The Katechon Strategy

I don’t normally write about current events, but if you like stuff about the Lord of the Rings, Ufos, and the quest for immortality, well settle in, and grab a drink because this is going to take a minute.

If you are feeling exhausted, terrified, or simply burnt out by the news this week, you are not alone. The constant barrage of updates and the relentless, chaotic energy of the Trump presidency are designed to be overwhelming. It feels like the world is spinning out of control.

But while your eyes are fixed on the blood in the streets of Minneapolis, the architect of the chaos is quietly giving a lecture in Paris. Yesterday, January 26, 2026, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir and the intellectual godfather of the New Right, spoke at a private event in France. The headline in Le Monde was esoteric: "Peter Thiel Comes to Paris to Speak About the Antichrist."

It sounds like click-bait, or perhaps just the ravings of an eccentric tech-oligarch. It is neither. If you want to understand why the country you love so much looks the way it does today, you have to look away from the chaos of the White House and listen to the theology of Peter Thiel. He isn't predicting the end of the world; he is engineering it.

Thiel’s lecture outlined a worldview based on a specific, heterodox reading of the Bible and the philosophy of René Girard. "For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them..." ~1 Thessalonians 5:3

I’ll save you some time and tell you his central argument is that the world faces a binary choice: The Antichrist, or The Katechon. In Thiel’s view, the Antichrist is not a horned demon, but a "One World Government". A globalist bureaucrat who prioritizes "peace and safety" above all else. A technological Luddite who wants to halt scientific progress. He argues that regulations like the EU’s AI Act or climate treaties are tools of this Antichrist, creating a stagnant, homogenous world where human progress freezes and humanity slowly dies. The Katechon is the biblical force that holds the Antichrist back. Thiel identifies this force as American Sovereign Power.

This is the keystone of the Trump era. In Thiel’s Asperger’s-assbackwards moral calculus, a terrifying, militarized, automated-surveillance American empire is not tyranny, it is the Katechon. It is the necessary "Restrainer" that prevents the world from sliding into the global stagnation he fears.

The Palantir Paradox

This theology explains the central hypocrisy of the tech-industrialist and his accomplices in the Paypal Mafia. How can a man who preaches "freedom" and "individual sovereignty" spend decades building Palantir, the world's most invasive surveillance apparatus?

The answer is simple yet difficult for me to grasp: Thiel believes that "Global Safety" is death, but "American Power" is life everlasting. I’ll get back to that last bit later, but right now the important distinction to note among the New Right is that when the EU or the UN or China uses regulation to make the world safe, Thiel calls it Stagnation, The Antichrist. When the White house uses Palantir to target its enemies or “secure the border”, Thiel calls it Sovereignty, The Katechon.

The chaos you see in Minnesota—the raids, the crackdowns, the show of force—is the system working as designed. To Thiel, this volatility is preferable to the "coma" of a regulated, peaceful, liberal democracy. He views "Peace and Safety" as a trap; he views Conflict and the Struggle for Dominance as the engine of history.

If this is starting to sound fruit-loops to you, then that’s a good sign as it merely indicates you are still sane. Good job. I’m warning you, though; it only gets weirder the further down you go.

The Scouring of the Shire

The depth of this twisted ideology is best glimpsed by looking at the names Thiel chooses for his companies. He has systematically stripped the vocabulary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and inverted their meaning. Tolkien was a Luddite Catholic who famously hated industrialization, described the atomic bomb as a supreme evil, and wrote The Lord of the Rings fundamentally as a story about the necessity of refusing power over others. Thiel has somehow inferred the opposite meanings of what Tolkien explicitly states and has used them as a mechanism for the unbridled accumulation of power.

Tolkien wrote that the Palantíri were dangerous because they showed the user selective truths controlled by Sauron, leading to despair and madness, as happened to Denethor. The clear message here being that you cannot use the Enemy's tools without becoming the Enemy. You must, at the end of it all, destroy the Ring, not use it. The Palantíri are an extension of that concept, one that Thiel has overlooked. He believes he and his cohort are the exception to the rule Tolkien established. He likely views himself as a figure like Fëanor, the creator of the Silmarils, or a Noldor who is strong enough to wield the "seeing stone" without being corrupted.

The other main theme of The Lord of the Rings is that the heroes find salvation in acts of humility, mercy, and empathy, and that the courage of the weak will shame the strong. Thiel has gone full Saruman and embraced salvation through achieving technological escape velocity. (More on that bit later.) He has essentially looked to Mordor as his model for industrial efficiency and military supremacy. After all, if the good guys in LotR had that level of organization and surveillance, they would not have had to rely on lucky hobbits with plot armor.

Fundamentally, the Palantir is a tool that constructs a narrative of doom, distilling a specific requested terrifying reality that justifies the user’s preemptive use of violence. It’s a system that doesn’t just bring you data, it frames it in the context of a worldview that perceives constant threat from all angles. Palantir, in real life and in the book, is not a spy. It is a device to distort the truth by showing a selective set of truths.

In 2024, Palantir signed a contract with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, ensuring Thiel has plentiful testing grounds for more advanced surveillance and automated “defense” weaponry. Aragorn’s “Sword of the West” Anduril will be rolling out their latest robotic “peacekeeping” units this year. No word yet on how the automated “kill chain” is supposed to work, so I guess it’s going to be a surprise.

Being a heartless industrialist, I can forgive. But this man has taken a treasured piece of western literature about human grace in the face of tyranny, striped it for parts, and used it to build a machine to subjugate others. He’s basically Vecna, if you haven’t gotten that by now. I want his head on a platter. (figuratively)

The Endgame: Breakaway Civilization

Why go to all this trouble? Why build a surveillance state, back a chaotic presidency, and turn the US into a fortress of ethnic techno-feudalism? The answer is as old as humanity itself, going back to the most ancient proto-emperors, god-kings, and pharaohs. Immortality.

Because Peter Thiel is terrified of death, and he is not the only one. He’s part of a growing international community of ultra-wealthy that are increasing in faith that anti-aging technology might not just be science fiction for very long. He has frequently described mortality as a "problem to be solved." One with a technological solution that could exist during our lifetime. He believes that the "Stagnation" of the last 50 years, the “slow” pace of scientific progress by his standards, is a death sentence. If we don't accelerate technology—AI, biotech, energy—we will all die. Accelerationism. He calls the acceptance of death "Stockholm Syndrome." This is why he hates the Antichrist of Regulation/Stagnation. To him, a world that slows down AI or biotechnology is a world that is sentencing him to die.

All of it, the surveillance, the military contracts, the political manipulation, the blood in the streets, it’s all one group of wealthy individuals’ dangerous gambit. The Gamble? Deregulate and accelerate technology to hyperspeed. Best case scenario, they invent immortality and become gods. Worst case scenario, AI apocalypse.

Now, this all sounds stupid if you're a poor person. We identify with the hobbits, after all. But, if you were a billionaire - or maybe just one of their parasitic sycophants - already under control of the rings of power, you might be tempted to bet the farm for that chance for an eternal dynasty on Mars one day. They believe they possess the "truth" that the rest of society is too stupid to handle, that democracy is a failure, that "freedom" is incompatible with "progress".

Before I go any further I would like to address those of you who are, like, “Surely this all can’t be as bad as you are saying.” First of all, good job making it this far, I salute your enduring combination of inquisitiveness with healthy skepticism. Before we continue further down this rabbit hole I just want to make sure we are on the same page regarding the enormous scale of the problem we are dealing with. Warning: incoming Epstein rant.

The Private Island Industry

So you didn’t buy my Immortality spiel. Pause. I would like to draw your attention to the thousands of private islands across the world owned by the ultra-wealthy. Many of them are “legit” billionaire playgrounds, like those of Richard Brandson, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and many, many others. But if you wanted me to give you an exact count of the number of these types of privately owned islands I could not, as many do not even appear on google earth. Market data suggests there are roughly 12,000 to 15,000 private islands globally that are "habitable" or developed enough to host a compound.

In an effort to obtain a more manageable number, suppose I wanted to know the number of islands that are like Little St. James, or “Epstein Island” as it has become known as colloquially. Owning an island is easy; owning the police on the neighboring main island is harder. For an island to function like Little St. James, you need three things: Proximity to airstrip, Privacy from tourism, Bribable government. Of known islands, that cuts the number down to around 500 worldwide. 500 private personal kingdoms where the landlord’s desires and whims are law, and where human life is traded and extinguished without fear of consequence.

Those islands are not just playgrounds for the pedophilic ruling class, they are perfect laboratories for research into biotech, AI, and robotics as well as, I’m sure, perverted combinations of all three. People want to believe that Jeffery Epstein was a monster, an aberration, inhabiting an otherwise functional diplomatic community. The truth is that he was just one unsightly protruding piece of the machinery of a gigantic industry that caters to the diabolical appetites of the global elite. It’s the reason the files cannot be released. It would shine light into their inner workings and conflicts of interest.

Time to wrap this up, I promised you Ufo stuff. Fuck!

After WWII the spoils of war included the treasure trove of horded scientific data investigating our species' ancient history as well as research into entities of a supposed extraterrestrial origin. A lot of the nazi physicists were legit old world sorcerers. Some of whom became card carrying Republicans after Project Paperclip.

Thiel’s mouthpiece and director at Thiel Capital, Eric Weinstein, has claimed the secrecy surrounding the UFO phenomena has impeded scientific research into physics. The claim being that initial research into UFOs led to the technolocigal renaissance of the 60’s and 70’s, but that the government took the physics underground, essentially freezing us all onto a technological plateau over the past five decades. I’m not making this up. He’s on Joe Rogan all the time disseminating the orders from above to the rank and file.

So this slow moving coup, this assault on our democracy, is result of a coalition of private wealthy individuals wanting the secret spoils of WWII, anti-grav, free-energy, and you guessed it - immortality - for themselves on private islands where they can do what they like with it in secrecy.

They do not want to expose UFO secrets for freedom or democracy. They want a boogeyman they can use for the next phase of their agenda. It is hard to justify a total global surveillance state just to fight "terrorists" or "China." That excuse will only work for so long. An Alien Threat (or a super-advanced adversary like a rogue AI) is the perfect justification for infinite military spending, total planetary surveillance, and the suspension of democracy.

The Katechon Strategy is essentially a holding action. Thiel wants to use the raw power of the American state to hold back the "mob" of regulation, democracy, and equality just long enough for his class to achieve Escape Velocity. Whether it is through anti-aging research, seasteading (sovereign islands), or the Breakaway Civilization implied by his network’s interest in UFOs and off-world tech, the goal is not to fix society. The goal is to build a lifeboat for the “worthy."

When you see the news from Minnesota, do not just see politics. See the Katechon in action. You are watching a philosophy that views your safety as "stagnation" and your anxiety as "progress."

The world isn't falling apart by accident. It is being taken apart by design, to build a fortress for those who plan to live forever at your expense.

Don't be discouraged. Continue reading Part 2 of this exploration of the geopolitics of technology in "The Gardener Hyperstition"