Something is happening in California’s Silicon Valley that is going to change America and the world. It’s a cultural shift with implications that will have an impact as profound as what it has already done with its technology. It’s happening from the ground up, changing the attitudes of techies in the Valley and their counterparts across America. The signs were evident for years. They embraced progressive rhetoric. They supported the one-party, Democrat-run state. But everything just got worse. Unaffordable homes. Expensive energy and rationed water. Uncontrolled crime and homelessness. Ineffective, overpriced public education. Overpaid public employees, with their unions running everything. And a hostile state legislature that kept adding layers of harassment onto every private business.
From the outside looking in, it is reasonable to think the Silicon Valley elites and their progressive workforces were willing accomplices, if not the actual architects of California’s dysfunction. But even in the early days of progressive dominion over the state, the late 1990s and the early aughts, that was only partially true. California’s technology sector and Silicon Valley culture thrived in spite of California’s one-party state, not because of it. And as that state and its regulators became increasingly hostile, one by one, techies began to flip from blue to purple and from purple to red. Today, those flips are becoming a cascade.
The 2020s will be the decade that Silicon Valley returns to its roots. Despite the horrified commentary coming from the corporate left and its captive commentariat, these are not “techno-fascists.” And while the New Yorker, in a February 2025 feature article, may have recently popularized that phrase, what they characterize as “Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government” is just the latest major episode in a cultural revolution. Techies are taking the Red Pill, and it’s going to change America.
The core ideology that has governed Silicon Valley for decades has been fundamentally libertarian. The valley is populated by entrepreneurs whose successes and failures have been forged in one of the purest ecosystems of meritocracy the world has ever seen. In this heartland of high tech, this epicenter of innovation, this digital wonderland where start-ups are spawned by the millions, thousands of successful companies emerge for just one reason: They build the most compelling products anybody has ever seen. They create industries that dominate the world, where a few years earlier, there was nothing. They invent wants that become needs that become necessities. They drive the future of the world. And the competition is ruthless and unrelenting. Those who have risen to the top in this Darwinian crucible are the smartest, richest, most creative, and most energetic people on the planet. It is Athens, Rome, and Chicago: it is every place that ever, in its prime, had rewritten the future.
Until social media came along, most of Silicon Valley’s top executives and successful investors were almost apolitical. If they had political leanings, they were moderate, pro-business Democrats without strong passions either way. The Valley had nurtured prosperity at a stunning rate, going through cycles of booms and downturns, but every iteration yielded more world-leading companies and more billionaires. Washington, DC, was on the other side of a big continent. Life was good.
The downward spiral began in earnest sometime around 2010 when the Pavlovian power of social media was mutually recognized by Silicon Valley companies that were exploding in revenue and reach and the deep state operatives running Washington, DC, who were confronting a new phenomenon that threatened to utterly demolish their ability to influence political narratives.
As Silicon Valley was morphing into more than just a purveyor of high-tech innovation and becoming, almost unwittingly, an extremely powerful arbiter of political dialogue, a quiet takeover was happening internally in its corporations. Under pressure to hire diverse workforces and unable to find and hire enough software engineers who filled those criteria, these companies swelled the ranks of their human resources and marketing departments, disciplines for which there was no shortage of “diverse” applicants.
These twin forces—a sudden focus by America’s elite political insiders on high-tech companies, along with a growing internal cadre of diversity hires—at first didn’t affect these companies or their cultures very much. They were enjoying one of the Valley’s biggest booms yet, so they could afford to hire a percentage of less productive employees in order to fulfill race and gender quotas. Overall, the internal and external pressure still wasn’t that intense, and for the most part, it all seemed consistent with their generally left-of-center and fairly unexamined beliefs.
But in 2016, Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected president, and everything changed. As is well documented by, for example, investigative writer Michael Shellenberger, former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, and many others, enormous pressure to censor social media content was put onto these companies, in many cases—at least initially—with their willing complicity. The pressure campaigns were successful, and four years later, Trump lost to Joe Biden in a close and contested election.
And with Biden in the White House, the clown show began. What pressure had occurred between 2016 and 2020 may have raised eyebrows among the Silicon Valley elite and may have begun to stir feelings of resentment, but the Biden administration took everything to a much more intense and more absurd level. Under Biden, every imaginable left-wing, allegedly counter-culture obsession became mainstream and mandatory. Movements that had matured and mellowed—think feminism and gay marriage—suddenly became urgent and extreme again. Tolerance was passé. Active endorsement and promotion were the new norm, as was condemnation and cancellation of any content even slightly critical of these movements. At the same time, movements that had never concerned more than a minute fraction of the population abruptly also acquired urgency and extreme visibility—in particular, transsexual and transgender rights. And again, tolerance was no longer enough. Active endorsement was required.
Human resources departments that were now expanded and entrenched in large, high-tech companies took on these new mandates with enthusiasm. They took it upon themselves to move well beyond screening and hiring new employees or managing health benefits. Now they held company seminars, brought in diversity consultants, and packed employees into sensitivity trainings. They set up snitch lines to encourage anyone who felt marginalized or in any way mistreated to report the offenders and poured time and resources into adjudicating what in saner times would have been non-incidents. For every case of genuine harassment requiring corrective action, there were hundreds of microaggressions to be investigated, all of them consuming corporate resources, all of them given unwarranted attention.
And the tech bros who just wanted to write code and get rich started to notice that their workplace was becoming ridiculously unpleasant. Where there had always been a hierarchy of brilliant and action-oriented bosses taking the company to new heights, there were now commissars who cared more about whether or not you had complied with their directive to insert your “preferred pronouns” in your email signature. From top to bottom, the competent people began to feel more resentment. And then came the 2024 presidential election, where, despite all the coercion, despite all the censorship, in the biggest comeback in the history of American politics, Trump won again.
Now there was an administration in Washington, DC, that was proclaiming out loud the resentments that had been building up for years among the Valley’s most productive contributors. Talented employees and results-oriented executives were able to speak their minds again. It wasn’t as if they all became right-wing zealots. It merely meant they didn’t have to agree with every leftist orthodoxy imaginable. They were set free. And that shift, that small shift, in a place so consequential, shook the woke tower of Barad-dûr to its foundations. Put another way, it was a shift felt around the world.
This is the context in which to explain why the established American Left is terrified by the “techno-fascists.” But what is happening in Silicon Valley today should surprise nobody who has lived in that culture for more than this most recent generation. These are people shaped by a culture that thrives on competition and excellence. That culture is incompatible with woke ideology, and the collision between the two was inevitable.
Next week, we will explore some of the coalitions they’re building and why we have every reason to hope that Silicon Valley, abruptly turned purple, may even turn red. And true to form, it will be a shade of red that is a unique and potent expression of everything they’ve learned and every partner they’ve embraced.