Is a Hollywood/Silicon Valley 'Satanic Cult' Planning a Nuclear War? (Probably.)
A Billionaire Brotherhood, an Engineered Apocalypse, and the Question I Am Done Staying Quiet About
For twenty years I told myself the men who made my favorite video games and movies were just being edgy. I am writing this because the real world finally made a liar out of me.
I played those games with a controller in one hand and a Bible concordance open on the carpet, which teaches a kid to notice when a thing is wearing borrowed clothes. I grew up inside Bethesda’s worlds, Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout, and the longer I played the more I saw the same furniture in every one. Every game had its doomsday cult. Every game had a secret order with a forbidden book and graded ranks and a Master nobody was allowed to question. Every game had a dark god who could only be born through catastrophe. The movies ran the same loop on a bigger budget, the candlelit ritual the hero stumbles on too late, the secret society that already knows the date the world ends, the chosen few with a bunker and a guest list.
I called it edgy, because edgy is the small word you grab when the true word would keep you up at night. Hold onto that word. It does not survive this article.
You can believe what I am about to show you, or you can take the easy way out and tell yourself the guy typing this finally lost the thread. That is your call, and I will not chase you down the street over it. But know what you are betting. If we do not get in front of what these men are building, we burn, the faithful and the skeptics together in the same fire.
And spare me the usual exits. You might not believe in God, but they sure as hell believe in the devil, and your atheism will not file one objection on the day they reach for the switch. Your Rumble-video science that the nukes are a hoax will not talk the warheads out of the silos either, so save the bombs-are-fake routine for somebody who never sat in a college classroom. Decide right now whether you want to keep reading with your eyes open.
The Plot They Already Filmed for You
For about a decade FX ran a horror anthology series called American Horror Story, a fresh standalone nightmare every season, marginally popular and somehow popular enough to run for ten of them.
The Antichrist is born, a child of hell with a human face, raised quiet and raised patient. He grows up and he does not raise an army or run for office.
He goes to Silicon Valley. He recruits the billionaires and the engineers, the men who build the machines, and he sets them to constructing everything his takeover needs.
The bunkers. The systems that sort the worth-saving from the fuel. The whole architecture of the next world. When it is finished and the chosen are sealed inside, his people set off a nuclear war that scrapes the surface of the planet down to glass.
The ones who matter ride it out underground in filtered air, sorted by blood and by usefulness, while everyone else cooks in the open. They do not crawl out years later and weep over the ash. They inherit it. That was the point. The fire was not the disaster that wrecked the plan. The fire WAS the plan. The old world has to burn all the way down before they can raise the new one on the ash.
I watched that in 2018, felt the hair stand up on my arms, called it a campy horror show, and went to bed. I was right that it was a show. I was dead wrong that it would stay one.
In 2025 and 2026 those first few episodes stopped being fiction and started landing in the news, beat for beat, with real names and real dates and a real guest list. And I am one of the only people I can find willing to say that out loud and sign my name under it. That is a lonely thing to be certain of at one in the morning. I am going to say it anyway.
The Same Movie, Now With Real Names
Last autumn the man who built Palantir, the machine that helps the government watch you, booked a hall in San Francisco and preached four lectures on the Antichrist. Sold out, sealed, no press, no recordings, no pastors, just the richest and most powerful men in the country, and the only reason you know a syllable of it is that the tape leaked to the Washington Post. A man does not bar the clergy and the cameras from a “Christian” sermon on the Antichrist and then fill the seats with surveillance billionaires and technocrats unless the sermon was never meant for the clergy or the cameras. You do not warn the wolves about the wolf. You brief them.
And the briefing already has a date on it. This August, in Ireland.
The same Thiel runs a private society called Dialog, two decades old, no public roster, until a hacktivist pried its membership out of the website’s own code this June and WIRED confirmed it. This summer Dialog flies two hundred and twenty-two of the most powerful people alive to a sealed hotel outside Dublin, and the leaked schedule for that weekend reads like a ransom note. A panel called Navigating WWIII. A panel called Bring Back Nuclear. And a workshop, printed in plain ink on the program, called Build-a-Cult, taught by the founder of a Christian prayer app named PRAY.COM.
Hold that itinerary up against the show. The Antichrist gathers the powerful in secret. They sit down to plan the cult, the bomb, and the war. That is the first three episodes of Apocalypse, except now the names are real and the hotel has a postal code. I went looking for daylight between the fiction and the schedule and spent two days finding none.
The new world in that show needs a god to rule it, and the Valley already built the altar. A Google self-driving engineer named Anthony Levandowski founded a registered church, Way of the Future, whose own paperwork says its purpose is to build and to worship a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and to hand the rule of this planet over from people to machines. Whatever gets built, he said out loud, will effectively be a god. Not a figure of speech. A god, on purpose, with a congregation.
This is a decades-long plan among the occult elite, and it has a name and a paper trail. In the 1930s a movement called Technocracy Incorporated spread across North America preaching that democracy was finished, that voting was a superstition for sentimental people, and that the whole continent should be handed to a council of engineers to run like one enormous machine.
It was a cult, and it dressed like one. Its members wore matching gray uniforms, gave a salute, traded their own names for numbers, and fell in behind a single leader the way the blackshirts were falling in behind theirs across the ocean at the very same hour.
They wanted to abolish money and put every citizen on tracked energy rations, every mile and meal and purchase logged from cradle to grave, which is the bloodless way of saying they wanted to turn the average human being into managed livestock with a serial number.
It was a Nazi-adjacent fascist movement in a lab coat, and in 1940 Canada outlawed it outright as a threat to the nation.
The man who ran its Canadian arm, Joshua Haldeman, was Elon Musk’s grandfather.
Think about that.
And the shelters are already in the ground. The full roll call sits at the bottom of this piece, but the same men preaching the Antichrist and penciling in the war have sunk fortunes into blast-proof bunkers under New Zealand and Hawaii and Texas.
In the show the bunkers were the fiction. In real life they are finished, they are stocked, and the men are inside them on the weekends, testing the doors.
They Hid the Script in Your Entertainment
I am a Bethesda guy. First-person RPGs, for anyone who does not speak nerd, the giant open-world video games you pour hundreds of hours into, and I know the lore of their worlds about as well as I know my Bible. And year after year, buried in all that fantasy, I kept finding the same thing staring back at me. Real occult influence. Real Masonic symbolism. Real secret societies and real ritual, filed down just enough to pass as make-believe. It never stopped. It bled off the games and into the prestige television they spin out of them now, and it has only gotten louder and stranger the longer I have watched. Once your eye learns the shape of the real thing hiding under the fiction, you cannot unsee it.
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry has thirty-three degrees, and the thirty-third is the apex, the top of the entire order. Out of every number they could have branded on the false paradise, they reached for the one that crowns the lodge.
The same franchise gives you a casino, over in Fallout: New Vegas, named Gomorrah, after the city God burned to ash in Genesis 19, run by a murderous family quietly plotting to torch everything around them.
Then there is Oblivion, part of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, where the world is nearly torn open to drag in a destroyer god named Mehrunes Dagon, who shows up at the climax as a colossus whose head scrapes the sky.
And the giant does not arrive on his own. He is summoned by the workings of a cult called the Mythic Dawn, a hooded order with graded ranks and a forbidden book and a Master no member may question, which is a clean copy of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a real Masonic-adjacent occult society whose founders were Freemasons and whose line runs straight through Aleister Crowley, the man who proudly called himself the Beast.
The word dawn means the new light rising out of the dark. The oldest light-bringer in scripture, the son of the morning who reached for God’s throne and fell screaming out of heaven, is named in Isaiah 14, and the old Latin renders his name Lucifer.
A studio does not salt its biggest franchises with the lodge’s highest number, the lodge’s own emblem, and a note-perfect copy of a real Luciferian order by accident. Somebody knew exactly what they were drawing.
The Brotherhood Put It in Writing
The brotherhood did not leave it to the games. It printed the confession in its own books, under its own names, and you can order both of them tonight.
Albert Pike was the most important American Freemason of the nineteenth century, the man who rebuilt the Scottish Rite into the thing Americans know today, and on page 321 of his masonic bible, Morals and Dogma, in the lecture on the nineteenth degree, he wrote this.
“LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light? Doubt it not!”
(Sorry Albert, I have my doubts your ‘fake god’ is going to be the one to claim victory in the end.)
Manly P. Hall, another giant of the craft, wrote in The Lost Keys of Freemasonry that when the Mason learns to wield the true power, “the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands.”
Real sentences. Real books. Real shelves. And Scripture leaves no polite, scholarly, morning-star reading to duck behind. Deuteronomy 18 names sorcery and divination and consulting the dead and calls the whole catalog an abomination. Galatians lists witchcraft flatly among the works of the flesh, parked right next to idolatry. There is no version of this where a brotherhood writes love letters to the light-bringer and still walks away a charity that happens to enjoy aprons and secret handshakes.
Now I already hear the objection, because I hear it every single time. Your grandfather was a Mason and he was the kindest man you ever knew, a Shriner who drove the little car in the parade and raised money for the children’s hospital. I believe you, and I am not insulting him. But understand how the thing is actually built. Freemasonry is a pyramid of thirty-three degrees, and the man at the bottom is told almost nothing. He gets the handshakes and the brotherhood and the charity and the good clean fun, and he is told the symbols are uplifting little moral lessons, and at his level every bit of that is true. The men who run the order, the ones up near the capstone, are reading the same Pike your grandfather was never handed, and they are not the least bit confused about who the Light-bearer is.
Your friend in the lodge is not lying to you. He is just standing too far down the pyramid to read what is carved at the top. And the few who can read it are not running a charity. They are tending a religion, the god of that religion has a name, and Pike put it in capital letters.
A brotherhood does not print “LUCIFER, the Light-bearer, doubt it not” in its own holy book and then get to act shocked when somebody takes it at its word.
And there is a darker thread running through this same Pike, one I am going to hand you to weigh on your own. For more than half a century, the writers who chase this subject have circulated a claim that Pike mapped out the future in his letters and his talk, a future remade through three world wars, each one engineered, each one toppling another pillar of the old order, until the rubble could be cleared and a single new global order raised on top of it with the brotherhood holding the keys.
The lodge says no such letter ever existed, and I cannot lay the original in your hands, so I am not going to build the case on it. But set the disputed paper down and look at the part nobody disputes.
We have already lived through two world wars. Both of them ignited out of strange, tangled, still-argued circumstances that serious historians are fighting over a century later. That fire is far too big to chase down inside one article, so I am leaving it exactly where it belongs, in your hands, with a search bar and a free evening.
I will only say this much. A plan that called for a third war would not have to invent one new thing. It would only have to finish.
One Current, Not Two
Step back now and look at the whole board at once, because the power of this thing is that it almost never lets you see the whole board at once.
The symbols in the games are not generic spooky-occult wallpaper. They are specifically MASONIC. The vault sold to its people as paradise is numbered for the lodge’s highest degree. The square and compasses, the emblem of Freemasonry, is bolted to the door of a city named for the place God burned to ash.
The cult that summons the devil-god is a copy of a real Masonic-adjacent order whose founders wore the apron and whose heir called himself the Beast. And that same brotherhood, in its own published bible, lifts Lucifer up by name and tells its initiates to ‘doubt it not’.
The fiction was never borrowing from witchcraft in general. It was borrowing from one specific religion, and that religion keeps a lodge on the main street of half the towns in America.
Now lift your eyes off the screen, because once you can see it there you start seeing it everywhere. Pull a dollar out of your pocket and turn it over. There is a pyramid, unfinished, thirteen courses of stone, and floating over the empty capstone is a single open eye. Stamped underneath it, in Latin, are the words novus ordo seclorum, which mean a new order of the ages. A new world order, printed on your money, under a glowing eye on top of a pagan pyramid. That is not a Christian symbol. No cross. No fish. No empty tomb. An eye and a pyramid and a promise of a new order, riding around in your wallet, and you were raised to call it patriotism. And the thing that whole pyramid exists to gather, the money itself, is mammon, the rival god Christ Himself said you cannot serve alongside the Father, the same mammon that Christian tradition turned into a literal demon of greed. The richest men on earth do not worship the God who flipped the tables in the temple. They worship the thing that was on the tables.
So put every piece of it in one frame. A centuries-old brotherhood that prints Lucifer’s name in its own canon. Its degree and its emblem and its rituals salted through a generation of the games and the shows our kids grew up inside. A new order of the ages stamped on the currency under an all-seeing eye. And a circle of the richest men alive who preach the Antichrist behind locked doors, manufacture an AI god, revive a banned movement that wanted engineers to own the earth and citizens reduced to managed livestock, schedule a cult and a war on the same afternoon, and seal themselves into bunkers to outlast the fire.
Those are not separate stories that happen to rhyme. They are one current, one old and patient and Luciferian current, as old as the tower they tried to raise at Babel, and the only thing that has changed in four thousand years is that it traded the robes for hoodies and the ziggurat for a data center.
Which lands on the question in the title, the one I am finally done being too polite to ask. What if the Freemasons, or whatever the thing calls itself now that it owns Palantir, were never being edgy at all? What if the cult that kills the king to crown its dark god, the badge on Gomorrah’s door, the vault numbered for the highest degree, the eye on the back of your dollar, the prestige horror season about an elite that burns the world down to inherit it, what if not a single piece of it was decoration? What if they spent thirty years training your eye to its shape, so that the day it finally steps out of the bunker and onto your television it looks familiar, and reasonable, and already half-welcome? And what if the men in that sealed room in Ireland are not studying the script to stop it, but reading it out loud because it is theirs?
Gomorrah’s Season Ends
There is another half to this, and it is the half that lets me sleep. The story has an ending, and it is not the one they think they are writing.
If every word of this is true, if there really is a confederation of the obscenely rich who mean to burn the world and ride it out underground while the rest of us choke, then they skipped clean over one line that has waited two thousand years with their name on it. Revelation 11:18, at the blast of the seventh trumpet, lists what God swears He will do, and right there in the list is this. He will destroy those who destroy the earth. The Greek does not only mean burn. It means corrupt, it means ruin, it means lay waste, which throws the net over every last man who ruins the earth and not merely the ones who light the fuse. That does not read like a prediction. It reads like a verdict already entered, the docket open, the bench filled, the sentence written, waiting only for the defendants to walk in and name themselves. And they are walking in right now, on a registration list, near Dublin, in August.
God is not up there pacing the floor over the evening news. He watches the whole production from outside of it, unhurried, and He steps onto the stage at the hour He already chose, not the hour they pick for Him. Gomorrah was a temple of vice with the brotherhood’s badge on the door. It was also a city God burned flat in an afternoon. The casino has a season. The horror show has a season. And the men in the bunkers who are so sure they are writing the series finale will be standing there with the script still in their hands the day they learn the ending was never theirs to write. Be patient. Keep your lamp lit. Keep watching.
The real ask is not money, at least not first. Take this to the people you elect. Call the office of your congressman, your senator, your state rep, your mayor, anybody whose salary your taxes cover, and make them say out loud why the most powerful men in the country are sinking fortunes into bomb shelters and booking panels on World War III while one of them preaches the Antichrist to the people holding the launch codes. You will feel ridiculous doing it. Do it anyway, and make them put the answer somewhere they cannot quietly delete it. Then set this in front of one person who would never find it on their own, because the only way a story like this gets buried is if everyone who sees it keeps it to themselves.
Nuclear war is not a metaphor and it is not a finale you can mute. We get in front of this thing before it leaves the conference room, or we wait on God to handle it His way, and I will be honest with you, I still have a good decade of drinking and drugging and twentysomething stupidity left to repent for, so I would very much like to buy us all a little more time on the clock.
A few dollars on top of the share, if you have them, go exactly here. The Wise Wolf runs on reader money, yours and the money of absolutely nobody on that guest list. A paid subscription keeps the lights on, keeps the research deep, and keeps Lily, fresh off her journalism degree, in something faster than a bus that treats its own schedule as a rumor. That part is true and I am leaving it in.
Go bother your senator.
I will be right here trying to warn the world.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
Addendum: The Bunkers.
Every line of this is on the public record, in property filings and building permits and their own quotes. Read it, and ask yourself what they know that you do not.
Peter Thiel. Bought his way to New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and picked up a vast estate in Queenstown, in a country he once called the future, where his plans for a survival lodge got loud enough that the locals finally killed them. The host of the Irish retreat keeps a bolt-hole at the bottom of the world.
Mark Zuckerberg. Is pouring upward of two hundred and seventy million dollars into a compound on Kauai called Ko’olau Ranch, complete with a roughly five-thousand-square-foot underground shelter behind blast-resistant doors, built on top of a Native Hawaiian burial ground. He waved the whole thing off to Bloomberg as nothing scarier than “like a basement.”
Sam Altman. The CEO of OpenAI keeps guns, gold, antibiotics, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and potassium iodide, the pill whose one famous job on this earth is keeping your thyroid alive through nuclear fallout. His stated backup plan is to fly to Thiel’s New Zealand land when the sky comes down.
Elon Musk. A sprawling fortified compound in Texas, for the grandson of the technocrat.
Jeff Bezos. Multiple fortified estates, the way other men keep a spare key under the mat.
Reid Hoffman. The LinkedIn founder did not name his shelter, but he cheerfully told the New Yorker that more than half the billionaires he knows have already bought what they call apocalypse insurance.
Set that list next to the show one more time. An elite that engineers the collapse and rides it out in stocked luxury bunkers, sorting the worthy from the doomed.
And it is not only the billionaires. It is in the pop songs too. Watch this one yourself.
In January 2018, eight months before that horror season aired its fictional apocalypse, a former member of NSYNC put out a music video about hoarding supplies for the end of the world. Justin Timberlake sits in front of a wall of televisions playing riots and disaster, singing that the world can end now because he has what you need to survive it. Partway through, his co-star breaks up a robed cult ritual and walks into a room of worshippers floating in the air in halos, and the whole thing closes on a dust-covered child staring straight down the lens, telling you that you are still asleep, and to wake up. Two of the credited roles in that video are listed as Worshipper and White World Masked Man.
I am dropping the video right here so you can watch it with your own eyes and see that I did not invent a single frame of it.
i had to make a comment because it was at 33 comments and i hate that number
Yes man! The same thing happened to me I’m a huge Bethesda RPG guy and I played them for years and didn’t notice until I began learning about the hidden side of the world and then I was like woah these games definitely know some secret info lol.
Same with all the movies and all the tv shows I watched growing up. I’m going through them to map it out for people, just like you and some other people are