Alec MacGillis draws our attention to this preposterous letter to The Wall Street Journal from Tom Perkins, founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:
... Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."Look, I'm not sure about tactics like slashing Google buses' tires, but if Perkins is going to have the bad taste to equate his fellow richies with the victims of the Holocaust, tell me: Who's the Hitler in all this? Where's the state power?
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
Oh, but I know what the right's answer to this will be, because the Murdoch press has been working on it for a while: Here's Fox Nation with a compendium of stories collected under the headline "Is There A COORDINATED, VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY?" Evidence, real or imagined: investigations of Chris Christie's Bridgegate, the indictment of Dinesh D'Souza, alleged IRS targeting of a right-wing Hollywood group, New York State asking James O'Keefe's group to provide standard employer tax documents, etc., etc. The New York Post's Kyle Smith throws in the jailing of the filmmaker who made "Innocence of Muslims" and Bill de Blasio wanting a tax increase on the rich for universal pre-K. Before that, it was de Blasio inadequately plowing the Upper East Side. Y'know, just like Hitler in the Jewish ghettoes.
Meanwhile, gays in Russia actually are experiencing violent repression by gangs of thugs encouraged by the state, and it's even worse for gays in many African countries. Gays in Russia and Africa aren't tossing off letters to the editor in between yacht-building sessions, like Perkins, or fretting to the San Francisco Chronicle's society columnist about criticism of their landscaping, like Perkins's ex-wife, Danielle Steel.
Steel, you see, bought a landmark San Francisco mansion, but it was across from a city park, so she maintains a hedge around it that a Chronicle writer called "comically off-putting." Her version of Kristallnacht: one additional nasty Chronicle column, in which, yes, she was called a snob -- in part for the hedge, and in part for this explanation, from a 2011 Wall Street Journal interview, for why she spends more time in Paris than in San Francisco:
"San Francisco is a great city to raise children, but I was very happy to leave it," she said. "There's no style, nobody dresses up -- you can't be chic there. It's all shorts and hiking boots and Tevas -- it's as if everyone is dressed to go on a camping trip. I don't think people really care how they look there; and I look like a mess when I'm there, too."Oh, but I'm sure the gay people who are being brutalized, with state encouragement, in Russia and Africa feel Steel has suffered far more.
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ALSO, TOO: Here's a novel Tom Perkins wrote (and got published by a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, back when Perkins was on the News Corp board):
