How Silicon Valley’s Right-Wing Power Network Took Shape

Summary

• Every business and political choice Peter Thiel has made has a philosophical blueprint behind it. This episode starts with The Stanford Review, which he co-founded with Norman Book in 1987 during his junior year, and maps 3 intellectual sources—Girard, Schmitt, and Strauss—onto PayPal, his early investment in Facebook, and Palantir. 狄皓’s sharpest observation: “What Thiel said more than 30 years ago lines up perfectly with what he says today”—he is a committed right-winger who has followed “one blueprint all the way through” (一张蓝图绘到底).
• Girard’s theory of mimesis is the starting point for the monopoly logic in Zero to One. People have no spontaneous desires, and imitation inevitably produces conflict, so “competing is a very stupid thing to do”—PayPal’s merger with Musk’s X.com and Facebook as a “perfect mimetic-growth machine” are business applications of the theory.
• Palantir is a company built on philosophy. Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception—“sovereignty comes from whoever can decide what constitutes a state of exception”—is directly tied to the logic behind Palantir’s founding; the company made money for years through B2B data analytics but has become “increasingly explicit” in its involvement in ICE’s search for undocumented immigrants and in military operations against Venezuela and Iran in recent years.
• Strauss’s concept of esoteric writing explains why Thiel is content to be a behind-the-scenes kingmaker. He believes that under democracy “there must be an implicit politics” and that a “deep state” exists and is a good thing—so he backed JD Vance ($15M in his Senate race), Josh Hawley, and Blake Masters, sending people who passed his “intellectual filter” into positions of power while rarely stepping into the spotlight himself.
• The Stanford Review was a talent-selection machine that kept running. It produced David Sacks (now the White House AI and Crypto Czar), Keith Rabois, Palantir co-founders Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, and Senator Josh Hawley; the Thiel Fellowship application question—“What is something that most people agree on but you disagree with?”—is the same intellectual filtering mechanism.
• The tech right is building its own media and capital infrastructure. Thiel-backed Pirate Wires keeps attacking San Francisco governance and exposing the concentration of Wikipedia’s editorial power; the tech right pushed the impeachment of San Francisco’s radical prosecutor; and the Rockbridge Network, built by Buskirk and Vance, also established 1789 Capital, which a son of Trump joined in 2024, investing in xAI, Neuralink, SpaceX, Anduril, and even influencer sparkling-wine brand HappyDad—“in the influencer economy, influence is the chip that gets you a seat at the table.”
• Thiel’s major ideological shift was from “escaping politics” to “seizing politics.” From supporting the Seasteading Institute, whose vision was a life without taxes or state jurisdiction, as a libertarian to openly backing Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, 天语 suggests that after Trump took office he may have come to believe more strongly that libertarians could gain power through U.S. politics.

Deep dive

1. The Stanford Review: The Campus Right’s Counterattack in the First “Culture War”

• 天语 places this 1987 student paper in the continuation of the Bay Area counterculture movement of the late 1960s: left-wing students opposed “the hegemony of Western culture” and pushed to move Western classics courses off campus—this was where the critique of “cultural relativism” began. Thiel and Norman Book founded The Stanford Review, while Keith Rabois and others responded to this left-wing critique.
• The key disconnect was this: American society was broadly conservative in the Reagan era, but “school was progressive while society was conservative”—Thiel was not fighting the U.S. mainstream, but the progressive mainstream on Stanford’s campus. The debate in the 1980s was already known as the “Culture War”; today’s Culture War is really the second one.
• Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind criticized universities for making students feel good about themselves while failing to transmit intellectual ideas. The Stanford Review, The Dartmouth Review, and Berkeley’s California Review formed a conservative media movement opposing campus progressivism from within the campus.

2. The Olin Foundation: Without an Arms Magnate’s Money, Thiel Would Have Had No First Platform

• 天语 fills in the funding trail: arms magnate John M. Olin—his family’s company manufactured the M1 carbine—founded the Olin Foundation at age 80 after radical students occupied a building at Cornell in 1969, with the goal of “breaking the left’s monopoly over universities.” Rather than influence campus media, it funded right-wing students to launch new independent publications—more than 100 student journals in all, every one with a name ending in “Review.”
• 天语 puts it bluntly: “Money matters enormously.” With an outside foundation footing the bill, Thiel did not need to ask the university for funding, and “the university was far less likely to silence him by controlling the budget.” Otherwise, he would have “remained forever just a particularly angry but powerless student.” An interesting footnote: Olin’s will required the foundation to spend all its money and close within 25 years of his death; it closed as promised in 2005.
• The paper itself was full of provocation: Keith Rabois once hurled homophobic abuse at a gay student in his dorm (“he himself was gay”)—that provocative streak “may also have been one reason this group gathered around Thiel.” 狄皓’s biggest surprise was that “the core of Thiel’s thinking has never changed.” Many major intellectuals went through dramatic shifts between left and right, but Thiel “has followed one blueprint all the way through since he was very young.”

3. Girard’s Theory of Mimesis: From Literary Criticism to Monopoly Economics

• Thiel’s first philosophical source was French literary critic René Girard, who taught at Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s. 天语 jokes: “The French think he is famous in America; Americans think he is famous in France; in fact, he is not especially famous in either country.” At the center is the “theory of mimesis”: people have no spontaneous desires; all desire imitates someone else’s desire, and imitation plus scarce resources inevitably produces competition and violence.
• That is the direct business logic of Zero to One: do not compete; become a monopolist. Thiel’s own example is that he and Musk each started an electronic-payments company in Palo Alto; “they went to the same places to eat every day, hired very similar people, and had very similar products”—“this was really mimetic desire… rather than compete every day, why not merge?” 天语 warns that the story has “many versions”; exactly how friendly the two were is another question.
• Thiel’s early investment in Facebook was likewise an application of mimesis: people imitate others, so a platform large enough to “give everyone many, many people to imitate” can “keep expanding the space for mimetic desire”—a perfect mimetic-growth machine. PayPal’s original conception sat in the same framework: 泓君 believes Thiel initially wanted a substitute currency rather than a way to transmit fiat money, “very much like today’s crypto”; P2P technology simply had not advanced that far at the time.

4. Thiel’s Selective Use of Girard: Those Who Understand the Rules Disdain Following Them

• 天语 points out the contradiction: Thiel uses Girard to understand social rules but disdains imitation himself—he champions dropping out, with the Thiel Fellowship supposed to pay $100K per person per year, opposes business competition, “but he also knows imitation is hard to avoid, so he has no problem making money from it.”
• A sharper demystification: Girard’s theory is grounded in literary criticism of Shakespeare, Don Quixote, and The Red and the Black, making it highly complex in its own right; but the part Thiel uses “is not very complicated”—anyone who has attended elementary school and “competed for the same class-monitor position” understands it. Today, the theory “has itself become a ‘meme’”; Silicon Valley’s Thiel followers “say every day that this is imitation and that is imitation, and the whole thing itself is highly imitative”—Thiel uses Girard’s packaging to make it “feel more philosophical, more political.”

5. Schmitt and Palantir: Technological Sovereignty in a State of Exception

• The second source is German legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who was a Nazi Party member. His core position was anti-liberal: liberalism’s problem is that it hides the “friend-enemy relationship.” In The Straussian Moment, Thiel draws on Schmitt to assess 9/11: “If you do not identify who your enemy is, your enemy will not forget it”—he sees the coexistence of friend and enemy as an illusion, “a great failure of liberalism.”
• Schmitt’s maxim, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”—sovereignty comes from whoever can decide what constitutes a state of exception—runs directly into Palantir’s founding logic: Thiel believed the response to 9/11 “had to cross institutional and legal boundaries,” and that Patriot Act-style bypassing of procedure was necessary. Palantir was built to use technology to help governments operate in a state of exception: big-data analysis, surveillance, and retrieving information needed by the military and government from vast datasets.
• In practice, the company struggled to raise money early on; Thiel funded it out of pocket and appointed the liberal-arts graduate Alex Karp as CEO—“a company built on philosophy” (一家建立在哲学上的公司). It spent years doing enterprise B2B (“B2B SaaS makes a lot of money”), but is now “increasingly explicit”: reports say ICE has used Palantir to search for undocumented immigrants, and its technology was also used in military operations against Venezuela and Iran in the past few months—“increasingly involved in the extralegal actions of these American warlords and governments.”

6. Strauss: Esoteric Writing, the “Deep State,” and the Chosen Few

• The third is Strauss, a German-Jewish philosopher and a conservative who was “the exact opposite” of Schmitt on the political spectrum. He believed secularization had not truly left Christian and Jewish traditions behind; liberal democracy “could be the final system,” but philosophical criticism of it would continue. The philosopher’s method was “esoteric writing”: every text has a literal meaning and a deeper meaning accessible only to a few “chosen ones.”
• The implication of Thiel’s self-identification as a Straussian is that there can be a parliament and an elected president, “but we must have an implicit politics beneath this system, one that the entire public cannot know about; otherwise democracy will not function.” In 2016, Trump’s camp accused Democrats of having a “deep state”; Thiel believes the deep state exists—and is a good thing—because someone needs to steer society’s progress from the shadows, and “he of course considers himself one of them.”
• 天语 ties the two threads together: if the vast quantities of data in the late 2000s were all text, Palantir’s capability was to extract the surface meaning of that text and “help the ‘deep state’ he himself wants govern society, thereby bypassing democratic procedures”—for Thiel, Schmitt and Strauss are “very closely linked.”

7. The 2016 RNC Speech and The Flight 93 Election: The Right’s Crisis Narrative

• For years Thiel was so low-profile that “outside the tech industry it was hard to find anyone who knew who Peter Thiel was”; in 2016, however, he took the stage at the Republican National Convention to openly back Trump: “I’m proud to be gay, I’m proud to be a Republican, but most of all I’m proud to be an American.” 天语’s candid non-answer: “I still don’t know why.” Given Thiel’s long-running logic, “he might have thought this was too high-profile.”
• The figure who shifted the Republican intellectual debate was Michael Anton—now the Trump administration’s director of policy planning and apparently a Straussian introduced to Trump by Thiel—with The Flight 93 Election: conservatism had been “hijacked” by the left and multiculturalists; Trump was “a pilot who didn’t know what he was doing” but had “the nerve to storm the cockpit”—“he may fail, but if we do nothing, the probability of failure is 100%.” Thiel’s RNC speech was a similar expression of the same crisis mentality.

8. David Horowitz’s Tactical Lesson: Use the Left’s Methods to Beat the Left

• The key influence outside academia was David Horowitz, father of Ben Horowitz, A16Z’s No. 2. Born into a Communist Party USA family that joined in 1929, he served as an executive at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, was close to Sartre and de Beauvoir, and edited Ramparts, the hippie “bible” that first exposed the U.S. military’s use of napalm in Vietnam. He later made a 180-degree turn to the right and provided strategic help to Trump’s first presidential campaign. 狄皓 summarizes his lesson for Thiel: “Don’t follow the rules… create narratives, proactively provoke, and attack people by name.” Horowitz himself published The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America and feuded with Chomsky for years. Horowitz and Thiel met at an Olin Foundation seminar.
• In 1995, David Horowitz expanded an article from The Stanford Review into The Diversity Myth; its arguments “remain core beliefs of the tech right” and accurately predicted the expansion of administrative bureaucracy and the politicization of research. Its foreword was by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese—a pioneer in women’s studies who had been a Marxist and feminist, then converted to Catholicism and turned fully conservative, becoming firmly anti-abortion and a traitor in the eyes of mainstream feminists. She said she wrote the foreword because she “particularly disliked identity politics.”

9. The Stanford Review Alumni Network: A Power List Still Being Passed Down

• The list itself is the argument: David Sacks (co-author of Pluralism, now the White House AI Czar and Crypto Czar—“he is responsible for all high technology himself”); Keith Rabois (a prominent VC; his husband, Jacob Helberg, is now deputy secretary of state); Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder and founding partner of 8VC, and former head of the Cicero Institute think tank); Stephen Cohen (built Palantir’s first product prototype in 8 weeks, now its president); Josh Hawley (now a Republican senator, and an editor in the 2000s). Recent editors-in-chief also include Lisa Wallace, co-founder of Assemble (acquired by Deel in 2024), and Anthony Ghosn, former chief of staff at 8VC and the son of Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s former CEO.
• Do these people converge on the same political spectrum? 房天语 says most “accepted the ideas first and joined later”—writing for the paper demanded full commitment, and anyone who fundamentally disagreed would “find it hard to fit in.” 狄皓 adds that they were 18- or 19-year-olds: “political thought is formed to a large extent through social interaction.” You might not read Schmitt at first, but be drawn to a circle that “dares to say what others dare not”; “it was a process of self-selection from the start.”

10. Building Their Own Media Infrastructure: From Pirate Wires to 1789 Capital

• Mike Solana, founder of Pirate Wires, followed a distinctly Thielian path: he read a Thiel article and became a “little fanboy,” proactively joined the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute, helped Thiel publish Zero to One, and later became Founders Fund’s first PR hire—“he never left; he is still a Founders Fund employee.” Two lines of coverage broke through. First, it attacked San Francisco city governance every day—shoplifting and petty theft worth $950 or less were rarely prosecuted—and the tech right directly drove the impeachment of a radical-left prosecutor; “I seem to recall” that a pro-business mayor took office in 2024. Second, it investigated Wikipedia: “more than 90% of the content is decided by a tiny number of editors”; entries on right-wing figures are markedly more negative, it takes in several hundred million dollars in donations a year, and it runs many DEI-leaning projects.
• Another Thiel-backed publication, Palladium, discusses what society looks like “after liberalism”; its breakout piece, “Stanford’s War on Happiness,” criticized pandemic rules and sexual-consent policies for making students afraid to socialize. 天语 observes: “For all these years, Thiel has hated schools so much, yet what they have kept discussing all these years is these few universities.”
• Chris Buskirk, founder of American Greatness, was a “down-and-out businessman”—he had been sued at least 11 times by creditors seeking payment, including a dry cleaner. In 2016, he rose through a pro-Trump, anti-establishment platform and initially survived only because of Thiel’s sponsorship. In 2019, Thiel introduced him to Vance; together they built the grassroots political-mobilization organization Rockbridge Network, which also established 1789 Capital, named for the year the U.S. Constitution took effect; a son of Trump joined days after Trump’s 2024 victory. 1789 Capital invested in xAI, Neuralink, SpaceX, and Anduril—狄皓 says bluntly that the Musk-linked share “was somewhat like giving them money,” not something that should have gone to a VC founded only in 2023.
• The most jarring piece of the portfolio is hard-seltzer company HappyDad, founded by right-wing influencer collective Nelk, which has more than 8M YouTube followers and once met Trump on Air Force One. 狄皓 interprets it this way: “In the influencer economy, influence is the chip that gets you a seat at the table” (网红经济的时代，影响力就是上桌的筹码). Vance himself is “an influencer from an earlier era”: the Hillbilly Elegy label established his influence, following the same logic as today’s right-wing influencers targeting young white men who had previously felt overlooked in mainstream discourse.

11. JD Vance and Thiel’s Shift: From Escaping Politics to Making Kings

• Thiel met Vance at a 2011 Yale Law School talk on technological stagnation and the decline of the American elite; Vance called it “the most important moment at Yale Law School.” Thiel later put $15M into Vance’s Senate campaign and helped secure Trump’s endorsement, then helped smooth Vance’s relationship with Trump before Vance ran for vice president—even though Vance had once publicly and emphatically opposed Trump. 天语 stresses that this was diversified betting: Thiel also backed Josh Hawley and Blake Masters, the co-author of Zero to One. “I think he is a kingmaker; he wants to send people who have passed through his intellectual filter into positions of political power.”
• The key turning point in his thinking came in 2008–2009, when Thiel supported the Seasteading Institute: he was a thoroughgoing libertarian—he did not believe in taxation or government control, and believed a true libertarian should “leave this political center and use technology to find other solutions.” 天语 thinks that after Trump took office, Thiel may have developed greater confidence in politics and become more convinced that libertarians could gain power through U.S. politics; the Trump case showed him that he could change the status quo through the establishment. Moving from escaping politics to engaging in politics was “a fairly major shift” in his thinking.
• Why does he not run himself? 天语 offers two explanations: first, a Straussian “knows that the real people pulling the strings can never be onstage”; second, self-awareness—Vance and Trump feel relatable to voters, “but Thiel is not that kind of person; he is a very, very difficult person to communicate with.” But 天语’s earlier candid warning remains: if Thiel really is a Straussian, “what he does and what he believes may have nothing to do with each other”—outside judgments of his motives always pass through a layer of esoteric writing.