And what makes you think that's nonsense?

It's disappointing but unsurprising how little the HN crowd is able to engage with these sorts of abstract discussions. I swear it's got much worse here over the years for anything other than arguing about kernels and AI.

Thiel is painting with words as the Book of Revelations itself does, so trying to interpret all this literally will of course sound like nonsense. Revelations describes Jesus as a "lamb with seven eyes and seven horns", which like the rest of the book is meant symbolically.

So Thiel doesn't literally believe Greta Thunberg or the Pope have horns and a forked tail. The last link sums it up correctly:

> In Thiel’s apocalyptic vision, the Antichrist isn’t a horned beast so much as a seductive movement bent on halting human progress.

At his exclusive lectures in San Francisco, Thiel argued that the ultimate end-times tyrant would come as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” using doomsday fears to seize global control over technology.

He railed against “legionnaires of the Antichrist” in today’s world — a cast that, in his view, includes environmentalists, international agencies and regulators who urge caution on AI or climate change.

If you think progress is the highest form of salvation from human's naturally fallen state, then those who want to halt progress would be the opposite of that. Hence the anti-christ.

The biblical/Christian spin on this argument probably helps him attract attention to these ideas but the idea that leftism is anti-progress is hardly new - anyone observing the way the Soviets approached technological development could have argued that - so the religious framing might just obfuscate things rather than bring clarity. Especially as the Book of Revelations is one of the most symbolically obfuscated books of the Bible and reads like it was written in a kind of code meant only to be understood by Christians at the time it was written.