How extreme is Peter Thiel?

A quick follow-up to yesterday's post. 

I've noticed that mainstream media have a tendency to underplay or perhaps underestimate how far out of the mainstream Thiel is, despite the man literally being on the record that he thought women's suffrage was bad for the country. Nonetheless, outlets like the New York Times and NPR continue to treat him as a deep and sensible thinker. He is neither.

His reputation comes partly from the bizarre but widespread view that the elite of Silicon Valley are some unearthly breed of super-intellects. Thiel is smarter than peers like Musk, but you'd be hard pressed to find anything that he said that was either profound or insightful. He's a reasonably bright fellow who won the lottery a couple of times by being at the right place at the right moment hanging out with the right people. 

He is also arguably to the right of the Koch Brothers with a comparable sense of personal ethics.

The is a real tweet from an actual US Senate candidate. pic.twitter.com/SrCVTfkh5c

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) March 28, 2022

From TPM:

But fear not, [Thiel protégé and good ol' boy cosplayer J.D.] Vance has their back — or at least Greene’s. Referring to Greene as a “friend” last night, Vance declared the congresswoman — who has turned her role as a lawmaker into a platform for annoying everyone in the Republican caucus, spreading vicious conspiracy theories and calling for violence against her colleagues — “did nothing wrong.”

“The accusation against Marjorie is pretty simple: that she appeared at a conference where somebody said something bad,” he said, referencing Holocaust-denier Fuentes, who used the event last month to lament that America has abandoned “young white men” and to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Did she say something bad at the conference?” Vance continued. “I actually watched her remarks, I agreed with nearly every word that she said.

From Vanity Fair:

Billionaire Peter Thiel hosted about two dozen Republican donors at his 10,000-square-foot Miami compound on Wednesday night to raise money for Wyoming Republican Harriet Hageman, the Donald Trump–backed candidate running a primary challenge against GOP representative Liz Cheney. According to a person briefed on the event by an attendee, the gathering had the feel of a MAGA rally in miniature. Thiel introduced Hageman, who then launched into a stump speech about why Cheney needed to be defeated because of her disloyalty to Trump. “It was all about how the 2020 election was stolen and Cheney is a RINO,” the source told me. The source added that Donald Trump Jr. arrived with heavy security and spoke about how Republicans need “to take back the country.” 

Thiel’s foray into the Wyoming Republican primary shows how devoted the secretive PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor has become to the MAGA movement. In October, Politico reported that Thiel donated the maximum $5,800 to Hageman’s campaign. His support is helping Hageman, a Wyoming lawyer, close the significant fundraising gap with Cheney, who raised more than $3.6 million by the end of September, Politico reported last month. According to the outlet, Hageman reported having only $245,000 in the bank at the end of September.

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A spokesperson for Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.