Peter Thiel’s influence over the administration of the U.S. President Donald Trump continues to grow. During the 2016 elections, he was one of the few Silicon Valley oligarchs from the tech and fintech sectors to support Trump. JD Vance, already touted by many as Trump’s successor, owes his career to Thiel’s financial and political support. Thiel financed Vance’s 2022 Senate win, while also convincing Trump to meet him and choose him as his vice-presidential running mate.
Who is Peter Thiel?
After graduating from Stanford, German-American Thiel worked as a clerk, securities lawyer, speechwriter, and then derivatives trader at Credit Suisse—one of the world’s leading banks in the sector whose name regularly comes up in drug-related money laundering cases. Recently, in May 2025, Credit Suisse was convicted and fined for involvement in money laundering linked to a Bulgarian drug ring, but the bank remains “too big” for its executives to end up in jail (Too Big to Jail).
Thiel used the money earned from speculation to invest in information technology and artificial intelligence (AI). After founding Thiel Capital Management in 1996, he co-founded PayPal, and later Clarium Capital, a global macroeconomic hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analytics company of which he has been Chairman of the Board of Directors since its inception. Palantir’s predictive AI systems are today used by industrial companies in many countries, as well as by defense, intelligence, and security forces, both in the United States (NSA, FBI, etc.) and abroad (Israel, Ukraine).
In 2005, Thiel launched Founders Fund, which, through Privateer Holdings, owns 76% of Tilray, the world’s largest investor in “legal marijuana,” the firm that convinced the German government to decriminalize cannabis use in 2024. Thiel was Facebook’s first outside investor and has founded myriad other investment companies.
Thiel announced that he had signed a contract to have his body frozen after his death, a ritual specific to the transhumanist sect which also includes Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, a major deep pocket of the Tony Blair Institute.
The “doctrinaire corpus” of the titans of the “tech right” makes many references to George Lucas, Star Wars, and the work of British high-fantasy author JRR Tolkien, a real obsession of Thiel, who has read The Lord of the Rings trilogy more than ten times, and named several of his companies after characters in the series (Palantir, Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital, etc.). Thiel wants to be “immortal like the elves,” and transhumanism, in a nutshell, is that. Like Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Thiel sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Society, whose meetings he never misses.
Apocalypse
On January 10, 2025, just after Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel published an article in the Financial Times titled “A Time for Truth and Reconciliation.”
Prophetically, he wrote: “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien régime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance—reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.”
Let’s try to understand. In Greek, the word apokálypsis simply means “revelation.” In Christianity, it appears as the first word of the Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament. But to decipher the meaning of these enigmatic formulations, we must penetrate Thiel’s philosophical mindset and grasp the code of his language.
Thiel is right when he says that in order to maintain their dominance over “the masses,” many U.S. governments, under the influence of various lobbies, the mafia, and financial interests, have suppressed information, discussion, and debate on key issues.
“It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein,” writes Thiel, at one time a financial partner of the sexual predator. “But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects—Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles—gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure. We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19….
“The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions—the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the U.S., the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt. Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.”
It all sounds very appealing: Revealing the darkest secrets of U.S. and world history, clearing them up, reconciling the American people, and making America great again—who could be against it? Yet Thiel’s article in the Financial Times is misleading as to his true thinking.
René Girard
A key aspect in understanding the character of Peter Thiel begins with knowing that he was seduced by the theories of one of his professors at Stanford, the reactionary “Catholic” philosopher René Girard (1923-2015). Thiel now funds most contemporary research on Girard, a fact which annoys many of Girard’s academic adherents, who claim that the technology entrepreneur misinterprets the philosopher. For his part, current Vice President JD Vance loudly asserts that it was Peter Thiel who converted him to Girardian philosophy.
As a reminder, Thiel was part of a small reading group led by Girard himself, which met every two weeks on the Stanford campus, [as noted] in a trailer dating from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The ten members of this group were able to interact directly with Girard, the author of Violence and the Sacred (1972) and Romantic Lies and Romance Truth (1961).
Paul Leslie, himself a member of this sect, enthusiastically sums up Girard’s theory:
“Girard’s mimetic theory posits that human desires are not innate, but are formed through the imitation of others. This imitation breeds rivalries as individuals compete for the same objects or status, escalating into conflict. To restore order, societies have historically resorted to scapegoating: transferring collective aggression onto an innocent victim. This act temporarily unites the community, but perpetuates cycles of violence, masked by myths that present the scapegoat as deserving of punishment.”
Girard’s postulate is clear: dominated by passion, man is not inclined to do good, but allows himself to be guided by envy (the source of greed, lust and jealousy), which leads him to rivalry, fatally degenerating into conflict. Violence is inherent in human nature, and, instead of repressing it by elevating man to reason based on agapē (universal love), “wise leaders” must organize violence to control it.
In reality, Girard offers a polished version of the fascist arguments developed by the Savoyard synarchist ideologue Joseph De Maistre (1753-1821) in his “Treatise on Sacrifices,” published in 1822 as an appendix to his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.
Like Girard and Peter Thiel, De Maistre was fiercely opposed to the Enlightenment and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), because both naïvely asserted that man, using his free will, was capable through his creative action and his true nature, of accomplishing good. For De Maistre, “The philosopher [Rousseau] does not see that humanity is a fallen species, whose temporal perfection is definitively annulled by its own ‘mortal inclination to evil.’ ”
For the most feudal branches of the Vatican, God (as well as his supposed representatives on Earth) necessarily becomes useless as a savior of man if the latter is good by nature.
Since many, if not almost all cultures have practiced various forms of sacrifice (including human sacrifice), Demaistre deduces that human sacrifice is the prerogative of man. Logical, right?
God Himself sacrificed his own son, Jesus, to redeem humanity. Who could do otherwise? Society can only be saved by strengthening the absolute authority of the Pope and the state. And the redemption of the souls of guilty elites can only be achieved by sacrificing the (innocent) lives of the people. It was from this supposedly religious perspective that Demaistre applauded Napoleon, who led an entire generation of French people to their deaths for the sake of his Empire and those who sold him weapons. “Murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and it is remembered and transfigured in the form of myth,” notes Thiel.
The ‘Straussian Moment’
Once convinced of the evil nature of man, Thiel turns his attention to Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojève, whose synarchist analyses and solutions seemed to him to be moving in the right direction, although insufficient. Only René Girard offered satisfactory answers.
He presents his views on these authors in a 30-page article entitled “The Straussian Moment,” a short and rather cryptic essay published in 2007 in a book entitled Politics and Apocalypse, which brought together various authors.
