American Caesar
How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sep 15, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A chilling and urgently needed exposé on the forces pushing American politics and religion toward a post-constitutional autocracy
From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural pulpits, from Catholic monasteries to Beltway think tanks and Project 2025, a convergence is underway. Reactionary Catholics dream of a new Christendom. Protestant pastors invoke divine right over democratic rule. Tech billionaires, led by the likes of Peter Thiel, argue that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Their solution? A singular ruler to bring “order” out of what they see as liberal chaos.
With a theologian’s sensibility, a journalist’s touch, and a historian’s eye for how movements evolve and adapt, Dr. Bradley B. Onishi traces the strange alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism. At the center of it all is the desire for an unbound executive—one man, beyond checks, beyond balance, beyond democracy. This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s an organized attempt to abandon the American experiment altogether. A former insider turned academic expert, Onishi brings unmatched depth to this investigation—tracing his own path from evangelical pastor to co-host of Straight White American Jesus, the nation’s leading religion and politics podcast.
As the 2024 election fades into history and a new political order takes shape, American Caesar is not just a warning. It’s a map of how we got here—and a call to act before the Republic as we know it becomes just another chapter in a forgotten history book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unlikely alliance of conservative Catholics, reconstructionist Protestants, and tech autocrats wants to replace U.S. democracy with a monarchy, according to this trenchant and troubling examination from religious studies scholar Onishi (Preparing for War). Though their ideas differ in the details, the author shows how these three groups have recently found an essential overlap: democracy, they believe, with its emphasis on individual rights, is "the fundamental cause of civilizational decline," and the only solution is a second American revolution to install a dictator who could "impose the necessary... order." Looking backward, Onishi traces how these illiberal views evolved from "the ignored outskirts of our society," originating with mid-20th-century extremists like anti-democratic Catholic thinker L. Brent Bozell, who promoted Franco's fascist Spain, and " ‘crazy uncle' of American evangelism" R.J. Rushdooney, who saw democracy as "anti-faith." Turning to the present, Onishi emphasizes how mainstream these once fringe ideas have become, profiling each group's most influential voices in the Trump administration's orbit, including, among the Catholics, Heritage Foundation president and "shepherd of Project 2025" Kevin Roberts; far-right Baptist pastor William Wolfe, who believes America needs an "autocrat fashioned in the model of a Julius Caesar"; and tech monarchists like Curtis Yarvin, who sees inalienable rights as "ancient mystical horseradish." It's a dire warning that enemies are at the gates of American democracy.
