MAGA’s Transhumanist Tension
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the alliance of expedience between the tech-right and MAGA populists was one founded on volatile contradictions (“The New Social Revolution,” April 2025 Chronicles). At the time, Tesla founder Elon Musk and MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon were already taking shots at each other. A few months later, Musk would fall out with Donald Trump after Musk’s pet project, the Department of Government Efficiency, crumbled and failed, at least as a cost-saving enterprise.
Musk and Trump have since seemingly made amends, but the tension from that fracture in the MAGA coalition persists, like the continental plates pressing against one another under our feet. The pressure of this tension builds steadily, until its inevitable, violent release.
The lines of division are not neatly left or right, nationalist or globalist, but rather between humanists and transhumanists, who advocate for acceleration in the development and implementation of artificial intelligence. For some on the right, such as Bannon, that divide is already clear. Most importantly, as right-wing opposition builds against this new enemy, it continues to ignore the elephant in the room: that MAGA’s heir apparent, JD Vance, falls squarely inside the transhumanist camp. This tension demands a resolution, and there is a good chance it will happen before or by the time the next presidential election rolls around.
To be certain, AI is already ubiquitous and already wreaking havoc. Those most affected are job seekers between the ages of 16 and 24, including recent college graduates. As work that is typically assigned to people early in their careers is outsourced to algorithms, these young individuals will miss out on opportunities to gain basic work experience. The kind that is crucial to professional advancement and to the kind of long-term financial stability that is so often a prerequisite to family formation and a healthy middle class life.
According to labor research firm Revelio Labs, postings for entry-level jobs in the U.S. have declined by about 35 percent since January 2023, with AI playing a significant role in this change. That is bad enough, and it is set to get even worse. An analysis of 183 firms by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that the job market for the Class of 2026 will be the worst for college graduates since the first year of the pandemic, with AI again contributing to the carnage.
The ladder that previous generations climbed to prosperity is being put through a virtual woodchipper—and that is apart from the other evils AI is facilitating, like the creation of a new, far more sophisticated security state. AI is being used to surveil us and make us even more addicted to and dependent on technology, at the expense of what makes us free and human.
No one in power seems to know what to do about any of this, if they even care at all. Part of the problem, to be blunt, is that there really is no “stopping” AI. It is here, and there is no way to roll it back. What can be done, and ought to be done, however, is to mitigate the excessively harmful effects associated with it. This is what I’ll call the humanist position: reckoning with reality, rather than impotently standing athwart it. It has found perhaps its best articulation from Pope Leo XIV.
“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity,” the pontiff posted on X. “The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
Transhumanists view with contempt such reasonable calls for us to take seriously the “ethical and spiritual” weight of AI, which could be considered the most significant technological innovation since the atom bomb. This attitude was perfectly illustrated in a reply to the pope by Marc Andreessen, a close ally of Vance and a tech-right venture capitalist: a meme of a GQ interviewer casting a smug expression at Sydney Sweeney during a line of questioning about her controversial American Eagle jeans ad. In essence, Andreessen’s meme portrayed the pope as the obnoxious, moralistic schoolmarm reporter, stifling the style of the fast and sexy tech accelerationists who are speeding us toward the next phase of our social evolution as a species.
Andreessen’s little rebuttal to the pope was telling because, usually, the tech right does a pretty good job of wearing a populist mask. Little slips like this by its key figures reveal the pure contempt the tech right has for any considerations other than the speedy development of AI. Andreessen initially reacted to criticism of his hubris with more mockery, posting the same image over and over again, as if it were a kind of talisman warding off evil spirits.
But Daniel Francis, founder of tech startup Abel Police, seemed to strike a raw nerve. “Marc primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bot farms,” Francis wrote on X. “He does not want you to build things that are actually good for society.”
Francis wasn’t kidding. See Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen, that is building AI-powered phone farms to give clients the power to deploy armies of bots trained to flood social media with spam. The company’s motto is “never pay a human again.”
The venture capitalist subsequently deleted several tweets, including his swipe at the pope.
Vance and Andreessen have identical views on AI, though Vance has been marginally better at hiding them. A similar sort of contempt for people concerned about AI can be detected in the vice president’s comments. At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris in February, Vance declared that the “AI future will not be won by hand-wringing about safety.” He has reiterated variations of that line through the present, even as it continues to decimate, addict, and flatten. It is no surprise that there is no daylight between Vance and Andreessen, given that both are members of a shadowy group called the Rockbridge Network.
Founded in 2019 by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Vance, the network is a secretive constellation of businessmen and political operatives who aim to redefine not just the right, but the country itself. They style themselves as aristocratic populists, a new elite that will bridge the gap between wealthy capitalists and working-class people, leading to the enlightenment and uplifting of the latter. “You either have an extractive elite—an oligarchy—or you have a productive elite —an aristocracy—in every society,” Chris Buskirk, a former insurance salesman who sits at the head of the Rockbridge Network, told The Washington Post last month.
Of course, Buskirk and his friends would argue that theirs is a “productive elite.” And yet, one of the first things they did upon Trump’s return to the White House was to launch a $500,000-a-head membership club in D.C. called the Executive Branch, with the express purpose of providing ultra-wealthy people Buskirk “sees as vital to the country’s future a role shaping government and lasting political power.”
In other words, Buskirk and his allies are pushing textbook, naked oligarchy, reframing it as “aristopopulism,” and are able to do so thanks to Vance, as the Rockbridge Network and specifically Thiel were instrumental in Vance’s political ascent. It was Thiel who effectively bankrolled Vance’s professional career, hiring him at his firm Mithril Capital as a junior investor in 2016, and then contributing at least $10 million to Vance’s successful Senate bid, which is arguably the reason he is now the vice president.
After Vance’s election as vice president, Thiel’s tech-defense company, Palantir, has secured one federal contract after another, even as the Trump administration has claimed to be slashing costs. As of this writing, Palantir’s market value has soared to more than $400 billion, making it the most valuable national security contractor. Since Trump’s reelection, the company has secured at least $300 million in new business. Maybe that’s just good fortune. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Thiel’s protégé is the vice president of the United States.
Bannon, again, is one of the only prominent voices who suffers no delusions about the tension, even if he isn’t willing to go after Vance yet. The War Room host called Palantir “really the villain in the AI” world, doubting that it had actually “become MAGA, because then you see what they want to do.”What Palantir wants to do is to build a digital panopticon more advanced than anything that has ever existed before. Indeed, Palantir’s technology is currently being used in warzones from Ukraine to Gaza, where it has been accused of facilitating the deaths of noncombatants and civilians.
Bannon has gone so far as calling attention to the fact that the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein invested $40 million into two funds managed by Valar Ventures, a firm backed by Thiel. Today, that investment is worth around $170 million. Bannon said that there are “big questions about Palantir and some of these other companies today about the surveillance technology—exactly who’s financing it, who owns it, who controls it, all of it.” He’s even called out the Rockbridge Group for declaring itself our new aristocracy, blasting Buskirk, Thiel, and the rest for their “avarice.”
How long the right can continue to avoid the Vance question is uncertain. What is certain is that the designs of Vance and his allies are fundamentally incompatible with the goals of the populist movement that emerged with Trump’s rise in 2015, one that clings to humanist values that people like Andreessen dismiss as old-fashioned and superstitious. Vance has carefully reinvented himself numerous times, cultivated a MAGA persona as Trump’s most effective defender, and has a sophisticated social media machine on his side to deflect attacks from people like Bannon.
It is also possible that the underlying tension between Vance and his transhumanist backers and the MAGA base remains unresolved until the next presidential election. An eruption is coming, one way or another. It would be better for the country if it comes sooner rather than later.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/magas-transhumanist-tension