Peter Thiel’s Twisted Vision for the Trump Presidency
In more concrete terms, Thiel finds the ordinary agonism of American politics both dangerous and duplicitous. In a 2019 interview, he said, “I would like to live in a world that’s less political, where there’s less politics, but I’d also like us to be honest about how terrible politics is … it’s not a nice thing.” Like his recent essay, “The Straussian Moment” also imagined a great unveiling of truth: “One must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and all those who perpetuated them will be held to account.”
The question we should ask this very wealthy, very influential person who would vest more credibility in people on the internet just asking questions about Covid-19 than he would in the CDC or the Johns Hopkins Department of Epidemiology is: What then? What would a combination of “less politics,” an even more unfettered internet, and a weakening of media organizations, universities, and government agencies look like?
Universities, media organizations, bureaucracies, and NGOs all serve as information guardrails. Those civic institutions, it’s fair to say, have lately failed to sustain popular trust, but it’s hard to imagine how a Trump government commission on, say, whether Covid-19 was an “inside job” would help to restore that trust.
