Allison Huynh bought into Silicon Valley’s woke idealism.
The co-creator of Willow Garage, a company that designed robotics and AI systems that were sold to Google, Huynh helped to raise millions of dollars for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She and her husband at the time, early Google programmer Scott Hassan, helped organize elaborate fundraisers and dinners for tech bigwigs.
“My role was to bring in Silicon Valley people for the $50,000- and $100,000-per-plate dinners,” Huynh said. “[We] brought in [Google co-founders] Sergey [Brin], Larry [Page] and Eric [Schmidt]. Obama was a hopeful candidate who was outside of the system.”
She was so passionate about the left that, in 2005, she and Hassan bought a rocking chair that once belonged to Democratic icon John F. Kennedy for nearly $100,00 at auction.
In 2008, she acquired the Shepard Fairey mixed-media artwork that the iconic Obama “Hope” posters were based on, paying more than $1 million for the work on canvas.
Now, as President Biden’s term draws to a close, Huynh feels that she had been sold a bill of goods. “I think Biden has been out of touch,” she told The Post. “He’s asleep at the wheel.”
Exasperated by violent crime and illicit drug use in America, the 48-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, who helped build some of the world’s first e-commerce websites and once lived down the street from Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley, has done a total 180 when it comes to her politics.
No longer identifying as a left-leaning Democrat, she calls herself an Independent — and she’s vocally backing Donald Trump.
She recently traveled from her home in Palo Alto, Calif., to Florida to show support for the former president at a fundraiser at Mar-A-Lago and hopes to attend more.
“I was surprised when I met Donald Trump,” Huynh, who is working on a Silicon Valley memoir entitled “Beyond Good and Evil,” recalled. “He was light and funny and intelligent. The people there were down-to-earth.
“I was happy with how knowledgeable Trump is about what is going on with the country and the economy. He had the information. He is all there with the things that matter: education — his kids are well-educated -— fighting crime, immigration and business,” continued Huynh, who has two daughters, age 21 and 18, and a 16-year-old son.
The lefty collectibles are poised to go the way of Obama. She is currently shopping the JFK chair and Shepard Fairey “Hope” piece around — with a seven-figure price all in, we’re told.
“I am cleaning house,” said Huynh. “I was a lifelong liberal and Democrat but when things don’t serve us in this moment, it is best to move on and let other people enjoy the items. They don’t have much meaning for me right now.”
Where she does find meaning in are elected representatives who promote law and order, low taxes, control at the border.
“I support politicians like Trump and Abe Hamadeh,” she said, name-checking the Republican who ran for Attorney General in Arizona in 2022, lost to a Democrat by 280 votes and is currently trying to get the results overturned as he mounts a Congressional run.
“[We need elected officials] with policies that make our cities safer,” Huynh continued. “We need police to support those laws.”
Huynh sees San Francisco, where she owns property and once lived full-time, as “a failed science experiment for super leftist ideas and ideals.” Its descent into lawless chaos in recent years spurred her move to the right.
“We are allowing heroin addicts to shoot up in public, violent attacks on Asians in Chinatown, and looting of our grocery stores and shopping malls,” she said, also mentioning people defecating in the streets. “City officials and police just look the other way.”
It is not just law and order that pushed Huynh to the right. She would like to see policies, such as lower taxes, that benefit businesses and encourage entrepreneurship.
“Many people are coming to Trump for his good policies,” she continued. “Look at his 2016 Jobs Act. It encourages investment, which helps to sustain this country.”
Her change of heart and mind first began to percolate during early COVID. Fauci-inspired restrictions that kept kids out of school, shoppers out of stores and people masked rankled her. “People living in big cities had awful daily lives; I had to homeschool my children,” said Huynh.
“The Republicans were smarter [than the Democrats]. They wanted to look at who was getting sick. Young people suffered the most, even though they were low risk. We had lazy policy in California,” she said, noting how many of the state’s residents flocked to Florida and its more lax restrictions. And, she added, “many of the super liberal tech billionaires left the country for private islands, super yachts and estates in New Zealand.”
Border policy is another issue that’s led her to abandon the left.
“I am all for hardworking immigrants, but not for open admission of immigrants. We have to differentiate between legal immigrants who come here and work hard and illegal immigrants who come here and commit crimes,” she said.
Huynh knows from where she speaks. She was born in Saigon in 1975, as the city fell to North Vietnam. Her father – a pilot who had been doing work on chemical weaponry with the US Air Force – came to America that year. She and her mother followed in 1982.
The family lived primarily in Texas. Huynh was an exceptional student. She graduated high school in three years, got a scholarship to Stanford, earned a degree in symbolic systems engineering and joined the tech boom.
“I worked as a consultant, developing websites for banks,” said Huynh. She met Hassan in 2000, introduced by mutual Silicon Valley friends. They married in 2001 and divorced acrimoniously in 2020.
Google’s Brin and Page were frequent guests at their homes in San Francisco and Palo Alto, but Huynh speaks negatively of who they became.
“[Initially], they were very idealistic, believing in equality and inclusiveness,” she said. “But once they attained their Master of the Universe positions, they trivialized everyone who was not a big tech founder. They became the very institutions they rejected and wanted to dominate other people.”
She continued, “I came up with the idea for one of the most profitable engines in US history – which was text based advertising on Google – but Larry [Page] tried to marginalize and trivialize what I did. He told me that ideas are cheap and that it’s all about the implementation.” (Google PR did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.)
She sees similarities between the Silicon Valley tech bros and the Democrats for whom she once hustled to raise millions.
“Obama started out with an aspirational messaging that resonated with me; it was about equality and women and minorities; Biden projected the image of being cool and hip,” she said.
“But where are we now? Immigrants come into our country and commit crimes . . . Big tech tracks you and knows everything about you. But if you are having a problem with whatever [tech] service, you can never get a hold of anyone.”
By contrast, Trump is in touch with the people and an advocate for regular Americans, she said.
“His rhetoric is entertaining. But the policies and politics make sense. I think Trump is engaging. I would like to hang out with Trump. He’s a really cool guy.”
