Before the 2024 election, Piers Morgan interviewed Peter Thiel and asked a question about Luigi Mangione, who murdered a healthcare CEO in cold blood:
And to those who think this shooter is a hero because he did it because he said this healthcare executive was presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover, what would you say to them?
What followed is one of the most excruciating non-answers I have ever heard, but also instructive because, at least to me, Thiel seems like a man contorted by the desire to say what he really thinks but realizes that he can’t screw up Trump’s chances by saying something blatantly evil. He reminds me of the farmer at the beginning of Men In Black who has been infested by an alien that can’t quite wear its human suit right.
I posted the above clip on Twitter yesterday, in the wake of reporting about Palantir’s windfall and the creation of a “master database” on every American. [NYT Gift link]
The post went viral—2.6 million views and counting—for two reasons, in my view. First, it’s remarkable to see someone who advertises themselves as hyper-intelligent and in control, to struggle with such a simple question. He looks like a man consumed by evil. The regulation Wehrmacht haircut doesn’t help the impression.
Second, the accumulation of private data to create a database of every single man, woman and child, including biometric, DNA, tax, medical, psychological and financial information by a corporation on behalf of the government is a non-partisan nightmare.
No one wants a surveillance state. This is what Q believers and MAGA have been told for years that “Soros” was doing. But yet here is this very weird billionaire getting hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to create exactly the sort of centralized Orwellian dystopia they have been warned about.
At the same time, Thiel’s long-time co-conspirator, richest man Elon Musk, has completely fallen off the Trump train:
Musk is furious with the “big, beautiful bill”—for all the wrong reasons—but nevertheless is now in open mutiny with Trump after coming out of his tenure in the White House with a black eye, a bruised ego, and less money than he went in with.
To complicate things further for Trump, Zelenskyy’s historic attack on Russia’s air force has caused a major rift with Putin’s American assets, who are openly siding with Musk and want “heads to roll inside the administration.”
Evil is not an ideology and it is not a plan. It is a human construct that can be described by, as Hannah Arendt said, its “banality” or by its inverse—“the absence of empathy.”
But evil is also chaotic because it universally inflicts pain and suffering on human beings, who universally don’t like it—and naturally seek to stop it. That’s why when governments turn evil, they always fall apart, eventually. It’s just a matter of how much death and destruction they cause on the way out.
Trump’s coalition was always weak, a brittle sort of fascism, constrained by the deteriorating mental condition of its leader, and the narcissism of its participants. In a strange way, the chaos of their collective evil may be our saving grace.
Long live a free America. Heroyam Slava. 🇺🇦
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