At the risk of beating a dead horse, I return to the topic of my last installment of my public catharsis in the form of moral outrage: the dinner party at the White House with America’s titans of tech. In particular, the hot mic moment between Mark Zuckerberg and the President. A moment that reveals everything that’s really going on. The performance and the spectacle. Made up numbers, designed to dazzle the gullible, while an unaccountable elite closes ranks around a collapsing constitutional order.
“I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with,” Zuckerberg whispered to Trump after announcing that Meta would invest $600 billion in American AI infrastructure—a figure so astronomically absurd that it would require borrowing more than twice the company’s total book value. The CEO of a publicly traded company just admitted on live microphone that he fabricates financial projections based on whatever pleases the Dear Leader, securities law and shareholder responsibilities be damned.
This isn’t business negotiation. This is a courtier asking his king what lies he’d prefer to hear, then delivering them with practiced servility to a public they view as sheep requiring management rather than citizens deserving truth.
The Performance Apparatus
What the hot mic moment exposes is the elaborate theater that authoritarian consolidation requires to maintain legitimacy while systematic plunder proceeds. Each tech CEO arrived with their scripted lines, their choreographed praise, their fabricated projections designed to create the appearance of economic dynamism while the regime systematically destroys the institutional framework that makes genuine prosperity possible.
They’re not making independent business decisions—they’re participating in coordinated performance art designed to legitimize a regime that uses military jets to silence sexual assault survivors, claims unlimited authority to execute suspected criminals without trial, and deploys Marines to guard detention centers where human beings drink from toilets.
The made-up numbers serve the same function as the Department of War renaming, the AI-generated memes threatening to burn Chicago, the claims that Trump was an FBI informant investigating Epstein: they’re props in an elaborate reality show designed to distract from systematic constitutional destruction.
The Moral Hierarchy
I think Zohran Mamdani’s idea for government-run grocery stores is an absolutely terrible policy, and that anti-poverty measures should focus on other approaches. But in the grand scheme of things, it is—at least—well-intentioned policy. And in this moment of moral collapse, intention counts for something.
One must contrast this with the wealthiest people in the history of humanity, sitting in the court of the most corrupt man to ever hold the office of the Presidency, casually making up numbers to placate a public they view as sheep, while the regime they ingratiate themselves with engages in extrajudicial killings of suspected drug traffickers, plans military occupations of American cities that don’t bend the knee, and oversees an era of extractive capitalism that makes the robber barons look restrained.
Even misguided attempts to help people afford food deserve more moral consideration than sophisticated systems designed to help billionaires avoid accountability while democracy dies around them. The question isn’t whether policies are optimal but whether they serve human flourishing or oligarchic extraction.
The Time of Monsters
Winter is not coming. It is here. And as Antonio Gramsci once observed: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
We’re living in exactly that interregnum where democratic institutions have lost legitimacy but authoritarian alternatives haven’t fully consolidated, creating space for the kind of monstrous figures who thrive in moral collapse. The oligarchs making up numbers for Trump aren’t just corrupt—they’re the monsters Gramsci predicted, people whose wealth grants them enormous power during periods of institutional breakdown but whose moral emptiness makes them incapable of building anything sustainable.
Zuckerberg, who destroyed American democratic discourse through algorithmic manipulation, now manufactures investment figures to serve Trump’s propaganda needs. Truth becomes whatever number the strongman wants to hear, reality becomes whatever the regime finds convenient to claim, and the public becomes whatever the oligarchs need them to believe to maintain their position in the collapsing order.
The Choice Before Us
The choice isn’t between perfect policies pursued by flawless leaders. It’s between people who still believe governance should serve human welfare and people who’ve abandoned that pretense entirely for the more efficient extraction that authoritarian rule provides.
Between democratic socialists who want government-run grocery stores and oligarchic fascists who want government-run execution squads. Between politicians who might implement bad policies with good intentions and tech titans who implement sophisticated deception with purely extractive intentions.
Between those trying to help people eat and those trying to help autocrats eliminate the people who might question why so many can’t afford food in the richest society in human history.
The hot mic didn’t just catch Zuckerberg lying—it caught him revealing the fundamental relationship between oligarchy and authoritarianism in our time. Power serves wealth, truth serves power, and human dignity becomes an inefficiency to be optimized away by people who’ve forgotten what dignity means.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the wealthiest people in human history just got caught making up numbers for a dictator while he plans to bomb American cities.
The monsters are here. The question is whether enough of us will recognize them before they finish optimizing humanity out of existence.
Remember what’s real. Choose intention over extraction. Resist the monsters who mistake wealth for wisdom.
The center holds only when someone chooses to hold it.
Bravo Mike ! This is a powerful essay and one I’m going to translate to share in my activism overseas. All the monstrosities have to be identified and strongly addressed so they don’t become normalized. Your incisive comments are important.
So very well said. The imaginary horrors of a brown person advocating for humane public policy to help the most vulnerable versus the unimaginable horrors of wealthy white people advocating for inhumane and dehumanizing public policy to further enrich themselves.