Not AI. Not markets. The Antichrist

Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.Peter Thiel, is a man who looks like what would happen if a Bond villain’s tax attorney got hit by a beam of pure libertarian ambition and decided to become human. He has apparently run out of governments to destabilize and is now going after theology itself. Not content with having built the Palantir surveillance apparatus that feeds your neighbor into a deportation van, not satisfied with having bankrolled a Vice President who makes Mike Pence look like Hunter Thompson, the German-born Peter Thiel has saddled up his apocalyptic hobby horse and trotted it directly to Rome. To a palazzo. Steps from the Vatican. Because when you’re going to explain who the Antichrist is, you might as well do it in the Antichrist’s neighborhood.The event is invitation-only. Four lectures. No press. NDAs. Which is exactly the kind of event the Antichrist would throw, if you think about it, but we’re not here to think about that.Herr Thiel’s thesis —is that the Antichrist isn’t some horned sulfurous beast crawling up from the Pit. No, no. That’s old Antichrist thinking. The new Antichrist is a bureaucrat. A regulator. Someone who wants to slow down technology in the name of, quote, “safety.” In Thiel’s eschatology, the greatest threat to Western civilization isn’t nuclear war, ecological collapse, or the fact that Elon Musk is in charge of the government’s accounting. It’s Greta Thunberg.Yes. Greta Thunberg. A Swedish teenager with a disability, a braided pigtail, and a sailboat is, according to Peter Thiel, a foot soldier of Satan. He said this. In leaked recordings. With the serenity of a man ordering a flat white.Now, the creator of both PayPal and Palantir didn’t come up with this theological architecture entirely on his own. He had help — specifically from Carl Schmitt, the WWII Nazi legal theorist. When you’re a libertarian tech oligarch shopping for intellectual frameworks, apparently the Nazi section is just the most ergonomically convenient aisle. Schmitt argued that world history is a cosmic cage match between the Antichrist and the Katechon, which is Greek for “the Restrainer,” which is the force that holds the Antichrist back. In Schmitt’s version, strong continental empires – like the third Reich were the Katechon. In Thiel’s remix, apparently Peter Thiel is the Katechon, which is a self-assessment that even his own mirror must find as a Funhouse reflection.What Thiel has essentially done is take regulatory policy debates — boring, important, democratic regulatory policy debates — and recast them as Revelation. Should the EU regulate AI? That’s not a policy question anymore. That’s prophesied Satanic interference. Should there be international bodies governing weapons-grade machine learning? Brother, you just joined the Legion of the Antichrist. Congratulations on your pitchfork. The Geneva Convention? Probably Beelzebub’s HR department.Look: Peter Thiel is a very intelligent man. This is what makes him so magnificently, operatically dangerous. He’s not a kook. He’s not preaching this in a parking lot to eleven people with sandwich boards or people with missing teeth. He’s preaching it in a palazzo, to two hundred hand-selected tech aristocrats and conservative Christian money-changers, under ferocious NDAs, with no press, while the President of the United States owes him favors and the same Vice President is his former mentee. He is building, with some care and considerable financing, a theological immune system for American oligarchy — a complete spiritual framework in which every attempt to govern the powerful is recast as the work of Satan, and every billionaire who resists oversight is, by definition, doing the Lord’s work….The Cary Harrison Files is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Copyright Audiences United, LLC – all rights reserved. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe