I urge you to read it - if you can. It's not very long but some parts you have to go over several times and even then you may be no wiser. Most people, those who have heard of Thiel anyway, were probably unaware of how deeply sick he is.
The title is: A time for truth and reconciliation. It is as if Thiel is likening the last four years under the Democrats to the years of the apartheid regime in South Africa requiring profound apologies and forgiveness by Republicans. The pretentious sub-title is: Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets.
Thiel explains that apokálypsis means 'unveiling' in Greek. I'm not sure what it is that he expects to be revealed and it's quite clear that he hasn't either.
This is the key bit:
"The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth."
And this:
"Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe but by 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past."
His effort looks more like it belongs in Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye. If you manage to get through it do read the comments section below where FT readers give their opinion. They are not impressed. They generally thinks it's "garbled nonsense", "unintelligible ramblings", "genuinely nuts", "incoherent drivel", and Thiel himself is described as "a deranged fantasist" and and an "unhinged idiot." And I must say I agree with them all.
One reader suggested it's the kind of thing a teenage undergraduate might submit to a supervisor to impress with his or her brilliance, otherwise known as "dazzling bullshit."
Honestly, if I had written it and was reading through to see if it looked and sounded OK I would have been embarrassed - and I'm no writer.
He appears to believe the internet is the place to discover objective truth. He writes:
"Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania."
His calls for more transparency which would be better received if he hadn't thrown his weight behind Trump who has tried desperately to suppress DoJ reports on the 6 January insurrection and the classified papers he stole and took to Mar-a-Lago. And note we haven’t yet seen an unredacted copy of the Muller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
These people really think the ‘deep state’ exists and is controlled by some malign forces with motives that are never explained beyond preventing the hard right from doing whatever it is they want. Most people will more readily believe Thiel, Musk et al are themselves the deep state, pulling strings in the background and spending $billions to prevent any social progress whatsoever in American or indeed anywhere else.
The BBC has listed ten of Trump's proposed cabinet, most of whom look clinically insane. But if anyone was hoping JD Vance would step in at some point and provide stable, sensible government, Thiel shows you can forget it. He is as mad as the rest.
