"Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods. They are worshipped and invited to all the events worth going to (meetups, hackathons, etc.). Everyone wants to be like them.
And it seems to me to be a geographical problem too. In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.
So, the issue is really just that he has far too much power, as an individual
This is absurd to the point of being cartoonish. No one treats billionaires like supervillains. How many billionaires are in supermax prisons right now in New York?
> Nobody particularly likes them
This is not relevant, regardless of whether it’s true. A ton of people hate Thiel and Trump. Disliking a billionaire doesn’t take away their power.
That said, buying airtime/ads does is not sufficient to create traction with your ideas. I have worked at plenty of foundations that spend a lot of money to "raise awareness" on various issues, which ultimately goes nowhere.
IMHO the zany, outlandish claims by Thiel, are gaining attention because of their inherent shock-value. I sent a text to my girlfriend last week, incredulous that Thiel was reported to claim the Pope is now an antichrist (¡). Definitely not because I agreed with that claim.
I think the root issue here is deep to human nature -- heightened awareness of danger, that adrenaline amygdala response. Social media helps these messages spread, but news publishers have been putting train wrecks on the front page since the 1800s. A growing handful of savvy operators, Thiel included, have learned how to manipulate this primal instinct to garner fame and influence.
I'm not sure how to change human nature. I do think that education about these tactics helps -- the magic trick is not as impressive when you know how it is done.
I find the premise of projects like Ground News -- trying to de-bias media -- really compelling.
That said, a de-biasing site isn't much help if people don't read it. Infamously, people's politically-melded worldviews are increasingly divorced for reality -- there's a famous example of people in surveys saying they "hated Obamacare" but "loved and relied on the Affordable Care Act" (for international readers: those are the exact same thing, which a simple google search would reveal).
b) regardless of who hears about Thiel's philosophy, it still has impact. He funds political candidates, companies, think tanks etc and directly affect the world.
IIRC it covers things like how to maintain proper oxygen levels and sustenance while still blocking frequencies in the human audible range with the sand around one's head.
Because of human nature, the two are inseparable, and influence over people's attention is power, especially when those people hold seats of power.
The question is about what perspective society takes towards wealth/power concentration at any given time, and that usually ends up correlated with how the non-wealthy and non-powerful are feeling.
I've said this about celebrities for two decades now. Most people don't care though; they love the gossip, I guess.
Voting is the only power we have but the voting booths are at the stadium.
Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful. And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.
Taking away the microphone is not censorship. We're not talking about taking away Thiel's right to speech, we're talking about taking away undue amplification of Thiel's speech.
You are allowed to stand on a soapbox and shout your politics.
But if you amplify your speech on that soapbox you're given a little bit of slack because of "free speech" but then are rightly arrested for public nuisance and/or noise violations.
Kind of hard to do this when he has so much money to buy influence anywhere. An example is how the current vice president of the United States is a protege of the guy.
But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.
Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.
This is false. His ideas get attacked plenty because it's clear that his ideas are destructive to society. But there are only so many times one can have the "holy shit his ideas are destructive to society" conversation without talking about how the only reason his destructive ideas are front and center is because of his money.
The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.
Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.
It's not that free speech absolutism is fair, it's that there's not really an alternative that's any more fair.
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
HN seems very ready to defend the rich and powerful from attacks that don't even exist and its weird to come here and say how great he is while also seeing what his efforts have actually wrought - nothing positive on education or government overreach via the Trump admin. Paypal may have been ok at one point, but is generally considered to be a terrible company to work with, Palantir is a murderer for hire, and SpaceX burns billions to get us not very much with its continued explosions in the sky with hilarious mars shot promises regardless of its other commercial successes.
And what about the influencers with millions of followers (recent Qatari influence campaign comes to mind)? What about Hollywood (again Qataris and their influence campaign, if you notice how some famous actors started to speak on certain topics)
Thiel is courting Christian nutjobs whether or not you pay attention to it. I’m personally not gonna stick my head in the sand.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
Something has to change. The superrich act as parasites and broken all inter-generational promises. The USA really messed up here - they should have put down control systems to prevent this parasitic situation.
Saying weird/extreme shit and then building a movement is a way of qualifying initiates and those willing to rally to the cause. It's part of the cult programming playbook. You build an in-crowd and you aim their energies at the out-crowd. It often leads to more unhinged positions too.. these things don't self-correct.
Thiel's a loon, Elon's a loon, Trump's a loon, Vought's a loon.
Pointed dismissiveness completely misses the point.
The notion that there is an antichrist and that "international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise" is ludicrous.
The only reason we listen to his nonsense is because he has money, and with that comes power in this country.
I suggest he take some shrooms and chill...
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
Interesting perspective, considering that you said this only 5 minutes later in this same post:
> There's a communist who's just been elected to Mayer of New York.
The two-party system seems pretty cooked at this point.
If you don't think so, play this game: how would things change for Peter Thiel if he was of a different race? It wouldn't. Greed is blind to these superficial facets that drive the normies up the wall. It's truly by design. And it's so broadly accepted you don't even need to hide these things anymore which only adds insult to injury.
The problem is that in much of the world (e.g. the UK) Catholics are historically left wing, AND uninterested in apocalyptic ideas so it seems a big ask.
The article does not leave me with any understanding of what his ideas actually are.
Because really?
Greta Thunberg is the best that a nearly omnipotent second only to the Creator itself can do? Did he ever watch The Omen movies? Insist on nothing less than Sam Neill's portrayal of Damian Thorn as the Antichrist.
In contrast, Greta Thunberg would be the six-fingered AI slop of antichrists. Is he insinuating that Satan has been replaced with generative AI? If so, times are much worse than I thought.
I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there would have been interesting (to me).
I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.
Why not, it’s not as if you’d face any real consequences for your own reckless stupidity.
Fortunately, Silicon Valley has now provided a machine to do that for you.
I'd be somewhat concerned that this type of severe detachment from reality may become more common as LLMs make the obsequious ego-buffing that was previously available only to billionaires too cheap to meter.
He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
Thiel warns about Antichrist, while doing the very thing that's enabling his coming. Unrestrained technological expansion is exactly what's erasing the human spirit and replacing it with a machine culture.
It is a classic tactic of fascism, called [accusation in a mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror)
> Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza.
Thiel is IMO not doing this for profit. He is deeply ideological, which should be more worrisome.
It is profit. The craziness is just the cover for it.
You haven't given away your money. Does that mean everything you do (including writing the above comment) is for profit?
This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United
States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a
bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by
international law.I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.
It will end him, and his insanely stupid ideology. He is obviously a sociopath with very deep childhood trauma. Karma will get him. Probably cancer as he seems to be genially rotten soul.
The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.
"it's the same because they're both bad"
ok...
Communists left the chat in 1989, grandpa. There are multiple factions competing for power but communists aren't really in the ring right now. It's mostly different flavours of establishment factions and alt-right factions.
It’s a magazine with a professed socialist view point but it’s more aligned with left-of-center American politics. Think Sanders or Mamdani rather than Stalin or Mao.
> Sanders or Mamdani
Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment, such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao.
The mental gymnastics you’re doing to blunt that fact is absolutely incredible.
Stalin was an ideological authoritarian that executed political rivals and used lethal force, price controls, and other governmental tools to control the economy and the general working population. The idea that Sanders and Mambani advocate anything close to that is laughable.
The rhetoric on both the right and left that liken today's politics to extremism in the 20th century is a ridiculous anachronism that needs to be called out more often.
No, they aren’t. They are about as far left of center as you can get and be competitive in US elections, maybe, but that’s a very different thing. There’s a lot to their left (as you an see from the by the opposition from leftist as sellouts to capitalist/imperialist/etc. institutions both have.)
... Oh, come on now. I can't tell whether you're extremely confused about Sanders and Mamdani, or extremely confused about Stalin and Mao.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/25/bernie-sande... would have gone very differently if Sanders was Mao, for a start.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a no-kidding literary tool used throughout history.
I could follow an argument that Jacobin is naive, but it seems silly to make the direct comparison to someone who thinks we're approaching some predictable end of days and say they're the same.
They're both wrong, just in different ways, and observing this is not "bothsidesism."
there's lots of stupid brigading on HN, but sometimes dumb comments get the downvotes they deserve.
The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.
...and man, did Haiti turn out to be a perfect example of Third-Worldism. Ethnocide, ecological disaster, full on regression into a post-civilizational nightmare.