Peter Thiel Says He Would ‘Strongly Support’ Ron DeSantis If He Became GOP Nominee
Republican megadonor and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would “make a terrific president.”
According to Business Insider,Thiel said he would strongly support DeSantis while discussing politics with journalist Bari Weiss for her podcast Honestly, released Wednesday.
According to Forbes, Thiel, a megadonor to the GOP who cofounded PayPal, has reportedly told associates that he won’t be donating to any candidate in the 2024 elections because he’s unimpressed with Republicans’ hyperfocus on the culture wars.
Thiel endorsed Trump in previous elections and has donated over $40 million dollars to GOP candidates since 2018, according to Forbes.
During the podcast appearance with Weiss, he was asked about culture wars, a fight he had previously warned about during an RNC speech in 2016.
“One of the other things you said in that RNC speech, and I went back and read it, was this –‘Fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline. And nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.’ Seven years after the fact it seems to me that the culture wars have not just gotten worse arguably because of Trump… but it actually seems to me that the culture wars matter a great deal to people,” Weiss said.
She also pointed out that their interview was taking place in Miami, Florida where the current Governor, DeSantis, has described the state as “the place where woke goes to die.”
“Do you still think the culture wars are a great distraction, or are you defining culture war in a more narrow way?” Weiss asked.
“Well, things can be both important and a distraction at the same time,” Thiel said, noting that some of the very same arguments we hear today, he encountered in college in the 80’s and 90’s.
“So there were sort of all these arguments that we made, you know, 25 plus years ago that I think were in some sense, correct. They’ve stood up incredibly well over time. And then at the same time, they’re all these things I worry that they missed — that the focus on identity politics on the woke religion, you know, is probably a distraction from stagnation. It’s a distraction from economics, it’s a distraction from the way in which, the younger generation in the U.S. is probably gonna have a hard time having as a good standard of living as their parents,” Thiel explained.
Despite this, Thiel still praised DeSantis.
“I think DeSantis would make a terrific president if he’s the Republican nominee. I will strongly support him in 2024. But I do worry that focusing on the woke issue as ground zero is not quite enough,” Thiel said.
“We’ve thought some about moving our offices from California to Florida, and it’s a tough thing to do at this point because the real estate prices in Florida have doubled and the interest rates have doubled. If you buy a house in Miami today versus just three years ago, you’re paying four times as much in a monthly mortgage payment. And that kind of an economic cost is probably not enough to offset all the wokeness in the world, or even the taxes,” Thiel said.
Thiel noted that those more complex ecomonic issues were harder to solve and he understood why DeSantis doesn’t talk about them more, “but it surely is a bigger problem.”
Listen above via Honestly with Bari Weiss.
