Patrick McKenzie is about as close as you will get to a “good guy”. Traditionally this would be the statement you make before you twist the knife, but in this case I find him a genuinely admirable personality. I would describe him as primarily a popularizer of how certain otherwise opaque institutions actually function, on both a principled and mechanical level, with a main audience of autiste engineers who would be otherwise be tempted to excessively defer to such institutions’ self-descriptions (“I’m sorry, but due to equity concerns we can’t negotiate compensation with new hires”). In this capacity he has done a lot of good, in mostly a sort of benign technocratic way.
So it is interesting when he tells this same audience of autistes, in what he (grading on a curve) perceives to be a polite and near-Straussian manner, that the State of California waged a race war against them for most of 2020 and will do so again the instant it is politically expedient, because that state government has a plurality of incompetents and deranged race communists running the show.
I am certain McKenzie would disagree, at least for social purposes, with my characterization of his words (after all, the real problem with the vaccine race war was that it was racist), and my inferences from his broader textual conclusions about the way the vaccination effort and COVID policy generally were administered. Nevertheless. There are more and less lurid ways to describe a system where, for instance, it was official government policy to intentionally limit vaccine distribution to whiter neighborhoods and then to establish an internal passport system so they could not use doses that would otherwise be dumped in the trash. The invective version seems fair when that policy was explicitly described, in official communications, as being motivated by a desire that whites should die at least as hard as any other posited population slice - even if saving their lives was free. McKenzie notes all this very dryly, in the run-up to describing why even the efforts to serve Underserved Populations failed miserably, but he does note it.
(I am also dead certain that comments on this article will be filled with people who stopped reading precisely here to inform me that the vaccine itself was a scam, died suddenly, etc. It is important to note that when McKenzie assumes that at least the vaccine was helpful for the old and sickly and analyzes government policy through that assumption, this is informative of his model of political governance regardless of the technical efficacy of the vaccine, because the government also appeared to be operating based on that assumption. To the extent they weren’t, it paints McKenzie’s same story in a starker light.)
When he repeatedly uses the construction of “we decided” in describing these decisions, it raises obvious questions of what mean “we”, kemosabe. It certainly doesn’t actually include McKenzie personally, as he is at pains to detail, so it must be some broader conception of the polity - a “we live in a society” construction where “we” are responsible for what our democratic leaders do in our name because “we” in some sense approved them. (If democracy brought you to this…)
In this sense the “we decided” construction is begging the nerd class to decide differently, that is, to exercise political power and rid themselves of the communists and incompetents currently constituting their putative political leadership. And McKenzie is not the only one.
Andreesen and Horowitz, of Andreesen Horowitz, would like you to know that although they are lifelong moderate Democrats happy to write checks, pay outrageous taxes, participate in regulatory regimes, assist with staffing, inflate pension funds, and generally be good soldiers for the Democratic regime, there seems to be a problem as of late where the Democratic party wants them dead, for unclear reasons. Whoops!
Up until now the bargain, as they explain it, has been that you make money inside the rules and then pay your dues. Except now, they aren’t allowed to write a check. They can’t even get anyone on the horn to tell them what “contribution” to make, or how to set up their operations to be friendlier to DIE job bank imperatives. They’ve simply been kulakized - regime spokemodels tell them their entire operation is illegal without enumerating why, and outright threaten them with expropriation in ways that won’t even raise revenue, given that it would destroy the ecosystem the feds have been skimming from ever since Microsoft figured out how to make nice with the DOJ and broader power structure in 2001.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is dropping the kind of letter normally reserved for #MeToo scenarios. The Biden administration and the Democratic faction of the FBI evidently cornered them in a conference room, had their way with them during the election and the COVID campaign, and left them a crumpled $50 “for the cab” on their way out.
All of these communiques have a sort of “if Stalin only knew!” element to them. It’s extremely clear that as of right now, no one is “running the country” in the sense of exercising coherent executive leadership and balancing different constituencies in a rational manner. The various departments are de facto running themselves, and whoever has wormed their way into a position of authority is operating in purely parochial interest. The cope is that if it wasn’t for Biden’s existence as a cautionary tale on the fragility of the blood-brain barrier, but some hypothesized business-friendly Clintonesque triangulator, everything could go back to business as usual. PrEP pills for the homies, abortifacients for the ladies, crypto for the bros, and a faint scent of weed gently wafting past the Asian 6’s of San Francisco as the picturesque hobos hold redditesque signs. Ah, to be 2010 again.
The problem with this is that the current third-tier leadership running the show got into their positions somehow. They are now such a massive cabal that they have become self perpetuating, and only a Stalin-tier purge is capable of dislodging them - even by a prospective FDR-level pseudodictator, to say nothing of a nonentity like Kamala Harris (who in any case appears to be one of the loons on board with the broader program of censorship and expropriation). A dozen or so agencies, “independently”, decided they would harass Elon Musk for being a Reddit libertarian. Everyone who has dealt with the feds in a professional capacity has similar stories. That kind of mobbing behavior is not something you modify with a vibe check from upstairs, any more than youthful scholars exploring their ability to act collectively on public transit start behaving properly if they only had a teacher who cared.
But Silicon Valley is not naturally equipped for politics, let alone this kind of Maoist immolation of institutions - they have not yet fused to the governing apparatus as de facto franchisees of government power like Wall Street or the defense sector. That is to say, politics is not survival for them, even when it is - it’s what you have your lobbyist handle for you, it’s what you sometimes opine on as a responsible citizen. It’s essentially a hobby.
Thus you get this dissonant narrative, where the objective fact pattern is that these people want the nerd class dead, they explain at length the ideological basis for economic and racial liquidation, they float some trial policies to that effect, assemble a team to do it, and the response is… a podcast and some donations, or a strongly written letter, or an exposé website plus a podcast. It seems rather underpowered, for people who do have objective command of a very large amount of resources (not merely monetrary, but as McKenzie points out, running the “operating system of the world”). They hedge their bets. They express deep regret that they, surprisingly, endorse Trump, but, the whole “liquidation as a class” thing. Please forgive our remaining self preservation instincts.
This is not the first time this pattern has emerged. If you want a maximally competent rocket scientist with a genuine vision for man’s future beyond Earth, and it happens to be 1940, you will run into a number of people with unsavory politics. If it happens to be 1944, many of them will in private admit that Mistakes Have Been Made, but at the time in which those politics arose they did have a point, and the best thing for everyone involved right now is to make der rocketluften luffen - and maybe stay as close to the Western Front as possible. If it happens to be 1946, they will point out that regrettably they had limited other options for personal and societal advancement, and let’s just focus on the whole space thing and not so much the other unpleasantness. The people remain fundamentally the same. They did not, so to speak, fall out of a coconut tree. And they always have reasons to go with the flow, even if it’s blowing the opposite way as last time around, and cooperate with power as much as they possibly can.
So one of the priorities of the Trump administration must be to durably realign the Silicon Valley faction. “Libertarian” is already code for “fascist”, let us formalize this and complete the system. (Sorry ladies, but the only thing more right wing than “not really into politics” is “basically a libertarian”. Your man has a secret podcast and three alts on Xitter). He has done an admirable job of telling Silicon Valley what they want to hear with regards to future policy, but the job extends further - the cabalists who jumped at the opportunity to collude with the Democratic party in 2020 and 2021 must be purged, and Trump must demand his supporters be effectively immunized and allowed to operate in the open. The infinite subcontinental and East Asian labor supply must be choked off, and in compensation the DOJ will no longer scrutinize them for hiring smart white boys from flyover country. We will make the “tech bro” meme real. BTC will hit 100K. Make zero interest rate phenomena great again.
Besides heightening the contrast between “allowed to operate with a free hand” versus “please die”, the goal here is to predicate Silicon Valley’s prosperity on new operational model that would be anathema to a revanchist Democratic party. Ideally the survival interest that has caused their face turn is made permanent, rather than going into a quokka-like slumber as soon as the S&P hits 6K, and they realize the only alternative to death is the anti-death faction winning bigly.
Very enjoyable read! The third tier is the SPLC people that Obama installed with Civil Service classification so they could not be fired. Remember when he purged the government of conservatives and people not loyal to him, including the Military higher ups? We are living the results of that.
Remember when they claimed * woke* and * DEI * is gone and * ESG*