David Friedberg just said what a lot of people in tech are thinking but won't say out loud and the evidence backs him up (Save this). @friedberg argument is that the people who talk loudest about inequality, fairness, and protecting the working class are the same people building the most sophisticated machinery of economic control this country has ever seen and disguising it as virtue. He calls it the Great American Politburo. The Politburo, for context, was the small committee that ran the Soviet Union controlling the economy, education, media and what citizens could and couldn't do, while insulating its own members from the rules they imposed on everyone else. Freeberg's case is that Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna are doing the exact same thing, American edition. And here is the evidence. Congressional members outperformed the S&P 500 again in 2024 , Democratic representatives averaged 31% returns while Republicans averaged 26%, compared to a 24.9% gain for the S&P itself. Nancy Pelosi's Nvidia positions have returned 586% since 2021 while she simultaneously sat on committees regulating the semiconductor industry. Elizabeth Warren publicly calls for soaking the rich while financial disclosures reveal she has made millions on Wall Street investments, the same markets she campaigns against. A nonpartisan tracker of congressional wealth found that roughly half of all 540 members of Congress match or beat the S&P 500 on an annualized basis. These are people with access to intelligence briefings, regulatory decision-making, and committee hearings held months before public disclosure and they're trading the whole time. The AI angle is where this becomes directly relevant to every reader of this newsletter. In February 2026, Sanders and Khanna held a town hall at Stanford specifically calling for slowing down AI development warning of profound dangers from AI controlled by billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Thiel. They called for keeping humans in the loop," broad AI regulation, a federal AI regulatory agency, and ensuring productivity gains are shared with workers. On the surface, that sounds reasonable. Who could be against sharing gains with workers? But look at what that agenda actually means in practice, a federal AI regulatory agency means political appointees deciding which companies can and cannot deploy AI, which models can and cannot be released, and which applications are approved or denied with no market mechanism and no accountability to the people actually building the technology. That is the Politburo structure Freeberg is describing, translated into tech policy.