The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession (Wired) [View all]

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https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

By Laura Bullard
The Big Story
Sep 30, 2025 12:05 PM
The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession
Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

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Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.

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Then, about halfway through his paper, Thiel switched gears completely. As if having second thoughts, he ruled out Schmitt’s “drastic solutions” as “fraught with far too much violence” in an age of nuclear weapons. Then he shifted toward imagining “a way to fortify the modern West” that involved working around democratic institutions via misdirection, hidden meanings, and a lack of transparency—an approach he identified with the theorist Leo Strauss. (He titled his paper “The Straussian Moment.”)

“A direct path forward is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery,” Thiel said. “Still, there are more possibilities for action than first appear.” Strangely for someone so suspicious of global unity, Thiel saw one such possibility for action in the creation of a worldwide surveillance network. “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots,” Thiel said, “we should consider … the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” This surveillance supersystem, Thiel wrote, could act as “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.”

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It’s no secret that Vance is largely a product of Thiel—the billionaire has helped architect nearly every professional endeavor of Vance’s adult life, including his meteoric political rise. After Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, he published an essay in the Catholic magazine The Lamp, partly attributing his conversion to the influence of two men: Peter Thiel (“he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”) and the late René Girard. “His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale,” Vance wrote. “But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.”

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This is a VERY long piece on Peter Thiel, a deep dive into his bizarre thinking, and the paragraphs quoted above give just a tiny sampling.

Gil Duran recommended it on Bluesky, so I'm posting it here.

This piece by @laurabullard.bsky.social goes DEEP into Peter Thiel’s Antichrist fixation—a bizarre melding of biblical scripture and Nazi philosophy.

Remember: This isn't about AI. It's a much deeper story about the strange mind behind JD Vance.

Read it:

www.wired.com/story/the-re...

— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) 2025-09-30T23:41:08.698Z