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Peter Thiel, longtime Trump supporter and billionaire master of the universe, published an op-ed in the Financial Times which perfectly reproduces the experience of being met by a sweaty cokehead at an Austin, Texas house party.
“A time for truth and reconciliation”, is the ominous title of the piece. The reference to South Africa’s post-Apartheid era policies is the most consistent line in the article. The subhed immediately takes us into drug territory: “Trump’s return to the White House heralds the ‘apokálypsis’ of the secrets of the Old Regime.”
According to Thiel, Trump’s incoming presidency is the dawn of a new era. Thiel uses the old, sorry “ancien”, spelling of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” he says lead to the great revelation of many truths. Who murdered 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 reveal 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 organizations, bureaucracies, universities and Government-funded NGOs that traditionally limited public conversation.” In short, the elites.
There are many problems here. The greater Thiel is, by any measure, an elite. He is a member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex that he seems to oppose. He’s the kind of person who keeps going Piers Morgan to speak 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 JD Vance, a man who is now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel’s opinion reads like ketamine- and amphetamine-induced populist scorn. It’s an appeal to the masses layered with literary references that will 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 Lord of the Rings. He has access to more revelatory and apocalyptic truths than the average person, but he complains about more. For us, presumably.
The op-ed baffles. “In retrospect, the Internet had already started our release from DISC prison after the death in prison of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019,” he writes. Who was president in 2019 when Epstein died? His boasted Trump. Who is in all of Epstein’s flight records? Trump. Who was photographed several times with Epistein? Trump.
“The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” insists Thiel. “New ideas could save the old regime, which barely recognizes, let alone answers, our deepest questions – the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the real estate price racket growing, and the explosion of public debt”.
Let me help the billionaire. Scientific and technological progress has exploded in the United States over the past five decades from the point of view of anyone but the oddballs hovering over spreadsheets. Real estate prices are “rising” because we won’t build new housing and venture capitalist vultures like Thiel squat on the few available resources. The public debt has exploded because presidents like Trump don’t give a shit and spend money like it’s going out of style.
“Our ancien régime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought that the party would never end,” says Thiel. It is incredible that Theil did not realize that he is part of “l’Ancien Régime”, and that he is one of the elite who dance at the party.
“There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past,” he says. And he is right. But if their much-vaunted populist Internet is anything to go by, they won’t see Thiel as a hero or a prophet. It will be just another leader for the guillotine, an elite alien who wrote about the apokálypsis and The Decameron while California burned.
