Civil War in MAGA World. Plus…

It’s Monday, December 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. I’m Joe Nocera, covering for Olly Wiseman who is on paternity leave after his wife gave birth to their second girl just before Christmas (congrats Olly! Please come back soon!) Coming up: Jimmy Carter dies at 100, why the movie “Nosferatu” is so good at depicting bad, and much more.

But first: the debate that has roiled social media over the last few days.

If you woke up from your Christmas reverie and encountered your news feed full of stories about something called H-1B, you could be forgiven for thinking we were experiencing the latest strain of bird flu. In fact, it was the fulcrum of the first great MAGA schism—and Trump isn’t even in office yet.

H-1B is not a new pandemic, but a visa program intended to allow American companies to hire temporary skilled workers from abroad—emphasis on skilled. The H-1B program, which goes to some 65,000 people a year, most from countries like India and China, is beloved by tech companies because they can bring in highly educated, technically proficient engineers, and pay them less than they would pay an American doing the same job.

Its supporters—the techno-libertarian wing of the MAGA movement, led by Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other DOGE proponents—say that it provides American companies with the kind of talented employees they simply can’t get here. As Musk put it on X, “The reason I’m in America with so many critical people who built Space X, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.”

Its detractors point to a series of ways the program has been abused over the years. The good-faith ones include Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former vice-presidential candidate, a Silicon Valley lawyer, and, notably in this case, Sergey Brin’s ex-wife. “The system we’ve constructed with H-1B visas, whether we like it or not, incentivizes people to come here and serve as essentially indentured servants for Big Tech, taking on the tough, grueling jobs that few here in America are excited to perform at the current suppressed salaries.” she wrote on X. The program, she concluded, needed to be overhauled.

Another criticism, coming from Eric Weinstein, the mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital, described the H-1B visa program as an anti-labor device. Its original aim, he wrote on X, “was to weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be ‘forced’ to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage tampering program.”

Disagreements about immigration policy are totally within the bounds of political discourse. What isn’t—or at least, what didn’t used to be—is the way this debate devolved into plain old unapologetic racism. It was focused on a Trump appointee, an Indian American immigrant named Sriram Krishnan. Shortly after Krishnan was named to an advisory role on AI policy, he called for caps on green cards to be lifted—and all hell broke loose.

Led by Laura Loomer, who was once considered a Trump confidante, Krishnan’s critics weren’t just angry about his proposal to lift the caps. They were angry about his Indian heritage. “Our country was built by white Europeans,” she wrote on X, “not third world invaders from India.” She was hardly the only one: “This country was built by white europeans and we will not destroy it importing third world Indians and Arabs to do our work, steal our jobs, and suppress our wages,” wrote another critic. And on and on. (Musk called them “contemptible fools” and “hateful, unrepentant racists.”)

In the end, the debate was less about immigration policy or about whether or not H-1B can be reformed, which of course it can. It was about more fundamental disagreements brewing inside the right: between the Musketeers and the Steve Bannon wing; between the libertarians and the protectionists; between Silicon Valley elites and the working class; and between those who still sincerely believe in America’s identity as a nation of immigrants—and those playing with identity politics of the white racial kind.

In our first story today, my colleague Rupa Subramanya writes about the backlash against Krishnan. Born in India, Rupa became a Canadian citizen this year, and she has also faced her own blowback from the illiberal right in her country.

During an online attack against her last year, she writes, “I, too, was referred to as a ‘guest,’ and told to ‘go back home,’ even though I’ve been in Canada for more than a quarter of a century. That this hatred was brewing among those who believe progressive identity politics are ‘racist’ is an unforgettable reminder that neither political side is immune to bigotry.” Read her piece: A MAGA Attack on a Trump Nominee—and the Problem with the Woke Right.

My colleague River Page, meanwhile, was perturbed by another part of this brouhaha. In his defense of H-1B visas, Vivek Ramaswamy argued that American kids are not being raised to compete for top jobs. He wrote on X that American parents need to embrace the culture of the Tiger Mom: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long . . . A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” He argued in favor of “more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV.” In other words, more hypercompetitive parenting that will stress kids out and not produce great art or risk-taking that leads to founding new businesses, River writes. Read his piece: America Should Not Become a Nation of Tiger Moms.

And in case you missed it yesterday, read Suzy Weiss’s hilarious defense of the Great American Sleepover, clapping back at Ramaswamy’s suggestion that American kids would also benefit from “fewer sleepovers.”

As the second Trump administration approaches, there will be many serious debates to be had about immigration, both legal and illegal, and you can expect us to cover the big ones. One assertion Trump often makes is that the recent wave of illegal immigrants has led to our current housing crisis. But in his piece for us today, Bob Ivry found that a host of other, more important factors are actually to blame. Read his piece: “No, Illegal Immigrants Are Not Causing the Housing Crisis.”

The Legacy of Jimmy Carter

The conventional wisdom about Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at the age of 100, is that he had a lousy presidency and a model post-presidency. There is some truth to that. During his four years in the White House, which began in 1977, inflation roared like it hadn’t in decades. In 1979, Iran took 53 American diplomats and citizens hostage—and when Carter tried a daring rescue mission, one of the helicopters crashed, killing eight American servicemen. During the final 1980 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan closed his arguments by asking, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan won the election by a landslide.

Yet even Carter’s harshest critics had to admire how he spent his years out of office: He worked with the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity to build badly-needed housing. He started a center that worked to eradicate disease and promote democracy—for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2002. And every Sunday he taught Bible study in Plains, Georgia, where he lived for much of his life.

What the conventional wisdom forgets is that while the country’s economic woes did Carter in, he also brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, and was the first president to emphasize “human rights.” And with his presidency coming just a few years after the Watergate scandal, his integrity was something the country badly needed to see. James Fallows, who had been his chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency, wrote in this fine 2023 reminiscence that, in many ways, Carter was simply unlucky. Having lived through his presidency, that strikes me as right. So does Fallows’s summation of the man: “disciplined, funny, enormously intelligent, and deeply spiritual.”

• For years, President Joe Biden has denied meeting with the foreign business associates of his son Hunter, who has been accused of peddling his father’s influence to VIPs abroad. But perhaps these meetings were silent ones? Because newly released photos show Biden, as vice president, shaking hands with two of Hunter’s Chinese business partners, adding another lie to a steady stream of misrepresentation from the president about the First Son: 1) Biden said he would never pardon Hunter, then he did. 2) He said Hunter’s laptop scandal was a Russian plant, which it wasn’t. 3) He repeatedly rejected claims of Hunter’s influence peddling before a House inquiry found he knew about dozens of his son’s interactions with overseas partners. Next Biden will tell us his son has never done drugs, taken a nude, or slept with his brother’s widow.

• 2024 ends with a series of tragedies in the skies. Yesterday saw the deadliest air crash in six years and the largest ever in South Korean history, when a Jeju Air flight crash landed at Muan International Airport near the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, killing 179. Two flight attendants survived. Investigators are still trying to find the reasons for the accident, which they suspect was caused by a bird strike that disabled the plane’s landing gear. Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan, a plane crashed Saturday, killing 38 people, after likely being hit by a Russian missile. Though Putin expressed condolences “to the families of those killed,” neither he nor Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, a close ally of the Kremlin, have explicitly said that an air strike downed the plane. If a missile hit is confirmed as the cause, it would be the third major shootdown of a commercial aircraft as a result of armed conflict since 2014, the cause of more than 500 deaths in the past decade.

• The mother of an OpenAI whistleblower demanded an FBI investigation into her son’s death, calling it a “cold-blooded murder declared by authorities as suicide.” The whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, claimed OpenAI broke U.S. copyright law in its collection of data used to power its AI chatbot, ChatGPT—a claim now central to multiple lawsuits against the company. Balaji died three months after making the accusation; his parents remain adamant that he did not commit suicide, with his mother saying “there was nobody else on the scene, that doesn’t mean they can just come to conclusion. And we have seen the blood shots in the bathroom, signs of [sic] fight in the bathroom.” They have hired a private investigator.

• Dust off those red berets! Founded by Curtis Sliwa in the 1970s amid rampant crime and disorder, the NYC-based Guardian Angels, a famous and controversial neighborhood patrol group, announced that they will resume patrols on subways after a woman was burned alive on a subway car in Brooklyn. “The need is here now once again,” said Sliwa, 70. “We’re going to step up. We’re going to make sure we have a visual presence just like we had in the ’70s, 80’s and ’90s.” Calling the subways “out of control,” Sliwa said his team of volunteers will patrol the subway after hundreds of New Yorkers called for their return.

• Two Portland men died this past week after setting out to search for Sasquatch in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The men, aged 59 and 37, disappeared in woods known to be the world’s “most active” region for Bigfoot sightings. They were found after a nearly three-day-long search requiring more than 60 volunteers, canines, and drones (the search party could not, however, locate Sasquatch). The sheriff’s office reported that “both deaths appear to be due to exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness.”

AND FINALLY…

For those of you fed up with the schmaltz of the Christmas season, our culture critic Kat Rosenfield recommends the movie Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s much-anticipated vampire flick set before the advent of electricity. Kat calls the movie “refreshing.” Why? Because there’s no backstory explaining why the villain turned out to be so wicked. He’s just, you know, a really bad guy. That’s Kat’s kind of villain. Read her review, “Make Villains Evil Again.”