The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poor. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29. It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car. 

Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60 percent of the world’s cars. 

This century, humanity has halved the mortality rate for children under five and reduced AIDS-related deaths from their peak by 70 percent. But the number of people killed by cars has remained roughly the same for the last 20 years. As motor vehicles spread around the world — the total fleet has doubled over the past 20 years — the burden of those deaths has shifted increasingly to lower-income countries. Despite all the progress we’ve made against ancient natural killers, we’re making little against a killer we engineered ourselves. 

That’s not for a lack of known solutions, but rather because there’s been comparatively little attention paid to car crash deaths as a real global health issue until relatively recently. Unlike deadly maladies that are purely bad, cars do add value to society. Perhaps as a result, even though wealthy countries have brought down per capita road fatalities over the course of decades, deaths by car have still often tended to be discounted by policymakers and the general public as the price of progress and economic growth. It’s “one of the few public health problems where society and decision makers still accept death and disability on such a large scale as inevitable,” the late Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology wrote in 2019. 

“You can become very depressed,” James Leather, director of transport at the Asian Development Bank, told me in a recent conversation at the International Transport Forum summit (an event sometimes called the Davos of transportation). “Why is no one taking this seriously?” 

Of course, it’s not that literally no one is taking it seriously, but rather that cars have long been an underrated threat to human well-being. But that is, perhaps, slowly beginning to change. 

Why cars kill so many people in countries with so few of them

I am sometimes known as a bit of a car hater, devoting a lot of my consciousness to thinking about how the United States got locked into car dependence. Our car-oriented development pattern is part of the reason the US has one of the highest road fatality rates of any wealthy country. (But, listen, I own a car too, and benefit greatly from it! I am American, after all.) 

US car fatality rates may be an outlier by wealthy-country standards, but most low- and middle-income nations face far greater risk. Haitians and Ethiopians are more than three times more likely to be killed by a car than an American; Kenyans, Bolivians, and Thais are more than twice as likely. 

That alone is worth dwelling on. If you live in the US, consider that you probably know at least several people who’ve been killed in a car crash or who have loved ones who have, and that this proximity to sudden, violent loss is felt even more acutely in most of the world. Road deaths account for around 1 percent of all deaths in the US; globally, that figure is about 2 percent, and in a typical middle-income country like Vietnam, it is more than 3 percent. 

That might sound a bit surprising — and feels all the more unfair — in light of the fact that poorer nations do not have anywhere close to as many cars as wealthy ones do, and their residents travel fewer miles by car than people in rich countries do. If cars kill so many Americans because we simply drive so much, in the developing world, the problem is almost the inverse: A minority of people who can afford it ride in private cars, while everyone else walks, bikes, or rides a motorcycle, scooter, or three-wheeled vehicle like an auto rickshaw. And those outside of an automobile — known as “vulnerable road users” — often share space in the road with cars and are at high risk of being hit. 

Cars themselves in developing nations are often more dangerous for their occupants than vehicles in rich countries are, too. Weaker car safety standards and a reliance on imported old cars mean that people sometimes travel in vehicles that lack safety features long taken for granted in rich countries, including airbags and frames designed to absorb the force from a crash. 

Amid all this, cars and other motorized vehicles are spreading rapidly in the Global South — much more quickly than that transition took place in North America and Europe — and doing so before governments have built safer roads, vehicle standards, adequate trauma care, or robust traffic regulations. Many nations lack comprehensive laws governing what the WHO considers the five key behaviors that shape road fatalities: high speeds, drunk driving, seatbelt use, helmet use for motorcyclists, and child restraints in cars.  

In Southeast Asian countries, which have seen a massive proliferation of motorized vehicles since 2010, “maybe the infrastructure was designed when you didn’t have so many cars, and now all of a sudden you have twice the number of cars that you did before,” Nhan Tran, the WHO’s head of violence and injury prevention, told me. Road crashes are a major burden on the medical systems of these countries and exact staggering economic costs, amounting to about 5 percent of national GDP in Vietnam, for example. 

Meanwhile, as the total number of global road fatalities has stayed roughly constant for the last few decades, the gap between poor and rich countries has widened. Between 2010 and 2021, high-income countries, particularly those in Europe, saw dramatic decreases in car crash deaths, while deaths in the vast majority of low-income nations (which are predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa) increased, according to the WHO’s most recent report on global road safety. Across lower-middle-income nations, like India, the aggregate number of deaths and the per capita fatality rate stayed roughly flat. 

I asked Leather whether there was an easy, no-brainer intervention that could make a big dent in these deaths. He pointed, among other things, to helmets — in the Philippines, where he lives, national law now requires that helmets be made available with every new motorcycle purchase, though for that to work, people of course actually have to use them.

“If you go to New Delhi today, nearly every motorcycle rider wears a certified full-faced helmet. This was achieved through strong enforcement,” Kavi Bhalla, a professor at the University of Chicago’s department of public health sciences and an expert on global road safety, told me in an email. “In contrast, most other cities in India don’t enforce the helmet law, have very low helmet use, and this leads to many unnecessary deaths.”  

Poor countries don’t need to wait their turn for safer roads

Twenty years ago, two US economists published what became one of the most influential papers in the field of global road safety, on the relationship between a nation’s wealth and its traffic fatality rate. As countries get richer, they argued, motor vehicle ownership rises, and per capita car deaths rise in tandem. Eventually, as countries become wealthier — and as safer roads, vehicles, and traffic policies catch up with motorization — fatality rates start to fall, as they did across much of the industrialized world beginning in the early 1970s. That tipping point, the authors found, comes at around $8,600 (in 1985 international dollars) of per capita GDP. 

But this “economic determinism,” as Bhalla has described it, might be the wrong way of looking at the problem. It contributes to a sense that traffic carnage is inevitable until a nation becomes rich. But we would never argue that maternal mortality or malaria deaths can’t be significantly mitigated in low-income countries; in fact, we already know they have been. Although Europe, the US, and other high-income nations have steadily reduced car death rates over the last 60 years, Bhalla told me “it is a mistake to think that this has much to do with these countries being rich.”

Instead, “safety improved in these countries once they established national road safety agencies, gave them the authority to regulate what happens on the roads, and gave them a dedicated funding stream,” he wrote to me. “These agencies did what you would expect agencies to do. They identified the most common traffic safety risks in the countries, undertook investigations on how best to address these, and then made investments for large scale interventions focused on safer designs of cars and roads, coordinated enforcement programs, and emergency medical systems. Low and middle income countries can and should do this now.”

The WHO and other global organizations, along with some philanthropies, have been working to speed along such work over the last few decades, but the results have so far been somewhat underwhelming. The United Nations had aimed to halve global road deaths from the baseline of roughly 1.2 million by 2020, a goal we didn’t come anywhere close to reaching. On the other hand, world population has greatly increased in the last few decades, so holding the absolute number of traffic deaths constant is still a meaningful achievement: From 2010 to 2021, the global per capita road fatality rate decreased by about 16 percent. And in that period, Tran said, road safety has at least gained a lot more visibility among political leaders and civil society as a badly neglected public health crisis. 

Having missed the 2020 target, the UN now aims to halve road deaths by 2030. But we will “definitely not” meet that goal either, Bhalla told me. 

A core reason the global road fatality crisis has been so maddeningly obstinate is that the root of the problem is complicated, contested, and depends on one’s perspective. “It’s not the same as when you’re talking about Covid or HIV, where there is a virus” that we want to eradicate, said Tran. “When you talk about road safety, what is the virus?” Is it dangerous individual behaviors — speeding, drunk driving, refusing to wear a seatbelt? Is it deteriorating roads or a lack of sidewalks? Is it humanity’s growing dependence on cars themselves? 

Tran, like many road safety advocates today, calls for an approach that focuses on the most upstream cause of car fatalities — the proliferation of cars — and champions good urban planning designed to prioritize transit, walking, and cycling over the movement of cars. That would make safety an inherent feature of the transportation network and obviate the need for what Tran calls “quick fixes” to poorly designed systems.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed that message in the agency’s 2023 road safety report: “As motor vehicles proliferate, countries are doubling down on transport systems built for cars, not people, and not with safety at their core,” he wrote. 

There’s a lot of wisdom to this, as the American experience over the last century well shows. The US experiment in car dependence has burdened us with a road fatality rate that rivals nations much poorer than us. Urban planners now widely agree that that car-dependent paradigm was a mistake, but now that it’s built out, it’s hard to claw our way out of.

But that lesson also requires some humility: Even a car hater like me can acknowledge that for many people in poorer nations, automobility offers a measure of freedom that rich countries have taken for granted for many years. And it would be a mistake to see simple interventions that can save tens of thousands of lives, and that were instrumental in bringing down car fatalities in rich countries, as mere Band-Aids. We need both approaches. Just as humans did with once-devastating infectious diseases, we will have to learn to see a person killed for simply trying to get somewhere not as a tragic act of God, but as the result of forces within our control. 

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In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But in the year of our Lord 2026, a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

A number of far-right dissidents, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, are asking questions about whether President Donald Trump is more than he seems. “Could this be the Antichrist?” Tucker Carlson asked on his podcast. “Well, who knows?” It didn’t help when Trump posted an AI-slop image of himself as the Messiah, which he later claimed was meant to be a doctor. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” conservative Rod Dreher told the Wall Street Journal. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

It’s more than blasphemy.
It’s an Antichrist spirit. https://t.co/Lqd9GkBPmO

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 13, 2026

The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist. 

Scholars and experts on biblical writing and apocalyptic history say there’s a long history of perceived antichrist figures popping up in moments of collective crisis or despair in the western world. And there are certain traits that tend to supercharge these narratives — the presence of war (especially in the Middle East), economic or public health crises, political or societal instability, and the appearance of an unusually charismatic leader. 

Needless to say, we were probably due for a revival. 

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing. 

So it’s a good time to ask: Where did the idea of the Antichrist come from in the first place? How does it tend to manifest in politics? And what is it about our current moment that’s driving such renewed interest in the concept? 

The biblical roots of the Antichrist

It’s probably helpful to start off with actually defining what the Antichrist is, and what the signs that believers in his arrival actually are. 

Definitions vary across various Christian denominations and traditions, but they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages that either use this term explicitly or get linked to the same figure. 

Surprisingly, the term “antichrist” only appears five times in the New Testament. These explicit mentions in the letters of the disciple John refer  to “deceivers” who come to confuse Christians by denying Jesus Christ’s divinity and preaching other heresies. Scripture suggests that there can be (and have been) multiple antichrists, whose aim is to derail the faithful from achieving salvation.

Whether this is a symbolic or literal figure depends on Christian traditions, and how close you link these passages to references to other beasts and deceivers written about in other parts of the New Testament. For example: The apostle Paul writes of a “man of lawlessness” in his second letter to the Thessalonians, who “will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” 

Then you have horror-movie, apocalyptic visions from the Book of Revelations about the chaotic period before the second coming of Christ, which includes reference to a seven-headed “beast coming out of the sea,” who bears a fatal wound, “but the fatal wound had been healed.” This beast is empowered by a dragon, understood to be Satan, and the people of the world stand in awe and worship this beast, asking “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” 

Catholics and mainline Protestants have less literal interpretations of these passages. 

Many mainline Protestant denominations teach that these figures are more symbolic manifestations of unholy traits and un-Christianlike beliefs and behavior, not an actual being who is due to appear at some point in the future.

Catholics are called to view the “antichrist” as a period of intense prosecution, testing of the church, and the rise of false prophets; “a final trial” before Christ returns in which believers face a “supreme religious deception” and are faced with a choice to believe in a “pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah” or stay true to their faith. 

But the Catholic Church also cautions against believing claims that an antichrist figure is imminently coming. And the explicit characters in the Bible have been understood by many scholars to be references to Roman leaders who persecuted Christians during early church history.

More fundamentalist and evangelical believers, however, view all these textual clues as actual signposts and steps in the process toward the apocalypse and Christ’s return. That’s been the main entry point for the Antichrist’s place in American culture.  

The long history of the Antichrist in the Western imagination

Because of the detail and color of these symbols and characters in the Bible, it has been enticing for believers and readers to draw firm connections between the text and the real world. 

“They read the Bible like it’s a secret code book, and that if they can unlock the code, then they can understand what’s going to happen in the end times,” Matthew A. Sutton, a historian of American apocalypticism at Washington State University, told me. “It’s a very modern way to read the Bible compared to what you would’ve seen through much of church history.”

“So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”

Brett Whalen, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sutton and other historians differentiate between the modern (and by that they mean in the last century) antichrist discourse and historical beliefs. But there tend to be some preconditions necessary for this chatter to rise that go back even further in time: war in the Middle East, the rise of charismatic or terrifying leaders, and environmental, political, or economic catastrophe.

For example, the turn of the first millennium was one of the earliest surges in interest in the figure of the Antichrist, given explicit references in the Bible to thousand-year periods (as in Christ’s thousand-year kingdom on Earth, from the Book of Revelations) and the violent and unstable nature of life in the early Middle Ages, Brett Whalen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. In the same century, the First Crusade sparked another of these waves, as crusaders captured Jerusalem from Islamic rule. And the Middle Ages were rife with antichrist talk, primarily by critics of the papacy. 

“You can always call the pope ‘Antichrist,’” Whalen said. “Historically, they’re probably the No. 1 candidate for being Antichrist, or kings or emperors. You had a limited cast.”

Various secular rulers have been labeled as such too: Frederick II, a Holy Roman emperor around the turn of the 12th century, was called Antichrist by the pope with whom he regularly feuded. The Muslim sultan Saladin, who retook Jerusalem around this time, was similarly described as such.

“Martin Luther was called Antichrist when the Protestant Reformation happened,” Whalen said. “So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”

What makes modern iterations of the Antichrist different

So how did these historical waves of antichrist panic lead us to Donald Trump and Peter Thiel? 

Blame America, in this case. In the modern era, antichrists became democratized, as US-based evangelical movements picked up steam, literal readings of the Bible spread, and end-times theories were solidified. 

“Obsessing over everyday news and trying to align that with biblical prophecy — that is a modern American phenomenon,” Sutton told me. “And by modern, that begins in the 1880s, 1890s, and that really is what gives birth to fundamentalism, [another] uniquely American phenomenon. And then fundamentalism morphs into today’s evangelicalism.” 

Certainly, the news seemed to confirm their suspicions: Even for secular Americans, it’s easy to feel like a particular moment is a time of struggle, or that we’re headed toward some violent catharsis, or are being engulfed by a personality cult.

And the 20th century, marked by two World Wars, the rise and fall of new totalitarian governments, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, was especially fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Figures like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were all labeled Antichrists; President Franklin D. Roosevelt also faced accusations. 

In the postwar period, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was another crucial development in today’s antichrist theology. Many of the apocalyptic biblical stories center on the Holy Land, the return of Jewish people to it, and a period of tribulation for them; there, this antichrist figure will allow the Jewish people to rebuild a temple, then betray them, demand worship, and assemble global armies under his command for a final battle in the valley of Armageddon (which historically is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel).

Now, these narratives have become central to dispensationalist evangelical theology: Israel’s unity and existence must be preserved in order for these phases to take shape, and for the eventual rapture to occur. Consequently, “anything that involves Israel or the Middle East is going to trigger speculation” of end-times prophesies, Sutton said, especially when there’s instability or war in the region.

These literal biblical interpretations also suggest a period of global domination by the Antichrist — governments submit to this figure and turn over their armies to him. 

“Part of what has driven concerns about the Antichrist is the idea that they’re going to sacrifice American sovereignty through a global organization,” Sutton said. “And so this is why religious conservatives are so suspicious of groups like NATO and especially the United Nations, because they believe ultimately we’re moving towards one world government, and it’s the Antichrist. He’s going to prevail over that one world.”

Combined with the expectation that the antichrist figure will be a charismatic leader, you get the more recent panics: Saddam Hussein faced antichrist allegations during the Gulf War. Hillary Clinton was called the Antichrist. But nobody drew more scrutiny in recent times than Barack Obama, whose meteoric political rise on a message of greater international cooperation and outreach to the Muslim world made him a magnet for antichrist talk. 

This speculation broke into the mainstream in 2008, when some Democrats accused former Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign of deliberately referencing it with a web video mocking Obama’s celebrity by depicting him as a Moses-like religious figure. 

The McCain campaign denied it was a dogwhistle, but the discussion around the topic grew so heated that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind novels about the Antichrist, stepped in to publicly reassure their Christian readers that Obama was not the figure they had in mind. 

Which brings us to 2026. The latest panics fit neatly into these traditions: Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures seem to boil down to a fear over technological stagnation and growing opposition to artificial intelligence. He warns that efforts to regulate AI, in the name of fighting some future existential risk, could bring about the conditions for a central power to seize global authoritarian control — the Antichrist. 

Sutton, who has written about these lectures before, argues that it’s not the most novel approach, but it is dangerous: “Dressing political theory in apocalyptic robes carries risks. When powerful actors reframe ordinary policy debates such as about guardrails for AI as a battle against the antichrist, they raise anxieties, delegitimize compromise and insinuate that democratic deliberation is spiritually suspect.”

The recent Trump panic, however, is a bit of an inversion: Trump is typically championed by the same right-wing religious figures who are most attuned to literal interpretations of the Antichrist and the end times. It’s surprising that figures like Carlson and Fuentes would break the seal on this front. But, historically speaking, Trump also fits the mold of prior antichrist hunts: He is surely a charismatic leader; he’s launched civilizational wars in the Middle East; he’s survived assassination attempts, mimicking the fatal, but healed, wound of the beast of Revelations; and he’s blasphemed and used the trappings of religion to advance his personal brand.

But to focus on any one person or movement as antichrist is to miss the broader point, Robert Fuller, a religious studies professor at Bradley University, told me. The concept, applied politically, risks taking an already polarized time and raising the stakes of elections and policy debates even further. 

“This image sustains a crisis mentality,” Fuller said. “It summons out hatred and resentment that can fuel long-term grudges. It makes compromise unthinkable since no one compromises with the devil. It justifies hatred and violence, recasting these traits as virtues.”

In that vein, it’s inevitable that antichrist narratives persist; such a flexible idea can adapt regardless of century. It’s likely we’ll see many recurring returns of the Antichrist, at least until the world does actually end.