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      JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

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      JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration

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      Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.Now this latest recording raises renewed questions about Vance’s contribution to the Republican ticket, which is trailing behind Kamala Harris and her bid to be America’s first woman of color president.In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response.‘Racial and gender resentment’A video version of the podcast was published to YouTube on 20 September 2021, and events discussed in it suggest that it was recorded in the days immediately before. The liberal watchdog Media Matters had previously flagged the broadcast.At that time, Vance was a relatively new political candidate. He achieved national prominence as a writer in 2016, but on 1 July 2021 he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. That March, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated $10m to Protect Ohio Values, a Pac established to support a potential Vance candidacy.View image in fullscreenThe recording was initially published as an episode of the podcast of American Moment, a rightwing 501c3 non-profit whose website says its mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all”. At the time of the recording, Vance sat on the non-profit’s advisory board; he’s now listed under “board members emeritus” on the organization’s website.Vance’s hosts were American Moment’s president and founder, Saurabh Sharma, and its COO Nick Solheim. Introducing the discussion, Solheim speculated that Vance “may end up with some angry texts after this one. It was a very spicy episode.”In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers.At about 39 minutes into the recording, when asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”Vance added: “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”Minutes later, Vance adopted the perspective of a hypothetical professional woman to answer Sharma’s question about where “the racial and gender resentment comes from”.“OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,” Vance began, “And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.”He continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”Last weekend, Vance tried to clean up previously reported comments about childless women by claiming it was “sarcasm”.‘Soy boys who want to feed the monster’On the other hand, Vance depicted men and boys as “suppressed”, saying 52 minutes in that “one of the weird things about elite society is it’s deeply uncomfortable with masculinity”.Warming to the theme, Vance said: “This is one weird thing that conservatives don’t talk about enough … We don’t talk enough about the fact that traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood.”Assessing his young son’s habit of fighting imaginary monsters, Vance said: “There’s something deeply cultural and biological, spiritual about this desire to defend his home and his family.”He connected this with a hypothetical invasion: “If the Chinese invade us in 10 years, they’re going to be beaten back by boys like you who practice fighting the monsters who become proud men who defend their homes.”By contrast, for Vance, “They’re not going to be defended by the soy boys who want to feed the monsters.”“Soy boy” is a term, originating on the “alt-right”, which is used to impugn the masculinity of its targets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion‘The left uses racism as a cudgel’Looming over the conversation was the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which had been completed on the orders of Joe Biden on 31 August, just weeks before the recording was published.These events led the trio to discussions of immigration and asylum, in which Vance expressed doubts about the suitability of Afghan and Somali people for immigration to the US, even those who had assisted the US military overseas.At about 22 minutes into the recording, Vance mocked the claims of Afghan refugees to have helped the US military in its occupation, saying: “Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter.”He attributed the idea that the US should grant asylum to those who helped US forces to “the fraudulence of our elites”, saying: “You talk to people who served in Afghanistan. And one of the things they will tell you is, yeah, a lot of the translators and interpreters who helped us were great guys.”Vance added, however, that “a lot of the interpreters who said they were helping us were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”, without substantiating the claim.Vance continued: “The idea that every person in Afghanistan, even those who said they were helping us, are actually good people is a total joke.”Vance expressed similar skepticism about another immigrant group, while characterizing himself and others as victims of the left.At about 25 minutes into the recording, Solheim said: “There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu. Like that’s what they call it. There’s nothing in English. People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.”Solheim added: “I was just down there a couple of weeks ago. It’s like a totally different country.”View image in fullscreenReplying, Vance said: “The thing that I hate about this is the left uses racism as a cudgel. And I myself was guilty of being a little worried about that. Like, I don’t want to be called a racist because I knew it can be career-ending and they can destroy a person’s life.”Vance then asked, rhetorically, “Why don’t you want, you know, people getting hatcheted in the street in downtown Minneapolis? Is it because you’re a racist or is it because you don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in your own community?”“Like, obviously, the answer is the latter,” he concluded. “But the left uses racism as a cudgel to shut us up and to make it impossible to complain about obvious problems.”Last July, not long after being named as Trump’s VP pick, Vance suggested in a speech that Democrats would describe drinking Diet Mountain Dew as racist. The comment backfired and was widely mocked.‘You would be living in a craphole’Several times, the three steered assessments of migrant groups and their capacity for assimilation into negative personal commentary on the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.View image in fullscreenAt about 28 minutes in, Sharma said: “You know, thinking about the Minnesota example, specifically, that’s how you get someone like Ilhan Omar, who despises the country.”Vance replied, “I mean, [the US] gave her an incredible amount of opportunity and she has a complete lack of gratitude,” later adding: “My family has been here as far as I can tell for nine, 10, like many generations. I’ve never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country.“And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me,” Vance allowed.“But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too,” he concluded.Congresswoman Omar’s full response to the Guardian took Vance to task over the comments.“The ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance is not just troubling – it’s dangerous and un-American. I love America fiercely, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” she wrote.Omar added: “America deserves better than Vance’s hateful, divisive politics. We are a nation of immigrants, and we will continue to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – no matter how much it terrifies small-minded men like JD Vance.”Vance also talked about institutions like universities and the media as components of a “broken elite system”, and portrayed their inhabitants as enemies whom conservatives would need to reckon with.“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.” More

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      How JD Vance’s path to being Trump’s VP pick wound through Silicon Valley

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      When JD Vance was a student at Yale Law School in 2011, he attended a talk featuring Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire. Although Vance didn’t know Thiel at the time, over the next decade he would become Thiel’s employee, friend and the recipient of his largesse. Thiel’s millions paved the way for Vance to become a senator.Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”, Vance would write in a 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. In Vance’s telling, Thiel’s talk of the failures of elite institutions and belief in Christianity made him reconsider his own faith and immediately make plans for a career outside of law – one that wound through the worlds of tech and venture capital before politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Vance is best known for the hardscrabble origin story he laid out in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in the years following his graduation from Yale he developed extensive ties with Silicon Valley’s investors and elites. His time as a venture capitalist, coupled with his status as a rags-to-riches media fixture, helped him make connections central to his political rise, as well as garner him influential supporters that pushed Trump to make him his vice presidential pick.Following a brief period of work in corporate law after he graduated Yale, Vance moved to San Francisco and got a job at Thiel’s Mithril Capital venture firm in 2015. After Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller in 2016 and brought him to national prominence, Vance joined the venture capital firm Revolution, founded by the former AOL CEO Steve Case.Vance remained a part of the tech VC world after returning to Ohio and leaving Revolution in early 2020. He received financial backing from Thiel to co-found the venture firm Narya Capital – which, like Thiel’s enterprises, was named after an object from The Lord of The Rings, this time a ring of power made for elves. Other prominent investors in Narya included Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO,and Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who announced his own support for Trump this past week. The stated goal of Vance’s firm was to invest in early-stage startups in cities that Silicon Valley tended to overlook.Narya Capital in 2021 led a group of conservative investors, including Thiel, to put money into Rumble, the video streaming platform that positions itself as a less-moderated and more rightwing friendly version of YouTube. Vance’s co-founder at Narya, Colin Greenspon, touted the investment as a challenge to big tech’s hold on online services – a frequent conservative talking point during the backlash to content moderation around the pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It was also around this time that Thiel, who heavily backed Trump financially during the 2016 campaign, brought Vance to first talk with Trump during a secretive meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February of 2021, according to the New York Times.Vance’s long association with Thiel also proved lucrative during his run for senator in 2022. Thiel put a staggering $15m into Vance’s campaign and, according to the Washington Post, helped court Trump’s endorsement, leading to Vance winning a tightly contested Republican primary race and then the senate election.Although Thiel has pledged in recent years to stay out of donations to the 2024 election, Vance has since flexed his other Silicon Valley connections to ingratiate himself to Trump. The Ohio senator introduced David Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist, to Donald Trump Jr in March, the New York Times reported, and attended Sacks’ pro-Trump fundraiser in June, co-sponsored by Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks’ co-host on the popular podcast All In. The event, which cost as much as $300,000 to attend, was held at Sacks’s San Francisco mansion and featured the investor thanking Vance for his help making the fundraiser happen. During an informal conversation at the dinner, Sacks and Palihapitiya told Trump to nominate Vance as his VP choice.Sacks spoke at the Republican national convention Monday. In the days prior, he had also called Trump to advocate for Vance as the VP pick, as had Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox News host, according to Axios. Thiel also expressed his support for Vance in private calls with Trump, the New York Times reported. When Trump confirmed Vance would be his running mate, Sacks and Musk posted fawning celebrations on Twitter – with Musk saying the ticket “resounds with victory”.Many of Vance’s wealthy tech elite and venture capitalist supporters now appear to be preparing to offer even more tangible support. Investors including Musk, Andreessen and Thiel’s co-founder in Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, are all reportedly planning to donate huge sums of money to back the Trump and Vance campaign. More

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      Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump? | Robert Reich

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      Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.Some of this aligns with Musk’s business interests. In India, he secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries.But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are leading a movement against democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?Thiel donated $15m to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. (Vance is now high on the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.)Thiel also donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.Billionaire money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump Republican party.In 2021, Stephen A Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, called the January 6 attack on the US Capitol an “insurrection” and “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear”. Now he’s backing Trump because, Schwarzman says, “our economic, immigration and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”Trump recently solicited a group of top oil executives to raise $1bn for his campaign, reportedly promising that if elected he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies adopted by Biden. Trump said this would be a “deal” for the oil executives that would avoid taxation and regulation on their industry.Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab last January in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on Trump’s policies while president. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump “grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked”.Rubbish. Under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth under Trump was slower than it’s been under Biden.Most of the benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase and wealthy individuals like Dimon, while the costs blew a giant hole in the budget deficit. If not for those Trump tax cuts, along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions, the ratio of the federal debt to the national economy would now be declining.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut don’t assume that the increasing flow of billionaire money to Trump and his Republican party is motivated solely by tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. The goal of these US oligarchs is to roll back democracy.When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted (in a podcast in November): “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes … Woke mind virus is communism rebranded.”Communism rebranded? Hello?A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and their fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel wrote: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. 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.”If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – as Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and other billionaires are now putting on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Under fascist strongmen, no one is safe – not even oligarchs.If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Peter Thiel won’t fund any 2024 races after backing Trump in 2016: ‘It was crazier than I thought’

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      Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who supported Donald Trump in 2016 and sunk millions more into underperforming Maga candidates in subsequent election cycles, has confirmed rumors that he is stepping away from 2024 political funding.In an interview with the Atlantic, Thiel said voting for Trump “was like a not very articulate scream for help” and that things had not turned out the way he had hoped when he donated $1.25m to Trump and Trump-affiliated political funds eight years ago.“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was – I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”Thiel told the magazine that Trump had called him earlier this year to solicit $10m – the same amount that he had donated to Blake Masters, a former protege who campaigned and lost a Senate bid in Arizona last year, and JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy who won an Ohio Senate seat.When Thiel turned down Trump’s request, he said the former president told him that “he was very sad, very sad to hear that”. He later heard that Trump had insulted him to Masters, calling him a “fucking scumbag”.Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the big-data analytics firm Palantir whose fortune is estimated at between $4bn and $9bn, said that while he was not planning to donate in this cycle, “there’s always a chance I might change my mind”. He added that his husband “doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right”.He also said that he knew political candidates are “going to be pestering me like crazy”.The Atlantic profile sheds light on why Thiel, sometimes described as a techno-libertarian, had become a political donor at all.He explained that in early 2016, when a jury sided with Terry Gene Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan, in an invasionof privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media – an action Thiel had funded – he read it as a sign that Trump could win.Ten days before Trump’s political coronation at the Republican national convention that year, Trump’s son Don Jr called to ask if Thiel wanted to speak from the platform. He agreed, he told the magazine, in part because he favored candidates with pessimistic slogans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch,” he said. “‘Make America great again’ was the most pessimistic slogan of any candidate in 100 years, because you were saying that we are no longer a great country. And that was a shocking slogan for a major presidential candidate.”Thiel also sounded off on diversity initiatives – calling them “very evil and it’s very silly” – and his interest in life-extension, a common theme among tech billionaires. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he said. More

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy Parler | Arwa Mahdawi

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy ParlerArwa MahdawiThe rapper’s antisemitic remarks have got him banned from Twitter and Instagram. But here’s a safe space where he’ll be able to say just what he likes Kanye West, a man who can’t seem to stop saying bigoted things, is buying Parler, a social network designed especially for people who like to say bigoted things. I was a little surprised when this news broke on Monday because I thought Parler was basically a Nazified version of Myspace that nobody used any more. There are a bunch of fringe rightwing social networks out there – Gettr, Gab, Truth Social – and Parler might be the least successful of a very unsuccessful bunch. The Twitter clone was launched in 2018 with the stated aim of countering the “ever-increasing tyranny … of our tech overlords”; it had a brief moment of popularity then that fizzled out. No doubt because of the tyranny of our tech overlords.Despite the fact it’s not a household name, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why West, who has changed his name to Ye, is interested in Parler, which, one imagines, may soon change its name to Er. The musician, who has been moving dramatically to the right in recent years, had his Twitter and Instagram accounts locked this month because of antisemitic comments. Or that’s what us lefties have been saying anyway – West seems to think he was being censored and free speech is dead and liberals are trying to cancel him yada yada yada. Instead of engaging in any sort of introspection following his Twitter suspension, Ye apparently decided to fight for his right to be a bigot. Parler’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, put that in rather more sanitised terms. In a statement, it said West is making “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again”.If you think you’ve heard this story before, it’s because you have. Rich conservatives are obsessed with creating safe spaces where they can never be criticised or contradicted; where nobody cares about facts and everyone cares about their feelings. Donald Trump launched Truth Social at the beginning of this year after he was banned by Twitter. Elon Musk said he was buying Twitter then said he wasn’t buying Twitter and now seems to be buying Twitter again. Trump-supporting Peter Thiel has put money into Rumble, a more rightwing version of YouTube.While it may look suspiciously like they’re too fragile to deal with other people’s opinions, conservatives always couch their obsession with building echo chambers in terms of “free speech”. George Farmer, the CEO of Parler’s parent company, for example, said he thinks West will “change the way the world thinks about free speech”. I don’t know about that. I do know, however, that the acquisition (which is for an undisclosed sum) is likely to change Farmer’s bank balance.Farmer, it’s important to note, happens to be married to Candace Owens, a rightwing pundit who once suggested the US military invade Australia in order to free its people “suffering under a totalitarian regime”. When she’s not dreaming about liberating Australia, Owens is busy palling around with West; the pair recently wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at Paris fashion week. Owens also defended West after he tweeted that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE … You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” This is obviously indefensible, but Owens did her best, saying on her podcast: “If you’re an honest person, when you read this tweet, you had no idea what the hell he was talking about … if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” (If I’m honest, I think it was.) The Farmer-Owens-West connection has led a number of people to suspect that the Parler acquisition was a brilliant manoeuvre on Owens’ part to get West to redistribute some of his wealth to her family. Candace was cashing in on Kanye, in other words.While West’s descent into extremism is disturbing, his acquisition of Parler (assuming it goes through) is not keeping me up at night. If Truth Social is anything to go by, I highly doubt that Parler is going to be influential anytime soon. What is keeping me up at night, however, is the rightward drift of more mainstream platforms such as CNN. What’s keeping me up at night is the rightward drift of politics. West is a very prominent symbol of a much bigger problem. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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      TopicsKanye WestOpinionParlerSocial mediaUS politicsDigital mediaPeter ThielcommentReuse this content More

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      Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs? | Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis

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      Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri MugianisMagic mushrooms are no magic cure for society’s ills, and a substance as powerful as psychedelics can be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands Psychedelic therapies are receiving unprecedented financial and political support – and much of it comes from the right. Peter Thiel has invested extensively in the emerging psychedelic therapeutic industry. Jordan Peterson is a psilocybin fan. In 2018, the Mercer Foundation donated $1m to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), the leading US psychedelics research organization, for studies of MDMA treatment of PTSD in veterans.The Mercer family also supports the American right wing and climate crisis denial. They’re a long way from Woodstock – but Maps and some other psychedelic advocates seem glad for any support they can get.Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake | Bernie SandersRead moreTo be sure, there are plenty of leftists and liberals who endorse the medical use of psychedelics. In July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a successful amendment to the new $768bn defense spending bill to support increased research into psychedelic treatment for veterans and active-duty service members. So did Dan Crenshaw, a navy veteran and Republican representative from Texas. Matt Gaetz, Republican from Florida and noted misogynist, offered a similar amendment.Psychedelics have long been associated with utopian experiments. Today, some researchers dream of finding a scientific basis for the hypothesis that psychedelics might help end intractable political conflict. Last year, Maps and Imperial College London organized a joint ayahuasca trip for Israelis and Palestinians. In 2018, Imperial College received much attention for a tiny study suggesting that one dose of psilocybin therapy reduced support for “authoritarian attitudes”. Could psychedelics be the cure for anti-democratic tendencies? Rick Doblin, founder of Maps, has even suggested that psychedelic use could help stop environmental degradation.Psychedelics can certainly increase openness – but this can be openness to Nazism, eco-fascism or UFO cults as well as to peace and love. Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher and fascist admired by both Hitler and Steve Bannon, was a staunch LSD advocate. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who recently made headlines for sending buses of migrants to New York, Washington and Chicago, signed a 2021 state bill to study the medical benefits of psychedelics. Steve Bannon supports legalized psychedelics, too.As professors Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot point out in their work rebutting the science on psychedelics as a kind of medicine for authoritarianism, psychedelics have never had a purely leftwing fanbase. Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, experimented extensively with psychedelics in his youth. The founder of 8chan, the now-defunct extremist message board that hosted the manifestos of several mass shooters, was inspired by a mushroom trip.Why is the American right so intrigued by these substances today? The most obvious answer is money. As psychedelics are absorbed into mainstream medicine, they promise to become another American cash cow. Money will come from patents on novel formulations and by patenting and providing the associated treatment techniques.There may be political factors at play, as well. Was the Mercer Foundation’s donation to Maps motivated by a desire to shore up American military resources by palliating the harms suffered by those sent to fight those wars? The military-industrial complex is even more lucrative than the pharmaceutical sector, but those weapons still require human beings to deploy them. Is rightwing psychedelic funding an attempt to ensure the continued viability of American wars around the world?And, if MDMA is so helpful in the treatment of PTSD, why are veterans given special priority in a society that has traumatized so many people? What about the trauma of racism, of poverty, of police violence and mass incarceration – problems actively increased by rightwing policies supported by people like the Mercers?Psychedelics have the potential to help people break out of repetitive, destructive thoughts, to help them discover new possibilities and new joy. But the effects of psychoactive drugs can never be detached from their setting.It’s foolish to imagine positive transformation achieved with the help of Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon or Greg Abbott. After all, these are the same people who vociferously oppose universal healthcare and deny climate change. With their support, we can expect psychedelic medicine for the elite, as a tool of state power or an engine of conspiracy theories, rather than a liberationist psychedelic movement. Until we have universal, single-payer healthcare, the benefits of psychedelic therapy will be out of reach for most Americans.And it’s naïve to expect psychedelics to change your mind for the better (in Michael Pollan’s formulation) when they’re a gift of the right wing, or when they’re offered within a framework of gross inequality. Look at Burning Man: this pseudo-utopia has become a playground of Silicon Valley’s ultra-rich. It leaves the desert strewn with thousands of abandoned bicycles and produces 12-hour traffic jams in the desert – which is hotter than ever thanks to our profligate burning of fossil fuels. With the wrong company, a journey of self-discovery can lead to even deeper solipsism. In fact, the illusion of transcendence can be used to justify greater selfishness, even cruelty.Psychedelic therapies – like all other forms of care – should be available to those who need them, not only to those with money and connections and political utility. In the psychedelic community there’s a lot of talk about “integration”, a processing of your trip. But this “integration” is too often limited to the individual. To be truly beneficial, psychedelics should be integrated into a social vision of equality and justice, one that opposes the sacrifice of human life and health at the altar of military spending and empire building, one that values every life regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender or class.Magic mushrooms are no magic cure for society’s ills, and a substance as powerful as psychedelics can be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Psychedelic advocates need to stop cozying up to the right and expand their mission to encompass a commitment to broader social justice.
      Ross Ellenhorn is a sociologist, psychotherapist and author and the founder and CEO of Ellenhorn. His new book, Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life, is out on 1 November. Dimitri Mugianis is a harm reductionist, activist, musician, poet, writer, and anarchist, with over two decades of experience as a psychedelic practitioner. Ellenhorn and Mugianis are the founders of Cardea
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionMedical researchPeter ThielSteve BannonGreg AbbottHealthcommentReuse this content More

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      Peter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracy

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      AnalysisPeter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracyAndrew Gumbel in Los AngelesRe-energized this election cycle, the tech entrepreneur joins other mega-donors apparently out to undercut the political system Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every levelRead moreHe’s not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.Thiel’s priorities this midterm cycle have partly aligned with those of Donald Trump, with whom he has had an on-again, off-again relationship since writing him a $1.25m check during the 2016 presidential campaign.Thiel, like Trump, has made it his business to end the careers of what he calls “the traitorous 10”, Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Four of these members opted not to run for re-election at all, and four more, including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating January 6, went down in the primaries.But there are also signs that Thiel is thinking around and beyond the former president. The lion’s share of his largesse – $28m and counting – has been directed towards two business proteges who, with his help, have established themselves as gadfly rightwing darlings: JD Vance, the best-selling author of the blue-collar memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who is running for Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a self-styled “anti-progressive” and anti-globalist who is running for Senate in Arizona.Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican party’s own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.Masters, who has campaigned on the notion that “psychopaths are running the country right now” and spoken approvingly of the anti-establishment philosophy of the 1990s Unabomber, and Vance, a frequent speaker on the university circuit during his book tour days who now says “universities are the enemy”, fit the same mould. They and Thiel all have ties to a branch of the New Right known as NatCon, whose adherents believe, broadly, that the establishment needs to be torn down, much as Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley disrupters believed two decades ago that the future lay in destroying longstanding business models and practices.Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed “little hope that voting will make things better”. While a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.Conservatives could soon be swiping right on Peter Thiel-backed dating appRead moreSuch proposals were too much even by Trump’s iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there.”Thiel did not respond to a request for an interview, and his representatives did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.Masters and Vance also did not respond to inquiries.Democracy under attack: the mega-donorsThiel sat out the 2020 election but appears to have been re-energized by the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s claims of a stolen presidential election and the January 6 insurrection. Addressing a NatCon convention this time last year, he denounced the “incredible derangement of various forms of thought, political life, scientific life and the sense-making machinery generally in this country”.Liberal democracy, in his view, had turned the United States government into a dissent-squashing Ministry of Truth working toward a “homogenizing, brain-dead, one-world state” – a problem to which only rightwing nationalism could provide an “all-important corrective”.“We’re close to a Toto moment, a little dog pulling aside the curtain on the holy of holies only to find there’s nobody there,” he told the crowd. “We always think of democracy as a good thing. But … where do you shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? When does it become a mob, a racket, a totalitarian lie?”Such views might be easy to write off as the eccentricities of a wealthy man but for the money that Thiel has spent buying influence and supporting like-minded candidates – thanks in large part to a campaign financing system that, while still capping contributions to individual campaigns, allows unlimited funding of nominally outside groups and political action committees.Campaign finance experts see Thiel as a symptom of a much broader problem: a political environment in which a small group of mega-donors are growing ever bolder in the size of the checks they write and the erosion of any nominal firewall between the war chests run by candidates and the funds controlled by outside groups dedicated to their success.America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert ReichRead more“It does seem to be getting worse,” said Chisun Lee, an expert on campaign finance who directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government program at New York University. “Outside spending in this federal midterm cycle is more than double the last midterm cycle. Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now we’re seeing a troubling new trend … that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.”Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.Many experts also believe the attack on democracy began long before it became as explicit as Thiel has made it, because the whole point of funneling large amounts of money into the political system is to sway policy away from the will of the majority to the narrow interests of the donors and their friends.This ability to control the policy agenda drives spending even more than the desire to see specific candidates win, says the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose 2011 book Republic, Lost offers an enduringly devastating analysis of the relationship between money and political influence. And the spending is likely only to increase.“You’re going to see much, much bigger individual contributions and an acceleration of contributions to Super Pacs [like the ones established to support Vance and Masters],” Lessig said. “The candidates and the Super Pacs can’t coordinate on spending, but that doesn’t mean they can’t coordinate on the fundraising. Since the Super Pacs are outspending candidates by orders of magnitude, it’s all a dance to flush money into Super Pacs … They basically call the shots, and politicians can’t get anything through that they oppose.”Less than a month from election day, both Vance and Masters are trailing their Democratic opponents in the polls (Vance by less than Masters). But, Lessig says, it would be wrong to conclude Thiel – or any of the other mega-donors – are wasting their money.“If you’re a candidate and you know $10m is going to come in against you on a particular issue,” he said, “you are going to bend to avoid the effect of that money, whether or not it’s going to decide the race … If you’re someone who would otherwise be a strong climate activist, but you know that if you mention a carbon tax, a million dollars will drop from some anti-carbon tax Super Pac, you won’t talk about it.”Thiel’s bid to overthrow the system, in other words, goes well beyond his ability to determine which party controls the Senate next year. The money will solidify the notion that the country is being run by psychopaths, at least among a hard core of Republican voters, analysts warn, and will further harden the ideological battle lines that have split the country in two and made common ground ever harder to find. It also brings the extreme opinions of NatCon further into the mainstream, making it easier for radical Republican candidates to run and win in future races, they say.“We are at a crisis point here, not so much because the ideas are hard to defeat but we don’t have a context in which to defeat them,” Lessig said. “The fact that the same number of people believe the election was stolen as believed it on 6 January is a profound indictment of the information ecology in America.”The Brennan Center believes there are ways of improving the system, at least at the state and local level, and points to efforts in both red and blue states to close certain loopholes and introduce public financing models to rein in the influence of the mega-donors. Lee said she would also like to see federal legislation to build a meaningful firewall between campaign funds and Super Pacs.“The legislation exists,” she said, “and it would be a constitutional improvement even under [the] Citizens United [ruling]. All we need is the political will to act.”TopicsPeter ThielUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsUS political financinganalysisReuse this content More