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Comment by cbb330 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but that take is complete garbage.

Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful. And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.

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> If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him

Kind of hard to do this when he has so much money to buy influence anywhere. An example is how the current vice president of the United States is a protege of the guy.

Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.

But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.

Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.

> his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do

This is false. His ideas get attacked plenty because it's clear that his ideas are destructive to society. But there are only so many times one can have the "holy shit his ideas are destructive to society" conversation without talking about how the only reason his destructive ideas are front and center is because of his money.

I see multiple comments regarding his actual views. Its been pointed out multiple times that hes a believer in a dark-enlightenment, where democracy has run its course and the power should be taken from ordinary people and centralized to the aristocratic elite such as himself.

He uses alot of coded language, hence why he is often called a Crypto Fascist (Crypto as in encrypted language, not cryptocurrency) To anyone knowledgeable enough to own a basic mental cypher, they can decode fascist and monarchist language. He's very clearly a selfish person in the business of consolidating his own power over others to fulfill his outlandish fantasies.

He's deffinately not the only person in the world holding these sorts of views, there is an overabundance of sociopathic elites in the world. But Thiel is able to operate on an influence level beyond that of most sociopaths and thus his wealth is one of the most pressing issues regarding his person. This particular nutjob being far less powerful and wealthy, would preserve alot of our social order.

> “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone”

Taking away the microphone is not censorship. We're not talking about taking away Thiel's right to speech, we're talking about taking away undue amplification of Thiel's speech.

You are allowed to stand on a soapbox and shout your politics.

But if you amplify your speech on that soapbox you're given a little bit of slack because of "free speech" but then are rightly arrested for public nuisance and/or noise violations.

The soapbox-vs-megaphone analogy falls apart fast.

Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.

They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.

If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.

Thiel owns Vance. That's the undue level of influenece that should be illegal via anti-corruption laws.

"Thiel owns Vance" is obviously shorthand, but is there evidence that Vance is actually under Thiel's control or do they just agree on stuff? I think proving corruption would probably require that Thiel personally/materially benefit from actions that Vance takes in office, not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.

Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump

If anything they seem to be friends, with Curtis Yarvin as well, and believes that democracy has run its course. It doesn't really matter if he's just bought by money or if he has bought into the same ideas. Thiel maneuvered Vance into this position using his money and power, and their plans extend far beyond Trump's lifetime.

> not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.

That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.

Does it matter then he can just buy direct political influence and power? He's not winning on the merits of ideas on a marketplace other than getting other billionaires and SV tech people on board as they would be on top of his new hierarchy, much more so than they are today.

Just buy your own vice president if you don't like it!

it's not complete garbage, it's simply the cycle repeating itself.

the resort to violence can be wielded by everybody. therein lies its limitation as an unreliable means to control people and resources. power based on consent, ie, power from below, is predicated on promises proffered by patron-brokers who trade resources for allegiance. it's a comparatively stable structure until it reaches a certain scale. to get to that point, the stakes had to have been raised through manufacturing consent in the forms of ritual, ideology, capital, bureaucracy, and all the other goodies that Girard and Thiel love discussing. throw in the compounded accumulation of resources through arbitrage and leveraged betting, and you're left with social structures characterized by skewed wealth distributions and leaders who get to wield power asymmetrically. there's a clear historical and logical sequence where power by consent leads to power by coercion embodied in hegemony. given that's the current state of affairs, (and no sense in contesting this point since Thiel grapples with this fact himself in his investments and mythologizing of the US through this antichrist/katechon dialectic), it's pretty obvious what tools are left to those who no longer have any control to surrender via the consensual framework. suboptimal as it may be, at least violence-or the threat thereof-can be wielded by both sides.

now, where we land individually on the matter is one thing, but i'm afraid yours is the genteel fantasy.

Thiel believes democracy has run its course and wants to usher in a new world of network states where tech CEOs are feudal lords. This is all to avoid the anti Christ and the rapture.

Nothing the GP said had anything to do with taking away people's voice because they are rich, they are saying just because they are rich they don't automatically deserve a microphone.

HN seems very ready to defend the rich and powerful from attacks that don't even exist and its weird to come here and say how great he is while also seeing what his efforts have actually wrought - nothing positive on education or government overreach via the Trump admin. Paypal may have been ok at one point, but is generally considered to be a terrible company to work with, Palantir is a murderer for hire, and SpaceX burns billions to get us not very much with its continued explosions in the sky with hilarious mars shot promises regardless of its other commercial successes.

> how to not give these people a microphone

Yes, the word is give, as in "we are all giving our time away listening to this dumbass" - nothing about pointing my ears in a different direction is taking away anyone's ability to speak.

Today, the super-wealthy have a megaphone for their worldview that is orders of magnitude more effective than anything anyone else has got. It's not just Thiel: Bezos, Soros, Musk, Paul Singer, and others all are or have been promulgating their worldviews at a scale formerly reserved for nation-states. If unchecked, this inequity will bring us to a world not dissimilar to Byzantine Europe, where the "word of god," as filtered through your lord of choice, utterly dominates the marketplace of ideas.

You're not wrong, but the same megaphone applies to the average Joe. In the early 1990s, unless you were a celebrity or politician, your ideas could not spread beyond the confines of the next city council meeting - at best. Now an average person has far more reach. Yes there's often a cacophony of other information that will drown you out, but it's hardly worse than the previous situation where all media was in the hands of very few, often very wealthy, individuals.

free speech absolutism sounds fair in a vacuum but neglects the power disparity that wealth provides in a connected world. Free Speech is not the concept of anyone can say anything without rules. Its about the ability for those without power to be able to speak on an even playing field as those with power.

The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.

Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.

What's the alternative though? Regulation of speech is often used by those already in power to silence dissent[1]. And there's still plenty a rich person can do to hide themselves as the source of something unsavoury while making it appear "grassroots". Now more than ever, with LLMs and bots.

It's not that free speech absolutism is fair, it's that there's not really an alternative that's any more fair.

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...

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