Queer Atheist.
Oct 13, 2025
Headline: The antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it’s rearing its head again
Sub-headline: From Silicon Valley to Michigan, the biblical figure is in the headlines. The shift from pulpits to politics is familiar – and dangerous
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/antichrist-peter-thiel-michigan
Editor: Did both The Guardian and Matthew Avery Sutton delay the mention of a notorious Straussian Peter Theil, as the latest figure that trades in “Antichrist” hysteria. How might a Straussian enter this ‘place’ the question hangs in the air like a wild fire that connot be contained?
Let’s recall that Thiel believes:
July 4, 2025 :
Can The New Citizens, like Peter Thiel, associated with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, now present an opportunity to view humanity within another frame? ‘The Straussian Moment’ is now superceded by men who are attached to how their brain functions, as outside ‘the norm’. ?
https://www.ft.com/content/82774b98-965d-4ed8-9876-cd250ed1448c
Political Observer.
Editor: Matthew Avery Sutton is a Guggenheim Fellow, that establishes him as an Expert, in sum a Technocrat that writes newspaper commetaries? He is the Claudius O and Mary Johnson distinguished professor and chair of the department of history at Washington State University. (Editor: This puts me in my place!)
Two scenes from the past two weeks capture something unsettling – and familiar –about American public life. In San Francisco, a tech billionaire delivered a sold‑out, off‑the‑record lecture series on the antichrist. In Michigan, a man rammed his pickup truck into a Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse during Sunday worship, opened fire and set the building ablaze, apparently believing that Mormons are the antichrist.
The antichrist is clearly back. But perhaps he has never really left.
As a historian of American apocalypticism, I’ve traced how this symbol – a protean figure cobbled together from obscure biblical passages – has repeatedly migrated from pulpits to politics and back again.
Almost a century ago, fundamentalists mapped European dictators and New Deal bureaucrats on to biblical prophecy. During the cold war, evangelicals scanned Moscow and Jerusalem for signs of the Beast. In the first Gulf war, some Christians argued that Saddam Hussein was the antichrist who was rebuilding the Tower of Babel.
Whenever American power felt threatened or social change accelerated, antichrist talk surged. Today’s version arrives with AI, deepfakes and venture funding. And with bullets.
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Editor: In a brief but scintillating 1004 words Matthew Avery Sutton narrates the story that is repeated by other men, and a woman, who are like Peter Thiel: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Bill Ackman, Shari Redstone etc! Thinking about Peter Thiel can be simpified, by thinking about him as a hybred: in sum a cross between Cotton Mather and Leo Strauss!
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