Starting on September 28, 2026, Peter Thiel gave a series of four off-the-record lectures about the Antichrist. These were held in Nashville at the Grand Lodge of Tennessee Free and Accepted Masons on four consecutive Mondays.

I was fortunate enough to attend each of these lectures, and more fortunate yet to be permitted to write about their contents. Thiel has given versions of these talks previously, also off the record, in San Francisco and Rome. As I did not break the rules by sneaking in a recording device, the below is my best attempt at a faithful reconstruction of the events and arguments from my memory, notes, and occasional reference to online posts from other attendees.

I. The arrival

I parked several minutes’ walk from the Masonic lodge, arriving half an hour before the event’s 6 p.m. posted start time. As I approached, it became clear that this was insufficient: winding down from the metal detectors situated atop the pillared building’s stone stairs, and past multiple security guards and a pacing K-9 team, was a line of people so long that it turned the street corner and continued on for multiple blocks. I walked sheepishly to its caboose.

The crowd was largely male and suit-wearing, not in a formal or businessy way, but rather in a tieless or two-buttons-undone way. I expected to see a larger presence of bespectacled, bed-headed techy types, but in their stead found throngs of guys who were much conventionally cooler than I was and were likely cigar puffers or raw-egg slonkers.

There were a lot of young men who looked plucked out of a College Republicans club, but there were also perhaps a few more women, old and young, than one would have expected to see at the event. As we collectively snaked our way up to the front for ID checks, the sidewalk and adjacent buildings’ wall nooks became increasingly strewn with notebooks and pens. Apparently, a message had been passed down that note taking would not be permitted. The flat top of some truncated pillar nearest to the security entrance was littered with several dozen short-cylindrical Zyn tins, as it turned out that these were also prohibited. It was not particularly surprising to me that this crowd, as a demographic, would be packing heavy Zyn artillery. Both prohibitions (notebooks, Zyns) were later lifted by the organizers, citing overzealous security, meaning that I was able to take written notes for three of the four lectures I attended.

The theater was large and somewhat traditional, with raked red velvet seating. Space in the center, in front of the stage, was rowed with pew-like wooden benches and roped off for VIPs. Each session was to have a roughly two-hour format: a one-hour lecture followed by an hour-long Q&A moderated by Peter Robinson, a Hoover Institution fellow (and host of the popular Uncommon Knowledge podcast) who penned Reagan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech.

Peter Thiel came out from stage left. His lecture slides were displayed behind him on an extremely large, blindingly bright screen that was maybe twelve feet tall and covered the entire width of the stage. The slides were simple in design: white backgrounds and blue text. He settled at the podium and began.

Author’s note: Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe have co-authored two excellent essays, “Voyages to the End of the World” (October 2025) and “The Pope and the Antichrist” (July 2026), which overlap with certain elements of the Antichrist lectures. I recommend reading each in its entirety.

II. Biblical end-times prophecy

The Christianity of these lectures is central; they are necessarily Christian and rely heavily on Biblical descriptions of the end of history and the signs that herald its coming. Thiel says that he modeled them after John Henry Newman’s four-part 1835 lecture series, “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist.”

In one of the Q&A sessions with Peter Robinson, Thiel — affectionately referred to throughout as the “young” Peter, relative to the boomer-generation Peter Robinson — described himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian.” When asked if he believes that Scripture is “inspired,” he responds, “yes, it should be taken seriously, though sometimes not completely literally.” Thiel emphasized that we should study and reason about the Bible, rather than follow it blindly, and notes that one will find it to have a surprising resonance with our times. In a related discussion, he emphasized that the so-called “Great Books” are much lesser than the Bible and should not be worshipped. Instead, these books should be treated as tools to understand their times and must themselves be considered through the lens of the Bible. This approach sets up the ethos for much of the following lecture series.

The Christian eschatology that Thiel draws upon tells of an apocalyptic age dominated by a deceptive ruler referred to as the Antichrist — the portrait of this ruler is one constructed through an amalgamation of biblical sources and whose shape is up to some level of ecumenical interpretation.

Revelation tells of a beast from the sea, often interpreted as the Antichrist and his associated apparatus of power, and a beast from the land, who rises from the earth to persuade humanity to worship the beast from the sea and enforces this worship under threat of death. This latter figure is viewed as a kind of ideological or religious ally to the Antichrist, a false prophet.

Satan empowers the beast from the sea to exercise authority over all peoples, languages, and nations. It wages war against the saints, and all earthly kings surrender their power to it. From this, and other earlier biblical mentions, the image of the Antichrist as a one-world totalitarian dictator emerges. If the Bible is true, or at least “inspired,” how do we end up in such a dire situation, and what can be done to delay or prevent it, if anything?

The reign of these beasts precedes a final conflict in which Christ returns victorious; the Antichrist and false prophet are cast into a lake of fire. Christ then reigns for a thousand years, during which time Satan is bound. Satan is released after this epoch, briefly rebels, and is eternally defeated. God then passes final judgment on the dead, death and hell are cast into the lake of fire, and a new heaven and earth replace the old.

Even more complicating, then, is the implication that the Antichrist’s arrival is a necessary precursor to the Second Coming of Christ and subsequent renewal of all creation. Does stopping one prevent the other? Should we even be looking to delay the end of the world? Maybe we should just accelerate, put the pedal to the floor and close our eyes and just get it all over with already.

While portrayed metaphorically as the beast from the sea in Revelation’s account, the Antichrist has long been thought to manifest himself in a counterintuitively Christlike manner. Thiel featured Luca Signorelli’s “Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist” in his lectures multiple times: It shows Satan whispering into the ear of the visually Christlike Antichrist, and the upper-left scene of the fresco depicts the Antichrist’s failed imitation of the Ascension of Christ.

To understand the arguments that Thiel sets forth, it is important to understand that the Antichrist will be somehow very much like Christ, perhaps even hyper-Christian in a perverted way, superficially co-opting the culture and moral ethic of Christianity while removing Jesus Himself from its center. Thiel cites Matthew 24:24, “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” If even “the very elect” of the Christian body may be deceived, the Antichrist must at least appear to have something in common with Christ.

III. The Christian view of history

A key feature of the Christian conception of history is that it is progressive, rather than cyclical. We are moving through time toward an endpoint. More than this, Christianity itself is a primary driver of that history. It is upstream of science, says Thiel, referencing French philosopher René Girard’s burgeoningly acclaimed and often shallowly represented theory of mimetic desire. The nuances of Girard’s philosophy are too difficult to crack open here, but suffice it to say that this logic involves a process of desacralization which is intertwined with the spread of Christianity and results in the deconstruction of the “scapegoating” victimage mechanism. Thiel’s simplified explanation is that when you can no longer scapegoat a witch and burn her at the stake to restore societal unity, you have to instead begin looking for natural causes. This creates a cascading effect which, in turn, means — per Thiel and Girard — that the Christian understanding of progress is upstream of the Enlightenment.

This is not an idea acknowledged only by those of Christian faith: great non-Christian thinkers have similarly recognized Christianity’s role in shaping history. Nietzsche understood that Christianity as a moral and cultural force could not be left behind, as much as he desperately wished to obviate its influence, and he realized that it was Christianity which reshaped the modern understanding of morality.

Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and inspiration behind Dr. Strangelove’s character, was an agnostic of Jewish heritage. He wrote in a July 1945 letter to Leo Szilárd that he wished to leverage the power of atomic bombs in order to end war itself. One who believes that war as a concept can be ended cannot fully subscribe to a cyclical historical framework, which would instead view conflict as endlessly recurring between powers.

Thiel emphasizes that even as things get greater over time, they can grow more terrible. The 20th century was the most great and most terrible, he said, but the 21st could be “even greater and more terrible.” This is endemic to the Christian historical idea.

IV. Signs of the (end) times

Given, then, that the Christian eschatological age is a potential reality rather than simply fictional invention, one might begin to wonder where we are on the timeline. Will the milk in my fridge have time to curdle? Should I empty the 401k and IRA, penalties be damned, and live while the living is free?

The end may not be quite that imminent, but Thiel does identify a series of signs that indicate we may be in, or very near to, the aforedescribed apocalyptic time. The first of these is somewhat meta-referential: the fact that we frequently talk about armageddon, but do not talk anymore about the Antichrist.

i. Antichrist and armageddon

For those attuned to the culture of modernity, the prevalence of armageddon discourse is self-evident. Various groups of people proselytize their particular causes: Greta and the hyperbolic climate change people, those who think we are always on the brink of nuclear war, the effective altruists and rationalists who tell tales of misaligned artificial intelligence killing us all, those convinced of existential bioweapon and pandemic threats, and so on.

We, Christian society, have discussed and thought through the problems of the Antichrist for two thousand years. The anomaly is not that these lectures on the Antichrist are happening, but rather that such a topic is seen as strange and outside the Overton window. Thiel’s point of emphasis is not that fears of armageddon are without basis — whatever your particular catastrophic flavor of choice — but rather that there is a complicated relationship between Antichrist and armageddon, and that if everyone is talking about armageddon, we should probably think more about the threat of the Antichrist.

This leads to one of the most fundamental pieces of Peter Thiel’s thinking on this topic: the Antichrist, he says, is likely to come into power by playing on people’s fears of armageddon.

Thiel recounts Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s — a Lutheran pastor and theologian — identification of Hitler as the Antichrist and the Reich Church as spiritual accomplice. Bonhoeffer’s movement incited Claus von Stauffenberg’s July 1944 assassination attempt, in which the latter recited Stefan George’s “The Antichrist” to his co-conspirators before planting a bomb intended to kill Hitler. Thiel says that historians censor the Antichristic elements of the Bonhoeffer and von Stauffenberg events, and that this is evidence of a longer preexisting unwillingness in modernity to talk about the Antichrist. Thiel noted that we have 378 years to “catch up” on, a duration which maps to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, an agreement that ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. In a 2024 conversation with Tyler Cowen about political theology, Thiel said that “these sorts of things were abandoned… one type of reason it was abandoned was because it’s too hard to figure this stuff out… I’m inclined to think the other reason was, it was often deemed as too dangerous, too divisive.” Talking about the Antichrist is perceived as dangerous not because it is ridiculous, but because it strikes some sort of underlying nerve of modernity.

ii. Globalism as creating totalitarian plausibility

One of the binding scriptural citations that shows up throughout the lecture series is Daniel 12:4, which reads, “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” This latter phrase, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased,” is taken by Thiel as a reference in part to globalism. He shows in the lectures, and discusses in one of the essays co-authored with Sam Wolfe, the below 1620 frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s “Instauratio Magna.” It features, in Latin, this section of Daniel 12:4 inscribed underneath the Pillars of Hercules, symbolic of the boundary of the known world. The reference is to maritime exploration and to early globalization.

What we now have, in late-stage globalization, is a set of conditions which make international totalitarianism a less ridiculous proposition than it was in the 17th century. The world is more connected than ever before: the internet and other global digital architectures; thirteen million international flights each year; supply chains distributed across the face of the earth; bureaucratic political unification structures like the EU and the United Nations; shared mass culture and global migration.

iii. Stagnation, singularity, and mastery over death

Peter displayed two graphic representations of chronological technological progress and presented them as competing future trajectories. The first, stagnation, showed accelerating progress as in the past. The second, singularity, depicted a relative flatness followed by a future exponential.

Thiel’s long-standing “stagnation thesis” — skepticism about the magnitude and types of progress that we have had over the last fifty or so years — is well-known and has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. He briefly recapped this in the lectures, pointing out that the fact that AI “feels so different” from what has come before it serves as a kind of “retroactive proof” for the thesis. He indicated that the second, singularity-depicting graph is what Silicon Valley would like us to believe. His own view on the matter, as far as the future goes, remained somewhat ambiguous to me.

Thiel asserted a dramatic decline of scientific ambition over time, tracing the idea from early modernity’s search for immortality through to later modernity’s MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) phenomenon, remarking that this is a woeful interpretation of “mastery of death via science.” This seems emblematic of some kind of stagnation which is manifesting in technology but rooted in a deeper cultural or spiritual malaise.

This was connected to sporadic discussion throughout the lectures on transhumanism, which Peter does not view as being in opposition to Christianity. He noted that Matthew 10:8 is an imperative (“Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils”) and posited that, perhaps, transhumanism does not go far enough, and that Christian transformation goes even further than that. Thiel noted that Peter and Paul perform resurrection miracles of their own in Acts (Tabitha and Eutychus, respectively).

Eliezer Yudkowsky, an influential figure in early AI who now preaches its apocalyptic dangers, is described by Thiel as transforming from a transhumanist optimist into a Ludditic pessimist. Yudkowsky wrote in a 2022 essay that we should “shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with [sic] slightly more dignity.” The essay was published on April Fool’s Day, though Thiel — and many of those within the rationalist and effective altruist communities themselves — do not take it to be completely satirical.

iv. The end of the Great Commission

Another sign that the end times are nigh, says Thiel, is the ostensible fulfillment of the Great Commission. The Great Commission is a common Christian concept often sourced to Jesus’ words in Matthew 28:19 — “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Worldwide proclamation of the gospel, per Matthew 24:14, precedes the end times: “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”

How many, today, have not heard the gospel? In John Paul II’s February 21, 2001, homily, he asks, “Is this not a sign of the Church’s ability, now that she has spread to every corner of the globe”? Thiel references the 2018 attempt by John Allen Chau — a then twenty-six-year-old American missionary — to bring the gospel to the North Sentinelese, one of the last “uncontacted” peoples on the Earth. Chau was killed on the island. Perhaps this was their opportunity, and the Great Commission is now over, posits Thiel.

v. Society without succession

When society becomes dominated by a gerontocracy no longer concerned with its succession, as Thiel argues ours has, one cannot help but think apocalyptic thoughts. A successionless society is clearly not thinking hard enough about the future. Thiel asserts that there is an endemic lack of consideration among baby boomers around the idea of financial and political succession in particular. Bill Clinton “sabotaged” Hillary Clinton, Peter says in a tongue-in-cheek manner, before suggesting that perhaps Barack Obama is even “more narcissistic” than Bill Clinton in this way. The boomer-led Giving Pledge — a commitment by billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes — is anti-dynastic and anti-succession by its nature. Thiel says that there is “no eschatology for boomers.”

V. The katechon

If, then, the end times are either nigh or already upon us, and the Christian conception of them is in some way predictive, we must think about the concept of the “katechon.” The katechon is described in the Bible as a restraining force that prevents the arrival of the “lawless one,” the Antichrist. It is only once the katechon is removed or hijacked that the Antichrist can ascend to global power.

i. Katechon as historical power

Thiel borrows a framework from Carl Schmitt’s “Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History,” which was a criticism of Karl Löwith’s attempt in “Meaning in History” to estrange Christian eschatology from the progression of world history. These three possibilities are as follows:

1. Great Parallel — History is cyclical; our current historical situation simply mirrors the world of early Christianity and Roman civil wars.

2. Katechon — Historical powers are differentiated throughout time, but serve katechontic roles and restrain the coming of the end.

3. Marian — A more difficult concept which involves Mary as the mother of Christ playing a major role in irrevocably altering history through receptive participation, rather than through direct mastery of worldly forces.

Thiel appears to somewhat reject the Great Parallel while embracing elements of both the katechontic and Marian approaches. He does, however, note that the Holy Roman Emperors — Charlemagne, Frederick II, and Charles V are specified — combined all three concepts to form a major katechontic empire.

Some believe that many end-times prophecies were already fulfilled in the past, e.g. preterists, some that the katechon was removed long ago and that the Antichrist is in some form the papacy, e.g. some historicist Lutherans, and others — a widespread view — believe that the katechon is still in place today, and that its removal and the subsequent coming of the Antichrist lie in the future. Thiel falls into this last group.

The katechon is necessarily violent and pagan on some level. It changes shape and is of history — frequently identified as various empires. It is time-bound and eventually deconstructed by the gospel. These mechanisms of deconstruction are related in complicated ways to the Girardian exposure of scapegoating and the progressive nature of Christian timing. In the same way that there exist both “the Antichrist” and “antichristic figures,” one can think about both “the katechon” and related “katechontic forces.”

Thiel and Wolfe discuss Pope Benedict XVI at length in their The Pope and the Antichrist essay, so I will stick to the basics. Before becoming Pope Benedict, he was Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger made a 1969 radio prediction that the Church of the 21st century would become less entangled with worldly powers and shrink over time to resemble the Church of the 1st century: small, nonviolent, not particularly katechontic. This idea that entities must deal with forces of the world in perhaps less-than-Christian ways in order to be katechontic, e.g. through the state’s enforcement of violence, is one that Thiel sees both truth and difficult tension in.

Just as there is a complicated relationship between Antichrist and armageddon — as well as “Armageddon,” the biblical location of the final worldly conflict from which the general term arises — there is a complicated relationship between the katechon and the Antichrist. Thiel says that it is possible both for the katechon to become the Antichrist and for the Antichrist to hijack the katechon for his own purposes. He gives examples of archetypical katechontic and antichristic figures that mirror one another, e.g., Claudius and Nero, Charlemagne and Napoleon. Carl Schmitt, whose framework was borrowed above and who is mentioned frequently throughout the lectures, saw the katechontic Leviathan — viewed as a kind of empire or state apparatus — mutating into an antichristic power in his esoteric “The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.”

ii. The “katechontic” Christian ethic

In my estimation, the tension between the two ethics that Thiel refers to as “katechontic ‘pagan’ Christianity” and “hyper-Christianity,” and his stated desire to find an acceptable “middle path” between them, are perhaps the most important and yet-unresolved elements of these Antichrist lectures.

Following from the necessary worldly entanglements and violent characteristics, in Thiel’s view, of the katechon as described above, he expands this idea to a set of demonstrative concepts and their “hyper-Christian” opposites.

A selection of these dichotomous representations in katechontic vs. hyper-Christian pairings: Constantine vs. Mother Teresa, sacred violence vs. nonviolence, the Good Samaritan vs. the welfare state, attending church to find a spouse and community vs. attending church to save your soul, and Great Individuals vs. no individuals. Thiel says that he is more sympathetic to the katechontic side of things, and wary of its opposite, but again recognizes that in some way the katechontic ethic is not quite as Christian, and he wonders what degree of leeway one has to take actions that slow the coming of the Antichrist.

He made the follow-up point that, in some sense, conservatives are too katechontic and liberals are too Christian. Thiel referred to the welfare state, for example, as “the Good Samaritan at gunpoint” and characterized it as an “antichristic parody.” He also noted that the Christian revival happening today has “a very strange character.”

VI. When will the Antichrist arrive?

Matthew 24:36 states that we cannot know the “day and hour” of the end. Thiel criticizes the Joachimites — medieval Christians inspired by Joachim of Fiore who predicted that the Age of the Holy Spirit would begin in the year 1260 — and the Millerites — a 19th-century group led by William Miller that predicted the Second Coming would occur on October 22, 1844 — for being too ambitious with their degree of specificity. He also, however, criticizes Thomas Aquinas for his lack of ambition on this front. (Aquinas wrote that “No period, either long or short, can be determined, in which is to be expected the end of the world, or the coming of Christ or of Antichrist.”)

Thiel posits, instead: “perhaps we may know the century.”

He characterizes the katechon as a restraining force, but also as having a sense of expansion toward something greater. Thiel discusses the Baconian belief in conquering chance through science, contrasting it with the burgeoning technological pessimism of late modernity while critiquing Bacon’s anti-Christian frame of believing in science as a substitutionary salvational force for Christ.

Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee who lost to FDR in the 1940 election, wrote a bestselling book called One World that argued for a post-WWII vision of international cooperation. In the Antichrist lectures, Thiel characterized Willkie’s argument as a sort of Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic: globalism is an inevitable fact, so you must work hard to bring it about. Like the fulfillment of the Great Commission — in Thiel’s estimation — this element of inevitability and completion pushes on his characterization of the katechon as necessarily expansive in some way, rather than in a state of rest or resignation.

Thiel asks whether empires are providential or demonic. His answer to the question involves this katechontic character of pursuing something greater, and he concludes that perhaps expanding empires are providential, while completed empires are susceptible to antichristic mutations and hijackings and therefore tend toward the demonic.

VII. By what means will the Antichrist ascend to power?

Peter Thiel has long referred to “peace and safety,” sourced from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, as the “slogan” of the Antichrist. In Thessalonians, proclamations of peace and safety precede sudden destruction. It is through talking about the dangers of armageddon that the Antichrist will be able to consolidate his rule under international governance, Thiel argues.

Matthew 24:6 reads, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” Thiel reads the “rumours of wars” as somehow an escalation of the “wars” that come before, implying that perhaps WWI and WWII could be the wars in question and the Antichrist’s leveraging of armageddon fears the referenced escalatory rumors of wars. The Antichrist might offer “peace and safety” in exchange for humanity’s freedom, leading to our acceptance of an “unjust peace.”

Jesus’ command in that verse, to “see that ye be not troubled,” potentially supports the idea that succumbing to a fear of these rumors would be a mistake that catalyzes the end of the world.

i. The antichristic pursuit of unjust peace

In the Cold War, America threaded the needle to lead us into a post-nuclear world. Thiel characterizes this, and the fall of the Soviet Union, as feeling — to him — “close to a miracle.”

Watchmen, a comic book series written by Alan Moore, features “Ozymandias” as its primary villain; he is eponymous with the famous Shelley poem. In Watchmen, Ozymandias kills millions in a false-flag attack in order to unite humanity against a common enemy and avert nuclear armageddon. In the Shelley poem, his long-crumbled statue’s pedestal inscription reads, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” but there is nothing but empty desert surrounding his ruins.

I was already familiar with the Ozymandias of Shelley, but not with the Ozymandias of Watchmen. Upon Googling, I encountered results that I found both fascinating and, frankly, shockingly validating for Thiel’s position:

Francis Bacon wanted to conquer chance through science. Ozymandias wanted to stop science entirely. Alan Moore, the man behind Watchmen, seems to have constructed a story which is against both Christianity and science, leaving it rotting in some kind of nihilistic void, and the pessimistic ending — Rorschach’s journal, which could expose Ozymandias’ scheme, comes into a newspaper employee’s possession — suggests, per Thiel, that Alan Moore had no belief in conquering chance at all.¹

Thiel expands on this idea of just and unjust as modifiers for both war and peace. World War I was an unjust war, he says, World War II was a just war, and the Cold War resolved into a just peace. His fear is that, through humanity’s own choices and the manipulative egging-on of the Antichrist, we might accept unjust peace (one-world totalitarianism) as a resolution to Cold War II (our current and potentially escalatory conflict with China) in order to avoid World War III (an unjust war).

Thiel says that we must have a “tough fight” with China to avoid this potential unjust peace.

ii. Filling deus ex machina plot holes with artificial intelligence

During the lectures, Peter Thiel mentioned both Vladimir Solovyov’s 1900 “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” and Hugh Benson’s 1907 “Lord of the World,” separate fictional accounts depicting the rise of the Antichrist.

Both of these stories, he said, have the same plot hole. In Solovyov’s narrative, the Antichrist writes a book so powerfully unifying that it reconciles everyone’s differences and leads to his becoming the Emperor of Europe. The book’s text is not reproduced. In Benson’s account, the Antichrist gives mesmerizing, hypnotic speeches, possessing some kind of supercharisma by which he ascends to total power. The contents of these speeches are not printed. The pressing problem that Thiel hopes to solve, then, is figuring out a more pragmatic mechanism by which the Antichrist might take over the world.

Thiel references Eliezer Yudkowsky’s 2025 book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” co-authored with fellow rationalist Nate Soares, and draws parallels between it and the “One World or None” 1946 animated film produced by the National Committee on Atomic Information (referred to by Thiel as a “communist” nuclear group). The film depicts an atomic bomb leveling Manhattan and urges international control of atomic energy. The only way these kinds of things could be truly enforced, whether Yudkowsky’s proposed indefinite halt to the development of superintelligence or the Oppenheimer-esque calls for international nuclear government, is through an incredibly powerful totalitarian world state.

Thiel believes that the rise of artificial intelligence, and the secular apocalyptic doomerism being touted by a meaningful section of the sector’s upper echelon, is a plausible mechanism by which the Antichrist may be able to leverage fears of armageddon into international totalitarian control in a short period of time.

AI safetyists, and many of the people building AI, says Thiel, have no real “faith” anchor. (Thiel points out that their faith anchor, particularly for the rationalists, is something vapid like IQ as a measure of value.) Peter says that without this anchoring of faith, these people tend to react in fear.

As Solana noted in his recent “Doom Analysis” piece, AI safetyists seem to have a peculiar obsession with aliens. Thiel briefly discussed what he referred to as “the light-speed plot hole,” explaining that an alien race that could travel at light speed could also fire weapons (presumably thermonuclear, at least) at light speed. Thus, if aliens do exist, since we have not been annihilated without warning, they must either be totally good, i.e., angels, or totally evil, i.e., demons, existing in a sufficiently totalitarian state such that they have managed not to annihilate themselves. This line of logic, and the fact that alien-preoccupied doomers have not arrived at this conclusion independently, supports the idea that AI safetyism may be plagued by certain major blind spots that the Antichrist could leverage to powerful effect.

iii. AI figureheads, disarmament, and regulation

May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in which he discussed artificial intelligence in the context of Catholic theology. On a basic level, the Pope’s tacit endorsement of AI safetyism grants more Western cultural authority to AI doomers, whose authority Thiel believes we should be looking to deconstruct. Further, Thiel dubbed Pope Leo a “useful idiot” inadvertently working on behalf of China and characterized the encyclical itself as some combination of Ludditic and “word salad.” He half-jokingly commented that Obama and the Pope both came out against AI simply to take a popular stance and distract from their respective scandals: that the Democrats are “out of ideas,” and that the Catholic church is afflicted internally with “sex predators.”

Thiel’s argument, as it relates to AI and the Antichrist’s pursuit of an unjust peace, is that some people in America might listen to the Pope, while nobody in China cares at all what the Pope has to say. Thus, this could amount to what is essentially unilateral technological disarmament. The logical conclusion of events would then be China dominating the AI race, creating a set of global conditions through which we may not be able to resolve Cold War II in any way other than unjust peace, as America would have forfeited its negotiating power.

As for the recent public self-flagellations and “pace the frontier” rhetoric coming out of the major AI labs, Thiel attributed this phenomenon to a combination of several factors. First, he says, the major players do not think that the government is actually competent enough to regulate them in any significant way. (Thiel remarks that this, in his opinion, is “playing with fire.”) Second, that crying wolf about the dangers of your AI models is necessary competitive marketing: if your model is not scary at all, then you must be very far behind. Third, that this kind of rhetoric is meant to obscure the potential truth of intelligence becoming commoditized; profits may end up being widely distributed and competed away unless some kind of early regulation can create lock-in for the frontier companies.

iv. Antichristic political miracles

Recall Matthew 24:24, in which Jesus says to his disciples that the “false Christs, and false prophets” will perform “great signs and wonders” in an attempt to “deceive the very elect.” It is in part through these works that the Antichrist will ascend to power. In the Nashville lectures, Thiel asks: what kinds of “miracles” might the Antichrist be performing in order to achieve this goal?

He suggests that these miracles will be not scientific or supernatural wonders, but political miracles. The Solovyov and Benson accounts described earlier, which Thiel reads as insightful, both portray the Antichrist as a political leader who ascends through a series of what are essentially political miracles.

Throughout the lectures, Thiel references the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic as being relevant to the nature of the Antichrist’s workings. He describes this as an “A, but not A” framing. In the Solovyov narrative, the Antichrist reconciles seemingly irreconcilable differences: his social reforms satisfy both the poor and the rich, and he somehow unifies progressive radicals with staunch traditionalists. Thiel sees “peace and safety” as an example of this internally contradictory construction, asserting that “safety” necessarily contains — in both definitional senses, of restraining and of enacting — violence. Peace and safety itself, therefore, represents a kind of political miracle.

He connects this to the false, precarious unity that exists between a free America and a “fundamentally un-free” China. This is perhaps already Hegelian contradiction, a nascent political miracle of an antichristic kind.

v. The international apparatus of the Leviathan

The beast from the sea, sometimes termed the Leviathan, is representative of some kind of Antichrist / antichristic apparatus amalgamation. Aside from the Antichrist’s rise through political miracle to power, he must have mechanisms by which he can then dominate the world. Thiel argues that much of this infrastructure is ideological and financial, and that it already exists, erected largely since 2000.

Thiel talked about the increasingly difficult task of hiding money from the “orcs,” his quippy Tolkien-reference nickname for the tax collectors of the world. He notes that Swiss banking secrecy has eroded and identifies the “Common Reporting Standard,” an international system for automatically sharing financial-account information between tax authorities with 116 participating jurisdictions (not the USA, yet), as a piece of this international financial machinery. He brought up the recent (2025) implosion of the UK non-domicile tax infrastructure, under which one could reside in Britain while having their permanent home elsewhere, claiming that the impetus for its abolition was Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty being too publicly rich (roughly $800m net worth).

He brought up three additional examples of international ideological happenings that seem to indicate antichristic tendencies: Brazil’s temporary 2024 judge-led shutdown of X, Australia’s imposition of widespread online age verification infrastructure that can require video selfies or ID uploads, and the UK’s disconcerting speech-crime arrest spree, which is at a clip of something like at least 12,000 arrests per year under the Communications Act and Malicious Communications Act. Thiel did not mention the following case in particular, but it is perhaps symbolic of the issue: a 15-year-old British boy was arrested in August of this year for posting photos of a local politician on Facebook and mocking his clothing and conduct, editing rabbit ears onto one image and implying in another that the politician was a gay prostitute. He was arrested for this.

We must have the freedom to talk about the Antichrist, says Thiel. If you get arrested in the UK in 2026 for posting on Facebook that some low-level politician looks like a hooker, imagine what might happen if you asked others to consider in intellectual earnest whether or not one powerful man or another were the Antichrist?

Thiel characterized the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the “most shocking ideological machinery.” The ICC website, which Thiel called “highly antichristic,” states in its About section that the organization orients itself “Towards stability and lasting peace.” The ICC is tied to the “United Nations system.”

Netanyahu can’t really fly over Canada, or go to Europe, says Thiel. In January 2025, Netanyahu did not want to risk going to Auschwitz for the 80th liberation commemoration because of the outstanding international arrest warrants.² Putin didn’t go to BRICS in 2023 for the same reason. Thiel claimed that the Cheney family’s hostility toward the Trump administration is a bid to buy leniency from the ICC, and noted that Dick Cheney had avoided Europe before his death. He called the ICC a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the Trump administration as it prosecutes the war in Iran, commenting separately that he is “skeptical” of the Iran war and thinks that we “should not have done it.”

Are American officials increasingly in danger of international arrest and prosecution? Would a leftist U.S. president block the ICC from arresting Trump, Rubio, et al. if it wanted to? Perhaps, Thiel says, such a president might permit or even encourage action against American targets.

On the same day as the final lecture, October 19, 2026, The Bulwark published a podcast episode in which Kara Swisher spoke openly about the next Democratic administration looking to potentially put Elon Musk and Donald Trump in jail. We may have received spiritual confirmation of Peter Thiel’s above supposition in real time as he gave his final Nashville presentation.

VIII. Archetypes of the Antichrist

To begin considering archetypical identities of the Antichrist, Thiel thinks that it is useful to historicize totalitarianism.

1. Incipient — Calling out totalitarianism seems silly at this time, but it is safe to do so. Hitler was arrested in 1923 after attempting to violently seize power in Munich; he went to jail for only nine months and worked on Mein Kampf.

2. Full-blown — The totalitarians are in power, e.g., Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim Jong Un.

3. Decaying — Eastern Bloc countries in the 1970s and 1980s; totalitarianism in this stage can be broken down.

Thiel used Senator Palpatine as an example to make the historical-to-archetypal connection. He described Senator Palpatine as “regular evil,” in the incipient totalitarianism stage, and Emperor Palpatine — his later transfigured form — as something “much worse,” extraordinarily evil; full-blown totalitarianism.

Thiel asserts repeatedly that the Antichrist, who is doing political miracles, will therefore very likely be a political leader. Peter presents Hitler and Goebbels as a historical example of this antichristic pairing, identifying Hitler as the beast from the sea (the Antichristic archetype) and Goebbels as the beast from the land (the false prophet and ideological ally archetype).

Thiel went on to make a self-admittedly controversial case for Solomon being an early antichristic figure in the Bible. He argued for a 1 Kings 4:25 peace and safety, proto-world-state connection: “Judah and Israel dwelt safely… all the days of Solomon.” He pointed out that, according to 1 Kings 10:14, the annual amount of gold that Solomon receives from various sources is “six hundred threescore and six talents of gold” (666). Further, 1 Kings 10:23 states that Solomon “exceeded all the kings of the earth for riches and for wisdom”: the theme of the Antichrist exceeding all worldly powers in wisdom is a recurring one both biblically and in interpretive texts, e.g., on Francis Bacon’s fictional island of Bensalem.

Milton’s Satan, in Paradise Lost, is often said to have been given the most cunning and interesting lines. Rather than being incidental, this may be to remind attentive readers that evil forces can be deceptive, intelligent, and highly persuasive. I myself think of The Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” a large and bald and frequently naked and brutally evil semi-divine entity far more formally learned and eloquent than any other character in the story.

The Antichrist, says Thiel, will mark the totalitarian termination of philosophy.

Thiel and Wolfe’s The Pope and the Antichrist essay’s primary concern is with Benedict XVI’s esoteric (as in, hidden) communications regarding Christian eschatology and the Antichrist specifically. In short, they put forth the possibility that Benedict had Hans Küng in mind as an antichristic archetype. Küng was a real Catholic theologian and Tübingen professor associated with the “pan-religious” World Ethos project at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago and who bears a very strange resemblance to Solovyov’s fictional Antichrist, who was a Tübingen University theologian and biblical criticism scholar. Solovyov’s book was published twenty-eight years before Küng was born.

The 1993 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic says plainly, “Let no one be deceived: There is no survival for humanity without global peace!”

i. The Antichrist must be high-velocity

In the biblical account, the Antichrist takes over the world within a lifetime. How? Thiel says that he must be “high-velocity,” and that this is a useful identifying marker for us to consider. Jesus and Alexander the Great both died at (roughly) thirty-three. Thiel makes reference to Plutarch’s Caesar, in which it is written that Caesar was “reading from the history of Alexander” and “burst into tears.” When asked why, Caesar responded, “‘Do you not think,’ said he, ‘it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?’”

The Antichrist, thinks Thiel, will ascend to power roughly by or before his thirty-third year of life. This will be particularly striking in an age where the United States is increasingly led by geriatric goons; “perhaps sixty-six is the new thirty-three,” Peter quipped.

By thirty-three, the Antichrist could become extremely rich, or extremely famous, but not — as of now, at least — President of the United States. Thiel remarks that the thirty-five-year-old age requirement is perhaps katechontic.

ii. Belief in the existence of Great Individuals

One of the strongest tensions that Thiel acknowledges within the lectures is that in late modernity, we no longer believe in Great Individuals, yet somehow the Antichrist must ascend to power as a Great Individual. Daniel 8:23 reads, “a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up.”

Thomas Carlyle, a famous Scottish historian, and Ernst Kantorowicz, a German historian of medieval art and politics, both feared that Great Individuals were extinct. Thiel identifies Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History” as a pro-Antichrist manifesto, noting that Jesus Christ is conspicuously absent from its list of great men, and describes Kantorowicz’s Frederick II biography seemingly somewhat in jest as a “séance gone wrong” that summoned Hitler.

On the political dimension in particular, looking from early modernity to middle modernity and through to late modernity, Thiel identifies for demonstrative purposes a certain thread of French leadership: from Napoleon, an extraordinary historical person, to Tolstoy’s representation of Napoleon in “War and Peace” — who is not a master of destiny, but rather a man buoyed by circumstance — to Emmanuel Macron, who he dubs “Jupiterian”: grandiose, but also not in charge of much or really doing anything of great meaning. How the Great Individual has fallen and disappeared from political consciousness!

If our society no longer believes in Great Individuals, and a Great Individual of antichristic evil enters onto the world stage, what will we be able to do about it? Thiel interprets Girard’s deconstruction of scapegoating as, once fully complete, meaning that no one can seriously “denounce anyone as the Antichrist.” If the majority of the world thinks that Great Individuals no longer exist, or perhaps never existed, they will not fear the power of the Antichrist until it is too late, and the elect who are not deceived may be too straitjacketed to speak out.

IX. America as the final katechon

In his Glossarium writings, Carl Schmitt implored us to name the katechon for every epoch over the past 1,948 years. These writings were published posthumously in 1991, and Thiel believes we must continue the spirit of his work. What is the remaining katechon, if it still exists? Or are the end times already upon us?

Thiel agrees with the line of thinking that states the Roman Empire, as katechon, did not end in 476 AD, but has instead been reconstituted over the ages into other katechons. He claims that he and Ian Paisley — who interrupted Pope John Paul II at the European Parliament in 1988 with an Antichrist sign — both made the same mistake: thinking the final katechontic reconstitution of the Roman Empire would be in Europe. It is instead, in Thiel’s estimation, the empire of the United States of America.

i. Empires as katechons through history

The Roman Empire, per Thiel, acted as the katechon from 27 BC–AD 476. It continued in the East Roman Empire from AD 395–1453, and was later reconstituted as the Holy Roman Empire from AD 962–1806 (all dates are my general historical assignments, and overlap is noted). Then, from 1806–1945, it was Pax Britannica and the British Empire. Thiel believes that, from 1949–1989, “anti-communism” was a meaningful component of the American katechon.

He gives three requirements for the katechontic empire and a scriptural sourcing for each:

1. Military superpower — Daniel 2:40, “And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron…”

2. Financial superpower — Revelation 13:17, “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast…”

3. Ideological or religious superpower — Matthew 24:24 is again cited (“deceive the very elect” verse).

ii. Criteria-testing the modern American empire

Thiel argued in the lectures that America is based on Rome, citing the Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay), Brutus, and Cato pseudonyms of the constitutional essay debates. He noted the importance of English as a world language, remarking that Chinese is simply too hard for people to learn, and made a “prosaic” currency connection: The word “dollar” derives from “thaler,” a currency of the Holy Roman Empire, and the “American Caesar” — George Washington, in this case — is still pictured on our money. Thiel pointed out that the EU puts generalized imagery of fake buildings on its money and that, in the UK, the Bank of England is taking Churchill, Jane Austen, and Alan Turing off of its money to replace them with things like the Atlantic puffin, barn owl, and European hedgehog.

The U.S. presides over the world — Thiel characterizes this as both “self-perception” and practical reality — as a global policeman. We police ourselves “as violently as we police the world,” says Peter. We have more guns than people in America, the most guns per capita by a large margin, and the fifth-highest incarceration rate on earth. He framed these things reluctantly as a “package deal,” saying that perhaps the “violence and insanity,” as he termed it, is symptomatic of us not having “fully neutered ourselves and abdicated our role as the katechon.” He displayed a death penalty map of the world and highlighted that, in order to join the EU, you must abolish the death penalty.

We are “far more violent” than Europe, he says, which is “not strictly Christian.” He again listed the guns and incarceration points, this time adding in a kind of ambition and connection to new businesses, wryly claiming about the latter that “even this is too violent for Europe.”

The global infrastructure mentioned earlier in the antichristic mechanisms section is actually largely run by America. The global reserve currency is the dollar. SWIFT is under significant American influence, and the largest financial companies, e.g., Visa, are American as well. On the military and financial superpower statuses, then, the American empire checks out. America is also clearly an ideological superpower and dominant force in global culture.

Asked about China, Thiel pointed out that China fails to meet the three criteria; he is ambivalent on whether or not it meets the military criterion, and convinced that it meets neither the financial nor ideological or religious superpower requirements. He said that it “would be a very strange candidate,” and reminded the audience that the Antichrist must be very broadly popular and somehow Christlike. China is a powerful rival in some ways, but Thiel thinks it unlikely to be the home of the Antichrist.

iii. Can the American katechon be hijacked?

We must not forget about the Leviathan’s potential for mutations and hijackings: the katechon can become the Antichrist, or his mount.

The geographic separation and cultural distance of American cities are katechontic, Thiel said. He discussed the “world city” as a key element of an empire and compared the major American cities to Napoleon’s Paris and the London of the British Empire, a key distinction being that American cities have significantly less relative concentration of population and power within the empire than these historical world cities did.

Thiel characterized cities as “immortal principalities,” in comparison to their mortal counterparts of people and companies. He identified important scaling differences between the two categories: cities scale superlinearly, growing more robust at size, while companies scale sublinearly, becoming ossified or flabby at size and eventually dying. Thiel quipped that, because of their relative immortality, negotiating with cities was like negotiating with demons. They face no real existential threat and thus have limited motivation to adapt.

Here, more of Thiel’s dichotomous katechontic “pagan” Christianity and hyper-Christian pairings become useful. In katechontic vs. hyper-Christian pairing order: dynastic wealth vs. the Giving Pledge, anti-communism vs. neoliberalism, Christian democracy vs. Brussels bureaucracy, the deep state vs. NGOs, the Age of Discovery & Early Globalism vs. Global Financial and Ideological Architecture, and the 17th-century Leviathan vs. the 21st-century Leviathan.

Thiel seems to be thinking a lot about “succession,” and the modern American lack of it, as a dangerous phenomenon by which we may take an antichristic turn. He discussed the biblical Parable of the Talents — in which a man who buries his entrusted sum out of fear faces the wrath of a returning master — and concluded that you can invest the money, or spend it, or give it away, but you must not “save it.”

He, self-admittedly, thinks too much about money and identity, but not enough about succession. Thiel believes this is endemic to Silicon Valley and tech people at large; they think about “success, not succession,” he says. Thiel referred to the Succession television show as extremely “retro” for this reason, pointing out that it had to be about media companies in order to make sense to the modern audience.

One joins the Giving Pledge for “less guillotine,” said Thiel. He said that yes, you can give your money away, but it will go to “communist” Gates philanthropies and NGO slush funds if you aren’t careful. Thiel said that just because you’re not thinking about where your money goes after you die does not mean that others are not.

X. Identity of the Antichrist

Thiel displayed the above image on his massive lecture-slides screen. It shows FDR dressed up as Caesar for his birthday. Thiel says this getup was intended as a joke, but maybe not fully. He characterized FDR as “antichristic” in large part because of his heavy entanglement with and fusion of both the economic and political power centers.

He noted that something like a Gavin Newsom 2028 presidency could be frightening for the same reason that FDR’s terms were somewhat antichristic: President Newsom would reflect a significant centralization of America’s primary economic (California) and political (D.C.) powers.

In August of 1945, when America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, the United States President became, Thiel says, a “semi-divine being” who is able to destroy the world by hitting a button. Congress is just a “clown show,” remarked Thiel before asserting that the President and the judges essentially run the United States. (He noted as an aside that perhaps the Senate matters more than the House because the former confirms judges.)

Thiel characterized the President as the “mayor of America,” saying that the identity of the American president matters much more to the rest of the world than it does to America — this individual can bomb or sanction other countries more or less at will.

Recall our earlier mention of Schmitt, Hobbes, and the mutating Leviathan. Thiel thinks that the deep state, even post-1945, was still katechontic in nature, playing a key role in opposing communism and one-world-desirous nuclear scientists. The deep state now, however, he characterized as more impotent and bureaucratic and clownish than anything else. He gave as an example the verbal imagery of “some woman taking notes at a climate change conference.”

Displayed prominently in the United Nations’ Security Council chamber is Per Krohg’s 1952 Mural for Peace, upon which at this point one feels the reflexive urge to tack on an obligatory “and safety” like some kind of esoteric Tourettic tic.

Per Per Krohg’s own description (ha), the painting shows that “mankind is thronging into the new world to join the Phoenix… Equality is symbolized by a group of persons weighing out grain so that all share alike… War is over… they are at peace.” Iconographically, of course, Christ’s compositional role is taken by the Phoenix. This is in New York, right now, at the core of a large international ideological apparatus.

Thiel’s expression appeared more urgent than grave as he said that the American empire is “the last and final form of Rome. When America is done, the West is done, the world is done.”

Thiel later qualified that he is “not one hundred percent certain,” obviously, but said that it is “very hard to see” a successor to the American Empire.

i. Naming names

Of course, various particular antichristic candidates were lobbed in Thiel’s direction by Peter Robinson during the course of the lectures’ Q&A sections. He ruled out Mamdani because he cannot become president, as Mamdani is a naturalized citizen, not a natural-born citizen. He included Kamala Harris in the same category of “concerning economic and political power center fusion” as Gavin Newsom, given her California connection. Thiel then described Hillary Clinton as “probably still the most competent” Democrat, but pointed out that something like a 2028 run by Abdul El-Sayed (currently the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan) would be much more plausible than Hillary getting another swing at bat. He said that the situation is volatile because things are “all very, very open” and that successful candidates often come “out of nowhere,” citing Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as examples.

Thiel is not concerned about a Democratic sweep of the November midterms for its own sake, then, but because of what a sweep might mean for the confidence of the Democratic Party in 2028. If the Democrats feel very little political pressure, Thiel says that they may be less concerned about selecting a traditionally “electable” candidate, opening the door for a socialist presidential nominee. This is the thing that he “fears far more” than the midterm results themselves.

Asked about Donald Trump, Thiel responded that Trump is “not the Antichrist,” but that he could potentially be the last katechontic president. Thiel again reminded the audience that the Antichrist must be very broadly popular, something that is hardly true for Trump. When discussing Xi Jinping, Thiel said that he was certainly not the Antichrist, but half-joked that he might be some kind of “second coming of Hitler.”

Thiel said that, regarding the potential identity of the Antichrist, one should “look for a person who would be a very bad president of the United States.” Every four years, he said, we have “this obsession” with the presidential elections. It is “very unhealthy,” but perhaps this “common-sense intuition” is correct and the stakes are actually very, very high.

Bill Gates, said Thiel, is more of a “Jekyll and Hyde” character than an Antichrist candidate. He recalled a meeting “two years ago” with Gates which involved the ex-Microsoft magnate unloading “a torrent of swear words.” Thiel remarked that “maybe [Gates] wants to be the Antichrist,” but again emphasized that the Antichrist will be a very popular political leader. This, Thiel said, rules out both Gates and himself. He emphasized that the antichristic element of the Gates story is mostly in the velocity of his early life.

At one point, Thiel joked that perhaps he is not introspective enough to realize that he himself is in fact the Antichrist, but that in any case he fails to meet the (self-identified) criteria.

XI. What do we do now?

Thiel levied similar criticisms throughout the lecture series against Leo Strauss, Pope Benedict XVI, and Carl Schmitt. All of these, he argued, were far too indirect, too esoteric, and too coded in their communications. It is in the katechontic spirit to talk directly and openly about the Antichrist and his eschatological role in the Bible.

Thiel said that he has tried to be as clear and as direct as possible in these lectures. He cracked a joke about the material not quite being “thirty-third-level Gnostic Masonic knowledge,” referencing the Nashville venue, but being important nonetheless. He said that he has now been working on the lectures for two years and that his motivations for giving them are primarily to think more about the topic, to sharpen his thinking on it, and to get other people to consider the problem of the Antichrist more deeply. Peter Robinson proposed that part of Thiel’s motivation was also perhaps to simply recenter discourse back onto the Bible in a serious way. Thiel agreed with this.

He also addressed Nashville specifically when closing. As a Nashvillian, I found this meaningful. He spoke of seeing a deep pride in the city, but also an inferiority complex. He wanted to shake us out of that. Thiel explained that in doing these lectures and living his life more generally, he gets some sense of the world and of the whole, and he believes that there are very few places willing to entertain these Antichrist discussions. He urged Nashville not to leave finance, tech, politics, and ideas to the other American cities, and referred to Nashville as the global capital of Protestantism. He urged the Protestants — if they think the Pope is a useful idiot for China or for the Antichrist, or that the Catholics are somehow wrong or weak — to take up the fight for themselves.

The most dangerous ideas are “just outside the Overton window,” he said, rather than “very far” outside of it. He did not think that the Antichrist discussions necessarily fit this criterion, but after seeing the unexpected level of backlash and attention, he now believes that the Antichrist as a topic is much closer to the window frame than he previously thought. (Thiel recalled an article by Paolo Benanti titled — English translation — “American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?” that was published before he gave the Antichrist lectures in Rome.) Thiel described himself as “just barely ahead of the curve… just barely ahead of you, the audience.”

There are two types of biblical prophecy: certain and contingent. In Jonah 3, Nineveh has its destruction announced and subsequently averted via repentance; God decides not to destroy them. It is unclear which category the eschatological Scripture falls into. Thiel pushes back against monastic retreat as a viable approach.

At the beginning of the first Nashville Antichrist lecture, Peter Thiel opened by clarifying that — first and foremost — Christians should spend most of their spiritual time thinking about Jesus Christ. He also reinforced the idea that he was not giving these lectures to incite fear, but to stoke serious intellectual consideration.

Thiel later, multiple times, referenced 1 Corinthians 13: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” He explained that, in his view, faith has to do with the next world, hope has to do with the current one, and love abides in both. He said that he sees faith and hope as being correlated in some important way, where it is very difficult to have one without the other. The Antichrist lectures are not meant to weaken either.

The audience, he said, must “figure out a way” to stop, or at least slow, the arrival of the Antichrist. Thiel differentiated the human point of view on this from the God-level point of view, in that the human will to avoid antichristic apocalypse does not in his conception amount to a desire to stop the Second Coming of Christ. “There is always freedom in history,” he said. “I believe that you always have agency.” You are “supposed to try.”

Peter Robinson asked Peter Thiel, at the end of the last lecture session, what his advice would be for living a “good life.” Thiel responded first by calling the question “way above my pay grade.” He thought for a minute, and then told the audience “not to fall into yourself… we are not disembodied Cartesian minds.” He said that one should work to have meaningful relationships with God, and with other people.

Peter had said at a lecture earlier in the month that “courage is, perhaps, the virtue in least supply in our times.” When faced with the enormity of a task such as preventing the arrival of the Antichrist, on top of all the other unavoidable turmoil and difficulty that comes along with living, maybe remembering Christ’s familiar refrain of “be not afraid” is the right place to begin.

— G. B. Rango