Google drew a lot of attention last week for updating the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America,” falling in line with Donald Trump’s recent executive order. While that received the most mainstream media attention, it was only one of Google’s recent moves that demonstrated that corporations are ready to wholeheartedly embrace their role in oppression. The United States government has long been more interested in the wants of corporations than those of everyday citizens. The latest quid pro quo in that symbiotic relationship has Google and others enforcing the spirit of oppressive policies before the legality of those orders has had the chance to be worked out.

Google Calendar no longer automatically populates “cultural holidays,” including Pride, Black History Month, Trans Day of Visibility, and Trans Day of Remembrance. They’ve also recently backed away from their promise not to use AI for weapons. This is apparently the behavior that gets you front row seats to Trump’s inauguration.

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Google isn’t alone in cozying up to Trump and his team. Meta was ahead of the curve when they rushed to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, rewrite their code of conduct to allow accusing LGBTQ+ people of being mentally ill, and terminate their DEI team. Hearing that another company is pulling their DEI programs has become commonplace, but Meta and Google aren’t Walmart, which people can simply choose to avoid. These tech corporations control our access to information and our social spaces. When they preemptively comply with orders and adjust their approaches to marginalized communities, they are stripping us of an avenue for resistance.

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It might be tempting to argue that these are independent companies that have no obligation to push back against Trump and his policies. But they are jumping into bed with this administration. Google claims that their Calendar changes are because there were too many cultural holidays to keep up with, but the timing is suspicious when it coincides with Trump releasing an executive order targeting “anti-Christian bias” and makes a specific mention of Trans Day of Visibility within it. (Republicans were apoplectic last year when the Trans Day of Visibility just happened to fall on Easter Sunday.)

We’re actually seeing more pushback from parts of the government, school systems, and hospitals than we are from these supposedly independent companies. Providers who had paused gender-affirming care after the executive order targeting it have resumed care. A federal judge has since blocked Trump’s gender-affirming care ban. And multiple school systems have refused to comply with Trump’s executive order calling for discrimination against trans people in schools.

Corporations like Google and Meta are eager to get in with Trump and Elon Musk today so that they can win favor for their businesses. But that’s really just the culmination of a long unmasking process around the true nature of the U.S. government. Back in 2010, the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC massively increased the lobbying power and political sway that corporations could have. 

With the cult of Trump, tit for tat is the name of the game and if Google and Meta want to make sure they’re the ones with their voices heard in the White House, they have to go to bat for the administration when it comes to tearing down marginalized communities and trampling on people’s rights. Corporations acting as the boot for the government is more of a U.S. tradition than that, however. Even a hundred years ago, when empire became a dirty word, the United States took to colonizing countries around the world not with government force, but through economic exploitation by U.S. corporations.

Google and Meta abandoning any moral pretense and using the Republican anti-”woke” playbook to get closer to governmental power (and Elon Musk sitting in the White House) is simply the natural next step from all that has come before. Because of the political moment during which it has arrived, major targets have been trans people and DEI initiatives. Scapegoating marginalized groups is a longstanding fascist tradition, and these organizations preemptively complying and over-complying is signaling that they are willing to be tools of the Executive Branch, that they will allow politicians to exercise unlawful power through them when judges try to block their actions as unconstitutional.

So what can we do about all of this? Boycott? Quitting Meta products might be feasible for some, but it means leaving social spaces where people have built a community and tossing out Meta Quests and Meta Glasses if people have bought them. Dropping Google from day-to-day life is likely to be a significant challenge for most as Google’s information technology products are seen as the default and only good options to the extent that looking something up is just called “Googling it.” Hitting companies in their wallets has traditionally been the only thing that they’ll listen to. However, in this case, it seems likely that they have done their cost-benefit analyses and decided that Trump and Musk ensuring the continuation and expansion of Google and Meta’s federal contracts will cover enough financial losses if they sign up to enforce the will of the oppressors.

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