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Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is set to extend his financial reach into the UK, after Keir Starmer and the US President announced a new transatlantic tech partnership incorporating his data mining company Palantir. As part of the deal Thiel’s company will invest a further £1.5 billion into Britain, on top of its already extensive interests in the NHS.
However, a Byline Times investigation can reveal that Thiel’s far deeper impact on the country could be an ideological one, focused on a network seeking to rehabilitate discredited race science and authoritarian ideas into the Conservatives, Reform UK and Labour.
At the centre of the network is his friend, admirer, and leading figure in the “neo-reactionary” movement, Curtis Yarvin, the blogger known as Mencius Moldbug.
Thiel’s venture firm has already invested in Yarvin’s company Tlon, and his main political protégé JD Vance — now US vice president — is also a big admirer. What began on fringe blogs is increasingly embedded in Washington, and is now being exported to Britain.
The ‘Dark Enlightenment’
Yarvin is not well yet known among the UK public but his “Dark Enlightenment” writings have been deeply influential on the US right and increasingly in the UK right too. These ideas include calls for the end of democracy, with Yarvin arguing that Western democracies should be replaced by what he has referred to as a “monarchy” run by an unelected dictator, or “CEO”.
They have also included the endorsement of discredited ideas about the “natural inferiority” of black people.
In a 2009 essay Yarvin argued that “the obvious statistical differences in the average talents of human races” justified eliminating the system of representative government.
“Obviously, once you stop believing in democracy, it is easy to stop seeing the failure of this political design in societies with a high percentage of non-Eurasian genetic ancestry as a moral reflection on persons of non-Eurasian ancestry, and start seeing it as a mere engineering failure…” he wrote.
Yarvin is also known for his repeated use of the n-word. In an interview with Byline Times, his associate and founder of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement, Maurice Glasman, confirmed that Yarvin had shown the racial slur to him during a London portrait sitting. Glasman said that he had reacted with disgust but admitted he remained interested in Yarvin’s views on artificial intelligence.
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In February 2025, Yarvin appeared at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) summit in London, co-founded by Jordan Peterson and funded by GB News investor Paul Marshall. Its advisory board includes Peterson, commentator Douglas Murray, Lord Glasman, and Reform UK policy chief James Orr. Both Peterson and Murray have defended The Bell Curve, which claimed racial hierarchies in intelligence. The event was addressed by other leading figures on the right of British politics, including Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.
Yarvin is also scheduled to appear at this year’s How the Light Gets In festival in London, where he will take part in three panels, including one in which Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell says he will interview him for a “lively discussion” as the “philosopher behind JD Vance”.
The upcoming Byline Times investigation will show how Thiel’s ideological network cuts across Britain’s political spectrum:
- Conservatives: Yarvin admirer Dominic Cummings’ former adviser Andrew Sabisky, who argued Black people are predisposed to lower IQ, now influences Civic Future’s Conservative leadership pipeline.
- Labour: Glasman co-leads Policy Exchange’s Future of the Left programme, which feeds into No.10.
- Reform UK: James Orr, who hosted Bell Curve author Charles Murray at Cambridge, now heads Reform’s policy think-tank.
Together, these strands form a cross-party pincer movement: Thiel’s hard power through Palantir’s contracts, and his soft power through the normalisation of discredited pseudo-scientific neo-reactionary ideas.
As figures like Yarvin move alongside establishment names, Thiel’s network is shifting ideas once confined to the far-right fringe into the centre of mainstream debate.
Byline Times will publish its full exclusive investigation into Thiel’s new transatlantic network and the Big Tech’s British Takeover, in the coming days.
