Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...

[admin]

PART 2 ANTI-ANTI-NAZI BARBARIAN HORDES ARE KNOCKING DOWN THE GATES

[admin]

Trump WAKES UP to NIGHTMARE NEWS and PANICS
Legal AF
Oct 10, 2025 The Intersection with Michael Popok

Trump controls all 3 branches of government, yet exploits the Shutdown he caused on the Democrats, rather than help Americans and red-state voters by ensuring that Americans have dignified healthcare they can afford. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York joins Popok to brief our audience on how they can hold Trump and the MAGA accountable, and to discuss Trump's use of the Presidency to indict his enemies and line his pockets.



Transcript

Somebody take the social media button
away from Donald Trump. Pissed off that
he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize, he
decided to go attack the Chinese. and by
posting
this long multi-screen missive which
I'll have to read to you in which he
attacked the Chinese for trying to flex
their muscle and show that they alone
control the global supply chain for
technology and that they were going to
start putting massive tariffs on rare
earth minerals, you know, copper and
zinc and lead and other things that go
into magnets that are used in
semiconductor production, automotive
production, electric vehicle production.
Once they did that, Donald Trump said,
"Well, I'm not going to meet with she
then, the Chinese premier. I'm not going
to meet with him then. There's no reason
to meet with him. He's been laying in
wait." And the stock market went over
the cliff, shedding a trillion dollars
or more in one social media post. I'm
Michael Popock. You're here on Friday on
Legal AF. It's time for Trump economics
and Donald Trump having a hissy fit and
throwing America's economy into a tail
spin again. Right now that the tariff
war between China and the United States
is being won by China who is eating
Donald Trump and therefore our lunch. We
have the rates already at 57% against
Chinese goods. China has a 35% or 33%
tariff rate against us and it decided in
the next round of negotiations to
demonstrate its power, its economic
power over the American economy. And so
it announced that it will be putting uh
major control tariffs over rare earth
minerals, cobalt, copper, zinc, lead
etc.
US manufacturing especially in the tech
industry and the automotive industry
need all of those things and they also
need it for magnets which goes into
batteries and EVs and those types of
things. In fact, the US automotive
industry has said they're going to start
shutting factories if they are denied
access at a reasonable price to rare
earth minerals. China knows that. So, it
wanted to show Donald Trump what it
could do to the to the uh technology
supply chain with one decision. And
Donald Trump fired back, said, "We're
going to do high tariffs against China,
and we're back at a Chinese American
tariff war that Donald Trump told the
American people months ago was settled."
The just to show you what's happened to
the stock market, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average just today shed 700
points, almost 2% of its value. NASDAQ,
which has a lot of tech companies inside
of it, worse over over um over 2.5%.
The only companies that did well today
on the stock market are the American
companies that are in the rare earth
business because who went up 14% because
people are like, "Where do I put my
money? I better put it into rare earth
materials." Now, this fight between
Trump and she is a losing proposition
for the American people. There's an old
adage, there's an old saying, when
elephants fight, only the grass suffers.
And we got two elephants fighting here,
and we're on the wrong end of that. Um,
but this Chinese muscle flex, Donald
Trump knew how to be coming. He You
think that China and she were going to
allow the the tariffs to sit at 35% for
this long? And after the negotiations
got stuck in the mud between America and
US interest, that's when she struck. Let
me read to you from this crazy
this crazy
nutbag
posting that Donald Trump did after he
learned that he was not going to win the
Nobel Peace Prize. Obviously trying to
put his his uh his eye somewhere else.
He posted, "Some very strange things are
happening in China." exclamation mark.
They're becoming very hostile and
sending letters to countries throughout
the world that they want to impose
export controls on each and every
element of production having to do with
rare earths and virtually anything else
that they can think of. You know, Donald
Trump doesn't write these things, right?
We know they don't write these things
because Marco Rubio had a run into him
with the Israel Gaza resolution pre
being proposed to approve a social media
post. So, he doesn't actually write this
stuff. But let's continue. Nor nor are
we uh confident that he actually wanted
to post this. You know, there's
reporting that that instruction he gave
to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to
prosecute everybody and hurry up about
it. That wasn't supposed to be uh a that
was supposed to be a direct message to
her. Apparently, he's using the direct
messaging to get around presidential
records act problems. But I digress.
Let's keep going. Whoever wrote this
that he that he posted on Truth Social,
Trump says nobody has ever seen anything
like it. it would clog the markets and
make life difficult for virtually every
country in the world, especially for
China. Um, I've always felt they've been
lying and wait and now, as usual, I've
been proven right. There is no there is
no way. Um, there is no way, he says,
uh, that China is going to be able to
hold us captive. The Chinese letters
were especially inappropriate in that
that this was the day that after 3,000
years of bedumin fighting, there is
peace in the Middle East. I wonder if
the timing is coincidental. I wonder if
it's coincidental that you wrote this
thing to tank the American economy after
you lost the Nobel Prize. Um, so he says
he's going to have to do massive
increase of tariffs on Chinese products
as a countermeasure. That freaked out
traders and brokers on Wall Street. And
there goes wealth wiping out all of this
week's gains and then some on the stock
market which Donald Trump likes to point
to as the in one of the indishia of the
health of his economy. Well, his economy
sucks. American people are suffering
every day and we know it. All you got to
do is talk to people about their
pocketbook, purse, and checkbook issues
around their kitchen table. And you know
that Donald Trump uh economics are
terrible for the American people. He's
been in nine months. He took a healthy,
vibrant economy handed to him by the
Democrats and he threw it into the trash
can to reward his friends.
The consumer confidence is way down as
we go into Christmas buying season, if
you can believe it, and holiday season.
The inflation is up, manufacturing is
down, the production of goods and
services is down,
and he's cut off all of the information
lines to the Federal Reserve so they can
set an appropriate interest rate for the
to to help the economy. And now's the
time to pick a fight with China. We just
had Canada effectively work out a number
of issues with Donald Trump when Mark
Carney, their prime minister and former
central banker who knows what he's
doing, took Donald Trump to the
cleaners. And that's a compliment on on
tariff policy. So, having lost his trade
war, if you will, with Canada, Donald
Trump's like flailing around looking for
a new country to pick a fight with. I
know China, one of our major trading
partners
and who has control over a tremendous
amount of the supply chain related to
our technology that drives artificial
intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Donald Trump wants this to be an AI
cryptocurrency economy. Not without the
Chinese, it's not going to be not
without their rare earth minerals.
There's only so much rare earth minerals
that we have in the United States. See,
that's the that's the paradox of the
American economy. We make more than we
use. We make more in quality goods and
services, especially in technology than
Americans can possibly consume,
especially in America that's in a
strangle hold because of Donald Trump
and who has choked out the life of
Americans and their budgets. So, we have
to look to foreign markets
and to sell our agricultural products,
our goods, our services. But Donald
Trump is busy choking them off because
of America first and then wanting to
brag, "Oh, I brought in hundreds of
billions of dollars into the Treasury
and tariffs. You've spent a billion
dollars on your national guards invading
um blue states." So, it's let's just
call it a wash.
So now we're going to see what's going
to happen next. But this is the I think
the lesson here is you can't trust a
word that Donald Trump says when he says
he has a deal. And I think that applies
right here to the Israel Hamas conflict.
When he says he has a deal and he
celebrates it prematurely. He's very
good at premature celebration if you
know what I mean. Then then we have to
sit around and see if what the what the
reality in real life IRL
uh turns out to be. Right now the
economy looks in the trash. Federal
Reserve knows it. Donald Trump's Council
of Economic Adviserss know it and the
American people who have the pain at the
pump and the pain at the at the cash
register every day. They know it as
well. I'll continue to follow it here.
Thank you for joining Legal AF on
Friday.

[admin]

Chief Justice Roberts Gets EXPOSED in NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
Legal AF
Oct 10, 2025

On Court of History, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak with Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent, about how Chief Justice John Roberts helped build a Supreme Court that shields corruption, empowers Trump, and dismantles the Constitution. From Bush v. Gore to Trump v. United States, Graves exposes the right-wing network and billionaires behind America’s judicial takeover.



Transcript

Welcome to the Court of History.
I'm Sydney Blumenthal. I'm here with my
colleague Sean Menum, Princeton
University, subscribed to Legal AF.
We're here with Lisa Graves, the author
of a
new book on the Supreme Court and John
Roberts called Without Precedent: How
Chief Justice Roberts and his
accompllices rewrote the Constitution
and Dismantled Our Rights. Lisa was the
chief counsel for nominations on the
Senate Judiciary Committee. She was
deputy assistant attorney general. She
is the executive director of True North
Research, president of the board of the
Center for Media and Democracy. In part
one, we discussed the myth of John
Roberts as an institutionalist
and the core takeover. And we'd like to
continue that. For those uh who have not
heard part one, I urge you to
watch that. Now, we will pick up with
John Roberts leading the Supreme Court
to cover up what becomes the coup of
January 6th. First of all, what he does
to create the presidential immunity
decision.
Yes, this is, I think, perhaps the worst
decision ever issued by the Supreme
Court. Although Dreadscott still holds
that that role in history because it it
uh propelled us into the Civil War. But
this decision uh this decision in Trump
versus United States dismantles a core
component of the United States in a way
that is different than what happened in
DreadScott. What John Roberts has done
is knock down the central pillar of the
founding of America, which is basically
founded on no kings, on not having a
president be a king. And in fact, the
constitution in two places expressly
says that the job of the president of
the leader of the of the executive
branch is to faithfully execute the law
to to act faithfully toward our
constitutional laws. And what John
Roberts did was orchestrate a decision,
a partisan decision by the six
Republican appointees to the court,
including himself, that in essence
pardoned Trump that exonerated him, that
said that he could not be held liable in
criminal court for his prior actions and
that in and that he couldn't going
forward. and he sent a signal to some a
subset of the American people that Trump
did no wrong and could do no wrong and
that the prosecutions of him were
illegitimate. In fact, those
prosecutions were well grounded in law
and the Constitution, which also
describes how presidents can be
impeached for high crimes and
misdemeanors. And even Mitch McConnell,
the then Republican leader of the United
States Senate in voting against that
second impeachment, improvidently,
outrageously voting against it,
conceded, as the other Republican
Republicans who did who also voted
against it conceded that of course
Donald Trump could be tried for his
crimes surrounding January 6. But not
just that, that's not the only thing
that John Roberts did. The other thing
that he did was to move heaven and earth
to block Colorado from keeping Trump off
the ballot. In that case, the court
acted rapidly uh in order to stop uh a
decision by the Colorado Supreme Court
and lower courts that of course under
the 14th amendment, Donald Trump was
barred for engaging in insurrection, for
fermenting an insurrection. But John
Roberts worked uh to create basically a
a you know a five a pardon me a four a
five to four uh ruling that he didn't
even sign that blocked Colorado from
from keeping Trump off the ballot. And
let's go back to the signing for a
minute because
he assigned it to Justice Alo
to write
and there were two justices on the
Supreme Court who should have recused
themselves because of conflicts in of
interest involving January 6.
Yes, that's right. So there's a the
third decision involving uh people who
were charged with crimes around around
um you know people who were charged with
crimes for their actions their violence
decision.
The Fischer decision.
The Fischer decision. That's right. And
so um what what happened was there were
two justices on the Supreme Court who
were clearly conflicted who under the
federal recusal statute should have
recused themselves. And one of them was
Clarence Thomas, whose wife, there's
ample documentation of her role, her
text messages to Mark Meadows trying to
stop the recount, her actual outreach to
legislators in Wisconsin and Arizona to
try to get fake electors appointed.
There's no way Clarence Thomas should
have been near that case. But also,
there's no way Alto should have been
allowed to sit on that case after a flag
aligned with the insurrection. The
upside down American flag was was
hoisted over his home for weeks um after
January 6th. Um so both of them had
significant conflicts that any
reasonable person would believe they
would not be fair, could not hear those
cases fairly. But John Roberts let them
set on the cases. And as you point out,
Sydney, uh, in one of the cases, Roberts
had assigned Alo to write the opinion,
um, but then after the news broke about
the, um, January 6 sympathizing flag
hoisting, uh, Roberts took that
assignment away and wrote the decision
himself. So, he didn't ask Alto to
recuse or demand that Alto recuse this
supposed institutionalist defender of
the court. he let him sit on that case
and participate in the arguments and
participate in the drafting in essence
even though he knew that he had an
obvious conflict and Roberts wrote that
decision but Roberts beyond that had
orchestrated that whole ruling by taking
by taking the case up from the DC
circuit a well-reasoned well-grounded
opinion saying of course the president
doesn't have this wide immunity for
so-called official acts that's contrary
to our entire history and Robert's
moved uh you know moved everything he
could to make sure that that Donald
Trump would not face a criminal trial
before the 2024 election and that in
fact if he returned to power he would
have even more power than he had before
and more power than any president has
ever had.
You know in direct in direct direct cont
you know contradiction as you say to not
not only the spirit but the actual
letter of the constitution of the United
States.
Yeah. Yeah. So uh um we begin with um um
John Roberts working in Bush vGore to
give the presidency on a Supreme Court
decision five to four to George W. Bush
when he is which elevates him and then
he as chief justice
uh is an expert at delaying the process
when he wants to on the January 6 case
and expediting it when he wants to to
make sure that Trump is on the ballot
and acts in a transparently partisan way
and also does not force the recusal of
two justices who are clearly conflicted
now.
Yeah. And and when you look at it from
that perspective, what you see is John
Robert's devotion not just to not to the
presidency because we saw how he behaved
when Biden was president and worked in
all sorts of ways to block signature
initiatives of Joe Biden and uh before
him Barack Obama uh in terms of the
clean power plan for example. But when
there's a Republican president, there's
no impediment that he John Roberts works
to aid Republican presidents um Bush and
Trump and in this case has done so in a
way that basically made him made John
Roberts the kingmaker for Donald Trump.
Yeah. So um uh the Supreme Court under
Roberts um over the last few months has
used the sha what's called the shadow
docket to issue I hesitate to call them
decisions but rulings that provide no
decisions no reasoning no opinions that
allow uh fedical please on the part of
Trump to operate u on the basis of his
illegitimate and illegal emergency
declarations. Um and now the court is
back and so um and we are also facing a
crisis over voting rights. Trump has
talked about uh invoking the
insurrection act. Um Governor JB
Pritsker of Illinois has said he wants
to use it to intimidate voters leading
into the 2026 election and possibly use
it to seize ballot boxes. Uh and we have
a voting rights case coming up um
involving uh the uh the house. Uh it
comes from Louisiana. What can we expect
from John Roberts here?
I don't think we can expect John Roberts
to be anything other than the partisan
that he has been. Uh I don't think that
he will uh do anything to stand up to
Trump in any significant way. And in
fact, what we've seen this year, as you
point out, Sydney, is decision edict, I
would say, edict after edict by this
court overturning well-reasoned
uh decisions by lower court judges that
Trump's actions have violated the law,
that the facts prove it, that that the
Trump administration is behaving
contrary to the Constitution, to
statutes, to regulations, to contracts,
and to long-standing legal precedents.
But but what Roberts and his fellow
partisan Republicans on the Supreme
Court have done is wave those laws away
without even giving the reasoning for
doing so. And now we're going to see
them spool out the purported reasoning,
the pretext for allowing Trump these
extraordinary powers. There may be one
or two times where they they stop Trump.
I doubt it. I think what's going to
happen this term is is we're going to
see in full bloom that the mask is off.
The mask has fallen from this court and
it is going to be doing everything it
can to try to rationalize whatever
Donald Trump wants.
Yeah. Um Sean and Lisa, could you both
reflect on the postconstitutional moment
we're in? Have we ever been here before
and how do we navigate it? Sean,
no. I mean, Lisa made a very good point
in saying that in many ways Trump vy US
was an even more um what should we say
dramatically um um
unpatriotic unconstitutional violation
than even the DreadScott decision. I
mean the DreadScott decision um had over
saying that blacks were not citizens. It
did a lot of different things but this
has actually completely undone the
American Revolution as far as I can see.
I mean the American Revolution was
fought in part for independence but also
to overthrow a unmarkable order that was
in power in the United in what was going
to become the United States. The United
States was rejecting the United States
was going to be a republic. Trump v uh
US basically that decision came as close
as you can to undoing that revolution
and when people say no kings and so
forth I mean it's a slogan that has but
the fact is that that is exactly what
that decision did. So, you know, we're
not talking now about, you know,
DreadScott may no longer be the um the
measure for how bad a Supreme Court can
be, how how much in violation of the US
Constitution that a Supreme Court can
run. And that's my view of it.
I I I agree. I agree with you, Sean. And
and also, you know, when you think of
the people that Trump has surrounded
himself with in the second
administration, it includes people like
Russell VA who are talking about a
postconstitutional
regime.
And that's saying out saying the quiet
part out loud. Lisa Graves, thank you
very much uh for appearing on the Court
of History. Lisa is the author of
Without Precedent, an essential book to
understand the moment that we're in and
the role of the Supreme Court and
particularly John Roberts. On behalf of
uh Sean Walens of Princeton and myself,
the court is adjourned and don't forget
to subscribe to Legal AF.

[admin]

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist. The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’. Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon
by Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr in San Francisco and Nick Robins-Early
theguardian.com
Fri 10 Oct 2025 11.24 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... antichrist

[x]
Over the past month, Peter Thiel has hosted a series of lectures philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.

Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming.

Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.

“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”

Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.

“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.

The meandering gospel of Peter

Thiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.

Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.

Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attender who gave them on the condition of anonymity.

When reached for comment, Thiel’s spokesperson, Jeremiah Hall, did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist.

The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”

The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.

“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.

His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.

On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”.

[x]
People protesting outside a Peter Thiel event in San Francisco. Photograph: Dara Kerr/The Guardian

A trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”

What do Thiel’s lectures say?

The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors.

He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.

What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.

Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen?

Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.

There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?

Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.

Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.

Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:

They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.

When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’

During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:

I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.

Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?

Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.

A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.

Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.

My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.

It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.

During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.

Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.

Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.

In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.

Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.

One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:

He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.

I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.

Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist:

The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.

However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”.

I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills.

Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation:

If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people …

This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’

And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’

And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’

When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:

I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?

Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.

Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:

Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. 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.

Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.

By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:

Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.

He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.

Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.

In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:

One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.

What does he say about Trump and politics?

Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.

At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.

One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.

I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.

I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:

In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.

Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.

There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.

In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, antisemitic theologians who suggested that the antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov.

Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:

Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.

Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.

Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.

At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:

By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.

During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate:

I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes.

In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.

Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.

“The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.

Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor.

​​I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, … someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last precedent where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky.

And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.

But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different.

Why is he fixated on stagnation?

Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.

The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says.

During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.

If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.

The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.

In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:

This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.

In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal:

I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad.

References to pop culture and literature

Thiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here:

The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.

In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”.

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

Do Thiel’s arguments make sense?

In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be:

There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power?

[admin]

Netanyahu inches toward Gaza deal under pressure from Trump
by Marc Caputo, Barak Ravid
Axios
Updated 2 hours ago -
https://archive.is/a3Gye#selection-353.0-891.27

[x]
Trump and Netanyahu in the Oval Office in February. Photo: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty

The U.S. and Israel are inching toward an agreement on President Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza, which Trump hopes will be announced after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, White House officials say.

Why it matters: The meeting could come down to a binary choice for Netanyahu: accept Trump's plan or risk a public rift with a president who appears willing to break with him over Gaza for the first time since returning to office.

• Trump told Axios on Sunday that his Gaza plan is in its "final stages" and that Netanyahu is on board. But the Israeli prime minister's public statements have been far more ambiguous.
• Still, Israeli officials tell Axios the gaps between the U.S. and Israel narrowed significantly during a lengthy meeting on Sunday between Netanyahu, White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. They think a White House announcement is likely on Monday.
• U.S. and Israeli officials tell Axios we could see an announcement from Trump and Netanyahu on Monday. Hamas would still need to endorse the deal.

Driving the news: Monday's meeting at the White House will include lunch and press conference.

• A Trump adviser involved in the plans said the view in the White House is that if Netanyahu doesn't take the deal, he'll be to blame for continuing the war, "enabling Hamas and doing nothing for the Palestinians who have so many humanitarian needs. People will continue to starve. Let's hope we get there."
• "The Arabs have agreed to it like 100%. Now we're waiting for the president to work his magic on Netanyahu," the adviser said.

Friction point: Trump has never publicly blamed Netanyahu for prolonging the war with Hamas or failing to deliver a deal to free the remaining hostages.

• But if Netanyahu says no this time, some of Trump's aides think he might turn on the prime minister. Support for Israel and the war in Gaza has sunk to new lows, including at the White House and MAGA world more broadly.
• "Everyone — and I mean everyone — is exasperated with Bibi," said one administration official familiar with the peace talks.
• Some of Trump's advisers have told him the Gaza peace process is a test for his global credibility. Everything Trump wants to accomplish in the Middle East will be undermined until he can convince Netanyahu to end the war, one adviser said.

State of play: Witkoff and Kushner met Netanyahu in New York for several hours on Sunday to try to bridge the remaining differences over Trump's 21-point peace plan.

• Both Witkoff and Kushner have "just about had it" with Netanyahu, the Trump adviser claimed: "Steve was handling Israel more and Jared was with the Arab states. But both are at their wits' end with Israel."

Zoom in: The most recent peace initiative was paradoxically born out of Israel's failed attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders with a highly controversial missile strike in Qatar.

• "When Bibi sent those missiles into Qatar, he united the Gulf state Arabs," Trump's adviser said. "They are all one. They speak with one voice. ... It was a rallying effect. And on this, for the first time, you really had a monolithic Arab world. And Witkoff and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said: 'Aha, this is the time.' And that's what's happening."

Zoom out: Frustration, irritation and confusion with Netanyahu has mounted for months in Trump's orbit, both inside and outside the White House.

• Some Trump advisers told the president that Netanyahu was "manhandling" him, one of those advisers told Axios. Others believe Netanyahu has been making massively destabilizing decisions, like the Qatar strike, mainly to help his own political survival.
• "He is obviously very worried about his trial," a senior White House official said, adding that's probably why Netanyahu is being so aggressive. The official characterized it as "invading and bombing every country on the map."
• U.S. and Israeli officials believe Netanyahu will now have to choose between Trump's desire to end the war and the ultranationalist coalition partners who are pressing him to fight on, and with whom he has repeatedly sided up to now.

One factor in the Trump-world frustrations with Netanyahu is his tendency to wade into domestic U.S. politics.

• On Friday at the UN, Netanyahu met with friendly U.S. social media influencers, most of whom are conservative Trump supporters, to ask for their help to "fight" online for Israel.
• "We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefield, and the most important ones are on social media," Netanyahu said, singling out X and TikTok.
• In the meeting, Netanyahu also attacked what he called "the woke right — or the woke Reich" and said "they are insane, they are lunatics." He's clashed in particular with Tucker Carlson, who has become increasingly critical of Israel.
• Carlson claimed over the weekend on his show that Netanyahu "is going around telling people: 'I control Donald Trump.'" Netanyahu denied that in an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

What they're saying: In interviews this month with Axios, Trump advisers expressed bewilderment at Netanyahu's "bizarre obsession" with online political discourse in the U.S.

• "We can't figure out what the guy is up to. Focus on Israel. Focus on Gaza. Stop getting involved in U.S. domestic political issues," a White House official said. "Stop talking about Tucker. Stop getting influencers here to be your propaganda. It's not helping you. It's not helping Israel. And it damn sure isn't helping us get a peace deal."

[admin]

Ex-CIA Spy Reveals Mossad's DARKEST Secrets, Israel CRUMBLING | John Kiriakou JOINS
Danny Haiphong
Started streaming 41 minutes ago #israel #mossad #trump

As the world holds its breath on a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou joins the show to discuss the terrifying secrets of the Mossad and its relationship to US foreign policy, the CIA, Trump, and much more. Also joining the show are Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria and Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka!

-- THE TORTURE PAPERS: THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB, Edited by Karen J. Greenberg, Joshua L. Dratel, Introduction by Anthony Lewis

xxx

[admin]

Leaked US files reveal secret Israeli-Arab military pact targeting Iran amid war on Gaza: The Washington Post
The Cradle @TheCradleMedia
10/12/25

Leaked US military documents have exposed a covert security partnership between Israel and six key Arab states, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, forged under the leadership of US Central Command, even as these countries publicly condemned Israel’s war on Gaza.

Behind the scenes, the parties held years of secret meetings and joint trainings in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and the US, focusing on countering Iran and combating underground tunnel warfare used by Hamas and other resistance factions in Gaza.

The partnership, known as the “Regional Security Construct,” began in 2022 and quietly expanded through 2025, linking the countries into a shared air-defense network designed to monitor Iranian missiles and drones.

The leaked files also reveal US plans to establish a “Combined Middle East Cyber Center” and an “Information Fusion Center” to further integrate Israeli and Arab security capabilities. It also involved onboarding partners to a US-run secure chat system, distributing intelligence and operational material through the 'Five Eyes network' (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States), sharing radar and sensor data to build a joint regional picture, and coordinating information operations to undermine Iran’s narrative as the regional protector of Palestinians while promoting a partner narrative of prosperity and cooperation.

This shadow alliance was thrown into turmoil after Israel’s 9 September airstrike on Doha targeting Hamas leaders. Netanyahu later issued an apology to Qatar under pressure from Washington, but the incident exposed the fragility of the cooperation. US radar systems had failed to detect the Israeli strike because they were focused on Iran, a revelation that deepened mistrust among Arab partners.

While Arab leaders, including those of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have publicly denounced Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocidal,” their militaries were simultaneously working alongside Israel and the US on security planning tied to Trump’s ceasefire plan, which envisions Arab participation in Gaza’s postwar security arrangements. Around 200 US troops are set to deploy to Israel to support the ceasefire agreement, with several of the Arab states involved expected to contribute forces.

Last edited
4:21 PM · Oct 11, 2025