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Comment by pstuart

2 days ago

Alex Karp's transformation from progressive to MAGA is fascinating; more so knowing that his father was jewish and his mother was black.

I can understand a zeal to "protect the country", but FFS, to be the brains of the secret police is a bit much.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palanti...

9 comments

pstuart

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close04  2 days ago

It’s easy to explain once you realize the real ideology of these people is money. Even if they have other internal beliefs they’ll get buried under the desire to make more money.

  • mindslight  2 days ago

    Money is just a metric. I'd say their real ideology is power. It's the classic authoritarian delusion that has fueled every "web 2.0" startup, now writ large - it's okay if we centralize power, because we will only ever use the power for good. Of course this completely ignores how power agglomerates in the real world, especially in the presence of the strong Moloch attractor accelerator that is state-orchestrated capitalism (why it's tempting to focus critiques on money).

    And ironically (or not), this overarching dynamic is exactly the core lesson of the One Ring! It's like their main takeaway from the books was "having that ring would be awesome!!1!".

    Maybe the facile fascination with Tolkien comes from having read them too early in life, before they were able to understand adult concepts like burden ? If you think of Frodo as merely having to do some chore that The Adults are making him do, then at least he gets to play with some pretty awesome toys and see some pretty cool stuff. And this would seem to be the level of moral development underpinning the contemporary neofascist movement (or "autocratic authoritarian", for those who are triggered by the F-word).

    • pstuart  1 day ago

      Here are some key quotes from the linked article:

         But Karp, Steinberger told me, needed “to find a reason beyond just opportunism and necessity” to embrace Trumpism. His reasoning, however, is so incoherent it seems pretextual.

   Toward the end of the book, Steinberger quotes Karp lambasting the left for failing to adequately address antisemitism, chaos at the border and the threat of Iran. “I’m sick and tired of left-wing people fostering right-wing populist movements because they won’t be adults about these issues,” said Karp. That is perfectly cogent as a centrist critique of progressives. As a justification for aligning with a right-wing populist movement, it’s bizarre.

      "Woke" was originally about waking up to the fact that America was built on systemic racism (which is absolutely the case), but was then artfully redefined by the Right as "shrill liberal nonsense" that is designed to be completely vague and amorphous so that it satisfies the desire for "librul tears" and cannot be defended because there's no specific points to defend.

      So by stating they are "anti-woke" they just mean "New! Improved! 100% Librul Tears!". It's intellectually fraudulent and just spiteful.

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xg15  2 days ago

Might be a hint that a lot of tech/SV signalling was just "woke capitalism" the whole time, and they dropped the pretense the moment it became politically advantageous.

  • pstuart  1 day ago

    Tech was never woke. It's a boys club and on the "good" side was geeky nerds who just cared about hacking and the "bad" side about financial velociraptors hunting money. Nothing woke about that.