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Revealed: top Vance aide worked for far-right consultancy with extremist links
Parker Magid worked for Beck & Stone, which is close to shadowy fraternal order and Claremont Institute
A senior aide to Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, once worked for a far-right political consultancy that touts its capacity for “clandestine actions” and has links to a network of extremist groups and thinktanks, the Guardian can reveal.
Parker Magid was recently appointed as Vance’s press secretary and his employment history links Vance and his circle to elements of the extremist right far outside the mainstream of American politics.
Vance’s staffer links him to Beck & Stone and its subsidiary political consultancy Knight Takes Rook (KTR). The brand consultancy with a business address in New York is close to Vance allies including the far-right Claremont Institute, the serial Arizona political candidate Blake Masters and the “counter-revolutionary” magazine IM–1776.
Beck & Stone was founded in 2014, according to statements by its founders, Andrew Beck and Austin Stone. Initial company filings in Florida date from April 2015. Its current Florida filings give an address that is a UPS store in New York City.
Beck, Beck & Stone’s co-founder, is closely involved with the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a secretive invitation- and men-only fraternal lodge that has been the subject of extensive previous reporting in the Guardian.
Beth Daviess, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who has published research on SACR, said the politics represented by the group are “much more extreme than mainstream conservatism”. She explained there were two elements of that extremism: “their opinions on gender and the role women should have in society” and “their views on whether government should be democratic at all”.
The link is just one of a series of connections between Vance and the so-called “new right”, an anti-democratic movement that attacks feminism, racial equality and immigrants while centering the grievances of white men. Those connections were dramatized in an April 2023 photo resurfaced last month in which Vance posed with the staff of New Founding, a Beck & Stone-aligned venture capital firm “for the right” that opposes what it calls “woke capital”.
The Guardian contacted Beck & Stone, Vance’s office and the Trump campaign for comment on this reporting. A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.
Andrew Cuff, whom Beck & Stone’s website identifies as its communications director, responded in an email that Magid “transitioned to a new role in the Senate in 2023, concluding our professional relationship on positive terms”.
From Beck & Stone to JD
Parker Magid assumed a senior role as Vance’s Senate press secretary this month after serving as deputy press secretary from March 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Immediately before joining Vance’s office, Magid spent a six-month stint in the office of the California Republican Darrell Issa, who Business Insider reported in 2021 was the third-richest member of Congress. A source familiar with the Senate office’s hiring process said that Magid was hired based on his experience with Issa’s office and Trump’s 2020 campaign.
During 2022, however – in the months leading up to Vance’s election to the US Senate – Magid worked for Beck & Stone, whose clients include “dissident right” magazines, secret societies and far-right thinktanks, and which is part of a network of activist firms that strive to create a rightwing “aligned economy”.
An archived snapshot of Beck & Stone’s website from July 2022 indicates that at that time Magid was “public relations coordinator” at the firm. His archived biography there said: “Parker hopes his career as a political strategist will give him the opportunity to interview Éric Zemmour and Lana Del Rey at the same time”.
Zemmour, a far-right, anti-immigrant politician in France, was fined €10,000 in 2022 after a French court convicted him of hate speech.
Magid was also co-host of a Washington DC fundraising event for the then Senate candidate Blake Masters in November 2021, according to contemporaneous Politico reporting and an online archive of the event. A source familiar with Magid’s relationship with Beck & Stone said he did not play a role in organizing the fundraiser.
Masters, like Vance, received support in 2022 from Pacs that were flooded with the largesse of the far-right tech mogul Peter Thiel. Both men have cited Thiel as an influence and mentor. Masters, however, has been less successful than Vance in winning office: he lost his 2022 Senate race to the Democrat Mark Kelly, and earlier this year lost a Republican primary for a House of Representatives seat.
Beck & Stone and SACR
Beck & Stone’s website portfolio includes some mainstream clients, but it is unclear how recent or extensive that work was: samples of work the agency cites for Condé Nast include mock-ups for Golf World, a magazine that ceased publication in 2014.
The website also promotes the agency’s work with leading conservative publications including First Things and the New Criterion. Other, similarly positioned websites with footers branded “designed by Beck & Stone” include Modern Age, Law & Liberty and American Compass.
More recently, Beck & Stone has also leaned into design work for newer or newly insurgent far-right organizations.
Beck, the Beck & Stone co-founder, posted on X that he had “created the brand identity, designed the mark, and crafted the website” for the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal, the fraternal order that claims to be directed at “civilizational renewal”.
In the same post he wrote: “I am a member.”
The Guardian has reported extensively on SACR, including on the role of the retired soap manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood and the Boise State University professor Scott Yenor in founding the group; on internal documents that spelled out the group’s desire for influence and secrecy; and on its close links with the Claremont Institute, whose president, Ryan Williams, is an admitted board member of the group. Claremont’s 2021 tax filings record a $26,248 donation to SACR.
TPM reported in June that SACR’s two Idaho chapters were formally dissolved but would continue as dues-paying organizations, which the outlet said “adds another layer of secrecy to the group”. The New York Times reported last month that SACR had “about 10 lodges in various states of development”, and that “key figures” in the Claremont-SACR nexus – including Williams, Beck and Claremont scholar Michael Anton – had moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in recent years.
Vance and New Founding
Dallas-Fort Worth is also home base for the SACR Dallas lodge director, Nate Fischer, another subject of previous Guardian reporting, whose business career has encompassed real estate investment, ammunition manufacturing and more recently providing venture capital for explicitly rightwing enterprises through his firm, New Founding.
Last month, on the day that JD Vance was announced as Trump’s vice-presidential pick, a New Founding employee, Joshua Clemans, posted an undated photograph to X showing Vance clasping the shoulders of Fischer and the New Founding podcast co-host Santiago Pliego, flanked by other men in suits.
Clemens captioned the photograph “Our guy”, invoking a code phrase originating on 4chan, which indicates an alignment with far-right political values.
The photograph was first posted by Fischer himself on 3 April 2023 with the caption “great to spend time with @JDVance1 this evening in Dallas”, and the post identified the others in the picture as other New Founding identities including a partner, Angus Schaller, Pliego and Clemans.
Along with his other activities, Fischer has published several articles in American Reformer, New Founding’s in-house journal.
One, co-written with the SACR organizer Yenor, identifies Hamas with the “revolutionary left” and argues: “American Christians should recognize the Israeli state as a co-belligerent … we should appreciate the threat posed by this shared enemy and should support – or at least, not sabotage – actions taken against that enemy.” Another on Covid-19 protective equipment castigates it as “non-Christian ritual masking”. A third casts Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions last May in an apocalyptic light, telling readers: “Legal appeals are necessary, but not sufficient. Electoral wins will be necessary, but not sufficient. In-kind reprisals will be necessary, but not sufficient. In a state of nature, differences are resolved by power.”
The agency’s roster overlaps significantly with Beck & Stone, according to a “Team” page. Beck and Stone are listed as partners at KTR, as they are at Beck & Stone. Cuff is listed as communications director at both agencies. An archived 2022 version of the same page lists former employees, including Magid.
Beck & Stone has also apparently done design work for the far-right Claremont Institute, including for the online version of its publication, the Claremont Review of Books. Beck reportedly did communications work for Claremont on an informal basis: Rolling Stone wrote – days after Beck’s SACR post – that he had been “putting out fires” for Claremont, which at that moment included an installment of the Guardian’s SACR reporting.
Beck was concurrently appointed last month as vice-president of communications at the Claremont Institute, after being awarded a Lincoln fellowship by the institution in 2023. His classmates included Josh Abbotoy, the New Founding director who the Guardian reported in January was seeking to sell plots of land in a planned Christian nationalist “haven” in Kentucky.
Beck maintains other positions in the burgeoning institutional infrastructure of the anti-democratic “new right” movement.
According to his website biography, he sits on the board of the Art & Literature Foundation, which publishes IM–1776.
Beck has promoted far-right positions in opinion pieces and on social media, including arguments for “Christian civilizationism” as a more expansive version of Christian nationalism.
Some of these positions have been idiosyncratic. On X in January 2023, Beck drew attention to a public art statue in New York City that the artist reportedly intended in part to memorialize the legacy of the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
One account replying to Beck asked: “Why would they put politically divisive monuments on the courthouse?”, to which Beck replied: “The same reason why a conquering army raises their banner over a castle.”
Also in the replies, the former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wrote: “What a visual desecration of the landscape.” Beck replied: “The destruction of tradition must include the desecration of landscape,” and Miller shot back: “Yes. That is exactly what they are doing.”
The Guardian reported last February on the links between the rightwing culture warrior Christopher Rufo and IM–1776, which has published pieces praising El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele; Renaud Camus, who coined the “great replacement” conspiracy theory; the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; and the Italian proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio.
KTR aggressively promoted the candidacy of Jace Yarbrough, a former US space force officer, on its social media accounts including its X account, though many of the posts made during his candidacy have apparently since been deleted. Stone donated $5,209 to Yarbrough’s campaign, according to Texas campaign finance records; Fischer gave $1,100; Beck gave $309.
The same records, however, do not name Beck & Stone or KTR as recipients of Yarbrough campaign disbursements, however, a fact that is striking in the light of KTR’s boast on its website, under the heading “special operations”, that it “facilitates clandestine actions with plausible deniability on behalf of clients who share our mission”, and that “none of our Special Operations can be linked to KTR or our clients before, during, or after they are conducted.”
Asked about any work on the Yarbrough campaign, Cuff, the Beck & Stone communications director, wrote that while “we generally refrain from discussing the specifics of our operations with those outside the firm, particularly members of the media … subcontracting through third-party entities is a standard and fully compliant practice employed by many campaigns.”
This article was amended on 28 August 2024 to clarify that Andrew Beck is not a co-founder of the Claremont and that Austin Stone, not Beck, made a post about the SACR.
© 2024, The Guardian
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