Imagination Deficit Disorder
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel think they know the future and how to win it. They can't both be right.
Introduction
“You want a revolution? I want a revelation.” - Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton
Counter-revolutions aren’t usually source of good drama. If in the 23rd century someone makes a Lin Manuel Miranda-type musical to explain this moment, instead of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, it will need to feature Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
They keep meeting. Sometimes they are on the same side, though not always at the same time. They may see themselves as fellow “immigrants [who] get the job done”1. Their real relationship is rivalry, powered by fundamentally different views about how the world works, what people are like, what kind of future people could expect or should want, and how to wield power to profit from that future.
As I write this, on the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord, “NO KINGS” signs will picture Teslas as flammable “Swasticars” and Musk as either puppetmaster or wannabe co-monarch with the president of the United States at more than a thousand protests. So I get that on a day of action against tyranny the idea of framing Musk and Thiel as on the Revolutionary side is probably offensive.
But we continue to be taken by surprise. So we keep losing.
It doesn’t take a Hamilton, never mind a Sun-Tzu, to recognise the necessity to understand how people shaping events, and how those will affect global politics, economics, finance, technology, and the climate, see themselves. Grasping that, and how they came to see themselves that way, is essential if you are going to stop losing, because you then have a shot at no longer being surprised.
Instead, we who are appalled at what the Trump Administration is doing tend to reduce Musk and Thiel to caricatures. This essay suggests it might be more useful to understand them and what hints the influences they cite give us about what makes them tick – not to empathise, but to make better-educated guesses about what they want, beyond their most obvious short-term pecuniary interest, and better predict what they’re trying to do. In fairness, it’s pretty uncomfortable to spend a lot of time in their heads.
Their ends are pretty weird, but what might save us is that they are also contradictory: like a counter-revolutionary restoration of monarchy, or replacement of the administrative welfare state with AI machines of loving grace to redeem us with fully automated luxury communism, or a techno-feudalism that one may see as the alternative to full end-times apocalypse, or a future (no matter how far-fetched) of abundance and freedom for all vs a future of scarcity and control by a deserving elite.
Their means are just as important to pay attention to, because on the surface they have a lot in common with each other and a difference from almost everyone else, and the combination is a crucial source of their power, wealth, and influence:
Musk and Thiel see themselves as the revolutionary good guys – the Rebel Alliance – who are going to build the future, because no one else will, and if they don’t, all is lost.
That America’s civic religion so exsanguinated, fossilized, and deified the ‘founders’ and ‘framers’ in Statuary Hall or in a Mr Smith Goes to Washington montage is part of why “Hamilton” worked so well. It feels closer to depicting them as we might imagine they saw themselves: full-blooded sex-mad ambitious polymaths, ‘move fast and break things’ types, with varying appetites for risk, who yet worked together, and managed to turn a world upside down. And then fell out, on what should come next. Papered over those fundamental disagreements with seemingly clever political technology. But ultimately fell into rivalry that ended in blood.
The analogy can only get us so far, because despite having a soundtrack full of ear worms it traps us in that nostalgia. These OG ‘move fast and break things’ guys were sufficiently nostalgia-free that they could imagine entirely different worlds than the one in which they were raised. They were arrogant enough to think they weren’t solving for New York or “the colonies” but a much bigger, much more universal (or at least universalizable), project. As they saw it, most of the people around them suffered from a more common malady: let us call it Imagination Deficit Disorder.
Imagination Deficit Disorder (IDD) ™ afflicts the most successful, the wealthiest, the most powerful, in any society. If you are reading this, you are unlikely to be someone who, for this moment, wakes up worrying how to ensure you and your family do not go to bed hungry tonight. A particular set of rules, institutions, and conditions – and a huge amount of luck – made possible whatever level of success you inherited, earned, and enjoy.
Imagining a world without those things, believing they are based on false assumptions, or what should replace them, is almost impossible. Proactively choosing to dismantle them and take your chances on a different future? Even harder to picture. It is borderline irrational – and by many schools of moral thought ingratitude that slides into betrayal – to choose to work against the system that made you who you are. And the more success you have had, the more likely it is you’ll have a bad case of IDD.
This is a more generous thought, I hope, than the Upton Sinclair quote: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The sentiment, however, isn’t a million miles away.
One cure for IDD is immersion in ideas and stories that challenge or up-end your existing assumptions, and to keep that up throughout a life.
As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh points out, you might find the conventional stories of contemporary literary fiction insufficient for the task. In his 2016 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh suggests a grand failure of imagination explains why humanity has failed to grapple with its greatest crisis, climate change.2
He didn’t suggest sci-fi was automatically going to be better than realist literary fiction for imagining a way through the uncanny Anthropocene, though he certainly drops a lot of hints that he thinks sci-fi offers a better toolset for dealing with questions that cause discomfort in more ‘mainstream’ literary circles.
If you take sci-fi as having room for Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood rather than just endless versions of Horatio Hornblower among the stars, it’s hard to avoid the idea there’s more going on in common with philosophy, theology, and myth than “pew pew” space opera.
As James Burton, lecturer at Goldsmiths University, said during a London School of Economics online event during COVID in 2020:
Kant, Aristotle…there's a lot of moments in history of philosophy where they say, well, philosophy starts with looking up at the starry heavens and this sense of awe at the universe, and then going back and trying to figure it out. And I'd say you could say, well, that applies to a lot of science fiction, or at least the reasons I fell in love with science fiction as a younger reader.
Or as Arthur C. Clarke put it, in 19703:
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic -- hardware and technology -- to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.
Despite impressive if varied academic credentials, Musk and Thiel tell us pretty regularly they see themselves in opposition to the academy. I’m far from the first person to want to look at the influences of sci-fi on them.
Dorian Lynskey’s undated blog post looked at a few of Musk’s influences, though his main task (potentially not incorrect but perhaps missing a wider point) was to argue that Musk doesn’t get the irony in some of his favourite sci-fi, or - like Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics - understand these were often cautionary tales, not instruction manuals.
The Zeroth Law, an add-on to the “Three Laws of Robotics”, is the command that AI/robots not just be prevented from harming humans but having a positive obligation to the whole of humanity: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”.
As one of Asimov’s Foundation characters admits, the Zeroth Law is hopelessly subjective: “Humanity is an abstraction. How do we deal with it?” Musk’s messianic answer is to embody the abstraction and speak for the whole. The lives of actual human beings — NPCs, he calls them — are worth less than nothing.
The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore went through a similar exercise in 2021 for the BBC, producing a podcast series now being re-aired on Musk’s “Origin Story”.
What I think is novel isn’t to point out that these men were influenced by sci-fi — and there’s plenty of material particularly about Musk on this point. But (as Lynskey does to an extent) to focus on what those influences might tell us about the world these two are desperately rushing to create - and how their visions have some in common, but the most important objectives appear to be in opposition.
Their choices in how they name things offer more than a few hints about their real influences. SpaceX’s ‘drone ships’ borrow quirky names such as “Just Read the Instructions” from vessels in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Palantir, Thiel’s spooky data analytics company, is named after the “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings.
Musk says often that if you want to understand how he sees the future, you need to read Banks’ Culture novels – which depict a far-future post-scarcity society of abundance benevolently administered, if not exactly ruled, by super-powerful AIs called “Minds”.
Thiel – who is more prone to extended essays or speeches layered with esoteric references than rapid-fire 3am tweets – often tells how at PayPal, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon was required reading, “and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”[4]
If you are reading this, you may be more thoughtful than most. You probably are at least ‘queasy’ with the reality playing out since Donald Trump returned to the American presidency and proceeded, as he promised, to systematically dismantle the US state and the global order it built over 85 years. This would be disorienting enough. Because he won more votes than any other candidate in 2024, his victory may seem much less an illegitimate fluke than – for many – a head-fuck that tells people they do not understand the world they inhabit or the people with whom they share that world.
And yet part of you continues to be as shocked as a 1940 Frenchman who can’t quite believe the Germans have simply gone around the Maginot Line, the army has collapsed, the Brits are hoping for escape across the Channel, and the Nazis are about to parade through Paris.
Thankfully, so far this comparison mostly (Abrego Garcia and other CECOT prisoners aside) is metaphorical.
Still, we are watching a DOGE digital coup of the US government so well-executed most people don’t realise it was over in days and what’s left is merely a mopping-up operation, a wilful acceleration of the climate crisis, and how their actions are freeing up a political force that truly believes that “law”, nevermind “democracy”, is part of an analogue past and that the triumph of its version of history is as inevitable as any 1930s true believing Communist in the wdst.
I want to understand how we came to this moment. Fortunately (lol), I find myself writing this at a moment without salary, without clients, and while attempting to live solely by my wits and with a belief that seeing things as they are is both extremely difficult and the only work worth doing in 2025.
If you are surprised at the speed and scale of what we are seeing now, you owe it to yourself to ask, why didn’t I see this attempt at Revolution (or, if you prefer, Counter-Revolution) coming?
What were the signposts I missed? What madmen could want such things? And if you were to find the signs were obvious if you’d bothered to look, you might ask yourself, what else am I missing?
The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept; Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn, 1837
1
“All of this has happened before” - Battlestar Galactica (2004)
Musk’s DOGE is not the first DOGE.
We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western world needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.
Where to start? John Rawls will need to be displaced in philosophy departments. Malcom Gladwell must be persuaded to change his theories. And pollsters have to be driven from politics. But the philosophy professors and the Gladwells of the world are set in their ways, to say nothing of our politicians. It’s extremely hard to make changes in those crowded fields, even with brains and good intentions.
- Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One, 2014
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to get rid of a layer of what the radical part of the Chinese Communist Party thought were backward-looking elites. And those were professors, they were civil servants, they were older people who had some kind of status, and they were hauled before student groups who shouted at them and demanded that they resign, and in some cases could arrange for them to be sent to, I don't know, cut trees in outer Mongolia. But the point was that it was a revolution against the existing culture, against the cultural institutions, universities, museums, everybody who had some kind of educational rank or status. And this attack on American universities and on science more broadly has a whiff of that.
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to on Podcast, 18 April 2025In some supreme cosmic prank, “DOGE” has gone from being a weird Musk crypto memecoin that hijacked the likeness of an unfortunate Japanese dog, to the name for a “department of government efficiency” that because it had no basis in law seemed like a troll when it claimed it would cut 33% of the US federal budget, to a Trojan Horse operation by which a small cabal of digital infiltrators working for Elon Musk seized control of the most powerful government in human history because people around them failed to imagine what they might do – and were thus defenceless before it was too late.
For most, on its surface the DOGE effort to destroy state capacity and related attacks on universities seems irrational. Who could want to do such a thing? Cui bono?
For others, there is a whole lot of deja vu.
Because we had a dry-run of this in 2017.
After being the lone Silicon Valley titan to back Donald Trump in 2016, Peter Thiel became the first openly gay man to speak at the Republican National Convention. After the unexpected result, Thiel was named to the transition team and offered himself as a bridge between Silicon Valley and the incoming administration.
Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook…and one Elon Musk were among those Thiel persuaded to come to Trump Tower in December 2016.
Peter Thiel was rewarded with what many considered an unusual choice for a role - Thiel didn’t want photo-ops with Trump or to be helping put allies in key Cabinet posts.
As described by Bloomberg journalist
, in his 2021 biography of Thiel, The Contrarian:Peter Thiel showed up in Trump Tower about a week after Election Day to ready to work. The Trump staffers hadn't known quite what to think of him….transition team staffers were constantly trying to hustle their way into a few minutes with the president-elect. Strangely Thiel never asked to see Trump at all.
Instead, Chafkin reported based on interviews with Steve Bannon, Thiel took a different view of where the power actually sits in Washington, and where to push. It may sound familiar:
Thiel's role would be to appoint people who could disrupt “the administrative state” -- the alphabet soup of agencies that sit below the cabinet level, including the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, the FDA (Food and Drug administration), and much smaller groups like the OSTP (Office of science and technology policy). These agencies employed tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of political appointees who represented a sort of government within a government. According to [Steve] Bannon, Thiel’s job was to appoint people who could “break it up.”
Even the words “deep state” undersold it, according to Bannon. “It's not deep it's in your fucking grill,” he told me, crediting this as “Peter Thiel’s theory of government.”
“The progressives understood something,” Bannon continued, “they said sometimes we win and sometimes we lose elections, but if we expand the functions of the federal government into these alphabet agencies, and then inside the agencies themselves, we'll have our own legislative branch, our own executive branch, our own courts. This was everything Peter went after.”
Thiel clearly believed personnel is policy, and went about compiling dozens of names in a few weeks. Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation went about it at a far more leisurely pace. Chafkin’s reporting makes clear that this wasn’t the first time:
“Peter's idea of disrupting government is out there,” said Bannon. “People thought Trump was a disruptor. They had no earthly idea what was being pitched by Thiel.”
For Trump's science advisor, he suggested Princeton’s William Happer, the country's most prominent climate change sceptic, who taken up the ultimate contrarian position on the subject. Happer had argued that carbon dioxide was not only not harming the planet but that it was actually good for the earth, since trees need the gas to grow. He had likened “the demonization of fossil fuels” to Hitler's treatment of the Jews. Thiel seemed enamoured with the physicist when he visited, failing to appreciate that there was no earthly way that Trump or his staff would put a denier of man-made climate change up for Senate confirmation [emphasis added], no matter how brilliant they thought he was.
Eight years is a long time. And when writing this, Chafkin could not have expected Donald Trump to return to office in 2025, much less that we’d be fully through the looking glass on climate. Even now, it is shocking to consider that climate denial - if it ever was that - is over. Being obsessed with Greenland makes a certain amount of sense if you expect an ice-free Arctic to become a main theatre of geostrategic competition of the rest of this century.
But in 2017, Thiel’s two-month run at being the first “Shadow President” before Elon Musk had a go yielded few obvious successes. Less than 10% of the names he put forward wound up getting jobs with the administration, though some wins proved significant. Thiel chief of staff Michael Kratsios gained a Senate-confirmed tech role, and ultimately oversaw Pentagon R&D in the last months of Trump 1.0.4
Kratsios is now back in government, as chief scientific adviser, and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He recently made remarks that went viral, telling an audience in Austin, Texas: “Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space”.
Elon Musk’s DOGE effort relies less on personnel picks than on infiltrating the data infrastructure of the whole of the federal government. Why seek an office if you plan to eliminate it?
WIRED magazine has far and away done the best reporting on what DOGE has been doing, the people recruited from various parts of the Musk or Thiel networks to carry out the work, and where there have been instances of resistance.
The operation has been audacious, and often cruel, but not random. It is the 21st century equivalent of some colonels with just a few loyal platoons seizing control of the radio station and the national bank in a tropical republic.
The question is, why? Why smash up so much, so quickly, but with specific targets in mind?
Some investigative reporting has looked for examples of pure grift. What government contracts will SpaceX and Tesla get, or how will Elon Musk’s personal tax affairs be treated?
Others suggest it’s a full-bore effort to simply shred the welfare state at stroke, or at least create propaganda wins from claims of fraud and abuse. Wildly exaggerated claims of money saved certainly were made and often debunked.
Because it stands to reason there must be something the world’s richest man is getting out of all of this.
Not until recently has reporting really dug in to what seems the most obvious 5 reason - if you take a step back and think in terms of everything Elon Musk has been telling us for decades about what he believes and what he sees as important. If only it was something as simple as contract for Starlink. Those are table stakes.
The world’s richest man is completely convinced that AI is the key to the future.
As Walter Isaacson wrote in his Musk bio:
He also realised that success in the field of artificial intelligence would come from having access to huge amounts of real-world data that the bots [sic] could learn from. One such gold mine he realised at the time was Tesla, which collected millions of frames of video each day of drivers handling different situations. ‘Probably Tesla will have more real world data than any other company in the world,’ he said. Another trove of data he would later come to realise was Twitter, which by 2023 was processing 500 million posts per day from humans.
He also thinks it’s not safe in anyone else’s hands but his. And the one thing you couldn’t buy, even as the world’s richest man, is the data securely stored in the Digital Holy of Holies. Every tax return, social security file, individual health data from HHS and the VA, satellite imagery, climate models, not to mention the personnel files of 20 million veterans, and tens of millions of current and former federal employees. For decades. Plus contracts, messages, lawsuits, field reports. Immigration records, student loans, FEMA disaster relief payments, voter records, biometric data, passport information, digitised surveillance video. Decades’ worth.
It must run into the exabytes. And at least some of it has already left the building.
And as NPR reported, exfiltrating data from various agencies seems to have already happened on a massive scale. Their reporting recently focused on just one example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.
WIRED reported that one output could be to connect all of these previously separate data lakes in order to create a real-time surveillance tool aimed at immigrants:
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior DHS official tells WIRED. “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
Since president Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, WIRED and other outlets have reported extensively on DOGE’s attempts to gain unprecedented access to government data, but until recently little has been publicly known about the purpose of such requests or how they would be processed. Reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post has made clear that one aim is to cross-reference datasets and leverage access to sensitive SSA systems to effectively cut immigrants off from participating in the economy, which the administration hopes would force them to leave the county. The scope of DOGE’s efforts to support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown appear to be far broader than this, though. Among other things, it seems to involve centralizing immigrant-related data from across the government to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.
In the next chapter we will look at what Musk has been saying for a long time about potential uses for all of this.
What if Collapse is the Point?
Near the beginning of the 1990 film The Hunt For Red October, there’s a lovely scene in which Peter Firth plays a political officer in the Red Navy (delightfully named ‘Iva Putin’). Putin has let himself into the submarine captain’s quarters and is snooping around his books.
Poltical Officer Ivan Putin: [Reading from a book belonging to Ramius, quoting the Bible] And the seventh angel poured his bowl into the air, and a voice cried out from heaven, saying: "It is done." A man with your responsibilities reading about the end of the world. And what's this? "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
Captain Ramius: It is an ancient Hindu text, quoted by an American.
Poltical Officer Ivan Putin: An American?
Captain Ramius: Mmm. He invented the atomic bomb, and was later accused of being a communist.
There are quite a lot of apocalyptic references that Thiel and Musk have made for decades. Some of them have a dark comic side - Musk was quoted by one of his baby-mamas that it was urgent to impregnate as many surrogates as possible to create a “legion” of high-IQ mini-Musks6 ‘before the Apocalypse’.
Some describe the references as cynical moves to create a sense of urgency and crisis to justify their actions. Or the product of Ket-fuelled late night episodes of instability.
But one thing we’ll come back to later is that Thiel, in particular, seems to have thought a lot about crisis and collapse and what comes after. Some speculate that Thiel thinks it’s already happening, and DOGE/smashing US state capacity is both a way to bring it about faster and on his terms.
One of the first crossovers of philosophy and sci-fi I came across, a long time ago, is the beginning of an influential book on moral philosophy written by Scottish-born, Notre Dame-based, Alasdair Macintyre.
Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally, a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.
Later still there is a reaction against this destructive moment and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry, and biology…
What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by fictitious pseudo-scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world I described.
- Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, 1981
Macintyre, insofar as I understand him, is using it as a metaphor for what happened to his field of study, moral philosophy. In his view - a view that has a lot in common of what Thiel has said and written - modernity and the Enlightenment so thoroughly smashed a coherent framework of moral thought that by the time later philosophers sought to stitch it back together they just had fragments.
It’s based on the backstory of a less-well-known 1958 sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz:
and there followed the flame deluge.
Within weeks - some said days - it was ended, after the first unleashing of the Hellfire…
In all parts of the world men fled from one place to other places, and there was a confusion of tongues…
From the confusion of tongues the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: let's stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a Holocaust those who wrought this crime. Together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, then the world should begin again.
So it was that, after the deluge, the fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants for limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons leaders of the mad and mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the side of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds bloodthirsty simpletons
Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We'll build a town and we'll name it Simpletown, 'cause by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard if there is!
To escape the fury of the simpleton packs such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents had survived and could be re occupied, for the religious were less despised by the mob except when they openly defied it and accepted martyrdom. Sometimes such sanctuary was effective, but more often it was not. Monasteries were invaded, records and sacred books were burned, refugees were seized and summarily hanged or burned. The simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as that can occur only when the last traces of social order had gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget, but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurs sporadically even through the 4th generation after the deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.
- Walter M. Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz, 1958
Whether you consider that a metaphor for cultural revolution or some more literal apocalypse, it’s worth considering - as Anne Applebaum does in the above quote to Tim Miller - if this is just occurring to people living through it, shouldn’t we spend some time trying to figure out what two men who have been thinking about this since their childhoods and now have more wealth and power than anyone could have imagined might be prepared to do? How else would you even begin to figure out how to respond.
Back soon with the next part.
So long as they are immigrants of a certain type, let us stipulate.
We’ll come back later to Ghosh.
The Making of Kubrick's 2001, Jerome Agel, 1970
Chafkin, The Contrarian: “Bannon and the other more radical members of Thiel’s circle saw Thiel’s failure to install more allies in the trump White House for the wash out it was. He took a full shot, he got a few wins, and he had more defeats, Bannon said. ‘He failed because Trump turned out to not be a revolutionary.’
Of course, if Thiel really failed, it was partly because he cast his lot with Bannon, who only lasted seven months in the White House. ‘They basically align themselves with the alt right’, said another person who worked on the transition, referring to Thiel and Blake Masters, who served as his deputy. They chose disruption over normalcy and it backfired. In this view, the moderates in Trump's circle, led by his daughter and son-in-law, had squashed the revolution that Bannon teal had plotted.
But Thiel had never counted on a revolution. He always had a backup plan, a hedge. And as the Trump administration began—even as Thiel himself suffered a political setback—the pieces for his next move were well set up.”
Obvious even to bears of small brain like me.
Oops. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-intelligence-iq-mother-inherit-inheritance-genetics-genes-a7345596.html