When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
eyes on the U.S.

The Trump-Clinton Race For Silicon Valley Support

A young Clinton supporter poses in front of posters of the two candidates before Monday's debate.
A young Clinton supporter poses in front of posters of the two candidates before Monday's debate.
Leonid Bershidsky

Donald Trump has few supporters in liberal Silicon Valley: Even Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member, who spoke for Trump at the Republican National Convention, hasn't given a cent to the campaign. Yet the tech world doesn't unanimously favor Democrats.

Consider, for example, the financial support that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has given to a pro-Trump trolling campaign. Luckey, 24, sold his virtual reality startup to Facebook for $2 billion after Oculus became a crowdfunding star. He has confirmed to the Daily Beast that he's donated money to a group called Nimble America to produce memes and negative posts about Hillary Clinton. Nimble America also put up a billboard outside Pittsburgh with a large image of Clinton's face and the legend, "Too Big to Jail." Luckey explained that he'd met the meme-makers behind the group on Facebook and offered them money because he "would love to see more of that stuff." It's this kind of surprising support that has made Trump a strong contender for the presidency.

Nimble America was set up by two moderators of the r/The_Donald thread on Reddit, which is full of not just anti-Clinton, but also anti-immigrant and outright racist memes. Luckey made it sound as if he just enjoyed the trolling as "a real jolly good time." That would ring hollow to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who offered to launch Trump into outer space after the candidate lashed out at him as the owner of The Washington Post. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, wouldn't see it the same as Luckey either: He withdrew Apple's support for the Republican National Convention this year after Trump called for a boycott of Apple products because of the company's reluctance to help U.S. law enforcement decrypt a terrorist's iPhone.

The Silicon Valley has long leaned Democratic or even further left. This year, the most typical donor of the Green Party candidate Jill Stein is a male software engineer from California, according to Crowdpac, an organization that analyzes political donation data. Trump's right-wing views are unappealing to this constituency. A group of tech executives and venture capitalists, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and a few other important names in the industry, published a strongly-worded anti-Trump letter in July. Trump hasn't been nice to the Valley's aristocracy such as Bezos and Cook, and they have no reason to back him. According to data from Crowdpac, the technology industry has donated all of $225,000 to the Trump campaign.

Clinton has collected $6.1 million from tech donors, according to Crowdpac, out of her total of $510 million. Barack Obama did better with tech workers in both of his presidential campaigns.

Neither Thiel nor Luckey has described himself as a hardcore Trump fan. The PayPal co-founder is a libertarian who believes that an increasingly incompetent government has run down the economy. Luckey claims to be a believer in politically incorrect fun. It's not easy to find people in tech who would be against trade or immigration as Trump says he is: The industry wins from both. Those who back the billionaire do so out of contrariness, the spirit of disruption and rebellion that is as important to Silicon Valley's soul as social liberalism.

The rare open Trump backers are not so much pro-Trump as anti-Clinton. To them, she stands for the bland, faceless status quo; Thiel says that the U.S. needs to be "rebuilt" and that Clinton would be a one-term president because she'd drive the economy into a new crisis. Luckey, in one of his Reddit posts as "NimbleRichMan," wrote of "fighting the American elite."

This doesn't present any serious danger to Clinton in Silicon Valley, where polls show she has more than double Trump's support. It's just that the backing, at least initially, was less enthusiastic than for Obama, and techies' belief that she can shake things up and bring positive change is weaker than it was with the outgoing president. That's a bad sign for her nationwide. So is the departure from their peers of Thiel and Luckey: The U.S. is at least partly built on the same contrarian spirit that drives these two successful startup founders, and it can outweigh many voters' distaste for the Republican's views.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

Should Christians Be Scared Of Horror Movies?

Horror films have a complicated and rich history with christian themes and influences, but how healthy is it for audiences watching?

Should Christians Be Scared Of Horror Movies?

"The Nun II" was released on Sept. 2023.

Joseph Holmes

“The Nun II” has little to show for itself except for its repetitive jump scares — but could it also be a danger to your soul?

Christians have a complicated relationship with the horror genre. On the one hand, horror movies are one of the few types of Hollywood films that unapologetically treat Christianity (particularly Catholicism) as good.

“The Exorcist” remains one of the most successful and acclaimed movies of all time. More recently, “The Conjuring” franchise — about a wholesome husband and wife duo who fight demons for the Catholic Church in the 1970s and related spinoffs about the monsters they’ve fought — has more reverent references to Jesus than almost any movie I can think of in recent memory (even more than many faith-based films).

The Catholic film critic Deacon Steven Greydanus once mentioned that one of the few places where you can find substantial positive Catholic representation was inhorror films.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest