Speaking before a group of entrepreneurs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Monday, billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel praised President Donald Trump as a “very healthy corrective,” to the unyielding growth of political correctness.
“I got to meet a lot of people running for president on the U.S. Republican side in 2016 and they all felt like zombies,” Thiel told conference attendees. “They couldn’t say anything different other than programmed ideological soundbites,” later adding that he believes the president is “a very healthy corrective to that.”
“I fully understand why people think of President Trump as a rude, mean person,” added the Silicon Valley investor. “But I think that’s often better than telling beautiful lies about the way the country is working.”
Thiel was the only Silicon Valley titan to endorse then-candidate Donald Trump for president in 2016, drawing the ire of fellow technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — many who supported Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton. Not only was the billionaire investor the first-ever gay speaker at the Republican National Convention, but also played an important role in Donald Trump’s transition team. Thiel was even considered the frontrunner to lead the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Speaking at Turning Point USA’s high school leadership summit in Washington, D.C. in July, Thiel contended that supporting Trump’s candidacy may have been the “least contrarian and the most contrarian thing I’ve done in my life.” “And then in certain contexts like in Silicon Valley, it feels like an incredible contrarian thing where it’s like you’re the only person,” Thiel said. It’s like you’re against everybody, and you always have this sense (of) ‘How can someone who’s in such a small minority ever be right?’”
Espaserated by Silicon Valley’s ever-creeping PC culture, Thiel recently moved to Los Angeles to manage his personal investments. “You’re not getting closer to the truth, you’re getting to something like North Korea or a totalitarian one-party state,” Thiel said of Silicon Valley. “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.”
While speaking at the Brazilian business conference, Thiel also noted,”with all the flaws, all the challenges the Trump administration’s had, I believe it was incredibly important to articulate certain things about how our political institutions and our society were not working as well as before.”