The Catturd to Silicon Valley Billionaire Pipeline Must Be Broken

The Tech Right, the establishment, and the need for a synthesis

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article about the rise of the Tech Right that got a lot of attention, applauding what I thought was a welcome development. In the time since, we have seen Elon Musk and a group of tech CEOs go all in on Trump, with the New York Times Magazine recently running a piece on how Silicon Valley billionaires have become the new Republican donor class.

My view was always that the Tech Right could help solve the right’s human capital problem by making conservatives smarter. But what I didn’t anticipate was that being in right-wing circles makes even the smartest people dumber. Successful businessmen who are publicly supporting Trump regularly fall for fake news and conspiracy theories, and we can watch their transformations online in real time. Twitter has become a cesspool, with the worst accounts profiting off lies rocketing to the top of the algorithm.

All of this demonstrates that no individual is that smart, and also how reliant we all are on our broader environments to have accurate models of the world.