I wasn’t really planning to, but I wound up devoting part of yesterday afternoon to Peter Thiel, and part to Aleksandr Kwasniewski. Let me explain.

First, Peter Thiel. Let’s get the basics out of the way. He is 56, he is gay, he was born in Germany, he went to Stanford for undergraduate and law school, he practiced law with Sullivan and Cromwell for a spell, he founded PayPal, and he’s worth about $10 billion. Thiel is a conservative (maybe) and a libertarian (maybe), and he has been a large contributor to conservative political causes. He was a big supporter of Ron Paul (that tells you something) and gave mucho dinero to the Trump campaigns and to Republicans in general. In 2022, says Wikipedia, he gave over $20 million to Republican candidates, but in 2023, says the same Wikipedia, it was reported (by Barton Gellman of The Atlantic) that Thiel had soured on politics, and wouldn’t be spreading his money around during the 2024 campaign.

In 1995, when still in his 20s, he wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which has, I believe, recently been updated and republished; it deals with anti-DEI and anti-wokeness beliefs. Last October, Thiel was a presenter at the annual Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture Series at Oxford. I watched the lecture, more or less, while riding on my stationary bike.

My first conclusion was: Peter Thiel is nuts. At the end of the lecture, I wanted to ask a question. It would have been straightforward. I would like to have asked: ”Mr. Thiel, I had hoped you would enlighten me on your thoughts on the DEI movement and on wokeness. I understand that you are in opposition to both. But I must admit that I did not understand one word (I recognized the words, yes, but that does not mean understood the. m) that you said. Could you please explain, in just a few sentences, what you were trying to get across?”

The moderator of the program was Oxford philosopher John Gray. I can’t say that I understood Gray any better than I understood Thiel, but I will give Gray the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that his lack of clarity came about because he had to pretend that he understood what Thiel had said.

I am not going to bore you with any of what Thiel or Gray said (you can go to YouTube for that), but will leave you with the thought that the only intriguing part of their post-lecture discussion was when Thiel mentioned Russian cosmism (with Gray nodding up and down), a late 19th/early 20th century Russian movement that suggested that the goals of science were (a) interplanetary travel, (b) the extension of human life indefinitely and (c) the resurrection of the dead (all of the dead), as a matter of fairness. (Maybe I should also tell you that Thiel did talk a lot about the high price of housing, which he says is a result of wokeness, and that maybe people should move out of cities into the Outback, or its equivalent, and connect with the rest of the world via the Internet, as presumably Amazon prime.)

Okay, on to Kwasniewski. Alexsandr Kwasniewski was the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. I probably knew a little about him 20 years ago, but I have forgotten all of that (clearly), and needed to start from scratch. He was a progressive (woke, I don’t know) president, who led Poland’s modernization, and guided its admission into both NATO and the European Union, and governed during the rewriting of the Polish Constitution. He was in his 40s as president, and today is a relatively young (speaking for myself) 69. His post-presidency has been the Polish equivalence of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency, I think, leading many international efforts to promote peace and other good things. Any flaws in his post-political life? Oh, yes, like Hunter, he became a Director of Burisma.

Where did my interest in AK (let’s just call him AK) come from? The non-profit Carpe Librum is a peripatetic used book store, whose profits support the DC public schools. They are holding a four day Martin Luther King Weekend sale near us, in the 4400 block of Connecticut Avenue, near Van Ness. I purchased six books – all (of course) signed by the author. One of the books, titled We Won The Future is by AK, and contains a generous inscription to a Catholic priest. AK taught for a while at Jesuit Georgetown University, but apparently (again, says Wikipedia) describes himself as an atheist, although that is hard to believe for a Polish politician.

The book itself contains English translations of various of his speeches and pronouncements as President, running about 900 pages and weighing about 900 pounds. It was printed in Warsaw in 2008, and published by a private foundation AK established. What’s interesting is that I can’t find any reference to the book anywhere – not on sites where books are sold, not on sites where books are described, and not on sites belonging to universities and university libraries. Usually, when that happens, the book is 100 years old and of no real interest. Surprised me.

That’s it for today.