“Our goal is to bring together investors who are dissatisfied with the status quo of politics and raise capital to fund projects that will disrupt but advance the Republican agenda,” a Rockbridge Network brochure read.21“The Rockbridge Network’s Plan To Remake The Right (Fall 2021),” DocumentCloud – Contributed by Kenneth Vogel (The New York Times). Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
In 1987, while a sophomore in college, Thiel co-founded the Stanford Review, a student paper that eventually joined ISI’s Collegiate Network. “Thiel saw that the university desperately needed an alternative to its stifling liberal orthodoxy,” ISI wrote, adding:27“Peter Thiel,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Archived August 9, 2020. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/ZpeMD
“That January, Jesse Jackson had led hundreds of students and faculty in protesting Stanford’s required Western Culture course. ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!’ the protesters chanted. Stanford soon gutted its core curriculum and caved to the ceaseless demands for ‘diversity,’ but Thiel and the Stanford Review were there to push back. The paper provided well-reasoned opposing views and exposed the intolerance of so many multiculturalists.”28“Peter Thiel,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Archived August 9, 2020. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/ZpeMD
On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Thiel described climate change as “science in quotes.” He added, “I think the fact that it’s called climate science tells you that it’s more dogmatic than anything that’s truly science should be.”31“Joe Rogan Experience #2190 – Peter Thiel,” YouTube video uploaded by user “PowerfulJRE,” August 16, 2024. Archived audio on file at DeSmog.
The below is based on FEC campaign finance data, reviewed by DeSmog, for individual contributions by Peter Thiel matching name, listed addresses, and employers.
“I’m not in favor of science in quotes. And it’s always a tell that it’s not real science. And so we call it climate science or political science or social science, you know, you’re just sort of making it up, and you have an inferiority complex to real science or something like physics or chemistry.”
He elaborated when Joe Rogan asked, “You don’t feel that climate science is a real science?”
“There’s several different things one could say,” Thiel said. “It’s possible climate change is happening. It’s possible we don’t have great accounts of why that’s going on. So I’m not I’m not questioning any of those things. But, but how scientific it is? I don’t think it’s a place where we have really vigorous debates. You know, maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions. Temperatures are going up. Maybe it’s methane, maybe it’s people are eating too much steak. It’s the cows flatulating, or…
“And you have to measure how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus versus carbon dioxide. I don’t think they’re rigorously doing that stuff scientifically. I think the fact that it’s called climate science tells you that it’s more dogmatic than anything that’s truly science should be. Dogma doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, but…”
“Jay Bhattacharya, he sort of ended up pursuing sort of center-right, vaguely Libertarian, ended up pursuing an academic career. Got a Ph.D. in econ., medical degree, then just like became a tenured prof. at Stanford in health policy, and spent, you know decades plugging away, you know, writing various papers and books on, you know, what didn’t work about socialist medicine of one sort or another and then you know really found his voice in the last year or two as someone who started to question some of the conventional wisdom on COVID, and and you know it began with him just a lot of just very nuanced debates about, you know, was the infection rate higher and therefore was the mortality rate lower, and therefore was the panic overdone? You know, if you were prioritizing COVID above everything else, you know, how much, how many cancer patients were dying, how many people, and all other cases were not being taken care of, were we sort of getting these very basic cost-benefit calculations right?
“We sort of, you can sort of imagine how the movie roughly ended. It ended with posters of his face plastered around campus, you know, this sort of this terribly evil person. You know, probably the hope was that someone would muster up the courage and maybe beat him up on sight or something like that. Normally, it’s probably mostly Kayfabe and LARPing, but, that’s sort of what people are hoping I guess. And then a petition circulated by his faculty colleagues calling for him to be shut up so as not to, ‘put lives at risk.’
“So, you know, it was very uncomfortable for him to have this person who the university wasn’t specifically telling him to shut up and not talk. And if you want to sort of distill it down to the specific crime, I think there was maybe once sentence that he had in one of his things, and I’ll quote it. ‘There is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the COVID disease from spreading.’ And this was of course a nuanced thing, didn’t say there was no evidence, saying maybe there’s quality evidence, but there was no high-quality evidence. And then, you know, and then there could be sort of a debate about this which of course never, never happens, and one then suspects that, you know, the sort of natural suspicion I always have is that if we can’t have a debate about the high-quality, whether the evidence is high quality or not, that tells us the evidence probably wasn’t high-quality and that he’s probably simply, simply right.
“And of course, more generally raises questions about just this very, very strange way in which, you know, the mob goes against the individual in which, you know, the consensus theories of truth seem to misfire so badly in our society where, you know, when we look back, you know, a year, year and a half later, I think he was more right than wrong on these things as far as I can tell. It’s still complicated. Certainly, there was something deranged about a debate in which you could not have these sorts of, you could not have these sorts of discussions. And you know if you want to frame it politically, we always think of, you know, democracy as a good thing. In a democracy the majority is more right than wrong and if you get you know 51 percent is more right than 49, and 70 percent is even more right. But you know, if you get to 99.9 percent, maybe that’s totally right, or maybe you’re in North Korea.”
Thiel continued:
“And you have to ask this, you know, this very subtle question, a very all-important question, where do you sort of shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? Where do these things shift, becoming, you know, a mob, or a racket, or simply something that’s, you know, a totalitarian lie. … I always think that, you know, when you have to call things science, you know they aren’t, like climate science or political science. We don’t use physical science or chemical science because, you know, you don’t need to push it quite that hard.
“And, this sort of, you know, extreme dogmatism, you know, has of course, it’s not even been one of a very stable variety like maybe, you know, the Catholic Church and its anti-Aristotelian notions, or its Aristotelian notions on Earth, you know it didn’t shift itself every month or every year on this. And we’ve had a dogmatic, maybe an atheist church in science, a dogmatic church that has nevertheless had crazed hairpin turns in the last year. Just on the COVID thing, they’re too many to enumerate, but just, you know, the very basic ones are, you know, masks first ineffective, then required. You know, vaccines, one year ago, Kamala Harris was campaigning that, you know, she would never take a Trump vaccine. Now they’re mandatory.
“And of course, of course there’s the strange history of the lab leak where it was first racist and taboo, now it’s probably correct even though I’m not totally certain I’m allowed to discuss that yet, but it’s sort of, it’s probably sort of allowed to discuss this. And this sort of dogmatism, these hairpin turns, this sort of epistemic closure, is I think one of the ways that things have just gotten deranged over and over and over again.
[…]
“The problem, whether it’s Fed, Afghanistan, COVID, is that we’ve, we have this sort of, these machines for generating consensus, uniformity, you know, and not asking dissident questions even though they’re super urgent and as far as I can tell, the hour is late for all of these institutions, and it’s more urgent than ever that we find a way to have some of these dissident voices get heard in all these different contexts.”
Key Quotes
January 11, 2017
“Everyone says Trump is going to change everything way too much. Well, maybe Trump is going to change everything way too little. That seems like the much more plausible risk to me,” Thiel said in an interview with The New York Times.36Maureen Dowd. “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017. Archived September 6, 2024. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/jFnh2
Joe Rogan Experience #2190 – Peter Thiel. Source: YouTube39“Joe Rogan Experience #2190 – Peter Thiel,” YouTube video uploaded by user “PowerfulJRE,” August 16, 2024. Archived audio on file at DeSmog.
Rogan replied, “Well, there’s certainly ideology that’s connected to climate science. And then there’s certainly corporations that are invested in this, this prospect of green energy, and the concept of green energy, and they’re profiting off of it, and pushing these different things, whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is.”42Ilana Berger. “Joe Rogan continues to cast doubt on climate science on The Joe Rogan Experience,” Media Matters, August 22, 2024. Archived August 29, 2024. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/aono1
Rogan later echoed climate change denier messaging that claims increased carbon dioxide emissions were net positive when he commented: “we’re also ignoring” regenerative agriculture and stated that “the more carbon dioxide is, the greener it is, which is why it’s greener today on Earth than it has been in 100 years.” He added, “These are all facts that are inconvenient to people that have a very specific, narrow window of how to approach this.”43Ilana Berger. “Joe Rogan continues to cast doubt on climate science on The Joe Rogan Experience,” Media Matters, August 22, 2024. Archived August 29, 2024. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/aono1
“It’s a tremendous privilege to be back here as we reconvene from a little over two years ago. And there are so many different things we could talk about, but perhaps the theme I would want to start with is some reflections on the incredible derangement of various forms of thought, political life, scientific life, the sense-making machinery generally in this country over the last few years, and what we can perhaps do to counteract this derangement, what can be done, what must be done.
“Maybe, you know maybe, there’s sort of many anecdotes one can start with, but I thought I’d start with one that involves you know, good friend of mine from undergraduate days at Stanford. Jay Bhattacharya, he sort of ended up pursuing sort of center-right, vaguely Libertarian, ended up pursuing an academic career. Got a Ph.D. in econ, medical degree, eventually became a tenured prof. at Stanford in health policy, and spent, you know, decades plugging away, you know, writing various papers and books on, you know, what didn’t work about socialist medicine of one sort or another and then you know really found his voice in the last year or two as someone who started to question some of the conventional wisdom on COVID, and and you know it began with him just a lot of just very nuanced debates about, you know, was the infection rate higher and therefore was the mortality rate lower, and therefore was the panic overdone? You know, if you were prioritizing COVID above everything else, you know, how much, how many cancer patients were dying, how many people, and all other cases were not being taken care of, were we sort of getting these very basic cost-benefit calculations right?
“We sort of, you can sort of imagine how the movie roughly ended. It ended with posters of his face plastered around campus, you know, this sort of this terribly evil person. You know, probably the hope was that someone would muster up the courage and maybe beat him up on sight or something like that. Normally, it’s probably mostly Kayfabe and LARPing, but, that’s sort of what people are hoping I guess. And then a petition circulated by his faculty colleagues calling for him to be shut up so as not to, ‘put lives at risk.’
“So, you know, it was very uncomfortable for him to have this person who the university wasn’t specifically telling him to shut up and not talk. And if you want to sort of distill it down to the specific crime, I think there was maybe once sentence that he had in one of his things, and I’ll quote it. ‘There is no high quality evidence to support the assertions that masks stop the COVID disease from spreading.’ And this was of course a nuanced thing, didn’t say there was no evidence, saying maybe there’s quality evidence, but there’s no high quality evidence. And then, you know, and then there could be sort of a debate about this which of course never, never happens, and one then suspects that, you know, the sort of natural suspicion I always have is that if we can’t have a debate about the high quality, whether the evidence is high quality or not, that tells us the evidence probably wasn’t high quality and that he’s probably simply, simply right.
“And of course, more generally raises questions about just this very, very strange way in which, you know, the mob goes against the individual in which, you know, the consensus theories of truth seem to misfire so badly in our society where you know, when we look back, you know, a year, year and a half later, I think he was more right than wrong on these things as far as I can tell. It’s still complicated. Certainly, there was something deranged about a debate in which you could not have these sorts of, you could not have these sorts of discussions. And you know if you want to frame it politically, we always think of you know, democracy as a good thing. In a democracy the majority is more right than wrong and if you get you know 51 percent is more right than 49, and 70 percent is even more right. But you know, if you get to 99.9 percent, maybe that’s totally right, or maybe you’re in North Korea.
“And you have to ask this, you know, this very subtle question, a very all-important question, where do you sort of shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? Where do these things shift, becoming, you know, a mob, or racket, or simply something that’s, you know, a totalitarian lie. And there’s sort of, you know, in the philosophy of science, sort of the, you know, one of the ways I think you sort of frame it is that science always thinks of itself as fighting a two-front war against extreme skepticism and extreme dogmatism. Sort of the way it originated in the 17th and 18th centuries. So extreme skepticism, if I say, you know, I don’t believe the audience exists, I don’t can’t trust my senses, you can’t do science. Extreme dogmatism, you know, the Aristotelian notation that the Earth can’t possibly move, that’s probably also bad for science. And of course, in its, you know 18th-century version where the scientists style themselves as deists and rationalists and free thinkers of various types, it was always the fight against dogmatism that was what dominated, and in a very I think paradoxical turn that is still, you know, the way they think of themselves, even though if you sort of say where it’s gotten unbalanced and erred is obviously just become massively on the side of dogmatism. Not enough skepticism at all. And, you know, you see this of course in all the genuflections to science with a capital S. You know, ‘In this household we believe in Science,’ that’s sort of an evidence that you don’t, or just even just the assert… I always think that, you know, when you have to call things science, you know they aren’t, like climate science or political science. We don’t use physical science or chemical science because, you know, you don’t need to push a point that hard.
“And, this sort of, you know, extreme dogmatism, you know, has of course, it’s not even been of a very stable variety like maybe, you know, the Catholic Church and its anti-Aristotelian notions, or its Aristotelian notions on Earth, you know it didn’t shift itself every month or every year on this. And we’ve had a dogmatic, maybe an atheist church in science, a dogmatic church that has nevertheless had crazed hairpin turns in the last year. Just on the COVID thing, they’re too many to enumerate, but just, you know, the very basic ones are, you know, masks first ineffective, then required. You know, vaccines, one year ago, Kamala Harris was campaigning that, you know, she would never take a Trump vaccine. Now they’re mandatory.
“And of course, of course there’s the strange history of the lab leak where it was first racist and taboo, now it’s probably correct even though I’m not totally certain I’m allowed to discuss that yet, but it’s sort of, it’s probably sort of allowed to discuss this. And this sort of dogmatism, these hairpin turns, this sort of epistemic closure, is I think one of the ways that things have just gotten deranged over and over and over again.
“And I want to maybe just go in the COVID example, I want to go through maybe two other ones. One that was sort of the, a very dramatic one, where I think, which is the… sort of incredible collapse of the absurdist postmodern experiment that was called Afghanistan. And, where, you know, if we discuss it in terms of military tactics, or you know, they didn’t defend the Air Force base or stuff like that, we’re missing what went wrong. What went wrong were, you know, 20 years of this sort of extreme epistemic closure of, you couldn’t dissent, you couldn’t really ask questions about what we were doing, and then you ended up in some, you know, bizarre, absurdist place.
“There’s sort of many different, you know, we spent two trillion dollars, you know, there’s this sort of artificial country we created, propped up. There’s all sorts of crazed anecdotes I sort of found in putting the speech together, you know, two of… one of my bizarro… the super bizarro one was some NGO, you can look this up on YouTube, these are not, you know, things from The Onion as far as I can tell. But you can look it up on YouTube, it’s a NGO offering art studies, they’re going to the Duchamp toilet exhibit from 100 years ago where he just puts a toilet in a museum and they’re explaining to people in Afghanistan why this was an important moment in modern art.
“Of course, this gets translated into Pashto, and then, you know, people are sort of not quite sure what they’re doing there, but, and then of course we had you know, we had the last president who got his Ph.D. from Columbia University wrote a book called, ‘Fixing Failed States,’ again this in even more The Onion episode. And then as the Taliban was closing in on Kabul, he held urgent meetings about ‘digitizing’ the Afghan economy.
“But of course, you know, in general it was just this lie that we were building, you know, a liberal democracy that this was, you know, just history was on the side of people. And if we again want to sort of focus on a dissenting individual voice that articulated the alternative in very clear terms, in ways I will also quote, it would have been president Trump. It was articulated maybe at a late date, we can debate whether it could have still been course corrected, but he said that Afghanistan was fundamentally and irreducibly a ‘shithole country.’ And, you know, you know, I would never say this myself. I would never, you know, and there was a reason he was sort of out on a limb in saying that. Most of us wouldn’t say this. It’s not a very nice thing to say. It’s not clear that it’s a very rigorous scientific description. But certainly in a world where that question couldn’t be debated, couldn’t be discussed, is he right? Is this an accurate description of the country? Is the two trillion dollars just sort of throwing good money after bad? That’s the kind of world in which, you know, the whole thing ends in this crazy way. The mob, the individual is right, the mob sort of silenced the argument, and then, you know, it works until at some point it just, you get to this point of crazed total collapse.
“Now I think, you know, there’s sort of a way in which, you know, Afghanistan is sort of this far away country we don’t know much about. There’s a way in which you could think of COVID as sort of, you know, strange questions of health policy, but maybe I will end on one where I think the epistemic closure is even bigger. It’s maybe, it maybe involves, it involves our, you know, perhaps our most sacred institution, our most high-functioning deep state institution, you know, one we can’t ask questions about at all and therefore we should suspect functions worse than almost all the others. And it’s one that I think, you know, to some extent is accessible more and more on this common-sense level, and I’m thinking of sort of the runaway non-transitory inflation that’s happening in this country, and the complete bankruptcy of the Fed. And, you know, it’s sort of, it’s again, we have this sort of epistemic closure in the form of everybody jumping onto MMT [modern monetary theory] theories, or, you know, theories that you can print as much money as you want so there will never be inflation at of course precisely the moment when they’re wrong. Precisely the moment when no dissent is allowed. I’ve sort of, you know, I think one of my sort of incredibly big misses of the last decade, I did some, but not as much as I should have, was not buying enough bitcoin, not buying enough crypto, and you know it’s $60,000 a bitcoin and still not sure that one should aggressively buy it, but surely what it is telling us is that we are at a crisis moment for the Fed. It is a canary in the coal mine. It is, the crypto market is the pure money market and it is telling us that the epistemically closed bubble around fiat money in the US is heading towards some crisis point.
“You know, the Wizard of Oz is always this metaphor on Fed, on central banking, and I’ve sort of thought that maybe we’re close to a Toto moment in the Fed, where the little dog is pulling the curtain aside from, you know, the holy of holies, and you realize that there’s nobody there, nothing’s really going on. And we’ve had sort of these preliminary questions about the nature of the stock trading and things like this, and, you know, without going into the details of that, it’s when you start asking these questions, you know the institution is in trouble, that it is so over its limb, so out on a limb, and so much at a point where something is going to break. And again, the problem, whether it’s Fed, Afghanistan, COVID, is that we’ve, we have this sort of, these machines for generating consensus, uniformity, you know, and not asking dissident questions even though they’re super urgent and as far as I can tell, the hour is late for all of these institutions, and it’s more urgent than ever that we find a way to have some of these dissident voices get heard in all these different contexts.
“And so, you know, there’s sort of a, you can frame the skepticism dogmatism or the, you know, wisdom of crowds vs madness of crowds. We’re on the side of the madness of crowds, we’re on the side of excess dogmatism, you know, there’s sort of a centralization, decentralization, is there too much decentralization? No it’s way too much centralization of, you know, is it too much misinformation, are there too many crazy dissidents? No. It’s too much the Ministry of Truth. And so yes, maybe there is some theoretical debate, but in practice, it is, you know, if there’s, you know, if there’s a misinformation problem, it’s a centralized misinformation problem, and it’s the misinformation coming from the Ministry of Truth, whether that ministry is telling us things about COVID, or about Afghanistan, or that there’s no inflation at all, even, you know, even to the, even going against what everyone says.
“Now, relating this a little bit to the theme of this conference, of the question of nationalism. It strikes me that one of the ways the question of nationalism always gets misperceived is that it is, it is seen as not so much on the side of individuals or classical liberalism or even conservatism, and yet this seems to be very wrong because the place where we have the worst mobs, the most homogenized forms of thinking possible are, in the context of globalization, and if we think of nationalism as a corrective to the sort of, you know, homogenizing, you know, brain-dead one-world state that’s totalitarian and where there’s no dissent, no individualism is allowed, it is the sort of all-important corrective at this point. And I keep thinking that the worst forms of this sort of fake consensus, fake dangerous centralization Ministry of Truth are all the globalist versions. You know, to make this even more self-referential to the attendees here, I’ve… I was sort of reflecting on, you know, the World Economic Forum, the Davos Conference, where, you know, I last went in 2013 and the sort of insight I had there was sort of interesting where you have all these different people, but they represent, you know, companies, or maybe they represent, maybe they’re the heads of states they represent a government, a country, they might represent, you know, in various contexts they represent of course lots of NGOs. But there are no individuals, and there’s virtually nobody who’s simply representing themselves and thinking for themselves, and saying, ‘This is what I believe. This is not… Nobody agrees with me on this, but this is… I’ve just been looking at the facts and the data and thinking about it myself and this is what I’ve concluded.’
“And it’s sort of a picture of a globalist future in which individuals, you know, will not exist, and it will just be some kind of a braindead Borg. And I think the character of this conference will be the exact opposite of that. We have, you know, all sorts of individuals here, I hope they will not agree with one another. I hope that we will have, you know, incredibly, incredibly vigorous debates and that this is the sort of thing that is needed if we’re going to course correct in this country. And, you know, so I don’t know what metaphor you want to use, but it’s sort of the, you know, the Biden administration is sort of like the Titanic in which we have the zombie retreads from, you know, the Clinton and Obama administrations. I mean people like Larry Summers, even Larry Summers is probably too heterodox to be allowed, and we sort of have the zombie retreads that are just busy rearranging the deck chairs, you know, maybe mopping the floors on the deck or something like that. You know, captain’s reading from the teleprompter, just always North, due North, steady as she goes, and, you know, we need some, you know, we need some dissident voices more than ever.
“Let me, maybe, I will just end with sort of a fantasy of mine of what victory would look like, and I don’t think this will happen, and, or it’s a long ways off. But if… You know, I would like us to go back to a country in which we have ticker tape parades for single individuals. We haven’t had such a ticker tape parade in the 21st century, and individuals not just sports stars, not just individuals who might even be American, who might even be doing things that are changing society, asking dangerous questions, inventing things, and my candidate for the first such person we should do a ticker tape parade for, and he or she may well not show up, but we should still do it, my candidate is Satoshi Nakamoto. Thank you very much.”
Image credit: Nigel Luckhurst (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Peter Hitchens
Credentials
Politics and Philosophy, University of York. Nigel Farndale. “Peter Hitchens,” nigelfarndale.com, June 16, 2013. A...
Peter Ridd
Credentials
BSc and PhD, Physics, James Cook University.“Peter Ridd,” LinkedIn. Accessed March 21, 2018. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
Dip Ed.“Professor Peter Ridd,” James ...
Peter J. Ferrara
Credentials
J.D., Havard Law School (1979).“Appointments, January 21, 1984,” Ronald Reagon Presidential Library. Archived March 21, 2005.
B.A., Harvard College (1976).“A...
Peter Lilley
Credentials
According to his biography, Lilley was educated at Hayes County Primary School, Dulwich College and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied natural sci...
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