The tech mogul is amping up his apocalyptic rhetoric—and adding a dangerous dose of extremism into the already-fraught culture war.

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.

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