The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood. Stability persists, two guests, two segments.

Jacob Silverman will talk about how and why so many Silicon Valley hotshots move to the right,

and Forrest Hilton will provide a tour d'Orison, pardon my French, of political developments in South America.

Over the past few weeks, I've been looking a lot at the political landscape of the

Silicon Valley. Here's another installment. Jacob Silverman is just out with gilded rage,

Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley published by Bloomsbury. Not all that long ago,

the dominant politics of the tech elite was centrist Democrat. Back when he first entered politics, Donald Trump

told Rupert Murdoch, who's never had a very high opinion of Trump, that he thought he could

win support in the valley. Murdoch dissented, telling the political neophyte, for eight years these guys

had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. Eight years later, it looks

like Trump naive was right,

and the Kenny Murdoch was wrong. Elon Musk is the most prominent of the turncoats,

but there are lots more, and there were some, notably Peter Thiel, who were already

seriously right-wing. Here with names and reasons is Jacob Silverman. These guys weren't always

right-wing. Their poster boy, Musk, six or seven years

ago was not a reactionary. He resigned from Trump's Business Advisory Board over his withdrawal from the

Paris Accord. He bragged on Twitter about Tesla's high ratings on the LGBTQ scorecard. More

generally, Silicon Valley was pretty close to Obama.

What happened that pushed so many of this cohort to the right?

Well, I think there were certainly some things particular to their class,

but a lot of the social and political currents that swept through the culture and the country in the COVID years especially affected these guys too.

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