Good morning and happy Monday. As our neighbors to the south refocus their anxieties from fire alerts to flood watches, let’s nevertheless take a moment to say a prayer of thanks for the rains that graced much of California this weekend.
I want to remind you that below The Newsletter’s featured article, recipe, etc., you will find a News Digest consisting of articles we’ve selected from our Media Allies and other trusted news sources. This week, you can find out how the various municipalities in your county are responding to Pres. Donald Trump’s executive order regarding undocumented immigrants. (As you may have heard, many California law enforcement officials are vowing to not cooperate.) Other news too—on a variety of topics depending on where you live—that’s how we do it.
But first, let’s just say it—‘broligarchs.’ That is a funny word and a frightening reality. I first saw the word back in August, in The Atlantic, in an article by Brooke Harrington, who wrote of “prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president [and who] have done an about-face.”
I witnessed this movement from the perspective of a journalist who worked in Silicon Valley way back in the day, and has since witnessed its metastatic growth with both fascination and dread. Mostly, if I’m honest, fascination. The tech bros who give the broligarchy its name are men I have followed for years. I’ve paid close attention to Elon Musk himself from the moment he arrived on the scene, and written about him and his ventures countless times, beginning in 2008, when he gave a keynote at a conference dedicated to the newly burgeoning green-technology sector. At that time, he was a bit of a hero to folks longing to see the fossil-fuel-dominated ecomony displaced.
(For those of you who do not recall that Musk was someone who progressive Americans liked and admired, check a fact that Brooke Harrington included in her Atlantic piece, that Musk once waited in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand.)
So when we talk about the broligarchy, I need to remind everyone that these men, who now appear to be entirely corrupted, were recently revered as the good guys. I can say that for Musk, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, Netscape-founder and VC Marc Andreeson—three leaders of the pro-Trump Silicon Valley cohort—and others. (Not so sure about Zuckerberg and Bezos.)
And how is it that these men have now decided that public enemy number one is federal support for public education? (And why is government-subsidized public education worth defending?) Let’s find out.
