No Sir, It's a Reckoning, Not A "Reconciliation": How To Think About KKR and Peter Thiel's Financial Times Op-ed
Today brought news that the DOJ is suing KKR for avoiding antitrust scrutiny.
Reuters has more:
The U.S. filed a civil lawsuit on Tuesday against private equity firm KKR & Co (KKR.N), opens new tab, "for repeatedly flouting the premerger antitrust review process," alleging the company avoided antitrust scrutiny for at least 16 deals from 2021 to 2022.
“Through document omissions, alterations, and failures to report deals, KKR threatened the integrity of the (Antitrust) Division’s premerger reviews and, in some cases, obscured the market impact of its deals and serial acquisitions,” said Justice Department official Doha Mekki.
In a related lawsuit filed against the DOJ in federal court in Washington on Tuesday, KKR said, “After a sweeping investigation that has spanned nearly three years — with which KKR fully cooperated — the purported filing ‘errors’ the Antitrust Division has identified are trivial.”
“Not a single alleged ‘error’ was material to or interfered with any merger review,” KKR added.
This is a dangerous post to write, partly because what I’m about to write is true and partly because what I’m about to write is likely to occasion all manner of attacks back at me. Such is life, I suppose. We didn’t start this here Substack because we were going to for career support. Quite the opposite, actually.
Whenever you hear KKR you should hear private equity and whenever you hear private equity you should hear China. There are good Chinese — think Carlyle — and there are bad Chinese — think KKR.
I want to start by saying that I am very grateful to Henry Kravis and his brother George Roberts for having donated so much to my alma mater of Claremont McKenna College. Claremont is a special place — the city of trees and PhDs — and I did my best to forget all my troubles on the East Coast.
I regard the years of my life at Claremont as particularly difficult — my closest relatives were a continent away — and I struggled mightily during that time. I slept on couches. I worked crazy odd jobs. At one point I even lived outside in a tent in someone’s backyard though this being Southern California it wasn’t as bad as it might have been had I lived in Boston, the city of my birth.
I recently visited Claremont and was struck by how well the campus is seemingly doing. There were art installations, new buildings, the works. I couldn’t help but feel old. I had learned that much of the embarrassment of riches was largely attributable to two men who were cousins — George Roberts and Henry Kravis, the proprietors of KKR, one of the preeminent private equity firms — the very same private equity firm which is being sued.
In the early days the school effectively started as a kind of meeting place between the Armenian, patriotic Mormon and Native world. It was the sort of place post-World War II where a young man — it didn’t become co-ed until the 1970s — could become a middle manager. “Civilization prospers with commerce” went the motto.
Some really prospered. I once calculated that Claremont McKenna produced the largest number of billionaires per capita of any American college though what it means to produce a billionaire is, as we have explored, something of a difficult topic.
Of course this post-war can do period didn’t last. With it came the turbulent 1960s. When Henry Kravis attended Claremont Men’s College his father Raymond was a well established man in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Business partner to Joseph P. Kennedy and Prescott Bush? My word!
Raymond didn’t start out in Oklahoma. Born in Britain, young Raymond started out in Atlantic City. Think Boardwalk Empire. It’s a period I know well, having written about it in my 2013 (!) book, Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons From America’s Most Underrated President. Can you believe it’s been a hundred years since the election of 1924? Dear me.
Anyway it’s safe that Kravis was something of a mobster. “It was a magnificent era in Atlantic City. It helped groom me for the future in many respects,” he told his hometown press. He brought mob tactics to the Oklahoma oil fields and he parlayed his wealth into fame and polite company as you can see here.
Now I happen to know a little thing or two about the oil business in Oklahoma, my great-grandfather and namesake being Charles Centennial Carlisle, chief petroleum engineer of Sinclair Oil.
It’s a brutal, nasty business — if you can call it that. It’s also a phenomenally easy place to launder money. If you’ve seen There Will Be Blood you know the kind of fanaticism oil brings about. One of my Middle Eastern friends says it’s his favorite movie though I’m not quite sure what he means by that. I think often of my own family sin here. It’s a major reason I’ve become a supporter of electric vehicles — the real sort, not the Elon sort.
We are all well acquainted with the Michael Milken story and how Milken was himself turned and all of that jazz. I don’t know that we need to go over that again but we can if you want. Let me know.
The key detail you need to know regarding all of this: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was put into business by Henry Kravis’s KKR.
You can think of this as the German-Jewish-China network and that network is starting to fray now that Germany, Israel and China are all under macroeconomic pressure. You might believe, as I do, that those networks are, in fact, a threat to the security of the United States of America.
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Hence the desire by Peter Thiel to expand Palantir into new markets, namely the United Kingdom where there is a futile hope that Palantir might access the National Health Service.
This push should be how we understand Peter’s efforts in the United Kingdom. Now I introduced Peter to these networks and of course received nothing but trouble for my efforts. It’s always that way with Peter. C’est la vie as his French handler teacher Rene Girard might have put it.
Of course the choice of The Financial Times for Thiel’s op-ed should be understood as taking up space in the British establishment’s house organ. This is a decidedly gutsy move and on par with Thiel’s decision to sit for an interview with Piers Morgan. Does he really know what’s happening there? I suspect the cheeky Brits are trapping Peter within their orbit in much the same way they tried but failed to ensnare Musk. (Musk’s grandfather was British military intelligence.)
We should start with the title — “A Time for Truth and Reconciliation.”
That’s a very curious title. Who decides what the truth is? Who is doing the reconciling and on whose terms? This goes unmentioned.
Might the proprietor of Founders Fund be a little bit more circumspect about truth? After all, how do we know it’s actually a venture fund at all and not a front or a cult machine?
There’s much to be said about Thiel’s op-ed so let’s tuck into it. “The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth,” is quite the sentence. But what does it actually mean?
Thiel makes mention of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, or “the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.”
The phrase comes from Eric Weinstein, who hasn’t been Thiel’s colleague for a great many years. Eric is an Israeli spy and a fraud.
Why was he hanging around Peter for so many years? Might Peter have used him as a back channel?
In his FT op-ed Thiel makes mention of Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination to suggest that Americans are being lied to. And indeed they are. They’ve hidden altogether the role that Israel played.
There’s no mention of Israel even though we now know that a Likud activist was certainly involved with the coverup of the assassination and may well have been involved in the assassination itself.
Did Peter not mention Israel because he’s afraid of Netanyahu? I wonder… Who do we think killed Peter’s paramour anyway?
And while we’re on the subject of Thiel’s views about the coronavirus might we note that there is a Pfizer syringe displayed in Netanyahu’s office? That he, in effect, turned all of Israel into a police state?
Might a lot of this fight over the lab leak or gain of function really be about accelerating a conflict betwixt the United States and China?
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I attended a few academic conferences on Leo Strauss with Peter over the years. We met, fittingly enough, at a Machiavelli conference at Claremont McKenna College. Thiel, Professor Mark Blitz, Bill Kristol and I all had a lovely dinner at the ill-fated Walter’s in what may well have been the highlight of my college career.
Having spoken with Peter over the years I don’t think he much understands the point of a Straussian education. The objective is to select for close readers of texts. Strauss was, in fact, a similar player to the Ritchie Boys in that he was interested in the project of finding careful, diligent men. The trick isn’t so much to write esoterically but to train your mind to look at things very closely.
It isn’t exactly true that Peter is the most powerful man in Washington — he didn’t donate in 2024 — and the Russian Jewish mafia which had hoped that he would be their new sugar daddy after the death of Sheldon Adelson has promoted Elon Musk instead. You’re welcome for that, Peter.
I take him at his word that Peter wants a reconciliation and that he hopes that Trump’s second term prefigures that possibility. But that’s going to mean accountability and that’s going to include Peter.
Palantir is increasingly being made real by the NSA but Founders Fund has a lot of problems. It requires a top to bottom cleaning. Every bit of it. It’s going to require sudden departures and retirements. In much the same way Carlyle put fraudster Josh Wolfe in business, KKR put Founders Fund in business.
Now it’s time for the rest of Peter’s strange menagerie of characters to be put out to pasture. It’s time for Peter to shed his assets—and quickly.
The truth of the matter is that Trump-Biden-Trump is going to be a continuation of the Deep State’s primacy, not the last gasp of the ancien regime.
Au contraire, the Deep State is going to consolidate its gains with President Trump, who, as we noted long ago, is really the Federal Informant President.
Do we even allow Germans to speak French?
Do we even know if Peter is really German? Or is he something far more special? Something rarer still?
I think Peter may well be the sole survivor of the counterintelligence sweep that’s coming for Silicon Valley but he had better act quickly.
Of course all the bad guys are going to go crazy and do stupid evil things like burn Los Angeles to the ground. But we’ll stop them. We have to.
You might even say “I’m your huckleberry.”
This is interesting because I was researching James Turgal who lead CISA. Is now at Optiv and Optiv primary investor is KKR. So our election security oversight individuals were compromised by Peter Thiels connection with KKR
"Do we even know if Peter is really German? Or is he something far more special? Something rarer still?"
Belarussian? White Russian?