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Peter Thiel saved his last word for the city that hosted him.
Closing the fourth and final night of his Antichrist lectures at Nashville’s Masonic Temple on Oct. 19, the billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance’s political and professional career told the crowd that people kept asking him why he had come to Nashville at all. In that question, he said, he heard “a mild inferiority complex.”
“I want to shake you out of that,” Thiel told them.
He then handed the city a mission. Nashville, Thiel said, was “arguably the global capital of Protestantism” and “the center of a place with no center.” He told them not to leave “finance, technology, and politics to other people in other cities.” “And if you give up on the battle of ideas,” he added, “you will simply lose.”
His closing order was blunt: “get over your inferiority complex and fight.”
We know what Thiel said because someone in the hall taped it, and Nashville’s top reporter got hold of it.
