While J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in a new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy and reining in the surveillance state.

After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years, with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.

Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution’s “Rise of the Rest” seed fund whose major investors included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm Narya Capital in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Continued here:

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/07/investigative-reports/the-man-behind-trumps-vp-pick-its-worse-than-you-think/

I don’t know much about Vance, but this article raises some questions.

Who is J.D. Vance?
https://leohohmann.substack.com/p/who-is-jd-vance