Many tech leaders were left “dazed and confused” after top Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel won a standing ovation at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last Thursday when he introduced himself as both “proud to be gay” and “proud to be Republican.”
As Breitbart News has reported, the Obama Administration has shown lots of love to Silicon Valley’s corporate elite by allowing tech companies to offshore the majority of their employment, deflect a huge chunk of their 40 percent U.S. corporate tax rate to Ireland’s infamous 12.5 percent tax rate, and still do spectacular business with the federal bureaucracy.
One investigation documented that offshore tax havens had saved tech corporations $89 billion in U.S. tax liability. That also explains why Silicon Valley industries lead American business interests in contining to park $2.1 trillion in profits offshore to avoid any U.S. taxation.
Silicon Valley’s biggest customer is government at all levels. Valley companies have been pocketing a growing percentage of the $1.24 trillion annual U.S. procurement budget, about half of the $86.4 billion IT budget, and billions from the secret “black” cyber-warfare budgets.
Because of its symbiotic business relationship with Washington D.C., Silicon Valley earned the nickname of the “Valley of the Democrats” in the 2012 presidential election, when 83 percent of Silicon Valley top tech firm employee donations went to Obama.
This special relationship explains why Silicon Valley technorati overwhelmingly see Donald Trump’s “Make America Great” policies as the single most important existential threat to their crony business model.
When the Daily Beast polled Silicon Valley start-up executives last year, they could not find anyone who supported Trump’s candidacy. Putting their money where their self-interest lies, Silicon Valley executives have showered Hillary Clinton with $1,200,712 in “pixie dust,” and chipped in another $845,968 to Bernie Sanders, while donating only $3,065 to Trump, according to the OpenSecrets.com blog.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention, 140 prominent Silicon Valley movers and shakers published a manifesto to denounce Trump’s “Make America First” movement as a campaign of “anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline.”
But Silicon Valley’s “thought police” were left dazed and confused when PayPal co-founder, Palantir founder, and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, gave one of the three final prime time warm-up speeches before Trump’s Republican July 21 acceptance of the Republican nomination for President.
Peter Thiel started his speech by stating: “I build companies and I’m supporting people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. I’m not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it’s time to rebuild America.”
Thiel talked about how Silicon Valley is becoming rich on a rigged system, while Oakland, Sacramento and much of America is “paid less today than ten years ago.” He compared families burdened with inflating healthcare and college tuition costs to Wall Street bankers inflating bubbles and spending millions on Hillary Clinton speaking fees.
Thiel described Trump in venture capitalist terms as a disruptive change agent who can challenge the “ossified monoculture of liberal upper-class privileged ethnic groups.”
Although most of the community was left speechless by Thiel’s robust endorsement of Trump, Silicon Valley investor Keith Rabois lit up social media when he tweeted that the “Tech industry is primarily out of touch by being too far to the Left.”
Even VC investor Marc Andreessen, a once-prominent Republican donor now publicly supporting Clinton, replied, “I don’t agree with my friend Peter Thiel on Trump, but this is an excellent point from Keith.”