Billionaire Opponent of Diversity Is Underwriting Mailers Targeting Black Voters in Virginia to Aid Donald Trump

The front group trying to defeat new maps by using images of Barack Obama and MLK is fueled by Peter Thiel, the 40th richest man in the U.S.

Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union

Early voting is underway for Virginia’s April 21 special election, which could help Democrats secure four additional congressional seats. The effort comes in response to moves by Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, to redraw maps and try to deliver Donald Trump up to nine more seats in the House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow edge: 217-214, plus one independent and three vacancies.

Last November, Californians voted to counter the Texas legislature’s actions to redraw congressional districts to benefit Trump, ultimately shielding him from investigations into his lawlessness and alleged abuses of power and corruption. The Roberts Court intervened in December to overturn a lower court ruling that the Texas maneuver–targeting five representatives, including Rep. Al Green (D-TX), a Black congressman elected ten times by Harris County, who has filed impeachment articles against Trump–violated the Voting Rights Act and legal precedents. That Roberts Court edict was issued, without full briefing or oral arguments, under the shadow docket (also called the emergency docket) without a full opinion justifying the reversal. Nonetheless, it signaled to other states that they could proceed with similar redistricting efforts.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has steered the chamber away from any check on Trump’s power, with the exception of the few defections that forced a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein transparency law. That measure forced the administration to release files detailing the investigation into sex trafficking and sexual abuse orchestrated by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The files reveal the identities of numerous men who traveled on Epstein’s private jet, the “Lolita Express.” Trump’s name appears thousands of times, including in allegations by a woman that she was forced, as a child, to perform fellatio on him.

The stakes in Virginia are very high.

A U.S. House of Representatives under Democratic leadership could act as a robust check on Trump, including by investigating how then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump’s former criminal defense attorney) botched the requirements of the transparency law by redacting the names of potential predators while exposing the names of numerous survivors. A Democrat-led Congress could also be a powerful counterweight to Trump’s demands that more money be diverted from services the American people need–like Medicare and Medicaid–to fuel his foreign wars and reckless tax cuts for billionaires.

There has been a flurry of ads attacking the measure in Virginia, including these misleading mailers that were shared with me by some friends.

So who exactly is behind all of this?

A billionaire.

But not just any billionaire. Peter Thiel, one of the richest men in America.

Thiel is profiting enormously both from Trump’s massive tax cuts and the administration’s huge contracts with companies he controls, including Palantir Technologies and related platforms. Those entities have received more than $13 billion in contracts with the Trump administration for systems involved in deploying artificial intelligence tools or weapons. (Palantir is named for the fictional surveillance spheres depicted as powerful panopticons in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

Thiel has used another corporation, Per Aspera Policy Inc., to drive money into various elections backing politicians who want to make it harder for Americans to vote. The group backed Kris Kobach’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial run in Kansas and Blake Masters’ attempt to unseat U.S. Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. Kobach has notoriously sought to disqualify American voters with common names–and his campaign even hired a social media contractor who repeatedly “posted hateful comments about Jews and racial minorities on a white nationalist website” (the aide was fired after that story broke). Masters is known for his support for white nationalism and anti-Black rhetoric.

Per Aspera also spent big to get JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate for Ohio in 2022. Vance, who previously worked closely with Thiel in venture capital, was swept into elected office with a record-breaking $15 million in funding from Thiel. Vance was later chosen by Trump to be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election.

Now, Per Aspera is directing money into Virginia through a group that calls itself “Justice for Democracy PAC,” and is targeting Black households with grossly misleading mailers. Some use “Klan imagery,” while others feature Barack Obama and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (without their permission or their estate’s) alongside assertions that the redistricting proposal being voted on this month will hurt Black representation. Those claims run counter to public statements from Obama, who has specifically weighed in for the new maps, calling them essential to level the playing field. Almost all Black elected officials in Virginia, including state legislative leaders like Louise Lucas and Don Scott, along with Congressman Bobby Scott and others, strongly back the measure.

On paper, that PAC is led by A.C. Cordoza, a controversial Black Republican who lost his state seat in 2025, but the funding traces back to Thiel, a controversial white billionaire.

Thiel has publicly claimed “there is no problem with racism” and that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Why would–or should–anyone trust any ads meant to influence our democracy and elections that are funded by a tech billionaire who has expressed hostility toward our very system of government?

A biography published in 2021 also reported that Thiel told some of his Stanford Law School classmates that South Africa’s racial apartheid system was “economically sound,” a claim he has since denied (he spent part of his childhood in South Africa and Namibia). In 2024, The Guardian reported that leaked materials indicated Thiel had flown a eugenicist engaged in “race science”–who has made claims about racial hierarchies–to talks in Silicon Valley; Thiel did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.

Thiel also co-authored a book called “The Diversity Myth,” attacking the idea of multiculturalism at universities (he later apologized for asserting in the book that date rapes were just “seductions that are later regretted” by women).

Notably, Per Aspera’s corporate filing was signed by Trevor Stanley, a partner at the law firm of BakerHostetler, who previously represented Republicans opposing changes to absentee voting in Virginia during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanley was legal counsel to Kanye West in Virginia during West’s brief 2020 presidential run–a stint widely seen as designed to peel away Democratic votes for Joe Biden. Among other legal work, Stanley also represented amicus lawyers in a North Carolina case involving Republican efforts to make it harder to vote. An appellate court ultimately rejected those measures, finding that they violated the Voting Rights Act and related legal precedents.

Election lawyer Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket has reported on the flurry of ads in Virginia being fueled by Per Aspera and Cordoza’s PAC. As of April 1, Thiel’s group had given the operation at least $2.5 million. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones accused the PAC’s ad campaign of being “built on lies and racial division,” asserting that they “deliberately exploit the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to mislead Black voters and suppress participation.”

We will see next week if the Thiel-backed smear campaign succeeds or is rejected by Virginia voters. Meanwhile, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering an even broader pro-Republican ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case this summer. Stay tuned for more from Grave Injustice on the story behind that case and its implications.

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What I’m Reading:

• David Daley’s Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections

  • I’m re-reading this because, as Heather Cox Richardson noted, Daley’s book is “chilling and convincing … a must-read.” (I confess he kindly thanked me for my research in his acknowledgements.)

• Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket

  • This site provides reliable and compelling updates on the battle to protect the right to vote, being led by Elias, his team, and their colleagues.

• My chapter of John Roberts’s efforts to undermine the Voting Rights Act in my book Without Precedent, along with the congressional debates over the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to secure voting rights for Black men freed from slavery in the midst of the Civil War.

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