Ctrl-Alt-Trump: Tech's liberal lords reboot as MAGA fans

Why is Silicon Valley swiping right?

Cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has had a change of heart. In a phone call from prison last month with the New York Sun, where he’s serving time for swindling $8 billion from investors, the Democrat mega donor accused his former beneficiaries of “political censorship,” snubbed “center-left” politics, and expressed sympathy for President Trump.

Bankman-Fried is the most recent Johnny-come-lately tech titan to pile into the Trump train’s caboose, and he’s in appropriately sleazy company.

Of course, even your pet goldfish remembers how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spent $419 million to defeat Trump in 2020, banned the sitting president from Facebook and Instagram, and spent nearly a decade punishing Trump supporters on his platforms.

Yet on February 6 there he was in the Oval Office meeting with the new president, the third such rendezvous since Trump’s landslide win in November and following Zuckerberg’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.

If Zuckerberg’s version is to be believed, his road to Damascus began after an assassin’s bullet struck Trump in the ear in Butler, Pa. last summer. Zuckerberg was enchanted by the bloodied Trump raising his fist and shouting “fight!” to the crowd, describing the moment as “badass” in an interview. In theory, this tracks with the late-blooming dork’s recent adventures into masculinity—Zuck’s become a gym rat and martial arts enthusiast. Now he’s decided to vote like a man, too, apparently.

Then there’s Jeff Bezos. Last week the Amazon chief announced his newspaper, The Washington Post—known around town as the Jan Brady to the New York Times’s Marcia—was going in a new editorial direction.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in a letter to employees. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.”

How, exactly, he imagines this to pan out is unclear. More op-eds from Bill Kristol and Alyssa Farah Griffin? Shortly after the proclamation, opinion editor David Shipley quit the paper—an early sign this won’t go well for throne-sniffing Bezos.

And there are many reasons why. For one, the imperial media talent pool simply lacks anyone who understands, or can relate to, the new Republican party—and that’s unlikely to change. The legacy news business doesn’t take kindly to people whose kids went to different schools. Their haughty disdain and tribal exclusivity rival only their collective devotion to the chimera of globalism—a dream that demands America’s proud spire to be humbled.

📚 Order a Signed & Personalized copy of Tucker, the NYT bestselling biography of Tucker Carlson, by Chadwick Moore 📚

Still, on Inauguration Day, Bezos, who banned books on Amazon that were critical of gender theory and COVID response, purchased great seats inside the rotunda to welcome Trump back to office, sitting next to Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Bezos treated his fellow seat mates in billionaire’s row to a giant pair of breasts to ogle. His fiancé, Lauren Sanchez, showed up in a plunging white blazer over a lacy bra with no blouse.

It was shockingly trashy. Notably, the hobgoblins who write about fashion at The Washington Post, ever so quick to snipe at Melania Trump’s objectively impeccable flair, didn’t dare touch Lady Bezos’s brassiere.

(It also raises the question: how many bimbos rejected Bezos before he was rich enough to get laid—and to what extent was his developing brain rotted by porn overconsumption? Because bandying around a date who jiggles into a solemn and historic ceremony while dressed like a woman advertising her negotiable affections is not normal).

Seated directly in front of the tech billionaires, with Sanchez’s tits looming overhead like a pair of Luftwaffe airships, was Beverly Vance, mother of the impending vice president. The scene was a haunting snapshot of a grand and timeless American tale. Here was Vance, emerging from the rusted heart of Middletown, Ohio—a nurse ensnared by addiction—her life an elegy to resilience and the bombed-out dreams of Middle America, surrounded by the chameleons who worked for years to further suffocate people exactly like her.

In all, Silicon Valley’s MAGA reboot is, fundamentally, a good thing. But if the whole situation makes you feel a bit melancholic, you’re not alone. Perhaps it would be more comforting to think of Sam Bankman-Fried and his ilk as true believers in the Democrat cause rather than readymade turncoats.

But as we continue to see, the Democratic Party—beneath its hollow chorus of platitudes—reveals no noble cause to rally the soul, serving instead as a gilded trough for those hungering after wealth and domination. Yet, these very figures, though they embody the Republic’s most grotesque blemish, somehow might steady the fragile machinery of the nation.