Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to the Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the Left to stop demonizing “the rich,” and he condemned the Occupy movement’s “rising tide of hatred.” [Note: his letter is reprinted below.]
The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. ...Malkin argues the most dangerous threats to the nation's job creators doesn't come from left-wing punks. Rather, she writes,
The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side, and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation’s oldest and most important venture-capital firms — Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
Because he dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked Perkins and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture-capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing punk journalists immediately branded him “nuts” and a “rich idiot.”
...they come from the men in power in Washington who stoke bottomless hatred against 'millionaires and billionaires' through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-cursing policies ... It's high time to shame the wealth-shamers and their cowed enablers. Silence is complicity._______________________
Perkins' letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal published on January 24, 2014:
Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?
Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): 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."
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 descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
Tom Perkins
San Francisco
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