Meet the “Thielbillies” Reshaping the Republican Party
They’re into rootedness, tech, and JD Vance—with a distinctly nativist edge.
Kiera Butler
On four successive Monday evenings this fall, hundreds of people filed through metal detectors and past armed guards into the Grand Lodge of Tennessee, a Masonic temple in Nashville, for a very special closed-door event. Culturally, it was a world away from the cowboy-boot-clad bachelorette parties and honky-tonks of Broadway, the city’s nearby tourist drag. The “largely male and suit-wearing,” according to an account by Pirate Wires—had come to hear billionaire techno-optimist Peter Thiel lecture on the Antichrist.
By the final session, Thiel had spent a total of some six hours traversing political, economic, and religious history for his audience. He closed with a plea to the locals. He’d told the crowd he’d often been asked, “‘Why are you speaking in Nashville?’” according to leaked recordings obtained by Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams. “In that question, I hear a mild inferiority complex.”
Nashville is “arguably the global capital of Protestantism,” Thiel said, and its residents should not leave “finance, technology, and politics to other people in other cities.” His exhortation was blunt: “Get over your inferiority complex and fight.”
Two weeks later, the tech-right and the Republican Party finally got their fight—they lost. Democrats surged across the map, powered in part by a sharp swing among 18-to-29-year-old men. Texas, the right’s proving ground for a decade, fell outright: Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa beat Ken Paxton and ousted Greg Abbott. Tennessee was different, though. Sen. Marsha Blackburn won the governorship and state Republicans kept their legislative supermajorities.
Which is why the election’s most revealing post-mortem isn’t happening in Washington, but in Tennessee’s burgeoning right-wing intellectual scene—a red bubble inside a blue bubble inside a red state. Here, a well-heeled crew of tech workers, financiers, and edgelords—heavily dominated by men—are converging on a single conviction: that America is not an idea but a people, rooted in particular places, and that its wars and its borders must answer to them first.
Call them the Thielbillies. They’re into regionalism with a nativist edge—the politics of roots. Over the coming months, they are likely to define the reshaped GOP.
To understand the Thielbillies, start with The Pamphleteer, the right-leaning riff on an alt-weekly that Davis Hunt, a 36-year-old Nashville native, founded five years ago. With a staff of five, the publication, Hunt says, is writing for “an audience that’s kind of neglected by local media, which is people with perspectives like my own who are interested in Nashville, want it to do well, and don’t really have a home in local politics.” Only about 20 percent of Nashville’s registered voters turn out for city races, Hunt told me, and most of the Republicans who vote in midterms and presidential races “are not voting in metro elections.” The Pamphleteer wants them back in local politics, where conservatives have been losing.
Arguably more influential than The Pamphleteer’s coverage is its event series, which included Thiel’s Antichrist lectures. Last month, it hosted “Building on the Cultural Frontier,” a gathering that promised to inform its audience about a “cultural and educational revival” that includes “boys’ schools to properly educate the next generation of American men” and “conference circuits to facilitate robust intellectual discourse, especially on issues neglected or suppressed in academia.” In July, another Pamphleteer event featured Kevin Dolan, who organized last year’s NatalCon, a conference in Austin, Texas, that brought conservative Christians and techies together to strategize about how to get people to have more babies. Dolan has since turned his attention to running EXIT group, a “fraternity of like-minded men.”
Around the publication sits a constellation of related ventures. There’s Meriwether Academy, “a men’s group in Nashville built on great books, serious conversation, and the outdoors.” Meriwether has also co-hosted events with The Piraeus, a project of the Nashville-based writer Nick Gallo that offers “Grassroots Western Civ Revival” of salons, civic clubs, and retreats. (“Saving Western Civilization” from the libs and immigrant hordes has become a trendy pet project of the right.)
There’s also Delphica Society, which describes itself as a “decentralized, invitation-only club dedicated to the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, trust, capital, and a beautiful culture.” Last November, it partnered with Pamphleteer to host an event it called the Southern Revival Salon; the invitation instructed guests to “Expect a sensory feast: Tennessee whiskey-based cocktails paired with decadent caviar, live bands setting the stage ablaze, and the signature Delphica energy that blends refined elegance with raw vitality.” Featured guests included alt-right social media influencer Douglass Mackey, whose 2023 conviction for interference in the 2016 election was overturned on appeal last year, and Andrew Isker, a far-right pastor and the author of the 2023 book The Boniface Option: A Strategy for Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation.
In Nashville, the Thielbillies have real institutions to work with. “You also have country music, which is red-coded culture,” Hunt says. The Grand Ole Opry, he adds, is “inherently inflected with a Christian conservative” bent, and “the cultural output of the city is ingested mostly by conservative, red-blooded Americans.” Even Vanderbilt University has distinguished itself against academia’s activist drift, recently welcoming Education Secretary Linda McMahon to campus.
Nashville is a hub, but the Thielbilly movement is expanding. There’s Heritage Hubs Knoxville, an eastern Tennessee group that last month co-hosted an immigration forum featuring former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, followed by a watch party of the Tennessee–Arkansas college football game with the hard-right Mass Deportation Coalition. In Atlanta, there’s the 1903 Club, an invitation-only discussion and supper club for “the finest men in Dixie.” In St. Louis, there’s Oyarsa, a men’s salon series “working to make the city a home for intellectual and cultural life again and to inspire others in heartland cities to do the same.”
And then there’s the Highland Rim Project, a real estate initiative in rural northern Tennessee, the project of a conservative Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The project is spearheaded by Josh Abbotoy, a former fellow at California’s arch-conservative Claremont Institute. He describes the Highland Rim Project as a group of “charter communities” organized around “traditional American values like faith, family, and freedom, in a rural and vintage small-town American setting.” It’s also a tech-forward project: Promotional materials note that the communities will be designed around “digital self-governance,” including cryptocurrency, and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech, and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”
The midterm election results will likely be a boon for Abbotoy’s project. That’s because Texas, the tech right’s adopted home since the pandemic, voted blue and Tennessee didn’t. Governor-elect Blackburn is, as Hunt puts it, “favorable towards data center development”—the state has no income tax, and the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority is pursuing small modular nuclear reactors to power data centers. Oracle plans to break ground soon on a sprawling new campus across the river from downtown Nashville.
Texas’ loss is Tennessee’s gain, says Abbotoy, who believes his state is poised to become “the ‘it’ place for tech investment.” It can do this, he argues, without giving up its sense of place and predominant culture. “The whole point of it is to plant a flag and say ‘This small town is where our people are gathering,’” Abbotoy noted in a promotional video for Highland Rim Project. “The question is, who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something that’s culturally authentic to the region’s history? Or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”
As The Pamphleteer‘s Hunt sees it, Tennesseans differ from Californians and New Yorkers—they’re “even different from people in Georgia.” He and the others espouse a localized version of what has become an article of faith among the new right: that place makes a people, and that a nation is, at its foundation, a people rooted in a place.
JD Vance is an especially prominent champion of this idea. At the July 2024 National Conservatism Conference, he described America as “not just an idea” but “a homeland.” A week later, while accepting the VP nomination, he called America “a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
Tennessee is the kind of place a candidate running on rootedness would want in his corner. “Most of my circle would still love to have Vance,” Abbotoy says, “if we could just wave a wand and get him in.”
William Wolfe, a self-described Christian nationalist and former Trump administration official who also has spoken at a National Conservatism Conference, appears to agree. “My message?” he wrote on X. “More George Washington, less Nazi hunting, and JD Vance is our guy.”
In his own (lengthy) post on X the day after the midterms, Vance wrote that a pollster he called “one of the smartest people I know in politics” had told him some Trump 2024 voters “were angry and planning to vote for Democrats.” They wanted to “end the war,” “focus on cost of living/inflation,” “put America First,” and “change our relationship to Israel.” In the same post, Vance warned that “anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.” It was basically an update of his 2024 homeland speech.
His amnesty line was a reminder that a nation’s “people” is an exclusive group. As Texas slipped away this cycle, conservative candidates dabbled in nativism. Republican primary voters ousted the incumbent railroad commissioner in favor of Bo French, a former Tarrant County GOP chair who has called for deporting 100 million people, purging the nation of Muslims, and emulating apartheid-era Rhodesia. As my colleague Tim Murphy reported in September, French’s rise is “in many ways the defining story of the era.”
French lost by roughly seven points but his worldview thrives on social media. An unmistakably AI-generated video purporting to explain why Texas flipped showed caricatured Indians, heads waggling, dancing in traditional dress before idols and McMansions, and grinning Muslims waving Islamic flags outside mosques. One X post sharing the video has been viewed 1.8 million times.
The Thielbillies are worried about how immigrants are changing their communities, too. Hunt noted that suburbs southeast of Nashville bucked the statewide trend—Democrat Victoria Broderick unseated Rep. Scott DesJarlais in the 4th congressional district, and three state House seats flipped—partly, Hunt says, because Murfreesboro has been absorbing newcomers priced out of Nashville. “There’s also a very large immigrant population down there,” he added, “which I think played into that.”
The silver lining of last week’s Republican loss, Abbotoy told me, is that the election “flushed out a lot of stultified establishment people” and will “reset the bench” for younger operators. His models are two Texans who outran their collapsing ticket: Reps. Brandon Gill and Rep.-elect Jace Yarbrough. Gill responded last year to a video of Zohran Mamdani eating rice with his hand by declaring that “civilized people in America don’t eat like this,” and that Mamdani should “go back to the Third World.” Yarbrough, who received a $7,000 campaign donation from Thiel, has accused Muslims of “attempting to set up Sharia law here in the United States” and lamented that “we no longer share common values with people that we see in the grocery store or at our public schools.”
Both lawmakers, Abbotoy says, talked about immigration “in sensible, responsible ways” and could “translate these political issues into kitchen-table issues.” The fact that nativist rhetoric worked for Yarbrough and Gill but not for French suggest that their red districts are distinct from Texas as a whole, and that they understood the voters there.
Abbotoy isn’t the only one who believes such messages can win. On Monday, a new conservative candidate recruitment group called American Ascent launched with an initial $12 million from Thomas Klingenstein, the Claremont Institute board chair and a Yarbrough donor. Helmed by former Heritage Foundation chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus, the group aims to find and equip a new generation of conservatives to replace older Republicans in 2028.
American Ascent has strong ties to Vance: It will partner with a PAC run by the vice president’s close advisor Andy Surabian. In the Politico interview, Vance was the first name Neuhaus’ mentioned in his list of Republicans he considered “inspirational to the base.” He also mentioned Gill and Yarbrough. American Ascent communications director Bradley Devlin, a former editor of the Daily Signal, told Politico, “Republicans lost on the economy. They did not lose on the immigration agenda, which voters time and time again say is the number one best issue for Republicans to run on.”
The emergence of the Thielbillies gives Abbotoy more cause for optimism: “The whole scene is going to be on the upswing.” He’s based in the Highland Rim, but also hangs out in Nashville—Abbotoy and Hunt are friends. He likens the Thielbilly scene to Dimes Square, the downtown Manhattan post-left salon circuit, while conceding that it’s not a perfect comparison. Dimes Square is “a little bit more counterculture,” he says. “Nashville’s different.” The rooms here are full of investment bankers, marketing executives, country-music brass and stars, and “a lot of crypto whales that have been moving to Nashville.”
Less bohemia, in other words, than a right-wing chamber of commerce with better parties. A red bubble inside a blue bubble inside a red state convinced that America is a people, that it lives here, and that, as Thiel suggests, it is worth fighting for.
