As Trump’s second administration rolls back women’s rights and economic protections, Silicon Valley’s most powerful men are embracing the movement—not just to escape regulation, but to cement their own dominance.
In 2017, The New York Times published its exposé on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predations, sparking the viral #MeToo movement and revelations of how pervasive sexual harassment remains in the workplace. The same year, with much less fanfare, future Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Lina Khan published an article arguing that Amazon had gotten too big. With this, she sparked the less catchily named and significantly wonkier new Brandeis or neo-Brandeis movement to rethink antitrust for the 21st-century’s new forms of corporate power and push to break up Big Tech.
These two sustained movements to check the power of men and the companies they helmed seemed unconnected at the time. Today, however, it is clear that the second Trump administration is powered by an alliance between the men who were caught up in both efforts. We are learning just how deeply offended powerful men are by the idea that any limits might be placed on them. Faced with the most basic oversight, they have lashed out, determined to take bodily and economic autonomy away from the rest of us.
The #MeToo movement was, for a moment, an earthquake through a corporate America that had long allowed sexual harassment to flourish. A year after its original Weinstein coverage, The New York Times identified 201 powerful men who had been “brought down” by the movement. These men spanned a truly remarkable number of professions from elected officials, to leaders in the entertainment industry, to labor organizers, to businessmen.
While notably few men on this 2018 list are from the tech industry, women at tech companies were also actively organizing to point out that tech also had its #MeToo problems. In response, some of the biggest tech companies made early moves to acknowledge the movement and preemptively change policies to address these issues. Microsoft, Google and Facebook all removed forced arbitration clauses in relation to employee sexual harassment claims.
Around the same time, neo-Brandeisians were pressing forward with a case that America’s antitrust laws had allowed giant tech firms to exploit their consumers and workers and exert too much control over the information ecosystem. Democrats in Congress started investigating these companies’ anti-competitive behavior, releasing a report in early 2020 that found that companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook were exercising monopoly power, and called for these companies to be broken up. These ideas made it into the 2020 presidential primary through Elizabeth Warren‘s and Bernie Sanders‘ campaigns. Looking at the energy behind this push, one professor declared, “Antitrust is sexy again.”
When President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he installed antitrust thinkers across his administration, including Lina Khan at the FTC. They began to pursue a more muscular approach to antitrust enforcement, suing Facebook and Amazon and hitting them with a range of fines.
If the tech companies felt they had to pay lip service to #MeToo, they felt no such compunction about the new antitrust movement—fighting back aggressively in court and in the political sphere.
- In 2022, Amazon had given $400,000 to a conservative nonprofit to fight new antitrust legislation, according to CNBC. The nonprofit was the Koch-backed anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum, which was also busy trying to “minimize political blowback to Republicans” from the overturning of Roe v. Wade and whose website includes gems like this: “#MeToo pushed a narrative of pervasive misconduct and rampant discrimination, painted men as potential predators, and drove a wedge between men and women. As a result, there has been a backlash against women in hiring.”
- Amazon was more than happy to team up with organizations peddling misogyny if they were also pushing back against efforts to ensure competition in the tech market.
… which brings us back to the new Trump administration, so offended by women leading in the workplace that the NSA has covered over photos of women in cryptology that used to hang in the National Cryptologic Museum. United by an utter disdain for anyone getting in their way, tech billionaires and accused rapists—from the president on down— have made common cause and powered a revenge-fueled set of decisions that are bad for economic democracy and women.
Yes. At the US NSA National Cryptologic Museum they covered over with brown paper photos of Women in American Cryptology. Acting on President Trump’s anti-diversity executive order.
— Arr David. (@arrdavid.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 9:44 AM
In Trump’s first weeks back in office, his administration forced Pete Hegseth through the confirmation process to run the Department of Defense and are paving the way for a self-described “raging misogynist” to run the Office of Personnel Management. Of course, the MAGA anti-woman agenda extends beyond running a jobs program for formerly disgraced men: They also pardoned 23 people arrested for blocking access to or invading reproductive healthcare clinics. Further, they have followed the Project 2025 playbook recommendations to reinstate the global gag rule, eliminate the White House Gender Policy Council, and rescind not only Biden-era executive orders on racial and gender equity but also civil rights executive orders dating back to LBJ.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have suggested that the way to fund further tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations is to slash Medicaid (a program that disproportionately benefits women) and eliminate tax credits for childcare.
This is not just an attack on women’s bodily autonomy, but also our economic autonomy. Eliminating programs and policies that protect women from harassment at work is about making it harder for women to be in the workforce. Eliminating programs that ensure families can afford childcare is about making it harder for women to work. And, eliminating programs that ensure women and children have access to healthcare independent of their jobs is about making sure women have fewer choices about how they make ends meet. None of these actions alone will drive women out of the workforce; they will just make it harder for us to demand our rights in the workplace or leave bad jobs—and that’s the point.
This is a small subset of the agenda with which Silicon Valley’s leaders have not just made peace but wholeheartedly embraced. Mark Zuckerberg explained last month to Meta employees, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government. … We’re going to take that.” Zuckerberg is clear he wants a government that not only will stop giving him a hard time but also will actually give him special treatment. Zuckerberg—who in a different time was occasionally celebrated for his feminist choices—has now decided companies need to be more aggressive and embrace “a masculine energy.”
In exchange for their support, the White House has handed over the keys of government (and its funds and our data) to these tech tycoons: first among them Elon Musk (and his very young acolytes); but we should also include the vice president, a former never-Trumper and former tech investor; the new White House crypto czar; the new undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment; our new NASA administrator; and the new director of the Office of Science and Technology. And that’s just the men with official positions.
The men who have lined up around Trump are in it for themselves. What unites them is an unwillingness to be told no—by government regulators, by women or by voters. In pursuit of this total freedom for themselves, the agenda they are pursuing is two-fold: Eliminate any restrictions on their ability to amass power, and remove the rights and economic protections that let women say no.
