Part 9: The Billionaire Prophet: How Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Theology Justifies Dismantling Democracy
Part 1: The Dark Enlightenment Lens: Understanding the Slow Strangulation of Democracy
Part 3: Silicon Valley’s Unholy Alliance: How Tech Wealth Powers the New Religious Right
Part 4: From Heidegger to Here: The Philosophical Roots of America’s Alt Right
Part 5: Accelerating Toward Autocracy: Nick Land’s Vision and Its Implementation
Part 7: The Hyperstition President: How Trump Became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
In September 2025, Peter Thiel stood before a sold-out audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to deliver the first of four private lectures on the biblical Anti-Christ. The event was off-the-record, invitation-only, and tickets sold out within hours. The billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the man who bankrolled J.D. Vance’s rise to the vice presidency and built the surveillance infrastructure now being deployed by the Trump administration, was not there to discuss technology or politics. He was there to preach about the end times.
The cognitive dissonance was astounding. Here was a man whose company, Palantir Technologies, has secured major federal contracts to create what critics describe as an “AI-powered super-database on all Americans” (Reich, 2025). A man whose technology provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with “almost real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements” as part of Trump’s mass deportation program (NPR, 2025). A man who deliberately named his surveillance company after the corrupted seeing stones from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings - instruments used by Sauron to manipulate and deceive (Reich, 2025). And he was warning his audience about the dangers of unified global control.
In Part 8 of this series, we examined how Thiel built the technological infrastructure for authoritarian surveillance. We documented the contracts, the capabilities, and the deliberate symbolism of the palantir, a tool designed to “distort truth and present selective visions of reality” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). But we left one question unanswered: How does a man who builds unified global surveillance systems justify spending two years warning against unified global surveillance? The answer lies in the apocalyptic theology Thiel has been developing since 2023, a framework that elevates his political preferences to cosmic significance, and provides theological justification for dismantling democracy itself.
The Anti-Christ According to Thiel
Thiel’s apocalyptic roadshow began in earnest in 2023 at a conference of scholars devoted to his chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. In a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris, Thiel delivered a nearly hour-long account of his thoughts on Armageddon to dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it. But the lecture would become the template for a speaking tour that continues to this day (Bullard, 2025).
By Thiel’s telling, the modern world is paralysed by fear of its own technological power. Our “listless” and “zombie” age, he argued, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, and a culture mired in the “endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web” (Bullard, 2025). But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological apocalypse - the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway artificial intelligence - modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Anti-Christ.
According to some Christian traditions, the Anti-Christ is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is synonymous with any attempt to unite the world through collective action. “How might such an Antichrist rise to power?” Thiel asked his Paris audience. “By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist’s slogan: peace and safety” (Bullard, 2025). In other words, the Anti-Christ would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from catastrophe.
Thiel offered concrete examples of what he sees as potential manifestations of the Anti-Christ. He pointed to philosopher Nick Bostrom, an AI safety advocate who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology to prevent existential risks (Bullard, 2025). But it was not just Bostrom. Thiel identified a whole “zeitgeist of people and institutions focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost” as potential Anti-Christs (Bullard, 2025). Climate activists like Greta Thunberg, who warn of environmental catastrophe and call for international coordination. Public health authorities proposing pandemic preparedness measures that might require collective sacrifice. International bodies coordinating responses to global threats. Anyone advocating for collective action to address shared dangers becomes, in Thiel’s framework, a potential harbinger of apocalyptic tyranny.
The framework creates a double bind. Humanity faces two threats, Thiel argues: technological calamity and the Anti-Christ. But the latter is far more terrifying. For reasons grounded in the theories of René Girard - who argued that human desire is fundamentally imitative and that this mimetic rivalry leads to violence - Thiel believes that a unified global regime, even one established with benevolent intentions, could only lead to “decades of sickly, pent-up energy” culminating in an all-out explosion of “civilization-ending violence” (Bullard, 2025). Better to risk nuclear war, climate catastrophe, or rogue artificial intelligence than to accept the tyranny that would come from trying to prevent them through democratic coordination.
When asked at the Paris lecture what might be done to navigate this impossible situation, Thiel’s answer was revealing. Fend off the Anti-Christ, he said. But beyond that, he claimed he was not in the business of offering practical advice. This was a curious position for a man who has spent decades funding politicians, shaping policy through government contracts, and building the technological infrastructure for state surveillance. The contradiction would only become more apparent as Thiel’s apocalyptic theology developed.
From Nazi Jurist to Silicon Valley
To understand where Thiel’s ideas come from, one must trace an intellectual lineage that runs through three figures: René Girard, Wolfgang Palaver, and Carl Schmitt. The last name should give pause. Schmitt was the German legal theorist who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and provided the legal justification for Hitler’s consolidation of power, including writing the most prominent defence of the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 purge in which Hitler eliminated his political rivals (Bullard, 2025). As Wired put it in a recent investigation: “You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world...starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist” (Bullard, 2025).
René Girard, who taught at Stanford where Thiel took his class in the 1980s, developed what he called “mimetic theory,” the idea that human desire is fundamentally imitative, that we want what others want, and that this creates rivalry and violence. Girard argued that societies traditionally resolved these conflicts through the scapegoat mechanism, uniting against a common victim. Christianity, in Girard’s view, was unique among religions in siding with the victim - Christ on the cross - and thus exposing the violence at the heart of human culture (Bullard, 2025). Thiel identifies as a “hardcore Girardian” and has used mimetic theory to explain everything from tech industry competition to political conflict.
But Girard’s influence on Thiel’s apocalyptic thinking has been filtered through a second figure: Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year-old Austrian theologian from Innsbruck. At that Paris lecture in 2023, when Thiel claimed that Girard offered no practical advice, a voice from the audience corrected him. “It’s not true what you said about Girard,” the man said in a recognisably Austrian accent. “On many occasions, young people asked Girard, ‘What should we do?’ And Girard told them to go to church” (Bullard, 2025).
Thiel squinted toward the speaker, trying to determine who was challenging him. Then recognition dawned. “Wolfgang?” he asked. It was Wolfgang Palaver, whom Thiel had last seen in 2016 when both delivered eulogies at Girard’s funeral. After this correction, Thiel began incorporating the line into his lectures. “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in October 2024 (Bullard, 2025). This spring, he cut off podcaster Jordan Peterson to insist: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church” (Bullard, 2025).
But Palaver’s influence on Thiel goes far deeper than this single correction. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, analysing the Nazi jurist’s lesser-known theological and apocalyptic thinking. Schmitt had developed a concept called the katechon, a term from Christian eschatology meaning “that which withholds” or restrains the end times. For Schmitt, politics required a strong sovereign who could decide on the “state of exception,” suspending normal democratic procedures to prevent chaos. This thinking provided the intellectual framework for Hitler’s consolidation of power, justifying the elimination of democratic constraints in the name of preventing a greater catastrophe.
Palaver’s papers critiqued Schmitt’s apocalyptic theology, analysing how it had been weaponised to justify authoritarianism. But Thiel appears to have appropriated Palaver’s scholarship for the opposite purpose. In his recent lectures and interviews, Thiel’s language often mirrors Palaver’s papers directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing them, but using the ideas Palaver critiqued as a positive framework rather than a warning (Bullard, 2025). Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Palaver’s influence, even as he borrows extensively from the theologian’s analysis of Schmitt.
The transmission is clear: Schmitt’s authoritarian theology, developed to justify Nazi dictatorship, filtered through Palaver’s critical scholarship, appropriated by Thiel as a framework for opposing democratic coordination in the twenty-first century. The historical parallel is not subtle. Schmitt argued that democracy was too weak to prevent catastrophe and that a strong leader must suspend democratic norms to save civilization. Thiel argues that democratic attempts to address global threats will lead to the Anti-Christ and that we must resist unified governance even at the risk of technological apocalypse. Both use crisis rhetoric and apocalyptic theology to justify dismantling democratic institutions. Both frame the choice as between authoritarian control and civilizational collapse.
The Palantir Hypocrisy
The contradiction at the heart of Thiel’s project becomes impossible to ignore when we examine what his company actually does. Part 8 of this series documented how Palantir has created an “AI-powered super-database on all Americans,” integrating data from social media profiles, financial transactions, travel patterns, and other personal information into what critics describe as a “panopticon of unprecedented scope and sophistication” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Palantir has received over $113 million in federal contracts, including an $800 million Pentagon deal and a $30 million contract with ICE to provide “almost real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements” for the administration’s mass deportation program (Notes From Plague Island, 2025).
This is precisely the kind of surveillance system that Thiel warns will lead to tyranny. A global database integrating multiple sources of information. A system promising “peace and safety” by identifying and tracking threats. Technology that enables a centralised authority to monitor and control populations. By Thiel’s own definition, Palantir is “Anti-Christ” technology.
The company’s name makes the contradiction even more explicit. Thiel deliberately chose to name his surveillance firm after the seeing stones from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; instruments that, in the story, fall under Sauron’s control and are used to manipulate and deceive. The literary reference reveals his understanding of his own project: a tool of authoritarian control masquerading as a neutral technology.
So how does Thiel reconcile building the very infrastructure he claims to fear? The answer lies in who controls it. Thiel does not oppose surveillance, he opposes democratic surveillance. He does not fear unified data systems, he fears they will be used for collective democratic purposes rather than to serve the interests of what he sees as the right kind of leaders. The issue is not the tool but who wields it.
This distinction is crucial to understanding Thiel’s entire political project. Democratic surveillance - systems designed to protect public health, address climate change, regulate dangerous technologies, or ensure economic fairness - represents the Anti-Christ because it serves collective welfare and constrains individual (particularly billionaire) power. But authoritarian surveillance - systems that track immigrants for deportation, monitor political dissidents, or enable a strongman to consolidate control - becomes the katechon, the restraining force that prevents the chaos Thiel believes democracy creates.
The class dimension of this theology is impossible to miss. Only the extraordinarily wealthy can afford to reject “peace and safety.” Working people need collective protections: public health systems to prevent pandemics, environmental regulations to ensure clean air and water, labour laws to prevent exploitation, social safety nets to cushion economic shocks. When Thiel frames these collective protections as the path to the Anti-Christ, he is providing theological justification for policies that serve billionaire interests at the expense of everyone else.
This distinction runs through all of Thiel’s political thinking. In his 2009 essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian,’ Thiel wrote that he had “come to doubt that freedom and democracy are compatible” (Thiel, 2009). He has praised Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionary ideas about replacing democracy with CEO-style rulers. He has funded politicians like J.D. Vance who embrace postliberal and Christian Nationalist ideologies that explicitly reject pluralistic democracy.
Part 8 asked the critical question: “Will the Trump regime use an emerging super-database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics?” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). Thiel’s Anti-Christ theology now provides the answer. Surveillance is only dangerous when used for democratic coordination; for addressing climate change, preparing for pandemics, regulating artificial intelligence, or protecting vulnerable populations. When used to dismantle what Yarvin calls the “Cathedral” of democratic institutions, to target immigrants for deportation, to monitor political opponents, it becomes a tool of the katechon - the restraining force that prevents the chaos Thiel believes democracy creates. The inversion is complete. The surveillance state is not the tyranny to be feared. Democratic coordination is.
Theology as Political Weapon
The practical implications of Thiel’s Anti-Christ framework become clear when we examine what it opposes. By defining the Anti-Christ as anyone who “warns of disaster and seeks to prevent it” (Deal, 2025), Thiel provides theological justification for resisting virtually any form of collective action to address shared threats.
The Reverend Kevin Deal, a priest at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco, published a devastating critique of Thiel’s theology in the San Francisco Standard on October 1, 2025. Deal points out that only one book in the Bible mentions the Anti-Christ - the first letter of John - and in context, the reference “was heard as a rebuke against the fear of a specific apocalyptic figure.” John wrote that there were “many antichrists,” anyone who works against the mission of God in the world, which John defined as a mission of love (Deal, 2025).
“Thiel is not using the term Antichrist in any kind of historical or biblical context,” Deal writes. “By his own admission, his larger goal is in part to garner attention. Thiel knows that Antichrist is a ‘flashy’ term and will bring attention to the political and economic theories he is espousing.” If he billed his talks as “Fears about tech regulation and globalisation,” Deal notes, “they would get much less attention. Instead, he is cynically co-opting the language of faith to further his own goals” (Deal, 2025).
Deal’s critique cuts to the heart of the matter. “I wish Thiel would consider meeting Jesus as he is: a marginalized radical at the outskirts of an empire, friends of the poor and sick, who was crucified for threatening the powerful. I wish Thiel would speechify less about the Antichrist and spend more time trying to be like Jesus” (Deal, 2025). Christianity, traditionally understood, sides with victims and calls for care of the vulnerable. Thiel has inverted this, using Christian language to justify the concentration of power among billionaires, the surveillance of immigrants, and the dismantling of institutions that protect the powerless.
The theological inversion serves a clear political function. By framing collective action as cosmic evil, Thiel shields his political preferences from rational critique. Policy disputes become cosmic battles. Democratic compromise becomes theological surrender.
This is elite messianism in its purest form. Thiel positions himself as a prophet with elevated spiritual understanding, able to see threats that others miss. His vast wealth becomes evidence of his insight rather than a source of bias. His political preferences are elevated to divine will. And those who oppose him are not fellow citizens with different views but potential manifestations of apocalyptic evil.
The Dark Enlightenment’s Theological Completion
Thiel’s apocalyptic theology does not exist in isolation. It answers a question that has haunted this entire series: how do you convince people that democracy itself - not just flawed governance but the very principle of collective self-rule - is evil? How do you make the dismantling of democratic institutions feel not like loss, but like salvation?
Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment provided the intellectual architecture. His concept of the “Cathedral” - the network of universities, media, civil service, and NGOs that sustains democratic governance - identified what needed to be destroyed. His RAGE proposal (Retire All Government Employees) offered the mechanism: systematic elimination of the civil service that makes democratic administration possible. But Yarvin’s framework, for all its influence in certain circles, remained a niche ideology. It could explain why democracy was inefficient, corrupt, or misguided. It could not explain why democracy was evil. It could not transform political preference into spiritual necessity.
That transformation required something Yarvin could not provide: cosmic stakes. Thiel’s theology supplies them. Simply, democratic coordination leads to the Anti-Christ. Collective action to address shared threats is the path to apocalyptic tyranny. The Cathedral is a manifestation of the forces that would unite humanity under the slogan of “peace and safety” and deliver us to catastrophe. What was political theory becomes holy war.
The theology also completes the alliance between Silicon Valley libertarianism and Christian Nationalism that we examined through J.D. Vance’s rise to the vice presidency. That alliance always seemed improbable: tech billionaires who want freedom from democratic regulation joining forces with religious conservatives who want freedom from pluralistic culture. What could unite radical individualism with religious communitarianism? What could make libertarian tech founders and Christian Nationalist voters see each other as allies rather than antagonists?
Thiel’s apocalyptic framework provides the answer. Both groups can unite against a common enemy: the Anti-Christ of democratic coordination. For tech billionaires, that coordination takes the form of antitrust enforcement, privacy regulation, and labour protections. For Christian Nationalists, it takes the form of secular pluralism, LGBTQ+ rights, and separation of church and state. Thiel’s theology allows both to frame their political preferences as resistance to cosmic evil. The billionaire opposing tech regulation and the Christian Nationalist opposing secular education are not pursuing different agendas: they are both fighting the Anti-Christ. The alliance that seemed cynical becomes, in this framework, spiritually necessary.
The philosophical pedigree matters too. Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity and rejection of Enlightenment universalism - the same thinking that led him to support the Nazis - provides intellectual respectability for rejecting democratic equality. But Heidegger is difficult, abstract, inaccessible to mass audiences. Thiel’s theology translates Heideggerian philosophy into the language of American evangelicalism. The rejection of universalism becomes resistance to the Anti-Christ’s false promise of unity. The critique of technological modernity becomes spiritual warfare against those who would seduce us with “peace and safety.” Philosophy becomes prophecy.
And then there is Palantir. Throughout this series, we have documented how Thiel built the surveillance infrastructure that enables authoritarian control: the AI-powered databases, the ICE tracking systems, the Pentagon contracts, the integration of data sources into what critics call a “panopticon of unprecedented scope.” The contradiction seemed inexplicable. How does the man building unified global surveillance spend two years warning against unified global control?
The theology resolves the contradiction by distinguishing between surveillance in service of democracy and surveillance in service of the katechon. Democratic surveillance systems represent the Anti-Christ because they serve collective welfare and constrain power. Authoritarian surveillance becomes the restraining force that prevents the chaos Thiel believes democracy creates. Palantir is not the problem. Democracy’s attempt to regulate or democratically control such technology is the problem.
The pieces now fit together with terrible clarity. Yarvin’s political theory identifies what must be destroyed. Christian Nationalism provides the mass movement and electoral strategy. Silicon Valley wealth provides the funding and technological infrastructure. Heidegger’s philosophy provides the intellectual tradition. And Thiel’s apocalyptic theology provides the cosmic justification that transforms the entire project from political preference to spiritual necessity, from policy debate to holy war.
This is not abstract theory. The theological framework is being deployed right now to justify the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of democratic institutions. The government shutdown that began on October 2, 2025, is presented not as governance failure but as what Trump calls an “unprecedented opportunity” to “clear out dead wood” (BBC, 2025). The elimination of 300,000 federal workers through DOGE becomes the implementation of Yarvin’s RAGE concept, now blessed with theological purpose (NPR, 2025). The defunding of the Council of Inspectors General and other oversight bodies is framed not as the removal of accountability but as dismantling Cathedral control, as resistance to the Anti-Christ (Politico, 2025).
When politics becomes cosmic warfare, democratic norms become impossible to maintain. Compromise requires seeing opponents as fellow citizens with legitimate but different views. Thiel’s theology makes this impossible. Opponents are not wrong, they are evil. They are not mistaken about policy; they are potential manifestations of the Anti-Christ. There is no middle ground between salvation and apocalypse, no room for the messy negotiations that democracy requires. The Dark Enlightenment has found its cosmic dimension, and democracy hangs in the balance.
The Authoritarian Endgame
The historical parallels demand attention. Carl Schmitt provided the intellectual framework for Nazi Germany’s transition from democracy to dictatorship. The sovereign, he argued, “is he who decides on the exception,” who determines when normal rules no longer apply (Schmitt, 1922). Thiel’s apocalyptic theology serves the same function for our era, using multiple crises to justify dismantling democratic constraints in favour of CEO-style rule and surveillance infrastructure controlled by the right people.
As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has documented, “Since January 20, the Trump government has sought to crush democratic rights and institutions, intimidate the media and individuals who dissent from its policies, and destroy oversight and inspection mechanisms meant to hold government officials accountable” (Ben-Ghiat, 2025). Thiel’s role as elite enabler fits a pattern Ben-Ghiat has traced across authoritarian transitions: wealthy backers provide the infrastructure and intellectual framework while the strongman provides the political will. Economic crisis generates fear. Fear is channelled toward scapegoats - immigrants, the “Cathedral,” democratic institutions themselves. A strongman emerges promising to restore order. Elite enablers like Thiel provide the surveillance technology, fund the politicians, build the intellectual framework, and wrap it all in religious language that makes opposition seem not just wrong but wicked.
What is being normalised should terrify us. Billionaires are positioning themselves as theological authorities, claiming special insight into cosmic truths. Political preferences are being elevated to divine mandates. Democratic coordination is being framed as apocalyptic evil. Authoritarian control is being presented as spiritual necessity. And the infrastructure for surveillance and repression is being built and deployed while its architect warns against the very thing he is creating.
Part 8 of this series noted that modern authoritarians possess technological capabilities their 1930s predecessors could only dream of (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). Now we see the ideological framework that justifies deploying those capabilities. The theology transforms surveillance from a threat to democracy into a defence against the Anti-Christ. It transforms the dismantling of oversight from the removal of accountability into spiritual warfare. It transforms the concentration of power among billionaires from oligarchy into the katechon that restrains chaos.
The Prophet’s True Message
Return for a moment to that lecture hall at the Commonwealth Club in September 2025. Peter Thiel at the podium, warning about the dangers of unified control while his company integrates global surveillance data. The billionaire prophet preaching fragmentation while building empire. The theological justification for authoritarianism, wrapped in Christian language, borrowed from Nazi jurists, delivered to sold-out crowds in San Francisco.
This is not random eccentricity. It is not billionaire philosophy disconnected from practical politics. It is the ideological superstructure for the systematic dismantling of democracy, and it is being implemented in real time.
Part 8 of this series concluded that “the most troubling aspect of Thiel’s success is not his wealth or his technology, but how completely he has normalised the unthinkable” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). Thiel “has made authoritarianism seem inevitable,” creating “a sense that resistance is futile, that the surveillance state is simply the price of technological progress, that democracy was always doomed to fail.” His “greatest achievement” may be “convincing a free people to surrender their freedom voluntarily” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025).
Thiel is building what he claims to oppose. The palantir’s gaze, as Part 8 noted, “is not coming, it is already upon us” (Notes From Plague Island, 2025). But Thiel does not see this as a warning - he sees it as salvation. The surveillance state is not the Anti-Christ; it is the defence against it. The dismantling of democratic institutions is not authoritarianism; it is resistance to tyranny. The concentration of power among tech billionaires is not oligarchy; it is the katechon that restrains chaos.
In biblical terms, the Anti-Christ is that which opposes love, justice, and care for the vulnerable. By this measure, we can identify the true Anti-Christ in our midst: the concentration of wealth that leaves millions in poverty while billionaires play prophet, the surveillance systems that track immigrants for deportation, the dismantling of institutions that protect workers and the environment, the theological frameworks that justify letting the planet burn rather than accept collective action to save it.
The palantir’s gaze is upon us. The only question is whether we will recognise what we see.
References
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Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020) Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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