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, and I find that worth watching. 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 end-times thinking. The same us-or-them framing runs through parts of the evangelical right.
My quarrel is with the framing, not the theology. Once the stakes are the end of the world, extreme measures feel not just justified but necessary. Compromise gets recast as part of the deception. Opponents stop being wrong and become less than human, and history is clear about where that leads. Every crusade needs a devil more than it needs a god. Whether planned or not, the story 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 building, not tearing down. Powerful people have every reason to convince you the ending is already here.