Today, Explained - The New Right’s pay pal

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

From politicians to podcasters, one man’s money unites the New Right. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin explains how Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is shaping the fledgling conservative movement in his own image. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey and Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Everyone knows this was politically motivated. Everyone. Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters responding to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Who even knows what's fully going on, right? But we know. All of us know it's messed up. On yesterday's show, we told you about the new right a group Masters is associated with. It's a small but influential bunch of thinkers and politicians who want to reshape the U.S. with a nationalist bent. They're skeptical of democracy, but that's the system we have. And so they want to win elections, which means they need money. And that is where the billionaire Peter Thiel comes in.

With somebody like Peter Thiel, it's always hard to tell whether the contrarianism, the desire to just disagree with people comes first or the ideology comes first. But I think they're tied together. Coming up on today explained the man bankrolling the new right and the wildly provocative past that might have you thinking we should have seen this one coming. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Max Chafkin, reporter for Bloomberg, wrote The Contrarian, a biography of Peter Thiel. Max, how much did Peter Thiel agree to talk to you for the book? Well, Thiel is pretty secretive and somebody who's done a lot to kind of try to control the narrative around him. He was aware of the book and there was, you know, a single off the record meeting where he spoke for a little over an hour. But unfortunately, I can't give any details from that conversation.

Is Peter Thiel a guy who doesn't want publicity or is he a guy who wants a certain kind of publicity? Oh, I think he definitely wants publicity. Please welcome the co-founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook, entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Good evening. It's a publicity that he wants to control. I mean, and he's somebody who's been extremely effective at creating kind of a mythology around his entrepreneurial exploits and around his ideas. I build companies and I support people who are building new things from social networks to rocket ships. And I think that's one of the things that's kind of given him power and influence in Silicon Valley.

For his followers, he's this kind of weird combination of like an Ayn Rand, like a sort of right wing libertarian philosopher and like an Ayn Rand character, because, of course, he's not just a philosopher. He's somebody who really built a startup and who got incredibly rich. So you have this weird combination of very provocative ideas and then this kind of aspirational, almost self-help quality to some of those ideas where it's like, and you can too. Peter Thiel has all these contrarian ideas. And if you follow them, you too can be, you know, fabulously wealthy and successful and live with absolute freedom. Tell me about Peter Thiel's early life.

So Thiel is an immigrant. He was born in Germany. His family were conservative German immigrants living in the U.S. for the most part, although his father was a mining supervisor. He was somebody who straddled the line between sort of a technical field. He had an engineering degree, but worked on job sites. And Thiel's childhood was tough. I mean, they were tough, conservative parents. And he was, you know, very much an outsider. They bounced from Cleveland to South Africa and then Namibia, or at the time it was Southwest Africa, and then came to California. And by the time he gets to California, basically at the beginning of middle school and high school where he stayed, he is this kind of a bit of a nerdy misfit. He's incredibly intelligent,

but also an outsider and somebody who is not just an outsider literally, but in his own kind of, I think, bearing, somebody who considers himself apart from the group. And then he goes away to college. He goes to Stanford. What's that like for him? He was, you know, almost from the beginning, and I talked to people who met him like, you know, right when he came on campus.

It's like he stepped out of, you know, some sort of alien world almost to some of these Stanford students where he was just painfully serious, unbelievably driven. And that ends up, you know, creating strife between him and some of the people at Stanford, which I think he processed, you know, rightly or wrongly as political. The multicultural educator at Stanford University liked to go around saying, I started looking for racism everywhere and I started finding racism everywhere.

And indeed he did. And he came to feel that basically Stanford was this place full of these deranged liberals. There was an ongoing debate over boycotting table grapes. Why? Well, because most of the grape pickers in California happen to be Latino farm workers and they were exposed to dangerous pesticides, supposedly. And what he does is he starts a newspaper and it's called the Stanford Review. And it was a and it is a very sort of provocative, conservative publication. Now remember, this is like 1987. This is kind of at one of the high points of campus conservatism.

You have across the country these right-wing newspapers forming. You had the Dartmouth Review, which was Dinesh D'Souza's paper. Even though the problems of American civilization stretch across the national culture, there are some problems that are distinctive to black culture. You had the Cornell Review, where Ann Coulter worked. She's a good friend of Thiel's at this point. You go find Black Santa at the North Pole. He's white. And you had the Stanford Review.

And these papers are all, you know, pretty similar. And the basic shtick is pressing what they regard as the liberal administration and student body and attempting to walk right up to the line or across the line on topics like race, gender, gender identity, and so on. And then when that, you know, offends people, when that offends your fellow classmates or the administration or whatever, you claim that you are being discriminated against. You know, we have a modern word for that now, right? It's trolling. And I think that's a good description of what they were doing that can be provocative. It can cause your intellectual opponents to do and say dumb things. And that's what happened.

I'll share one other thing that was probably formative. So when Thiel was a small boy, the family lived in South Africa and then Southwest Africa, which at the time was like basically a client state of South Africa, modern day Namibia. It had apartheid. And his father worked in a uranium mine. Now, when you work in a uranium mine in apartheid and his father worked in a uranium mine now when you work in a uranium mine in apartheid country you are very very much bought in to that economic system and if you remember back to the 80s a big focus of campus leftism was around South Africa you know there's this huge divestment movement that was going on around him. The students at Columbia and Rutgers and UC Berkeley protesting South Africa on the next day. And I think Thiel may have regarded that as a personal attack, not just as a political

statement, but as as as an attack on his family, his upbringing, on his understanding of the world, because you have these accounts from his early years at Stanford, which Thiel has denied, it's important to say, but I've spoken to sources who have confirmed it, but where Thiel basically defended apartheid to black students, where he said that it was a reasonable economic system and that, you know, the United States should basically stay out of it. And that, of course, for his classmates was, you know, incredibly upsetting, incredibly aggressive. And I think, you know, it kind of shows perhaps part of the source of some of his anger and so on, but also the kind of way he forms himself, which is as somebody who is this kind of dorm room debater. And so he is at Stanford. He is trolling at Stanford successfully. I imagine he graduates with good grades.

And then does he go into tech immediately after graduation? Well, no. He originally thinks he's going to go into government. He goes to law school. He has a very good federal judge clerkship. He gets a white shoe law firm job, and he's interviewing for Supreme Court clerkships. And what basically happens is, you know, he washes out. Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more

like an alibi for the present. It was a way to explain to anyone who would ask that there was no need to worry. I was perfectly on track. And so what ends up happening is, misses out on the clerkship, and he basically bounces around a little bit, but then moves back to Silicon Valley and then writes this book, which is basically a continuation of his kind of Stanford trolling. It's called The Diversity Myth, and it's basically like a distillation of a lot of the work he'd been doing at the Stanford Review. The reason we have racial tensions in our society, the reason we have other kinds of tensions is not because there is a problem with racism and other forms of oppression,

but because people are looking for these things too much. And the book is kind of a modest success, I think, within conservative circles. But again, it doesn't it doesn't really hit in, I think, the way he hoped. And And then what's happening around him is there's a tech boom, and he basically attached himself to that. Without a lot of real background or qualifications or anything like that, and it's kind of a testament to Thiel's ambition

and determination that he was able to sort of very quickly set himself up as a pretty important figure in that world. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. team's unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC,

terms and conditions apply. We'll be right back. All off quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit ConnexOntario.ca. Max Chavkin, author of The Contrarian. So Peter Thiel goes from campus conservative to tech investor. He co-founds PayPal. He sells PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. He's an early investor in Facebook. His net worth goes up and up. When does he start giving money to political candidates? Teal has considered himself political

for like his entire adult life and probably part of his childhood, his political activity really started to ramp up with the candidacy of Ron Paul. And this is kind of like a weird, forgotten little corner of Silicon Valley history. But Thiel backed a Ron Paul pack, this very weird pack that made these like incredibly long YouTube videos that were designed to help Ron Paul win the Florida Republican primary, which he lost very badly. Attention, Iowa caucus voters. I'm fake Mitt Romney, which makes me remarkably like the real Mitt Romney. But I think what Thiel was trying to do was sort of insert himself into what was becoming

a movement, which was this kind of libertarian youth movement that was already happening, like even before Peter Thiel came on the scene. But by backing this Ron Paul pack, he gets he gets invited to the convention. He gets he gets to speak at these youth groups. And I think that is kind of the beginning of what becomes this, you know, incredibly active and engaged fan base where you have people who are fans of Thiel, not just because of his business success, because he's just another guy who made a lot of money, but because he's a, you know, boundary pushing, you know, libertarian renegade.

Going into the 2016 election, so now we're talking about, you know, 2014, 2015, he's initially backing Carly Fiorina, who doesn't seem like, you know, the kind of new right nationalist populist that you would expect that we've come to associate with Peter Thiel. It's just more like a conventional business type. What is leadership? It's challenging the status quo. It's solving festering problems and it's producing results. That is what I have done all my life. That's how you go from being a secretary to being a CEO. And I think Thiel backed her partly because she was somebody from his world. You know, she had run Silicon Valley companies. Maybe he thought he would have a decent amount of influence. But of course, Carly Fiorina washed out and then Thiel was kind of left with a choice. Should he back

Ted Cruz or should he back Donald Trump? And ultimately decided to back Trump, partly, I think, because he thought Trump would win. And also because I think there were things about Trump that really kind of spoke to Thiel. Two main ones. One is the immigration thing. Thiel is going back to his Stanford review days, right? He's been super hard line on this idea that the West is somehow under siege, not a far bridge to get to the kind of hardline, build the wall type stuff. There's an immigration bubble where we say, you know, it's all good, you shouldn't ask questions.

And I think we could have a better policy. I personally would like one like Canada or Australia. And then the other thing is that Trump was this figure who was kind of saying the unsayable, right? He was getting up on stage at these rallies and saying racist or sexist or just generally offensive things and sending the media and left-wing politicians

into kind of a frenzy. And of course, that's what Thiel loves. I mean, he was somebody who was directly attacking what Thiel considers to be one of the big threats, which is this idea of political correctness. Do you personally support Mr. Trump's comments and rhetoric before about banning Muslims from traveling to the United States? You know, I think one thing that should be made distinguished here is that the media always is taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally. So I think it wasn't that Teal backed Trump despite the provocations.

I think it really was the provocations. Right. And then we get to these provocative candidates associated with the new right, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of them Republicans running for Senate. Where do these two men fit into Peter Thiel's worldview? success has been identifying these kind of promising young men. And these could be political rebels of the kind of Stanford Review variety, or they could be kind of the business rebels, right? These guys who are breaking business norms in one way or another, disrupting, and Thiel will identify them, nurture them, and so on. And so you have this thing where he's found people, people who are these kind of like verbose provocateurs. And that's the category I put both Blake Masters and J.D. Vance's. Masters has known Thiel for, you know, more than a decade. He got to know him when he was a Stanford law student and Thiel was

lecturing about startups. And I think that class sort of jostled me awake because it was the first time I had had impressive professors, but it was the first time where like someone accomplished from the business world was coming in and not just saying a bunch of s***. Masters was taking notes in the class. He worked for Thiel as an intern and then became his co-author on Zero to One and then has become this kind of basically Thiel's right-hand man, sort of de facto chief of staff, somebody who was very involved, I think, in the kind of construction of the Thiel myth, but also who had managed aspects of Thiel's business, and in particular, the Thiel Fellowship, which is this thing where Thiel would pay young people, you had

to be under 20 initially, to drop out of college and start a company. And Masters helped administer that program. He's been like Thiel's closest aide, you know, one of his closest confidants over the last decade or so. Blake, how do primary voters respond when they learn that you're so heavily backed by a single individual billionaire? I think they're happy that we have one on our side. Vance is different. Vance, of course, wrote a successful book, Hillbilly Elegy. The two men kind of hitched themselves together. Right around the time the book was published, Vance took a job at one of Teal's venture capital firms. And then after, when Vance sort of struck out on his own and started this fund called Noria, Teiel was one of the key investors.

Conservative venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in the video platform called Rumble. It's gained popularity among right-leaning users in recent months. So I think in both cases, Vance and Masters are extremely ideological, right? They're both hard-right populist nationalists, kind of in the Trumpist mold. I think what makes them kind of different than Trump is that they have discipline, right? And I think that's what Thiel likes about him. So it's kind of like Trumpism without the erratic behavior, which includes some of the, you know, allegedly corrupt aspects, I guess, of Trump's tenure. But also, you know, Trump wants to be liked, right?

He's capable of sort of shifting his views and molding them to popular sentiment. And I think these guys and the political figures that Thiel has found his way to backing are much more ideological. How important is Peter Thiel's money to the candidacies of these gentlemen? Well, if you ask them, they would say not that important. But if you ask me, I don't think either of them is a serious candidate without Peter Thiel. They both owe their careers in some sense to Thiel. And then Thiel has been basically the anchor investor in both their campaigns, giving more than $10 million each in the primary, which is a lot of money. And of course, by having him there as this anchor donor, that helps them bring in additional money, right? And creates a center of gravity around both

candidates. And I think play an important role, not just in bringing additional funding to those guys, but to getting Trump to endorse both of them. New right candidates and new right figures are not particularly friendly to gay people. They talk a lot about a family headed by a father and a mother. Now, the mainstream Republican Party has in large part moved on from that, or at least polling suggests it has. Peter Thiel is gay, and I understand that being gay is only one facet of his identity. But with everything you learned about him in the course of writing this book, can you discern why a gay man would make common cause with politics that seem retrograde even by the standards of the mainstream Republican Party? I think that some of this gets inside of Peter Thiel's soul, which, you know, I don't have

access to. But I'll tell you what I know based on my reporting, which is that he identifies as a gay man, I think kind of reluctantly, but he identifies more as a contrarian, right? And there are other aspects of his identity, I think, that are more important to him. And we saw that during the Republican National Convention when Thiel gave this speech.

I think a really important speech that he really only gave reluctantly because I don't think he wanted to talk about his sexual orientation publicly I am proud to be gay I am proud to be a Republican You know the whole Trump family was up and and cheering and and he did it in a way that was designed to say it's OK to to kind of go along with some of the dog whistling and the and the anti-gay politics that are coming out of the modern GOP because that stuff doesn't matter. And what really matters is the economy and so on and so forth. And so I think that is, you know, what he believes. And I also think that, you know, some of this is ideological, but I think a lot of it is just trolling. And it's just finding ways to heighten areas of, you know, disagreement with liberals and to push liberals into a position where they're

going to say something dumb. So I think it's important that we take seriously, you know, when there's homophobia or racism that's coming out of corners of our political spectrum. But I also think it's important that we recognize that not all of it is something that is coming from a deep intellectual place. Some of it is just it's just trolling. It's just provocation for provocation's sake. I think at some point Peter Thiel makes the statement that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Do I have that right?

Yeah. There you go. Okay. So that made me think of something the writer James Pogue told me. He said of Peter Thiel, quote, he still loves to try stuff and see what works. And it made me think the point of a venture capitalist is to try out new ideas, to invest in new companies. Only this time, it seems he's less interested in new companies than in new forms of government. And those forms of government might not include democracy. Do you think Peter Thiel is trying to be a venture capitalist of government? I think Thiel has an actual hostility to democracy. It's pretty core to his worldview, actually, that the world would be a better place if people like Peter Thiel

had freedom from the popular will, right? If billionaires were able to just do what they want. And he's built an entire intellectual architecture around that. It's really at the core of a lot of his business ideas, which include letting founders of tech companies, you know, have absolute power over their companies. You know, famously, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the absolute dictator of Facebook, right? He can't be fired by the board. He will control it forever.

And I think this is part of what Thiel believes. And I think we're seeing those beliefs kind of coincide with an authoritarian kind of moment in our politics. And I think Thiel has, you know, as you say, like a venture capitalist latched onto this. We saw it with Trump and we're seeing it with some of the candidates he's supporting who are in a lot of ways hostile to democracy. And I think that is the scariest part of Peter Thiel's career. And it's the part that gives me the most pause. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Mounsey.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.