In his keynote address to the National Conservatism Conference Oct. 31, billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel argued that false consensus has silenced debate on important questions, including COVID-19, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and ongoing inflation in the American economy. Thiel spoke to the conference about examples of what he called “the incredible derangement of various forms of thought,” including ways of political and scientific thinking. He highlighted the experience of Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose skepticism about masks culminated in anonymous posters of his face plastered across his university’s campus that, in The Federalist’s words, “[linked] him to COVID deaths in Florida.” Thiel criticized what he characterized as excessive dogmatism in science, as epitomized by lawn signs proclaiming a household’s belief in “science.” “When you have to call things science, you know they aren’t—like climate science or political science,” Thiel said. That same dogmatism, Thiel argued, led the …