Vice President JD Vance hosted a fundraiser with extremist tech bro Joe Lonsdale on Monday, spotlighting his deep and enduring ties to far-right financiers who have helped fuel violent machismo and bigotry in the MAGA movement.
Tickets for the event, which came as President Donald Trump’s war with Iran wreaks further havoc on the American economy, went for $50,000 per person.
Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir, the technology company that has proved vital to, and raked in riches from, Trump’s racist anti-immigrant agenda. He has endorsed the use of public hangings as a way to demonstrate what he called “masculine leadership,” and he has promoted the idea that “extremism in defense of liberty” is morally justifiable. He also has said he created Palantir to save “Western civilization” from “communists and Islamists.”
The Texas-based investor once responded to a social media user’s rosy reminiscence over racist, apartheid-driven societies, such as in Rhodesia and South Africa, by saying, “We can take things back the right direction here.”
I’ve written before about how Vance and the Trump administration have deployed bigoted rhetoric eerily similar to the Ku Klux Klan’s. And through that same historical lens, Lonsdale is a modern-day equivalent to people such as Edward Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler — organizers who used their wealth and influence to promote the klan’s bigotry and increase its membership in the early 20th century. Vance’s fundraiser with Lonsdale is also of note given recent suggestions — amid Trump’s unpopular war with Iran — that the vice president might be at odds with MAGA hawks. Lonsdale has been pining for regime change for years now, an agenda he has pushed while openly touting his interest in doing business in Iran under more favorable terms. Lonsdale, like fellow tech bros Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, has become one of the GOP’s biggest benefactors in recent years, and Vance has often been portrayed as the front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential nomination. In that sense, Monday’s ritzy meetup was potentially a window into the future of the MAGA movement and its pro-extremist, technocratic leaders.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
