Notes on 'The Thiel Thing': Real Threat or Mere Conspiracy Theory?

A Response to Critics...

I’ve genuinely been surprised by the reaction to the last several pieces I managed to put up on Substack. A shocking number of people read and shared them, something I admit I didn’t necessarily expect, as a lot of this stuff is relatively obscure. Obviously a pleasant surprise. However, I do feel it necessary to make a couple of points, partly in response to some criticisms and partly for the sake of simple clarity.

Unfortunately, this is mostly going to involve a somewhat detailed discussion of the goings-on of ‘the Thiel Thing’, in particular pointing out some of the more obvious connections between players. I say ‘unfortunately’ because I personally find this to be a completely tedious task, like having to make a detailed case as to how exactly it is I know the sky is blue or that the sun rises in the east. In addition, it’s tedious because of just how big the Thielverse actually is. The Thieloids fund an immense amount of things; tracking them all down (at least the ones you can actually verify) is quite a bit of work, something I might actually do in full if I were writing a book on the subject, but, alas, as of now I am not (probably for the better, all things considered).

I feel the need to do this largely due to the kind of standard evasion you will sometimes hear when discussing such things: namely, the accusation that the 'Thielverse’ itself is some kind of bizarre conspiracy theory (such as the response below, taken from a Twitter thread by

Ashley Fitzgerald

) which, in this case, is essentially the same thing as basic gaslighting. I grapple with enough of my own internal accusations as it is due to my Roman Catholic sensibilities so I have found this type of thing to be quite irritating and worth responding to.

The funny thing about this type of response is that it tends to come from one of two types of people: either someone who knows very little about Thiel and his network and has no personal connection to it at all or someone who is deeply enmeshed in the network and is actively trying to obscure how it functions (usually for the sake of people in the first group, the only ones gullible enough to buy the bullshit).

All that being, there are a few things I would like to briefly and succinctly state before we really get into some of the more gory details here. In particular, I would like to discuss exactly what I don’t mean when I mention the Thielverse or ‘the Thiel Thing’ and its influence in American culture and politics:

1. The Thielverse does not operate like a classic X-Files-esque conspiracy ‘system.’ That is to say there is not a centralized leadership at the top of a rigid military-like hierarchy that gives direct commands to its underlings as part of a grand strategy of which every small move and event is but a part.

2. That being said, in the very literal sense of the term, there is very much a ‘conspiracy’ afoot in the sense that Thiel and other key players do in fact meet and discuss their ideas and plans for the future. They quite literally ‘conspire’ together in order to promote certain ideological narratives and build media networks to support them, back certain candidates for political office, and advance certain technological developments in service of a generally agreed upon vision of the future.

3. Nothing about this is really all that strange. It’s funny, the minds of many seem to bounce constantly only between two extreme and radically incompatible hypotheses: either uncritically ascribing to conspiracies that require the most intricate and insanely complex webs of organization (think 9/11 was an inside job, the moon landing was faked, etc.) OR believing that any suggestion of people actually sitting down and planning something in secret (something people of all types and classes have consistently done for thousands of years) is somehow inherently conspiratorial, merely the delusions of a paranoid mind. All this is to say that I believe the actions of the Thielverse are entirely rational and not in the least bit surprising. The ideology put forward by it (Gay Space Fascism) is, in many respects, quite attractive and compelling to many of its adherents. In addition, many of its conclusions about the nature of reality are extremely dangerous and controversial enough to require a significant amount of discretion when discussing them, no less when actually trying to organize IRL to promote them. Too often critics of the Thielverse (especially ones bearing detailed network charts) seem to try and imply that the very existence of such a network is some kind of sign of inherent guilt. As though the attempt to discreetly organize in service of an ideological movement is somehow inherently suspect. I write this off to the profound atomization of the Western public, many of whom are so alienated from others as to find the very idea of being a part of a larger movement to be almost incomprehensible.

4. I do not believe, nor have I ever claimed, that the vast majority of those involved in the greater Thielverse do so simply because they are being paid by Thiel. Obviously it's impossible to fully know a person’s true motives, and almost certainly a non-insignificant number of those who have gravitated toward ‘the Thiel Thing’ have done so as a way of chasing social status, or online clout, or perhaps even some money. However I do not think this is true of most of the more important figures, the majority of whom are just as motivated by the substance of Peter’s ideas (both of the exoteric and esoteric varieties) as any other inducements on offer. I also think it is important to take people at their word and not accuse any of being ‘shills’ without evidence, if for no other reason than that it is more interesting to interrogate ideas than motives.

5. There are a number of serious rumors circulating about the true nature of some of the relationships between Thiel, his senior allies, and many of the young men in his ‘court.’ So far I have personally seen no hard evidence confirming these, however their persistence over the years, along with other circumstantial evidence leads me to believe it’s very possible there may be more than a measure of truth to them. That’s a longish way of saying: please get in touch if you ‘know’ what i’m talking about and would like to discuss it privately!

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to try and describe what exactly the Thielverse is in reality.

The best way to understand how the Thielverse generally operates is as a two-tiered network. The first, foundational, and most important aspect of which consists of a massive amount of capital. This capital is active primarily in a number of key companies that wield an immense amount of influence in the real world. The most important of these powerful companies are active in the tech and defense sectors (Facebook, Twitter, Palantir, Anduril, etc.) in the United States and have, in many ways, begun to form their own kind of new ‘deep state’ within the United States government. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to lump the political activities of the Thielverse (including his backing of such figures as now Vice-President Vance) in with this first tier of organization.

The second tier of the network consists of the Thielverse’s media and ideological webs, which are significant and also are probably the easiest to really notice and understand.

Thiel has tended to approach his ideological ventures in much the same way he approaches his business ventures, with a venture capital approach. Put simply, Thiel is more than happy to spread his seed to the wind by funding dozens and dozens of different endeavors, many of which he believes have been significantly undervalued and/or ignored by others, in hopes that one or two may eventually take off.

This approach was obviously the one Thiel took when dealing with the so-called ‘dissident right,’ a project he was deeply involved in at least since 2016, if not before.

It is also important to know something else about Peter: all in all, he’s a bit cheap. Especially when it comes to funding cultural and political movements. By cheap, I mean here that he does not take the more conventional route to political influence previously blazed by heavyweights like George Soros and the Koch brothers, individuals who successfully built up massive and handsomely funded nonprofit activist organizations with the sole purpose of advancing their own idiosyncratic political agendas. By comparison to such extravagance, Peter’s approach feels downright stingy.

However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, one can argue convincingly that this approach has already paid far more dividends for Thiel than the way of, say, the Kochs.

After all, ask yourself the question: whose vision of the world currently has more cultural cache and political influence? Now try and guess what the difference in financial investment between Thiel and the Kochs has been. Now I haven’t bothered to try and calculate these figures, so I guess I could somehow be wrong here, but it has to be something on the order of 20 to 1 in favor of the Kochs.

One of the things Peter has learned quite well is that, especially in the age of modern social media, it makes much more sense to focus on building up networks as opposed to building organizations or heavily funding certain individuals.

After all, if one can build up an effective ideological social media network, it, in a sense, becomes ‘self-oiling’ and self-funding for the majority of those involved (teach a man to fish etc.)

Hence why I had to laugh when Anna Khachiyan, of Red Scare fame, attempted to lazily obscure her connections to Thiel by claiming that she had never received any money from Thiel. While this is likely true in a technical sense, it also is a mystification of sorts. The primary benefit Thiel provided to someone like Khachiyan is not direct funding; after all, Red Scare receives an obscene amount of financial assistance from fans on Patreon as it is, but rather an alternative media patronage network that she could plug herself into as she transitioned away from the former left-wing scene she had previously been a part of. The same is true for the rest of the personalities that populate the Thielverse.

This network is part social scene, part fandom, and part political movement, and while not always directly funded by the Thielverse, it is heavily subsidized by it. Peter might not be cutting direct checks to the people involved in the everyday work of making memes or slaving away deep in the content mines of Twitter, but he is funding the parties and conferences they go to, the publishing houses and magazines that promote their work, and the startups that ‘employ’ many of them. In addition, he also offers them something else, something much more important than mere money: access to power. Or, at least, the potential for it. Thiel is part of an incredibly influential network of extremely rich and powerful individuals, including both the world’s richest man and the President of the United States (to say nothing of the likely future President of the United States: JD Vance). Some of whom might even be willing to appear on your up and coming podcast and/or promote your content on Twitter if you have been deemed a part of the network.

For most people with the disposition to be interested in the things Thiel’s social media vanguard are, this is an offer that is too good to refuse. Outsiders for much of their lives, they have now been offered the opportunity to become the ultimate insiders, but not amongst the old liberal elite (the traditional fantasy of the left-wing adjunct professor, ever longing to be recognized by The New York Review of Books, etc.) but in something different, in something altogether new and thus exciting.

And under such circumstances, who in their right mind would turn such an offer down? Especially seeing as most of the so-called ‘dissident right,’ particularly in its current incarnation, hold no deep beliefs, either of the ideological or theological varieties, in spite of much posturing to the contrary. Rather, they are driven almost entirely by a simple combination of dissatisfaction with the liberal order (that is to say: with their own lives, most of which are profoundly lonely) and a basic libido dominandi towards the rest of the human race.

In this sense they serve as a perfect vanguard for Thiel, a fact made even more salient by the reality that they owe everything to Peter, in a not dissimilar way to someone like, say, J.D. Vance.

Again, though, most people already know this, at least at some level. Especially about the more obvious players (Curtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu, Claremont, Passage Press, Red Scare, Sovereign House, Mans World Magazine, Palladium Magazine etc.), as it's pretty transparent they are all reading from the same sheet of music most of the time. Some journalists are occasionally worth reading when it comes to this stuff, but they are also frequently inflexible and lazy in addition to having ideological fixations that don’t allow them to fully understand the complexity of what’s actually going on. When it comes to covering these parts of ‘the Thiel thing,’ I would recommend following someone like @BasilianThought, who I admit does have a bit of an axe to grind and who I frequently find somewhat obnoxious but who I also think does an excellent job of explaining the details of what he calls the ‘patronage network’ of the Thielverse.

Here’s Where it Gets Weird

None of this, in and of itself, is that interesting if you ask me to be honest. It’s all relatively straightforward, maybe too straightforward. Weird rich guy funds a new political scene to advocate for his eccentric far-right views. In other news: dog bites man.

This is where it gets interesting though, at least to me. It of course makes perfect sense for Thiel to fund a cadre of young, errr… ‘youngish’ (by ‘youngish here I, of course, mean middle-aged) propagandists who basically agree with his program of right-wing transhumanist, technophilic, atheistic biologism (what we call ‘Gay Space Fascism’).

What doesn’t make sense, at least at first blush, is why Thiel funds so many other political projects, including those that he should, at least theoretically, have contempt for.

I first discovered this years ago when it was revealed to me that a very niche and obscure political publication (and I mean very obscure) had gotten a major offer from Thiel. Now this made no sense to me for a couple of reasons: not only was it a completely obscure publication with no real possibility of ever ‘making it big,’ but its stated tenets were also such that they completely clashed with Thiel’s entire worldview. Why in the world would Peter be willing to financially support such a publication?

As the years passed, I encountered this exact same situation time and again; it was almost as if Thiel was preoccupied with finding right-of-center publications that were philosophically opposed to everything he wanted and then giving them lots of money. For a long time I couldn’t figure out why he would do this, and then…it hit me.

Now, I suppose this is just a theory I have, something I ‘know’ versus something I can 'prove,’ but I’m pretty positive I know why Thiel did this.

When one takes the king’s money, one inevitably ends up playing the king’s tune. In this case, however, I don’t think this means that Thiel funded all these places in order for them to push explicit Gay Space Fascist talking points on their unsuspecting micro audiences. Rather, I think Thiel funded them not so much for what they would say, but for what they wouldn’t say. In particular, any and all criticism of Thiel himself or his many controversial corporate and political projects, many of which might otherwise deeply offend the conservative audiences in question.

This thus allows Thiel to only have to focus on one front at a time, in this case his campaign against the left, without having to worry about any meaningful resistance or resentment from his right flank, particularly regarding issues like surrogacy and genetic engineering which he has put a massive amount money behind. If you don’t believe me, then feel free to try and get any sort of criticism, however polite or well reasoned, of Thiel published in any right of center outlet in the English speaking world (Reason Magazine doesn’t count), let me know how that goes for you

One of the best (and, in my opinion, funniest) examples of this was the recent revelation that Thiel was funding the red-brown ‘post-left’ magazine Compact. A fact that was recently uncovered by the usually somewhat lazy liberal journalist Julia Black:

I say ‘funniest’ because this example is the most elegant encapsulation of the entire phenomenon of ‘the Thiel Thing’ that I’ve yet seen.

Here Thiel is giving an, honestly quite large, amount of money to a political magazine that promotes ideas very much in conflict with Thiel’s own stated ideology. In addition, it’s obvious whoever did the filing for him purposefully attempted to obfuscate exactly which magazine the money was going to. So much so that unless you actually checked the EIN, you wouldn’t have known the money was going to Compact.

Again, ask yourself, why is Thiel doing this, and why the secrecy?

And remember, this is just one example. A lot of Thiel money finds its way into people's pockets by much less direct means (usually through 3rd-party organizations). Most of it is on the down low (and I’m not just talking about money, if you know what I mean!).

Anyway, ‘The Thiel Thing’ has earned massive cultural dividends for Peter after a shockingly small investment and thus will likely remain a fixture of internet politics for some time.

Ultimately it’s important to remember that the Red Scare /BAPsphere /Claremont /Dimes Square/Leverage Research-Palladium Magazine/ Bari Weiss ‘Thiel Thing,’ while in many ways a shiny object that is easy to fixate on, is only a small part of Thiel’s empire and far from the most important part at that. If these people all disappeared tomorrow analogs would be found in a relatively short period of time who would serve the same function at a comparable level of effectiveness. A fact that is crucial to keep in mind for anyone interested in effectively opposing, or even just understanding, Thiel’s world.

For we are aiming to gore the matador, not his cape.