It has a rulebook.

The Industrielleneingabe was a petition delivered to President Paul von Hindenburg in November 1932. Roughly nineteen to twenty industrialists, bankers, and landowners — including the arms magnate Gustav Krupp and a representative connected to the chemical giant IG Farben — urged the head of state to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. The effort was organized through the Keppler Circle, the group of businessmen convened by Wilhelm Keppler and including the financier Hjalmar Schacht, who cultivated ties between heavy industry and the Nazi party. This is not interpretation: it is a signed document. When people say business would never back an authoritarian, the honest answer is that a class of German business leaders once put it in a letter.

• Wikipedia — Industrielleneingabe (the industrialists' petition to Hindenburg, November 1932)
• Wikipedia — Keppler Circle (Wilhelm Keppler, Hjalmar Schacht, and the business network behind it)

Weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and days before the March 1933 election, a group of leading German industrialists met privately with Hitler and Hermann Göring. At that meeting the assembled businessmen — figures tied to IG Farben, Krupp, Telefunken, Osram, and others — pledged roughly two to three million Reichsmarks to bankroll the Nazi and allied election campaign. The petition asked for the strongman; this was the class paying to entrench him once he held office. The record of the meeting, including the pledges, is documented and was later used as evidence in postwar proceedings.

• Wikipedia — Secret Meeting of 20 February 1933 (industrialists pledge ~2–3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi campaign)
• Wikipedia — Industrielleneingabe (the November 1932 petition that preceded the funding)

Here is where we hold ourselves to the standard we demand of others. The quote everyone reaches for — 'Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power' — is apocryphal. There is no primary source for it in Mussolini's writings or speeches; it first surfaced in a 2004 book and has been circulating, misattributed, ever since. Worse, it misdescribes what Mussolini actually built. His corporatism — the corporazioni — was a system of vertical estate organization, folding labor and employers into state-controlled bodies by economic sector; it was not a doctrine about modern commercial corporations like the ones we mean today. So we debunk the quote we would have been tempted to use, and we argue from the real record instead: a genuine 'corporate state' existed, and it was an instrument for fusing organized economic power with the authoritarian state.

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism... — attributed to Mussolini, but with NO primary source; a documented fake.”

• The Skeptical Libertarian — 'Fake Mussolini Quote: Fascism should more properly be called corporatism' (the debunk)
• Wikipedia — Corporatism (Italian corporatism / the corporazioni as vertical estate organization; context)

This is not only a European story, and we do not need to rebuild it here — our archive already carries it. In 1933, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified before the McCormack–Dickstein Committee that he had been approached to lead a corporate-backed coup against President Franklin Roosevelt, the episode known as the Business Plot. Across the war years and after, American corporate and state ties to the Nazi apparatus are documented — from Trading with the Enemy transactions, to the postwar High Commissioner John J. McCloy commuting the sentences of and freeing convicted Nazi industrialists, to Operation Paperclip's recruitment of German scientists. We cross-link these rather than re-litigate them; the point is that the pattern reached American shores and American boardrooms, and it is recorded.

• The Business Plot — the 1933 corporate-backed coup attempt against FDR (Smedley Butler; McCormack–Dickstein Committee)
• Trading with the Enemy — U.S. corporate transactions with the Nazi apparatus
• McCloy Freed the Nazis — the postwar High Commissioner and the release of convicted Nazi industrialists
• Operation Paperclip — postwar recruitment of German scientists into the U.S. state

Patterns need conditions, and the concentration of wealth today is not a metaphor — it is measured. Work by the economist Gabriel Zucman finds that the very top of the distribution, on the order of the top 0.00001 percent, now captures roughly 12 percent of national income, against about 4 percent around 1910 — that is, roughly triple the Gilded Age peak. The top 0.1 percent hold about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent combined. Forbes counted roughly 905 U.S. billionaires worth on the order of $7.8 trillion in 2025. We keep the framing deliberately loose — 'roughly,' 'on the order of' — because the exact figures move with method and year. The claim we stand behind is directional and well-sourced: concentration at the very top now rivals or exceeds the Gilded Age it is so often compared to.

• Gabriel Zucman — research homepage on wealth and income concentration at the top of the distribution
• Forbes — The World's Billionaires (U.S. billionaire count and aggregate wealth, 2025)

This entry is a FACT about what certain influential texts SAY — not a label pinned on any living businessman. The intellectual canon the new tech-right openly cites is, in its own founding documents, anti-egalitarian. Curtis Yarvin, writing as 'Mencius Moldbug,' has described slavery as 'a natural human relationship' akin to that of patron and client, has praised the Victorian reactionary Thomas Carlyle, and has scorned the premise of 'natural human equality' — and we carry his denial that he is a racist or an advocate of slavery. Nick Land, whose 'Dark Enlightenment' essay gives the movement its name, has openly advocated what he calls 'hyper-racism,' a program of eugenic sorting via assortative mating. We do NOT call any living businessman a racist as a matter of fact. We document the cited ideology's own words and pose the question it forces: when a movement's demand for 'freedom' rests on a philosophy that rejects human equality, the obvious question is freedom for whom?

“When a demand for 'freedom' is built on texts that reject human equality, the fair question is: freedom for whom?”

• Wikipedia — Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug; writings on hierarchy, Carlyle, and equality; and his own denials)
• Wikipedia — Dark Enlightenment (Nick Land and his advocacy of what he terms 'hyper-racism')

Set the record side by side. A century ago, a wealthy industrial class did not merely tolerate an authoritarian turn — a documented slice of it petitioned for the strongman in writing and then paid to entrench him. Today, wealth at the very top rivals or exceeds that era's peak, and the intellectual canon the new tech-right openly cites rejects, in its own founding texts, the premise of human equality. We are not saying the two are the same, and we are not calling anyone a fascist. But the plain questions are these: big business has enabled the authoritarian turn before, in writing — why assume it never would again? And when the demand for “freedom” is anchored to a philosophy that scorns equality, freedom for whom? We think those are legitimate questions. We also think the honest posture, right now, is to pose them from the documented record and let the reader weigh the echo.

• Wikipedia — the 1932 industrialists' petition, the documented precedent
• Wikipedia — the Dark Enlightenment canon, in its own words