Peter Thiel: Libertarian, technocratic authoritarian, Antichrist or aspiring narcissistic Katechon? By Kayla Carman

Peter Thiel evokes a lot of emotions, but trust is not one of them. From Kayla Carman at strategic-culture.su:

The answer matters less than the realisation that he is not, and never will be, the saviour of civilisation.

It’s hard not to marvel at how people like Peter Thiel rise to prominence. In every age, we get the same archetype: the billionaire who discusses human agency, suggesting he believes he’s as omnipotent as God, perceives himself as the restrainer of chaos, and starts rearranging humanity as if we were Sims characters trapped in his private Silicon Valley sandbox. In Thiel’s case, the marketing label is “somewhat free market libertarian, champion of free speech, scourge of globalist bureaucracy.” The reality is a little less Hayek, a little more Orwell with a dose of Revelation sprinkled on top.

Thiel is painted as the billionaire rebel who stands against the encroaching globalist order. He bankrolls Rumble, the supposed digital haven of free speech where dissenters flee when YouTube’s algorithm bans them for wrongthink. He smiles wryly as he describes himself as anti-global governance, anti-bureaucracy, and the Davos-sceptic billionaire who won’t be invited to Klaus Schwab’s fondue party. And yet, behind the curtain, Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir — the surveillance darling of the national security state, a company whose entire business model is hoovering up every scrap of public and private data and feeding it into predictive policing software for governments. If you’re against global governance, you probably shouldn’t be designing its nervous system.

Palantir is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster built for the permanent security state. It helps ICE track migrants, it helps the Pentagon track targets, and it helps Western intelligence agencies track entire populations. Thiel markets himself as the libertarian outsider, but in reality he’s the data oligarch making sure no one escapes the panopticon. If George Orwell were alive today, he’d sue for plagiarism.

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