Last week, Reuters reported that Rockbridge Network, a Silicon Valley right-wing advocacy group co-founded by 2019 vice presidential candidate JD Vance, is working to influence the upcoming election. With a budget of about $75 million, the group plans to use right-wing media and voter turnout efforts to influence the election results. According to Reuters, its biggest backers include Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor who has been funding Vance's political career for years, and of course Vance's former boss (Vance worked at Thiel's venture capital firm after graduating from Yale).
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What does this have to do with the art world? More than you might think.
Just recently, it was reported that Thiel was trying to exert influence among the creative types in New York's downtown arts district. Remember those “Teal Bucks” that amoral creatives claimed they were happy to accept for their own reckless projects?
Remember Dimes Square?
A champion of the Republican Party’s emerging national conservatism movement and a man whose policies point to a potential future of extremism and authoritarianism, Vance, through Thiel, has undeniable ties to the tentacles of dark money that once (and perhaps still) lurk in New York City.
Thiel is one of the funders of the National Conservatism Conference (aka NatCon), and the shady billionaire has also chosen to perpetuate his own (and by extension Vance's) agenda by backing projects like 2021's semi-infamous New People's Cinema film festival, where the co-hosts of the Red Scare podcast held court and parties coinciding with the rise of neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin were commonplace.
More than a year ago, in March 2023, the New York Young Republican Club hosted a party at the now-closed Gigi's restaurant on Mulberry Street, headlined by Roger Stone and hosted by Red Scare's Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khatyan. NYYRC executive director Vishu Bra told Daily Beestat at the time that the event was meant to be a “horseshoe party” that blurred lines.
Dasha Nekrasova. Getty Images for IMDb
“Especially now that the Republicans are in power, at least at the congressional level, the populist left, or at least the left that's not going crazy, and the new right are finding places where they can work together,” Barra said.
Also, news broke last week that Yarvin had returned to Urbit as head of strategy. Urbit is a Coinbase-based non-profit that nominally aims to give data back to individual internet users and take back this control from the big platforms. In 2015, Yarvin was kicked out of Urbit, the company he founded, after he indicted himself and, by extension, Urbit through a “mind-boggling political pamphlet” he wrote under the real loser coded online web name of Mencius Moldbug, and caused trouble at a tech conference.
“Moldbug is a self-described 'neo-reactionary,' an avowed elitist and inegalitarian in the vein of one of his heroes, Thomas Carlyle,” Microsoft software engineer David Auerbach wrote in Slate magazine. “His worldview was that democracy sucks, that the strong should rule the weak, and that we needed an old-fashioned dictator to clean up this mess.”
In a sign of what many in the tech industry were thinking then, and still are, Auerbach wrote an article defending Jarvin.
Some Downtown key figures were vaguely aware of Vance as a memoirist even before he entered politics: Literary critic Christian Lorentzen was invited to the publication party for Vance's 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” by Raihan Salam, a former editor in chief of National Review who is now president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies, a conservative political think tank.
“I was a book reviewer for New York magazine at the time, and I saw the book and the launch party and I thought, 'Oh, I don't need to look into this right-wing creep. Who cares?'” Lorentzen said.
“It's like the so-called downtown right-wingers just keep talking until you have nothing left to say and then all of a sudden you convince yourself that you're a Republican or a Trump supporter or whatever,” Lorentzen continued. “Do they have any meaningful connection to J.D. Vance? I really don't think so. If he showed up at some f**king Clandestino, would they want to hang out with him? I don't think so.”
Similarly, critic Dean Kissick never seems to take the “Dime Square is a red pill” thesis seriously. In a November 2022 essay, Kissick wrote that “the real Square is not the reactionary hellmouth it is often portrayed to be,” and that he “doesn't believe Peter Thiel is funding downtown notables.”
But Kelly Weil, a journalist and author of Off the Edge, which examines flat-Earth conspiracy theorists, told me that the connection shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.
“Thiel is very committed to the idea of reaction,” says Weil, who has reported extensively on extremism. “He sees benefit in funding not only figures who are clearly on the New Right, but also in funding these radical arts figures who can promote the idea that feminism is embarrassing, that slander is radical and interesting, and that at least political apathy is interesting.”
“Thiel is funding an emerging far-right project while also funding the defection of people who would otherwise vote left,” Weil added.
Peter Thiel speaks at the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, May 8, 2024. Getty Images for Cambridge Union
Listening to Vance ramble on these days about “fighting the anti-child ideology” perpetuated in part by “sad, pathetic, lonely, average millennial journalists,” you could be forgiven for hearing echoes of many a loser wannabe thought leader who haunts dingy drinking establishments and dusty “Hegelian e-girl” poetry readings, clinging to the last vestiges of a fashionable, irrelevant nihilism.
“J.D. Vance is against fascist ideology,” Weil said. “He goes to these people's parties and he takes their money. The policies that he represents, while not overtly fascist, certainly satisfy these people and are consistent with their long-term goals. I think it's fair to say that he's promoting an extreme agenda.”
Two years after numerous op-eds proclaimed a “changing mood” at Dimes Square, another shift seems to be underway in the wake of voter enthusiasm for Kamala Harris' presidential bid. But while America's Dad and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz denigrated Vance with some well-chosen jokes, the celebratory mood at last week's Democratic National Convention was deflated by widespread criticism of the Biden-Harris administration's Gaza policy and the party's failure to endorse a Palestinian speaker at the convention. Harris and her running mate still have a lot to prove — everything.
One more thing about Vance: Besides being a fascist-leaning venture capitalist and a once-staunch critic of Trump who has since changed his tune and become a staunch anti-feminist bigot, Vance is a recent convert to Catholicism after a long period of professed atheism. He takes on many of the characteristics of the traditional Catholic e-girls who have mushroomed in bows and slip dresses in the downtown Manhattan art scene during the post-pandemic surge in highly cynical socializing.
In other words, Vance has taken on a girly image (derogatory), and the last thing we need as a nation is a girly confessional memoir of a rise to power. Hell, skim through this new Daily Mail exclusive on Vance and tell us he doesn't exude an edgy coquette.
A few weeks ago, on a campaign flight to Wisconsin and Michigan, Vance spoke to a British newspaper glowingly about the weight-loss regime he's adopted since becoming a senator (skipping breakfast), and even went so far as to deny the Ozempic allegations: “I'm not taking any drugs. Of course I'm eating a bit less, but I'm just eating better.”
The lyrics of “Mean Girls,” from Charli XCX's summer 2024 album Brat, feel fitting here, given that the song is rumored to have been inspired by the online persona of Red Scare presenter and alt-right e-girl Dasha Nekrasova. “You say she's anorexic, and I heard she likes it when people say that.” Meanwhile, in a new interview with New York magazine, Charli XCX insisted that her music isn't political, and that politics don't influence her art. The pop star was also evasive when asked if Nekrasova would be in her It-girl-studded music video for “360.” “Um… I didn't ask her. But um, shit.”
Vance also told the Mail that, like other college freshmen, he is currently reading Joan Didion's 1968 essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and said he sees parallels between the legendary journalist's critique of hippie culture and the problems facing liberals today.
“She writes essays that are basically criticising think tanks,” Vance told the Mail, “and there are these people who used to be important and now they just write rubbish articles. I'm like, 'Oh my goodness … everything old is new again.'”
In the words of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” icon Kim Richards, “Hey, maybe if you eat a piece of bread, you'll calm down a little bit?”
