Peter Thiel's Secret Political Network Is Already Planning Life After Trump
When these people say liberal democracy has failed, they are not talking about the left. They are talking about the American ‘experiment’ itself.
Rockbridge, Ohio is not a town. It is not a village. It is not, technically speaking, much of anything at all.
The federal government, which has an opinion about everything, classifies it as a census-designated place, which is the official term for a community that has 160 people, a post office, a ZIP code, and the good sense not to overstate its own importance.
You would not stop there unless you had a reason. And in the autumn of 2019, under the roof of an inn in a town that barely exists, several billion dollars of net worth — including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Rebekah Mercer, and Chris Buskirk — sat down together and got to work.
See, 2019 was a very transformational year for J.D. Vance, if you happen to believe in coincidence. He moved to Ohio. He converted to Catholicism, and so began the formal process of political transformation that Peter Thiel had been architecting for years.
By 2022, Vance was a Senator. Peter Thiel’s $15 million got him there, along with other donations from billionaires and millionaires alike.
It started in early 2021, when Thiel personally walked Vance into Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump — whom Vance once referred to as America’s Hitler — for the first time. Time magazine’s account of the same meeting attributes it to the suggestion of Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and financier Omeed Malik who all begged Trump to give one of his former critics a chance.
All people who are major players in this network today.
Vance had spent months before that building a relationship with Donald Trump Jr., who lobbied his father to endorse him. It worked. By 2024, Vance was Vice President. But none of that was the end goal, or the point.
The point, the thing the people in that room in Hocking County were actually building, is the end of American democracy as we know it.
I am not asking you to simply trust me. I am asking you to watch a clip of the Vice President of the United States, in his own words, on tape, from 2021, before he had any reason to be careful.
In September 2021, while running for Senate, Vance sat down with Jack Murphy, a ‘manosphere’ influencer similar to Andrew Tate, whose website once published the phrase, “feminists need rape.” This was not an accident of booking with a bad guy. This was Vance, on his way to the United States Senate, choosing his audience deliberately.
Here are some highlights from the interview, you can watch the full nearly two-hour interview by clicking here.
In this interview, he name-dropped Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who had spent years building a following around a single core idea: that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with something closer to monarchy. Vance goes on to say that universities need to be attacked honestly and aggressively. And then Vance described America as being in a “late republican period.”
If you did not study Roman history, here is what that means: Rome’s late republican period is the moment just before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, defied the Senate, and made himself dictator for life. It is how historians describe the last days of a republic that did not know it was dying.
At the end of Rome, the institutions were still standing. The votes were still being counted. The Senate was still meeting. The republic was already over. It just had not made the announcement yet.
When Vance used that phrase in 2021, he was not reflecting on history. He was telling anyone paying close enough attention that the courts, the universities, the democratic norms standing between this network and total power were the Roman Senate. And that someone was already sharpening a knife.
He said all of this publicly, on an alt-right podcast, while running for Senate. Nobody important was listening. They counted on that, too. They love to tell on themselves in places they think we can’t hear them.
A Network Built to Last, Built to Hide
The network they built has no website, no public office, and no press releases. What it has instead is a structure, a deliberate and layered architecture designed to move hundreds of millions of dollars while leaving as few fingerprints as possible.
At the top sits Rockbridge Network, LLC. The business at the top is not a nonprofit, and it is not a PAC, yet it oversees dozens of entities that move billions of dollars through nonprofits, Super PACs, and a venture capital fund, most of it shielded from public disclosure.
Rockbridge was able to start because of initial funding from Rebekah Mercer, who was in that room in Ohio in 2019. She is the daughter of billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and directs the Mercer Family Foundation, overseeing day-to-day operations of the family's vast political ‘projects.’
She co-founded 1789 Capital and sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025.
She was a primary person behind Steve Bannon’s rise, a primary funder of Breitbart, and an architect of the Cambridge Analytica scheme. She wastes no breath on public pageantry; her purse holds all the eloquence she needs.
It’s a textbook example of the éminence grise dynamic — named after Père Joseph, the right-hand man to Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century.
Historically, the most successful shadow operators realize that standing in the spotlight just makes you an easy target. And the network they created — Rockbridge Network, LLC — is a perfect for that as a private, for-profit limited liability company.
It is incorporated in Delaware because Delaware asks the fewest questions.
An LLC has no public disclosure obligation for its ownership. The people who actually control the entire operation are legally permitted to remain nameless, and they have taken full advantage of that permission.
Below the holding “parent” company, the Rockbridge structure fans out into a series of purpose-built vehicles, each with a different legal status and a different function to meet their goals.
There are four 501(c)(4) nonprofits that legacy media has named, a designation that allows them to spend on politics without disclosing their donors:
Better Tomorrow (EIN: 87-2086524): pays people to knock on doors and drive voters to the polls on Election Day.
Over the Horizon Action (EIN: 88-0696885): find new conservative voters, get them on the rolls, and make sure they show up.
Faithful in Action (EIN: 93-1558726): turns Sunday sermons into voter mobilization, using the church as a political organizing infrastructure.
Firebrand Action (EIN: 92-0533628): calls itself a journalism nonprofit, but what it actually does is fund polling that flows directly into RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, the two most-cited polling averages in American political media.
Control the data, and you control what everyone believes is true
All four of these ‘nonprofits’ list the same phone number on their IRS-990 filings: 202-813-9118.
What Peter Thiel and his confidantes call a donor network, history may yet call something else entirely. PACs, Super PACs, advocacy groups, media firms, and fundraising vehicles scattered across multiple states, all connected by a single ten-digit thread that nobody was supposed to pull. But I did.
But the numbers make sense knowing that Rockbridge now holds semi-annual summits at Four Seasons hotels and the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, where roughly 250 donors pay between $100,000 and $1 million each for a seat at the table.
Their annual budget is $75 million.
Buskirk and Omeed Malik have created a private membership club in Washington called Executive Branch, where Trump-supporting business leaders pay $500,000 a head to rub shoulders with cabinet officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has attended Rockbridge events.
So has the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
So has Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was gifted a $100,000 speaking fee from one of the network’s nonprofits (Over the Horizon Action) three months before he was confirmed to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Known members include: Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, PayPal Mafia co-founders Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, Blake Masters, and Tucker Carlson, who was in the room at that first meeting in Ohio. Each of them pays between $100,000 and $1 million a year for the privilege of being in the room.
The Super PAC's top donors in 2024 included Wisconsin roofing billionaire Diane Hendricks at roughly $11 million, Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren at $10 million, and Richard Uihlein, who funneled $2.5 million through his own Restoration PAC.
That same phone number also appears on the filings for American Mission Florida, a state-level PAC.
In early 2026, American Mission Florida received $3 million from Leading the Future, a $100 million Silicon Valley Super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, built to push AI-friendly candidates into Congress during the 2026 midterms.
The money flows from Silicon Valley through a Super PAC in Henderson, Nevada, and lands in a Florida PAC that shares its phone number and compliance infrastructure with the Rockbridge Network.
Marc Andreessen is already a confirmed Rockbridge member. The same people keep showing up on both sides of these transactions, wearing different hats each time.
Architecture of Anonymity
I know this is a lot of data, and many of you are wondering, how does all of this money actually move?
Start at the top. A wealthy donor writes a check to Rockbridge Network, LLC. Because it is a private LLC, there is no legal requirement to disclose who that donor is. Their name never appears anywhere.
Rockbridge then passes that money down to Better Tomorrow, or another one of the 501(c)(4) nonprofits under their umbrella. Because of the way 501(c)(4)s work, they do not have to disclose where its money came from either. The donor has now disappeared behind two layers of legal protection.
From there, the “non-profit” sends grants to the other nonprofits in the network, like Over the Horizon Action, Faithful in Action, and Firebrand Action, or in friendly adjacent ones.
On paper, these look like separate organizations making independent decisions.
In reality, the same handful of people run all of them.
Chris Buskirk is an Arizona insurance entrepreneur most Americans could not pick out of a lineup.
He is president or leader of nearly every node in this network simultaneously. He runs the Super PAC, he founded the nonprofits, and he co-founded both 1789 Capital and the network itself.
In the words of Oren Cass — who was also in that room in Ohio — Buskirk is “the convener of that ecosystem.”
Janna Rutland is the network’s treasurer, the financial plumbing connecting the donor side to the spending side.
But Janna does not work for Rockbridge. She works for a company called the Crosby Ottenhoff Group, a political ‘compliance firm’ based in Chicago run by Caleb Crosby and Benjamin Ottenhoff.
What do they do? Well, PACs and nonprofits are legally required to name a treasurer on their filings. Crosby Ottenhoff rents one out.
Rutland is that person for Rockbridge, and many others. She is listed as treasurer on dozens of political organizations simultaneously, from Rockbridge’s nonprofits to Winning for Women to the White Coat Waste PAC to Save Our Country PAC and many, many more.
The phone number that appears on all those filings — (202-813-9118) — is not Rockbridge’s number. It is Crosby Ottenhoff’s number. That is why it shows up on hundreds of organizations. It is the compliance firm’s switchboard.
Rutland is not just signing paperwork. She is the financial plumbing connecting the donor side to the spending side of the entire operation.
She is treasurer of the Rockbridge entities and is also named on the filings of Red Eagle Media Group, which was paid $56 million by Republican political committees in the 2024 cycle to place their advertising.
Red Eagle is actually a Virginia fictitious business name for National Media Research, Planning and Placement, the same company implicated in allegedly illegal coordination between the NRA and the Trump campaign in 2016.
The Campaign Legal Center has already filed FEC complaints alleging that Crosby Ottenhoff ran “shell super PAC” arrangements.
Janna Rutland has no public profile and has never given an interview. Yet, she controls the flow of tens of millions of dollars, and almost nobody knows her name. In these types of operations, that is by design.
By the time the money exits the system as field operations, ad buys, or polling, it has passed through three or four entities controlled by the same two or three people. The original donor is invisible.
Every step is technically legal, and tax deductible.
Patriotic Capitalism
And then we of course, we have to talk about the venture capital arm of Rockbridge… 1789 Capital. The venture capital firm was co-founded in 2022 by Mercer, Buskirk, and Omeed Malik, with Donald Trump Jr. joining as a partner after the 2024 election. They call it “patriotic capitalism.”
By early 2026, 1789 Capital — which has over a billion dollars in assets now — has invested in roughly 30 companies. They say the fastest way to a man’s loyalty is through his wallet and his ambition. At 1789 Capital, they deal in both.
These companies include, but are not limited to:
Firehawk Aerospace: A startup that uses 3D printing to make rocket fuel in just a few hours, rather than the usual two months.
Hadrian: A company that uses AI to run automated factories for military and aerospace equipment.
Vulcan Elements: A small company that makes special magnets. Just three months after 1789 invested in them, the Pentagon gave them a record-breaking $620 million loan.
All three of these companies — which are linked to the Vice President of the United States and his friends — have millions of dollars in government contracts.
They are not separate events — but instead all connected — as AI needs rare earth minerals. You can’t build the chips, data centers, or energy systems without them, and China controls almost all the global supply.
Now remember this every time you see the Trump admin making moves on rare earth minerals and AI, whether it's Project Vault, the 2025 critical mineral executive orders, or the mineral deals they're cutting with countries like Australia, Japan, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia.
Trump declared a national security emergency, which let him skip normal bidding rules and pour hundreds of millions in Pentagon money into companies like Vulcan Elements.
The catch? The presidents son's firm — 1789 Capital — had just invested in Vulcan three months earlier.
So, to review: Trumps son invested first. The Pentagon's hundreds of millions came three months later. No review, no competition, no questions asked. Your taxes, their profit.
Common Good Catholicism
There is one more thing the four nonprofits share, and it’s one of the most disturbing. Read the 990 filings. All of them have in their mission statements their goal is to, “further the common good.”
That phrase sounds harmless. It is not.
“The common good” is the central organizing idea of a political movement called postliberal common-good Catholicism, and it has a very specific meaning: that liberal democracy has failed, that individual rights have atomized society, and that the state must be redirected by a counter-elite who will impose a moral order from above, whether the public asks for it or not.
A professor named Deneen wrote a whole book saying America needs a new ruling class. Vance wrote an official blurb for his book, Regime Change:
"Deneen does more than show how our present ruling class has declared war on beauty, tradition, and the social institutions that make life worth living; he articulates a vision for a populist politics that can rebuild what has been torn down." — J.D. Vance
Vance is their ‘guy’ in politics. He converted to Catholicism, buddied up with the Heritage Foundation, and still name-drops Deneen publicly. Vance wrote the official foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts's book, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.
And look at the language:
The old conservative money used words like “Prosperity” and “Freedom.”
The new right picks names like “Better Tomorrow” and “Faithful in Action.”
And before your eyes glaze over at the phrase “liberal democracy,” understand what it actually means. It does not mean progressive politics. It does not mean the Democratic Party. Liberal democracy is the system of government the United States was built on.
It is the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, free elections, individual liberty, and the idea that the government answers to the people rather than the other way around. It is America as we know it.
When these people say liberal democracy has failed, they are not talking about the left. They are talking about the American ‘experiment’ itself.
The 22nd & 25th Amendment
Members of Congress, from both parties, are formally calling for the President’s removal under the 25th Amendment.
The Rockbridge Network has been patient. They may not need to be patient much longer. The only thing standing between Vance and the Oval Office is Donald J. Trump — a man whose public decline the nation watches in real time, and who forms his understanding of the world primarily through whatever Fox News decides to show him that morning.
In September of 2025, Trump mobilized federal troops against American citizens because Fox News showed him five-year-old protest footage and told him it was happening now. Oregon’s governor had to call Trump personally to explain that the courthouse he thought was under attack was not under attack.
A man this responsive to whatever is put in front of him is not running the country. He is being run. What the ever-elusive Rockbridge Network has built is not a simply another dark-money political network. It is a succession plan.
If Vance reaches the Oval Office after January 2027, the 22nd Amendment allows him to serve nearly a decade.
I know what you are thinking. Vance is not electable. He isn’t as popular as Trump. And right now, you are not wrong. As of April 2026, Vance holds the worst approval rating of any vice president at this stage in office, a 21-point swing in the wrong direction since January 2025.
Rockbridge is not waiting for Vance to become popular. They are building a country in which popularity matters less than infrastructure.
Since 2021 — before Vance won the Senate on Thiel’s money — they have funded redistricting efforts, voter turnout operations in swing states, and litigation designed to rewrite election law.
Their own internal planning documents put $3.75 million toward rewriting election law, $3 million for what they literally called a “government-in-waiting,” and $6 to $8 million per state in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan.
And this wasn’t some abstract plan. James Blair was running polling for the network’s nonprofit. He left to become Trump’s campaign political director. After the election, he got named White House Deputy Chief of Staff.
The guy went straight from the network into the West Wing. This is the Koch model, turbocharged and stripped of its libertarian pretense. Charles Koch publicly opposed Trump and lost his influence after 2018, and Rockbridge was purpose-built in 2019 to replace him.
They're not playing for the next election. They're playing for the foundation of every election after it. Trump was never the destination — he was the vehicle — and the people who were in that room in Ohio are still driving.
People love to comfort themselves by saying Rome wasn’t built in a day. They conveniently forget it didn’t fall in one, either. It crumbled slowly, imperceptibly, while very smart people stood around arguing over the acoustics in the Colosseum.
Fantastic work, Dissent. This plan of creating invisible networks is especially potent in our celebrity-obsessed culture, where media sees no reason to pay any attention to “nobody nobody knows,” in the old Chicago phrase.
Thank goodness we have independent media and sleuths like you who understand what’s important.
Phenomenal investigating and reporting. When you see the dots connected, it seems like they are too strong to defeat. I have to believe we can do it but it shakes me.