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From scapegoats to city hall: how New York Muslims built power and shaped Zohran Mamdani
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 October 2025, 10:00
Life was never the same for New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, with every resident coping with the trauma and devastation of that day.But for Muslim New Yorkers there was an added burden: the suspicion and sometimes physical harm now lurking around every corner.Vigilante violence against Arabs and Muslims exploded across the city and around the country. In what feels very much like a precursor to today’s ruthless ICE raids, mass arrests swept up Muslims on flimsy immigration pretexts, with many of them being held under extremely abusive conditions. The contemporary national security state was born atop the vestiges of Muslim civil rights.Twenty-four years later, the situation in New York appears completely different. The country’s largest city is now poised to elect its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won the Democratic slot on the ranked-choice primary earlier this summer. What accounts for this profound change?The practically unstoppable rise of the man with a smile as wide as the West Side Highway can certainly be explained by his oratorical gifts and political skills. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, has described him as a “once-in-a-generation leader”. But Mamdani’s success is also part of a larger story of how young Muslim New Yorkers have been organizing themselves after the dangerous situations they were in after 9/11.Spurred by the necessity to counter a rising tide of Islamophobia, young Muslim New Yorkers have spent years developing political power in the city, building local political institutions, and leaning into a different kind of politics, one that embraces identity yet also moves beyond its sometimes shallow appeal. That movement has been growing quietly and steadily for years. Mamdani is now its best and most accomplished expression.View image in fullscreenAs the Muslims of New York have been organizing, their numbers have also been steadily growing, making it impossible to ignore Muslim voters for anyone who wants to run for office and win. The city probably has about 1 million Muslims (there are no official numbers tallied for religious groups), which is about the same number as Jews in New York City.The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates more than 350,000 Muslim New Yorkers of that million are registered to vote, though only about 12% voted in the 2021 mayoral election. That is also now changing. Muslim and south Asian voter turnout in the mayoral primary this summer was up 60% compared with the 2021 primary, according to the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. And despite what rival Andrew Cuomo claims when he stated last month that “the Muslim community are not socialists,” it is clear that Muslims are a growing political force pushing the Democratic party to the left on fundamental issues.“People are looking at Zohran as being a very unique candidate, and he is,” said Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. “But his prominence in this election is built on the work of Muslims over the past decades, in the post-9/11 era.”That work began immediately after the 2001 attacks. Within days, the government began using federal immigration law to arrest anyone it suspected of having a connection with terrorism, which often meant little more than being an immigrant and having a Muslim name. Hundreds of people were detained, and the justice department refused to release their names, leaving families scrambling to look for those who had in effect been disappeared into jails around the country.Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), a community-based social justice organization of working-class south Asians and Indian Caribbeans, recalled the moment. His organization, he said, was doing “the work of finding people in jails, organizing them on the inside, organizing their families on the outside, and warning community leaders about working with the FBI and the NYPD”.View image in fullscreenMost efforts in the years after 2001 were often reacting to crises rather than building alternatives. And the crises were many. The Bush administration began requiring all adult males from two dozen Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. The FBI interviewed Muslim community members as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Spies and informants infiltrated mosques and community organizations across the city and around the nation. The Obama administration’s Terrorism Screening Database ballooned to more than 680,000 names. Through the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA was revealed to by spying on ordinary Americans, including Muslim Americans. Working with a CIA officer, the NYPD engaged in a years-long campaign of warrantless surveillance of Muslims Americans across the city.Muslim New Yorkers had little influence in city politics during those years. The only Muslim elected to city council was Robert Jackson, who won his seat in 2001 and who subsequently became a trailblazer for politically minded young Muslims. (In 2018, Jackson became the first Muslim elected to the state senate.)But Jackson’s victory was unique at the time, and by the time the 2013 mayoral election season rolled around, Muslim New Yorkers were still searching for more structural solutions to battle government repression targeted at them and fight for political recognition.The Muslim Democratic Club of New York was formed that year, and the club co-sponsored its first mayoral forum, where all the major Democratic candidates, including Bill de Blasio and Christine Quinn, showed up. Each candidate was asked about incorporating Muslim holidays into the public school calendar (a campaign some Muslim New Yorkers began in 2006, when a state regents exam was held on the same day as a major Muslim holiday) and if they believed warrantless surveillance of Muslims was unconstitutional. Only two of the seven candidates found the spying unconstitutional.Mamdani’s rise to the top of New York city politics began with the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. Ali Najmi, its co-founder, is a lawyer who specializes in election law. In 2015, he attempted a run for city council. Najmi’s childhood friend, the rapper Heems, had endorsed him in the race, which was enough to inspire Heems fan Mamdani to trek to Queens to volunteer for Najmi’s campaign. In 2017, the Palestinian American Lutheran pastor (and Democratic Socialists of America member) Khader El-Yateem ran for a seat on the council. Mamdani, who joined the DSA around this time, was his canvassing director. And in 2018, Mamdani managed the left-leaning political journalist Ross Barkan’s run for state senate.Najmi, El-Yateem and Barkan all lost their races, but as Najmi told the newspaper amNewYork: “Zohran’s ascension is the culmination of a bunch of people losing, myself included. And you learn lessons, you learn as you go. There’s institutional knowledge that was passed.” In 2021, Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to city council.Mamdani served on the board of the Muslim Democratic Club between 2018 and 2019, shortly before winning his own seat as a state assembly member in 2020. Soon after assuming office, he joined a 15-day hunger strike organized by the Taxi Workers Alliance to win debt relief for taxi drivers who, out of an exploitative system, owed enormous amounts of money on the medallions which authorized them to drive their cabs.View image in fullscreen“In a city where a large number of taxi drivers are south Asian, there’s a natural affinity between Zohran and taxi drivers,” said Fahd Ahmed of Drum. “And Zohran used that to cultivate a relationship with the Taxi Workers Alliance. Similarly, with us. After he was elected to the state assembly, he reached out to us to say: ‘I know you all have historically worked on [the issue] of [warrantless] surveillance of Muslim communities. What can my office do?’”It would be a mistake, however, to assume Mamdani bases his politics on identity over values. “Other candidates have been south Asian or Muslim, but they’ve not succeeded in capturing the community’s vote the way that Zohran has,” Ahmed said. “He instead uses identity as a way to get to people’s issues.”Asad Dandia, a community organizer and friend of Mamdani’s, echoed Ahmed. “Zohran and I both came of age when 9/11, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and NYPD surveillance of Muslims all occurred before we turned 20,” Dandia wrote in an email. “We were only a year or two out of college when Trump won the 2016 election. These are the events that shaped us.”View image in fullscreenDandia has personal experience with the NYPD spying on his life. When he was 19 – years – old, Dandia co-founded a charity in New York, Muslims Giving Back, to aid poor families throughout the city. The charity was soon infiltrated by a paid informer for the NYPD, Shamiur Rahman, who later admitted that he had been recruited by the police to spy on Muslims, for which he was cleared of a drug arrest and paid first $1,000 a month and then $1,500 a month. He was to “create and capture” opportunities for Muslims to say suspicious things about terrorism and report them to the police. He never saw anyone he “spied on do anything illegal, not even littering”, he later wrote.In retrospect, Dandia said, he should have seen this coming. Rahman’s behavior was odd. He would arrive late to meetings and photograph the sign-on sheet. He would take pictures of food being placed in cars to get license plates in the photos. He began posing strange questions, asking if killing innocent people is justified. Dandia eventually joined and won a lawsuit against the NYPD, which in 2017 established a new office of civilian oversight over the police force. He began thinking of the connections between surveillance capitalism and Islamophobia and, in 2020, he co-founded a Muslim caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America.“We could not hide the fact [from the world] that we are Muslim,” Dandia said, referring to himself and Mamdani. “Yet we do not anchor our politics strictly on these identitarian terms. Adequate housing is a ‘Muslim issue’, public transit is a ‘Muslim issue’, and universal childcare is a ‘Muslim issue’. Zohran fights for these issues because they advance the common good for all of us, Muslim or not, and align with both democratic socialist principles and Islamic values.”Campaign fundraising statistics bear out how Mamdani’s affordability message is resonating beyond the confines of the Muslim community. According to Open Secrets, a non-partisan group tracking money in US politics, the Mamdani campaign has raised $16.8m, with about 90% of Mamdani’s donors contributing less than $250. The average contribution is $98. By contrast, the average contribution to the Cuomo campaign is $615, yet Cuomo has raised only $12.6m. Cuomo-supporting Super Pacs, on the other hand, have received 11 times as much money – including millions from Airbnb ($10m), former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3m) and DoorDash ($1.8m) – than the Super Pacs that support Mamdani or oppose Cuomo.But the most powerful political action committee of the season is arguably the city of 87,000 volunteers for Mamdani who are knocking on voter doors across the five boroughs talking about building an affordable New York City with the Muslim democratic socialist nominee.View image in fullscreenOver the last decade, there has been a rising number of Muslim American politicians who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America or lean very deliberately left: Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Omar Fateh, Zaynab Mohamed, Shahana Hanif, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed. It is not the first time a religious minority in the US played an outsized role in the left. For decades, the American Communist party was made up of a disproportionate number of Jewish Americans.“The left has been one of the only places that has been generally open, receptive and supportive of Muslim communities since 9/11,” said Ahmed. “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and then in the anti-war movement around Iraq and Afghanistan, there was nobody else standing with us against our repression. Many of us grew into our organizing at that nexus.”Waquad is a member of the DSA and president of the Muslim Democratic Club. For Muslims, she explained, the DSA is “an alternative to the mainstream Democratic party”. The general election “showed how disenfranchised a lot of voters felt. Muslim voters felt pretty much ignored.“The feeling that I had submitting my ballot for the general election was one of sadness. There [wasn’t] much of a choice in what we could vote for,” said Waquad.“Whereas when I submitted my ballot for the primary for the mayoral race, I cried,” she said. “I’m not just voting for somebody who is Muslim. I’m voting for somebody that I truly believe is the best candidate right now for the city and its people.” More
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Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 October 2025, 15:24
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Peter Thiel famously isn’t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.Immanentizing the KatechonTo be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admissions rates, scholarly output and Nobel prize recognition would seem to contradict it. To Thiel, even then, Jerusalem was definitely not build’d here, among these dark Satanic diploma mills.In September, Falter in Austria published a long profile about the theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who is one of those academics Thiel used as beta testers on his antichrist material. Palaver says it makes sense to him that Thiel is seeking out academics: “It’s really difficult in his environment: who tells him the truth to his face?”There is something deeply funny imagining a rapt audience, cowed by Thiel’s legend and wealth, following the billionaire into the autodidact’s private cosmos, in lectures whose bullet points were certainly more robust at the start of lecture one than at the close of lecture three. Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations. You picture the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Piece, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies “the legionnaires of the antichrist”, such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate. With enemies like these, who needs friends?But such is Thiel’s odd relationship to academia. For someone who dislikes universities and researchers, he has a hard time staying away. Thiel, who received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, was deeply impressed with the thinking of Girard, his Stanford professor. He has spent decades promoting Girard’s “mimetic theory”, including attributing his famous investment in Facebook to “betting on mimesis”. His current “Whore of Babylon” tour started with a presentation at a Paris conference devoted to Girard’s work.Thiel clearly admired Girard not just for his arguments but for his style of argumentation. These lectures don’t so much feel inspired by Girard’s ideas. They feel like his attempt to do Girard.Mimetic style over substanceGirard’s books were breathtaking in their range. They were deeply eclectic, but managed to be a mad dash through the western canon. The connections the philosopher made could seem to come out of left field, but at times the absurd swerves were held together by the sheer force of his erudition. Most importantly, Girard was always having a conversation all his own: his work could look like theology, but it wasn’t ultimately that religious; his work could look like philosophy, but wasn’t really in dialogue with academic philosophy. In San Francisco, Thiel appeared to be cosplaying this kind of performance.One of the things he replicates is the airtight and airless insularity of Girard’s thought. Thiel seems to take on board objections only to then barrel ahead with his initial instinct. Palaver is quoted in Falter as saying that he is “no longer the professor, and he’s no longer the graduate student”. It’s a funny remark because watching Thiel take feedback makes him seem exactly like a graduate student about to crash out of his comprehensive exam.In his telling, Thiel is already a part of an intellectual community. He loves telling his audience what he “always” says, he refers to standard answers and even a “spiel” that he gives. He seems a little bored with himself. Based at least on the recording, the actual audience in San Francisco seemed puzzled by Thiel’s disquisitions.Like his inspiration Girard, Thiel is prone to speaking in absolutes that, in order to make any sense at all, have to be quite a bit less than absolute. “In all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems,” he said in his second lecture. Big if true, as they say.What is Thiel actually arguing? He suggests that we live in an age obsessed with apocalyptic thinking (keep that “we” in mind, it’ll become important later). “It’s AI, of course, it’s climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war,” “maybe fertility collapse”, he says.His overall point is that the current fixation on the apocalypse gets it wrong in two different directions: we’re too apocalyptic and “not apocalyptic enough”. Not apocalyptic enough because we tend to think of the various plausibly forecast ends of days as mutually exclusive: either climate change will get us, or nuclear war. The antichrist is Thiel’s attempt to think about the end of the world holistically.But we’re also too apocalyptic: in each lecture, Thiel comes back to the idea that “the Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop.” Or, as he puts it in the second lecture, “the Antichrist might present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon”, meaning that withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. This lecture is more or less a gloss on Carl Schmitt’s assertion in Nomos of the Earth, that the Katechon was what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman empire. The doubleness of Thiel’s apocalypse – that what halts the apocalypse might in fact bring about the apocalypse – allows the billionaire to tilt boldly at any number of big questions: empire, Christianity, progress, and Silicon Valley’s dominance. Each of these, to Thiel, is ambiguous, might stymie or accelerate Armageddon.Warring with windmills, confusion and contradictionSo who or what is the antichrist? Thiel is admirably and uncharacteristically specific on this matter in a scattershot sort of way. The antichrist wants to erect a one-world state, which largely seems to mean any kind of global regulatory regime. Longtime Thiel watchers will recall his preoccupation with sovereignty and seasteading. The antichrist appears to be any force opposing that. The antichrist also is people who are against AI, especially those who seek to regulate it. If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown. It does lead, however, to the insight that the antichrist is “someone like Greta”, as in Thunberg, the climate activist, but “not Andreessen”, as in Marc, the venture capitalist.“I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because, you know, the antichrist is popular.” Respect where it’s due: that is a good line.But let me return to Thiel’s list of possible apocalypses: artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing. Thiel is probably not wrong to say that people are pretty worried about the climate crisis. But the examples of AI, bioweapons and fertility collapse in particular suggest that Thiel has confused the world’s worries for those of a very recherché set of aging tech entrepreneurs he hobnobs with. And the antichrist, too, seems very Silicon Valley-coded. This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.Thiel thinks that by both increasing knowledge and particularizing knowledge, modernity has made thinking of the totality more difficult. He has observed there is “this sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge”. We do more science than ever but without true insight. In the “post-modern multiversity”, “science continues to grow like a colony of rabbits”, but since the inputs, in terms of people, degrees awarded, investment, etc, keep increasing, “you have to suspect that there are diminishing returns,” he says.So for those playing along at home: Thiel is both a “classical liberal” who just thinks in terms of inputs and outputs and wants the university to be as efficient as it can possibly be. And he is a fire-breathing theologian who thinks that the university is failing at its job of considering the totality, venerating at the altar of hyperspecialization and postmodern deathworks. He is the libertarian offended at researchers “stealing money” and “not doing anything”, he says in one lecture. And he is the campus critic he was during his Stanford days, the one who refers to former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as “the DEI person”.How any of that mishmash fits together isn’t as important as why it goes together: it serves as a justification for Thiel’s own autodidactism.What does it all mean? Anything?It’s important to note that he holds himself to a vastly different standard than just about anyone else: he thinks just raising some questions about the antichrist might be useful in its own right – which may be true for all I know. But then he wants to quantify what everyone else contributes to knowledge in a way I can only describe as Doge-like. It would be difficult to count the monetary value of theorizing about Armageddon, as he is doing while pontificating about the cost-ineffective academic from the other side of his mouth. The rules appear to be different for Thiel, at least in his own mind. And such is Thiel’s odd relationship to power.One is reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen’s character comes across a platoon and asks who’s in charge here. “Ain’t you?” Ain’t you running the world, Peter? If it isn’t you, who is?If we want to look at Thiel as something he can’t seem to see himself as – as, in the end, a pretty standard specimen of homo siliconvalliensis – then what is interesting in these lectures is not the amateurish breadth and ambition. It’s the narrowness. Thiel’s vision of the antichrist may not be holistic enough. In the first lecture, where Thiel proposes that the catastrophes we see in the various end-of-days narratives in the Bible are threatening to play out literally in our day. He says we shouldn’t think of “the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible … in a mystical way”, but almost as “rational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not changed or improved”.But that is surely not what Revelation is about: the end of days in the Bible is in there because it attests to a view of the cosmos, its alpha and omega, its entire meaningful constitution. Otherwise, it is just a bunch of trumpets and locusts and people who give suspiciously good speeches. In the end, it isn’t clear how meaningful these four lectures make the antichrist or indeed the apocalypse.It’s not even clear how they make meaning. During the Q&A after the second lecture, someone in the audience asked Thiel whether he was moving away from his erstwhile teacher Girard – which is the central question, though perhaps not for the reason the questioner thinks. It gets at what Thiel is aiming at with these lectures. Perhaps some of their surface strangeness is explained by the fact that Thiel is ultimately engaging in some kind of Girardian play with doubles, mirrors and imitation. Not least among those would be the fact that the description he gives of the antichrist might also apply to one Peter Thiel.So maybe getting stuck on the details means we are missing the hidden, esoteric meaning within? But in that case, what’s the point of these lectures? As he warns in his third lecture, “excessive esotericism means you don’t really think coherently enough about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly”. It feels like Thiel is keeping both options open. He gets to tap dance between “I said what I said” and “you don’t understand what I’m doing here”. He seems to want to stand apart from his own immense power – apart from his own positions, apart from his own attempts to make himself understood – in something like bemused contemplation.body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: #23b4a9;–news-core-05: #494949;–news-core-06: #cca36e}@media (prefers-color-scheme: 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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 October 2025, 15:24
Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.The meandering gospel of PeterThiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attender who gave them on the condition of anonymity.When reached for comment, Thiel’s spokesperson, Jeremiah Hall, did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist.The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”.View image in fullscreenA trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”What do Thiel’s lectures say?The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors.He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.
What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen?Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.
There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?
Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.
Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.
Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.
As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:
They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.
When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’
During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:
I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.
Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.
A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.
Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.
My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.
During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.
Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.
Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.
In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.
Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.
One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:
He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.
Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist:
The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.
However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”.
I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills.
Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation:
If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people …
This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’
And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’
And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’
When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:
I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?
Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.
Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.
Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.
By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:
Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.
He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.
Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.
In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:
One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.
What does he say about Trump and politics?Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.
At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.
One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.
I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.
I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.
Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:
In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.
Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.
There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.
In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, antisemitic theologians who suggested that the antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov.Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:
Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.
Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.
Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.
At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:
By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.
During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate:
I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes.
In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.
“The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.
Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor.
I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, … someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last precedent where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky.
And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.
But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different.
Why is he fixated on stagnation?Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says.During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.
If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.
The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.
In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:
This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.
In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal:
I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad.
References to pop culture and literatureThiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here:
The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.
In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”.He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:
The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.
Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.
Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.Do Thiel’s arguments make sense?In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be:
There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power? More
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‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 September 2025, 15:00
Christian nationalists in the US are positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement, one that has grown in popularity and whose rise was intertwined with Kirk’s own political ascent.After Kirk’s killing, his widow, Erika Kirk, wrote on social media that the “world is evil”, but God “so good.” The “sound of this widow weeping [echoes] throughout this world like a battle cry,” she said. “They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”While Erika Kirk’s private sorrow is no doubt very real, her public remarks are telling, said Jeff Sharlet, the author of several books on Christian nationalism and the far right. “That’s holy war, that’s accelerationism, and it’s incredibly powerful,” he said, particularly in the emotional context of a grieving widow.Sharlet noted that although Kirk was best known for his non-religious political organizing, conservative eulogizing has overwhelmingly emphasized that he was a man of faith. Some people have gone further, and characterized Kirk’s death as martyrdom for conservative Christian values.“We know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” Sean Feucht, a pastor who worked with Kirk and is known for his Christian nationalist views, said in an emotional video on social media. “The devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up … We need to be more bold.”Matt Tuggle, a megachurch pastor, posted a video of Kirk’s death with the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”The rise of Trump-era Christian nationalismKirk’s meteoric career as a pundit and far-right activist was in some ways a microcosm of the rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism. Kirk started as a publicly secular young Republican in the Alex P Keaton mold but came to embrace a strident Christian culture war, speaking of a “spiritual battle … coming to the West” that would pit “Christendom” and “the American way of life” against leftism and Islam.Similarly, Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded in 2012, started as a pro-free market organization downstream of the late-2000s Tea Party movement against “big government”, but by the time of his death he had leaned into ideas associated with the Christian right. The organization may have done so because it spotted an opportunity.Shortly before Donald Trump won his first election to the presidency, the mainstream Christian right was demoralized and open to more extreme and anti-democratic ideas, noted Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christianity and the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.View image in fullscreenChristian nationalism is the belief that the US is and should be an explicitly Christian nation. Experts tend to view the ideology as existing on a continuum that ranges from relatively mainstream cultural conservatism to extreme religious supremacy. Defining it is difficult because Christian nationalism is less an organized movement than a tendency or way of thinking, Taylor and others said.For many years, the Christian right was dominated by groups such as the Moral Majority, which emphasized the idea of organizing Christian voters to democratically achieve conservative outcomes, as well as efforts to train and elevate conservative jurists to influence the federal judiciary.Yet two electoral victories by Barack Obama and the US supreme court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, left Christian conservatives feeling that all their efforts were for nothing. Because of changing demographics and the ongoing secularization of society, the number of Americans who identified as Christian was also dropping – meaning that majoritarian democracy was no longer a reliable political tool for the Christian right.“The early summer of 2015 … was a low point for them,” Taylor said. “There was this sense of, ‘What we’re doing is not working. We need someone strong. We need a fighter.’ And it just so happened that Trump kind of appeared on the scene at that moment, and I think that was, in part, the rocket fuel behind his appeal to evangelicals; he said: ‘I will speak for you. I will defend you. I will give you more power.’”Despite occasional misgivings, the Christian right soon enthusiastically aligned with Trump. But when he came into office, Trump did something new: he surrounded himself with Christian advisers from outside the traditional leadership of the Christian right. Led by Trump’s longtime adviser, the pastor Paula White-Cain, his new consiglieres tended to be megachurch preachers who had big followings in their spheres of influence but were viewed as B-list – or C-list, or D-list – figures by the conservative Christian political establishment.White-Cain “was an independent, charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor and was on her third marriage, a female preacher, and preached the prosperity gospel,” Taylor said – in other words, someone with many markers “that people in the conventional evangelical world would have either labeled heresy or just low-brow”.‘He drew the church into Maga’After this changing of the guard, there were “some pretty wild and extreme theologies” that gained access to the Trump administration and conservative centers of power, Taylor said, including a far-right movement, popular in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, that is sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR advocates for modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.The NAR leaders who “attached themselves to Trump and the Maga movement very early on,” Taylor said, “had a vision of social change, of societal conquest, that was far more aggressive than some of the old frameworks of the religious right.” That vision was exciting and politically potent to people including Kirk, who adopted theories and language associated with the NAR.The NAR has a distinctly minoritarian and anti-democratic valence. Rather than a Christian public lobbying to make government and society reflect its values, NAR ideas argue for Christians to take positions of power and push their values from the top down. A key NAR concept is something called the “seven mountains mandate” – the idea that “spiritual war” will not succeed until Christians have scaled and conquered seven summits of influence in public life, commonly identified as religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment, and business.“The seven mountains, as an ideology, is deeply ambivalent about democracy,” Taylor said. “If democracy works, and gets you to positions of power, great, but if not, well, God’s will is still for Christians to take over the seven mountains, and they need to do it by whatever means they can.”The concept of the seven mountains has existed since the 1970s but was popularized in the 2000s, according to Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career expressed reluctance at politicizing his religious views. That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the NAR, including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches.View image in fullscreenKirk’s own evolution was striking: he went from saying, in 2018, that it was important that Christians respect the separation of church and state to denying that any such separation existed in the US constitution.Kirk never used the exact phrase “seven-mountain mandate”, Boedy said, but at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 Kirk praised Trump by saying: “Finally, we have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence,” which was one of the most prominent mentions of the concept in the conservative mainstream. Kirk also attended conferences organized around the theme of the seven-mountain mandate.“‘Seven mountains’ is a kind of weird, wonky theology,” Sharlet said; Kirk “normalizes it and mainstreams it and smooths it out”.Kirk understood “the political and religious baggage that comes with the idea of Christian dominionism, of theocracy,” Boedy believes, and was trying to gently popularize Christian nationalist ideas while avoiding their more negative connotations.The “Appeal to Heaven” flags seen at the January 6 riot and elsewhere are often an NAR symbol. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has ties to NAR circles and flies an Appeal to Heaven flag at his congressional office. Ché Ahn, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a charismatic preacher, is an adherent of NAR and “seven-mountain” ideas.Kirk was an activist more interested in uniting conservative Christians than representing any one faction or denomination. Yet the NAR might be understood as one of three main currents of hardline contemporary Christian nationalism in the US, Taylor said. The other two streams are radical traditionalist Catholics and a certain aggressively “masculine” reformed Protestantism embodied in Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense.In contrast to the Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, which tend to be very white and male in their leadership and intellectually influential but not widely popular, the NAR has roots in a rapidly growing international charismatic movement that is multi-ethnic, open to women in leadership, and viscerally exciting to rank-and-file churchgoers.Yet the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism are also attractive to broad swathes of conservative Americans, including those who are not actively religious, Sharlet noted. Although the Christian nationalism of popular imagination is a strict, Handmaid’s Tale-style piety, he said he often encounters Maga conservatives who are intensely dedicated to Christian nationalist ideas despite the fact that they do not attend church.“It wasn’t so much that [Kirk] joined the church as he drew the church into Maga,” Sharlet feels. “And I think he made a kind of influencer-lifestyle Christian nationalism that was appealing, that you could adopt [as a] kind of performance without having to change your life too much.”“No civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,” Kirk declared not long before he died. But he also gestured at a broader and more potent theme: that “a civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out.” More
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Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife
by Evelyn Reynolds 13 September 2025, 12:00
The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.” More
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Zohran Mamdani proudly embodies what I often feel alienated in: my own identity as an unapologetic Muslim and progressive | Sarah Malik
by Evelyn Reynolds 12 September 2025, 15:00
He eats biryani with his hands, references Bollywood, is an unapologetic Muslim and a progressive. He has also done something politically risky for a mainstream candidate: been vocal for Palestine. Zohran Mamdani proudly embodies what I have often felt alienated in: my own positioning as a Muslim progressive – one that has been treated as an oxymoron at best, or suspect at worst.From Australia, watching him feels like having my own personality projected large. I feel both an elation at his reception and win as Democratic candidate for mayor of New York as well as exhaustion at the double bind and suspicion brown Muslims inevitably experience in the public sphere. It’s echoed here in Australia with the treatment of the first hijab‑wearing senator Fatima Payman and deputy Greens leader Mehreen Faruqi.The outright dog-whistling is expected, but as Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times points out, it is the elite liberal panic which is most interesting, with critics scrambling to find a dent in Mamdani’s affable armour by zooming in on everything from code-switching accents to college applications.Mamdani should be a darling of the left and liberal press. But what the veiled racism echoes, in a more subtle way, is the same anxiety I feel writ large and explicit in the rise of Trumpism and its echoes in Australia. Demographic changes are irrevocably transforming power in western democracies. As we, the sons and daughters of migrants from formerly colonised nations, seek power in media and politics and transform the societies we have grown up in, we are still seen as threatening, and not just to the far right. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best readsWe are seen as having “broken the rules of multiculturalism” for disagreeing, and too often the very people championing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) feel more comfortable offering a (conditional) hand than power sharing and equality.This idea of being too Muslim for progressives or too progressive for Muslim communities and somehow an impostor in both those worlds, which bar entry because of what they perceive as parts of you that are incompatible, is an experience I’ve often felt. But Mamdani’s ability to sit proudly in that, a respect for his heritage, a confidence in his self, and a vision for the future, is a real decolonial practice. Because so many of us are also sitting in the overlap of political Venn diagrams and showing others it is possible too.We are the natural evolution of the third culture kid identity, and a product of a pluralistic, multicultural west. At home with pop culture and the internet, online and intercultural dating. We are comfortable with difference and tradition, loving our Naanis, and often existing in the pointy, working-class ends of society, where surveillance and systemic violence as well as lack of access to affordable housing, education, safety and justice have forced a political savvy and urgency to mobilise and challenge systems that impact us the most.For a long time, the price of entry to these worlds of power was to capitulate to the model of the grateful migrant. The insanity of our current times has perhaps created an opportunity, an appetite, for the kind of boldness, cultural confidence and agility Mamdani embodies. As the fear-mongering and Islamophobia reach saturation point and doesn’t seem to work, especially in the age of social media, a new appetite emerges – for unapologetic voices who refuse to be silenced.Just like Mamdani, who visited a Shia mosque in the Muslim holy month of Muharram and represented for Pride, stepping out of the pigeonholes and private spaces I’m allowed to exist in has made me feel more confident and mentally healthy and helped me find the right people in my life. It’s not for me to explain myself, but to exist fully and allow society to absorb and become something new with that.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a city like New York, which prides itself at least symbolically on venerating the immigrant, the rebel and the outsider, Mamdani has a natural home. I hope in my own way I can try to do this too in Sydney more consciously. I belong to the beach and also to Eid, in swimmers and shalwar kameez. I’m a feminist who prays, and happy to wave both Pride flag and Palestinian keffiyeh.I want this confidence to translate into corporate, arts and media environments, where having this multiplicity is not seen as incongruous but increasingly reflective of the world we live in.This kind of confidence in forcing change in the face of our current catastrophes, both political and ecological, by refusing to budge and by being intentionally and fully our uncensored selves feels like the start of an answer. We’re here. Get used to it. More
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Pete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote
by Evelyn Reynolds 9 August 2025, 16:47
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.“I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” Wilson said.Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”Later in the video, Wilson says he does not believe women should hold leadership positions in the military or be able to fill high-profile combat roles.A statement from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Saturday said Hegseth “is a proud member of a church affiliated with” the CREC.“The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr Wilson’s writings and teachings.”Hegseth and his family were in attendance at the Wilson church’s inaugural service in Washington in July, according to CNN.Doug Pagitt, a pastor and the executive director of the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good, told the Associated Press that the ideas in the video are views that “small fringes of Christians keep” and said it was “very disturbing” that Hegseth would amplify them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHegseth’s repost on Thursday came as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to promote Christian nationalism. The push follows Donald Trump’s renewed alliance with the Christian right in his second presidential term, whose moves have included an executive order creating a federal taskforce to investigate what he calls “anti-Christian bias” in government agencies.The president also created a White House faith office in February, saying it would make recommendations to him “regarding changes to policies, programs and practices” and consult with outside experts in “combating antisemitic, anti-Christian and additional forms of anti-religious bias”.In May, Hegseth invited his personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, to the Pentagon to lead the first of several Christian prayer services that the defense secretary has held inside the government building during working hours. Defense department employees and service members said they received invitations to the event in their government emails.The US constitution’s first amendment prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. But the US courts’ administrative office says the precise definition of “establishment” in that context historically has been unclear, especially with the constitution also protecting all citizens’ right to practice their religion generally as they please. More
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Joe Rogan anoints a new progressive star – can James Talarico triumph in Texas?
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 July 2025, 13:00
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In late May, four of Texas’s top Democrats convened on Zoom to strategize about the 2026 election. The upcoming Republican primary battle for Senate pits incumbent senator John Cornyn against the state’s more right-leaning attorney general, Ken Paxton, and is expected to be bruising – greasing the skids for a potential Democratic pickup. With governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor also in play, the question the liberal quartet aimed to answer was whether they might divvy up these contests, thereby avoiding a contentious primary of their own.On the call were three fixtures of Lone Star Democratic politics: Beto O’Rourke, Colin Allred and Representative Joaquin Castro. Less well-known was the fourth man, a 36-year-old member of the state’s house of representatives from Austin’s district 50 named James Talarico. A former middle-school language arts teacher and aspiring Presbyterian minister with the earnest demeanor and yearbook-ready countenance of a young Ron Howard, Talarico had begun his political career in 2018, flipping a swing district to become the youngest member of the house. A good bit greener than his colleagues, Talarico seemed an unlikely aspirant for the Senate run.Then along came Joe Rogan.The world’s most influential podcast host had learned of Talarico from comedian Brian Simpson, who had been awestruck by a viral clip of the state senator taking a Republican colleague to task for her “idolatrous” bill forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments. A producer reached out, and within a few weeks the virtually unknown official was stepping into Rogan’s Austin studio to offer his gloss on the radical teachings of Jesus. If the conversation was friendly – about two hours in, Rogan was practically begging Talarico to run for president – the reviews from Rogan’s right-leaning, MMA-loving fanboys were less so. Many took particular issue with Talarico’s reading of the Bible as arguably pro-choice or at least ambivalent about abortion.Even so, Daniel had entered the lion’s den and held his own. Within hours of the show’s airing, Politico was enthusing that “Joe Rogan’s Latest Guest Might Turn Texas Blue” and Talarico’s beaming choirboy mug was front and center on the Drudge Report.“I learned this when I flipped the Trump district at the beginning of my career,” Talarico said. “It’s almost like asking someone on a date, or any relationship in your life – you have to put effort into it. If we’re not going to make the effort to show up in these places where people are, then we can’t be surprised when they don’t make the effort to get off the couch and vote for us.”The week marked a notable turnaround for a politician who just a few years ago hit what he calls his political “rock bottom”. It was the fall of 2021, a year that had begun with the January 6 insurrection and a catastrophic winter storm that killed hundreds of Texans. Meanwhile, “Maga” was ascendant in the Lone Star state. Officials rammed through the nation’s most unforgiving abortion ban, legalized permitless carry and implemented a new civics curriculum Talarico describes as a “historical whitewash”.Then came an aggressive attempt to curtail voting rights that led him and dozens of Democratic lawmakers to flee the state in an attempt to deny the legislature a quorum. After 38 days, Talarico was among a handful who saw the writing on the wall and returned to Austin. As he explained in a lengthy op-ed, Texas Democrats held a dwindling stack of cards, and Congress would need to address the problem at the federal level. (The House delivered, but the bill failed in the Senate due to opposition from senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.)Despite Talarico’s hopes that ending the standoff might preserve a modicum of bipartisanship, it was not to be. In October, the legislature voted to redraw the state’s congressional districts – an attempt to dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters and “kill me off politically”, he said. “Walking on to that floor and realizing that my [Republican] colleagues weren’t looking me in the eye, I felt like I had lost hope, not just in my colleagues and the institution, but in whether democracy was even possible in such polarized and divided times. It was my lowest point in public service so far.”Overcoming an urge to pack it in, he opted to fight. As it happened, a seat in solid-blue Austin, where he’d grown up, was open. Talarico moved home and won handily. (Now, Texan Republicans are contemplating another redistricting as a way to further dilute the Democratic vote. “Clearly their gerrymandering didn’t hold from five years ago, and so now they’re having to get back in there and do some touch-ups and fortifying,” Talarico said.)Following his crisis of political faith, he made another critical life decision, enrolling in the seminary with the goal of becoming a minister. “Jesus gave us these two commandments, to love God and love your neighbor,” he explained, noting that he considers his political career a vehicle for doing the latter. Now he understood: the two injunctions went hand in hand. Getting in touch with God, “or whatever you consider to be the ground of your being”, is what Talarico says makes love of neighbor sustainable. “Whether that’s in public service, as a teacher or a nurse or a firefighter or a police officer, or whether it’s with activism or volunteering or just being a good person in your community, it is difficult and sometimes exhausting work, and that’s why we have to be connected to something deeper.”An outspoken progressive Christian is something of a unicorn in today’s political environment – a sign not only of the secularism that has characterized the Democratic party since the Reagan years but of the ever-increasing ties between the far right and the evangelical movement. Perhaps nowhere is this alliance more pronounced than in Texas, where the last legislative session saw a flurry of bills that would, among other things, allow prayer in public schools, fund parochial schools with taxpayer money and outlaw the provision of litter boxes for students – an actual bill based on a debunked rightwing hoax. The latter proposal stalled after Talarico’s polite if methodical humiliation of the bill’s author became one of his many viral TikToks; the others, including the Ten Commandments bill, became law.Talarico has done more than simply oppose what he considers to be bad legislation. He regularly calls out fossil fuel barons Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who backed the legislative crusade. “They basically own every Republican member of the state senate,” he said, noting that they are by far the state’s biggest political donors. “They own a majority of Republicans in the state house. They own every statewide elected official. And they run a massive network of thinktanks and advocacy organizations and media outlets. So their empire has really taken over state government. And they have a pretty extreme theocratic vision for for the state and the country.” Asked whether a Handmaid’s Tale-style dystopia seemed possible, he said, “We’re a lot closer than people think.”Talarico defines the effort to wed government with biblical ideology as Christian nationalism, “the worship of power – social power, economic power, political power, in the name of Christ”, as he put it in a 2023 guest sermon. Accusing adherents of turning Jesus “into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist,” he declared it “incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it”. Posted to YouTube, the sermon has since garnered 1m views.The question now is not merely whether Talarico can translate that kind of social media buzz into votes but whether he wants to. He expects to obtain his master’s in divinity next year, and he often speaks of his desire to one day take over the ministry at his home church, St Andrew’s Presbyterian.But a slight detour to the US Senate seems increasingly possible – an indication of his growing popularity and ambition as well as a notable vibe shift on the left. A recent poll found that 62% of Democrats wanted their party’s leadership replaced. And a strong contingent has shown a hunger for candidates, such as Talarico, who are willing to lean into progressive values without apology (he has, for example, mounted a forceful defense of gender-affirming care for trans kids).While Talarico makes a strong case for the undercurrent of wealth redistribution inherent in Jesus’ teachings, he doesn’t call himself a socialist – certainly not in Texas. Still it’s not hard to see parallels between his meteoric rise and that of New York City’s socialist mayoral hopeful, Zohran Mamdani, another young state legislator whose online savvy, bold progressivism and evident sincerity have endeared him to liberal voters. (In 2019, Talarico walked across his 25-mile district – nearly double the distance of Mamdani’s recent Manhattan hike.)For Talarico, the key to winning over the electorate is authenticity. “Voters can sniff out that consultant-driven messaging,” he said. “The poll-tested stuff is just not going to cut it.”Moreover, voters are spoiling for a fight. One quality they appreciated in Trump, he said, was the aggression he’d shown on behalf of his vision, however malevolent. Democrats, he said, need to bring that kind of energy to the fight for a better world. And while Jesus Christ was famous for his humility and pacifism, Talarico noted, he was also an uncompromising radical who could tap into a combative side when needed.“If we are doing our best to mimic Jesus, being kind and humble and meek are all part of it,” he said. “But when the powerful are abusing people, we have to stand in the way, and that requires courage and bravery, and speaking truth to power.”In late June, Talarico appeared at a town hall in San Antonio alongside Castro and O’Rourke, a show of unity before what may well turn into a heated primary race. Befitting his status as the youngest and least seasoned politician on the stage, he spoke first. But as Talarico recalled the story of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple, when he ejected the money-changers and merchants from the Lord’s house, he didn’t sound like a man inclined meekly to wait his turn to run for higher office. “To those who love democracy, to those who love our neighbors,” he proclaimed, “it’s time to start flipping tables.”As for the Senate race, Talarico is praying on it. He’ll make a decision this summer, he said. More

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