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--:-- Noel King: Everyone knows this was politically motivated. Everyone. Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters responding to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Who even knows what's fully going on, right? But we know, all of us know it's messed up.
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--:-- Noel King: On yesterday's show, we told you about the new right, a group Masters is associated with. It's a small but influential bunch of thinkers and politicians who want to reshape the U.S. with a nationalist bent. They're skeptical of democracy, but that's the system we have, and so they want to win elections, which means they need money. And that is where the billionaire Peter Thiel comes in.
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--:-- Noel King: With somebody like Peter Thiel, it's always hard to tell whether the contrarianism, the desire to just disagree with people comes first or the ideology comes first. But I think they're tied together. Coming up on Today Explained, the man bankrolling the new right and the wildly provocative past that might have you thinking, we should have seen this one coming.
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--:-- Noel King: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out.
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--:-- Noel King: Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian. So Peter Thiel goes from campus conservative to tech investor. He co-founds PayPal. He sells PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. He's an early investor in Facebook. His net worth goes up and up.
--:-- Max Chafkin: When does he start giving money to political candidates? Thiel has considered himself political for like his entire adult life and probably part of his childhood.
--:-- Noel King: His political activity really started to ramp up with the candidacy of Ron Paul. And this is kind of like a weird, forgotten little corner of Silicon Valley history. But Thiel backed a Ron Paul PAC, this very weird PAC that made these like incredibly long YouTube videos that were designed to help Ron Paul win the Florida Republican primary, which he lost very badly.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Attention, Iowa caucus voters. I'm fake Mitt Romney, which makes me remarkably like the real Mitt Romney. But I think what Thiel was trying to do was sort of insert himself into what was becoming a movement, which was this kind of libertarian youth movement that was already happening, like even before Peter Thiel came on the scene.
--:-- Noel King: But by backing this Ron Paul pack, he gets he gets invited to the convention. He gets he gets to speak at these youth groups. And I think that is kind of the beginning of what becomes this, you know, incredibly active and engaged fan base where you have people who are fans of Thiel, not just because of his business success, because he's just another guy who made a lot of money, but because he's a, you know, boundary pushing, you know, libertarian renegade.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Going into the 2016 election, so now we're talking about, you know, 2014, 2015, he's initially backing Carly Fiorina, who doesn't seem like, you know, the kind of new right nationalist populist that you would expect that we've come to associate with Peter Thiel's, just more like a conventional business type.
--:-- Max Chafkin: What is leadership? It's challenging the status quo. It's solving festering problems and it's producing results. That is what I have done all my life. That's how you go from being a secretary to being a CEO.
--:-- Noel King: And I think Thiel backed her partly because she was somebody from his world. You know, she had had run Silicon Valley companies. Maybe he thought he would have a decent amount of influence. But of course, Carly Fiorina washed out and then Thiel was kind of left with a choice. Should he back Ted Cruz or should he back Donald Trump?
--:-- Max Chafkin: And ultimately decided to back Trump partly, I think, because he thought Trump would win. And also because I think there were things about Trump that really kind of spoke to Thiel. Two main ones. One is the immigration thing.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Thiel is going back to his Stanford Review days, right? He's been super hardline on this idea that, you know, the West is somehow under siege. Not a far bridge to get to the kind of hardline, build the wall type stuff.
--:-- Noel King: There's an immigration bubble where we say, you know, it's all good. You shouldn't ask questions. And I think we could have a better policy. I personally would like one like Canada or Australia.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And then the other thing is that Trump was this figure who was kind of saying the unsayable, right? He was getting up on stage at these rallies and saying racist or sexist or just generally offensive things and sending the media and left-wing politicians into kind of a frenzy.
--:-- Noel King: And, of course, that's what Thiel loves. I mean, he was somebody who was directly attacking, you know, what Thiel considers to be, you know, one of the big threats, which is this idea of political correctness.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Do you personally support Mr. Trump's comments and rhetoric before about banning Muslims from traveling to the United States?
--:-- Max Chafkin: You know, I think one thing that should be made distinguished here is that, you know, the media always is taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally.
--:-- Max Chafkin: I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally. So I think it wasn't that Thiel backed Trump despite the provocations. I think it really was the provocations.
--:-- Noel King: And then we get to these provocative candidates associated with the new right, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of them Republicans running for Senate.
--:-- Max Chafkin: So a big source of Thiel's success has been identifying these kind of promising young men. And these could be political rebels of the kind of Stanford Review variety, or they could be kind of the business rebels, right? These guys who are breaking business norms in one way or another, disrupting, and Thiel will identify them, nurture them, and so on.
--:-- Noel King: And so you have this thing where he's found people, people who are these kind of like verbose provocateurs. And that's the category I put both Blake Masters and J.D. Vance's.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Masters has known Thiel for, you know, more than a decade. He got to know him when he was a Stanford law student and Thiel was lecturing about startups.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And I think that class sort of jostled me awake because it was the first time I had had impressive professors, but it was the first time where like someone accomplished from the business world was coming in and not just saying I'm like.
--:-- Noel King: Masters was taking notes in the class. He worked for Thiel as an intern and then became his co-author on Zero to One and then has become this kind of basically Thiel's right-hand man, sort of de facto chief of staff, somebody who was very involved, I think, in the kind of construction of the Thiel myth, but also who had managed aspects of Thiel's business and in particular the Thiel Fellowship, which is this thing where Thiel would pay young people.
--:-- Max Chafkin: You had to be under 20 initially to drop out of college and start a company. And Masters helped administer that program. He's been like Thiel's closest aide, you know, one of his closest confidants over the last decade or so.
--:-- Noel King: Blake, how do primary voters respond when they learn that you're, you know, so heavily backed by a single individual billionaire?
--:-- Blake Masters: I think they're happy that we have one on our side.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Vance is different. Vance, of course, wrote a successful book, Hillbilly Elegy. The two men kind of hitched themselves together. Right around the time the book was published, Vance took a job at one of Thiel venture capital firms.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And then after when Vance sort of struck out on his own and started this fund called Naria Thiel was one of the key investors.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Conservative venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in the video platform called Rumble. It's gained popularity among right-leaning users in recent months.
--:-- Noel King: So I think in both cases, Vance and Masters are extremely ideological, right? They're both hard right populist nationalists kind of in the Trumpist mold.
--:-- Max Chafkin: I think what makes them kind of different than Trump is that they have discipline. Right. And I think that's what Thiel likes about him.
--:-- Noel King: So it's kind of like Trumpism without the erratic behavior, which includes some of the, you know, allegedly corrupt aspects, I guess, of Trump's tenure.
--:-- Max Chafkin: But also, you know, Trump wants to be liked. Right. He's capable of sort of shifting his views and molding them to popular sentiment.
--:-- Noel King: And I think these guys and the political figures that Thiel has found his way to backing are much more ideological.
--:-- Max Chafkin: How important is Peter Thiel's money to the candidacies of these gentlemen?
--:-- Max Chafkin: Well, if you ask them, they would say not that important. But if you ask me, I don't think either of them is a serious candidate without Peter Thiel.
--:-- Noel King: They both owe their careers in some sense to Thiel. And then Thiel has been basically the anchor investor in both their campaigns, giving more than $10 million each in the primary, which is a lot of money.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And of course, by having him there as this anchor donor, that helps them bring in additional money, right, and creates a center of gravity around both candidates.
--:-- Noel King: And I think play an important role, not just in bringing additional funding to those guys, but to getting Trump to endorse both of them.
--:-- Max Chafkin: New right candidates and new right figures are not particularly friendly to gay people. They talk a lot about a family headed by a father and a mother.
--:-- Noel King: Now, the mainstream Republican Party has in large part moved on from that, or at least polling suggests it has. Peter Thiel is gay, and I understand that being gay is only one facet of his identity.
--:-- Max Chafkin: But with everything you learned about him in the course of writing this book, can you discern why a gay man would make common cause with politics that seem retrograde even by the standards of the mainstream Republican Party?
--:-- Max Chafkin: I think that some of this gets inside of Peter Thiel's soul, which, you know, I don't have access to. But I'll tell you what I know based on my reporting, which is that he identifies as a gay man, I think kind of reluctantly, but he identifies more as a contrarian.
--:-- Noel King: Right. And there are other aspects of his identity, I think, that are more important to him.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And we saw that during the Republican National Convention when Thiel gave this speech. I think a really important speech that he really only gave reluctantly because I don't think he wanted to talk about his sexual orientation publicly.
--:-- Noel King: I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
--:-- Max Chafkin: You know, the whole Trump family was up and cheering, and he did it in a way that was designed to say it's OK to to kind of go along with some of the dog whistling and the anti-gay politics that are coming out of the modern GOP because that stuff doesn't matter.
--:-- Noel King: And what really matters is the economy and so on and so forth.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And I also think that, you know, some of this is ideological, but I think a lot of it is just trolling and it's just finding ways to heighten areas of, you know, disagreement with liberals and to push liberals into a position where they're going to say something dumb.
--:-- Noel King: So I think it's important that we take seriously, you know, when there's homophobia or racism that's coming out of corners of our political spectrum.
--:-- Max Chafkin: But I also think it's important that we recognize that not all of it is something that is coming from a deep intellectual place. Some of it is just it's just trolling. It's just provocation for provocation's sake.
--:-- Noel King: I think at some point Peter Thiel makes the statement that freedom and democracy are incompatible.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Yeah. There you go. OK, so that made me think of something the writer James Pogue told me. He said of Peter Thiel, quote, he still loves to try stuff and see what works.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And it made me think the point of a venture capitalist is to try out new ideas, to invest in new companies. Only this time it seems he's less interested in new companies than in new forms of government.
--:-- Noel King: And those forms of government might not include democracy.
--:-- Max Chafkin: I think Thiel has an actual hostility to democracy. It's pretty core to his worldview, actually, that the world would be a better place if people like Peter Thiel had freedom from the popular will, right? If billionaires were able to just do what they want.
--:-- Noel King: And he's built an entire intellectual architecture around that. It's really at the core of a lot of his business ideas, which include letting founders of tech companies, you know, have absolute power over their companies.
--:-- Max Chafkin: Famously, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the absolute dictator of Facebook, right? He can't be fired by the board. He will control it forever.
--:-- Noel King: And I think this is part of what Thiel believes. And I think we're seeing those beliefs kind of coincide with an authoritarian kind of moment in our politics.
--:-- Max Chafkin: And I think Thiel has, you know, as you say, like a venture capitalist, latched onto this. We saw it with Trump and we're seeing it with some of the candidates he's supporting who are in a lot of ways hostile to democracy.
--:-- Noel King: And I think that is the scariest part of Peter Thiel's career, and it's the part that gives me the most pause.
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--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
