Where to begin with Peter Thiel? The right-wing venture capitalist and “scourge of Silicon Valley” exploited a middle-class tax break to make billions for himself, helped destroy Gawker, and earlier this month, announced that he was leaving Meta (that’s good) to support pro-Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 midterm elections (that’s not great). “It’s bordering on fascism,” Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, told Time about the PayPal co-founder’s philosophies. “He is hostile to the idea of democracy. That’s pretty scary when you consider the role the companies that he’s been involved in play.”
Speaking of fascism…
Axios reports that Thiel is forking over “$1.5 million into a seed round for a new conservative dating app called The Right Stuff,” which will “be catered to conservatives living primarily in big, progressive cities” and “feel like any other standard dating app,” just with more Confederate flags. The same number of fish photos, though.
If “The Right Stuff” (which was created by Trump’s ex-political aide John McEntee), sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also the name of a “neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, and white nationalist conspiracy theory” website founded by Mike Peinovich. Hmm.
Here’s how the New Yorker described it in 2017:
Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts — amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers — are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.
We didn’t know how good we had it with the Jeremy Renner app. The Right Stuff is expected to launch this summer.
(Via Axios)