What bunkers, islands, and Mars visions have to do with the Megamachine. On the economic substructure of what Thiel packages theologically — and why the theological packaging is no accident.
In April 2025 Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published an essay in the Guardian with a term that has been unavoidable ever since: End Times Fascism. In German the term is difficult — Faschismus refers to what happened at the beginning of the twentieth century in Italy and Germany, and any present-day comparison is immediately overlaid by controversy about the suitability of the historical analogy. I propose a slightly shifted term because it names the same phenomenon without the dispute over the analogy: End-Times Capitalism.
What Klein and Taylor described is an observation that has been on the table for years but was never sharply named. The wealthiest people in the world have for about a decade been behaving as if they were preparing for a world in which most people no longer figure — and they themselves survive. Mark Zuckerberg is having an underground bunker built on Hawaii, estimated several hectares in size, equipped for an extended period of seclusion. Peter Thiel has bought more than two hundred hectares in New Zealand, with construction plans he had to withdraw after local resistance. Larry Ellison acquired the island of Lanai for half a billion dollars. Elon Musk has talked for years about the Mars colony. Other tech billionaires invest in seasteading, in charter cities like Próspera in Honduras, in Network State projects, in the freedom cities that Trump promised during his 2023 campaign with ten prototypes.
These activities are not the hobby of preppers. They are not luxury security policy. They are the material expression of an expectation. And the expectation can be put briefly: There will be a point in the coming decades at which the current order no longer works. We are preparing for it — not for everyone, only for ourselves.
A movement that believes life on Earth will soon no longer be worth living and that the problems are no longer solvable does not invest its energy and resources in preserving the Earth — but in private security, in the survival of its own class.
This is not a new logic. There is even a monument that articulated it openly for more than forty years. In Elberton County in the U.S. state of Georgia there stood, from 1980 until 2022, a granite monument almost six metres high, weighing a hundred tons, inscribed in eight languages — the Georgia Guidestones. They had been commissioned by an anonymous man who called himself R.C. Christian; investigations point to a physician from Iowa with ties to eugenicists like William Shockley and David Duke. The ten commandments for an Age of Reason began with two sentences that say everything you need to know about the logic of End-Times Capitalism:
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Five hundred million. With a world population of eight billion that means eliminating 94 percent of humanity. Who is to carry out the reduction, the stones do not say. Who is to remain, they say indirectly: guided reproduction to improve fitness and diversity — the eugenics language of the early twentieth century, which in Germany famously became practice. On 6 July 2022 unknown perpetrators blew up one of the granite slabs; the rest was demolished for safety reasons. The identity of the bombers has never been clarified. The Republican gubernatorial candidate of Georgia, Kandiss Taylor, had made the destruction of the stones part of her platform — as a satanic monument.
The official reading thus sees in the bombing an act of religiously motivated vandalism from the right. A more plausible reading is different: the stones were blown up because their demands were too blunt and no longer fit the concept. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 is the operative logic of End-Times Capitalism — but in a form that is no longer marketable. What in 1980 still passed as esoteric curiosity sounds in 2022, in the phase in which Thiel is preparing his theological lectures and Yarvin is conceiving his King-CEO, like an open self-incrimination. Whoever wants to communicate the same message today formulates it in the finer vocabularies of sovereignty, antichrist, innovation, efficiency. The crude granite version is in the way. It is the image no one wants next to their own pitch deck.
The most likely configuration of the bombing is therefore not a pure one: the perpetrators were probably exactly the Christian-right actors who had publicly denounced the monument as satanic for years — instrumentalised by a side that wanted the monument gone for other reasons. This is not to be understood as one person steering another. It is the mode of operation we described in the main paper on the Megamachine as evolutionary selection: the Megamachine needs no conspirators. It needs actors with prepared interests and opportunities they take when these arise. When the ideological atmosphere is so prepared that sooner or later someone acts — and at the same time another side has an interest in the monument disappearing — then no one has to coordinate anything. It is enough that the conditions of selection are such that the right voices grow louder at the right moment. Voices like that of the Republican gubernatorial candidate of Georgia, Kandiss Taylor, who had made the destruction of the stones a point of her platform. The perpetrators act on their own initiative. They are not steered. They are selected.
This is the precise mode of operation of the Megamachine: no plot, no single decision-maker, but a configuration of interests that reinforces itself. Variation — the countless Christian-right actors who despised the monument. Selection — the atmosphere of 2022, which brought one of them to act. Reproduction — the narrative as a victory over the devil, which encourages others to act similarly. And the external shock that makes all of this possible: the awareness that a phase is coming in which the message of the stones can no longer be communicated openly, but only in code. Whoever survives in the Megamachine is the one who serves its logic best — even without knowing its logic.
Who actually blew up the stones is not decisive. Decisive is that the logic they formulated remains operative — and that the form in which it is communicated today is so fine-grained that it could no longer be eliminated by a single bombing attack. It is in bunker construction plans, in investment decisions, in investor presentations, in theological lectures. It does not hide itself. It only no longer shows itself in a form that would be exposed to a bombing.
Klein and Taylor formulate the thesis as follows: The right-wing movement of the twenty-first century has departed from the right-wing movement of the twentieth century at a decisive point. The fascists of the 1920s and 30s had a horizon after the apocalypse. They wanted to commit massacres, yes — but they also promised their followers a pastoral, peaceful future afterwards, for the chosen ones. They had a utopia. Today this utopia is missing. What remains is the apocalypse itself, with bunkers for the few.
Klein in an interview in May 2025: We are confronted with people who are actively betting against the future — and not only that, they are fanning the fires that are burning this world. That is the sharp formulation. A movement that no longer believes the Earth will remain habitable — and that therefore does not invest its energy in preserving the Earth, but in privately securing its own class.
This diagnosis connects three phenomena that in public discussion are mostly treated separately. First, the climate crisis and its foreseeable intensification. Second, the erosion of democratic institutions. Third, the rise of authoritarian tech visions such as Yarvin's CEO monarchy or the Network State movement. Klein and Taylor show: these are not three phenomena. They are one phenomenon with three faces. A class that simultaneously intensifies the climate crisis, blocks the democratic correction of this intensification, and secures authoritarian structures for the moment when the consequences become visible.
This diagnosis changes the reading of the theological language in which Peter Thiel has been moving for years. In my first essay on Thiel's San Francisco lectures (The Antichrist as Business Model) I read this language as marketing for a portfolio — as brand positioning. That was right but insufficient. The theological language has a second function that is more important.
When you are preparing a world in which most people will no longer be saved, you need a language in which this fact no longer appears as a scandal. Secular languages don't work for that. Whoever says, in secular terms, we are leaving most behind, says an untenable sentence. Whoever says, theologically, the world state is the Antichrist and we must resist it, even if it costs sacrifices, seems to say something noble. The theological packaging is the rhetorical operation that makes the economic behaviour bearable — first for those carrying it out, then for the observers.
The word sacrifice in this language is never applied to oneself. The sacrifice is always made by the others. As long as the word remains abstract — it will cost sacrifices — it can be heard as noble. As soon as the question becomes concrete — which sacrifices, whose sacrifices, what percentage — the noble gesture tips over. When the stones in Georgia name 500 million as a target value, that means eliminating 94 percent of today's world population. The moment a listener to this sentence understands that he statistically belongs to the 94 percent and not to the 6 percent, he sees his future prospects differently. The theological packaging works only as long as it does not allow this calculation to be opened. That is precisely its function — to prevent the calculation by keeping the concepts reserved for the abstract noble gesture.
Thiel knows the Catholic tradition in which two terms play a central role: the Antichrist and the Katechon. The Antichrist is the figure who wants to save everyone, who seduces through false promises of peace, who builds a world state in which no one is excluded. The Katechon is the restrainer who prevents this world state. In Thiel's translation: international institutions, climate regulation, AI safety debates, the International Criminal Court — all antichristian. Sovereign nation-states with strong military power, that is above all the USA — these are the Katechons.
Wolfgang Palaver, the Innsbruck theologian who has known Thiel personally since 1996, has theologically dismantled this reading. In January 2026 he told the Neue Kirchenzeitung: Thiel's interpretation of the Antichrist is theologically untenable. The central biblical passage Thiel cites — 1 Thessalonians 5:3 with the slogan peace and security — does not yield what Thiel attributes to it. It is not a description of a coming world state but a warning against false promises of security. Palaver continues: I do not at all see the Antichrist in Thiel's understanding today. We are further away from a world order or world regulation than we have been in a long time.
This is the theologically clean correction. Today's world has no problem of world regulation. It has a deficit of world regulation. The UN is weaker than at any time since 1945. The WTO has been paralysed for years. The WHO could not coordinate the pandemic. The International Criminal Court is being openly sabotaged by the USA and Israel. The climate negotiations produce declarations but no enforceable mechanisms. If Thiel sees the Antichrist in this global architecture, he sees something that is not there.
But Thiel does not see wrongly by accident. He sees in a tradition that has a name: Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt — constitutional jurist, NSDAP member from 1933, never academically reintegrated in the Federal Republic but read worldwide in authoritarian and new-right currents — introduced the concept of the Katechon from 2 Thessalonians into political theology. In Schmitt, the Katechon is always a concrete political sovereign who holds back the chaos that would otherwise break in. Who the Katechon is, is the central question of political theology.
How this sovereignty theory looks in operation, Schmitt himself documented. On 1 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives — the murder operation of 30 June 1934, in which Hitler had SS units shoot about 200 SA leaders and political opponents without trial — Schmitt published in the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, by then under Nazi control, an article titled The Führer Protects the Law. The central sentence reads:
The Führer protects the law from the worst abuse when, in the moment of danger, by virtue of his leadership and as supreme judicial authority, he directly creates law. […] The true Führer is always also a judge.
This is the juridical justification of mass murder as an act of genuine jurisdiction. Hitler had ordered killings without trial — Schmitt declared that the Führer himself creates the law in that moment, because as sovereign he stands above the law. Precisely this operation — the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception, the sovereign as the immediate source of law — is Schmitt's lasting theoretical contribution. The murder operation was the application in 1934. The theory survived its first application and waited for the next.
In Schmitt the Katechon is, in the 1920s, the strong state that holds back Bolshevism. In the 1930s it is the Führer who holds back the chaos of the Weimar Republic — and who, in order to hold it back, may also kill directly. After 1945, in Schmitt's writing, it is American anti-communism that holds back Soviet world rule. After 1989, in Schmitt's late diaries, Schmitt no longer knows who the Katechon is — the figure is searching for a new subject.
Thiel provides this new attribution of subject. In him the Katechon is sovereign America, which prevents the world state. The world state is the Antichrist. Whoever is for the world state is objectively for the apocalypse. Whoever is against the world state holds it back.
This argument is rhetorically elegant, because it turns every form of international cooperation into an apocalyptic threat. Climate regulation is no longer climate regulation — it is preparation of the Antichrist. AI safety debates are no longer AI safety debates — they are preparation of the Antichrist. International tax coordination, which would close global tax havens, is no longer tax coordination — it is preparation of the Antichrist. What connects all three is not apocalyptic. What connects them is that they would economically curtail the position of the tech billionaires.
Whoever reads Schmitt cannot pretend not to know where this operation leads. Schmitt's own life path showed it. Whoever cites Schmitt — and Thiel cites him explicitly, in conversation with Ross Douthat in the New York Times in May 2025 — takes over not only the rhetorical elegance but also the implication.
The Antichrist for Thiel is any policy that would close his tax havens. The Katechon is any policy that keeps them open.
What Thiel hints at theologically, Curtis Yarvin has spelled out politically. Yarvin — software developer, blogger under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, co-financed by Thiel through his startup Tlon — has been calling since 2007 for the abolition of American democracy. In its place a King-CEO is to step, an absolutist monarch in the style of a corporate executive, with unlimited authority.
In an interview with the New York Times in January 2025, Yarvin answered the question of why democracy is bad: It's not that democracy is bad. It's that it's very weak. And its weakness is shown by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass migration continue despite strong majorities against them. JD Vance, the current U.S. Vice President, has cited Yarvin several times as an influence. Yarvin himself said in a 2025 podcast that he could imagine Vance as king of America. For 2028 that will no longer be a theoretical question.
Yarvin's operative programme has a name he invented in 2012: RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. Send all government employees into retirement, replace them with loyal personnel. In May 2021, in the podcast The Stakes of the Claremont Institute, Yarvin discussed with Michael Anton — today Director of Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department — for almost two hours in detail how an American Caesar could seize power. Yarvin proposed that on the first day the Caesar should declare a national emergency, send ninja teams into all federal agencies, take over all positions of power without regard for paper protections, including against court decisions. A Trump app should mobilise the 80 million supporters directly to place human barricades in front of every resisting agency.
What in 2021 still passed for crazy talk has, in parts, been implemented in 2025: DOGE — Department of Government Efficiency — under Elon Musk dismissed tens of thousands of federal employees between January and May 2025, closed agencies, siphoned data in real time. The operation corresponded to Yarvin's RAGE plan in an attenuated form. Yarvin himself told CNN in May 2025: What DOGE has done is not on the scale I would wish. But structurally it is his line.
Here the circle closes. Yarvin's programme is not accidentally compatible with Thiel's theology. Both belong to an operation that has a common goal: the weakening of every institution that could hinder the self-rescue of the few. Democratic majorities could enforce climate regulation — so they must be weakened. International institutions could close tax havens — so they must be discredited as antichristian. Bureaucracies could enforce environmental protection and labour standards — so they must be dissolved. Universities could produce alternative narratives — so they must be branded as the Cathedral of the ruling ideology and stripped of power.
Each individual one of these steps is rationalised with its own arguments. Democracy is too slow. International institutions are corrupt. Bureaucracies are parasitic. Universities are ideological. Each individual rationalisation contains a grain of truth. But together the steps yield a pattern that only makes sense if you take the End-Times Capitalism thesis seriously: the step-by-step dismantling of all structures that would stand in the way of the prepared self-rescue of the few.
This is not the conspiracy theory of a secret plan. It is an anonymous strategy in Foucault's sense — a network of individual tactics, each of whose conscious goals is bounded, but whose overall tendency is unmistakable. Yarvin wants to abolish bureaucracy because he wants efficiency. Thiel wants to preserve tax havens because he wants freedom. Hegseth wants to remove women from the right to vote because he wants biblical order. Wallnau wants Trump as saviour because he wants Christianisation. Musk wants to go to Mars because he wants innovation. No one explicitly pursues the goal of preparing a world in which the majority is left behind. But that is the resultant.
In Germany all of this is so far treated as an American phenomenon. That is a mistake. The logic of End-Times Capitalism knows no national borders, because the capital that carries it knows none. What is still missing are the operative actors on the European level — but the preparation is under way. The connections between FPÖ, AfD, Lega, and the Hungarian Fidesz, the German-speaking Network State projects, the libertarian tech investors in Berlin and Munich — all of these are the building blocks of a European variant of the same operation. It is slower than in the USA, but it is growing.
The networking is concretely personified by Jens Spahn. We described him in a separate essay The End Product as a symptom of a system that enables advancement without substance — and that is precisely why it is compatible with the ideological operation Thiel runs in the Antichrist essay. Spahn entered the Bundestag at age 22 and has since spent not a single day in an activity not financed by taxpayer money. A politician without a profession, without practice, without workshop, without clinic, without school. A career whose only qualification is the career itself.
What makes this résumé dangerous is not the missing experience. It is the combination of missing experience with a policy of targeted networking with a milieu that no longer understands democratic structures as a condition of its own success but as an obstacle. Spahn was at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024 when JD Vance was nominated as vice-presidential candidate. He publicly called Vance there an insanely intelligent man. He commented that behind the broad shoulders of a President Trump, Vance could quietly gather the troops for a fundamental political change. That is the language of an admirer, not an observer.
As early as 2017, during Trump's first term, Spahn spoke with Stephen Bannon in the White House. He knows Peter Thiel personally. The bridge between him and Thiel usually runs via Christian Angermayer — the German-born tech investor who shares several businesses with Thiel: the pharmaceutical company Atai Life Sciences, Compass Pathways in the psychedelics sector, the Enhanced Games as a doping Olympics. Angermayer maintains close relationships with Spahn, with former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and with several CDU top politicians. A birthday party of Angermayer's took place in a Viennese palace, with Spahn and Kurz as guests. During the pandemic, Angermayer benefited from a federal government order for Covid medication from one of his portfolio companies — the order ran under Spahn's responsibility as Minister of Health.
Spahn's Ministry of Health spent 5.9 billion euros on masks, of which over four billion had to be destroyed. The contracts went to companies from his personal circle, to intermediaries from the party network, to a confidant of Friedrich Merz without a tender. Masks that failed quality tests were distributed to the homeless. In June 2025, his fellow party member and successor Nina Warken had the investigation report of Margaretha Sudhof redacted — precisely at the points concerning Spahn. The Union blocks an investigative committee, opting for a toothless inquiry commission. In the Bundestag Andreas Audretsch of the Greens asked: We do not know whether Spahn is to this day subject to blackmail. The sentence stands in the room, unanswered.
Spahn is also Vice Chairman of the International Democrat Union, in which CDU/CSU, the U.S. Republicans, and Fratelli d'Italia sit together. The Heritage Foundation, which designed Project 2025 for the Trump administration, actively networks with German actors like the Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft and Hans-Georg Maaßen. At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in September 2025, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Russell Vought (Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget) spoke on the same stage. The National Conservatism Conference in Brussels in April 2024 was coordinated by the Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a documented network that has been reconstructed independently in investigations — by Der Freitag, by Correctiv, by Campact, by Lobbypedia. The actors make no secret of their networking. They know one another, meet one another, finance one another, speak at common conferences. What unites them is a shared agenda: low taxes, weakening of international institutions, expansion of fossil energy, expansion of nuclear power, migration defence, dissolution of ESG and supply-chain regulation. These are the policy fields in which End-Times Capitalism is operatively manifested — the dismantling of everything that would make the self-rescue of the few more difficult.
Spahn as CDU parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag is the highest-ranking German politician who openly cultivates this networking. If Friedrich Merz stumbles in the coming years — and the signs are mounting — Spahn is the likely successor. What Vance is for Trump, Spahn could become for the Federal Republic: the younger, ideologically more consistent successor who carries on the line that the predecessor did not quite dare to approach. With the difference: Vance served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq, has a Yale law degree, has a career as an investment manager behind him. Spahn has none of that. What makes Spahn dangerous is not his substance. It is his absence of substance, combined with the willingness to fill the vacuum by adopting a ready-made ideology — the ideology we describe in this essay as End-Times Capitalism.
In June 2025 Spahn called for a European nuclear shield: Whoever cannot deter with nuclear weapons becomes a plaything of world politics. The sentence is factually not wrong. It is, however, spoken by a man who has never worked a day in a security agency, whose defence expertise is limited to party conference speeches, and who does not mean it as strategic analysis but as a positioning manoeuvre for the post-Merz era. If Europe's most important security policy question lands in the hands of people whose only demonstrated ability is the party career, that is not the solution to the problem. It is the completion of the problem.
Whoever wants to read the Spahn diagnosis in full depth — adverse selection in professional politics, the masks affair as a case study in clientelism, the villa, the 9,999-euro donations, the career principle we will have to forgive each other a great deal as preemptive amnesty — will find it in the essay The End Product on this website. Here the finding suffices: the likely next chancellor candidate of the CDU is more closely networked with the Thiel-Vance network than with German industrial society. That is the German resonance of End-Times Capitalism. It has a name.
The German discussion is poorly prepared for this variant, because it still has only the concepts of the 1930s as a foil. Whoever says fascism thinks of Mussolini. Whoever says dictatorship thinks of Hitler. Whoever says authoritarian thinks of the GDR. But what is currently emerging resembles none of these models. It has no mass parades, no single leader, no party members in uniforms. It has foundations, podcasts, investment funds, talk-show appearances, Network State projects. The form is not mass-political. The form is network-economic.
Precisely for this reason the diagnosis is so difficult. A movement without mass parades does not look like a movement. A dictatorship without a single leader does not look like a dictatorship. An end-times economy without an official end-times language looks like normal economic activity. Only when you read the activities together — the bunker in Hawaii, the island in New Zealand, the Network State projects, the theological lectures, the Yarvin proposals, the DOGE operations, the evangelical Trump anointing, the climate denial, the UN dismantling, the Mars visions, the Spahn-Angermayer network in Germany, the Heritage-IDU connections — does the picture emerge.
End Times Fascism is Klein and Taylor's term, and it has its justification. I use End-Times Capitalism instead because I think the economic substructure determines the political form, not the other way around. Fascism is a political form. End-Times Capitalism is the economic logic that can produce this political form, but also other forms — authoritarian liberalism, tech Caesarism, Network State secession, or combinations we do not yet know.
What the term precisely names is the fact that the leading actors of this capitalism no longer believe in the habitability of their own world. The old capitalists invested in schools because they needed workers. They invested in hospitals because they needed healthy consumers. They invested in infrastructure because they needed markets. They invested in peace because war disrupted their production. The current capitalism no longer invests in any of this to the extent that would be necessary. It invests in private bunkers, in private security systems, in private energy supply, in private data centres, in private space travel. The asymmetry between private and public investment is growing exponentially. This is measurable. This is the diagnosis.
What follows from this is the question that concludes this essay — and that I cannot answer.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor close their essay with a call to movement. They write: Our task is to build a broad and deep movement, spiritual as well as political, strong enough to stop these unmoored traitors. That is the tradition Klein comes from — the anti-globalisation left of the early 2000s, which placed its hope in social movements. Michael Jäger in Der Freitag formulates the German variant: If not now, when is the time to end capitalism, that is, to commit to a different and better mode of production?
Both calls have their justification, and I take them seriously. But they presuppose a subject that no longer exists in this form. The organised working class, which in the 1970s could still be the subject of the anti-globalisation left, is today in most Western countries no longer a political class. The trade unions are service organisations. The social-democratic parties are as a rule at historic lows. The climate movement surged in 2019 and has since been fragmented. The anti-globalisation left of the early 2000s has dissolved into NGOs, academies, and foundation discourses.
Whoever wants to stop End-Times Capitalism cannot wait for the subject that is supposed to stop it. The subject is not there. What is possible is the preparation of structures that enable the subject when it emerges. That is the point at which work on concrete projects begins — cooperatives, local energy autonomy, communal data architectures, alternative educational structures, new forms of political organisation beyond the parties. Much of this sounds small. It is small, measured against the size of the problem. But it is not smaller than what started End-Times Capitalism itself — a handful of tech investors, a few libertarian theorists, a few foundations. They too began with small projects.
The only difference is that the other side has taken its plan seriously, has worked at it patiently, over decades. Whoever wants to build a counter-movement must have the same patience. To identify End-Times Capitalism is the precondition. To fight it is a task that, with the identification, has only just begun.