Peter Thiel is (allegedly) having second thoughts.
The billionaire, right-wing megadonor reportedly has decided that he’s done bankrolling political candidates because Republicans are too focused on fighting cultural battles over abortion and transgender rights.
If true, he’s not alone. Billionaire GOP donor Thomas Peterffy similarly told the Financial Times in April that he had qualms about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ relentless crusade against abortion, drag queens and “woke” books. “I have put myself on hold,” he said. “Myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” (A few days later, Peterffy wired $1 million to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s political action committee.)
It’s too soon to know whether this marks a widespread shift among the billionaire funders.
The trickle of discontent threatens to become a deluge. Other well-heeled GOP donors, including Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin, are also reportedly rethinking their 2024 contribution plans. Andy Sabin, chairman of Sabin Metal Corp., expressed similar reservations, telling Reuters, which also reported Thiel's alleged decision to stop funding Republican campaigns, citing interviews with his associates, that “if it wasn’t for abortion and the book-banning, there would be no question I would support [DeSantis].”
It’s too soon to know whether this marks a widespread shift among billionaire funders, or whether it will even make any difference. Despite the qualms of the donors, Republican candidates continue to race to the right on culture issues, and the GOP donor class has a long history of getting back in line.
But all of this, if true, does raise a nagging question for Thiel and company: “What did you expect?”
For years, these donors funded candidates who rushed to embrace every meme and narrative of the culture war: from transgender bathroom etiquette and pronouns to variously nebulous and nonsensical attacks on “wokeness.” They backed candidates who publicly pledged to outlaw abortion, and supported Trumpists and Trump-like candidates who had played on racial distrust and gender anxieties.
For years, they nursed baby alligators and are now surprised to find out those baby reptiles have grown up — and are on the loose.
And Peter Thiel is apparently shocked, shocked, that those many-toothed monsters may be coming for him.
This would be the same Peter Thiel who bankrolled Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, whose political posts in a CrossFit chat room “lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s,” New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman wrote.
During his failed Senate bid, Masters appeared to embrace the racist “replacement theory” and suggested that America’s gun violence problem boiled down to “Black people, frankly.” Masters suggested that all of the Army’s “woke” generals should be fired and replaced with “the most conservative colonels.”
When an interviewer asked the Thiel-funded Masters to pick a “subversive thinker” that people should know more about, he picked the “Unabomber.” “I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Masters responded. “How about, like, Theodore Kaczynski?”
The AP reports that Masters “was careful to point out he doesn’t condone the bombings that killed three people and injured dozens between 1978 and 1995 and terrorized the nation until Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996.” But while the Arizona Republican “said he doesn’t endorse all of Kaczynski’s views,” he thinks Kaczynski “had a lot to say about the political left, about how they all have inferiority complexes and fundamentally hate anything like goodness, truth, beauty, justice.”
Masters also pandered to the cultural right by opposing gay marriage — despite the fact that he attended Thiel’s same-sex wedding.
Thiel contributed around $20 million to Masters’ political action committee. In November, he lost to Democrat Mark Kelly.
Masters also pandered to the cultural right by opposing gay marriage — despite the fact that he attended same-sex Thiel’s wedding.
Thiel also backed Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who was elected to the Senate last year after Thiel spent at least $10 million boosting Vance’s candidacy. As my Bulwark colleague Tim Miller wrote after the election, Vance transformed himself into the perfect MAGA troll.
Vance accepted the endorsement of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., even defending her appearance at a white nationalist conference. “She is my friend, and she did nothing wrong,” Vance said after she appeared at an event organized by Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Thiel’s record is clearly mixed. In Ohio, the right-wing billionaire essentially bought Vance a Senate seat; in Arizona, his candidate crashed and burned. But after donating $35 million to candidates in 2022, Thiel may have decided to sit out next year because the GOP has become too extreme and too consumed by the culture war.
That would be the culture war that he helped launch, and the extremism he so richly funded.