For someone obsessed with the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and other doomsday scenarios, tech baron Peter Thiel sure is keen to place himself within the existing political order’s power elite. An early Silicon Valley recruit to the MAGA movement, Thiel donated heavily to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He then distanced himself from Trump’s 2020 campaign, but resumed his role as a MAGA kingmaker during the 2022 cycle, donating to 16 hard-right House and Senate candidates. And as his pet software and surveillance company Palantir continues to rake in massive government contracts from the second Trump administration, Thiel is already spending big to support the Republican House majority in this year’s midterms.

But electoral politics is just a small part of Thiel’s self-appointed purview as an aspiring thinker of big civilizational thoughts. Since 2006, the reclusive mogul has hosted a series of confabs called Dialog—a private, invitation-only gathering of global power brokers and influencer-types, funded by a cool $16,000 registration fee for participants. Reports of Dialog’s activities have been sketchy at best, since all the group’s sessions are held off the record, and its membership list has been jealously guarded from public view. Until now, that is. On Tuesday, Wired magazine published a trove of leaked Dialog documents and information about the group’s membership.

The leak includes the schedule for the group’s pending August retreat outside Dublin, Ireland. The subject matter gives the lie to the notion that Thiel’s vanity project is brokering any meaningful dialogue, in the sense of a probing exchange of opposing views. Instead, it seems closer to a list of trending topics on Truth Social: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

Read more from Chris Lehmann: https://www.thenation.com/.../peter-thiel-dialog-leak-wired/

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