‘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.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (R) and PayPal founder Peter Thiel (C) listen as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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
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