Billionaire Compares Occupy and Anti Google Protestors to Nazis

http://www.mercurynews.com/business...d-tom-perkins-compares-anti-google-protesters

VC legend Tom Perkins compares anti-Google protesters to Nazis

In a bizarre dispatch from one of Silicon Valley's most fabled and outspoken characters, venture-capital legend Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal comparing recent activism against the Bay Area's tech elite to the early anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis.

In the letter published Saturday in the Journal's weekend edition, Perkins suggests that the "outraged public reaction to the Google (GOOG) buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them" could be a precursor to the sort of violent attacks the Nazi's waged against Jews on "Kristallnacht'' in November 1938.

The co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers drew shocked reactions throughout the blogosphere for his sharp attack on what he called the Bay Area's "progressive radicalism."

In the letter, Perkins said:

"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.'"

Kristallnacht, also called the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Nazi-controlled parts of Austria and Czechoslovakia in which paramilitary forces and civilians attacked stores owned by Jews, killed dozens of Jews and rounded up more than 30,000 others.

Perkins went on to trash the Occupy movement, along with the San Francisco Chronicle, which he accused of stoking the "demonization of the rich."

Referring to recent protests in the Bay Area against the Google buses that ferry commuters up and down Highway 101, Perkins said that same anger that some people feel toward Google employees has also carried over to "outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these 'techno geeks' can pay."

Then, in another strange twist, he comes to the defense of his ex-wife, author Danielle Steel, whom he refers to as "our number-one celebrity," who he says has suffered "libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle," alleging that "she is a 'snob' despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades."

In closing, Perkins brings up the Nazi metaphor.

"This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking," he writes. "Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"

Reaction against Perkins' letter has been swift and mostly negative, particularly for his suggestion that Nazi fascism and anti-tech protests are somehow synonymous.

Neither Perkins nor representatives with the company he co-founded could be reached for comment. But on Twitter on Saturday, Kleiner Perkins said: "Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree."

And on The Verge blog, "ruddyD" wrote: "No matter how you feel, Perkins' comparison is way, way, way out of proportion. With comparisons like that you diminish the actual horrors that came with and after the Kristallnacht."

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689. Follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.

Here is Tom Perkins' letter published in the Wall Street Journal:

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?
Tom Perkins
San Francisco