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#Peter #Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund #NatCon and who had just given the conference’s opening address, has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left–inflected
"New People’s Cinema film festival", which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began.
He’s long been a big donor to Republican political candidates,
but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world
—becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective.
Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called #Thielbucks.
His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene
and influenced by its intellectual currents: 
"Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. #Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and #Blake #Masters in Arizona.
Thiel has given more than
$10 million to super PACs supporting the men’s candidacies,
and both are personally close to him.
Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital,
and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family office,” also ran the #Thiel #Foundation,
which has become increasingly intertwined with this #New #Right ecosystem.
These three
—Thiel, Vance, Masters
—are all friends with 
#Curtis #Yarvin,
a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique
and popularize the key terms of the New Right.
You’ll often hear people in this world
—again under many layers of irony
—call him things like "Lord Yarvin" or "Our Prophet."
I was looking around the party for Vance, who hadn’t arrived yet,
when Milius nudged me and pointed to a table off to our left.
“Why is it that whenever I see Curtis, he’s surrounded by a big table of #incels?” she asked
with apparent fondness.
I spotted Yarvin, a slight, bespectacled man with long dark hair,
drinking a glass of wine with a crowd that included
#Josh #Hammer, the national conservatism–minded young opinion editor of Newsweek,
and #Michael #Anton, a Machiavelli scholar and former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council
—and a prominent public intellectualizer of the Trump movement.
Other luminaries afoot for the conference included Dignity author #Chris #Arnade, who seemed slightly unsure about the whole NatCon thing,
and #Sohrab #Ahmari, the former opinion editor of the New York Post,
now a cofounder and editor at the new magazine #Compact, whose vision is, according to its mission statement,
“shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a #libertine #left and a #libertarian #right.”
It is a very of-the-moment project.
Political reporters, at least the ones who have bothered to write about Yarvin, have often dismissed him as a #kook with a readership made up mostly of lonely internet weirdos, fascists, or both.
But to ignore him is to underestimate how Yarvin’s ideas,
or at least ideas in conversation with his,
have become foundational to a whole political and cultural scene that goes much deeper than anything you’d learn from the panels and speeches at an event like NatCon.
Or how those ideas are going to shape the future of the American right,
whether or not Vance and Masters win their Senate primaries.
I introduced myself, and soon Milius and I were outside smoking as Yarvin and I chatted about whether he’d be willing to talk to me on the record.