Thank goodness for America's vigilant wealthy people, for how else would we know that the country has been taken over by Nazis?
Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and former president of Facebook, is the latest tech mogul to identify the creeping fascist menace. In an email to the New York Post earlier this week, the billionaire called Gawker Media founder Nick Denton "Joseph Goebbels’ annoying little shitzu (sic)" and called writers for the Gawker-owned tech blog Valleywag "Goebbels’ fleet of diminutive attack dogs."
Why are Denton and Valleywag Nazis, or at least dogs of Nazis? Because they wrote a post last week about the havoc caused on a street in Manhattan's West Village when Verizon installed FiOS in Parker's $20 million apartment there.
And that is exactly something Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and a fervent supporter of the slaughter of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, would have done. Or at least gotten his dogs to do.
It was once difficult to imagine a tech mogul appearing more unhinged than Tom Perkins, the millionaire venture capitalist who wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal warning that attacks on the rich by left-wingers were just like attacks on Jews during Kristallnacht. But Parker has somehow managed it. At least Perkins was apparently motivated by an actual fear that he might be lightly holocausted, while Parker went immediately to Nazi metaphors just because somebody wrote an unflattering article about him.
Actually, this is not the first time Parker's ostentatious wealth has been the subject of unflattering media coverage, which may be why he has had enough. First, there was "The Social Network," in which Parker was portrayed by Justin Timberlake as kind of a jackass. Then Gawker and many, many others made fun last year of his fantasy-themed wedding, which may or may not have been harmful to the delicate ecosystem of the redwood forest, but was at the very least hilarious.
Parker responded to that by typing a 10,000-word screed about the evils of the media and some other stuff, maybe (we didn't actually read it all). This latest attack, on his $20 million Manhattan apartment, was the last silk straw that broke the golden camel's back, apparently, and tipped Parker into Godwin's Law territory.
I mean, come on, Parker doesn't even use that $20 million apartment any more, he told the New York Daily News. Who could deny that an empty apartment, and any occasional, hypothetical friends who might want to crash there, should have cable and high-speed Internet service? Nazis, that's who.
Fortunately, along with Parker, there are many other wealthy people joining the Perkins Nazi Spotters Brigade all the time. They will protect us, or at least themselves.