Company Backed by J.D. Vance Gives Platform for Russian Propaganda

In June, two American veterans fighting as volunteers in Ukraine, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, were captured by Russian forces. They were taken to a black site where they were beaten, run into walls with bags over their heads and hooked up to a car battery and “electrocuted,” the men said after being freed in late September.

Between beatings, they told The New York Times, they were interviewed on Russian media outlets, including RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda organs in the West.

“They stayed away from our faces because they knew that we were going to be on camera, that they were going to try and use this for propaganda.,” Mr. Drueke said. “So they wanted our faces to look OK. But they took care of our bodies pretty good.”

Rumble has become a leading destination for conservative content by positioning itself as a platform for unfettered speech, an alternative to the content moderation — or “censorship,” to many on the right — of mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Rumble received a major investment from a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings. Mr. Vance also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show.

Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor.

The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford. It also helps illuminate the relationship between Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel, who mentored the candidate in his Silicon Valley business empire and has contributed more than $15 million to his campaign and affiliated political action committees. (Mr. Thiel has contributed another $15 million to support the candidacy of another protégé, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.)

Asked about Rumble’s hosting of RT, the Vance campaign issued a statement. “J.D. does not play an active role at Rumble, nor does he set Rumble’s content moderation policies,” the campaign said. “It’s a dishonest straw man to suggest that just because someone believes in free speech rights online that they also personally endorse that speech. It’s embarrassing that an industry like the media, which relies on the First Amendment, has so much trouble comprehending that.” Mr. Thiel’s spokesman did not comment.

Even so, Rumble is serving as a platform for RT’s Russia-friendly content at a time of growing unhappiness on the right — and also from some voices on the left — about the Biden administration’s expansive arming of Ukraine. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, has said that if his party wins back the House next month, it will resist writing “a blank check” to the Ukrainian government. While Russia’s war has been broadly condemned in the West, several influential conservative pundits, including Tucker Carlson on Fox, have often been reluctant to criticize Mr. Putin.

Mr. Vance, who once assailed Donald J. Trump (“my god what an idiot,” he tweeted in 2016), has‌ become an enthusiastic supporter and adopted his isolationist stance on foreign policy. In February, several days before the invasion, he said: “I gotta be honest with you. I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”

Over the summer, Mr. Vance, a Marine veteran, sought to clarify that, saying, “We want the Ukrainians to be successful,” and calling Mr. Putin “the bad guy.” But he added, “We’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually.”

Mr. Vance is hardly the first candidate backed by Mr. Thiel, who has been underwriting political allies for many years — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri among them, not to mention Mr. Trump. But his relationship runs deeper than most. Mr. Vance met Mr. Thiel in 2011 while studying at Yale Law School. He attended a speech in which Mr. Thiel lamented the failings of both the legal world and Silicon Valley, and he called it “the most significant moment of my time at Yale.” Within a half-decade, he was hired to work at Mithril Capital, one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds.

Mr. Vance gained celebrity for writing “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir from 2016 about his hardscrabble Ohio roots. He co-founded Narya in 2020 with Mr. Thiel’s backing, envisioning it as an Ohio-based venture fund that would focus on the Midwest instead of Silicon Valley. But Mr. Thiel’s imprint remains, starting with the name, which follows the Thielist convention of using various details from “The Lord of the Rings.” Narya is named for one of the “Rings of Power” that was forged, per J.R.R. Tolkien, by the “Elven-smiths of Eregion” in the Second Age, under the watchful eye of the evil wizard Sauron. This took place in Middle-earth, presumably a long way from Ohio.

But Rumble is the highest-profile of these. Popular Rumble videos this year have headlines like “Biden’s Invasion at the Southern Border Is Next Step to Global Government” and “George Soros’ Shocking New Plans.”

RT’s livestream has received nearly five million views since Rumble began hosting it in March. On Sept. 10, an RT report on Rumble mocked “Kiev’s flawed counteroffensive” as “incredibly unsuccessful,” even as Ukraine was on the cusp of sweeping gains. A more recent RT piece interviewed Ukrainians sympathetic to Russia on the front lines, including one woman saying, “I’m sure the Russian troops will not leave us.” Typical headlines seek to project a sense of competence onto Mr. Putin’s beleaguered military (“Russian sea-based missile strikes hit all designated targets”) and recklessness onto Ukraine and its Western allies (“Ukraine hits Donetsk civilian areas with over 200 NATO-supplied shells”).

Brian Doherty, an outside spokesman for Rumble, said the company’s platform was open to those who “hold politically unpopular views, so long as they comply with our content policies,” adding, “We cannot fight aggressive authoritarians by surrendering a key principle that separates us from them.”

He also pointed to instances when users on Twitter and YouTube shared video clips of Mr. Huynh talking on RT about his capture. But Rumble provides an official outlet for RT, while both Twitter and YouTube’s parent, Google, have taken steps to curb its content — though YouTube has been more aggressive. The company removed an RT clip within hours of being asked about it by The Times. Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said, “YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded news channels are blocked on our platform, globally.”

Anna Belkina, RT’s deputy editor in chief, said that the company “always follows the highest journalistic principles in its reporting,” and that “interviewing inmates seems to be quite standard for The New York Times.” She added, “We hope that you’ve provided ample evidence that the inmates weren’t coerced or tortured.”

Mr. Drueke is a 40-year-old Army veteran who was working as a delivery driver in Alabama when the war broke out. Mr. Huynh is a 27-year-old former Marine. Both are from Alabama and were inspired by news coverage to travel to Ukraine and join other foreigners fighting on the ground. They were captured after coming under fire during a reconnaissance mission, and held for 104 or 105 days — they are not sure of the precise number — mostly in Donetsk, a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine. They were freed in September as part of a prisoner exchange.

“Those interviews were very much under duress,” Mr. Drueke said after The Times sent him a link to the video, which he had not previously seen. He said that his captors were watching off camera, “pantomiming, scribbling things on paper, stopping the interview so they can tell us to try again.”

“We were stored in a closet in between interviews,” he said. “They bring us in the room, sit us down in front of a light and camera, where it felt like just another interrogation,” adding, “We didn’t even know if it was media or an interrogation.”

Mr. Huynh, after watching the video, said: “We know it’s a lie from our experience. We know that they’re just straight up putting words in our mouths.”