The PayPal billionaire and longtime California resident is back in the news this week, joining media provocateur Bari Weiss’s “Honestly” podcast for its Nov. 14 episode. About 10 minutes into the two-hour conversation, Thiel, an early supporter of Donald Trump, let fly a truly bizarre metaphor.
He’d been talking about the “intellectual straightjacket” that he sees the Democratic Party forcing people into. He said there’s no room for “individual thought” on the left — not mentioning Trump’s sidelining of the critics within his party — before explaining his point with a “Star Wars” reference.
"Provocateur" is a funny way to describe Weiss. I think "handmaiden to fascist plutocrats" is more accurate.
I have no doubt that Thiel has funded Weiss's "Free Press" project in an effort to add to the right-wing media network led for so long by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.
To get an idea of how truly weird and semi-coherent and religion-fanatical Thiel is, check out my transcript of his speech from a few years ago, given to the right-wing whine festival, known as the "Stanford Academic Freedom Conference." It was an event where hardcore racists like Amy Wax could go to complain that they get pushback when they publicly attack non-white people.
Thiel himself has used Star Wars references before, to express his own extreme racism:
These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”
Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing.
“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.
