Rewriting the plan of the world: Peter Thiel’s messianic rhetoric and the end of progressive neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Following the 2007–8 financial crisis, far-Right conservatives advanced a reactionary political turn, seeking to replace the prevailing political order, what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism,” with an overtly exclusionary and rapacious form of capitalism. This article investigates how entrepreneur Peter Thiel sought to shape this transition, adopting a messianic rhetoric to return capitalism to its essential principles. Employing Giorgio Agamben’s study of Saint Paul, I argue that Thiel employed a Pauline stance to realize a plērōma, or fullness, of capitalism, preserving the profit motive while jettisoning neoliberalism’s deployment of progressivism. In this analysis, I build upon rhetorical scholars’ exploration of contemporary neoliberal discourse, framing the billionaire rhetor as a uniquely agentive figure in twenty-first-century capitalism and positing neoliberalism as an eminently versatile rhetorical logic capable of operationalizing arguments from across the political spectrum.

KEYWORDS:

• Peter Thiel
• neoliberalism
• theology
• fascism
• messianism

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dana Cloud for her deeply incisive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 CNN, “Peter Thiel’s Entire Republican Convention Speech,” YouTube, July 21, 2016, video, 5:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUTnOQZOYv0.

2 In 1996, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined “The Californian Ideology,” the name of “a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley” (44–5). Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.

3 See Rebecca Nelson and National Journal, “The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-secret-republicans-of-silicon-valley/451086/.

4 See Lisa Friedman and Ryan Mack, “White House Condemns Elon Musk for Spreading ‘Antisemitic and Racist Hate,’” New York Times, November 17, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/us/politics/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-house.html and Jack Ewing, “Federal Lawsuit Accuses Tesla of Racial Discrimination,” New York Times, September 28, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/business/tesla-eeoc-discrimination-black-workers.html.

5 Hanna Ziazy, “The UK Economy Still Can’t Cope with the Consequences of Brexit,” CNN, August 29, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/29/economy/uk-food-imports-safety-brexit/index.html.

6 Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) (London: Verso, 2022), 29.

7 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 29.

8 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 30.

9 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 33.

10 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 39.

11 Steven Greenhouse, “‘Old-School Union Busting’: How US Corporations Are Quashing the New Wave of Organizing,” Guardian, February 26, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/amazon-trader-joes-starbucks-anti-union-measures.

12 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 39; see Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (London: Verso, 2019), 10.

13 Martín Carcasson and Mitchell F. Rice, “The Promise and Failure of President Clinton’s Race Initiative of 1997–1998: A Rhetorical Perspective,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 243–74; Jeff Weaver, How Bernie Won: Inside the Revolution That’s Taking Back Our Country—and Where We Go from Here (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018).

14 The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “FACT SHEET: Obama Administration’s Record and the LGBT Community,” The White House, June 9, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/09/fact-sheet-obama-administrations-record-and-lgbt-community; David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 571–3; David Sirota, “Obama Was Always in Wall Street’s Corner,” Jacobin, June 2, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/06/barack-obama-ezra-klein-nyt-wall-street-bailouts.

15 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 125.

16 See Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), 4 and Bill Jordan, Why the Third Way Failed: Economics, Morality and the Origins of the ‘Big Society’ (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2010), 1–22.

17 Fraser, Old, 10.

18 Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023), 2.

19 Toscano, Late Fascism, ix.

20 Toscano, Late Fascism, 72.

21 Toscano, Late Fascism, 113 (emphasis in the original).

22 See Samuel Huneke, “The Pendulum of Queer History,” The Baffler, July 6, 2023, https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-pendulum-of-queer-history-huneke.

23 Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Rise of the Thielists,” The New Yorker, May 13, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-rise-of-the-thielists.

24 Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Perth: Imperium Press, 2023), 5, 10, and 17.

25 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 10.

26 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 10; Yarvin, a blogger, cultural figure, and proponent of the dark enlightenment, is most notable for coining the phrase “red-pilled” to connote “the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.” Jacob Siegel, “The Red Pill Prince,” Tablet, March 30, 2022, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin. Yarvin is also, notably, a close associate of Peter Thiel. James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets.

27 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 92–3; see Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

28 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 4; Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.

29 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 4.

30 Toscano, Late Fascism, 72.

31 See Tooze, Crashed and Jordan, Third Way.

32 David Graeber observed in 2014 that Zero to One calls for a “cultural revolution.” “David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?,” The Baffler, September 19, 2014, video, 1:03:06, https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel; see Roxanne J. Fand, “Reading The Fountainhead: The Missing Self in Ayn Rand’s Ethical Individualism,” College English 71, no. 5 (2009), 486–505.

33 As I will subsequently contend, Thiel’s rhetoric resurrects arguments of the Geneva, Austrian, and Chicago Schools of Economics. See Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

34 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 103–4.

35 David W. Seitz and Amanda Berardi Tennant, “Constitutive Rhetoric in the Age of Neoliberalism,” in Rhetoric in Neoliberalism, ed. Kim Hong Nguyen (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 110; Damien Smith Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric, Civic Attention, and Common Sensation in Sergey Brin’s ‘Why Google Glass?,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 2 (2019): 182–203; Mark Meister and Carrie Anne Platt, “Warren Buffet’s Celebrity, Epideictic Ethos, and Neoliberal Humanitarianism,” in Nguyen, Rhetoric in Neoliberalism, 40.

36 Emma Haslett, “Tesla: The Trillion-Dollar Personality Cult,” The New Statesman, November 4, 2021, https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2021/11/tesla-the-trillion-dollar-personality-cult.

37 See Jeffrey St. Onge, “Neoliberalism as Common Sense in Barack Obama’s Health Care Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2017): 295–312 and John Sloop, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch: The Sport’s Power, Profit, and Discursive Politics (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2023).

38 Toscano, Late Fascism, 113; Rachel C. Riedner, Writing Neoliberal Values: Rhetorical Connectivities and Globalized Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Jennifer Wingard, Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation-State (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).

39 In this insistence, I follow scholarship that has understood capitalism as an essentially theological project. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 5 and Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 2022).

40 See Kim Hong Nguyen, ed., Rhetoric in Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Sloop, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch; and Riedner, Writing Neoliberal Values.

41 Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric,” 185.

42 Norman Fairclough, New Labour, New Language? (London: Routledge, 2000).

43 Fairclough, New Labour, New Language?, 43.

44 Michael Sherer and Sarah Ellison, “How a Billionaires Boys’ Club Came to Dominate the Public Square,” The Washington Post, May 1, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/01/billionaires-politics/.

45 Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric,” 186.

46 Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric,” 185.

47 Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric,” 200.

48 Meister and Platt, “Warren Buffet’s Celebrity,” 42.

49 Meister and Platt, “Warren Buffet’s Celebrity,” 40.

50 St. Onge, “Neoliberalism,” 296.

51 St. Onge, “Neoliberalism,” 296.

52 St. Onge, “Neoliberalism,” 302.

53 Sloop, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, 142.

54 Toure F. Reed, “Between Obama and Coates,” Catalyst Journal 1, no. 4 (2018), https://catalyst-journal.com/2018/03/between-obama-and-coates.

55 See Toscano, Late Fascism, 113 and Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013).

56 Wingard, Branded Bodies, 111.

57 Catherine Chaput also offers a substantive analysis of neoliberal branding in the context of “Trumponomics.” See Catherine Chaput, “Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 2 (2018): 194–209.

58 See Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961): 209–10; Edward P.J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann and others, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

59 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 33.

60 Badiou, Saint Paul, 13.

61 Badiou, Saint Paul, 87.

62 Badiou, Saint Paul, 89.

63 Agamben, Time, 95 and 107.

64 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 108.

65 Agamben, Time, 106–7.

66 See Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

67 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

68 Agamben, Time, 105 (emphasis in the original).

69 Max Chafkin, The Contrarian (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 4; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), 252.

70 Chafkin, Contrarian, 51; David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (Oakland: The Independent Institute, 1998).

71 Billy Gallagher, “Zero to One: How Blake Masters Went from Being Peter Thiel’s Student to Co-Author,” TechCrunch, September 16, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/zero-to-one-how-blake-masters-went-from-being-peter-thiels-student-to-co-author/; Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Currency, 2014).

72 Chafkin, Contrarian, 262.

73 Rae Hodge, “What Does Peter Thiel Want? He’s Building the Right-Wing Future, Piece by Piece,” Salon, March 27, 2023, https://www.salon.com/2023/03/27/what-does-peter-thiel-want-hes-building-the-right-wing-future-piece-by-piece.

74 As Agamben contends, “The messianic plērōma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katargēsis.” Employing Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung, Agamben suggests that law finds its ultimate fulfillment in the sublation of the law, in its contradictory suspension and preservation. Agamben, Time, 108; Alenka Zupančič elaborates that Aufhebung denotes a suite of meanings, including “to negate/cancel/annihilate, to preserve, and to ‘lift’ or elevate (to a higher level).” Alenka Zupančič, “Hegel and Freud: Between Aufhebung and Verneinung,” Crisis & Critique 4, no. 1 (2017): 481.

75 Slobodian, Globalists, 17.

76 Slobodian, Globalists, 89 and 119.

77 Slobodian, Globalists, 46.

78 Slobodian, Globalists, 161.

79 Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume II: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 66–7.

80 Slobodian, Globalists, 183.

81 Rob Van Horn, “Reinventing Monopoly and the Role of Corporations: The Roots of Chicago Law and Economics,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 204.

82 Van Horn, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 218–20.

83 William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Soverignty and the Logic of Competition (Los Angeles: Sage, 2017), 55.

84 Davies, Limits of Neoliberalism, 56.

85 Richard Feloni, “Peter Thiel Explains How an Esoteric Philosophy Book Shaped His Worldview,” Yahoo Finance, November 10, 2014, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-explains-esoteric-philosophy-221708682.html.

86 See Geoff Shullenberger, “The Scapegoating Machine,” The New Inquiry, November 30, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/the-scapegoating-machine/.

87 René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being, ed. Cynthia L. Haven (New York: Penguin Books, 2023), 10.

88 Shullenberger, “Scapegoating Machine.”

89 Alexander Douglas, “The Dirty Politics of Scapegoating—and Why Victims Are Always the Harmless, Easy Targets,” The Conversation, November 22, 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-dirty-politics-of-scapegoating-and-why-victims-are-always-the-harmless-easy-targets-66963.

90 Peter Thiel, “The Optimistic Thought Experiment,” The Hoover Institution, January 29, 2008, https://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-thought-experiment. see Harry M.J. Tonks, “What the 1990s Did to America,” Public Books, May 17, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/what-the-1990s-did-to-america/. In this argument, Thiel joins with contemporary New Right critics in reanimating the pejorative term “globalist,” a term that not only operationalizes neoliberal claims to combat the lingering progressive internationalism of the 1990s but that, previously, functioned as a xenophobic and antisemitic slur. See Ben Zimmer, “The Origins of the ‘Globalist’ Slur,” The Atlantic, March 14, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-origins-of-the-globalist-slur/555479/.

91 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

92 Much of Thiel’s thinking on apocalyptic matters is lifted directly from Girard. For Girard, the apocalypse, which the Christian tradition anticipates, is the ultimate negative consequence of the violence that follows from mimesis. See René Girard, “On War and Apocalypse,” First Things, August, 2009, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/08/on-war-and-apocalypse.

93 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

94 Agamben, Time, 62; Adam Kotsko notably argues that such a claim rests “on questionable ground.” Adam Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 102.

95 Agamben, Time, 62; see also The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

96 This is not to say, however, that Thiel is not otherwise apocalyptic in his outlook. Indeed, he is one of many billionaires actively preparing for a doomsday event. See Chafkin, Contrarian, 107–8.

97 Gilbert and Williams, Hegemony Now, 29.

98 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

99 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

100 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

101 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

102 Thiel has generally avoided offering a clear pronouncement on governance other than to suggest methods for escaping the reach of the progressive state. Thiel, “Education.” However, in a 2022 interview, Thiel offered an assessment of the nation, disparaging state power and violence while nevertheless defending the state’s essential function in maintaining global order: “We still need some kind of the old sacred structures, of the old violent structures, to make things work. We shouldn’t get rid of them altogether.” He further added, “The state contains violence in both senses of the word. The nation state contains violence, it is part of its very being … [but] it also limits violence.” Meeting of the Minds with Jeffrey Bowyer, “Peter Thiel: The State Contains Violence,” YouTube, September 29, 2022, video, 59:02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh_nxwTwKrg.

103 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

104 Thiel, “Optimistic.”

105 Thiel, “Optimistic.” In rejecting the efficient market hypothesis, Thiel evokes the arguments of Röpke and other Geneva School neoliberals who sought to protect the global economy from excessive competition. See Slobodian, Globalists, 269.

106 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/.

107 Thiel, “End.”

108 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 10; Thiel, “End.”

109 Slobodian, Globalists, 113.

110 Tess Owen, “They Love Jesus, Bon Iver, and Incels: Inside America’s New Ultranationalist Youth Movement,” Vice, June 7, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzgb4/groyper-young-christian-nationalists-movement; Thiel, “End.”

111 In several instances, Thiel has disparaged racial inclusion in his critique of the social justice agenda of Third Way politics. A 1996 op-ed co-written with David Sacks (Thiel’s co-author of The Diversity Myth (1995)) characterizes affirmative action as fundamentally racist because, as the article alleges, it rewards minority students whose grades and scores would not have allowed admission under a merit-based system. David Sacks and Peter Thiel, “The Case Against Affirmative Action,” Stanford Magazine, September/October 1996, https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-case-against-affirmative-action.

112 Thiel, “End.”

113 Thiel, “End.”

114 Thiel, “End.”

115 Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 3.

116 Thiel, Zero to One.

117 See Anne Sraders, Jessica Matthews, and Lucy Brewster, “How to Land a Job in Venture Capital, According to 4 Top VCs,” Fortune, May 25, 2023, https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/how-to-get-hired-venture-capital-career/ and Anna Merlan, “Peter Thiel’s Investment Firm Is Backing a Menstrual Cycle-Focused ‘Femtech’ Company,” Vice, September 6, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axnab/peter-thiels-investment-firm-is-backing-a-menstrual-cycle-focused-femtech-company.

118 Van Horn, “Reinventing Monopoly,” 218–20.

119 Thiel, Zero to One, 6.

120 See Shivangi Acharya and Sarita Chaganti Singh, “G20 to Discuss International Debt Architecture, More Loans to Developing Nations,” Reuters, July 13, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/india/g20-discuss-international-debt-architecture-more-loans-developing-nations-2023-07-13/ and Thiel, Zero to One, 9.

121 Thiel, Zero to One, 9.

122 St. Onge, “Neoliberalism,” 296.

123 See Tim Schwab, “Big Philanthropy,” The Baffler, November, 2023, https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/big-philanthropy-schwab and Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York: Vintage, 2022), 41.

124 Thiel, Zero to One, 10.

125 See René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 8–12 and Van Horn, “Reinventing Monopoly,” 218–20.

126 Thiel, Zero to One, 21.

127 Thiel, Zero to One, 24.

128 Thiel, Zero to One, 148–51.

129 Catherine Chaput, Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019), 96.

130 See Van Horn, “Reinventing Monopoly.”

131 Thiel, Zero to One, 56.

132 See Joseph L. Bower and Clayton Christiansen, “Disrupting Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Harvard Business Review, January, 1995, https://hbr.org/1995/01/disruptive-technologies-catching-the-wave and Nitasha Tiku, “An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption,” Wired, October 22, 2010, https://www.wired.com/story/alternative-history-of-silicon-valley-disruption/#:~:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9Cdisruptive%20innovation%E2%80%9D%20was,develop%20simpler%2C%20cheaper%20innovations%2C%20introduce+.

133 Thiel, Zero to One, 6 and 35.

134 Thiel, Zero to One, 1.

135 Thiel, Zero to One, 2 (emphasis in the original).

136 Thiel, Zero to One, 2.

137 Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 56.

138 Thiel, Zero to One, 81. See also Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1969) and John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008).

139 Thiel, Zero to One, 175.

140 Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 18 Notes Essay,” CS183: Startup—Peter Thiel Class Notes, June 6, 2022, https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes.

141 Masters, “CS183.”

142 Masters, “CS183.”

143 See René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

144 Thiel, Zero to One, 181.

145 Thiel, Zero to One, 181.

146 Thiel, Zero to One, 186.

147 Crouch, The Strange, 56; Michael J. Steudeman notably charges Trump with a similar use of the ad hominem argument. Michael J. Steudeman, “Demagoguery and the Donald’s Duplicitous Victimhood,” in Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump, ed. Ryan Skinell (Exeter: Societas, 2018), 21–38.

148 Patricia Roberts-Miller, Rhetoric and Demagoguery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019).

149 Thiel, Zero to One, 188.

150 In Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the prime movers of global society abdicate their roles and withdraw to a hidden mountain redoubt in response to innovation-stifling collectivism. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957); Thiel, Zero to One, 189.

151 Land, Dark Enlightenment, 10; Meeting of the Minds with Jeffrey Bowyer, “Peter Thiel: The State Contains Violence.”

152 Thiel, “Education.”

153 Derek Thompson, “Peter Thiel’s Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I’ve Read,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/peter-thiel-zero-to-one-review/380738/.

154 Seitz and Tennant, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 109.

155 See Ronan Farrow, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule,” The New Yorker, August 21, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule.

156 Sloop, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, 142.

157 Fraser, Old, 26.

158 See Joshua Gunn, Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020).

159 See James Pogue, “Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing for Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, February 21, 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/new-right-civil-war and Julia Yost, “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” New York Times, August 9, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/nyc-catholicism-dimes-square-religion.html.

160 Pogue, “Inside the New Right.”

161 See Erin Griffith, “From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money,” New York Times, December 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/technology/tech-startups-collapse.html.