The diversity of the silent shift right
Peter Thiel confirms tech CEOs privately admit their left-to-right political shift
Last week, I flew out to Miami for the event: Culture, Religion & Technology, take II, hosted by The Economic Club of Miami, and sponsored by IronGate Capital Advisors, Freedom Foundation, Vator and We Over Me. My son and I decided to try out an experiment: we’d wear our MAGA hats throughout the San Francisco airport and see what kind of reaction we would get from the crowd. As we walked through the airport, bracing for potential sneers and grimaces, we were surprised at the lack of disappointing stares.
To be sure, I kept my head down most of the time - maybe I wasn’t entirely confident that I wouldn’t be confronted. My son, on the other hand, wore his hat proudly, and the reactions he encountered were revealing. I saw men, and some women, give him stealthy fist bumps and shy grins and whisper: “I like your hat.” “Nice hat.” “Go Trump.” Another surprise, these were workers of mixed ethnicities and professions: security guards, baggage handlers, terminal staffers, airline stewards and even the two pilots of our flight. This is surprising in and of itself since 80% of airline workers are part of a Union, a constituency that heretofore has been aligned with the Democratic party. Based on our small sample size in Left-leaning San Francisco, this early indicator of acceptance made me wonder whether there was a silent shift right underway.
In Miami, we stayed in Coral Gables, which tends to vote democrat relative to the rest of the country and surrounding Miami cities. In Coral Gables, 67% of adults have a bachelor’s degree. Kamala Harris was expected to win college graduates, and she did by 13 points. Yet at the hotel pool, at least some people were more conspicuous about their Trump affection as one family - dad, mom, grandma, kids - all wore MAGA hats. My son quickly ran back to our room and grabbed his. As we sat as a family wearing our hats, a young man walked by and said “Trump” with a thumbs up.
Through-line moments
The event was held at Miami Dade College, a largely non-white institution. As MDC President Madeline Pumariega told me in my podcast, MDC’s faculty mirrors its community with 75% being Hispanic and around 18% African American. The audience certainly reflected this diversity in race, if not ideology. One guest who wore a dark MAGA hat seemed to enjoy a good amount of praise.
The main conversation was my fireside with Peter Thiel, a long-time friend in Christ, but someone known to the world as a successful entrepreneur and investor. This was the second time Peter and I had a public discussion on the topic of culture, religion and technology. It was a timely one given the ideological tension sweeping through the country. And while I clearly witnessed a demure nod of approval amongst blue collar workers in my travel to Miami, Peter’s observations of CEOs secretly shifting right in their views bookended the broad coalition of workers to managers that I saw forming.
The discussion of this conservative transformation started with Elon Musk’s ideological shift. “I’ve known Elon since 2000, and for the first 20 years, I would describe him as a conventional, politically correct liberal who thought Republicans were bad because they didn’t want to subsidize his electric cars,” Peter quipped. “Then he had a pretty radical conversion.”
I refer to these conversions as through-line moments, a different type of wokeness - an awareness of some concerted and coordinated effort to create a new narrative about history and humanity. When I asked Peter why people were having these through-line moments, he rightly observed that it’s hard to know when to “trust people’s own narratives” on what caused their shift because it’s a “cumulative process” of unfolding events. For Musk, was it the gender ideology madness? Or as Musk himself put it: “the woke mind virus that killed my son?” Or was it the Fremont public health official shutting down the Tesla factory during Covid?
Peter goes on to explain that Musk and others like him probably tried to be politically correct in so many ways, but realized their efforts, however sincere and however continual, always fell short of sufficient allegiance. There’s only so many social struggle sessions one can handle. “One day, they wake up and say, ‘I”m not going to try at all anymore.’”
My follow-up question was: what percent of his network of CEO friends had a similar through-line moment? His answer was shocking, and yet not so shocking.
“I would say every single person I know who I think of as a successful tech CEO has shifted [right] quite a bit… while they may not vote for Trump, they are in very different places than they were six or seven years ago,” he said, adding. “I don't know how widespread it is, but I want to say almost everybody I know who is in a CEO or founder role at these companies has shifted very dramatically, and I trust what they tell me, and I don't trust what they feel they have to say in public.”
When asked why people support Trump, Peter responded wryly that he’d rather go on a “long anti-Harris diatribe.” A notable observation he made was the fact that Trump and his VP running mate J.D. Vance went to Ivy League universities while President Biden, Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went to not so elite colleges. Trump went to University of Pennsylvania and Vance went to Yale Law School. Biden went to the University of Delaware. Harris went to Howard University. Walz went to Chadron State College.
“It used to be that the progressives, the liberals, the Left, were the people who thought they were smarter since they had gone to better colleges,” Peter said. That doesn’t seem to be the case today. “When Biden said he was going to be a transitional president - and he didn’t mean he was going to have a sex-change operation - I think in hindsight, it was a transition from smart to dumb. There was an incredible step-function down in dumbness. Harris is dumber than Biden and Walz is dumber than Harris.”
Stagnation is a reflection of a demotivated society
Jokes aside, his point was that the Democratic party, despite its facade of intellectualism and celebrity, provides zero inspiration to hundreds of millions of men and women who aspire to greatness and prosperity, and it’s only getting worse. It is this broad lack of motivation that’s in part caused the economic and technological writ large stagnation Peter has been calling out for the better part of 15 years. And the advances in bits and AI as well as the conversations around equity have only served to distract us from the stimulation we need to cultivate the earth and produce abundantly. “There’s something about stagnation that doesn’t make people work harder, it makes people work less,” he said.
It is ironic that amongst Harris’ scripted one-liners is “Hard work is good work.” Yet there is very little in the policies she’s espoused that incentivizes any work besides activism toward fighting for the rights of women and the LGBTQ cohort. For those who understand human nature as described in the Bible, it is clear that the best way to lift up others is to first be self-sufficient. People are called to profit and work.
Proverbs 14:23 - “In all toil there is profit.”
Proverbs 31:18 - “She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.”
Luke 19:13 - “Engage in business until I come.”
Humanity needs a sense of agency. Arguing for the rights of people to be called their preferred pronouns is senseless compared to working on projects like sending rockets into space, like Elon Musk. When aspiring toward excellence and meritocracy are pushed aside for an equity mandate, society is left with a very uncharismatic vision of the world: a shrinking economy divided amongst an ever-growing list of people dependent on government. There’s nothing energizing about that.
Post event, one guest rightly noted that his takeaway from the fireside was that “People make decisions based on their values and beliefs - it's important to not lose sight of this as we all sell our skills/services in the business world.” In other words, if we believe the system is keeping us down, we will have offense in our hearts toward others and God. This offense will dampen our desire to aspire to do great things, to work hard and to profit. Likewise, if we are told we’re too privileged or toxic or racist then we’ll constantly be weighed down by this burden of guilt that impedes our ability to also aspire to do great things, work hard and profit.
Peter said he didn’t know how “widespread” this shift to the right was. Now three days post-election, we know. The quiet fist bumps I saw in San Francisco and the private confessional conversations Peter had with his CEO friends – those were happening in spades, and we didn’t know it. Maybe now more of us won’t be so silent anymore.