The Flood

The Tech Right were considered an immutable force in Washington. Then, Central Texas flooded. What happens next?

Early in the morning on July 4th, around 1:14 am CDT, a Flash Flood Warning was issued for Kerr County, TX.

At 4:00 am CDT, the warning was upgraded to a Flash Flood Emergency as Guadalupe River surged.

Flash floods struck Central Texas, resulting in over 100 fatalities, including 104 confirmed dead in Kerr County and 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a summer camp about 13 miles west of Kerrville, TX.

Naturally, what happened next was a flurry of blame as to how this could happen, spreading across social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Reddit like wildfire. Obvious answers like “weather events are becoming more erratic due to the ongoing effects of climate change” were rebuked in favor of more exciting explanations, like the government purposefully using weather machines to target red-blooded patriotic Texans on Jesus’ America’s birthday. And given a few hours and a couple of badly placed coincidental ledes, gas-leak America honed in on their newest Public Enemy Number One:

A guy with a mullet trying to fix the drought problem with special airplanes.

Rainmaker

Rainmaker is, at its core, the all-American apple pie poster child of The Gundo, the gay sex branded militant wing of Los Angeles’ burgeoning tech-defense scene. Abundance here is served in the form of nearly empty warehouses adorned with American flags; employees are pulled from across the land but often coalesce upon young, twenty-something year old Christian men looking to escape their low-tech hometowns in pursuit of a high-tech American revival. And frankly, I don’t blame them. I was just simply too busy doing drugs with my roommates in college to aspire to anything greater, so hats off to The Gundo and their endless supply of Athenian towel boys.

It is here that we have Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding startup.

Cloud seeding is basically modern agriculture for the sky. On one side of the problem of “how to grow stuff” is soil. Cloud seeding solves for the other side of the equation — rainfall, by releasing particles like silver iodide, calcium chloride, or dry ice into clouds rich with moisture. These act as “seeds,” grabbing water vapor and accelerating droplet formation. It’s pretty simple: make water vapor heavier using nontoxic chemicals, and rain happens. Industry veterans estimate it can boost rainfall by up to 20 percent. This is clearly not enough to cook up a hurricane, but definitely enough to help parched farms or drought-stricken regions.

My ecologist friends say that cloud seeding is simply “stealing rainfall from elsewhere” by forcing precipitation over an incident zone which otherwise would naturally precipitate elsewhere. Truthfully, I don’t have a concrete opinion yet, especially since cloud seeding itself is hotly contested within the geoengineering space about whether or not it reliably works.

No matter. In The Gundo, offbeat ideas are treasured, and the academics are simply known as woke morons who place unnecessary brakes on the wheels of progress. Similarly postured ventures include Valar Atomics, a company which is intent on building fissile nuclear reactors to pull hydrocarbons out of the air to make fossil fuels. The sky’s the limit, here.

Anyway, back on topic. Rainmaker came about when its founder and CEO, Augustus Doricko (editor’s note: cool name) dropped out and joined the Thiel Fellowship. Previous to this, Doricko was working on a software venture. Today, Rainmaker captured four out of five of 2025’s weather modification initiatives in the US. This, I believe, sets them up with a big target on their back if any of this is perceived as wrong by the general public.

Which, like many things I call in advance, is more or less exactly what happened.

The Builder

Now, you probably think that I’m going to rip into Doricko here and the whole point of this article is for me to gravedance him. That’s where you’re wrong. Despite being ideologically perpendicular at best, I have a deep respect and appreciation for what Doricko and his team are doing. Why? Because I was doing much dumber shit at 25, 26 years old. I am a multimedia technician & full-stack developer described by my past clients as having “Mythbusters energy”. My biggest success is either an assistant engineering credit on a relatively popular Country Music record, or diabolically cashing out of an experimental ‘meme coin’ in a way that permanently ended my ability to safely travel to Turkey. I am an odd person comprised of seemingly endless numbers of odd jobs, now commanding a dark undercurrent of microculture which seeks both ritual penance to that which stood as an inspiration before me and an ascent to mesoculture so more people take more things less seriously. And maybe someday, that becomes macrocultural, and nobody takes anyone in power seriously ever again.

I am the Infinite Jester. Doricko and the others are aspirant Kings.

Augustus has cumulonimbus, I have CumeTV.

We are not the same.

My only true criticism has been that Doricko is not politically self-aware and vastly underestimates or miscalculates what’s happening to America writ large. It may also surprise you to learn that I’ve had a small handful of conversations with Doricko directly, mostly warning him about what he’s going up against in the hallowed halls of the Christian Right.

Earlier in 2024, I reached out to Doricko on a now-suspended X account to warn him about testifying to the FL Legislature. I grew up very, very close to several active members of the FLGOP and its legal apparatus. I understand them, their motivations, their workplaces, churches, and beliefs intimately. I told him plainly — look, you might have cozied up to the Right in order to get preferential tax cuts or thinking that we were getting the Ayn Rand timeline and Bitcoin Heaven or whatever, but what we’re actually moving towards is something more like the Iranian Revolution of 1979. And the bigger point is, you won’t be able to out-reason ideology.

Let me be extremely direct. These people in the FL/TX GOP hate you and want you to die. It does not matter who you are. It does not matter if you’re a fellow Christian. If you are not following in lockstep with their desire to build the kingdom, and you hold any sort of capital or social capital — you will be destroyed. I am not claiming these people to be inherently violent. I’m simply pointing to a pyramid they’ve constructed to throw sacrifices off of.

School shooting? Thoughts and prayers.

Bad flood? Thoughts and prayers.

Something bad happens and people die? Thoughts and prayers.

At a certain point, you have to wonder if this is becoming a ritual, or at worst — a sacrificial rite.

What I mean by this, is — there’s a distinction between someone who is Right and Christian and the Christian Right. The Christian Right isn’t even someone like Curtis Yarvin, who would be ejected from Dominionist circles as a weirdo who uses too many big words and needs a haircut. Same for Doricko, who is now spending his days fending off conspiracy theorists and Republican officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene who have him surrounded on all sides.

There’s a bigger picture here. What’s going on with Doricko and Rainmaker is a microcosm of a larger split within the American Conservative movement. The oldest and most powerful currently-relevant faction of the American Right is the Goldwater fire-and-brimstone revivalists, which I and many others inside and outside the church peg as the Christian Dominionists.

The Kingdom

How do you build a kingdom?

1. Get people to believe that you are divinely mandated to operate it.

2. Get rid of anyone who takes the feeling of divine jurisprudence away by reducing the footprint of things which are perceived as miracles.

It’s simple. Anything good that happens is because of The King. Anything bad that happens is because of God punishing you. As an instrument of The King, an instrument of God, you will avoid God’s punishment. Q.E.D.

I deliberately use this phrase building the kingdom because I first heard it when I was in high school by Dinesh D’Souza during an appearance during one of our school’s mandatory chapel sessions. In this chapel session, which was part of a series of sermons dedicated to helping students find what gifts God had given them — some to lead, some to help, others to exercise their talents to spread the Gospel, D’Souza repeated that it was each and every student’s purpose to use their talents to build the kingdom of heaven. It was everyone’s mission, when they left High School and entered College, to build Christian America in their friend groups, workplaces, etc.

I would next hear this phrase, long after my apostasy, at a bank in the same area I worked at well into my twenties. It became evident that this was a trans-national call to action. But where does it come from?

In America, there is a strain of the Religious Right rooted in the belief that Christians are divinely mandated to assume control over politics, culture, and government. This is derived from Genesis 1:26–28 (“have dominion…over the earth”) and formalized in theological schools such as Christian Reconstructionism. Dominionists advocate a theocratic vision in which biblical law guides societal institutions, similar to the political structure of countries like Iran and smaller city-states like The Vatican. It’s a relatively new idea which was born out of the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1968; many of you probably know this as the American Revival of fire-and-brimstone preaching which culminated in the rise of televangelists. Here are a few key modern manifestations:

1. New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) & Seven Mountain Mandate

   • A network of independent Protestant leaders preaching “spiritual warfare” and dominion over seven societal spheres: government, media, business, etc.

   • NAR leaders often assert divine authority to govern; some House Republicans, like Boebert, Greene, Johnson, and Cruz, align publicly with this movement.

2. Political Influence

   • Dominion theology and NAR have successfully infiltrated government via legal groups (Alliance Defending Freedom), judicial influence, and legislative bodies. Combined with a near-total capture of the Evangelical Christian Right by AIPAC, this has drastically changed US foreign policy: a considerable portion of Republican representatives believe that support for Israel is a ritual for material blessings. This has fueled the deliberate extermination of an entire population of indigenous Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, Jews and non-affiliated non-religious people in the Gaza Strip, causing a massive spike in misdirected antisemitism in response.

   • Their messaging emphasizes Christian nationalism, direct action through policy, and embedding biblical law into public institutions. It is close, semiotically, to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, well-known for her NAR ties — called for bans on cloud seeding, using the tragedy to push dominionist rhetoric: rainfall is one of God’s jobs, and you can’t take it, even if you have the ability to. This is the same sort of enforcement of “the natural order” which serves as an undercurrent to multiple NAR-associated movements across the US.

These responses reflect a broader trend: when catastrophes hit, dominionist-aligned politicians portray them as moral or divine signifiers, using spiritual framing to justify political action and reinforce Christian nation mythology. Bad thing = God’s wrath. Good thing = Friendly Santa Claus King has delivered presents to the worthy. The pattern repeats endlessly, regardless of the scale of the problem.

So at this point, you’re probably asking… how does this tie back to Rainmaker?

Burn the Witch

Here’s my prediction. As I said in the subheading of this article, the Tech Right and the Christian Right were seen as a holy alliance which together (along with the aid of top Redditor Elon Musk) gained the ability to elect Donald Trump in the November 2024 election in a landslide by mobilizing multiple disgruntled factions into a big-tent coalition. As of the time of this writing, I think this is over. Here’s why.

You see, the Tech Right — mostly disgruntled former Liberals in Silicon Valley and San Francisco with a small number of reactionary accelerationists, miscalculated profiling the Christian Right as a force of reason and not ideology. Many, like Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and others swung their personal value pendulums to the Right in hopes that they would receive more preferential policy treatment than they would by backing the Harris campaign (who were lambasted by X influencers as ‘decels’, a perjorative term for people who want to slow or stop technological progress). This is pretty straightforward and felt by everyone who has been working in this industry through the COVID-19 era and the chapters thereafter.

The Tech Right’s mistake was believing that they would be granted access to The Kingdom instead of cast aside once they had performed their role of getting Donald Trump elected for a second term. There are, ostensibly, more Faith advisors in the White House than Tech advisors. They gambled, and all of America except for a small devoted fanatical faction has lost. Ironically, and much to the probable ire of string-puller accelerationists like Peter Thiel, the ‘decels’ are winning.

When Augustus Doricko testified to the FL Legislature earlier this year, he failed to convince the state government that they should reject SB56, a complete ban on weather modification. It passed the Senate and was sent to the desk of Ron DeSantis, who proclaimed on his X account, "Florida is not a testing ground for geoengineering”.

And that was that.

Rainmaker would never make rain in Florida.

The takeaway is bigger than one small company’s battle against misunderstanding. Technology and theocracy are directly adversarial to each other. Technology, by way of education, science, and innovation, slowly allows the mysteries of the universe to reveal themselves, and each time it does, God’s domain gets a little bit smaller. And if God’s domain gets smaller, and your domain is God’s domain, that means your domain gets a little smaller.

This is the core existential fear that drives the NAR to propagate itself throughout America. They are right to be afraid. If it were up to people like me, I would use technology to eat so much of their domain that nobody would believe a single thing they say anymore (absent some good things, like ‘love thy neighbor’, most of which has long since been abandoned).

There is no rectification possible between the Tech Right (or Tech Anything) and the Christian Right (or any Theocratic Right for that matter). These are two different factions hell-bent on eventually destroying each other. The latter gorges itself on supernatural mysteries while the former abandons any sense of ethics to unveil as many mysteries as it can, meatbags in the way be damned.

The Dominant Right has now tasted blood — it’s own public officials, for months or years, have raised skepticism (or hostility) towards geoengineering. The ground is fertile for a crucifixion of Augustus Doricko a la Zuckerberg in the 2010s — endless congressional hearings, character assassinations, a federal ban on cloud seeding called the MYSTIC Act or something. One endgame scenario is that the Christian Right sacrifices the Tech Right entirely to galvanize its fanatic (and mostly uneducated) base, many of whom are starting to chomp on new conspiracy meat from the opacity of understanding what the fuck Palantir actually does. One prediction I have here is that they (the FedGov) gives a Harvey Weinstein treatment to Peter Thiel, starting with re-opening an investigation to his ex-partners, who for some reason keep mysteriously dying in Miami.

To tie it back to our publication, Vectorculture, here’s the moral of the story: never overestimate how big your movement is. The Tech Right believed itself, with the subsumption of X, to be macrocultural. Standing as obvious mesoculture against a macrocultural ideological religious force of reckoning, it is now directly in the teethy reflection of a much larger predator.

I guess we will have to wait and see what happens.