A rookie congressional candidate in a nine-way Texas primary has received the imprimatur of wealthy hard-right donors including tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Claremont Institute board chair Thomas Klingenstein and Charles Haywood, who once expressed a desire to be a “warlord”, according to new Federal Election Commission filings showing early donations to his campaign.

In a recent candidate forum, Jace Yarbrough unapologetically staked out a series of extremist positions, saying that critics may call his approach to politics “bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish”, but that he is “past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form”.

Following the flood of donations in December, Yarbrough was endorsed by Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Yarbrough’s remaining donors include others with ties to the Claremont Institute and the secretive far-right Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), including Nate Fischer, a venture capitalist with documented links to JD Vance; and Andrew Beck, Claremont’s vice-president for communications and an admitted SACR member.

Current and former employees of Beck-founded agency Beck & Stone are also among the donors.

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, said:“Jace Yarbrough is among the most militant figures in the Maga political movement in the United States, and a major recipient of Maga-billionaire donations in his run for a congressional seat in North Texas.”

Foster added: “If it can be said that there is a neofascist political movement in the United States, Yarbrough is certainly one of its chief would-be ‘lawgivers’.”

The Guardian contacted Yarbrough and all donors named in this reporting. Only Klingenstein replied, writing in an email: “I have no particular objections to or comments on the subjects you propose to cover.”

Jace Yarbrough

Yarbrough is a lawyer, a former US air force service member and a current reservist who has come to prominence on the right via a series of legal battles on his own account, and as a lawyer in the boutique Dallas metro litigation firm SL Law.

On 3 October 2023, Yarbrough filed suit against the US air force, the US space force, former secretary of defense Lloyd Austin and current chief of space operations B Chance Saltzman over a letter of admonishment he received following a speech he gave at a colleague’s retirement. In the speech, Yarbrough criticized then-current trainings aimed at limiting extremism in Department of Defense services as “a thinly veiled flex of political power”, and warned against “cancel culture” in the services.

That case is ongoing.

Yarbrough’s two-man firm also acted on behalf of Elon Musk’s X against Media Matters for America, and for X and alt-tech video platform Rumble against their former advertisers.

In 2024, Yarbrough failed in a bid for a Texas state senate seat.

On 11 December 2025, he filed for candidacy for Texas’s 32nd district, a formerly safe blue seat which redistricting turned into a likely Republican win, and which has now attracted a wide primary field.

At a 10 February candidate forum hosted by the Dallas Express – a conservative news website – Yarbrough articulated a series of extremist positions.

On immigrants, he said: “We no longer share common values with people that we see in the grocery store or at our public schools, people that are at the local mall. Because we’re not from the same place, we don’t have the same formation.”

He also called for repealing the Hart-Celler Act, the 1965 law that ended race-based immigration quotas – a longtime white nationalist policy demand that has increasingly been voiced in organs of the Maga movement.

On Islam, Yarbrough said: “Our first introduction, for most of us, was 9/11. And then what happens? Then we see hordes of Islamic immigrants coming and attempting to set up Sharia law here in the United States, which is fundamentally incompatible with American citizenship.”

In general, Yarbrough told the audience: “The kind of good government that I want to offer, that you and I agree with, they call it bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish.”

He added: “I am past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form.”

High-profile donors

The donations to Yarbrough listed by the FEC in a filing from the campaign all came in December.

Thiel, the tech billionaire and Palantir founder, gave $7,000 to Yarbrough’s campaign on 24 December – the maximum allowable contribution split between the primary and general elections.

Thiel was an early mentor to JD Vance; a million-dollar Trump donor and transition team member in 2016; and the rainmaker for a stable of “new right” candidates in 2022, spending some $30m on his favored candidates, including Vance in his successful Ohio senate run.

FEC records reveal that $1.6m in donations since Trump’s inauguration includes $852,200 to Grow the Majority Pac, a joint fundraising committee for House Republicans, and a cumulative $310,100 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Haywood, the former soap magnate whom the Guardian first identified as a founding member and sponsor of SACR, the secret fraternal group, contributed $1,000 to Yarbrough’s campaign on 29 December, according to FEC records.

As the Guardian previously reported, Haywood speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government” after a collapse of the US. He has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend his Indiana compound.

Haywood’s X social media posts in the last month include repeated open calls for an authoritarian overthrow of US democracy, including claims that “America cannot survive without a hard extra-legal reset … ie, an authoritarian reset”; “Colonialism was the best thing to ever happen to India”; “Francisco Franco was both necessary and awesome” and “Such a man will, it appears, be necessary for the restoration of America”; and “the key question is whether all Trump’s people know that they cannot hand power back to the Left, ever”.

Klingenstein, the fund manager who chairs the Claremont Institute’s board and is its largest known funder, providing about a third of its income, according to the most recent available filings, gave $7,000 to Yarbrough’s campaign on 30 December – again, the maximum split between primary and general.

As the Guardian previously reported, Klingenstein previously funded and appeared in videos exhorting conservatives to join a “cold civil war” against “woke communists”.

These apocalyptic forecasts coincided with his emergence as a Republican megadonor over the last two electoral cycles. Klingenstein sank more than $10m into a range of Republican Pacs and political candidates in the 2024 cycle, and has also provided ad hoc funding to initiatives like the far-right media outlet Action Idaho.

Yarbrough echoed Klingenstein’s “cold civil war” vocabulary in a 14 January profile in the Dallas Express.

Klingenstein has fashioned his personal website as a journal of rightwing opinion: recent articles include The University Is the Engine of the Regime, written by Scott Yenor, a SACR founder who was recently hired by the Heritage Foundation; an article praising Chile’s new far-right president, who is an admirer of Pinochet and the son of a member of the Nazi party; and Klingenstein’s endorsement of the view that “antifa” is the “paramilitary vanguard of the cold civil war”.

Klingenstein has continued to be a generous funder of rightwing causes beyond the realm of electoral politics.

A November filing shows that in 2024, he donated more than $4.3m to Claremont; more than $200,000 to the Edmund Burke Foundation, host of National Conservatism conferences that have been held in the US, UK, Italy and Brussels since 2019; more than $500,000 to RealClearFoundation, which in turn sponsors other rightwing media initiatives; and $250,000 to the Madison Media Fund, whose biopic of election-denying Trump attorney and Claremont fellow John Eastman premiered at Mar-a-Lago on 6 January.

A separate $7,000 donation to Yarbrough came from Robin D Weaver, Klingenstein’s wife. Klingenstein’s first wife, Nancy Perlman, died in 2018.

Beck & Stone connections

Beck and co-founder Austin Stone also made donations, each listing their affiliation with the agency.

Beck, who is also Claremont’s vice-president for communications, gave $3,500 on 13 December, listing his employer as “Beck & Stone” and his occupation as “consultant”.

Beck, who designed SACR’s logo and website, admitted his membership in a 2024 post on X.

In the last month on X, Beck has spent some time lending his support to Jeremy Carl, Beck’s former Claremont colleague and the author of a book alleging systemic discrimination against white people in the US.

Carl’s nomination for a senior state department role appeared to have stalled last week, with Republican senators concerned about his previous comments on Israel, and Democratic senator Chris Murphy describing him as a “legit white nationalist”.

Another post, apparently posted during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, reads: “A fundamental part of being an American is communicating in the language of America. And that language is English.” Another announces: “The end of the transgender experiment.” Another boasts about a $500-a-head Yarbrough fundraiser in Dallas.

The Guardian previously reported that despite Beck’s subsidiary political consultancy Knight Takes Rook’s (KTR) aggressive social media promotion of Yarbrough’s earlier statehouse campaign, neither Beck & Stone nor KTR appeared in his campaign disbursement filings.

When asked in 2024 about the work, Beck & Stone’s then-communications director, Andrew Cuff, confirmed the relationship, calling “subcontracting through third-party entities” a “standard and fully compliant practice”.

Cuff himself donated $1,041.02 to Yarbrough’s campaign on 30 December. In his FEC filing, Cuff listed his employer as “Federal Government” and his occupation as “Appointee”.

Cuff is currently chief speechwriter in the Department of Education, according to the department’s website. His office of government ethics filing in 2025, which has not been previously reported on, confirms that Beck & Stone worked for Yarbrough among dozens of other clients.

Beck & Stone co-founder Austin Stone gave the maximum $7,000 on 13 December, split between primary and general elections.

Another donor, Nate Fischer, is along with Haywood and Beck closely linked to SACR, as previously detailed in the Guardian.

Fischer gave $1,000 on 13 December, listing his employer as “NF Macro” and his occupation as “investor”. His wife, Meghan Fischer, listed as a homemaker, also donated $1,000 on the same day.

Fischer was the founding president of SACR’s Dallas chapter and runs New Founding, a venture capital firm explicitly designed to fund rightwing enterprises. The Guardian has reported on Fischer’s friendly relationship with JD Vance, documented in a photograph showing the now-vice president clasping Fischer’s shoulders at a 2023 gathering in Dallas.

SACR is a men-only, invitation-only fraternal network that the Guardian first exposed in 2023. Internal documents obtained by the Guardian revealed the group’s aim to recruit men who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise” and to form “the backbone of a renewed American regime”.

A 2024 Middlebury Institute report pointed to “undercurrents of neo-fascist accelerationism” in SACR’s philosophy. The Claremont Institute, where both Beck and Fischer have held fellowships, donated $26,248 to SACR in 2020.

Haywood, the SACR founding member, has habitually described the January 6 riot as an “election justice protest”.

For his part, at the 10 February candidate forum, Yarbrough characterized January 6 as a “peaceful protest” and lamented: “People’s lives were destroyed, held in solitary confinement for months, years. And who’s gone to prison for it? Nobody.”