It has been widely reported that the US tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently gave a series of rambling lectures to a private audience in San Francisco in which he laid out his apocalyptic reading of world politics. These lectures mark the culmination of two years of Thiel traveling the world speaking at Catholic universities, at international conferences, and on right-wing podcasts about how the Antichrist threatens global order.

While Thiel’s discourse may lack clarity and coherence, it is still profoundly significant in view of 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 tech sector’s economic dominance, and US imperialism.

While some have associated Thiel’s vision with what they refer to as “end-times fascism,” it is more useful to characterize what he advances as an apocalyptic geopolitics — a simplified remapping of global politics onto the spiritual coordinates of salvation and damnation. Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics seeks to overcome internal social contradictions by projecting them onto an external evil, at once foreign and metaphysical.

This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.

Thiel and the Reactionary Right

Thiel has long been associated with the reactionary right in the United States, establishing hyperlibertarian projects like the Seasteading Institute, funding the far-right National Conservative movement, and supporting the work of reactionary intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin, guru of the “Dark Enlightenment.” He also donated generously to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and bankrolled J. D. Vance’s successful bid for a Senate seat in Ohio.

In short, Thiel, like his friend and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk, occupies 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 so doing, Thiel is locating his business empire, particularly Palantir, at the heart of two major 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 perplexing and perverse they might appear. Thiel’s idiosyncratic apocalyptic geopolitics draws heavily on obscure elements of the infamous Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s work. Schmitt argued that behind the material struggles of worldly geopolitics lay a metaphysical battle between the* Antichrist* and the Katechon, or “restrainer,” who would hold the Antichrist at bay, deferring the apocalypse.

Schmitt’s katechon was represented by forces that resisted global government and universalist ideologies. As such, he cast his own preference for a multipolar world order dominated by continental empires as a means to restrain the Antichrist and fend off the apocalypse.

Like Schmitt before him, Thiel recasts geopolitics as Revelation. The globe is divided between katechontic space, specifically the libertarian frontier of Silicon Valley backed by the United States as restrainer, and a global network of bureaucratic overreach doing the work of the Antichrist.

This worldview presents the secular institutions of modernity as apocalyptic agents, while capital and technology are redemptive forces. The Antichrist operates in Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics as a cipher through which he places questions of taxation, multilateralism, economic regulation, and environmental governance on a spiritual battlefield, removing them from democratic challenge and diplomatic deliberation.

The United States: Antichrist or Katechon?

The United States occupies a paradoxical position in Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics, as both self-interested nation and aspirational world sovereign, free-market champion and regulator-in-chief, savior and destroyer. This type of self-contradiction is typical of apocalyptic thought, which collapses binary divisions into a single eschatological horizon.

In one of his recent San Francisco lectures, Thiel explicitly identifies the United States as both Katechon and Antichrist: “ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state.” This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by international law.

Schmitt was deeply concerned with the “disordering” impact of new advances in military technology, pointing to the rapidly increasing destructive powers of new weapons across the twentieth century, from aerial bombing and submarines to nuclear weapons and the possibility of war in space. Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza.

Indeed, this is where the stakes of Thiel’s eccentric apocalypticism come into focus. Thiel fuses the emerging “digital-military-industrial complex” with Christian eschatology, and this has real and malign influence on the lives of many across the world. It is hardly plausible to maintain that Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics and his business interests are wholly distinct, not only because he explicitly links them in his public statements but also because they align so neatly together.

For evidence we can look at just one of Thiel’s ventures. Palantir is a data analytics company whose tools have been purchased by government agencies in the US and beyond for the purpose of facial recognition, predictive policing, and military targeting.

In 2023, Palantir was awarded a £330 million data contract by Britain’s National Health Service, the largest data contract in the organization’s history. Thiel declared the NHS a “natural target” for privatization, suggesting it needed to “start over” and be subject to “market mechanisms.” In practice, Palantir is not in the business of saving lives but rather that of extinguishing them.

In September the British military announced a “strategic partnership” worth £1.5 billion with Palantir to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine to speed up decision making, military planning and targeting.” According to the Ministry of Defence, Thiel’s firm 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 complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza gives a sense of what “transformed lethality” looks like. The Israeli military has been employing Palantir’s Lavender and Gospel systems to generate targets for aerial bombing, as detailed in a recent report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

When not exporting the technologies 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 employs a purposefully designed data platform known as ImmigrationOS to identify suspected illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation.

Evidence of widespread racial profiling and the illegal detention and deportation of immigrants as well as US citizens is mounting. Under the new Trump administration, a beefed-up ICE is in effect a racist secret police operating in a lawless “state of exception” worthy of Schmitt.

In each case, we see data technologies harnessed for racialized state violence to extend the imperial power of the US and its allies. This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.

End-Time

Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics delegitimizes international law, legitimizes violence against racialized others, and sanctifies elite tech wealth as a last bulwark against a coming apocalypse. By remapping material power structures onto a metaphysical struggle, Thiel mystifies US imperialism, class privilege, and his own corporate interests as divine vocation.

His Armageddon is not so much a prophecy of world’s end as a rhetoric to legitimize the sovereignty of technocapitalist elites against the moral claims of the global majority and the planetary commons. Nor is the one-world government he fears a coherent political project; it is rather a condensation of reactionary anxieties about perceived loss of sovereignty, moral relativism, and technological democratization.

By fusing Silicon Valley’s myth of progress with apocalyptic visions of salvation, Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion — now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaire CEOs — into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization.

At a time of escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid militarization, and intensifying environmental volatility, with the far right on the rise across the world, the danger posed by imperialist, chauvinistic, and supremacist geopolitical visions such as those espoused by Thiel, and the murderous profane interests they serve, should be all too clear.