Greenland is preparing to defend itself from MAGA:
Let’s hope that not even Trump is stupid enough to send troops to Greenland.
Moving on … an online war has broken out among the MAGAts. As you may recall, a big part of Trump’s campaign pitch was that he was going to save Americans from all those evil immigrants. But there are a whole lot of immigrants — plus first-generation children of immigrants — being appointed to his administration. And some of them want to expand immigration. In particular, the techbros of Silicon Valley want the government to issue more H1b visas and green cards so that Silicon Valley companies can import more technonerds from India to work here. This is not sitting well with the nativists. This is from Axios:
Catch up quick: The skirmishes started Sunday when Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his adviser on AI policy.
Krishnan’s appointment triggered an anti-Indian backlash on social media, particularly given his past advocacy for lifting caps on green cards.
Vivek Ramaswamy escalated the conflict into a full-blown war Thursday morning with a post on X blaming an American culture that “venerated mediocrity over excellence” for the growth in foreign tech workers.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote, calling for a 1950s-style “Sputnik moment” to prioritize “nerdiness over conformity.”
“That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence,” he said.
Between the lines: Elon Musk’s X is the town square for the MAGA movement, and by stepping into that square and firmly criticizing American culture — while praising the immigrant work ethic and parenting model — Ramaswamy threw down a gauntlet.
Musk also weighed in, saying that the number of “super talented” and “super motivated” techies in the U.S. is “far too low.” And why do I suspect that “super motivated” means “willing to work longer hours for less money”? Hmmm.
Here’s Ramaswamy’s entire X rant about the deficiencies of American culture, if you want to read it. After Ramaswamy posted this, White Supremacist Nick Fuentes accused Ramaswamy of trying to lure “500 million Indians to move here,” essentially accusing Ramaswamy of being an agent of the Great Replacement Theory.
When Trump appointed Indian-born venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, alarms went off among the nativists. Laura Loomer has been blowing up social media over it.
Describing workers from India as “third-world invaders,” Loomer also took issue with Musk and Ramaswamy defending the tech industry importing “super talented engineers” from overseas.
“The average IQ in India is 76,” Loomer tweeted at one point, along with several other posts disparaging Indians and their home country.
The techbros have money, which gives them an edge with Trump over the likes of Loomer and Fuentes.
Another wrinkle is that the nativists, including Loomer, who criticized Elon Musk on X have all been stripped of their blue-check verification badges. Loomer wrote (on X),
Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for supporting original Trump immigration policies.
I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.
Elon has decided to retaliate by removing my blue check and demonetizing me.
I guess he doesn’t really believe in Free speech after all.
None of these people ever believed in free speech for everybody, of course.
Update: Now Elon Musk is throwing MAGA under the bus. On X he called MAGAs who are criticizing him “contemptible fools” who “must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.” And Steve Bannon has declared war on Elon Musk.
Steve Bannon has joined the MAGA war between hard-line immigration opponents and tech executives like Elon Musk, taking the side of xenophobia on his War Room show Friday.
“H-1B visas? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages,” the former Trump adviser turned pundit said, referring to the visa program that allows immigrants in specialized fields to work in the United States temporarily.
“This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less. Simple. To let them in through the golden door,” Bannon added.
Trump has been silent about the whole mess.
Stuff to Read
Stephen Robinson, Public Notice, The Press Is Ignoring the Real Liz Cheney Scandal
Joyce Vance, Educate or Not
Keep in mind, the Orange One hasn't even been inaugurated yet. How we're going to survive four years of this remains to be seen.
Microsoft was a spin-off from IBM. No IBM engineer wanted to be associated with writing an operating system for a toy computer. Which is how the personal computer was viewed by Big Blue. IBM farmed the tasks out to a startup – Microsoft. And Microsoft got bigger than IBM. Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world. I think Microsoft created more millionaires within MS than any comparable company. This isn't the only rags-to-riches story to come out of techworld.
What does this have to do with Musk and Ramaswamy? An excellent American engineer knows he's the creative source of wealth. If his talents are in demand, he wants a piece of the action. If what the engineer produces sells, the engineer wants more than a basic wage. I suspect for an engineer from India, the goal is to get out of the system there, which limits his/her opportunities. (My opinion – I am no expert on India.) An engineer from India wants out of India, with a shot at US citizenship. A US engineer of equal talent wants a slice of the big pie.
If Ramaswamy can hire overseas talent, he can force US engineers to accept the wage structure he wants to pay. This is offensive to me and to MAGA, one of a very few points of agreement. Trump's business model, on the occasions where he actually did construction was to rip off his vendors, pay then ten cents on the dollar and require a NDA on top. Trump is a thief who agrees with keeping the little people down.
Musk made it clear when he took over Twitter – he was going to fire most of the workforce. And he did. He wanted anyone who stayed on to see Twitter as a religion – sleep at the office – work 70 hours per week. This attitude is what Musk and Ramaswamy consider "excellence." The American engineer who's never gonna see any serious profit-sharing expects a normal 40-hour work week.
The issue is how much the venture capitalist should have to share in a successful start-up. US engineers expect and demand a share in the profit. Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy want to keep it all. Workers are the N-word on the plantation. Welcome to the reality of Trumpism, MAGA.
I was a H1-B once in the late 1990's during the dotcom boom. Got out before the crash (more through good luck than good planning) and went home to Australia. Been home ever since.
Bannon is screaming about H1-B being indentured servitude (which it is). OK then. So change the freaking law!
Pass a law that the overseas hire must be paid 25% more than an equivalent local hire and the H1-B is transferable after 3 months.
That makes the local talent cheaper and ends the indentured servitude nature of H1-B's. If I don't like you, I can go anywhere else with no penalty.
So MAGA, how about fixing the law? *crickets*
Anyway, Bannon is still an idiot because fixing or banning H1-B's would cause the techbros to switch to 100% outsourcing and still pay substandard wages to overseas programmers who are stuck in battery hen conditions in the outsourcing firms. No new US jobs will happen.
Need more laws to fix that too …
P.S. Funny thing is, the dotcom crash caused the Indian outsourcing boom – many of the laid off Indian H1-B's in Silicon Valley went home and founded contracting firms to sell services back to Western companies.
I wonder if Musk even realizes the gap in his disingenuous argument is so wide you could drive a Cybertruck through it. He says he wants to attract the 0.1% of engineering talent, and implies the H1-B immigration quota, which stands at 65,000 right now, needs to be increased "many times" in order to do it. First, if we're talking the 0.1%, you're not going to need that many additional H1-Bs. Second, H1-B is a form of indentured servitude, in that a company has to sponsor you, and while you're here, you can only work for that company. If you're fired, laid off, you have to leave the country unless you can find another sponsor, which is rare in the process. No one with that level of talent Musk is demanding is going to agree to come here under those conditions. H1-B visas have been used for the grunts in IT — programmers, QA, tech support, etc. and they get them from India and other countries, for cheap. Since their inception 30 some years ago, they've used the lie that there aren't enough US workers with the skills to do these jobs. US workers have been doing IT work for decades long before the inception of H1-B. The reality is, they want cheap labor and don't want to pay US workers what they're worth in this market. Corporations have been lobbying congress for decades to increase the H1-B quota, and if they had their way, they would fill all US IT jobs with cheaper H1-B labor. This is essentially what Musk and Ramaswamy want to do, undercut US IT workers with cheap labor, but of course they won't admit that.
The problem for Trump is he ran and won on the most racist, nativist campaign in recent history. The real MAGA, know-nothing wing of the party was serious about "immigration" because to them its less about labor, as it is about race. Trump sold them on non-white immigrants taking their jobs, which wasn't true, but it wore well in the racist scheme of things. Making America Great Again was about putting white workers back in the saddle. But now here comes Musk openly saying Americans (read: MAGA) are too stupid to do skilled technical work, and we need your betters, brown people, to take these jobs. Of course they're pissed because it goes against everything they were told.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Ironically, in some of the MAGA know-nothing responses to Musk, they say they could do the jobs if they had training. But they support the party that has been doing its damndest to destroy public education, and make college education unaffordable by supporting predatory student loan shysters. They support getting rid of the Dept. of Education, but now they want training.
The balls in Trump's court now. Either he comes down on the side of Musk and let the mask drop that the Trump/GOP was never about the working class or the "American worker." Or he sides with the know-nothings and piss of the tech-bro/money class, who he might not have made it back to the presidency without their help.
Lastly, this is a great opportunity for democrats to not only fan the flames on this stupid war, but let the MAGAs know once and for all, Trump and the GOP are not for working people. They only wanted to use you for your vote.