Photographs by Cole Barash

Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.

The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.

Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities. To Marissa—whose father, Diego Rodriguez, is himself an extremist leader and Bundy’s close friend—the hospital was a “lion’s den.”

By the next evening, Levi and Marissa were demanding to take their baby home, but hospital staff said it wasn’t yet safe. They left a few days later, with instructions to bring Cyrus in for follow-up appointments. When they failed to show up for a scheduled weigh-in at a local clinic the following week—Marissa was feeling sick herself and decided to postpone it—a nurse there referred the case to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Cyrus missed another appointment that afternoon at St. Luke’s, and another nurse contacted the detective on the case. Someone had to see the infant right away, she said.

That night, officers pulled the family over at a gas station in nearby Garden City. Marissa begged for Bundy’s help by phone. “They’re trying to take my baby. They’re trying to take my baby,” she kept telling him, until she was out of breath. Police lights were flashing all around her as a crowd began to gather. She couldn’t understand how things had escalated so fast.

Bundy put out a call for help from his group, the People’s Rights Network, which claimed to have more than 50,000 members, and told Marissa to livestream what was happening on Facebook. When a police officer demanded that she hand Cyrus over, she pleaded with him. “Do you understand what happens when the state takes custody of babies?” she said. “I’ve seen this so many times. I can’t be that next person—I can’t.” While Bundy was driving to the gas station, he learned that both Levi and Marissa had been arrested, and Cyrus was on the way to another St. Luke’s branch, an ER about 10 miles away in Meridian. Bundy and his supporters headed there.

Within an hour, a small crowd was blocking the ambulance bay, forcing the hospital to divert patients elsewhere. Protesters shouted that the hospital staff were kidnappers and child molesters. Some followed nurses to their cars as they left the building. Bundy himself was arrested for trespassing on hospital property, and Rachel Thomas, the lead doctor in the ER that night, feared that the crowd would break down the doors and try to take the baby.

Protesters gather outside St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in downtown Boise, Idaho, in March 2022. (Darin Oswald / Idaho Statesman / AP)

In the early hours of the next morning, after getting out of jail, Bundy posted a video urging more of his followers to join the protest. “It’s just sickening, sickening, sickening,” he said. “These people believe they have the authority to take our little babies. They are wicked.”

By that time, it was clear to Dr. Thomas that the child had to be moved back to the hospital in Boise as quickly as possible for security reasons. She wrapped Cyrus in a blanket and carried him through the bowels of the hospital to an ambulance at a back entrance. Security officers led the way, searching each area for intruders before giving the “all clear” and letting her enter. She felt like she was in a cheap action movie. To avoid the crowd, the ambulance jumped the median as it made a U-turn and sped east on I-84.

Dr. Erickson met Cyrus on his arrival. He looked even sicker than he had the week before. His weight now put him below the .02nd percentile. As doctors reinserted the IV and the feeding tube, Bundy sent out a new People’s Rights alert redirecting the crowd to the Boise campus. Protesters arrived with Free Baby Cyrus signs. Bundy told his followers to call St. Luke’s, and soon threats were pouring in by the hundreds.

“The parents of a child have all the rights,” one caller said. “I need you to remind everybody who works there before we come and lop off your fucking head, bitch. We will fucking kill you.” Rodriguez, Marissa’s father, began holding regular rallies at the hospital and at one of them called on God to “crush the necks of those that are evil.” Three days into this ordeal, the FBI and state authorities warned St. Luke’s that some of Bundy’s followers were planning to storm in and take the baby by force. About 30 Boise police officers were called in. Hospital workers constructed a barricade of furniture to block access to the children’s wing.

As the protest escalated, Health and Welfare workers spirited Cyrus to a secret location, where they babysat him in shifts. A few days later, and about a pound heavier, he was returned to his parents. The protesters dispersed, and Bundy and Rodriguez celebrated. Cyrus’s return home, Bundy said, was nothing short of “a miracle.”

In the months that followed, Bundy pleaded guilty to misdemeanor trespassing at the hospital and avoided time in jail. But the protests he and Rodriguez had fomented with their false accusations of child trafficking resulted in a civil suit against them. This past August, after a weeklong trial that Bundy and Rodriguez skipped, a judge assessed $52 million in damages, almost certainly more than their combined net worth.

Bundy has promised to hold firm. If the county sheriff ever showed up on his property to collect, he told one interviewer, he’d “meet ’em at the front door with my friends and shotgun.”

In early August, I flew out to Idaho to visit Bundy. But at 3:11 a.m. the night before we were scheduled to meet, he texted me to cancel. He was on the verge of financial ruin, he said, and it was getting harder and harder to shield his children from the effects. The message went on for some 230 words about how a man described as one of America’s most dangerous right-wing extremists was “fighting a lot of emotional anxiety.”

If he did confront the sheriff, it wouldn’t be the first time his family had done battle with the law. In 2014, about a thousand militiamen and other supporters helped his family repel government agents trying to impound their cattle in Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy’s followers still speak with awe about how officers Tasered him three times, and three times, with the help of the crowd behind him, he ripped out the Taser darts and stood his ground. His father, Cliven, led that battle, but when the Bundys clashed with government agents again in 2016, Ammon was in charge. His six-week occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge left a rancher dead, shot down by police officers after a backwoods car chase.

Left: An armed man stands guard as Bundy supporters arrive at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Right: Early morning at the front-gate guard post during the occupation. (Alex Milan Tracy / AP; Jeffrey Schwilk / Alamy)

In 2020, with the start of the pandemic, Bundy found a new purpose. One of the first meetings of his People’s Rights Network, held in April of that year, was to plan an Easter service in defiance of local COVID-19 restrictions. At another early demonstration, members gathered outside a health commissioner’s home in Montana and burned masks on a grill. In August 2020, Bundy was arrested and jailed after leading a contingent of supporters, some with guns, as they stormed the Idaho statehouse, pushing officers and shattering a glass door, during a special legislative session on public-health precautions.

When People’s Rights members started telling Bundy about how the government was unjustly separating children from their parents, that became another cause. Instances of actual overreach by Child Protective Services became, for them, evidence supporting QAnon-style conspiracy theories about “government subsidized child trafficking,” as Rodriguez put it, which were proliferating in extremist circles and beyond. By the time Cyrus was taken, People’s Rights members had already staged protests on behalf of supposedly “kidnapped” children in Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. But none of those had escalated like the one at St. Luke’s.

Despite his late-night text, Bundy did in the end agree to see me, for what was supposed to be a quick hello but stretched into a day-long visit. I’d spend more time with him in the weeks that followed, and speak with him regularly on the phone. We discussed many aspects of his life, but most of all we talked about the judgment against him, and what would happen if the government tried to take his home.

“I feel like I’m not supposed to yield,” he told me at one point. If he were killed, he said, his friends and followers would avenge him: “They’ll go take the life of the judge and the sheriff and St. Luke’s CEO and the head attorney and all the most culpable people.” He delivered these words with an unnerving lack of menace—less like a threat than like a weather forecast.

Ammon Bundy in his auto-repair workshop

Bundy’s home sits on a five-acre property at the edge of Idaho’s Emmett Valley, just across the road from Last Chance Canal. If he could choose any place in the world to live, he told me, it would be here.

When I showed up, I found him pacing around his auto-repair workshop, looking for parts. His beard is almost fully gray, and at 48, he has a bit of a belly, which he finds embarrassing. As always, he wore a chocolate-brown cowboy hat and a mechanic’s jacket with the logo of the fleet-maintenance company he once ran. He’s worked on cars ever since he was a teenager, when his father told him that the family ranch could not sustain him and his siblings.

Ammon was the fourth of six children of an unhappy marriage. Cliven was often away, working construction jobs in Las Vegas. Ammon’s mother, Jane Marie, resented the lonely domesticity she’d been consigned to, he told me. When he was 5 years old, she left. One night soon after, a huge storm took down a tree in the yard. The next morning, as he and his siblings played in the wreckage, he remembers thinking, Where’s Mom? She had not said goodbye.

With their mother gone and their dad away, the Bundy children mostly raised themselves. Instead of doing homework, Ammon and his brothers hunted rabbits in the hills and built Quonset huts. After high school, he went on his Mormon mission to Minnesota and then started a truck-repair business. A couple of years later, he married Lisa Sundloff, a student at Southern Utah University whom he met through his secretary, and they moved to Arizona.

Their first apartment was tiny, but as Bundy’s business took off, they moved into a house in the Phoenix suburbs, then a bigger one with a stone fireplace and a swimming pool, a home he still speaks of with pride. He didn’t drink or smoke; he had five kids and avoided trouble with the law. He leaned libertarian, but he was no militant: In 2010, he took out a $530,000 loan from the Small Business Administration.

It isn’t easy, now, to reconcile that law-abiding suburban dad, his growing business supported by a federal loan, with the man he has become. Thirteen years and two standoffs later, Ammon believes the proper functions of government are limited to preventing violent crime, protecting private property, and defending the country from foreign threats. He says that abortion is murder and homosexuality is an abomination, but also that the government doesn’t have any business outlawing gay marriage (though it should prohibit same-sex couples from raising children). He opposes a border wall and views Trumpian policies as insufficiently compassionate, a position for which he has been criticized by other prominent right-wingers. He thinks it would perhaps be best if the country were divided in half before a partisan civil war breaks out.

At one point, he asked about my faith, and when I said Jewish, he remarked on how interesting it is that Jews hold so many positions of power in government, media, and finance. Somehow this didn’t sound like conspiracism, the way he said it. More like: Well played, Jews, from our small religious minority to yours.

Invariably, though, conversation turned back to his current predicament. He ranted for hours about the corruption of the government, the corruption of medical institutions, the corruption of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The courts, he said, are simply a “playbox” for the rich and powerful, a place for them to justify their misdeeds. Though he’d been cleared of any crime associated with the standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, the final legal victory came after he’d already spent nearly two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, he said. By the time he was released, his business had all but collapsed, and he’d missed those years of his children’s lives. “That changed me,” he said. It taught him that even when you win, the process is the punishment.

I asked Bundy what he thinks motivates his many enemies, and how he accounts for so much wickedness. He reached for the Book of Mormon, put on his glasses, and began to read aloud. The passage he’d chosen told the story of Jared, a prince who devises a scheme to have his father beheaded and seize the throne for himself. The conspirators form “a secret combination,” which is “most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God,” and their scheme succeeds.

That is what Ammon Bundy believes is happening in America. His enemies, motivated by the desire for power, have formed secret combinations, which threaten, as the Book of Mormon warns they will, to “overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries.”

Ammon Bundy with one of his sons in Emmett

That night, I tagged along with Bundy to a barbecue hosted by Scott Malone, a friend of his who runs a dietary-supplement business and lives just down the road. About 30 people, many of them members of the LDS Church and most of them members of People’s Rights, sat at picnic tables with checkered tablecloths eating burgers and hot dogs and peach cobbler. After dinner, we played cornhole.

“I’m pretty much into conspiracy theories,” Malone told me. A sprawling web of nefarious forces is undermining our freedom, he explained, at the center of which are the Freemasons. In Gem County, where he and Bundy live, the sheriff and his deputies are all Masons. Malone knows this because he rents office space directly below the Masonic lodge, and he says he sometimes catches evil spirits wandering around the office on his security cameras. To cast them out, he performs exorcisms. “We think the basement has some kind of an underworld connection,” he said. “Crazy things, but we take it in stride.”

When Ammon launched the People’s Rights Network in early 2020, Malone was an early member. The group is sometimes described as a paramilitary organization—a sort of “Uber for militias.” That description is not wholly inaccurate, but it is misleading. People’s Rights’ membership does overlap with that of militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, and it serves in part to connect groups like these around the country. But it’s much bigger than those other groups, and it draws in people who would never join a traditional paramilitary organization. Most of its activities are mundane. Some members use the network to trade and barter; others organize workshops with naturopathic doctors. When one member’s truck broke down in early August, he put out a call via People’s Rights for someone to pick him up. In that sense, the group is less of a militia than a mutual-aid organization, where the aid sometimes takes the form of armed resistance to perceived despotism.

[From the November 2020 issue: Mike Giglio on the pro-Trump militant group that recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

Which is not to say that it doesn’t pose a threat. In addition to the protest at St. Luke’s and other instances of potentially dangerous intimidation, one member got into a shootout with police after a traffic stop in 2020. And its leaders have stated plainly that bloodshed is not only justified but necessary for resisting tyranny. “There is no silver bullet to securing liberty,” Bundy himself wrote on the People’s Rights website. “It is going to take unity, suffering and the willingness to use violence in defense.” The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors extremist organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, ranks Bundy’s group “at the top of our threat matrix.”

Beyond some basic tenets and anxieties of extreme libertarianism, those in Bundy’s group don’t agree on much. Some are fans of Donald Trump; others aren’t. Few would say that they support the police. Each seems to have his or her own peculiar origin story. While visiting Bundy, I met a onetime Ron Paul delegate who’d grown disillusioned with the Republican Party and stepped away, only to be drawn back in by the imposition of pandemic-era “Sharia law.” I met a former foster child turned chain-smoking Hempfest organizer who tried to live as a hermit before deciding that the only answer to government tyranny was active resistance. I met a Black kickboxing champion who has an on-screen credit in a Mad Max movie and, over the course of a decade, went from protesting the gentrification of Boise’s historically Black neighborhoods to sketching a portrait of Barack Obama with swastika-pupils.

And I met Malone, who may well be Bundy’s most loyal supporter. “He’s a good man, and I love him as a brother,” Malone told me. “I told my wife, ‘If I die with him, I die with him … I’m 72, and if this is how I end my life, then that’s how it ends. It couldn’t happen in a better way.”

By 9 o’clock, the party was winding down. The group prayed for me, just as they had when I’d arrived. (“We’re also grateful for our new friend, Jacob. Please bless him and help him on his journey and on his way.”) A grandmotherly woman who seemed genuinely concerned for my health warned me to stay away from the COVID vaccine. Another told me to be very careful driving home at this hour. A kid who’d recently returned from his Mormon mission invited me to go fishing the next day. Over the course of the evening, several people joked about the media calling them a militia. A militia?! they seemed to say. Just look at us!

As the sky darkened, everyone gathered in a circle to sing hymns. Bundy sat with his youngest son on his lap, the sunset at his back.

The next day, I met with Rachel Thomas, the ER doctor who’d ferried baby Cyrus to the back exit of the Meridian hospital as the mob pressed in. We sat at a small round table in a Boise coffee shop while her 6-year-old son ate a chocolate-chip muffin and watched Minions on his iPad for the dozenth time.

As we talked, Thomas noticed that a user named “Wolf Man” had just left a series of comments on her Facebook profile calling her a criminal and a perpetrator of “vile,” “disgraceful and appalling” acts. The comments linked to a new YouTube video Bundy had posted about the St. Luke’s case that very morning. “See, this is the problem with people like Rachel Thomas,” he says to the camera, after offering a litany of examples of her alleged dishonesty. “They are revered by the public because they are doctors and professionals, but they have no scruples. They are liars.”

With each new post like this, Thomas told me, the harassment ramps up again. “This is my life,” she said. “The second I feel like I can take a breath, they come after us again.” She pointed at her son, oblivious and chocolate-smeared behind her. “He didn’t sign up for this.”

For Natasha Erickson, the St. Luke’s pediatrician who first saw Cyrus, the threats and abuse began immediately and never stopped. Diego Rodriguez posted her photo and hospital bio on his website under the heading “Child Trafficker Profile.” “It is obvious she has a ‘god complex,’” he wrote, “and loves to threaten families using CPS as a weapon.” Bundy posted a video of his own calling Erickson “a wicked person for instigating this.” They said that she’d run unnecessary tests on Cyrus in order to profit off him and that she’d misdiagnosed his mild dehydration as life-threatening malnutrition. Commenters asked her how she’d feel if her kids were stolen.

Supporters gather on Bundy’s property after a judge issued a misdemeanor warrant for his arrest for contempt-of-court charges in April 2023. (Kyle Green / AP)

Erickson was less worried that large numbers of people would end up believing these claims than that a delusional person would take it upon himself to exact justice. She attached an emergency whistle to her purse, and her husband started carrying his handgun around whenever they were in public. She forbade her kids from playing in the front yard or answering the door, no matter who they thought was on the other side. The locks stayed bolted at all times.

For a while, Erickson was obsessed with what Bundy and Rodriguez were saying about her. She’d check their websites two or three times a day. At the grocery store, she was constantly afraid of who might be in the next aisle over. She took to wearing sunglasses whenever she could. Almost every time she saw a new patient, she worried that the parents might have seen her “Child Trafficker Profile,” and that they might genuinely believe it. So much of her job had been about forging personal connections with the “kiddos”: You like unicorns? My children love unicorns. But now even that felt fraught. When one child’s father asked her how old her kids were, she froze, retreated to the nurses’ station, and broke down sobbing. She considered leaving medicine entirely.

Both she and Thomas testified in the defamation case against Bundy and Rodriguez; so did a nurse who had seen Cyrus for a checkup and then coordinated his care for weeks after. But whereas Erickson and the nurse were named as plaintiffs, Thomas was not, because at the time St. Luke’s filed the lawsuit, she hadn’t yet been doxxed. She wound up getting the worst of both worlds: all of the harassment, none of the money.

This past summer, as she was driving with her son, he asked her out of the blue if “that Ammon Bundy guy” was gone yet, and whether he might hurt them. “No, buddy, we’re going to be okay,” she told him. By that point, the family had already taken steps to ensure their safety. In September, they packed up for New Zealand. They plan to stay for at least a year.

In between my trips to Bundy’s land in Idaho, I made a stop in Bunkerville, Nevada, to visit his father at the family ranch. When I got there, Cliven Bundy was sitting in a black leather recliner beneath a portrait of him by Jon McNaughton, the realist painter famous for his hagiographic renderings of Donald Trump. In the portrait, titled “Pray for America,” Cliven rides on horseback and raises an American flag. In the flesh, he chuckled a lot in a folksy-grandpa sort of way and held forth for some three and a half hours in his high-pitched rasp about faith, politics, biodiversity, and his decades-long conflict with the U.S. government.

If you were to tell the complete story of that conflict, you could begin in 1844, with the murder of Joseph Smith. Or you could begin in 1877, with the arrival of the Bundy family’s ancestors in Utah’s Virgin Valley. Or in 1934, with the Taylor Grazing Act. Or even in 1976, with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. But you could not begin any later than 1989, with the Mojave desert tortoise. That year, the tortoise was given an emergency endangered-species designation, and as part of its recovery plan, the Bureau of Land Management told Bundy and his fellow Clark County ranchers a few years later that they would have to limit their use of public lands for grazing cattle. At the same time, the county struck a deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service that allowed real-estate developers to expand the Las Vegas metropolitan area into the tortoises’ habitat. The ranchers got squeezed in favor of the city.

Almost all of the roughly 50 ranchers in Clark County took a buyout from the government. Cliven refused. He continued grazing his cattle the same way he always had, and his herd fanned out into the lands vacated by his former neighbors. For 20 years, this remained the uneasy status quo: Bundy’s fines soared into the seven figures, but no one tried very hard to collect. Finally, a federal judge ordered Bundy—now calling himself “the last rancher standing” in the valley—to remove his cattle. He ignored the judge, and so in early 2014, the BLM came in to do it for him. The next day, Cliven’s wife, Carol, posted on the family website: “Range War begins tomorrow.”

Left: Cliven Bundy speaks during a news conference near his ranch in April 2014. Right: Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp, where the Bundys’ cattle were being held. (David Becker / Getty; Jim Urquhart / Reuters)

The climactic standoff took place at a sandy underpass beneath Interstate 15, near the spot where the BLM was keeping the impounded cattle. Federal agents were outnumbered and outgunned by Cliven’s militiamen supporters, and within a couple of hours, they’d released the herd. A group of armed vigilantes—cowboy heroes, they believed, in their own modern Western—had prevented the U.S. government from enforcing the law. And they seemed to be facing no repercussions.

Almost overnight, the Bundys were the “first family” of the Patriot Movement, with Cliven as its public face. Republican Senators fawned over him; Sean Hannity had him on Fox News again and again. And then, at a public meeting less than two weeks later, Cliven self-destructed. “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said, before wondering aloud whether Black people were maybe “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things,” than they were on the dole.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Polite society can condemn Cliven Bundy and ignore the American racism that remains]

That was the end of Cliven Bundy’s brief stint as a Republican darling. Ammon took over as the family spokesman. He was good in front of a camera, with a soft-spoken polish that none of his siblings could match. A few weeks earlier, he’d been a successful businessman in Phoenix, living a comfortable, suburban life. He hadn’t been particularly political, and was certainly not a militant—an early BLM threat assessment had labeled him the least dangerous of the Bundy men—but now he was angry, and he saw the federal government as his enemy. Less than two years later, at Cliven’s urging, he went to Oregon to stage a standoff of his own.

To this day, Cliven’s cattle continue to graze on public lands, the courts be damned. At dusk on the evening of my visit, he rose from his recliner, and Ammon’s brother Ryan drove us up into the desert hills to see them. On the way, Cliven and Ryan explained their not-entirely-scientific theory of the mutually beneficial relationship between cattle and tortoises. “A cow never conflicted with a tortoise ever,” Ryan said.

The Mojave desert tortoise is extremely rare, but we’d been driving for only a few minutes, when, sure enough, we came face-to-face with one. Ryan stopped the car and we all got out. The animal looked prehistoric, its mud-colored shell weathered and chipped in places, its scales the same dusty black as the stones around it. Cliven walked over and started knocking on its shell. “Hey! Hey!” he said. The tortoise retreated inside. “Go on. Go on then!” Cliven said. It did not go on.

“You’re not gonna make him move,” Ryan said. Cliven reached down to try to overturn the tortoise, but it squirmed and hissed at him. After a few tries, he gave up. “He’s protecting himself,” Ryan said. “Imagine having to live in the rocks like he does. What a life, huh?”

On a Friday evening near the end of summer, six sheriff’s deputies arrested Ammon Bundy at a fundraiser for his son’s high-school football team. This was not the dreaded standoff, not the government coming for his land. But there had been a warrant out for Bundy’s arrest on contempt-of-court charges since April, and the sheriff seized his chance.

The officers marched into the hall just as people were finishing dinner. Bundy did not resist. He just put on his cowboy hat and placed his hands behind his back. Some people shouted and booed as the officers led him outside. Some sat quietly and looked away. “Nobody knows what they’re going to do to him!” his wife yelled. “They will abuse him!” Her voice broke. “This is our son! We’re here to support our boy! Come on! Come on, you guys, rally together! Help us!” She was sobbing now. Nobody moved.

When I went out to Emmett a few days later, I again found Bundy in his workshop, this time lying on his back beneath a ’67 Chevy Nova with his phone beside him. He’d posted bond Sunday morning, and now he had his father on speaker. “I feel like you shouldn’t have bailed out,” Cliven said. “You should’ve made a process of it.”

“I was going to, but the last time I did that, when they sent me to Ada County, they literally about killed me,” Ammon told him, referring to time he’d served as a result of the 2020 statehouse protest. “They call it the cold box. It’s an extremely cold cell. No pads, all concrete. And then they strip you. So all you’ve got is your underwear. No shoes, no nothing”—the jail says this isn’t accurate—“and it literally is torture, and that’s what they do. I just couldn’t think about going through that again.”

“I understand. I’ve been there before,” Cliven said. “But I don’t know.”

There was no sympathy in his voice. And perhaps one shouldn’t expect any from a man who, during the trial that followed the Bunkerville standoff, at the age of 71, had spent an extra month in prison rather than be released on house arrest, because he would accept nothing short of unconditional freedom. I know it’s hard, he seemed to be telling his son, but you’ve gotta suck it up.

That day, Ammon seemed more resigned, more circumspect than he had a week earlier. He told me that he’d decided to contest the legal case against him. “Not because I have a whole lot of faith in the courts,” he said. But he’d already started mourning the loss of his home, and he wasn’t sure it made sense to hold his ground. “There’s many ways to fight, and I may very well go down that route,” he told me, “but it just gets tiring to fight those battles. Alone, almost. Least it feels that way.”

This was a strange admission from the leader of a national network of rights-defending citizens, a network designed for just this sort of situation. “Maybe I shouldn’t say, but I think in his mind he was really hoping that People’s Rights would back him,” Cliven would later tell me. “But when it gets right down to it, I don’t know. He claims he has, like, 70,000 or more followers, but does he have one that would actually stand and fight with him?” Many of the People’s Rights members I put that question to were noncommittal. They’d have to see how the situation played out.

I visited Bundy one last time in mid-September. “The dog seems to always be chasing me,” he’d told me during our very first conversation, and now it seemed it might finally catch him. He didn’t have a lawyer, so he’d been staying up all night writing his own legal motions. Sometimes he lost track of what day of the week it was. At one point, I watched him try and fail to navigate a CAPTCHA prompt six times in a row as he attempted to access a legal document. The courts had frozen his assets and forbidden him from continuing to make false accusations against St. Luke’s and its staff.

Bundy’s co-defendant, Diego Rodriguez, had already moved, in 2022, to Florida, where he lives with Levi, Marissa, and Cyrus, who celebrated his second birthday in May. (Rodriguez declined to be interviewed for this story.) The baby’s vomiting problem has not gone away entirely, Marissa told me, though he is doing much better now. As of this month, she said, Cyrus is in the 28th percentile on the growth chart. (Though Levi was arrested at the gas station, he was never charged with a crime; charges against Marissa were dropped last December. The medical staff at St. Luke’s have said this didn’t seem like a case of intentional abuse or neglect but rather that Levi and Marissa did not appear to appreciate the gravity of their baby’s health problems.)

Just a few weeks earlier, Bundy told me, he’d nearly given up and fled the state too. This whole saga could devour years of his life, he’d realized, and so rather than let it, he’d go elsewhere, start fresh. The kids had been upset at first, but they’d come around. The boxes were packed. The mover was scheduled. And then, as Bundy lay in bed on the morning they were supposed to leave, he thought he heard the voice of God. The Lord wanted him to stay and fight.

How long? He didn’t know. Fight how? He couldn’t say. But he trusted that this would all become clear in time. “I have to believe that the things going on here are going to mean something,” he said in a video about his decision. It was hard not to hear these words as a sort of desperate self-exhortation, the sort of thing you whisper to yourself over and over in the hope that repetition will make it so.

Emmett, Idaho

One morning a few weeks ago, Scott Malone arrived at the Bundy property to find it deserted. He’d come to pick up some pots and stoves he’d lent to Ammon for the apple harvest, and he found those in the driveway. Otherwise there was nothing. The trucks were gone. The house was cleaned out. The workshop was stripped. Bundy hadn’t even said goodbye—a noble act, Malone believed, meant to protect friends from being implicated.

A few days after they left, Lisa posted a farewell message on Facebook (“It’s not goodbye, it’s ‘I’ll see you later’”), but she and Ammon stopped answering my messages and calls. When I finally managed to get in touch with Ryan Bundy, he told me that his brother had tried to muster a group to fight with him, “but when it come down to it, only about half of ’em are willing to stand.” And so now, Ryan said, Ammon was a “refugee.”

Malone says he has no idea where Bundy is. Lawyers for St. Luke’s have heard that the family is in southern Utah, hardly an hour’s drive from where Cliven lives, and from where the family staged its first standoff nearly a decade ago. But Bundy seems to have kept his plan a secret, even from his father. “I don’t know why he quit,” Cliven told me a few days later. “My way of thinking is you can’t give up on something like this. You got a battle going, and it’s a terrible one, and you know”—he trailed off, seemingly at a loss—“I don’t know.”

Ammon Bundy still faces an ever-growing list of contempt-of-court charges, and there is still a warrant out for his arrest, with bail set at $250,000. For Rachel Thomas and Natasha Erickson, the news of his flight delivered both relief and frustration: relief because it meant that, for the moment at least, they would not have to testify in the scheduled contempt trial; frustration because, once more, he had escaped accountability. Seeing him behind bars wouldn’t have undone the pain of the past year and a half—Erickson was still considering leaving medicine, and even in New Zealand, Thomas’s son was still asking, “Mommy, that Ammon Bundy guy can’t come here, can he?”—but it would have brought a degree of closure, a feeling that justice had been served.

Law enforcement could still come looking for Bundy in Utah, or wherever he is, and bring him back to Idaho. And if that happens, he could face months or even years in jail. Even if it does not, St. Luke’s will soon claim possession of the home he left behind.

Standing there alone on the deserted property, Malone felt his own mix of emotions. He, too, was relieved: Had Bundy stayed and fought, the sheriff and his deputies would have gunned him down, Malone was sure of it. He, too, was frustrated: People’s Rights could have done more; people weren’t prepared to lay down their lives for freedom the way they used to be. And he was also heartbroken: The others may have been afraid, but he really would have died by his friend’s side. And now Ammon Bundy was gone. The specific era of American extremism that had begun a decade earlier at Bundy Ranch was, in some sense, over.

Ammon never returned my calls, but he did eventually send me a brief message via an encrypted app. “I have always told the truth,” he said, “and God will be my judge.”

His note called to mind something he’d once told me about his enemies. “I think most people over the years come to think that they’re doing what should be done,” he said. “And it doesn’t change the fact that what they’re doing is not right.”

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The Supreme Court’s new ethics code is a nod at the public pressure the court is facing. Beyond that, it will do little to change the justices’ behavior.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Hillary Clinton: Hamas must go. Sphere and loathing in Las Vegas The plight of the eldest daughter The meaning of “sir” and “ma’am”

An Unstable Structure

Don’t worry, the Supreme Court said to America yesterday. Though it may not be enforceable, the Court at least has a formal code of conduct now. The Court has been facing an onslaught of public pressure after reports that justices, particularly Clarence Thomas, had engaged in behavior that an average person could deem improper for representatives of the highest court in the land, such as receiving undisclosed gifts from wealthy conservatives. This code, the first in the Court’s history, is signed by all nine justices, and lays out “rules and principles” for the justices’ behavior. Its publication is an acknowledgment that the public is dissatisfied with the Court, but beyond that, it is more symbolic than anything else.

The 15-page document opens with a paragraph-long statement emphasizing that the rules contained within it are largely not new. Their codification is an attempt to “dispel” the “misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” The code does not explicitly restrict any of the activities, such as undisclosed gifts and travel, that have been drawing attention to the justices in recent months, and its guidelines on recusals in the event of potential conflicts of interest are vague. (A progressive group noted that the document includes should 53 times and must just six.) It also doesn’t acknowledge the existence of any current or past misbehavior, Noah Rosenblum, an assistant law professor at NYU, told me. But the introduction of the code, he said, “does suggest that, in fact, the pressure is getting to the Supreme Court, which, if you believe that the Supreme Court has gone rogue, is a really useful and important thing to know.”

The Supreme Court has long operated, as the justices explain in the opening statement of the code, according to “the equivalent of common law ethics rules,” using guidelines derived from a variety of sources, such as historical practice and the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary. The idea of the Court formalizing its ethics guidelines had been percolating for a while. Back in 2019, Justice Elena Kagan said at a budget hearing that John Roberts was exploring the idea of establishing a code of conduct for just the Supreme Court. In 2022, a group of legal scholars wrote an open letter to Justice Roberts urging the Court to adopt such a code. “We simply believe that a written Code, even if primarily aspirational, would have a broad salutary impact,” the professors wrote.

But public pressure, including from lawmakers in Congress, picked up starting in the spring, when ProPublica released the first in a series of stories about Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Other outlets soon published reports on the lavish gifts and trips Thomas received from wealthy businessmen and donors. As Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, told me, Thomas is seen as the “violator in chief.” But, Dorf noted, other justices’ behavior has been called into question as well. Those wishing to present this as a bipartisan issue, Dorf said, have also pointed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose staff reportedly urged libraries and colleges to buy her books. And conservative Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip with Paul Singer, a billionaire who had cases before the Court in following years. (The Supreme Court responded that it works with Sotomayor and her staff to ensure compliance with ethics guidance during book events. Alito said that he never discussed Singer’s business and that he was unaware of his connection to the cases.)

My colleague Adam Serwer, who covers political and legal issues for The Atlantic, told me that “much of the conduct that has exposed the justices as partisan actors” would not seem to be prohibited by these guidelines. The code is not a move toward stricter ethics rules; rather, Adam argued, it might have the opposite effect: “It is an attempt to remove any motivation for Congress to impose restrictions on the Court that have actual teeth.” Adam added that the only apparent punishment for breaking the rules will be public shame—of which the Court has seen plenty lately. As Adam reminded me, “public outrage and tarnishing of the Court’s prestige” is why the justices likely felt pressured to adopt the code in the first place.

The American public has soured on the Court in recent years, in the midst of ethics scandals and controversial decisions on topics such as abortion, student loans, and affirmative action. According to a Pew Research Center poll from July, voters are more likely to see the Supreme Court as conservative than they were a few years ago, and just 44 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Court—the lowest since the survey began, in 1987. The new code of conduct is not likely to change things. For those concerned that the justices’ behavior compromises the integrity of the Court, “there’s nothing in this code of ethics that should reassure them,” Rosenblum told me.

The Supreme Court is an anomaly in America’s justice system; other judges have to adhere to strict, enforceable ethics rules. To understand the ethics mechanisms ruling most American judges, picture a three-legged stool, Rosenblum suggests. Leg one is a code of conduct, leg two is an advisory body, and leg three is an enforceable disciplinary procedure. The Supreme Court has long had no such stool. Now, with its new code of conduct, it has one leg. That does not make a very stable structure.

Related:

The Supreme Court just keeps deciding it should be even more powerful. The care and feeding of the Supreme Court justices

Today’s News

The House passed a short-term funding bill to successfully prevent a government shutdown. Al-Shifa Hospital says that it has buried more than 170 people in a mass grave. According to the United Nations, only one of 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip is reportedly operational. A “March for Israel” took place in Washington, D.C., to protest rising anti-Semitism and demand the release of hostages taken by Hamas.

Evening Read

Painting by Debra Cartwright. Source: University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

How Black Americans Kept Reconstruction Alive

By Peniel E. Joseph

The Civil War produced two competing narratives, each an attempt to make sense of a conflict that had eradicated the pestilence of slavery.

Black Americans who believed in multiracial democracy extolled the emancipationist legacy of the war. These Reconstructionists envisioned a new America finally capable of safeguarding Black dignity and claims of citizenship. Black women and men created new civic, religious, political, educational, and economic institutions. They built thriving towns and districts, churches and schools. In so doing, they helped reimagine the purpose and promise of American democracy …

Black Reconstructionists told the country a new story about itself. These were people who believed in freedom beyond emancipation. They shared an expansive vision of a compassionate nation with a true democratic ethos.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Have yourself an early little Christmas. Did humans ever live in peace? The panda phase of the British Conservatives

Culture Break

Read. “Sitcom,” a new poem by Jericho Brown.

“Since, her long hair curled, / Combed out, and pushed up / Into a volume so thick, you felt / Both the power of an Afro and / The requirement of a relaxer”

Watch. Nathan Fielder’s newest show, The Curse, is weird and off-putting, yet intensely compelling (streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime).

Play our daily crossword.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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This article was originally published by High Country News.

Two Septembers ago, the residents of Grotto, Washington, woke to the Bolt Creek Fire ripping through the mountains above their homes. “This doesn’t happen here,” Patricia Vasquez remembers saying at the time, shocked. Though areas east of the state’s Cascade mountains frequently burn in the summer, Grotto is on the mountains’ western side, in a wetter climate, where fires had been infrequent but are becoming more common. Vasquez evacuated with her husband, Lorenzo; their dog, Ava; and the fresh Alaska halibut they’d just caught while on vacation. Elizabeth Walther, their neighbor, evacuated with a puppy, but her husband, Richard, a ski patroller, stayed behind to hose down the house.

No one died, and no houses burned. But wildfire survivors in Washington now face a new threat: debris flows. Wildfires can lessen the soil’s ability to absorb water, so when thunderstorms, rapid snowmelt, atmospheric rivers, or rain falling on snow occur in a burned area, that can create a roaring earthen river. Debris flows can move quickly—30 mph or more—sliding from the uplands to the valley floor in a matter of minutes.  

Debris flows are more dangerous than mudslides and slower-moving landslides: They can sweep away boulders, trees, and cars, and threaten everything in their path, including roads and homes and the people who live in them. Last year, in Washington’s Okanogan County, two residents were rescued from their home after earth flowed through a burn scar. Another flow destroyed a cabin and sent a foot of water and mud into at least 30 structures. And in 2018, 23 people were killed when heavy rains triggered a debris flow in the burn scar of Southern California’s Thomas Fire.

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

United States Geological Survey (USGS) modeling indicates that, for perhaps the next several years, there’s a high probability of debris flows in the mountains above Grotto and other communities along the South Fork of the Skykomish River Corridor. The USGS models were originally created using data from drier areas in the West, where debris flows have been happening for years after fires, and may be less accurate in Washington’s wet climate—particularly on the rainier side of the Cascade Range. Until recently, there’s been little research on how post-fire debris flows behave in Washington.

One May afternoon, eight months after the fire, a team of researchers made their way up a soot-blackened hillside a few miles from Grotto. Ashy dirt crunched underfoot as they scrambled over and around trees that had been toppled by the fire. They were looking for the right tree to mount a game camera on in order to document future debris flows. They also wanted to check on the rain gauges they’d installed last fall, not long after the fire, when rainy weather and still-smoldering stumps had made setting up the equipment extra tricky.    

The Washington Geological Survey’s Wildfire-Associated Landslide Emergency Response Team is tracking recently burned sites in the state to understand when landslides occur and how much precipitation it takes to trigger them. “The missing piece is the exact time,” Kate Mickelson, a geologist, says. The weather patterns, geography, and vegetation of the Pacific Northwest are different from California’s, and these variations can influence when the earth slides.

In the Northwest, for example, debris flows can occur several years after a fire, but in California, they usually happen in the first two rainy seasons that follow. (Researchers think that might be because tree roots take longer to decay in the Pacific Northwest.) Generally, National Weather Service debris-flow warnings are triggered if a quarter-inch of rain falls in 15 minutes, or if one inch falls in an hour, Mickelson said. Sometimes they’re issued for at least the first two years post-fire, either countywide or just for the area near a burn scar. The warning system’s thresholds can be tweaked to reflect the region. But in rainy parts of western Washington, heavy rain is not unusual, and scientists fear that issuing alerts all the time could numb people to the danger, making them less likely to evacuate.

After 15 minutes of hiking, the researchers found the perfect location for their camera: a standing tree perched just above a likely flow path, a few feet up on a mound of rocks. Finding the right spot is tricky; the tree must be close enough to a debris flow for it to trigger the camera to record, but not so close that the tree (and camera) get swept away. Mickelson and the geoscientist Emilie Richard wrapped a strap around the tree’s trunk and mounted the solar-powered camera facing south, then took a few test pictures to make sure it was properly angled.

[Read: Maui’s fire risk was glowing red]

Game cameras, rain gauges, and other tools can help scientists understand how much precipitation it takes to trigger debris flows in western Washington, and help the USGS fine-tune its modeling. Mickelson’s team has set up cameras in five and rain gauges in 11 recent burn scars around the state. In some locations, they also installed pressure transducers, devices that measure the water’s pressure on the earth. The devices are drilled into bedrock and can sense the rapid increases in pressure caused by a debris flow.

When the researchers returned in May to install the camera, they also checked on their other equipment. Luckily, all the rain gauges were still in place, so they downloaded the data and changed batteries that were low on juice after the cold winter months. The equipment they installed will monitor the sites for the next five years, noting real-time rainfall—unless, of course, everything gets taken out by a debris flow.

Sitting barefoot in their front yards in May, amid lilac bushes and daisies, Grotto residents expressed their concerns. “We have to cross our fingers,” Lorenzo Vasquez said. “We’re screwed for mudslides,” Richard Walther, his neighbor, agreed. They’re worried that debris flows could reroute the creek between their homes and the mountainside, causing flooding or road damage. The Washington Geological Survey scientists hope their work will help residents prepare in the future. “We would like to be able to tell people, ‘This is your peak risk,’” Mickelson says. “We just don’t know that yet.”

Thomas Newsome had been charged with sharing military information but was cleared at an Old Bailey hearing.

It wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me.

He is, famously, no friend of the media. But Thiel—co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left—consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los Angeles. He was more open than I expected him to be, and he had a lot to say.

But the impetus for these conversations? He wanted me to publish a promise he was going to make, so that he would not be tempted to go back on his word. And what was that thing he needed to say, loudly? That he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician, including Donald Trump, in the next presidential campaign.

Already, he has endured the wrath of Trump. Thiel tried to duck Trump’s calls for a while, but in late April the former president managed to get him on the phone. Trump reminded Thiel that he had backed two of Thiel’s protégés, Blake Masters and J. D. Vance, in their Senate races last year. Thiel had given each of them more than $10 million; now Trump wanted Thiel to give the same to him.

When Thiel declined, Trump “told me that he was very sad, very sad to hear that,” Thiel recounted. “He had expected way more of me. And that’s how the call ended.”

Months later, word got back to Thiel that Trump had called Masters to discourage him from running for Senate again, and had called Thiel a “fucking scumbag.”

Thiel’s hope was that this article would “lock me into not giving any money to Republican politicians in 2024,” he said. “There’s always a chance I might change my mind. But by talking to you, it makes it hard for me to change my mind. My husband doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right. I know they’re going to be pestering me like crazy. And by talking to you, it’s going to lock me out of the cycle for 2024.”

This matters because of Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.

And why does he want to cut off politicians? It’s not that they are mediocre as individuals, and therefore incapable of bringing about the kinds of civilization-defining changes a man like him would expect to see. His disappointment runs deeper than that. Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

Not for the first time, Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel’s decision to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 surprised some of his closest friends. Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

But four months earlier, Thiel had seen an omen. On March 18, 2016, a jury delivered an extraordinary $115 million verdict to Hulk Hogan in his invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media, whose website had published portions of a sex tape featuring Hogan. Thiel had secretly funded the litigation against Gawker, which had mocked him for years and outed him as gay. The verdict drove the company out of business.

For Thiel, the outcome was more than vindication. It was a sign. When the jury came back, “my instant reaction at that point was ‘Wow, maybe Trump wins the election,’” he told me. In his mind, Gawker was a stand-in for the media writ large, hostile to the presumptive Republican nominee; Hogan was a Trumplike figure; and the jury—the voters—had taken his side.

Thiel himself had not yet publicly embraced Trump. In the Republican primary, he had backed Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and a fellow Stanford alum, with a $2 million contribution. Though his candidate had lost, he planned to attend the RNC as a delegate.

Then came a call from Donald Trump Jr. Thiel had never met father or son, and had yet to give money to Trump’s campaign, but the younger Trump had noticed his name on the delegate list. The convention was 10 days away, and Trump was short on high-profile endorsements. “Do you want to speak?” Don Jr. asked. Thiel thought it might be fun.

He sounded out his old friend Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who has since become his political nemesis. “We were talking, and he said, ‘I think I’m going to—I’m considering going and giving a speech at the Republican National Convention,’” Hoffman recalled. “And I laughed, thinking he was joking. Right? And it was like, ‘No, no, no, I’m not joking.’”

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.” His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“‘Make America great again’ was the most pessimistic slogan of any candidate in 100 years, because you were saying that we are no longer a great country,” Thiel told me. “And that was a shocking slogan for a major presidential candidate.”

He thought people needed to hear it. Thiel gave $1.25 million to the Trump campaign, and had an office in Trump Tower during the transition, where he suggested candidates for jobs in the incoming administration. (His protégé Michael Kratsios was named chief technology officer, but few of Thiel’s other candidates got jobs.)

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

But if supporting Trump was a gamble, Thiel told me, it’s not one he regrets.

Reid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment. “Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

Disillusionment was a recurring theme in my conversations with Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker. Yet he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

Born in Germany, the son of a mining engineer, Thiel lived briefly in South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) as a child but grew up primarily in Ohio and California. After graduating from Stanford and then Stanford Law, he worked briefly on the East Coast before heading back to Silicon Valley.

In 1998, Thiel teamed up with Max Levchin, a brilliant computer scientist, and together they founded the company that became PayPal, with the declared purpose of creating a libertarian alternative to government currency. That grand ambition went unfulfilled, but PayPal turned out to be a terrific way to pay for online purchases, which were growing exponentially. In 2002, eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion.

In 2004, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a private intelligence firm that does data mining for government and private clients at home and abroad. The CIA’s venture-capital arm, called In-Q-Tel, was his first outside investor.

This was also the year he placed the most celebrated wager in the history of venture capital. He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012. He came to regret the sale, however; at Facebook’s market peak, in 2021, his stake would have been worth many times more.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied. But on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it. But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine. He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Thiel does not believe death is inevitable. Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,” he said. He has spent enormous sums trying to evade his own end but feels that, if anything, he should devote even more time and money to solving the problem of human mortality.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Adam Kirsch on the people cheering for humanity’s end]

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings? I wondered.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves. “And then there are sort of all these questions, you know: How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

“So why can’t we be elves?” I asked.

Thiel nodded reverently, his expression a blend of hope and chagrin.

“Why can’t we be elves?” he said.

Thiel’s abandonment of Trump is not the first time he has decided to step away from politics.

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz and the anti-tax Club for Growth’s super PAC.

But something changed for Thiel in 2009, the first of several swings of his political pendulum. That year he wrote a manifesto titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he disavowed electoral politics as a vehicle for reshaping society. The people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

It was a striking declaration. An even more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (He elaborated, after some backlash, that he did not literally oppose women’s suffrage, but neither did he affirm his support for it.)

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach—spheres where the choices of one great man could still be paramount. “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution.” His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics.” (I tried to reach Musk at X, requesting an interview, but got a poop emoji in response.)

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters. This, Thiel believed, was a more realistic path toward functioning libertarian societies in the short term than colonizing space. He gave substantial sums to Patri Friedman, the grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, to establish the nonprofit Seasteading Institute.

Thiel told a room full of believers at an institute conference in 2009 that most people don’t think seasteading is possible and will therefore not interfere until it’s too late. “The question of whether seasteading is desirable or possible in my mind is not even relevant,” he said. “It is absolutely necessary.”

Engineering challenges aside, Max Levchin, his friend and PayPal co-founder, dismissed the idea that Thiel would ever actually move to one of these specks in the sea. “There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape. He already had German and American citizenship, but he invested millions of dollars in New Zealand and obtained citizenship there in 2011. He bought a former sheep station on 477 acres in the lightly populated South Island that had the makings of an End Times retreat in the country where the Lord of the Rings films were shot. Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

[From the September 2023 issue: Ross Andersen on Sam Altman’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence]

Over and over, Thiel has voiced his discontent with what’s become of the grand dreams of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in his Seasteading Institute keynote. “You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias. The tech boom brought us the iPhone and Uber and social media, none of them a fundamental improvement to the human condition. He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

For a time, Thiel thought he knew how to set things right. Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 2005 with Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, published a manifesto that complained, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

I joined Thiel one recent Tuesday afternoon for a videoconference to review a pair of start-ups in his portfolio. In his little box on the Zoom screen, he looked bored.

Daniel Yu, connecting from Zanzibar, made a short, lucid presentation. His company, Wasoko, was an ecommerce platform for mom-and-pop stores in Africa, supplying shopkeepers with rice, soap, toilet paper, and other basics. Africa is the fastest-urbanizing region in the world, and Wasoko’s gross margin had doubled since last year.

Thiel was looking down at his briefing papers. He read something about Wasoko becoming “the Alibaba of Africa”—a pet peeve. “Anything that’s the something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere,” he said, a little sourly.

Next up was a company called Laika Mascotas, in Bogotá. Someone on the call described it as the Chewy of Latin America. Thiel frowned. The company delivered pet supplies directly to the homes of consumers. It had quadrupled its revenues every year for three years. The CEO, Camilo Sánchez Villamarin, walked through the numbers. Thiel thanked him and signed off.

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

The trouble is not exactly that Thiel’s portfolio is pedestrian or uninspired. Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

“Because you couldn’t find those companies?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.”

In 2018, a Russian named Daniil Bisslinger handed Thiel his business card. The card described him as a foreign-service officer. Thiel understood otherwise. He believed that Bisslinger was an intelligence officer with the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. (A U.S. intelligence official later told me Thiel was right. The Russian embassy in Berlin, where Bisslinger has been based, did not respond to questions about him.)

Thiel received an invitation that day, and then again in January 2022, to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No agenda was specified. Thiel had been fascinated by Putin’s czarlike presence in a room in Davos years before, all “champagne and caviar, and you had sort of this gaggle of, I don’t know, Mafia-like-looking oligarchs standing around him,” he recalled, but he did not make the trip.

Instead, he reported the contact to the FBI, for which Thiel had become a confidential human source code-named “Philosopher.” Thiel’s role as an FBI informant, first reported by Insider, dated back to May 2021. Charles Johnson, a tech investor, right-wing attention troll, and longtime associate of Thiel’s, told me he himself had become an FBI informant some time ago. Johnson introduced Thiel to FBI Special Agent Johnathan Buma.

A source with close knowledge of the relationship said Buma told Thiel that he did not want to know about Thiel’s contacts with U.S. elected officials or political figures, which were beyond the FBI’s investigative interests. Buma saw his interactions with Thiel, this source said, as strictly “a counterintelligence, anti-influence operation” directed at foreign governments.

Thiel responded to my questions about his FBI relationship with a terse “no comment.” A close associate, speaking with Thiel’s permission, said “it would be strange if Peter had never met with people from the deep state,” including “three-letter agencies, especially given the fact that he founded Palantir 20 years ago.”

Johnson told me he knows he has a reputation as a right-wing agitator, but said that he had fostered that image in order to gather information for the FBI and other government agencies. (He said he is now a supporter of President Joe Biden.) “I recognize that I’m an imperfect messenger,” he said. He told me a great many things about Thiel and others that I could not verify, but knowledgeable sources confirmed his role in recruiting Thiel for Buma. He and Thiel have since fallen out. “We are taking a permanent break from one another,” Thiel texted Johnson about a year ago. “Starting now.”

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

In Thiel’s Los Angeles office, he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

Thiel saw the sculpture at a gallery in Auckland in December 2017. He loved the piece, perceiving it, he told me, as “sympathetic to roughly my side” of the political spectrum. (In fact, the artist intended it as a critique.) At the same show, he bought a portrait of his friend Curtis Yarvin, an explicitly antidemocratic writer who calls for a strong-armed leader to govern the United States as a monarch. Thiel gave the painting to Yarvin as a gift.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

This felt like a debater’s riposte, not to be taken seriously. He had given a more honest answer before that: He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian. “One of the big things that he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in this reading of history, used a domineering view of executive authority, a compliant Congress, and an intimidated Supreme Court to force what Thiel called “very, very drastic change in the nature of our society.” Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

It would be hard to find an academic historian to endorse the view that fascism, light or otherwise, accounted for Roosevelt’s presidential power. But I was interested in something else: Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

Looking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line. He was disenchanted with the former president, who did not turn out to be the revolutionary Thiel had hoped he might be. A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

The first time Thiel and I spoke, I asked about the nature of his disappointment. Later, he referred back to that question in a way that suggested he felt constrained. “I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Discouraged by Trump’s performance, Thiel had quietly stepped aside in the 2020 election. He wrote no check to the second Trump campaign, and said little or nothing about it in public. He had not made any grand resolution to stay out. He just wasn’t moved to get in.

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on Donald Trump’s next coup]

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instance: Thiel thought Gore was probably the rightful victor. Before that, he’d gotten started on a riff about Kennedy-Nixon.

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

Trump’s lies about the election were, however, a big issue in last year’s midterms. Thiel was a major donor to J. D. Vance, who won his Senate race in Ohio, and Blake Masters, who lost in Arizona. Both ran as election deniers, as did many of the other House and Senate candidates Thiel funded that year. Thiel expressed no anxieties about their commitment to election denial.  

But now, heading into 2024, he was getting out of politics again. Beyond his disappointment with Trump, there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss. In July, Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politics. (The reported leaders of the oppo campaign did not respond to my questions.) Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

Thiel declined to comment on Thomas’s death, citing the family’s request for privacy. He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,” he said.

On the last Thursday in April, Thiel stood in a ballroom at the Metropolitan Club, one of New York’s finest Gilded Age buildings. Decorative marble fireplaces accented the intricate panel work in burgundy and gold, all beneath Renaissance-style ceiling murals. Thiel had come to receive an award from The New Criterion, a conservative magazine of literature and politics, and to bask in the attention of nearly 300 fans.

These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing.

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.” Evil, he explained, because “the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

His closing, which used the same logic, earned a standing ovation.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests. Thiel answered with an unprompted jab at a fellow billionaire.

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

Thiel sometimes uses Gates as a foil in his public remarks, so I asked him what he thought of the Giving Pledge, the campaign Gates conceived in 2010—with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett—to persuade billionaires to give away more than half their wealth to charitable causes. (Disclosure: One of my sons works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

“I don’t want to waste Bill Gates’s time,” Thiel replied.

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them. The prevailing view in Europe, he said, and more and more in the United States, “is that philanthropy is something an evil person does.” It raises a question, he said: “What are you atoning for?”

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

And besides, a different cause moves him far more.   

One night in 1999, or possibly 2000, Thiel went to a party in Palo Alto with Max Levchin, where they heard a pitch for an organization called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Alcor was trying to pioneer a practical method of biostasis, a way to freeze the freshly dead in hope of revivification one day. Don’t picture the reanimation of an old, enfeebled corpse, enthusiasts at the party told Levchin. “The idea, of course, is that long before we know how to revive dead people, we would learn how to repair your cellular membranes and make you young and virile and beautiful and muscular, and then we’ll revive you,” Levchin recalled.

Levchin found the whole thing morbid and couldn’t wait to get out of there. But Thiel signed up as an Alcor client.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by. The moment he is declared legally dead, medical technicians will connect him to a machine that will restore respiration and blood flow to his corpse. This step is temporary, meant to protect his brain and slow “the dying process.”

“The patient,” as Alcor calls its dead client, “is then cooled in an ice water bath, and their blood is replaced with an organ preservation solution.” Next, ideally within the hour, Thiel’s remains will be whisked to an operating room in Scottsdale, Arizona. A medical team will perfuse cryoprotectants through his blood vessels in an attempt to reduce the tissue damage wrought by extreme cold. Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

Thiel knows that cryonics “is still not working that well.” When flesh freezes, he said, neurons and cellular structures get damaged. But he figures cryonics is “better than the alternative”—meaning the regular kind of death that nobody comes back from.

Of course, if he had the choice, Thiel would prefer not to die in the first place. In the 2000s, he became enamored with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from England who predicted that science would soon enable someone to live for a thousand years. By the end of that span, future scientists would have devised a way to extend life still further, and so on to immortality.

A charismatic figure with a prodigious beard and a doctorate from Cambridge, de Grey resembled an Orthodox priest in mufti. He preached to Thiel for hours at a time about the science of regeneration. De Grey called his research program SENS, short for “strategies for engineered negligible senescence.”

Thiel gave several million dollars to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, helping fund a lucrative prize for any scientist who could stretch the life span of mice to unnatural lengths. Four such prizes were awarded, but no human applications have yet emerged.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

If anything, Thiel thinks about death more than they do—and kicks himself for not thinking about it enough. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

And then he made an uncomfortable admission about that frozen death vault in Scottsdale, dipping his head and giving a half-smile of embarrassment. “I don’t know if that would actually happen,” he said. “I don’t even know where the contracts are, where all the records are, and so—and then of course you’d have to have the people around you know where to do it, and they’d have to be informed. And I haven’t broadcast it.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?

“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

He picked up his hand and gestured. Stop. Enough about his family.

Thiel already does a lot of things to try to extend his life span: He’s on a Paleo diet; he works out with a trainer. He suspects that nicotine is a “really good nootropic drug that raises your IQ 10 points,” and is thinking about adding a nicotine patch to his regimen. He has spoken of using human-growth-hormone pills to promote muscle mass. Until recently he was taking semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic; lately he has switched to a weekly injection of Mounjaro, an antidiabetic drug commonly used for weight loss. He doses himself with another antidiabetic, metformin, because he thinks it has a “significant effect in suppressing the cancer risk.”

In the HBO series Silicon Valley, one of the characters (though not the one widely thought to be modeled on Thiel) had a “blood boy” who gave him regular transfusions of youthful serum. I thought Thiel would laugh at that reference, but he didn’t.

“I’ve looked into all these different, I don’t know, somewhat heterodox things,” he said, noting that parabiosis, as the procedure is called, seems to slow aging in mice. He wishes the science were more advanced. No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

“There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

Thomas Hand has fresh hope that his daughter, who was thought to be dead following the Hamas attacks, is alive.