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Have you been following libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s newly launched and diabolically branded crusade? His stated goal is to prevent any restrictions on tech (including AI) — and on tech moguls, apparently no matter how dangerous some of their products might potentially be. 

Thiel is a major factor in our country and our world, and, whether we like him or not, we have to pay attention to him because, like Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s, his manic passions have legs. 

And Thiel, like Musk and Trump, has the stench of Nazi about him: Thiel said Carl Schmitt’s work “helped create the core of his own beliefs.” Schmitt, a man who endorsed Hitler’s murder of political adversaries and promulgation of anti-Jewish policies. Thiel complained about a German law that cracks down on hate speech online, saying it’s an example of tech regulation going too far — and thus gives power to the Antichrist. And according to those close to him, his childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa cemented in him a belief that some people are simply meant to rule — and he has long expressed a visceral distaste for multiculturalism and progressive politics, and a deep skepticism toward democracy. 

His latest idea was to have a series of “off the record” speeches (or “lectures”) on a highly provocative — nay, wacky — theme. His correct assumption was that anyone who attended would be thrilled to hear this celebrity’s private thoughts, while the secrecy would make everyone else’s ears burn, after which it would be leaked and get as much attention as possible. 

To a privileged audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, he pitched his guaranteed attention-getting theme: 

Technology vs. the Antichrist. 

Why the antichrist theme? Most likely this whole thing was hatched by a marketing team, but the underlying compulsion is certainly all his. After all, the likelihood that a single person in that audience of sophisticates believes in the antichrist is slim to none. 

In his speech, Thiel made obvious his dilemma: He wants to stave off regulation of tech, which many think is urgently needed. But he knows that most people don’t give a hoot about the fortunes of tech billionaires or the tediums of tech policy. It seems obvious he needs the unwashed Trumpian masses on his side to generate enough pushback at global efforts to ensure AI doesn’t enslave us all. 

Now, if he can just find a way to snooker the vast millions for whom any voodoo will do, find a fantastically lurid supernatural hook of the sort sold every Sunday in megachurches throughout the land, he can build a vanguard to protect him and whatever lucrative new opportunity might come down the pike. 

We certainly live in strange times. Here is this educated man, this national business leader, having actually claimed that regulating artificial intelligence risks hastening… the coming of the antichrist. He also confessed that he had been searching for some reason to get people on his side, and that he had found a way to soup it up:

But I think if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough. You will never really resist.

Thus, he apparently hopes to enable unfettered development of new science by… harnessing the most unscientific, irrational beliefs. He claims to believe that if everyone stays out of his way, and that of his small cohort of electron billionaires, the world will prosper like never before. Smacks of the kind of grandiosity modeled by his good friend the president.

Thiel — who has long professed a deep Christianity, and became furious when he was outed as gay — seems conflicted on a variety of levels. In his remarks, he hints at a kind of ruthlessness and comfort with doing almost anything that advances his own ends. 

His stated faith notwithstanding, Thiel grasps the gullibility of the American character — a favorite topic throughout the country’s historical literature — and he seemingly figures he’ll just manipulate the poor suckers further. His pitch: Declare that regulation is the work of the antichrist. 

He warns that the kind of regulation others believe necessary to humanity’s survival will instead lead to “one world government” or totalitarianism. And this, he thinks, he can sell as the work of the antichrist.

The Antichrist Is Here! Maybe Two of Them

Also, he thinks the antichrist is here, walking among us now, and he has an idea who it is. Actually, maybe it’s two people. 

One is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leading tech thinker warning that human-like artificial general intelligence — allowed to advance without guardrails — will likely have dire consequences. Yudkowsky thinks it most likely will wipe out humanity altogether, and he’s having a real impact with his warnings. 

But Yudkowsky’s worst sin might have been pointing out that “authorities from multiple Christian denominations have stated that Thiel’s views, identifying the antichrist with proposals to regulate the AI industry, are not deemed by them to be compatible with conventional Christian belief.”

One of Thiel’s problems is that he personally funded Yudkowsky’s research for years. Now he regrets that and has decided to seek vengeance on his Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster. Given Thiel’s propensity to freak out if anyone says anything mean about him, it is kind of ironic that he thinks it is OK to level kind of the most literally damning charge he can against his former friend. 

But he won’t stop with Yudkowsky. No, he thinks there may be a second antichrist among us. And it is… wait for it… the tiny but big-spirited activist Greta Thunberg. Yes, that’s right, folks. Now, step on up and buy a ticket! 

“The antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” he said. “It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.” He also said, “And if Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire.”

Speaking of the Devil

For his sophisticated San Francisco audience, Thiel may want them to think he doesn’t literally believe these people are the antichrist and he probably assumes, for good reason, they won’t believe it either. So maybe he hopes they will see it as a metaphor. 

But not the public: It is fully capable of taking him literally, and running with it. Like Trump hinting they ought to storm the Capitol, while denying he said that. 

Besides — and I have no idea to what extent Thiel is a major factor — there’s a new movement in the technology sector to embrace Christianity, though perhaps not “Christ-like” values of generosity, kindness, and concern for the wellbeing of others, especially where it might impact the payout when your company gets bought. 

In any case, if there were actually an antichrist, Thiel himself would be a pretty good candidate. To be sure, he co-founded Paypal, the venture capital firms Founders Fund, Valar Ventures, and Mithril Capital, and helped bankroll Facebook. But, above all, he is also the main founder of Palantir.

Palantir, among other things, helps ICE track and identify immigrants, contributing to workplace raids, detentions, and deportations. Amnesty International has specifically condemned the company for enabling family separations and other violations. 

And Palantir created something called the “Nectar” intelligence system, an AI-powered software that brings together various law enforcement databases into a single computing platform — to obtain details about an individual’s race, private sex life, health, and political beliefs. 

It is currently being tested in a small town in England. Its justification is to “develop tools to better protect vulnerable people by preventing, detecting and investigating crime.” Sounds good, but it could be used to blackmail dissenters into passivity. 

Ironically, Thiel seems unusually protective of some of the worst people on the planet, a few of whom should qualify as antichrists themselves.

The Guardian reported: “As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon…”  In Thiel’s words:

They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.

When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: “I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza — you can’t just firebomb them.” So it’s like, come on, “I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?”

It’s especially ironic that Thiel says he’s worried about a totalitarian world, given that his company is a leading force for surveillance of the public. 

And if that weren’t enough to nominate him for the Anti-Nobel Peace Prize, we also have Thiel to thank for JD Vance, whose career he funded and whose position as vice president he urged on Trump.

Vance shares Thiel’s horror of progressives, as shown by his praise for Unhumans, a book by Jack Posobiec that characterized progressives as “subhuman.” If Vance becomes the next president of the US, he will be the gift from Thiel that keeps on giving.

And forget about Christian charity. Thiel urged Musk to not give money to the Giving Pledge under which signatories leave the majority of their wealth to charity, warning him that his money would go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates” — despite the fact that most of Gates’s money has actually gone to vanilla public health, poverty, and other decent causes. Thiel suggested that Musk should, instead, hoard it so it could be used to battle a future antichrist.

Thiel thinks about money a lot (apart from his own $20 billion). He complained that international financial bodies make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens — and are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon — saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

Which must be such a hassle! No wonder we need to get rid of those pesky bureaucrats and their latent totalitarianism. 

If one can think of anything worse than Peter Thiel shaping our destiny, it is several Peter Thiels doing so. These “brilliant” nutcases hold power so awesome it defies description — possibly enough to permanently harm the entire planet — even more, down the road, than Trump. 

Thiel’s latest and greatest caper serves to underline the growing risks of letting a small group of people control so much of the money, the power, and the technology. In other words, his behavior only underscores the exact opposite of what he advocates: It’s too dangerous to have no means of saying when enough is enough. 

For example, I just saw that Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, once an outspoken liberal, now loves Trump and wants him to send troops into San Francisco. Presumably to roust out those terrorists over at the Commonwealth Club. 

People like these latter day super-robber-barons of tech remind us of the limitations of the libertarian philosophy. Boiled down from its vestigial little nods to “freedom,” it posits basically that whoever has the most money ought to rule the roost. It also calls for “less government” in the US —  and opposes efforts of governments working together, at the exact time that the US is under significant pressure from rising nation-states. 

This preposterous episode reminds us just how important it is that we, the people, elect competent representatives. Who then can and should consult both domestically and internationally to figure out what to do about transnational corporations and entities growing rapidly out of control. 

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Finally, on a positive note: A controversial ban on cellphones in New York City schools seems to be going surprisingly well, and teachers and parents are pleased. Meanwhile, the students are… actually talking to each other! 

Getting off social media and talking to each other is the ticket. A little less Peter Thiel in our faces and our ears, and a little more healthy human interaction.