“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:
We ask you, brothers, not to be easily upset in mind or troubled, either by a spirit or by a message or by a letter as if from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way. For that day will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the Man of Lwlessness is revealed, the son of destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he sits in God’s sanctuary, publicizing that he himself is God…
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:
The First Temple had, half a millennium before, been sacked and profaned by the Babylonian King Nabû-Kudurri-Uṣur and his soldiers at the start of the Babylonian Captivity.
The Second Temple had been, a century or more before the writing of “Thessalonians”, profaned on four occasions by Ptolemy IV Philopator ho Lagides, Antiokhos IV Epiphanes ho Seleukides, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and Marcus Licinius Crassus and their forces.
But all of those were long past.
Thus tomorrow could not be the Last Day.
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:
Don’t you remember that when I was still with you I told you about this? And you know what currently restrains him, so that he will be revealed in his time. For the working-but-hidden lawlessness is already at work. But the Restrainer will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed. The Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth and will bring him to nothing with the brightness of His coming…
But before that will come the age of
the Lawless One… based on Satan’s working, with all kinds of false miracles, signs, and wonders, and with every unrighteous deception among those who are perishing…
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.
But we do know what in 1940-1942 Nazi jurist-philosopher-theologian Carl Schmitt thought St. Paul had been saying:
World Jewry is the AntiChrist, personified as the “Man of Lawlessness”—a bad guy.
Adolf Hitler is the Restrainer—a good guy.
Adolf Hitler is enabling the German people to hold back the tide of evil by unifying them politically in the struggle against world Jewry and its British Imperial, Russian Bolshevik, and American Mongrel puppets and allies.
Since the principal political relationship is friend/enemy, this mobilization can only be accomplished by mobilization against scapegoats, of which World Jewry is the clearest and most obvious.
But World Jewry is, of course, a powerful and dangerous enemy.
And then, forty years later, a then-young theologian named Wolfgang Palaver picked up the work of René Girard on how every archaic culture in human history has founded itself on some version of the scapegoat myth, and how it is Christianity’s rejection of that myth that is at the core of human moral progress and, indeed, hope for salvation.
Now it is time for me to hand the microphone over to the brilliant and incredibly industrious Laura Bullard of Wired:
Laura Bullard: The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession <https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/>: ‘Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice. With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited…. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: No matter the endgame, one must wholly reject scapegoating. Imitation remains inescapable, but we can choose our models. And the sound path forward, as he saw it, is to mimic Jesus—the one model who will never become a “fascinating rival”—in leading lives of Christian non-violence….
Girard’s theory almost immediately became a lodestar for the young Palaver…. The bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from rallying a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe…. The bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to an idea—coined by Carl Schmitt—that politics is grounded in distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized he was “more or less against every sentence.” So as a doctoral candidate, the young Austrian decided to write a Girardian critique of Schmitt….
In the summer of 1996, the 28-year old [Peter] Thiel attended the annual conference…. Wolfgang Palaver… was squaring up to present one of the first English-language critiques of Carl Schmitt’s theories…. After the presentation ended, Thiel rushed to introduce himself to Palaver. “He was familiar with Schmitt,” Palaver told me, because he knew Schmitt had been important to Leo Strauss, a key intellectual influence among conservatives around the time Thiel was running the Stanford Review. But much of Schmitt’s writing, taboo as it was, had never been translated into English. Now here was Palaver’s scholarship, bridging the gap between Thiel’s interest in conservative political theory and the work of René Girard, and Thiel was eager to discuss it…
And now, today, Peter Thiel roams the earth giving lectures about how it is important to fight the AntiChrist—who may be a figure like philosopher Nick Bostrom, who wants to put AI research under strict government control—by building and empowering Restrainers. How does one build and empower Restrainers? By finding new and better ways of political mobilization via the creation and condemnation of scapegoats. He seems to be serious. Deadly serious.
And J.D. Vance is in the mix as well.
READ THE WHOLE THING: <https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/>.
References:
Bullard, Laura. 2025. “The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession.” Wired, September 30. <https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/>.
Paul. ca. 49. “First Letter to the Thessalonians”. New Testament. <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Thessalonians%201%3A1&version=HCSB>.
Paul?. ca. 51?. “Second Letter to the Thessalonians”. New Testament. <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Thessalonians%201%3A1&version=HCSB>.