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Last Thursday, as wildfires continued to blaze through Los Angeles, firefighters appeared to be no match for the deadly combination of winds and flames. But one entrepreneur in the LA suburb of El Segundo had an idea. Augustus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geoengineering startup called Rainmaker, announced on X his attention to help. “Rainmaker will do what it can,” he posted, “starting Saturday.”
Doricko may not be a tech celebrity like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he isn’t a nobody, either—at least not anymore. Just four years ago, Doricko was a lowly undergrad conservative activist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. But for Doricko as for many young aspiring tech entrepreneurs, a college degree was not a prerequisite for success.
Last year, PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. In Doricko’s case, that venture was Rainmaker, which seeks to increase the US water supply through cloud-seeding technology. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Doricko believes his work is the solution to an urgent problem. “Cloud seeding is a necessary technology to avert worsening drought,” he posted recently.
But he also believes his work manifests God’s will. In August, he told his followers on X, “One of our Lord’s first commandments was to subdue the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind control the weather for the sake of building the kingdom of God on earth and stewarding it well.” In another post, he wrote, “Dams modify rivers, Jesus was a carpenter who modified forests (cut trees) to build houses. We aim to serve God.” Cloud seeding is just the next step in the evolution of man’s relationship with nature for the greater glory of the Divine.
Doricko didn’t say exactly how he and his few dozen employees planned to help with the fires. But the practical details seemed to be beside the point, at least to his admiring followers on social media who responded to his post. “Augustus promises to do what he can to stop the bleeding,” enthused one fan on X. “He plans to command the heavens and make the angels cry for life to prevail.” Another added, “Godspeed brethren, may the good Lord bless you and keep you.”
Doricko is just one example within a rising tide of American Christianity that appears to be cresting in California’s tech enclaves. Recent news stories have described a new generation of tech bros flocking to church in the famously secular San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, discovering Christianity through PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and investing in a Christ-centered real estate enclave in rural Kentucky. There are the usual reasons for this surging interest in Christianity like yearning for community and searching for the greater meaning of life. And for those immersed in a tech culture that has long been obsessed with longevity, the promise of eternal life must offer a special appeal.
But there are other forces at play, which revolve around a very specific kind of Christianity: that of the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z, ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. While the TheoBros’ beliefs are extreme—many of them think women shouldn’t be able to vote, and that the Constitution has outlived its usefulness and we should instead be governed by the Ten Commandments—their movement is moving out of the fringe. In part because they are very savvy about broadcasting it on a multitude of platforms—on podcasts and YouTube shows, on X, at a seemingly never-ending round-robin of conferences. Doricko attends a church that is part of the TheoBros denomination in an LA suburb, as do others in his El Segundo tech community and beyond.
The TheoBros also have made inroads to the upper reaches of political power. In November, President-elect Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church in Tennessee that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and his children attend a school affiliated with the network of classical Christian schools that Wilson helped found. JD Vance has brushed shoulders with the TheoBros, too—he spoke at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference, where Wilson also spoke, and he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a powerful group of Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who once served as the editor and publisher of the unofficial TheoBro magazine, American Reformer.
The TheoBros’ burgeoning connections with the Trump administration mark a divergence from the style of Christianity that the MAGA world had once embraced. During Trump’s first term, he forged connections with leaders in what’s known as the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement whose adherents believe that Christians are called to take over the government. Those leaders went on to become instrumental figures in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that led to the Capital insurrection of 2021. Yet the TheoBros are, for the most part, much more militant in their political and social beliefs than the New Apostolic Reformation adherents. Recent pieces in American Reformer have bemoaned the “feminization” of Christianity, lambasted the “willfully childless feminists in the media,” and predicted that “traditional American holidays that reflect our Christian and Anglo heritage will become battlegrounds in the contest over the soul of America among the disparate groups now populating the country.”
TheoBros are also more tech- and media-savvy than many of their New Apostolic Reformation counterparts. As Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades, told me when I interviewed her for a piece on the TheoBros last year, “They are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”
With the prominence of figures like Elon Musk and Peter Theil, the tech industry has gained a greater profile in Trump world, and so too are the links between the Trump administration and the TheoBro universe deepening. Shortly before Christmas, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club hosted a group of tech investors for a luncheon of butternut squash soup, roasted cod, and Trump Chocolate Cake (double chocolate cake, dark chocolate glaze, vanilla ice cream) for dessert. Among the firms represented was 1789 Capital, the firm that Donald Trump, Jr. joined in November. 1789 Capital’s founder is American Reformer’s Buskirk.
Another attendee was a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Isaiah Taylor, a friend of Rainmaker’s Doricko. Taylor runs a startup he founded in 2023 called Valar Atomics, which says it is “scaling nuclear energy for heavy industrial power and clean hydrocarbon fuel production.” He too currently lives in El Segundo, but he is originally from Moscow, Idaho, which, in 2023, he described on X as “a silly little town in northern Idaho (pop. 20k).” He lived there, he wrote, “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community,” specifically Christ Church, the reformed evangelical church founded by Wilson, the TheoBro patriarch.
Today, with Doricko as a fellow worshipper, Taylor attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a southern California member church in the denomination that Wilson founded. In 2023, Taylor wrote on X that Wilson had been “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” Wilson has written that he sees technology as something like a divine gift. “If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth. “We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources.”
In keeping with that philosophy, Taylor told The Information’s Julia Black in December that he saw his company’s mission as spiritual in nature. “I think God created the world full of abundant energy and we have to unlock it,” he explained. On X, he put it differently. “I’m a Christian environmentalist,” he posted in 2023. “I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a garden. So naturally I want to reindustrialize the United States and build 1000 nuclear reactors.”
The hypermasculine aesthetics of TheoBros would seem to fit right into the El Segundo tech scene, the overwhelmingly male members of which refer to themselves as “’Gundo Bros.” In an article last February, Forbes’ David Jeans and Sarah Emerson described guys in defense tech startups who “pump iron while they code, host weekly bonfires on the beach, and shotgun energy drinks.” Vanity Fair’s Zoë Bernard observed the Gundo Bros’ “outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their lord and savior Jesus Christ.”
The Gundo Bros have a way of casually mixing the realms of tech, masculinity, and Christianity. (“El Segundo is where you can: try to end scarcity, reverse engineer meteorological RF equipment, machinate about geopolitical GTM strategy, eat milk and steak for lunch, scheme w cracked engineers, squat a 5×5 of back squats w a disgusting amount of ammonia, praise god,” posted Doricko last year. In another post, he mused, “The physiques at Gold’s are markedly better after church hours on Sunday. Angelically sanctioned anabolism.”)
Many of the Gundo Bros have benefitted from the largesse of tech investor Marc Andreessen, a major Trump supporter, friends with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and close adviser to Trump’s newly convened Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. “Big Tech spent a decade doing everything possible to be the best conceivable progressive ally,” Andreessen posted on X in November. “They got treated with utter contempt, pounded daily, crucified in return. A full rethinking is required.” To that end, through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, he started a $500 million fund for tech companies, several of which have headquarters in El Segundo, which are “solving our country’s most vexing challenges.” Andreessen has TheoBro connections, too: Last month, Forbes reported that Andreessen backed New Founding, an investment firm that aims to build a conservative Christian community and real estate empire in rural Appalachia. Andreessen didn’t respond to emailed questions from Mother Jones.
Another powerful force in the El Segundo scene is Discipulus Ventures, an accelerator program, funded in part by Andreessen Horowitz, that says it seeks to build “a network of the smartest, most contrarian individuals whose aspirations to change the world have been overlooked by their respective universities and companies.” Discipulus’ guiding principles are “religion, patriotism, and family”; its participants must have “a strict devotion to truth and goodness.” The cohort of 10 entrepreneurs starts each day with a 6 a.m. workout, then the participants learn from more seasoned entrepreneurs. Mentors include Rainmaker’s Doricko and Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen’s firm.
It doesn’t look like Doricko’s company was able to make much progress against the fires over the past few days; the only evidence on X is a single post on Friday, by a Rainmaker engineer, showing a photo of some people holding a large white balloon attached to a spool of what looks like kite string. Doricko didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment for this piece. But he and his friends are aiming higher, anyway. In October, he reposted an X post from Valar Atomics’ Isaiah Taylor. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right categories,” Taylor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logistics? Who gets to own the weather? Who gets to own energy? Think bigger.”
Meanwhile, the TheoBros’ mingling with MAGA elites is likely just getting started. This week, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Valar Atomics’ Taylor, who also didn’t respond to a request for comment, is scheduled to return to Mar-a-Lago, this time to present at an event called Nuclear Energy Space & Defense Tech Investor Summit. “I’ll be speaking on Nuclear Energy and the Founding Fathers,” he posted on X in early January. “Come ready to restart America’s energy engine. We’re gonna fix this thing.”
