MAGA populists call for holy war against Big Tech

If you wanted a sense of the current relationship between the tech right and the populists, you had to be sitting in Breakout Room C on the first day of NatCon 5, the annual gathering of the MAGA right’s powerhouses. At the end of the afternoon panel on the culture wars (“The Need for Heroism”), Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company’s AI efforts.

“I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference’s core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI and the American Soul,” calling for the populists to wage a literal holy war against artificial intelligence developers “as betrayers of our species, traitors to our nation, apostates to our faith, and threats to our kids.” Now, he stared right at the technologist who’d just given a speech arguing that tech founders were just as heroic as the Founding Fathers, who are sacred figures to the natcons. The AI industry was, he told Sankar, “by and large, globalist, secular, liberal, feminized transhumanists. They explicitly want mass unemployment, they plan for UBI-based communism, and they view the human species as a biological ‘bootloader,’ as they say, for artificial superintelligence.”

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