Peter Thiel, longtime Trump supporter and billionaire master of the universe, published an op-ed in Financial Times that 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 piece’s ominous title. The reference to South Africa’s post-Apartheid era policies is the most coherent line in the article. The subhed immediately takes us into drug-rant territory: “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets.”
To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new age. Thiel uses ancient, I’m sorry “ancien,” spellings of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the grand unveiling of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What’s the real story behind the JFK assassination? Was COVID-19 a U.S. bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the behest of the Biden administration?
According to Thiel, Trump has an opportunity to unveil all these truths and more. It’s an essay that rails against a word coined by Thiel’s “friend and colleague” Eric Weinstein, what they call the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.” In short, elites.
There’s a lot of problems here. The biggest being that Thiel is, by any measure, an elite. He is a member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex he seems to oppose. He is the kind of person who goes on Piers Morgan to speak out against assassinated CEOs and writes op-eds in the Financial Times.
Thiel is worth more than $10 billion dollars. He contributed significant time and money to the political career of J.D. Vance, a man who is now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel’s op-ed reads like a ketamine and amphetamine-induced populist rant. It’s an appeal to the masses layered with literary references that’ll fly over the heads of most college graduates.
This is a man who funded Facebook and PayPal and now backs a mass surveillance and AI company named after a cursed object from The Lord of the Rings. He has access to more revelatory and apocalyptic truths than the average person, yet he whines for more. On our behalf, presumably.
The op-ed baffles. “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,” he writes. Who was president in 2019 when Epstein died? His vaunted Trump. Who is all over Epstein’s flight logs? Trump. Who has been photographed multiple times with Epistein? Trump.
“The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” Thiel insists. “New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions—the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt.”
Let me help the billionaire. Scientific and technological progress exploded in the U.S. in the last five decades from the point of view of anyone but weirdos hovering over spreadsheets. Real estate prices are “crescendoing” because we won’t build new housing and venture capitalist vultures like Thiel squat on the few resources available. The public debt exploded because Presidents like Trump don’t give a shit about it and spend money like it’s going out of style.
“Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end,” Thiel says. It’s incredible that Theil doesn’t realize he’s part of the “ancien regime,” and that he is one of the elites dancing at the party.
“There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past,” he says. And he’s right. But if his much-praised populist internet gets anything like control, they won’t view Thiel as a hero or prophet. He’ll just be another head for the guillotine, an elite alien who wrote about apokálypsis and The Decameron while California burned.
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