‘The Antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon,’ Thiel said in pre-election interview
In a newly-resurfaced interview, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, said he believes biblical concepts like the Antichrist and Armageddon stem from the potential of catastrophic technologies that could lead to a totalitarian one-world government.
Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, stated in an October 2024 interview with Stanford University’s think-tank, the Hoover Institution, that the Antichrist figure from the book of Revelation could emerge by exploiting fears of apocalyptic destruction and offering a solution through global governance. He told “Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson” this figure or system would present itself as a savior, promising “peace and safety” in a world of extreme stakes.
Pointing to 1 Thessalonians 5:3, Thiel, 57, said his “speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.” He added, “The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety. But you have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things.”
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Describing the Antichrist as either a figure or system which emerges in a post-Christian society, Theil said he believes the Antichrist — “You can think of it as a system where maybe communism is a one-world system,” he explained — would first mimic Christian ideals, but ultimately oppose them through excessive state power or global control.
“In some sense, the Antichrist as an idea is something that really comes into being in the world after Christ,” he said. “And then there’s a lot of things about it that are mysterious. In some ways, the Antichrist copies Christ, the Antichrist pretends to be greater than Christ, hyper Christian, ultra Christian, and then maybe only ultimately, deeply anti-Christian.”
Thiel suggested this interpretation raises a troubling theological quandary: is it possible to be “too Christian?” “In theory, no,” he said. “But in practice, if you think you’re more Christian than Christ, you’re in trouble.”
In the two-part interview, Thiel referenced two early 20th century fictional works by Vladimir Soloviev and Robert Hugh Benson, which portray the Antichrist as a charismatic figure achieving global dominance. He noted what he viewed as a “plot hole” in these works — the lack of a clear mechanism for this dominance — but suggests modern technology and fear of existential risks provide such a mechanism today.
“But the plot hole is sort of like, how does this sort of world take over actually happen?” he said. “And it’s kind of not a deus ex machina, but like a daimonium ex machina. It’s like the Antichrist just gives these hypnotic speeches where nobody can remember a word and then sort of just swindles people’s souls out of them and they submit to this totalitarian state or something like this.”
Speculating on how that “plot hole” might be solved, Thiel said the development of atomic energy and nuclear weapons might hold the answer. “In 1900, early 20th century, people were not yet scared of apocalyptic weapons. They could not imagine anything of the scale that we’d have by the second half of the 20th century. And so, the Antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon.”
While he rejected the false dichotomy of the choice between worldwide destruction and a totalitarian one-world state, Thiel said secular phrases like “one world or none” obscure the need for a third, alternative path. “Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, we can envision a third way. ‘One world or none,’ that’s pretty hard to envision a third way. And so, that’s where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it’s actually more hopeful.
“‘One world or none’ — those are the two options if you’re a political atheist.”
In 2016, Thiel — who Vice President JD Vance, after meeting him after a 2011 talk at Yale Law School, once called “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met” who “defied the social template … that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists” — became the first person to publicly announce to the GOP convention that he is gay and played a key role in helping Trump get elected to his first term in office.
According to The New York Times, Trump has tapped Thiel to implement his March executive order, which calls on the federal agencies to integrate data-sharing practices — an order that has raised fears among civil libertarians as potentially laying the groundwork for a vast federal surveillance database.
In his interview with “Uncommon Knowledge” last October, Thiel suggested the United States itself could, depending on its political trajectory, be an “obvious candidate” for what he sees as the Antichrist system. Pointing to the Cold War era, Thiel said the U.S. has embodied characteristics of both good and evil. “I think anti-Communism was the supranational ideology that stood against the one world state of Communism.
“And so, the U.S. is ground zero of globalization and it’s ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization, we’re both,” he said. “That’s why it matters so much, the President of the United States maybe is the catacomb, maybe it’s a type of anti-Christ, but presidential elections matter.”
Despite his ominous predictions, Thiel suggested Americans are more focused on Armageddon-like risks like nuclear war or AI mismanagement than the risk of a totalitarian one-world government, which, according to Thiel, poses a greater threat due to its lack of scrutiny. “That tells me that we should worry about both, but if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one’s worried about it,” he said.
Ultimately, Thiel, despite signaling an uncertainty about any literal interpretation of the Scriptures, warned that most Americans — and even most Christians — fear the end of the world more than the Antichrist. “I don’t know how literally one should take these biblical accounts, but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist, perhaps.”
Thiel’s Palantir, which last month landed a $480 million contract with the U.S. Army for its AI-driven Maven Smart System, helped develop a new system for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2020 to track the production, administration and distribution of COVID-19 injections.
The Tiberius system, a data collection and analysis platform from Palantir, was used by HHS to track hospital data related to COVID-19 patients. As part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, Tiberius was later used to manage the purchase of COVID-19 serum and to track whether certain populations were taking the injection.
