Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Silicon Valley Wants Endless War

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

[VIDEO ESSAY] --- Anti-Muslim hate is becoming extremely profitable in Silicon Valley as the tech industry pivots towards defense tech and embedding itself with the U.S. war machine. From funding Israeli defense startups to spreading racist conspiracy theories about Zohran Mamdani, VCs like Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire are pushing a new breed of tech militarism. Defense tech, AI surveillance, and far-right pro-Trump ideologies are merging in the tech world as Silicon Valley’s obsession with profit fuels a dangerous new era of "the war on terror 2.0." Shaun Maguire and others like him will play a leading role in this new landscape, where human rights are obstacles and endless war is the ultimate market opportunity.***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social

Anti-Muslim hate is becoming extremely profitable in Silicon Valley. And as the tech industry pivots more towards defense tech and embedding itself with the U.S. war machine, I think we're about to see a lot more of it, especially after what just happened this weekend. At 10 a.m. Eastern on July 4th, while most people were preparing to pop some burgers on the grill and celebrate the birth of America, Sean McGuire, the multi-millionaire general partner at Sequoia Capital, the most esteemed venture capital firm in Silicon Valley was up rage tweeting. He posted on X, quote, Zoran Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything.

It's literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way. McGuire attached a screenshot of hacked material from 2009, showing that when applying to Columbia University, Mamdani checked the Asian and the African American boxes on his application. Mamdani also hand wrote in the word Ugandan to reflect his Ugandan-born heritage.

Now, this is totally reasonable for a teenager who grew up in Uganda and whose lineage in Africa goes back generations. As Mamdani told the New York Times, he was obviously trying to convey his complex identity, not mislead anyone or gain any sort of improper advantage. And all of this is completely irrelevant anyway, I just want to say, because Mamdani did not even get into Columbia.

So this whole thing is just like a complete non-story. Regardless, some of the worst journalists at the New York Times got a hold of this hacked material and published a deeply misleading and inflammatory article where they basically tried to make this whole thing a controversy in order to rally black voters against Mamdani. To make matters worse, the entire New York Times story relied on one primary source, Jordan Lasker. Lasker is a race science proponent who runs a substack where he pushes race. science and eugenics nonsense about race and IQ. Lasker has used his platform to boost the work of racist pseudoscientists like Richard Lynn, a self-described scientific racist who the Southern

Poverty Law Center called, quote, one of the most unapologetic and raw scientific racists. This is the type of stuff that the New York Times is laundering through their paper to smear Mumdani. But back to Silicon Valley, Sean McGuire doesn't even live in New York City. He, like most venture capitalists lives in the Bay Area. But since Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary last month, McGuire has tweeted about Mamdani incessantly. Like, he cannot stop posting about this man. McGuire has repeatedly falsely claimed that Mamdani, who is Muslim and has faced a tidal wave of Islamophobia since his win, is a radical Islamist. It goes without saying, by the way, that Mamdani is obviously not a radical Islamist.

He literally marched in New York City's pride parade just last week, proudly waving a trans flag. And he is a close relationship and partnership with Brad Lander, New York City's Jewish comptroller. McGuire also published a post on the 4th of July, implying that, quote, ending America is a, quote, religious goal for Mamdani. McGuire posted, quote,

Mamdani is a new strain of Islamism, mutated to be more palpable for the Western mind. The fact, that McGuire can make such extremely racist and Islamophobic comments publicly about a major American political figure shows how deeply anti-Muslim bigotry has become embedded in Silicon Valley culture. And none of this is a coincidence. Silicon Valley billionaires are now openly embracing anti-Muslim hate as they pivot towards defense startups that profit from perpetual war and the genocide in Palestine. The U.S. war machine has been structurally dependent on Islam

to justify decades of military intervention and surveillance. As Silicon Valley becomes even more intertwined with the defense sector, extremists like McGuire will likely only obtain more power and influence. So I think it's really important for us to dig into exactly who this man is. Sean McGuire is basically a poster boy for Silicon Valley's alliance with Israel and the defense tech industry. He has deep ties to the U.S. military industrial complex. Prior to his VC career, he worked on classified DARPA projects in Afghanistan. He then leveraged his military connections to co-found Quadium, a DARPA-backed company that claimed to index all devices connected to the internet.

His co-founder in that company, by the way, is a former CIA agent. And the company was founded using $6 million of seed funding from Peter Thiel. Like most Silicon Valley leaders with ties to defense tech, McGuire is also a vocal defender of Israel. He identifies as a staunch Zionist and uses his. platform on X to push pro-Zionist propaganda and disinformation. He has spread blatant lies about activists, including the false conspiracy theory that the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine knew about Hamas's October 7th attack before it happened, which is just a crazy thing to even imply. McGuire is also an outspoken fan of Tommy Robinson,

a far-right British anti-Islam activists and conspiracy theorist. Maguire has also repeatedly amplified the Pallywood conspiracy theory. The idea of Pallywood is racist propaganda that falsely accuses Palestinians of faking their own deaths and wounds from Israel's attacks. McGuire also falsely claimed that a dead Palestinian baby was just a doll and has encouraged his followers to search the term Pallywood on X. More recently, McGuire has been denying the slaughter of innocent Palestinians at Israeli-run AIDS centers. On July 4th, just hours after his post about Mumbani, McGuire posted a doctored image of an old Washington Post retraction about a completely unrelated incident, trying to cast doubt on the more recent killings of innocent Palestinians at aid sites.

These are killings, by the way, that IDF soldiers have since admitted to. These multiple massacres at humanitarian aid centers, by the way, have been irrefutably reported on by Israeli news outlets like Harats and U.S. outlets like the Associated Press. But McGuire never took down his tweet or even acknowledged that he had spread blatant disinformation. Last summer, McGuire spent three weeks in Israel with the IDF. He praised the IDF and Israel repeatedly and claimed that, quote, the generation fighting this war will be Israel's greatest generation since Ben Gurion and Golda Meyer. McGuire has also played a key role in tightening his venture capital firm's relationship with Israeli defense tech companies, earning him millions of dollars in the process. For instance, in March, McGuire touted his firm's investment in Kela, a Tel Aviv-based base.

startup founded by four veterans of Israel's most elite intelligence units, like Unit 8200 and the Talpiat. Kela's stated goal is to leverage Israel's unique cadre of techno warriors to help defend the Western world order. Sequoia led Kela's entire $11 million seed round and helped the company raise over $100 million from investors, including the CIA. In addition to doing, quote, border protection work, Kela's long-term ambition is to, quote, convert Israel into a defense Defense Tech Hub for Western militaries, according to a post co-authored by McGuire on the Sequoia blog. In fact, Sequoia has backed and profited off a slew of IDF-affiliated Israeli tech companies. The firm funded Wiz, a cloud security company founded by alumni of the IDF's Unit 8200,

Eon, a cloud infrastructure company whose founder was part of the first class of Aram, an elite IDF research program, and Descartes, an AI company that was co-founded by two former members. of the IDF's Unit 8200. Sequoia, like many other Silicon Valley firms, has also recently begun investing more heavily in domestic defense tech. McGuire has played a key role in securing these investments and profiting from them.

In 2024, McGuire co-authored a piece on Sequoia's blog announcing its investment in March Industries, which is described as a, quote, defense tech company for the post-unmanned world. McGuire wrote at the time, quote, as industries experience widespread technological revolution, the defense sector is undergoing a crucial transition. With aging defense systems and struggling supply chains, the opportunity for innovation has become increasingly compelling and is

driving modernization initiatives aimed at advancing the U.S.'s defense technology. As consumer markets plateau and regulatory pressure rises, the U.S. military has become a new frontier for growth in the tech industry. The military industrial complex has deep potty. and is not bound by ethical constraints. Companies that once provided software to help people share photos and keep up with friends are now pivoting to sell drones and use AI for battlefield logistics

and predictive surveillance. VCs like Sean McGuire have helped accelerate this shift by branding military tech as morally necessary. They basically claim that it's essential to fund these maniacal startups in order to defend Western values or the Western world against existential threats, aka brown people. It's not a coincidence that McGuire's 4th of July post about

Mamdani claims, quote, the West will learn this lesson the hard way. In fact, McGuire tweets constantly about the West and how the West is in danger from non-white influence. This allows VCs to frame their investing, which at the end of the day is 100% about making money, as protecting civilization itself from nefarious evil forces abroad, in the Middle East or Asia. You see, they're not funding weapons manufacturers because they want to get rich off perpetual war and profit off the police state here at home.

They're just generous do-goaters who want to save humanity or whatever. By wrapping their business interests in nationalist language, Silicon Valley's defense tech investors can market themselves as defenders of freedom, even as they openly allow the government to use their tech to subjugate and oppress people right here on American citizens.

oil. Venture-backed military tech and the rise of AI has breathed new life into the whole idea of the war on terror. And it's notable that this shift is closely tied to Silicon Valley's growing affinity for authoritarian politics and the resurgence of Donald Trump. Trump has made it abundantly clear that under his administration, tech firms willing to serve the military industrial complex will be handsomely rewarded. His promises to expand ice operations and boost military spending have been received with great enthusiasm in venture capitalist circles. VCs also recognize that Trump is willing to embrace policies that will help make the billionaires richer. These policies are things like complete and total deregulation of AI and a hyper-militarized

version of innovation that's tied with defense spending. Unlike past Republican leaders who quietly supported defense contractors, Trump has openly championed the idea of using defense tech to dominate enemies here and abroad. Trump's open disdain for civil liberties also makes him the ideal candidate for an industry that has reoriented itself around AI-driven surveillance and control of online speech. Venture capitalists like Sean McGuire are helping to manufacture this worldview. The more Islamophobia gets normalized, the more profitable the defense sector becomes, and the more money gets fueled into scaling these deeply evil companies, especially AI surveillance. companies. McGuire is a perfect figurehead for this convergence of Islamophobia, militarism,

and tech. And Sean McGuire has been a steadfast supporter of Trump. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump's re-election campaign in 2024 and has championed Elon Musk and his efforts at Doge. After Musk was accused of doing a Nazi salute on stage in January, McGuire rushed to his defense, condemning anyone who implied that Musk supported anti-Semitism. But according to a study by the network contagion research institute, anti-Semitic tweets skyrocketed by 136% following Musk's takeover of the platform. And in 2023, Musk openly called an anti-Semitic post on the platform, quote, the actual truth.

McGuire leveraged his relationship with Musk to personally secure Starlink satellite internet access for the IDF within days of the October 7th attack, right as Israel began to invade Gaza. It took McGuire, quote, 12 hours, maybe less, to get Starlink switched on over Israel. Israeli venture capitalist Aviv Aal said in May. McGuire has also previously spread other racist lies and conspiracy theories about brown and black people right here in America. He spent weeks falsely claiming that Haitians were stealing people's pets and eating them. He implied that there was a Democrat conspiracy to leverage the census to consolidate power in blue states. In February, he amplified a libs of TikTok lie that Stacey Abrams had somehow laundered $2 billion from the government.

He frequently boosts far-right accounts like end-wokeness, which traffic in political disinformation and racist conspiracy theories. After McGuire's posts about Mamdani on the 4th of July, many non-white Silicon Valley startup founders and tech workers reported feeling alienated and dismayed. Amen Nadim, founder and CEO of AI startup nuanced, posted to X, quote, I'm a YCVC-backed founder. Building is hard enough without tech cheering on open racism. Saying vile things about Muslims and Arabs is now seen as edgy in VC Twitter. It's not. It's just bigotry.

Timer Abdel, co-founder of Casual, a finance planning tool, said, quote, Sean has gone from laundering atrocities abroad to spreading racist lies and dumb self-fulfilling clash of civilizations narratives at home. All perfectly acceptable, even based discourse in tech now. Armand Domiloweski, a data scientist in the Bay Area, posted, quote, imagine being a Muslim founder, trying to get funded by Sequoia and having to read this racist. Others noted that Sumaya Babelay, the COO and operating partner at Sequoia, where's a hijab. I reached out to Sequoia, by the way, multiple times over the weekend to find out if

had any commentary on McGuire's comments, and they declined to respond. But as firms like Sequoia pour more money into U.S. and Israeli military-linked startups, the incentives for Islamophobic fearmongering are only growing. The Silicon Valley tech industry is becoming more and more aligned with the U.S. war machine. And figures like McGuire are at the center of this shift, leveraging anti-Muslim racism to justify their investments in dystopian, militarized tech and imperial violence. This new Silicon Valley regime is based on military domination and racial hierarchies. McGuire is the current poster boy for this sort of virulent hate,

but he is not remotely the only one in Silicon Valley who holds this worldview. The reality is that in this new tech landscape, where tech, militarism, surveillance, AI, authoritarianism, and war, war-mongering all converge, you can make millions off anti-Muslim hate. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co, where I write about all of these things and more. That's usermag.com. If you like this video, please leave a comment and share it and subscribe to my channel.

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