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Who are the new ‘they’?
When I was a kid growing up in Lily white West Menlo Park, I recall sitting in the car with my Dad while my Mom was shopping, and a beautiful black woman walked by, all put together in her Sunday best, complete with a hat and gloves. Mutually impressed, my father then looked at me and explained, ‘You can love and marry a black woman, but it could be tough because some people would treat you differently.’ I remember thinking that my Dad’s remarks related to what I had just read in the biography of my favorite baseball player, Willie Mays, where I discovered that he had to stay in different motels than his white teammates when he played in the minor leagues during the early 1950s.
My father then used the moment to share a revelation that would literally change the course of the rest of my life. ‘You see, Little Man, first ‘they’ go after the blacks, then ‘they’ go after the Jews, then ‘they’ come after us (i.e., the Catholics),’ he advised. Now, this may sound strangely paranoid coming from a distinguished medical doctor and clinical professor at Stanford, but keep in mind these remarks were made when our psyches were still reeling from the assassinations of John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, his Catholic brother, and the 1968 presidential election favorite, Bobby Kennedy, and black preacher and non-violent Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the road to find out
The Lily White bubble would burst when I went to Menlo Atherton High, where 40 percent of my classmates were bused in from the largely black (at the time) neighborhood in East Palo Alto. While I grew up with some exposure to black culture through team sports, my Mother's adoration of Sarah Vaughn and Nat King Cole, my older siblings' passion for Motown toons, and my favorite band—the Jackson 5—M-A represented the first time I would meaningfully interact with Black Americans.
Part of this journey led me to the black Baptist church in EPA under the inspiration of the saintly Lovie Lewis, where we would bring her clothes to distribute, rock to gospel music, and go to the ‘cookout’ after the service for my reward. It was all quite a different experience compared to the staid Sunday Masses I attended on the other side of El Camino Real—no hugging, no grooving to the Lord, and no cookout. 😭 Lovie would feed this poor little white boy so many ribs I would go into a food comma.
As Catholics, we are taught very early that ‘the more you are given, the more you are accountable to those in need.’ This early catechesis and my father’s insights inspired me to take on a political disposition at a very young age. At the time, the Democratic Party was all about watching out for those ‘falling through the cracks,’ whereas the Republicans had a more ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude. Leaning Blue with our compatriots—the Blacks, Jews (whom my father referred to as our ‘elder brothers and sisters’), and fellow Catholics, including the Latinos who started arriving in town with green cards in hand and ready to work in the 1970s—was the natural for me.
My college years were spent as a student lobbyist in Sacramento, fighting to keep UC tuition low (then only $245 a quarter 😳) and trying to eliminate the 'culturally biased' SAT and other college entrance examinations. We cared about clean water, clean air, migrant worker rights, and, believe it or not, keeping the State budget balanced, which was gushing with surpluses at the time. By 19, I was California Governor Jerry Brown's student campaign manager for his re-election, during which I produced and MC'd a vast outdoor—day-before-election—rally at UC Davis featuring the entire California Democratic Party election slate and our friend Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers Union.
With the Vietnam War over, our cause was standing up to Apartheid in South Africa. In the nonviolent spirit of MLK, Jr., we staged a peaceful takeover of the UC Administration building to protest UC investments in South Africa. By July 1986, the UC Regents voted to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business with the apartheid government. It was the largest university divestment in the country.
Once I had transitioned to Silicon Valley to help establish the early Silicon Valley Bank with its founders, we were honored to host hereditary Prince Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief of the Zulu tribe, at the Churchill Club we founded a year after SVB opened its doors. Chief Buthelezia was a prominent and controversial figure in South African efforts to take down Apartheid, as his Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) opposed Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) armed rebellions, and he believed that sanctions only hurt the less privileged economic classes.
The first ideological cracks in my relationship with the Democratic Party began when my father handed me two books. The first written by one of his distinguished patients, Thomas Sowell, a renowned American economist, social theorist, and political philosopher called Ethnic America: A History (1981). Born and raised in Harlem, Mr. Sowell’s book examined nine major ethnic groups in America: Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. Provocatively, he argued that there is no true ‘majority’ in America, as the largest ethnic group (British ancestry) makes up only 15 percent of the population. Mr. Sowell’s book further challenged the idea that discrimination alone explains disparities between ethnic groups and has more to do with cultural values, family structures, and individual choices.
Professor Sowell’s observation also mirror the philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. that individual achievement has more to do with caliber of character than color of skin, and assistance should be based up economic need, not race.
The Latino economic phenomenon
There is no other ethnic group in the last 50 years that proves Mr. Sowell's point more dramatically than the hard-working, family-oriented, and faithful Latinos, whose population in the US has grown from 9.6 million in 1970 to 62.5 million in 2022. During this period, the economic success of the Latino community is nothing short of breathless. While Latinos represent only 19 percent of the people, they were responsible for 39 percent of the US's real GDP growth in 2020 and 2021 —representing $3.2 trillion in new wealth in 2021 alone. US Latino GDP output is now greater than the UK, France, and India, and, if segmented, would rank as the 5th largest economy in the world.
The other book my father handed me was Wealth and Poverty (1981) by (now friend) George Gilder, who went on to become the most accurate innovation futurist of the last 60 years. In his book, Mr. Gilder maintained that entrepreneurial innovation is the driving force behind economic advancement and growth, not the redistribution of existing wealth via inefficient centralized government agencies. His proof was showing how the billions President Lyndon Johnson spent (when a billion was a LOT of money) on the 'Great Society' showed little or no economic improvement for the impoverished.
Along the way, I also had the honor to meet a pioneering magazine founder (National Review), talk show host (Firing Line), and political commentator and author William F. Buckley, Jr., who taught me everything I know about the principle of subsidiarity. First articulated by German theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning in the early 1900s, this organizing principle for society emphasizes that the autonomy and dignity of the individual are paramount and that all social agencies exist for the sake of the individual, not for the benefit of the institutions or the people running them. Imagine that 😎👍🏼
The essence of this decentralized approach is the belief that the best person or agency to help someone is the one closest to the one in need and who sees their service as a vocation. The federal, state and local government agencies should be the support mechanism of last resort.
At the time I was contemplating all these things, I witnessed a first-hand example of the subsidiarity principle in action. When the AIDS epidemic first broke out, I was in a bank management training program in San Francisco, and catching the virus was still a death sentence. Overnight, Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charities arrived to set up a hospice, as they had also done in Greenwich Village and Washington, DC to provide the suffering love and dignity at their passing. It's ditto for Lovie's story, another example of decentralized love in action.❤️
“The pigs did not actually work but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural that they should assume the leadership. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
—Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
Centralized power corrupts, is highly inefficient, and on the out
There are two points to my meandering political essay here. The first is that no one, whether Blue, Red, or Green, trusts centralized power any longer. Everyone wants a world that offers more security, privacy, and transparency—particularly online, where we spend too much of our lives and take the most risks. The good news is there exists a legion of crafty Web3 entrepreneurs creating a new generation of AI and blockchain applications (See Cryptonite 300 Top Companies below) that will radically decrease our dependence on centralized agencies and middlemen and return power to the people. We project the ensuing Web3 boom to represent a $200 trillion new wealth creation opportunity over the next 20 years—10 times the wealth created during Web2.
All this reminds me of hanging out with YouTube founder Chad Hurley in 2005 when the company was only seven months old and imagining a world where independent 'citizen journalists,' free of puppet masters, eventually take down Corporate Media. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we can now finally claim that in the current Presidential election Citizen Journalists we were delivered a lot more eyeballs in their candidate interviews than Corporate Media, and this pendulum is going to keep swinging until Corporate Media largely fades away.
The decentralization of power for the rest of society will take time, but it will happen because, in the end, customers always get what they want.
"The politicians lied to Americans tremendously and used false intelligence to justify the Iraq War and send young people off to battle with no end. We need to learn from the Iraq and Libyan wars, which they propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering but actually increased human suffering many times over."
—Tulsi Gabbard, Iraq War veteran, former Member of Congress from Hawaii, and Presidential candidate
The political reality of the Democratic Party
At Cryptonite, we are not Party people; we are idea and policy researchers, with our main focus on tracking the business of innovation. That being said, if the Democratic Party does not do some soul-searching, the country could face a one-party government for many years to come, and that is never a good idea. As a former Donkey and confirmed classical liberal, I wanted to provide, with charity, some very frank observations about why the Blue team is on the out and it’s urgent need to modernize and reinvent itself to keep balance in in Washington.
At the highest level, rather than positioning the Party as a leader in returning power back to the people, the Party is still peddling the Nanny State—which no one wants—and only fuels gigantic budget deficits that lead to inflation. Reminder: According to Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans trust Congress, and only 25 percent of Americans trust our government at all. Don't fight the movement to decentralize power; join us!
The Party's candidate for President was swapped out after the primaries, with an astonishing lack of transparency. The Party (including Ms. Harris) consistently defended Joe Biden's mental competency right up until his inadequacies were on full display during the June debate. After that, the Party engaged in Politburo-style behavior by hand-picking a replacement..
Then, the Party has the audacity to claim 'Saving Democracy' as its new political mantra by offering a non-democratically elected candidate chosen by a very small group of people in complete secrecy. How much more out of touch could a Party be?
The Democratic Party is now the Party of War. The proof? Bobby and Tulsi went red, Dick Chaney went blue, and the Party is bragging about it. 😳
MLK, Jr. with RFK, Sr. in the Posing in the Rose Garden circa 1962 during John F. Kennedy's administration.
“The party I grew up with was the party of peace, of Constitutional and Civil rights, the party that stood up to Wall Street and the big corporations. The Democratic Party today is the party of censorship and surveillance, banking and the military industrial complex, and the party of Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Pharma.”
—Robert Kennedy, Jr.
The Party of Lawfare. The Party spent millions on very unsuccessfully trying to keep RFK, Jr. off primary ballots all over the country, and ditto for the Party’s leading opponent. The Party’s Super Donors are also funding civil suits against political opponents and attorney general candidates running promising to prosecute opponents. Innocent people are going bankrupt fighting these frivolous lawsuits. Stop it! These tactics are evil and ugly.
As RFK, Jr. notes above, the Party has taken an ominous turn toward censorship under the guise of stopping 'misinformation.' Old Party leaders such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have made controversial statements lately about regulating free speech and the First Amendment, which many see as attacks on constitutional freedoms. Remember the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the 1964-65 academic year that grew out of student activism, particularly the civil rights movement? That’s the Party’s roots! Don’t abandon them.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel just over a year ago, the US has witnessed a 360 percent increase in antisemitic incidences in the US, much on 'top' university campuses, and the people committing these hate acts are not wearing red hats.
As Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz notes, calling political opponents ‘Hitler' and 'fascist' in US politics is insensitive to the 245,000 living Holocaust survivors and their families. "In American politics, there are no gas chambers, no shooting squads, no mass killings of Jews, no genocide—to make this comparison is a form of Holocaust denial,' the professor reminds us.
In California, the Democratic elite live with walls around their properties surrounded by people carrying guns to protect them, while turning the eye on millions of undocumented immigrants flooding the country and overwhelming communities, draining resources, and driving up crime.
The commercialization of the Internet boomed because it was largely untethered from government regulation. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party continues to regulate and stall the development of new industries, making the US less competitive. The current administration and its SEC chairman have been very hostile to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general and have no understanding of their emerging role in the economy.
Catching people falling between the cracks
Yes, we could make a list of Red team ills, as well, but they will be in power for at least the next four years so we will be on them like white on rice. But today’s math says that only 25 percent of Americans believe the US is on the right track, and that adds up to a Red team sweep. The Democratic Party base of young people, blue-collar workers, Latinos, blacks, and—at least in New York,—Jews is shrinking. The Blue team needs to drop the patronizing, condescending posture, walk outside its walled gardens, express some empathy, show some creativity, and get back in the game for the better of all.
—Anthony Perkins, founder & editor @ Cryptonite
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I agree with your assessment. My Dad was fighting for free speech in the 1960s but now accepts that maybe some censorship is necessary. But, some censorship is censorship and who’s to say what is to be censored.?
That being said, there is a group forming around an Open Letter to the Next President about decentralizing information for free speech, privacy, and assembly. I would love your input on the letter from the web3 perspective. This campaign is supported by one of the fathers of the internet.