The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party: How Silicon Valley Toasted American Fascism

While Democracy Burns, Tech CEOs Celebrate the Destruction They Enabled

This week tells you everything about Silicon Valley’s relationship to American fascism. On Monday, Pete Hegseth claimed “absolute authority” to execute alleged drug traffickers without trial. On Tuesday, Trump ordered military jets to silence Epstein survivors during their testimony. On Wednesday, a DOJ official was caught on tape admitting they moved Ghislaine Maxwell to comfortable prison conditions “to keep her quiet.” On Thursday, RFK Jr. revealed he doesn’t know how many Americans died from COVID while claiming vaccines killed more people than the virus.

And on Thursday evening, America’s tech titans gathered at the White House to toast Trump for his “visionary leadership on artificial intelligence.”

Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and the rest of Silicon Valley’s oligarchic pantheon assembled to celebrate the future of American innovation while the systematic construction of authoritarian governance unfolded around them. Did Tim Cook bring another gold bar? You know they all brought gifts—tribute for the strongman, offerings for the regime, tokens of submission disguised as diplomatic courtesy.

The moral obscenity is breathtaking. These are the people who built the systems that made democratic reasoning impossible, now toasting the dictator who’s made democratic reasoning unnecessary.

The Emblematic Crime

To understand what these oligarchs have done to America, start with Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram. His company’s internal research showed the platform was systematically destroying teenage girls’ mental health—creating unprecedented levels of depression, self-harm, and suicide among the most vulnerable users. The data was clear, the causation documented, the human cost undeniable.

Zuckerberg buried the research and continued the optimization.

This isn’t business negligence—it’s systematic cruelty disguised as innovation. Instagram was designed to extract maximum engagement from teenage minds through carefully engineered addiction, turning the most vulnerable period of human development into a profit center for algorithmic manipulation. The teenage suicide epidemic wasn’t an unfortunate side effect; it was the predictable result of systems optimized for engagement over human welfare.

But Instagram represents something larger: the entire Silicon Valley model of turning human consciousness into commodity. Every platform, every algorithm, every “connection” technology follows the same logic—fragment attention, replace authentic relationship with algorithmic substitutes, optimize human behavior for extraction rather than flourishing.

Tim Cook’s Apple markets privacy protection while building surveillance infrastructure for authoritarian regimes. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft promises AI enhancement while developing predictive policing systems that target communities for algorithmic enforcement. Each oligarch represents a variation on the same theme: technological sophistication serving moral barbarism, innovation rhetoric disguising systematic dehumanization.

The Systematic Destruction They Celebrated

What these oligarchs toasted wasn’t just political success—it’s the systematic elimination of the democratic capacity that might constrain their technological projects. The week of their dinner party revealed the full scope of authoritarian consolidation they’ve enabled:

Trump ordered eight military jets to conduct a flyover that literally drowned out Epstein survivors during their nationally televised testimony. Women who were publicly confronting their trauma for the first time were silenced by military aircraft deployed for witness intimidation. One survivor stopped mid-sentence as the jets roared overhead, raising her arm skyward and waiting for the deafening noise to pass before resuming her testimony about sexual assault.

Hegseth claimed “absolute authority” to execute alleged drug traffickers in international waters, posting videos of the killings on social media as entertainment content. “I’d say we smoked a drug boat and there’s 11 narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” he bragged about extrajudicial executions conducted without trial, legal process, or constitutional constraint.

A DOJ official was caught on undercover video confessing that Maxwell was moved to minimum security facilities “to keep her quiet” and that Epstein files would be selectively redacted to protect Republicans while exposing Democrats. The Justice Department isn’t seeking justice—it’s managing criminal exposure for the regime while weaponizing evidence against political enemies.

RFK Jr. appeared before Congress unable to answer basic questions about public health—admitting he doesn’t know COVID death counts, claiming vaccines caused more deaths than the pandemic, systematically destroying the scientific expertise that makes public health policy possible. The Health and Human Services Secretary literally doesn’t know how many Americans died from the disease his department is supposed to address.

The Pentagon is being renamed the Department of War as part of systematic militarization that includes restoring Confederate base names, banning books at military installations, and eliminating LGBTQ recognition from military culture. This isn’t military reform—it’s ideological purification designed to transform defensive institutions into offensive instruments of regime power.

Meanwhile, ICE operates with congressional funding exceeding most nations’ military budgets—$150 billion through 2029, making it larger than the military forces of Canada, Italy, and Israel combined. Internal emails obtained by The Guardian reveal explicit instructions to “turn the creative knob up to 11″ when arresting “collaterals”—innocent bystanders swept up to meet numerical quotas. Palantir’s federal contracts provide AI systems that identify targets for arrest based on algorithmic predictions rather than evidence of wrongdoing.

The Infrastructure of Control

This is what optimized governance looks like when human agency becomes an inefficiency to be eliminated. The masked federal agents operating like professional kidnappers, the Marines guarding detention centers where humans drink from toilets, the systematic disappearance of legal immigrants into foreign prisons—this represents the beta test for algorithmic administration backed by state violence.

The tech oligarchs who celebrated at Trump’s table built the cognitive infrastructure that made this systematic dehumanization possible. Their platforms don’t just extract attention—they make sustained attention to systematic criminality impossible. Citizens whose consciousness has been fragmented beyond repair can’t maintain focus long enough to understand that they’re witnessing the construction of a police state funded like a military superpower.

Every algorithmic feed that prevents sustained focus on institutional destruction, every recommendation engine that radicalizes users toward tribal thinking, every engagement optimization that rewards outrage over accuracy—these systems serve the same function as traditional propaganda but operate at neurological rather than ideological levels.

The Complicity Dinner

When these oligarchs gathered to toast Trump’s AI leadership, they weren’t just celebrating technological innovation—they were celebrating the successful implementation of their vision for human governance. Citizens optimized into behavioral compliance, democratic processes replaced by algorithmic efficiency, constitutional constraints eliminated as obstacles to systematic optimization.

They built the attention economy that made sustained democratic reasoning impossible, then toasted the authoritarian who eliminated the need for democratic reasoning altogether. They created the epistemic collapse that made fascism seem inevitable, then celebrated the fascist who promised to manage the collapse according to their technological preferences.

Zuckerberg, who buried research showing his platforms destroyed teenage mental health, celebrates a president who uses military jets to silence sexual assault survivors. Cook, who marketed privacy while building surveillance infrastructure, toasts a regime that uses federal surveillance to eliminate political opposition. Nadella, who promised AI would enhance human capability, celebrates an administration that uses algorithmic systems to identify innocent people for arrest.

The Future They’ve Engineered

What they celebrated at that dinner table represents the systematic replacement of democratic governance with technological management. Not the rule of law but the rule of algorithms. Not constitutional protection but algorithmic optimization. Not human agency but technological efficiency.

The country they’re helping create will have the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history governing citizens whose cognitive capacity has been systematically destroyed. People who can’t think for thirty seconds without algorithmic intervention, controlled through technological systems that make traditional authoritarianism look primitive, processed through AI-optimized bureaucracies that treat constitutional rights as coding inefficiencies.

The Clearview AI contracts with ICE that enable facial recognition arrests without warrants. The Palantir integration that combines federal databases to create comprehensive surveillance profiles of American citizens. The social media platforms that fragment attention until sustained resistance becomes cognitively impossible. This isn’t speculative future—it’s documented present.

The Oligarchic Toast

So raise a glass, tech titans, to the future you’ve engineered. A future where masked federal agents kidnap citizens based on algorithmic identification while engagement optimization rewards their suffering as content. Where military assets silence sexual assault survivors while recommendation engines promote their trauma as viral videos. Where human beings drink from toilets in detention centers while AI systems optimize the efficiency of their processing.

You built the technological infrastructure of fascism, funded the epistemic collapse that made fascism inevitable, and showed up to toast its political implementation. You optimized consciousness out of existence, then celebrated the unconscious state you left behind.

The Historical Verdict

History will remember that dinner party exactly as it was: oligarchs celebrating the destruction of everything that once made their wealth possible, toasting the strongman who promised to manage the chaos they created while protecting the power they accumulated.

They destroyed American democracy through technological manipulation, then gathered to celebrate the authoritarian who would govern the ruins according to their preferences. They fragmented civic consciousness until collective reasoning became impossible, then toasted the dictator who eliminated the need for collective reasoning entirely.

The merchants of attention who stole our capacity for sustained moral recognition now celebrate the regime that’s eliminated the need for moral recognition. They built the systems that made democratic choice impossible, then toasted the autocrat who’s made choice unnecessary.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the oligarchs who destroyed our democracy showed up to dinner to celebrate its replacement with something more efficient.

They got exactly what they paid for: governance optimized like their platforms, citizens processed like their users, resistance eliminated like their competition. The attention economy they built to extract profit from human consciousness now serves to extract consent for systematic dehumanization.

Welcome to the future Silicon Valley engineered: technological sophistication serving moral barbarism, algorithmic optimization eliminating human agency, artificial intelligence replacing human wisdom.

They built it. They funded it. They celebrated it.

And now we all live in it.

Remember who was there. Remember what they toasted. Remember what they chose when the choice between human dignity and technological efficiency became clear.

They chose efficiency. Every time.