Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When I was faster i was always behind.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

This fight is for everything.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Consistently wrong since 2002

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the Managers

Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the Managers

by | 83 Comments

This post is in: , ,

All I can say about this Peter Thiel op-ed in the Financial Times is that it reads like something he actually wrote. No comms team or AI chatbot is capable of producing this strange paranoid string of sentences www.ft.com/content/a46c…

[image or embed]

— Micah Loewinger (@micahloewinger.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Back on Friday, the Financial Times published an op-ed by Peter Thiel which has attracted a certain amount of internet scorn attention, even over the weekend. Some people say that Thiel, after spending lavishly of his own money & effort to install J.D. Vance on the incoming maladministration undercard, is just annoyed that his old running buddy Musk has side-stepped the official rules and moved into the top slot through the sheer leverage of money. Others point out that Thiel, like Elon, is a known (‘but of course he has a prescription’) ketamine user, and ketamine may assuage depression but it has concerning side effects.

Or then again, comes the rejoinder, maybe these Very Important Tech Dudes all got lucky — just happened to be standing outside with buckets when it started raining soup — and this is what the insides of their sweaty little brains have always looked like. In any case, here’s (ex South African) Thiel on A time for truth and reconciliation…

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. 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.

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. 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…

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.” …

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. 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? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. 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? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?…

The future demands fresh and strange ideas. 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…

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.

As we would say in the funky-scented dormitory lounges late at night, back in the early 1970s: Heavy, maaaan.

It is easy to picture him writing this, his face aglow with moisture of unclear provenance.

— Triplejake (@triplejake.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 10:24 AM

The Financial Times didn’t exactly use an eye-roll emoji, but its readers seem to have construed that its publication was not an endorsemnt:

Wow. I have never seen a comment hit 1,000+ "recommended" before
www.ft.com/content/a46c…

[image or embed]

— Librarian Capital (@librariancapital.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM

I cannot believe the FT agreed to publish this. This piece isn’t news. It is not even opinion. I is openly gaslighting the readers. This is unacceptable and unprofessional from the FT’s editorial team.

 
Be that as it may. Insert ‘Let them fight’ gif…

Reader Interactions

83Comments

  2. 2.

    Kathleen

    Good morning. I hate that I agree with something coming out of Steve Bannon’s mouth. I feel the need to atone for this and will withdraw from online forums. Please respect my privacy at this time

  5. 5.

    Montanareddog

    Thiel’s screed reads like some mimeo-graphed 1960s newsletter circulated by a John Birch Society nutjob.

    Except, with his wealth and influence, it gets prominent space in a respected newspaper. I doubt many of the FT demographic will take it seriously.

  6. 6.

    Gretchen

    I’m so tired of people who haven’t learned anything about biology since their 10th grade survey class second guessing experts and refusing to listen when they explain. “ Why did you say it might be a lab leak, and two days later you said it was from wildlife? Huh? Huh?” “ Because it took two days to get the nucleotide sequences and compare them to known isolates”. “But there’s a virology lab in Wuhan. What about that? Huh? Huh?”
    These people don’t even know what a nucleotide sequence is, never mind what can be learned from it, but they confidently assume that they can evaluate evidence they don’t understand.
    We’re being governed by morons whose only evidence that they’re intelligent is that they have a lot of money.

  7. 7.

    Lapassionara

    @Gretchen: I’m thinking the only evidence that they are sentient is that they have a lot of money.

    ETA, thank you AL, for posting this. Now I know what DISC is.

  9. 9.

    JaySinWA

    @Jay: Bannon doesn’t quite have the entrance fee for a Billionaire cage match.

    I’m guessing that Musk and Thiel will squash him like a bug. Of course Bannon has cockroach tendencies, so he might just survive.

    ETA I do wonder how Thiel figures into the gang. He and Musk might just manage to do some damage to each other.

  10. 10.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Let the Bannon wing and the Thiel wing fight it out to the death, with the winners being judged worthy of being thrown into Kilauea to appease the restless earth while those of us who haven’t fallen under the spell of the Trump cult get busy repairing the damage and ensuring that no Republican ever holds power again.

  13. 13.

    Basilisc

    The Monroe Doctrine said US-based social media platforms have immunity from regulation in the Americas? Man, I knew I should have paid better attention in History class.

    I do remember it was usually enforced by sending in the Marines. So I guess we should look forward to that.

  14. 14.

    Baud

    The future demands fresh and strange ideas.

    Like cutting taxes for rich people and deregulating corporations. No one has thought of that before!

  15. 15.

    Van Buren

    I know “May you live in interesting times” isn’t really an ancient curse but damn, spot on.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    @p.a.:

    Bannon isn’t our ally against Musk or Thiel, anymore than Musk and Thiel are our allies against Bannon.

    This is not a Liz Cheney situation.

  20. 20.

    MagdaInBlack

    Thiel bought himself a VP. Musk bought himself a FOTUS. Now they fight over who got the better deal?

  21. 21.

    Daoud bin Daoud

     

    @Basilisc:  there will be much Marine-sending. The Trumpanzees want blood and glory, and they will certainly get lots of blood. Why not conquer all of the Americas (to free them from Wokeness, of course!)  It’s lebensraum Manifest Destiny, baby! Let them feel the [self-]righteous wrath of our Golden God-Emperor!

  24. 24.

    Kay

    Race to the bottom. They want the whole world to be run by billionaires, instead of just the United States.

  27. 27.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @NotMax: Good point. My only counterpoint is that Krakatoa’s already been blown to kingdom come, while Kilauea is still there and active and spewing lava for our sacrifice-Trumpists-to-the-volcano gods needs. Plus no international travel concerns (for most of the jackaltariat, anyway).

    :)

  28. 28.

    Mai Naem mobile ¹

    @MagdaInBlack: that was my first thought when I read the Bannon screech. Distraction while Thiel and Musk empty the treasury and Bannon will get some fat table scraps and ,oh, a pardon or whatever he needs to take care of his legal issues.

  30. 30.

    Ksmiami

    I picked the wrong year to stop sniffing glue. I used to be ok with billionaires, now I think they’ll be better off as lamp post decorations.

  31. 31.

    Kay

    I’m outraged that Australia has regulations and laws that are enforced. I insist they blindly follow the directives of US based billionaires.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    I listened to an interview with weasely JD Vance. He’s dropped the lie that the indigenous Greenlanders want to be purchased by the US and instead says Greenlanders want independence. So of course we must invade and occupy.

  33. 33.

    oldster

    @Kay:

    Yup. Plus:

    When the government controls anything, that’s Orwell. When billionaires control everything, that’s good and natural.

  34. 34.

    Rusty

    Thiel’s opening isn’t even clever, I’ve heard several ministers discuss the definition of apocalypse as revealing in sermons.  The comment thread in FT was brutal, there were of course the tech bro acolytes that thought the price was brilliant,  but many more that savaged it for being delusional.  All that money and the best Thiel can do with his life is to take drugs and construct weird resentments against poor people getting to eat and be healed when sick.  It would be sad if it didn’t have real consequences for the rest of us.

  35. 35.

    Kay

    @oldster:

    It’s always the same. Cut taxes, deregulate and invade other countries. It’s just George W Bush without the “compassionate” veneer.

  37. 37.

    Jeffro

    @JaySinWA:I’m guessing that Musk and Thiel will squash him like a bug. Of course Bannon has cockroach tendencies, so he might just survive.

    LOL

    @NotMax:Magafest Destiny.

    stealing THAT

    @Ksmiami:I picked the wrong year to stop sniffing glue. I used to be ok with billionaires, now I think they’ll be better off as lamp post decorations.

    LOLOL

     

    Looks like I picked the right top 10,000 blog to visit and start my morning with a smile.  =)

  39. 39.

    Jeffro

    @Kay:I listened to an interview with weasely JD Vance. He’s dropped the lie that the indigenous Greenlanders want to be purchased by the US and instead says Greenlanders want independence. So of course we must invade and occupy.

    So…like Grenada, only with less sand and sun?

  40. 40.

    Shalimar

    @JaySinWA: Bannon still works for Rebekah Mercer if you trace his funding sources.  She is his billionaire.  This is a fight over which billionaires control the Republican party and she will pay any entry fees necessary.

  41. 41.

    Kay

    @Jeffro:

    I thought it was interesting he wasn’t willing to go full Trump lie, where they claim Greenlanders are MAGAs.
    I love how the US media person sits there nodding her head as he explains how they plan to purchase 50,000 indigenous people and steal their land. The NYTimes had a “Dealbook” on it – how much would it cost to buy these savages. Just absolute degenerates.

  42. 42.

    Princess

    Wow, Thiel sounds like he’s completely insane and I don’t mean that figuratively. That piece sounds like the manifesto of a Batman villain. Is he just gaslighting or does he believe it? Can’t tell which would make me more nervous.

    Also too, haha Bannon thinking Trump will listen to him instead of people with billions of dollars. MAGAts about to realize they’ve lost the war already.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    I actually think the intra-MAGA fights are fake and designed to keep MAGAs engaged and the various factions onboard. Bannon and Musk are on the same team. Its professional wrestling. They’ll have Team Bannon and Team Musk working together to screw Team Trump Voter.

    Liberals always think conflict or disunity means weakness, but that’s not at all true on the Right. These purely theatrical “fights” keep the base engaged and thinking they have a voice, no matter which MAGA they align with.

  45. 45.

    Chris

    @MagdaInBlack:

    @Baud: Yup. Bannon isn’t anyone’s ally. Bannon just feeds whatever chaos presents itself.

    I suspect what happened is that Bannon expected to be or wanted to be either the power behind the throne or the trusted right hand of the Trump regime.  That didn’t end up happening.  Now he’s seeing Elon Musk, who has ten times the money and status that Bannon ever did, playing exactly the role that he wanted for himself, and it makes him furious, so he’s lashing out.  In exactly the identitarian terms that a fascist would know to lash out in.

    Imagine how much Ernst Rohm would’ve hated Heinrich Himmler if he’d somehow survived the Night of the Long Knives and spent the next decade watching Himmler turning into exactly what Rohm wanted to be.  That’s Bannon.

  46. 46.

    Princess

    @Kay: That makes so much more sense. It’s WWE. Keeps Trump amused; distracts the many many resistance libs I see getting all excited about the possibility of a split.

  48. 48.

    Baud

    This news blurb just popped up on my blue sky. I didn’t click.

     

    US President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on promises of aggressive import tariffs, strict immigration curbs, deregulation and smaller government, but the economy he inherits next week may be screaming for something different. Namely, don’t break anything reut.rs/3ChSwVb

    [image or embed]
    — Reuters (@reuters.com) Jan 13, 2025 at 6:44 AM

  49. 49.

    Kay

    @Princess:

    They cover the whole Right and they’re all slightly different flavors of MAGA. If Musk isn’t your idea of MAGA you go to Bannon, or RFK Jr, or JD Vance but all the phony “factions” funnel into the GOP and end up with the same policy – tax cuts, deregulation and invading other countries.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    And someone just reposted this from yesterday. LOL

     

    FYI, folks from Bluesky. Reporters at The NYT, among other news organizations, are now generating a giant wave of accountability stories about the new Trump era. Reading these stories, sharing them, is a form of accountability as well. It is a form of participatory democracy too. Substance matters.
    — Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) Jan 12, 2025 at 1:46 PM

  52. 52.

    Soprano2

    I highly recommend the podcast “Hidden Brain” did about billionaires. They interviewed a woman who had been a wealth manager for some of them. They truly believe no country’s laws should apply to them; in fact, many of them see different countries’ laws as a petty annoyance to be overcome. Kay’s right, they think they should rule the whole world.

  53. 53.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    It may not work with the crunchy MAGAs, the RFK Jr people. Christ were they ever bamboozled. They may well be the dumbest MAGAs of all.

    I dont want them back on our side. MAGA can keep them.

  56. 56.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    I just love how the concept of “sovereignty” has completely disappeared. Republicans and media are now casually floating overturning the laws of Australia. New World Order, indeed. This is the billionaire world order.

  57. 57.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: They’re abusers telling the abused that they don’t know what they want, that instead of being free they should allow the abuser to control their life because really the abuser knows better than they do what they want and need.

  58. 58.

    Anyway

    We all like to mock Bannon and Gawd knows he’s extremely mockable But that man had a laser focus on electing Dotard from 2015 and never gave up. He was dropped from the maladministration but stayed loyal to the cause. Despite the small little prison break (bygones) he’s remained true to his cause — getting Rs over the finish line. Making sure Ds lose.

    Celebrity endorsements on our side don’t compare to the kind of reach and influence that Bannon, Rogan and others on the right have. Our adjacent don’t even come close.

  59. 59.

    Baud

    @K-Mo:

    Same. These people are incredibly boring to me. I just want the facts so I can oppose what their up to. I don’t want narratives about them.

  63. 63.

    Princess

    @Kay: Russia. That’s the model. Russia was run exclusively by billionaires working together under a billionaire leader with zero checks from the courts of the press even before the US was. That’s the model.

  67. 67.

    Jeffro

    @Soprano2:They truly believe no country’s laws should apply to them; in fact, many of them see different countries’ laws as a petty annoyance to be overcome. Kay’s right, they think they should rule the whole world.

    Ordinary citizens need to understand have it beaten into their heads that great wealth is great power; it has the capacity to inflict great harm (and not just on ‘others’) and like every other source of great power, MUST be restrained.

  68. 68.

    JML

    Billionaires remind me of college faculty sometimes. For faculty, they’re (usually) incredibly smart and experienced in a particular subject, and because they’re an expert on one thing they act like that means they’re an expert that needs to be consulted and listened to about everything. Billionaires act like being rich means they’re right about everything and should always be listened to, kowtowed to, etc.

  69. 69.

    Chris Johnson

    @MagdaInBlack: ‘Burn it all down’ is the Putin angle.

    I think that’s the bottom line here: the various billionaires and legacy Republicans that have gained power, are all united in that they want to KEEP that power, and they want it to mean something.

    Bannon is a truer representation of what Putin wants, than any of that. I think you’ll find him surprisingly tenacious because of that. Fundamentally, Putin wants all these people to lose all they have, and become subservient to him. They do not agree, but Putin thinks he can exploit this situation and Bannon’s a good weathervane for that.

    Right now it looks like it serves Putin’s aims, to have the MAGA base flip out and attack the billionaires (rightly so, but the billionaires don’t like this). There could come a time when it’ll serve Putin’s aims to have the MAGA base even slay Trump, much like there came a time when Epstein outlived his usefulness (remember MTG invoking Epstein in threatening her peers?)

    If it’s about divisiveness, chaos, and decline, that’s what Putin’s trying to do. Don’t expect Russian-backed Republican power and consistency. They think they’re there to have power, but they are really there to take a fall and bring down the US with them. And they don’t want to take said fall, but Putin wants to trip them up after having guided them up the stairs to his window of choice. Technically, they came up in the world, sort of? Too bad about the balcony and all.

  70. 70.

    tobie

    Every English teacher in the world is scratching her head at Thiel’s purple prose. It’s only “dusk” but “darker questions” from the pit of hell in which we currently reside are already emerging. This is such sophomoric prose.

    Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum.

  72. 72.

    azlib

    The term “tech bro” should be banned and replaced with just “bro” with all its negative conotations. Most of these folks were simply investors and got lucky in a technology field. Thiel has no more understanding of Internet tech than my pet cat.  Same goes for Musk who was born wealthy and got lucky with Tesla and SpaceX. Oddly, his welath is a result of Federal contracts and Federal subsidies, but hypocrisy has always been a strong suit for these folks.

  73. 73.

    CCL

    Late as ever to the thread, but re Thiel’s monologue:  what a dumb person thinks a smart, well read person sounds like.

  74. 74.

    hotshoe

    @Daoud bin Daoud: The Brits managed to keep the Raj in effect for almost a hundred years .

    Since Muskrat wants to abandon Earth for Mars, he won’t be as helpful to the next Raj as Queen Victoria was. But Thiel might be.

  75. 75.

    hotshoe

    @Kay: … they plan to purchase 50,000 indigenous people and steal their land. The NYTimes had a “Dealbook” on it – how much would it cost to buy these savages. [US media are] Just absolute degenerates.

    The “good news” for the Thugs is that there are only those 50000 indigenous people to manage. Dumpster could actually win on that.

    Big difference compared to the wild-ass promotion of the idea that US can invade/buy/control Mexico.

    I really don’t wish harm on any poor nineteen-year-old US Army recruit who gets sent south with their automatic weapons against the Mexican villagers (and cartels). It would be Viet Nam times 100, and I already lived through the Viet Nam war once; please not again thanks all the same.

    But I gotta say it would be well-deserved for some of those MAGAt boys to find consequences in the real world for their lust for domination.

  81. 81.

    brantl

    @Kay: Trump is the absolute incarnation of what the phrase “Ugly American” was supposed to be. He’s Achie Bunker in a fat guy’s suit.

  83. 83.

    Chris T.

    @MagdaInBlack:

    Thiel bought himself a VP. Musk bought himself a FOTUS. Now they fight over who got the better deal?

    Pretty much, yes. I think Thiel got the better deal: he paid a lot less and the guy he bought won’t keel over from dementia so soon. But there’s a time value as well, so it’s not all that clear.

Comments are closed.