And The Winner of The MAGA Scat Fight Is...
The war over visas is a preview of coming attractions
It seems pretentious and overblown to call it a MAGA Civil War, but the Oligarch vs. Nativist furor that broke out last week over immigration, race, and visas was real. And it was spectacular.
The angry skirmish exposed a fundamental divide over a core issue for MAGA, and it’s likely a preview of coming attractions, because as Nick Catoggio notes, “A populist coalition led by billionaires is absurd, and so absurdity is unavoidable in its internal squabbles.”
But the scat fight was also a reminder that irony is good and truly dead. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting a candidate who lied about immigrants eating cats and dogs, the neo-MAGA tech bros seem genuinely shocked to discover that the fear and loathing extends to their immigrants.
Who knew?
Happy Sunday.
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Let’s quickly review the tape. Over the last few days, Elon Musk:
Pledged to go to war to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers and declared that his MAGA critics — whom he called “contemptible fools” — be “removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.”
Told his MAGA critics to, “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”1
Doubled down on his support for a German neo-Nazi party, even as he was calling his right-wing MAGA critics in the United States, “hateful, unrepentant racists.”
Endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy’s criticism of American culture for encouraging mediocrity.
Went even further by agreeing with a post that said that Americans were too “retarded” to meet America’s need for a high-tech work force. Responded Musk: “That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening.”
Retaliated against MAGA critics — including Donald Trump’s previous BFF, Laura Loomer — by stripping them of their verification badges on X.2
**
The blowback from MAGA loyalists was intense. Steve Bannon mocked Musk as a “toddler” who needed a “wellness check” from ‘Child Protective Services.”
Former Congressman and alleged sex-offender Matt Gaetz also weighed in, telling Musk & Co. to stay in their lane:
We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender - and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline. We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.
And Laura Loomer — who, until recently played the role of Trump’s BFF — called Musk a “stage 5 clinger” who was a “total fucking drag on the Trump transition.”
**
And yet.
Amid the escalating and increasingly bitter fight, Donald Trump seemed to endorse Musk’s position on the visas, thus cementing Musk as the most influential and dominant voice of Trump 2.0.
For now.
How did we get here?
MAGA’s internecine shitstorm started small.
Last Sunday, Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as a senior adviser on AI policy. Almost immediately, an anti-Indian backlash erupted on social media. Krishnan has called for lifting country caps on American green cards. But much of the reaction focused on his ethnicity.
“Did any of yall vote for this Indian to run America?” one nativist poster asked.
Musk and his tech-bro ally, David Sacks seemed genuinely gobsmacked by the level of racist blowback from their new allies. “Sriram has been a U.S. citizen for a decade,” Sacks posted. “He’s not ‘running America.’ He’s advising on A.I. policy. He will have no influence over U.S. immigration policy. These attacks have become crude, and not in the holiday spirit.”
But it was just the beginning. Via Axios:
Vivek Ramaswamy escalated the conflict into a full-blown war Thursday morning with a post on X blaming an American culture that "venerated mediocrity over excellence" for the growth in foreign tech workers.3
In many ways, Ramaswamy’s ham-handed critique tried to emulate conservative critiques of American culture from the Before Times (including criticisms by pre-Trumpified JD Vance)4. But he clearly failed to read the MAGA room.
There is, after all, an inherent tension between “America First!” and “American culture sucks!”
Even MAGA-exile Nikki Haley took the opportunity to dump on Ramaswamy. “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” she fired back. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
But “investing and prioritizing in Americans” is not what folks like Musk have in mind. On Christmas Day, Musk posted that: [This post has been deleted.]
“Investing in Americans is actually hard. really hard. it costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It's a short-term net loss.”
Then he said the quiet part out loud.
“It's much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite as good a job but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”
**
For the moment, Trump is apparently backing Musk and the tech bros over his populist base.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said by phone, referring to the H-1B program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.’
On the surface, this sounds like a complete reversal of the position he took in 2016, when he had declared that he “will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions”
In fact, the H-1B program continued under his first administration, although it closely scrutinized H-1B applications as part of an approach it called “extreme vetting,” making the process more onerous for workers and employers. In the final year of his first term, Trump issued an order in 2020 that temporarily blocked new visas, including H-1Bs.
But even as he endorsed Musk’s position, Trump fudged the details. The H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled tech workers, but Trump “employs workers under the H-2A program, which covers temporary visas for agricultural workers, and the H-2B program, for seasonal workers in sectors such as tourism, hospitality and landscaping.”
But these are mere details.
For the moment, the important thing is that the president-elect is siding with the guy who told Trump’s most loyal supporters to fuck themselves in the face.
Check back for updates, folks.
Winter dogs
Judd Legum quips: ‘Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect a president with a virulently anti-immigrant agenda and now is telling Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters to “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” Unclear who Musk thought was voting for the guy who blamed immigrants for all of America’s economic problems.”
You’ll recall Loomer from this piece: “Trump's bigoted, freaky new BFF.” After Musk retaliated, Loomer tweeted:
@elonmusk has removed my blue check mark on X because I dared to question his support for H1B visas, the replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants, and I questioned his relationship with China.
Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for supporting original Trump immigration policies.
I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.
Elon has decided to retaliate by removing my blue check and demonetizing me.
I guess he doesn’t really believe in Free speech after all.
Here’s the full text of Vivek’s X Post:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
And by me. In 1994, I wrote, “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add.” In 2007, I wrote, “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School.” Some of the rules:
#1 Life is not fair. Get used to it.
#7 If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you FEEL about it.
#15 Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it "opportunity."
#42 Change the oil.
I hasten to point out that, unlike Ramaswamy, I did not blame “Saved by the Bell,” or cartoons for the nation’s educational woes.
As an American former MIT engineer turned physician I resent a South African business mogul and his salesman sidekick calling American engineers Lazy, undisciplined and favoring a comment calling me and my colleagues retarded. What a jerk.
All these Billionaire Boys - Musk, Thiel, the tech bros - are mostly venture capitalists—unlike REAL tech bros Jobs & Gates, they don’t create but just hire the creators. They may know a good deal … but not how real people work.