Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Do We Really Need to Talk About the Antichrist?

Art by Michelle Horsley

(Audio at the end of the piece for paying subscribers)

Hotez & the Trump-Biden Vaccine Wars (or Theater)

Over dinner last week, my wife mentioned that (vaccine advocate) Peter Hotez had announced a flurry of new pandemics (avian flu, SARSCovid25, dengue, yellow fever, polio!), complete with a release date (as tweeted by Robin Monotti):

Hotez is the same guy who, earlier in the year, was advocating the use of Homeland Security and NATO to crush anti-vaccine dissidents (as tweeted by Ben Tapper). “200,000 Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression. This is now a lethal force.”

It took me some time to process the meaning of my wife’s words. She often offers some apocalyptic tidbit over dinner, concerning some recent or pending crisis—usually in the US—threatening the stability of our lives. And it’s characteristic of me to be impatient and dismissive of these little hors d’oeuvres. “When was there ever a major global event,” I replied, “that was accurately predicted just before it happened?”

She said she’d have to think about it. Turns out this wasn’t why she mentioned it, however.

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Over the next couple of days, my wife explained that the Biden administration has been promising “blanket pardons” as a counter-measure for prosecutions that Donald Trump is threatening to initiate, once in office. The speculative “list of targets” (courtesy of Politico’s reportage) in the planned “purge” may or may not dovetail with Project 2025 and Curtis Yarvin’s R.A.G.E: Retire All Government Employees, and it may or may not include: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, former FBI director James Comey, Mark Zuckerberg (despite sucking up to DJT after the first “assassination attempt”), Hunter Biden, and a motley crew of “covid19 criminals” not included on Politico’s hit list (though in the follow-up article, the first link above, Biden’s proposed blanket pardons include Anthony Fauci).

Presidential pardons of people convicted of specific federal crimes are traditional; what’s on offer currently, however, is lots of preemptive pardons, issued before any charges or convictions have even been made. Politico proselytizes:

That the conversations are taking place at all reflects the growing anxieties among high-level Democrats about just how far Trump’s reprisals could go once he reclaims power. The remarkable, 11-year breadth of Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter illustrated how worried the White House is about Trump officials seizing any potential openings for prosecution. . . . Adding to Biden’s challenge in the final weeks of his presidency is the pressure he’s also feeling from Democrats who want him to offer the same generous clemency to those less privileged that he handed his son. (Quote from first link above)

My wife follows Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, who on a recent podcast picked the Politico article apart as an example of “prebunking,” or preemptive debunking. Their theory is that the Politico article exists not to report news, but to spread the word of blanket pardons to Biden appointees, and prevent them from turning evidence as a way to avoid the Trump-purge. The mentions of “officials without significant means [for whom] the specter of six-figure legal bills in the coming years is unnerving . . . already considering taking the best-paying jobs next year” suggests monetary incentives (bribes) for sticking with the old guard.

Whether or not this is one more piece of schismogenetic theater to makes it look like the DJT admin is really going to drain the swamp this time, and is already being subverted, there’s little doubt it involves leaving real crocodiles out to dry.

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My wife’s theory is roughly this: both the theater and the frenzied backstage activity we are being alllowed to glimpse provides context for understanding Hotez’s bizarre announcement, about a host of new/old viruses, arriving two days after Trump’s inauguration.

“All that’s going to come crashing down on Janaury 21st on the Trump adminsitration,” Hotez said. “We need a really, really good team to be able to handle this.” Huh?

Did anyone think to ask how exactly Hotez can claim to have an exact date for unveiling his bizarre stew of pandemics? If not, why not? Is it because Hotez isn’t really talking about a pandemic, because he’s not giving out “science-based” information to the public, at all? Is he sending a message to other insiders, and to his secret handlers, to apply some leverage during a very different (more personal) sort of crisis?

Maybe Hotez hasn’t been given the nod yet, my wife suggests, and is understandably nervous about being turned into a public patsy? He desperately wants to crawl under the Biden blanket, so he lets his handlers know he still has access to dangerous “pathogens” (i.e., inside information), but that he’s still loyal, and that he really, really wants to be on the team.

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Why do I spend time on this? For two reasons. One, as an example of how “the news” may not be best interpreted the way even dilligent and discerning researchers tend to read it, but as coded messages being passed back and forth between different elite factions, “skits” being performed to achieve specific results.

Second, as an example of how shit is always threatening, or promising, to hit the fan, at any time, in the slow march to Armageddon, and how we never really know which horseman will come charging out of the mists next. (Covid or polio—who knows? Who cares?)

So then taking any of this stuff literally, at face value, is probably a bad idea.

“And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars [pandemics and rumors of pandemics]: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” (Matthew, 24:6)

Peter Thiel Circles the Catholic Wagon

This brings us to Neoliberal Feudalism’s recent piece, “On the End Times and the Antichrist.” While NLF and I disagree on what makes a movie dissident (or decent), how trustworthy Carl Jung is, and—perhaps most critically and topically—on DJT being an actual threat to the global elite, rather than another deep state actor on “Team Schismogenesis,” his thoughts are always stimulating, and generally based in a broad historical knowledge-base.

In his recent article, NLF writes about how the “upcoming central bank digital currencies (CBDC)” and surveillance technology are combining to form “the rough equivalent of the biblical Mark of the Beast,” or “digital panopticon.” All that’s required, he writes, “is a triggering event such as World War 3, an enormous stock market crash, or a terrorist attack (Cyber Polygon?) to roll out comprehensively, providing the pre-determined ‘solution’ to the artificial crisis.”

Oddly, a few days after the NLF article appeared, Peter Thiel did an interview with Uncommon Knowledge called “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech.” A better title might have been, “We Need to Talk About the Antichrist.”

Coincidence? Zeitgeist? Or “dissident-right” messaging, high and low?

Thiel’s view is essentially the same as NLF’s: that fear of Armageddon is being whipped up in order to usher in the Antichrist, which he compares to a “one world or no world” advertising campaign of the fifties, around the dangers of nuclear fission.

One-world government, digital panopticon, Mark of Beast, and the reign of Antichrist is being sold to us as a bogus solution to total destruction, Thiel warns. What we need instead is “good globalism” to counteract the evil globalists, and presumably a CEO type who isn’t the Antichrist.

At the start of the second part of the interview, the interviewer quotes Cardinal John Newman, the 19^th century Catholic theologian, from one of his public lectures:

It is [Christian] duty ever to be watching for the advent of their Lord, to search for the signs of it in all that happens around them; and above all to keep in mind this great and awful sign of which St. Paul speaks to the Thessalonians. As our Lord’s first coming had its forerunner, so will the {45} second have its own. The first was “One more than a prophet,” the Holy Baptist: the second will be more than an enemy of Christ; it will be the very image of Satan, the fearful and hateful Antichrist. Of him, as described in prophecy, I propose to speak; and, in doing so, I shall follow the exclusive guidance of the ancient Fathers of the Church.

Theil and the interviewer also quote Girard a few times, also a Catholic. Theil quotes him saying that all we really need to do is go to Church—though clearly both Girard and Thiel have kept themselves busy, doing worldly work that no one could do on bended knees.

Thiel doesn’t mention his close association with VP J.D. Vance, or his backing DJT with millions or billions of “Thiel-bucks.” (See my 3-part series:

Thiel leads by citing Alexander the Great as a forerunner to Christ—even comparing his plan of world conquest (Alexander’s, not Thiel’s) to Christ’s ministry.

For Thiel, clearly, evil is all in the eye of the beholder, and less a matter of divine sanction than who he is funding.

And the renewed discourse on Antichrist, which he may or may not be spear-heading, is an almost entirely secular, sociopolitical discourse. Metaphysics do not appear to have any place in Thiel’s worldview. To a significant degree (as I hope to get to next week), this is also true of Thiel’s mentor, Girard.

This omission may be essential to the ends to which Christian rhetoric is currently being employed, by the so-called “deep dissident right.”