Can I get an ‘Amen’?
Mega money doesn’t necessarily go with megalomania. But one can find plenty of evidence for a correlation.
Josh Marshall unearths a fine example in “Donald Trump’s Greenland jones” originating perhaps with tech-bro Dryden Brown.
When money goes to your head, what does it do there? In Brown’s case, convince you you can fly into a poor country unannounced and try to buy it. In Peter Thiel’s case, prompt you to send an essay packed with “just asking questions” conspiracy theories and get the august Financial Times to print it.
Kieran Healy, a Duke University Professor of Sociology, read Thiel’s offering and commented:
This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.
It’s never clear just what Thiel’s point is. Something about the intersection of the internet and Donald Trump’s return to the White House representing the fall of the ancien regime (the reality-based community) and the revelation of dark secrets that for decades it’s concealed from truth suckers seekers.
Free speech in Elon Musk’s conception must be free, free of grounding in fact. Let the internet decide what truth is. In the Digital Dispensation, the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and Covid-19’s origins shall be revealed:
Did [Dr. Fauci and his advisers] suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.
Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?
“Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum,” Thiel declares in breathless prose. There will be no return to the “pre-internet past.”
I SEE JESUS!
With the help of the tech-bros, Trump finally has overthrown the ancien regime. He will ignore America’s unrectified historical failings to concentrate on prosecuting the malefactors of identity politics who’ve rendered America Not-Great, Thiel promises.
“The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”
HALLELUJAH!
Blessed are the poor, for they are less prone to wealth-induced delusions.