U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ latest FEC filings show that her re-election campaign last month received a $2,800 contribution from tech millionaire and alt-right online activist Palmer Luckey. The donation, along with others from far-right contributors, would seem to contradict Maine’s senior senator’s calls for civility in politics.
Luckey, who made the maximum legal contribution to Collins under FEC regulations, co-founded the company Oculus VR and invented the Oculus Rift virtual reality device. He found himself in the national political spotlight in 2016 when he funded the pro-Trump nonprofit Nimble America, a group dedicated to influencing political discourse through hard-right internet memes and billboards. Luckey poured nearly $10,000 into the group, which claimed to specialize in “shitposting,” clogging online political and cultural discussion with conservative talking points and controversial humor that frequently veers into racism and misogyny. (Nimble America’s most notorious work involved billboards outside Pittsburgh featuring Hillary Clinton with the words “too big to jail.”)
According to the Daily Beast and other media outlets, Luckey took to a notoriously racist forum on Reddit to solicit donations to the organization, posting under the user name NimbleRichMan.
“We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt,” he wrote, “a warmonger, a freedom stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom and grants it to donors[…] Let’s generate some success of our own. Make America great again with your meme magic, centipedes of The Donald!”
The post was endorsed by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, then an editor at Breitbart News.
Collins has often called for a more civil political discourse. Last May, she urged graduates during a commencement speech at the University of Maine to reject the belligerent dialogue so common in political debate, particularly online.
“The sheer ugliness so commonly seen on social media is evidence of the anonymous tyrants who can ruin lives with crude insults and cruel gossip,” Collins said.
Less than a year later, the “anonymous tyrants” are bankrolling the senator’s re-election campaign.
After the presidential election, Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural celebration. He later co-founded Anduril Industries, a defense tech company centered around military drones. The company assisted U.S. Customs and Border Protection in creating a “virtual wall” at the U.S.-Mexico border last year.
Other notable politicians who have received contributions from Luckey include Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), an ardent Trump backer who threatened the president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as he prepared to testify before the House, and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who was stripped of all committee assignments earlier this year for his support of white nationalism.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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