Tech Fascists vs Christian Nationalists?

Brad Onishi: Will the technocrats break up with the Christian Trumpists? Will Elon Musk starting a third party lead to a separation between the tech bros and evangelicals and Catholics who have supported Trump for the last 10 years? The answer is not, if JD Vance can help it. I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Mundi Media, which brings you public scholarship in podcasts and video form. We connect the ivory tower to the grassroots. We have over a dozen series available, all made by scholars of religion, bringing their research into cutting-edge formats and professionally produced podcasts. Check it out at accessmundi.us.

For today, this Monday, we need to talk about whether or not there's going to be a breakup between the tech fascists led by Elon Musk and the Christian Trumpists who have supported Trump for a long, long time. Are we going to see Musk form a third party and break away some supporters from Trump and ultimately tear apart what has always been a loosely knit coalition?

Let's back up and do a little bit of homework before we get into the question. When Trump ran in 2016, people were surprised that 81% of evangelicals—white evangelicals—supported him. A large number of white Catholics also did that. That support has not wavered in the last 10 years. Over that time, endless amounts of books and articles and think pieces and podcasts, just like this one, have analyzed how and why some of the most conservative religious people in the country have been Trump's most ardent supporters.

What we saw in 2024 was a continuation of this trend. And what we know now is that there is seemingly nothing Trump can do, no Rubicon he can cross, that will lead white Catholics, white evangelicals, and a growing number—at least, according to some data—of Latino and Black and Asian Christians from supporting the 47th president.

Now, one of the things that happened in 2024 was new, and that was the inclusion of JD Vance on the presidential ticket, which meant the inclusion of a traditionalist Catholic—somebody who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has a lot of influences and friends and networks with post-liberal Catholic thinkers. I've talked about that on other episodes.

The thing we need to know about them today is they are very much wary of the techno-fascist approach led by Musk and Peter Thiel and others. They're not sure it's a good idea. These are people who long for Christendom. They long for an age of what they take to be an analog life marked by Christian order. These are folks that are always talking about the local, always talking about the village, always talking about the hearth. You might find adjacent to them rad-trad Catholic wives on Instagram who are talking about a retrograde vision of femininity and domesticity.

The point here is that you can see very quickly, without having to read a bunch or listen to three hours of a podcast, that some of those traditional Catholics—who are some of whom are really into speaking Latin at church and longing for the good old days of a Christian empire and a Christian way of life, or whatever that means—would not be so into things like AI or Silicon Valley, or Elon Musk and all of his braggadocio and so on and so forth.

What happened in 2024 was that Elon Musk became part of the ticket. So we had JD Vance, but then we had Elon Musk, who kind of became the co-president and the tech bros and Silicon Valley moved quickly into the Trump orbit. They became part of the window dressing and the furniture. Musk, at one point, was living at Mar-a-Lago, and people were wondering when he was going to go home.

That has not slowed down, and that has not become separated. And you might be thinking, "Well, I thought Trump and Musk had a breakup. Isn't there some sense of a cleavage?"

So this is where we jump into our question: Is there going to be a break? Is there going to be a divorce? Is there going to be a splintering of the Trump coalition that in some way will actually hurt him?

I think the answer is largely no, with a little bit of yes mixed in. What does that mean?

When Elon Musk takes on Trump, I think there's a couple of things involved. I think there's a sense of two outsized narcissistic personalities vying for power. I mean, I don't think you could convince Elon Musk that there's anyone in the world with more power than him, simply because of his riches and his influence and his companies. That's not somebody who goes to bed at night thinking that Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or anyone else is more influential or powerful than himself.

Whatever lessons he might have learned, if any, working in the White House and in government through that whole disgusting DOGE process, I don't think humility was one of them.

Now, when he threatens to start a third party, there is a chance—don't get me wrong, I think there is a chance—that he ends up splintering off some hardcore tech bros who are devoted to him, devoted to his brand, devoted to Silicon Valley as a kind of pantheon of demigods. Sure, that's possible. And will Musk follow through on that? I don't know.

Is Musk going to actually set that party up, back candidates, put in the work to primary people, to take on Trump head on, to take on Trump and his entire apparatus in government? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure.

I think two things, though, and this is where I'm going to differ from some people. I don't think that the Trump-Musk breakup was kayfabe. I don't think they're playing at this now. It doesn't mean that there won't be Trump-Musk crossover in the future, but I don't think they're play acting. I don't think Elon Musk actually settled on a script with Donald Trump about how to play the heel.

I think they really do have enmity. I think there's harsh feelings, and I think that goes back to the narcissism. You just can't have two people at the top. Donald Trump is the president. Elon Musk is not. And I think Elon Musk is butting up against that fact.

So I don't think this is kayfabe, but I want to say it doesn't mean that they've broken up forever. And here's what I mean by that: There's a great scene in Jesse Armstrong's new film Mountainhead. And at the end of Mountainhead, which is all about tech bros who are kind of emblematizing Thiel and Musk and others from Silicon Valley—Mark Zuckerberg and so on—a character undergoes basically a murder attempt by other characters, and he ends up surviving it. And at the end, he ends up sort of in this weird bro-y, testosterone, dopamine-filled exchange with one of the guys who tried to kill him, who's a lot like Musk and/or Zuckerberg, and they end up striking some sort of plan to work together and collaborate.

I won't go into more details than that, but it was this really striking example of the way that technocrats like these guys work. It was just this incredible example of how what seems insurmountable and the kinds of relationships that normal people have just don't register with folks who are red-pilled in the tech world and also raging narcissists.

My point is I can see, if it fits both of their agendas—Trump and Musk—working together in ways that we've seen before happening again. Is it likely? Probably not, but it's not totally out of the picture.

The more important point, though, I think, is that I don't think that this is going to lead to, at least in the short term, a kind of breakup of the technocratic wing of the Trump coalition and the Christian nationalist wing of that coalition. And the reason is JD Vance.

Now again, I could eat my words. If in six months, Musk has lined up primary candidates, if he is somehow using his platform and his riches to take on the man Donald Trump, who he spent $250 million getting elected, then maybe I'm wrong. But he did that already in Wisconsin, and it went really bad. At least him trying to sway elections in Wisconsin didn't go well. So is he going to do that again?

Are we going to see Elon Musk fund 40 or 50 election candidates? I've seen enough of Musk in the public eye to see this is a guy who loses interest. He loses his attention span for various reasons—seems to be pretty short—and so I'm just not sure.

But I think the more important character now is JD Vance. I've chronicled on the show, people have written about this, I'm currently writing a book about this: JD Vance is the guy at the center of a Venn diagram. If you look at a Venn diagram of traditional Catholic Christian voters and Silicon Valley, at the center is JD Vance.

Now you can add a third circle to that, and that's Christian Reconstructionists—people who are to the right of normie evangelicals, and many of them are into JD Vance. That's because those religious groups, those Protestants and Catholics I just talked about, they really love JD Vance on the family, on gender: "childless cat ladies," saying people with children should get more of a vote, maybe women shouldn't vote, the purpose of a woman over 50 or after menopause is to take care of her grandkids and so on. They love that stuff from JD Vance.

But they also love from him his emphasis on the idea that to be an American is to be somebody whose family has been here for generations and has a heritage here.

So last week, JD Vance was in Southern California. He got booed endlessly at a San Diego sushi restaurant, but he also went and gave a talk at the Claremont Institute. And at that talk, he defined Americans in such a narrow way, and he said things that he said before, but he seems to have refined his position based on what is happening with immigration and deportation in this country at the moment.

So what Vance said is that America is not an idea, and that if you define America as an idea, that is over-inclusive and under-inclusive. Now this was typical Vance—he's always trying to sound so smart. He just wants to be the smartest guy with the biggest words in the room every time.

But here's what he says: If you believe that America is an idea, then that is at the same time over-inclusive and under-inclusive, and therefore it's a bad definition.

Why is it over-inclusive? It's over-inclusive, according to Vance, because there are people all over the world who think America is an idea. They think that America was based on the idea of freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, equality before the law, no kings, no royalty, and so on. So that could include people in Singapore or people in Germany, or people in Thailand or people in Bolivia.

It's under-inclusive because there's a lot of folks in the country who think America is not an idea, who think that America is about heritage and having lived here, and that to be a real American, you actually have to be able to trace your family's history like four or five, six generations. You have to go to a cemetery and point out where they're buried. Unless you can do that, you're not really an American.

And JD saying, "Look, if America is an idea, and these people think it's not an idea—that it's heritage and kin and ethnicity—well, they'll be excluded."

And then he goes on with the kicker. He says, "I just don't think people who have family members who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War should be told by those who don't that they're not real Americans."

You can see what he's doing here, and he's been doing this for a while. JD Vance is more and more on this kick that to be an American, you have to be a heritage American—that you have to be able to go find your great grandma and your great grandfather and your great-great grandmother and trace their records to Kentucky or to Georgia or to New England, and to say, "Yeah, this one fought in the Civil War. This one fought in World War I for the United States" and so on.

You can see what he's doing there. He's saying to be a real American is not to hold to the ideals of liberty, justice, equality, representation, democracy. No, no, that's too easy. And if we go that route, then people who don't even live here might buy into the idea.

Now this is where I think I just quickly have to say this. He’s trying to do something slippery, and I know he thinks it’s slick. And I know he thinks it’s really intellectual, but I don't think any of us hold this position.If you believe that the United States is based on an idea—it's based on creed, attesting to the creed of democracy and equality and liberty—I don't think anyone's saying, "Well, that makes you an American." I'm not sitting here talking to you today thinking that somebody in Singapore or Bolivia or in Canada who says, "Well, yeah, of course, America based on a creed, based on a set of ideals," I'm not looking at them going, "Well, here's your passport. You're an American. Thank you."

What it means is—and JD is a Catholic, he's not a Protestant. If he was protestant I might let him off the hook, because Protestants, at least some, excuse me my liturgical friends, are much less invested in deep reitual than Catholics. To be an American means to live in the United States, or to have lived in the United States in some way, and to be invested in that idea, in the way that you're contributing to making those ideas a reality. That for some reason, you are a citizen, you have been given citizenship. And what that includes, it would seem, is that you're attesting to the ideals by practicing them.

And that, I think, especially includes naturalized citizens—people who were not born here, but came here and are now citizens, people who have gained citizenship through the various ways you can do that here and become naturalized. I think they know more than anyone that, yes, they came here from El Salvador or from Argentina or from Canada or from Germany, or from China, Japan, etc. And they've learned about the United States. And by being here, they're attesting to the ideals by practicing that, by exercising them.

Nobody's saying that everyone around the world who just believes in these ideas is a citizen, but he thinks it's slick. He's like, "Oh, it's over-inclusive—billions of Americans everywhere." And no one's saying that, JD, and I think you know that, but you don't care about that.

What you care about is the second part. The second part is the: “Well, I just think that all those people who don’t think America is an idea, but actually heritage, should be hearing a damn thing from anybody else.” What he really wants is this: the Southern Neo-Confederate who has a Confederate flag over his bed, whose great-great grandpappy fought in the Civil War for the South—he doesn't want to exclude that person from this idea of America.

Now I'm not doing that. I'm not going to that person—and I have people like that in my family, so I know if you think that I sound bitter or resentful towards those folks. My mother's side of the family comes from very rural Tennessee. I have deep ties to that part of the country. I've visited my family there. I used to live in Tennessee, so it's not me making fun of anyone in that boat.

What I'm saying is I'm not going to them and saying, "Well, you don't get to be an American anymore because you didn't pass the test." I'm not trying to strip their citizenship either.

So what is JD up to? What does this little slippery, JD-Vancy, reply guy, I’m the smartest guy in the room do for him? What it does is allows him to push the idea that if you want to be an American, you have to have heritage here, and if you don't—if you arrived a generation ago, if you arrived 10 years ago, if you don't have family members who fought in the right wars—then you're not a real American, and you never will be. It's just not possible for you.

And this, of course, leads us to a Europeanization of the category of American, because the majority of people who can do that are people of European descent. So we know what JD is doing, and it's perfectly on brand for him and for the Claremont Institute to kind of play these intellectual games to justify what is, in essence, looking more and more like white ethno-nationalism.

And you can say, "Well, Brad, is that too strong? Is that too strong of a word? JD Vance is married to a South Asian woman, and so on." And yeah, you're right. That's complicated. There's a lot more to say about that. I want to get to those in the future. I'm not going to go there today.

What I will say is this: Tom Homan said July 10th that he believes ICE has the freedom and the right to approach people without any due cause based on how they look and to ask them questions. He basically said ICE, which has now been funded in ways that surpass other military branches, can walk up to anyone on the street that they feel like and say, "Who are you? Show me your papers. Do you have a passport? Are you a citizen?"

That starts to sound like white ethno-nationalism, doesn't it? Because presumably it's not the white family walking down the street to get lunch. And we already know there's story after story of people who are brown or Asian, who are born in the United States, who are not naturalized citizens—who are actually native-born citizens—and they have been taken into ICE custody for no other reason except for ICE deeming them as lying about their status and their citizenship and so on.

So it is possible to make a link between the very stuffy and fancy dinner at the Claremont Institute where JD was and Tom Homan and what's happening with ICE all over the country. If you're brown, you might just need to show your papers. Does that sound like anything but Soviet Russia? Does that sound like anything but Communist Czechoslovakia? Does that sound like anything but all the things you read about as a kid about those places that United States was fighting to liberate somehow, through democracy and so on and so on?

But this brings me to a second part of this with JD, and that is: JD Vance is only the vice president because of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel funded his Senate run in Ohio five years ago. JD, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, and others from Silicon Valley—David Sacks, Marc Andreessen—were the ones who were there on the front lines to make JD the vice presidential candidate on the ticket with Trump.

JD is the guy who has two parents who are threatening to get divorced, and that is the Christian Trumpists—some of those trad Catholics, some of those evangelicals who are not going to go with Elon Musk, no matter what you say and no matter what you do, they're just not, they never will—and the tech fascist elements that we've seen in Musk and others in Silicon Valley.

But bringing up ICE and immigration, bringing up the heritage citizenship stuff, bringing up the speech he gave at Claremont, is actually illustrative of why the divorce is not happening yet and it may never happen.

And the reason is because Peter Thiel, JD's political patron, one of his spiritual fathers, in my view, the man who may be most responsible for JD Vance being where he is today, is the founder, co-founder, of Palantir.

Palantir is the technological company, the surveillance company, the data company that many of you are now familiar with that has just signed a new $30 million contract with the United States government—DHS—in order to ramp up surveillance of immigrants and to collect data, and this is with other agencies, about Americans.

There's a sense now that what Palantir can do is, instead of just processing data from clients that pay it, that it can become this sort of super center, this command center of American surveillance, such that it can collect and share data in a super database about health, taxes, all kinds of other identifying markers—whether they be how many tattoos you have or how tall you are, your eye color, down to what kind of financial situation you have, etc.

Now the use for this—what is Palantir doing with DHS? Well, they're going to be basically the technological apparatus of ICE. They're going to be the ones who can track migrants' movements, can inform ICE where to go, how to maneuver, how to strategize and so on. I'm not going to go into all the details of that today. I'm writing about it. There'll be more to say in the weeks to come.

The point I want to come back to, though, is this: Peter Thiel has been committed to combating multiculturalism for three decades. He started a whole newspaper at Stanford when he was a student there, in order to combat the ideas of multiculturalism. The first book he helped to write, he co-wrote, was about how multiculturalism degrades the intellectual standards of Western culture, and that it doesn't help us, and it's not good—and in fact, it's based on things that allow inferior people to gain positions of power.

Peter Thiel has been anti-DEI, anti-diversity, anti-racial pluralism for a long time.

It's one of the ideas you can trace from his student days till now. So if you think Peter Thiel is not super excited about being at the helm of a company—at least the founder of a company that has now contracted with the United States government to surveil migrants in an effort of mass deportation based on white ethno-nationalism, where ICE—where Tom Homan is saying, "If we want to, we will walk up to you on the street and just basically say, 'Are you an American citizen?' And we might arrest you right there if you're brown or Asian or Afro-Caribbean or anything else. We might just have to do that."

And JD Vance is giving talks saying, "Well, you know, if you can't find your granddaddy's grave over there from 1870, you might not be a real American."

Do you think that Peter Thiel doesn't find this to be something that is in line with things he's argued for and desired for 30 or 40 years?

What's the point? The point is I don't think there's kayfabe between Musk and Trump. I don't think they're faking it, but I don't think the Musk-Trump feud is the end-all be-all of the Silicon Valley participation in the Trump coalition. And I think because JD Vance is in place, you're going to see JD Vance do everything possible to assuage the traditional Catholics and other retrograde traditionalist Christians and the Silicon Valley types.

He's the one who's tapped to sort of play the peacemaker between the two parents who might get divorced, and I just don't think that Musk and Trump tweeting at each other back and forth is the entire picture.

And I don't—I'm not sure that you're going to see any kind of real movement go with Musk if he decides that he's really actually starting this third party, and he's going to do that. There would be no real movement there unless Peter Thiel and the PayPal army and all of the other power players from Silicon Valley joined him.

And if that happened—if you, if that happened, if Musk said third party, and people like Sacks and Andreessen and Thiel and others jumped on board—then I would start to say, "Well, this is getting interesting."

But right now it feels like Elon Musk, who's always been compared to Thiel—if you look at their history, he has always been this braggart, the guy who wants to be in the spotlight, who wants everyone to look at him. He's always been that guy, and Thiel has always been behind the scenes, playing this role of mastermind, this role of organizing all the chess pieces behind the scenes. He's always been that guy.

So yes, Musk and Trump are feuding, and they have been feuding. I think the real story is that we should be seeing how what Palantir is doing, what Musk is doing, and what Vance and Homan are articulating, is a technological apparatus that will enforce white ethno-nationalism in the United States.

That when ICE receives its boost in funding, we may have situations in your suburb where ICE officials are walking through your suburb canvassing like you live in a war zone, like you live in a place that's been invaded, because that's what they think. That's what they're trying to convince you.

That's the story—that we are six months out from you picking up your kids from school and seeing ICE officers who hang out at 7-Elevens, schoolyards, everywhere. And some of you are like, "Brad, it's already happening." And I know. I know if you're in LA right now, it's already here. I know that that's what's happening in Camarillo and Santa Ana. I know that that's what's happening in East LA, in downtown LA. I know that's what's happening in San Francisco.

LA is this test case of what happens when you bring the military and an ICE presence that is so strong and ubiquitous. Will it scare people? Will it terrorize people? What if it just becomes the new normal? What if that's true in Salt Lake City? What if that's true in Tempe, Arizona? What if that's true in the Twin Cities? What if we just see ICE everywhere—unidentified men in masks near schools and hospitals, in the public square, wherever you look?

And then—and I'm not going to jump into this too much today, but what happens when you go to vote? What happens if you're a brown person trying to vote, an Asian person trying to vote—they just take you away, and they just approach you and say, "We're ICE. Tom Homan says we can approach anybody. You're going to vote today. Let me see your phone. Let me see what kind of posts you got on social media. No, sorry. I think we're going to have to detain you now."

Saying those words out loud, I feel like a crazy person. I feel like a conspiracy theorist. And if you would have told me three years ago, five years ago, eight years ago, that I would have said that, I would have been like, "Brad, come on, man, what's going on?"

There is sufficient data now to think that that's what's going to happen.

If you're a subscriber, stick around. I'm going to talk about that for a few more minutes and get into some things that I think are happening on that front.

If you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to subscribe. We so appreciate you listening. I appreciate your support. I know that subscribing and money sounds hard right now, and if you check out our show notes, we have a special going on for the rest of the year where you can get our subscription for $40 for 12 months. And we know times are hard. We know things are just not easy. So we're trying to keep our show going. We're trying to do this three times a week. We're trying to keep Axis Mundi Media and our doors open.

So if you can think about doing that, it would help us out a ton. You get ad-free listening, access to our Discord server, access to our entire archive, invitations to live recordings of our special episodes each month, where you can ask Q&A in real time, and so much more. Check it out if you can.

Thanks for listening. Hope you have a good day.