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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Yeah, I honestly don't understand why companies are so pumped to hire this sort of person. In my experience, they contribute little, and it's all in a very metric-chasing but not-actually-value-adding sort of way. Yet people like Elon Musk are, in his own words, willing to go to war to let this sort of person in.

And Elon Musk is nowhere near the most smoothbrained capitalist out there running our world.

Here's one way to think about it: public sentiment on, say, Indian immigrants to the US is definitely affected positively by the heavy selection we put on their immigration. Now imagine the filters required to be a direct report to Elon. If Elon thinks that H1b/O1 tech workers are incredible at their jobs, he's probably inferring accurately from those he interacts with.

Part of the reason I'm so distrusting of this is that these visas are de facto Indian mass immigration pipelines. Yet if I look at the open source software I depend and use every day, it's... not built by Indians. It's built mostly by western Europeans, followed by ex-Soviet demographics and white Americans, with India being barely represented at all.

So, if we're so thirsty for talent, why aren't we mass importing the Swedes and Swiss?

I just find the whole thing extremely dishonest. The problem with the Kalergi conspiracy theory is even if it's not "true" in some sense, it's hard to find a more accurate model of the world.

And to the extent that capitalists are indeed responsible for the Great Replacement under some well-intentioned chart-maxxing myopia, well... I don't know, I'm kinda inclined to not object too hard when the commies have their way with them.

I think many tech higher-ups either don't believe or don't want to believe that, because they don't see it themselves (or they're not articulate/nuanced enough to say they want to close the fraud and keep the elite). The reason half these guys went rightwards is that they started believing their lying eyes, and their eyes are giving them very strong data about the immigrant engineers high up in their businesses/portcos. I agree that this state of affairs is utterly insane, but if you want to convince them you will have to explain how unrepresentative their personal experience is - for Elon, I'd just call it fraud, he likes that.

The emergent tech right seems to have switched sides for reasons unrelated to this: it was at best discontent with the social justice nonsense, though more likely as the leftists contend, because the left is actually somewhat capable of wielding regulatory power, while the right is basically clueless and incapable of wielding this power at all.

The reason I say this is JD Vance, the tech anointed heir, has an Indian wife and children that look far more like her than him. And the RNC featured a tattooed pornstar and an Indian praying to a Hindu god. This does not sound like "rightward drift": it sounds like a hostile takeover of the Republican party. The mass import of Indians and degeneracy promotion will continue just as it did when the Democrats were in power. All the right-wing voters got some token oppression of LatAm immigrants for a short period, and even that was executed with all the enthusiasm of a geriatric bingo club.

But hey, we got some WWE on the White House lawn. And I love WWE Smackdown!

Musk wants to cream skim the smartest people of the world so they come to America.

It just so happens that the same programs that enable that also enable migration of ZMP, or maybe even NMP, WITCH employees. Very few people seem to be interested in drawing a distinction between these groups for immigration purposes.

Because they don't distinguish between value-add and metric chasing. This makes them reliable metric pumping engines, especially if they come from a culture with normalized double-speak, e.g. "Achieve great success while adhering to the highest levels of ethics and accountability" -> "Cut every corner possible to juice the KPI as long as you don't get caught".

You're probably right.

Still, I find Elon baffling because he does sound moderately sentient when he talks. Of course, then you see his Elden Ring build and.... yeesh, one can understand why he started paying people to play on his accounts.

Musk is a goofy autist, but he's probably well-positioned to skim the cream of the crop. This is something I feel like I should just never shut up about. There's a huge disconnect between people whose experience with immigrants is massively filtered exceptions, compared to the normies. It really makes you appreciate how much a shared cultures does to smooth the friction when dealing with someone 20+ IQ points below you, much less the horror of 50+.

If he spent a week trying to help Haitians, Somalians and Guatemalans set up Starlink, he'd probably turn into Enoch Powell.