Well, that was something, wasn’t it?
I’m talking, of course, about our hero, conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s rather strange New York Times podcast interview with his favorite tech oligarch, Peter Thiel. While it started out pretty normal with standard Douthatesque questions and similarly predictable Thieloid answers, around the halfway point things started to get interesting and even turned a little awkward.
This is very much out of the ordinary by the standards of Douthat interviews, which as a general rule tend to be conciliatory and irenic to a fault. Ross is simply not a confrontational guy, choosing instead to take the path of gentle, roundabout argumentation and vague intellectual gesturing, skills he has perfected out of necessity as the Times’ only genuine right-of-center voice. Hence why the strangeness of this interview in particular is all the more notable.
This is not the first time Douthat and Thiel have had publicly recorded discussions. It’s happened several times before, in all instances with Douthat pitching mostly slow, softballs down the center for Thiel. Still, one gets the distinct sense that, deep down, Douthat knows something is not right with Peter.
Undoubtedly this is something Ross has known (or at least intuited) for years, but, like many others in the post-Trump conservative movement, it is something he has likely not allowed himself to articulate openly, even to himself. One can’t necessarily blame him for doing this, as there is quite literally zero incentive for it.
In spite of this, Ross remains, insufferable Whig Thomist and general striver tendencies aside, a man of genuine faith and conscience, meaning that, like Jonathan Harker, he will naturally be deeply unsettled and shattered if he is unfortunate enough to catch a glimpse of his benefactors’ true visage, even if only for a moment.
Truth be told, the comparison of Douthat to Harker, particularly in the context of their respective relationships to you-know-who, is almost comically on the nose. In one corner you have an earnest, faithful, and pious, if somewhat naive, middle-aged family man; in the other, an immensely rich, European born neo-aristocrat with an obsession with achieving immortality through the siphoning of the blood of the young and vulnerable and the accrual of vast power via a variety of unholy machinations. This is, at once, the hilarity and absurdity of the Douthat-Thiel dynamic.
That being said, I think it’s about time we actually dive into exactly what took place.
Renee Girard and The Antichrist: a Brief Primer on Thiel’s Rhetorical Squid Ink Strategies
In addition to his usual bevy of conversation topics (most of which have become quite stale at this point), Thiel also has been on a new kick recently concerning the concept of the Antichrist.
Thiel’s main contention regarding the Antichrist, it seems, as you can observe in his conversation with Douthat, is that, well…he’s not what you think he is. That is to say that, at least in Thiel’s telling of it, the Antichrist is likely to be exactly the opposite of what is expected in the historically accepted Christian understanding of it. Instead of being a charismatic Nietzschean superman bent on world domination via a combination of Machiavellian machinations and technological marvels (a description that is an uncomfortably close composite of Thiel himself), Thiel reads him as the exact opposite of this: as someone who offers to save the world from the dangers of science, technology, and progress.
In this sense it very much tracks with his reading of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ the books from which he famously takes names for his companies. Humorously, it seems that many of his fans, especially his ostensibly Christian ones, do not understand this, or at least do not understand it in the way Thiel intends. Here we have a complete inversion of the traditional meaning of the text itself (this kind of ‘inversion’ being a pretty consistent part of Thiel’s worldview across subjects). Thiel’s reading of LOTR basically mirrors Kirill Yeskov’s; instead of being the good guys, Gandalf and his allies are aggressive warmongers bent on destroying the peaceable and technologically advanced kingdom of Mordor in order to protect their feudal kingdom of mystical obscurantism.
“Gandalf's the crazy person who wants to start a war,” Thiel explains in a 2011 interview with Details magazine. “And Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it's all sort of mystical and environmental, and nothing works.”
“Up is down, good is bad, freedom is slavery, war is peace.” If you notice, these are all, at one time or another, Thiel mantras, even if they are communicated in slightly more esoteric formulations. Again, these are not so much ‘contrarian takes’ as they are simple ‘inversions’ of the truth.
Related to this is Thiel’s oft-cited use of René Girard. Recently, I engaged in a bit of a messaging back and forth with a very smart reader of this Substack about my views on various Thiel-related topics, including his use of Girard. I told him that—while I admittedly am not a particularly close reader of Girard, an author who has never really interested me—my view of Thiel’s use of him is a pretty straightforward one. This is the part of Thiel lore I genuinely think most people actively overthink. While Thiel undoubtedly has other reasons he finds Girard’s theories worthwhile, the primary utility of it for him, in my view, is as a kind of camouflaging squid ink for his more nefarious projects and desires (that is to say, all of them).
In many ways Girard’s theories, particularly regarding scapegoating, are the perfect vehicle for this, as they allow Thiel to immediately reverse (invert) any accusations leveled against him and his projects. Instead of having to actually defend his funding and support of, say, eugenic genetic manipulation and commercialized surrogacy, extreme transhumanism, mass surveillance, and the literal weaponization of AI technologies, he can merely accuse his interlocutor of attempting to scapegoat him out of some kind of hidden, internalized resentment. This serves as an invaluable rhetorical tool for Thiel, especially in light of his general paranoia regarding being ‘found out’ or foiled by the forces of his backwards and resentful enemies.
Hence the appeal of his new anti-Christ narrative, which serves as yet more squid ink for him, yet another attempt to camouflage his true intentions and activities behind a veil of half-formed heresy and pseudo-profundity (descriptors that can be applied accurately to almost all of Thiel’s ‘ideas’).
The problem, in this case, is that this strategy now seems to have completely backfired on him. Thiel’s contention is just too manifestly ridiculous and strained to work as effective squid ink and actually seems to have, in the wake of the interview, done more to reveal his hideousness than obscure it.
I’m not even just talking about Thiel’s apparent hesitation to answer when confronted with the question of whether the human race should continue to survive. I’m willing to write this moment, awkward and inadvertently humorous as it was, off to Thiel’s tendency to stutter.
Thiel’s downfall really starts when he starts talking about his theory of the Antichrist in depth, which he outlandishly claims will be someone much more like…Greta Thunberg than someone like, well, him. As he notes in the interview:
The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
But even the usually hyper-irenic Douthat isn’t having it, not this time; after a good bit of back and forth, he appears to openly call him out on the patent absurdity of his argument:
But we’re not living under the Antichrist right now. We’re just stagnant. And you’re positing that something worse could be on the horizon that would make stagnation permanent, that would be driven by fear. And I’m suggesting that for that to happen, there would have to be some burst of technological progress that was akin to Los Alamos, that people are afraid of.
And my very specific question for you: You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
Douthat and Thiel then pivot to an incredibly awkward back-and-forth about divine providence, with Thiel basically writing it off completely as ‘Calvinist’ and then accusing Douthat of ‘scapegoating God’ (more squid ink) before Douthat somewhat abruptly ends the interview.
Thiel as Anti-Christ
I’m sure Ross had his doubts about Thiel before, but now they are likely getting harder and harder to ignore, even for someone whose professional and ideological incentives would encourage him to do so.
The truly off-putting part for Ross has to be the fact, pointed out by a poster on Twitter, that he has spent the better part of a decade helping to advance an agenda that is, for all intents and purposes, completely antagonistic to his deepest held beliefs about morality, Christ, and the intrinsic value of the human person.
Ross’s general failing is the same one shared by the vast majority of the conservative Catholic/Christian commentariat in the English-speaking world: a vast, hubristic overconfidence in their own cleverness and powers of persuasion combined with the unrelenting ambition of the striver. This has led him and others of similar persuasions to become the de facto servants of an individual who—in a very strict and formal sense of the term—is a practicing Satanist.
Thiel’s actual vision, stripped of its various squid inks, is very close to the one explicated by Costin in his ‘Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy’: a freedom of the masters who, through technological breakthroughs and their own vital energies and genius, have now become supermen and are now free to rule over, and do that which they please with, the remaining 95 percent of humanity. The bulk of which will exist in primitive, technologically backward societies, being of actual use to the vampire elites above them only perhaps as a source of spare organs, fertile wombs, or momentary pleasure. Beings who are as distant from the new supermen as a troop of baboons are from the Greek gods. Only they will have true freedom because only they will be developed enough to actually use or value it. This, in the most concise and truncated sense, is Thiel’s vision: Gay Space Fascism.
Of course, this is certainly a disquieting possibility for people like Ross, true as it may be. They simply have too many sunk costs at this point.
Still, it’s never too late to turn from a dark path, regardless of how late the hour may be, never too late to take the advice of someone wiser than yourself:
“The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled
In folds of himself until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.
But the Mystery of Iniquity is a pit too deep for mortal eyes to plumb. Come
ye out from among those who prize the serpent's golden eyes…”
Are conservatives truly unaware of gay space fascists' truly irredeemable nature? My impression is that a number of them are sore losers willfully supporting them out of spite.
For these conservatives, their causes are irreversibly lost (the youth at large practices neither marriage nor Christianism) and they put entirely the blame on the Left, especially the wokes, willfully ignoring other causes like neoliberal capitalism which they can't bring themselves to hate.
They would rather support and surrender all power to nominally right wing transhumanists who claim to hate the left too. They might royally screw humanity but, why would they care? At least it's not the leftists, and for them humanity is already screwed anyway.
Just want to point out that Jason Blakely is not just some random poster on X but an extremely interesting scholar and social critic, a serious Catholic in the mold of Charles Taylor (with whom he studied). In a different, better, world, Blakely would be far better known and respected among Christians than Thiel and his crew.