Here's a headline from the print edition of today's LA Times:
Why Silicon Valley's elite adore RFK Jr.
Palo Alto, though long a bastion of privilege, loves the illusion of a scrappy underdog
Scrappy underdogs? Hmmm. When you get to the text of the story it turns out there's something else at play in their infatuation with RFK Jr.:
He’s been championed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, promoted on a live audio event hosted by Elon Musk, and embraced by the venture capitalist podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, who not only endorsed Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, but also threw him a fundraiser.
....Why, just a decade and a half after embracing the Obama-Biden ticket....are the loudest voices in Silicon Valley throwing their weight behind a man who just claimed that Wi-Fi causes cancer?
....The first reason is pretty obvious: COVID and vaccine denialism is in vogue with a prominent subset of Silicon Valley’s power players.
Kennedy has spent the last two decades as one of the leading voices for the anti-vaccine movement, alleging a (spurious) link between vaccines and autism....He was kicked off Instagram for spreading misinformation but embraced by figures such as Tucker Carlson, as the right’s dalliance with anti-vax politics bloomed.
That was also around the time when Musk became a prominent COVID skeptic too; in the early days of the pandemic, Musk tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”...Dorsey, the Silicon Valley figurehead who has most fully endorsed Kennedy, too, has been cozying up to anti-vaccine views of late, although he’s long embraced other questionable health fads and self-styled gurus....Less mainstream tech figures, such as LimeWire’s Gorton and InfoSeek founder Adam Kirsch, have fully embraced the anti-vax movement — and RFK Jr. too.
So there you have it: A lot of tech geniuses may be geniuses, but the same high-powered minds which convince themselves that Uber-but-for-pineapples is a great idea are the same high-powered spectrum-y minds that take leave of the real world and convince themselves we should colonize Mars and stop taking vaccines.
In other words, many of them are brilliant crackpots. This is just the latest evidence.
I think in many cases these "tech geniuses" aren't as genius as people assume. Most of them were born wealthy or amassed their wealth through more traditional financial means, and live a sheltered life surrounded by yes-men, all of which leads them into crackpot and sociopathic thinking tendencies. The reason many of their "ideas" are successful is because they have the financial resources and connections to shove them into production, and everyone assumes they're genius ideas because of the very "tech genius" mystique that's been reinforced by the media.
I can make 190 US dollars an hour working on my home computer. I never thought it was possible, but my closest friend made seventeen thousand USD in just five weeks working on this historic project. convinced me to take part. For more information,
Click on the link below... https://GetDreamJobs1.blogspot.com
A lot of them have always been crackpots. It just used to be far less political - for a long time, California tech companies tried to ignore Washington. Now that they have to engage, and you get the whole meal.
Also, "genius" - can we please cut this bullshit out. It is a dumb legacy of "nurds are smart, jocks get chicks" cliches from decades ago. Musk is a finance guy with poor enough self-control that he got suckered in to one of the biggest money-losing deals in corporate history. Dorsey's a bright flake with attention span problems and way too much ego. And so on. Billg was legitimately smart. And there have been a few others. But the bulk of the current crop are vat-grown rich kids running off connections like in any other industry.
(Cite: personal experience. I'm an engineer who has worked for internet startups in SV since the 90s.)
How did we come to live in a world with so many whackos in powerful influential positions. What the hell is going on? (It can't be lead in pipes, can it?)
This isn't really new. Try reading more than the propaganda about our past overlords.
For a disturbingly relevant example, try starting with Henry Ford. If you're more interested in a mix of hilarious, sad and disturbing, try the DuPonts. But an awful lot of them have been some flavor of crackpot, they just left enough money and spawn behind to cover a posthumous PR operation.
Isn't it simply that many of them are snake oil salesmen with enough brains to be good at it and find a lot of people want to talk to them about complex things and they start feeling self-conscious about all the things they really don't know and cover that over with an explanatory aesthetic of conspiracy theories projecting their incompetence and swindling onto all they can't explain or actually know?
And so, rfk, jr.
The guy who built the Titan submersible was probably just this type of personality, here's a great description of exactly what happened it imploded,
https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14gcjxq/with_news_of_the_titan_experiencing_a/
Is the journalism in play here any better than most journalism?
Specifically we have one set of facts
- FRK Jr believes (or at least is summarized as believing) some unorthodox medical opinions
and a second set of facts
- a bunch of tech people support him.
What's the proof that the second is driving, or even an important part of, the first? A candidate is a bundle of opinions; you never get exactly what you want, you choose the options you care about and accept whatever nonsense comes along with them.
So what are RFK Jr's opinions about other things that matter a whole lot more, either for the world as a whole (nuclear weapons? China? climate change?) or for the US internally (SJW issues? role of regulation?)
I have NO IDEA because our journalists are doing their usual crack job of providing me with plenty of BS fluff and nothing of substance.
I don't even know(and am certainly not being informed) WHY RFK Jr thinks the way he does. Is it driven by general woo and distrust of science (ie the sort of thing that would have made him a darling of the left as late as 2019)? Is it driven by a misinterpreted personal experience? By a feud with some individuals? As nothing to do with the science per se, but all about the extent to which the FDA and medical laws are believed to be overreach (ie a kind of libertarianism)? etc etc
Perhaps you did not notice this but Brian Merchant is a columnist not a reporter.
If you want to know more about RFK and his views it is not hard to find out about them elsewhere than an opinion piece. There are a few of his views that are pretty mainstream liberal/progressive but it is not exactly remarkable to point out the disaster of the Iraq invasion or to note that income inequality is a grave threat to our world. No, what makes him stand out - well aside from his money and his last name - is his highly unscientific conspiracy centric view of the world. So it is remarkable that many of the supposedly smart science based whiz kids in SV are showing interest in this dangerous trust fund nut job.
"Why do so many tech bros support RFK Jr.?"
1) Because, contra Kevin, they aren't "brilliant crackpots"--they're morons.
2) Because they hope this will put Republicans back in power--which will get the techbros their beloved tax and regulation cuts--without having to openly ally with Trump.
This is the most pithy summation I've seen so far. However, I'd also add that most tech bros are most defhinitely not 'tech' bros; they are at most moneymen who understand the business. Musk doesn't even have a real STEM degree, to name but one example.
The other bit that I'm sure surprises nobody is that a lot -- most? -- STEM types are notoriously one-sided. Their knowledge of the humanities tends to go from weak to practically non-existent. $100 for Neil Gaiman; not one cent for Rousseau.
Indeed. As someone who has worked many years in the high tech world I am frequently impressed with how frequently very smart engineers around me -my peers - know little of history, let alone literature or art or music. It can lead to a rather imbalanced and often sophomoric view of the world.
There is a difference between not being interested in history or art or anything, and between believing that vaccines don't save life. The former is a matter of taste, the latter is understanding of the real world. Lack in interest in these doesn't explain false beliefs.
I'll leave literature, art, music, etc. aside for the moment because that's a longer more complicated discussion but if you are not aware of much history beyond a grade school understanding of anything that happened before you turned 15 then I think it constricts your capacity for understanding the real world. So, no, I don't think it's just a matter of taste.
Twitter employees were warned not to crack down on violence-inciting Trump supporters ahead of Jan. 6,
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-twitter-2661758304/
I think it's worth noting specifically that while COVID obviously completely changed the politics of being anti-vax and made it predominantly a right wing thing, pre-COVID there was a ton of anti-vax sentiment in the Bay Area among the same sorts of folks that you might call RFK's base-- radical environmentalists, vegans, natural food types, former hippies, etc. And I think that culture has historic ties to Silicon Valley culture as well.
Shhh. We have always been at war with Eastasia...
Yes.
But it is important to note that the "fruits and nuts" population of the Bay Area is in decline, probably terminally. A lot of the technical folks used to be more aligned with "counterculture" here - I certainly was. And some of the dominant firms now were built by people who were (Apple, Google, more smaller ones).
New tech companies are not being built by hippies. They're rich transplants who for the most part find the arts scene irritating or just ignore it.
Take Zuckerberg (please!). He's a garden-variety Republican CEO snake who has to moderate a bit because most of his worker bees aren't. But there's a reason his go-to crisis management has been nonsense like blaming Soros.
So yeah - head to Berkeley, and to a lesser extent Marin, you'll totally find antivax, homeschooling hippies. And we still have a few interesting artists/culture jammer types around, but most of those can't afford to live here anymore. And we're not really making very many more of either of those, because young folks coming in want to cash in on their MBAs, not interesting conversation and illegal art installations.
Same blithering idiots who left $ billions on deposit with SVB, and who's collective asses were rescued by the US Treasury. I guess the types of idiots who keeps that much money on deposit at any 1 bank are the same types of idiot to support an anti-vax, Putin loving, asshole, who's only claim to fame is that his father and uncle was RFK and JFK.
According to his wikipedia page,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.
RFK, Jr attends church daily.
So, that, along with his obsessive conspiracy theories that he has basically held his entire life, and that he is now hanging out with people like No Labels and Joe Rogan and other populist wingnuts, makes him a great example of a leftist social conservative.
The formative incident for it seems obviously his father and uncle being assassinated, it's just unusual that you can ascribe it so directly in a public figure.
Hah!
Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC Has Deep Ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos,
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rfk-kennedy-trump-maga-biden-2024-election-1234777035/
Just another form of Jill Stein or Cornel West, but actually less gullible, more culpable.
"Techbros support RFK Jr." is a serious overstatement. This is all of four people cited, and of the four, three are highly aligned with Elon Musk who has taken a hard rightward turn in his politics. There is zero evidence that a material number of tech executives lean this way.
It would be way simpler, and more logical, to say that people aligned with Republican politics increasingly support a likely Democratic spoiler candidate.
Ahem. I am what is probably well described as a 'tech genius'. I came from working class parents, I went to a state-sponsored university (when they were still cheap) I qualified for an elite grad school (Stanford CS) and paid my way with an NSF Fellowship. I graduated, spent some time as an assistant professor, and ended up working as a Si Valley engineer, at a lot of very elite outfits.
Jack Dorsey is not an especially good engineer, though it seems he did some programming. What he is is an especially good entrepreneur, which means he's good at persuading people to do things.
This is an important ability, to be sure. What's also probably important is that Jack was raised Catholic in a middle class family.
Meanwhile, I don't endorse RFK Jr. I don't endorse Covid denialism. I am pro-trans. I do like UBI (remember, Andrew was a tech guy, too?).
I tire of slurs at "techbros" or "tech geniuses". I don't see how those terms exclude me, and so they are slurs of me. I object.
This is probably driven by anti-trans sentiment. Being raised Catholic, I is likely Dorsey to be friendly with it, at least. I'm sure there are trans-positive Catholics out there, but I haven't met any.
There are plenty of techies who aren't techbros. The term isn't value-neutral and was never intended to be; techbros, among other things, are mansplainers, .(though they claim -- and often mean it -- that they're just the opposite), ignorant of history, economics, etc. If that's not you, then you're not a techbro.
Uh Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine? But yes you do make excellent points otherwise, you almost sound a bit like a younger of my father, working class Catholic scholarship student to prep school, Fordam then NYU in the early 1950s, worked for MIT connected firm in the 1960s until retirement 30 years later.
Anyone still a daily church going Catholic is going to be fed a firehose of hate so naturally JFK is in a weird swimming lane politically speaking.
Is RFK jr. going to be a spoiler candidate in the general election too?
"Palo Alto, though long a bastion of privilege, loves the illusion of a scrappy underdog."
Spare me. These people wouldn't be caught dead supporting a "scrappy underdog" like Bernie Sanders.
"Because they hope this will put Republicans back in power--which will get the techbros their beloved tax and regulation cuts--without having to openly ally with Trump."
Smartest thing I've read today.
Sad thing is RFK Jr. could run a more effective campaign running as a Republican. I think he would be a threat to Trump. So that should answer your question why he's running as a Dem.
I've been saying for a decade: Any public information campaign on behalf of vaccination must include the demographic of Stanford-Berkeley-Ivy graduates.
All elite schools must create a general-education requirement on basic public health and policy reality: "Here's the basic history of infrastructure, clean water, disease, mortality, income then vs now, and here's why, and here's what CO2 does in our atmosphere. And here's why you should ignore any dietary/therapeutic belief unsupported by controlled studies - toss your aromatherapy, CBD and aloe in the trash, and have some gluten."
Just straight ground-rules reality.
And all college graduates must agree to ignore Oprah forever.