Peter Thiel, the Deeper State, and the Antichrist 2.0

Jan 21, 2026

In this new article by Prof. Alexander Dugin, we find ourselves plunged into one of the most enigmatic labyrinths and high-stakes dilemmas of our times: after the end of liberal globalism, what comes next? If the “Deep State” is uprooted, what will be planted in turn? The question should also include “who.” After all, orders and paradigms are not merely replaced by new orders and paradigms — elites are replaced by elites. And it is often those men with vision and resources behind the scenes who shape the shift.
Following up on a previous essay in Arktos Journal from March 2025, Dugin sheds light on the shadowy, increasingly apocalyptic-framed role of Peter Thiel, known as the “philosopher” among the Silicon Valley tech-oligarchs, whose recent discourse on the Antichrist has been dismissed as superstitious ramblings, pseudo-scientific rabbit holes, or merely another round of American Protestantism’s many recurring obsessions with the “End Times.”
In the case of Peter Thiel and his lectures on the Antichrist, however, Dugin reminds us that epochal shifts are not only a matter of money, power, and tech. The secular or atheistic world of Modernity is a bluff, and just as it resorted to its own invented “myths” and “religions,” so will the ancient religions, myths, and eschatologies still play a role, have their say, and resurface with a vengeance in the times ahead. As Dugin has argued for more than 30 years, sooner or later, “sacred geography” makes itself known and felt in geopolitics. While the powers-that-be had you scrolling TikTok, one of the billionaires that backed Trump has been deep in philosophy, theology, and eschatology, thinking about a new world order in the biblical terms of the Antichrist.
As you’ll read below, Dugin indicates that this article is one in an ongoing series of fresh dives into the deeper undercurrents swelling to the surface in the United States of America. Ignoring them can only be to our own peril.
Read the first part of this series here:

Peter Thiel, the Deeper State, and the Antichrist 2.0

by Alexander Dugin

Last spring, reflecting on Trump’s first steps in power, I wrote an article in which I raised the issue of an “even deeper Deep State.” The logic was as follows: if Trump has declared war on the Deep State, but was still allowed to come to power, then isn’t there an even more powerful and secretive authority in the US (and, more broadly, in the Global West)? This is what I tentatively referred to as the “Deeper State.”

This article, which was published simultaneously in Russian and in English, was taken very seriously in MAGA circles, sparking a debate: does such a “Deeper State” exist, and if so, what might it be? Various theories have been put forth. I suggested that the “Deeper State” could be those influential power circles whose mouthpieces are the techno-oligarchs of Silicon Valley, the most influential and conceptualizing of whom is Peter Thiel.

I drew attention to his support for Curtis Yarvin’s (and partly Nick Land’s) idea of “Dark Enlightenment” and the establishment of an “American monarchy” with Trump as Emperor, as well as plans to create a utopian “city of the future” in Greenland. Konstantin Malofeev recently wrote quite accurately about this project:

“Greenland will become something more than just a center for mineral extraction and the world’s largest missile carrier. There are also much more American-style commercial plans.
Peter Thiel (the creator of PayPal and Palantir, a Facebook investor, etc.), the ideologist behind Trump’s second term, is the main investor in the Praxis startup through his company Pronomos Capital.
Praxis’ goal is to build a super-modern city whose management will actively feature AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. Minimizing state intervention (project manager Dryden Brown was inspired by the book Atlas Shrugged). A city of technocrats — without religion, without conscience, with numbers instead of the Word.
Greenland has been chosen as the site. And now Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal along with Thiel, is becoming the US ambassador to Denmark.
On its website, Praxis claims to have more than 150,000 citizens and a total investment of over $1.1 trillion. The list includes people from 80 countries and 429 cities. What is interesting is that there are no Greenlanders. They are not even asked about this.
Among the investors with good faces is Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. Before he was sentenced to 25 years for fraud involving the FTX exchange, he was a participant in Epstein’s pedophile gang and the owner of a methamphetamine-fueled “polyamorous penthouse” for the elite in the Bahamas — one of the demo versions for the “city of the future.”
This is digital dictatorship in its purest form, without any embellishment. Artificial intelligence for people on a perpetual high. Inhumanity in the full sense of the word.”

At the time, I wasn’t convinced that this is the case, but I did advise keeping a close eye on Peter Thiel. Thiel himself joined the discussion, directly and indirectly, by raising topics that are quite characteristic of our school of worldview: the reign of the Antichrist, the End Times, the figure of the Katechon, the existence of the soul, the role of liberalism and the Radical Enlightenment as the ideology of the devil overall.

Even before COVID, messengers from Thiel came to me and proposed to start a big dialogue on the geopolitics of the future, the role of Land and Sea, oil and gas, spirit and matter. It then became apparent that he had made a fairly large investment in one of our major commercial banks. He was interested in Eurasianism and, oddly enough, Traditionalism and eschatology.

These relations did not develop further, partly because I have been under the harshest sanctions since 2014, which complicates contact. Once certain that I could not be invited to the US, Thiel promised to come to Russia, but then came COVID-19, the Special Military Operation, and Trump’s election campaign, in which Thiel and a number of other techno-oligarchs from Silicon Valley (especially Elon Musk) played a decisive role. The dialogue was postponed indefinitely.

Interestingly enough, however, Thiel then gave a sensational interview to The New York Times in which he talked at length about the Antichrist, and he then proceeded to deliver a whole series of four lectures specifically on this topic.

Below is how the lectures are presented by Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, which by definition presents itself as anti-woke and claims “objectivity” and distance from the harsh liberal globalist propaganda that is partly “sewn into” other versions of AI (although this thesis is not entirely justified, since other AI platforms, with proper prompting, can be tuned to different ideological registers, sometimes even the most radical ones):

Peter Thiel, a well-known entrepreneur and investor, gave a series of four lectures under the general title “The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series” in September-October 2025. These lectures were organized by the non-profit organization ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which seeks to develop a “Christian” community in the technological environment. The events took place in San Francisco.
They were strictly private and off-the-record (no official recordings or broadcasts), with participants asked not to disclose the content publicly. Tickets were sold only for the entire series, were non-transferable and non-refundable, and sold out very quickly. The audience numbered in the hundreds – mostly invitees from the technology industry, Christians, intellectuals, and like-minded associates of Thiel. Each evening included drinks, a lecture, a Q&A with moderator Peter Robinson (Reagan’s former speechwriter) and the audience, and dessert. Outside, there were protests with demonstrations and music, but inside, the atmosphere was calm and intellectual.
The lectures were structured as a coherent series, with each subsequent lecture building on the previous one. Thiel, drawing on his Christian faith (influenced by René Girard and other thinkers), linked the biblical figure of the Antichrist to contemporary issues in science, technology, politics, and globalization. He defined the Antichrist as “an evil king, tyrant, or anti-messiah who appears at the end of time” and warned that his manifestations could take the form of global institutions, regulations, and anti-technological sentiments leading to stagnation and apocalypse.
Thiel drew ideas from theology, history, and literature, referring to René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt, John Henry Newman, Vladimir Solovyov, and others. He also mentioned the concept of Katechon — the force that holds back the Antichrist (from 2 Thessalonians) — and linked it to contemporary structures such as Trump, MAGA, and the United States.

Here is a brief description with the main topics of each lecture.

Lecture 1: “Knowledge shall be increased” (September 15, 2025)
Main topic: The relation of the Antichrist to Armageddon and the role of science/technology. Thiel argued that the Antichrist exploits fears of existential threats (war, rumors of war, technological apocalypse) to seize control and halt progress. This leads to stagnation, which is already evident in the world. Key examples: references to Daniel 12:4 (“knowledge will increase”) and Matthew 24:6; Los Alamos as a symbol of escalating threats. Thiel warned that fears (of AI or nuclear weapons, for example) are being used for global control.
Lecture 2: “Empire and the Antichrist’s relation to government” (September 22, 2025)
Main topic: Antichrist-like forms of government and their evolution. Thiel discussed how governments can be anti- or pro-science, anti- or pro-Christian, and how globalization (Daniel 12:4: “many will wander”) leads to “one world” – “the Empire of the Antichrist,” which suppresses science. He illustrated this through literature: Bacon’s New Atlantis, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen (where Ozymandias is an Antichrist figure striving for world peace through global government) and One Piece by Eiichiro Oda (the future world suppresses science, the hero is Christ-like).

However, in an article written by Thiel on the same topic, Francis Bacon’s project is identified with the creation of the “civilization of the Antichrist,” and his “New Atlantis” as a prototype of the European Modern Era was interpreted as Satanism. Clearly, Thiel swings from one extreme to another in eschatology.

Lecture 3: “How one person can take over the world and the velocity at which that person has to move to do so” (September 29, 2025)
Main topic: How one person (the Antichrist) can take over the world in one lifetime. Thiel emphasized “velocity” — the Antichrist must be young (ideally 33 years old, like Christ, Buddha, or Alexander the Great) in order to accumulate wealth and power quickly. Older figures (such as Xi Jinping or Trajan) are not suitable. Examples: Napoleon (30 years old), Hitler (50, too late); from literature: Livy’s 33rd chapter on Roman history, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (the hobbits come of age at 33).

The theme of speed and acceleration is central to the entire philosophy of the “Dark Enlightenment” (right-wing accelerationism) and plays a key role in the construction of political, economic, and military strategies.

Although Trump does not fit the profile of a 30-year-old, Vice President JD Vance, who was promoted to this position by Peter Thiel, fits it perfectly. However, observing Trump’s behavior in his second term, one can assume that he has set himself the ambitious goal of completing this journey before his 90th birthday. And again, there is ambiguity: on the one hand, Thiel seems to criticize the Antichrist and warn about him, but on the other hand, he openly sympathizes with him in many ways.

Lecture 4: “The new Rome” (October 6, 2025)
Main theme: The modern “Katechon” and the Antichrist’s “New Rome.” Thiel identified the United States as a potential Katechon (the one who restrains the Antichrist), but with features of unipolarity and hegemony (NATO, the dollar, the role of “world policeman”). San Francisco, as a center separated from Washington, risks becoming the epicenter of a global state. After the Second World War, the Katechon was anti-communism (1945-1989), now it is bureaucracy. Examples: Guantanamo (the weakening of formalization); Russia/Putin – too weak; Jews as resistance to the Antichrist (according to Solovyov).

Thiel’s train of thought on the Jews is just as paradoxical as his reasoning on everything else. He proceeds from how the New Testament defines them as “stubborn,” that is, obstinate. Thiel says: because of their stubbornness, the Jews did not accept Christ, and because of the same radical stubbornness, multiplied by chutzpah, they will not accept the Antichrist either (but this is not certain).

On the whole, Thiel expressed libertarian views: he sees the Antichrist in centralization, regulations (for example, in attempts to control AI), climate activism (Greta Thunberg as a “legionnaire of the Antichrist”), and global organizations such as the UN, which lead to stagnation and the end of the world. He emphasized that technology is the “new — albeit ‘black’— miracle” that opposes this, and called for vigilance.

These lectures continue his previous speeches on similar topics (for example, in Paris in 2023 and Oxford in 2025, but the series in San Francisco is the most detailed.

When you read all this, it is difficult to shake off the feeling: it is as if we’re not in the United States, but back at the lectures of the “New University” in Moscow in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where we — myself and intellectuals from the Yuzhinsky Circle along with the ecstatic, neo-Traditionalist, up and coming youth — discussed very similar topics, intertwining religion, geopolitics, mysticism, philosophy, science, and international relations into an extravagant field.

At the time, to outside observers, this seemed “marginal” and “eccentric.” No one would dare call Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and even more so JD Vance or Trump himself, who clearly listens to these ideas, “marginal” or “eccentric.” But anything can happen.

And so, the “Deeper State”: if it is indeed close to the techno-oligarchic projects of the “Dark Enlightenment” (and it does seem to be, but this requires further investigation), then this “Deeper State” appears in the following light:

It recognizes that liberal globalism, human rights ideology, wokeism, gender politics, and the environmental agenda no longer work. This is what Thiel calls the “collective Antichrist” — the US Democratic Party, the EU’s current liberal leaders, environmentalists, NGOs, supporters of uncontrolled migration, the “open society” fanatics (Soros and son). Inefficient state bureaucracy also falls into this category. So far, so good, and we can fully agree with this. This is all the project of Western European Modernism – de-Christianization, materialism, atheism, anti-Christianity, and then pure Satanism.
Against the globalists, Thiel proposes to support the “Katechon,” the figure of the Restrainer, and to establish a World Empire — without a hint of human rights or democracy. But what is this “Empire”? It is headed by the United States and the American Monarch (Trump or his successor). The techno-oligarchs become the hereditary aristocracy, and their vassals are programmers. The rest will become a crude labor force, the need for which will gradually disappear altogether, as people with low IQs will simply be replaced by robots or algorithms. The American monarch will merge with strong Artificial Intelligence (AGI) and the Singularity will come. That is, in this version, America is the “Empire” (hence Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, and plans to annex Greenland and then Canada), and Artificial Intelligence is the Katechon.
The “immortal soul” is remembered, but in a rather sinister context. According to Thiel, gender reassignment is only the first stage (he himself adheres to a non-traditional orientation). Next, one must learn to transfer consciousness (=soul) from body to body, human, machine, or something else. This will be the triumph of the “church,” but a rather peculiar one. Its prototype is the very organization that held Thiel’s seminars in San Francisco: “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society.”

If the first point of such a program of right-wing accelerationism can be accepted, then the second and third points, although vaguely reminiscent of something familiar (Empire, Katechon, the immortality of the soul – we’ve heard this somewhere before, for such is the Russian idea!), when applied to the US, artificial intelligence, and post-humanism, create a picture of the very real Antichrist: now the Antichrist 2.0. In place of the Antichrist that already exists, the techno-oligarchs propose an Antichrist that is to come. This is an invitation to take another step forward on the same path into the abyss that the West has been going down over the whole course of the Modern Era.

If this is the case, then the difference between simply the “Deep State” (classical liberal globalism) and the “Deeper State” is clear. These are simply two logical phases of the same historical process. In the Book of the Apocalypse, one horn of the beast replaces the other horns until it is the only one remaining.

Considering what Trump is currently doing in world politics — abolishing international law, invading sovereign states, kidnapping legitimate rulers, seizing oil and minerals wherever he wants, bombing nuclear facilities and, incidentally, continuing to support the openly demonic Kiev regime — the topic of Thiel’s seminars ceases to be something abstract.

However, this is only a first approach to the problem of the “Deeper State” after a year of Trump’s presidency. At the same time, several other issues have come to light that have divided even Trump’s most loyal supporters into two antagonistic camps. They are also relevant to our topic. I shall devote future articles to them.

To be continued…

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