Why a secretive tech billionaire is bankrolling J.D. Vance

[Nevilledog]

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Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
Anti-elitist JD Vance's Senate run is partly the creation of billionaire Peter Thiel, who chipped in $15 million. I took a look at this alliance with help from Thiel's biographer. He told me Thiel is a "reactionary capitalist," which explains a great deal:

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Why a secretive tech billionaire is bankrolling J.D. Vance
Behold the ugly nexus of reactionary capitalism and right-wing nationalism.
9:16 AM · May 5, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/05/peter-thiel-bankrolling-jd-vance-reactionary-nationalism/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/h2HkZ


Now that J.D. Vance has won the GOP nomination for Senate in Ohio, heightened scrutiny will fall on his chief financial backer, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Thiel’s involvement has unleashed much snickering about the absurdity of Vance, the self-styled scourge of globalist elites and Big Tech, being backed by an obscenely wealthy venture capitalist and globetrotting tech oligarch.
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That does seem bizarrely incongruent. But in reality, the politics of Vance and Thiel overlap in a discernible fashion. And this sheds light on the broader political project that Vance and some of his right-wing nationalist fellow travelers are pursuing — revealing something that’s much uglier than even the mockery suggests.

The New York Times has new reporting on Thiel’s importance to Vance’s victory. Thiel bankrolled a pro-Vance super PAC with $15 million and brokered a meeting with Donald Trump that helped secure his endorsement, which proved decisive.

Thiel’s support interlocked with Tucker Carlson’s Fox News megaphone. Vance appeared on the show 15 times, according to Media Matters: The combined cash and airtime helped enable Vance to withstand a barrage of negative ads from rivals funded by traditional GOP-aligned plutocratic interests.

*snip*

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Pro Fascism Guy

Author Max Chafkin reveals alleged details about the 2019 meeting of Thiel, Zuckerberg, Trump, and Kushner.

The Daily Beast
Updated Oct. 22, 2021 11:53AM ET

Peter Thiel scares a lot of people. He’s the tech billionaire who was able to shutter Gawker and he holds a lot of influence in Silicon Valley and politics, and the intersection of the two.

On the latest episode of The New Abnormal, author Max Chafkin, whose upcoming book The Contrarian is all about Thiel, tells Molly Jong-Fast that “if there’s a Trump political party or a Trump faction, Thiel wants to be the Koch brothers to that faction.”

That’s because Thiel allegedly got richer than he already was during the Trump presidency. And that leads us to the secret meeting that he attended with then-President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Mark Zuckerberg in response to Zuck and Facebook coming under fire for manipulated ads whose targets included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as for supposedly suppressing conservative content—despite analytics proving otherwise.

The meeting is not news, but Chafkin shares some details that haven’t been in the news.

“Thiel told a friend, [and] according to the friend, Zuckerberg and Jared Kushner basically reached an accommodation…”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secret-meeting-between-mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-donald-trump-and-jared-kushner?ref=scroll

The billionaire class doesn’t care if Dim Donnie Drumpf is an unstable NAZI moron. They get richer, which is all what matters to them.

[LisaM]

3. Calling J.D. Vance an "anti-elitist"

Is like calling Putin a serf.

[dalton99a]

7. +1

[ck4829]

10. Truth

[empedocles]

4. 'reactionary capitalist', [from the article].

[jmbar2]

5. In other words

He sees himself as John Galt.

[ck4829]

8. K&R for exposure

[lame54]

9. Did he pay for Trump's endorsement?