Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller, and the Antichrist Walk into a Bar in Minneapolis — Part 1

Gods in the Machine series; Chapter 6, Part 1 — From Manifest Destiny to Medicaid Records: How Eugenics Became an Algorithm.

Spring 2025: an ICE agent in Oregon testifies under oath about an app on his phone. Palantir Technologies built the app. It’s called ELITE (Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting for Enforcement). It pulls together data from government databases, including Medicaid records. Then, the app assigns a confidence score to each person’s current home address. Afterwards, — BOOM! — it populates a map with clusters of people who might be undesirable and deportable.

The agent describes it as being like Google Maps, except what it shows you is where to go to find people to arrest. By January 2026, that map is guiding operations in Minneapolis.

So, ELITE is a healthcare database, built on the promise that people could seek medical care without that information being used against them. Now, it feeds an algorithm that scores human beings by the likelihood that agents will find them at home. While the data was collected for one purpose, it is being used for another.

In reality, the tool was built for military applications abroad. Meanwhile, it is running domestically. And the man who holds a significant financial stake in Palantir, Stephen Miller, is the chief architect of the policy the tool executes.

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to the beginning of the ideology that made it possible. And when you do, you find something that should by now be familiar from my Substack series “American Exceptionalism: How the Ideology that Keeps on Taking Actually Works”: a permission structure built to justify the suffering of people society deems undesirable.

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The vocabulary is new. The mechanism is not.

The Garage Was Always a Myth

The standard Silicon Valley origin story goes roughly like this: brilliant, contrarian individuals working outside established institutions built technologies that transformed human life. The garage is the central image: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Cupertino. Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. The lone genius, the breakthrough, the world remade.

The actual history is more instructive: DARPA funded the internet. Federal research universities produced the basic science. The semiconductor industry grew on military contracts.

GPS, touchscreens, the browser: these are the foundational technologies of the digital economy that came out of publicly funded research. Researchers developed the overwhelming majority of that research originally for military and intelligence applications.

The garage mythology sits on top of this foundation the way a house sits on a slab — invisible from the outside, load-bearing throughout. The Mythology drives a self-serving Narrative: since the technology came from individual genius — tech bros figure — rather than public investment, then the tech bros who commercialized it owe NOTHING to the public whose taxes funded the underlying science.

If the disruption was “purely” creative (which it was not) rather than mostly extractive, then the wealth it generated belongs entirely to the disruptors; i.e., the tech bros.

The garage story is a property claim wearing a creation myth’s clothes.

The ideological arc that produced this Mythology runs from the counterculture of the 1960s through the libertarian turn of the 1980s and 1990s. It crystallized in the synthesis that people like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and the founding generation of Wired magazine assembled in the early 1990s. The Whole Earth Catalog crowd had genuinely believed in community, access, and decentralization.

What the Wired generation did was take that energy and route it through libertarian economics and technological determinism. The synthesis produced a worldview in which markets and technology together would solve every problem the government had failed to fix, and in which the people building that technology were, by definition, the vanguard of human progress.

The Chosen People had found a new frontier: the Mission had gone digital. Just as the Puritans adapted American Exceptionalism to incorporate Manifest Destiny, Silicon Valley took on the mission to save the world.

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A Very Old Line

Here is the through-line running through 500 years of American “progress:”

Westward expansion: “we are building something unprecedented, we are uniquely capable of this mission, therefore the people bearing the cost are less important than the destination we are building toward.”

America’s Forever Wars: “we are uniquely qualified to determine how other nations should organize themselves, our power is benevolent even when it is lethal; therefore, the civilians dying in drone strikes are an acceptable cost of the mission.”

Mass incarceration: “we are maintaining social order, the populations we are removing from civil life threaten that order, therefore their removal is a reasonable cost of the safety we are building.”

Techno-utopianism: “We are building Artificial General Intelligence that will cure disease, end poverty, and expand human capability beyond anything previously imaginable. We are uniquely capable of this mission; therefore, the people harmed by current deployment of these systems are an acceptable cost of the future we are building toward.”

The mechanism of Exceptionalism and Exclusion is the same across all four Narratives:

A chosen agent, exempt from ordinary moral constraints by the magnitude of The Mission, determines that the exclusion and even genocide of certain people are collateral damage in the discharge of The Mission.

What changes in each epoch is the vocabulary. What stays constant is the permission structure that places The Mission above the people in its path.

Techno-utopianism is American Exceptionalism with a change of clothes. Manifest Destiny took root in Silicon Valley. Then, the chosen people rebranded, and Exceptionalism upgraded from national to civilizational scale.

What the series “American Exceptionalism: How the Ideology that Keeps on Taking Actually Works” traced through its chapters how Indigenous genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, eugenics, the forever wars, and mass incarceration are all facets of the Exceptionalist rationale.

Now, the reasoning wears a hoodie.

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In the long term, we’re all dead anyway

Effective Altruism and its more philosophically ambitious cousin, longtermism, represent this permission structure dressed up in academic sophistry.

The core longtermist argument runs as follows: there could be trillions of people living in the future whose welfare depends on the AI development mission continuing without constraint. Given that number, the harm to present people from current AI deployment is miniscule in the grand scheme of things.

The future beneficiaries justify the present victims.

This is the oldest move in the Exceptionalist playbook wearing a philosophy professor’s tweed jacket.

The Founders could write “all men are created equal” while holding slaves because the republic they believed they were building was so historically significant that certain people of the time (the Indigenous, Africans, and women) had to be classified outside the calculation.

The settlers moving west could frame genocide as Progress because the civilization they were building was so unprecedented that the people being destroyed were an acceptable cost of its construction.

Longtermism runs the same calculation.

What longtermism licenses, concretely, is the deployment of systems that harm undesirable people in service of a hypothetical future people. The welfare of the future desirable people supposedly depends on The Mission continuing.

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Palantir’s ELITE system pulls Medicaid data to map deportation targets. People who sought healthcare now find that data predicting their likelihood of being home when agents arrive.

This harm is real, present, and identifiable.

The longtermist framework makes casualties an acceptable cost, because The Mission is large enough to dwarf any present damage in the utilitarian calculation.

The people being culled are not stakeholders in The Mission. They are, in the language of Exceptionalism across all its historical forms, the cost of The Mission.

Utopia is just a click away

But longtermism is only one of the ideological streams feeding this outcome.

Here is where the story gets considerably darker: the techno-utopian permission structure did not arrive at this political moment alone.

It arrived in confluence with two other redemptive teleologies, each with its own chosen people, its own predetermined destination, and its own logic for making present suffering acceptable.

Teleology is the idea that things are best understood by where they’re headed or what purpose they serve, rather than by what caused them in the first place.

So, American Exceptionalism has its own teleology. Exceptionalism claims that the United States was always destined to lead the world.

Exceptionalism treats American dominance as the predetermined finish line of history rather than the result of specific choices, lucky breaks, and a great deal of violence along the way.

So we have three streams of Mythology that have shaped the Palantir moment: American Exceptionalism, Long-termism, and the Antichrist.

Huh?

The Antichrist?

Where did he (is the Antichrist a He? Probably).

The Antichrist story is a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish theologian’s vision of the end of history, which has become an obsession with Peter Thiel.

John Nelson Darby assembled his version of The End of Times and the Coming of the Antichrist in the 1830s, which American settlers took on with zeal in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’ll elaborate on his contribution to American extremism in Part 2 of this chapter.

Weirdly, The Rapture turns out to share more architecture with Silicon Valley’s savior-of-humanity complex than anyone has been entirely comfortable acknowledging.

The Deportables and What Comes Next

Let’s return to Minneapolis. And let’s go back to the agent with his phone, and the phone with the map populated with clusters of deportables. Recall, each of the dots on the map has a score attached to each address. The score reflects the confidence the AI system has that a resident is home at the time.

Peter Thiel did not invent the idea that a specially chosen group, building something unprecedented, gets to decide whose suffering counts as the acceptable cost of The Mission. He built a company that operationalized the ethos.

The data infrastructure was assembled across decades of military and intelligence contracts.

The philosophical permission structure was provided by longtermism and Effective Altruism.

The policy architecture was designed by Stephen Miller, who holds a financial stake in the instrument of The Mission’s execution.

The Mythology of “the lone visionary building the future” licensed the entire operation by branding the technology as Progress rather than as what it actually is: eugenics.

In reality, ELITE is a system that assigns numeric fitness scores to human beings and generates maps of where the low-scoring ones live.

That is what technology built in service of a civilizational mission to redeem the worthy looks like when it arrives on domestic streets. The tools developed for Fallujah and justified by the salvation of future billions, runs on the healthcare records of people who went to a doctor to be healthy, contributing members of their communities.

The confidence score tells the agent how likely it is that someone is home. It does not tell him whether the data is accurate. Nor does it display whether the address is current. Nor whether the person living there has done anything beyond existing in a country that has decided that their presence here is suddenly inconvenient.

The algorithm does not ask those questions. The Mission does not require it.

What makes the present moment different from earlier iterations of this mechanism is the Convergence of Narratives .

The technology is more powerful, the surveillance infrastructure more total, and the philosophical permission structures more numerous than at any previous point in American history.

Three separate ideological streams, each with centuries of institutional development behind it, have arrived at the same destination simultaneously.

Understanding that convergence is the subject of Part 2 of this exploration. It begins, appropriately enough, with Peter Thiel, while a student at Stanford studying under a French philosopher.

It’s then that Thiel arrives at the conclusion that the Antichrist is a live analytical category for understanding where history is going. He pops the world view into his pocket protector, and then builds the infrastructure to ensure he ends up on the right side of Trump and the Rapture.