The Peter Thiel Threat
The doyen of alt-investigative journalists, Whitney Webb, is worried about JD Vance. When Whitney speaks, it behooves us to listen to what she has to say, if not always to agree with her stated or implied conclusions:
While J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in a new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy and reigning in the surveillance state.
Webb certainly captured the attention of Clayton Morris at Redacted, another great source of deep state scepticism and independent podcasting.
I am no specific fan of Thiel, the gay Republican billionaire and Big Tech mover and shaker. A libertarian, so it is said. One of his companies, Palantir, has been shown to have unnerving ties to the Central Intelligence Agency:
Also, according to TechCrunch, "The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."
Suspicious, then. Then again, who on earth could possibly trust Wikipedia? Thiel is hated by the left, probably for the wrong reasons.
Our private medical data is being outsourced to a company linked to the US deep state and run by an NHS-hating hard-right Trump-supporting billionaire, warns JON TRICKETT MP
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/hold-nhs-data-given-cia-backed-palantir
Trump supporter! Hard right! NHS hating? Well, who doesn’t? Oh, the left just misses so damned much. But a libertarian doing deals with the CIA? Are they onto something? Questions must be asked.
Thiel has also caught the attention of Damon Linker of Quillette and The New Republic.
Of the many wealthy donors working to shape the future of the Republican Party, none has inspired greater fascination, confusion, and anxiety than billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
The perplexity is understandable. Co-founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, bestselling author, and Ron Paul-supporting libertarian-turned-nationalist-conservative Trump donor, the 55-year-old Thiel is an idiosyncratic and enigmatic intellectual fond of speaking at length about the ideas of René Girard and Leo Strauss, naming firms after objects found in the fictional world of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and speculating about fine points of Christian theology.
He also spent tens of millions of dollars on Republican candidates in the 2022 election cycle. The highest profile ones were the Senate runs of Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio. (Both men have worked for Thiel: Masters as co-author of Thiel’s book Zero to One, chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, and president of the Thiel Foundation; Vance as a principal at the venture capital firm Mithril Capital Management.) Masters lost his race, but Vance won. Thiel’s rate of success in House races was better—9 of the 12 candidates he supported in Republican primaries (several of whom denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election) ended up winning.
Any fan of Tolkien’s …
Thiel is assumed to have “recruited” Vance. A little like a World Economic Forum Young Global leader. A Manchurian candidate? Is Pete trying to penetrate ze cabinets? Perhaps he is just supporting a friend. That, too, is a theory.
I am prepared to accept all these claims as valid hypotheses. But hypotheses are, well, just that. Are these hypotheses falsifiable, a la Karl Popper? What would falsifiability look like? Well, people will be paying close attention to a Trump Term Two attack on the deep state. (Of course, if you want a deep state attack dog, you need to be voting for RFK Jr come November, but that is another story).
Mind you – and regular readers will know this – I am more than willing to believe conspiracy theories. I have possibly started a few. If I had been George Pell (for example), I would not have trusted a Vatican anaesthetist, possibly an employee of the Vatican’s deep state. I probably wouldn’t have even contemplated going back to Rome. Mind you, the options for his eventual, deserved retirement were Australia or Rome. Not a pretty choice.
Covid was riddled with conspiracies. Climate change? Blind Freddie territory. JFK? Not even a doubt, on the circumstantial evidence.
And as that esteemed KC, Mark Tedeschi, pointed out in his book on the Kerry Whelan case (Missing, Presumed Dead, 2022), and was equally relevant in the case of Chris Dawson’s guilt in the matter of his wife Lynette’s disappearance, there is nothing remotely stopping circumstantial evidence being compelling for a jury or judge. This is the law, despite the bad wrap that circumstantial evidence normally gets.
Many conspiracy theories are not even a stretch.
So, Peter Thiel is in play. Why not? It is a great thing, for the freedom movement, that all political candidates are subject to the deepest scrutiny and on the broadest criteria. Do other big corporate Trump supporters, like Elon, deserve equal scrutiny? If not, why not? What does HE want from a Trump Vance ticket and a Trump second presidency?
Of course, contemplating conspiracy research always brings me back to my old ally, public choice theory. This is the idea that public actors have private interests, and that they act on them, and that this helps to explain public policy outcomes.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html
It explains much in political science and in government.
In the age of globalist corporate governance, the UniParty and the big, broad and deep state, global private sector and non-profit sector actors with both private and public policy agendas, they deserve the greatest scrutiny. A hat-tip, then, to Whitney Webb, despite the euphoric atmospherics of the Republican Convention and Trump’s assassination survival, not to mention the utterly filthy administration of the gaga White House incumbent.
It is quite possible to believe that anyone could be a Manchurian candidate. But … There is no evidence that JD Vance, let alone a maverick like Trump, would be good choices for someone wishing to ingratiate himself to an incoming administration. The aim of all good social science is to triangulate to get to the truth. Triangulation means proving things by other, independent methodologies. Identifying connections is never enough.
In social science triangulation is defined as the mixing of data or methods so that diverse viewpoints or standpoints cast light upon a topic. The mixing of data types, known as data triangulation, is often thought to help in validating the claims that might arise from an initial pilot study.
https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/207102987/TriangulationChapterFinaleditedSS.pdf
Yes, I know, conspiracy researchers are not necessarily social scientists. But you cannot simply wish away real science. Unless you are a climateer, perhaps.
You might well think – but what if triangulation is difficult? After all, conspiracists are good at hiding things? What counts as evidence?
Two points.
One is – mostly conspiracists aren’t always that good at hiding things. Look at Klaus the Bond Spectre leader. He actually writes books saying exactly what he is up to. Second. There is a recourse for the serious social scientist and truth-seeker in cases where solid evidence is thin on the ground. It is this – is the hypothesis plausible? Here is where we should focus our efforts.
Thiel has been in the public eye for many years. He is hardly a shady operative well off the big stage. He penned an influential book, Zero to One, on business and startups, and also co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth. Zero to One argued that all businesses hate competition and seek out monopoly. True enough, though not often said out loud. It was very Adam Smith, in a way. Was he taking the piss? And any Big Tech player must be assumed to be trying to get richer, even if the client is the CIA. This is what they do. The whole development of Silicon Valley, and indeed the internet, was always an embedded military industrial complex play, a DARPA project. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Thiel was a key driver of the PayPal mafia, of course. With all the links to the Silicon Valley set.
Strangely, for a self-proclaimed libertarian, unlike Elon, Thiel hasn’t done heroic things in the marketplace to give us greater freedom. And, even more oddly for a libertarian, he has aligned himself to Trump and JD Vance. Really? Ron Paul is one thing. Neither of these two (Trump and Vance) is remotely libertarian. As noted here previously, Vance’s speech at the initial NatCon went out of its way to attack libertarianism.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/07/beyond-libertarianism
As for Trump, his first term as President was hardly a paean to the free market. He was for high deficits, industrial policy and bringing globalised jobs back home. Not a free trader. Cutting the now over thirty trillion-dollar national debt was no priority. And despite being a victim of the big state (the ultimate victim?), he did little to downsize it or reduce its sinister power. As for the biggest peacetime threat to our freedom – the Covid State – Trump scored about zero out of ten. And that is being generous. Mind you, a host of libertarians were MIA during Covid.
So, the Thiel-Trump-Vance ticket is decidedly, ideologically odd. Not to mention that Thiel, to the extent he is a CIA man, is now embracing the man that CIA probably hates most in the world. Unless you assume that something sinister is afoot. Buying favour? Buying inaction? I would favour the latter as the more plausible of the two. Trump running dead on the deep state in a second term is a decided possibility. Again, RFK Jr would be your man here.
One of the noteworthy contributions of Whitney Webb is to point out the fact that Thiel is embedded in the Bilderberg Group, a highly secretive branch of the “international community”, aka the new world order. One should always assume that Webb is right on the facts. Not a mere rabbit-holer. So, perhaps there is something evil going on, off-stage. The celebrity historian and Kissinger biographer, Niall Ferguson, is a Bilderberger. You have to dig to find these things out. Deep homework, if you will. Niall does like mingle with the rich and powerful, of course. Perhaps Thiel does as well. Mind you, he seems far less of a billionaire nutter than most of the others.
The real question? Does it matter? Conspiracy researchers and unlimited hang-outers make fantastic pointers-out of connections. After all, one of a conspiracy’s key attributes is connections and networks. But they don’t always prove their theories to be correct.
Are we yet at the point where it is established that JD Vance is a bad pick because of his ties to the possibly evil Thiel? No, not yet. With the possibility that endlessly quoting J M Keynes on changing your mind is quite okay, is tedious … We wait, and watch. And form conclusions. On evidence.
The Trump-Vance ticket may well not even win the election, of course. It seems likely that their opponent will not be Beijing Joe. Then, who knows? The deep state might be safe, after all, whatever Thiel’s funding of the Vance career might have hoped for.
In which case, why on earth isn’t Thiel supporting the proven deep statist, Biden?
Paul Collits
19 July 2024
Thanks for writing on Thiel. While reading Musks biography by Isaacson one learns something of Thiel as a composed,inscrutible person of accommodating goals/aims. There’s a picture of him with a group of other Paypal management with the caption ‘The PayPal Mafia’. They all look very Mafia-esque, presumably it was a serious photo, but they may have been striking a pose and Isaacson didn’t know it. Musk clearly didn’t feel at home amongst them and I suspect this largely informed Isaacson’s perspective. In any case, Thiel comes across as an ambitious who holds his cards close to his chest.
Has he changed with time? It’s possible. Clearly Musk has had his eyes opened in the last 10 or so years.
I particularly appreciated your point of triangulation. It’s frustrating in the extreme when people see a connection in isolation and draw strong conclusions from it. It’s creates so much noise in an already noisy Information environment.
I’ve read Whitney Webb and wondered if she sometimes (not often) does this as her content at times relies on a connection without seeming to allow for the fact that connections can sometimes cause those involved to recoil and change directions, in which case it’s less important that there was a connection than what the effect of that connection was.
Excellent writing as always.
Re the comment above - auto spell changed the text - Thiel is inscrutable and holds his cards close with uncertain goals/aims