Seducing the billionaires

It's time to capture a new generation of elites. We need them. They need us.

The time is right for dissidents to secure meaningful elite support. Elites are aware of our ideas and beginning to explore advocating for them.

Marc Andreessen

is posting BAP memes and recommending authors including Fustel De Coulanges, Burnham, Gottfried, and Cuddihy. Peter Thiel is backing

Curtis Yarvin

and a cadre of others. Elon Musk is promoting

Bennett's Phylactery

. Tucker Carlson is evangelizing the work of

Darryl Cooper

.

This support largely remains in a nascent and exploratory stage: occasional social media shares and Substack subscriptions. It’s easy to blame the billionaires (and the multi-millionaires) for this: if they know what time it is, why aren’t they putting big money behind dissidents against progressive orthodoxy and managerialism?

But to blame the donor class would be misguided. The dissident sphere lacks trustworthy philanthropic infrastructure for donors to engage with. We must correct this. The key point: the production of this infrastructure would benefit them as much as it would benefit us.

Stephanie Rew

Elites have world-visions which they desire to bring to reality, but also have professional commitments which prevent them from focusing on the necessary tactical steps to enact radical societal change. More than mere tactical support: they need help to dream. They have good instincts, but require inspiration about the art of the possible and an understanding of the hidden sociological and historical mechanics at play in creating our present situation. Hence the Thiel-Yarvin relationship, for example.

Elites have capital waiting to be productively deployed, and good intentions to make use of it. Old charities are irrelevant to their concerns and often antithetical to their values. Unfortunately, because progressive organizations still have a monopoly on established philanthropic infrastructure, this is what they still default to when they fulfill their charitable obligations (this is presumably the reason why Andreessen made donations to bizarre waste-of-time organizations like Trans*H4CK and Lesbians Who Tech).

The time is now to change this. Annual philanthropic donations continue to significantly decline in America. This is what we’d expect in the context of a growing misalignment between potential donors and legacy non-profit infrastructure, as well as the effects of an overall decline in societal trust and cohesion.

Consider the opportunity which we can present this new generation of donors: our civilization is at a pivotal point. Now is the time that the next Rockefellers and Carnegies - era-defining philanthropists - will be written into history. By establishing the right projects, we can help our donors achieve this status.

We must go about this the right way. High-end philanthropy rarely involves blank cheques, or the direct patronage of vague creative projects. It is not about artists making demands and rich people fulfilling them.

This is about elites and their needs as much as it is about us and ours. Every donor is a donor for their own reasons. They have their own ambitions that they want to achieve. Where we have the opportunity, we should engage them, listen to them, and find out what these ambitions are. We should find out why they can’t achieve their goals as things stand, and how a vanguard movement might be the solution.

This does not mean that we should entirely cater our work to their whims: we should come to the table with well-developed proposals of your own. But anyone who seeks to secure patronage should also carefully research what the individual whom they are engaging cares about.

Our sphere has unique strengths that can be leveraged - we’re more interesting, more curious, more principled, more radical - but these are all human strengths which will not emerge without an authentic conversation. We cannot treat donors like targets to be worked so that we can exclusively pursue our pre-set projects. 

---

---

This also means calibrating collaborations to their desired risk-appetite. They have a lot to lose. They don’t want to accrue existential risk or trust their reputations to loose cannons. Legacy fundraising buys them easy prestige (putting their name on venerable institutions), access to power, and reputation. We can offer none of that - so we need to offer targeted and well-considered interventions instead. 

Ideally, by the time you engage a potential donor, you will already have some small version of your suggested project underway. This helps demonstrate that an expanded version of your work is realizable and will do good. It helps them understand you, your mission, and how you achieve it.

Whenever you have an opportunity to engage a potential wealthy donor (as an increasing number of influential Substack and Twitter anons now do), I’d suggest a basic playbook (informed by my exposure to more traditional arts fundraising):

1. Know your target audience. Know what they care about and what they currently support.

2. Ensure you have the ability to speak succinctly about the need you’re attempting to address, and how your work sets about addressing this need.

3. Have the ability to enrich this initial pitch with stories, metrics, achievements, history, and predictions if necessary.

4. Have opinions about other initiatives in the space, what works, who you respect, and what doesn’t work.

5. Come with a specific ask, and details of what the provision of this ask would achieve. If your conversation with the donor indicates that they have other preferences, be ready and willing to tailor your ask to their needs.

6. A willingness to fail and to try again. This is radically new territory and failures are inevitable.

Bear in mind that elites have typically participated in sophisticated organizational strategy sessions, and will be familiar with receiving well-developed pitches from for-profit companies for investment. They will be experienced in spotting ventures which are ill-considered and going nowhere. The total lack of this sophistication in charity pitches will be a block for them in donating. As we are likely to be asking for orders of magnitude less money than legacy charities, we will receive some leeway, but we shouldn’t depend on this. Come prepared.

Be ready to commit to discretion and restraint in public, together with authentic gratitude in personal communities. Remember that we should always be aiming to provide donors more than they are providing us - in terms of the effects we generate and the community, gratitude, and trust we unlock for them.

Really significant donations require longstanding trust and familiarity. This can only emerge out of smaller, discrete, low-risk trials. The literature shows that those who have initially made small donations are more likely to make later large donations, and for good reason. Be prepared to start small.

Some examples of this done well:

• Bennett's Phylactery
  organized and executed the Natalism Conference to a professional standard. The event was focused on a single issue of known importance to major figures (solving the birthrate crisis). Excellent speakers were invited: although some have quite radical online profiles, they presented well on the day. Bennett created something productive which major figures could attach themselves to without existential risk, and indeed, Elon Musk amplified the event on X: an excellent springboard for more substantive engagement.

• Peter Thiel destroyed the New York gossip rag Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against it. The origin of this idea? “…a twentysomething acquaintance of Thiel’s, identified only as Mr. A, not only came up with the idea in April 2011 - before the publication of the Hogan video - to target Gawker through an open-ended legal fund but also spearheaded the plot to take down Gawker using Thiel’s money.”

• The Manhattan Institute backing the work of

  Christopher F. Rufo
  , and the Claremont Institute backing many friends of this blog.

For the young and not-yet-well-connected among my readership: I’d suggest reaching out to a wealthy person at your church. If nothing else, I’m sure they’ll be surprised and impressed at being taken out to lunch by a rare high-agency young believer.

Donors (of any size): do you need a Philanthropic Advisor to navigate this space? I’m happy to assist, even if in an informal capacity. We need to get these wheels turning. Email me: johannkurtz [at] proton.me

---

Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please leave a like (the heart button below) and subscribe.

Paid subscriptions are hugely appreciated, and unlock the archive of almost 100 articles on a great range of relevant subjects. You’ll be emailed a guide of where to start. All revenue goes towards supporting my family.

Sic transit imperium,

Johann