People are just asking questions. Earlier I wrote the history of Peter Thiel’s father Klaus, and asked whether he had refused to end WWII by deliberately sheltering his son in order to transmit Nazism. Now a German news site has continued the exposure, writing a brief summary of Peter’s time in college and early work. Here’s my interpretation through translation of their new article:

Until the early nineties, Thiel studied at Stanford, where his extremist worldview crystallized. The elite university provided an intellectual veneer for ideas he had absorbed through his father’s deliberate ideological transmission.

Thiel said he obsessed over the work of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who provided intellectual justification for dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating authoritarian power.

Thiel also used his studies to embrace the theories of René Girard, whose concept of “mimetic desire” and scapegoating mechanisms offered a framework that complemented his inherited authoritarian mindset. Girard’s focus on violence and the necessity of sacrificial victims resonated with someone raised to see democracy as an obstacle to proper hierarchical order.

This intellectual foundation appealed to Thiel precisely because it provided sophisticated language for the anti-democratic beliefs his father had carefully preserved and transmitted. “He was so out of step with the times, which naturally appealed to a rather rebellious student,” Thiel later said about Girard, revealing his attraction to ideas that challenged egalitarian principles.

Technology as Racial Supremacy: Thiel synthesized these influences into a techno-authoritarian philosophy that echoes his father’s belief in racial and technological hierarchy. “What distinguishes us humans from other animals is our ability to perform miracles. We call these miracles technology,” he wrote in 2014, promoting a vision of technological supremacy that mirrors the Nazi concept of superior peoples deserving to rule. In 2009, he explicitly rejected democratic governance, stating his understanding of freedom was “no longer compatible with democracy.

During his studies, Thiel’s provocation wasn’t mere intellectual rebellion—it was the expression of inherited extremist ideology. His former professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy recognized this, noting Thiel’s opposition to “women’s suffrage, equal rights and inclusion.” Dupuy identified Thiel as “an advocate of chaos—to destroy the system, democracy,” understanding that behind the friendly demeanor lay a commitment to dismantling democratic institutions.

After graduation, Thiel systematically worked to translate his anti-democratic ideology into economic and political power. His mockery of legal institutions and democratic governance reflected not Silicon Valley iconoclasm, but the fulfillment of his father’s project to undermine American democratic norms from within.

The 1998 founding of Confinity and subsequent creation of PayPal represented more than business success—it established a network of like-minded technologists committed to circumventing democratic oversight of economic power.

The self-described “PayPal Mafia” became a vehicle for advancing Thiel’s vision of corporate governance superseding democratic accountability, with alumni founding Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube and LinkedIn as extensions of this anti-democratic project.

This wasn’t entrepreneurial innovation—it was the methodical construction of parallel power structures designed to render democratic institutions irrelevant, apparently as his father had taught him through their strategic migrations away from every emerging democratic accountability.

How is my translation?

This German article to me carries a tone of “like father like son”, especially given scholarship about the transmission of Nazism.

Historians like Norbert Frei, Mary Fulbrook, and Harald Welzer have documented how Nazi beliefs persisted in post-war German families and communities. Welzer’s research on “communicative memory” shows how families transmitted Nazi-era attitudes through everyday conversations and silences, often without explicit ideological instruction.

Studies of second and third-generation Germans reveal patterns of inherited authoritarianism, antisemitism, and democratic skepticism. The work of researchers like Sabine Reichel (“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”) and Peter Sichrovsky documented how Nazi ideology was preserved through family dynamics, geographic choices, and social networks.

The student movement in 1968 explicitly aimed to force Germany to confront its Nazi past and break the silence surrounding war crimes and collaboration. Students demanded that their parents’ generation account for their roles in the Holocaust and Nazi regime. This new generation was specifically trying to prevent exactly the kind of ideological transmission that appears to have occurred in cases like the Thiel family.

Klaus Thiel fled Germany in 1967, just as his reckoning was intensifying, typical of Germans who sought to avoid this confrontation with the past. It places the Thiel family within a documented historical pattern of Nazi ideological preservation through geographic escape and institutional avoidance. This isn’t speculative – it’s applying established frameworks for understanding how extremist ideologies survive generational transitions.

What’s particularly revealing by German press is how Peter’s intellectual development at Stanford wasn’t random academic exploration, but rather the sophisticated articulation of beliefs his father had carefully preserved and allegedly transmitted. The embrace of Carl Schmitt (the Nazi legal theorist) and René Girard’s theories about violence and scapegoating reads very differently when understood as the formalization after intentional transmission of extremist ideology.

Thiel’s subsequent political activities – funding JD Vance, supporting Trump, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – appear as the logical culmination of a multi-generational Nazi project that never accepted defeat.

Nazi ideology has been tactically laundered through Silicon Valley success and academic respectability. Peter left the legal industry a failure, he left the financial industry a failure, yet in the rapidly emerging unregulated technology industry he found the least resistance to expressions of Nazism. Twitter infamously worked hard to censor women for showing breasts (yet no men for the same), and delayed or refused restrictions on hate speech. In 2017, Twitter said they would finally ban Nazi swastikas, which in 2022 rapidly pivoted when they changed their logo to a swastika.

Klaus’s strategic positioning succeeded – Peter now wields enormous influence over American politics while his Nazi genealogy remains largely hidden from public discourse. Fascist ideology can persist and adapt across decades, using migration, economic success, and intellectual sophistication to avoid accountability while working to undermine democratic institutions from within.

This isn’t coincidence. Klaus created a record of deliberate choices that consistently aligned with authoritarian, racially hierarchical systems while avoiding democratic accountability.

Peter’s trajectory – from defending apartheid at Stanford to obsessing over Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt to explicitly rejecting democracy – follows logically from this foundation. His current influence over American politics through Vance and others represents exactly what you’d expect from someone raised with these transmitted beliefs.

Peter Thiel’s documented political activities – opposing democracy, funding authoritarian candidates, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – are concerning enough on their own merits. These don’t require a Nazi genealogy narrative to be problematic.

That being said, it’s unmistakable the fight against Nazism didn’t end in 1945. Is Peter Thiel an example of how?

The uncomfortable possibility is that an insistence on conventional evidentiary standards may be part of the problem – that the very analytical frameworks designed to maintain objectivity could be inadequate for identifying sophisticated forms of fascist coordination that operate through simplistic plausible deniability.

There seems to be a petty grudge driving government attacks on Harvard.

Michael Velchik, the government lawyer, received both his undergraduate and law degree from Harvard. …as a senior at Harvard, Velchik turned in a paper in the voice of Adolf Hitler in response to a prompt in his Latin class asking students to submit an essay written from the perspective of a controversial figure. The essay rattled the instructor, who asked Velchik to write a new paper…. “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” Velchik wrote in the June 2013 email.

Favorite book? Come on. And now he’s back. And he’s still mad about being told to write that new paper.

Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler…. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things’…” …it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.

Is it harder to believe that Trump missed it, than this Harvard graduate Trump has attacking Harvard?

Missing it seems to be the point for these guys.

Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works delivered the U-2 in eight months in 1955. It was a genuinely revolutionary aircraft that could fly at 70,000 feet and photograph the Soviet Union. And they did it with slide rules and drawing boards.

Now, apparently we’re supposed to celebrate two years to get a “collaborative combat aircraft” (which sounds like consultant-speak for “drone”) into the air, with all our modern CAD tools, simulation software, and manufacturing capabilities. Uh huh, ok USAF.

“This is More Air Force in action,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin. “We’re not just moving fast — we’re learning fast. CCA will help us rethink the battlespace, extend reach, flexibility and lethality in combat operations, and optimize warfighter performance through human-machine teaming.”

Totally. In other words, it’s a radio controlled airplane of the 1930s. The enemy must be so scared.

Johnson would’ve revealed “It takes pictures the Russians can’t stop” and walked away. This is like watching the brass pour alphabet soup into a blender and then forget how to turn it off.

The U-2 was more than just fast development, it was hard development. They pushed absolute limits of what was physically possible with materials and engines of the era. This thing… we don’t even know what it’s supposed to do besides “collaborate” and “operate alongside” other aircraft increasing complexity and cost of operation.

Correction. It’s a participation medal robot. And to be honest, at first glance, I smell a Nazi V1 design error already.

The Nazis sold the deeply flawed V-1 as revolutionary autonomous aircraft technology right up until people realized it was an expensive way to maybe hit London if the wind was blowing the right direction. At least the V-1 had a clear mission: blow stuff up in roughly the right area. This “collaborative” spiel sounds like management consultants who find new ways to make a mess and avoid accountability by “optimizing performance through teaming.”

Lowering the bar comes to mind. When engineering management can’t deliver results, they sometimes move the goalposts to where just showing up becomes their achievement. “We didn’t take three years!” becomes the win condition instead of “We built something that fundamentally changes air combat.” You are only allowed to measure things that are self-evident and irrefutable noise.

The fact that they’re more excited about their acquisition process than their aircraft tells you everything.

Kelly Johnson would’ve been embarrassed to hold a press conference about procurement methodology while the actual plane needed for war was still a concept unable to deliver a win. He would say “It flies higher and farther than anything else.” This PR puff says “enables rapid transition of combat power upon delivery”, a fancy way of saying “we’ll deliver when we deliver, sign here please”.

Let’s cut to the chase. “Human-machine teaming” isn’t a capability, it’s a cynical liability distribution strategy to protect the men playing golf during go-time. When a machine inevitably fails, brass can release “teaming” chaff at investigators and accountants hot on the trail of dead pilots. Was it a human’s fault for not collaborating properly? The machine’s fault for not optimizing correctly? Tesla has proven the absolute stupidity of such a metric, killing hundreds of civilians unnecessarily.

The U-2 is still flying 70 years later, yet we have to wonder if anyone will remember these YFQBGDXGYDXV-42AHFCBJYDDVJES drones by next year. Can they survive modern contests, advance into the fire and collaborate mixups, without defunding every public school in America let alone killing their own “collaborators”?

See you at the white board.

FTC Letter Mirrors 1933 Nazi Playbook Against Foreign Laws

A Direct Parallel

In August 2025, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson (former chief counsel to Mitch McConnell 2019 to 2021, serving as judicial confirmation strategist) sent letters to major tech companies warning them against complying with European regulations – using tactics that directly mirror the Nazi approach from 1933. Both Ferguson’s 2025 letter as reported in Wired and the Nazi regime followed the same playbook:

1. Demanding Companies Reject Foreign Laws: Ferguson explicitly warned tech companies that “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws” could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act and that “weakening encryption or other security measures to comply with the laws, demands, or expected demands of a foreign government may also violate Section 5.”

   The Nazis did exactly this in 1933. Hitler’s government “immediately began preparing for the war he planned to wage” with foreign policy that sought to “undo the Treaty of Versailles, build alliances, and incorporate territories with German populations into the Reich.” Just three months after taking power, Hitler made his first major break with the Treaty of Versailles by withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations on the 14 October 1933.

2. “Foreign Powers” Rhetoric: Ferguson characterizes EU regulations as actions by “foreign powers to impose censorship and weaken end-to-end encryption” that “will erode Americans’ freedoms.”

   The Nazis used nearly identical language, with German Foreign Office having “the task of persuading Europe’s sovereign states to resolve their ‘Jewish question’ themselves or by turning their Jewish population over to Germany.” To be clear, both regimes specifically targeted democratic allies as threats. The Nazis characterized the League of Nations (democratic countries) as enemies, just like Ferguson is targeting EU/UK democratic regulations.

3. Threatening Business Enforcement: Ferguson threatened companies with FTC action if they comply with European laws, stating “if companies censor Americans or weaken privacy and communications security at the request of a foreign power, I will not hesitate to enforce the law.”

   The Nazis used identical enforcement tactics in 1933. They systematically threatened German businesses with legal consequences for any cooperation with foreign powers or international agreements. Through Gleichschaltung, the regime forced companies to choose between Nazi compliance and international relationships. The German Labor Front, established in May 1933, became the primary enforcement mechanism, dissolving all independent trade unions and replacing them with Nazi-controlled organizations. By 1933, Nazi authorities were conducting coordinated raids on businesses that maintained international ties, confiscating assets and imprisoning leaders who refused to reject foreign oversight. During 1933-1939, “Government agencies at all levels aimed to exclude Jews from the economic sphere of Germany by preventing them from earning a living” – precisely the same tactic Ferguson is now using against companies that comply with European democratic regulations.

The Nazis framed rejection of international agreements as defending German sovereignty and freedom, while threatening domestic businesses with legal consequences for any cooperation with foreign powers – exactly what Ferguson is doing with European digital regulations.

The FTC thus is following the 1933 Nazi playbook nearly word for word.

The fact Ferguson is targeting democratic allies’ regulations (EU Digital Services Act, UK Online Safety Act) using the same playbook the Nazis used against the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles is particularly striking. Let’s cut to the core of how authoritarian tactics work: they don’t start with obvious extremism, they start with seemingly reasonable sovereignty arguments that gradually normalize the rejection of international cooperation and democratic norms. When government officials use sovereignty rhetoric to demand businesses reject democratic allies’ laws while threatening enforcement, history shows us exactly where this leads.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels in 1933 deceptively framed foreign regulation as interference that threatened domestic freedom:

They do all they can to cause the Reich domestic and international difficulties. These pacifists from head to toe do not even hesitate to urge bloody war against Germany in the foreign papers that are not yet wise enough to refuse them space.

This is the same logic flip as Ferguson’s language today about “foreign powers” trying to “impose censorship” and “erode Americans’ freedoms.”

Both men fraudulently frame regular democratic criticism instead as hostile foreign interference threatening national sovereignty. In other words, they advocate harsh regulation and censorship while falsely claiming they oppose it.

Don’t forget, Ferguson served as McConnell’s judicial confirmation strategist, systematically placing conservative judges throughout the federal court system. His expertise in institutional capture through legal mechanisms set the autocratic foundation work he’s now employing against tech companies.

Ferguson’s letter follows the exact legal-theoretical framework Carl Schmitt developed to justify Nazi authoritarianism. Schmitt’s infamous doctrine that “the sovereign is he who decides on the exception” provided the intellectual foundation for suspending normal legal rules whenever the regime claimed a crisis. On March 26, 1933, Schmitt proclaimed the Weimar Constitution defunct and justified Hitler’s emergency powers as necessary to protect German sovereignty from foreign interference.

Ferguson is applying identical logic: declaring that compliance with democratic allies’ regulations constitutes an emergency threatening American sovereignty, justifying the FTC’s authority to override normal international legal cooperation.

This is Schmittian exceptionalism in practice with crisis rhetoric to expand executive power while rejecting democratic institutional constraints. Ferguson demanded immediate responses (by August 28), showing the same pressure tactics the Nazis used for absurdly rapid compliance to fascist doctrine.