How To Turn Oligarchs, Silicon Valley Edition
And a letter to our Arab friends about how to treat being treated like an ATM
There’s a lot to be said about The Atlantic piece regarding Peter Thiel and I did a 3 hour Twitter space discussion about my involvement with turning him and his network for the FBI.
Yours truly makes a cameo. Here it is in the rather long piece.
…Thiel received an invitation that day, and then again in January 2022, to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No agenda was specified. Thiel had been fascinated by Putin’s czarlike presence in a room in Davos years before, all “champagne and caviar, and you had sort of this gaggle of, I don’t know, Mafia-like-looking oligarchs standing around him,” he recalled, but he did not make the trip.
Instead, he reported the contact to the FBI, for which Thiel had become a confidential human source code-named “Philosopher.” Thiel’s role as an FBI informant, first reported by Insider, dated back to May 2021. Charles Johnson, a tech investor, right-wing attention troll, and longtime associate of Thiel’s, told me he himself had become an FBI informant some time ago. Johnson introduced Thiel to FBI Special Agent Johnathan Buma.
A source with close knowledge of the relationship said Buma told Thiel that he did not want to know about Thiel’s contacts with U.S. elected officials or political figures, which were beyond the FBI’s investigative interests. Buma saw his interactions with Thiel, this source said, as strictly “a counterintelligence, anti-influence operation” directed at foreign governments.
Thiel responded to my questions about his FBI relationship with a terse “no comment.” A close associate, speaking with Thiel’s permission, said “it would be strange if Peter had never met with people from the deep state,” including “three-letter agencies, especially given the fact that he founded Palantir 20 years ago.”
Johnson told me he knows he has a reputation as a right-wing agitator, but said that he had fostered that image in order to gather information for the FBI and other government agencies. (He said he is now a supporter of President Joe Biden.) “I recognize that I’m an imperfect messenger,” he said. He told me a great many things about Thiel and others that I could not verify, but knowledgeable sources confirmed his role in recruiting Thiel for Buma. He and Thiel have since fallen out. “We are taking a permanent break from one another,” Thiel texted Johnson about a year ago. “Starting now.”
In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)
Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”
Think of it as when Genius turned Philosopher. I am enormously proud of the role that I played in this and other operations.
Now naturally I had concerns given Barton Gellman’s ties and the general Likudnik nature of The Atlantic but I decided to participate. Gellman did an OK job but missed the story. There’s a deep state effort to turn a number of billionaires and make them loyal to the United States whether they like it or not.
In fact it was I who cut off Peter Thiel due to his Bibi ties and his funding of operations against the interests of the United States. And while I was heartened to see the firings in Thielworld, especially of Eric Weinstein, the backing of obvious frauds and foreign ops continued at Founders Fund. I had to speak out even at great risk to myself.
Of course I knew I’d be blacklisted and suspected I was already. When the VCs don’t want to play fair it’s time to end their games. I have intimate experience with these networks as I have clashed with their discriminatory bent often. For all their talk they aren’t interested in companies which help the United States. Think of them more as a kind of Chinese-Israeli penetration.
We’ve been on this beat already but it should be repeated often — a lot of venture funds are effectively fronts of foreign powers. We know this a bit about Sequoia but it’s also true of Lux Capital, a16z, 8VC, and of course, Founders Fund.
I defy you to find a single venture partner who is a son or a daughter of the American Revolution. They’re at best a monoculture but we know that’s not really true, don’t we? It’s a club — and it is readily penetrated or run by foreign actors.
I suspect that foreignness is true of Peter as well — he did work at Credit Suisse, didn’t he? — and alas neither the Atlantic nor the subsequent Business Insider piece get into his closeness to the Russians and their network. It’s extensive and multigenerational and you should understand a lot of the Longevity stuff as a way to fund the Russians. When Peter says he should be spending even more money on it what he’s really saying is that he intends to pay a bigger bribe in the future.
Now I’m more in the dictating terms than on speaking terms phase of my relationship with Peter and that’s just as well. For years he exploited our friendship and my network by promising he things he had no intention of ever delivering. You might consider it vampiric. I certainly do. There are ways he could make amends and he knows what those are but well, I’m not holding my breath. He has real character and integrity issues. We’ll settle up soon enough, I’m sure.
Anyway I wasn’t going to let the Russians put pressure on Thiel the way they have on Musk precisely because I wasn’t sure I could trust Thiel to do the right thing, especially as Palantir tries to get access to British health data. I did you a solid on this one, Cousin Nigel. You’re welcome.
Over the next few months we’re going to be upping the pressure on various Silicon Valley tech investors and on their LPs who sustain their funds—and their frauds.
We will turn who we can and end the careers of those we can’t. It’s time. It’s necessary and it’s on us. No one will do it for us. We have to do it ourselves. So far, so good but so much more to do.
This is our country and no, we won’t tolerate it being run poorly by foreign interlopers (or their help) who want to get rich through exploiting us or our children.
I got a sense of the stakes when I visited my grandparents at Arlington National Cemetery.
My friend Arthur Bloom had a rather good piece earlier this year about how the Arabs ought to choke out Silicon Valley, especially now that so many of them have shown themselves to be rather treasonous.
Bloom said recently that “[o]ne of the really interesting dimensions of what's going on right now is all the right-of-center venture capital guys looking to the gulf states to top them off with cash are in a tough spot now after all their shilling for the war in Gaza.”
He wrote earlier this year:
When times are good, these VCs are at the top of the world. Now times are going bad, so they’re toddling around the world with a tin cup. In a big whoosh, a lot of Chinese cash has left the United States, leaving these guys high and dry.
….
Andreessen Horowitz has serious problems, very little of what they do has any benefit to America.
These guys portray themselves as business geniuses at the forefront of innovation, but most of what they invest in has nothing to do with that.
To the princes of the Gulf, if you want to show yourselves a friend to America: send these guys away empty-handed. We need new elites, new businessmen, who are willing to put their country first. This crop has failed.
New opportunities will come along, to help build a better world. Forget these desperate mercenaries.
My brothers in the Middle East, you don’t have to live like this. Come with us.
In the meantime let’s chat Marc Andreessen. Stop signing up for my Substack and then blocking me on Twitter. We got space for you.
You don’t have to go down for all the shady crypto stuff you did and which the SEC and IRS and the FBI are investigating. You could be useful.
And MBS, you don’t have to keep pretending that these guys are smart. You don’t believe it. And neither do we. So just don’t. It’s embarrassing.
What would a new generation of leadership look like?