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♫ I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist ♫ |
This was based on hearing his keynote speech at the Standford Academic Freedom Conference, which I called Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
Peter Thiel had been on my radar since it was claimed that he had funded the racist shit-rag Quillette, which Bari Weiss herself called "...the publication most associated with (the IDW) movement."
But even I was shocked by how completely bonkers Thiel sounded in his keynote speech.
Here's a small excerpt from the transcript I created, where Thiel compares environmentalism to Charles Manson:
...You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component...
It's hard to know when to begin and end the excerpt because it is not a collection of discrete, inter-related thoughts, but rather a stream-of-consciousness ramble.
And by the end of the speech he introduced the Antichrist:
...Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.
So three years ago, I found it disturbing that one of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world was ranting about the Antichrist and even more disturbing that nobody else seemed to care.
I mean, not even the militant atheists connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, who also gave speeches at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, had much to say about Thiel's Christian apocalypse spiel. The worst Steven Pinker had to say was that Thiel's keynote speech was "data-light and impressionistic."
Jerry Coyne, another IDW militant atheist at the Conference, never said anything about Thiel at the time, although thanks to Bari Weiss' The Free Press touting religion recently he - three years later! - took note of Thiel's religiosity, but utterly ignores the Antichrist babble and makes Thiel sound almost mainstream in his critique.
Thiel's nuttiness finally started to breach mainstream's consciousness when he was interviewed by someone on Thiel's side on most issues: the New York Times' Ross Douthat.
But few people outside of intellectuals and the very online know who Ross Douthat is, nor who Peter Thiel is.
Pod Save America posted an episode about the South Park episode "Twisted Christian," explaining the various cultural references like the 6-7 phenomenon and pointing out that Thiel really did hint that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.
Kudos to the South Park team - it was absolutely inspired to give Peter Thiel a song and dance routine.
