A-Eye, A-Eye, Captain!

The Broligarchy Salutes Its Servant

There they were at the First Felon’s inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, four years after it was ransacked in service of The Big Lie. All reeking of black Lexus SUV air freshener and the Axe Body spray their phalanx of security rubbed off on them. Mark Zuckerberg with his wife, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook. Somewhere off camera, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, maybe Marc Andreesen. Most were in better seats than the clown car of Trump cabinet nominees placed just behind them.

BroLord Musk soon distinguished himself with an enthusiastic Sig Heil salute in front of Trump and an audience of untold tens of millions who tuned in to watch the indoor inaugural parade. The night before, he stuttered his way through a short speech at the pre-inauguration MAGA rally, introducing Trump. Nothing he said made much sense, and he kept looking down and behind the podium, where, it turns out, the son that one of his baby mamas, Grimes, has said she was rarely allowed to see, was jumping around after “just following” his dad up on stage.

Musk (anyone notice this still autocorrects to Muck?) was the last warmup act before the appearance of the dumpy oaf the stadium was waiting for, the Oz whose Second Reich the tech bros have bought and paid for.

Trump took the podium and, right away, to grind in Americans’ sense of helplessness against abusive politics, surveillance, and algorithms, wink-winked that Musk had … maybe … people are saying … helped him steal Pennsylvania: "He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide." (Fact check: Starlink is not connected to counting computers and election experts don’t think Trump stole Pennsyltucky, a lot of voters there just really like him.)

Talk about triggering the libs.

Meanwhile, the financial media was busy normalizing the on-paper, overnight multibillion-dollar haul the $trump and $melania memecoins “earned” for the Trump family. Shameless corruption and crypto as a bottomless bribe intake machine are, just like that, part of America’s wallpaper – just some more updates brought to you by chirpy anchor voices and Wall Street analysts whose corporate media employers are unanimously on bended knee before the fluffy golden-crowned, red-tied New Pharaoh.

As I write this, the short fat fingers have not started to sign hundreds of expected – or perhaps, threatened – executive orders. Those documents are waiting on a desk placed high on a dais inside the Capitol One Arena, where a MAGA horde in red, white, and blue waits to be entertained Hunger Games-style as their Dear Leader with a flick of the pen turns national parks into oil fields, sends SWAT-clad feds into local police stations to round up migrants, and initiates the rest of the Christo-fascist Project 2025 agenda by fiat.

The Capitol Rotunda seating arrangement pressed home a fact made increasingly obvious for the last weeks as the bros poured cash into the inauguration and Zuck promised to let in some “masculine energy” and stop fact-checking Facebook users who want to call Mexican people rapists, Black people lazy, women whores, gay people mentally ill, etc.

Trump’s election was not only bought and paid for by the U.S. tech oligarchy. The Second Reich will now be upheld by the people who showed up Saturday night at Peter Thiel’s Washington mansion, where Donald Trump Junior (the family member the tech boys keep on speed dial to make sure Grampa knows how rich crypto can make him and how to use his I-phone) stepped out of a limo with his gelled-back hair, squealing to reporters that a Monday morning has never looked good as this one.

As a white nationalist endeavor (paramilitary Proud Boys mustered outside the Capitol in the cold as the fat man laid his hand on the Bible), it’s apt that the men at the pinnacle of the MAGA oligarchy are South Africa-born, suckled in a nation with a terrifying history of entrenched white supremacy: Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. Musk and Sacks have been granted actual positions in the administration – Musk to defund the government and Sacks to promote unregulated crypto-coin and ensure the U.S. creates a bitcoin reserve. Thiel is sitting back with his freak of a monarchist philosophe Curtis Yarvin (here profiled like a spider in waiting in the Times) writing incomprehensible essays, and replenishing his middle aged skin with whatever age-defying human biofuel Silicon Valley dermatologists have legal access to.

The reason for the wholesale capitulation of Silicon Valley moguls to Trumpism is, in one way not that much different than the first wave of MAGA support – white people from rural parts and the flinty upper middle-class gated communities who wanted a strongman to say what they couldn’t say about the rise of a black president and his people.

The techy white rich guys are as afflicted with a sense of victimization as the supposedly victimized white rabble was before the 2016 win. You only need listen to former Democrat venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, who’s been making the rounds in the last few weeks explaining his conversion.

In a long interview with the New York Times this past weekend, Andreesen explained that the Democrats lost him during Obama’s second term when newly minted college graduates from fancy schools back east coming to work for him started talking like socialists. Andreesen freaked out:

And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Like the odious, cat-loving, human-loathing freaky Wall Street tech billionaire Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon’s financier, as well as Musk and Zuckerberg and the rest of them, Andreesen clearly thinks he is entitled to his massive fortune by virtue of being superior, smarter than everyone else.

None of these men would be willing to admit that they are at some level just lucky bastards who were standing around near a math department when the sum of all human knowledge galloped into a new era of silicon chips and massive machine computing power. Furthermore, none of them acknowledge that public money in the universities and the DARPA enabled a lot of that early research. Instead, Andreesen is pissed that the “radicalized hard” young people coming to work for him didn’t revere him for essentially having been in the right University of Illinois computer science lab at the right time.

The second reason the broligarchy went MAGA is, of course, cold, simple greed. Andreesen was hardly alone in whining that the Biden administration has been crushing crypto coin with its regulations. It’s a complaint that people like David Sacks have been airing for years.

A conspiracy theory that’s been making the rounds since last summer, and to which I didn’t give much credence now looks like it has a little merit: These guys wouldn’t mind if crypto could replace the dollar - and sooner rather than later. According to David Sirota at The Lever, fossil fuel magnates are among the dark money backers of a crypto lobby that wants the US to create a Bitcoin reserve. Doing so would immediately boost the value of Bitcoin by orders of magnitude, making holders of it richer than Croesus (or Musk anyway). Among those pushing it is a dark money group called Satoshi Action Fund (named after the pseudonymous supposed inventor of blockchain):

A Lever review of the group’s tax filings and its executives’ past employers found that the Satoshi Action Fund has deep connections to the Koch Network, a consortium of oil and petrochemical companies, and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the sweeping Project 2025 blueprint to reshape the federal government when Trump takes office. One of the Satoshi Action Fund’s executives even wrote the blueprint’s chapter on how to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency — a government agency that she worked for during the first Trump administration.

The mounting Bitcoin reserve efforts come as the crypto industry spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars during the last campaign cycle to help elect crypto-friendly lawmakers. Both chambers of Congress will have a majority of pro-crypto legislators, and Trump has begun nominating industry allies for key regulatory positions.

No one cares if unregulated crypto becomes a high-tech version of the credit default swap scheme that a past generation of financial geniuses drove into a global financial crash. They care even less if the industry destroys the environment: According to The Lever, in the same article, U.S.-based Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than the state of New Jersey. And data centers are now using 200 billion gallons of water every year — 700 gallons for every American.

If you want to really understand how deeply banal and unfit these men are to run American government and policy, I suggest listening to a podcast called All In with David Sacks. I occasionally check in and have been enlightened to the mediocrity of, for example, AI magnate Sam Altman, talking about how he hopes he can make an AI that fits into his phone so that he can have the most efficient executive assistant ever right in his pocket at all times. Th All In bros preen and prattle on in sometimes incomprehensible MBA-speak lingo. They recently praised a new generation of Chinese robots that can run faster than any human, which one of them suggested would be useful to police the perimeter of his “ranch.” These tech cowboys, desperate for “masculine energy,” clearly believe they are among the highest possible iteration of the tool-making human, with a direct lineage to Prometheus, or whoever shaped the first club or arrowhead. Our era’s toolmaking apes, scornful toward the humanities, with little use for anything or anyone that seeks to teach community or encourage morality and social skills.

On the contrary, such knowledge is derided by men like Curtis Yarvin as a relic of the “longhouse” - scornful code for the supposedly indigenous maternal living spaces where clusters of gossiping useless women spy on each other, so inferior to the frontier lone gun, the oligarch on his “ranch,” home, home on the range with a robot, rocking to the Village People at Mar a Lago, the unapologetic MAGA-fied techie Man in Full.

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