GRIM

Vance’s Billionaire Mentor Predicts We Are ‘Sleepwalking Into Armageddon’

The words are particularly chilling coming from a man who chairs one of the largest military contractors.

Peter Thiel, a longtime booster of JD Vance’s political career and founder of data-collecting defense contractor Palantir, says that we are “sleepwalking into Armageddon.”

“We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon,” he said during a lecture recording obtained by The Verge. “And then because we know World War III will be an unjust war, that pushes us very hard towards peace at any price.”

Thiel has long mused about the return of the Antichrist, a disembodied, oppositional force to the Christian Messiah that will usher in the end of times.

Last year, he began an off-the-record speaking series in which he discussed this obsession, the next global conflict, and the necessity of artificial intelligence as a counterweight to “effective altruism”—the desire to improve the world for as many people as possible.

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These lectures have reportedly taken place in San Francisco, Rome, and the emerging tech hub of Nashville over the past year.

The recordings The Verge obtained show that Thiel, who chairs one of the largest military contractors, has tied his zealotry to global conflicts and financial regulation, all while using millions to prop up Vance, who is said to be eyeing a 2028 presidential run.

“The Book of Revelation tells us, sort of, the Antichrist will abolish financial freedom,” Thiel said during one lecture. “There’s this whole constellation of things, where over the last 25 years… under cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed… It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

This obsession has seemingly dribbled down to Vance, who told a Christian podcaster last month that he would “not be shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us,” and that he felt “really weird spiritual dark energy” from AI companies and world leaders he did not name.

One would expect Vance, an adult Catholic convert, to be troubled by some of Thiel’s talking points, which rebuke Pope Leo as a “woke” pope who seeks to establish a secular rule over the global Catholic Church.

Thiel’s company, Palantir, has been used on the battlefield in the Middle East and Ukraine to accumulate data on certain targets—through cameras, sensors, and digital surveillance—that warfighters can use for advanced targeting.

He seems to believe the Antichrist has emerged not through dystopian-level destruction, but in the form of alarmists, like 23-year-old activist Greta Thunberg.

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“The thing that has political resonance is ‘We need to stop science’... In our world [the Antichrist] is far more likely to be Greta Thunberg,” Thiel told journalist Ross Douthat in June during the same interview in which he struggled to answer whether humanity should survive.

A man with such outsized political influence holding these ideals seems troubling for many, but many of his own heterodoxical arguments work against him. To quote a verse from Thiel’s most repeated edicts, Matthew 24:24: “For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.”

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Christopher Buchanan

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