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Last night, Sen. JD Vance officially accepted the Republican nomination for vice president at the 2024 Republican Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sending optimism to Silicon Valley and the tech community.
A right-wing populist, Vance has been critical of the old right’s market fundamentalism in favor of the new right’s pro-worker economic nationalism — one that calls for antitrust crackdowns on Big Tech. A New York Times article described Vance as “pro-labor, a fan of crypto and the F.T.C.'s Lina Khan, and says Big Tech is too powerful.”
Without tough antitrust legislation against Big Tech monopolies and pro-innovation regulatory reform, Big Tech will continue to enjoy its “wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions and that new startups cannot possibly scale.” Breaking up Big Tech, on the other hand, will empower startups and foster an innovative environment.
Last February, Vance called for government action against Google, tweeting, “It’s time to break Google up,” since Google is “an explicitly progressive technology company“ and “a threat to democracy.”
“In October and November, as millions of undecided voters consider their choice for president, they will go to Google and ask 'Did Donald Trump say X?' 'Is Biden too old to be president?' The results they see will be explicitly biased towards Democrats,” Vance tweeted.
A conservative trustbuster?
Vance has drawn criticism from the libertarian right for bucking the GOP’s free-market orthodoxy and praising Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive trust-busting revolution against Silicon Valley and private equity. As FTC chair, Khan has battled various big multinational businesses by cracking down on corporations who make bogus “Made in America” claims, going after a private equity firm’s plan to “drive up the price of anesthesia services provided to Texas patients,” and suing Kochava for selling geolocation data and violating Americans’ privacy.
At RemedyFest, an antitrust conference organized by Y Combinator and Bloomberg, Vance told conference attendees that he “look[s] at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who ... is doing a pretty good job.”
Following Vance’s VP announcement, Reason, a libertarian publication,put out a story attacking Vance’s “love” for Khan’s “anti-free markets” and “anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business, and anti-consumer agenda.”
“A second Trump administration may mirror some of the tactics of Khan and the Biden administration but turn them against policies and companies that left-leaning types support. No matter who wins the election this November, we're looking at four more years of aggressively anti-free market policies coming from the FTC,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote.
Some, like libertarian journalist Brad Polumbo, have also likened him to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), claiming Vance “has more in common with [her] on economic policy than Ronald Reagan” due to his open willingness to go after large corporations, raise their taxes, and “do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons.”
Others, however, are pleased with the GOP’s populist trajectory. Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, tweeted, “Exceptional VP pick. @jdvance1's conservative economics and dedication to American workers captures perfectly the Republican Party’s transformation over the past eight years.”
Little Tech vs. Big Tech’s agenda
Vance’s support for aggressive trust-busting and regulations creates an interesting dynamic within the GOP. With the exception of being pro-crypto, Vance holds many ostensibly anti-tech stances, putting him at odds with some of his biggest supporters — tech billionaires and venture capitalists.
It was reported that Elon Musk and tech investor David Sacks helped push Vance over the line for Trump’s VP selection. Furthermore, Vance first got into politics through his exploration into venture capital. He initially worked at Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital after briefly working in corporate law. And a couple of years later, he started his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, where he raised $93 million from several tech billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
After his spell in venture capital, Vance shifted his eyes to holding public office. Vance went on to win an Ohio Senate seat even after a hotly contested GOP primary in large part due to Peter Thiel’s record-breaking $15 million donation. Thiel also helped garner large donations from wealthy individuals, including David Sacks.
Considering the tech sector’s increasing support for Trump and Vance’s ties to tech billionaires and venture capitalists, some are starting to think the 47th administration might go soft on Big Tech and “switch on Lina Khan now.”
Fortunately, Vance is not likely to. After all, Big Tech’s agenda isn’t always in the interest of America’s tech sector because “their interests are often at odds with a positive technological future as they are more interested in regulatory capture and preserving their monopolies. As a result, technology startups need a voice,” venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in a blog post.
Startups, also referred to as “Little Tech,” are at the heart of the American tech sector and could turn the 21st century into the American century. In Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s Little Tech Agenda, they highlight Little Tech’s role as "the vanguard of American technology supremacy." They say, “From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.”
Vance’s endorsement of Khan’s antitrust revolution serves as a net positive for America’s tech industry since Little Tech faces huge disadvantages by having to “go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength — incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.”
The Little Tech agenda could be the catalyst that recaptures American supremacy. The Trump/Vance ticket must not back down from Big Tech. Andreessen and Horowitz don’t explicitly endorse Khan’s trust-busting, but without tough antitrust legislation against Big Tech monopolies and pro-innovation regulatory reform, Big Tech will continue to enjoy its “wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions and that new startups cannot possibly scale.” Breaking up Big Tech, on the other hand, will empower startups and foster an innovative environment.
As Andreessen and Ben Horowitz write, “The glory of a second American Century is within our reach. Let’s grasp it.”
Conspiracy theorists might be RIGHT about this
It’s no secret to those paying attention that the economy is not doing well.
While it’s clear that recent changes to policy under the current administration have had a negative effect, Dave Rubin wonders whether there’s a little more to the story.
“Do you sense that partly, it was all set up to build a giant system that kind of didn’t work and kept people confused about things?” Rubin asks Robert Breedlove, who hosts the “What Is Money?” podcast.
“This is one of those things, I guess, guys like us in this corner of the internet probably get — well, they call us conspiracy theorists, right?” Breedlove says, adding, “the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact is, like, three months.”
While he agrees that there’s something terribly wrong with the economy, he tells Rubin that he gets “a little skeptical” when he hears that particular version of this conspiracy theory.
“You know, you get this sort of James Bond villain-esque bunch of guys in a room plotting world domination,” Breedlove says. “I try to look at it a little more practically. I think it’s just incentives.”
In a recent conversation he had with Ed Dowd, Breedlove recalls Dowd’s use of the “meta fraud.”
“He’s saying even the plandemic, like, although there are top-down elements of it, there’s also just broken incentives that sort of create pathological outcomes in a way,” he explains.
“So, although I think you could read a book like ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’ about the inception of the Federal Reserve, which is the Central Bank of the United States, there was clearly a small group of people that were very interested in getting a central bank implemented into the United States.”
“However,” he continues, “I don’t think even they could foresee all of the problems that it would create over the subsequent 100-plus years.”
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Billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya detailed recently how personally meeting Donald Trump changed his perception of the former president.
Earlier this month, entrepreneur David Sacks hosted a Silicon Valley fundraiser for Trump, raising $12 million. The crowd was full of wealthy tech businessmen and venture capitalists, many of whom Sacks later said were lifelong Democratic voters. Last week, Sacks and Palihapitiya recounted the event on their podcast "All-In."
'There is a huge gap between how the media tries to portray Donald Trump and what he's like when you meet him in person.'
On the podcast, Palihapitiya admitted that he had "misjudged" Trump in the past, and his view of the former president changed after meeting him.
"He is charismatic, he's intellectually sharp, and he's funny. And when you put that together, he can engage an audience for a long time and be totally extemporaneous," Palihapitiya said of Trump.
"The other thing I would say that is, that he is very polite, and he's kind in a way that was disarming and was not what I expected, and so I felt that I had misjudged him many years in the past," he explained. "So, I was very glad that I had an opportunity to sit beside him and to actually interact with him one-on-one — it was really, really engaging."
Palihapitiya explained that his interaction with Trump left a lasting impression, one that exposed the media's false depictions of him.
"I think that there is a huge gap between how the media tries to portray Donald Trump and what he's like when you meet him in person — and that gap is really wide," Palihapitiya said.
Trump, Palihapitiya said, impressed him with his "pro-American" and "pro-innovation" agenda, one that emphasizes "low regulation" and "low taxation." The platform, Palihapitiya added, "does stand very much in contrast with" the Democratic Party's agenda.
Sacks told a similar story.
"President Trump is extremely charming. He connects with people in like five seconds. I mean, he meets you and finds something interesting or funny to say, and he's hilarious," Sacks recounted.
"When he spoke in the living room, and he talked extemporaneously for an hour, he's speaking off-the-cuff. Every speech he gives is different," he explained. "People don't realize how entertaining he is."
Something that especially stood out at the fundraiser, Sacks later said, was Trump's energy level.
"He's someone who's very sharp, very on the ball, very funny, and then his energy level is incredible," Sacks said. "So, he had started his day at Mar-a-Lago at 3:30 a.m. Then, he flew to Arizona, did a Trump rally in Arizona, then he flew to San Francisco for our event. He spent four hours at our event. ... Then, he flew to Los Angeles for more events the next day there. So, think about his day and his energy level was just amazing the whole time."
Earlier this month, Sacks announced his endorsement of Trump.
Sacks explained he decided to support Trump on the basis of Trump's economy performance, his foreign policy record, the border crisis, and lawfare.
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