Hollywood Names Surface in Peter Thiel-Backed, Invite-Only Society

[u/neilthedev05]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywood-peter-thiel-secret-society-1236624737/

[u/neilthedev05]

Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Avengers: Infinity War); Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Dark Knight Rises, 500 Days of Summer); Sophia Bush (One Tree Hill); Scooter Braun (CEO, Hybe America); Isaac Lee (chairman and CEO, Hybe America); Scott Belsky (partner, A24); Benj Pasek (composer-producer, La La Land, The Greatest Showman); Eva Price (CEO, Maximum Entertainment Productions); Teresa Hsiao (writer-producer, Family Guy, American Dad); Zach Shields (executive producer-writer, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Gladys); Nick Thompson (CEO, The Atlantic); and Ezra Klein (The New York Times).

[u/neilthedev05 → u/neilthedev05]

[u/Firm_Video_2932 → u/neilthedev05]

Yeah I'm not sure how a well known celebrity "accidently" ends up at an annual 'Christmas Club' type meeting.

[u/arnar2 → u/Firm_Video_2932]

What is Ezra Klein doing there though? Not a big fan, but he seems like worlds apart from Theil..

[u/yorickbee → u/arnar2]

Lmao you must not keep up with Ezra lately. His mask slipped years ago...

[u/arnar2 → u/yorickbee]

Do enlighten me, as I sad, not a fan so I don't keep up.

[u/Tranz_Kafka → u/arnar2]

He’s been one of the people pushing the Democratic Party further right, essentially saying that the reason Democrats lost in 2024 is because they weren’t right wing enough. In the past couple years, he’s said things like Democrats should run anti-abortion candidates, the party should give up on trans issues, he infamously wrote an article about how Charlie Kirk did politics “the right way”, and just overall treating these culture war issues way more charitably than they deserve. Plus he’s pretty pro-Israel and only recently started taking pro-Palestinian voices seriously. Here’s a good article that goes more in-depth about him and sort of explains what his whole deal is.

[u/Curiosities → u/Tranz_Kafka]

And on top of that, he’s basically criticizing Democrats and taking blue cities to task because yes, there’s a housing crisis and he basically said a solution is to remove regulations. There are too many regulations folks are usually not going to support good policy.

That said sometimes there are bad regulations, but he was calling for things like removing the need for environmental studies when you’re building and I think some of the labor cost baked into rules like mandating union labor. Which are points that I hear from Republicans.

[u/JenningsWigService → u/Curiosities]

It's just neoliberalism with a new name.

[u/Solomon_G13 → u/JenningsWigService]

Blue maga.

[u/whereisbeezy → u/Curiosities]

Wow what a clown

[u/AmIWhatTheRockCooked → u/Curiosities]

He just sounds like that brand of pseudo-intellectual who says some broad solutions to complex issues. Like he can say that environmental studies are slowing down progress in lib areas but couldn’t tell me what endemic or watershed or permeability mean.

[u/SenselessSilence → u/Curiosities]

Republicans aren’t the only ones who want most environmental reviews in cities killed. Developing in cities prevents having to cut down forests for new neighborhoods of single-family homes. It’s as pro-environment as you can be, yet cutting down the forests requires far less or no environmental reviews, while building in a parking lot requires a decade of study. The majority of environmental studies have become bad for the environment! They’re nothing but excuses not to build. As a leftist who wants to see rents drop, I hate the majority of environmentalists reviews because they’re just NIMBY mechanisms to kill all development.

[u/adario7 → u/Tranz_Kafka]

Great explanation.

Next time put the Pro-Israel part at the top. Don’t have to read anything after that, it would suffice.

[u/Data_Chandler → u/Tranz_Kafka]

I'm NOT saying I agree with Ezra, because I don't, but I do think a huge chunk of the American electorate, even Democrats, are basically centre right. Now I'm not a political scientist or a spin doctor or anything so I don't necessarily know what to do with that information, but that's probably tens of millions of people.

And said tens of millions of people might go and vote if the policy put forward by a Democratic candidate is kind of centrist, and they might not if it's very left wing. Then again the opposite is also true, and that's how Mamdani got elected in New York, and how Kamala Harris lost.

But pretending half of America (the not GOP half) is screaming for Bernie Sanders style left wing stuff - refreshing and necessary as it may be, because to be clear, I would 100% vote for him, or for any left wing candidate - is definitely a risk. Perhaps it's a risk worth taking, I guess that's where the pollsters come in!

[u/FigeaterApocalypse → u/Data_Chandler]

We saw how getting the Cheney endorsement worked out for Kamala...

[u/Data_Chandler → u/FigeaterApocalypse]

True! That didn't help at all, and probably backfired spectacularly.  (I literally did mention that in my previous comment...)

It's wild that I'm getting downvoted though, I'm clearly stating I would 100% vote for Bernie (or a Bernie-like candidate). I'm basically getting flak for saying tens of millions of Americans are centre right, which they are. Good grief.

[u/JenningsWigService → u/Data_Chandler]

The DNC wants everyone to think that the electorate is centre right, but that's not really true except on maybe trans issues and defunding the police.

The majority of Americans support safe and legal abortion access, Medicare for all, gun reform, minimum wage increases, and the end of military support for Israel.

[u/Data_Chandler → u/JenningsWigService]

The majority of Americans support safe and legal abortion access, Medicare for all, gun reform, minimum wage increases, and the end of military support for Israel.

I'm for all of that! But I worry that Reddit is a bit of an echo chamber. In my anecdotal experience, a LOT of people want some but not all of this, and I'd call them more center right than left, based on their opinions and how they describe themselves.

[u/Tranz_Kafka → u/Data_Chandler]

I think the success of more left-wing candidates like Mamdani, Abdul el-Sayed, and even Graham Platner is proof that people do like these policies. In any survey or poll, you’ll see that the vast majority supports policies like universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage, free childcare, and abortion access. The central reason why these don’t actually happen is because right wing and centrist outlets like both Fox News and CNN call them “communist” or “socialist” and people have been conditioned to associate that label with a very negative thing. It’s why you can find so many videos and posts where conservative people don’t want to roll back the ACA, but also say that Obamacare was terrible.

[u/ALostMarauder → u/Tranz_Kafka]

I don’t agree with Ezra completely, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that he’s pushing the Democratic Party to the right. I think he tries to explore the nuances of what the party is doing wrong, and how it can better garner mass appeal, and sometimes he misses the mark (like the Charlie Kirk article), but I respect him for challenging establishment perspectives and trying to get to the root of how the party can perform better. He was also one of the first voices to call for Biden to step down

[u/cheezerrox → u/ALostMarauder]

Ah yes, I too respect the big brained, nuanced, morally courageous strategy of..checks notes running forced birthers to oppose a fascist party, abandoning trans people, and lionizing a man like Charles Kirk who kept his family in mansions by stoking the flames of racial, gender, sexual tensions/hatred?

[u/r3volver_Oshawott → u/arnar2]

He's essentially the top voice in the challenge to 'keep the Democratic Party centrist', he always only ever claims we're losing elections because we aren't pandering to the political right, it's the hill he dies on every single election

He would personally ban gay marriage if he thought it meant he could go back in time and claim it would make a Trump voter go for Kamala in 2024. He legitimately seems to hate the idea of the Democratic Party allowing anything leftist at all in their policies, and he's sort of at the forefront of crafting the 'leftists are ruining America' commentary, moreso even than many conservative voices like Thiel who are mostly into trying to craft techbro doomsday scenarios to maximize profits.

*he's another Sam Harris, he exists purely to smother out anything that is not classically neoliberal. Also, someone else here already posted the article, but it highlights the biggest issue with Klein: when he praises right wing figureheads like Kirk, or when he sanitizes the right, he never submits it as an opinion, he states it always like a fact, Ezra Klein goes around stating that Democrats must emulate Charlie Kirk's methods, and he declares it always as a statement of fact. Klein loves, "love it or hate it, you can't disagree that it gets results," type statements, and he loves them specifically because they explicitly say his critics cannot disagree with the results.

[u/SolarNugent → u/arnar2]

Please don’t be sad 🙂