Maybe you thought rich maniac Thomas Perkins was kidding or drunk when he wrote that the Poors were basically Nazis preparing to Holocaust him to death. But no: He has doubled down on this claim in a new email to Bloomberg.
“In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,” typed Perkins, according to a Bloomberg article on Monday.
Perkins is also having difficulty understanding why the media is not more concerned about Occupy Wall Street protestors -- who break windows at luxury-car dealerships and Wells Fargo branches, which is exactly like Kristallnacht! -- than about brave wealthy people who discuss important issues, such as whether poor people are really Nazis.
Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, was responding to the uproar he sparked last week when he first wondered out loud -- on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, naturally -- whether the Poors might not all be Nazis.
His comments were so outrageous that even Perkins' fellow rich people recoiled. The firm he founded, Kleiner Perkins, tweeted:
Perkins did his old firm a giant solid by confirming to Bloomberg that he had long ago left their reservation, emailing that their "philosophies and strategies have drifted so far apart that now my name means little on the door.”
It is easy and fun to make fun of Perkins, whom a French court once convicted of committing manslaughter WITH HIS GODDAMN YACHT and who has written a bodice-ripper called Sex And The Single Zillionaire, which Rupert Murdoch hailed as “Fun, fast -- a great read!"
But to dismiss Perkins as a deranged lunatic is to overlook the fact that he is far from alone. As David Sirota pointed out at Pando Daily, Perkins is just the latest in a long line of rich people comparing progressives to Nazis, part of a widespread campaign to get us all to "pity the billionaire," as author Thomas Frank puts it.
Update: As further evidence that Perkins has lots of company in the Nazi-spotting game, another wealthy venture capitalist, Tim Draper, has ridden to Perkins' rescue, telling Business Insider that Perkins "is a brilliant man, and he is identifying schadenfreude, something that continues to be a thorn in humanity’s side. The bitter taste of envy brings us all down."