Rogé Karma
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, his name is Sriram Krishnan. He's the Silicon Valley figure who has like a long history. He works in tech and he was being appointed to be an advisor on Trump's AI team, which is being headed up by another big guy in tech, David Sachs, who's a part of the infamous PayPal mafia that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.,
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, there's like some like different ideological things happening. But for the most part, they're largely on the same page. And like a lot of people right now are kind of calling them the new tech right or just like the tech right.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, so there's this provocateur troll in Trump world called Laura Loomer. She's been kind of this weird thing on the right for a long time. She's chained herself to the headquarters of Twitter in protest of her account being banned at one point. But she sees this appointment and she decides to make hay of it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
She pulls out a tweet that Krishnan made about country caps for green cards, rather, and high-skilled immigration. And she points to these things and says, this is like not what we want. This is not America first. These things are not good for our constituency. And so that's like the sort of obvious bit of it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
The other bit, too, is you can kind of see how race is like this animating issue in this fight. David Sachs had already been appointed by Trump to be his chief advisor on issues of AI and crypto. David Sachs has talked about H-1B visas. He's pushed Trump on this. He's successfully gotten Trump to say that he would support the continued use of H1B visas.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
But Loomer didn't attack him on that and didn't turn this into a huge issue. Instead, she went after Sriram Krishnan, who is South Asian. And I think it's, you know, her targeting him specifically on this issue and associating him with that kind of speaks to the sort of like nativist sentiment undergirding all of this.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Kind of right after the election, I sort of thought that maybe there was a chance that there was going to be some sort of fractious element at some point in the future, because these are two sides that kind of believe sort of different things. The tech right is reactionary like the nativist right that includes people like Laura Loomer, people like Steve Bannon.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
They sort of all have this streak of like being frustrated with the progress that's taken place in America. They are frustrated with what they see as like American weakness. But the distinction is that the tech right also loves business. They love being rich. They love making a lot of money and having their industry be benefited.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
The sort of nativist right cares much more about the American constituency and specifically the white American constituency and benefiting what they see as like the natural order of whiteness and the average American and things that some people in the tech right kind of care about but prioritize less than their own companies and less than their own industry.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, I think on the sort of nativist right, the ideal America is this place that prioritizes, with some exceptions more so now, but like fundamentally it's this like white sort of very classic conventional conservative vision for what the United States is. It's this like return fantasy to a version of the 1950s America that prioritizes like white American interests above other people.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Again, with exceptions, there's You know, these people would all say that they're not racist, that they're just like meritocratic or things like that. The tech right is more agnostic to those kinds of things.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
People like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel kind of to some degree see value in that, but they only see value as far as that doesn't get in the way of their vision for creating this sort of like all-star team of Americans that can sort of dominate the global stage in technology and dominate like economically.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so they're willing to go to look to other countries to bring people in to try to like get the best talent according to them to try to like solve the toughest engineering problems and to do things like beat China, which is something that they're all very obsessed with.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
After a few days of silence, perhaps because this was happening literally over Christmas and the days after, Trump did say that he does support H-1B visas, and he seemed to kind of take Elon's side on this. I wasn't super surprised because on an episode of the All In podcast, which is like a sort of who's who of the tech right, it includes David Sachs.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Trump was pressed on the H-1B visa issue and he did say, yeah, like I support it. I'm down for this. This was in the summer. And so it was consistent for him to come back up with this. And the other thing is sort of consistent with a sort of like more general patterny kind of way is that.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
In the past, when there is sort of tension between his sort of more nationalist nativist base versus the wealthier interests that are in his coalition, not always, but he often tends to go with the sort of interests of the wealthy, the people who have given him the most amount of money, people who he probably respects because he has a great deal of respect for people who have built wealth.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so it wasn't super surprising to see him break that way. especially because it seems like his larger immigration priority is not regarding H-1Bs, and he seems more flexible on that. His larger immigration priority is people who, as he would say, came here illegally and are not, quote-unquote, high-skilled workers.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so on the sort of issue of mass deportation, this doesn't signal that he's going to break from that at all. He's talked a lot, very aggressively, about conducting mass deportations and, quote-unquote, securing the southern border.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And they talk about the southern border specifically because they're talking about a different kind of immigrant and they have a different set of priorities when it comes to people coming across the southern border.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Miller hasn't weighed in directly on this specific moment and this specific issue. He sort of gave a cryptic tweet that signaled that he is still anti-H-1B. But he's been very consistent on this in the past, and there's no reason to believe that he would change. As someone who is like
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
motivated primarily by this sort of nativist perspective that is again like sort of galvanized by racial animus and in many cases just outright racism. I don't think he'll change his perspective and he's going to fight on this. And so there's going to be weird tension moving forward.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Elon seemed to like, I don't want to say he walked back from this position, but like after a few days of fighting, he did seem to try to like want to soften the blows and sort of extend an olive branch. People in
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Sort of fairly influential but niche figures in this sort of like nationalist reactionary wing of the party also tried to sort of smooth over the tension and make it seem like there was like common cause being found. And so they have an interest among themselves in trying to come together and paint themselves as a united front and sort of like reach a consensus on this.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that from my perspective and the things I pay attention to, that seems exactly the direction it's going to go in. The tech right is aware of the mass deportations, has not really talked out against them. Elon Musk has tweeted acknowledging them and sees them as an inevitability that he doesn't seem to have a clear problem with.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
That could change when we sort of get like harrowing images of ICE conducting raids and things like that. But right now, that's the track that we're on.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, that if we extrapolate this out, which we can both from this example, but then also from how 2016 through 2020 went, Trump is probably going to side, I guess, with more of the wealthier faction, which includes the tech right, which includes people in his coalition who are people like the hedge fund manager, Scott Besson, who also sort of have this this prioritization of wealth.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
More like economically laissez-faire issues, they have this sort of more traditional conservative perspective on economics. And that's something that's going to run at attention with what the nationalists want.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
They want this sort of economic nationalist perspective that is a departure from this hyper free market sort of way of viewing the world that's been the dominant conservative perspective for the past several decades. Yeah.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Exactly. Yeah. AI and automation is going to be a really big one in this area too, because like the tech right obviously cares a lot about AI and automation. They're very pro AI and automation. They see this as like an existential issue in the United States versus China and that the US must to continue like it's... being the most important country in the world that must beat China on this.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
But a lot of the more nationalist right doesn't agree with this. They see this as a different kind of issue. Tucker Carlson, who I think squarely falls in this nativist camp and is one of its most influential members, has outright said that he opposes not necessarily the development of AI and automation, but its implementation and use.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
He's talked directly about never using AI for things like driverless trucks, but Elon at Tesla is directly like making self-driving trucks. And so, yeah, there's a lot of like weird places where these sort of fractures are going to play out.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah. Yeah, it seems like that. I do want to say that this is kind of a unique issue in that it draws in race, which is a very big thing, and it draws in immigration. And so it might get a uniquely high amount of attention, but there's still going to be versions of this fight that might not play out as aggressively that are going to happen over the next four years.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.