American Monster — Peter Thiel
American Monster — Peter Thiel
13th in a series on the network of US criminals accelerating global fascism
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“There are very few people in history who have wrought the damage that Peter Thiel has done. Genghis Khan had his barbarian hordes, Hitler had his Blitzkrieg and death camps, and Peter Thiel has the internet.”—High Fidelity, Silicon Valley technologist and co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, to Bette Dangerous
“Thiel’s politics aren’t libertarian at all; they’re closer to authoritarianism. It’s super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words.”—Max Chakfin, author, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power in Politico
Fluffers larping as journalists wax obsequious on Peter Thiel — reaching into the infinite universe of adjectives and euphemisms to flatter this international techbro of mystery. Among the dewy puffery applied to the German-born billionaire:
“Silicon Valley’s most interesting venture capitalist and all-around great character!”
“Few people in Silicon Valley can match Thiel’s combination of business prowess and philosophical breadth.”
“…America’s leading public intellectual…”
“…fantastically white teeth…”
Or, consider these softballs…
“What do you find the hardest part of being CEO?”
“What’s it like to be a billionaire?”
“What’s a trait you possess that you really value?”
The fawning fealty to Thiel is emblematic of the Fourth Estate’s massive failure in 2016 to warn of the rise of technofascism and the destruction it wrought. Silicon Valley tycoon Thiel is among the most obvious key figures in accelerating authoritarianism, but there are many others.
Among Thiel’s achievements to date:
RUMBLE — Thiel funded Rumble, a pro-Putin, pro-Trump propaganda platform laden with conspiracy theories, anti-Semiticism, misogyny, and racism
MAGA3X — Thiel is linked to MAGA3X, the white supremacist network of digital terrorist cells that engaged in 2016 election interference and trafficked stolen goods from the GRU. Some of its members are implicated in international hacking scandals, and one member sentenced to prison
POLITICIANS — He finances extremist candidates into office — among his successes, Trump, Josh Hawley, and JD Vance
MONEY — At the same time he was damning fiat currency with performance art about the glory of Bitcoin, he was dumping it
MEDIA — He financed the destruction of the media outlet, Gawker, by spending ten million dollars on lawfare to sue it into bankruptcy after then-editor Nick Denton outed him, using Hulk Hogan as a single-digit millionaire proxy
DATA — Thiel co-founded the ubiquitous surveillance company, Palantir, which aided the Robert Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica to steal data from the Thiel- and Russian-funded Facebook, where Thiel also sat on the Board of Directors. That data was weaponized to target Americans with voter suppression, extremist recruitment, and domestic terrorist radicalization. Palantir had a good friend in Mike Flynn
So when I see Thiel, who has a history of engaging in dark operations to subvert democracy, I don’t see his fantastic white teeth — I see fangs.
I see a sweaty lost boy funding the demolition of democracy with the speed of someone who fears tea and defenestration — indeed, whose reported boyfriend did die by defenestration — allegedly self-inflicted.
Tech publications don’t report on his dark arts — they report that he founded PayPal, was the first outside funder of Facebook, and also backed tech companies with various VC funds, while paying people not to go to college. He’s great at chess, and played Dungeons and Dragons. It makes for nice press releases, while utterly ignoring his methodical demolition of the US, despite the wealth this country has provided him.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”—Peter Thiel
Okay, so what does he believe?
In my first interview with Jim Stewartson nearly three years ago — A ‘Brainwashed Death Cult’: The Gamification of Conspiracy, he described the tentacles of five white men who played a pivotal role in the spread of the QAnon conspiracy:
“Mike Flynn is the psyops guy and the general,” Stewartson told Byline Times. “Roger Stone spreads the propaganda on various media outlets, along with Steve Bannon who brings the billionaires and runs enormous targeting and propaganda operations. Erik Prince trains everybody and executes specific targeting operations from training centers in Wyoming, North Carolina, and Virginia. He trains physical troopers, but he also trains psychological terrorists. Peter Thiel funded Maga3X, which was the group that started QAnon.”
I recall asking him what is in it for them, and he said:
“They want to destroy global liberal democracy and replace it with fascism and authoritarianism, because they believe that situation is the best for them, and they may be right. Because if you’re rich, king of the world, what do you need all these people for?”
I never forgot that quote.
What do you need all these people for?
It seemed so cold, like a psychopathy run wild.
Achtung
So what happened to Peter Thiel that he should be so hellbent on destroying the country that gave him wealth?
Like me, Thiel was raised by German immigrants on the pristine peninsula of San Mateo County. Although born in Frankfurt, Germany, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and then South Africa and South West Africa, before settling in Foster City, a suburb of San Francisco known for wind surfing and kite-surfing.
I was raised up the hill in San Mateo, on a block populated by German immigrants.
Much has been written about Thiel’s childhood — his religious authoritarian father — and I recognize that archetype.
Down the block, my sensitive neighbor was also raised by a German brute. We used to cut school together and drive his muscle car to Pacifica, listening to Bad Company on 8-Track and watching the surfers, not speaking of the abuse in his home — an unspoken pact to keep each other’s secrets.
My friend grew up to be kind and decent, despite his father’s bullying. Thiel grew up to become an American Monster.
At Stanford, he left a trail of repulsive writings, and despite the myths created by the aforementioned obsequious stenographers, Thiel had a string of early business failures, which surely caught the eye of those who target misfits and give them money.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
And as I wrote in The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro, Thiel and other tech bros who comprise what came to be known as the PayPal Mafia were thought to possess magical powers.
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appear in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site…
And what of the bag men? The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out its funding.
As the Guardian reported in 2017: “Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
“The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.”
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads.
It was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel who said in 2009 that he “no longer believed freedom and democracy are compatible”. To his point, he funds extreme anti-democratic candidates.
As democratic strategist Fred Wellman tweeted last year:
“I think the media should cover these elections like they do business transactions: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel completed a key first step in his purchase of American democracy with the acceptance by the Ohio GOP of his $10M bid for the Republican Senate seat there.”
And the extremist candidate he funded, JD Vance, is now a sitting Senator.
Both Thiel and Vance are behind the platform Rumble, which functions as a pro-Kremlin propaganda and radicalization outlet, and extremist presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has benefited from his friendship with Vance and Thiel’s investments in his businesses.
Ergo, if the tech bro is a genius, then it feels more like Dr. Evil than Einstein.
The Apocalypse
Because the tech scene exploded out of the progressive waters of the San Francisco Bay Area, there was a time when people thought that meant Silicon Valley was progressive, too.
And then Thiel, who Spent Big on helping to elect Trump, not only spoke at the RNC in 2016, but a dewy post-election cover story on Jared Kushner in Forbes revealed a cozy relationship.
"It's hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared's role in the campaign," says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. "If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer."
"I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff," Kushner says. "They gave me their subcontractors."
So together they scaled a Russian asset all the way to the White House.
Enter the New York Times, with more dewy dewiness and downplayingness of the Russians:
“The election had an apocalyptic feel to it,” says Mr. Thiel, wearing a gray Zegna suit and sipping white wine in a red leather booth at the Monkey Bar in Manhattan. “There was a way in which Trump was funny, so you could be apocalyptic and funny at the same time. It’s a strange combination, but it’s somehow very powerful psychologically.”
At the recent meeting of tech executives at Trump Tower — orchestrated by Mr. Thiel — the president-elect caressed Mr. Thiel’s hand so affectionately that body language experts went into a frenzy. I note that he looked uneasy being petted in front of his peers.
“I was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t look too weird on TV,’” he says.
I ask if he had to twist arms to lure some of the anti-Trump tech titans, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. (Author’s note: lol).
On the Russian hacking, Mr. Thiel says: “There’s a strong circumstantial case that Russia did this thing. On the other hand, I was totally convinced that there were W.M.D.s in Iraq in 2002, 2003.”
A whataboutism classic.
I suppose I take this destruction of democracy personally — not only for what we are facing in 2024, but for what happened to my home town.
How it went from a melting pot of immigrants who bought nice homes on lower middle class salaries to the explosion of tech pricing out the lower middle class. Houses bought in the 1960s on one blue collar salary for $20,000 now selling for multiple millions. Gig workers delivering overpriced food — the haves have it all, the have nots get $15 an hour.
The hippies of the sixties have been replaced with yoga babble-spewing cutthroats that gave us a post-privacy world without so much as an ‘I’m sorry.’
My podcast partner High Fidelity, a Silicon Valley technologist, said the promised techtopia was always a lie.
“They gathered our data, they processed it, and they turned it around and used it against us to drive some of us mad, some of us into radicalized extremists willing to kill for a political figure,” he said.
Author Neil Gaiman — in his book American Gods — created New Gods to worship — the god of technology, the god of the internet — as the Old Gods’ waned in relevancy.
“They draw you into the tent to take your money, but not just your money, your data,” said High Fidelity. “They know where you live, how many kids you have, how you tend to vote, what TV programs you watch, the brand of toilet paper you like to buy.
“They know how to put people around you if you're on social media. ‘Here's a group that you should join. Hey, have you read this new website that might just be run by a bunch of f**king Russians pretending to be Americans?’”
It seems no tech platforms run by the Gods of the Internet appear to be operating in good faith or proving they can regulate themselves, and Section 230 of Title 47 of the US Code — part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — is weak tea, providing immunity for platforms from third-party content. So they go ahead and become accessories to global crimes against humanity — mass shootings are livestreamed, beheadings are uploaded, revenge porn continues to traumatise its intended targets, because… whatever… it’s the internet.
The most sensible thing I’ve heard is to move fast, and break up tech — turning these social media platforms into regulated public utilities. Like clean water, and clean air, we now rely on communications platforms, and rather than allow communication to be disrupted by Nazi trolls and bot farms or paid internet assassins hired to discredit reporters and politicians, we should be able to communicate without fear, emotional trauma, and death threats.
Or is that the point — fear and trauma weaponized to weaken a nation into submission.
In his final column on August 22, 2016, Gawker managing editor Nick Denton wrote: “This is an act of destruction.”
But that was just Thiel’s First Act of Destruction. We’ve already seen Act Two, Act Three, and Act Four of this drama — culminating with the veritable drowning of democracy.
But don’t worry. Peter Thiel will be fine.
There is always another journalist willing to absolve him of the role he has played in the attempted destruction of our world.
The latest media profile assures us Mr. Thiel Has Regrets — so ‘weary’ he has grown from using his money to overthrow democracy.
His replicants are everywhere.
They are in the Senate, in the halls of Congress, in finance, and think tanks, and some even larp as journalists.
I sometimes think of the scene in Blade Runner ‘82 when the prodigal son returns home to meet his maker.
I wonder if Thiel thinks of this, too.
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To read the first 12 in the American Monster series, please go here:
To read the first three in the 2016 Election Attack series, please go here:
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