Far Right Billionaire, Slavery Proponent And Holocaust Denier Shape Vance’s World Views
Peter Thiel, Charles “Chuck” Johnson and Curtis Yarvin are not household names outside of GOP insiders but the three, far right provocateurs have each had a large impact on the man who could be the next vice president of the United States.
Trump’s vice presidential partner, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has a close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right. And each is playing a role in influencing the party of trump and JR Vance to further embrace Christian nationalism, white supremacy, anti-immigration and fear of the great replacement.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in an April 20, 2022, story in Vanity Fair. He was saying what many right wing conservatives have been warning, comparing America to Rome awaiting Caesar.
“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with,” said the wannabe, future vice president.
In a 2009 essay, Thiel, a billionaire GOP benefactor, went further, claiming, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
In 2009, Yarvin wrote that since U.S. civil rights programs were “applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber,” the result was “absolute human garbage.”
Thiel is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal; Johnson is a far right, conspiracist and Holocaust-denier; and Yarvin is a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy. The three are all friends with Vance.
Involvement of Thiel, Johnson and Yarvin at the highest levels of government shows that the Republican Party’s drift toward the far right fringe conspiracists and white supremacists is becoming more of a tsunami than a wave.
Thiel, who is a citizen of Germany, the United States, and New Zealand, has given millions to the political campaigns of trump and other Republicans. Thiel was one of the largest donors to Republican candidates in the 2022 election campaign with more than $20.4 million in contributions. He supported 16 senatorial and congressional candidates, including several who supported the trump lie of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Two of the senatorial candidates were Blake Masters and Vance, both silicon valley investors who had both previously worked for Thiel.
Masters lost his 2022 bid for U.S. Senate from Arizona, despite $15 million in contributions from Thiel and trump’s endorsement. He also lost in the race for a House seat from Arizona in 2024. During his campaign, Masters promoted writings by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and white supremacist Sam Francis, and actively endorsed the far right, Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to tip the voting scales to Democratic people of color.
Masters was chief operating officer of Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, and was president of the Thiel Foundation. Vance’s venture capital career took off in 2016 when Thiel hired him to run Mithral Capital Management, a venture capital fund founded by Thiel.
Thiel’s political-action committee, “Free Forever,” supports stricter border control, restrictive immigration policy, funds for veterans, and anti-interventionist foreign policy, all high on the agenda of trump and vance. Vance has said that his worldview was partly shaped by Theil, who has written against democracy and Yardin who has written favorably of slavery.
Johnson has a long-standing relationship with Thiel. He collaborated in a suit against Gawker magazine after the publication ran a sex tape featuring Hulk Hogan which led Hogan to sue the company for invasion of privacy. Hogan received financial support from Thiel, who had been outed by Gawker against his wishes. On June 10, 2016, Gawker filed for bankruptcy after being ordered to pay Hogan $140 million in damages.
The extent of Vance’s relationship with Johnson was uncovered in texts published by the Washington Post on a variety of subjects, from the war in Ukraine, UFO’s, US-Israel policy and Jeffrey Epstein.
The texts were sent encrypted over the messaging app Signal. In January 2022, Signal had around 40 million monthly users and as of May 2021, it was downloaded more than 105 million times. Among its more controversial users, in 2016, authorities in India arrested members of a suspected ISIS-affiliated terrorist cell that communicated via Signal. Extremist right-wing militias and white nationalists also use Signal for organizing their actions, including the 2018 Unite the Right II rally in Washington, D.C., a white supremacist gathering to mark the first anniversary of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which ended in deadly violence.
Johnson, 35, who was a guest of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., at trump’s first State of the Union address to Congress, has spread false news stories through his now-defunct alt-right websites GotNews.com, WeSearchr.com, and Freestartr.com.
Johnson has instigated various false situations including using forged documents to smear Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as a sexual harasser. In 2017, Johnson wrote on his Facebook page that he and far right blogger, Mike Cernovich, were “going to end the career of a U.S. Senator.” Johnson claimed to have uncovered a sexual harassment lawsuit against Schumer. The lawsuit turned out to be false and a forgery of a lawsuit that had nothing to do with Schumer.
Johnson also has posted on Reddit that he had “never believed” that the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust. In 2017, Johnson posted that he agreed with Holocaust denier David Cole “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” Cole writes for Taki’s Magazine, a white nationalist hub that carries headlines like “The Trouble with Blacks” and “Our De Facto Antiwhite Apartheid.” Johnson’s website WeSearchr also raised more than $150,000 for the legal defense of neo-Nazi propagandist Andrew Anglin.
Among Johnson’s phony stories was one in the Daily Caller that accused Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., of soliciting underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. A criminal investigation found no evidence, and the women who made the allegations admitted she had been paid by a local lawyer to make the claims.
In 2014, Johnson published an article reporting that N.Y. Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick was arrested for exhibitionism and had previously posed for “Playgirl.” Johnson’s source for the Playgirl claim was a January 22, 1990, article in “The Daily Princetonian,” which was later revealed to be satirical.
In 2014, Johnson published a story on GotNews accusing Mississippi state Sen. Thad Cochran of bribing African-Americans to vote for him in the Mississippi Senate Republican primary. Johnson claimed that a black pastor named Stevie Fielder had told him he was paid by Cochran’s campaign to bribe black Democrats into voting for Cochran. It was later reported that Johnson paid the pastor for his statements and Fielder recanted his story. During the election, Johnson also falsely accused the Cochran campaign of being responsible for Mississippi Tea Party leader Mark Mayfield’s suicide.
In 2015, Johnson tweeted a call for donations to help him “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. Johnson was permanently banned from Twitter after several users reported him for harassment.
In 2014, Johnson tweeted with Jeff Giesea, a former Thies employee, who founded the action platform game, MAGA-X3, with Mike Cernovich who was involved in promoting the Pizzagate hoax that Democrats were sexual pedophile predators.
In 2015, Johnson created the crowdfunding website, WeSearchr, which became a fundraising platform for alt-right causes. Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website “The Daily Stormer,” used WeSearchr to raise money to defend himself against a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The site closed in May 2017.
Johnson also started the crowdfunding site Freestartr, which collected funds for white nationalist Richard B. Spencer’s legal defense and far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who was accused in July of spreading misinformation about the man responsible for the mass stabbing of children in Southport, England. False claims that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker led to violent far-right riots across the UK. Johnson’s site also raised funds for Canadian white supremacist Faith Goldy. In mid-2018, Freestartr stopped accepting funds, as the site was banned by Stripe and PayPal.
Yarvin, who had ties to former trump advisor, Steve Bannon, is a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger known in far right circles as “Lord Yarvin” or “Our Prophet.” Thiel was an investor in Yarvin’s startup Tlon and gave $100,000 to Tlon’s co-founder, billionaire, John Burnham in 2011. In 2016, Yarvin said he had been “coaching Thiel” and that he had watched the 2016 U.S. election at Thiel’s house.
Last month, Andreessen announced he will donate to Super PACs that support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Andreesen is the co-founder of Netscape and in 2012, he was listed in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.
Andreessen has consistently complained about what he views as the media’s hostility to free speech. In Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he lists what he terms “patron saints” of the movement. They include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist who was also the co-author of “The Fascist Manifesto”; Nick Land, whose writing is a foundational text for the so-called alt-right; Neven Sesardic, a philosopher who argues that race is biologically real and not socially constructed; and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that democracy is an illusion.
As early as 2012, Yarvin proposed RAGE — Retire All Government Employees — as a first step in the overthrow of the American “regime.” A plan to fire all government workers and replace them with trump-friendly employees is a centerpiece of Project 25, the controversial, far right blueprint if trump wins reelection.
Yarvin told a Vanity Fair reporter in 2022,that the nation needs a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.” Yarvin has softened his rhetoric and said recently that the nation needs a monarchy.
Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism and said the U.S. has been soft on crime, dominated by “economic and democratic delusions.” Yarvin has pointed to what he called the “World War II mythology” that Hitler’s invasions were acts of self-defense.
Yarvin reflected a page out of comments made by trump that if he is elected, he would be a dictator only on “Day 1” of his tenure.
“If Americans want to change their government,” Yarvin said, “they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
Yarvin has said that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons and that some races are more suited to slavery than others. In 2009, Yarvin wrote that since U.S. civil rights programs were “applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber,” the result was “absolute human garbage.”