Anti-Christ, or Just a Deluded Old Man?

It seems that the Anti-Christ is back.  Or rather, talk about the Anti-Christ is back.  In another depressing sign that we seem to be entering a new Dark Age, an Age of Unreason, if you will, ushered in by players who seem to want to reverse all of the scientific, intellectual and social progress made since the enlightenment, in favour of a return to mediaeval values, we now have deluded US billionaires ranting on about how the Anti-Christ's arrival is imminent and that we're about to enter the 'End Times'.  Now, I know that there have always been nutters in the US spouting this shit, but previously it was confined to crazed extremists from the margins of the Christian faith.  But now it is coming from what some might describe as more mainstream sources, primarily tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel.  For those of us still in possession of our powers of reason, his warnings about the Anti-Christ seem somewhat disingenuous as, arguably, he is one of the people who has helped facilitate the accession to the US presidency of the closest thing to the Anti-Christ that can exist in a rational world.  I mean, really, have Thiel and his acolytes never seen The Omen III, when the Anti-Christ becomes US President and plots to bring about Armageddon?  OK, I know that Anti-Christ was a lot more charismatic, normal looking and, frankly, likeable, than Trump, but the analogy stands.  Which begs the question of why, like the film, we don't have bands of fanatical monks trying to stab Trump with magic daggers?  Or even just some other world leader, during a visit to the White House, whipping out a crucifix and shouting 'By the power of Christ, I command you back to Hell!', before touching him with the cross which will cause him to burst into flames before vanishing into the ground, screaming.

But obviously, he isn't the Anti-Christ, just a demented and ailing old man determined to play out his revenge fantasies - against both individuals and institutions, including democracy itself - before he dies.  The Anti-Christ is an entirely fictional creature of superstition, talk of whom, let alone belief in, has no part in the modern world.  As noted, the Anti-Christ is part of a mediaeval belief system.  Which makes it even more bizarre that someone who has made billions from technology should now be invoking his name.  Let's face it, back in that mediaeval belief system that Thiel wants to resurrect, the sort of tech that he deals in would be perceived as evidence of witchcraft and he would inevitably find himself being persecuted by witch hunters, tried and convicted and burned at the stake.  (Unless he was in England, where he would have been hanged, as burning was reserved for heretics).  The ultimate irony.  But just what is his motivation for all this Anti-Christ bollocks?  Possibly to scare impressionable Americans and reinforce the idea promoted by the Q Anon conspiracy and various religious fanatic in the US that Trump is their only saviour.  It is entirely possible that he and his fellow billionaires would like to usher in a theocracy of some kind for the US, believing that they could control it from behind the scenes.  Such a theocracy would, inevitably, enforce the sort of conservative 'values' that the US right seems to like so much:  a reversal of things like women's rights, gay and trans rights, legislation designed to eliminate racial discrimination, not to mention religious tolerance.  It would also represent a step toward their aim of effectively eliminating democracy, replacing it with a technocracy, (a religious technocracy, perhaps, of the kind you see in science fiction stories, where the 'miracles' performed by priests are actually the result of advanced technology), with the real power lying in the hands of those billionaire tech bros.  Sound crazy?  Before Trump returned to the White House, I might have agreed, but in light of the destruction wrought in his name since January, I'm not so sure.