Silicon Valley Got Their Guy
J. D. Vance has solidified tech’s MAGA moment.
When Donald Trump tapped Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate on Monday, far-right influencers were pleased. The announcement was met with a chorus of “we’re so back” and all of its iterations from people who post very angrily, many via pseudonymous accounts, about things including the inferiority of women, the inferiority of Black people, the inferiority of gay people, and the inferiority of Jewish people.
“Vance has voiced support for mass deportations and legal immigration restriction,” wrote Patrick Casey, who previously led the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa, celebrating the vice-presidential pick. Bronze Age Pervert, whose actual name is Costin Alamariu and who espouses fascist and racist positions, re-shared Casey’s post.
Some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people had a similar reaction—yet another marker of how portions of the tech world are drifting deeper into reactionary politics that flit around the edges of the far right. The prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are planning to donate to Trump’s campaign, The Information reported yesterday. Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt on Saturday, also said he would donate $45 million a month to a Trump super PAC, and called Trump’s VP pick an “excellent decision.” The influential investor Balaji Srinivasan posted that Vance is “a great choice for VP.”
Both the online far right and Silicon Valley have reason to be excited. Vance is steeped in the discourse of the online right. On X, he follows niche but popular anonymous posters such as Bronze Age Pervert, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Lomez, who have either expressed racist beliefs or, in the lattermost’s case, released books by racists through his publishing house. Although people follow accounts on X for a number of reasons, what’s more telling is that Vance is reportedly friends with Curtis Yarvin, an anti-egalitarian monarchist blogger who is an influential figure among the intellectual online right. Vance says that he doesn’t cook with seed oils, a cause du jour of the online right, whose influencers say they cause obesity. He has publicly praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian leader. And he has promoted a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white-supremacist conspiracy theory that there is an liberal plot to replace white people in the West with nonwhite immigrants.
Vance is also steeped in the world of Silicon Valley. He used to work for an investment firm run by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has famously long harbored a mélange of right-wing positions ranging from moderate to extremist. (A Thiel biographer, Max Chafkin, wrote that Vance was a political extension of Thiel.) Even when Vance left Silicon Valley proper, his connections followed him. When he founded a venture-capital firm in Cincinnati, he raised money from Thiel, Andreessen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Thiel reportedly was in the room when Vance first met Trump, in early 2021—and, more recently, Musk vouched for Vance as Trump mulled his VP decision.
Tech heavy hitters’ pleasure with Trump’s VP pick is in part because Vance is a former venture capitalist and a Thiel acolyte. But there is also something else happening. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance wrote in “The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism,” the Silicon Valley embrace of Vance is another step in the direction of a political ideology Andreessen outlined in the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” he published last year. He positioned the manifesto as an argument in favor of technological development, but it reads as a reactionary screed against anyone who questions the uninhibited development of technology corporations. He cites ideological patron saints that include Nick Land—an influential far-right philosopher who has dabbled in a form of eugenics Land calls “hyper racism”—and the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti, who helped provide the intellectual underpinnings for fascism in the early 1900s. Musk has become a far-right influencer himself.
[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]
Andreessen’s and Musk’s politics may not match one-to-one with Yarvin’s, Bronze Age Pervert’s, and the like. But as Ezra Klein wrote in October, they are all a part of a new group of figures on the right whose politics embody reaction more than free-market, limited-government principles. “It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites,” Klein writes. “It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.”
This is what undergirds Vance’s grievance politics. We are a nation that has strayed. This can be fixed only by strong hands. In the book that fueled his rise, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance critiqued Appalachians for their supposed weak mental pathologies that lock them in a recurring cycle of dysfunction. They had become like “the bugmen,” Bronze Age Pervert’s term for the people—primarily progressive and urban—who he claims have been made soft by the excesses of liberalism. This hatred of softness also shows up in tech. As Andreessen spells out in his manifesto, America has been led astray by “ESG” and “anti-merit” corporate policies, almost certainly code for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that have become reviled in parts of Silicon Valley.
When Andreessen wrote his manifesto in October, the threads between people like him and Bronze Age Pervert were starting to form but still seemed loose. The collective embrace of Vance suggests that they’re getting tighter.