The referenced 2009 essay by Thiel: The Education of a Libertarian
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
Peter Thiel's essay The Straussian Moment in POLITICS AND APOCALYPSE
Peter Thiel: the "libertarian" who loves mass government surveillance, monopolies, and censorship - The Libertarian Logic of Peter Thiel
Sorry Peter Thiel; Libertarianism is Not Compatible with Authoritarianism [compare and contrast: The Insidious Libertarian-to-Alt-Right Pipeline, The Libertarianism-to-Fascism Pipeline, A Rejoinder To Matt Lewis On Libertarians And The Alt-Right]
Why Peter Thiel Wants to Topple Gawker and Elect Donald Trump
Neoreaction has a number of different strains, but perhaps the most important is a form of post-libertarian futurism that, realizing that libertarians aren’t likely to win any elections, argues against democracy in favor of authoritarian forms of government. In this guise, it’s a heretical offshoot of Valley nerd culture, and has particular associations with Thiel. Mencius Moldbug (real name Curtis Yarvin), the “founder” of neoreaction, is a Bay Area programmer whose start-up, Urbit, is backed by Thiel; and reactionary blogger Michael Anissimov was formerly media director at the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Unit (MIRI). Even Nick Land, the major NRx figure after Moldbug (whom I’ve written about before), has no personal connections to the Valley but shares many of its peculiar cultural interests: Before his neoreactionary conversion, he spent much of the 1990s as a rogue academic writing philosophy-fiction about the Singularity, killer-AI, and time travel. So when it came out that Thiel was attacking a media company and supporting a candidate already perceived as a neo-fascist, it looked a little like some Pynchon-esque conspiracy coming to fruition.What’s more interesting, however, than Peter Thiel being the shadowy puppetmaster behind a neoreactionary conspiracy — he’s not, and one doesn’t exist — is why he doesn’t need to be. It may seem a little puzzling why a tech entrepreneur, whose own interests include “disruption” and high-modernist sci-fi dreams of space travel and life extension, might get in bed with Trump’s brand of strongman bullying and populist white resentment. But we’re living through a number of crises in our liberal-democratic political system that have no obvious way out, and that are pushing all sorts of different people to react and realign in similar ways. It shouldn’t be a surprise if some are beginning to converge on pretty weird positions.
Peter Thiel and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Alliance for Trump
french
Peter Thiel and the Struggle Beyond Politics - "It’s subtle, but it points to a key idea from this now past election, that put both major parties on their heels: Thiel sees himself as something beyond these ideologies, implying that he himself is a kind of shepherd, sent to guide us beyond our mortal trappings. A kind of Superman, if you will, reinforced by the undeniable success he’s had in 21st century business."
The French Origins of "You Will Not Replace Us"
“You will not replace us”: a French philosopher explains the Charlottesville chant - "American white nationalists may not realize it, but the fear of replacement is essential to the work of a controversial French writer named Renaud Camus."
rene girard
Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection
Thiel’s connection to the late René Girard, his former teacher at Stanford, is well known but poorly understood. Most accounts of the Girard-Thiel connection have described the common ground between them as “conservatism,” but this oversimplifies the matter. Girard, a French Catholic pacifist, would have likely found little common ground with most Trump delegates. While aspects of his thinking could be described as conservative, he also described himself as an advocate of “a more reasonable, renewed ideology of liberalism and progress.” Nevertheless, as the Politics and Apocalypse symposium reveals, Thiel and Girard both believe that “Western political philosophy can no longer cope with our world of global violence.” “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel’s contribution to the conference, seeks common ground between Girard’s mimetic theory of human social life – to which I will return shortly – and the work of two right-wing, anti-democratic political philosophers who were in vogue in the years following 9/11: Leo Strauss, a cult figure in some conservative circles, and a guru to some members of the Bush administration; and Carl Schmitt, a onetime Nazi who has nevertheless been influential among academics of both the right and the left. Thiel notes that Girard, Strauss, and Schmitt, despite various differences, share a conviction that “the whole issue of human violence has been whitewashed away by the Enlightenment.” His dense and wide-ranging essay draws from their writings an analysis of the failure of modern secular politics to contend with the foundational role of violence in the social order.
Reading Rene Girard At The End Of The World
The Concept of carl schmitt - Nazi-era philosopher [and jurist] who wrote blueprint for New Authoritarianism
Politics Above Law: How Trump channels Far Right icon Carl Schmitt without Knowing It
It is safe to assume that Trump has not read the writings of the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote his most important books during the Weimar Republic and leading up to the Nazi regime. At the root of these writings was Schmitt’s emphasis on placing politics above law. According to Schmitt, legality of a particular constitutional order cannot be separated from the specific political system it which it originates. He argued that sovereign authority of the ruler is superior to rigid, abstract legal principles, especially during a crisis, when he argued, the ruler must be freed from legal restraints.
The Prehistory of the Alt-Right
leo strauss
Rise of the Reactionary - "How a handful of Weimar émigrés came to have an outsize influence on the ideology of the American right."
Richard Spencer’s Master’s Thesis Was an Anti-Semitic Critique — of a Jewish Philosopher - " And, seriously, how does an anti-Semite build a philosophy of white nationalism — at least to some extent — on the study of Jewish philosophers? That last question is difficult to answer, because much of Spencer’s writing on those philosophers — Theodore Adorno, on whom he wrote his thesis in a master’s program in the humanities at University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, and the heavily Jewish Frankfurt School of whom Adorno was a part — is inaccessible."
oswald spengler: Pessimism's Prophet
sadly, the best Spengler references are lots in the fever-swamps of neoreaction. moving on.
roberto calasso
"As part of the René Girard Lectures, Calasso will be speaking on “The Last Superstition”"
Roberto Calasso's Encyclopedia Mind At Play, a " “neo-gnostic,” a master of secret knowledge. " a sacred egoist
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The Rise of Anti-Liberalism
The alt-right are targeting disgruntled white male lefties to join their movement
Answering the Alt-Right
some extended previouslies:
Peter Thiel[readme] (Paypal inventor, venture capitalist, libertarian, vampire, techno-optimist, futurist, tranhumanist, lawsuit-machine finanicier and inflation-predicting billionaire) is supporting Donald Trump for President of the United States, and thinks America made a (one of many) wrong turn granting women the vote. Why?
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want to understand schmitt, spengler and r.camus? try adorno, arendt and gramsci!