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Kevin DeAnna who met with Thiel on the evening of July 29, 2016, in the midst of the 2016 election cycle was not merely a participant in a white supremacist subculture when he met Thiel but also was immersed in its most extreme elements, including literature admired by terrorists. Deanna wrote under the pseudonyms Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick over a decade for white nationalist publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance, as Hatewatch reported in a four-part series published in March 2020. He cited texts like SIEGE and used terminology drawn from such other books as The Turner Diaries in his work and in private conversation. The Turner Diaries, originally published in 1978, has influenced some of the most infamous acts of U.S. domestic terrorism, including the murder of Alan Berg in 1984 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. SIEGE, once an obscure neo-Nazi newsletter, has resurfaced in recent years as the preferred text of neo-Nazi terroristic organizations such as the now-defunct Atomwaffen Division.

Peter Thiel speaks onstage during the New York Times Dealbook conference on Nov. 1, 2018, in New York City. (Photo by Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times)

DeAnna was also connected to people in the U.S. government. About six weeks prior to his meeting with Thiel, DeAnna discussed recruiting for a white nationalist group with State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert. Gebert, who used the pseudonym Coach Finstock online, recruited members for D.C. Helicopter Pilots a Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based organizing chapter of white nationalist organization The Right Stuff. Gebert was suspended from his job in the Bureau of Energy Resources, but the State Department has never clarified whether or not he is still being paid.

Hatewatch confirmed reporting first published in Buzzfeed suggesting Thiel met with DeAnna, using a cache of images provided by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who has since renounced white nationalism. McHugh captured a picture of DeAnnas exchange with Thiel, as well as of several other emails, in August 2016. Hatewatch was able to compare a screenshot of one of these photos, given to us by McHugh in November 2018, with a series of cached images uploaded to her iCloud. Hatewatch has also been able to verify another email thread between DeAnna and his editors at VDARE, a white nationalist website where he wrote under the pseudonym James Kirkpatrick, discussing the meeting in the same manner.

Hatewatch reached out to Thiel, DeAnna, Gebert and several other figures mentioned in this article. All but one, VDARE editor Peter Brimelow, declined to comment. Brimelow told Hatewatch that he [didnt] have clear recollection of the events mentioned in an email and asked, Isnt it rather a long time ago? Hatewatch also reached out to both Facebook and Palantir, a data analytics firm co-founded by Thiel. Palantir declined to respond, and a spokesperson from Facebook declined to comment.

The images provided to Hatewatch show a series of messages between Thiel, DeAnna and Brendan Kissam. Kissam, according to BuzzFeed, is a former conservative activist who has produced videos for VDARE under a pseudonym. Archived posts from Kissams Facebook, which were provided to Hatewatch by a group of antifascist researchers known as the Anonymous Comrades Collective, showed him interacting with white nationalists such as Counter-Currents Greg Johnson and Millicent Willows an account that appears to belong to the white nationalist YouTuber Colin Robertson, who published videos under the pseudonym Millennial Woes. (Millicent Willows used the same logo as Robertsons Millennial Woes YouTube channel.) On Jan. 21, 2017, the same weekend as Trumps presidential inauguration, he posted a selfie with Richard Spencer, who lived near Washington, D.C., at the time.

Kissam introduced the two men over email on July 30, 2016 a few days after Thiel appeared at the Republican National Convention. The message used the subject line Right Wing Dinner Squad III. Though the intent is unclear, the subject line appears similar to a meme popular on the far right, Right Wing Death Squad. As a meme it refers to the history of authoritarian far-right dictatorships and their extrajudicial killings.

Kissam wrote that he had been looking forward to you guys getting to meet. Thiel then followed up with DeAnna individually, saying he really enjoyed meeting you last night and suggesting they meet up when Thiel was in Washington, D.C., next or whenever DeAnna was in SF which likely stood for San Francisco, where Thiel lived.

As Hatewatch has noted, DeAnna had been involved with far-right and, later, white nationalist organizations for 10 years at the time the email was exchanged with Thiel.

It is unclear who else was at the gathering. However, in another email referencing the meeting, DeAnnas editor at VDARE, Peter Brimelow, cited a few other possible attendees. Dated July 2, a little less than 30 days before Thiel, DeAnna and Kissam met, Brimelow chastised DeAnna for not keeping him abreast of Alt Right developments. He cited a forthcoming meeting with the Right Stuff, Ann Coulter, Thiel, etc. as an example.

DeAnna was one of numerous people who attempted to balance careers in mainstream institutions in and around Washington, D.C., with a secret life as a white nationalist organizer. In 2006, he founded a far-right student group, Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), while working at the right-wing Leadership Institute as a field representative. (Leadership Institute, which has provided training for a number of prominent right-wing figures in the past, denied any affiliation with YWC.) While head of YWC, DeAnna began writing under the bylines Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick on hate sites in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Over the course of the next 12 years, DeAnna wrote well over 1,700 articles for white nationalist outlets, including VDARE, the National Policy Institutes Radix Journal, American Renaissance, Counter-Currents and The Social Contract.

Kevin DeAnna appears at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jeff Malet)

Kissam, for his part, was clearly aware of DeAnnas pseudonymous personas at the time he connected DeAnna to Thiel.

As McHugh recalled to Hatewatch, Kissam had attended an event where DeAnna was scheduled to speak as Gregory Hood a few months prior to his meeting with Thiel. She noted that both men were attendees at Counter-Currents inaugural New York Forum in May 2016. DeAnna, who had been a Counter-Currents contributor since 2011, was billed as one of the main speakers. McHugh, who attended the event with DeAnna, told Hatewatch that she met Kissam after the event. She noted that Kissam accompanied Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson, as well as other speakers, to a restaurant in the city after the speeches at the forum concluded.

DeAnna indulged deeper, more sinister currents within the white power movement as well.

DeAnnas work under the pseudonym Gregory Hood drew upon foundational white nationalist and neo-Nazi texts that have inspired numerous acts of domestic terrorism. As both Kirkpatrick and Hood, DeAnna frequently refers to a System often with a capital S, mirroring Turner Diaries author William Pierces own orthography. DeAnna, like Pierce, presents the System as both a governmental and nongovernmental coalition of minority groups set out to destroy whites.

Writing as Hood, DeAnna cited SIEGE, a collection of neo-Nazi James Masons writings, on numerous occasions. In 2013, years before the text was popularized by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March, DeAnna cited SIEGE in a Counter-Currents essay about the need to destroy the Republican Party. DeAnna wrote that Mason was correct in stating that white advocates must think of all white people everywhere as our army. The original post, published on Counter-Currents website on Jan. 31, 2013, linked to a part of the site where one could buy Masons tract for $20, plus shipping and handling.

McHugh, who dated DeAnna from 2013 to 2016, and again briefly in 2017, told Hatewatch that DeAnna owned a copy of SIEGE prior to its popularization by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March.

The bold, red lettering of SIEGE on the book spine is unmistakable. It is a heavy book, and DeAnna told me not to read it, she told Hatewatch.

Some of DeAnnas writing, such as an April 2016 essay in Radix Journal titled On LARPing, combined references to both The Turner Diaries and SIEGE.

Most of us dont do anything. . . . We dont take to the streets; we dont hang the traitors from lampposts; we dont revolt the same way any of our ancestors would, DeAnna wrote.

Unless youre not paying taxes, living outside the law, or in some form of war against the powers that be, youll be objectively helping the System keep going, whatever subversive thoughts you have within your own head. Hence, the radical (even by National Socialist standards) James Mason recommended either total war or dropping out of the System entirely, he continued.

The essay earned him the praise of at least one user on Iron March, an international neo-Nazi forum that birthed the terroristic neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

Gregory Hood is by far the closest writer to our views that [Radix Journal has], wrote one user, James Futurist, on Nov. 16, 2016.

DeAnna helped carry water for the more violent wing of the movement in other ways. The email thread between DeAnna and the Brimelows referring to his forthcoming meeting with Thiel contained a reference to a Gregory Hood article about Sacramento on AmRen. Here, Brimelow is referencing a piece penned by DeAnna under his Hood pseudonym about the battle of Sacramento a June 26, 2016, riot in Sacramento that broke out after members of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party and Golden State Skinheads clashed with antifascist counterprotesters. As Hatewatch reported, the event resulted in 514 misdemeanor and 68 felony charges, and it involved over 100 people.

There is no doubt that it was the leftists who started the violence, but by most accounts, it was the TWP that finished it, DeAnna wrote on July 1, 2016, parroting the language used by TWPs leader Matthew Heimbach. DeAnna called TWP and GSSs event a legally sanctioned demonstration, and wrote, It is invariably violent or potentially violent leftists who attack white advocates who are demonstrating or meeting peacefully.

However, Heimbach who was not present at the event boasted at the time that we, referring the participants in the TWP and GSS event, sent six antifascist protesters to the hospital.

Around the same time he met with Thiel, DeAnna was invited to a white nationalist recruitment meeting by former State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert.

In June, a little less than two months before his post-RNC dinner with Thiel, DeAnna received an email from Gebert inviting him and McHugh to a gathering of what appeared to be members of the white nationalist group D.C. Helicopter Pilots. The group appeared to be largely active between 2016 and 2018.

Our nucleus (about 10 sharp and accomplished goys) will meet for dinner around 6 pm in Old Town, then head out to a few bars where some prospects from the Forum will join. If your plans fall through, wed be honored to host you and the lady as special (surprise) guests for dinner, or just grab a few drinks after, Gebert wrote from a Proton Mail account associated with his Coach Finstock pseudonym on June 16, 2016.

Old Town here appears to refer to the historic district of Alexandria, Virginia.

The prospects from the Forum appears to refer to members looking to join the local chapter of TRS for which Gebert performed recruitment, as Hatewatch previously reported.

In fall 2018, this reporter received a tip from a source, then anonymous, who claimed to have information on an alleged meeting between Peter Thiel and a prominent white nationalist that took place during the 2016 election cycle. The source later revealed herself to be former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh.

In November 2018, McHugh provided Hatewatch with an image file showing an email exchange between DeAnna and Thiel. McHugh told Hatewatch that the image was a photo she had taken with her phone of DeAnnas unlocked computer in August 2016, when the two were living together in Virginia.

However, the file provided to Hatewatch was a screenshot dated November 2018, and not the original JPG file from McHughs phone. As a result, it lacked the metadata that would corroborate the time and date the photo was taken, and when/if it was backed up to either McHughs hard drive or the cloud.

Hatewatch has now been able to verify the authenticity of these images from a reconstructed archive of McHughs iCloud, which was created when McHugh backed up her phone by plugging it into her computer. Hatewatch was also able to verify images of a few other emails in the same manner.

With these cached images in hand, Hatewatch concluded McHugh conducted a backup on Sept. 15, 2016, as that is when MacOS appears to have created the cache. Hatewatch was thus able to determine that McHugh had taken this image between backups made on Aug. 5, 2016, and Sept. 15, 2016 a timeline that matched McHughs own recollection that she took the photo in early Aug. 2016.

The image appeared identical to the screenshot provided to this reporter in late 2018.

Photo illustration by SPLC

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White Nationalist Who Met With Peter Thiel Admired Terroristic Literature - Southern Poverty Law Center