The Sociopaths Are Shocked That Most People Aren’t Sociopaths

Inside Trump’s second term, Silicon Valley’s surrender, and the moral awakening that followed.

The day after Trump’s election in November of 2024 felt much different than 2016. Something shifted. It felt like a surrender. And in the cultural vacuum that formed, a series of historic shifts happened throughout the fabric of American life.

Silicon Valley CEOs who had been backing Kamala Harris moved quickly to take a knee. Mark Zuckerberg congratulated Trump on Threads: “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country.” Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post endorsement in the final weeks, then congratulated Trump with unusual effusiveness: “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” Tim Cook’s capitulation would ultimately culminate in an August 2025 Oval Office ceremony where he presented Trump with a glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base, seemingly to win tariff exemptions for the iPhone. The tech elite who had spent years publicly distancing themselves from MAGA suddenly discovered they’d been misunderstood—they were really allies all along.

Friends of mine transformed into MAGA supporters. Not before the election. Afterwards. Clearly joiners. People who felt the wind direction move and wanted to be on the winning team. Not converts convinced by argument, but weather vanes turning with the breeze. They’d calculated that MAGA had won the culture war and wanted to be on the winning side of history.

This fed the vicious triumphalism of MAGA, and set the stage for the catastrophe we are now living through.

Because what followed wasn’t just political victory—it was moral validation for people who’d spent years convinced that kindness is weakness, that cynicism equals intelligence, that power and profit are all that matter. The surrender confirmed their worldview: everyone is ultimately self-interested, morality is performance, and when the masks come off, the strongest simply take what they want.

Elon Musk declared it “inevitable.” Steve Bannon proclaimed “full-spectrum dominance.” Marc Andreessen announced it was “morning in America”—liberation from the oppression of... having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties. The triumphalism wasn’t just political—it was psychological. They thought they’d proven that their sociopathic framework for understanding human nature was correct all along.

They expected universal capitulation. They got something else instead.