# Kevin DeAnna Kevin DeAnna (born 1983) is an American far-right writer and activist who spent roughly a decade as one of the most prolific white nationalist propagandists in the United States while hiding behind pseudonyms. Operating publicly as a conservative campus organizer and later as a [[VDARE]] and World Net Daily writer, he simultaneously authored nearly two thousand articles under the pen names "Gregory Hood" and "James Kirkpatrick" for explicitly white nationalist outlets. He was, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an "ideological architect" of the alt-right — and the man Peter Thiel hosted for a private dinner in the summer of 2016. ## From Campus Conservative to Movement Architect DeAnna attended the College of William & Mary, where he led the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom and helped edit a libertarian-leaning student paper, The Remnant. After graduating he took a job at the [[Leadership Institute]], the conservative training organization that has incubated generations of right-wing campus activists. In 2006 he founded [[Youth for Western Civilization]], which he led until 2012. YWC was designed as a more radical alternative to mainstream conservative campus groups, and functioned as a launching pad for a new generation of white-power activists. The group boosted the profile of [[Richard Spencer]] by inviting him to speak on college campuses in 2010 and 2011, helping to connect older paleoconservative networks with the emerging online alt-right. Around 2012 DeAnna left the Leadership Institute for World Net Daily, where he wrote many articles over the next five years, mostly without a byline. ## The Pseudonyms DeAnna's lasting influence came through two pen names. As "Gregory Hood" — a byline that first appeared in [[American Renaissance]] in 2008 and grew prolific from 2011 — he wrote for [[Radix Journal]], [[Counter-Currents]], American Renaissance, and other white nationalist publications. As "James Kirkpatrick" he became a star writer for [[VDARE]], the anti-immigration site founded by [[Peter Brimelow]]. Across the two identities he produced close to 2,000 articles, making his a decade-long white nationalist writing career conducted almost entirely in the shadows. He also published two books under these names: *Waking Up from the American Dream* as Gregory Hood (Counter-Currents, 2016) and *Conservatism, Inc.: The Battle for the American Right* as James Kirkpatrick (Arktos Media, 2019). In his writing he was explicit about the goal: in 2013 he described the creation of a white ethnostate as "the great dream of the White Republic." DeAnna was at one point a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a neo-pagan group with ties to the far right. He dated former Breitbart editor [[Katie McHugh]] in the 2010s; after McHugh left the alt-right milieu, she leaked their emails to the SPLC, and that trove is what publicly unmasked "Gregory Hood" and "James Kirkpatrick" as Kevin DeAnna. ## The Peter Thiel Dinner — and Why It Mattered On the evening of July 29, 2016 — the same month [[Peter Thiel]] spoke at the Republican National Convention endorsing Donald Trump — Thiel hosted a private dinner in which DeAnna was a guest. An attendee labeled the gathering the "Right Wing Dinner Squad, III." The next morning Thiel emailed DeAnna directly: "Kevin — really enjoyed meeting you last night. I may be in DC towards the end of September, and let me know [if you] make it to SF anytime!" DeAnna replied that it was "a real honor meeting you and thanks for hosting all of us." The connector who arranged the introduction, former Tea Party activist [[Brendan Kissam]], wrote to both men predicting they would "have plenty strategy to bounce back and forth." What was actually discussed has never been disclosed, and that ambiguity is the point. The dinner sat at the intersection of two stories. The first is Thiel's all-in bet on Trump in 2016, during which — as BuzzFeed News revealed in 2020 through the leaked McHugh emails — he repeatedly met with figures on the racist fringe (DeAnna, plus dinners and overtures involving [[Milo Yiannopoulos]], [[Curtis Yarvin]], and others) even as he publicly tied his reputation to the campaign. The second is the alt-right's own strategy: a cluster of small, cash-strapped white nationalist organizations actively hoped a sympathetic billionaire might bankroll their mainstreaming project. One movement leader, Counter-Currents publisher [[Greg Johnson]], privately speculated that Thiel's money and influence could make him "our George Soros." DeAnna was a logical bridge for that ambition. By 2016 he had spent close to a decade channeling white nationalist ideology into the alt-right's more palatable packaging, and he was also a Trump evangelist who urged movement skeptics to work inside the system rather than marginalize themselves — writing a 2015 piece for Spencer's Radix Journal making the case for backing Trump. The Brimelow emails in the leaked trove show DeAnna's VDARE editor scolding him for not keeping the outlet "abreast of Alt Right developments," and specifically griping about being kept in the dark about "this meeting with the Right Stuff, Ann Coulter, Thiel etc." — placing the Thiel dinner inside a wider web of 2016 contacts between the white nationalist right and Trump-aligned money and media. (Brimelow was referring to [[Ann Coulter]], a longtime friend of Thiel's.) In the end the hoped-for patronage never materialized. After Richard Spencer's "Heil Trump" incident in November 2016 made the movement too toxic, Greg Johnson lamented that Thiel would not become "our George Soros after all." But the DeAnna dinner remains one of the clearest documented instances of a Silicon Valley power broker privately breaking bread with the white nationalist movement at the precise moment it believed it was "taking over the right." ## Connections DeAnna's network reaches across the alt-right and into the [[Alt-Right]] media ecosystem: [[Richard Spencer]] (whom YWC promoted), [[Peter Brimelow]] and [[VDARE]] (his pseudonymous employer), [[Greg Johnson]] and [[Counter-Currents]] (his publisher and book imprint), [[American Renaissance]] and [[Radix Journal]] (frequent outlets), and [[Katie McHugh]] (whose leak exposed him). His brush with mainstream power runs through [[Peter Thiel]], [[Brendan Kissam]], and [[Jeff Giesea]] — the latter a Thiel associate and former Thiel Capital employee who became active in far-right organizing. ## See Also - [[Peter Thiel]] — host of the 2016 dinner; his 2016 outreach to the racist fringe - [[Youth for Western Civilization]] — the campus group DeAnna founded - [[Alt-Right]] — the movement he helped build and brand - [[VDARE]] — published him as "James Kirkpatrick" - [[Katie McHugh]] — the leak that unmasked him