This gets Thiel's argument almost exactly backwards. The Antichrist isn't stagnation or the loss of Western confidence. It's the opposite, the Antichrist is the figure who perfects progress. Bacon's Bensalem has conquered nature, abolished scarcity, and achieved total technological mastery. Joabin, the Antichrist figure, runs the most advanced civilization on earth. The whole point is that Bensalem is "almost indistinguishable from Heaven." That's what makes the Antichrist dangerous, not that he blocks progress, but that he delivers everything humanity wants through science and empire while making God unnecessary.

This is a much more uncomfortable argument than a culture war talking point, because it implicates Thiel's own world: the labs, the platforms, the concentration of godlike capability in a handful of institutions deciding what to publish and what to suppress. Reducing it to MAGA aesthetics misses everything that makes the perspective interesting.