Vance went full fash with the speed of a Peter Thiel cash transfer. https://t.co/BBMsJrx5VM
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 7, 2023
Itâs long past the time that Yale Law should have been burned to the ground https://t.co/vmRInqUZ8R
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 7, 2023
Peter Thiel can easily afford to pick up the odd young authoritarian-in-training, the way lesser men might buy Funko Pop figures from their preferred franchises. But, like those Funko Pops, the J.D. Vances and Blake Masters are just cheap plastic gimcracks — even kept mint-in-box, they’ll never rise to the level where their value stands as a sign of their former owner’s historical importance, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army or even J. Pierpont Morgan’s library. Our degraded age!…
At no other moment in human history could this guy be living this life. Yet he somehow sees it as a failure that must be demolished. https://t.co/RsEvcuPxER pic.twitter.com/zCp8ujPHo5
â Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2023
Barton Gellman, at the Atlantic, “Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy”:
… For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because âif youâre too optimistic, it just shows youâre out of touch.â He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trumpâs America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. âThe â30s, â40s, and â50sâwhich had massive, crazy amounts of powerâhe admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,â Hoffman told me. âWe started the space program.â
But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a âsenile, central-left regime.â His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it…
Reid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friendâs way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him âkind of furious or angryâ about the worldâs unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment. âPeter tends to be not âglass is half emptyâ but âglass is fully empty,ââ Hoffman told me.
Disillusionment was a recurring theme in my conversations with Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker. Yet he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks…
He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or âredistributionist economicsâ that would impinge on their wealth and powerâor any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine. He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.
More than anything, he longs to live forever…
Late Night <em>Twilight Zone</em> Read: Peter Thiel Is A Disappointed ManPost + Comments (135)