History of American prosecution of Nazi sympathizers shows JD Vance and Pete Hegseth have entered seditious territory

The Precedent

In 1944, the U.S. government brought sedition charges against 30 Americans under the Smith Act. Their crime: membership in the America First Committee and publishing “seemingly pro-German writings” that prosecutors said were part of “a gigantic conspiracy with German and Nazi officials.” The charges established the standard: even passive support for Nazis through speech was considered seditious.

Joining America First in 1940 simply meant a white supremacist campaign to enable Hitler, given how the Yale “college” movement has been documented by the Gerald Ford archives (arguably foundational to selection as VP for the extremely racist anti-democratic President Nixon).

The defendants of America First opposed going to war against fascism and espoused rabid hate speech. They plotted overthrowing the American government, held mock trials of the President and published materials questioning U.S. involvement in stopping Hitler.

They attempted to destroy democracy and passively supported the Nazi cause through speech and published materials. Rather than identify as Nazis themselves, they opposed anyone anti-fascist.

Given their more direct attempts to overthrow the government in 1933 failed, they became passive and didn’t threaten political opponents with gas chambers and they didn’t say “I love Hitler.” They said stop trying to stop Hitler.

For this, they faced five to twenty years in prison. I mean, except for Ford who went free and became the President decades later, if you see the problem already.

By 1996 the official America First candidate for President still was openly regarded as being a Nazi, and he received under 1,000 votes. America First was so extreme, thoroughly crushed as a brand of fascism, that it had to rebrand itself into “Christian Patriot” ranchers and cowboys.

Let me be more clear. Ralph Forbes was the “America First Party” candidate in 1996, campaigning as former leader of the KKK and American Nazi Party. He had rapidly advanced to the rank of captain and commander of its western division under George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, as there wasn’t really much competition. He had served also as the campaign manager for David Duke’s disasterous Populist Party (KKK) campaign for the Presidency.

THAT was, and still is, what should be understood as America First.

The Legal Standards

The Smith Act very clearly criminalized America First to block its intended outcomes:

• Conspiring to “impair the loyalty of the armed forces”
• Advocating overthrow of government by force
• Speech intended to cause insubordination or obstruct military recruitment

The constitutional framework has not changed since 1944. Three Supreme Court cases, however, have been argued to define boundaries:

Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942): Fighting words that “by their very utterance inflict injury” are unprotected.

Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969): Speech loses First Amendment protection when “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Virginia v. Black (2003): True threats—”statements where a speaker means to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence”—are not protected speech.

These standards have made prosecution of Nazis harder than the 1944 Smith Act, not easier. The bar for sedition is higher now than when America quickly jailed Nazi sympathizers, which is arguably why America First (waving their red, white and black hats and flags) suddenly openly campaigned itself into control of the White House.

The question isn’t whether these Republican actions meet historical thresholds for sedition—they clearly exceed them. The question is whether America in 2025 still has the institutional will to enforce laws it once considered fundamental to national security.

The Vance Standard

This rapid decline of American protection against Nazis helps explain the headlines in 2025. Young Republican leaders—including government officials, state legislators, and congressional staffers—sent 2,900 pages of messages showing:

• White supremacist symbol 1488 used repeatedly
• “Great. I love Hitler” with enthusiastic reactions
• “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber”
• 251+ racial slurs and dehumanizing language
• Explicit support for Republicans who “support slavery”
• Discussions of rape, violence, and “psychological torture methods”

This isn’t passive support like during WWII. This is now very active promotion of hateful violent Nazi ideology combined with explicit threats against political opponents by people with government authority and organizing capacity.

Vice President JD Vance’s response reveals the well known America First pattern: dismissed Nazism as “college group chat” and told Americans not to “pearl clutch” about his fellow Republicans who advocate for rapid political assassination and genocide.

Under the 1944 standard—even passive support for Nazis—every person in those chats would face sedition charges. Active sabotage conviction would mean execution.

Under the 2025 standard—active threats of violence—they meet the legal threshold for prosecution.

Under any standard—the Vice President is providing institutional cover for seditionists.

When Vance:

• Minimizes documented Nazi symbolism and genocide threats as harmless banter
• Simultaneously labels Democrats a “domestic terrorism movement”
• Calls universities “the enemy” requiring “aggressive attack” for opposing Nazism
• Uses government power to order FBI/Treasury crackdowns on political opponents without evidence

…he meets the elements of seditious conspiracy under 18 U.S. Code § 2384: using force or intimidation to “oppose,” “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution” of U.S. law.

The laws against domestic terrorism that he’s actively obstructing?

Those are the laws his self-admitted allies are violating in those chats. But Vance’s cover extends beyond protecting just the Young Republicans actively promoting Nazism.

The Hegseth Standard

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s actions reveal an even more direct violation of the Smith Act’s prohibition on “conspiring to impair the loyalty of the armed forces.”

Hegseth ordered all service members to watch his speech demanding they conform to his political ideology or resign. Active-duty service members describe this as “a loyalty test” and warn “it’s scary how many of these higher-ups are following blatantly illegal orders.”

Military legal scholars at Yale Law School warn that Hegseth is attempting to “subordinate our national defense to the personal, political and social agendas of a commander-in-chief who prizes personal loyalty above the military’s commitment to our nation and Constitution.”

The evidence of impairing military loyalty is systematic:

• Fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. CQ Brown and dozens of generals/admirals in what officials call a “purge”
• Told podcast audiences “any general that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go”
• Ordered 20% cuts to four-star generals and admirals—eliminating roughly 100 senior officers
• Fired the Army and Air Force’s top judge advocates general to avoid “roadblocks to orders”
• Commissioned his personal lawyer—who defended a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes—to overhaul military legal counsel to “approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war”
• Summoned 800+ generals and admirals from worldwide posts to Quantico for a loyalty speech, with defense officials calling it “embarrassing” and questioning why senior officers had to be “pulled away from their missions to listen to hours of political grievances”

This is not reforming the military. This is systematically purging officers based on political ideology and demanding personal loyalty over constitutional oath.

Under the 1944 Smith Act standard, Hegseth would face immediate prosecution for conspiracy to impair military loyalty—the exact charge brought against America First members who merely published anti-war materials.

Hegseth is actively restructuring military command to prioritize loyalty to Trump over the Constitution, firing officers who resist, eliminating legal oversight, and forcing remaining officers to publicly affirm his political agenda.

The Vice President provides cover for this too.

The LaGuardia Standard

In the 1930s, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia faced Nazi infiltration of law enforcement. His response was unequivocal: he issued orders to all city departments prohibiting association with fascist organizations.

As documented in the historical record, when faced with evidence of Nazi organizing, LaGuardia took aggressive action in order to declare NYC free of Nazism. He refused professional licenses to German nationals invoking treaty rights, arguing “it is well known that American citizens of the Jewish faith have been discriminated against in Germany.” He issued criminal libel charges against anti-Semitic propagandists (e.g. Edmondson). He canceled German steel contracts for city projects.

Most importantly: LaGuardia never dismissed even the slightest Nazi organizing as harmless.

LaGuardia understood how officers sworn to uphold the Constitution cannot simultaneously pledge loyalty to movements seeking to overthrow it. This was considered a fundamental principle of democratic governance.

Hegseth has inverted this principle. Rather than purge those with authoritarian loyalties, he purges those loyal to the Constitution. Rather than prohibit association with extremist ideology, he demands conformity to it.

Under the LaGuardia standard—enforced against individual police officers—Hegseth’s systematic restructuring of military command to prioritize personal loyalty over constitutional oath would warrant immediate removal and prosecution.

Sedition Question

In 1944, America prosecuted citizens for even passively supporting Hitler through speech.

In 2025, government officials actively spread Nazi symbolism and threaten opponents with mass murder (e.g. Hitler rapidly jailed both his supporters and opponents to execute anyone with power). And the Vice President very openly and unashamedly provides cover, while accusing victims of being the threat.

MAGA tells us to go backwards in time, which means the 1942 America First active seditionists were executed, and the 1944 America First passive seditionists deserved jail.

Given these standards that America has applied to Nazi sympathizers, what are Vance and Hegseth… again?

How Peter Thiel’s apparent “Christian” front group weaponized scripture to legitimize his Nazi territorial philosophy.

Historians Train to Spot Patterns

When Peter Thiel recently delivered four private lectures warning that climate activists and tech industry critics are “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” most coverage ended up focused on the carnival-like spectacle — apocalyptic language, religious fervor, sheer weirdness of a billionaire investor preaching eschatology into San Francisco “tech elites”.

These reporters missed the point entirely, perhaps because historians are so rare these days.

The lectures, hosted by ACTS 17 Collective—a religious lobby group pushing church control over state through tech industry elites—are neither eccentric theology nor mysterious. As leaked to the Washington Post, they represent the latest iteration of a multigenerational fascist project: establishing sovereign territorial racist enclaves outside democratic accountability.

Understanding this requires historical rigor, not journalistic circumspection or diplomatic euphemism. Let’s be precise then: ACTS 17 Collective functionally is a return to overt promotion of the Nazi Lebensraum doctrines.

Lebenswhat?

I know, the word sounds like some kind of gross cake the neighbors bring over for the holidays.

The Nazis promoted a concept of Lebensraum (living space) to justify territorial expansion. Several interlocking claims were used:

• Superior people require separate territory
• The “contaminated” mixed societies are irredeemable
• Wacky groundless mystical frameworks, meant to sound philosophical or even moral, provide legitimation
• Availability of space, or really existing populations are worthless and to be displaced or subordinated
• This expansion is civilizational necessity, not mere conquest or colonization. That’s how “Mars” references, to the trained historian ear, have the unmistakable ring of 1960s Rhodesian or Namibian white flight:

  

The sophistication of modern tech fascism is that it replaces military conquest with silicon venture capital, and racial pseudo-science with scripture. But the core structure remains identical.

The Thiel surname itself appears repeatedly in Nazi records: Walter Thiel, a famous example, managed a Nazi techo-compound in the 1930s where his more than 700 slave laborers died producing weapons systems. When German newspapers today glorify this “Silicon Valley,” they’re explicitly connecting Nazi tech slavery to modern tech culture.

…a part of the Nazi war machine, Thiel dreamed of… a rocket capable of manned flight to the Moon.

Werner Thiel, another well known example, was captured in 1942 attempting to smuggle bombs into America to sabotage the defense industry from within, a bumbling covert agent of death turned in by his colleagues.

The Genealogical Evidence

Peter Thiel’s father Klaus Thiel provides the clearest through-line. In 1967, Klaus departed Frankfurt on the eve of denazification intensification, relocating to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1971, he pivoted his United States papers into criminal work in apartheid-era Namibia (illegally occupied by South Africa), where he managed the Rössing uranium mine from a Nazi enclave. His clandestine illegal nuclear weapons supply operation was being reported for Black workers “dying like flies” from radiation exposure, while white managers like Klaus enjoyed country club privileges. In 1977, Klaus abruptly fled his racist enclave of Namibia when Black majority rule no longer could be blocked, settling into Reagan-era California’s white-flight suburbs.

The Klaus Thiel story is NOT a normal economic migration.

Each relocation follows the same pattern: flight from democratic accountability toward territories with legally-sanctioned racial hierarchy.

The son clearly has systematized what his father improvised. Peter Thiel has funded charter cities like Próspera in Honduras and California Forever in Solano County—attempts to establish private governance outside democratic control. He invested in seasteading projects for floating cities beyond national jurisdiction.

Through Palantir, Peregrine and Anduril, he’s positioned technology as a prerequisite for white nationalist sovereignty. He installed JD Vance as ideological successor in government. And according to journalist Jacob Silverman:

…politically connected people in the charter cities movement, people receiving investment from Thiel and others, were very excited about the prospect of the U.S. taking over Greenland.

This isn’t even close to libertarian theory, as it often contradicts it. It’s the long-standing active Nazi territorial acquisition strategy transmitted from Klaus to Peter.

Lebensraum.

The Old Acts 17 Red Flag: Scriptural Legitimation of Segregation

ACTS 17 Collective didn’t choose its name randomly. The Acts 17 reference is known white nationalist doctrine, providing the three key elements essential to Lebensraum ideology.

First, the “divine boundaries” verse Acts 17:26 states:

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

This verse has been explicitly weaponized throughout history by extremists to justify racial segregation and apartheid.

Apartheid. Acts 17. Inseparable in history.

Think about Peter Thiel and Elon Musk… spreading the encoded language of apartheid. Or as a defender of American segregation once wrote plainly:

The Scriptures teach Segregation…Acts 17:26…is used over and over again in defense of segregation of the races.

The verse provides divine sanction for separate territories for separate peoples, opposition to “mixing” (racial, cultural, democratic), God-ordained hierarchy and boundaries, and the right of “superior” groups to their own sovereignty.

That’s apartheid, just apartheid wrapped in “Christian” phrases.

Second, consider the elitist engagement model of the reference. Acts 17 depicts Paul addressing the Areopagus—the intellectual and political elite of Athens. This creates a scriptural template for bypassing democratic processes through elite capture, targeting cultural centers (Athens becomes Silicon Valley, the Nazis appropriated classical imagery), converting powerful individuals rather than building mass movements, and achieving top-down civilizational transformation.

That’s fascism, just fascism wrapped in “Christian” phrases.

Third, the apocalyptic civilizational warfare frame. Paul’s message announced God’s intention:

…to put an end to the civilisation that has, for a long time, dominated the geographical space that has Athens at its centre.

This justifies viewing democratic culture as existentially threatening, framing opposition as cosmic struggle, demanding complete societal transformation, and rejecting incremental reform in favor of rupture.

It has elements of apartheid, and overt reference to fascism, but really Acts 17 appears to be about the rapidity of rupture for… Nazism.

The Nuremberg Moment

Thiel’s comments on the Nuremberg trials expose the whole gambit for its underlying resentment doctrine. When asked about Nazi accountability, he expressed nostalgia for Churchill’s early political pressure for summary executions:

I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. …I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the American one.

“The Churchill one” means the most extreme, the most illogical, the least law and order. Churchill was not a great guy, let that be clear, across a number of issues. He helped preserve the Chamberlain government’s campaign to defeat Hitler (wrangling in overt UK sympathy for Nazism), and this interrupted German spread of evil, but we must also beware his many flaws.

Why would a Nazi today prefer summary executions over trials, to “burn and forget”? Because Nuremberg trials were created to generate documentary evidence of Nazi crimes, international law frameworks for accountability, legal precedents preventing fascist rehabilitation, and historical record making denial impossible.

It’s like Bernie Madoff arguing fraud should bring a firing squad instead of forensic accounting. The logic is perverse: extreme penalties without documentation eliminate the evidence trail. If they’re not executed, the argument goes, there’s no proof of crime—and if they are executed, there’s no trial record to study. It’s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy weaponized: real Nazis would have been shot, therefore anyone still breathing can’t be one.

For someone whose father fled denazification, this isn’t abstract philosophy. The Nuremberg framework is precisely what threatens multigenerational transmission of fascist ideology. Thiel’s preference for summary execution over documented accountability reveals his actual concern: preventing the power of historians to account, by evicerating historical records and covering up what his projects represent (let alone his father’s).

How Silicon Lebensraum Wags the Valley

Silverman’s Gilded Rage documents the practical implementation across multiple domains.

• Physical sovereignty through Thiel’s New Zealand compounds, charter cities in Honduras and California, Musk’s Texas compounds, interest in Greenland acquisition and “exit” strategies for sovereign enclaves.
• Economic sovereignty via cryptocurrency as parallel financial system, opposition to tax transparency and the Common Reporting Standard, and resistance to democratic oversight of capital.
• Educational sovereignty including private schools like Zuckerberg’s pandemic academy, control over curriculum and values transmission, and escape from “contaminated” public education.

  

• Ideological sovereignty means purging organizations that represent internal dissent. A fetish for unity in thought pervades tech companies. Fifty Google employees were fired for protesting Israeli contracts. As Silverman documents, there’s now “very little tolerance for internal dissent or anything political that feels disruptive.”
• Military integration proceeds through Palantir and Anduril positioning as essential defense infrastructure, what Silverman describes as “outright enthusiasm for working in the defense industry,” and defense contracts as leverage for political influence.

“Urban” Life Framed as Justification

Silverman identifies their view of San Francisco as “irredeemable” due to prosecutorial reform, equitable history teaching, and treating homelessness as social rather than criminal issue.

President Trump regularly parrots 1970s racist extremist doctrine when fraudulently attacking cities as unsafe or in “decline.” This echoes Klaus Thiel’s 1970s Namibia rhetoric about “failed” multiracial governance—the same lens Peter Thiel applies to San Francisco today, marking its prosecutorial reform, equitable history teaching, and social treatment of homelessness as signs of an “irredeemable” city. It’s the Nixon “Urban Renewal” playbook: frame diverse, democratic governance as failure requiring white-flight (abandonment) or destruction and replacement.

Thiel told Stanford classmates that apartheid “works” and is “economically sound.” His current projects apply the same logic: democratic, diverse society is dysfunctional; superior people require separate sovereign space of exclusivity.

America Needs Historians More Than Ever

JD Vance is a coin-operated “Thiel disciple” who “has written about how much Thiel influenced the course of his life.” His extremely expensive campaigns that enabled elevation to Vice President places the Lebensraum network at the center of American governance.

Americans don’t get it clearly enough yet and seem to think this is about tech regulation disputes, tax policy disagreements, and antitrust enforcement.

Nope.

It’s actually about territorial sovereignty outside democratic control, racial and class separation dressed as innovation, and ending democratic governance for ideologically pure enclaves. As Silverman notes:

I think the Democrats, in some ways, still may not understand what they’re dealing with.

These aren’t opportunistic politicians. These are Nazis infiltrating a political party. Silverman emphasizes: “these guys are rather sincere in a lot of ways.”

People need to smell the coffee. When someone writes like this:

[Thiel has] long been skeptical, at the very least, of democracy. Democracy interferes with his idea of true freedom. [Those feelings] are more widely felt now among the tech elites than they were when Thiel was a little bit lonely on that front in the late 1990s.

This is a platform of swastikas waving, by people who explicitly reject democracy and are building alternatives.

This is stated openly, repeatedly, in their own words.

Historical Analogy as Antidote

In 1930s-40s Germany, society was viewed as “contaminated” by democracy, Jews, and communists, creating the need for Lebensraum in the East. Philosophical justification came from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—whom Thiel openly credits as his core influence: technological and racial superiority justified Hitler’s genocidal expansion through military conquest.

…Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work [Thiel] said helped create the core of his own beliefs.

In 2020s Silicon Valley, society is viewed as “contaminated” by wokeness, diversity, and democracy, creating the need for sovereign enclaves through charter cities and compounds. Philosophical and theological justification comes from Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Acts 17. Technological superiority justifies sovereignty achieved through venture capital and defense contracts.

The sophistication is the mechanism, not the ideology.

Some will repeatedly fall for the logical fallacies like Scotsman, and object that any or all comparisons to Nazism are inflammatory.

It’s actually precise.

Lebensraum requires identification of a superior group requiring separate space, justification through philosophical or pseudo-scientific framework, territorial acquisition strategy, rejection of “contaminated” mixed society, subordination or displacement of existing populations, and civilizational necessity framing.

Peter Thiel and his associated network exhibit these characteristics. Thiel has expressed anti-democratic views, stating that ‘democracy interferes with true freedom.’ Thiel has pursued territorial sovereignty projects including charter cities and expressed interest in Greenland acquisition. The ACTS 17 Collective uses Acts 17:26 scripture in its organizational framework. Thiel and associated figures have criticized San Francisco’s governance as failed. Thiel’s broader network invests in alternative governance infrastructure through cryptocurrency, private education, and defense technology companies like Palantir and Anduril. Thiel positioned JD Vance in government through political funding and mentorship.

What ACTS 17 Actually Does

The organization presents as Christian networking for tech leaders “wrestling with what it means to live with purpose and conviction.”

Its actual function is providing theological legitimation for oligarchic territoriality.

By hosting Thiel’s “sold out” apocalyptic carnival selling fear of “Antichrist legionnaires,” ACTS 17 vaulted speaker has framed democratic oversight as cosmic evil, as if to provide divine sanction for elite sovereignty, by weaponizing Acts 17:26 “boundaries” theology for ideological cohesion among tech elites. It’s hard to say this is anything but a mask for territorial ambitions in thick religious appeals.

This is precisely how fascist ideology gets transmitted across generations: the core remains constant (superior people deserve sovereign space) while packaging is adapted to the latest mystical power juice (from racial pseudo-science to biblical exegesis).

The Multigenerational Project

Klaus Thiel spent his life fleeing democratic accountability through migration to territories with legally-sanctioned hierarchy.

Peter Thiel is systematizing this impulse through institutional capture via defense tech and political placement; territorial acquisition through charter cities and compounds; ideological transmission through ACTS 17 and Vance mentorship; infrastructure building through Palantir surveillance and crypto sovereignty; and philosophical legitimation through Schmitt, Yarvin, and scripture.

This isn’t opportunistic. This is apocalyptic, destructive.

It’s the continuation of fascist ideology through adapted institutional forms, using theological language to avoid acknowledging what they actually seek: the end of democratic accountability and the establishment of sovereign elite enclaves organized on hierarchical principles.

Demand a Stand

Historical analytics demands we name patterns accurately. When a man whose father fled denazification builds surveillance technology for authoritarian regimes; studies Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt; explicitly rejects democracy; funds territorial “exit” strategies; uses scripture historically weaponized for apartheid; positions protégés to dismantle democratic governance; and hosts lectures framing democratic critics as apocalyptic enemies—calling this “libertarianism” or “contrarianism” isn’t analysis.

It’s evasion. It’s information warfare.

It’s certainly not the first time a white supremacist went around saying critics of AI are the real killers, not the horrible people creating the AI.

And look how that prediction turned out.

Don’t allow another goose step.

The ACTS 17 Collective appears in proper context to function as a Nazi front, a Lebensraum organization. The evidence is overwhelming, documented, and stated in their man’s own words.

The only question is whether we have the clarity today, to recognize in 2025 what people said could be seen in 1932 (let alone 2012).

Related Reading

• Washington Post, “Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction” (October 10, 2025)
• Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley (Bloomsbury, 2025)
• Politico Magazine, “‘The Democrats Still May Not Understand What They’re Dealing With'” (October 11, 2025)
• John Ganz, “The Enigma of Peter Thiel,” Unpopular Front (July 23, 2022)
• Jim Stewartson, “Peter Thiel’s Radioactive Childhood,” Mind War (April 4, 2025)
• Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (Penguin Press, 2021)
• Richard Davis, “The Politics of Nations and Boundaries—Acts 17:22-31,” Political Theology Network (May 23, 2018)

People are asking me questions about the recent unhinged rants of political extremist Peter Thiel, setup by the Acts 17 Collective.

What do I think?

Thiel is clearly backwards and ignorant, inverting history.

The real Luddites, for example, were technology experts who opposed undemocratic deployment that stripped workers of power and dignity. His depiction of them was completely wrong. Thiel himself opposes democratic oversight of technology deployment because elites like himself gain from being above the law.

The reasons for his false telling of history should be obvious.

When he calls critics “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” he’s not making an economic argument. It’s a worldview shaped by his father’s lifelong flight from democratic accountability. Getting all dressed up in religious language is a simple trick to seem profound and hide their authoritarian desires.

Once again his rants sound like the son of a Nazi still denying history, on the run from accountability, because that’s exactly who Thiel is.

Consider Peter’s life story of his father fleeing denazification in 1967 Germany for apartheid Namibia, then fleeing approaching majority rule in 1977 for Reagan’s vision of white rule over California. Peter himself bragged at Stanford that apartheid “works” and is “economically sound,” referring to his father’s illegal uranium mining operation where Black workers died from radiation exposure while white managers enjoyed country club privileges.

Most revealing is Thiel’s resentment toward the very accountability mechanisms designed to document horrible crimes and prevent their return. When directly asked about Nazi accountability he openly expressed nostalgia for summary executions over due process:

I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.

The Nuremberg trials created an undeniable historical record, established international law for crimes against humanity, and built the framework for holding authoritarian regimes accountable.

Thiel argues it would have been “healthier” to execute Nazis quickly without trials because that would avoid creating exactly the documentary evidence and legal precedents that prevent fascist ideology from being laundered across generations.

Given his father’s 1967 flight from denazification, this isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s personal resentment of the accountability framework that threatens to expose what he represents.

The illegal apartheid uranium mining background is especially chilling given the current push for unfettered AI development. Same pattern: extract maximum value, externalize the risks onto vulnerable populations, resist any democratic input.

This isn’t intellectual contrarianism, because it’s simply Nazism.

Once you see the multigenerational fascist ideology underneath his Silicon Valley success, you see exactly why someone who studied Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt explicitly rejects democracy as incompatible with his vision of the future. The continuation from his father’s laundering of Nazism means he wields enormous influence over American politics while the genealogy remains conveniently masked-even as he maneuvers pawns like JD Vance into positions to end democracy.