Turning Ploughshares Into Swords

Palmer Luckey, Joe Rogan, and the Bro-ification of War

At UNASB, we don’t listen to MAGA voices to mock them. We listen to understand them — to study how they package power, masculinity, nostalgia and grievance into something aspirational. We try to decode the vibe.

Last Monday, we spent three hours inside one of the most influential vibe machines in America: The Joe Rogan Experience. His guest was Palmer Luckey.

If you only know Luckey as a young billionaire with political opinions, you’re missing the engineering part of the story. He’s not a nepo baby. He built something real.

As a teenager, Luckey began developing what would become the prototype for modern virtual reality headsets. He founded Oculus Rift. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion. By his early twenties, he was one of Silicon Valley’s wunderkinds — proof that technical brilliance plus timing equals astronomical wealth.

He is now 33 years old and has spent over half his life building advanced electronic systems. After leaving Facebook, he founded Anduril, a defense technology company with billions in U.S. government contracts focused on autonomous weapons systems, surveillance and AI-enabled military tools.

He is now a big boy with very big toys.

He is, by any definition, accomplished. Smart. A true engineer.

And he is also a MAGA supporter, moving comfortably within the ecosystem that Rogan both shapes and reflects.

That is where the metaphor becomes unavoidable.

In the biblical book of Isaiah, there is a vision of peace: They shall beat their swords into ploughshares. Weapons transformed into tools of cultivation. Instruments of death reshaped into instruments of nourishment.

For centuries, that phrase has represented moral progress — the idea that technology and power can be redirected toward human flourishing.

Luckey represents a cultural inversion.

The engineer who once built a device designed to expand human experience — to immerse us in new worlds — now builds machines designed to dominate and, if necessary, eliminate perceived enemies. The ploughshare has become a sword.

And we are funding the forge.

Anduril’s contracts are not speculative venture capital experiments. They are taxpayer dollars. Public money flowing into increasingly autonomous and increasingly anonymous systems of force.

Luckey frames this as innovation.

He does not present himself as a warmonger. He presents as an engineer solving problems. He sees inefficiency and wants to optimize it. He sees risk and wants to automate it. He sees global competition and wants to win.

In that framing, morality becomes secondary to capability.That’s the cultural shift.

Rogan’s platform amplifies this because it rewards confidence, competence, and masculine spectacle. It prizes strength, innovation, and the thrill of competition. The allure of dominance. In that ecosystem, robots fighting robots isn’t horrifying. It’s fascinating.

Palmer Luckey doesn’t appear cruel. He seems excited, proud, almost boyish in his enthusiasm. And that is what makes it complicated.

Because what he builds is not neutral.

Autonomous weapons are not simply cooler versions of existing tools. They alter the moral distance between decision and consequence. They abstract human cost. They make force scalable and, potentially, easier to deploy.

Three hours of conversation, and very little sustained reflection on what happens when lethal capability becomes software-driven and self-directed.

Three hours of futurism and nostalgia — and almost no pause to consider what kind of world emerges when cultivation loses cultural prestige and combat gains it.

I found myself strangely conflicted.

Luckey is charismatic, brilliant, and in some ways admirable. The self-made engineer archetype still holds enormous power in the American imagination. We are drawn to competence. We root for builders.

But admiration without scrutiny is how cultural currents quietly reverse direction.

We once imagined technology as something that would free humans — from labor, from scarcity, from limitation. Increasingly, it is being sold as something that will outfight us.

Turning ploughshares into swords is not simply a defense policy decision. It is a cultural one. It reflects what we celebrate. What we fund. What keeps life going.

And while we argue over groceries and healthcare, billions of public dollars are moving from cultivation to combat — from tools that feed to tools that fight.

This isn’t inevitable.

It is a choice.

The most unsettling part of the interview was not aggression. It was what was missing. An absence of moral wrestling. An absence of hesitation about where this road leads. The engineer sees a system to improve.

The question is whether we, as a culture, still see the difference between building a world and dominating one.

In many ways, 2026 feels like a Mars moment — whether you believe in astrology or not. The cultural current favors fire, assertion, boldness. Competence is prized. Strength is aestheticized. Winning is a virtue.

Palmer Luckey embodies a version of masculinity ascendant in this moment: technically brilliant, fascinated by capability, comfortable with scale and force. It is not an angry masculinity. It is an optimized one.

But masculinity is at a crossroads. Real strength is not measured in how powerful the tool is, but in what the tool is for. The divine masculine — if we still believe in such a thing — is not defined by domination. It is defined by stewardship. It asks not only “Can we build it?” But…“What are we responsible for once we do?”

A warrior without guardianship is a spectacle. Power without compassion is performance.

It isn’t how big or good-looking your muscle is. It’s what you use it for.

If we do not remember the difference, we may wake up one day to discover its long-term cost: we didn’t shift resources to infrastructure, or that which helps people.

We simply built better swords — and called it progress.