Thiel's Escape To Milei's Argentina
Peter Thiel, the billionaire behind JD Vance’s rise to the vice presidency, and one of the key financial backers of the rise of the Fascist States of America, is looking for his exit strategy. He has looked into his palantir and seen something the rest of us cannot.
His kids are now reported to be in school in Buenos Aires. Perhaps there, they will grow up learning about what their father has been a part of doing.
After the Second World War, thousands of Nazis fled Germany. While they went to numerous countries, Adolf Eichmann’s Mossad extraction to Israel, trial, and execution for his key involvement in the Holocaust resulted in Argentina becoming synonymous with these escaping war criminals.
Thiel’s choice of Argentina, then, is deeply symbolic. Nazis escaping after the war were refugees from their own destruction. They had systematically destroyed their own country, their neighbours, and put in place industrial concentration and death camps to legitimise their own sense of moral and ethnic supremacy.
Argentina, today, is run by Javier Milei, a Trump ally. It was only a few months ago, while the American dictatorship was cutting domestic social programs and claiming bankruptcy that they offered Milei a $20 billion bailout to stabilise his crashing economy, conditional on him winning his own re-election. It is no surprise, then, that the country’s government is willing to offer itself as a safe haven for the current generation of escaping Nazis.
Peter Thiel, it should be remembered, wrote in 2009:
Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
It is not a position he has left as open to philosophical debate. He has spent his time since systematically undermining the very fabric of democracy, presumably in the interests of his own freedom.
The company he chairs, Palantir, is at the centre of the American government’s Big Data drive which, in case you were wondering, is not aimed at analysing trends to fix social programs for the betterment of society.
The simultaneous existence of a privately-run database of all details of all people, and an on-going effort to detain and deport “illegal immigrants” by the millions is not coincidental. The United States, even under ostensibly progressive Democrat leaders, already had among the highest incarceration rates in the world. In raw numbers, the United States imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world.
Controlling a people, though, requires more than for-profit prisons and grossly inflated prison populations. It requires full-on concentration camps, and the United States is still building those, in case the lack of recent headlines on the topic caused anyone to forget. Industrial imprisonment requires industrial data, and so it is no surprise to find Palantir’s name turn up here.
When one of the wealthiest and most connected people in the country, whose efforts have gone into installing an openly corrupt government, says that he does not believe democracy and freedom are compatible, you’d best believe he intends to put his money where his mouth is.
Freedom, as it exists for the masses in the United States, is ephemeral. American freedom today is over which brand of car to share ownership with which bank to commute too far to which soul-crushing job while feeding your family from a narrow selection of fast food and grocery chains. The owners of the auto manufacturers, parts suppliers, and fuel companies are the same people, and they own the food supply chain. Freedom in the United States exists principally in the minds of the peasants serving their feudal lords, who are themselves the only ones to have actual freedom.
That true freedom is the ability to enjoy life, to have control over your own time, your own location, your own health, your own priorities. It is the kind of freedom that comes with having enough money that daily stresses are essentially optional, offloadable to others. All are freedoms systematically denied to a working class convinced they are the freest people in the world.
From Thiel’s point of view, freedom and democracy being incompatible is probably correct. True democracy empowers the people, and an empowered people will recognise the oligarchs for what they are, that the assertion of genuine democratic powers is the only way for the masses to enjoy genuine freedom. The extreme prison populations, and the concentration camp system being built to further expand it without the benefit of due process, is essential to keeping freedom exclusive to its current owners.
If, after following in Eichmann’s footsteps in being a key architect of the American concentration camp system, Thiel feels a need to move to Argentina to protect his own freedom, it may be that the Big Data he is working on has warned him that he has pushed too far.
The democracy he fears, that his allies have tried to suppress and destroy, may be regaining enough strength to defeat his brand of freedom. He has access to data that the rest of us do not. He may have seen through his own palantir what the future holds for him and his fellow oligarchs, and he is making sure he, like Adolf Eichmann, has an escape plan.
The sudden need for the person at the very centre of the most extensive data and analysis on every person in the United States ever gathered to hedge, to get his own family a safe haven out of the country, is the most positive sign yet that the collapse of the fascist American administration may finally be on the horizon.