Peter Thiel and Australian rightwing politics

How important is Peter Thiel to the authoritarian Right outside America?

Peter Thiel is a central actor in the breakdown of the American democratic experiment. It is critical that those of us in the rest of the anglosphere are alert to authoritarian and reactionary influences in our own “conservative” politics and society.

Towards the end of Nafeez Ahmed’s longue durée study of the networked far right in the West, Alt Reich, he focuses on his investigations of the influence operation run at Britain’s Cambridge University by figures connected to Thiel. (Ahmed notes the profitable government contracts for Thiel’s Palantir that accompany the culture war work in the UK.) While Ahmed does not pursue this angle, this Cambridge operation appears to be the source of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conference organisation firmly connected to Australia’s rightwing politics and media.

This is important because Peter Thiel is not just authoritarian and anti-democratic. Ahmed quotes a 2020 Buzzfeed exploration of Thiel’s connections to far right and white supremacist thinkers, which included a quotation from an email by techno-authoritarian influencer Curtis Yarvin describing Thiel thus: “He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully”.

Cambridge University and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

In a chapter entitled “Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge”, Ahmed documents his investigations into the Thiel operation at the British university, underway since 2016.

Ahmed’s investigation showed that Thiel was “liaising with a network of Cambridge academics" which fellow academics referred to as the “Thiel network.” Thiel’s “top chief of staff” Charles Vaughan appears to have been key to the operation and a “regular fixture” at the meetings, flying out from the US. From the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity, this network has spread out to other universities. Notable figures include James Orr, Stephen Blackwood, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson: all ended up on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Advisory Board. That organisation was founded in June 2023, and while it can be depicted as a climate science denial operation, this essay focuses on its social and nationalist goals.

The “Thiel network” goal appeared to be a platform for “conservative” voices to promote a worldview. That worldview states that the “liberal” project is a threat to, in Ahmed’s summary, “traditional Christian religious and theological beliefs.” The ideology is interwoven with “an unnerving fascination with race science.”

Through the European arm of the Trinity Forum, Thiel’s project brought Atlas Network-promoted eugenicist Charles Murray to Cambridge in 2021. Murray was labelled by another Cambridge figure as “basically the academic KKK”. It also introduced scientific racism-sympathiser and rightwing influencer Jordan Peterson to Cambridge, with Peterson finally taking up a fellowship there in 2021.

Peterson is credited with being the sole founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship by some reporting. Other stories share that credit with UK politician and Atlas thinktank partner alumna Philipa Stroud (who was also invited by Orr to speak at Cambridge with the Trinity Forum). Australian accounts focus on it being founded by a triumvirate adding John Anderson AO, former deputy prime minister.

While the ARC Advisory Board features several present and past “conservative” political figures from, primarily, the UK (4), US (4) and Canada (2), Australia (6) is the only nation to have provided two former prime ministers and a deputy prime minister to the board.

The Australian political actors on the board include: Amanda Stoker, Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, John Anderson, John Howard and Tony Abbott.

There is one Labo(u)r politician on the ARC Advisory Board, but he is the UK’s Maurice Glasman. Glasman is the founder of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement and the Future of the Left project. That project emerges out of (Atlas Network-partner?*) the Policy Exchange. (Australian “statesman” Alexander Downer is its Chairman of Trustees.)

Policy Exchange is a fossil-fuel funded source of draconian laws against protest in the UK and a central factor in the British division of the transnational Islamophobia industry. The ARC Board also boasts Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, key figures in that work.

The people of New Zealand/Aotearoa should monitor the operation because of the pivotal funding provided by NZ/Ao billionaire Christopher Chandler. His funding helped set up the Atlas Network-partner, the Legatum Institute. Ahmed’s reporting has tied Legatum to Koch-funded climate denial and US “race-baiting.” Much of Chandler’s money appears to have come from exploitation of Russia’s sell-off of its assets to oligarchs-in-the-making. Chandler denies that Legatum’s promotion of a hard (and damaging) Brexit was related to Russian interests. Legatum is the primary money behind ARC. There are no other NZ figures on the ARC board.

Links to NatCon?

Thiel is credited with helping fund and giving the “the opening keynote”at the inaugural National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in 2019. In it, he was described as “[explaining] the new National Conservatism” (in this account by libertarians disappointed in Thiel’s opposition to individual liberty). This suggests his prominence in the movement.

The NatCon conference organisation is a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF). Cambridge theologian, James Orr is UK Chairman of the EBF. He is on the ARC Advisory Board. Orr is, like Thiel, a Signatory to the NatCon Statement of Principles alongside a provocative array of figures and bodies. Orr is, furthermore, on the Advisory Council of the Free Speech Union (see below). He is the Director of UK Programs for the Trinity Forum Europe. To what degree the various bodies are connected and shaped by Thiel’s concerns is to be determined.

At their core is a defence of “traditional” (Judeo)Christian or Western civilisation described as being existentially threatened by immigration and pluralism. NatCon is the pseudo-intellectual driver of the ideology underpinning the far-right politics gaining strength in much of the West and beyond. It is a conference circuit that promotes religious nationalism as a substitute for racial nationalism. It combines Christian Nationalists with Israeli Jewish Nationalists at its roots. Hindutva nationalists were also brought in as part of this mutually-reinforcing propaganda to justify building functionally ethnonationalist states. It supports White nationalist and Islamophobic projects around the world, including in places like South Africa and Iran. The National Conservatism Institute of Australia has a podcast series where it interviews an array of Atlas partner figures and far right influencers. It has an episode with NZ/Ao nationalist Dieuwe de Boer.

One aspect of the EBF’s operations and funding is a radical Zionist agenda. It was launched and is led by a Zionist Settler Israeli, Yoram Hazony. Hazony has been part of the broad Atlas Network partner “thinktank” movement in Israel since the 90s. The CEO of the EBF is Rafi Eis, one of Hazony’s partners in that work. Several of the bodies that have funded EBF are Jewish Zionist. Despite that, the EBF’s founding principle is “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honoured by the state and other institutions both public and private.”

One of the Islamophobia industry’s key figures, Daniel Pipes, spoke at the first NatCon conference. As a Jewish man, he claimed that Neo Nazis were his fellow civilisationists, protecting Europe against Muslims. He dismisses the antisemitism he lists amongst the many “problems” of his civilisationalist coalition: they just need to buff off their rough edges.

John Anderson interviews various figures from the networks on his YouTube channel. In this video he speaks with James Orr about the dangers of importing “the Arab World.” In another, Anderson praises Douglas Murray’s “intellectual courage” for these ugly opinions.

In Australia, ARC appears to have strong ties with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. NatCon talking points dominate the brand’s elite masthead’s op/ed pages.

NatCon now runs conferences around the world where it unites cultural chauvinist and religio-ethnonationalist factions transnationally. It feigns intellectual heft, leaving the more populist messaging to interlinked conference bodies like CPAC. The network of networks involved is concerning.

The significance of these bodies likely cannot be overstated. Thiel is also responsible for the political career of JD Vance, the US Vice President, whose nomination to the ticket appeared to be soft launched at a NatCon conference in Washington. Stephen Miller, described as Trump’s prime minister, is a direct product of the Islamophobia industry and integrated into the MAGA thinktanks run by Atlas longtermists also integrated into the NatCon Signatory list. (It is difficult to detect whether the MAGA offshoots are revolutionary against Atlas or whether stepping away from former official partnership allows plausible deniability.)

Thiel and the “free speech” movement

Thiel’s operation appears to be firmly connected to the founding of the Free Speech Union project, here promoted at ARC, which also emerged out of that Cambridge operation. The Free Speech Union began in the UK and now has branches in Australia New Zealand/Aotearoa Canada Switzerland South Korea and South Africa.

Ahmed’s research situates this work primarily as a mission to allow the promotion of bigotries as inherent to a scientifically-supported worldview. Figures associated with the FSUs support scientific racism, cultural chauvinism and oppose trans rights. Free Speech Unions defend prejudiced speech, not the free speech allied to plurality.

Ahmed links this to an Australian commentator. Thiel is alleged to be a funder of Australian Claire Lehmann’s online journal Quillette, which promotes “race science” in its modern guise, the “Human Biodiversity Movement” (HBD). HBD pretends scientific support exists for essential differences in race, class and gender. (Ahmed says Lehmann denied the Thiel funding to him, but that Thiel himself did not deny the allegations.) Stephen Pinker claimed himself to be “impressed that Quillette publishes heterodox but intellectually serious and non-inflammatory pieces [about] ideas that have become near-taboo in academic and intellectual discourse, including ones connected to heritability, sex and sex differences, race, culture, Islam, free speech, and violence.” (Heterodox tends to be code for material that functions as a gateway to rightwing thinking. It pretends to disturb the status quo but rarely seems to challenge rightwing talking points, instead reinforcing old power dynamics.) This report suggests Quillette links to Koch money, Koch-funded thinktanks and people.

Lehmann is on the FSU Advisory Council alongside Orr and other figures from the Cambridge Thiel network. She (like Daniel Pipes) is regularly featured in The Australian’s op/ed pages.

The Australian senate has announced the launch of a committee investigating controlling mis- and disinformation spread, related to climate change. The “free speech” campaign against the first iteration of such a Bill was led by Christian Nationalists and Atlas affiliates.#

Thiel and the Atlas Network

While ARC was born out of an Atlas partner “think” tank, ARC is not an official partner of the Atlas Network, the architecture of influence that promotes corporate goals - labelled as “freedom” - in over 500 civil society bodies around the globe. Neither is NatCon, although it has many overlapping people. NatCon also has links to the Christian Nationalist operation the Council for National Policy (CNP). The Heritage Foundation, which claims to have left the Atlas Network may have reverted to its primary allegiance to the CNP, promoting America as an authoritarian Christian/capitalist state. Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership’s shift in its Project 2025 iteration to an overtly Christofascist trajectory would lend support to this theory.

The degree to which Thiel’s work, ARC and NatCon have direct links with Atlas operations is unclear. It could well be that people who share Atlas’s goals are networked on overlapping projects.

Atlas (1981) emerged out of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) (1947) which has been described as its steering committee. The MPS was from its first meeting invested in preserving Western Civilisation, as the bulwark of free market capitalism, from the communist/atheist threat. That first meeting debated its leaders certainty that Christianity was central to this mission. Quinn Slobodian’s work has explored the promotion of white supremacy, cultural chauvinism, neo-imperialism and scientific racism in more recent MPS debates. The CNP (1981) also has MPS links, but it is unclear to what degree they were formative in that alliance between free marketeers and Christian Nationalist extremists.

Thiel’s first career was as a culture warrior for the Atlas Network partner, the Independent Institute. Palantir lists Thiel as a director of the Independent Institute in 2023, but the “thinktank” site claims him as a research fellow. Palantir also describes him as director of the Pacific Research Institute, another Atlas partner, but he is not listed amongst that site’s people.

There are many Atlas links on the ARC Advisory Board, the representatives of the Atlas partner Legatum Institute are foundational as funders: Christopher Chandler and Alan McCormick. John Howard and Niall Ferguson were listed as members of the Mont Pelerin Society when the membership was last leaked in 2013. Ben Elliot is connected to foundational Atlas partner thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies. Heather Higgins has chaired the Independent Women’s Forum, an Atlas partner. Jacinta Price is affiliated to Australia’s Atlas partner Centre for Independent Studies. Magatte Wade is the founder of the Atlas partner, the Centre for African Prosperity. Rebeccah Heinrichs belongs to the Atlas partner Hoover Institution. Rick Geddes is a Scholar with the key Atlas partner, the American Enterprise Institute. Tony Abbott is connected to the Institute of Public Affairs (and the Ramsay Centre which co-brands events with Atlas partners). Victor Hanson Davies is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, another Atlas partner.

Bjorn Lomborg, another board member, is cited in The Merchants of Doubt historic account of proto-Atlas Network thinktank anti-science activity from the 1950s. He is listed there as one of the more recent scientists willing to work for corporate goals.

Tobacco, the first anti-science war fought by the proto-Atlas Network influence operation, remains in focus with (Atlas partner strategist and donor) Charles Koch funding continuing to push for tobacco consumption. One billion people are predicted to die from tobacco smoking this century.

The most recent challenge to corporate profits by scientific activity has been the public health response to the Covid pandemic before the vaccines became widely available (in the West). Convincing reporting shows the Koch network (Atlas partners and donors) activity in destroying consensus about life-saving policy action. The disbanding of scientific research has been a pivotal function of the first months of the second Trump administration. It appears that Covid responses were the last straw in corporate America’s willingness to accept obstacles from public health science.

The Free Speech Union network has included Covid disinformation as activity it aims to protect.

Scientific basis for a new aristocracy

The Thiel project appears to foster a necropolitics for the age of automation. The ascent of automation and AI appears to compound the reckless disdain for the lives of others held by the old ultra-free market profiteers. The tech fascists are taking for themselves necropolitics’ “power to expose a whole population to death”. While the Silicon Valley authoritarians’ technology remains unable to provide all the services they need, the surviving masses will be surveilled and suppressed so that they cannot impede profit. The tech bros, like the plutocrats, justify this to themselves with a belief in their own genetic superiority. Racialised (and gendered) IQ rankings are an inherent part of the belief system. For human quality, or for population IQ, the more the masses die off, the better the remaining gene pool. Their bigotries assert the Western, conservative, male’s inherent superiority and right to rule.

If we are not confronting the tech billionaires’ neofeudal dreams, we will be enslaved in them.

*The Policy Exchange has long been on Atlas Network partner lists. George Monbiot reports that it, like the Heritage Foundation, has ceased to consider itself an affiliate since the Atlas Network made its partner listing secretive in 2021.

# Confusingly, the head of the Atlas Partner the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance spoke at the first senate hearing on the earlier bill not representing his Atlas partner employer but as the “campaigner” for George Christensen’s Christian Nationalist foreign influence operation.