People are asking me questions about the recent unhinged rants of political extremist Peter Thiel to the Commonwealth Club. 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.
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.