A Spooky Halloween With Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

A Gothic Telling of Peter Thiel’s Rivalry With the Antichrist

Peter Thiel seems determined to associate himself with the Antichrist. For years now, the venture capitalist has been making headlines with his private, off-the-record lecture series on the subject and with bizarro podcast appearances — such as when he struggled to answer Ross Douthat’s question on whether he thinks the human race should endure. (“There’s so many questions implicit in this.”) But with influential Silicon Valley denizens seemingly in competition with one another to put forward the most unrelatable and sometimes unhinged ideology while also pushing a technology that could complicate humanity’s future, Thiel’s fixation on the Antichrist might, in 2026, solicit little more than a shrug. 

This is in part because, unlike this new wave of tech moguls and weirdos preaching New Age “isms,” such as rationalism or effective accelerationism, Thiel’s ideology is a comparatively known quantity. He wrote in 2009 that he doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He was the only major tech leader to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. He bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that put Gawker out of business. The company he founded, Palantir, has contracts with cities, states and the federal government to power surveillance by the police and ICE. For fans of liberal democracy, he’s become the first true tech villain of the internet age. That a man so many people take, figuratively, to be the antichrist would be obsessed with the literal antichrist is too cute by half, and perhaps just another Silicon Valley ego trip. 

At least, that’s how I had been thinking about it until I got an email offering to take me “Inside Peter Thiel’s Nashville Antichrist Lectures.” And maybe the Halloween spirit got the better of me, because I clicked.

The link came from Pirate Wires, a right-wing tech site founded by Mike Solana, the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund — a venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. Being familiar with the site, I wasn’t expecting an objective account. But who cares? I was being taken inside, and that had its perks. As my insider correspondent explained, although the event was off-the-record, he was allowed to bring a notebook (after the first day) and permitted to write about its contents. 

To the extent that I can summarize four days of billionaire mumbo jumbo that took my inside-access correspondent some 10,000 words to convey, the crux of Thiel’s concept of the Antichrist comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:3 where the apostle Paul says, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” This verse has often been cited as a prophecy of the end times; the Antichrist brokers a false state of security with humanity before breaking it and leading them to damnation. In Thiel’s telling, the phrase “Peace and safety” is a stand-in for the global regulatory state exemplified by institutions like the United Nations or the FDA. For Thiel, the age of modernity, and thus progress, ended sometime between the development of the nuclear bomb and the moon landing. Post moon landing, we’ve been in a state of stagnation where concerns over safety have trumped our innate desire to innovate and solve problems like the pesky issue of our own mortality. AI won’t move the needle enough: Thiel wants us to become fully transhuman and go to Mars.

Borrowing heavily from Carl Schmitt, Thiel identifies the Antichrist as an attempt to unify nations into one global world order. He believes that current apocalyptic fears about climate change, nuclear war, or AI-driven doomsday are manifestations of the Antichrist intended to make us afraid of our own technology and lure us into a unified nanny state under a false sense of security. We will follow the Antichrist according to Girard’s memetic theory, which explains humans fundamentally seek to imitate other humans. Copying others, says Girard, can lead to memetic rivalry or violence in which case communities restore unity by directing the violence at a scapegoat (the crucifixion of Jesus being the ultimate example). In Thiel’s reading of Girard, scapegoats are necessary, and thus a single world order without nation states competing and scapegoating each other would lead to the ultimate unleashing of violence — e.g. armageddon.

Thiel contrasts the Antichrist with the katechon, another biblical term referring to the power that stops the Antichrist from accomplishing his mission. For example, Schmitt saw Hitler as the katechon to the Antichrist that was the Soviet Union. (He admitted later he was wrong.)

Thiel won’t definitively put a name to the Antichrist (or on the katechon), but he does offer some requirements needed to fill the role. He/she should be young (ideally 33), popular, likely a politician, and will talk obsessively about the coming apocalypse. He has repeatedly offered up climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky as potential candidates. Donald Trump isn’t the Antichrist, according to Thiel, but his presidency could be the katechon.

Apparently modeled on another four-part lecture series on the Antichrist given by theologian and philosopher John Henry Newman in 1835, Thiel’s lectures, as depicted by my inside-access correspondent, do evoke the lyceum of the antebellum era. Set at a Free Masons lodge in downtown Nashville, my correspondent described the scene as attended mostly by men in suits packing tin canisters of Zyn. I could see Thiel at the podium, resembling any number of mid 19th century charlatans explaining to a willing audience how they had fused religion and science with some new theory or invention. I happen to have a particular fondness for this era because it was these charlatans that inspired one of my favorites writers: Edgar Allan Poe.

I thought of Poe as I read Theil’s interpretation of the Antichrist. Specifically, Poe’s story William Wilson. It’s about a privileged man who in his youth unknowingly encounters his consciousness transformed into a physical entity identical to him in appearance. This doppelgänger follows and antagonizes him through boarding school, elite universities and into adulthood. Ultimately, there is a confrontation between the two rivals and William stabs his antagonist. In classic Poe fashion, when William views himself in a mirror, he sees that he has stuck the knife in himself.

It was written a hundred years before Girard introduced his idea of the mimetic double, where rivals become so fixated on copying each other that the relationship inevitably ends in violence. I wonder if Peter Thiel has ever read it.

Ultimately, what persuaded me there might be something worth considering in Thiel’s lectures comes near the end of my correspondent’s account where he notes: “At one point, Thiel joked that perhaps he is not introspective enough to realize that he himself is in fact the Antichrist, but that in any case he fails to meet the (self-identified) criteria.” It took William Wilson looking in the mirror to see the truth.

Explaining Nicki Minaj’s Inexplicable (Very Explicable) MAGA Turn

Nicki Minaj, the rap star now under (real? joking?) consideration to be the next White House press secretary, says she has already benefitted from cozying up to President Donald Trump — and could be eyeing more.

Her political odyssey has been extreme. Here’s Minaj in 2020, saying she was “not gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon.” 

“I get that a lot of people don’t like him for obvious reasons. But what stuck with me was the children being taken away from their parents when they came into this country,” she said. “That really bothered me because I was one of those immigrant children coming to America to flee poverty. And I couldn’t imagine a little child going through all of that, trying to get to another country because they didn’t have money in their country, or whether you’re fleeing from war.”

And here’s her now: “I am probably the president’s number one fan, and that’s not going to change.”

And here are some things that happened in her life meanwhile: 

• January 2020: Her brother, Jelani Maraj, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for repeatedly raping his 11-year-old stepdaughter 
• September 2021: She seemed to buy in to some COVID-19 conspiracy theories, posting a much-memed tweet about her cousin’s friend’s “swollen testicles” and “impotency” that he suffered as a vaccine side effect (public health officials quickly debunked the connection)
• July 2022: Her husband, Kenneth Petty, was sentenced to house arrest and probation after he failed to register as a sex offender in California. He had been convicted of first-degree attempted rape in 1995 (Jennifer Hough, the woman who said in a lawsuit that he raped her at knife point when she was 16, sued the couple in 2021, alleging that they were harassing her to get her to recant her testimony)
• Shortly before the 2024 election: She reportedly called Trump and told him that she was secretly supporting his reelection
• January 2026: She posted that she’d received a Trump “gold card” a fast-tracked visa the White House says can be purchased for $1 million (the White House clarified to the New York Times that the card was just a memento, though Minaj also posted that her citizenship paperwork was “being finalized”)
• Earlier this year: She accused rivals in the music industry of “satanic practices” and told Katie Miller on her podcast that the moon landing was faked  
• Wednesday: She tweeted: “Kathy Hochul is an evil woman. The Democratic Party should forfeit her seat because even if she wins, she will be of great consequence to them. Downward spiral for her. She will not escape God’s wrath. She did not denounce evil when she had the chance.” 

A couple other things that are true: 

• Minaj’s brother was convicted in state court, and can only be pardoned by the New York governor (Hochul, or, perhaps, her Republican opponent Bruce Blakeman, whom Minaj has endorsed)
• Minaj’s husband’s failure to register as a sex offender is a federal offense, and can be pardoned by the president  

Multiple things can be true at once. Minaj seems inclined towards conspiratorial thinking, and towards specific conspiracies that have a right-wing valence. She also has a contrarian streak and is famously pugnacious towards other musicians who — broad strokes — tend to be liberal. But it would be naive to ignore that Trump (and Blakeman, who is trailing Hochul by around 12 points, per Nate Silver’s aggregator) also has something material, and very valuable, to offer her.

Stop Lying

Of all the voices I’ve heard in my life, there are few I’ve heard more than ESPN college football analyst and broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit. I love college football, and that means Herbstreit is a fixture in my living room on Saturdays. It was surprising, then, when a few weeks ago I heard him say — after Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on College GameDay — that he doesn’t really follow politics, claimed he is “for America,” and that he “didn’t even know anything about Cruz’s views.”

When a football guy says, “I’m just for America,” that is usually a tell he is hiding something. I was pretty sure I’d heard or seen Herby commenting on politics before (which I later confirmed). But the bigger issue was revealed by David Covucci on his site FOIABall where he explained that Herbstreit had headlined an event sponsored by a PAC in Alabama, which in turn gave money to Republican Sen.ator Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) campaign.

I’m not here to admonish Herbstreit for his politics. I really don’t care that much. What’s irritating is how comfortable celebrities and powerful people are lying these days. I can’t really put it better than Covucci: “One thing that’s been driving me up the wall lately (I’ve mentioned this before) is how okay all our public figures have become with blithely lying to us. It’s always been a problem in politics. Now, it’s everywhere.”

Lying is, generally speaking, a bad thing to do. It’s especially bad when you are (kind of) a journalist. It’s also embarrassing and pathetic. How could a guy who talks about young men and toughness — a quarterback standing in the pocket attempting to complete a pass even as he’s about to get blasted, for example — not even handle a group of reporters asking about his politics? He couldn’t have just said, no comment. He had to lie? 

Shame on you, Kirk.

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. What state refused to comply with the DOJ’s request to separate 400 ballots from supposed noncitizens voters when they discovered citizens on the list the DOJ provided?
2. What is TPM doing for the first time on Tuesday night as part of its election coverage?
3. Name the two right-wing influencers who were charged with voter fraud after making a video trying to demonstrate how easy it is to get away with voter fraud?

Answers below

Youthful Indiscretions

“As I near 60 years old, the expiration date has come and gone on any of my youthful indiscretions.” — Tennessee congressional candidate Brent Taylor (R), commenting on his history of sending unsolicited nude photos to women up until the youthful age of 53.

Top 5 John Carpenter Movies to Watch on Halloween

With all due respect to Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero and even the great Alfred Hitchcock, nobody made movies that are more suited for Halloween watching than John Carpenter. Here are the top five:

1: Halloween

Obviously. Although it came out after Black Christmas, it set the template for the slasher movie and spawned countless imitations.

2: The Thing

Carpenter’s best movie, but it’s hard to compete with Halloween on Halloween.

3: In the Mouth of Madness

If not the best channeling of H.P. Lovecraft’s “weird fiction” then it’s tied with number 4 on the list. It gets the nod here because the vibes are more Halloween. 

4: Prince of Darkness

Nothing makes sense. That’s the point. “You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED!”

5: Christine

A movie about a car possessed by an evil spirit that is way better than it has any business being. Possibly the third best Stephen King horror adaptation after The Shining and Carrie.

Honorable mention to The Fog. Happy Halloween!

Pennsylavania!

Trivia answers: 1) Washington 2) A live election show! 3) James O’Keefe and Cam Higby