Meet the Theo­Bros. They’re theocrats, but they don’t live in the dark ages. On the con­trary, some of them are among the biggest tech entre­pre­neurs on the plan­et. Titans of indus­try. Oth­ers are indeed reac­tionary preach­ers with a desire to turn back the clock at least a cen­tu­ry or two. It’s an umbrel­la the­ol­o­gy. Although less a the­ol­o­gy and more a polit­i­cal move­ment built more around a wor­ship, and under­stand­ing of, pow­er more than any real val­ue sys­tem. And it’s a move­ment that is only acquir­ing more and more of pow­er thanks to this net­work’s close work­ing rela­tion­ship with the cur­rent White House. It’s ‘the Dark Ages meets tech­no-fan­ta­sist future’ walk­ing the halls of pow­er today.

The Theo­Bros aren’t real­ly a new net­work. More of a alliance of already well estab­lished inter­ests con­geal­ing around a shared vision for the future. A vision cen­tered around the promise of cre­at­ing break­away soci­eties. More specif­i­cal­ly, break­away author­i­tar­i­an-led soci­eties, where Sil­i­con Val­ley fas­cists and theocrats are free to run things as they see fit. It could be seen as the next step in the ‘Seast­eading’ ini­tia­tive Peter Thiel launched rough­ly two decades ago, or the relat­ed ‘Char­ter Cities’ ini­tia­tives. The move­ment even has an unof­fi­cial pub­li­ca­tion pro­mot­ing its vision, omi­nous­ly named the Amer­i­can Reformer. A bet­ter, or at least more hon­est, name would have been Amer­i­can Cap­ture.

But this author­i­tar­i­an vision of the future could also be seen as an exten­sion of the same theo­crat­ic agen­da that has been assault­ing what’s left of the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions ever since the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. As we’ve seen, much of the plan­ning and orga­niz­ing that led up to Jan­u­ary 6 was the work of the pow­er­ful theo­crat­ic Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP), a orga­ni­za­tion­al behind-the-scenes lynch­pin of mod­ern Repub­li­can Par­ty pol­i­tics since its ori­gin in the ear­ly years of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, where indus­tri­als, politi­cians, and reac­tionary fun­da­men­tal­ist preach­ers for­mal­ly pooled their resources. And it was the CNP that went on to car­ry out much of the schem­ing that ulti­mate­ly man­i­fest­ed in Project 2025. Of course, as we also saw, much of the inspi­ra­tion for Project 2025 came from the mus­ings of none oth­er than Cur­tis “Men­cius Mold­bug” Yarvin, the ide­o­log­i­cal archi­tect of the ‘Dark Enlight­en­ment’ rejec­tion of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy that has been ani­mat­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley’s fas­cists for decades now. And the same CNP behind the ongo­ing efforts to trig­ger an Arti­cle V con­sti­tu­tion­al con­ven­tion and rewrite the con­sti­tu­tion to their lik­ing. This isn’t a new anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic alliance between Sil­i­con Val­ley fas­cists and the theo­crat­ic oli­garchs that have long dri­ven the Repub­li­can Par­ty. But it is new­ly invig­o­rat­ed, hav­ing effec­tive­ly turned the Trump White House into its con­tem­po­rary head­quar­ters.

Chris Buskirk and the Rockbridge Network

There are some new fig­ures in this net­work cur­rent­ly ris­ing to promi­nence in realm of tech­no-fas­cist Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Or rel­a­tive­ly new. Notably, Chris Buskirk, an Amer­i­can Reformer board mem­ber and founder of 1789 Cap­i­tal, an overt­ly pro-MAGA ven­ture cap­i­tal firm formed in 2022 that includes Don­ald Trump Jr as a part­ner. As we might expect The fir­m’s assets under man­age­ment have explod­ed over the last year, from $200 mil­lion to $3.5 bil­lion, as the com­pa­ny has exploit­ed its exten­sive polit­i­cal con­nec­tions while rid­ing the AI-dri­ven tech bub­ble. As one co-founder recent­ly describe, the firm views itself as the new Car­lyle Group, the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm long asso­ci­at­ed with its close ties to the Bush dynasty.

But Buskirk’s for­ay into the ‘Theo­Bros’ world did­n’t start with 1789 Cap­i­tal. In 2019, Buskirk formed the Rock­bridge Net­work, which could be seen as a kind of ‘Theo­Bros’ elite club, where MAGA-ori­ent­ed donors came togeth­er to for­mu­late a joint agen­da. The open­ing meet­ing for the group was con­vened by JD Vance and Peter Thiel. Oth­er atten­dees includ­ed Rebekah Mer­cer, Tuck­er Carl­son and econ­o­mist Oren Cass. As we’ve seen, Rebekah and her father Robert Mer­cer, played key roles in orga­niz­ing the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca social media data min­ing scan­dal that helped fuel the 2016 Trump cam­paign’s inter­net-dri­ven polit­i­cal cam­paign designed to flip per­suad­able vot­ers. And then there’s Oren Cass, whose New Com­pass orga­ni­za­tion has been work­ing to cre­ate a kind ‘New Right’ pol­i­cy frame­work that can appeal to appeal to labor while doing away with labor unions. And, of course, Tuck­er Carl­son has now pub­licly dis­tanced him­self from MAGA to the point he’s posi­tioned him­self as an ‘estab­lish­ment crit­ic’ who is now in a lead­ing posi­tion to run as the same kind of ‘estab­lish­ment out­sider’ role in 2028 that Don­ald Trump played in 2016.

As we should expect, Rock­bridge has as one of its core mis­sions the same kind of mis­sion that drove the Trump 2016 cam­paign and the relat­ed Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca efforts: using new tech­nolo­gies to iden­ti­fy poten­tial vot­ers and bring them into the MAGA fold. It’s an elite ‘grass­roots’ oper­a­tion. But don’t mis­take this focus on iden­ti­fy­ing new vot­ers as some sort of gen­uine pop­u­la­tion. Quite the oppo­site. Part of what makes the Rock­bridge Net­work stand out is how open they are with their elit­ist ambi­tions. Lit­er­al­ly aris­to­crat­ic ambi­tions that they aren’t scared to share with reporters. The net­work even has a term for this form of grass­roots elit­ism: aristopop­ulism. The idea is cre­at­ing a bridge between wealthy cap­i­tal­ists and the work­ing-class vot­ers they intend to rep­re­sent. Some sort of elite class is unavoid­able, accord­ing to Buskirk. It will either be an extrac­tive oli­garchy or a pro­duc­tive aris­to­crat­ic elite. Those are the choic­es. Buskirk goes on to argue that the term “aris­toc­ra­cy” is mis­un­der­stood and should­n’t be seen as a pejo­ra­tive because “a prop­er elite that takes care of the coun­try and gov­erns it well so that every­one pros­pers.” In turn, unleash­ing full-throat­ed cap­i­tal­ism is also on the Rock­brige agen­da. That’s the sales pitch. They’re aspir­ing aris­to­crats. But they’re also ‘for the peo­ple’ and should­n’t be held back in any way. And with one of its core mem­bers, JD Vance, now serv­ing as the Vice Pres­i­dent and seen as one of the top fig­ures to lead a post-Trump MAGA move­ment, it’s hard to argue the Rock­bridge Net­work has made enor­mous progress since its start in 2019. No one is hold­ing them back.

But, again, it’s not as if the peo­ple behind the Rock­bridge Net­work sud­den­ly got togeth­er in 2019. Vir­tu­al­ly all were already part of the MAGA-sphere by that point. Buskirk, for exam­ple, got his start in polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing while pur­su­ing a mas­ters degree in polit­i­cal sci­ence and intern­ing at the Clare­mont Insti­tute. As we’ve seen, the Clare­mont Insti­tute is one of the increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal­ized con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tion that was deeply involved with the orga­niz­ing that led up to Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, which even includ­ed hold­ing the “79 Days Report” sim­u­la­tion dur­ing the final weeks of the 2020 elec­tion that cen­tered around a sce­nario where Don­ald Trump won re-elec­tion but large num­bers of left­ists opposed the out­come with large protests. The deploy­ment of Trump aligned-mili­tias to quell the demon­stra­tions and appre­hend left­ist lead­ers was part of the imag­ined response. Buskirk end­ed up leav­ing his polit­i­cal sci­ence stud­ies and the Clare­mont Insti­tute to go on to start an insur­ance firm, but he was­n’t done with pol­i­tics. In July of 2016, Buskirk found­ed an online pub­li­ca­tion, Amer­i­can Great­ness, ded­i­cat­ed to a rein­vig­o­rat­ed artic­u­la­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples. As we learned back in 2022, when Peter Thiel decid­ed to make big invest­ments in cre­at­ing an alter­na­tive con­ser­v­a­tive media ecosys­tem, that includ­ed an invest­ment in Amer­i­can Great­ness, which has put out the kind of con­tent one might expect from VDARE or some oth­er white nation­al­ist pub­li­ca­tion. It was Thiel who then put Buskirk in touch with Vance. By 2019, Thiel and Vance con­vened the first Rock­bridge Net­work meet­ing. Chris Buskirk has expe­ri­enced a fair­ly rapid rise in the world of MAGA-donor orga­niz­ing. A Thiel-spon­sored rapid rise. Much like JD Vance. Which is why it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that while Chris Buskirk may be the face of the Rock­bridge Net­work, we are real­ly look­ing at anoth­er Thiel-backed enti­ty. And with the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion arguably oper­at­ing itself as anoth­er Thiel-backed enti­ty, it’s not hard to see why the Rock­bridge Net­work and 1789 Cap­i­tal are set to accrue a lot more wealth and influ­ence in com­ing years. The kind of wealth and influ­ence that will long out­live Don­ald Trump.

New Founding’s Highland Rim Project: A Theocrat Template

Now, as we’ve seen, Peter Thiel has a rather bizarre the­ol­o­gy of his own that is appar­ent­ly dri­ving his ener­gies. A the­ol­o­gy root­ed in the world­view of Carl Schmitt, the lead­ing legal the­o­reti­cian for the Nazi Par­ty. A the­o­log­i­cal world­view that saw the rise of com­mu­nism as lit­er­al­ly an Antichrist force that must be opposed at all cost, at risk of trig­ger­ing the Bib­li­cal End Times if human­i­ty fails in this mis­sion. It was a the­ol­o­gy that saw the Nazis as a ‘kat­e­chon’ — a per­son for force hold­ing the Antichrist at bay — and as a jus­ti­fi­able bul­wark against the Antichrist force of com­mu­nism. Thiel has, in turn, updat­ed Schmit­t’s the­ol­o­gy, replac­ing com­mu­nism with anti-tech­nol­o­gy cau­tion as the new Antichrist, with the ulti­mate per­il being a world com­mu­ni­ty unit­ed by lead­er­ship that cau­tious­ly approach­es tech­nol­o­gy. As Thiel sees it, fight­ing the Antichrist entails cre­at­ing a world that is dis­unit­ed by design. A mul­ti-polar world, where each region has its own cul­ture, race, lan­guage, and nation­al her­itage. Only through an embrace of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, which is real­ly a euphemism for remov­ing all restric­tions on the abil­i­ty of tech oli­garchs like Peter Thiel to reshape soci­ety to their lik­ing, will the Antichrist be held at bay and the End Times pre­vent­ed at this point in human his­to­ry. In that sense, the Rock­bridge Net­work is a very direct man­i­fes­ta­tion of Peter Thiel’s kat­e­chon. Grant­i­ng tech oli­garchs like Thiel, or the Mer­cers, or Elon Musk as much wealth and pow­er as pos­si­ble over soci­ety is the kat­e­chon. That’s the insane the­ol­o­gy Peter Thiel has been pub­licly shar­ing at pub­lic events in event years, where peo­ple amaz­ing­ly pay mon­ey just to hear him talk about the fight­ing against reg­u­la­tions restrain­ing tech oli­garchs like him­self is what we need to do to pre­vent the End Times in this age.

Giv­en the direct role Peter Thiel played in the rise of Chris Buskirk as a MAGA mega-donor orga­niz­er and Thiel’s spon­sor­ship of the cre­ation of the Rock­bridge Net­work, it might be tempt­ing to assume the ‘Theo’ in ‘Theo­bros’ is a ref­er­ence to Thiel’s gross­ly self-serv­ing the­ol­o­gy. And while Thiel’s the­ol­o­gy is cer­tain­ly part of this sto­ry, there’s a dif­fer­ent insane the­olo­gian behind what could be con­sid­ered the shared ‘Theo­bros’ the­ol­o­gy: Pas­tor Doug Wil­son. Yes, the same Doug Wil­son who co-authored South­ern Slav­ery, As It Was in 1996 with League of the South co-founder Steven J. Wilkins, where the pair argue the Con­fed­er­a­cy was clos­er to a Bib­li­cal­ly sanc­tioned soci­ety than any oth­er soci­ety ever and that slav­ery was actu­al­ly har­mo­nious. And the same Doug Wil­son who found­ed the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Reformed Evan­gel­i­cal Church­es (CREC) which is root­ed in a Domin­ion­ist the­ol­o­gy that calls for the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist takeover of gov­ern­ment and soci­ety. That’s the the­o­log­i­cal net­work defin­ing the ‘Theo’ in ‘Theo­bros’. It’s Doug Wilson’s Domin­ion­ist net­work.

And, in par­tic­u­lar, it’s the net­work of CREC-aligned forces behind the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist project to take over Jack­son Coun­ty, Ten­nessee, and turn the coun­ty into a kind of Domin­ion­ist mod­el com­mu­ni­ty. Yes, it turns out the ‘Theo­Bros’ net­work is deeply involved in the ven­ture capital/financing side of that project along with the Domin­ion­ist the­ol­o­gy. As we’ve seen, the Jack­son Coun­ty project, dubbed the “High­land Rim Project”, has busi­ness com­po­nent and a political/social com­po­nent. The land needs to be acquired and the peo­ple to fill that land need to be con­vinced to move there. To that end, the prop­er­ty devel­op­ment firm New Found­ing is lead­ing the efforts to buy up large tracts of land intend­ed for project while CREC-aligned Chris­t­ian pod­cast­ers Andrew Isker and C. Jay Engel play the role of entic­ing fel­low Domin­ion­ist-mind­ed Chris­tians to pack up and relo­cate to the area. The idea is to have enough Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist move to Jack­son Coun­ty to secure com­plete polit­i­cal con­trol and, in turn, begin turn­ing the coun­ty into the kind of place where only “Her­itage Amer­i­cans” reside and are wel­come, with “Her­itage Amer­i­cans” being defined as those of Euro­pean ances­try who had ances­tors in the US dur­ing the Civ­il War along with African Amer­i­cans who can prove they are descen­dants of slaves. Non-Her­itage Amer­i­cans will have to leave. It’s a vision for the future of Amer­i­ca that excludes a large num­ber of present day Amer­i­cans.

New Found­ing’s founder, Nate Fis­ch­er, hap­pens to also be the founder of the Theo­Bros pub­li­ca­tion Amer­i­can Reformer, where New Found­ing man­ag­ing part­ner, Josh Abbotoy, works as the exec­u­tive direc­tor. Fis­ch­er and Abbotoy are both affil­i­at­ed with the Clare­mont Insti­tute. As we’ve seen, Fis­ch­er is deeply inter­twined with Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism through anoth­er project: the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR), which includes Fis­ch­er as a mem­ber along with Abbotoy. The orga­ni­za­tion was found­ed in in 2020 by sham­poo mil­lion­aire Charles Hay­wood, one of the par­tic­i­pants in the “79 Days Report” and some­one who was long seen as a ris­ing right-wing media per­son­al­i­ty, until it was revealed that he was the per­son behind an online per­sona who long called for an ‘Amer­i­can Cae­sar’. Of course, Hay­wood’s SACR isn’t just a men’s only orga­ni­za­tion. The group is ded­i­cat­ed to a kind of post-demo­c­ra­t­ic Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist author­i­tar­i­an rebirth of the US and active­ly pre­pares for the col­lapse of the US gov­ern­ment and a peri­od of war­lordism. SACR’s board includes Ryan P. Williams, pres­i­dent of the Clare­mont Insti­tute. And one of guid­ing philoso­phers behind SACR was Cur­tis ‘Men­cius Mold­bug’ Yarvin, a fig­ure who pro­vid­ed much of the ide­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings for Project 2025. So when we see two of the top fig­ures in New Found­ing on SACR’s mem­ber­ship ros­ter, it’s a reminder that the net­work behind the High­land Rim Project extends well beyond the New Found­ing investors and High­land Rim res­i­dents.

In fact, High­land Rim is a tem­plate for the Theo­Bros’s much larg­er ambi­tions. Which brings us to anoth­er major fac­tion in the Theo­Bros net­work: the “Net­work State” enthu­si­ast. What’s a “Net­work State”? Well, imag­ine if the High­land Rim Project of Jack­son Coun­ty Ten­nessee was just the first of many such projects that pop up around the US, or even the world. If those com­mu­ni­ties — theo­crat­ic eth­nona­tion­al­ist author­i­tar­i­an com­mu­ni­ties in this case — unite around, say, a com­mon cur­ren­cy or shared set of rules, that col­lec­tive of com­mu­ni­ties could com­prise a de fac­to ‘state’ that the rest of the world will be forced to rec­og­nize. It’s like a con­cept that is arguably a more ambi­tious and aggres­sive ver­sion of the ‘seasted­ding’ move­ment Peter Thiel start­ed financ­ing decades ago ded­i­cat­ed to cre­at­ing sov­er­eign float­ing com­mu­ni­ties on the seas. With the Net­work State, those float­ing com­mu­ni­ties might be unit­ed under some sort of shared ide­ol­o­gy or cur­ren­cy. And they might not be float­ing. They might be com­mu­ni­ties that are for­mal­ly already part of a nation but have decid­ed to break away and oper­ate by a set of rules of their own mak­ing. High­land Rim is the begin­ning of a “par­al­lel econ­o­my”, as Nate Fis­ch­er has described it. That’s a big part of the Theo­Bro agen­da. Cre­at­ing a net­work of break­away com­mu­ni­ties, oper­at­ing under a shared post-demo­c­ra­t­ic vision. “We are at the end of a civ­i­liza­tion­al cycle,” Fis­ch­er wrote in a New Found­ing man­i­festo. “Com­ing years will bring tur­moil and per­il, but also great opportunity—perhaps the first in near­ly a century—to forge new mod­els and insti­tu­tions that can shape the direc­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.” As Jason Blaza­kis, a pro­fes­sor at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege who focus­es on extrem­ism, not­ed, it’s the kind of lan­guage that is fun­da­men­tal­ly accel­er­a­tionist in nature. “It’s implied that there needs to be change, there needs to be poten­tial­ly a blood let­ting, with­out say­ing that there needs to be vio­lence,” Blaza­kis observed. “Because there’s no oth­er way to change the fab­ric of the coun­try in the way that they would like, with­out hav­ing some lev­el of vio­lence or upheaval.”

Intrigu­ing­ly, New Found­ing even report­ed­ly has a tal­ent net­work of 3,000 indi­vid­u­als ded­i­cat­ed to the group’s mis­sion and even put for­ward dozens of them for roles in Project 2025. As we saw, back when Project 2025 was still oper­at­ing under the “Sched­ule F” label, it was the Amer­i­can Moment out­fit that was tasked with gen­er­at­ing lists of thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als who could fill gov­ern­ment slots after the planned fed­er­al purge. New Found­ing is appar­ent­ly play­ing a sim­i­lar role. Which should­n’t at all be a sur­prise. Both Project 2025 and the larg­er Theo­Bros move­ment are prod­ucts of the pow­er­ful theo­crat­ic CNP, the same group that brought us the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion.

Silicon Valley’s Fascist-Friendly ‘Network State’ Vision

But it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that the vision laid out in New Found­ing’s man­i­festo isn’t an exclu­sive­ly Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist vision. It’s a shared vision of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists and Sil­i­con Val­ley tech oli­garchs. A shared agen­da exem­pli­fied by one very notable New Found­ing investor: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal giant Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z). An increas­ing­ly vocal crit­ic of ‘wok­ism’ in recent years, Andreessen has report­ed­ly invest­ed a six-fig­ure sum in New Found­ing as a lim­it­ed part­ner, which may be a pal­try sum rel­a­tive to Andreessen’s vast wealth, but it’s nonethe­less a sig­nif­i­cant stamp of approval that serves as an invi­ta­tion for oth­er like-mind­ed investors who share that vision of a ‘anti-woke’ par­al­lel econ­o­my. Once a Demo­c­rat, Andreessen now rails against the Amer­i­can cul­ture that he crit­i­cizes as hav­ing evolved into “a left-wing reac­tionary scream”: “rad­i­cal­ized rage that’s sort of fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-cap­i­tal­ist… fun­da­men­tal­ly communist…and then fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-tech­no­log­i­cal.” In fact, Andreessen pub­lished a 5,000 word ‘Tech­no-Opti­mist’ man­i­festo of his own back in 2023 that includ­ed dec­la­ra­tions like how “tech­nol­o­gy must be a vio­lent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” It’s not hard to see why Marc Andreessen would be will­ing to endorse New Found­ing ‘Theo­Bros’ mis­sion with a six-fig­ure invest­ment. Forcibly reshap­ing soci­ety into the tech­nol­o­gy-wor­ship­ping cul­ture is a big part of the Theo­Bros agen­da.

Oth­er notable fig­ures who appear to be on board with New Found­ing’s agen­da include Andreessen Horowitz part­ner Kather­ine Boyle, who has appeared on New Found­ing’s pod­cast, along with Trae Stephens, the chair­man of AI defense con­trac­tor Anduril and a part­ner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Erik Prince, the founder of Black­wa­ter with his own exten­sive back­ground in Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist pol­i­tics, has also been a guest. As we saw back in Feb­ru­ary of 2025, the open­ing weeks of Trump’s sec­ond term, Prince was lob­by­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion for the cre­ation of a pri­vate army that would be dep­u­tized with immi­gra­tion enforce­ment pow­ers. Includ­ing pow­ers to round up immi­grants and send them to pri­vate­ly run “pro­cess­ing camps” where detainees would be run through an expe­dit­ed legal process of deter­min­ing whether or not they are eli­gi­ble for depor­ta­tion. As Prince argued, the only way Trump could pos­si­bly deport 12 mil­lion immi­grants with­in the first two years of his term would be for a mas­sive pri­vate expan­sion of immi­gra­tion enforce­ment author­i­ty. Steve Ban­non endorsed the plan. He lat­er came back with a pro­pos­al for El Sal­vador to declare parts of the coun­try “US soil” and then have the US gov­ern­ment pay Prince’s com­pa­ny to run a super-jail there where deport­ed immi­grants can be housed. Prince’s calls for a pri­vate army hired by the gov­ern­ment for immi­gra­tion enforce­ment is a reminder that the pri­vate army (or war­lord mili­tia) that groups like SACR are cre­at­ing will have plen­ty of use as mus­cle to back up an author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment if that oppor­tu­ni­ty aris­es. The Theo­Bros agen­da is dual-use author­i­tar­i­an orga­niz­ing.

But as we’re going to see, Marc Andreessen isn’t the tech titan who has tak­en the lead in the devel­op­ment of the Theo­Bros phi­los­o­phy. That prize goes to Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, a for­mer gen­er­al part­ner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Net­work State: How to Start a New Coun­try. “Bal­a­ji has the high­est rate of out­put per minute of good new ideas of any­body I’ve ever met,” write Andreessen in a blurb for the 2022 book, which lays out a plan for how tech plu­to­crats can effec­tive­ly escape the con­straints of democ­ra­cy by estab­lish­ing new sov­er­eign states. Srini­vasan even host­ed the first Net­work State con­fer­ence in 2023. While Srini­vasan has gone on to serve as chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Coin­base, it’s the Net­work State con­cept that has real­ly become the focus of Srini­vasan’s life at this point. Fit­ting­ly, he’s could be see as a pro­tege of Peter Thiel, hav­ing once billed his course at Stan­ford as the “spir­i­tu­al sequel” to Peter Thiel’s own course on busi­ness start ups.

And as we should expect for a Thiel pro­tege, Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan isn’t new to author­i­tar­i­an schem­ing or the dis­man­tling of soci­ety’s insti­tu­tions. In 2013, Srini­vasan declared the Unit­ed States to be the “Microsoft of nations”, old and out­dat­ed. He instead called for Sil­i­con Val­ley to secede from the US and cre­ate a new nation. Srini­vasan defend­ed him­self at the time with state­ments like, “I’m not a lib­er­tar­i­an, don’t believe in seces­sion, am a reg­is­tered Demo­c­rat, etcetera etcetera...This is real­ly a talk that is more about emi­gra­tion and exit.” In 2014, TechCrunch pub­lished its high­ly pre­scient piece, “Mouth­breath­ing Machi­avel­lis Dream of a Sil­i­con Reich” all about the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Cur­tis Yarv­in’s pro-monar­chist phi­los­o­phy among Sil­i­con Val­ley elites, nam­ing Thiel and Srini­vasan as exam­ples. A few years lat­er, Peter Thiel rec­om­mend­ed Srini­vasan as the head of the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion dur­ing the first Trump admin­is­tra­tion, a rec­om­men­da­tion endorsed by Steve Ban­non. But he was ulti­mate­ly passed over for the slot when it was deter­mined that he pri­or sug­ges­tions that the FDA should­n’t exist would be too polit­i­cal­ly prob­lem­at­ic. “For every thalido­mide,” Srini­vasan once tweet­ed, “many dead from slowed approvals.” Yes, Srini­vasan went from “don’t wor­ry, I’m real­ly a Demo­c­rat...” deflec­tions in 2013 to being turned down for the head of Trump’s FDA because he was too rad­i­cal just 4 years lat­er. It’s quite an arc. And he’s clear­ly only grow­ing more rad­i­cal.

In 2019, the com­pa­ny Prax­is was formed with the back­ing of Srini­vasan along with oth­er ‘usu­al sus­pects’ in the area of tech oli­garch fas­cism like Palan­tir co-found Joe Lons­dale, and Geoff Lewis, a for­mer part­ner at Thiel’s Founders Fund. Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alame­da Research was also involved. The com­pa­ny, lead by a proud­ly open fas­cist named Dry­den Brown, is ded­i­cat­ed to the idea of buy­ing up a large tract of land some­where in the world and build­ing an autonomous char­ter city. Brown is said to believe that monar­chy is supe­ri­or to democ­ra­cy and envi­sions a form of ide­al gov­er­nance that is some­thing between an all-pow­er­ful ruler and Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch. Brown is said to encour­age employ­ees to read the works of Julius Evol­va. Those employ­ees include Mike Mahoney, an ‘Alt Right’ fig­ure who has been described as “a cen­tral fig­ure among some online white pow­er accel­er­a­tionist com­mu­ni­ties”. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Cur­tis Yarvin has attend­ed Prax­is events, which makes this a good time to recall how Srini­vasan’s 2013 call for Sil­i­con Val­ley to secede from the US was an echo of Cur­tis Yarv­in’s pro­pos­al that all coun­tries should be small city states that com­pete for cit­i­zens, which is sup­posed to be the kind of new form of democ­ra­cy. You get to choose with author­i­tar­i­an city state you want to live in (if you’re lucky). And if choos­ing your fas­cist city-state sounds like an appeal­ing alter­na­tive com­pared to the dys­func­tion of today’s exam­ples, this is a good time to recall that these philoso­phies that bring us con­cepts like Dry­den’ Brown’s hybrid between an all-pow­er­ful ruler and Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch are the same ones that bring us philoso­phies like Hans-Her­mann Hoppe’s ver­sion of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that not only includes monar­chies but the right of peo­ple to ‘vol­un­tar­i­ly’ become slaves. Just because you’re allowed to enter a fas­cist city-state does­n’t mean you’ll be allowed to leave. The own­ers will have all the ‘free­dom’ they need to decide what to do with you.

And if you’re sus­pect­ing that maybe Srini­vasan is actu­al­ly some sort of tech-opti­mist reformer who envi­sions a tech-dri­ven ‘democ­ra­cy 2.0’ ver­sion of self-gov­er­nance, wait until you hear about his vision for San Fran­cis­co: Srini­vasan imag­ines a San Fran­cis­co city state where cit­i­zens are cat­e­go­rized based on polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy, with a polit­i­cal space cen­tered around feal­ty to the tech oli­garchy. The favored cit­i­zens, the Grays, will wear gray shirts in pub­lic to self-iden­ti­fy as mem­bers of the tribe, shirts adorned with some­thing like bit­coin or Elon Musk. Their feal­ty will be to the rul­ing tech oli­garch class. Reds (Repub­li­cans) will be anoth­er ‘tribe’, along with the Blues (lib­er­als), who will serve as some sort of qua­si-offi­cial under­class. The dis­sent denizens of Srini­vasan’s utopia. Grays will host police balls. But it won’t be a one-way street of back-scratch­ing. Police will pledge feal­ty to the grays in exchange for extra food and jobs. Food and jobs. That’s the vision. Sub­sis­tence con­trol of the police force, which is a key detail to keep in mind when we are talk­ing about a plan for cre­at­ing a glob­al net­work of lib­er­tar­i­an dic­ta­tor­ship city-states. Police who join the grays will even be giv­en spe­cial uni­forms designed by their tech lords. “A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” mused Srini­vasan in an inter­view he gave a month before head­ing the first 2023 Net­work State con­fer­ence. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Fly­ing Spaghet­ti Mon­ster. You have the Bit­coin parade. You have the drones fly­ing over­head in for­ma­tion.... You have bub­bling genet­ic exper­i­ments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re fly­ing the Anduril drones …” And every­one would be wel­come at the parade...except for the Blues, who will be banned from Gray-con­trolled zones. In addi­tion, there will be pub­lic screen­ings of anti-Blue films. “In addi­tion to cel­e­brat­ing Gray and cel­e­brat­ing Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abus­es.…”, Srini­vasan declare. “There should be lots of sto­ries about what Blues are doing that is bad.” Grays will go on to rename city streets after tech fig­ures, erect mon­u­ments to memo­ri­al­ize the hor­rors of pro­gres­sive Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, and even­tu­al­ly push the Blues out of their neigh­bor­hoods. Srini­vasan, the lead­ing intel­lec­tu­al artic­u­lat­ing the “Net­work State” vision to the world, is an open fas­cist who is very open about how he wants to be free to break away from soci­ety in order to cre­ate new soci­eties he can define and rule. And he’s just one of the extreme­ly wealthy peo­ple with this vision. The “Net­work State” is, at its core, a social net­work of aspir­ing auto­crats. At least today. Some­day it could be a net­work or autoc­ra­cies. Time will tell.

But a big part of what makes the net­work of pow­er bro­kers around the “Net­work State” so dan­ger­ous is that this isn’t a ran­dom net­work. It’s the “Theo­Bros” net­work. The same net­work that brought us Jan­u­ary 6, Project 2025, and much of the rest of the cur­rent and future Trump admin­is­tra­tion agen­da. In oth­er words, this is the net­work behind the future of MAGA. JD Vance and all. They don’t need to seize pow­er in order to cre­ate the con­di­tions for break­away soci­eties. They already have that pow­er. At least they have all the nec­es­sary pow­er in the US, across all branch­es of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, to more or less do what­ev­er they want when it comes to set­ting up break­away soci­eties. This is the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion. An admin­is­tra­tion that isn’t just ide­o­log­i­cal­ly aligned with Theo­Bros agen­da but com­prised of key mem­bers. The laws, reg­u­la­tions, and court rul­ings that are need­ed to push the Theo­Bros’ vision for­ward can be arranged.

At the same time, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that part of the Net­work State strat­e­gy is cre­at­ing these new break­away com­mu­ni­ties with­out ask­ing the gov­ern­ment, or any­one else, for per­mis­sion. Make them a de fac­to real­i­ty and force the world to deal with it. Which brings us to anoth­er part of the Theo­Bro Net­work State agen­da: pow­er. In some cas­es, it’s plans for pro­vid­ing the ener­gy need­ed to pow­er an AI-cen­tric soci­ety. Or even con­trol­ling the weath­er. A fix­a­tion of cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy is at the core of the Theo­Bros vision. Cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy and Domin­ion­ist the­ol­o­gy. For exam­ple, take Augus­tus Doricko, the mid-twen­ties CEO of a geo­engi­neer­ing start­up, Rain­mak­er, that promis­es to one day con­trol the weath­er through cloud seed­ing. Doricko even pledged to help pro­vide the nec­es­sary rain dur­ing the Los Ange­les files of Jan­u­ary 2025. And while his com­pa­ny obvi­ous­ly did­n’t make good on that pledge, that did­n’t stop con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists from blam­ing Rain­mak­er for the Texas floods a year lat­er, which is a pret­ty good accu­sa­tion to have to refute if you’re in the busi­ness of rain mak­ing. Nor has the lack of any demon­stra­ble rain mak­ing abil­i­ties seem­ing­ly slowed down Dorick­o’s entre­pre­neur­ial momen­tum. Doricko has ‘juice’. Theo­Bro ‘juice’. Once an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, Doricko launched the school chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, an orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by youth Nazi leader Nick Fuentes, leader of the “Groypers”. As we’ve seen, Fuentes’s has gone from being an online white nation­al­ist youth leader to some­one who infa­mous­ly dined with Don­ald Trump with Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in Novem­ber of 2022. Nick Fuentes is, trag­i­cal­ly, a polit­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant fig­ure in the mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in the US. But his extrem­ism isn’t lim­it­ed to an appre­ci­a­tion of Hitler. Fuentes has grown close to the same “church mil­i­tant” rad­i­cal Catholic move­ment that Steve Ban­non has been back­ing, which is pre­sum­ably part of the con­text of the day-long meet­ing Fuentes held back in Octo­ber 2023 at the offices of Jonathan Stick­land, the key polit­i­cal oper­a­tive for Texas theo­crat­ic bil­lion­aire Tim Dunn. Nick Fuentes is a youth fas­cist icon with a dis­tinct­ly theo­crat­ic pitch. So when we see Augus­tus Doricko start­ing the Berkley chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, that gives you a sense of Dorick­o’s pol­i­tics.

But Augus­tus Dorick­o’s polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions aren’t lim­it­ed to Nick Fuentes’s Hitler-lov­ing style of Catholi­cism. As we’ll see, Dorick­o’s col­lege expe­ri­ence was some­what trun­cat­ed thanks to the Thiel Fel­low­ship, the pro­gram set up by Peter Thiel that pays col­lege stu­dents $100,000 to drop out of col­lege and start a busi­ness instead. But Dorick­o’s ide­o­log­i­cal align­ment with Thiel isn’t lim­it­ed to a shared inter­est in tech­nol­o­gy star­tups. Both have a keen inter­est in Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy, although the par­tic­u­lar strains might dif­fer some­what. As we’ve seen, Thiel has been giv­ing sold out talks in recent years where he shares with the audi­ence a the­ol­o­gy that could be seen as a mod­ern day update to the the­ol­o­gy of Nazi the­o­reti­cian Carl Schmitt. Where Schmitt saw Com­mu­nism as the Antichrist force of his time and Nazism as a ‘kat­e­chon­ic’ bul­wark against the Antichrist, Thiel argues the oppo­si­tion to unbri­dled tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is the mod­ern day Antichrist-like force most imper­il­ing human­i­ty today. Yes, if you’re con­cerned about what fig­ures like Thiel or Elon Musk (or Augus­tus Doricko) are up to, you’re suc­cumb­ing to the spir­it of the Antichrist, accord­ing to Thiel. Peo­ple actu­al­ly pay mon­ey for tick­ets just to hear him talk about this stuff.

Valar Atomics: Fueling the Network State One Micro-Nuclear Reactor at a Time. And Run by a Doug Wilson Acolyte with No Training in Nuclear Physics

Augus­tus Doricko, on the oth­er hand, appears to fol­low a Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy that is more direct­ly tied into the Theo­Bro move­ment: he’s a fol­low­er of Pas­tor Doug Wilson’s Domin­ion­ist teach­ings. And then there’s Augus­tus’s young entre­pre­neur­ial friend, Isa­iah Tay­lor, founder of the nuclear ener­gy firm Valar Atom­ics in 2023. Tay­lor, who claims he’s the great grand­son of a physi­cist who worked on the Man­hat­tan Project devel­op­ing the first nuclear bomb, is such a close fol­low­er of Wilson’s teach­ing that he at one point moved to Moscow, Ida­ho, where Wil­son is locat­ed, “in order to be part of a medi­um-sized church com­mu­ni­ty.” Tay­lor has since relo­cat­ed to El Segun­do, Cal­i­for­nia, where he now attends a San­ta Clari­ta con­gre­ga­tion fol­low­ing Wilson’s teach­ings along­side Doricko. As we’ll see, part of what undoubt­ed­ly makes Wilson’s teach­ings appeal­ing to two young fas­cist-mind­ed tech entre­pre­neurs is the fact that Wilson’s strain of Domin­ion­ism is extreme­ly tech-friend­ly. “If you have a smart­phone, you have more wealth in your pock­et than Neb­uchad­nez­zar accu­mu­lat­ed over the course of his life­time,” wrote Wil­son in his 2020 book, Plo­duc­tiv­i­ty: A Prac­ti­cal The­ol­o­gy of Work and Wealth. “We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to turn a prof­it on these astound­ing resources.” The Theo­Bros embrace of Doug Wil­son isn’t a mys­tery. He’s offer­ing up a the­ol­o­gy tai­lor-made for pow­er grab by tech oli­garchs.

As we should expect, Doricko and Tay­lor both cast their busi­ness­es as fol­low­ing a bib­li­cal call­ing. “One of our Lord’s first com­mand­ments was to sub­due the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind con­trol the weath­er for the sake of build­ing the king­dom of God on earth and stew­ard­ing it well,” Doricko tweet­ed his rain­mak­ing ambi­tion. In anoth­er tweet, he wrote, “Dams mod­i­fy rivers, Jesus was a car­pen­ter who mod­i­fied forests (cut trees) to build hous­es. We aim to serve God.” Rain-mak­ing is high-tech Domin­ion­ism.

Isa­iah Tay­lor took Wilson’s teach­ings to rather self-serv­ing con­clu­sion that the build­ing 1000 nuclear reac­tors was part of God’s call for Chris­tian’s to care for the world. “I’m a Chris­t­ian envi­ron­men­tal­ist. I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a gar­den. So nat­u­ral­ly I want to rein­dus­tri­al­ize the Unit­ed States and build 1000 nuclear reac­tors.” And if build­ing 1000 nuclear reac­tors sounds over­ly ambi­tious, keep in mind that the nuclear tech­nol­o­gy Tay­lor’s com­pa­ny is devel­op­ing con­sists of arrays of hun­dreds of small mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tors. In fact, that mod­u­lar­i­ty is part of the sales pitch, with the idea being that small nuclear reac­tors will ulti­mate­ly be safer. If there’s a reac­tor emer­gency, hope­ful­ly it will be just a sin­gle small reac­tor emer­gency.

Of course, a sales pitch around the safe­ty of a mod­u­lar reac­tor design would be a lot more com­pelling if Valar Atom­ics was will­ing to share its design spec­i­fi­ca­tion with reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies like the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (NRC). Instead of pro­vid­ing those designs, Valar has, as of report­ing in July 2025, joined with oth­er com­pa­nies and the states of Texas, Ari­zona, Flori­da and Utah in suing the NRC on the grounds that it is hold­ing back inno­va­tion. Valar fur­ther argues that 1954 Atom­ic Ener­gy Act exempts small reac­tors from reg­u­la­tions because they don’t pose the same kind of risks as larg­er reac­tors.

Alarm­ing­ly, Valar Atom­ics fur­thered argued in the NRC law­suit that its tech­nol­o­gy is so safe a per­son could hold the spent fuel in their hand and get the same than of radi­a­tion as one would get from a CT scan. Nuclear experts argue the fuel could pro­vide a fatal dose in as lit­tle as 85 mil­lisec­onds. Tay­lor appears to be unable to rebut their cal­cu­la­tions. Now, while you may not want to hold the pro­posed nuclear fuel, Tri-Struc­tur­al ISOtrop­ic fuel, in your hand, experts do agree that it’s rel­a­tive­ly safe over­all, being able to oper­ate at high tem­per­a­tures and avoid melt­ing like oth­er fuels. But there’s a price for that safe­ty. Lit­er­al­ly. The fuel is sim­ply incred­i­bly expen­sive. It’s anoth­er part of the Valar Atom­ics busi­ness mod­el that does­n’t make sense.

Oth­er con­cerns raised by experts include the fact that these pro­posed farms of small nuclear reac­tors aren’t as free of risk as Valar is claim­ing and will require vig­or­ous mon­i­tor­ing, in part to make sure “nobody is able to remove the fuel for nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es” like a dirty bomb. But those secu­ri­ty costs could be dwarfed by the costs of sim­ply oper­at­ing the pro­posed farms of small nuclear reac­tors. While Valar is tout­ing the mod­u­lar small nuclear reac­tor design as being a safer, cheap­er approach to nuclear ener­gy, it could actu­al­ly end up being more expen­sive and tech­ni­cal­ly more dif­fi­cult to man­age. Instead of a sin­gle nuclear reac­tor, hun­dreds or thou­sands will need to be mon­i­tored and oper­at­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. So while this tech­nol­o­gy is being tout­ed as some kind of cheap­er and safer alter­na­tive to tra­di­tion­al nuclear pow­er, the real­i­ty is that the eco­nom­ics will cre­ate a pow­er­ful incen­tive to cut back on safe­ty.

But if it seems like a com­pa­ny that refus­es to turn its designs over the NRC and is oper­at­ing under a busi­ness mod­el that may not even make any eco­nom­ic sense could­n’t pos­si­bly be viable, the real­i­ty is that Valar Atom­ics signed an agree­ment with the state of Utah in 2025 to explore allow­ing Valar to use the Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab to build a small mod­u­lar test reac­tor by 2026, and built the reac­tor. The com­pa­ny has also argued that the time frame for get­ting approval for a nuclear reac­tor, which can take up to eight years, is pre­pos­ter­ous. And if the idea that a com­pa­ny that refus­es to show its designs could get reg­u­la­to­ry per­mis­sion to oper­ate nuclear reac­tors, keep in mind the land­mark June 2024 Supreme Court rul­ing strik­ing down the legal prece­dent of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Nat­ur­al Resources Defense Coun­cil estab­lished back in 1984 that put the author­i­ty of inter­pret­ing con­gres­sion­al­ly man­date reg­u­la­tions in the hands of the experts at agen­cies like the NRC. Today, that author­i­ty now sits in the hands of fed­er­al judges. In oth­er words, Valar Atom­ic­s’s prospects for get­ting approval prob­a­bly has less to do with ulti­mate­ly get­ting per­mis­sion from the NRC and will instead hinge on the suc­cess of their abil­i­ty to go judge shop­ping.

And, again, a net­work of Theo­Bro-con­trolled theo­crat­ic enclaves where unreg­u­lat­ed tech­nol­o­gy is allowed to thrive is going to need a lot of elec­tric­i­ty. It won’t just be Valar Atom­ics push­ing for the approval of this tech­nol­o­gy. Nuclear dereg­u­la­tion for their Net­work State enclaves is bound to be a major goal for the Theo­Bro agen­da. Imag­ine the cur­rent con­cerns of data cen­ter elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion. The high tech theo­crat­ic city-states the Theo­Bros are plan­ning on rul­ing like mon­archs will be brim­ming with indus­try and espe­cial­ly AI, with an end­less appetite for elec­tric­i­ty to go along with it. Some­thing like what Valar Atom­ics is promis­ing is going to have to hap­pen. And it’s hard to imag­ine a bet­ter con­nect­ed net­work more capa­ble of mak­ing it hap­pen than the Theo­Bros for the remain­der of Don­ald Trump’s sec­ond term. The Theo­Bros are the ulti­mate insid­ers right now. That’s why this is a sto­ry about a real threat to civ­i­liza­tion and not just anoth­er sto­ry about lunatic bil­lion­aires. These are well-orga­nized, hyper-con­nect­ed lunatic bil­lions. With a new­ly mint­ed tril­lion­aire thrown on top.

It’s also worth recall­ing that, when we’re talk­ing about a net­work of ulti­mate insid­ers, Valar Atom­ics hap­pens to be the lat­est in a num­ber of “Valar” named enti­ties in recent years. Except Isa­iah Tay­lor isn’t the founder of those oth­er Valar firms. Peter Thiel is the big Valar fan. Because of course Thiel is a big “Valar” fan giv­en that Valar is a name tak­en from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fan­ta­sy world, with the Valar being the angel­ic beings who shape and rule Mid­dle Earth. As we’ve seen, Thiel loves nam­ing his com­pa­nies after JRR Tolkein con­tent, as Palan­tir, Mithril Cap­i­tal, Arda Cap­i­tal, Riven­dell One LLC, and Lem­bas LLC make clear.

The Tolkein nam­ing theme isn’t lim­it­ed to Thiel’s com­pa­nies. JD Vance’s ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, Narya Cap­i­tal, was after a Tolkein con­cept. And as we’ll see, Valar Atom­ics got a $130 mil­lion investor infu­sion back in Novem­ber 2025. New Valar investors include Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar and Doug Philip­pone, the for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir. Philip­pone will be jon­ing Valar Atom­ic’s board. Anoth­er new investor is Palmer Luck­ey, the founder of the AI-mil­i­tary drone man­u­fac­tur­er Anduril Indus­tries. In addi­tion to Luck­ey being a close Thiel asso­ciate, Anduril hap­pens to be a Tolkein-inspired named. In fact, Thiel and Luck­ey just formed a new bank, Ere­bor, that will be ded­i­cat­ed to cater­ing to start-ups and high-net-worth indi­vid­u­als with­in the cryp­tocur­ren­cy, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, defense and man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tors. Ere­bor is, of course, anoth­er Tolkein-inspired name. Also recall how Anduril and Palan­tir formed a coali­tion of AI-defense man­u­fac­tur­ers that were plan­ning on mak­ing joint bids for Pen­ta­gon con­tracts.

And as we should prob­a­bly expect, there’s a Pen­ta­gon con­tract­ing angle to Valar Atom­ic’s busi­ness mod­el: Project Janus, a new Pen­ta­gon ini­tia­tive with a goal of fos­ter­ing the devel­op­ment of small nuclear reac­tors that can be used on mil­i­tary bases. On the one hand, it’s not hard to see why the mil­i­tary might have an inter­est in spe­cial nuclear reac­tors for mil­i­tary bases. But on the oth­er hand, we’re lit­er­al­ly talk­ing about plac­ing nuclear reac­tors in some of the places most like­ly to expe­ri­ence some sort of an attack, which is going to make the promis­es of melt­down-proof tech­nol­o­gy all the more impor­tant. The Pen­ta­gon is hop­ing to have work­ing domes­tic Army-reg­u­lat­ed pro­to­type nuclear reac­tor installed at a base no lat­er than Sep­tem­ber of 2028, with hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in Pen­ta­gon con­tracts to be award­ed to the win­ner.

But Sep­tem­ber 2028 isn’t the dead­line Valar Atom­ics has been rac­ing to meet. No, that dead­line has already passed: July 4, 2026, the dead­line set by Pres­i­dent Trump as part of a new fed­er­al Depart­ment of Ener­gy (DOE) ini­tia­tive Trump announced in May of 2025 with a goal of fos­ter­ing the extreme­ly rapid devel­op­ment of new micronu­clear reac­tor com­mer­cial tech­nol­o­gy. July 4 was to be the day when the 10 com­pa­nies select­ed for the pro­gram would have their reac­tors demon­strate crit­i­cal­i­ty, i.e. a sus­tain­able nuclear reac­tion. Valar Atom­ics became the sec­ond com­pa­ny to meet­ing the July 4th dead­line in June, demon­strat­ing the abil­i­ty to pow­er and Nvidia AI com­put­ing clus­ter. The com­pa­ny recent­ly signed a deal worth Nvidia to build a water­less 30MW AI fac­to­ry and raised $1 bil­lion in new cap­i­tal on an assumed val­u­a­tion of around $6 bil­lion. Beyond that, Valar has already had a pro­to­type reac­tor flown in a mil­i­tary C‑17 trans­port from Cal­i­for­nia to Utah’s San Rafael Ener­gy Lab, a state-man­aged research facil­i­ty that is now help­ing Valar devel­op its tech­nol­o­gy with the back­ing of Utah’s Gov­er­nor Cox. The trip itself was hailed as break­through in demon­strat­ing the abil­i­ty to trans­port func­tion nuclear reac­tors, a sign that the mil­i­tary is already look­ing very favor­ably at Valar Atom­ics.

Addi­tion­al gov­ern­ment sup­port for Valar Atom­ics came in the form of changes to fed­er­al nuclear reg­u­la­tions ear­li­er this year. Or sud­den lack of fed­er­al nuclear reg­u­la­tions, as the case may be. It turns out the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has found a loop­hole for nuclear ener­gy research reg­u­la­tions and decid­ed to exploit that loop­hole to the fullest extent. By extend­ing the scope of the DOE’s reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight over research reac­tors to include pri­vate­ly devel­oped reac­tors at pri­vate facil­i­ties, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has tak­en the devel­op­ment of the next gen­er­a­tion reac­tors under this DOE pro­gram out of the purview of the NRC, a gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion set up by Con­gress to be inde­pen­dent and rel­a­tive­ly resis­tant to exec­u­tive branch rule. Although, fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s June 2026 rul­ing in Trump vs Slaugh­ter, the NRC’s inde­pen­dence is very much in ques­tion along with the inde­pen­dence of every oth­er ‘inde­pen­dent’ fed­er­al agency at this point. Still, as we’re going to see, the DOE isn’t just assum­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty for the pri­vate devel­op­ment of these next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear reac­tors. The DOE is gut­ting the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty guide­lines too, impact­ing aspects of nuclear research safe­ty pro­to­cols. Like rules that pre­vi­ous­ly pre­vent­ed on the emis­sion of radioac­tive waste into pub­lic sew­ers. In fact, the require­ment to use the “best avail­able tech­nol­o­gy” to pro­tect water sup­plies from the dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­i­al is no longer there. Rules on the amounts of radi­a­tion work­ers can be exposed to have been weak­ened, along with the length­en­ing of allow­able work­er their shifts. Spe­cial­ist engi­neers will no be required for the dif­fer­ent aspects of the nuclear safe­ty sys­tems. Less con­crete shield­ing is man­dat­ed and the long-stand­ing guid­ing con­cept known as “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA) — which requires reac­tor oper­a­tors to keep radi­a­tion dis­charges as low as pos­si­ble — has been removed too. And sev­en secu­ri­ty direc­tives, total­ing over 500 pages, were con­sol­i­dat­ed into a 23-page order. As experts warn, some of these exper­i­men­tal reac­tor designs use fuel at high­er lev­els of enrich­ment that tra­di­tion­al civil­ian reac­tors, mak­ing the issue of fuel theft all the more alarm­ing. As we’ve seen, the Natri­um reac­tor design backed by Bill Gates and War­ren Buf­fet uses 20% enriched Ura­ni­um, enough to build a dirty bomb and poten­tial­ly even high enough to be use­ful for cre­at­ing nuclear weapons. It sounds like we could see a pro­lif­er­a­tion of new reac­tor designs that rely on poten­tial­ly weaponiz­able fuel.

And all of these changes and more were made in secret over the fall and win­ter of 2025. Although it was­n’t entire­ly secret. The com­pa­nies par­tic­i­pat­ing in the DOE pro­gram like Valar Atom­ics were noti­fied. Because of course they were. The gut­ting of the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty mea­sures were done for their ben­e­fit. It was just the pub­lic that was­n’t noti­fied. And if it turns out the rules haven’t been gut­ted enough, there’s a easy option made avail­able to these com­pa­nies: each com­pa­ny has a DOE ‘concierge team’ ded­i­cat­ed to work­ing with them on this project. The mem­bers of the concierge team all report direct­ly to the sec­re­tary of ener­gy. In oth­er words, fur­ther gut­ting of the stan­dards isn’t going to be a prob­lem. At least not a prob­lem for the com­pa­nies, although all the leaked radi­a­tion (or stolen fuel) could obvi­ous­ly end up being a prob­lem for some­one.

And let’s keep in mind that Valar Atom­ics isn’t just poised to pro­vide next-gen­er­a­tion micro-nuclear pow­er that could be invalu­able for the Net­work State’s AI-cen­tric agen­da. Micro-nuclear reac­tors are the kind of ‘solu­tion’ we can eas­i­ly imag­ine the broad­er AI indus­try adopt­ing as AI elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion soars. Grow­ing pub­lic out­rage over ris­ing elec­tric­i­ty prices and calls for data cen­ters to sup­ply their own pow­er makes a pro­lif­er­a­tion of micro-nuclear reac­tors a very real pos­si­bil­i­ty. The US, and world, real­ly could be on the cusp of some sort of nuclear pow­er bonan­za. With mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tors poten­tial­ly pop­ping up all over the place. Is a new data cen­ter show­ing up in your town? If so, get ready for the nuclear reac­tor to pow­er it.

But it will only be a bonan­za if the tech­nol­o­gy works as promised. And while did Valar Atom­ics report­ed­ly demon­strate crit­i­cal­i­ty with its reac­tors in advance of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s July 4 dead­line, it’s not the only one. If the future of ener­gy real­ly is going to be micro-nuclear reac­tors, the com­pe­ti­tion is going to be intense. But so will the spoils, and with Valar’s deep polit­i­cal con­nec­tions it’s hard not to see it as a front run­ner in that race. A com­pa­ny found­ed by Isa­iah Tay­lor, a 20-some­thing fol­low­er of Doug Wil­son, and stacked with promi­nent AI investors and Palan­tir board mem­bers is posi­tioned to offer micro-nuclear reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy to data cen­ters and who knows where else as elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion is pro­ject­ed to soar in our AI-cen­tric future econ­o­my. And make a vast for­tune in the process. The fact that the com­pa­ny refused to share its reac­tor designs with the NRC and has ques­tion­able safe­ty prac­tices is now beside the point. The Theo­Bros aren’t just polit­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal author­i­tar­i­ans. They are increas­ing­ly the own­ers of the future econ­o­my.

The Owners of the Future are Trying to form Breakaway Privately Run Theocracies

It’s that cap­ture of the future econ­o­my that makes the sto­ry of the Theo­Bros more than just anoth­er chap­ter in the con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry of Amer­i­can fas­cism. This isn’t just an alliance of theocrats and tech-cen­tric author­i­tar­i­ans. This is a net­work with immense polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pow­er already that is posi­tion­ing itself to con­trol the indus­tries like­ly to dom­i­nate the next cen­tu­ry. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, space, robot­ics and drones, weath­er manip­u­la­tion and oth­er forms of geo­engi­neer­ing, pow­ered by next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear ener­gy and con­cen­trat­ed in the break­away ‘net­work states’ they are intend­ing to build. With boun­ti­ful mil­i­tary and defense con­tracts for polit­i­cal con­nect­ed Theo­Bro firms 1789 Cap­i­tal. Who knows, maybe these pri­vate­ly owned and run net­work state enclaves will have pri­vate­ly owned and run mil­i­taries of their own. The Theo­Bros will, at a min­i­mum, have access to some very advance mil­i­tary drones.

But it’s not like this is just about an agen­da of cre­at­ing break­away pri­vate­ly run tech-cen­tric theoc­ra­cies. The sto­ry of the Theo­Bros is real­ly the sto­ry of the larg­er coali­tion of MAGA and aligned enti­ties like the fas­cist Clare­mont Insti­tute and the theocrats at the CNP that brought us Jan­u­ary 6 and have been joined at the hip for the last decade. This is a sto­ry about the cre­ation of break­away states and the cap­ture of gov­ern­ment by the same pri­vate net­work that has turned the present day White House into a car­ni­val of graft and cor­rup­tion. It’s a sto­ry about wild tech-fueled ambi­tions of bil­lion­aires for a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent future but also a sto­ry of more of the same, but worse. Worse in ways nev­er before pos­si­ble, fueled by the pow­er of AI and the temp­ta­tion of human obso­les­cence. But also fueled by a Trump-built Supreme Court major­i­ty that has proven ready and eager to turn back the clock on all sorts of rights. Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism polit­i­cal projects like the High­land Rims Chris­t­ian project will be com­plet­ed and joined by oth­ers, per­haps around the world. We don’t know if this agen­da will suc­ceed but we can be con­fi­dent it will have immense resources of hyper-ambi­tious fas­cist tech-bil­lion­aires and their fel­low trav­el­ers behind it. In oth­er words, if you think the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is an unpar­al­leled orgy of cor­rup­tion by peo­ple drunk on pow­er and greed, just wait until the Theo­Bros real­ly start flex­ing their mus­cle. The Theo­Bros agen­da is very like­ly what a post-Trump right-wing polit­i­cal land­scape will look like. JD Vance and the Trump kids are Theo­Bros/­co-investors, after all. We real­ly should expect noth­ing less from the GOP in its inevitable post-Trump era than an ongo­ing Trumpian cor­rupt pow­er grab, unre­strained by pre-Trump norms, tak­en to new lev­els. Oli­garchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen will take fur­ther steps to seize as much wealth and sov­er­eign pow­er as pos­si­ble while the decades-long assault on a func­tion­ing democ­ra­cy by the CNP con­tin­ues unabat­ed. Calls for seces­sion or spe­cial pri­vate­ly-run eco­nom­ic zones. The pol­i­tics of balka­niza­tion merg­ing with the long-stand­ing desire to destroy the reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight gov­ern­ment once and for all. The pri­va­ti­za­tion of the pub­lic good, done in the name of a very right-wing Jesus. That’s prob­a­bly the future the GOP. That or some­thing worse. That’s why the Theo­Bros are a sto­ry to keep an eye on. This is the net­work that’s best posi­tioned to greed­i­ly destroy the post-Trump future.

Ok, first, here’s a pre­view of the arti­cle we’re going to exam­ine below:

* May 17, 2026: “Don­ald Trump Jr’s VC firm touts ‘patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism’ in invest­ment push”:

We’re going to start off with a May 2026 report from the Finan­cial Times on 1789’s grow­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal ambi­tions, with assets under man­age­ment jump­ing from $200 mil­lionz to $3.5 bil­lion over the past year and a goal of $10 bil­lion in the next few years after going on a deal­mak­ing spree with many of the lead­ing AI com­pa­nies. The new ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, found­ed just three years ago by by Omeed Malik, Chris Buskirk and Rebekah Mer­cer, recent­ly added Don Trump Jr as a part­ner and has been pitch­ing itself as the new Car­lyle Group, with invest­ments that include pre-IPO SpaceX and xAI as well as mil­i­tary drone mak­er Anduril and pre­dic­tion mar­ket plat­form Poly­mar­ket.

* Novem­ber 4, 2025: Inside the bil­lion­aire net­work shap­ing MAGA’s post-Trump future:

Next, a Novem­ber 2025 piece in the Wash­ing­ton Post about Rock­bridge, the polit­i­cal net­work Chris Buskirk has been build­ing, with plans on shap­ing the post-Trump future of the MAGA move­ment. The net­work was launched in 2019 with a Rock­bridge, Ohio, gath­er­ing that was con­vened by JD Vance and Peter Thiel and includ­ed fig­ures like Rebekah Mer­cer, Tuck­er Carl­son, Oren Cass, and Marc Andreessen. The goal of the net­work has been described as “aristopop­ulism” with a focus on build­ing bridges between wealthy cap­i­tal­ists and the work­ing-class. As as Buskirk puts it, the group is col­lec­tive­ly work­ing to give the busi­ness­peo­ple he sees as vital to the country’s future a role shap­ing gov­ern­ment and last­ing polit­i­cal pow­er. It’s a vision where unre­strained cap­i­tal­ism will lead to a peri­od of nation­al renew­al. And while Buskirk acknowl­edged that the US is unlike­ly to make iPhones and Nike shoes again, he argues it can revive its indus­tri­al base — par­tic­u­lar­ly in nation­al defense — to restore the mid­dle class. So when we read about how Buskirk’s 1789 Cap­i­tal is mak­ing all sorts of polit­i­cal­ly-con­nect­ed invest­ments in the defense sec­tor, keep in mind that the Rock­bridge net­work would frame that as a step towards reviv­ing the mid­dle-class. It’s that kind of ‘pop­ulism’.

* Novem­ber + Decem­ber 2024: To Under­stand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the “Theo­Bros”:

We’re then going to look at an arti­cle excerpt from the November+December 2024 Issue of Moth­er Jones intro­duc­ing the Theo­Bros net­work, which could be seen as the part­ner­ship of the “aristopop­ulism” ambi­tions of the Rock­bridge Net­work with the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism of the CNP and oth­er long-stand­ing com­po­nents of the US right-wing pow­er struc­ture that long influ­enced US pol­i­tics and econ­o­my. In addi­tion to fig­ures like JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Rebekah Mer­cer, and Chris Buskirk, mem­ber­ship in the ‘Theo­Bro’ net­work includes domin­ion­ists with a pen­chant for call­ing for a theo­crat­ic takeover like Stephen and William Wolfe (no rela­tion). The arti­cle also makes clear that the Theo­Bros vision for the future of Amer­i­ca is one where only ‘Her­itage Amer­i­cans’ are allowed to stay, and every­one else is deport­ed, includ­ing cur­rent cit­i­zens who don’t fit the ‘Her­itage Amer­i­can’ def­i­n­i­tion. Pas­tor Doug Wil­son, who co-authored a book with a co-founder of the League of the South that excused slav­ery and cel­e­brat­ed the Con­fed­er­a­cy as a Bib­li­cal­ly sanc­tioned soci­ety, serves as a kind of de fac­to spir­i­tu­al leader of the move­ment although fas­cist Bib­li­cal Recon­struc­tion­ist R.J. Rush­doony could be seen as hav­ing laid down the the­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tions for the move­ment decades ago. It’s a ver­sion of pop­ulism exclu­sive­ly for white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists and their tech­no-fas­cist fel­low trav­el­ers. And as part of this ‘Theo­Bros’ agen­da, the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic cap­ture of com­mu­ni­ties is already under­way through ini­tia­tives like the Jack­son Coun­ty, Ten­nessee, project being led by fig­ures like Andrew Isker, an advo­cate of the ‘Her­itage Amer­i­can’ con­cept. Work­ing along­side Isker on the project is New Found­ing, a ven­ture cap­i­tal and real estate firm that is buy­ing up large tracts of land for the project. New Found­ing’s founder, Nate Fis­ch­er, the com­pa­ny wants to “form the back­bone of a renewed Amer­i­can regime” and that its mem­bers “under­stand the nature of author­i­ty and its legit­i­mate force­ful exer­cise.” And in case it’s not clear what Fis­ch­er is hint­ing at when he talks about the legit­i­mate force­ful exer­cise of author­i­ty, New Found­ing’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Josh Abbotoy, hap­pens to be a mem­ber of Charles Hay­wood’s fas­cist Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR), a group ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing the foun­da­tion for a post-demo­c­ra­t­ic theo­crat­ic new order. The Theo­Bros aren’t plan­ning on win­ning elec­tions. They are plan­ning on tak­ing over through any means nec­es­sary. All done in the name of God, alleged­ly.

* Decem­ber 23, 2024: Here Come The Anti-Woke Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists:

We’ll take a clos­er look at New Found­ing’s ide­ol­o­gy and ambi­tions in an excerpt from a Decem­ber 2024 arti­cle in Forbes. Like 1789, New Found­ing is a ven­ture cap­i­tal and real estate firm serv­ing as a kind of cor­po­rate man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Theo­Bros move­ment. As the arti­cle makes clear, the goals of New Found­ing are noth­ing less than remak­ing soci­ety with a large­ly MAGA, tech-dri­ven, Chris­t­ian world­view. Under­scor­ing the seri­ous­ness of the soci­ety trans­for­ma­tion they are seek­ing, New Found­ing’s founder, Nate Fis­ch­er, is not only a mem­ber of the Clare­mont Insti­tute but, like New Found­ing Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Josh Abbotoy, is also a mem­ber of Charles Hay­wood’s fas­cist Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR). As Fis­ch­er shares with reporters, in his view, “We are at the end of a civ­i­liza­tion­al cycle.” As extrem­ism experts warn, the lan­guage used by New Found­ing has all the hall­marks of an Accel­er­a­tionist move­ment will­ing to engage in vio­lence to achieve its ends. But as the arti­cle also makes clear, this is new sim­ply a move­ment of wealthy Theocrats. Pow­er­ful Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­garchs like Marc Andreessen are Theo­Bros too! It’s not the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism that unites the seem­ing­ly dis­parate ele­ments of his move­ment. It’s the shared desire to throw off the shack­les of democ­ra­cy and take con­trol of soci­ety that uni­fies them. As Andreessen wrote in a 5,000 word 2023 man­i­festo, “tech­nol­o­gy must be a vio­lent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as will become clear, those ‘forces of the unknown’ include democ­ra­cy and any sort of civic account­abil­i­ty for oli­garchs like Andreessen. New Found­ing even has a pod­cast pro­mot­ing its agen­da. Past guests include Founders Fund part­ner and Anduril chair­man Trae Stephens, and Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince. And as we should prob­a­bly expect giv­en the heavy over­lap of the Theo­Bros net­work with the CNP, there’s a direct Project 2025 con­nec­tion to New Found­ing: the com­pa­ny has been oper­at­ing a ‘tal­ent net­work’ of at least 3,000 mem­bers, and sub­mit­ted dozens of peo­ple for roles in Project 2025.

* April 8, 2025: Chris­t­ian “Theo­Bros” Are Build­ing a Tech Utopia in Appalachia:

Next, we’re going to exam­ine the High­land Rim Project, the ‘Tech Utopia’ theoc­ra­cy being cre­at­ed in Ten­nessee. It’s New Found­ing’s flag­ship project, but it’s real­ly the Theo­Bros flag­ship project. A place where a ‘Her­itage Amer­i­can’ white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist vision of the future can take root and hope­ful­ly grow­ing. Not just grow direct­ly as New Found­ing buys up more and more prop­er­ty to be used for this ‘inten­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty’, but grow in terms of serv­ing as a tem­plate for sim­i­lar Theo­Bros-run inten­tion­al com­mu­ni­ties to blos­som across the US and maybe the world. As Andrew Isker, one of the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist fig­ures exhort­ing fel­low believ­ers to pack up and move to the com­mu­ni­ty, explained, the “Net­work State” is very much the con­cept they are bas­ing the project on. The inten­tion is to be a mod­el for new Theo­Bros ‘projects’ all over, with the goal of even­tu­al­ly sup­plant­i­ng the present day order. A project of simul­ta­ne­ous polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic cap­ture, with added ele­ment of deport­ing or sup­press­ing any­one who does­n’t fit the ‘Her­itage Amer­i­can’ def­i­n­i­tion. But Isker did­n’t come up with the Net­work State con­cept. That was the work of investor and entre­pre­neur Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, a close friend of Pay­Pal titan Peter Thiel, and a for­mer part­ner at Andreessen-Horowitz, Marc Andreessen’s firm. It was Srini­vasan who wrote an arti­cle in 2021 call­ing for the cre­ation of a new utopia, or ‘fresh start’ as he put it. It would be an online vir­tu­al ‘nation’ at first. In 2022, Srini­vasan pub­lished the best­seller, The Net­work State: How to Start a New Coun­try. But while Srini­vasan and Isker share a com­mon goal of cre­at­ing new break­away soci­eties, their visions aren’t exact­ly the same. Isker has dis­tinct­ly white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist vision, declar­ing Judaism to be “lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian” and call­ing for the rever­sal of the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act on the basis that it bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple.” Srini­vasan wants to cre­ate a San Fran­cis­co where cit­i­zens show their loy­al­ty to tech com­pa­nies by the col­or of their shirts. Both forms of author­i­tar­i­an extrem­ism. They aren’t exact­ly the same, but it’s still a shared move­ment.

* April 26, 2024: The Tech Baron Seek­ing to Purge San Fran­cis­co of “Blues”:

We’ll then take a clos­er look at Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan’s vision for the future of San Fran­cis­co. And while it’s a vision framed as a kind of “Sil­i­con Val­ley call for seces­sion”, it’s real­ly a tem­plate for tech-oli­garch-run city states to be estab­lished all over the world. A vision that sees democ­ra­cy and ‘wok­ism’ as ene­mies to be van­quished. And it’s a vision that is gain­ing fol­low­ers. In Octo­ber of 2023, Srini­vasan host­ed the first-ever Net­work State con­fer­ence. Srini­vasan char­ac­ter­ized his move­ment as “tech Zion­ism”, com­par­ing it those start­ed by the bib­li­cal Abra­ham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mor­monism), Theodor Her­zl (“spir­i­tu­al father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (for­mer author­i­tar­i­an ruler of Sin­ga­pore). Under Srini­vasan’s vision, cit­i­zens of San Fran­cis­co would break down into dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal tribes that fall along sociopo­lit­i­cal lines. Cit­i­zens would wear shirts with col­ors while in pub­lic, indi­cat­ing their tribe. A ‘Red’ tribe would con­sist of MAGA-ori­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als, with tra­di­tion­al Democ­rats or pro­gres­sives falling into the ‘Blue’ tribe. Then there’s the ‘Gray’ tribe of cit­i­zens who are pri­mar­i­ly loy­al to the tech oli­garchs. When you see anoth­er mem­ber of your tribe on the street you nod at them, acknowl­edg­ing your shared alle­giance. The Reds and Grays will have a kind of alliance, with cer­tain parts of the city only being ‘Gray’ areas acces­si­ble only for Reds and Grays. Blues will be for­mal­ly sec­ond-class cit­i­zens and banned from the Gray zones. There will even be a ‘Gray Pride march’ and films show­ing the evils of the Blues will shown in pub­lic. Grays will rename city streets after tech fig­ures and erect pub­lic mon­u­ments to memo­ri­al­ize the alleged hor­rors of pro­gres­sive Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance. The sky­line will be filled with cor­po­rate logos and signs sig­ni­fy­ing Gray dom­i­nance of the city. “Take total con­trol of your neigh­bor­hood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they’re ... unwel­come,” Srini­vasan declared. “Just as Blues eth­ni­cal­ly cleanse me out of San Fran­cis­co, like, push out all Blues.” Srini­vasan’s vision for a future of fas­cist city states may not have the same aes­thet­ics as the kind of theoc­ra­cy Andrew Isker is try­ing to cre­ate with the High­land Rim Project, but it a shared agen­da of over­throw­ing democ­ra­cy and purg­ing soci­ety.

* Jan­u­ary 14, 2025: The Ultra-Chris­t­ian Tech Bros Have Been Min­gling at Mar-a-Lago:

The next arti­cle excerpt, a Moth­er Jones piece from Jan­u­ary 2025, under­scores the fact that the Theo­Bros move­ment isn’t just a mat­ter of tech-oli­garchs and theocrats find­ing com­mon cause in the goal of mak­ing author­i­tar­i­an microstates some­thing they can cre­ate and run. The Theo­Bros endorse a vision of Chris­t­ian Domin­ion­ism that calls for estab­lish­ing man’s domain over the earth through tech­nol­o­gy like geo­engi­neer­ing and weath­er mod­i­fi­ca­tion. The arti­cle intro­duces a pair of young Theo­Bros entre­pre­neurs in the mid-20s. Augus­tus Doricko runs the geo­engi­neer­ing start­up, Rain­mak­er. Doricko, like so many young con­tem­po­rary tech entre­pre­neurs oper­at­ing in a tech-fas­cist space, hap­pens to be the recip­i­ent of a Thiel Fel­low­ship, the pro­gram set up by Pete Thiel to pay under­grad­u­ate stu­dents $100,000 to drop out of col­lege and start a com­pa­ny. While a stu­dent at UC Berke­ley, Doricko found­ed the col­lege’s chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, which hap­pens to be the col­lege out­reach orga­ni­za­tion start­ed by Nazi online youth leader Nick Fuentes. Doricko also serves as men­tor at Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures, an accel­er­a­tor pro­gram, fund­ed in part by Andreessen Horowitz. And then there’s Dorick­o’s close friend, Isa­iah Tay­lor, a high-school dropout who found­ed the nuclear ener­gy start­up Valar Atom­ics, a com­pa­ny promis­ing safe nuclear pow­er gen­er­a­tion from small mod­u­lar reac­tors. Both Doricko and Tay­lor live in El Segun­do, Cal­i­for­nia, where they attend a branch of the church led by Domin­ion­ist preach­er Doug Wil­son, the Theo­Bros’ the­o­log­i­cal guid­ing light. Wil­son has writ­ten that he sees tech­nol­o­gy as some­thing like a divine gift. But don’t assume it’s gift for every­one. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right cat­e­gories,” Tay­lor wrote on X.com back in 2024. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logis­tics? Who gets to own the weath­er? Who gets to own ener­gy? Think big­ger.” They’re plan­ning on ‘own­ing the weath­er’. It’s that kind of Domin­ion­ism.

* July 7, 2025: Who is Valar Atom­ics?:

We’re then going to take a clos­er look at Isa­iah Tay­lor and Valar Atom­ics in a July 2025 piece in the Utah News Dis­patch describ­ing the “cul­ture of fast-paced inno­va­tion” guid­ing the nuclear pow­er start­up. As we’ll see, while Tay­lor and the com­pa­ny’s back­ers are very bull­ish on the prospects of their mod­ule nuclear pow­er tech­nol­o­gy, nuclear experts aren’t so con­fi­dent, in part because Valar Atom­ics has not only refused to hand its reac­tor designs over to the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (NRC) for review, but the com­pa­ny has also joined a law­suit against the NRC argu­ing that the agency is hold­ing back inno­va­tion. But it’s not just the refusal to hand over reac­tor designs to the NRC. It’s also what experts see as exag­ger­at­ed safe­ty claims. Nonethe­less, Valar Atom­ics not only as the back­ing of Peter Thiel but also the state of Utah, which made an agree­ment with the com­pa­ny to allow Valar to use the Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab in Emery Coun­ty to build a pro­to­type mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tor in 2026. And then there’s the help the com­pa­ny is get­ting from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing the fact that Trump White House has issued exec­u­tive orders urg­ing nuclear pow­er be ramped up at the same time it ordered the NRC reduce its staff.

* Novem­ber 13, 2025: New financ­ing round ben­e­fits Valar:

We’ll then take a quick look at an update on Valar Atom­ic­s’s investors with the news of a $130 mil­lion round of ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing the com­pa­ny had back in Novem­ber 2025. The arti­cle notes that, in addi­tion to the exper­i­men­tal reac­tor being built in Utah, the com­pa­ny is also build­ing a reac­tor in the Philip­pines in part to avoid US reg­u­la­to­ry bur­dens. In addi­tion, the com­pa­ny was select­ed in Sep­tem­ber of 20225 to par­tic­i­pate in a new pro­gram set up by the Depart­ment of Ener­gy, Fuel Line Pilot Pro­gram, that has a goal of see­ing at least three of the 10 par­tic­i­pat­ing firms have their exper­i­men­tal next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear reac­tors up and run­ning by July 4th, 2026.

* Novem­ber 10, 2025: Nuclear start­up that’s suing NRC rais­es $130 mil­lion with back­ing from Anduril’s Palmer Luck­ey and senior Palan­tir exec­u­tive:

Next, we’ll take a quick look at anoth­er arti­cle from Novem­ber 2025 describ­ing Valar Atom­ic­s’s new investors, includ­ing Anduril Indus­tries founder Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar. Doug Philip­pone, co-founder of Snow­point and for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, also joined Valar’s board of direc­tors. The arti­cle also notes how the tech­nol­o­gy behind their mod­u­lar reac­tor design relies on heli­um as a coolant which allows the reac­tor to oper­ate at much high­er tem­per­a­tures than tra­di­tion­al plants.

* Jan­u­ary 28, 2026: The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has secret­ly rewrit­ten nuclear safe­ty rules:

We’ll then take a look at an NPR piece from Jan­u­ary 2026, describ­ing the array of changes on the Depart­ment of Ener­gy’s (DOE) rules and reg­u­la­tions for exper­i­men­tal nuclear reac­tor devel­op­ment, all made in secret in the fall of 2025. Changes that could be accu­rate­ly char­ac­ter­izes as a whole­sale gut­ting the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty stan­dards that were pre­vi­ous­ly in place, all osten­si­bly done with the goal of ensur­ing the com­pa­nies par­tic­i­pat­ing in the DOE’s exper­i­ment reac­tor pro­gram with the goal of hav­ing at least sev­er­al work­ing pro­to­types func­tion­al by July 4, 2026, an incred­i­bly ambi­tious time frame. The DOE’s rules pre­vi­ous­ly just applied to reac­tors being devel­oped by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on fed­er­al prop­er­ty. Pres­i­dent Trump’s exec­u­tive orders signed in May of 2025 expand­ed the scope of the DOE reg­u­la­to­ry domain to pri­vate­ly devel­oped nuclear reac­tors on pri­vate prop­er­ty, effec­tive­ly tak­ing the kind of reac­tor devel­op­ment com­pa­nies like Val­or Atom­ics are doing out of the reg­u­la­to­ry scope of the NRC and under the umbrel­la of the DOE with the new­ly gut­ted rules. Rule changes include strip­ping out the “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA) guide­lines for the release of radi­a­tion which requires nuclear reac­tor oper­a­tors to keep lev­els of radi­a­tion expo­sure below the legal lim­it when­ev­er they can, but that’s no longer the case for these pri­vate­ly devel­oped reac­tors oper­at­ing under the DOE’s purview. Rules on the num­ber of hours work­ers can work have also been gut­ted, mean­ing work­ers will be allowed to spend­ing longer hours get­ting exposed to high­er lev­els of radi­a­tion. Engi­neers who spe­cial­ize on each aspect of the reac­tor’s safe­ty sys­tems are no longer required, along with the require­ment to use the “best avail­able tech­nol­o­gy” to pro­tect water sup­plies from the dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­i­al. The new DOE rules now says only that radioac­tive dis­charges into san­i­tary sew­ers “should be avoid­ed,” with sim­i­lar changes to restric­tions on ground­wa­ter dis­charges, and pro­tec­tions for the envi­ron­ment. And if all of these changes aren’t enough to sat­is­fy the com­pa­nies par­tic­i­pat­ing in the DOE’s new pro­gram, there are DOE concierges assigned to each of the com­pa­nies who answer direct­ly to the Sec­re­tary of Ener­gy. In oth­er words, don’t be shocked if we learn the nuclear safe­ty rules that were gut­ted in secret in the Fall of 2025 end up get­ting secret­ly gut­ted again. And also try not to be shocked with the new data cen­ter built in your town is pow­ered by one of the small nuclear reac­tors devel­oped by this fed­er­al crash course pro­gram.

* August 3, 2026: Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire leads $1B round for nuclear start­up Valar Atom­ics:

And in our final arti­cle are excerpt, we’ll take a quick look at a recent update on Valar Atom­ic­s’s fundrais­ing sta­tus. It turns out the com­pa­ny just com­plet­ed a $1 bil­lion round of fundrais­ing, with a report­ed $6 bil­lion val­u­a­tion. That’s after the com­pa­ny demon­strat­ed the abil­i­ty to pow­er an Nvidia Black­well high per­for­mance AI com­put­ing clus­ter back in June, estab­lish­ing the ‘crit­i­cal­i­ty’ thresh­old before the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s July 4th dead­line. Valar Atom­ics and Nvidia then signed a deal to devel­op a water­less 30MW AI fac­to­ry. In oth­er words, Valar Atom­ics — a com­pa­ny found­ed by a high school dropout with no back­ground in nuclear physics — is already lead­ing the race to pro­vide nuclear pow­er for the AI econ­o­my of tomor­row.

It’s the Theo­Bros net­work in action, cap­tur­ing tomor­row’s econ­o­my, fol­lowed up with a cap­ture of pol­i­tics and soci­ety. That’s the ‘Theo­Bros’ sto­ry we’re going to be exam­in­ing below. It’s not so much about the rise of the ‘Theo­Bros’. The ele­ments that com­prise the ‘Theo­Bro’ move­ment — tech oli­garchs and Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist theo­crat­ic pow­er bro­kers — were already supreme­ly wealthy and pow­er­ful. It’s more about a con­geal­ing of goals and strate­gies among these dif­fer­ent ele­ments, with a shared vision of a post-demo­c­ra­t­ic future. A world where a shared gov­ern­ment is replaced by pri­vate­ly-owned-and-oper­at­ed tech­no-fas­cist states. Maybe those tech­no-fas­cist states will exalt the cor­po­rate own­ers like Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan imag­ines for San Fran­cis­co. Or per­haps they will be Domin­ion­ist theoc­ra­cies like the one Andrew Isker is try­ing to build in Ten­nessee. Theoc­ra­cies where the teach­ings of preach­ers like Doug Wil­son — who teach­es that the Con­fed­er­a­cy was a Bib­li­cal­ly aligned soci­ety — reign supreme. A Net­work State of dic­ta­tor­ships, where you’ll, at best, have the choice of choos­ing which dic­ta­tor­ship to live under. But who knows if even that will be an option for you. It won’t be up to you.

1789 Capital: one of the Venture Capital Arms of the TheoBros Agenda, Pitching Itself as the New Carlyle Group, with Don Jr. Already a Partner

Ok, start­ing off, let’s take a look at 1789 Cap­i­tal, the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm found­ed by Chris Buskirk, Omar Malik, and Rebekah Mer­cer in 2022, that has been tout­ing itself as the new ‘Car­lyle Group’, a ref­er­ence to the fir­m’s remark­able polit­i­cal con­nec­tions. And with Buskirk and Mer­cer hav­ing already found­ed the MAGA-con­nect­ed Rock­bridge Net­work mega-donor out­fit back in 2019, and Don­ald Trump Jr. already a part­ner at the firm, it’s clear the Car­lyle Group brag isn’t just a boast. This real­ly is one of the most polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed ven­ture cap­i­tal firms for the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Assets under man­age­ment jumped from $200 mil­lion to over $3.5 bil­lion over the past year, with a goal of $10 bil­lion by the end of the next few years (i.e., the end of Trump’s sec­ond term), so we should­n’t be sur­prised to dis­cov­er that 1789 Cap­i­tal has already been invest­ing in many of the same com­pa­nies as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. 1789 Cap­i­tal does­n’t just have a ‘Theo­Bro’ vision for the future. It has the mon­ey and polit­i­cal con­nec­tions to make that future a real­i­ty:

Finan­cial Times

Don­ald Trump Jr’s VC firm touts ‘patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism’ in invest­ment push

1789 Cap­i­tal is seek­ing to grow its assets to $10bn after build­ing sprawl­ing AI port­fo­lio

Alex Rogers in Wash­ing­ton and George Ham­mond in San Fran­cis­co
Pub­lished May 17 2026

Don­ald Trump Jr’s ven­ture cap­i­tal firm is build­ing an invest­ment empire around “patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism”, in the lat­est effort by an enti­ty tied to the president’s fam­i­ly to cap­i­talise on his Amer­i­ca-first agen­da.

1789 Cap­i­tal, which counts Trump Jr as a part­ner, told the FT that its assets under man­age­ment had jumped from $200mn to $3.5bn over the past year after going on a deal­mak­ing spree with many of the lead­ing pri­vate­ly held AI com­pa­nies.

Paul Abrahimzadeh, a 1789 Cap­i­tal part­ner, said the goal was to reach $10bn in the next few years, estab­lish­ing the firm beyond the Trump era.

He pitched the firm as a new Car­lyle Group, the Wash­ing­ton-based invest­ment firm known for its con­tacts in Wash­ing­ton and once nick­named “the ex-president’s club” after pre­vi­ous­ly count­ing George HW Bush and John Major as advis­ers.

...

The plans for Palm Beach, Flori­da-based 1789 Cap­i­tal, which Abrahimzadeh described as build­ing a “gen­er­a­tional Amer­i­can finan­cial plat­form”, are the lat­est exam­ple of how enti­ties with ties to Don­ald Trump’s fam­i­ly are ben­e­fit­ing from the president’s poli­cies, par­tic­u­lar­ly his vocal sup­port for AI and defence com­pa­nies.

...

Over the past year, 1789 Cap­i­tal has bought stakes in some of the most sought-after late-stage pri­vate com­pa­nies: soft­ware com­pa­ny Data­bricks, expense man­age­ment start-up Ramp, HR plat­form Deel, data cen­tre com­pa­ny Cru­soe, chip design­er Groq and fron­tier lab Reflec­tion AI, accord­ing to Pitch­Book.

In a sign of how 1789 Cap­i­tal has ben­e­fit­ed from its polit­i­cal con­nec­tions, Mohsen Moaza­mi, pres­i­dent of Groq’s inter­na­tion­al busi­ness, said he first met the 1789 part­ners at a din­ner at Don­ald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, which was attend­ed by the pres­i­dent and Elon Musk.

The firm got an “A‑plus” in con­nect­ing its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies with influ­en­tial peo­ple both in the US and abroad, he said. Moaza­mi added that Don­ald Trump Jr was a big asset to the firm, whose name “can­not be ignored”. But he warned that “if the pen­du­lum swings [polit­i­cal­ly] you may get a mag­ni­fy­ing glass on you”.

1789 Cap­i­tal has also invest­ed in Musk’s xAI and SpaceX, which is expect­ed to go pub­lic next month at a val­u­a­tion of $1.75tn. Oth­er invest­ments include defence start-ups Anduril, Hadri­an Automa­tion and Vul­can Ele­ments, a Flori­da real estate fund, and pre­dic­tion mar­ket Poly­mar­ket.

1789 Capital’s lat­est wind­fall is chip­mak­er Cere­bras, which surged to a mar­ket val­u­a­tion of $60bn after its Wall Street debut this week. The firm invest­ed in 2025 when Cere­bras was val­ued at $8bn and in recent months when it was val­ued at $23bn.

The group’s AI buy­ing spree marks a broad expan­sion since its found­ing about three years ago by Omeed Malik, Chris Buskirk and Rebekah Mer­cer. Its first invest­ment was Tuck­er Carlson’s media com­pa­ny in 2023. After Trump won the 2024 elec­tion, 1789 Cap­i­tal hired Don­ald Trump Jr and invest­ed in pre­scrip­tion drug deliv­ery com­pa­ny Blink Health.

Abrahimzadeh joined Malik, a friend from their time at Col­gate Uni­ver­si­ty three decades ago, and 1789 Cap­i­tal in 2025 after work­ing as Citigroup’s co-head of equi­ty cap­i­tal mar­kets in North Amer­i­ca.

The firm’s polit­i­cal con­nec­tions in Trump’s Wash­ing­ton go well beyond employ­ing the president’s son. Malik is a Trump donor and was part of the 2024 effort to bring Robert F Kennedy Jr into the Trump tent.

Last year, Malik and Trump Jr launched a pri­vate mem­bers club in Wash­ing­ton called Exec­u­tive Branch along with Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of real estate tycoon and the president’s spe­cial envoy Steve Witkoff.

Buskirk co-found­ed an influ­en­tial donor net­work with JD Vance, now the US vice-pres­i­dent, backed by Peter Thiel, who once employed Vance. 1789 Cap­i­tal has invest­ed in many of the same com­pa­nies as Thiel’s Founders Fund.

...

————

“Don­ald Trump Jr’s VC firm touts ‘patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism’ in invest­ment push” by Alex Rogers and George Ham­mond; Finan­cial Times; 05/17/2026

“He pitched the firm as a new Car­lyle Group, the Wash­ing­ton-based invest­ment firm known for its con­tacts in Wash­ing­ton and once nick­named “the ex-president’s club” after pre­vi­ous­ly count­ing George HW Bush and John Major as advis­ers.”

A new Car­lyle Group. That’s how 1789 Cap­i­tal part­ner Paul Abrahimzadeh char­ac­ter­ized his firm in an arti­cle describ­ing the astro­nom­i­cal growth in the fir­m’s cap­i­tal in just the last year. Explo­sive growth tied, in part, to its strate­gic invest­ments in a slew of AI-relat­ed firms whose val­u­a­tions have, them­selves, tak­en off over the last year, includ­ing Elon Musk’s soon-to-IPO SpaceX fol­low­ing its merg­er with xAI. And then there’s Poly­mar­ket, the ‘bet on any­thing’ app that placed Don Jr on its advi­sor board after 1789’s August 2025 invest­ment and is now sus­pect­ed of facil­i­tat­ing ram­pant high-pay­out insid­er trad­ing on glob­al events by Trump insid­er cir­cles. From an polit­i­cal insid­er stand­point, 1789 isn’t sim­ply striv­ing to become the new Car­lyle Group. It’s already the Car­lyle Group and posi­tioned to ride both the AI bub­ble and MAGA-cor­rup­tion bub­ble to their heights and what­ev­er comes after:

...
Over the past year, 1789 Cap­i­tal has bought stakes in some of the most sought-after late-stage pri­vate com­pa­nies: soft­ware com­pa­ny Data­bricks, expense man­age­ment start-up Ramp, HR plat­form Deel, data cen­tre com­pa­ny Cru­soe, chip design­er Groq and fron­tier lab Reflec­tion AI, accord­ing to Pitch­Book.

In a sign of how 1789 Cap­i­tal has ben­e­fit­ed from its polit­i­cal con­nec­tions, Mohsen Moaza­mi, pres­i­dent of Groq’s inter­na­tion­al busi­ness, said he first met the 1789 part­ners at a din­ner at Don­ald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, which was attend­ed by the pres­i­dent and Elon Musk.

...

1789 Cap­i­tal has also invest­ed in Musk’s xAI and SpaceX, which is expect­ed to go pub­lic next month at a val­u­a­tion of $1.75tn. Oth­er invest­ments include defence start-ups Anduril, Hadri­an Automa­tion and Vul­can Ele­ments, a Flori­da real estate fund, and pre­dic­tion mar­ket Poly­mar­ket.

1789 Capital’s lat­est wind­fall is chip­mak­er Cere­bras, which surged to a mar­ket val­u­a­tion of $60bn after its Wall Street debut this week. The firm invest­ed in 2025 when Cere­bras was val­ued at $8bn and in recent months when it was val­ued at $23bn.
...

And that stratos­pher­ic rise of 1789 Cap­i­tal is, of course, inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined with the firms deep con­nec­tions to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and Trump fam­i­ly. Ties that include hav­ing Don Jr as a part­ner in the firm. But also ties to the ‘Sil­i­con Val­ley’ side of the MAGA uni­verse through Chris Buskirk and his sta­tus as one of Peter Thiel’s ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist avatars. It’s not a coin­ci­dence 1789 Cap­i­tal has invest­ed in many of the same com­pa­nies as Thiel’s Founders Fund. Buskirk’s sta­tus as a MAGA-world ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist is very much a Thiel-backed project, which makes 1789 Cap­i­tal a Thiel-backed project too. Much like the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, which could be seen as a Thiel-spon­sored ongo­ing invest­ment. Thiel does­n’t uni­lat­er­al­ly con­trol the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. But he has a big seat at the table. Big­ger than almost any­one. And, of course, this is the same Peter Thiel who has been giv­ing talks to sell-out audi­ences where he shares his view that the mod­ern-day man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Antichrist is cham­pi­on cau­tion when it comes to tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, a world­view that appears to be Thiel’s update to Carl Schmit­t’s anti-Antichrist world­view that drove Schmit­t’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of Nazi Ger­many as a nec­es­sary bul­wark against the Com­mu­nist-dri­ven Antichrist forces of that era. Peter Thiel, with his bizarre pro-oli­garch author­i­tar­i­an lib­er­tar­i­an the­ol­o­gy, is kind of the liv­ing embod­i­ment of the ‘Theo­Bros’ move­ment. With Chris Buskirk oper­at­ing as one of his many avatars. But then there’s Rebekah Mer­cer, daugh­ter of tech bil­lion­aire Robert Mer­cer, and half of the father-daugh­ter polit­i­cal duo who orches­trat­ed the 2016 Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca scan­dal and have become a pil­lar of the MAGA-defined mega-donor world. This is a ven­ture cap­i­tal firm posi­tioned to take advan­tage of an orgy of AI oppor­tu­ni­ties and polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion:

...
1789 Cap­i­tal, which counts Trump Jr as a part­ner, told the FT that its assets under man­age­ment had jumped from $200mn to $3.5bn over the past year after going on a deal­mak­ing spree with many of the lead­ing pri­vate­ly held AI com­pa­nies.

Paul Abrahimzadeh, a 1789 Cap­i­tal part­ner, said the goal was to reach $10bn in the next few years, estab­lish­ing the firm beyond the Trump era.

...

The firm got an “A‑plus” in con­nect­ing its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies with influ­en­tial peo­ple both in the US and abroad, he said. Moaza­mi added that Don­ald Trump Jr was a big asset to the firm, whose name “can­not be ignored”. But he warned that “if the pen­du­lum swings [polit­i­cal­ly] you may get a mag­ni­fy­ing glass on you”.

...

The group’s AI buy­ing spree marks a broad expan­sion since its found­ing about three years ago by Omeed Malik, Chris Buskirk and Rebekah Mer­cer. Its first invest­ment was Tuck­er Carlson’s media com­pa­ny in 2023. After Trump won the 2024 elec­tion, 1789 Cap­i­tal hired Don­ald Trump Jr and invest­ed in pre­scrip­tion drug deliv­ery com­pa­ny Blink Health.

...

The firm’s polit­i­cal con­nec­tions in Trump’s Wash­ing­ton go well beyond employ­ing the president’s son. Malik is a Trump donor and was part of the 2024 effort to bring Robert F Kennedy Jr into the Trump tent.

Last year, Malik and Trump Jr launched a pri­vate mem­bers club in Wash­ing­ton called Exec­u­tive Branch along with Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of real estate tycoon and the president’s spe­cial envoy Steve Witkoff.

Buskirk co-found­ed an influ­en­tial donor net­work with JD Vance, now the US vice-pres­i­dent, backed by Peter Thiel, who once employed Vance. 1789 Cap­i­tal has invest­ed in many of the same com­pa­nies as Thiel’s Founders Fund.
...

Yes, adding Don Jr. on as a part­ner is most def­i­nite­ly a big asset to the firm, whose name “can­not be ignored” while his father remains pres­i­dent. But the com­pa­ny’s ties to MAGA aren’t lim­it­ed to Don Jr.

The Rockbridge Network: the MAGA Mega-Donor Network Dedicated to Building The Future of MAGA. A Future of ‘Aristopopulism’ and Unrestrained Capitalism

And that intro­duc­tion to 1789 Cap­i­tal brings us to a group that could be seen as the polit­i­cal wing of the same under­ly­ing move­ment. That would be the Rock­bridge Net­work, a MAGA mega-donor group found­ed by Chris Buskirk and Rebekah Mer­cer back in 2019, with Peter Thiel and JD Vance con­ven­ing the open­ing gath­er­ing. But it’s not just a mega-donor net­work. It’s a group with a shared vision of a post-Trump future for the MAGA move­ment. A future led by a cap­i­tal­ist aris­toc­ra­cy yet sup­port­ed by the mass­es through a kind of ‘aristopop­ulism’ the group intends to cul­ti­vate. And if ‘aristopop­ulism’ sounds like a fan­cy term for fas­cism, that’s because this is a fas­cist net­work plan­ning a fas­cist future:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Inside the bil­lion­aire net­work shap­ing MAGA’s post-Trump future

Chris Buskirk put tech elites at the cen­ter of pow­er in Trump’s Wash­ing­ton. His efforts are ground­ed in a con­tro­ver­sial the­o­ry — an “aris­toc­ra­cy” is need­ed to move the coun­try for­ward.

By Eliz­a­beth Dwoskin
Novem­ber 4, 2025

In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rent­ed a resort out­side the 100-per­son town of Rock­bridge, Ohio, for a sum­mit to secure the future of the MAGA move­ment. They aimed to turn a sin­gu­lar can­di­date — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — into an endur­ing polit­i­cal coali­tion, with a pipeline of vot­ers, donors and can­di­dates that would cement a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the GOP.

Con­vened by Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel and JD Vance, then an investor who had writ­ten a best-sell­ing mem­oir, the meet­ing includ­ed hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mer­cer, then-Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son and econ­o­mist Oren Cass, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the meet­ing. The peo­ple spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe the pri­vate gath­er­ing, details of which have not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

But the per­son in the room who would solid­i­fy the group’s ambi­tions was decid­ed­ly low­er pro­file: an Ari­zona insur­ance entre­pre­neur and con­ser­v­a­tive media fig­ure named Chris Buskirk.

Today, Buskirk helms the Rock­bridge Net­work, a secre­tive orga­ni­za­tion birthed out of the week­end gath­er­ing that has estab­lished itself as one of the most influ­en­tial forces in GOP pol­i­tics. Polit­i­cal strate­gists cred­it the close-knit net­work of busi­ness­men-cum-donors with help­ing fuel the president’s reelec­tion last year and pro­pelling one of its own — Vance — into the vice pres­i­den­cy.

With sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from tech lead­ers, Rock­bridge aims to equip MAGA to out­live Trump. The group has no web­site or pub­lic-fac­ing enti­ty, but it has assem­bled poll­sters, data crunch­ers, online adver­tis­ers and even a doc­u­men­tary film arm. It is gear­ing up to deploy its arse­nal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 pres­i­den­tial con­test, when many Rock­bridge mem­bers hope Vance will be the nom­i­nee. The group has assem­bled a data­base with deep pro­files of poten­tial vot­ers through non­po­lit­i­cal mem­ber­ships, includ­ing out­doors groups and church­es, accord­ing to a per­son direct­ly famil­iar with the orga­ni­za­tion.

Buskirk’s ties to Trump’s orbit go beyond Rock­bridge. 1789 Cap­i­tal, the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm he co-found­ed with investor Omeed Malik, focus­es on what the part­ners call “patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism” and now counts Don­ald Trump Jr. as a part­ner. The pair — along with admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and friends — recent­ly launched Exec­u­tive Branch, a $500,000-a-head mem­ber­ship club for Trump-sup­port­ing busi­ness lead­ers to hob­nob in D.C.

These orga­ni­za­tions have a col­lec­tive ambi­tion, accord­ing to Buskirk, which is to give the busi­ness­peo­ple he sees as vital to the country’s future a role shap­ing gov­ern­ment and last­ing polit­i­cal pow­er.

Their efforts are ground­ed in a con­tro­ver­sial the­o­ry of social progress: That a select group of elites are exact­ly the right peo­ple to move the coun­try for­ward, a posi­tion Buskirk argues is not in defi­ance of MAGA’s pop­ulism. Putting indus­try lead­ers in posi­tions of pow­er is a hall­mark of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy — from Com­merce Sec­re­tary Howard Lut­nick to tech titan Elon Musk — and Buskirk says the MAGA move­ment has ener­gized a new gen­er­a­tion of stew­ards for the coun­try.

His var­i­ous projects echo what some on the right call “aristopop­ulism” and aim to build a bridge between wealthy cap­i­tal­ists and the work­ing-class peo­ple they intend to rep­re­sent, accord­ing to inter­views with Buskirk and nine oth­er peo­ple in his inner cir­cle, prof­itably rein­dus­tri­al­iz­ing the coun­try and tying their inter­ests to that of their base.

“You either have an extrac­tive elite — an oli­garchy — or you have a pro­duc­tive elite — an aris­toc­ra­cy — in every soci­ety,” he said in an inter­view in his office in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona.

Many inno­v­a­tive peri­ods in his­to­ry have been dri­ven by such an aris­toc­ra­cy, Buskirk argues, a point he makes in his 2023 book, “Amer­i­ca and the Art of the Pos­si­ble.” “In the clas­sic Greek sense,” the term isn’t pejo­ra­tive, he says, but “a prop­er elite that takes care of the coun­try and gov­erns it well so that every­one pros­pers.”

As Buskirk sees it, he has approached the polit­i­cal mar­ket as a busi­ness­man, iden­ti­fy­ing a gap and tak­ing delib­er­ate steps to close it. The right had what he calls a “coor­di­na­tion prob­lem” — vot­ers who had unex­pect­ed­ly elect­ed Trump and a nascent group of wealthy peo­ple who had become alien­at­ed by the pro­gres­sive left. But the sides lacked orga­niz­ing infra­struc­ture.

Buskirk uses a one-lin­er to describe his efforts: “Brains-plus-mon­ey-plus-base.”

Oth­ers describe his impact more force­ful­ly. Though peo­ple still see Trump’s sup­port as “a cult of per­son­al­i­ty,” said Cass, chief econ­o­mist of the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank Amer­i­can Com­pass, a pow­er­ful ecosys­tem now backs the MAGA move­ment.

“Chris is the con­ven­er of that ecosys­tem,” he added.

...

Rel­a­tive­ly unknown out­side his rar­i­fied cir­cle of busi­ness lead­ers and tac­ti­cians, Buskirk is an unusu­al fig­ure to step into a role once dom­i­nat­ed by the Koch broth­ers, the deep-pock­et­ed Repub­li­can megadonors who have opposed many of Trump’s trade poli­cies. He is not a meme-throw­ing MAGA fire­brand; friends describe Buskirk as a dogged tac­ti­cian who is fierce­ly per­cep­tive. He was “the first mover” to rec­og­nize that there were going to be thou­sands of well-off peo­ple who “no longer felt at home in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty,” said Omeed Malik, Buskirk’s part­ner and co-founder of 1789 Cap­i­tal.

...

Out­side of elec­toral pol­i­tics, Buskirk’s projects aim to push unre­strained cap­i­tal­ism into Amer­i­can life. 1789 Cap­i­tal, he says, serves as a test­ing ground for the idea that home­grown inno­va­tion can revive America’s indus­tri­al base, what the firm’s part­ners pitch on their web­site as “the next chap­ter of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism.” The firm, which has invest­ed in rough­ly 30 com­pa­nies, has fund­ed start-ups tied to anti-woke pol­i­tics and to the Trump administration’s eco­nom­ic agen­da, includ­ing com­pa­nies that mine rare-earth min­er­als, build AI fac­to­ries for war or 3D-print rock­et fuel.

As Buskirk’s net­work has become entwined with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, the cohort has formed a par­ty cir­cuit for Washington’s new pow­er bro­ker class. Rockbridge’s semi­an­nu­al con­fer­ence, at the Ritz Carl­ton on Key Bis­cayne in April, which fea­tured MAHA-themed breath­work and yoga ses­sions, includ­ed Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Scott Bessent, Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence Tul­si Gab­bard and Mid­dle East Spe­cial Envoy Steve Witkoff. Buskirk’s friend, Health and Human Ser­vices Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attend­ed the open­ing of Exec­u­tive Branch in June, which serves high-end wine and sushi but no seed oils.

Those in Buskirk’s net­work view their grow­ing clout as evi­dence of gov­ern­ment final­ly work­ing to cheer­lead rather than chas­tise society’s inno­va­tors — unleash­ing a pent-up eco­nom­ic engine that they say was sup­pressed dur­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion.

Yet in enti­ties like Rock­bridge and 1789, some crit­ics see some­thing more per­ni­cious — the rise of a group of unelect­ed Amer­i­can oli­garchs who are under­min­ing Trump’s promis­es to ben­e­fit work­ing peo­ple. Since com­ing into office, the Trump White House has rolled out a raft of new poli­cies that ben­e­fit tech entre­pre­neurs, includ­ing lift­ing export con­trols on AI tech­nol­o­gy and sign­ing exec­u­tive orders and leg­is­la­tion pro­mot­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy. “Pres­i­dent Trump’s first and only focus is restor­ing pros­per­i­ty for the work­ing-class Amer­i­cans who resound­ing­ly re-elect­ed him back to the White House,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a state­ment.

Since Trump Jr. joined 1789 as a part­ner in Novem­ber, the firm has raised hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars and now has more than $1 bil­lion in assets, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the firm. This sum­mer the gov­ern­ment dropped two Biden-era fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tions into Poly­mar­ket, a blockchain-based bet­ting start-up that 1789 has invest­ed in and where Trump Jr. now sits on an advi­so­ry board.

“It’s gen­er­al­ly the case that what’s good for busi­ness is good for Amer­i­ca, but I don’t think the peo­ple sur­round­ing the pres­i­dent are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Amer­i­can busi­ness,” said Michael Strain, direc­tor of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy stud­ies at the right-lean­ing Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, which has received fund­ing from the Koch’s phil­an­thropic net­work. “The government’s job is to advance the pros­per­i­ty of the nation and not the pros­per­i­ty of wealthy indi­vid­u­als, founders, and exec­u­tives.”

To Buskirk, these cri­tiques miss the point. He says he is deter­mined to bring the busi­ness­peo­ple that put Trump back in the White House to Wash­ing­ton, even if he doesn’t much like the city. He describes pol­i­tics as “venal” and D.C. think tanks as “every cliché, squared,” say­ing the cul­ture must be rebuilt from the ground up.

...

‘A coor­di­na­tion prob­lem’

Ask Buskirk to rat­tle off where he is on any giv­en day and the 56-year-old father of four might name sev­en dif­fer­ent cities. He splits his time between his Scotts­dale fam­i­ly office; Palm Beach, where 1789 Cap­i­tal is head­quar­tered; Dal­las; San Fran­cis­co; Austin and, reluc­tant­ly, D.C. He says he is on the phone from the moment he wakes up until bed­time, always mak­ing time for Vance when the vice president’s sched­ule allows.

But Buskirk’s ear­ly life was spent almost entire­ly in Ari­zona. Though he was born on a mil­i­tary base in Ger­many, where his father was sta­tioned in the Army dur­ing the Cold War, he grew up in Scotts­dale. He spent week­ends work­ing at the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny, which insured homes and small busi­ness­es across the state. The house­hold was “patri­ot­ic to the nth degree,” Buskirk recalls, and they were stal­wart sub­scribers to the con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine the Nation­al Review.

As a young adult, Buskirk pur­sued a master’s degree in polit­i­cal the­o­ry and interned at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, the right-wing think tank inspired by the polit­i­cal philoso­pher Leo Strauss.

But he quit both the think tank and the degree, judg­ing acad­e­mia too imprac­ti­cal. He returned home to Scotts­dale to start an insur­ance firm, doing under­writ­ing for ambu­lance ven­dors and oth­er uncon­ven­tion­al busi­ness­es. Over the next two decades, he built and sold four oth­er insur­ance-relat­ed com­pa­nies.

His fam­i­ly had become alien­at­ed from pol­i­tics. The Buskirks can­celed their Nation­al Review sub­scrip­tions in the mid-2000s, dis­gust­ed by a Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment they believed had led the coun­try astray. The Iraq War had become “a smoke screen,” Buskirk said, dis­tract­ing from the stark eco­nom­ic prob­lems emerg­ing before his eyes.

...

When Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma came on the scene in the late aughts, Buskirk watched as he elec­tri­fied the cul­ture. In con­trast, he felt the GOP and its insti­tu­tions had lan­guished on autopi­lot.

Dur­ing those years, Buskirk had sold off the last of the insur­ance busi­ness­es he had built with his father. By the time Trump came down the gold­en esca­la­tor at Trump Tow­er to announce his pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy in 2015, Buskirk had more time on his hands.

...

In July 2016, Buskirk found­ed an online mag­a­zine, Amer­i­can Great­ness, which high­light­ed an “unde­ni­able” need for a new artic­u­la­tion of con­ser­vatism. It received fund­ing from Thiel, who had shocked lib­er­al Sil­i­con Val­ley with his mil­lion-dol­lar dona­tion to Trump and had recent­ly been intro­duced to Buskirk by a friend. “The soil of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment is exhaust­ed,” the edi­tors wrote in an open­ing man­i­festo. “It needs fer­til­iza­tion, resow­ing, and dili­gent cul­ti­va­tion if it is to thrive again.”

Thiel put Buskirk in touch with his pro­tégé, “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy” author Vance. Vance and Buskirk became fast friends.

The men spent a year and a half “just nerd­ing out,” with no par­tic­u­lar end in mind, Buskirk recalls, just a feel­ing that “we should cre­ate some­thing.”

In 2019, Vance and Thiel sum­moned a dozen or so peo­ple to an inn in rur­al Ohio, locat­ed just out­side the tiny town that would become the organization’s name­sake. Some atten­dees were staunch­ly pro-Trump, like Buskirk. Oth­ers had their doubts. But all of them felt that any suc­cess­es that took place dur­ing the Trump years could eas­i­ly become a fluke if a Demo­c­rat retook the White House, said Blake Mas­ters, an investor who met Buskirk that week­end.

“We spent so much time bemoan­ing the effec­tive­ness of the left,” Mas­ters adds. “They had a pret­ty ter­ri­ble agen­da … but they are very effec­tive at orga­niz­ing. … The right had just been coast­ing for a long time, and its insti­tu­tions had just start­ed to decay.”

It became to clear to some of those present that MAGA had a net­work prob­lem. While donors on the right, such as the Kochs, had spent years build­ing their orga­ni­za­tions, wealthy peo­ple who sup­port­ed Trump and the emerg­ing con­stel­la­tion of right-wing view­points he rep­re­sent­ed “didn’t real­ly know each oth­er,” Buskirk said. And peo­ple who had vot­ed for Trump — includ­ing a work­ing-class cohort — weren’t orga­nized either.

“There’s no coor­di­na­tion. No man­age­ment. No plan­ning. It all just kind of hap­pened,” he recalled. “What if we just said, okay, look, these are two prob­lems that, if solved, would make every­thing else work bet­ter and be more effec­tive. Let’s set about solv­ing that.”

The mak­ing of a move­ment

Buskirk returned from the sum­mit ener­gized, and he became a stu­dent of polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing. He start­ed from first prin­ci­ples, read­ing “Roots to Pow­er,” an influ­en­tial left-wing orga­niz­ing man­u­al from the ’80s.

...

Buskirk will not go into many details about Rock­bridge oper­a­tions, but says that on a high lev­el he devised a clas­sic online sales fun­nel to entice peo­ple to join social media groups based on affil­i­a­tions. This includ­ed small busi­ness own­ers, out­doors­men and church atten­dees.

This is the oppo­site of how polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions tend to func­tion, per­suad­ing peo­ple to come to your side by “brute force,” Buskirk said, blast­ing out ads right before an elec­tion. Rock­bridge, by con­trast, took a more grad­ual approach: “Build a trust rela­tion­ship and give peo­ple some sort of ben­e­fit. Only then you can ask them to do some­thing.”

By April 2022, Vance was mak­ing his first, long-shot bid for polit­i­cal office. Malik host­ed a small fundrais­er for him at a restau­rant in Palm Beach. The investor had relo­cat­ed from New York City the pre­vi­ous year, after defect­ing from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty over coro­n­avirus restric­tions and tech plat­forms’ polic­ing of speech about the coro­n­avirus. Buskirk attend­ed, along with Don Jr.

The group hopped over to Mar-a-Lago, where Buskirk was throw­ing a Rock­bridge con­fer­ence.

...

Malik and Buskirk went into busi­ness togeth­er the fol­low­ing year, start­ing 1789 Cap­i­tal, named after the year the Bill of Rights was pro­posed. It ini­tial­ly focused on what Malik had dubbed “anti-woke com­pa­nies.” Their first invest­ment was in Last Coun­try Inc., a new media and enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny found­ed by Tuck­er Carl­son, who had been pushed out of Fox News. The part­ners went on to invest in GrabA­Gun, an online gun mar­ket­place; Enhanced Games, which allows ath­letes to take per­for­mance-enhanc­ing drugs and Hadri­an, a start-up mak­ing AI fac­to­ries for defense. (The part­ners have also tak­en posi­tions in three of Elon Musk’s com­pa­nies: SpaceX, Neu­ralink and xAI.)

Will Edwards, whose Dal­las-based start-up Fire­hawk Aero­space spe­cial­izes in 3D-print­ing sol­id rock­et fuel to be used in mis­siles, said many Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists had reject­ed his pitch­es out­right because they didn’t want to fund com­pa­nies sell­ing exclu­sive­ly to the mil­i­tary.

...

Buskirk, who has since led a fund­ing round that put $60 mil­lion into Fire­hawk, took a par­tic­u­lar inter­est, trav­el­ing to Dal­las to tour Edward’s fac­to­ry, where, he said, work­ers with­out col­lege degrees can make six-fig­ure incomes.

Buskirk believes Edwards’s com­pa­ny is eco­nom­ic proof of the investors’ polit­i­cal argu­ments: The U.S. is unlike­ly to make iPhones and Nike shoes again, he says. But it can revive its indus­tri­al base — par­tic­u­lar­ly in nation­al defense — and help restore the mid­dle class.

This goal is one Pres­i­dent Joe Biden also tried to accom­plish when he signed the $52 bil­lion CHIPS Act in 2022, which aimed to re-shore advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs with the largest sup­port pack­age for domes­tic chips man­u­fac­tur­ing in a gen­er­a­tion. Trump has crit­i­cized the grants as waste­ful and clawed back some of the funds.

Strain, the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute econ­o­mist, said the polit­i­cal rhetoric of the MAGA move­ment mis­con­strues the nation’s actu­al eco­nom­ic pic­ture. Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion — and not out­sourc­ing — has been the main dri­ver of the loss of man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs, he said, adding that many of those argu­ing that home­grown man­u­fac­tur­ing will revive Amer­i­ca are the same investors push­ing major labor dis­place­ment through arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Cass, of Amer­i­can Com­pass, said the scale of invest­ment required to rebuild work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties is far greater than what 1789 or oth­er like-mind­ed investors can spend. But the exper­i­ments Buskirk and his part­ners are fund­ing are impor­tant, he said, because they “blaze a trail.”

...

Today, the group’s vibe is euphor­ic. Inter­est has surged since the elec­tion, accord­ing to Buskirk, with rough­ly half of new mem­bers com­ing from the tech indus­try. Sev­er­al of the group’s mem­bers are bil­lion­aires; promi­nent investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are already mem­bers.

Still, Fire­hawk founder Edwards, who joined Rock­bridge with an invi­ta­tion from Buskirk, said the events feel warm, “like a close group of peo­ple who enjoy each other’s com­pa­ny.” Edwards said he lives in a duplex and dri­ves a Toy­ota. A wide age range is rep­re­sent­ed, includ­ing NextGen, an under-30 divi­sion that includes Buskirk’s son, Chris, a recent col­lege grad­u­ate.

Richard Painter, a cor­po­rate law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta who served as chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House, said this influx of inter­est in Rock­bridge, 1789 and Exec­u­tive Branch, cre­ates the appear­ance of a “pay-to-play” net­work, of peo­ple who are pay­ing to get access to admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials or the Trump fam­i­ly. (He also said he would have advised admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials not to attend these gath­er­ings if they hap­pened in his time.)

...

In a text mes­sage sent while over­seas on busi­ness, he said that Amer­i­can great­ness will only be accom­plished “by the inten­tion­al cul­ti­va­tion of tal­ent­ed, high-agency peo­ple work­ing togeth­er in high-trust envi­ron­ments.”

His book lists his­tor­i­cal moments when elite net­works moved soci­ety for­ward, includ­ing Flo­rence dur­ing the Renais­sance, mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, and the coun­ty of Lan­cashire, Eng­land, dur­ing the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion. The Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment was actu­al­ly “the work of a few dozen peo­ple,” he notes, who “devel­oped long-term friend­ships” at a pri­vate social club called the Select Soci­ety.

...

———–

“Inside the bil­lion­aire net­work shap­ing MAGA’s post-Trump future” By Eliz­a­beth Dwoskin; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 11/04/2025

“With sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from tech lead­ers, Rock­bridge aims to equip MAGA to out­live Trump. The group has no web­site or pub­lic-fac­ing enti­ty, but it has assem­bled poll­sters, data crunch­ers, online adver­tis­ers and even a doc­u­men­tary film arm. It is gear­ing up to deploy its arse­nal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 pres­i­den­tial con­test, when many Rock­bridge mem­bers hope Vance will be the nom­i­nee. The group has assem­bled a data­base with deep pro­files of poten­tial vot­ers through non­po­lit­i­cal mem­ber­ships, includ­ing out­doors groups and church­es, accord­ing to a per­son direct­ly famil­iar with the orga­ni­za­tion.”

The Rock­bridge Net­work is unam­bigu­ous­ly pro-MAGA. But it has big­ger ambi­tions than just boost­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s polit­i­cal agen­da. Rock­bridge is gear­ing up to ensure a MAGA-aligned admin­is­tra­tion replaces Pres­i­dent Trump in 2028 and beyond. The fact that JD Vance is their pre­ferred avatar going for­ward is hard­ly a sur­prise. The ini­tial 2019 gath­er­ing of the group in Rock­bridge, Ohio, was con­vened by Vance and Peter Thiel, with busi­ness­man Chris Buskirk serv­ing as the appar­ent ring­leader. And as we can see, oth­er notable fig­ures attend­ing this inau­gur­al meet­ing include Rebekah Mer­cer, Tuck­er Carl­son, and Oren Cass. To find Mer­cer and Carl­son at an event like this is hard­ly a sur­prise. Nor is it real­ly a sur­prise with Cass, but it’s worth recall­ing how Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass group oper­ates as a kind of pop­ulist astro­turf­ing scam in its push for the cre­ation of a new ‘pro-work­er’ Repub­li­can labor pol­i­cy, a goal that appears to be very much in line with the Rock­bridge agen­da. An agen­da that build­ing deep pro­files of poten­tial vot­ers through non­po­lit­i­cal mem­ber­ships, which sounds a lot like a more sophis­ti­cat­ed ver­sion of the new polit­i­cal coali­tion build­ing that helped pro­pel Trump into the White House in 2016:

...
In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rent­ed a resort out­side the 100-per­son town of Rock­bridge, Ohio, for a sum­mit to secure the future of the MAGA move­ment. They aimed to turn a sin­gu­lar can­di­date — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — into an endur­ing polit­i­cal coali­tion, with a pipeline of vot­ers, donors and can­di­dates that would cement a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the GOP.

Con­vened by Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel and JD Vance, then an investor who had writ­ten a best-sell­ing mem­oir, the meet­ing includ­ed hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mer­cer, then-Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son and econ­o­mist Oren Cass, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the meet­ing. The peo­ple spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe the pri­vate gath­er­ing, details of which have not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

But the per­son in the room who would solid­i­fy the group’s ambi­tions was decid­ed­ly low­er pro­file: an Ari­zona insur­ance entre­pre­neur and con­ser­v­a­tive media fig­ure named Chris Buskirk.

Today, Buskirk helms the Rock­bridge Net­work, a secre­tive orga­ni­za­tion birthed out of the week­end gath­er­ing that has estab­lished itself as one of the most influ­en­tial forces in GOP pol­i­tics. Polit­i­cal strate­gists cred­it the close-knit net­work of busi­ness­men-cum-donors with help­ing fuel the president’s reelec­tion last year and pro­pelling one of its own — Vance — into the vice pres­i­den­cy.

...

In July 2016, Buskirk found­ed an online mag­a­zine, Amer­i­can Great­ness, which high­light­ed an “unde­ni­able” need for a new artic­u­la­tion of con­ser­vatism. It received fund­ing from Thiel, who had shocked lib­er­al Sil­i­con Val­ley with his mil­lion-dol­lar dona­tion to Trump and had recent­ly been intro­duced to Buskirk by a friend. “The soil of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment is exhaust­ed,” the edi­tors wrote in an open­ing man­i­festo. “It needs fer­til­iza­tion, resow­ing, and dili­gent cul­ti­va­tion if it is to thrive again.”

Thiel put Buskirk in touch with his pro­tégé, “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy” author Vance. Vance and Buskirk became fast friends.

The men spent a year and a half “just nerd­ing out,” with no par­tic­u­lar end in mind, Buskirk recalls, just a feel­ing that “we should cre­ate some­thing.”

In 2019, Vance and Thiel sum­moned a dozen or so peo­ple to an inn in rur­al Ohio, locat­ed just out­side the tiny town that would become the organization’s name­sake. Some atten­dees were staunch­ly pro-Trump, like Buskirk. Oth­ers had their doubts. But all of them felt that any suc­cess­es that took place dur­ing the Trump years could eas­i­ly become a fluke if a Demo­c­rat retook the White House, said Blake Mas­ters, an investor who met Buskirk that week­end.

...

Buskirk will not go into many details about Rock­bridge oper­a­tions, but says that on a high lev­el he devised a clas­sic online sales fun­nel to entice peo­ple to join social media groups based on affil­i­a­tions. This includ­ed small busi­ness own­ers, out­doors­men and church atten­dees.

This is the oppo­site of how polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions tend to func­tion, per­suad­ing peo­ple to come to your side by “brute force,” Buskirk said, blast­ing out ads right before an elec­tion. Rock­bridge, by con­trast, took a more grad­ual approach: “Build a trust rela­tion­ship and give peo­ple some sort of ben­e­fit. Only then you can ask them to do some­thing.”
...

As we should expect, the for­ma­tion of the Rock­bridge net­work was just about shap­ing the future of pol­i­tics. With Don­ald Trump Jr. becom­ing a part­ner in Buskirk’s 1789 ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, this kind of net­work­ing was obvi­ous­ly a major mon­ey-mak­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for all involved. But when we see how this net­work is an ‘aristopop­ulist’ that seeks to ‘build bridges’ between work­ing class peo­ple and the select group of elites who have been cho­sen by this net­work to ‘move the coun­try for­ward’, this is project about cap­tur­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pow­er at the same time, in part, by pitch­ing aris­toc­ra­cy as some­how ‘pop­ulist’:

...
Buskirk’s ties to Trump’s orbit go beyond Rock­bridge. 1789 Cap­i­tal, the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm he co-found­ed with investor Omeed Malik, focus­es on what the part­ners call “patri­ot­ic cap­i­tal­ism” and now counts Don­ald Trump Jr. as a part­ner. The pair — along with admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and friends — recent­ly launched Exec­u­tive Branch, a $500,000-a-head mem­ber­ship club for Trump-sup­port­ing busi­ness lead­ers to hob­nob in D.C.

These orga­ni­za­tions have a col­lec­tive ambi­tion, accord­ing to Buskirk, which is to give the busi­ness­peo­ple he sees as vital to the country’s future a role shap­ing gov­ern­ment and last­ing polit­i­cal pow­er.

Their efforts are ground­ed in a con­tro­ver­sial the­o­ry of social progress: That a select group of elites are exact­ly the right peo­ple to move the coun­try for­ward, a posi­tion Buskirk argues is not in defi­ance of MAGA’s pop­ulism. Putting indus­try lead­ers in posi­tions of pow­er is a hall­mark of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy — from Com­merce Sec­re­tary Howard Lut­nick to tech titan Elon Musk — and Buskirk says the MAGA move­ment has ener­gized a new gen­er­a­tion of stew­ards for the coun­try.

His var­i­ous projects echo what some on the right call “aristopop­ulism” and aim to build a bridge between wealthy cap­i­tal­ists and the work­ing-class peo­ple they intend to rep­re­sent, accord­ing to inter­views with Buskirk and nine oth­er peo­ple in his inner cir­cle, prof­itably rein­dus­tri­al­iz­ing the coun­try and tying their inter­ests to that of their base.

“You either have an extrac­tive elite — an oli­garchy — or you have a pro­duc­tive elite — an aris­toc­ra­cy — in every soci­ety,” he said in an inter­view in his office in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona.

Many inno­v­a­tive peri­ods in his­to­ry have been dri­ven by such an aris­toc­ra­cy, Buskirk argues, a point he makes in his 2023 book, “Amer­i­ca and the Art of the Pos­si­ble.” “In the clas­sic Greek sense,” the term isn’t pejo­ra­tive, he says, but “a prop­er elite that takes care of the coun­try and gov­erns it well so that every­one pros­pers.”

...

Out­side of elec­toral pol­i­tics, Buskirk’s projects aim to push unre­strained cap­i­tal­ism into Amer­i­can life. 1789 Cap­i­tal, he says, serves as a test­ing ground for the idea that home­grown inno­va­tion can revive America’s indus­tri­al base, what the firm’s part­ners pitch on their web­site as “the next chap­ter of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism.” The firm, which has invest­ed in rough­ly 30 com­pa­nies, has fund­ed start-ups tied to anti-woke pol­i­tics and to the Trump administration’s eco­nom­ic agen­da, includ­ing com­pa­nies that mine rare-earth min­er­als, build AI fac­to­ries for war or 3D-print rock­et fuel.

...

Yet in enti­ties like Rock­bridge and 1789, some crit­ics see some­thing more per­ni­cious — the rise of a group of unelect­ed Amer­i­can oli­garchs who are under­min­ing Trump’s promis­es to ben­e­fit work­ing peo­ple. Since com­ing into office, the Trump White House has rolled out a raft of new poli­cies that ben­e­fit tech entre­pre­neurs, includ­ing lift­ing export con­trols on AI tech­nol­o­gy and sign­ing exec­u­tive orders and leg­is­la­tion pro­mot­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy. “Pres­i­dent Trump’s first and only focus is restor­ing pros­per­i­ty for the work­ing-class Amer­i­cans who resound­ing­ly re-elect­ed him back to the White House,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a state­ment.

...

Since Trump Jr. joined 1789 as a part­ner in Novem­ber, the firm has raised hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars and now has more than $1 bil­lion in assets, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the firm. This sum­mer the gov­ern­ment dropped two Biden-era fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tions into Poly­mar­ket, a blockchain-based bet­ting start-up that 1789 has invest­ed in and where Trump Jr. now sits on an advi­so­ry board.
...

The fact that 1789’s first invest­ment was in Tuck­er Carl­son’s media com­pa­ny is hard­ly a sur­prise. But when we see how Buskirk’s vision for hav­ing a group of aris­to­crat­ic elite cap­i­tal­ists some­how rein­vig­o­rate the Amer­i­can mid­dle-class through unre­strained cap­i­tal­ism, and in par­tic­u­lar through defense con­tract­ing, it becomes appar­ent that this is a group with a sin­gu­lar focus on acquir­ing as much pow­er as pos­si­ble. Cul­tur­al, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and mil­i­tary pow­er. The new mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex. In that sense, the invest­ments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Neu­ralink, and xAI are very much in line with Buskirk’s vision. But that focus on defense con­tract­ing also makes clear that this vision for Amer­i­can renew­al like­ly includes plans for a lot more war. A coali­tion of the work­ing class and bil­lion­aires, unit­ed by a shared reliance on the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex for their wealth:

...
By April 2022, Vance was mak­ing his first, long-shot bid for polit­i­cal office. Malik host­ed a small fundrais­er for him at a restau­rant in Palm Beach. The investor had relo­cat­ed from New York City the pre­vi­ous year, after defect­ing from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty over coro­n­avirus restric­tions and tech plat­forms’ polic­ing of speech about the coro­n­avirus. Buskirk attend­ed, along with Don Jr.

...

Malik and Buskirk went into busi­ness togeth­er the fol­low­ing year, start­ing 1789 Cap­i­tal, named after the year the Bill of Rights was pro­posed. It ini­tial­ly focused on what Malik had dubbed “anti-woke com­pa­nies.” Their first invest­ment was in Last Coun­try Inc., a new media and enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny found­ed by Tuck­er Carl­son, who had been pushed out of Fox News. The part­ners went on to invest in GrabA­Gun, an online gun mar­ket­place; Enhanced Games, which allows ath­letes to take per­for­mance-enhanc­ing drugs and Hadri­an, a start-up mak­ing AI fac­to­ries for defense. (The part­ners have also tak­en posi­tions in three of Elon Musk’s com­pa­nies: SpaceX, Neu­ralink and xAI.)

Will Edwards, whose Dal­las-based start-up Fire­hawk Aero­space spe­cial­izes in 3D-print­ing sol­id rock­et fuel to be used in mis­siles, said many Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists had reject­ed his pitch­es out­right because they didn’t want to fund com­pa­nies sell­ing exclu­sive­ly to the mil­i­tary.

...

Buskirk, who has since led a fund­ing round that put $60 mil­lion into Fire­hawk, took a par­tic­u­lar inter­est, trav­el­ing to Dal­las to tour Edward’s fac­to­ry, where, he said, work­ers with­out col­lege degrees can make six-fig­ure incomes.

Buskirk believes Edwards’s com­pa­ny is eco­nom­ic proof of the investors’ polit­i­cal argu­ments: The U.S. is unlike­ly to make iPhones and Nike shoes again, he says. But it can revive its indus­tri­al base — par­tic­u­lar­ly in nation­al defense — and help restore the mid­dle class.

This goal is one Pres­i­dent Joe Biden also tried to accom­plish when he signed the $52 bil­lion CHIPS Act in 2022, which aimed to re-shore advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs with the largest sup­port pack­age for domes­tic chips man­u­fac­tur­ing in a gen­er­a­tion. Trump has crit­i­cized the grants as waste­ful and clawed back some of the funds.

Strain, the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute econ­o­mist, said the polit­i­cal rhetoric of the MAGA move­ment mis­con­strues the nation’s actu­al eco­nom­ic pic­ture. Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion — and not out­sourc­ing — has been the main dri­ver of the loss of man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs, he said, adding that many of those argu­ing that home­grown man­u­fac­tur­ing will revive Amer­i­ca are the same investors push­ing major labor dis­place­ment through arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Cass, of Amer­i­can Com­pass, said the scale of invest­ment required to rebuild work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties is far greater than what 1789 or oth­er like-mind­ed investors can spend. But the exper­i­ments Buskirk and his part­ners are fund­ing are impor­tant, he said, because they “blaze a trail.”
...

And when we see how Buskirk at one point interned at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, recall how that enti­ty has popped up repeat­ed­ly in recent years in rela­tion to the anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic plots tak­ing shape around the MAGA move­ment. Most notably, there was the “79 Days Report” ‘sim­u­la­tion’ in 2020 ran by the Clare­mont Insti­tute and Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion (TPPF), where sce­nar­ios involv­ing mass polit­i­cal vio­lence that pre­vent­ed the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote on Jan­u­ary 6 were gamed out. Par­tic­i­pants in this ‘exer­cise’ includ­ed Kevin Roberts, who went on to become the head of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and a lead­ing fig­ure in Project 2025. It was Roberts who issued the omi­nous threat about a ‘Sec­ond Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion’ that would ‘remain blood­less if the left allows it’ on July 2, 2024. Anoth­er notable par­tic­i­pant was Charles Hay­wood, the open­ly fas­cist busi­ness­man who went on to found the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR), a men’s-only project seem­ing­ly designed to pre­pare for the col­lapse of the US gov­ern­ment and a peri­od of war­lordism. Hay­wood wants to run and ‘armed patron­age net­work’ that will rebuild a new theo­crat­ic Amer­i­can soci­ety after every­thing col­laps­es. And as we’ve also seen, SACR mem­ber­ship includes Ryan P. Williams, pres­i­dent of the Clare­mont Insti­tute and a SACR board mem­ber. And one of guid­ing philoso­phers behind SACR was Cur­tis ‘Men­cius Mold­bug’ Yarvin, a fig­ure who has been embraced in these cir­cles, with JD Vance being a par­tic­u­lar­ly big fan. The Clare­mont Insti­tute is, today, one of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing fas­cist orga­ni­za­tions. So of course that’s where Buskirk interned there. It’s the same net­work as Rock­bridge:

...
As a young adult, Buskirk pur­sued a master’s degree in polit­i­cal the­o­ry and interned at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, the right-wing think tank inspired by the polit­i­cal philoso­pher Leo Strauss.

But he quit both the think tank and the degree, judg­ing acad­e­mia too imprac­ti­cal. He returned home to Scotts­dale to start an insur­ance firm, doing under­writ­ing for ambu­lance ven­dors and oth­er uncon­ven­tion­al busi­ness­es. Over the next two decades, he built and sold four oth­er insur­ance-relat­ed com­pa­nies.
...

Sim­i­lar­ly, when we see how tech bil­lion­aires like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are mem­bers of Rock­ridge, keep in mind that Sacks served as Trump’s ‘AI and cryp­to czar’ until March of this year. And as we’re going to see, Marc Andreessen isn’t just a promi­nent mem­ber of this net­work and one Sil­i­con Val­ley’s most open­ly fas­cist bil­lion­aires. He’s also a close ally of the MAGA-aligned theo­crat­ic move­ment that is increas­ing­ly fused with Sil­i­con Val­ley’s top fas­cists:

...
Today, the group’s vibe is euphor­ic. Inter­est has surged since the elec­tion, accord­ing to Buskirk, with rough­ly half of new mem­bers com­ing from the tech indus­try. Sev­er­al of the group’s mem­bers are bil­lion­aires; promi­nent investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are already mem­bers.

Still, Fire­hawk founder Edwards, who joined Rock­bridge with an invi­ta­tion from Buskirk, said the events feel warm, “like a close group of peo­ple who enjoy each other’s com­pa­ny.” Edwards said he lives in a duplex and dri­ves a Toy­ota. A wide age range is rep­re­sent­ed, includ­ing NextGen, an under-30 divi­sion that includes Buskirk’s son, Chris, a recent col­lege grad­u­ate.

Richard Painter, a cor­po­rate law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta who served as chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House, said this influx of inter­est in Rock­bridge, 1789 and Exec­u­tive Branch, cre­ates the appear­ance of a “pay-to-play” net­work, of peo­ple who are pay­ing to get access to admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials or the Trump fam­i­ly. (He also said he would have advised admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials not to attend these gath­er­ings if they hap­pened in his time.)
...

Yes, as Richard Painter observes, the appar­entt merg­er of Rock­bridge, 1789, and the Trump Exec­u­tive Branch does indeed have the appear­ance of a “pay-to-play” net­work. If only it was just appear­ances.

Meet the TheoBros, the Movement with Big Plans for the Future. A Post-Democratic Future where Hyper-Capitalism, Technology, and Theocracy Unite as our ‘Aristopopulist’ Rulers

Next, let’s take a look at the fol­low­ing piece from the November/December 2024 issue of Moth­er Jones intro­duc­ing the ‘Theo­Bro’ move­ment. A move­ment that had, at that point, effec­tive­ly just won con­trol of all three branch­es of the US fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. And for all the hype about tech­nol­o­gy and grand visions of the future, this is move­ment ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing soci­ety back to a pre-democ­ra­cy era when author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers made the rules, claim­ing a God-giv­en man­date. And when we see how fig­ures like Stephen and William Wolfe (no rela­tion) are part of this move­ment — two mil­i­tant Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists fig­ure­heads who have long been mak­ing argu­ments that would jus­ti­fy a mil­i­tant approach to impos­ing a new Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist theo­crat­ic order — and Pas­tor Doug Wil­son serves as its the­o­log­i­cal guid­ing light, it’s clear that this is a move­ment that isn’t plan­ning on nec­es­sar­i­ly win­ning the sup­port of the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion. The Theo­Bros are intend­ing to seize pow­er by declar­ing large swathes of soci­ety ille­git­i­mate ene­mies of the com­ing Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist order. And when we see how Theo­Bros had their fin­ger­prints all over the designes of Project 2025 — which at the time of this arti­cle had yet to come into being — it’s also clear that this is an agen­da already years in motion:

Moth­er Jones

To Under­stand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the “Theo­Bros”

These extreme­ly online young Chris­t­ian men want to end the 19th Amend­ment, restore pub­lic flog­ging , and make Amer­i­ca white again.

Kiera But­ler
November+December 2024 Issue

Our November+December issue inves­ti­gates the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment that aspires to take over gov­ern­ment at all lev­els, from school boards and state leg­is­la­tures to Con­gress and the Supreme Court. Read the series of sto­ries here.

On July 15, when for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump first appeared at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Mil­wau­kee, he brought along two new acces­sories. One was a large ban­dage cov­er­ing his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bul­let. The oth­er was Ohio’s first-term sen­a­tor and Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice pres­i­den­tial hope­ful.

Two days lat­er, after pay­ing trib­ute to his wife, Usha—the child of immi­grants from India—and their three bira­cial kids, Vance por­trayed a vision of Amer­i­ca that res­onat­ed deeply with Trump vot­ers. “Amer­i­ca is not just an idea,” he said solemn­ly. “It is a group of peo­ple with a shared his­to­ry and a com­mon future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many view­ers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boil­er­plate, patri­ot­ic stump speech. But the words “shared his­to­ry” lit up a far-right evan­gel­i­cal cor­ner of social media. “Amer­i­ca is a par­tic­u­lar place with a par­tic­u­lar peo­ple,” Joel Web­bon, a Texas pas­tor and pod­cast­er, wrote on X. “This is one of the most impor­tant polit­i­cal ques­tions fac­ing Amer­i­ca right now,” post­ed for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born pop­u­la­tions are being utter­ly dis­placed by third world migrants and Mus­lims. Answer it right, and we can renew Amer­i­ca once more.”

Vance was embrac­ing one of their most cher­ished beliefs: Amer­i­ca should belong to Chris­tians, and, more specif­i­cal­ly, white ones. “The Amer­i­can nation is an actu­al his­tor­i­cal peo­ple,” says Stephen Wolfe (no rela­tion to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, “not just a hodge­podge of var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties, but actu­al­ly a place of set­tle­ment and root­ed­ness.” For this group of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers, Vance, a 40-year-old for­mer Marine who wax­es rap­tur­ous about mas­culin­i­ty and women’s revered role as moth­ers, was the per­fect tri­bune to spread their gospel of patri­ar­chal Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.

For years, gray­ing, kha­ki-clad evan­ge­lists have faith­ful­ly made the rounds at con­ser­v­a­tive events. How­ev­er, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old for­mer Prince­ton post­doc, writes in his book, these “men in wrin­kled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sit­ting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Chris­tians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embod­i­ment of an inef­fec­tive boomer approach to tak­ing over the Unit­ed States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pas­tors hope to spear­head a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist glow-up as they eager­ly await a “Chris­t­ian prince” to rule Amer­i­ca. These often beard­ed thir­ty- and fortysome­things have suits that actu­al­ly fit. They are extreme­ly online, con­stant­ly post­ing on myr­i­ad plat­forms, broad­cast­ing their YouTube shows from man­caves, and con­ven­ing an end­less stream of con­fer­ences for like­mind­ed fol­low­ers. Let’s call them, as one schol­ar I spoke with did, the Theo­Bros.

For all their youth­ful mod­ish­ness, this group is actu­al­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive than their old­er coun­ter­parts. Many Theo­Bros, for exam­ple, don’t think women belong in the pul­pit or the vot­ing booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amend­ment. For some, prison reform would involve replac­ing incar­cer­a­tion with pub­lic flog­ging. Unlike more main­stream Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists, like House Speak­er Mike John­son, who are obsessed with the US Con­sti­tu­tion, many Theo­Bros believe that the Con­sti­tu­tion is dead and that we should be gov­erned by the Ten Com­mand­ments.

In Amer­i­can Reformer, their unof­fi­cial mag­a­zine, hagiogra­phies of Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­cis­co Fran­co appear along­side full-throat­ed defens­es of coun­tries that exe­cute gay peo­ple. On pod­casts, the Theo­Bros unpack “the per­ils of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism,” expose “Burn­ing Man’s wicked agen­da,” and peel back the nefar­i­ous fem­i­nist plot of Tay­lor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, one of their sem­i­nal texts, he writes that in an ide­al Chris­t­ian nation, heretics could be exe­cut­ed.

The rise of the Theo­Bros wor­ries more main­stream reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives. Janet Mef­ferd, a for­mer Chris­t­ian radio host and jour­nal­ist who tracks their ascen­dan­cy, says her com­mu­ni­ty is alarmed to see an extrem­ist move­ment gain­ing trac­tion. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, oth­er than they want to advance Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that ter­ri­fy­ing.”

The Theo­Bros’ strat­e­gy is bot­tom-up: They aim to con­vert small Amer­i­can towns into Chris­t­ian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are work­ing to posi­tion them­selves close to the locus of fed­er­al pow­er. Vance, a Catholic con­vert mar­ried to a Hin­du, would seem an unlike­ly hero for a move­ment of devout Protes­tants who believe in a homo­ge­neous Amer­i­ca. But over the last few years, his polit­i­cal orbit has increas­ing­ly over­lapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to care­ful observers, his pub­lic echoes of their ideas are begin­ning to sound less like coin­ci­dence and more like dog whis­tles.

...

With no meet­ings, web­site, or an explic­it state­ment of faith that uni­fies their beliefs, the Theo­Bros are not an offi­cial orga­ni­za­tion. They iden­ti­fy with 16th-cen­tu­ry French the­olo­gian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deter­min­is­tic form of Protes­tantism. Julie Inger­soll, a Uni­ver­si­ty of North Flori­da reli­gion schol­ar, traces the cur­rent move­ment back to R.J. Rush­doony, an Armen­ian Amer­i­can philoso­pher who pop­u­lar­ized the idea of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism (and home­school­ing) in the ear­ly 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s move­ment emerged two camps: the charis­mat­ic Chris­tians, now known as the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, and the reformed Protes­tants, which include the Theo­Bros. They share the goal of cre­at­ing a Chris­t­ian nation, says Inger­soll, but dif­fer on a key point of the­ol­o­gy: Adher­ents of the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion believe that God is still speak­ing direct­ly to peo­ple through pas­tors who have declared them­selves apos­tles and prophets. The Theo­Bros, mean­while, believe that God said all he need­ed to say in the Bible.

Many Theo­Bros are also pro­po­nents of post­mil­len­ni­al­ism, the idea that believ­ers can has­ten Jesus’ return by fight­ing against the satan­ic forces of lib­er­al excess. Theo­Bro Aaron Renn, an Accen­ture con­sul­tant turned Chris­t­ian pun­dit, has described our cur­rent era as a “neg­a­tive world,” where Chris­tians are per­se­cut­ed for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, anoth­er Bro, calls it “trash­world.”

Like all self-respect­ing mil­len­ni­als, the Theo­Bros have lit­tle tol­er­ance for boomers, with the excep­tion of their patri­arch, Dou­glas Wil­son, a 71-year-old pas­tor in Moscow, Ida­ho. When he was younger, Wil­son imag­ined him­self going into the fam­i­ly business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the mil­i­tary, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho, where he became involved with the Jesus Peo­ple, a kind of mashup of evan­gel­i­cal and hip­pie cul­ture. He helped found Christ Church, the con­gre­ga­tion over which he still pre­sides and that reg­u­lar­ly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wil­son has since turned the col­lege town into his own Chris­t­ian king­dom. He helped found New Saint Andrews Col­lege, the Canon Press pub­lish­ing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian schools, where stu­dents exclu­sive­ly study the West­ern canon. Wil­son embraced Calvin­ism in 1988 and remade his church from the free­wheel­ing Jesus Peo­ple hub into some­thing far more sober and but­toned-up, where women couldn’t be church lead­ers and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the ear­ly 1990s, Wil­son helped launch the Asso­ci­a­tion of Clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian Schools, which had 502 mem­ber insti­tu­tions across the Unit­ed States as of March 2023.

...

Wil­son has also pro­mot­ed anoth­er form of dom­i­nance. In the 1996 book South­ern Slav­ery: As It Was, Wil­son and his co-author argued that the mas­ter-slave dynam­ic was “a rela­tion­ship based upon mutu­al affec­tion and con­fi­dence,” and “there has nev­er been a mul­ti-racial soci­ety which has exist­ed with such mutu­al inti­ma­cy and har­mo­ny in the his­to­ry of the world” as that of the ante­bel­lum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wil­son said he now allows that while “the benev­o­lent mas­ter is not a myth, the idea of the hor­rif­ic taskmas­ter is no abo­li­tion­ist myth either.”) When I asked Wil­son about his con­tro­ver­sial state­ments, he likened him­self to a chef who strate­gi­cal­ly deploys jalapeno pep­pers: “Then some of my ene­mies online have combed through my writ­ings, have gath­ered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz crack­er.”

In July, at the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Wil­son shared the stage with Sens. Josh Haw­ley (R‑Mo.), Ron John­son (R‑Wis.), and Mike Lee (R‑Utah), as well as Vance, who audi­tioned his “Amer­i­ca is a peo­ple” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP con­ven­tion. Wil­son agrees with Vance’s sug­ges­tion that chil­dren should be allot­ted votes, man­aged by their par­ents. “I would like to see elec­tions where house­holds vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of house­holds, would actu­al­ly cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suf­frage was “a mis­take,” he would allow a spe­cial excep­tion for sin­gle moth­ers.

Wil­son offered the crowd a few one-lin­ers (“I’m a Pres­by­ter­ian, not a Les­by­ter­ian”), but most­ly, he talked about the per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians. “It used to be that the sex­u­al­ly trou­bled had to keep their kinks hid­den away in the clos­et,” he mused. “Now it is the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian who needs to keep his virtues hid­den in the recess­es of the clos­et.” After the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence, Wil­son appeared at the Believ­ers’ Sum­mit, which was head­lined by Trump and host­ed by the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal group Turn­ing Point USA.

But it’s not just con­fer­ences and inter­views with the likes of Tuck­er Carl­son where Wil­son pro­motes his ideas. He has a blog, a pod­cast, and a YouTube chan­nel, thanks most­ly to the urg­ing of his chil­dren and younger col­leagues. One exam­ple is that every year since 2018, Wil­son has been cel­e­brat­ing what he calls No Quar­ter Novem­ber: “The month where we say out loud what every­one is think­ing.” In a 2023 video, which was the brain­child of one of his sons, Wil­son sits at a sump­tu­ous­ly appoint­ed Thanks­giv­ing table, sur­round­ed by his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, and address­es the cam­era. “If you think of my blog as a shot­gun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typ­i­cal, care­ful qual­i­fi­ca­tions and blast away with a dou­ble-bar­reled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tran­quil scene is inter­rupt­ed by a blar­ing alarm and a glow­ing red “perime­ter breach” sign. Wil­son excus­es him­self, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrow­er. After using it to light a cig­ar, he aims the fire at card­board cutouts of Dis­ney princess­es Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Insta­gram, Tik­Tok, Twit­ter, and Net­flix.

Wilson’s will­ing­ness to make campy con­tent sets him apart, says Rachel Tabach­nick, an extrem­ism researcher who has been study­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism for decades. “Instead of a crotch­ety old guy talk­ing about ston­ing peo­ple, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s wit­ty.”

...

Wil­son has used his plat­forms to anoint the next gen­er­a­tion of ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive reformed Chris­t­ian pas­tors, all of whom hap­pened to be men. Mef­ferd, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian jour­nal­ist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism got trac­tion in main­stream Chris­t­ian cir­cles in part “because Doug Wil­son endorsed.” Anoth­er Wil­son pro­tégé is Joel Web­bon, a 38-year-old pas­tor who hosts a pod­cast and YouTube show, which he films from a wing­back leather chair in a book-lined room.

Web­bon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alum­nus of a Bible school run by a New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion affil­i­at­ed out­fit, which he now con­sid­ers “straight-up hereti­cal.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and start­ed his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Web­bon cred­it­ed Wil­son with embold­en­ing him to say what­ev­er he wanted—like telling a guest that the Found­ing Fathers weren’t respon­si­ble for the slave trade because Africans had done the actu­al kid­nap­ping and enslav­ing.

...

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of peo­ple are gonna be sur­prised” when “you’re spend­ing eter­ni­ty wor­ship­ping Christ next to Stonewall Jack­son and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George White­field and Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Web­bon is so impressed by his own audac­i­ty that he main­tains an online list of all the con­tro­ver­sies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Chris­t­ian men liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia “stu­pid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop read­ing a book on the­ol­o­gy (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were dif­fer­ent from his own); and why he believes in a patri­ar­chal house­hold struc­ture (the Bible says so). Web­bon, who is plan­ning to host a con­fer­ence in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trash­world!” main­tains that a “return to the Con­sti­tu­tion is impos­si­ble” and that the only viable alter­na­tive is the Ten Com­mand­ments.

Some of Wilson’s oth­er acolytes are attempt­ing to cre­ate their own ver­sions of Moscow, Ida­ho. Take Bri­an Sauvé, a 33-year-old Chris­t­ian record­ing artist, pod­cast­er, and pas­tor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Web­bon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charis­mat­ic Chris­t­ian church. After the lead pas­tor resigned in a scan­dal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascend­ed to take his place, immersed him­self in reformed the­ol­o­gy, and moved the church in a new direc­tion. Today, he pre­sides over a Moscow-esque ecosys­tem: a pub­lish­ing house called New Chris­ten­dom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian Acad­e­my, mod­eled after those in Wilson’s net­work. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s web­site. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Ida­ho? We can.”

...

But unlike more main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives, Sauvé does not even pre­tend to cham­pi­on the idea of a Judeo-Chris­t­ian nation. He post­ed in July, “[O]ur polit­i­cal sys­tem is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all man­ner of evils.”

An even more well-con­nect­ed Wil­son emu­la­tor is Josh Abbotoy, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­can Reformer and man­ag­ing part­ner of a ven­ture cap­i­tal fund and real estate firm called New Found­ing. A for­mer fel­low of the right-wing think tank the Clare­mont Insti­tute, Abbotoy report­ed that he recent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Project 2025 pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion “strate­gic plan­ning ses­sion” host­ed by the right-wing think tank the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. Bucks Coun­ty Bea­con reporter Jen­nifer Cohn revealed ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Chris Buskirk was list­ed as the edi­tor and pub­lish­er of Amer­i­can Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fis­ch­er, lat­er clar­i­fied to Moth­er Jones that Buskirk’s list­ing in the fil­ing had been a cler­i­cal error, and that he was actu­al­ly a board mem­ber of Amer­i­can Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-found­ed the Rock­bridge Net­work, a col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful Trump donors includ­ing Catholic judi­cial king­mak­er Leonard Leo and Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel. Anoth­er co-founder of the Rock­bridge Net­work? None oth­er than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s men­tor and for­mer employ­er, is also a major fun­der of the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism move­ment. Obsessed with glob­al birthrates, Thiel spent $10 mil­lion on his protégé’s suc­cess­ful 2022 Sen­ate cam­paign. In July, short­ly after Trump had announced Vance as his run­ning mate, Cohn sur­faced a tweet by New Founding’s net­work direc­tor, Josh Cle­mans: a pho­to of Vance with sev­er­al New Found­ing staffers. The cap­tion read “Our guy.”

New Found­ing lists as a part­ner the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, a secre­tive fra­ter­nal order found­ed by Indi­ana sham­poo baron Charles Hay­wood, who describes him­self as an aspir­ing Chris­t­ian “war­lord.” Accord­ing to founder Nate Fis­ch­er, New Found­ing wants to “form the back­bone of a renewed Amer­i­can regime” and that its mem­bers “under­stand the nature of author­i­ty and its legit­i­mate force­ful exer­cise.” But its main pub­lic-fac­ing project appears to be turn­ing tracts of land in Appalachia into Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als describe a com­mu­ni­ty of “unmatched seclu­sion” where “sim­ple coun­try faith” pro­tects local cul­ture from rain­bow flags and crime. Poten­tial buy­ers, he advis­es, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based peo­ple who want to build some­thing inspir­ing, some­thing authen­tic to the region’s his­to­ry, or is it going to be Bill Gates and Black­Rock and hip­pies from Cal­i­for­nia?”

One eager cus­tomer is 38-year-old Theo­Bro Andrew Isker—the pas­tor who interned at Wilson’s church, stud­ied divin­i­ty at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism with Andrew Tor­ba, the open­ly anti­se­mit­ic CEO of the social media plat­form Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his fam­i­ly of sev­en to lead a church in a New Found­ing com­mu­ni­ty in Ten­nessee. Life in his native Min­neso­ta, he said, had become unten­able because of per­mis­sive laws around trans rights and abor­tion, not to men­tion how hos­pitable the state has been to refugees. “Min­neso­ta is one of the top des­ti­na­tions for reset­tling for­eign peo­ple hos­tile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas con­fer­ence about the “war on white Amer­i­ca” along­side Paul Got­tfried, the men­tor of promi­nent white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer. The con­fer­ence was host­ed by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑Texas) and Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton.

...

One prob­lem is that there sim­ply are not enough Theo­Bros to pop­u­late Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Cen­ter for Bap­tist Lead­er­ship, which aims to per­suade mem­bers of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion that it, the largest of all Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions in the Unit­ed States, has fall­en prey to the cor­rupt­ing forces of lib­er­al­ism. Bap­tists are only the begin­ning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evan­gel­i­cal main­stream, which he and oth­er Theo­Bros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he post­ed on X, “Once you real­ize that Big Eva thinks it’s a big­ger sin to desire to pre­serve the cus­toms, her­itage, val­ues, and cul­tur­al homo­gene­ity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can bet­ter under­stand their moral frame­work.”

Wolfe served in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion both as the deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary of defense and as direc­tor of House affairs at the Depart­ment of State. He is also an alum­nus of Her­itage Action, a sis­ter orga­ni­za­tion of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the arch-con­ser­v­a­tive think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief archi­tect, Rus­sell Vought, post­ed on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scop­ing out a sound Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism.” A few months lat­er, the Bucks Coun­ty Bea­con uncov­ered a lengthy online man­i­festo on the goals of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists. The doc­u­ment, which list­ed Wolfe and Joel Web­bon as con­tribut­ing edi­tors and Okla­homa Sen. Dusty Deev­ers as a co-author, called for “civ­il mag­is­trates” to ush­er in “the estab­lish­ment of the Ten Com­mand­ments as the foun­da­tion­al law of the nation.”

The man­i­festo doesn’t spec­i­fy exact­ly how Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists should achieve these goals. As Tabach­nick, the extrem­ism researcher, inter­prets it, the Theo­Bros are imag­in­ing a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entre­pre­neurs in all dif­fer­ent sens­es, includ­ing the tech world that they’re mix­ing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that author­i­tar­i­an­ism “is required to have the utopi­an vision.”

Last year, the extrem­ism watch­dog group Right Wing Watch post­ed a video of Wolfe quot­ing a scrip­ture pas­sage. There are times when “even the God of peace pro­claims by his prov­i­dence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are get­ting close.”

William Wolfe’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism man­i­festo made the rounds on social media, but in main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought Theo­Bro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by edi­tors at the Fed­er­al­ist and the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, Wolfe paints Amer­i­ca as a “gynoc­ra­cy” whose gov­ern­ment and cul­ture have been fem­i­nized by unhap­py women lead­ers. (Sound famil­iar?) He has stat­ed on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “intereth­nic” mar­riage can be “sin­ful.”

...

Over the sum­mer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the con­di­tion that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more mut­ed ver­sion of the fire­brand I’d watched online. He said his ide­al ver­sion of Amer­i­ca would be led by a Cae­sar fig­ure. Gay mar­riage would be strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their house­holds.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s per­mis­si­ble, in prin­ci­ple, for a state to sup­press the­o­log­i­cal heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s pru­dent or prop­er, suit­able in every cir­cum­stance or every tra­di­tion or way of life.” The Found­ing Fathers, he added, had encour­aged reli­gious lib­er­ty, so killing heretics would not be appro­pri­ate in the Unit­ed States that we inhab­it.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent con­fer­ence con­vened by Bri­an Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Chris­tian­i­ty, or Judeo-Chris­t­ian world­view, or Judeo-Chris­t­ian what­ev­er, and real­ly erad­i­cate that from our think­ing. Because if we say that Amer­i­ca is a Judeo-Chris­t­ian coun­try, then it can’t be a Chris­t­ian coun­try, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exer­cise their reli­gion freely.”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me under­stand what the Theo­Bros heard in Vance’s phrase about Amer­i­ca as a peo­ple. The founders, Wolfe not­ed, intend­ed for their coun­try to be “Anglo-Protes­tant with an Amer­i­can inflec­tion.” Amer­i­ca, he con­tin­ued, is “a place of set­tle­ment and root­ed­ness, but it’s an open eth­nic­i­ty in which peo­ple can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some oth­ers, Wolfe is not nec­es­sar­i­ly opposed to the idea of non­white peo­ple in America—as long as they agree to assim­i­late to the Anglo-Protes­tant dom­i­nant cul­ture.

In this telling, Amer­i­ca is not a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Chris­tians and those they reluc­tant­ly tol­er­ate. Toward the end of our con­ver­sa­tion, I asked Wolfe what moti­vat­ed him. “I want Chris­tians to be more assertive and to rec­og­nize the Chris­t­ian her­itage of the Amer­i­can way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Chris­t­ian coun­try, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s con­fer­ence, titled “Why Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Plu­ral­ism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the con­cept of Amer­i­ca as a melt­ing pot “an ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the con­fi­dent Anglo-Protes­tant estab­lish­ment.” WASPs were the “dis­tinct eth­nic­i­ty” of Amer­i­ca, he insist­ed, and Amer­i­ca should only wel­come those who aspired to assim­i­late. As he put it, “This is our home­land, and we wel­come you on the con­di­tion of con­for­mi­ty.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, Amer­i­ca “is a group of peo­ple.”

Cor­rec­tion, Sep­tem­ber 19: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this arti­cle inac­cu­rate­ly described Chris Buskirk’s role at Amer­i­can Reformer.

Update, Jan­u­ary 14: After this sto­ry was pub­lished, Nate Fis­ch­er, CEO of New Found­ing and co-founder of Amer­i­can Reformer, clar­i­fied toMoth­er Jonesthat Buskirk’s list­ing intax fil­ingsas the edi­tor and pub­lish­er ofAmer­i­can Reformerhad been a “cler­i­cal error (pre­sum­ably copy­ing his bio fromAmer­i­can Great­ness, where he was edi­tor and pub­lish­er)” and that Buskirk was actu­al­ly a board mem­ber ofAmer­i­can Reformer. The sen­tence has been revised.

————–

“To Under­stand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the “Theo­Bros”” by Kiera But­ler; Moth­er Jones; November+December 2024 Issue

“Two days lat­er, after pay­ing trib­ute to his wife, Usha—the child of immi­grants from India—and their three bira­cial kids, Vance por­trayed a vision of Amer­i­ca that res­onat­ed deeply with Trump vot­ers. “Amer­i­ca is not just an idea,” he said solemn­ly. “It is a group of peo­ple with a shared his­to­ry and a com­mon future. It is, in short, a nation.””

Amer­i­can isn’t just an idea. It’s a spe­cif­ic group of peo­ple with a shared his­to­ry. That was the idea shared by JD Vance back in July of 2024 at a Trump cam­paign event days after being select­ed as Trump’s nom­i­nee. The kind of lan­guage that was eas­i­ly intre­pret­ed by Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist “Theo­Bros” fig­ures like William Wolfe and Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, as a def­i­n­i­tion of “shared his­to­ry” intend­ed to include white Chris­ten­dom and lit­tle else. Recall how Stephen and William Wolfe are both vocal advo­cates of project in North­ern Ten­nessee to build a com­mu­ni­ty for “Her­itage Amer­i­cans” who will con­sist of whites who can trace their ances­try back to the Civ­il War peri­od. Soci­ety will be ruled accord­ing to their white Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist inter­pre­ta­tion of Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples. Black Amer­i­cans will be allowed if they can prove they are the descen­dant of slaves and promise not to get uppi­ty. Every­one else has to go. A project that is very much a Theo­Bros project. This is an agen­da in motion:

...
To many view­ers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boil­er­plate, patri­ot­ic stump speech. But the words “shared his­to­ry” lit up a far-right evan­gel­i­cal cor­ner of social media. “Amer­i­ca is a par­tic­u­lar place with a par­tic­u­lar peo­ple,” Joel Web­bon, a Texas pas­tor and pod­cast­er, wrote on X. “This is one of the most impor­tant polit­i­cal ques­tions fac­ing Amer­i­ca right now,” post­ed for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born pop­u­la­tions are being utter­ly dis­placed by third world migrants and Mus­lims. Answer it right, and we can renew Amer­i­ca once more.”

Vance was embrac­ing one of their most cher­ished beliefs: Amer­i­ca should belong to Chris­tians, and, more specif­i­cal­ly, white ones. “The Amer­i­can nation is an actu­al his­tor­i­cal peo­ple,” says Stephen Wolfe (no rela­tion to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, “not just a hodge­podge of var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties, but actu­al­ly a place of set­tle­ment and root­ed­ness.” For this group of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers, Vance, a 40-year-old for­mer Marine who wax­es rap­tur­ous about mas­culin­i­ty and women’s revered role as moth­ers, was the per­fect tri­bune to spread their gospel of patri­ar­chal Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.

For years, gray­ing, kha­ki-clad evan­ge­lists have faith­ful­ly made the rounds at con­ser­v­a­tive events. How­ev­er, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old for­mer Prince­ton post­doc, writes in his book, these “men in wrin­kled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sit­ting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Chris­tians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embod­i­ment of an inef­fec­tive boomer approach to tak­ing over the Unit­ed States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pas­tors hope to spear­head a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist glow-up as they eager­ly await a “Chris­t­ian prince” to rule Amer­i­ca. These often beard­ed thir­ty- and fortysome­things have suits that actu­al­ly fit. They are extreme­ly online, con­stant­ly post­ing on myr­i­ad plat­forms, broad­cast­ing their YouTube shows from man­caves, and con­ven­ing an end­less stream of con­fer­ences for like­mind­ed fol­low­ers. Let’s call them, as one schol­ar I spoke with did, the Theo­Bros.
...

And as the piece warns, the Theo­Bros aren’t just the next gen­er­a­tion of the white Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists. They are in many ways more con­ser­v­a­tive than their pre­de­ces­sors, embrac­ing atti­tudes like repeal­ing the right of women to vote, a view infa­mous­ly shared by Peter Thiel in a 2009 ‘Cato Unbound’ essay. Or hagiogra­phies of Fran­cis­co Fran­co in the unof­fi­cial Theo­Bro mag­a­zine, Amer­i­can Reformer, along­side defens­es of gov­ern­ments that exe­cute gay peo­ple. As reli­gion schol­ar Julie Inger­soll observes, the roots of the ‘Theo­Bros’ traces direct­ly back to R.J. Rush­doony, whose teach­ings influ­ence both the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion and the reformed Protes­tant ‘Theo­Bros’ today. As we’ve seen, Rush­doony was­n’t just a ran­dom theo­crat. He was report­ed­ly a mem­ber of the CNP’s board of gov­ern­ers in the ear­ly 90s and an ally of the League of the South’s vision of Bib­li­cal Recon­struc­tion­ism that saw the Con­fed­er­ate South as a Biblli­cal­ly sanc­tioned soci­ety. In oth­er words, when we see how the Theo­Bros call for things like the repeal of wom­en’s suf­frage, keep in mind that this move­ment has been brew­ing for decades:

..
For all their youth­ful mod­ish­ness, this group is actu­al­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive than their old­er coun­ter­parts. Many Theo­Bros, for exam­ple, don’t think women belong in the pul­pit or the vot­ing booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amend­ment. For some, prison reform would involve replac­ing incar­cer­a­tion with pub­lic flog­ging. Unlike more main­stream Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists, like House Speak­er Mike John­son, who are obsessed with the US Con­sti­tu­tion, many Theo­Bros believe that the Con­sti­tu­tion is dead and that we should be gov­erned by the Ten Com­mand­ments.

In Amer­i­can Reformer, their unof­fi­cial mag­a­zine, hagiogra­phies of Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­cis­co Fran­co appear along­side full-throat­ed defens­es of coun­tries that exe­cute gay peo­ple. On pod­casts, the Theo­Bros unpack “the per­ils of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism,” expose “Burn­ing Man’s wicked agen­da,” and peel back the nefar­i­ous fem­i­nist plot of Tay­lor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, one of their sem­i­nal texts, he writes that in an ide­al Chris­t­ian nation, heretics could be exe­cut­ed.

...

With no meet­ings, web­site, or an explic­it state­ment of faith that uni­fies their beliefs, the Theo­Bros are not an offi­cial orga­ni­za­tion. They iden­ti­fy with 16th-cen­tu­ry French the­olo­gian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deter­min­is­tic form of Protes­tantism. Julie Inger­soll, a Uni­ver­si­ty of North Flori­da reli­gion schol­ar, traces the cur­rent move­ment back to R.J. Rush­doony, an Armen­ian Amer­i­can philoso­pher who pop­u­lar­ized the idea of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism (and home­school­ing) in the ear­ly 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s move­ment emerged two camps: the charis­mat­ic Chris­tians, now known as the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, and the reformed Protes­tants, which include the Theo­Bros. They share the goal of cre­at­ing a Chris­t­ian nation, says Inger­soll, but dif­fer on a key point of the­ol­o­gy: Adher­ents of the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion believe that God is still speak­ing direct­ly to peo­ple through pas­tors who have declared them­selves apos­tles and prophets. The Theo­Bros, mean­while, believe that God said all he need­ed to say in the Bible.
...

And those roots in Rush­doony’s teach­ings — some­one who defend­ed the League of the South’s neo-Con­fed­er­ate pro-slav­ery the­ol­o­gy — is part of the rea­son we should­n’t be at all sur­prised to find Pas­tor Doug Wil­son as one of the lead­ing lights of the move­ment. It was Wil­son, after all, who co-authored the 1996 book South­ern Slav­ery: As It Was with League of the South co-founder Steven J. Wilkins that defend­ed the Con­fed­er­a­cy as a bib­li­cal­ly sanc­tioned soci­ety. So when we see how Wil­son is viewed as a kind of patri­arch to the Theo­Bros move­ment, it’s clear that Wilson’s pro-Con­fed­er­a­cy teach­ings is very much in line with the Theo­Bros the­ol­o­gy. But as we’ve also seen, Wil­son isn’t just an obscure preach­er from Moscow, Ida­ho. When we see how Wil­son shared a stage with Repub­li­can sen­a­tors at the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence in DC and just opened a DC branch of his con­gre­ga­tion in May of 2025, it’s clear that Doug Wil­son is more than just the patri­arch of the Theo­Bros. He’s a dri­ving the­o­log­i­cal force behind the fusion of pol­i­tics and reli­gion that serves as the ide­o­log­i­cal frame­work for the mod­ern MAGA-dri­ven con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in the US:

...
The Theo­Bros’ strat­e­gy is bot­tom-up: They aim to con­vert small Amer­i­can towns into Chris­t­ian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are work­ing to posi­tion them­selves close to the locus of fed­er­al pow­er. Vance, a Catholic con­vert mar­ried to a Hin­du, would seem an unlike­ly hero for a move­ment of devout Protes­tants who believe in a homo­ge­neous Amer­i­ca. But over the last few years, his polit­i­cal orbit has increas­ing­ly over­lapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to care­ful observers, his pub­lic echoes of their ideas are begin­ning to sound less like coin­ci­dence and more like dog whis­tles.

...

Like all self-respect­ing mil­len­ni­als, the Theo­Bros have lit­tle tol­er­ance for boomers, with the excep­tion of their patri­arch, Dou­glas Wil­son, a 71-year-old pas­tor in Moscow, Ida­ho. When he was younger, Wil­son imag­ined him­self going into the fam­i­ly business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the mil­i­tary, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho, where he became involved with the Jesus Peo­ple, a kind of mashup of evan­gel­i­cal and hip­pie cul­ture. He helped found Christ Church, the con­gre­ga­tion over which he still pre­sides and that reg­u­lar­ly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wil­son has since turned the col­lege town into his own Chris­t­ian king­dom. He helped found New Saint Andrews Col­lege, the Canon Press pub­lish­ing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian schools, where stu­dents exclu­sive­ly study the West­ern canon. Wil­son embraced Calvin­ism in 1988 and remade his church from the free­wheel­ing Jesus Peo­ple hub into some­thing far more sober and but­toned-up, where women couldn’t be church lead­ers and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the ear­ly 1990s, Wil­son helped launch the Asso­ci­a­tion of Clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian Schools, which had 502 mem­ber insti­tu­tions across the Unit­ed States as of March 2023.

...

Wil­son has also pro­mot­ed anoth­er form of dom­i­nance. In the 1996 book South­ern Slav­ery: As It Was, Wil­son and his co-author argued that the mas­ter-slave dynam­ic was “a rela­tion­ship based upon mutu­al affec­tion and con­fi­dence,” and “there has nev­er been a mul­ti-racial soci­ety which has exist­ed with such mutu­al inti­ma­cy and har­mo­ny in the his­to­ry of the world” as that of the ante­bel­lum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wil­son said he now allows that while “the benev­o­lent mas­ter is not a myth, the idea of the hor­rif­ic taskmas­ter is no abo­li­tion­ist myth either.”) When I asked Wil­son about his con­tro­ver­sial state­ments, he likened him­self to a chef who strate­gi­cal­ly deploys jalapeno pep­pers: “Then some of my ene­mies online have combed through my writ­ings, have gath­ered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz crack­er.”

In July, at the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Wil­son shared the stage with Sens. Josh Haw­ley (R‑Mo.), Ron John­son (R‑Wis.), and Mike Lee (R‑Utah), as well as Vance, who audi­tioned his “Amer­i­ca is a peo­ple” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP con­ven­tion. Wil­son agrees with Vance’s sug­ges­tion that chil­dren should be allot­ted votes, man­aged by their par­ents. “I would like to see elec­tions where house­holds vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of house­holds, would actu­al­ly cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suf­frage was “a mis­take,” he would allow a spe­cial excep­tion for sin­gle moth­ers.

Wil­son offered the crowd a few one-lin­ers (“I’m a Pres­by­ter­ian, not a Les­by­ter­ian”), but most­ly, he talked about the per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians. “It used to be that the sex­u­al­ly trou­bled had to keep their kinks hid­den away in the clos­et,” he mused. “Now it is the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian who needs to keep his virtues hid­den in the recess­es of the clos­et.” After the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence, Wil­son appeared at the Believ­ers’ Sum­mit, which was head­lined by Trump and host­ed by the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal group Turn­ing Point USA.
...

Sim­i­lar­ly, when we see how Doug Wil­son has been inter­viewed by Tuck­er Carl­son, it’s clear that his reach extends well beyond his direct fol­low­ing. The the­ol­o­gy pro­mot­ing by Doug Wil­son is being pro­mot­ed as a kind of ‘anti-woke’ polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al force, with the back­ing of the ‘Theo­Bros’:

...
But it’s not just con­fer­ences and inter­views with the likes of Tuck­er Carl­son where Wil­son pro­motes his ideas. He has a blog, a pod­cast, and a YouTube chan­nel, thanks most­ly to the urg­ing of his chil­dren and younger col­leagues. One exam­ple is that every year since 2018, Wil­son has been cel­e­brat­ing what he calls No Quar­ter Novem­ber: “The month where we say out loud what every­one is think­ing.” In a 2023 video, which was the brain­child of one of his sons, Wil­son sits at a sump­tu­ous­ly appoint­ed Thanks­giv­ing table, sur­round­ed by his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, and address­es the cam­era. “If you think of my blog as a shot­gun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typ­i­cal, care­ful qual­i­fi­ca­tions and blast away with a dou­ble-bar­reled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tran­quil scene is inter­rupt­ed by a blar­ing alarm and a glow­ing red “perime­ter breach” sign. Wil­son excus­es him­self, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrow­er. After using it to light a cig­ar, he aims the fire at card­board cutouts of Dis­ney princess­es Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Insta­gram, Tik­Tok, Twit­ter, and Net­flix.

Wilson’s will­ing­ness to make campy con­tent sets him apart, says Rachel Tabach­nick, an extrem­ism researcher who has been study­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism for decades. “Instead of a crotch­ety old guy talk­ing about ston­ing peo­ple, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s wit­ty.”
...

But the polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing by the Theo­Bros isn’t lim­it­ed to influ­ence ped­dling in DC. Fig­ures like Andrew Isker fall into the ‘Theo­Bros’ camp. As we’ve seen, Isker leads the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist project ded­i­cat­ed to turn­ing Jack­son Coun­ty, Ten­nessee, into an exper­i­ment in theo­crat­ic local gov­ern­ment where only “Her­itage Amer­i­cans” would be wel­come. And then there’s Texas Pas­tor Joel Web­bon, described as a pro­tege of Wil­son. As we’ve seen, Web­bon’s response to the assas­si­na­tion of Char­lie Kirk was to declare that “The Left will not stop until they are forced to. The Right must gain pow­er, keep pow­er, and wield pow­er right­eous­ly. @realDonaldTrump, you have been appoint­ed by Prov­i­dence. You are com­mand­ed by Scrip­ture to be a TERROR to those who do evil. Give them hell.” A month ear­li­er, dWeb­bon remarked how “a lot of peo­ple are gonna be sur­prised” when “you’re spend­ing eter­ni­ty wor­ship­ping Christ next to Stonewall Jack­son and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George White­field and Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.” Web­bon even warns how a “return to the Con­sti­tu­tion is impos­si­ble” and that the only viable alter­na­tive is the Ten Com­mand­ments. Don­ald Trump’s pres­i­den­cy was appoint­ed by divine Prov­i­dence while Robert E Lee looks down from heav­en at MLK burn­ing in hell, and a gov­ern­ment based on the Ten Com­mand­ments is the only viable path for­ward. This is the ‘Theo­Bros’ the­ol­o­gy’. One that embraces a the­o­log­i­cal man­date for com­plete polit­i­cal capture...up to and includ­ing a defense of the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery:

...
The rise of the Theo­Bros wor­ries more main­stream reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives. Janet Mef­ferd, a for­mer Chris­t­ian radio host and jour­nal­ist who tracks their ascen­dan­cy, says her com­mu­ni­ty is alarmed to see an extrem­ist move­ment gain­ing trac­tion. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, oth­er than they want to advance Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that ter­ri­fy­ing.”

...

Many Theo­Bros are also pro­po­nents of post­mil­len­ni­al­ism, the idea that believ­ers can has­ten Jesus’ return by fight­ing against the satan­ic forces of lib­er­al excess. Theo­Bro Aaron Renn, an Accen­ture con­sul­tant turned Chris­t­ian pun­dit, has described our cur­rent era as a “neg­a­tive world,” where Chris­tians are per­se­cut­ed for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, anoth­er Bro, calls it “trash­world.”

...

Wil­son has used his plat­forms to anoint the next gen­er­a­tion of ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive reformed Chris­t­ian pas­tors, all of whom hap­pened to be men. Mef­ferd, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian jour­nal­ist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism got trac­tion in main­stream Chris­t­ian cir­cles in part “because Doug Wil­son endorsed.” Anoth­er Wil­son pro­tégé is Joel Web­bon, a 38-year-old pas­tor who hosts a pod­cast and YouTube show, which he films from a wing­back leather chair in a book-lined room.

Web­bon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alum­nus of a Bible school run by a New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion affil­i­at­ed out­fit, which he now con­sid­ers “straight-up hereti­cal.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and start­ed his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Web­bon cred­it­ed Wil­son with embold­en­ing him to say what­ev­er he wanted—like telling a guest that the Found­ing Fathers weren’t respon­si­ble for the slave trade because Africans had done the actu­al kid­nap­ping and enslav­ing.

...

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of peo­ple are gonna be sur­prised” when “you’re spend­ing eter­ni­ty wor­ship­ping Christ next to Stonewall Jack­son and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George White­field and Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Web­bon is so impressed by his own audac­i­ty that he main­tains an online list of all the con­tro­ver­sies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Chris­t­ian men liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia “stu­pid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop read­ing a book on the­ol­o­gy (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were dif­fer­ent from his own); and why he believes in a patri­ar­chal house­hold struc­ture (the Bible says so). Web­bon, who is plan­ning to host a con­fer­ence in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trash­world!” main­tains that a “return to the Con­sti­tu­tion is impos­si­ble” and that the only viable alter­na­tive is the Ten Com­mand­ments.
...

And Andrew Isker isn’t the only indi­vid­ual asso­ci­at­ed with the Jack­son Coun­ty, Ten­nessee, Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist polit­i­cal project. We also find Josh Abbotoy, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­can Reformer and man­ag­ing part­ner at New Found­ing. As we’ve seen, New Found­ing is the com­pa­ny pro­vid­ing cap­i­tal for the High­land Rim Project. As we’ve also seen, Abbotoy hap­pens to be a mem­ber of Charles Hay­wood’s fas­cist Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR), a group ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing the foun­da­tion for a post-demo­c­ra­t­ic theo­crat­ic new order. So it should come as lit­tle sur­prise to learn that New Found­ing is also list­ed as a SACR part­ner. Sim­i­lar­ly, it should hard­ly be a sur­prise to learn that Chris Buskirk is an Amer­i­can Reformer board mem­ber. And note how the Rock­bridge Net­work includes none oth­er than Leonard Leo, the fig­ure who has prob­a­bly done more to shape the cur­rent make­up of US Supreme Court court than any­one else. The Rock­bridge Net­work is real­ly just an exten­sion of this larg­er theo­crat­ic ‘Theo­Bros’ net­work which, in turn, is a kind of mod­ern man­i­fes­ta­tion of the same CNP-backed theo­crat­ic oli­garchy that has been dri­ving the Repub­li­can Par­ty since Ronald Rea­gan. An increas­ing­ly overt­ly fas­cist and author­i­tar­i­an theo­crat­ic oli­garchy that is active­ly plan­ning a kind of post-democ­ra­cy soci­ety:

...
An even more well-con­nect­ed Wil­son emu­la­tor is Josh Abbotoy, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­can Reformer and man­ag­ing part­ner of a ven­ture cap­i­tal fund and real estate firm called New Found­ing. A for­mer fel­low of the right-wing think tank the Clare­mont Insti­tute, Abbotoy report­ed that he recent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Project 2025 pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion “strate­gic plan­ning ses­sion” host­ed by the right-wing think tank the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. Bucks Coun­ty Bea­con reporter Jen­nifer Cohn revealed ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Chris Buskirk was list­ed as the edi­tor and pub­lish­er of Amer­i­can Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fis­ch­er, lat­er clar­i­fied to Moth­er Jones that Buskirk’s list­ing in the fil­ing had been a cler­i­cal error, and that he was actu­al­ly a board mem­ber of Amer­i­can Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-found­ed the Rock­bridge Net­work, a col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful Trump donors includ­ing Catholic judi­cial king­mak­er Leonard Leo and Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel. Anoth­er co-founder of the Rock­bridge Net­work? None oth­er than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s men­tor and for­mer employ­er, is also a major fun­der of the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism move­ment. Obsessed with glob­al birthrates, Thiel spent $10 mil­lion on his protégé’s suc­cess­ful 2022 Sen­ate cam­paign. In July, short­ly after Trump had announced Vance as his run­ning mate, Cohn sur­faced a tweet by New Founding’s net­work direc­tor, Josh Cle­mans: a pho­to of Vance with sev­er­al New Found­ing staffers. The cap­tion read “Our guy.”

New Found­ing lists as a part­ner the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, a secre­tive fra­ter­nal order found­ed by Indi­ana sham­poo baron Charles Hay­wood, who describes him­self as an aspir­ing Chris­t­ian “war­lord.” Accord­ing to founder Nate Fis­ch­er, New Found­ing wants to “form the back­bone of a renewed Amer­i­can regime” and that its mem­bers “under­stand the nature of author­i­ty and its legit­i­mate force­ful exer­cise.” But its main pub­lic-fac­ing project appears to be turn­ing tracts of land in Appalachia into Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als describe a com­mu­ni­ty of “unmatched seclu­sion” where “sim­ple coun­try faith” pro­tects local cul­ture from rain­bow flags and crime. Poten­tial buy­ers, he advis­es, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based peo­ple who want to build some­thing inspir­ing, some­thing authen­tic to the region’s his­to­ry, or is it going to be Bill Gates and Black­Rock and hip­pies from Cal­i­for­nia?”
...

Sim­i­lar­ly, Stephen Wolfe is open about how his ver­sion of Amer­i­ca would be led by a Cae­sar fig­ure. As we’ve seen, SACR founder Charles Hay­wood spent years advo­cat­ing for an Amer­i­can Cae­sar when writ­ing under an anony­mous pseu­do­nym. So when we see the open anti­semitism of Wolfe, or his calls to elim­i­nate wom­en’s right to vote and warn­ings about the ‘sin­ful’ nature of “intereth­nic” mar­riage, paired with the fact that he’s some­one who is has been appear­ing on main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive media out­lets, and pop­u­lar­iz­ing this ‘Theo­Bros’ world­view, it’s a warn­ing that this move­ment is bet­ting on the pop­u­lar appeal of a Cae­sar-like fig­ure among Amer­i­cans. At least, bet­ting that will be the case under the right/wrong con­di­tions:

...
William Wolfe’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism man­i­festo made the rounds on social media, but in main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought Theo­Bro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by edi­tors at the Fed­er­al­ist and the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, Wolfe paints Amer­i­ca as a “gynoc­ra­cy” whose gov­ern­ment and cul­ture have been fem­i­nized by unhap­py women lead­ers. (Sound famil­iar?) He has stat­ed on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “intereth­nic” mar­riage can be “sin­ful.”

...

Over the sum­mer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the con­di­tion that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more mut­ed ver­sion of the fire­brand I’d watched online. He said his ide­al ver­sion of Amer­i­ca would be led by a Cae­sar fig­ure. Gay mar­riage would be strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their house­holds.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s per­mis­si­ble, in prin­ci­ple, for a state to sup­press the­o­log­i­cal heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s pru­dent or prop­er, suit­able in every cir­cum­stance or every tra­di­tion or way of life.” The Found­ing Fathers, he added, had encour­aged reli­gious lib­er­ty, so killing heretics would not be appro­pri­ate in the Unit­ed States that we inhab­it.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent con­fer­ence con­vened by Bri­an Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Chris­tian­i­ty, or Judeo-Chris­t­ian world­view, or Judeo-Chris­t­ian what­ev­er, and real­ly erad­i­cate that from our think­ing. Because if we say that Amer­i­ca is a Judeo-Chris­t­ian coun­try, then it can’t be a Chris­t­ian coun­try, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exer­cise their reli­gion freely.”

...

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s con­fer­ence, titled “Why Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Plu­ral­ism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the con­cept of Amer­i­ca as a melt­ing pot “an ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the con­fi­dent Anglo-Protes­tant estab­lish­ment.” WASPs were the “dis­tinct eth­nic­i­ty” of Amer­i­ca, he insist­ed, and Amer­i­ca should only wel­come those who aspired to assim­i­late. As he put it, “This is our home­land, and we wel­come you on the con­di­tion of con­for­mi­ty.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, Amer­i­ca “is a group of peo­ple.”
...

And as we should expect, Stephen Wolfe is far from the only leader in this move­ment who is open­ly anti­se­mit­ic. It’s just beneath the sur­face of this ‘Chris­t­ian’ move­ment. Or right at the sur­face, in the case of Bri­an Sauve, anoth­er of Doug Wilson’s acolytes who warns how “[O]ur polit­i­cal sys­tem is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all man­ner of evils.” Or there’s Andrew Isker’s co-author of a book on Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, Andrew Tor­ba, the open­ly anti­se­mit­ic CEO of Gab. As we saw, both Tor­ba and Isker spoke at a 2021 con­fer­ence orga­nized by youth online neo-Nazi per­son­al­i­ty Nick Fuentes. The anti­semitism isn’t some hid­den scan­dal. It’s out in the open:

...
Some of Wilson’s oth­er acolytes are attempt­ing to cre­ate their own ver­sions of Moscow, Ida­ho. Take Bri­an Sauvé, a 33-year-old Chris­t­ian record­ing artist, pod­cast­er, and pas­tor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Web­bon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charis­mat­ic Chris­t­ian church. After the lead pas­tor resigned in a scan­dal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascend­ed to take his place, immersed him­self in reformed the­ol­o­gy, and moved the church in a new direc­tion. Today, he pre­sides over a Moscow-esque ecosys­tem: a pub­lish­ing house called New Chris­ten­dom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian Acad­e­my, mod­eled after those in Wilson’s net­work. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s web­site. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Ida­ho? We can.”

...

But unlike more main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives, Sauvé does not even pre­tend to cham­pi­on the idea of a Judeo-Chris­t­ian nation. He post­ed in July, “[O]ur polit­i­cal sys­tem is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all man­ner of evils.”

...

One eager cus­tomer is 38-year-old Theo­Bro Andrew Isker—the pas­tor who interned at Wilson’s church, stud­ied divin­i­ty at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism with Andrew Tor­ba, the open­ly anti­se­mit­ic CEO of the social media plat­form Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his fam­i­ly of sev­en to lead a church in a New Found­ing com­mu­ni­ty in Ten­nessee. Life in his native Min­neso­ta, he said, had become unten­able because of per­mis­sive laws around trans rights and abor­tion, not to men­tion how hos­pitable the state has been to refugees. “Min­neso­ta is one of the top des­ti­na­tions for reset­tling for­eign peo­ple hos­tile to our way of life,” he said.
...

And when we see how Isker spoke at a 2024 con­fer­ence for the True Texas Project along­side Paul Got­tfried, Richard Spence’rs men­tor, keep in mind that the True Texas Pro­jec­t’s pri­ma­ry donor was Defend Texas Lib­er­ty, is one of the main polit­i­cal vehi­cles of Tim Dunn, the theo­crat­ic MAGA-aligned Texas bil­lion­aire who has cap­tured effec­tive con­trol of the major­i­ty of the Texas Repub­li­can par­ty. Just weeks before Nick Fuentes held his infa­mous day long meet­ing at Pale Horse Strate­gies, the polit­i­cal con­sul­tan­cy group for Dun­n’s chief oper­a­tive Jonathan Stick­land, the True Texas Project co-host­ed a a “pass­ing the torch” event in Dal­las that fea­tured white nation­al­ist activists John Doyle and Jake Lloyd Col­glazier. Doyle has fre­quent­ly appeared along­side Fuentes at events. In 2019, Col­glazier, Fuentes, and Patrick Casey — the leader of Iden­ti­ty Evropa — were the head­lin­ers at a white nation­al­ist con­fer­ence where they advo­cat­ed a strat­e­gy of pulling the Repub­li­can Par­ty fur­ther to the right with a strat­e­gy of attack­ing Repub­li­cans for issues like being weak on immi­gra­tion or sup­port for Israel. Also recall how, when we learned back in 2022 about Peter Thiel’s big invest­ments in cre­at­ing an alter­na­tive con­ser­v­a­tive media ecosys­tem by invest­ing in Chris Buskirk’s new pub­li­ca­tion Amer­i­can Great­ness, Paul Got­tried was one of the many Amer­i­can Great­ness colum­nists push­ing the kind of con­tent one might expect in VDARE pub­li­ca­tion. It’s one big net­work, work­ing earnest­ly at cre­at­ing some sort of white nation­al­ist theo­crat­ic fas­cist pow­er grab:

...
That month, Isker spoke at a Texas con­fer­ence about the “war on white Amer­i­ca” along­side Paul Got­tfried, the men­tor of promi­nent white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer. The con­fer­ence was host­ed by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑Texas) and Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton.
...

And when we see how William Wolfe co-authored a doc­u­ment with Joel Web­bon and Okla­homa Sen. Dusty Deev­ers call­ing for “civ­il mag­is­trates” to ush­er in “the estab­lish­ment of the Ten Com­mand­ments as the foun­da­tion­al law of the nation,” we can see how this is a move­ment that a strat­e­gy of seiz­ing pow­er at both the fed­er­al and local lev­el. The focus may be on the fed­er­al lev­el with a Trump admin­is­tra­tion in the White House and Repub­li­cans in charge of both cham­bers of con­gress for now. But state-lev­el pow­er grabs are very much a part of the strat­e­gy too. It’s sort of the Sil­i­con Val­ley “Move fast and break stuff” mot­to for cre­at­ing and cap­tur­ing new mar­kets, but in the con­text of a theo­crat­ic fas­cist takeover:

...
One prob­lem is that there sim­ply are not enough Theo­Bros to pop­u­late Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Cen­ter for Bap­tist Lead­er­ship, which aims to per­suade mem­bers of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion that it, the largest of all Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions in the Unit­ed States, has fall­en prey to the cor­rupt­ing forces of lib­er­al­ism. Bap­tists are only the begin­ning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evan­gel­i­cal main­stream, which he and oth­er Theo­Bros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he post­ed on X, “Once you real­ize that Big Eva thinks it’s a big­ger sin to desire to pre­serve the cus­toms, her­itage, val­ues, and cul­tur­al homo­gene­ity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can bet­ter under­stand their moral frame­work.”

Wolfe served in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion both as the deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary of defense and as direc­tor of House affairs at the Depart­ment of State. He is also an alum­nus of Her­itage Action, a sis­ter orga­ni­za­tion of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the arch-con­ser­v­a­tive think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief archi­tect, Rus­sell Vought, post­ed on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scop­ing out a sound Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism.” A few months lat­er, the Bucks Coun­ty Bea­con uncov­ered a lengthy online man­i­festo on the goals of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists. The doc­u­ment, which list­ed Wolfe and Joel Web­bon as con­tribut­ing edi­tors and Okla­homa Sen. Dusty Deev­ers as a co-author, called for “civ­il mag­is­trates” to ush­er in “the estab­lish­ment of the Ten Com­mand­ments as the foun­da­tion­al law of the nation.”

The man­i­festo doesn’t spec­i­fy exact­ly how Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists should achieve these goals. As Tabach­nick, the extrem­ism researcher, inter­prets it, the Theo­Bros are imag­in­ing a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entre­pre­neurs in all dif­fer­ent sens­es, includ­ing the tech world that they’re mix­ing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that author­i­tar­i­an­ism “is required to have the utopi­an vision.”
...

Yes, as extrem­ism researcher Rachel Tabach­nick observes, author­i­tar­i­an­ism “is required to have the utopi­an vision.” An ‘aristopop­ulist’ fas­cist ver­sion of utopia.

New Founding: The Aptly-Named ‘Anti-Woke’ TheoBros Venture Capital Firm Dedicated to Building the Future, ‘Anti-Woke’ Breakaway Community at a Time

As we’ve seen, the Theo­Bros move­men­t’s agen­da is total con­trol of the US’s econ­o­my and soci­ety. But they aren’t just focused on fed­er­al, or even state-lev­el con­trol. In addi­tion to promis­es of build­ing a ‘par­al­lel econ­o­my’, where con­ser­v­a­tive ver­sions of ser­vices like Google’s ad-tech­nol­o­gy, which is alleged­ly too lib­er­al, there is an entire ‘break­away com­mu­ni­ty’ com­po­nent to the strat­e­gy. It could be thought of as the ‘grass-roots’ com­po­nent of the Theo­Bros agen­da, to the extent that an ‘aristopop­ulist’ move­ment can even have a gen­uine grass roots ele­ment. And with ‘anti-woke’ tech titans like Marc Andreessen ful­ly on board with the agen­da, it’s clear that this isn’t just an exten­sion of the CNP’s long-stand­ing Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism agen­da. It’s a merg­er of over­lap­ping inter­ests. Sil­i­con Val­ley titans like Andreessen who aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists them­selves are more than hap­py to find com­mon cause with CNP’s Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist ‘anti-woke’ soci­ety-cap­tur­ing aims, with New Found­ing as a kind of cor­po­rate man­i­fes­ta­tion of that merg­er of inter­ests:

Forbes

Here Come The Anti-Woke Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists

As Sil­i­con Val­ley lead­ers decry ‘wokeism,’ a group called New Found­ing that says its “birthright is to lead West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” is among the firms build­ing a new blue­print for VC — and bil­lion­aire Marc Andreessen is in.

By David Jeans, Forbes Staff
Dec 23, 2024, 06:30am EST
Updat­ed Apr 11, 2025, 11:57am EDT

Ear­li­er this year, a lit­tle-known com­pa­ny called New Found­ing made head­lines when it announced plans to build a Chris­t­ian enclave in Ken­tucky — an “aligned com­mu­ni­ty’” where own­ers could “dis­ap­pear from the cul­tur­al insan­i­ty of the broad­er coun­try.” But build­ing a vil­lage was just the begin­ning.

Now, New Found­ing has launched a ven­ture cap­i­tal fund to invest in what it calls “aligned com­pa­nies,” star­tups that oppose pro­gres­sive ide­olo­gies and are intent on both “cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion.” It’s one of a small but grow­ing num­ber of VCs vocal­ly reject­ing ‘wokeism’ and build­ing their invest­ment the­sis on core con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues.

New Founding’s invest­ments are one tent­pole of a broad­er goal: to remake soci­ety with a large­ly MAGA, tech-dri­ven, Chris­t­ian world­view. It decries left­ists as “anti-human,” cel­e­brates tech­nol­o­gy as a sin­gu­lar force that will define a new era of pros­per­i­ty, loves cryp­to and sees the inter­net (“deeply Amer­i­can in ethos and design”) as a means to its ends. “Our project offers a pow­er­ful avenue,” a man­i­festo on its web­site pub­lished in July reads, “both to devel­op the class of peo­ple who can ulti­mate­ly chal­lenge the incum­bent regime and to acquire the resources, ter­ri­to­ry, and insti­tu­tions that will enable this effort.”

...

New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er told Forbes these invest­ments are the begin­nings of a “par­al­lel econ­o­my” offer­ing con­ser­v­a­tive ver­sions of main­stream ser­vices it views as too lib­er­al, like Google’s ad-tech prod­ucts. “There’s a large share of peo­ple who feel that their views are almost entire­ly absent from the insti­tu­tions that are shap­ing the future,” Fis­ch­er explained. “And there’s a real acute need and hunger for alter­na­tives.”

At least one Sil­i­con Val­ley leader is on board. Marc Andreessen — a cofounder of the ven­ture giant Andreessen Horowitz, or A16z, who has also railed against “wokeism” — is among those back­ing New Founding’s ven­ture fund. He’s tak­en a small stake, invest­ing a “six-fig­ure” sum as a lim­it­ed part­ner, accord­ing to three peo­ple with direct knowl­edge of the fund. Andreessen didn’t respond to a com­ment request.

Mean­while, a rotat­ing cast of promi­nent Sil­i­con Val­ley voic­es have appeared on New Founding’s buzzy pod­cast. A16z part­ner Kather­ine Boyle, who leads the outfit’s high pro­file Amer­i­can Dynamism fund, has been a guest — along with mul­ti­ple oth­er main­stream defense tech big­wigs, includ­ing Founders Fund part­ner and Anduril chair­man Trae Stephens, and Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince (none respond­ed to a com­ment request). They are part of a grow­ing tech coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment that empha­sizes patri­o­tism, restor­ing an Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing base and build­ing weapons for the U.S. mil­i­tary. “We’re not only going to see, you know, inter­est­ing com­pa­nies emerge from this sort of this vibe shift,” Boyle told New Founding’s pod­cast in March. “But I think we’ll see new polit­i­cal move­ments.”

Polit­i­cal move­ments with a mes­sage that will trans­late into sol­id returns, as some investors see it. Vivek Ramaswamy, the bil­lion­aire for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and DOGE cofounder, launched an invest­ment firm in 2022 to push com­pa­nies to aban­don ‘woke’ ideals, after lam­bast­ing “stake­hold­er cap­i­tal­ism” in his book Woke Inc. More recent­ly, oth­ers are step­ping in: Investor Azo­ria Cap­i­tal said last week its ETF would shun com­pa­nies that sup­port DEI, and embraced the ‘anti-woke’ moniker. “If you com­mit to hir­ing on race and gen­der and not mer­it, your stock will con­tin­ue to under­per­form,” CEO James Fish­back told Fox News. “Our ETF will call you out.”

Anoth­er firm, 1789 Cap­i­tal, recent­ly hired MAGA First Son Don­ald Trump Jr. as a part­ner after its debut. It has raised more than $150 mil­lion for a growth equi­ty fund — accord­ing to a per­son with knowl­edge of the fund — to imple­ment its anti-woke blue­print: invest­ing in com­pa­nies that reject envi­ron­men­tal, social and gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples, glob­al­iza­tion, and bureau­cra­cy. Like New Found­ing, 1789 sees its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies as part of an emer­gent ‘par­al­lel econ­o­my.’ The firm has backed nine star­tups, includ­ing Sub­stack, video plat­form Rum­ble and the Tuck­er Carl­son Net­work.

...

It’s too ear­ly to see how the anti-woke the­sis will pay out, and com­pared to Wall Street and main­stream Sil­i­con Val­ley investors, these funds have raised a “pit­tance,” said Neil Patel, who leads the Tuck­er Carl­son Net­work, and nego­ti­at­ed 1789’s invest­ment. But momen­tum is build­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the arrival of a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, J.D. Vance, in the White House. Point­ing to the num­ber of peo­ple who elect­ed Trump, Patel added that “slight­ly more than half the coun­try are not being catered to by the nor­mal cor­po­rate world, and there’s a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty there.”

Sil­i­con Val­ley cement­ed America’s tech dom­i­nance large­ly on pro­gres­sive ideals like free trade, immi­gra­tion and social jus­tice, spawn­ing world-chang­ing com­pa­nies and a pow­er­ful class of new bil­lion­aires with cul­ture-shap­ing reach — peo­ple like Andreessen, who built one of the first web browsers and was an ear­ly backer of Face­book and Twit­ter. He is among the most promi­nent of a coterie of Sil­i­con Val­ley lead­ers who have in recent years turned against many of those same ideals, tak­ing aim at “woke” agen­das, which they now claim have stalled inno­va­tion, ham­strung busi­ness and lim­it­ed Amer­i­can pros­per­i­ty. “In the 2010s through 2024, being woke and repres­sive was the height of cool,” Andreessen pro­claimed on X last week. “Start­ing in 2025, resist­ing wok­e­ness will be the height of cool.”

...

In his Tech­no-Opti­mist man­i­festo, a 5,000 word screed pub­lished in 2023, Andreessen wrote, “tech­nol­o­gy must be a vio­lent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” Once a self-pro­fessed Demo­c­rat, in recent years he has moved to the right, pub­licly endors­ing now Pres­i­dent-elect Trump. And he has been vocal about his frus­tra­tion with gov­ern­ment and Amer­i­can cul­ture, which he says has evolved into “a left-wing reac­tionary scream”: “rad­i­cal­ized rage that’s sort of fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-cap­i­tal­ist… fun­da­men­tal­ly communist…and then fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-tech­no­log­i­cal.”

A response to this — Andreessen and New Found­ing have both sug­gest­ed — is already under­way, a so-called “vibe shift” in Sil­i­con Val­ley and beyond. Lega­cy insti­tu­tions are in accel­er­at­ing decline and new cul­tur­al move­ments are ris­ing to replace them, they claim.

...

Behind New Found­ing is Fis­ch­er, a Har­vard Law grad­u­ate and active mem­ber of var­i­ous con­ser­v­a­tive groups, includ­ing the Clare­mont Insti­tute and the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civ­il Renew­al, a male-only Chris­t­ian fra­ter­nal group that hopes to train young lead­ers to replace the U.S. rul­ing class with “a renewed Amer­i­can regime.” He appears to have made a small for­tune from man­ag­ing a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar real estate port­fo­lio. Anoth­er of his com­pa­nies, Trust­work — an online mar­ket­place for main­te­nance work­ers — was shut­tered in 2019, and is the sub­ject of an ongo­ing law­suit accus­ing Fis­ch­er and a busi­ness part­ner of embez­zle­ment; They have denied wrong­do­ing and coun­ter­sued, claim­ing they were extort­ed. Then, in 2021, he start­ed New Found­ing with oth­er Clare­mont alum­ni.

On the phone, Fis­ch­er is pen­sive and prag­mat­ic. He is also very much focused on New Found­ing as a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty built on its align­ment with three social groups: Trump’s MAGA fol­low­ers (“the new right polit­i­cal move­ment”), the dis­si­dent tech world (those fight­ing “the Google, Face­book, Sales­force woke cul­ture”), and the Chris­t­ian right (“would-be Chris­t­ian thinkers who are focused on a more assertive polit­i­cal vision”). “Our the­sis was that those would be three com­po­nents of an emerg­ing move­ment,” he said.

But in New Founding’s man­i­festo, he strikes a dark­er tone. “We are at the end of a civ­i­liza­tion­al cycle,” he wrote. “Com­ing years will bring tur­moil and per­il, but also great opportunity—perhaps the first in near­ly a century—to forge new mod­els and insti­tu­tions that can shape the direc­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.”

He con­cludes with a nod to an “inflec­tion point,” an upcom­ing upheaval, and a call to action. “Even anoth­er Trump pres­i­den­cy will not change the cur­rent system’s under­ly­ing fragili­ty or end the Left’s grip on most lega­cy insti­tu­tions,” he wrote, before fin­ish­ing with: “It is our birthright to lead West­ern civ­i­liza­tion into the dig­i­tal age.”

Such lan­guage appears to share par­al­lels with Accel­er­a­tionism, a phi­los­o­phy that claims soci­etal col­lapse is impend­ing, and mea­sures to has­ten its arrival will allow some­thing bet­ter — and more aligned — to be built in its place, said Jason Blaza­kis, a pro­fes­sor at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege who focus­es on extrem­ism. “It’s implied that there needs to be change, there needs to be poten­tial­ly a blood let­ting, with­out say­ing that there needs to be vio­lence,” he said. “Because there’s no oth­er way to change the fab­ric of the coun­try in the way that they would like, with­out hav­ing some lev­el of vio­lence or upheaval.”

Fis­ch­er insist­ed this isn’t as grim as it might sound, and said it is not a sub­tex­tu­al call for unrest or civ­il war. Soci­etal upheaval “could be wide­spread vio­lence” or it could be “like the finan­cial cri­sis of 2008 where you saw the col­lapse of major insti­tu­tions,” he said. Or the fall of the Sovi­et Union. “We’re in a world where polit­i­cal volatil­i­ty is high, mean­ing, it’s very hard to pre­dict any sort of out­come, and you have a wide array of pos­si­ble out­comes,” he said. “And I tend to avoid the busi­ness of pre­dic­tion.”

New Found­ing start­ed as a “dis­si­dent” orga­ni­za­tion, Fis­ch­er said, acknowl­edg­ing that he has leaned into provo­ca­tion. He even launched a ven­ture last year with an online per­son­al­i­ty who has a his­to­ry of post­ing swastikas and oth­er Nazi imagery (which he has pre­vi­ous­ly described as “iron­ic trolling” as opposed to “gen­uine Nazi belief”). “My the­sis from the begin­ning was to be pub­lic and be online, and that would attract peo­ple,” he said. “Many peo­ple are look­ing for some­thing that has been cen­sored by the main­stream and by being pub­lic about our inter­est in that, we will have some­thing attrac­tive that is scarce in the world.”

It’s still ear­ly, but the group is gain­ing trac­tion. New Founding’s tal­ent net­work, which promis­es to place can­di­dates at com­pa­nies that sup­port the organization’s mis­sion, is 3,000 mem­bers strong and grow­ing. It sub­mit­ted sev­er­al dozen peo­ple for roles to be con­sid­ered by Project 2025, the alleged far-right blue­print for Trump 2.0 (Trump, notably, dis­tanced him­self from its more extreme ideas). With increas­ing momen­tum span­ning Sil­i­con Val­ley roy­al­ty to the White House itself — one staffer post­ed a group pho­to with Vance after he was cho­sen as Trump’s VP, call­ing him “our guy” — the firm plans to close its first fund at $6 mil­lion, before rais­ing anoth­er in 2025.

...

—————–

“Here Come The Anti-Woke Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists” By David Jeans; Forbes; 12/23/2024

“New Founding’s invest­ments are one tent­pole of a broad­er goal: to remake soci­ety with a large­ly MAGA, tech-dri­ven, Chris­t­ian world­view. It decries left­ists as “anti-human,” cel­e­brates tech­nol­o­gy as a sin­gu­lar force that will define a new era of pros­per­i­ty, loves cryp­to and sees the inter­net (“deeply Amer­i­can in ethos and design”) as a means to its ends. “Our project offers a pow­er­ful avenue,” a man­i­festo on its web­site pub­lished in July reads, “both to devel­op the class of peo­ple who can ulti­mate­ly chal­lenge the incum­bent regime and to acquire the resources, ter­ri­to­ry, and insti­tu­tions that will enable this effort.” ”

Remak­ing soci­ety with a large­ly MAGA, tech-dri­ven, Chris­t­ian world­view. That’s the incred­i­bly dystopi­an broad­er goal of New Found­ing’s invest­ment strat­e­gy. Dystopi­an but hard­ly sur­pris­ing for a com­pa­ny filled with SACR mem­bers, includ­ing the founder, Nate Fis­ch­er. The com­pa­ny lit­er­al­ly states “We are at the end of a civ­i­liza­tion­al cycle,” in its man­i­festo. As Jason Blaza­kis, a pro­fes­sor at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege who focus­es on extrem­ism, observes, it’s the kind of lan­guage that points towards an Accel­er­a­tionist world­view. In oth­er words, they aren’t just pre­dict­ing the col­lapse of civ­i­liza­tion. They are work­ing on mak­ing that hap­pen, under the pre­sump­tion that civ­i­liza­tion will be rebuilt by a tech-fueled author­i­tar­i­an ‘Theo­Bros’ new order:

...
New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er told Forbes these invest­ments are the begin­nings of a “par­al­lel econ­o­my” offer­ing con­ser­v­a­tive ver­sions of main­stream ser­vices it views as too lib­er­al, like Google’s ad-tech prod­ucts. “There’s a large share of peo­ple who feel that their views are almost entire­ly absent from the insti­tu­tions that are shap­ing the future,” Fis­ch­er explained. “And there’s a real acute need and hunger for alter­na­tives.”

...

Behind New Found­ing is Fis­ch­er, a Har­vard Law grad­u­ate and active mem­ber of var­i­ous con­ser­v­a­tive groups, includ­ing the Clare­mont Insti­tute and the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civ­il Renew­al, a male-only Chris­t­ian fra­ter­nal group that hopes to train young lead­ers to replace the U.S. rul­ing class with “a renewed Amer­i­can regime.” He appears to have made a small for­tune from man­ag­ing a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar real estate port­fo­lio. Anoth­er of his com­pa­nies, Trust­work — an online mar­ket­place for main­te­nance work­ers — was shut­tered in 2019, and is the sub­ject of an ongo­ing law­suit accus­ing Fis­ch­er and a busi­ness part­ner of embez­zle­ment; They have denied wrong­do­ing and coun­ter­sued, claim­ing they were extort­ed. Then, in 2021, he start­ed New Found­ing with oth­er Clare­mont alum­ni.

On the phone, Fis­ch­er is pen­sive and prag­mat­ic. He is also very much focused on New Found­ing as a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty built on its align­ment with three social groups: Trump’s MAGA fol­low­ers (“the new right polit­i­cal move­ment”), the dis­si­dent tech world (those fight­ing “the Google, Face­book, Sales­force woke cul­ture”), and the Chris­t­ian right (“would-be Chris­t­ian thinkers who are focused on a more assertive polit­i­cal vision”). “Our the­sis was that those would be three com­po­nents of an emerg­ing move­ment,” he said.

But in New Founding’s man­i­festo, he strikes a dark­er tone. “We are at the end of a civ­i­liza­tion­al cycle,” he wrote. “Com­ing years will bring tur­moil and per­il, but also great opportunity—perhaps the first in near­ly a century—to forge new mod­els and insti­tu­tions that can shape the direc­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.”

He con­cludes with a nod to an “inflec­tion point,” an upcom­ing upheaval, and a call to action. “Even anoth­er Trump pres­i­den­cy will not change the cur­rent system’s under­ly­ing fragili­ty or end the Left’s grip on most lega­cy insti­tu­tions,” he wrote, before fin­ish­ing with: “It is our birthright to lead West­ern civ­i­liza­tion into the dig­i­tal age.”

Such lan­guage appears to share par­al­lels with Accel­er­a­tionism, a phi­los­o­phy that claims soci­etal col­lapse is impend­ing, and mea­sures to has­ten its arrival will allow some­thing bet­ter — and more aligned — to be built in its place, said Jason Blaza­kis, a pro­fes­sor at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege who focus­es on extrem­ism. “It’s implied that there needs to be change, there needs to be poten­tial­ly a blood let­ting, with­out say­ing that there needs to be vio­lence,” he said. “Because there’s no oth­er way to change the fab­ric of the coun­try in the way that they would like, with­out hav­ing some lev­el of vio­lence or upheaval.”

Fis­ch­er insist­ed this isn’t as grim as it might sound, and said it is not a sub­tex­tu­al call for unrest or civ­il war. Soci­etal upheaval “could be wide­spread vio­lence” or it could be “like the finan­cial cri­sis of 2008 where you saw the col­lapse of major insti­tu­tions,” he said. Or the fall of the Sovi­et Union. “We’re in a world where polit­i­cal volatil­i­ty is high, mean­ing, it’s very hard to pre­dict any sort of out­come, and you have a wide array of pos­si­ble out­comes,” he said. “And I tend to avoid the busi­ness of pre­dic­tion.”

New Found­ing start­ed as a “dis­si­dent” orga­ni­za­tion, Fis­ch­er said, acknowl­edg­ing that he has leaned into provo­ca­tion. He even launched a ven­ture last year with an online per­son­al­i­ty who has a his­to­ry of post­ing swastikas and oth­er Nazi imagery (which he has pre­vi­ous­ly described as “iron­ic trolling” as opposed to “gen­uine Nazi belief”). “My the­sis from the begin­ning was to be pub­lic and be online, and that would attract peo­ple,” he said. “Many peo­ple are look­ing for some­thing that has been cen­sored by the main­stream and by being pub­lic about our inter­est in that, we will have some­thing attrac­tive that is scarce in the world.”
...

And when we see Marc Andreessen on the board of New Found­ing, it’s clear that this ‘Theo­Bros Cae­sar’ vision of a fas­cist tech-cen­tric post-col­lapse new order has buy in from some of the biggest names in Sil­i­con Val­ley. It’s not just Peter Thiel. Which is hard­ly a sur­prise. This is a move­ment intend­ing on turn­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­garchs into soci­ety’s new fas­cist over­lords, after all. What’s remark­able here is how open Andreessen with his fas­cist pol­i­tics:

...
At least one Sil­i­con Val­ley leader is on board. Marc Andreessen — a cofounder of the ven­ture giant Andreessen Horowitz, or A16z, who has also railed against “wokeism” — is among those back­ing New Founding’s ven­ture fund. He’s tak­en a small stake, invest­ing a “six-fig­ure” sum as a lim­it­ed part­ner, accord­ing to three peo­ple with direct knowl­edge of the fund. Andreessen didn’t respond to a com­ment request.

...

Sil­i­con Val­ley cement­ed America’s tech dom­i­nance large­ly on pro­gres­sive ideals like free trade, immi­gra­tion and social jus­tice, spawn­ing world-chang­ing com­pa­nies and a pow­er­ful class of new bil­lion­aires with cul­ture-shap­ing reach — peo­ple like Andreessen, who built one of the first web browsers and was an ear­ly backer of Face­book and Twit­ter. He is among the most promi­nent of a coterie of Sil­i­con Val­ley lead­ers who have in recent years turned against many of those same ideals, tak­ing aim at “woke” agen­das, which they now claim have stalled inno­va­tion, ham­strung busi­ness and lim­it­ed Amer­i­can pros­per­i­ty. “In the 2010s through 2024, being woke and repres­sive was the height of cool,” Andreessen pro­claimed on X last week. “Start­ing in 2025, resist­ing wok­e­ness will be the height of cool.”

...

In his Tech­no-Opti­mist man­i­festo, a 5,000 word screed pub­lished in 2023, Andreessen wrote, “tech­nol­o­gy must be a vio­lent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” Once a self-pro­fessed Demo­c­rat, in recent years he has moved to the right, pub­licly endors­ing now Pres­i­dent-elect Trump. And he has been vocal about his frus­tra­tion with gov­ern­ment and Amer­i­can cul­ture, which he says has evolved into “a left-wing reac­tionary scream”: “rad­i­cal­ized rage that’s sort of fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-cap­i­tal­ist… fun­da­men­tal­ly communist…and then fun­da­men­tal­ly anti-tech­no­log­i­cal.”

A response to this — Andreessen and New Found­ing have both sug­gest­ed — is already under­way, a so-called “vibe shift” in Sil­i­con Val­ley and beyond. Lega­cy insti­tu­tions are in accel­er­at­ing decline and new cul­tur­al move­ments are ris­ing to replace them, they claim.
...

Oth­er notable fig­ures who have appeared as guests on the New Found­ing pod­cast include Founders Fund part­ner and Anduril chair­man Trae Stephens and Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince. As we’ve seen, Trae Stephens is more than just a part­ner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the chair­man of AI defense con­trac­tor Anduril. Stephens also worked for Palan­tir and the 2016 Trump tran­si­tion team. Intrigu­ing­ly, Stephens was also an investor in Car­byne, one of the tech firms that includ­ed by Thiel and Jef­frey Epstein as fel­low investors. And Erik Prince is, of course, some­one who has long man­i­fest­ed both fas­cist and theo­crat­ic ambi­tions, includ­ing his lob­by­ing of the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion to deploy pri­vate mil­i­tary con­trac­tors domes­ti­cal­ly and a return to colo­nial­ism. The kind of guests we should expect on a ‘Theo­Bro’ cor­po­rate pod­cast:

...
Mean­while, a rotat­ing cast of promi­nent Sil­i­con Val­ley voic­es have appeared on New Founding’s buzzy pod­cast. A16z part­ner Kather­ine Boyle, who leads the outfit’s high pro­file Amer­i­can Dynamism fund, has been a guest — along with mul­ti­ple oth­er main­stream defense tech big­wigs, includ­ing Founders Fund part­ner and Anduril chair­man Trae Stephens, and Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince (none respond­ed to a com­ment request). They are part of a grow­ing tech coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment that empha­sizes patri­o­tism, restor­ing an Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing base and build­ing weapons for the U.S. mil­i­tary. “We’re not only going to see, you know, inter­est­ing com­pa­nies emerge from this sort of this vibe shift,” Boyle told New Founding’s pod­cast in March. “But I think we’ll see new polit­i­cal move­ments.”
...

Nor should we be sur­prised to find that New Found­ing is appar­ent­ly oper­at­ing a ‘tal­ent net­work’ of at least 3,000 mem­bers, and sub­mit­ted dozens of peo­ple for roles in Project 2025. Recall how the cre­ation of mas­sive lists of MAGA loy­al­ists who could fill gov­ern­ment jobs was at the core of the ‘Sched­ule F’ agen­da that ulti­mate­ly became Project 2025. So it sounds like we should expect an abun­dance of New Found­ing-dis­cov­ered fas­cists pop­u­lat­ing more and more posi­tions of influ­ence. It’s a plan for a pow­er grab, after all:

...
It’s still ear­ly, but the group is gain­ing trac­tion. New Founding’s tal­ent net­work, which promis­es to place can­di­dates at com­pa­nies that sup­port the organization’s mis­sion, is 3,000 mem­bers strong and grow­ing. It sub­mit­ted sev­er­al dozen peo­ple for roles to be con­sid­ered by Project 2025, the alleged far-right blue­print for Trump 2.0 (Trump, notably, dis­tanced him­self from its more extreme ideas). With increas­ing momen­tum span­ning Sil­i­con Val­ley roy­al­ty to the White House itself — one staffer post­ed a group pho­to with Vance after he was cho­sen as Trump’s VP, call­ing him “our guy” — the firm plans to close its first fund at $6 mil­lion, before rais­ing anoth­er in 2025.
...

And as we can see, New Found­ing isn’t the only ‘anti-woke’ invest­ment group to pop up in recent years. There’s Azo­ria Capi­tol with CEO James Fish­back. As we’ve seen, not only is Fish­back run­ning as the ‘anti-woke’ can­di­date in the 2026 Flori­da Repub­li­can guber­na­to­r­i­al pri­ma­ry but he’s been run­ning a cam­paign that involves hang­ing out with ‘Alt Right’ fig­ures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. And then there’s 1789 Cap­i­tal, Chris Buskirk’s firm:

...
Polit­i­cal move­ments with a mes­sage that will trans­late into sol­id returns, as some investors see it. Vivek Ramaswamy, the bil­lion­aire for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and DOGE cofounder, launched an invest­ment firm in 2022 to push com­pa­nies to aban­don ‘woke’ ideals, after lam­bast­ing “stake­hold­er cap­i­tal­ism” in his book Woke Inc. More recent­ly, oth­ers are step­ping in: Investor Azo­ria Cap­i­tal said last week its ETF would shun com­pa­nies that sup­port DEI, and embraced the ‘anti-woke’ moniker. “If you com­mit to hir­ing on race and gen­der and not mer­it, your stock will con­tin­ue to under­per­form,” CEO James Fish­back told Fox News. “Our ETF will call you out.”

Anoth­er firm, 1789 Cap­i­tal, recent­ly hired MAGA First Son Don­ald Trump Jr. as a part­ner after its debut. It has raised more than $150 mil­lion for a growth equi­ty fund — accord­ing to a per­son with knowl­edge of the fund — to imple­ment its anti-woke blue­print: invest­ing in com­pa­nies that reject envi­ron­men­tal, social and gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples, glob­al­iza­tion, and bureau­cra­cy. Like New Found­ing, 1789 sees its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies as part of an emer­gent ‘par­al­lel econ­o­my.’ The firm has backed nine star­tups, includ­ing Sub­stack, video plat­form Rum­ble and the Tuck­er Carl­son Net­work.
...

Like New Found­ing, 1789 Cap­i­tal is try­ing to build a ‘par­al­lel econ­o­my’ too. And by par­al­lel econ­o­my, they mean an explic­it­ly ‘anti-woke’ econ­o­my. But, again, 1789 Cap­i­tal and New Found­ing are just part of a much larg­er strat­e­gy. There’s a ‘par­al­lel gov­ern­ment’ com­po­nent to this strat­e­gy too, with New Found­ing already buy­ing up land for this par­al­lel gov­ern­ment to take root.

New Founding’s Highland Rim Project: A Template Community for a Network of Breakaway States

And that intro­duc­tion to the ‘par­al­lel econ­o­my’ Theo­Bros strat­e­gy brings us to the ‘par­al­lel gov­ern­ment’ objects of one of New Found­ing’s biggest invest­ments: The High­land Ring Project of Jack­son Coun­ty, Ten­nessee. The project may be cul­tur­al­ly led by Domin­ion­ist pod­cast­ers like Andrew Isker who exhort their fol­low­ers to pack up and move to Jack­son Coun­ty to become res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ty and help pro­vide the ‘grass roots’ demands for a white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist polit­i­cal takeover of the coun­ty. But it’s New Found­ing, and the Theo­Bros cap­i­tal behind it, that is buy­ing up the large tracts of land for the project. It’s a group effort. And as Isker and New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er make explic­it, the High­land Rim Project is a “Net­work State” tem­plate. As Fis­ch­er post­ed on X.comin 2024, “Nation states are not the prin­ci­pal form of gov­ern­ment today. I see no rea­son Chris­t­ian nations or peo­ples couldn’t orga­nize net­work states.” The arti­cle goes on to intro­duce Sil­i­con Val­ley tech investor Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan as the archi­tect of the ‘Net­work State’ con­cept. But New Found­ing isn’t just envi­sion­ing white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist enclaves. Srini­vasan has open­ly shared his vision for a cor­po­rate run San Fran­cis­co, where cit­i­zens would where dif­fer­ent col­ored shirts to show their polit­i­cal alle­giances, with ‘Reds’ and ‘Blues’ rep­re­sent­ing tra­di­tion­al Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats, but also ‘Grays’, whose pri­mar­i­ly alle­giances are to some tech firm like Google or a fig­ure like Elon Musk. Srini­vasan also imag­ines the Grays and Reds will effec­tive­ly run the city and cre­ate zones were ‘Blues’ aren’t wel­come. There will also be pub­lic view­ings of films show­ing the pub­lic the hor­rors of ‘Blue’-run soci­eties. The ‘Grays’ will form alliances with the police and gain spe­cial pro­tec­tions. Srini­vasan’s friend, Marc Andreessen, is a New Found­ing investor.

Isker has a some­what dif­fer­ent vision for the kind of state he wants to build. As he has shared with his fol­low­ers on X.com, back in 2023, “I don’t hate Jews. Their reli­gion is lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian. You can­not be a Chris­t­ian with­out rec­og­niz­ing this.” Isker added that “Lee was more of an Amer­i­can than any­one in the 21st Cen­tu­ry crit­i­ciz­ing him,” pre­sum­ably a ref­er­ence to Con­fed­er­ate Gen­er­al Robert E. Lee, which is the kind of sen­ti­ment that aligns with Isker’s opin­ion that the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple.” He’s also referred to mod­ern day Amer­i­ca as a “gynoc­ra­cy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no’.” In July of 2023, Isker spoke at a con­fer­ence

But else­where, Isker is less whole­some. To his 43,000 fol­low­ers on X, he makes state­ments that some­times cross the line into anti­semitism. “I don’t hate Jews,” he post­ed in 2023. “Their reli­gion is lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian. You can­not be a Chris­t­ian with­out rec­og­niz­ing this.” On that same plat­form, he has referred to Indi­an peo­ple as “cow wor­ship­pers,” called the Unit­ed States a “gynoc­ra­cy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no,’ and thun­dered against the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act, say­ing it bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple.” In July 2023, Isker spoke at a Texas con­fer­ence about the “war on white Amer­i­ca” along­side Paul Got­tfried, the men­tor of promi­nent white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer. Andrew Isker and Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan don’t have the exact same vision for the states they aspire to run. But they do have a shared rejec­tion of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy and shared visions of a “Net­work State” future, where the Unit­ed States is replaced by a con­stel­la­tion of author­i­tar­i­an ‘anti-woke’ polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic enclaves, with New Found­ing serv­ing as the cor­po­rate man­i­fes­ta­tion of that shared agen­da:

Moth­er Jones

Chris­t­ian “Theo­Bros” Are Build­ing a Tech Utopia in Appalachia

What could go wrong?

Kiera But­ler
April 8, 2025

A cou­ple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pas­tor and father of six, made a big deci­sion. He would move his fam­i­ly away from Min­neso­ta, where six gen­er­a­tions of his ances­tors had lived before him, to a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty in Ten­nessee. Leav­ing his home state wasn’t easy, he told Tuck­er Carl­son on Carlson’s YouTube show in March. But he had no choice; the pro­gres­sive excess­es of Gov­er­nor Tim Walz sim­ply had become too much to bear. Isker was espe­cial­ly con­cerned about his autis­tic son, who had attend­ed a pro­gram at a local pub­lic school. “They could be putting him in a dress and call­ing him a girl name, and I would have no idea,” said Isker, echo­ing an unfound­ed claim that Pres­i­dent Trump made dur­ing a Sep­tem­ber debate with Kamala Har­ris. “And then when I find out and I oppose it, boom. [Child Pro­tec­tive Ser­vices] comes, takes him out of our cus­tody, and he’s gone for­ev­er.”

So Isker decid­ed to move to rur­al Appalachia—choosing that par­tic­u­lar loca­tion to help launch a new com­mu­ni­ty near the small town of Gaines­boro, Ten­nessee, in the cen­tral north­ern part of the state. Isker’s new neigh­bor­hood sounds idyl­lic, with “bucol­ic pas­tures, water­ways teem­ing with over 140 species of fish–including some of the country’s pre­mier trout fish­ing, rolling hills, thick hard­wood forests, and abun­dant wildlife,” accord­ing to the real estate web­site.

There were rea­sons oth­er than just its nat­ur­al beau­ty that this area was appeal­ing. The com­mu­ni­ty that Isker is help­ing to build in Ten­nessee is part of the High­land Rim Project, an ini­tia­tive from a Chris­t­ian ven­ture cap­i­tal firm called New Found­ing. The com­pa­ny seeks to build neigh­bor­hoods with Chris­t­ian val­ues in rur­al Amer­i­ca: “Thick com­mu­ni­ties that are con­ducive to a nat­ur­al, human and unique­ly Amer­i­can way of life,” places where “your neigh­bors are peo­ple who seek a self-deter­mi­na­tive lifestyle and a return to a more nat­ur­al human way of liv­ing for them­selves and their fam­i­lies.”

But the High­land Rim Project is not just anoth­er old-fash­ioned utopi­an fan­ta­sy. Rather, it is delib­er­ate­ly for­ward-look­ing, infused with Sil­i­con Val­ley tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an val­ues. The com­mu­ni­ties will be designed around “dig­i­tal self-gov­er­nance” includ­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy and a cul­ture “in which our pat­ri­mo­ni­al civic rights, chiefly those of prop­er­ty, free polit­i­cal speech and civil­ian arma­ment, can be main­tained and per­pet­u­at­ed.”

For Isker, a pod­cast­er and pro­lif­ic poster on X, the High­land Rim Project is an exam­ple of how Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties that have pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ed only online might soon coa­lesce in phys­i­cal spaces. On Carlson’s show, he described the line of rea­son­ing he has observed as some­thing like, “‘I like this pas­tor. I like the ser­mons that he preach­es, I agree with this the­ol­o­gy, and I’m being formed and shaped.’ So you band into groups online where you sort of self-sort,” he said. “It’s like, what if we took this dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty that exists, and what if we made it in real life?”

There’s a name for the rough con­cept that Isker describes: the “Net­work State,” an ascen­dant and buzzy tech move­ment where inter­net groups are begin­ning to explore what it might be like to start their own new coun­tries. At first, these new coun­tries would appear online, and even­tu­al­ly in actu­al phys­i­cal loca­tions. Sim­ply put, the High­land Rim Project is the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist take on that idea. As New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the prin­ci­pal form of gov­ern­ment today. I see no rea­son Chris­t­ian nations or peo­ples couldn’t orga­nize net­work states.”

As with many things tech, the Net­work State move­ment began in Sil­i­con Val­ley. The con­cept is the brain­child of investor and entre­pre­neur Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, a close friend of Pay­Pal titan Peter Thiel, and a for­mer part­ner at Andreessen-Horowitz, the firm run by ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Marc Andreessen. In a 2021 arti­cle on his web­site, Srini­vasan laid out his vision of a plan for peo­ple seek­ing to build a new utopia, or, as he put it, “a fresh start.”Sure, there were the old-fash­ioned con­ven­tion­al ways to do this—such as form­ing a new coun­try through rev­o­lu­tion or war. But these options are not only, well, real­ly hard, but also unpre­dictable. A cruise ship or some­where in space were appeal­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for new coun­tries, but both pre­sent­ed logis­ti­cal chal­lenges. Far sim­pler and more prac­ti­cal was an online nation, com­plete with its own cul­ture, econ­o­my, and, of course, laws.

Even­tu­al­ly, Srini­vasan mused, such a com­mu­ni­ty could move into the ana­log space and acquire actu­al phys­i­cal prop­er­ty where peo­ple would come togeth­er and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders. The com­mu­ni­ty did not have to be on con­tigu­ous land, how­ev­er, but instead a “reverse dias­po­ra,” he said. “A com­mu­ni­ty that forms first on the inter­net, builds a cul­ture online, and only then comes togeth­er in per­son to build dwellings and struc­tures.”

Acknowl­edg­ing that the idea might sound a lit­tle goofy—like a giant live-action Minecraft—he empha­sized that this was a seri­ous propo­si­tion. “Once we remem­ber that Face­book has 3B users, Twit­ter has 300M, and many indi­vid­ual influ­encers have more than 1M fol­low­ers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imag­ine we can build a 1–10M per­son social net­work with a gen­uine sense of nation­al con­scious­ness, an inte­grat­ed cryp­tocur­ren­cy, and a plan to crowd­fund many pieces of ter­ri­to­ry around the world.” Imag­ine the net­work state as a kind of a Pac-Man gob­bling up lit­tle pieces of land.

Con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ties! Even­tu­al­ly, the new nation would be so big with so much eco­nom­ic pow­er that oth­er nations would be forced to rec­og­nize it as legit­i­mate. And once that hap­pens, con­ven­tion­al laws in more con­ven­tion­al nations could become almost irrel­e­vant along with the nations them­selves. Why on earth would, say, a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny choose to spend bil­lions of dol­lars and decades of test­ing on a new drug when they could go to a dereg­u­lat­ed net­work state and take it to mar­ket in record time?

In 2022, Srini­vasan turned his sem­i­nal arti­cle into a best­seller, The Net­work State: How to Start a New Coun­try. Srinivasan’s book is still in the top 20 lists in both the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and gen­er­al tech­nol­o­gy and ref­er­ence sec­tions on Amazon—and in the three years since its pub­li­ca­tion, the ideas in it have gained a robust fol­low­ing. My for­mer col­league Ali Bre­land wrote a 2023 inves­ti­ga­tion about Prax­is, a “cryp­toc­i­ty” con­cept that drew tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in invest­ment from Thiel and oth­er Sil­i­con Val­ley luminaries—though the phys­i­cal city has yet to mate­ri­al­ize. There is also Próspera, a dereg­u­lat­ed eco­nom­ic zone in Roatán, Hon­duras, and a some­what dif­fer­ent mod­el, Cal­i­for­nia For­ev­er, an ongo­ing effort by a group of tech bil­lion­aires to turn part of Cal­i­for­nia wine coun­try into a new city with a “ded­i­cat­ed Indus­try & Tech­nol­o­gy Zone.”

In an email to Moth­er Jones, New Found­ing cofounder Josh Abbotoy, a for­mer fel­low of the right-wing think­tank the Clare­mont Insti­tute, said the net­work state con­cept doesn’t per­fect­ly cap­ture the High­land Rim Project; he prefers the term “char­ter com­mu­ni­ties,” which he describes as places “char­tered around par­tic­u­lar­ized lifestyles or affini­ties. In our case, we empha­size tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can val­ues like faith, fam­i­ly, and free­dom, in a rur­al and vin­tage small-town Amer­i­can set­ting.” New Found­ing, he says, offers “a plat­form on which many local­ists can build their more par­tic­u­lar­ized projects.”

Nev­er­the­less, he says, Srini­vasan is an influ­ence. “I have def­i­nite­ly learned from his the­o­ries about how dig­i­tal con­di­tions encour­age more trib­al social orga­ni­za­tion across the board,” Abbotoy said. “Whether one is excit­ed or hor­ri­fied by Balaji’s pre­dic­tions of the future, dis­miss­ing them out of hand isn’t good busi­ness.”

...

While Abbotoy didn’t pro­vide details on plans to incor­po­rate cryp­tocur­ren­cy into the com­mu­ni­ties, the peo­ple who have bought prop­er­ty so far, “are high agency and pri­or­i­tize sov­er­eign­ty in their per­son­al lives, includ­ing dig­i­tal and finan­cial sov­er­eign­ty,” he said. “So nat­u­ral­ly many of them love cryp­to. We encour­age cryp­to adop­tion and use, and eager­ly wel­come entre­pre­neurs oper­at­ing in this space.” He esti­mates that about 60 house­holds “have bought or moved to our tar­get regions as a result of our efforts,” and the web­site assures inter­est­ed par­ties, “We see ris­ing demand and capac­i­ty for new types of com­mu­ni­ties built around a shared vision for local life in Amer­i­ca.”

But whose shared vision? The peo­ple who already live in the com­mu­ni­ties that New Found­ing is tar­get­ing already have their own vision for local life, and many of them are not thrilled about the idea of wealthy Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists mov­ing in and tak­ing over. Last year, Nashville’s Newschan­nel 5 aired an inves­ti­ga­tion about the move­ment. A few months lat­er, Phil Williams, the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist who broke the sto­ry, talked with locals in Gaines­boro, Ten­nessee. “Main­ly peo­ple are scared,” said the chair of the county’s Repub­li­can par­ty. “It scares me that they are very clear about tak­ing over.” A local restau­rant own­er added, “I don’t want to lose what we already have.” In response to the seg­ment, Isker’s pod­cast cohost C.J. Engel, who also moved to the area to help launch the com­mu­ni­ty, post­ed on X, “Phil and the entire jour­nal­ist class at large are ter­ri­fied that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians are assert­ing them­selves in the face of dwin­dling media pow­er. This is why they dou­ble down on their strate­gies of pro­vok­ing fear through dis­tor­tion.” Abbotoy reit­er­at­ed that rejec­tion of Williams’ inves­ti­ga­tion in an email to Moth­er Jones.

...

But else­where, Isker is less whole­some. To his 43,000 fol­low­ers on X, he makes state­ments that some­times cross the line into anti­semitism. “I don’t hate Jews,” he post­ed in 2023. “Their reli­gion is lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian. You can­not be a Chris­t­ian with­out rec­og­niz­ing this.” On that same plat­form, he has referred to Indi­an peo­ple as “cow wor­ship­pers,” called the Unit­ed States a “gynoc­ra­cy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no,’ and thun­dered against the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act, say­ing it bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple.” In July 2023, Isker spoke at a Texas con­fer­ence about the “war on white Amer­i­ca” along­side Paul Got­tfried, the men­tor of promi­nent white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer.

And yet for all his extrem­ist views, Isker, whom Abbotoy described as “a part of the broad­er project” and “a friend,” is well con­nect­ed in Wash­ing­ton and Sil­i­con Val­ley. The New Found­ing staffers hob­nob with Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance. Andreessen—the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and Srinivasan’s friend—has invest­ed in New Found­ing. New Founding’s Nate Fis­ch­er has invest­ed in the start­up soci­eties ven­ture firm Pronomos Cap­i­tal, Pronomos head Patri Fried­man recent­ly told me. Through the online mag­a­zine Amer­i­can Reformer, which Abbotoy and Fis­ch­er cofound­ed, New Found­ing has robust con­nec­tions to the world of the Theo­Bros, a group of most­ly mil­len­ni­al, ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive men, many of whom proud­ly call them­selves Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists, believe women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and idol­ize author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers like Fran­cis­co Fran­co.

...

As the net­work state con­cept gains trac­tion, Srini­vasan has offered still more details about exact­ly what he has in mind. Last year, writ­ing for the New Repub­lic, jour­nal­ist Gil Duran chron­i­cled a ram­bling, four-hour inter­view that Srini­vasan gave on the pod­cast “Moment of Zen.” In it, Srini­vasan described his vision for a new San Fran­cis­co, one in which cit­i­zens would show their loy­al­ty to tech com­pa­nies by don­ning gray shirts. The ulti­mate goal is for the Grays to dri­ve out the “Blues,” Srinivasan’s word for pro­gres­sives:

The “Grays” would have access to exclu­sive zones of the city, and they would also enjoy pro­tec­tion through a spe­cial arrange­ment with the police, whom they would win over with lav­ish ban­quets.

Dystopi­an and pre­pos­ter­ous though this may sound, fans of the Net­work State are try­ing to con­vince the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to scale up their vision—and there are signs that the pres­i­dent is lis­ten­ing. In 2023, dur­ing the lead­up to his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Don­ald Trump pro­posed build­ing “free­dom cities,” which would con­vert fed­er­al land in rur­al areas into zones with laws specif­i­cal­ly designed to attract indus­try and man­u­fac­tur­ing in spe­cif­ic sec­tors. Ear­li­er this year, a group called the Fron­tier Foun­da­tion—one of whose found­ing mem­bers is New Founding’s Josh Abbotoy—draft­ed an open let­ter to Trump urg­ing him to act on that idea. The group’s pol­i­cy memo explains that the new cities “should be exempt from cer­tain fed­er­al reg­u­la­tion under spe­cial over­sight by the exec­u­tive branch.” Asked whether New Found­ing had plans to lease any of the High­land Rim Project land back to the US gov­ern­ment, Abbotoy answered, “This is unlike­ly at this stage, but I won’t rule it out entire­ly.”

Mean­while, Patri Fried­man of Pronomos Cap­i­tal, the start­up soci­eties ven­ture firm, told me that both the Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and a sep­a­rate group called the Free­dom Cities Coali­tion, had met with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, though he declined to pro­vide details. Last month, Wired also report­ed that the Free­dom Cities Coali­tion had been meet­ing with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. “The ener­gy in DC is absolute­ly elec­tric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Hon­duras’ Próspera spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone told Wired. “You can tell in meet­ings with the peo­ple involved that they have the man­date to do some of the more hyper­bol­ic, ver­bose things Trump has men­tioned.”

...

———–

“Chris­t­ian “Theo­Bros” Are Build­ing a Tech Utopia in Appalachia” by Kiera But­ler; Moth­er Jones; 04/08/2025

“There’s a name for the rough con­cept that Isker describes: the “Net­work State,” an ascen­dant and buzzy tech move­ment where inter­net groups are begin­ning to explore what it might be like to start their own new coun­tries. At first, these new coun­tries would appear online, and even­tu­al­ly in actu­al phys­i­cal loca­tions. Sim­ply put, the High­land Rim Project is the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist take on that idea. As New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the prin­ci­pal form of gov­ern­ment today. I see no rea­son Chris­t­ian nations or peo­ples couldn’t orga­nize net­work states.””

When Andrew Isker describes the phi­los­o­phy behind the plans for the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist High­land Rim Project, he isn’t bas­ing that idea sole­ly on some sort of theo­crat­ic demand. He’s draw­ing from a “Net­work State” con­cept that has been fer­ment­ing in fas­cist lib­er­tar­i­an cir­cles for years. As New Found­ing CEO Nate Fis­ch­er put it, “Nation states are not the prin­ci­pal form of gov­ern­ment today. I see no rea­son Chris­t­ian nations or peo­ples couldn’t orga­nize net­work states.” In oth­er words, Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists around the world can ‘break away’ from their soci­eties and col­lec­tive­ly orga­nize into a kind of geo­graph­i­cal­ly sep­a­rate­ly, but ide­o­log­i­cal­ly aligned new form gov­er­nance. A form of gov­ern­ment osten­si­bly designed around “dig­i­tal self-gov­er­nance” includ­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy and a cul­ture “in which our pat­ri­mo­ni­al civic rights, chiefly those of prop­er­ty, free polit­i­cal speech and civil­ian arma­ment, can be main­tained and per­pet­u­at­ed.” An author­i­tar­i­an theo­crat­ic ide­ol­o­gy wrap­ping itself in the lan­guage of ‘free­dom’. Which, as we’ll see, is real­ly free­dom for bil­lion­aires to reshape soci­ety as they see fit:

...
There were rea­sons oth­er than just its nat­ur­al beau­ty that this area was appeal­ing. The com­mu­ni­ty that Isker is help­ing to build in Ten­nessee is part of the High­land Rim Project, an ini­tia­tive from a Chris­t­ian ven­ture cap­i­tal firm called New Found­ing. The com­pa­ny seeks to build neigh­bor­hoods with Chris­t­ian val­ues in rur­al Amer­i­ca: “Thick com­mu­ni­ties that are con­ducive to a nat­ur­al, human and unique­ly Amer­i­can way of life,” places where “your neigh­bors are peo­ple who seek a self-deter­mi­na­tive lifestyle and a return to a more nat­ur­al human way of liv­ing for them­selves and their fam­i­lies.”

But the High­land Rim Project is not just anoth­er old-fash­ioned utopi­an fan­ta­sy. Rather, it is delib­er­ate­ly for­ward-look­ing, infused with Sil­i­con Val­ley tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an val­ues. The com­mu­ni­ties will be designed around “dig­i­tal self-gov­er­nance” includ­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy and a cul­ture “in which our pat­ri­mo­ni­al civic rights, chiefly those of prop­er­ty, free polit­i­cal speech and civil­ian arma­ment, can be main­tained and per­pet­u­at­ed.”
...

And as we can see, the “Net­work State” con­cept is, itself, the brain­child of anoth­er promi­nent Sil­i­con Val­ley fig­ure and close friend of Peter Thiel: Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, who appar­ent­ly arrived at the con­clu­sion that social net­works can some­how cre­ate their own coher­ent real-work com­mu­ni­ties through the acqui­si­tion of enough land and eco­nom­ic pow­er that oth­er nation states would sim­ply be forced to rec­og­nize the net­work state’s sov­er­eign­ty. And at that point, the net­work state could flour­ish with inno­va­tions like dereg­u­lat­ing things like drug devel­op­ment and oth­er tech­nolo­gies. But it’s not just Srini­vasan’s fan­ta­sy at this point. Con­cept ‘zones’ like Pros­pera in Hon­duras already exist. Recall how Trump’s par­don­ing of the right-wing for­mer pres­i­dent of Hon­duras, was seen, in part, as an attempt to save the Pros­pera project. Srini­vasan is real­ly just the lead­ing fig­ure­head in a much larg­er move­ment long ded­i­cat­ed to cre­at­ing what amount to pri­vate­ly run sov­er­eign states:

...
As with many things tech, the Net­work State move­ment began in Sil­i­con Val­ley. The con­cept is the brain­child of investor and entre­pre­neur Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, a close friend of Pay­Pal titan Peter Thiel, and a for­mer part­ner at Andreessen-Horowitz, the firm run by ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Marc Andreessen. In a 2021 arti­cle on his web­site, Srini­vasan laid out his vision of a plan for peo­ple seek­ing to build a new utopia, or, as he put it, “a fresh start.”Sure, there were the old-fash­ioned con­ven­tion­al ways to do this—such as form­ing a new coun­try through rev­o­lu­tion or war. But these options are not only, well, real­ly hard, but also unpre­dictable. A cruise ship or some­where in space were appeal­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for new coun­tries, but both pre­sent­ed logis­ti­cal chal­lenges. Far sim­pler and more prac­ti­cal was an online nation, com­plete with its own cul­ture, econ­o­my, and, of course, laws.

Even­tu­al­ly, Srini­vasan mused, such a com­mu­ni­ty could move into the ana­log space and acquire actu­al phys­i­cal prop­er­ty where peo­ple would come togeth­er and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders. The com­mu­ni­ty did not have to be on con­tigu­ous land, how­ev­er, but instead a “reverse dias­po­ra,” he said. “A com­mu­ni­ty that forms first on the inter­net, builds a cul­ture online, and only then comes togeth­er in per­son to build dwellings and struc­tures.”

Acknowl­edg­ing that the idea might sound a lit­tle goofy—like a giant live-action Minecraft—he empha­sized that this was a seri­ous propo­si­tion. “Once we remem­ber that Face­book has 3B users, Twit­ter has 300M, and many indi­vid­ual influ­encers have more than 1M fol­low­ers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imag­ine we can build a 1–10M per­son social net­work with a gen­uine sense of nation­al con­scious­ness, an inte­grat­ed cryp­tocur­ren­cy, and a plan to crowd­fund many pieces of ter­ri­to­ry around the world.” Imag­ine the net­work state as a kind of a Pac-Man gob­bling up lit­tle pieces of land.

Con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ties! Even­tu­al­ly, the new nation would be so big with so much eco­nom­ic pow­er that oth­er nations would be forced to rec­og­nize it as legit­i­mate. And once that hap­pens, con­ven­tion­al laws in more con­ven­tion­al nations could become almost irrel­e­vant along with the nations them­selves. Why on earth would, say, a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny choose to spend bil­lions of dol­lars and decades of test­ing on a new drug when they could go to a dereg­u­lat­ed net­work state and take it to mar­ket in record time?

In 2022, Srini­vasan turned his sem­i­nal arti­cle into a best­seller, The Net­work State: How to Start a New Coun­try. Srinivasan’s book is still in the top 20 lists in both the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and gen­er­al tech­nol­o­gy and ref­er­ence sec­tions on Amazon—and in the three years since its pub­li­ca­tion, the ideas in it have gained a robust fol­low­ing. My for­mer col­league Ali Bre­land wrote a 2023 inves­ti­ga­tion about Prax­is, a “cryp­toc­i­ty” con­cept that drew tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in invest­ment from Thiel and oth­er Sil­i­con Val­ley lumi­nar­ies—though the phys­i­cal city has yet to mate­ri­al­ize. There is also Próspera, a dereg­u­lat­ed eco­nom­ic zone in Roatán, Hon­duras, and a some­what dif­fer­ent mod­el, Cal­i­for­nia For­ev­er, an ongo­ing effort by a group of tech bil­lion­aires to turn part of Cal­i­for­nia wine coun­try into a new city with a “ded­i­cat­ed Indus­try & Tech­nol­o­gy Zone.”
...

And when we see how New Found­ing co-founder Josh Abbotoy makes a dis­tinc­tion between the vision of the High­land Rim Project and Srini­vasan’s ‘net­work state’ con­cept, describ­ing High­land Rim as more of a “char­ter com­mu­ni­ty”, recall how Hon­duras’s Con­gress passed a law 2013 allow­ing for “mod­el cities” that the country’s Supreme Court had pre­vi­ous­ly declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it would cre­ate devel­op­ment zones out­side the juris­dic­tion of Hon­duran law. The Con­gress respond­ed to that rul­ing by fir­ing four out of five of the jus­tices and passed the law again. And in 2023, then-can­di­date Don­ald Trump pro­posed the cre­ation of “free­dom cities” on fed­er­al land, an con­cept endorsed by Patri Fried­man of Pronomos Cap­i­tal, a “start­up soci­eties ven­ture firm”. As we’ve seen, Fried­man, grand­son of Mil­ton Fried­man, has been close­ly involved with Peter Thiel’s decades-old Seast­eading efforts. The ‘net­work state’ is a vari­ant of a ‘pri­vate sov­er­eign state’ con­cept that has been brew­ing for years and man­i­fests in a vari­ety of forms:

...
In an email to Moth­er Jones, New Found­ing cofounder Josh Abbotoy, a for­mer fel­low of the right-wing think­tank the Clare­mont Insti­tute, said the net­work state con­cept doesn’t per­fect­ly cap­ture the High­land Rim Project; he prefers the term “char­ter com­mu­ni­ties,” which he describes as places “char­tered around par­tic­u­lar­ized lifestyles or affini­ties. In our case, we empha­size tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can val­ues like faith, fam­i­ly, and free­dom, in a rur­al and vin­tage small-town Amer­i­can set­ting.” New Found­ing, he says, offers “a plat­form on which many local­ists can build their more par­tic­u­lar­ized projects.”

Nev­er­the­less, he says, Srini­vasan is an influ­ence. “I have def­i­nite­ly learned from his the­o­ries about how dig­i­tal con­di­tions encour­age more trib­al social orga­ni­za­tion across the board,” Abbotoy said. “Whether one is excit­ed or hor­ri­fied by Balaji’s pre­dic­tions of the future, dis­miss­ing them out of hand isn’t good busi­ness.”

...

While Abbotoy didn’t pro­vide details on plans to incor­po­rate cryp­tocur­ren­cy into the com­mu­ni­ties, the peo­ple who have bought prop­er­ty so far, “are high agency and pri­or­i­tize sov­er­eign­ty in their per­son­al lives, includ­ing dig­i­tal and finan­cial sov­er­eign­ty,” he said. “So nat­u­ral­ly many of them love cryp­to. We encour­age cryp­to adop­tion and use, and eager­ly wel­come entre­pre­neurs oper­at­ing in this space.” He esti­mates that about 60 house­holds “have bought or moved to our tar­get regions as a result of our efforts,” and the web­site assures inter­est­ed par­ties, “We see ris­ing demand and capac­i­ty for new types of com­mu­ni­ties built around a shared vision for local life in Amer­i­ca.”

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Dystopi­an and pre­pos­ter­ous though this may sound, fans of the Net­work State are try­ing to con­vince the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to scale up their vision—and there are signs that the pres­i­dent is lis­ten­ing. In 2023, dur­ing the lead­up to his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Don­ald Trump pro­posed build­ing “free­dom cities,” which would con­vert fed­er­al land in rur­al areas into zones with laws specif­i­cal­ly designed to attract indus­try and man­u­fac­tur­ing in spe­cif­ic sec­tors. Ear­li­er this year, a group called the Fron­tier Foun­da­tion—one of whose found­ing mem­bers is New Founding’s Josh Abbotoy—draft­ed an open let­ter to Trump urg­ing him to act on that idea. The group’s pol­i­cy memo explains that the new cities “should be exempt from cer­tain fed­er­al reg­u­la­tion under spe­cial over­sight by the exec­u­tive branch.” Asked whether New Found­ing had plans to lease any of the High­land Rim Project land back to the US gov­ern­ment, Abbotoy answered, “This is unlike­ly at this stage, but I won’t rule it out entire­ly.”

...

Mean­while, Patri Fried­man of Pronomos Cap­i­tal, the start­up soci­eties ven­ture firm, told me that both the Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and a sep­a­rate group called the Free­dom Cities Coali­tion, had met with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, though he declined to pro­vide details. Last month, Wired also report­ed that the Free­dom Cities Coali­tion had been meet­ing with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. “The ener­gy in DC is absolute­ly elec­tric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Hon­duras’ Próspera spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone told Wired. “You can tell in meet­ings with the peo­ple involved that they have the man­date to do some of the more hyper­bol­ic, ver­bose things Trump has men­tioned.”
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And when we see how Andrew Isker remains well con­nect­ed in DC and Sil­i­con Val­ley at the same time he’s declar­ing Judaism to be “lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian” and call­ing for the rever­sal of the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act on the basis that it bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple,” and Srini­vasan wants to cre­ate a San Fran­cis­co where cit­i­zens show their loy­al­ty to tech com­pa­nies by the col­or of their shirts, it’s a reminder that a return to the hyper-hier­ar­chi­cal nature of pre-civ­il-rights Amer­i­ca is very much one of the goals of this ‘pro-sov­er­eign­ty’ move­ment. It’s about the free­dom to return to a time when fla­grant dis­crim­i­na­tion on the basis of race, reli­gion, and sex the norm enforced by the pow­er of law. And any oth­er rules our new ‘sov­er­eign’ over­lords decide to come up with. Like pub­lic dis­plays of loy­al­ty:

...
But whose shared vision? The peo­ple who already live in the com­mu­ni­ties that New Found­ing is tar­get­ing already have their own vision for local life, and many of them are not thrilled about the idea of wealthy Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists mov­ing in and tak­ing over. Last year, Nashville’s Newschan­nel 5 aired an inves­ti­ga­tion about the move­ment. A few months lat­er, Phil Williams, the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist who broke the sto­ry, talked with locals in Gaines­boro, Ten­nessee. “Main­ly peo­ple are scared,” said the chair of the county’s Repub­li­can par­ty. “It scares me that they are very clear about tak­ing over.” A local restau­rant own­er added, “I don’t want to lose what we already have.” In response to the seg­ment, Isker’s pod­cast cohost C.J. Engel, who also moved to the area to help launch the com­mu­ni­ty, post­ed on X, “Phil and the entire jour­nal­ist class at large are ter­ri­fied that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians are assert­ing them­selves in the face of dwin­dling media pow­er. This is why they dou­ble down on their strate­gies of pro­vok­ing fear through dis­tor­tion.” Abbotoy reit­er­at­ed that rejec­tion of Williams’ inves­ti­ga­tion in an email to Moth­er Jones.

...

But else­where, Isker is less whole­some. To his 43,000 fol­low­ers on X, he makes state­ments that some­times cross the line into anti­semitism. “I don’t hate Jews,” he post­ed in 2023. “Their reli­gion is lit­er­al­ly blas­phe­mous and anti-Chris­t­ian. You can­not be a Chris­t­ian with­out rec­og­niz­ing this.” On that same plat­form, he has referred to Indi­an peo­ple as “cow wor­ship­pers,” called the Unit­ed States a “gynoc­ra­cy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no,’ and thun­dered against the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act, say­ing it bias­es “our laws against Chris­tians, men, and white peo­ple.” In July 2023, Isker spoke at a Texas con­fer­ence about the “war on white Amer­i­ca” along­side Paul Got­tfried, the men­tor of promi­nent white nation­al­ist Richard Spencer.

And yet for all his extrem­ist views, Isker, whom Abbotoy described as “a part of the broad­er project” and “a friend,” is well con­nect­ed in Wash­ing­ton and Sil­i­con Val­ley. The New Found­ing staffers hob­nob with Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance. Andreessen—the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and Srinivasan’s friend—has invest­ed in New Found­ing. New Founding’s Nate Fis­ch­er has invest­ed in the start­up soci­eties ven­ture firm Pronomos Cap­i­tal, Pronomos head Patri Fried­man recent­ly told me. Through the online mag­a­zine Amer­i­can Reformer, which Abbotoy and Fis­ch­er cofound­ed, New Found­ing has robust con­nec­tions to the world of the Theo­Bros, a group of most­ly mil­len­ni­al, ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive men, many of whom proud­ly call them­selves Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists, believe women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and idol­ize author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers like Fran­cis­co Fran­co.

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As the net­work state con­cept gains trac­tion, Srini­vasan has offered still more details about exact­ly what he has in mind. Last year, writ­ing for the New Repub­lic, jour­nal­ist Gil Duran chron­i­cled a ram­bling, four-hour inter­view that Srini­vasan gave on the pod­cast “Moment of Zen.” In it, Srini­vasan described his vision for a new San Fran­cis­co, one in which cit­i­zens would show their loy­al­ty to tech com­pa­nies by don­ning gray shirts. The ulti­mate goal is for the Grays to dri­ve out the “Blues,” Srinivasan’s word for pro­gres­sives:

The “Grays” would have access to exclu­sive zones of the city, and they would also enjoy pro­tec­tion through a spe­cial arrange­ment with the police, whom they would win over with lav­ish ban­quets.
...

Spe­cial arrange­ments with the police for spe­cial pro­tec­tions. That’s Srini­vasan vision that he decid­ed to pub­licly share, pre­sum­ably on the assump­tion that a hier­ar­chi­cal fas­cist caste soci­ety would be pop­u­lar with his audi­ences. And as is appar­ent, it is indeed a very pop­u­lar vision with the most impor­tant audi­ence of all: Srini­vasan’s fel­low fas­cist tech oli­garchs and their Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist fel­low trav­el­ers.

The Network State: How to Start a New Country. Balaji Srinivasan’s Recipe for an ‘Anti-Woke’ Post-Democracy Future

Now let’s take a clos­er look at Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan’s thoughts on how he would like to see the city of San Fran­cis­co run in the future with the fol­low­ing New Repub­lic arti­cle from April of 2024. It’s not that ‘Blues’ won’t be allowed to live in Srini­vasan’s San Fran­cis­co. They’ll just be sec­ond-class cit­i­zens unless they change alle­giances and join the ‘Reds’ or ‘Grays’. The arti­cle recounts how Srini­vasan host­ed the first-ever Net­work State Con­fer­ence in 2023, where he made the case that, “What I’m real­ly call­ing for is some­thing like tech Zion­ism,” and went on to com­pare his move­ment to those start­ed by the bib­li­cal Abra­ham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, Theodor Her­zl, (the “spir­i­tu­al father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (for­mer author­i­tar­i­an ruler of Sin­ga­pore). And as the arti­cle notes, none of this is new for Srini­vasan. In fact, he was ref­er­enced in 2013 New York Times as hav­ing “told a group of young entre­pre­neurs that the Unit­ed States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: out­dat­ed and obso­les­cent.” The forces behind the Net­work State con­cept haven’t been oper­at­ing behind the scenes. On the con­trary, they’ve been quite open about it for years:

The New Repub­lic

The Tech Baron Seek­ing to Purge San Fran­cis­co of “Blues”

If Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan is any guide, then the Sil­i­con Val­ley plu­to­crats are def­i­nite­ly not OK.

Gil Duran
April 26, 2024

To ful­ly grasp the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in San Fran­cis­co, where ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists are try­ing to take con­trol of City Hall, you must lis­ten to Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan. Before you do, steel your­self for what’s to come: A nor­mal per­son could eas­i­ly mis­take his ram­bling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s rav­ings, but influ­en­tial Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aires regard him as a genius.

“Bal­a­ji has the high­est rate of out­put per minute of good new ideas of any­body I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Net­work State: How to Start a New Coun­try. The book out­lines a plan for tech plu­to­crats to exit democ­ra­cy and estab­lish new sov­er­eign ter­ri­to­ries. I men­tioned Balaji’s ideas in two pre­vi­ous sto­ries about Net­work State–related efforts in California—a pro­posed tech colony calledCal­i­for­nia For­ev­erand thetech-fund­ed cam­paignto cap­ture San Francisco’s gov­ern­ment.

Bal­a­ji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a sol­id Val­ley pedi­gree: He earned mul­ti­ple degrees from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, found­ed mul­ti­ple star­tups, became a part­ner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Coin­base. He is also the leader of a cultish and increas­ing­ly stri­dent neo-reac­tionary tech polit­i­cal move­ment that sees Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy as an ene­my. In 2013, a New York Times sto­ry head­lined “Sil­i­con Val­ley Roused by Seces­sion Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entre­pre­neurs that the Unit­ed States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: out­dat­ed and obso­les­cent.”

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Still, his appetite for autoc­ra­cy is bot­tom­less. Last Octo­ber, Bal­a­ji host­ed the first-ever Net­work State Con­fer­ence. Gar­ry Tan—the cur­rent Y Com­bi­na­tor CEO who’s attempt­ing to spear­head a polit­i­cal takeover of San Francisco—participated in an inter­view with Bal­a­ji and cast the effort as part of the Net­work State move­ment. Tan, who made head­lines in Jan­u­ary after tweet­ing “die slow moth­er­fuck­ers” at local pro­gres­sive politi­cians, frames his cam­paign as an exper­i­ment in “mod­er­ate” pol­i­tics. But in a pod­cast inter­view one month before the con­fer­ence, Bal­a­ji laid out a more dis­turb­ing and extreme vision.

“What I’m real­ly call­ing for is some­thing like tech Zion­ism,” he said, after com­par­ing his move­ment to those start­ed by the bib­li­cal Abra­ham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mor­monism), Theodor Her­zl (“spir­i­tu­al father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (for­mer author­i­tar­i­an ruler of Sin­ga­pore). Bal­a­ji then revealed his shock­ing ideas for a tech-gov­erned city where cit­i­zens loy­al to tech com­pa­nies would form a new polit­i­cal tribe clad in gray t‑shirts. “And if you see anoth­er Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, dur­ing a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen pod­cast. “You’re a fel­low Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would fea­ture “Bit­coin or Elon or oth­er kinds of logos … Y Com­bi­na­tor is a good one for the city of San Fran­cis­co in par­tic­u­lar.” Grays would also receive spe­cial ID cards pro­vid­ing access to exclu­sive, Gray-con­trolled sec­tors of the city. In addi­tion, the Grays would make an alliance with the police depart­ment, fund­ing week­ly “policeman’s ban­quets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srini­vasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, ban­quets. That means every policeman’s son, daugh­ter, wife, cousin, you know, sib­ling, what­ev­er, should get a job at a tech com­pa­ny in secu­ri­ty.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loy­al­ty to the Grays. Srini­vasan rec­om­mends ask­ing offi­cers a series of ques­tions to ascer­tain their polit­i­cal lean­ings. For exam­ple: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s build­ing?”

This refers to the August 2023 inci­dent in which Elon Musk ille­gal­ly installed a large flash­ing X logo atop Twit­ter head­quar­ters, in vio­la­tion of build­ing safe­ty codes. City inspec­tors forced him to remove it. This was the sec­ond time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refur­bish his head­quar­ters: In July, police briefly halt­ed his attempt to pry the “Twit­ter” sig­nage from the building’s exte­ri­or. But in Balaji’s dystopia, he implies that offi­cers loy­al to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleas­es (demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly inclined offi­cers, he sug­gests, can be paid to retire).

Sim­ply put, there is a ton of fas­cist-chic cos­play involved. Once an offi­cer joins the Grays, they get a spe­cial uni­form designed by their tech over­lords. The Grays will also donate heav­i­ly to police char­i­ties and “merge the Gray and police social net­works.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city togeth­er.

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srini­vasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Fly­ing Spaghet­ti Mon­ster. You have the Bit­coin parade. You have the drones fly­ing over­head in for­ma­tion.... You have bub­bling genet­ic exper­i­ments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re fly­ing the Anduril drones …”

Every­one would be wel­come at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srini­vasan defines the Blue polit­i­cal tribe as the lib­er­al vot­ers he implies are respon­si­ble for the city’s prob­lems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-con­trolled zones, said Bal­a­ji, unlike Repub­li­cans (“Reds”).

“Reds should be wel­comed there, and peo­ple should wear their trib­al col­ors,” said Srini­vasan, who com­pared his col­or-cod­ed apartheid sys­tem to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rival­ry. “No Blues should be wel­comed there.”

While the Blues would be exclud­ed, they would not be for­got­ten. Srini­vasan imag­ines pub­lic screen­ings of anti-Blue pro­pa­gan­da films: “In addi­tion to cel­e­brat­ing Gray and cel­e­brat­ing Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abus­es.… There should be lots of sto­ries about what Blues are doing that is bad.”

Bal­a­ji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech fig­ures and erect pub­lic mon­u­ments to memo­ri­al­ize the alleged hor­rors of pro­gres­sive Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance. Cor­po­rate logos and signs will fill the sky­line to sig­ni­fy Gray dom­i­nance of the city.“Take total con­trol of your neigh­bor­hood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they’re ... unwel­come,” he said. “Just as Blues eth­ni­cal­ly cleanse me out of San Fran­cis­co, like, push out all Blues.”The idea, he added, is to do to San Fran­cis­co what Musk did to Twit­ter.

“Elon, in sort of clas­sic Gray fash­ion ... cap­tures Twit­ter and then, at one stroke, wipes out mil­lions of Blues’ sta­tus by wip­ing out the Blue Checks,” he said. “Anoth­er stroke … [he] renames Twit­ter as X, show­ing that he has true con­trol, and it’s his vehi­cle, and that the old regime isn’t going to be restored.” Those who try to down­play Balaji’s impor­tance in Sil­i­con Val­ley often por­tray him as a “clown.” But Don­ald Trump taught us that clowns can be dan­ger­ous, espe­cial­ly those with prox­im­i­ty to influ­ence and pow­er. In the near­ly 11 years since his seces­sion speech at Y Com­bi­na­tor, Balaji’s pol­i­tics have become even more stri­dent­ly author­i­tar­i­an and extrem­ist, yet he remains a cel­e­brat­ed fig­ure in key cir­cles.

...

Even more dis­turb­ing, how­ev­er, is Balaji’s tight con­nec­tion with Tan, the Y Com­bi­na­tor CEO who has pub­licly aligned him­self with the Net­work State for years. “I legit believe [Y Com­bi­na­tor] is a pro­to­type mod­el for what@balajistalks about when he says the Net­work State,”wrote Tanin August 2022, short­ly before he was named CEO. Over the past two years, as Musk has trans­formed Twit­ter into a right-wing infor­ma­tion weapon, Tan has used the plat­form, along with his bul­ly pul­pit at Y Com­bi­na­tor, to wage all-out war for polit­i­cal con­trol of San Fran­cis­co. This fits with Balaji’s rec­om­men­da­tion that, as an alter­na­tive to form­ing new cities, tech zil­lion­aires can use elec­tions to seize exist­ing gov­ern­ments.

Increas­ing­ly, Tan has also pur­sued anoth­er key Net­work State goal: attack­ing jour­nal­ists. Bal­a­ji por­trays the press, espe­cial­ly TheNew York Times, as the chief ene­my of the Net­work State ide­ol­o­gy. He accus­es the ven­er­a­ble paper of uphold­ing some­thing called “Woke Cap­i­tal.”

“Woke Cap­i­tal is the ide­ol­o­gy of America’s rul­ing class as expli­cat­ed by America’s rul­ing news­pa­per, The New York Times,” writes Bal­a­ji in his book. “It’s cap­i­tal­ism that enables decen­tral­ized cen­sor­ship, can­cel cul­ture, and Amer­i­can empire.” Times pub­lish­er A.G. Sulzberg­er, whom Bal­a­ji char­ac­ter­izes as a “rich white male nepo­tist,” espe­cial­ly irks him. “What if Sulzberg­er is more like Keyser Söze?” writes Bal­a­ji, com­par­ing Sulzberg­er to the mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind in 1995’sThe Usu­al Sus­pects. “What if his employ­ees are high­ly self-inter­est­ed pro­fes­sion­al pre­var­i­ca­tors? What if they’ve always been like that?”

“So long as you aren’t run­ning a cor­po­ra­tion based on hered­i­tary nepo­tism where the cur­rent guy run­ning the show inher­its the com­pa­ny from his father’s father’s father’s father, you’re more diverse and demo­c­ra­t­ic than the own­ers of The New York Times Com­pa­ny. You don’t need to take lec­tures from them, from any­one in their employ, or real­ly from any­one in their social circle—which includes all estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists.”

The solu­tion, he says, is to cre­ate rival media outlets—“parallel” forms of jour­nal­ism con­trolled by tech plu­to­crats. Both he and Tan point to Musk’s trans­for­ma­tion of Twit­ter as a per­fect exam­ple of par­al­lel media: a pro­pa­gan­da machine that smears real jour­nal­ism as “fake” while aggres­sive­ly pro­mot­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion.

Over the past year, Tan has ramped up his attacks on reporters at The San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, The San Fran­cis­co Stan­dard, andMis­sion Local. “If you want to under­stand why we got here, you have to under­stand three things,” Tan wrote in an anti-media Twit­ter screed last year. “1/The local polit­i­cal machine and the local media (Chron­i­cle, Mis­sion Local) are com­plic­it in keep­ing it this way, sup­port­ing the worst, most cor­rupt can­di­dates and repeat­ing their pro­pa­gan­da.”

...

Amid his drunk­en tweet scan­dal, Tan paused such attacks. He hired a pub­lic rela­tions con­sul­tant, apol­o­gized, and ceased send­ing out caus­tic tweets—temporarily. Then, on March 29, the Times pub­lished a favor­able pro­fileof him. Writ­ten by for­merChron­i­clecolum­nist Heather Knight, it char­ac­ter­ized him as a “mid­dle-of-the-road” Demo­c­rat agi­tat­ing for “com­mon sense” ideas. Tan came across as con­trite and hum­ble, a civic-mind­ed cen­timil­lion­aire who let his pas­sion for polit­i­cal change get the best of him. “Mr. Tan has tried to learn from his online mess—or says he has,” wrote Knight. “In per­son, he speaks kind­ly and calm­ly and smiles often, fre­quent­ly bow­ing to peo­ple while mak­ing a prayer ges­ture with his hands.”

Pro­gres­sives groaned at what they saw as a con­spic­u­ous white­wash­ing of Tan’s behav­ior. Tan proud­ly shared the piece on social media. He has nev­er­the­less returned to his old antics. “SF lega­cy media is dis­hon­est and lies to you,” he wrote to his 428,000 fol­low­ers on April 1.

What’s stun­ning, how­ev­er, is the degree to which cov­er­age of Tan has been quite even­hand­ed and fair, if not pos­i­tive. The press has unques­tion­ing­ly accept­ed the fram­ing that he rep­re­sents mod­er­ate or “com­mon sense” pol­i­tics. Not one local sto­ry has men­tioned his long affil­i­a­tion with Bal­a­ji or the Net­work State cult that is cur­rent­ly try­ing to cre­ate tech-con­trolled cities around the globe, and which main­tains a fas­ci­na­tion with an alt-right, neo­fas­cist move­ment known as the “Dark Enlight­en­ment.” (In 2021, Cade Metz of theTimes wrote that Bal­a­ji had sug­gest­edtar­get­ing jour­nal­ists who men­tion these con­nec­tions. “If things get hot, it may be inter­est­ing to sic the Dark Enlight­en­ment audi­ence on a sin­gle vul­ner­a­ble hos­tile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hos­tile report­ing sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,”wrote Bal­a­ji in an email viewed by theTimes.) In a twist­ed way, these omis­sions almost lend cre­dence to claims that main­stream press out­lets don’t tell us what’s real­ly going on.

In the after­math of Tan’s death threat tweets, both the Chron­i­cleand theStan­dard hes­i­tat­ed for at least a day before pub­lish­ing full sto­ries. For a moment, it seemed unclear whether they would cov­er it at all. Yet despite the local media’s gen­er­al­ly fair approach and the puffy Times glow-up, Tan con­tin­ues to rage against the press. Noth­ing less than absolute con­trol and feal­ty seems accept­able to the Net­work State types.

“Do not hire PR,” tweet­ed Bal­a­ji on April 4, days after Tan’s P.R.-wrangled Times pro­file. “They want to ‘train’ you to talk to journos. But journos hate you! So this is an obso­lete mod­el. Instead, just hire influ­encers. Build your own chan­nel. And go direct.”

Tan boost­ed the mes­sage to his feed.

This arti­cle has been updat­ed.

————

“The Tech Baron Seek­ing to Purge San Fran­cis­co of “Blues”” by Gil Duran; The New Repub­lic; 04/26/2024

“Bal­a­ji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a sol­id Val­ley pedi­gree: He earned mul­ti­ple degrees from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, found­ed mul­ti­ple star­tups, became a part­ner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Coin­base. He is also the leader of a cultish and increas­ing­ly stri­dent neo-reac­tionary tech polit­i­cal move­ment that sees Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy as an ene­my. In 2013, a New York Times sto­ry head­lined “Sil­i­con Val­ley Roused by Seces­sion Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entre­pre­neurs that the Unit­ed States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: out­dat­ed and obso­les­cent.””

A cultish, increas­ing­ly neo-reac­tionary polit­i­cal move­ment that sees Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy as an ene­my. No, that’s not a ref­er­ence to MAGA, although it obvi­ous­ly could be. Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan has his own cult, ded­i­cat­ed to a vision for a dif­fer­ent form of soci­ety. One that puts tech­nol­o­gy, and tech busi­ness lead­ers, at the cen­ter of the uni­verse. It would be “some­thing like tech Zion­ism” as Srini­vasan puts it. Tech sec­tor employ­ees would self-iden­ti­fy as fel­low trib­al mem­bers through pub­lic dis­plays of loy­al­ty, like wear­ing a gray t‑shirt. Law enforce­ment would be won over through var­i­ous gifts and, ulti­mate­ly, pledge their own loy­al­ty to the tech firms too. This isn’t some sort of fas­cist dystopia in Srini­vasan’s mind. It’s a tech-cen­tric utopia:

...
Still, his appetite for autoc­ra­cy is bot­tom­less. Last Octo­ber, Bal­a­ji host­ed the first-ever Net­work State Con­fer­ence. Gar­ry Tan—the cur­rent Y Com­bi­na­tor CEO who’s attempt­ing to spear­head a polit­i­cal takeover of San Francisco—participated in an inter­view with Bal­a­ji and cast the effort as part of the Net­work State move­ment. Tan, who made head­lines in Jan­u­ary after tweet­ing “die slow moth­er­fuck­ers” at local pro­gres­sive politi­cians, frames his cam­paign as an exper­i­ment in “mod­er­ate” pol­i­tics. But in a pod­cast inter­view one month before the con­fer­ence, Bal­a­ji laid out a more dis­turb­ing and extreme vision.

“What I’m real­ly call­ing for is some­thing like tech Zion­ism,” he said, after com­par­ing his move­ment to those start­ed by the bib­li­cal Abra­ham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mor­monism), Theodor Her­zl (“spir­i­tu­al father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (for­mer author­i­tar­i­an ruler of Sin­ga­pore). Bal­a­ji then revealed his shock­ing ideas for a tech-gov­erned city where cit­i­zens loy­al to tech com­pa­nies would form a new polit­i­cal tribe clad in gray t‑shirts. “And if you see anoth­er Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, dur­ing a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen pod­cast. “You’re a fel­low Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would fea­ture “Bit­coin or Elon or oth­er kinds of logos … Y Com­bi­na­tor is a good one for the city of San Fran­cis­co in par­tic­u­lar.” Grays would also receive spe­cial ID cards pro­vid­ing access to exclu­sive, Gray-con­trolled sec­tors of the city. In addi­tion, the Grays would make an alliance with the police depart­ment, fund­ing week­ly “policeman’s ban­quets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srini­vasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, ban­quets. That means every policeman’s son, daugh­ter, wife, cousin, you know, sib­ling, what­ev­er, should get a job at a tech com­pa­ny in secu­ri­ty.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loy­al­ty to the Grays. Srini­vasan rec­om­mends ask­ing offi­cers a series of ques­tions to ascer­tain their polit­i­cal lean­ings. For exam­ple: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s build­ing?”

...

Sim­ply put, there is a ton of fas­cist-chic cos­play involved. Once an offi­cer joins the Grays, they get a spe­cial uni­form designed by their tech over­lords. The Grays will also donate heav­i­ly to police char­i­ties and “merge the Gray and police social net­works.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city togeth­er.

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srini­vasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Fly­ing Spaghet­ti Mon­ster. You have the Bit­coin parade. You have the drones fly­ing over­head in for­ma­tion.... You have bub­bling genet­ic exper­i­ments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re fly­ing the Anduril drones …”
...

And with the cre­ation of a ‘Grays’ in-group, there would be a ‘Blues’ out-group. Lib­er­al vot­ers who aren’t on board with the post-demo­c­ra­t­ic norms. Blues will be banned from Gray-con­trolled zones, while “Reds” (Repub­li­cans) would be allowed free trav­el. Peo­ple are encour­aged to wear their trib­al col­ors and recieve the wild­ly unequal treat­ment in turn. Every­one will join a tribe, and then one of those tribes will be purged from soci­ety. That’s the vision and Srini­vasan isn’t hid­ing it:

...
Every­one would be wel­come at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srini­vasan defines the Blue polit­i­cal tribe as the lib­er­al vot­ers he implies are respon­si­ble for the city’s prob­lems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-con­trolled zones, said Bal­a­ji, unlike Repub­li­cans (“Reds”).

“Reds should be wel­comed there, and peo­ple should wear their trib­al col­ors,” said Srini­vasan, who com­pared his col­or-cod­ed apartheid sys­tem to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rival­ry. “No Blues should be wel­comed there.”

While the Blues would be exclud­ed, they would not be for­got­ten. Srini­vasan imag­ines pub­lic screen­ings of anti-Blue pro­pa­gan­da films: “In addi­tion to cel­e­brat­ing Gray and cel­e­brat­ing Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abus­es.… There should be lots of sto­ries about what Blues are doing that is bad.”

Bal­a­ji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech fig­ures and erect pub­lic mon­u­ments to memo­ri­al­ize the alleged hor­rors of pro­gres­sive Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance. Cor­po­rate logos and signs will fill the sky­line to sig­ni­fy Gray dom­i­nance of the city.“Take total con­trol of your neigh­bor­hood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they’re ... unwel­come,” he said. “Just as Blues eth­ni­cal­ly cleanse me out of San Fran­cis­co, like, push out all Blues.”The idea, he added, is to do to San Fran­cis­co what Musk did to Twit­ter.

“Elon, in sort of clas­sic Gray fash­ion ... cap­tures Twit­ter and then, at one stroke, wipes out mil­lions of Blues’ sta­tus by wip­ing out the Blue Checks,” he said. “Anoth­er stroke … [he] renames Twit­ter as X, show­ing that he has true con­trol, and it’s his vehi­cle, and that the old regime isn’t going to be restored.” Those who try to down­play Balaji’s impor­tance in Sil­i­con Val­ley often por­tray him as a “clown.” But Don­ald Trump taught us that clowns can be dan­ger­ous, espe­cial­ly those with prox­im­i­ty to influ­ence and pow­er. In the near­ly 11 years since his seces­sion speech at Y Com­bi­na­tor, Balaji’s pol­i­tics have become even more stri­dent­ly author­i­tar­i­an and extrem­ist, yet he remains a cel­e­brat­ed fig­ure in key cir­cles.
...

But also note the absurd fic­tion that Srini­vasan’s dystopi­an vision is pred­i­cat­ed on: the idea that ‘Woke Cap­i­tal’ rep­re­sents the pre­vail­ing ide­ol­o­gy of the Amer­i­can rul­ing class. As if all the bil­lion­aires and CEOs per­son­al­ly believe in ‘wok­e­ness’ that must be imposed from on high through can­cel cul­ture and Amer­i­can Empire, and that bil­lion­aires like Thiel, Andreessen and Srini­vasan rep­re­sent a bold minor­i­ty agi­tat­ing for real free­dom. It’s the kind of nar­ra­tive only the sin­cere­ly clue­less could accept, which is a trag­i­cal­ly large tar­get audi­ence:

...
Even more dis­turb­ing, how­ev­er, is Balaji’s tight con­nec­tion with Tan, the Y Com­bi­na­tor CEO who has pub­licly aligned him­self with the Net­work State for years. “I legit believe [Y Com­bi­na­tor] is a pro­to­type mod­el for what@balajistalks about when he says the Net­work State,”wrote Tanin August 2022, short­ly before he was named CEO. Over the past two years, as Musk has trans­formed Twit­ter into a right-wing infor­ma­tion weapon, Tan has used the plat­form, along with his bul­ly pul­pit at Y Com­bi­na­tor, to wage all-out war for polit­i­cal con­trol of San Fran­cis­co. This fits with Balaji’s rec­om­men­da­tion that, as an alter­na­tive to form­ing new cities, tech zil­lion­aires can use elec­tions to seize exist­ing gov­ern­ments.

Increas­ing­ly, Tan has also pur­sued anoth­er key Net­work State goal: attack­ing jour­nal­ists. Bal­a­ji por­trays the press, espe­cial­ly The New York Times, as the chief ene­my of the Net­work State ide­ol­o­gy. He accus­es the ven­er­a­ble paper of uphold­ing some­thing called “Woke Cap­i­tal.”

“Woke Cap­i­tal is the ide­ol­o­gy of America’s rul­ing class as expli­cat­ed by America’s rul­ing news­pa­per, The New York Times,” writes Bal­a­ji in his book. “It’s cap­i­tal­ism that enables decen­tral­ized cen­sor­ship, can­cel cul­ture, and Amer­i­can empire.” Times pub­lish­er A.G. Sulzberg­er, whom Bal­a­ji char­ac­ter­izes as a “rich white male nepo­tist,” espe­cial­ly irks him. “What if Sulzberg­er is more like Keyser Söze?” writes Bal­a­ji, com­par­ing Sulzberg­er to the mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind in 1995’sThe Usu­al Sus­pects. “What if his employ­ees are high­ly self-inter­est­ed pro­fes­sion­al pre­var­i­ca­tors? What if they’ve always been like that?”
...

“Woke Cap­i­tal is the ide­ol­o­gy of America’s rul­ing class.” It’s one of the core fic­tions serv­ing as a pre­text for what Srini­vasan is plan­ning to do to soci­ety. We have to be saved from the ‘Wok Cap­i­tal’ rul­ing class.

The ‘Gundo Bros’, The Hi-Tech Future and Doug Wilson’s Retrograde Theology Merge into Dominionism

And while Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan may talk like a tech­no-fas­cist with lit­tle inter­est in the kind of Domin­ion­ist the­ol­o­gy that ani­mates the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist wing of the Theo­Bros move­ment, we don’t have to think of the tech oli­garchs and theocrats as mere mutu­al fel­low trav­el­ers with a shared anti-democ­ra­cy agen­da. As we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing Moth­er Jones piece from Jan­u­ary of 2025, there is no need to make a clear dis­tinc­tion between the tech­no-fas­cist and theocrats. Because the the­ol­o­gy expound­ed by Domin­ion­ist preach­ers like Doug Wil­son is a the­ol­o­gy that embraces the kind of com­plete embrace of advanced tech­nol­o­gy that we might expect from Sri­navasan or Peter Thiel.

The arti­cle also intro­duces a pair of ‘Gun­do Bros’, Augus­tus Doricko and Isa­iah Tay­lor, a pair of 20-some­thing entre­pre­neurs based in El Segun­do, Cal­i­for­nia. Doricko found­ed Rain­mak­er, a com­pa­ny promis­ing geo­engi­neer­ing weath­er con­trol tech­nol­o­gy. Tay­lor’s com­pa­ny, Valar Atom­ics, promis­es safe next-gen­er­a­tion mod­u­lar nuclear pow­er tech­nol­o­gy. The pair both attend a church that hap­pens to be a local branch of Doug Wilson’s Domin­ion­ist denom­i­na­tion. In fact, before mov­ing to El Segun­do in 2023, Tay­lor was liv­ing in Moscow, Ida­ho, the home town of Wilson’s denom­i­na­tion, and Tay­lor claimed he lived there in order to be part of Wilson’s con­gre­ga­tion. Doricko actu­al­ly frames the goals of Rain­mak­er as in keep­ing with the Domin­ion­ist God-giv­en man­date, writ­ing on X.com at one point that “One of our Lord’s first com­mand­ments was to sub­due the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind con­trol the weath­er for the sake of build­ing the king­dom of God on earth and stew­ard­ing it well.”

But Doricko and Tay­lor aren’t just devout fol­low­ers of Doug Wil­son. The pair have help. The kind of help that sug­gests their com­pa­nies have a very good chance of suc­ceed­ing, assum­ing the tech­nol­o­gy works. In 2024, Doricko was award­ed a Thiel Fel­low­ship, which used to give young adults $100,000 to drop out of col­lege and start a busi­ness. Today, the fel­low pays $250,000. While still in school, Doricko hap­pened to start the UC Berke­ley branch of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, Nick Fuentes’s cam­pus orga­ni­za­tion.

This pair of young ‘Gun­do Broth­ers’ has seri­ous Theo­Bro ‘juice’. And they’re just an exam­ple of what is report­ed­ly a larg­er El Segun­do tech scene that is falling under the sway of the Theo­Bro net­work, with Marc Andreessen also play­ing a sup­port­ive role in many El Segun­do firms, includ­ing through Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures, an accel­er­a­tor pro­gram, fund­ed in part by Andreessen Horowitz. Doricko serves as a Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures “men­tor”.

And as we’ll see in the arti­cles that fol­low, Thiel’s Palan­tir isn’t just an investor in Tay­lor’s Valar Atom­ics. Senior Palan­tir offi­cers have joined the com­pa­ny’ board. Omi­nous­ly, it sounds like Thiel’s bizarre per­son­al cru­sade to pro­mote the idea that tech­nol­o­gy reg­u­la­tions are the actu­al mod­ern day Antichrist force on the plan­et today has been win­ning over a num­ber of tech entre­pre­neurs, who are report­ed­ly start­ing to attend church­es in the Bay Area and Sil­i­con Val­ley at rates pre­vi­ous­ly unseen. It’s not exact­ly a shock. Thiel’s reli­gios­i­ty — which, as we’ve seen, includes the view that Chris­tian­i­ty is inher­ent­ly tran­shu­man­ist and entire­ly com­pat­i­ble with Thiel’s tran­shu­man­ist ambi­tions like liv­ing for­ev­er — is kind of tai­lor-made for aspir­ing tech oli­garchs with dreams of run­ning the world. So try not to be shocked when we one day learn that most of the major tech titans are part of some sort of apoc­a­lyp­tic cult that exalts their work as a divine mis­sion. The seed has been plant­ed and it’s tak­ing root:

Moth­er Jones

The Ultra-Chris­t­ian Tech Bros Have Been Min­gling at Mar-a-Lago

These Gen Z entre­pre­neurs bring a mil­i­tant ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty to Trump’s inner cir­cles.

Kiera But­ler
Nation­al Cor­re­spon­dent
Jan­u­ary 14, 2025

Last Thurs­day, as wild­fires con­tin­ued to blaze through Los Ange­les, fire­fight­ers appeared to be no match for the dead­ly com­bi­na­tion of winds and flames. But one entre­pre­neur in the LA sub­urb of El Segun­do had an idea. Augus­tus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geo­engi­neer­ing start­up called Rain­mak­er, announced on X his atten­tion to help. “Rain­mak­er will do what it can,” he post­ed, “start­ing Sat­ur­day.”

Doricko may not be a tech celebri­ty like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he isn’t a nobody, either—at least not any­more. Just four years ago, Doricko was a low­ly under­grad con­ser­v­a­tive activist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, where he launched the school’s chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, the uni­ver­si­ty arm of the polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by white nation­al­ist “Groyper” and Holo­caust denier Nick Fuentes. But for Doricko as for many young aspir­ing tech entre­pre­neurs, a col­lege degree was not a pre­req­ui­site for suc­cess.

Last year, Pay­Pal founder Peter Thiel’s foun­da­tion grant­ed Doricko a Thiel Fel­low­ship, a grant award­ed annu­al­ly to a select group of entre­pre­neurs who have fore­gone a col­lege degree in order to pur­sue a tech-focused busi­ness ven­ture. In Doricko’s case, that ven­ture was Rain­mak­er, which seeks to increase the US water sup­ply through cloud-seed­ing tech­nol­o­gy. Like many tech entre­pre­neurs, Doricko believes his work is the solu­tion to an urgent prob­lem. “Cloud seed­ing is a nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy to avert wors­en­ing drought,” he post­ed recent­ly.

But he also believes his work man­i­fests God’s will. In August, he told his fol­low­ers on X, “One of our Lord’s first com­mand­ments was to sub­due the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind con­trol the weath­er for the sake of build­ing the king­dom of God on earth and stew­ard­ing it well.” In anoth­er post, he wrote, “Dams mod­i­fy rivers, Jesus was a car­pen­ter who mod­i­fied forests (cut trees) to build hous­es. We aim to serve God.” Cloud seed­ing is just the next step in the evo­lu­tion of man’s rela­tion­ship with nature for the greater glo­ry of the Divine.

...

Doricko is just one exam­ple with­in a ris­ing tide of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty that appears to be crest­ing in California’s tech enclaves. Recent news sto­ries have described a new gen­er­a­tion of tech bros flock­ing to church in the famous­ly sec­u­lar San Fran­cis­co Bay Area and Sil­i­con Val­ley, dis­cov­er­ing Chris­tian­i­ty through Pay­Pal founder and bil­lion­aire investor Peter Thiel, and invest­ing in a Christ-cen­tered real estate enclave in rur­al Ken­tucky. There are the usu­al rea­sons for this surg­ing inter­est in Chris­tian­i­ty like yearn­ing for com­mu­ni­ty and search­ing for the greater mean­ing of life. And for those immersed in a tech cul­ture that has long been obsessed with longevi­ty, the promise of eter­nal life must offer a spe­cial appeal.

But there are oth­er forces at play, which revolve around a very spe­cif­ic kind of Chris­tian­i­ty: that of the Theo­Bros, a group of most­ly mil­len­ni­al and Gen Z, ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive men, many of whom proud­ly call them­selves Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protes­tant Christianity—known as Reformed or Recon­struc­tion­ist—is the idea that the Unit­ed States should be sub­ject to bib­li­cal law. While the Theo­Bros’ beliefs are extreme—many of them think women shouldn’t be able to vote, and that the Con­sti­tu­tion has out­lived its use­ful­ness and we should instead be gov­erned by the Ten Com­mand­ments—their move­ment is mov­ing out of the fringe. In part because they are very savvy about broad­cast­ing it on a mul­ti­tude of platforms—on pod­casts and YouTube shows, on X, at a seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing round-robin of con­fer­ences. Doricko attends a church that is part of the Theo­Bros denom­i­na­tion in an LA sub­urb, as do oth­ers in his El Segun­do tech com­mu­ni­ty and beyond.

The Theo­Bros also have made inroads to the upper reach­es of polit­i­cal pow­er. In Novem­ber, Pres­i­dent-elect Trump nom­i­nat­ed one of their allies, for­mer Fox News com­men­ta­tor Pete Hegseth, to lead the Depart­ment of Defense. Hegseth attends a church in Ten­nessee that is affil­i­at­ed with the Theo­Bro move­ment, and his chil­dren attend a school affil­i­at­ed with the net­work of clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian schools that Wil­son helped found. JD Vance has brushed shoul­ders with the Theo­Bros, too—he spoke at last summer’s Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence, where Wil­son also spoke, and he co-found­ed the Rock­bridge Net­work, a pow­er­ful group of Repub­li­can donors, with Chris Buskirk, a board mem­ber of the unof­fi­cial Theo­Bro mag­a­zine, Amer­i­can Reformer.

The Theo­Bros’ bur­geon­ing con­nec­tions with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion mark a diver­gence from the style of Chris­tian­i­ty that the MAGA world had once embraced. Dur­ing Trump’s first term, he forged con­nec­tions with lead­ers in what’s known as the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, a charis­mat­ic move­ment whose adher­ents believe that Chris­tians are called to take over the gov­ern­ment. Those lead­ers went on to become instru­men­tal fig­ures in the “Stop the Steal” cam­paign that led to the Cap­i­tal insur­rec­tion of 2021. Yet the Theo­Bros are, for the most part, much more mil­i­tant in their polit­i­cal and social beliefs than the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion adher­ents. Recent pieces in Amer­i­can Reformer have bemoaned the “fem­i­niza­tion” of Chris­tian­i­ty, lam­bast­ed the “will­ful­ly child­less fem­i­nists in the media,” and pre­dict­ed that “tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can hol­i­days that reflect our Chris­t­ian and Anglo her­itage will become bat­tle­grounds in the con­test over the soul of Amer­i­ca among the dis­parate groups now pop­u­lat­ing the coun­try.”

Theo­Bros are also more tech- and media-savvy than many of their New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion coun­ter­parts. As Rachel Tabach­nick, an extrem­ism researcher who has been study­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism for decades, told me when I inter­viewed her for a piece on the Theo­Bros last year, “They are going to be free to be entre­pre­neurs in all dif­fer­ent sens­es, includ­ing the tech world that they’re mix­ing with so freely.”

With the promi­nence of fig­ures like Elon Musk and Peter Theil, the tech indus­try has gained a greater pro­file in Trump world, and so too are the links between the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and the Theo­Bro uni­verse deep­en­ing. Short­ly before Christ­mas, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club host­ed a group of tech investors for a lun­cheon of but­ter­nut squash soup, roast­ed cod, and Trump Choco­late Cake (dou­ble choco­late cake, dark choco­late glaze, vanil­la ice cream) for dessert. Among the firms rep­re­sent­ed was 1789 Cap­i­tal, the firm that Don­ald Trump, Jr. joined in Novem­ber. 1789 Capital’s founder is Amer­i­can Reformer’s Buskirk.

Anoth­er attendee was a 24-year-old entre­pre­neur named Isa­iah Tay­lor, a friend of Rainmaker’s Doricko. Tay­lor runs a start­up he found­ed in 2023 called Valar Atom­ics, which says it is “scal­ing nuclear ener­gy for heavy indus­tri­al pow­er and clean hydro­car­bon fuel pro­duc­tion.” He too cur­rent­ly lives in El Segun­do, but he is orig­i­nal­ly from Moscow, Ida­ho, which, in 2023, he described on X as “a sil­ly lit­tle town in north­ern Ida­ho (pop. 20k).” He lived there, he wrote, “in order to be part of a medi­um-sized church com­mu­ni­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly Christ Church, the reformed evan­gel­i­cal church found­ed by Wil­son, the Theo­Bro patri­arch.

Today, with Doricko as a fel­low wor­ship­per, Tay­lor attends Christ Church San­ta Clari­ta, a south­ern Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber church in the denom­i­na­tion that Wil­son found­ed. In 2023, Tay­lor wrote on X that Wil­son had been “a huge influ­ence on me regard­ing wealth.” Wil­son has writ­ten that he sees tech­nol­o­gy as some­thing like a divine gift. “If you have a smart­phone, you have more wealth in your pock­et than Neb­uchad­nez­zar accu­mu­lat­ed over the course of his life­time,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Plo­duc­tiv­i­ty: A Prac­ti­cal The­ol­o­gy of Work and Wealth. “We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to turn a prof­it on these astound­ing resources.”

In keep­ing with that phi­los­o­phy, Tay­lor told The Infor­ma­tion’s Julia Black in Decem­ber that he saw his company’s mis­sion as spir­i­tu­al in nature. “I think God cre­at­ed the world full of abun­dant ener­gy and we have to unlock it,” he explained. On X, he put it dif­fer­ent­ly. “I’m a Chris­t­ian envi­ron­men­tal­ist,” he post­ed in 2023. “I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a gar­den. So nat­u­ral­ly I want to rein­dus­tri­al­ize the Unit­ed States and build 1000 nuclear reac­tors.”

The hyper­mas­cu­line aes­thet­ics of Theo­Bros would seem to fit right into the El Segun­do tech scene, the over­whelm­ing­ly male mem­bers of which refer to them­selves as “’Gun­do Bros.” In an arti­cle last Feb­ru­ary, Forbes’ David Jeans and Sarah Emer­son described guys in defense tech star­tups who “pump iron while they code, host week­ly bon­fires on the beach, and shot­gun ener­gy drinks.” Van­i­ty Fair’s Zoë Bernard observed the Gun­do Bros’ “out­size respect for their coun­try and men in uni­form. They love fast cars, tobac­co prod­ucts, and their lord and sav­ior Jesus Christ.”

...

Many of the Gun­do Bros have ben­e­fit­ted from the largesse of tech investor Marc Andreessen, a major Trump sup­port­er, friends with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and close advis­er to Trump’s new­ly con­vened Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy or DOGE. “Big Tech spent a decade doing every­thing pos­si­ble to be the best con­ceiv­able pro­gres­sive ally,” Andreessen post­ed on X in Novem­ber. “They got treat­ed with utter con­tempt, pound­ed dai­ly, cru­ci­fied in return. A full rethink­ing is required.” To that end, through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, he start­ed a $500 mil­lion fund for tech com­pa­nies, sev­er­al of which have head­quar­ters in El Segun­do, which are “solv­ing our country’s most vex­ing chal­lenges.” Andreessen has Theo­Bro con­nec­tions, too: Last month, Forbes report­ed that Andreessen backed New Found­ing, an invest­ment firm that aims to build a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty and real estate empire in rur­al Appalachia. Andreessen didn’t respond to emailed ques­tions from Moth­er Jones.

Anoth­er pow­er­ful force in the El Segun­do scene is Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures, an accel­er­a­tor pro­gram, fund­ed in part by Andreessen Horowitz, that says it seeks to build “a net­work of the smartest, most con­trar­i­an indi­vid­u­als whose aspi­ra­tions to change the world have been over­looked by their respec­tive uni­ver­si­ties and com­pa­nies.” Dis­cip­u­lus’ guid­ing prin­ci­ples are “reli­gion, patri­o­tism, and fam­i­ly”; its par­tic­i­pants must have “a strict devo­tion to truth and good­ness.” The cohort of 10 entre­pre­neurs starts each day with a 6 a.m. work­out, then the par­tic­i­pants learn from more sea­soned entre­pre­neurs. Men­tors include Rainmaker’s Doricko and Kather­ine Boyle, a gen­er­al part­ner at Andreessen’s firm.

It doesn’t look like Doricko’s com­pa­ny was able to make much progress against the fires over the past few days; the only evi­dence on X is a sin­gle post on Fri­day, by a Rain­mak­er engi­neer, show­ing a pho­to of some peo­ple hold­ing a large white bal­loon attached to a spool of what looks like kite string. Doricko didn’t respond to Moth­er Jones’ request for com­ment for this piece. But he and his friends are aim­ing high­er, any­way. In Octo­ber, he repost­ed an X post from Valar Atom­ics’ Isa­iah Tay­lor. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right cat­e­gories,” Tay­lor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logis­tics? Who gets to own the weath­er? Who gets to own ener­gy? Think big­ger.”

Mean­while, the Theo­Bros’ min­gling with MAGA elites is like­ly just get­ting start­ed. This week, just a few days before Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion, Valar Atom­ics’ Tay­lor, who also didn’t respond to a request for com­ment, is sched­uled to return to Mar-a-Lago, this time to present at an event called Nuclear Ener­gy Space & Defense Tech Investor Sum­mit. “I’ll be speak­ing on Nuclear Ener­gy and the Found­ing Fathers,” he post­ed on X in ear­ly Jan­u­ary. “Come ready to restart America’s ener­gy engine. We’re gonna fix this thing.”

Update, Jan­u­ary 14: After this sto­ry was pub­lished, Nate Fis­ch­er, CEO of New Found­ing and co-founder of Amer­i­can Reformer, clar­i­fied toMoth­er Jonesthat Buskirk’s list­ing intax fil­ingsas the edi­tor and pub­lish­er ofAmer­i­can Reformerhad been a “cler­i­cal error (pre­sum­ably copy­ing his bio fromAmer­i­can Great­ness, where he was edi­tor and pub­lish­er)” and that Buskirk was actu­al­ly a board mem­ber ofAmer­i­can Reformer. The sen­tence has been revised.

————-

“The Ultra-Chris­t­ian Tech Bros Have Been Min­gling at Mar-a-Lago” by Kiera But­ler; Moth­er Jones; 01/14/2025Z

“But he also believes his work man­i­fests God’s will. In August, he told his fol­low­ers on X, “One of our Lord’s first com­mand­ments was to sub­due the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind con­trol the weath­er for the sake of build­ing the king­dom of God on earth and stew­ard­ing it well.” In anoth­er post, he wrote, “Dams mod­i­fy rivers, Jesus was a car­pen­ter who mod­i­fied forests (cut trees) to build hous­es. We aim to serve God.” Cloud seed­ing is just the next step in the evo­lu­tion of man’s rela­tion­ship with nature for the greater glo­ry of the Divine.”

Cloud seed­ing is just the next step of the evo­lu­tion of man’s divine­ly ordained rela­tion­ship with nature. A rela­tion­ship of man tak­ing con­trol and reshap­ing nature. That’s a fair sum­ma­ry of the the­o­log­i­cal mis­sion behind the geo­engi­neer­ing firm, Rain­mak­er, launched by the 24-year old Augus­tus Doricko using seed mon­ey from the Thiel Fel­low­ship. Notably, Doricko start­ed the first UC Berke­ley chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, part of Nick Fuentes’s online Nazi youth polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, is sad­ly very on brand for the kind Nazi-enabling Schmit­t­ian the­ol­o­gy that Peter Thiel has been evan­ge­liz­ing. But as we’ve also seen, Thiel argues that Chris­tian­i­ty is a tran­shu­man­ist faith that is com­pat­i­ble with his ambi­tions tran­shu­man­ist tech­nol­o­gy agen­da. Doricko was echo­ing a kind of a trans-human­ist and trans-nature tech­no-Domin­ion­ist cor­po­rate man­date that Thiel has been push­ing for years. In fact, we are told Doricko is part of a new gen­er­a­tion of Sil­i­con Val­ley ‘tech bros’ dis­cov­er­ing Chris­tian­i­ty thanks to Peter Thiel’s evan­ge­lis­tic efforts. As we’ve seen, Thiel has been giv­ing sold out talks where he shares with the audi­ence his the­ol­o­gy. A the­ol­o­gy that could be seen as a mod­ern day update to the the­ol­o­gy of Nazi the­o­reti­cian Carl Schmitt, with oppo­si­tion to unbri­dled tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is seen as the mod­ern day ana­log to Schmit­t’s Com­mu­nism as the ‘kat­e­chon­ic’ Antichrist-like force most imper­il­ing human­i­ty. Doricko and Tay­lor are just two notable exam­ples of a larg­er trend of Peter Thiel’s tran­shu­man­ist form of Chris­tian­i­ty win­ning over Sil­i­con Val­ley:

...
Last Thurs­day, as wild­fires con­tin­ued to blaze through Los Ange­les, fire­fight­ers appeared to be no match for the dead­ly com­bi­na­tion of winds and flames. But one entre­pre­neur in the LA sub­urb of El Segun­do had an idea. Augus­tus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geo­engi­neer­ing start­up called Rain­mak­er, announced on X his atten­tion to help. “Rain­mak­er will do what it can,” he post­ed, “start­ing Sat­ur­day.”

Doricko may not be a tech celebri­ty like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he isn’t a nobody, either—at least not any­more. Just four years ago, Doricko was a low­ly under­grad con­ser­v­a­tive activist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, where he launched the school’s chap­ter of Amer­i­ca First Stu­dents, the uni­ver­si­ty arm of the polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by white nation­al­ist “Groyper” and Holo­caust denier Nick Fuentes. But for Doricko as for many young aspir­ing tech entre­pre­neurs, a col­lege degree was not a pre­req­ui­site for suc­cess.

Last year, Pay­Pal founder Peter Thiel’s foun­da­tion grant­ed Doricko a Thiel Fel­low­ship, a grant award­ed annu­al­ly to a select group of entre­pre­neurs who have fore­gone a col­lege degree in order to pur­sue a tech-focused busi­ness ven­ture. In Doricko’s case, that ven­ture was Rain­mak­er, which seeks to increase the US water sup­ply through cloud-seed­ing tech­nol­o­gy. Like many tech entre­pre­neurs, Doricko believes his work is the solu­tion to an urgent prob­lem. “Cloud seed­ing is a nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy to avert wors­en­ing drought,” he post­ed recent­ly.

...

Doricko is just one exam­ple with­in a ris­ing tide of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty that appears to be crest­ing in California’s tech enclaves. Recent news sto­ries have described a new gen­er­a­tion of tech bros flock­ing to church in the famous­ly sec­u­lar San Fran­cis­co Bay Area and Sil­i­con Val­ley, dis­cov­er­ing Chris­tian­i­ty through Pay­Pal founder and bil­lion­aire investor Peter Thiel, and invest­ing in a Christ-cen­tered real estate enclave in rur­al Ken­tucky. There are the usu­al rea­sons for this surg­ing inter­est in Chris­tian­i­ty like yearn­ing for com­mu­ni­ty and search­ing for the greater mean­ing of life. And for those immersed in a tech cul­ture that has long been obsessed with longevi­ty, the promise of eter­nal life must offer a spe­cial appeal.
...

Then there’s the fact that the “Gun­do Bros” net­work around the El Segun­do tech scene oper­ates as an LA-area exten­sion of the Sil­i­con Val­ley ‘Theo­Bros’ net­work under the largesse of Marc Andreessen. Sil­i­con Val­ley is just one of the focal points for the tech com­po­nent of this tech­no-fas­cist net­work. And when we see how Andreessen is oper­at­ing the “Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures” accel­er­a­tor pro­gram with Augus­tus Doricko serv­ing as a ‘men­tor’, it becomes clear that the mint­ing of more fas­cist-mind­ing young tech lead­ers like Doricko is a pri­or­i­ty of this agen­da. The same agen­da the Thiel Fel­low­ship has been pro­mot­ing for years:

...
The hyper­mas­cu­line aes­thet­ics of Theo­Bros would seem to fit right into the El Segun­do tech scene, the over­whelm­ing­ly male mem­bers of which refer to them­selves as “’Gun­do Bros.” In an arti­cle last Feb­ru­ary, Forbes’ David Jeans and Sarah Emer­son described guys in defense tech star­tups who “pump iron while they code, host week­ly bon­fires on the beach, and shot­gun ener­gy drinks.” Van­i­ty Fair’s Zoë Bernard observed the Gun­do Bros’ “out­size respect for their coun­try and men in uni­form. They love fast cars, tobac­co prod­ucts, and their lord and sav­ior Jesus Christ.”

...

Many of the Gun­do Bros have ben­e­fit­ted from the largesse of tech investor Marc Andreessen, a major Trump sup­port­er, friends with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and close advis­er to Trump’s new­ly con­vened Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy or DOGE. “Big Tech spent a decade doing every­thing pos­si­ble to be the best con­ceiv­able pro­gres­sive ally,” Andreessen post­ed on X in Novem­ber. “They got treat­ed with utter con­tempt, pound­ed dai­ly, cru­ci­fied in return. A full rethink­ing is required.” To that end, through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, he start­ed a $500 mil­lion fund for tech com­pa­nies, sev­er­al of which have head­quar­ters in El Segun­do, which are “solv­ing our country’s most vex­ing chal­lenges.” Andreessen has Theo­Bro con­nec­tions, too: Last month, Forbes report­ed that Andreessen backed New Found­ing, an invest­ment firm that aims to build a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty and real estate empire in rur­al Appalachia. Andreessen didn’t respond to emailed ques­tions from Moth­er Jones.

Anoth­er pow­er­ful force in the El Segun­do scene is Dis­cip­u­lus Ven­tures, an accel­er­a­tor pro­gram, fund­ed in part by Andreessen Horowitz, that says it seeks to build “a net­work of the smartest, most con­trar­i­an indi­vid­u­als whose aspi­ra­tions to change the world have been over­looked by their respec­tive uni­ver­si­ties and com­pa­nies.” Dis­cip­u­lus’ guid­ing prin­ci­ples are “reli­gion, patri­o­tism, and fam­i­ly”; its par­tic­i­pants must have “a strict devo­tion to truth and good­ness.” The cohort of 10 entre­pre­neurs starts each day with a 6 a.m. work­out, then the par­tic­i­pants learn from more sea­soned entre­pre­neurs. Men­tors include Rainmaker’s Doricko and Kather­ine Boyle, a gen­er­al part­ner at Andreessen’s firm.
...

And note this inter­est­ing dis­tinc­tion we’re see­ing between the ‘Theo­Bros’ — who are por­trayed as the most­ly mil­len­ni­al and Gen Z, ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive men — and the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion adher­ents who played instru­men­tal roles in the “Stop the Steal” cam­paign that led up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. In oth­er words, there’s appar­ent­ly a dis­tinc­tion to be made between the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy theo­crat­ic net­work behind Jan­u­ary 6 and this ‘Theo­Bros’ net­work that orga­nized around Peter Thiel’s vision of tech­no-futur­is­tic lib­er­tar­i­an fas­cist Chris­tian­i­ty. It’s a kind of bat­tle over the future of Amer­i­can fas­cist white Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, between the tra­di­tion­al­ist and futur­ist. Except, when we see how neo-Con­fed­er­ate fig­ures like Doug Wil­son are com­plete­ly inter­twined with this tech­no-fas­cism, it becomes appar­ent that it’s less a bat­tle and more a hand off:

...
But there are oth­er forces at play, which revolve around a very spe­cif­ic kind of Chris­tian­i­ty: that of the Theo­Bros, a group of most­ly mil­len­ni­al and Gen Z, ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive men, many of whom proud­ly call them­selves Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protes­tant Christianity—known as Reformed or Recon­struc­tion­ist—is the idea that the Unit­ed States should be sub­ject to bib­li­cal law. While the Theo­Bros’ beliefs are extreme—many of them think women shouldn’t be able to vote, and that the Con­sti­tu­tion has out­lived its use­ful­ness and we should instead be gov­erned by the Ten Com­mand­ments—their move­ment is mov­ing out of the fringe. In part because they are very savvy about broad­cast­ing it on a mul­ti­tude of platforms—on pod­casts and YouTube shows, on X, at a seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing round-robin of con­fer­ences. Doricko attends a church that is part of the Theo­Bros denom­i­na­tion in an LA sub­urb, as do oth­ers in his El Segun­do tech com­mu­ni­ty and beyond.

The Theo­Bros also have made inroads to the upper reach­es of polit­i­cal pow­er. In Novem­ber, Pres­i­dent-elect Trump nom­i­nat­ed one of their allies, for­mer Fox News com­men­ta­tor Pete Hegseth, to lead the Depart­ment of Defense. Hegseth attends a church in Ten­nessee that is affil­i­at­ed with the Theo­Bro move­ment, and his chil­dren attend a school affil­i­at­ed with the net­work of clas­si­cal Chris­t­ian schools that Wil­son helped found. JD Vance has brushed shoul­ders with the Theo­Bros, too—he spoke at last summer’s Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence, where Wil­son also spoke, and he co-found­ed the Rock­bridge Net­work, a pow­er­ful group of Repub­li­can donors, with Chris Buskirk, a board mem­ber of the unof­fi­cial Theo­Bro mag­a­zine, Amer­i­can Reformer.

The Theo­Bros’ bur­geon­ing con­nec­tions with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion mark a diver­gence from the style of Chris­tian­i­ty that the MAGA world had once embraced. Dur­ing Trump’s first term, he forged con­nec­tions with lead­ers in what’s known as the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, a charis­mat­ic move­ment whose adher­ents believe that Chris­tians are called to take over the gov­ern­ment. Those lead­ers went on to become instru­men­tal fig­ures in the “Stop the Steal” cam­paign that led to the Cap­i­tal insur­rec­tion of 2021. Yet the Theo­Bros are, for the most part, much more mil­i­tant in their polit­i­cal and social beliefs than the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion adher­ents. Recent pieces in Amer­i­can Reformer have bemoaned the “fem­i­niza­tion” of Chris­tian­i­ty, lam­bast­ed the “will­ful­ly child­less fem­i­nists in the media,” and pre­dict­ed that “tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can hol­i­days that reflect our Chris­t­ian and Anglo her­itage will become bat­tle­grounds in the con­test over the soul of Amer­i­ca among the dis­parate groups now pop­u­lat­ing the coun­try.”

Theo­Bros are also more tech- and media-savvy than many of their New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion coun­ter­parts. As Rachel Tabach­nick, an extrem­ism researcher who has been study­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism for decades, told me when I inter­viewed her for a piece on the Theo­Bros last year, “They are going to be free to be entre­pre­neurs in all dif­fer­ent sens­es, includ­ing the tech world that they’re mix­ing with so freely.”

With the promi­nence of fig­ures like Elon Musk and Peter Theil, the tech indus­try has gained a greater pro­file in Trump world, and so too are the links between the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and the Theo­Bro uni­verse deep­en­ing. Short­ly before Christ­mas, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club host­ed a group of tech investors for a lun­cheon of but­ter­nut squash soup, roast­ed cod, and Trump Choco­late Cake (dou­ble choco­late cake, dark choco­late glaze, vanil­la ice cream) for dessert. Among the firms rep­re­sent­ed was 1789 Cap­i­tal, the firm that Don­ald Trump, Jr. joined in Novem­ber. 1789 Capital’s founder is Amer­i­can Reformer’s Buskirk.
...

And that agen­da of mint­ing young tech lead­ers who are ide­o­log­i­cal­ly aligned with this tech­no-fas­cist theo­crat­ic agen­da brings us to Isa­iah Tay­lor, a friend of Augus­tus Doricko and the founder of Valar Atom­ics, the nuclear pow­er start­up found­ed by Augus­tus Doricko. As we’ve seen, there’s anoth­er rather notable “Valar” enti­ty in this net­work: Valar Ven­tures, one of Peter Thiel’s ven­ture cap­i­tal funds which hap­pened to include Jef­frey Epstein as an investor. In fact, Epstein’s invest­ments in Valar appear to com­prise a sub­stan­tial por­tion of his assets in 2019 at the time of his alleged ‘sui­cide’. Is Valar Atom­ics tied to Valar Ven­tures? We don’t know, but it’s hard not to be extreme­ly sus­pi­cious. Doricko is a Thiel Fel­low, after all. But as we can also see, Isa­iah Tay­lor has unam­bigu­ous ties to anoth­er major fig­ure in this tech­no-fas­cist net­work: pas­tor Doug Wil­son:

...
Anoth­er attendee was a 24-year-old entre­pre­neur named Isa­iah Tay­lor, a friend of Rainmaker’s Doricko. Tay­lor runs a start­up he found­ed in 2023 called Valar Atom­ics, which says it is “scal­ing nuclear ener­gy for heavy indus­tri­al pow­er and clean hydro­car­bon fuel pro­duc­tion.” He too cur­rent­ly lives in El Segun­do, but he is orig­i­nal­ly from Moscow, Ida­ho, which, in 2023, he described on X as “a sil­ly lit­tle town in north­ern Ida­ho (pop. 20k).” He lived there, he wrote, “in order to be part of a medi­um-sized church com­mu­ni­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly Christ Church, the reformed evan­gel­i­cal church found­ed by Wil­son, the Theo­Bro patri­arch.

Today, with Doricko as a fel­low wor­ship­per, Tay­lor attends Christ Church San­ta Clari­ta, a south­ern Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber church in the denom­i­na­tion that Wil­son found­ed. In 2023, Tay­lor wrote on X that Wil­son had been “a huge influ­ence on me regard­ing wealth.” Wil­son has writ­ten that he sees tech­nol­o­gy as some­thing like a divine gift. “If you have a smart­phone, you have more wealth in your pock­et than Neb­uchad­nez­zar accu­mu­lat­ed over the course of his life­time,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Plo­duc­tiv­i­ty: A Prac­ti­cal The­ol­o­gy of Work and Wealth. “We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to turn a prof­it on these astound­ing resources.”

In keep­ing with that phi­los­o­phy, Tay­lor told The Infor­ma­tion’s Julia Black in Decem­ber that he saw his company’s mis­sion as spir­i­tu­al in nature. “I think God cre­at­ed the world full of abun­dant ener­gy and we have to unlock it,” he explained. On X, he put it dif­fer­ent­ly. “I’m a Chris­t­ian envi­ron­men­tal­ist,” he post­ed in 2023. “I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a gar­den. So nat­u­ral­ly I want to rein­dus­tri­al­ize the Unit­ed States and build 1000 nuclear reac­tors.”

...

It doesn’t look like Doricko’s com­pa­ny was able to make much progress against the fires over the past few days; the only evi­dence on X is a sin­gle post on Fri­day, by a Rain­mak­er engi­neer, show­ing a pho­to of some peo­ple hold­ing a large white bal­loon attached to a spool of what looks like kite string. Doricko didn’t respond to Moth­er Jones’ request for com­ment for this piece. But he and his friends are aim­ing high­er, any­way. In Octo­ber, he repost­ed an X post from Valar Atom­ics’ Isa­iah Tay­lor. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right cat­e­gories,” Tay­lor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logis­tics? Who gets to own the weath­er? Who gets to own ener­gy? Think big­ger.”

Mean­while, the Theo­Bros’ min­gling with MAGA elites is like­ly just get­ting start­ed. This week, just a few days before Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion, Valar Atom­ics’ Tay­lor, who also didn’t respond to a request for com­ment, is sched­uled to return to Mar-a-Lago, this time to present at an event called Nuclear Ener­gy Space & Defense Tech Investor Sum­mit. “I’ll be speak­ing on Nuclear Ener­gy and the Found­ing Fathers,” he post­ed on X in ear­ly Jan­u­ary. “Come ready to restart America’s ener­gy engine. We’re gonna fix this thing.”
...

“I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right cat­e­gories,” Tay­lor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logis­tics? Who gets to own the weath­er? Who gets to own ener­gy? Think big­ger.”

Who gets to own ener­gy. Who get to own the weath­er. That’s part of the game the Theo­Bros are play­ing, all at once. And as we’ll see, with all the Theo­Bros con­nec­tions Valar Atom­ics has, it is legit­i­mate­ly well posi­tioned to ‘own’ a big chunk of the future of next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear ener­gy by being one of the first com­pa­nies giv­en approval to build­ing this kind of small mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy. At least they can get approval by the end of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

We also have to ask has more the­o­log­i­cal sway with this crowd, Peter Thiel or Doug Wil­son? It would be nice if we did­n’t have to ask that.

Valar Atomics: The TheoBros Nuclear Power Startup on the Quest to Power the AI Economy (and Bypass the NRC)

Is Valar Atom­ics the future of nuclear ener­gy or a crack­pot dan­ger­ous scam? For a long time that was hard to say because the com­pa­ny refused to sub­mit its designs to the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (NRC). Now, it’s impor­tant to note that Valar Atom­ic­s’s tech­nol­o­gy does report­ed­ly works well enough to have demon­strat­ed ‘crit­i­cal­i­ty’ (a self-sus­tain­ing nuclear chain reac­tion) in time to meet the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s ambi­tious July 4, 2026. And yet, as we’re going to see, the con­cerns about the via­bil­i­ty of Valar Atom­ic­s’s tech­nol­o­gy weren’t pri­mar­i­ly around whether or not the tech­nol­o­gy could poten­tial­ly work. The con­cerns have more to do with safe­ty, cost-effec­tive­ness, and poten­tial radi­o­log­i­cal pol­lu­tion. And as we’re also going to see, those con­cerns are fueled by a Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s deci­sion to place the devel­op­ment of these next-gen­er­a­tion small nuclear reac­tors under the purview of the DOE, and out of the reg­u­la­to­ry purview of the NRC, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly gut­ting the DOE’s nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty rules and guide­lines. Even the state of Utah is show­ing the com­pa­ny favor­able treat­ment. But as the fol­low­ing Utah News Dis­patch arti­cle from July of 2025 describes, a lot of the con­cerns about the via­bil­i­ty of Valar Atom­ic­s’s tech­nol­o­gy have to do with the fact that the com­pa­ny’s found, Isa­iah Tay­lor, does­n’t appear to be seri­ous about safe­ty and secu­ri­ty. Not only has the com­pa­ny refused to share its designs with the NRC but it also joined a law­suit against the NRC that is try­ing to strip down fed­er­al nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty rules for the entire nuclear ener­gy indus­try:

Utah News Dis­patch

Who is Valar Atom­ics?

A look at the tech bros behind the com­pa­ny part­ner­ing with Utah to build nuclear

By: Eric S. Peter­son, Utah Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism Project
July 7, 2025 6:03 am

When police in Moscow, Ida­ho, rolled up to the scene of the struc­ture fire on Oct. 23, 2021, the home was a fire­ball.

The offi­cers quick­ly took con­trol of the scene and checked on the vic­tims. One man, Eli­jah Froh, was sent to the hos­pi­tal with seri­ous burns on his tor­so. His employ­er, Kip Mock, also received a less severe burn on his arm.

Mock said he took “sole respon­si­bil­i­ty” and explained that he put “old diesel” into a wood-burn­ing stove.

“When the old diesel went onto the fire, not exact­ly sure how it hap­pened but the wood stove… it blew back,” Mock said.

They said the fire was all over Froh, even his beard was aflame, and they quick­ly ripped his shirt off and got him and every­one else out of the build­ing.

...

The offi­cers not­ed that “his bud­dy could have got killed” before dis­cussing next steps for keep­ing the scene secure. As the offi­cers talked, bois­ter­ous laughs came from Mock and the oth­er young men who had fled the fire and were hud­dled togeth­er 50 feet away.

...

Froh would sue his then-employ­er Mock alleg­ing in a law­suit that Mock “reck­less­ly threw an accel­er­ant on a fire,” and his “gross­ly neg­li­gent” actions caused an explo­sion, result­ing in “phys­i­cal dis­fig­ure­ment” and major med­ical expens­es. The case was lat­er dis­missed and Froh now works with Mock at his new ven­ture.

Mock’s most recent gig? Since 2024 he’s list­ed him­self as head of oper­a­tions for Valar Atom­ics, the com­pa­ny that has signed a deal with Utah to explore devel­op­ing an advanced nuclear test reac­tor by 2026. Mock is lead­ing the company’s efforts to build a reac­tor for the com­pa­ny in the Philip­pines to avoid the reg­u­la­to­ry delays of being licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion.
0
The com­pa­ny founders are all young, con­ser­v­a­tive scions of the start­up cul­ture of fast-paced inno­va­tion. But while that pace can be game chang­ing, crit­ics say it can also be reck­less, and that nuclear pow­er is not a space for entre­pre­neurs to “move fast and break things” as the pop­u­lar Mark Zucker­berg mot­to goes.

Valar Atom­ics has been crit­i­cized by nuclear experts for mak­ing exag­ger­at­ed safe­ty claims for its prod­ucts, even claim­ing a per­son could safe­ly hold spent nuclear fuel from their reac­tors in their hands while receiv­ing only a mild dose of radi­a­tion.

This at the same time they announced they were join­ing a law­suit with oth­er com­pa­nies and the states of Texas, Ari­zona, Flori­da and Utah in suing the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion, claim­ing the agency is hold­ing back inno­va­tion. It’s a maneu­ver that crit­ics say mis­in­ter­prets the law to claim a safe­ty exemp­tion the com­pa­ny has sim­ply not proven that they deserve. Valar Atom­ics also made news for secur­ing $21 mil­lion in ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing to build its first advanced test reac­tor.

...

Dr. Anna Erick­son is a nuclear engi­neer and pro­fes­sor at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. She’s skep­ti­cal of the company’s claims. For all the hype about its small mod­u­lar reac­tors, she notes it hasn’t made one and nei­ther has any­one else in the coun­try. But more impor­tant­ly, Valar hasn’t even sub­mit­ted a design for review with the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion — while oth­er star­tups have. Such a sub­mis­sion would show the pub­lic and reg­u­la­tors what its designs are about and how seri­ous the tech­nol­o­gy is.

“I don’t know how you can claim your design is so safe with­out doing engi­neer­ing. It’s not fairy dust — this is engi­neer­ing. We can’t take your word for it,” Erick­son said.

The nuke bros

Valar Atom­ics’ mis­sion state­ment calls for the mass pro­duc­tion of nuclear pow­er gen­er­a­tors.

“One stan­dard­ized design built thou­sands of times, with a busi­ness mod­el engi­neered for scale,” the state­ment reads. “Our approach will deliv­er abun­dant clean ener­gy to pow­er humanity’s future.”

...

On social media, Valar Atom­ics head of oper­a­tions Mock mix­es posts about world­wide ener­gy pro­duc­tion with jokes about becom­ing the gov­er­nor of Green­land and pic­tures of his Porsche with the Valar Atom­ics logo paint­ed on the side. He sings Elon Musk’s prais­es and mus­es about par­ent­ing – “1. If you abide by car seat rec­om­men­da­tions, your kids will be cod­dled and impo­tent. 2. If you can’t afford a big­ger car, you’re lame” — to also shar­ing “absolute banger” quotes from lib­er­tar­i­an author Ayn Rand.

The com­pa­ny has also enlist­ed a slew of nuclear engi­neers, but the main buzz behind the com­pa­ny has been on founder Isa­iah Tay­lor, the 25-year-old high school dropout and self-made entre­pre­neur who says he’s the great grand­son of a physi­cist who worked on the Man­hat­tan Project devel­op­ing the first nuclear bomb.

One writer for Advi­sor­pe­dia, a media site focused on finan­cial advis­ers, described vis­it­ing Tay­lor in his cig­ar lounge at the company’s south­ern Cal­i­for­nia head­quar­ters.

...

But before he was tak­ing inter­views in a com­pa­ny cig­ar lounge, Tay­lor scraped his way up from much more mod­est begin­nings.

On social media a com­menter had derid­ed Tay­lor as a “trust fund baby.” In response Tay­lor post­ed a long descrip­tion of his life “muck­ing goat barns in the back­woods of Ken­tucky.”

...

When he was 12 he said his father made him a deal. “I will go out and buy you a Mac­Book Pro today, if you shake hands that I don’t have to pay for your col­lege.”

The two shook on it and Tay­lor got his com­put­er, writ­ing that while he imag­ined his father thought the com­put­er would help him get a gig to pay for col­lege, Tay­lor instead bypassed col­lege.

“What he didn’t expect is that by the time I was 16 I would be mak­ing six fig­ures, lead­ing me to drop out of high school and skip col­lege alto­geth­er.”

Tay­lor par­layed that into the Ida­ho-based auto repair com­pa­ny found­ed with Mock that then led them to Valar Atom­ics.

‘…a good engi­neer does not make claims about things he sim­ply has no knowl­edge of’

Valar Atom­ics’ sto­ry has impressed many, includ­ing Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. In May, Cox announced the state had come to an agree­ment with the com­pa­ny to explore allow­ing Valar to use the Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab in Emery Coun­ty to build a small mod­u­lar test reac­tor by 2026.

...

When Valar Atom­ics joined the law­suit against the NRC, it argued its tech­nol­o­gy was so safe that a per­son could hold the spent nuclear fuel from its reac­tor in their hand and get the same amount of radi­a­tion as one would expect from a hos­pi­tal CT scan.

This caught the atten­tion of a lot of peo­ple online, includ­ing Nick Touran, a nuclear engi­neer who since 2009 has worked with Ter­raPow­er, a com­pa­ny that is also work­ing on small mod­u­lar reac­tor design, and also start­ed the WhatIsNuclear.com site.

When Touran point­ed out that claim could not pos­si­bly be true, Tay­lor respond­ed by pro­vid­ing some cal­cu­la­tions and chastis­ing Touran, say­ing “Nick, a good engi­neer does not make claims about things he sim­ply has no knowl­edge of.”

When Touran then looked at the new data, he saw that hold­ing Valar’s spent fuel would result in a fatal dose in 90 sec­onds. Anoth­er nuclear engi­neer used a more advanced cal­cu­la­tion method to argue the fatal dose would actu­al­ly be as fast as 85 mil­lisec­onds.

Tay­lor post­ed a reply stat­ing: “I will fol­low up with a detailed write­up tonight or tomor­row, back to back today. Should be fun…”

Tay­lor also told Wired.com he was work­ing on a response, but more than two months lat­er no reply has been pro­vid­ed.

Touran said Tay­lor often lash­es out at his “haters.”

“I don’t con­sid­er myself a hater, like I think what they’re doing is very inter­est­ing and cool and I’m glad they have peo­ple out there build­ing nuclear hard­ware and build­ing up the skills need­ed to build nuclear equip­ment,” Touran said. “I think that’s all awe­some.”

But Touran believes post­ing an absurd safe­ty claim and then per­son­al­ly attack­ing peo­ple dou­ble-check­ing the math on it demon­strates a lack of matu­ri­ty.

“Giv­en his hyper­sen­si­tive and tox­ic reac­tion to my sim­ple cri­tique of his out­ra­geous radi­a­tion claim, I think his reac­tor should be scru­ti­nized quite a bit by inde­pen­dent experts before any­one allows him to turn it on,” Touran said.

Valar’s web­site and its law­suit against the NRC argues that the intent of the 1954 Atom­ic Ener­gy Act was to exempt cer­tain small reac­tors from reg­u­la­tion because they did not present the same health and safe­ty risks as larg­er, more tra­di­tion­al nuclear reac­tors.

But the com­pa­ny is not propos­ing build­ing just one small reac­tor, it is propos­ing build­ing hun­dreds of the small reac­tors in a sin­gle area.

Touran said this “nuclear farm” idea real­ly over­states its cost and safe­ty ben­e­fits.

It would still present a major safe­ty and secu­ri­ty risk group­ing so many reac­tors togeth­er and would need vig­i­lant mon­i­tor­ing, accord­ing to Touran. Erick­son, at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, agrees, say­ing secu­ri­ty would have to make sure “nobody is able to remove the fuel for nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es” like a dirty bomb.

But the cost of secu­ri­ty would be noth­ing com­pared to the cost of sim­ply run­ning a nuclear farm, Touran said.

“You can do main­te­nance of one con­trol rod or move one con­trol rod” in a tra­di­tion­al reac­tor, he said, or “you have to move and main­tain a thou­sand con­trol rods in those 1,000 (small) reac­tors for the same pow­er.”

“Even though the parts them­selves may be small­er and cheap­er, there are a thou­sand of them and you have to pay a thou­sand peo­ple to go in there and do main­te­nance on that pump, or check that wire or move that con­trol rod,” Touran said. “That just real­ly kills the con­cept right there.”

Then there’s the fuel.

Valar is propos­ing the use of Tri-Struc­tur­al ISOtrop­ic fuel, or TRISO fuel, that are like “tiny ura­ni­um ker­nels” sur­round­ed by lay­ers of car­bon, ceram­ic and graphite, Touran said. The fuel is very robust, safe and can reach high tem­per­a­tures and avoid melt­ing like oth­er fuels. But it’s incred­i­bly expen­sive.

“Peo­ple are just say­ing, ‘we’re going to build (reac­tors) in a fac­to­ry, so that would be cheap.’ But just the fuel cost alone pre­vents that from even mak­ing sense at all,” Touran said.

For Erick­son, the big­ger con­cern is that the company’s big ambi­tions for small mod­u­lar nuclear pow­er are too secre­tive.

She said it’s too hypo­thet­i­cal to talk about Valar’s designs when they’ve sub­mit­ted noth­ing to the NRC.

The NRC lists pub­licly the com­pa­nies work­ing on advanced reac­tors and any­one can review infor­ma­tion about the project. They can see the dates when com­pa­nies inter­act­ed with reg­u­la­tors, con­tact infor­ma­tion for com­pa­ny staff and even review con­cep­tu­al design doc­u­ments of com­pa­nies’ reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy. Over a dozen advanced reac­tor com­pa­nies are list­ed on the site, but not Valar.

Even com­pa­nies like Deep Fis­sion that joined Valar in suing the NRC are list­ed on the NRC’s web­site as sub­mit­ting designs and engag­ing in pre-licens­ing activ­i­ties.

Erick­son said per­haps Valar has the most state-of-the-art design and just hasn’t shown it to any­one. But that secre­cy, she said, is a red flag.

“I don’t care how much mon­ey you’ve raised, I want to see if you engage in con­ver­sa­tions with the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion ear­ly on,” Erick­son said. “This is an indi­ca­tor that you’re actu­al­ly treat­ing your design as a seri­ous prod­uct and not just the flashy Pow­er­Point that you present to your investors.”

While the state has an agree­ment with Valar, Utah Office of Ener­gy Devel­op­ment Direc­tor Emy Lesof­s­ki stress­es that the agree­ment is a non-bind­ing mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing. The state has also reached a sim­i­lar agree­ment with anoth­er com­pa­ny, NuCube Ener­gy, out of Ida­ho. The state has not yet for­mal­ized any arrange­ment for Valar to access state facil­i­ties and resources like the Emery Lab.

The broad out­line is still part of an ongo­ing nego­ti­a­tion.

...

She said the com­pa­ny would still also have to abide by all fed­er­al licens­ing reg­u­la­tions for the project. And Utah is still eval­u­at­ing the com­pa­ny as a research part­ner.

...

Going nuclear

Arden Row­ell is a pro­fes­sor of law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Urbana-Cham­paign. She focus­es on envi­ron­men­tal law and is part of a team work­ing on a research grant from the NRC to help it safe­ly and effec­tive­ly update its reg­u­la­tions for new and emerg­ing nuclear tech­nolo­gies.

She said when the NRC was cre­at­ed, it was struc­tured as an inde­pen­dent agency because Con­gress didn’t want it hijacked by com­pa­nies that might take short­cuts on safe­ty.

...

She agrees the need is there for nuclear to get a reg­u­la­to­ry update. But the claim that the NRC is sit­ting on its hands and sti­fling inno­va­tion is not true, or help­ful, she said.

“All three branch­es of gov­ern­ment have been shift­ing the land under the feet of the NRC and so they need to do a six-foot­ed dance, a very com­pli­cat­ed dance,” while also try­ing to update licens­ing reg­u­la­tions for advanced nuclear pow­er, she said.

The Trump White House has fired off a bar­rage of exec­u­tive orders urg­ing nuclear be ramped up, while at the same time issu­ing one demand­ing that the NRC under­take work­force reduc­tions. On June 13, Trump also fired one of the com­mis­sion­ers of the NRC in a move that shocked anti- and pro-nuclear groups alike.

Con­gress just last year also passed the ADVANCE Act ask­ing the NRC to stream­line its per­mit­ting process­es. The courts are also now tak­ing swings at the NRC, not just from law­suits like the one Valar and Utah joined, but also because of the U.S. Supreme Court strik­ing down the Chevron doc­trine in a 2024 deci­sion. Pre­vi­ous­ly fed­er­al agen­cies had lat­i­tude to craft reg­u­la­tions about aspects of laws that Con­gress didn’t specif­i­cal­ly address in leg­is­la­tion.

Now Row­ell says the courts will have a strong say in inter­pret­ing fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions, includ­ing about nuclear licens­ing for tech­nol­o­gy that is still years away from prov­ing itself.

“(The NRC) has to choose the best inter­pre­ta­tion that a court would choose in sev­er­al years, when it’s nev­er seen any court inter­pret that lan­guage before,” she said.

Valar Atom­ics seems hope­ful that Trump’s lead­er­ship will help it bypass NRC reg­u­la­tions. But the com­pa­ny would still face chal­lenges even if it did. Valar’s top nuclear engi­neers and sci­en­tists were recruit­ed from a com­pa­ny called Ultra Safe Nuclear that went bank­rupt last year and sold its intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty to anoth­er com­pa­ny called Nano Nuclear to help pay off its debts. While most nuclear com­pa­nies oper­ate off patents that are very old and not pro­pri­etary, the com­pa­ny could still poten­tial­ly face lit­i­ga­tion over use of trade secrets from Nano.

...

Then there’s the oth­er dilem­ma of get­ting to bypass exist­ing reg­u­la­tions. What if some­thing goes wrong? A small mod­u­lar reac­tor placed in a remote area won’t like­ly cause a Cher­nobyl-esque cat­a­stro­phe, but work­ers may be injured or killed. And nuclear is an indus­try that can eas­i­ly be stymied when the pub­lic reacts to even small acci­dents. Then all the buzz won’t be so pos­i­tive and pub­lic out­cry could set back the indus­try.

“In nuclear, an inci­dent any­where is an inci­dent every­where,” Touran said.

Erick­son also wor­ries a mis­take could set back the whole indus­try. She ques­tions why Valar thinks it’s pre­pos­ter­ous that it can take up to eight years for a nuclear reac­tor to be approved, point­ing out that when approved, they are invest­ments that last 80 years.

“If your pro­to­type takes eight years, is this long? Is it even long enough? Because this is nuclear tech­nol­o­gy, it is not anoth­er hot app that will die out in two years.”

————-

“Who is Valar Atom­ics?” By Eric S. Peter­son; Utah News Dis­patch; 07/07/2025

“The com­pa­ny founders are all young, con­ser­v­a­tive scions of the start­up cul­ture of fast-paced inno­va­tion. But while that pace can be game chang­ing, crit­ics say it can also be reck­less, and that nuclear pow­er is not a space for entre­pre­neurs to “move fast and break things” as the pop­u­lar Mark Zucker­berg mot­to goes.”

A nuclear pow­er start­up led by young con­ser­v­a­tive scions of the fast-paced “most fast and break things” start­up cul­ture. What could pos­si­bly go wrong? It’s not that the com­pa­ny does­n’t have any nuclear engi­neers. It does. But the nuclear physi­cists aren’t the ones run­ning the com­pa­ny. Instead, Valar Atom­ics is run by ‘young con­ser­v­a­tive scions’ like Isa­iah Tay­lor, a mid-twen­ties high school dropout whose back­ground in nuclear physics appears to be lim­it­ed to being the grand­son of a physi­cist who worked on the Man­hat­tan Project:

...
On social media, Valar Atom­ics head of oper­a­tions Mock mix­es posts about world­wide ener­gy pro­duc­tion with jokes about becom­ing the gov­er­nor of Green­land and pic­tures of his Porsche with the Valar Atom­ics logo paint­ed on the side. He sings Elon Musk’s prais­es and mus­es about par­ent­ing – “1. If you abide by car seat rec­om­men­da­tions, your kids will be cod­dled and impo­tent. 2. If you can’t afford a big­ger car, you’re lame” — to also shar­ing “absolute banger” quotes from lib­er­tar­i­an author Ayn Rand.

The com­pa­ny has also enlist­ed a slew of nuclear engi­neers, but the main buzz behind the com­pa­ny has been on founder Isa­iah Tay­lor, the 25-year-old high school dropout and self-made entre­pre­neur who says he’s the great grand­son of a physi­cist who worked on the Man­hat­tan Project devel­op­ing the first nuclear bomb.

One writer for Advi­sor­pe­dia, a media site focused on finan­cial advis­ers, described vis­it­ing Tay­lor in his cig­ar lounge at the company’s south­ern Cal­i­for­nia head­quar­ters.

...

But before he was tak­ing inter­views in a com­pa­ny cig­ar lounge, Tay­lor scraped his way up from much more mod­est begin­nings.

On social media a com­menter had derid­ed Tay­lor as a “trust fund baby.” In response Tay­lor post­ed a long descrip­tion of his life “muck­ing goat barns in the back­woods of Ken­tucky.”

...

When he was 12 he said his father made him a deal. “I will go out and buy you a Mac­Book Pro today, if you shake hands that I don’t have to pay for your col­lege.”

The two shook on it and Tay­lor got his com­put­er, writ­ing that while he imag­ined his father thought the com­put­er would help him get a gig to pay for col­lege, Tay­lor instead bypassed col­lege.

“What he didn’t expect is that by the time I was 16 I would be mak­ing six fig­ures, lead­ing me to drop out of high school and skip col­lege alto­geth­er.”

Tay­lor par­layed that into the Ida­ho-based auto repair com­pa­ny found­ed with Mock that then led them to Valar Atom­ics.
...

The con­cerns over Valar Atom­ic­s’s lead­er­ship aren’t lim­it­ed to their lack of expe­ri­ence. There’s also the lack of any reac­tor designs that have been sub­mit­ted to the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (NRC) cou­ple with the com­pa­ny’s exag­ger­at­ed safe­ty claims that even include the claim that the spent fuel is so safe you can safe­ly hold it in your hands and just receive a minor dose of radi­a­tion. It sure would be nice if these were claims that could be inde­pen­dent­ly val­i­dat­ed. But Valar isn’t just refus­ing to sub­mit designs to the NRC. It’s also joined in a law­suit and the NRC on the charges that the agency is ‘hold­ing back inno­va­tion’. A law­suit whose plain­tiffs include oth­er com­pa­nies and the states of Texas, Ari­zona, Flori­da and Utah. This push to pro­mote look unreg­u­lat­ed new nuclear tech­nolo­gies has seri­ous polit­i­cal pow­er behind it:

...
Valar Atom­ics has been crit­i­cized by nuclear experts for mak­ing exag­ger­at­ed safe­ty claims for its prod­ucts, even claim­ing a per­son could safe­ly hold spent nuclear fuel from their reac­tors in their hands while receiv­ing only a mild dose of radi­a­tion.

This at the same time they announced they were join­ing a law­suit with oth­er com­pa­nies and the states of Texas, Ari­zona, Flori­da and Utah in suing the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion, claim­ing the agency is hold­ing back inno­va­tion. It’s a maneu­ver that crit­ics say mis­in­ter­prets the law to claim a safe­ty exemp­tion the com­pa­ny has sim­ply not proven that they deserve. Valar Atom­ics also made news for secur­ing $21 mil­lion in ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing to build its first advanced test reac­tor.

...

Dr. Anna Erick­son is a nuclear engi­neer and pro­fes­sor at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. She’s skep­ti­cal of the company’s claims. For all the hype about its small mod­u­lar reac­tors, she notes it hasn’t made one and nei­ther has any­one else in the coun­try. But more impor­tant­ly, Valar hasn’t even sub­mit­ted a design for review with the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion — while oth­er star­tups have. Such a sub­mis­sion would show the pub­lic and reg­u­la­tors what its designs are about and how seri­ous the tech­nol­o­gy is.

“I don’t know how you can claim your design is so safe with­out doing engi­neer­ing. It’s not fairy dust — this is engi­neer­ing. We can’t take your word for it,” Erick­son said.

...

When Valar Atom­ics joined the law­suit against the NRC, it argued its tech­nol­o­gy was so safe that a per­son could hold the spent nuclear fuel from its reac­tor in their hand and get the same amount of radi­a­tion as one would expect from a hos­pi­tal CT scan.

This caught the atten­tion of a lot of peo­ple online, includ­ing Nick Touran, a nuclear engi­neer who since 2009 has worked with Ter­raPow­er, a com­pa­ny that is also work­ing on small mod­u­lar reac­tor design, and also start­ed the WhatIsNuclear.com site.

When Touran point­ed out that claim could not pos­si­bly be true, Tay­lor respond­ed by pro­vid­ing some cal­cu­la­tions and chastis­ing Touran, say­ing “Nick, a good engi­neer does not make claims about things he sim­ply has no knowl­edge of.”

When Touran then looked at the new data, he saw that hold­ing Valar’s spent fuel would result in a fatal dose in 90 sec­onds. Anoth­er nuclear engi­neer used a more advanced cal­cu­la­tion method to argue the fatal dose would actu­al­ly be as fast as 85 mil­lisec­onds.

Tay­lor post­ed a reply stat­ing: “I will fol­low up with a detailed write­up tonight or tomor­row, back to back today. Should be fun…”

Tay­lor also told Wired.com he was work­ing on a response, but more than two months lat­er no reply has been pro­vid­ed.
...

And as we can see, the state of Utah has­n’t just joined in the law­suit against the NRC. of Utah Gov­er­nor Spencer Cox who has already announced an agree­ment between the state and Valar to build a test reac­tor. Valar’s polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed ambi­tions are mov­ing ahead, with an announce­ment in May of 2025 that the com­pa­ny would build a small mod­u­lar test reac­tor in the state by 2026. It’s not the kind of sched­ule that leaves a lot of room for safe­ty reviews:

...
Valar Atom­ics’ sto­ry has impressed many, includ­ing Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. In May, Cox announced the state had come to an agree­ment with the com­pa­ny to explore allow­ing Valar to use the Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab in Emery Coun­ty to build a small mod­u­lar test reac­tor by 2026.

...

While the state has an agree­ment with Valar, Utah Office of Ener­gy Devel­op­ment Direc­tor Emy Lesof­s­ki stress­es that the agree­ment is a non-bind­ing mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing. The state has also reached a sim­i­lar agree­ment with anoth­er com­pa­ny, NuCube Ener­gy, out of Ida­ho. The state has not yet for­mal­ized any arrange­ment for Valar to access state facil­i­ties and resources like the Emery Lab.

The broad out­line is still part of an ongo­ing nego­ti­a­tion.

...

She said the com­pa­ny would still also have to abide by all fed­er­al licens­ing reg­u­la­tions for the project. And Utah is still eval­u­at­ing the com­pa­ny as a research part­ner.
...

And then there’s the pro­posed fuel for these arrays of small mod­u­lar reac­tors. For starters, the fuel, tiny ura­ni­um ker­nels sur­round­ed by car­bon, ceram­ic and graphite, is so expen­sive the cost alone arguably breaks any kind of busi­ness mod­el. But that’s on top the fact that this fuel could be used for all sorts of nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es includ­ing build­ing a dirty bomb. This is a good time to recall how the next-gen­er­a­tion small nuclear reac­tors backed by Bill Gates’s nuclear start­up also works with Ura­ni­um fuel that is enriched enough to poten­tial­ly make a viable nuclear weapon. Secu­ri­ty night­mares are appar­ent­ly a fea­ture of this next gen­er­a­tion of nuclear tech­nol­o­gy. And each one of these mod­u­lar reac­tors Valar is plan­ning will have to be secured from poten­tial ter­ror­ists and all sorts of oth­er bad actors. What are the odds a com­pa­ny that won’t even sub­mit their designs for NRC review is going to both­er with prop­er secu­ri­ty:

...
Valar Atom­ics’ mis­sion state­ment calls for the mass pro­duc­tion of nuclear pow­er gen­er­a­tors.

“One stan­dard­ized design built thou­sands of times, with a busi­ness mod­el engi­neered for scale,” the state­ment reads. “Our approach will deliv­er abun­dant clean ener­gy to pow­er humanity’s future.”

...

Valar’s web­site and its law­suit against the NRC argues that the intent of the 1954 Atom­ic Ener­gy Act was to exempt cer­tain small reac­tors from reg­u­la­tion because they did not present the same health and safe­ty risks as larg­er, more tra­di­tion­al nuclear reac­tors.

But the com­pa­ny is not propos­ing build­ing just one small reac­tor, it is propos­ing build­ing hun­dreds of the small reac­tors in a sin­gle area.

Touran said this “nuclear farm” idea real­ly over­states its cost and safe­ty ben­e­fits.

It would still present a major safe­ty and secu­ri­ty risk group­ing so many reac­tors togeth­er and would need vig­i­lant mon­i­tor­ing, accord­ing to Touran. Erick­son, at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, agrees, say­ing secu­ri­ty would have to make sure “nobody is able to remove the fuel for nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es” like a dirty bomb.

But the cost of secu­ri­ty would be noth­ing com­pared to the cost of sim­ply run­ning a nuclear farm, Touran said.

“You can do main­te­nance of one con­trol rod or move one con­trol rod” in a tra­di­tion­al reac­tor, he said, or “you have to move and main­tain a thou­sand con­trol rods in those 1,000 (small) reac­tors for the same pow­er.”

“Even though the parts them­selves may be small­er and cheap­er, there are a thou­sand of them and you have to pay a thou­sand peo­ple to go in there and do main­te­nance on that pump, or check that wire or move that con­trol rod,” Touran said. “That just real­ly kills the con­cept right there.”

Then there’s the fuel.

Valar is propos­ing the use of Tri-Struc­tur­al ISOtrop­ic fuel, or TRISO fuel, that are like “tiny ura­ni­um ker­nels” sur­round­ed by lay­ers of car­bon, ceram­ic and graphite, Touran said. The fuel is very robust, safe and can reach high tem­per­a­tures and avoid melt­ing like oth­er fuels. But it’s incred­i­bly expen­sive.

“Peo­ple are just say­ing, ‘we’re going to build (reac­tors) in a fac­to­ry, so that would be cheap.’ But just the fuel cost alone pre­vents that from even mak­ing sense at all,” Touran said.
...

And, of course, it’s going to be the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and the cor­rupt­ed far right Supreme Court that ulti­mate­ly decides on how to han­dle this nuclear safe­ty clusterfu#ck of a sit­u­a­tion. A cor­rupt Trump admin­is­tra­tion already in bed with the same Theo­Bros polit­i­cal net­work back­ing Valar and a Supreme Court that hand­ed fed­er­al reg­u­la­to­ry deci­sion-mak­ing over to the courts, end­ing decades of an expert-based approach to fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions. In oth­er words, it’s going to be either Trump or the cor­rupt Supreme Court that makes the final deci­sions:

...
Arden Row­ell is a pro­fes­sor of law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Urbana-Cham­paign. She focus­es on envi­ron­men­tal law and is part of a team work­ing on a research grant from the NRC to help it safe­ly and effec­tive­ly update its reg­u­la­tions for new and emerg­ing nuclear tech­nolo­gies.

She said when the NRC was cre­at­ed, it was struc­tured as an inde­pen­dent agency because Con­gress didn’t want it hijacked by com­pa­nies that might take short­cuts on safe­ty.

...

She agrees the need is there for nuclear to get a reg­u­la­to­ry update. But the claim that the NRC is sit­ting on its hands and sti­fling inno­va­tion is not true, or help­ful, she said.

“All three branch­es of gov­ern­ment have been shift­ing the land under the feet of the NRC and so they need to do a six-foot­ed dance, a very com­pli­cat­ed dance,” while also try­ing to update licens­ing reg­u­la­tions for advanced nuclear pow­er, she said.

The Trump White House has fired off a bar­rage of exec­u­tive orders urg­ing nuclear be ramped up, while at the same time issu­ing one demand­ing that the NRC under­take work­force reduc­tions. On June 13, Trump also fired one of the com­mis­sion­ers of the NRC in a move that shocked anti- and pro-nuclear groups alike.

Con­gress just last year also passed the ADVANCE Act ask­ing the NRC to stream­line its per­mit­ting process­es. The courts are also now tak­ing swings at the NRC, not just from law­suits like the one Valar and Utah joined, but also because of the U.S. Supreme Court strik­ing down the Chevron doc­trine in a 2024 deci­sion. Pre­vi­ous­ly fed­er­al agen­cies had lat­i­tude to craft reg­u­la­tions about aspects of laws that Con­gress didn’t specif­i­cal­ly address in leg­is­la­tion.

Now Row­ell says the courts will have a strong say in inter­pret­ing fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions, includ­ing about nuclear licens­ing for tech­nol­o­gy that is still years away from prov­ing itself.

“(The NRC) has to choose the best inter­pre­ta­tion that a court would choose in sev­er­al years, when it’s nev­er seen any court inter­pret that lan­guage before,” she said.

Valar Atom­ics seems hope­ful that Trump’s lead­er­ship will help it bypass NRC reg­u­la­tions. But the com­pa­ny would still face chal­lenges even if it did. Valar’s top nuclear engi­neers and sci­en­tists were recruit­ed from a com­pa­ny called Ultra Safe Nuclear that went bank­rupt last year and sold its intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty to anoth­er com­pa­ny called Nano Nuclear to help pay off its debts. While most nuclear com­pa­nies oper­ate off patents that are very old and not pro­pri­etary, the com­pa­ny could still poten­tial­ly face lit­i­ga­tion over use of trade secrets from Nano.
...

As we can see, Valar Atom­ics has just about every advan­tage is could desire when it comes to win­ning the next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear ener­gy race. At least for the time being while the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is still in charge of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. This is Valar Atom­ic­s’s moment.

Valar Atomics’s TheoBros ‘Juice’

And we’ll see in fol­low­ing pair of arti­cles, despite all of the con­cerns raised by experts about the safe­ty and eco­nom­ic via­bil­i­ty of Valar Atom­ic­s’s tech­nol­o­gy, the com­pa­ny received more than just a mas­sive $130 mil­lion cash infu­sion back in Novem­ber 2025, includ­ing invest­ments from Anduril Indus­tries founder Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar. It also gained Doug Philip­pone, the for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, as a board mem­ber. Peter Thiel’s Palan­tir is clear­ly on board. As the Nuclear Newswire arti­cle from Novem­ber 2025 notes, Valar was chose as one of the com­pa­nies to par­tic­i­pate in the DOE’s Fuel Line Pilot Pro­gram back in Sep­tem­ber 2025, with the DOE goal of hav­ing these next-gen­er­a­tion reac­tors enter oper­a­tion by July 4, 2026. The com­pa­ny is build­ing the reac­tor at the Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab, a facil­i­ty owned by the state of Utah, but that’s note the only reac­tor the com­pa­ny is build­ing. The com­pa­ny is also build­ing a reac­tor in the Philip­pines under a sub­sidiary, the Valar Atom­ics Research Insti­tute, appar­ent­ly in case the nuclear reg­u­la­tions it faces in the US prove to be too bur­den­some:

Nuclear Newswire

New financ­ing round ben­e­fits Valar

Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 3:00PM
Nuclear News

Hawthorne, Calif.–based reac­tor start-up Valar Atom­ics recent­ly announced that it has raised $130 mil­lion in its Series A fund­ing round, led by ven­ture cap­i­tal groups Snow­point, Day One, and Dream.

...

The com­pa­ny is pur­su­ing two major projects to deploy its flag­ship reac­tor. The first, dubbed Ward One, is slat­ed to be built in the Philip­pines under the direc­tion of the Valar Atom­ics Research Insti­tute, a sub­sidiary of Valar incor­po­rat­ed in the coun­try.

Valar chose to pur­sue deploy­ment in the Philip­pines in part to avoid U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry bur­dens. To that end, the com­pa­ny is also involved in the State of Texas et al. v. U.S. Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion, a law­suit that chal­lenges the NRC’s abil­i­ty to license SMRs and microre­ac­tors.

Valar is also pur­su­ing a domes­tic project in Utah through the Depart­ment of Energy’s Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram. The com­pa­ny broke ground in Sep­tem­ber at Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab on its U.S. Ward 250 site.

Also in Sep­tem­ber, Valar was select­ed along­side four oth­er com­pa­nies for the DOE’s Fuel Line Pilot Pro­gram. Under this pro­gram, Valar plans to “sup­port TRISO fuel fab­ri­ca­tion for the Ward 250 reac­tor deploy­ment and poten­tial­ly oth­er high-tem­per­a­ture gas reac­tors.”

The time­line: Of the 10 com­pa­nies select­ed for the Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram, Valar is one of only three that has bro­ken ground on its asso­ci­at­ed project. First out of the gate was Aalo Atom­ics in August, which start­ed con­struc­tion at Ida­ho Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Valar came next and was fol­lowed by Oklo short­ly after, which also broke ground at INL.

The DOE has set a goal of July 4, 2026, for reac­tors in the pro­gram to enter oper­a­tion. In an inter­view with Bloomberg TV, Valar founder and CEO Isa­iah Tay­lor affirmed that the com­pa­ny is still on track to meet that goal.

...

———–

“New financ­ing round ben­e­fits Valar”; Nuclear Newswire; 11/13/2025

“The com­pa­ny is pur­su­ing two major projects to deploy its flag­ship reac­tor. The first, dubbed Ward One, is slat­ed to be built in the Philip­pines under the direc­tion of the Valar Atom­ics Research Insti­tute, a sub­sidiary of Valar incor­po­rat­ed in the coun­try.”

With $130 mil­lion in new fund­ing, Valar Atom­ics is mov­ing ahead with its plans, and not just in the US. The com­pa­ny is build­ing a reac­tor in the Philip­pines too, in part to avoid US ‘reg­u­la­to­ry bur­dens’, which pre­sum­ably means the nuclear reg­u­la­tions in the Philip­pines are a lot less strin­gent than in the US. And at the same time the com­pa­ny is pur­su­ing its law­suit against the NRC, it broke ground in Sep­tem­ber 2025 on its Ward 250 site at Utah state’s San Rafael Ener­gy Lab. Valar’s rela­tion­ship with Utah’s Gov­er­nor Cox is already pay­ing div­i­dends:

...
Valar chose to pur­sue deploy­ment in the Philip­pines in part to avoid U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry bur­dens. To that end, the com­pa­ny is also involved in the State of Texas et al. v. U.S. Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion, a law­suit that chal­lenges the NRC’s abil­i­ty to license SMRs and microre­ac­tors.

Valar is also pur­su­ing a domes­tic project in Utah through the Depart­ment of Energy’s Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram. The com­pa­ny broke ground in Sep­tem­ber at Utah San Rafael Ener­gy Lab on its U.S. Ward 250 site.
...

But Valar’s gov­ern­ment sup­port isn’t lim­it­ed to the state of Utah. In Sep­tem­ber, it was was one of the com­pa­nies select­ed for the Depart­ment of Ener­gy Fuel Line Pilot Pro­gram. The shock­ing­ly ambi­tion pro­gram intends on get­ting next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear reac­tors up and run­ning by July 4, 20226. Lit­er­al­ly a mat­ter of months, not years. Valar’s desires to fast-track nuclear ener­gy devel­op­ment has the sup­port of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s Depart­ment of Ener­gy:

...
Also in Sep­tem­ber, Valar was select­ed along­side four oth­er com­pa­nies for the DOE’s Fuel Line Pilot Pro­gram. Under this pro­gram, Valar plans to “sup­port TRISO fuel fab­ri­ca­tion for the Ward 250 reac­tor deploy­ment and poten­tial­ly oth­er high-tem­per­a­ture gas reac­tors.”

The time­line: Of the 10 com­pa­nies select­ed for the Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram, Valar is one of only three that has bro­ken ground on its asso­ci­at­ed project. First out of the gate was Aalo Atom­ics in August, which start­ed con­struc­tion at Ida­ho Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Valar came next and was fol­lowed by Oklo short­ly after, which also broke ground at INL.

The DOE has set a goal of July 4, 2026, for reac­tors in the pro­gram to enter oper­a­tion. In an inter­view with Bloomberg TV, Valar founder and CEO Isa­iah Tay­lor affirmed that the com­pa­ny is still on track to meet that goal.
...

And as we can see in the fol­low­ing CNBC piece from Novem­ber 2025, that $130 mil­lion invest­ment hap­pened to come from fig­ures like Anduril’s Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar, with for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, Doug Philip­pone, join­ing the com­pa­ny’s board of direc­tors. The com­pa­ny may have been found­ed by a 20-some­thing ‘Gun­do­Bro’ acolyte of Doug Wil­son, but it’s even more in the ‘Theo­Bro’ orbit after these invest­ments. And a lot clos­er to com­mer­cial suc­cess:

CNBC

Nuclear start­up that’s suing NRC rais­es $130 mil­lion with back­ing from Anduril’s Palmer Luck­ey and senior Palan­tir exec­u­tive

Pub­lished Mon, Nov 10 2025 11:33 AM EST
Updat­ed Mon, Nov 10 2025 11:41 AM EST
Spencer Kim­ball

Key Points

* Valar Atom­ics raised $130 mil­lion with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Anduril Indus­tries founder Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar.
* Valar is devel­op­ing reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy that uses heli­um as a coolant and oper­ates at high­er tem­per­a­tures than tra­di­tion­al plants.
* Valar is suing the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion over its licens­ing process for small reac­tor designs.

Advanced nuclear reac­tor devel­op­er Valar Atom­ics raised $130 mil­lion in its lat­est fund­ing round with back­ing from Anduril Indus­tries founder Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar, the start­up said Mon­day.

The fundrais­ing was led by ven­ture cap­i­tal firms Snow­point Ven­tures, Day One Ven­tures and Dream Ven­tures. Lock­heed Mar­tin board mem­ber and for­mer AT&T exec­u­tive John Dono­van also par­tic­i­pat­ed. Valar’s total fundrais­ing now totals more than $150 mil­lion, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

Doug Philip­pone, co-founder of Snow­point and for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, will also join Valar’s board of direc­tors.

...

Valar is devel­op­ing reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy that would use heli­um as a coolant and oper­ate at much high­er tem­per­a­tures than tra­di­tion­al plants, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny. Its busi­ness plan calls for the deploy­ment of hun­dreds of small reac­tors at a sin­gle site.

...

————

“Nuclear start­up that’s suing NRC rais­es $130 mil­lion with back­ing from Anduril’s Palmer Luck­ey and senior Palan­tir exec­u­tive”; CNBC; 11/10/2025

“Doug Philip­pone, co-founder of Snow­point and for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, will also join Valar’s board of direc­tors.”

Oh look at that, the new round of $130 mil­lion in fund­ing for Valar also came with the for­mer head of glob­al defense at Palan­tir, Doug Philip­pone, join­ing the board. And along with Philip­pone, back­ers include Palmer Luck­ey, the founder of mil­i­tary AI drone man­u­fac­tur­er Anduril Indus­tries, and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar. This is a good time to recall how Anduril and Palan­tir formed a coali­tion of AI-defense man­u­fac­tur­ers that were plan­ning on mak­ing joint bids for Pen­ta­gon con­tracts. As we’re going to see, Valar Atom­ics is very much in the run­ning for defense con­tracts. Already:

...
Advanced nuclear reac­tor devel­op­er Valar Atom­ics raised $130 mil­lion in its lat­est fund­ing round with back­ing from Anduril Indus­tries founder Palmer Luck­ey and Palan­tir Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Shyam Sankar, the start­up said Mon­day.
...

And then we get to a detail that could unfor­tu­nate­ly become much more rel­e­vant in the future should this tech­nol­o­gy not be as safe or reli­able as we’re being told: The heli­um-cooled reac­tors Valar is build­ing also hap­pen to run at much high­er tem­per­a­tures than tra­di­tion­al plants. And heli­um does have major advan­tages over the water tra­di­tion­al­ly used which does indeed allow for the safe run­ning of reac­tors at high­er tem­per­a­tures. But that’s assum­ing the tech­nol­o­gy is work­ing as adver­tised, some­thing that would be a lot eas­i­er to believe were it not for the shock­ing­ly fast planned pace of devel­op­ment:

...
Valar is devel­op­ing reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy that would use heli­um as a coolant and oper­ate at much high­er tem­per­a­tures than tra­di­tion­al plants, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny. Its busi­ness plan calls for the deploy­ment of hun­dreds of small reac­tors at a sin­gle site.
...

We don’t know if Valar is going to win the race to build the next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear reac­tor, but there’s no deny­ing it has the mon­ey and, more impor­tant­ly, deep polit­i­cal and busi­ness con­nec­tions that will be nec­es­sary to win a race like this.

Next Generation Nuclear Power is a Trump Administration Priority. Nuclear Safety and Security, Not So Much

Next, we are going to take a look at an excerpt from an NPR piece pub­lished back in Jan­u­ary 2026 about some of the extra steps the Trump admin­is­tra­tion took to ensure at least some of the 10 com­pa­nies select­ed for the DOE pilot pro­gram reach the goal of an oper­a­tional reac­tor by July 4, 2026. Steps that includ­ed first extend­ing the DOE’s rules to include pri­vate sec­tor research reac­tors par­tic­i­pat­ing with the DOE, tak­ing the reg­u­la­tion out of the NRC’s Purview. Then, the DOE dra­mat­ic scaled back of the safe­ty, secu­ri­ty, and envi­ron­men­tal expo­sure rules.

The work­ers at these com­pa­nies devel­op­ing next-gen­er­a­tion nuclear reac­tors can now work longer shifts with high­er radi­a­tion lev­els. Strict pro­hi­bi­tions on the dump­ing of radioac­tive sub­stances into sew­ers and ground­wa­ter are now just actions that “should be avoid­ed.” A require­ment for sep­a­rate spe­cial­ists for the dif­fer­ent safe­ty sys­tems has been drop, along with the con­cept known as “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA), which requires nuclear reac­tor oper­a­tors to keep lev­els of radi­a­tion expo­sure below the legal lim­it when­ev­er they can. Impli­ca­tions for the removal of ALARA include new reac­tors poten­tial­ly being con­struct­ed with less con­crete shield­ing and work­ers work­ing longer shifts trans­lat­ing to high­er radi­a­tion dos­es.

And if the rules haven’t been gut­ted enough to sat­is­fy the com­pa­nies, DOE concierge teams made up of “rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Sec­re­tary’s office, the Office of the Gen­er­al Coun­sel, the Office of Nuclear Ener­gy” that report direct­ly to the sec­re­tary of ener­gy have been made avail­able to each com­pa­ny. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion is hell­bent on get­ting the next gen­er­a­tion nuclear pow­er sec­tor kick-start­ed as soon as pos­si­ble, it appears, and Valar Atom­ics is clear­ly a MAGA favorite, espe­cial­ly now with it’s deep­en­ing Palan­tir ties, mean­ing we can prob­a­bly add nuclear ener­gy to the list of tech sec­tors run by Theo­Bros fas­cists.

That’s all part of why the sto­ry of Valar Atom­ics is so illus­tra­tive of the eco­nom­ic-cap­ture com­po­nent to the Theo­Bros move­ment. It’s a move­ment that already has many of the biggest tech investors on the plan­et on board, using their immense eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal clout to ensure the own­ers of these future sec­tors of the econ­o­my — like mod­u­lar nuclear pow­er — are ide­o­log­i­cal­ly aligned with their fas­cist agen­da. And with the Theo­Bros’ deep ties to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion — which has lead­ing Theo­Bros JD Vance as the vice pres­i­dent — it’s hard to see why we should­n’t expect the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal clout of this move­ment to remain on the ascen­dance as a kind of post-Trump next gen­er­a­tion of the MAGA move­ment:

Nation­al Pub­lic Radio

Heard on Morn­ing Edi­tion

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has secret­ly rewrit­ten nuclear safe­ty rules

Geoff Brum­fiel
Updat­ed Jan­u­ary 28, 2026 2:03 PM ET

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has over­hauled a set of nuclear safe­ty direc­tives and shared them with the com­pa­nies it is charged with reg­u­lat­ing, with­out mak­ing the new rules avail­able to the pub­lic, accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained exclu­sive­ly by NPR.

The sweep­ing changes were made to accel­er­ate devel­op­ment of a new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear reac­tor designs. They occurred over the fall and win­ter at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy, which is cur­rent­ly over­see­ing a pro­gram to build at least three new exper­i­men­tal com­mer­cial nuclear reac­tors by July 4 of this year.

The changes are to depart­men­tal orders, which dic­tate require­ments for almost every aspect of the reac­tors’ oper­a­tions — includ­ing safe­ty sys­tems, envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, site secu­ri­ty and acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tions.

NPR obtained copies of over a dozen of the new orders, none of which is pub­licly avail­able. The orders slash hun­dreds of pages of require­ments for secu­ri­ty at the reac­tors. They also loosen pro­tec­tions for ground­wa­ter and the envi­ron­ment and elim­i­nate at least one key safe­ty role. The new orders cut back on require­ments for keep­ing records, and they raise the amount of radi­a­tion a work­er can be exposed to before an offi­cial acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tion is trig­gered.

Over 750 pages were cut from the ear­li­er ver­sions of the same orders, accord­ing to NPR’s analy­sis, leav­ing only about one-third of the num­ber of pages in the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments.

The new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear reac­tor designs, known as small mod­u­lar reac­tors, are being backed by bil­lions in pri­vate equi­ty, ven­ture cap­i­tal and pub­lic invest­ments. Back­ers of the reac­tors, includ­ing tech giants Ama­zon, Google and Meta, have said they want the reac­tors to one day sup­ply cheap, reli­able pow­er for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. (Ama­zon and Google are finan­cial sup­port­ers of NPR.)

...

“I would argue that the Depart­ment of Ener­gy relax­ing its nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty stan­dards in secret is not the best way to engen­der the kind of pub­lic trust that’s going to be need­ed for nuclear to suc­ceed more broad­ly,” said Christo­pher Han­son, who chaired the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion from 2021 to 2025, when he was fired by Pres­i­dent Trump.

“They’re tak­ing a wreck­ing ball to the sys­tem of nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty reg­u­la­tion over­sight that has kept the U.S. from hav­ing anoth­er Three Mile Island acci­dent,” said Edwin Lyman, direc­tor of nuclear pow­er safe­ty at the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists. “I am absolute­ly wor­ried about the safe­ty of these reac­tors.”

In a lengthy state­ment to NPR, the Depart­ment of Ener­gy defend­ed the changes. “The reduc­tion of unnec­es­sary reg­u­la­tions will increase inno­va­tion in the indus­try with­out jeop­ar­diz­ing safe­ty,” it said.

It said that ear­ly copies of the new rules were shared with the com­pa­nies as part of an “iter­a­tive effort” to devel­op a reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work that would “expe­dite our review process while main­tain­ing safe­ty and secu­ri­ty stan­dards.”

(The orders seen by NPR were not marked as drafts and had the word “Approved” clear­ly dis­played on their cov­er pages.)

...

A new nuclear path

The ori­gins of the changes can be traced to the Oval Office. In May of last year, Trump sat behind the Res­olute Desk and signed a series of exec­u­tive orders on nuclear ener­gy.

...

Among the exec­u­tive orders Trump signed that day was one that called for the cre­ation of a new pro­gram at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy to build exper­i­men­tal reac­tors. The doc­u­ment Trump signed explic­it­ly stat­ed that “The Sec­re­tary shall approve at least three reac­tors pur­suant to this pilot pro­gram with the goal of achiev­ing [nuclear] crit­i­cal­i­ty in each of the three reac­tors by July 4, 2026.”

In oth­er words, the Depart­ment of Ener­gy had just over a year to review, approve and over­see the con­struc­tion of mul­ti­ple, untest­ed nuclear reac­tors.

...

“To say that it’s aggres­sive is a pret­ty big under­state­ment,” said Kathryn Huff, a pro­fes­sor of plas­ma and nuclear engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­paign who served as head of the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Ener­gy from 2022 to 2024. Research reac­tors typ­i­cal­ly take at least two years to build from the point when con­struc­tion begins, Huff said. Few — if any — have been built on the timescale laid out in the exec­u­tive order.

Offi­cials at the Ener­gy Depart­ment knew the clock was tick­ing. In June, they met with the heads of sev­er­al com­pa­nies at the Nuclear Ener­gy Insti­tute, the nuclear indus­try’s main lob­by group in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. They briefed the gath­er­ing of CEOs, lawyers and nuclear engi­neers about the depart­men­t’s new “Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram.”

“One thing I do want to stress, this is not a fund­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty,” Michael Goff, the DOE’s prin­ci­pal deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary for nuclear ener­gy, said dur­ing the meet­ing, which was record­ed. Rather than offer­ing mon­ey, the Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram was promis­ing some­thing else that the com­pa­nies had long want­ed — a path­way to quick­ly get new test reac­tor designs through reg­u­la­to­ry approval.

“Our job is to make sure that the gov­ern­ment is no longer a bar­ri­er,” said Seth Cohen, a lawyer at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy respon­si­ble for imple­ment­ing Trump’s exec­u­tive orders.

The DOE was unique­ly posi­tioned to offer a speedy path­way to approval. The nation’s com­mer­cial nuclear reac­tors are typ­i­cal­ly under the reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight of the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion. Han­son says the NRC is inde­pen­dent and known for its rig­or and pub­lic process.

But since the NRC began its work in 1975, the Ener­gy Depart­ment has retained the abil­i­ty to reg­u­late its own reac­tors, which have his­tor­i­cal­ly been used for research and nuclear weapons-relat­ed activ­i­ties.

The rules gov­ern­ing DOE reac­tors are a mix of fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions and direc­tives known as “orders.” Changes to fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions require pub­lic notice and com­ment, but DOE’s orders can be legal­ly changed inter­nal­ly with no pub­lic com­ment peri­od. The orders have his­tor­i­cal­ly been made pub­lic via a DOE data­base.

Until now, the DOE’s rules have typ­i­cal­ly applied to just a hand­ful of reac­tors locat­ed on gov­ern­ment prop­er­ty. The Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram expands that reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty to all reac­tors built as part of the pro­gram. Offi­cials explained to the crowd in the June meet­ing that this includes DOE-con­tract­ed reac­tors built out­side of the depart­men­t’s nation­al lab­o­ra­to­ries.

And while broad­en­ing its over­sight, offi­cials said, safe­ty per­son­nel locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly at Ida­ho Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry would also rewrite the DOE’s orders for these reac­tors.

...

Rules rewrit­ten

The doc­u­ments reviewed by NPR show just how exten­sive the stream­lin­ing effort has been.

The new orders strip out some guid­ing prin­ci­ples of nuclear safe­ty, notably a con­cept known as “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA), which requires nuclear reac­tor oper­a­tors to keep lev­els of radi­a­tion expo­sure below the legal lim­it when­ev­er they can. The ALARA stan­dard has been in use for decades at both the Depart­ment of Ener­gy and the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion.

Remov­ing the stan­dard means that new reac­tors could be con­struct­ed with less con­crete shield­ing, and work­ers could work longer shifts, poten­tial­ly receiv­ing high­er dos­es of radi­a­tion, accord­ing to Tison Camp­bell, a part­ner at K&L Gates who pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a lawyer at the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion.

“So the result could be low­er con­struc­tion costs, saved employ­ment costs and things like that,” Camp­bell said. “That could reduce the over­all finan­cial bur­den of con­struct­ing and oper­at­ing a nuclear pow­er­plant.”

Huff said that many peo­ple in the indus­try think the con­cept of ALARA has become over­ly oner­ous, and she agrees it’s worth recon­sid­er­ing the stan­dard.

“The argu­ment against ALARA is that in a lot of cas­es it’s been mis­man­aged and used over­ly strin­gent­ly in ways that go beyond the ‘rea­son­able,’ ” Huff said.

But not every­one wants to rethink ALARA.

“It cer­tain­ly cost the indus­try mon­ey to low­er dos­es [of radi­a­tion],” said Emi­ly Caf­frey, a health physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma at Birm­ing­ham. “But I don’t think it’s been incred­i­bly prob­lem­at­ic.”

In a memo issued ear­li­er this month, Sec­re­tary of Ener­gy Chris Wright gave approval to end ALARA, in part to “reduce the eco­nom­ic and oper­a­tional bur­den on nuclear ener­gy while align­ing with avail­able sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence.” The exis­tence of the memo was first report­ed by E&E News.

How­ev­er, the orders seen by NPR sug­gest the depart­ment had already begun remov­ing the ALARA require­ment from the new rules as ear­ly as August, months before the sec­re­tary’s approval was giv­en.

“The Depart­ment of Ener­gy is, and always will be, com­mit­ted to the high­est stan­dards of safe­ty for work­ers and com­mu­ni­ties,” the agency said in its state­ment. Although ALARA had been removed from the orders “the ALARA stan­dards have not changed,” it said.

ALARA is not the only safe­ty prin­ci­ple that has been stripped from the orders. Gone too is the require­ment to have an engi­neer des­ig­nat­ed to each of a reac­tor’s crit­i­cal safe­ty sys­tems. Known as a cog­nizant sys­tem engi­neer, the idea is to task one per­son to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for under­stand­ing each part of a reac­tor that could lead to a severe acci­dent if it failed. The depart­ment told NPR that the require­ment for such an engi­neer was an “unnec­es­sary bur­den,” and that it had oth­er process­es in place to ensure safe­ty.

The new rules also remove a require­ment to use the “best avail­able tech­nol­o­gy” to pro­tect water sup­plies from the dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­i­al.

...

The revised orders leave out dozens of ref­er­ences to oth­er doc­u­ments and stan­dards, includ­ing the depart­men­t’s entire man­u­al for man­ag­ing radioac­tive waste. Some lines from the 59-page man­u­al have been inte­grat­ed into a new 25-page order on radioac­tive waste man­age­ment, but pages of detailed require­ments for waste pack­ag­ing and mon­i­tor­ing have been removed.

The Ener­gy Depart­ment said the changes to the nuclear waste order main­tained all nec­es­sary require­ments and were made to pro­vide nuclear waste rules in “a more stream­lined ‘user friend­ly’ for­mat.”

But per­haps nowhere are the cuts more obvi­ous than in the new order on safe­guards and secu­ri­ty. Sev­en secu­ri­ty direc­tives total­ing over 500 pages have been con­sol­i­dat­ed into a sin­gle, 23-page order.

Gone are detailed require­ments for firearms train­ing, emer­gency drills, offi­cer-involved shoot­ing pro­ce­dures and lim­its on how many hours secu­ri­ty force offi­cers can work in a day or week. Entire chap­ters spec­i­fy­ing how nuclear mate­r­i­al should be secured and what sorts of phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers should be built to pro­tect it have been reduced to bul­let points.

“Secu­ri­ty is an expense that the nuclear indus­try has long com­plained about,” Lyman said. Pay­ing for a guard force is cost­ly and many com­pa­nies would like to reduce the require­ments, he said. “They don’t know why they have to pay so much mon­ey to pro­tect against some­thing they think is nev­er going to hap­pen.”

Review­ing the new secu­ri­ty rules, Lyman said he felt the gen­er­al require­ments are allow­ing com­pa­nies “to write their own tick­et as far as secu­ri­ty goes.” He’s espe­cial­ly con­cerned because sev­er­al of the new reac­tor designs use high­er lev­els of enriched ura­ni­um in their cores, which could make them tar­gets of theft.

In its state­ment the Depart­ment of Ener­gy said that the changes “did not remove any require­ments sig­nif­i­cant to secu­ri­ty.” “This order only removed require­ments that were unnec­es­sary for secu­ri­ty and increased bur­den and costs,” it said.

Loos­en­ing pro­tec­tions for the envi­ron­ment and work­ers

NPR’s review of the new orders shows that, in cer­tain cas­es, they also appear to loosen rules about dis­charg­ing radioac­tive mate­r­i­al.

For exam­ple, the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of an order titled “Radi­a­tion Pro­tec­tion for the Pub­lic and the Envi­ron­ment” states that dis­charg­ing radioac­tiv­i­ty “from DOE activ­i­ties into non-fed­er­al­ly owned san­i­tary sew­ers are pro­hib­it­ed,” then pro­vides a lim­it­ed series of excep­tions.

The new stan­dard says only that radioac­tive dis­charges into san­i­tary sew­ers “should be avoid­ed.” Sim­i­lar lan­guage changes were made to soft­en restric­tions on ground­wa­ter dis­charges, and pro­tec­tions for the envi­ron­ment.

...

“Any­where they have changed ‘pro­hib­it­ed’ or ‘must’ to ‘should be’ or ‘can be’ — that is a loos­en­ing of reg­u­la­tion. That’s a big change in words, in mean­ing,” Caf­frey said.

The changes con­sti­tute “very clear­ly a loos­en­ing that I would have want­ed to see exposed to pub­lic dis­cus­sion,” Huff told NPR. She calls the relax­ing of envi­ron­men­tal rules “espe­cial­ly dis­ap­point­ing” because the Ida­ho Nation­al Lab, where sev­er­al of the reac­tors are due to be built, has been the site of eco­log­i­cal preser­va­tion activ­i­ties in the past. “I think some of those preser­va­tion activ­i­ties have had a great pos­i­tive impact on the ecosys­tem there,” she said.

In its state­ment, the Ener­gy Depart­ment said that the changes con­tin­ue to pro­tect the pub­lic and envi­ron­ment from “undue risks.” “DOE fol­lows applic­a­ble U.S. EPA require­ments in these areas,” it said.

There are signs that the Ener­gy Depart­ment is seek­ing to change safe­ty rules beyond the orders seen by NPR. Last week, the depart­ment pub­lished a plan to exclude some work­er safe­ty stan­dards in order to help the reac­tor pro­gram move more quick­ly. The pro­posed rule change would strip out some stan­dards for things like res­pi­ra­to­ry pro­tec­tion and weld­ing. Because the work­er safe­ty rules are part of the Code of Fed­er­al Reg­u­la­tions, the depart­ment was required by law to pub­lish the pro­posed changes. The agency said in its notice that the changes “present sig­nif­i­cant advan­tages that can enhance oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy and safe­ty for DOE con­trac­tors.”

Concierge ser­vice

The new orders are now being used by around 30 experts across DOE and around a dozen experts on loan from the NRC to con­duct design and safe­ty reviews of 11 reac­tor designs being built by 10 pri­vate com­pa­nies.

Each com­pa­ny also has access to a “Concierge Team” to “pro­vide assis­tance to the appli­cant to ensure expe­di­tious pro­cess­ing of its appli­ca­tion,” accord­ing to a memo also obtained by NPR, which has not been made pub­lic.

The team is made up of “rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Sec­re­tary’s office, the Office of the Gen­er­al Coun­sel, the Office of Nuclear Ener­gy” and each team mem­ber reports direct­ly to the sec­re­tary of ener­gy — rais­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that senior offi­cials could exert pres­sure on low­er-lev­el staff to speed safe­ty eval­u­a­tions of the new reac­tors.

...

Reac­tors by July

Ulti­mate­ly, experts who viewed the new rules had doubts about whether they real­ly would help the Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram reach its goal of build­ing three new reac­tors by July.

Han­son said he believes the numer­ous cuts to the new orders will not nec­es­sar­i­ly sim­pli­fy the review process. One of the ben­e­fits of hav­ing things explic­it­ly writ­ten down was that “con­trac­tors and oth­ers knew how to com­ply with the rules,” he said. “If you take that away, you might have more flex­i­bil­i­ty, maybe, but it’s also less clear how to do that.”

The orders also clear­ly laid out the steps need­ed to ensure com­pa­nies abid­ed by oth­er rel­e­vant laws, Camp­bell said. He wor­ries that the rewrites that loosen rules on things like radi­o­log­i­cal dis­charges could actu­al­ly lead com­pa­nies to vio­late oth­er envi­ron­men­tal and safe­ty laws. For exam­ple, radi­o­log­i­cal releas­es into pub­lic sew­ers might vio­late legal lim­its under the Clean Water Act.

Com­pa­nies may not read those under­ly­ing laws, “so I think you’re set­ting them up to vio­late statutes or reg­u­la­tions that are going to remain in place,” he said.

But above all, the fact that the rewrites were done with­out pub­lic knowl­edge could be the most dam­ag­ing, said Huff. In the past, pub­lic dis­trust has been a huge bar­ri­er to the devel­op­ment of nuclear pow­er, and trans­paren­cy is an impor­tant way to counter that mis­trust.

“In the best world, the pub­lic should expect as much open­ness from the gov­ern­ment as is pos­si­ble,” she said. “If it’s pos­si­ble to share with the com­pa­nies at this point, then there’s a real­ly impor­tant ques­tion as to why it’s not pub­lic.”

———–

“The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has secret­ly rewrit­ten nuclear safe­ty rules” by Geoff Brum­fiel; Nation­al Pub­lic Radio; 01/28/2026

“NPR obtained copies of over a dozen of the new orders, none of which is pub­licly avail­able. The orders slash hun­dreds of pages of require­ments for secu­ri­ty at the reac­tors. They also loosen pro­tec­tions for ground­wa­ter and the envi­ron­ment and elim­i­nate at least one key safe­ty role. The new orders cut back on require­ments for keep­ing records, and they raise the amount of radi­a­tion a work­er can be exposed to before an offi­cial acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tion is trig­gered.”

A mass gut­ting of envi­ron­ment and safe­ty stan­dards, done in secret over the fall and win­ter of 2025. Less pro­tec­tions, more radi­a­tion, and few­er records of what was done. Only the com­pa­nies involved in build­ing these next gen­er­a­tion reac­tors got to learn about the new stan­dards. Or lack of stan­dards. But it isn’t just the gut­ting of the stan­dards that is so alarm­ing. It’s the fact that it was done with the intent of facil­i­tat­ing the devel­op­ment of func­tion­ing reac­tors, capa­ble of reach­ing crit­i­cal­i­ty, by July 4, 2026, bare­ly a year after Pres­i­dent Trump signed the May 2025 exec­u­tive order cre­at­ing the new Depart­ment of Ener­gy (DOE) pro­gram. As experts warn, research reac­tors typ­i­cal­ly take at least 2 years to build. But it can be done in a year thanks, in part, to the gut­ting of all these stan­dards:

...
The sweep­ing changes were made to accel­er­ate devel­op­ment of a new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear reac­tor designs. They occurred over the fall and win­ter at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy, which is cur­rent­ly over­see­ing a pro­gram to build at least three new exper­i­men­tal com­mer­cial nuclear reac­tors by July 4 of this year.

...

The new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear reac­tor designs, known as small mod­u­lar reac­tors, are being backed by bil­lions in pri­vate equi­ty, ven­ture cap­i­tal and pub­lic invest­ments. Back­ers of the reac­tors, includ­ing tech giants Ama­zon, Google and Meta, have said they want the reac­tors to one day sup­ply cheap, reli­able pow­er for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. (Ama­zon and Google are finan­cial sup­port­ers of NPR.)

...

The ori­gins of the changes can be traced to the Oval Office. In May of last year, Trump sat behind the Res­olute Desk and signed a series of exec­u­tive orders on nuclear ener­gy.

...

Among the exec­u­tive orders Trump signed that day was one that called for the cre­ation of a new pro­gram at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy to build exper­i­men­tal reac­tors. The doc­u­ment Trump signed explic­it­ly stat­ed that “The Sec­re­tary shall approve at least three reac­tors pur­suant to this pilot pro­gram with the goal of achiev­ing [nuclear] crit­i­cal­i­ty in each of the three reac­tors by July 4, 2026.”

In oth­er words, the Depart­ment of Ener­gy had just over a year to review, approve and over­see the con­struc­tion of mul­ti­ple, untest­ed nuclear reac­tors.

...

“To say that it’s aggres­sive is a pret­ty big under­state­ment,” said Kathryn Huff, a pro­fes­sor of plas­ma and nuclear engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­paign who served as head of the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Ener­gy from 2022 to 2024. Research reac­tors typ­i­cal­ly take at least two years to build from the point when con­struc­tion begins, Huff said. Few — if any — have been built on the timescale laid out in the exec­u­tive order.

...

“I would argue that the Depart­ment of Ener­gy relax­ing its nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty stan­dards in secret is not the best way to engen­der the kind of pub­lic trust that’s going to be need­ed for nuclear to suc­ceed more broad­ly,” said Christo­pher Han­son, who chaired the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion from 2021 to 2025, when he was fired by Pres­i­dent Trump.

“They’re tak­ing a wreck­ing ball to the sys­tem of nuclear safe­ty and secu­ri­ty reg­u­la­tion over­sight that has kept the U.S. from hav­ing anoth­er Three Mile Island acci­dent,” said Edwin Lyman, direc­tor of nuclear pow­er safe­ty at the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists. “I am absolute­ly wor­ried about the safe­ty of these reac­tors.”
...

And as we can see, the fact that this is a DOE pro­gram, putting it out­side the purview of the NRC, is part of what allowed for the gut­ting of these stan­dards in the first place. For­tu­nate­ly, this also means these new­ly relaxed stan­dards should only apply to research reac­tors. But with the DOE also expand­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of research reac­tors to include pri­vate research, it’s hard to pre­dict just how many loose­ly reg­u­lat­ed nuclear reac­tors we should expect to emerge in com­ing years and where they might end up being locat­ed. Espe­cial­ly when so much of this agen­da is being kept out of the pub­lic eye:

...
The changes are to depart­men­tal orders, which dic­tate require­ments for almost every aspect of the reac­tors’ oper­a­tions — includ­ing safe­ty sys­tems, envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, site secu­ri­ty and acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tions.

...

Over 750 pages were cut from the ear­li­er ver­sions of the same orders, accord­ing to NPR’s analy­sis, leav­ing only about one-third of the num­ber of pages in the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments.

...

The DOE was unique­ly posi­tioned to offer a speedy path­way to approval. The nation’s com­mer­cial nuclear reac­tors are typ­i­cal­ly under the reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight of the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion. Han­son says the NRC is inde­pen­dent and known for its rig­or and pub­lic process.

But since the NRC began its work in 1975, the Ener­gy Depart­ment has retained the abil­i­ty to reg­u­late its own reac­tors, which have his­tor­i­cal­ly been used for research and nuclear weapons-relat­ed activ­i­ties.

The rules gov­ern­ing DOE reac­tors are a mix of fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions and direc­tives known as “orders.” Changes to fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions require pub­lic notice and com­ment, but DOE’s orders can be legal­ly changed inter­nal­ly with no pub­lic com­ment peri­od. The orders have his­tor­i­cal­ly been made pub­lic via a DOE data­base.

Until now, the DOE’s rules have typ­i­cal­ly applied to just a hand­ful of reac­tors locat­ed on gov­ern­ment prop­er­ty. The Reac­tor Pilot Pro­gram expands that reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty to all reac­tors built as part of the pro­gram. Offi­cials explained to the crowd in the June meet­ing that this includes DOE-con­tract­ed reac­tors built out­side of the depart­men­t’s nation­al lab­o­ra­to­ries.
...

And then there’s the fact that the new­ly rewrit­ten safe­ty stan­dards removed the “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA) guide­line for the release of radi­a­tion. Less con­crete shield­ing will be use along with longer shifts and, in turn, high­er dos­es or radi­a­tion for the work­ers. Well, and high­er dos­es of radi­a­tion for every­one liv­ing in the area and exposed to what­ev­er if allowed to leak out into the envi­ron­ment. Some­body is going to have to pay the price for cheap, fast next gen­er­a­tion ener­gy. Adding to the alarm over these moves is the fact that the ALARA rules were removed before the Ener­gy Sec­re­tary for­mal­ly approved the changes. And yet the DOE insists that there’s no ele­vat­ed risks because “the ALARA stan­dards have not changed.” In oth­er words, the stan­dards haven’t changed. It’s the expec­ta­tions that they’re met that changed:

...
And while broad­en­ing its over­sight, offi­cials said, safe­ty per­son­nel locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly at Ida­ho Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry would also rewrite the DOE’s orders for these reac­tors.

...

Rules rewrit­ten

The doc­u­ments reviewed by NPR show just how exten­sive the stream­lin­ing effort has been.

The new orders strip out some guid­ing prin­ci­ples of nuclear safe­ty, notably a con­cept known as “As Low As Rea­son­ably Achiev­able” (ALARA), which requires nuclear reac­tor oper­a­tors to keep lev­els of radi­a­tion expo­sure below the legal lim­it when­ev­er they can. The ALARA stan­dard has been in use for decades at both the Depart­ment of Ener­gy and the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion.

Remov­ing the stan­dard means that new reac­tors could be con­struct­ed with less con­crete shield­ing, and work­ers could work longer shifts, poten­tial­ly receiv­ing high­er dos­es of radi­a­tion, accord­ing to Tison Camp­bell, a part­ner at K&L Gates who pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a lawyer at the Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion.

“So the result could be low­er con­struc­tion costs, saved employ­ment costs and things like that,” Camp­bell said. “That could reduce the over­all finan­cial bur­den of con­struct­ing and oper­at­ing a nuclear pow­er­plant.”

Huff said that many peo­ple in the indus­try think the con­cept of ALARA has become over­ly oner­ous, and she agrees it’s worth recon­sid­er­ing the stan­dard.

“The argu­ment against ALARA is that in a lot of cas­es it’s been mis­man­aged and used over­ly strin­gent­ly in ways that go beyond the ‘rea­son­able,’ ” Huff said.

But not every­one wants to rethink ALARA.

“It cer­tain­ly cost the indus­try mon­ey to low­er dos­es [of radi­a­tion],” said Emi­ly Caf­frey, a health physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma at Birm­ing­ham. “But I don’t think it’s been incred­i­bly prob­lem­at­ic.”

...

How­ev­er, the orders seen by NPR sug­gest the depart­ment had already begun remov­ing the ALARA require­ment from the new rules as ear­ly as August, months before the sec­re­tary’s approval was giv­en.

“The Depart­ment of Ener­gy is, and always will be, com­mit­ted to the high­est stan­dards of safe­ty for work­ers and com­mu­ni­ties,” the agency said in its state­ment. Although ALARA had been removed from the orders “the ALARA stan­dards have not changed,” it said.
...

Oth­er gut­ted safe­ty stan­dards include the strip­ping of the “best avail­able tech­nol­o­gy” to pro­tect water sup­plies from the dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­i­al. In fact, the man­u­al for man­ag­ing radioac­tive waste has had detailed require­ments stripped out in the spir­it of “a more stream­lined ‘user friend­ly’ for­mat.” At the same time, radioac­tive dis­charge can now be dumped in non-fed­er­al­ly owned san­i­ty sew­ers. Sure, it “should be avoid­ed”, but it can hap­pen. Even the require­ment for spe­cial­ized engi­neers for the var­i­ous aspects of nuclear safe­ty. It’s going to be ‘safe­ty’ on the cheap. For progress, alleged­ly:

...
ALARA is not the only safe­ty prin­ci­ple that has been stripped from the orders. Gone too is the require­ment to have an engi­neer des­ig­nat­ed to each of a reac­tor’s crit­i­cal safe­ty sys­tems. Known as a cog­nizant sys­tem engi­neer, the idea is to task one per­son to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for under­stand­ing each part of a reac­tor that could lead to a severe acci­dent if it failed. The depart­ment told NPR that the require­ment for such an engi­neer was an “unnec­es­sary bur­den,” and that it had oth­er process­es in place to ensure safe­ty.

The new rules also remove a require­ment to use the “best avail­able tech­nol­o­gy” to pro­tect water sup­plies from the dis­charge of radioac­tive mate­r­i­al.

...

The revised orders leave out dozens of ref­er­ences to oth­er doc­u­ments and stan­dards, includ­ing the depart­men­t’s entire man­u­al for man­ag­ing radioac­tive waste. Some lines from the 59-page man­u­al have been inte­grat­ed into a new 25-page order on radioac­tive waste man­age­ment, but pages of detailed require­ments for waste pack­ag­ing and mon­i­tor­ing have been removed.

The Ener­gy Depart­ment said the changes to the nuclear waste order main­tained all nec­es­sary require­ments and were made to pro­vide nuclear waste rules in “a more stream­lined ‘user friend­ly’ for­mat.”

...

NPR’s review of the new orders shows that, in cer­tain cas­es, they also appear to loosen rules about dis­charg­ing radioac­tive mate­r­i­al.

For exam­ple, the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of an order titled “Radi­a­tion Pro­tec­tion for the Pub­lic and the Envi­ron­ment” states that dis­charg­ing radioac­tiv­i­ty “from DOE activ­i­ties into non-fed­er­al­ly owned san­i­tary sew­ers are pro­hib­it­ed,” then pro­vides a lim­it­ed series of excep­tions.

The new stan­dard says only that radioac­tive dis­charges into san­i­tary sew­ers “should be avoid­ed.” Sim­i­lar lan­guage changes were made to soft­en restric­tions on ground­wa­ter dis­charges, and pro­tec­tions for the envi­ron­ment.

...

“Any­where they have changed ‘pro­hib­it­ed’ or ‘must’ to ‘should be’ or ‘can be’ — that is a loos­en­ing of reg­u­la­tion. That’s a big change in words, in mean­ing,” Caf­frey said.
...

But the gut­ting of the radioac­tive waste dis­pos­al man­u­al was noth­ing com­pared to the safe­guards and secu­ri­ty guide­lines, which have been dis­tilled from 500 pages down to 23. Safe­guards and secu­ri­ty are more of an after­thought, which is espe­cial­ly dis­turb­ing giv­en how many of these next-gen­er­a­tion reac­tors rely on high­er-lev­els of enriched ura­ni­um than tra­di­tion­al reac­tors. Recall how the Natri­um reac­tor design backed by Bill Gates and War­ren Buf­fet uses 20% enriched Ura­ni­um, enough to build a dirty bomb and poten­tial­ly even high enough to be use­ful for cre­at­ing nuclear weapons. In oth­er words, the poten­tial envi­ron­men­tal fall­out to this cheap­en­ing of secu­ri­ty could include actu­al nuclear fall­out:

...
But per­haps nowhere are the cuts more obvi­ous than in the new order on safe­guards and secu­ri­ty. Sev­en secu­ri­ty direc­tives total­ing over 500 pages have been con­sol­i­dat­ed into a sin­gle, 23-page order.

Gone are detailed require­ments for firearms train­ing, emer­gency drills, offi­cer-involved shoot­ing pro­ce­dures and lim­its on how many hours secu­ri­ty force offi­cers can work in a day or week. Entire chap­ters spec­i­fy­ing how nuclear mate­r­i­al should be secured and what sorts of phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers should be built to pro­tect it have been reduced to bul­let points.

“Secu­ri­ty is an expense that the nuclear indus­try has long com­plained about,” Lyman said. Pay­ing for a guard force is cost­ly and many com­pa­nies would like to reduce the require­ments, he said. “They don’t know why they have to pay so much mon­ey to pro­tect against some­thing they think is nev­er going to hap­pen.”

Review­ing the new secu­ri­ty rules, Lyman said he felt the gen­er­al require­ments are allow­ing com­pa­nies “to write their own tick­et as far as secu­ri­ty goes.” He’s espe­cial­ly con­cerned because sev­er­al of the new reac­tor designs use high­er lev­els of enriched ura­ni­um in their cores, which could make them tar­gets of theft.
...

And if the active enthu­si­as­tic gut­ting of every­thing ‘stand­ing in the way’ of all this progress isn’t enough, the gov­ern­ment is pro­vid­ing “Concierge Teams” to each com­pa­ny that reports direct­ly to the sec­re­tary of ener­gy. It’s going to be any­thing goes:

...
Concierge ser­vice

The new orders are now being used by around 30 experts across DOE and around a dozen experts on loan from the NRC to con­duct design and safe­ty reviews of 11 reac­tor designs being built by 10 pri­vate com­pa­nies.

Each com­pa­ny also has access to a “Concierge Team” to “pro­vide assis­tance to the appli­cant to ensure expe­di­tious pro­cess­ing of its appli­ca­tion,” accord­ing to a memo also obtained by NPR, which has not been made pub­lic.

The team is made up of “rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Sec­re­tary’s office, the Office of the Gen­er­al Coun­sel, the Office of Nuclear Ener­gy” and each team mem­ber reports direct­ly to the sec­re­tary of ener­gy — rais­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that senior offi­cials could exert pres­sure on low­er-lev­el staff to speed safe­ty eval­u­a­tions of the new reac­tors.
...

How many requests for addi­tion­al rule changes did these com­pa­nies make? We’ll prob­a­bly nev­er know. Or, if we do find out, it will be long after the changes were done in secret.

Valar Atomics Achieve Criticality and Raises Another $1 Billion

As we saw, it was back in Novem­ber of 2025 that Valar Atom­ics received a $130 mil­lion invest­ment infu­sion, includ­ed major invest­ments from senior Palan­tir offi­cers. Flash for­ward to the fol­low­ing August 2026 TechCrunc and we’re now learn­ing about a new $1 bil­lion round of fundrais­ing, and an over­all val­u­a­tion of around $6 bil­lion for the com­pa­ny. The arti­cle also men­tions how the com­pa­ny demon­strat­ed the abil­i­ty of its Ward 250 reac­tor to pow­er an Nvidia Black­well sys­tem (a high-per­for­mance data cen­ter clus­ter) back in June, and announced a deal with Nvidia to devel­op a water­less 30MW AI fac­to­ry. In oth­er words, it would appear Valar Atom­ics is already lead­ing the race to be the future of pow­er­ing the AI data cen­ter econ­o­my of tomor­row:

Tech Crunch

Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire leads $1B round for nuclear start­up Valar Atom­ics

Julie Bort
Post­ed:
10:16 AM PDT · August 3, 2026

Valar Atom­ics con­firmed the whis­per­ings that it was rais­ing a giant round led by Sequoia on Mon­day. The startup’s founder and CEO Isa­iah Tay­lor announced that the com­pa­ny has raised $1 bil­lion in equi­ty, with Sequoia part­ner Shaun Maguire join­ing its board, and that it also secured a $200 mil­lion line of cred­it from Ere­bor and oth­er banks.

While the nuclear start­up did not dis­close its val­u­a­tion, Bloomberg report­ed that it was $6 bil­lion.

Valar is build­ing small mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tors (SMRs) — essen­tial­ly minia­tur­ized, fac­to­ry-built pow­er plants intend­ed to be cheap­er and faster to build than tra­di­tion­al reac­tors. In June, it demon­strat­ed its Ward 250 reac­tor suc­cess­ful­ly pow­er­ing an Nvidia Black­well sys­tem, the com­pa­ny said, and announced a deal with Nvidia to devel­op a water­less 30MW AI fac­to­ry.

Valar says its reac­tors gen­er­ate the engi­neer­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and oper­a­tional data need­ed to improve next-gen­er­a­tion reac­tors, speed­ing its devel­op­ment cycles.

“It took two years to com­plete the NOVA core. It took sev­en months to take Ward 250 crit­i­cal. With each reac­tor built, the tick rate will become small­er until Valar is pro­duc­ing tens, then hun­dreds, then thou­sands of reac­tors per year,” it said, adding that this fund­ing will allow it to reach its next mile­stone: man­u­fac­tur­ing fleets of its SMRs.

...

———-

“Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire leads $1B round for nuclear start­up Valar Atom­ics” by Julie Bort; TechCrunch; 08/03/2026

“While the nuclear start­up did not dis­close its val­u­a­tion, Bloomberg report­ed that it was $6 bil­lion.”

A $6 bil­lion val­u­a­tion for a com­pa­ny found­ed a few years ago by a high-school dropout with no back­ground in nuclear physics. And after spend­ing just sev­en months to put its Ward 250 reac­tor into pro­duc­tion, the com­pa­ny has already signed a deal with Nvidia. Don’t be sur­prised to see that $6 bil­l­lion val­u­a­tion climb sig­nif­i­cant­ly in com­ing years:

...
Valar is build­ing small mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tors (SMRs) — essen­tial­ly minia­tur­ized, fac­to­ry-built pow­er plants intend­ed to be cheap­er and faster to build than tra­di­tion­al reac­tors. In June, it demon­strat­ed its Ward 250 reac­tor suc­cess­ful­ly pow­er­ing an Nvidia Black­well sys­tem, the com­pa­ny said, and announced a deal with Nvidia to devel­op a water­less 30MW AI fac­to­ry.
...

Isa­iah Tay­lor may not have the techn­ni­cal back­ground or busi­ness expe­ri­ence nec­es­sary to start a nuclear pow­er start­up. But he has some­thing far more impor­tant: the back­ing of Theo­Bros, a move­ment that is arguable bet­ter resourced and more polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed than vir­tu­al­ly any oth­er polit­i­cal move­ment in the US today.

A move­ment ded­i­cat­ed to the devel­op­ment of an ‘Aristopop­ulist’ future for the MAGA move­ment, where tech oli­garchs and pow­er­ful theocrats are allowed to amass an even greater share of the eco­nom­ic pie and reshape soci­ety as they see fit. Maybe Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance will be the per­son to lead the move­ment next or maybe it will be some­one else. Either way, the Theo­Bros aren’t going away. They have a man­date from heav­en, after all. There isn’t real­ly any­thing to dis­cuss.