Peter Thiel views Silicon Valley as a “totalitarian place,” and he explained why in a Fox Business interview Friday.
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“You backed President Trump in a big way, and Silicon Valley’s very liberal,” Maria Bartiromo posed to the venture capitalist. “Do you get heat for that?”
“You know, of course, I got heat, and I don’t want to exaggerate the importance — I think it’s okay to be in a place where most people are liberal or most people have views different from my own,” Thiel answered. “I do think there’s something different when it goes from a large majority having one way to it being almost unanimous.”
“When people are unanimously on one side, that tells you not that they’ve all figured out the truth but that they’re in a sort of totalitarian place, that they’re in a one party state, where they’re not allowed to have dissenting views,” he continued. “I think somehow Silicon Valley shifted from being quite liberal to being a one party state. Those are two very different things.”
Thiel also stated he has, “often said that our greatest political problem is the problem of political correctness, properly understood because that’s how we limit the debate — how we aren’t allowed to consider all the possibilities, and certainly I think the universities share a lot of blame for this. The education system shares a lot of blame.”
“But I think the pushback is you have to try to push back in every specific context where you find it and say the real debate is not this super narrow debate,” he explained. “There’s a much broader range of possibilities we should be considering.”