Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Silicon Valley’s Red Pill Decade, Part Two: New Alliances - Edward Ring

 

by Edward Ring

A new wave of Red-Pilled Silicon Valley rebels—led by Musk and Thiel—are ditching woke orthodoxy to build parallel systems rooted in tech, natalism, and civilizational revival.

 

 

Anyone who has spent a few years in Silicon Valley will realize its sudden status at the beginning of the 2020s as a powerful accomplice to regime censorship was incompatible with the core values of the people running these companies. It lasted as long as it did because the progressive pieties they were pressured to protect and promote—social equity and climate alarm—were beliefs they generally shared with the Democratic establishment and the army of activists who had infiltrated their companies. But then a few powerful defectors rejected the pieties and defied the pressure from Washington. Most notably, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the subsequent emergence of that platform as a place where anyone, including the reinstated, reelected U.S. President Trump, could post their unvarnished, politically incorrect opinions without being canceled.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter didn’t just reopen the floodgates of uncensored content on the internet. By reducing headcount by 80 percent, yet preserving, if not improving, the user experience, he demonstrated just how bloated many of the major social media platforms had become and dramatically asserted how meritocracy and efficiency could decisively improve a company’s financial resilience. And then Musk went to Washington with a mandate to do the same thing with the federal government.

This effort created panic across the entire federal bureaucracy and apoplectic criticism from the established media. Perhaps it was always impossible for Musk’s DOGE project to rapidly reduce federal spending, but the seed was planted. Musk has refocused on his private ventures, but what he started will continue. There is now a permanent and growing cadre of federal appointees and watchdogs in Washington delivering heightened scrutiny of federal spending. They are exposing decades of corrupt redirection of funds to partisan NGOs and incompetent and wasteful management of benefits, and they are displaying a far more aggressive commitment to do something about it.

However, Musk’s accomplishments have had a greater impact on Silicon Valley culture than on Washington, DC culture. What he did with Twitter and DOGE are just two very recent examples of the legacy he is building. Musk’s SpaceX has lowered the cost to deliver a payload into low Earth orbit, adjusting for inflation, by more than an order of magnitude in just ten years. His other main venture, Tesla, has pioneered and completely transformed the automotive industry, advancing the rollout of EVs by many years. What he’s doing with NeuralinkxAI, and the Boring Company are all innovations that hold similar breakthrough potential. Musk is a quintessential example of what Silicon Valley means to the people who built it, and he’s not alone.

Musk, like Steve Jobs one generation earlier or Bob Noyce and the rest of the Fairchild Eight a generation before that, exemplifies the pioneers who made Silicon Valley the center not only of a worldwide revolution in technology but also a revolution in individual empowerment. These are eccentric, brilliant, driven innovators. The idea that men like this would allow Washington DC bureaucrats and a pack of woke mediocrities to hamstring their companies and define what they could and couldn’t build or say was doomed from the start. It was just a matter of time. When Musk bought Twitter, the writing was on the wall. When Trump won the 2024 election, it was game on.

So, who are Silicon Valley techies aligning themselves with now that they’ve divorced themselves from the woke pack? There are plenty of candidates. To get an idea of who is fighting for freedom, it’s always instructive to read the compilations produced by the left. For example, DeSmog BlogSourceWatch, or the Southern Poverty Law Center are all organizations that produce lists of who they deem dangerous. But if you read their lists, apart from a few individuals and groups that are truly problematic, you have a valuable resource. If you want to fight the special interests that want to turn us all into livestock and micromanage our lives in the name of “equity” and to cope with the “climate emergency,” you will find allies by perusing the enemies lists produced by these groups.

Which brings us to a series of articles recently published in the July/August 2025 issue of Mother Jones under the cover headline “Techno-Fascist Takeover.” Behind the horrified rhetoric, which is catnip for their progressive readership, is a useful compendium of who in Silicon Valley has taken the Red Pill and what alliances they’re forming. In no particular order, here are just a few of the tycoons of Silicon Valley who have decided they’d rather help define and empower the MAGA movement than support the woke alternative:

Peter ThielMarc AndreesenJoe LonsdaleDavid SacksChamath Palihapitiya, and, of course, Elon Musk. What animates these leaders is a revulsion against censorship and regulatory interference in their business ventures, but also a recognition that Western civilization itself is imperiled by these policies and the cultural dysfunction that is both the cause and the result of them. Many of them, Musk most visibly, are pro-natalist. Mother Jones accurately typifies the two currents of pro-natalists as “the ‘trads,’ most of whom are religiously motivated,” and “the ‘techies,’ many of whom see pronatalism as an imperative for maximizing the potential of the human race.”

The article, true to the editorial bias of the magazine, includes what we may safely presume were obligatory paragraphs quoting “experts” who claim that collapsing birth rates are nothing to worry about. But the author and the editors are required to view anything remotely pro-natalist as both racist and sexist. That required bias, combined with a probable lack of numeracy or common sense, compels them to view the defining issue of our time as right-wing hype. No such delusions inform the Red-Pilled tycoons of Silicon Valley. They’ve analyzed the worldwide distribution of birth rates and recognize it as a genuine crisis.

The natalist movement rejects mass immigration as a solution to the birth dearth in the developed world, believing large families are the only solution that will preserve Western civilization. Proponents of natalism include NewFounding, an investment and real estate firm with a goal “to shape institutions with Christian norms and orient them toward a Christian vision of life, of society, and of the good.” For the last few years, the pronatalist movement has converged at “NatalCon,” an annual conference to explore solutions to “the greatest population bust in human history.”

What Mother Jones characterizes as the “tech-trad” alignment has other dimensions, of course. This would include proponents of breakaway communities, mostly represented by techies, seeking to escape the regulatory state. They imagine—wherever they can be established—“pop-up cities” or “special economic zones” to bring together like-minded people who will operate under their own set of laws, often relying on cyber currency to acquire assets and conduct commerce. They even envision “online nations” with territories that exist virtually but create an economic and political environment that is independent of the host nations.

Proponents of breakaway communities include Balaji Srinivasan, a leading advocate for independent online nations; Joseph McKinney, who has invested in starting a Digital Economic Zone that would secure some of its autonomy by leveraging a potential partnership with a sovereign tribal nation on the East Coast; and Patri Friedman, founder of Pronomos Capital, a startup-societies investment firm.

It is easy to imagine how these new alliances can become fraught, insofar as they unify individuals and movements that aren’t marching in ideological lockstep. Nonetheless, they share a great deal in common – a libertarian affinity for independent communities unregulated by a central state, a belief in the transformative and fundamentally good impact of rapidly advancing technological innovation, an embrace of cyber currency as a pathway to financial privacy and economic independence, a recognition that the population collapse in the West is real and cannot be mitigated by population replacement via mass immigration, a commitment to the preservation of Western civilization, a colorblind version of anti-racism that awards membership and achievement within society based on individual merit and shared values, a disillusionment with government bureaucracies and established political parties, and a wholesale rejection of the entire edifice of woke ideology.

This is the milieu into which increasing numbers of Silicon Valley techies and tycoons, joined by their counterparts across America and the world, are gravitating. Understandably, the left sees it as a mortal threat. It has the potential to completely dismantle the empire they’ve constructed, built on racial resentment and apocalyptic climate panic, first by creating a parallel society that is indifferent to the institutions currently captured by the left, and then by ripping those institutions apart and reinventing them with a new set of values. And those values will reflect what Silicon Valley has always been, apart from a brief interregnum when the woke dominated for a few years, then grossly overplayed their hand.


Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/09/silicon-valleys-red-pill-decade-part-two-new-alliances/

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