Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.

The first time I encountered Peter Thiel’s name was in China, about a decade ago. He was scheduled to give a talk about his 2014 book, Zero to One, at tech-focused Tsinghua University (known as China’s MIT) where giant banners emblazoned with his face were hard to miss.

I dismissed the fascination with Thiel as another example of the “David Hasselhoff phenomenon”: second-tier American celebrities achieving disproportionate fame abroad. At that time in China, even tenuous connections to some US center of power — Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood — could be lev

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