Authoritarian movements have always championed “freedom” abroad while crushing dissent at home. This pattern is well-documented.
Trump is doing both publicly, lazily and simultaneously, assuming his audience either won’t notice or won’t care about the plain contradiction.
His hypocrisy is coherent once you understand the operating principle: protest is legitimate when it destabilizes enemies, unless he is the enemy. The language of liberation is only a weapon of control, and targets are decided by him alone. Same tool, his direction.
The “senseless killing of protesters” demands cancelled meetings and promised consequences. But not Renee Nicole Good. Her senseless killing is justification for threatening the protesters, not the killers.
The rhetoric is structurally identical. Protests, institutional takeover, naming names, retribution coming. The only variable is whose power gets threatened.
Mark Zuckerberg complained bitterly that Biden officials made phone calls. He said he couldn’t handle the interference as they “pressured” Meta to address pandemic misinformation. He even called their calls censorship and wrote a letter to Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee detailing performative outrage.
His new response to alleged government overreach? He just installed a government official to run the company as if in a tin-pot dictatorship.
Dina Powell McCormick, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, is now President and Vice Chairman of Meta. Trump immediately celebrated the collapse of separation on his social media account:
A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!
The complaint about Biden was never about independence from the state. It was about partisanship, splitting the country, to control which state gets the controller’s seat.
Zuckerberg’s letter to Jordan wasn’t a complaint—it was an offering. Evidence submitted to the investigative apparatus building cases against the previous administration. Jordan’s committee used that letter to subpoena Biden officials Andrew Slavitt and Robert Flaherty by name. The corporation provided the evidence to divide the country and target enemies within; the party apparatus converts it into prosecutions.
Meta is now cited as the persecution model other companies must follow. Jordan’s committee recently subpoenaed Alphabet because, unlike Meta, it hasn’t “similarly disavowed the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to censor speech” meaning it’s too free from Trump censorship.
The Nazi Germans had a word for Zuckerberg: Selbstgleichschaltung—self-coordination. Corporations rushing to install party-aligned leadership to demonstrate loyalty and secure position. The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes that the state enforced coordination from the top-down, but many Germans responded with bottom-up coordination of their own. Even Hitler was surprised at the speed from the Zuckerbergs of his day: “everything is going much faster than we ever dared to hope.”
Powell McCormick could even be a controller imposed from outside, like a domestic Venezuela “grab”. She appears right now as voluntary installation of a party loyalist to signal that Meta has completed its own coordination of targeted censorship by the state. The sequence is now established: file evidence with the committee, receive subpoena protection, install the party official to divide the country and censor enemies, get dictator endorsement.
Zuckerberg positioned himself as defending Meta from government influence, and shows now he’s the exact opposite guy. The operational reality is he invited government influence when it meant the end of the democracy. The letter to Jordan was the application. Powell McCormick is the acceptance letter.
Texas A&M brought a robot to a culture war to scan syllabi for “gender ideology.” Their censorship AI flagged Plato’s Symposium, a 2,400-year-old dialogue where the phrase “platonic love” comes from.
The administrators wouldn’t overrule their dumb robot. They told the professor to censor the classics and delete Plato or be reassigned to teaching MAGA hat tricks.
This is the whole story.
Texas spent years building a political brand around defending the classics of “Western civilization” against woke academics who don’t teach the classics anymore.
Then they built an enforcement robot to kill liberalism. The robot instead killed Plato because the robot can’t tell the difference between woke training and the foundational text of Western philosophy.
Neither can they.
That’s the deepest cut here. The “classical education” thing was all hat and never any cattle. Cultural signaling for people who never read books. Hillsdale markets their Great Books programs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation runs “Western Civilization Summits.” The political network meant to save the classics built the robot that red-flagged the Symposium, just because Aristophanes’ speech from thousands of years ago mentioned a third gender.
They are not hypocrites, because that requires knowing what you claim to value. These are cargo cultists. Their cowboy affectations, the “defend Western civ” rhetoric, the Great Books branding… all of it just big empty hats.
This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again
He explicitly says he’d “do it again” while also saying “I do not recommend that at all”, the sort of contradiction in a value extraction guy that deserves pushback. He’s claiming vindication while disavowing the method. That’s the tell of someone who knows his real story wouldn’t survive scrutiny, and who acts like nobody is allowed to challenge him on it.
The CEO acquires dying software products and extracts remaining value. He celebrates firing people for not “believing” rather than for failing to deliver measurable outputs. The technical staff who raised concerns about what AI couldn’t do, which is exactly what competent engineers should do, were labeled the “most resistant.”
Expertise became evidence of heresy. And then came the loyalty purge to get rid of technology experts. In other words he rapidly curated a value story and deleted everyone who could prove it wrong.
Engineering operates on evidence to reach a conclusion. You measure, you test, you revise based on outcomes.
Evangelical Christianity operates on belief as the only allowed evidence. You commit first, then interpret outcomes as confirmation. Doubt is sin, not method.
This CEO isn’t accidentally using religious language. He’s describing an actual faith-based decision process, toxic to engineering:
“saw the light”
“evangelize”
“belief was really the thing he needed to recruit for”
“changing minds was harder than adding skills”
All of this is evidence of incompetent leadership, because it destroys the foundation of intelligence necessary to build quality products. He invested 20% of payroll in a “mass learning initiative” that “failed”, but there’s no metric for what success would have meant. No measurement of productivity gains that justified the purge.
A 75% EBITDA figure is offered as vindication, but there’s no baseline comparison, no demonstration that the mass firing produced better results than alternatives. Because the firings were never about a measured outcome other than loyalty to the supreme ruler.
The business case is entirely post-hoc rationalization for a faith-based loyalty test to block human intelligence. An industry survey found workers who didn’t perform sufficient enthusiasm were labeled as committing “sabotage”. Vaughan’s framework shows why that false framing would follow.
Dissent essential to engineering becomes treason. In Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer abruptly shoots an engineer in the head, because she told him the foundation is flawed, and then he orders his men to follow her recommendation. The expertise was correct. The doubt was the crime.
The infamous Nazi Amon Goeth found causes for anger everywhere he looked, and especially hated technical expertise, as depicted in the movie Schindler’s List
The McKinsey framing of “lifelong reskilling” completes the circuit. In evangelical Christianity, you’re never saved enough because you must continually demonstrate faith, attend services, tithe, testify. Backsliding is always possible.
The worker under permanent reskilling obligation is the congregant who can never miss a Sunday, always being evaluated for sufficient devotion, while the pastor accumulates wealth as proof of blessing.
Capital gets to be the priesthood.
Labor gets to be the congregation that must perpetually prove faith while receiving no guaranteed salvation.
And let’s be honest. All this “AI transformation” narrative really is just PR cover for what this guy at ESW Capital has always done to squeeze blood from a rock: acquire companies, convert employees to contractors, surveil them, and eliminate headcount.
The faith-based language signals more than incompetent tech leadership—it’s cover for a private equity extraction operation rebranding mass layoffs as visionary disruption mumbo jumbo.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
