Peter Thiel and The Anti-Christ
With Trump’s health visibly in decline, attention is shifting to Peter Thiel’s invention, JD Vance, who may soon be president. Which means Thiel, a billionaire doomsday prepper who thinks the Anti-Christ is Greta Thunberg, could effectively rule the world. What does Thiel’s obsession with the Anti-Christ reveal about how we can resist him?
Thiel’s worldview isn’t just weird Silicon Valley paranoia; it’s vintage fascist fan fiction. His ideas trace back to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who justified Hitler’s violent purges as necessary for “saving civilization.” Schmitt’s argument was simple and horrifying: democracy is too weak, so we need a strongman to suspend the rules. Thiel recycles Schmitt’s logic in a twenty-first-century sermon on why democracy itself is the real threat. In Thiel’s version, collective action to solve global crises like man-made climate change is the definition of evil. So you know what to do, folks: double down on building collective action.
In Part One of our conversation with journalist Gil Duran, of the Nerd Reich newsletter, that tracks Silicon Valley’s billionaire Bond villains, we dig into Thiel’s apocalyptic delusions, how they shape his politics, and why it’s a very big deal that a man this afraid of democracy has his hands in everything from expanding government surveillance to election data. Part Two will be out this Thursday, with a special look at Thiel and Trump’s Big Brother–their latest efforts to establish a Chinese-style surveillance state.
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Show Notes:
Action alert! Send postcards to California to ensure Prop 50 passes and help support other must-win races: https://www.activateamerica.vote/postcards
Action alert! Sister District x Gaslit Nation Halloween Phonebank for VA! https://www.mobilize.us/sisterdistrict/event/847185/
The One Trait That Predicts Trump Support (w. Matthew MacWilliams) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp19ZKI2m2w
Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich: Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist? NYT Didn’t Think to Ask https://www.thenerdreich.com/is-peter-thiel-the-antichrist-nyt-didnt-think-to-ask/
The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession: Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since. https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
I Worked At Palantir: The Tech Company Reshaping Reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ95Gmvg_D4
Why Everyone Around Trump is Paranoid Now: Michael Wolff | Inside Trump's Head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HplPf8F5NaI&t=13s
Peter Thiel calls the anti-Christ as a humanitarian: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CQ5ATBoF8og
Peter Thiel compares Greta Thunberg to the Anti-Christ: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4xVOOgmH3-w
Thiel compares being woke to Saudi Arabia https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-873PUOq1s8
Trump’s Texts to CNN Host Renew Health Speculation https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-texts-to-cnn-host-renew-health-speculation/
Has Big Brother arrived? Inside the secretive Trump effort to centralize government data on millions of Americans https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-doge-palantir-data-immigration-b2761096.html
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Andrea Chalupa (00:07):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film MCC Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it.
(00:23):
There is of course, a lot of understandable speculation about Donald Trump's health, whether he'll even make it through a full term, nevermind his great ambitions to run again, run, basically just stay in power in 2028. Lindsey Graham is sporting Trump 2028 hats. That is obviously such a fascist fever dream, given the very clear signs that something's going on with Trump's health. He sounds increasingly unhinged like he might have dementia. At his war criminal summit with Putin in Alaska, Trump struggled to walk in a straight line. He also wasn't seen over Labor Day weekend sparking more rumors of ill health. And most recently, after not being seen since Tuesday, Trump, who lives for attention, who loves doing TV interviews, who loves calling into the news shows and just running his mouth, failed to show up or call into Jake Tapper's Sunday show on CNN. And remember, Jake Tapper is one of the easy ones. Jake Tapper was active in helping rehabilitate Jared Kushner's reputation during the Biden years.
(01:42):
Kushner came out with some book and Tapper was selling it. So this would've been a very easy, fun interview for Trump. Any combative questions would've been just softballs in the scheme of things. It wouldn't have been real journalism. Jake Tapper is basically a Ken doll and instead of daring to appear on Jake Tapper's Sunday show for a little bit of circle jerk rubbing, instead Trump texted his answers in and everyone's like, wait, what? And Jake Tapper just goes with that. Doesn't even say, oh, this is weird America, because it very much was weird. How do we even know that was Trump that he was texting with? When anyone can sound like Trump, just look at what a good job Gavin Newsom's social media team is doing, which of course is ran by a woman.
(02:32):
So yes, it's weird. What is going on with Trump's health? I mean, if he's not up for being president, which he clearly is not. Step aside, step aside. Just get this over with step aside. The Pope did it, the German Pope, the blinky Pope Benedict did it. So Trump, just step aside. Just go to Mar-a-Lago surround in case yourself with gold and McDonald's. Do everyone a favor. You'll be so much happier. You'll be so much happier, the whole world. Be the sigh of relief because who's up next? It's JD Vance. And who is JD Vance? Well, JD Vance will be whoever you want him to be. JD Vance is a Silicon Valley creation of Peter Thiel, an early PayPal investor who took the millions he raked in from PayPal to then launch Palantir, a surveillance company named after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings, which ironically deliciously helped bring down the villains who dare to use them and get manipulated by them.
(03:34):
So under Trump's first term, the Department of Justice and FBI became dependent on Palantir using it to map criminal networks. Biden's Department of Justice under Merrick Garland, complicit Merrick Garland, did nothing about this. Just let openly anti-democracy, openly gleeful, authoritarian, openly Bond movie villain, Peter Thiel's hyper surveillance network live inside our tax payer funded government system. Again, mapping tracking criminals, a deep surveillance system that under Trump's second term is now being expanded to practically every area of government.
(04:16):
There are reports, the New York Times and elsewhere that Palantir is working with the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and is also looking, I guess they're also going to move forward with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. Why might you ask? Well, they're claiming it's to track migrants, and that's obviously to track Americans as well, because what they want to do is quote-unquote streamline government, make government more intelligent, more efficient, but never ever listen to what they say.
(04:52):
Always listen to what they do. And one of the strongest, strongest pieces of evidence we have that Palantir is Orwell's Big Brother and that JD Vance as president of the United States would just be a tool for Peter Thiel. And what are these guys all about? Well, Peter Thiel, what he's telling us plainly is that he sees his work as some cosmic civilizational battle between good and evil. And guess who is evil? Us? We're the evil. We're the antichrist.
(05:30):
Yeah. So currently during the recording of the interview you're about to hear during these fall weeks of 2025, Peter Thiel has been giving a series of lectures on his favorite obsession, which is the antichrist. There's apparently some novel written by a Catholic priest on the antichrist, which is total gaslighting. I'll link to that in the show notes so you can read more because all of it is bonkers.
(05:58):
But his obsession of the antichrist goes back years. He will corner you at a party and talk to you all about the antichrist and you'll have such a hard time escaping him. That's the level of intensity Peter Thiel has in trying to make you understand the antichrist. Now, who is the antichrist really in Peter Thiel's Twisted Thoughts? It's pretty much Greta Thundberg. He says that I'm going to play now a series of clips so you can hear in his own words who he sees as enemy number one and who he's going to go after through a president JD Vance and through a Palantir that is soaking up our entire US government data right now and coming after all of us. All right, play the clips.
Peter Thiel (06:47):
The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as a great, as an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist. All of those kinds of things, and these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power, something is very wrong. There are sort of ways Christ wants to unify the world. You have the parable of the Good Samaritan where you should take care of people even if you're not related to them. And it's good to act like the Good Samaritan and to take care of people or not just in your family or tribe or country. But then if you force everyone to be a good Samaritan and you force a borderless world, it's somehow adjacent, somehow it's an intensification, but it's somehow also very much the opposite.
(07:46):
I think there's always a question, how do we articulate some of these existential risks, some of the challenges we have, and they're all framed as sort of runaway dystopian science techs.
(07:57):
There's a risk of nuclear war, there's a risk of environmental disaster. But I always think that if we're going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one world totalitarian state. I've been wondering whether that's a going from the frying pan into the fire. And so the atheist philosophical framing is one world or none, and the Christian framing, which in some ways the same question is antichrist or Armageddon, but I think we have an answer to this plot hole the antichrist would take over the world, is you talk about Armageddon nonstop, you talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It's the opposite of the picture of in science from the 17th, 18th century where the antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. The thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is we need to stop science. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
(09:02):
Saudi Arabia has a crazy Wahabi ideology. California has awoke ideology. Wahhabism to Saudi Arabia is roughly like wokism to California
Andrea Chalupa (09:12):
Here to help us make sense of Peter Thiel's obsession with the antichrist and what that might mean for JD Vance and beyond is Gil Duran, the researcher and analyst behind the Essential Nerd Reich newsletter, a watchdog of the fascist tech bros who are determined to replace our democracy with their own ego gratification pet projects. After you listen to this interview, head on over to the show notes and listen to Sam Stein interview Matthew McWilliams of the Marshall Project, who in 2016 in a piece for Politico, warned that Trump was consolidating power among authoritarian voters. In their discussion, Meck Williams makes clear that we are on the path already to authoritarianism, which is something Gaslit Nation has been warning about for years, and that it's going to require new ways of thinking in order to get us out of it. Yes indeed. And that's what we are going to be covering on this show.
(10:13):
We are not just telling you what is happening and what it means and lifting the veil of the gaslighting and helping us process our grief and be prepared and fight for a livable future for ourselves, our children, a livable, sustainable economy for all. We are taking all of their dark arts, reverse engineering it and establishing our own urgent short-term and sustainable long-term thinking and planning to get out of this. Gaslit Nation was your early warning system. We have the hit pieces and the death threats that prove that we were early. We stuck our necks out in 2016 saying Trump wants to be an authoritarian, and Russia's helping him because they want to overthrow American democracy and establish a lawless mafia state like Russia. And it's part of this global war of fascism versus democracy. Everybody wake up and instead the white male dominated media wrote hit pieces attacking us, calling us conspiracy theorists, hysterical and so on.
(11:16):
And now everybody sounds like Gaslit Nation. But the danger of that is we're getting drowned out when we're the ones that warned you early and we have the solutions on how to get out of this. So listen to those who are there first because we saw this coming, and we also know what we need to do next. If you want to know what to do next, there's small things that make a huge difference and that include joining me at the Gaslit Nation Halloween phone bank with our friends at Sister District on Wednesday, October 22nd at 6:00 PM Eastern. We are making calls to must win Virginia because as hopeless as things seem, we still have a lot of power left. It is not game over yet is far from that. So spread your wings, use every lever of power you have now, and join me October 22nd at the Gaslit Nation District Phone Bank.
(12:10):
It's just make it phone calls so much easier than having to build and stay on the barricades for weeks if not months in a popular uprising. All right, so make your phone calls. Make your phone calls. Get out the vote, send your texts, send postcards. There's a big referendum in California to balance the scales against the Republican gerrymandering crisis in this country. Gavin Newsom, put it on the referendum. Please, please, please send postcards to voters in California telling them to please ensure the redistricting of the new maps in California so that the Republicans don't automatically gerrymandered their way into a house victory every two years. We can get this done. I will show you how I'll link to some actions you can take in the show notes. And I know these little actions seem like nothing compared to what we're up against, especially when you hear this conversation.
(13:03):
But they do matter collectively. They do matter collectively. Our hope matters collectively. Our defiance and our rage matters. So please stick with us, stick with each other, refuse to abandon all that we need to hold dear and sacred. And that is our inner light, our inner power. And of course, please find a no King's Day march on October 18th. And if you want a sign idea, hold up a sign saying, make phone calls. Get out the votes and postcards. Yes, it matters. Yes, you matter. There's your sign idea. Now go to no kings October 18th. Stay strong America. This is our country, as they say in Ukraine. Bandits out.
(13:44):
Okay, so what is the deal with Peter Thiel's obsession with the antichrist?
Gil Duran (13:57):
Apparently Peter Thiel heard a speech 30 or so years ago where a theologian talked about the antichrist in various themes on that subject. And now 30 years later, he's decided to give a very similar speech that sort of reverses all of that theologian's thinking and creates this sort of DIY theology that Peter Thiel is traveling around the planet delivering in these private antichrist lectures. So he seems fairly obsessed with the idea of using biblical scripture and Nazi philosophy to make a very strange argument about how politics should be structured here in the 21st century. And it's pretty strange coming from a tech billionaire who has a surveillance company and has said that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. And while I've been covering these guys for a while and they're pretty strange and very little surprises me, I would say I did not expect to be reading or writing so much about the antichrist in 2025.
Andrea Chalupa (15:09):
I mean, it goes along with Jared Kushner's 666 5th Avenue. So Peter Thiel recently gave or is currently as we're recording this in Spooktober October the month of Halloween, Peter Thiel's currently giving a series of lectures in the Bay Area, California, on the Antichrist, drawing in crowds to teach people all about the antichrist and how early it's today. What is he telling people?
Gil Duran (15:40):
Well, I wrote a piece for the New Republic. What I did was I went back and looked at all of his public speeches so far because he's been actually talking about the antichrist for a few years now. And I know from having worked for politicians and having been a speech writer that often you'll see the material developing over time. So if you go and look at the previous speeches, you'll see that, okay, this new speech they're given builds out of these other speeches. And so what Thiel's main message seems to be in the Antichrist speeches is that defining an existential enemy like the Antichrist is a very powerful tool in politics because it taps into religion, it taps into death anxiety, and it gives people the signal that politics is actually a battle between literal good and literal evil. And what he does that's especially concerning is that he doesn't just go through some chosen excerpts of scripture.
(16:40):
He also makes a point of juxtaposing the thinking of Carl Schmidt, who was a Nazi jurist and a political theorist whose main ideas were that politics is largely religious concepts in a light disguise, that the most important thing in politics is defining who is the friend and who is the enemy. And that politics should be considered an existential battle between these two sides. And more importantly, that one way to win that battle is to declare some kind of existential emergency that allows you to suspend the normal rules in the Constitution and do everything you must to destroy that enemy, which is pretty much what Adolf Hitler did in taking over Germany. And so there's a lot of concerning things to unpack there. To me, having been raised in the religion, being very familiar with these apocalyptic themes from a certain part of my childhood where that kind of religious thinking was taken seriously and where I remember being really scared that the world could end any day and the trumpets are going to blow, and we're going to see the end of the world, I'm familiar with the religion.
(17:50):
I have really never heard anyone juxtapose the Bible and Nazi philosophy, putting them on equal terms and suggesting a relationship between the two. I mean, except for that's what the Nazis did. The Nazis were sort of this apocalyptic style movement. They had to eliminate who? The Jews, right? They made it a biblical event and thought they were going to have a thousand year reich. They were in many ways mimicking the Bible where Satan's supposed to be defeated for a thousand years. So it's weird to see this guy coming out of Godless Silicon Valley speaking like a fire in brimstone preacher at a time when Donald Trump is going as authoritarian as he can, as fast as he can. So it's a pretty disturbing development
Andrea Chalupa (18:41):
And it's very clear from what they're doing this time around. They're launching economic warfare against the American people, the mass purges, starting with Elon Musk's DOGE and his Hitler youth henchman Big Balls. And then you have now Russell Voight, however you say it, Russell fuhrer, you have him like the project 2025 architect gleefully in this viral video as the grim reaper, then cuing, purging more desperately needed federal workers. And then Kash Patel just fired someone at the FBI just for having a gay pride flag, which is his constitutionally protected right of free speech. And also you have the tariff war, which is destroying already economically vulnerable farms across America. It really looks like they're trying to starve us to death by taking away our jobs and hurting our variability to feed ourselves with America's farms and just let the corporations, the vultures, their oligarch friends from around the world pick out of whatever's left like vultures. Do you see that as part of their end times obsession?
Gil Duran (20:05):
Oh, definitely. I mean, the end times thing has been a long running part of the MAGA movement. Trump as some kind of religious figure. We've seen these AI generated weird images of Jesus hugging Trump or whatever. Some MAGA people seem to think that Trump is even above Jesus in the hierarchy and that he's here to defeat Satan. The whole Q Anon conspiracy theory was largely predicated on this idea of a satanic cabal. So we see this a recurring theme on the right. What I take from Thiel's decision to obsess over it very publicly is that it is indeed a meme that's going to be pushed on multiple fronts and become a central part of our political story in the coming years. And where does Trump go when the economy is collapsing, when jobs are falling off, when everything's going wrong and he's not delivering on his promises, right? His polls are sinking. People are not happy with what he's doing. They disapprove of almost his entire suite of actions. So he's going to have to reframe the narrative around some other battle that he can hopefully he thinks politically win. And I don't think it's too long before people in the White House are also screeching about the antichrist. The other way I read this too is that the big problem that these guys have is what happens after Trump. Trump's old. He's obviously in deteriorating physical and mental health and he's not...
Andrea Chalupa (21:40):
We saw that at his military rally where he was pitching the generals on becoming his Nazi generals. Remember one of the books that came out from his cabinet saying that Trump moaned that his generals weren't obedient like Hitler's generals. He was like, I want good German generals. And then he made the pitch on the stage to all heads of our military, and they were just blank faced, shocked, trying not to laugh and just outraged. But yes, go on. He's very much deteriorating any day now.
Gil Duran (22:10):
Well, what was really funny is Hegseth saying the generals are fat, lazy, undisciplined, and in front of a commander in chief who is quite corpulent and unhealthy himself.
Andrea Chalupa (22:19):
Who loves his McDonald's.
Gil Duran (22:21):
Exactly. So it was just sort of a weird spectacle to see. But I think that we're going to see, we do already see it with a deployment of the military with the way that Trump is trying to designate Antifa some kind of terrorist organization. They're looking for an emergency. They're looking for some way to declare that, you know what? We can't have elections. We're under attack by an enemy within, and we have to protect the nation by ending democracy. I'm pretty sure that's where they're headed because having spent a lot of my career in politics, when you're, your poll numbers are going down, you have to correct course. You have to find a way to get off that track. They seem to be full speed ahead in the downward trajectory. And that tells me they do not plan on being held accountable by the voters.
(23:12):
I think that's delusional on their part. I think they are overestimating the degree to which people are not necessarily in the streets every day right now. But I do think we're going to have a battle at some point, a spiritual battle, a political battle for the existence of the United States. And we're not there yet, partly because the media has a way of making it seem like this is all very normal, and that possibly a fascist takeover is a completely reasonable thing to assume and try. And I think it's largely in denial about what's happening. I think I look at some of my journalist colleagues and I wonder if they really know what fascism means for journalists. Do you think you're going to be sitting there having a job telling the truth? If these guys win, you're going to be out there unemployed and scared and wishing you had done things a little bit differently.
(24:06):
So I think push hasn't come to shove yet, but we do see people responding. Look at what Portland's doing. They're pushing back with humor and theater. And I would just hope that people will find a way to not take the bait and play into what Trump wants as somebody to get violent so that he has an excuse. They tried this for a minute with the Charlie Kirk thing, right? It was this, oh, we're under attack. They're murdering us, dah, dah, dah. But it didn't quite pan out because the shooter had a more complicated identity than they wanted it to be. But I think we had to be very creative and always remember that we are far more numerous than they are. Nobody wants what they're pushing, and this country has never had a test like this. And we're all going to have to improve our ability to stand up at a time when we feel so disconnected and it's not totally being made clear to people what's happening.
Andrea Chalupa (25:06):
So on the point of media capitulation, certainly at the very top of media ownership, all of the oligarch class, they are convinced that they'll be safe cloistered in their money. And the people that work for them, people that you and I know in past lives and social media that are still in denial of what's coming just are falling into the trap of a normalcy bias and just eating popcorn and treating this as a ratings machine to take advantage of, and the rest of us as historical and blue MAGA and all that nonsense and not understanding that this is how it works. This is very much how it works. And I want to ask about Bari Weiss. She is the New York City elite private school version of Charlie Kirk trying to get people fired, outing people, docs putting big target on anyone that disagrees with her. And she gets credited with shifting the New York Times opinion section further towards the right. And she, that still wasn't enough for her. And she stormed out of there. And now she has been installed by the Ellison family, long time Republican donors to be the head of all news for CBS News, which gave us Walter Cronkite. CBS news, it gave us 60 minutes. And for me, this feels like Fox News is multiplying and there's a Peter Thiel connection between Bari Weiss. What is that?
Gil Duran (26:44):
Well, she founded her little fake University of Austin with a lot of help from Joe Lonsdale, who's a member of the PayPal Mafia and who has been kind of a less visible but major player in a lot of this stuff. And part of what this has been, and this is something that a lot of these tech guys talk about in the context of something called the network state, which is their plan to create a new governing system for the world marked by these tech ruled fiefdoms, is the need to create a parallel media parallel institutions. So a media that has the legitimacy and the historical credibility of a CBS, but that now acts more like a Fox News. That's what the University of Austin was about. Create something that sounds like a university that is actually just a sort of small cult of people being indoctrinated into the radical politics of Silicon Valley.
(27:42):
In fact, actually one of the few places Peter Thiel already gave his secret antichrist lecture was at the Bari Weiss University. So it's a very small group of people doing this. What they have is a lot of money, but they have a very small group of personnel trying to do these things. Bari Weiss is in no way qualified to be the editor-in-chief of CBS. And what this really means is that RIP CBS. CBS is dead, CBS is done, and the key is to protect our other institutions from being taken over in this way. And one thing I'd say to people when you see this happening where they take over an institution and destroy it and try to rename it and put lipstick on a pig and pretend like it's still the Walter Cronkite, this idea of creating these parallel institutions come straight from Curtis Yarvin, he called the soul, the cathedral, the universities, the media institutions that you have to hollow out and take control of and remake in the image of these sort of fascist tech bros.
(28:44):
So what we're seeing is these sort of crazy ideas play out. And I think the lesson here is that when you give these people too much money to go crazy, and then they start trying to tear society apart. So it is depressing to see someone get this kind of reward, but I don't think it's going to work out in the end. I think they just destroyed CBS, and I think legitimate, credible journalists are going to have to get out of there. And I think it's the beginning of the end of you already have Fox and Newsmax. I don't know why they're so obsessed with having some kind of legacy brand, but by seizing it in this way, you're also destroying it. So I think we have to make sure that that happens, that CPS loses all credibility immediately and that this is another failed venture.
Andrea Chalupa (29:34):
I want to point out that when this happened in Ukraine, the journalists would jump ship and band together and start a new media company which would go on to thrive because they would be practicing actual journalism. So what needs to happen now from CBS is a bunch of those credible journalists and editors and producers need to join forces and start an all new media company because there's money there for that. There is investment there for that. And I know because look at the foundations that are giving to groups like ProPublica and other groups, other independent media, there's money there. There's plenty of foundations on our side that want to protect facts and what to protect knowledge itself. So to all those CBS journalists get together, plan something new, build something new. That's the only way out of this. That's how you, Ukraine has survived so long. I want to ask you about how Peter Thiel sees independent minded folks looking at him and saying, wait a minute, you are actually the antichrist.
Gil Duran (30:42):
I think it's a question he struggles with because by his own definition, all the things he described as being the antichrist could easily be applied to him. But I think it's important to avoid playing his game. I don't believe in a literal antichrist. In fact, in the Bible, it's more that antichrist are people who were against Christ against Christ's teaching. It was used to describe people who were watering it down and giving a version of the teachings that was not what certain people felt were the teachings of Christ and what is more anti-Christian in Silicon Valley and venture capital, what is more anti-Christian than cutting USAID, which means that 14 million people, many of them children will die over the next five to 10 years. So I think it's more important to focus on those deeper moral questions in what the role of these billionaires is.
(31:33):
In a way, I think he would be titillated to be compared to the antichrist. It's almost as if on a subconscious level, that's the game he's trying to put into motion, right? Going around pointing the finger while giving a set of criteria that could easily be applied to him. He has said the antichrist would be someone who's always talking about Armageddon. Well, if you look Peter Thiel's, like the only really famous person always talking about Armageddon, except for Alexander Dugan in Russia, who gives an antichrist spiel. That sounds a lot like what Peter Thiel's talking about, except in his version of it, the United States is the antichrist. It's the country of apocalypse. But he uses all the same lingo, so they're huffing the same paint. And that's concerning for people who know who Alexander Dugan is and the role that he plays. It suggests that Peter Thiel's trying to play this role as this sort of meme philosopher who provides this basis for where the arguments go, how the culture of politics is shaped.
(32:33):
The good thing, if one believes in God and in miracles, the older he gets, the less articulate Peter Thiel becomes. It's painful to hear him speak. He stutters. He can't get a word out. He seems very, there's a big disconnect between his brain and his tongue. And so even as he tries to preach and evangelize this message of Armageddon and Antichrist, his speech has been struck from him. So we can take a little bit of solace in that. But yeah, I've seen the first rejoinder people always say is that he's the antichrist, right? But a lot of this too, he ties to Rene Gerard, who he took a class with at Stanford, a French theologian, Catholic theologian who talked a lot about something called mimetic rivalry. And the idea that desire is what creates conflict. People want to be like other people. They get into these competitions.
(33:29):
And the more you compete with somebody, the more you become like that person. You're after the same things. And so I think we have to avoid being sucked into a mimetic rivalry where we decide to start pointing the finger about the antichrist. Because if the game becomes who is the antichrist? It seems like they're very well prepared to play that game, right? That's kind of what he's telling us is let's play the Antichrist game. And so I'd say we should not worry about who is the antichrist. We should worry about why this very powerful and influential billionaire who's completely wrapped up on our law enforcement and intelligence surveillance systems is preaching nonstop about the end of the world. That's very concerning.
Andrea Chalupa (34:09):
Do you think maybe Peter Thiel is self-conscious because he suspects he might be the antichrist?
Gil Duran (34:15):
I don't think he's very self-conscious at all, because you wouldn't be going around giving a weird speech like this. You could just not say these things. And I think it's way too kinky for mass audiences for someone like Peter Thiel to be going off the rails like this. I compare it to if he decided instead of being into the antichrist, he was into modern dance and taught himself some moves and decided to put together a little dance recital and went around the world, a 57-year-old man doing a modern dance routine in front of a bunch of sycophantic members of the audience, that would be very strange. This is kind of what he's doing here. He's just put on a theologian cap. And by the way, the theologians are all rejecting this and saying that this is not how you should talk about this stuff. And that basically saying he doesn't have the credibility to do it, but I think if he were more self-conscious, he'd be more quiet because he's not exactly the face that anybody needs to see. He has no charisma. He's inarticulate, and his ideas are very, very strange.
Andrea Chalupa (35:19):
Does he do drugs?
Gil Duran (35:21):
I'm not sure if he does. I'm not sure that he would need them. He's been into strange ideas for a very long time, going all the way back to the nineties. He's had these very apocalyptic ideas about where things are headed in the 21st century, and we see that evolving over time to become more directly apocalyptic and Christian. Earlier on, he was really inspired by a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted that the rise of crypto, something called cyber currency, remember this is 97, before the stuff was totally real to most people would lead to the downfall of nation states. And that a cognitive elite of smart people who are really good at web and internet moneymaking would rise up and become this new powerful force in the world. So that was the animating cause of his earlier days. Actually, that was why he started PayPal was because of that book.
(36:15):
He was trying to create crypto. And here we are almost 30 years later, and he's sort of fanatical about the antichrist. So it's a bad trajectory, but there's a running theme there of embracing the most apocalyptic and terrifying ideas of the future of a very grim and pessimistic future, which is odd because Peter Thiel, after struggling to be a lawyer and a hedge fund manager and not doing very well at those things, ends up lucking out and becoming a billionaire in Silicon Valley. It seems like if you had that kind of luck, you should be a lot more optimistic about things. Instead, he seems to become increasingly pessimistic. And I think the real problem is that he does not understand why he needs to die, and he's terrified of death. And I think that's an animating dysfunction for a lot of these guys where you see this move toward trying to extend their lives.
(37:05):
And so if he takes drugs, I would assume it's sort of life extension type of drugs, drugs. And unfortunately, no matter what he does, he's going to die. And if you're a Christian and you read the Bible and you pay attention to the words of Christ, it's not going to be really good for you when you die, if you're a rich man, it's one of the few groups that Jesus really burned in the Bible. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God. And so I think that maybe this weird juxtaposition of being a bad person and trying to be a Christian has led to this very strange sort of collapse of context by which he is now trying to preach on the antichrist and adopt this religious framework while also trying not to die. Again, having been raised in the Christian religion, there is only one path to eternal life if you're a Christian. And it's called Jesus Christ. So we're not talking, it's not clear why he's so obsessed with the antichrist when he should be talking about Jesus.
Andrea Chalupa (38:05):
Right? Exactly. And the original socialist -- Jesus. And so what's really interesting about the Book of Revelations that of course features the Antichrist 666, all of it, the beast is that it was written in the late first century by someone believed to be named John. And this was following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed not just Pompeii, but the entire area of the Bay of Naples, where the Roman elite, where the oligarchs would party hardcore. They had palaces that put the Hamptons to shame. And the Roman emperors would all have their orgies and crazy, crazy weeks long parties on the Bay of Naples. And then Vesuvius explodes, and it felt like the end of the world, like the wrath of the Gods for the Roman empire's corruption. And at the same time, this is happening, you have a ragtag group of Jewish socialists who are telling everybody, your life matters.
(39:12):
My life matters. Women, slave women are saying, wait, my life matters. And then you have the founding of the early church, which was a very radical experiment in empathy, saying, our lives matter. And we know about this because the Romans were masters of bureaucracy. So they have letters to each other, the governors of these various regions saying, I've got these slave women here. We've been torturing, and they admitted they're deacons in the church. So women were deacons in the early founding of the church, and so on and so on. So I find it really fascinating, this obsession in the bro oligarchs of the Armageddon, antichrist and all that. But at the same time, Rome, you have Elon Musk naming his kids Roman names and so on, but it's like what happened to the Roman Empire? It got, according to the earliest historians who tried to figure it out, they're like, it became too soft because it turned Christian, they turned inward instead of outward. So what are your thoughts on that?
Gil Duran (40:13):
They're really very confused. And the truth about these tech billionaires is they are very, very, very dumb about the things they don't understand. We all know they understand something. They make billions of dollars off technology. They're good at that whole hustle and whatever. Some rockets, some cars, but they try to extend their expertise to everything, and it all falls apart. Are you Rome or are you their Christians? Right? Who are you? Exactly. And this goes across all literature in humanities for these guys. They are the villains of almost every narrative that they claim to appreciate science fiction. They're the villains of science fiction. There's always this rich elite with more technology trying to oppress everybody else. That's who the Silicon Valley are oligarchs of today are very clearly a lot of them clinging to the Lord of the Rings and seem to think that they're somehow the good guys in the Lord of the Rings, even though Peter Thiel names his company, Palantir, after the all seeing orb that the evil Wizard Soman uses to work against the good guys in the Lord of the Rings.
(41:19):
They are the bad guys in the Lord of the Rings, but they somehow think they're the good guys in Lord of the Rings. In fact, Saron has this. He creates orcs and they're a mix between Elf and something else. It's like transhumanism, right? It's artificial life. They bring it's artificial intelligence. They are the bad guys in the Lord of the Rings. And quite clearly, they are the bad guys in the villains of the Bible, the wealthy rich people who want to oppress and surveil and deprive everyone of the ability to thrive and be free in the world. And so they get it all twisted, mostly because they think they filter everything through the lens of their ego. And because they surround themselves with people who'd never tell them how dumb they are, and who only as Tim Dylan said on the Joe Rogan show, did nobody in Thiel's Inner Circle say Maybe don't give four lectures about the antichrist.
(42:15):
Maybe give one lecture, maybe give no lectures. Even people on the right are shocked and bemused by this. And so it really tells you something that he would take it this far, that there's really nothing stopping these guys from enacting their bad ideas and imposing them in the world. They don't have a filter that says, Hey, we all have things. I have things I don't say that. I think they can't filter, though. They can't say, Hey, what should I really focus on? And so if you look at all the narratives, they're always the villain and they're always the bad guy, which makes our role very clear, which is to defeat this evil force in the world. And it's sad that we've come to this and that things are so scary right now. But that's why all this literature exists, is to show us the way to be courageous, to have hope, to be in solidarity with others, to remember what we stand for, what our values are, and to remember the sacrifices that many others have made before us to keep our ideas, our freedom, and our country alive. And so if they can be inspired by the books, we can be inspired by the books as well.
Andrea Chalupa (43:25):
Our discussion continues. And you can get access to that by signing up at the Truth Teller level or Higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available, and you can give the gift of membership bonus shows invites to exclusive events. Get all shows ad free and more@patreon.com slash That's patreon.com/gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show to help Ukraine with urgently needed humanitarian aid. Join me in donating to ROM for ukraine@romforukraine.org to support refugees in conflict zones. Donate to Doctors Without borders@doctorswithoutborders.org, and to protect critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry. Donate to The Orangutan project@theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our associate producer is Carlin Dagel, and our founding production manager is Nicholas Torres. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. Original music and Gaslit Nation is composed by David Whitehead, Martin Berg, Nick Farr, Damian Arga, and Carlin Daigle.
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