In the week since Donald Trump was relected as President of the United States, Republicans have loudly celebrated the death of "wokeness." That may be true, but as I've analyzed the festering feelings inside of me I've come to realize that something far more problematic has risen in its place.

The era of Fake Principled People is upon us.

Fake principled people go to great lengths to convince you of their noble beliefs and agenda—yet their actions conflict with their words as soon as they have something to gain. 

Let's look at the examples of the moment.

• Elon Musk previously called Donald Trump "completely unfit to be President." This bastion of free speech has spent much of the past year rallying against the biases of "main street media," yet he's spreading as much misinformation as anyone and has added bias to his own social media company's algorithm. He's now Trump's closest ally.
• JD Vance previously called Trump an "idiot" and "rehensible." Now he's his VP.
• Marco Rubio previously said that if Trump had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he'd be "selling watches in Manhattan." Trump said Rubio is "foolish" and that he "wouldn't hire him to run even one of his small companies." He's now looking to make Rubio Secretary of State.
• Even in the industry that I work, tech, esteemed investor Naval Ravikant has long waxed poetic about things like the importance of working with highly intelligent people with strong ethics. Yet he's spent the last six months using all of his social capital to get Trump elected?

What happened here, fellas?

It's not hard to unravel.

These people all changed their tune—and their actions no longer reflected their words—as soon as they had something to gain. 

Musk's support for Trump has already made him billions, and he wants to get to Mars. Vance and Rubio's political careers were accelerated. Naval is a venture capitalist with heavy holdings of crypto. We're talking about the richest man in the world and two venture capitalists here—it shouldn't come as shocking that these people ditched their stated beliefs in lieu of their own financial interests.

If that's the case, fine—but save me the pithy tweets and the noble agendas. At least have the balls to admit it.

Your principles and beliefs only mean something if you stick to them—even when it's against your own best interests.

I want to see just one person say "I'm willing to overlook Donald Trump's criminal record and character because it's in my financial interests to do so."

That's my call in this post—stop hiding and be truthful in your motivations. But we won't see that. Consider Musk's move to stop showing who likes posts on Twitter; he literally built a feature so that people can hide without taking accountability for their opinions.

As we head into whatever lies ahead, you'll earn my respect and my ear more than ever by being an authentically principled person. If it's obvious that you'll abandon your stated principles as soon as you have something to gain, you're not a principled person—you're an opportunist.

And that's the era we're entering in the United States—one where our leaders' actions are incongruent with what they've articulated as their beliefs.

The dominant American value over the next 4 years is clear—one's own self-interest.

I wake up today in a country filled with an awful lot of fake principled people. And it's tough to be suprised, given that we just elected a conman.