Know Your Enemy: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

Know Your Enemy: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

Matt and Sam discuss Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist and what they reveal about his politics and this political moment.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Over the course of the past year, Peter Thiel—the Trump-backing, Vance-boosting gay tech billionaire—has been delivering a series of lectures on the Antichrist, using an examination of the Biblical antagonist of the End Times to make an argument about the supposed perils of this political moment. We got our hands on transcripts of these talks as delivered last year in San Francisco and explain what Thiel said and why it matters. Topics include: Thiel’s conservative evangelical upbringing, the influence of Rene Girard on his thinking, and how Thiel’s Antichrist lectures relate to his broader thinking and worldview; the place of the Antichrist in the eschatology of different Christian traditions, and the curious similarities between Thiel’s understanding of the Antichrist and that found in the work of Timothy LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind novels; Christianity’s recent trendiness in Silicon Valley; the way Thiel’s account of how the Antichrist will come to power connects to his economic interests; and more!

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Listen again: 

Rene Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz), Know Your Enemy (2024)

A Remedy for Envy? Rene Girard Redux, Know Your Enemy (2024, subscribers only)

Sources:

Peter Thiel, The Straussian Moment, (2007)

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel (transcript), New York Times (2025)

Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs (2021)

Timothy LaHaye, Revelation Unveiled (1999)

Elisabetta Povoledo, Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming. In Rome, Some Call His View Heresy, New York Times (2026)

Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr, and Nick Robins-Early, Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist, The Guardian (2025)

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe, Voyages to the End of the World, First Things (2025)

Emma Goldberg, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley, New York Times (2025)

Kate Lucky interview w/ Michelle Stephens, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Funny if We Tricked a Bunch of People into Going to Church?’ Christianity Today (2025)

Laura Bullard, The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession, Wired (2025)

John Ganz, What Happened Here, Unpopular Front (2025)