Makes sense to me. While it's probably implied in Buttigieg's point, I'd like to add there's a level of contempt for the poor, and by poor I mean folks who are not wealthy.
Gay billionaire knows his people are the billionaires, not the gays.
Only the poors think about cultural conflict, the rich know we’ve got a class-based war a-raging, and the score’s not even close. The rich are the one’s stoking the cultural conflicts as a ruse to keep the onslaught on the poors out of sight.
In another thread about Grindr going down during the RNC convention, the general opinion is that they are repressed homosexuals and that is why they are fascists. I think Pete hits on, and you sum up, the real reason: some rich gay people feel insulated by their wealth from the problems that republicans might introduce, and think adding even more wealth is the way to go.
It isn't as though conservatives limit their derision to homosexuality. Any kind of sexual promiscuity is cause for condemnation and persecution if you're poor. This isn't homosexuality as taboo, this is sexuality as a luxury reserved for the wealthiest and most well-connected.
FFS, we've got video recordings of Donald Trump groping Rudy Giuliani in drag as part of a sketch comedy routine. Lauren Boebert gives handies out at the theater. JD Vance himself is married to a migrant of color. Vanishingly few conservatives seems to mind. This has always been a question of economic privilege, rather than some universal social taboo. Its a tool for Othering the political opposition, not policing the party leadership internally.
Wealth, along with the benefits of an obsequies mass media and mercenary police force, guarantee you can have all the Burning Man orgy tents you want just so long as you've paid off the right people.
Because being gay when you have enough money and power stops being a factor. You’re insulated from the overwhelming majority of any social problems that affect normal lgbtq people.
So your decisions are going to be the same as most any others in the Uber-wealthy: you look to enhance your power and finances. Nothing else is your problem.
Nazis, neo or otherwise, think of being gay as a mental illness. Being a billionaire might insulate Thiel from the face eating leopards, but only in so far as the leopards have other targets. Neo Nazis are going to clean up house of minorities and gays once they have sufficient legal foothold.
As for conservatives, they don’t care about how much money someone else has, but rather how much they can use someone else’s money.
They're willing to tolerate gay people so long as they're racist...well for a while anyway. I mean Ernst Rohm was head of the SA (brown shirts) under Hitler.
Being a billionaire might insulate Thiel from the face eating leopards, but only in so far as the leopards have other targets.
The Catholics might think they can preach against homosexuality, but eventually they're going to discover that their congregants won't put up with all the homosexuality in the priesthood. Maybe not today, but possibly within the next 1500 years. And then won't they fell bad about what they've done.
He subscribes to a branch of neo-reactionary politics coined "dark enlightenment" that basically rejects liberalism. In short, these fine fellows believe that we should be their literal serfs in a neo-feudal society. I think point for point, their ideology is even more fucked up than fascism.
Even serfs had to be treated halfways decently by their lords or they risked being overthrown or having no one left to work their land. With this capitalist dystopia we don't even get that.
Its a shame for Thiel, that insulation via wealth only goes so far. Once oppression has been codified into law, and most of the streets have been sterilized of "undesirables", the machine will drink its own juice and come for him, too.
Its a shame for Thiel, that insulation via wealth only goes so far.
"You'll get yours in the end" is a prophecy liberals make endless, while plutocrats continue to ignore it without real consequence.
Once oppression has been codified into law
Laws Are For Little People. My man Elon Musk should be serving a thousand year consecutive life sentence for the endless string of SEC violations, financial frauds, drug abuses, and sexual assaults he's committed in the last five years alone. Donald Trump should be on death row. None of these assholes actually get prosecuted for any of this shit, precisely because they're insulated through their wealth and social connections.
JD Vance isn't going to try and throw his sugar daddy under the bus, particularly when Thiel's fortune is based around his enormous government contracts for mass surveillance via Palantir. It would be just shy of trying to pick a fight with Eric Prince (America's premiere international warlord for hire) or Gregory Hayes (CEO of Raytheon, the company that makes all the high performance missiles, rockets, and smart bombs).
I'm sure Ernst Röhm thought the same thing. Inevitably, the alliance of convenience runs its course and the fascists decide it's easier if they're dead.
Dead men can't hire lawyers to defend their stock portfolios, after all.
This is real life, anything could happen. The rich get fucked just as much as they get away. There will be no warning. Even for those like Thiel if Project 2025 was fully implemented. He would automatically be branded a pedophile and receive the death penalty. Don't think they wouldn't be quick to consume each other. The vacuum of power would be ripe for anyone remaining. We're getting to the point where the greedy must devour each other to grow.
Just keep in mind, there's a shit ton of republikkklowns that are closet gays. They just use it as more outrage because scared idiots eat it up and join the cult.
It doesnt matter. They'll march us off the cliff over coming out. Which is also a shame. I may have been depressed, but I have come to terms with who and what I am and can be content with it. I couldn't imagine rejecting yourself to such an extent. It has to cause serious mental harm.
I actually "met" Thiel once. I was working for a limo company and we picked him and his luggage up. He booked 2 limos, one for himself, one for his luggage. I was driving the luggage car. We picked him up on the Tarmac at the private Jetway. He was walking towards me, and I greeted him with my hand out and said something along the lines of pleasure to meet you Mr Thiel, I'll be getting the luggage today, your driver is over there. He walked past my outstretched hand and didn't even acknowledge me. Then when they unloaded his "luggage" it was literally a single backpack. The guy ordered a whole separate car "probably $500+) to avoid the hassle of carrying a backpack 90' from the private jet to the limo. When I arrived at his home to drop off the "luggage" I was told I couldn't go in the front and had to use the service entrance. Guy seemed like a cunt then and still does today.
There's plenty of Dems caught up in it, but the worst of the Silicon Valley scene supports the GOP.
Bilaji Srinivasan's Gray Pride pipe dream is based on using street paramilitaries to remove the (quite pro-capital) Democrats from power in the Bay area.
Now thankfully, he's too much of a fuckin' weirdo to bring a movement like that together, but the right wing already has groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front working on a similar political project.