Is Peter Thiel the real-life Bond villain a considerable number of people believe him to be, or is he an idiot whose attempts at becoming a political power player are doomed to fail spectacularly? There’s also a third option. According to Max Chafkin, who wrote The Contrarian, Thiel said he’d rather be thought of as evil rather than incompetent. Well, evilness and incompetence aren’t mutually exclusive, so why not both? Notice that at no point did I say he’s stupid. However, being book smart won’t help you win the game of thrones – just because someone reads Machiavelli, doesn’t mean they’re a great schemer. Of course, we won’t know for sure which is the right answer until telepathy becomes a reality and we’re able to read Thiel’s mind and see what’s really going on in there. However, nothing stops us lowly peasants (in this case, me) from speculating.
Why does Thiel do what he does? Is everything a step in a much bigger plan? Thiel tried to start a career as a professional whiny little bitch with The Diversity Myth (which was the basis for a sequence in our Geek Addiction due to its unintentional hilarity) but that failed. After the Satanic Panic, which involved accusations of Satan worship, human sacrifices, animal sacrifices, child abuse, and cannibalism, Thiel and Sacks’s denunciations of the Multiculturalists’ attempts to curtail free speech by outlawing bad words in the most incompetent way possible just couldn’t generate enough indignation among the public. Is that why he got involved with the Alt Right crowd? Is it merely a case of whiny little bitch solidarity? Or is something else at play? Did Thiel, after witnessing the power of these new quasi-religious cultural movements during his years at Stanford, decide to attach himself to one in order to influence its key players like a puppet master and become the power behind the throne? What other reason could there be for someone who complained about grade reforms and how that affected meritocracy to latch himself on to Trump, the master of failing upwards? Much like the dreaded Multiculturalists, Trump’s appeal is purely emotional and reduces people to loony cult members ready to defend the dumbest idea. Or did Thiel fall for it himself? In the end, he turned out to be as susceptible (and dumb) as the supporters of Multiculturalism he mocked in his whiny little bitch phase.
Luckily, there’s a whole book about Peter Thiel and his nefarious schemes, so, maybe, that’ll help. Chafkin is a supporter of the Evil Genius hypothesis. He blames Thiel for everything. Elon Musk? His fault. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook? His fault. Trump being elected? His fault. The Alt Right’s trollish tactics? His fault (because one of his minions used toilet humour in adds supporting one of the libertarian Paul’s campaign) (no, I don’t care enough to check which one it was). And if the Alt Right internet lunacy is his fault, then, in a roundabout way, the attack on the Capitol is also his fault. Wow, Peter Thiel is one efficient supervillain! Sure, Paul’s campaign failed and Chafkin even mocked the stupid adds, but that was only a trial run. The real campaign was the Alt Right’s support for Trump. So, even when Thiel fails, he succeeds. Dammit! Nothing can stop him! Not even his social awkwardness and inability to read a speech in an engaging way!
Sadly, Chafkin never explains how the mechanics of all those plans within plans actually work. He does make a point of telling us how attractive the younger men surrounding Thiel are. For instance, the team who helped him write the list of candidates for presidential appointments apparently looked like male models. But what does this mean? Does Thiel have his own harem of hot protégés? To be clear, Chafkin never goes as far as to say it, which is pretty lame. Is that bit of useless information about the assistants’ looks meant to distract us from the fact that only a couple of names from that list ended up being accepted? Yeah, the “Shadow President” failed his disruptive goals, but hey, his assistants are hot, which means… something I’m not going to tell you because this is serious journalism, okay? What Chafkin also doesn’t tell us is if Thiel invested in that whole libertarian island nations project because the guy who came up with it was hot, even though he, of course, describes him as handsome. Sure, seasteading sounds like a scheme worthy of a Bond villain, but what if Thiel is just a horny idiot who would’ve invested in Theranos if he were straight? Anyway, what Chafkin does tell us is that the man whose college newspaper used to rail against gays’ natural promiscuity and degeneracy threw gay sex parties. Shockingly, he doesn’t take the chance to do a side-by-side comparison between what went on at those sex parties and the beliefs about gay sex spewed by the Stanford Review. He could’ve at least assured us that no gerbils were harmed. He also doesn’t even try to make a connection between the orgies and Thiel’s evil global masterplan, so I’ll do it for him: Is this just a typical case of a hypocritical conservative, or is there more to it? Is Thiel trying to make Trumpism the dominant political current of the Republican Party because he genuinely believes all that MAGA nonsense or is this some devious plan to destroy not only the GOP but the entire US political system from within so he can create his own polyamory libertarian utopia on dry land (which would be way cheaper and more practical than building islands)? See, you thought him giving up on seasteading meant defeat, but you were WRONG!
If you still doubt Peter Thiel’s scheming genius, look no further than the conspiracy that took down Gawker. It was an intricate plan with many moving pieces worthy of a chess master… or maybe it was just some rich guy throwing money at a problem. Besides, it wasn’t even his idea. Seriously, how the hell wasn’t Thiel even able come up with that ridiculously simple plan on his own? Is waiting for someone to sue Gawker and offering to cover the costs really such a complex plot? And according to Chafkin there was another person involved that isn’t mentioned in Ryan Holiday’s book! Like, how many people can it possibly take to come up with such a lame strategy? I guess I should at least be impressed with Thiel’s ability to successfully follow other people’s instructions, but the second-hand embarrassment generated by all these reveals is too overwhelming. On top of all this, Thiel couldn’t even keep his mouth shut about it. It’s a conspiracy, ffs, it’s meant to be secret!
And how much of Gawker’s ruin was because of their own idiocy? All you have to do is read Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy to realize how much utter stupidity rather than intellectual brilliance moved the whole thing. Which, ironically, is the opposite of what Holiday meant by writing his paean to the subject of conspiracy. Anyway, this was what earned Thiel his scheming villain title and is why he’s often referred to as an enemy of the free press. Like, how threatening of him to fund a lawsuit against a gossipy news outlet that ignored every single opportunity to take down someone’s illegally obtained sex tape from their website! Can you imagine if other people did the same thing? The HORROR! By the way, would Thiel be considered such a villain if people stopped trying to paint Gawker as blameless heroes? They were hated by EVERYONE! And it wasn’t because they spoke truth to power. They weren’t thought to be horrible because they made fun of David Geffen’s shitty philanthropy. Gawker‘s journalists posted sex tapes, leaked nudes, and outed people (and kept doing it even as they were being sued and some of them even quit in protest when their boss asked them to stop) (see? I told you, utter stupidity). I watched the Netflix documentary Nobody Speaks: Trials of the Free Press, and frankly, the story about the Las Vegas multimillionaire who bought the newspaper that frequently reported on his dealings seemed waaay more threatening to the freedom of the press than Thiel’s so-called conspiracy, but I’m guessing that guy wasn’t sufficiently famous or weird to be awarded supervillain status.
Want more evidence of idiocy? How about Thiel’s continuing support of the type of super conservative politicians who work against gay rights? Even worse, lots of his MAGA buddies seem to just love Russia and Putin, aka as guy who hates gays and has no problem sending oligarchs to gulags. (And if Thiel ever ended up penniless in Siberia that would probably generate enough schadenfreude to cause a rip in the time-space continuum) I know that his wealth puts him at that level where you can get away with anything, including hunting poor people for sport, but surely at some point his sense of self-preservation would kick in, right? Are Peter Thiel’s survival instincts set to “gullible dodo”? And why Trump? Is that really the person anyone with a fully functioning brain would throw away their credibility for? Like, what’s the reasoning here? Didn’t his presidency essentially demonstrate that he’s not even good as a useful idiot.
More and more it feels like I was right when I wrote in the second paragraph that Thiel is basically the Right-Wing version of a Multiculturalist. Or maybe he just takes his religious beliefs so seriously that he puts them above all else and so he couldn’t possibly support some heathen liberal. That would at least make him religious dumb rather than just dumb dumb. Of course, he also says he prefers the New Testament, which is the one with the bits about turning the other cheek and not judging people, so it’s unclear if he’s read the whole thing or just skipped to the Book of Revelation.
Thiel’s supervillain aura seems less dependent on what he actually does than on the ever-growing number of people who insistently denounce him as one. Chafkin’s book clearly suffers from multiple personality disorder on that regard. It basically reads as Incompetence + Incompetence + Incompetence = Evil Genius. Frankly, after adding all of Thiel’s moves shown in The Contrarian, this feels less like a case for James Bond than Jack Bauer. Chafkin’s Thiel is a classic 24 villain with an insanely complex plan whose actions end up looking nonsensical and even contradictory because the writers have to not only keep the twists coming, but also stretch the plot for twenty-four episodes. What, pray tell, sets Thiel apart from all the other rich Right-Wing assholes out there other than a colourful past he’s abandoned? I watched a bit of an interview in which he mentioned the welfare state and the thought that popped into my mind wasn’t “This man is a veritable menace to the current world order and must be stopped!” but a mere “Jerk!”. The political candidates he’s wasting his money on aren’t even that popular. And what will happen when they lose? That will, of course, put Peter Thiel one step closer to the end goal of his ever-evolving masterplan the intricacies of which are so deeply complex that no ordinary human mind would ever be able to handle them in its entirety and if anyone ever tried, their head would spontaneously explode Scanners-style! Or maybe he’ll just fade into that homogeneous mass of rich assholes trying to shape democracy that plagues every nation.
Maybe it’s time to move on from the Genius VS Idiot debate and focus on something much more important: just how boring has Peter Thiel become? I know that his love of privacy probably makes people wonder about what deep dark secrets he’s hiding, but I think the only thing he’s hiding is deep dark BOREDOM. Let’s face it, there’s a greater chance of George R R Martin finishing Winds of Winter than of him writing another essay for a Christian magazine in which he praises Goethe’s soul-selling Faust, who wanted to reclaim land from the sea (literally?) which could be part of God’s plan, because that’s where Leviathan lives (I’m not making this up) (yeah, it’s all probably metaphorical, but surely there was a less loony way of expressing it) (oho, do you know who else lives in the sea? Cthulhu) (you do not want to mess with Tluhluh!). Did Thiel fall prey to that mimetic desire thing? Did he spend so much time around boring people that he became one? Or was he always boring and we just hadn’t noticed it yet? That would certainly explain how he managed to read Lord of the Rings over and over again. (God, just that prologue about Hobbits is enough to take down a woolly mammoth) (I mean, there’s slow build and then there’s Tolkien)
Anyway, whatever the answer to all these questions is, the truth is that Peter Thiel can’t possibly live up to the evil genius techno-libertarian messiah hype. No one could. He’ll also never be as entertaining as he once was. And that’s even worse than joining the Nazi-adjacent crowd.
By Danforth