“If you’re evil, you’re at least competent.
And if you’re evil, you’re not bad.
And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”
—Peter Thiel, 9/23/26
Thursday night in Berlin, billionaire Peter Thiel received the “Axel Springer Award” from a German media company. Thiel’s mother was in attendance, along with CBS News editor Bari Weiss, who introduced him with a fawning, unctuous tribute, calling him “a vanguard of the counter-elite.”
Notably, Weiss was installed at CBS by Larry and David Ellison, close friends of Thiel who agree with his vision of a surveillance state. Weiss has infamously taken a wrecking ball to the CBS news division—and its crown jewel “60 Minutes.” Having her introduce Thiel was a kind of exhibitionist display of elite influence over the media.
“Tonight I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit. Heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent, and that of course is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is many things. He is a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a vanguard of the counter elite. He’s a man whose name itself has become a rorschach test the world over, including judging from the protest down the street here in Berlin. But above all, I would say, Peter Thiel is free.”
Appearing by video for the event were Palantir co-founder Alex Karp and Thiel’s protege, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—who won the same award in 2025.
The night before the ceremony, Thiel was asked in an interview by Axel Springer CEO Matthias Dopfner about the swirling controversy around the science fiction narrative that AI could “kill all humans”: “So why do we always moralize new technologies?”
The answer is one of the scariest and most deeply telling quotes I’ve ever heard.
“Yes, I’m gonna get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And there’s always a question, I like to ask, what is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.
A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. They are a trubby, is a bad car. It works less good than a golf cart. The former East German car. And so if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done. […]
And so if you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. That’s the problem we should actually be talking about.”
Thiel says he admires Goethe’s Faust because even though Faust did a deal with the devil at least he got something done. What Thiel elides in this description are the victims. In order to embark on his grand engineering project Faust and his new partner Mephistopheles have to murder people.
Thiel is explicitly making this claim: Good is better than evil, but evil is better than incompetence—as defined by him.
This is exactly the species of propaganda used by the worst dictators in history. “At least the trains run on time” was a myth used by Fascists in Italy to excuse Mussolini’s violence. It is a call to “order” over morality, the ideological kickstarter for many of the worst atrocities in history.
This was not an offhand remark, although to my knowledge it’s the first time he’s said it in public. Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital—a key role in Thiel’s power structure. Responding to this quote from Thiel, Weinstein confirms that it’s a kind of litmus test. He quotes Thiel as saying—“we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”
Weinstein’s reaction: “I thought it totally logical… This is an old idea of his.”
There is, of course, nothing logical about it. It is simple fallacy created by ignoring the multitude of semantics in English around the word “good.” Thiel is just playing word games to make a false equivalence that suits his worldview.
Eric Weinstein does not just manage Peter’s money. He was also the original member of the deceptively named “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of Thiel-connected elites who deliberately mix pseudo-science, metaphysics, and ideological narratives into allegedly intellectual pursuits. I have referred to them sardonically as “QAnon for rich white people.” They have trafficked in everything from anti-vax narratives, to race science, to mystical ruminations about a “theory of everything.” It’s all nonsense.
This was a relatively struggling effort at spreading disinformation until they received a massive boost in 2018 from a New York Times opinion piece written by the aforementioned Bari Weiss.
This is a perfect example of Thiel’s vast influence network in action, and why his words should be taken very seriously. Bari Weiss did not suddenly discover these people. As a writer for the New York Times, she was part of Thiel’s network. This was patronage—a promotion for Thiel’s purpose-built effort to undermine science, reason, and reality itself in the mainstream media. By participating, Weiss proved to Thiel she was willing “to be confused for evil.” That’s why she’s now editor of CBS News.
Thiel’s CEO protégés, like Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Karp—who together control upwards of $10 trillion in stock market valuation—are another layer of his direct influence. But if the full reality of how OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, and Palantir were built, and the true value of their products were understood, a large majority of that valuation would disappear. These companies are as much influence operations—corporate psyops if you will—as they are technology.
Of course, Thiel also has allies and assets throughout political, socioeconomic, and international spheres of influence, including both the President and Vice President of the United States. They both owe their political careers to him. Trump would not have won in 2016 without Thiel’s help. JD Vance was paid $15 million in 2019 by Peter Thiel to convert to Catholicism and run for Senate—all so Vance could be in a position to be installed as VP. Thiel may be evil itself, but he knows how to play chess.
People from the extended “Intellectual Dark Web” now run NIH, CDC, and HHS. Thiel’s operatives are throughout the White House, the Pentagon, and the right-wing media that covers both. Thiel’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is in charge of Science and Technology for the government, and has access to the most sensitive secrets America controls, including nuclear.
The power Thiel has over America is almost impossible to overstate—despite the fact that he hates it so much he moved to Argentina, a country which once infamously welcomed Nazi refugees after WWII.
At the awards ceremony, Thiel was asked why he identifies so strongly with being a German. In his video greeting, Alex Karp had provocatively called Thiel “the last German.”
With his mother in the audience, Thiel answers that he spoke German until 12 years old and didn’t learn English until they let him watch TV.
Although Thiel was born in Frankfurt, he did not grow up in Germany—he left as a one-year-old. Instead, he deliberately doesn’t mention that spent his youth in Swakopmund, SW Africa, an apartheid town that was cosplaying as the Third Reich through the 1970s. The standard greeting was “Heil Hitler!”
During this time, Peter’s father Klaus was building a uranium mine for apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program, using essentially slave labor.
Thiel, as a young chess-playing gay boy, was brought up to hate people like himself, and anyone else who did not fit the stereotype of a Nazi Youth. But nevertheless, he never truly left Swakopmund. He yearns for the order, the “cleanliness” of the ahistorical Nazi mirage he grew up in. Thiel knows his own childhood is seen as evil to others, but to him, at least it was not incompetent.
Thiel perceived apartheid as an example of efficiency and order, and despises the relative decadence of America. Live action role-playing as a Nazi youth decades ago, Thiel saw a tool that he could use over and over—creating an alternate reality that matches what he wants, and forcing other people to live in it.
This is how he approached investing in artificial intelligence, for example. Thiel didn’t just find smart people to help build the technology, he paid people like cult leader Eliezer Yudkowsky and perpetual conman Sam Altman to create a futuristic alternate reality where AI was either going to kill us all, or create perpetual abundance.
Peter Thiel did not invent AI (OpenAI), social media (Facebook), e-commerce (PayPal), or database software (Palantir). His “investments” are far less about building valuable technology, and much more about psychological warfare campaigns designed to sabotage a civilization he cannot abide.
PayPal was designed to take down the financial system. Facebook was designed to create social chaos. Palantir is designed to replace law enforcement. OpenAI is designed to monopolize knowledge. And Donald Trump is designed to destroy the federal government.
These are not companies or people; they are weapons in his war on Western civilization.
For many years, Thiel has been flirting with the image of the Antichrist. He warns from one side of his mouth that the Antichrist is a “one world totalitarian government” and from the other that it is the Pope and Greta Thunberg—while he builds all the infrastructure to create the dystopia he envisions.
But Thiel’s notion that evil is better than weakness and incompetence is hardly original. It came from one of his favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his last book described the nature of happiness this way:
“Not contentment… not virtue, but efficiency.” —Nietzsche, 1895
The book is called The Anti-Christ.
“What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power…
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness…
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases… Not contentment, but more power… not virtue, but efficiency.
What is more harmful than any vice?
—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
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Can amyone get inside the mind of gay NAZIs? Thiel and Bessent are married to men, GRINDR, a gay "dating" app is flooded whereever and whenever there is Republican conference or rally.
There is deceased Lindsey Graham whose nick was "ladybugs" because of spots on his "taint"
And there are conservative gays like Andrew Sullivan, a outspoken Catholic in a ideology that condemns him.
Finally the leadership of the Stiurmabeitlung, S.A., from Ernst Roehm on down were gay, and during the night of the long knives were shot by the S.S.while in bed with their lovers.
The stereotype of homosexuals as limp wristed fags is all wrong, while DRAG queens and effeminate gays exist, the vast majority or testosterone fueled macho's, you know like Whiskey Pete Headcase.
Like the Village People and leather men.
This is not a homophobic screed either, I am definitely, as John Fuegelsang says, Gay adjacent.
🔥🔥🔥ty