I have been reporting in Washington for nearly six years, and on politics for over a decade, and I’ve attended more corporate-sponsored policy events (and tend to nod off during them) than I can remember. I’ve also reported on the gradual disintegration of reality caused by the rise of MAGA, so I thought my tolerance for confusing political phenomena was pretty high. But never in my life did I think I would see Steve Bannon sitting onstage in his beat-up barn jacket next to former Consumer Finance and Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra, a notable progressive introduced as “a protege of Senator Elizabeth Warren,” with the two of them earnestly discussing the topic: “Are Techno-optimism and Populism Incompatible?”
Not that the topic was out of left field per se — the tech right and the populist right are in an all-out war, and it’s roiling the Trump administration. But this was a visual pairing that reduced me to sending a photo of the stage with the caption “what if horseshoe theory, but real” to several sources.
Bannon’s appearance at Y Combinator’s Little Tech Summit earlier this month was a surprise — his timeslot had been buried in the schedule as a panel titled “Conversation: TBA.” Conferences tend to have panels whose speakers aren’t confirmed until the last minute, and the attendees were hardly abuzz with anticipation.
The day had already been a mindfuck, and would continue to be a mindfuck. Saagar Enjeti, right-wing host of the podcast Breaking Points, moderated a panel – a smart guy, to be sure, but the idea of a podcaster hosting a policy panel at Y Combinator last year would have been bonkers. The Federal Trade Commission’s chair Andrew Ferguson was introduced with an AI-generated Ghibli-fied avatar of himself. He — as well as key officials in the Department of Justice’s antitrust division — appeared at the event while deliberately shunning the American Bar Association’s spring antitrust meeting across the street, the first time any administration had ever done so. Granted, this was hardly the weirdest thing he was up to these days — Ferguson, as leader of the FTC, had just recently declared his opposition to maintaining the FTC as an independent agency.
Hours later, Lina Khan, his progressive predecessor, slammed Trump for firing two Democrat FTC commissioners, then proceeded to take a photo with Bannon. (The photo, which ended up on social media, ended up causing a minor internet meltdown).
On stage, a DOJ attorney declared that this was the era of MAGA antitrust. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) continued to make threatening noises at Meta, despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has begun presenting himself as a manosphere, pro-free speech bro. (“I welcome the fact that Zuckerberg says that he’s not going to engage in obvious, outrageous censorship anymore. Congratulations, but that doesn’t mean that you get to violate antitrust laws.”) Then the event suddenly swerved, giving me severe whiplash.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) bounded into the room, fresh off his 25-hour speech denouncing Trump the night before, and three-fourths of the room leapt to their feet to applaud his feat of stamina and Resistance bravery.
I can safely say that I have never attended anything that broke my mind as thoroughly as that moment: an audience of lawyers, policy experts, and government relations teams who clearly (and openly) disapproved of Trump, but were avidly (and quietly) taking notes on what the MAGA populists and right wing loyalists were saying. Granted, everyone in the room was there under the aegis of discussing antitrust, one of the extremely few tenuous commonalities between the populist right and progressive left. And to be fair, they were doing it with Y Combinator, one of the few A-list Silicon Valley entities that might reasonably say they support small businesses and are pro-competition. “When people criticize ‘tech,’ they typically mean a handful of trillion-dollar companies, not the countless startups trying to challenge them,” Luther Lowe, head of public policy at Y Combinator, told The Verge later in an email. “Our purpose was to demonstrate that supporting innovation and fair competition can unite people from across the political spectrum, even amidst today’s complex political dynamics.” (They do have a history of turning plucky small tech into market-domineering Medium Tech, but none of them have reached the monolith trillion-dollar market cap of true Big Tech.)
The year before, Y Combinator held a similar antitrust conference and invited a similar range of speakers (including then-Senator J.D. Vance, the ur-populist) — but you would have heard nary a whisper of the term MAGA, much less hear of an upcoming legal strategy to break up Meta and Google branded as “MAGA antitrust.” But this is what happens in Trump’s Washington, when the policy world, and the businesses that must navigate it, have to abruptly rebrand their talking points as MAGA-friendly. “Supporting small businesses” is now “economic populism.” “Breaking up monopolies” must include the justification “because they’re suppressing free speech.” The diehard conservative thinktankers who normally don’t get invited to fancy corporate-sponsored events suddenly get invited to host panels with progressive speakers. And Steve freaking Bannon can appear without being booed out of the building. It was not as if the DC tech policy industrial complex became full of MAGA diehards overnight — they gave Booker a standing ovation, for Christ’s sake — but it was strange, at least for this reporter, to see the barbarians inside the gates and being treated collegially. It was so confusing, in fact, that I could barely process the news that Trump had just blown up the world economy with his tariff announcement until the next morning.
Sometimes, you have to team up with enemies to get something done, but MAGA was running the town. MAGA hated Big Tech. And the DC tech establishment, built on the very companies MAGA wants to blow into bits, has to live with it now.
Update, April 4, 2025: The article has been updated with comment from Y Combinator.
