Apocalypticism frames the present as the end times, with the world split into the righteous and the demonic. Some of its loudest voices today are wealthy tech figures: Peter Thiel has lectured on the Antichrist and cast Greta Thunberg in that role, as Gil Duran reports in The Nerd Reich. His interview with Robert C. Fuller places this in a long American tradition of millenarian thinking. The same zero-sum framing runs through parts of the evangelical right.
My quarrel is with the framing, not the theology. Once the stakes are existential, extreme measures feel not just justified but necessary, and compromise gets recast as part of the deception. Opponents stop being wrong and become unhuman, and history is unambiguous about where dehumanization leads. Every crusade needs a devil more than it needs a god. Whether deliberate or emergent, the narrative works as a tool of control that makes an agenda feel like a mandate.
The way out runs through the scripture these movements claim. Daniel and Revelation are two books out of sixty-six; the rest is mostly a call to build a more just world and to love thy neighbor. The point was construction, not demolition, and powerful people have every incentive to convince you the ending is already here.