Recently I noticed in an old USAF study that a Dr. Walter Thiel (chemist) was credited as Germany’s “best propulsion expert” until he was killed by a 1943 Allied bombing run on a Nazi weapons research center.
This little detail (perhaps with a nod to Operation Paperclip) prompted me to start looking into the Thiel family after they emigrated from Germany.
Some obscure French news sets the context:
…Thiel, convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws…
Denial of history and science? That mindset allegedly fits Peter Thiel.
Thiel said no to investing [in electric cars]. “He doesn’t fully buy into the climate change thing,” said Musk.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here’s another obscure example from 1942. Werner Thiel was caught by the FBI with “coal-shaped bombs” and Life Magazine ran a piece called “The Eight Nazi Saboteurs Should be Put to Death”
This case was cited in 1954 government records that discuss “…Thiel, an ardent Nazi…” coming by boat to the U.S.
It was only a decade after this 1954 U.S. government report that Susanne and Klaus Friedrich Thiel (chemist) in 1968 emigrated to America from Germany with their 1-year old son named Peter.
Thiel is no ordinary American or European. His father, Klaus, was born in Germany in 1938, which means Thiel’s grandparents were German adults during World War II.
Leaving Germany with a 1-year old son meant they avoided having to face their family role in the Holocaust, and denied Peter an American anti-Nazi education that was mandated for all children in Germany:
A visit or even spending a decade of your adult life there isn’t enough time to ever understand it, if you haven’t grown up in Germany yourself; most modern, young Germans have very balanced and matter-of-fact view on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
Even more strange, this immigrant family took a very significant detour while attempting to become American in the 1970s.
Just as international condemnation of South Africa for an apartheid government began to ramp up, the Thiel family relocated there to profit directly from chemistry work for barbaric concentration camps of mining operations, sending little Peter to a overtly racist whites-only school.
…many of the forms of social control described by van Onselen in Rhodesian compounds in the first three decades of the century are still being explicitly used in South African mining in 1979.
You might guess where that ended up:
[Peter] said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant.
The weird thing about being the white kid of parents bouncing from one brutally oppressive society to another where they seem to have been on the wrong side of history every time, is that their kid ends up extremely scared, really really scared of the world (e.g. false-paranoia fundamental to Nazism).
…he was bullied to some extent as a child and I think sort of comes into the world feeling a little bit aggrieved and maybe justifiably aggrieved…
Justifiably? Here’s what Peter Thiel himself published in a book regarding his views on victims of a crime:
…there’s a line in the book that describes, you know, rape – date rape as, you know, seductions later regretted…
This means Peter doesn’t believe in allowing a victim to be aggrieved, and would call his suffering from bullies just friendships he later regretted, right?
Look at what he also published on his concepts of power relative to citizenship and rights:
He also writes in that essay that, you know, women’s suffrage is kind of an unfortunate thing because women tend to vote… he’s never actually, like, changed his point of view there.
Thiel says don’t give women the right to vote because they will vote?
First he refers to raping women as “seductions later regretted”, then suggests women deserve no power or voice at all? No right to self-representation for the targets of violence? “He was bullied…” and then becomes a bully.
But wait, it then gets even worse. Peter Thiel used an encoded phrase (“welfare beneficiaries”) in order to argue non-whites also should lose the right to self-representation in government.
Just to give the full context, the quote is “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women, two constituencies that are notoriously tough on libertarians, have rendered the notion of a capitalist democracy an oxymoron.” So it’s not just women, it’s welfare beneficiaries.
His reference to 1920 as a start point seems important, given “America First”, eugenics, Jim Crow laws as well as my note above (about his formative years in South Africa) let alone this was the time that Nazi Germany emerged.
He’s promoting a racist doctrine of mob/police violence against non-white “beneficiaries” in order to end democracy, so whites can extract and hide ill-gotten wealth — a literal call for the return to “national socialism” (Nazism). He could have titled this essay “his struggle” (Mein Kampf, as Hitler put it) and nobody would have blinked.
Also as an apparent self-loathing victim, he hates immigrants while being one, which probably surprises nobody.
…he was donating money to this group called NumbersUSA, which is a very, very hard-right immigration group. You know, it’s – the idea is reducing the amount of immigration drastically…
It appears from all of his writing that Thiel lacks any empathy and neither sides with victims of obvious crimes, nor believes women or non-whites should be given any voting rights at all. He seems repeatedly to promote a return to the 1930s rise of fascism.
This all is very curious because if he was so “justifiably aggrieved” by experiencing bullying inside white insecurity militancy as a child, then do you think he could feel pain of others and help liberate targets?
Instead it appears he hates victims and has made himself into an unapologetic proponent of the “cultural populism, white grievance” (fascism) bullying model to harm people even more than he was as a child.
People may try to position Thiel’s gross disregard for limits on power as some kind of normalized political thinking (e.g. libertarianism), yet clearly that is not at all what is going on here:
DAVIES: And, of course, it’s a little odd that a libertarian would want to shut down a publication.
CHAFKIN: It’s completely inconsistent with libertarianism, I think. And I think there’s lots of stuff about Thiel that, you know – I think describing him as a libertarian, you know, is way off. He also, you know, started this gigantic surveillance company, Palantir, which I think is about 180 degrees from what you and I would think of, probably, as libertarianism.
Indeed, a thirst for excessive unregulated power may be the only constant in the Thiel story.
He was in law, but didn’t really do law, he was in finance, but didn’t really do finance, and ends up in tech, but doesn’t really do tech. Morality seems to have gotten in his way…
Across them all, he just craved unrestricted power and tech (the least regulated of all) became his break out.
…Thiel was not a techie guy. He was not a computer geek. How did this happen? How did he have money to invest in something like a startup like PayPal?
CHAFKIN: No. And this is what’s so amazing because he didn’t have the technical skills, as you say. He’d kind of washed out of corporate law. And he’d only lasted – he didn’t last very long in finance either – comes back and basically scrounges together some money from friends and family. You know, we’re not talking about a huge sum here, but it’s enough to make a small investment, you know, on the order of $100,000 in PayPal, which at the time was – it was basically a one-man operation, this other coder that he found, Max Levchin. And they kind of zig and zag and eventually, you know, found their way to become a tech startup. But as you say, it almost happened by accident. Or maybe it happened because he had the, you know, ambition and skill to put himself in that position.
I want you to think seriously about what transpired at this moment in his life and the unregulated industry where his financial “success” is rooted.
Thiel poured his family money (seemingly from Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa) into what has been called a vision for financing crimes against humanity.
…the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in your pocket… governments can’t stop their citizens from moving money out of the country.
We earlier read how he thought about a racist white police state as a “sound economic system”.
The major obstacle to building such systems of immoral wealth accumulation (e.g. the Holocaust) ends up a question of how to avoid embargoes and sanctions.
A list has been discovered in Argentina that includes names of thousands of former Nazis and their Swiss banking accounts that may have held stolen profits from German appropriations during World War II. The records were found in a Buenos Aires building that was formerly a Nazi headquarters, officials said.
Stolen profits from ill-gotten appropriations during a war sounds eerily relevant to the origin story of PayPal.
Look at how Thiel’s “exit” from PayPal was described by his coworkers:
…this bunch of buccaneers who took a lot of gambling and porn transactions …this guy who had been their leader, who had been – you know, they were brothers in arms, you know, against the world and the banking system, you know – was leaving… from the point of view of some of the people who were there, you know, a bit of a betrayal or a sense of, you know, just him not really caring what other people thought…
“Brothers in arms against the world and the banking system”? Do you see what I’m saying?
Do you know who tries to gin up the story they are in a brothers in arms against the banking system?
Nazis (and Kanye West, for those really paying attention to profits in America based on hate).
And the conclusion of the journalist above is backwards. In fact it is the exact opposite, which comes out later in the very same article.
…he’s literally destroyed a media company for writing things that he didn’t like. …to kind of control the narrative about himself. And I think that’s been one of the sources of his power. …somebody who’s able to shape his own personal narrative and cultivate this army of followers that’s, you know, in some places, borderline – bordering on, you know, cult-like.
You’d think someone writing these two paragraphs could have put them together better.
Peter Thiel doesn’t care at all about people. He cares a LOT about what people think about him.
He cares about loyalty to him and him alone, which is undeniably a philosophy straight out of 1930s fascist Germany (and Putin’s Russia, for those really paying attention to profits in America based on hate).
He appears like someone whose life is centered on a false abject fear, always carrying an aim for total monopolization (whatever forms power takes — information, money, etc.) to avoid experiencing or dealing with anything real.
It is super dangerous for anyone to align with such a power quest, since presumably he would leave or double-cross them at any moment should they bring up something like morality or ethics (since they’d correctly be perceived as threats to his desire for unrestricted power).
Thiel, like other particular Germans or South Africans overly obsessed with false power, never stops “really caring what other people thought”. That’s why he has poured his money into social programs, political campaigns and propaganda:
…he owned a sort of nightclub. He was publishing a NASCAR magazine, and it was staffed by all these conservative journalists. So it was sort of like a sports magazine, but it was attempting to kind of do some of the same culture war stuff that he had been trying to do as an undergraduate.
This “same culture war stuff” might not just be tied to him “as an undergraduate”. Was he in any way the funding source behind a “fake news empire” setup for cognitive warfare?
Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people’s perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US. “Russia played such a minor role that they weren’t even a blip on the radar.”
To be fair it would be far easier to patch the hole that Russia comes through versus completely changing the business logic failure of America that enables constant domestic disinformation for profit/power from immigrants like Thiel.
It all begs the question, starting with his family generating their ill-gotten wealth from Nazism and apartheid, whether Thiel’s prolific writing and campaigning on social issues has ever formally denounced Nazism and apartheid. He clearly believes in standing firm against things and being a contrarian, even fighting hard to cancel speech.
So where has Peter Thiel stood against Nazism or when has he cancelled Nazi speech? Again we see the opposite. He allegedly ordered a ban on funds if a group said it opposed Nazism.
The Four Freedoms, ratified by UN and USA, call for freedom of religion and speech, freedom from tyranny and want. Based on my research Thiel objectively appears to regularly oppose freedom of speech, promotes tyranny and dismisses want. It all reads to me like someone 3/4 on the wrong side of history, from a family repeatedly on the wrong side of history, and I haven’t looked at the other 1/4 yet.
In other words, after exhaustive reading I’ve been unable to find formal denunciations of Nazism by anyone in the Thiel family, only denial and continuation. In Peter’s latest book “Zero to One” (a barely hidden allegory for the Nazi binarism of extremist evaluation and value placement) he very openly expresses broken ideas like this:
Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits. So, a monopoly is good for everyone on the inside… Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
There it is again. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a book in German that translates to “the daily brute struggle” to do good only for “everyone on the inside” (i.e. Nazis). It’s the very definition of pathology and exception.
This kind of monopoly is not business at all; it’s use of political power to totally collapse the market (eliminate business) with a government that runs things to benefit only those in power.
The far more appropriate words for what Thiel tries to advocate for here — classic fascism or Nazism — appear exactly zero times in the book.
Crooks and Liars even frames Thiel’s philosophy and politics in terms of him participating in Nazi meetups:
Peter Thiel, the German-American billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and one of the first investors in Facebook, loves to hang out with White Nationalist Nazis, apparently…
Thiel probably would say he just loves to hang out with monopolists, the white men who care only about what’s good for insiders (them).
Seems at this point that the complete failure of a German immigrant to denounce Nazism — while describing core objectives of Nazism as some kind of ideal, even spending time “to hang out” with Nazis — is something very important to highlight. What do government agencies doing business or aligning with Peter, let alone political candidates he’s funding, think of this?
Also, back to Thiel family history, it probably is worth mentioning to denounce Nazism is only a start.
They also have to stop actively participating in the Nazi party (America First) infiltration of America.
I guess you could say I’m just asking rhetorical questions here, sort of like someone else has been known to do:
Thiel, the founder of the PayPal financial service, relied on rhetorical questions. He asked Google who was working on artificial intelligence, whether “senior management considers itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated”…
As Politico put it recently:
If there is an [infiltration], it might look a bit like Thielism…
