The problem is that Thiel's Antichrist looks, with extraordinary precision, exactly like the people who want to regulate Peter Thiel...
peace-obsessed leader who speaks the language of safety, ethics, and global coordination. He builds harmonized regulatory regimes. He appeals to existential risk—climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war—to justify sweeping institutional authority.
This is what "terrorizes" the wealthy and sociopathic.
He does not persecute Christianity openly. He absorbs it, incorporates it, makes it comfortable within a technocratic order that promises to manage civilization's dangers on humanity's behalf.
Sounds like what USA has had from the jump.
This is where the argument stops being purely theological and starts being something else. Because the institutional apparatus Thiel finds spiritually treacherous is the regulatory state. Things like the EU's AI Act, the Paris Agreement, the people who want Palantir to explain its surveillance algorithms and OpenAI to submit to external audits, which Thiel has been arguing against for decades on political and economic grounds, but not religious ones.
Thiel and Wolfe point to a concrete real-world template: Catholic theologian Hans Küng's "World Ethos" project, quoting Küng's own words that there can be "no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions." They cast this ambition—a single, universal ethical-political consensus enforced through global dialogue—as structurally identical to the Antichrist's promised "peace and safety" (1 Thessalonians 5:3).
Surprise 🙄
The essay's target has also sharpened. Recent reporting suggests Thiel has extended the argument to Pope Leo XIV directly, framing the current pope's openness to AI regulation as making him—unwittingly—a vehicle for the same dynamic. That marks a shift from critiquing abstract "technocrats" to naming a sitting pope as a potential legionnaire, raising the stakes of the argument considerably.
That's...not new.
None of this means the theology is insincere...
Yes it does.
Also, is he wearing pedo glasses in that photo? He looks though for his age, but still better than overly plastic surgeried.