I enjoyed Peter Thiel’s book and even more so Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel. We also have a “mutual like” — René Girard — and the person whose book Wanting introduced me to Girard, Luke Burgis, is a stand-up guy who is a bit of a Thielophile. So, when Peter Thiel publishes an unpaywalled opinion piece in my newspaper of choice you can be sure I’ll read it. And so I did, with interesting results
You see, Thiel seems to have a grievance against America. Here is an immigrant to the US of A who earned billions while in the country and co-founded a corporate behemoth whose major source of revenue is the US federal government who does not seem to think the country is headed in the right direction. In a feat of projection, he presents FT’s readers with a laundry list of 20th and 21st-century conspiracy theories, from the murder of JFK to that of Jeffrey Epstein (sic!) to the the covid-19 lab leak, then notes:
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
I will remind you that Holiday’s book about Thiel — “Conspiracy” — was, in fact, about Peter Thiel’s conspiracy to destroy Gawker as revenge for outing him as a gay man living in San Francisco.
Note that he doesn’t say exceptional countries wouldn’t have “these questions”, but rather that they could have ignored them. Indeed, the exceptional 1960s America ignored so many, mostly thanks to what Eric Weinstein — name-checked in Thiel’s essay — calls The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC): a confluence of mass media and vetted experts who act as the great filter of what can be spoken about in polite company. So is America no longer exceptional because DISC broke down? Or Because its citizens no longer have anything better to preoccupy themselves with?
Or perhaps I am overthinking the text’s possible Straussian reading. It could just as well be a middle finger to FT’s regular audience, the mass media-consuming elites, and a victory sign pointed at the unwashed internet masses able to climb the FT paywall on piles of Peter Thiel’s money (because I doubt the article became ungated out of the goodness of FT management). If so, kudos.