Then, in May 2024, I read an article that talked about Trump’s speech in Charlottesville, where he said there are good people on both sides, and the article said it was completely propaganda and didn’t actually reflect what he said. That he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech.

So then I went and watched that video, and that was my red pill moment. I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn’t just the media or politicians spinning it. That speech was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump.

Then you see Biden say that’s why he had to run a second time, and Obama says it, and Biden brings it up again at the DNC. They clearly know they are misrepresenting things, so for me, that was beyond uncomfortable.

Now, I have to go back to first principles and look at the primary data, listen to only original speeches by people, and I just realized I couldn’t trust the mainstream media.

It was interesting that, billionaire though he might be, he had a chief of staff who controlled what he would say in public on things like X/Twitter. Once that guy departed Pincus started saying exactly what he thought on X.

I already wrote about another Silicon Valley billionaire who switched from the Democrat Party to supporting trump, Marc Andreesen Gives Examples of Fascism, but this NYT interview with him is worth a read, How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms. This a lot of interesting stuff but this caught my eye:

By the way, I didn’t discover until much later that I’m an archetype. Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce — who was the original founder of Intel, the original C.E.O. and the father of the chip industry — and actually Noyce and I followed very similar paths. I never met him, and he was an earlier generation, but he grew up as an Iowa farm boy, and I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy. A lot of other people like us over the years have made this trek.

I wrote about Noyce and Wolfe’s 1983 article in the post, How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley.

The part where Andreesen talks about the breakdown of the Silicon Valley-Democrat synthesis is where it really gets interesting because of the starting point being where the relationship was supposedly at its height, with Obama’s re-election using tech savvy in 2012:

[T]he unifying thread here is, I believe it’s the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.
…
It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

Wow. It’s quite a thing for a pro-abortion, pro-everything-socially-liberal, to start sounding like a 1950’s Republican. But what he describes next is the New New Left, the 60’s New Left reborn in the 2010’s:

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
…
They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. 

Read the whole thing.

As an afterthought, amidst the stories about the main Trump Derangement Syndrome MSM sources losing viewers even faster since the election and subsequently cutting jobs (Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, etc) comes news of one particular job cut that I find especially juicy; the NYT has fired one of nuttiest TDS people it had, opinion writer Charles Blowjob. At the link you can read the details by someone who has actually paid attention to him for magnificent awfulness of his prose:

Blow, who somehow secured the loftiest gig in this business despite having no professional record as a writer (he was a graphics artist beforehand),…[produced] without exception, [] the clunkiest, most superficial, self-serious pieces of writing….
….
“As someone who is Black and queer, allow me to borrow from that vernacular, and say in a tone dripping with disdain: ‘Child, please.’”
…
“In America, and throughout the diaspora, all Black people are linked together like a chain of paper dolls.”
…
“The death dealing of Covid amounts to the Appalachians of ignorance.”
…
“[I]t seems obvious that he is being intentionally … provocative in his proposals and pronouncements in order to provoke a reaction …”

I only occasionally read him because he was a two-trick pony; Black Queerness and TDS. The NYT is losing nothing in firing the worthless bastard, but if they think this going to “re-balance” their editorial sections they clearly have no idea what right-wingers think of David Brooks and other such “conservatives” still on their bench.