What Do J.D. Vance, Dimes Square, and the Art World Have in Common? More than You Think

Last week, Reuters reported that Rockbridge Network, a right-wing Silicon Valley-backed donor organization cofounded by vice-presidential hopeful J.D. Vance in 2019, is working to influence the upcoming election. With a budget of some $75 million, the organization the plans to use right wing media and voter turnout operations to put its thumb on the scale. Among its biggest backers, according to Reuters: billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who has long been a main funder of Vance’s political career and, not to mention, his former boss (after Yale, Vance worked at Thiel’s venture capital firm).

What does this have to do with the art world? More than you think.

Not so long ago, Thiel was reported to be courting influence among a nebulous art-adjacent constellation of downtown New York creative types. Remember “Thielbucks,” the supposed money that creative types unburdened by morals claimed they gladly took for their madcap projects?

Remember Dimes Square?

Via Thiel, Vance, a champion for the GOP’s fledgling national conservatism movement and a man whose agenda points towards an extremist and authoritarian potential future, has undeniable affiliations with the tentacles of dark shadow money once—and maybe still—slithering through New York City.

Thiel is one of the funders of the National Conservatism Conference, better known as NatCon, and the shady billionaire has also chosen to perpetuate his (and by extension, Vance’s) agenda by backing projects such as 2021’s semi-infamous New People’s Cinema film festival, during which the co-hosts of the Red Scare podcast held court and parties that dovetailed with the ascent of neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin were commonplace.

Then, over a year ago, in March 2023, the New York Young Republican Club threw a party headlined by Roger Stone and hosted by Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan at now-defunct restaurant Gigi’s on Mulberry Street. Vish Burra, NYYRC’s executive secretary, told the Daily Beastat the time that the event was intended to be a lines-blurring “horseshoe party.”

“The populist left, at least the ones who haven’t lost their minds, and the new right are finding places to work together, especially now that the Republicans are in charge, at least on the congressional level,” Burra said.

And news also broke last week that Yarvin was reinstated—title-free, but as the head of strategy—at Urbit, a Coinbase-based nonprofit that nominally seeks to return data to personal internet users, wresting this control back from the big platforms. In 2015, Yarvin was booted from Urbit, which he founded, after he told on himself and, by extension, Urbit, via his “mind-numbing political tracts” written under the truly loser-coded online web name Mencius Moldbug; which got him in trouble at a tech conference.

“Moldbug is a self-proclaimed ‘neoreactionary,’ an unabashed elitist and inegalitarian in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, one of his heroes,” David Auerbach, a Microsoft software engineer, wrote at Slate. “His worldview: Democracy sucks, the strong should rule the weak, and we could use a good old-fashioned dictator to clean up this mess.”

To tell you where a lot of tech people’s heads were at and remain: Auerbach was writing in Yarvin’s defense.

Certain downtown scene mainstays were vaguely aware of Vance the memoirist before he became Vance the politician. Literary critic Christian Lorentzen was invited to a book party for Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy memoir back in 2016, when the book came out. Raihan Salam, former executive editor of National Review and current president of the conservative political think tank Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, proffered the invite.

“At the time, I was a book critic for New York magazine, and I kind of looked at the book, and looked at the book party, and I was like, Eh, I don’t need to fucking check out this right wing creep. Who cares?” Lorentzen said.

“People who are now, like, right wing in the so-called downtown scene…it’s almost like they’ve kept talking until you run out of things to say, so you suddenly talk yourself into being a Republican or pro-Trump, or whatever,” Lorentzen continued. “Do they have any meaningful connection to J. D. Vance? I don’t really think so. Would they want to hang out with him if he showed up at fuckin’ Clandestino? I doubt it.”

Similarly, critic Dean Kissick never seemed to take the “Dimes Square is red-pilled” theory seriously. In an essay from November 2022, Kissick wrote, “The real square is not the reactionary hellmouth it’s often painted as” and “I … don’t believe Peter Thiel is funding any Downtown personalities.”

And yet, journalist Kelly Weill, author of Off the Edge, an investigation into Flat Earth conspiracy theorists, told me we shouldn’t dismiss the connection out of hand.

“Thiel is very engaged in the idea of reaction,” said Weill, who has reported extensively on fringe extremism. “He finds it beneficial both to fund explicitly new right personalities, but also to fund these edgy art world figures who can maybe push the idea that feminism is cringe, that slurs are edgy and interesting and that if nothing else, political apathy is interesting.”

“Thiel is both funding the ascendant far right project and he’s funding disengagement of people who would otherwise vote for the left,” Weill added.

Listening to Vance drawl lately about going “to war against the anti-child ideology” perpetuated, in part, by “mediocre millennial journalists” who are “sad, pathetic and lonely,” one could be forgiven for hearing  echoes of the many, many loser wannabe thought leader stragglers who continue to haunt dim barrooms and dusty “Hegelian e-girl” poetry readings, grasping at the last vestiges of the fuck-it nihilism trend.

“J. D. Vance butts up against fascist ideas,” Weill said. “He goes to these people’s parties. He takes their money. He expresses platforms that, while not avowedly fascist, certainly would make these people happy and are compatible with their long-term goals. I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that he is advancing an extreme agenda.”

Two years after a slew of think pieces declared the Dimes Square “vibe shift,” it appears another shift has been taking place following the surge of voter enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s entrance to the presidential race. But while America’s dad and Minnesota  governor, Tim Walz, has been cutting down Vance with choice wisecracks, the celebratory atmosphere at the Democratic National Convention last week was dampened by widespread criticism for the Biden-Harris administration’s Gaza policies and the Party’s failure to approve a Palestinian speaker for the convention. Harris and her running mate still have much—no, everything—to prove.

One more thing about Vance: In addition to being a fascist-adjacent venture capitalist; a formerly harsh critic of Trump who’s since changed his tune; and a diligently anti-feminist crank, Vance happens to be a recent convert to Catholicism after a long stretch of avowed atheism. He carries many of the signifiers of the trad Cath e-girls who’ve proliferated, clad in bows and slip dresses, within the downtown Manhattan arts scene during a surge of deeply cynical post-pandemic socializing.

In other words, Vance is girlie-coded (derogatory), and the last thing we need as a nation is a confessional memoir girlie in a seat of power. My God, just scan this new Daily Mail exclusive with Vance and tell me he’s not oozing edgelord coquette.

Speaking mid-plane ride on campaign runs to Wisconsin and Michigan a couple weeks ago, Vance gushed to the U.K. dishrag about the weight loss regimen he adopted since becoming a senator—skipping breakfast—and even went so far as to deny Ozempic allegations: “I haven’t taken any drugs. Obviously, you eat a little bit less, but it’s also just eating better.”

A line from “Mean Girls,” a track off Charli XCX’s 2024 summer-defining  album brat, feels appropriate here, especially because the song is rumored to have been inspired by Red Scare host and alt right e-girl Dasha Nekrasova’s online persona: “You say she’s anorexic, and you heard she likes when people say it.” Charli XCX, meanwhile, insisted in a new interview with New York that her music is not political, and that politics doesn’t feed her art. The pop star also demurred when asked whether she asked Nekrasova to be in the It girl-studded “360” video. “Ummmmm … I didn’t ask her. But ugh, fuck.”

Vance also told the Mail that he—like most college freshmen—is currently reading Joan Didion’s iconic 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Vance opined that he sees parallels between the legendary journalist’s takedowns of hippie culture, and the problems with liberals today.

“There’s an essay where she’s basically criticizing a think tank,” Vance told the Mail. “Like these people sit around and they used to be important, and now they just write shitty articles. And I’m like, Oh, God … everything old is new again.”

In the words of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills icon Kim Richards, “Babe, why don’t you have a piece of bread, and maybe you’ll calm down a little?”