Special Edition: Why is Cleveland's Mayor palling around with tech bros and defense contractors in Detroit?
This is a joint post with Upbeat Nonsense, a Cleveland newsletter about pop culture and politics.
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Last week, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb attended the Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit, where he was the only current public official outside the Trump administration scheduled to speak. Alongside billionaires, defense contractors and tech oligarchs, Bibb appears to be the only elected Democrat to speak in the summit’s history since launching in 2024.
Bibb’s decision to appeal to a conservative base is part of a pattern of behavior. In 2024, Bibb appeared on a podcast hosted by a Republican megadonor, and in 2025 publicly called immigrants “illegals” and said that people are “tired of the resistance.” Earlier this spring, he collaborated with Trump's Department of Justice to try and overturn Cleveland’s decade-long consent decree. (A federal judge ruled within weeks that Cleveland police had not satisfied the terms of the agreement, calling the request to end it “surely premature.”) For years, Bibb has tried to push through multiple contracts with controversial surveillance companies such as ShotSpotter and Flock.
Strangely, Bibb himself is not listed as a speaker in the June 2 press release announcing the lineup for Reindustrialize. The primary public evidence of his involvement comes from a conference announcement on LinkedIn and a few pictures attendees snapped with the mayor. Both of Bibb’s own social media accounts are uncharacteristically quiet about his participation. The City of Cleveland also did not issue a press release and has not posted anything publicly either.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Reindustrialize said that the list of speakers is a “living document” and that Bibb was asked to speak by the cofounders, one of whom—Aaron Slodov, CEO of Atomic Industries—is an “acquaintance of the mayor stretching back to the Cleveland tech ecosystem of 2014.” The spokesperson also said that Bibb discussed Cleveland’s Midline district, a large tract of land on the city’s near east side which has been redeveloped for new business use, during a session with Ken Biberaj of real estate firm Savills.
The City of Cleveland did not respond to a request for comment.
Reindustrialize is a conference in its third year for “builders, engineers, and leaders” determined to “forge a new era of American dynamism, built on steel, silicon, and sovereign capability.” Its website promises “trillion dollar opportunities” in “exascale manufacturing.” Its politics lean heavily toward the post-Reagan new right: the New American Industrial Alliance (NAIA), which calls itself a founding partner of Reindustrialize, was itself co-founded by Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs. Narya, a venture capital firm started by noted Peter Thiel protege and Vice President of the United States JD Vance, is listed as a “marquee sponsor.” Most of the conference’s brand partners are members of NAIA: they include Palantir, a company co-founded by Thiel which today plays midwife to ICE surveillance, and a litany of defense contractors. Another brand sponsor is Build American AI, a dark money group connected to Andreessen Horowitz, which is led by Trump cheerleader Marc Andreessen and is the largest spender in this year’s midterm elections.
The speakers’ list is even more revealing of the conference’s ideological bent. Despite nods to bipartisanship, Mayor Bibb is the only elected Democrat listed in public announcements. Other speakers include Brendan Carr (Trump’s FCC chairman, who seems to believe free speech means not being allowed to criticize the president on television); Kelly Loeffler (head of the Small Business Administration and a former US senator from Georgia who traded $20 million in stock in the weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic’s peak); and Antonio Gracias, a DOGE affiliate and ally of Elon Musk.
The conference has attracted controversy in the past: last year, a group called Engineers Against Apartheid protested against the inclusion of Palantir and the company’s involvement in Israel’s war in Gaza. Attendees that year included Palmer Luckey, CEO of Anduril. Luckey calls himself a “radical zionist” and has fundraised for President Donald Trump; Anduril operates a “hyperscale manufacturing plant” outside of Columbus, OH.
Attendees are invited to “apply for an invitation,” which costs more than $2,500 after taxes and are subject to approval by the conference organizers. It is not clear whether or not the mayor’s ticket was comped by the organizers.
Perhaps Mayor Bibb does not feel it is beneath his office to go to Detroit, hat in hand, to ask for investment from America’s techno-oligarchs. But Reindustrialize appears more concerned with procuring lucrative defense contracts than producing manufacturing jobs for cities like Cleveland. The website even links to a manifesto, which boasts that “We may even get to the point where it only takes a few people to operate a factory,” and many of the convention partners boast openly about their “AI-native” manufacturing operations.
Surely these are not the kind of business partners Bibb envisions rejuvenating Cleveland’s industrial base? If they are, then his vision is more in line with JobsOhio—the state economic development agency, funded through a tax on liquor sales, which also attended Reindustrialize—than Cleveland mayors of yesteryear. JobsOhio has been a major booster of state investment in data centers, which are heavily subsidized through tax abatements in Ohio but create very few permanent jobs.
Justin Bibb is far from the only, or even the most, disappointing Democratic politician in the United States today. The oldest American political party seems determined to stay as far from its base as possible, routinely opting for short-term economic gains for investors over popular steps toward more equitable prosperity. But Bibb’s attendance at Reindustrialize will do little in the long-term to build power for working families—or for Cleveland.
Jennifer Scheel