“There are, like, things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us,” Vice President JD Vance said this week.¹ That is not normally what you hope to hear from the man standing one actuarial event away from the nuclear codes. It gets more interesting when Vance starts talking about artificial intelligence, because the administration he helps run is simultaneously trying to produce as much of the stuff as possible, as fast as possible, with fewer people getting in the way.
Vance was talking with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford about faith, technology and the end times, which is apparently what vice presidents discuss now that ribbon-cuttings have become boring. To be fair, he did not announce that Armageddon is scheduled for Thursday afternoon. He said he doesn’t know whether these are the end times and tries not to obsess over it.¹
But he does think something spiritually peculiar is going on. Vance worries about people using AI as companions, counselors and substitutes for actual human relationships. Crawford supplied the word “satanic”; Vance agreed that separating human beings from the relationships God intended for them was very bad. He also described occasions when “every spiritual alarm bell in my body” went off and talked about sensing “very dark spiritual energy.”¹ Ordinarily, that would be enough weirdness for one column.
Then Peter Thiel enters the story.
Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Vance’s former employer, political benefactor and, by Vance’s own account, one of the most important intellectual influences of his life. Writing about a Thiel speech he heard at Yale Law School in 2011, Vance called it “the most significant moment” of his time there.²