In yet another troubling sign of these times, Peter Thiel can’t stop talking up the Antichrist. This month, the tech billionaire is delivering a four-part, closed-door lecture on the topic, which he is framing as “political theology,” in San Francisco. It’s part of what you might call an “Antichrist World Tour” by the PayPal and Palantir co-founder, who has already given off-the-record Antichrist lectures at Oxford, Harvard, and Bari Weiss’s ersatz college, the University of Austin.
It’s not clear why Thiel needs secrecy to hold forth on his latest obsession. He’s been pontificating about the Antichrist in public talks for years. During a June interview with The New York Times, Thiel offered extended thoughts on the shadowy figure, barely mentioned in the Bible, who according to legend (and countless pulp horror movies) will arise to help Satan kick off Armageddon. He even named a suspect: Greta Thunberg. (The interview went viral when Thiel struggled to answer a question about whether he wants the human race to endure.)
Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.
Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”
Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.
“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.
Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.
“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”
Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.
“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”
He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.
Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.
Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.
Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.
After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”
These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”
But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.
“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”
Last week, in the hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the words “demon” and “evil” trended on X as some on the right portrayed his murder as the work of supernaturally possessed Democrats and leftists. Major right-wing influencers echoed Carl Schmitt’s ideas, calling for a political crackdown on Kirk’s critics. Chris Rufo, a prominent right-wing propagandist, called on law enforcement to “infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate” the “radical left.”
This is where apocalyptic rhetoric always leads. When political opponents become evil, cosmic enemies, persecution, and violence become a sacred duty. This surge in demon and devil talk showed that Thiel has correctly identified a potent but perilous impulse in our politics.
But if tech billionaires seek to spread Christianity, they should stop hunting Antichrists and reflect on the words of Jesus Christ, who urged his followers to practice empathy and forgiveness and to care for people rather than exploit and surveil them. Instead of worrying about Armageddon, Thiel should heed the Gospels, which warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Now there’s scripture worth dwelling on—and it’s a problem that no AI, no surveillance, no power, no money can fix.
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