A new and dangerous religion is emerging from the bowels of Silicon Valley. In a recent article entitled “How Silicon Valley Became a Center of Reactionary, Anti-Democratic Politics,” Jacob Silverman tells the story. It is excerpted from his book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.*
When Gil Duran, with whom I dialogued last week, opposed the movement, he was slandered by propagandists shouting that he is financed by George Soros, which he is not.
But billionaires shout with very large megaphones, being owners of vast media and social media outlets and busy devouring ever more. (A recent rumor suggests Elon Musk wants to buy MSNBC and replace Rachel Maddow with Joe Rogan.)
With the recent knifing of PBS and NPR by the MAGA world, it may not be long before all the media tastes and smells like Fox News. The dumbing down of America will be almost complete.
The New Silicon Valley Religion is not your father’s fundamentalism. Jerry Falwell, step aside. This is not a religion of churches or scriptures but, as one of its preachers, Peter Thiel, makes clear, of apocalypse and end of times and end of democracy.
And the rise of the antichrist is understood as anyone who opposes unlimited capitalism, or gives to the poor in Africa, or supports ending fossil fuels, and uniting the world to combat global warming. Thus, Greta Thunberg makes the list and Bill Gates too, for his urging of fellow billionaires to give to the poor—a “left-wing” or “woke” activity.
This religion lies at the crux of the current shutdown of the government—the reason Democrats won’t go along with the gutting of Medicare, Medicaid, and consequent loss of health care for millions of working Americans. Let no one interfere with the $4 trillion tax-break billionaires have demanded—and received from MAGA. Such billionaires and aspiring billionaires don’t feel they should have to pay taxes that support the elderly (Social Security), the sick, the poor, or the common good.
When one San Francisco venture capitalist, Garry Tan, went on a tirade on X, calling for the death of city supervisors and naming them, five received death threats in the mail. Tan apologized, but continued his tirades sans the death threats.
Duran describes the tech ideology as “corporatist” with startup founders as their heroes or saints. They dismiss a politics that is “obsessed with wokeness and against tech’s unrepentant pursuit of innovation and profit.” Though boasting a sense of religiosity, God had been dethroned by AGI—a Greater-than-Human Intelligence they are busy making.
Some call it “the last invention” (or “second coming”?), which would fix all problems facing humanity. Or possibly end all humanity.
Does this explain some of Thiel’s preoccupation with the apocalypse? And his somewhat ambiguous relationship to the antichrist?
Duran describes these people as having kind of reached a point where they have so much wealth, and so much egomania, and in some cases, so much drug-addled thinking, that they decide they’re going to rule the world and that democracy is an outdated form of software.
He adds, “These people have enough money to be dumb and dangerous for a very long time.”
San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin says, they think that because they have an algorithm and an app, they can be the rulers of the world…Good luck with that.
Donald Trump visited one of their “palatial” San Francisco homes during the 2024 campaign and was urged by Peter Thiel to name J.D. Vance his running mate. And it was done. “San Francisco became a hotbed of elite resentment and an unlikely source of cash for the Trump campaign.”
Duran observes that these people “are throwing a lot of gasoline on the fire” of political polarization and moving “everybody’s politics toward the right” while pretending “that they have solutions to the problems” of the world.
Elon Musk spoke to Germany’s AfD—“the closest thing the country had had to a Nazi party since 1945”—urging them to move beyond “past guilt.” AfD finished second in the German election, “the best result for a far-right German political party since the Nazis came to power.” Vice President Vance also spoke to them.
* Jacob Silverman, “How Silicon Valley Became a Center of Reactionary, Anti-Democratic Politics,” Literary Hub, October 15, 2025.
Banner Image: “Facepalm Jesus.” Photo by Hans_Hofer on Pixabay.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you believe democracy is outdated? How do you feel about Silicon Valley billionaires becoming “the rulers of the world”? And about “AGI”—a greater-than-human-intelligence–that they are busy making? Does this sound sort of déjà vu what with Frankenstein, et al? Myself, I prefer a God that made us and the rest of creation to any god that we make.
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
3 thoughts on “The New Fundamentalist Religion from Silicon Valley”
Matthew, these are extremely dangerous times and you are to be applauded for calling it out and lampooning it. Democracy is vital but it needs more than voters. It needs leaders to stand against this far-right tirade with strong voices; the foundation of which is moral courage, determination, insight and wit. In short, we need champions.
No, democracy is not outdated! Also, our personal and communal spiritual journeys are more important than ever in our modern perilous times of the crises of our environment, growth of dehumanizing technology and AI, growth of greedy billionaires, and growth of autocratic governments. The Contemplative, Creation, and Incarnational spiritual traditions are kept alive in many persons, communities and groups, including the Indigenous and the internet, through which the power, healing, creativity, transformation, Loving Diverse ONENESS of Our Source~Co-Creator’s Spirit of LOVE~WISDOM, Truth, Peace, Justice, Beauty, Joy, COMPASSION… IS PRESENT and Flows/manifests in many different forms and physical/nonphysical spiritual dimensions of Our evolving Humanity and planetary galactic Cosmos….
“Do you believe democracy is outdated?”
The notion of “power of the people” cannot be outdated, even if it is often misunderstood and misused.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Chateaubriand wrote in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave these words that are not outdated either: “The ministry has invented a new morality, the morality of interests; that of duties is left to fools. However, this morality of interests, which they want to make the basis of our government, has corrupted the people more in three years than the revolution did in a quarter of a century. What destroys morality among nations, and with morality the nations themselves, is not violence, but seduction; and by seduction I mean what is flattering and specious in every false doctrine.”
In our industrial and consumerist age, seduction by money, property and prestige, has induced a coma-like slumber in the masses. How could 90 million abstentions in the crucial 2024 presidential elections be explained otherwise? Although not outdated, in that context, democracy resembles the “evening spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table” of Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Opinions vary as to dating the birth or dawn of democracy; historians may be less hesitant about dating its dusk. Darkness, however, does not make daylight outdated.