Part 2 in a continuing Falls Church News-Press series on Technology in 2025 and the Future of America
Falls Church — We sing the national anthem at ballgames. We plaster “Land of the Free” on bumper stickers. We recite the First Amendment in classrooms as if the words alone can still protect us. But here is the brutal truth: America is not free. Not anymore. Not really.
Freedom wasn’t stolen in one moment. It was sold off piece by piece, click by click, dollar by dollar — until the very industries that once built this nation were twisted into machines of manipulation. The divide-and-conquer strategies once used on battlefields became corporate business models. Rage was monetized. Division was packaged. Truth itself was put up for sale.
And then Donald Trump arrived. He didn’t invent the system — but he poured gasoline on it. Trained by Roy Cohn in the art of projection, Trump showed the Titans that truth no longer mattered, that hashtags could replace facts, that lies repeated loudly enough would reshape reality. He was the accelerant, the proof of concept, the final blow that confirmed democracy could be gamed and sold like everything else.
Even the CIA, once thought to be the all-seeing eye of national power, has been reduced to a pawn. Its servers run on Amazon Web Services. Its surveillance tools are powered by Palantir. Its risk models run through BlackRock’s Aladdin. The agencies that once watched the world are now dependent on the very Titans they should have been watching.
The History Channel’s “Titans of America” reminded us how Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt once owned entire industries. They bent presidents to their will, bought off Congress, and crushed competition. But compared to today’s Titans, they look quaint. The oil barons and railroad kings controlled industries. The new Titans control reality itself, including speech, behavior, culture, money, war.
Mark Zuckerberg has near-total control of Meta, wielding 54 percent of voting power despite holding less than 15 percent of its stock. He openly idolizes Augustus Caesar, the man who killed the Roman Republic. He secretly bought 1,300 acres in Hawaii and sued Native Hawaiian families to seize their ancestral land. His engineers admitted they could predict a relationship breakup with 90 percent accuracy three days before it happened. Internal memos revealed the company could tweak algorithms to shift national voter turnout by one percent. He buried research showing Instagram worsens depression and suicidal thoughts in teenagers. He tried to launch Libra, a private global currency that would have rivaled the U.S. dollar. Zuckerberg doesn’t just run a platform. He has built a surveillance empire that knows more about you than your family does.
Elon Musk, who legally crowned himself Tesla’s Technoking, has shown how fragile the system is when one man can swing global markets with a tweet. His Dogecoin memes drove the coin up 12,000 percent in weeks, creating and erasing billions of dollars. His company Neuralink killed dozens of monkeys in gruesome brain-chip experiments: one bled uncontrollably, another clawed at its own brain before dying. Musk has received more than $5 billion in taxpayer subsidies, even while posturing as a self-made genius. Meanwhile, he struck exclusive Pentagon deals that made SpaceX the default launch provider for the U.S. military, consolidating America’s access to space in his hands. Musk is not just a meme-maker. He is a defense contractor, a market manipulator, and a man testing brain control on living beings.
Peter Thiel built Palantir with CIA seed money after 9/11. Its surveillance software, once used to track insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, now powers predictive policing in American cities and ICE’s deportation dragnet. He secretly obtained New Zealand citizenship as an escape hatch. He has said publicly: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” He pays teenagers $100,000 to drop out of college, undermining higher education while grooming his own pipeline of loyal disciples. He bankrolled Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that scraped billions of faces from the internet without consent. He funds “Seasteading” floating cities designed as billionaire havens outside law. And in 2022, he poured $30 million into Trumpist candidates like J.D. Vance. Thiel doesn’t just doubt democracy. He is actively investing in its replacement.
Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, owns 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he is building a “smart island” that tracks residents’ energy, water, and even health data. After 9/11, he lobbied Congress for a national ID system — with Oracle as the vendor. Today he is circling both TikTok and Disney, meaning one man could control both the social feeds that dominate youth attention and the cultural stories that define American childhood. Ellison is not just a businessman. He is a would-be cultural monarch.
Jeff Bezos embedded Amazon at the very core of government surveillance. Amazon Web Services holds a $600 million CIA contract and powers the Pentagon and NSA. Amazon patented wristbands that buzz warehouse workers when their hands move “incorrectly.” The company built “union heat maps” to predict which warehouses were most likely to organize, then spied on workers’ private Facebook groups. Bezos is building a 10,000-year clock in a Texas mountain as a monument to permanence while quietly buying hundreds of thousands of acres of land. His space company Blue Origin imagines orbital colonies where corporations, not nations, own humanity’s future. And while running the backbone of U.S. intelligence computing, Bezos owns The Washington Post. He controls both the servers of the spies and the stories the public reads.
Then there is BlackRock, the trillion-dollar shadow government. With nearly $10 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock is larger than the GDP of Japan and Germany combined. Its Aladdin super-AI tracks more than 20,000 risk factors across the global economy every day. It has direct data pipelines with the Federal Reserve. During Covid, Trump’s Treasury outsourced U.S. bond-buying to BlackRock, literally privatizing America’s central bank. BlackRock owns stock in both defense contractors and the media companies that cover their wars, profiting from the bombs and the headlines. Internal documents advised clients to buy water rights as a future asset, planning to profit from global thirst. BlackRock doesn’t just move markets. It dictates them.
And behind the curtain are the defense contractors who perfected this game decades ago. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program is the most expensive weapons system in history, projected to cost $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, and with factories in 45 states, it is politically untouchable. Northrop Grumman oversees America’s nuclear modernization while funding PR campaigns that tie local jobs to nuclear weapons, making nukes a source of civic pride. These companies don’t just build weapons. They build dependency. They make it impossible for Washington to ever stop paying them.
Donald Trump sits at the political center of this machinery. Mentored by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s ruthless lawyer, he mastered the rules: never admit, always attack, accuse others of what you are guilty of. Trump turned those rules into hashtags. #FakeNews to delegitimize journalism. #DrainTheSwamp to disguise his own actions. #StopTheSteal to cover his attempt to overturn the election. His allies’ Project 2025 is the Cohn doctrine turned into government policy: purge 50,000 civil servants, politicize data, weaponize the DOJ, and fuse billionaire monopoly with the state itself.
Here in Virginia, Senator Mark Warner has been one of the only voices connecting the dots. The first in his family to graduate college, Warner built his fortune in telecom spectrum and helped launch Nextel. As governor, he expanded broadband into rural Virginia. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he has seen firsthand how platforms are used to manipulate public opinion and national security. He pressed Meta to release internal research on Instagram’s impact on teens. He warned that TikTok is a national security threat. He co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, the first attempt to regulate online political advertising, which Big Tech spent millions to kill. In classified hearings, Warner has warned that foreign powers are using U.S. platforms to “map the American mind in real time.” He has said bluntly that Project 2025 is a direct plan to dismantle democracy. He is one of the only leaders who understands both the code and the consequences, and that makes him dangerous to the Titans.
So why do we keep teaching history if we refuse to learn from it? Why do we keep teaching science if its data can be twisted into propaganda? Why do we teach math if algorithms are designed not to solve problems but to weaponize fear? The old Titans built railroads and oil fields. The new Titans build mental prisons.
The terrifying truth is that democracy did not end with tanks in the streets. It ended with hashtags, algorithms, and billionaires who turned freedom into a product. America is not free. We are datasets. We are monitored, modeled, and managed. We are citizens only in name, commodities in reality. Unless we wake up, history will not remember us as defenders of liberty. It will remember us as the generation that gave it all away while still singing that we were free.