Civil War MAGA: Why They're Fighting

Well, the most predictable thing ever has begun happening—the self-driven implosion of the Trump administration. Everyone knew it, I knew it, the only question was how many months it would be into Trump’s second term before the cracks started showing.

 The answer, beating everyone’s most pessimistic estimates, is negative one.

 Also utterly predictable is that the collapse revolves around Elon Musk, but what is surprising is that the rift isn’t between Musk and Trump himself. It’s between Musk and his sycophants, and Trump’s crew from back in 2016—Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes, and the Very Fine People who made their voices heard in Charlottesville and January 6.

 It’s basically that scene in Anchorman where the crew throw down with the Evening News team.

What does tend to stir confusion is why these people are fighting at all. If we accept that these groups of people are all Nazi-adjacent—and there’s plenty of that going around—then what could they possibly have beef about? It’s not as easy as  saying that they’re just all vying for power. That’s part of it, but not the whole story. Donald Trump is not King Lear, despite the exhaustive comparisons.

If these people are all Nazis, why are they fighting?

To understand the feud you have to try to come to terms with the idea that there are multiple different ideologies on the far right that are not fully compatible with each other. They can get along for as long as it takes to defeat the liberals in an election, but as soon as they try to run the government together all the gears just lock up while they try to turn different directions.

 And while I say this I need to make clear that, yes, everyone I’m talking about is a type of white nationalist. Yes, they are all bad. You certainly don’t need to root for any of them and trying to rank either side as worse than the other is the wrong question. The ranking is irrelevant if it’s even coherent. But I see way too many—nearly all—of the progressive writers I respect dropping all of these people into the exact same “they are Nazis” bucket, and getting upset if you raise any objection or draw any distinction.

 I understand the reasoning. A Nazi is the worst type of person you can imagine and the measure against which all ideologies are ranked. If’s like Einstein’s constant C in a theory of asshole relativity. To suggest someone isn’t a Nazi, even while insisting they are very, very bad, you’re still saying they are different from a Nazi, which means they are not as bad as a Nazi, which means they are better than a Nazi, which means they are preferable to a Nazi, which means you agree with them to some extent, which means you think they are good actually.

 This, to me, is like saying if you venture out into the wild and encounter a predator it doesn’t really make a difference whether it’s a hungry bear or an angry leopard. Sure, they both want you equally dead, but your survival depends on knowing their specific motives and behaviours.

All that said, there are Nazis in this story. Actual ones. Nick Fuentes and his so-called “groyper” army are probably the most predominant modern American neo-Nazi group active on social media, and they’re a visible force on the anti-Musk side of this conflict—it’s the resurgence, in effect, of the Alt-Right alliance, as opposed to what I’m going to call the Tech-Right for lack of a better term.

Where’s The Beef?

It was Laura Loomer, of all people, who fired the first consequential shot of the MAGA civil war. You do not, in any way, ever “gotta hand it to” Laura Loomer. She is a hysterical, serial liar, engagement farmer, and general public nuisance who once handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s headquarters to protest having been suspended. 

Loomer, the same as all of us frankly, had been watching Donald Trump add to his mouth-to-ass human centipede of cabinet appointees with growing horror, but it was a different type of horror to the one we’ve been feeling. Abundantly relieved, I imagine, for the dearth of black people or Hispanics, but deeply concerned for the number of appointees with names like Patel, Ramaswamy, and Bhattacharya. She finally became incensed enough to speak up when Trump announced Sriram Krishnan as his head of AI policy.

To be clear, Krishnan is an American citizen, albeit an immigrant, whose political views are by all accounts very right wing and whose appointment as “official AI policy guy” will mostly involve further worsening your quality of life through climate-obliterating memecoin slop but will have absolute zero impact on immigration policy.

 Loomer’s characterisation of him as a “career leftist” has literally everything to do with his birthplace and skin colour, which is very much in line with the far right’s dubious categorization of anything non-white as leftist or woke. I’m not sure whether Loomer has a particular animosity toward Indian people or whether she’s just still chugging on the racist steam that powered her during the presidential campaign when she attacked Kamala Harris, who is half-Indian and half-Black, with the threat that the White House was going to “smell like curry” if she were elected.

 Incoming Vice President JD Vance, who is married to an Indian woman, was once asked to comment on Loomer’s racist crap, and chose instead to double down on it by adding “fried chicken” to the things that the White House would smell like if Harris were elected. Because he’s a piece of shit.

Loomer’s complaint set off the bomb below what seems to have been a long-burning fuse of MAGA loyalists excited by Trump’s reelection but nevertheless feeling shut down and overlooked by The Donald in favour of his new best friend, the star-jumping dipshit who runs Twitter and his primary sycophants. Tensions ran hotter when the eternally patronising Vivek Ramaswamy entered the chat.

 Ramaswamy is of course that really cringy guy who pretended to run for president when he knew Trump was going to win the primary, using the campaign merely as an elaborate job interview. He managed to calmly accept that being Indian strictly limits the amount of tolerance the people he’s sucking up to will ever have for him, but he really put his foot in it here by getting cocky and talking down to white America about its culture.

This turned the situation nuclear. Steve Bannon entered the fight, warning Elon Musk to stop poisoning Trump’s cabinet with Indians, and Musk responded angrily by botching a Tropic Thunder quote. 

The particular policy that has come under fire during this firestorm is what’s known as the H-1B working visa system. It allows American companies to hire foreign, non-citizen, workers for cheap labour. For the employer it’s effectively the same idea as driving your pickup down to the barrio and shouting “I need three men” at the first group of lads you see.

 The reason it has a much classier reputation than that, besides being all above board and legal, is also because of stereotypical differences in the types of jobs involved, and the types of foreigners involved. Racially, I mean.

 Though all exploitation of foreign labour draws comparisons to plain old bog ugly indentured servitude, H-1B workers bring much more readily to mind Asian computer jobs than they do Hispanic fruit picking jobs.

 This is the perceptual class schism that drives the animosity between the two Royal Houses of MAGA. The Apartheid regime of South Africa spat its phlegmy Muskwad onto the United States by way of the H1-B system (though credible evidence bolstered by his idiot brother speaking out of turn suggests they were both working in the country illegally for some time) and Musk, in turn, exploits the program heavily for staffing his companies.

 You see, besides the cheap labour, the really fun thing for employers is that H1-B workers get deported if they’re fired or quit. Therefore the amount of bullshit they will typically put up with before willingly throwing in the towel would defy the borders of your imagination. Twitter, after it was purchased and gutted by Musk, was for at least a time staffed almost entirely by foreign H1-B workers who grit their teeth and submitted to coding slavery in an office that no longer supplied toilet paper for the long term dream of a fake email job to avoid being thrown out of the country.

 This is standard practice among the panel of science fiction villains that Trump is letting Elon Musk pick to run his government, and as exploitative as it is, and as unabashedly White Nationalist as it is, it’s still incompatible from the legacy Trumpism of the 2000-teens. The “whites only” Alt-Right doesn’t interlock with the “whites first but the rest is complicated” Tech-Right.

Who Are the Alt-Right?

The term “Alt-Right” was huge during both the lead-up to and most of the duration of first Trump presidency. As a writer for Cracked during that period I must have typed the phrase a thousand times, but I’m not sure how many people ever really understood what it meant beyond a way of distinguishing it from Bush era neocons.

 Being coined originally by the Richards Spencer and Hanania (the worst Richards) it was initially proposed in reaction to the post 9/11 anti-Islamic movement in the west being rooted too much in religion and culture and vibes and not enough in good hard Racism. As Hanania (under his pseudonym Richard Hoste) wrote in his article for Spencer’s website, Why an Alternative Right is Necessary

Besides our disagreements with mainstream conservatives on the issue of foreign policy and the relative importance of fighting terrorism, there is the topic of race and, more broadly, IQ and heredity.  We've known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies--if common sense wasn't enough--that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom.

As I noted in The Real Origin of Woke the rise of Donald Trump was coming at a time when youth culture in the west was searching for a more secular and marketable Right than dorky Republican Conservatism, marred as it had been by the disappointment of Iraq and the inward turn of government surveillance. A whole cohort of post-9/11 youths grew up entirely online, many of them boiled in the culture of anarchic unmoderated messageboards like 4Chan, rebelling against the infuriating scolds who kept trying to make them supress their natural inclination to racism.

 Inspired by unconventional new manifestations of right wing thought like Dawkins and Hitchens’ so-called New Atheism, the kids these days were hungry for a more secular racism, and they found a lot to like in this burgeoning Alt-Right idea.

 That’s where Steve Bannon came into the picture. Short of Trump himself, Bannon is the King of the Alt-Right, or I don’t know, its Pope or something. But he is not himself primarily ideological. He is, like Trump, foremost a megalomaniac. Unlike Trump, he is extremely intelligent. Like almost everyone in this story, he’s also evil. Probably the most evil one.

Many people don’t realise that Steve Bannon was the architect behind Gamergate. He saw the potential of young male gamers as a weapon because they had actually thwarted him before—one of his former scams had been running a large scale gold farming operation, basically employing a factory full of cheap labour to cheat at World of Warcraft for profit—and a large, angry, and motivated coalition of gamers had raised enough hell with Blizzard Entertainment that they got the whole thing shut down.

 Bannon figured he could use the pent-up energy of tens of thousands of bored but strongly motivated racist trolls to help get Trump elected, if only he could find a way to aim the weapon. They wouldn’t need to be micromanaged and that was beneficial for plausible deniability if they wanted to get up to some behaviour in service of the mission that wasn’t strictly clean-hands. Ironically, one of 4Chan’s primary catchphrases is “Not Your Personal Army,” but they became exactly that for Steve Bannon.

 During the actual Trump years the Alt-Right was never an exclusive club. It was less a strictly defined ideology and more like the Island of Misfit Toys. The only requirements were that you weren’t a neocon and that you were some flavour of racist, and the latter was unspoken but didn’t need to be. The whole spectrum of ideologies that encompasses were free to join the Trump train. That absolutely included all the legit Nazis, but also a lot of more exotic flavours of fringe assholery like the Yarvinites and the Skull-Measurers.

 That kind of loose alliance is bound toward inevitable schisms, and between the two terms of Trump a new power sprouted out of the Alt-Right like a tumour that develops its own sentience.

Who Are the Tech-Right?

 Decades of ceaselessly mythologising the “tech start-up” in the age of the internet and hero-worshiping the CEOs of these companies in a way that we never did with the CEOs of oil and mining companies (can you imagine?) has given rise to a group of incredibly wealthy men who think they legitimately own you.

 Wealthy men seeking as much money and power as they can possibly get is a concept as old as wealth and power itself, but wealth and power has always been the end in itself. Wealth was the ideology. American billionaires, for the most part, have been independent agents content to rule their own fiefdoms.

 But now these bizarre New Right ideologies that are sprouting out of the GOP elephant corpse that Bush and Cheney shot, these 4Chan-shaped too-online abominations, have infected this particular subset of billionaires and united them. As people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos came to prominence in the 21^st century they’ve started listening to these bonehead self-styled “right wing philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania and Marc Andreessen and decided they have a mission beyond capital acquisition. They believe that they are being called to a higher duty to take their divine right as kings. 

Instead of merely doing all they can to enrich themselves, and influence politics to enrich themselves, the techbro right of the Google era are united, working together to enrich each other, and using their riches to replace politics. It will be replaced with themselves as a literal oligarchy.

Now, these are all tech startup CEOs and investors and venture capitalists and none of them know anything about politics. That’s why so many of them started out as libertarians (the political philosophy of people who know nothing about politics). Their ultimate goals are the laziest science fiction ketamine dreams imaginable and they figure they will ultimately be the Engineer Kings who will breed and brainwash the progressivism out of us and convert all of society into one giant anonymous reactionary 4Chan edgelord party full of memes and AI slop.

 Until that happens, though, if they succeed in taking control of government they’re going to need to run it and, knowing nothing about politics, they figure they’ll simply run it as a tech startup.

 Here’s a super important thing that businesspeople often cannot get their heads around when it comes to politics: A country is not and cannot be a company, and cannot be run like a company. As unintuitive as it might seem, that’s especially if you’re talking about a capitalist country.

 There are way too many reasons to go into here, but the one most pertaining to our topic is this: One of the key responsibilities of a nation’s government is employment. You want to get and keep as many people employed as possible, to keep the economy strong, to keep the standard of living high, and to keep costs down.

 But one of the strongest forces in a company’s governance is to employ nobody. That’s what drives the push for automation. Ideally you don’t want to be paying anyone at all, and if you do, then you want their wages to be as low as you can possibly get away with.

This is the very heart of the H1-B conflict.

 The tech oligarchs are all racialists. More specifically they adhere to the same type of hierarchical racial caste system that Richard Hanania outlined in his Alt-Right manifesto: Whites and Asians on top, with all the others including Black people at the bottom.

 In parallel, they are also White Nationalists—meaning that they think some countries such as America are simply White countries and should be run in a way that serves that basic understanding. All of these things are beliefs they share with the Bannon Alt-Right.

 The difference is that the Tech-Right doesn’t want to employ white people for jobs they consider to be below white people. If America is run like a tech startup writ large, then they’ll keep costs down the same way that Elon does at his companies—import cheap labour from overseas and limit their rights.

 To the Bannon Alt-Right, to the Loomers and the Groypers and the Ethnonationalists, this sounds like: Swamp the country with nonwhite people to steal white jobs and dilute and replace white culture.

 Again, this is a shitty racist argument and everyone involved is a bastard. It’s like an argument between Jefferson Davis and Hitler—the former wants to expand the institution of slavery and the latter wants to abolish it because he doesn’t ever want to see a black person. You don’t need to take a side. But the Bannon Alt-Right aren’t incorrect about this being what Musk would do if he had his way with H1-B visas—he already has a very entrenched history of replacing as many American workers with foreign ones as he can get away with, and he’s not expanding his business to do this. He lays Americans off.

An Overcrowded Trojan Horse

One of the most important things to understand about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t believe in anything except his own naked power. He doesn’t care if America is great or not just as long as he’s in charge of it, and he will eagerly take the help of anyone who offers it just as long as they don’t usurp him. He’s already flipped his apparent stance on foreign visas from what it was the last time he was president in order to better align with the people he’s letting run the show this time.

 He is an ideologically empty man. A perfect vessel for an ideologue—a Great and Mighty Oz with a vacant room behind the curtain. A big old orange Trojan Horse.

 In 2016 this was Steve Bannon’s horse to fill. And I said that he’s a frighteningly intelligent man but I think even he didn’t see Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley Insurrection coming. I want to rip my own hands off at the wrist with my teeth for typing this, but Laura Loomer is right about at least one thing: A lot of these guys were pretending to be apolitical if not outright Democrats until five fucking minutes ago. The clock struck eleven in Trump’s campaign and suddenly they all dropped so much money on it that the incoming 47^th presidential cabinet now reads like the board of PayPal circa 2002.

 I thought that was a witty line but I also mean it literally—former PayPal fascist executive dipshit David Sacks, who will himself be joining Trump’s government in some made up Bitcoin department, is about as subtle about this as anything he ever says:

I don’t think Team Bannon is going to win this one—it was checkmate when Trump made the out-of-the-blue decision to select JD Vance as his running mate, a venture capitalist with deep ties to Peter Thiel, and who many suspect was picked as a favour to the Tech-Right investors as a show of good faith.

 It will almost certainly, however, not be the last or the worst we hear of this MAGA civil war. Welcome to January, folks, things are about to get much stupider.