Trumpist Peter Thiel: Against Women's Suffrage--But Not so Much Against Apartheit
Julie Lythcott-Haims: (91) Gotta say I wasn't surprised when tech...: "Gotta say I wasn't surprised when tech billionaire Peter Thiel endorsed Trump... (Live from the Republicans Self-Made Trump Hell)
...Peter and I were dormmates at Stanford freshman year, and while I barely knew him - we ran in different circles - his fiercely Libertarian views were often a topic of conversation among those of us living in Branner Hall. One day I heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid (which was then still the law of the land in South Africa), which I found morally repugnant.
To know that a fellow student, a dormmate for that matter, might defend such a brutally oppressive race-based caste system gave me the willies. But I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room to ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman.
Needless to say, the chill up my spine didn't go away that day; if anything my fear was now greater knowing I was living with someone who seemed indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance. The looming threat of a Trump presidency makes me feel the exact same way.
[I summarized the six hours since posting here: https://medium.com/@JulieLH/my-conversation-with-peter-thiel-about-apartheid-and-its-aftermath-3fdf4249b08d#.mssa871vr]
