The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire
Peter Thiel, image Wikipedia.
General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security advisor, boasted to the Young America Foundation soon after Trump’s first election victory in 2016, that the President’s campaign had been a quasi-military “insurgency” run by “digital soldiers”.
That same year the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.
Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and political operative, who had run companies on behalf of pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence surveillance giant Palantir and business partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media”.
To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as “an annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one’s perspective”: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.
The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap” recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.
To the editors of the NATO journal, these may have appeared as novel strategic prescriptions. In fact, they had already appeared – in a different context entirely.
In 2011, hackers breached the servers of HBGary Federal, a private US intelligence contractor, and leaked internal documents revealing a proposed operation – developed with involvement from Thiel’s data company Palantir – to deploy near-identical tactics against trade unions, journalists and left-wing activists on American soil.
This reporter was among those who covered the breach at the time, and who first drew public attention to Palantir’s role in it — the beginning of more than a decade tracking the network this piece describes.
The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel’s own firm.
Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations – funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.
That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms – among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer — covertly funded, according to participants, by Giesea. The same platforms served as testing grounds for the harassment campaigns, disinformation operations and memetic tactics that Giesea would later present to a NATO-affiliated journal as a respectable strategic toolkit.
Connecting those platforms to Thiel’s wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as “Weev”. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established — through Auernheimer’s own private statements and a decade of documented network activity — for the first time.
Auernheimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet and organised white supremacist movements. He connected the PayPal and Palantir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped create and harness. And he linked the first generation of online harassment operations to the contemporary influence networks that today increasingly shape mainstream political discourse.
Jeff Giesea, Charles Johnson
In Discord server logs – a messaging platform used widely by gaming and political communities – as first reported by journalist Luke O’Brien in his 2020 investigation into Thiel’s development of the alt-right, Auernheimer described Giesea as “a major investor providing help to racists”. O’ Brien reported that an online alias used by Giesea had encouraged donors to give money to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.
Giesea initially denied this. When confronted with evidence of a $5,000 donation to the white supremacist organisation led by notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, he replied: “No comment.”
Giesea’s financial support for the neo-Nazi platform Daily Stormer along with other associated projects run by Auernheimer and Johnson has since been claimed by other participants in those far-right networks.
One identified Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz as another Epstein associate involved in the Giesea project during his producing role on Mike Cernovich’s 2016 documentary Silenced: Our War on Free Speech – a film featuring Auernheimer, Johnson and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Giesea denied the claims by participants in these neo-Nazi networks, telling Byline Times: “I have never supported Weev or the Daily Stormer. I have always found the Daily Stormer and its orbit vile and reprehensible.”
However, he confirmed that he had engaged with Aurnheimer. He said that this was limited to a single occasion: “My only interaction with Weev was a single, brief exchange while conducting research for a NATO paper on memetic warfare. At the time, I barely knew who he was, only that he was a notorious internet troll. I asked how he would approach trolling ISIS. That was the full extent of it. There was no funding, no relationship, and no alignment of any kind.”
Andrew Auernheimer: Formation and Function
Like Johnson, Weev served as an operational connector, moving between overlapping worlds that were, in other contexts, kept separate – the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet, white supremacist organising, the investment and intelligence networks around Thiel, and the broader influence ecosystems that shaped the 2016 political cycle and its aftermath.
Auernheimer’s elevation was made possible by such things as 4chan, the image-board platform that served as an incubator of memes, organised harassment campaigns known as “raids”, and novel forms of information warfare.
He was also a prolific editor of Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki that catalogued 4chan-era internet culture and its developing repertoire of tactics.
Auernheimer gained early notoriety for using an Amazon exploit to flag LGBT materials as inappropriate in what he characterised as a strike against “the hypocracy [sic] of the gay community” – and for founding trolling collectives from which he recruited operatives for more consequential ventures.
After being indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for exploiting a vulnerability in AT&T’s systems to extract exposed data of more than 100,000 customers, which he shared with the outlet Gawker, he became a temporarily useful ersatz hero of civil liberties campaigners.
The Thiel and Epstein Connections
As with much else involving Thiel’s network, Aurenheimer’s role was initially concealed until referenced in leaked correspondence.
On 17 November 2014, the technologist Vincenzo Iozzo emailed the financier Jeffrey Epstein, alerting him that a novel hedge fund strategy he and Epstein had been developing was already being executed by Auernheimer, reportedly funded by Thiel:
“I’ve heard rumors that Thiel (who I believe you know) was bankrolling this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev to do similar things.”
Auernheimer had effectively confirmed his relationship with Thiel six months earlier in what he believed to be a private conversation.
“I have run a hedge fund, I am starting another one, and it is not nearly as regulated,” Weev stated, having separately referenced “a meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand this week”.
In the same exchange, he spoke warmly of the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who played a central role in PayPal’s creation alongside Thiel: “I’ve met Pierre, I like Pierre, and he’s a friend of a close friend.”
The /pol/ Board, GamerGate and the Radicalisation Infrastructure
In November 2011, Boris Nikolic – a biotech investor later named as a trustee in Epstein’s will – wrote to Epstein linking to a Washington Post article on 4chan’s political influence, noting: “The potential for manipulation is huge.”
The email followed Epstein’s first meeting with Chris Poole, 4chan’s founder. Days later, 4chan launched its /pol/ board – a “Politically Incorrect” forum that would become a central organising space for online far-right radicalisation.
The /pol/ board subsequently served as a primary incubator for GamerGate, the 2014 online harassment campaign directed primarily at women in the games industry. Auernheimer and Yiannopoulos were both instrumentally involved in driving elements of that campaign.
Auernheimer came from the same 4chan ecosystem that had given rise to Anonymous, but from an ideologically opposite direction: he played no part in its broadly leftist anti-authoritarian campaigns.
Soon after he was released from prison – his chest now adorned with a massive swastika tattoo – in 2014.
GamerGate and the constituency it mobilised later migrated to 8chan, the image-board founded by Auernheimer’s associate Frederick Brennan, who also contributed to Daily Stormer. 8chan went on to function as a central dissemination space for QAnon as it continued to embed itself in mainstream Republican politics.
By 2016, Auernheimer was writing to an associate that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people”. In 2017, Charles Johnson announced on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads”.
Clearview AI – the facial recognition company that subsequently expanded the capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – launched in 2018, seed-funded by Thiel, operating under Johnson’s Giesea-funded software framework WeSearchr, and represented in legal matters by Aurenheimer’s longtime lawyer, Tor Ekeland.
Johnson, Auernheimer, Giesea, Yiannopoulos, Dershowitz and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.
Ekeland objected to the allegation that Auernheimer used an “exploit” on AT&T, telling Byline Times: “All that happened was his alleged co-conspirator Daniel Spitler wrote a script to access non password protected, publicly facing information – email addresses, on an unsecured server.”
The Scale of the Network
In 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel summarising what he saw as the political opportunity opened by the Brexit vote: “return to tribalism. counter to globalisation. amazing new alliances.” This, he concluded, was “just the beginning.”
What the documented record shows across a decade is a consistent pattern.
Tactics developed in far-right corners of internet culture – harassment campaigns, disinformation operations, sockpuppet networks, memetic influence campaigns – were progressively absorbed into elite political and strategic discourse, sometimes through the same operators who first deployed them.
Far from an anomaly, the NATO StratCom paper Giesea co-authored with Johnson was a culmination of this activity.
As General Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., boasted last year: “The public has no idea how massive our Digital Army is.”
This piece first appeared at Byline Times.
