“If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it” — Dorothy Parker quoting Maurice Baring
Peter Thiel
Hell is tech billionaires. Far-right-loving Elon Musk is losing his marbles. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is scrambling for premium Trump ass adjacency. And JD Vance’s owner, Peter Thiel is slinging conspiracy theories in the Financial Times
In an op-ed piece published this Friday in the venerable British financial newspaper Thiel, the German-born, South African-raised American with New Zealand citizenship offered his thoughts on the current state of politics and truth in contemporary America. Let’s have a look.
But before we do, a quick note on Thiel’s style. He talks of the end of America’s ancien regime and a new era of apokálypsis. He refers to delimiting and a struldbrugg ruler (because everyone has read and can remember Gulliver’s travels?). If your spidey sense suggests that, using a vocabulary like this, Thiel is a ‘look at me’ pretentious git, well played. You nailed it.
He is what my high-school mates and I called an ‘intellectual pseud’. The sort of man who throws obscurity into a conversation, not to advance knowledge, but to let the reader know he paid attention in class. It’s the uptown version of ‘baffle them with bullshit’.
A classic example of this kind is Boris Johnson. He convinced the pro-Brexit rubes he was a smart guy because he spoke classical Greek at the family’s dining-room table — which might seem like an accomplishment. However, many people — some as dumb as rocks — are bilingual. (George W. speaks Spanish).
Bearing that in mind let’s have a look at what Thiel has to say.
The essay
Thiel refers to his South African years in the title:
A time for truth and reconciliation
He adds a sub-title: Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets (see above)
Then we get to the meat of it. It takes a while because Thiel has to waste time explaining his obscure words:
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets.
Thiel could have left Obama out of it and saved time by just writing, without compromising his point, “Trump’s return to the White House means the old order’s secrets will be revealed.”
Thiel continues:
The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.
It is an absurd ask. Relying on the Trump administration to forgo vengeance and promote the truth is like asking a rabid dog to spell ‘apokálypsis’. It is beyond its ability and not in its nature.
Thiel goes on to celebrate the victory of technology over tradition in the war over truth.
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.
You can imagine Thiel stroking himself while writing this and muttering, “Oh, that’s good — really, really good.” Meanwhile, the average FT reader is thinking: “WTF is this?’ Why didn’t he just write ‘The internet has allowed every Tom, Dickhead, and Harriet to say whatever the feck they want‘.”
Thiel continues:
In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.
Is Epstein’s death now the most significant fatality in Western history since Christ on the Cross? In all seriousness, Thiel’s claim that ‘DISC’ controlled the narrative does not explain why people have distrusted the ‘man’ for centuries. Peter should study the ‘60s.
Thiel is just getting warmed up. Next, he writes:
It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects — Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles — gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.
“Some closure”? Who needs closure? I guess when you are a paranoid who believes shadowy forces are controlling information, you think everyone is as deranged as you. Let’s note that 76% of Americans alive today were born after 1963. I suppose there may be some academic interest in the subject, but only the mentally compromised are losing sleep over it.
Wait. There’s more:
We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”
C’mon Peter — The Decameron? I get the juxtaposition of two plagues. That’s quite clever. But if Thiel were to think it through, he would realize the contemporaneous explanations for the cause of the Black Death were as unsound as Thiel’s claims of the cause of COVID-19. Is that a comparison he wants the reader to make?
Thiel continues by asking questions about why this group did that — and why that person did this — ending with: “And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?”
The government stopped the spread? Has Thiel been on social media? Even before FB and Twitter threw in the towel on fact-checking, you couldn’t spend 17 seconds online without some weirdo asking some nonsense.
In addition, Thiel sees America’s fingerprints everywhere:
Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine?
Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity?
Yes, we can. And no, we weren’t. Between Peter, Elon, other oligarchs, conservative think tanks, and God only knows how many MAGA internet sleuths, if there were any there, there, they would have found it. Be it drink, drugs, boasting, or pillow-cooing, people talk. So where’s the whistle-blower?
Thiel is indefatigable. There is no end to the questions he asks without answering. He continues:
Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum.
How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system?
Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics?
I don’t know. Nor does Thiel (he claims). And neither does anyone else. Because Thiel is using the Tucker Carlson tactic of “I’m just asking questions.” It’s offensive and low-rent.
I could write a piece along the lines of “Does Thiel have a micro penis? Are reports he diddles little boys true? Is he a ketamine abuser?” And I would be rightly criticized as a salacious, pot-stirring know-nothing.
Thiel then leaps on the high-tech plutocrats’ latest meme, “Americans suck.”
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
Let’s remember that, for four of the last eight years, Trump was President. He said he would fix the country. What happened? I don’t want to hear excuses. If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Theil then gets to his dismount. Here it is without commentary. Because I am tired of hacking my way through Peter’s turgidity
Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.
