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“My brilliant colleague Ross Douthat recently called Peter the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years. I think that might be true. But what that label, right-wing or conservative, misses, is how strange and wild, how untamed, Peter’s worldview is”.
That quote is from Bari Weiss, former opinion writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, founder of The Free Press, and now editor-in-chief of CBS after it was acquired by David Ellison. It was delivered in a tribute that she dedicated to Peter Thiel during the 2026 Axel Springer Award ceremony that he attended in Berlin on the 24th of September.
“That is why it is so fun,” she continued, “to sit across from him in a conversation or an interview, because you never know where he will go. He might wind up saying he’s not sure freedom and democracy are compatible, or seriously considering, as he did recently, whether or not the human race should continue”.
Axel Springer is a German media conglomerate which owns Business Insider and, since 2021, Politico, among 150 other newspapers and journals in 36 countries, such as Bild and Die Welt in Germany. Among Axel Springer’s five core ideas are the defence of the State of Israel and the fight against antisemitism, as well as the alliance between the U.S. and Europe. These ideas were restated in 2025.
We must assume Axel Springer condones the Gaza genocide. That is not a surprise; the investment fund KKR bought a majority stake in the group in 2019, an investment fund which is linked to profiting from the occupation of the West Bank. However, in 2024, the company was divided in order to separate its news side from the classified ad business and gave majority control to its current CEO, Mathias Döpfner, and the widow of the founder. The idea was to make it a global news powerhouse.
During the event, Peter Thiel praised both Bari Weiss and Mathias Döpfner, saying that the media would be in extremely bad shape if it were not for people like them and that he can’t understand why “so much of it has degenerated into a left-wing hate factory”. It is, ostensibly, from this “degeneration” that Thiel’s concept of the Antichrist is derived.
For Thiel, the Antichrist is primarily a political archetype representing global tyranny that arises under the guise of benevolence, universal peace, and salvation from catastrophe. He accuses those to the left of him of wanting to bring it about through such things as Agenda 2030 or the UN climate conferences, which set global standards.
He frequently posits that modern political philosophy presents humanity with a false binary: Armageddon—total catastrophe via existential risks such as nuclear war, runaway AI, bioweapons, or climate collapse—or the Antichrist, a totalitarian “One-World State” or hyper-surveillance apparatus created to prevent that destruction.
He argues that the public is constantly terrified of Armageddon, which blinds them to the threat of the Antichrist. In his view, the Antichrist gains power not by promising evil, but by talking about Armageddon nonstop and promising an “unjust peace” and total safety at the cost of human freedom.
In order to escape this dichotomy, Thiel proposes rejecting the inevitability of an “unjust peace” through strengthening the Katechon—which is, to him, drawing on 2 Thessalonians and political theorist Carl Schmitt, the force or institution that holds back the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the world. Thiel believes that decentralized national sovereignties, competition, and technological progress act as checks against a unified global regime.
He has other additions to his escape route. One is that humanity must break the “great stagnation”; he argues that progress has slowed down everywhere except in bits/software. In his theological lectures, he reframes this stagnation as deeply dangerous because of scarcity and resource competition. In order to avoid this, he proposes “accelerationism” and “opening new frontiers”.
In essence, Thiel’s belief system—because that is what it is—holds that there is no predestined outcome and that the Antichrist is a warning from old traditions that we must avoid a world government system. The irony is that, while he accuses the “left-wing hate factory” of fomenting the appearance of such a system, he is doing as much as anyone he criticises to bring it about.
A one-world government, independently of whether we think it is a good or a bad idea, can only happen through technological dependency and surveillance. This means there can only be one world government once the entire world is under a control grid, even if that grid is composed of different nodes that interact with each other. That control grid is exactly what companies such as Palantir, of which he is a co-founder, are allowing to emerge.
But there is another, more sinister side to Thiel’s thinking. The belief in the Antichrist, as proposed by Thiel, is the belief in a constant fight between good and evil. The Antichrist is the incarnation of evil and anything that opposes it, like the katechon, is goodness. We must then support the good in order to fight evil.
Thiel has identified a “one-world government” with the Antichrist, and anything that appears to go in that direction according to him, like modern political liberalism, international institutions, or world trade, must be fought as evil. Therefore, nationalism, authoritarianism, and closed markets must be good and must be supported. This has direct consequences on people’s lives, which makes his theory of the Antichrist relevant, especially when he is receiving an award from one of the largest media conglomerates in Europe.
I do think there is good and there is evil. The genocide in Gaza is evil, and those who support it are supporting evil. In Türkiye, people buy extra bread at bakeries and they leave it “on the hook”; meaning, the bread is placed in a bag outside and anyone who needs it can just walk by and take it. That is a good action, similar to many others happening all around the world. It seems we humans are not equally keen to take goodness to the same large level as we have taken evil. Although we could endlessly discuss their essential nature, or whether one even exists, there is a more basic level on which most of us agree
But I don’t believe in a constant fight between good and evil that will end in an apocalyptic event. I actually think this is part of the dualistic understanding of the nature of the universe that we should be questioning, at least since the emergence of quantum field theory. See, for example, the work of the designer of the modern commercial microprocessor, Federico Faggin, on the quantum unity of fields. From a scientific standpoint, this is not settled either; there is much that we do not know. However, it would seem that things do not work strictly according to Thiel’s dualistic vision.
Despite all the theological and technological dressings, Thiel’s argument remains firmly within the realm of Cartesian dualism and Hobbesian materialism. While he claims to propose a third way between Armageddon and a one-world government, he doesn’t offer any new possibilities, only justifications for continuing his business model. The danger is that he is being rewarded and that others are following him.
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