Peter Thiel's Convenient Antichrist
How Silicon Valley desperately seeks to weaponize Christian memes to escape criticism and consequence
People tend to think of Silicon Valley as a secular citadel of detached rationalism—a place where algorithms rule over angels, software beats scripture, and optimized efficiency rules over religious dogma. These days, we’re seeing a bizarre ideological twist among the tech sector’s ruling elite. Peter Thiel, ex-PayPal CEO and the founder of Palantir, can’t stop talking about the Antichrist, which he associates with liberal pacifists and do-gooders like Greta Thunberg. Nicole Shanahan, a billionaire after her divorce from Google founder Sergei Brin and formerly RFK’s vice-presidential candidate, recently announced her surprisng conversion to Christianity and denounced the Burning Man festival—which she once loved as a hedonistic libertine—as literally “demonic.” Brock Pierce, deviant Bitcoin billionaire and crypto investor, frenetically posts Christian memes on his Instagram as if his social media feed can bring him instant salvation.
Silicon Valley’s fixation with the Singularity—a transhumanist future of perfect immortality where geeks merge with their machine overlords (please, God, techno-rapture-them quickly!)—always had an alien, eschatological tang. But their wholesale embrace of traditional Christianity is a new phenomenon.
As Gil Duran explores in his indispensable Nerd Reich podcast, the new religious fervor of tech elites has two goals: On the one hand, they seek to align themselves with the gun-toting masses as protection. On the other, they need to create new scapegoats (like secular atheists, liberals, or festival-goers) to deflect criticism and attacks against them for what they are: Not only beneficiaries, but the root cause of immense societal and ecological harm. The sudden piety of Silicon Valley elites is, in other words, a cynical, ham-handed attempt to colonize the religious imagination, just as they have colonized our digital attention.
I agree with Duran who notes, “It’s time to expose Silicon Valley and the Antichrist playbook.” We need a clear understanding of what they are doing. We need to keep focused on it, calling them out and, also, ridiculing them mercilessly.
Duran recently interviewed Dr. Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies and author of Naming the Antichrist, on the modern obsession with Antichrist. According to Fuller, Thiels’ idea of a cosmic supervillain has no basis in the Bible itself. The specific word “Antichrist” appears only four times in scripture, solely in the minor epistles of First and Second John. It appears nowhere in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation or the prophetic Book of Daniel.
In its original biblical context, Antichrist did not refer to a demonic world leader or a monster from the abyss. It referred merely to “deceivers” within the early church community who held slightly different doctrinal views regarding the nature of Jesus. However, over centuries, this vague concept got conflated with the “Beast” of Revelation, creating a spooky mythological creature—a boogieman that Christians could link to any political adversary. As Fuller notes, “There’s no scriptural warrant for any of the people who go talking about ‘signs of the antichrist’. They usually then go to the Book of Revelation which, again, never uses the term.”
Even so, the Antichrist remains a potent psychological tool to build tribal cohesion. Fuller, referencing the work of Eric Hoffer, explains the psychological necessity of an enemy for any mass movement: “You can have a vibrant fanatic cause without a god. But you cannot have a fanatic cause without a devil.” When a political opponent is reframed as a literal agent of Satan, any possibility of compromise or cooperation disappears. Duran points to the book Unhumans, written by two White Christian nationalists and blurbed by Vance, Trump, and Bannon, which declares that Leftists and Democrats are not fully human and do not deserve to be treated as human beings. This is an extremely dangerous development that could lead to genocidal outcomes, based on historical precedent.
Once you have named your political opponent as demonic, Satanic, or the Antichrist, you can no longer debate, compromise, or speak with them. You can only seek to destroy them via a Holy War. To call someone the Antichrist is to declare they are the embodiment of evil—an enemy with whom no compromise is possible. Dehumanizing people in this way is a despicable act.
Historically, apocalyptic thinking appeals to the poor and oppressed—those with little hope for justice, who pray for a divine reversal or intervention. It is a supreme irony that, today, this rhetoric is being adopted by the most powerful and wealthy individuals on the planet. Why does Peter Thiel, a man with immense resources and an escape pad in New Zealand, need to resort to calling his political enemies the Antichrist? Why does Nicole Shanahan feel the need to call a desert arts festival a demonic riot?
In the hyper-polarized environment of modern America, tech elites are seeking to forge a tactical alliance with the religious right and the MAGA movement. By adopting the extremist language of spiritual warfare, they want to frame their political battles—against tech regulation, taxation, or DEI programs—as more than policy disagreements. These become part of a cosmic, Manichean struggle between light and darkness. Somehow, those building massive surveillance systems and AI-based weapons while profiting off massive government corruption want to convince us they are the agents of light, while a young woman who risks herself to call attention to Israel’s genocide of children is an emissary of the Antichrist.
Matthew Fox, a theologian and former Dominican priest, considers this a terrifying inversion of Christian ethics. He suggests that these tech figures are engaging in a form of “Antichrist” behavior themselves by twisting the core tenets of their adopted faith. Christ preached humility, non-violence, decried the wealthy as almost unredeemable, and worked to uplift the poor. Christ threatened the established order of the Roman Empire by challenging hierarchies of wealth and power. Fox notes, “Mussolini defined fascism as the marriage of government and corporations. And it seems to me that this is that marriage on steroids, now coming out of Silicon Valley.”
When billionaires use Christianity to justify the destruction of the environment and the erosion of democracy, they are engaging in an intentional misdirection. “Antichrist means that what’s being said is taking the language of Christ but perverting it turning it inside out,” Fox explains. We are seeing a familiar practice where the powerful hide themselves under false religious pieties while doing whatever they want behind closed doors.
Peter Thiel studied under the weird Christian philosopher René Girard at Stanford, where Thiel was a Right Wing ideologue crusading against diversity with David Sacks. Girard developed a theory of “mimetic desire,” positing that human conflict arises because we copy the desires of others. This inevitable conflict eventually threatens to tear society apart. It gets resolved through the “scapegoat mechanism”—the collective murder or expulsion of a single sacrificial victim, which temporarily restores social order.
Duran believes that Thiel is obsessed with the Antichrist because he views the world through this Girardian lens. “Thiel believes we’re headed toward a massive scapegoating of some kind,” Duran explains. “And he has a terror that Silicon Valley billionaires are going to be the scapegoats.” Thiel understands that as wealth inequality widens and technology disrupts the social fabric, the public will eventually look for someone to blame. The tech billionaires and trillionaires backing Trump’s rapacious decimation of America’s institutions for short-term gain might be natural targets.
Thiel’s Antichrist narrative is a preemptive strike—a calculated attempt to identify a different scapegoat and deflect blame away from him and his cronies. By labeling environmentalists like Greta Thunberg, government regulators, anti-genocide activists, racial justice advocates, or those concerned that Artificial Super-Intelligence will kill everyone as agents of the Antichrist, Thiel is trying to direct the mob’s pitchforks away from himself and his peers. He is trying to define the enemy before the public identifies him as the enemy—and the most Antichrist-like guy in the room. This is not theology; it is a survival strategy for the ultra-wealthy, a Girardian move that deserves to backfire badly.
This strategy is further illuminated by the concept of “hyperstition,” a term originating from the technophiliac Lovecraftian philosopher Nick Land, one of the fathers of accelerationism.
