SAN FRANCISCO, March 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Peter Thiel, the openly homosexual tech billionaire who bucked both the LGBT lobby and his colleagues to support President Donald Trump in 2016, has slammed Silicon Valley as a “totalitarian place” dominated by “political correctness.”
“I think it’s OK to be in a place where most people are liberal or most people have views different from my own,” Thiel said in an interview Friday with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. But, he added, “I do think there is something different when it goes from a large majority having one way to it being almost unanimous.”
In Thiel’s opinion, Silicon Valley — where most of the world's largest high-tech corporations exist — has veered so far toward the latter that it’s crossed over into groupthink.
“When people are unanimously on one side, that tells me not that they’ve all figured out the truth but that they are in sort of a totalitarian place, that they are in a one-party state where they are not allowed to have dissenting views,” he said.
According to NBC News, Silicon Valley employees donated a total of $3 million to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, sixty times more than the $50,000 they sent to Trump.
Thiel told Bartiromo that he believes this one-sidedness has resulted in a politically-correct, “super narrow” debate that ultimately harms the country by preventing people from considering or debating every possible solution to a given problem. Much of the blame for this state of affairs, he said, belongs with American universities.
Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, is a libertarian Republican who endorsed Trump in hopes that the real estate mogul would help bring about a “less intrusive government, in both social and economic areas.”
But while Thiel’s fiscal conservatism has stymied his liberal neighbors, his social liberalism remains a point of contention with his more traditional fellow Republicans. In 2016, he became the first openly homosexual man to address the Republican National Convention, with a speech that dismissed concerns over issues like women being forced to share restrooms with men as “fake culture wars [that] only distract us from our economic decline.”
That said, Thiel and social conservatives are of one mind on the subject of indoctrination in higher education.
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Last week, LifeSiteNews covered the case of Indiana University of Pennsylvania senior Lake Ingle, a religious studies major barred from a religion course for arguing that there are only two genders. In December, the University of Minnesota told faculty and staff not to display overtly Christian or Jewish holiday symbols on campus, including Santa Claus, Nativity scenes, dreidels, or menorahs. Hostile receptions to, and attempts to shut down, peaceful pro-life activism on college campuses have also become increasingly common.
Censorship of dissenting viewpoints is a growing concern on social media, as well. LifeSiteNews recently reported that Facebook was censoring ads from a variety of pro-life groups, including LifeSiteNews, while allowing ads for illegal abortion drugs linked to serious medical complications.
The internet search giant Google has removed revenue-generating ads from several factual LifeSiteNews articles it determined to be “dangerous or derogatory.” The Google-owned video platform YouTube recently enlisted the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center to help police “hateful” content.
Twitter, meanwhile, has censored pro-life ads from the Susan B. Anthony List, Live Action, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, and marriage and gender scholar Dr. Ryan T. Anderson. It relented in Blackburn and Anderson’s cases, however, following the public backlash. Twitter has also made use of the practice of “shadow banning,” in which a user’s tweets are blocked from appearing anywhere but in the feeds of the account’s followers.