Peter Thiel Has Lost His Mind Again, And Other Dumb Billionaire Adventures
These guys.
Has Peter Thiel considered just lying down with a cool washcloth pressed to his forehead? And then staying there for at least a couple of months?
The gazillionaire tech guy/Apartheid fanboy/JD Vance top published an editorial on Friday in the Financial Times, and it very much needs to be read both to be believed and as a window into the thinking of our incoming broligarchs who will be able to get Donald Trump on the phone anytime they wish, unless the president is busy watching “Hannity,” in which case they’ll have to wait a couple of seconds while he finds and pushes the pause button on his TiVo remote.
Fuck it, let’s just read through it together and gaze in awe at its overwritten, overdramatic, preposterous, conspiratorial, bullshit-freshman-philosophy-class language:
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.
Ooo, Thiel (or his ghostwriter) has learned some fancy French! What horrific crimes against Peter Thiel has the “ancien regime” committed in pre-revolutionary France America?
My friend Eric Weinstein calls the pre-Internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. [...] Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that [Jeffrey Epstein] died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.
Absolutely perfect, pure, uncut tech billionaire brain here. A paragraph with an admiring mention of a portentous acronym that makes the normal institutions of a democratic society sound like a group of evil, conspiring masterminds. A poll that elevates a minority view with no evidence to the level of “teach the controversy.” Conspiracism. Grievance. An insinuation that the scales are starting to fall from the sheeple’s eyes, which implicitly makes the writer and his friends some sort of revolutionary heroes.
This is followed by some bafflegab about how 65 percent of Americans don’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and therefore the United States can’t wait another 60 years to find out how Anthony Fauci is responsible for COVID-19. It is as if Thiel has been mainlining clips of Rand Paul at Senate hearings, before we get to the meat of the argument:
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”?
Other countries have other laws not subject to or influenced by America’s First Amendment! Boy, this is the sort of insight that you can’t can get anywhere everywhere else, and without the rich-guy smarm.
But by all means, multi-billionaire who sued Gawker out of existence because it printed something about him that was true but still made him mad, please continue with the lecture on not punishing people for writing content on the Internet that hurts someone else’s fee-fees.
This is followed by some more “just asking questions” yammer about crypto entrepreneurs and IRS leaks, which leads up to this:
South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information.
More of the typical tech billionaire absurdity, comparing a system of racial discrimination codified into law and often violently enforced by organs of the state over several decades with America’s federal government trying to regulate cryptocurrency so people don’t lose their life savings to scam artists.
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.
Well, a huge amount of the solution to underfunding scientific research and not building up America’s housing supply while at least slowing down the debt buildup could be solved by taxing the living fuck out of billionaires like Peter Thiel, but we don’t think he’ll like that solution.
There was another “stupid billionaires and the idiots enabling them” story on Friday that we also want to point out, this one about how the twits working for the phony-baloney Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by chief twits Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are showing up at government agencies and demanding to speak to the manager.
This is leading to much confusion, because DOGE has zero authority. It is a make-work project to keep two Trump bootlickers occupied. Nonetheless, it has hired over 50 people (with more on the way) who, working from SpaceX’s office in DC, are trying to gather information from agencies that they can then use to cut the hell out of their budgets as part of Musk and Ramaswamy’s “enormous ambitions to tame Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy”:
Needless to say, this is not going over well with federal bureaucrats who have devoted decades to learning how to do their jobs. Longtime civil servants — some who have built their careers learning the intricacies of the federal bureaucracy — are an awkward fit with Silicon Valley’s fast-moving and disruptive culture. Many in Washington regard the tech entrepreneurs as arrogant or naive about the complexity of reining in government.
At least Musk is already backing away from his laughable ambitions for cutting $2 trillion in spending from the government, which is about one-third of what it spends in a year. This may partly be a product of other Republicans quietly resisting huge budget cuts at the same time they want to also cut taxes for the filthy rich. This was a result that could have been predicted by anyone who has spent more than five minutes observing national politics.
This crap is breaking out all over. Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir, nearly got laughed off a BBC show this week for endorsing imperialism in the guise of calling it an “important aesthetic” and a “frontier mindset” that won’t end up in people fighting wars over resources because everyone will recognize that only things that are “competent” should grow. In Lonsdale’s mind, it is all just the market recognizing efficiencies. Sorry Greenland, but we’re more efficient than you!
Welcome to our billionaire oligarchal nation. It’s terrifying, but there is hope that we can find ways to mitigate the damage. For as an anonymous Ukranian soldier once said of the Russians invading his country, we’re lucky they are so fucking stupid.
[Financial Times / Washington Post / Bluesky]
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>> My friend Eric Weinstein calls the pre-Internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex <<
Wait, I've been living in DISCworld this entire time?
Ha! Someone being interviewed on CNN just called Dumb Donald 'the original coin-operated president.'