Kleiner Perkins’ cofounder is afraid of another Kristallnacht — specifically, a “Progressive Kristallnacht.”
Tom Perkins, the 81 year-old cofounder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, compared the current “hatred” of the rich to the outrage in Nazi Germany prior to Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against the Jewish community throughout Germany in November 1938.
In an outlandish letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Perkins cited the Occupy movement, Google bus protests, and “virtually every word” of the San Francisco Chronicle as evidence of a “dangerous drift” that could lead to a similar campaign against the American one percent.
The letter also contains a bizarre shout-out to Perkins’ ex-wife Danielle Steel, “our number-one celebrity,” who has been criticized for the massive hedge around her San Francisco property.
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We’ve included the entirety of Perkins’ letter below. After you read it, be on the lookout for gangs of liberals roaming the Bay Area, beating up rich people, as local law enforcement stands by without intervening. Because, you know, that’s definitely a thing to worry about.
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 descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
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