This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… On Peter Thiel's AntiChrist“Restrainer” Politics: Billionaire TechBro Peter Thiel, Nazi Political Philosopher-Theologian Carl Schmitt, Pacifist Christians René Girard & Wolfgang Palaver, the AntiChrist & his enemies, & J.D...
“Restrainer” Politics: Billionaire TechBro Peter Thiel, Nazi Political Philosopher-Theologian Carl Schmitt, Pacifist Christians René Girard & Wolfgang Palaver, the AntiChrist & his enemies, & J.D. Vance & the scapegoating of the immigrants of Ohio…
Peter Thiel’s Antichrist obsession isn’t performance art—it’s a governing theory. Follow the thread from theologian René Girard’s anti‑scapegoating ethic to Nazi Carl Schmitt’s friend‑enemy politics and see where the idea of the “Restrainer” of the AntiChrist turns into a scapegoat-bashing cudgel. Watch Doomsday theology meet real-world surveillance, and anti-immigration ethnicist mobilization reshape tech, politics, and the public sphere. There is a “Second Letter to the Thessalonians”, written by St. Paul. Perhaps. Perhaps not, for there is substantial doubt about whether the author was in fact St. Paul. It might be a forgery by a person or people later on. St. Paul had written in his “First Letter to the Thessalonians” that to morrow might well be the Last Day, for “you yourselves know very well that the Day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night…” In the “Second Letter” he pulls that back massively.In the “Second Letter” St. Paul—if it is St. Paul—writes:
That is: Before the Last Day there will be such a decline in faith in God that a man—the Man of Lawlessness—will enter the Jerusalem Temple of God, seat himself on a throne in the Holy of Holies, and demand to be worshipped as a being with divinity, or perhaps as High God himself. Nothing like that had happened yet:
Perhaps the author was a person or persons after Paul who forged the letter to neutralize the impact on Believers of what Paul had written in his “First Letter”. Or perhaps Paul did write the letter, having seen the effect of that declaration of his on Believers, and himself wanting to roll it back. We do not really know. But immediately after this Second-Letter declaration stating that the Last Day will come after the enthronement and worship of the Man of Lawlessness, we see St. Paul’s (or whoever’s) thought jump the tracks:
But before that will come the age of
We see in here that the Risen Christ will destroy all rule and authority and power: the rulers, the authorities, the world powers of this darkness, and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. We see from elsewhere in the writings of Paul that it will be a great and final battle: the Theomakhy of the Eskhaton. All the old Powers and Principalities on Earth and in Heaven are cast down. The LORD and his Son execute final judgment on all the Gods of Egypt—and every other power and principality claiming some aura of divinity. But we do not know what St. Paul told or was claimed to have told them “when I was still with you”. We do not know what “you know what currently restrains him… the one still restraining him…”. Thus we have a difficult time indeed even trying to understand what St. Paul meant to say here, and an even harder time figuring out what Believers heard him saying. There is some bubbling mental stew there in St. Paul’s and his first-century readers’ brains in which ingredients are the Book of Daniel, the Book of Enoch, plus other works that are now lost to us. So what Paul said to Believers and what Believers thought they knew about the Restrainer is unrecoverable. But Peter Thiel thinks he knows... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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On Peter Thiel's AntiChrist
Tuesday, 7 October 2025
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