resulting, by Jones’s estimate, in a 30 percent decline in the potential for new discoveries and inventions. By analogy, imagine how unimpressive career statistics would be if Major League Baseball barred players from competing until age 30. Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the four papers that revolutionized physics in 1905. Isaac Newton was 23 or 24 when he developed calculus and the theory of gravity. The NSF should be looking in these age ranges for tomorrow’s talent.

Second, the NSF must speed up the grant-review process. As it stands, it’s a circus. Multiple studies find that scientists spend 20 percent to 40 percent of their working hours preparing applications that have only about a one-in-five chance of success and take far too long to process. Endless peer-review rituals and elaborate decision procedures, neither of which improve outcomes, slow the pace of discovery.

We should accept a higher risk of flubs, blind alleys, and dead ends in exchange for a better shot at major breakthroughs. Two ideas are worth testing. One is a partial lottery: randomly select from applications that clear a quick initial screen. The other would be scout programs: recruit a rotating network of proven agents—working scientists, professors, independent thinkers—with firsthand knowledge of emerging talent. No interviews or prestige proxies. Give credentials near-zero weight. Scouts would simply select recipients, who wouldn’t even know they were being evaluated until the funding arrived. To avoid entrenched patronage, scouts would serve two-year terms and then pass their authority to a peer outside their immediate professional circle.

Third, measure what matters: the expected magnitude of discovery, not the expected number of citations. Create a “renegade scientist” grant program that explicitly rewards risky, interdisciplinary, even unconventional, proposals that peer review tends to kill. Pair it with a clear list of major unsolved problems that the grants are meant to tackle.

Fourth, use the NSF’s funding and authority to break the cartel of prestigious scientific journals. Taxpayers fund the research, only to have access sold back to them at exorbitant prices. The NSF should use its leverage to free that work from paywalled journals by requiring that all government-funded research be publicly accessible.

Fifth, fix the incentives. Cap or eliminate indirect-cost siphons to universities, especially those with endowments in the tens of billions. Fund people, not buildings. Today, if a university scientist wins a grant, the university claws back more than half of it for “indirect costs” or administrative overhead. This rake-off goes not to the actual business of scientific discovery but to salaries for DEI officers or planting flowers in the quad. The NSF should also require an “idiot index”—a comparison between a scientist’s estimate of an experiment’s cost and the university’s. The aim is to drive spending toward tools and lab space, not bureaucracy.

Do these five things, and the NSF will become the fire for American ingenuity instead of being a steward of stagnation. We have the money and the talent. What’s missing is the courage to stop buying prestige and start buying discoveries.

Jim O’Neill has spent his career proving he can spot that courage in others. Now he should get the shot to institutionalize it. The Senate should confirm him so the next chapter of revolutionary science can begin. As he wrote in an X post announcing his nomination, “Entropy is on the march and China is not waiting.”

Get Your NFT's...

Slavoj Zizek, "It’s naive to think Bitcoin & NFT give us freedom"

In a world where digital control and manipulation have become a norm, many believe that cryptocurrency and Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, enable freedom. But this is not exactly true.

The best indication of the changes affecting our financial system is the rise of two new interrelated phenomena: Cryptocurrency and NFTs. Both emerged from a libertarian idea to bypass state apparatuses and establish direct communication between concerned parties.

However, in both cases, we see how the idea turned into its opposite, with bitcoin and NFTs now having their own 1% which dominate and manipulate the field. Here we should avoid both extremes: neither praising Bitcoin or NFT as offering us new freedom, nor dismissing them as the latest speculative capitalist madness.

In our usual experience of money, its payment value is guaranteed by some state authority, such as a central bank, and the state can also misuse its authority, by printing money and causing inflation, etc.

The value of bitcoin, a digital currency or cryptocurrency, is not guaranteed by any public institution of authority. It is determined by what people are willing to pay for it right now. And they are ready to pay for it and accept it as money if they believe in it, if they trust it.

Here, in the domain of cold and ruthless financial speculation, confidence and trust enter the stage: bitcoin is like an ideological Causer that exists as a real force only if enough people believe in it – without individuals who believe in the Communist cause, for instance, there would’ve been no Communism.

There’s a similarity between this and how stocks are priced: if more people want to buy than sell, prices will likely go up, whereas when there are more sellers, the price usually falls. However, one difference is that – at least, in principle – the value of stocks is not purely self-referential, it refers to investments that are expected to generate profit from ‘real’ production.

The maximum number of bitcoins that can be issued, or mined, is limited; cryptocurrency inventor Satoshi Nakamoto capped it at 21 million (about 19 million has already been mined). This makes Bitcoin similar to gold and other precious metals, but it has no intrinsic “real value.”

How can this be? Bitcoins have to be registered in blockchains which are “essentially decentralized ledgers. They’re a ‘place’ to store information and, crucially, because they are decentralized, cannot be edited without the knowledge of other users on the blockchain. The idea is that blockchains are able to store records of information without the need for third parties (e.g., banks and financial institutions), so that the system is essentially self-sufficient and self-regulating. As a digital infrastructure, an added benefit is that huge legal fees added by third parties are avoided,” according to an article published by Aesthetics for Birds website.

Here we stumble upon the tension that defines blockchains: precisely because there is no third party and the system is essentially self-sufficient and self-regulating, every registration/inscription of a new bitcoin involves a tremendous amount of work through which the new bitcoin will be brought to “the knowledge of other users on the blockchain.” Since there is no third party to which every bitcoin owner could refer, each new owner has to elaborate a complex texture of algorithms and codes which guarantee that the specific identity of the new bitcoin will be clearly perceived by all others without turning it into something that can be appropriated by others.

Blockchain – as a non-alienated ‘Big Other' – needs a lot more work than inscription into an alienated third party, creating the new ‘proletarians’ of this new domain out of the bitcoin ‘miners’ who do this work. We move from old miners who do their difficult work deep beneath the earth as the genuine 19th-century kat’ exochen proletarians, to the bitcoin miners who toil to construct and secure the space for a bitcoin in the digital ‘Big Other.’

The paradox here is that they do not work to produce new use-values, but to create new space for exchange-value. To guarantee that bitcoins do not need a legal external authority and the accompanying legal fees, an effort is required which takes a lot of time and uses so much energy (electricity) that it is a heavy ecological burden.

The potentially progressive idea of Bitcoin as global, independent of particular state apparatuses, thus actualizes itself in a form which undermines its premises. This makes it similar to NFTs.

NFT (non-fungible token) – proclaimed by Collins Dictionary its word of the year for 2021 – was also invented as a decentralized, anti-State, libertarian attempt to save the autonomy of artists from institutional clutches. The price we pay for this idea is that “the creation of an NFT is an attempt to create artificial scarcity where there is none. Anyone can create an NFT for a digital asset, even if there’s no actual asset behind it!”

The paradox of NFTs is that they introduce scarcity into a domain where items are accessible to everyone for free. For this reason, NFTs compel us to rethink the notion of property, of owning something in a digital space:

“Through subscription services, we have temporary access, but never own a thing. In some quite important sense we might ask, were we to own something, what would it be? An original master of a film or music? Perhaps. But in reality what we can say is ours is either the temporary access, or a download. The download is likely to be absolutely identical to every other download that exists. In other words, our owning it doesn’t preclude others from owning it. This is why even the thought of owning a piece of art online has a tinge of absurdity about it. If the song exists as a file, it can exist identically in an infinite number of digital spaces. But NFTs provide a kind of ‘solution’: artificial scarcity. They give us digital collectibles in a world where duplication has zero costs.”

What is intriguing in NFTs is the idea of taking a digital asset that anyone can copy and claiming ownership of it. An NFT has almost no use-value (maybe it brings some social prestige to owners), and what sustains it is its potential future exchange-value. It is a copy with a price, an item of purely symbolic ownership that can bring profit.

The key Hegelian insight here – just as in the case of bitcoin – is that, although Bitcoin and NFT appear as an anomaly, as a pathological deviation of the ‘normal’ functioning of money and commodities, the two effectively actualize a potentiality that is already contained in the very notion of commodity and money.

Exemplary here is the figure of Peter Thiel, a German-American billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, who declared that “[Artificial Intelligence] is communist and crypto is libertarian.” Why? Because with AI, “you’re sort-of going to have the big eye of Sauron watching you at all times, in all places.”

“The main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort-of monitor people, … where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort-of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist, because China loves AI…” Thiel said.

That sounds evident and convincing. However, as Thom Dunn duly noted:

“Thiel's big critique here does seem to be about the authoritarian use of data and surveillance. Which, okay, cool, I agree, that’s a valid concern. I don’t know what that has to do [with] a revolutionary vanguard party forming a transitional state in order to establish a classless and leaderless society, but, um, sure. China does technically call itself a government. So I think I get what he’s putting down here. But just so we’re clear: this is the guy who helped found Palantir. Like, the big data analytics company that literally [taught] ICE to organize its authoritarian tactics. Which is the same Peter Thiel who also founded the Anduril surveillance company, and used his billions to destroy a successful news organization for criticizing him. And he’s afraid of AI because of … communism?”

Impossible to miss the irony here: the libertarian anti-Leninist Thiel relies on the very ‘Leninist’ AI mechanisms he deplores. The same goes for former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who (yet another irony) allegedly described himself as “Leninist”:

“Bannon’s White House adventure was only one stage of a long journey – the migration of revolutionary-populist language, tactics, and strategies from the left to the right. Bannon has reportedly said: ‘I’m a Leninist. Lenin … wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment,’” Thiel reminds us.

This same Bannon who’s rambling against big corporations that, together with apparatuses of state, control and exploit ordinary working Americans, had allegedly intended to use sophisticated AI during the 2016 election campaign. It was revealed that Cambridge Analytica (CA), a political consulting firm where Bannon was vice president between 2014 and 2016, had scraped masses of user data from Facebook to provide information on populations of interest to political campaigns around the world.

The company was shut down in 2018, after Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, blew the whistle on how CA had engaged in data-mining operations. Wylie, a gay Canadian vegan who, at 24, came up with an idea that led to the foundation of CA, which he described to The Guardian as “Bannon’s psychological warfare.” At a certain point, Wylie was genuinely freaked out: “It’s insane. The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

What makes this story so fascinating is that it combines elements which we usually perceive as opposites. The right-wingers say that addresses the concerns of ordinary white, hard-working, deeply religious people who stand for simple traditional values and abhor corrupted eccentrics like homosexuals and vegans, but also digital nerds–and then we learn that their “psychological warfare” is created by precisely such a nerd who stands for all they oppose. There is more than an anecdotal value in this: it clearly signals the vacuity of far-right populism, which has to rely on the latest technological advances to maintain its popular redneck appeal.

There is no contradiction between Thiel’s anti-Leninism and Bannon’s Leninism: if we understand under ‘Leninism’ the practice of total digital control over populations, they both practice it while maintaining a libertarian face. The difference resides only in the fact that, for Bannon, Leninism means destruction of the state and its apparatuses (without, of course, really intending it).

To conclude, digital control and manipulation are not an anomaly, a deviation, of today’s libertarian project, they are its necessary framework, its formal condition of possibility. The system can afford the appearance of freedom only under the conditions of digital and other modes of control that regulate our freedom – for the system to function, we HAVE to remain formally free and perceive ourselves as free.

Views from Silicon Valley, Curtis Yarvin: Breaking the Future

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 – What Is Sovereignty? 

11:34 – Elections vs Authority 

24:08 – Institutional Continuity 

37:52 – AI as Acceleration 

52:41 – Bureaucratic Limits 

1:07:29 – Responsibility Problem 

1:17:42 – Debt & Fiscal Fragility 

1:31:05 – Reform Constraints 

1:49:44 – Regime Stability 

2:07:10 – What Breaks First?

from Google AI:

Curtis Yarvin, a blogger also known as "Mencius Moldbug" who advocates for replacing democracy with a "CEO-led" monarchy, has developed a significant following within elite Silicon Valley circles. His anti-democratic, "neo-reactionary" ideas (often referred to as the "Dark Enlightenment") have gained traction among prominent tech founders, investors, and influencers who are disillusioned with traditional institutions. 

Key figures in Silicon Valley associated with or influenced by Yarvin include:

• Peter Thiel: The PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist is often described as the primary supporter and "patron" of Yarvin, with some referring to Yarvin as the "house political philosopher" of the "Thielverse".
• Elon Musk: While Yarvin has stated he has not met Musk, the Tesla and X CEO has echoed ideas similar to Yarvin's regarding the restructuring of government, with Yarvin's work influencing the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) agenda.
• Marc Andreessen: The prominent venture capitalist has called Yarvin a "friend".
• J.D. Vance: Although more closely associated with Washington now, the Vice President has praised Yarvin by name and previously echoed his ideas on "de-wokification" and dismantling the federal bureaucracy.
• Blake Masters: The tech entrepreneur and politician, associated with Thiel, has also expressed admiration for Yarvin.
• David Sacks: The Craft Ventures partner and podcaster, who is close with Musk and Thiel, has been identified as a key figure spreading these anti-progressive, anti-democratic ideas within the tech scene.
• Alexander Karp: The Palantir CEO has also been associated with this group of founders, CEOs, and thought leaders. 

Influence and Impact

• "The Cathedral": Yarvin's theories often center on dismantling what he calls "the Cathedral"—a term for the combined power of the media, universities, and government, which he believes should be replaced by a "sovereign corporate" structure.
• "RAGE": He coined the acronym RAGE ("Retire All Government Employees"), which directly influenced the "drain the swamp" and bureaucracy-slashing rhetoric of the second Trump administration.
• "Redpilled": Yarvin is credited with popularizing the "red pill" meme in tech circles, used to describe a, often politically right-wing, awakening to a "suppressed truth".
• Reach: His Substack newsletter, Grey Room, boasts 57,000 subscribers, and his ideas are often discussed within the "New Right" podcast and intellectual scene. 

Yarvin's followers in Silicon Valley generally believe in the idea of "techno-feudalism," where society is managed by technocratic elites or "genius" founders, unconstrained by government regulation or democratic processes

Peter Thiel Reprises "The Diversity Myth": The Woke Distraction

Is Thiel right?  The Sciences are even MORE corrupted than the Humanities?

Straussian Moments - The Return to Politics

The original Peter Thiel text

So was all this an Ad for Thiel's Palantir Technologies?

Dugin's Westernology - An Analysis of Current American Politics

Alexander Dugin, "Lacan and Psychedelic Trumpism"

Alexander Dugin applies Lacan’s three orders to US politics, arguing that while Kamala Harris and the Democrats seek to dismantle traditional structures, “psychedelic Trumpism,” influenced by figures like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and J. D. Vance, alongside the Alt-Right, counters from the right, with a warning that a Harris victory could spell the end of humanity.

Lacan’s Method

Let us try to apply Lacan’s topology to the American elections.

Let us recall Lacan’s basic model. It can be represented as three Borromean rings or three orders:

The Real
The Symbolic
The Imaginary

The Real is the domain where every object is strictly identical to itself. This absolute identity (A=A) excludes the very possibility of becoming, i.e., of being in a state of transformation. Thus, the Real is the zone of pure death and nothingness. There are no changes, movements, or relations. The Real is true, like the truth of nothingness that has no alternatives.

The Symbolic is the domain where nothing equals itself, where one thing always refers to another. It is an escape from the Real, motivated by the desire to avoid death and falling into nothingness. It is here that content, relationships, movements, and transformations are born, but always in a dreamlike state. The Symbolic is the unconscious. The essence of a symbol is that it points to something other than itself (it does not matter what specifically, as long as it is not itself).

The Imaginary is the domain where the dynamic of the Symbolic stops, but without the object dying and collapsing into the Real. The Imaginary is what we mistakenly take for Being, the world, ourselves — nature, society, culture, and politics. It is everything, yet it is also a lie. Every element of the Imaginary is actually a frozen moment of the Symbolic. Wakefulness is a form of sleep that does not realize itself. Everything in the Imaginary refers to the Symbolic but presents itself as supposedly “Real.”

In the Real, A=A is true. In the Imaginary, A=A is false. In the Imaginary, no object is identical to itself, but unlike in the Symbolic, it doesn’t want to admit this — neither to itself nor to others.

The Real is nothing. The Symbolic is ever-changing becoming. The Imaginary consists of false nodes of the frozen Symbolic.

Lacan and Politics

Lacan was well aware that the model of the three orders casts doubt on the basic strategies of reformism, progressivism, and revolution. It is no coincidence that in his youth, he was right-wing and a monarchist, close to Charles Maurras. And in the 1960s, contrary to the “New Left,” he supported the status quo and de Gaulle’s rule. This was no accident but stems directly from the Borromean rings model.

The “New Left” revolutionaries (in Lacan’s interpretation) wanted to replace the Imaginary (old social-political structures, order as such) with the Symbolic (surreal, schizophrenic, transgressive). They used Lacan’s ideas in a utilitarian way — ironic Freudianism helped undermine the claims of the Imaginary (Order) to foundational logic (A=A), revealing it as merely a frozen moment of delirium. However, they overlooked the fact that once the old Imaginary collapses or melts under the pressure of critique (whether political, aesthetic, social, or epistemological), the Symbolic cannot take its place. It will instantly become the new Imaginary — equally totalitarian, dictatorial, and absurd.

Examples of this, Lacan saw everywhere, especially in Soviet Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks began with a call for freedom and equality but quickly transformed into a rigid party hierarchy with a totalitarian apparatus of violence. The same happened with Cromwell or the French Revolution. The Symbolic retains its properties only while remaining in the unconscious, in the realm of dreams. The moment it surfaces, it turns into the Imaginary, essentially the same thing, though now dressed in new forms. All Imaginary systems were once Symbolic, alive, and changing before freezing into permanence.

Thus, today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s totalitarian, cruel official and enforcer of violence. Reforms (in the context of the Borromean rings) are impossible, as they will lead to the same result. The Symbolic can never replace the Imaginary under any conditions.


Lacan believed this, and this conclusion flows directly from his system.

Kamala Harris and the Symbolic

Now to the US elections. Here we see a fierce clash between “progressives” (Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party) and “conservatives” (Trump and the Republicans). In Lacanian analysis, the roles seem obvious: Kamala Harris embodies an invitation to transgression, the legalization of perversions, and liberation from all prohibitions and norms, i.e., the expansion of the Symbolic realm. The Democrats’ platform is a structure of well-tempered delirium: more LGBT, more cancel culture, more illegal immigrants, more drugs and gender reassignment surgeries, more deconstruction of old orders, more BLM and critical race theory.

Of course, the main Imaginary being mocked and attacked from all sides is Donald Trump — the generalized archetype of “unfreedom,” “hierarchies,” and “male rationality.”

Kamala Harris represents the Symbolic, as seen in her strange speeches, endless cold and meaningless laughter, her incoherence, and her expressive gestures that point to something intuitively understandable but indefinable. Harris is a figure of active dreaming. The voter sees in her that the impossible becomes possible, and one thing seamlessly flows into another. But everything remains unfocused and blurry. This is “progress”: Whites become Blacks, capitalists become something else (“Loot the stores — that’s the whole law!”), men and women become vague objects of desire (Lacan’s “little a”), always evading fixation.

In other words, despite Lacan’s own warnings about the unchanging structure of the Borromean rings, the Democrats are actively trying to destroy the American Imaginary, fervently wanting to replace it with the Symbolic.

Psychedelic Trumpism and Right-Wing Dreaming

Where can we find a counterattack on the frozen liberal Imaginary, which has turned into overt totalitarianism? The answer is obvious: in the opposite pole, which we can call “Trumpist Symbolic.” We saw the signs of this strategy during Trump’s first presidential campaign in the Alt-Right, on 4chan, in the figure of the meme Pepe the Frog, in reptilian conspiracy theories, chaos magic, and the delirious theories of QAnon. We might call this “esoteric Trumpism” or, more precisely, “psychedelic Trumpism.” If the Democrats and their transgressive practices have become the Imaginary — frozen in totalitarian prescriptive power structures — then psychoanalytic critique from the Symbolic has naturally focused on the Republicans. Of course, not all Republicans, but the most liberated, “unhinged,” and delirious factions.

Here we encounter an interesting picture. The power held by the Democrats and the neoconservative wing of the Republicans places them as carriers of the Imaginary, that is, the globalist order. However, progressivism as a synonym for the Symbolic clashes with the totalitarianism entrenched in the Democrats, who fiercely cling to power. Even though the Democrats’ narrative depicts the Imaginary as Trump — the tough, feminine Melania, the Republicans, and old liberal America — in the larger system, it is the Democrats who now embody the Imaginary, desperately holding onto power. Kamala Harris is an agent of a rigid, organized system — what is called the Deep State. She is not an organism but a mechanism, a link in the vertical chain of authority. This is how the Imaginary order manifests itself. Appeals to the Symbolic only slightly obscure its true nature.

The only critique capable of identifying and destabilizing this frozen order comes from “psychedelic Trumpism,” which increasingly assumes the function of the Symbolic.

This analysis helps explain the selection of J. D. Vance as a potential vice president or even Trump’s successor in his ideological battle against the liberal establishment. Vance no longer represents the Imaginary but the purely Symbolic. He openly aligns himself with the extravagant, psychedelic field of post-liberal right-wing thought, especially the chaotic Alt-Right universe. Figures like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), and the brilliant French philosopher René Girard (who wrote on sacred violence) are atypical for classic right-wing Republicans. They cannot be used to illustrate the Imaginary (which the progressives supposedly aim to dismantle in the name of the Symbolic). In Vance, the Democrats’ psychoanalytic strategy fails, as Vance himself embodies the atypical right-wing Symbolic pole. It is even possible that he understands this and is familiar with Lacan. Thus, choosing Vance as vice president is a key move in Trump’s campaign. Once again, the magic of chaos — represented by the Borromean rings and their connection to dreamlike psychedelia — comes into play, but this time more systematically.

Strictly following Lacan, the Trump-Vance alliance seems harmonious and full of promise. Trump himself offers the Imaginary that appeals to the right-wing electorate. But this is complemented by right-wing postmodernism, social critique, and the liberating delirium embodied in “psychedelic Trumpism” and, by extension, Vance. The rational, daytime mode of governance, inevitable in any administration and transparent in Trump’s case, is balanced by the nighttime mode of liberated (right-wing) dreaming.

Transgression from the Right

From this application of Lacan’s model to the upcoming American elections, we can draw several more conclusions.

First, it brilliantly explains the totalitarian nature of modern globalist liberalism, which has become impossible to ignore. The attempt to replace the Imaginary with the Symbolic is doomed to failure but will only generate a new Imaginary — one that is more alienated, aggressive, intolerant, and violent. Hence, we see the phenomenon of “liberal fascism.”

On the other hand, the emergence of “psychedelic Trumpism” makes sense, representing not a marginal anomaly but a perfectly reasonable and even pragmatic strategy. If every kind of deviation and pathology is permitted, but Tradition is forbidden, then the will to life and the dynamic of the Symbolic will fuel tremendous energy into normal gender and species-based orientations. Tradition, then, acquires a revolutionary character. When Tradition is outlawed, this alone makes it an object of passionate desire. Progressives freeze socio-political and cultural life, alienating it. Thus, the new counterculture becomes non-conformism from the right.

Who Will Win the Election?

It is difficult to say, but the aggressive, totalitarian elite, betting on minority groups, might fail. By removing the forbidden status from deviations, they automatically make legally suppressed normalcy the center of attraction. If, in the order of the Imaginary, normalcy resides in the “past” — what existed before the progressives and liberals — then in the order of the Symbolic, normalcy resides in the “future.” Normalcy is the suppressed and outlawed today that, like a forbidden fruit, longs to triumph tomorrow. Usually, conservatives struggle with envisioning the future. But “psychedelic Trumpism” offers a unique response, shifting the unconscious and even transgressive practices to the right, thereby capturing the future’s territory.

Be Cautious of Nothingness

Lastly, we have not yet touched on the subject of the Real — one of the Borromean rings.

Here, progressives attempt a complex maneuver: by normalizing the Symbolic, they aim to remove the tension between it and the Real. They hope to bring nothingness (death) under their control rather than excluding it. Likely, this is the goal of AI, migration to cyberspace, and the Singularity, where the identity of the machine with itself will no longer create traumatic flows that awaken the unconscious (the Symbolic). If the Symbolic (as progressives naively believe) has already replaced the Imaginary, then the problem of confrontation with the Real has been solved. To conquer death and the terror it brings, life itself must be eliminated. Hence the focus on transhumanism and mechanical immortality, a theme explored in speculative realism.

The Democratic Party’s ontological project inevitably leads to the elimination of humanity.

These elections in the United States will determine the fate of humanity — whether it will be or not. A Trump victory will maintain the balance between the three Borromean rings. A Harris victory may mean their irreversible collapse.

And here, finally, it must be said that for Lacan, the Borromean rings and their three orders are what constitute the human being.

TDS, and other Post-Modern Symptoms of the Erika Effect!

When Charisma squares off against Celebrity on an Equal Playing Field, Charisma wins Every Time!  Celebrity's only advantage lies in the ability to Finance the Events and Media Environment (New Media: Ellison's Oracle/ or Thiel's Palantir) which bestow Celebrity and Connect Celebrities with their Public (Censorship thru Donor Financing, not Forbidding).  TPUSA and Erika Kirk represent the "Celebrity" approach.  Charlie Kirk was pure "Charisma".

The Linked Post (above) is entitled "What TDS Prevents UniParty Supporters from Seeing..."  Why can't they see?  The criterion  for understanding Truth is "Will to Power" (Nietzsche).  And they therefore have no "desire" to recognize the Truth.  It doesn't "empower" them (unless they also understand that they can censor through financing instead of forbidding outright (through Law)

from Google AI:

Nietzsche primarily develops the concept of will to power as the criterion for truth and value in his posthumously published notebooks, compiled as The Will to Power (specifically notes from the 1880s) and in Beyond Good and Evil. He argues that "truth" is not objective but a, perspectival tool used by the will to power to master reality. 

Key, specific locations and contexts include: 

The Will to Power (Notebooks/WP): In notes often cited as WP 688 and WP 1067, Nietzsche argues that the will to power is the fundamental drive, asserting that "This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!". In this context, truth is interpreted as a type of error that allows a particular species of life to survive and dominate, making the "truth" dependent on its power-enhancing value. 

Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), Section 13: Nietzsche challenges philosophers by asking why they desire truth rather than untruth, implying that the "will to truth" is actually a manifestation of the will to power. 

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Nietzsche explicitly connects the concept to all life, stating, "Wherever I found a living thing, I found there the will to power" (Part 2, "Self-Overcoming"). 

Essentially, Nietzsche argues that what is "true" is simply what enhances a particular will to power.

How Much Power Do Other Countries Think That America Has?

"The History of the Intelligence State" -- an essential 40 min lecture on the origin story of The Blob. Thanks to @Hillsdale for a beautiful event. Timestamps in tweet below pic.twitter.com/GTRrgPpLqt

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024

Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."

2. "Never go outside the experience of your people."

3. "Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy."

7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

8. "Keep the pressure on."

9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."

11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."

Is the fact that Trump is currently both exposing AND burning down the NED and USAID an indication the Peter Thiel's Palantir no longer requires the "old Intel apparatus"... or an Alinskyan bluff intended to buy time by convincing our enemies that we have more power to control world events than they had previously imagined, while we await an AI breakthrough or technological singularity event?

And can America  return to the pursuit of George Kennan's original 'mad' vision before his "whole of society" doctrine was implemented and turned the people of the world into "mere rags" of US manipulation?

Isaiah Berlin 2/13/51 letter to George Kennan (excerpt):

When armies were slaughtered by other armies in the course of history, we might be appalled by the carnage and turn pacifist; but our horror acquires a new dimension when we read about children, or for that matter grown-up men and women, whom the Nazis loaded into trains bound for gas chambers, telling them that they were going to emigrate to some happier place. Why does this deception, which may in fact have diminished the anguish of the victims, arouse a really unutterable kind of horror in us? The spectacle, I mean, of the victims marching off in happy ignorance of their doom amid the smiling faces of their tormentors? Surely because we cannot bear the thought of human beings denied their last rights--of knowing the truth, of acting with at least the freedom of the condemned, of being able to face their destruction with fear or courage, according to their temperaments, but at least as human beings, armed with the power of choice. It is the denial to human beings of the possibility of choice, the getting them into one's power, the twisting them this way and that in accordance with one's whim, the destruction of their personality by creating unequal moral terms between the gaoler and the victim, whereby the gaoler knows what he is doing, and why, and plays upon the victim, i.e. treats him as a mere object and not as a subject whose motives, views, intentions have any intrinsic weight whatever--by destroying the very possibility of his having views, notions of a relevant kind--that is what cannot be borne at all.

What else horrifies us about unscrupulousness if not this? Why is the thought of someone twisting someone else round his little finger, even in innocent contexts, so beastly (for instance in Dostoevsky's Dyadyushkin son [Uncle's Dream, a novella published in 1859], which the Moscow Arts Theatre used to act so well and so cruelly)? After all, the victim may prefer to have no responsibility; the slave be happier in his slavery. Certainly we do not detest this kind of destruction of liberty merely because it denies liberty of action; there is a far greater horror in depriving men of the very capacity for freedom--that is the real sin against the Holy Ghost. Everything else is bearable so long as the possibility of goodness--of a state of affairs in which men freely choose, disinterestedly seek ends for their own sake--is still open, however much suffering they may have gone through. Their souls are destroyed only when this is no longer possible. It is when the desire for choice is broken that what men do thereby loses all moral value, and actions lose all significance (in terms of good and evil) in their own eyes; that is what is meant by destroying people's self-respect, by turning them, in your words, into rags. This is the ultimate horror because in such a situation there are no worthwhile motives left: nothing is worth doing or avoiding, the reasons for existing are gone. We admire Don Quixote, if we do, because he has a pure-hearted desire to do what is good, and he is pathetic because he is mad and his attempts are ludicrous.