Right-wing SF tech rears its head at Heritage Foundation's Reboot
The point: Somehow, last week's Reboot 2024 conference turned out even worse than I expected. Kevin Roberts – the president of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025 – emerged as Reboot's "secret special guest." And he had some big plans to unveil.
The Backstory: Last week, I wrote about how the Reboot 2024 Conference was a "coming out party" for the alliance between San Francisco's Peter Thiel-inspired tech bros and the far-right Heritage Foundation. But I did not expect this: The Heritage Foundation's president showed up as the special guest for a talk called "Tech and the American Republic."
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
With even Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump distancing himself from the Project 2025 manifesto, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts doubled down on the controversial blueprint for a Republican presidency on Thursday, saying that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, “we’re going to have a press conference outside the White House announcing Project 2028.”
Roberts, appearing at the “Reboot: The New Reality” conference in San Francisco, said his only regret about Project 2025 was that his group did not fight back harder against its critics. The 922-page conservative roadmap advocates for policies such as mass deportation of immigrants, more restrictive abortion laws, and wholesale firing of civil servants.
So, to recap, the president of the Heritage Foundation came to the city that launched Kamala Harris’s political career and announced plans for Project 2028 — the sequel to Project 2025 — if she wins.
At a tech conference hosted by Peter Thiel's friends, including Y Combinator's Garry Tan.
When I started writing about the alliance between the far-right and certain SF tech figures, I didn't think we would see this kind of open collaboration in 2024. I figured they would keep their alliance kind of subtle until some future date. But they are accelerating at warp speed, and the mask is fully off now.
Crypto's 'hard-right heart'
I did not attend Reboot, but several local journalists did. Eddie Kim of the Gazetteer wrote two great pieces that examine the right-wing politics of tech.
First, he did a piece that explores the right-wing lean of the crypto industry:
Can cryptocurrency be non-partisan? Some of the industry’s biggest boosters hope support can spread — but for now, they say crypto is a bastion of conservatism that must strike back against liberal critique and regulation.
Read the full piece by clicking below:
Eddie Kim
Kim's second piece, headlined "Reboot 2024 promised a ‘New Reality.’ It was mostly conservative bluster," summed up the conference:
Reboot 2024 was supposed to shed light on the so-called “New Reality.” In promotional materials, its organizers prominently touted how this paradigm shift would lay waste to institutions and incumbents, all in the name of a revolution against the “elite.”
“To achieve that future, America will need Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley will need its window into Washington,” the website for Reboot crows.
To its credit, the all-day conference, held at Fort Mason on Thursday, coalesced a group of some of the Bay Area’s most influential figures in politics and tech, including political scientist Francis Fukuyama, media agitator Mike Solana, and Y Combinator head Garry Tan, the latter of whom is waging a war against progressive policy in the Bay Area.
But while there were a few big swings at existential issues in America, what was billed as a disruption to the status quo primarily served to reinforce a variety of conservative talking points — courtesy of a slate of far-right speakers who blame liberalism, regulation, and skepticism toward tech as anathema to human progress.
Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Soleil Ho homed in on the issue of "pronatalism," which seems to unite the far-right and SF tech scenes. From a column headlined "Why did a major S.F. tech conference just host a panel about making more babies?":
Conservative entities like the Heritage Foundation, a chief sponsor of the event, are trying to bring well-educated and rich young people into the fold. They’re using tried-and-true flashpoints like lower taxes for the rich and free speech absolutism. But they’re also trying pronatalism, a “more babies” policy directive that’s trying to fold a conservative anti-choice agenda into the utilitarian philosophy that rules Silicon Valley.
Ho describes the scene:
A panel of three white men, with one woman moderating, took the stage and began to puzzle out the supposed problem of people not making enough babies.
One participant, Samuel Hammond from the Foundation for American Innovation, who looked like a JD Vance clone, argued that low fertility is a problem because governments won’t be able to invest in ambitious, multi-decade infrastructure projects. For example, what if the government builds a road, but there aren’t enough drivers?
Another panelist, Lyman Stone from the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, pointed a finger at declining religiosity and the global spread of Western media, though he didn’t clarify if he was talking about the “King James Bible” or “Friends.”
“The best predictor of falling fertility is how much your media content is from the West,” he said. “First we colonize countries, and then we colonize their brains.”
Read the whole column by clicking below (Gift Link):
Soleil Ho
Don't Die
The Reboot conference ended in a disastrous racism scandal for one Y Combinator funded company. More on that in our next installment.
Also: Last week was a banner week for weird tech conferences in San Francisco. I attended the "Don't Die" conference, hosted by Bryan Johnson, a tech founder who claims he has reversed the aging process and may cheat death.
I spent all day Sunday at the conference and, trust me, I have some thoughts.
More to come – soon.
Big thanks to The Nerd Reich's paid subscribers, whose generous contributions allowed me to buy a $179 ticket to the Don't Die conference. The Russians and the tech plutocrats are spending millions to flood our information streams with lies and propaganda. If you can afford it, please become a paid subscriber to fund more of this work!
