Peter Thiel’s Oddly Conventional Defense of Trump
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor, seemed out of place, diminished, when he walked up to a podium at the National Press Club on Monday. Thiel has made a fortune and cultivated a public persona based on his confident predictions about technologies that most of us barely understand. His mode of talking, in the past, could be called utopian/dystopian Manicheanism. He has described a marvellous world that could be—space colonies and abundance fuelled by biotech, cheap energy, and brilliant robots—and then explained why our risk-averse culture and stifling, confiscatory government prevent us from achieving what should be ours.