LGBTQ POLITICS – On Wednesday night, as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) prepared to accept the Republican nomination to be Donald Trump’s running mate for vice president, MSNBC’s out-of-common host Rachel Maddow laid out the unusual path Vance, a 39-year-old Ohio native, took to power.
“Writing a memoir or interning for Peter Thiel doesn’t usually get you a vice presidential candidate,” she noted.
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Thiel, the gay conservative billionaire co-founder of PayPal, turned out to be an integral part of nearly everything in Vance’s life and career, from his work in tech to his conversion to Catholicism to his selection as Trump’s running mate.
Vance first met Thiel when the venture capitalist gave a lecture while Vance was a student at Yale in 2011. It was “the most pivotal moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for the Catholic magazine The Ramp.
During the talk, Thiel detailed the failure of elite organizations and his Christian faith, which he said led Vance to reconsider his legal career and pursue technology instead.
According to the New York Times, Thiel recommended Vance for his first job at Silicon Valley biotech company Circuit Therapeutics in 2013, and in 2016 Thiel recommended him for a principal role at Mithril Capital, a venture firm he co-founded.
Around the same time, Thiel wrote a blurb for Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which detailed the Vance family’s history in Kentucky and Ohio and offered a timely portrayal of white working-class grievances at a time when Donald Trump was campaigning to appeal to that same demographic.
While Thiel is an avowed Trump supporter, Vance has not yet followed his backer’s lead.
“What an idiot,” Vance tweeted about Trump in October 2016.
In 2020, Vance started his own venture firm, Naria Capital, with $120 million in funding from Thiel and other tech moguls who introduced him to him. Thiel sits on Naria’s leadership advisory board, and Vance’s venture was named after him. The names of the companies are all based on the Lord of the Rings series, with Naria referring to the rings of power made for elves.
In July 2021, Vance jumped into politics by announcing his candidacy for U.S. Senate in Ohio, a race that Thiel has poured $15 million into.
As he made the switch, Vance also changed his views on Trump, whose candidacy Thiel introduced him to at Mar-a-Lago and brokered his endorsement.
“J.D. Vance, like others, may have said some not-so-nice things about me in the past, but I understand now,” Trump said when endorsing him for the Senate seat, “and I’ve seen it clearly.”
(Greg Owen is a writer for LGBTQ Nation. This article was first published there.)
