On Silicon Valley's New Right
What does Peter Thiel want? And how have his views influenced Donald Trump's running mate JD Vance?
Scapegoat ceremony. Image by Jules & Jenny from Lincoln, UK - Detail of East Window, Lincoln Cathedral, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71408186
Donald Trump’s decision to pick former venture capital (VC) executive JD Vance as his running mate in this year’s US presidential election has drawn attention to Silicon Valley’s right-wing ideologues. Who are they? And what do they want?
The key figure in this world is Peter Thiel, a billionaire who founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook. He controversially backed Trump in 2016; and funded his former VC employee Vance in his campaign for Senate in 2022. He had declined to back Trump, but has said he would vote for him if someone held a gun to his head and made him pick sides;. More recently, he has been warming to the Republican candidate after Trump picked Vance as his running mate.
It is fairly easy to see what Thiel thinks using the techniques of open source intelligence (OSINT), which pay close attention to his own words in public. The investor and entrepreneur taught a class on startups at Stanford University in 2012. One of his students, Blake Masters, took notes and turned it into a rather good book in 2014. Zero to One explains what a startup is; and is well worth reading even if you strongly disagree with Thiel’s politics.
To cut a long story short, Thiel (and Masters) see startups as exercises in applied contrarianism.
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
The rest of the book looks at how startups can be a platform to put skin in the game for testing unpopular opinions. If you are right, you will get very rich indeed. If you are wrong, your project is likely to fail.
Thiel’s stance of dogged contrarianism is the basic attitude that underpins the whole of the new right of Silicon Valley. Its members are going against the grain of the centre-left political culture of the Northern California tech hub. The tech establishment firmly believes in markets (socialists are notable by their absence), but they tend to be socially progressive. Think “don’t be evil” (Google’s former motto); tech billionaires promising to give away their fortunes; and some boilerplate messaging about “connecting people.”
Knee-jerk contrarianism, applied with less finesse than Thiel recommends, can be a slippery slope. The knock-off version of contrarianism popular among crypto bros and other right-wing edge-lords and trolls often involves automatically rejecting any messages from experts, which can quickly lead to anti-vaccine rabbit holes and pseudo-finance scams. Right-wing contrarians also often struggle to understand that the right to be wrong can be taken too far. The right to be a bigot is not a particularly important one, given its terrible consequences for society, as discussed previously.
It is worth noting that Vance’s deliberate contrarianism - a stance he shares with Thiel and Masters - partly explains why he seems quite so awkward and creepy to so many ordinary voters, many of whom have had little exposure to this way of seeing the world in their daily lives. It often takes a certain amount of disagreeableness to be consistently contrarian.
Dogged contrarianism is not necessarily the best mindset you need to win elections in a liberal democracy, as Thiel’s co-author Masters found out the hard way when he lost a Senate race in 2022 after promoting the views of the Unabomber, Ted Kacynski. Contrarian? Yes! Good politics? Absolutely not! It is interesting to note that Democrat taunts of “weird” get under the skins of conservatives, who realise they have lost (or are losing) their cultural hegemony in American society.
Libertarian?
The media often describes Thiel as a libertarian, but this can be slightly misleading. Most libertarians are in awe of Adam Smith’s insight into the existence of “an invisible hand,” an 18th century metaphor that shows how people following their own interests in a competitive market economy can lead to results that are in the public interest. This is known as an “emergent order,” in more modern jargon.
By contrast, Thiel argues that monopolies are better than competition.
Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits…
In this book, we’re not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: by “monopoly” we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.
These comments on monopolies make Thiel very much a contrarian libertarian. In order to understand his views, we need to set aside the economists who developed libertarian ideas by thinking about competition and turn to Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist, who saw society as a battle between great entrepreneurs and the bureaucrats who hold them back. Rather bizarrely, she thought that true monopolies were impossible in capitalism, which made her very hostile to anti-trust regulations.
Thiel has this to say about Rand:
That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everyone around them. In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake.
Who were Rand’s villains? In her binary worldview, the good guys were knowingly selfish, but tried to create something new and valuable. The bad guys are also selfish, but - lacking self-knowledge - claim to be selfless. They hate originality and are driven by envy of the novelist’s heroes. They come in many shapes and sizes, from bureaucrats to journalists.
Thiel’s comment that Rand’s villains are real is very telling. He has identified Elizabeth Warren - an elected official who wants to use anti-trust legislation to prevent monopolistic billionaires deliberating promoting platform decay - as the Democrat he is “most scared” by. She replied with one word: “Good.”
The implication is that Thiel wants to build monopolies with as little regulatory oversight as humanly possible. However, the billionaire isn’t just building user-friendly platforms for consumers. He is also backing defence startup Anduril, which is building autonomous systems (a polite term for killer drones). The idea that elected officials, regulators and bureaucrats should just let Anduril get on with the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can kill human beings with minimal to no oversight would shock many voters.
Thiel probably also saw the people behind Gawker as Rand-like villains. The gossip blog had outed him in 2007. Thiel later funded a lawsuit by retired wrestler Hulk Hogan over the publication of a sex tape. The lawsuit bankrupted the site in 2016.
The investor and entrepreneur has also long been critical of elite universities, which he no doubt sees as being full of Randian villains. While an undergraduate, he co-founded The Stanford Review, a newspaper for conservative and libertarian students. He was its first editor-in-chief and remained in contact after graduation. He also offers grants to aspiring entrepreneurs encouraging them to drop out of university. He has said that measures meant to protect diversity at universities have tended to backfire in the real world.
Girard and scapegoats
People who have barely followed Thiel up to now might be a little surprised by the next part of our tale, which takes an unexpected turn into French social theory. Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University, where he met René Girard, a historian and literary critic, who was a Roman Catholic. The entrepreneur and investor says that he was a “somewhat rebellious undergraduate” at the time, who was interested in questioning what he saw as the conformist ideas of the university.
Thiel first thought that Girard was “crazy,” but the thinker’s ideas about imitation took time to take hold as the younger man gradually realised how powerful and perceptive they were. Thiel predicted that by the turn of this century, Girard would be seen as “one of the great intellectuals” of the 20th century.
One of Girard’s most basic ideas is “mimetic desire.” We see that other people want an object and that means that we want it too. In Girard’s words: “What makes the object valuable is not its true price but the desires that are already in it.” We can check this ourselves on social media. Have you ever felt a pang of jealousy when a friend shares a picture of a new house or car? This is often true even if you had no particular interest in living in that particular area or that means of transport before seeing the photo that provoked the reaction.
Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook in 2004 and joined its board in 2005. In April 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, a social media platform that is based almost entirely upon mimetic desire. Thiel sold most of his shares in Facebook in November 2012, but remained on the company’s board until 2022.
Girard thought that mimetic desire could be dangerous. If we all want what our neighbour desires, it will lead to conflict in society. After doing a deep review of ancient texts, the theorist came to the conclusion that over time our species learnt to use scapegoats to reduce these tensions. He says that ancient societies looked for signs like disabilities, immigration and membership of an elite to identify potential scapegoats who could be killed. Disabilities later morphed into signs like what the ancients perceived as excessive or aberrant sexuality, or being androgynous, or cross-dressing, he says.
“The more signs of a victim an individual bears, the more likely he is to attract disaster,” Girard argues. Oedipus, who limps, arrived in Thebes without knowing anyone, and became a king, is the perfect example, he says. We also need to believe in the guilt of innocent scapegoats for the mechanism to reduce tension, he argues.
This philosophy might appear a little arcane. And yet it has tremendous explanatory power. Let’s pick on Billie Eilish for a moment. The young singer appeared at the Oscars ceremony in March 2024 wearing a badge showing a red hand in solidarity with the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip after Israel counter-attacked following the atrocities of October 2023. The red hand symbol dates back to 2000 (a year before Eilish was born), when two Israeli reservists were slaughtered by a Palestinian mob. One of the killers, Aziz Salha, waved bloodied hands at the mob.
Why is an alternative singer, who advocates for climate change awareness, wearing a symbol that celebrates ethnic murder while insisting on the guilt of the sacrificial victims? It seems strange to anyone who thinks we are (or should strive to be) rational creatures. And yet Girard, who died in 2015, would have been unsurprised. The Jewish people barely survived the Holocaust; Palestinian narratives make the case that the Israelis are strangers in a land that doesn’t belong to them; and Israel has built a high-tech society in the desert. We have a full hand.
I will leave the point here. If your own support of the Palestinian cause troubles you after finding out about Girard’s views about scapegoats, please go outside somewhere quiet and spend some time mulling it over in your head. Don’t expect immediate results, as Thiel realised as a young man.
Girard sees just one way out of mimetic desire, societal conflict and the need to find scapegoats to reduce tension. This is the Gospel accounts of the Passion of Jesus Christ (the period from his triumphal entry to Jerusalem to his burial a few days later), which emphasise the innocence of a cosmic sacrificial victim.
We are aware that the Gospels reject persecution. What we do not realize is that, by doing so, they release its mechanism and demolish the entire human religion and the resulting cultures: we fail to recognize the fruit of the persecutors’ accounts of persecution in the symbolic forces surrounding us. But the very fact that these forms have a diminished hold, and their power of illusion is weakened, is due precisely to our increasing ability to identify the underlying scapegoat mechanisms. Once understood, the mechanisms can no longer operate; we believe less and less in the culpability of victims they demand. Deprived of the food that sustains them, the institutions derived from these mechanisms collapse one after the other about us. Whether we know it or not, the Gospels are responsible for this collapse.
It is worth mentioning that the weakest part of Girard’s argument is his idea that the many times Christians have persecuted non-Christians throughout history should be taken as a sign of immature faith. When the liberal order eventually emerged a few hundred years ago, it tended to be secular. The theorist gives Christianity too much of the credit for the emergence of these institutions, in my opinion; and glosses over the way that nationalists still tend to scapegoat those that they see as outsiders in the contemporary world while paying lip-service to Christianity.
Deirdre McCloskey’s account of the rulers of the newly independent Netherlands in its Golden Age taking the unprecedented decision to let ordinary people live their lives as they saw fit is a much more convincing account of the end of witch hunts, in my opinion. She argues that this revolutionary idea of elite non-intervention in the lives of ordinary people gradually spread throughout much of the world, leading to what she calls the Great Enrichment. Vance’s obsession with what other people do in their bedrooms goes against the grain of this revolution.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given Girard’s defence of the Gospels, Thiel and many of his associates are Christians - a contrarian stance in Silicon Valley, which is largely secular. Thiel himself grew up as an Evangelical and describes his adult religion as “somewhat heretodox,” with no need to convince anyone else of his views. His former employee, Vance, was once an atheist, but converted to Catholicism as an adult. Meanwhile, Thiel’s co-author Masters, who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate with the backing of the investor, is also Catholic.
Vance’s Catholicism and contrarianism have already created problems for the Trump campaign. For example, the politician wrote a forward to a book by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank, which has proposed a radically right-wing Project 2025 for the next conservative to lead the US. The plan has been criticised as being authoritarian and undermining civil liberties, for example, by banning emergency contraception and pornography.
However, Vance describes the plan’s author as having a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” This is problematic for Trump, who has been trying to distance himself from the proposals, which are wildly unpopular with those voters who know about them.
Thiel lives with his husband and has said that it is a mistake for the Republican Party to focus too much on culture war issues. However, some of his followers tend to be significantly more socially conservative than he is. Vance and Masters both strongly oppose abortion and want to push back against LGBT rights, for example.
It is worth mentioning that Thiel worked closely with Tesla and X (formerly known as Twitter) owner Elon Musk in their PayPal years. They are often described as members of the “PayPal mafia.” Musk now describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” which is a very Girardian thing to say. In fact, the way that Musk has allowed terrible people like professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to return to X can be read as his own take on the scapegoating mechanism: he thinks letting “woke” progressives “cancel” bigots on social media counts as a return to ancestral patterns that have no place in a modern society built on the back of an appreciation of the Passion of Christ.
It is interesting to note that Thiel himself bears the marks of a scapegoat. He is a gay man in a society where many (including his closest followers) stress traditional gender norms; he was born in Germany and lived in Africa before his family immigrated to California when he was a child; and he is ranked 212 on the list of the richest people in the world. He has said that California’s “wokeness” - or secular progressive views - should be seen as roughly equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist religion. If we assume he isn’t exaggerating, it brings to mind a question: is he worried that Californians will turn him into a scapegoat?
Although speculative, the idea that Thiel distrusts what he sees as the secular left’s atavistic tendencies to scapegoat people helps tie together some of his more controversial views. For example, in 2009 he published an essay saying that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible. He has also supported sea-steading projects, which aim to build new libertarian-inspired societies from scratch on permanent dwellings at sea.
In 2011, Thiel was granted citizenship of New Zealand despite not meeting the usual criteria; and in 2015 he bought 193 hectares of land. His friend Sam Altman said in 2016 he had made backup plans to go with Thiel to his retreat in New Zealand in the event of an emergency like a pandemic. A long-time investor in life-extension research, Thiel has said that he is registered to be cryonically preserved when he dies.
To sum up, we have seen that under the influence of Thiel, the members of Silicon Valley’s new right tend to be contrarians. Being wary of expert opinion can take less sophisticated members down populist rabbit holes. The ideologues want the government to leave startups alone, even if they are developing killer drones powered by AI. They are interested in social media platforms that make users jealous of other users, but want to avoid any online witch hunts that might emerge as a result.
Members of tech’s right wing often embrace Christianity, either in a modernised version that stresses practice over belief, or as old-school converts to ancient faiths. They often distrust secular progressives and worry about liberal democracy giving the left a turn in power. Their embrace of traditionalism and pushback against “wokeness” can sometimes provide cover for bigotry.
Finally, to conclude the essay, it is worth mentioning that the Girardians of Silicon Valley often have a blind spot about the nationalist right’s own scapegoating tendencies. These are often much more atavistic than any left-wing social media campaigns against people who have made bigoted statements in public.
To take one significant example, Trump has refused to rule out building detention camps for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, both Trump and Vance have falsely blamed undocumented migrants for the US opioid crisis. In this context, Trump’s comments that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of the country” should strike cold fear into the heart of anyone who has read Girard closely.
Girard’s views on strangers who behave “in a strange or insulting way in the eyes of his hosts,” are very relevant here. He says small misunderstandings can become disastrous in the context of these tensions; and the earlier inhabitants might feel the need to destroy the newcomers and later venerate them as sacrificial victims.
The social theorist’s grasp of human psychology seems to me to be much stronger than his defence of Catholicism. This observation would be my answer to Thiel if he asked for "an important truth” that few people agree with me on: Girard was a merely half-great writer. Of course, few people have actually sat down and read the French theorist’s works; but many of those who have accept his conclusions too readily. Girard captured something essential about human nature, but his defence of Catholicism fails to provide an effective escape route.
As a result of this insight, the risks of scapegoating immigrants seem very raw and very real to me if Trump and Vance win in November. It is worth mentioning that there is also a mimetic element at the heart of illegal immigration. Imagine someone growing up in poverty outside the US, who watches images of the American dream every time he or she passes a television. One implication of reading Girard is that we should not be surprised that these people want what Americans also want. Putting them in detention camps instead of offering them a route to citizenship seems a little like overkill to those of us who are critical of nationalism.
The comments are closed, as usual whenever we discuss the excesses of nationalists. However, if you subscribe, you can reply to the email. I will answer when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
The risks of defending the right to be a bigot
Further Reading
How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by David DeStefano
The Scapegoat by René Girard (trans Yvonne Freccero)
Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre N McCloskey
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N McCloskey
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre N McCloskey
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