A billionaire dinner party points to a political realignment in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

A billionaire dinner party points to a political realignment in Silicon Valley

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12 pointsanigbrowl16 comments

I don’t believe these men have any specific sociopolitical values whatsoever. They just want the most easily manipulable person in power as a means to maximize their own goals.

David Sacks is a funny guy who peddles Russian talking points. Now I actually understand why he's possibly doing that but it still astonishes me how shortsighted this thinking is.

It's not even Russian talking points. The version of Russia that American right-wingers love doesn't exist in real-life nor in Russian propaganda.

Putin's speeches call Ukraine a fake nation that shouldn't exist. The bullshit excuses about NATO enlargement and biolabs were entirely made up by American right-wingers and only later picked up by Russian propaganda.

Russia's own propaganda is more honest about Russia than the way American right-wingers like David Sacks portay Russia.

Not true for NATO expansion argument, which has very deep roots, going back to the 1999 NATO-Yugoslavia war specifically (which is when US-Russia relations started heading south generally). As regards NATO-Ukraine, it seems to have picked up with the Orange Revolution around 2004-2005. Then sealed with the 2008 Munich Security Conference.

In any case originating from the Russian side. Most right wingers probably couldn't have found Ukraine on the map back then.

The "biolabs" argument may have started with the Feb 24th invasion, as there were Russian press releases dated suspiciously close to the onset of the operation (suggesting they may have been part of a pre-orchestrated campaign, as opposed to "discoveries" on the ground as they were made out to be).

Then again - they're of a refined category of bullshit that it hardly seems to matter. How can anyone believe that stuff?

Yeah, I don't think it's accurate to blame certain US blocs for originating most of that bullshit, even if they're obviously re-broadcasting it.

It's weird to imagine how someone might respond 30 years ago if you told them the US Republican party would be indifferent to Russia invading its neighbors while their presidential candidate was floating plans for abandoning NATO.

I'm not sure if that means truth is stranger than fiction, or that 30 years is just a rather long time, or both.

That wouldn't be weird at all. The Republican party has many different factions. It would be weird to imagine the neoconservatives advocating those positions but the neoconservatives do not advocate those positions. And the neoconservatives are leaving the Republican party. It wouldn't be weird to imagine the paleoconservatives advocating those positions - sounds like typical Pat Buchanan policy positions.

Wasn't a lot of this crew early adopters of RFK Jr?

They more or less dropped him because polls showed he was taking votes from Trump and not Biden.

Except most of those people originally backed Trump in 2016. One served in his administration.

And many are also not part of Silicon Valley, or to the extent they are have always been on the edges.

Exactly. The "realignment" in the article heading is clickbait. The article describes a group of right-leaning tech leaders meeting over dinner at one of their houses.

Spoiler, it's Elon...

Nobody has more to lose from a Trump presidency than Elon Musk. That $7500 EV tax credit is going to disappear PDQ after Trump is elected.

You’re crazy. Under Trump, the EV credit will continue to exist, but only Tesla qualifies. That’s how the game works.

Nonsense. Only the Democrats have any interest in dealing with climate change.

As to "the game", the fossil fuel industry is vastly bigger and makes vastly more political contributions--so the Republicans are going to do what the fossil fuel industry wants. Thus bye-bye EV credits and EV charging station expansions.

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