Dave Rubin released a direct-message clip he says shows tech investor Peter Thiel privately warning Jordan Peterson about a danger most Americans aren’t being told: systemic fraud inside the sciences and academic research. Rubin frames the clip as more than gossip — he presents Thiel’s message as a red flag that the institutions we trust to deliver truth and innovation may, in fact, be rotten.
Watching the exchange, Peterson — a man who has spent his life contesting intellectual fads — looked caught off guard, and for good reason: if Thiel is right, the betrayal runs deeper than a single scandal and threatens the very foundations of policy, medicine, and national security. Conservatives should welcome moments like this when establishment-friendly billionaires and dissident intellectuals point to real rot; it’s a rare alignment that exposes what the mainstream media would rather sweep under the rug.
We already have hard evidence that scientific institutions are not immune to corruption. Peter Thiel is no stranger to controversial, targeted interventions — he quietly bankrolled lawsuits that toppled the Gawker empire and has long used his wealth to challenge institutions he judges corrupt or captured. Whether you admire his methods or not, the man’s playbook is to fund accountability where traditional checks fail.
And the problem Thiel warned about is not theoretical. The replication crisis and a rising tide of retractions and misconduct investigations show that whole swaths of published research are unreliable or outright fraudulent. For years conservatives have warned that capture, incentives, and groupthink in elite institutions produce bad science and bad policy; now the data are catching up with the suspicion.
Concrete cases have already cost taxpayers and reputations. The Justice Department forced Duke University to settle claims it submitted falsified data on federally funded grants, underscoring that fraud is not just academic finger-wagging but a theft of public resources. At Harvard, the controversial Francesca Gino case — which ended with dramatic institutional sanctions after data irregularities were exposed — shows the cultural prestige of a university does not inoculate it from scandal. These are not isolated incidents; they are flashes of a systemic problem.
If conservatives really believe in limited government and responsible stewardship of taxpayer money, we must apply those principles to science funding and academic governance. That means pushing for independent audits, whistleblower protections, and criminal penalties when federal grant funds are abused. It also means refusing to cede moral authority to self-anointed academic elites who pontificate from a pedestal while their institutions shelter misbehavior.
This is also a cultural fight. For decades the left has monopolized the language of expertise while simultaneously rigging incentives in universities and journals to reward flashy, politically convenient results. The best antidote is transparency: preregistration of experiments, open data policies, and incentives for replication over sensational headlines. Conservatives should champion reforms that restore credibility to research without politicizing the process in the opposite direction.
Americans who care about truth, prosperity, and national security should pay attention when figures like Peter Thiel ring alarm bells, and we should demand that our representatives do the same. Congress and state governments must stop treating universities as untouchable cathedrals and start treating them like public-interest contractors whose work can and should be audited. The country that built the atomic bomb, the internet, and modern medicine deserves better than a hollowed-out academy and taxpayer-funded fraud.
