The Banality of Peter Thiel’s Evil

Newly unearthed details of the tech giant’s secret annual retreat show the malignity of his influence—and the mundanity of his ideas.

For someone obsessed with the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and other doomsday scenarios, tech baron Peter Thiel sure is keen to place himself within the existing political order’s power elite. An early Silicon Valley recruit to the MAGA movement, Thiel donated heavily to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He then distanced himself from Trump’s 2020 campaign, but resumed his role as a MAGA kingmaker during the 2022 cycle, donating to 16 hard-right House and Senate candidates. And as his pet software and surveillance company Palantir continues to rake in massive government contracts from the second Trump administration, Thiel is already spending big to support the Republican House majority in this year’s midterms.

But electoral politics is just a small part of Thiel’s self-appointed purview as an aspiring thinker of big civilizational thoughts. Since 2006, the reclusive mogul has hosted a series of confabs called Dialog—a private, invitation-only gathering of global power brokers and influencer-types, funded by a cool $16,000 registration fee for participants. Reports of Dialog’s activities have been sketchy at best, since all the group’s sessions are held off the record, and its membership list has been jealously guarded from public view.

 

𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐈𝐭 𝐍𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐚𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐈𝐭

Facebook Summary:

There is a sentence the Israeli prime minister returns to whenever the pressure from his patron grows uncomfortable. If Israel is forced to stand alone, he says, Israel will stand alone. It is built for the domestic ear and aimed at the foreign one, and it has the ring of a hard truth spoken by a man prepared to face it. There is only one difficulty. The entire history of Israel at war says it is not true, and it says so beginning in October 1973, when Israel did not stand alone, because it could not.

In October 1973, attacked on two fronts, Israel burned through its arms and ammunition faster than it could replace them. As the shortages grew critical, the United States launched an emergency airlift, flying thousands of tons of weapons and equipment into Israel over the course of the war, replacing what was being consumed. [1] It is widely credited with helping Israel stabilize and turn the fighting. At the first existential test of the modern state, what allowed Israel to keep fighting was not the depth of its own resources. It was the arrival of its patron supply. That was not an exception. It was the rule. In the decades after, Israel became the largest cumulative recipient of American military aid in the world, its missile-defense systems funded substantially by the United States, its expended interceptors replaced from American production. The state that proclaims it will stand alone built its entire defense on the certainty that it never would. And the war of 2026 confirmed it on the largest scale yet: through months of fighting, Israeli air defense was sustained by a continuous American resupply of interceptors, drawn down faster than they could be made, and as the war ended the United States began rebuilding the stocks the fighting had emptied. [2] The most advanced shield in the world could not sustain itself through one war without its patron.

Set the boast beside the record. In 1973, the airlift. In the decades after, the aid that became the foundation of the defense. In 2026, the resupply without which the shield could not have functioned. At every decisive moment, what let Israel keep fighting was the supply of the United States. There is no chapter in which Israel stood alone and prevailed, because there is no chapter in which it stood alone at all. So why make the claim? Because it does work unrelated to its accuracy. To a domestic audience frightened by a patron making decisions over the head of Israel, it is a comfort. To the patron, it is a lever, a way of saying the client cannot be taken for granted. Its one function it cannot perform is the literal one. And the deepest reading turns it inside out: to declare you will stand alone, if forced to, is to concede that standing alone has become a real possibility. No leader secure in his alliance announces his readiness to do without it. The boast is not a sign of strength but a symptom of the fracture. When he says Israel will stand alone, he is not reporting a capacity. He is registering an anxiety, that the supply on which the state has always depended may no longer be assured, surfacing as bravado because it cannot be said plainly. The words are meant to suppress the fear. Instead they reveal it.

The pattern set in 1973 has never been broken, only confirmed, down to the interceptors flying off American production lines to refill a shield emptied in 2026. The state that says it will stand alone has never taken a single step alone. The boast and the record cannot both be believed, and the record is written in tonnage and dollars and the manifests of resupply, while the boast is written only in the air.

When a state insists most loudly that it can stand alone, what has just happened to make the insistence necessary?

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References:

1. Historical accounts of Operation Nickel Grass, the US emergency airlift to Israel during the October 1973 war; specific tonnage to be confirmed against primary sources before publication.

2. Analysis of the 2026 war on the continuous US resupply of interceptors and the multi-year stockpile rebuild, including Harvard Kennedy School and CNBC, April 2026.

#Israel #Netanyahu #1973 #YomKippurWar #NickelGrass #USIsrael #Dependency #Iran #Geopolitics #MilitaryAid #StandingAlone #MiddleEast #MuslimNations #Ummah

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Peter Thiel’s Pseudo Catholic Apocalypse: A leaked directory this week exposed Peter Thiel’s secret elite forum. The tech billionaire who lectures on the Antichrist is also the patron who led JD Vance into the Catholic Church.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is not a Catholic and does not claim to be one, but he is clearly obsessed with Catholicism.

On June 20 the Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported a leak that exposed the guest directory of Dialog, the invitation-only forum Thiel founded in 2006 and that critics set beside the Bilderberg Group. The list surfaced in the source code of Dialog’s own website, preserved in an Internet Archive snapshot and first flagged by a hacktivist on Bluesky. It gathered Elon Musk, senators of both parties, Trump cabinet officers, Gulf royals, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, OpenAI’s president, and New York Times columnists.

The leak landed in the same season as Thiel’s other public turn, the one in which he lectures elite audiences on the Antichrist and warns that Armageddon is near. The two roles belong to one project. Thiel borrows the vocabulary of Catholic apocalypse to dignify a politics of power, and he has supplied that politics with a Catholic Vice President of his own making.

He calls himself a Christian of broadly Protestant background. He studied at Stanford under René Girard, the French literary theorist and Catholic convert whose theory of mimetic desire became Thiel’s master key to markets, rivalry, and now the end of the world. Over the past year Thiel has carried a traveling lecture series on the Antichrist from city to city -- four closed-door sessions in San Francisco in the fall of 2025, organized by the ACTS 17 Collective at the Commonwealth Club, then private talks in Paris reported by Le Monde and Politico, and in March 2026 a four-day series in Rome.

The Rome sessions ran invite-only, no recordings, no press. The Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, tied to the Italian far right, organized them with the independent Cluny Institute and praised Thiel for the “courage and intellectual liberty” to discuss forces it described as bent on destroying what remains of the West.

Italian newspapers first reported the venue as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the Angelicum, where the American-born Leo XIV once studied -- and the pontifical universities hurried to deny any role. In a parliamentary session, Italian lawmakers called Thiel’s ideas scandalous and demanded transparency about the government’s contracts with Palantir, the surveillance firm Thiel chairs. Voices close to Leo XIV called the content heretical.

A Protestant billionaire delivered a private theology of the last days a short walk from St. Peter’s Square, and the Catholic institutions of Rome backed away from the room.

Ross Douthat asked Thiel on a New York Times podcast what the Antichrist meant to him. Thiel answered, “How much time do we have?” His formula comes from Paul. The slogan of the Antichrist, Thiel says, is “peace and safety,” the phrase from First Thessalonians that arrives just before sudden destruction.

He draws the rest from an improbably assembled bookshelf: St. John Henry Newman’s apocalyptic sermons; Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ — a 1900 tale of an Antichrist who presents himself as a humanitarian and a benefactor; German Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s katechon — the restrainer who holds back the end of the world and provides the only bridge between an eschatological paralysis of all human effort and great historical power like that of the early Christian Empire of the Germanic kings.

In Thiel’s telling, the Antichrist of this century wears the costume of a reassuring administrator who promises to end existential risk -- the regulator, the arms-control negotiator, the global-governance official, the precautionary state that slows the machines. Greta Thunberg serves as his recurring example. Thiel hands his audiences a choice between a one-world state under the Antichrist and an Armageddon if that project collapses.

His account of the Antichrist and his commercial interest run in the same direction. If safety is the slogan of the enemy, then the people who would slow artificial intelligence, audit Palantir, or restrain the surveillance frontier are doing the enemy’s work. The chairman of a surveillance company has produced an account of the end times in which restraint is the temptation and acceleration is the faithful act.

Thiel met JD Vance in 2011, when he spoke at Yale Law School and the future Vice President was a striving student from Ohio. Thiel handed him Girard. Vance has credited that encounter for his conversion, which he recounted in a 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Girard was Catholic. Thiel is not. Vance became one. The line ran from the dead French Catholic to his Protestant student to the convert that student would fund into the United States Senate in 2022. Thiel is also credited with handing Vance the work of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who served the Nazi state and defined politics as the division of humanity into friend and enemy.

Girard exposed the scapegoat so that communities might stop sacrificing their victims, the crucified Christ being the innocent the civilization wronged. Critics who read Girard closely, among them the Jesuit commentators in Ireland who have tracked Vance’s turn, argue that he absorbed the mechanism and now works it -- defending the administration’s indictments, its deportations, and its lists of enemies. Thiel calls himself a Girardian while building a politics organized around the enemy: the woke, the climate activist, the globalist, the regulator. By that reading, both men took the anatomy of the scapegoat as an instruction manual.

He handles the other sources the same way. The katechon restrains the Antichrist and delays the end; Thiel reassigns it, treating the global order of safety and control as the danger and calling disruption the faithful answer. Paul’s “peace and safety” warns of false comfort on the edge of judgment; Thiel turns the phrase into the slogan of tyranny, which lets him brand AI safety, climate caution, and arms control as the devil’s work. He conscripts the texts rather than submitting to them.

The living Pope has answered the program directly. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, Leo XIV condemned “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” and he has denounced the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States. In April 2026, Vance -- the Catholic Thiel made -- told the Pope to be careful when he speaks about theology. The Church that received Vance now rebukes the agenda Thiel funds.

The fusion of maximal technology, friend-enemy politics, and Christian end-times language repeats a Weimar formula. The historian Jeffrey Herf called the pairing reactionary modernism, the embrace of the machine joined to a rejection of Enlightenment reason and liberal democracy, with Carl Schmitt among its theorists. Thiel revives it and routes Schmitt to the second-highest office in the country.

The faction is specific. Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and the Founders Fund orbit carry the technology side; Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and the postliberal Catholics around Vance carry the religious one. The leaked Dialog list runs wider than that circle and older than Thiel’s turn to Trump. It holds Democrats who hurried to disown it -- Wes Moore, Cory Booker, and Jared Polis among them -- and writers with no stake in any of it. The argument is about Thiel’s faction, not Silicon Valley and not the American right.

He takes the categories -- Antichrist, katechon, the two cities of Augustine -- and the two-thousand-year vocabulary of cosmic struggle, and he leaves behind the magisterium that interprets them, the preferential option for the poor, and the Pope who is alive and disagreeing with him.

The forum the leak exposed is the material body of that vision. Dialog meets off the record under a confidentiality its members prize; Auren Hoffman chairs it, Raffi Grinberg directs it, and the group is building a permanent campus in the Washington suburbs. Wired’s account of the August retreat near Dublin listed sessions called “Navigating WWIII,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Build-a-Cult.” Records released by the House oversight committee show Hoffman invited Jeffrey Epstein to the 2014 gathering, alongside Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. Janine Wedel, who studies power elites at George Mason University, calls these closed forums “a problem for democracy,” the rooms where agendas get set past any vote the rest of us could cast.

The source Thiel cites describes a figure he seems unable to recognize. In Vladimir Soloviev’s tale, the Antichrist arrives as a benefactor and a peacemaker, a superman who ends scarcity, unites the world under a single government, wins the gratitude of nations, and convenes the churches to ask them to bow to him in exchange for everything they have wanted. That likeness fits the technologist who promises to cure death and administer the human future more closely than it fits an official asking for a safety review. Thiel drew a careful portrait of the Antichrist and addressed it to the wrong man.

Catholic social teaching levels a sharper charge than excess piety. The first commandment forbids the worship of substitutes, and a man who borrows God’s vocabulary to consecrate his own power has raised a god he can manage.

The borrowing does political work. Thiel funds the 2026 Republican campaigns, chairs a surveillance company that sells to governments, and has placed his protégé a step from the presidency. His apocalyptic story dignifies that power and brands the people Leo XIV defends, the migrant and the poor, as frightened masses who would trade their freedom for the Antichrist’s safety.

When he brought the performance to Rome, the Catholic institutions there heard him out and refused him the bow that Soloviev’s Antichrist demands of churches. The Church — and, we hope, most Catholics, can tell the difference between Thiel’s mashed-together distorted pseudo-religion for the real thing.

This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/.../peter-thiels...

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This report dropped just hours ago. Published this morning by NBC News. Based on a brand-new study that is already shaking Silicon Valley to its core.

In just 90 days — January, February, and March 2026 — ordinary American citizens with no lobbyists, no corporate lawyers, and no billions of dollars stopped Big Tech dead in its tracks.

The number is almost impossible to believe. But it is real. It is verified. And it changes everything.     $130 BILLION. BLOCKED. IN 90 DAYS.

A new study conducted by Data Center Watch — a project of AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity — found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March 2026. That is the most blocked and delayed data center projects ever recorded in a single three-month period since tracking began in 2023. 

75 projects. $130 billion. In 90 days.

To put that in perspective — $130 billion is more than the entire annual GDP of Hungary. More than the annual revenue of Walmart. Stopped — not by governments, not by regulators, not by courts — but by regular Americans who showed up and said no.

The total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during just the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for ALL of 2025 combined. 

Everything that took an entire year to block in 2025 — communities matched it in just one quarter of 2026.

This is not a trend. This is an avalanche. THE STUDY THAT SENT SHOCKWAVES THROUGH SILICON VALLEY.

The researchers at Data Center Watch did not just count the blocked projects. They explained exactly why this is happening — and their conclusion is the part Big Tech least wants you to read.

The authors wrote: “The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states.” 

A structural shift. Not a spike. Not a temporary protest. A permanent, organized, nationwide movement that has now taken root in 49 of America’s 50 states.

Data Center Watch stated that opposition to data centers has “consolidated into a national political force” — adding that “what began as individual zoning disputes is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide.” 

Individual zoning disputes. That is how this started — neighbors showing up to complain at a county meeting. Now it is reshaping elections. Replacing politicians. Rewriting laws. And blocking $130 billion in 90 days.

THE RUMOR OF A DATA CENTER IS NOW ENOUGH TO TRIGGER A REVOLT

Here is the detail in today’s study that stopped every data center executive in their tracks.

The study found: “In some cases, opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance.” 

Not an announcement. Not a permit application. Not a groundbreaking ceremony.

A rumor.

Communities are now so organized, so alert, and so determined that the moment anyone hears a whisper that a data center might be coming — the resistance begins. Before a single document is filed. Before a single acre of land changes hands.

Big Tech used to be able to quietly file permits, quietly buy land, quietly start construction — and by the time communities figured out what was happening, it was too late.

Those days are over.

AND THE LAWMAKERS ARE FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE

The grassroots movement did not just block projects. It forced politicians to act — fast.

More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026 alone — marking what researchers described as “a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer.” 

300 bills. In six weeks. In legislatures across America. From red states to blue states. From Oklahoma to New York. From Texas to Maine.

Three years ago — data centers were handing out press releases and politicians were lining up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Today — 300 bills in six weeks. All driven by the same force: ordinary Americans who got fed up and showed up.

AND YET BIG TECH IS NOT BACKING DOWN — IT IS DOUBLING DOWN

Here is the part of today’s story that makes this a true David vs. Goliath battle for the ages.

On May 11, Moody’s Ratings raised its capital spending projections for the top six U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, and CoreWeave — to $785 billion for 2026 and nearly $1 trillion for 2027. 

$785 billion this year. $1 trillion next year. From just six companies.

Against 833 grassroots opposition groups. Armed with community meetings, petitions, and votes.

That dynamic — community opposition steam rolled by corporate momentum — is playing out across America at accelerating speed. 

Big Tech is spending more. Communities are fighting harder. And right now — today — the communities are winning more often than anyone in Silicon Valley predicted possible.

In the town of Saline, Michigan, residents voted against a $16 billion data center in their backyard. Weeks later — construction began anyway. 

The people voted. The company built anyway.

That single sentence explains why 833 opposition groups now exist across 49 states. Because democracy was ignored. And Americans do not forget that.

TWO OUT OF EVERY THREE FIGHTS — COMMUNITIES ARE WINNING

And here is the number that should give every community in America hope — and every data center executive nightmares.

Opposition groups were successful in blocking or delaying two out of every three projects they protested — underscoring the growing impact of organized local resistance. 

Two out of three. When communities organize and fight — they win the majority of the time.

This is not a movement that is losing. This is a movement that is winning. Consistently. Repeatedly. Across 49 states.

Every town council member who supported Amazon’s proposed data center in Warrenton, Virginia has subsequently lost re-election — starting in 2023 and continuing through every election since. 

Every single one. Lost their seat. Because they chose Amazon over their community.

Politicians across America are reading that sentence very carefully right now.

 WHAT HAPPENS NEXT — AND WHY THE NEXT 90 DAYS ARE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT

Today’s study covers January through March. The second quarter of 2026 — April, May, and June — is not yet fully counted. But the early signals suggest the numbers will be even larger.

The New York moratorium bill passed both chambers. Nashville’s zoo petition hit 386,000 signatures. Nassau County voted for a full pause. North Carolina is fighting to protect its aquifers. Ohio farmers are battling eminent domain proposals. The EPA said it won’t protect communities. And 833 opposition groups — across 49 states — are more organized today than they were on January 1.

As Data Center Watch concluded in its report published today: “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.” 

Sustained. Intensifying. Nationwide.

$130 billion blocked in 90 days. By regular Americans. With no corporate backing. No billionaire donors. No armies of lobbyists.

Just neighbors. Showing up. Saying no.

And winning.

This study was published TODAY by NBC News — just hours ago. SHARE this post so every American knows that their community has the POWER to stop Big Tech — and that 833 groups across 49 states are already proving it. FOLLOW this page for the most important and most current data center news in America, updated every single day. 

 Comment below: Does it give you HOPE that ordinary Americans are blocking $130 BILLION in data center projects — or do you think Big Tech will ultimately win? Tell us what you think!

 

 Sources: NBC News — June 12, 2026 (Published TODAY, 10 hours ago) | AOL / NBC News — June 12, 2026 | International Business Times — June 12, 2026 (Published 2 hours ago) |