Peter Thiel
Silicon Valley billionaire; PayPal co-founder; Palantir founder; Stanford Review co-founder 1987; student of Schmitt, Strauss, and Girard; major funder of the MAGA New Right; “freedom and democracy are incompatible” (2009)
Who He Is
Peter Thiel is one of the most consequential figures in the MAGA New Right — not as a thinker in the academic sense, but as a financier, network-builder, and ideological legitimator who brought Silicon Valley money and anti-democratic philosophy into the New Right coalition.
Born in Germany, raised in the United States, Thiel co-founded Stanford’s The Stanford Review in 1987 at age nineteen — a conservative campus publication that became a training ground for right-wing intellectuals. He went on to co-found PayPal, make the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-found Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/data analytics firm with major government contracts, including with federal immigration and law enforcement agencies).
Intellectual Formation
Thiel is unusual among Silicon Valley figures in taking political philosophy seriously. His intellectual influences, documented by Field:
- Carl Schmitt — Thiel absorbed the friend/enemy distinction and Schmitt’s critique of liberalism’s pretense of neutrality
- Leo Strauss — Thiel participated in a Strauss reading group where he met Michael Anton — the connection that later facilitated Anton’s path to the Trump White House
- René Girard — Thiel’s Stanford mentor; Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating shaped Thiel’s worldview (he became a practicing Catholic)
This combination — Schmittian decisionism, Straussian political philosophy, Girardian anthropology — makes Thiel’s intellectual formation unusual and more sophisticated than the typical tech-right libertarian. He is not simply anti-regulation; he is philosophically anti-liberal.
The “Freedom and Democracy Are Incompatible” Statement
In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute journal, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He went on to exclude women from his political calculus, noting the expansion of the welfare state had occurred “since women’s suffrage.”
Field identifies this as unusually candid: Thiel articulated what the New Right increasingly believed but rarely stated directly — that liberal democracy as practiced leads to egalitarian leveling that is incompatible with the kind of freedom (economic and political) that Thiel and the Hard Right prefer.
Role in the New Right Network
Thiel’s institutional investments in the New Right are extensive:
- American Greatness — funded the website that grew out of JAG
- American Affairs — funded the journal co-founded by Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin
- Michael Anton → White House: Thiel facilitated Anton’s hiring into the Trump administration
- JD Vance — Thiel’s most important political investment; funded Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, which proved transformative for Vance’s trajectory
- Edmund Burke Foundation — $50,000+ donor to Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism organizing vehicle
- National Conservatism conferences — keynote speaker at the first conference (July 2019, Washington DC)
NatCon Keynote: “Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough”
At the first NatCon conference in July 2019, Thiel gave the keynote speech. Field characterizes it as embodying NatCon’s contradictions: Thiel told an audience of traditionalist nationalists that what they really needed was better technology — specifically AI and supersonic jets — rather than the “Star Trek computer” (voice assistant / Siri-style AI) that Silicon Valley had been building.
The speech illustrated the strange coalition NatCon was attempting: Silicon Valley techno-optimists and Catholic integralists, Straussian Americanists and Israeli nationalists, sharing a platform under a nationalist banner while disagreeing about almost everything else.
Palantir and State Power
Palantir Technologies, which Thiel co-founded in 2003 (partly funded by the CIA’s venture arm), became the data infrastructure for federal surveillance and law enforcement. Palantir’s contracts with ICE, CBP, and other agencies make Thiel not merely a donor to the New Right but an active builder of the administrative capacity that a nationalist government would use.
This is the practical dimension of Thiel’s anti-liberalism: not just funding ideas, but building the tools.
The Curtis Yarvin Connection
Thiel’s friendship with Curtis Yarvin (“Mencius Moldbug”) is the most important single conduit between neoreactionary Silicon Valley thinking and the mainstream MAGA New Right. Yarvin’s explicit advocacy for “the Cathedral” thesis — that liberal institutions (media, universities, government) form an interlocking ideological monopoly that must be dismantled — became the template for Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state” in more palatable form.
Cross-References
- Michael Anton — met at Strauss reading group; Thiel facilitated his White House hiring
- Julius Krein / Gladden Pappin — funded their American Affairs journal
- JD Vance — political protégé; funded his Senate campaign
- Curtis Yarvin — friend; ideological bridge to neoreactionary Silicon Valley
- Carl Schmitt — intellectual influence (Schmittian decisionism)
- Leo Strauss — participated in Strauss reading group
- National Conservatism — keynote speaker at first NatCon (July 2019); major donor
- Hard Right — his philosophical position (“freedom and democracy incompatible”) aligns here
- Decisionism — Schmittian influence in his anti-democratic politics