Silicon Valley’s nasty war on voters

Two years ago, Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign because it had been reported that he had given $1,000 to the campaign to pass Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure approved by California voters that prohibited same-sex marriage. (Later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality.)

Now Silicon Valley activists are targeting Peter Thiel, because the controversial venture capitalist and a board member for Facebook donated $1.25 million to a super PAC that supports Donald Trump. Those of you who wonder why there is so much division in American politics need look no further than Silicon Valley.

Eich must have been in shock when activists went after him for giving a modest sum for a position that was mainstream in 2008. Barack Obama said he opposed samesex marriage and, incongruously, Prop. 8 — and he won the White House that year. Six years later, Eich lost his job for opposing same-sex marriage, and actually believing it.

Ellen Pao, a co-founder of Project Include, which is supposed to promote diversity in the tech world, said Thiel’s big donation prodded her group to sever ties with tech incubator Y Combinator, where Thiel is a part-time partner. Pao explained, “While all of us believe in the ideas of free speech and open platforms, we draw a line here. We agree that people shouldn’t be fired for their political views, but this isn’t a disagreement on tax policy, this is advocating hatred and violence.”

Pao, who is most famous for her failed sexual discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, doesn’t understand free speech or the difficult balancing acts it requires. She doesn’t say how Thiel advocated for hatred and violence, other than to assert that Trump makes some people — women, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, Asians — feel “unsafe.” She relies on intolerance’s favorite crutch, guilt by association.

“No one’s calling for every Trump supporter to be driven out of the Valley,” Will Oremus wrote in Slate; when critics call for a billionaire to lose a board seat, “it’s a far cry from the systematic persecution of suspected communist sympathizers.”

Of course it’s not systematic persecution because there is only one known Trump mega-donor in Silicon Valley. But it’s still persecution designed to marginalize a point of view.

Even though Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg disagrees with Trump on immigration, he has resisted calls from his staff to expel Thiel from Facebook’s board. “We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate,” Zuckerberg wrote. “There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault.”

Zuckerberg also has had to overrule staffers who wanted to remove Trump posts on a Muslim ban as “hate speech.”

This is all about who gets to play in the hightech playground. Pao and like-minded techies fear they might have to work next to people with dissident views. If they got out more and talked with folks with different philosophies, they could argue and engage in a battle of ideas.

But they don’t know how to argue. They only know how to cover their ears.

Despite controversies that rage over immigration, it is hard to see how anyone could be either for or against immigrants in general. First of all, there are no immigrants in general.

Both in the present and in the past, some immigrant groups have made great contributions to American society, and others have contributed mainly to the welfare rolls and the prisons. The same has been true of Sweden and of other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. As of 1940, only about 1 percent of the Swedish population were immigrants. Even as the proportion of immigrants increased over the years, as late as 1970 some 90 percent of foreignborn persons in Sweden had been born in other Scandinavian countries or in Western Europe.

These immigrants were usually well-educated, and often had higher labor force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than the native Swedes. That all began to change as the immigrants came increasingly from the Middle East, with Iraqis becoming the largest immigrant group in Sweden.

This changing trend was accompanied by a sharply increased use of the government’s “social assistance” program, from 6 percent in the pre-1976 era to 41 percent in the 1996-1999 period. But, even in this later period, fewer than 7 percent of the immigrants from Scandinavia and Western Europe used “social assistance,” while 44 percent of the immigrants from the Middle East used that benefit.

Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden’s population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. The proportion of foreigners in prison was five times their proportion in the population of the country.

The point of all this is that there is no such thing as immigrants in general, whether in Europe or America. Yet all too many of the intelligentsia in the media and in academia talk as if immigrants were abstract people in an abstract world, to whom we could apply abstract principles — such as “we are all descendants of immigrants.”

A hundred years ago, when a very different mix of immigrants was coming to a very different America, there was a huge, multi-volume study of how immigrants from different countries had fared here.

Some people like to refer to the past as “earlier and simpler times.” But it is we today who are so simpleminded that it would be taboo to do anything so politically incorrect as to sort out immigrants by what country they came from.

What is it that makes this country so different that so many people from around the world have, for centuries, wanted to come here, more so than to any other country? It is not the land or the climate, neither of which is so different from the land and the climate in many other places.

What is unique are American institutions, American culture and American economic and other achievements within that framework.

People who came here 100 years ago usually did so in order to fit within the framework of America and become Americans. Some still do. But many come from a very different cultural background — and our own multiculturalism dogmas and grievance industry work to keep them foreign and resentful of Americans who have achieved more than they have.

Some immigrant groups seek to bring to America the very cultures whose failures led them to flee to this country. Not all individual immigrants and not all immigrant groups. But too many Americans have become so gullible that they are afraid to even get the facts about which immigrants have done well and improved America, and which have become a burden that can drag us all down.