‘I don’t know how you support Trump in 2019 and don’t suffer reputational damage if you’re in any mainstream part of society…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Many conservatives can relate all too well to the plight of California Trump supporters who are choosing to give quietly and anonymously to the president’s re-election campaign as liberals up the ante on their viciousness.
Already the central message of the Democrats’ 2020 presidential platform is shaping up to be shrill cries of racism, paired with not one but two looming impeachment fights over yet-to-be determined crimes.
Meanwhile, Antifa has threatened to close down Trump fundraisers, and his major supporters have faced growing concerns of being doxed, blacklisted and boycotted by everyone from leftist political rivals to Hollywood sitcom stars.
Among those whom left-wing partisans have sought to shame and punish for their political contributions are Stephen M. Ross, the owner of gym chain SoulCycle and the Miami Dolphins football franchise; and Bernie Marcus, the retired 90-year-old co-founder of Home Depot.
Often, on a national level, boycotts from the Left tend to backfire, as one did last August against the Christian-based In-N-Out Burger, which benefited from the exposure that an attempted protest over GOP donations brought it.
But in Silicon Valley, where 99 percent of the 2016 presidential donations went to Hillary Clinton, there remains an inherent risk to violating the ideological dogma.
Not surprisingly, as reported by Vox, Trump’s recent California visit to solicit campaign support was “shrouded in secrecy.”
The far-left website gloated that many of the president’s backers were ashamed to present themselves publicly—ascribing their reluctance to Trump’s polarizing persona.
“[I]t will reflect just how toxic Trump has become in C-suites and cafeterias alike across the Bay Area, where the few supporters he does have are borderline desperate not to talk about him,” opined Vox’s Theodore Schleifer.
“Political fundraisers for Democratic politicians are often shows of force, with star donors paraded in bold-faced font on widely distributed invitations,” he continued. “But when Donald Trump shows up? In an era and an industry where each campaign donation is a publicity crisis waiting to happen, people cannot run away—or at least shut up—fast enough.”
Facing the Threat
The reality, of course, is that Trump mirrors the deranged Left’s own toxicity and turns it back on itself.
Hopeless of staving off the endless crash-and-burn tactics, Alinsky-inspired polemic and menacing threats of physical intimidation from the radical-progressive fringes—much of it ignored by mainstream media and financially backed by jackbooted plutocrats like George Soros and Tom Steyer—Trump made the calculated decision to embrace the vitriol being directed at him.
While Trump, however, is an atom bomb—controversial and morally ambiguous, but decisive and resolute to serve the greater good—his Silicon Valley donors are more like the French maquisards, operating behind the scenes in hostile territory.
Vox noted that a 2016 trip to San Jose, Trump’s last incursion into the Bay Area, saw rally-goers violently attacked.
“Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are deeply curious about who is planning to host the fundraiser, which as of Monday was still being kept tightly under wraps in an attempt to avoid protests,” it said.
Corporate Warfare
Vox nonetheless proceeded to “out” some of Trump’s Silicon Valley donors.
It reported that Scott McNealy, the former chair of Sun Microsystems, was hosting the event but that McNealy had declined to speak with the leftist site Recode, saying he was in Lake Tahoe with poor cell-phone reception.
The article also disclosed a previously unreported $100,000 donation from venture capitalist Doug Leone, the global managing partner of Sequoia Capital.
Immediately, it followed up with two liberal activists’ calls to divest from Leone’s firm.
“I don’t know how you support Trump in 2019 and don’t suffer reputational damage if you’re in any mainstream part of society,” said Catherine Bracy, a Bay Area community organizer. “If you’re a Trump supporter in 2019 to the tune of $100,000, that says a lot about your character.”
‘Gender equality’ activist Ellen Pao, who has ties to a rival venture capitalist firm, went even farther, attempting to smear both Leone and Sequoia by claiming they fostered a male-oriented culture that was tantamount to sexual assault.
The mean, misogynist firm only hired its first female senior investor in 2016, Pao said. So it was no surprise that they were standing behind the p***y-grabber-in-chief.
“The fact that they’re backing someone who is an alleged sexual harasser and is rolling back women’s rights and all sorts of other rollbacks on the progress that we’ve made on social issues is not a surprise,” Pao said. “People have to decide where’s the line they’re going to draw, and I hope people draw stronger lines than they have in the past. And I think people should be judged on who they’re supporting.”
Duplicitous ‘Tolerance’
But even those who fall somewhere on the Left’s spectrum of intersectionality as members of a marginalized and oppressed identity group can become anathema to liberals when they dare to think differently.
Vox noted that one of Trump’s highest-profile Silicon Valley supporters, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel—who was notoriously outed as gay by the site Gawker—faced nowhere near the persecution for that as he did for his Trump support.
Thiel’s $1 million donation in 2016 elicited from tech-industry leftists “a push to cut him out of Silicon Valley’s elite institutions” Vox said.
“Thiel became the most divisive person in the industry—serving as something of a cautionary tale for conservatives who think they can publicly back Trump in 2020 without consequence,” it said.
David Blumberg, a gay venture capitalist whose strong support for Israel helped prompt him to back the president, said the hypocritical double-standard of Democrats’ so-called tolerance was all too evident.
“Conservatives didn’t drop us when we became gay or came out as gay,” Blumberg said. “It’s only when we came out politically—to the conservative side—that liberal friends dropped us.”