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To be honest I dont think the tech right is bending the knee to the traditional right. I see the tech right as breathing free after more than a decade of incessant political correctness that permeated the professional managerial classes, a political correctness enforced by commissars emboldened by the fat of the land being creamed off for the commisars benefit as sinecures to maintain respectability. Remember, till Nov 2024 the popular vote was always Democratic, or Labour+SNP+Green, or whatever other permutation that proved that most people actually were not right wing.
The end of ZIRP means that tech has to pay attention to bottom lines more, conservative wins have shown the unpopularity of pretending political correctness serves a useful social goal, and finally Trumps victory has shattered the myth of minorities and young people being more receptive to equity outcome pandering. With the illusion cast aside, the tech bros, who are still largely anodyne liberal cowards, have firmer footing to raise up Inconvenient Issues at least for consistencies sake.
It used to be Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hassan Yousef, maybe even Maajid Nawaz who were screaming into the void about irredentist minorities who were not obeying the presumed liberal playbook of inevitable assimilation. Instead the 2010s and 2020s were dominated by screeching feminist institutions and race baiters like Gawker, Jezebel, Slate, Salon Vice and Buzzfeed, before they were annihilated by market forces and leaving DiAngelo and Kendi to step in as thought leaders for socially cowardly professionals.
Musks aggressive attack on Starmer may have some other reasons like a personal vendetta against the twitter ban or whatever, but the undeniable fact is that the illusion is shattered and the protected classes no longer enjoy the presumption of mass social acceptance for their Culture. The meta has finally changed. I fully expect a mass blackpilling among normies who finally realize that verbalizing coincidentally racist stereotypes that boomers correctly observed are no longer social suicide.
You could say that fairly about Zuckerberg. Not about Musk.
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