tantaman

The Capture Of American Power Peter

Published 2025-01-01

Introduction: A New Class of Elite

Something shifted in the topology of American power over the past decade. The Epstein-class elite—figures whose influence derived from finance, institutional access, and the murky leverage of compromising information—has given way to a new configuration. Call it the Thiel class: technologists who understood, at least a decade before most, that whoever controlled the emerging digital infrastructure would control the conditions of future governance itself.

This is not a story of conspiracy but of strategy—specifically, a strategy informed by the mimetic theory of René Girard, the Stanford literary critic and anthropologist who became Peter Thiel’s most important intellectual influence. Girard’s insights into desire, rivalry, and the scapegoat mechanism have become, in Thiel’s hands, an operational framework for accumulating and exercising power in the twenty-first century.

Crucially, this is not speculation or inference from behavior. In his 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel laid out his intellectual framework explicitly—articulating his understanding of Girardian theory, his belief in the necessity of founding violence, his endorsement of surveillance over democratic deliberation, and his embrace of Straussian esoteric communication. The essay is a Rosetta Stone for understanding his subsequent actions: the Palantir founding, the Facebook investment, the Trump alliance, the DOGE project. What follows is not a theory about what Thiel might believe but an analysis of a strategy he has openly described, for those willing to read carefully.

This essay traces the development and deployment of this framework: from Girard’s theory through Thiel’s explicit adoption of it, to its application in electoral politics, platform governance, and the systematic transformation of the American federal government from an instrument of positive governance into a purely negative—coercive and protective—apparatus that serves oligarchic interests while providing the theater of democratic contestation.

Part I: Girard and the Mechanics of Desire

The Mimetic Foundation

René Girard’s central insight was deceptively simple: human desire is not autonomous but imitative. We do not want things because of their intrinsic qualities; we want them because others want them. Desire is triangulated—it flows through a model whose wanting makes the object desirable.

This has profound implications for understanding conflict. If we desire what others desire, we inevitably become rivals with the very person who inspired our desire. The person we imitate—whom Girard calls the “model” or “mediator”—becomes an obstacle standing between us and the object we now both want.

But here is the crucial next step: rivalry is contagious. When model and imitator are close enough—when they occupy the same social space and contest the same objects—the model can be infected by the imitator’s desire. The imitator’s intensity increases the model’s attachment to the contested object. Now the model is imitating the imitator’s wanting. Each party’s desire inflames the other’s. The imitation becomes reciprocal, the escalation becomes symmetrical, and both parties become increasingly similar even as their opposition intensifies—what Girard called “mimetic doubles.”

Girard distinguished this dynamic—which he called internal mediation—from external mediation, where the model is distant enough (socially, temporally, or categorically) that no rivalry develops. Don Quixote imitates Amadis of Gaul; a teenager imitates a celebrity. The model doesn’t know they’re being imitated, or doesn’t care. There is no contested object, no collapse into symmetric rivalry. This distinction will prove crucial for understanding Thiel’s strategy: the monopolist seeks to remain an externally mediated model—imitated but never rivaled.

Consider the Cold War as an example of internal mediation at civilizational scale: the United States and Soviet Union, each occupying the same contested space of global influence, gradually came to mirror each other in their security apparatuses, their surveillance states, their nuclear arsenals, their imperial reach. Or consider bitter divorces, where spouses who once seemed complementary become indistinguishable in their tactics of mutual destruction. The very intensity of opposition produces convergence.

Girard observed that cultures have a natural mechanism for resolving the escalating violence of mimetic rivalry: the scapegoat. Communities achieve temporary peace by collectively turning on a victim whose expulsion or sacrifice unifies the group. The victim must be both inside enough to be blamed and outside enough to be sacrificed without triggering further retaliation.

Thiel’s Adoption

Peter Thiel encountered Girard at Stanford, where Girard taught from 1981 until his retirement. The influence was formative and lasting. Thiel has spoken openly about Girard’s importance to his thinking:

“I had read most of the Girard corpus by the time I got to Stanford Law School... I’ve been repeat-reading his work for over thirty years now.”

Thiel co-founded the Imitatio foundation to promote Girard’s work and gave the eulogy at Girard’s funeral in 2015. But more importantly, he operationalized Girard’s insights in ways that Girard himself—a scholar of literature and anthropology, not a strategist—never attempted.

But Thiel’s engagement with Girard goes far beyond casual influence. In his 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel provides his own systematic articulation of Girardian theory—revealing how deeply he has internalized its implications:

“That murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and is remembered and transfigured in the form of myth. The scapegoat, perceived as the primal source of conflict and disorder, had to die for there to be peace. By violence, violence was brought to an end and society was born.”

He is explicit about mimetic rivalry driving escalation:

“In the process of ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ mimesis pushes people into escalating rivalry. This disturbing truth of mimesis may explain why the knowledge about mimesis remains rather suppressed.”

And he frames the stakes in civilizational terms:

“No single question has more of a future today than the question of man.”

This is not a businessman cherry-picking insights for competitive advantage. This is a thinker who has fully absorbed Girard’s radical claim that all human culture rests on concealed violence—and who has spent decades considering how to operationalize that knowledge.

The key move was recognizing that mimetic theory is not merely descriptive but prescriptive. If you understand how desire and rivalry work, you can engineer them. You can position yourself as a model rather than a rival. You can identify and create scapegoats. You can manipulate the triangulation of desire through the platforms you control.

The remainder of this essay traces how these three operational moves have been executed: first in business (Part II), then in the transformation of the state (Parts III-IV), then through platform infrastructure (Part V), then in electoral politics (Parts VI-VII). We examine why the opposition has failed to counter this strategy (Part VIII) and what the completed project looks like (Part IX).

Part II: Competition Is for Losers

Positioning as Model: The Anti-Mimetic Business Strategy

The first operational move is to position yourself as a model rather than a rival. In business terms, this means achieving monopoly—the only position from which you can be imitated without being drawn into destructive competition.

Thiel’s business philosophy, articulated most clearly in his book Zero to One (2014), is explicitly anti-competitive—which is to say, it seeks to escape mimetic rivalry rather than win it:

“Competition is for losers.”

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

This sounds like contrarian business advice, but it is Girardian strategy applied to markets. Competitive markets are mimetic bloodbaths—internal mediation at industrial scale, everyone imitating everyone else, margins driven to zero, no one achieving escape velocity. Monopoly is the only position from which you can remain an externally mediated model: others may imitate your general posture of success, but there is no contested object, no direct competition, no proximity that would collapse the relationship into symmetric rivalry. The monopolist is imitated but never rivaled.

PayPal, Palantir, Facebook (as first outside investor), SpaceX (as early backer)—the through-line is the pursuit of monopoly positions in domains that would become infrastructural. Not competing within existing markets but creating new ones where you are the only player.

From Business to Politics

The same logic applies to politics, but with a crucial modification. In business, you can sometimes achieve monopoly through pure innovation—building something so different that you have no competitors. In politics, you cannot avoid the existing structure; you must capture or transform it.

Thiel’s political evolution reflects this understanding. His early libertarianism emphasized exit—escaping the political system entirely:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”

He invested in seasteading (floating libertarian cities), backed space colonization, and championed crypto as a domain beyond state control. These are exit strategies.

But exit proved insufficient. The state remained too powerful, too capable of reaching into any domain and regulating, taxing, or prohibiting. So the strategy shifted: if you cannot escape the state, capture it—but capture it in order to hollow it out, to transform it from an obstacle into an instrument.

Part III: The Hollowing of Federal Power

Removing the Obstacle

Achieving monopoly is not enough if the state retains the power to regulate, break up, or compete with your platform. The second phase of the strategy is to neutralize this threat—not by defeating the state in direct confrontation, but by transforming it from within. Capture it, then hollow it out. Remove its capacity to constrain private power while preserving its capacity to protect property and deploy violence on your behalf.

From Positive to Negative Capacity

The American federal government once possessed significant positive capacity—the ability to build, provide, and create. The interstate highway system, the Apollo program, Social Security, Medicare—these were massive exercises of state power to shape society and provide for citizens.

That capacity has been systematically degraded. Infrastructure projects that once took years now take decades. Regulatory agencies have been captured by the industries they ostensibly regulate. The administrative state has become sclerotic, unable to respond to novel challenges.

What remains is negative capacity: the power to block, punish, prosecute, exclude, and destroy. The federal government can still:

What it increasingly cannot do:

DOGE: The Strategy Made Explicit

The Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s project within the Trump administration, makes the strategy visible and explicit: use federal power to destroy federal power.

This is not incoherent. It is a one-time maneuver: you need to capture the state once in order to dismantle its capacity, and then you don’t need to capture it again because there’s nothing left to wield against you.

The targets are telling:

This is not a minimal state in the libertarian sense. It is a praetorian state—strong in violence, weak in governance, aligned with oligarchic interests.

Part IV: Libertarianism as Ideological Cover

The Scapegoat of “Big Government”

Every political project needs a scapegoat—a shared enemy whose opposition unifies the coalition. For the Thiel project, that scapegoat is “big government,” “the regulatory state,” “bureaucracy.” The libertarian rhetoric identifies the enemy clearly: federal overreach constrains freedom; markets would provide if only government got out of the way.

But rhetoric and strategy are not the same thing. Girard understood that the scapegoat is always partly arbitrary—the victim is blamed for problems they did not wholly cause, sacrificed to restore peace rather than justice. The libertarian scapegoat functions similarly: “big government” is blamed for problems that the proposed solution (monopoly plus praetorian state) will not actually solve—and is not intended to solve.

The Straussian Dimension

To understand why the libertarian cover works, we must recognize Thiel as more than a Girardian. He is also a Straussian—a student of Leo Strauss’s doctrine that philosophers must write esoterically, hiding dangerous truths from the masses while communicating them to initiates.

In “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel approvingly describes this practice:

“These thinkers used an ‘esoteric’ mode of writing in which their ‘literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.’”

Strauss argued that the great philosophers of the past concealed their true views to protect themselves from persecution and to protect society from truths it could not handle. The exoteric teaching is what the public sees; the esoteric teaching is reserved for those capable of understanding it.

This framework explains the apparent contradictions in Thiel’s public positions. The exoteric teaching is libertarianism: small government, competitive markets, individual freedom, federalism. This is the public-facing ideology that recruits allies, provides rhetorical cover, and makes the project legible as a recognizable political faction.

The esoteric teaching—visible in “The Straussian Moment” and in the actual pattern of investments, alliances, and policy outcomes—is something else entirely: monopoly power, surveillance infrastructure, state capture, and the recognition that founding violence is both inevitable and necessary.

The libertarian language is not hypocrisy in the simple sense; it is Straussian communication. The surface meaning serves a political function. The deeper meaning is available to those who read carefully—or who simply observe what is actually being built.

The Contradiction

The libertarian justification for minimizing federal power depends on two conditions:

  1. Competitive markets that discipline private actors and ensure efficient, fair provision of goods and services

  2. Federalism that allows genuine policy experimentation at the state level and meaningful exit options for citizens

Neither condition holds in practice, and—crucially—Thiel explicitly rejects both.

On competition, as noted above: “Competition is for losers.” The entire project is to achieve monopoly, not to participate in competitive markets. Network effects, platform lock-in, data advantages—these create winner-take-all dynamics that are the opposite of the competitive market that libertarian theory assumes.

On federalism: for states to genuinely self-govern, they would need the ability to regulate commerce, set labor standards, tax wealth, and control their information environments. But when platforms operate nationally and globally, when capital is mobile and stateless, when the information infrastructure is controlled by a handful of companies—state governments become minor players.

A governor has less power over daily life in their state than Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. State-level AI regulation is meaningless when models are trained in California and deployed everywhere.

What They Say vs. What They Mean

RhetoricRealityFree marketsMonopoly powerSmall governmentWeak constraints on capitalFederalismRace to the bottom between statesFreedomExit options for the wealthyCompetitionWinner-take-all dynamicsDeregulationPrivate rule-making by platforms

The libertarian language serves as ideological cover for a project that is not libertarian at all. The actual goal is not a minimal state plus competitive markets; it is monopoly power plus a state reduced to property protection and violence.

Part V: Governance by Platform

Engineering Desire Through Infrastructure

The third operational move is the most consequential: manipulating the triangulation of desire through the platforms you control. If desire flows through models, and platforms determine which models people see, then platforms are machines for engineering desire at scale.

This is not metaphorical. The algorithmic feed decides what you see, in what order, with what framing. It determines which models of desire are visible to you—which people, products, ideas, and lifestyles appear desirable because others appear to desire them. Control the feed, control the triangulation. Control the triangulation, control desire itself.

Facebook’s business model provides the clearest proof of this thesis. The advertising industry distinguishes between two fundamentally different functions: demand capture and demand generation. Google Search is the paradigmatic demand-capture platform—it reaches people who already want something and are actively searching for it. The desire pre-exists; the platform merely harvests it. Facebook, by contrast, is what advertisers call a demand generation platform—it creates desire that did not previously exist.

This is why marketers describe Facebook as “interruption advertising”: you are not searching for the product; the product interrupts your scroll and makes you want it. One industry analysis describes Facebook and Instagram as “arguably the most powerful and effective demand generation platform ever devised.” Google captures demand; Facebook manufactures it.

The business implications confirm the Girardian thesis. Demand generation commands premium pricing because it is harder and more valuable than demand capture. Anyone can place an ad in front of someone already searching for “running shoes.” It takes something more powerful to make someone who wasn’t thinking about running shoes suddenly want them. Facebook’s advertising machine does exactly this—and does it by showing you what your friends like, what people you admire have purchased, what is trending among your peers. The triangulation is built into the product.

This is not a side effect of Facebook’s design. It is the design. The entire business model depends on the Girardian insight that desire is mimetic and can be manufactured by controlling the models people see. Every algorithmic choice about what appears in your feed is a choice about which models of desire will shape your wanting. Zuckerberg may never have read Girard, but he built a machine that operationalizes mimetic theory at scale—and charges advertisers for access to its controls.

The Migration of Sovereignty

If the federal government has been hollowed out, where has governance capacity migrated? Primarily to platforms.

But there is a second migration, one that Thiel himself articulates. In “The Straussian Moment,” he approvingly quotes Roberto Calasso:

“The period between 1945 and the present could conceivably be rendered in two parallel histories: that of the historians, with its elaborate apparatus of parameters, discussing figures, masses, parties, movements, negotiations, productions; and that of the secret services, telling of murders, traps, betrayals, assassinations, cover-ups, and weapons shipments. We know that both accounts are insufficient, that both claim to be self-sufficient, that one could never be translated into the other, and that they will continue their parallel lives.”

This is Thiel telling us directly that the official history—the one taught in schools, covered by journalists, debated by politicians—is only half the story. The other half operates through intelligence services, private networks, and infrastructure invisible to public scrutiny.

The platform layer represents a third parallel history, or perhaps the convergence of the other two. It is where the visible world of commerce and social connection merges with the invisible world of surveillance and strategic manipulation. And unlike the intelligence services of the Cold War, this infrastructure is controlled by private actors—including Thiel himself through Palantir.

Consider what platform companies now decide:

These are governance functions. They were never formally transferred from public to private hands; they emerged as platforms became the infrastructure through which social and economic life is conducted.

The Thiel network understood this early. Palantir provides data infrastructure for government surveillance and military operations. Facebook (with Thiel as first outside investor and long-time board member) became the infrastructure of social connection and information distribution. PayPal and its successors became financial infrastructure.

The strategy was to build the tools of governance before anyone recognized them as such, then to make them indispensable, and finally to ensure that the public state lacks the capacity to either compete with or regulate them.

The Palantir Model

Palantir, co-founded by Thiel, Alex Karp, and others, deserves special attention. Named after the seeing-stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—artifacts that allow their users to surveil distant places—the company provides data integration and analysis tools to intelligence agencies, military operations, and police departments.

The company’s business model is instructive: it makes government surveillance and military capacity dependent on private infrastructure. The surveillance state becomes a public-private partnership in which the private partner controls the actual technical capacity.

What makes Palantir particularly revealing is that Thiel has explicitly articulated the ideology behind it. In “The Straussian Moment,” he writes:

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

This is not subtext. Thiel is stating directly that global order should be achieved through coordinated surveillance rather than democratic deliberation. Palantir is the institutional embodiment of this vision—the tool that makes “the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services” technically possible.

This is not “small government.” It is government that retains its most coercive powers while outsourcing the technical means to exercise them. The state can still watch, track, target, and kill—but it does so using tools it does not own, cannot fully understand, and cannot replace.

Anthropic’s recent partnership with Palantir to provide AI capabilities to defense and intelligence agencies represents the next phase: the most advanced AI systems, nominally developed by a “safety-focused” company, integrated into military and surveillance operations through infrastructure controlled by a Thiel-founded company, all running on Amazon Web Services (Amazon being Anthropic’s major investor).

The TikTok Problem: When the Model Becomes the Rival

The platform control strategy has a significant vulnerability, and it has a name: TikTok.

For a decade, Facebook occupied the position Thiel’s strategy requires—the model that others imitate, the infrastructure through which desire is triangulated. But TikTok broke the monopoly. Consider what happened:

In Girardian terms, the roles reversed. TikTok became the model; Facebook became the mimetic rival—increasingly similar to its competitor, increasingly desperate. This is precisely the position Thiel’s “competition is for losers” philosophy was designed to avoid. The company that was supposed to be the unchallengeable infrastructure of social desire is now locked in exactly the kind of mimetic bloodbath that destroys margins and eliminates strategic advantage.

More critically, 170 million Americans—disproportionately young, disproportionately the Mamdani coalition—now have their desire triangulated by an algorithm controlled from Beijing. Whatever content strategy American elites design for domestic platforms, it doesn’t reach the demographic that will matter most in coming elections.

This explains the bipartisan panic over TikTok—a rare point of consensus among factions that agree on almost nothing else. The concern is not really “data security” in any conventional sense; American platforms harvest user data just as aggressively. The concern is that a foreign power controls the most powerful desire-shaping machine for the next generation of American voters.

China could, in principle, amplify or suppress content to shape American electoral outcomes. Whether they exercise this capacity or not, the capacity itself exists outside the control of any American faction—Thiel’s network, Democratic donors, the national security establishment. This is intolerable to all of them.

The TikTok situation reveals both a vulnerability in the strategy and an underlying unity among ostensible rivals: whatever their conflicts, American elites agree that the infrastructure of desire must remain in domestically legible hands. The fight over TikTok is not about privacy or national security in the conventional sense. It is about who controls the triangulation—and the shared recognition that it cannot be no one in the American power structure.

Trump’s repeated extensions of the TikTok ban deadline are interesting in this light. Rather than simply killing the platform, the maneuvering suggests an effort to engineer a deal that places TikTok under friendly ownership—capturing the desire-machine rather than destroying it.

Part VI: Mimetic Politics in Action

The Operational Framework Applied

If mimetic dynamics can be engineered, politics becomes a design problem. The three moves—positioning as model, deploying scapegoats, controlling the triangulation of desire—are as applicable to electoral campaigns as to business strategy. The difference is that political competition cannot be escaped through monopoly; you must manage the rivalry directly.

Donald Trump, whatever his limitations, demonstrates intuitive mastery of this framework.

Trump as Girardian Operator

His political success can be analyzed in Girardian terms:

Positioning as Model: Trump presents himself as the figure whose desires others should imitate—his wealth, his defiance, his apparent freedom from constraint. The MAGA aesthetic is aspirational; followers seek to embody Trump’s stance toward the world.

Managing Mimetic Rivalry: The greatest threat to Trump comes from mimetic doubles—figures similar enough to compete for the same desire. Ron DeSantis was dangerous precisely because he was too similar. The strategic response is either absorption (welcome the rival into subordination) or differentiation (emphasize differences until rivalry dissolves).

Scapegoat Maintenance: Girardian unity requires a sacrificial victim. Trump’s rhetoric consistently provides scapegoats—immigrants, elites, the “deep state,” various minority groups—whose symbolic expulsion unifies his coalition. The scapegoat must be threatening enough to require collective action but not so powerful as to actually threaten.

Persecution Narrative as Inoculation: Trump has successfully positioned himself as already-persecuted—the victim of witch hunts, hoaxes, unfair treatment. This inoculates against further scapegoating: you cannot sacrifice someone who has already been martyred. The base sees every attack as confirmation of his victim status rather than legitimate criticism.

The Mamdani Meeting: A Case Study

The November 2025 meeting between Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani illustrates these dynamics in action.

Mamdani—a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won the largest vote total in a New York mayoral race in over 50 years—represents everything the MAGA movement ostensibly opposes. Trump had called him “my little communist,” threatened to cut federal funding to New York, and even suggested stripping him of citizenship.

Yet the Oval Office meeting was, by all accounts, remarkably cordial. Trump praised Mamdani’s campaign, said they “agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” and expressed confidence in his future success. Mamdani, for his part, focused on shared concerns about affordability and cost of living.

What explains this? Several Girardian dynamics:

  1. Mamdani is not a mimetic rival: Unlike DeSantis, Mamdani is not competing for Trump’s base. He occupies a completely different symbolic space. This makes him safe to praise—his success does not threaten Trump’s position as model.

  2. Co-optation over confrontation: When a rising figure cannot be defeated, one option is absorption—claiming a share of whatever they represent. By embracing Mamdani rather than attacking him, Trump associates himself with youth, momentum, outsider energy.

  3. Denying Democrats their antagonist: If Trump attacks Mamdani relentlessly, Mamdani becomes the face of resistance—the anti-Trump around whom opposition can crystallize. By praising him instead, Trump denies Democrats the clear antagonist they need. It’s hard to rally the base against a president who keeps complimenting your mayor.

  4. Affordability as shared territory: Both Trump and Mamdani ran on cost-of-living concerns. Rather than ceding this ground to a successful progressive, Trump claims common cause—confusing the narrative about who represents working people.

This is mimetic strategy in real-time: managing rivalry, claiming desire, refusing the confrontation that would clarify opposition.

Part VII: The Content Strategy of Power

Platform Control Meets Electoral Politics

The platform infrastructure described in Part V and the political instincts described in Part VI converge in content strategy. If platforms control the triangulation of desire, and elections are won by shaping desire, then whoever controls the platforms controls elections—not by stuffing ballot boxes but by shaping what voters want before they ever enter the booth.

Shaping Desire at Scale

If desire is mimetic—if we want what we see others wanting—then controlling what people see is controlling what they want. This is the core function of algorithmic content curation, and it has obvious political applications.

The platforms that Thiel helped build or fund are, in Girardian terms, machines for manufacturing and directing desire. They do this through:

Triangulated Desire: Showing users what their peers want, like, share, and engage with. The model is not an individual but the abstracted behavior of one’s social graph.

Manufactured Scapegoats: Algorithmic amplification of outrage, creating shared enemies whose symbolic opposition unifies communities. The scapegoat mechanism, automated.

Mimetic Contagion: Virality is desire spreading. When something “goes viral,” it means that wanting it (engaging with it, sharing it, responding to it) has become contagious through imitation.

Electoral Applications

Applied to elections, these dynamics suggest a content strategy:

  1. Amplify triangulated desire for candidates: Show the preferred candidate being desired by figures the target audience already models themselves on. Not traditional endorsements but visible proximity, shared laughter, the appearance of insider status.

  2. Manage internal rivalry carefully: Differentiate from potential mimetic doubles without creating outright rivalry. Absorb or scapegoat competitors before they can become alternative models.

  3. Maintain external enemies: Keep scapegoats visible but not genuinely threatening. The sacrificial victim must be present enough to unify against, but not so powerful as to flip the dynamic.

  4. Manufacture momentum: People desire what others desire. Show enthusiasm, crowds, winning. The appearance of inevitability creates desire for the inevitable outcome.

This is not unique to any political valence—these dynamics operate across the spectrum. The question is always who controls the triangulation, who operates the machinery of desire-formation.

Part VIII: The Opposition Landscape

Rivals, Not Alternatives

The opposition to the Thiel project fails for a Girardian reason: they are rivals, not alternatives. They are caught in the same mimetic structure, competing for the same prizes, imitating the same moves. Hoffman wants to be Thiel for the Democrats. Democratic tech donors want platform power for their side. The AI safety faction partners with the same defense contractors as the acceleration faction.

Girard would recognize this immediately: mimetic rivals become doubles. The more intensely they oppose each other, the more they converge. And neither can offer escape from the game because both are playing it.

The Absence of Alternatives

If the Thiel faction has a coherent theory of power and is executing it, where is the opposition? The landscape is fragmented and largely ineffective.

Reid Hoffman: The most direct anti-Thiel within the PayPal Mafia itself. Stanford classmates, co-workers at PayPal, now publicly feuding. Hoffman called supporting Trump “a moral issue.” But Hoffman is not offering an alternative model—he wants to be Thiel for the other team. He is a rival, not an alternative.

Democratic Tech Donors: Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder, largest Bay Area Democratic donor in 2024), Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder, funds journalism and democracy initiatives), Laurene Powell Jobs—these figures oppose Trump but share much of the techno-optimism that drives the Thiel faction. They’re competing for the same prizes with different aesthetics.

The striking fact is that Democratic tech donors have largely gone dormant in 2025. Moskovitz gave $51 million in 2024 but nothing in 2025 so far. The demoralization is palpable—they backed a losing candidate, lost the presidency, and have no clear theory of what to do next.

The AI Safety/Acceleration Split: A new fault line has emerged around AI regulation:

But this split is less significant than it appears. Anthropic, the “safety-focused” AI company, just partnered with Palantir to provide AI to defense and intelligence agencies. The safety faction and the acceleration faction are converging on the same state-adjacent power structure. They argue about velocity and guardrails; they agree on destination.

Genuine Alternatives?

What would a genuine alternative look like? It would need to escape the mimetic structure entirely—to offer a different game rather than competing within Thiel’s game.

Labor Revivalism: The Teamsters’ flirtation with Trump, UAW’s growing militancy, new organizing at Amazon and Starbucks—there is something here. Organized labor offers power rooted in production rather than tech capital or credentials. But unions are institutionally weak, lack a theory of technology, and are often fighting the last war.

Religious Traditionalism: Patrick Deneen, the post-liberal Catholics, some Orthodox communities reject both progressive techno-liberalism and MAGA nationalism. They’re building parallel institutions—classical schools, intentional communities, alternative economies. But they lack a political vehicle, are deliberately anti-political in many cases, and remain tiny in scale.

Municipal Socialism: The Mamdani model—pragmatic, multiracial left populism focused on material conditions. Rent freezes, free transit, public childcare. This addresses real needs without culture-war positioning. But cities cannot control monetary policy, immigration, or trade. The federal government can crush any municipal experiment. Scaling from mayor to president requires navigating a captured party apparatus.

Genuine Decentralization: Not crypto (which is Thiel-adjacent and mostly captured by the same VC class), but actual localism. State-level resistance, parallel institutions that don’t depend on federal recognition, communities that opt out of platform dependence. The homeschooling movement, community land trusts, credit unions, mutual aid networks. These don’t aggregate into political power. They are exit strategies, not voice strategies.

Part IX: The End State

The Logic Completed

What happens when all three moves succeed? When monopoly platforms control the infrastructure of daily life, when the state has been hollowed out to pure coercion, when desire itself is triangulated through systems you control?

The end state is not the libertarian utopia of competitive markets and minimal government. It is something older, dressed in new technology.

Neo-Feudalism

What is the actual end state of the Thiel project? Not the libertarian utopia of competitive markets and minimal government. Something closer to neo-feudalism:

Private lords: Platform monopolies that provide governance functions—managing speech, commerce, information, increasingly physical infrastructure. These are not firms in a market; they are powers exercising jurisdiction over their domains.

A praetorian state: The federal government reduced to property protection and violence. Enforcing contracts, securing borders, suppressing challenges to the order, maintaining the currency—and nothing more.

Symbolic democracy: Elections continue, providing legitimacy and a pressure valve for popular frustration. But the things we vote on are increasingly disconnected from the things that determine how we live. The contest is over who wields negative power; positive governance happens elsewhere, in private hands.

Exit for the wealthy: Thiel’s early libertarian dream of escape—seasteading, space colonization, crypto—remains operative as an option for those who can afford it. The citizenship of the rich becomes optional; they are subjects of no sovereign, free to move between jurisdictions.

The Democracy Problem

Thiel’s 2009 essay made the logic explicit:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

This is not a throwaway line. It is a clear statement that democracy and the accumulation project are in tension, and democracy must yield. The “vast increase in welfare beneficiaries”—that is, people who benefit from positive state capacity—makes them voters for the continuation of that capacity. Women, as voters, tend to support social provision.

The solution is not to win democratic arguments but to make democracy irrelevant. Hollow out the positive functions of the state so that there is nothing to vote for. Migrate actual governance to private hands beyond democratic reach. Maintain the theater of elections while ensuring the elections do not decide anything important.

The MAGA base thinks they are winning when Trump takes office. What they are actually winning is the experience of victory—the symbolic defeat of cultural enemies, the pleasure of seeing their scapegoats punished. What they are not winning is any positive governance capacity that would materially improve their lives.

Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?

The Diagnosis

The argument of this essay is that Peter Thiel recognized something Girard himself did not emphasize: mimetic theory is operational. If you understand how desire and rivalry work, you can engineer them. Three moves follow:

  1. Position yourself as model, not rival: Achieve monopoly—the only position from which you can be imitated without being destroyed by competition.

  2. Deploy scapegoats strategically: Use “big government” as the sacrificial victim that unifies your coalition, even as the actual project requires state capture rather than state elimination.

  3. Control the triangulation of desire: Build the platform infrastructure through which desire is mediated, so that you determine which models people see and therefore what they want.

The Thiel project has executed all three moves—though not without complication:

Libertarian ideology served as cover, but the actual goal was never competitive markets plus minimal government. It was monopoly plus a praetorian state. The opposition remains trapped in mimetic rivalry—competing for the same prizes rather than offering a different game.

The Prognosis

If this diagnosis is correct, the prospects are bleak but not hopeless.

The Thiel project has vulnerabilities:

Overreach: The explicit abandonment of even the pretense of competitive markets and democratic accountability may generate backlash. The DOGE project makes the strategy visible in ways that could mobilize opposition.

Internal rivalry: The tech elite is not unified. The Hoffman-Thiel split is real. The AI safety vs. acceleration conflict is real, even if both sides are converging on state adjacency. Mimetic rivalry could fracture the coalition.

Platform control is incomplete: TikTok demonstrated that the desire-triangulation infrastructure is not a settled monopoly. Facebook, rather than being the unchallengeable model, became a desperate imitator. The most important demographic—young voters—has their desire shaped by a platform outside any American faction’s control. The bipartisan effort to ban or force a sale of TikTok reveals how seriously elites take this gap, but the outcome remains uncertain.

Material failure: If the hollowed-out state cannot provide basic functions—if infrastructure collapses, if pandemic response fails, if economic instability grows—the legitimacy of the arrangement may collapse.

Alternative models: Mamdani’s success suggests appetite for a politics of material provision that is neither captured by tech capital nor reducible to culture war. Whether this can scale and survive federal opposition is unclear, but the model exists.

The Countervailing Forces: Real or Illusory?

The Thiel project assumes that traditional state institutions will simply cede control to private technological infrastructure. But the state has its own power centers, its own interests, and its own theorists of what is happening—and they are beginning to articulate what sounds like resistance.

On December 15, 2025, Blaise Metreweli, the new chief of MI6, delivered her first major public address. The speech is remarkable for how precisely it identifies the threat—in terms that are, whether consciously or not, deeply Girardian:

“Power itself is becoming more diffuse and more unpredictable, as control over these technologies shifts from states to corporations—and sometimes to individuals.”

“As some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control.”

“The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so too does our shared sense of truth—one of the greatest losses a society can suffer.”

This is a senior intelligence official describing exactly what our essay describes: algorithms as desire-shaping machines that “flatter our biases” (mimetic reinforcement), “fracture our public squares” (the destruction of shared models), and collapse “our shared sense of truth” (the erosion of the common reality that makes politics possible).

Metreweli’s speech came weeks after Elon Musk publicly called for the overthrow of the UK government at a far-right rally—an event that “rattled politicians” and made vivid the stakes of private platform power. The MI6 chief stopped short of naming Musk, but the target was unmistakable.

At first glance, this suggests genuine resistance from the security state. The “parallel history” Thiel himself describes—the world of intelligence services, covert operations, and strategic manipulation—has its own protagonists, its own agendas, and its own reasons to resist subordination to tech billionaires. Metreweli explicitly frames technological mastery as an intelligence priority: “AI is a domain in which we will excel.” This is the security state announcing its intention to master the new terrain, not surrender it.

But we should be cautious about interpreting this as meaningful opposition to the underlying project.

The Deeper Structure: Transnational Capital Alignment

What if the apparent geopolitical rivalry—US vs. China, democracy vs. authoritarianism, Western platforms vs. TikTok—is itself mimetic theater? What if the “competition” between great powers is a scapegoat mechanism that manages domestic populations while a deeper class consolidation proceeds across borders?

Consider the actual capital relationships:

The nationalist framing obscures what Girard would immediately recognize: mimetic convergence at the elite level. American and Chinese tech oligarchs have more in common with each other than with their respective populations. They share interests in:

From this perspective, the TikTok panic looks less like geopolitical resistance and more like a scapegoat—nationalist theater that provides both governments justification for expanded surveillance and control while the underlying capital relationships remain intact. The “threat” framing rallies domestic populations behind their respective elites. The actual class consolidation proceeds undisturbed.

Mimetic Rivals or Mimetic Doubles?

Girard would note the irony: the US and China, ostensibly locked in conflict, are becoming increasingly similar in certain dimensions even as their structures diverge. Both are developing AI surveillance systems. Both are building social credit mechanisms (America’s are privatized through credit scores, platform bans, and employment screening, but the function converges). Both use platforms to shape information environments and manage dissent. The experience of being a surveilled subject is converging even if the institutional arrangements differ.

Yet the configuration of power differs fundamentally. China’s state disciplines capital—Jack Ma’s Ant Financial IPO was cancelled, tech giants were brought to heel, “common prosperity” campaigns explicitly subordinate billionaires to Party priorities. The Chinese state retains and expands its positive capacity through massive infrastructure investment and industrial policy. The American trajectory is the inverse: capital captures the state, hollows its positive functions, and leaves only the coercive apparatus intact.

The outcome for ordinary people may converge—surveilled, algorithmically managed, desires triangulated through platforms—but the structure differs. China is techno-authoritarian state capitalism. The US is evolving toward techno-feudal oligarchy with a praetorian rump state. These are not identical systems but they are compatible systems—and crucially, they are systems whose ruling classes can do business with each other even while performing civilizational conflict for domestic audiences.

This is the signature of mimetic rivalry: the antagonists converge even as their opposition intensifies. But it is also, potentially, the signature of something else—coordinated management of global populations by elites whose internal competition is real but whose shared interests in maintaining control are more fundamental than their differences.

The MI6 speech, in this light, reads differently. Metreweli’s critique of platform power may be genuine—but it may be a conflict within elite structures rather than a challenge to them. The intelligence community and the tech oligarchs are competing for control of the same surveillance infrastructure. That is a real conflict with real stakes. But it is not a conflict that offers ordinary people any path to liberation. Whichever faction wins, the infrastructure of control remains—and likely expands.

European regulation tells a similar story. The EU’s GDPR and Digital Markets Act do impose friction on American tech giants. But they do not challenge the fundamental model of platform-mediated social control; they merely demand that European states and European companies get a larger share of the data and the leverage. This is inter-elite bargaining, not democratic resistance.

The Scapegoat of Geopolitical Conflict

If this analysis is correct, the “China threat” narrative serves a Girardian function: it provides a shared enemy that unifies otherwise fractious domestic coalitions, justifies the expansion of surveillance and security apparatus, and directs attention away from the class consolidation happening in plain sight.

The American worker losing their job to automation is told to blame China. The Chinese worker in a Foxconn factory is told to blame American containment. Both are managed through nationalist narratives that obscure their shared position relative to transnational capital.

This does not mean geopolitical conflict is fake or that great power competition has no real stakes. Wars can start, people can die, and the outcomes matter. But it does suggest that the framing of this conflict as a battle between fundamentally different systems is misleading. Both systems are converging on platform-mediated techno-authoritarianism. The question is not whether this future arrives but which configuration of elites administers it.

The MI6 speech ends with a call that could have come from a Girardian theorist: “Let’s all check sources, consider evidence, and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions, like fear.” This is an appeal to resist mimetic capture—to recognize the manipulation and refuse it. It is good advice. But coming from the head of a foreign intelligence service—an institution whose history includes 42 coup attempts in 27 countries—one might wonder whether the appeal to resist manipulation is itself a form of manipulation, redirecting attention toward foreign algorithms while domestic ones operate undisturbed.

The darkest possibility is that there are no countervailing forces—only competing factions within a global elite that has already consolidated control over the infrastructure of desire. The theater of national rivalry provides narrative cover. The scapegoats are rotated as needed. And the populations of all nations remain captured, their desires triangulated through platforms that answer to no democratic authority anywhere.

The Alternatives

A genuine alternative would need to:

  1. Offer a different theory of technology: Neither acceleration nor mere safety, but perhaps limitation—actually choosing not to build certain things, or building them under genuinely public control.

  2. Build power outside the tech stack: Harder every year as more of life is platform-mediated, but not impossible. Labor organizing, community land trusts, local currencies, parallel institutions.

  3. Capture the state and restore its positive capacity: The reverse of the Thiel maneuver—use political power to rebuild the public’s ability to regulate, provide, and build. This requires winning elections with candidates committed to this project, which requires a party apparatus and donor class that currently do not exist.

  4. Constitutional refounding: The American federal structure may simply be incapable of responding to these challenges. Some form of reconstitution—regional reorganization, constitutional convention, something new—may be necessary.

None of these are near-term plausible. The Thiel faction is winning because they have a coherent theory of power and are executing it, while their opponents are still arguing about whether to break up Facebook.

But mimetic theory itself suggests a possibility: desire is contagious, and so is the desire for a different world. The Mamdani campaign showed that enthusiasm can shift rapidly when an alternative model emerges. The question is whether such models can proliferate faster than the centralizing logic of AI-enabled governance can close the remaining spaces for alternatives.

That is the race we are in. Understanding the game being played is the first step toward playing a different one.

Case Study: Operation Metro Surge (January 2026)

As this essay was being written, events in Minnesota provided a real-time demonstration of its thesis—a case study in the praetorian state operating against domestic political opposition.

The Operation

In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Metro Surge,” deploying 2,000 federal agents to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area—the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated explicitly that Minnesota was targeted because it was a “sanctuary” jurisdiction with Democratic leadership. By mid-January 2026, DHS claimed 3,000 arrests.

The rhetorical justification was familiar: DHS released daily press statements highlighting arrests of “the worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, drug traffickers. But the numbers told a different story. Of 3,000 arrests, only about 10% fit the “worst” category. Among those detained: a 5-year-old child, taken into custody with his father in their driveway moments after the boy returned home from preschool.

The Killing

On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three. Video footage shows Good sitting in her SUV as agents approached. As she began driving away, Ross fired three shots into the vehicle.

DHS claimed Good had “weaponized” her SUV against the agent. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, having viewed the footage, responded: “That is bullshit.” The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide.

The Prosecutorial Response

What followed revealed the architecture of the praetorian state more clearly than any theoretical analysis could.

The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, ordered federal prosecutors in Minnesota to:

Twelve federal prosecutors refused. They resigned, including Joseph Thompson, the No. 2 official in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office and lead prosecutor on the high-profile Feeding Our Future fraud case. Members of the Civil Rights Division in Washington also resigned. Those who did not resign voluntarily were terminated.

Governor Tim Walz called Thompson “a principled public servant” and the resignations “the latest sign that President Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the Department of Justice.”

The Subpoenas

When Minnesota officials responded to the operation—filing lawsuits, making public statements, documenting constitutional violations—the federal government escalated.

On January 20, 2026, the FBI served grand jury subpoenas to:

The investigation: whether their public statements criticizing ICE constituted obstruction of federal law enforcement.

Deputy Attorney General Blanche told Fox News: “When the governor or the mayor threaten our officers, when the mayor suggests that he’s encouraging citizens to call 911 when they see ICE officers, that is very close to a federal crime.”

A former federal prosecutor offered the obvious response: “A grand jury subpoena should not be issued to an individual who is merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Impeding an investigation is not done by words. It is done by actions.”

But the subpoenas were not issued to secure convictions. They were issued to demonstrate power—to show that any elected official who opposes federal operations will face the full weight of prosecutorial machinery.

The Asymmetry

Minnesota deployed every tool available to a state government:

The federal response: deny injunctive relief, continue operations, subpoena the officials who complained, investigate them for their speech, purge prosecutors who refused to cooperate.

The essay’s claim that state-level resistance is largely illusory found its proof. A governor, an attorney general, two mayors, and county officials—all elected, all exercising their constitutional duties—face federal investigation for disagreeing with an administration policy. The “competitive federalism” that libertarian theory assumes simply does not exist when one level of government controls prosecutorial power and deploys it against the other.

What the Case Reveals

Operation Metro Surge demonstrates every element of the praetorian state:

Violence preserved: The federal government can deploy 2,000 armed agents to any American city. It can kill citizens and face no accountability.

Positive capacity absent: The same government cannot build a rail line or provide healthcare efficiently. The capacity flows in one direction only.

Prosecution as political weapon: The DOJ investigates elected officials for their speech while declining to investigate an agent who killed an unarmed citizen. The coercive apparatus serves factional interests.

Scapegoat mechanics: “The worst of the worst” justifies operations that also detain kindergarteners. The rhetorical victim—the dangerous criminal—bears little relation to the operational reality.

Guardrail elimination: Career prosecutors who resist are purged. The institution is hollowed from within.

Federalism as theater: States can sue, protest, document—and be investigated for it. The asymmetry is absolute.

The essay asked what happens when “the hollowed-out state cannot provide basic functions” while retaining “the power to block, punish, prosecute, exclude, and destroy.” Minnesota provides the answer: it deploys that power against American citizens and their elected representatives, daring anyone to stop it.

Representative Robin Kelly of Illinois introduced articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Noem on January 14, citing obstruction of congressional oversight, warrantless arrests without due process, and self-dealing. The articles will not pass. The operation continues. The scapegoats rotate. The infrastructure of control expands.

This is not a future to be warned against. It is the present, documented in real time.

Appendix: Key Primary Sources

Peter Thiel on Democracy

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

— “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, 2009

Peter Thiel on Competition

“Competition is for losers.”

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

— Zero to One, 2014

Peter Thiel on Escape from Politics

“The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”

— “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, 2009

Peter Thiel on Girard

“I had read most of the Girard corpus by the time I got to Stanford Law School... I’ve been repeat-reading his work for over thirty years now.”

— Interview, 2019

Peter Thiel on Founding Violence and Mimesis (from “The Straussian Moment”)

“That murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and is remembered and transfigured in the form of myth. The scapegoat, perceived as the primal source of conflict and disorder, had to die for there to be peace. By violence, violence was brought to an end and society was born.”

— “The Straussian Moment,” 2007

“In the process of ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ mimesis pushes people into escalating rivalry. This disturbing truth of mimesis may explain why the knowledge about mimesis remains rather suppressed.”

— “The Straussian Moment,” 2007

Peter Thiel on Surveillance Over Democracy

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

— “The Straussian Moment,” 2007

Peter Thiel on Esoteric Writing

“These thinkers used an ‘esoteric’ mode of writing in which their ‘literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.’”

— “The Straussian Moment,” 2007

Peter Thiel on Parallel Histories

“The period between 1945 and the present could conceivably be rendered in two parallel histories: that of the historians... and that of the secret services, telling of murders, traps, betrayals, assassinations, cover-ups, and weapons shipments.”

— “The Straussian Moment,” 2007 (quoting Roberto Calasso)

MI6 Chief Blaise Metreweli on Algorithmic Power

“Power itself is becoming more diffuse and more unpredictable, as control over these technologies shifts from states to corporations—and sometimes to individuals.”

— Speech, December 15, 2025

“As some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control.”

— Speech, December 15, 2025

“The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so too does our shared sense of truth—one of the greatest losses a society can suffer.”

— Speech, December 15, 2025

René Girard on Mimetic Desire

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

— Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1978

Essay synthesized from conversation on December 26, 2025