As the Hegseth hearings unfold, I wanted to give you a view into a small part of the story which, while perhaps not terribly consequential in itself, sheds some additional light on the Trump team’s effort to lock down details about Hegseth’s background as well as general press credulity about the same. This morning’s Axios reports that the Trump transition’s “red line” is that only Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) should be briefed on Hegseth’s FBI background check, not the rest of the committee. “The Trump transition team is demanding the president-elect’s nominees be treated the same way they insist Joe Biden’s were,” it reads.

There’s currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always secretly or latently right wing or whether “progressives” took a business constituency that was a reliably friendly and financially generous ally and turned it into an enemy through relentless attacks. Needless to say, there are a lot of jangling threads to this story, details that are hard to wrestle into an overarching theory. There are Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel who have always been not simply right-wingers but advocates of weird, tech-infused neo-monarchism. There have also been various left-aligned campaigns that must have rankled various tech titans. And finally, it’s very important to remember that it’s not at all clear that Silicon Valley as a whole is moving right. Management is. But the real and big story is simpler and more structural. The major technology platforms became mature businesses at vast scales; in so doing they butted up against the regulatory purview of the national government; and with the former leading to the latter they shifted toward a more conventionally anti-regulatory politics. A lot of it is really that simple.

There’s an important additional, related point which is that on becoming mature businesses they began looking toward the federal government more and more to protect their business positions from new entrants or other threats.

Having watched Mark Zuckerberg’s week-long rollout of the new MAGAfied Facebook/Meta, let me put my chips down on none of this aging well for his company. It’s simply too clumsy and over-the-top and it places too many bets on a lame-duck President who will be governing a still sharply divided country. As much as anything else, these moves highlight Meta’s tech and global regulatory vulnerabilities — not so much vis a vis the U.S. government or even the European Union as other tech giants. These things take a long time to play out. The U.S. government and the executive branch that Trump will soon control can absolutely do a lot of favors for Zuckerberg and Meta. And Zuckerberg has been pretty transparent about what he hopes those favors are. But overall it just tells a very weak and defensive brand story as you see this playing out over the years to come.