High Tech Overlord Sees a Socialist Apocalypse!
Peter Thiel does not think the argument that matters in 2028 is Vance against Rubio. In Berlin last month, on Mathias Döpfner's podcast, the PayPal and Palantir cofounder said he was still a Vance partisan and that it would be hard for either Republican to win. He put the odds of a democratic socialist in the White House at about fifty percent. "If Democratic Socialists take over the Democratic party that's a much bigger deal," he said. "That is the end of America." Michael P. Gibson's piece in The Spectator, published October 4, treats that line as a forecast rather than a mood, and notes that Thiel has already bought the exit: a $12 million house in Buenos Aires, children enrolled in local schools. At dinner Gibson told him that "German moves to Argentina" was not a good headline. Thiel laughed and shrugged.
The mechanism he is watching is the one he already lived through on the other side. Trump did not persuade the Bush establishment. He replaced it. Gibson's reading, which tracks Thiel's, is that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could do the same to the Clinton-Obama centre, and that the platform which then becomes ordinary is not a richer welfare state. It is court-packing, a wealth tax, nationalization, and the end of the Electoral College. A friend told Gibson that Thiel is "abysmally pessimistic" about Republican chances no matter the nominee, and that the best hope is a divided government "while AI just does its thing." The bellwether is this November. If Republicans lose the House and perhaps the Senate, and a Democratic Congress answers with impeachment hearings rather than mere obstruction, the 2028 offer to the country is the same treatment, extended to the people who funded the other side.
Some of that treatment has already been rehearsed. In 2020 an IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, stole tax-return data and leaked it, including Thiel's. Littlejohn is serving a minimum five-year sentence. The leak showed what Silicon Valley had only heard as rumour: early PayPal stock, worth pennies, parked in a Roth IRA and grown into a tax-free sum in the billions, against an average Roth balance of about $106,000. Democrats tried to unwind accounts like it in the 2021 Build Back Better debates. A House rule would have forced withdrawals down to $20 million. It did not name Thiel. Almost nobody else qualified. The bill died in the Senate. Gibson's point is that a socialist government would not stop at mega-Roths. After Musk broke with the Democrats in 2021, Biden's Justice Department sued SpaceX over hiring, the FBI looked at Tesla's self-driving claims, and the FTC examined the Twitter purchase. Gibson's worst case from there is nationalisation of SpaceX, or a prosecution built around Musk's time at DOGE. Lawfare, confiscation, nationalisation, open-ended social spending, packed courts, a debt default: that is the list he says would end the country. It is a list of permissions, not a budget.
What follows, if the permissions are used, is not a Scandinavian afternoon. The United States does not have the trust, the tax compliance, or the small homogeneous state that made the Nordic model look calm. It has a reserve currency, a capital market that prices political risk by the hour, and a tech sector whose founders can leave. Wealth taxes collect less than they promise once the base moves, and then they collect from whoever cannot move: private businesses, farms, unrealized gains marked to a bad year. Nationalisation of a launch company or a defence-software firm does not produce a public rocket program. It produces a flight of engineers and a contract dispute with the Pentagon. Court-packing does not settle the culture war. It tells the next majority that the court is a spoil. Eliminating the Electoral College does not make the country fairer. It tells the interior that population is the only vote that counts. The young socialists Thiel refuses to dismiss, he noted that about 70 percent of millennials say they are pro-socialist, and that proletarianising them with student debt and unreachable housing is how you get the result, would inherit a state that can punish, and an economy that has already started to leave.
Australia is not that sequence, and it is not a refuge from it either. There is no democratic-socialist capture of a major party underway. The Greens sit at about 11 to 13 percent. What the polls actually show, in Newspoll and in the Financial Review's Redbridge survey this month, is a collapse of the Labor primary into the high twenties, Anthony Albanese at a net approval of minus 27, and Pauline Hanson's One Nation level with or ahead of Labor on the primary vote, near 29 or 30 percent. Voters rank One Nation first on cost of living, housing, immigration, and crime. The pressure Thiel names is here: housing that wages cannot buy, and a generation that can do the arithmetic. The revolt, for now, is running the other way.
The exposure is still real. Australia's export income, its security, and a large share of its capital market are priced off the United States. A Washington that nationalises, taxes unrealized wealth, and packs its court would not need a sister party in Canberra to be felt in Sydney. It would be felt in the five-eyes contracts, in the AUKUS schedule, and in whatever capital decided Buenos Aires was not far enough. Locally, the copying risk is bureaucratic rather than revolutionary. A tired Labor government has already reached for the easy levers, superannuation taxes on large balances, a housing market it will not free, an immigration setting it is now being punished for, without ever winning a mandate for socialism. Compulsory preferential voting makes a Mamdani-style takeover of a major party harder than an American primary. It does not stop a Treasury from importing the policy once Washington has made it respectable. Thiel's shrug in the restaurant is the rational move for a man with a jet. The question for Australia is blunter. If the republic he is leaving treats departure as the tell, a country that cannot leave its alliance, its ore ships, or its mortgage belt will have to decide whether it is a branch office of that experiment or a place that still lets people keep what they build.
https://spectator.com/article/get-ready-flee-socialist-america-peter-thiel/
