Years before it was poached by another company — after the home security client I developed it for was acquired — the tagline “What have you got to lose?” always was more than a double entendre. Today, it’s even more meaningful. The economy, international alliances, educational standards, and the US government itself are all at risk.

​Peter Thiel lecturing on the antichrist (and suggesting Greta Thunberg as a prototype) is like Machiavelli expounding on democracy.

Thiel, like his PayPal colleague Elon Musk, uses wealth and the high profile it brings to commandeer public attention and espouse a world view that demonizes altruism and repositions the detrimental actions of the rich as beneficial and, in Thiel’s case, somehow Christian. He is himself a good candidate for antichrist.

The new goodness of bad
It is, in New Testament terms, incompatible to equate Donald Trump, as Thiel seems to do, with anything Christ-like. The current President lacks understanding, compassion, charity, forgiveness, gratitude, and morality… unless it’s toward sycophants who, despite his violations of nearly all of the Ten Commandments, praise him as the Second Coming. Yet Thiel supports him, and Thiel’s conservatism mirrors those same self-serving attitudes. 

The Bible itself is a cesspit of contradictions. If it were clear on every point, there wouldn’t be more than a thousand denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be the true interpreter of the Testaments. To selectively choose an interpretation that supports one claim — while ignoring other parts of the Bible that contradict that explanation — is disingenuous. 

The write way
The accounts of the creation vary depending on whether they were written by Aaronids or Levites. The gospels of the New Testament, none of which was written less than 100 years after the crucifixion, have their own unique stories and viewpoints on the events they have in common. Each one emphasizes a particular viewpoint. Each can be used to support assertions that contradict someone else’s. 

Scholars, rabbis, ministers, and priests will never agree on a single meaning for anything in the Bible. It’s human nature to claim evidence, real or imaginary, that supports your own point-of-view. Just as iis now happening with the United States Constitution.

Lost in mutation
Unlike “the good book” (about which Oscar Wilde said, “When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it”), the Constitution used to be considered straightforward and clear in its meaning. Not now. The separation of powers has become undetectable: the Supreme Court has assigned powers to the Executive branch that are not mentioned or implied anywhere in the document, and Congress has allowed its control over financial matters and treaties and international alliances to be usurped.

The Bible and the Constitution have both been appropriated as totems. Donald Trump has used them both: holding up the Bible in front of a church during Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, and displaying his signature-stained executive orders that, one by one, represent claims of Constitutional power that he does not legitimately possess. He qualifies as both antichrist and antipresident, yet his supporters, most of whom want to see a Christian nationalist nation, are happy to ignore both the founding fathers and the father, son, and holy spirit to seize power on earth and, like Crusaders, annihilate the infidels. 

Rallying the dupes
Thiel’s lectures are sold out. Republicans in Congress understand that, having sold out themselves. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no native American criminal class,” Mark Twain wrote, “except Congress.” Combine that with Blaise Pascal’s assertion that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,” and you have a modern profile of wolves in sheep’s clothing preying on their flocks and their constituents.

Businesses in this country have been boycotted over their support for people their customers don’t like (Target for its DEI initiatives and gay-friendly product displays; Bud Light for featuring a transgender celebrity; Tesla for the anti-personnel mine that is Elon Musk; advertisers’ boycott of Fox News because of Tucker Carlson’s toxicity; South African products during apartheid). Yet American corporations have folded like empty wallets when threatened with financial penalties and operational restrictions by an administration that has no official power to impose them.

Profit over piety, safety over spine, partyotism over patriotism, feudalism over freedom: the drumbeat of defeat against the creep of dictatorship and the unholy veneration of an antichrist.