‘Are the National Conservatives Winning, Son?’
News Analysis
Peter Thiel had a question.
“How do we do better than California?” he asked, looking around the packed hall.
The crowd was listening. It was, after all, the first talk on the first day of Miami’s National Conservatism Conference (NatCon III), and tech mogul Thiel was among the event’s largest funders.
They’d arrived hours or just minutes beforehand, negotiating the tropical, maze-like grounds of the resort hotel like figures in a daytime de Chirico: politicians, journalists, think tankers, and the donor class.
Zooming in closer, we can see the shifting, shimmering outlines of the newest New Right, as assembled by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist and NatCon’s intellectual lodestar.
Young veterans of the Trump administration crossed paths with politicos out of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Insiders ducked, dodged, or derided the occasional legacy media reporter or liberal-friendly moderate “conservative” sent down to Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida to file the obligatory horror stories. (DeSantis, along with virtually every other top Florida Republican politician, eventually made his way to the same stage where Thiel first spoke.)
NatCon co-organizer Anna Wellisz told me she wanted to build a ‘nationalist internationale’—a worldwide network of patriots, capable of fighting back against globalists, communists, and other forces waging war on the nation-state.
The concept, though reactive, is a definite and forward-looking one. That might explain its appeal to Thiel.
Although Thiel made his fortune in Silicon Valley, no one would mistake him for a fan of California’s politics. With Miami emerging as a new tech hub, the Republican mega-donor bought a pair of Miami Beach mansions in 2021.
Thiel’s commitment to Florida made his California question all the more urgent. He had just argued that rising real estate prices in the state (driven in part by purchases like his own) pose a problem.
If DeSantis’s Florida is to be a meaningful alternative to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Golden State, it cannot fall victim to the same parasitic wasting disease.
The problems, Thiel continued, don’t end there.
He warned that Republicans have grown too dependent on “pure nihilistic negation,” an especially acute concern as the GOP’s anticipated “red wave” threatens to subside before the midterms.
It’s not enough to point out what doesn’t work about a place like California—things like falling test scores, rising homelessness, rampant drug use, and unrelenting “wokeness.”
“How can we do better? How can we really offer a vision for the 21st century?” Thiel asked.
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