Capture: Peter Thiel, Dark Enlightenment, & The End Of The Open Society / Barrett Brown

This image is a derivative of “Peter Thiel” by Gage Skidmore, used under CC BY-SA

Award-winning investigative journalist, media critic, and activist Barrett Brown joins me to discuss Silicon Valley billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. He describes the complex web of media outlets and personalities, hackers, and intelligence community assets connected directly or indirectly with Thiel — a powerful, enormously well-resourced figure aiming to undermine the last remnants of democracy and the open society.

Bio:

Barrett Brown is a writer and activist. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Intercept, Huffington Post, New York Press, Skeptic, The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera, and other outlets. In 2009, he founded Project PM, a “distributed think tank” later repurposed to oversee a crowdsourced investigation into private intelligence contractors and little-known surveillance/disinformation methodologies. In 2011 and 2012, he worked with Anonymous on campaigns involving the Tunisian revolution, state misconduct, and other issues. In 2012, Brown was arrested and later sentenced to four years in federal prison on charges stemming from his investigations into HBGary, Stratfor, Palantir, Archimedes, and other firms that would later be implicated in election interference operations in the US and UK. While imprisoned, he won the National Magazine Award and other journalism and writing honors for his column, “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison.” Upon his release in late 2016, he established the non-profit Pursuance to develop a platform for mass civic engagement and to promote his doctrine of non-institutional “process democracy.” His third book, My Glorious Defeats, is available for pre-order from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Episode Notes:

Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettB

Pre-order My Glorious Defeats from Bookshop

Listen to Barrett on CounterPunch Radio and Black Power Media 

Watch the Field of Vision documentary following Barrett after his release from federal prison in 2016

Read Dallas Journalist Barrett Brown Went to the U.K. Now, He Wants Asylum published at The Dallas Observer

Learn more about the Black Socialists in America at the website and follow on social media @BlackSocialists

Sounds by Midnight Sounds