Inside Peter Thiel’s Nashville Antichrist Lecture #1

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from an researcher and writer we’re giving the pseudonym Jay PH.

On Peter Thiel: South African billionaire Peter Thiel is the man that funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker which eventually took down that entire news organization. He’s also the co-founder of the “data” firm, Palantir, that spy agencies love to use. Thiel is JD Vance’s mentor and helped elect Vance to his Senate seat. The billionaire whose net worth is valued at over $35 Billion according to Forbes also communicates with white nationalists.

Jay PH reporting from Nashville, TN

When Peter Thiel took to the stage for the first night of his Antichrist Lectures in Nashville, Tennessee, my first impression was of a man who did not feel he belonged. His presentation style, as anyone who has seen him interviewed can attest, is stilted, halting and meandering.

Despite performing for a friendly audience generally invested in his worldview, Thiel delivered his talk like a shy musician, mostly hiding behind his podium and gesturing at his minimalist slide deck. The audience, for their part, were clearly familiar with Thiel’s catalogue, nodding along and politely clapping at the appropriate times.

But for anyone in the audience unfamiliar with conservative grievance-nostalgia in general or Thiel’s brand of it in particular, this would have been a confusing evening full of non sequiturs and arcane references to religious art.

Thiel’s Antichrist Lectures, delivered first in San Francisco and then in Rome, Italy, have finally come to Nashville, Tennessee. This 4-part lecture series promises to expound on one of Thiel’s stranger interests: the Biblical Antichrist and its relationship to modern society. The first of the four lectures, describing the relationship between the antichrist and armageddon, took a meandering path through religious art, conservative nostalgia and complaints about higher education before finally landing on the notion that global AI regulation would be a profoundly dangerous policy to implement.

How very convenient for Thiel’s portfolio.

The lecture was delivered on the main stage at downtown Nashville’s Grand Lodge Building, the chief meeting place of Tennessee’s Free and Accepted Masons. This groan-inducing choice of venue is typical of Thiel’s style: provocative, on-the-nose, and intellectually vapid. The VIP area, which consisted of a handful of roped-off church pews placed over the iconic black-and-white checkered floor, housed the most ardent of the Thiel acolytes.

I sat in the balcony, as it gave me a better view of the crowd, which interested me at least as much as Thiel’s remarks. What struck me about both the crowd and Thiel himself was the utter lack of creativity on display. Each of these men (and they were mostly men) had clearly picked a particular ghoul to emulate.

As the time for Thiel to take the stage grew closer, I saw maybe six Charlie Kirks come into the auditorium with their round faces, swooped hair and utterly gormless expressions. I saw several Tucker Carlson models, easily distinguished by their bowties and slightly overdone tans. The JD Vance model was very popular that night, with varying levels of eyeshadow application skill on display. I saw a handful of the Nick Fuentes model, easily parsed from the others by the massive suits they packed their tiny bodies into.

As Thiel’s people prepared the stage for his arrival, the crowd settled and the lights dimmed. The introduction was quick and to the point, with the moderator noting that Nashville, and the American southeast as a whole, was one of the last places on earth with “authentic Christian culture.”

The talk itself was unremarkable in every way. Thiel is not an engaging speaker, and the content will be familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Thiel’s public statements and persona. He decried political correctness, university education, regulatory systems, and globalism, suggesting that these cultural forces have produced a stagnant society, afraid to give the reins to true men of power and vision.

Thiel went so far as to reuse several of his catchphrases he has developed over the years, such as his evergreen complaint that, “we used to have flying cars. Now we just have 140 characters.” This statement, a complaint about changing horizons of how we see the future, is emblematic of the Gen X nostalgia baiting that Thiel engages in so regularly.

Other, similar complaints include how we’re not inventing faster planes, we haven’t cured cancer yet, and that science isn’t as cool as when Thiel was a kid. Indeed, much of the talk seemed to be focused on how things just aren’t as cool as they used to be. Thankfully, Thiel stopped short of recounting how he would drink from the hose in his childhood, but I was surprised by how much of his remarks were eaten up by bog-standard nostalgic whining. This content seemed popular with the audience, however, who vigorously nodded along.

When he wasn’t expressing his deep-seated anhedonia, Thiel would occasionally wander back on topic, holding forth about how the antichrist may refer to a system or to a particular person. His systemic critiques were vapid, bog-standard libertarian critiques of regulation, democracy and political correctness.

The philosophical and theological parts of his talk were equally vapid, clearly deployed to give the illusion of academic rigor while completely failing to move his argument forward. Emblematic of his philosophical tourism, Thiel referred to “Hegel’s” system of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, which is actually an invention of Johan Fichte and not present anywhere in Hegel.

I know that’s pretty deep in the weeds, and to be fair, we do culturally associate the tripartite synthesis system with Hegel, but I’m sorry, if you want me to take you seriously as a thinker and public intellectual, you should at least do the bare minimum reading to get it right.

Thiel likewise deployed the work of John Henry Newman, whose 4-part lecture on the antichrist in the 1830s is one of the most popular theological works on the subject. Sound familiar? That’s because it mirrors the 4-part lecture series Thiel is delivering. If the content of the talks were more compelling, I would maybe consider this an homage, but with the pure vapidity of the content, this smells more like Thiel asking Newman to copy his homework.

OK, so the philosophy is a bust. The theology is a bust, as well. Surely, I thought, the rest of the talk will contain something of value. That was not the case. After complaining that things aren’t as cool as they used to be and blaming that on universities and multiculturalism, Thiel turned to his notions on policy. In this portion of the talk, he included a 4-square chart on his slide deck. The Y-axis contained “Just” and “Unjust,” and the X-axis included “War” and “Peace.”

Thiel went on to explain that World War I was an unjust war, and that World War II was a just war, filling those terms into the 4-square chart. Then, he went on to say that Cold War I was a just peace, and that the upcoming Cold War II between the US and China was going to be an unjust peace, because, wait for it, it might result in a multipolar regulatory system that hampers the growth of AI technology.

The staggering stupidity of this chart has stayed with me in the time after the lecture. Not only does it play fast and loose with history, political theory and the chronology of the 20th century, but it also points to the gaping hole at the center of this entire endeavor: Peter Thiel has nothing interesting to say.

This chart, and its associated policy implications, is the best representation of the fundamental intellectual fraud at the heart of Thiel’s endeavor here. He desperately wants to be taken seriously as a public intellectual, but he is either unable or unwilling to actually do the work necessary to construct arguments.

Thiel closed out with some vague, dire warnings about China and the United States implementing multipolar AI regulatory systems. He will certainly return to these claims in subsequent weeks of the lecture series, but the link between AI regulation and the antichrist is a tenuous one, and his attempts to link the two are so far sloppy, vague, and unconvincing.

Thankfully, his audience isn’t there to be convinced. They’re already convinced. They just want to bask in the warm glow of their hero, a man who has shown them that you don’t need to be well-read, well-spoken, or well-liked to be influential. And yet, despite Thiel’s limitless wealth and power, there is something sad and desperate about this speaking tour.

Thiel makes bold claims, but those claims are backed with neither evidence nor warrants that connect the evidence to the claim. This is basic stuff, the kind of instruction you’d receive in a first-year college public speaking or composition class. It’s a shame, then, that Thiel is so opposed to universities in general and humanities departments in particular, because he could clearly use some instruction on how to make a decent argument.

Jay PH is a researcher, teacher and artist based in the American Southeast. His research combines machine learning tools and rhetorical criticism to explore how far-right communities are created and sustained online.