by Edward Ring
Silicon Valley billionaires broke with Democrats in 2024, boosting Trump and sparking a realignment that challenges California’s oligarch-driven, one-party dominance.
Donald Trump is again president of the United States, and Republicans now control both houses of the U.S. Congress. In California, however, Gavin Newsom is still governor, and Democrats remain in absolute control of the state legislature. Whatever realignment may have swept the rest of America in 2024 has not yet affected California. But adding critical weight to the momentum of Trump’s victory was the decision by some of California’s wealthiest entrepreneurs and investors to walk away from the Democratic Party and support the MAGA movement.
Needless to say, this unexpected development has left Democrats scrambling to discredit the defectors. One of the highlights of outgoing President Biden’s farewell address on January 15 was what he hoped would be accepted as a dire warning to the American people. Two of his statements stand out. The first identifies the alleged threat:
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
The second describes, at least according to Biden, the possible consequences if the threat isn’t contained:
“But powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.”
It’s difficult to imagine a more hypocritical pair of utterances. American politics have always been heavily influenced by oligarchs, but in recent decades it is the Democratic Party that has been the primary instrument of America’s oligarchy. In the modern era, the Democratic Party’s embrace of the oligarchy took off when President Clinton approved financial deregulation and gave a green light to offshoring American manufacturing. The process accelerated during Obama’s alliance with Wall Street special interests and was again furthered during Biden’s term with the Green New Deal. The Democratic party is now firmly in the hands of oligarchs, and with Trump, the Republican party is now the party of working families across America.
While Biden claims oligarchs are contributing to Trump’s MAGA movement, everybody knows that for the last several election cycles, billionaire donors have favored Democrats. Biden’s party is supported by wealthy individuals including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Reid Hoffman, Fred Eychaner, James Simons, Stephen Mandel, and more. Democrats also continue to receive support from Wall Street firms. Then there are the billions in soft money going to Democrat-aligned C4 advocacy groups from the above-listed direct donors, along with George Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, and thousands of other supporters who fly under the radar.
But something changed in 2024. The billionaires split. And the schism happened in an unlikely place: Silicon Valley. Biden’s Democrats, and the oligarchy controlling them, went too far. They pissed off the so-called tech bros.
It’s hard to know exactly when the split began. You can go all the way back to longtime libertarian Peter Thiel’s decision to support candidate Trump, expressed in his speech at the 2016 National Republican Convention. Or more recently, you can point to Elon Musk’s realization that woke ideology had spawned institutions that deceived him, at great personal cost, with medical half-truths that were peddled as urgent and beyond debate. And then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, who spent more than $400 million in 2020 paying for get-out-the-vote efforts in Democrat-heavy precincts in swing states, performing an abrupt political about-face to publicly announce his political neutrality. Zuckerberg then claimed the threat to free speech was coming from Democrats.
Even though the Democratic politicians who still run California are doing everything they can to drive the tech bros and the companies they run out of the state, it remains the epicenter of a political realignment at the top. California’s oligarchs are no longer united, which brings us to the second highlight of Biden’s farewell speech, where he suggests these oligarchs want to “eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.”
Let’s be clear. The “steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis” so far, thanks to Biden’s oligarchs, have served their interests for power and profit. The climate crisis industry is literally the biggest money and power grab in the history of the world. Biden, in his remarks, went on to paraphrase President Eisenhower’s farewell address, where he warned Americans of the military-industrial complex.
That’s almost funny because Biden perfectly embodies the menace he’s warning us about. To use one of Biden’s own favorite phrases, here’s the deal: The military-industrial complex is alive and well, along with the woke-DEI industrial complex, the affordable-housing industrial complex, the homeless industrial complex, and most definitely the climate-crisis industrial complex. And all of these manifestations of special interest regulatory capture, politically connected industries and NGOs, and government bureaucracies— all prioritizing their own aggrandizement and unconcerned about its impact on the American people—are products of Biden’s oligarchs. These are the oligarchs behind the Democratic Party.
Trump’s mandate is often questioned by people who underestimate its strength. Outside of America’s big cities, which remain dominated by political machines controlled by unions of government employees and their cronies in the private sector, Trump commands supermajorities of the American people. Any national map showing the geographic distribution of Trump’s support proves this. Add to that, finally, the decision by a handful of extremely powerful Silicon Valley titans to reject the direction of the national Democratic Party, and you have a coalition that wins national elections.
California is a mess. Its Democratic politicians are a disgrace. Watch these performances by Senator Padilla, Senator Schiff, Governor Newsom, and former Senator Harris. These are California’s political elite: self-serving, malevolent hacks who lack integrity or substance. Like Joe Biden, they will do whatever their donors tell them to do. The idea that they care about the freedom and prosperity of individual families is laughable.
We may hope that while the tech bros and their populist allies, the American people, are busy cleaning up Washington, DC, they’ll focus some of their attention on California. Because maybe, just maybe, the people in that beleaguered state have had enough.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/22/californias-divided-oligarchy/
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