The latest edition of The Big Ben Show dropped last night, and I hope you’ll give it a listen or a watch here for my conversation with Maria Bartiromo, Luke Rosiak on the Kavanaugh assassin’s hearing, and my takes on politics in Virginia and the massive Free Press-CBS deal:
Israel’s government was set to vote Thursday on an agreement brokered by the Trump administration that would free the remaining hostages held by Hamas and establish a cease-fire in Gaza, a diplomatic breakthrough after months of failed talks.
The hostage deal, which President Trump announced from the White House on Wednesday, promises to close a major wound opened by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel and give momentum to the effort to end a two-year war that has left tens of thousands of Gazans dead and the enclave in ruins.
The administration hopes the deal will be the first step toward a longer-term settlement that will involve talks over the disarmament of Hamas and the formation of an interim government to oversee Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has faced resistance to ending the war from far-right members of his coalition government, welcomed the deal to bring home Israeli hostages, which his government is expected to approve.
“This is a diplomatic success and a national and moral victory for the state of Israel,” he said early Thursday.
The deal would go into effect once Israel’s government approves it, people familiar with the matter said. Trump in an interview with Fox News said the hostage release itself might not happen until Monday. The president is considering a trip to the region to mark the event.
Comey would later be asked about this multiple times, most infamously on April 11, 2019. By then, the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process was no longer a secret and information about Halper and “campaign spying” had reached even the legacy press. Yet Comey had the stones to say on television of FISA surveillance, “I’ve never thought of that as spying,” because after all, what he did was “court-ordered electronic surveillance.” This is someone who knows the FISA court was lied to, in documents containing his signature, and also knows this information is going to come out…
Another Comey trick is to try to sneak out a non-fact and then step back and suggest it was a good-faith error if called on it. In an April 2018 interview with Bret Baier he tried to push the old saw that Christopher Steele was “funded first by Republicans”. This wasn’t true and moreover Comey had to know this wasn’t true, because he signed three of the four FISA applications, in which the motives of the “identified U.S. person” who hired Steele were a major issue. Comey either lied to the FISA court when he signed the document below, or he lied on the air:
From the Carter Page warrant application
There are more instances than one can count of Comey responding with faux-outrage after being busted himself. His reaction to the “Nunes memo” outlining the abuse of the FISA process impressively complained that Devin Nunes “damaged [sic] relationship with the FISA court” — after the FBI serially liedto the court:
Ifreaders detect a note of frustration it’s because messaging around the Comey affair has succeeded in masking the enormity of the offenses in question. The consequence of years of headlines like the New York Times piece, “F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” has left a significant portion of the public unmoved by the now-undisguised reality of the FBI ordering political surveillance of a major-party presidential candidate, then attempting to prosecute using invented evidence. Every conceivable detail must be lied about to uphold the principle of impunity for such behavior. Old friend Ken Dilanian even went with an amazing whopper on MSNBC in coverage of the trial, claiming “it’s not entirely clear” what Comey’s being charged with:
Just baldly untrue… The indictment is clear that Comey is charged with answering in the negative when asked if he “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports.” Zero doubt what this means, but lie about it they must. Characters like Comey can’t just ride off into sunsets of inflated book deals and teaching gigs anymore. They can’t all get away with it, can they?
Six months later, Thiel delivered his Armageddon lecture again, now at The Catholic University of America. According to a recap posted by one attendee, Thiel’s argument was pretty much the same. Except this time Thiel told his listeners how they might personally navigate the slender path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: “Go to church.”
In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel echoed the line again: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” This spring, during one of the podcaster Jordan Peterson’s many failed attempts to interject, Thiel cut him off: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church.”
It’s not just that line. Although Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian’s influence arguably runs through nearly everything Thiel has ever said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazis to justify Germany’s slip from democracy to dictatorship. Palaver’s papers critiqued a lesser-known, theological, and apocalyptic line of Schmitt’s thinking—and they seem to have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996. In his recent doomsday lectures and interviews, Thiel’s language often mirrors Palaver’s scholarship directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing it. (Thiel did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)
You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)
But the times have been even weirder for Palaver. A lifelong peace activist, he first wrote about Schmitt’s apocalyptic theories in hopes of driving a stake through their heart. Yet for years now, Palaver has watched as his own Girardian take on Schmitt seems to have provided a roadmap not only for Thiel’s speaking tour but for his considerable strategic interventions in global politics—from his investments in military tech to his role in shaping the careers of JD Vance and Donald Trump to his support of the National Conservatism movement. If Thiel takes his own thinking seriously, he seems to regard these moves as interventions in the end of human history.
For the past year or so, the two men have been in regular touch, meeting together once at Thiel’s home and debating with each other over text and email. In August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day, closed-door “dress rehearsal” of the billionaire’s four-part San Francisco Antichrist lecture series. In an interview with the Austrian news outlet Falter, Palaver said he’d agreed to the event with Thiel “in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions.” In my own months of conversation with Palaver, he has said he fears that the investor has arrived at a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt.
And believe it or not, the nature of Palaver and Thiel’s relationship gets even more complicated. Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly, and in our conversations he sometimes downplays his own influence and disagreements with the billionaire. Perhaps that’s because, as followers of Girard, both men believe that any two figures who oppose each other strongly enough—as Palaver has opposed Schmitt, as Thiel opposes the Antichrist—are bound to mimic each other and become entangled. As Thiel himself has said, “Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist.” …
When Thiel arrived at Stanford in the mid 1980s, he was a teen libertarian with a zeal for Reagan-era anti-communism, a hatred for conformity stemming from his time in a draconian South African prep school, and a drive, as he has described it, to win “one competition after another.” He quickly filled the role of a classic overachieving conservative campus gadfly. He played on the Stanford chess team, maintained excellent grades, and was the founding editor of The Stanford Review, a right-wing student publication—which heaped scorn on the trendy politics of diversity and multiculturalism at a time when mass student demonstrations were railing against the Western canon and South African apartheid.
So it’s not surprising that Thiel found himself drawn to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a cantankerous, theologically conservative Stanford campus minister who once referred to himself as a “bumpkin from South Africa armed with fascist boarding school education.” Hamerton-Kelly taught classes on Western Civilization and, according to the school newspaper, was booed on at least one occasion by anti-Apartheid audiences on campus. According to several people who knew them both, Thiel came to see Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor. And it was through him that Thiel got to know Girard personally.
Hamerton-Kelly was one of Girard’s closest friends at Stanford and one of mimetic theory’s loudest champions in the United States. He also led a biweekly Girardian study group in a trailer on campus, and at his invitation, Thiel became a regular fixture in the early 1990s. By Thiel’s own admission, his initial attraction to Girard’s mimetic thinking was simply contrarian. “It was very much out of temper with the times,” Thiel said in a 2009 interview, “so it had a sort of natural appeal to a somewhat rebellious undergraduate.” Beyond that, Thiel’s first impression was that mimetic theory was “crazy.”
But at some point, Thiel came to realize that—contrary to Ayn Rand’s fantasy of a few heroic, self-determined individualists striding against a backdrop of pale conformists—no one is immune to imitative desire and its frustrations. After graduating from Stanford law school, Thiel landed a highly coveted job as a securities lawyer at a prestigious Wall Street firm—and almost instantly hated it. “From the outside it was a place where everybody wanted to get in,” Thiel would later say. “On the inside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get out.” Then, when he applied to clerk under the conservative US Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both men turned him down. By his own account, Girard’s theory of rivalry was gradually hitting home for the hyper-mimetic Thiel. “As I had this rolling quarter-life crisis in my twenties,” he has said, “there was something about this intense competition and desire to win that I came to question.”
On numerous occasions, Thiel has described his investment in Facebook as a wager on the explanatory power of Girardian theory. “I bet on mimesis,” Thiel would later say.
Finally, after a brief stint as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group, Thiel headed home to the Bay Area to launch the career in tech that would make him famous. But in returning to California, Thiel was also coming back to Girard. In the summer of 1996, the 28-year old Thiel attended the annual conference of Girardians, held at Stanford that year. On the final day of the event, he found a seat in a lecture hall. Wolfgang Palaver—whom Thiel had never met—was squaring up to present one of the first English-language critiques of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the Antichrist and the katechon. It would help set a new course for Thiel’s thinking for the next 30 years.
“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”
