Peter Thiel looking for the Antichrist

My mom took this picture in 1991. That's my twin sister and me, almost three, hugging at Liberty State Park with the Twin Towers behind us. After 9/11, she printed a poster-size copy and hung it up in our house. She thought it symbolized some kind of rebirth for the hope of world peace in the midst of national tragedy and righteous rage. My mom was sweet and hokey like that. The 25th anniversary was a few weeks ago, and it's been pretty cathartic to process what that day did to my life (all of ours?), how it continues to shape America, and how it still directs the trajectory of our world. From the personal experience of having two fraternity brothers who lost their dads, close friends who spent their twenties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and celebrating at Ground Zero the night we finally got bin Laden... to the ensuing "war on terrorism", which saw over 7,000 American service members die in combat and another 30,000+ who took their own lives after coming home. Abroad, we won hearts and minds by killing 432,000+ civilians and displacing 38 million people. 45 days after the attacks, the Patriot Act passed 98 to 1, and we needed no explanation to take our shoes off at airports. Since then, that same security and surveillance apparatus has been weaponized in Orwellian fashion against our own people, as it reads license plates at intersections in small towns across this country. I wrote about these reflections and what I think my mom was hoping for in a new essay I just dropped on Starving Capitalist (@starvingcap ). You can check it out below (and subscribe if you dig it!): 25 Years Later starvingcapitalist.com/essay…

when I first saw Talarico interviewed I thought "this kid's the GOP's worst nightmare"... left-of-center, populist Charlie Kirk vibes. Then I quickly realized the strategically compromised DNC would never go for a straight, white, Christian guy from Texas. Ever since the super delegate self-sabotage in the 2016 primary that got Trump elected 45th, there seems to be a recurring form of self-sabotage at play that makes some of it feel very scripted

Feels like those space and ocean-based data centers would solve this DC NIMBY problem... make it happen, Mr VC man!😉 In all seriousness, I appreciate this thoughtful take, which feels too obvious to not be understandable by most in tech... it seems blocked by opportunity, convenience, and a bit of willful ignorance (with perhaps an unhealthy dose of narcissism). I think a key cultural driver of DC resistance is the growing "surveillance state" (real or otherwise) with Flock, Palantir, etc constantly in the zeitgeist adjacent to the AI hype... showing up to a local council meeting to bitch about a proposed DC provides these same folks with a (relatively healthy?) channel for their expanding list of conflated grievances

Everyone's suddenly an expert on "taste" and "slop." … but I haven’t seen anyone define what actually separates them. Here’s a thread on the four key variables that do 🧵