Why Peter Thiel’s campaign towards the antichrist is much from a innocent fad | EUROtoday

The friends are handpicked and the content material of the conferences that the sulphurous Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel offers, in Rome from Sunday March 15 and till Wednesday March 18, should stay as confidential as attainable. All we all know is the theme: the antichrist.

Organizing such an occasion a number of steps from the Vatican could seem to be a provocation. Especially since these conferences had been to happen on the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the place the present Pope Leo XIV studied, underlines the AP press company.

The antichrist, a “Thielian” obsession

The college has distanced itself from these conferences, which finally happen in a location stored secret by the organizers. The Vatican, via a number of articles within the Catholic day by day Avvenire, additionally criticized Peter Thiel, his imaginative and prescient of a world dominated by know-how and his techno-religious discourse centered across the antichrist, underlines the Financial Times.

Because this isn’t Peter Thiel’s first campaign towards this biblical determine saying the top of the world. It has grow to be an obsession for the co-founder of the Big Data and cybersurveillance big Palantir, and eminence grise of the very spiritual and right-wing Vice President of the United States JD Vance.

He spoke about it for the primary time in public “during a hot day in Paris in 2023”, explains Wired, a web site on digital cultures which devoted an extended article to the significance of the determine of the antichrist in Peter Thiel’s “ideological corpus” in September 2025.

Since then, this investor has launched into what the location has dubbed the “Armageddon Tour.” It can be his sequence of 4 conferences on the antichrist which passed off in San Francisco in September 2025 which actually propelled Peter Thiel’s spiritual obsession to the forefront of the media scene.

The Big Bad Regulatory State

Here once more, the holy Thielian phrase needed to stay confined to the circles of initiates and friends. But leaks to the press didn’t take lengthy, and Peter Thiel himself then spoke on the problem in a number of publications, such because the German day by day Die Zeit in March 2026.

“Peter Thiel uses the metaphor of the antichrist to refer to the big bureaucratic order that tries to regulate tech,” summarizes Mark Coeckelbergh, professor of philosophy of know-how on the University of Vienna and creator of an essay on Peter Thiel’s imaginative and prescient of the antichrist.

This speech of the massive dangerous State which needs to devour the Tech sector is no surprise for somebody like Peter Thiel who “began his career in Silicon Valley as the incarnation of the libertarian, that is to say someone who is opposed to any form of regulation”, underlines Wolfgang Palaver, Austrian theologian who debated with Peter Thiel his imaginative and prescient of the antichrist.

The spiritual veneer added to this criticism of the overly intrusive state is a bit more shocking in Silicon Valley. “This environment has long been associated with atheism, first because of the influence of the hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s which embodied a post-Christian America. Then, from the 1990s, this emphasis on free market values, embodied by thinkers like Ayn Rand, often openly atheist”, explains Anthony Burton, researcher within the division of media research on the University of Amsterdam who labored on the notion of technoapocalypse.

Peter Thiel is the person of this nice ideological hole. “He cultivates his image as an intellectual who studied at Stanford under the direction of the anthropologist René Girard,” underlines Marc Tuters, specialist in radical subcultures on the Internet on the University of Amsterdam and creator of an evaluation of using the picture of the antichrist by Peter Thiel.

The French thinker behind Peter Thiel’s obsession

The French thinker is central to understanding how Peter Thiel imagined himself as a tech white knight towards the Antichrist. René Girard developed the idea of mimicry which states that human want is equal to the will of some to own what others have. The result’s a state of everlasting battle and violence between people which may, if not resolved, result in social apocalypse. The strategy to resolve it will be, based on the anthropologist, to discover a “scapegoat” which might substitute the battle of “all against all”, inherent to this competitors based mostly on want, with a battle of “all against one”. Eliminating the scapegoat brings the beginnings of peace.

In liberal thought, the State gives the answer within the type of the social contract. For Peter Thiel, this isn’t the case. Since September 11, the influential investor has been satisfied that the State shouldn’t be geared up to place an finish to violence until it turns into a totalitarian state, explains Mark Coeckelbergh.

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According to Peter Thiel, know-how can present solutions that may forestall the slide in the direction of this totalitarian state. As a outcome, something that places obstacles in the best way of tech innovation favors the appearance of this apocalypse. Any supporter of regulation is subsequently an agent of the antichrist… QED.

He additionally accused the UN, the European Union and even Greta Thunberg of taking part in within the camp of the antichrist due to their protection of AI regulation.

Proof that Peter Thiel’s antichrist obsession is not only an instructional debate. “It’s dangerous and potentially irresponsible to designate targets in this way. Perhaps in his mind, it’s just an image but how can we know if those who listen will not take it at face value”, worries Marc Tuters. Wild conspiracy theories in regards to the supposed existence of a pedophile conspiracy working out of a Washington pizzeria led a conspiracy theorist to open hearth in a pizzeria.

Antichrist or antidemocratic

For Marc Tuters, Peter Thiel additionally flatters conspiracy pondering along with his speech on the antichrist. “He adapts for a religious audience the conspiracy theory about the ‘New World Order’ and the deep state that pulls the strings behind the scenes,” explains Marc Tuters. “This way of reinforcing distrust of the state ultimately works in favor of private enterprise,” he provides.

Indeed, “if there is an antichrist, it is because there is also a savior. In this case, for Peter Thiel, this savior is the CEO,” summarizes Anthony Burton.

A manner “to respond to the distrust of a part of the religious public towards technological innovation. This rhetoric of the fight against the antichrist is a way of offering a reading grid of technological progress acceptable to a significant part of the American population”, underlines Wolfgang Palaver.

These conferences on the antichrist are, subsequently, not only a considerably weird billionaire passion however a “deliberate effort to weaken democracy for the benefit of the interests of a small group of Tech billionaires,” says Mark Coeckelbergh. And even when Peter Thiel has, in concept, no say in American politics, he has been cited as a vital affect for JD Vance whose ambitions to succeed Donald Trump are little unsure.