In 2016, JD Vance compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and now he is the former president’s running mate. Behind the scenes of the Ohio Senator’s transformation from a “Never Trump guy” to the Republican nominee's second-in-command is Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Paypal.
From giving Vance a job in Silicon Valley to funding his Ohio Senate campaign — and introducing him to a network of tech billionaires who could give him more money — Thiel helped propel Vance into the MAGA-verse and onto the ballot, simultaneously bringing the agenda of the New Right into mainstream politics. The New Right is a post-Trump movement of young and elite conservatives that essentially believe federal institutions and current democratic systems have failed the United States and must be dismantled.
Vance was first exposed to Thiel in 2011 while attending Yale Law School. Thiel was giving a talk on campus in which he criticized the hyper-competitive nature of professions like law, arguing that it was connected to stifled technological innovation. In Silicon Valley, Thiel said, too much time was spent on developing mobile phones and software and not enough on developing new energy and transportation systems.
If technological innovation drove prosperity for all, Vance would later write, summarizing Thiel's talk, elite professionals wouldn't feel so competitive "over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes."
“Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance later wrote in a blog post. Vance wrote that Thiel’s speech made him realize he was obsessed with achievement and winning the “social competition." He began plotting a career outside of law.
Inspired, Vance emailed Thiel. “Stop by my house next time you’re out here,” the investor responded, according to The New York Times.
The connection was made.
After Yale, Vance worked just two years in law before heading to Silicon Valley, where he was hired by Frederic Moll, a friend of Thiel’s, to work at Circuit Therapeutics, The Times reported. In 2016, the same year Vance released his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” (Thiel wrote a blurb for it), Vance began working at Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by Thiel. The company is named after a fictional metal from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."
Throughout Vance’s stint in Silicon Valley, Thiel exposed him to a network of tech tycoons, including David Sacks, who went on to financially support Vance’s political endeavors and lobby for him to become an Ohio Senator and now Trump’s running mate. Sacks recently spoke at the Republican National Convention, where he criticized Democrats in San Francisco and Biden's support for Ukraine.
In 2019, Vance also converted to Catholicism, a move that aligned him with the young, religious crowd of the New Right. In 2020, Vance wrote that Thiel was an original inspiration for his path to Christianity despite previously calling himself an atheist.
“He defied the social template I had constructed — that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” Vance wrote.
Armed with a new faith and a wealth of connections in one of America’s most influential industries, Vance returned to Ohio to start his own venture, Narya Capital (also a "Lord of the Rings" reference) funded by Thiel and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
It was during this time Vance began to publicly transform from a Trump critic to one of his closest allies.
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Back in 2016, Vance made his contempt for the future president well known. Prior to Trump’s election, Vance contemplated whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” in a text to a former roommate and said he couldn’t “stomach Trump” in an interview on NPR. In 2017, Vance called Trump a “moral disaster.”
Just a few years later, however, Vance publicly embraced Trump, developing a relationship with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and echoing many of the former president’s absurdities, including that the 2020 election was stolen.
In July 2021, Vance announced he would run for Ohio Senate, backed by none other than Thiel, who donated over $1.5 million to pro-Trump outfits in 2016. According to reporting from The New York Times, the billionaire orchestrated talks between Trump and Vance and even escorted him to meet with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago residence in 2021.
Just over a month before the 2022 Ohio Republican Primary, Trump announced his endorsement for Vance. Thiel donated a total of $15 million to Vance’s 2022 campaign, the largest amount ever given to a Senate candidate, according to Politico.
“What changed my mind about Donald Trump more than anything is that I saw the corruption in our institutions,” Vance said at a campaign speech in Ohio in 2022, Spectrum News reported. "A lot of what this campaign is about — and a lot of my own thinking about politics is about — is that our institutions are corrupt. We have to replace the people who run them. Some of those institutions we have to destroy. But we need better people in our government."
This rhetoric is in part what led to Vance being dubbed the face of the “New Right," a movement that emphasizes the importance of national sovereignty, as opposed to international cooperation, pairing opposition to abortion and immigration with skepticism of democratic institutions. Though the New Right lacks a clear leader, the movement's ideology has been partly influenced by Patrick Deneen, the author of "Why Liberalism Failed," and right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin, who has argued that the current system of government should be replaced by one leader who could seize absolute power and "dismantle the whole regime."
Thiel has been key in bringing the movement to the mainstream. In a 2022 Vanity Fair article, reporter James Pogue wrote that Thiel has become somewhat of a “nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle” to the young crowd of Republicans.
Along with supporting Vance, he also supported Blake Masters’ Senate run in Arizona, donating $10 million to the former venture capitalist’s campaign. Masters also worked for Thiel in Silicon Valley.
Thiel has funded and spoken at the National Conservatism Conference, also known as NatCon, an annual gathering for the New Right. It was designed to bring together people who “understand the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation.”
“We see the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race,” the website reads.
These kinds of ideas have long-marked Thiel, who wrote in 2009 that he doesn’t believe “freedom and democracy are compatible.”
“I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate. I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist told The New York Times of Thiel.
With Vance on the ballot, he may have a way to do so.
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