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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?

Some Irresponsible Speculation

Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?

Some possibilities:

-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.

-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.

-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.

-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.

-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.

It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.

Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power.

This seems the most likely to me. Unlike many here, I've never bought into these "new right" movements like Maga. They feel very synthetic to me (or, as the kids say, fake and gay), in the sense of both being manufactured and specifically being manufactured by people who have dubious belief in the product they're selling. Like having a tattooed pornstar, a WWE Smackdown champ, and an Indian woman praying to a Hindu god featured at the RNC does not strike me as a sincere evolution of the right-wing movement from 20 years ago: it looks more like a spiteful mockery of the Christian right's inability to stop a hostile takeover.

Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper. She presumably meant he was there to lead the right astray into clowning themselves and severing their access to power forever, as she, the stout and civilised pantsuit princess, ascended to the throne as First Woman President and Leader of the Free World.

As is often the case in politics, she was quite deluded about herself. But I think she was basically correct about her opponent.

I keep predicting a market crash, and I keep being wrong, but... well, I'm going to keep predicting it anyway, because the market looks pretty damn irrational to me. And yeah, if you get the largest market crash since the Great Depression, it might be a good idea to be somewhere else, because people are already not in a good mood. There will be calls for heads on pikes.

Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper.

He wasn't their only candidate, and the strategy still gets trotted out: build up the extreme opponent so they take or split the vote from the more moderate guy who would be harder to beat. I still enjoy this piece from Politico where it is claimed the Clinton campaign expected she'd be running against Jeb Bush, and the problem was that his policies were doing better than they expected. So they needed someone on the Republican side to weaken him, by forcing him to move more to the right and thus adopt positions that would alienate moderates, but nobody imagined that Jeb would drop out and Trump would end up as the candidate, much less win against Hillary:

Six months later, Clinton associates' wariness of Bush and his likely financial firepower was still acute: Democratic pollster Celinda Lake wrote to Clinton adviser Minyon Moore to warn her that she’d been testing Bush’s economic message for a client. “It has been remarkably strong. Getting even half of african americans and democrats and two thirds of latinos. Some thought it ended too harsh. But the perspective on the economy has really worked. Now we didn’t tell people this was from bush. But it’s a warning."

So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.

“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."

Salon was equally shocked and disgusted about his victory:

Republican Donald Trump, a far-right demagogue who campaigned on a slew of bigoted, xenophobic policies, has won the 2016 presidential election in a shocking victory few people predicted.

...On April 23, 2015, two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a group message with information for a “strategy call.” The email included as an attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”

The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”

The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”

It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”

The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”

From the memo itself:

Friends,

This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field. Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.

Our Goals & Strategy

Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-­‐in-­‐the-­‐same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal:

  1. Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;

  2. Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;

  3. Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.

To be fair, the strategy worked great! They sure showed Jeb! 😁

Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper. She presumably meant he was there to lead the right astray into clowning themselves and severing their access to power forever, as she, the stout and civilised pantsuit princess, ascended to the throne as First Woman President and Leader of the Free World.

That's what she wanted, her machine reassured her that by boosting Trump she'd have the presidential election in the bag. The entire MSM played along. They couldn't get enough of Trump being a loud obnoxious orange man.

If only they realized that was exactly what people wanted, some one to say fuck you to the "losing respectably" RINOs and cuckservatives in GOP inc.

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