I Dream of Demon

Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and Nick Land explore Satan, the Antichrist, and the occult

These days, when it comes to writing about what’s happening, I feel a bit like the proverbial Dutch Boy standing behind a massive dam as it breaks in a thousand places at once, spewing brackish ideological water from cracks and fissures. While the original story was a fable in which the boy heroically saved his town, my lived version of it feels more like a nightmare. I try to plug the growing number of widening holes with my fingers, although I can see the effort is pointless.

We seem to have entered a post-rational world, a reality where linear logic and sequential thought moves too slowly to confront every horror that is being unleashed. I believe that logic and language still matter — perhaps more than ever. But it is quite a struggle to organize these sluggish tools to understand and counteract the deluge of intentional lies and vile deceptions from the Right, as well as the somewhat confused, murky, and faulty views of many who are not on the Right: People who mean well, but get their minds caught in various linguistic and ideological traps, or who ultimately sacrifice some level of truth and clarity to preserve social status or perhaps for survival.

This may sound like I believe I have it all figured out. I do not believe that. But I have, at least, put a lot of time into reflecting on the rhetorics, the conflicting ideologies, and the underlying dynamics pushing our system toward irredeemable breakdown. I also — rare for somebody on “the Left” — possess some level of understanding, however imperfect, of the occult (hidden, invisible, supersensible, archetypal) beings, forces, processes (however we name them) underlying the obvious stuff, such as ICE agents attacking people in the street or Trump issuing executive orders that seek to end free speech and Constitutional protections and construct a “brave new 1984” of unleashed race hatred, pseudo spectacles, and vigilante vengeance.

The Right takes the occult far more seriously than progressives or Leftists do, for the most part. This is partly because they understand, far better than progressives, how to control reality through symbol, spectacle, and language. They study these techniques — like NLP — because that is the only way to get the masses to act against their own best interests. They do this by controlling what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the “frames.”

I was struck by Tucker Carlson’s recent interview about occultism, demons, and other witchy stuff with 38-year-old Conrad Flynn, a Christian filmmaker from a Hollywood family who is seeking to launch TV projects on occultism and rock and roll and occultism and AI. There is quite a lot of nuance and detail we could delve into about what they discussed and how the topics were inflected. I don’t follow Carlson and I don’t actually know that much about him. I recall, before the last election, he said he felt he had been attacked by a demon. From his MAGA-inflected Christian nationalist perspective, Carlson is increasingly interested in occultism, Satanism, and so on, although it is not clear yet to what end (for instance, he could be mining this material for new conspiracy theories, post QANON).

Carlson opens by noting that words like demonic and spiritual warfare are filtering into mainstream political discourse, indicating a growing sense that metaphysical forces shape events. One of Flynn’s grandfathers was Robert Conrad, an actor and friend of Reagan’s, His other grandfather was a publicist for shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched (1960s Hollywood “occult lite”). Flynn learned early that “the People magazine version of reality is not the truth.” While developing a TV series on rock music and occultism, he discovered that Silicon Valley elites were involved in similar practices. “People in tech told me there are some weird kind of Aleister Crowley cults there,” he says, although he remains vague on details.

Flynn draws a distinction between those who unconsciously participate in occult practices and those who deliberately invoke supernatural forces — but seems to think both things are happening in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Carlson maintains his Christian Right “street cred” by calling abortion a ritual of “child sacrifice” and describing hallucinogens as “a portal for demonic possession.” Flynn proposes that the occult is a very wide belief system across the public, including New Age culture, astrology, and ideas of manifestation from The Secret and other bestselling books and movies. Their conflation of various kinds of irrational belief and the occult as a category made me uneasy.

Flynn focuses on philosopher Nick Land, whom Flynn celebrates — excessively — as “the Timothy Leary of the ‘90s,” and “the Velvet Underground or Brian Eno of philosophers.” Land is an English thinker, currently living in Shanghai, who was part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), centered at the University of Warwick from 1995-2003. The group blended philosophy, fiction, and occult theory into an experimental collective that treated ideas as viral entities. Core members included Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher (known for Capitalist Realism), and Steve Goodman (aka Kode9). They collaged accelerationism, Deleuze-Guattari theory, and apocalyptic techno-mysticism, with Fisher moving Left and Land moving very far to the reactionary Right, supporting Curtis Yarvin’s monarchist techno-fascism in books such as The Dark Enlightenment.

Land is, indeed, influential among the tech-authoritarians. When I attended a conference put on by Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund in Miami, Land’s books were being given out freely along with H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and (I can only assume ironically) copies of The Unabomber Manifesto. New iterations of Crowley-ism, neo-Satanism, always possess a glamor to it; this kind of unhinged occultism has a cache that meshes well with extremist ideologies of techno-libertarian Capitalism. This is why I prefer Rudolf Steiner, whose “White occultism” supports healthy balance and humility.

Thiel (one of the principle architects of Trump’s victory whose protege, J.D. Vance, is one congested heartbeat away from the MAGA throne) is fixated on the Antichrist.