Picking Ro Khanna

Silicon Valley's Rep

Silicon Valley is a bit of a puzzle to me. Here you have the most innovative environment ever seen in the history of mankind. They are by definition, rebels. They rebel against the standards. They rebel against what everyone thinks. You cannot be an entrepreneur if you are not at your heart a rebel. The odds are so long against you and so many things are working against you that you have to be rebellious to fight.

Another aspect of Silicon Valley’s values is its “permissionless” attitude. They don’t worry about asking for permission to do anything. Why do I need someone’s permission to build (fill in the blank here)?

There are so many people in Silicon Valley who have built huge companies when the entire world said they couldn’t. It’s in the DNA there.

Hence my question. How can a bunch of rebels who value permissionless innovation pick Ro Khanna as their voice in Congress? By his own definition on his own page, he is a progressive. Progressives in the US are pro-censorship. They are anti-free speech. They are pro-regulation and pro-permission. They are for progress as they see fit.

I think Marc Andreessen tweeted one of the most underrated concepts of all time today. He tweeted: Communists like capitalists because the capitalists build the things the communists plan to seize.

Here is a corollary: Progressives like capitalists because they build things that allow them to create rules, regulations and standards around so the progressives can aggregate government money and remit it to the people who support them.

I don’t know Ro. Never met him. I only know him from his public appearances. Two stick out to me.

The first time I ever had heard of him was when acted as a paid attack dog for Sam Bankman Fried on the House Financial Services Committee. SBF gave him big dollars and in return, he tried to put CME chair Terry Duffy on the spit. During the hearing, Duffy said he’d never been treated that way in any Congressional hearing and he is a veteran of thousands of them.

That hearing showed me Ro could be bought.

I listened to him on the Megyn Kelly podcast this past week. He was gentlemanly and pleasant in his delivery. But, if you listen to his points and then think critically about how they would be implemented, absolutely scary and a destructor of a capitalistic and innovative society.

Ro Khanna is for putting boys in girls’ locker rooms and for boys in girl’s sports. Like most progressives, Ro confuses and obfuscates the idea of inclusion, being nice to people, tolerance, and acceptance by putting an extremely small minority ahead of society and creating a victim class for them to put a permanent government-fed fence of NGOs and government agencies around.

Ro’s answer is to regulate everything. Ro’s answer is to listen to the experts while in the background they are telling the experts what to tell everyone. Ro is the definition of “seek permission before you do” along with “punish those who do not do things the way we tell them”.

“Build that factory, but make sure you do it our way and that means making sure the unions have all the power.”

“Bring your company here but you must pay people the minimum we tell you, divide up the equity the way we say, and if you make it, give back in the way we tell you to give back.”

I understand that the denizens of Silicon Valley are wealthy enough to be Democrats. Ro’s district doesn’t include parts of San Francisco so even though those people know about the problems in SF, they can adjust their lives to never have to interface with them.

Telling those citizens you will lower their taxes doesn’t affect them. Even if you raised their taxes a little, they are willing to pay the price because they can afford to figure out ways around the increase.

But, I don’t understand how they can support someone that will tell them what to do. At its extreme, that same person and the current culture of their political party won’t stop at just telling them what to do.