# Brendan Kissam Brendan Kissam is a former Tea Party activist from Philadelphia who served as the personal connector behind the July 2016 dinner between [[Peter Thiel]] and white nationalist [[Kevin DeAnna]]. Though a minor public figure, he is the human link that made one of the more striking documented contacts between Silicon Valley money and the alt-right possible. ## Connecting Thiel and DeAnna Kissam met [[Peter Thiel]] in 2010 while helping organize a fundraiser for the gay Republican group GOProud at Thiel's New York apartment, and the two kept in touch. A supporter of Trump's 2016 campaign (he was quoted as such in a Philadelphia Inquirer story on gay Republicans), Kissam arranged the introduction that BuzzFeed News later reported: the "Right Wing Dinner Squad, III" on July 29, 2016. In emails the next morning he wrote to both men, "I'd been looking forward to you guys getting to meet, and last night proved fantastic! I'm sure you two will have plenty strategy to bounce back and forth." ## VDARE Alias According to BuzzFeed News, in 2018 and 2019 Kissam appeared in videos for the white nationalist site [[VDARE]] under the pseudonym "Wilson Hewlett"; photographs and videos reportedly show the same person presented under both names. ## The DeAnna Connection Kissam's role is narrow but pivotal: without him, the [[Peter Thiel]]–[[Kevin DeAnna]] dinner — and the documentary trail it left in the leaked [[Katie McHugh]] emails — might never have happened. He exemplifies the kind of mid-level operator who quietly stitched together the social network connecting establishment figures to the movement's propagandists. ## See Also - [[Kevin DeAnna]] — introduced to Thiel by Kissam - [[Peter Thiel]] — host of the dinner Kissam arranged - [[VDARE]] — where he later appeared as "Wilson Hewlett"