The MAGA-tech situationship
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 Sen. Elizabeth Warren,†with the two of them earnestly discussing the topic: “are techno-optimism and populism incompatible?â€Â
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 …