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.
Thank you, Mike, as always for your clear and incisive moral direction.
Not to quibble to fine a point, as altogether I agree with you, but all over Europe there are what might be called government run grocery stores. They are called markets. They are large covered structures, government owned, and run, open summer and winter, where small farmers and purveyors can sell real estate fresh food directly to the public. Although they may not bear label saying organic, they are often grown by the people who sell them which allows small farms to stay in business. It also allows ordinary people to buy real food at an affordable price without the middleman of corporations.
I am the 1st physician in my family. Neither of my parents had more than a high school education. I started working in my father's gas station as soon as I had the strength to squeeze the handle of a gas pump. I used a wooden crate to reach the windows to clean them. I turned out to be an incredibly excellent MD, combining intelligence with technical skills and compassion to the point of empathy. My choice of specialty became cancer medicine (oncology). I will be 83 in 10 days and am the sharpest mentally I have ever been. With that said, I cannot fathom what has happened to America and the quality of Its People. By the latter, I mean the many millions who voted for and remain loyal to Trump. I am beyond being shocked at the vacuum of intelligence in this disconnected-from-reality population.
To me, it is easy to identify ALL of Trump's actions. They have three (3) screaming-out-loud characteristics:
1. Destroy America as it was. Whatever good there was in this country, Trump and his coterie of incompetents are hell-bent on destroying it. Steve Bannon even stated this openly. What happened with Elon Musk and DOGE was precisely that. But instead of DOGE being the Department of Government Efficiency, it really was DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment).
2. Emulate Vladimir Putin- Trump's role model. Trump idolizes the power possessed by Putin. Trump's burning desire is to replicate what Putin has accomplished in Russia and his tactics. What Putin has done in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and now all of Ukraine, Trump will emulate in his aggressions towards (a) the immigrant, (b) those who challenge him sufficiently to create a threat in his paranoid mind, and (c) governments and institutions that oppose his actions as they relate to items 1-3. I predict that Trump will eventually invade Greenland a la Putin by planting Trump proxies in Greenland and stirring unrest.
3. Amass humongous wealth. Trump is all about greed (aka gold). He and his father have a long genealogy pockmarked by fraudulent business transactions, all poised to amass great wealth. If Trump does something, ask, "Is this about Trump's self-aggrandizement?" or is this related to emulating Putin? If those two caveats are absent, ask if the event or action will help erase another facet of what once made America great. The MAGA acronym is the exact opposite of what Trump and friends want. Truth Social is another 180° open-faced lie.
The best description of Trump is by Kornetzke:
“Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul-all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been-arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul-it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.” Oliver Kornetzke 9/3/25
But as cathartic as this cascade of expletives is, it is action by the people that will remove him from office, along with his feckless crew, and displace the GOP from Congress.