Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.

Peter Thiel, is a man who looks like what would happen if a Bond villain’s tax attorney got hit by a beam of pure libertarian ambition and decided to become human. He has apparently run out of governments to destabilize and is now going after theology itself. Not content with having built the Palantir surveillance apparatus that feeds your neighbor into a deportation van, not satisfied with having bankrolled a Vice President who makes Mike Pence look like Hunter Thompson, the German-born Peter Thiel has saddled up his apocalyptic hobby horse and trotted it directly to Rome. To a palazzo. Steps from the Vatican. Because when you’re going to explain who the Antichrist is, you might as well do it in the Antichrist’s neighborhood.

The event is invitation-only. Four lectures. No press. NDAs. Which is exactly the kind of event the Antichrist would throw, if you think about it, but we’re not here to think about that.

Herr Thiel’s thesis —is that the Antichrist isn’t some horned sulfurous beast crawling up from the Pit. No, no. That’s old Antichrist thinking. The new Antichrist is a bureaucrat. A regulator. Someone who wants to slow down technology in the name of, quote, “safety.” In Thiel’s eschatology, the greatest threat to Western civilization isn’t nuclear war, ecological collapse, or the fact that Elon Musk is in charge of the government’s accounting. It’s Greta Thunberg.

Yes. Greta Thunberg. A Swedish teenager with a disability, a braided pigtail, and a sailboat is, according to Peter Thiel, a foot soldier of Satan. He said this. In leaked recordings. With the serenity of a man ordering a flat white.

Now, the creator of both PayPal and Palantir didn’t come up with this theological architecture entirely on his own. He had help — specifically from Carl Schmitt, the WWII Nazi legal theorist. When you’re a libertarian tech oligarch shopping for intellectual frameworks, apparently the Nazi section is just the most ergonomically convenient aisle. Schmitt argued that world history is a cosmic cage match between the Antichrist and the Katechon, which is Greek for “the Restrainer,” which is the force that holds the Antichrist back. In Schmitt’s version, strong continental empires – like the third Reich were the Katechon. In Thiel’s remix, apparently Peter Thiel is the Katechon, which is a self-assessment that even his own mirror must find as a Funhouse reflection.

What Thiel has essentially done is take regulatory policy debates — boring, important, democratic regulatory policy debates — and recast them as Revelation. Should the EU regulate AI? That’s not a policy question anymore. That’s prophesied Satanic interference. Should there be international bodies governing weapons-grade machine learning? Brother, you just joined the Legion of the Antichrist. Congratulations on your pitchfork. The Geneva Convention? Probably Beelzebub’s HR department.

Look: Peter Thiel is a very intelligent man. This is what makes him so magnificently, operatically dangerous. He’s not a kook. He’s not preaching this in a parking lot to eleven people with sandwich boards or people with missing teeth. He’s preaching it in a palazzo, to two hundred hand-selected tech aristocrats and conservative Christian money-changers, under ferocious NDAs, with no press, while the President of the United States owes him favors and the same Vice President is his former mentee. He is building, with some care and considerable financing, a theological immune system for American oligarchy — a complete spiritual framework in which every attempt to govern the powerful is recast as the work of Satan, and every billionaire who resists oversight is, by definition, doing the Lord’s work….

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Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.

So let’s talk about the grand spectacle currently being sold to you like a late-night miracle tonic—the majestic, patriotic, absolutely bullet-proof idea of a war with Iran. A masterpiece in lipstick and a borrowed tuxedo. The sort of visionary policy that only a Really Stable Genius and the courtiers surrounding Our Leadership could dream up while polishing their medals and adjusting their bolo neckties in the mirror.

You’ve gotta admire the elegance of it. Wars used to be messy affairs—mud, blood, public debate, that kind of nuisance. But now? Now it’s streamlined. Digitized. Monetized. A sleek modern product where missiles fly, defense contractors grin like lottery winners, and the bill slides quietly across the table to you like the check after a long, boozy dinner.

According to the bean-counters over at the Institute for Policy Studies—who apparently had the audacity to add numbers instead of waving flags—just running aircraft and ships in the region costs about $59 million every single day.

Every day.

Made Possible by People Like You—Literally.

That’s right. While you’re trying to decide whether eggs or gasoline will wreck your budget first, War-shington’s running a geopolitical strip club where the jets dance, the destroyers twirl, and the meter never stops ticking.

Fifty-nine million bucks a day just to keep the engines humming. Not even counting the fireworks—the bombs, the missiles, the fancy little interceptors that cost more than the average neighborhood.

Because nothing says “fiscal responsibility” quite like lighting stacks of cash on fire while simultaneously telling millions of Americans they might have to tighten their belts… preferably around an empty stomach.

See, that same pile of daily war money? It could cover Medicaid costs for millions of people. Or food assistance for nearly ten million. But instead it’s being converted into sonic booms over the Persian Gulf.

Now, the strategic sales pitch floating around the diplomatic grapevine—voiced by analysts and commentators watching this soap opera unfold—goes something like this: the real magic trick is nudging Arab countries into a direct showdown with Iran.

Let the neighbors duke it out. Let rival powers grind each other down. Meanwhile the United States supervises the whole bar fight like a bartender selling expensive drinks to both sides while sliding intelligence briefings across the counter.

Elegant, right? A geopolitical ménage à trois where everybody swings, everybody spends, and somebody else picks up the tab.

And if that leaves the region’s biggest players exhausted, while arms dealers rake in profits, Well, that’s just clever business.

But the plot thickens faster than evaporating lube in an Epstein guestroom. Critics argue the war itself isn’t just expensive—it’s illegal, wildly unpopular, and open-ended enough to stretch well into the fall… maybe even longer.

Which means the meter keeps running.

Ching.

Ching.

Ching.

Meanwhile the Pentagon—already lounging atop a trillion-dollar budget—is preparing to ask Congress for even more cash to replenish munitions. Because when you’re burning through billion-dollar toys, you’ve gotta restock the toy chest.

It’s the kind of economic strategy that would make a casino owner blush.

And that’s why today’s guest is here.

Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, has been crunching the numbers behind the curtain—looking at what this war actually costs and what that money could do if it wasn’t being converted into airborne fireworks.

So Hanna, let’s kick the tires on this global joyride. Welcome to the cary Harrison files….

The Cary Harrison Files is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Copyright Audiences United, LLC – all rights reserved.