While Thiel’s discourse may lack clarity and coherence, it is still quite significant given the political and economic power concentrated in his hands. Yet perhaps more important still is what Thiel’s comments on the Antichrist tell us about the convergence of Christian apocalypticism, the economic dominance of the tech sector, and American imperialism.
While some have referred to Thiel’s approach as “end-times fascism”, it is more useful to describe what he puts forward as an apocalyptic geopolitics – a simplistic remapping of global politics onto the spiritual coordinates of salvation and destruction. Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics attempts to overcome internal social contradictions by projecting them onto an external evil, simultaneously alien and spiritual.
This justifies the most extreme violence against their opponents while protecting their own ideas from competition. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than an arena of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.
In short, Thiel, like his friend and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk, holds a position of immense power at the center of US and global politics and is using his wealth to influence elections and secure lucrative government contracts. In doing so, Thiel is positioning his business empire, particularly Palantir, at the center of two key growth areas in otherwise sluggish Western economies: AI and the military-tech nexus.
It is the depth of his political penetration that makes Thiel’s pronouncements on the Antichrist worthy of scrutiny, no matter how confusing and distorted they may appear. Thiel’s fantastical apocalyptic geopolitics draws heavily on obscure elements of the work of notorious Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that behind the material conflicts of earthly geopolitics lies a spiritual battle. Antichrist and this CatechonOr “restrainer,” which will keep the Antichrist at bay, averting the apocalypse.
Schmitt’s catechon was represented by forces that opposed global government and universal ideologies. Thus, he gave his preference for a multipolar world order dominated by continental empires as a means of controlling the Antichrist and preventing the apocalypse.
Like Schmitt before him, Thiel recasts geopolitics as revelation. The world is divided between the catechontic space, especially the libertarian frontier of Silicon Valley supported as a barrier by the United States, and a global network of bureaucratic redundancies doing the work of the Antichrist.
This worldview presents the secular institutions of modernity as apocalyptic agents, while capital and technology are emancipatory forces. The Antichrist functions as a cipher in Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics through which he places questions of taxation, multilateralism, economic regulation, and environmental governance on the spiritual battlefield, removing them from democratic challenge and diplomatic deliberation.
In his recent San Francisco lecture, Thiel explicitly identified the United States as both the catechumen and the Antichrist: “Ground Zero of the one-world state, Ground Zero of resistance to the one-world state.” This dilemma reflects the paradox of American empire, where the United States sees itself as the guarantor of global order and a bulwark against world government: as the “policeman of the world” bound by international law.
Schmidt was deeply concerned with the “disorderly” impact of new advances in military technology, pointing to the rapidly increasing destructive powers of new weapons in the twentieth century, from aerial bombardment and submarines to nuclear weapons and the possibility of warfare in space. In contrast, Thiel is profiting from the use of AI weapon targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the massacre in Gaza.
Indeed, this is where the stakes of Thiel’s fantastical nihilism come into focus. Thiel connects the emerging “digital-military-industrial complex” with Christian eschatology, and the real and deadly impact it has on the lives of many people around the world. It is hardly plausible to say that Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics and his business interests are completely separate, not only because he explicitly links them in his public statements, but also because they align so well together.
We can only look to one of Thiel’s ventures for evidence. Palantir is a data analytics company whose tools have been purchased by government agencies in the US and beyond for the purposes of facial recognition, predictive policing and military targeting.
In 2023, Palantir was awarded a £330 million data contract by the UK National Health Service, the largest data contract in the organization’s history. Thiel declared the NHS a “natural target” for privatisation, suggesting that it needed to be “reprogrammed” and subject to “market mechanisms”. In practice, Palantir is not in the business of saving lives, but of extinguishing them.
In September the British Army announced a £1.5 billion “strategic partnership” with Palantir to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine to accelerate decision-making, military planning and targeting.” According to the Defense Department, Thiel’s company and its new partner will “work together to transform lethality on the battlefield” with AI-powered data analytics.
Palantir’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza gives a sense of what ‘transformed lethality’ looks like.
Palantir’s involvement in Israel’s genocide in Gaza shows what “transformed lethality” looks like. The Israeli military is using Palantir’s Lavender and Gospel systems to prepare targets for aerial bombing, according to a recent report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
When not exporting the techniques of state violence to Palestine and Ukraine, Palantir is profiting from them within the United States. The now-notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency uses a purposefully designed data platform known as ImmigrationOS to identify suspected illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation.
There is growing evidence of large-scale racial profiling and illegal detention and deportation of immigrants as well as US citizens. Under the new Trump administration, a strong ICE is actually a racist secret police operating in an anarchic “state of exception” worthy of Schmidt.
In each case, we see data technologies used to perpetrate racial state violence to expand the imperial power of the US and its allies. This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a distorted military-industrial eschatology where AI-driven genocide is understood as “preventing” rather than the end of the world.
His Armageddon is not so much a prophecy of the end of the world as a rhetoric to legitimize the sovereignty of the technocapitalist elite against the moral claims of the global majority and the planetary commons. Nor is he afraid of a one world government as a coherent political project; Rather it is a condensation of reactionary concerns about sovereignty, moral relativism, and the perceived loss of technocratic democratization.
By combining Silicon Valley’s myth of progress with an apocalyptic vision of salvation, Thiel turns American imperial power and uncontrolled technological expansion – now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaire CEOs – into the last bulwark against what he envisions as a catastrophic global homogenization.
At a time of rising geopolitical tensions, rapid militarization and rising environmental instability, when the far right is on the rise around the world, the threat posed by the imperialist, chauvinist and supremacist geopolitical approaches espoused by Thiel and the murderous unholy interests they serve should be crystal clear.
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