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BrandRank.AI Expands Advisory Team with Industry Leaders in Marketing, Research, Technology, and Client Excellence

BrandRank.AI Expands Advisory Team with Industry Leaders in Marketing, Research, Technology, and Client Excellence – Technology Today – EIN Presswire

The Ultra-Christian Tech Bros Have Been Mingling at Mar-a-Lago

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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.”

Spokane’s aerospace Tech Hub lands $48M in federal funding for Eastern Wash. testbed

The leaders of Spokane’s American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Center Tech Hub have selected a 386,000-square-foot facility as its HQ. (ATC Manufacturing Photo)

After missing out on federal funding awarded in July, Spokane’s Tech Hub for developing advanced aerospace has landed $48 million to launch the Eastern Washington effort. The money is coming from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Tech Hubs program.

The hub is billed as a first-of-its-kind testbed facility for the U.S. and will focus on developing and manufacturing advanced thermoplastic materials for aircraft. The composite materials can replace metal components and are considered more versatile and environmentally sustainable than the thermoset composites often used for aerospace applications.

“The country that figures out how to use advanced materials to increase manufacturing capacity and aircraft fuel efficiency is going to have a huge competitive advantage,” said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., in a statement.

“These investments are critical as we work to ensure Washington state continues to lead the way in aerospace innovation and jobs,” added U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

The Spokane-based American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Center is one of 31 consortiums that in 2023 won a Tech Hub designation as part of the Biden administration’s effort to fire up engines of innovation in places that are typically off the beaten tech track.

A group of nearly 50 organizations in the Spokane area initially had applied for and did not receive a $72 million grant to set up a testbed for materials research and pilot manufacturing at a 386,000-square-foot facility near the city’s airport.

The consortium’s industry partners had pledged $8 million in matching funds to support the testbed, and members also committed themselves to making $70 million in in-kind contributions.

“We have been confident from the beginning that the Spokane-North Idaho Tech Hub holds tremendous potential for the development of advanced technologies, manufacturing, and production that will help meet critical demand for aerospace components,” said Gonzaga University President Thayne McCulloh, who added that supporters would be seeking additional funding to pay for education and workforce development.

How global technology leaders meddle with EU policy

The line between technology and politics is becoming increasingly blurred, with tech founders stepping into the political arena as both influencers and agitators.In the European Union, the sway of these ‘Technocrats’ is drawing growing attention, as their financial power, technological clout, and vast platforms are used to shape policy and public opinion.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to campaign financing or lobbying efforts. From Daniel Ek’s push for ‘fairer’ digital regulations to Elon Musk’s interventions in European political debates, tech leaders are reshaping political discourse in Brussels and beyond.
EU politicians, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, have publicly criticised figures like Musk for perceived meddling in democratic processes, raising alarms about the unchecked power of tech magnates in shaping Europe’s political landscape.
As a handful of primarily US tech founders navigate the corridors of power in Brussels, their influence is challenging the balance between democratic principles and technological progress. Are these leaders driving innovation, or are they steering Europe toward a new era of technocratic dominance?
Spending by tech founders and companies
Tech entrepreneurs have emerged as major players in lobbying and advocacy spending, often aligning their contributions with causes that resonate with their business interests or personal ideologies.
In the United States, lobbying efforts by major technology companies continue to increase on a year-by-year basis. For example, in the first quarter of 2024, Meta (formerly Facebook) spent a record €7.4 million on federal lobbying, marking its highest quarterly expenditure to date. This surge contributed to a total of over €1.1 billion in federal lobbying spending across various industries during the same period.
While comprehensive data on political donations by tech organisations within the EU remains limited, evidence suggests significant lobbying efforts.
According to LobbyFacts, In 2022, companies registered in the EU Transparency Register collectively increased their annual lobbying budgets to approximately €120 million, a notable rise from €90 million in 2015.
Big Tech dominated the top 10 highest spending companies, with six firms coming from the tech sector: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm (all U.S.-based), and Huawei (China).
These companies appear to have recognised the potential risks posed by new EU regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Digital Markets Act (DMA), and Digital Services Act (DSA). Their lobbying efforts have edged out energy companies, which previously featured more prominently in the top 10.
The tech industry as a whole was noted by Lobbyfacts for its inclusion in the 50 highest spending corporate lobbies in 2022 in the EU. Apple, for example, was not among the top 50 in 2015 (ranking 53) while in 2022 it took the third place, with a sixfold increase in its declared lobby budget since 2015, from €750k to €6.5 million. Meta also increased its lobby budget in 2022 by more than sixfold since 2015 from €450k to €6 million.
This highlights the strategic interest of global tech companies in shaping the regulatory frameworks governing digital assets in the EU.
EU tech entrepreneurs and companies are also increasing their advocacy and lobbying endeavours in Brussels through concentrated efforts, but it should be noted they do not yet match the influence or purchasing power of US tech companies.
This can include national organisations within the EU such as the German Startup Association or the French Tech Mission, or EU wide organisations such as the European Startup Network.
A notable example is the collaborative effort of four leading European blockchain advocacy groups—the European Crypto Initiative, INATBA, Blockchain for Europe, and the European Blockchain Association—which released a manifesto in November 2023 advocating from decentralised technologies in government.
Advocacy and policy influence
Beyond campaign contributions, certain tech founders are also using their platforms to advocate for specific policies.
Founders like Daniel Ek of Spotify have been vocal about the need for ‘fairer’ regulations for tech companies operating in Europe. Ek’s efforts have focused on reforming EU policies to support innovation and creativity, particularly concerning open-source AI and fair competition in the digital market.
In August 2024, Ek, alongside Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, expressed concerns over Europe’s regulatory approach to AI. They argued that complex and inconsistent regulations could hinder innovation and cause Europe to fall behind in the global tech landscape. They emphasised the importance of open-source AI in leveling the playing field and driving progress.
Ek has also been vocal about the need for ‘fair’ competition in the digital market. Spotify filed a complaint against Apple in 2019 with the European Commission, accusing Apple of anti-competitive behaviour that stifles innovation. Ek highlighted the importance of keeping fair competition at the top of the Commission’s agenda, given the amount of developers and consumers affected by gatekeeper platforms.
The Musk factor
In a more direct and incendiary way, Elon Musk’s use of X has become a key point of contention in the EU.
Musk’s interference in national debates, including sensitive topics like Ukraine and global security, has sparked criticism from European leaders. Without naming him directly, French President Emmanuel Macron stated, “Ten years ago, if someone had told us that the owner of one of the biggest social networks in the world would support a new Reactionary International and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined it.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez echoed this sentiment, claiming that Musk is “openly attacking our institutions, inciting hatred, and openly calling for support for the heirs of Nazism in Germany in the next elections.”
Sánchez’s remarks follow Musk’s public endorsement of Alice Weidel, the co-president of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose interview Musk livestream on X last Thursday.
Musk has also made inflammatory statements, such as calling German Chancellor Olaf Scholz “an incompetent fool” after the attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market and accusing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of negligence in handling cases of sexual exploitation during his time as a prosecutor. Berlin condemned these statements as “erratic,” and London denounced “those who spread lies and misinformation.”
According to reports from The Guardian, the EU Commission has been urged by several of its MEPs to act on Musk’s perceived interference in democratic processes, especially when considering the weight Musk’s statements carry in public opinion and policy discussions.
German MEP Damian Boeselager called for swift action under the DSA, highlighting the risks of Musk amplifying narratives or favouring political entities through X’s algorithms.
A spokesperson for the Commission outlined that “The Commission services, together with the German Digital Services Coordinator and with very large online platforms including X – will host a roundtable on 24 January to discuss risks ahead of the elections.”
This raises broader concerns about the unchecked power of tech founders and companies in shaping political discourse and influencing democratic outcomes.
The legacy of the Technocrats
The growing involvement of tech founders and companies in EU politics has not been without controversy. Critics argue that their influence risks creating a technocratic dynamic, where wealth translates into disproportionate political power—raising concerns about the balance between democratic principles and technological advancement.
The increasing role of tech founders, from Daniel Ek and Mark Zuckerberg’s push for open-source innovation to Elon Musk’s use of X for political influence, highlights the evolving relationship between tech and governance in the EU.
While policymakers and regulators in Europe face the challenge of managing this influence while safeguarding democratic integrity, only time will tell what the legacy of the Technocrats will be.