The Moment You can Name the Trick, the Trick Stops Working

Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.PayPal and Palantir inventor, Peter Thiel flew to Rome — steps from the Vatican — to tell hand-selected billionaires that climate scientists and AI regulators are literally agents of Satan. No press. NDAs. A Nazi legal theorist as his theological blueprint. We are looking at exactly what he's selling, who's buying it, and how to make sure it's not you.Systems are built to solve massive problems and can accumulate power in ways that become permanent and hard to unwind.Here are your Cary Harrison Files Six Steps On How to Not Get Trampled By Tech. You can think of yourself now as a member of this six step program.Here’s the thing about Peter Thiel’s little Revelation Roadshow in Rome that nobody in the invitation-only palazzo is going to tell you: it only works if you don’t see it coming. The entire architecture of this grift — and let’s call it what it is, it’s a grift wearing a doctoral robe — depends on you being too busy, too exhausted, or too algorithmically marinated to notice that someone just repackaged “don’t regulate my AI” as the Word of God. The moment you can name the trick, the trick stops working. So let’s name every single one of them.Step One: Learn To Spot When Policy Gets Dressed Up As Prophecy.This is the foundational con and it’s older than Thiel, older than Schmitt, older than the Vatican itself. Whenever someone tells you that a political position is cosmically ordained — that their preferred tax rate is divinely sanctioned, that their deregulation agenda is literally fighting Satan — your first instinct should be the same instinct you’d have if a stranger at a bus stop told you God personally wanted you to wire him four hundred dollars. That instinct is called skepticism and it’s free, it works on any operating system, and no billionaire can patent it.Ask yourself one question. Just one. Who benefits materially from this theological position? If the answer is “the guy delivering the theology, to the tune of several billion dollars,” you’ve found your con. Thiel doesn’t want AI regulated. Thiel has enormous financial stakes in AI being unregulated. Thiel has now declared that AI regulation is the work of the Antichrist. This is not a coincidence requiring a theology degree to decode. This is a man putting his thumb on the scale and calling the thumb Jesus.The Vatican — which has seen some things, let’s be honest, the Vatican has been around for two thousand years and has watched emperors, plagues, Borgia popes, and the Reformation come and go — looked at Peter Thiel doing his little Antichrist lecture series in a Renaissance palazzo around the corner and said, with the weary authority of an institution that has literally excommunicated kings: quote “That man is the dark side of technology.” The two Catholic universities that were originally attached to the event backed away so fast they left brown skid marks on the travertine.Mr. Thiel is sketching a world where only powerful elites with tools and nerve can steer history. This isn’t random Silicon Valley eccentricity. You’re hearing an echo. A very old, very loaded echo that once marched in jackboots. He isn’t out there goose-stepping through Rome or calling for a Fourth Reich. That’s not the game. The game is subtler, slicker, dressed in Patagonia vests instead of uniforms. It’s about borrowing the structure of thought without the branding. The skeleton without the skull.And that’s what makes it unsettling in a way that’s less “comic book villain” and more “quiet guy at the table who’s a little too comfortable with extreme ideas.” It’s not loud tyranny. It’s intellectual permission for it. These TECH billionaires love framework. And why wouldn’t they? It’s got everything: conflict as inevitable, protests are irrational, stability is only achieved through identifying and isolating “the problem” – which is code for you.Step Two: Understand That “Too Complicated For You” Is A Power Move, Not A Fact.One of the great unspoken hustle techniques of the oligarch class is the deliberate cultivation of complexity — the sense that whatever they’re doing is simply too sophisticated for regular people to evaluate, question, or govern. Thiel does this with technology. He does it with theology. He does it with references to Carl Schmitt, who you haven’t read, in the original German, which you don’t speak, in a palazzo you weren’t invited to.Here’s what you actually need to know about Carl Schmitt: he was a Nazi. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You don’t need to read The Concept of the Political to evaluate whether Peter Thiel building his worldview on Nazi legal theory is a good or bad development. You already have that answer. It came with you from the factory.The complexity is the product. They want you to feel unqualified to have an ...