These MAGA Republicans have angrily condemned big tech while making huge profits from it: report
Before the MAGA movement, Republicans were — apart from Patrick Buchanan — known for being staunch defenders of Corporate America. Billionaire corporate CEOS and Wall Street tycoons, the late radio host Rush Limbaugh often told listeners during the 1990s and 2000s, were America’s job creators and “achievers.” And raising their taxes, Limbaugh argued, was “punishing achievement.”
But the Republican Party took a pseudo-populist turn when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and pushed his Buchanan-influenced MAGA movement to the forefront of the Republican Party. Now, in 2022, one of the ways in which Republican candidates try to show voters how MAGA they are is by railing against big tech.
Journalist David Corn, in an article published by Mother Jones on October 19, cites two Republican U.S. Senate candidates — J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona — as examples of MAGA Republicans who have been railing against big tech relentlessly. But both of them, Corn stresses, are hypocrites, as they have profited a great from big tech and Silicon Valley.
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“It’s become de rigueur for Republicans — especially Republican candidates — to blast away at big tech, assailing it for an assortment of ills, such as privacy violations and a presumed, and often unproven, bias against conservatives,” Corn explains. “Two GOP Senate candidates, in particular, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, have pounded technology companies. Yet both have had connections to tech firms that have spurred privacy concerns, and their Senate bids have each been funded by big tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has founded and financed ventures that prompt similar worries.”
When liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont proposed breaking up large banks into a bunch of smaller banks during the Great Recession, they were slammed by many Republicans as anti-business. But Corn notes that Vance, on his campaign website, proposes, “We need to break up the big tech companies, to reduce their power in our economy and our politics.”
“Despite their anti-big tech rhetoric, Vance and Masters each have had deep and profitable ties to the Silicon Valley they decry,” Corn observes. “Masters, who co-wrote a book with Thiel, worked for him at Thiel Capital, an investment firm, eventually becoming its chief operating officer, and he was president of the Thiel Foundation. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital Management, Thiel’s venture capital firm.”
Corn continues, “In 2019, he co-founded Narya Capital, a VC firm. To launch the company, he relied on funding from Thiel and two other Big Tech titans, Eric Schmidt, a past CEO of Google, and Marc Andreesen, who co-founded Netscape and the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.”
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