In Silicon Valley, it is a worse “crime” for the founder of Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey, to have donated in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump than for Facebook to have potentially engaged in fraudulently inflating its average video viewing times for the last two years.
Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in mid-2014. Forbes currently estimates that his net worth is $700 million. According to a report by the Daily Beast, Luckey gave $10,000 to Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican presidential nominee.
The 24-year-old virtual reality pioneer told The Daily Beast that he has been active on Reddit’s r/The_Donald page, a community where the rule is “no dissenters,” and where he posted under the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan,” a password given to him by the organization’s founders.
The Daily Beast claims that Luckey was first hooked up with Nimble America through Breitbart’s sensational tech editor, Milo Yiannopoulos.
Nimble America is careful not to mention support for Trump directly (and Luckey now says he backs Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson). Instead, Nimble America is creating conservative content and posting high impact videos on its website that warn of the economic dangers to middle class wages from illegal immigration, and how crony capitalists are the primary beneficiaries of trade agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In an effort to gain economic advantage through crony federal government relationships, Silicon Valley tech CEOs now make about 83 percent of their political contributions to Democrats. The influential TechCrunch blog now refers to the Bay Area as the “Valley of the Democrats.”
Tim Cook last month invited Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Google CFO Ruth Porat, Zynga chairman Mark Pincus, Napster founder Sean Parker, SolarCity CEO and Elon Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to celebrate his fifth year as Apple CEO by coming to his Silicon Valley home and each contributing or raising at least $100,000 for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Media in the “Valley of the Democrats” fully advocate for an even more progressive Democrat Party line, in order to keep up good business relationships with tech CEOs.
Anyone who questions progressive values or makes supportive comments on social media about Donald Trump is immediately lambasted by progressive trolls as “shitposting,” which is defined as making “worthless overly offensive generally racists posts written in a manner which aggravates others.”
Many r/The_Donald followers have tried to stay secretive to avoid being labeled as a white supremacist or other names by progressive trolls. They are appalled that near-billionaire Luckey publicly acknowledged on September 24 that he had given money to attack Hillary Clinton, and made hundreds of conservative Reddit posts under “NimbleRichMan.
But with Luckey outing himself as a conservative, Luckey also joins libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel (the Facebook investor and outspoken libertarian who helped to fund the lawsuit that took down Gawker), as the first shock troops in a potential wave of tech millionaires and billionaires who may decide to use their fortunes to rebel against the rigid rules of the Valley of the Democrats.