Why did Big Tech Billionaires Fund the Distribution of Sound of Freedom? The “New Right” Technocrats are Redefining Conservative Politics and Religious Values

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

I (and many others) have already reported on the fact that the original funding to produce the film “Sound of Freedom” came from Billionaires, many of whom have direct associations with child trafficking themselves. See:

Sound of Freedom: A Movie About Child Trafficking Produced by Child Traffickers?

In an investigative article published this week on The Information, Julia Black has reported that Elon Musk’s venture capital firms rescued Angel Studios from bankruptcy last year with a $47 million funding round that allowed them to distribute the box office hit, Sound of Freedom.

In February 2021, a Mormon film producer named Jeffrey Harmon returned home to Provo, Utah, raving about an exclusive gathering he’d just attended in Austin, Tex. He’d been invited by an old friend, Stephen Oskoui, who ran Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund alongside Luke Nosek, a founding partner of Founders Fund and a member of the famed PayPal mafia.

According to sources close to Harmon, the event was attended by a who’s who of tech elites, including Oskoui, Nosek and, most memorably, Elon Musk. At the gathering, Harmon had the chance to speak to Musk and Oskoui about VidAngel, the film company founded with three of his brothers that would soon become rebranded Angel Studios.

Later that year, Oskoui and Nosek’s Gigafund led a $47 million funding round to support Angel Studios in its efforts to upend Hollywood with religious programming and other “stories that amplify light.” This summer, the fruits of that investment appeared: Angel Studios released the blockbuster film about child sex trafficking “Sound of Freedom,” which has surpassed $210 million in global box office numbers and become a rallying point for Christian conservatives and the far right.

The investment in Angel Studios was an unusual one for Oskoui and Nosek, who had never previously shown interest in the entertainment industry. The duo started Gigafund in 2017 with the intention of raising funds for Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and followed up with a $125 million investment that year. In the years since, they have followed up with bets on other firms owned by Musk as well as on companies developing nuclear energy solutions (Last Energy), photonic artificial intelligence chips (Luminous Computing) and precision genome engineering (Synthego).

So what could a  venture firm focused on frontier technologies possibly see in Angel Studios, a media company whose productions include a TV series about the life of Jesus Christ and a libertarian-themed children’s cartoon with episodes like “The Itsy Bitsy Victim Mentality”?

While a Gigafund spokesperson said Oskoui and Nosek were impressed by the Harmons’ “highly disruptive vision of a uniquely democratic media publishing house,” another answer can be found in their political and social interests over the past decade.

These ties shed light on the unlikely connections between the present-day culture wars stoked by Musk and others in Silicon Valley, and the race to unleash technologies that they believe will ultimately benefit humankind. (Full article – Subscription needed.)

This funding of religious content by Big Tech is part of what some people are defining as “The New Right”, where former PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, part of the infamous PayPal Mafia, is seen as one of their leaders. See:

Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets

They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics. (Vanity Fair – Full article.)

Big Tech Wants to Save the World though Technology and Philanthropy, and Their Brand of “Conservatism” Helps Them Meet Those Goals

Behind the names of the rich and powerful who control our nation, such as CEOs of big corporations (like Elon Musk), and bankers and fund managers such as Jamie Dimon (Chase Bank) and Larry Fink (BlackRock), which are generally well-known to the public, are those who control huge amounts of money that are on deposit in these financial institutions and fund these large corporations through venture capital firms (VCs), and their names are often in the background and relatively unknown to the public.

But they are just as important, if not more so, than other classes of billionaires, because they are the decision makers who decide where all of this money in the economy is being spent.

The two venture capitalists featured in Julia Black’s article at The Information this week are Stephen Oskoui and Luke Nosek of Gigafund, the VC that has invested the most into Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as well as many other of Elon Musk’s businesses.

Without these two venture capitalists, it is doubtful that Musk would be in the position he is in today.

They identify politically more as “libertarians” and see many of the policies on the Left as being “anti-business” and as standing in the way of their Technocratic goals.

Oskoui and Nosek are part of a growing contingent in tech—including, most visibly, former PayPal colleagues and close friends Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks—who believe that onerous regulation, bureaucracy and what they call “woke” censorship have stymied the rate of technological progress.

Only by removing these cultural and political restraints, their thinking goes, can they fling open the doors to an abundant, transhumanist and multiplanetary future.

According to its website, Gigafund seeks out “the world’s most ambitious and transformative entrepreneurs” who are looking to “solve the world’s biggest problems.”

The firm’s investment horizons span decades instead of years, and true to that mission, none of the firm’s portfolio companies has exited on the public markets or been acquired.

But Nosek and Oskoui have managed to tap into a potential mother lode by working in lockstep with Elon Musk.

To date, Gigafund has plowed more than $1 billion of its $3 billion in total raised capital into SpaceX, which has raised $9.7 billion since its founding in 2002.

With SpaceX reportedly valued on the private markets at $150 billion, Gigafund is sitting on an equity stake potentially worth billions. (Full article – Subscription needed.)

Luke Nosek is a member of the “PayPal mafia“:

Nosek, whom associates describe as charming and charismatic, hovers in the background of some of this tech epoch’s most pivotal scenes.

In 1998, alongside Thiel and Max Levchin, Nosek co-founded Confinity, the company that merged with Musk’s payments platform, the original X.com, to eventually become PayPal.

When Nosek’s co-founders were seeking a role for their enigmatic friend, they decided he would do “Luke things,” according to Jimmy Soni’s book “The Founders.”

They characterized these as counterintuitive ideas in marketing, such as the PayPal referral program that helped grow the company’s user base to over a million people in six months—a number employees tracked obsessively on a widget Nosek called the “World Domination Index.”

When tensions grew over what direction the company would take, Nosek allied himself with the team that executed Thiel’s infamous coup in 2000, which ousted Musk from his role as PayPal CEO. The episode left a strain on Musk and Thiel’s relationship for years—though somehow Musk and Nosek remained close.

Following the sale of PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Nosek co-founded Founders Fund with his PayPal colleagues Thiel and Ken Howery. Their high-risk, high-ambition investment thesis would lay the groundwork for the kind of bold stances Gigafund would take years later.

In 2008, when Musk needed emergency funding for SpaceX following two failed rocket launches, Nosek convinced Thiel to come to Musk’s aid with a $20 million infusion—one of Founders Fund’s largest investments at the time. As part of the deal, Nosek was named to the SpaceX board.

“Luke always struck me as the bridge between Elon and Peter,” said Ashlee Vance, who met Nosek while writing his 2015 biography of Musk. (Full article – Subscription needed.)

Stephen Oskoui, a Stanford graduate and Warren Buffet protégé (much like Bill Gates), has an equally impressive resume:

Meanwhile, Oskoui, a young Stanford University graduate, was bootstrapping an internet advertising services company, Smiley Media, which he launched in 2001. Like Nosek, Oskoui had a superpower—helping brands catch fire. Early on, he gave away smiley-face T-shirts to anyone who shared his site with five friends; later, he pioneered the use of A/B testing in online advertising, reaching $50 million in annual revenue on zero outside funding. While the now-defunct Smiley Media never grew to PayPal levels of success, Oskoui became a fixture in Austin’s then-small tech scene after relocating his company there in 2006.

Eventually, he wound down the business, purportedly inspired by Warren Buffet’s investment strategy with Berkshire Hathaway: “He took all the cash flows of the Smiley Media businesses…and turned them into higher returning investments such as Google, Apple, Founders Fund, and Gigafund,” said a spokesperson.

Jonathan Siddharth, the founder of talent platform Turing, recalled meeting Oskoui when he was fundraising for Rover, a content discovery app in which Oskoui became an angel investor. Siddharth called Oskoui one of the “three godfathers of virality” along with Tagged founder Greg Tseng and Nosek’s fellow Founders Fund partner Sean Parker.

“He had that rare combination of quantitative optimization plus creative optimization coupled with business savvy,” said Siddharth.

“I feel like Steve would have been a great head of growth for any of today’s leading social networking companies.” (Full article – Subscription needed.)

These technocrats are the friends of fellow technocrat and Mormon film producer Jeffrey Harmon, whom they bailed out and then funded and rebranded into Angel Studios, which is what allowed Sound of Freedom to make it to the Big Screen:

By the time Harmon, Oskoui, Nosek and Musk gathered at that February 2021 event, the libertarian-minded cohort had a number of things to be angry about. Harmon had been tweeting incessantly about Covid-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, the overblown response to the January 6 insurrection and social media censorship. Musk, who was in the midst of building Tesla’s new gigafactory in Austin, was airing similar frustrations.

Harmon also had more personal frustrations to deal with. He and his brothers had been forced to settle a messy legal battle against Disney, which had sued VidAngel, the company that would become Angel Studios, for copyright infringement. (Fortunately, the Harmons had convinced a pool of devoted fans of their religious content to donate enough money to cover their legal fees.)

Following a bankruptcy reorganization, VidAngel would be reborn as Angel Studios, its mission more ambitious than ever before. It would expand beyond religious programming—partly because the creators of its hit Biblical show, “The Chosen,” had parted ways with the studio over creative differences.

Like Oskoui and Nosek, the Harmon brothers were also die-hard libertarians and cryptocurrency devotees. By 2021, the company was in the midst of launching “Tuttle Twins,” a cartoon that teaches children libertarian values through episodes like “When Laws Give You Lemons” and the forthcoming “Wrestling With Socialism.”

The show reflected the kind of ideas Nosek and Oskoui had been preaching for years.

In March 2023, “Sound of Freedom”—which had been made years prior but which most studios and streamers passed on—finally inked a distribution deal with Angel Studios. The film tells the story of Tim Ballard, a Department of Homeland Security agent who resigns from his position so that he can rescue dozens of children from sex trafficking in the Colombian jungle. (Various details of Ballard’s story have been called into question, and Ballard recently resigned from his nonprofit, Operation Underground Railroad.)

Some of the film’s success is attributed to its unique marketing strategy, which allowed fans to pay it forward, buying tickets for strangers. Notably, the film also went viral on tech Twitter, in no small thanks to an endorsement from the Musk himself.

“I recommend putting it on this platform for free for a brief period or just asking people to subscribe to support (we would not keep any funds),” Musk tweeted on June 14, before the film’s release.
Harmon responded, “Let’s talk. This is an interesting idea.” (Full article – Subscription needed.)

Transhumanism is Central to the New Right

It is not surprising that these Technocrats that make up the “New Right” are defining Christianity mainly through Mormon lenses, as there are elements within Mormonism that find transhumanism as an acceptable religious outcome of modern technology. See:

What is Mormon Transhumanism?

Abstract

Mormon transhumanism is the idea that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is essential to Mormonism, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Mormon transhumanists are not limited to traditional or popular accounts of religion, and embrace opportunities and risks of technological evolution. Although usually considered secular, transhumanism has some religious origins and sometimes functions as religion. Accelerating change contextualizes a Mormon transhumanist narrative of common expectations, aspirations, and parallels between Mormonism and transhumanism. Mormon transhumanism has produced secular arguments for faith in God and religious arguments for transhumanism. (Source.)

Transhumanism is, of course, just a modern-day extension of Darwinian evolutionary biology, with the added belief that biological life forms can merge with technology.

This religious ideology is not only NOT taught in the Bible, the opposite is actually taught, which is the fact that only God can create life, something that technology has yet to produce, and never will.

All that modern-day “genetic engineering” has been able to produce so far, are imitations of the original creation, and in my opinion, always lower quality forms of the original created forms.

In agriculture, for example, technology has allowed genetic manipulations of certain crops, such as corn and soybeans, that give us varieties that do not die when sprayed with toxic herbicides, such as glyphosate in RoundUp.

But technology has never been able to create a new species, such as planting a new GM corn that then grows into a watermelon, or a completely different species.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.”

And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:11-12 Emphasis mine.)

When one understands how “life” is actually defined in the ancient scriptures, it is impossible to believe in transhumanism, since only God can create life. See:

These transhumanist Technocrats that are part of the “New Right” believe that technology can eventually achieve immortality and cheat death.

Both Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel have invested in “cryogenic suspension” where their bodies can be frozen after their physical death, in the hopes that technology will beat death and that they can then be thawed out and continue living in the future.

Peter Thiel is also a lead investor in “young blood” products, the harvest of the blood from children and young people to make products that extend life. See:

“Young Blood” – The Emerging Market for Products Made from the Blood of Children

These leaders of the “New Right” are billionaire technocrats who are now embracing many political issues that are also embraced by the Christian Right, but a simple investigation into their associations and the technology they are investing in clearly point to a Satanic, Freemason agenda.

When you study Freemasonry, which is the “good ole’ boy club” or “the oldest secret religion in the world“, you will learn that they commonly use terms for “light” that are actually terms for the occult, such as “Illuminati, Lucifer, etc.” See:

Insider Exposes Freemasonry as the World’s Oldest Secret Religion and the Luciferian Plans for The New World Order

So when Oskoui and Nosek’s Gigafund invested $47 million to support Angel Studios to “upend Hollywood with religious programming and other stories that amplify light“, just understand that there are multiple definitions for “light” in today’s culture.

For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11:13-15)

One of these companies that Musk’s VCs are investing in, for example, is called “Luminous”:

“We are a group of mission-driven pragmatists. Where some might see an impossible task, we see a series of difficult, interconnected challenges that can be solved with a combination of focus, resources, and smart engineering. We’re here to build tomorrow’s technological miracles.” (Source.)

These technocrats are not to be trusted! Their technology enslaves, and their belief in these “technological miracles” will be their downfall.

Billionaires are all either part of Freemasonry, or controlled by it. Why would we look to the rich to save us?

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.

For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?

But you have dishonored the poor man.

Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called? (James 2:1-7)

But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.

But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. (1 Timothy 6:6-10)

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

Warning to the Followers of Satan: God has Energy Weapons Too

“Eyes of the Devil” – The REAL Documentary that Exposes the Horror of Child Sex Trafficking

Our Duty to Shine the Light into the Darkness and Expose the Evil

Who are the Children of Abraham?

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain

An Invitation to the Technologists to Join the Winning Side

“Dataism” is the New Religion of AI and Transhumanism: Those Who Own and Control the Data Control Life

Fact Check: “Christianity” and the Christian Religion is NOT Found in the Bible – The Person Jesus Christ Is

How to Determine if you are a Disciple of Jesus Christ or Not

What Happens When a Holy and Righteous God Gets Angry? Lessons from History and the Prophet Jeremiah

Insider Exposes Freemasonry as the World’s Oldest Secret Religion and the Luciferian Plans for The New World Order

The post Why did Big Tech Billionaires Fund the Distribution of Sound of Freedom? The “New Right” Technocrats are Redefining Conservative Politics and Religious Values first appeared on Health Impact News.