Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Lecture: The Student Betrays the Teacher

Peter Thiel is starting a lecture series on the Antichrist this month, and the irony is almost unbearable.

Thiel and I have something in common in a lopsided way: the prophetic works of the great Catholic thinker René Girard. The lopsidedness comes in the form of what ought to be Thiel’s superiority to me. After all, by the time I founded my apostolate in 2002, he had personally known Girard for over a decade and deeply studied his works – and nearly another decade would pass before I first encountered Girard’s writings.

But here’s the difference: When I did discover Girard, I was astonished by the clarity his thinking brought to my mission, and I immediately and wholeheartedly adopted him as my spiritual guide. Since then, he has always pointed me to a principle that we find at the heart of the Gospel – and which I’ve made the core of my work: the Christian must stand with the scapegoat.

Thiel, on the other hand, has made it his mission to suppress the scandal Girard uncovers rather than to live in it: the scandal that, in this world, to stand with the scapegoat is not to win but, almost always, to lose.

I often say, paraphrasing Girard, that to stand with the vulnerable is to become vulnerable yourself. That is the meaning of the Cross, and it is the only way to break the cycle of sacrifice. It’s also the central principle of my organization, the Vulnerable People Project.

The opposite of that principle is the opposite of the Gospel and of the Cross. As Thiel himself has said, “the slogan of the Antichrist is ‘peace and safety.’”

St. Paul warned us that the final deception would come clothed in those very words. “While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape,” he wrote. (1 Thesselonians 5:3)

Girard warned that the Antichrist would not look like an obvious villain but like a counterfeit of Christ — promising reconciliation and harmony while concealing violence.

And yet, what do the products of Thiel’s tech company Palantir’s promise?

- Gotham, the counterterrorism platform, integrates oceans of surveillance data to track people, map networks, and predict crimes. Its selling point? Safety.

- Foundry, the enterprise system, promises clarity and control across chaotic human systems. Its pitch? Peace of mind.

- Apollo, the deployment engine, advertises stability and seamlessness – safety for the system itself.

- AIP, the AI platform, offers governments “responsible” large-scale AI integration. (Translation: the peace of total oversight.)

Every one of these tools is sold in the language of “peace and safety.”

The very slogan Thiel says will herald the Antichrist serves as the basis of his own empire’s marketing copy.

Clearly, as I’ve written before, the student has betrayed the teacher.

Imagine. Peter Thiel knew Girard intimately. He sat with him. He funded his work. And yet, in Thiel’s politics, his investments, and his silences, he has consistently double-crossed Girard’s Christian vision.

And today, nearly three years into a historic campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the betrayal is clearer than ever.

Nowhere is it more stark than in Gaza. Lavender, the Israeli AI tool, has flagged tens of thousands of Palestinians for targeting. Some were killed after less than a minute’s human review. Entire families erased by an algorithm.

Asked about this moral scandal, Thiel recently shrugged: “I defer to Israel.”

That is not justice. That is not war. That is sacrificial math.

“Palestinians are not targeted because they are powerful. They are targeted because their survival disrupts the myth,” I wrote earlier this year. “Their stubborn humanity unsettles the story Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Washington want to tell: that war can be clean, that history is secure, that progress is smooth.”

Thiel knows that if the scapegoat is innocent, then the whole system is guilty. He knows because Girard taught him that – just like he tought us all that when you see the scapegoat for who they truly are, the Antichrist’s myth collapses. The lie is exposed. The sacrifice is interrupted.

But Thiel has taken the Gospel and Girard’s insight into it and inverted the whole beautiful revelation. He has used what he learned as a manual for maintaining myth, for optimizing sacrifice, for re-masking the victim.

The Gospel Against the Algorithm

Our age is marked by systems that eclipse empathy, that prefer abstraction to blood, data to dignity. The Christian task is to resist those systems. “If there must be destruction and violence,” says the Christian, “not in our name. Not with our money. Not with our silence.”

Because every algorithm that denies the dignity of the human person is not merely a technical error – any more than Our Lord’s crucifiers just accidentally “got the wrong guy.” We aren’t up against carelessness and fallibility. We are up against lies and treachery.

And if you still follow the Christ whom Girard loved, then you must follow Him all the way to the Cross — not to win, but to stand with, and to love, the scapegoat.