Peter Thiel to Launch New Round of "Antichrist" Lectures in Nashville, Tennessee Starting September 28
Thiel's Antichrist Lecture Tour Arrives in Nashville
Peter Thiel will begin a new round of "Antichrist" lectures in Nashville, Tennessee, starting September 28, held on four consecutive Mondays. This is the third stop following his lectures in San Francisco in Fall 2025 and Rome in March 2026.
The lectures are co-hosted by local media The Pamphleteer and the nonprofit Meriwether Academy, which focuses on boys' education. The four sessions are scheduled for September 28, October 5, 12, and 19, with doors opening at 5 PM and lectures starting at 6 PM, followed by a Q&A session. The specific location will be disclosed to invited attendees the day before the event. Attendees must present valid identification matching their registration information and undergo bag checks and security scans. The use of electronic devices is strictly prohibited, and the "off the record" rule will be enforced.
The previous round of lectures in San Francisco was organized by ACTS 17 Collective and was also closed to the public. However, after the first session, tech worker Kshitij Kulkarni published detailed notes on his personal website, leading the organizers to cancel his tickets for the remaining three sessions without a refund, citing a "violation of off the record rules." This incident attracted media coverage from outlets like The Washington Post, and the content of the lectures was subsequently leaked.
Leaked content revealed that the core argument of the first lecture, titled "Knowledge shall be increased," is that the Antichrist of the 21st century will not seize power through war but will instead amplify "apocalyptic risks" such as nuclear war, AI out of control, and climate disasters, demanding humanity surrender more power in the name of "peace and security." Thiel stated, "The Antichrist of the 21st century is a Luddite who wants to stop all science, like Greta or Eliezer," directly associating figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Greta Thunberg, who have long warned about AI and climate risks, with the "Antichrist army."
In subsequent sessions, Thiel discusses globalization and the "one-world state" using the Book of Daniel, arguing that multinational institutions like the UN and the International Criminal Court risk sliding in this direction. He also posits that the Antichrist must be young and able to mobilize funds quickly to unify the world within their lifetime, specifically analyzing why the age of 33—at which both Jesus and Alexander the Great died—recurs among historical and religious figures. He even claims that the U.S. Constitution's requirement for the president to be at least 35 years old is a "design against the Antichrist" and jokes that under contemporary gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33, also mentioning that aspiring for the Nobel Peace Prize is a characteristic of the Antichrist's personality.
The lecture leak incident itself constitutes a game of attention capital: Kulkarni's tickets were canceled without a refund, which instead expanded the reach of the content from dozens of invited attendees to national media audiences like The Washington Post and The Guardian, objectively amplifying the influence of Thiel's theories. When the lectures moved to Rome in March this year, several Catholic institutions rumored to be associated with the event quickly distanced themselves, and Pope Leo XIV subsequently publicly called for caution regarding AI, urging that technology serve the "common good." One side gains topic heat and ideological mobilization, while the other must bear the public relations costs of separation.
Father Paolo Benanti, who has long provided AI ethics advice to two popes, publicly referred to Thiel as a "political theologian deeply embedded in the Silicon Valley ecosystem," claiming his theories represent a "radicalization" of Western values that emphasize individuality, technological progress, and competition. Meanwhile, Palantir, co-founded and deeply involved with by Thiel, has secured contracts for the ICE "ImmigrationOS" system since 2025, ranging from $30 million to about $60 million, used for tracking immigrant movements and assisting in large-scale deportation enforcement.
Source: Public Information
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Thiel has long maintained a unique stance between "warning against power concentration" and "participating in building the infrastructure for power concentration": the Palantir he co-founded in 2003 is now deeply embedded in the U.S. Department of Defense, intelligence agencies, and immigration enforcement systems, securing contracts for the ICE "ImmigrationOS" system since 2025, ranging from $30 million to about $60 million, used for tracking and screening immigrants and assisting in large-scale deportations. At the same time, he began the first round of "Antichrist" lectures in San Francisco in Fall 2025, subsequently moving to Rome and Nashville, with the core of the lectures warning that "multinational institutions, AI regulation, and global governance" are leading towards Antichrist-style tyranny.
This lecture series itself is also a carefully designed path of attention—starting from closed-door lectures in a small circle in San Francisco, to the leak of Kulkarni's notes prompting mainstream media coverage from The Washington Post and others, to the organizers pressuring the leaker with "cancellation of tickets without refund," which objectively amplified the topic's volume, and finally moving to Rome to directly challenge the ideological authority of the Vatican—each stop uses "scarcity + controversy" to transform a private theological lecture into an asset that sustainably generates media attention and political influence, aligning closely with the Silicon Valley investment circle's common strategy of "creating scarcity and relying on external amplification."
A comparable concept is Thiel's long-admired philosopher René Girard's "scapegoat" theory—simplifying complex real-world conflicts of interest into a narrative of a recognizable and expellable "enemy." In terms of industry positioning, as the global AI regulatory framework gradually takes shape and various countries hold AI safety summits, the internal divisions in Silicon Valley over "whether it should be regulated" are intensifying. Thiel's Antichrist narrative is essentially an extreme expression of this regulatory route dispute on an ideological level.
Structural judgment: This is a game of regulatory change. As discussions on regulation in areas like AI, climate, and transnational governance enter substantive advancement stages, vested interests need a narrative tool that can bypass specific policy debates and directly appeal to moral and theological ultimate concerns, redefining "whether technology should be regulated" as "whether we are paving the way for the Antichrist"; once this narrative is accepted by a significant portion of the elite circles, it can raise the political costs of any specific regulatory proposal in factual terms, essentially using ideological mobilization to reverse influence the pace of real-world regulatory agenda advancement.
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