Peter Thiel’s Armageddon speaking tour has—like the world—not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for “that which withholds” the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco.
Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world’s most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.
The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel’s chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. (Thiel identifies as a “hardcore Girardian.”) On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon—and all the things he believed were “not enough” to prevent it.
By Thiel’s telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our “listless” and “zombie” age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the “endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web.” But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon—the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI—modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist.
According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. “How might such an Antichrist rise to power?” Thiel asked. “By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist’s slogan: peace and safety.” In other words: It would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse.
By way of illustration, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist might appear in the form of someone like the philosopher Nick Bostrom—an AI doomer who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing to erect an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology. But it wasn’t just Bostrom. Thiel saw potential Antichrists in a whole zeitgeist of people and institutions “focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.”
So humanity is doubly screwed: It has to avoid both technological calamity and the reign of the Antichrist. But the latter was far more terrifying for the billionaire at the podium. For reasons grounded in Girardian theory, Thiel believed that such a regime could only—after decades of sickly, pent-up energy—set off an all-out explosion of vicious, civilization-ending violence. And he wasn’t sure whether any katechons could hold it off.
When Thiel was finished, a moderator kicked off the Q&A session by noting, in so many words, that the speech had been a huge bummer. If the world was hurtling toward an apocalyptic crisis, he asked, what might the billionaire suggest we do?
Fend off the Antichrist, came the reply. But beyond that, Thiel said that he—like Girard—wasn’t really in the business of offering practical advice.
A few moments later, someone in the audience stood and offered a correction. “It’s not true what you said about Girard,” a man’s voice said.
Thiel—who often has a tendency to stonewall or steamroll his interlocutors—squinted in the speaker’s direction, trying to determine exactly who was pushing back. The voice had the rounded vowels and soft Rs of a recognizably Austrian accent and conveyed a quiet, familiar authority. “On many occasions,” the speaker went on, “young people asked Girard, ‘What should we do?’ And Girard told them to go to church.”
Thiel finally seemed to recognize who was speaking. He leaned in toward the microphone: “Wolfgang?”
II.
The voice belonged to Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year old theologian from Innsbruck, Austria, whom Thiel had last seen in 2016, the year they both delivered eulogies at Girard’s funeral. Palaver has a round face, a bookish white mustache, and eyes permanently crinkled at the corners by laugh lines. But that night in Paris, there was no trace of humor in his voice. And he evidently commanded the billionaire’s respect.
Six months later, Thiel delivered his Armageddon lecture again, now at The Catholic University of America. According to a recap posted by one attendee, Thiel’s argument was pretty much the same. Except this time Thiel told his listeners how they might personally navigate the slender path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: “Go to church.”
In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel echoed the line again: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” This spring, during one of the podcaster Jordan Peterson’s many failed attempts to interject, Thiel cut him off: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church.”
It’s not just that line. Although Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian’s influence arguably runs through nearly everything Thiel has ever said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazis to justify Germany’s slip from democracy to dictatorship. Palaver’s papers critiqued a lesser-known, theological, and apocalyptic line of Schmitt’s thinking—and they seem to have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996. In his recent doomsday lectures and interviews, Thiel’s language often mirrors Palaver’s scholarship directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing it. (Thiel did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)
You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)
Carl Schmitt
But the times have been even weirder for Palaver. A lifelong peace activist, he first wrote about Schmitt’s apocalyptic theories in hopes of driving a stake through their heart. Yet for years now, Palaver has watched as his own Girardian take on Schmitt seems to have provided a roadmap not only for Thiel’s speaking tour but for his considerable strategic interventions in global politics—from his investments in military tech to his role in shaping the careers of JD Vance and Donald Trump to his support of the National Conservatism movement. If Thiel takes his own thinking seriously, he seems to regard these moves as interventions in the end of human history.
For the past year or so, the two men have been in regular touch, meeting together once at Thiel’s home and debating with each other over text and email. In August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day, closed-door “dress rehearsal” of the billionaire’s four-part San Francisco Antichrist lecture series. In an interview with the Austrian news outlet Falter, Palaver said he’d agreed to the event with Thiel “in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions.” In my own months of conversation with Palaver, he has said he fears that the investor has arrived at a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt.
And believe it or not, the nature of Palaver and Thiel’s relationship gets even more complicated. Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly, and in our conversations he sometimes downplays his own influence and disagreements with the billionaire. Perhaps that’s because, as followers of Girard, both men believe that any two figures who oppose each other strongly enough—as Palaver has opposed Schmitt, as Thiel opposes the Antichrist—are bound to mimic each other and become entangled. As Thiel himself has said, “Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist.”
III.
In some ways, Palaver and Thiel have always been mirror images of each other.
Palaver grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps, less than an hour from the German border. The landscape of his childhood was idyllic: rolling valleys and meadows, dotted with small churches and boxed in by towering, snow-capped mountain ranges. The historical context was less so. Palaver was born 13 years after the Allies dropped their last bombs on Austria, and within a month of his fourth birthday, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
From a young age, Palaver was a peace activist, registering as a conscientious objector at 18 and then organizing against nuclear weapons in college. It was in a class about the roots of human violence where he came to study the work of Rene Girard—whose unusual theories were generating buzz in parts of Europe.
Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”
According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.
But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.
With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.
The upside of the crucifixion narrative, however, is that it offers humanity moral redemption. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: No matter the endgame, one must wholly reject scapegoating. Imitation remains inescapable, but we can choose our models. And the sound path forward, as he saw it, is to mimic Jesus—the one model who will never become a “fascinating rival”—in leading lives of Christian non-violence.
Girard’s theory almost immediately became a lodestar for the young Palaver, who recognized it as a bridge between his peace activism and theology. “You discover Girard,” Palaver says, “and you suddenly have a perfect tool to criticize all the scapegoaters.” And the young activist already had certain major scapegoaters in his sights.
In 1983—the same year as that first class on Girard—the bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from rallying a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe. Dismissing Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivete, the bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to an idea—coined by Carl Schmitt—that politics is grounded in distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized he was “more or less against every sentence.”
So as a doctoral candidate, the young Austrian decided to write a Girardian critique of Schmitt. He would use Girardian theory against a legal architect of Europe’s last great calamity, who was now inspiring the Cold Warriors stoking its next. “Focusing upon Schmitt,” he explained, “meant for me turning against the archenemy of my pacifist attitude.”
By the late 1980s, Palaver had become one of a small cadre of Girardian devotees on faculty at the University of Innsbruck. Girard’s ideas were also picking up steam in academic circles elsewhere in Europe. But Girard himself continued to develop his theories in relative obscurity across the Atlantic, at Stanford University.
IV.
When Thiel arrived at Stanford in the mid 1980s, he was a teen libertarian with a zeal for Reagan-era anti-communism, a hatred for conformity stemming from his time in a draconian South African prep school, and a drive, as he has described it, to win “one competition after another.” He quickly filled the role of a classic overachieving conservative campus gadfly. He played on the Stanford chess team, maintained excellent grades, and was the founding editor of The Stanford Review, a right-wing student publication—which heaped scorn on the trendy politics of diversity and multiculturalism at a time when mass student demonstrations were railing against the Western canon and South African apartheid.
So it’s not surprising that Thiel found himself drawn to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a cantankerous, theologically conservative Stanford campus minister who once referred to himself as a “bumpkin from South Africa armed with fascist boarding school education.” Hamerton-Kelly taught classes on Western Civilization and, according to the school newspaper, was booed on at least one occasion by anti-Apartheid audiences on campus. According to several people who knew them both, Thiel came to see Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor. And it was through him that Thiel got to know Girard personally.
Hamerton-Kelly was one of Girard’s closest friends at Stanford and one of mimetic theory’s loudest champions in the United States. He also led a biweekly Girardian study group in a trailer on campus, and at his invitation, Thiel became a regular fixture in the early 1990s. By Thiel’s own admission, his initial attraction to Girard’s mimetic thinking was simply contrarian. “It was very much out of temper with the times,” Thiel said in a 2009 interview, “so it had a sort of natural appeal to a somewhat rebellious undergraduate.” Beyond that, Thiel’s first impression was that mimetic theory was “crazy.”
But at some point, Thiel came to realize that—contrary to Ayn Rand’s fantasy of a few heroic, self-determined individualists striding against a backdrop of pale conformists—no one is immune to imitative desire and its frustrations. After graduating from Stanford law school, Thiel landed a highly coveted job as a securities lawyer at a prestigious Wall Street firm—and almost instantly hated it. “From the outside it was a place where everybody wanted to get in,” Thiel would later say. “On the inside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get out.” Then, when he applied to clerk under the conservative US Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both men turned him down. By his own account, Girard’s theory of rivalry was gradually hitting home for the hyper-mimetic Thiel. “As I had this rolling quarter-life crisis in my twenties,” he has said, “there was something about this intense competition and desire to win that I came to question.”
Finally, after a brief stint as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group, Thiel headed home to the Bay Area to launch the career in tech that would make him famous. But in returning to California, Thiel was also coming back to Girard. In the summer of 1996, the 28-year old Thiel attended the annual conference of Girardians, held at Stanford that year. On the final day of the event, he found a seat in a lecture hall. Wolfgang Palaver—whom Thiel had never met—was squaring up to present one of the first English-language critiques of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the Antichrist and the katechon. It would help set a new course for Thiel’s thinking for the next 30 years.
V.
As a theorist, Schmitt is best remembered for two things: his incisive Weimar-era critique of liberalism and his decision to join the Nazi party in the run-up to the Second World War (before being cast aside by the Reich in 1936). Schmitt’s embrace of the Nazis, Palaver told his audience, stemmed from his fear of “the satanic unification of the world” under a global state, which Schmitt treated as synonymous with the reign of the Antichrist.
During the Second World War, Schmitt saw the globalist ambitions of the USSR as presenting precisely this kind of apocalyptic risk, according to Palaver. Schmitt, he said, was desperate to locate a katechon—the shadowy figure, referenced in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, who stands in the way of the Antichrist in order to hold off the end of the world. Schmitt’s “greatest failure,” Palaver told his audience, “had been to think that Hitler was a katechon able to prevent the coming of a destructive world state.”
According to Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt was trying to solve an unsolvable political problem. Schmitt’s support of Hitler was effectively a bet that cranking up the volume on the scapegoat mechanism could work—that Germany would achieve social stability by channeling all of its fury toward Jews, the Roma, foreign powers, and all the other enemies that the Nazis designated as poisonous to the Reich. But Schmitt’s katechon, Palaver said, was doomed from the start.
“Far too late did Schmitt realize that his support of Hitler was actually serving the Antichrist,” Palaver told the Girardians. Schmitt was correct to warn against “the totalitarian dangers of a unified world,” but the old scapegoating rituals were no longer sustainable. Schmitt relied on a brutal nationalist ethos that saw countrymen as friends and everyone else as vile enemies. Girard had proved the world was evolving beyond the workability of such a scheme. So ultimately, Schmitt’s plan backfired. The atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi party had been so revolting, they’d prompted the spontaneous formation of the first truly global institution in human history. The Holocaust paved the way for the United Nations. His katechon had been an Antichrist all along.
This is the Girardian conundrum. If the old structures for containing violence no longer work, a violent world-ending apocalypse seems all but inevitable. For anyone who wants to shape history, Palaver suggested, there are two available courses of action: Follow in the footsteps of Schmitt or follow in the footsteps of Jesus. To follow Schmitt would be to invest in the katechon. By creating systems that permit violence against scapegoats, one might be able to postpone the far greater violence of the apocalypse. But for Palaver, the only morally acceptable answer was clear. Even if scapegoating could hold off the apocalypse for a time, we should not scapegoat. He ended his paper by quoting Girard’s call for “the definitive renunciation of violence.”
After the presentation ended, Thiel rushed to introduce himself to Palaver. “He was familiar with Schmitt,” Palaver told me, because he knew Schmitt had been important to Leo Strauss, a key intellectual influence among conservatives around the time Thiel was running the Stanford Review. But much of Schmitt’s writing, taboo as it was, had never been translated into English. Now here was Palaver’s scholarship, bridging the gap between Thiel’s interest in conservative political theory and the work of René Girard, and Thiel was eager to discuss it.
That day, they joined around 20 other participants for an after-party at Girard’s house. “There, we talked for one and a half hours about how I see Strauss and Schmitt,” Palaver told me. The young Austrian was thrilled to learn that someone in the audience had found his presentation interesting. “Usually in academia, not many people will eagerly listen,” he said. “ So I was happy to find a conversation partner who was really interested in the topic.” It would be years before Palaver started to realize how much their fascinations with the same subject diverged.
VI.
In the summer of 2004, Thiel and his old mentor Hamerton-Kelly organized a weeklong Girardian seminar at Stanford and invited Girard and Palaver to take part. The gathering was a small, closed symposium with only eight participants and served as Thiel’s self-orchestrated debut as a Girardian intellectual. Newly wealthy after having sold PayPal in a deal valued at $1.5 billion, he footed the bill for the week and also helped underwrite the publication of a book that would collect all the papers presented at the seminar.
At Palaver’s suggestion, the theme of the conference was “Politics and Apocalypse.” It had been three years since 9/11, and mimetic theorists were still processing whether the terror attacks augured history’s final explosion of “planetary mimetic rivalry.” But for Thiel—who sat at the head of the seminar table—the attacks mainly exposed the West’s deep and pathetic inability to protect itself.
“The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics,” Thiel wrote in the paper he presented that July. “Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”
It would quickly become apparent that Thiel had spent some time considering the paper Palaver presented the day the two men met in 1996. The “strange new thoughts” Thiel wanted his audience to entertain were, it turned out, largely those of Carl Schmitt.
Where Palaver had been repulsed, Thiel extolled Schmitt’s “robust conception of the political,” in which “humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies,” and everything else is delusion. “The high points of politics,” he quotes Schmitt as saying, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” In Thiel’s mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics. The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not.
Schmitt, Thiel conjectured, would have responded to 9/11 by calling for a holy crusade against Islam. But the West was instead slipping beyond politics altogether, Thiel seemed to fear, toward the creation of a bland “world-embracing economic and technical organization.” This was Schmitt’s nightmare scenario. In such a world, Thiel said, “a representation of reality might appear to replace reality: Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts,’ as in a soap opera.” But that counterfeit reality, Thiel argued, would just be the “brief harmony that prefigures the final catastrophe of the Apocalypse”—the harmony, in Schmitt’s telling, of the Antichrist.
Thiel’s discussion of Schmitt didn’t mention Hitler or the Nazis once.
Then, about halfway through his paper, Thiel switched gears completely. As if having second thoughts, he ruled out Schmitt’s “drastic solutions” as “fraught with far too much violence” in an age of nuclear weapons. Then he shifted toward imagining “a way to fortify the modern West” that involved working around democratic institutions via misdirection, hidden meanings, and a lack of transparency—an approach he identified with the theorist Leo Strauss. (He titled his paper “The Straussian Moment.”)
“A direct path forward is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery,” Thiel said. “Still, there are more possibilities for action than first appear.” Strangely for someone so suspicious of global unity, Thiel saw one such possibility for action in the creation of a worldwide surveillance network. “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots,” Thiel said, “we should consider … the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” This surveillance supersystem, Thiel wrote, could act as “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.”
Sitting down the seminar table from Thiel, Palaver had no idea that Thiel had more than an academic interest in spycraft. Just a year earlier, Thiel had quietly incorporated a new company called Palantir Technologies, where he would spend the next two decades developing some of the most sophisticated surveillance infrastructure in human history. At the time of the conference, the firm was still in its infancy. But it would soon land its first major client: the CIA.
As Palaver recalls it, Thiel’s paper received little pushback from the Girardians around the table in 2004. “I reread it recently,” Palaver tells me. “You can feel the anxiety. You feel that he was worried.” After 9/11, Palaver sighs, “I think Thiel’s first reaction was: We have to build tools to never again be in a situation where people can sneak into the United States without discovery.”
About a month after the symposium, Thiel committed his most famous act of putting his money where his Girardian mouth was. In August of 2004, he put $500,000 in TheFacebook.com, becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s first major investor. On numerous occasions, Thiel has described this as a wager on the explanatory power of Girardian theory. “I bet on mimesis,” Thiel would later say. LinkedIn intellectuals began referring to Girard as “the godfather of the Like button.” One critic even speculated that Thiel saw Facebook as “a mechanism for the containment and channeling of mimetic violence.”
But that wasn’t the only investment Thiel would make based on the power of his favorite theories.
VII.
After World War II, according to Palaver, Schmitt himself eventually soured on the idea that Hitler was the katechon. Clearly, the Führer had been a bad bet.
In Schmitt’s postwar book The Nomos of the Earth, he pitched a new kind of katechon. This would be a world order “based on the equilibrium of several independent large blocs,” as Palaver summarized it in 1996. In Schmitt’s multipolar world order, each hegemonic power would have its own distinct “culture, race, language, and national heritage.” The world would be disunified by design. There would be no global regulatory bodies and no global enforcement mechanisms—no United Nations, no International Criminal Court.
In July of 2019, Thiel went onstage to present a keynote lecture at the inaugural US conference of a new international political force: the National Conservatism movement. Established that year by the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, National Conservatives are opposed to “universalist ideologies” and want to “see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative.”
Thiel has presented a lecture at all but two US-based conference of the National Conservatives, where illiberal world leaders meet with their international counterparts and where right-leaning intellectuals from across the globe gather to give talks on the failures of liberalism, the necessity of reevaluating the separation of church and state, and the virtues of closed borders and self-interested, soil-deep nationalism. In 2021, Thiel was listed among the conference’s biggest donors of $50,000 or more.
Almost since the beginning, observers have noted that Hazony’s theories—and those of the National Conservatives in general—appear to be “suffused with the ideas of the German jurist Carl Schmitt,” though Hazony has disavowed the connection. Among the relatively few people associated with National Conservatism who do cite Schmitt openly in their own work are Thiel and Michael Anton, the essayist and sometime Trump administration official.
In 2023, Thiel returned to Schmitt’s ideas yet again when he gave his first major lecture on the Antichrist before the Girardians in Paris. This time he did refer obliquely to Schmitt’s “misadventure in nationalism”—a cute way of referring to his vigorously prosecuted Nazism—and gave much more air to the idea of the katechon.
After Thiel finished his talk—and Palaver issued his “go to church” correction from the audience—the Austrian went up to Thiel to say hello and make sure there were no hard feelings. As Palaver recalls it, Thiel responded that, in fact, he hoped they could discuss the substance of his lecture more deeply. So a year later, at Thiel’s invitation, Palaver flew to California to meet with Thiel in his sprawling Los Angeles home.
Before he arrived, the theologian was surprised to learn that Thiel had already decided what they would discuss: one of Palaver’s old papers critiquing Schmitt. “I had to reread it myself,” Palaver told me, “and I was partly astonished by what I had collected there and had to address.” It had been years since he’d thought about his mid-’90s scholarship. By the evening’s end, Palaver realized the same could not be said for his host.
As time went on, Palaver realized that he may have become a major vehicle for his once-taboo archenemy’s thought. “Some of those crazy ideas were really presented by myself for the first time,” Palaver says in his somewhat broken English. “And now they are all over the place.”
VIII.
As the National Conservatism movement picked up steam, its members began angling to have a man in the White House by 2024. They pinned their early hopes on Ron DeSantis, but when his campaign fizzled out, all eyes turned toward Ohio senator JD Vance.
It’s no secret that Vance is largely a product of Thiel—the billionaire has helped architect nearly every professional endeavor of Vance’s adult life, including his meteoric political rise. After Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, he published an essay in the Catholic magazine The Lamp, partly attributing his conversion to the influence of two men: Peter Thiel (“he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”) and the late René Girard. “His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale,” Vance wrote. “But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.”
As Vance put it, “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.” In applying this to his own life, Vance focused mainly on his generation’s petty online habits in the 2010s. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced,” he wrote. “We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”
It was a fairly shallow gloss on Girard’s theory. But to many Girardians, it suggested Vance knew exactly what he was doing when—two months after Donald Trump selected him as a running mate—the nominee began tweeting that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets. And when, on the campaign trail and in televised debates, he contorted himself to blame nearly every American crisis on immigrants.
For some Girardians, this was a breaking point. The mimetic theorist Bernard Perret lambasted Vance and his billionaire mentor in a French political journal, accusing them of “casting a shadow over Girard’s legacy.” Within months, several more prominent Girardians followed suit. “It’s difficult to claim Girard, who fundamentally believes that violence is linked to exclusion, and at the same time to accuse Haitians of eating dogs,” Girardian scholar Paul Dumouchel told a Canadian newspaper. “Either you didn’t understand Girard, or you’re a liar.”
It’s possible that Vance may have genuinely misunderstood the scapegoat mechanism. Or he may have been familiar enough with Girardian mimetic theory to recognize that, while the old sacred rituals might not work perfectly, they aren’t entirely broken yet. Collective acts of violence still bind people together somewhat—perhaps enough to win an election. “They feel relieved of their tensions and they coalesce into a more harmonious group,” Girard wrote. “They now have a single purpose, which is to prevent the scapegoat from harming them by expelling and destroying him.”
IX.
By February of 2025, Thiel’s Armageddon tour had gotten to the point where he was handing out T-shirts that said “Don’t Immanentize the Katechon.” (This was a nerdy Thielian play on the anti-utopian quote, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton”—meaning don’t try to manifest heaven on Earth.) In a recent interview, Thiel was asked whether or not Donald Trump might be the katechon, and he refused to answer. His reticence to name a katechon is a lesson he seems to take directly from Palaver’s account of Schmitt and Hitler. “If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong,” Thiel told Cowen. “There’s always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist,” he said, echoing Palaver’s 1996 paper.
Throughout Thiel’s strange circuit as an itinerant preacher, he and Palaver have been in frequent touch. The first time I spoke with Palaver, he’d recently emailed Thiel to express his disgust over JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where the vice president called for greater inclusion of nationalist populist parties like Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany. Thiel engaged with Palaver’s criticism of Vance without really conceding it, Palaver says. Whether the message trickled down to the vice president is unclear.
Last summer, I signed up to attend the 35th annual Girardian conference in Rome so I could spend time with Palaver in person. In the days leading up to it, I had dozens of unplanned conversations with mimetic theorists—in between lectures, in the back seats of taxis, and over espressos and cigarettes at tiny Roman cafés. The Girardians are a remarkably welcoming bunch, and many were reasonably eager to express how misrepresented they felt by the media. Several noted how disturbed they’d been to see a recent illustration, which accompanied a story in the Financial Times, of a smirking carved bust of Girard wearing a bright red MAGA hat.
By virtue of his enormous fortune (and his tendency to name-drop Girard whenever he speaks to the media), Thiel is easily the most well-known Girardian on the planet. He does not, however, speak for the vast majority of mimetic theorists—particularly the European contingent. Certainly, none of the Girardians I spoke with seemed remotely interested in constructing katechons.
It’s not that they aren’t thinking about the apocalypse. There’s no way to take Girard’s mimetic theory seriously without acknowledging his conclusion: As scapegoating becomes less and less effective, the world begins to fall apart. It was just that the Girardians I met seemed to be at peace with the thought that we might be living through the denouement of human history.
They were not interested in building katechons, they told me, because they do not want innocent people to get hurt. Their work is concerned with scapegoating less, not scapegoating more. Come what may. “Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness,” Girard wrote. “The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope.”
Palaver wanted to make sure I understood that he, too, was concerned with scapegoating less—he seemed worried that I might be scapegoating Peter Thiel. It was a lesson he himself had learned over and over. “Schmitt was the type of thinking I was fighting against,” Palaver told me. “And partly I’m still fighting against Schmitt.” But over the years, Girard had prodded him to see that he was becoming mimetically entangled with his opponent. “To understand mimetic theory properly means to reflect also on your own possible scapegoats.” So when I wanted to talk to him about Thiel’s hand in Palantir and National Conservatism, Palaver kept steering the conversation back to the condition of the billionaire’s soul.
X.
In a June interview, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat asked Thiel whether he—with his heavy investments in AI, military tech, and the data analysis firm Palantir—is actually building tools that work in the service of the Antichrist. The halting six seconds the men subsequently devoted to unpacking the idea, which immediately became a meme, were remarkably underwhelming.
Thiel: I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
Douthat: I mean, to be clear, I don’t think that’s what you’re doing either.
Less than a month before Douthat spoke with Thiel, I posed the exact same question to Palaver, and it elicited more of a response. Why was Thiel, given his fixation on preventing a one-world state, building surveillance tools that a totalitarian dictator could use to seize power? Was he on the side of the katechon or the Antichrist?
Palaver told me he wasn’t entirely sure. “There’s a tension between those two things, and in some ways he goes along with both of them,” he told me. “It’s a good strategy, if you have the means—to have something at stake on all the sides.” In other words, maybe the billionaire is hedging his bets—investing heavily in both the katechon and the one-world, totalitarian Antichrist.
But to understand why Thiel may be willing to take that risk, Palaver says you need to first understand that he’s human. “What I’ve observed are traces of deep fear,” he told me. “Fear of death, fear of terrorism.” It all comes down to a lack of trust and a craving for security, Palaver suspects. “There are so many cases where he expresses fears and concerns and a need for protection,” Palaver says. “And if your main thing is seeking protection, you play with fire.”
Palaver has decided that he has to pick his battles with Thiel. “We have different political views of the world. That’s quite clear for him and for me,” he says. But matters of religion are different. “That’s where I hopefully can have an influence on him,” Palaver says. Ultimately, Thiel needs to choose who he is going to imitate. “In the end, you have to decide: Are you really going to be a Christian in a proper sense? Or are you a Schmittian?”
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