How Techno-Fascists Are Engineering Our Surrender

They’ll target our identities, our values, our pain. And they’ll dress it up as principled resistance.

Last year, I voted for Kamala Harris—and lost several friends.

Not because they supported Trump. They didn’t. My friends are leftists: principled, passionate, and deeply disturbed by the Democratic Party’s actions. In their words, they couldn’t support a candidate who co-signed billions of U.S. dollars going toward the slaughter of children in Gaza. When I told them I planned to vote for Harris, they called me complicit.

There were days I wondered if they were right.

“Am I really going to let the Democrats get away with this?” I asked myself. “Is there a world where Trump actually changes course and stops the genocide?”

Even as I defended my choice, I couldn’t shake the feeling that abstaining—or encouraging others to disengage—wasn’t wrong on values, but on first principles. Choosing inaction in the face of fascism wasn’t resistance. It was surrender. And not a surrender imposed by the ruling class—but one we were choosing ourselves.

I felt it then, and I feel it now. As we stare down the barrel of a fascist takeover of the U.S. government, too many voices across our digital ecosystem are still saying: “Sit down.” “It doesn’t matter.” “This isn’t our fight.” “These protests are too establishment.” “Too suburban.” “Too old.”

If our charge is to fight with principle—to actively oppose fascism—why do so many of our arguments spiral into digital infighting and collective inaction? Why have we splintered into ideological factions and isolated micro-communities, growing ever more fractured and suspicious of one another, pushing ourselves deeper into paralysis?

The answer isn’t just about politics or personality. It’s a historical tactic that the right has been perfecting for decades. Like when Turning Point USA made ads targeting leftists and encouraging them to vote for the Green Party or when Elon Musk bought ads in Michigan that said Kamala Harris was both arming Israel against Gaza and ads saying she wasn’t doing enough to support the Jewish people.

To understand the fractures in our digital ecosystem—where friends who protested together one week are canceling wedding invitations the next—we need to look at the logic of white supremacy, and more specifically, the legacy of apartheid South Africa.

Its influence on American politics and conservative strategy can’t be overstated. During the Reagan era, anti-apartheid activists were labeled Soviet sympathizers. The U.S. government detained student protesters, funded fake grassroots campaigns to undermine anti-apartheid activism, and quietly supported a regime that used extrajudicial violence to crush Black resistance (see: student protests in support of Gaza). Even now, the racist history of South African apartheid is having direct impacts on the Trump administration as he capitulates to South African white supremacists and paves the way for Afrikaner “refugees” while ending support for all other refugees around the world.

So it’s no surprise that white South African immigrants—and the ideologies they brought with them—are playing an outsized role in shaping the present, particularly in American tech and right-wing politics.

“Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, now fundraising for Trump and trolling Ukraine, grew up in a South African diaspora family. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining—part of the apartheid regime’s nuclear ambitions. And Paul Furber, a South African software developer, has been identified by two forensic linguistics teams as the original voice behind QAnon, which helped shape Trump’s MAGA movement. (Furber denies being ‘Q’).”

These men didn’t just grow up under apartheid—they absorbed its logic. And now they’re using their platforms to shape our economy, media, and politics around that worldview. Understanding that lineage matters. Because the disinformation, division, and disempowerment we’re experiencing today aren’t random. They’re deliberate. They come from a very specific playbook.

One of the most important tools from that playbook? The disturbing use of South African Bantustans.

In apartheid South Africa, Bantustans were the foundation of the “grand apartheid” policy. Under the guise of “separate development,” Black South Africans were divided into ten ethnic groups, each assigned a “traditional homeland.” In theory, this was about self-determination. In reality, it was a strategy to strip people of their citizenship, voting rights, and access to basic infrastructure. These territories became territories of cheap labor for white South Africans—and a way to exclude Black people from political life.

Today’s digital misinformation campaigns try to foist something similar on us: isolation disguised as self-determination.

Unlike the geographic Bantustans of South Africa, we can’t immediately see our digital isolation. The walls close in slowly. The social fabric erodes behind an algorithm. Most insidiously, our rights are not being taken from us in one fell swoop—we’re surrendering them willingly. In a way, we’re being boiled, not burned.

Through digital echo chambers, people—our friends, our families, our neighbors—have internalized narratives crafted by some of the world’s most powerful bad actors. Narratives designed to divide us, not through laws or policies, but through ideas. Ideas that pit neighbor against neighbor, activist against activist. The right is effectively seeding narratives that are meant to discourage us from protests, voting, and activism. They started with policies to make it harder to vote—but they have evolved to make it feel like “not voting” was a choice we made all on our own.

This virtual isolation is the enemy of organizing. But digital spaces don’t have to be. It just means we need to build stronger muscles for navigating the slop. And that starts by understanding that these strategies didn’t work because people are naive. They work because people have reasons to distrust systems that have failed them, and we must encourage individual belief in real changemaking—not virtue signaling to our like-minded cohorts.

Take Russian interference: whether or not it changed the outcome of the 2016 election is beside the point. What matters is how it refined and accelerated the far-right’s use of digital isolation. And it wasn’t (just) about wild conspiracy theories like drinking bleach or denying climate change. A study from 2019 shows that their main targets were far-right conservatives, Black Americans, and those on the left. The goal was not simply spreading falsehoods. It was about drawing people into ideological corners, feeding existing doubts, and deepening our sense of powerlessness.

They targeted conservatives who already believed the government shouldn’t exist. They targeted people of color who had been systematically excluded. They targeted leftists who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party. Disinformation didn’t spread because people were ignorant—it spread because the systems were already failing the groups they chose to target. Reader: this will only get worse over time. As our systems are plundered by privatization, those feelings of helplessness will increase.

Just like apartheid-era leaders used Bantustans to fracture resistance, today’s disinformation architects use digital silos to isolate us. Fragmented, demoralized, and disengaged, we become easier to control.

Long term, we have to show people that the government isn’t a distant force to fear, but a tool we can shape and use together. In the short term, we have to recognize as individuals that collective action is impossible if we allow ourselves to wear powerlessness as a badge of honor.

Disagreement is part of being human. It’s part of how we grow. But when our differences become calls to disengage, the PayPal Mafia is laughing all the way to the cryptobank.

The hard truth is that we can’t fact-check our way out of this balkanized digital landscape. The only defense is building resilience against the narratives meant to tear us apart and believing deeply in our own power to affect change. These attacks are only going to become more sophisticated. They’ll target our identities, our values, our pain. And they’ll dress it up as principled resistance.

In the near future, we’ll face identity wars amplified by waves of AI-generated content micro-targeting our deepest anxieties and divisions. Civic tech, once used for organizing, will be repurposed to track us and feed our paranoia. Promises of “Freedom Cities” will be sold to us as places where we can live in harmony with our own kind, away from the division and mess of building solidarity across identities (again…sound familiar?). These are not fights we can win with our current playbook.

But we can write a new one.