Essential Reading

 Jamelle Bouie has a critically important piece explaining why the some of the rich are so cozy with White Supremacists. He traces the support for eugenics and "race science" by people like John D. Rockefeller to the current support of people like Richard Hanania by people like Peter Thiel. 

While Bouie doesn't go back that far, this was the critical political dynamic of the Post-Reconstruction South. "Hey, sure, you're a dirt poor farmer trapped in the same debt peonage/sharecropping system as Blacks, but you are White and therefore racially superior. If you want to keep things that way and avoid Radical Republican efforts to create an egalitarian South, then vote for the rich White planter." When the Populist Party threatened the political control of the Planter Class in the 1892 election by trying to link poor farmers, regardless of race, that was the end of Black voting in the South for 70 years. 

Sound familiar? Voter suppression in the service of White Supremacy?

The toxic Gilded Age idea that the rich were simply better than the average person has obvious limits as an appeal for votes in a democratic society. Few people are interested in being told that they are inferior and that they should cede political control to their economic superiors. It has to be couched in racist or nativist terms. "Trump is protecting you from Blacks and Hispanics who are coming to destroy your way of life." That's it. That's the message. It doesn't have to make sense, he doesn't actually have to build the wall, it's just an clear appeal to in-group/out-group dynamics.

We should go on to note that a disproportionate number of Tech Billionaires are really fundamentally awful people. These are men (almost exclusively) who stumbled into an economic ecosystem where it was exceedingly easy to turn a small fortune into a large one. The idea that Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or David Sacks is actually superior to the rest of us is largely absurd. That Thiel was born in Germany and Musk and Sacks in South Africa is - I'm sure - just a random quirk. 

The slavish devotion that a certain type of person has to perpetuate the myth that Elon Musk is a super-genius is a tell that it's Musk's persona that's being evaluated, not his accomplishments or actions. Musk is important because he's a White Bro and any number of screw ups or errors won't matter because he's a superior dude.

I am not and never have been in favor of revolutions, because I don't think they tend to work. I'm a fan of evolutionary change, because I think it does. But these motherfuckers do make me sympathetic to the guillotine crowd. I'm willing to settle on a wealth tax, but...