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The Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’ name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references.
It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.
Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’ name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah—commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression—to recruit new agents for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to US President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”
A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from lifesaving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 and providing free healthcare to lepers.)
And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.
In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”
Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress”—a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.
There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.
More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)
Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, DC, Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.
On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on Earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.
For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”
In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.
Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the 19th century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.
Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
We must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so.
Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025. Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: If a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say, ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”
And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Reps Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-Tenn.) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with preexisting conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for healthcare.
Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.
Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And—though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans—they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of antipoverty programs run through it all.
That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.
My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”
Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”
In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.
A health researcher for Public Citizen said Trump's interim CDC director has "no medical or public health background and extremist libertarian views."
After pushing out his own handpicked Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director, infectious disease expert Susan Monarez, fueling a wave of outraged resignations this week, US President Donald Trump has appointed a loyal acolyte to replace her at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s side.
On Thursday, the president tapped one of RFK's top aides as interim CDC director: biotech investor Jim O'Neill, a man with no medical experience but extensive experience profiting from healthcare while working at billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Mithril Capital.
Unlike his predecessor, whose ouster came as she tried to push back against RFK's anti-vaccine agenda, O'Neill fits snugly into the secretary's efforts to restrict access to the Covid-19 vaccine, and potentially ban it outright, as the Daily Beast reported earlier this week.
"A tech investor with no medical or public health background and extremist libertarian views, Jim O'Neill was unfit for the number two position at HHS and manifestly unqualified to lead the CDC," said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen's health research group, on Friday.
Just as Kennedy did during his confirmation hearings, O'Neill insisted he was "pro-vaccine," noting that he was "an adviser to a vaccine company." However, this is belied by his record on the subject.
He has championed unproven cures like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and vitamin D supplements to protect against Covid-19, and has accused the CDC under the administration of former President Joe Biden of downplaying the vaccine's dangers while railing against mandates.
O'Neill has also praised Kennedy's response to the measles outbreak that swept across the US earlier this year, during which the secretary downplayed the severity and cast unfounded doubt on the effectiveness and safety of the measles vaccine that had virtually eradicated the disease before vaccination rates began to decline.
"Unlike Susan Monarez," Steinbrook said, "O'Neill is likely to rubber-stamp dangerous vaccine recommendations from HHS Secretary Kennedy's handpicked appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and obey orders to fire CDC public health experts with scientific integrity."
O'Neill melds medical crankery with a Thielite strain of anarcho-libertarianism. He has served on the board of the Seasteading Institute, an organization founded by Patri Friedman, the grandson of the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, who advocates for corporations like Apple and Google to form their own floating cities at sea, which would be governed as corporate "dictatorships" free from the constraints of democratic governance.
That anti-government ethos extends to his views on the healthcare system, which O'Neill says is flawed not because of the rampant profiteering of the private companies that run it, but because it is supposedly not "free market" enough.
In 2014, he advocated for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin approving drugs for the market without conducting clinical trials to determine their effectiveness. "Let people start using them, at their own risk," he argued, "Let's prove efficacy after they've been legalized."
He has also argued for the government to allow people to sell their own internal organs. This process often results in deteriorating health for the disproportionately poor people who partake.
While working at HHS under the administration of former President George W. Bush, O'Neill also opposed the FDA regulation of companies that use algorithms to perform laboratory tests.
At the time, he was focused on DNA testing products like 23andMe, but a report from the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen says that "a decade after he made this remark, it's clear how dangerous such a concept is," noting that "with the development and proliferation of artificial intelligence, algorithms are omnipresent in the practice of medicine, including in diagnostic tools, medical devices, AI assistants to doctors, and personalized medicine."
In addition to Thiel's ideology, he reportedly brings several conflicts of interest to the CDC director job from his time working at Thiel's venture capital firm.
Accountable.US reported Friday that O'Neill "took money from, helped incubate, or was otherwise linked to at least eight medical industry startups with direct business before the department he could help run."
These include firms he advised, like the pharmaceutical company ADvantage Therapeutics or the National Institutes of Health grantee Rational Vaccines, which manufactures herpes drugs.
It also includes four companies seeded by his Thiel-affiliated venture capital firm Breakout Labs, some of which have received government funding or have products awaiting FDA approval.
Though O'Neill agreed to divest from some of these companies and abstain from involvement in decision-making with them as part of his ethics agreement, the report notes that "he did not promise to abstain from decisions involving these companies for the duration of his term, or to abstain from doing business with them after departing HHS."
"O'Neill would be in a prime position to ensure favorable outcomes for several medical industry startups he's been financially linked to that have direct business before HHS and the CDC," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk. "How can American patients be sure that proper vetting of these companies would take place on O'Neill's watch and that public health will be a higher priority over the profits of his former clients?"
Though Steinbrook describes O'Neill as "manifestly unqualified" for the position, he said, "No credible public health authority is likely to work for Kennedy, who is dictating the agency's decisions based on whim, not science."
"The only path forward," Steinbrook said, "is for Kennedy to go, which Congress, professional organizations, medical journals, and the public should demand."
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Sitting face to face on grey sofas, Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat continued another propaganda piece for the New York Times. Thiel is the billionaire owner and founder of Palantir, the world's largest private surveillance company, one of the biggest financiers of OpenAI and one of Silicon Valley's most influential ideologues. Douthat asked Thiel, "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" After hesitating, Thiel replied, "I don't know." A glimpse of the impact of his response and the journalist's astonishment led him to amend his statement: "I, I would prefer, I would prefer." Would he, though?
Thiel is one of the main promoters of the archaic ideology that dominates the thinking of men such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Andreessen Horowitz, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Although these tech moguls are presented as neutral or technology driven, reality is different. Their adaptation to the far-right is no longer surprising. The techlords have laid some of the cornerstones of authoritarian politics and provided the means for the rise of the new ideology of a return to the past.
So what do Thiel and the other techlords stand for? Their ideological base revolves around something called the "Dark Enlightenment", also known as the "Neo-Reactionary Movement." It is a mixture of libertarian doctrines with scientific racism, an anti-historical vision of a return to feudalism and an acceleration toward social and environmental collapse. According to Curtis Yarvin, another of its ideologues, this shadowy enlightenment is the formal recognition of the realities of existing power, aligning property rights with current political power and defending that "corporate power should become the organizing force in society." They seek to assert inequality not as an accident, but as a structure. For all practical purposes, the ideology of the techlords aims to overthrow any democratic illusion and install in its place a feudal division of territories, under which the supreme lords, technological monarchs, President-CEOs, the Techlords, would rule.
We can see what they aspire to in the most banal science fiction: a Star Wars world with a Supreme Emperor who rules the entire galaxy; a Dune world where noble houses dominate technologies, planets, resources and religions; or a Hunger Games world where, after a global rebellion, production has been forcibly distributed geographically and different peoples have to kill each other to entertain the elite. The ideology is so lazy that it has not evolved beyond the books that mostly teenagers read for entertainment during the holidays. The rejection of formal education, with these men abandoning university studies, so touted in the "self-made man" propaganda they peddle about themselves, has deprived them of essential information about history, biology, chemistry, physics, and other key areas of knowledge. The markets reward their audacious ignorance by offering praise and money in exchange for each usurpation. No wonder they think they are demigods and seek ideological rationalisations for their privilege. For the techlords, the reading of these works of popular science fiction culture is contrary to the instincts of people with a basic sense of justice. In Star Wars, they defend Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader; in The Hunger Games, the Capitol and President Snow.
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right.
In a work such as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where eugenics runs through the narrative from all sides, the techlords seem to support the most perfidious position. Palantir, the company Peter Thiel created to surveil, steal data, and hand it over to authoritarian governments or whoever pays him, is a name taken from this fiction. Palantir is a crystal ball that reveals information, but is actually being used by the main villain, Sauron, to deceive and pervert wizards and kings, turning them against their territories and peoples. It would be difficult to interpret this name in any other way.
The ideology of the techlords is directly opposed to democracy, which they see as an obstacle to the accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power by the rich. They advocate corporate monarchies and authoritarian city-states controlled by themselves, praising Singapore as a model. To destroy democracy, they advocate dismantling the institutional apparatus of nation states, not because of any oppression or inequality, but to ensure that injustices have no social opposition and that, if opposition does arise, it can be strongly repressed. They advocate the removal of almost all public officials and services, increasing the numbers of the armed forces and police, building up the capacity for repression by the powers that be, no longer public, but corporate and business. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, combined with the expansion of a militia-style political police force such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a trial run of this. This month, the US government announced a $10 billion contract with Palantir to create a super database that aggregates information from all federal agencies and a platform to detect migratory movements in real time.
Another cornerstone of techlord ideology is accelerationism, which advocates the removal of all restrictions on capitalist growth and technological development, even if this leads to social and environmental collapse. As Zuckerberg said, "Move fast and break things." This idea does not differ fundamentally from neoliberal ideology but, unlike the latter, it does not hide the fact that social collapse is a goal of deregulation, rather than a side effect to be ignored or concealed. The removal of restrictions in accelerationism actually serves to create social breakdowns that allow the techlords to establish themselves as the new masters. Because they are accelerationists, they describe any opposition to their ideological infrastructure—social networks, "Artificial Intelligence," trips to Mars or outer space—as attacks on progress. This is the ideological strand that is trying to create a widespread feeling that the development of Large Language Models, touted as "Artificial Intelligence," is inevitable. There is no possibility that language models will not be biased and racist. Building on these and other prejudices, accelerationism argues that we must ignore the current suffering of billions of people in order to optimize technological developments that will create the environment in which future humans will colonize space. This suffering is destined for people other than the techlords, who are constantly building bunkers to hide in.
Added to the techlords' beliefs are other segments of science fiction, all of them anti-scientific: the imminent colonization of space, the physical fusion of humans with digital technology, the Singularity (the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence), and the childish idea that "Artificial Intelligence," Large Language Models, will solve all of humanity's problems. Authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and fields of "research" such as AI Safety are attempting to consolidate these ideas in popular culture and academia.
The science fiction in the minds of these billionaires, articulated with the orphaned leaders of the new fascist movements on the rise, has concrete and material effects. They are producing, in addition to suffering on a massive scale, a catastrophic waste of time and resources in the face of the greatest crisis in human history, the climate crisis. The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens. They lead a political movement that is rising today against the future of our entire species, seeking to subjugate all societies to a technological dystopia in which CEOs rule and behave like survivors of the apocalypse (and what is Elon Musk's reproductive frenzy if not his idea that he can be the warlord after the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, i.e., climate collapse, and repopulate the world and the galaxy as a new Adam?).
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right. They already use "Artificial Intelligence" to impose their ideology on education, information, public services, justice, the arts, and every field they can usurp. They have set the traps, and we have been caught in them for a long time. The mainstream digital space is a straitjacket of complacency and a black hole of energy and ideas. Algorithms isolate us and deprive us of information that is useful for our collective life. The techlords and their ideology are mortal enemies of humanity and will stop at nothing to impose their dystopias in the coming years, trying to prevent us from stopping the collapse of all human civilisations. To make the digital space controlled by Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon a battlefield is to accept fighting underwater with our hands tied and weights on our feet. But it is in their arrogant ignorance that their vulnerabilities lie. These giants do indeed have feet of clay that must be knocked down, and their ideology is central to this: They despise material reality, reject the collective and the social as realities, and are submerged in fiction. Moving away from their preferred playing field, social media, may be one of the first steps toward their demise.