Peter Thiel criticizes Trump policy in exclusive recordings

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Brendan Bordelon (0:32)

Hello, and welcome to Decoded. I'm Brendan Bordelon.

Calder McHugh (0:35)

And I'm Calder McHugh. Decoded has exclusive access to new recordings from Peter Thiel's lectures on the Antichrist. Thiel, a longtime Trump supporter, criticized the president's actions in Iran.

What else is the longtime political donor saying just two weeks from the midterms?

Brendan Bordelon (0:52)

So Calder, we talked about the story before. In fact, you and I were on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, talking about Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures. For those who might not remember, these recordings are from the tech billionaire and frequent donor to Republican causes.

Peter Thiel's lectures that he's been doing in Nashville about the Antichrist, the End Times, the Pope's response to AI, just the kind of things that you'd normally be just chatting about with your friends on a Saturday night in Nashville. You just got your hands on some new recordings. What do they say?

Calder McHugh (1:22)

Well, I think we should take a listen first. We're going to play a section of the recordings here.

Peter Thiel (1:26)

I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran. Again, I'm skeptical of it. I think we should not have done it. There were a lot of mistakes that were made. We may not have had hard power. Maybe we're going to lose the soft power war. But there's this in-between legal dimension that people are not thinking about enough. Rubio came out recently and declared the ICC to be an illegitimate institution and sank it. On the surface, this looks like a favor to Israel, but perhaps Rubio or his less politically acceptable colleagues like Pete Hegson are the people who are really in danger.

You have to again sort of imagine if you get a president in 2029 who's to the left of Obama, will they really be blocking the ICC from arresting all these people? And then at some point, people figure this out. Now the reaction, I sometimes get to these points and these lectures is, Peter, aren't you exaggerating a little? We don't really live in a totalitarian society, do we?

And my response to that is that anything that treats, we should not just treat totalitarianism as a timeless and eternal category.

Brendan Bordelon (2:45)

So a lot to unpack there, Calder. I'm curious about your thoughts since you're the teal whisperer on the podcast.

Calder McHugh (2:51)

Like you said, there's a lot in there. The biggest thing that stood out to me that's kind of buried in there a little bit is at a certain point, he does say that he does not support President Trump's war in Iran, which is pretty notable given both his previous support for President Trump all the way back to 2016

It's quite notable that he's saying this now to an audience of a few hundred people and he feels comfortable out loud saying, I don't support the president's war in Iran.

Brendan Bordelon (3:19)

What did you make of his comments on the International Criminal Court? Obviously, something that the Trump world is increasingly fixated on.

Calder McHugh (3:27)

So the International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This arrest warrant is not honored by many countries that Netanyahu visits, including the United States.

The US again is not bound by this arrest warrant. In fact, they're a long history of international law, not really having many enforcement mechanisms within it. So many countries actually don't have to abide by that. But Secretary Marco Rubio has, in fact, taken that even a step further and has actually earlier this year announced sanctions on the ICC from the United States. So this is not just a relationship in which the US is ignoring this international body, but it's one in which it's seeking to actively hamper it. And what Thiel is talking about here is that it looks like maybe Rubio is doing this on the behalf of Israel or for Netanyahu's benefit. What Thiel believes is that it's possible it's actually for his own benefit, and for the benefit of some of his friends in the Trump White House. Because his fear is that the ICC will not stop at Netanyahu, that in fact, his fear is that after Trump leaves office, they could actually start to look at members of the Trump administration. Again, Rubio, potentially Secretary Pete Hegseth, as people who they want to send arrest warrants for and have in front of the docket themselves. And that if we get some sort of liberal president in 2029, they could actually carry out those orders. Now, right after that, he does say that some people say to him, maybe this is far-fetched.