“Today we’re seeing him blanketed as a racist and a white supremacist”, says Torba, who also supports Trump, “and that’s scary to me”.
Advertisement
“You may have seen the news yesterday that ties Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey to Nimble America, a Trump-endorsing organization Luckey started to defame Clinton via “the power of Internet memes”.
The “shitposting” memes the right wing group known as “Nimble America” creates often target Trump’s presidential opposition Hillary Clinton. Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501 (c) 4 non-profit”, announced itself on the promise that “meme magic is real”. Its fundraising drives, nearly entirely driven through Reddit, have already resulted in anti-Clinton billboards. Luckey, 24, whose virtual-reality headset first got attention on Kickstarter, is said to have a net worth of 0 million.
Additionally, the site noted that Reddit posts about Nimble America were “rapidly deleted” in the process of reporting on the story.
Dustin Ward, co-founder at Nimble America, informed Daily Beast that his group managed to raise $11,000, but without revealing how much of that sum was from Luckey.
Until now, Luckey’s political leanings have never been discussed, and it seems he wanted to keep his involvement with Nimble America out of the spotlight. “It went along the lines of ‘hey, I have a bunch of money”.
“I came into touch with them over Facebook”, Luckey, who runs a Reddit account under the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan”, told the Daily Beast. One of the group’s most notable projects is a billboard in Pennsylvania with Clinton’s face on it, declaring that the Democratic presidential nominee is “too big to jail”.
Advertisement
Palmer Luckey was a driving force behind the resurgence of virtual reality (VR) within the tech industry, having developed a series of prototypes from 2011 that eventually become the Oculus Rift. Let us know in the comments. “We can not tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform”, they said in a statement. “We are also confident that this behavior and sentiment does not reflect the values of the many Oculus employees we work with on a daily basis”. “It’s not his politics that bother me so much as it is his willingness to put money behind one of the worst things about our culture right now”. He, along with Peter Thiel, are the highest profile individuals in Silicon Valley to publicly support Trump. “It’s an empathy headset.You can literally walk in someone else’s shoes, see the horrors of war up close, meet people around the world and understand them more viscerally”.
