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I recently stumbled upon a headline that is essentially catnip to me. Beccanip, let’s say. “JD Vance Says UFOs Are Actually Demons.” Yep. Yep, of course JD Vance said that. Why WOULDN’T JD Vance say that?
And of COURSE he said it to Benny Johnson, the embarrassing far-right loser who is most famous for being a closeted plagiarist. And of course he just randomly said that in a conversation that did not involve religion in any way. Here, have a look.
This is not, in fact, as much of a non sequitur as many people may understandably think. For a start, those who study the history of superstitions and myths and weird beliefs have made clear how humans spent millennia blaming gods and angels and demons for scary phenomena they could not explain: eclipses and floods and comets and diseases. As we learned more about our planet and then our solar system and our universe, some of the remaining scary mysteries started to be attributed to creatures from outer space, an idea that really took off in the 1950s thanks to an influx of movies and television shows. Cases of sleep paralysis that were previously attributed to succubi became incidences of alien abduction. We don’t just lose silly beliefs as science and technology progresses: we incorporate science and technology into our silly beliefs.
So why is JD Vance now marrying the two ideas, and in a way regressing back away from a technological explanation to a religious explanation? Well, I can’t say for sure because happily I do not live in his head. Maybe he truly, fervently believes what he’s saying and he just happened to come up with the idea all on his own. But knowing what I know about JD Vance, I have another hypothesis.
First, let me lay out the basis: for a start, JD Vance has a very well-known history of being a snivelly little lying piece of shit who will say or do absolutely anything to get ahead. Most famously, perhaps, he called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler,” like, in a derogatory way, and not long after he was happily joining him on the campaign trail as a candidate for Vice President. He also wrote a book years prior to that, and marketed it by pretending to be a concerned liberal. He also married a nonwhite immigrant and later announced that nonwhite immigrants were terrible people who eat cats and dogs. And on and on and on.
The other basis for my hypothesis is how JD Vance managed to gain all of his political power despite being an obvious weasel with zero charisma: because Peter Thiel paid for him to get that power. Essentially, every win JD Vance has ever won was thanks to Peter Thiel and his billions of dollars. Thiel hired Vance to his venture capital firm, then gave him funding to co-found his own venture capital firm (which then invested in Rumble, back when JD Vance was still “The Hillbilly Elegy guy”), then funded his successful Senate campaign, and then sat down with him and Trump to smooth over all that “Hitler” stuff to make way for Vance’s chance to be VP. Peter Thiel owns JD Vance.
That’s also probably why in 2019, JD Vance officially converted to Catholicism, which is Peter Thiel’s religion of choice. It’s also probably why Vance also decided that he really loves the philosophy of René Girard, a Catholic scholar who was so influential that he spawned a group of fans known as Girardians, which I’m pretty sure is also now the name of a weight loss medication. The most famous Girardian on the planet is Peter Thiel.
Okay, so what does all that have to do with demons and aliens? Well, Girardians like Peter Thiel and JD Vance believe in something called “mimetic rivalry,” which, put simply, is the idea that we all tend to imitate one another’s desires, and that that eventually and inevitably leads to violence. In order to find relief from mimetic rivalry, we “scapegoat”: we all agree to turn our aggression on a single target. When the entire world bands together against a single scapegoat, we find a moment of peace before the Antichrist ushers in the End Times.
I will once again point to my own history of growing up in a Baptist church where I was taught end times theology: I was explicitly told that the Antichrist would be the guy who was running the United Nations. This was extremely confusing for me as a child because in school I learned that the UN was a good thing, and I couldn’t really square how it would end up being a tool of the Antichrist. These days, I’m older, wiser, and I’ve seen way crazier belief systems, so yeah, I sort of get it: Jesus was the first “scapegoat” that the world turned against, so the world uniting against one victim means the world is the problem and the victim is not.
But as I’ve mentioned when discussing Christian Zionism, I was taught that the Antichrist’s arrival was not only inevitable, but also a good thing. We Christians who had already welcomed Christ into our hearts would be brought to heaven, and only the Jews and Muslims and atheists and whatnot would have to deal with the worst of the End Times. But some people, like Peter Thiel, have clung on to a word that pops up briefly in the Bible: the katechon, or “that which withholds”: a figure who can delay the End Times. Some people, like Peter Thiel, are desperate to identify and lift up the katechon.
If you have some time, I highly recommend you read this incredible article from Laura Bullard, published by Wired last September. In it, she describes the foundation of Thiel’s belief system, and why he became so obsessed with the Antichrist that he’s been on a lecture tour about the topic for the past two years and is now holding court in the Pope’s backyard, much to the chagrin of the mainstream Catholic Church. Essentially, Thiel became obsessed with both Rene Girard and Carl Schmitt, an early 20th century political theorist who agreed that a united world would usher in the apocalypse, and so he identified a katechon who he was sure would keep the world fractured and thus safe: Adolf Hitler. Schmitt joined the Nazis, excited to be part of Operation Stop the Antichrist, only to watch as the world literally banded together to defeat the Third Reich, forming the United Nations, which is now what so many Christians believe is the vehicle of the Antichrist. It’s actually impressive to be as wrong as Schmitt was.
Despite that, Thiel seems to think that the main thing Schmitt got wrong was announcing that he had found the katechon. Girard’s mimetic rivalry suggests that when we fight our opposite, we become like them, and that is why Schmitt and Hitler failed. Thiel is taking a different tack: he has spent his life investing his billions of dollars into technologies that he believes will hold off the End Times.
At a Girardian seminar Thiel hosted at Stanford in the summer of 2004, Thiel delivered a paper in which he lauds and quotes Schmitt, and says that Schmitt would surely choose to have responded to 9/11 by launching a Holy War against Islam. But now that nuclear weapons are a thing, Thiel suggested the better path forward was working around Democratic institutions, because America’s constitutional machinery prevents a direct path forward. Instead, he thought the answer was a global surveillance network that “operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.” He had just launched Palantir the year prior, and he brought on the CIA as his first client shortly after the conference.
So. Why do I think JD Vance is suddenly, and seemingly randomly, combining the ideas of high tech aliens with medieval demons? For a start, to redirect the conversation in a way that his owner, Peter Thiel, is sure to notice and appreciate on a break between lectures on the Antichrist in Rome.
And according to some very annoyed Girardians mentioned in the Wired article, it may also have something to do with the fact that JD Vance has no real understanding of Girard’s ideas, and is using “scapegoating” the completely wrong way. As Bullard wisely points out, though, does he misunderstand it? Or does he correctly guess that “scapegoating” a population of immigrants as pet-eaters can coalesce a base of voters into harmony, enough to get him elected?
Now, I’m not going to give JD Vance any credit for running a game of 5D chess: this is pretty basic politics in the 21st century, unfortunately. But I do think that his off-putting, clumsy, and awkward comment about demons and aliens isn’t quite as random as it seems. I think he’s genuinely attempting to synchronize these concepts in a way that he hopes will net him rewards, both from his wealthy Antichrist-obsessed owner AND his conspiracy-brained base of voters, in preparation for his future run for President. Here’s hoping the End Times happen before he’s successful.