Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got some attention recently for taking time away from developing weapons and surveillance systems to give a four-part, closed-door lecture series on the antichrist. This foray into Thiel’s theological interests, along with comments he has made in interviews with folks like Ross Douthat of the New York Times and Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, mostly received the sort of response one would expect when a billionaire starts making biblical proclamations. There was discussion on how literally to take these claims, plenty of jokes about Thiel outing himself as the antichrist, as well as more in-depth analysis about his connections to various religious and political scholars who seem to be influencing his thinking on the subject, particularly the Nazi legal apologist Carl Schmitt.
While all of that analysis was valuable, one thing that seems somewhat obscured in all of this is that, when you strip away all the academic jargon and pop culture references, Thiel is still just advancing the same (((anti-globalist))) paranoia that has animated right-wing politics in American since the Civil War: the simple fear that people with power are going to destroy freedom in their attempts to make the world better. What is fascinating is that these paranoid fantasies are rightly derided when they come from the likes of Alex Jones, but they’re treated – by some at least – with seriousness and respect when they come from more esteemed individuals like Peter Thiel.
When I read or listen to Thiel’s views on the antichrist, with their overwrought references to Christian eschatology and flowery prose about the always looming end of history, I’m reminded of the absurd High Weirdness book The Illuminatus! Trilogy, where the plot centres on concerns that shadowy forces are seeking to immanentize the eschaton. This exotic sounding and typically pejorative phrase means something like trying to bring about heaven on earth, or at least bring about the end of the world on one’s own terms.
The phrase entered common usage via the work of political philosopher Eric Voegelin, a refugee from the Nazis who blamed their ideology on a utopian form of Christianity. It was then popularised, primarily amongst conservatives, by William F. Buckley Jr. through the slogan “don’t immanentize the eschaton!”. Buckley firmly believed that progressives were moving too quickly in their push for equality through desegregation in the US and decolonialism in places like South Africa, and that doing so ignores the fundamentally fallen nature of reality with disastrous consequences for society.
As a countercultural text, The Illuminatus! Trilogy plays with terms like ‘eschaton’ and ‘antichrist’ in part to poke fun at occultism and theologically driven politics, but the emphasis also captures a genuine concern of conservatives and libertarians that trying to improve the world is often used as compelling justification for oppression.
When Peter Thiel talks about the antichrist, he’s genuinely afraid of those who seek to immanentize the eschaton. On this view, the antichrist is anyone who uses talk of peace and safety as pretext to seize power and radically reshape our world into some sort of dystopian hellscape. Whether it’s Greta Thunberg with her ecological arguments for limiting technological development, or democratically-elected officials seeking to regulate that development in any way, Thiel is afraid of someone who will use high-minded ideals to trap humans in a totalitarian one-state nightmare.
The nature of that hellscape isn’t always clear or coherent: sometimes it’s a transhumanist technocracy ruled by an omniscient surveillance state, other times it’s an anarcho-communist depopulation bloodbath where the survivors are meant to return to Rousseau’s idyllic state of nature where they happily subsist on bugs. Whatever the details, the common theme is that humans are deprived of the freedom and improved quality of life they were experiencing under free-market capitalism.
Back when 1975 when The Illuminatus! Trilogy was written, fear of busy-bodies seeking to immanentize the eschaton was a more bipartisan concern, with the counterculturists of the left fearing oppressive regimes undermining their liberties in the name of the moral majority. Today, though, any concerns about the dangers of social progress on the left are dwarfed by the pervasive paranoia on the right that (((globalists))) are scheming to force us all into a totalitarian state, and not the good Christian kind like the one proposed in Project 2025 that President Trump is currently enacting. In this sense, Thiel joins Buckley and other conservatives in decrying authoritarianism when it’s used against their goals, while still believing that authoritarianism in the hands of genuine elites is the best hope for Western Civilisation.
What matters most here is that Thiel isn’t saying anything new, but he is saying something that is extremely dangerous and has driven hundreds of years of reactionary violence on the right. Fundamentally, his concern is indistinguishable from the one that Alex Jones promotes on a daily basis as a pretext for making holy war against the left. Thiel’s version shouldn’t be seen as anything more meaningful because he’s rich and can cite sources like an academic. It’s still just antisemitic conspiracy theories bubbling up as vague concerns about authoritarian overreach. That’s all it is. If he had lived sixty years ago, his antichrist would have been FDR. If he’d been a contemporary of Buckley, it would have been MLK.
While Thiel’s eschatological proclamations lack deeper meaning, they are worth taking seriously because Thiel has the wealth to turn those beliefs to extremely harmful actions. In the 2025 movie Mountainhead,about a fictional meeting between tech billionaires, Steve Carell’s Thiel-esque character casually argues that they should engage in a coup against the US government if it doesn’t maintain regulations favourable to their goals. If the real-life Thiel is serious about preventing attempts to immantentize the eschaton, and there’s no reason to think he’s not, it’s likely that he will engage in increasingly drastic behaviours targeting individuals and systems that he perceives as seeking to limit harms or promote social progress by curtailing human liberties.
Given how broad that fear is, that can mean a lot of targets, though consistently, historically, it has also meant Jewish puppet masters. Whoever he decides to target, they will likely join Gawker as yet another case in point for why billionaires are a threat to the very freedom Thiel claims to cherish.
