The Elites Are Always Thinking About Us

Why Peter Thiel thinks we should have checked with him first before asking for our right to exist

On June 26, 2025, Peter Thiel sat down for an interview with New York Times journalist Ross Douthat, host of the podcast Matter of Opinion for an episode titled “A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough?”

Like always, UNASB paused, rewound, and asked questions to follow the thread all the way out to understand the influential billionaire’s thoughts on decline, loss of progress, and even time set aside for the antichrist. This essay is based on what we heard between the lines.

To begin, Peter Thiel keeps saying the world is in “stagnation.” Not recession. Not transformation. Stagnation. Like we are all in a civilization-sized traffic jam and we all hit the breaks in 1970. He says it like a lament, a prophecy, his own personal TED Talk with end-times spice.

But here’s what he doesn’t say about the world he misses, the one before everything slowed down, that this was before people like me could live freely.

According to Thiel, something broke around 1970. The “best years for growth” ended, and humanity wandered off course. But if you know your history, and not just the Apollo kind, you’ll know what else happened around then, Stonewall, Roe v. Wade, The EPA, Black liberation, Disability rights, and so much more. 

And what were these for those of us not in the club? The slow, loud undoing of white, male, hetero monopoly on power. So maybe the future didn’t fail to arrive. Maybe it just stopped looking like him. To Thiel, that’s stagnation. To me? That sounds a lot like progress.

This isn’t just a billionaire’s midlife crisis. It’s a symbolic crusade. One where trans people, and anyone whose freedom doesn’t fit the old blueprints, become proof that society has lost its way. Like we’ve heard before from those on the right, society has been bad and those like Thiel are the daddies bringing their tough love down on us all.

Now, I don’t mind a little bit of spanking but be damn sure it’s not happening without my consent! When someone like Joey Mannarino calls for mass arrests of trans people after the recent Minnesota church shooting, based on a lie, he’s not inventing the story. He’s just borrowing the script.

The year their world got complicated

During the course of the interview, Thiel says the world changed between 1870 and 1970, and then… nothing. Claiming, “The world in 1970 looked incredibly different from the world in 1870. The world today does not look that different from the world in 1970.”

At first, it sounds almost like “someone should fix that.” Until you ask: Different for who? Different in what way? So what exactly changed in 1970 that made people like Thiel mourn the modern world? Spoiler! It wasn’t just that we never got our moonbase.

But rather, It’s that we stopped letting just one kind of person determine the future.

So what else shifted around 1970? A few significant things like: the first brick flew at Stonewall in 1969, Roe v. Wade was argued in 1971, the EPA was founded, and Earth Day was born, people of color demanded representation, and LGBTQ+ people organized with purpose. In the end, more peoples’ language and identities entered the mainstream.

If you believed society should be orderly, binary, and controlled from the top down… 1970 felt like the gates bursting open.

So when he says the world stopped changing after 1970, he doesn’t mean nothing changed.

He means too much change, and not on his terms.

From podcast theory to real-world threat

Peter Thiel doesn’t have to say “trans people are destroying civilization.” He just has to create the conditions for someone else to.

That’s where minor characters like Joey Mannarino enter the frame and create the echo chamber the right’s media loves to lean on.

On August 29, 2025, a tragic shooting took place in a Minnesota church. Before the facts were confirmed, before victims were even named, Mannarino, a far-right influencer and political agitator, claimed the shooter was transgender. He then demanded the mass arrest of all trans people, and that we be placed into mental institutions “for the good of society.”

It was false.

It was violent.

It was the most honest expression of what Thiel’s worldview leaves unsaid.

When Thiel grieves the loss of civilizational hierarchy, when he equates “transcendence” with orderly immortality but casts gender transition as spiritual decay, when he pairs economic decline with the rise of cultural pluralism, he’s writing a script.

This is not an accident, it’s a sequence where someone like Mannarino just fills in the villain.

Thiel intellectualizes the collapse, Mannarino radicalizes and targets it, followed by a segment of the public, already conditioned by a steady diet of grievance, buys the ending: “We’d be safe if they were gone.”

Guess what! That's eliminationism with a podcast filter.

Symbolic violence always precedes material violence. When entire communities become metaphors for “decay,” it’s only a matter of time before someone starts believing they’re society’s rot to be cut out.

What they call collapse, I call becoming

Thiel talks a lot about transcendence, in fact, he makes it the centerpiece of what he thinks our civilization has lost.

He doesn’t just mean technological innovation. He means something spiritual. Metaphysical. Almost apocalyptic in tone. In the interview, he ties this absence of transcendence to what he calls the cultural breakdown of the modern West—a malaise brought on, apparently, by too much visibility and not enough control.

But I know something about transcendence. I’ve lived it.

My transition didn’t come with a microchip or a billionaire’s blessing. It wasn’t about uploading myself to the cloud or extending my lifespan through libertarian science fiction. It was about becoming more fully human, on my own terms, in a world that would rather I stayed a ghost.

Thiel’s version of transcendence is top-down: engineered, ordered, centralized. Mine? It’s lived. Felt. Fought for. To him, a trans person is a symbol of what’s gone wrong. To me, we’re what’s finally going right. 

And as much as they fixate on us to take the blame, I’ll say, we didn’t break the world, we broke their illusion that they own it.

Because if people like me can rewrite our stories, if our bodies can exist beyond the binaries they control, then the whole myth of preordained order falls apart. The old gods don’t look so sacred anymore.

And that’s what scares them most. Not that we’ve “hacked biology,” but that we’ve done so without their funding, their permission, or their need to be thanked.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud

So how does this relate to our conversations here at Unfortunately Not A Sound Bath (UNASB)? The rights’ yearning to keep those like me at the center of their fringe culture war, it is more or less a larger central to a campaign to control who gets to define reality. Thiel’s framing of “decline” is really just more people entering the room. So, guessing that most anyone that listens to Thiel or reads this are not billionaires, then you are in the fight too, even if you don’t see it yet.

Whether you’re queer, conservative, working-class, or just trying to survive in a country being reshaped by tech elites and grievance billionaires, those rules they’re writing do and will affect you. And that’s why this conversation matters. That’s why it belongs here. That's the purpose of UNASB.

They want you to believe that “stagnation” means society has lost its way. But all it means is they are no longer at the center of it. So no, we’re not going back into the closet. And if our existence threatens their myths? Maybe we’re doing something right.