> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
The monarchists bent wasn't masked, but the racism was. I still remember the controversy around Yarvin being removed as a speaker at Strange Loop. A lot of people could not understand why what he said was racist.
I do not think the racism was masked anymore than the monarchist bent. Monarchists are just more palatable than racists.
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
I agree they were not masked for people who can see through the masks, but the abstractness of their argument style gave them a level of plausible deniability that you just don't see anymore. For example, whereas before they would express their racism by pointing to literature like "The Bell Curve", now they just say stuff like this: https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-hav...
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.