Achieving that requires an enormous concentration of technological capability in American companies and the American government.
The restrainer has to become very powerful indeed.
There are perfectly reasonable national-security arguments for much of this. China is not going to abandon artificial intelligence because Americans develop theological qualms about Revelation. But look at the structure of the argument: we need greater technological power to protect ourselves from the dangers created by technological power.
That is where Palantir becomes useful evidence rather than an ideological smoking gun.
Thiel co-founded Palantir to do something governments find enormously valuable: combine vast quantities of disconnected information so that people, relationships, patterns and threats become visible. The Army’s current enterprise agreement consolidates 75 Palantir contracts and lets the military purchase data-integration, analytics and AI tools for up to ten years, with a maximum potential value of $10 billion. The Army is explicit that $10 billion is a ceiling, not a commitment to spend it.⁸
Palantir also won a $30 million ICE contract for an operating system Reuters reported is intended to track undocumented immigrants.⁹ The company argues that its technology contains safeguards against unauthorized government access and misuse, and that distinction matters. A powerful tool does not become oppressive merely because a government owns it.
Still, the irony is difficult to overlook. The man warning that fear of technology could produce a government capable of knowing almost everything co-founded a company whose great commercial talent is helping governments know considerably more.
Peter Thiel is warning us about Big Brother while selling him software.
But even that is not quite the paradox. Thiel’s own theory already anticipates it. The people building those systems do not believe they are constructing the Antichrist. They believe they are constructing the restrainer.
That makes Vance’s Catholicism an especially awkward complication. The Catholic Catechism describes the deception of the Antichrist as a “pseudo-messianism” offering people an apparent solution to their problems and warns specifically against political attempts to realize a kind of messianic salvation within history.¹⁰
That warning is wonderfully uncooperative politically. It does not say pseudo-messianism has to come from Brussels, Beijing, Davos or Democrats. A global technocracy promising perfect safety if we surrender enough control might qualify. But the warning also raises an uncomfortable question about any nationalist government promising a golden age through enough authority, technological supremacy and liberation from the institutions standing in its way.
Which brings us back to JD Vance and his suspicion that the Antichrist may already be walking among us.
If Peter Thiel is right, we may be looking for the wrong costume. The dangerous figure does not necessarily arrive promising destruction. He arrives promising to restrain it. He offers order instead of chaos, protection instead of catastrophe, peace and safety instead of Armageddon.
The more frightening the monster outside the gates becomes, the easier it is to hand more power to the fellow promising to keep it out.
So if the Antichrist does eventually walk among us, I doubt he will have much trouble getting through security.
He’ll already have the clearance.