Non-Vampiric Peter Thiel's New Senate Candidate Is An Uncanny Valley of New American Conservatism

US Senate candidate Blake Masters, described by the mainstream press as German-American billionaire Peter Thiel’s “protege,” is a fount of apple pie conservatism lately — and has become a favorite of some MAGA-world pundits. Masters, in particular, has positioned himself as an anti-establishment champion of parent’s rights and educational freedom.

In exploring his candidacy, Masters opens up his ideological master — Peter Thiel — to some further scrutiny.

Thiel, of course, enjoyed a number of cameos toward the start of the MAGA years, and was heralded by some in the MAGA media bubble as a kind of enlightened deepstate technocratic elder who had come over to Donald Trump’s side, showing Trump which scary pitfalls to avoid, and gingerly guiding him through Silicon Valley’s hall of mirrors. In one photo opp, Trump is shown literally clasping Thiel’s hand appreciatively (see above), as if some unknowable great burden was defused due to Thiel’s timely assistance.

If a protege is defined by his master, and if a student is to a degree molded by the teacher, then we should see some of that apple pie conservatism reflected in Peter Thiel’s past. Instead, we find a bizarre Where’s Waldo of admittedly impressive deepstate and investment fund accomplishments that have nothing to do with American limited government conservatism, and may even be at complete odds with the cultural and economic goals of American conservatism, and/or modern populism.

Consider, if you will:

Thiel has been widely credited (see above) as funding the lawsuit that shattered blog news empire Gawker Media years ago, as purported retribution for an article about his personal life. Senate candidate Blake Masters has vocally if indirectly supported Thiel’s unilateral destruction of an entire media organization that put food on the table for many staff writers and contributors. Destroying media outlets (“job providers”) because they wrote a blog post about your personal life you didn’t like isn’t populist, it’s pathological.

Thiel, best known for being a founder of PayPal and the first external investor in Facebook, was also the co-founder of deepstate data crunching firm Palantir — which recently boasted it helped “millions” of Americans get to mRNA vaccine injection sites around the nation. Palantir quietly led the charge. Part of Big Tech’s ability to geolocate and harass, I mean tailor, messages to the “vaccine hesitant” was powered by Palantir. Not a populist value; pathological.

Strangest of all, perhaps, a bevy of mainstream media outlets including Vanity Fair in 2016 and early 2017 published anecdotes, claims, and conjecture that billionaire Thiel was interested in consuming kids’ blood to extend humanity’s lifespan — then the claim disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, debunked by the same media outlets that uninvited and unannounced had brought up the topic to begin with. Drinking teen blood to extend your life; not a cultural conservative value. Pathological and self-centered Silicon Valley elite behavior, perhaps, but not culturally conservative activity.

So, in assessing whether Blake Masters is an asset to the freedom-loving post MAGA world, conservatives in D.C. and around the country need to ask a sobering but key question: is this a genuine candidate with his own opinions and worldview? And if not, is this person just basically a loyal proxy for Peter Thiel?

If Thiel — who is definitely not interested in teen blood, and definitely didn’t unilaterally fund the destruction of a media company that reported on his personal life, and definitely also didn’t profit more than almost anyone from deepstate data mining that rushed Americans into taking an experimental mRNA therapy that may have been unnecessary, and also reportedly hoarded more than $5 billion in a tax-free Roth IRA typically intended for blue collar workers and the aging middle class saver… if Thiel wants a Senate seat, he should run for it himself.

And that would present him the opportunity to explain his track record, which is the track record of a Silicon Valley power broker who was enriched greatly by the pandemic, not a conservative kingmaker, and not a constitutionalist in any tangible shape or form.

—FULCRUM Research