A math problem that had defeated experts for 80 years, cracked by a chatbot in response to a single prompt.
Reusable rockets the size of skyscrapers, with SpaceX's Starship aiming to put Americans back on the moon by 2028.
A man who used AI to design a cancer vaccine that shrank his dog's tumor by half. Another using AI to hunt for schizophrenia treatments in his garage. Most spectacularly — a man who was told by doctors he was sure to die, only to use AI to find a cure for his rare blood disease.
More frivolously, but pointing to a seismic shift in elite control over culture, we find complete video games being built in minutes, with no big-studio diversity consultants anywhere in the loop.
Any one of these would have been considered a remarkable development just a decade ago, the stuff of science fiction fantasy. It's progress — not the fake progress sought by critical race theorists and DEI consultants, but progress of the Promethean kind. It is an impossibly complex artificial brain, a car that drives itself, a rocket pointed at the stars. It is a conquering of humanity's material frontiers, comparable to the emergence of railroads and telegraph wires.
What's even more remarkable: the industry that produced these extraordinary developments is now widely perceived as aligned with the political right.
Nobody is more surprised than me. I started covering Big Tech censorship for Breitbart News in 2015, back when most conservatives still thought of Silicon Valley as a place where their kids wanted to work. Over the years that followed, the platforms, leaned on by furious advertisers and "counter-disinformation" NGOs living off government grants, smothered online discourse. Conservative commentators were throttled, demonetized and banned. In January 2021, so was the sitting President of the United States.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter in the fall of 2022 and broke ranks. One by one, the other moguls decided they had been bullied by the press and the activist class for long enough. Mark Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee in 2024 admitting that the Biden White House had pressured Facebook to censor content, and said he regretted not pushing back harder. In January 2025, Facebook cut loose its left-wing "fact-checkers" altogether. That September, YouTube announced an amnesty for creators banned under its COVID rules. Others simply got louder. Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are now reliably right of center in their public commentary. So is Palantir's Alex Karp, who once denounced the "far right" and now says the president's border and national security agenda are the only two things he focuses on.
Part of the reason for the realignment is that the establishment overplayed its hand. When the platforms caved to the media and the "disinformation" watchdogs during Trump's first term and under Biden, the censors smelled blood. Federal money kept flowing, and the demands kept growing. Lina Khan's FTC went after the industry with an expansive new reading of antitrust law. The advertising cartel, through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), kept its boot on the platforms' necks. The last Democratic majority on Capitol Hill tried to force tech companies to subsidize a dying establishment press through the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
Conservatives are the ones who fought those forces off. House Republicans under then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy killed the JCPA by a narrow margin. Jim Jordan's Judiciary Committee spent two years dragging the ad industry's blacklisting operations into the open, and between that and a lawsuit from Musk, GARM shut its doors in the summer of 2024. Within hours of returning to the White House in January 2025, President Trump signed the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship executive order, which cut off the money that had kept the counter-disinformation industry alive.
The realignment makes sense. One of the things that irked me the most about the tech industry's shift towards censorship between 2016 and 2022 was that it represented a betrayal of its promise: to disrupt. Eventually, the social media moguls stopped worrying and embraced their roles as harbingers of the legacy media's doom. Despite their history of siding with the progressive left, the underlying technology of social media naturally empowers those who oppose the entrenched managerial class that has dominated western institutions since the Second World War.
So too does AI and automation. I've already covered how it might destroy the gatekeeping power of the video game industry (with animation and movies sure to follow). It could also decimate the market for illegal immigrants. Automated food delivery robots and self-driving cars represent a looming disruption to ridesharing and DoorDashing — two professions that are firm favorites amongst those who flout immigration laws in western countries.
Little wonder that progressives' stance towards the tech industry is something resembling total war. This was apparent even before Sen. Bernie Sanders' proposal of 20-year jail terms for tech executives caught developing "superintelligent" AI. The EU's Digital Services Act, a censorship law dressed up as consumer protection, made X the first company ever fined under it. Britain's Online Safety Act followed the same pattern.
Brussels bureaucrats are now openly planning to replace American tech firms with homegrown, censorship-compliant substitutes under a scheme they call the "Eurostack." Here at home, activists like Erin Brockovich are leading the charge against new data centers. And if Democrats win back the White House, expect the FTC to be turned on Musk as payback for tearing down the censorship regime, something the Biden administration had already started.
None of these people care what their crusade will cost. It does not register with them that the United States is in an AI race with China that will decide whether America keeps its edge in military technology. It does not matter to them that Musk is nearly single-handedly responsible for America's commanding lead in orbital launches; SpaceX alone flew half of every rocket launched to orbit on Earth last year. All that matters is that the tech industry is now seen as a threat to the establishment's power, and must be destroyed because of it.
President Trump understands what is at stake. Data centers poll badly with voters of both parties, not just progressives, and rather than duck the issue he has waded into it, making the case for what data centers bring to local economies and warning that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement."
He is right. Data centers may be unloved for now, but they are what will keep America at the frontier of technology, with everything that flows downstream from that. We should not let the tech industry go the way of oil and gas in Europe, sacrificed on the altar of a progressive political campaign. Silicon Valley knew it was inviting exactly this kind of backlash when it loosened its grip on speech. Conservatives should welcome the industry's realignment; for all its faults, it keeps producing extraordinary things, with its underlying technology chipping slowly but surely away at the foundations of power that the managerial elite relies on.
Allum Bokhari is managing director at the Foundation for Freedom Online. Follow him on X at @AllumBokhari
