MAGA Is Splitting Apart
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Sources:
MAGA is fighting a ‘civil war’ over H-1B visas. Here’s what they are. Washington Post (Dec. 2024)
Musk’s efficiency department is seeking volunteers for ‘tedious’ work with no compensation. Politico (Nov. 2024)
Musk’s Daily Routine (lol this is made by AI PLEASE don’t take it as fact),
Ramaswamy full “Normalcy” tweet
Ramaswamy was (is) a nerd. PROOF
Elon Musk Wages New Capitol Hill War With Blitz of Posts. The Daily Beast (Jan. 2025)
Sanders Calls Out Musk for Billionaire Exploitation of Foreign H-1B Workers. Truthout. (Jan 2025)
Who’s Winning the MAGA-Musk Civil War? Intelligencer. (Dec. 2024)
Steve Bannon says there’s no MAGA ‘civil war’ because Elon Musk is ‘not tough enough’ Independent (Dec. 2024)
Elon Musk accused of censoring conservatives on X who disagree with him about immigration. NBC (Dec 2024)
Transcript:
Last week, the splinters in ideological and class divisions within the MAGA movement began to show, as anti-immigration hardliners went head to head with President Elon Musk on his own platform, who defended H1B visas that allow highly skilled immigrants to live and work in the US, saying, in a quote surely pulled from the dumbest trove of Bond villain lines, “Take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Dude get a grip. But also ok, can’t wait to watch.
And the conflict between Musk and anti-immigrant MAGA supporters has the media in a TIZZY. Every headline has something about the MAGA CIVIL WAR!!! In it. And while I think we could cool it on the hyperbolic titles, leave that shit to us YouTubers and podcasters, I do think part of the GLEE with which we are watching this unfold comes from the fact that it’s a fucking breath of fresh air to watch ideological infighting happen on the right for once. The left is fucking inSUFFERABLE about shit like that, and I think it’s rare to see MAGA supporters rub two brain cells together long enough to even identify or address inconsistencies or nuances in their ideologies or policies. So it feels like we’re in a moment where maaaayybeee something might click? Perchance the many Musk acolytes who worship the ground he walks on might stop for a split second and think huh!! This billionaire maybe doesn’t have my best interests at heart????? Is this…. Class consciousness????
So today, in our first episode BACK in the new year, hi how’s everyone doing, we’re going to discuss the inflighting within the MAGA block and the larger discussion it should illicit about good immigrants vs bad immigrants as well as the divergent goals of the MAGA 1% versus the MAGA working man and woman, because it’s a rare, shining opportunity to unpack the ways in which class divisions are often stronger, and more unifying, than the bigotry, hatred, and fear that tends to be the Republican party’s lifeblood. Let’s get into it.
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The washington post did a helpful lil write up about H1B visas and this controversy so let’s discuss based on that info, sources are linked in the description. H1B visas are granted to immigrants through their US employer or a US university typically and allow them to stay and work in the US for up to six years. Immigrants must have at least a bachelor’s degree or similar levels of experience in a specialty occupation, though some visas are also granted to people graduating with a master’s degree or doctorate from a US college or university. 85,000 H1B visas are officially granted each year, representing about 13% of the total 675,000 long-term visas allowed to be granted each year in the US.
Naturally, you might guess that tech companies hire a LOT of H1B immigrants with specialty training in whatever the tech company needs, like someone to build another poorly functioning AI-offshoot with a bad name that’s mainly a hassle to work around, for example. It’s hard to find people with those high level skills, so being able to look outside the US and attract talent with the promise of living and working in beautiful sprawling US of A through an H1B visa, is very valuable for tech companies.
H1B visas were created by Republican President George HW Bush in 1990 though, according to the Washington Post, they have roots back to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended exclusion of immigrants based on race and instead created new categories and requirements based on employment and work skills, because when overt racism is no longer allowed, here in America we LOVE to discriminate based on class as a proxy.
However, that all changed when Trump took the white house the first time, because for Trump racism is BACK ON THE TABLE BABY!!! Enter the Muslim ban but also, in the early days of the pandemic, Trump signed an executive order denying entry to H1B visa holders, in theory to try to curb the 11 percent unemployment rate, the idea being that all these immigrants were taking our jobs!!! The tech industry was mad back then, too, indicating the beginning of the fissures to come. Because hating on and exploiting outsiders is ALL fun and games until it’s directed at you–with many tech billionaires benefitting financially and personally from the very visas now under attack.
And this latest controversy over H1B visas involved a number of back and forths between conservative influencers like Stephen Miller and elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Green and Representative Mike Collins, but in particular it gave our old friend Laura Loomer another opportunity for the limelight. That’s funny, she featured prominently in my LAST episode about the implosion of the Republican party. History rarely remembers well-behaved women, as they say. It’s just too bad that this one happens to be deeply bigoted and, by all accounts, a very bad person, and not in a fun way. In like a hateful maniacal way.
It all started with Loomer tweeting about her disappointment with Trump’s pick for senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence, Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born tech entrepreneur, specifically for his support for removing immigration caps and making it easier for skilled foreign workers to come to the US. Because Laura Loomer is nothing if not an equal opportunity bigot. Steve Bannon quickly jumped on board the Loomer express, calling the H1B visa process “a total complete scam” on his podcast The War Room, demanding an end to the H1B visa process.
This sparked a larger conversation about immigrants and the H1B visa process, with our lord and emperor Elon Musk weighing in, along with his trusty DOGE side-kick Vivek Ramaswamy, and his other sidekick, Trump. And Elon’s and Vivek’s responses made it really really clear both how much they fucking hate all of us and how fucked up their views are about work and life, both of which are frankly predictable outcomes for people who are allowed to hoard so much wealth that they become untouchable. Studies have shown that they literally lose their ability to empathize. When you can pay anyone to do anything for you, and you can get away with literally anything because you’re above the law, that means you don’t need people, you don’t need community, and society is literally beneath you. That’s gonna fuck you up. Frankly we need to PROTECT people from this gruesome outcome, and taxing billionaires out of existence is for their own good. But alas instead we are stuck with these megalomaniacs and their clear disdain for non-billionaire humans and completely out of touch relationship with “work.” Vivek Ramaswamy blamed American culture for the lack of talent, saying it has “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” and complaining “Normalcy doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” That tweet included, and I quote: ““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.'” Which gave me a hunch and I googled it and I was right: Vivek Ramaswamy was a fuckin’ nerd in high school. For those of you listening to the podcast, please just trust that what appears on screen right now is cold hard evidence, I rest my case your honor.
Elon, for his part in the twitter feud, said that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.” Reminder that not long ago he, through the Department of Government Efficiency twitter account, was seeking, and I quote “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” FOR FREE. Unpaid. This mirrored his words not long after he bought Twitter and sent an internal email demanding that employees be “hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity.” Elon has also called working from home “morally wrong” indicating how intertwined his views on humanity, morality, and personhood are to productivity and work.
According to unverified reports I found online that mashed together various articles over the years of Elon Musk’s daily routine, which are notoriously probably mostly made up, including one from a website called Routines dot club which included various AI generated images of Musk doing his daily routine which I found to be really compelling journalism, Musk wakes up around 7, has a donut or omelet or nothing and some coffee, checks his phone, takes a shower, tries to fit in 20 minutes of exercise, gets his kids ready for school (yeah right), and then heads to work, where he claims to do 80 to 100 hours of work every week, divided between his many enterprises, in the evenings he has business dinners, and gets home from work around 10pm every night. And he’s claimed he works 7 days per week. And all of that may or may not be true, and I do believe that he’s working 80 to 100 hour weeks, I find that to be believable. The difference is that he owns the companies or in some way financially benefits from doing extra work.
I feel I have a unique perspective on this as I am someone who has worked as a waitress, at a call center, at a law firm as an attorney that demanded 80 hour weeks from me, and now owns my own business–80 hour weeks are VERY different depending on the type of labor and your position within the business. 80 hours as a server is not the same as 80 hours at a desk. And 80 hours working for a firm someone else owns is NOT the same as 80 hours working for yourself on a business where you’re personally and financially benefitting from its growth. This is not a motivation PROBLEM or inherent laziness in the American workforce. This is a product of Elon Musk being completely out of touch with what actual average workers think and feel, because he’s been rich his whole life and has the plague of being a money hoarder as his endless source of motivation. He’s never had to work a demanding job where you get paid pretty much the same whether you try hard or whether you coast. And where that pay is barely enough to cover your bills. We all collectively have sloughed off the lie our parents in the boomer generation believed that company loyalty meant you’re part of a family that cares about you. That’s not how it works, we no longer feel loyalty to a business entity. And why would we, it’s unrealistic for him to have that expectation. It does not make logical sense to expect someone to work really really hard on something they only kinda care about because there’s nothing really in it for them if the company thrives or doesn’t, other than maybe a couple promotions and meager pay raises that result in even more work. But because he doesn’t actually speak to people other than other billionaires, he and his sidekicks Vivek and Donald cannot fathom why people don’t want to work that hard, and conclude that it’s simply a product of laziness and nothing more.
However, when you have an H1B visa to dangle over someone’s head, that becomes a different equation. Because that person is now motivated not just by money or the wellbeing of the company but by the promise of their own personal wellbeing and opportunity if given the chance to immigrate to America. Whether or not that promise will be realized is another question, but tying work to your life in such a profound way through the H1B visa is likely one of the only ways to motivate someone to care about their work as much as the people who financially benefit from the company’s growth do. This is also why corporations have a death grip on keeping health insurance tied to employment–because company towns are mostly illegal so they gotta cling to whatever they can to tie our life and wellbeing inextricably with our 9 to 5. This is also why wealthy people who accumulated their wealth off other peoples’ labor are willing to drop a fortune on buying out politicians and maintaining the status quo–because the second we’re not fucking desperate for money and scrambling to make ends meet, if we had the basic necessities for sustaining life covered by the government so our literal survival didn’t depend on our employers, imagine the bargaining power we’d gain. If we didn’t need our employers for literal survival. That’s a terrifying concept for the people that profit off our labor.
And what’s even more insidious is that, according to reporting from truthout, not only does an H1B visa give a company more power to manipulate its workers, studies have shown that the visa program is abused by large companies who pay H1B visa workers less, trap them in jobs because they cannot leave for fear of losing the visa, and lay of vast swaths of American workers in order to hire H1B workers who they are able to pay less, which also then depreciates the potential wages for American workers everywhere. It’s almost like our entire immigration system is exploitative??? And the answer isn’t to hate immigrants but, in fact, the major companies and the people running them who exploit the system??? Elon Musk later walked back his stance, conceding that the H1B program needed to be updated to protect against exploitation, claiming “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.” Sure, was that before or after you told everyone to “take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face”, Elon?
And I’m sorry this has turned into a major tangent and I’m on my soap box, but I think the discussion is important to have and this infighting over visas really elucidates important power dynamics that a lot of us weren’t conscious of until the pandemic gave us some unexpected space from our work. The billionaires who profit from our labor have been scrambling ever since to tie our dedication to our job back to our morality, like Musk does when he says working from home is morally wrong. It only benefits THEM to have us back under their thumbs.
Though I’m certain Laura Loomer did not intend for a class consciousness discussion to come from her tirade against immigrants. So let’s get back to that. Loomer doubled down on Steve Bannon’s podcast, calling Elon a “welfare queen,” latching on to what has become a popular left wing talking point, pointing out that Elon Musk has benefitted personally both from immigration visas–he’s not even from here and from major government handouts in the form of grants and contracts with a number of his businesses over the years. Those grants are the things that, especially in the case of SpaceX, allowed the companies to grow and thrive, delivering shareholder value and skyrocketing Elon Musk’s personal net worth. And while of course Laura Loomer had to go and make it racist, using the welfare queen stereotype that is often targeted at black women and was itself born of a complete racist falsehood fabricated by, say it with me, Ronald Fuckin Reagan, who ruined everything, tshirts available at leejamillermerch dot com. The point still stands and I think it’s really interesting that, despite the racist undertones and bigoted rhetoric, Laura Loomer has unexpectedly brought discussions about who’s ACTUALLY benefitting the most from government handouts to the MAGA block, along with the immigration debate. And ON TOP of that, Elon Musk allegedly retaliated against her by having her verified badge removed on twitter, prompting Loomer to tweet “So much for free speech. Quite totalitarian if you ask me.” She also at one point posted about how Elon “bought his way into MAGA,” and calling Elon a “stage 5 clinger.” When I tell you it is WILD to watch these people get so close to the point and then veer right and fall off the fucking cliff. Loomer wasn’t the only one to get her check mark removed, according to NBC reporting, at least 14 people had their status revoked, many from the media brand “ConservativeOG”, headed by 23-year old influencer Preston Parra, who told NBC “If anyone thinks for one minute the REAL backbone of the right wing and MAGA is gonna stand idly by while these big tech gillionaire Silicon Valley dweebs who didn’t get bullied enough in high school, steal our country, they’re mistaken,” which is objectively pretty funny. See we CAN agree on something, even with bigots who call themselves a “twink for Trump” and an “Alpha Chad MAGA Twink” in a way that I think is not meant to be satirical. And that’s bullying Elon Musk. Though when I looked at Parra’s twitter account today it had a blue check so it appears Musk has backed off on that too.
To Loomer and Steve Bannon and many others in MAGA, any immigrant is a bad immigrant, because they’ve been sold the lie that immigrants are simultaneously lazy criminals while also stealing all our jobs and having the finances to buy up all our available houses. And because, when taken in isolation and ignoring all facts to the contrary, it’s a pretty easy line to make the logical leap to. We don’t have enough houses… I’ve seen an immigrant neighbor buy their home… therefore all immigrants are buying up homes, and that’s why Americans (specifically, white Americans) are struggling. I can’t find a job, I see immigrants working all over my town, therefore they have taken the jobs I could be working, and the lack of employment is their fault. I am struggling financially, the government isn’t helping me, but I’m watching my immigrant neighbor receive food stamps, that means immigrants are taking government handouts and the government cares more about them than me. When you have a populace wherein 20% of them can’t read above a 5th grade level, with a failing school system filled with overworked and increasingly underqualified teachers that themselves don’t possess critical thinking skills, let alone the ability to teach them, then context and nuance get lost and whoever commands the peoples’ attention most readily will be able to connect the dots for them. And for much of America, that attention is grabbed by Fox News and by political leaders and billionaires on social media. So I’m not going to stoop to Elon Musk’s level and say Americans are just all stupid. The systems have failed them at every turn and then the people in charge of those failures have successfully pointed the blame towards immigrants. But now it’s backfiring because people like Laura Loomer have taken that and run with it, because people who haven’t been taught critical thinking skills are also prone to strict, black and white thinking. All immigrants are bad. And so when those same people who have benefitted from anti-immigrant bigotry, like Trump and Elon who paid for Trump’s election and made a fortune off that investment, say wait wait but there’s nuance here, some immigrants are good, it’s too late. They’ve unintentionally benefitted from and perpetuated a runaway train that is now dividing the MAGA base. For example, nearly in the same breath as saying that H1B immigrants are good, Elon Musk this week took to Twitter to rail against House Democrats who voted against the “Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act,” a deceptively named bill that criminalized what were already illegal and deportable offenses related to immigrants committing sexual assault, but that was so poorly and vaguely written that it would also include deportation of assault survivors. It was introduced by Nancy Mace, the same lady behind the anti-trans bathrooms stunt, as a means to bait voters into thinking that Democrats are willing to protect immigrants no matter what. Because she can introduce a trash heap of a bill with the right sounding name and then point at the democrats who actually read it and voted against it and say “These Democrats voted AGAINST the Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act” they WANT immigrants to harm you!!! And Elon took the bait hook, line, and sinker, calling on the American people to vote out all 158 Democrats who voted against the bill. It actually passed in the house, but went nowhere in the Senate and will need to be reintroduced in this new Congress to go anywhere. Nancy Mace, according to the Daily Beast, voted AGAINST reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2021, which actually protects women, unlike her sham bill. But I digress.
As the anti-immigrant infighting continues, the MAGA base has become even more inflamed because Trump sided with the billionaires, telling the New York Post in a phone interview “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them, 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.” Which is a li.e Trump has of course flip flopped repeatedly on his views about H1B visas, having passed the ban during the pandemic and campaigned in 2016 on a platform in which he promised to end the H1B visa program. But now instead of Steve Bannon in his ear, another equal opportunity bigot who personally benefits from generalized widespread fearmongering, he has billionaires like Elon Musk in his ear, people who possess the one thing he prizes above all else, other than loyalty: wealth. Because billionaires will always put class status over everything else. Which is frankly hard to initially understand in this country where we tend to put other personal identifiers above everything else. Whiteness. Gender. Because humans have a tendency to favor whatever identifier gives them the most power. The 99% don’t have the power that extreme wealth brings, so we identify with and divide ourselves over the next best thing. Whiteness. Maleness. Cisgender. Hetersexuality. Able-bodied. Whatever thing we can cling to to step on the heads of those beneath us. That’s why so many white women will engage in incredibly racist behavior, because whiteness is the thing that gives us power in a world that fucking hates women. And while that knee jerk reaction is understandable, not excusable but understandable, given how scary the world is and how individualistic we are taught to be in this country, it also makes us lose sight of the power that comes in numbers. So my individual wealth doesn’t make me more powerful than Elon Musk. But there are only 800 billionaires in the US. The top 1% represents around 30 million people and the 99% are 300 million people. 300 million people against 800 billionaires? I like those odds. And I’m not even talking like armed rebellion, though the murder of a CEO sure did make rich people quake in their fuckin boots in a way that I think gave us a brief glimpse of our collective power, no I’m really just talking about the potential for change if we were willing to ignore our individual differences long enough to push for a country where wealth doesn’t buy you a seat at the political table, at least not so easily and readily. There’s always going to be corruption in politics, there is no government on the planet now or in history where someone hasn’t been buyable for a price. But the point of laws and regulations against corruption, put in place by the government in service of the people, is to put up as many barriers against that corruption as possible. To make it as hard as possible for anything other than the will of the people to dictate how our government behaves. At least that’s the ideal we’re supposed to be striving for.
So within this divide in the MAGA party, I think there is opportunity for a discussion, no matter your political leanings, about where solidarity could be found in unexpected places and alliances could be formed with people you fundamentally disagree with on many levels, in order to address the major colossal elephant in the room that is tangibly making all our lives worse, and that is that money overrides all other inputs in the functioning of our government. And if we address that, getting money out of politics, making elected officials answerable to the electorate and not a handful of people with the cash to buy them out, we will fundamentally shift the functioning of government towards something slightly more representative of what the people want and slightly less corrupted by the influences of corporate cash and billionaires. And then perhaps we can get back to the fighting over rights and freedoms, but at least, having gotten money out of politics, we’ll have a fair shot at getting our views heard, whatever side of the aisle we happen to be on. I have been screaming about this for years and now I’m creating a community around learning about just that–it’s called the Why, America? Co-Learning Lab. All year we’ll be covering topics under the umbrella theme of “Eat the Rich: Building Solidarity in the New Gilded Age.” This launched on January 1st and this month’s topic, which is covered in a monthly syllabus curated by me, is learning from history to fight for the future. We’re looking at and discussing past movements to see where we can learn from history, because it does have a tendency to repeat itself. This is all hosted over on Patreon, which is linked down below. If you’re interested, please join us. I’ll also be hosting a special inauguration eve seance livestream, free and open to the public, on January 19th, keep your eyes peeled for more details soon.
Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Art, David, R_H, Tee, L’Etranger (Lukus), Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!
And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one last week where I discuss all the ways billionaires avoid paying taxes.
