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Some of the most prominent figures in Silicon Valley are enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump’s campaign. And Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, is a former venture capitalist with deep ties to the right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel; as my colleague Ali Breland put it in a recent article, Silicon Valley “got their guy.” I spoke with Ali, who covers tech and right-wing politics, about the long-simmering ideas animating Silicon Valley’s shift to the right.
Returning to Their Roots
Lora Kelley: Many people think of the Silicon Valley tech scene as a pretty liberal one. Is that assumption true? And if so, how did we get to this point where some of the most visible leaders in tech are backing Trump?
Ali Breland: There is a shift happening. I don’t want to discount that. But this, to me, is also indicative of some segments of Silicon Valley returning to their roots.
If you look back at some of the original literature that was coming out of the tech scene—the early issues of Wired magazine, or the Whole Earth Catalog—they featured not necessarily hard-right ideologies but these free-market, libertarian ideologies. This kind of stuff was always flowing through Silicon Valley, even when tech executives were voting for and supporting Democrats. A lot of tech companies’ business models involve finding ways to circumvent regulation and then hiring workforces that are not on staff or are extremely difficult to unionize.
The tech industry supported Democrats such as Barack Obama in part because he allowed that culture to exist within his version of liberalism. Tech titans perceive Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to be chipping away at that flexibility, so they’re turning to a right that they see as more friendly to tech.
Lora: Is the selection of Vance as Trump’s running mate hastening this turn?
Ali: Elon Musk was very excited when Trump picked Vance; he posted on X that the ticket “resounds with victory.” Some tech people seem to be feeling: He’s one of us. He’s connected to Peter Thiel. He worked out here. He believes in what we believe. There are certainly people coalescing around the campaign because of that.
Vance is where he is in large part because of Thiel’s $15 million donation to his Senate campaign. Even though Thiel has said he isn’t donating this cycle, the 2021 campaigns of Vance and Blake Masters were a warm-up moment. Venture capitalists were giving many millions more to the right than to Democrats in that cycle.
Lora: How pervasive is the support for Trump in Silicon Valley? Is the entire sector shifting? Or is it more that a few loud voices are getting lots of attention?
Ali: There are different factions. A lot of tech workers still skew left, or believe in a liberal version of the free market. And a lot of the tech-titan set are still Democrats: There’s Aaron Levie of the software company Box; Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, is the mega Democratic donor of Silicon Valley; Sheryl Sandberg has publicly supported Kamala Harris.
But we are also seeing a group of right-backing tech titans expressing a new rhetoric that didn’t have a place in Silicon Valley before. Thiel, for example, has been pushing his far-right beliefs into the ether for a long time. At one point, he was treated as an oddity. Now he’s in step with the prevailing ideological movement among tech billionaires.
Lora: What are some of the ideas animating this new rhetoric?
Ali: In the techno-optimist manifesto that Marc Andreessen released last fall, he cites Nick Land, a British philosopher who became important in the intellectual development of the far right. He also cites F. T. Marinetti, who was an Italian futurist and fascist. And he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, who is not inherently right-wing, but who is having a moment among this set of right-wing advocates of eugenics and a “natural order” who want to see “strongmen” take over, and who see feminists and the DEI movement as getting in the way of the country’s true potential. I don’t know if Andreessen believes in all of that. But that appeal to the strongman is indicative of the new right-wing thinking that’s taking shape in Silicon Valley.
Lora: Some of this seems to be about ideology and values. But what are some of the more immediate policy concerns that are pushing tech titans toward the right?
Ali: A lot of tech leaders want to be left alone and unregulated. And there’s lately been a shift in how the industry perceives Democrats to be approaching tech. Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan, a proponent of stringent antitrust law, to lead the Federal Trade Commission is something tech people bring up a lot, and cite as an example of Biden not being interested in helping the industry. Even Andreessen has suggested that he misses the old Democrats who gave tech this cozy place and let them do what they want.
There is also a large crypto contingent that sees Biden as aggressively anti-crypto, and they’re very skeptical of his appointment of Gary Gensler as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. They’re a bit more cautiously optimistic about Harris. But they still see Trump as the clearest path toward a low-regulation environment that’s good for them.
Clearly, there is an aesthetic sensibility that crypto people appreciate about Trump, too. There’s a troll-y aspect, and both Trump’s MAGA base and the crypto community have ties to 4chan. Still, in past election cycles, crypto communities were not broadly pro-Trump, because there was no clear edge for them and their own material interests. Now some tech leaders see Trump as a way to satisfy those interests.
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What a 100-Year-Old Trial Reveals About America
By John Kaag
Thirty years ago, when I was an eighth grader at a small public school in central Pennsylvania, my biology teacher informed us that we would be studying evolution, which she described as “an alternative theory to the story of divine creation.” She was usually imperturbable, but I remember noticing that, just for a moment, her voice had a certain tone; her face, a certain expression—an uncanny mix of anxiety, fear, and rage.
Roughly a century ago, the trial of John T. Scopes marked a flash point in an American culture war—between religious faith and science—that has been waged, in one form or another, to this day.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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