Antichrists and Empires

Peter Thiel, Alexander Dugin, and the theology of illiberal power

American venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin are arguably two of the most famous illiberal political thinkers who are – to various degrees – accepted as legitimate participants of international political discussions beyond the narrower illiberal milieus. For example, Dugin participated in the symposia organised by the Dutch Nexus Instituut and engaged with a number of mainstream thinkers and political analysts such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Francis Fukuyama, and John Mearsheimer. Thiel, in his turn, enjoys even wider acceptance, with a few drawbacks such as cancellations of his appearances or events linked to him in 2026.

Dugin and Thiel are coming, however, from different social and professional backgrounds. Dugin rose to fame as a political philosopher sometimes credited, incorrectly, as being an adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin after many years of countercultural activities and fringe (and failed) far-right politics. Dugin is predominantly known for elaborating the ideology of Neo-Eurasianism, which I define as a form of fascism aiming to revolutionise Russia and build a totalitarian, Russia-led Eurasian empire that will defeat the US-led Atlanticist West, thus bringing about a new “golden age” of global political and cultural illiberalism.

Thiel is an entrepreneur and technology investor, a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, and, with a net worth at around €24 billion, is placed among the 100 richest individuals in the world. Thiel is also a representative of techno-oligarchy, which is seen as capitalism’s tech-derived power, where technology-firm leaders exploit state-finance-platform interdependencies to shape policy through lobbying, litigation, legislation, campaign financing, and access to political elites.

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As illiberal thinkers both Dugin and Thiel share resentment towards the liberal-democratic order and reject the values of the Enlightenment. They both use the same religious terms, for example, “katechon” and “Antichrist”, to explain, and render philosophical depth to, their doctrines that stand at different levels of development and sophistication.

Dugin’s doctrine is arguably the more elaborate of the two. At the heart of his dualistic worldview lies an idea of the existential conflict between two presumed geopolitical blocs. One is Russia imagined as a Eurasian Empire of land; the other is the US-led Western power of sea. This conflict goes well beyond the geopolitical dimension and is reflected on cultural, political, religious and metaphysical levels. For Dugin, Russia is a unique geographical and civilisational “entity”, neither Europe nor Asia, but a third, distinct continent-world. It is a system governed by the immaterial and spiritual values; an organic, communal, collective whole, standing in opposition to Western individualism and atomisation. Russia-led Eurasia is also a multi-ethnic Empire, a supranational state uniting many peoples under a common, overarching idea of “New Rome”, and a pole of continental, multipolar integration.

The West, in Dugin’s perspective, is a commercial civilisation, with the primacy of exchange, the market, money and material interests, a “commercial order” where everything is measured by profit. It is a realm of modernity and postmodernity, secularisation and desacralisation, the “death of God”, and the disenchantment of the world. The West is governed by liberalism and individualism, and the isolated individual is the measure of all things, from human rights through civil society to the primacy of the body, quantity, and matter over the spirit. According to Dugin, the West strives to create a homogeneous global order, in which egalitarianism, democracy, and profanity will ultimately bring the triumph of the world government and the end of history.

Dugin identifies this triumph in religious terms as the Antichrist, so effectively the global liberal-democracy is the kingdom of the Antichrist. Drawing on the political thinking of German philosopher Carl Schmitt, Dugin introduces a counter to the Antichrist, the katechon, equated with Russia as the Eurasian Empire. The katechon is a biblical term referring to something or someone who restrains the coming of the Antichrist. While interpretations of the katechon differ among Christian scholars – it is interpreted as the church, Holy Spirit, or the government – Dugin follows exactly the Schmittian view of the katechon as the latter, namely the political order, and pictures the historical succession of the katechon starting from the Roman Empire through the Byzantine Empire to the Russian Eurasian Empire, the “New Rome” or “Third Rome”. The task of the Russian Empire thus transcends the realm of politics and geopolitics – as long as the Empire stands, the Antichrist cannot rise to the world’s reign – the elimination of the Empire as the katechon leads to the Antichrist’s enthronement and the “End of Times”.

Where Dugin cautiously deviates from the mainstream Christian thinking is that he introduces – likely under the influence of geopolitical thinking – an element of ambiguity and uncertainty into his politicised vision of the relationship between the coming of the Antichrist, the final confrontation between God’s forces and the Antichrist, and the Second Coming of Christ. Because Dugin politically identifies the final apocalyptic confrontation with the existential conflict between the Russia-led Eurasian Empire and the West, he argues that the outcome of that confrontation is uncertain and that “the task of a conservative who champions eternity is either to shape what is coming in favour of the future, or to fight on the side of the future against what is coming”. However, this introduction of ambiguity is still cautious: Dugin usually reduces the level of amalgamation of (geo)political, cultural, religious, and metaphysical dimensions of his doctrine on this issue, and argues that the Antichrist will anyway be defeated by Christ.

Thiel’s political and cultural public worldview is less developed than that of Dugin, and in his essays, presentations, and lectures he all too often asks questions that he does not venture to answer. Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct – with allowance for its continuous development – the main concepts of Thiel’s cultural and political doctrine.

Its central phenomenon is unlimited and unrestricted technological progress – a progress that, in particular, must, in Thiel’s perspective, result in the technological singularity. The need for such technological acceleration is explained across several dimensions.

One dimension that Thiel often highlighted in his early writings and lectures is purely libertarian: technological progress offers an exit from politics and state. It is in these terms that he explained the grand vision of the financial technology company PayPal as an instrument of creating “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution”.

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Another dimension is economic: he argues that the modern, capitalism-based political order (he predominantly talks about the US) “is predicated on easy and relentless growth”, and without that growth based on technological acceleration the order will not survive, while politics will turn increasingly nasty and vicious. Thiel gives a similar explanation from the demographic angle: he expects that the Earth’s population will rise to 10 billion people in the 21st century, and without “a highly advanced level of science and technology” human life on the planet will be unsustainable.

Yet another perspective on the technological progress is the transhumanist thrust: the singularity offers a literal escape from death by technological means, which turns Thiel’s doctrine into a committed stand against “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual”. However, there is also an eschatological aspect of Thiel’s anti-death transhumanism: he holds that scientific and technological development is a natural ally of what he calls “Judeo-Western optimism” because, within an eschatological frame where God works through human effort, the defeat of death becomes genuinely possible, as the kingdom of heaven is not only a future reality but can also be partially anticipated in the present.

Since technological acceleration is seen as one of the primary values for Thiel, he identifies regulatory systems that delay, constrain, or restrict technological development as the Antichrist. Thiel acknowledges that the drive to regulate development of technology is underpinned by fears of the devastation that technology can unleash on humans and the Earth – from the nuclear war through bioweapons to the runaway AI. However, drawing on the discussions of Carl Schmitt’s works, as well as interpretations of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians in the New Testament, he associates the Antichrist with the offer of “peace and security”, so his argument is that the Antichrist is the despotic system or world government that – by playing on the fears about technological acceleration – offers people that “peace and security”.

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Moreover – and, like Dugin, drawing on Schmitt’s thinking – Thiel introduces into his worldview the idea of the katechon, something that restrains the coming of the Antichrist, or the global regulatory system. Thiel does not specify how the katechon is manifested, but it can be deduced from Thiel’s writings and his real-world actions that whatever or whoever reduces the power of state-linked regulations of technological progress – ranging from libertarian projects of cryptocurrency to the presidency of Donald Trump – may function as the katechon.

There are two tensions in Thiel’s doctrine that he keeps unresolved.

First, his acknowledgement of the existential dangers of technological acceleration is honest, so within his own system of quasi-religious interpretations, it would be logical to assume that it is the unrestricted technological development which is the Antichrist, while global regulations imposed on this development to mitigate the threats inherent in it is the actual katechon, as it restrains the catastrophic scenarios of technology gone “haywire”.

Second, his insistence that the Antichrist is the global centralised order raises questions about the role in the strengthening of the Antichrist played by the company Palantir Technologies that he founded – a company that is involved in expanding government mass surveillance and predictive policing through artificial intelligence and big data analysis.

The two tensions resolve once we foreground the transhumanist dimension of Thiel’s commitment to technological acceleration. He states half of it openly – his refusal of personal death and his pursuit of the immortality that technological progress claims to offer. The half he will not state is that this pursuit is prior to his other commitments: it leads him not to ignore but to discount the potentially devastating costs that the requisite level of technological development may impose on humankind.

While there has been no direct dialogue between Dugin and Thiel, the former has formulated his opposition to the latter’s doctrine. Dugin does agree with Thiel in his diagnosis of liberal globalism, human-rights universalism, and the bureaucratic “open society”, which he sees as the Antichrist, but he is fundamentally opposed to Thiel’s solution to the problem of the Antichrist. Dugin accuses Thiel of distorting Christian interpretations of the katechon and immortality, and using them to justify the rise of the US-led techno-oligarchic monarchy in which an American “emperor” fuses with AI to reach the singularity, humans are ranked by IQ and replaced by algorithms, and salvation becomes the transfer of consciousness between bodies.

For Dugin, this is not an escape from the Antichrist: “Katechonic Russia fights against global government but the Thiel’s project isn’t alternative. It is the part of the same Antichrist”, or “Antichrist 2.0”, a transhumanist, godless acceleration of the already decadent West. Even if Dugin adopts the terminology of the far-right MAGA movement and opposes the liberal globalist “deep state”, which he believes Thiel opposes too, “Antichrist 2.0” for him is the “deeper state”, and despite the fact that it is illiberal, it is still seen as radically contrasted with Dugin’s own illiberal political visions.

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While Dugin’s position on Thiel’s ideas is clear, the reverse is not: there is no publicly available evidence that Thiel named Dugin or responded to his work. In January 2026, Dugin, however, claimed that, some time before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Thiel’s envoys” had gone to see Dugin, allegedly proposing that the two launch “a wide-ranging dialogue on the geopolitics of the future, the roles of land and sea, oil and gas, spirit and matter”. Dugin also asserted that Thiel “was interested in Eurasianism and, strangely enough, traditionalism and eschatology”. However, according to Dugin, that “relationship did not develop any further” due to the sanctions imposed on him, the pandemic, the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and Trump’s election campaign, so “the dialogue was postponed indefinitely”.

At this moment, Dugin’s claims are impossible to verify. However, it is possible to infer Thiel’s potential stance on Dugin’s doctrine on the basis of his essays, lectures, and other statements, although a degree of variation in Thiel’s thinking over time must also be taken into consideration.

One cue comes from Thiel’s paper “The Straussian Moment”, presented at a conference in 2004 and published in 2007. Written in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the paper reflected on “the unfolding confrontation between the West and Islam”. Referring to Schmitt’s conceptualisation of the political and the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy which proceeds from that conceptualisation, Thiel argued that Islam had a consciously adversarial position towards the West, while the West was confused about its relationship with Islam and did not think that “there should be a civilisational war” between the two. While critical of the position of the West he imagined, Thiel was nevertheless sceptical of the idea, which could follow from Schmitt’s reasoning, that the West should respond to Islam “with the same ferocity with which it [was] attacking the West [...] for it would come at the price of doing away with everything that fundamentally distinguishes the modern West from Islam”. Transporting this argument to Thiel’s possible position on Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism, which is fundamentally based on Schmittian opposition between Eurasian Empire and the US-led Atlanticist West, it seems viable to conclude that, in this framework, Thiel would oppose Dugin’s political doctrine.

On the other hand, Thiel has developed, across a period of approximately fifteen years, a foreign-policy view comparable to Dugin’s, and this view concerns China. In his early writings, Thiel looked at China primarily from an economic and financial perspective. In 2008, he cautiously welcomed the rise of China and argued that “there [was] no good scenario for the world in which China fail[ed]”. Later, he would come to see China as a source of competitive and resource pressure, raising concerns, in 2015, about China’s failure to develop “clean-energy technologies” – a failure that allegedly resulted in “massive environmental devastation”. In 2019, however, Thiel’s approach to China hardened radically, which may be linked to the presidency of Trump and his assertive anti-China position. China was no longer just a competitor – it appeared to be a rival in the full military and geopolitical sense, and Thiel praised Trump for becoming “the first president since Richard Nixon to pay attention and run a reality check on China”.

In this regard, Thiel’s “civilisational” antagonism towards China has grown Schmittian and closer to Dugin’s doctrine in form, though not in content. Dugin tends to regard China as an ally of Russia in the latter’s geopolitical war against the Atlanticist West, whereas Thiel sides rather with the Atlanticist West in the presumed dualistic struggle between the US and China.

Moreover, since 2023, and especially in the period of his Antichrist lectures (2025-2026), Thiel’s thinking has grown even more Schmittian, although simultaneously directly counter to Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism. During a Q&A session after one of his lectures, Thiel distanced himself, to a certain degree, from his apparent interpretations of the katechon as something or someone that reduces the power of state-linked regulations of technological progress, and unequivocally politicised it: “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”.

If the Antichrist is “the tyrant of the last empire”, is a katechon powerful enough to restrain him dissimilar to him? Like with many other questions, Thiel has not answered this so far, but taking into account his embrace of the idea of the civilisational duel between the US and China, it is not inconceivable that Thiel admits the need for empire to confront another empire.

This admission leads to another tension Thiel articulates but does not resolve: “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”. Nevertheless, Thiel is clear on Russia, rejecting one of the central elements of Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism: according to Thiel, Russia is no “New Rome”. Since a true katechon must be strong enough to potentially become the Antichrist, Russia cannot qualify for either, as it is too weak.

Yet perhaps the deepest divergence between Thiel’s and Dugin’s doctrines lies not on the geopolitical but rather on the ontological plane. Although both profess Christianity and, as self-proclaimed Christians, are nominally committed to the immortality of the soul, this shared profession appears to be a secondary overlap rather than the driver. Dugin’s fascism locates immortality in the survival of a sacralised supra-individual order – people, nation, empire, civilisation – into which the individual is dissolved. Thiel, in turn – and arguably despite his more recent Schmittian admission of the usefulness of empire as a potential katechon – locates immortality, consistent with his professed libertarianism, in the preservation of the individual self against death.

Neither of them, however, is deterred by the human cost of their immortality projects. Thiel’s individualist transhumanism renders the human mass expendable, Dugin’s fascism – whole nations; the one sorting humanity by instrumental worth, the other by national belonging.

And it is here, rather than in their rival geopolitics or their duelling readings of the katechon, that the two doctrines – from the humanistic point of view – quietly converge. For all that Dugin casts Thiel as “Antichrist 2.0”, and for all that Thiel would deny Russia the dignity of a “New Rome”, what presents itself as a confrontation between two illiberalisms rests on a shared premise: that some human beings, or some human multitudes, may be spent in pursuit of an immortality that is, in the end, reserved for the few.

Recommended on Alexander Dugin:

• Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo‐Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s Worldview” [link]

• Andreas Umland, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Transformation from a Lunatic Fringe Figure into a Mainstream Political Publicist, 1980–1998: A Case Study in the Rise of Late and Post-Soviet Russian Fascism” [link]

• Marlène Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?” [link]

Recommended on Peter Thiel:

• Wolfgang Palaver, “Peter Thiel, the Antichrist, and the End Times” [link]

• Laura Bullard, “The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession” [link]

• Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr, Nick Robins-Early, “Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist” [link]