Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

No paywall
https://archive.ph/2KL29

It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit—though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there were some of those floating around. Not that anyone cared. These were people who were used to guarding their words.

“Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party—“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.”

I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them.

“Oh, fuck,” she said as we walked into a small ballroom where the party was already underway. The room was pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and the sparse crowd was almost entirely male, with a cash bar off in the corner that seemed unable to produce drinks fast enough to buoy the mood. “We have a thing we say,” she said. “ ‘This is what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.’ Well, this is exactly what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.”

*snip*

[Ilsa]

1. Peter Thiel comes into this story how? nt

[shrike3]

2. From the article:

One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund NatCon and who had just given the conference’s opening address. Thiel has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left–inflected New People’s Cinema film festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He’s long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world—becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene and influenced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona.

Thiel has given more than $10 million to super PACs supporting the men’s candidacies, and both are personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family office,” also ran the Thiel Foundation, which has become increasingly intertwined with this New Right ecosystem. These three—Thiel, Vance, Masters—are all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right. You’ll often hear people in this world—again under many layers of irony—call him things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.

[enough]

3. This is a fascinating article that goes beyond the usual stereotypes.

Useful in knowing what’s going on. Thanks for posting.

[uponit7771]

5. Except it doesn't, the author eluded on it but there still no one of color under 50 in those crowds

... and their anger at "wokeness" seems to be pointed at the fact they can't attract Under 50 of color so attack whatever they're about.

White right wing centrism does that, people like me don't fair too well under authoritarianism of any stripe

[uponit7771]

4. Read the whole thing, the "New Right" is pissed it can't attract those who were being beaten by

... cops during the George Floyd protest so everything about them is evil to the core.

"Wokeness" goes against their dream of having a dictator or "monarch" who can clean the swamp or RAGE; Replace All Government Employees.

Their populism is still white world centrinc even though in another 30 years the half of America that will be of color are going to be able to vote against them constantly.

Right wing world is dying a slow death ... that's a good thing ... for now

[keep_left]

6. This is a really amazing article. I had no idea of the influence on the "post left"...

...by people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance. I guess we should have suspected something when so many "post left" types (writers like Angela Nagle, the Red Scare podcast) started sounding increasingly reactionary.

It turns out that Thiel (among others) has been funding the "Rockbridge Media Project" rather covertly for several years. There was a recent NYT article about it that may have been posted here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/politics/republican-donors-rockbridge-network-trump.html

Some additional analysis: https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/whos-on-the-payroll-of-peter-thiels