5.2 What he said, lecture by lecture

Lecture 1 (28 Sept).

• Closing: "A big part of why I'm doing this series is because I believe it is dangerous to focus on just one risk. There's one existential risk that nobody seems to want to discuss … and that is the risk of a totalitarian one-world government" (Nashville Scene) [V].
• On government: "As a thought experiment, which part of the U.S. government do you think runs the worst? The post office or the DMV is like a university humanities department where they're not doing anything. … The NSA is like some esoteric science thing" (same source, Nashville Scene) [V].

Lecture 2, "The End of Empire" (5 Oct).

• "So by scaring you, I've shown you just how powerful the Antichrist's arguments will be. And if you were too scared, maybe you need to pray a little harder and anchor a bit more on your faith" (Nashville Scene, 8 Oct) [V].
• "This is the challenge with the people making AI in Silicon Valley. Almost none of them have any other faith on which to anchor or relativize discussions about the technology" (same source, Nashville Scene, 8 Oct) [V].
• In Q&A: "The undercurrent of all these lectures is that it's certainly not moral to despair. It's not right to think that something like the Antichrist is inevitable or there's nothing you can do about it" (same source, Nashville Scene, 8 Oct) [V].
• The Scene's paraphrase, without a full passage: he cast "woke-ism" and effective altruism as roads to American fascism, named "a world government or totalitarian empire that has nowhere left to expand" as the looming Antichrist, and argued that preventing it "may justify violence", pointing to "Christ's more militant comments". He also placed his 2009 essay on democracy and freedom in the Enlightenment tradition (same source, Nashville Scene, 8 Oct) [V].
• The katechon (the "restrainer" of 2 Thessalonians) was the theme, with Carl Schmitt central. He read Stefan George's poem "The Antichrist" and argued that the Antichrist had been edited out of the history of Bonhoeffer and Schmitt (X) [R]. He called Hobbes's state a deliberate attempt at "constructing an antichristic system" (X) [R].

Lectures 1–2, from Politico's recordings.

• On Obama and the pope: "Many people know that AI is politically unpopular and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity. Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI" (Fortune, Times of India) [V].
• On Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: "AI is the threat über alles of late modernity. The pope knows it. That's why he wrote his first encyclical … he needed something politically popular to distract from the church's child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI" (Gizmodo, Fortune) [V]. The reports do not say he called either man the Antichrist.
• On effective altruism: "one also has to take seriously that once you create a near totalitarian one-world government with the power to stop all dangerous science, it cannot easily be uncreated either … There is no precedent in human history that suggests that this global prison warden would willingly give up his or its power. The effective altruist ideology has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI" (Gizmodo) [V].
• Politico's verdict: "The structure is largely unchanged, and Thiel invokes religion to argue that regulation of the AI industry is evil" (Politico Decoded) [V-s]. On Politico's podcast, the reporter says the talks also wove in the manga One Piece and Schmitt (spoken.md transcript) [V].
• Katechon candidates (Charlemagne, Metternich) and the line "If anti-communism is the Katechon restraining communists that are trying to create the communist one world state, then neoliberalism is anti-communism in a world where there are no communists left" (The American Antichrist, opinion) [R].

Lecture 3, "Velocity of Antichrist" (12 Oct). No newspaper report was found [U]. From an attending reporter's posts:

• The Antichrist "need not be wealthy"; it could be a rich person who gives money away (he cited Sam Bankman-Fried's plans) or even an influencer such as MrBeast, but his intuition is that it will come out of politics (X) [R].
• He named the Patriot Act, the International Criminal Court and the erosion of bank secrecy as parts of "the system of the Antichrist", the place where "we've had velocity" over the past quarter century (same post) [R].
• He drew a laugh by explaining why the Antichrist is not Bill Gates, the pope or himself: it must be a political leader and broadly popular (X) [R].
• On Schmitt's Nazi Party membership: "It's a very bad fact." He added that one should not make "a pietistic retreat from action" and said he wants the audience to figure out how to stop the Antichrist (X) [R]. On Strauss: "I overdosed on way too much of this stuff" (X) [R]. On Benedict XVI and Strauss, "the time for esotericism is over" (paraphrase) (X) [R].
• A self-described attendee's blog adds a list of FATCA, the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, SWIFT and the end of the UK's non-dom status, and the line "in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33" (Daniel Forrester Nash, Substack, opinion) [U].

Lecture 4, "New Rome" (19 Oct). The organiser's summary: the inheritance of Rome and "the question of which powers have claimed, and might still claim, the role of restrainer against the end" (Luma, part 4) [V]. From the reporter's posts (X) [R]:

• The United States is the New Rome. As a restraining (katechontic) force it "runs the risk of flipping into something antichristic" [R].
• A New Rome needs three things: a military superpower (Daniel 2:40), a financial superpower "that monitors and controls payments" (Revelation 13:17), and an ideological or religious superpower (Matthew 24:24) [R].
• US power rests on Five Eyes/ECHELON, the SWIFT system and the dollar's reserve status; the president is something like the mayor of the United States and dictator of the rest of the world (paraphrase) [R].
• "I don't like Russia" as a New Rome; on Putin, "I have my suspicions". Americans "haven't totally neutered ourselves" [R].
• A joke: the US is the only country where revolution is impossible because it is the only one without a US embassy (X) [R].
• An anonymous student account attributes to him "America is the last and final form of the Roman Empire", that Trump "could be the last restrainer", and that the Antichrist could be "a very bad president of the United States" (X) [U].