George Packer

speaker

697 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 6 May

George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How Silicon Valley has profited by aligning with MAGA · 6 May 2026 podcast

And so I thought the best way to find out who he is and what he thinks would be to listen to him on his podcast.

And at one point, they were talking about – I think it was during the height of the Minneapolis –

ice crisis, which, by the way, Sachs essentially defended the conduct of ice agents in the deaths of Alex Pretty and Rene Good.

He said that this was Antifa-style operations intended to prevent federal agents from carrying out the roundup of criminal aliens, which the public elected Trump to do.

So for him, this was like a political organized effort to stop

And we could go through some of his views of other Trump policies because one after another, he lined up right behind Trump on everything Trump has done in the first year.

But on immigration, he said to his co-hosts,

Look, if we were just talking about letting in immigrants with 150 IQ, and then he cited Elon Musk and Jensen Wang of NVIDIA, we wouldn't even be having this argument.

And in another place, he has said the only way to ease the public's fears of immigration is to stop this mass immigration of people with average IQs and instead only let in these titans of technology with high IQs

Elon Musk from South Africa, Jensen Wang from Taiwan.

And then the public will see that immigration and technology are to their benefit.

And so the real problem with immigration is that we're letting in subpar people who aren't smart enough to contribute to the country.

We should only be letting in the masters of the universe.

They're called H-1B visas and there's a big argument at the beginning of the Trump second term over whether –

Those should be continued.

Elon Musk wanted them because they're important for his sector.

Steve Bannon was virulently opposed to them.

And this, again, is where the populist side of MAGA and the tech side of MAGA have real differences.

And now, because immigration has been brought to a near standstill,

There's all kinds of industries that are quietly or not so quietly telling Trump, you're really hurting us.

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