Tech Won't Save Us - The Growing Divide Between MAGA and Big Tech w/ Tina Nguyen

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Tina Nguyen to discuss the divisions within the American far-right between the Trump administration, the wider MAGA movement, and the tech executives trying to show they’re on their side. Tina Nguyen is a senior reporter at The Verge and author of The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out). Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Tina wrote about visiting NatCon and Charlie Kirk’s memorial event. Tina also wrote about Peter Thiel’s ongoing obsession with the antichrist. Jared Isaacman was revoked as a candidate to lead NASA, highlighting the rifts Tina is discussing. Elon Musk is talking about starting a new political party.

There's a fundamental level of distrust between Maga and Big Tech when you start breaking into things like what they believe happens after they die, what they think is moral or amoral or immoral. Welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tina Nguyen. Tina is a senior reporter for The Verge and the author of The Maga Diaries, My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing and How I Got Out. Tina wrote a fascinating article recently about visiting NatCon 5, the annual gathering of the powerhouses of the MAGA right wing in the United States. And I found this particularly fascinating because Tina was laying out basically how you have

these people who are kind of the leaders of the MAGA movement, really dedicated people on the extreme right in the United States, who, you know, are basically laying out their vision for the country, making their arguments for what the politics of the Trump administration and of the broader country should be. Meanwhile, you have these people from the tech industry who are there who are trying to show that they are also part of this national conservative movement, and it's clear that there is a rift, right? It's clear that these people are really not seeing eye to eye with one another, and it seems quite clearly that people in this national conservative movement are seeing the tech industry very skeptically. They don't believe that these are people

who are really aligned with the values of this extreme right-wing movement. And they even see some of the technologies that these companies are creating as a threat to the broader political project that they are trying to pursue. As I was reading this in this article, I thought I really want to learn more about what is happening here. I want to understand like the political dimension of this, but also how these people are looking at the tech industry, looking at technologies like AI, and to see how that might inform how we collectively understand what is happening in American politics at the moment, you know, this embrace of the Trump administration by so many in the tech industry and whether that is going to pay off and sustain itself in the long term, or, you know,

whether this other movement within the political right that is really driving what MAGA is beyond Donald Trump might actually supplant them, might push them to decide and the ways that they have already done that in some instances. So for me, this was really interesting. You know, it was a really interesting topic that is certainly going to remain relevant at least for the next few years, if not well beyond that, right? Who knows what happens post-Trump on the American right? Beyond that, of course, we also talked a bit about what we saw recently with Charlie Kirk, though admittedly, I meant to talk about that a little bit more, but I was so interested in digging into different aspects of this story that we didn't get to it until closer to the end.

And so then it became a question of like, what did we really learn from this? And in particular, this memorial service that they held and Trump's appearance there and how a lot of people didn't seem particularly interested in seeing Trump himself. So yeah, basically, I was really happy to have Tina on the show to get some more insight from her on what we are seeing from this dimension of right-wing politics in the United States. So if you enjoy this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making tech won't save us every single week so we can keep having these critical

in-depth conversations and so that you can get ad-free episodes. You can join supporters like Tim from London in the UK, Ellen from California, and Sarah in Gander, Newfoundland by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Tina, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me. Really excited to chat with you because I think you have a really interesting beat, I guess. You know, it feels like, you know, I've been reading your work for a little while and it feels like you're showing up at these different, like, right-wing conferences and events and kind of telling us what is going on as, you know, also just paying attention more broadly to what

is going on with the political right, the Trump administration, the relationship to the tech industry. I think just to start, like, how did you fall into this being the thing that you are reporting on? And what is it like to be in those spaces? Oh, my God. It's a long story. And this would definitely be the point where I show my memoir, the MAGA Diaries. But ages and age is and ages ago, I went to Claremont McKenna because I followed a boy there, and I ended up falling into this world of like intellectual right-wing thought leadership, which ended up expanding into the general world of the organized conservative movement. From there, I ended up having a bunch of very wild, weird experiences that no one else really does. I don't think you could say

any other reporter in quote-unquote legacy media has ever worked at The Daily Caller with Tucker Carlson I bailed from that for a while, moved to New York, and then I got a job as a blogger at Vanity Fair in 2015. And my second day there, Trump announced he was running for office. Once he got elected, everyone started realizing, wait a second, Tina. How is it that you know all of the random right-wing people who are now in his administration? Why is it that you're just name-dropping Steve Bannon? Why is it that you know what the hell's going on with Breitbart or these random little thing tanks or Michael Anton? And I'm like, oh, no one knew that this is a thing.

Okay, I guess I'll write about it. So I ended up writing about this universe of like right-wing intellectuals, right-wing influencers who just started like saying things online. Then I lived a little too online, but realized that whenever Donald Trump was on Twitter, he would retweet something that someone who was like friendly or defending him would say. And then those guys would end up building entire careers of their own because now the president of the United States endorsed them. So these guys ended up building so much power and so much influence with the president. When this new administration came to power,

you had like Peter Thiel backing, J.D. Vance, you had Elon Musk also get Twitter poisoned. And he became a Twitter guy to the point he bought Twitter and turned it into X. And the fact that there were so many internet people embedded in this campaign, then they went to the administration with him and then all of these other tech moguls realized that they either had to jump on board with Trump or just not have any business. I was thinking, okay, do I really want to stay at a political publication where I'm going to have to explain these dynamics to an editor every single freaking day of my life? Or do I go to a tech publication where everyone already kind of gets it and they understand this new psychological, mental dynamic? And whatever is happening is

like not impossible for them to understand. And I ended up talking to Nilai Patel, who's the editor in chief of the verge, like December 2024. And like I was so happy because that was the first conversation I've ever had with anyone when I'm discussing my beat where they weren't like, no, that's impossible. That could never happen. His reaction was, oh yeah, I thought about it. Have you considered it could be worse? He was absolutely right. And a lot of things that we talked about in those conversations are happening now. Like, we thought the influencers on the podcast pros were going to be right or die with the president.

But Nile goes, because he's covered this for ages, actually, these guys are too independent. What happens when they realize that they don't have power politically? Like right now you're seeing Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, like revolt against Trump for the FCC decisions against Kimmel or the DHS using their podcast clips. Neelai called it ages ago. I hadn't even thought of that. But that's why I went to the Virgin. Every single time I've pitched something, they're like, oh, yeah, we see that.

I don't have to fight to be believed anymore, which is phenomenal. People who have been watching this stuff happening online or have some degree of like understanding of it are like, okay, we need to understand more about this. This is the thing that you and your reporting is obviously bringing to us and informing so many more of us about what is going on in this space and something that we need to be understanding because of the way that political power is being. being used at the moment, the type of people who have gained it, but also, you know, the cracks and the fissures, which is one of the things that I want to talk to you about today. Before we go into this, I definitely want to, like, lay out the groundwork here in that, like, why is it that the MAGO woman talks about technology all the time? It's because they've talked about technology the entire time I've followed them.

It wasn't just, oh, my God, we're getting canceled online, although you do see that complaint result in Section 230 stuff with canceling people for saying the wrong. kind of things using weirdo mechanisms buried in FCC minutia. But they understood really deeply that in order to have any sort of political power, they needed to harness technology to its fullest extent. They realized that you had to have a platform in the first place. You need to build your own platforms. You needed to build your own servers. You needed to find the best ways to press people to like bench their way, technologically speaking. I think that's the reason you reached out to me. It was because of that MAGA AI article. Absolutely. I'm fascinated by these

kind of like divisions, right? And I want to talk about that, but first I want to kind of set this up a bit for the listeners, right, who have obviously been following this to a certain degree, but I want to make sure that they are really understanding what's happening. And if we look at what has been occurring over the past number of months, I think most people would look at it and say the extreme right and many of the people at the top of the tech industry have basically forged an alliance, which is indicated through the Trump administration and basically the closeness that many of these executives now have with Donald Trump himself and with different members of the administration and this feeling that they are all working together. So can you

talk to me a bit about how you saw that, I guess that alliance kind of coming together and what we have been seeing since Trump returned to power in terms of how that has taken shape? I have also had a very interesting, like, perspective shift from the beginning of Trump's election to now. And I think it also comes from the fact that I was a political reporter. And when you're in politics, what you do is you look at things and go like, oh, these people are making an appeal to the masses by saying that we align with your values. And so when you see Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, all of these titans of tech, suddenly migraine. great tomorrow Lago and, like, throw themselves at the foot of the president and go, like, we love you, Mr. President.

You're fantastic. Of course, that looked like capitulation. That looked like an ideological merging of the highest degree. And Elon, of course, being the Uber tech billionaire, him throwing himself face first into being a MAGA guy, that made a lot of sense. That totally made a lot of sense. But over time, like, I started realizing that there was such a fundamental difference in how tech and Silicon Valley worked, which was tech. What they want is number go up.

What they want is to make sure their businesses are functional and their shareholders are satisfied and they have the best technology and they beat their competitors. They will say whatever it is they need to the politicians. And the politicians, especially the MAGA people who are so ideologically locked into making the world a specific place, they do not like when people try to appeal to their values. And they sure as hell do not like when a person who was a Silicon Valley bro suddenly starts saying things like, oh yeah, the founding fathers were wonderful. And I read Friedrich von Hayek too. And here's what I think of his theory or whatever. And over time, you just started realizing that the MAGA people viewed the tech people as folks who would easily turn on their values, depending on if they thought it was good or bad for their company. So I was talking to a guy named Vish Bura, who used to be, do you remember George Santos? Oh, yes, I remember.

Remind the listeners, though, just who might not. Okay. George Santos was a member of Congress who apparently lied about everything that he was in his bio. He claimed that he worked at Goldman Sachs. He never did. He claimed that he was never a drag queen in Brazil. He did. There was some fraud and something that he actually had to go to prison for. I believe he's still in prison. But in the meantime, he became this huge MAGA figure and made an alliance with Matt Gates. He was also doing cameos for a while if people wanted to pay for them. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Camios and making fun of what female reporters were wearing in Congress. Very sassy man. Vishboro was the guy who ran his social media. And he now works for Matt Yates. He's an alumni of Steve Bannon. He was the person who put together his streaming show, which War Room is so influential now. And I was asking him for a story I did about TikTok what he thought of the tech right alliance. And he went, I don't trust them.

Nobody trusts them. If they were so dem to begin with and then immediately became Republican and bought into our culture war stuff and said that they would do whatever it is we wanted to the culture war, what happens if someone else takes power? Wouldn't they just immediately flip back and support those guys? You can't really do that in politics and you can't do it as quickly as those guys did. So there's a fundamental level of distrust between Maga and Big Tech. When you start breaking into things like what they believe happens after they die, what they think is moral or amoral or immoral, how many sexual partners you can have at once. When you break things down into beliefs, Maga has beliefs and they really don't like it when people don't.

I mean, these guys came up with the term rhino, which is Republican in name only. And those guys at least had some conservative values to begin with. What do you think they're going to think of the tech guys? We have obviously seen this close relationship between many of the executives in Silicon Valley and the Trump administration for the past number of months. obviously we saw Elon Musk go his own way after disagreements with Donald Trump. And it feels like a lot of those other executives have been trying to stay on side, you know, announcing the major investments in the United States that Donald Trump wants to see and, you know, adopting kind of changes to their platforms or whatnot that the conservative movement would potentially

demand. You know, if we think about Mark Zuckerberg saying that they're going to be doing less moderation. And I just saw the other day, YouTube is letting COVID deniers and election misinformation people back on the platform or to apply to return to the platform. So you see these investments, you see these attempts to kind of keep the administration happy. But then on the flip side, you do see increasing maybe policy disagreements, particularly on immigration and things like that. I wonder what you think of the state of that relationship between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration at the moment. Again, I think it boils down to where do you lie ideological? and how does that butt up against a company's profit motive? So it makes a lot of sense that these

businesses would feel comfortable throwing money at the Trump administration, allowing him to take investments in their company, directing them where to put their money. But when it comes to the making of their money, they need overseas skilled workers to come to the U.S. to work for them. Unfortunately, that is sort of a hard line for an anti-immigration MAGA person who is like, No, no, no, no, no, no. The entire point of what we believe and what we started this entire MAGA thing on is there are too many immigrants coming across the border and the government's giving too many visas to them and taking jobs away from Americans. What are you doing, Big Tech? What are you doing? You are not playing by the rules that we believe in. And tech goes, well, we need the money. So that's an intractable problem that they cannot resolve. And once that happened, I think that was when MAGA started realizing, wait a second, I don't think big tech is actually on our side at all. I don't know. It's like the first real policy disagreement, but it's a very, very important one.

So I don't know how tech would have been able to get themselves out of that. One, I wasn't like too looped into the business side of tech quite yet, but it did seem really significant from my area of coverage. Absolutely. And, you know, I think we really started to see that begin to emerge a number of months ago. And it feels like this, you know, attempt by the administration to really go after the H-1B visas now, it's hard to see how that doesn't create some kind of rift with the tech industry and the Trump administration, even though they're certainly trying to keep Trump on side.

But, you know, you were talking about those rifts within the MAGA movement and rifts with the tech industry and the MAGA movement. And so I wanted to talk about that a bit more because if people are watching from the outside, they might look at it and say the tech executives and the MAGA movement are on the same. side as one another, they're fighting for the same things, or they might even say there is this one MAGA movement that is exemplified by Donald Trump and his beliefs. But actually, you know, what I really take away from some of the reporting that you have been doing is how there are these real rifts between maybe what the Trump administration is doing and what this kind of, I don't know, more grassroots movement is kind of demanding. So can you talk to me a bit more about

those divisions that we're seeing and how the right that maybe lined up behind Donald Trump is now having disagreements with what the administration itself is doing and the alliances that they're making, say, with the tech industry. It's like all along these very interesting little cracks. The biggest one that I saw was with copyright and AI. So one of the first big scoops I got out of the Trump administration was there was a chain of events that everyone thought led to a doge takeover of the Library of Congress. So he fires the librarian of Congress for woke stuff, I guess.

the head of the U.S. Copyright Office for writing a paper that establishes where the copyright office falls on if copyrighted works can be fed into an AI. And if that's transformative or not. And if it's not transformative, does AI have to pay the creators? One day, the copyright office suddenly sees three random dudes walk in with a letter saying, we're in charge now. And it was Doge time. Everyone thought it was Doge. But all of a sudden, I just started looking at the names and I go, wait, no, that guy's Maga, that guy's Maga, that guy's Maga, what the heck's going on here? And it turns out that over the weekend, when Maga and right wingers found out that Trump had done this and that Elon and David Sachs are trying to get their Polks in, it was a full court

press among the American right, like content creators, right wing media going, no, no, Mr. President, don't do that. Do not do that. Those guys are trying to take our work. And the thing with MAGA content creators is that they are so protective of the content they create. It dates back to when they were being de-platformed and all of the attention they were getting was gone, and then all of the money they were making from advertisements got demonetized. So they view the intellectual property they generate as a very precious resource. So when big tech comes in and then just tries to steal it outright to feed into their like LLMs, that makes them really angry and it makes them doubly angry if they do it in a super underhanded manner. So that was sort of where the first cracks

began to surface. And what they were really, really mad about was that the tech rose had tried to convince Trump by saying, oh, these people are woke. And there was not really that much justification. But when you say to Trump, hey, Mr. President, that person's woke, you can get them fired. This person's disloyal. You can get them fired. Eventually, that's what happened to the NASA Administrator Jared Isickman, the falling out for anyone who didn't, who like is unfamiliar with this fucking roller coaster of the Trump administration, the reason that Elon fell out with Trump was because someone in the White House, who was way more MAGA, was trying to root out all of the Elon people and went after the NASA administrator nominee and went Mr. President, look how

many times this guy donated to Democrats. And that was enough for Trump to kick him out. Yeah. Right. I remember that. Yeah. I mean, it'll say the guy was qualified for the job. It wasn't like Elon threw a total noob in there, but also Elon wanted loosened regulations for him to send his SpaceX rockets up. I think it's fascinating to think about those examples, right? And kind of what they tell us about these divisions within the administration and different people in the administration with the tech folks. But I think one of the things I was interested in understanding is I feel like if we talk about the MAGA movement generally, what we often talk about is, what Donald Trump says is MAGA, right? Because Donald Trump is the figurehead of MAGA. But I feel like one of the things I took away from your reporting was like, there's what Donald Trump is doing, but then there's this much broader Christian nationalist movement that doesn't always agree with what Trump is doing.

And that seems to be really flexing its muscle. So I wonder if you could draw the distinctions between, say, the Trump administration, national conservatism, and what we actually mean by this term MAGA. The reason that Trump is Maga is that Trump is just so charismatic and people can sort of wishcast any sort of like grievances or desires about how strong they want the country to be like directly onto him. And the reputation he has as a businessman gives him this ability to detach himself from values, like being held responsible to a specific set of values. so he can easily hire someone who has, let's see, like a hardcore nationalist bent like Stephen Miller, but then on the other hand, hire Howard Lutnik or have David Sachs work in his office and he'll just be like, oh, no, you know, I'm a businessman. I strike deals. I like, I bring

everyone closer together and then I let them fight it out. And that has been how he's operated his entire career, even in the private sector. That's how he operated in Trump won. He just wanted people to, like, fight each other and whoever convinced him first, not necessarily convinced him over time and laid out the best argument. Whoever convinced him first would end up being the, you know, the dominant one for now. I feel like this is what we hear constantly, right? You know, Trump is saying what the most recent person has kind of like fed into his ear, right? Pretty much. And the stakes are just in a much different arena now. I think in for, In Trump, one, you could easily call it, like, nascent populism versus the elites and the adults in the room.

So Steve Bannon versus Ivanka and Trump, you could not think of two more diametrically opposed to people. But in this case, it is the hardcore nationalists and the billionaires who want to make a lot of money. And you can't really have nationalist populism in the same area as a billionaire that you want to enrich. and Trump is just sort of, you know, he's a lame duck president at this point. Even if he tries for a third term, he's old, he can't live forever. And that movement is divided on enough ideological lines that it is pretty ripe for the taking and also ripe for, you know, fragmentation unless magically some other person who has all of the attributes I just gave to Donald Trump appears and that person does not seem to exist.

Yeah, we certainly haven't seen it yet. Maybe if Donald Trump spoke to like Peter Thiel about teenager blood or Brian Johnson, he might find some ways to live a bit longer. I mean, who is to say he isn't right now? He can call anybody. He has the best doctors. He has the best advice. Maybe he wants to get into that little trio with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin because there was that report at the recent summit where apparently they were talking about how they're trying to live a lot longer. I'm sure Trump would like some of those tips too. Any authoritarian president kind of does, like, how many authoritarians have their bodies preserved?

Yeah, it's not uncommon, right? Yeah, exactly. I would like to dig more into this national conservative movement, though, right? Because you went to this NatCon conference in recent months where, like you said, I reached out because I read this piece and I found it really fascinating to see the ways that they were talking. And when I spoke to, like, Naomi Klein in the past, she was telling me about the types of things that Steve Bannon. was saying, which I think would align with, you know, what you're hearing at a conference like that, but just to see how, you know, the tech industry is saying these things to try to appeal to this national conservative movement, but they're really not buying into it and have these really

deeply rooted skepticism about the technologies that this industry is trying to sell to us effectively. So maybe just to start, like, what is national conservatism and who is kind of leading this movement? And then we can get into the broader approach that they have. to technology and things like that. The best way I can describe the NACONs is highly nationalistic, very America first, but in a way that links it to the strength of Western civilization, quote, unquote. That is a very long discussion I could go into about what counts as Western civilization. But if anyone has the time to read Michael Anton's Flight 93 and look at all of the values that he lays out as like

worthy of protecting. That's a pretty good summary of what is considered Western civilization. So there's a philosopher named Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss existed in the 1950s or 60s. His entire deal was you can find all like all of the wisdom on how to be a good human and build a good society can be found in the ancient texts from like Greek philosophers, Roman philosophers. His followers really got into that. And then one group was like, wait, everything pre-modernity when when Machiavelli declared actually you don't need morals in order to run a civil society, that is sort of where the Straussians thought, okay, no, we've ended it there. Everyone's amoral now. Everyone prior to him was moral. And then another group was like, but wait, what if the

founding fathers were that were actually trying to put together this moral society? And they were citing the ancients and they were also like embedding it in our government. And so they all moved to California and establish the Claremont Institute. And that's where a lot of American foreign policy is coming from right now and immigration policy. But yeah, that's sort of the very Straussianism for dummies. But that's sort of where Nat Khan springs from. Like a very, very intelligent group of people figuring out how to implement that version of society inside the society we currently arrive right now, which is very multicultural, sectarian in a lot of ways. not other cultures coming into our pure, beautiful American culture and, like, sullying it and

bringing the simplistic way Trump would say it would be like crime and drugs. Was the religious element always there, or has that really been added or amplified by these type of people who identify as it today? It has always been there, but in a highly academic manner. It's not so much like here is what Jesus said in the Bible. boom, that's it. It's how is it that these philosophers and saints and theologians approach biblical values and interpret them over time and exactly what is it we can learn from them? Another fun thing about Strauss is there's a really good reason you can read whatever you want

into it. And that's because Strauss was like, the ancients had such radical ideas, but they knew that they would be persecuted if they voiced them out loud. So you have to read between the lines of what they wrote in order to understand. understand what they actually meant. How convenient. Yeah, Straussian reading. That's a, I went through a phase of that in college and was like, I don't know, this seems a little, this seems stretching a bit.

Would I be right that like in modern America, there's a big overlap between, say, this kind of national conservatism and like the evangelical movement, or would I be understanding that incorrectly? The evangelical movement, and this is where my understanding of the American Christian Rai gets little fuzzy. My understanding is that the evangelical movement is just like a much broader cultural societal thing that does fragment off into very specific interpretations of what evangelicalism is. But Western civilization stuff, the Christian nationalist, Christian nationalism is it's not broken down among the traditional ways that one thinks of Christianity in America.

It's not like, oh, the Catholics are more nationalist or the evangelicals are more likely to be nationalist. It's a very syncretic, more political way of enforcing your values or trying to bring them into power. It's more along the lines of we think the left is bringing spiritual darkness and sin on America. Here are X, Y, Z reasons that we think this. If you're a NACON, you kind of presented in a much more philosophical way. If you are a dude on the internet, Sometimes you just kind of draw rhetorical lines on a chalkboard between pictures, I guess. But the ultimate way to look at Christian nationalism is how is it that my political enemies might be driven by offending God or maybe demons. Sometimes they cite demons.

It depends where you go. But I really would not try to pin this in the traditional, like, evangelical versus Catholic versus Protestant box. I think anyone can be a Christian nationalist as long as they see the enemy in liberal. Gotcha. No, that makes sense. You know, and of course you think of J.D. Vance, who's obviously very prominent in this kind of national conservatism, of course, a converted Catholic and all this sort of stuff. In the piece that you wrote, you were talking a lot about how these people were talking about technology and how they saw it as this thing that was really affecting society in a negative way, and I guess against the type of society that they were trying to create.

So can you talk a bit about their perspective on technology and the types of things that they are focusing on? I think they were okay with technology up until the point it actually threatened their livelihoods and to take their jobs and not just that, to steal their content to create a different type of content. They've always had a suspicion about technology and quote unquote big tech, more specifically big tech, because these guys were hosting the platforms that they were spreading their ideas on. but then they could also kick them off the platforms. And all of a sudden, the influence and the money they were making by getting followers on the internet could be taken away for what they saw were political reasons. And I think I could point to Donald Trump getting kicked off of Twitter as like a very seminal moment in the MAGA movement because that was proof that big tech did not care about the authority of the president of the United States. and big tech did have that power to literally just silence him. And a lot of the time between Trump leaving office and Trump coming back to office was

them trying to build up this digital fortress for themselves that would not allow big tech to cancel them again. So you would see startups trying to do servers that were ideologically owned by conservatives and that would host, say, like Trump's like truth social or something, you would see Rumble commit itself to free speech. Truth Social is not necessarily a good piece of technology or a good social media network. But the more important thing is that it is a complete tech stack

that Trump owns. No one can kick him off. He owns the entire thing top to bottom, I think a majority of the shares. And so no one can vote him out. There's no board that he answers to. I remember Gab and Parlor were trying to do something similar as well, like in that vein?

Yeah. Actually, Parlor, the reason that Parlor ended up failing was because Amazon kicked them off their cloud servers. Right. Yeah, Amazon kicked them off their cloud servers. They were never really able to come back. But the lesson that the Wright took away from that was we should not be hosting big websites on Amazon cloud servers. Hence, they started building their own servers. And now I think one of the big things that they're holding over companies like Amazon is we're going to make you put your servers in Europe.

As you're saying that, like, it's kind of fascinating to me to think about the political right in the United States kind of being ahead of all these digital sovereignty conversations that so many countries are having now. They're like, you know, it's probably pretty bad that we're relying on these servers for in their, in their view, you know, companies that are like not on our side or going to allow us to echo our kind of political persuasions or whatever. And now other countries are like, man, it's probably pretty bad that like we're hosting all our stuff on these servers for, you know, in this case, companies that are based in

U.S. and might not have our interests that hard or whatnot. Oh, yeah. And now I think the State Department is literally throwing, like, we could do more tariffs on you if you don't let us host the content that we want to host in your country, even though that would break your internet laws. I think that literally happened in Brazil. A judge ruled that Rumble and truth social weren't allowed to operate in Brazil. And then Trump, he either threatened or actually did put a 40% extra tariff on Brazil for that. Yeah, there was definitely a tariff in response to the Bolsonaro stuff, but there were, I can't remember if there was a specific tariff in response to like the things against

Rumble, but there were definitely threats. It was bundled together. In the same executive order, he was like, their anti-A, you know, freedom and such, look what they did to Bolsonaro, look what they did to Rumble and true social. It's all sort of the same thing. But if you, like, really go into Maga brain, of course they would see it as the same issue. One guy had a stolen election, an election stolen from him, and his free speech is being taken away by them de-platforming, a friendly platform. So spiritually, in Maga logic, this all meshes together.

Even when we're talking about that beyond this aspect of what you're talking about, like, you know, I know that Steve Bannon has been going on a lot about transhumanism and, you know, how he sees this to be absolutely abhorrent. And of course, you know, you hear people like Sam Altman talking about how he hopes someday we'll be able to like merge human and machine and all these sorts of things. They have been explicitly, as you've kind of been mentioning, going after AI. Sometimes it's AI in particular context. Sometimes it's AI generally. You know, what do you see more broadly? I guess social media obviously is another place where they're very focused. But, you know, what are their kind of obsessions on the tech front?

Weirdly, you would think it'd be monopolies, but they seem to be totally happy with letting that fly. I think if you follow what happened with ABC and Jimmy Kimmel and how the FCC used a random law to threaten a telecom that wanted to do a merger, they are willing to do a lot in the tech space in order to have their ideas preserved and spread. And that is the foremost important thing to them. So AI, they see as a possibility to replicate a human brain and then take away their sense of self, not to mention their labor. And if you are a person who's wanted to bring jobs back to America from overseas, do you really want them to be replaced by a computer or a robot? No, absolutely not. There was this one guy I spoke to who has been on an absolute tear against AI. And he said that his fear was that AI would be able to summarize all of his.

his recent podcast appearances and no one would go to listen to his podcast and he would lose out on that monetization. And I think people would laugh at him because he's Maga. But then you realize that same conversation is happening in the news industry too. Like, I can empathize with that concern. Exactly. Right now, I think a lot of the pressure against the platforms like meta, Google, maybe a couple of other websites, but those two specifically is that they believe that conservative content had been algorithmically suppressed. Either they had a very, like, weird idea of, oh, no, they're like flagging words that say Donald Trump Jr. or COVID and then like pushing that content further down. And then you actually see things like COVID denialism, an election

denialism, literally in the policy being flagged. And then this other story I wrote recently was about how 4chan and a whole bunch of other really terrible websites are suing the, the British Office of Communications for blocking their content. But it's also part of a much larger attempt within the MAGA movement and the Trump administration to either their content not being blocked in the EU or other countries, but also not used to enforce quote-unquote censorship laws against them in the United States. Apparently during the Biden administration, a lot of these websites that were putting up content that Biden found objectionable, they found that those requests were being routed through the EU and they were like suddenly found in violation

of the EU's laws. But the Biden administration really could have stepped in at any point and go actually no, their right to say these things is protected under the First Amendment. The Biden administration did not. And so what they came to believe was that the Biden administration was doing censorship by proxy via the EU. So yeah, now that they're in control, they are like running to the EU and the UK and going like, no, you can't push your laws against us, but also we are allowed to operate in your country. That's being hashed out in a very vocal manner right now between several countries in the U.S.

I hopefully will have more reporting on that soon. I look forward to reading it. But yeah, what you're describing there is really interesting because we can look at this through the dimension of like, obviously the tech companies want to go after these laws because they don't want to be held to account for certain things and they don't want to have to worry about certain types of moderation or changing the way that their platforms work to say to comply with EU regulations or anything like that.

But it's interesting then to look at that other dimension of it and think that, okay, there's this right wing alliance that can be formed there because they also don't want to see whatever they're posting be subject to these EU enforcement measures as well because people in the the EU would be seeing it too, right? I hadn't thought about it through that kind of lens before. I think that's really fascinating. Yeah. I mean, that's why you saw the Trump administration and Apple work pretty decently hand in hand over the encryption laws in the UK. They both had a pretty vested interest in making sure that that happened. And they were successful. So it's just a matter of exactly how long that specific alliance lasts and whether they can push it on the rest of the

world. But then when you come back to the United States is where, is where things get a little hairy. There was one more piece of that that I found really interesting and that I want to move on to something else. But you mentioned that even when these arguments were made that, say, the United States needed to, you know, lead on AI because it needed to beat China or lead on these other technologies because it needed to beat China, that many of these kind of national conservatives were not really interested in that argument. It seemed like they were more interested in what was happening in the U.S. rather than, you know, its kind of broader relations with other countries and whether they were leading or anything like that. I think they believe that AI itself is a

big threat and the way that AI companies have gone full bore in trying to develop as quickly as possible is a much bigger threat. And so when they see AI companies wanting to move as quickly as they do and that the justification is because it's China, they are not buying that at all. And the A.A. industry has, like, done very little to endender that sort of trust with them either. This is roughly the most MAGA thing ever. So were you following the AI moratorium vote in Congress at all? Yep, absolutely. When that was happening, that obviously flew in the face of state's rights, which is the

most MAGA thing ever. Like, we don't want federal government telling us what to do. And just to be clear, for listeners, this was the attempt to put like a 10-year moratorium on AI regulations by states, right? It was a 10-year moratorium on states passing their own AI laws. And if they did, it seemed as if a lot of rural broadband money would be taken away from those states, which I spoke to Steve Vanden about it. And he went, that's the fucking cruelest thing you could do. So the MAGA universe made this massive push behind the scenes in order to get that specific bill killed because AI developed very quick. to the general public.

Two years ago, I don't think anyone really cared about it. And now it's like ruining people's lives, ruining marriages, convincing children to kill themselves. Like, it happens so fast. So naturally, of course, states want to regulate it as quickly as possible. And Congress will not get its act together because that's just a thing they can't do. But the fact that the AI industry was like, all right, no, here's the solution. No one gets to have any laws that.

really alarmed MAGA proponents. And then it also just continued adding to this belief that the tech bros who want to implement AI and build it and develop it as quickly as possible are doing something that is fundamentally harmful to humanity. The most insane thing I heard over that weekend was this guy who said that AI devs want to, there's general intelligence and then the one above that is superintelligence. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, they're trying to develop AI superintelligence and bring about the sand god. That's what they call it. And we need to persecute all the AI developers now and call them apostates to our faith, traitors to our species, villains to our children, something like that. I mean, if you think about exactly how fast AI has been ruining

people's lives and marriages and communities and, like, ability to talk to each other, yeah, I would freak out over that too. And if I were MAGA, I would totally go after big tech as hard as they're doing right now. Totally. And I am also very angry at the AI companies for like allowing so many of those things to happen. So I can see how that would also be like an appealing pitch to people, right? You know, if say Steve Bannon or someone is going out and saying, look at all the harms that are coming from these AI companies, we need to go after them. If I wasn't thinking a whole lot about politics or these broader movements or whatever, I would probably think like, Yeah, I agree with that.

You know, that makes sense, right? I mean, it's both a very popular thing and a thing that does fit very neatly inside MAGA. The problem is right now, the coalition that got Trump elected is going to divide over this highly fundamental thing. Like, the Christian nationalists do not like AI at all. It goes against everything that is that Christ has ever taught. The tech bros really need Trump to lift these regulations so they can, like, develop as quickly as, possible. The tech people, this is just like a fundamental thing I've noticed when I launched my newsletter at The Verge. The political people don't understand technology. They're always like

six years behind the curve. And then the tech people just don't understand how to do politics. So it's been very dramatic. It's been it's been really angry people trying to undermine people who really want to undermine them. But the people who want to undermine them are just like, wait, no, we just don't know how to talk to anybody in town. I talked to a lobbyist once who had these new tech clients and he was like, yeah, they don't know how to wear suits and I had to teach them how to talk to senators. And these were very, very powerful people. And I was like, oh, that's so bad. This is a tailor. We're going to get you set up with some formal clothes so you can walk the halls of power and actually look the right way. You know, you're talking about those

divisions, right? Those splits between the Christian nationalism, the MAGA and the tech folks. But I was also really struck, you know, obviously for the past few weeks, the murder of Charlie Kirk has been everywhere and there's been a lot said about it. But when I read your piece, and I was even thinking this like, I obviously didn't watch the big funeral service that they put on or anything like that. But I was struck in the reporting how Charlie Kirk's wife kind of came out and said that she forgave the shooter and all this kind of stuff, you know, really kind of aligning with Christian traditions, Christian values, right? traditional ones, and then to see Trump come out and, you know, have his big fireworks display and do his usual kind of schick about how, you know, he has all these enemies and all these kinds of things and explicitly saying that, you know, he didn't, I believe he didn't agree with Charlie Kirk's wife and saying that she was forgiving and all that kind of stuff.

Like, what did that tell you, experiencing that, watching that, what did that tell you about the current relationship that, say, this hardcore mega movement, these national conservatives have with Donald Trump himself, this figure that we associate with representing their political project. It's very tenuous, I think. And the fact that the fact that it's still together is because Donald Trump himself is keeping it together. I will say about the fireworks, Turning Point USA had the fireworks for everybody. It wasn't just Trump. Okay, my bad. Sorry. That was like what I saw online. People were like, oh my God, it's so gross. They're using fire. Okay, my bad on that one. No, they're incapable of ever throwing an event that had no pyrotechnics. Every event they

have has pyrotechnics. I like pyrotechnics. Yeah, exactly. That's why they were so successful. But what really stood out to me was not that Trump said that and that it was immediately after Erica. It was that the moment he started talking, people started leaving. This is the biggest crowd I'd ever seen for anything maga-coded in my life. I have been to so many events. I've never seen Trump fill an NFL stadium. I don't know if he's capable of filling an NFL stadium. I think 100,000 people came to Phoenix for this. And Erica was the apogee of that moment. And it was so deeply religious. It was like a traditional Christian revival to a sense. The moment that Trump started speaking, people were

like headed to the exits. And by the time he was done, I think half of the crowd was gone. And one would think, if you weren't in that room, you would think everyone's listening to this guy. He's totally wrapped. Everything was just so intense and insane. But one, people, who voted Maga know what Trump's about to say. They understand this chick. You will actually see events that Trump speaks at where people just like get up and leave early. Two, traffic is insane. But three, like, it was clear they didn't care specifically for his message. They were there to experience a religious moment. And once Trump came in with his, I don't forgive anyone and I hate my opponent, that's the most un-Jesus thing you could possibly say in your life. Yeah, they don't

want to stick around for that. They'd rather be traffic. So the moment I saw that dynamic play out, I was like, oh, okay, the air has just gone out of the room. I was think, I thought theocracy was imminent and that it was going to look like maga. But like they don't care that much about what Donald Trump has to say anymore and they are not glued to him as much as they used to be. They were just like there to experience this deeply religious moment. And if Erica had not gone last, Would they have stayed for J.D. Vance, Don Jr., Stephen Miller, any of these people? I truly do not know that. That at least showed me that the Christian nationalists for sure, but the religious right overall will not necessarily, they were not going to ally immediately

with whoever comes next or whoever does come next has to fight really strongly for them. But in fighting for that audience so strongly, they risk alienating. a totally different audience. One of the funniest things I saw on the internet right after that was I think Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports tweeting about all of the football that was happening that weekend. And his replies were filled with, why aren't you watching Charlie Kirk's Memorial? Why aren't you doing this, Dave Portnoy? Portnoy did say that it was really terrible what happened to Charlie. That shouldn't have happened. But football was also happening and he didn't rent his garments and watch four hours of a religious service for Charlie Kirk.

So would he do that for another guy who said that you had to do that? I don't think so. I think a lot of Americans wouldn't do that. It was a really good football day. This is why I was interested in that connection between religion and that kind of like national conservative movement, the MAGA movement, right? Because especially where you described what happened with all these people coming together as kind of like a pilgrimage, right?

Like all these people wanting to be there for this service, for this big event that seem kind of major in this particular religious right-wing community, right, that they wanted to be a part of. You were talking about how a lot of them left before Trump, maybe it's going to be difficult for somebody else to kind of channel this. Like, do you think J.D. Vance is someone who is closer to that? He obviously has a lot of ties with the tech industry, but also seems to want to position himself as more religious, as more tied into this more right-wing movement. Yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that dimension of it. I think he, is fairly religious. I don't think, I don't think you become, like, that hardcore of a Catholic

and not experience any sort of attachment or deep religious faith. The issue, though, is that how does he maintain ties with his tech backers and his tech community? Is the tech community starting to get more religious? But is there religiosity something that is incompatible with the Maga movement's religiosity? Did you have a chance to read that Peter Thiel the report that about Peter Thiel believing in the Antichrist. Yeah, I've read some of it. I know he still has a couple lectures to go at the time that we're talking. Yeah.

I mean, if you go along with, oh, no, the Antichrist is coming. Yeah, you would think that slots directly into an alliance with J.D. Vance. And then you start realizing that like the very specific way he thinks that the Antichrist is coming to Earth is that technological development and science and artificial intelligence are developing so rapidly that it could bring about Armageddon, the Antichrist will come in and promise safety from Armageddon. The Antichrist could be a one-world government that imposes regulations on AI and technological advancement. Maybe, you know, like, maybe the United States is that one-world government right now. It's basically a hegemon, right? So, like, once you start

getting into the nitty-gritty of exactly how this religiosity is playing out, if you were a a person who doesn't want AI and technology to advance any faster, you're not going to believe the guy who says the antichrist will be people who don't want things to happen faster. Totally. I thought it was wild when I read his interpret. Well, many of his interpretations, but that aspect of it as well. And as you say, like, that doesn't align at all with this more right-wing MAGA movement that we've been discussing. I have one quick thing and then a final question for you, which is I was really fascinated in one of the stories that you wrote that Apparently, they were really on Elon Musk's side and thought that he was one of theirs until the Grot Chatbot started having its own kind of porn avatars and stuff.

And then they were done with him. Am I understanding that right? Yeah, pretty much. At a certain point, if you are the type of person who is worried about drag queens in libraries and RuPaul on TV and Kendrick Lamar doing Black Panther stuff during the Super Bowl, you're not going to like a guy who invents an AI that makes porn. That's just like beyond the pale. So it was a fairly immediate like a hell no moment. And I don't know if there's really a way for him to win people's trust back on that.

I think he's not even just because like it would be like logically incapable or rhetorically incapable. I just don't think Elon Musk is wired to think in that dimension. Also everything he believes about having his. many wives as possible to, you know, build a race of super humans is fundamentally not very Christian. Also, when he's posting about how personally obsessed he is with talking to the porn chatbots, I'm sure that would also contribute there to their dislike of him. My final question is basically, okay, so we've been talking about all of this, right? About this relationship between the Trump administration and the tech industry, how the broader

MAGA movement is seeing technology and these tech billionaires in this relationship, and it not really feeling in their interest for what they are interested in. So where do you see this all going in the next little while as we've already seen some kind of breakages and rifts emerging? Like to me, it seems like there could be this breach and things could kind of fall apart. But at the other hand, maybe we're even heading in a more dangerous direction where these, this kind of religious right movement could command even more political power. Where do you see it going? Or do you have any thoughts on where you see going, particularly after we've seen all this stuff with Charlie Kirk and how that has been used. With regards to the relationship between MAGA and big tech, I think it depends on who

blinks first. And I think you really can never count out an ideologue to last as long as humanly possible. I think you're seeing this with media conglomerates right now. At what point do they think that they ask is to, you know, financially detrimental that they can't do? I don't know what that point is going to be quite yet. I don't know how long Trump holds this weird, unholy alliance together. But the moment that I think the tech industry either blinks or says, screw this, we've had enough, that's when things are going to break. The big question I have, though, is exactly like what will the tech industry do in response to MAGA if they feel the need to do that? Because I don't really know if they have a traditional ideology.

and the way that I, a political reporter, would understand it. What I've joked lately is that my beat has turned into horseshoe theory. Like, Maga is really into antitrust and breaking up big tech, so are progressives. Maga also doesn't really want, like, big tech to be spying on them. So do a lot of progressives. So do, like, most of the American people. And the fact that the tech industry was so quickly able, at least at the highest levels, to go from we're defending journalism and free.

speech to sure, we'll change the entire newspaper for you. Please don't like fuck over our cloud services means that like I just don't know exactly how they don't flip back. They can't really flip back to the first thing. No one's going to like it if they flip back to the first thing. And I don't think that's going to work either. But like what does them trying to undercut the Maga movement look like? Is it something that I've never even thought of before? Are they going to innovate an entirely new political dimension? I don't know. And it's bothering me so much. I think Elon Musk's America party is just going to be the way forward.

Well, I mean, if he can focus enough to actually get that off the ground, and I don't think he can. No, absolutely not. I don't think so either. Tina, it's a wild subject matter, I think, that we're in just like a wild political moment, trying to watch this all play out, figure out where it's going. Every single day seems to bring new surprises. And as you were saying earlier, there's just so much going on with the Trump administration that you never know which kind of direction it's going to take. But I still think it's important for us to

understand these relationships, these fissures, these breaches, because, you know, that informs the way that we're going to have to respond to and try to see what is happening in this moment. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show to inform us about what you have been seeing out in the trenches in these kind of national conservative movements and things like that. Thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. This was really fun. Thanks again. Tina Nguyen is a senior reporter for The Verge and the author of The Maga Diaries. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

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