Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

It’s important to see Thiel as a product of Reagan’s reactionary California suburbs and the Hooverite intellectual conspiracy undergirding them, including organizations such as FEE, the AEI, the Mont Pelerin Society, and of course, the Hoover Institution. He came of age in the gentle arms of the cohort of active conservative donors that built on these foundations, the ones who funded the various Reviews, whose beneficiaries fought the campus PC wars, and, after graduation, sabotaged the Clinton administration. Like Dave Packard paying Hoover’s conspiratorial army of flying monkeys with their associations and foundations, Peter Thiel quietly funds a wide variety of ideological projects. His introduction to writing seven-figure checks to the ultra-right was a $1 million donation to Numbers USA, part of the openly racist, anti-immigrant Tanton network and an outgrowth of Ehrlich and company’s zero population growth.76 Thiel took the baton from generations of Stanford racists.