I have no idea what Peter Thiel is trying to say and it makes me feel really uncomfortable

Peter Thiel, longtime Trump supporter and billionaire Mr. Universe, Published an op-ed in the Financial Times Which perfectly replicates the experience of being cornered by a sweaty cockhead at a house party in Austin, Texas.

“A Time for Truth and Reconciliation” is the ominous title of the piece. The reference to post-apartheid South African politics is the most coherent line in the article. The subtitle immediately takes us into drug rant territory: “Trump’s return to White House heralds ‘end’ of old order secrets.”

To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new era. Thiel uses the spelling of many archaic words, “Ancien” I’m sorry. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the great revelation of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What is the real story behind the assassination of JFK? Was COVID-19 an American bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the request of the Biden administration?

According to Thiel, Trump has an opportunity to reveal all these facts and more. It’s an article attacking a word coined by Thiel’s “friend and colleague,” Eric Weinstein, of what they call the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the government-funded media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and NGOs that traditionally define the public conversation.” In short, the elite.

There are a lot of problems here. The biggest thing is that Thiel is elite by all standards. He is a member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex that he seems to oppose. He’s the kind of person who keeps going Piers Morgan to speak Against assassinated CEOs and writes op-eds for the Financial Times.

Thiel is worth more than $10 billion. He contributed significant time and money to the political career of J.D. Vance, a man who was now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel’s article sounds like a ketamine and amphetamine-induced populist rant. It’s an appeal to audiences, full of literary references that would fly over the heads of most college graduates.

This is the guy who funded Facebook and PayPal and is now backing a mass surveillance and AI company named after a cursed being from The Lord of the Rings. He has access to more revelatory and shocking truths than the average person, and yet he craves for more. On our behalf, probably.

The editorial is mystifying. “In hindsight, the Internet has already begun to free us from DISC prison following the death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019,” he writes. Who was president in 2019 when Epstein died? Trump the braggart. Who is in all of Epstein’s travel logs? Trump. Who was photographed multiple times with Epstein? Trump.

“The future requires new and strange ideas,” Thiel insists. New ideas might have saved the old order, which had barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions—the causes of the fifty-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the clamor of soaring real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt.”

Let me help the billionaire. Scientific and technological progress in the United States has exploded in the past five decades from the perspective of anyone except the eccentric hovering over spreadsheets. Real estate prices are “spiking” because we are not building new housing, and venture capitalists like Thiel are sitting on the few resources available. Public debt has exploded because presidents like Trump don’t care about it and are spending money as if it’s going out of style.

“Our old regime, like the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France, believed that the party would never end,” Thiel says. It’s incredible that Thiel doesn’t realize that he’s part of the “old order,” and that he’s one of the elites dancing at the party.

“There will be no retrospection of the pre-Internet past,” he says. And he’s right. But if the populist Internet he’s acclaimed gets anything like control, they won’t look to Thiel as a hero or a prophet. He would be just another head of the guillotine, an elite alien who wrote about the end of the world and Decameron While California burned.