Yesterday, we meditated on the media takeover by billionaires in America. This is not a new thing entirely. After all, Rupert Murdoch has had a stranglehold on right-wing America for decades, and the results are there for all to see in Fox News, the New York Post, and often the Wall Street Journal.
And, of course, his empire wrought devastation in British politics as well.
Before him, there was Henry Luce, who, though a gentleman in comparison to Murdoch, nevertheless had an outsize impact on American culture, politics, and foreign policy for decades through Time Magazine, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, etc. I learned a lot about religion, pseudo-religion, and the power of the media in researching my doctoral thesis 55 years ago on Luce and his empire, later published as Religion USA: Religion and Culture by way of Time Magazine.
The billionaire in the White House is busy gilding the White House itself in this new gilded age of billionaires while calling the media an “enemy of the people.” The billionaire class he represents is receiving a four trillion-dollar tax cut from the poor and middle classes, thanks also to the supine Congress. In my study on Luce, I analyzed the philosophy he instilled into the culture via TIME magazine, a philosophy that was deeply republican in the manner of the 1950s.
So it is appropriate to ask: What is the philosophy behind the billionaire class that has taken over our public and social media in 2025? It is not at all that of Henry Luce, son of Calvinist missionaries in China, that I can assure you.
Let us consider one big influencer, Peter Thiel, who contributed over 13 million dollars to Vance’s senate campaign in Ohio, thus buying him his political future. Thiel is currently teaching a four-part seminar in the heart of Silicon Valley on the topic of “The Anti-Christ.” Yes, you are reading that correctly.
The workshop is secret and sold out, but Thiel’s basic philosophy and mentors are not all that secret. Like fellow billionaire and presidential influencer Elon Musk, Thiel came of age in South Africa during apartheid times, profited from it, and never criticized it.
Thiel has publicly proposed that the antichrist of our day might well be…Greta Thunberg. (sic) He has confessed that a big philosophical influence on him is Carl Schmitt.
Who was Carl Schmitt, and what does it mean that he influenced Peter Thiel, mentor and financial daddy to the vice president of the United States? Carl Schmitt was a jurist and political theorist with a doctorate in law who wrote about the deficiencies of Enlightenment political philosophy and liberal political practice in Germany in the 1920s and 30s.
He defined the “political” as the eternal propensity of human collectivities to identify each other as “enemies,” where mortal combat is a constant possibility and frequent reality. In the last days of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt advised President von Hindenburg to bypass Parliament and rule by presidential decree. (Does this sound familiar?)
When Hitler outmaneuvered them, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and helped coordinate their seizure of power. “He wholeheartedly endorsed Hitler’s murder of political adversaries and promulgation of anti-Jewish policies.”*
Schmitt is Thiel’s mentor, and Thiel is Vance’s. And Thiel is raking in billions of tax dollars with his Palantir project spying on Americans for Trump’s sake.
Thiel has said he believes democracy is dead. And he is telling us what comes next while preaching about the antichrist and his unique religious worldview. He tells us, “I am religious but not spiritual.”
This is the billionaire whispering in the ear of America’s president and vice president. What could possibly go amiss?
Soon, I am teaming up with journalist Gil Duran to offer a two-part workshop as a counterpoint to Thiel’s version of the antichrist.
Here is the event registration page: Counterpoint: A Response to Peter Thiel’s Antichrist
* Carl Schmitt | German Political Realism & Legal Theory | Britannica
Banner Image: Apocalyptic theology going off the tracks and into the weeds. Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
What do you think it means to call oneself “religious but not spiritual”? And to call Greta Thunberg the “antichrist” of our time? How concerning is it that Peter Thiel, thanks to SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling, has delivered Vance to the American electorate and his Palantir Company to ICE and the Pentagon to spy on the American people?
Recommended Reading
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
Religion USA: Religion and Culture by way of Time Magazine.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the World.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox).
5 thoughts on “Peter Thiel, Carl Schmitt, & Silicon Valley’s New Religion”
To call oneself religious but not spiritual is to be utterly devoid of conscience and common sense. One becomes an automaton and soulless. It is curious that this has been allowed to play out, in a similar way that humanity allowed the crucifixion of Christ to play out (and the Buddha to beg), but it cannot last. The Sun still shines despite the passing clouds.
I would call the Evangelicals who support Trump to be religious but not spiritual, but I do not know enough about Thiel to know if he belongs to a church. Nazism co-opted a lot of churches in Germany, and today I think traditional Christianity in many instances has no spirit. I have found more to my taste in indigenous religion.
To call Greta Thunberg the anti-Christ means he does not care about the planet and probably thinks humanity could be improved if taken over by AI. He is unlikely to care about people and compassion is an unknown for him.
Thiel is just a Nazi dressed up in techno drag. Hate and the lust for power always teams up with the religious (the religious always hate the spiritual), it has ever been so, they are always partners. So now, the third reich has returned – the Mevangelicals with ultra conservative Catholics – the religious, joined at the hip with the ultra rich oligarchs, and they all serve the orange fuhrer. How grotesque and bizarre that Thiel thinks he can teach about the anti-christ when he is actively part of him.
The marriage of religion and the regime is evil in every time and place–just go back as far as Jesus and his criticism of the religious establishment that supported Rome and the consequences of his challenge to them. In the 19th and 20th centuries there was Hearst who supported a repressive government, anti-women, anti-union, anti-every attempt to improve things for ordinary people. I was shocked as a younger person to find out that there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in this country. We are just reaping the consequences of a strain of fascism in this country that is now at full flower. Any progressive and loving person or movement is threatening to those in power, so there are attacks on those like Greta or our late night comedians because they stand in the light, which darkness cannot bear. So I–we–must continue to be light bearers in every way possible.
I recommend the free enclosed video conference sponsored by Convergence called “Post-Doom Spirituality.” Just click ‘Here’ under the enclosed “Counterpoint” picture and scroll down under the classes offered by Converge.