Simon Gros

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At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring struggles over institutional power, public language, and the moral self-understanding of Western societies. He described his early immersion in what he called the “culture wars” and “campus wars,” including the founding of a conservative student newspaper, the Stanford Review, and suggested that what initially looked like parochial arguments about university curricula ultimately functioned as proxies for broader contests over civilizational inheritance and legitimacy.

To establish continuity between those earlier debates and contemporary controversies, Thiel returned to a signature episode at Stanford: protests against the “Western culture” core curriculum, condensed in the chant “Western culture’s got to go,” and the subsequent replacement of canonical texts with a revised set of readings. He presented this episode as simultaneously narrow and expansive: narrow insofar as it concerned a particular freshman requirement, expansive insofar as it posed an implicit question about whether “Western civilization” could still be affirmed as a coherent, teachable object of loyalty. In this context, he recalled co-authoring The Diversity Myth in the mid-1990s, an anti–political correctness critique that, in his telling, attempted to “speak truth to power” within the university while warning that academic ideas would migrate outward, shaping corporate, bureaucratic, and political life over time.

Thiel illustrated the intellectual style he opposed by reading from Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, a reworking of Shakespeare in which Prospero is interpreted as a colonial oppressor and Caliban as a revolutionary subject who rejects humiliation and condescension, promises retaliation, and declares the “old world” to be collapsing. Thiel’s point was less literary than diagnostic: he treated the adoption of such reinterpretations as evidence that moral and political categories—victim and oppressor, liberation and domination—were being embedded in educational institutions as organizing principles, and that these principles, repeated and reinforced, would eventually structure how elites narrated history and justified authority.

From this retrospective, Thiel argued that his earlier critique had been substantially vindicated in its particulars—he suggested he would change little of the book’s concrete claims—yet he also insisted that a long defeat should force a different kind of reckoning. If one has “lost” an argument for decades, he said, the appropriate question is not only what one misjudged, but whether one failed to identify the real center of gravity. He used the ambiguity of his book’s title to frame that admission. One can stress “diversity,” yielding the familiar conservative objection that institutions pursue demographic representation while suppressing genuine pluralism of ideas. But, Thiel suggested, a deeper critique stresses “myth”: diversity functions as an undefined term whose vagueness is not accidental but operational. In his account, the concept’s power lies partly in its indeterminacy, allowing it to serve as an instrument of attention management—an emotionally charged focus that narrows debate, redirects scrutiny, and draws energy away from issues that may be more materially consequential.

On that basis, he proposed three domains that he believed deserved priority over symbolic or procedural disputes about diversity: economics, science and technology, and religion—particularly Christianity. His economic argument began with a familiar claim in both libertarian and Marxist critiques of identity politics: dividing populations primarily by race and gender can push class and political economy into the background. Thiel noted that the rise of diversity-centered frameworks since roughly the 1970s coincided with decades of stagnant or uneven growth and sharply rising inequality. He emphasized that correlation does not by itself establish causation, but argued that the temporal overlap is large enough to justify asking whether cultural focus has been politically useful to economic arrangements that concentrate gains.

He then advanced what he described as an underrated framework positioned “halfway between libertarianism and Marxism”: Georgism, associated with the 19th-century economist Henry George, which treats land and real estate as structurally central to inequality. Thiel argued that runaway property values can capture a disproportionate share of social growth for landlords and asset-holders, generating a large-scale transfer from renters to owners, and that this dynamic can become self-reinforcing through restrictive housing policies and “NIMBYism.” He suggested that in high-demand cities—he cited examples such as London, New York, and San Francisco—housing-market constraints create perverse incentives in which additional supply can reduce aggregate property values, encouraging political resistance to building. In his telling, the result is not merely expensive housing but a social structure in which the difference between owning and renting, relatively muted in earlier decades, becomes a decisive axis of stratification.

To convey how counterintuitive he finds the persistence of these urban price dynamics, Thiel offered a hypothetical: if, at the height of the mid-2000s housing bubble, one had predicted that rents in Manhattan or San Francisco would double within less than two decades, he would have regarded it as implausible on the assumption that people would simply move. That they often did not, he suggested, implies additional forces—social, ideological, and institutional—that discourage exit. He offered deliberately provocative examples of how fear narratives might function: gay residents being told that leaving a core city would expose them to violence, or women being told that relocating to more affordable regions would subject them to coercive reproductive policies. He did not present these as literal conspiracies so much as stylized illustrations of how moralized discourse can keep populations anchored in high-cost environments, thereby sustaining the economic rents that accrue to property owners. The scale of the transfer, he argued, should at least make it legitimate to ask whether the surrounding ideological environment has been actively cultivated, or whether it operates as an “as if” conspiracy that produces similar outcomes without explicit coordination.

He extended this analysis to universities, treating elite institutions as both participants in and beneficiaries of the same urban political economy. He suggested that faculty members in expensive academic hubs face deteriorating material conditions, contributing to professional radicalization and a sense of proletarianization. As an example of how he wants audiences to think about these pressures, he recounted a remark he had made elsewhere: if an Oxford faculty member could afford to purchase J.R.R. Tolkien’s former house at market price, that fact itself would demand scrutiny, because it would be difficult to reconcile with typical academic compensation. The point was to frame elite urban real estate as a hidden constraint shaping institutional behavior and ideological postures, and to argue that cultural disputes may be downstream of material conditions rather than primary causes.

Thiel’s second major domain, science and technology, focused on what he described as a long stagnation in “atoms” (the physical and regulated world) relative to “bits” (software, computing, networks, and, more recently, artificial intelligence). He suggested that universities often market themselves to donors and the public through narratives of scientific progress—medicine, physics, frontier research—while the cultural conflicts he described are concentrated in the humanities. The risk, he argued, is that critics engage where claims are easiest to expose as incoherent while ignoring domains where institutional authority is stronger and where failures could be more consequential and more difficult to evaluate from the outside.

He argued that physical-world progress has been constrained since the 1970s by regulation, institutional inertia, and professional gatekeeping, and that the complexity and esotericism of scientific domains can shield misallocation and fraud. As anecdotal reinforcement, he described a conflict involving a Nobel Prize–winning Stanford physicist, whom he portrayed as believing that the prize conferred genuine academic freedom. According to Thiel’s account, the physicist publicly accused portions of the university’s biology department of effectively defrauding government funders—an intervention Thiel implied ended predictably, with students forced to find new advisors and institutional resistance closing ranks. He connected this to a broader “replicability crisis,” arguing that even when researchers acknowledge systemic problems, they often do so cautiously, avoiding direct attribution that could destabilize status hierarchies.

To make this contrast vivid, Thiel juxtaposed two high-profile university leadership scandals from the prior year: the departure of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay amid plagiarism accusations and controversy over institutional responses to campus politics, and the resignation of Stanford’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne following allegations and investigations related to research integrity in neuroscience. In Thiel’s telling, these episodes were “complementary” rather than separate: the first associated with what he regarded as formulaic, conventionalized discourse in diversity and institutional governance; the second associated with scientific research practices that, if compromised, could misdirect very large sums and distort public priorities. He argued that, although cultural scandals attract attention, the potential societal cost of scientific misconduct may be greater.

From this, he offered a strategic claim about criticism itself: one can attack an opponent at a weak point for tactical advantage, or at a strong point for decisive victory. He suggested that much conservative critique has focused on the humanities because their vulnerabilities are visible, but that a more consequential critique would test the strongest claims of academic authority in the sciences. He used string theory as an emblematic case—less as a technical target than as a symbol of peak intellectual prestige—and suggested that if one could show that the most celebrated scientific subfields have delivered little over long periods, it would force a reevaluation of the broader knowledge-production system.

Thiel’s third domain—religion and Christianity—treated “diversity” discourse as potentially powerful precisely because it can distract from questions that, in his view, have greater metaphysical and political weight. He invoked a classical theological formulation—associated with Anselm’s ontological argument—as a way of describing the scale of the displacement: if God is conceived as the greatest conceivable reality, then a cultural system that successfully prevents serious reflection on God has demonstrated extraordinary capacity to control attention. He suggested that a specifically Christian analysis might illuminate features of contemporary moral politics that are otherwise misdescribed.

In this part of the address, he argued that Christianity is historically distinctive in its orientation toward victims: the Bible, he said, takes the side of Abel rather than Cain, and narrates foundational events from the standpoint of the oppressed rather than the city-builder or imperial founder. He contrasted this with Roman myth, where the founding violence is integrated into civic legitimacy. From this standpoint, he characterized contemporary “woke” moral politics as adjacent to Christianity—“one toggle switch away”—because it inherits the focus on victimhood. Yet he argued that it differs in what it does with that focus: it foregrounds guilt and condemnation while lacking forgiveness, redemption, and the capacity to “move on.” For Thiel, this absence of forgiveness is central to why he described the phenomenon as illiberal and closer to fundamentalist moralism or a puritanical posture than to open-ended pluralism.

He framed the ideological landscape as a triangle of temptations and failures: a Christian posture that acknowledges historical injustice while sustaining forgiveness; an “alt-right” posture that seeks relief from guilt through denial or minimization; and a “woke” posture that intensifies moral indictment while foreclosing redemption. He used provocative examples to show how fragile the guiltless posture becomes when it confronts concrete historical suffering, and he argued that the perpetual-condemnation posture produces a politics of permanent accusation.

He closed the keynote by returning to the genealogy of “political correctness.” He noted that by the 1980s it was used by conservatives and libertarians to critique illiberal tendencies on the left, and that earlier it had functioned as an intra-left descriptor. But he pushed the etymology further back to mid-20th-century communism, where “politically correct” meant obedience to party discipline and alignment with Moscow. From that lineage, he argued that the central feature to keep in view is not relativism but totalitarianism—not mere insincerity but coercion. He ended with a deliberately compressed slogan: when compelled to treat DEI as an all-consuming topic, one should mentally map it to the Chinese Communist Party, as a way of keeping the specter of disciplined ideological conformity in view.

A subsequent discussion—framed as a fireside chat—began with the moderator offering an alternative analytic lens: wokeness can function as a distraction, but it can also be a symptom of a deeper condition. On that medical analogy, symptoms deserve attention both because they indicate underlying pathology and because they can independently harm the body politic. The moderator suggested that activists who focus on institutional capture might be understood as providing “aspirin”—not solving the root cause, but performing necessary mitigation.

The moderator then asked Thiel about “decadence,” distinguishing a republican moral critique (decadence as luxury and softness) from an economic-institutional critique (decadence as bureaucratization and loss of entrepreneurial spirit). Thiel aligned himself more explicitly with the second. He rejected the view that younger generations fail because they have it too easy; instead, he argued that they are demotivated by an anticipatory sense that effort will not translate into a better future. To make the point concrete, he borrowed a standard framework from public finance: under higher tax burdens, an “income effect” would predict people work more to maintain after-tax income, while a “substitution effect” predicts they work less because the marginal return to work falls. Thiel claimed that, empirically, substitution effects dominate: when conditions worsen, people often substitute leisure for labor rather than intensifying effort. He used this to support a broader claim that the contemporary problem is not too much comfort but the sense of blocked mobility and narrowing prospects.

From there, Thiel widened the frame to what he described as an apocalyptic undercurrent: he suggested that critiques of contemporary liberalism, capitalism, and even scientific progress have become increasingly strong, while plausible visions of succession—what a post-liberal order would concretely look like—remain weak. He described mainstream politics as rearranging “deck chairs” while the more urgent question is how to reach “lifeboats.” He also suggested that liberal elites may implicitly recognize the exhaustion of their own model and the absence of a successor, producing a politics of prolongation rather than renewal. His metaphor for this was a gerontocratic “endless funeral”: a system that keeps extending its own ceremonies because what follows appears worse—potentially catastrophic conflict or totalitarian consolidation.

The conversation then turned to geopolitics and the stability of American power. The moderator suggested that imperial fragility, debt, and foreign policy overextension could destabilize late-liberal governance, drawing an analogy to Britain’s post-Suez unraveling. Thiel acknowledged the plausibility, while also warning against excessive optimism. He treated certain theaters—he mentioned Ukraine and the Red Sea—as tests of whether the United States can sustain peripheral commitments, and suggested that failure in one region would have cascading implications for other commitments. He distinguished the current situation from Britain’s decline partly by emphasizing that Britain had a clear successor in the United States, whereas a U.S. decline may be closer to a Roman scenario without a stable handoff. He argued that assessments of China are distorted in two directions: complacent U.S. narratives that assume China must collapse, and anti-U.S. hopes that imagine China as a coherent successor. In his view, China faces its own structural constraints and opacity, limiting the likelihood of a clean transition to a new hegemon and pointing instead toward a prolonged, unstable interregnum.

Returning to political theology, the moderator proposed that wokeness might be interpreted as a heresy—specifically a modern form of Pelagianism, or a secularized drive to build a new Eden through collective effort. He also suggested that wokeness might be genealogically closer to liberal Protestant traditions in New England than to Frankfurt School Marxism. Thiel responded by shifting emphasis toward harsher Calvinist elements and predestination, and by returning to the idea that modern ideological projects can become “hyper-Christian”: they take Christianity’s concern with victims and attempt to intensify it beyond Christianity’s own internal limits. He invoked earlier heresies and, more broadly, the tendency to claim moral purity through escalating condemnation. In his formulation, a practical Christian check on this escalation is the refusal to claim victimhood that exceeds Christ’s; once victimhood becomes absolute, it becomes politically destabilizing and morally unbounded.

In a further exchange about the paradox that Christ’s suffering can be construed as victory (Christus Victor), Thiel suggested that modern moral politics may have fixated on one dimension—victimage—while losing the integrative movement toward restoration of order. He expressed, somewhat provocatively, a preference for “Constantine” over “Mother Teresa” as symbols of Christianity’s relation to power and governance, implying that political order and authority cannot be indefinitely grounded in an ethic of suffering alone, even if the historical record of empire is morally compromised. He also referenced René Girard’s anthropological observation about scapegoating and sacred violence, suggesting that Christian revelation exposes the mechanisms by which authority and sacrality have historically been constructed around victimization.

The discussion then moved to conservatism, libertarianism, and the state. Thiel described his earlier self-identification as libertarian as having both an ideological and a sociological function: it expressed commitments to limited government and individual rights, but it also signaled political marginality—a posture of being “left alone” rather than seeking power. He framed the underlying theological question in the language of empire: whether political order is providentially ordered toward good, or whether it is structurally bound up with temptation, corruption, and idolatry. He contrasted accounts that treat the Roman Empire as a vehicle for spreading the Gospel with accounts that treat empire as fundamentally compromised—exemplified by the temptation narrative in which Satan offers “all the kingdoms of the world.” He argued that Christian political theology contains an implicit critique of emperor worship, and suggested that a certain “political atheism”—a refusal to sacralize state power—can function as a corrective against modern ideological fervor.

As the conversation returned to contemporary Europe, the moderator asked whether Thiel saw Brussels and postwar liberalism as distorted by wokeness or fulfilled by it. Thiel answered that it is, in different respects, both: a degenerative form and also an outcome of tendencies that have long been present. He pointed to the erosion of genuine debate and the shift toward enforcement rather than persuasion, while also treating those shifts as predictable responses once a worldview becomes fragile and defensive.

When pressed for practical policy implications—especially around housing and urban political economy—Thiel resisted the framing that solutions are primarily legislative. He described earlier historical “relief valves” for urban inequality: frontier expansion in the 19th century, and automobile-enabled suburbanization in the 20th. He argued that the current cycle has reopened because those relief valves are exhausted and because cities have regained centrality. He then suggested that a plausible contemporary relief valve is technological and social rather than strictly political: remote work and networked life could reduce the premium on living in a small number of superstar cities, enabling people to relocate to lower-cost regions without losing access to opportunity. In this view, the key obstacle is not only zoning law but a cultural and psychological “Stockholm syndrome” that constrains imagination and makes exit from elite urban ecosystems feel impossible or morally forbidden. He ended by implying that one of the most consequential interventions may be the simplest to state and hardest to achieve: encouraging people to think independently about where to live, how to structure institutions, and which problems deserve sustained attention rather than ritualized distraction.