To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Peter Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.

But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.

Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.

To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

Well you’re going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    Saw some clips of an interview he had where he straight up said modern day villains don’t look like Hitler; they look like Greta Thunberg. As well as other, equally batshit, bizarro land levels of ass-backwardness.

    Also: “Right-wing intellectual” is an oxymoron.

    • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
      14·
      2 days ago

      modern day villains don’t look like Hitler; they look like Greta Thunberg.

      Of course a modern day Hitler would say that.

      Lmao I literally just compared him to Hitler the other day. “Don’t look at me, look at Greta Thunberg. Eww! She’s so smug, right guys? BTW I believe I’m god, but don’t worry about that for now. Let’s all focus on Greta and the way she calls out genocide when she sees it happening, like a total Nazi!”