By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 13, 2025
I. Introduction: Deepening the Terrain of Analysis
John Bellamy Foster has done a great service to the left by offering one of the most rigorous Marxist analyses to date of the MAGA movement and its consolidation under the Trump 2.0 regime.His framework rightly identifies MAGA as a neofascist formation, rooted in the contradictions of monopoly capitalism and the fraught alliance between finance capital and a revanchist white petty bourgeoisie. But as comrades in struggle, our task is not merely to affirm—we must develop, sharpen, and extend. This critique is fraternal in that spirit.
What Foster terms “neofascism,” I argue has crystallized into something historically distinct: technofascism. That is, a new stage of capitalist development marked by the material fusion of corporate, state, and Big Tech power into a single ruling-class formation. Technofascism is not just MAGA ideology, nor merely the return of authoritarianism with new branding. It is the structural response of a decaying empire to the internal and external crises of the capitalist system itself. And it is this structure—not simply the aesthetic or ideological trappings of MAGAism—that defines the contours of our present danger.
Where Foster offers a clear account of MAGA’s ideological architecture and class base, what must be further excavated is the long historical process that gave rise to it. Technofascism did not arrive with Trump. It was incubated over decades, born out of counterinsurgency, perfected through war, and now deployed to discipline both domestic and global surplus populations. This analysis is not a rejection of Foster’s work, but a continuation of the Marxist tradition he upholds—one that demands we theorize the enemy as it actually exists, not simply as it once appeared.
II. From Counterinsurgency to Technofascism: The Long Arc of Empire in Crisis
Technofascism did not emerge fully formed in the Trump era. It is the product of a dialectical process: the evolution of U.S. capitalism as it grappled with the contradictions of empire, decolonization, and class rebellion. From the Cold War to COINTELPRO, from Silicon Valley’s birth in military contracting to the post-9/11 surveillance state, the fusion of Big Tech, capital, and the state was not incidental. It was strategic, and it was always aimed at counterinsurgency.
In the Cold War era, U.S. imperial planners understood that maintaining global hegemony required not just bombs and bases, but psychological warfare and information control. RAND Corporation, MITRE, and DARPA became the breeding grounds for what would eventually be known as the tech sector. Early computing and networking technologies were developed explicitly to wage ideological war against the decolonizing Global South. Social science and cybernetics were militarized to track, predict, and prevent revolutionary movements from Havana to Hanoi to Accra.
But the enemy was not only abroad. By the late 1960s, Black, Brown, and Indigenous uprisings inside the U.S. forced the empire to turn its counterinsurgency tools inward. COINTELPRO, mass surveillance, psychological operations, and militarized policing became the domestic counterpart to imperial conquest. The state framed these as responses to “crime” or “civil unrest,” but in truth they were the recolonization of surplus labor within the metropole—particularly the African and Indigenous nations trapped within U.S. borders.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the consolidation of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the carceral state. Under the banner of the “War on Drugs,” the U.S. government fused policing with data surveillance and privatized punishment. This was not a deviation from liberal capitalism; it was its logical extension under conditions of overaccumulation and deindustrialization. Prisons became warehouses for capital’s dislocated victims. Welfare was digitized and disciplined. Public space was privatized. The neoliberal phase of capitalism gave tech firms new responsibilities: not just to extract profit, but to help administer the imperial core.
Then came the catalytic moment: 9/11. The attacks did not create the national security state—they justified its acceleration. The Patriot Act, the NDAA, and warrantless surveillance programs tore the last threads of Constitutional constraint from the executive. Tech firms were brought fully into the state’s apparatus: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir became core contractors for the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon. Intelligence was outsourced. Censorship became privatized. Surveillance was laundered through “platforms.” The line between state repression and corporate service delivery disappeared.
By the time Trump arrived, the architecture was already in place. His regime simply brought it into the open. What had been “public-private partnerships” under Obama became explicit fascist statecraft under Trump: executive orders drafted by Heritage Foundation ideologues, enforced by tech platforms owned by fascist billionaires, targeting colonized people at home and abroad.
Technofascism, then, is not a break from the past. It is the culmination of the long counterrevolution—the domestication of digital empire. And now, with Trump 2.0, it has fully consolidated behind a unified ruling-class project to defend white capitalist power at all costs.
III. Defining Technofascism: A New Stage of Capitalist Class Rule
Technofascism is not simply the return of fascism in the old sense, nor is it just a new ideological variant of authoritarianism. It is a historically specific response to the exhaustion of neoliberalism, the deepening of the capitalist crisis, and the collapse of liberal-democratic legitimacy. Its form is not merely cultural or institutional. It is structural, grounded in the material merger of corporate monopoly capital, the capitalist state, and the Big Tech infrastructure that now governs every dimension of life.
Where Foster frames MAGA as a neofascist mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie by monopoly capital, technofascism names the ruling class formation itself: a fusion that emerged dialectically from capital’s need to suppress revolt, discipline labor, and sustain imperial accumulation. It is not just that capitalists use the state or fund MAGA. Rather, the state, monopoly capital, and tech infrastructure are now indistinguishable in function. Their unity is the basis of governance.
This is not fascism as spectacle, nor as rhetorical posture. This is fascism as infrastructure. Tech corporations operate as extensions of the state. The state contracts its most repressive functions to private firms. Financial and logistical systems of control—from Amazon Web Services to predictive policing platforms—are embedded in governance itself. The monopoly media and the algorithms that shape political discourse are aligned not by accident, but by design.
Technofascism is capitalism stripped of its democratic mask, armed with biometric surveillance, cloud-based coercion, privatized propaganda, and total control over data flows. It is a regime that governs through the logic of logistics, where dissent is not just censored but preemptively neutralized through digital architecture. It is the ruling class’s final solution to the crisis of legitimacy—a digital boot stomping on a human face, forever.
IV. The Yankee–Cowboy–Digerati Convergence: Mapping the Ruling Class Bloc
To understand how technofascism has been politically consolidated, we must examine the internal composition of the U.S. ruling class. While Foster rightly identifies monopoly capital as the material foundation of MAGA, what is needed is a deeper mapping of its internal factions: the Yankees, Cowboys, and Digerati.
These are not metaphors, but distinct yet overlapping sectors of white ruling-class power:
- Yankees: East Coast financial capital, old-money dynasties, policy think tanks, and institutions of high-state governance (e.g., the Fed, Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings).
- Cowboys: Fossil fuel magnates, military-industrial capitalists, extraction industries, and agribusiness—anchored in the South and West.
- Digerati: Tech oligarchs from Silicon Valley and Seattle; monopolists in data, surveillance, logistics, and AI who dominate global communications infrastructure.
Historically, these factions have had tensions and contradictions. The Yankees were more globally oriented, the Cowboys more nationalist and militarist. The Digerati, meanwhile, emerged with libertarian posturing and deep CIA ties. But under Trump 2.0, these factions have forged a conditional unity around a shared project: the defense and restructuring of U.S. empire through technofascist governance.
The economic basis for this unity is capital convergence. Asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard own controlling stakes across all three sectors. Fossil fuel companies and defense contractors share board members with Big Tech firms. Investment portfolios are diversified across surveillance, war, real estate, biotech, and entertainment. These firms may compete rhetorically, but their profits are intertwined. So are their political interests.
The Trump regime offers this bloc a vehicle for state capture. The Cowboys get fossil fuel deregulation and global war; the Digerati get AI contracts, platform immunity, and censorship privileges; the Yankees get tax cuts, asset bubbles, and executive protection of capital. What unites them is not Trump the man, but Trump the mechanism: a battering ram for the destruction of the administrative state and the expansion of ruling-class power through coercive digital infrastructure.
This convergence is not permanent. Contradictions will emerge. But for now, the alliance holds—because it is materially profitable and strategically necessary. It is the economic scaffolding of technofascism.
V. Capital Has Merged: Financialization and the End of Competition
At the root of this convergence is a profound transformation in the structure of capital itself. The old mythology of market competition and entrepreneurial dynamism has collapsed beneath the weight of financialization and monopoly asset management. The American ruling class no longer operates as a collection of independent industrial firms but as an integrated bloc of capital, coordinated through financial instruments, asset portfolios, and institutional ownership.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—the so-called “Big Three”—now control upwards of $20 trillion in assets. These firms are not neutral intermediaries. They are the commanding heights of the capitalist system. Their investment strategies dictate corporate policy. Their political influence determines regulation. Their centralized holdings create a system where all major U.S. firms are interlocked through shared ownership.
This means that “competition” between corporations is increasingly fictitious. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Lockheed and Raytheon, Amazon and Microsoft—they all share the same top shareholders. They attend the same conferences. They funnel money to the same politicians. They collaborate in shaping public policy. And in moments of crisis, they coalesce behind shared interests: the defense of capital accumulation and the neutralization of resistance.
Technofascism emerges in this context as the political superstructure for a financialized economy without rivals. It is not about restoring capitalism to its mythical free market roots. It is about ensuring that monopoly-finance capital, now fused with digital infrastructure and state power, can continue to extract value under conditions of declining legitimacy and ecological collapse.
When we see Elon Musk running federal agencies, or Peter Thiel placing his acolytes in national security posts, or Google writing surveillance laws, we are not seeing “private actors” intervening in politics. We are witnessing a new mode of class rule: a system where ownership, governance, and enforcement have merged. And the Trump 2.0 regime is the executive mechanism for this new order.
In this sense, technofascism is the political expression of asset-manager capitalism. It is what happens when the market becomes a cartel, when democracy becomes a brand, and when class war is waged not through legislation but through code, capital flows, and platform control. It is the iron logic of monopoly-finance capital—digitized, militarized, and globalized.
VI. MAGA as Settler Revanchism: Mass Base of Technofascism
Foster is absolutely correct to identify the MAGA base as rooted in the white lower-middle class and its reactionary alliance with monopoly capital. But what remains underdeveloped in his analysis is the settler-colonial formation of this class itself. The MAGA movement is not merely a reaction to neoliberalism’s failures—it is the latest political articulation of settler revanchism: a desperate attempt by segments of the white population to reclaim racialized property, social dominance, and cultural centrality in the face of imperial decline and domestic demographic transformation.
To understand MAGA’s ideological grip, we must analyze the material history of whiteness in the United States as a colonial construct. The white lower-middle class was historically formed not simply through small business ownership or wage labor, but through its access to land, racialized citizenship, and the spoils of empire. This class managed local governance, filled the ranks of settler militias, policed enslaved and colonized populations, and served as shock troops for both state repression and frontier expansion. Their material interests were always fused with white domination.
MAGA’s call to “take back America” is not a metaphor—it is a reactionary counterinsurgency against the perceived erosion of settler privilege. The urban rebellions of 2020, the growth of a multinational working class, the decolonial turn in global politics—all of these signal to the MAGA base that their historic position atop the racialized social hierarchy is under threat. Technofascism offers them a false salvation: a racial fantasy of restoration, coded as patriotism, channeled through algorithmically engineered grievance networks, and weaponized by billionaires who see in them a useful army for dismantling liberal constraints on capital.
This is why technofascism tolerates, nurtures, and then betrays the MAGA base. It requires their revanchist energy to seize the state, dismantle institutions, and liquidate opposition. But it has no intention of sharing power. The tax cuts benefit the rich. The deregulation serves capital. The surveillance state they cheer will soon turn on them. They are cannon fodder for the digital dictatorship—a temporary instrument of class war from above, not its beneficiaries.
We must therefore reject the liberal temptation to psychologize MAGAism as mere ignorance or backwardness. It is a settler project, rooted in real material contradictions and historical entitlements. To defeat it, we must organize against the entire infrastructure of technofascist rule—and its settler-colonial base. Not through appeals to civility, but through counterpower: revolutionary, multiracial, and anti-colonial in character. Anything less concedes the terrain to fascism’s digitalized advance.
VII. Propaganda, Repression, and the Big Tech-State Merger
Foster rightfully identifies MAGA’s media ecosystem—Compact, Claremont, Bronze Age Pervert, TPUSA—as a festering ideological sewer of irrationalism and revanchism. But to leave it at the level of content is to underestimate the apparatus itself. These are not simply fringe pundits and rogue outlets; they are nodes in a vast and integrated information war machine, orchestrated by Big Tech in coordination with the state, to discipline political consciousness and crush dissent.
The MAGA movement’s success in manufacturing consent is not simply the result of persuasive memes or right-wing charisma. It is the product of algorithmic counterinsurgency: a system of predictive surveillance, behavioral manipulation, and digital censorship designed to isolate, discredit, and neutralize insurgent consciousness—particularly among the colonized, the poor, and the youth.
Platforms like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Facebook function as privatized extensions of state intelligence. Their algorithms privilege white grievance, amplify fascist talking points, and systematically shadowban or ban anti-colonial, socialist, and Black liberation voices. Tech CEOs sit on Pentagon advisory boards. Platform data is mined and sold to law enforcement. “Content moderation” is the euphemism for digital policing. These aren’t platforms—they are digital plantations where political subjectivity is cultivated, surveilled, and repressed.
Information control under technofascism is not a “culture war.” It is class war waged in the digital terrain. The MAGA cultural complex is merely the propaganda front of a deeper, militarized operation. Google doesn’t just serve you ads—it geofences protests and shares the data. Amazon doesn’t just sell books—it builds surveillance infrastructure for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Palantir doesn’t just analyze data—it targets entire communities for predictive repression.
This fusion of digital platform and carceral power is qualitatively distinct from the propaganda systems of earlier fascist regimes. Hitler had radio. Trump has neural networks, biometric data, and AI-powered behavioral forecasting. The Nazis centralized the press. The MAGA regime can tailor your news feed to fit your psychological profile and political susceptibility with real-time precision.
We must therefore understand the tech-state merger as the central nervous system of technofascism. Without this infrastructure of digital repression, the MAGA regime could not maintain ideological coherence or suppress class and colonial rebellion. It is not an adjunct to fascist power—it is its engine room. To fight technofascism is to confront this system head-on: to build platforms of our own, to resist surveillance, and to expose the empire’s informational war against the people at every turn.
VIII. Contradictions Within the Bloc: Betrayal of the Base, Friction Among Elites
Technofascism, like all formations of class rule, is riddled with contradictions. Foster emphasizes the eventual betrayal of the MAGA base—how the white lower-middle class will be discarded once it has served its function. That process is already underway. But what must also be examined are the fractures within the ruling class itself, which technofascism papered over in its consolidation, but cannot indefinitely suppress.
The alliance between Yankees, Cowboys, and Digerati is not seamless. It is tactical, born of necessity. Their core contradictions—between globalist finance and nationalist extraction, between AI monopolies and fossil capital, between old-money institutionalism and libertarian tech rebellion—still fester beneath the surface. These sectors remain interlocked through asset ownership, but they have different timelines, geographies, and political imperatives.
Yankee elites, anchored in transatlantic finance and international law, worry about geopolitical instability, sanctions blowback, and global legitimacy. Cowboys want imperial expansion without constraint, dreaming of energy dominance and militarized borders. The Digerati seek digital sovereignty, algorithmic governance, and escape from all regulation—even the very state they now partially run. Each faction uses MAGA as a battering ram, but none can fully control its trajectory.
These cracks surface in policy debates: immigration reform, ESG rollbacks, Ukraine funding, AI governance, digital currency. They also emerge in media warfare: the Wall Street Journal vs. Breitbart, Fox vs. MSNBC, Substack vs. network news. And they appear in strategic spats—Musk beefing with regulators, Thiel criticizing the intelligence community, Rubio clashing with Wall Street donors. These are not just personality quirks. They are manifestations of deeper contradictions within technofascist unity.
Still, what binds these factions together—at least for now—is their shared material stake in suppressing working-class rebellion, neutralizing anti-colonial forces, and securing imperial accumulation. Technofascism provides the infrastructure for this shared rule. It gives them algorithmic repression, executive fiat, platform control, and information warfare capacities they cannot afford to abandon. But the longer the crisis deepens—ecologically, economically, geopolitically—the harder it will be to manage these fractures.
The left’s task, then, is not just to analyze these splits but to exploit them: to expose the contradictions, pit elite factions against one another, and reveal the false populism of the MAGA project. We must demystify the billionaire class’s manipulation of settler anxieties and organize the working-class base they’ve betrayed into revolutionary alignment. Every technofascist betrayal is an opening for resistance—if we are ready to seize it.
X. Conclusion: From Analysis to Insurrection
John Bellamy Foster has offered an essential analysis of the MAGA regime as a neofascist formation rooted in monopoly capitalism and the contradictions of U.S. empire. His contribution is significant and necessary—especially at a moment when liberal analysts flail for meaning and the organized left struggles to mount a coherent response. But we must now push the analysis further. MAGA is not simply fascism redux. It is the culmination of a decades-long process of state restructuring, imperial decline, and technological integration that has given birth to a qualitatively new formation: technofascism.
This is not just a merger of ideology and repression. It is a reorganization of class rule at the infrastructural level: the consolidation of power by a ruling class bloc composed of financial, extractive, and digital capital; the subordination of public governance to asset managers and tech oligarchs; the replacement of consent with surveillance, of regulation with privatized policing, and of democracy with logistics. Trump is not the aberration—he is the glove pulled off the iron hand.
The stakes are now existential. Technofascism is not a phase that will pass. It is a durable system of repression, calibrated for crisis, capable of mutating and evolving, and already global in its reach. It will not collapse on its own. It must be defeated. But that defeat cannot come from courtrooms, ballots, or Senate hearings. It will come from insurgent movements—led by the colonized, organized by the working class, and guided by revolutionary strategy.
That strategy must be rooted in clarity. We must name the enemy—not just MAGA voters, but BlackRock and Thiel; not just Christian nationalists, but Raytheon and Google; not just Trump, but the entire white ruling-class bloc unified around the annihilation of dissent and the expropriation of life. We must reclaim the terrain of political imagination—not by retreating to liberal norms, but by organizing around the needs of humanity: land, housing, water, health, dignity, and freedom.
Technofascism has already arrived. It is here, embedded in the apps we use, the jobs we work, the schools we attend, and the stories we’re told. But so too is resistance. From Jackson to Gaza, Atlanta to Nairobi, Chiapas to Detroit, the global masses are stirring. The future is not yet written. But it will not be won with analysis alone. It will be forged in struggle—and in our willingness to meet the enemy with all the force history demands of us.
The question is not whether the old world is collapsing. It is. The question is: what will we build in its place?
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