Eccentric gay tech billionaire and Gawker slayer Peter Thiel made history at the Republican convention in Cleveland on Thursday.
“I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American,” he said, to which the crowd responded with a standing ovation and cheers of “U-S-A!”
Thiel said he didn’t agree with every aspect of the Republican platform, but slammed what he described as “fake culture wars,” such as debates over “who gets to use which bathroom,” calling them “a distraction.”
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won,” Thiel said. “Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
Thiel urged Americans to vote for Donald Trump because the GOP nominee was the only candidate who was being “honest” about the real problems facing the country.
The Silicon Valley billionaire and founder of PayPal painted a bleak picture of a country that is woefully behind the curve when it comes to technology.
“Our government is broken,” he said. “Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all.
“That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.”
Donald Trump, in his primetime address on Friday, attempted to adopt a more gay-friendly tone and reach out to the LGBTQ community. “As president, I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said to cheers from the crowd, before adding a line that was not in his prepared remarks: “And, I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”