JD Vance, Blake Masters, Peter Thiel, and Their Anti-Big Tech Hypocrisy
These GOP candidates profited off tech firms; now they denounce them.
DAVID CORN
Washington, DC, Bureau Chief
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It’s become de rigueur for Republicans—especially Republican candidates—to blast away at Big Tech, assailing it for an assortment of ills, such as privacy violations and a presumed (and often unproven) bias against conservatives. Two GOP Senate candidates, in particular, JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, have pounded technology companies. Yet both have had connections to tech firms that have spurred privacy concerns, and their Senate bids have each been funded by Big Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has founded and financed ventures that prompt similar worries.
In an interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham last year, Vance complained that Big Tech has become “more powerful than our own government” and controls “what you’re allowed to say and what you’re allowed to think in your own country.” He railed against tech companies that don’t respect consumers’ privacy: “They steal their data from them, and then they sell it back to them in the form of targeted ads. That’s really what Silicon Valley is all about.” Vance called for “breaking up these companies” and complained “there are very few senators willing to go after Silicon Valley.” On a Breitbart podcast, he accused Big Tech of “stealing our data and selling it to our enemies, selling it to our enemies, foreign, sometimes the Chinese… There is nothing that says that Google should be allowed to harvest your data as a consumer. Sell it back to you. Sell it to our adversaries.” He characterized the “entire economic engine of Big Tech, of Facebook, of Google, of everyone” as “harvesting your data, it’s effectively spying on you.” On his campaign website, Vance says, “The solution is simple: we need to break up the big tech companies, to reduce their power in our economy and our politics. We also need to ban the theft of our personal information. If they want our data, it’s time they paid for it.”
Masters has pushed a similar line, assailing Big Tech companies for perpetrating “acute harms” on the American public regarding data privacy, as he noted on the Andrew Klavan Show earlier this year. “Data privacy in the United States,” he added, “doesn’t exist.” Masters blasted “giant multinational corporations” for taking “our data” and using “it against us every which way.” Appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast a year ago, he insisted, “We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation. You own your data; giant multinational corporations do not.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/jd-vance-blake-masters-peter-thiel-and-their-anti-big-tech-hypocrisy/