J.D. Vance’s Ties to Silicon Valley
On Wednesday, the junior United States Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, formally accepted the vice presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. After his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy received national attention during the 2016 election, Vance has had an interesting road to potential vice presidency and has made some key allies along the way.
Vance, following his time in the Marine Corps and at various law firms, would eventually be hired as a junior investor at Mithril Capital after his memoir was released in 2016. There, Vance connected with Mithril Capital co-founder Peter Thiel, a conservative libertarian billionaire who also co-founded the online money transfer system PayPal. Thiel has become one of the biggest financial players in right-wing politics in recent years but most importantly, he contributed $10 million to a super PAC to get Vance elected to the Senate.
The day after Donald Trump announced Vance as his running mate, it was reported that another PayPal big-wig Elon Musk, a social liberal, would donate $45 million dollars a month to the Trump campaign.
Following his time at Mithril Capital, Vance joined the investment firm Revolution LLC. Steve Case, the founder of Revolution LLC, was also a co-founder of AOL. In 2019, Vance started his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, which received financial backing from Thiel, Eric Shdmidt (former CEO of Google), and Marc Andreessen (co-founder of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm).
Trump’s choice to pick J.D. Vance, a former Never Trumper who once likened Trump to Hitler, as his running mate and likely successor as the face of the Republican party is a strange one. Trump originally won the 2016 election thanks to his populist platform and anti-establishment rhetoric. Although Trump is an elitist himself, he used that to his favor, portraying himself as someone who wanted to fix the rigged system of American politics. Despite being portrayed as a more conservative Trump, Vance is the opposite, he doesn’t come from an elitist family yet he is involved with all the wrong people if the end goal is populism or conservatism in anything other than name.
While Vance has had an overall positive record so far on social issues, his connections to Thiel alone are enough to question his intentions. Thiel, an FBI informant, is a former Trump supporter and donor in 2016 who has since distanced himself from Trump. Thiel represents a faction within the Republican party that simply does not care about social issues, such as abortion or family-related issues, instead focusing on economic and financial issues. Per Reuters, Thiel is “unhappy” with the Republican party’s focus on controversial social issues, specifically citing abortion and restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use as problems. Thiel, himself, has expressed pride in his homosexual identity on the biggest stage in right-wing politics, the Republican National Convention.
Nonetheless, Vance is Trump’s running mate and will likely be a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics for the foreseeable future. The possibility that he is a pawn of a faction from Silicon Valley (PayPal Mafia) should be worrying to conservatives who care about the social issues of America. After all, Silicon Valley isn’t exactly a “city upon a hill” when it comes to social conservatism.
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