There's some context at the end about Thiels connections to the Trump administration. This is normal for reputable news agencies line AP, not everybody is as keenly aware of Thiel's influence as hn readers.
I guess that's what you get for electing an American as the Pope. /s
What sort of mental gymnastics would be required to not only convince yourself the end of days is here, but that it's not directly being caused by the guy who is indiscriminately bombing foreign countries and spends each morning have a group of evangelical zealots call him the chosen one while praying on him.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter...
A Google search turns up the usual stuff (e.g. his Wikipedia page) and then a Youtube video accusing him of destroying democracy, so if that is what he is trying its not working: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=peter%20thiel&sei=tfWzadnD...
generally holds true soros marc rich bill gates musk thiel nassim taleb epstein etc
On Twitter, in my experience. The 'manosphere' is practically all philosopher-wannabe-billionaires.
archetype is people who sell their success as a model for you to follow while having none themselves, wrapped up as some kind of philosophical position, so they can make money
lots of self help authors, failed vc funds, podcasts
Maybe that we all need to surrender all our data to an intransparent global surveillance tool, that gets more and more connected to automatic killer drones?
Oh and also despise democracy of course. Jesus Christ was on the side if the poor, so the antichrist would be on the side of the rich.
Any ideas who the new antichrist might be?
That being said, I don’t care much for Christian prophecies. Better to talk why than who.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, his views are deeply, deeply heretical. He’s so far out of pocket he’s in a completely different pair of trousers.
Why is Thiel, whose parents were American evangelical and whose own beliefs are described as "heterodox", trying to sell this in Catholic packaging outside the US?
I'll do you one further, as someone from a deeply catholic country: Considering the triggering of Armaggedon in daily politics is seen as batshit crazy.
No, but as a general rule, Catholics don’t and have never fretted about the end times the way all sorts of Protestant sects have, historically. Which is curious given Matthew 24:36 and all the hullabaloo Protestants make about being “scriptural”. And perhaps more importantly, because it has authority on such matters, Church teaching makes no claims about when the end of the world will occur and it never has, because it cannot.
Putting effort in triggering the end of the world is nowhere on the spectrum though. I think if you told a priest you're pushing for that he would be seriously alarmed, like calling the police alarmed if you hold power.
I would venture that it is less than half of Christians who believe in this idea at all. It does seem to be the domain of wild eyed TV evangelists though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
Thiels parents were originally West Germans and they also lived in South Africa, and he himself attended a German school in Swakopmund, famous for still glorifying Hitler at the time.
So I think that "American evangelical" is not the full picture but it have morphed with other, adjacent but compatible ideologies
But Catholicism has its own government, which prevents individual catholic countries to veer off too much.
In lack of a better word, that sounds more like anti-Cristian
See also: bean soup / "what about me?*
So, you (not you, a generic you) believe that Armageddon is happening in your lifetime, and the event is the literal moment when God will pour his Holy Wrath against unrepentant sinners in a final judgement as the world wraps up... And you, deeply religious as you are, will obviously go to Heaven, while all the annoying people you rightly hate will go to Hell, to be punished for eternity.
Considering this, is it not obvious that this hypothetical person would wish for Armageddon already? I mean, for you it is the final prize.
I believe these people don't want a future. They want the end.
It'd be bad enough if he was just some random crank, but the fact he's got the level of power and influence needed to actually make his beliefs happen makes it exponentially worse.
Who should take into their hands the job to stop him, and to what lengths should they push themselves?
In his case - I assume most of it is from Palantir these days. Therefore stop your governments from contracting with them.
Thiel is only "relevant" because he's wealthy.
In a system that allows wealth to equal political power, systematically weakening the impact of wealth on civic and political systems is an effective method. Whether that can be done in America, with the current understanding of the constitution and the current philosophy that many take towards taxation/wealth is questionable; but the idea that we can do nothing is just not true. We don't need to slide back into an era of 19th century robber barons and pseudo-aristocracy. If we do, it's because we largely gave up or allowed it to happen.
Unfortunately the political rhetoric have smeared "the globalists" and equated people that want global coordination to limit those multinationals with power, with the ones abusing it. Even the platform that was promising to drain the swamp turns out was just another swamp, so one would need to start from the scratch for that political movement.
But why though? If that's what you believe and there's nothing more, we know the sun is going to explode and destroy everything and an asteroid impact is likely to happen that destroys even sooner than that, so why does that matter?
Call me cynical, but I haven't seen any improvement in human nature in 50 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
It's suitably insane rambling nonsense. It actually seems to dovetail pretty well with Andreesen's manifesto in that evil is portrayed as anyone who opposed relentless technological progress at any cost. If you worry about the economic or human effects of tech oligarchs (Grete Thunberg is named as a candidate) then you are preparing your evil army for the final battle. Seeking to regulate AI also makes you a candidate.
1) These are actual good faith views that are inspired by his own piety
2) This is some chess game he thinks he's playing in which he erects the world government/ totalitarian state as signals of the antichrist, with Thunberg and other "woke" leaders as candidates, because they pose a risk to his business interests. "Peace and safety" is a guise and a front, but conveniently, are just bad for Palantir.
3) He is too disconnected for too long and has disappeared up his own ass
For anyone considering investigating, I wouldn't advise it. He's given huge liberties by interviewers to give vague non-answers and is never (rarely) pressed about reconciling his actions as an investor with his alleged concern for humanity.
Maybe people should put some pressure on these outlets to do so.
Journalists have a real knack for warping banal things into sensational, ominous nonsense. The implication here is that that universities are monolithic coordinated machines with a single voice where all things are organized top-down. Some club here is hosting this event. That’s it. We had clubs at university that did the same thing. The quoted passages read like factual answers to questions posed by journalists to the Angelicum’s and CUA’s communications offices, not some frantic “distancing” or gotchas. They probably don’t care one way or another.
“the Catholic magazine First Things”
Not officially Catholic. Ecumenical is perhaps a better term. Even that word is not accurate, as there are plenty of contributions from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, etc writers.
“an ancient Christian concept of the order of love, received a famous slapdown from Pope Francis […] Prevost shared an article […] with the headline, ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’”
Charitably, Francis and then-Prevost were critical of what they privately perceived as a misapplication or misunderstanding of this principle, not the principle itself. Prevost’s own Augustinian order draws heavily from St. Augustine who expounded the concept of ordo amoris/ordo caritatis. The concept isn’t an endorsement of national chauvinism, but merely that our love must be prioritized and ordered. It is a moral obligation and is simply part of and entailed by the natural law.
In any case, I don’t see any relevance to the article. It’s like some mish-mash of disconnected propositions held together by dubious or meaningless associations to imply something significant has taken place. Or would have sufficed to say “Peter Thiel lecturing on the Antichrist in Rome”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima
also end of the world prophecies are a Catholic meme
my favorite is Pope Sylvester II in 1000 AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
My point is that it's not crazy, it's survival. It's a feature not a bug.
In other words this looks dangerous, but it's really just every day normality for all of us.
karel-3d•1h ago
> I'm the problem, it's me
- Taylor Swift, 2022
soco•1h ago