Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
"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."
> Presumably the commenter read the article and is expressing his disagreement with the article’s second sentence.
The comment in question didn't make a point, it provided only this unsupported opinion that happens to be flatly wrong: "It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention."
In fact, good buddies Thiel and Musk came from S Africa sharing similar librarian attitudes and both worked hard at circumventing the banking regulations while being part of the "PayPal mafia". They are both very keen on remodeling the government around the libertarian idea of uncountable corporate power.
“They went from scrappy guys dodging government regulation to now they are the government, in a generation” said Steve Blank... an adjunct professor of management science [1]
That cannot be done without using concentrated wealth to conquer people's attention. Sure enough, Musk proceeded to acquire Twitter at a great cost and to proclaim his idea of corporate control of speech through control of attention reach: "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" [2]
This exactly. There are different kind of attention. We shouldn't pay attention to the billionaires in a submissive follower mode; or in a "let them set the agenda" mode; but in a wary, defensive mode (ready to oppose or try to get out of the way).
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.
> I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods.
Just look at some of the comment threads here. So many replies essentially White-Knighting for a billionaire! Why does one take time out of their day to post an impassioned defense of this guy? He doesn't need your help. Do y'all think he's going to Venmo you $100 every time you defend his honor online?
Same thing for Musk. Say one thing bad about him, and the Musk Defense League reliably crawls out of the woodwork to passionately argue for him and downvote criticism. What's the point?
> 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.
I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.
Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].
In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.
In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).
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.
> 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?
"Supervillains" are comic book entities who are rarely in prison
I dont know "billionaire realestate mogul and serial criminal gets elected president" is the quick bio of both Lex Luthor and Donald Trump. Larry Elision buying up Hawaiian islands sure looks like a Bond Villian if you squint a little.
Being a billionaire seems to be a prerequisite for being a modern supervillain but most billionaires probably don’t qualify. There are 125 billionaires living in New York City alone.
When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?
Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.
Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures.
More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
How does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.
> It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.
Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.
They’re roughly proxies for each other. But I think land is a much more fundamental source of power. Makes sense that a lot of these types have started to invest in defense fortresses and opine about building new cities.
Fundamentally money can buy a microphone (including literally).
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).
What I have come to realize is that, at a societal level, no amount of rational discourse will counter the fear/emotional response. If it were, the world wouldnt' be in the state it is today.
Only time, reality shock or meeting a proportionate external force are the antidote. And even these can be stretched via the constant propaganda drip.
There is a great Charles Mackay quote applicable here:
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Joe Rogan, now's mainstream media, humble brags about hanging with Thiel on show.
Thiel very much plays the game in your second sentence, he's just smart about it. Thiel is gaining attention because he's put in the work, for a long time. Not because of shock value. And he's leveraging his soft power/contacts/PR sources/exposing his power level/drawing on what he built pretty hard now. Why?
I agree on the first part - I could not care any less about those insane superrich. But they use their money to influence people - this part is dangerous and must be stopped.
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that the only problem with Thiel’s apocalyptic beliefs is that people are writing articles about them?
a) that is partly bubble. There are others, in other political and social circles, that do hear from him directly.
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.
His power is not in his public speech, but in his money, connections and private speech. I think overall it's probably more useful to expose just how insane his views are, even if that publicizes them more broadly.
You and the article's position about not ignoring his views are both right.
One cannot ignore his views (for the reasons stated) and yet there needs to be a feedback loop to limit the spread of their views using their wealth and influence.
> It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention.
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.
"The notion that because one is rich one must be smart, however fallacious, is deeply embedded: People can equate piles of money - or the promise of it - with good sense, wisdom, and savoir faire," she wrote." (2000)
The name of the draft document escapes me but there's burgeoning work on this. (IETF?)
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.
I agree about handing the wrong people a microphone, but people are handing it to him and he has money so it potentally matters, even if I think it should not.
On the other hand, nothing is quite as liberating as finding out that being batshit insane doesn't automatically disqualify you from tremendous economic success.
What matters most is what people with extreme wealth do with that wealth because the power means those actions can affect many many people. Listening to them can help you predict what those actions may be, either because they say outright what they are planning, or because the tone of their rants can indicate a mindset that would lead to some actions being much more probable than others.
I hate having to listen to rich people. To me its as bad as having to listen to politicians, but these people affect my life (whether I like it or not) so I have to listen to know what's coming.
you should care, he and his fellow nutters have siezed control of the USA and most tech-mega-corp leadership either agree with them or will go along with them.
Where to draw the line? Only the right-wing billionaires? What about other more left-wing like Soros.
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)
Having listened to a fair amount of Thiel, he tends to be very, very mischaracterized. He relies on metaphor and allegory to describe the world, and is very philosophical and analytical–all of which opens the door to broad interpretation. For instance, his use of the phrase "Antichrist" has been wildly (and deliberately, IMO) misinterpreted by the commentariat and intelligentsia that dominate our sense making institutions. I'm not suggesting anyone should agree with everything (or anything!) he says, but I think the dismissal of him is to one's own detriment as much of it is very interesting and thoughtful.
My problem with Thiel is that he's actively working to make the world a horrible place for anybody who isn't in his circle, and has the wealth needed to make inroads towards that end. I am not interested in listening to someone whose philosophy leads him to such behavior.
He believes that democracy has run its course (did so in the 2008 crash as well) and believes in the ideas of Curtis Yarvin that think that tech CEOs should reign as feudal lords over small fiefdoms that he calls network states. Essentially the plan is to break the federal government and buy up its assets for pennies on the dollar. If this sounds bad for most people is up to you I guess.
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.
it's not complete garbage, it's simply the cycle repeating itself.
the resort to violence can be wielded by everybody. therein lies its limitation as an unreliable means to control people and resources. power based on consent, ie, power from below, is predicated on promises proffered by patron-brokers who trade resources for allegiance. it's a comparatively stable structure until it reaches a certain scale. to get to that point, the stakes had to have been raised through manufacturing consent in the forms of ritual, ideology, capital, bureaucracy, and all the other goodies that Girard and Thiel love discussing. throw in the compounded accumulation of resources through arbitrage and leveraged betting, and you're left with social structures characterized by skewed wealth distributions and leaders who get to wield power asymmetrically. there's a clear historical and logical sequence where power by consent leads to power by coercion embodied in hegemony. given that's the current state of affairs, (and no sense in contesting this point since Thiel grapples with this fact himself in his investments and mythologizing of the US through this antichrist/katechon dialectic), it's pretty obvious what tools are left to those who no longer have any control to surrender via the consensual framework. suboptimal as it may be, at least violence-or the threat thereof-can be wielded by both sides.
now, where we land individually on the matter is one thing, but i'm afraid yours is the genteel fantasy.
> If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him
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.
Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.
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.
> his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do
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.
I see multiple comments regarding his actual views.
Its been pointed out multiple times that hes a believer in a dark-enlightenment, where democracy has run its course and the power should be taken from ordinary people and centralized to the aristocratic elite such as himself.
He uses alot of coded language, hence why he is often called a Crypto Fascist (Crypto as in encrypted language, not cryptocurrency)
To anyone knowledgeable enough to own a basic mental cypher, they can decode fascist and monarchist language. He's very clearly a selfish person in the business of consolidating his own power over others to fulfill his outlandish fantasies.
He's deffinately not the only person in the world holding these sorts of views, there is an overabundance of sociopathic elites in the world.
But Thiel is able to operate on an influence level beyond that of most sociopaths and thus his wealth is one of the most pressing issues regarding his person.
This particular nutjob being far less powerful and wealthy, would preserve alot of our social order.
> “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone”
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.
The soapbox-vs-megaphone analogy falls apart fast.
Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.
They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.
If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.
"Thiel owns Vance" is obviously shorthand, but is there evidence that Vance is actually under Thiel's control or do they just agree on stuff? I think proving corruption would probably require that Thiel personally/materially benefit from actions that Vance takes in office, not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]
> not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.
If anything they seem to be friends, with Curtis Yarvin as well, and believes that democracy has run its course. It doesn't really matter if he's just bought by money or if he has bought into the same ideas. Thiel maneuvered Vance into this position using his money and power, and their plans extend far beyond Trump's lifetime.
Does it matter then he can just buy direct political influence and power? He's not winning on the merits of ideas on a marketplace other than getting other billionaires and SV tech people on board as they would be on top of his new hierarchy, much more so than they are today.
Thiel believes democracy has run its course and wants to usher in a new world of network states where tech CEOs are feudal lords. This is all to avoid the anti Christ and the rapture.
Today, the super-wealthy have a megaphone for their worldview that is orders of magnitude more effective than anything anyone else has got. It's not just Thiel: Bezos, Soros, Musk, Paul Singer, and others all are or have been promulgating their worldviews at a scale formerly reserved for nation-states. If unchecked, this inequity will bring us to a world not dissimilar to Byzantine Europe, where the "word of god," as filtered through your lord of choice, utterly dominates the marketplace of ideas.
You're not wrong, but the same megaphone applies to the average Joe. In the early 1990s, unless you were a celebrity or politician, your ideas could not spread beyond the confines of the next city council meeting - at best. Now an average person has far more reach. Yes there's often a cacophony of other information that will drown you out, but it's hardly worse than the previous situation where all media was in the hands of very few, often very wealthy, individuals.
free speech absolutism sounds fair in a vacuum but neglects the power disparity that wealth provides in a connected world.
Free Speech is not the concept of anyone can say anything without rules. Its about the ability for those without power to be able to speak on an even playing field as those with power.
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.
What's the alternative though? Regulation of speech is often used by those already in power to silence dissent[1]. And there's still plenty a rich person can do to hide themselves as the source of something unsavoury while making it appear "grassroots". Now more than ever, with LLMs and bots.
It's not that free speech absolutism is fair, it's that there's not really an alternative that's any more fair.
Nothing the GP said had anything to do with taking away people's voice because they are rich, they are saying just because they are rich they don't automatically deserve a microphone.
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.
His ramblings aren't that relevant. The problem is that the money
is used to get influence; we could see this with Musk too.
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.
Your first sentence is belied by everything else you wrote.
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.
And here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?
In the current setup, having enough money protects you from the laws of the country and the judgment of others. Thiel is rich enough and therefore powerful enough that these culture wars will never personally affect him or anyone he cares about.
I've always suspected this mentality had a lot to do with why Peter Thiel is like that. Growing up in the wreckage of the AIDS crisis and thinking to yourself, "I don't have to go down with them. I don't ever have to be like them. I'm still here, because I'm smarter, I'm better than them." I'd never admit any of this publicly, but I have a lot of similar thoughts as a trans woman who slipped through all the cracks and ended up wealthy in my thirties. Poverty is the tip of the discrimination spear and you really could buy your way out of it all.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I'm quite aware of the origin, but I appreciate you posting the link for others' edification.
For one with less confusion about the speaker: "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law." --Oscar R. Benavides, President of Peru from 1933 to 1939
I used to think this was deep, but it equally applies to progressivism as well as well as a range of human institutions. It's a restatement the basic observation that humans are prone to in-group bias. What's really dangerous is that some refuse to see the same flaw within themselves and instead always ascribe it to "the other".
The weird part isn't that a socialist got elected mayor of New York. The weird part is that the Democratic party didn't have anyone better to primary him out of the nomination.
The two-party system seems pretty cooked at this point.
Personally I find that quote tired and trite. But so-called "conservatives" could certainly stand to clear up the matter by articulating what their constructive political stances actually are these days - that is beyond merely vice signalling, performative cruelty, and a cult of personality around Dear Leader.
As a libertarian, I certainly have my problems with the progressive orthodoxy. But every time I've tried to work out current conservative principles, by generally appealing to what they claim to be, I've basically just gotten a brush off of why those traditional ideals are not applicable and then a bunch of whataboutism to justify why they have to kill our society to purportedly save it.
TBF Trump isn't a conservative. He's a populist that overthrew the Republican party without firing a single shot and the "conservatives" are all too busy running around in circles to do something about him.
The secret is that their racism and bigotry is more important to them than their conservative "values".
See also: the success of the "Southern Strategy" in converting racists in the southern US from Democratic to Republican voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party's focus on civil rights.
As long as Trump keeps hurting the people they don't like, they'll continue to support him.
Sure, I agree and I've made similar arguments. But there are still throngs of people self-identifying as conservative and considering Trump conservative. The best I've been able to surmise is that to them, "conservative" merely means in line with the reactionary talk radio of the past several decades, and that anger has replaced all of their ideals.
This is kind of understandable, because that reactionary talk radio was always a form of managed dissent. They kept getting tricked by it, and as communications democratized they somewhat realized this (hence the whole RINO thing). But as usual they're unable to see the larger overall picture, and so direct blame at whomever scapegoats their new info-bubble managers point at.
While I think one party started it back in the '90s, both parties are mostly 2-minute hate daily talking point driven at this point.
I don't think that bodes well for our geopolitical competitiveness in the long run. And you can already see it in the irrational hatred of renewables on the right and the irrational hatred of AI on the left. Meanwhile, enough of the rest of the world has better things to do that we seem destined to become a geopolitical NPC.
While the Democratic party has strongly embraced the 2-minute hate in much of their propaganda, I do not think the both sidesism is warranted. The point is that Republicans have taken their 2-minute hate dynamic of the past several decades, and retconned that anger as the entirety of their policy platform. Whereas Democratic leaders are still trying for constructive policies that abide by their own ideals. We can criticize those ideals, and criticize their policies for failing to live up to those ideals, yes. But their platform doesn't revolve around overtly harming the country with the idea that the other tribe will be harmed more.
As for the "irrational hatred" of "AI", isn't that what laying the groundwork for controlled opposition and regulatory capture looks like? There have been serious problems from lack of business accountability and responsiveness, now exacerbated by AI. But pigeonholing it all into an "AI bad" narrative is basically setting up to defeat any specific reforms.
My take on the democrats at this point is they are the party of learned helplessness. And that's just as harmful as the party of nihilism when they both drop their differences to block the emergence of new voices and new parties.
But I agree they have become the useful idiots for regulatory capture. The right's hatred of renewables is just stupid.
It's in the proud tradition of Roy Cohn, Grover Norquist and countless others that cause a huge surge in grindr usage whenever there's a Republican event anywhere.
I think it's more and more evident that the ultra rich (and their circles of subordinates) don't actually care about the common divisive topical areas. It seems to be the playbook that they have a divisive stance to put them in a specific camp (at their convenience). History has shown us that those ultra rich have no regard to flip flopping as it sees fit to their outcomes. It has nothing to do with self hate or being savvy - the reality is: it doesn't matter for them because nobody in their circle cares. I think that's very evident with Thiel.
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 superrich in general don't care about being hypocritical, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to his personal preferences. Just look at the Epstein situation. The superrich frequented there.
That maybe why he seems to be targetting Catholics rather than evangelicals.
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.
"In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science."
Imagine you’re an elite billionaire in America. Half your peers have made a "party" trip to Epstein island. What difference does a little gay sex make in that context?
That would be consistent with his assertion that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.
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.
While it's possible this is true, I would have preferred that the article make its own case on why Thiel is crazy and not just cite the Guardian. The article is written for someone who already agrees with the title.
Hmm... If anybody meets the definition of his antichrist, it might be him.
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.
> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.
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 (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
Okay :) I actually do have a pretty deep familiarity with all of this and that's why I'm criticizing the article. It felt like a rehash of known facts (Thiel is a christian fascist, his company Palantir does innovatively horrible stuff), rather than drawing new connections between those known facts. At a fine-grain I want to know how his ideology underpins the business decisions of his company, I don't need someone to gesture at the two together and mumble something about eschatology.
I think we (and probably HN in general) aren't the target audience here. Last time I met up with some non-tech friends, Peter Thiel came up a lot in the pub chat - a year ago I'm not sure they would have known who he is. The more people outside of tech who understand what a deranged loon he really is, the better.
There's a timecube level of unhinged to his antichrist ramblings - spurious connections steadfastly believed. If he wasn't a billionaire there would be men in white coats chasing him.
> 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.
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.
At a certain threshold of wealth, you stop having anyone around you that will tell you anything other than platitudes about how great and wonderful you are. If he ever had any self-awareness or humility -- and that is questionable -- it's been Dunning Krugered and yes-manned into absolute shreds.
He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
It's crazy how this is trickling down. I work with someone who has recently started openly talking about the antichrist and is convinced the final revelation is going to occur. This person has always been loony but it seems to be going into hyperdrive.
If you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions.
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.
> Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion ... into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization.
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.
Supposedly Thiel's earlier writings warn about an Antichrist that sounds very similar to the Thiel and Musk of 2025. OTOH Thiel's current writing claims the antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
Everything else aside, this is a really stupid comparison. A multi-billionaire giving away even 99% of their billions of dollars is not the same as any normal person giving away a substantially smaller percentage of their money. Thiel can give away 99% of his money and would still have hundreds of millions of dollars left, which is already quite literally more money than any normal person can spend in their entire lifetime. Even at only 3% interest, he would get more interest money alone per year than the income of almost anyone on the planet.
I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
> I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
IMHO, that's the obvious end-state of AGI: the economy eats the world and a few trillionaires sitting atop AGI armies control the economy, and nearly everyone else becomes powerless, irrelevent, and eventually "ended."
The problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products. Henry Ford was a terrible person in many ways, but his idea of paying his auto workers decently so they could afford to buy the Model T's they were building was not only good for the workers but smart business.
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.
I don't think cancer works that way. Also there's no such thing as karma, at least not within a person's lifetime. That much should be extremely obvious by the consequence-free success of a great many sociopaths.
I mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.
There is obviously a huge difference between fascist-aspiring westerners and communist-aspiring westerners. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Tankies are crazy and I don't approve of their ideology, but they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population.
> they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population
They dehumanize and kill everyone equally.
I think the West (US especially) has a great system of government figured out, and I wouldn't try to say any group attempting to break that is better than another. It's not disingenuous to say that both are authoritarians who kill millions.
Please don't be childish. I have no love for communism and I get that you probably have some personal grudge against communism because of what your family has gone through. But the way you are expressing your hatred of communism is diminishing the evil committed by the NAZIs and the suffering of their victims, and that's just not right. And it's also not winning you any friends and you'd be better served if you showed solidarity with victims of other evil regimes, instead of trying to up them with your personal victim-hood.
The above commenter's point was actually drawing a distinction between these, and "one-upping" by saying there was a difference, or worse one, out of these extremist ideologies.
I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.
Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.
I would agree that government run stores falls into the communist playbook. Despite the communism boogie man, though, I don’t think supporting a couple of communist policies strictly makes a person a communist.
Trump sent a bunch of government checks to people during Covid and no one called him communist for this.
It’s intentionally blunt. That’s exactly the issue right now: fascists and communists are going at each other and tearing apart what remains of our liberal world.
"Christian nationalist" is a term that on the one hand, insults Christians, and on the other hand flatters these power hungry grifters. Why would you use such a term?
I mean - obviously the modern day communists rarely use the original name too. But I guess we are adults and know that in reality, under all of that political marketing, we are talking about fascists and communists.
Where are all those communists? As far as I can see, only one extreme of the political spectrum is viable in the first world, and that extreme is currently rapidly approaching its logical conclusion of completely crippling democracy. It's not a both sides issue.
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.
Jacobin is not a whole journal on literal communism.
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.
> Jacobin is not a whole journal on literal communism.
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.
> Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment
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.)
> 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.
So, when's Mamdani's Great Purge coming? Do you think he's gonna stand by the standards of his historical ideological equivalent, Stalin, and execute a couple hundreds of thousands of elites (if we're going by the same proportions as the USSR), or is he going all out - maybe he could get a million deaths in? Maybe he could also start a famine or two on the way there?
The utter insanity of American politics baffles me. "Anything left is abhorrent totalitarian communism in the making" isn't just a meme, it's a foundational piece of mainstream American ideology that has been at its core for nearly a century now.
While I agree that the US has a historical obsession with communism, "anything right is abhorrent totalitarian fascism in the making" has been a far more commonly stated position for the last decade. At this point, it's necessary to regard both "communism" and "fascism" as simple pejoratives and focus on the specific policies being discussed.
This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable. There are not that many left that remember the horrors of either ideology clearly.
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.
The core belief in communism is "collective ownership for the common good" which feels like a far cry from "the literal antichrist is coming."
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.
Not sure why people keep bringing this up. Every ideology has blood on their hands, but communism is nowhere near #1. Try comparing the death tolls/genocides/etc of the capitalist/anti-communist side with the communist side.
Communism and its associated pairings have killed far more than capitalism ever will. Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government. There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
> Communism and its associated pairings have killed far more than capitalism ever will.
Ever will? The "capitalists" have already killed far more. Did communists wipe out a continent full of native americans? Did communists killed more people than the Nazi germany, the US, british empire, chinese empire, japanese, etc in ww2? Did communists kill more people during both the vietnam wars?
> Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government.
Fine, that's an actual argument that can be discussed. But why lie outright about reality. But pretty sure the natives would have loved to live under their own authoritarian government rather than being wiped out by the capitalist paradise.
> There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
Must be why you are so good at lying. Because you grew up under communism?
Interesting that this is being downvoted considering "Thiel is a right-wing loon" and "Jacobin are a bunch of left-wing loons" are not mutually exclusive statements.
They're both wrong, just in different ways, and observing this is not "bothsidesism."
Yeah, expect this to get flagged and vanish. This has nothing to do with anything even remotely interesting except to those who are emotionally invested with pwning their political or ideological opposition. At this level of discourse, they're all batshit bonkers.
it's not interesting at all - the comment is very stupid (jacobin is not "whole journal on literal communism") as well as such lazy both-sidesism everyone is dumber for having read it.
there's lots of stupid brigading on HN, but sometimes dumb comments get the downvotes they deserve.
Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.
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.
This supports my initial reaction. The "antichrist" indicators he points to are things like authoritarianism and homogenization, not burning bushes and bints with swords.
> This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.
The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.
Which in turn were named after the original Jacobins.
...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.
Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
This is the article's second sentence:
"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."
Presumably the commenter read the article and is expressing his disagreement with the article’s second sentence.
> Presumably the commenter read the article and is expressing his disagreement with the article’s second sentence.
The comment in question didn't make a point, it provided only this unsupported opinion that happens to be flatly wrong: "It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention."
In fact, good buddies Thiel and Musk came from S Africa sharing similar librarian attitudes and both worked hard at circumventing the banking regulations while being part of the "PayPal mafia". They are both very keen on remodeling the government around the libertarian idea of uncountable corporate power.
“They went from scrappy guys dodging government regulation to now they are the government, in a generation” said Steve Blank... an adjunct professor of management science [1]
That cannot be done without using concentrated wealth to conquer people's attention. Sure enough, Musk proceeded to acquire Twitter at a great cost and to proclaim his idea of corporate control of speech through control of attention reach: "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" [2]
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/how-musk-thiel-and-sac...
[2] https://www.chiefmarketer.com/twitters-musk-touts-new-freedo...
Librarians, what will they do next?!? (Typo ;)
This exactly. There are different kind of attention. We shouldn't pay attention to the billionaires in a submissive follower mode; or in a "let them set the agenda" mode; but in a wary, defensive mode (ready to oppose or try to get out of the way).
Yes we can actually.
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.
It's also a governmental problem. Remember that Vance is functionally owned by Thiel, who also backed Trump's campaign.
So, the issue is really just that he has far too much power, as an individual
> I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods.
Just look at some of the comment threads here. So many replies essentially White-Knighting for a billionaire! Why does one take time out of their day to post an impassioned defense of this guy? He doesn't need your help. Do y'all think he's going to Venmo you $100 every time you defend his honor online?
Same thing for Musk. Say one thing bad about him, and the Musk Defense League reliably crawls out of the woodwork to passionately argue for him and downvote criticism. What's the point?
> 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.
I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.
Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].
In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.
In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).
[1] https://paulgraham.com/cities.html
It's getting harder and harder to even hazard a guess as to why a comment on HN gets downvoted. Is Paul Graham becoming persona non grata? Is that it?
> In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains.
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.
In cartoons, supervillains are rarely in prison either, even though that's where they belong.
> 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?
"Supervillains" are comic book entities who are rarely in prison
Because they escape or cannot be captured. Not because there’s no will to lock them up.
But this is really not my point. Billionaires == Supervillains is not a commonly held view outside some echo chambers.
I dont know "billionaire realestate mogul and serial criminal gets elected president" is the quick bio of both Lex Luthor and Donald Trump. Larry Elision buying up Hawaiian islands sure looks like a Bond Villian if you squint a little.
Being a billionaire seems to be a prerequisite for being a modern supervillain but most billionaires probably don’t qualify. There are 125 billionaires living in New York City alone.
Batman is a billionaire too in comic lore.
Power might be hard to ignore, but wealth you literally just can.
Wealth is allowing people to buy consent for their worldviews these days. this is an incredibly naiive take.
When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?
Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.
Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
How does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.
Traditionally, through personal networks in media and industry — placing talking heads and op-ed’s and editorial direction to repeat your message.
More recently, purchasing a social network and then flooding it with your worldview.
The party who accepts the bid generally wins the election.
It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.
> It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.
Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.
How does a politician or his opponent ignore millions of dollars donated to political campaigns ?
It's weird to not understand that wealth buys power.
That's a dangerously myopic take in a political landscape where money == speech and speech == influence.
Wealth is power
"lemme just jump in this swimming pool while ignoring the water"
They’re roughly proxies for each other. But I think land is a much more fundamental source of power. Makes sense that a lot of these types have started to invest in defense fortresses and opine about building new cities.
Fundamentally money can buy a microphone (including literally).
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).
> incredulous that Thiel was reported to claim the Pope is now an antichrist (¡)
It has long been a belief of the "religious right". For decades, and their predecessors for centuries.
What I have come to realize is that, at a societal level, no amount of rational discourse will counter the fear/emotional response. If it were, the world wouldnt' be in the state it is today.
Only time, reality shock or meeting a proportionate external force are the antidote. And even these can be stretched via the constant propaganda drip.
There is a great Charles Mackay quote applicable here: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Joe Rogan, now's mainstream media, humble brags about hanging with Thiel on show.
Thiel very much plays the game in your second sentence, he's just smart about it. Thiel is gaining attention because he's put in the work, for a long time. Not because of shock value. And he's leveraging his soft power/contacts/PR sources/exposing his power level/drawing on what he built pretty hard now. Why?
I agree on the first part - I could not care any less about those insane superrich. But they use their money to influence people - this part is dangerous and must be stopped.
You mostly hear about their views from contrarian articles warning of the dangers of their views.
Highlighting the lunacy coming from Thiel, Andreesen, Yarvin, Vance, Musk, etc is not being "contrarian."
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that the only problem with Thiel’s apocalyptic beliefs is that people are writing articles about them?
a) that is partly bubble. There are others, in other political and social circles, that do hear from him directly.
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.
His power is not in his public speech, but in his money, connections and private speech. I think overall it's probably more useful to expose just how insane his views are, even if that publicizes them more broadly.
The trouble is, he isn't just a crazy uncle. He's a crazy uncle with significant political power.
The issue is that having concentrated wealth and having concentrated people's attention are not separate things.
On the contrary, people should talk about these parasites more so we can get rid of them, they thrive in the shadows
> I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone.
I've said this about celebrities for two decades now. Most people don't care though; they love the gossip, I guess.
You and the article's position about not ignoring his views are both right.
One cannot ignore his views (for the reasons stated) and yet there needs to be a feedback loop to limit the spread of their views using their wealth and influence.
> It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention.
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.
"The notion that because one is rich one must be smart, however fallacious, is deeply embedded: People can equate piles of money - or the promise of it - with good sense, wisdom, and savoir faire," she wrote." (2000)
The writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46107890
The name of the draft document escapes me but there's burgeoning work on this. (IETF?)
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.
I agree about handing the wrong people a microphone, but people are handing it to him and he has money so it potentally matters, even if I think it should not.
Buying elections, politicians, doesn't require a microphone.
On the other hand, nothing is quite as liberating as finding out that being batshit insane doesn't automatically disqualify you from tremendous economic success.
I find it kind of terrifying, since the US culture tightly couples economic success with moral superiority.
> finding out that being batshit insane doesn't automatically disqualify you from tremendous economic success
Nothing really disqualifies you from tremendous economic success because inheritance exists.
Unfortunately he and people like him own the microphone, the PA system, the stadium…
Voting is the only power we have but the voting booths are at the stadium.
What matters most is what people with extreme wealth do with that wealth because the power means those actions can affect many many people. Listening to them can help you predict what those actions may be, either because they say outright what they are planning, or because the tone of their rants can indicate a mindset that would lead to some actions being much more probable than others.
I hate having to listen to rich people. To me its as bad as having to listen to politicians, but these people affect my life (whether I like it or not) so I have to listen to know what's coming.
you should care, he and his fellow nutters have siezed control of the USA and most tech-mega-corp leadership either agree with them or will go along with them.
Having peoples’ attention strikes me as not very interesting when you can just buy a newspaper (or the opinions therein) and have it anyway.
Thiel is courting Christian nutjobs whether or not you pay attention to it. I’m personally not gonna stick my head in the sand.
Where to draw the line? Only the right-wing billionaires? What about other more left-wing like Soros.
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)
Do you think you're being subtle? Anyway, Israel's genocide is pretty irrelevant to this subthread.
Darn, can't hide anything from the "but it's a genocide squad", eh?
Having listened to a fair amount of Thiel, he tends to be very, very mischaracterized. He relies on metaphor and allegory to describe the world, and is very philosophical and analytical–all of which opens the door to broad interpretation. For instance, his use of the phrase "Antichrist" has been wildly (and deliberately, IMO) misinterpreted by the commentariat and intelligentsia that dominate our sense making institutions. I'm not suggesting anyone should agree with everything (or anything!) he says, but I think the dismissal of him is to one's own detriment as much of it is very interesting and thoughtful.
My problem with Thiel is that he's actively working to make the world a horrible place for anybody who isn't in his circle, and has the wealth needed to make inroads towards that end. I am not interested in listening to someone whose philosophy leads him to such behavior.
> he's actively working to make the world a horrible place for anybody who isn't in his circle
Can you be more specific? I see similar claims thrown about him, but they don’t really hold up to scrutiny and often o. The basis of straw men claims.
He believes that democracy has run its course (did so in the 2008 crash as well) and believes in the ideas of Curtis Yarvin that think that tech CEOs should reign as feudal lords over small fiefdoms that he calls network states. Essentially the plan is to break the federal government and buy up its assets for pennies on the dollar. If this sounds bad for most people is up to you I guess.
Sorry, but that take is complete garbage.
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.
it's not complete garbage, it's simply the cycle repeating itself.
the resort to violence can be wielded by everybody. therein lies its limitation as an unreliable means to control people and resources. power based on consent, ie, power from below, is predicated on promises proffered by patron-brokers who trade resources for allegiance. it's a comparatively stable structure until it reaches a certain scale. to get to that point, the stakes had to have been raised through manufacturing consent in the forms of ritual, ideology, capital, bureaucracy, and all the other goodies that Girard and Thiel love discussing. throw in the compounded accumulation of resources through arbitrage and leveraged betting, and you're left with social structures characterized by skewed wealth distributions and leaders who get to wield power asymmetrically. there's a clear historical and logical sequence where power by consent leads to power by coercion embodied in hegemony. given that's the current state of affairs, (and no sense in contesting this point since Thiel grapples with this fact himself in his investments and mythologizing of the US through this antichrist/katechon dialectic), it's pretty obvious what tools are left to those who no longer have any control to surrender via the consensual framework. suboptimal as it may be, at least violence-or the threat thereof-can be wielded by both sides.
now, where we land individually on the matter is one thing, but i'm afraid yours is the genteel fantasy.
> If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him
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.
Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.
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.
> his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do
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.
I see multiple comments regarding his actual views. Its been pointed out multiple times that hes a believer in a dark-enlightenment, where democracy has run its course and the power should be taken from ordinary people and centralized to the aristocratic elite such as himself.
He uses alot of coded language, hence why he is often called a Crypto Fascist (Crypto as in encrypted language, not cryptocurrency) To anyone knowledgeable enough to own a basic mental cypher, they can decode fascist and monarchist language. He's very clearly a selfish person in the business of consolidating his own power over others to fulfill his outlandish fantasies.
He's deffinately not the only person in the world holding these sorts of views, there is an overabundance of sociopathic elites in the world. But Thiel is able to operate on an influence level beyond that of most sociopaths and thus his wealth is one of the most pressing issues regarding his person. This particular nutjob being far less powerful and wealthy, would preserve alot of our social order.
> “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone”
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.
The soapbox-vs-megaphone analogy falls apart fast.
Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.
They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.
If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.
Thiel owns Vance. That's the undue level of influenece that should be illegal via anti-corruption laws.
"Thiel owns Vance" is obviously shorthand, but is there evidence that Vance is actually under Thiel's control or do they just agree on stuff? I think proving corruption would probably require that Thiel personally/materially benefit from actions that Vance takes in office, not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump
> not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.
If anything they seem to be friends, with Curtis Yarvin as well, and believes that democracy has run its course. It doesn't really matter if he's just bought by money or if he has bought into the same ideas. Thiel maneuvered Vance into this position using his money and power, and their plans extend far beyond Trump's lifetime.
Does it matter then he can just buy direct political influence and power? He's not winning on the merits of ideas on a marketplace other than getting other billionaires and SV tech people on board as they would be on top of his new hierarchy, much more so than they are today.
Just buy your own vice president if you don't like it!
Thiel believes democracy has run its course and wants to usher in a new world of network states where tech CEOs are feudal lords. This is all to avoid the anti Christ and the rapture.
Today, the super-wealthy have a megaphone for their worldview that is orders of magnitude more effective than anything anyone else has got. It's not just Thiel: Bezos, Soros, Musk, Paul Singer, and others all are or have been promulgating their worldviews at a scale formerly reserved for nation-states. If unchecked, this inequity will bring us to a world not dissimilar to Byzantine Europe, where the "word of god," as filtered through your lord of choice, utterly dominates the marketplace of ideas.
You're not wrong, but the same megaphone applies to the average Joe. In the early 1990s, unless you were a celebrity or politician, your ideas could not spread beyond the confines of the next city council meeting - at best. Now an average person has far more reach. Yes there's often a cacophony of other information that will drown you out, but it's hardly worse than the previous situation where all media was in the hands of very few, often very wealthy, individuals.
free speech absolutism sounds fair in a vacuum but neglects the power disparity that wealth provides in a connected world. Free Speech is not the concept of anyone can say anything without rules. Its about the ability for those without power to be able to speak on an even playing field as those with power.
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.
What's the alternative though? Regulation of speech is often used by those already in power to silence dissent[1]. And there's still plenty a rich person can do to hide themselves as the source of something unsavoury while making it appear "grassroots". Now more than ever, with LLMs and bots.
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...
Nothing the GP said had anything to do with taking away people's voice because they are rich, they are saying just because they are rich they don't automatically deserve a microphone.
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.
> how to not give these people a microphone
His ramblings aren't that relevant. The problem is that the money is used to get influence; we could see this with Musk too.
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.
Your first sentence is belied by everything else you wrote.
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.
Media without regulation = oligarchy.
And here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?
Odd for a gay man to court those who support Leviticus stoning of gays. Self hating? Or just savvy?
In the current setup, having enough money protects you from the laws of the country and the judgment of others. Thiel is rich enough and therefore powerful enough that these culture wars will never personally affect him or anyone he cares about.
I've always suspected this mentality had a lot to do with why Peter Thiel is like that. Growing up in the wreckage of the AIDS crisis and thinking to yourself, "I don't have to go down with them. I don't ever have to be like them. I'm still here, because I'm smarter, I'm better than them." I'd never admit any of this publicly, but I have a lot of similar thoughts as a trans woman who slipped through all the cracks and ended up wealthy in my thirties. Poverty is the tip of the discrimination spear and you really could buy your way out of it all.
Tell that to Ernst Rohm...
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I was wondering about the origin of this phrase, and it may not be what you think it is.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
I'm quite aware of the origin, but I appreciate you posting the link for others' edification.
For one with less confusion about the speaker: "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law." --Oscar R. Benavides, President of Peru from 1933 to 1939
I used to think this was deep, but it equally applies to progressivism as well as well as a range of human institutions. It's a restatement the basic observation that humans are prone to in-group bias. What's really dangerous is that some refuse to see the same flaw within themselves and instead always ascribe it to "the other".
And we're all made of matter and anti matter and nothing has meaning. This reductionism is not helpful.
There's no point misrepresenting a political stance. Well, there is a point, but it's malicious.
> There's no point misrepresenting a political stance. Well, there is a point, but it's malicious.
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 weird part isn't that a socialist got elected mayor of New York. The weird part is that the Democratic party didn't have anyone better to primary him out of the nomination.
The two-party system seems pretty cooked at this point.
Not a socialist. A democratic socialist.
Personally I find that quote tired and trite. But so-called "conservatives" could certainly stand to clear up the matter by articulating what their constructive political stances actually are these days - that is beyond merely vice signalling, performative cruelty, and a cult of personality around Dear Leader.
As a libertarian, I certainly have my problems with the progressive orthodoxy. But every time I've tried to work out current conservative principles, by generally appealing to what they claim to be, I've basically just gotten a brush off of why those traditional ideals are not applicable and then a bunch of whataboutism to justify why they have to kill our society to purportedly save it.
TBF Trump isn't a conservative. He's a populist that overthrew the Republican party without firing a single shot and the "conservatives" are all too busy running around in circles to do something about him.
The conservatives vote for trump. That's a pretty strong signal.
The secret is that their racism and bigotry is more important to them than their conservative "values".
See also: the success of the "Southern Strategy" in converting racists in the southern US from Democratic to Republican voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party's focus on civil rights.
As long as Trump keeps hurting the people they don't like, they'll continue to support him.
Sure, I agree and I've made similar arguments. But there are still throngs of people self-identifying as conservative and considering Trump conservative. The best I've been able to surmise is that to them, "conservative" merely means in line with the reactionary talk radio of the past several decades, and that anger has replaced all of their ideals.
This is kind of understandable, because that reactionary talk radio was always a form of managed dissent. They kept getting tricked by it, and as communications democratized they somewhat realized this (hence the whole RINO thing). But as usual they're unable to see the larger overall picture, and so direct blame at whomever scapegoats their new info-bubble managers point at.
While I think one party started it back in the '90s, both parties are mostly 2-minute hate daily talking point driven at this point.
I don't think that bodes well for our geopolitical competitiveness in the long run. And you can already see it in the irrational hatred of renewables on the right and the irrational hatred of AI on the left. Meanwhile, enough of the rest of the world has better things to do that we seem destined to become a geopolitical NPC.
While the Democratic party has strongly embraced the 2-minute hate in much of their propaganda, I do not think the both sidesism is warranted. The point is that Republicans have taken their 2-minute hate dynamic of the past several decades, and retconned that anger as the entirety of their policy platform. Whereas Democratic leaders are still trying for constructive policies that abide by their own ideals. We can criticize those ideals, and criticize their policies for failing to live up to those ideals, yes. But their platform doesn't revolve around overtly harming the country with the idea that the other tribe will be harmed more.
As for the "irrational hatred" of "AI", isn't that what laying the groundwork for controlled opposition and regulatory capture looks like? There have been serious problems from lack of business accountability and responsiveness, now exacerbated by AI. But pigeonholing it all into an "AI bad" narrative is basically setting up to defeat any specific reforms.
My take on the democrats at this point is they are the party of learned helplessness. And that's just as harmful as the party of nihilism when they both drop their differences to block the emergence of new voices and new parties.
But I agree they have become the useful idiots for regulatory capture. The right's hatred of renewables is just stupid.
And that includes the Catholic Church.
It's in the proud tradition of Roy Cohn, Grover Norquist and countless others that cause a huge surge in grindr usage whenever there's a Republican event anywhere.
I think it's more and more evident that the ultra rich (and their circles of subordinates) don't actually care about the common divisive topical areas. It seems to be the playbook that they have a divisive stance to put them in a specific camp (at their convenience). History has shown us that those ultra rich have no regard to flip flopping as it sees fit to their outcomes. It has nothing to do with self hate or being savvy - the reality is: it doesn't matter for them because nobody in their circle cares. I think that's very evident with Thiel.
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 superrich in general don't care about being hypocritical, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to his personal preferences. Just look at the Epstein situation. The superrich frequented there.
That maybe why he seems to be targetting Catholics rather than evangelicals.
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.
"In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science."
From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
#WorstAntiChristsEver
Imagine you’re an elite billionaire in America. Half your peers have made a "party" trip to Epstein island. What difference does a little gay sex make in that context?
Not everything is a conspiracy; sometimes a crazy person is just a crazy person.
No the dude is genuinely cooked.
As are we all, with these people in charge.
The federal government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent?
Longer than you can stay alive.
That's not just a statement about how long it can remain irrational. Federal irrationality can kill you in several ways.
That would be consistent with his assertion that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.
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.
While it's possible this is true, I would have preferred that the article make its own case on why Thiel is crazy and not just cite the Guardian. The article is written for someone who already agrees with the title.
Jacobin magazine is a leftist partisan publication, so yeah.
Hmm... If anybody meets the definition of his antichrist, it might be him.
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...
Would that the mainstream press had treated the Gawker episode as the five-alarm free speech fire that it was.
Fossil fuel is the real antichrist!
"Dozens of churches withdraw investments from fossil fuels"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw...
> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.
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 (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
I think the author assumes a basic familiarity with the subject. FYI Thiel is chairman and co-founder of Palantir.
Okay :) I actually do have a pretty deep familiarity with all of this and that's why I'm criticizing the article. It felt like a rehash of known facts (Thiel is a christian fascist, his company Palantir does innovatively horrible stuff), rather than drawing new connections between those known facts. At a fine-grain I want to know how his ideology underpins the business decisions of his company, I don't need someone to gesture at the two together and mumble something about eschatology.
I think we (and probably HN in general) aren't the target audience here. Last time I met up with some non-tech friends, Peter Thiel came up a lot in the pub chat - a year ago I'm not sure they would have known who he is. The more people outside of tech who understand what a deranged loon he really is, the better.
Thiel's ramblings seem so unhinged, delusions of grandeur.
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.
There's a timecube level of unhinged to his antichrist ramblings - spurious connections steadfastly believed. If he wasn't a billionaire there would be men in white coats chasing him.
> 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.
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.
At a certain threshold of wealth, you stop having anyone around you that will tell you anything other than platitudes about how great and wonderful you are. If he ever had any self-awareness or humility -- and that is questionable -- it's been Dunning Krugered and yes-manned into absolute shreds.
He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
> 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.
Because I like to be able to live with myself.
It's crazy how this is trickling down. I work with someone who has recently started openly talking about the antichrist and is convinced the final revelation is going to occur. This person has always been loony but it seems to be going into hyperdrive.
Ask this person to give you all their stuff since they won't be needing it anymore.
If you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions.
You’re allowed to use ad hominem when you’re writing a profile feature. Addressing the man is kind of the point :)
> Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion ... into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization.
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.
Supposedly Thiel's earlier writings warn about an Antichrist that sounds very similar to the Thiel and Musk of 2025. OTOH Thiel's current writing claims the antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
You are right.
It is a classic tactic of fascism, called [accusation in a mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror)
The problem that this article has is essentially this:
> 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.
He 100% uses this for profit. Why does he not give away his money?
It is profit. The craziness is just the cover for it.
> He 100% uses this for profit. Why does he not give away his money?
You haven't given away your money. Does that mean everything you do (including writing the above comment) is for profit?
Sure, but I don't profit from wars.
Everything else aside, this is a really stupid comparison. A multi-billionaire giving away even 99% of their billions of dollars is not the same as any normal person giving away a substantially smaller percentage of their money. Thiel can give away 99% of his money and would still have hundreds of millions of dollars left, which is already quite literally more money than any normal person can spend in their entire lifetime. Even at only 3% interest, he would get more interest money alone per year than the income of almost anyone on the planet.
What AI weapons systems are in use in Ukraine?
I don't really know, but maybe drones.
I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
> I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
IMHO, that's the obvious end-state of AGI: the economy eats the world and a few trillionaires sitting atop AGI armies control the economy, and nearly everyone else becomes powerless, irrelevent, and eventually "ended."
The problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products. Henry Ford was a terrible person in many ways, but his idea of paying his auto workers decently so they could afford to buy the Model T's they were building was not only good for the workers but smart business.
I fact I think exactly the opposite observing how the nations are ruling their people.
You gotta expand on that because it sounds ludicrous.
Vague whataboutisms aside, at least governments can be changed more easily than waiting for a single individual to die off or be hanged/guillotined.
Perhaps not though!
Seems like any time posts about Thiel and a few other billionaires gain traction it flies off the front page quickly.
Thiel is a creepy fuck, as are most tech bros.
I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.
Hubris.
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.
I don't think cancer works that way. Also there's no such thing as karma, at least not within a person's lifetime. That much should be extremely obvious by the consequence-free success of a great many sociopaths.
I mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.
Nice "both sides" argument, very subtle.
When one side of crazies goes after a different side of crazies, “both sides are crazy” is an appropriate way to look at it.
I guess if you want to completely abandon nuance... but at that point everyone is some variety of crazy. Half the US believes in ghosts.
There is obviously a huge difference between fascist-aspiring westerners and communist-aspiring westerners. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Tankies are crazy and I don't approve of their ideology, but they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population.
> they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population
They dehumanize and kill everyone equally.
I think the West (US especially) has a great system of government figured out, and I wouldn't try to say any group attempting to break that is better than another. It's not disingenuous to say that both are authoritarians who kill millions.
Please don't be childish. I have no love for communism and I get that you probably have some personal grudge against communism because of what your family has gone through. But the way you are expressing your hatred of communism is diminishing the evil committed by the NAZIs and the suffering of their victims, and that's just not right. And it's also not winning you any friends and you'd be better served if you showed solidarity with victims of other evil regimes, instead of trying to up them with your personal victim-hood.
The above commenter's point was actually drawing a distinction between these, and "one-upping" by saying there was a difference, or worse one, out of these extremist ideologies.
I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.
Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.
You're purposefully ignoring all the nuance. There is nothing more to say.
Sometimes both sides do suck.
One side is metastasising in the US government right now, the other has been long dead.
"it's the same because they're both bad"
ok...
It's not been long dead. There's a communist who's just been elected to Mayer of New York.
He’s a socialist. Painting all socialism as “evil communism” is reductive and dishonest.
Mamdani has said that (1) they'll open government-run stores, and (2) the government will seize buildings from bad landlords.
My family is from a communist country and I can assure you, that is communistic.
I would agree that government run stores falls into the communist playbook. Despite the communism boogie man, though, I don’t think supporting a couple of communist policies strictly makes a person a communist.
Trump sent a bunch of government checks to people during Covid and no one called him communist for this.
It’s intentionally blunt. That’s exactly the issue right now: fascists and communists are going at each other and tearing apart what remains of our liberal world.
I think "facists" is a tiring word to describe them. I would recommend christian nationalists.
"Christian nationalist" is a term that on the one hand, insults Christians, and on the other hand flatters these power hungry grifters. Why would you use such a term?
I mean - obviously the modern day communists rarely use the original name too. But I guess we are adults and know that in reality, under all of that political marketing, we are talking about fascists and communists.
Where are all those communists? As far as I can see, only one extreme of the political spectrum is viable in the first world, and that extreme is currently rapidly approaching its logical conclusion of completely crippling democracy. It's not a both sides issue.
> and communists
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 not particularly worth saving
I guess we have to learn every 80-100 years, that, actually it is.
Jacobin is not a whole journal on literal communism.
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.
For the US, that's still "far left" as opposed to merely "left of center."
Jacobin is more closely aligned with Stalin or Mao than Sanders or Mamdani, actually.
> Jacobin is not a whole journal on literal communism. 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.
> Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment
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.)
> 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.
So, when's Mamdani's Great Purge coming? Do you think he's gonna stand by the standards of his historical ideological equivalent, Stalin, and execute a couple hundreds of thousands of elites (if we're going by the same proportions as the USSR), or is he going all out - maybe he could get a million deaths in? Maybe he could also start a famine or two on the way there?
The utter insanity of American politics baffles me. "Anything left is abhorrent totalitarian communism in the making" isn't just a meme, it's a foundational piece of mainstream American ideology that has been at its core for nearly a century now.
While I agree that the US has a historical obsession with communism, "anything right is abhorrent totalitarian fascism in the making" has been a far more commonly stated position for the last decade. At this point, it's necessary to regard both "communism" and "fascism" as simple pejoratives and focus on the specific policies being discussed.
This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable. There are not that many left that remember the horrors of either ideology clearly.
> such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao.
... 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.
You really think if they had the unchecked power of Stalin or mao they would be… better?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a no-kidding literary tool used throughout history.
> such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao
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.
Here comes another person throwing out words like “communism” yet using the term inaccurately. Please invest in a dictionary.
The core belief in communism is "collective ownership for the common good" which feels like a far cry from "the literal antichrist is coming."
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.
100M+ dead ideology
Not sure why people keep bringing this up. Every ideology has blood on their hands, but communism is nowhere near #1. Try comparing the death tolls/genocides/etc of the capitalist/anti-communist side with the communist side.
Communism and its associated pairings have killed far more than capitalism ever will. Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government. There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
capitalism is great just don't ask the natives about it
> Communism and its associated pairings have killed far more than capitalism ever will.
Ever will? The "capitalists" have already killed far more. Did communists wipe out a continent full of native americans? Did communists killed more people than the Nazi germany, the US, british empire, chinese empire, japanese, etc in ww2? Did communists kill more people during both the vietnam wars?
> Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government.
Fine, that's an actual argument that can be discussed. But why lie outright about reality. But pretty sure the natives would have loved to live under their own authoritarian government rather than being wiped out by the capitalist paradise.
> There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
Must be why you are so good at lying. Because you grew up under communism?
Jacobin is to communism as Gary Johnson is to JD Vance. "Left politics" covers a lot of ideologies and they all hate each other.
Interesting that this is being downvoted considering "Thiel is a right-wing loon" and "Jacobin are a bunch of left-wing loons" are not mutually exclusive statements.
They're both wrong, just in different ways, and observing this is not "bothsidesism."
Discussing the messenger instead of the message is a common strategy to derail conversations away from the message.
As you observe, the original comment is wrong and as such it contributes nothing useful to the discussion.
Yeah, expect this to get flagged and vanish. This has nothing to do with anything even remotely interesting except to those who are emotionally invested with pwning their political or ideological opposition. At this level of discourse, they're all batshit bonkers.
it's not interesting at all - the comment is very stupid (jacobin is not "whole journal on literal communism") as well as such lazy both-sidesism everyone is dumber for having read it.
there's lots of stupid brigading on HN, but sometimes dumb comments get the downvotes they deserve.
For anyone wondering about the source, here is how Jacobin describes themselves:
“ Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. ”
Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.
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.
Left wing magazine discovers metaphor; confuses it for Nazism
Do you mean cause Thiel says he based the core of his beliefs on Schmitts teachings, a fervent nazi? Don't get the connection otherwise.
To me this piece just looks like someone who hates wealth and willfully misunderstands metaphors.
I recommend to read the source:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
This supports my initial reaction. The "antichrist" indicators he points to are things like authoritarianism and homogenization, not burning bushes and bints with swords.
> This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.
The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.
I downvoted you. It's well-known that The Jacobin is named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins.
Which in turn were named after the original Jacobins.
...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.