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.”
If you threw a rock down the Westin Hotel hallway, you had a high chance of hitting someone who contributed to Project 2025
Sankar mounted a calm defense that leveraged the correct NatCon vocabulary (“I think that the broadly secular culture of Silicon Valley has filled the God-shaped hole in their heart with this belief towards AGI.”) But over the next several days, it appeared that Sankar was one of the very, very few attendees with a net positive view of the tech industry and AI. NatCon was the home of the intellectual right dominating Donald Trump’s government — if you threw a rock down the Westin Hotel hallway, you had a high chance of hitting someone who contributed to Project 2025 — and there seemed to be two topics on everyone’s minds that week: the imminent end of the right’s support of Israel, and the existential threat that technology posed to Western civilization.
The tech right and the MAGA populists had united briefly to get an anti-woke Trump into the White House, and as their coalition fractured, Vice President JD Vance, a Peter Thiel protege who’s attended NatCon multiple times, tried to serve as a bridge between them. But this year’s NatCon has made it clear that the factions are no longer on the same page.
Nearly half of the conference’s panels were explicitly focused on tech. Tech atrophying the brains of their children in school and destroying critical thought in universities. Tech weakening the American economy, tech weakening the national defense and international dominance, tech assaulting the Judeo-Christian faith and destroying humanity.
Others claimed that further AI development would lead to ‘civilizational suicide’
Their hostility varied wildly: some acknowledged that AI was not going away and could have some societal benefit if harnessed correctly, while others claimed that further AI development would lead to “civilizational suicide.” But nearly all the speakers expressed a deeply, emotionally entrenched suspicion against the tech industry.
Even the threat of Chinese AI dominance was not enough to sway them, nor was the fact that Trump himself had signed off on funding projects like Stargate. “The state’s own rationale for AI acceleration is quite explicit about it: ‘We must beat China and grow the economy,’” said Michael Toscano, the director of the Family First Technology Initiative, during his Thursday talk. “These, of course, have significant implications for the future of Americans, but the message is one of a barren life: ‘To beat China, you must be willing to part ways with everything — including a happier future for your children and grandchildren.’”
Trump allies were saying this at NatCon, too, from Steve Bannon to Josh Hawley to Mike Benz. And even top administration officials laid into Big Tech: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’d been deplatformed for questioning the origins of covid and was subsequently appointed by Trump to lead the National Institutes of Health, claimed that tech companies doing “censorship” had set back scientific progress.
This animosity had been simmering for years on the right, said Dean Ball, a former senior policy adviser on AI and emerging technology in the Trump White House, who also spoke at NatCon 5. “It dates back to this feeling that I think was accurate for a long time,” he told The Verge, “that the tech industry was colluding against conservatives to silence conservative ideas.” He ran through a partial list of Big Tech’s offenses: algorithmic suppression, Twitter bans, demonetization, Section 230, content labeled as “misinformation,” and so forth.
But although the tech industry is no longer perceived as actively censoring conservatives post-election, it’s as though it’s incapable of not running afoul of the cultural, intellectual, and religious values of social conservatives. Social media addiction and chatbots marketed toward kids, for instance, feed directly into right-wing panic over family values. (This was the subject of the panel “Tech and the Future of the Family.”) Biohacking and genetic modification are a direct insult to the Christian laws of nature. And transhumanism — the idea that technology would directly enhance humanity — is an affront to the creations of God, a point made during the conference’s very first speech.
“Conservatism is about human dignity and human flourishing,” said Rachel Bovard, the vice president of programs at the influential Conservative Partnership Institute, during the first speech of the conference. “By definition, there is no such thing as a transhuman conservative.”
Ball noted that the right’s AI antipathy was so deep that it had permanently exiled Elon Musk
Ball noted that the right’s AI antipathy was so deep that it had permanently exiled Elon Musk, whom they once considered a true ideological ally. “If a socially conservative person was gonna use a language model, they would use Grok, because they trusted Grok,” he said. But the moment that Musk released Grok xAI’s generative AI porn feature, unleashing “hentai sex bots,” he lost the right’s goodwill. (His extremely un-Christian stance on solving the fertility crisis didn’t help matters, either.)
The animus toward AI at NatCon was intense enough to prompt some formerly heretical ideas, such as joining forces with labor unions. “[They] have a long history of confronting technological change and should be treated as sources of experience and knowledge, rather than a historical dead weight force for anti-modernization,” argued Toscano at one point, adding that if Trump managed to bring the right wing and the unions together, “he would go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents, if not the man who saved the future.”
When we spoke the day after the conference, Ball — one of the very few at NatCon who expressed optimism about the future of technology in America — voiced his concern that the movement’s suspicion of Big Tech could not be overcome by vigorous policy debates. “I am on the right,” he said, “but I say this to my friends on the right all the time: you can have a very reasonable discussion about what, technically, should we be doing to make chatbots safer for kids. I don’t think you could have a very fruitful discussion if that’s not really your objective, and actually your objective is to prosecute, basically, a sort of religious war against technology and technologists.”
At the very beginning of the conference, Sankar — the AI industry’s most prominent representative at NatCon, who could have damaged Palantir’s relationship with the Trump administration if he said the wrong thing in that room — seemed to note the roiling anger, too. “The AI genie is out of the bottle — that doesn’t imply a transhumanist future,” he said in response to Miller. His own vision of AI was a powerful tool for entrepreneurial Americans “getting busy rolling up their sleeves.” AI, he said, “is a uniquely American phenomenon,” one that he claimed could “change the world and promote our values.”
Unfortunately, by the end of NatCon, no one seemed to agree with Sankar. “Yes, artificial intelligence could have tremendous upsides,” Steve Bannon said during closing remarks. “But you’re looking into a bottomless pit. It’s a downside that nobody understands and nobody can articulate. And the last thing I want is a bunch of folks on the spectrum in Silicon Valley — who I’m not sure are even that dedicated to the United States of America, because they got these weird people talking about network systems and ‘we’re a network and not really a country’ — I don’t want them making decisions for the American people.”
The crowd burst into applause.
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