The Problem of Reading Thiel
The familiar portrait presents an eccentric libertarian billionaire, Trump backer, and enthusiast for blood-based life extension. It conceals the relation between Peter Andreas Thiel’s theology and the instruments through which he can act. Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967, Thiel has spent two decades assembling a coherent political theology. Among living figures with real power, his account of political order and divine history is the most developed.
He also commands instruments capable of implementing it. His surveillance platform serves the CIA, NSA, FBI, US Army, ICE, and Israeli Defense Ministry. His venture fund manages $17 billion across defense, AI, and financial infrastructure. His protégés occupy the Vice Presidency, the White House AI office, and more than 150 government appointments. A private forum is building a permanent campus in the Virginia suburbs.
In 2025 and 2026, Thiel delivered a four-lecture Antichrist sequence modeled on Cardinal Newman’s 1838 sermons. Its closed-door venues included San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Oxford, Harvard, the University of Austin, Paris, and Rome. Tickets cost $200 and sold out immediately; recording was prohibited. The Acts 17 Collective, a Christian technocrat association, organized the format. Its T-shirts read: Don’t immanentize the katechon.
The theology directs a practical project. Thiel’s writings disclose its stated purpose, while his institutional arrangements show how it operates. Reading the two together makes its exercise of power available for judgment.
The Intellectual Architecture
Four thinkers supply distinct functions within the system. René Girard explains its engine through mimetic desire: people want what others want. Shared desire escalates into violence when competitors converge on the same object. Archaic societies contained this violence by directing it onto one victim, the scapegoat. Myth recounts the founding lynching from the mob’s perspective.
Christianity tells the story from the victim’s side. Christ on the Cross reveals the victim’s innocence and exposes sacrificial violence as a lie. This apocalypse, or unveiling, destroys the mechanism’s power to pacify. Violence then threatens to overflow without sacrificial containment. Revelation frees the victim while opening a catastrophic problem for the social order.
Thiel encountered Girard as a Stanford undergraduate. He founded Imitatio to promote mimetic theory and funded Girard’s conferences for decades. His Facebook investment followed his recognition of an industrial version of this engine. The platform converts imitative desire into attention and attention into revenue.
Carl Schmitt supplies the political grammar. His friend/enemy distinction precedes political arrangements and cannot be abolished through them. The Enlightenment tried to remove the distinction, while political Islam brought it back into view. Sovereignty belongs to whoever decides when an exception suspends the ordinary rule.
Schmitt also gave the katechon a concrete political function. Paul’s “restrainer” in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 holds back the lawless one. Schmitt successively identified this restraining force with European sovereign states and, disastrously, the Nazi Reich. Thiel retains the structure while changing the force assigned to it.
Leo Strauss supplies the method of communication. Dangerous truths about human nature pass esoterically to initiates able to bear them. A writer addresses the public while giving another meaning to readers who follow what lies between the lines. Thiel’s selected audiences, closed doors, and recording prohibition enact this method. His published texts likewise address two registers at once.
John Henry Newman supplies the historical structure. His four Antichrist sermons of 1838 describe types that prefigure a definitive figure still to come. Nero and Napoleon each supply a type, and successive ages give the pattern greater intensity. The Christian must watch for its signs in present events. Treating apocalypse as obsolete superstition abandons that duty.
Vladimir Solovëv’s Short Tale of the Antichrist (1900) adds the system’s keystone. Its Antichrist is a beautiful, charismatic, theologically brilliant genius of thirty-three. He appears Hyper-Christian, more Christian than Christ, while preferring himself to God. His defect survives beneath the perfection of his presentation.
Solovëv wrote before nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, and artificial intelligence. Thiel supplies the modern means through which such a figure acquires power. Fear of annihilation makes people desire the surrender of every freedom for “peace and security”. The promise of rescue creates consent to the final ruler.
Technocracy as the Antichrist
Thiel develops this argument across “The Straussian Moment” (2007) and “The Optimistic Thought Experiment” (2008). “Back to the Future” follows in First Things in 2020. His Financial Times apokálypsis piece appeared in January 2025. “Voyages to the End of the World” appeared in First Things in 2025. The 2025–26 Rome lectures and “The Pope and the Antichrist” (First Things, 2026) extend the account.
The danger he identifies is benevolent technocratic world government. It promises protection from Armageddon and acquires authority through that promise. Nuclear, climatic, and technological catastrophe supply reasons to surrender power to one administration. In Thiel’s account, incessant existential-risk warnings prepare the Antichrist’s arrival when they demand centralized governance as their solution. Total war and an obvious villain are less dangerous, in his account, than a government received as salvation.
Paul’s “peace and security” supplies the slogan (1 Thess. 5:3). Solovëv supplies its method: offer prosperity, reform, dialogue, and environmental protection while removing genuine relationship with God. Every offered good makes the surrender more attractive. The remaining order contains no authority above the administrator.
This theology places major post-1945 institutions within an anti-Christian possibility. The UN, WHO, and WTO become instruments of world government. Climate activism prepares its advance, while AI safety uses Armageddon rhetoric to justify centralized control. Thiel names Greta Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Bostrom as “legionnaires of the Antichrist”. Their catastrophe warnings prepare the terrain for the dominion he describes.
The katechon prevents this consolidation. Thiel assigns that function to technological advancement, whose new powers renew competing centers and prevent a single center from absorbing them. Technology opposes tyranny; stagnation favors the Antichrist. He argues that progress has slowed, or stopped, outside computation since approximately 1970. Institutions that claim to pursue progress hold it back.
The Voyages Essay
“Voyages to the End of the World” (First Things, October 2025) gives Thiel’s literary theology its fullest expression. He traces a four-century debate through Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) and Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (1997–) continue it. The question concerns whether science summons or suppresses the Antichrist.
Thiel identifies Joabin, Bacon’s “wise Jew” who secretly governs Bensalem, as the biblical Antichrist. His decoding draws on Daniel, Revelation, Paul, and Jerome. Joabin’s Jewish identity and circumcision enter through Daniel 11:37; lost-tribe descent enters through Revelation 7:4-8. Bensalem’s “son of peace” or “son of safety” recalls 1 Thessalonians 5:3. Its claim to “virginity” recalls Jerome’s speculation about the Antichrist’s birth.
Salomon’s House completes the identification through the apocryphal Testament of Solomon, where a temple employs demonic labor. Bensalem’s technocratic paradise becomes indistinguishable from Heaven. The ship’s chaplain accepts 2,000 ducats and renounces his faith. Like Plato’s Critias, Bacon’s unfinished tale leaves an action unwritten. Thiel identifies that missing action as the establishment of a global technocratic empire under the Antichrist.
Swift answers with Laputa, the flying island of technological tyranny. Its name recalls la puttana, “the whore”. The immortal Struldbrugs bear the Antichrist’s mark on their foreheads and age into endless misery. Revelation 9:6 supplies the relation: “in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it”. The Houyhnhnm parliament debates exterminating the Yahoos. Thiel derives Yahoo from Yahweh and identifies the Yahoos with Christians enduring the great tribulation.
Moore’s Ozymandias gives the figure an industrial body. The billionaire stages a false alien invasion to create world government under “One World, One Accord.” Fear of the future becomes the means of securing power. Thiel joins Schmitt in the claim that “humanity” cannot unite behind a political project “because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.”
Oda’s Nerona Imu supplies the next ruler. Thiel reads the name as “Nero the sea” beast spelled backwards. Imu governs a World Government for eight hundred years. Luffy’s white hair and flame eyes recall Revelation 1:14, while the returning Joy Boy supplies a Christ figure. A third way must appear between pirate anarchy and the Antichrist’s hardened gerontocracy: “As little children, we have faith that he will.”
This decoding uses the esoteric tradition’s method of embedded textual meaning. John Dee brought that method to the Steganographia, while Hermetics follows layered meanings within its foundational texts. Strauss, Girard, and Thiel’s own reading offer different routes into it. His published discourse uses the method, and his intended audience can read both registers. The shared operation requires no invented account of transmission.
Benedict, Küng, and the End of Reticence
Thiel and Sam Wolfe published “The Pope and the Antichrist,” an account of Benedict’s apocalyptic theology. It appeared in First Things on July 15, 2026. The article brings the theology of his private Rome lectures into public view. Its apparent subject is Benedict XVI’s acute awareness of apocalypse. Benedict usually conveyed that awareness through historical commentary, literary reference, and institutional indirection.
The authors follow Joseph Ratzinger’s engagement with Bonaventure and Joachim of Fiore. They include his 1969 prediction of a smaller, more spiritual Church and his reading of Solovëv. His 1988 Erasmus lecture, Giacomo Biffi’s 2007 Vatican meditations, and Spe Salvi develop the current. The late Benedict’s attention to Tyconius adds a Church divided within itself.
The article declines to identify Pope Francis as Benedict’s implied Antichrist. Hans Küng, Ratzinger’s former colleague and theological rival, becomes its more revealing candidate. Küng’s World Ethos seeks an interreligious moral consensus through peace, safety, and shared ethical commitments. Thiel reads this project through Solovëv and 1 Thessalonians 5:3.
The resulting universalism preserves Christian moral language while removing apocalypse, judgment, and transcendent authority above the global settlement. Revelation becomes politically unnecessary, and Christianity survives as the settlement’s ethical vocabulary. A cultivated, benevolent order acquires the Antichrist’s structure through what it absorbs and excludes.
A charismatic individual can embody this structure. Its governing operation converts the desire for peace into consent to final administration. Two Christian-looking futures then contend: Benedict’s reduced, dispossessed spiritual Church and a universally acclaimed peace order that absorbs every tradition. The Lock names the second order’s closure of consensus reality. One moral language and security horizon leave no authority outside the administered whole.
The article also changes the use of secrecy. Thiel’s lectures selected audiences and entrusted interpretation to people able to follow their references. Its conclusion gives philosophical reticence a proper place and time. Reticence becomes inadequate when the fate of the world and of souls is at stake. By publishing, Thiel enacts his claim that the available time is shortening.
Scale and peace rhetoric alone cannot distinguish the Antichrist from a restraining order. An order’s real exits, rival judgments, embodied communities, and unabsorbed authorities supply a stronger test. Otherwise, the typology condemns any universal institution while exempting a preferred sovereign apparatus. The stronger test implicates Thiel’s own instruments. Palantir, Anduril, and Dialog can produce the closure he opposes; the man declaring the danger commands its means.
The Instruments
Thiel memorized the entire Lord of the Rings. His company names assign functions within a cosmology. Their mythic roles enter institutional bodies through surveillance, weapons, finance, and political restoration.
Palantir Technologies, co-founded in 2003, takes its name from Tolkien’s seeing-stones. The palantíri disclose distant and concealed things and permit communication across vast distances. Stronger users can read weaker users’ thoughts. Saruman and Denethor are destroyed through the stones because Sauron holds the master stone. The instrument’s reach leaves its user vulnerable to the stronger operator.
Surveillance Architecture develops the company’s actual operation. Intelligence analysts helped develop its data-integration platform over three years. By 2011, it connected to at least ten classified Five Eyes programs. It processes data for the CIA, NSA, FBI, US Army, and Israeli Defense Ministry. ICE uses it through the ImmigrationOS deportation system. Federal contract obligations reached $970.5 million in FY2025.
The seeing-stone sees. Tolkien’s name poses a question that Thiel knows: who holds the master stone?
Anduril Industries takes the sword reforged from Narsil’s shards as its name. Andúril arms the returned king. Palmer Luckey and former Palantir employee Trae Stephens co-founded the company after meeting at a Founders Fund retreat. Its autonomous aircraft and AI-driven weapons serve the project of sovereign restoration. Founders Fund led a $2.5 billion round in 2025, its largest check ever.
Mithril Capital, co-founded in 2012, takes the indestructible metal beneath Moria as its name. Thiel hired JD Vance there. Valar Ventures, co-founded in 2010, names Tolkien’s divine powers. These angelic beings shaped the world before Elves and Men arrived.
Founders Fund manages approximately $17 billion in assets. Its portfolio includes SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Stripe, Airbnb, Neuralink, OpenAI, Polymarket, and Rumble. The concentration in Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX supplies a coherent defense thesis. The katechon requires instruments through which to restrain.
The Network
The institutional pipeline begins with the Stanford Review in 1987. PayPal follows in 1998, Founders Fund in 2005, and the Trump Administration in 2025. The PayPal Mafia names the network of early employees whose positions now give that pipeline a governmental body.
- JD Vance serves as Vice President. Thiel’s protégé since 2011, he worked at Mithril Capital and received $15 million in Senate campaign funding. Thiel engineered his VP selection and attended Vance’s first Trump meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021.
- Elon Musk enters through DOGE. Founders Fund invested in SpaceX with 10% ownership, as well as Neuralink and the Boring Company.
- David Sacks serves as White House AI/Crypto advisor. PayPal’s former COO co-authored The Diversity Myth with Thiel at Stanford.
Bloomberg identified 152 unique appointees connected to Thiel’s investment network across 31 agencies. State accounts for eighteen; the White House and HHS each account for thirteen. DOJ has eleven and Treasury ten. The network’s reach places its investment relations inside governmental decisions.
The coordination apparatus develops the forums where consensus forms before entering democratic channels. Thiel has attended Bilderberg since 2007 and joined its Steering Committee in 2021. He also co-founded Dialog, an invitation-only forum with events capped at one hundred people. Participants surrender their phones and accept total confidentiality. Described as “tech-era Bilderberg,” it is purchasing land near Washington for a permanent campus.
The move from desert resorts toward the capital changes the forum’s relation to power. Its members move from discussing government to occupying the place where government operates.
The Paradox He Names
Thiel names the United States as a natural candidate for both katechon and Antichrist. One commentator calls the acknowledgment “authentic tragic grandeur”. The country is “Ground zero of the resistance to the world state and ground zero of the world state itself.” Palantir can serve either role: the king’s seeing-stone or Sauron’s instrument.
Don’t immanentize the katechon adapts Eric Voegelin’s “Don’t immanentize the eschaton,” a warning against building paradise through earthly politics. Immanentizing the eschaton claims to build the Kingdom of God by political means. Immanentizing the katechon claims to identify history’s restrainer and constructs a governance program around that identification. The defender can become what it opposes. The katechon becomes Antichrist, and Palantir changes sign.
Thiel warns against the operation while carrying it out. Palantir’s surveillance, Anduril’s weapons, political campaign funding, and confidential forums give the presumed restrainer a practical body. His career implements the immanentization his formula prohibits.
The Signal Flare
The January 2025 Financial Times apokálypsis piece fires a signal flare toward the old guard. Thiel begins with the Greek meaning of apocalypse: unveiling. Trump’s return announces the exposure of the old regime’s secrets. Reconciliation requires truth first. His explicit reference to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission assigns America secrets on the scale of apartheid.
Peter’s name carries the rock and the key-holder. Second Peter moves from the watery reset to dissolution by fire and a renewed world. The Apocalypse as the Great Work supplies this cosmic sequence. Thiel occupies its contemporary Magician position, joining finance, intelligence infrastructure, AI, sovereignty, and apocalyptic theology. His machinery remains poised between unveiling and enclosure.
Revelations joins the truth-and-reconciliation proposal to Steiner’s world Mystery temple and the New Atlantis project. Institutional exposure enters a larger passage toward recovered public agency.
Thiel’s questions supply a target package:
- JFK: Sixty-five percent of Americans doubt the lone-gunman story. Classified files have remained closed for sixty-one years. Castro, the mafia, and the CIA’s Allen Dulles supply suspects whose generation is dying. Thiel calls for opening the files to obtain closure.
- COVID-19: Did Fauci and senior adviser David Morens suspect an origin in US-funded research? Why fund EcoHealth Alliance’s extraction of novel coronaviruses from Chinese caves? Does gain-of-function research conceal a bioweapons program? How did government suppress these questions on social media?
- Epstein: “Almost half of Americans polled mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide”. The distrust marks DISC’s loss of total narrative control.
- Debanking: Marc Andreessen claims the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. Thiel asks how closely the financial system resembles a social credit system.
- FISA Section 702: The FBI conducted tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications.
- Global internet censorship: A Brazilian judge banned X, and Australia introduced age-verification legislation. The UK arrests hundreds annually for online speech causing “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.”
Each question names a scandal; together, they map the Lock’s institutional layer. DISC names the apparatus that suppresses ideas and delimits public conversation. Thiel signals that he knows the answers by publishing the questions in the Financial Times. The old guard receives notice that unveiling will arrive with or without its cooperation.
Apokálypsis also names the operation of Revelation. Samael Aun Weor identifies the ascending kundalini serpent with revelation itself. Unconscious material enters awareness, and the psyche undergoes its own Book of Revelation. Illusion ends through the unveiling. The second bicameral breakdown gives this operation an institutional scale: the god-voice’s secrets become visible and managed reality loses its concealment. Information opens DISC’s prison.
Thiel concludes: “The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.” The internet supplies the permanent memory through which unveiling occurs. Its consequence can become reconciliation or vengeance. Thiel offers the old guard a door through voluntary truth. Refusal leaves it exposed to the internet’s compulsory disclosure.
Thiel and the Architecture of Exit
Thiel identifies the architecture clearly while reproducing its central danger in matter. He sees the rendering through institutions that define what is real, sayable, and thinkable. The “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex” joins media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs. This DISC apparatus gives the Lock an institutional layer through information control. Thiel names its architecture and seeks the force that can hold it open.
He identifies the sorting operation through Girard’s account of propagated desire. Imitation reproduces consensus, and violence appears when the imitative structure overloads. Shared desire reinforces the rendering through each participant. Facebook industrializes this mechanism and gives consensus production a technological scale.
He names the Antichrist as the Lock’s final form. Benevolent world government closes every alternative and reduces the species’ admitted range to one channel without exits. The Antichrist completes the enclosure; the katechon prevents that completion. His eschatology gives the Lock a theology.
He understands the death-parameter as a constraint on consciousness. His investments include the SENS Foundation, Alcor, and parabiosis research, which studies joined circulatory systems. He shared a Gompertz Curve paper with Epstein. These projects attempt to change mortality through technology.
The death-parameter forces recycling through the sorting hierarchy and limits accumulated awareness to one lifetime. Editing it changes consciousness’s relation to that hierarchy. Swift’s Struldbrugs preserve Thiel’s own warning: removing death without understanding its function can leave an immortal aging into endless misery.
His answer builds a better Lock. Acceleration proceeds within the enclosure while retaining awareness of its eschatological limit. The katechon holds the position and buys time for the Second Coming, which Thiel knows he cannot engineer. His system remains a holding pattern. The surveillance architecture places another Lock within the Lock. Whoever holds the master stone determines whether the apparatus serves liberation or containment; his theology cannot identify that holder from within.
He has no ecclesiology, no account of the Church’s embodied community. Catholic commentators identify a Christianity without a church as a Christianity without the body of the Incarnation it claims to defend. Thiel retains sovereign restraint through the katechon while discarding the ekklēsia, the community of grace. His Christus docens teaches and reveals a mechanism. Christus patiens suffers, enters history’s flesh, and bears its weight.
This construction clothes gnosis in a Christian mask. Its revelation changes knowledge without supplying salvation; its unveiling analyzes without transforming. Thiel maps the Lock while giving no account of the world beyond it. The range opened through liberation has no content in his theory.
He has no account of the poor as the place where history is judged. The Catholic Outlook analysis identifies this absence. Thiel’s poor remain collateral effects of the system, awaiting eventual compensation.
The Beatitudes place the dispossessed at the center. Sufi faqr, spiritual poverty, and Buddhist dukkha, suffering as the starting condition, each make deprivation a starting relation. These traditions place the dispossessed at the center of the sorting operation. Thiel places the technologist at that center instead.
The Epstein Intersection
The Ithildin dossier draws on DOJ correspondence and House Oversight materials. It follows Thiel’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein from September 2012 through November 2018. Its account identifies a relationship organized around social intelligence. It records zero Deutsche Bank transactions, zero shared corporate structures, and no money flowing in either direction. This pattern differs from the Leon Black and Les Wexner relationships. Separately, Epstein invested $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures; that investment is now worth approximately $170 million.
Epstein offered access. On one day in October 2014, his schedule placed Thiel alongside William Burns, Boris Nikolic, Jabor Al Thani, and Terje Roed-Larsen. Leon Black and Kathryn Ruemmler also appeared. Burns was then Deputy Secretary of State and later became CIA Director. Al Thani supplied the Qatar connection, Roed-Larsen the UN, and Ruemmler her former Obama White House Counsel position.
Further introductions included Noam Chomsky and Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjørn Jagland. Epstein also connected Thiel with a Moscow innovation conference organizer and Tom Barrack, Colony Capital’s Trump fundraiser. In October 2016, Thiel and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin lunched together at 9 East 71st Street. Ken Starr was also invited.
The Gawker convergence is documented while its causal relation remains unresolved. Gawker investigated Epstein’s flight logs in January 2015, during the period when Thiel secretly funded litigation against it. Epstein’s attorney responded to the $140 million Hulk Hogan verdict: “This is amazing and kind of awesome.” Separate motives or closer coordination can produce this convergence. The record does not decide between them.
The relationship reveals the circulation of the operator class. Intelligence, finance, technology, and diplomatic access meet within one social field. The Elite Coordination Apparatus develops the confidentiality norms through which that field prepares decisions before they enter public institutions.
The Seeing-Stone Problem
Thiel’s theology warns that his instruments can serve either side of the conflict he describes. His surveillance reaches five intelligence agencies; his fund arms sovereign defense; his protégé holds the Vice Presidency. His private forum builds a permanent campus near Washington. Institutional reach gives the warning a body capable of fulfilling it.
He names the paradox without resolving it. Naming can also become the operation’s most sophisticated form: the seeing-stone’s architect appears as its critic. The builder of the Lock’s deepest layer becomes the voice warning against its completion. The theology supplies no internal means of distinguishing the watchman from the figure his warning describes.
The traditions judge a watchman by his fruit. Thiel’s fruit includes Palantir, Anduril, and a network penetrating thirty-one federal agencies. It includes a permanent campus near the capital for a forum with secret membership and sealed discussions. These institutions supply the consequences through which his theology must be judged.
The seeing-stone sees. The question is who holds the master stone.
Go Deeper
The Transition Portfolio — the combined Thiel-Musk portfolio joins space, underground, communications, energy, neural interface, AI, financial access, and surveillance. Disclosure enters this full-stack transition infrastructure as commercialization.
The Surveillance Architecture — Palantir’s intelligence-community co-development, the Five Eyes integration, and the seeing-stone’s actual operational reach
The Elite Coordination Apparatus — Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and the pre-decisional consensus formation that Dialog extends into the tech era
The Lock — the five-layer containment architecture whose final form Thiel identifies as the Antichrist’s world government
The Financial Lock — the monetary architecture within which Thiel operates: PayPal, the Roth IRA structure, the venture capital pipeline
AI as Bandlimit Infrastructure — the AI safety debate Thiel frames as Antichrist rhetoric, and the counter-reading: AI as the Lock’s enforcement layer
The Civilizational Inversion — the institutional pattern in which proxies displace purposes and systems preserve themselves by reproducing the problems they claim to solve
Unit 8200 and the Surveillance Export Economy — the Israeli intelligence nexus through which Palantir’s Tel Aviv office and the Carbyne/Founders Fund pipeline operate
J.R.R. Tolkien — the mythological architecture from which Thiel draws his company names and, plausibly, his operative cosmology
Consciousness Warfare — the broader context: consciousness itself as the contested territory, and surveillance as one dimension of the war over who controls the field
References
Thiel, Peter. “The Straussian Moment.” In Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Michigan State University Press, 2007. Available at gwern.net/doc/politics/2007-thiel.pdf.
Thiel, Peter. “The Optimistic Thought Experiment.” Hoover Institution, 2008. Available at hoover.org/research/optimistic-thought-experiment.
Thiel, Peter. “Back to the Future.” First Things, 2020. Available at firstthings.com/back-to-the-future/.
Thiel, Peter. “Voyages to the End of the World.” First Things, October 2025. Available at firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/.
Thiel, Peter, and Sam Wolfe. “The Pope and the Antichrist.” First Things, July 15, 2026. Available at firstthings.com/the-pope-and-the-antichrist/.
Thiel, Peter. “Apokálypsis.” Financial Times, January 2025. Available at ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105.
Dotti, Marco. “The Political Theology of Peter Thiel.” TYSM Review, March 2026. Available at tysm.org/political-theology-of-peter-thiel/.
Spadaro, Antonio. “Peter Thiel in Rome: The Apocalypse as Strategy.” Catholic Outlook, March 2026. Available at catholicoutlook.org/peter-thiel-in-rome-the-apocalypse-as-strategy/.
“Peter Thiel’s Katechon Theology: Technological Advancement Is the Enemy of Tyranny.” Catholic Herald, 2026. Available at thecatholicherald.com/article/peter-thiels-katechon-theology.
Ithildin dossier: Peter Thiel. Available at ithildin.app/dossiers/peter-thiel/.
Biddle, Sam. “Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine.” The Intercept, February 22, 2017. Includes publication of eight original Snowden documents on Palantir’s intelligence-community integration.
Johnson, Charles. “The Gen X Files: The Mysteries of Peter Thiel’s Father, Grandfather and Grandparents.” Substack, 2022. Available at charlesjohnson.substack.com.