Thiel’s 'Antichrist' Never Turns Up

A month after event organizers issued ticket refunds to media members, attendees of Peter Thiel’s "Antichrist" lecture series may be seeking the same remedy. The Silicon Valley tech principal, who's worth more than $30 billion, never actually delivered his goods despite a detour through political, economic, social and religious history that commanded some six hours over four consecutive Monday evening lectures at downtown Nashville's Grand Lodge of Tennessee. Once again, the Scene reviewed a full-length recording of this week's lecture. 

In his final talk on Monday, Thiel offered scant specifics about his Antichrist — the initial premise of the lecture series — beyond an occupation conveniently suited to intense divisiveness. 

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“The Antichrist will be a politician,” stated Thiel 30 minutes into his final lecture, later adding a more specific office. “If you want to look for a person to be the Antichrist, I think the place to look is a very bad president of the United States.” 

Further descriptions revealed Thiel’s partisan argument against Democrats, assigning suspicion to the party’s policies espousing civil liberties, opposing climate change and questioning artificial intelligence. The result was a fourth tour loosely connecting dots across history that supported Thiel’s well-known positions against liberal democracy.

Thiel answered one question in particular. Nashville follows San Francisco and Rome on his lecture circuit, prompting questions about why a modestly sized Southern city factors so centrally into Thiel’s era-spanning vision. Throughout this week’s talk, he defended America as the modern Roman Empire. 

“ I do believe in American exceptionalism insofar as America is the last and final form of the Roman Empire,” said Thiel. “There is no successor. When America is done, the West is done, Christendom is done, and the world is done.”

An apparent personal obsession with individual Christian interpretation, not mediated through a Catholic hierarchy, fits Nashville into Thiel’s Antichrist paradigm.

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“One of the things I get from doing these lectures is a map of the world, a sense of where people are thinking about how to understand our time with reference to Christianity,” concluded Thiel. “The apocalyptic conclusion I've arrived at is that there are very, very few places willing to entertain such a discussion, and to see hundreds of people here turn up for four two-hour dense discussions about our time is heartening.”

In other words: Thiel came to Nashville because there are people who will show up to hear him. For a fourth straight week, people did show up, before capping the evening with an after-party at Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk. He ended with a chilling echo of the violent Christian nationalism that has found a recent foothold in Middle Tennessee. 

“You, as arguably the global capital of Protestantism, as the center of a place with no center, of the form of Christianity that has no center, must get over your inferiority complex and fight,” Thiel said. “You here tonight at these lectures can play an extremely important role in the future of our civilization.”