Turns out Big Tech loves fascism by and for the elites

You know the Upton Sinclair quote. And we know this one is really his (unlike that other one).

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Now replace the word “salary” with “fortune” and you get what we saw last Thursday at the White House. 

Replace both with the word “fascism” and we’re even closer.

So let’s add a little context to last Thursday’s embarrassment, where Don and Melania hosted “33 Silicon Valley power players,” including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook, at the White House.

As some of the wealthiest humans ever to live gathered to shine Donald Trump’s gold-plated ass, Donald Trump was preparing to send troops to Chicago. This was just days after the Trump regime committed a war crime against a small Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean, which, as far as we know, could have been filled with anyone of any age. And it was just hours later, Bobby Kennedy Jr. defended the regime’s shredding of America’s world-leading public health infrastructure for the exclusive benefit of sadists, eugenicists, and morticians.

Rich dudes polishing Trump’s posterior in public has become so common it’s barely news. 

But that this crowd—which included Bill Gates, whose pretensions to altruism withered along with his marriage—represents America’s high-tech elite, an industry once seen as the vanguard of this country’s promise and openness to the world, singes a nerve. 

And it’s even worse if you caught any of the actual hind shining. 

Axios reports:

• Gates, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, thanked the president "for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing, advanced manufacturing here."

The next day, the jobs report gave us the truth about what Trump has actually achieved when it comes to manufacturing:

These men and a few women gathered to pay tribute to Trump at a moment when his regime is facing a massive crisis of legitimacy. 

Strength in Numbers reports “nearly a majority of Americans strongly disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, twice as large as the percentage of adults who strongly approve of him.” The Epstein cover-up continues to mutate into unheard-of levels of bizarre deflection. The grifter-in-chief, whose family has made some $6 billion off cryptocurrency cons since he took office while cutting food stamps for kids, is scrambling to rebrand his one significant legislative accomplishment, which is even less popular than he is. There’s also the matter of some of the biggest protests in US history.

And farmers are so devastated by Trump’s policies that they’re just begging him to send them a check, which won’t be coming from all that Trump family crypto:

As Greg Sargent nailed, “Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So”.

If the mainstream weren’t largely complicit in propping Trump up, the calls for shakeups, policy retreats, and “Come to Jesus” huddles would drown out all the traffic in America. Instead, we have an aspiring fascist government gathering legitimacy from the very few elites who will benefit—or at least won’t be terrorized—by this regime.

To be fair, this is a regime whose legitimacy once came from the people, having won the popular vote less than a year ago. 

Yes, Trump won less than 50% of the vote during an anti-incumbent period unmoored by the pandemic and inflation. And that victory came after a campaign that was more like a conspiracy of all the worst forces on earth—including carbon dumpers, Apartheid lost causers, bro podcasters, Meta, and Vladimir Putin—to elect a man who was obviously a garbage human being. They elected a guy who wanted to rule them all, who had even threatened to jail some of them for imaginary crimes. Yet, they were sold on the idea that his reign would be preferable to a democracy where workers have power, trusts are busted, scams get investigated, poor people control their bodies, and pollution is treated as pollution.

Today, the Trump regime’s legitimacy comes entirely from co-opted oligarchs, die-hard MAGA dead-enders, and Tories, what I’ve decided to call Americans who aren’t in love with Trump yet prefer a white king to a Black president.

That these elites feel comfortable bathing in their association with Trump shows one of three things:

1. They’re content to be ruled by Trump or Trumps for the rest of their life and have never Googled “Putin oligarchs.”
   Because, in fact, they like or love what Trump is doing. Or—at the very least—they don’t mind it at all.
2. Our betters have the self-preservation of a toddler set free in a Costco parking lot.
   We’ve seen this collective action problem endlessly. It’s what gave us the Great Recession. It’s what gave the GOP and then America Trump in 2016 and 2024. And it’s why the stock market responded to Trump’s tyrannical tariff announcements with some appropriate dismay and then became boiled frogs that decided to buy Trump’s slight walkback. They’ve willingly ignored the fact that the tariffs are even worse than initially imagined, with shipments to the US now down 80%. And they refuse to consider the consequences of how this regime wants to destroy the independence of our central bank, the way dictators do everywhere.
3. They’ve got no fear of the underdog.
   The mainstream media have largely ignored the success of the Tesla Takedown. And the truth is, it’s almost impossible to convey the significance of one of the most effective protest movements in American history. A small group of thoughtful, committed citizens helped the CEO of one of the most beloved brands in recent memory wreck that company’s image and sales worldwide. It helped force Trump to publicly split with the man who was most singularly responsible for his election. And that man, the richest human ever to live, responded by opening an Epstein Files-sized gash in Trump’s forehead. The Takedown hasn’t finished off Trump or Musk by any means, but it’s up there with the iceberg that sank the Titanic in terms of piercing threats the elites did not see coming.

The planchettes of the elite are primarily pointing to 2, making a safe bet by going along with Trump and saying and doing whatever it is he wants them to say or do. That could be confirmed by the way some of the tech elite appear to be hedging their bets. 

Bloomberg tells us “Big Tech Looks to Strengthen Frayed Relationship With Democrats Ahead of Midterms.” And that appears they mean to use “Silicon Valley’s ample financial resources” to forge good relationships with Democrats who may take control of at least one House of Congress next November. Or are they performing a ratfuck by getting in Democratic leaders' ears and telling them to be easy on Trump, a trickle-down of the “Working Toward the Führer” effect in which they consciously or unconsciously adopt Trump’s goals as their own.

The truth is, none of us can know how complicit others will become. That's because being American in 2025 generally means being complicit in ways that few, if any, can afford to avoid. We all burn fossil fuels. Most of us have to worry about our family as we weigh what we’re willing to risk to fight for our values. The only estimate I can find indicates that 274.5 million Americans (out of a total of 340 million) use Google.

So I want to linger for a minute on the tech baron who attended Trump’s inauguration —the one who gets the least attention: Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai.

His politics appear to be an exact reflection of the elite capture that’s threatening our existence as a free people.

What are those politics? Well, we don’t know for sure! Maybe he doesn’t see “politics.”

We know he doesn’t want politics at work, a proclamation he made in 2024 as part of the elite backlash that supercharged MAGA. It was a backlash to many things. Me too. People without power having non-AIPAC-approved opinions about Gaza. Imperfect DEI programs, which were part of a new technology inclusiveness that worked so well that it seemed to drive anyone in any C-suite of any note to demand to know why they can’t use the “n-word.”

Pichai’s drive for “no politics” has also allowed Google to pursue the destruction of the climate with full abandon of its previous pretensions to carbon reduction. And guess what! The search giant's DEI is deteriorating even faster than the climate.

The Trump regime rewarded those “no politics” by basically allowing Google to search the deck for a “Get out of an antitrust investigation almost FREE” card.

However, the story doesn’t end there, as this story is a perfect example of elite capture today.

Pichai’s cold, hard, “no politics” approach to adopting AI and trying to replace all human workers with contextual advertising could explain his partiality to Trump. But there’s another obvious explanation for Google’s embrace of Trump.

That would be co-founder Sergey Brin’s “really wonderful MAGA girlfriend,” as Trump drooled over her during the dinner Thursday night.

Brin’s taste in women feels consistent, given that his most recent ex-wife is Nicole Shanahan, Bobby Jr.’s 2024 funder/running mate. Shanahan strongly denies that a brief affair with Elon Musk helped end her marriage, which reminds me that America’s brief affair with Musk may have ended our democracy.

All of this is to say that fascism merges the personal and the political by design. The ruler can leave no room for anyone or anything to exist outside the realm of domination.

And just as it’s crucial to understand that we are all complicit to some degree, we must assert with our sacred honor that the degrees matter. 

Any twist of the dial away from collaborator is a move toward resistance. And the goal of the fascist and his collaborators is to raise the costs of that resistance beyond the realm of the possible. And no one understands how to do that better than Big Tech.

THE FARCE fights fascism with fearlessness. 

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