Peter Thiel, in his interview with Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, seems to put the group-think bubble in a nutshell – if that’s not mixing my metaphors too much.

Thiel became the pariah of Silicon Valley – and further afield – when he opted for Donald Trump in the US election. Dowd conducted a long interview with him and in it sets the apparent craziness of American politics over the past year in a context which makes it all seem quite sensible, even if full of risk. That is perhaps the best context for a healthy politics in any country.

He recalls that he went through a lot of “meta” debates about Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley. “One of my good friends said, ‘Peter, do you realize how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?’ I was like: ‘Well, why am I wrong? What’s substantively wrong with this?’ And it all got referred back to ‘Everybody thinks Trump’s really crazy.’ So it’s like there’s a shortcut, which is: ‘I don’t need to explain it. It’s good enough that everybody thinks something. If everybody thinks this is crazy, I don’t even have to explain to you why it’s crazy. You should just change your mind.’”

Thiel is undoubtedly one of those influencers in the culture which, If they didn’t exist, we would have had to invent them. But thank heavens he does exist – because no one on the planet could ever have invented this one.

The frightening thing about conventional wisdom is how stupid it can be. Thiel is one of those who defy conventional wisdom and who is a force which will hopefully expose the fallacies of the illiberal-left dictatorship of our time and bring the sheep who have been duped by it back to some semblance of rational humanity.

The first crack in the whole illiberal-left monolith has already appeared in the very environment from which Thiel himself comes. He thinks the bigger tech companies all want to get a little bit off the ledge that they had gotten on, he said when asked how he had managed to get so many of them to turn up to a meeting with the President-elect in Trump Tower.

“Normally, if you’re a C.E.O. of a big company, you tend to be somewhat apolitical or politically pretty bland. But this year, it was this competition for who could be more anti-Trump. ‘If Trump wins, I will eat my sock.’ ‘I will eat my shoe.’ ‘I will eat my shoe, and then I will walk barefoot to Mexico to emigrate and leave the country.’

“Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan. There were hedge fund people I spoke to about a week after the election. They hadn’t supported Trump. But all of a sudden, they sort of changed their minds. The stock market went up, and they were like, ‘Yes, actually, I don’t understand why I was against him all year long.’”

We might wonder when the Hillary fan club of  ‘famous actors’ from Hollywood might take the same message on board. Despite the satirical drubbing they got in the Save The Day parodies, they will probably remain as vain and opinionated as their trivial pursuits and the toxic star-system condition them to be. The only cure for that condition might be a dent in their box-office receipts. That might bring them to their senses.

Read Dowd’s full interview here.