The top venture capitalist who compared the liberal critique on inequality in the United States to Nazi Germany doesn’t seem to be backing down from his comparison.
The celebrated venture capitalist, Tom Perkins followed up to his remarks on Sunday, saying that the difference now is instead of racial demonization, it’s class demonization.
“In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,” Perkins said in an email to Bloomberg News.
Perkins recently penned a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal where he wrote that there are parallels between Nazi Germany’s “war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the rich.”
Perkins wrote that there seemed to be “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.”
“This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?” Perkins wrote in the letter to the editor.
Perkins is a founding member of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPCB), which has refused to comment on Perkins’ letter. He is currently listed as a partner emeritus.
In the email to Bloomberg Perkins also said that the philosophies and strategies of the firm and himself “have drifted so far apart that now my name means little on the door.”
