What do the "Epstein class' and the "Thiel class" have in common?
Connect the dots, sheeple...
A whole constellation of politicians, finance and tech guys, and media personalities have been implicated in yet another bizarre elite secret society, Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova report for Wired. The reveal comes courtesy of a Swiss hacktivist named maia arson crimew, who was able to uncover a list of 113 members of Peter Thiel’s spooky “Dialog” group from their poorly secured private website. A lot of the names are predictable, but liberals are likely to be surprised by others:
Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Garry Kasparov, Ezra Klein, Wes Moore, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Reid Hoffman, Steven Pinker, Ann-Marie Slaughter, Larry Summers, and for some insane reason Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Though names like Booker and Klein have gotten the most attention so far, I think Hoffman is clearly the most fascinating. Hoffman is the third largest donor to the Democratic Party. In the media he is portrayed as a highly ideological partisan so dismayed at the ascendant right that he was tempted to expatriate from the United States when Trump won re-election in 2024. Yet here he is, immersed in a chatroom salon culture that reportedly occupies an inordinate amount of time among the ruling class, and side-by-side with some of the biggest and most partisan Republican donors there are: Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and of course Peter Thiel himself. By all reports, these groups chats exist precisely to host “debates” that are not “dominated by progressive social movements,” and tend to revolve around the premise that “what really matters is defeating the left”. But for the most part they seem to be entirely cordial affairs:
There is a touch of alchemy to picking the right people to come into a chat. A great dinner party doesn’t have the same kind of person – the best ones have a mix.
Is it a coincidence that this leak comes only a week after multiple progressives like Ro Khanna and Graham Platner started to incorporate into their messaging talk about an “Epstein class”? The sort of parapolitics fans who have been obsessing over Epstein since 2019 would probably say no. But do they understand why? Obviously conspiracies are extremely common under capitalism, as Marx argued:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters…But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject…To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.
Just kidding: that was actually Adam Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations. But it’s worth reflecting on the way that Smith gets at something here that parapolitics commentary rarely talks about. When he insists that the ruling class conspires, he is referring to a certain conspiracy in particular: “not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.” Later, he adds that “Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
Wage-fixing conspiracies are not what people have in mind when they hear about the “Epstein class,” of course. Neither are they the sort of thing that we hear about from guys with the Eye of Providence as their Twitter avis, or from streamers who think that Trump is just sending arms to Israel because he’s being blackmailed. But if you want to know what Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, and the shadowy “Masters” we find in Wealth all have in common, connect the dots and follow the money: all of them have a direct economic interest in lowering wages.
If you pressed progressives like Khanna and Platner on this point, they’d probably admit it, just like Smith did. But here’s the real red pill that even liberals won’t acknowledge: capitalism doesn’t even need a conspiracy. Reid Hoffman may be a member of Thiel’s Dialog, The Council for Foreign Relations, and The Bilderberg Group, but he doesn’t need to meet in a dark room with his investees to tell them to keep wages low. Everyone just does it without being told because it’s the obvious thing to do, taking for granted that every other capitalist is constantly trying to do the same thing.
Similarly, you are probably never going to find a secret document online where rich people lay out their plan to steal surplus value created by the labor of their employees by leveraging their control over the means of production. This plan has had much greater consequences for our world than stuff like Dialog’s plan to start cults, but nobody spells it out in a private elites-only chatroom because no one has to. That is just the way capitalism works, and it’s not even a secret: it all happens right out in the open.
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