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07:00

by Flo Read

Billionaire Peter Thiel addresses students at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford

Oxford

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have a secret agreement to talk about the culture wars as much as possible, Peter Thiel has said.

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Speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford as part of the Scruton Memorial lecture series, the Silicon Valley billionaire argued that the Prime Minister and Labour leader were trying to distract the population from the economic problems facing the country:

- Peter Thiel

He began his speech with a chant he remembered from his days as a student at Stanford: Hey hey, ho ho, western cultures got to go. It sums up, he says, a battle that has raged ever since. But the woke vs. anti-woke dichotomy is a magic trick designed to distract us from what is really going on.

Thiel singled out the housing crisis, which successive politicians have failed to remedy over the last two decades: Think about the craziest woke excess in the UK of the last 10 years and then think about how it increased aggregate housing prices, he told the audience, before adding that the Marxist critique had quite a bit to it:

- Peter Thiel

Thiel asserted that the Left was more prone to trying to repeat old radical ideas than the Right, warning that going back to Blair is a mistake we have to make in the UK:

- Peter Thiel

In his address and subsequent conversation with philosopher John Gray, Thiel said there were other issues that politicians and elites were attempting to distract from. One was the decline of the sciences in universities.Be suspicious of cancer researchers claiming theyll have a breakthrough in just a few more years, Thiel warned. Science has been degraded, and it is no longer progressing:

- Peter Thiel

The most significant loss in contemporary society, according to Thiel, has been that of God and religion. Its an odd thing to be distracted from, Thiel said, because it suggests so many ways that this debate could be reframed. Wokeness, meanwhile, was a perversion and acceleration of Christian narratives: woke post-Christian temptation is to be more Christian than the Christians.

The venture capitalist concluded that a possible alternative to the extremes of fascism or communism might be some form of Christian democracy.

Read more:
Peter Thiel: UK leaders have 'secret agreement' to talk up culture wars - UnHerd