We’re looking at a big, fat glitch in Peter Thiel’s matrix
Creators are already using it to frame the 2028 race
I’d tell Peter Thiel to blink twice if he’s pissed, but I think they offloaded his human reaction functions like 12 system updates ago.
The Palantir-founding, antichrist-lecturing, maybe Argentina-moving tech billionaire is having what we call A Tough One™️. I personally feel like public displays of inspection into the shadowy billionaire and his growing empire are too few and far between.
On Tuesday, a post came up on my “For you” tab on Twitter from an account I had never seen, called: “maia arson crimew gay facts and tea.” You could consider the post contents both “gay facts” and “tea,” indeed. This user received a tip about a security flaw in the website of one of Thiel’s many extracurricular activities. What flowed from the spring?
113 names. The hacktivist wrapped the discovery in a thin layer of caution: It is “what seems to be a list of some members” of a much whispered about, invitation-only organization called Dialog. Thiel is the co-founder of the group, which has declined to publicize their membership list for two full decades.
WIRED verified the findings and reported on an additional list of 222 registrants for Dialog’s 2026 retreat this August in Ireland. They haven’t published it in full, but their reporting did include some of the panel offerings like “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “How’s Your Sex Life?” and yes, “Build-a-Cult.”
This is the type of reporting that can, and does, fly under the radar far too regularly. Whether that’s due to technocrat stringpulling or an over-saturated news cycle, who’s to say.
But I’m seeing this story start to have legs with political content creators on the left and I have some theories about why.
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JUST A GIRL WITH A GRIPE
First, my forever nit that I’ll never not pick. Almost every liberal creator has played very fast and loose in designating this as an official “membership” list in a “secret society.” This is despite an added disclaimer from the OG hacker saying it is not clear if these are “Members or Speakers/Guests.” Jess Craven, a Dem organizer with an extremely engaged audience, actually got a rare community note on Instagram for the framing on her video with 4M views.
Listen, I’m just as inclined as the next guy to assume this is a nefarious intellectual circlejerk assembled to determine the fate of humanity. But that’s not explicit in the information we’ve received this week. That said, I feel like one of the few iron-clad truths in the political culture we’ve built is that if your name is on a list that was intended to be private … you got some ‘splaining to do.
A few of the figures whose names elicited a very loud “HUH???” reaction among list-readers quickly took to social media to do their ‘splaining. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — huh? — clarified that he spoke at one event 13 years ago, never returned, and never met Thiel. Joseph Gordon-Levitt — HUH??? — called “some of the headlines and posts … alarming, if not bizarre.”
“I have been to two Dialog conferences. But, I do not know Peter Thiel. I’ve never met him. I’ve never spoken with him or his representatives. I’ve never seen him at an event. From what I’ve read about his views, we are political and ideological opposites.”
Whether you want to take their word for it or not is your prerogative. I’d say Peter Thiel is punching air over these public denials, but that emote was also removed from his operating system. Here’s a word you should consider, if not take, from one of the most trusted voices on the left, Under the Desk News:
We knew that Dialog existed and some of the people who attended their events before
We can see Thiel’s “paranoia” reflected in the workshops scheduled at the retreat
V Spehar got invited in the past, turned it down: “I didn’t want to be in a room with people I’m afraid of.”
And a reality check: “If somebody did go it doesn’t mean that they’re automatically bad or automatically evil.”
READING THE THIEL LEAVES
I’m gonna link to some of the wider content I’ve seen about this story in the past day. Almost all of these videos pull a unique thread in this story (listed), and yet, all of them are intentionally setting up an early argument about the 2028 election.
Monte Mader, 500k views — highlights the leader of the “Build-A-Cult” workshop is the founder of Pray.com, “one of the top-five grossing lifestyle apps”
Steve Tapas, 130k views — one of a handful of creators to invoke George Carlin’s “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”
Cheyenne Hunt, 150k views — “This is the oligarchy rigging the system against us while they’re on vacation”
Philip DeFranco, 1.3M views — goes into the ethical problems with the regulators and who they regulate meeting in private, off-the-record
Dave Neal, 500k — “This is why the issues in this world, they’re not left versus right, they’re up versus down.”
NOT TOO LATE FOR 2028
There’s a reason Peter Thiel’s prodigal son — the actual vice president of the United States — has just been sent off on a doomed humanization tour around popular media. Though they cast themselves as visionaries, Thiel and his technocrat brethren are definitionally reactionaries.
The stickiest and most potent sentiment shared by Americans of all ideologies is this sense that the wealthy elite are plotting — without us and against us. Amplifying awareness of Dialog’s existence (and, for some, inflating the known details) further enriches that sentiment.
These creators on the left recognize that post-partisan appeal and have already started to direct their audiences’ attention toward it. Everything is a funnel, get in at the top.
THINGS YOU DEFINITELY MISSED
Starting with the worst color-matched foundation humanity has ever seen:
