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Thiel and Bannon: “Yellow Peril” in Silicon Valley

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COMMENT: There has been much com­men­tary about anti-Asian racism in the U.S. fol­low­ing numer­ous, some­times lethal attacks on Asian-Amer­i­cans in the wake of the pan­dem­ic.

Aside from the full-court press against Chi­na that we have cov­ered extensively–including and espe­cial­ly the dis­turb­ing evi­dence that the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic was delib­er­ate­ly engi­neered by the U.S.–this should come as no sur­prise.

Peter Thiel–lynchpin of pow­er in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, the top dog in Palan­tir (the alpha preda­tor of the elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance milieu), a key play­er in Facebook–has dis­sem­i­nat­ed anti-Chi­nese vit­ri­ol about the “yel­low per­il” in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

He has been joined in that effort by Steve Ban­non, a coor­di­na­tor of anti-Chi­na activ­i­ty in Wash­ing­ton D.C.

” . . . . The bil­lion­aire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “trea­son” and called for a law enforce­ment inves­ti­ga­tion of the search engine’s par­ent com­pa­ny. He spec­u­lat­ed that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has invad­ed its employ­ee ranks. A Ger­man immi­grant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeat­ed asser­tions of the rab­ble rouser Steve Ban­non that there are too many Asian CEOs in Sil­i­con Val­ley. These claims, com­bined with sim­i­lar charges of wrong­do­ing against stu­dents and pro­fes­sors of Chi­nese ori­gin on cam­pus­es across the coun­try, are as omi­nous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evi­dence, Ban­non dis­plays ample prej­u­dice. They are inspir­ing para­noia about every­one of Chi­nese her­itage. . . .”

Ban­non’s state­ments and actions are par­tic­u­lar­ly iron­ic in light of his cyn­i­cal use of rem­nants of “the old Chi­na” in his “Gold Farm­ing” busi­ness the first decade of this cen­tu­ry.

“. . . . From 2007 to 2012, he had been the CEO of a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar video-game gold-farm­ing scheme. “Gold farm­ing” was a term for let­ting third-world labor­ers to do; the same repet­i­tive tasks in mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er online role-play­ing games (MORPGs) to acquire in-game cur­ren­cy. . . . . The self-pro­claimed anti-glob­al­ist Ban­non ran the scheme by sub­con­tract­ing Chi­nese labor. Accord­ing to Wired writer Julian Dibbel, who vis­it­ed one of the Chi­nese busi­ness part­ners who employed min­ers for Bannon’s com­pa­ny in 2009, the dig­i­tal labor­ers “slept upstairs on ply­wood bunks, day-shift work­ers sat in the hot, dim­ly-lit work­shop.” They earned about four dol­lars a day with eighty-four-hour work­weeks. . . .”

1.    “Peter Thiel and Steve Ban­non fuel a new Yel­low Per­il over Google and Chi­na” by Frank H Wu; The Guardian; 07/17/2019

The bil­lion­aire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “trea­son” and called for a law enforce­ment inves­ti­ga­tion of the search engine’s par­ent com­pa­ny. He spec­u­lat­ed that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has invad­ed its employ­ee ranks. A Ger­man immi­grant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeat­ed asser­tions of the rab­ble rouser Steve Ban­non that there are too many Asian CEOs in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

These claims, com­bined with sim­i­lar charges of wrong­do­ing against stu­dents and pro­fes­sors of Chi­nese ori­gin on cam­pus­es across the coun­try, are as omi­nous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evi­dence, Ban­non dis­plays ample prej­u­dice. They are inspir­ing para­noia about every­one of Chi­nese her­itage.

At a Sun­day appear­ance which opened the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton DC fol­lowed by an appear­ance with the Fox TV host Tuck­er Carl­son, Thiel, the founder of the Pay­Pal finan­cial ser­vice, relied on rhetor­i­cal ques­tions. He asked Google who was work­ing on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, whether “senior man­age­ment con­sid­ers itself to have been thor­ough­ly infil­trat­ed” and if the Chi­nese would steal the infor­ma­tion any­way.

Google answered by reit­er­at­ing that “we do not work with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary”.

Thiel left Sil­i­con Val­ley last year in protest over its lib­er­al­ism. He is also behind Palan­tir, the secre­tive sur­veil­lance firm, and has been a sup­port­er of tar­iffs. Google had been report­ed to be devel­op­ing a Chi­na-com­pat­i­ble search engine code­named Drag­on­fly. They stopped due to employ­ee objec­tions.

The open hos­til­i­ty to Chi­nese peo­ple, as dis­tinct from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, vio­lates norms inte­gral to Amer­i­ca itself. On the face of these utter­ances is the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a com­mu­ni­ty, named by ances­try, as a prob­lem. Last year, the FBI direc­tor, Christo­pher Wray, char­ac­ter­ized it as a “whole of soci­ety” threat to Amer­i­can val­ues.

Guilt by asso­ci­a­tion is not what the Amer­i­can dream has promised to those who have sac­ri­ficed every­thing for that prover­bial oppor­tu­ni­ty. What­ev­er the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment may be up to, their poli­cies should not com­pro­mise the sta­tus of Chi­nese peo­ple, almost all of whom are ordi­nary folks, not spies, “sleep­ers”, agents of influ­ence or oth­er­wise con­spir­a­tors.

Although in this new Yel­low Per­il, a spe­cif­ic eth­nic­i­ty is tar­get­ed as a group, no line is drawn between cit­i­zens and for­eign­ers. The orig­i­nal Yel­low Per­il was the notion, pro­mot­ed by Germany’s Kaiser Wil­helm II in the late 19th cen­tu­ry and by the Amer­i­can author Jack Lon­don, that Asians might con­tend against Euro­peans and white Amer­i­cans in a con­test of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty. Pro­pa­gan­dists such as Lothrop Stod­dard wrote titles that would sum­ma­rize the the­sis: The Ris­ing Tide of Col­or Against White World Suprema­cy was a 1920 best­seller.

Nowa­days as ear­li­er, the peo­ple who fear an Asian takeover of Sil­i­con Val­ley do not both­er to add that Asians who become Amer­i­cans are accept­able. They can­not dis­tin­guish by look­ing at a line­up of ran­dom Asians, whether the one is a vis­it­ing schol­ar “fresh off the boat” in that pejo­ra­tive phrase being reap­pro­pri­at­ed, the oth­er a sixth-gen­er­a­tion Cal­i­forn­ian “banana” (yel­low on the out­side, white on the inside, in anoth­er deroga­to­ry term). If they did clar­i­fy that they meant no dis­par­age­ment of those whose fam­i­lies came before their own, at least they would be pure nativists rather than also racists.

The con­fu­sion of Asians over­seas and “Asian Amer­i­cans” (a con­cept coined dur­ing the social jus­tice move­ments cir­ca 1968) has been a recur­ring theme through­out his­to­ry. Dem­a­gogues suc­ceed­ed in per­suad­ing Con­gress to pass the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act of 1882. They argued the “Ori­en­tals” would out­com­pete Occi­den­tal rivals but remain loy­al to a for­eign empire. The pro­hi­bi­tion was then expand­ed to an Asi­at­ic Barred Zone intend­ed to main­tain eth­nic pro­por­tions favor­ing white Anglo-Sax­on Protes­tants in the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion (even Catholics, Jews and Euro­peans too south­ern and east­ern were to be lim­it­ed albeit not as strict­ly). Japan­ese Amer­i­cans were locked up dur­ing the sec­ond world war no mat­ter that they were bona fide Unit­ed States cit­i­zens two gen­er­a­tions removed from Tokyo and base­ball-play­ing Chris­tians.

Civ­il rights and nation­al inter­est are com­pat­i­ble. For those who fear Chi­nese will help Chi­na in achiev­ing glob­al dom­i­nance, there is a rem­e­dy: turn those Chi­nese into Chi­nese Amer­i­cans who will con­tribute to the Unit­ed States, or who will embrace a con­cep­tion of belong­ing that is cos­mopoli­tan instead of nation­al­is­tic. There could be no greater gift for Shen­zhen and Shang­hai, the per­ceived usurpers of west­ern cen­ters of tech­nol­o­gy and finance, respec­tive­ly, than to dri­ve out Chi­nese who oth­er­wise would be stake­hold­ers on this side of the Pacif­ic Ocean.

Google relies on Chi­nese, Chi­nese immi­grants and Chi­nese Amer­i­can engi­neers, along­side numer­ous Indi­ans and oth­er Asians, as do oth­er tech­nol­o­gy firms. Only a few of those experts are pro­mot­ed to exec­u­tives.

So it is true that there are many Chi­nese, Indi­ans, oth­er Asians and entre­pre­neurs from the world over who are attract­ed to these shores. That is to be cel­e­brat­ed. If they were to leave, how­ev­er vol­un­tary their depar­ture, that would ruin the econ­o­my. Thiel and Ban­non expose the real con­flict: between those who val­ue democ­ra­cy and diver­si­ty and those who do not.

2.  It Came From Some­thing Awful: How a Tox­ic Troll Army Acci­den­tal­ly Memed Don­ald Trump into Office by Dale Beran; All Points Books [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Dale Beran; ISBN 978–1‑250–18974‑5; p. 161.

. . . . From 2007 to 2012, he had been the CEO of a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar video-game gold-farm­ing scheme. “Gold farm­ing” was a term for let­ting third-world labor­ers to do; the same repet­i­tive tasks in mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er online role-play­ing games (MORPGs) to acquire in-game cur­ren­cy. Even­tu­al­ly, the vir­tu­al gold, min­er­als, armor, real estate, or what­ev­er it may be can be sold for real Amer­i­can dol­lars to gamers who don’t want to work to earn in-game items. The self-pro­claimed anti-glob­al­ist Ban­non ran the scheme by sub­con­tract­ing Chi­nese labor. Accord­ing to Wired writer Julian Dibbel, who vis­it­ed one of the Chi­nese busi­ness part­ners who employed min­ers for Bannon’s com­pa­ny in 2009, the dig­i­tal labor­ers “slept upstairs on ply­wood bunks, day-shift work­ers sat in the hot, dim­ly-lit work­shop.” They earned about four dol­lars a day with eighty-four-hour work­weeks. . . .

Discussion

2 comments for “Thiel and Bannon: “Yellow Peril” in Silicon Valley”

  1. Ignor­ing Charles C. John­son is gen­er­al­ly a sound pol­i­cy. And yet even trolls can some­times have some­thing impor­tant to say. Even if they’re only ulti­mate­ly telling us for very troll­ish rea­sons. And here we are, faced with hav­ing to inter­pret Charles John­son’s lat­est troll­ish behav­ior:

    There’s a new Busi­ness Insid­er report about a rather bizarre sto­ry involv­ing John­son, long-time ally Peter Thiel, and the FBI. Accord­ing to John­son, Thiel became a con­fi­den­tial human source (CHS) for the FBI back in the sum­mer of 2021. John­son goes on to claim that it John­son him­self who put Thiel in con­tact with Johnathan Buma, an LA-based FBI agent who spe­cial­izes in inves­ti­gat­ing polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion and for­eign-influ­ence cam­paigns. John­son him­self was already a CHS for Buma at the time. This is good time to recall how John­son report­ed­ly worked with Thiel dur­ing the Trump tran­si­tion peri­od in putting togeth­er lists of poten­tial White House recruits.

    So what was Thiel help­ing the FBI with? Well, we’re told that it was explic­it­ly NOT about Thiel’s ties to MAGA world. Instead, it was focused on for­eign gov­ern­ment influ­ence oper­a­tions in Sil­i­con Val­ley. While it’s unclear which gov­ern­ments Thiel may have been inform­ing the FBI about, this is good time to recall how Thiel and Steve Ban­non have been foment­ing fears in recent years around Chi­na’s influ­ence in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

    Intrigu­ing­ly, John­son goes on to sug­gest that he was encour­ag­ing Thiel to start this CHS rela­tion­ship with the FBI — and offer the FBI a win­dow into his con­tacts with for­eign gov­ern­ments — as part of an effort to prove his loy­al­ty to the US. John­son also described Thiel’s moti­va­tion as a kind of hedge in an envi­ron­ment where extrav­a­gant wealth no longer affords the safe­ty it use to. John­son went on to cite the ProP­ub­li­ca report­ing on how Thiel unscrupu­lous­ly used a Roth IRA to avoid bil­lions in tax­es...a sto­ry that hit the news in June of 2021. John­son also cit­ed the death of Jef­frey Epstein. So Epstein’s jail­house ‘sui­cide’ appar­ent­ly freaked Thiel out so much they he felt the need to prove his loy­al­ty to the US gov­ern­ment. At least that’s nar­ra­tive John­son is putting out there.

    So why is John­son com­ing for­ward with all this? Well, we get mul­ti­ple expla­na­tions from John­son. First, he claims that it was ret­ri­bu­tion for what John­son per­ceives to be bad deci­sion-mak­ing by Thiel’s Founders Fund. John­son goes on to describe how he felt betrayed that Thiel did­n’t sup­port John­son’s own star­tups. John­son claims he felt like Thiel owed him sup­port in John­son’s star­tups in return for John­son hav­ing intro­duced Thiel to Buma. Yes, becom­ing an FBI infor­mant is por­trayed by John­son as some­thing so ben­e­fi­cial to Thiel that Thiel owed John­son a favor in return. What was Thiel so ter­ri­fied of at this time? How trea­so­nous was his behav­ior lead­ing up to that point?

    But then we get to the oth­er part of John­son’s expla­na­tions for why he’s going pub­lic with all this: John­son claims he want to help agent Buma with his whistle­blow­ing efforts. Yes, it turns out Agent Buma is now an FBI whistle­blow­er and is no longer active­ly man­ag­ing his con­fi­den­tial human sources. Accord­ing to Buma, the FBI shut down his inves­ti­ga­tion into whether or not Rudy Giu­liani was com­pro­mised by the Moscow. He even tes­ti­fied about it before the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee that he was ordered to cease con­tact with all his sources in late 2022. It’s not clear if Thiel has been put in con­tact with a new FBI agent at this point or what his cur­rent CHS sta­tus is at all.

    But Buma’s inves­ti­ga­tion into Giu­liani isn’t the only Trump-relat­ed inves­ti­ga­tion Buma was work­ing on. He was also using a human source code­named “genius” who was pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion on far-right fig­ures involved with plan­ning the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. Yes, “genius” was Charles John­son. So John­son has been help­ing the FBI with the Jan­u­ary 6 insur­rec­tion. But the FBI head­quar­ters “closed his most valu­able sources”, includ­ing “genius”, accord­ing to Buma.

    So that’s the very bizarre sto­ry we’re now get­ting about Peter Thiel becom­ing an FBI asset in the sum­mery of 2021. We only know about it because Charles John­son decid­ed to share it with the world for still con­fus­ing rea­sons. But it’s impor­tant to note that this sto­ry is entire­ly based on the claims of a known troll like John­son. Two anony­mous sources are con­firm­ing John­son’s account, with one source sug­gest­ing that any assis­tance Thiel might have pro­vid­ed to the FBI should be under­stood as part of Thiel’s grad­ual dis­tanc­ing of him­self from Trump and the broad­er MAGA move­ment. In oth­er words, it’s all part of a rebrand­ing effort. A rebrand­ing effort seem­ing­ly intend­ed to allow Peter Thiel to prove to the US gov­ern­ment that he’s not a trai­tor, brought to us by his pro­fes­sion­al troll bud­dy who is also now a val­ued FBI asset:

    Busi­ness Insid­er

    Exclu­sive: Tech bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel was an FBI infor­mant

    Mat­tathias Schwartz
    Oct 19, 2023, 6:30 AM CDT

    Peter Thiel has worn many hats over the years: Sil­i­con Val­ley founder, Trump megadonor, cryp­tocur­ren­cy boost­er, democ­ra­cy skep­tic.

    But there is yet anoth­er facet to Thiel, one that has remained secret until now: FBI infor­mant.

    In the sum­mer of 2021, Insid­er has learned, Thiel began pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion as a “con­fi­den­tial human source,” or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Ange­les-based FBI agent who spe­cial­izes in inves­ti­gat­ing polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion and for­eign-influ­ence cam­paigns.

    Charles John­son, a long­time asso­ciate of Thiel’s and a noto­ri­ous fig­ure in the far-right move­ment that Thiel has sub­si­dized for a decade, told Insid­er in a state­ment that he helped recruit the bil­lion­aire as an infor­mant by intro­duc­ing him to Buma.

    A source with knowl­edge of Thiel’s rela­tion­ship to the FBI, whose iden­ti­ty is known to Insid­er but who insist­ed on anonymi­ty, cor­rob­o­rat­ed John­son’s account, telling Insid­er that John­son bro­kered a rela­tion­ship between Thiel and Buma. Insid­er was able to con­firm through an addi­tion­al source that the FBI added Thiel to its for­mal ros­ter of reg­is­tered infor­mants.

    Anoth­er source close to Thiel told Insid­er that while they could not con­firm that Thiel was a CHS, Thiel did speak to Buma occa­sion­al­ly. The source said that any assis­tance Thiel might have pro­vid­ed to the FBI should be under­stood as part of Thiel’s grad­ual dis­tanc­ing of him­self from Trump and the broad­er MAGA move­ment, which has vig­or­ous­ly crit­i­cized the FBI and oth­er fed­er­al law-enforce­ment agen­cies.

    Valu­able infor­ma­tion on a recur­ring basis

    The FBI main­tains a vast net­work of infor­mants to keep tabs on orga­nized crime, ter­ror­ist threats, extrem­ist groups, and oth­er crim­i­nal and intel­li­gence tar­gets. These sources, accord­ing to the bureau’s Con­fi­den­tial Human Source Pol­i­cy Guide, are more than casu­al tip­sters.

    Con­fi­den­tial human sources enter “into a rela­tion­ship with the FBI, and that rela­tion­ship will for­ev­er affect the life of that indi­vid­ual,” the guide says. “[They] will be either an ‘FBI source’ or a ‘for­mer FBI source’ and, in turn, his or her con­duct or mis­con­duct will reflect upon the FBI.” As such, the process for recruit­ing and main­tain­ing such sources is high­ly reg­u­lat­ed, requir­ing mul­ti­ple lay­ers of approval. Only peo­ple who are able to pro­vide “valu­able infor­ma­tion … on a recur­ring basis” are grant­ed CHS sta­tus, accord­ing to the pol­i­cy.

    As a CHS, Thiel was assigned a code name and an inter­nal ser­i­al num­ber to track his report­ing. The infor­ma­tion he passed on about for­eign con­tacts and Sil­i­con Val­ley intrigue was reviewed and “val­i­dat­ed,” or cross-checked against oth­er sources, by his case agents and their col­leagues.

    ...

    No report­ing on polit­i­cal ties

    Thiel is a cit­i­zen of Ger­many, the Unit­ed States, and New Zealand; as of last year, he was report­ed­ly in the process of acquir­ing yet anoth­er pass­port, from Mal­ta. In 2016, he donat­ed $1.25 mil­lion to Trump’s cam­paign and endorsed him from the stage at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion. After Trump won, Thiel served on his tran­si­tion team.

    John­son, who said that he was also an infor­mant for Buma, told Insid­er that he believes that Thiel’s report­ing to the FBI was large­ly lim­it­ed to for­eign con­tacts and attempts by for­eign gov­ern­ments to pen­e­trate Sil­i­con Val­ley. Thiel has pub­licly called on the FBI to inves­ti­gate Google’s ties to the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

    Thiel, John­son said, was direct­ed by the FBI not to report on his inter­ac­tions with Don­ald Trump or oth­er US polit­i­cal fig­ures.

    Many of the politi­cians that Thiel has bankrolled — includ­ing Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Blake Mas­ters, a for­mer Ari­zona sen­a­to­r­i­al can­di­date — have repeat­ed­ly attacked the bureau and its lead­er­ship in pub­lic. In 2022, Vance, whose cam­paign and affil­i­at­ed PACs received a total of $15 mil­lion from Thiel, false­ly claimed that the FBI had ille­gal­ly wire­tapped Trump’s phone. Vance accused the bureau of “harass­ing faith­ful Chris­tians” and pledged to block all of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice nom­i­nees in retal­i­a­tion for the Trump pros­e­cu­tions. (Most but not all of Thiel’s dona­tions occurred in ear­ly 2021, before the launch of Vance’s cam­paign and the many false claims he made over the course of the race.)

    Mas­ters, whose cam­paign received $20 mil­lion of sup­port from Thiel, has endorsed the false con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that under­cov­er FBI agents foment­ed the Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, insur­rec­tion and accused the FBI agents who exe­cut­ed a search war­rant on Mar-a-Lago of “going after Pres­i­dent Trump because they hate him.” (As with Vance, most but not all of Thiel’s dona­tions to Mas­ters occurred before Mas­ters made his most inflam­ma­to­ry and base­less state­ments dur­ing the lat­er stages of his cam­paign.)

    Thiel is report­ed­ly plan­ning to sit on the side­lines of the 2024 elec­tion.

    ...

    Doing busi­ness with the FBI

    Some of Thiel’s busi­ness inter­ests rely on the FBI and oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies as poten­tial rev­enue sources. He retains a 10% stake in Palan­tir, a data com­pa­ny that has sold more than a bil­lion dol­lars of soft­ware and relat­ed ser­vices to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the Pen­ta­gon, the CIA, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, and the FBI. A $250 mil­lion con­tract with the US Army in Sep­tem­ber adds to the evi­dence that Palan­tir is essen­tial­ly “a gov­ern­ment ser­vice provider,” a finan­cial ana­lyst said.

    Thiel also backed Bold­end, a spy­ware com­pa­ny mar­ket­ing itself as an Amer­i­can com­peti­tor to the Israeli NSO Group, Forbes report­ed last year. NSO’s prod­ucts have been bought and test­ed by the FBI.

    (Mithril Cap­i­tal, anoth­er enti­ty Thiel cofound­ed, was report­ed­ly a sub­ject of FBI inter­est in 2019, although noth­ing appears to have come of the inquiry. Mithril’s co-founder did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment. The FBI did not respond to a ques­tion regard­ing the Mithril mat­ter.)

    John­son, who revealed Thiel’s FBI ties, is a tech investor and far-right agi­ta­tor with long-stand­ing ties to both Thiel and to the net­work of MAGA polit­i­cal oper­a­tors sur­round­ing Trump. He claims to have had a hand in found­ing Clearview, a facial-recog­ni­tion start­up, and Traitwell, a genomics com­pa­ny. Accord­ing to Forbes, he worked with Thiel to help vet and select senior staffers for the Trump tran­si­tion in 2017.

    John­son claimed to be an FBI infor­mant in a law­suit he filed against Clearview’s founders. He told Insid­er he recruit­ed Thiel to serve as a CHS and intro­duced him to Buma, the FBI spe­cial agent who was John­son’s han­dler.

    It’s unclear whether Thiel remains a CHS for the FBI. John­son told Insid­er that he believes that the rela­tion­ship has been sev­ered but declined to offer details; Buma wrote in his state­ment to the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee that he was ordered to cease con­tact with all his sources in late 2022.

    John­son’s ties to Trump and Thiel are well-doc­u­ment­ed. But he is also a self-iden­ti­fied “troll” with a his­to­ry of spread­ing false infor­ma­tion and smear­ing his rivals. In this instance, his claims are cor­rob­o­rat­ed by two addi­tion­al sources, as well as sup­port­ed in part by a third who says Thiel and Buma spoke occa­sion­al­ly.

    ‘Join up or get crushed’

    Buma came for­ward in August as a whistle­blow­er, alleg­ing that the FBI under Trump and Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bill Barr shut down his efforts to deter­mine whether Rudy Giu­liani had been com­pro­mised by a Russ­ian asset. Insid­er was the first news orga­ni­za­tion to report on his claims.

    In a state­ment pre­pared for the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, Buma said that FBI head­quar­ters had closed his most valu­able human sources, includ­ing one code-named “Genius,” who had report­ed on far-right fig­ures involved with plan­ning the attack on the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. John­son told Insid­er that “Genius” was his CHS code name. Insid­er was able to con­firm John­son’s iden­ti­ty as “Genius” with two addi­tion­al sources. The state­ment does not men­tion Thiel.

    In a writ­ten state­ment to Insid­er, John­son said he was step­ping for­ward as a CHS to sup­port Buma’s effort as a whistle­blow­er to bring about what Buma believes to be nec­es­sary reforms in how the FBI han­dles infor­mants. John­son said that he was expos­ing Thiel’s work as a CHS as ret­ri­bu­tion for what John­son per­ceives to be bad deci­sion-mak­ing by the Founders Fund, Thiel’s ven­ture-cap­i­tal firm.

    John­son also told Insid­er he felt betrayed that Thiel did not invest in John­son’s own star­tups, which he had expect­ed Thiel to do in exchange for intro­duc­ing him to Buma. John­son said that he told Thiel that by offer­ing the FBI a win­dow into his con­tacts with for­eign gov­ern­ments, he could demon­strate his loy­al­ty to the Unit­ed States.

    He described Thiel’s moti­va­tion for work­ing with Buma as a kind of hedge in an envi­ron­ment where extrav­a­gant wealth no longer affords the safe­ty it used to. He point­ed toProP­ub­li­ca’s report­ing on Thiel’s income-tax avoid­ance and the death of Jef­frey Epstein, who had report­ed­ly sched­uled sev­er­al meet­ings with Thiel.

    “I told him to join up or get crushed,” John­son said.

    The FBI’s recruit­ment of Thiel as a CHS puts him among the bureau’s most promi­nent assets, but he is not alone among right-wing fig­ures who have col­lab­o­rat­ed with the bureau. Trump him­self offered to help the FBI fight orga­nized crime in Atlantic City in the ear­ly 1980s. Truth Social, the Trump-owned social-media com­pa­ny, has qui­et­ly tipped the FBI off to users who threat­en vio­lence, even as it seeks to cash in on their anger. At least two of the riot­ers who showed up to storm the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6 were also FBI infor­mants, as was Enrique Tar­rio, the Proud Boys leader who was sen­tenced to 22 years in prison for sedi­tious con­spir­a­cy and oth­er felonies stem­ming from the Capi­tol breach. Tar­rio report­ed­ly served as a source for fed­er­al and local law enforce­ment, assist­ing with the pros­e­cu­tion of more than a dozen peo­ple.

    ———-

    “Exclu­sive: Tech bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel was an FBI infor­mant” by Mat­tathias Schwartz; Busi­ness Insid­er; 10/19/2023

    “Anoth­er source close to Thiel told Insid­er that while they could not con­firm that Thiel was a CHS, Thiel did speak to Buma occa­sion­al­ly. The source said that any assis­tance Thiel might have pro­vid­ed to the FBI should be under­stood as part of Thiel’s grad­ual dis­tanc­ing of him­self from Trump and the broad­er MAGA move­ment, which has vig­or­ous­ly crit­i­cized the FBI and oth­er fed­er­al law-enforce­ment agen­cies.”

    Did Peter Thiel real­ly turn him­self into an FBI human source as part of some sort of grad­ual dis­tanc­ing from Trump and the broad­er MAGA move­ment? That’s the claim of one of the two anony­mous sources cor­rob­o­rat­ing this sto­ry. It’s inter­est­ing spin, espe­cial­ly giv­en the cir­cum­stances of the FBI agent who ulti­mate­ly served as Thiel’s point of con­tact: Johnathan Buma, an LA-based agent who spe­cial­izes in inves­ti­gat­ing polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion and for­eign-influ­ence cam­paigns. Thiel has appar­ent­ly been tasked with feed­ing the FBI intel on for­eign gov­ern­ments try­ing to wield influ­ence in Sil­i­con Val­ley. And it was none oth­er than pro­fes­sion­al troll Charles John­son who put Thiel in con­tact with Buma. It’s a bizarre sto­ry on many lev­els. Sure, Thiel has obvi­ous­ly been try­ing to build up a pub­lic rep­u­ta­tion as a stal­wart against Chi­nese influ­ence in the US, but that does­n’t explain why he would some­how be in a posi­tion to inform the FBI about what are pre­sum­ably covert Chi­nese Sil­i­con Val­ley influ­ence oper­a­tions. What’s real­ly going on here?

    ...
    In the sum­mer of 2021, Insid­er has learned, Thiel began pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion as a “con­fi­den­tial human source,” or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Ange­les-based FBI agent who spe­cial­izes in inves­ti­gat­ing polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion and for­eign-influ­ence cam­paigns.

    Charles John­son, a long­time asso­ciate of Thiel’s and a noto­ri­ous fig­ure in the far-right move­ment that Thiel has sub­si­dized for a decade, told Insid­er in a state­ment that he helped recruit the bil­lion­aire as an infor­mant by intro­duc­ing him to Buma.

    A source with knowl­edge of Thiel’s rela­tion­ship to the FBI, whose iden­ti­ty is known to Insid­er but who insist­ed on anonymi­ty, cor­rob­o­rat­ed John­son’s account, telling Insid­er that John­son bro­kered a rela­tion­ship between Thiel and Buma. Insid­er was able to con­firm through an addi­tion­al source that the FBI added Thiel to its for­mal ros­ter of reg­is­tered infor­mants.

    ...

    John­son, who said that he was also an infor­mant for Buma, told Insid­er that he believes that Thiel’s report­ing to the FBI was large­ly lim­it­ed to for­eign con­tacts and attempts by for­eign gov­ern­ments to pen­e­trate Sil­i­con Val­ley. Thiel has pub­licly called on the FBI to inves­ti­gate Google’s ties to the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

    Thiel, John­son said, was direct­ed by the FBI not to report on his inter­ac­tions with Don­ald Trump or oth­er US polit­i­cal fig­ures.
    ...

    But when it comes to poten­tial­ly valu­able infor­ma­tion that Thiel could pass along to the FBI, we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to ask about Thiel’s per­son­al con­tacts. The guy still owns 10% of Palan­tir, after all. Which pre­sum­ably means he still has access to Palan­tir’s tor­rent of infor­ma­tion. Could it be that Thiel is pass­ing along to the FBI intel acquired through Palan­tir? Or maybe one of Thiel’s oth­er tech firms like hack­ing firm Bold­end? It’s part of what’s so puz­zling about this sto­ry: Thiel’s val­ue as an intel­li­gence asset is obvi­ous when you con­sid­er the com­pa­nies he owns. It’s less obvi­ous why he would be recruit­ed as a human asset based on his inter­per­son­al inter­ac­tions, espe­cial­ly if this role was explic­it­ly not at all relat­ed to MAGA world:

    ...
    Doing busi­ness with the FBI

    Some of Thiel’s busi­ness inter­ests rely on the FBI and oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies as poten­tial rev­enue sources. He retains a 10% stake in Palan­tir, a data com­pa­ny that has sold more than a bil­lion dol­lars of soft­ware and relat­ed ser­vices to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the Pen­ta­gon, the CIA, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, and the FBI. A $250 mil­lion con­tract with the US Army in Sep­tem­ber adds to the evi­dence that Palan­tir is essen­tial­ly “a gov­ern­ment ser­vice provider,” a finan­cial ana­lyst said.

    Thiel also backed Bold­end, a spy­ware com­pa­ny mar­ket­ing itself as an Amer­i­can com­peti­tor to the Israeli NSO Group, Forbes report­ed last year. NSO’s prod­ucts have been bought and test­ed by the FBI.

    (Mithril Cap­i­tal, anoth­er enti­ty Thiel cofound­ed, was report­ed­ly a sub­ject of FBI inter­est in 2019, although noth­ing appears to have come of the inquiry. Mithril’s co-founder did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment. The FBI did not respond to a ques­tion regard­ing the Mithril mat­ter.)
    ...

    And then there’s the fact that it’s Charles John­son who appears to be the ini­tial source of this sto­ry. As we’ve seen, John­son’s ties to Thiel goes back years and include their work on the Trump tran­si­tion team. Recall how John­son even claimed at one point that Thiel used him as a con­duit to leak emails between Thiel and Reed Hast­ings, who crit­i­cized Thiel for back­ing Trump. John­son already out­ed him­self as an FBI infor­mant in a law­suit he filed in rela­tion to Clearview. And yet we’re told that John­son is out­ing Thiel as a FBI source both as a means of sup­port­ing Buma’s whistle­blow­ing but ALSO as ret­ri­bu­tion for what John­son per­ceives to be bad deci­sion-mak­ing by the Founders Fund and a sense of betray­al over Thiel not sup­port­ing him enough in his own star­tups. But beyond that, John­son claims that he expect­ed Thiel’s start­up sup­port as some sort of pay back for intro­duc­ing Thiel to Buma, at which point Thiel could offer the FBI a win­dow into Thiel’s con­tacts with for­eign gov­ern­ments and could demon­strate his loy­al­ty to the US. John­son went on to explain Thiel’s moti­va­tion as see­ing work­ing with Buma as a kind of ‘hedge’ in an envi­ron­ment where extrav­a­gant wealth no longer affords the safe­ty it used to. That was appar­ent­ly the moti­va­tion Thiel had for becom­ing an FBI asset in the sum­mer of 2021. Cozy­ing up to the US gov­ern­ment to avoid some sort of pros­e­cu­tion. It’s the kind of expla­na­tion that rais­es a rather chill­ing ques­tion: was Thiel pre­vi­ous­ly under sus­pi­cion of act­ing as some kind of trea­so­nous schem­ing? Why the need to prove his loy­al­ty? A major undis­closed Jan 6 role, per­haps? Is Thiel’s loy­al­ty sole­ly to him­self so pal­pa­ble that it endan­gers how com­pa­nies’ pre­cious gov­ern­ment con­tracts? It’s not like Thiel’s fas­cist pol­i­tics were a secret all these years and yet he still got these high­ly sen­si­tive gov­ern­ment con­tracts. Why the sud­den need to prove his loy­al­ty?

    ...
    John­son, who revealed Thiel’s FBI ties, is a tech investor and far-right agi­ta­tor with long-stand­ing ties to both Thiel and to the net­work of MAGA polit­i­cal oper­a­tors sur­round­ing Trump. He claims to have had a hand in found­ing Clearview, a facial-recog­ni­tion start­up, and Traitwell, a genomics com­pa­ny. Accord­ing to Forbes, he worked with Thiel to help vet and select senior staffers for the Trump tran­si­tion in 2017.

    John­son claimed to be an FBI infor­mant in a law­suit he filed against Clearview’s founders. He told Insid­er he recruit­ed Thiel to serve as a CHS and intro­duced him to Buma, the FBI spe­cial agent who was John­son’s han­dler.

    ...

    In a writ­ten state­ment to Insid­er, John­son said he was step­ping for­ward as a CHS to sup­port Buma’s effort as a whistle­blow­er to bring about what Buma believes to be nec­es­sary reforms in how the FBI han­dles infor­mants. John­son said that he was expos­ing Thiel’s work as a CHS as ret­ri­bu­tion for what John­son per­ceives to be bad deci­sion-mak­ing by the Founders Fund, Thiel’s ven­ture-cap­i­tal firm.

    John­son also told Insid­er he felt betrayed that Thiel did not invest in John­son’s own star­tups, which he had expect­ed Thiel to do in exchange for intro­duc­ing him to Buma. John­son said that he told Thiel that by offer­ing the FBI a win­dow into his con­tacts with for­eign gov­ern­ments, he could demon­strate his loy­al­ty to the Unit­ed States.

    He described Thiel’s moti­va­tion for work­ing with Buma as a kind of hedge in an envi­ron­ment where extrav­a­gant wealth no longer affords the safe­ty it used to. He point­ed toProP­ub­li­ca’s report­ing on Thiel’s income-tax avoid­ance and the death of Jef­frey Epstein, who had report­ed­ly sched­uled sev­er­al meet­ings with Thiel.

    “I told him to join up or get crushed,” John­son said.
    ...

    But then we get to the con­fus­ing mess around what it was that Buma was actu­al­ly inves­ti­gat­ing: Buma came for­ward in August of this year as a whistle­blow­er, alleg­ing the FBI under Trump shut down his inves­ti­ga­tion into Rudy Giu­lian­i’s ties to Rus­sia. And while that was all pre-2021, Buma’s inves­tiga­tive work at the FBI has appar­ent­ly already come to an end, with Buma telling the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee that he was ordered to cease con­tact with all his human sources in late 2022:

    ...
    It’s unclear whether Thiel remains a CHS for the FBI. John­son told Insid­er that he believes that the rela­tion­ship has been sev­ered but declined to offer details; Buma wrote in his state­ment to the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee that he was ordered to cease con­tact with all his sources in late 2022.

    ...

    Buma came for­ward in August as a whistle­blow­er, alleg­ing that the FBI under Trump and Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bill Barr shut down his efforts to deter­mine whether Rudy Giu­liani had been com­pro­mised by a Russ­ian asset. Insid­er was the first news orga­ni­za­tion to report on his claims.
    ...

    And then we get this very juicy nugget in rela­tion to Buma’s pre­vi­ous inves­ti­ga­tions: he was appar­ent­ly using John­son as an infor­mant on far-right fig­ures involved with plan­ning the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. But that inves­ti­ga­tion is had been closed down by the FBI head­quar­ters:

    ...
    In a state­ment pre­pared for the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, Buma said that FBI head­quar­ters had closed his most valu­able human sources, includ­ing one code-named “Genius,” who had report­ed on far-right fig­ures involved with plan­ning the attack on the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. John­son told Insid­er that “Genius” was his CHS code name. Insid­er was able to con­firm John­son’s iden­ti­ty as “Genius” with two addi­tion­al sources. The state­ment does not men­tion Thiel.
    ...

    And yet, despite Buma get­ting pulled from his work with his human assets, it does­n’t sound like being a con­fi­den­tial human source for the FBI is some­thing you can just casu­al­ly shirk off. Which rais­es the ques­tion as to whether or not Thiel was sim­ply giv­en a new FBI con­tact to con­tin­ue his human source activ­i­ties. At the same time, note one con­se­quence of John­son going pub­lic with this sto­ry: Thiel’s sta­tus as a CHS is more or less ruined at this point. Any for­eign gov­ern­ment assets stu­pid enough to trust Thiel with sen­si­tive info before are pre­sum­ably pulling back at this point:

    ...
    Valu­able infor­ma­tion on a recur­ring basis

    The FBI main­tains a vast net­work of infor­mants to keep tabs on orga­nized crime, ter­ror­ist threats, extrem­ist groups, and oth­er crim­i­nal and intel­li­gence tar­gets. These sources, accord­ing to the bureau’s Con­fi­den­tial Human Source Pol­i­cy Guide, are more than casu­al tip­sters.

    Con­fi­den­tial human sources enter “into a rela­tion­ship with the FBI, and that rela­tion­ship will for­ev­er affect the life of that indi­vid­ual,” the guide says. “[They] will be either an ‘FBI source’ or a ‘for­mer FBI source’ and, in turn, his or her con­duct or mis­con­duct will reflect upon the FBI.” As such, the process for recruit­ing and main­tain­ing such sources is high­ly reg­u­lat­ed, requir­ing mul­ti­ple lay­ers of approval. Only peo­ple who are able to pro­vide “valu­able infor­ma­tion … on a recur­ring basis” are grant­ed CHS sta­tus, accord­ing to the pol­i­cy.

    As a CHS, Thiel was assigned a code name and an inter­nal ser­i­al num­ber to track his report­ing. The infor­ma­tion he passed on about for­eign con­tacts and Sil­i­con Val­ley intrigue was reviewed and “val­i­dat­ed,” or cross-checked against oth­er sources, by his case agents and their col­leagues.
    ...

    So how much ‘dis­tance’ will there be between Thiel and the rest of MAGA world after the pub­li­ca­tion of this arti­cle? That remains unclear. In part because this whole thing seems designed send the sig­nal that Thiel is keen on work­ing with the US gov­ern­ment, and yet the actu­al mes­sage sent by the arti­cle is that Thiel was feel­ing so vul­ner­a­ble over some sort of trea­so­nous activ­i­ties that he was involved in that he felt com­pelled to send the sig­nals that he’s not actu­al­ly a trea­so­nous bas­tard who can’t be trust­ed with sen­si­tive gov­ern­ment con­tracts.

    Either way, it appears that Thiel’s attempts to cozy up a lit­tle clos­er to the US gov­ern­ment did indeed work. He became a CHS and pre­sum­ably fed the FBI all sorts of juicy intel. Or at least enough intel to keep the US gov­ern­ment sat­is­fied with its fas­cist pri­va­tized spy-chief for the time being. Intel like­ly focused on ampli­fy­ing the exist­ing ‘yel­low per­il’ sen­ti­ments in the US gov­ern­ment. Which is also a reminder that the very real ‘fas­cist per­il’ loom­ing over the world relies heav­i­ly on infil­trat­ing gov­ern­ments with fas­cists intent on foment­ing one witch­hunt after another...as long as the witch­es aren’t fas­cist. The fas­cist witch­es get CHS sta­tus.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 23, 2023, 5:30 pm
  2. Is there trou­ble in par­adise already? It seems so. Trou­ble is com­ing for MAGA world. And Elon Musk, in par­tic­u­lar. At least, if Steven Ban­non has his way. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inau­gu­ra­tion Day,” accord­ing to Ban­non in a recent inter­view with an Ital­ian dai­ly, adding, “He is a tru­ly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my per­son­al thing to take this guy down.” Those were just some of the warn­ings Ban­non issued about the influ­ence Musk has over Don­ald Trump. And while this ‘civ­il war’ between two MAGA lead­ers isn’t exclu­sive­ly about the H‑1B visa con­tro­ver­sy that erupt­ed in the last week of Decem­ber, that H‑1B issue is what is cur­rent­ly ani­mat­ing this fight.

    Impor­tant­ly, this recent H‑1B con­tro­ver­sy isn’t just a fight with Ban­non on one side and Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on the oth­er side. Don­ald Trump has tak­en a side too, back­ing Musk and Ram­swamy and com­ing out in favor of H‑1B work­er visas. As we’re going to see, it’s not just that Trump took a side in this fight. He took a side that is the oppo­site of the stance he’s had on H‑1B work­er visas for years includ­ing dur­ing his first term in office when he cur­tailed in tem­po­rary work­er pro­gram. Trump’s embrace of H‑1B visas is arguably one of the biggest flip flops of his polit­i­cal career. And that’s how he’s start­ing off his sec­ond term. Show­ing def­er­ence to Elon Musk and enrag­ing his base. This is a good time to recall how the MAGA ‘civ­il war’ over H‑1Bs may have been a fac­tor in moti­vat­ing the New Years Day Trump Hotel Cybertruck bomb­ing when we close­ly exam­ine the time­line of those events.

    As we might expect, with India pro­vid­ing 70 per­cent of the H‑1B visa work­ers in 2023, this MAGA ‘civ­il war’ has already become a sto­ry in India too, part­ly dri­ven by the fact that the Modi gov­ern­ment views the export of Indi­an tech work­ers as an impor­tant nation­al export and even per­son­al­ly brought up the issue of H‑1Bs with Joe Biden on mul­ti­ple occa­sions.

    And yet, as Tan­ul Thakur, a New Del­hi-based inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist and author of a forth­com­ing book about the H‑1B pro­gram titled “Wild Wild East,” warns, it’s not like H‑1Bs are great for Indi­an work­ers either. Instead, Thakur sees it as a sys­tem that harms both US tech work­ers AND Indi­an immi­grants who end up trapped in low wage jobs in the hopes of get­ting a green card. He also accused the main­stream Indi­an news media of aban­don­ing its past crit­i­cisms of H‑1Bs — which used to be seen as a dam­ag­ing brain drain until the late 2000s — and replac­ing that crit­i­cism with a nation­al­ist stance. Which is a reminder that this isn’t sim­ply an issue about US cor­po­ra­tions and Indi­an work­ers screw­ing US tech work­ers out of a job. It’s more about a sys­tem that is joint­ly screw­ing over both US and Indi­an work­ers for the ben­e­fit of oli­garchs like Musk. Which is part of what makes Ban­non pick­ing this fight at this point a major stress test of Don­ald Trump’s pop­u­lar appeal. But also a test of Trump’s loy­al­ty to his base. Will Trump choose to pla­cate Musk, the wealth­i­est man alive? Or his MAGA base, who he does­n’t real­ly need any­more?

    And as we’re also going to be remind­ed of below, for all of Ban­non’s com­plaints over Musk’s stances of H‑1Bs, it’s Musk’s deep ties to Chi­na that has Ban­non see­ing red. Will Trump choose friend­ly rela­tions with Chi­na — pre­sum­ably with all sorts of busi­ness kick­backs for him and his fam­i­ly — or will he stay true to the MAGA anti-Chi­na ani­mos­i­ty? We’ll find out soon, but there’s no deny­ing that a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion under Musk’s sway is like­ly to be much less aggres­sive­ly opposed to Chi­na than it would be under Ban­non’s influ­ence.

    The range of crit­i­cisms Ban­non had for Musk in that Ital­ian inter­view were also rather notable in that Ban­non did­n’t lim­it his crit­i­cism to Musk. He made a gen­er­al state­ment about the num­ber of influ­en­tial white South Africans in Trump’s orbit. “Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” as Ban­non put it. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist peo­ple on earth, white South Africans, we have them mak­ing any com­ments at all on what goes on in the Unit­ed States?” It was an inter­est­ing choice of argu­ments on Ban­non’s part. White South African racists pre­sum­ably aren’t a huge boogey­man for MAGA world, but that’s the line of attack Ban­non chose. Which is a reminder that, yes, Elon Musk real­ly does appear to be a huge racist, whether we’re talk­ing about his aggres­sive pro­mo­tion of the far right anti-immi­grant AfD par­ty in Ger­many or his a his­to­ry of push­ing the Great Replace­ment The­o­ry. This isn’t a fight between a racist Ban­non-led wing of MAGA vs an anti-racist Musk-led wing. Both wings are rou­tine­ly drip­ping with con­tent for non-white pop­u­la­tions. It’s more a fight over whether or not US cor­po­ra­tions should retain access to that, most­ly Indi­an, labor pool. And based on the time frame Ban­non has picked for this fight — to be resolved by Inau­gu­ra­tion Day — it sounds like we’re going to get an answer on which side Don­ald Trump ulti­mate­ly choos­es, soon­er rather than lat­er:

    Bre­it­bart

    Steve Ban­non: ‘I Will Do Any­thing’ to Keep Elon Musk out of the White House

    Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.
    11 Jan 2025

    ROME — For­mer Bre­it­bart News exec­u­tive chair­man Steve Ban­non has declared war on Elon Musk, vow­ing to have the tech bil­lion­aire kicked out of the White House by the time Don­ald Trump is inau­gu­rat­ed.

    “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inau­gu­ra­tion Day,” Ban­non told the Ital­ian dai­ly Cor­riere del­la Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any oth­er per­son.”

    “He is a tru­ly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my per­son­al thing to take this guy down,” Ban­non added. “Before, because he put mon­ey in, I was pre­pared to tol­er­ate it; I’m not pre­pared to tol­er­ate it any­more.”

    ...

    This thing of the H‑1B visas, it’s about the entire immi­gra­tion sys­tem is gamed by the tech over­lords, they use it to their advan­tage, the peo­ple are furi­ous,” Ban­non said, not­ing that “76 per­cent of engi­neers work­ing in Sil­i­con Val­ley are non-Amer­i­cans.”

    “No blacks or His­pan­ics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Ban­non said.

    “Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Ban­non observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist peo­ple on earth, white South Africans, we have them mak­ing any com­ments at all on what goes on in the Unit­ed States?”

    “We have been fight­ing this fight for ten years,” he declared. “We are going to expose the entire cor­rup­tion of the Amer­i­can sys­tem, of how mon­ey con­trols every­thing and hope­ful­ly we’ll inspire you in Italy to wake up,” he told Cor­riere del­la Sera jour­nal­ist Viviana Maz­za.

    ...

    “He went out of his way to mock our move­ment as racist and retards, and he lost,” Ban­non said. “We blew him out of the water. He won’t fight. He’s got the matu­ri­ty of a lit­tle boy.”

    Musk has had “tremen­dous loss of cred­i­bil­i­ty here in the Unit­ed States, and quite frankly, the peo­ple around Trump are tired of it,” he said.

    Ban­non went on to accuse Musk of being self-serv­ing, insist­ing that his “sole objec­tive is to become a tril­lion­aire.”

    ...

    Ban­non said that Musk’s eco­nom­ic sup­port of Pres­i­dent Trump has been a pos­i­tive thing, adding that he should do the same for any of the dif­fer­ent pop­ulist move­ments in Europe.

    “What’s not pos­i­tive,” he added, “is when all of a sud­den he tries to put his half-baked ideas which are real­ly about the imple­men­ta­tion of tech­no-feu­dal­ism on a glob­al scale. I don’t sup­port that and we’ll fight it.”

    ——–

    “Steve Ban­non: ‘I Will Do Any­thing’ to Keep Elon Musk out of the White House” by Thomas D. Williams; Bre­it­bart; 01/11/2025

    ““I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inau­gu­ra­tion Day,” Ban­non told the Ital­ian dai­ly Cor­riere del­la Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any oth­er per­son.””

    Them’s fight­ing words. Steven Ban­non has declared war on Elon Musk. Over Musk’s stance on H‑1B visas. Well, not just Musk’s stand. Trump appears to have the same stance too, after all. Ban­non isn’t just upset about H‑1B visas. Instead, he’s fram­ing the issue as emblem­at­ic of how “the entire immi­gra­tion sys­tem is gamed by the tech over­lords.” That’s part of the sig­nif­i­cance of this MAGA ‘civ­il war’ over H‑1B visa: it may have start­ed as a fight over H‑1B visa, but it’s already turn­ing into a fight over whether or not Elon Musk and his fel­low bil­lion­aire tech bros have too much pow­er and influ­ence:

    ...
    “He is a tru­ly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my per­son­al thing to take this guy down,” Ban­non added. “Before, because he put mon­ey in, I was pre­pared to tol­er­ate it; I’m not pre­pared to tol­er­ate it any­more.”

    ...

    This thing of the H‑1B visas, it’s about the entire immi­gra­tion sys­tem is gamed by the tech over­lords, they use it to their advan­tage, the peo­ple are furi­ous,” Ban­non said, not­ing that “76 per­cent of engi­neers work­ing in Sil­i­con Val­ley are non-Amer­i­cans.”

    “No blacks or His­pan­ics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Ban­non said.
    ...

    And then we get to this rather sur­pris­ing com­ment by Ban­non point­ing out how three of the most influ­en­tial peo­ple Trump’s orbit — Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk — are all white South Africans, going on to char­ac­ter­ize white South Africans as “the most racist peo­ple on earth”. It’s a very inter­est­ing choice of words on Ban­non’s part. On the one hand, Ban­non’s audi­ence prob­a­bly isn’t super wor­ried about white South African racists on the US gov­ern­ment. On the oth­er hand, as we’ve seen, Musk’s fam­i­ly back­ground includes the fact that his grand­fa­ther moved the fam­i­ly from Cana­da to South Africa over a deep belief in the right­eous­ness of the South African apartheid gov­ern­ment and a con­vic­tion that white peo­ples need­ed to oppose the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion-style glob­al Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy. Ban­non was basi­cal­ly dog-whistling around that still large­ly unknown part of Musk’s fam­i­ly his­to­ry with these com­ments:

    ...
    “Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Ban­non observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist peo­ple on earth, white South Africans, we have them mak­ing any com­ments at all on what goes on in the Unit­ed States?”

    “We have been fight­ing this fight for ten years,” he declared. “We are going to expose the entire cor­rup­tion of the Amer­i­can sys­tem, of how mon­ey con­trols every­thing and hope­ful­ly we’ll inspire you in Italy to wake up,” he told Cor­riere del­la Sera jour­nal­ist Viviana Maz­za.
    ...

    Keep in mind that this was Bre­it­bart report­ing on Ban­non’s inter­view. MAGA world isn’t just going to roll over and sud­den­ly embrace H‑1Bs, even if Trump gets behind them. And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle from Novem­ber 7, just days after the 2024 elec­tion, reminds us, Don­ald Trump has­n’t just voiced oppo­si­tion to H‑1B visas for years but he active­ly cur­tailed them dur­ing his first term. So when we see Trump sud­den­ly come out in favor of H‑1Bs as a kind of defense of Musk of Ramaswamy, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that he’s engag­ing in some­thing that could eas­i­ly be con­sid­ered a major betray­al of his MAGA base. A betray­al few saw com­ing just months ago. All seem­ing­ly done for Elon:

    Fast Com­pa­ny

    How Trump’s immi­gra­tion poli­cies could affect employ­ers and work­ers

    As Trump gears up for a sec­ond term, he is like­ly to crack down on all kinds of immigration—even the H‑1B visa that many employ­ers rely on.

    BY Pavithra Mohan
    11-07-2024

    Don­ald Trump’s bids for the pres­i­den­cy have long been defined by incen­di­ary anti-immi­gra­tion rhetoric. On the cam­paign trail over the last year, the pres­i­dent-elect dou­bled down on his posi­tions, declar­ing that immi­grants are “poi­son­ing the blood of our coun­try” and repeat­ed­ly tout­ing his plan to oust mil­lions of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, in what he has described as the “largest domes­tic depor­ta­tion oper­a­tion in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.”

    Trump has also said he would end birthright cit­i­zen­ship for chil­dren of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants born in the U.S., and rein­state the work­site raids that were con­duct­ed by Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) dur­ing his first term to detain work­ers.

    As Trump now gears up for a sec­ond term, how­ev­er, his admin­is­tra­tion is like­ly to crack down on all kinds of immi­gra­tion, even visa pro­grams like the H‑1B, which tech com­pa­nies and oth­er employ­ers have relied on for years to attract high­ly skilled for­eign tal­ent.

    Over the years, Trump has often claimed to sup­port legal immi­gra­tion. But both Trump and his soon-to-be vice pres­i­dent JD Vance have argued that the H‑1B and oth­er visa pro­grams encour­age employ­ers to hire for­eign work­ers at low­er pay, there­by tak­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties away from Amer­i­can work­ers. While cam­paign­ing, Vance has echoed the idea that there should be a ceil­ing on immi­gra­tion.

    ...

    Lead­ing up to the 2016 elec­tion, Trump had said the H‑1B visa pro­gram was “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. work­ers and that it should large­ly be reserved for a select group of appli­cants. Just months into his pres­i­den­cy, he intro­duced an exec­u­tive order that increased scruti­ny of H‑1B appli­ca­tions with the intent of lim­it­ing them to only the most skilled or high­est paid of work­ers. Accord­ing to an analy­sis by the Nation­al Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Pol­i­cy, a pro-immi­gra­tion think tank, Trump rolled out 52 poli­cies to lim­it access to visas and green cards for high­ly skilled work­ers dur­ing his time in office.

    While in office, Trump made the U.S. cit­i­zen­ship test more complex—and there­fore more dif­fi­cult to pass—and pro­posed a bill that would alter fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion to ban per­ma­nent res­i­dents from bring­ing their par­ents or sib­lings to the U.S. The same bill would have slashed the num­ber of green cards issued annu­al­ly from a mil­lion to 500,000 (though the pro­pos­al nev­er made it through Con­gress).

    Trump also tried to cut the num­ber of poor and dis­abled immi­grants who would need to rely on gov­ern­ment assis­tance, and in response to the pan­dem­ic, he put a freeze on sev­er­al forms of legal immi­gra­tion, from work visas to fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion. The num­ber of refugees dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly dur­ing that peri­od, as did stu­dent visas. In late 2020—again, report­ed­ly as a response to the pandemic—Trump increased the pay floor for H‑1B work­ers and made eli­gi­bil­i­ty guide­lines more strin­gent, in an effort to dis­cour­age employ­ers from hir­ing for­eign work­ers.

    What this could mean for employ­ers

    Both Trump and Vance have dis­tanced them­selves from Project 2025, an ini­tia­tive to sup­port the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent that was spear­head­ed by many for­mer Trump offi­cials. But buried in Project 2025’s extreme pol­i­cy pro­pos­als is a men­tion of how H‑1B visas can be used to sup­press wages and out­source wages—in line with the president-elect’s stance on work visas. “The oft-abused H‑1B pro­gram should be trans­formed into an elite pro­gram through which employ­ers are vying to bring in only the top for­eign work­ers at the high­est wages so as not to depress Amer­i­can oppor­tu­ni­ties,” the authors wrote.

    ...

    Dur­ing his first term, some of Trump’s desired immi­gra­tion reforms drew resis­tance from busi­ness lead­ers whose com­pa­nies depend on immi­grant labor. Elon Musk, for example—perhaps the most notable Trump donor lead­ing up to the 2024 election—has often expressed his sup­port for legal immi­gra­tion (though recent report­ing has revealed that Musk him­self may have worked in the U.S. ille­gal­ly while on a stu­dent visa). It’s pos­si­ble that despite his inten­tions to restrict immi­gra­tion, legal or oth­er­wise, some of Trump’s plans may meet oppo­si­tion from the likes of Musk and oth­er busi­ness lead­ers who now have his ear.

    ———–

    “How Trump’s immi­gra­tion poli­cies could affect employ­ers and work­ers” BY Pavithra Mohan; Fast Com­pa­ny; 11/07/2024

    “Over the years, Trump has often claimed to sup­port legal immi­gra­tion. But both Trump and his soon-to-be vice pres­i­dent JD Vance have argued that the H‑1B and oth­er visa pro­grams encour­age employ­ers to hire for­eign work­ers at low­er pay, there­by tak­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties away from Amer­i­can work­ers. While cam­paign­ing, Vance has echoed the idea that there should be a ceil­ing on immi­gra­tion.

    As we can see in this arti­cle writ­ten just days after the 2024 elec­tion, Trump has a very long track record of not just voic­ing oppo­si­tion to the H‑1B visas but poli­cies that cur­tailed in pro­gram in his first term. There was no expec­ta­tion of a devi­a­tion from this his­to­ry. Trump’s embrace of H‑1Bs real­ly has been an enor­mous flip flop:

    ...
    Lead­ing up to the 2016 elec­tion, Trump had said the H‑1B visa pro­gram was “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. work­ers and that it should large­ly be reserved for a select group of appli­cants. Just months into his pres­i­den­cy, he intro­duced an exec­u­tive order that increased scruti­ny of H‑1B appli­ca­tions with the intent of lim­it­ing them to only the most skilled or high­est paid of work­ers. Accord­ing to an analy­sis by the Nation­al Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Pol­i­cy, a pro-immi­gra­tion think tank, Trump rolled out 52 poli­cies to lim­it access to visas and green cards for high­ly skilled work­ers dur­ing his time in office.

    ...

    Trump also tried to cut the num­ber of poor and dis­abled immi­grants who would need to rely on gov­ern­ment assis­tance, and in response to the pan­dem­ic, he put a freeze on sev­er­al forms of legal immi­gra­tion, from work visas to fam­i­ly immi­gra­tion. The num­ber of refugees dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly dur­ing that peri­od, as did stu­dent visas. In late 2020—again, report­ed­ly as a response to the pandemic—Trump increased the pay floor for H‑1B work­ers and made eli­gi­bil­i­ty guide­lines more strin­gent, in an effort to dis­cour­age employ­ers from hir­ing for­eign work­ers.
    ...

    And then we get this fun fact that’s only going to make this a trick­i­er polit­i­cal line for Trump to walk: it’s not just his MAGA base who oppose H‑1Bs. Project 2025, a prod­uct of the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist wing of the GOP mega-donor class, also includes some lines about the need to curb the visas. Keep in mind that, while Project 2025 was writ­ten as a hand­book for the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion regard­less of who that Repub­li­can may be, it was also writ­ten with Don­ald Trump’s sec­ond term in mind. There should be no sur­prise Project 2025 was opposed to more H‑1Bs. The sur­pris­ing part is Trump’s recent embrace, seem­ing­ly at the behest of Elon Musk. It real­ly is quite a remark­able polit­i­cal flip flop on an issue that cuts to one of the core MAGA rea­sons for being. Oppos­ing immi­gra­tion that seemed to harm US work­ers was sup­posed to be non-nego­tiable for MAGA. And then Trump just kind of casu­al­ly agreed with Elon:

    ...
    Both Trump and Vance have dis­tanced them­selves from Project 2025, an ini­tia­tive to sup­port the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent that was spear­head­ed by many for­mer Trump offi­cials. But buried in Project 2025’s extreme pol­i­cy pro­pos­als is a men­tion of how H‑1B visas can be used to sup­press wages and out­source wages—in line with the president-elect’s stance on work visas. “The oft-abused H‑1B pro­gram should be trans­formed into an elite pro­gram through which employ­ers are vying to bring in only the top for­eign work­ers at the high­est wages so as not to depress Amer­i­can oppor­tu­ni­ties,” the authors wrote.

    ...

    Dur­ing his first term, some of Trump’s desired immi­gra­tion reforms drew resis­tance from busi­ness lead­ers whose com­pa­nies depend on immi­grant labor. Elon Musk, for example—perhaps the most notable Trump donor lead­ing up to the 2024 election—has often expressed his sup­port for legal immi­gra­tion (though recent report­ing has revealed that Musk him­self may have worked in the U.S. ille­gal­ly while on a stu­dent visa). It’s pos­si­ble that despite his inten­tions to restrict immi­gra­tion, legal or oth­er­wise, some of Trump’s plans may meet oppo­si­tion from the likes of Musk and oth­er busi­ness lead­ers who now have his ear.
    ...

    All signs were point­ing towards fur­ther H‑1B visa restric­tions fol­low­ing Trump’s elec­tion vic­to­ry. That’s what he did before, after all. And yet here we are, before he’s even sworn into office, with a pol­i­cy rever­sal that is poten­tial­ly very sig­nif­i­cant for for the MAGA base. And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, it’s not just Steven Ban­non who has tak­en issue with this flip flop. Far right ‘QAnon’-friendly activist Lau­ra Loomer has joined the fight. The same ‘9/11 Truth’ activist who Trump invit­ed to attend the 9/11 cer­e­mo­ny with him last year.

    And as the arti­cle also reminds us, this should­n’t be viewed as some sort of ‘civ­il war’ between racist and non-racists wings of the MAGA move­ment. At the same time he was pro­mot­ing H‑1Bs, Musk was aggres­sive­ly pro­mot­ing the far right anti-immi­grant AfD par­ty in Ger­many and has a his­to­ry of push­ing the Great Replace­ment The­o­ry. This isn’t a fight over racism. It’s a much less prin­ci­pled fight between two wings of MAGA — both deeply uncom­fort­able with non-white immi­gra­tion — over whether or not cheap, exploitable, large­ly non-white labor should be avail­able to cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. Which makes this the kind of fight that could be deeply divi­sive to the MAGA move­ment:

    The Nation

    In the GOP Civ­il War Over Immi­gra­tion, Both Sides Are Racists

    Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want cheap labor—not a mul­tira­cial democ­ra­cy.

    Jeet Heer
    Jan­u­ary 3, 2025

    Democ­rats are right­ly excit­ed by the fact that the MAGA crew have already start­ed vicious­ly fight­ing among them­selves even before Don­ald Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion. After all, with the Repub­li­cans set to enjoy a tri­fec­ta (even one that rests on a frag­ile hold of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives), the best hope for Democ­rats is that inter­nal GOP strife will sab­o­tage Trump’s abil­i­ty to enact his agen­da. This is, in fact, what hap­pened in Trump’s pre­vi­ous go-round as pres­i­dent, when the MAGA king was often thwart­ed by inter­nal strife in his coali­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly the intense bat­tles between GOP insti­tu­tion­al­ists such as Mitch McConnell and anti-sys­tem provo­ca­teurs such as Steve Ban­non).

    The cur­rent intra­mur­al GOP strife is a famil­iar bat­tle between a busi­ness elite that wants cheap immi­grant labor and nativist agi­ta­tors who believe restric­tion of immi­gra­tion is cen­tral to the MAGA agen­da. As New York mag­a­zine reports, “Last week, while Amer­i­cans were busy cel­e­brat­ing the hol­i­days with their fam­i­lies, a con­tentious online rift emerged among the MAGA faith­ful after Don­ald Trump’s tech-world allies, led by bil­lion­aire Elon Musk, began push­ing back on attacks on high­ly skilled for­eign tech work­ers by the movement’s nativist wing.”

    The ini­tial insti­ga­tion for the con­flict was Trump’s nom­i­na­tion of Sri­ram Krish­nan, an Indi­an-born tech entre­pre­neur, as senior pol­i­cy advis­er for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. The bat­tle soon spread to the larg­er issue of H‑1B visas, which are wide­ly used in Sil­i­con Val­ley as a way of hir­ing immi­grants.

    Lead­ing the charge against both Krish­nan and the H‑1B pro­gram was Lau­ra Loomer, a con­tro­ver­sial media per­son­al­i­ty who report­ed­ly has spe­cial access to Trump. As New York not­ed, “Loomer, who has nev­er been one to shy away from out­right racism, also launched attacks on Indi­an immi­grants, call­ing them ‘third world invaders’ while cel­e­brat­ing the ‘white Euro­peans’ who she claimed built the coun­try.”

    ...

    While it is true that Loomer and her allies (includ­ing for­mer Trump advis­er Steven Ban­non and pun­dit Ann Coul­ter) are racists, that does not mean that Musk and his fel­low Sil­i­con Val­ley allies (notably for­mer Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Vivek Ramaswamy, who is work­ing with Musk in advis­ing Trump on sub­du­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to the MAGA agen­da) are ani­mat­ed by tru­ly anti-racist pol­i­tics in their strug­gle.

    As my Nation col­league Joan Walsh not­ed, as repug­nant as they are, anti-sys­tem agi­ta­tors such as Loomer and Ban­non have a point when they deride the H‑1B pro­gram as exploita­tive. For decades, pro­gres­sive pro-labor activists have argued that the H‑1B is in effect a guest work­er pro­gram, cre­at­ing a reserve army of employ­ees who work for low­er wages and have few­er rights than Amer­i­can cit­i­zens or those with per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy sta­tus. The H‑1B visa is tied to employ­ment, which means employ­ees are espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to exploita­tion.

    On Jan­u­ary 2, Bernie Sanders expressed this long-stand­ing left­ist posi­tion, not­ing, “The main func­tion of the H‑1B visa pro­gram is not to hire ‘the best and the bright­est,’ but rather to replace good-pay­ing Amer­i­can jobs with low-wage inden­tured ser­vants from abroad. The cheap­er the labor they hire, the more mon­ey the bil­lion­aires make.”

    The cur­rent GOP civ­il war is one where both sides have pro­found­ly reac­tionary and big­ot­ed views of soci­ety, although with slight vari­a­tions. MAGA nativists such as Loomer and Ban­non are dream­ing of a return to the over­whelm­ing­ly white Amer­i­ca of the 1950s, with mid­dle-class jobs a pat­ri­mo­ny reserved large­ly for the nation’s dom­i­nant eth­nic group. Musk and Ramaswamy might want a more mul­tira­cial Amer­i­ca, but it would still be a pro­found­ly hier­ar­chi­cal one, with immi­grants pro­vid­ing the cheap labor that allows the 1 per­cent to flour­ish.

    Musk’s own his­to­ry of racism clar­i­fies the fact that both fac­tions in this bat­tle are just offer­ing dif­fer­ent strands of big­otry. Musk has a long his­to­ry of pro­mot­ing racist myths such as the idea of “white geno­cide” and the “Great Replace­ment.” These ideas are, as Julia Black doc­u­ment­ed in a 2022 arti­cle for Busi­ness Insid­er, tied up with his eugeni­cist belief that peo­ple such as him­self have supe­ri­or genes and thus a duty to pop­u­late the earth. This is a belief that Musk seems to have acquired from his father, Errol Musk.

    As Black reports:

    Musk, who has fathered 10 known chil­dren with three women, is the tech world’s high­est-pro­file prona­tal­ist, albeit unof­fi­cial­ly. He has been open about his obses­sion with Genghis Khan, the 13th-cen­tu­ry Mon­gol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the human pop­u­la­tion. One per­son who has worked direct­ly with Musk and who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty for this arti­cle recalled Musk express­ing his inter­est as ear­ly as 2005 in “pop­u­lat­ing the world with his off­spring. In August, Elon’s father…told me that he was wor­ried about low birth rates in what he called ‘pro­duc­tive nations.’”

    Musk’s ally Ramaswamy has cagi­ly recast these argu­ments in a more polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect form, as a mat­ter of cul­ture rather than genet­ics. Accord­ing to Ramaswamy, Sil­i­con Val­ley needs to hire immi­grants because “Amer­i­can cul­ture has ven­er­at­ed medi­oc­rity over excel­lence for way too long.”

    One rea­son not to take Ramaswamy’s claim to care about cul­ture seri­ous­ly is that he him­self, like Musk, has a his­to­ry of racism. More­over, these “cul­tur­al” jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for hier­ar­chy are often just bare­ly dis­guised man­i­fes­ta­tions of the belief that some peo­ple are inher­ent­ly mas­ters and oth­ers inher­ent­ly ser­vants. The Indi­an jour­nal­ist Abhi­jit Iyer-Mitra, in tak­ing sides with Musk against a nativist crit­ic of the H‑1B pro­gram, gave the game away by argu­ing, “Three gen­er­a­tions of my ances­tors have spo­ken & writ­ten, bet­ter Eng­lish than your blue col­lar labour­er fam­i­ly. I’ll hire you to pol­ish my shoes though, because that’s the only thing you seem to be qual­i­fied for.”

    Iyer-Mitra’s words show that sup­port of Sil­i­con Valley’s ver­sion of mer­i­toc­ra­cy is per­fect­ly com­pat­i­ble with aris­to­crat­ic hau­teur. Musk’s belief in the great­ness of his own genes and the nec­es­sary to pop­u­late the plan­et with his DNA is a par­tic­u­lar­ly ludi­crous man­i­fes­ta­tion of the same atti­tude.

    At the very same time that Musk was decry­ing the racism of Loomer and oth­er crit­ics of the H‑1B visa, he was express­ing suport for the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many par­ty (AfD), which is noto­ri­ous­ly anti-immi­grant. There’s no ten­sion between Musk’s two posi­tions. He is oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly anti-racist when he needs work­ers for his com­pa­ny, but in the long run he wants to keep the mul­tira­cial work­ing class dis­ci­plined and divid­ed. The best way to do that is to sup­port nativist polit­i­cal move­ments, whether MAGA in the Unit­ed States or AfD in Ger­many.

    ...

    ———-

    “In the GOP Civ­il War Over Immi­gra­tion, Both Sides Are Racists” by Jeet Heer; The Nation; 01/03/2025

    As my Nation col­league Joan Walsh not­ed, as repug­nant as they are, anti-sys­tem agi­ta­tors such as Loomer and Ban­non have a point when they deride the H‑1B pro­gram as exploita­tive. For decades, pro­gres­sive pro-labor activists have argued that the H‑1B is in effect a guest work­er pro­gram, cre­at­ing a reserve army of employ­ees who work for low­er wages and have few­er rights than Amer­i­can cit­i­zens or those with per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy sta­tus. The H‑1B visa is tied to employ­ment, which means employ­ees are espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to exploita­tion.”

    Just because Ban­non and Loomer are big­ots does­n’t mean they don’t have a point when it comes to the exploita­tive nature of the H‑1B sys­tem. They even have some com­mon ground with Bernie Sanders on this issue:

    ...
    On Jan­u­ary 2, Bernie Sanders expressed this long-stand­ing left­ist posi­tion, not­ing, “The main func­tion of the H‑1B visa pro­gram is not to hire ‘the best and the bright­est,’ but rather to replace good-pay­ing Amer­i­can jobs with low-wage inden­tured ser­vants from abroad. The cheap­er the labor they hire, the more mon­ey the bil­lion­aires make.”

    The cur­rent GOP civ­il war is one where both sides have pro­found­ly reac­tionary and big­ot­ed views of soci­ety, although with slight vari­a­tions. MAGA nativists such as Loomer and Ban­non are dream­ing of a return to the over­whelm­ing­ly white Amer­i­ca of the 1950s, with mid­dle-class jobs a pat­ri­mo­ny reserved large­ly for the nation’s dom­i­nant eth­nic group. Musk and Ramaswamy might want a more mul­tira­cial Amer­i­ca, but it would still be a pro­found­ly hier­ar­chi­cal one, with immi­grants pro­vid­ing the cheap labor that allows the 1 per­cent to flour­ish.
    ...

    And then there’s the fact that, for all of Musk’s appar­ent embrace of immi­gra­tion, the guy has been steadi­ly reveal­ing him­self to be a eugeni­cist and a big fan of the Great Replace­ment The­o­ry and polit­i­cal par­ties like the AfD. It’s the kind of gross hypocrisy that under­scores the real­i­ty that even big­ot­ed bil­lion­aires can love immi­gra­tions, at least when they’re allowed to hire these immi­grants in a sys­tems that leaves them with low­er pay and few­er rights:

    ...
    Musk’s own his­to­ry of racism clar­i­fies the fact that both fac­tions in this bat­tle are just offer­ing dif­fer­ent strands of big­otry. Musk has a long his­to­ry of pro­mot­ing racist myths such as the idea of “white geno­cide” and the “Great Replace­ment.” These ideas are, as Julia Black doc­u­ment­ed in a 2022 arti­cle for Busi­ness Insid­er, tied up with his eugeni­cist belief that peo­ple such as him­self have supe­ri­or genes and thus a duty to pop­u­late the earth. This is a belief that Musk seems to have acquired from his father, Errol Musk.

    ...

    At the very same time that Musk was decry­ing the racism of Loomer and oth­er crit­ics of the H‑1B visa, he was express­ing suport for the far-right Alter­na­tive for Ger­many par­ty (AfD), which is noto­ri­ous­ly anti-immi­grant. There’s no ten­sion between Musk’s two posi­tions. He is oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly anti-racist when he needs work­ers for his com­pa­ny, but in the long run he wants to keep the mul­tira­cial work­ing class dis­ci­plined and divid­ed. The best way to do that is to sup­port nativist polit­i­cal move­ments, whether MAGA in the Unit­ed States or AfD in Ger­many.
    ...

    And then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempts to frame the debate as one over ‘cul­ture’. Which was effec­tive­ly a means of declar­ing most Amer­i­cans too stu­pid and lazy for tech­nol­o­gy jobs. It’s the kind of argu­ment that obvi­ous­ly isn’t going to play well with much of the MAGA base. But it’s also a reminder that dis­till­ing these kinds of debates to debates over ‘cul­ture’ eas­i­ly lends itself to gross jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for exploita­tion sys­tems under the pre­tense of a cul­tur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty and the idea that there are ‘those with the cul­ture to be mas­ters and those with the cul­ture to be ser­vants’:

    ...
    Musk’s ally Ramaswamy has cagi­ly recast these argu­ments in a more polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect form, as a mat­ter of cul­ture rather than genet­ics. Accord­ing to Ramaswamy, Sil­i­con Val­ley needs to hire immi­grants because “Amer­i­can cul­ture has ven­er­at­ed medi­oc­rity over excel­lence for way too long.”

    One rea­son not to take Ramaswamy’s claim to care about cul­ture seri­ous­ly is that he him­self, like Musk, has a his­to­ry of racism. More­over, these “cul­tur­al” jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for hier­ar­chy are often just bare­ly dis­guised man­i­fes­ta­tions of the belief that some peo­ple are inher­ent­ly mas­ters and oth­ers inher­ent­ly ser­vants. The Indi­an jour­nal­ist Abhi­jit Iyer-Mitra, in tak­ing sides with Musk against a nativist crit­ic of the H‑1B pro­gram, gave the game away by argu­ing, “Three gen­er­a­tions of my ances­tors have spo­ken & writ­ten, bet­ter Eng­lish than your blue col­lar labour­er fam­i­ly. I’ll hire you to pol­ish my shoes though, because that’s the only thing you seem to be qual­i­fied for.”
    ...

    But the con­tro­ver­sy isn’t just lim­it­ed to dif­fer­ent wings of MAGA. India — which sup­plied over 70 per­cent of H‑1B visa work­ers in 2023 — has, unsur­pris­ing­ly, tak­en notice. And it’s not just an issue for Indi­an’s at large. The Modi gov­ern­ment has long viewed H‑1Bs as a pos­i­tive export for India and a means of extend­ing Indi­an influ­ence. In fact, Pres­i­dent Modi per­son­al­ly brought up the issue of H‑1Bs with Joe Biden on mul­ti­ple occa­sions.

    And yet, as Tan­ul Thakur, a New Del­hi-based inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist and author of a forth­com­ing book about the H‑1B pro­gram titled “Wild Wild East,” warns, it’s not like H‑1Bs are great for Indi­an work­ers either. Instead, Thakur sees it as a sys­tem that harms both US tech work­ers AND Indi­an immi­grants who end up trapped in low wage jobs in the hopes of get­ting a green card. He also accused the main­stream Indi­an news media of aban­don­ing its past crit­i­cisms of H‑1Bs — which used to be seen as a dam­ag­ing brain drain until the late 2000s — and replac­ing that crit­i­cism with a nation­al­ist stance. Which is a reminder that this isn’t sim­ply an issue about US cor­po­ra­tions and Indi­an work­ers screw­ing US tech work­ers out of a job. Indi­an and US tech work­ers can both end up get­ting exploit­ed, to the ben­e­fit of busi­ness own­ers like Trump and Musk:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Indi­ans slam MAGA ‘war’ over H‑1B skilled-work­er visas as ‘racist’

    As the top recip­i­ents of H‑1Bs, Indi­ans have been incensed by MAGA crit­i­cism of the pro­gram.

    Jan­u­ary 7, 2025
    By Anant Gup­ta

    KOLKATA, India — The “civ­il war” among sup­port­ers of Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump over H‑1B visas in recent days has sparked sharp reac­tions and accu­sa­tions of racism from com­men­ta­tors in India, where these visas for skilled work­ers are in high demand.

    News­pa­per columns and social media posts decried what they char­ac­ter­ized as a “racist” back­lash against legal Indi­an work­ers in the Amer­i­can high-tech indus­try, after crit­i­cism of the visa pro­gram by far-right activists in the Unit­ed States, such as Lau­ra Loomer.

    “The ris­ing pow­er, wealth, and vis­i­bil­i­ty of Indi­an-Amer­i­cans made it per­haps inevitable that the nativist base would direct its anger at the Desi [Indi­an] com­mu­ni­ty. What Loomer and her ilk have done is open the flood­gates for this anti-Indi­an racism,” said an arti­cle in the Hin­dus­tan Times.
    ...

    The Times of India and the Hin­dus­tan Times called the debate “a red-hot pota­to” and “a new chap­ter of racism against Indi­ans” in their head­lines and warned of its long-term impli­ca­tions for the rela­tion­ship between the two coun­tries. Dig­i­tal news sites were less restrained and blamed “America’s cor­ro­sive pol­i­tics” for the “explo­sion of racism.”

    For decades, the H‑1B pro­gram has allowed hun­dreds of thou­sands of com­put­er pro­gram­mers and oth­er high-skilled work­ers from India to work in the Unit­ed States on a tem­po­rary basis. In 2023, Indi­ans made up more than 70 per­cent of all H‑1B work­ers, accord­ing to U.S. Cit­i­zen­ship and Immi­gra­tion Ser­vices data.

    ...

    Indi­an com­men­ta­tors on X respond­ed by sneer­ing at the short­age of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics grad­u­ates in the Unit­ed States. Sev­er­al painstak­ing­ly dis­sect­ed the Amer­i­can econ­o­my to show how the coun­try needs to keep import­ing labor.

    Dur­ing a news brief­ing Fri­day, a spokesman for India’s Min­istry of Exter­nal Affairs said, “India‑U.S. eco­nom­ic ties ben­e­fit a lot from the tech­ni­cal exper­tise pro­vid­ed by skilled pro­fes­sion­als, with both sides lever­ag­ing their strengths and com­pet­i­tive val­ue.”

    The Indi­an gov­ern­ment has seized on the export of skilled labor as a patri­ot­ic issue, por­tray­ing it as a source of ris­ing Indi­an pow­er on the glob­al stage. Past Indi­an lead­ers once lament­ed this exo­dus as a brain drain.

    Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi per­son­al­ly took up the cause of H‑1B work­ers in mul­ti­ple meet­ings with Pres­i­dent Joe Biden.

    With Trump com­ing out in favor of the H‑1B pro­gram, the con­tro­ver­sy in itself is unlike­ly to cause major fric­tion in the U.S.-Indian rela­tion­ship in the short term. It does, how­ev­er, reveal the grow­ing bel­liger­ence among hard­core sup­port­ers of the respec­tive admin­is­tra­tions in the two coun­tries and the shrink­ing space for nuance in dis­cus­sions on com­plex issues such as immi­gra­tion.

    Tan­ul Thakur, a New Del­hi-based inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist and author of a forth­com­ing book about the H‑1B pro­gram titled “Wild Wild East,” rued the “woe­ful­ly bad” media report­ing on an issue that he insist­ed is eco­nom­ic, and not about civ­il rights.

    “I am a Brown guy, and I was an H‑1B work­er for two years, so you can take it from me,” he said, crit­i­ciz­ing the pro­gram for what he described as exploita­tion of Indi­an IT work­ers with low-wage jobs.

    Thakur said the visa sys­tem harms both Amer­i­can tech work­ers, who lose out on jobs, and Indi­an H‑1B visa hold­ers, who remain stuck in a rel­a­tive­ly low-wage trap for years as they cling to the hope of obtain­ing law­ful per­ma­nent res­i­dent sta­tus, or green cards. He accused the main­stream Indi­an news media, which used to be vocal about the brain drain until the late 2000s, of fail­ing to get to the bot­tom of the issue because of its nation­al­ist stance.

    ...

    ———–

    “Indi­ans slam MAGA ‘war’ over H‑1B skilled-work­er visas as ‘racist’” By Anant Gup­ta; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 01/07/2025

    “For decades, the H‑1B pro­gram has allowed hun­dreds of thou­sands of com­put­er pro­gram­mers and oth­er high-skilled work­ers from India to work in the Unit­ed States on a tem­po­rary basis. In 2023, Indi­ans made up more than 70 per­cent of all H‑1B work­ers, accord­ing to U.S. Cit­i­zen­ship and Immi­gra­tion Ser­vices data.

    When the H‑1B fight erupt­ed it may have tech­ni­cal­ly been a fight over ‘immi­gra­tion’. But with 70 per­cent of all H‑1B work­ers com­ing from India, this is large­ly a fight of Indi­an immi­gra­tion. And as we can see, it’s a fight that has­n’t escape the atten­tion of India. And that’s after Naren­dra Modi per­son­al­ly took up the cause of H‑1B work­ers in mul­ti­ple meet­ings with Joe Biden. This is clear­ly an issue India takes very seri­ous­ly. Now, with Don­ald Trump com­ing down on the side of H‑1B visas, this pre­sum­ably won’t end up becom­ing a major diplo­mat­ic rift between the US and India. But that’s assum­ing this MAGA ‘civ­il war’ is some­how resolved in favor or H‑1B visas for good. And as Steven Ban­non and Lau­ra Loomer have been mak­ing clear, it’s far from resolved:

    ...
    The Times of India and the Hin­dus­tan Times called the debate “a red-hot pota­to” and “a new chap­ter of racism against Indi­ans” in their head­lines and warned of its long-term impli­ca­tions for the rela­tion­ship between the two coun­tries. Dig­i­tal news sites were less restrained and blamed “America’s cor­ro­sive pol­i­tics” for the “explo­sion of racism.”

    ...

    Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi per­son­al­ly took up the cause of H‑1B work­ers in mul­ti­ple meet­ings with Pres­i­dent Joe Biden.
    ...

    And yet, as New Del­hi-based inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist and author Tan­ul Thakur explained, the prob­lems with the H‑1B sys­tem aren’t just prob­lems for Amer­i­can work­ers. Indi­ans are being trapped in low-wage exploita­tive jobs for years too. And as Thakur points out, its a sys­tem of exploita­tion the Modi gov­ern­ment has no inter­est in reform­ing either:

    ...
    The Indi­an gov­ern­ment has seized on the export of skilled labor as a patri­ot­ic issue, por­tray­ing it as a source of ris­ing Indi­an pow­er on the glob­al stage. Past Indi­an lead­ers once lament­ed this exo­dus as a brain drain.

    ...

    Tan­ul Thakur, a New Del­hi-based inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist and author of a forth­com­ing book about the H‑1B pro­gram titled “Wild Wild East,” rued the “woe­ful­ly bad” media report­ing on an issue that he insist­ed is eco­nom­ic, and not about civ­il rights.

    “I am a Brown guy, and I was an H‑1B work­er for two years, so you can take it from me,” he said, crit­i­ciz­ing the pro­gram for what he described as exploita­tion of Indi­an IT work­ers with low-wage jobs.

    Thakur said the visa sys­tem harms both Amer­i­can tech work­ers, who lose out on jobs, and Indi­an H‑1B visa hold­ers, who remain stuck in a rel­a­tive­ly low-wage trap for years as they cling to the hope of obtain­ing law­ful per­ma­nent res­i­dent sta­tus, or green cards. He accused the main­stream Indi­an news media, which used to be vocal about the brain drain until the late 2000s, of fail­ing to get to the bot­tom of the issue because of its nation­al­ist stance.
    ...

    Final­ly, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle reminds us, Steven Ban­non’s issues with Musk — and with Trump’s embrace of Musk — isn’t lim­it­ed to H‑1Bs. In fact, that’s not real­ly Ban­non’s main cri­tique of Musk. Instead, Ban­non insists he dis­agrees with Musk on “just about every­thing”, and in par­tic­u­lar Musk’s deep­en­ing rela­tion­ship with Chi­na:

    Newsweek

    Steve Ban­non Issues New Elon Musk Warn­ing: ‘Mas­ters in Bei­jing’

    Pub­lished Jan 04, 2025 at 5:06 PM EST
    Updat­ed Jan 06, 2025 at 7:55 AM EST
    By Jason Lemon

    Promi­nent right-wing pod­cast­er Steve Ban­non took aim at bil­lion­aire Elon Musk, say­ing the world’s wealth­i­est man has “mas­ters in Bei­jing” dur­ing a Sat­ur­day episode of his War­Room pod­cast.

    ...

    Why It Mat­ters

    Ban­non, who served as the CEO of Don­ald Trump’s 2016 cam­paign as well as a White House advis­er in his for­mer admin­is­tra­tion, and Musk, who donat­ed over a quar­ter bil­lion dol­lars to help get the pres­i­dent-elect across the fin­ish line in 2024, are two of the Repub­li­can lead­er’s top allies. How­ev­er, Ban­non has long been crit­i­cal of Musk, and rou­tine­ly crit­i­cized his busi­ness ties to Chi­na.

    The pod­cast­er has pre­vi­ous­ly called Musk a “stone cold liar” and said “his pay­mas­ters” are from the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP). In a recent inter­view with Semafor, Ban­non said that he and Musk dis­agree on “just about every­thing.”

    What to Know

    On Sat­ur­day, Ban­non dis­cussed how Musk has said he will change the algo­rithm on X, for­mer­ly Twit­ter, to reduce “neg­a­tiv­i­ty.” Musk pur­chased X and has run the com­pa­ny since Octo­ber 2022.

    A recent X update announce­ment explains that Musk aims to tweak the algo­rithm “to penal­ize ‘neg­a­tiv­i­ty’ while pro­mot­ing con­tent that is infor­ma­tion­al and enter­tain­ing. Musk’s goal is to enhance user expe­ri­ence by increas­ing what he refers to as ‘unre­gret­ted user-sec­onds.’ ”

    Ban­non sug­gest­ed Musk was exhibit­ing hypocrisy after pre­vi­ous­ly say­ing that he’d make X a bea­con of free speech. The right-wing pod­cast­er said the bil­lion­aire was tak­ing a cue from the CCP.

    ...

    “He’s using a social cred­it score,” Ban­non said. “He’s using it from his mas­ters in Beijing—have taught him through the Shang­hai joint ven­ture, of how to use social cred­it scores.”

    Chi­na’s so-called “social cred­it” sys­tem has drawn sub­stan­tial crit­i­cism in the West. Bei­jing’s end goal is to estab­lish a mas­ter data­base, a black­list­ing sys­tem, and a reward and pun­ish­ment instru­ment that can be applied nation­wide, with the aim of mea­sur­ing trust in soci­ety, gov­ern­ment, the judi­cia­ry, finance and com­merce.

    Ban­non’s remarks ref­er­enced Musk’s busi­ness oper­a­tions in Chi­na. Tes­la, in which Musk is the CEO of, announced in mid-2018 that it had “signed a Coop­er­a­tive Agree­ment for Tes­la to start build­ing Gigafac­to­ry 3, a new elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty in Shang­hai.” The Chi­nese fac­to­ry’s oper­a­tions have sub­stan­tial­ly boost­ed the com­pa­ny’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and val­ue to investors.

    Addi­tion­al­ly, Musk often prais­es Chi­na’s tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments, includ­ing the coun­try’s space pro­gram, infra­struc­ture and renew­able ener­gy. In 2019, he was offered per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy in the coun­try after vis­it­ing and say­ing, “I love Chi­na and want to come here more often.”

    In Decem­ber, Musk came out against the bipar­ti­san spend­ing bill that would avert a gov­ern­ment shut­down, with some law­mak­ers sug­gest­ing he was against it due to the pro­vi­sions on Chi­na.

    The orig­i­nal bill would have pro­hib­it­ed or required noti­fi­ca­tion of over­seas trans­ac­tions involv­ing Chi­na in sec­tors like semi­con­duc­tors, quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. It also would have includ­ed an expand­ed review of Chi­nese real estate pur­chas­es near nation­al secu­ri­ty-sen­si­tive sites and a require­ment to study nation­al secu­ri­ty risks posed by Chi­nese-made con­sumer modems and routers.

    The final ver­sion of the bill removed all Chi­na-relat­ed pro­vi­sions.

    ...

    ———–


    Steve Ban­non Issues New Elon Musk Warn­ing: ‘Mas­ters in Bei­jing’ ” By Jason Lemon; Newsweek; 01/04/2025

    “The pod­cast­er has pre­vi­ous­ly called Musk a “stone cold liar” and said “his pay­mas­ters” are from the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP). In a recent inter­view with Semafor, Ban­non said that he and Musk dis­agree on “just about every­thing.”

    It’s not just H‑1Bs. Ban­non and Musk dis­agree on “just about every­thing,” accord­ing to Ban­non. Espe­cial­ly when it comes to Musk’s rela­tion­ship with Chi­na. A rela­tion­ship that is absolute­ly crit­i­cal to Tes­la and Musk’s wealth. Musk may be a big fan of H‑1B visas, but he’s undoubt­ed­ly a big­ger fan of the US main­tain­ing friend­ly busi­ness rela­tions with Chi­na:

    ...
    Ban­non’s remarks ref­er­enced Musk’s busi­ness oper­a­tions in Chi­na. Tes­la, in which Musk is the CEO of, announced in mid-2018 that it had “signed a Coop­er­a­tive Agree­ment for Tes­la to start build­ing Gigafac­to­ry 3, a new elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty in Shang­hai.” The Chi­nese fac­to­ry’s oper­a­tions have sub­stan­tial­ly boost­ed the com­pa­ny’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and val­ue to investors.

    Addi­tion­al­ly, Musk often prais­es Chi­na’s tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments, includ­ing the coun­try’s space pro­gram, infra­struc­ture and renew­able ener­gy. In 2019, he was offered per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy in the coun­try after vis­it­ing and say­ing, “I love Chi­na and want to come here more often.”

    In Decem­ber, Musk came out against the bipar­ti­san spend­ing bill that would avert a gov­ern­ment shut­down, with some law­mak­ers sug­gest­ing he was against it due to the pro­vi­sions on Chi­na.

    The orig­i­nal bill would have pro­hib­it­ed or required noti­fi­ca­tion of over­seas trans­ac­tions involv­ing Chi­na in sec­tors like semi­con­duc­tors, quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. It also would have includ­ed an expand­ed review of Chi­nese real estate pur­chas­es near nation­al secu­ri­ty-sen­si­tive sites and a require­ment to study nation­al secu­ri­ty risks posed by Chi­nese-made con­sumer modems and routers.

    The final ver­sion of the bill removed all Chi­na-relat­ed pro­vi­sions.
    ...

    Ban­non has his declared mis­sion. And yet, with Trump seem­ing­ly still enam­ored with Musk’s wealth and influ­ence, it would seem that Ban­non has his work cut out for him. Trump has­n’t real­ly wavered in his sup­port of Musk or his new­found sup­port of H‑1Bs. At least not yet. Time will tell.

    And yet, even if Trump does ‘break up’ with Musk as many are pre­dict­ing, that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly means he’ll break up with H‑1Bs too. Again, Trump does­n’t actu­al­ly need his MAGA base any­more. What exact­ly that means in terms of pol­i­cy remains to be seen. But he’s nev­er going to have to run for reelec­tion again and will nev­er need to do anoth­er ral­ly. Sure, he might love ador­ing crowds. But he loves ador­ing bil­lion­aires who can make him a ton of mon­ey too and Musk obvi­ous­ly isn’t the only bil­lion­aire who loves H‑1Bs. Which group does Trump val­ue more now that he nev­er has to run for reelec­tion again? We’re all going to find out, includ­ing his still-ador­ing MAGA base. A still-ador­ing MAGA base that prob­a­bly isn’t as ador­ing as it was a cou­ple of months ago.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 14, 2025, 5:52 pm

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