What do you call tech billionaires who back Trump? Fascists. You call them fascists

Here's a new CNN story about Silicon Valley billionaire's newly emphatic embrace of the coup-attempting convicted felon Donald Trump, and it's positively enraging because it continues to peddle the boot-polishing narrative that oh, it's not because our self-proclaimed captains of innovation are true believers in the sort of malevolent, hate-riddled authoritarianism on display at the Republican National Convention this week. No, they're dumping money into Trump's campaign because of tax policy, or out of frustration with "antitrust enforcement."

The two biggest pain points for people in tech have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward crypto, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.

“I don’t think it has as much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they would have probably stayed with Biden if they felt more care and attention was being paid to the innovation economy.”

Well first of all, f--k all of these guys very damn much. And second of all, the suggestion that any of these too-rich self-obsessed societal hemorrhoids ought to skate free from being tainted with the fascist label because they're only supporting mass deportation, future coup attempts, a new police state and the other plans laid out by Trump and his allies for their own personal monetary gain is a journalistic and upper-class construct that is absurd on its face.

Yes, yes, when you're at the big important parties I'm sure it's important to state that you're not supporting the only American president to ever lead a coup attempt because, for example, you're a true believer in his promises to undertake nationwide mass deportations that would rival the Holocaust in scale. And it really doesn't f--king matter, because that's what these people are supporting, and that they're doing it for the sake of getting a little richer makes them much, much worse than the red-hatted racists who wave their anti-government flags around but who have very little actual power to re-install Trump in office.

These billionaires do have power to re-install Trump, granting him all the powers bestowed by a new Supreme Court decision announcing that he can do whatever crimes he feels like so long as he can say he's doing those crimes in an official capacity.

Two of the most famous venture capitalists in the Valley, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have committed to donating to America PAC, according to several news outlets.

The pair haven’t exactly been hiding their frustration with the Biden administration, either.

“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, which cited regulatory agencies using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, which they said would “absolutely kill” startups and the venture capital industry.

Oh eat sh-t and barf tapeworms you malevolent Norma Desmond wannabes.

There is a name for wealthy self-described pillars of society who lend their money and support to fascist movements: Fascists. We call them fascists. We do not call them reluctant fascists, or incidental fascists, or any other narrowing adjective. If an adjective can be added, it is important. We call such people important fascists, because they are the people in a nation who provide the backing for all the evil things promised by a fascist movement to go from theoretical to actual.

They are the people who are typically well-informed and fully knowledgable about the dangers the movement poses to their nation, and who nonetheless believe that it is a risk the rest of the nation should take if it allows them to rake in more cash and be bound by fewer restrictions than their current government will allow.

The title of CNN's piece is itself galling: "A rash of tech billionaires are pivoting to Trump — but not because they’re MAGA bros."

No. No, that is very much the narrative that Trump's wealthy backers all want the press to deploy on their behalf, but it is not true. That is not how these things work. There is no but on support for a plainly fascist movement. There is no but you could put on that support that is of any consequence at all.

Listen to yourselves, you self-obsessed oil spills. "Oh, I support the candidate who's promising mass deportations, the prosecution and imprisonment of political enemies, and authoritarian purges of anyone in government who is not a full-throated supporter, but it's only because I want to make more money." That's not distancing yourself from all those dangerous and evil things, that's embracing the dangerous and evil things out of pure self-interest!

CNN claims supporters like Andreessen, Horowitz, David Sacks, "the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale" are not truly "MAGA bros," but they most certainly are. Objectively so, in fact. The core of the MAGA movement is raging insistence on personal unaccountability—on the notion that its supporters ought to be able to do whatever they want without laws or societal scorn intervening, even as they subject everyone else to a barrage of new laws and public campaigns targeting them.

So yes, when you're willing to put up with mass deportations, the criminalization of abortion and of birth control, and all of the rest of it so long as you, personally, get to skate away from accountability for society-damaging actions then f--k you very much, buddy, you are the very definition of a "MAGA bro." You don't get to duck that label just because you have servants who bring you beer instead of having to haul your skeevy ass through liquor store aisles at 10am on a Wednesday.

I want to repeat this point because it is very, very important. The behind-the-scenes backers of fascism who provide the financial means and the access to power required for a fascist movement to move from movement to government are called fascists. Nothing else. They are the ones who toppled democracy in countless other nations; they are the ones who said they were doing it not because they believed in all of the truly batshit and evil promises of the movement's leaders but because they believed that new government would offer them compensations that the current, democratic government would not. None of these people are a new breed, in fascism's rise; we have seen them all before. They are the wheels and the engines of such movements. They are the "corporate powers" who lend their support to fascist leaders out of pure money-grubbing self-interest, and who soon learn that their new fascist government is actually not a boon to their own welfare but an enforcer that grants favors only in exchange for favors, and that doles out retaliation against any once-allies that do not grant favors quickly enough.

Fascists. The people dumping money into the campaign of hate, criminality, and sedition that has seized control of the Republican Party are called fascists. It really doesn't matter what the f--k they want to be called or how often they explain to their billionaire peers that no, they are only supporting the movement out of unbridled, uncontrollable greed: They are still fascists. And they are far more consequential to the movement then the flag-on-truck cultists who scream their support in the streets, because the propaganda they finance could well return Trump to power—the first American president to organize and mount an attempted toppling of his Constitutional successor.