Trump's Chief Design Officer Just Boosted the John Birch Society

Joe Gebbia, the U.S. Chief Design Officer appointed by Trump to lead the new National Design Studio boosted anti-immigrant claims by the John Birch Society. The guy whose entire job is branding the US government aligned himself with a group that has been spouting conspiratorial and hateful nonsense for decades. Gebbia is also one of Airbnb’s three co-founders and so his complaints about immigrants raising the costs of housing feel especially hypocritical.

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The post above was reported by independent tech journalist Matt Binder and is now apparently deleted. However, it is not an anomaly. Gebbia’s feed is full of far-right MAGA messaging, most frequently falsely portraying immigrants as violent criminals who threaten natives. He also reposted the John Birch Society just a couple of days before.

Its not just immigration. Here is a post he made about how DEI is destroying merit. This seems to be based on a right-wing criticism that Caitlin Clark is being targeted by Black players. Using basketball as an example of how Blacks are exploiting DEI to deny White merit is the kind of thing you do when you’ve cooked your brain on X. He is one more example of life under our clicktatorship.

What is the John Birch Society?

In his defense, maybe Gebbia does not know the history of the John Birch Society. So lets do a brief recap. It best represents what Richard Hofstader described as the paranoid style of politics of the cold war era. The Birch Society is the grandaddy of conspiracy theories like Birtherism, QAnon, and the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020.

How bad was the Birch Society? It’s leader claimed that President Eisenhower was a secret communist agent.

In one telling of American conservatism, a critical moment is when William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the Birch Society in the 1960s, pushing it to the fringe of the movement.

But the…