When Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump White House aide, recorded an interview with Breitbart News just outside the conference ballroom, he said that China was the “one existential threat to the United States.”
“Two, maybe,” replied Breitbart’s editor, Alex Marlow. “Silicon Valley.” Both men laughed.
Amid the mounting animus, Big Tech laid low.
Google, a leading conference sponsor in 2018 — when its logo was plastered on banners alongside groups like the National Rifle Association and the Heritage Foundation — did not participate this year. Facebook’s “help desk” was also nowhere to be found.
Representatives from both companies were not keen to explain their reasoning. “The list of events that Facebook sponsors or participates in evolves from year to year,” a Facebook spokesman, Andy Stone, wrote in an email. A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment.
That left conservative activists to fill in the blanks.
“Good riddance,” said Raheem Kassam, a former London editor of Breitbart News, who was asked about Silicon Valley’s absence shortly before hosting a nightclub party that was among the conference’s most sought-after tickets. (Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit leader, made an appearance.)
“They don’t want to be welcome here,” Mr. Kassam said of Facebook and Google. “Each of them has shown over the last couple of years that they are just not willing to play fair with the political right.”
Days earlier, Mr. Kassam set off a furor in the right-wing media when his Facebook page, which has tens of thousands of followers, was deleted without warning. The move seemed to confirm conservative fears of “de-platforming,” the claim — denied by leaders of social media — that tech companies seek to suppress right-wing content.
