Representative Tom Kean Jr. hasn’t cast a vote in more than a month—and no one in his party has heard from him.
|
Democratic members of Congress know they have an age problem—and it’s hurting them.
|
The vote happened in the early hours of the morning, while most of America was still asleep.
|
Twenty-second-century historians tracing the ascent of American technocracy from quirky garage tinkerers grooving on the Whole Earth Catalog to sinister oligarchs enacting Philip K. Dick prophesies may locate its apogee in four lectures that Peter Thiel (net worth: $29 billion), chairman of the data-mining giant Palantir and a co-founder of PayPal, delivered at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in September and October 2025. The subject was the Antichrist.
"In the seventeenth, eighteenth century," Thiel explained, "the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science." As Thiel spoke, dozens of protesters—some in devil costumes—marched outside bearing signs that said things like The End Is Near/ Palantir Is The Path/ Thiel Leads The Way. "In the twenty-first century," Thiel continued, "the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer." Greta is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change activist. Eliezer is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Berkeley-based critic of artificial intelligence, or AI.
|
|
