I Have No Idea What Peter Thiel Is Trying to Say and It’s Making Me Really Uncomfortable

Peter Thiel, longtime Trump supporter and billionaire master of the universe, published an op-ed in the Financial Times It perfectly replicates the experience of being cornered by a sweaty cokehead at an Austin, Texas house party.

“A time for truth and reconciliation,” is the ominous title of the piece. The article’s most coherent line is the reference to South Africa’s post-apartheid era policies. Subed immediately takes us into drug-rent territory: “Trump’s return to the White House signals the ‘apocalypse’ of ancient regime secrets.”

To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new era. Thiel uses the ancient, I’m sorry “ancient,” spelling of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the grand unveiling of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What is the real story behind the assassination of JFK? Was COVID-19 a US bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the behest of the Biden administration?

According to Thiel, Trump has the opportunity to uncover all these truths and more. This is an essay against a term coined by Thiel’s “friend and colleague” Eric Weinstein, which he calls the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that traditionally restrict public conversation.” In short, elite.

There are many problems here. The biggest being that Thiel is, by any measure, an elite. A member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex he seems to oppose. He is the person who moves forward Piers Morgan to speak Out against killer CEOs and writes op-eds in the Financial Times.

Thiel is worth more than $10 billion. He contributed significant time and money to the political career of J.D. Vance, who is now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel’s op-ed reads like a ketamine and amphetamine-fueled populist rant. It’s an appeal to the masses layered with literary references that would fly over the heads of most college graduates.

This is the man who funded Facebook and PayPal and now backs a mass surveillance and AI company named after The Cursed Object of The Lord of the Rings. He has access to more revelation and universal truth than the average person, yet he cries out for more. From our side, perhaps.

The op-ed is confused. “Indeed, the internet has already begun our release from DISC prison following the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019,” he writes. Who was president in 2019 when Epstein died? His pride is Trump. Who is in Epstein’s flight log? Trump. Who has been photographed with Epstein more than once? Trump.

“The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” asserts Thiel. “New ideas can save the old regime, which barely admits, our deepest questions can be answered – the causes of the 50-year slump in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the real estate inflation racket and the explosion of the public debt.”

Let me help the millionaire. Scientific and technological progress in the United States has exploded over the past five decades from the perspective of oddballs on spreadsheets. Real estate prices are “affordable” because we won’t be building new housing and venture capitalist vultures like Thiel squat. Public debt has exploded because presidents like Trump don’t give a damn about it and spend money like it’s going out of style.

“Our ancien régime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end,” says Thiel. It’s unbelievable that Thiel doesn’t realize that he’s part of the “ancient regime” and that he’s one of the elites dancing at the party.

“There will be no reactive recovery of the pre-Internet past,” he says. And he is right. But if his much-admired populists get anything like Internet control, they won’t see Thiel as a hero or a prophet. He will be another head of the guillotine, an elite alien who writes about the apokálypsis and Decameron When California Burns