By: Vincent L. Hall
It’s been recorded on this page before but let me repeat it. If you are not watching/listening/studying Amy Goodman and her podcast, Democracy Now, you have no idea what the underbelly of Trump and his MAGA monster looks like.
My latest epiphany about how rank and putrid this present administration is, came to me during an interview with the show’s host and longtime journalist Gil Duran. This segment on the ills of tech fascism and the brazen billionaires behind it is frightening.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy explores the rise and reach of tech billionaire, PayPal co-founder, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Thiel is the wind beneath VP JD Vance’s wings, whose big bucks helped to create his trajectory from virtual unknown to venture capitalist and now his post as Trump’s right-hand pickpocket.
Gil Duran said Thiel and “Tech Reich” are power-hungry and willing to trade their ethos for the right number of pesos! Listen to what he said.
“During the first Trump administration, we saw something called Tech Against Trump, where there were all these tech companies standing up to Trump, filing lawsuits, opposing his crackdowns on immigration. This time around, it’s completely different.
What happened is that Trump was able to tap into some undercurrents in Silicon Valley with his return to power. Billionaires had become radicalized by things like the #MeToo movement, by Occupy, by the Black Lives Matter movement, and then by the pandemic.
And so, when Trump can return to power, they are now in a very different mentality. They’ve made billions and billions of more dollars. They’re even more against taxes and government, even though government is generally the basis for many of their fortunes.”
Duran reminded us that the “PayPal Mafia had been around a while. One of the members, Elon Musk, like Thiel weren’t born in the United States. Thiel was born in Germany and Musk in South Africa. And the other commonality appears to be that neither gives a damn about women, American-born Negroes or non-whites abroad.
When Amy asked where women and people of color fit into the mafia’s scheme, Duran delivered a swift, conclusive answer.
“They belong at the bottom of the hierarchy, if they exist at all. Look at what’s happening with the USAID cuts: a targeted hit delivered against the poorest people in the world by the richest man in the world (Elon Musk), with millions of people projected to die.
These billionaires who promise abundance because of AI- well, we already have abundance, and we’re not sharing it. Look at what they’re doing to the poorest people today. And if you listen to the apocalyptic visions that AI will kill all jobs and transform everything, they say that “Well, don’t worry. Everyone will get a share of the extreme universal wealth that’s created.”
But that’s not what we’re seeing today, and we can’t really believe that when they say that. Fascism is about imposing a hierarchy, a moral order. And white, wealthy, Western men are at the top of that moral order.”
Duran threw in a few more names of tech billionaires who have drunk the Trump Kool-Aid at great benefit to their bottom lines. Names like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Bezos is always the one who disappoints me most, because he took a national treasure and tailor-made it for Trump’s destruction of media and political norms. As the owner of the Washington Post, Bezos transformed the “Watchdog” on the front steps of democracy into a hound dog or lap dog on the president’s porch. The Nerd Reich is a book worth your money. Duran explains how they use Bitcoin as a political sledgehammer. Go order it from Bezos! That’s where you seem to order every damn thing else!
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
