Build-a-Party

The session is called "Build-a-Party." According to WIRED's verified reporting and Newsweek's coverage, it is moderated by a former White House national security official. It appears on the Dialog retreat agenda alongside "Build-a-Cult," which is moderated by the founder of the Christian networking platform Pray.com.

Build-a-Cult is about building movements. Build-a-Party is about building power. And the people in the room for the latter have more experience doing it than perhaps any other 222 humans alive.

But before we get to the political implications, a clarifying question: which kind of party?

Because one reading of the title is a session about the future of partisan politics in a fracturing democracy. Another reading is: how to throw an excellent gathering for 222 extremely important people at a luxury hotel outside Dublin, with assigned seating, no small talk, and a moderator who ensures nobody argues just to win.

Dialog, as it turns out, has put serious thought into both.

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The Room Is the Party

Here is the list of political affiliations represented at Dialog, according to WIRED's reporting, the Hollywood Reporter, and Wikipedia's compiled roster:

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican, Texas. Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FTC. Senator Cory Booker, Democrat, New Jersey. Currently running for re-election in 2026. Representative Jim Himes, Democrat, Connecticut. Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Leonard Leo, conservative legal architect, widely credited with reshaping the Supreme Court through his leadership of the Federalist Society. Governor Wes Moore, Democrat, Maryland. Governor Jared Polis, Democrat, Colorado. Jared Kushner, former senior White House advisor and the former president's son-in-law. Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic congresswoman turned Trump-administration Director of National Intelligence.

And that's just the politicians. The broader roster includes Ezra Klein (left-leaning journalist and podcaster), Bret Stephens (conservative New York Times columnist), Grover Norquist (anti-tax crusader), Anne-Marie Slaughter (former Obama State Department official), Larry Summers (former Obama and Clinton Treasury official), and Rick Warren (evangelical pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life).

Dialog's registration form, according to Harici and Straight Arrow News, asks attendees to declare their political leaning with the options "Far Left," "Left," "Right," and "Far Right." The form promises this data will never be shared.

But in a room where Ted Cruz and Cory Booker are attending the same off-the-record retreat, paying the same $16,000, eating the same meals, and discussing how to build a political party together — the question of what "political leaning" means becomes genuinely complicated.

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The Two-Party Illusion

American politics operates on a foundational assumption: there are two parties, they disagree about almost everything, and elections are how citizens choose between them. The drama of democratic life is structured around this binary. Red versus blue. Left versus right. Fox versus MSNBC. The parties compete; the voters decide; the winner governs.

Dialog's membership list suggests a different model.

The 2014 Dialog retreat invitation — surfaced in the DOJ's Epstein files released in January 2026 — described the gathering as a "two-day bipartisan retreat discussing how to change the world." It called its attendees "150 global leaders who can have an impact now and emerging leaders who can help implement the plans we develop."

Read that again: "implement the plans we develop."

Not propose. Not debate. Not submit to the voters. Implement. The language assumes a group that plans and a world that receives the plan. The bipartisan framing isn't about bridging differences — it's about establishing that the differences don't matter at this altitude. Cruz and Booker don't need to agree on immigration policy to agree that the people in this room should be the ones shaping the future. The partisan disagreement is downstream. The structural agreement — that these 222 people belong in the room and you don't — is the foundation everything else rests on.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an organizational design. Dialog doesn't hide from the bipartisan nature of its membership — it advertises it. According to Yahoo News' summary of the leaked documents, Dialog describes itself as a place for "off-the-record relationships among leaders from different fields and ideological backgrounds." The whole point is that the left and the right meet here, away from the cameras, to talk about things they can't discuss in public.

The question is what happens when a nominally adversarial political system has a private back channel where the adversaries spend four days together at a luxury hotel, share meals, get assigned seats next to each other, and are explicitly told not to argue for the sake of winning.

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The Kingmaker's Workshop

If "Build-a-Party" is about constructing political power, the retreat's co-founder has a résumé.

Peter Thiel's most consequential political investment, according to CBS News, the Revolving Door Project, and multiple other outlets, was not a donation or an endorsement. It was a person: JD Vance.

Thiel hired Vance at his global investment firm in 2017. He nurtured Vance's political ambitions. He introduced Vance to Trump. He donated $15 million to a Super PAC supporting Vance's 2022 Ohio Senate campaign — the largest single donation Thiel had ever made to a candidate. Vance won a contested Republican primary and then the general election. In 2024, Trump chose Vance as his vice-presidential running mate. Vance is now Vice President of the United States.

From Thiel's venture fund to the White House in seven years. That's not party politics. That's venture capital applied to governance. Identify an undervalued asset. Invest early. Provide strategic support. Scale.

Thiel's approach to politics mirrors his approach to business: find an outsider who can be shaped, funded, and positioned before the market recognizes the value. It worked with PayPal. It worked with Facebook. It worked with Palantir. And it worked with the Vice Presidency.

According to KQED, six members of the so-called PayPal Mafia appear on the Dialog registration list. Thiel co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, who is also on the list. Reid Hoffman, PayPal's former COO and Dialog's co-founder, was a major Democratic donor in 2024 before the leak. David Sacks, PayPal's former COO, hosted a $12 million fundraiser for Trump in June 2024 and was appointed to a senior administration role.

The PayPal Mafia doesn't have a partisan affiliation. It has a portfolio. Some investments are Republican. Some are Democratic. The returns are bipartisan.

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What Replaces Parties

The traditional political party serves a few core functions: it aggregates voter preferences, recruits and trains candidates, raises money, builds coalitions, and develops a policy platform that distinguishes it from the opposition. In theory, parties are the mechanism through which democratic preferences become government action.

Each of these functions is now performed, arguably more effectively, by private networks like Dialog.

Aggregating preferences? Dialog's registration form collects the political leanings, predictions, and priorities of 222 of the most influential people on Earth — a focus group that no pollster could assemble.

Recruiting candidates? Thiel's track record speaks for itself. The path from Founders Fund to the Vice Presidency is shorter and more reliable than the path through any state party apparatus.

Raising money? The 222 people on the Dialog list have, collectively, access to more capital than either the Republican or Democratic National Committee. A single dinner at David Sacks' home raised $12 million for a presidential campaign.

Building coalitions? Dialog explicitly builds cross-partisan relationships. Cruz and Booker. Leo and Hoffman. The coalitions that matter aren't left-right. They're inside-outside. And everyone at Dialog is inside.

Developing policy? The retreat agenda — nuclear energy, battlefield technologies, AI regulation, party-building — covers every major policy domain. The difference is that at Dialog, the people discussing policy and the people implementing it are often the same people, sitting at the same table, under rules that ensure no one outside the room will ever know what was said.

The session isn't called "Join a Party." It's called "Build a Party." The verb implies creation from scratch. And when you look at who's in the room — the venture capitalists who fund candidates, the media figures who shape narratives, the government officials who make policy, the tech executives who control the platforms where political discourse happens — the question isn't whether they could build a political party.

The question is whether they already have.

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The Party Nobody Voted For

There is no line on any ballot that says "Dialog." There is no platform, no convention, no primary election. There are no voters.

And yet: the co-founder of Dialog created the Vice President. The members of Dialog include the Treasury Secretary, two senators, multiple governors, a NATO commander, and the CEO of the platform where the President of the United States communicates with the public. The policies discussed at Dialog retreats — nuclear expansion, AI regulation, defense procurement — are the policies being enacted. The companies represented at Dialog are the recipients of the contracts those policies produce.

The two-party system isn't collapsing. It's being routed around. The parties still exist. They still hold primaries and conventions and campaign rallies. They still raise money from small donors who believe their $25 contribution matters. But the architecture of actual power — the relationships, the capital flows, the policy coordination, the candidate selection — increasingly runs through private networks that operate outside the party system entirely.

"Build-a-Party" is on the agenda. But the party is already built. It meets in August, at the Powerscourt Hotel, outside Dublin. Admission is $16,000. There are 222 seats. Your political leaning will be recorded on the registration form.

You weren't invited. But don't worry — the plans are being implemented regardless.

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How to Throw a Good Party

Now. For the other 10 percent.

If the Dialog leak reveals anything heartening, it's that even billionaires struggle with the same problem the rest of us face when hosting a gathering: how do you get interesting people to have interesting conversations instead of defaulting to small talk and status performance?

Dialog's answer, according to Axios and the leaked moderator guide, is genuinely thoughtful:

Assign the seating. Don't let people cluster with the people they already know. Force the Treasury Secretary to sit next to the podcast host. Put the NATO commander next to the actress. The collision is the point.

Keep groups small. Eight to twelve people per conversation. Large enough for diversity of perspective, small enough that hiding is impossible. Everyone has to contribute.

Ban small talk. Literally. The participation guide instructs members to be concise and "nonobvious." If you're going to say something everyone in the room already knows, don't.

Appoint a moderator. Not a host — a moderator. Someone whose job is to draw out the quiet people, redirect the blowhards, and keep the conversation moving. Dialog coaches its moderators to model brief introductions to prevent status signaling.

Pick a venue that makes leaving inconvenient. A four-day retreat at a luxury hotel outside Dublin means nobody ducks out early. The relationships form because there's nowhere else to be.

And — apparently — ask people if they're looking for love. Because nothing bonds a group faster than the shared vulnerability of admitting that the person who runs a $360 billion defense company is, at the end of the day, also just hoping to meet someone.

Whether you're building a political movement or a dinner party, the principles are the same: curate the guest list, structure the conversation, remove the exits, and make it safe to be honest. Dialog does all four, at scale, for $16,000 a head.

The rest of us can approximate it for the cost of a good meal and the courage to put our phones in a basket by the door.

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Sources

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This is original analysis published by Build a Cult. It is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The session title "Build-a-Party" is drawn from Dialog's leaked 2026 retreat agenda, as reported by WIRED.