Makes sense to me. While it’s probably implied in Buttigieg’s point, I’d like to add there’s a level of contempt for the poor, and by poor I mean folks who are not wealthy.
Gay billionaire knows his people are the billionaires, not the gays.
Only the poors think about cultural conflict, the rich know we’ve got a class-based war a-raging, and the score’s not even close. The rich are the one’s stoking the cultural conflicts as a ruse to keep the onslaught on the poors out of sight.
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Simple. “Fuck you, got mine”
In another thread about Grindr going down during the RNC convention, the general opinion is that they are repressed homosexuals and that is why they are fascists. I think Pete hits on, and you sum up, the real reason: some rich gay people feel insulated by their wealth from the problems that republicans might introduce, and think adding even more wealth is the way to go.
Yeah, they should ask Ernst Rohm how well that goes.
That is a mindset I am having a very hard time wrapping my head around. Why?
Think about it. Our entire western civilization revolves around how much money you have. Most billionaires are only concerned with accumulating more wealth, and historically Republican administrations are pretty good about supporting that (tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting of social programs to support those cuts, etc). They don’t give two shits about the rest of the population, as long as their wealth increases.
Money is also power. The more power you have, the more you get away with. So even though someone like Thiel might be as gay as a rainbow, he’s in that echelon of people who are quite rich and powerful that being gay doesn’t matter, he has the money and power to sidestep the oppression his comrades seek. Their reason for the oppression of gays is the same as the oppression of any other marginalized group (LGBT+, women, POC, etc); it gives their supporters an enemy, which in turn galvanizes their base, and reinforces the party’s power. People like Thiel aren’t concerned with any of that because they have the resources and influence to sidestep that oppression.
It isn’t as though conservatives limit their derision to homosexuality. Any kind of sexual promiscuity is cause for condemnation and persecution if you’re poor. This isn’t homosexuality as taboo, this is sexuality as a luxury reserved for the wealthiest and most well-connected.
FFS, we’ve got video recordings of Donald Trump groping Rudy Giuliani in drag as part of a sketch comedy routine. Lauren Boebert gives handies out at the theater. JD Vance himself is married to a migrant of color. Vanishingly few conservatives seems to mind. This has always been a question of economic privilege, rather than some universal social taboo. Its a tool for Othering the political opposition, not policing the party leadership internally.
Wealth, along with the benefits of an obsequies mass media and mercenary police force, guarantee you can have all the Burning Man orgy tents you want just so long as you’ve paid off the right people.
Because being gay when you have enough money and power stops being a factor. You’re insulated from the overwhelming majority of any social problems that affect normal lgbtq people.
So your decisions are going to be the same as most any others in the Uber-wealthy: you look to enhance your power and finances. Nothing else is your problem.
Peter Thiel is also a neo-Nazi. Don’t let his suit and tie and fancy degrees fool you.
Nazis, neo or otherwise, think of being gay as a mental illness. Being a billionaire might insulate Thiel from the face eating leopards, but only in so far as the leopards have other targets. Neo Nazis are going to clean up house of minorities and gays once they have sufficient legal foothold.
As for conservatives, they don’t care about how much money someone else has, but rather how much they can use someone else’s money.
As a billionaire, you’re putting forward 99% of the world as targets first. His life isn’t in any danger from them.
Not necessarily, given enough legal framework to support the action of nazi like groups, rich people (including billionaires) would become the target of other rich people or billionaires
Edit some historical context:
That’s what happened in Nazi Germany. The Jewish people were robbed of their wealth and priceless heirlooms. Not only that but the possessions of Jewish people were tallied up so that “wealth would not be stolen from the state”
See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_plunder
Also happened with IP: https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2022/04/the-seizure-of-jewish-intellectual-property-ahead-of-world-war-ii/
In 1938, the Nazi government moved to hasten and complete the ‘Aryanisation of Jewish property’. In April a decree issued by Nazi leader Hermann Goering ordered Jews to compile and submit details of all private property valued at in excess of 5,000 Reichsmarks. Source https://alphahistory.com/holocaust/jewish-property-seizures/
A book for anyone interested in the subject https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/robbing-jews-confiscation-jewish-property-holocaust-19331945/
They’re willing to tolerate gay people so long as they’re racist…well for a while anyway. I mean Ernst Rohm was head of the SA (brown shirts) under Hitler.
Right and soon as they have a legal framework for dealing with the first undesirable, they’ll just move on to the next one
Being a billionaire might insulate Thiel from the face eating leopards, but only in so far as the leopards have other targets.
The Catholics might think they can preach against homosexuality, but eventually they’re going to discover that their congregants won’t put up with all the homosexuality in the priesthood. Maybe not today, but possibly within the next 1500 years. And then won’t they fell bad about what they’ve done.
Yes, that’s kind of what’s happening now.
According to the studies, “self-identified homosexual orientation is notably more common among ordinations that occurred before the year 2000—between 11 and 15 percent—than it is after 2000 (2–3 percent),” he wrote. “The same is true of respondents’ selection of the category ‘somewhere in between, but more on the homosexual side,’ the response given by 7–9 percent of respondents with pre-2000 ordinations but only 3.2–3.5 percent of those more recently ordained.”
https://catholicvote.org/study-number-of-gay-priests-plunges/
There’s also growing support in some cases, but with mixed results
https://www.christianpost.com/news/1-million-member-regional-body-leaves-umc-over-lgbt-stance.html
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Even serfs had to be treated halfways decently by their lords or they risked being overthrown or having no one left to work their land. With this capitalist dystopia we don’t even get that.
Its a shame for Thiel, that insulation via wealth only goes so far. Once oppression has been codified into law, and most of the streets have been sterilized of “undesirables”, the machine will drink its own juice and come for him, too.
Its a shame for Thiel, that insulation via wealth only goes so far.
“You’ll get yours in the end” is a prophecy liberals make endless, while plutocrats continue to ignore it without real consequence.
Once oppression has been codified into law
Laws Are For Little People. My man Elon Musk should be serving a thousand year consecutive life sentence for the endless string of SEC violations, financial frauds, drug abuses, and sexual assaults he’s committed in the last five years alone. Donald Trump should be on death row. None of these assholes actually get prosecuted for any of this shit, precisely because they’re insulated through their wealth and social connections.
JD Vance isn’t going to try and throw his sugar daddy under the bus, particularly when Thiel’s fortune is based around his enormous government contracts for mass surveillance via Palantir. It would be just shy of trying to pick a fight with Eric Prince (America’s premiere international warlord for hire) or Gregory Hayes (CEO of Raytheon, the company that makes all the high performance missiles, rockets, and smart bombs).
I’m sure Ernst Röhm thought the same thing. Inevitably, the alliance of convenience runs its course and the fascists decide it’s easier if they’re dead.
Dead men can’t hire lawyers to defend their stock portfolios, after all.
I’m sure Ernst Röhm thought the same thing
If you need to go back 90 years to make a point, it might be a weak one.
Reagan had gay members of his administration while he joked about the AIDS epidemic.
Nixon had gay men in his administration, a fact he complained about on tape.
Hoover crossdressed as head of the FBI, and he was at the heart of a fascist white terror during the 1950s.
It’s strongly believed that James Buchanan was in a relationship with Senator Rufus King, while President.
Reactionary attitudes towards sex did not seem to affect any of these economic elites.
Elites do fall they are often just replaced with new ones but its absolutely plausible the snake eats him
This is real life, anything could happen. The rich get fucked just as much as they get away. There will be no warning. Even for those like Thiel if Project 2025 was fully implemented. He would automatically be branded a pedophile and receive the death penalty. Don’t think they wouldn’t be quick to consume each other. The vacuum of power would be ripe for anyone remaining. We’re getting to the point where the greedy must devour each other to grow.
The rich get fucked just as much as they get away.
The rich get fucked way less than what they get away with. That’s why you’ve got prisons overflowing with low-income felons while everyone from Donald Trump to OJ Simpson seem immune to prosecution.
Even for those like Thiel if Project 2025 was fully implemented.
A big facet of 2025 is the way it immunizes members of the political elite from the policing they intend to inflict on everyone else. The “Freedom Cities” (often referred to as Charter Cities in other libertarian wet-dream proposals) revolve around granting dictatorial control in municipal districts to a handful of powerful property owners, fully exempt from a normal democratic process. The police, the judges, the prosecutors - they’re all just employees of these oligarchs. In the same way that a CEO isn’t threatened by the HR department, a guy like Thiel granted his own private fief through a California “Freedom City” charter would be immune to whatever anti-LGBTQ proposal Mike Johnson cooked up in the House.
The vacuum of power would be ripe for anyone remaining.
The vacuum is being filled by these techbros.
Getting fucked does not mean going to prison. Getting fucked for rich people is when a meme tanks your stock 50%. The reason they’re trying to codify this is so they dont ever get fucked again.
In this hypothetical (we hope) future, where being LGBTQ+ brands you as a pedophile and serves you the death sentence, the populace will become angry with the fact they are ruled by “one of them” and question why this is so.
Laws, after all, are not physically existing things. The law can say Thiel is fine on his fiefdom of lower SoCal. But it won’t stop the head dictator from feeling like sending his gay crusher squad to all of Thiel’s addresses in one night. And the only thing needed to make that decision happen is the swinging mood of the orange.
Just keep in mind, there’s a shit ton of republikkklowns that are closet gays. They just use it as more outrage because scared idiots eat it up and join the cult.
It doesnt matter. They’ll march us off the cliff over coming out. Which is also a shame. I may have been depressed, but I have come to terms with who and what I am and can be content with it. I couldn’t imagine rejecting yourself to such an extent. It has to cause serious mental harm.
Wealth allows mobility. He can flee to the EU or Canada easily.
or at the very least he will be spending so much on bribes to keep himself out of a prison that he’ll eventually run out of cash.
He’s got a huge bug out property in New Zealand I think ?
When being gay is criminalized, I will be at the forefront of calling for Thiel’s prosecution because I am that petty.
Priorities. Billionaire 1st, gay 2nd.
I actually “met” Thiel once. I was working for a limo company and we picked him and his luggage up. He booked 2 limos, one for himself, one for his luggage. I was driving the luggage car. We picked him up on the Tarmac at the private Jetway. He was walking towards me, and I greeted him with my hand out and said something along the lines of pleasure to meet you Mr Thiel, I’ll be getting the luggage today, your driver is over there. He walked past my outstretched hand and didn’t even acknowledge me. Then when they unloaded his “luggage” it was literally a single backpack. The guy ordered a whole separate car "probably $500+) to avoid the hassle of carrying a backpack 90’ from the private jet to the limo. When I arrived at his home to drop off the “luggage” I was told I couldn’t go in the front and had to use the service entrance. Guy seemed like a cunt then and still does today.
Eat the rich.
A lot of gay people are financially kind to people they have had sex with. I am not saying that’s relevant in this situation.
There’s another person who Theil “randomly” put a lot of money and clout behind too.
I guess it’s possible it’s not related to sex both times? But it seems really random if it’s not related to sex.
Pete gave the kind safe answer.
Looks like both the big political parties offer people opprtunities to fuck their way up to the top.
Mr. Bean-egg-egg…
I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to, to get ahead
Including one in the mirror. And he said this on Real Smugness With Bill Maher.
Not that he’s at all wrong about Vance. He isn’t. He’s just also an enormous hypocrite.
He’s steering away from the real connections between JD Vance, Peter Thiel and his connections to government infiltration, which includes democrats.
There’s plenty of Dems caught up in it, but the worst of the Silicon Valley scene supports the GOP.
Bilaji Srinivasan’s Gray Pride pipe dream is based on using street paramilitaries to remove the (quite pro-capital) Democrats from power in the Bay area.
Now thankfully, he’s too much of a fuckin’ weirdo to bring a movement like that together, but the right wing already has groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front working on a similar political project.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir which has its claws in every aspect of government is a larger danger when some white supremesists.
Peter theil is only one person. One vote.
You have no fucking idea.
The people you need to be afraid of the most are your dick cheneys. Nameless dod contractors hiding behind layers of corporations that hide their identity.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir is way more nefarious than Dick Chaney and Halliburton. his policies and acceptance into politics is full bipartisan.
