Peter Thiel Proletarian

I didn’t want to go, but it felt important. The Uber, driven by a woman with a thick, almost African, Creole accent, awkwardly navigated the suburban roads just off Pennsylvania Avenue. The highway was blocked off, so we were forced to take the backroads, catching a glimpse of the Capitol, lit up beautifully and white, with just a bare blue tint due to the snow and ice. I knew the drinks at the bar would be awful, I knew before I even saw the cheap decor on the walls, and felt the sticky counter that seemed to clutch at my skin. The doors were black, clearly repurposed, and passing through felt like entering some imitation castle. I half expected to find jousting inside. I asked for a G&T. The bartender poured half a shot of gin into a glass that looked dirty, popped open a bottle of tonic—you know the kind? The cheap sort is packed in cardboard boxes on the floor of some Trader Joe’s, with a lid that could be metal, but feels cheap and plastic-like, and poured. He handed me the drink, silently; he clearly couldn’t speak English. It tasted like artificial lime and fake carbonation. As if the drink was already flat, but kept fizzy by some strange chemical element I didn’t want to think about.

I didn’t wear my best black dress because it was a” defense tech” networking event. Instead, I wore a sort of baggy plaid dress and a turtleneck beneath it. I wanted to present myself with New England charm, and the way the fabric hung off me felt suitably modest. I felt a little nice—I was supposed to. Everyone was supposed to. It didn’t matter that my Uber was cheap, that the pub was too, and that the staff couldn’t speak to me in English. It didn’t matter that, even in D.C. during the Golden Age, the Luma didn’t have the address until twenty-four hours before. It didn’t matter that it was because there were posters that said “WILL PAY FOR MAGA NAZI GROUPCHATS” plastered on the bottom of the steel streetlights outside. All of those concerns were subsumed in the atmosphere of aspiration and secrecy that had brought everyone together. An obsessive hope, the kind you feel watching green lines on little screens wink at big bets paying off, suffused the room. Like markets, idle chatter traded on secrets. Most of the people there were men, the kind who used their high school savings and an AMC payout to buy Defense and Tech stocks, boosting their portfolios just enough to make the dream of getting rich off Robinhood seem feasible. You might even afford a wife, or hit big, and get a date. They had made just enough to make them think they might make it, and so, they were here, and I was there too, with them, and we were chatting.

I spoke with the host. He was an old stock American (not that that matters anymore), though younger than me. He’s the kind of person you ask about which schools they’re bullish on, who swaps gossip like oxygen without ever revealing what they really think, or who they’re getting money from. I’ve never gotten the sense he likes me. I thought it was so strange that I ended up in a political coalition with him. Fifty years ago, our families would have been nothing to each other, along the old lines of class, ethnicity, and distance. My grandpa, a Utah postman, German and Eastern European, my uncles, Idaho Wendy’s managers. His dad, an attorney, I bet, maybe in Connecticut. His grandpa? I’m sure he had political enemies. If the old American gears, which ran on last names and alma maters, had stayed spinning, we would not be allies. In fact, he’d probably look down on me. He might be right to. Instead, he’s now an acquaintance and political ally, and we’re suspicious of each other. “You didn’t seem like that type that would like us, at first.” I held my tongue and let the soda water fizzle on top. “Here, you’ll love her. She’s a writer too.”

Walking through the bar, in search of the other writer, I glanced at the bartenders. Despite being served by these new Americans, taxied by them, and made awful drinks by them, we were cordial and polite. Everyone there was desperate, first, to pitch themselves to everyone else; second, to find helpful secrets, and third, and most importantly; to build the sort of companies and weapon systems that could, as a last lunge at a new founding, re-establish American hegemony and push back the endless tide. The bathrooms were getting dirtier every year. The food, not worse—but different. Stale and yet disgustingly fresh. A bifurcated palette of one-star ethnic fusion or post-American had emerged; the former was always too wet, the latter always too dry. Finding good restaurants was harder than ever. Only European ones held any charm. I only heard Tagalog at the Sushi place.

The drinks were too sweet, and the alcohol always felt strong; it dulled the taste and resulted in an unpleasant imbalance. We all resented this world more than anything else, because we all knew we hated the Uber drivers, and the bad drinks, and the staff we couldn’t speak to, and, and, and, I could list the things I hated forever and ever—and so we plotted. The plot was that the bartenders and the Uber drivers had to go home. Though we were an assorted mess of post-liberals and Protestant writers, monarchists, and MAGA die-hards. Jewish psychiatrists drinking with ex-Bernie staffers and Hapa Zoomettes dancing along while autistic black guys chatted about Curtis Yarvin, we all agreed on the basic principle. They have to go home. Of course, if they did go home, some of us would have to be bartenders, janitors, and taxi drivers. We could automate almost everything, but someone would still have to get their hands dirty. So, who?

When you spoke to someone, they looked at your eyes in the way someone looks at a Kalshi bet. Maybe it had always been that way. I wondered if Roman legionaries saw dice in Caesar’s eyes. All of these thoughts came to me after the fact, of course. At the time, all I thought was that I didn’t really want to be there.

I was brought to the other writer, standing in the corner of the room. She was older and obviously a devout Christian. The conversations turned to religion. She had been at a Peter Thiel lecture on the Antichrist. I already knew his argument; I had read the leaked notes and the essay he partially authored. I don’t know how the subject came up—I think I mentioned how utterly banal I was beginning to find Catholic intellectuals in an attempt to surprise and offend her. I didn’t even feel bad for trying to be hurtful; I was drunk and terribly bored. She had laughed with me instead and shared that, as a Protestant, she had been invited to attend a Thiel lecture to “see how his ideas would play with a new audience.” This is exactly what I had gone for; I had found an informant.

As she explained his theory to me, my only thought was how much Thiel’s ideas sounded like my uncle’s, who, in turn, sounded like Alex Jones. What a stark contrast to all of us there (maybe drinking on his or Marc Andreesen’s dime), who wanted nothing more than to escape life as just another little glass bottle in a box of glass bottles in a cheap storage room to be poured into dirty glasses. We would do almost anything to stand out and survive. But Peter Thiel, with his global audience and endless resources, had given a lecture no more unique or insightful than anything I’ve heard from my uncles and brothers before. Maybe that was the point? Maybe he was doing the same thing to us that I had just done. Offending, from boredom. Or…was there something more? I really did mean it: Catholic intellectuals are boring.

The Anti-Christ

As my new friend explained it to me, “He thinks that at some point the global institutions of government, like the United Nations and other multilaterals, will either find or be taken over by a charismatic individual, gay, or a gay Jew, who will then expand their power, stifling individual freedom, and plunging humanity into a thousand years of darkness.” In addition to his lectures, he co-authored “Voyages to the End of the World,” published in First Things magazine. He later discussed his ideas in a podcast episode titled “Where Is the Antichrist?” with R. R. Reno. He’s referenced these ideas as far back as 2011. In addition to these sources, my new friend’s summary is backed by leaked quotes from the lecture:

“Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man,” Thiel pondered at one point during the leaked audio. “The Antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number — I’d rather stress the Antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.”

" In his second lecture, Thiel explains how "a new, reformed government called 'Leviathan,'" as described by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 political treatise, that wields supreme power to cow men into peaceful cooperation, will be ridden by the Antichrist "to take over the world."

“He believes that humanity's future will be defined by who wins between those who prefer freedom and those who prefer the absence of risk. That the champion of the total state that protects its population at the cost of its freedom is China, and that the whole stakes are whether the West—the only civilization defending individual freedom—prevails. The risk being that at the heart of the West, fear of risk (ecological or from AI) encourages us to abandon technological progress, and thus power. So if we're afraid of risk within our own civilization, we'll end up stagnating and handing the keys to the planet to totalitarian China. Abdicating our freedom here and now means abdicating humanity's freedom for all and for a long time.”

“Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.”

“Thiel said the Antichrist is “not only a medieval fantasy” but that it and the apocalypse are both linked to “the end of modernity…”

 “…Thiel recognizes state power as a double-edged sword, identifying the American empire as simultaneously "the natural candidate for Katechon"—the entity that delays the emergence of the Antichrist—"and Antichrist; ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state.”

Katechon: Erasure of Distinction

The Katechon is a ring of containment; it is that which restrains the Antichrist. One can view this as a more literal restraint, an actual bind, or a temporal restraint, such as the Church. The Katechon, in Thiel’s telling—he’s never willing to commit fully—is left mysterious, though he implies that it is the United States. Our capacity for freedom, individualism, and technological achievement brings us closer to Utopian dreams of immortality and post-scarcity every day. This makes human goodness possible. The Antichrist prospers in ignorance, hunger, and poverty because sin thrives in conditions of want and desperation. Thus, from the Soviet bread line and regulations on AI development (which would slow human progress), Thiel can extract the Beast’s arcane machinations. For Thiel, human sin is partially contingent on human weakness, a weakness we can overcome with our will and intellect, the sole gift we were left with after being cast from the Garden of Eden. To restrain our creativity is to aid the Antichrist. For Thiel, the Book of Revelation is sort of like a game of blackjack. The more conservatively we play, the better off the Beast is; the more it profits from our self-restraint, and the more we suffer, and vice versa. None of this is certain; it’s speculation: that’s it’s a bet. But you can’t leave the table. So we need to have the courage to gamble. Isn’t free will the freedom to play the odds? Maybe Caesar’s dice rolled like Thiel’s, and maybe all of us, in that shitty bar, felt exactly the same as the crowds did when the Mount was empty, and the fish was gone. Might there be a chance tomorrow? If it happened once....

And this is where my critique of Thiel emerges. To speak on his terms, I don’t think the Katechon is the United States, which gave the world the United Nations—the Katechon, more truthfully, may actually be Peter Thiel’s own performance of intellectualism, which takes a simplistic, even low-brow, narrative of apocalypse ideas, and forces elites to listen. For all the long speeches he’s given and the long essay he published, his basic idea of apocalypse is stunningly proletarian. Proletarian culture is no “culture” at all. It is a vagabond compilation of bourgeois and aristocratic ideas, fallen from grace, and the detritus of pop culture. The highest literary aspiration of a proletarian is an appreciation of The Lord of the Rings, and in music, a passion for folk musicians, like John Denver. As for their views of the world, proletarian ideas are often fantastical, touching on adrenochrome, a one-world government, Orwell’s writings, and satanic machinations. Thiel’s milieu is not academia or the heights of Christian theology, but Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and countless boomers with YouTube channels who went along with QAnon. Thiel’s narrative removes the most ostentatious and salacious elements—the pedophile sex rings and Satan worship at Bohemian Grove—but maintains the core message, perhaps even distills it: a one-world government aims to destroy the United States, which is the closest thing to God’s kingdom on Earth.

If the “Katechon” is that which holds back the Antichrist, then the Katechon is simplistic populism. It is the 90 IQ instinct that gets you to laugh when academics say gender is a social construct, and your memories return biology lessons of sex and memories of pleasure had in car backseats. It’s Wesley Yang and Flyover Jim agreeing. It is New Founding distilling the Oklahoma diner table. It’s First Things marching beside Deplorable Jan to save America from the brink. That is to say, it is the vast number of the poor, forgotten men and women—suitably Christian, meek and humble—that hold back the Antichrist’s ambitions, and the writers and the thinkers and the Caesars are along for the ride. Vox Populi, Vox Dei, whether you want it or not.

Many magazines, publishing houses, and authors lay claim to the term “MAGA” in various ways. Passage, UnHerd, Rod Dreher and Deneen, Breitbart, Compact, and National Review each have little flags planted in the digital landscape, proclaiming their specific brand of populism as the most legitimate and best.

The reality is that you do not need these magazines or thinkers to be populist. They are superfluous, parasitic institutions, grafted onto a movement that does not even know of their existence, and which serve the ambitious strivers (like myself) who go to Defense Tech parties and abandon the very rural and suburban communities that made them possible, powering, with their anger and resentment, the dissident political insurgency so many others have, remora-like, latched onto. I'm a remora. And my hometown is the whale. On a good day, I can believe I did the right thing, leaving the pod. The pod might want a baby swimming in Washington’s water. Any parent wants their child to succeed. But how do we separate a remora from a little whale, braving the big swamp? At a certain distance, everything begins to look the same.

And this is why I like Peter Thiel and his antichrist lecture. This is why I came. This is why I bore the burden of free drinks and sticky tables. I wanted to hear it firsthand. Did he really force a bunch of very smart people to sit down and listen to his lecture about how Thunberg and a gay Jew are going to destroy the world? Of course, it’s not that simple. It’s far more complicated. But if his prophecy came to pass, “Greta Thunberg destroyed the world” would be an apt summary.

My red state uncle may say the same if he had a mic and thirty minutes. But he only has Facebook Live. And no one in DC, LA, or NY is going to listen to him. It’s not because he mentions adrenochrome rather than “Katechon.” The words don’t matter. Ideas matter less on their own merit than on the perceived status of holding an idea. Status is the final test of whether an idea is good or bad. Good ideas bring high status, and bad ideas, bad. That is why Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been received with almost universal mockery and disbelief. He’s one of the richest, most powerful men on Earth, and he’s betting on apocalyptic fears of a one-world government? To aspirational, striver types, this seems like a low-status idea—a bad bet. And, for many years, it has been a very bad bet indeed. No one who thinks that a Dragon with seven heads is lurking beneath a Robin’s egg blue helmet has ever had a billion dollars.

Thiel is putting simplistic, banal, low-status ideas of evil at the center of political life. He is insisting that evil exists and that it may thrive in hunger and ignorance. He’s echoing the faithful cry of countless near-poor preachers that our country is a “light unto the world” and a kingdom of God—it is God’s own land. It’s almost insultingly simple: the less free we are, the more the Antichrist wins; uncle is never wrong. That this narrative serves as a method of status arbitrage is what I find genuinely interesting about his lectures. He could say whatever he wants, and he wants to say that the Antichrist has a very good hand.

Thiel’s lectures are not surprising or innovative. They are a straightforward application of Christian eschatology to basic technological and political questions. His bet is, on one level, a bet on populism’s moral character—restraining elite liberal projects that seek to remake human beings—thus preserving the moral character of normal people, which in the United States is entrepreneurial, Christian, and invidualistic. On another level, his bet is on himself, and he’s doing us the favor, with this lecture, of telling us that. Finally, his bet is against us—people are too self-assured to reflect on why one of the richest men on the planet is making a fool of himself.