Podcast Summary

Podcast: On with Kara Swisher
Episode: Tech Billionaires & the Rural Poor: Two Sides of Trump’s MAGA Populism
Date: December 4, 2025
Host: Kara Swisher (Vox Media)
Guests:

• Beth Macy: Author, “Dopesick” and “Paper: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America”
• Jacob Silverman: Journalist, Author, “Gilded Rage. Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley”

Overview

This episode explores the parallel radicalization of two groups under Trump’s MAGA populism: America’s rural poor and the urban, ultra-wealthy tech elite. Kara Swisher, with guests Beth Macy and Jacob Silverman, investigates how tech billionaires have fueled and appropriated populist energy for their own ends, and how rural America has both suffered from and contributed to growing political divides, with attention to media fragmentation, education, and crumbling social mobility.

Key Discussion Points

1. The Collapse of Shared Reality: Media, Misinformation, and Manipulation

• Rural News Deserts and Media Radicalization

  • Beth Macy illustrates how Urbana, Ohio (her hometown) became a “news desert,” with nationalized politics flooding in through Fox News and Facebook, fracturing family and community ties.
  • Macy’s personal anecdotes (“My brother unfriended me on Facebook because of, quote, all the liberal shit you post” – [05:33], Beth Macy) show first-hand the loss of local information and the polarization stemming from online echo chambers.
  • The lack of local news, combined with proliferation of online misinformation, left many without trusted sources: “Trump won 90% of the counties living in news deserts.” – Beth Macy ([05:22])

• Tech Billionaires as Unwitting or Witting Media Barons

  • Jacob Silverman discusses how figures like Elon Musk wield media influence, deliberately or not, by steering the news agenda via platforms like X (Twitter), collapsing the distinction between “your paranoid cousin and a paranoid billionaire.” ([07:38])
  • “The paranoid billionaires and, you know, your paranoid cousin are now operating in the same epistemological and media space.” – Jacob Silverman ([07:49])
  • Tech leaders evade responsibility by framing platforms as neutral, despite setting (and profiting from) the news cycle and outrage.

• Responsibility and Avoidance Among Tech Elites

  • Silverman flags the tech elite’s “incredible sensitivity” to critique, comparable to right-wing defensiveness.
  • “There’s such an intolerance for critique or for admitting any mistake...there’s always another talking point to jump to rather than take responsibility.” – Jacob Silverman ([12:02])

2. Social Mobility, Education, and Upward (or Downward) Trajectories

• Decline in Social Mobility

  • Macy contrasts her own path (growing up poor, “paper girl,” upwardly mobile thanks to Pell grants and community support) with that of current youth in rural America (like Silas James) for whom the path is “downward mobility.”
  • “For a poor kid like me to sort of look up to (role models)...that’s what’s missing today with the hollowing out of the middle class.” – Beth Macy ([15:37])
  • Today’s rural poor face greater hurdles—economic, logistical, and social—to escape poverty.

• Tech Billionaires’ Formative Contexts and Authoritarian Drift

  • Silverman provides background on the “PayPal Mafia” (Thiel, Musk, Sachs), highlighting their roots in patriarchal, racist, apartheid or post-colonial settings, shaping their later disdain for democracy and preference for elite, anti-institutional politics. ([17:56])
  • Elon Musk’s radicalization is traced to moments when politics began to affect his business interests.

• Attack on Public Education and Elitism from Both Camps

  • Both MAGA rural communities and Silicon Valley elites attack higher education—rural parents for fear of liberal indoctrination, tech billionaires for alleged woke bias and as a gatekeeper.
  • “There’s this idea that if you do send your kid to college, they’re just gonna get liberal.” – Beth Macy ([22:21])
  • Deregulation of homeschooling leads to truancy and “no schooling”—a vacuum that further frays community oversight ([20:37]; [21:45])
  • Tech billionaires lobby for charters, encourage dropouts (Thiel Fellowship), and disparage “woke” universities ([23:43]).
  • “They see [universities] as these kind of left wing woke institutions…turning their kids into left wingers who hate them or communists…or trans.” – Jacob Silverman ([23:43])

3. Populism, Agency, and the Trap of Brainwashing

• Portrayals of MAGA Supporters and Tech Influence

  • Swisher challenges guests: Do they grant working-class people agency, or (in blaming “brainwashing”) risk sounding condescending?
  • Macy says, “My editor doesn’t like me to use the word brainwashing, but I think that’s exactly what’s happened...he didn’t have health insurance…he gets pneumonia…and then he dies. When I interviewed his daughter…she said the Internet killed my dad.” ([26:12]–[27:24])

• Extent of Populist Manipulation by Tech and Media

  • Silverman: “When Musk tweets something like that Covid will be gone by the end of April of 2020…that has a huge effect and one they refuse to recognize.” ([27:35])
  • Both see the billionaire-driven information ecosystem as sustaining—and in some cases directly endangering—rural lives and democratic society.

4. The Iron Triangle: Silicon Valley, Authoritarian States, and Trump

• Saudi Money, Tech, and Political Corruption

  • Silverman details how Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian governments have become key tech investors, reshaping corporate culture and reinforcing the anti-democratic “iron triangle” between global oligarchs and the MAGA movement.
  • “Saudi Arabia also has a founder, but you call him your highness.” – Ben Horowitz (as cited by Silverman, [36:57])
  • The lines between corporate control, geopolitical power, and U.S. populist authoritarianism continue to blur.

• Decay of Community, Disempowerment, and the Collapse of the Local

  • Macy finds that many in rural America are seeking belonging in toxic online communities as local institutions decay or disappear.
  • “The people I saw who were deeply down the rabbit holes were looking for community where their community no longer existed.” – Beth Macy ([39:13])

5. “Exit” Strategies: Billionaire Utopias and Rural Stagnation

• Elites’ Escape: Creating Alternative Societies

  • Tech billionaires (Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Musk) are building “network states,” offshoring, and company towns to escape social responsibilities.
  • “‘Exit’…is about exiting society, your money…places where it can’t be governed…Thiel funded the seasteading project…It’s all about total kind of corporate control over where they live.” – Jacob Silverman ([43:45])

• No Exit for the Rural Poor

  • Macy: “The people left behind have been brainwashed...there is no exit.” ([45:50])

6. What’s to Be Done? Policy, Political Agency, and Real Populism

• Repairing Democracy and Media

  • Macy calls for support to local journalism as “the democracy's immune system”—but recounts how even targeted philanthropic support is insufficient ([46:46]).
  • Both guests argue for genuine economic populism (not billionaire-fueled “false populism”), higher taxes, more robust labor protections, and stronger information guardrails.
  • “We don’t have a genuine populism. In the absence of that...Trump and the right wing billionaires really flourish...” – Jacob Silverman ([47:30])

• On Tech Elites’ Disdain for Democracy

  • Swisher is blunt: “You imagine they care, Beth. They don’t...They don’t have any values whatsoever, and they really don’t like people. I think that’s ultimately at the heart of it.” ([49:51])

7. Ohio as Battleground: Vance, Ramaswamy, and the Next Generation

• J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy

  • Macy critiques J.D. Vance’s trajectory (“He’s blaming the poor for their poverty and saying, well, I got out, everybody should be able to get out” – [54:54]) and his lack of systemic critique in Hillbilly Elegy.
  • Silverman discusses Ramaswamy’s opportunism, willingness to shift ideology for ambition: “He is malleable. He is very smart. We’ll be dealing with him for decades.” ([57:00])
  • Both express doubt that these new MAGA-aligned figures can “bridge the gap” between rural and tech populists as Trump has.

• Beth Macy Runs for Congress

  • Macy reveals her congressional run in Virginia’s 6th District, motivated by the crises she’s reported on and lived through.

8. Looking Ahead: Agency, Hope, and the Fight for Reality

• Can People’s Views Be Shifted?

  • Swisher reads James Baldwin: “The world changes according to the way people see it…if you alter...the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.”
  • Silverman is hopeful: “These people...aren’t that popular...when people understand what they’re about, it’s not what they want.” ([64:44])
  • Macy: “If we can reach out, start with our families...have these hard conversations...and really make this a grassroots campaign...people are starting to see.” ([66:21])

• Final Hopes

  • Macy encourages personal, gentle conversation and media literacy at the grassroots.
  • Silverman hopes that the failure of tech to deliver real benefits (and the coming collapse of the AI bubble) might “produce some positive kind of political anger and sentiment where people realize, like, hey, these guys poured unbelievable resources into something that’s not really helping people.” ([67:40])

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “You’re either going to have to do something about income inequality or you’re going to have to armor plate your Tesla. Those are your two choices.” – Kara Swisher ([00:00], [61:43])
• “The paranoid billionaires and, you know, your paranoid cousin are now operating in the same epistemological and media space.” – Jacob Silverman ([07:49])
• “Marc Andreessen…does not think that journalists or anyone who’s kind of a non technical expert has any authority at all.” – Jacob Silverman ([12:02])
• “The people I saw who were deeply down the rabbit holes were looking for community where their community no longer existed.” – Beth Macy ([39:13])
• “I said, look, when the revolution starts and we have a civil war in this country and someone’s dragging you and your family out of your Silicon Valley homes before the knife goes into you, you’re going to think, maybe I could have stopped this.” – Iowa newspaper owner (via Beth Macy, [46:46])
• “We don’t have a genuine populism...that seeks to put a check on billionaire power, that seeks to really tax them, break up companies.” – Jacob Silverman ([47:30])
• “You imagine they care, Beth. They don’t...They don’t have any values whatsoever, and they really don’t like people.” – Kara Swisher ([49:51])
• “We have an idolatry of innovators and money, you know, in this country. And I think it’s gone to the extreme at this point.” – Kara Swisher ([63:42])
• “If we can somehow galvanize the moms to get more active and really make this a grassroots campaign…they are not paying their fair share.” – Beth Macy ([65:27])

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|---------| | [04:36] | Introductions: contrasting radicalization of tech rich & rural poor | | [05:13] | Beth Macy on rural news deserts & online radicalization | | [07:49] | Jacob Silverman: tech billionaires in the conspiracist media space | | [12:02] | Silverman on tech elites’ evasion and intolerance of critique | | [14:51] | Beth Macy: downward mobility for today's rural poor | | [17:56] | Silverman on PayPal Mafia's formative authoritarian influences | | [20:37] | Effects of deregulating homeschooling and "no school" trend | | [23:43] | Tech elites' disdain for college and partnership with right | | [26:12] | Macy: consequences of media-driven health disinformation | | [36:57] | Silverman on Saudi/tech/Trump “iron triangle” | | [39:13] | Macy: community decay and search for belonging | | [43:45] | Silverman on billionaire “exit” projects and shadow societies | | [47:30] | Real populism vs. “false populism” as solution | | [54:54] | Macy on J.D. Vance’s narrative failings | | [57:53] | Macy: motivation for running for Congress | | [61:43] | Swisher: Tech elites would rather “armor plate their Tesla” than fix inequality | | [64:44] | Baldwin quote; can public perception still change? | | [66:21] | Final hopes: conversation, media literacy, grassroots organizing |

Tone & Language

• Direct, personal, often caustic: The conversation features Swisher’s sharp, sardonic commentary (“You imagine they care, Beth. They don’t...”). Macy and Silverman provide both empathetic profiles and forceful critique.
• Urgent and engaged: The guests and host repeatedly return to the stakes for democracy, economic justice, and the next political generation.
• Richly anecdotal and data-informed: Personal stories (family, friends, rural youth), lived reporting, and references to broader structural changes.

Summary for New Listeners

This episode offers a penetrating look into how MAGA populism unites—and exploits—America’s rural poor and tech billionaires alike, resulting in a deeper, more dangerous political, economic, and informational fracture. Through the eyes of Beth Macy and Jacob Silverman, listeners see the decimation of rural social mobility, the spread of conspiracist media (online and offline), billionaires’ casual disregard for democratic norms, and the lack of a genuine economic populist alternative. Despite the dire diagnosis, the episode ends with practical hope: the importance of media literacy, grassroots organizing, personal conversations, and robust democratic guardrails to reclaim agency and reality itself.