Truth & Reconciliation in America
The most extraordinary public writing of recent times is this new manifesto by Peter Thiel, in, of all places, FT. Stranger still, it’s not paywalled, everyone can read the demand for truth, for shining a light on the deep state & therefore opening the way for a reconciliation of the people & the state after the inauguration. It’s full of zingers, it has a few very interesting observations & arguments, & above all Thiel insists on his Girard-inspired Christian demand that we look at ourselves & at America through the lens of Revelation / Apocalypse: We must reveal, unveil things, we must come to see ourselves as we are if we are to live well. Quite an op-ed!
Here are some quotes:
The future demands fresh & strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific & technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, & the explosion of public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — & more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Titus. In the for-what-it's-worth department, I've been using the term "apocalypse/apocalyptic" to describe our times since 2016 and the immediate Resistance to the Trump election, as though he'd violated the natural order, a sacred order. That was very revealing, very clarifying, I thought. One can wish Thiel's Truth & Reconciliation proposal well, while harboring doubts about its likelihood of happening. I don't think the nefarious "Powers-that-be" (to continue the apocalpyse discourse) are ready to accept and acknowledge defeat, much less the errors of their way. Maybe if we take
apocalypse to mean the revelation of the cosmic battle in which we're engaged. I do like him naming the ancien regime "the ancient regime" (another term I've been using for a while.) Carl, of course, has been writing about the need for repentance and forgiveness for a number of years.
Well, it's a pre-January-20th piece. And I can't see into his soul.
But I insist that we notice that nothing in his vocabulary suggests any need for a reckoning and revealing about A.) what happened with the Covid-19 vaxxes, or about B.) Covid-19 deaths actually due to required protocols. The language is general. "We" and "the regime" are tossed about a bit, instead of specific terms like "DOD contracts" and "SV-40." And no name of any real dissident expert, such as "Sasha Latypova" is mentioned. Theil seems to want to position himself as being brave, but to still have the safe door there to retreat back through, and especially if Trump turns out to still want the suppression. If that moral calamity happens, Thiel could, as far as we can judge by this piece, pretend to be satisfied merely with investigations into the origins of the virus. And into a few other things, such as his wilder suspicions about the innovation slow-down.
Today I watched a stunning video with a soft-spoken Peter-McCullough-associated researcher, Nicholas Hulscher. Hulscher is asked about the latest research on death estimates, and one of his own medical papers. https://rumble.com/v67qmhs-nicholas-hulscher-covid-vaccines-have-killed-more-americans-than-wwi-wwii-a.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
See esp. 32:20-35, and 27:20-29:00.
Nothing in Thiel's piece except certain markers of tone suggest that he is thinking about A.), or that if he is, his mind is anywhere in the ball-park of the reality revealed by Hulscher and the many studies he cites.