Another Cabal Update

I never have been very skeptical regarding the idea of an elite, wealty cabal trying to rule the world. I've mentioned this many times before here on Augoeides. There's plenty of evidence that all sorts of plots to dominate society are devised by people with more money than they could ever spend and way too much time on their hands. The part that I have always been skeptical about is that the cabal has anything to do with occultism.

The idea that occultists and/or Pagans pose some kind of existential threat to "regular" people is ridiculous. It is nonetheless the mainstay of much fundamentalist Christian musing about what they fear is going on in the world. Their enemies can't just be garden-variety ultra-rich money-grubbing sociopaths - you know, the kind of people who actually pose an existential threat to everyone outside their income bracket. No, their enemies must somehow be metaphysically evil and depraved. As if starving the world just to amass unlimited wealth isn't evil enough.

Here's a new update on who these folks really are, or at least one particular subgroup of them. The original article was published in Wired but it is behind a paywall, so I am instead linking to this summary from Esquire that includes a link to the original piece. The cabal or sub-cabal in question is called "Dialog" and is led by perennial super-villian Peter Thiel, founder of uber-surveillance firm Palantir. And as usual, there's not an occultist in sight. Thiel himself appears to be some odd variety of fundamentalist Christian obsessed with the End Times and the Antichrist, which South Park parodied quite effectively in its latest season.

A source separately provided Wired with the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12–16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander of Europe and the head of U.S. European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021.

The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Now at first I wondered about that Build-a-cult thing, because that at least sounds like it could be occult adjacent. But no, it's being put on by a Christian organization. That means that either (A) it's about how to create a Christian cult, or (B) it's going to be full of the usual fundie nonsense about occultism that has no basis in reality.

As a point, "Bring Back Nuclear" is a good idea in my opinion. It's emission-free and new reactor designs are incredibly safe. But that's likely about where my agreement with these folks is going to end. This sort of concentrated political and financial power is always going to be dangerous, and these are the same folks pushing artificial intelligence, the end of personal privacy (for everyone but them, naturally), and accelerationism.

So it's not that the conspiracy theorists are wrong, exactly. They just wander too far into the realm of fantasy regarding the cabal and its members. People don't need to be aliens or lizards or demons or wizards to be dangerous. Massive concentrated wealth and lack of accountability can do are plenty of harm all on their own.