Dave, you briefly link to FTR #757 in the above text but I think it’s so impor­tant that it should also be high­light­ed by a com­ment. Lis­ten­ers would do very well to review that pro­gram and the net­work behind Palan­tir.

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-757-the-adventures-of-eddie-the-friendly-spook-part-4-dramatis-personae-part-4-the-gruppenhobbit-and-the-underground-reich/

Your point on the prob­a­ble — but denied — link between all of the PRISM soft­ware in use around the world is excel­lent. The name Palan­tir was inspired by the mag­ic crys­tals in Tolkien’s LOTR tril­o­gy which were placed in dif­fer­ent king­doms but all linked togeth­er allow­ing their users to con­nect and share infor­ma­tion, know­ing­ly or not. That type of inspi­ra­tion leads me to believe the denials of the link are just pre­var­i­ca­tion.

With the sur­prise last minute move by Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Jeff Flake to delay the con­fir­ma­tion of Brett Kavanaugh by a week to give the FBI (not enough) time to inves­ti­ga­tion the wave of alle­ga­tions of past sex­u­al assaults and pos­si­ble gang rapes, Amer­i­can soci­ety is set to spend anoth­er week scru­ti­niz­ing the increas­ing­ly dis­turb­ing pro­file of Kavanaugh­’s char­ac­ter. So giv­en that we’re talk­ing about appoint­ing a man who appears to have embraced a world­view of machis­mo and the misog­y­nis­tic and dehu­man­iz­ing objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women to a life­time appoint­ment to one of the most pow­er­ful posi­tions in the US, it’s prob­a­bly a use­ful time to note that the casu­al cul­ture of rank misog­y­ny that Kavanaugh appears to have been immersed rep­re­sents a meta-prob­lem that has plagued human­i­ty for­ev­er: the dehu­man­iza­tion of ‘oth­ers’.

Whether those ‘oth­ers’ of mem­bers of anoth­er race, tribe, gen­der, or what­ev­er. There’s sim­ply no deny­ing that the dehu­man­iza­tion of ‘oth­ers’ is a trag­i­cal­ly ‘human’ thing to do, and there’s per­haps no bet­ter and old­er exam­ple of that facet of human­i­ty than misog­y­ny. And when you com­bine that human ten­den­cy towards dehu­man­iza­tion with an embrace of a preda­to­ry mind­set and hor­mones and apply it in the con­text of a misog­y­nis­tic cul­ture (which is vir­tu­al­ly every tra­di­tion­al cul­ture), you’re going to end up with a soci­ety inevitably pop­u­lat­ed with a lots of lit­tle Brett Kavanaughs. Guys who have adopt­ed a world­view where women are con­quests and lit­tle else.

Sure, such men might have some women in their lives that they don’t objec­ti­fy, but it’s unde­ni­able that the view of women as prop­er­ty, sex objects, and not much else is one of those meta-sto­ries across human his­to­ry. And that fun­da­men­tal dri­ve to dehu­man­ize and prey on ‘oth­ers’ isn’t just found at the core of misog­y­nis­tic world­views. All sorts of dif­fer­ent aspects of author­i­tar­i­an cul­tures rely on that same under­ly­ing human capac­i­ty to dehu­man­ize and prey on oth­ers. And Brett Kavanaugh just hap­pens to be a great exam­ple of high­light­ing this foun­da­tion of dehu­man­iz­ing pre­da­tion shared by every­thing from misog­y­nists to dic­ta­tors to theocrats and any oth­er pow­er mon­ger. And most espe­cial­ly fas­cists. If you had to give a name to an ide­ol­o­gy that essen­tial­ly embraces the spir­it of dehu­man­iz­ing pre­da­tion it’s facism.

When that desire by the pow­er­ful few to cap­ture soci­ety and put it under their thumb under the spir­it that the strong should dom­i­nate and sub­ju­gate the weak is man­i­fest­ed as a polit­i­cal move­ment, that’s invari­ably going to be a move­ment with heavy fas­cist over­tone. And one of those over­tones is a dri­ve to remove what­ev­er pro­tec­tions might exist to pre­vent the strong from prey on every­one else. Cre­at­ing a vir­tu­al ‘law of the jun­gle’ that empow­ers the strong to dom­i­nate the weak isn’t just an ends and a means when it comes to fas­cist thought. It’s also an under­ly­ing human impulse embraced by those who have adopt­ed a fun­da­men­tal­ly preda­to­ry mind­set. A preda­to­ry impulse that’s found in every­one from a ser­i­al rapist to a ser­i­al strong­man. Or an author­i­tar­i­an oli­garch intent on cap­tur­ing soci­ety.

And in the realm of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, it’s hard to come up with a group more emblem­at­ic of that move­ment by the pow­er­ful to shape soci­ety in ways that empow­er the pow­er­ful to dom­i­nate the weak and vul­ner­a­ble than a group like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, of which Brett Kavanaugh is a mem­ber. Because the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety just hap­pens to be the most influ­en­tial judi­cial orga­ni­za­tion in the US — the four cur­rent right-wing mem­bers of the Supreme Court are all Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety mem­bers — and the entire goal of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety is to reshape the US courts in a way that makes them friend­lier to the very wealthy, big busi­ness, and the author­i­tar­i­an reli­gious right. Oh, and it’s heav­i­ly financed by the Koch broth­ers. It’s that kind of orga­ni­za­tion.

So if the US Sen­ate is about to appoint a ser­i­al preda­tor to the Supreme Court, it’s prob­a­bly a good time to point out that mak­ing life eas­i­er for elite ser­i­al preda­tors — i.e. right-wing oli­garchs who want to cap­ture soci­ety — is the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety:

The New States­men

Who are the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety? Inside the right-wing group pick­ing Trump’s Supreme Court judges

How a group for lib­er­tar­i­an law stu­dents found­ed in 1982 has come to dom­i­nate the judi­cial nom­i­na­tion process.

By Sophie McBain
7 Sep­tem­ber 2018

When Brett Kavanaugh is con­firmed as Supreme Court Jus­tice, as he almost cer­tain­ly will be, it will mean that five of the nine Supreme Court jus­tices are mem­bers of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, a net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an lawyers that has become one of the most pow­er­ful groups in Amer­i­ca today.

The most endur­ing lega­cy of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion may be its remak­ing of the courts: in addi­tion to two Supreme Court appointees (Trump’s oth­er pick, the con­ser­v­a­tive Neil Gor­such was appoint­ed last Jan­u­ary), Trump inher­it­ed 107 oth­er judi­cial vacan­cies. Accord­ing to New York Times fig­ures, Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan inher­it­ed 35 unfilled judge­ships and Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma had 54.

Trump has effec­tive­ly out­sourced the task of fill­ing these seats to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, and in par­tic­u­lar to its exec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent, an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive, devout Catholic named Leonard Leo, who has helped trans­form the lawyers net­work into, as the New York­er describes it, a “con­ser­v­a­tive pipeline to the Supreme Court”.

So how did the Soci­ety, which began as a stu­dents’ group, become so pow­er­ful – and what does it stand for?

The Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety was start­ed in 1982 by con­ser­v­a­tive law stu­dents at Yale and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go who want­ed to cre­ate a coun­ter­bal­ance to what they saw as the lib­er­al ortho­doxy of law fac­ul­ties around the coun­try. Its first fac­ul­ty advis­ers were Robert H. Bork at Yale (who was a Rea­gan nom­i­nee to the Supreme Court but who was reject­ed by the Sen­ate) and Antonin Scalia (who served on the Supreme Court from 1986–2016, hav­ing been appoint­ed by Rea­gan).

The organ­i­sa­tion rapid­ly spread to cam­pus­es across the coun­try, spurred by fund­ing from wealthy con­ser­v­a­tive donors such as the Koch broth­ers, and lat­er sprung pro­fes­sion­al chap­ters too. Today the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has 70,000 mem­bers and a pres­ence on almost every uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus and in every major city. It organ­is­es reg­u­lar talks and events for law stu­dents and prac­tic­ing lawyers, which pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty for con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers to net­work and build rep­u­ta­tions.

That the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has such an active stu­dent and pro­fes­sion­al body makes it dif­fer­ent from many oth­er inter­est groups, which tend to be dom­i­nat­ed by Wash­ing­ton staff, says Steven Teles, the author of Rise of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Legal Move­ment: The Bat­tle for Con­trol of the Law. It means that Leo has a very “dense intel­li­gence net­work”, Teles told me when we spoke on the phone.

As well as build­ing links between con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers, the Fed­er­al­ist Society’s talks and events have pro­vid­ed a way for it to spread and devel­op its ideas and approach to judi­cial phi­los­o­phy. The Soci­ety grew up with its first stu­dent mem­bers, as they began tak­ing up senior jobs in gov­ern­ment and the judi­cia­ry, pro­vid­ing the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety with a net­work of like-mind­ed lawyers that extends right up to the Supreme Court and the Pres­i­dent (the White House lawyer Don McGahn is a mem­ber of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety) and across cam­pus­es, com­pa­nies and local courts around the coun­try.

As well as being well-organ­ised and well-fund­ed, the Fed­er­al­ist Society’s ide­o­log­i­cal puri­ty makes it a for­mi­da­ble polit­i­cal force, Teles argues. Its mem­bers are unit­ed by their judi­cial phi­los­o­phy rather than any par­ti­san affil­i­a­tion to the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

On its web­site it describes these prin­ci­ples as “that the state exists to pre­serve free­dom, that the sep­a­ra­tion of gov­ern­men­tal pow­ers is cen­tral to our Con­sti­tu­tion, and that it is emphat­i­cal­ly the province and duty of the judi­cia­ry to say what the law is, not what it should be”, which entails “reorder­ing pri­or­i­ties with­in the legal sys­tem to place a pre­mi­um on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty, tra­di­tion­al val­ues, and the rule of law”.

As this abstract word­ing sug­gests, the range of opin­ions held by mem­bers of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety is quite broad though they share a sim­i­lar approach to the law. The main ten­sion with­in the group is between those who believe their pri­ma­ry func­tion should be con­strain­ing the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry and those who believe their role is to empow­er the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry to enforce what they see as America’s found­ing prin­ci­ples, Teles says.

“In gen­er­al they pro­mote these kinds of ideas: they are in favour of small gov­ern­ment as opposed to big gov­ern­ment, they oppose most gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of busi­ness and prop­er­ty, their core val­ue is pri­vate prop­er­ty and the abil­i­ty of a pri­vate prop­er­ty own­er to do what he or she wants with their pri­vate prop­er­ty, they are strong believ­ers in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism and believe the US has a spe­cial role to play in the world and that peo­ple in the US are some­how a spe­cial kind of peo­ple, they would rather have things done by the state than fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and they are strong on reli­gious free­dom but reli­gious free­dom of a some­times extreme nature – argu­ing, for exam­ple, that reli­gion is an excuse for not com­ply­ing with anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion laws,” says Michael Avery, the co-author with Danielle McLaugh­lin of the book, The Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety: How Con­ser­v­a­tives Took the Law Back from Lib­er­als.

The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s influ­ence rose with the pres­i­den­cy of George W Bush – all the fed­er­al judges that were appoint­ed by Bush were either mem­bers of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety or were approved by the group – but it has nev­er been more pow­er­ful than it is today. Not only does the large num­ber of judi­cial vacan­cies present them with an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty to remake the courts, but Trump has also giv­en Leo more pow­er than any pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent over judi­cial nom­i­na­tions.

At the Trump administration’s request, Leo drew up a list of 25 poten­tial Supreme Court nom­i­nees for the president’s con­sid­er­a­tion, which includ­ed Kavanaugh. At the same time, the influ­ence exert­ed by the Sen­ate on the nom­i­na­tion process has decreased.

“It used to be that Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors played a much more impor­tant role in judi­cial selec­tion than they do now, so ordi­nary par­ty patron­age mech­a­nisms used to be more impor­tant. But I think this ide­o­log­i­cal net­work that we asso­ci­at­ed with the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has clawed away more and more pow­er from that sen­a­to­r­i­al role over time,” says Teles. “And it’s clear­ly the case that Trump… has been will­ing to com­plete­ly sub­con­tract this over to these con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial net­works.”

...

One of the most effec­tive checks on Trump has been the US courts, who have chal­lenged some of the administration’s most egre­gious poli­cies, from the Mus­lim ban, to child sep­a­ra­tions, the rescind­ment of DACA and envi­ron­men­tal dereg­u­la­tion. In addi­tion to the threat to women’s repro­duc­tive rights and LGBT rights, a judi­cial sys­tem dom­i­nat­ed by right-wing lib­er­tar­i­ans might have respond­ed very dif­fer­ent­ly to Trump’s exec­u­tive orders.

“It’s impor­tant for all Amer­i­cans to under­stand that the extreme right wing, the extreme con­ser­v­a­tives, are much bet­ter organ­ised, much bet­ter financed, and have a much bet­ter idea of what they’re about than the lib­er­als or pro­gres­sives do. The lib­er­als or pro­gres­sives need to wake up and take a look at what’s hap­pen­ing at the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum and fig­ure out a way to get their own house in order, because lib­er­als and pro­gres­sives have been los­ing ground now for the last almost 40 years, and even to this day they have not come with either an effec­tive set of ideas or an effec­tive organ­is­ing prin­ci­ple that allows them to make this a fair con­test,” Avery tells me.

In the absence of an effec­tive lib­er­al alter­na­tive to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the best hope for lib­er­als is that they will win back con­trol of Con­gress at the Midterms, he says. “If the left-wing and pro­gres­sives can’t cap­ture the leg­isla­tive branch and turn the pop­u­lar will into their way of think­ing, we’re in for a rough ride for the next sev­er­al years if not decades.”

———–

“Who are the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety? Inside the right-wing group pick­ing Trump’s Supreme Court judges” by Sophie McBain; The New States­men; 09/07/2018

““It’s impor­tant for all Amer­i­cans to under­stand that the extreme right wing, the extreme con­ser­v­a­tives, are much bet­ter organ­ised, much bet­ter financed, and have a much bet­ter idea of what they’re about than the lib­er­als or pro­gres­sives do. The lib­er­als or pro­gres­sives need to wake up and take a look at what’s hap­pen­ing at the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum and fig­ure out a way to get their own house in order, because lib­er­als and pro­gres­sives have been los­ing ground now for the last almost 40 years, and even to this day they have not come with either an effec­tive set of ideas or an effec­tive organ­is­ing prin­ci­ple that allows them to make this a fair con­test,” Avery tells me.”

The lib­er­als or pro­gres­sives need to wake up and take a look at what’s hap­pen­ing at the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum. It’s a chill­ing an apt warn­ing. And in the con­text of these alle­ga­tions of Kavanaugh oper­at­ing in a world where women were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly preyed upon, it’s a warn­ing that’s become espe­cial­ly chill­ing and apt. Because, again, that under­ly­ing capac­i­ty to dehu­man­ize and prey upon the vul­ner­a­ble isn’t just a the core of misog­y­ny. It’s also at the core of all sorts of oth­er human behav­iors that involve the sys­tem­at­ic abuse of pow­er. And when we look at what the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety fights for, and who it’s fight­ing for, it’s hard to avoid the con­clu­sion that it’s a soci­ety ded­i­cate to mak­ing it eas­i­er for the pow­er­ful to wield their pow­er:

...
On its web­site it describes these prin­ci­ples as “that the state exists to pre­serve free­dom, that the sep­a­ra­tion of gov­ern­men­tal pow­ers is cen­tral to our Con­sti­tu­tion, and that it is emphat­i­cal­ly the province and duty of the judi­cia­ry to say what the law is, not what it should be”, which entails “reorder­ing pri­or­i­ties with­in the legal sys­tem to place a pre­mi­um on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty, tra­di­tion­al val­ues, and the rule of law”.

...

“In gen­er­al they pro­mote these kinds of ideas: they are in favour of small gov­ern­ment as opposed to big gov­ern­ment, they oppose most gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of busi­ness and prop­er­ty, their core val­ue is pri­vate prop­er­ty and the abil­i­ty of a pri­vate prop­er­ty own­er to do what he or she wants with their pri­vate prop­er­ty, they are strong believ­ers in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism and believe the US has a spe­cial role to play in the world and that peo­ple in the US are some­how a spe­cial kind of peo­ple, they would rather have things done by the state than fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and they are strong on reli­gious free­dom but reli­gious free­dom of a some­times extreme nature – argu­ing, for exam­ple, that reli­gion is an excuse for not com­ply­ing with anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion laws,” says Michael Avery, the co-author with Danielle McLaugh­lin of the book, The Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety: How Con­ser­v­a­tives Took the Law Back from Lib­er­als.
...

Yep, the pow­er­ful judi­cial orga­ni­za­tion in the US has, at it’s core cre­do, the idea that busi­ness and prop­er­ty own­ers should be able to do what­ev­er they want with­out inter­fer­ence. And while that is no doubt por­trayed as “stop­ping the oppres­sive gov­ern­ment from tram­pling on the help­less pri­vate cit­i­zen”, it’s unde­ni­able that the groups is fight­ing for the rights of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the coun­try to act with impuni­ty. In addi­tion, the reli­gious right should get the pow­er to use reli­gion as an excuse to dis­crim­i­nate, extend­ing that capac­i­ty to abuse pow­er to aver­age cit­i­zens to be wield­ed against their fel­low cit­i­zens. It’s tru­ly a ‘wolf in sheep­’s cloth­ing’ move­ment. A move­ment ded­i­cat­ed to pow­er for pow­er’s sake under the guise of judi­cial phi­los­o­phy. A phi­los­o­phy torn between the goal of lim­it­ing the abil­i­ty of the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry to act on the pub­lic’s behalf and the goal of enabling that same judi­cia­ry to enforce a tra­di­tion­al­ist right-wing reli­gious world­view:

...
As this abstract word­ing sug­gests, the range of opin­ions held by mem­bers of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety is quite broad though they share a sim­i­lar approach to the law. The main ten­sion with­in the group is between those who believe their pri­ma­ry func­tion should be con­strain­ing the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry and those who believe their role is to empow­er the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry to enforce what they see as America’s found­ing prin­ci­ples, Teles says.

...

One of the most effec­tive checks on Trump has been the US courts, who have chal­lenged some of the administration’s most egre­gious poli­cies, from the Mus­lim ban, to child sep­a­ra­tions, the rescind­ment of DACA and envi­ron­men­tal dereg­u­la­tion. In addi­tion to the threat to women’s repro­duc­tive rights and LGBT rights, a judi­cial sys­tem dom­i­nat­ed by right-wing lib­er­tar­i­ans might have respond­ed very dif­fer­ent­ly to Trump’s exec­u­tive orders.
...

And this orga­ni­za­tion run by and for the pow­er­ful is now more pow­er­ful than it’s ever been before and the most influ­en­tial judi­cial orga­ni­za­tion in the coun­try. And yet it was only start­ed in 1982. It shows just how pow­er­ful the pow­er­ful are in the US: with enough financ­ing from wealth donors like the Kochs, this group that was start­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive law stu­dents at Yale (where Kavanaugh went) and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go man­aged to basi­cal­ly take over the US judi­cial sys­tem in a few decades:

...
The Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety was start­ed in 1982 by con­ser­v­a­tive law stu­dents at Yale and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go who want­ed to cre­ate a coun­ter­bal­ance to what they saw as the lib­er­al ortho­doxy of law fac­ul­ties around the coun­try. Its first fac­ul­ty advis­ers were Robert H. Bork at Yale (who was a Rea­gan nom­i­nee to the Supreme Court but who was reject­ed by the Sen­ate) and Antonin Scalia (who served on the Supreme Court from 1986–2016, hav­ing been appoint­ed by Rea­gan).

The organ­i­sa­tion rapid­ly spread to cam­pus­es across the coun­try, spurred by fund­ing from wealthy con­ser­v­a­tive donors such as the Koch broth­ers, and lat­er sprung pro­fes­sion­al chap­ters too. Today the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has 70,000 mem­bers and a pres­ence on almost every uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus and in every major city. It organ­is­es reg­u­lar talks and events for law stu­dents and prac­tic­ing lawyers, which pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty for con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers to net­work and build rep­u­ta­tions.

...

The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s influ­ence rose with the pres­i­den­cy of George W Bush – all the fed­er­al judges that were appoint­ed by Bush were either mem­bers of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety or were approved by the group – but it has nev­er been more pow­er­ful than it is today. Not only does the large num­ber of judi­cial vacan­cies present them with an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty to remake the courts, but Trump has also giv­en Leo more pow­er than any pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent over judi­cial nom­i­na­tions.

At the Trump administration’s request, Leo drew up a list of 25 poten­tial Supreme Court nom­i­nees for the president’s con­sid­er­a­tion, which includ­ed Kavanaugh. At the same time, the influ­ence exert­ed by the Sen­ate on the nom­i­na­tion process has decreased.

“It used to be that Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors played a much more impor­tant role in judi­cial selec­tion than they do now, so ordi­nary par­ty patron­age mech­a­nisms used to be more impor­tant. But I think this ide­o­log­i­cal net­work that we asso­ci­at­ed with the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has clawed away more and more pow­er from that sen­a­to­r­i­al role over time,” says Teles. “And it’s clear­ly the case that Trump… has been will­ing to com­plete­ly sub­con­tract this over to these con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial net­works.”
...

And that takeover of the US courts by an orga­ni­za­tion run by and for the pow­er­ful to make them­selves even more pow­er­ful is one of the meta-sto­ries that isn’t just tan­gen­tial­ly con­nect­ed to the sto­ry of Brett Kavanaugh­’s appar­ent his­to­ry of sex­u­al assault and misog­y­ny. It’s deeply con­nect­ed. To some extent it’s dif­fer­ent facets of the same under­ly­ing sto­ry of that all too human capac­i­ty to prey on those you don’t see ful­ly human. And that sto­ry, in today’s con­text, is the sto­ry of the rise of ascen­dan­cy of fas­cism and the far right across the globe. Brett Kavanaugh­’s nom­i­na­tion is just one par­tic­u­lar­ly sor­did chap­ter in that larg­er under­ly­ing sto­ry.

It’s also worth not­ing that act of dehu­man­iz­ing and prey­ing on oth­ers rep­re­sents does­n’t just rep­re­sent an all too human capac­i­ty. And also rep­re­sents an all too human inca­pac­i­ty, in the sense of that the dehu­man­iza­tion of oth­ers tends to be a pro­found­ly stu­pid act in addi­tion to being evil. Because evil and pro­found stu­pid­i­ty are deeply inter­twined phe­nom­e­na. And if you’re the kind of guy that, hor­mones or not, does­n’t feel awful about abus­ing women you prob­a­bly lack a cog­ni­tive capac­i­ty to do so and that’s a real form of stu­pid­i­ty. Espe­cial­ly when alco­hol is involved. If you can’t see peo­ple of the oppo­site sex or dif­fer­ent tribes, reli­gions, social class­es, or what­ev­er as ful­ly human, you aren’t just evil. You are pro­found­ly stu­pid too, at least in that key area of cog­ni­tion and that’s inevitably going to affect all sorts of oth­er areas of cog­ni­tion. The ‘ol ‘stu­pid or evil’ ques­tion is real­ly a trick ques­tion. Because while you can have stu­pid­i­ty with­out evil, you can’t real­ly have evil with­out some sort of pro­found stu­pid­i­ty. So that’s anoth­er aspect of this sto­ry. It’s a stu­pid sto­ry about the Supreme Court. Or rather, a very impor­tant sto­ry about pro­found stu­pid­i­ty and the Supreme Court and the pow­er dynam­ics of soci­ety in gen­er­al and the dan­gers of putting some­one on that court who appears to have embraced a world­view where the pow­er­ful should be able to act with impuni­ty. This is prob­a­bly a good week for the US to explore all of that and hope­ful­ly learn about the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety in the process.

With the nom­i­na­tion of Brett Kavanaugh cur­rent­ly await­ing the results of an FBI inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing a wave of sex­u­al assault alle­ga­tions, one of the big ques­tions at this point is why is the GOP stick­ing with this guy, and risk­ing alien­at­ing even more women from the GOP, when they could just as eas­i­ly ask him to with­draw and choose a dif­fer­ent can­di­date? And while attempts to answer that ques­tion usu­al­ly revolve around the obser­va­tion that Kavanaugh­’s views the a sit­ting pres­i­dent can’t be indict­ed are going to be high­ly prized by some­one like Pres­i­dent Trump.

But as the fol­low­ing pair of arti­cles point out, there’s anoth­er area of sig­nif­i­cant sup­port for Kavanaugh with­in the GOP estab­lish­ment: He is real­ly close to the Bush fam­i­ly. Brett served as the Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent and Staff Sec­re­tary for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush from 2003–2006. He also worked in George H. W. Bush’s solic­i­tor gen­er­al’s office. And, of course, he was the prin­ci­pal author of the Starr Report.

And his wife Ash­ley Kavanaugh is also quite close to the Bush­es. She was the assis­tant to George W. Bush when he was gov­er­nor of Texas from 1996 to 1999. She worked on the Bush-Cheney cam­paign in 2000. From 2001 to 2005 she was George W. Bush’s per­son­al sec­re­tary. From 2005–2009 she was the Direc­tor of Spe­cial Projects for the George W. Bush pres­i­den­tial Foun­da­tion. And from 2009–2010 she was the media rela­tions coor­di­na­tor for the George w. Bush Pres­i­den­tial Cen­ter.

So if it seems amaz­ing that the GOP estab­lish­ment appears to be will­ing to stick with Kavanaugh and risk solid­i­fy­ing the GOP’s Trumpian brand as a haven for sex­u­al assaulters, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that the Bush-fac­tion of the GOP is prob­a­bly par­tic­u­lar­ly keen on see­ing Kavanaugh get that seat:

Heavy.com

Brett Kavanaugh & George W. Bush: What are the Ties?

By Jes­si­ca McBride

Updat­ed Jul 10, 2018 at 10:35am

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Supreme Court nom­i­nee to replace Antho­ny Kennedy, has long­stand­ing ties to for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, as does his wife, Ash­ley Estes Kavanaugh.

Both Brett and Ash­ley Kavanaugh served in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and Bush nom­i­nat­ed Brett M. Kavanaugh to the posi­tion he cur­rent­ly holds on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Wash­ing­ton D.C. Trump revealed Kavanaugh as his pick for Supreme Court on July 9, 2018. Kavanaugh was one of four rumored final­ists, with Judges Amy Coney Bar­rett, Thomas Hardi­man, and Ray­mond Keth­ledge also among them. Because Trump and the Bush fam­i­ly have a pub­li­cized feud, some peo­ple thought Brett Kavanaugh’s Bush ties could hurt his chances with the pres­i­dent. How­ev­er, that didn’t stop the pres­i­dent from pick­ing him in the end, even though some con­ser­v­a­tive infight­ingbroke out over the pick, with “whis­per cam­paigns” call­ing Brett Kavanaugh the “low-ener­gy Jeb Bush pick,” accord­ing to Nation­al Review..

Bush praised the selec­tion.

JUST IN: For­mer Pres. George W. Bush “Pres­i­dent Trump has made an out­stand­ing deci­sion in nom­i­nat­ing Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the; Supreme Court...He will make a superb Jus­tice of the Supreme Court of the Unit­ed States.” https://t.co/K7XhW1iSMb pic.twitter.com/T9brBFNQ1U— Evan McMur­ry (@evanmcmurry) July 10, 2018

Here’s what you need to know about Brett Kavanaugh’s Bush ties:

Brett Kavanaugh Served as the Staff Sec­re­tary to George W. Bush

Brett Kavanaugh is a judge serv­ing on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Cir­cuit Court. He is a grad­u­ate of Yale Law School who also spent time in pri­vate prac­tice.

A bio for Brett Kavanaugh also sketch­es out his Bush ties, say­ing, “From July 2003 until his appoint­ment to the court in 2006, he was Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent and Staff Sec­re­tary to Pres­i­dent Bush.”

Kavanaugh, the for­mer staff sec­re­tary to George W. Bush, also played a role in draft­ing the Ken Starr report into the impeach­ment of for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. When Kavanaugh was sworn in as a fed­er­al judge, Bush said, “for the past five years, he has served in the White House as Asso­ciate Coun­sel, a senior Asso­ciate Coun­sel, and as Staff Sec­re­tary.”

At the same event, Kavanaugh told Bush he had the “great­est respect” for him. “I also appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to have served under the Vice Pres­i­dent and under Chiefs of Staff Andy Card and Josh Bolten. The White House staff are ded­i­cat­ed pub­lic ser­vants who have been good col­leagues and good friends, and I’ll miss work­ing with all of you very much,” Kavanaugh said at his swear­ing-in hear­ing.

He has held oth­er gov­ern­ment jobs, and served in George H.W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion too in the solic­i­tor general’s office. “Kavanaugh was a pro­tegé of Ken­neth Starr,” reports Vox. “He was a prin­ci­pal author of the Starr Report.”

The Dai­ly Caller, a con­ser­v­a­tive web­site, report­ed on the snip­ing against Brett Kavanaugh, quot­ing one anony­mous source as say­ing, “Kavanaugh is Jeb Bush’s pick for the Supreme Court. This is the low-ener­gy Jeb Bush pick. No one in the base will be ani­mat­ed by [Kavanaugh] — espe­cial­ly Trump sup­port­ers who reject­ed the Bush lega­cy.”

George W. Bush Called Brett Kavanaugh a ‘Good Man’ & Joked That He Arranged His Mar­riage

Bush nom­i­nat­ed Brett Kavanaugh to the Court of Appeals, and he spoke at the swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny in 2006. Accord­ing to a sto­ry post­ed by the White House, Bush praised Brett Kavanaugh, say­ing, “the sec­ond-high­est in our land gains a bril­liant and tal­ent­ed new mem­ber. The staff of the White House cel­e­brates a friend they admire and a col­league they will miss. I con­grat­u­late a good man and a fine pub­lic ser­vant on a job well done.” Bush then quipped, “I’m espe­cial­ly pleased to be with Brett’s wife, Ash­ley, whose face I know well and whose mar­riage was the first life­time appoint­ment I arranged for Brett.”

The for­mer pres­i­dent added, “I chose Brett because of the force of his mind, his breadth of expe­ri­ence, and the strength of his char­ac­ter.”

Bush also men­tioned Kavanaugh’s then new daugh­ter. “Wel­come the star of Brett’s most recent tele­vised hear­ing, Mar­garet Mur­phy Kavanaugh,” Bush said to laugh­ter from the crowd. “Mar­garet has his mother’s — has her mother’s good looks, and her dad’s pref­er­ence for hear­ings that do not last too long.”

At the same hear­ing, Brett Kavanaugh called Mar­garet, his only child at the time, a “dai­ly inspi­ra­tion.”

“Ash­ley and our lit­tle girl Mar­garet are a dai­ly inspi­ra­tion. Ash­ley, as the Pres­i­dent not­ed, is from Abi­lene, Texas. For those of you who don’t know much about Texas geog­ra­phy, it’s about halfway between Dal­las and Mid­land,” he said. “Ashley’s par­ents are here, and I thank them for com­ing. Ash­ley likes to remind me that true love, true love is a Texas girl who is will­ing to mar­ry a guy with a life­time appoint­ment in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.”

Accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er, “In 2004, Kavanaugh mar­ried pres­i­den­tial assis­tant Ash­ley Estes, who gave birth to their daugh­ter, Mar­garet, 13 months lat­er. The fam­i­ly lives in Chevy Chase, direct­ly across the street from White House Coun­sel Dan Bartlett.”

...

Kavanaugh’s Wife Has Deep Ties to the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion

Ash­ley Estes Kavanaugh, the spouse of Brett Kavanaugh, has deep ties to the admin­is­tra­tion of George W. Bush as well. Her links to Bush go back to his days as Texas gov­er­nor.

Accord­ing to her LinkedIn page, Ash­ley Estes Kavanaugh worked as media rela­tions coor­di­na­tor for the George W. Bush Pres­i­den­tial Cen­ter from 2009–2010; worked as Direc­tor of Spe­cial Projects for the George W. Bush pres­i­den­tial Foun­da­tion from 2005 to 2009; was Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s per­son­al sec­re­tary from 2001 to 2005; was an assis­tant in the White House from 2001 to 2005; and worked on the Bush-Cheney 2000 cam­paign from 1996 to 2000.

Her time with Bush dates to his work in Texas as gov­er­nor there. She was assis­tant to Gov­er­nor George W. Bush from 1996 to 1999. She attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin from 1994 to 1997.

Her LinkedIn page says she is Town Man­ag­er, Sec­tion 5 of the Vil­lage of Chevy Chase, Mary­land. A newslet­ter for the town reports, “She has lived in Sec­tion 5 on Under­wood Street for the last ten years along with her hus­band, Brett, and their two daugh­ters, Mar­garet and Liza.”

———

“Brett Kavanaugh & George W. Bush: What are the Ties?” by Jes­si­ca McBride; Heavy.com; 07/10/2018

“Both Brett and Ash­ley Kavanaugh served in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and Bush nom­i­nat­ed Brett M. Kavanaugh to the posi­tion he cur­rent­ly holds on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Wash­ing­ton D.C. Trump revealed Kavanaugh as his pick for Supreme Court on July 9, 2018. Kavanaugh was one of four rumored final­ists, with Judges Amy Coney Bar­rett, Thomas Hardi­man, and Ray­mond Keth­ledge also among them. Because Trump and the Bush fam­i­ly have a pub­li­cized feud, some peo­ple thought Brett Kavanaugh’s Bush ties could hurt his chances with the pres­i­dent. How­ev­er, that didn’t stop the pres­i­dent from pick­ing him in the end, even though some con­ser­v­a­tive infight­ingbroke out over the pick, with “whis­per cam­paigns” call­ing Brett Kavanaugh the “low-ener­gy Jeb Bush pick,” accord­ing to Nation­al Review..”

Both Brett and his wife Ash­ley go way back with the Bush­es. It’s a key fea­ture of Kavanaugh­’s resume. And not a good fea­ture giv­en the polit­i­cal nature of the Bush clan, but a rel­e­vant one:

...
Brett Kavanaugh Served as the Staff Sec­re­tary to George W. Bush

Brett Kavanaugh is a judge serv­ing on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Cir­cuit Court. He is a grad­u­ate of Yale Law School who also spent time in pri­vate prac­tice.

A bio for Brett Kavanaugh also sketch­es out his Bush ties, say­ing, “From July 2003 until his appoint­ment to the court in 2006, he was Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent and Staff Sec­re­tary to Pres­i­dent Bush.”

Kavanaugh, the for­mer staff sec­re­tary to George W. Bush, also played a role in draft­ing the Ken Starr report into the impeach­ment of for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. When Kavanaugh was sworn in as a fed­er­al judge, Bush said, “for the past five years, he has served in the White House as Asso­ciate Coun­sel, a senior Asso­ciate Coun­sel, and as Staff Sec­re­tary.”

At the same event, Kavanaugh told Bush he had the “great­est respect” for him. “I also appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to have served under the Vice Pres­i­dent and under Chiefs of Staff Andy Card and Josh Bolten. The White House staff are ded­i­cat­ed pub­lic ser­vants who have been good col­leagues and good friends, and I’ll miss work­ing with all of you very much,” Kavanaugh said at his swear­ing-in hear­ing.

He has held oth­er gov­ern­ment jobs, and served in George H.W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion too in the solic­i­tor general’s office. “Kavanaugh was a pro­tegé of Ken­neth Starr,” reports Vox. “He was a prin­ci­pal author of the Starr Report.”
...

And Ash­ley Kavanaugh arguably has just as close ties to the Bush­es as her hus­band:

...
Kavanaugh’s Wife Has Deep Ties to the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion

Ash­ley Estes Kavanaugh, the spouse of Brett Kavanaugh, has deep ties to the admin­is­tra­tion of George W. Bush as well. Her links to Bush go back to his days as Texas gov­er­nor.

Accord­ing to her LinkedIn page, Ash­ley Estes Kavanaugh worked as media rela­tions coor­di­na­tor for the George W. Bush Pres­i­den­tial Cen­ter from 2009–2010; worked as Direc­tor of Spe­cial Projects for the George W. Bush pres­i­den­tial Foun­da­tion from 2005 to 2009; was Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s per­son­al sec­re­tary from 2001 to 2005; was an assis­tant in the White House from 2001 to 2005; and worked on the Bush-Cheney 2000 cam­paign from 1996 to 2000.

Her time with Bush dates to his work in Texas as gov­er­nor there. She was assis­tant to Gov­er­nor George W. Bush from 1996 to 1999. She attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin from 1994 to 1997.
...

But this all does­n’t quite cap­ture just how influ­en­tial a role Kavanaugh played in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion. For that, we’ll take a look at the fol­low­ing arti­cle, which cov­ers how Kavanaugh was basi­cal­ly George W. Bush’s “intel­lec­tu­al body man” and mil­lions of doc­u­ments relat­ed to his work for Bush are being with­held dur­ing this nom­i­na­tion process:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Brett Kavanaugh: Bush’s intel­lec­tu­al body man

By Robert O’Har­row Jr.
August 24, 2018

It was the apogee of Brett Kavanaugh’s rise through the ranks of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, a job that put him in dai­ly prox­im­i­ty to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and made him an intel­lec­tu­al “umpire” for a wel­ter of polit­i­cal and pol­i­cy aides who were aim­ing to shape the Repub­li­can agen­da.

Kavanaugh, now Pres­i­dent Trump’s nom­i­nee to the Supreme Court, had an ordi­nary-sound­ing title: staff sec­re­tary. But he wield­ed extra­or­di­nary influ­ence as the advis­er respon­si­ble for screen­ing, review­ing and edit­ing doc­u­ments deliv­ered to Bush, inter­views and doc­u­ments show.

“Ulti­mate­ly, the umpire was Brett,” said Karl Rove, a Bush advis­er and one of the peo­ple Kavanaugh worked with close­ly as staff sec­re­tary.

Many Supreme Court jus­tices over the decades have held strong polit­i­cal views or been active in lib­er­al or con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es. Jus­tice Ele­na Kagan, a law pro­fes­sor, served as an asso­ciate coun­sel and advis­er in the Clin­ton White House. For­mer Jus­tice Abe For­t­as pri­vate­ly advised Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B. John­son on polit­i­cal mat­ters. William Rehn­quist was ­active in the Repub­li­can Par­ty in Ari­zona before he became a ­jus­tice.

But no jus­tice in recent mem­o­ry has worked as intent­ly as Kavanaugh at the high­est lev­els of the nation’s polit­i­cal machin­ery, schol­ars said. His time as staff sec­re­tary, from 2003 to 2006, was the cul­mi­na­tion of a polit­i­cal and legal appren­tice­ship that last­ed more than a decade, enabling him to demon­strate his zeal for con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples and putting him on a path to the Supreme Court.

Doc­u­ments and inter­views show that while Kavanaugh was not a pol­i­cy­mak­er, he was direct­ly involved in help­ing the White House man­age a wide array of sen­si­tive mat­ters, includ­ing the war on ter­ror­ism, the treat­ment of ene­my com­bat­ants and war­rant­less wire­tap­ping.

“It put Kavanaugh at the cen­ter of every polit­i­cal and pol­i­cy deci­sion at the Bush White House,” said Peter Irons, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego and author of sev­er­al books about the Supreme Court. “He is exact­ly the kind of per­son that the legal con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment wants on the court.”

His tenure is now a source of con­tro­ver­sy, because much of his work in the White House has been cloaked by pres­i­den­tial priv­i­lege. Repub­li­cans have declined to request records from that era, sug­gest­ing that they would not be rev­e­la­to­ry.

“He was more or less a traf­fic cop,” Sen­ate Major­i­ty Whip John Cornyn (R‑Tex.) said last month.

Ques­tions about Kavanaugh’s work in the polit­i­cal realm sur­faced in 2004, after he was nom­i­nat­ed by Bush to be a cir­cuit court judge. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D‑N.Y.) alleged that the “nom­i­na­tion appears to be judi­cial pay­ment for polit­i­cal ser­vices ren­dered.”

“In fact, Mr. Kavanaugh would prob­a­bly win first prize as the hard-right’s polit­i­cal lawyer,” Schumer said, accord­ing to a tran­script of the nom­i­na­tion hear­ing.

Kavanaugh defend­ed him­self vig­or­ous­ly, say­ing that pri­or polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions did not nec­es­sar­i­ly impede a good judge’s per­for­mance.

“There is one kind of judge,” he said dur­ing the hear­ing. “There is an inde­pen­dent judge under our Con­sti­tu­tion. And the fact that they may have been a Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat ... in a past life is com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant to how they con­duct them­selves as judges.”

As the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee pre­pares for con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings start­ing Sept. 4, much remains unknown about that sig­nif­i­cant stretch of Kavanaugh’s career.

Most of the mil­lions of doc­u­ments relat­ing to his White House ser­vice will not be avail­able for review before his con­fir­ma­tion. The com­mit­tee has received batch­es of records from the George W. Bush library, releas­ing tens of thou­sands of doc­u­ments in recent weeks. But most relate to Kavanaugh’s years in the White House Counsel’s Office, before he became staff sec­re­tary, and have been devoid of telling detail. Democ­rats have com­plained they can’t prop­er­ly take stock of ­Kavanaugh.

“We asked for doc­u­ments from Kavanaugh’s time as staff sec­re­tary because he admit­ted those years shaped his views as a judge, par­tic­u­lar­ly with regard to issues of exec­u­tive pow­er,” Sen. Dianne Fein­stein (D‑Calif.) said in a ­state­ment.

“We also need to know more about his involve­ment with con­tro­ver­sial issues like tor­ture, war­rant­less wire­tap­ping and pres­i­den­tial sign­ing state­ments,” Fein­stein said. “He has a far more exten­sive record in pol­i­tics than pre­vi­ous nom­i­nees. It’s crit­i­cal that sen­a­tors see the full pic­ture to under­stand how those polit­i­cal posi­tions influ­enced his cur­rent views.”

White House spokesman Raj Shah said Kavanaugh has demon­strat­ed his com­mit­ment to tak­ing a judi­cious and fair-mind­ed approach to the Supreme Court.

“What will tell you most about the type of Supreme Court Jus­tice he will make are the 307 opin­ions he wrote as a Judge on the D.C. Cir­cuit Court of Appeals, a dozen of which were affirmed by the Supreme Court, over the last 12 years,” Shah said in a state­ment. “His opin­ions are wide­ly cit­ed by judges, appoint­ed by pres­i­dents of both par­ties, in courts across the coun­try. They demon­strate inde­pen­dence and a fideli­ty to our laws and con­sti­tu­tion.”

To find clues about Kavanaugh’s role as staff sec­re­tary, The Wash­ing­ton Post exam­ined more than 2,000 pages of emails and oth­er doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly released by the Bush library, along with scores of emails con­tained in 191 pages of doc­u­ments released last week by the Jus­tice Depart­ment in response to a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request by Fix the Court, a group advo­cat­ing for more trans­paren­cy in the fed­er­al court sys­tem.

The Bush library and Jus­tice Depart­ment emails have been heav­i­ly redact­ed, with most of the con­tent removed, as part of the government’s nor­mal appli­ca­tion of exemp­tions under the fed­er­al Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act or the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. But com­bined with Kavanaugh’s pub­lic state­ments and writ­ings, the email address­es and sub­ject lines pro­vide gran­u­lar­i­ty to a com­pos­ite por­trait of him in the years he was staff sec­re­tary and before.

Kavanaugh was respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing the process that helped shape the president’s think­ing and fueled the Bush admin­is­tra­tion agen­da. “He was every­where,” said Michael Ger­son, a speech­writer in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and now a syn­di­cat­ed colum­nist at The Post.

Ger­son, Rove and oth­ers said Kavanaugh was an hon­est bro­ker, even as he con­veyed com­pet­ing ideas to the pres­i­dent.

“Vir­tu­al­ly every piece of paper had to pass through the staff secretary’s hands,” Rove said.

Kavanaugh, now 53, has described the White House jobs — end­ing in 2006 when he was con­firmed as a fed­er­al judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Cir­cuit — as an unre­lent­ing mix of demands that required him to con­stant­ly con­sid­er the legal, pol­i­cy, leg­isla­tive, polit­i­cal, inter­na­tion­al and pub­lic rela­tions impli­ca­tions of White House actions.

“I spent a good deal of time on Capi­tol Hill, some­times in the mid­dle of the night, work­ing on leg­is­la­tion — it’s not a pure or pris­tine process,” Kavanaugh wrote in an essay for Mar­quette Lawyer Mag­a­zine in the fall of 2016.

“I worked on draft­ing and revis­ing exec­u­tive orders, as well as dis­putes over exec­u­tive branch records,” he wrote. “I saw reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies screw up ... I saw the good and the bad sides of a president’s try­ing to run for reelec­tion and to raise mon­ey while still being pres­i­dent. I was involved in the process for lots of pres­i­den­tial speech­es. I trav­eled almost every­where with the pres­i­dent for about three years. I ­most­ly recall the mas­sive deci­sions that had to be made on short notice.”

Kavanaugh’s roots in the con­ser­v­a­tive legal world date to at least 1988. While attend­ing Yale Law School, he joined the con­ser­v­a­tive-lib­er­tar­i­an Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety for Law and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Stud­ies, and has since spo­ken at dozens of the group’s events.

In the ear­ly 1990s, he worked under Ken­neth Starr in the Solic­i­tor General’s Office in the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush. He served as clerk to Supreme Court Jus­tice Antho­ny M. Kennedy and worked under Starr again in the inde­pen­dent counsel’s office that inves­ti­gat­ed Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton.

Some of the emails released by the Bush library come from Kavanaugh’s days in the White House Counsel’s Office, which he joined in 2001.

On Octo­ber 10, 2002, Kavanaugh received or was copied on emails relat­ing to ene­my com­bat­ants and the Guan­tanamo prison. The sub­ject line of one email read: “If you get asked about detainees at Quan­tanamo.” The email con­tained a set of Defense Depart­ment talk­ing points from Jan. 17, 2002, titled “The War Against Ter­ror­ism.”

“Karen — here are some on the GITMO folks. I am work­ing with Jus­tice on the domes­tic peo­ple we are hold­ing. Stay turned for more talk­ers.”

The emails also show that Kavanaugh worked with oth­ers on up to 22 drafts to refine Bush’s speech­es, while also edit­ing radio address­es and rou­tine state­ments. Peo­ple famil­iar with his work said he was effec­tive­ly an intel­lec­tu­al body man for the pres­i­dent, one who con­stant­ly asked ques­tions of his col­leagues and kept in mind the impli­ca­tions of the president’s state­ments and poli­cies.

Kavanaugh was often at Bush’s side, here and abroad. On June 5, 2004, the day that for­mer pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan died, Kavanaugh had to wake up Bush in the Amer­i­can Embassy dur­ing a trip to France to make a state­ment.

On Sept. 3, 2005, Kavanaugh received a call that Rehn­quist had died. He need­ed to meet with Bush and White House speech­writ­ers ear­ly the next morn­ing to pre­pare remarks.

...

In Decem­ber 2005, not long before he left the White House, Kavanaugh joined in an admin­is­tra­tive scram­ble to respond to bomb­shell rev­e­la­tions in the New York Times of a war­rant­less wire­tap­ping pro­gram that was launched after Sept. 11, 2001, accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment emails.

Kavanaugh and oth­ers weighed in on talk­ing points from the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency that spelled out the legal autho­riza­tion for the sur­veil­lance pro­gram. On Dec. 20, 2005, Kavanaugh rec­om­mend­ed that amend­ed talk­ing points be shared with the NSA before their release.

“I think we should make sure Gen­er­al Hay­den sees these before they go,” Kavanaugh wrote.

———-

“Brett Kavanaugh: Bush’s intel­lec­tu­al body man” by Robert O’Har­row Jr.; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/24/2018

“It was the apogee of Brett Kavanaugh’s rise through the ranks of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, a job that put him in dai­ly prox­im­i­ty to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and made him an intel­lec­tu­al “umpire” for a wel­ter of polit­i­cal and pol­i­cy aides who were aim­ing to shape the Repub­li­can agen­da.”

An “intel­lec­tu­al umpire” for the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion. That’s not exact­ly an uncon­tro­ver­sial part of one’s resume. And as part of his work for Bush as the staff sec­re­tary Kavanaugh was work­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly close with “Bush’s Brain” Karl Rove:

...
Kavanaugh, now Pres­i­dent Trump’s nom­i­nee to the Supreme Court, had an ordi­nary-sound­ing title: staff sec­re­tary. But he wield­ed extra­or­di­nary influ­ence as the advis­er respon­si­ble for screen­ing, review­ing and edit­ing doc­u­ments deliv­ered to Bush, inter­views and doc­u­ments show.

“Ulti­mate­ly, the umpire was Brett,” said Karl Rove, a Bush advis­er and one of the peo­ple Kavanaugh worked with close­ly as staff sec­re­tary.
...

And this is why Kavanaugh stands out as being an unusu­al­ly polit­i­cal Supreme Court nom­i­nee. Many jus­tices have had some sort of involve­ment with pol­i­tics before join­ing the high court, but none in recent mem­o­ry are as much of a polit­i­cal ani­mal of Kavanaugh. And a polit­i­cal ani­mal for not just any admin­is­tra­tion but the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion. When you’re the for­mer “intel­lec­tu­al umpire” of that admin­is­tra­tion that’s a pret­ty mas­sive issue that needs to be addressed before you’re appoint­ed to the Supreme Court:

...
Many Supreme Court jus­tices over the decades have held strong polit­i­cal views or been active in lib­er­al or con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es. Jus­tice Ele­na Kagan, a law pro­fes­sor, served as an asso­ciate coun­sel and advis­er in the Clin­ton White House. For­mer Jus­tice Abe For­t­as pri­vate­ly advised Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B. John­son on polit­i­cal mat­ters. William Rehn­quist was ­active in the Repub­li­can Par­ty in Ari­zona before he became a ­jus­tice.

But no jus­tice in recent mem­o­ry has worked as intent­ly as Kavanaugh at the high­est lev­els of the nation’s polit­i­cal machin­ery, schol­ars said. His time as staff sec­re­tary, from 2003 to 2006, was the cul­mi­na­tion of a polit­i­cal and legal appren­tice­ship that last­ed more than a decade, enabling him to demon­strate his zeal for con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples and putting him on a path to the Supreme Court.

Doc­u­ments and inter­views show that while Kavanaugh was not a pol­i­cy­mak­er, he was direct­ly involved in help­ing the White House man­age a wide array of sen­si­tive mat­ters, includ­ing the war on ter­ror­ism, the treat­ment of ene­my com­bat­ants and war­rant­less wire­tap­ping.

“It put Kavanaugh at the cen­ter of every polit­i­cal and pol­i­cy deci­sion at the Bush White House,” said Peter Irons, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego and author of sev­er­al books about the Supreme Court. “He is exact­ly the kind of per­son that the legal con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment wants on the court.”

His tenure is now a source of con­tro­ver­sy, because much of his work in the White House has been cloaked by pres­i­den­tial priv­i­lege. Repub­li­cans have declined to request records from that era, sug­gest­ing that they would not be rev­e­la­to­ry.

“He was more or less a traf­fic cop,” Sen­ate Major­i­ty Whip John Cornyn (R‑Tex.) said last month.
...

So it should come as no sur­prise that the major­i­ty of the doc­u­ments relat­ed to his work as Bush’s “intel­lec­tu­al umpire” aren’t being made avail­able to the Democ­rats or the pub­lic dur­ing the nom­i­na­tion process. The offi­cial line from the Trump White House is that the only part of Kavanaugh­’s past that’s wor­thy of review is his work as a judge. His work as George W. Bush’s intel­lec­tu­al umpire is appar­ent­ly irrel­e­vant:

...
As the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee pre­pares for con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings start­ing Sept. 4, much remains unknown about that sig­nif­i­cant stretch of Kavanaugh’s career.

Most of the mil­lions of doc­u­ments relat­ing to his White House ser­vice will not be avail­able for review before his con­fir­ma­tion. The com­mit­tee has received batch­es of records from the George W. Bush library, releas­ing tens of thou­sands of doc­u­ments in recent weeks. But most relate to Kavanaugh’s years in the White House Counsel’s Office, before he became staff sec­re­tary, and have been devoid of telling detail. Democ­rats have com­plained they can’t prop­er­ly take stock of ­Kavanaugh.

“We asked for doc­u­ments from Kavanaugh’s time as staff sec­re­tary because he admit­ted those years shaped his views as a judge, par­tic­u­lar­ly with regard to issues of exec­u­tive pow­er,” Sen. Dianne Fein­stein (D‑Calif.) said in a ­state­ment.

“We also need to know more about his involve­ment with con­tro­ver­sial issues like tor­ture, war­rant­less wire­tap­ping and pres­i­den­tial sign­ing state­ments,” Fein­stein said. “He has a far more exten­sive record in pol­i­tics than pre­vi­ous nom­i­nees. It’s crit­i­cal that sen­a­tors see the full pic­ture to under­stand how those polit­i­cal posi­tions influ­enced his cur­rent views.”

White House spokesman Raj Shah said Kavanaugh has demon­strat­ed his com­mit­ment to tak­ing a judi­cious and fair-mind­ed approach to the Supreme Court.

“What will tell you most about the type of Supreme Court Jus­tice he will make are the 307 opin­ions he wrote as a Judge on the D.C. Cir­cuit Court of Appeals, a dozen of which were affirmed by the Supreme Court, over the last 12 years,” Shah said in a state­ment. “His opin­ions are wide­ly cit­ed by judges, appoint­ed by pres­i­dents of both par­ties, in courts across the coun­try. They demon­strate inde­pen­dence and a fideli­ty to our laws and con­sti­tu­tion.”
...

But despite the refusal to release the bulk of the doc­u­ments that cov­er Kavanaugh­’s work dur­ing the Bush years, there are still hints from the avail­able doc­u­ments of the kind of work he was doing. And those hints point towards Kavanaugh influ­enc­ing vir­tu­al­ly every pol­i­cy agen­da of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. As Karl Rove put it, “Vir­tu­al­ly every piece of paper had to pass through the staff secretary’s hands” on the way to Bush’s desk. In that sense he real­ly was Bush’s intel­lec­tu­al umpire:

...
To find clues about Kavanaugh’s role as staff sec­re­tary, The Wash­ing­ton Post exam­ined more than 2,000 pages of emails and oth­er doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly released by the Bush library, along with scores of emails con­tained in 191 pages of doc­u­ments released last week by the Jus­tice Depart­ment in response to a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request by Fix the Court, a group advo­cat­ing for more trans­paren­cy in the fed­er­al court sys­tem.

The Bush library and Jus­tice Depart­ment emails have been heav­i­ly redact­ed, with most of the con­tent removed, as part of the government’s nor­mal appli­ca­tion of exemp­tions under the fed­er­al Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act or the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. But com­bined with Kavanaugh’s pub­lic state­ments and writ­ings, the email address­es and sub­ject lines pro­vide gran­u­lar­i­ty to a com­pos­ite por­trait of him in the years he was staff sec­re­tary and before.

Kavanaugh was respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing the process that helped shape the president’s think­ing and fueled the Bush admin­is­tra­tion agen­da. “He was every­where,” said Michael Ger­son, a speech­writer in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and now a syn­di­cat­ed colum­nist at The Post.

Ger­son, Rove and oth­ers said Kavanaugh was an hon­est bro­ker, even as he con­veyed com­pet­ing ideas to the pres­i­dent.

“Vir­tu­al­ly every piece of paper had to pass through the staff secretary’s hands,” Rove said.
...

So when the Bush/Rove-fac­tion of the GOP con­tin­ues to stand behind Kavanaugh despite the grow­ing polit­i­cal dam­age his nom­i­na­tion is doing to the GOP don’t for­get that they’re about to get Bush’s intel­lec­tu­al umpire on the Supreme Court! It’s a pret­ty mas­sive prize.

It’s also worth not­ing that a law­suit to force the release of 100,000 of those unre­leased Bush-admin­is­tra­tion Kavanaugh doc­u­ments being put for­ward by Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Jeff Merke­ly is slow­ly mak­ing its way through the courts. So it’s pos­si­ble those doc­u­ments will even­tu­al­ly be released. But if it does hap­pen it prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen until after the nom­i­na­tion vote that’s sup­posed to hap­pen soon.

So don’t for­get that while it’s abun­dant­ly clear that the GOP would pre­fer it if a recount­ing of Brett Kavanaugh­’s drunk­en abu­sive school days were left out of the nom­i­na­tion process, there’s a much more recent chap­ter of Kavanaugh­’s life they’re also try­ing to avoid talk­ing about.

There’s no short­age of ques­tions raised by the con­fir­ma­tion of Brett Kavanaugh­’s nom­i­na­tion as a Supreme Court jus­tice. The fact that the Supreme Court now has the first clear hard right major­i­ty in decades rais­es basic ques­tions about what, if any­thing, of the post-New Deal era of jurispru­dence is going to sur­vive the com­ing onslaught. It’s easy to for­get that the right-wing oli­garchy in the US has nev­er viewed pro­grams like Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare as con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly legit­i­mate (let alone Oba­macare) and has nev­er giv­en up on its decades-long strug­gle to over­turn those laws through any means nec­es­sary, but it’s going to be a lot hard­er to for­get these things now that the Supreme Court real­ly is poised to become the ulti­mate right-wing ‘activist’ court. John Roberts is the new ‘swing’ vote. That’s how in per­il the lib­er­al lega­cies of the last 80 years are.

And then there’s the clear pos­si­bil­i­ty of the court becom­ing even more right-wing should some­thing hap­pen to one of the four remain­ing left-lean­ing jus­tices. We could eas­i­ly see a 6–3 far right major­i­ty before the end of Trump’s first term. And this, of course, is all hap­pen­ing in the con­text of the near total dom­i­na­tion of the US gov­ern­ment at fed­er­al and state lev­els by a Repub­li­can par­ty that is infused with the spir­it of fas­cism and white nation­al­ism.

So the long-term ques­tions about the impli­ca­tions of this his­toric shift loom large. But per­haps the ques­tion that looms the largest in the imme­di­ate term is what kind of impact that is going to have on the 2018 mid-terms that are just a month away. After all, the fight over the mul­ti­ple alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al assault lev­eled against Brett Kavanaugh has clear­ly caused a surge in Repub­li­can vot­er enthu­si­asm now that the Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing media com­plex all ral­lied around the idea that the accu­sa­tions are com­plete­ly base­less and part of a mas­sive smear cam­paign and part of some sort of broad­er left-wing attack against all white men (Tuck­er Carl­son actu­al­ly sug­gest­ed Kavanaugh­’s nom­i­na­tion fight could spark a race war). It’s the kind of argu­ment that has become a GOP spe­cial­ty, so it’s no sur­prise that this nar­ra­tive worked yet again.

It’s still unclear if the par­ty is going to be able to nurse kind of vic­tim­hood nar­ra­tive over the next month now that Kavanaugh is con­firmed. But all signs at this point indi­cate that the GOP is going to try to use that vic­tim­hood nar­ra­tive as its best tool for keep that right-wing vot­er enthu­si­asm going into the Novem­ber vote. And to some extent that log­ic makes sense: giv­en the yawn­ing ‘enthu­si­asm’ gap the GOP was suf­fer­ing up until this point that was closed by the right-wing back­lash against the Kavanaugh accu­sa­tions, it’s pret­ty clear that the GOP has lit­tle to lose by con­tin­u­ing to stoke out­rage with the Repub­li­can base by pro­mot­ing the nar­ra­tive that all of the alle­ga­tions against Kavanaugh are part of a giant con­spir­a­cy to base­less­ly destroy a good, hon­or­able man.

And per­haps that will con­tin­ue to be a suc­cess­ful tac­tic. But part of what’s so fas­ci­nat­ing about the cur­rent polit­i­cal dynam­ic is that it’s a high­ly unsta­ble dynam­ic in the sense that there’s still so much that isn’t known about Brett Kavanaugh­’s back­ground — includ­ing, but not lim­it­ed to, the sex­u­al assault accu­sa­tions — and there’s noth­ing stop­ping more of that infor­ma­tion from com­ing out over the next month and shap­ing that dynam­ic. For instance, it’s now become clear that the White House total­ly rigged the one week FBI inves­ti­ga­tion into the alle­ga­tions. The New York Times just report­ed that Trump was about to give the FBI per­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate any­one but White House lawyer Don McGahn report­ed­ly stopped him after warn­ing that a full inves­ti­ga­tion could imper­il Kavanaugh­’s chances. And the FBI only inter­viewed 10 peo­ple, and that did­n’t include Ford or Kavanaugh. And that report about what appears to be a joke FBI inves­ti­ga­tion came out before the vote to con­firm Kavanaugh. It’s an exam­ple of the kind of new infor­ma­tion that could come out and poten­tial­ly shape how this issue is per­ceived over the next month and high­lights how big a polit­i­cal gam­ble this is going to be for the GOP to nation­al­ize the right-wing out­rage over Kavanaugh­’s nom­i­na­tion head­ing into the final stretch of the mid-terms.

And yet, giv­en the remark­able pow­er of the right-wing media com­plex to sell pret­ty much any nar­ra­tive they want to their audi­ences, it’s unclear what, if any­thing, could emerge about Kavanaugh that would punc­ture the ‘Kavanaugh was attack with smears and lies’ nar­ra­tive that man­aged to so suc­cess­ful­ly fire up the right-wing based. Still, it’s very pos­si­ble that left-wing and inde­pen­dent vot­ers could become even moti­vat­ed to vote as new infor­ma­tion about Kavanaugh comes out. The polit­i­cal impact of Kavanaugh­’s ascen­sion to the Supreme Court remains a high­ly flu­id sit­u­a­tion.

So giv­en all that, it’s worth not­ing that there’s anoth­er unre­solved issue over Kavanaugh that did­n’t get much atten­tion dur­ing the nom­i­na­tion process but could actu­al­ly end up impact­ing the pub­lic per­cep­tion of Kavanaugh in ways that change the pub­lic per­cep­tion of the verac­i­ty of the sex­u­al assault claims against him: the ques­tion of whether or not Kavanaugh lied to Con­gress over the role he may have played in a 2002 GOP scan­dal over the theft of Demo­c­ra­t­ic doc­u­ments from a con­gres­sion­al serv­er, a.k.k the ‘Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal’. That’s the scan­dal sur­round­ing Man­u­al Miran­da, the for­mer Repub­li­can Sen­ate coun­sel on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee who noticed in 2002 that Demo­c­ra­t­ic files — files con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion on strate­gies for how to deal with judi­cial nom­i­na­tions — stored on a shared serv­er were acces­si­ble so he took the files. And Brett Kavanaugh, who was work­ing as assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent at the time and work­ing on select­ing judi­cial nom­i­nees, was alleged­ly giv­en access to the files.

These alle­ga­tions of course came up dur­ing the nom­i­na­tion process and Kavanaugh of course denied any involve­ment in it. So if evi­dence emerges sug­gest­ing that Kavanaugh did, in fact, work with those stolen doc­u­ments and knew they were stolen he could be charged with per­jury. And in the con­text of a ‘he-said/she-said/she-said/she-said/she-said’ series of alle­ga­tions over sex­u­al harass­ment, an emerg­ing per­jury nar­ra­tive prob­a­bly isn’t going to help Kavanaugh­’s case.

So is there some new infor­ma­tion that’s com­ing out about this Sen­ate email scan­dal and Kavanaugh­’s role? Maybe. That will depend on the speed of two Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act (FOIA) law­suits work­ing their way through the courts. Both are law­suits to get access to cur­rent­ly unre­leased doc­u­ments from Kavanaugh­’s time in the Bush White House and both are set to have new doc­u­ments released in com­ing weeks. Which means we could see some scan­dalous dis­clo­sures about Kavanaugh hit­ting right before the mid-terms. Maybe. We’ll see. And release of the doc­u­ments is still sub­ject to White House approval, mean­ing this could eas­i­ly start look­ing like a White House Kavanaugh cov­er-up.

One of the law­suits is pur­sued by the Elec­tron­ic Pri­va­cy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter (EPIC). The oth­er is by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. Yes, even the Sen­a­tors who had to vote on Kavanaugh weren’t giv­en access to these doc­u­ments. Doc­u­ments that could have revealed whether or not Kavanaugh ear­li­er per­jured him­self before them.

So what do we know about these doc­u­ments? Well, one ‘smok­ing gun’ in the doc­u­ments is that there were a num­ber of emails sent from Miran­da to Kavanaugh short­ly after the reports of Miran­da’s theft of the Democ­rats’ doc­u­ments. Yep, we have sto­ries about the hack­ing scan­dal hit­ting the news, and then Miran­da emails Kavanaugh. But we don’t know what those emails said because they were sent in Decem­ber 2003, which was after Kavanaugh left the job of assis­tant to the pres­i­dent and moved on to become the staff sec­re­tary. And any­thing after his time as assis­tant to the pres­i­dent was deemed out­side the scope of the doc­u­ments that need­ed to be pro­duced to the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. So we know Miran­da sent Kavanaugh emails short­ly after this scan­dal went pub­lic but Sen­a­tors did­n’t get access to the con­tent of those emails due to a tech­ni­cal­i­ty caused by Kavanaugh shift­ing roles in the White House. And now these FOIA law­suits are set to see the release of those emails in com­ing weeks.

But, the release of these emails is still up to White House review. So we could eas­i­ly see a sit­u­a­tion where the White House refus­es to release these emails, at least until after the mid-terms. They will no doubt incor­po­rate it into the pre­vail­ing right-wing nar­ra­tive and frame it as pro­tect­ing Kavanaugh from a witch-hunt or some­thing. But that whole sit­u­a­tion real­ly could unfold. Poten­tial­ly right before the mid-terms. It’s a remark­able polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion and a big rea­son why the cur­rent polit­i­cal dynam­ic sur­round­ing the nation­al­iza­tion of the Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion as a polit­i­cal issue is such a big gam­ble:

Yahoo News

Law­suits point to large trove of unre­leased Kavanaugh White House doc­u­ments

Luppe B. Lup­pen Con­trib­u­tor
‚Yahoo News•October 5, 2018

New details have emerged about poten­tial­ly thou­sands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and oth­er records relat­ed to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal from ear­ly in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion and oth­er con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects that have not been dis­closed to the Sen­ate, accord­ing to Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The undis­closed doc­u­ments, which date from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House, are set to be pro­duced in com­ing weeks as a result of two Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act law­suits, one pur­sued by Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee and anoth­er by an out­side pri­va­cy group, the Elec­tron­ic Pri­va­cy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter (EPIC). Release of the doc­u­ments is still sub­ject to White House approval and oth­er con­sul­ta­tions.

The Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal involved a Repub­li­can Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee aide, Man­ny Miran­da, who, accord­ing to an offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion, infil­trat­ed the elec­tron­ic files of Democ­rats on the com­mit­tee with the help of a co-con­spir­a­tor, James Lun­dell, and passed the intel­li­gence on to oth­er sen­a­tors, the White House, and friend­ly opin­ion colum­nists over a peri­od of years. The pil­fered mate­r­i­al con­tained, among oth­er things, Democ­rats’ research and pre­pared ques­tions for judi­cial nom­i­nees.

With Kavanaugh fac­ing a poten­tial final con­fir­ma­tion vote over the week­end or ear­ly next week, the doc­u­ments that are cleared for release by the FOIA law­suits will like­ly emerge too late for sen­a­tors to take them into account.

“This high­lights how lit­tle we know about Judge Kavanaugh’s record,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D‑Vt., said in a state­ment. “More than 90 per­cent of his White House records remain hid­den. The fact that he appears to have had so many con­ver­sa­tions about a top­ic that he denied hav­ing involve­ment with, under oath, rais­es even more ques­tions,” Leahy con­tin­ued, refer­ring to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal.

The tab­u­la­tions pro­vid­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors and EPIC by offi­cials at the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion before the poten­tial pro­duc­tion of the doc­u­ments show that poten­tial­ly only a frac­tion of Kavanaugh’s cor­re­spon­dence relat­ed to sev­er­al con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects dis­cussed at his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings was made avail­able to sen­a­tors, accord­ing to Democ­rats on the com­mit­tee. The tab­u­la­tions indi­cate that the undis­closed doc­u­ments con­cern the Bush-era Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal; Kavanaugh’s inter­ac­tions with attor­ney John Yoo in the weeks fol­low­ing the ter­ror­ist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; and Kavanaugh’s work on the USA Patri­ot Act and var­i­ous domes­tic sur­veil­lance pro­grams, air­port screen­ing pro­grams and oth­er pri­va­cy-relat­ed sub­jects.

The tab­u­la­tions for EPIC, which are detailed in the table includ­ed below, were drawn from a sub­set of the over­all records the pri­va­cy group request­ed from the Nation­al Archives, accord­ing to Alan But­ler, EPIC’s legal direc­tor. In nego­ti­a­tions with EPIC, the Nation­al Archives agreed to tab­u­late first the records from the Judi­cia­ry Committee’s request that it has iden­ti­fied as being eli­gi­ble for release to the pub­lic and that are under­go­ing a final 60-day review by for­mer Pres­i­dent Bush and Pres­i­dent Trump. It is these records, already iden­ti­fied by the Nation­al Archives for pub­li­ca­tion, that are reflect­ed in table below. “This fur­ther under­scores the fact that there is impor­tant infor­ma­tion out there that is pend­ing release,” But­ler said. “It’s why we’ve called for the Sen­ate to post­pone the vote on Kavanaugh’s nom­i­na­tion.”

Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides com­pared the Nation­al Archives’ totals for these sub­jects to what they received short­ly before the Judi­cia­ry Committee’s hear­ings, through an unprece­dent­ed process over­seen by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s pri­vate lawyer and Kavanaugh’s for­mer deputy, William A. Bur­ck. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides found that the Nation­al Archives’ num­bers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er in some cas­es. “How­ev­er, But­ler, EPIC’s legal direc­tor, point­ed out that these doc­u­ments had been iden­ti­fied as ready for pub­lic release by the Nation­al Archives, so he found it unlike­ly that they con­tained sig­nif­i­cant clas­si­fied or priv­i­leged mate­r­i­al.

Because the doc­u­ments have not yet come to light, there is no way to tell how many are mere­ly dupli­cates of pre­vi­ous­ly pro­duced records. How­ev­er, pre­vi­ous pro­duc­tions from Bur­ck have includ­ed thou­sands of dupli­cate records, accord­ing to Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides. It is also uncer­tain how many doc­u­ments were with­held due to legit­i­mate claims of con­sti­tu­tion­al priv­i­lege or because they con­tained clas­si­fied or high­ly sen­si­tive per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

[see Table show num­ber of records cur­rent­ly sched­uled to be released by the Nation­al Archives vs the much small­er num­ber of doc­u­ments already made avail­able to Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Democ­rats]

While he was not will­ing to dis­cuss the spe­cif­ic cat­e­gories of doc­u­ments iden­ti­fied by Democ­rats, Bur­ck pro­vid­ed a state­ment list­ing the rea­sons why doc­u­ments were held back.

“As we have informed the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, we gave to the Com­mit­tee every page of every doc­u­ment giv­en to us by the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA), except per­son­al doc­u­ments — which the Com­mit­tee did not request and which NARA agreed should not be pro­duced — and con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly priv­i­leged doc­u­ments iden­ti­fied by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice — which the cur­rent Admin­is­tra­tion direct­ed that we not pro­vide,” he wrote in a state­ment to Yahoo News. “We also exclud­ed doc­u­ments that were auto­mat­i­cal­ly removed from our review using indus­try-stan­dard soft­ware, because they were exact dupli­cates of oth­er doc­u­ments that we did review; doc­u­ments that were dat­ed on or after July 7, 2003, when Judge Kavanaugh left the White House Counsel’s Office; State Depart­ment doc­u­ments dat­ing from the 1970s that were in Judge Kavanaugh’s White House Counsel’s Office hard copy files; doc­u­ments with tech­ni­cal issues such that they could not be processed by our third-par­ty ven­dor and thus were referred back to NARA to deter­mine if NARA could pro­vide review­able copies; and doc­u­ments which were either redact­ed or, in a few cas­es, with­held entire­ly on the basis that they con­tained per­son­al pri­va­cy infor­ma­tion, such as Social Secu­ri­ty num­bers, cell phone num­bers, pri­vate email address­es, and per­son­al med­ical or finan­cial infor­ma­tion.”

...

Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors are focused on what their aides say may be as many as 1,800 undis­closed records relat­ed to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal.

Before Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing, Democ­rats received 1,721 Kavanaugh doc­u­ments relat­ed to the scan­dal, which they used to call into ques­tion Kavanaugh’s pre­vi­ous tes­ti­mo­ny dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings for the D.C. Cir­cuit. At those hear­ings, Kavanaugh said under oath that he had no knowl­edge of receiv­ing the pur­loined doc­u­ments from Miran­da, the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee aide at the cen­ter of the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal, either in real time or in ret­ro­spect. The Nation­al Archives’ tab­u­la­tions indi­cate that there are approx­i­mate­ly 3,500 total records relat­ed to Kavanaugh’s deal­ings with Miran­da.

Democ­rats are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in indi­ca­tions in the Nation­al Archives’ tab­u­la­tions that there are a hand­ful of undis­closed emails from Miran­da to Kavanaugh at the time that the com­mit­tee aide’s mis­con­duct came to light, in Decem­ber 2003, which they say con­tain the word “Lun­dell,” the sur­name of the obscure staffer who con­spired with Miran­da in the hack­ing scan­dal. It is not con­firmed that the Decem­ber 2003 emails dis­cussed the hack­ing scan­dal, but Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides speak­ing on back­ground not­ed that Kavanaugh and Lun­dell were not friends and, since Kavanaugh had left the White House counsel’s office by Decem­ber 2003, he had no obvi­ous rea­son — oth­er than the hack­ing issue — to cor­re­spond with Miran­da about Lun­dell.

“Judge Kavanaugh owes us some expla­na­tion about why he was cor­re­spond­ing with Man­ny Miran­da about Jason Lun­dell in the month after their appar­ent crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy was exposed,” Sen. Richard Blu­men­thal, D‑Conn., said in a state­ment. “How can there be a plau­si­ble and inno­cent expla­na­tion for why almost 2,000 com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Kavanaugh and Miran­da were kept hid­den from the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee? These facts might be writ­ten off as coin­ci­dence if only Judge Kavanaugh hadn’t twice tried to mis­lead the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee about his rela­tion­ship with Miran­da and his receipt of stolen doc­u­ments.”

Because the Decem­ber 2003 emails were sent to Kavanaugh after he tran­si­tioned to the staff sec­re­tary role, they would have been out­side the scope of doc­u­ments pro­duced by Bur­ck to the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. Kavanaugh did not appear to reply to any of the emails, the tab­u­la­tions show.

One of the first con­tro­ver­sies of the Kavanaugh hear­ings was fought over the doc­u­ment pro­duc­tion process. Kavanaugh had a volu­mi­nous record of doc­u­ments from his six years of pub­lic ser­vice in the Bush White House, first as an asso­ciate coun­sel in the White House counsel’s office and then, after July 2003, as staff sec­re­tary. Typ­i­cal­ly, a judi­cial nominee’s White House records would be req­ui­si­tioned by the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee direct­ly from the Nation­al Archives using a pro­vi­sion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. The doc­u­ments would be gath­ered and screened for clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion and priv­i­leged mate­r­i­al in a process coor­di­nat­ed by the archivists, non­po­lit­i­cal civ­il ser­vants.

Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chair­man Chuck Grass­ley, R‑Iowa, made his first con­tro­ver­sial move by request­ing only Kavanaugh’s records for his time in the counsel’s office, exclud­ing his years of ser­vice as staff sec­re­tary. In ear­ly August, the Nation­al Archives wrote to Grass­ley that this lim­it­ed request could not be com­plet­ed before the end of Octo­ber, sig­nif­i­cant­ly lat­er than the Repub­li­cans want­ed to hold Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings.

Notwith­stand­ing the Nation­al Archives’ time­line, Repub­li­cans were still able to hold Kavanaugh’s hear­ings in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber because they had devel­oped a new strat­e­gy for pro­duc­ing doc­u­ments, one that would con­tro­ver­sial­ly rely on a for­mer pres­i­dent and an out­side lawyer.

Under a sep­a­rate pro­vi­sion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act, a for­mer pres­i­dent is per­mit­ted to request records for his own or his representative’s use. This pro­vi­sion is typ­i­cal­ly under­stood to allow the pres­i­dent to review his administration’s records for per­son­al pur­suits, like writ­ing a mem­oir. Repub­li­cans arranged to have for­mer pres­i­dent George W. Bush and his pub­lic records lawyer, Bur­ck, invoke it in Kavanaugh’s aid. Bush would request the doc­u­ments, and Burck’s legal team would coor­di­nate the process of review­ing them for priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion and turn them over to the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

While this approach was demon­stra­bly faster, Democ­rats heav­i­ly crit­i­cized it through­out the sum­mer. They object­ed to plac­ing in pri­vate hands the deter­mi­na­tion of which doc­u­ments elect­ed sen­a­tors would be able to review and also point­ed to poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est. Bur­ck is a lawyer for sev­er­al cur­rent and for­mer Trump White House offi­cials in Robert Mueller’s spe­cial coun­sel inves­ti­ga­tion, and he also worked inside the Bush White House as Kavanaugh’s deputy staff sec­re­tary.

Bur­ck man­aged the pro­duc­tion before and dur­ing Kavanaugh’s hear­ings, with attor­neys from the Depart­ment of Jus­tice assist­ing him in deter­min­ing which doc­u­ments to with­hold on claims of exec­u­tive priv­i­lege and which to pro­duce on the con­di­tion that they be main­tained as “com­mit­tee con­fi­den­tial.” The doc­u­ments iden­ti­fied in the Nation­al Archives tab­u­la­tions could include those with­held by Bur­ck.

While it’s far from clear how impor­tant the undis­closed doc­u­ments could be, and doubt­ful the mere prospect of their future dis­clo­sure will sway any votes, if new infor­ma­tion emerges about divi­sive sub­jects after the Sen­ate has already vot­ed to con­firm Kavanaugh, it could cast a per­ma­nent cloud on Kavanaugh’s ser­vice on the Supreme Court.

“If this process were designed to find the truth, we would be answer­ing those ques­tions before rush­ing to a vote,” Sen. Leahy said.

———-

“Law­suits point to large trove of unre­leased Kavanaugh White House doc­u­ments” by Luppe B. Lup­pen; Yahoo News; 10/05/2018

“While it’s far from clear how impor­tant the undis­closed doc­u­ments could be, and doubt­ful the mere prospect of their future dis­clo­sure will sway any votes, if new infor­ma­tion emerges about divi­sive sub­jects after the Sen­ate has already vot­ed to con­firm Kavanaugh, it could cast a per­ma­nent cloud on Kavanaugh’s ser­vice on the Supreme Court.”

Yep, while it’s far from clear how impor­tant the undis­closed doc­u­ments could have been for Kavanaugh­’s nom­i­na­tion process because that process was clear­ly a farce, there’s noth­ing stop­ping the even­tu­al release of these doc­u­ments from cast­ing a per­ma­nent cloud on Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court jus­tice. An even­tu­al release could hap­pen in com­ing weeks thanks to the two FOIA law­suits:

...
New details have emerged about poten­tial­ly thou­sands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and oth­er records relat­ed to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal from ear­ly in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion and oth­er con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects that have not been dis­closed to the Sen­ate, accord­ing to Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The undis­closed doc­u­ments, which date from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House, are set to be pro­duced in com­ing weeks as a result of two Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act law­suits, one pur­sued by Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors on the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee and anoth­er by an out­side pri­va­cy group, the Elec­tron­ic Pri­va­cy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter (EPIC). Release of the doc­u­ments is still sub­ject to White House approval and oth­er con­sul­ta­tions.
...

So will this release hap­pen before the mid-terms? We’ll see, but if it does­n’t hap­pen before the mid-terms there’s noth­ing stop­ping it from becom­ing a cam­paign issue. After all, if the GOP is going to run on out­rage over the accu­sa­tions against Kavanaugh, rais­ing this issue over pos­si­ble per­jury becomes a nat­ur­al response by Democ­rats. So this real­ly could sud­den­ly become a nation­al issue.

And part of what makes this a poten­tial cam­paign issue is the fact that the few facts we do know just look so sus­pi­cious. Kavanaugh denied, under oath, have any involve­ment with the stolen doc­u­ments and yet we know he sud­den­ly received a bunch of emails from Miran­da short­ly after the sto­ry went pub­lic. It just looks hor­ri­ble and the only way to tru­ly clear it up is to release the doc­u­ments:

...
The Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal involved a Repub­li­can Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee aide, Man­ny Miran­da, who, accord­ing to an offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion, infil­trat­ed the elec­tron­ic files of Democ­rats on the com­mit­tee with the help of a co-con­spir­a­tor, James Lun­dell, and passed the intel­li­gence on to oth­er sen­a­tors, the White House, and friend­ly opin­ion colum­nists over a peri­od of years. The pil­fered mate­r­i­al con­tained, among oth­er things, Democ­rats’ research and pre­pared ques­tions for judi­cial nom­i­nees.

With Kavanaugh fac­ing a poten­tial final con­fir­ma­tion vote over the week­end or ear­ly next week, the doc­u­ments that are cleared for release by the FOIA law­suits will like­ly emerge too late for sen­a­tors to take them into account.

“This high­lights how lit­tle we know about Judge Kavanaugh’s record,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D‑Vt., said in a state­ment. “More than 90 per­cent of his White House records remain hid­den. The fact that he appears to have had so many con­ver­sa­tions about a top­ic that he denied hav­ing involve­ment with, under oath, rais­es even more ques­tions,” Leahy con­tin­ued, refer­ring to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal.
...

So how many emails and doc­u­ments might get released in this process? As many as 1,800 released to the hack­ing scan­dal alone. And some of those emails sent by Miran­da to Kavanaugh appar­ent­ly con­tain the work “Lun­dell”. And Lun­dell That hap­pens to be the name of an obscure staffer who con­spired with Miran­da. It just looks so damn sus­pi­cious:

...
Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors are focused on what their aides say may be as many as 1,800 undis­closed records relat­ed to the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal.

Before Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing, Democ­rats received 1,721 Kavanaugh doc­u­ments relat­ed to the scan­dal, which they used to call into ques­tion Kavanaugh’s pre­vi­ous tes­ti­mo­ny dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings for the D.C. Cir­cuit. At those hear­ings, Kavanaugh said under oath that he had no knowl­edge of receiv­ing the pur­loined doc­u­ments from Miran­da, the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee aide at the cen­ter of the Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal, either in real time or in ret­ro­spect. The Nation­al Archives’ tab­u­la­tions indi­cate that there are approx­i­mate­ly 3,500 total records relat­ed to Kavanaugh’s deal­ings with Miran­da.

Democ­rats are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in indi­ca­tions in the Nation­al Archives’ tab­u­la­tions that there are a hand­ful of undis­closed emails from Miran­da to Kavanaugh at the time that the com­mit­tee aide’s mis­con­duct came to light, in Decem­ber 2003, which they say con­tain the word “Lun­dell,” the sur­name of the obscure staffer who con­spired with Miran­da in the hack­ing scan­dal. It is not con­firmed that the Decem­ber 2003 emails dis­cussed the hack­ing scan­dal, but Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides speak­ing on back­ground not­ed that Kavanaugh and Lun­dell were not friends and, since Kavanaugh had left the White House counsel’s office by Decem­ber 2003, he had no obvi­ous rea­son — oth­er than the hack­ing issue — to cor­re­spond with Miran­da about Lun­dell.

“Judge Kavanaugh owes us some expla­na­tion about why he was cor­re­spond­ing with Man­ny Miran­da about Jason Lun­dell in the month after their appar­ent crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy was exposed,” Sen. Richard Blu­men­thal, D‑Conn., said in a state­ment. “How can there be a plau­si­ble and inno­cent expla­na­tion for why almost 2,000 com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Kavanaugh and Miran­da were kept hid­den from the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee? These facts might be writ­ten off as coin­ci­dence if only Judge Kavanaugh hadn’t twice tried to mis­lead the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee about his rela­tion­ship with Miran­da and his receipt of stolen doc­u­ments.”
...

And the process of releas­ing the doc­u­ments looks super sus­pi­cious too. Using an unprece­dent­ed process, the doc­u­ments to be released are being reviewed by William A. Bur­ck, who hap­pens to be George W. Bush’s pri­vate lawyer and Kavanaugh­’s for­mer deputy. You almost could­n’t come up with a more sus­pi­cious-look­ing sce­nario:

...
The tab­u­la­tions pro­vid­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors and EPIC by offi­cials at the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion before the poten­tial pro­duc­tion of the doc­u­ments show that poten­tial­ly only a frac­tion of Kavanaugh’s cor­re­spon­dence relat­ed to sev­er­al con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects dis­cussed at his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings was made avail­able to sen­a­tors, accord­ing to Democ­rats on the com­mit­tee. The tab­u­la­tions indi­cate that the undis­closed doc­u­ments con­cern the Bush-era Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal; Kavanaugh’s inter­ac­tions with attor­ney John Yoo in the weeks fol­low­ing the ter­ror­ist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; and Kavanaugh’s work on the USA Patri­ot Act and var­i­ous domes­tic sur­veil­lance pro­grams, air­port screen­ing pro­grams and oth­er pri­va­cy-relat­ed sub­jects.

The tab­u­la­tions for EPIC, which are detailed in the table includ­ed below, were drawn from a sub­set of the over­all records the pri­va­cy group request­ed from the Nation­al Archives, accord­ing to Alan But­ler, EPIC’s legal direc­tor. In nego­ti­a­tions with EPIC, the Nation­al Archives agreed to tab­u­late first the records from the Judi­cia­ry Committee’s request that it has iden­ti­fied as being eli­gi­ble for release to the pub­lic and that are under­go­ing a final 60-day review by for­mer Pres­i­dent Bush and Pres­i­dent Trump. It is these records, already iden­ti­fied by the Nation­al Archives for pub­li­ca­tion, that are reflect­ed in table below. “This fur­ther under­scores the fact that there is impor­tant infor­ma­tion out there that is pend­ing release,” But­ler said. “It’s why we’ve called for the Sen­ate to post­pone the vote on Kavanaugh’s nom­i­na­tion.”

Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides com­pared the Nation­al Archives’ totals for these sub­jects to what they received short­ly before the Judi­cia­ry Committee’s hear­ings, through an unprece­dent­ed process over­seen by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s pri­vate lawyer and Kavanaugh’s for­mer deputy, William A. Bur­ck. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic aides found that the Nation­al Archives’ num­bers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er in some cas­es. “How­ev­er, But­ler, EPIC’s legal direc­tor, point­ed out that these doc­u­ments had been iden­ti­fied as ready for pub­lic release by the Nation­al Archives, so he found it unlike­ly that they con­tained sig­nif­i­cant clas­si­fied or priv­i­leged mate­r­i­al.

...

Notwith­stand­ing the Nation­al Archives’ time­line, Repub­li­cans were still able to hold Kavanaugh’s hear­ings in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber because they had devel­oped a new strat­e­gy for pro­duc­ing doc­u­ments, one that would con­tro­ver­sial­ly rely on a for­mer pres­i­dent and an out­side lawyer.

Under a sep­a­rate pro­vi­sion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act, a for­mer pres­i­dent is per­mit­ted to request records for his own or his representative’s use. This pro­vi­sion is typ­i­cal­ly under­stood to allow the pres­i­dent to review his administration’s records for per­son­al pur­suits, like writ­ing a mem­oir. Repub­li­cans arranged to have for­mer pres­i­dent George W. Bush and his pub­lic records lawyer, Bur­ck, invoke it in Kavanaugh’s aid. Bush would request the doc­u­ments, and Burck’s legal team would coor­di­nate the process of review­ing them for priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion and turn them over to the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

While this approach was demon­stra­bly faster, Democ­rats heav­i­ly crit­i­cized it through­out the sum­mer. They object­ed to plac­ing in pri­vate hands the deter­mi­na­tion of which doc­u­ments elect­ed sen­a­tors would be able to review and also point­ed to poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est. Bur­ck is a lawyer for sev­er­al cur­rent and for­mer Trump White House offi­cials in Robert Mueller’s spe­cial coun­sel inves­ti­ga­tion, and he also worked inside the Bush White House as Kavanaugh’s deputy staff sec­re­tary.

Bur­ck man­aged the pro­duc­tion before and dur­ing Kavanaugh’s hear­ings, with attor­neys from the Depart­ment of Jus­tice assist­ing him in deter­min­ing which doc­u­ments to with­hold on claims of exec­u­tive priv­i­lege and which to pro­duce on the con­di­tion that they be main­tained as “com­mit­tee con­fi­den­tial.” The doc­u­ments iden­ti­fied in the Nation­al Archives tab­u­la­tions could include those with­held by Bur­ck.
...

And the only rea­son these high­ly sus­pi­cious look­ing emails from Miran­da to Kavanaugh haven’t already been released is because only doc­u­ments relat­ed to Kavanaugh­’s work as Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent had to be released. For some rea­son his work as staff sec­re­tary did­n’t war­rant Sen­ate review:

...
Because the Decem­ber 2003 emails were sent to Kavanaugh after he tran­si­tioned to the staff sec­re­tary role, they would have been out­side the scope of doc­u­ments pro­duced by Bur­ck to the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. Kavanaugh did not appear to reply to any of the emails, the tab­u­la­tions show.

One of the first con­tro­ver­sies of the Kavanaugh hear­ings was fought over the doc­u­ment pro­duc­tion process. Kavanaugh had a volu­mi­nous record of doc­u­ments from his six years of pub­lic ser­vice in the Bush White House, first as an asso­ciate coun­sel in the White House counsel’s office and then, after July 2003, as staff sec­re­tary. Typ­i­cal­ly, a judi­cial nominee’s White House records would be req­ui­si­tioned by the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee direct­ly from the Nation­al Archives using a pro­vi­sion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. The doc­u­ments would be gath­ered and screened for clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion and priv­i­leged mate­r­i­al in a process coor­di­nat­ed by the archivists, non­po­lit­i­cal civ­il ser­vants.

Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chair­man Chuck Grass­ley, R‑Iowa, made his first con­tro­ver­sial move by request­ing only Kavanaugh’s records for his time in the counsel’s office, exclud­ing his years of ser­vice as staff sec­re­tary. In ear­ly August, the Nation­al Archives wrote to Grass­ley that this lim­it­ed request could not be com­plet­ed before the end of Octo­ber, sig­nif­i­cant­ly lat­er than the Repub­li­cans want­ed to hold Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings.
...

All in all, it’s look­ing like a high­ly sus­pi­cious sit­u­a­tion. A high­ly sus­pi­cious sit­u­a­tion that strong­ly points towards per­jury. And don’t for­get that the Sen­ate ‘hack­ing’ scan­dal is only one of the poten­tial issues where Kavanaugh may have per­jured him­self that could be revealed by the release of these doc­u­ments.

So that’s all going to be a polit­i­cal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing sit­u­a­tion to watch play out. Will the White House stonewall the release of these doc­u­ments until after the mid-terms and will the Democ­rats man­age to turn that into a polit­i­cal lia­bil­i­ty? Might the GOP suc­cess­ful­ly frame ques­tions of per­jury as an exten­sion of the ‘Democ­rats will do any­thing to destroy a good man’s rep­u­ta­tion’ nar­ra­tive and keep their base fired up? Who knows, block­ing the release of these doc­u­ments to ‘stop the destruc­tion of Brett’ could become Trump’s new ral­ly­ing cry.

Anoth­er gen­er­al ques­tion raised by Kavanaugh­’s ascen­sion to the Supreme Court is what the impact of poten­tial­ly per­ma­nent large gen­der-gap in vot­ing pref­er­ences might do to Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Because one thing that’s empir­i­cal­ly clear at this point is that if the GOP has deter­mined that a vot­ing demo­graph­ic is over­whelm­ing­ly going to sup­port Democ­rats (like minori­ties and urban vot­ers) the GOP is going to do every­thing in its pow­er to restrict that demo­graph­ic from being able to suc­cess­ful­ly vote. Ger­ry­man­der­ing, vot­ing restric­tions on felons, and a grow­ing array of rule lim­it­ed vot­ing access are all well-honed vot­er sup­pres­sion tech­niques tar­get­ing left-wing con­stituen­cies at this point. But they aren’t tech­niques that can clear­ly tar­get women. So if we enter into an era of a per­ma­nent large gen­der-gap, where women over­whelm­ing­ly net oppose the GOP, how are female vot­ers going to be sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly sup­pressed? We know the GOP is going to try to do it so how are they going to go about it? That’s prob­a­bly a ques­tion that’s going to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant to ask going for­ward.

There was a poten­tial­ly explo­sive sto­ry last night on MSNBC when Lawrence O’Don­nell regard­ing the source of Don­ald Trump’s cur­rent wealth and whether or not he’s an actu­al bil­lion­aire: Accord­ing to a source described as “close to Deutsche Bank”, not only is Deutsche Bank in pos­ses­sion of Trump’s tax returns, but the bank is also in pos­ses­sion of loan doc­u­ments that show Trump obtained loans with for­eign oli­garchs are co-sign­ers. Specif­i­cal­ly Russ­ian oli­garchs close to Putin, accord­ing to this anony­mous source.

It’s also worth recall­ing what we’ve learned about Jared Kush­n­er’s deal­ings in 2015 and 2016 with Lev Leviev to pur­chase the old New York Times build­ing from Leviev in 2015 for $295 mil­lion. Kush­n­er received a $285 mil­lion loan from Deutsche Bank about a month before the 2016 elec­tion as part of a refi­nanc­ing deal for that pur­chase. And Deutsche Bank employ­ees have said they saw sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty in both Kush­n­er’s and Trump’s accounts that had the appear­ance of mon­ey-laun­der­ing in 2016. Recall how Leviev was involved with one of the mon­ey-laun­der­ing oper­a­tions involv­ing Man­hat­tan real estate impli­cat­ed in the Mag­nit­sky inves­ti­ga­tion. Leviev is als described as ‘close to Putin’, although he is more accu­rate­ly char­ac­ter­ized as a ‘Russ­ian-Israeli’ busi­ness­man who is report­ed­ly close to Felix Sater too.

So we already know about Kush­n­er get­ting Deutsche Bank loans in 2016 to help with pur­chase one of Lev Leviev’s prop­er­ties and this is based on Deutsche Bank employ­ees decid­ing to go to the press with this infor­ma­tion. Might this lat­est source ‘close to Deutsche Bank’ be one of those employ­ees and might Lev Leviev be the co-sign­er?

O’Don­nell then had David Cay John­ston on to talk about this news and John­ston point­ed out that, while it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble there were Russ­ian oli­garchs co-sign­ing those loans, if Trump has been in the kind of sit­u­a­tion where he need­ed for­eign oli­garchs to co-sign his loans we should­n’t assume it’s lim­it­ed to Russ­ian oli­garchs. We should be look­ing into Sau­di, UAE, or Turk­ish oli­garchs too as like­ly sus­pects. It’s impor­tant per­spec­tive to keep in mind with this sto­ry: if Trump was broke enough to need an oli­garch co-sign­er, we should­n’t assume he was exclu­sive­ly using Russ­ian oli­garchs to get his loans giv­en the glob­al nature of his shady busi­ness rela­tion­ships:

Raw Sto­ry

Tax expert David Cay John­ston warns Russ­ian oli­garchs may not be the only for­eign­ers co-sign­ing Trump’s loans

By Bob Brigham
August 27, 2019

On Tues­day evening, MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell broke a bomb­shell report that Deutsche Bank has loan appli­ca­tions from Don­ald Trump that were co-signed by Russ­ian oli­garchs.

“The source close to Deutsche Bank says that the Trump tax returns reveal that the pres­i­dent pays lit­tle to no income tax in some years,” he said. “And the source says that Deutsche Bank is in pos­ses­sion of loan doc­u­ments that show Don­ald Trump has obtained loans with co-sign­ers and that he would not have been able to obtain those loans with­out co-sign­ers.”

“The source close to Deutsche Bank says that the co-sign­ers of Don­ald Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans are Russ­ian bil­lion­aires close to Vladimir Putin,” O’Donnell report­ed.

If con­firmed, it could make impeach­ment “absolute­ly inevitable.”

For analy­sis, O’Donnell inter­viewed Pulitzer Prize-win­ning inves­tiga­tive reporter and tax expert David Cay John­ston of DC Report.

“If Deutsche Bank has Don­ald Trump’s tax returns, isn’t the only pur­pose for a bank to have tax returns is for loans?” O’Donnell asked. “Is there — I can’t think of any oth­er rea­son why the bank would have his tax returns.”

“No, the bank gets your tax returns or a tran­script of your infor­ma­tion. If you apply for a mort­gage, you sign a doc­u­ment allow­ing your bank to check with the IRS to see if the income you’ve report­ed to them is the income that you’re report­ing to the bank,” John­ston replied.

“Now, of course, Don­ald has a long his­to­ry that I’ve doc­u­ment­ed show­ing two dif­fer­ent sets of doc­u­ments to dif­fer­ent peo­ple that don’t match up, and one of the inter­est­ing ele­ments of this is they appar­ent­ly have drafts as well as signed, filed tax returns. In exam­in­ing the dif­fer­ence between those could be reveal­ing about Donald’s behav­ior,” he explained. “Remem­ber, a tax return is basi­cal­ly the start­ing point for an inves­ti­ga­tion, it’s not the end.”

Sin­gle source report tonight by @Lawrence, when I was his open­ing guest, of Russ­ian co-sign­ers on Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans fits w/ what I’ve been say­ing for years.

Judge should review loan docs in cham­bers. If true, judge can – and should – put in pub­lic record ASAP.

.

— David Cay John­ston (@DavidCayJ) August 28, 2019

“And, David, you have stud­ied Don­ald Trump’s wealth, Don­ald Trump’s earn­ings over time. You’re one of the first peo­ple to punc­ture the myth of Don­ald Trump as a bil­lion­aire. We heard in court the lawyers for the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives who are seek­ing this infor­ma­tion, and they say they’re seek­ing it in a Russ­ian mon­ey-laun­der­ing inves­ti­ga­tion. That’s why they say they’re seek­ing it,” O’Donnell report­ed. “If those loan doc­u­ments show co-sign­ers, let’s just go to that, your under­stand­ing of Don­ald Trump’s finances by the time he’s try­ing to get loans from Deutsche Bank after every oth­er bank has turned him down. Would it make sense that he needs co-sign­ers at that point?”

“Oh, absolute­ly,” John­ston replied.

“And Don­ald I’ve argued on your show and oth­ers for sev­er­al years now that Deutsche Bank in mak­ing these loans had to have some­one in the back­ground that was guar­an­tee­ing these loans. It would be sur­pris­ing if they’re actu­al­ly co-sign­ers. That would be absolute­ly aston­ish­ing and I would think man­date his removal from office,” he con­tin­ued.

“David, know­ing what you know about Don­ald Trump’s finances as you’ve stud­ied them, when Don­ald Trump — if he came to the point where he had to look around for back­ers for his loans, co-sign­ers for his loans, is Rus­sia where he would end up look­ing?” O’Donnell asked.

“Well, it would be the best place for him to go and it fits with the family’s own pub­lic state­ments — that they’ve tried to walk back since — about get­ting lots of assets from Rus­sia,” John­ston replied. “But, you know, Don­ald may well have oth­er back­ers. The next places to look would be the Saud­is, the Emi­ratis and per­haps some peo­ple in Turkey, giv­en Michael Fly­nn, his Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er, hav­ing been on the pay­roll ille­gal­ly of Turk­ish inter­ests when he was in the White House.”

...

———-
“Tax expert David Cay John­ston warns Russ­ian oli­garchs may not be the only for­eign­ers co-sign­ing Trump’s loans” by Bob Brigham, Raw Sto­ry, 08/27/2019

““Well, it would be the best place for him to go and it fits with the family’s own pub­lic state­ments — that they’ve tried to walk back since — about get­ting lots of assets from Rus­sia,” John­ston replied. “But, you know, Don­ald may well have oth­er back­ers. The next places to look would be the Saud­is, the Emi­ratis and per­haps some peo­ple in Turkey, giv­en Michael Fly­nn, his Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er, hav­ing been on the pay­roll ille­gal­ly of Turk­ish inter­ests when he was in the White House.””

That’s some good advice from David Cay John­ston: don’t assume this sto­ry ends with a Russ­ian oli­garch. If there’s one there’s one oli­garch co-sign­er prob­a­bly more and there’s no rea­son to believe they’re all Rus­sians.

It’s also worth not­ing that we know the one per­son who could tell us the iden­ti­ties of any oli­garch co-sign­ers for Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans for any loans that took place before 2009: Justin Kennedy, Trump’s banker at Deutsche Bank until 2009 who report­ed­ly worked close­ly with Trump dur­ing a peri­od when Deutsche Bank was the only bank Trump could find to loan to him. So these mys­tery oli­garch co-sign­ers may explain why Deutsche Bank was will­ing to make loans to some­one no oth­er bank would touch.

And giv­en the curi­ous rela­tion­ship between Trump, Kush­n­er, and Leviev involv­ing Man­hat­tan real estate deals and Deutsche Bank loans and the fact that Leviev was impli­cat­ed in the mon­ey-laun­der­ing activ­i­ties uncov­ered by Sergei Mag­nit­sky involv­ing Man­hat­tan real estate, it’s worth not­ing that the peri­od when Justin Kennedy was Trump’s banker at Deutsche Bank would have over­lap with the peri­od when Mag­nit­sky dis­cov­ered Man­hat­tan real estate was being used for a mon­ey-laun­der­ing. So if it turns out the anony­mous source was refer­ring to loans Trump received from Deutsche Bank co-signed by Russ­ian oli­garchs were loans from that pre-2009 peri­od when Justin was Trump’s banker, that raise all sorts of fas­ci­nat­ing new ques­tions about Trump’s pos­si­ble role in those Man­hat­tan real estate mon­ey-laun­der­ing oper­a­tions Mag­nit­sky uncov­ered. It would also obvi­ous­ly raise some fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions about Justin’s pos­si­ble role in all that too.

Welp, it looks like that sto­ry bro­ken by Lawrence O’Don­nell on his MSNBC show Tues­day night about Pres­i­dent Trump get­ting loans from Deutsche Bank that were co-signed by a Russ­ian oli­garch ‘close to Putin’ is already being retract­ed. Although the retrac­tion isn’t a refu­ta­tion of the sto­ry. Instead, Lawrence O’Don­nell sim­ply acknowl­edged that the sto­ry was­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly ready for pub­lic dis­cus­sion when he first brought it up on his show because it had­n’t yet gone through the ver­i­fi­ca­tion stan­dards. As O’Don­nell put it on his show last night, “Last night on this show I dis­cussed infor­ma­tion that was­n’t ready for report­ing. I did not go through the rig­or­ous ver­i­fi­ca­tion and stan­dards process here at MSNBC before repeat­ing what I heard from my source. Had it gone through that process I would not have been per­mit­ted to report it. I should not have said it on air or post­ed it on Twit­ter. I was wrong to do so.“ In fair­ness, if you watch the ini­tial report where O’Don­nell reveals this scoop at the begin­ning of the show he repeat­ed­ly empha­sizes that it’s based on a sin­gle source and couch­es the sto­ry with phras­es like “if true”, so it was­n’t being pre­sent­ed as a well-sourced sto­ry.

And note that, while O’Don­nell does say, “Had it gone through that process I would not have been per­mit­ted to report it,” that state­ment does­n’t appear to indi­cate that MSNBC had sub­se­quent­ly deter­mined that the sto­ry was inac­cu­rate. O’Don­nell goes on to say that they don’t know if the sto­ry is accu­rate at this point, say­ing, “Tonight we are retract­ing the sto­ry. We don‘t know whether the infor­ma­tion is inac­cu­rate. But the fact is, we do know it was­n’t ready for broad­cast, and for that I apol­o­gize.“ That makes it sound like the rea­son he would­n’t have been able to report on the sto­ry even after the sto­ry went through a ver­i­fi­ca­tion process is prob­a­bly because it was a sto­ry based on a sin­gle anony­mous source.

So the ques­tion of whether or not Trump was get­ting his Deutsche Bank loans co-signed by for­eign oli­garchs remains a very open ques­tion. But this retrac­tion also opens up some more inter­est­ing ques­tions. First, was this anoth­er instance where an anony­mous source claims some sort of explo­sive Trump tie in to Rus­sia that nev­er pans out? It cer­tain­ly would­n’t be the first time it hap­pened. For exam­ple, there was the ‘Paul Man­afort was caught vis­it­ing Julian Assange at the Ecuado­ran embassy’ sto­ry in the Guardian that appears to have been dis­in­for­ma­tion being inject­ed by an anony­mous source. There was also the anony­mous­ly sourced report from McClatchy — claim­ing that Mueller’s team did indeed have evi­dence that the infa­mous Prague meet­ing between Michael Cohen and Russ­ian intel­li­gence real­ly did hap­pen — that appears to have been false and yet those reporters stood by the sources say­ing they had been impor­tant sources on oth­er sto­ries. And then there was the anony­mous­ly sourced Dai­ly Beast piece assert­ing that evi­dence of the GRU being behind “Guc­cifer 2.0” was found when a GRU offi­cer neglect­ed to turn on his VPN when log­ging in to Guc­cifer 2.0’s Twit­ter account and this cre­at­ed a dig­i­tal trail going back to the GRU’s head­quar­ters. The claims in that sto­ry have nev­er sur­faced in the released Mueller report despite it being poten­tial­ly com­pelling evi­dence. And those are just some of the exam­ples of sto­ries with explo­sive claims that appear to pro­vide pow­er­ful evi­dence of a Trump-Krem­lin con­nec­tion that were based on anony­mous sources that nev­er panned out. Might this retract­ed sto­ry be anoth­er exam­ple of that pat­tern?

Also keep in mind anoth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty: Trump him­self was the source as part of a dirty trick designed to pre­emp­tive­ly deflate a real sto­ry while dis­cred­it­ing the media. Recall that this already appears to have hap­pened back in March of 2017 when David Cay John­ston was giv­en a copy of Trump’s 2005 tax returns from an anony­mous source. The tax doc­u­ments were sent to John­ston in the mail and the source remained anony­mous to John­ston him­self. In the end, the sto­ry appeared to show Trump paid the Alter­na­tive Min­i­mum Tax that year which, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing, could be worse new for Trump. At least he paid some­thing. And it was that com­bi­na­tion of the com­plete­ly anony­mous source of these 2005 doc­u­ments and the fact that they weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly damn­ing doc­u­ments that led to much spec­u­la­tion over whether or not Trump him­self mailed John­ston the doc­u­ments as a means of shap­ing the nar­ra­tive around his tax returns. Trump already had a his­to­ry of assum­ing fake per­sonas (John Bar­ron) to feed reporters sto­ries about him­self which only fueled the spec­u­la­tion that the source for these tax returns was indeed Trump.

Giv­en that his­to­ry of both anony­mous sources — like­ly con­nect­ed to US law enforce­ment or intel­li­gence — and Trump him­self feed­ing reporters dubi­ous sto­ries that appear to designed to shape the nar­ra­tive around Trump, we have to ask: If indeed O’Don­nel­l’s retract­ed report ends up nev­er pan­ning out, was the anony­mous source one of the same anony­mous sources for the oth­er anony­mous­ly sourced sto­ries with explo­sive #TrumpRus­sia claims that now appear to be dis­in­for­ma­tion? Or was it Trump him­self or some­one close to Trump try­ing to pre­emp­tive­ly dis­cred­it a real sto­ry they fear com­ing out?:

Politi­co

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell apol­o­gizes, retracts report on Trump finances

By QUINT FORGEY and MATTHEW CHOI

08/28/2019 03:47 PM EDT
Updat­ed 08/29/2019 08:22 AM EDT

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednes­day retract­ed his report­ing that claimed Russ­ian oli­garchs had co-signed for Deutsche Bank loans to Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, and he apol­o­gized for not adher­ing to pro­fes­sion­al stan­dards.

“Last night on this show I dis­cussed infor­ma­tion that was­n’t ready for report­ing,“ O‘Donnell said at the top of his show Wednes­day night. “I did not go through the rig­or­ous ver­i­fi­ca­tion and stan­dards process here at MSNBC before repeat­ing what I heard from my source. Had it gone through that process I would not have been per­mit­ted to report it. I should not have said it on air or post­ed it on Twit­ter. I was wrong to do so.“

“Tonight we are retract­ing the sto­ry,” he added. “We don‘t know whether the infor­ma­tion is inac­cu­rate. But the fact is, we do know it wasn‘t ready for broad­cast, and for that I apol­o­gize.“

O’Donnell said at the out­set of his week­night news broad­cast on Tues­day that a sin­gle anony­mous source close to Deutsche Bank told him the Ger­man lender had obtained Trump’s tax returns, which “show that the pres­i­dent pays very lit­tle income tax.”

He said the source also told him that Trump‘s “loan doc­u­ments there show that he has co-sign­ers. That’s how he was able to obtain those loans. And that the co-sign­ers are Russ­ian oli­garchs.”

O’Donnell con­clud­ed: “That would explain, it seems to me, every kind word Don­ald Trump has ever said about Rus­sia and Vladimir Putin, if true — and I stress the ‘if true’ part of this.”

Trump on Thurs­day morn­ing went on the attack against O’Don­nell and used the inci­dent to con­demn the broad­er media.

“Crazy Lawrence O’Donnell, who has been call­ing me wrong from even before I announced my run for the Pres­i­den­cy, even being pre­vi­ous­ly forced by NBC to apol­o­gize, which he did while cry­ing, for things he said about me & The Appren­tice, was again forced to apol­o­gize, this time for the most ridicu­lous claim of all, that Rus­sia, Rus­sia, Rus­sia, or Russ­ian oli­garchs, co-signed loan doc­u­ments for me, a guar­an­tee,” Trump wrote. “Total­ly false, as is vir­tu­al­ly every­thing else he, and much of the rest of the LameStream Media, has said about me for years. ALL APOLOGIZE!”

Before O’Donnell issued his retrac­tion and apol­o­gy on Wednes­day, a lawyer for Trump demand­ed that NBCU­ni­ver­sal and O’Donnell retract the report.

“These state­ments are false and defam­a­to­ry, and extreme­ly dam­ag­ing,” attor­ney Charles Hard­er wrote in a let­ter dat­ed Wednes­day on behalf of the pres­i­dent and the Trump Orga­ni­za­tion to Susan Wein­er and Daniel Kum­mer, in-house attor­neys at NBCU­ni­ver­sal.

“The only bor­row­ers under these loans are Trump enti­ties, and Mr. Trump is the only guar­an­tor,” Hard­er wrote in the let­ter, obtained by POLITICO. “Numer­ous doc­u­ments for each of these loans are also record­ed, pub­licly avail­able and search­able online.”

In his let­ter, Hard­er request­ed that O’Donnell and NBCU­ni­ver­sal “imme­di­ate­ly and promi­nent­ly retract, cor­rect and apol­o­gize for the … false and defam­a­to­ry state­ments.”

If they do not con­firm their inten­tion to do so with­in 24 hours, Hard­er warned, his clients will be left “with no alter­na­tive but to con­sid­er their legal options which could include imme­di­ate legal pro­ceed­ings against” O’Donnell and NBCU­ni­ver­sal.

“Should that occur, my clients would pur­sue all avail­able caus­es of action and seek all avail­able dam­ages and oth­er legal reme­dies to the max­i­mum extent per­mit­ted by law,” Hard­er wrote.

Before his on-air apol­o­gy, O‘Donnell had already tweet­ed ear­ly Wednes­day after­noon that he regret­ted the report.

“Last night I made an error in judg­ment by report­ing an item about the president’s finances that didn’t go through our rig­or­ous ver­i­fi­ca­tion and stan­dards process,” he wrote on Twit­ter. “I shouldn’t have report­ed it and I was wrong to dis­cuss it on the air. I will address the issue on my show tonight.”

Asked to respond to Harder’s let­ter and O’Donnell’s report­ing, White House press sec­re­tary Stephanie Grisham said in a state­ment: “This is one of the rea­sons that a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans have lost trust in the media. Instead of apply­ing ethics and stan­dards to their report­ing, jour­nal­ists and left-wing out­lets have weaponized the media, using it to attack and harass peo­ple with lit­tle to no regard for the truth.”

...

———-

“MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell apol­o­gizes, retracts report on Trump finances” by QUINT FORGEY and MATTHEW CHOI; Politi­co; 08/28/2019

“Tonight we are retract­ing the sto­ry,” he added. “We don‘t know whether the infor­ma­tion is inac­cu­rate. But the fact is, we do know it wasn‘t ready for broad­cast, and for that I apol­o­gize.“

The sto­ry has­n’t been debunked yet. But if it does­n’t even­tu­al­ly get con­firmed it’s going to be hard to avoid sus­pect­ing it was anoth­er attempt to play the media and inject dis­in­for­ma­tion into the cov­er­age of Trump and the broad­er #TrumpRus­sia sto­ry. Still, even if the sto­ry gets con­clu­sive­ly debunked we still won’t know who was behind it or what the intent was.

Although it’s worth not­ing that if this was indeed a dis­in­for­ma­tion piece orig­i­nat­ing for the anony­mous sources of those pre­vi­ous appar­ent dis­in­for­ma­tion pieces rely­ing on anony­mous sources to make explo­sive #TrumpRus­sia claims, it would be rather slop­py dis­in­for­ma­tion attempt pre­cise­ly because it was a sin­gle source. The prob­a­ble rea­son O’Don­nell said he would­n’t have been allowed to report the sto­ry even if it had gone through the vet­ting process is because it was still just based on a sin­gle source. When we look at past sto­ries of this nature that did­n’t pan out there was always a ref­er­ence to mul­ti­ple anony­mous sources, pre­sum­ably because it’s required for a sto­ry to get pub­lished. So the fact that this was just a sin­gle anony­mous source sug­gests it did­n’t orig­i­nate from the anony­mous sources who pushed those pre­vi­ous­ly ques­tion­able sto­ries. Trump, on the oth­er hand, prob­a­bly would­n’t be think­ing about that detail if he turns out to be the source.

Also keep in mind that if this sto­ry was being pushed by Trump in order to pre­empt news he fears com­ing out, that would make David Cay John­ston’s spec­u­la­tion that non-Russ­ian oli­garchs (from Sau­di Ara­bia, the UAE, Turkey, etc) may have also been co-sign­ers for Trump’s loans a lot more like­ly to be cor­rect. If Trump real­ly was using Russ­ian oli­garch co-sign­ers it seems like he would be unlike­ly to even bring up the top­ic even it was part of a dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tion. But if he was using non-Russ­ian oli­garch co-sign­ers and feared that sto­ry would come out, push­ing a sto­ry about Russ­ian co-sign­ers makes a lot more sense.

All in all, whether or not this sto­ry ends up being true or ends up being part of a dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tion, either sce­nario seems entire­ly plau­si­ble. That’s kind of the big sto­ry here. And also the meta-sto­ry.

Pres­i­dent Trump gave his #UkraineGate impeach­ment acquit­tal ‘vic­to­ry’ speech today. It was a speech that could be viewed as a kind of infor­mal start of the 2020 cam­paign sea­son, a cam­paign sea­son that’s poised to large­ly be a nation­al ref­er­en­dum on Trump him­self. But giv­en how the impeach­ment process played out in the Sen­ate — with near­ly all of the Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors vot­ing not to call wit­ness­es and Mitt Rom­ney mak­ing a sur­prise vote to con­vict Trump — of the inter­est­ing ques­tions going for­ward is the extent to which the polar­ized nature of the impeach­ment process turns the 2020 elec­tion into a ref­er­en­dum on the broad­er Repub­li­can Par­ty par­ty and whether or not its will­ing and able to serve as a mean­ing­ful check on a Trump White House. In oth­er words, one of the sleep­er issues of the 2020 elec­tion could sim­ply be the con­cept of checks and bal­ances. Do Amer­i­cans want an unchecked Trump for anoth­er four years?

At the same time, we can be con­fi­dent that the right-wing is going to be using its full media might to turn the 2020 elec­tion into a ref­er­en­dum on ‘free­dom vs social­ism’, regard­less of who the Democ­rats ulti­mate­ly nom­i­nate. And it’s that com­bi­na­tion of like­ly 2020 themes — Trump and his unchecked dom­i­na­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty vs fear­mon­ger­ing about ‘social­ism’ — that makes the fol­low­ing arti­cle extra inter­est­ing in the con­text of the 2020 elec­tion. The arti­cle is about the pro­found intel­lec­tu­al sway Peter Thiel holds not only over today’s Repub­li­can Par­ty, includ­ing Trump him­self, but also his shap­ing of the future Repub­li­can Par­ty. And it’s about Thiel’s ide­o­log­i­cal jour­ney from a hard core lib­er­tar­i­an to some­one who is very much in favor or ‘Big Government’...when it suite him. As the arti­cle describes, Thiel has devel­oped a vision of a strong, robust cen­tral gov­ern­ment, but only as long as this strong cen­tral gov­ern­ment is lim­it­ed to pro­mot­ing the inter­ests of wealthy cap­i­tal­ists like him­self or he gets to per­son­al­ly prof­it from the the gov­ern­ment activ­i­ty, like his invest­ment in Palan­tir. As the arti­cle describes it, Thiel’s vision for a strong cen­tral gov­ern­ment is remark­able sim­i­lar to the gov­ern­ment of Chi­na, except with­out Chi­na’s poli­cies of help­ing aver­age cit­i­zens. And Thiel’s vision for cre­at­ing the kind of soci­o­log­i­cal ‘glue’ to hold a nation togeth­er is Trumpian-style blus­tery ‘Amer­i­can nation­al­ism’ that appears to most­ly involve feel-good chest-thump­ing and, iron­i­cal­ly, attacks on Chi­na. It’s that seem­ing ide­o­log­i­cal inco­her­ence — a lib­er­tar­i­an in favor of a strong, author­i­tar­i­an cen­tral gov­ern­ment — that high­lights the nature of the mod­ern Repub­li­can Par­ty’s def­i­n­i­tion of ‘free­dom’: it’s free­dom for fas­cist oli­garchs to take over gov­ern­ment and soci­ety and run it as they see fit, with no real checks on their pow­er:

New York Mag­a­zine
Intel­li­gencer

Peter Thiel’s Lat­est Ven­ture Is the Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment

By Max Read
Jan. 21, 2020

In mid-Jan­u­ary, at the con­clu­sion of a spe­cial meet­ing of the Mont Pelerin Soci­ety, the ven­er­a­ble free-mar­ket orga­ni­za­tion, after appear­ances by Con­doleez­za Rice and Niall Fer­gu­son, Peter Thiel was slat­ed to give clos­ing remarks on “Big Tech and the Ques­tion of Scale.” The keynote was the lat­est in a series of pub­lic remarks and inter­views in which the Pay­Pal founder and Face­book investor showed his promi­nence in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics.

...

But unlike oth­er major right-wing donors, Thiel seems intent on being known for his intel­lect as much as his wal­let. Over the past year, he has played the role of out­raged patri­ot, endors­ing Trump’s trade war and bizarrely accus­ing Google of “seem­ing­ly trea­so­nous” behav­ior in its Chi­na deal­ings. He inter­mit­tent­ly lec­tures at Stan­ford. Van­i­ty Fair has writ­ten about his hot-tick­et L.A. din­ner par­ties, where guests (includ­ing, at least once, the pres­i­dent) hold “deep dis­cus­sions” about the issues of the day. Last year, George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor and econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen called Thiel “the most influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­al with oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an intel­lec­tu­als.”

This emerg­ing Repub­li­can mach­er is a far cry from the ultra­l­ib­er­tar­i­an sedi­tion­ist who used to encour­age entre­pre­neurs to exit the Unit­ed States and start their own coun­tries at sea. But Thiel is no stranger to incon­sis­ten­cy. For decades, he cul­ti­vat­ed a rep­u­ta­tion as a rad­i­cal Sil­i­con Val­ley anti-sta­tist; in 2009, he wrote that Face­book, in which he was an ear­ly investor, might “cre­ate the space for new modes of dis­sent and new ways to form com­mu­ni­ties not bound­ed by his­tor­i­cal nation-states.” Yet, six years ear­li­er, he had co-found­ed the most aggres­sive­ly “sta­tist” com­pa­ny in the 21st cen­tu­ry: Palan­tir, the glob­al sur­veil­lance com­pa­ny used, for exam­ple, to mon­i­tor Iran­ian com­pli­ance with the nuclear deal. Can you real­ly claim to uphold indi­vid­ual free­dom if you’re prof­it­ing from a mass-sur­veil­lance gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor? Are you real­ly a lib­er­tar­i­an if you’re a promi­nent sup­port­er of Trump?

It would be easy enough to chalk up the seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion of Thiel’s thought to oppor­tunism or pet­ti­ness (he famous­ly fund­ed a law­suit, in secret, to bank­rupt Gawk­er, my for­mer employ­er) or per­haps even a mind less ambidex­trous than inco­her­ent. But it’s worth try­ing to under­stand his polit­i­cal jour­ney. Thiel’s increas­ing promi­nence as both an intel­lec­tu­al in and bene­fac­tor of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment — and his sta­tus as a leg­end in Sil­i­con Val­ley — makes him at least as impor­tant as more pub­lic tech CEOs like Mark Zucker­berg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zucker­berg: Recent reports sug­gest Thiel was the most influ­en­tial voice in Facebook’s deci­sion to allow politi­cians to lie in ads on its plat­form. What Thiel believes now is like­ly to influ­ence the next gen­er­a­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers — if not what the pres­i­dent believes the next day.

How to square Thiel’s post-nation­al tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an­ism with his blood­thirsty author­i­tar­i­an nation­al­ism? Strange­ly, he wants both. Today’s Thielism is a lib­er­tar­i­an­ism with an abstract com­mit­ment to per­son­al free­dom but no par­tic­u­lar affec­tion for democ­ra­cy — or even for “pol­i­tics” as a process by which peo­ple might make col­lec­tive deci­sions about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er and resources. Thiel has wed him­self to state pow­er not in an effort to par­tic­i­pate in the polit­i­cal process but as an end run around it.

If we want­ed to con­struct a geneal­o­gy of late Thielism, one place to start might be a rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle-read essay Thiel wrote in 2015 for the con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious jour­nal First Things. Thiel is a Chris­t­ian, though clear­ly a het­ero­dox believ­er, and in “Against Edenism,” he makes the case that “sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy are nat­ur­al allies” to what he sees as the inborn “opti­mism” of Chris­tian­i­ty. Chris­tians are nat­ur­al utopi­ans, Thiel believes, and because “there will be no return­ing” to the prelap­sar­i­an par­adise of Eden, they should sup­port tech­no­log­i­cal progress, although it may mean join­ing with “athe­ist opti­mists,” per­son­i­fied in the essay by Goethe’s Faust. At least Faust was “moti­vat­ed to try to do some­thing about every­thing that was wrong with the world,” even if he did, you know, sell his immor­tal soul to the Dev­il.

Thiel sug­gests that growth is essen­tial­ly a reli­gious oblig­a­tion — “build­ing the king­dom of heav­en today, here on Earth” — and that stag­na­tion is, well, demon­ic — the chaot­ic sea “where the demon Leviathan lives.” This bina­ry appears fre­quent­ly in Thiel’s writ­ing, where “progress” is always aligned with tech­nol­o­gy and the indi­vid­ual, and “chaos” with pol­i­tics and the mass­es. If Thiel has an apoc­a­lyp­tic fear of sta­sis, you can begin to see why his pol­i­tics have changed over the past few years, as it has become less clear whether the boom­ing tech­nol­o­gy indus­try has actu­al­ly added much to the econ­o­my or to human hap­pi­ness, let alone demon­strat­ed “progress.”

Where some of his fel­low lib­er­tar­i­ans have moved toward the cen­ter, attempt­ing to build a “lib­er­al­tar­i­an­ism” with a rel­a­tive­ly strong wel­fare state and mass demo­c­ra­t­ic appeal, oth­ers have found them­selves artic­u­lat­ing a ver­sion of what Tyler Cowen, in a recent blog post, called “state capac­i­ty lib­er­tar­i­an­ism,” a con­cept he says was influ­enced by Thiel’s think­ing. In its essence, it’s the admis­sion that “strong states remain nec­es­sary to main­tain and extend cap­i­tal­ism and mar­kets.”. Where Thiel would dif­fer with state-capac­i­ty lib­er­tar­i­ans like Cowen is that he isn’t mere­ly a believ­er in strong states in the abstract as agents of eco­nom­ic progress. He is pur­port­ed to be a specif­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can “nation­al con­ser­v­a­tive,” at least per his con­fer­ence-keynote sched­ule. Thiel has sug­gest­ed in the past that such a con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al­ism is the only thing that can pro­vide the cohe­sion nec­es­sary to re-cre­ate a strong state. “Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics,” he sug­gest­ed in an address at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, the free-mar­ket think tank, is a dis­trac­tion that stops us from act­ing at “the scale that we need to be focus­ing on for this coun­try.” MAGA pol­i­tics is the only way to grow.

This is the con­text in which it makes sense for a gay, cos­mopoli­tan lib­er­tar­i­an like Thiel to throw his sup­port behind a red-meat con­ser­v­a­tive like Sen­ate can­di­date Kris Kobach of Kansas. The tech­no­log­i­cal progress Thiel asso­ciates with his own per­son­al free­dom and pow­er is threat­ened by mar­ket fail­ure and polit­i­cal chaos. A strong cen­tral­ized state can restore order, breed progress, and open up new tech­nolo­gies, mar­kets, and finan­cial instru­ments from which Thiel might prof­it. And as long as it allows Thiel to make mon­ey and host din­ner par­ties, who cares if its bor­ders are cru­el­ly and ruth­less­ly enforced? Who cares if its leader is an auto­crat? Who cares, for that mat­ter, if it’s demo­c­ra­t­ic? In fact, it might be bet­ter if it weren’t: If the left’s com­mit­ment to “iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” is divi­sive enough to pre­vent tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment, its threat out­strips the kind of bel­li­cose reli­gious author­i­tar­i­an­ism that Kobach rep­re­sents. A Thielist gov­ern­ment would be aggres­sive toward Chi­na, a coun­try Thiel is obsessed with — while also seem­ing, in its cen­tral­ized author­i­ty and close ties between gov­ern­ment and indus­try, very much like it.

There is, of course, anoth­er con­text in which it makes sense for Thiel to join forces with social con­ser­v­a­tives and nation­al­ists: his bank account. Thiel’s ide­o­log­i­cal shifts have matched his finan­cial self-inter­est at every turn. His new­found patri­o­tism is prob­a­bly best under­stood as an alliance of con­ve­nience. The U.S. gov­ern­ment is the ves­sel best suit­ed for reach­ing his immor­tal tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an future (and a low­er tax rate), and he is hap­py to ride it as long as it and he are trav­el­ing in the same direc­tion. And if it doesn’t work out, well, he did effec­tive­ly buy New Zealand cit­i­zen­ship.

———–

“Peter Thiel’s Lat­est Ven­ture Is the Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment” by Max Read; New York Mag­a­zine; 01/21/2020

“It would be easy enough to chalk up the seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion of Thiel’s thought to oppor­tunism or pet­ti­ness (he famous­ly fund­ed a law­suit, in secret, to bank­rupt Gawk­er, my for­mer employ­er) or per­haps even a mind less ambidex­trous than inco­her­ent. But it’s worth try­ing to under­stand his polit­i­cal jour­ney. Thiel’s increas­ing promi­nence as both an intel­lec­tu­al in and bene­fac­tor of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment — and his sta­tus as a leg­end in Sil­i­con Val­ley — makes him at least as impor­tant as more pub­lic tech CEOs like Mark Zucker­berg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zucker­berg: Recent reports sug­gest Thiel was the most influ­en­tial voice in Facebook’s deci­sion to allow politi­cians to lie in ads on its plat­form. What Thiel believes now is like­ly to influ­ence the next gen­er­a­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers — if not what the pres­i­dent believes the next day.”

Thiel is the guy not just whis­per­ing in the ear of Pres­i­dent Trump. He’s guid­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers. And he appears to have come up with an ide­ol­o­gy that com­bines lib­er­tar­i­an­ism when it comes to restraints on busi­ness­es with ‘con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al­ism’ to pro­vide the social cohe­sion nec­es­sary to main­tain a strong state. Thiel approves of a strong cen­tral gov­ern­ment action, but only as long as that action is done to main­tain mar­kets and sup­port ‘growth’. Which is basi­cal­ly fas­cism: gov­ern­ment should be pow­er­ful, but only as long as that pow­er is used to ben­e­fit the busi­ness­es of pow­er­ful indi­vid­u­als like Thiel. Social­ism reserved for the bil­lion­aire elites with no real checks on their pow­er. That’s Trump’s/Thiel’s ver­sion of ‘free­dom’:

...

How to square Thiel’s post-nation­al tech­no-lib­er­tar­i­an­ism with his blood­thirsty author­i­tar­i­an nation­al­ism? Strange­ly, he wants both. Today’s Thielism is a lib­er­tar­i­an­ism with an abstract com­mit­ment to per­son­al free­dom but no par­tic­u­lar affec­tion for democ­ra­cy — or even for “pol­i­tics” as a process by which peo­ple might make col­lec­tive deci­sions about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er and resources. Thiel has wed him­self to state pow­er not in an effort to par­tic­i­pate in the polit­i­cal process but as an end run around it.

...

Thiel sug­gests that growth is essen­tial­ly a reli­gious oblig­a­tion — “build­ing the king­dom of heav­en today, here on Earth” — and that stag­na­tion is, well, demon­ic — the chaot­ic sea “where the demon Leviathan lives.” This bina­ry appears fre­quent­ly in Thiel’s writ­ing, where “progress” is always aligned with tech­nol­o­gy and the indi­vid­ual, and “chaos” with pol­i­tics and the mass­es. If Thiel has an apoc­a­lyp­tic fear of sta­sis, you can begin to see why his pol­i­tics have changed over the past few years, as it has become less clear whether the boom­ing tech­nol­o­gy indus­try has actu­al­ly added much to the econ­o­my or to human hap­pi­ness, let alone demon­strat­ed “progress.”

Where some of his fel­low lib­er­tar­i­ans have moved toward the cen­ter, attempt­ing to build a “lib­er­al­tar­i­an­ism” with a rel­a­tive­ly strong wel­fare state and mass demo­c­ra­t­ic appeal, oth­ers have found them­selves artic­u­lat­ing a ver­sion of what Tyler Cowen, in a recent blog post, called “state capac­i­ty lib­er­tar­i­an­ism,” a con­cept he says was influ­enced by Thiel’s think­ing. In its essence, it’s the admis­sion that “strong states remain nec­es­sary to main­tain and extend cap­i­tal­ism and mar­kets.”. Where Thiel would dif­fer with state-capac­i­ty lib­er­tar­i­ans like Cowen is that he isn’t mere­ly a believ­er in strong states in the abstract as agents of eco­nom­ic progress. He is pur­port­ed to be a specif­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can “nation­al con­ser­v­a­tive,” at least per his con­fer­ence-keynote sched­ule. Thiel has sug­gest­ed in the past that such a con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al­ism is the only thing that can pro­vide the cohe­sion nec­es­sary to re-cre­ate a strong state. “Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics,” he sug­gest­ed in an address at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, the free-mar­ket think tank, is a dis­trac­tion that stops us from act­ing at “the scale that we need to be focus­ing on for this coun­try.” MAGA pol­i­tics is the only way to grow.

This is the con­text in which it makes sense for a gay, cos­mopoli­tan lib­er­tar­i­an like Thiel to throw his sup­port behind a red-meat con­ser­v­a­tive like Sen­ate can­di­date Kris Kobach of Kansas. The tech­no­log­i­cal progress Thiel asso­ciates with his own per­son­al free­dom and pow­er is threat­ened by mar­ket fail­ure and polit­i­cal chaos. A strong cen­tral­ized state can restore order, breed progress, and open up new tech­nolo­gies, mar­kets, and finan­cial instru­ments from which Thiel might prof­it. And as long as it allows Thiel to make mon­ey and host din­ner par­ties, who cares if its bor­ders are cru­el­ly and ruth­less­ly enforced? Who cares if its leader is an auto­crat? Who cares, for that mat­ter, if it’s demo­c­ra­t­ic? In fact, it might be bet­ter if it weren’t: If the left’s com­mit­ment to “iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” is divi­sive enough to pre­vent tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment, its threat out­strips the kind of bel­li­cose reli­gious author­i­tar­i­an­ism that Kobach rep­re­sents. A Thielist gov­ern­ment would be aggres­sive toward Chi­na, a coun­try Thiel is obsessed with — while also seem­ing, in its cen­tral­ized author­i­ty and close ties between gov­ern­ment and indus­try, very much like it.
...

It’s a remark­ably Trumpian ide­ol­o­gy. But it’s the ide­ol­o­gy Peter Thiel, not Trump, is active­ly build­ing for the long-term with the Repub­li­can Par­ty. That’s why fig­ures like Peter Thiel real­ly should be part of the 2020 ref­er­en­dum on Trump: Thiel artic­u­lates the ide­ol­o­gy that guides Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. And Thiel is kind of the ulti­mate exam­ple of the kind of ‘elit­ist’ the Amer­i­can pub­lic hates. He’s the kind of elit­ist who has repeat­ed­ly made clear his dis­dain for aver­age peo­ple and repeat­ed­ly made clear that he’s per­fect­ly com­fort­able buy­ing off gov­ern­ment for his own per­son­al prof­it. And his life mis­sion is to put him­self out­side the bound­ary of gov­ern­ment con­trol. He wants to run the gov­ern­ment so he can be above it while he prof­its from it. Recall how we’ve already seen how Thiel refers to the Enlight­en­ment as a peri­od of “intel­lec­tu­al slum­ber and amne­sia” and draws inspi­ra­tion from Nazi legal schol­ar Carl Schmitt. That’s the guy guid­ing the intel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion of Repub­li­can Par­ty. While Trump may have his fin­ger on the pulse of the aver­age Repub­li­can vot­er, it’s Thiel who rep­re­sents the beat­ing heart of the actu­al Repub­li­can Par­ty pow­er elite. And it’s Thiel’s mod­el of gov­ern­ment that Trump is tru­ly fol­low­ing: giv­ing ‘con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al­ism’ rhetor­i­cal red meat to keep the mass­es in line while actu­al poli­cies are designed by and for the oli­garchs. It’s that warped super-vil­lain ver­sion of ‘free­dom’ that real­ly should be at the core of the 2020 nation­al ref­er­en­dum on Trump and the Repub­li­cans. Free­dom for the fas­cists like Thiel to cap­ture soci­ety and run it as they see fit.

Buz­zFeed has an new piece out on Peter Thiel that rais­es some inter­est­ing ques­tions about the nature and scope of Thiel’s polit­i­cal activ­i­ties going for­ward. The arti­cle describes a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown July 29, 2016 din­ner par­ty of Alt Right fig­ures host­ed by Thiel with Kevin DeAn­na as the fea­tured guest. Thiel and DeAn­na report­ed­ly met for the first time at the par­ty. Recall how DeAn­na is one of the lead­ing intel­lec­tu­als on the Alt Right and a key fig­ure in the long-stand­ing push by the far right to main­stream itself with­in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

The arti­cle depicts that din­ner par­ty as per­haps the height of Thiel’s open embrace of the Alt Right in 2016 and his hopes that the Alt Right move­ment would serve to main­stream white nation­al­ism and oth­er far right ideas under a kinder, gen­tler veneer. The Alt Right was, in turn, appar­ent­ly hope­ful that Thiel could become “our George Soros.” The arti­cle goes on to describe how Thiel appears to have sub­se­quent­ly soured on the Alt Right and the Trump admin­is­tra­tion due to a series of high-pro­file inci­dents that caused Thiel to lose faith in fig­ures like Richard Spencer and even Don­ald Trump. It sounds like the annu­al con­fer­ence for Spencer’s Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute in late Novem­ber 2016 where Spencer and oth­er fig­ures were pho­tographed giv­ing the Nazi salute and chant­i­ng “ail Trump” real­ly pissed off Thiel and shook his faith in their abil­i­ty to real­ly main­stream the far right. Thiel appar­ent­ly had a sim­i­lar response to Pres­i­dent Trump’s now noto­ri­ous com­ments about “good peo­ple on both sides” in response to the vio­lence at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi ral­ly.

So Thiel was quite hope­ful that the Don­ald Trump and Alt Right were final­ly going to be able to renor­mal­ize white nation­al­ism in Amer­i­ca but those hopes were dashed rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly on. At the same time, as the arti­cle describes, Thiel’s per­son­al for­tunes have explod­ed thanks to his close rela­tion­ship with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, in par­tic­u­lar through con­tracts for Palan­tir. What does that mean regard­ing Thiel’s sup­port for the Alt Right and the Trump admin­is­tra­tion going for­ward? Well, here’s where things get extra intrigu­ing: Thiel polit­i­cal dona­tions have seem­ing­ly been almost non-exis­tent in the 2020 cycle. He gave some mon­ey to Kris Kobach’s Sen­ate failed bid in Kansas but that’s it. So Thiel get con­cerned that his pet Nazis had made them­selves polit­i­cal­ly unpalat­able and his polit­i­cal dona­tions have in turn pub­licly dis­ap­peared. Which rais­es the obvi­ous ques­tion: so has Thiel actu­al­ly stopped giv­ing heav­i­ly to Repub­li­cans and Nazis or has he mere­ly found ways to use the bro­ken US cam­paign finance sys­tem to obscure his dona­tions? And if he has sim­ply obscure his polit­i­cal activ­i­ty and since he obvi­ous­ly loves the ideas of the far right, we have to ask the fol­lowup ques­tion of how many Nazis are still get­ting that secret fund­ing. These are the ques­tions raised by reports about Thiel sour­ing on Trump and the Alt Right, not due to their far right beliefs but for being too open about them:

Buz­zFeed News

Peter Thiel Met With The Racist Fringe As He Went All In On Trump

The ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and Face­book board mem­ber staked his rep­u­ta­tion on a Trump pres­i­den­cy. Now what does he have to show for it?

by Rosie Gray and Ryan Mac
Post­ed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2020, at 12:50 p.m. ET

Four years ago, bil­lion­aire ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and Face­book board mem­ber Peter Thiel made one of his biggest bets: He went all in on Don­ald Trump. The nor­mal­ly tight-lipped and enig­mat­ic Thiel gave a very pub­lic impri­matur as a promi­nent speak­er at the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion, tying his rep­u­ta­tion as one of the most suc­cess­ful fig­ures in mod­ern tech to a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date despised through­out Sil­i­con Val­ley.

“Tonight,” he said in a nation­al­ly tele­vised address at the con­ven­tion, “I urge all of my fel­low Amer­i­cans to stand up and vote for Don­ald Trump.” He made his­to­ry as the con­ven­tion’s first out gay speak­er and extolled Trump not as “a return to the past” but rather a return to “that bright future.”

Thiel was used to mak­ing risky bets. He was a start­up vet­er­an, a Pay­Pal cofounder who wrote Face­book a check for $500,000 months after it launched. But Trump was dif­fer­ent. Few in Sil­i­con Val­ley want­ed in on that round. Still, just a week after the Access Hol­ly­wood tape leaked of Trump boast­ing about sex­u­al­ly assault­ing women — a clip that sent oth­er promi­nent Repub­li­cans flee­ing — Thiel ponied up $1.25 mil­lion.

The dona­tion was well known. But what has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed is just how much Thiel was will­ing to gam­ble on Trump’s MAGA move­ment dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion. His bet went far beyond mon­ey, speech­es, or even main­stream Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. Even as Thiel staked his rep­u­ta­tion on the can­di­date in pub­lic, he met in pri­vate with the racist fringe that felt embold­ened by Trump’s rise to pow­er.

Buz­zFeed News can reveal that in at least one instance dur­ing the sum­mer of 2016, Thiel host­ed a din­ner with one of the most influ­en­tial and vocal white nation­al­ists in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca — a man who has called for the cre­ation of a white eth­nos­tate and played a key role in an effort to main­stream white nation­al­ism as the “alt-right.” And then Thiel emailed the next day to say how much he’d enjoyed his com­pa­ny.

Among those on the racist right, Thiel’s out­reach raised hopes that his finan­cial bet on Trump would extend into the ascen­dant alt-right move­ment, which despite its promi­nence was a col­lec­tion of small and often cash-strapped orga­ni­za­tions. One avowed white nation­al­ist pri­vate­ly spec­u­lat­ed that Thiel’s mon­ey and influ­ence could have made him “our George Soros.”

Thiel’s wager on Trump paid off, at least at first, and the Repub­li­can candidate’s vic­to­ry ush­ered him into a new ech­e­lon of polit­i­cal pow­er. Thiel seed­ed allies through­out the new admin­is­tra­tion and won a direct line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the White House.

Palan­tir, the data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny he cofound­ed, is flush with gov­ern­ment con­tracts and rush­ing to go pub­lic ahead of the Novem­ber elec­tion. Face­book, where he is a board mem­ber, counts the Trump cam­paign as one of its largest polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers, and part­ly avoid­ed the ire that peers such as Google and Twit­ter have faced from the admin­is­tra­tion. The peo­ple Thiel helped ele­vate in gov­ern­ment now over­see bil­lion-dol­lar bud­gets and nation­al secu­ri­ty deci­sions.

But while Thiel’s asso­ciates still remain in posi­tions of pow­er in the admin­is­tra­tion and he’s main­tained fleet­ing con­tact with Trump offi­cials, the Sil­i­con Val­ley mag­nate has dis­tanced him­self from the pres­i­dent and his 2020 cam­paign, accord­ing to sources who spoke with Buz­zFeed News. He has made no media appear­ances or penned any opin­ion pieces in sup­port of Trump, as he did in 2016. More telling­ly, he’s giv­en no mon­ey so far to the president’s effort to retain the White House.

Although Thiel has been mov­ing away from Trump for years now, his write-down on a pres­i­den­tial invest­ment dur­ing an elec­tion year is due in part to the administration’s dis­as­trous response to the coro­n­avirus. As the econ­o­my tanked and mil­lions got sick, Thiel became furi­ous, as first report­ed by the Dai­ly Beast. Two peo­ple close to Thiel have con­firmed that the pan­dem­ic was a break­ing point for the tech­no­crat, who once hoped elect­ing a polit­i­cal out­sider would dis­rupt bureau­cra­cy and bring about rad­i­cal change and inno­va­tion in gov­ern­ment.

Asked about Thiel’s lack of involve­ment, a senior White House offi­cial said, “It’s no secret that Peter Thiel has been a long and ded­i­cat­ed sup­port­er of the pres­i­dent and the many pol­i­cy achieve­ments the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has made on behalf of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

Thiel’s per­son­al vic­to­ries over the last four years came with risks that are only now becom­ing appar­ent. He was able to get in ear­ly on a ris­ing polit­i­cal pow­er, but his efforts also brought him into con­tact with the dark­est ele­ments of that pow­er, and to an admin­is­tra­tion whose com­pe­tence he doubts. Thiel’s bet worked until it didn’t. He has now decamped from Sil­i­con Val­ley, where he was no longer wel­come in some tech cir­cles, for Los Ange­les, where he lives with his fam­i­ly.

...

An Invest­ment

Thiel’s friends say the famed ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist viewed the Trump cam­paign as he would a Sil­i­con Val­ley start­up: It was an invest­ment, two peo­ple told Buz­zFeed News.

By the spring of 2016, Thiel con­sid­ered Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clin­ton pres­i­den­tial non­starters, both because of their pol­i­tics and their already-estab­lished net­works of pow­er. But over on the Repub­li­can side, Trump was show­ing a sur­pris­ing dura­bil­i­ty among vot­ers, even as the par­ty estab­lish­ment made an all-out effort to stop him. Trump was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for Thiel “to get in on the ground floor,” a friend of Thiel’s pre­vi­ous­ly told Buz­zFeed News

A long­time lib­er­tar­i­an who dab­bled in eccen­tric ideas like seast­eading — arti­fi­cial island com­mu­ni­ties in inter­na­tion­al waters far from gov­ern­men­tal juris­dic­tion — and life exten­sion, Thiel had made occa­sion­al for­ays into main­stream pol­i­tics.

Thiel had giv­en mil­lions to pres­i­den­tial long­shots like Car­ly Fio­r­i­na and Ron Paul. He was also an ear­ly sup­port­er of Ted Cruz, help­ing him first win attor­ney gen­er­al and then US Sen­ate races in Texas. In Mis­souri Repub­li­can Josh Haw­ley, whom he sup­port­ed for state attor­ney gen­er­al before he became sen­a­tor, Thiel found a fel­low ene­my of Google.

But Trump was dif­fer­ent. By the spring of 2016, Thiel was telling those in his close cir­cles that he thought the real­i­ty tele­vi­sion star had a bet­ter shot of win­ning than peo­ple thought, a belief that was for­ti­fied when Thiel’s for­mer favorite, Cruz, dropped out in May. The investor was named a Cal­i­for­nia RNC del­e­gate for Trump and met the can­di­date and his fam­i­ly for the first time in per­son in Cleve­land ahead of the con­ven­tion in July.

On paper, there was lit­tle in com­mon between the can­di­date and Thiel beyond their places on the Forbes Bil­lion­aires list. But Thiel was intrigued by Trump’s out­sider appeal, his sup­posed non-estab­lish­ment qual­i­ty that might shake up what the investor saw as a staid and bloat­ed bureau­cra­cy. And there were per­son­al moti­va­tions, said one per­son who was close to Thiel at the time.

That per­son said the bil­lion­aire saw his sup­port of Trump as a poten­tial way to sell his assets while avoid­ing scruti­ny. Because he owned chunks of Face­book and the still-pri­vate Palan­tir, Thiel’s stock sales could trig­ger con­cerns from the mar­ket that all was not well with the com­pa­nies. A Trump win and a poten­tial admin­is­tra­tion appoint­ment for Thiel, the think­ing went, could allow him to sell his stakes and pos­si­bly avoid cap­i­tal gains tax­es with­out dam­ag­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of the com­pa­nies and trig­ger­ing a fol­low-along sell-off from oth­er investors.

“Ful­ly Enlight­ened”

If Thiel had doubts, they didn’t pre­vent him from going ful­ly in on Trump and the move­ment for which the New York real estate mogul was a fig­ure­head. This includ­ed meet­ing with fig­ures in fringe and alt-right cir­cles whose influ­ence had grown dur­ing the elec­tion cycle.

The peo­ple he met or had had plans with are unfa­mil­iar to the vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans, but they were for a time key fig­ures push­ing racist ide­ol­o­gy and white nation­al­ism toward a place of greater accept­abil­i­ty with­in the hard-right world of Trump­ism. This laun­der­ing of white nation­al­ist ideas into wider con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles was the alt-right’s rai­son d’être.

A hand­ful of events Thiel attend­ed with some of the most influ­en­tial voic­es in the far-right and white nation­al­ist move­ments in 2016 and 2017 pro­vid­ed a venue for those con­nec­tions.

In May 2016, after he turned down an offer to appear on Bre­it­bart News edi­tor Milo Yiannopoulos’s pod­cast, Thiel invit­ed the provo­ca­teur to have din­ner at his home in Hol­ly­wood Hills the fol­low­ing month.

Yiannopou­los has large­ly been shunned from the right since Buz­zFeed News pub­lished footage of him per­form­ing a Nazi salute and a con­ser­v­a­tive news out­let post­ed video of him appear­ing to endorse pedophil­ia. But cor­re­spon­dence dur­ing the height of Yiannopoulos’s pop­u­lar­i­ty pre­vi­ous­ly obtained by Buz­zFeed News sug­gests Thiel’s lib­er­tar­i­an­ism might be some­thing dark­er.

“He’s ful­ly enlight­ened, just plays it very care­ful­ly,” Cur­tis Yarvin, bet­ter known as far-right blog­ger Men­cius Mold­bug, wrote about Thiel in an email to Yiannopoulous in late 2016, as Buz­zFeed News pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

Yarvin, a soft­ware devel­op­er who counts Thiel as an investor in his for­mer com­pa­ny Tlon, used his writ­ings to advance an anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic world­view that helped form the basis of the “Dark Enlight­en­ment” move­ment, which posits that democ­ra­cy has out­lived its use­ful­ness and that gov­ern­ments should instead be led by author­i­tar­i­an fig­ures.

New­ly uncov­ered emails seen by Buz­zFeed News show white nation­al­ist lead­ers were chat­ter­ing about plans with Thiel in the sum­mer of 2016.

On July 2, Peter Brimelow, the founder of lead­ing white suprema­cist web­site VDare, emailed his star writer Kevin DeAn­na to chas­tise him for free­lanc­ing for oth­er out­lets. Brimelow, who lat­er assert­ed that “His­pan­ics do spe­cial­ize in rape, par­tic­u­lar­ly of chil­dren,” also want­ed to know: Why hadn’t his writer kept him updat­ed on an upcom­ing meet­ing with Thiel?

Inbox
From: Kevin DeAn­na
Sent: July 3, 2016 To: Peter Brimelow, Lydia Brimelow

1. JT sent me some links and said you can write this up for us real quick. It took about two hours. Orig­i­nal­ly, it was just going to be on that teacher but then I found some stuff about BAMN.

I didn’t look too much into what actu­al­ly hap­pened at the protest because I still don’t know what hap­pened and don’t think I’ll ever know. I just don’t believe what TWP is putting out (that the skin­heads weren’t armed.)

My point is I didn’t plan this out and then write it. JT just said you can do this real quick and I said yes and then did it. But obvi­ous­ly first refusal from now on.

2. Not sure why I’m get­ting in trou­ble for the Thiel thing. I told Lydia about it one day after Greg told me about it. And she’s the only per­son I’ve told as it is total­ly secret. I thought you’d be hap­py about that.

I’ll blog more, let you know what I’m plan­ning on writ­ing with first refusal, and do a bet­ter job of talk­ing on the phone.

Will write on the GOP stab in the back against Trump on Tues­day.

Try­ing to fig­ure out who the cop is, no luck yet.

Email recre­at­ed by Buz­zFeed News.

“I am fed up with being sur­prised about e.g. this meet­ing with the Right Stuff, Ann Coul­ter, Thiel etc.,” Brimelow wrote, with his wife, Lydia Brimelow, copied on the mes­sage. “You are being paid in part to keep me abreast of Alt Right devel­op­ments and you’re not doing it.” The Right Stuff is a white nation­al­ist web­site and mes­sage board found­ed by the activist Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, which hosts pod­casts named Dai­ly Shoah and Fash the Nation — ref­er­ences to the Holo­caust and fas­cism, respec­tive­ly.

DeAn­na, an influ­en­tial white nation­al­ist who pens pieces for VDare and has writ­ten many pieces for oth­er promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions in the move­ment like Amer­i­can Renais­sance and Counter-Cur­rents, under the pseu­do­nyms “James Kirk­patrick” and “Gre­go­ry Hood,” wrote back the next day defend­ing him­self.

“Not sure why I’m get­ting in trou­ble for the Thiel thing,” he wrote, adding that he had told Lydia Brimelow about the event, which he had heard about from an indi­vid­ual named “Greg.” “And she’s the only per­son I’ve told as it is total­ly secret. I thought you’d be hap­py about that.”

Coul­ter — a long­time friend of Thiel’s and con­ser­v­a­tive hard­lin­er — Peinovich, and Brimelow did not respond to requests for com­ment.

On July 30, 2016, Thiel opened up his email to exchange pleas­antries with guests from his din­ner par­ty the pre­vi­ous night. As a renowned busi­ness leader, he was accus­tomed to host­ing salon-style meals that brought togeth­er exec­u­tives, intel­lec­tu­als, and just about any­one else he found inter­est­ing.

The din­ner that Fri­day night was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Termed the “Right Wing Din­ner Squad, III” in an email sent by one attendee, the event fea­tured an indi­vid­ual that the bil­lion­aire, despite his flair for con­tro­ver­sy, has nev­er asso­ci­at­ed with pub­licly.

That guest was DeAn­na.

Inbox
From: Peter Thiel
Sent: July 30, 2016
To: Kevin DeAn­na Sub­ject: Right Wing Din­ner Squad, III

Kevin – real­ly enjoyed meet­ing you last night. I may be in DC towards the end of Sep­tem­ber, and let me know [if you] make it to SF any­time!

—-Peter

From: Bren­dan Kissam
Sent: Sat­ur­day, July 30, 2016 11:52 AM
To: Peter Thiel
Sub­ject: Right Wing Din­ner Squad, III

Howdy Peter and Kevin,

I’d been look­ing for­ward to you guys get­ting to meet, and last night proved fan­tas­tic! I’m sure you two will have plen­ty strat­e­gy to bounce back and forth, and I look for­ward to hear­ing about it.

-Bren­dan

Email recre­at­ed by Buz­zFeed News.

“Kevin — real­ly enjoyed meet­ing you last night,” Thiel wrote from an email address asso­ci­at­ed with his per­son­al invest­ment fund, Thiel Cap­i­tal. “I may be in DC towards the end of Sep­tem­ber, and let me know [if you] make it to SF any­time!”

DeAn­na, though not a house­hold name, had by that time been involved in far-right pol­i­tics for close to 10 years, and had played a key role in chan­nel­ing white nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy into the emerg­ing alt-right. After grad­u­at­ing from the Col­lege of William and Mary in Vir­ginia, DeAn­na joined the con­ser­v­a­tive Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, and found­ed Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion in 2006.

The group, designed to be a more rad­i­cal ver­sion of estab­lished con­ser­v­a­tive cam­pus groups, was a launch­ing pad for a new gen­er­a­tion of white pow­er activists. YWC boost­ed the pro­file of Richard Spencer, the white nation­al­ist leader, by invit­ing him to speak on two cam­pus­es in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, DeAn­na dubbed the cre­ation of an eth­nos­tate “the great dream of the White Repub­lic.”

...

DeAn­na also served as a Trump evan­ge­list in his com­mu­ni­ty. He was among the voic­es on the fringe who exhort­ed their peers to get on board with Trump and work with­in the sys­tem instead of mar­gin­al­iz­ing them­selves out­side it. For Spencer’s web­site Radix Jour­nal, DeAn­na wrote in 2015 urg­ing sup­port for Trump, even though some in the move­ment were wary of con­ven­tion­al pol­i­tics.

“Ulti­mate­ly, of course, this is a sideshow,” DeAn­na wrote. “Real change will occur by build­ing our own insti­tu­tions, mar­kets, and tribes, and foment­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­scious­ness among the for­got­ten men of our Hol­low Empire. But elec­toral pol­i­tics will affect us, even if we try our best to ignore it and remain inde­pen­dent of it.”

DeAnna’s email with Thiel was prompt­ed by Bren­dan Kissam, a for­mer Tea Par­ty activist from Philadel­phia. Kissam met Thiel in 2010 when he vol­un­teered to help orga­nize a fundrais­er at Thiel’s New York City apart­ment for the gay Repub­li­can group GOProud. Accord­ing to a source who had spo­ken with Kissam, the activist and Thiel kept in touch after the fundrais­er; in Jan­u­ary 2011, a user iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves as “Bren­dan Kissam” com­ment­ed on a crit­i­cal post about Thiel on LGBTQ web­site Queer­ty, defend­ing the article’s sub­ject and refer­ring to him as “Peter.” Kissam was quot­ed in a June 2016 Philadel­phia Inquir­er sto­ry about gay Repub­li­cans vot­ing for Trump, iden­ti­fied by the paper as a sup­port­er of the can­di­date.

In 2018 and 2019, Kissam appeared in videos for VDare under the pseu­do­nym Wil­son Hewlett, two sources famil­iar said; pho­tographs and videos of Kissam iden­ti­fy­ing him under his own name appear to show the same per­son pre­sent­ed as Hewlett on VDare’s videos.

...

On the morn­ing of July 30, 2016, Kissam wrote to Thiel and DeAn­na in the email with sub­ject line “Right Wing Din­ner Squad III”: “Howdy Peter and Kevin, I’d been look­ing for­ward to you guys get­ting to meet, and last night proved fan­tas­tic! I’m sure you two will [have] plen­ty strat­e­gy to bounce back and forth, and I look for­ward to hear­ing about it.”

Thiel wrote to DeAn­na lat­er that day, and DeAn­na respond­ed the fol­low­ing day: “It was a real hon­or meet­ing you and thanks for host­ing all of us (and putting up with all of us stay­ing so late).” It is unclear who else DeAn­na was refer­ring to by men­tion­ing “all of us.”

What Thiel and his guests dis­cussed at their July 2016 din­ner also remains a mys­tery. But Thiel’s din­ner coin­cid­ed with the apex of the alt-right movement’s influ­ence in main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course.

That sum­mer, Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Hillary Clin­ton gave an entire speech about the alt-right, ele­vat­ing the move­ment into a cen­tral issue in the last months of the cam­paign and link­ing them to her oppo­nent through Steve Ban­non, Trump’s then–campaign CEO and for­mer chair of Bre­it­bart News.

Days ear­li­er, the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion to for­mal­ly nom­i­nate Trump in July had pro­vid­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for embold­ened white nation­al­ists to demon­strate their influ­ence, and they con­verged on Cleve­land. Spencer came to town, as did Brimelow and noto­ri­ous far-right troll Charles C. “Chuck” John­son, who was spot­ted in the con­ven­tion hall. John­son has stat­ed that he doesn’t believe that 6 mil­lion Jews were killed in the Holo­caust and claimed that the Nazi gas cham­bers were not real.

“It’s amaz­ing,” Spencer said on the night of a “Gays for Trump” par­ty thrown near the Quick­en Loans Are­na the night before Thiel spoke. “We’ve tak­en over the right.”

The party’s atten­dees report­ed­ly also includ­ed Thiel’s asso­ciate Jeff Giesea, a fel­low Stan­ford grad­u­ate and for­mer employ­ee at Thiel’s hedge fund Thiel Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment who was becom­ing increas­ing­ly con­nect­ed in far-right cir­cles. Giesea report­ed­ly gave $5,000 to Spencer’s orga­ni­za­tion and pub­lished a pseu­do­ny­mous guide to donat­ing to alt-right groups. (Giesea pre­vi­ous­ly told Huff­Post that he did not write the guide.)

...

Thiel cement­ed his back­ing of Trump with a $1.25 mil­lion dona­tion in Octo­ber and a speech that month at Wash­ing­ton, DC’s Nation­al Press Club. In that talk, he defend­ed his choice to back the nom­i­nee even in spite of the recent release of the explo­sive Access Hol­ly­wood tape.

“No mat­ter what hap­pens in this elec­tion, what Trump rep­re­sents isn’t crazy and it’s not going away,” he said.

“Shad­ow Pres­i­dent”

Although Thiel was denounced by large swaths of Sil­i­con Val­ley for his sup­port of Trump, he still found sym­pa­thet­ic ears in its exec­u­tive suites and board­rooms. At Face­book, employ­ees raised con­cerns that their board mem­ber was cam­paign­ing for an open­ly racist can­di­date who had glo­ri­fied grab­bing women’s gen­i­tals. In response, CEO Mark Zucker­berg post­ed a note to employ­ees the month before the elec­tion say­ing that “there are many rea­sons a per­son might sup­port Trump that do not involve racism, sex­ism, xeno­pho­bia, or accept­ing sex­u­al assault.”

“We can’t cre­ate a cul­ture that says it cares about diver­si­ty and then excludes almost half the coun­try because they back a polit­i­cal can­di­date,” Zucker­berg wrote. Lat­er that month, how­ev­er, Face­book employ­ees raised more con­cerns about Thiel after news reports resur­faced com­ments on race and sex­u­al assault from a book he coau­thored in 1995.

While Thiel went on to apol­o­gize for call­ing some rapes “seduc­tions that are lat­er regret­ted” — after pres­sure from Face­book Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer Sheryl Sand­berg, accord­ing to two sources — he remained on the board.

“Mark is very loy­al to folks,” said one for­mer Face­book exec­u­tive. “Peter Thiel has made it clear that he’s invest­ed in the com­pa­ny from the begin­ning and he’s been on the board a very long time.”

...

Trump’s sur­prise elec­toral vic­to­ry would make Thiel even more indis­pens­able to Face­book and Zucker­berg, giv­ing the social net­work a line into the White House. It also proved anoth­er notch in Thiel’s belt, boost­ing his con­trar­i­an cre­den­tials and ele­vat­ing him into the main­stream con­scious­ness.

That Jan­u­ary, Thiel joined Trump’s exec­u­tive tran­si­tion team, help­ing to vet and appoint mem­bers for the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion, while aid­ed by asso­ciates from Palan­tir and his fam­i­ly office Thiel Cap­i­tal. In that posi­tion — where he was dubbed the “shad­ow pres­i­dent” by his employ­ees — Thiel worked to place his own allies in posi­tions on the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, the Depart­ment of Defense, and the White House Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Pol­i­cy, where his for­mer chief of staff Michael Krat­sios now serves as US chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer.

Anoth­er asso­ciate, Jim O’Neill, who served as man­ag­ing direc­tor at Thiel’s ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Mithril Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, was also a final can­di­date to run the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion despite hav­ing no med­ical degree. While O’Neill’s quest for the job ulti­mate­ly failed, Forbes report­ed that Chuck John­son had helped to arrange meet­ings for him with con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers and polit­i­cal groups in an attempt to build inter­est in his nom­i­na­tion. John­son rec­om­mend­ed a dozen oth­er names to Thiel for oth­er gov­ern­ment posi­tions, accord­ing to Forbes, includ­ing Ajit Pai, the cur­rent chair of the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion.

“Chair­man Pai has no rela­tion­ship with Mr. John­son what­so­ev­er and is not aware that they have ever met or spo­ken,” FCC spokesper­son Bri­an Hart said in a state­ment to Buz­zFeed News.

...

Thiel also met with gov­ern­ment bureau­crats, includ­ing those who had the poten­tial to ben­e­fit Palan­tir and Face­book.

In Jan­u­ary 2017, he met with Fran­cis Collins, the direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, who was appoint­ed by Barack Oba­ma in 2009 and ulti­mate­ly con­tin­ued his role under Trump. Their con­ver­sa­tion, accord­ing to emails obtained by stu­dent researcher Andrew Grana­to and shared with Buz­zFeed News, showed they talked about ways to “lib­er­ate” young sci­en­tists from train­ing in post­doc pro­grams and phil­an­thropic-fund­ed research. They also dis­cussed Palan­tir, a com­pa­ny in which Thiel is the largest indi­vid­ual share­hold­er and serves as chair­man.

“I am look­ing for­ward to learn­ing more about Palantir’s cur­rent areas of inter­est,” Collins wrote on Jan. 12 in an email thank­ing Thiel for the meet­ing. In Sep­tem­ber 2018, NIH signed a $7 mil­lion con­tract with the Thiel-chaired big data com­pa­ny, and recent­ly used its soft­ware to aid in its response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Accord­ing to a recent­ly filed busi­ness prospec­tus, the major­i­ty of Palantir’s rev­enue for the first six months of this year came from gov­ern­ment con­tracts.

...

By the inau­gu­ra­tion, Thiel’s stand­ing with the new admin­is­tra­tion was unde­ni­able. Weeks before he took office, Trump called Thiel a “very spe­cial guy” while grasp­ing his hand dur­ing a media op at Manhattan’s Trump Tow­er that also fea­tured exec­u­tives from Face­book, Ama­zon, Apple, and Google. They had all been sum­moned by the tran­si­tion team and Thiel, Trump’s link to the nation’s new cen­ter of indus­try.

“He got just about the biggest applause at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion,” Trump said of Thiel. “He’s ahead of the curve, and I want to thank him.”

Those weeks of polit­i­cal vic­to­ry for Thiel coin­cid­ed with a pub­lic reck­on­ing for the alt-right, which had sought to por­tray itself as a gen­tler, more main­stream-friend­ly iter­a­tion of white nation­al­ism. Richard Spencer was caught in Novem­ber shout­ing “Heil Trump” while oth­ers per­formed Nazi salutes at an event host­ed by Spencer’s think tank. The inci­dent caused a bit­ter row in alt-right cir­cles and drew unwant­ed atten­tion to the dark under­bel­ly of the move­ment.

As the alt-right splin­tered at the start of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, Thiel appeared at the Deplora­Ball, a par­ty at the Nation­al Press Club in Wash­ing­ton that was orga­nized by Giesea and right-wing blog­ger Mike Cer­novich. Timed with Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion, the event, which banned Spencer, was seen as a com­ing-out par­ty for the nation­al­ist far right.

Spencer’s ban­ish­ment and Thiel’s pres­ence indi­cat­ed a new main­stream tak­ing shape on the right. While the more rad­i­cal ele­ments of the move­ment became mar­gin­al­ized, the Deplora­Ball crowd was still able to attract a high pro­file Trump donor like Thiel.

Thiel again met with peo­ple adja­cent to the white nation­al­ist fringe in the first year of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, accord­ing to two sources with knowl­edge of the event. In 2017, he attend­ed a din­ner orga­nized by Giesea at a restau­rant in down­town Wash­ing­ton, DC, with a num­ber of fig­ures from right-wing cir­cles, among them Scott Greer, a now-for­mer Dai­ly Caller writer who wrote under a pseu­do­nym for Spencer’s Radix Jour­nal, and Dar­ren Beat­tie, a for­mer White House speech­writer who in 2016 spoke at the H.L. Menck­en Club, a con­fer­ence that has often pro­vid­ed a forum for white nation­al­ists.

...

Face­book, Palan­tir, and the White House

Through the first months of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, Thiel, who did not take any admin­is­tra­tion posi­tion, con­tin­ued to make him­self avail­able to the White House. He appeared at a June meet­ing for the new­ly formed Amer­i­can Tech­nol­o­gy Coun­cil that was attend­ed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, Ama­zon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadel­la, and Ora­cle co-CEO Safra Catz. That month, he was also approached for a role as chair of the President’s Intel­li­gence Advi­so­ry Board, an influ­en­tial over­sight posi­tion in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, but turned it down.

The bridge Thiel built to cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca, how­ev­er, was shat­tered by Trump’s defense of white nation­al­ists fol­low­ing the events in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia in August 2017. After the pres­i­dent blamed vio­lence on “both sides” fol­low­ing the killing of a 32-year-old coun­ter­pro­test­er, tech giants includ­ing Apple, IBM, and Microsoft dis­tanced them­selves from the coun­cil, which was ulti­mate­ly dis­band­ed in embar­rass­ment by the admin­is­tra­tion.

Mean­while, Thiel sought to extend his influ­ence in more tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. As Buz­zFeed News pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, he explored the pos­si­bil­i­ty of build­ing a media out­let in 2017 with Roger Ailes, the late, dis­graced god­fa­ther of Fox News, and, sep­a­rate­ly, with the bil­lion­aire Mer­cer Fam­i­ly, the for­mer patrons of Bre­it­bart News. And though that nev­er came to fruition, the man who bank­rupt­ed Gawk­er Media via a series of clan­des­tine­ly bankrolled law­suits con­tin­ued his inter­est in media.

Face­book also ben­e­fit­ed from Thiel’s links to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. As the social net­work fought off unfound­ed alle­ga­tions of bias against con­ser­v­a­tives, Thiel became the ulti­mate buffer: a con­ser­v­a­tive bul­wark on the board who was trot­ted out to make amends every time right-wing per­son­al­i­ties com­plained about alleged cen­sor­ship. And while Thiel had sold off the bulk of Face­book shares and has want­ed to leave the board, accord­ing to two sources, he has remained, in part due to his loy­al­ty to Zucker­berg.

That’s proved use­ful to both the White House and Face­book. Thiel accom­pa­nied Zucker­berg at a secret din­ner at the White House with Trump and Jared Kush­n­er last Octo­ber, one stop in their tour of Wash­ing­ton, DC, to stave off scruti­ny and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of antitrust reg­u­la­tion. Thiel was also one of the biggest inter­nal oppo­nents of fact-check­ing polit­i­cal ads on Face­book, accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, a con­tro­ver­sial pol­i­cy that has allowed politi­cians like Trump, one of Facebook’s largest cus­tomers, to present out­right false­hoods on the social net­work as long as they’re paid for.

Palan­tir, Thiel’s main finan­cial hold­ing, has thrived dur­ing Trump’s three and a half years in office, with rev­enue grow­ing by 49% in the first six months of 2020 to more than $480 mil­lion com­pared to the same peri­od last year. Led by CEO Alex Karp, who once said “it would be hard to make up some­one I find less appeal­ing” than Trump, the big data com­pa­ny has signed con­tracts with fed­er­al agen­cies whose ranks were staffed with peo­ple vet­ted by Thiel and his asso­ciates dur­ing the tran­si­tion. In 2019, it won a Pen­ta­gon con­tract worth up to $800 mil­lion, while also pro­vid­ing soft­ware to US Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment. Those deals have bol­stered the firm’s bot­tom line as it heads toward going pub­lic at the end of 2020.

Those close to Thiel said he believes this is the win­dow for the com­pa­ny, which has nev­er had an annu­al prof­it, to hit the mar­ket. A Biden pres­i­den­cy could change the company’s momen­tum, and with Trump in office, Palan­tir has become a for­mi­da­ble DC con­trac­tor, said two sources famil­iar with the billionaire’s think­ing.

...

A Fray­ing Rela­tion­ship

The past few years have also seen Thiel retreat from the hot­house of Sil­i­con Val­ley. Call­ing the region’s lib­er­al­ism too intol­er­ant, he loud­ly dis­as­so­ci­at­ed him­self from the nation’s tech cap­i­tal. He ced­ed some man­age­ment duties of his famed ven­ture cap­i­tal out­fit Founders Fund to a lieu­tenant and relo­cat­ed per­ma­nent­ly to his mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar home in the Hol­ly­wood Hills. (Palan­tir has also said it’s mov­ing from Palo Alto to Den­ver.)

Thiel also start­ed a fam­i­ly. After mar­ry­ing long­time boyfriend Matt Danzeisen in an elab­o­rate cer­e­mo­ny in Aus­tria in 2017, the two had a baby daugh­ter, accord­ing to those close to the cou­ple.

The changes in his life, how­ev­er, haven’t dis­tract­ed him from pol­i­tics. Peo­ple con­nect­ed to him still remain in posi­tions of pow­er, among them Krat­sios, who in July was appoint­ed to a Depart­ment of Defense job where he’ll over­see a $60 bil­lion Pen­ta­gon bud­get.

Thiel’s ideas con­tin­ue to find their way into poli­cies. He pushed for the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to ramp up its trade war with Chi­na and, accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, accom­pa­nied Zucker­berg to a White House din­ner with Trump and Jared Kush­n­er, where the Face­book CEO raised con­cerns about rival Tik­Tok. (Zucker­berg has since told employ­ees that he doesn’t think Tik­Tok came up as a dis­cus­sion top­ic at the meal.)

Thiel’s line of think­ing that Amer­i­can com­pa­nies doing busi­ness in Chi­na amounts to pro­vid­ing tech­nol­o­gy to the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty has also been par­rot­ed by Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo. This Jan­u­ary, ahead of a speech at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in which Pom­peo railed on Chi­na for its human rights abus­es, he met pri­vate­ly with Thiel, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the event.

...

Yet Thiel has been notice­ably qui­et on Trump as the elec­tion approach­es, even as he has sup­port­ed oth­er can­di­dates. Thiel put close to a mil­lion dol­lars behind hard-right anti-immi­gra­tion advo­cate Kris Kobach in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry for Kansas’s open Sen­ate seat, which he lost. Blake Mas­ters, the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the billionaire’s fam­i­ly office Thiel Cap­i­tal, also flirt­ed with the idea of run­ning to unseat Repub­li­can Sen. Martha McSal­ly, but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed against the move, accord­ing to the Ari­zona Repub­lic.

...

Beyond the Kansas race, in which he gave $850,000 to a super PAC sup­port­ing Kobach, Thiel hasn’t pub­licly thrown his mon­ey behind any oth­er can­di­date this cycle — Trump includ­ed. Those close to Thiel say he is upset with how the admin­is­tra­tion han­dled the response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and that his rela­tion­ship with the pres­i­dent is fray­ing.

Two months before Elec­tion Day, Thiel still shows no signs of get­ting involved. Instead, he’s focus­ing on Palan­tir, which unveiled its S‑1 finan­cial state­ment — one of the first steps in going pub­lic — late last month. While Thiel has said very lit­tle about Palan­tir, the company’s CEO, Alex Karp, attacked Sil­i­con Valley’s “engi­neer­ing elite” and issued a vehe­ment defense of Palantir’s work with gov­ern­ment agen­cies in the doc­u­ment.

“The engi­neer­ing elite of Sil­i­con Val­ley may know more than most about build­ing soft­ware. But they do not know more about how soci­ety should be orga­nized or what jus­tice requires,” Karp wrote in the busi­ness fil­ing. “Our com­pa­ny was found­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley. But we seem to share few­er and few­er of the tech­nol­o­gy sector’s val­ues and com­mit­ments.”

Thiel and his company’s dis­tanc­ing from the tech estab­lish­ment mir­rors his step back from the Trump cam­paign. And in the end, he nev­er did emerge as the bene­fac­tor the alt-right move­ment hoped-for.

In an email from this April viewed by Buz­zFeed News, Greg John­son, the pub­lish­er of white nation­al­ist web­site Counter-Cur­rents and author of The White Nation­al­ist Man­i­festo, was still fum­ing over the “Heil­gate” inci­dent and blamed Richard Spencer and oth­ers for mak­ing the move­ment too tox­ic for big donors like Thiel. John­son, who said he nev­er met Thiel, didn’t deny the email’s accu­ra­cy to Buz­zFeed News, but said he was just speak­ing of Thiel in a gen­er­al sense of “seri­ous” peo­ple with “big mon­ey.”

Spencer and his think tank Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute were “being eyed for larg­er dona­tions, but he blew it. A lot was pos­si­ble in 2016, before Hail­gate,” John­son wrote to oth­er alt-right lead­ers.

“I don’t think Peter Thiel is going to become our George Soros after all this,” John­son con­tin­ued. “There is sim­ply no cal­cu­lat­ing the set­backs caused by these kooky and trea­so­nous peo­ple.” ?

———–

“Peter Thiel Met With The Racist Fringe As He Went All In On Trump” by Rosie Gray and Ryan Mac; Buz­zFeed News; 09/11/2020

“Buz­zFeed News can reveal that in at least one instance dur­ing the sum­mer of 2016, Thiel host­ed a din­ner with one of the most influ­en­tial and vocal white nation­al­ists in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca — a man who has called for the cre­ation of a white eth­nos­tate and played a key role in an effort to main­stream white nation­al­ism as the “alt-right.” And then Thiel emailed the next day to say how much he’d enjoyed his com­pa­ny.”

It’s com­plete­ly clear is that Peter Thiel and Kevin DeAn­na share a lot in com­mon, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing. What’s less clear is the extent to which Thiel is will­ing to open­ly espouse his beliefs. Back in 2016 the Alt Right had hopes that Thiel would become “our George Soros” and at the time it looked like that was going to hap­pen. Then Trump won and Thiel became one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the US gov­ern­ment and a major ben­e­fi­cia­ry of gov­ern­ment con­tracts. But the Alt Right and Trump him­self proved to unable to suc­cess­ful­ly keep their Nazi sym­pa­thies con­tained and Thiel has alleged­ly soured on Trump and giv­en almost no mon­ey to Repub­li­cans at all this year, at least not pub­licly:

...
Among those on the racist right, Thiel’s out­reach raised hopes that his finan­cial bet on Trump would extend into the ascen­dant alt-right move­ment, which despite its promi­nence was a col­lec­tion of small and often cash-strapped orga­ni­za­tions. One avowed white nation­al­ist pri­vate­ly spec­u­lat­ed that Thiel’s mon­ey and influ­ence could have made him “our George Soros.”

Thiel’s wager on Trump paid off, at least at first, and the Repub­li­can candidate’s vic­to­ry ush­ered him into a new ech­e­lon of polit­i­cal pow­er. Thiel seed­ed allies through­out the new admin­is­tra­tion and won a direct line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the White House.

Palan­tir, the data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny he cofound­ed, is flush with gov­ern­ment con­tracts and rush­ing to go pub­lic ahead of the Novem­ber elec­tion. Face­book, where he is a board mem­ber, counts the Trump cam­paign as one of its largest polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers, and part­ly avoid­ed the ire that peers such as Google and Twit­ter have faced from the admin­is­tra­tion. The peo­ple Thiel helped ele­vate in gov­ern­ment now over­see bil­lion-dol­lar bud­gets and nation­al secu­ri­ty deci­sions.

But while Thiel’s asso­ciates still remain in posi­tions of pow­er in the admin­is­tra­tion and he’s main­tained fleet­ing con­tact with Trump offi­cials, the Sil­i­con Val­ley mag­nate has dis­tanced him­self from the pres­i­dent and his 2020 cam­paign, accord­ing to sources who spoke with Buz­zFeed News. He has made no media appear­ances or penned any opin­ion pieces in sup­port of Trump, as he did in 2016. More telling­ly, he’s giv­en no mon­ey so far to the president’s effort to retain the White House.

...

Beyond the Kansas race, in which he gave $850,000 to a super PAC sup­port­ing Kobach, Thiel hasn’t pub­licly thrown his mon­ey behind any oth­er can­di­date this cycle — Trump includ­ed. Those close to Thiel say he is upset with how the admin­is­tra­tion han­dled the response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and that his rela­tion­ship with the pres­i­dent is fray­ing.

Two months before Elec­tion Day, Thiel still shows no signs of get­ting involved. Instead, he’s focus­ing on Palan­tir, which unveiled its S‑1 finan­cial state­ment — one of the first steps in going pub­lic — late last month. While Thiel has said very lit­tle about Palan­tir, the company’s CEO, Alex Karp, attacked Sil­i­con Valley’s “engi­neer­ing elite” and issued a vehe­ment defense of Palantir’s work with gov­ern­ment agen­cies in the doc­u­ment.
...

Note that Thiel’s dis­pute with Trump’s coro­n­avirus response was report­ed­ly less about the actu­al poli­cies and had more to do with Trump’s dis­as­trous dai­ly press brief­in­gs. Again, Thiel is dis­ap­point­ed in the qual­i­ty of the pro­pa­gan­da, not the qual­i­ty of poli­cies.

So has Thiel tru­ly backed away from his polit­i­cal patron­age? Well, he clear­ly has­n’t soured on the Alt Right due to a dif­fer­ence in beliefs. As Cur­tis Yarvin — the fig­ure behind the “Dark Enlight­en­ment” con­cept — put it, “He’s ful­ly enlight­ened, just plays it very care­ful­ly”:

...
“Ful­ly Enlight­ened”

If Thiel had doubts, they didn’t pre­vent him from going ful­ly in on Trump and the move­ment for which the New York real estate mogul was a fig­ure­head. This includ­ed meet­ing with fig­ures in fringe and alt-right cir­cles whose influ­ence had grown dur­ing the elec­tion cycle.

The peo­ple he met or had had plans with are unfa­mil­iar to the vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans, but they were for a time key fig­ures push­ing racist ide­ol­o­gy and white nation­al­ism toward a place of greater accept­abil­i­ty with­in the hard-right world of Trump­ism. This laun­der­ing of white nation­al­ist ideas into wider con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles was the alt-right’s rai­son d’être.

A hand­ful of events Thiel attend­ed with some of the most influ­en­tial voic­es in the far-right and white nation­al­ist move­ments in 2016 and 2017 pro­vid­ed a venue for those con­nec­tions.

...

“He’s ful­ly enlight­ened, just plays it very care­ful­ly,” Cur­tis Yarvin, bet­ter known as far-right blog­ger Men­cius Mold­bug, wrote about Thiel in an email to Yiannopoulous in late 2016, as Buz­zFeed News pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

Yarvin, a soft­ware devel­op­er who counts Thiel as an investor in his for­mer com­pa­ny Tlon, used his writ­ings to advance an anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic world­view that helped form the basis of the “Dark Enlight­en­ment” move­ment, which posits that democ­ra­cy has out­lived its use­ful­ness and that gov­ern­ments should instead be led by author­i­tar­i­an fig­ures.

New­ly uncov­ered emails seen by Buz­zFeed News show white nation­al­ist lead­ers were chat­ter­ing about plans with Thiel in the sum­mer of 2016.

...

On July 30, 2016, Thiel opened up his email to exchange pleas­antries with guests from his din­ner par­ty the pre­vi­ous night. As a renowned busi­ness leader, he was accus­tomed to host­ing salon-style meals that brought togeth­er exec­u­tives, intel­lec­tu­als, and just about any­one else he found inter­est­ing.

The din­ner that Fri­day night was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Termed the “Right Wing Din­ner Squad, III” in an email sent by one attendee, the event fea­tured an indi­vid­ual that the bil­lion­aire, despite his flair for con­tro­ver­sy, has nev­er asso­ci­at­ed with pub­licly.

That guest was DeAn­na.

...

“Kevin — real­ly enjoyed meet­ing you last night,” Thiel wrote from an email address asso­ci­at­ed with his per­son­al invest­ment fund, Thiel Cap­i­tal. “I may be in DC towards the end of Sep­tem­ber, and let me know [if you] make it to SF any­time!”

DeAn­na, though not a house­hold name, had by that time been involved in far-right pol­i­tics for close to 10 years, and had played a key role in chan­nel­ing white nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy into the emerg­ing alt-right. After grad­u­at­ing from the Col­lege of William and Mary in Vir­ginia, DeAn­na joined the con­ser­v­a­tive Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, and found­ed Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion in 2006.

The group, designed to be a more rad­i­cal ver­sion of estab­lished con­ser­v­a­tive cam­pus groups, was a launch­ing pad for a new gen­er­a­tion of white pow­er activists. YWC boost­ed the pro­file of Richard Spencer, the white nation­al­ist leader, by invit­ing him to speak on two cam­pus­es in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, DeAn­na dubbed the cre­ation of an eth­nos­tate “the great dream of the White Repub­lic.”

...

DeAn­na also served as a Trump evan­ge­list in his com­mu­ni­ty. He was among the voic­es on the fringe who exhort­ed their peers to get on board with Trump and work with­in the sys­tem instead of mar­gin­al­iz­ing them­selves out­side it. For Spencer’s web­site Radix Jour­nal, DeAn­na wrote in 2015 urg­ing sup­port for Trump, even though some in the move­ment were wary of con­ven­tion­al pol­i­tics.

“Ulti­mate­ly, of course, this is a sideshow,” DeAn­na wrote. “Real change will occur by build­ing our own insti­tu­tions, mar­kets, and tribes, and foment­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­scious­ness among the for­got­ten men of our Hol­low Empire. But elec­toral pol­i­tics will affect us, even if we try our best to ignore it and remain inde­pen­dent of it.”

...

On the morn­ing of July 30, 2016, Kissam wrote to Thiel and DeAn­na in the email with sub­ject line “Right Wing Din­ner Squad III”: “Howdy Peter and Kevin, I’d been look­ing for­ward to you guys get­ting to meet, and last night proved fan­tas­tic! I’m sure you two will [have] plen­ty strat­e­gy to bounce back and forth, and I look for­ward to hear­ing about it.”

Thiel wrote to DeAn­na lat­er that day, and DeAn­na respond­ed the fol­low­ing day: “It was a real hon­or meet­ing you and thanks for host­ing all of us (and putting up with all of us stay­ing so late).” It is unclear who else DeAn­na was refer­ring to by men­tion­ing “all of us.”

What Thiel and his guests dis­cussed at their July 2016 din­ner also remains a mys­tery. But Thiel’s din­ner coin­cid­ed with the apex of the alt-right movement’s influ­ence in main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course.
...

But even before Trump was sworn into office the Alt Right lead­er­ship was drop­ping the mask and act­ing like open Nazis in cel­e­bra­tion of their vic­to­ry. Thiel’s hopes of see­ing the Alt Right suc­cess­ful­ly sell them­selves to the pub­lic as some sort of nov­el new polit­i­cal move­ment — as opposed to just white­washed Nazis — was already being pissed away. And then Trump him­self turned his alliance with the Alt Right into a major lia­bil­i­ty with his “both sides” com­ments in Char­lottesville. Before the end of Trump’s first year in office Thiel’s dreams of a main­streamed far right were appar­ent­ly already being dashed:

...
By the inau­gu­ra­tion, Thiel’s stand­ing with the new admin­is­tra­tion was unde­ni­able. Weeks before he took office, Trump called Thiel a “very spe­cial guy” while grasp­ing his hand dur­ing a media op at Manhattan’s Trump Tow­er that also fea­tured exec­u­tives from Face­book, Ama­zon, Apple, and Google. They had all been sum­moned by the tran­si­tion team and Thiel, Trump’s link to the nation’s new cen­ter of indus­try.

“He got just about the biggest applause at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion,” Trump said of Thiel. “He’s ahead of the curve, and I want to thank him.”

Those weeks of polit­i­cal vic­to­ry for Thiel coin­cid­ed with a pub­lic reck­on­ing for the alt-right, which had sought to por­tray itself as a gen­tler, more main­stream-friend­ly iter­a­tion of white nation­al­ism. Richard Spencer was caught in Novem­ber shout­ing “Heil Trump” while oth­ers per­formed Nazi salutes at an event host­ed by Spencer’s think tank. The inci­dent caused a bit­ter row in alt-right cir­cles and drew unwant­ed atten­tion to the dark under­bel­ly of the move­ment.

As the alt-right splin­tered at the start of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, Thiel appeared at the Deplora­Ball, a par­ty at the Nation­al Press Club in Wash­ing­ton that was orga­nized by Giesea and right-wing blog­ger Mike Cer­novich. Timed with Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion, the event, which banned Spencer, was seen as a com­ing-out par­ty for the nation­al­ist far right.

Spencer’s ban­ish­ment and Thiel’s pres­ence indi­cat­ed a new main­stream tak­ing shape on the right. While the more rad­i­cal ele­ments of the move­ment became mar­gin­al­ized, the Deplora­Ball crowd was still able to attract a high pro­file Trump donor like Thiel.

Thiel again met with peo­ple adja­cent to the white nation­al­ist fringe in the first year of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, accord­ing to two sources with knowl­edge of the event. In 2017, he attend­ed a din­ner orga­nized by Giesea at a restau­rant in down­town Wash­ing­ton, DC, with a num­ber of fig­ures from right-wing cir­cles, among them Scott Greer, a now-for­mer Dai­ly Caller writer who wrote under a pseu­do­nym for Spencer’s Radix Jour­nal, and Dar­ren Beat­tie, a for­mer White House speech­writer who in 2016 spoke at the H.L. Menck­en Club, a con­fer­ence that has often pro­vid­ed a forum for white nation­al­ists.

...

Face­book, Palan­tir, and the White House

Through the first months of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, Thiel, who did not take any admin­is­tra­tion posi­tion, con­tin­ued to make him­self avail­able to the White House. He appeared at a June meet­ing for the new­ly formed Amer­i­can Tech­nol­o­gy Coun­cil that was attend­ed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, Ama­zon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadel­la, and Ora­cle co-CEO Safra Catz. That month, he was also approached for a role as chair of the President’s Intel­li­gence Advi­so­ry Board, an influ­en­tial over­sight posi­tion in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, but turned it down.

The bridge Thiel built to cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca, how­ev­er, was shat­tered by Trump’s defense of white nation­al­ists fol­low­ing the events in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia in August 2017. After the pres­i­dent blamed vio­lence on “both sides” fol­low­ing the killing of a 32-year-old coun­ter­pro­test­er, tech giants includ­ing Apple, IBM, and Microsoft dis­tanced them­selves from the coun­cil, which was ulti­mate­ly dis­band­ed in embar­rass­ment by the admin­is­tra­tion.
...

And yet, as we’ve seen, Thiel’s per­son­al for­tunes explod­ed under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, with Palan­tir’s rev­enue grow­ing 49% in the first six months of 2020 alone. And as the arti­cle notes, a Biden vic­to­ry prob­a­bly won’t help Palan­tir’s prospects:

...
Palan­tir, Thiel’s main finan­cial hold­ing, has thrived dur­ing Trump’s three and a half years in office, with rev­enue grow­ing by 49% in the first six months of 2020 to more than $480 mil­lion com­pared to the same peri­od last year. Led by CEO Alex Karp, who once said “it would be hard to make up some­one I find less appeal­ing” than Trump, the big data com­pa­ny has signed con­tracts with fed­er­al agen­cies whose ranks were staffed with peo­ple vet­ted by Thiel and his asso­ciates dur­ing the tran­si­tion. In 2019, it won a Pen­ta­gon con­tract worth up to $800 mil­lion, while also pro­vid­ing soft­ware to US Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment. Those deals have bol­stered the firm’s bot­tom line as it heads toward going pub­lic at the end of 2020.

Those close to Thiel said he believes this is the win­dow for the com­pa­ny, which has nev­er had an annu­al prof­it, to hit the mar­ket. A Biden pres­i­den­cy could change the company’s momen­tum, and with Trump in office, Palan­tir has become a for­mi­da­ble DC con­trac­tor, said two sources famil­iar with the billionaire’s think­ing.
...

So has Peter Thiel real­ly giv­en up on the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the Alt Right? That’s what those close to him are telling the press. But this is Amer­i­ca in 2020 where if you’re a bil­lion­aire who wants to giv­en mil­lions or bil­lions of dol­lars in secret cam­paign dona­tions you can do that with ease. And that’s why the ques­tion of whether or not Peter Thiel has tru­ly with­held his polit­i­cal dona­tions in 2020 dou­bles as a ques­tion of how many Nazis he’s secret­ly fund­ing. In par­tic­u­lar Nazis run­ning as Repub­li­cans.

There was an inter­est­ing fol­low up on the Brett Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion deba­cle and the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion, or lack there­of, that took place in response to a num­ber of sex­u­al assault accu­sa­tions:

For the past three years, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Shel­don White­house has con­tin­ued to pur­sue answers from the FBI over their han­dling of the near 4,500 tips sent to the FBI in rela­tion to Kavanaugh­’s per­son­al his­to­ry after the FBI cre­ate a “tip line”. We got some answers this week. The kind of answers we should have expect­ed. It sounds like the FBI’s “sup­ple­men­tal back­ground inves­ti­ga­tion” into Kavanaugh was con­duct­ed at the direc­tion of the Trump White House and that the most “rel­e­vant” of the tips were referred back to White House lawyers. In oth­er words, there was no FBI inves­ti­ga­tion of Brett Kavanaugh­’s back­ground:

Slate

We Now Know What the FBI Did With the 4,500 Kavanaugh Tips It Col­lect­ed in 2018

By Dahlia Lith­wick
July 22, 20216:08 PM

Kavanaugh points a fin­ger toward the desk at which he’s seat­ed and speak­ing from in a con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing.

Sen. Shel­don White­house has spent near­ly three years attempt­ing to under­stand the nature of the FBI’s “sup­ple­men­tal inves­ti­ga­tion” of claims that emerged against Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings in the sum­mer of 2018. The senator’s attempts to get answers from either the Trump White House or the FBI were large­ly unsuc­cess­ful while Trump was still in office. But White­house kept trying—almost as soon as Mer­rick Gar­land was sworn in as attor­ney gen­er­al, White­house asked him to help facil­i­tate “prop­er over­sight” by the Sen­ate into ques­tions about how seri­ous the FBI sup­ple­men­tal inves­ti­ga­tion real­ly was.

White­house asked Gar­land to explain why there was no mech­a­nism for wit­ness­es to report their accounts to the FBI, and why, after the FBI decid­ed to cre­ate a “tip line,” nobody was ever told how the tips were eval­u­at­ed. In his March let­ter to Gar­land, White­house described that tip line as “more like a garbage chute, with every­thing that came down the chute con­signed with­out review to the fig­u­ra­tive dump­ster.” White­house asked Gar­land to explain “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI con­duct­ed a “fake” inves­ti­ga­tion that vio­lat­ed stan­dard pro­ce­dures. White­house also asked Gar­land to probe into the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in cred­it card debt that mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished from Kavanaugh’s life in 2016.

And it seems he has final­ly got­ten at least some answers. On Wednes­day morn­ing, Whitehouse’s office released a June 30 let­ter from FBI Assis­tant Direc­tor Jill C. Tyson. The let­ter is a response to an even old­er request sent by White­house (and Sen. Chris Coons) ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions about the sup­ple­men­tal back­ground investigation—this one, sent to the FBI in August 2019. Among oth­er rev­e­la­tions, Tyson’s let­ter indi­cates that the FBI’s sup­ple­men­tal inves­ti­ga­tion hap­pened at the direc­tion of the White House, that the most “rel­e­vant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received were referred back to White House lawyers in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, and that in the days of the fol­low-up inves­ti­ga­tion, 10 peo­ple were inter­viewed (it doesn’t say this, but oth­er report­ing has con­firmed that nei­ther Chris­tine Blasey Ford nor Kavanaugh were among these 10 peo­ple). The let­ter clar­i­fies that this was a sup­ple­men­tal back­ground check, not a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion because that is what was sought by the White House counsel’s office.

White­house and Coons, joined by five oth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors, sent a fol­low-up let­ter to FBI Direc­tor Christo­pher Wray, dat­ed Wednes­day, ask­ing for an expla­na­tion of how the tips were eval­u­at­ed, what fol­low-up occurred, and why the FBI failed to inter­view key wit­ness­es. As they put it, “If the FBI was not autho­rized to or did not fol­low up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand the point of hav­ing a tip line at all.” In oth­er words: Why was this a sham inves­ti­ga­tion?

White­house tweet­ed on Wednes­day that he believes that facts that were hid­den and sup­pressed at the time still need to be made pub­lic, espe­cial­ly in light of the cur­rent debate about reform­ing the judi­cial ethics rules that do not apply to the jus­tices. And he said that part of the rea­son that he has per­sist­ed in his inves­ti­ga­tion of the fake FBI inves­ti­ga­tion is because he made a promise to Chris­tine Blasey Ford at the hear­ings that he would not deny her the rig­or­ous inquiry that her life-alter­ing deci­sion to come for­ward should have received.

...

But it still behooves me to point out that even though it’s not clear any­thing can be done to some­day see or eval­u­ate those 4,500 unex­am­ined tips sent to Don McGahn’s team (the same team that was tasked with con­firm­ing Kavanaugh to the bench) or about the 83 ethics com­plaints that were sent to the shred­der, one thing has changed: Brett Kavanaugh is now the reli­ably medi­an “swing” jus­tice on the most con­ser­v­a­tive Supreme Court in almost a cen­tu­ry—a court in which John Roberts may occa­sion­al­ly vote with the lib­er­al wing so it can lose by a 5–4 mar­gin. It is Kavanaugh that may well bring about the demise of abor­tion pro­tec­tions, robust vot­er pro­tec­tions, gun safe­ty laws, and a host of oth­er doc­tri­nal changes that have made the court more pro-busi­ness and more anti-work­er every year. So it isn’t just that Kavanaugh has life­time tenure at the high court because there was no mean­ing­ful inves­ti­ga­tion of whether he was qual­i­fied. It is also that due to his new swing-ish vote sta­tus, every lit­i­gant who appears before him, every Supreme Court advo­cate who wants to cur­ry favor, every low­er court judge in the land, and every oth­er sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice must devote their days to efforts to praise and charm and win him over. Which means that the only way to win at the high court involves Wash­ing­ton absolv­ing him, every sin­gle day, of alle­ga­tions that were not even sur­faced, much less adju­di­cat­ed by any fact-find­ing enti­ty. And if that’s not absolute pow­er, I’m not real­ly sure what is.

————

“We Now Know What the FBI Did With the 4,500 Kavanaugh Tips It Col­lect­ed in 2018” by Dahlia Lith­wick; Slate; 07/22/2021

“And it seems he has final­ly got­ten at least some answers. On Wednes­day morn­ing, Whitehouse’s office released a June 30 let­ter from FBI Assis­tant Direc­tor Jill C. Tyson. The let­ter is a response to an even old­er request sent by White­house (and Sen. Chris Coons) ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions about the sup­ple­men­tal back­ground investigation—this one, sent to the FBI in August 2019. Among oth­er rev­e­la­tions, Tyson’s let­ter indi­cates that the FBI’s sup­ple­men­tal inves­ti­ga­tion hap­pened at the direc­tion of the White House, that the most “rel­e­vant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received were referred back to White House lawyers in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, and that in the days of the fol­low-up inves­ti­ga­tion, 10 peo­ple were inter­viewed (it doesn’t say this, but oth­er report­ing has con­firmed that nei­ther Chris­tine Blasey Ford nor Kavanaugh were among these 10 peo­ple). The let­ter clar­i­fies that this was a sup­ple­men­tal back­ground check, not a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion because that is what was sought by the White House counsel’s office.”

Who got to ulti­mate­ly receive the infor­ma­tion from these tips and make a deter­mi­na­tion about Kavanaugh­’s fit­ness to serve on the bench? Trump White House lawyers. Some might con­sid­er that a con­flict of inter­est. Espe­cial­ly since the ques­tions about Kavanaugh­’s fit­ness were lim­it­ed to accu­sa­tions of sex­u­al assault. They also involve ques­tions about what hap­pened to tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in cred­it card debt that mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished in 2016. The White House­’s lawyers were pre­sum­ably vet­ting any infor­ma­tion relat­ed to that too:

...
White­house asked Gar­land to explain why there was no mech­a­nism for wit­ness­es to report their accounts to the FBI, and why, after the FBI decid­ed to cre­ate a “tip line,” nobody was ever told how the tips were eval­u­at­ed. In his March let­ter to Gar­land, White­house described that tip line as “more like a garbage chute, with every­thing that came down the chute con­signed with­out review to the fig­u­ra­tive dump­ster.” White­house asked Gar­land to explain “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI con­duct­ed a “fake” inves­ti­ga­tion that vio­lat­ed stan­dard pro­ce­dures. White­house also asked Gar­land to probe into the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in cred­it card debt that mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished from Kavanaugh’s life in 2016.
...

Who paid off that tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in cred­it card debt that mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared? We have no idea. We also have no idea if the FBI knows the answer to that ques­tion. But what we do know now is that if the FBI did obtain an answer to that ques­tion it would have exclu­sive­ly giv­en those answers to the Trump White House lawyers, who would be the peo­ple to deter­mine if that infor­ma­tion posed a prob­lem.

It’s also impor­tant to keep in mind that it’s not just the case that the Trump team of White House lawyers were giv­en the pow­er to deter­mine how that ‘sup­ple­ment back­ground inves­ti­ga­tion’ infor­ma­tion end­ed up being used in mak­ing an assess­ment about whether or not Kavanaugh was fit for the bench. It’s also the case that this same group of peo­ple now has the pow­er to decide whether or not to ever release this infor­ma­tion in the future. In oth­er words, that team of Trump White House lawyers — and any­one else they shared this info with — will have very real black­mail pow­er over Kavanaugh. He’s pre­sum­ably going to be serv­ing on the bench for decades to come. If you’re a Supreme Court jus­tice you real­ly do have the option of chang­ing your mind and judi­cial phi­los­o­phy. But you’re prob­a­bly a lot less like­ly to do so when a team of lawyers from one of the most cor­rupt admin­is­tra­tions in his­to­ry knows the stuff that should have kept you off the bench. Espe­cial­ly if that’s part of the rea­son they put you there.

Fol­low­ing up on the fas­ci­nat­ing new biog­ra­phy of Peter Thiel depict­ing him as a para­noid pow­er mad, here’s a pair of arti­cles describ­ing the explo­sion of Thiel’s influ­ence inside the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in recent years:

First, here’s a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle from last month about Rum­ble, the new YouTube rival start­ed in 2013 that appears grew from 1 mil­lion to 30 mil­lion active users over the past year. The com­pa­ny said in May it had received a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment from JD Vance’s Narya Cap­i­tal and Peter Thiel. So Thiel is get­ting into the ‘Alt’ social media mar­ket. Keep in mind that Vance is run­ning in the GOP Sen­ate pri­ma­ry for a Vir­ginia Sen­ate seat and has been a recip­i­ent of a report­ed $10 mil­lion in cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from Thiel this year.

But Rum­ble isn’t focused exclu­sive­ly on con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences. As part of an effort to show the plat­form can be friend­ly to non-con­ser­v­a­tives, Rum­ble signed deals with Glenn Green­wald and for­mer con­gress­woman Tul­si Gab­bard pay­ing them to pro­duce con­tent on the plat­form. How much are they being paid? We aren’t told oth­er than that it’s in the “mid-range six fig­ures”.

And as we’ll see in the sec­ond except below in a New York­er arti­cle from back in May, it’s Peter Thiel who par­ty lumi­nar­ies and 2024 hope­fuls like Mike Pom­peo are turn­ing to in for­mu­lat­ing their own ideas of what the future holds and how to pre­pare for it. Thiel has become one of the top thought lead­ers for the Repub­li­can Par­ty and that influ­ence is only going as he throws more and more mon­ey around. That’s part of the sig­nif­i­cance of the sto­ry of Rum­ble. It’s the kind of sto­ry that hints at a lot more sim­i­lar sto­ries are on the way in com­ing years as the broad­er sto­ry of Thiel’s post-Trumpian cap­ture of the GOP plays out:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Rum­ble, a YouTube rival pop­u­lar with con­ser­v­a­tives, will pay cre­ators who ‘chal­lenge the sta­tus quo’

The video site has explod­ed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic as a home for anti-vac­cine mis­in­for­ma­tion and con­ser­v­a­tive com­plaints about Big Tech cen­sor­ship

By Drew Har­well
August 12, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

A fast-grow­ing YouTube rival pop­u­lar with con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers has a new strat­e­gy to expand its online audi­ence: Pay­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to well-known media per­son­al­i­ties it says work to “chal­lenge the sta­tus quo.”

The Toron­to-based upstart Rum­ble said Thurs­day that it has struck deals with for­mer U.S. con­gress­woman Tul­si Gab­bard, the jour­nal­ist fire­brand Glenn Green­wald and oth­ers who had com­mit­ted to post­ing their videos first to the site.

Rum­ble has emerged over the last year as one of the most promi­nent video sites for right-wing view­ers and provo­ca­teurs, and it is seek­ing to bol­ster its image as a new online home for those who claim they’ve been cen­sored by Big Tech.

The site bans racism and hate speech but has con­trast­ed itself with the Google-owned YouTube by refus­ing to remove “med­ical mis­in­for­ma­tion,” includ­ing those cast­ing doubt on vac­cines dur­ing a pan­dem­ic that is surg­ing in many states and has killed more than 4 mil­lion peo­ple around the world.

Rum­ble has grown from 1 mil­lion active users last sum­mer to rough­ly 30 mil­lion, said the site’s chief exec­u­tive Chris Pavlovs­ki, a Cana­di­an tech entre­pre­neur who worked a brief intern­ship at Microsoft and found­ed a viral-joke web­site before launch­ing Rum­ble in 2013. And its traf­fic has explod­ed: Accord­ing to data shared with The Wash­ing­ton Post by the ana­lyt­ics firm Sim­i­lar­web, vis­its in the Unit­ed States to the site grew from about 200,000 in the last week of July 2020 to near­ly 19 mil­lion last week — a 9,000 per­cent increase.

Rumble’s move high­lights how a grow­ing group of online influ­encers have amassed lucra­tive fol­low­ings while dis­cussing their alleged sup­pres­sion in books, videos, social media posts, pod­casts, newslet­ters, pro­mo­tion­al spon­sor­ships, speak­ing events and oth­er mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties.

Gab­bard and Green­wald have expand­ed their fan bases in recent months by crit­i­ciz­ing what they call over­ly aggres­sive media cen­sor­ship in appear­ances on Fox News and Twit­ter, where each has more than 1 mil­lion fol­low­ers.

Green­wald said in an inter­view he sees Rum­ble as a way “of lib­er­at­ing our­selves from the con­trol and oppres­sion of Big Tech monop­o­lies’ cen­sor­ship and tyran­ny.”

“I’m not uncom­fort­able if peo­ple are on there say­ing things I dis­agree with. … This is a very recent phe­nom­e­non online: We expect our plat­forms to be cleansed of peo­ple we dis­like,” he said.

“Unlike YouTube, Face­book and Twit­ter, which began wild­ly expand­ing how the rules are applied for broad­er soci­ety to remove so-called ‘dis­in­for­ma­tion,’ Rum­ble just stayed true to the orig­i­nal mis­sion,” he added. “You can’t go on there and say racist stuff, but they don’t mon­i­tor for what’s true or false. They real­ly believe in true debate.”

Rum­ble, Green­wald said, reached out to him two months ago, offer­ing a deal to pro­duce high-qual­i­ty videos that would help show Rum­ble can be “a hos­pitable place for non-MAGA peo­ple,” a term for sup­port­ers of for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again” catch­phrase.

The com­pa­ny declined to pro­vide finan­cial details but Green­wald said the top cre­ators’ year-long con­tracts will pay in the “midrange six fig­ures.”

Green­wald said he is build­ing out a pro­fes­sion­al video stu­dio in his home in Rio de Janeiro, and that he intends to reg­u­lar­ly record and air hour-long videos and live ques­tion-and-answer ses­sions.

On his Sub­stack newslet­ter last week, he allud­ed to the new Rum­ble deal in a YouTube video, describ­ing an “ample fund­ing pack­age” to pay for a “high­ly pro­fes­sion­al­ized form of video” in a space “where peo­ple can be tru­ly free and inde­pen­dent.” His videos, he said, would spot­light the “repres­sion and cen­sor­ship on the part of Big Tech monop­o­lies in con­junc­tion with the lib­er­al sec­tor of the cor­po­rate media and the estab­lish­ment wing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.”

The Rum­ble-fund­ed cre­ators will be free to post their videos else­where, includ­ing YouTube, after a two-hour Rum­ble-exclu­sive win­dow. They will also be able to make mon­ey through video adver­tise­ments and oth­er mon­e­ti­za­tion fea­tures Rum­ble is now build­ing, sim­i­lar to those found on YouTube and Twitch, includ­ing allow­ing view­ers to pay extra to make their live-chat com­ments big­ger.

Rumble’s traf­fic has dra­mat­i­cal­ly out­paced oth­er social net­works pop­u­lar among con­ser­v­a­tive users. Between the last weeks of July in 2020 and 2021, web­site vis­its jumped near­ly 300 per­cent for MeWe, to near­ly 1.5 mil­lion vis­its, and 400 per­cent for Gab, with near­ly 3 mil­lion vis­its, the Sim­i­lar­web analy­sis shows. Par­ler, a site where many users post­ed videos of the Jan. 6 riots that have since been cit­ed in crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions, has seen its traf­fic cut in half, falling to rough­ly 200,000 vis­its.

Rum­ble still draws only a tiny frac­tion of YouTube’s audi­ence, with desk­top and mobile vis­its that reached only about 1 per­cent of YouTube’s 1.5 bil­lion vis­its last week, the Sim­i­lar­web analy­sis shows. And unlike the main­stream sites, Rumble’s traf­fic fluc­tu­ates wild­ly from day-to-day, a hint that its pop­u­lar­i­ty is heav­i­ly depen­dent on trend­ing events.

Rum­ble was launched in 2013 and for years served as a most­ly unre­mark­able col­lec­tion of cute videos about babies and house­hold pets.

But as YouTube and oth­er sites began more aggres­sive­ly adding dis­claimers and delet­ing videos pro­mot­ing false claims about the pan­dem­ic, many cre­ators began urg­ing their fol­low­ers to save and re-upload the videos to back­up sites such as BitChute and Rum­ble, where they could be viewed and shared.

Such copy­cat sites have got­ten a boost from con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers’ argu­ments that their fol­low­ers must stick by them in the face of Big Tech “deplat­form­ing” and “shad­ow­bans,” said Renée DiRes­ta, a research man­ag­er at the Stan­ford Inter­net Obser­va­to­ry. But many of the sites, she added, have faced a plateau­ing of view­er inter­est as the niche sites’ nov­el­ty fades.

“With every new con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form, there’s this spike and then there’s marked decline, because they can’t keep up that engage­ment, that activ­i­ty, that draw,” DiRes­ta said.

“Part of that may be that these peo­ple are not actu­al­ly cen­sored on the main­stream plat­forms, so they keep post­ing there,” she added. “They still want to engage and argue and share things on those plat­forms with all of the exist­ing net­work effects, those rela­tion­ships, that cen­ter of grav­i­ty where they already are.”

YouTube’s “med­ical mis­in­for­ma­tion” pol­i­cy since last May has banned videos about the coro­n­avirus that could pose a “seri­ous risk of egre­gious harm.” The site remains a pop­u­lar refuge for coro­n­avirus false­hoods, though the com­pa­ny said its mod­er­a­tors work to remove videos claim­ing, for instance, that the coro­n­avirus does not exist (it does) or that vac­cines con­tain track­ing devices (they don’t).

Rum­ble has avoid­ed those debates by allow­ing such videos to remain on the site unmod­er­at­ed. Pavlovs­ki said the com­pa­ny employs 40 con­tent mod­er­a­tors to police the site — slight­ly more than one mod­er­a­tor for every mil­lion users.

“We’re like your din­ner table. You can have a con­ver­sa­tion. You can have dis­agree­ments. And you can try to prove some­one wrong,” Pavlovs­ki said. “If it vio­lates our terms and con­di­tions, which ban anti­semitism, hate speech, defama­tion, etc., it will be removed. But we don’t move the goal posts and expand our terms and con­di­tions to be more than that. If you want to believe in UFOs, you’re free to believe in UFOs.”

Search­ing for “vac­cine” on YouTube returns most­ly videos from news orga­ni­za­tions, doc­tors and fact-check­ing orga­ni­za­tions. The same search on Rum­ble returns videos false­ly sug­gest­ing it “caus­es the virus to be more dan­ger­ous” and has “poor dura­bil­i­ty.”

Rum­ble lacks the more mod­ern trap­pings of new­er video sites such as Tik­Tok and Twitch, includ­ing algo­rith­mic rec­om­men­da­tions for what a user should watch next, which Pavlos­ki said pre­vents the site from ampli­fy­ing videos in an improp­er way.

The site’s top videos on its “Bat­tle Leader­board” come almost entire­ly from big con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers such as Dinesh D’Souza, Don­ald Trump Jr., Sean Han­ni­ty and Dan Bongi­no, who this week slammed Fox News for edit­ing out Trump’s false­hoods about a “fake elec­tion” in an inter­view the net­work post­ed to its YouTube account.

Most promi­nent Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have Rum­ble accounts, includ­ing Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who said this week that YouTube’s removal of a video in which he said most masks wouldn’t pre­vent coro­n­avirus spread was a “badge of hon­or.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Flori­da Repub­li­can now under inves­ti­ga­tion for pos­si­ble sex traf­fick­ing of a minor, said in a tweet this week that Rum­ble is his “new fav social media app” and “the best way” to watch his new video pod­cast.

Rum­ble also has a ver­i­fied account for the for­mer pres­i­dent, who was removed from most major social net­works after the Jan. 6 riot. The account, with 500,000 sub­scribers, has been used sole­ly to repost Trump’s speech­es at ral­lies and appear­ances on Fox News.

Rum­ble said Thurs­day that come­di­an Brid­get Pheta­sy, jour­nal­ist Zaid Jilani and oth­er “nation­al­ly rec­og­nized thought lead­ers” who believe “tech monop­o­lies should not dic­tate dis­course” would also join the site.

The com­pa­ny said in May it had received a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment from Narya Cap­i­tal, a fund co-found­ed by “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy” author J.D. Vance, and the bil­lion­aire ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Peter Thiel, an ear­ly investor in Face­book and a co-founder of the gov­ern­ment-con­tract­ing giant Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies.

The com­pa­ny runs or leas­es all of its servers, which Pavlovs­ki said will help shield it from the rules of the cloud-com­put­ing giants that run much of the Web. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices stopped pro­vid­ing Web-host­ing ser­vices to Par­ler after the Capi­tol riot, cit­ing con­cerns that the site had not done enough to remove vio­lent threats.

Rum­ble has also worked to align itself with broad­er con­cerns about Big Tech’s pow­er, includ­ing from antitrust reg­u­la­tors in Wash­ing­ton now scru­ti­niz­ing whether Sil­i­con Valley’s biggest names should be bro­ken up. The com­pa­ny sued Google ear­li­er this year, alleg­ing the search engine unfair­ly pro­mot­ed YouTube in its results. Google has said the ongo­ing law­suit is base­less.

Rum­ble is joined by a grow­ing cadre of sim­i­lar sites, such as Get­tr, a “can­cel free” Twit­ter clone led by Trump’s for­mer spokesman Jason Miller. The com­pa­ny boasts “cut­ting-edge A.I. tech­nol­o­gy” it says helps mod­er­ate con­tent, but view­ers have not­ed that Get­tr has also been used to share uncen­sored pornog­ra­phy and Islam­ic State pro­pa­gan­da.

Some researchers expect that Rumble’s lax rules for mod­er­at­ing con­tent will force it down the same path of pre­vi­ous “free speech” start-ups, fuel­ing an echo cham­ber that fur­ther entrench­es the most extreme cor­ners of its user base while also lim­it­ing its abil­i­ty to win main­stream view­ers.

...

———-

“Rum­ble, a YouTube rival pop­u­lar with con­ser­v­a­tives, will pay cre­ators who ‘chal­lenge the sta­tus quo’” by Drew Har­well; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 08/12/2021

“The com­pa­ny said in May it had received a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment from Narya Cap­i­tal, a fund co-found­ed by “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy” author J.D. Vance, and the bil­lion­aire ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Peter Thiel, an ear­ly investor in Face­book and a co-founder of the gov­ern­ment-con­tract­ing giant Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies.”

Rum­ble has poten­tial. At least that’s one inter­pre­ta­tion of the “sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment” made by Thiel and Vance. They’re invest­ing in a com­pa­ny they see as hav­ing poten­tial. Of course, when we’re talk­ing about a polit­i­cal­ly-charged social media plat­form, there are oth­er obvi­ous rea­sons for a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment that have noth­ing to do with future prof­its. Like sim­ply invest­ing in influ­enc­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

But as Glenn Green­wald and Tul­si Gab­bard also make clear with their paid pres­ences on the forum, Thiel and Vance aren’t just buy­ing influ­ence with con­ser­v­a­tives. The polit­i­cal ‘alt’-space occu­pied by Green­wald and Gab­bard — friend­ly fel­low trav­el­ers of the ‘Alt Right’ — is ripe for influ­ence ped­dling of this nature. A few “sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments” here and there and who knows how many peo­ple are going to end up on Thiel’s pay­roll:

...
Gab­bard and Green­wald have expand­ed their fan bases in recent months by crit­i­ciz­ing what they call over­ly aggres­sive media cen­sor­ship in appear­ances on Fox News and Twit­ter, where each has more than 1 mil­lion fol­low­ers.

Green­wald said in an inter­view he sees Rum­ble as a way “of lib­er­at­ing our­selves from the con­trol and oppres­sion of Big Tech monop­o­lies’ cen­sor­ship and tyran­ny.”

“I’m not uncom­fort­able if peo­ple are on there say­ing things I dis­agree with. … This is a very recent phe­nom­e­non online: We expect our plat­forms to be cleansed of peo­ple we dis­like,” he said.

“Unlike YouTube, Face­book and Twit­ter, which began wild­ly expand­ing how the rules are applied for broad­er soci­ety to remove so-called ‘dis­in­for­ma­tion,’ Rum­ble just stayed true to the orig­i­nal mis­sion,” he added. “You can’t go on there and say racist stuff, but they don’t mon­i­tor for what’s true or false. They real­ly believe in true debate.”

Rum­ble, Green­wald said, reached out to him two months ago, offer­ing a deal to pro­duce high-qual­i­ty videos that would help show Rum­ble can be “a hos­pitable place for non-MAGA peo­ple,” a term for sup­port­ers of for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again” catch­phrase.

The com­pa­ny declined to pro­vide finan­cial details but Green­wald said the top cre­ators’ year-long con­tracts will pay in the “midrange six fig­ures.”

Green­wald said he is build­ing out a pro­fes­sion­al video stu­dio in his home in Rio de Janeiro, and that he intends to reg­u­lar­ly record and air hour-long videos and live ques­tion-and-answer ses­sions.

On his Sub­stack newslet­ter last week, he allud­ed to the new Rum­ble deal in a YouTube video, describ­ing an “ample fund­ing pack­age” to pay for a “high­ly pro­fes­sion­al­ized form of video” in a space “where peo­ple can be tru­ly free and inde­pen­dent.” His videos, he said, would spot­light the “repres­sion and cen­sor­ship on the part of Big Tech monop­o­lies in con­junc­tion with the lib­er­al sec­tor of the cor­po­rate media and the estab­lish­ment wing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.”

...

The site’s top videos on its “Bat­tle Leader­board” come almost entire­ly from big con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers such as Dinesh D’Souza, Don­ald Trump Jr., Sean Han­ni­ty and Dan Bongi­no, who this week slammed Fox News for edit­ing out Trump’s false­hoods about a “fake elec­tion” in an inter­view the net­work post­ed to its YouTube account.
...

It was 2016 when we saw Thiel jump into the polit­i­cal realm in a big way. So just how influ­en­tial has Thiel grown inside the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment over the past 5 years? That brings us to the fol­low­ing New York­er piece from back in May about pre­cise­ly that kind of devel­op­ment: While Don­ald Trump may be the present-day incar­na­tion of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, it’s look­ing more and more like top Repub­li­can are look­ing to Peter Thiel to pro­vide the vision for the par­ty’s future. A future not entire­ly unlike its Trumpian present. Thiel has proven to be a mas­ter of the Trumpian tac­tic of chan­nel­ing his elit­ist anti-gov­ern­ment agen­da into a pop­ulist anti-gov­ern­ment shtick. But it’s not just Thiel’s vision for the future of the Repub­li­can Par­ty that has GOP lumi­nar­ies look­ing towards Thiel for guid­ance. It’s Thiel’s sense of impend­ing doom for civ­i­liza­tion — doom cre­at­ed by sti­fling Big Gov­ern­ment and social con­straints imposed on great vision­ar­ies like Thiel who only want to bring the world great things like fly­ing cars — that has cap­ti­vat­ed the par­ty and the move­ment. Thiel has become the GOP’s unof­fi­cial End Times prophet, and if that apoc­a­lypse is going to be avoid­ed, or embraced, they’re going to have to fol­low his lead:

The New York­er

The Rise of the Thielists

Has the Repub­li­can Par­ty found its post-Trump ide­ol­o­gy?

By Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells
May 13, 2021

Peter Thiel appeared at a Zoom event one evening this past April in a famil­iar pose: his face sat tense and almost twitchy, and yet his voice radi­at­ed author­i­ty and calm. Even by Thiel’s rar­efied stan­dards, his main inter­view­er that evening, in a con­ver­sa­tion host­ed by the Nixon Foun­da­tion, was impres­sive: Mike Pom­peo, Trump’s for­mer Sec­re­tary of State and a poten­tial Pres­i­den­tial con­tender, who was treat­ing the bil­lion­aire with def­er­ence while ask­ing him the broad­est of ques­tions about the future of the U.S. and Chi­na. “You spend a lot of time think­ing and writ­ing about the tech­nol­o­gy fight between the West and the ideas that the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty puts forward—whether that’s dis­in­for­ma­tion or the capac­i­ty to move dig­its around the world,” Pom­peo said to Thiel, before ask­ing the investor how the two pow­ers com­pared, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly. For any­one inter­est­ed in who will hold pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty in the near future, the event made for a stark tableau of clout. Pompeo’s eyes nar­rowed atten­tive­ly as he lis­tened to Thiel; the Trump nation­al-secu­ri­ty advis­er, Robert O’Brien, who had also been invit­ed to ask ques­tions, was nod­ding appre­cia­tive­ly beneath a for­mi­da­ble white coif.

Most of us, these days, oper­ate down­stream from one bil­lion­aire or anoth­er, and the most inter­est­ing and desta­bi­liz­ing parts of the Repub­li­can Par­ty are oper­at­ing down­stream from Thiel, whose net worth Bloomberg recent­ly esti­mat­ed at more than six bil­lion dol­lars. Eric Wein­stein, who coined the term “intel­lec­tu­al dark Web,” is the man­ag­ing direc­tor at Thiel Cap­i­tal. (“Man of many hats,” Thiel said not long ago, when asked to describe Weinstein’s role with­in his empire.) In 2015 and 2016, Thiel made a crit­i­cal three-hun­dred-thou­sand-dol­lar dona­tion to the cam­paign of Josh Haw­ley, who was then run­ning for Mis­souri attor­ney gen­er­al; once in office, Haw­ley had to answer ques­tions about whether his announce­ment of an antitrust inves­ti­ga­tion into Google had any­thing to do with Thiel, an avowed oppo­nent of the search giant. This year, Thiel has giv­en ten mil­lion dol­lars to an out­side group fund­ing the Ohio Sen­ate cam­paign of J. D. Vance, the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist who became famous as the author of the 2016 mem­oir “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy,” and a voice on behalf of the parts of Amer­i­ca that glob­al­iza­tion had left behind. (He is now a reg­u­lar on Tuck­er Carlson’s Fox News show.) Thiel donat­ed ten mil­lion dol­lars to the Ari­zona U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign of his own aide, Blake Mas­ters, who co-authored one of his books and has most­ly worked for Thiel since he grad­u­at­ed from Stan­ford Law, a decade ago; he gave rough­ly two mil­lion dol­lars to the failed 2020 Sen­ate cam­paign of the hard-right anti-immi­gra­tionist Sen­ate can­di­date Kris Kobach. There is no obvi­ous par­ty line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a cou­ple of char­ac­ter­is­tics. They are inter­est­ed in cham­pi­oning out­ré ideas and caus­es, and they are mem­bers of an Amer­i­can élite who nev­er­the­less empha­size, in their pol­i­tics, how awful élites have been for ordi­nary Amer­i­cans.

The Amer­i­can right just now is in a state of ner­vous inco­her­ence. Even the most basic ques­tions (for democ­ra­cy or against?) seem to trig­ger pan­icked, mul­ti­di­men­sion­al cal­cu­la­tions, with eyes always cast uncer­tain­ly at Mar-a-Lago. The temp­ta­tion is to say that some of this uncer­tain­ty is ide­o­log­i­cal in nature—that, a decade ago, the orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple of con­ser­vatism was lib­er­tar­i­an­ism (embod­ied by much of the Tea Par­ty). Trump ele­vat­ed a long-dor­mant nation­al­ism that briefly ener­gized the Par­ty, and, after his loss, politi­cians are left try­ing to sort out which mod­el still works. Thiel him­self came out of the lib­er­tar­i­an move­ment: he backed Ron Paul for Pres­i­dent twice, and he donat­ed lav­ish­ly to Paul’s cam­paigns. But, like Haw­ley, Vance, and Kobach, Thiel devel­oped a much more promi­nent role in ser­vice of Trump’s nation­al­ism, per­haps most of all in the address he gave, in 2016, to the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion, in which he seemed bewil­dered by the fact that the aston­ish­ing pros­per­i­ty he saw every day in Sil­i­con Val­ley was not evi­dent in Sacra­men­to. “Wait, wasn’t Peter Thiel a lib­er­tar­i­an?” Rea­son mag­a­zine, the movement’s Bible, won­dered in 2020. Thiel and the Thielists are a through line from the Party’s recent past to its like­ly future; their per­sis­tence sug­gests that Trump’s nation­al­ism didn’t rep­re­sent as extreme a depar­ture from the Party’s pri­or lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as it appeared to.

Before Peter Thiel was a bil­lion­aire, he had the bio­graph­i­cal points of a pret­ty con­ven­tion­al Gen X young Repub­li­can. He was born in 1967, in Frank­furt, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly that fol­lowed his chem­i­cal-engi­neer father to jobs around the globe before set­tling in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. As a teen-ager, Thiel was a math­e­mat­ics prodi­gy who says he was com­fort­able tak­ing con­trar­i­an posi­tions ear­ly, sup­port­ing Ronald Rea­gan and oppos­ing drug legal­iza­tion in mid­dle school. As an under­grad­u­ate, he found­ed the com­bat­ive, con­ser­v­a­tive Stan­ford Review, and, after law school and a stint as an appel­late clerk for a Rea­gan appointee, Thiel co-authored “The Diver­si­ty Myth,” in 1995, a book decry­ing mount­ing polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness on cam­pus. His career had scarce­ly begun—after a stint at a New York law firm, he’d found­ed a small tech-invest­ment com­pa­ny. But Thiel already had a ful­ly formed polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty, and his résumé wasn’t far from what you get from many Repub­li­can con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates.

Sil­i­con Val­ley was boom­ing dur­ing the late nineties, and it did not take Thiel very long to have a huge hit, when he found­ed Pay­Pal with a half-dozen friends and acquain­tances. Thiel’s friends, George Pack­er wrote, in 2011, “are, for the most part, like him and one anoth­er: male, con­ser­v­a­tive, and super-smart in the fields of math and log­i­cal rea­son­ing.” Thiel report­ed­ly came out as gay to his friends in 2003 (he would be out­ed pub­licly by Gawk­er some years lat­er, and went on to spon­sor a law­suit against the com­pa­ny). Thiel co-found­ed the defense-and-intel­li­gence firm Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies, in 2004; that same year, he became Facebook’s first out­side investor. Thiel donat­ed to John McCain’s 2008 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign after sup­port­ing Ron Paul in the pri­ma­ry, but his Repub­li­can­ism received less atten­tion than the fan­ci­ful, long-arc lib­er­tar­i­an projects in which he invest­ed: the Seast­eading Insti­tute (which aimed to build polit­i­cal­ly autonomous cities on plat­forms in inter­na­tion­al waters), the Machine Intel­li­gence Research Insti­tute (which want­ed to insure that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence was friend­ly to humans), and the Thiel Fel­low­ship (which sup­port­ed excep­tion­al­ly tal­ent­ed young peo­ple in cre­at­ing start­up com­pa­nies if they skipped, dropped out of, or took time off from col­lege).

In 2012, Blake Mas­ters, then a Stan­ford Law stu­dent, took a course on star­tups that Thiel taught, and pub­lished the notes on his Tum­blr page, where they became a phe­nom­e­non. By 2014, Thiel and Mas­ters had pub­lished the notes as a book, “Zero to One,” offer­ing the­o­ries on star­tups and advice for founders. Review­ing it, Derek Thomp­son, of The Atlantic, said he thought it “might be the best busi­ness book I’ve read.” Thiel and Mas­ters empha­size the breadth of forces arrayed against any founder: “In a world of gigan­tic admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies both pub­lic and pri­vate, search­ing for a new path might seem like hop­ing for a mir­a­cle. Actu­al­ly, if Amer­i­can busi­ness is going to suc­ceed, we are going to need hun­dreds, or even thou­sands of mir­a­cles. This would be depress­ing but for one cru­cial fact: humans are dis­tin­guished from oth­er species by our abil­i­ty to work mir­a­cles. We call these mir­a­cles tech­nol­o­gy.”

In between slight­ly bat­ty charts (one dis­tin­guish­es between the “def­i­nite opti­mism” of soci­eties like the U.S. in the nine­teen-fifties and six­ties and the “indef­i­nite pes­simism” of oth­ers, like present-day Europe), Thiel and Mas­ters offer a vision of the founder that is pat­terned after Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which imag­i­na­tive indi­vid­u­als are forced to fight through a soci­ety that is bureau­cra­tized and stul­ti­fy­ing in all its insti­tu­tion­al forms. They won­der why the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem com­pels peo­ple to strive for mediocre com­pe­tence in many things instead of try­ing to be unique­ly great at one thing, and bemoan the way large orga­ni­za­tions sti­fle ideas. In Wash­ing­ton, lib­er­tar­i­an­ism tends to take the form of a stark anti-gov­ern­ment posi­tion, usu­al­ly putting Repub­li­cans on the side of large busi­ness­es, which want to reduce their tax bur­den. But Thiel’s more ele­men­tal lib­er­tar­i­an­ism casts big busi­ness as an oppo­nent of progress. (The seem­ing para­dox of Haw­ley and oth­er mem­bers of an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pro-busi­ness par­ty rou­tine­ly call­ing for the breakup of Google, Ama­zon, and Face­book on antitrust grounds may not be a para­dox at all—it may sim­ply be Thielist.) The deep­est qual­i­ty of Thiel and Masters’s book is its out­sized vision of what a hero­ic individual—a founder—can do. In a late chap­ter, they argue that suc­cess­ful founders tend to have the oppo­site qual­i­ties of those seen in the gen­er­al population—that they are, in some basic ways, different—and com­pare them to kings and fig­ures of ancient mythol­o­gy. In a sec­tion on Steve Jobs, Thiel and Mas­ters write:

Apple’s val­ue cru­cial­ly depend­ed on the sin­gu­lar vision of a par­tic­u­lar per­son. This hints at the strange way in which the com­pa­nies that cre­ate new tech­nol­o­gy often resem­ble feu­dal monar­chies rather than orga­ni­za­tions that are sup­pos­ed­ly more “mod­ern.” A unique founder can make author­i­ta­tive deci­sions, inspire strong per­son­al loy­al­ty, and plan ahead for decades. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, imper­son­al bureau­cra­cies staffed by trained pro­fes­sion­als can last longer than any life­time, but they usu­al­ly act with short time hori­zons. The les­son for busi­ness is that we need founders. If any­thing, we should be more tol­er­ant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusu­al indi­vid­u­als to lead com­pa­nies beyond mere incre­men­tal­ism.

The height­ened vision of what a sin­gle leader can do, the ven­er­a­tion for more ancient and direct forms of lead­er­ship, the praise for author­i­ta­tive deci­sion-mak­ing and dis­dain for bureaucracies—it’s a short hop from here to the Don­ald Trump of “I alone can fix it.”

Dur­ing Trump’s 2016 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Thiel appeared to be devel­op­ing some alliances with the far right: Buz­zFeed News lat­er report­ed that he had host­ed a din­ner that includ­ed a promi­nent white nation­al­ist, Kevin DeAn­na; that sto­ry also not­ed that Thiel had backed the start­up of a promi­nent far-right blog­ger named Cur­tis Yarvin, known online as Men­cius Mold­bug. But by the sum­mer of 2020 Thiel, like many oth­er Repub­li­can fun­ders, had tired of the Pres­i­dent. The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed that he was not back­ing Trump’s reëlec­tion cam­paign, which he found so chaot­ic that he pri­vate­ly termed it the “S.S. Min­now.”

...

The Repub­li­can Par­ty, in this uncer­tain post-Trump phase, has often been described as under­go­ing a pop­ulist or nation­al­ist trans­for­ma­tion. But those terms sug­gest pol­i­cy cat­e­gories, and, as Nation­al Review’s Ramesh Pon­nu­ru put it recent­ly, “The Repub­li­can vot­ers them­selves have become post-pol­i­cy.” At the moment, con­ser­vatism seems to be expe­ri­enc­ing less of a pol­i­cy turn than a change in mood, one char­ac­ter­ized by anger and retrench­ment but per­haps espe­cial­ly by a bleak view of what is to come. (This may par­tic­u­lar­ly suit con­ser­v­a­tives at a moment when they find them­selves out of cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal pow­er.) Of all the con­ser­v­a­tive impuls­es, the one that seems the most for­eign right now is the pearly opti­mism of Mitt Rom­ney, on the Pres­i­den­tial trail in 2012, arriv­ing at a banal cam­paign event and declar­ing that the trees in Michi­gan were the right height.

For a while, I thought that the right’s declin­ism might be a ver­sion of nostalgia—as well as a prod­uct of Repub­li­can vot­ers’ com­par­a­tive iso­la­tion from the most dynam­ic parts of the coun­try and the advanced age of many Fox News view­ers. But, as Trump’s Pres­i­den­cy recedes from view, the most dynam­ic young politi­cians in the Par­ty, fig­ures like Haw­ley and Vance, and some of its most influ­en­tial sup­port­ers, such as Thiel, still argue that glob­al­iza­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal change have not deliv­ered on their promis­es. This week, I went back and rewatched Pom­peo and O’Brien inter­view­ing Thiel, ask­ing him for details on the progress of cryp­tocur­ren­cy and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, here and in Chi­na. But I saw it a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly this time. They were try­ing to gauge the posi­tion of the man who taught con­ser­v­a­tives that the future could no longer be count­ed on.

———–

“The Rise of the Thielists” by Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells; The New York­er; 05/13/2021

“Most of us, these days, oper­ate down­stream from one bil­lion­aire or anoth­er, and the most inter­est­ing and desta­bi­liz­ing parts of the Repub­li­can Par­ty are oper­at­ing down­stream from Thiel, whose net worth Bloomberg recent­ly esti­mat­ed at more than six bil­lion dol­lars. Eric Wein­stein, who coined the term “intel­lec­tu­al dark Web,” is the man­ag­ing direc­tor at Thiel Cap­i­tal. (“Man of many hats,” Thiel said not long ago, when asked to describe Weinstein’s role with­in his empire.) In 2015 and 2016, Thiel made a crit­i­cal three-hun­dred-thou­sand-dol­lar dona­tion to the cam­paign of Josh Haw­ley, who was then run­ning for Mis­souri attor­ney gen­er­al; once in office, Haw­ley had to answer ques­tions about whether his announce­ment of an antitrust inves­ti­ga­tion into Google had any­thing to do with Thiel, an avowed oppo­nent of the search giant. This year, Thiel has giv­en ten mil­lion dol­lars to an out­side group fund­ing the Ohio Sen­ate cam­paign of J. D. Vance, the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist who became famous as the author of the 2016 mem­oir “Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy,” and a voice on behalf of the parts of Amer­i­ca that glob­al­iza­tion had left behind. (He is now a reg­u­lar on Tuck­er Carlson’s Fox News show.) Thiel donat­ed ten mil­lion dol­lars to the Ari­zona U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign of his own aide, Blake Mas­ters, who co-authored one of his books and has most­ly worked for Thiel since he grad­u­at­ed from Stan­ford Law, a decade ago; he gave rough­ly two mil­lion dol­lars to the failed 2020 Sen­ate cam­paign of the hard-right anti-immi­gra­tionist Sen­ate can­di­date Kris Kobach. There is no obvi­ous par­ty line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a cou­ple of char­ac­ter­is­tics. They are inter­est­ed in cham­pi­oning out­ré ideas and caus­es, and they are mem­bers of an Amer­i­can élite who nev­er­the­less empha­size, in their pol­i­tics, how awful élites have been for ordi­nary Amer­i­cans.”

If you throw enough mon­ey around in pol­i­tics at some point you’re going to become the de fac­to leader. And right now, Peter Thiel is posi­tion­ing him­self to be that de fact leader. Sure, there are oth­er indi­vid­u­als like Charles Koch who still give more polit­i­cal­ly. But like Trump, Koch’s days are num­ber. We’re due for a chang­ing of the guard on the Amer­i­can Right and Peter Thiel appears to be the guy in posi­tion to become the next Charles Koch. The next per­son with the vision and cash the rest of the par­ty can fol­low:

...
Peter Thiel appeared at a Zoom event one evening this past April in a famil­iar pose: his face sat tense and almost twitchy, and yet his voice radi­at­ed author­i­ty and calm. Even by Thiel’s rar­efied stan­dards, his main inter­view­er that evening, in a con­ver­sa­tion host­ed by the Nixon Foun­da­tion, was impres­sive: Mike Pom­peo, Trump’s for­mer Sec­re­tary of State and a poten­tial Pres­i­den­tial con­tender, who was treat­ing the bil­lion­aire with def­er­ence while ask­ing him the broad­est of ques­tions about the future of the U.S. and Chi­na. “You spend a lot of time think­ing and writ­ing about the tech­nol­o­gy fight between the West and the ideas that the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty puts forward—whether that’s dis­in­for­ma­tion or the capac­i­ty to move dig­its around the world,” Pom­peo said to Thiel, before ask­ing the investor how the two pow­ers com­pared, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly. For any­one inter­est­ed in who will hold pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty in the near future, the event made for a stark tableau of clout. Pompeo’s eyes nar­rowed atten­tive­ly as he lis­tened to Thiel; the Trump nation­al-secu­ri­ty advis­er, Robert O’Brien, who had also been invit­ed to ask ques­tions, was nod­ding appre­cia­tive­ly beneath a for­mi­da­ble white coif.

...

The Repub­li­can Par­ty, in this uncer­tain post-Trump phase, has often been described as under­go­ing a pop­ulist or nation­al­ist trans­for­ma­tion. But those terms sug­gest pol­i­cy cat­e­gories, and, as Nation­al Review’s Ramesh Pon­nu­ru put it recent­ly, “The Repub­li­can vot­ers them­selves have become post-pol­i­cy.” At the moment, con­ser­vatism seems to be expe­ri­enc­ing less of a pol­i­cy turn than a change in mood, one char­ac­ter­ized by anger and retrench­ment but per­haps espe­cial­ly by a bleak view of what is to come. (This may par­tic­u­lar­ly suit con­ser­v­a­tives at a moment when they find them­selves out of cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal pow­er.) Of all the con­ser­v­a­tive impuls­es, the one that seems the most for­eign right now is the pearly opti­mism of Mitt Rom­ney, on the Pres­i­den­tial trail in 2012, arriv­ing at a banal cam­paign event and declar­ing that the trees in Michi­gan were the right height.

For a while, I thought that the right’s declin­ism might be a ver­sion of nostalgia—as well as a prod­uct of Repub­li­can vot­ers’ com­par­a­tive iso­la­tion from the most dynam­ic parts of the coun­try and the advanced age of many Fox News view­ers. But, as Trump’s Pres­i­den­cy recedes from view, the most dynam­ic young politi­cians in the Par­ty, fig­ures like Haw­ley and Vance, and some of its most influ­en­tial sup­port­ers, such as Thiel, still argue that glob­al­iza­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal change have not deliv­ered on their promis­es. This week, I went back and rewatched Pom­peo and O’Brien inter­view­ing Thiel, ask­ing him for details on the progress of cryp­tocur­ren­cy and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, here and in Chi­na. But I saw it a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly this time. They were try­ing to gauge the posi­tion of the man who taught con­ser­v­a­tives that the future could no longer be count­ed on.
...

And what is that vision? A vision where the great­est imped­i­ment to human­i­ty are the checks on the pow­er and influ­ence of cap­i­tal­ist super­men like Peter Thiel. If only we could rec­og­nize them for the noble kings they tru­ly are, every­thing would be bet­ter. A fas­cist super­man vision of tomor­row, a most appro­pri­ate fol­low up to Trump:

...
In between slight­ly bat­ty charts (one dis­tin­guish­es between the “def­i­nite opti­mism” of soci­eties like the U.S. in the nine­teen-fifties and six­ties and the “indef­i­nite pes­simism” of oth­ers, like present-day Europe), Thiel and Mas­ters offer a vision of the founder that is pat­terned after Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which imag­i­na­tive indi­vid­u­als are forced to fight through a soci­ety that is bureau­cra­tized and stul­ti­fy­ing in all its insti­tu­tion­al forms. They won­der why the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem com­pels peo­ple to strive for mediocre com­pe­tence in many things instead of try­ing to be unique­ly great at one thing, and bemoan the way large orga­ni­za­tions sti­fle ideas. In Wash­ing­ton, lib­er­tar­i­an­ism tends to take the form of a stark anti-gov­ern­ment posi­tion, usu­al­ly putting Repub­li­cans on the side of large busi­ness­es, which want to reduce their tax bur­den. But Thiel’s more ele­men­tal lib­er­tar­i­an­ism casts big busi­ness as an oppo­nent of progress. (The seem­ing para­dox of Haw­ley and oth­er mem­bers of an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pro-busi­ness par­ty rou­tine­ly call­ing for the breakup of Google, Ama­zon, and Face­book on antitrust grounds may not be a para­dox at all—it may sim­ply be Thielist.) The deep­est qual­i­ty of Thiel and Masters’s book is its out­sized vision of what a hero­ic individual—a founder—can do. In a late chap­ter, they argue that suc­cess­ful founders tend to have the oppo­site qual­i­ties of those seen in the gen­er­al population—that they are, in some basic ways, different—and com­pare them to kings and fig­ures of ancient mythol­o­gy. In a sec­tion on Steve Jobs, Thiel and Mas­ters write:

Apple’s val­ue cru­cial­ly depend­ed on the sin­gu­lar vision of a par­tic­u­lar per­son. This hints at the strange way in which the com­pa­nies that cre­ate new tech­nol­o­gy often resem­ble feu­dal monar­chies rather than orga­ni­za­tions that are sup­pos­ed­ly more “mod­ern.” A unique founder can make author­i­ta­tive deci­sions, inspire strong per­son­al loy­al­ty, and plan ahead for decades. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, imper­son­al bureau­cra­cies staffed by trained pro­fes­sion­als can last longer than any life­time, but they usu­al­ly act with short time hori­zons. The les­son for busi­ness is that we need founders. If any­thing, we should be more tol­er­ant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusu­al indi­vid­u­als to lead com­pa­nies beyond mere incre­men­tal­ism.

The height­ened vision of what a sin­gle leader can do, the ven­er­a­tion for more ancient and direct forms of lead­er­ship, the praise for author­i­ta­tive deci­sion-mak­ing and dis­dain for bureaucracies—it’s a short hop from here to the Don­ald Trump of “I alone can fix it.”
...

Will any­one arise with a com­pet­ing vision for the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s future? It’s pos­si­ble, but right now it’s hard to see who is going to replace Thiel as the next lead­ing light for the GOP. He’s made the invest­ments and he has the fas­cist super­man tem­plate vision the par­ty clear­ly craves. If the Trump expe­ri­ence has taught us any­thing its the endur­ing appeal of the fas­cist super­man per­sona in pol­i­tics. That crap sells. And it’s all Thiel is ped­dling.

At the same time, there’s a rather sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the fas­cist super­man tem­plate of Don­ald Trump’s pol­i­tics and the fas­cist super­man tem­plate of Peter Thiel: Trump is fol­low­ing a Mus­soli­ni-style in-your-face fas­cist super­man tem­plate. He adores the crowds. Thiel, on the oth­er hand, has more the tem­pera­ment of Karl Rove. A behind-the-scenes oper­a­tor who wants to the pow­er, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly the pub­lic glo­ry. We’re deal­ing with very dif­fer­ent kinds of dark psy­cholo­gies in these two fig­ures. The rise of Trump has demon­strat­ed a robust appetite for the high-pro­file pub­lic fas­cist super­man per­sona. Trump effec­tive­ly cap­tured the par­ty with that per­sona in the mat­ter of a year. But that was large­ly because Trump cap­ture the hearts and minds of the GOP base. He was direct­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the mass­es.

And while Thiel cer­tain­ly deploys sim­i­lar kinds of ‘pop­ulist’ rhetoric focused on rage against ‘lib­er­al elites’, there’s no indi­ca­tion that Thiel him­self can cap­ture the hearts of minds of the GOP base on the same scale as Trump. Thiel just does­n’t have Trump’s pow­ers with crowds and the pub­lic. What Thiel has cap­tured is the hearts and minds of par­ty elites like Mike Pom­peo.

So per­son who is increas­ing­ly posi­tion to be the future leader of the GOP is like a weird blend of Trump, Rove, and Koch. He has the vision, mon­ey, and fas­cist super­man vision the par­ty loves. But he does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the crown con­trol, which was the true secret to Trump’s cap­ture of the par­ty. He’s got a very real shot on cap­tur­ing the GOP, but it’s not secured. Some­one with the Trumpian abil­i­ty to cap­ture hearts and minds could steal it all away. That’s part of what makes the rise of Peter Thiel some­thing to watch: he’s the lead­ing can­di­date to lead the par­ty in the future, but he’s not a per­fect can­di­date and he real­ly, real­ly, real­ly hates com­pe­ti­tion. And for all his grow­ing influ­ence, he’s still got plen­ty of com­pe­ti­tion.

Here’s anoth­er look at the seem­ing­ly ever-grow­ing influ­ence of Peter Thiel over the future of the Repub­li­can Par­ty:

First, recall that fas­ci­nat­ing Sep­tem­ber 2020 Buz­zFeed piece describ­ing how Thiel appeared to sour on his open spon­sor­ship of the ‘Alt Right’ fol­low­ing Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry and the var­i­ous instances of Alt Right fig­ures engag­ing in open­ly racist antic. Thiel was appar­ent­ly upset they could­n’t suc­cess­ful­ly put a kinder, gen­tler face on white nation­al­ism. That appar­ent queasi­ness over overt­ly racist pub­lic rhetoric is part of what makes the fol­low­ing report from The Infor­mant last month about Ari­zona Repub­li­can Sen­ate can­di­date Blake Mas­ters so fas­ci­nat­ing.

As we’ve seen, Mas­ters hap­pens to be chief oper­at­ing offi­cer for Thiel Cap­i­tal and pres­i­dent of the Thiel Foun­da­tion. Thiel and Mas­ters even co-wrote a book where they ele­vat­ed ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists to the role of super­man who real­ly are tru­ly dif­fer­ent and bet­ter than every­one else. And Thiel has already donat­ed $10 mil­lion to Mas­ter­s’s sen­ate cam­paign. The two are clear­ly extreme­ly close­ly aligned.

So giv­en Thiel’s appar­ent hes­i­tan­cy over the open embrace of white nation­al­ism, it’s rather inter­est­ing to learn what type of can­di­date Mas­ters is turn­ing out to be. The kind of can­di­date who is clear­ly intent on out-‘dog-whistling’ the rest of the GOP pri­ma­ry pack. Yes, Mas­ters has even earned the praise of VDARE for his bold­ness in decry­ing Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry (CRT) as an “anti-white racism”. As an anony­mous VDARE author wrote, “As for CRT, pret­ty much every Repub­li­can denounces the racial tox­in, but very few call it anti-white,” the blog post said. “Mas­ters is dif­fer­ent.” Yes, the can­di­date most close­ly aligned with Peter Thiel has man­aged to dis­tin­guish him­self from the rest of the GOP by being the most “dif­fer­ent”. Dif­fer­ent by sound­ing the most like VDARE:

The Infor­mant

Sen­ate can­di­date Blake Mas­ters com­plains about ‘anti-white racism’
Mas­ters made the com­ments weeks before launch­ing his U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign.

Nick R. Mar­tin
Aug 9, 2020

Blake Mas­ters, the U.S. Sen­ate can­di­date and right-hand man of bil­lion­aire tech investor Peter Thiel, recent­ly took to the stage at a con­ser­v­a­tive ral­ly in Ari­zona and com­plained about what he described as “anti-white racism” in America’s schools.

His com­ments came amid a rant about Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, a bogey­man that con­ser­v­a­tives are increas­ing­ly using as a wedge issue in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elec­tions.

“All it does is teach kids to iden­ti­fy in racial terms. Right? You are good or bad, depend­ing on what you look like,” Mas­ters told the audi­ence. “At this point it is straight up anti-white racism. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that. But let’s call it what it is. It is tox­ic, and it does not belong in our schools.”

Mas­ters deliv­ered his com­ments to a most­ly white audi­ence on May 25 dur­ing an event in Phoenix called “America’s Come­back Tour.” The event was host­ed by far-right British politi­cian Nigel Farage and spon­sored by the con­ser­v­a­tive group Free­dom­Works.

Last month, Mas­ters announced he’s run­ning for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for U.S. Sen­ate in Ari­zona, hop­ing to unseat Demo­c­rat Mark Kel­ly in 2022. His effort is being backed finan­cial­ly by Thiel, who gave $10 mil­lion to a super PAC set up to sup­port Mas­ters.

The term Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry was unknown to most peo­ple out­side of grad­u­ate schools a year ago, but it has swept through con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics in recent months thanks to a coor­di­nat­ed (and appar­ent­ly fund­ed) effort, which some on the right have admit­ted is designed to put more Repub­li­cans in office in 2022.

Many on the right claim Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry is a sweep­ing attempt to get white peo­ple to hate them­selves and that it has infil­trat­ed schools, cor­po­ra­tions and even the mil­i­tary. Amid the hys­te­ria, mul­ti­ple GOP-con­trolled states have already banned the the­o­ry from being taught in pub­lic schools. In many cas­es, it has become short­hand for any dis­cus­sion of racism in the U.S., includ­ing the his­to­ry of slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion.

In real­i­ty, the the­o­ry is still a some­what obscure attempt to explain why racial dis­par­i­ties exist in the U.S. despite there being laws on the books that ban racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.

Mas­ters played on con­ser­v­a­tive fears dur­ing the Phoenix event. The Stan­ford Law School grad­u­ate paint­ed a dark pic­ture of edu­ca­tion in Amer­i­ca.

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly it all goes back to the schools,” he said. “Too much of school­ing in Amer­i­ca has become a machine to uproot com­mon sense and to replace it with some­thing much more sin­is­ter. You’ve heard of Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, I assume, at this point, right? Con­ser­v­a­tives are up in arms about it. And right­ful­ly so. It sounds aca­d­e­m­ic. It sounds fan­cy. It’s not.”

...

Com­plaints of “anti-white” or “reverse” racism were once rel­e­gat­ed to racist ral­lies and online mes­sage boards, but the com­ments from Mas­ters show that such lan­guage is increas­ing­ly becom­ing main­stream.

Buz­zFeed News pub­lished an inves­ti­ga­tion last year look­ing at Thiel’s ties to far-right extrem­ists. Among oth­er things, the arti­cle showed he has dined with a white nation­al­ist who reg­u­lar­ly writes for the racist web­site VDARE and met with oth­ers involved in the white nation­al­ist move­ment.

Mas­ters is the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer for Thiel Cap­i­tal and pres­i­dent of the Thiel Foun­da­tion.

While his cam­paign is still rel­a­tive­ly new, the pol­i­cy posi­tions out­lined on Mas­ters’ web­site show he’s aligned with the far-right. One of the issues he has put front and cen­ter of his cam­paign is a promise to reduce not just ille­gal immi­gra­tion but legal immi­gra­tion as well.

That posi­tion has already won Mas­ters favor with VDARE, which recent­ly pub­lished a blog post head­lined: “Ariz. GOP Sen­ate Can­di­date Blake Mas­ters Appears To Be Run­ning As An Immi­gra­tion Patri­ot.”

The anony­mous writer of the blog post was fond of Mas­ters’ posi­tion on immi­gra­tion, but the writer also men­tioned what they saw as anoth­er plus for the U.S. Sen­ate can­di­date: his com­ments about “anti-white racism.”

The writer not­ed how unusu­al it is to hear a Repub­li­can speak out in such terms.

“As for CRT, pret­ty much every Repub­li­can denounces the racial tox­in, but very few call it anti-white,” the blog post said. “Mas­ters is dif­fer­ent.”

...

—————

“Sen­ate can­di­date Blake Mas­ters com­plains about ‘anti-white racism’ ” by Nick R. Mar­tin; The Infor­mant; 08/09/2020

“Last month, Mas­ters announced he’s run­ning for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for U.S. Sen­ate in Ari­zona, hop­ing to unseat Demo­c­rat Mark Kel­ly in 2022. His effort is being backed finan­cial­ly by Thiel, who gave $10 mil­lion to a super PAC set up to sup­port Mas­ters.”

There’s going to be not dis­tanc­ing from Mas­ters for Thiel. If Mas­ters ends up implod­ing his cam­paign due to too many racist state­ments there’s no way Thiel can avoid the splat­ter. And yet this is 2021, when it does­n’t actu­al­ly appear to be pos­si­ble for GOP pri­ma­ry can­di­dates to embrace VDARE too open­ly, which is pre­sum­ably the rea­son Mas­ters is going to far right con­fer­ences and talk­ing about “anti-white racism”. He wants to win the pri­ma­ry and that’s how you win a GOP pri­ma­ry in 2021. By get­ting the VDARE endorse­ment:

...
Buz­zFeed News pub­lished an inves­ti­ga­tion last year look­ing at Thiel’s ties to far-right extrem­ists. Among oth­er things, the arti­cle showed he has dined with a white nation­al­ist who reg­u­lar­ly writes for the racist web­site VDARE and met with oth­ers involved in the white nation­al­ist move­ment.

...

While his cam­paign is still rel­a­tive­ly new, the pol­i­cy posi­tions out­lined on Mas­ters’ web­site show he’s aligned with the far-right. One of the issues he has put front and cen­ter of his cam­paign is a promise to reduce not just ille­gal immi­gra­tion but legal immi­gra­tion as well.

That posi­tion has already won Mas­ters favor with VDARE, which recent­ly pub­lished a blog post head­lined: “Ariz. GOP Sen­ate Can­di­date Blake Mas­ters Appears To Be Run­ning As An Immi­gra­tion Patri­ot.”

The anony­mous writer of the blog post was fond of Mas­ters’ posi­tion on immi­gra­tion, but the writer also men­tioned what they saw as anoth­er plus for the U.S. Sen­ate can­di­date: his com­ments about “anti-white racism.”

The writer not­ed how unusu­al it is to hear a Repub­li­can speak out in such terms.

“As for CRT, pret­ty much every Repub­li­can denounces the racial tox­in, but very few call it anti-white,” the blog post said. “Mas­ters is dif­fer­ent.”
...

So has Peter Thiel had a change of heart on the polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy of open white nation­al­ism? A lot has changed in the GOP between 2017 and 2021. It’s a much more overt­ly white nation­al­ist par­ty just four short years lat­er. White nation­al­ism wrapped in a blan­ket of nar­ra­tives about QAnon, stolen elec­tion, and Chi­na hate. And as we’ve seen, the embrace of the CRT is a strat­e­gy cur­rent­ly endorsed and pro­mot­ed by the Koch net­work of right-wing thank-tanks. The white nation­al­ist griev­ance pol­i­tics at the core of the “anti-white racism” CRT nar­ra­tive real­ly cap­tures the mood of the par­ty, even more now than in 2017. Trump’s defeat, and the stolen elec­tion nar­ra­tive around it, weird­ly solid­i­fied the VDARE world­view in the GOP. So whether or not Thiel would pre­fer that GOP open­ly embrace the pol­i­tics of white nation­al­ism, that’s what hap­pened any­way and he had bet­ter deal with it. And as we can see with the can­di­da­cy of Blake Mas­ters, deal­ing with it isn’t going to be a prob­lem for Thiel.