"Peter Thiel sat down with economist Tyler Cowen on the podcast Conversations with Tyler and said liberalism is exhausted, democracy is exhausted, and that Americans need to start asking questions way outside the Overton window.

He compared the United States in the 2020s to Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

That’s not a stray comment.

Thiel was making this point while praising Carl Schmitt, the German jurist who joined The Party in 1933 and used his legal career to help purge Jewish influence from German law and defend Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of political opponents.

Schmitt died in 1985 still unrepentant about backing the regime.

Thiel has cited Schmitt’s work for years as a framework for his own politics.

This is the same guy bankrolling JD Vance’s political career, the guy who funded his Senate run and helped install him as vice president.

A billionaire quoting a Yahtzee legal theorist to explain why American democracy needs to be blown up isn’t some goddamn academic exercise.

The man funding the vice president is telling you exactly what he believes and who he’s citing to get there."

- Newsweek, Conversations with Tyler

- via Eric Blackerby

...............

Response to comments, re capitalism's role in this:

Unrestricted capitalism, greed driven, proves to be absolutely self-destructive.

Restricted by anti-trust, union rights, environmental regulation, proportional taxation, limited corporate subsidizing, etc., capitalism has certainly been constructive, and so that's our job to make it fair again rather than let it go wild and bring down an empire.

The more money you control, the less interested you become in a level playing field, lol.

Ed Harker

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