Peter Thiel, Dark Enlightenment & the Free Speech Union

Thiel, Big data, AI and Genomics series Part 2

Aug 01, 2022

Part I can be found here

A corporate empire shrouded in secrecy and seemingly unconcerned by human rights spanning privatised military psy-ops, surveillance, predictive analysis, artificial intelligence development, automated killer drones, genomics, genetic engineering and life extension research, the description sounds more like a Bond villain than one of the largest donors in US politics in recent years, but this is the reality of Peter Thiel, and to top it off, it seems he would be happy to see the end of democracy.

In 2009 for the Koch funded Cato Institute Thiel wrote “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible”, continuing “the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He proposed the creation of settlements free from politics in cyberspace, outer space and the sea, however unlike others who might make such fanciful suggestions Thiel has a tech empire operating in cyberspace, shares in Musk’s X.com and set up a company to research the possibility of producing floating platforms as habitats.

Has Capitalism Outgrown Democracy?

On several occasions Thiel has voiced the view that democracy is a hindrance to capitalism, which isn’t surprising considering his leanings towards the economic ideology of Hayek, Friedman, Rand etc. Whilst he might not agree with much of their politics, his involvement as a member of the Republican Party has increased over time, by 2022 Thiel’s influence and apparent desire to undermine democracy was shown as he put considerable funding into backing rivals in selection processes to remove Republicans who had spoken out against Trump and the Stop the Steal narrative of the 6 Jan Insurrection.

Despite his private life being at odds with the homophobic evangelicals, Thiel has become one of the billionaires affiliated to the Council for National Policy, and similar to the Koch and the Mercers is heavily invested in the culture wars. Emails obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal Thiel was in contact with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart and Curtis Yarvin a blogger who as part of the neoreactionary movement the Dark Enlightenment believes democracy should be replaced with a form of authoritarian feudalism. In the emails Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”

“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

Breitbart was founded by Steve Bannon with the Mercers being the main funders, Politico has reported Bannon is also a fan of the Dark Enlightenment. Thiel also funds a start up belonging to Yarvin.

Olivia Goldhill, in an article for Quartz in her role as Science Reporter described the Dark Enlightenment as "The neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the alt-right and Silicon Valley technophiles."

Accelerationism and the end of nations

In the article Goldhill explains the Dark Enlightenment primarily focuses on a 2012 manifesto written by Nick Land, a philosophy professor from Warwick University who quit academia in 1998. Originally working on Cybernetic Culture Research, he believed in accelerationism, using all tools and technology available to “speed up capitalism”, which, similar to many libertarians, seems to take a reductionist and limited approach to capitalism where any form of regulation is considered anti-capitalist.

While Land’s 2012 writing is more artistic manifesto than political, reading like an alt-right rant of contradictions and lacking substantial policy, the Dark Enlightenment philosophy has influenced figures in the alt-right and white nationalist movements, with its themes of technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. “It’s an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester.

“It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world,” says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It becomes militarised, and states break down. For some reason that’s difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have.”

This is the core of Dark Enlightenment thinking, Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed and corporate power should become the organising force in society. Democracy restricts accountability and freedom,the world should do away with political power, and society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO. How removing democracy will increase accountability hasn’t been explained with any coherence.

Divergence in Humanity

With his interest in cybernetics and science fiction the stranger parts of Land’s manifesto around the future of humanity are focused on the creation of cybernetic super humans, almost like something out of Iain Banks best selling Culture books, the difference being that while Banks wrote about a utopian anarchy free from the constraints of resource scarcity, Land’s vision is of a divergence in humanity, seemingly influenced by the white supremacist research funded by the Pioneer Fund, of racial segregation as the “elites” will enhance their IQ by becoming increasingly insular. On racial divides, Land says the science is “an empirical question” but “that human population groups are significantly distinct, however, is a matter so self-evident to ordinary people that it makes for a natural default.”

I’m reminded of articles in the Spectator about progressive eugenics, of the “cognitive elite”, the “employment resistant” and the erosion of human stock worldwide due to healthcare and welfare. The “natural default”, again makes the false assumption we live in a genuine meritocracy, that the wealthy are inherently better.

Coalition of Fringes

The radical right is a coalition of fringe groups with overlapping interests, libertarian eugenicists may have very motivations than evangelical fundamentalists, however there are striking parallels between the eugenicists’ belief in wealth being directly proportional to IQ due to a meritocratic system and the prosperity gospel preached by certain churches in the US that people are wealthy due to God’s will.

The flip side of such beliefs being that poverty is a product of inferior genetics or God’s will, that those who might think the poor can’t be helped are also opposed to a welfare state feels to me to be a contradiction, particularly from those claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus whose three key points in my opinion are love, charity and most of all forgiveness.

The break up of democracy is a uniting theme across the radical right, free marketeers want to shrink the state into insignificance, evangelicals and white supremacists want a white nationalist Christian authoritarianism, several well known militia groups think a civil war along racial lines is inevitable whilst others are secessionists seeking independence for southern states.

The Dark Enlightenment and sections of the libertarians want feudalist city states, and the excitable alt-right who make up the bulk of the foot soldiers and culture warriors in Land’s opinion are “a predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase” Still, he says, “Insofar as it marks the end of global governance on the basis of evangelical egalitarian-universalism, it makes space for more realistic political conversations, which have notably begun to happen.”

Flexible Ideologues

Where does Thiel fit into these overlapping and linked ideologies? In a lecture at Stanford University Thiel said “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy,” continuing, “We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”

How does the rest of the radical right view Thiel? His sexuality will cause issues with sections of the evangelicals, however the way he values privacy in regards to his personal life will help them look over this, you can imagine them saying “at least he isn’t rubbing our faces in it”, which is a complaint made against openly homosexual individuals, more importantly Thiel’s support for CNP causes has been too valuable for them to wish to spurn him. The amount of scandals associated with the megachurches shows the evangelical leaders are more than capable of conquering cognitive dissonance in seeking to achieve their aims.

A piece on Thiel for the Koch funded Reason Magazine in 2020 described Thiel as “showing no particular libertarian inclinations. Instead he talked about how public policy decisions should be based on how they would not better individual lives, but a collective ‘America’ while crushing her enemies. These he named as Google, China and the US university system, advocating vigorous police action against the first and third and a trade war (at least) against the Middle Kingdom).

Universities, Thiel said, are spreading the virus of ‘cultural Marxism’ while perpetrating fraud by shackling students with debt that the institutions themselves should be forced to repay.” So traditional libertarians don’t see him as one of them, but they appreciate him pursuing the same agenda of crushing their perceived enemies.

Considering his actions as a student the attacks on universities are predictable, however he hasn’t been content to just wage culture war in the US, just like the Koch Network, Thiel thinks globally supporting the set up of “anti-woke” organisations in other countries specifically in universities, an example being Toby Young’s Free Speech Union. Thiel has also created his own University of Austin which will have a proudly anti-woke attitude.

The Dark Enlightenment is less a full blown organised movement and more a philosophical ideology influencing groups to one extent or another, Thiel’s investment into life extension, genetics, AI and other similar fields stretches back years before Land wrote his manifesto, but it seems like Thiel’s own views closely align. He certainly doesn’t think much of democracy.

“The high points in politics are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy.” Thiel wrote in an essay quoting the German Philosopher Schmitt, who continued to defend the Nazi dictatorship over a more bureaucratic state well into the 1940’s.

Racist Pseudoscience

On 26 November the Byline Times published an article by Nafeez Ahmed “For Whom the Bell Curves” which revealed that James Orr, a Ministry of Justice appointee advising on the Government’s levelling up agenda had organised an event hosting Charles Murray.

Murray the author of The Bell Curve which has widely been criticised as scientifically flawed is also on the Southern Poverty Law Centres list of extremists for use of racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor. It’s been noted that The Bell Curve has been spotted on Michael Gove’s bookshelf although he has declined to comment on his thoughts of the book’s content.

The Bell Curve relied heavily on research funded by The Pioneer Fund which the Southern Poverty Law Centre lists as a hate group. Founded by Nazi sympathisers in 1937 to promote the repatriation of black Americans, The Pioner Fund has been described as a Nazi endowment specialising in producing justifications for eugenics, its main grantee is the American Renaissance which hosts neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activists

Cambridge University

James Orr is a lecturer in philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, and is on the board of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, he is also a convener director of Trinity Forum Europe, which describes itself as a Christian charity and was responsible for hosting the event with Murray in conversation with Rob Henderson a PhD candidate at Cambridge. Henderson is now a Foundation Faculty Fellow at Peter Thiel’s anti-woke “free speech” University of Austin. The event described Murray as “one of the most accomplished social scientists alive today” which can only be taken as a full hearted endorsement of his views.

The event was part of a series of events led by Orr “to unite the different university campuses” on a weekly basis” which are regularly advertised to Cambridge staff and students; they have also hosted at least two events for Christians within the Civil Service under a connected charity called Trinity Forum Whitehall Johnathan Aitken, a Conservative MP for 23 years and a former Cabinet Minister is the executive director of Trinity Forum Europe and in September 2020 it was reported that he had held a parliamentary pass continuously since December 2015.

Trinity Forum Europe also has direct ties to the Republican Party, another director and provider of funding George Seay is a Republican Party donor and operative who has advised political campaigns by Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio and Trump’s former energy secretary Rick Perry. Property magnate Thomas Hutchison III, the charity's main financial backer is also a Republican Party donor, contributing to both of Trump’s election campaigns.

After the Byline Times article regarding the Trinity Forum events, sources at Cambridge University contacted the publication with further revelations that these events were part of a wider initiative to recruit staff and students in Cambridge and other universities into a network coalescing around Peter Thiel.

Serious Financial Weight

After initial meetings in 2016, from 2017 onwards there have been regular meetings among a group of Christian theologians at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity which have since expanded to other universities with Thiel’s chief of staff Charles Vaughan playing a key role in building a UK coalition of anti-liberal academics. By the end of 2018 Vaughan had attended a dinner at a members only club at Cambridge University.

A source at the university told the Byline Times “Charles Vaughan’s involvement illustrated a definitive connection to an external source with some serious financial weight. As the meetings went along, I became increasingly aware there was money involved. And there was a deliberate and systematic attempt at recruitment and fostering relationships. It was unclear exactly what money was involved where, but there was a sense that you would never lack for a job if you worked for the network.”

Over time the group’s opposition to liberalism turned to authoritarianism as a solution. “This led the group to harbour growing sympathies with some of the more divisive politics around Brexit, Trump, and related hard-line tendencies to push against a pervasive liberalism.”

The academics in the network then started recruiting interns to work for Peter Thiel. “This was a deliberate and systematic effort to recruit people into the group, and to mould them in a certain direction.”

Free Speech Union

Under a banner of free speech the group has sought to ramp up the culture wars around universities and were responsible for the organising of Jordan Peterson being booked to speak at Cambridge which sparked controversy. Popular with the incel movement which predominantly consists of angry white men with superiority complexes, the psychology professor Peterson has been criticised for claiming gender and class hierarchies are a function of the natural order. Initially the university cancelled his appearance in March 2019, but after outrage from politicians and the media regarding freedom of speech he eventually returned in November 2021 for a series of events organised by James Orr. Peterson has other links with Thiel having personally requested a meeting with the billionaire which then occurred in the summer of 2017.

Despite multiple campaigns by staff and students the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge has ignored all demands for an inquiry into the influence of Thiel at the university.

This Thiel network is closely linked to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union with James Orr, Arif Ahmed, Douglas Murray and Nigel Bigger involved in both initiatives. Douglas Murray also writes for the Spectator and has produced a number of articles suggesting Islam is incompatible with Western society and has been accused of propagating the “Great Replacement Theory” which implies that there is a conspiracy to flood the West with other ethnicity to turn white people a minority. The theory is popular with Qanon, the far-right movement heavily linked to Steve Bannon and Trump which is a cauldron of bizarre and intermingled conspiracy theories. Shortly before the launch of the Free Speech Union Toby Young interviewed Charles Murray for Quillette whose editor Lehmann now also sits on the Free Speech Union advisory board.

Division and Destruction

What is the political purpose of culture wars,? Why I have included this within a piece about the Dark Enlightenment?

I leave you with a passage from the book Shadow Network authored by the award winning journalist Anne Nelson, a history of the Council of National Policy, the secret hub of the radical right.