Within Big Tech, Peter Thiel is an intriguing figure who possesses influence in the venture capital space while also having his hands in politics, backing candidates like Ted Cruz, Blake Masters, and JD Vance. Masters wrote Zero to One, which encapsulates Thiel’s lectures from a Stanford seminar while JD Vance is the VP nominee for Donald Trump. Thiel’s close associate Mark Zuckerberg has declared neutrality going into the 2024 election, reflecting an ongoing “vibe shift” happening in Silicon Valley whereby the so-called PayPal Mafia is backing Donald Trump. This would include Elon Musk, who is part of the informal mafia. Obviously, the elephant in the room with Thiel is that he is a libertarian homosexual, but this makes him a strange bedfellow for the right.
Recently, Thiel interviewed with Triggernometry, a British podcast hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster that brands itself as “fact-based discussion of important and controversial issues.” They discuss a range of issues, including China-Taiwan, technological malaise, and even political correctness hampering innovation. In doing so, Thiel speaks to the issue of wokeness, which he describes it as “Ultra Christianity.”
The hosts claim that the woke mind virus arose at the universities and then metastasized throughout the rest of society, to which Thiel pushes back stating that he is open to a religious explanation. Thiel proceeds to explain Christianity “always takes the side of the victim.” This, he describes, is a “deformation” or an “intensification” in which he states that “you should think of wokeness as Ultra Christianity or hyper-Christianity.” He then proceeds to describe those themes which include a form of Original Sin, no option of forgiveness, and the belief that the past was terrible.
There’s surely a religious interpretation that…as the Church lost a certain amount of authority but people didn’t become, you know, rationalist, atheist people, they went into a woke religion.”
He interprets this woke religion to be an extreme form of Christianity. Now, Thiel does not say this is the only valid explanation, but rather one he is open to. He would proceed to critique 2000’s era New Atheism as being anti-Muslim more than anti-Christian in the wake of global Islamic terrorism. This is very much consistent with recent critiques of Richard Dawkins, though neglects that he is rabidly anti-Christian.
Analysis
Some have taken to calling out the low-hanging fruit of Thiel’s statements as he is a homosexual lamenting the woke on religious grounds, lacking the self-awareness to recognize that degeneracy from the Sexual Revolution directly led to the modern wokeness.
But there is much truth to what he said, in that wokeness is a religion, and it parallels Christianity. This is something that many on our side have noted over the years. It’s a positive indicator that Peter Thiel is mimicking these concepts, showing who is influencing him. While he does not describe exactly what the Original Sin of wokeness is, European Christendom’s existence, he is able to see the religiosity. Liberation Theology infused Marxist power dynamics within Catholicism while Protestants like Howard Thurman did the same in America, leading to the Civil Rights Revolution. This, combined with the materialistic humanism that championed using the courts and bureaucratic state to advance “progress,” made for a devastating combination. Thereafter, progress meant the pursuit of equality under the guise of civil rights and egalitarianism.
Many might take issue with his use of the term “Ultra Christianity” to describe wokeness, and while it is incorrect, wokeness is certainly the inversion of Christianity. One might instead call it the anti-Christianity, as it is Christianity without Christ or the possibility of forgiveness. Nevertheless, the parallels are why these false teachings are so easily intertwined with true Christianity which leads powerful men like Thiel and Musk to see Christianity as toothless.
