Government 2: Peter Thiel’s Secret Society Is a Window Into a Trojan State
The recent leak of Dialog members is an echo of Propaganda Due—which took down the Italian government.
P2
On March 17, 1981, the Italian financial police raided furniture maker Licio Gelli’s villa in the Tuscan countryside. In the course of the raid, they discovered a list of almost a thousand members of a previously unknown Masonic Lodge.
Gelli, a fascist and former fighter for Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the Spanish Civil War, turned out to be the head of a right-wing secret society known as Propaganda Due, or P2. The name had nothing to do with propaganda as we know it. It came from Propaganda Massonica a Masonic lodge created in the 19th century to keep its prominent membership secret.
Within three months, the discovery of Gelli’s list brought down Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani’s government. Gelli had created a secret society within the secret society of Masonry, that included top figures across government, military, and media. Although the P2 lodge had its Masonic charter revoked in 1976, Gelli maintained this double-shell structure until 1982.
TIME, Italy: A Grand Master’s Conspiracy, June 7, 1981: “The list of alleged P2 members read like an honor roll of Italy. Justice Minister Sarti was listed only as a candidate for lodge membership, but two other Cabinet members—Labor Minister Franco Foschi and Foreign Trade Minister Enrico Manca—were listed as full members. So were such military figures as Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, the Defense Chief of Staff; General Giulio Grassini, chief of the Interior Ministry’s secret intelligence service; and General Giuseppe Santovito, head of the Military Information and Security Service. Financiers included a top official of the Banco di Roma, Italy’s third largest bank, and a former director-general of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, the country’s largest.”
P2 was not just powerful men trading favors. Gelli’s papers included a “Plan for Democratic Rebirth”: a program to concentrate media power, weaken organized labor, strengthen the executive, and remake Italian democracy from inside its existing institutions.
Strategy of Tension
The “strategy of tension” is a political project that encourages chaos, bombings and street violence in order to push a population towards the perceived order of a strong government. It is most closely associated with the Years of Lead in Italy (1968-1982). It was during this period that Licio Gelli’s group P2 was most prominent.
While P2 was never formally found guilty of bombings, it ran cover for terrorist perpetrators and interfered with investigations of their crimes—from inside the government. This includes the Bologna Massacre, a bombing at a train station that killed 85 people, and injured 200, in August of 1980.
P2 was acting as a kind of secret state within the Italian government, one which threatened to swallow Italy whole. While Italy survived the near-collapse that followed the Years of Lead, had P2 not been discovered when it was, it might have grown “too big to fail.”
Dialog
45 years later, a list of several hundred registrants to a secret society have been discovered in America. While this is by no means the full extent of the underlying network, it is a small window into a movement with architectural similarities and remarkably congruent ambitions to Propaganda Due: a Trojan government being orchestrated in parallel to the official one by a secretive group of anti-democratic elites and political operatives.
Here are some of the previous attendees of Dialog, which include people from both sides of the political aisle, including Democrats like Cory Booker, House Intelligence leader Jim Himes, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and the governor who promotes crypto and freed election denier Tina Peters, Jared Polis of Colorado. It also includes a who’s who of antidemocratic operatives like Leonard Leo, Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, Scott Bessent, and Peter Thiel’s Palantir co-founders Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale.
The list was first published by a new reporter in Wired in an article which fails to mention the former editor-in-chief of Wired and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Nick Thompson is also on the list.
The group was started by Thiel and venture capitalist Auren Hoffman in 2006. It also appeared in the Epstein files when someone sent an invitation to Epstein and asked if it was worth attending an event.
Dialog sessions include topics like:
Navigating WWIII
Disinformation and Deepfakes
Democracy Under Surveillance
How’s Your Sex Life?
Build-a-Cult
Thiel has backed even more transgressive events like the “Enhanced Games”—an alternate Olympics that encourages doping and body hacks—and “Hereticon” where topics include “Must a Human Be an Ape?,” “The Bright Side of Nicotine,” and “How to Steal an Election.”
The invitation to Hereticon, put on by Thiel’s Founders Fund, suggests:
“Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough.”
There is a lot more to learn about Dialog, but rather than being the inner lair of Thiel’s influence, it is more like the top of the initiation funnel into a much larger, and darker, network.
The membership of Dialog, spanning the highest levels of government, media, and industry, who all chose to register for a secret society created by Peter Thiel, is not the operational core of Thiel’s influence. But it is just a small window into what I will call Government 2, or G2.
G2
“Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Government 2 (G2) is my name for the long project by Thiel, Musk, and the extended PayPal Mafia network to create a set of parallel services to the U.S. government with the ultimate goal of replacing it altogether.
They are not shy about this. In 2012, at a libertarian student event, Thiel said:
“As a society we may have to still go through one last really crazy bubble but when this one is over it will be time to sort of reassess the entire history of the last 200 years and I think the only thing left standing will be something like a libertarian account of what’s going to happen. When the government bubble breaks the people in this room will be the people who will be the only people who have been right all along.“
Breaking the “government bubble” is Peter Thiel’s chief goal because he believes he has a better alternative. For years, Thiel’s CIA-backed surveillance and data mining company Palantir described itself as: “the operating system for the government.”
But when you connect the various pieces of Thiel’s extended network together, it’s not just the operating system G2 intends to replace; it’s essentially everything.
Three G2 companies have already been deeply integrated into the government, receiving billions of dollars in government contracts for projects like Trump’s “Golden Dome” boondoggle, and placing operatives throughout the regime, including the “Department of War” CTO Emil Michael, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. These companies represent an alternate military-industrial complex.
Palantir: Central operating system, surveillance, data collection
SpaceX: Satellites, communications, AI, rockets, chips
Anduril: Drones, military weaponry
Thiel’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is currently Trump’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and is collecting all the government’s secrets under one project.
One of Thiel’s long-time operatives, and a Dialog member, venture capitalist Jim O’Neill, oversaw the dismantling of the CDC. Measles is now rampant in some areas of the U.S., and there is an Ebola outbreak in Africa due to DOGE cuts. O’Neill has been nominated to lead the National Science Foundation.
Infamously, in the first few months of Trump’s reign, Musk’s DOGE ran roughshod through the government, accessing vast troves of data, and destroying many of the systems that would regulate or exercise oversight over G2 companies. This was a calculated strike to set the stage for Government 2.
And until recently, PayPal Mafia member David Sacks was the White House “AI and Crypto Czar” helping to inflate the AI bubble to extreme, dangerous dimensions. He is now co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Despite their success, G2 leaders know, as did the leaders of Propaganda Due, that without control of the media, there is no chance of getting away with such a wide-ranging plot. That’s why G2 has recruited Thiel’s old friends the Ellison family to gobble up mainstream media and covertly promote the G2 project. G2-aligned entities now control: TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, CBS, Warner Bros./CNN, Paramount, Fox, and a vast network of digital channels and influence agents.
“The real power lies in the hands of the owners of the mass media.”
—Licio Gelli
Trojan State
When you add it all up, Government 2 is not just a “reactionary” movement. It is a seditious Trojan state, doing as much damage to the existing government as it can from the inside out and preparing the population for a takeover through media capture.
With Donald Trump’s decline into dementia, and his increasingly dysfunctional regime, G2 sees a perfect opportunity over the next two years to make itself too big to fail. Peter Thiel’s personal project JD Vance was installed as Vice President for just such a purpose.
It’s easy to become lost in the onslaught of transgressions by the Trump regime, and to see it as an aberrant period through which we must simply endure. But for Government 2, the chaos, suffering and death is a feature, not a bug—and the Constitution is just a dusty old relic.
The U.S. government is being shed, like a snakeskin.
“The accumulation of all powers… in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
—James Madison, Federalist 47
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