Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley Like ‘North Korea’

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel compared Silicon Valley’s one-party culture to “North Korea” in a speech to last week’s Turning Point USA conference, a gathering of conservative high school students in Washington, DC.

The Washington Times reported:

Speaking to a raucous crowd of conservative teenagers Wednesday evening, Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel lamented that the United States is turning into an authoritarian state like North Korea due to rampant political correctness that is stifling the sharing of ideas.

…

“I supported [Donald] Trump for president in 2016,” Mr. Thiel said, prompting a wave of applause from the young audience. “And it was in some ways both, perhaps, the least contrarian and the most contrarian thing I’ve done in my life. It was the least contrarian, because how far off can something be if half the country agrees with you?

“And then in certain contexts like in Silicon Valley,” he continued, “it feels like an incredibly contrarian thing where it’s like you’re the only person [supporting Trump]. It’s like you against everybody, and you always have this sense [of] ‘How can someone who’s in such a small minority ever be right?’”

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“If you get to unanimity, if you get to 99 to 1… You’re not getting closer to the truth, you’re getting to something like North Korea or a totalitarian one-party state,” he said. “And it’s certainly in a lot of the contexts that we find ourselves in. What’s very odd is that we’re living in something where the politics is this overwhelmingly one-sided, and it’s not an indicator that people have figured out the truth, it’s an indicator that there’s an incredible amount of political correctness and people can’t talk about the truth.”

 

Thiel was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2016. He is known for his libertarian views, and also supports the president’s policies on trade.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.