Peter Thiel's far-right crusade is just getting started

In mid-September, Peter Thiel appeared at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami to offer a bit of advice to the far-right movement that he helped create and for which he serves as the key financial patron. During the speech, Thiel complained that the Republicans had failed to offer a policy agenda to voters.

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Instead, he said, the prevailing 2022 message from GOP candidates amounted to warnings about liberal depravity in such cities as San Francisco. “It’s the homeless people pooping all over the place,” he said, summing up the candidates’ message. “My intuition is that this sort of nihilistic negation is probably not enough.”

Thiel’s analysis felt like a deliberate misdirection. There are few who have done as much to promote the sort of political nihilism that he was criticizing. As a college student in the 1980s, Thiel founded a conservative newspaper, the Stanford Review, that portrayed the Bay Area as a den of leftwing iniquity. Stanford, according to Thiel’s paper, was full of sexual perversion (gays were a frequent target of its mockery), out-of-control feminism (date rape being more a left-wing invention than an actual crime), and a creeping political correctness that threatened Western civilization itself.

In the years that followed, as I wrote in my biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, he would expand on his provocations even as he became one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors. Thiel funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, helped resurrect Donald Trump’s candidacy after the release of the