This past Friday, September 25th, I sat down for a Facebook Live from Charlotte to talk about someone I think everyone needs to understand right now: Peter Thiel. He is not a household name the way some politicians are, but he is one of the most powerful people operating largely behind the scenes in American politics today, including his role in shaping and supporting Vice President JD Vance. With elections coming in November and so much uncertainty about what happens next in Congress and in our political leadership, I think it matters more than ever to understand the ideas driving people like Thiel.
Over the past two weeks I have been reading Brad Onishi’s book, “American Caesar: How Theocrats and Our Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy,” and listening to his podcast, Straight White American Jesus. I want to be upfront about where I am coming from. I am an Air Force Academy graduate and a military veteran, I grew up in a conservative family in Manhattan, Kansas in the 1980s, and I engage regularly with classmates and friends across the political spectrum on Facebook. I think Onishi’s work is helping me, and can help a lot of us, make sense of just how much has shifted culturally and politically in this country.
In the video, I read the closing paragraphs of Chapter 3, titled “Peter Thiel’s Techno-Monarchism.” Onishi lays out how Thiel’s theology, while different in its specifics from other Christian nationalist figures, arrives at strikingly similar political conclusions: that democracy itself is the problem, not the solution. Thiel has framed a single unaccountable leader, what Onishi calls a “techno monarch,” as the only kind of figure capable of guiding Western civilization forward.
What struck me most in this excerpt is Onishi’s point that the alternative Thiel offers to the dangers he claims to fear is really just a surveillance state, one where a tech CEO holds power over everyone else without their consent. Onishi argues that Thiel’s theology reflects contempt for ordinary people, that the poor, the sick, migrants, and the vulnerable barely register in his vision except as scapegoats. It is a vision of salvation for the few, not the many.
Onishi is careful to say he does not think Thiel is literally the Antichrist, but he makes a compelling case that Thiel’s theology may be one of the most anti-Christian belief systems circulating in public life today. The book’s response to this is refreshingly simple: power without accountability corrupts, and freedom requires that those who govern answer to the governed. Monarchy might be simpler. Algorithmic governance might be less messy. But neither protects the dignity of the people living under it the way democracy does, however slow and imperfect democracy can be.
I connected all of this back to a broader pattern Onishi describes throughout the book, one where ideas that used to sit on the fringe of Christian theology are now shaping leadership decisions at the highest levels of our government. What was once extreme is increasingly treated as normal, and understanding figures like Peter Thiel is part of understanding how that shift happened. This is the heart of what I mean when I talk about techno-fascism, the fusion of Silicon Valley power with a particular strand of Christian political theology.
If any of this resonates with you, I would encourage you to pick up American Caesar and subscribe to Brad Onishi’s podcast, Straight White American Jesus. You can also find more of my own writing on these themes at resistandheal.com or resistandheal.substack.com. Whatever your own faith tradition or political background, I hope you will join me in thinking carefully about who holds power in this country, and how they believe that power should be used.
This video is also available on YouTube.
