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      Trump news at a glance: layoffs for federal workers begin and president threatens China with tariffs

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      Mass firings of US federal workers have begun, as Republicans work to exert pressure on Democrat lawmakers to end a government shutdown. The White House budget office said the layoffs were “substantial”, with unions for federal workers taking the matter to court. President Donald Trump said of the job losses “it’ll be a lot” and suggested those losing their jobs would be in areas that were “Democrat oriented”.The government shutdown comes as the US president has revived the trade war with China, this time promising to increase tariffs on Chinese imports by 100%. His administration is also considering using visa restrictions and sanctions against countries that support the International Maritime Organization’s “net zero framework” proposal.White House announces federal worker layoffsThe White House announced layoffs of federal workers on Friday, making good on a threat it had made in response to the US government shutdown, which now appears likely to stretch into a third straight week. Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget, wrote on social media that “RIFs have begun”, referring to the government’s reduction-in-force procedure to let employees go.Read the full storyTrump threatens 100% China tariffsDonald Trump has threatened to impose additional US tariffs of 100% on China from next month, accusing Beijing of “very hostile” moves to restrict exports of rare earths needed for American industry. Wall Street fell sharply after the US president reignited public tensions with the Chinese government, and raised the prospect of another acrimonious trade war between the world’s two largest economies.Read the full storyNational guard troops seen on Memphis streetsNational guard troops were seen patrolling in Memphis for the first time on Friday, as part of Donald Trump’s controversial federal taskforce, amid fierce legal challenges as he was blocked from sending troops to Chicago and a court ruling was awaited in Portland, Oregon.Read the full storyMIT rejects White House proposal to overhaul policiesThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has become the first US university to formally turn down a Trump administration proposal that would overhaul university policies in return for preferential access to federal funding.Read the full storyWhite House slams Trump’s perceived Nobel peace prize snubThe White House has denounced the Norwegian Nobel committee’s decision to award the Nobel peace prize to someone other than Donald Trump.“The Nobel committee proved they place politics over peace,” wrote Steven Cheung, a Trump aide and the White House’s director of communications.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump had what he has described as a “semiannual physical” at the Walter Reed national military medical center.

      Up to 40 US academics have been dismissed or disciplined after rightwing campaigns targeted their comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, creating a “climate of fear” on campuses.

      Leading New York Democrats have rallied behind Letitia James a day after she was indicted on mortgage fraud charges by a federal prosecutor appointed by Trump.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 9 October 2025. More

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      ‘Substantial’ federal layoffs begin as Congress remains deadlocked over funding to end shutdown – live

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      The Guardian has independently confirmed that reductions in force (RIFs) are under way at the following departments and agencies:

      Department of Education

      Department of Health and Human Services

      Department of Homeland Security (specifically the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

      Department of the Treasury
      Certain agencies haven’t immediately responded to the Guardian’s request for comment, but other media outlets have reported layoffs are expected at the following:

      Environmental Protection Agency

      Department of Energy

      Department of the Interior

      Department of Housing and Urban Development
      Donald Trump just started an Oval Office announcement on a deal with the British-based drug maker Asta Zeneca, for a “most-favored-nation” drug pricing model aimed at making prescription medicines more affordable, by boasting that he would have struck the deal sooner, but “we were interrupted by a rigged election”.Trump went on to repeat the wildly false claim that the discounted prices for American consumers would reduce the price of prescription drugs by up to 1,000%.As Daniel Dale of CNN has explained: “Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications rather than paying for them.” A health economist, Timothy McBride, told the network Trump’s claims are “just not logical,” since a 500% price reduction would mean that a drug that now costs $100 would cost be available for free, with consumers given a $400 rebate.The actual deal includes cutting prices for the government’s Medicaid health plan for low-income Americans and discounted prices through a “TrumpRx” website the president said.AstraZeneca’s chief executive Pascal Soriot stood near Trump in the gold-clad Oval Office as the president made the announcement.Pfizer previously agreed to drop prescription drug prices in the Medicaid program for lower-income Americans to what it charges in other developed countries in exchange for relief from tariffs threatened by Trump.Americans currently pay by far the most for prescription medicines, often nearly three times more than in other developed nations, and Trump has been pressuring drugmakers to lower their prices to what patients pay elsewhere or face stiff tariffs.Last month, he threatened 100% tariffs on drug makers, increasing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to agree to price cuts and shift manufacturing to the US.Writing on his social media platform, Donald Trump just announced that, in response to what he called China’s “extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade” and new export restrictions, he intends to “impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying” starting on 1 November.The same day, he adds, “we will impose Export Controls on any and all critical software.”That date is after Trump’s planned meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.Our colleague Callum Jones has more on the latest friction in Trump’s trade war with China.The wave of layoffs at federal agencies has reportedly reached the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) now, according to the PBS correspondent Lisa Desjardins.Federal prosecutors in Maryland could seek criminal charges next week against Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, report the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Carol Leonnig and her colleague Ken Dilanian for MSNBC.A grand jury in Maryland has been hearing evidence related to claims that Bolton, a former ally of Trump turned harsh critic, improperly kept classified national security information in his Maryland home.The journalists also report that Ed Martin, a Republican operative who served briefly as Trump’s acting US attorney in the District of Columbia now running the justice department’s “Weaponization Working Group”, has met multiple times with the Trump-appointed acting US attorney in Maryland, Kelly Hayes, on the Bolton case.An indictment on Bolton for illegally retaining classified documents would be the third of a Trump critic in recent weeks, and would echo the indictment of New York’s attorney general, Tish James, in accusing critics of the president of committing crimes he was indicted for after his first term.I’ve been chatting to Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York, about the indictment of Letitia James.Roth said it was “extremely distressing” to see prosecutions brought against the president’s perceived political enemies.“I can’t say that I was surprised that the department [under attorney general Pam Bondi] pursued these charges against Tish James,” she added. “That doesn’t lessen my distress … particularly in light of what had been longstanding Department of Justice policy not to pursue an indictment unless prosecutors were convinced that they would be able to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.”Lindsey Halligan, the handpicked and newly installed US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, has pursued the charges against James and former FBI director James Comey, and Roth notes that we could see a wider effort to bring charges against the president’s adversaries in districts throughout the country that are now run by Trump-friendly prosecutors.Much like the charges brought against Comey, Roth underscored that the crimes that James is being accused of are very difficult to prove “even under the best stances” because they require proof of “criminal intent as opposed to an honest mistake or negligence”.The Guardian has independently confirmed that reductions in force (RIFs) are under way at the following departments and agencies:

      Department of Education

      Department of Health and Human Services

      Department of Homeland Security (specifically the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

      Department of the Treasury
      Certain agencies haven’t immediately responded to the Guardian’s request for comment, but other media outlets have reported layoffs are expected at the following:

      Environmental Protection Agency

      Department of Energy

      Department of the Interior

      Department of Housing and Urban Development
      The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed to the Guardian that employees across “multiple divisions” have received reduction-in-force notices. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said this was “a direct consequence of the Democrat-led government shutdown”.He added that HHS under the Biden administration “became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%”.Nixon said that all employees receiving RIF notices were “designated non-essential by their respective divisions”.“HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” he added.The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal government workers, has condemned the mass layoffs announced by the White House budget office.“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelley, the union’s president.AFGE has already filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the firings, and a hearing is set for Thursday, 16 October. “We will not stop fighting until every reduction-in-force notice is rescinded,” Kelley added.The Department of Education has also confirmed to the Guardian that their employees will be affected by the reductions in force.An office of management and budget (OMB) spokesperson told the Guardian that the reductions in force that have begun are “substantial”.The official didn’t confirm an exact number, but we’re bringing you the latest as we hear from different agencies and departments about how they stand to be affected. More

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      The mortgage fraud case against Letitia James is ‘bupkis’, experts say

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      A prosecutor installed by Donald Trump may have been able to secure an indictment against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, but actually obtaining a conviction may be an uphill battle, legal experts say.Even before a grand jury handed down the indictment on Thursday, there was already deep skepticism about possible charges. Career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of Virginia had looked at accusations James committed mortgage fraud and concluded there was no probable cause to charge the case. Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked interim US attorney, nonetheless went ahead and presented the case to the grand jury. Her decision to do so reportedly caught top justice department officials off-guard.The indictment handed down on Thursday charges James with bank fraud and making a false statement when she secured a mortgage to buy a second home in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2020. As part of the purchase, James signed a rider that indicated she would use it as her second home and prohibited her from renting it out, according to the indictment. James proceeded to then rent out the home, prosecutors allege. By lying on the mortgage statement, prosecutors say, James secured a better mortgage rate and a seller credit that saved her about $18,933 over the life of the loan.“In this case, prosecutors will be required to show that at the moment James signed the mortgage paperwork, she was aware of the provision regarding a secondary home, that she intended to use it for some different purpose, and that she intended to obtain a financial benefit as a result of her deceit,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan. “That can be very difficult for a prosecutor to do because we cannot read other people’s minds. Anyone who has ever participated in a mortgage closing is familiar with the daunting pile of papers they put in front of you.”The second-home rider James signed does not prohibit renting the home outright, Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote in a blogpost. Instead, the rider prevents the owner from giving control over rental decisions to someone else. The agreement also only imposes the restriction starting one year after the agreement. The indictment made public on Thursday does not say when James rented the home or for how long.The rider also includes an exemption for “extenuating circumstances”, Levitin noted, pointing out that the mortgage was obtained in August 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.“I’m unaware of the federal government having previously charged anyone for fraud based on renting out a second home,” Levitin wrote in the post on Credit Slips. “It’s clear why the career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia refused to bring a case: James doesn’t appear to have made any misrepresentation in her mortgage because the mortgage does not directly prohibit rentals.”James has forcefully denied the charges. Last month, Trump publicly admonished the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to indict her, along with the former FBI director James Comey and California senator Adam Schiff.“These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost. The president’s actions are a grave violation of our Constitutional order and have drawn sharp criticism from members of both parties,” James said in a statement on Thursday evening.Trump’s public statements, combined with the conclusion of career prosecutors about a lack of probable cause, make it likely James will bring a selective prosecution argument to try to get the case thrown out.“Normally, a claim [that] this is a vindictive prosecution does not work,” said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School. But, he added: “You don’t usually have the president calling for these sort of things.”The charges against James come as William Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has deployed mortgage filings to attack Trump’s rivals. In April, Pulte, a staunch Trump ally, sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice regarding two different real estate transactions involving James. Neither of the transactions in the referral were the ones actually charged this week.Pulte has also accused Schiff of mortgage fraud as he has the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump is trying to remove from the central bank. In Cook’s case, Pulte has made an allegation similar to the one against James, alleging she rented out a property she indicated was her second home on mortgage documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso unusual in James’s case is the amount of money she is said to have benefited from because of the fraud. Typically, investigators in the inspector general’s office at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which handles mortgage fraud investigations, pursue cases where there are substantial losses to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that support the housing market by guaranteeing mortgages.Even the most junior prosecutor in a US attorney’s office would turn down a case with a loss amount that low, said Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in New York who is now a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner.“It would never be signed off on by a supervisor with a loss amount that low,” she said. The low loss amount could also bolster James’s claims of selective prosecution. “When she has to prove that someone similarly situated would not have been prosecuted, she is on really strong ground there because if you look at other cases charged under these same statutes, you’re not going to find one similar to this at all.”While the length of James’s loan is not clear, if it was a standard 30-year mortgage she would have defrauded the government out of about $633 each year.“That’s bupkis,” said one former federal prosecutor who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions. “Are you really going to believe when you get up there that the attorney general of New York would commit this willfulness over $600 a year?“It’s a race as to whether this is weaker than the Comey case or stronger because they’re the two weakest cases I’ve ever seen in my life.” More

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      White House announces federal worker layoffs as shutdown nears third week

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      The White House announced layoffs of federal workers on Friday, making good on a threat it had made in response to the US government shutdown, which now appears set to stretch into a third straight week.Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget, wrote on social media that “RIFs have begun”, referring to the government’s reduction-in-force procedure to let employees go.While Vought provided no details on the departments and agencies at which the layoffs were taking place, a treasury spokesperson said notices had been distributed within the department. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Guardian that layoffs would also happen at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And a union representing federal workers confirmed that members at the Department of Education would also be affected by the reduction in force.Union leaders warned the layoffs would have “devastating effects” on services relied upon by millions of Americans, and pledged to challenge the moves in court.“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,000 federal and DC government workers.Vought had warned that federal agencies could slash jobs if the government shuts down, but the Trump administration largely held off after funding lapsed last week. Asked at a press conference before Vought’s announcement why no layoffs had occurred, the top Senate Republican, John Thune, signaled they would happen soon.“The White House has now for 10 days laid off doing anything in hopes that enough Senate Democrats would come to their senses and do the right thing and fund the government,” he said.View image in fullscreen“My expectation is, yes, they’re going to start making some decisions about how to move money around, which agencies and departments are going to be impacted, which programs are going to be impacted, which employees are going to be impacted. That’s what a shutdown does.”The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, responded to Vought’s post on Friday, saying: “America’s unions will see you in court.”Last week, the AFGE and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed for a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from carrying out any reductions in force (RIFs) during the shutdown. The unions filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order on Friday, following Vought’s post.Lee Saunders, president of the AFSCME, said: “These mass firings are illegal and will have devastating effects on the services millions of Americans rely on every day. Whether it’s food inspectors, public safety workers, or the countless other public service workers who keep America running, federal employees should not be bargaining chips in this administration’s political games.“By illegally firing these workers, the administration isn’t just targeting federal employees, it’s hurting their families and the communities they serve every day. We will pursue every available legal avenue to stop this administration’s unlawful attacks on public service workers’ freedoms and jobs.”Congressional Democrats have refused to vote for a Republican-backed bill to restore funding unless it includes an array of healthcare-centered concessions. After holding seven unsuccessful votes on the parties’ spending bills, the Senate’s Republican leaders have put the chamber in recess until next Tuesday, meaning the standoff is unlikely to be resolved before then.The layoffs came on the same day government employees received only a partial paycheck covering the final days of September but not the beginning of October, since appropriations lapsed at the start of the month.At a Friday-morning press conference, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, blasted Senate Democrats for not supporting the GOP’s bill, which passed his chamber on a near party-line vote.If the government is not reopened by next Wednesday, US military personnel are set to miss a paycheck.“This is the last paycheck that 700,000 federal workers will see until Washington Democrats decide to do their job and reopen the government,” Johnson said.View image in fullscreen“Starting next week, American service members, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, are going to miss a full paycheck. If Democrats don’t end this shutdown by Monday, then that October 15 date will pass us by.”Johnson has kept the House out of session throughout the shutdown in an effort to pressure Senate Democrats into supporting the Republican funding proposal. Earlier this week, a group of House Democrats sent the speaker a letter asking him to allow a vote on legislation that would ensure US troops get paid during a shutdown, but Johnson has refused to bring lawmakers back to Washington.The Senate has become a chokepoint in the funding battle because any legislation needs at least 60 votes to advance in the chamber. In exchange for their support, Democratic senators are demanding that premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans be extended beyond their end-of-the-year expiration date.They are also seeking safeguards against Donald Trump’s rescissions of congressionally approved funding, a restoration of money for public media outlets, and an undoing of cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for poor and disabled Americans.Max Stier, the president and CEO of the non-profit Partnership for Public Service, condemned the gridlock’s impact on government workers.“It is wrong to make federal employees suffer because our leaders in Congress and the White House have failed to keep our government open and operational,” Stier said.“Our air traffic controllers, VA nurses, smoke jumpers and food inspectors are not responsible for this government shutdown, and they shouldn’t bear the financial burden created by the failures of our elected officials. The irony is that members of Congress and senior White House leaders are continuing to be paid.”Earlier this week, on 7 October, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to provide specifics on the status of any layoff plans, the affected agencies and whether any federal employees have been recalled back to work to carry out layoffs, by Friday, 10 October.A report by the Center for American Progress on 30 September argued that a government shutdown limits the ability of the Trump administration to carry out firings, citing guidance from the office of management and budget that admitted any permanent layoffs need to have been initiated before the shutdown began.“Constraints on permanently firing federal employees during a shutdown largely exist because of the Antideficiency Act and the distinction between ‘shutdown furloughs’ that happen during a lapse in congressional appropriations and ‘administrative furloughs’, which are department and agency procedures on how to permanently let staff go, including – for example – through a RIF,” the report, authored by Greta Bedekovics, associate director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress, states. “The Trump administration’s threats to layoff federal employees should be understood as a goal of the administration that will be pursued with or without a government shutdown and should not drive lawmakers’ decisions on whether to support government funding bills.”Shrai Popat contributed additional reporting More

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      Trump completes ‘semiannual’ physical before traveling to Middle East

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      Donald Trump – the oldest person ever to be elected US president – had what he has described as a “semiannual physical” at the Walter Reed national military medical center on Friday.The visit, which the White House announced earlier this week, comes as Trump is preparing to travel to the Middle East on the heels of a ceasefire deal in the Israel-Hamas war. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described it as a “routine yearly checkup”, although the president had his annual physical in April.Trump left the White House at about 10.45am on Friday and returned to the grounds at 2.15pm, which was slightly ahead of schedule. He did not answer questions from reporters upon his arrival, and the White House has not indicated when it would release results or more information about his exams.The White House declined to explain why Trump was getting a yearly checkup at Walter Reed, which is in Bethesda, Maryland, six months after his annual exam. But in an exchange with reporters on Thursday, the Republican president said it was a “semiannual physical”.“I’m meeting with the troops, and I’m also going to do a, sort of, semiannual physical, which I do,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I think I’m in great shape, but I’ll let you know.”Trump’s April physical found that he was “fully fit” to serve as commander in chief. The three-page summary of the exam done by his doctor, navy Capt Sean Barbabella, said he had lost 20lb (9kg) since a medical exam in June 2020 and that he had an “active lifestyle” that “continues to contribute significantly” to the wellbeing of the president, who is 79.Since his April exam, Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that can cause swelling, as the president has experienced in his legs and is common in older adults. Trump’s physician also addressed concern about bruising on the president’s hand, attributing it to irritation caused by frequent handshaking and his use of aspirin as a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen.Recent images of a purplish bruise on Trump’s hand, which appeared to have been covered with makeup, fueled online speculation that the president was ill. When Leavitt discussed the results of his chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis from the briefing room, she noted that the White House was disclosing details of the checkup to dispel rumors about Trump’s health.At the April physical, Trump also passed a short screening test to assess different brain functions.Presidents have large discretion over what health information they choose to release to the public. Trump’s summary from his April exam included information about his weight, body mass index, past surgeries, mental health screenings, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. Trump’s previous medical reports typically produced a flattering report scarce on details.Trump has long been cagey about his health, and concern about the president’s wellbeing stretches back to his first term. But wild rumors reached a fever pitch when the president faded from public view for several days over the summer, with critics and TikTok influencers speculating that the president was on his deathbed. “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE!” Trump wrote at the time, in an assertion that only fueled suspicions of a cover-up.Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      Trump officials cancel major solar project in latest hit to renewable energy

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      The Trump administration has killed a huge proposed solar power project in Nevada that would have been one of the largest in the world, indicating that the White House plans to attack not only wind power but all renewable energy.On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) changed the status of the Esmeralda 7 project to say its environmental review has been “cancelled”, the climate publication Heatmap first reported.The super project in southern Nevada was set to cover 185 sq miles – a footprint close to the size of Las Vegas – and include seven solar projects proposed by different companies, including NextEra Energy Resources, Leeward Renewable Energy, Arevia Power and Invenergy. Together, the network of solar panels and batteries was set to produce 6.2 gigawatts of energy, enough to power nearly 2m homes.Asked to comment, the interior department appeared to leave open the possibility that at least parts of the project could be resubmitted for review. In an email, a spokesperson said: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”The developers’ joint proposals were permitted by Joe Biden. Even once Donald Trump re-entered the White House this year, the process appeared to be moving forward when his BLM advanced a draft environmental impact statement. But the process has since come to a standstill, with the BLM failing to issue a final environmental impact statement or record of decision for the project.Reached for comment, a spokesperson for NextEra Energy Resources said: “We are in the early stage of development and remain committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”The Guardian has also contacted Leeward Renewable Energy, Arevia Power and Invenergy for comment.In an executive order on day one, Trump directed a pause on new renewable energy authorizations for federally owned land and water. Then in February he appointed Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Colorado-based oil industry trade group Western Energy Alliance, to head the BLM, which manages a quarter of a billion acres of public land concentrated in western states.In July, as part of an attempt to win support for his tax and spending bill, Trump issued another order aimed at halting renewable projects, which called on the Department of the Interior to review its policies that affect wind and solar, and gave the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, final decision-making power on whether such projects could proceed.The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” More

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      Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon

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      Peter Thiel famously isn’t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.Immanentizing the KatechonTo be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admissions rates, scholarly output and Nobel prize recognition would seem to contradict it. To Thiel, even then, Jerusalem was definitely not build’d here, among these dark Satanic diploma mills.In September, Falter in Austria published a long profile about the theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who is one of those academics Thiel used as beta testers on his antichrist material. Palaver says it makes sense to him that Thiel is seeking out academics: “It’s really difficult in his environment: who tells him the truth to his face?”There is something deeply funny imagining a rapt audience, cowed by Thiel’s legend and wealth, following the billionaire into the autodidact’s private cosmos, in lectures whose bullet points were certainly more robust at the start of lecture one than at the close of lecture three. Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations. You picture the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Piece, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies “the legionnaires of the antichrist”, such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate. With enemies like these, who needs friends?But such is Thiel’s odd relationship to academia. For someone who dislikes universities and researchers, he has a hard time staying away. Thiel, who received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, was deeply impressed with the thinking of Girard, his Stanford professor. He has spent decades promoting Girard’s “mimetic theory”, including attributing his famous investment in Facebook to “betting on mimesis”. His current “Whore of Babylon” tour started with a presentation at a Paris conference devoted to Girard’s work.Thiel clearly admired Girard not just for his arguments but for his style of argumentation. These lectures don’t so much feel inspired by Girard’s ideas. They feel like his attempt to do Girard.Mimetic style over substanceGirard’s books were breathtaking in their range. They were deeply eclectic, but managed to be a mad dash through the western canon. The connections the philosopher made could seem to come out of left field, but at times the absurd swerves were held together by the sheer force of his erudition. Most importantly, Girard was always having a conversation all his own: his work could look like theology, but it wasn’t ultimately that religious; his work could look like philosophy, but wasn’t really in dialogue with academic philosophy. In San Francisco, Thiel appeared to be cosplaying this kind of performance.One of the things he replicates is the airtight and airless insularity of Girard’s thought. Thiel seems to take on board objections only to then barrel ahead with his initial instinct. Palaver is quoted in Falter as saying that he is “no longer the professor, and he’s no longer the graduate student”. It’s a funny remark because watching Thiel take feedback makes him seem exactly like a graduate student about to crash out of his comprehensive exam.In his telling, Thiel is already a part of an intellectual community. He loves telling his audience what he “always” says, he refers to standard answers and even a “spiel” that he gives. He seems a little bored with himself. Based at least on the recording, the actual audience in San Francisco seemed puzzled by Thiel’s disquisitions.Like his inspiration Girard, Thiel is prone to speaking in absolutes that, in order to make any sense at all, have to be quite a bit less than absolute. “In all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems,” he said in his second lecture. Big if true, as they say.What is Thiel actually arguing? He suggests that we live in an age obsessed with apocalyptic thinking (keep that “we” in mind, it’ll become important later). “It’s AI, of course, it’s climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war,” “maybe fertility collapse”, he says.His overall point is that the current fixation on the apocalypse gets it wrong in two different directions: we’re too apocalyptic and “not apocalyptic enough”. Not apocalyptic enough because we tend to think of the various plausibly forecast ends of days as mutually exclusive: either climate change will get us, or nuclear war. The antichrist is Thiel’s attempt to think about the end of the world holistically.But we’re also too apocalyptic: in each lecture, Thiel comes back to the idea that “the Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop.” Or, as he puts it in the second lecture, “the Antichrist might present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon”, meaning that withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. This lecture is more or less a gloss on Carl Schmitt’s assertion in Nomos of the Earth, that the Katechon was what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman empire. The doubleness of Thiel’s apocalypse – that what halts the apocalypse might in fact bring about the apocalypse – allows the billionaire to tilt boldly at any number of big questions: empire, Christianity, progress, and Silicon Valley’s dominance. Each of these, to Thiel, is ambiguous, might stymie or accelerate Armageddon.Warring with windmills, confusion and contradictionSo who or what is the antichrist? Thiel is admirably and uncharacteristically specific on this matter in a scattershot sort of way. The antichrist wants to erect a one-world state, which largely seems to mean any kind of global regulatory regime. Longtime Thiel watchers will recall his preoccupation with sovereignty and seasteading. The antichrist appears to be any force opposing that. The antichrist also is people who are against AI, especially those who seek to regulate it. If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown. It does lead, however, to the insight that the antichrist is “someone like Greta”, as in Thunberg, the climate activist, but “not Andreessen”, as in Marc, the venture capitalist.“I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because, you know, the antichrist is popular.” Respect where it’s due: that is a good line.But let me return to Thiel’s list of possible apocalypses: artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing. Thiel is probably not wrong to say that people are pretty worried about the climate crisis. But the examples of AI, bioweapons and fertility collapse in particular suggest that Thiel has confused the world’s worries for those of a very recherché set of aging tech entrepreneurs he hobnobs with. And the antichrist, too, seems very Silicon Valley-coded. This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.Thiel thinks that by both increasing knowledge and particularizing knowledge, modernity has made thinking of the totality more difficult. He has observed there is “this sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge”. We do more science than ever but without true insight. In the “post-modern multiversity”, “science continues to grow like a colony of rabbits”, but since the inputs, in terms of people, degrees awarded, investment, etc, keep increasing, “you have to suspect that there are diminishing returns,” he says.So for those playing along at home: Thiel is both a “classical liberal” who just thinks in terms of inputs and outputs and wants the university to be as efficient as it can possibly be. And he is a fire-breathing theologian who thinks that the university is failing at its job of considering the totality, venerating at the altar of hyperspecialization and postmodern deathworks. He is the libertarian offended at researchers “stealing money” and “not doing anything”, he says in one lecture. And he is the campus critic he was during his Stanford days, the one who refers to former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as “the DEI person”.How any of that mishmash fits together isn’t as important as why it goes together: it serves as a justification for Thiel’s own autodidactism.What does it all mean? Anything?It’s important to note that he holds himself to a vastly different standard than just about anyone else: he thinks just raising some questions about the antichrist might be useful in its own right – which may be true for all I know. But then he wants to quantify what everyone else contributes to knowledge in a way I can only describe as Doge-like. It would be difficult to count the monetary value of theorizing about Armageddon, as he is doing while pontificating about the cost-ineffective academic from the other side of his mouth. The rules appear to be different for Thiel, at least in his own mind. And such is Thiel’s odd relationship to power.One is reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen’s character comes across a platoon and asks who’s in charge here. “Ain’t you?” Ain’t you running the world, Peter? If it isn’t you, who is?If we want to look at Thiel as something he can’t seem to see himself as – as, in the end, a pretty standard specimen of homo siliconvalliensis – then what is interesting in these lectures is not the amateurish breadth and ambition. It’s the narrowness. Thiel’s vision of the antichrist may not be holistic enough. In the first lecture, where Thiel proposes that the catastrophes we see in the various end-of-days narratives in the Bible are threatening to play out literally in our day. He says we shouldn’t think of “the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible … in a mystical way”, but almost as “rational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not changed or improved”.But that is surely not what Revelation is about: the end of days in the Bible is in there because it attests to a view of the cosmos, its alpha and omega, its entire meaningful constitution. Otherwise, it is just a bunch of trumpets and locusts and people who give suspiciously good speeches. In the end, it isn’t clear how meaningful these four lectures make the antichrist or indeed the apocalypse.It’s not even clear how they make meaning. During the Q&A after the second lecture, someone in the audience asked Thiel whether he was moving away from his erstwhile teacher Girard – which is the central question, though perhaps not for the reason the questioner thinks. It gets at what Thiel is aiming at with these lectures. Perhaps some of their surface strangeness is explained by the fact that Thiel is ultimately engaging in some kind of Girardian play with doubles, mirrors and imitation. Not least among those would be the fact that the description he gives of the antichrist might also apply to one Peter Thiel.So maybe getting stuck on the details means we are missing the hidden, esoteric meaning within? But in that case, what’s the point of these lectures? As he warns in his third lecture, “excessive esotericism means you don’t really think coherently enough about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly”. It feels like Thiel is keeping both options open. He gets to tap dance between “I said what I said” and “you don’t understand what I’m doing here”. He seems to want to stand apart from his own immense power – apart from his own positions, apart from his own attempts to make himself understood – in something like bemused contemplation.body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: #23b4a9;–news-core-05: #494949;–news-core-06: #cca36e}@media (prefers-color-scheme: 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      Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

      by

      Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.The meandering gospel of PeterThiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attender who gave them on the condition of anonymity.When reached for comment, Thiel’s spokesperson, Jeremiah Hall, did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist.The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”.View image in fullscreenA trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”What do Thiel’s lectures say?The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors.He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
      It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.
      What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
      Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
      How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen?Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.
      There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?
      Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.
      Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.
      Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.
      As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:
      They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.
      When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’
      During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:
      I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.
      Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.
      A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.
      Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.
      My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
      It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.
      During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.
      Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.
      Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.
      In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.
      Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.
      One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
      Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:
      He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
      I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.
      Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist:
      The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.
      However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”.
      I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills.
      Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation:
      If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people …
      This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’
      And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’
      And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’
      When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:
      I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?
      Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.
      Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
      Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.
      Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.
      By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:
      Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.
      He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.
      Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.
      In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:
      One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.
      What does he say about Trump and politics?Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.
      At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.
      One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.
      I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.
      I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.
      Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:
      In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.
      Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.
      There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.
      In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, antisemitic theologians who suggested that the antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov.Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:
      Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.
      Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.
      Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.
      At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:
      By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.
      During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate:
      I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes.
      In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.
      “The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.
      Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor.
      ​​I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, … someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last precedent where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky.
      And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.
      But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different.
      Why is he fixated on stagnation?Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says.During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.
      If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.
      The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.
      In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:
      This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.
      In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal:
      I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad.
      References to pop culture and literatureThiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here:
      The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.
      In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”.He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:
      The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.
      Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
      In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.
      Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.Do Thiel’s arguments make sense?In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be:
      There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power? More