Silicon Valley oligarch Peter Thiel compared the United States to North Korea—due to political correctness generating mass groupthink among the American population.
Addressing a room of conservative teenagers attending Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit, Thiel likened President Trump’s supporters to “contrarians” in a sea of conformists.
“It feels like an incredibly contrarian thing where you feel like the only person [supporting Trump]. It’s like you against everybody, and you always have this sense [of] ‘How can someone who’s in such a small minority ever be right?'” reflected Thiel on Wednesday.
Thiel asserted that majority decisions can be helpful in deciding democratic outcomes but are dangerous when they became “unanimity.”
“If you get to unanimity, if you get to 99 to 1… You’re not getting closer to the truth, you’re getting to something like North Korea or a totalitarian one-party state,” said the billionaire. “And it’s certainly in a lot of the contexts that we find ourselves in. What’s very odd is that we’re living in something where the politics is overwhelmingly one-sided, and it’s not an indicator that people have figured out the truth, it’s an indicator that there’s an incredible amount of political correctness and people can’t talk about the truth.”
Thiel described political correctness as the “tip of the iceberg” in dictating choices for “the average person in our democracy,” claiming it was “an indicator in which the ways Silicon Valley has become a one-party state where we can’t debate some of the most important foundational issues we have as a society.”
To the billionaire, the most important foundational issues involve “trade debate” and the contributions of NATO allies, which he credited Trump for bringing to the forefront.
After comparing the United States to North Korea, Thiel simplified the intricacies of the U.S. democratic process by describing Hillary Clinton as “a mean grandmother.”
“With the 2016 election, the common sense, low-brow version was, ‘Do you like the funny man with the strange hairdo? Do you like the mean grandmother?'” said Thiel. “Who are you supporting?”
