Unmasking MAGA, Part 2: The Corporatists
They don’t chant. They don’t march. They just write the checks and pull the strings.
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Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear:
This is not an anti-capitalist manifesto.
I’m a capitalist. I believe in markets, innovation, entrepreneurship, and the rewards of hard work. But that’s exactly why this section needs to be written—because the people we’re exposing here aren’t capitalists. They’re corporatists. And if we don’t draw a bright red line between the two, we risk handing the language of freedom, growth, and prosperity over to the very people destroying it.
So let’s be precise:
Capitalism is a system that works best when there’s fair competition, open markets, and rules that protect workers, consumers, and the environment.
Corporatism is what happens when power becomes concentrated, competition is rigged, and the government is captured—not to foster prosperity, but to consolidate control.
The New Deal was capitalist.
Breaking up monopolies is capitalist.
Creating safety nets to stabilize demand, protect workers, and make markets more dynamic is capitalist.
Corporatists hate those things. Because they limit extraction. They cap power. They elevate the people that corporatists spend their lives trying to keep small.
Corporatists don’t believe in actual capitalism—they believe in oligarchy with branding.
They hijacked capitalism to justify monopolies.
They weaponized deregulation to suppress wages.
And when democracy threatened their profits, they bought it.
They never cared about small business or individual freedom. They care about power. And over the last 50 years, they’ve done more to weaken democracy—and pave the way for fascism—than any other faction in this coalition.
Who Are They?
They don’t storm the Capitol. They own the building next door.
Corporatists aren’t the loudest part of the MAGA coalition—but they’re the most essential. They don’t crave attention. They crave control. And they’ve mastered the art of acquiring it quietly, efficiently, and permanently.
They aren’t in it for the culture wars. They couldn’t care less about Jesus, pronouns, or drag queens. What they care about is keeping the money flowing upward—and making sure nothing, not even democracy, gets in the way.
They’re not populists. They’re predators.
And they don’t want to burn the system down.
They want to own it—and lease it back to you at interest.
How to Identify Them
You won’t find them at school board protests or white nationalist rallies. But you will find them:
On corporate boards, funding both sides of the aisle to ensure nothing ever truly threatens their dominance
Writing op-eds warning about “entitlement reform” while dodging taxes through offshore shell games
Funding think tanks that produce endless white papers blaming poverty on laziness instead of wage suppression
Running hedge funds that buy hospitals, gut staff, inflate prices—and call it “efficiency”
Lobbying Congress to deregulate, defund, or dismantle any agency that might interfere with their extraction
They speak the language of “growth,” “freedom,” and “job creation”—but what they really mean is freedom from accountability, growth of monopoly, and jobs that pay less and come with no rights.
What They Want
Tax cuts for themselves
Deregulation of their industries
Public subsidies for private profit
No minimum wage hikes
No labor protections
No unions
No oversight
And no democracy strong enough to say “no”
They don’t need stormtroopers. They have lobbyists.
They don’t pass the laws. They write them.
They don’t scream about losing the country.
They quietly buy what’s left of it.
Origin Story
The long con: from Gilded Age robber barons to 21st-century monopolists
The Corporatists weren’t always hiding behind slogans like “freedom” and “efficiency.” Their story begins out in the open—during the Gilded Age, when titans like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt built sprawling empires that controlled railroads, oil, steel, finance, and shipping. It was capitalism without brakes—pure extraction, built on monopoly, political corruption, worker exploitation, and the quiet violence of market dominance.
They didn’t just influence government. They were the government.
And then came the crash.
The Great Depression shattered the illusion that unregulated capitalism could govern itself. Breadlines stretched for blocks. Banks collapsed. Workers revolted. And in the face of this chaos, a new force emerged—not to destroy capitalism, but to save it from the corporatists who were about to kill it.
That force was the New Deal.
The Interruption: When Capitalism Fought Back
Corporatism lost the home game—but found a new field abroad.
The New Deal wasn’t a revolution—it was a course correction. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t destroy capitalism. He cleaned it up.
He did it by recognizing a fundamental truth: unregulated capitalism eventually devours itself—and everyone else with it. So instead of waiting for full collapse, the government stepped in and rewrote the rules.
The New Deal created:
Antitrust enforcement to break monopolies
Strong labor protections to empower workers
Public works programs to rebuild the middle class
Banking regulations to prevent another collapse
Social safety nets like Social Security and unemployment insurance to stabilize demand and reduce despair
And it worked.
For a few decades—the mid-20th century golden age of American capitalism—corporatists lost their grip:
Wages rose
Unions were strong
Taxes on the rich were high
Inequality plummeted
The economy grew—not just for the wealthy, but for everyone—so long as they were white, and either a man or married to one—however imperfectly.
But here’s the catch: the New Deal era reined in corporate power mostly at home.
Internationally? The door was still wide open.
The Foreign Loophole: Where the Corporatists Hid
The Cold War gave American corporatists a new justification—and a new playground. If they couldn’t exploit U.S. workers and consumers the way they used to, they could still do it abroad, under the noble banner of fighting communism and spreading freedom™.
Even as domestic capitalism was constrained, U.S. corporations expanded their reach into:
Latin America, where companies like United Fruit helped orchestrate coups to protect banana profits
Africa, where natural resources were stripped with zero labor protections
Asia, where U.S. corporations fueled post-colonial client states with factories, extraction, and sweatshops
The CIA backed regimes that would play ball. U.S. trade policy was written to benefit American firms. And corporations that might have faced limitations at home now found unregulated foreign markets ripe for exploitation—from oil to minerals to human labor.
So while FDR, labor organizers, and civil rights activists fought for a more accountable capitalism in the U.S., the corporatists simply offshored their appetite.
But this wasn’t just foreign profiteering—it was the beginning of globalization.
What started as an escape route from New Deal regulations became a blueprint for outsourcing production entirely. As labor protections rose at home, corporations moved factories abroad. It began in the late 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s, especially as Reagan gutted unions and deregulated key industries. By the time Clinton signed NAFTA in the 1990s, the architecture was complete: corporate profits were decoupled from American jobs. The modern global economy had been born—not to raise standards everywhere, but to discipline labor everywhere by making workers compete across borders, without rights.
The Shadow Military: Profit in the Name of Peace
And they didn’t just ride the Cold War—they helped militarize it.
Defense contractors like Lockheed, Raytheon, and General Electric made billions off Cold War arms races, proxy wars, and the spread of U.S. military bases
Private firms partnered with the Pentagon to ensure that “capitalism”—not just democracy—won the global ideological war
And the media helped sell it all, turning “spreading freedom” into code for spreading American corporate power
This was the seed of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower had warned about—an alliance of capital and state power that used national security to justify permanent global intervention, surveillance, and expansion—a warning we would go on to ignore at our own peril.
The New Deal fought to save capitalism at home.
But abroad?
Corporatism was never interrupted.
It just went covert.
And while progress was made domestically, the stage was already being set—for the Corporatists’ return.
The Resurgence: How They Took It All Back
The gloves came off, the masks came on—and the Corporatists got smarter.
The New Deal may have knocked them down, but it didn’t knock them out. By the late 1960s, the Corporatists were already plotting their return. They didn’t want to break capitalism—they wanted to break the version of capitalism that worked for everyone else.
Their counterattack began with two documents—and one president.
1. Milton Friedman’s Shareholder Doctrine (1970)
In a New York Times essay, economist Milton Friedman declared that a company’s only obligation was to maximize profits for its shareholders. Not to workers. Not to the public. Not even to long-term national economic health. Just shareholder profit—quarter after quarter.
This wasn’t just an economic opinion. It was a moral reframing:
Greed wasn’t a vice. It was a duty.
Layoffs weren’t a tragedy. They were efficiency.
Environmental destruction wasn’t a crisis. It was someone else’s problem.
Friedman gave the Corporatists what they always wanted: intellectual cover for pure extraction.
2. The Powell Memo (1971)
A year later, Lewis Powell—then a corporate attorney, soon to be a Supreme Court justice—wrote what would become the manifesto for the modern corporatist movement.
In his confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Powell warned that American capitalism was under siege from leftist students, environmental activists, labor unions, and the media. His solution?
A multi-front war for ideological dominance.
His blueprint:
Build think tanks to produce pro-corporate narratives (e.g., Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, AEI)
Capture the courts through a pipeline of business-friendly legal minds
Take over academia, funding economics departments to normalize deregulation dogma
Flood politics with corporate money, lobbying, and “independent expenditures”
Seize the media, including the creation of “alternative” outlets to counter any press critical of business
But Powell’s legacy didn’t stop there.
While on the Supreme Court, Justice Powell authored the 1978 majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti—which laid the foundation for Citizens United by ruling that corporations had First Amendment rights to spend unlimited money on ballot initiatives. He helped create the legal infrastructure for corporate rule both ideologically and judicially.
In other words, he didn’t just write the memo—he ruled it into law.
3. Ronald Reagan (1981)
Then came the megaphone.
Ronald Reagan didn’t invent corporatist policy—but he was the salesman who made it sound like patriotism. With a smile, a flag pin, and a teleprompter, Reagan translated Friedman’s ideology and Powell’s blueprint into a decades-long policy revolution.
His agenda:
Trickle-down economics: Massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, justified by the lie that wealth would “trickle down” to workers
Mass deregulation: Industries like finance, energy, and telecommunications were unleashed to consolidate, pollute, and extract without limits
Union-busting: From firing air traffic controllers to vilifying labor, Reagan began the corporate assault on collective bargaining
Offshoring & globalization: Reagan laid the groundwork for corporations to move production abroad, weakening domestic labor by making U.S. workers compete with unprotected, low-wage labor across the globe. It wasn’t framed as betrayal—it was sold as “efficiency.”
Privatization: Public functions—schools, prisons, even the military—were handed over to private profiteers
Defunding the safety net: Social programs were slashed, welfare was demonized, and austerity became gospel
Media deregulation: The abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 laid the foundation for partisan corporate propaganda empires like Fox News and eventually NewsMax, OANN, and X/Meta’s disinformation algorithm machine
And perhaps most dangerously, Reagan embedded a corrosive ideology into the national psyche:
“Government is the problem.”
The Corporatists were back—and this time, they came wrapped in patriotism, freedom, and “small government.”
They sold America the idea that regulation was tyranny and corporate rule was liberty.
And America bought it.
And as they expanded their reach, the Corporatists didn’t stop at economics. They turned their attention to the culture wars—not because they cared about morality, but because they saw an opportunity.
With strategic funding, they helped elevate the Religious Right, bankrolling groups like the Moral Majority and, later, the Alliance Defending Freedom, turning pastors into political operatives and pulpits into campaign platforms.
They didn’t need to believe in God. They just needed voters who’d die for Him to keep the tax cuts coming.
The Era of Capture: From Citizens United to Bezos
They don’t lobby anymore. They legislate.
By the 1990s, the Corporatists had achieved what no Gilded Age baron ever dreamed: bipartisan obedience.
Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA, opening the floodgates to global labor exploitation—and repealed Glass-Steagall, deregulating banks and setting the stage for the 2008 collapse.
George W. Bush doubled down with tax cuts for the rich, an explosion of no-bid contracts, and wars that funneled trillions to defense contractors.
Barack Obama, facing the worst financial crisis since the Depression, rescued Wall Street—but not Main Street. Not one executive went to jail. Not one megabank was broken up. The lesson was clear: if you're big enough, you're untouchable.
And then came the corporate coup in legal form:
Citizens United (2010).
The Supreme Court, building on Lewis Powell’s earlier groundwork, ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money to influence elections. Political spending became “speech,” and corporations became “people.” It was the final tool the Corporatists needed to seize the system outright.
They didn’t just influence policy anymore.
They bought it.
This isn’t just about deregulation. It’s the quiet advance of neo-reactionary (we’ll get to them shortly) dreams—rule by algorithm, wealth, and unelected power—coded into court rulings, privatized infrastructure, and AI platforms built to serve the few.
It wasn’t just policy they controlled. It was theology.
The alliance between corporatists and the Religious Right didn’t just elevate both factions—it rewired American conservatism. And for a deeper dive into how this unholy alliance became the foundation of modern authoritarianism, read: The Real Deep State.
Judicial Capture: The Final Firewall Falls
Legislation can be overturned. Executives can be voted out. But judges? They’re forever.
While Corporatists were flooding elections with dark money and reshaping the economy in their image, they were also securing the last line of defense: the courts. And they did it through the Federalist Society.
Founded in 1982 and heavily funded by corporatist billionaires, the Federalist Society built a pipeline to staff the federal judiciary with pro-corporate, anti-regulation, anti-worker ideologues. Judges who would gut labor laws, block environmental protections, kneecap consumer rights, and hand corporations the constitutional rights of people—without the responsibilities.
Their strategy was long-term:
Recruit conservative law students
Groom judges who believed in corporate supremacy and originalist formalism
Push lists of approved nominees for Republican presidents to rubber-stamp
Create a permanent legal class loyal not to justice, but to power
It worked.
The majority of the Supreme Court now consists of Federalist Society-aligned justices.
Decisions like Citizens United, Shelby County v. Holder, and Janus were not flukes—they were the plan.
Lower courts are now flooded with appointees who rule reflexively against workers, consumers, unions, and marginalized communities.
This isn’t judicial restraint. It’s corporate protectionism in robes—ensuring that no matter how much power the people reclaim, the rules will be written to favor those at the top.
So what did they build with all that power?
They built a new gilded age—slicker, digital, and far more difficult to escape.
🛒 Amazon (E-Commerce Monopoly)
Controls everything from online retail and logistics to cloud computing and surveillance contracts. Crushes small businesses. Crushes unions. Tracks your data while smiling on your doorstep.
🏪 Walmart (Rural Extractor-in-Chief)
Killed Main Street. Locked rural workers into poverty wages. Weaponized scale to undercut everyone, then raised prices when the competition was gone.
📱 Apple (Mobile App Gatekeeper)
Controls the ecosystem. Charges developers for access to the App Store toll booth. Limits repairs, enforces surveillance compliance, and dominates global supply chains—while outsourcing exploitation abroad.
💻 Microsoft (Productivity + AI Monopoly)
The quiet kingmaker of enterprise. Embeds itself into government, defense, and education. Plays “neutral” while shaping the AI arms race and enterprise infrastructure.
🔍 Google (Search and Surveillance Monopoly)
Controls how the internet is navigated, monetized, and censored. Extracts behavioral data from every search, click, and scroll—then sells it back to advertisers, governments, and police departments.
🥤 Coca-Cola & Pepsi (Beverage Cartel)
Market dominance isn’t just digital. These two giants engineer addiction, exploit water rights across the Global South, and pour millions into lobbying against sugar regulation and recycling mandates.
💣 Lockheed Martin (War-for-Profit Machinery)
The face of the military-industrial complex. Profits from endless war, drone strikes, and weapons exports. One of the biggest winners of every U.S. foreign policy crisis—paid by taxpayers, protected from scrutiny.
And behind them all?
An ecosystem of think tanks, media outlets, and data platforms built to normalize the grift:
Heritage Foundation, AEI, Cato, and more—feeding policy to Congress and scripts to pundits
Fox News, NewsMax, OANN—turning pro-corporate talking points into moral crusades
X (formerly Twitter), Meta, YouTube—algorithmically boosting ragebait and disinformation while suppressing regulation talk
Private equity firms buying up everything from hospitals to housing—and turning life into a subscription model
This is corporatism in the 21st century:
Omnipresent. Unaccountable. Wrapped in convenience and framed as freedom.
They don’t need to storm the Capitol.
They own the ad network that tells you who’s patriotic.
They don’t need to crush democracy.
They simply make it irrelevant.
What Are Their Core Values?
They don’t believe in democracy. They believe in markets—rigged ones.
Corporatists aren’t driven by faith, nationalism, or even ideology in the traditional sense. They don’t want to control what you believe—they want to control what you can afford, where you can work, and how much of your life they can extract for profit.
Their worldview is ruthlessly simple:
Power belongs to the wealthiest
Efficiency is more important than humanity
Government exists to serve capital, not people
And everything else—democracy, liberty, even law—is negotiable.
Here are the pillars of the corporatist belief system:
Markets Should Rule Everything
To corporatists, the market isn’t a tool—it’s a god.
Healthcare? Let the market decide who lives.
Education? Let the market decide who gets to rise.
Housing? If you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve it.
Labor? If you're underpaid, that’s just “the invisible hand.”
This isn’t capitalism. It’s market absolutism—a belief that public institutions should be privatized, and all human needs commodified.
Regulation Is Tyranny
Corporatists don’t see regulations as protections—they see them as obstacles to extraction.
Whether it’s:
Labor laws that prevent wage theft
Environmental rules that stop pollution
Antitrust enforcement that prevents monopolies
Consumer protections that limit predatory behavior
—They see all of it as government “interference.”
And they’ve spent billions convincing Americans that basic guardrails are communism while corporate oligarchy is “freedom.”
Accountability Is the Enemy
They want all the rights of citizens—without any of the responsibilities.
If they pollute a river? They want immunity.
If they crash the economy? They want a bailout.
If they exploit workers abroad? They want zero oversight.
If they bribe lawmakers? They call it “free speech.”
And when they lose in the political arena, they turn to judicial shields—courts packed with Federalist Society loyalists ready to kill regulations, dismantle unions, and rule corporations as victims anytime someone tries to hold them accountable.
“Freedom” Is a Smokescreen
They’ve mastered the art of marketing oppression as liberty.
The freedom to die without healthcare
The freedom to work three jobs and still need food stamps
The freedom to “choose” between two monopolies that collude behind closed doors
Their version of “freedom” is freedom for the powerful—at the expense of everyone else.
Democracy Is a Threat—Not a Principle
Corporatists don’t want more people voting. They want just enough turnout to preserve the illusion of consent, and no more.
They know that a functioning democracy would threaten their profits, regulations would return, and billionaires would have to answer to the public.
So they’ve worked tirelessly to:
Suppress the vote through ID laws, roll purges, and polling closures
Gerrymander districts to entrench minority rule
Fund litigation that guts voting protections (Shelby County v. Holder)
Back politicians who cry fraud every time they lose
No one put it more clearly than Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
That’s not strategy.
That’s intentional democracy sabotage—disguised as patriotism.
Inequality Is Natural—and Desirable
Corporatists see massive inequality not as a problem, but as a feature.
Billionaires aren’t just lucky—they’re "deserving"
The poor aren’t oppressed—they’re “unproductive”
If a town collapses after a factory closes? That’s “creative destruction”
At their core, corporatists believe in a permanent underclass—one that works, consumes, and suffers while the elite accumulate more and more of everything.
They will never say this out loud.
Instead, they say things like:
“Job creators”
“Lean government”
“Public-private partnership”
“We just want to cut red tape”
But beneath the jargon is one unshakable belief:
The purpose of society is to serve the market.
And the purpose of the market is to serve them.
Key Figures
They don’t chant. They don’t march. They just fund, write, appoint, and win.
Corporatism isn’t chaotic. It’s precise. While other factions in the MAGA coalition chase headlines or manufacture outrage, the Corporatists play the long game—building institutions, shaping ideologies, and locking in power for generations.
Here are the people and entities who’ve made that possible:
The Architects and Billionaire Backers
Charles and David Koch – Perhaps the most influential corporatists in American history. Through an intricate web of think tanks, super PACs, “dark money” groups, and lobbying outfits, the Kochs reshaped everything from climate policy to education to labor law—all under the banner of “liberty.” David may be gone, but the machine lives on.
Paul Weyrich – Co-founder of both the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, Weyrich was one of the original minds behind the alliance between Corporatists and the Religious Right. He famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote”—a quiet confession of the corporatist strategy: less democracy, more control.
Leonard Leo – The de facto CEO of the judicial capture project. Through the Federalist Society and a network of anonymous donors, Leo has personally shaped the federal judiciary—including handpicking Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. He doesn’t just influence the law. He curates it.
Milton Friedman – The ideological godfather of modern corporatism. His economic gospel—shareholder primacy, deregulation, and market absolutism—became the script for Reaganomics and the blueprint for global neoliberalism. His smiling face gave moral cover to mass exploitation.
The Political Enablers
They didn’t bankroll the system. They codified it.
These aren’t theorists or billionaires.
They’re the ones who pushed the buttons, blocked the bills, and played parliamentary chess to ensure that corporate power stayed untouched and unchallenged.
Mitch McConnell – The architect of minority rule. As Senate Majority/Minority Leader, McConnell weaponized the filibuster, stacked the courts with corporatist ideologues, and blocked campaign finance reform at every turn. He didn’t just defend the elite—he rebuilt the Senate into a legislative bunker for them.
He didn’t pass laws. He protected power.
Newt Gingrich – The man who turned governance into warfare. Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and scorched-earth strategy in the 1990s helped dismantle bipartisan cooperation, weaponize disinformation, and create the culture of total obstruction. His legacy? A GOP that treats the state like an enemy—unless it’s serving capital.
Paul Ryan – The smiling face of corporate austerity. As Speaker of the House, Ryan sold massive tax cuts for the rich under the guise of “fiscal responsibility,” tried repeatedly to gut Social Security and Medicare, and posed as a policy wonk while shoveling wealth upward.
He made class warfare sound polite.
Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema (Honorable Mentions) – Though nominally Democrats, both have repeatedly blocked labor protections, corporate tax hikes, climate legislation, and filibuster reform—often on behalf of their donors. In a functioning democracy, Corporatists would fear opposition. Thanks to these two, they’ve barely had to notice it.
The Neo-Reactionary Billionaires
Not all Corporatists just want deregulation and low taxes. Some want the end of democracy itself—and they’re building the infrastructure to make it happen.
Peter Thiel – The ideological spearpoint of NRx thought in Silicon Valley. Allegedly funds fascist-adjacent candidates, promotes monarchist and anti-democratic ideas, and envisions a society ruled by “natural elites” with no obligation to the public. Often bankrolls chaos to make authoritarianism feel like order.
Elon Musk – Less philosopher, more accelerant. Reportedly uses his platforms to amplify fascist narratives, crush labor, and promote “free speech” that just happens to serve the far right. Seeks deregulated dominance in everything from media to AI to surveillance infrastructure—while joking about dictatorship.
Marc Andreessen – VC power broker and NRx signal booster. Purportedly champions authoritarian efficiency through the lens of “effective accelerationism.” Uses his influence to launder techno-feudalism into elite discourse while dismissing democracy as “obsolete software.”
These men aren’t just reshaping markets.
They’re trying to replace governance with capital—and calling it progress.
The Empire Builders and Platform Barons
These are the titans of modern corporatism—not theorists or lobbyists, but owners of the infrastructure that defines daily life. Their power doesn’t come from ideology—it comes from ubiquity, convenience, and control.
They don’t need to pass laws.
They write the terms of service.
And when governments falter, they’re already waiting with a platform to replace it.
Jeff Bezos – Built Amazon into a digital monopoly that controls online retail, cloud infrastructure (AWS), streaming, surveillance tech, and logistics. His warehouse empire is a labor dystopia. His cloud services power ICE. And he owns The Washington Post as a PR firewall. He doesn’t just move goods—he moves narratives.
Mark Zuckerberg – Architect of the world’s most powerful disinformation engine. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Meta shape the global flow of information—manipulating elections, laundering fascist narratives, and selling behavioral data at scale. Zuckerberg doesn’t just host your community. He owns the algorithm that controls it.
Elon Musk – While he appears under Neo-Reactionary Billionaires for his ideology, Musk also belongs here—for the sheer breadth of his empire:
X (formerly Twitter) has become the primary propaganda distribution tool of the far right
Tesla shapes energy, labor, and regulatory debates
Starlink is a private satellite network with military and political leverage
SpaceX is vertically integrated with national defense and civilian infrastructure
Musk doesn’t just have a platform. He has platforms, surveillance tools, satellites, and direct access to heads of state.
Together, these men don’t just shape markets—they own the rails of modern civilization.
And they’ve made sure that no one—not regulators, voters, or workers—can challenge their grip without going through them first.
The Institutions That Wrote the Playbook
The Heritage Foundation – A think tank turned policy factory. Heritage has written legislation, drafted executive orders, and hand-fed talking points to GOP lawmakers for decades—all geared toward dismantling the welfare state, crushing unions, and deregulating industry.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – Where corporate lobbyists literally co-author laws with Republican state legislators. ALEC is behind voter suppression laws, union-busting bills, environmental rollbacks, and “stand your ground” statutes—all written by and for corporate interests.
The Cato Institute – Born from Koch money, Cato packages corporatist greed as libertarian “freedom.” A constant drumbeat of white papers, op-eds, and staged research designed to justify privatization, deregulation, and economic inequality as moral imperatives. While they’ve recently distanced themselves from the Republican Party after Trump’s rise to power, they were key to the ideology that would lead to that very outcome.
The Federalist Society – The judiciary’s corporatist gatekeeper. Controls the bench through networking, grooming, and donor-backed judicial activism. With Federalist-trained judges across the courts—including the Supreme Court—the Corporatists don’t just break the rules. They rewrite them.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – A theocratic legal arm that corporatists fund not because they care about Christianity—but because weaponized morality keeps their coalition voting, raging, and distracted. ADF shapes the legal infrastructure for anti-LGBTQ+ laws, abortion restrictions, and religious exemptions for corporate discrimination.
The Infrastructure That Powers the Machine
Chamber of Commerce – The “respectable” face of corporatist lobbying. Quietly but consistently pressures Congress to block labor laws, tax increases, and regulatory oversight.
Manhattan Institute, AEI, Hoover Institution – Think tank chorus amplifying Heritage and Cato’s messages. These institutions produce the “experts” that flood cable news and testimony hearings with pro-corporate dogma.
Private equity firms like Blackstone and Carlyle Group – The ultimate endgame: converting everything from housing to healthcare into revenue streams. They don’t just exploit systems. They buy them.
Dark money networks (e.g., DonorsTrust, 85 Fund) – Anonymous pass-through entities that launder corporate contributions into media buys, legal cases, and culture war candidates—all without leaving fingerprints.
The Propagandists Who Sold the Lie
Rupert Murdoch – The oligarch behind the curtain. Murdoch turned his media empire—from Fox News to The Wall Street Journal—into a pro-corporate echo chamber. He didn’t just sell ads. He sold ideology: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for polluters, and endless distractions for everyone else.
Roger Ailes – The architect of Fox News. Ailes didn’t just report the news—he designed a narrative machine that told white Americans who to hate, who to blame, and who to vote for. Under his leadership, Fox turned corporatist policy into a cultural identity and made working-class rage a tool for billionaire gain.
Rush Limbaugh – The original voice of rage radio. Limbaugh’s decades-long assault on feminism, civil rights, unions, environmentalism, and public health was a corporatist wet dream wrapped in “conservative” values. He turned systemic exploitation into punchlines—and fed his audience the idea that billionaires were victims, and the poor were the problem.
The Corporatists built the system—but these men taught millions to love their chains.
The New Propagandists of Corporatism
Influence merchants, attention hackers, and ideologues who anchor their identity in economic libertarianism—yet continuously echo and amplify the talking points of other factions.
They sell capitalism as common sense, hierarchy as freedom, and deregulation as destiny.
Some are primarily Corporatist, while cross-pollinating other factions.
Others are anchored elsewhere—Fascist, Fake Christian, Conspiracist—but still reinforce corporatist dogma.
This list is not exhaustive. There are many more names that could be added.
But that’s not the point.
What matters is this: no matter where you enter the political spectrum, someone in this sphere is ready to welcome you.
They’ll meet you where you are—with podcasts, memes, newsletters, livestreams, or finance tips.
And once you’re in, you’re in.
You’ll find yourself caught in a self-reinforcing web of narrative, spectacle, and outrage that—given enough time—leads to the same endpoint:
A world where democracy is disposable, labor is the enemy, and capital is king.
This dynamic isn’t necessarily coordinated.
But it functions like an evolved organism:
Self-reinforcing. Redundant. Adaptive.
Ben Shapiro
Anchor: Corporatist
Cross-pollinates: Fake Christian moralism (Judeo-Christian “family values”), Fascist adjacent rhetoric (“Western civilization,” cultural decline)
Role: The straight-edged high priest of capitalist realism. Markets are good. Regulation is tyranny. Labor organizing is Marxism. Shapiro blends economic libertarianism with religious undertones and dog-whistle culture war, making him palatable to both young tech bros and older evangelical authoritarians.
Dave Rubin
Anchor: Corporatist
Cross-pollinates: Conspiracist language (“deep state,” government censorship), Libertarian aesthetics
Role: A washed-out liberal rebranded as a “classical liberal,” Rubin’s job is to normalize billionaire politics for audiences who want to believe they’re still reasonable centrists. He offers a safe, corporate-friendly landing zone for the politically disillusioned.
Tim Pool
Anchor: Corporatist-aligned cynicism
Cross-pollinates: Fascist alarmism (collapse, chaos), Conspiracism, Anti-media populism
Role: “Just asking questions” in a beanie. Pool’s constant framing is that government is incompetent, chaos is imminent, and corporate capture is less dangerous than left-wing solutions. His cynicism about institutions always ends up reinforcing the corporatist status quo.
Patrick Bet-David / Valuetainment
Anchor: Pure Corporatist entrepreneurialism
Cross-pollinates: Red-piller masculinity, soft Fascism through “strongman capitalism”
Role: His platform blends Ayn Rand-style capitalism with alpha male posturing. Entrepreneurship is salvation, and regulation is feminine weakness. He also provides access to harder-edged figures (Tate, Trump allies) to funnel viewers deeper into the machine.
Crypto Finfluencers (Pompliano, Balaji, etc.)
Anchor: Corporatist-libertarian
Cross-pollinates: Conspiracism (fiat collapse), Techno-accelerationism, occasionally Fascist survivalism
Role: Sell “freedom” while quietly reinforcing extreme individualism, anti-labor ideology, and deregulated wealth extraction. Crypto is pitched as revolutionary, but in practice it’s a speculative market free of rules and ripe for elite consolidation.
All-In Podcast (Calacanis, Sacks, Friedberg, Chamath)
Anchor: Venture Capital corporatism
Cross-pollinates: Neo-reactionary elitism (Sacks), culture war pandering (Chamath), faux centrism
Role: Speak the language of innovation while defending capital's power over democracy. Their critiques of government are never aimed at billionaire power—only at labor, regulation, and public oversight. They normalize “technocratic strongmen” as the adult solution to democratic chaos.
Matt Walsh
Anchor: Fake Christian
Cross-pollinates: Corporatism (anti-labor, anti-welfare), Fascism (gender control, hierarchy)
Role: A religious extremist who also serves the corporatist machine by demonizing labor unions, social programs, and public institutions. He provides the moral veneer for economic cruelty—righteous suffering in a fallen world.
Lex Fridman
Anchor: Technocratic corporatism
Cross-pollinates: Fascist and corporatist guests (Thiel, Musk), depoliticized soft-conspiracism
Role: Projects neutrality and thoughtfulness while platforming and humanizing elite apologists for authoritarianism and deregulation. His show operates like a laundering service—washing ideology into intellectualism.
This is the new face of corporatist propaganda.
Anchored in free-market orthodoxy—but wired into every other faction.
Some speak with religious fervor.
Some wear the mask of reason.
Some push crypto.
Some push podcasts.
But all of them push the same truth:
That the market is sacred, democracy is optional, and any resistance—labor, regulation, redistribution—is the real tyranny.
They don’t have to agree on everything.
They just need to make sure the system never changes.
And that no one believes it could.
This is the corporatist coalition:
The billionaires who bankroll it
The lawyers and economists who justify it
The think tanks that normalize it
The judges who ratify it
The media moguls and propagandists who sell it
And the institutions that launder its intent into policy
They don’t scream.
They don’t storm.
They whisper in boardrooms, draft the talking points, and fund the campaigns.
They don’t care if you believe them.
They just need you too tired to resist, too distracted to notice, and too desperate to care.
How Did They End Up in the MAGA Coalition?
They didn’t join it. They built it.
From the beginning, it was inevitable. The New Deal made the Democratic Party the architect of regulation, labor power, and social safety nets. That made the Corporatists’ path crystal clear: they would consolidate inside the party built to oppose it.
And they did.
They saw early on that culture wars could distract the masses while they gutted regulations and privatized the commons. So they bankrolled the rise of the Religious Right. They fed talking points to talk radio. They funded think tanks that taught working-class voters to fear “big government” more than big banks.
When Trump came along, they didn’t flinch.
He promised tax cuts? They wrote the plan.
He vowed to slash regulations? They handed him a checklist.
He put Stephen Miller in charge of immigration? They sold him the detention infrastructure and lobbied for contracts.
MAGA didn’t co-opt the Corporatists.
The Corporatists helped build the stage—and were happy to let others play the villain.
They wrote the policies. They funded the culture wars.
And when the fascists took the mic, they smiled—because the tax breaks kept coming.
What’s Their Role in the Coalition?
The money. The machinery. The master plan.
The Corporatists aren’t the face of the movement—they’re the foundation.
They don’t rally the base. They fund it.
They don’t scream about immigrants or “wokeism.” They weaponize those distractions to keep workers divided while wealth flows upward.
Their role is to:
Finance the ecosystem—from think tanks and Super PACs to astroturfed protest groups
Draft the policy agenda—tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, and union suppression
Control the infrastructure—media platforms, judicial appointments, lobbying networks, and surveillance tech
Normalize exploitation—through academic capture, PR firms, and constant rebranding of greed as “freedom”
And when the other factions get messy—when fascists get violent, when conspiracy theorists spiral, when red pillers crash the narrative—they don’t panic.
They just cash the checks and move the levers.
If You Believe in This Fight, Help Keep It Alive
There’s still more below, I just need a moment of your time.
The American Manifesto isn’t backed by corporations. There are no ads, no paywalls, no billionaires funding it.
It’s just one person, fighting like hell to expose the truth and give you the weapons to push back.
If you value this work—if you want this movement to keep growing, keep calling out fascism without fear, and keep fighting for the future we deserve—then I need your support.
Join the fight. Become a supporter. Every contribution keeps this mission alive.
Because silence is surrender. We do not surrender. We are #TheRelentless.
What Is Their Relationship With Other Subgroups?
They’re not beloved. They’re tolerated—because the checks clear.
Corporatists aren’t the movement’s soul. They’re its spine. The other factions may not trust them, but they need them—because without the money, infrastructure, and institutional muscle the Corporatists provide, the whole MAGA machine falls apart.
Still, the relationships are fragile. Some allies are useful. Others are volatile. And many are just one betrayal away from turning on their financiers.
Here’s how the relationships break down:
✅ Alignment
Fake Christians
A marriage of convenience—and funding. Corporatists don’t care about God, but they fund the pastors, the schools, and the legal groups that moralize corporate policy. In return, the Religious Right delivers voters who will march to the polls to protect tax breaks disguised as “family values.”Warhawks
Longtime allies in militarism and profit. Corporatists need global markets and cheap labor; Warhawks deliver access through war, regime change, and international “stability.” From Cold War expansion to the War on Terror, they’ve made a fortune together—and still do.
❌ Divergence
Libertarians
Philosophically incompatible. Libertarians want small government and civil liberty; Corporatists want a government big enough to protect capital but too weak to regulate it. The alliance holds only as long as “freedom” can be monetized.Blue-Collar Workers
They’re the ones Corporatists have screwed the hardest: union-busted, offshored, underpaid, and fed just enough culture war to blame someone else. Many still vote with the coalition—but the resentment is growing, and the contradictions are harder to hide.Conspiracy Theorists
Corporatists benefit from the chaos, but don’t respect it. They see conspiracy theorists as useful noise—until that noise threatens markets, profits, or public trust in the institutions Corporatists rely on to stay rich.Fascists
There’s deep distrust here. Fascists think Corporatists are weak, globalist parasites. Corporatists think fascists are dangerous, uncontrollable liabilities. Still, they tolerate each other—for now—because the tax cuts and surveillance tech keep flowing.
⚪ Neutral
Red Pillers
Not particularly aligned or opposed. Some Corporatists see opportunity in monetizing masculinity, grift, and hustle culture. Others keep their distance, seeing Red Pillers as unstable and bad for brand image. It’s a transactional relationship at best.
They aren’t loved.
They aren’t trusted.
But the Corporatists are still holding the keys to the kingdom—and everyone else in the coalition knows it.
Exploiting Wedge Issues
Everyone in the coalition thinks they’re using the Corporatists. The trick is showing them it’s the other way around.
Corporatists don’t shout. They don’t riot. And they don’t bleed.
They let the rest of the movement take the heat while they take the profits.
But the other factions are starting to notice. The resentment is real. The betrayal is visible.
And with the right pressure, the cracks become breaks.
Here’s where to drive the wedge:
Blue-Collar Workers
They call you the backbone of America—then break your back to boost their quarterly earnings while blaming someone else and telling you to “learn how to code.”
They gut your unions.
They shut down your factories.
They ship your job overseas.
They replace you with cheap foreigners.
They raise your rent, cut your benefits, defund your education—then tell you to lift yourself up by your bootstraps.
None of it is by accident. It was always the plan. To keep you angry at “others”, to keep you broke, and to keep you voting for the guy who signs their tax cuts.
Libertarians
You think you’re fighting for freedom.
They’re fighting to own the concept.
They hate regulation—until it protects their monopolies.
They hate taxes—unless they’re collecting the subsidies.
They hate surveillance—unless they’re selling the tools.
“They hate government—but only until they own it.”
Conspiracy Theorists
You want to dismantle the Deep State.
They are the Deep State—the real one.
They don’t need secret symbols or hidden tunnels.
They have lobbyists, stock portfolios, and nondisclosure agreements.
And while you were decoding numerology, they are:
Buying your elections
Monetizing your rage
And passing the laws that lock you out
“You’re looking for the cabal. They’re holding the strings.”
Fascists
You dream of a national revival.
They dream of quarterly returns.
They let you wave the flag, wear the uniform, and storm the Capitol—
Then dumped you the second you became a liability.
You rot in jail.
They get another tax break.
“They won’t save the republic. They’ll sell it to the highest bidder.”
Red Pillers
You talk about masculinity, power, dominance.
They sell you supplements, podcasts, and crypto scams—while laughing at how easy you are to monetize.
You worship hustle. They keep the profits.
You think you’re rising. They built the algorithm that keeps you running in circles.
“You’re not an alpha. You’re a mark.”
They’re not part of your revolution.
They’re managing the investment.
Burn it all down? They’ll insure the rubble.
Build something new? They’ll own the licensing rights.
And every time you think you’re fighting for your future—
They’re making money off your outrage.
Creating a Sense of Betrayal
They said they believed in the free market, individual liberty, and opportunity for all.
But when the time came, they chose monopoly, surveillance, and a future no one voted for.
The Corporatists weren’t supposed to be tyrants.
They said they were builders, reformers, rationalists.
They said they believed in merit, efficiency, and fairness.
But those weren’t values.
They were cover stories.
If you ever believed in real capitalism—you have every reason to feel betrayed.
Value: Markets Should Be Free and Fair
“You believe in competition. So do I. But they rigged the game—and called it freedom.”
They talk about innovation, but kill small business.
They talk about merit, but buy policy behind closed doors.
They talk about liberty, but patent the cage.
Their markets aren’t free. They’re fenced.
And every new idea that threatens their profits?
They crush it, buy it, or sue it into oblivion.
“If you believe in capitalism—what they’re doing isn’t it.”
Value: Work Should Lead to Prosperity
“You believe hard work should pay off. So do I. But they turned labor into leverage—and used it against you.”
You work harder than ever.
They get richer than ever.
You carry the risk. They take the reward.
They cut benefits, automate jobs, offshore accountability—and still ask for gratitude.
“If you still believe the middle class matters—why are you defending the people who erased it?”
Value: Government Should Be Limited and Accountable
“You believe government shouldn’t pick winners. So do I. But they’ve captured it—and they’re the ones writing the rules now.”
They oppose welfare for families—while collecting billions in bailouts.
They oppose red tape—unless it protects their monopolies.
They oppose big government—unless they own it.
What they built isn’t liberty.
It’s feudalism with broadband.
“If you fear tyranny, what do you call it when unelected billionaires decide what laws get passed and what voices get silenced?”
Value: Capitalism Should Reward Innovation—Not Extraction
“You believe in creating value. So do I. But they built a system that just extracts it—from workers, consumers, and the planet.”
Private equity builds nothing.
They buy everything.
They strip it for parts, squeeze out profits, and sell the scraps to the next firm.
They don’t revive industries.
Private equity guts them—and call it efficiency.
“If you're still defending them, ask yourself: When’s the last time they made something real?”
Value: Technology Should Empower—Not Control
“You believe tech should expand freedom. So do I. But they turned every tool into a trap—and called it convenience.”
They promised access.
They delivered surveillance.
They promised platforms.
They delivered monopolies.
They made the future feel frictionless—so you'd stop noticing who owns it.
“If you believe in tech empowering people—why are a handful of companies deciding what you can see, say, or build?”
They claimed to be defenders of the system.
But all they’ve defended is their ownership of it.
If you believed in capitalism, in merit, in liberty—you're not wrong.
You're just not on their team anymore. And maybe you never were.
The Empire Behind the Curtain
The Corporatists were never foot soldiers in the MAGA movement. They were the financiers, the engineers, the puppet masters. While others marched and shouted, they were writing checks, drafting laws, shaping courts, and buying silence.
But their greatest con wasn’t economic. It was spiritual.
They convinced millions that greed was godly, that wealth was righteousness, and that suffering was the price of freedom.
They didn’t just bankroll the Religious Right. They rewrote its gospel.
Next, we turn to the Fake Christians—the faction that traded grace for grievance, Scripture for supremacy, and Jesus for a golden idol. Because the Corporatists needed voters who wouldn’t just defend their power—but believe it was holy.
So when is the book coming out. Sorry I’ve been off-line but I have been sharing your stuff and I think I found you a few more subscribers. As always, this is a fantastic piece breaking down exactly how we got where we are.
Great piece. Thank you.