The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel's political donations and you'll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance's campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel's former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.
Author
- Luke Munn
Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland
But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance's speeches, and you'll hear echoes of Thiel's voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation : declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was "the most significant moment" of his time there.
Thiel's influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the "most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years". And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.
To "hedge fund investor" and "tech entrepreneur", Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker .
Who is Peter Thiel?
Thiel was born in Germany but grew up in the United States, with a childhood sojourn in apartheid South Africa. Max Chafkin's critical but balanced biography, The Contrarian , claims Thiel was bullied growing up and protected himself by becoming resolutely "disdainful". He studied philosophy and then law at Stanford, where he founded The Stanford Review, a libertarian-conservative student paper that signalled his early interest in controversial politics and culture wars.
While difficult to pin down precisely, Thiel's Christianity shapes his belief in a declining or even apocalyptic world that can only be countered with unapologetic interventions and technological innovations. God helps those who help themselves - but could always use additional help from ambitious tech elites.
In 1998, Thiel cofounded his first tech company, Confinity, which launched its flagship product PayPal in 1999 and merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion and Thiel became a multimillionaire. He invested in several startups, including Facebook, and established his hedge fund, Clarium, and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.
In their own ways, each of these developments is a response to Thiel's thesis that the world is stuck. In his 2011 essay The End of the Future , he decries the "soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia" and the "sordid world" of entertainment. The result is "50 years of stagnation" that has transformed humanity "into this more docile kind of a species".
Thiel's answer is more risk, more tech and more ambition. It's exemplified most clearly by Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm he cofounded in 2004.
Palantir has worked closely with US armed forces and intelligence agencies for 14 years. It is currently working closely with the Trump administration to create a "super-database" of combined data from all federal agencies, and building a platform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "to track migrant movements in real time".
Investing in right-wing politics
Thiel's political interventions have ramped up over time. Libertarianism generally takes an arms-length approach to politics in favour of individual freedom and market determination. But even in "purely" financial spaces, politics creeps in.
Clarium's macroeconomic approach meant the political landscape had to be factored in: "high-conviction, directional investments based on key drivers of the global economy and fundamental themes underappreciated by the marketplace".
If politics, like technology, had stagnated - into a non-choice between similar parties - how could it be "disrupted"? Thiel began making political donations in December 2011, with contributions totalling at least $2.6 million , to the third presidential campaign of Ron Paul , a longstanding conservative congressman in Texas.
While Paul would ultimately be unsuccessful, Thiel recognised something others had missed. Voters had not been attracted to some idealistic libertarian, as the media portrayed him , but to the old Ron Paul, a neoconservative whose newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and '90s suggested 95% of Black men in Washington DC were criminals. (He denied writing them in 2011, calling the statements "terrible".) His appeal was never "merely" about economic freedom, but about race and class, fear and grievance.
Donald Trump took this dark undercurrent, a strain that has always underpinned parts of US politics, and ran with it. Dog-whistles were dispensed with in favour of overt claims that most illegal immigrants were rapists, certain Latin American countries were shitholes, women were bitches , and white supremacists were "very fine people". Trump, noted one article , was "weaponizing the conservative id".
In these visions, multiculturalism and progressivism are not just cultural threats, but economic ones. They undermine the ability of company founders to exploit labour, blow past regulations, and obey the brutal logic of the market.
"A world safe for capitalism is presumably one of monopoly companies and patriarchal networks," note media scholars Ben Little and Alison Winch in their profile of Thiel. It's a world "where 'the multiculture' has been transformed into racialised domination".
Thiel has certainly contributed to the rise of Trump and the new breed of right-wing politicians through his vast wealth. In 2016, Thiel contributed $1.25 million to Trump's campaign, thinking "he had a 50-50 chance of winning". This earned him a speaking slot at the Republican convention. But his influence extends beyond mere money.
Thiel's endorsement of Trump at the 2016 Republican convention was hugely significant for garnering support. So was his famous declaration there that he was proud to be gay, Republican and American . After Trump won his first term, Thiel continued to be involved. He joined the transition team and recommended aligned individuals for key positions, such as Michael Kratsios, who would become chief technology officer.
So, Thiel's support of Trump should be understood as an investment, just like his early investments in PayPal and Facebook. As Chafkin notes, Thiel's bet on Trump is a wager with high upsides and low risk. Thiel's outspoken views in favour of "seasteading" (floating independent city-states) and against immigration and women's emancipation had already alienated the more progressive sectors of Silicon Valley.
If the bet paid off, Thiel and his empire could benefit handsomely. And this is exactly what has played out. Since Trump has taken office in his second term, Palantir has already netted more than $113 million in federal government spending.
Palantir: from information to domination
Palantir's origin story reflects its blend of technical expertise and political ambition. To combat rising fraud, members of PayPal developed a software tool that could mine vast amounts of transactions and find the connections between them, homing in on a handful of culprits in a deluge of data.
Thiel was prescient in spinning this core idea from finance to intelligence, where analysts were searching for patterns and anomalies amid the noise - a needle in a haystack . Palantir commercialised and expanded this concept, bringing a leaner, data-driven Silicon Valley approach to a sector dominated by established Washington incumbents.
Thiel and Palantir chief executive Alex Karp believe Silicon Valley has lost its way, frittering away its vast talents and ingenuity on trivial pursuits: advertising, gaming, social media. For them, the era of ambitious scientific projects and unapologetic military industrial collaborations - the Manhattan Project, the Moon landing - needs to be revived.
In his book, the Technological Republic , Karp calls for a state that looks more like a startup - lean, technology-driven, and led authoritatively by a founder-like figure who is not afraid to "move fast and break stuff" (the Silicon Valley motto), especially when it comes to dominating enemies and ensuring the safety of a nation's citizens.
Palantir, of course, answers this call. It combines machine learning with military spending, data-driven "intelligence" with naked violence. This is most clear in its longstanding collaboration with ICE, which is now carrying out notorious immigration raids at the behest of the Trump administration. "On the factory floor, in the operating room, on the battlefield," states a recent Palantir recruitment ad placed across US college campuses, "we build to dominate."
Palantir's blueprint has been emulated by a growing array of others. Anduril , Skydio and Shield AI are all founded on developing information technologies for military and intelligence use. Last week, Rune Technologies closed a $24 million Series A round of funding to move warfare logistics away from the "Excel era" and towards AI-augmented tools.
Answering Karp's call, these startups are unapologetic in leveraging engineering expertise for more substantial, authoritarian and historically controversial areas.
Playing the scapegoat
One of the clearest outlines of Thiel's political philosophy is laid out in the Straussian Moment , a 30-page essay he published in 2007.
For Thiel, the spectacular violence of the September 11 terrorist attacks was a wake-up call, rousing the citizenry from that "very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment".
In Thiel's view, the Enlightenment project - to advance knowledge, cultivate tolerance, and elevate humanity as a whole - rested on a naive understanding of human nature. Like Curtis Yarvin and other influential Silicon Valley political thinkers, he asserts that humanity is brutal and a shift from Enlightenment optimism to Dark Enlightenment pessimism is required.
It is unsurprising, then, that Thiel looks to René Girard ( once called "the new Darwin of the human sciences") for inspiration; he even organised a symposium at Stanford with Girad in attendance. Girard begins from a bleak view of human nature, a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish and short. For Girard , mimesis or imitation is at the heart of the human. This mirroring quality means violence is always threatening to escalate, to constantly ramp up with no inherent limit.
To corral this violence, ancient cultures created the scapegoat , a sacrificial system where all-against-all was replaced by all-against-one. Yet the scapegoat is no longer viable - the revelation of Christ is that the scapegoat is an innocent victim.
Thiel takes Girard's insights and twists them to his own ends . First, Thiel asserts that even if violence begets more violence, nonviolence is not an option. Enemies must not be allowed to prevail. In the face of uncompromising adversaries, such as the 9/11 attackers, who threaten to dismantle some idealised way of life, preemptively responding to violence is " urgently demanded ".
Second, Thiel takes the concept of the scapegoat and flips it. In this judo-like manoeuvre, the real victims are not the marginalised or the minority, but the hegemonic class (whites, males, liberals, conservatives), who are being pressured by cancel culture, political correctness, diversity initiatives and so on.
Shortly after graduating, Thiel coauthored a book, The Diversity Myth , about alleged political intolerance at Stanford. In it, he rails against a rampant multiculturalism that he claims stifles freedom of speech and derails education and entrepreneurialism. Here, scapegoating is weaponised. It's mobilised toward a conservative advance in the ongoing cultural wars, which are always also political wars.
Contradiction or evolution?
Thiel is a walking paradox. He bemoans cancel culture and political correctness, while waging a highly expensive and clearly personal war to bankrupt a media outlet that offended him. (After Gawker printed the "open secret" of Thiel's gay status in 2007, Thiel funded lawsuits against them until they were shut down.)
He calls himself a libertarian, but has founded a company that derives millions in contracts from the bloated budgets of the many military agencies (the National Security Agency, the FBI, the US Army) that now comprise the sprawling state.
He celebrates capitalism and the free hand of the market, but always stresses that the path to business success rests on establishing monopolies with no real competition. He is a German-born immigrant who actively supports technologies (Palantir) and candidates (Trump) that establish xenophobic environments and seek to deport those deemed "other". And, most personally , he is both a conservative Republican and an openly gay man.
At a purely logical level, these elements are incompatible. There is a perceived gap between Thiel's words and actions, a gulf between his ideologies and his activities. For staunch libertarians at Thiel's companies, his manoeuvrings at the state level make no sense. For queer scholars , Thiel's exclusionary rather than liberatory politics mean he is a man who has sex with other men, rather than being gay.
For these critics, both things cannot be true; therefore, some labels, identities and activities are fake, marginal or impossible. Yet one of Thiel's many lessons is that contradiction is a strength rather than a weakness.
Thiel's philosophy, which journalists have called techno-fascism , recalls philosopher Umberto Eco, who described fascism as a "beehive of contradictions" and "a collage of different philosophical and political ideas". The radical right , in particular, has no problem mashing together many views that at face value should not fit: scavenger ideologies that are opportunistic in grabbing elements that work for them.
Instead of contradictions, these hybrid forms need to be understood as evolutions. They are tensions, held within the body and the mind of the subject, that push monolithic frameworks like conservatism beyond their existing limits. Thiel's power - and his political blueprint for others - is insisting you can be a philosophical entrepreneur, an illiberal patriot, and a queer conservative.
Luke Munn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
