How Peter Thiel Turned a Pacifist Scholar’s Critique of Nazi-Era Thought Into His Apocalyptic Political Playbook

Peter Thiel’s apocalyptic speaking tour hasn’t wrapped up yet—just like the world it predicts is still standing. For two full years, the billionaire tech investor has crisscrossed the lecture circuit, laying out his bible-inflected doomsday theories to a rotating cast of interviewers who often leave the stage looking visibly confused. He’s discussed the katechon (the biblical term for the force that holds back the end times) onstage with economist and podcaster Tyler Cowen; shared a string of awkward on-camera silences with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and right now, he’s in the middle of a private, four-part lecture series on the Antichrist in San Francisco.

Depending on your perspective, the fact that one of the world’s most powerful men is obsessed with a figure from Sunday sermons and horror flicks can read as hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or terrifying. But the ideas driving these talks are critical to understanding how Thiel sees his own outsized role across politics, technology, and the future of humanity. To unpack Thiel’s fixation on the katechon and the Antichrist, we have to go back to the first major stop on his doomsday tour: an unseasonably hot 2023 day in Paris. No cameras recorded the event, no reporters covered it, but I’ve reconstructed it from interviews with multiple attendees.

The event was the annual gathering of scholars devoted to Thiel’s biggest intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard—Thiel calls himself a “hardcore Girardian.” That evening, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a small lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris for the unannounced talk. From the stage, Thiel spoke for nearly an hour, laying out his vision of Armageddon, and all the forces he says are not enough to stop it.

In Thiel’s telling, the modern world is far too afraid of its own innovation. Our “listless,” “zombie” age, he argues, is defined by rising hostility to new technology, plummeting fertility rates, an overabundance of yoga, and a culture stuck in the “endless Groundhog Day of the World Wide Web.” But in our neurotic rush to avoid technological Armageddon—think nuclear war, climate collapse, unaligned AI—Thiel says modern civilization has opened the door to something far more dangerous: the Antichrist.

Per some Christian traditions, the Antichrist will unite all humanity under a single rule before triggering the apocalypse. For Thiel, this evil is functionally interchangeable with any project to unify the entire world. “How might such an Antichrist rise to power?” Thiel asked the Paris crowd. “By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety.” In other words, the Antichrist will bind a terrified human race by promising to save it from end-times disaster.

To illustrate his point, Thiel suggested the Antichrist could take the form of thinkers like philosopher Nick Bostrom, an AI alarmist who published a 2019 paper calling for a global emergency governance system with predictive policing and strict tech restrictions. But Bostrom is just one example, Thiel said: he sees potential Antichrists across an entire cultural movement of people and institutions “focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.”

That leaves humanity between two existential threats: technological collapse and the Antichrist’s reign. But the latter was far more frightening to the billionaire on stage. Rooted in Girard’s theory, Thiel argued that after decades of suppressed tension, an Antichrist regime would eventually detonate into total, civilization-ending violence. And he wasn’t confident any katechon could hold it back.

When Thiel finished speaking, the moderator opened the floor for questions, and bluntly summed up the vibe: the talk was a total downer. If the world is speeding toward an apocalyptic crisis, he asked, what does Thiel suggest we actually do?

Thiel’s first answer was to fend off the Antichrist. But beyond that, he said, like Girard before him, he wasn’t in the business of giving step-by-step practical advice.

Moments later, an audience member stood to correct him. “It’s not true what you said about Girard,” a man’s voice said.

Thiel, who often brushes off or steamrolls pushback, squinted to identify his critic. The speaker had the distinct rounded vowels and soft Rs of an Austrian accent, and carried a quiet, familiar authority. “On many occasions,” the man continued, “young people asked Girard, ‘What should we do?’ And Girard told them to go to church.”

Thiel finally recognized the voice. He leaned into the microphone: “Wolfgang?”

The speaker was Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year-old theologian from Innsbruck, Austria. Thiel had last seen him in 2016, when both men delivered eulogies at Girard’s funeral. Palaver has a round face, a scholarly white mustache, and permanently crinkled eyes from laughing. But that night in Paris, there was no humor in his tone—and he clearly had Thiel’s full respect.

Six months later, Thiel gave his Armageddon lecture again at the Catholic University of America. Per an attendee’s recap, his core argument was almost identical, with one big change: this time, he told the audience how to walk the narrow line between Armageddon and the Antichrist: “Go to church.”

In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel repeated the line: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” This spring, when podcaster Jordan Peterson fumbled for a chance to interject during their conversation, Thiel cut him off: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church.”

This isn’t just a throwaway line. Though Thiel has never publicly credited Palaver, the Austrian theologian’s influence shapes nearly everything Thiel has said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver published a series of papers critiquing a little-known apocalyptic theological strain of thinking from Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who worked with the Nazis to justify their collapse of German democracy. Those papers have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996, and Thiel’s recent doomsday talks and interviews often mirror Palaver’s scholarship directly, sometimes even paraphrasing it closely. (Thiel did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)

It’s a surreal moment in global history when one of the world’s most influential billionaires—an investor who bankrolled both Facebook and the AI revolution, co-founded PayPal and Palantir, and launched the political career of a U.S. vice president—centers his public speaking on apocalyptic ideas borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist (the same man who immediately published the most high-profile defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives).

But the story is even stranger for Palaver. A lifelong peace activist, he first wrote about Schmitt’s apocalyptic theories to kill them off for good. Yet for years now, he has watched his own Girardian reading of Schmitt become a roadmap not just for Thiel’s lecture tour, but for Thiel’s high-stakes interventions in global politics: from his investments in military technology, to his role in shaping the careers of JD Vance and Donald Trump, to his support for the National Conservatism movement. If Thiel takes his own thinking seriously, he sees these moves as direct interventions in the final chapter of human history.

Over the past year, the two men have been in regular contact: they met once at Thiel’s home, and debate regularly over text and email. Last August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day closed-door “dress rehearsal” of Thiel’s four-part Antichrist lecture series in San Francisco. Palaver told Austrian outlet Falter he agreed to host the event “in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions.” In months of conversations with me, Palaver said he fears Thiel has landed on a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt’s work.

Unbelievably, the dynamic between Palaver and Thiel gets even more complicated. Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly, and in our conversations he often downplays both his influence and his disagreements with the billionaire. That may stem from their shared Girardian beliefs: any two people who oppose each other strongly enough—Palaver opposing Schmitt, Thiel opposing the Antichrist—are destined to mimic each other and become entangled. As Thiel himself put it: “Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist.”

In many ways, Palaver and Thiel have always been mirror images of one another.

Palaver grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps, less than an hour from the German border. His childhood landscape was idyllic: rolling valleys and meadows dotted with small churches, framed by towering, snow-capped mountains. But the historical context was far from peaceful. Palaver was born 13 years after the Allies dropped their final bombs on Austria, and less than a month after his fourth birthday, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation.

From a young age, Palaver was a peace activist: he registered as a conscientious objector at 18, then organized against nuclear weapons in college. It was in a class on the roots of human violence that he first encountered René Girard’s work, whose unusual theories were already gaining traction in parts of Europe.

Girard’s core insight, Palaver learned, is that all humans are imitators, starting with what they want. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people copy the ambitions of their most successful neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

Girard called this relentless copying mimesis, and argued it builds tension as it bounces between relationships. In groups, people converge on a small number of role models, copy the same desires, and compete fiercely for the same prizes, until everyone starts to look and act alike. The only reason this mimetic rivalry doesn’t spiral into all-out war is that it eventually gets channeled into a war of everyone against one person. Through what Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” the whole group unites against a single unlucky target blamed for all the community’s problems. This mechanism is so central to cultural cohesion, Girard argued, that scapegoat stories are the founding myths of every ancient culture.

But the rise of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—it finally revealed that scapegoats are actually innocent, and mobs are cruel. In the crucifixion story, Jesus is killed in a horrific act of collective violence. But unlike almost every other sacrificial myth, this story is told from the scapegoat’s perspective, leaving no room for audiences to miss the injustice.

With this revelation, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals began to lose their power, unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same unifying relief from collective violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but it brings less and less cohesion. What waits for us at the end of history, then, is the unconstrained, contagious, ultimately apocalyptic violence of unfettered mimetic rivalry.

The good news of the crucifixion story, however, is that it offers humanity moral redemption. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: no matter how the end plays out, we must fully reject scapegoating. Imitation is unavoidable, but we can choose who we imitate. The right path forward, he argued, is to imitate Jesus—who never becomes a “fascinating rival”—and live lives of Christian nonviolence.

Girard’s theory immediately became a guiding light for the young Palaver, who saw it as a bridge between his peace activism and his theological work. “You discover Girard,” Palaver says, “and you suddenly have a perfect tool to criticize all the scapegoaters.” And the young activist already had major scapegoaters in his sights.

In 1983—the same year he took that first Girard class—the bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from organizing a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe. Dismissing Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivety, the bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book was full of references to an idea coined by Carl Schmitt: that politics is fundamentally about dividing the world into friends and enemies. Reading it, 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 Girard’s theory against the legal architect of Europe’s worst modern catastrophe, who was now inspiring the Cold Warriors stoking the next one. “Focusing upon Schmitt,” he explained, “meant for me turning against the archenemy of my pacifist attitude.”

By the late 1980s, Palaver was part of a small group of Girardian scholars on the faculty at the University of Innsbruck. Girard’s ideas were gaining traction in academic circles across Europe, while Girard himself continued to develop his theories in relative obscurity at Stanford University, across the Atlantic.

When Thiel arrived at Stanford in the mid-1980s, he was a teen libertarian with a passion for Reagan-era anti-communism, a hatred of conformity forged at a strict South African prep school, and a drive, as he put it, to win “one competition after another.” He quickly became a classic overachieving conservative campus gadfly: he played on Stanford’s chess team, earned top grades, and founded The Stanford Review, a right-wing student publication that attacked the trendy diversity and multiculturalism politics of the era, when mass student protests were calling for removing the Western canon and opposing apartheid in South Africa.

It’s no surprise Thiel was drawn to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a cantankerous, theologically conservative Stanford campus minister who once described himself as a “bumpkin from South Africa armed with fascist boarding school education.” Hamerton-Kelly taught Western civilization classes, and according to the campus paper, was booed at least once by anti-apartheid audiences. Multiple people who knew both men say Thiel saw Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor, and it was through him that Thiel met René Girard in person.

Hamerton-Kelly was one of Girard’s closest friends at Stanford and one of the loudest advocates of mimetic theory in the United States. He led a biweekly Girardian study group in a trailer on campus, and at his invitation, Thiel became a regular attendee in the early 1990s. By Thiel’s own admission, his initial draw to Girard’s mimetic thinking was simple contrarianism. “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 over time, Thiel came to realize that contrary to Ayn Rand’s fantasy of a handful of heroic, self-determined individualists standing apart from conformist crowds, no one escapes imitative desire and its frustrations. After graduating from Stanford Law School, Thiel landed a coveted job as a securities lawyer at a top Wall Street firm—and hated it almost immediately. “From the outside it was a place where everybody wanted to get in,” Thiel later said. “On the inside it was a place where everybody wanted to get out.” Then, when he applied to clerk for conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both rejected him. By his own account, Girard’s theory of rivalry gradually hit home for the hyper-competitive 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 short stint as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse, Thiel moved back to the Bay Area to launch the tech career that would make him a household name. But returning to California also brought him back to Girard. In the summer of 1996, 28-year-old Thiel attended the annual Girardian conference, held that year at Stanford. On the final day of the event, he took a seat in the lecture hall to hear Wolfgang Palaver—who he had never met—present one of the first English-language critiques of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the Antichrist and the katechon. The talk would redirect the course of Thiel’s thinking for the next 30 years.

As a theorist, Schmitt is best known for two things: his sharp critique of liberalism from the Weimar era, and his decision to join the Nazi Party in the lead-up to World War II (before being sidelined by the regime in 1936). Palaver told the 1996 audience that Schmitt’s alliance with the Nazis grew out of his fear of “the satanic unification of the world” under a global state, which Schmitt equated with the Antichrist’s reign.

During World War II, Schmitt saw the Soviet Union’s global ambitions as exactly this apocalyptic threat, Palaver explained. Schmitt was desperate to find a katechon—the mysterious figure referenced in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, who blocks the Antichrist to delay the end of the world. Schmitt’s “greatest failure,” Palaver told the crowd, “had been to think that Hitler was a katechon able to prevent the coming of a destructive world state.”

Per Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt was trying to solve an impossible political problem. Palaver argued that Schmitt’s support for Hitler was essentially a bet that cranking up the scapegoat mechanism would work: that Germany would achieve social stability by channeling all its anger at Jews, Roma, foreign powers, and all the other enemies the Nazis labeled a poison to the Reich. But Schmitt’s katechon was doomed from the start, Palaver said.

“Far too late did Schmitt realize that his support of Hitler was actually serving the Antichrist,” Palaver told the Girardians. Schmitt was right to warn against “the totalitarian dangers of a