Hey! I'm in The Nation and on The Left Hook podcast, talking about Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein

So, as you may have gathered from the headline here, I have a piece in The Nation on Brotopian philosopher-king Peter Thiel and his weird (or maybe not-so-weird) bromance with Jeffrey Epstein.

[W]hat really united this odd couple was a common political and ideological project. Both believed that civilization was collapsing and that democratic norms were failing. And both did their part to help bring about these apocalyptic fantasies. In 2016, just after a majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union, a seemingly exuberant Epstein e-mailed Thiel to announce that Brexit was “just the beginning,” hailing the breakup of the UK and continental Europe as a welcome “return to tribalism [and a] counter to globalisation.” It’s not hard to imagine that Thiel, who believes that international organizations are quite literally tools of the Antichrist, might have felt he had found a soulmate at last.

I talked more about both of them on Wajahat Ali’s The Left Hook podcast earlier this week, with a digression into the whole will-robots-kill-us-all question. Check it out (and ignore the little technical snafu at the start)!