I’m going to warn you ahead of time: you might find yourself torn over where your allegiances lie in this brewing MAGA civil war—a showdown between the classists (Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy) and the racists (Laura Loomer, the MAGA base). And here’s the crux of the issue: billionaires running a party that supposedly champions the (white) working class is a recipe for disaster.
Here’s how it all unraveled: Donald Trump named billionaire venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an advisor on AI. The MAGA base started counting on their fingers how many people of Indian origin might end up in the White House and realized—after getting to the second finger—that the number exceeded what they’d deem tokenization. This revelation didn’t sit well with the white nationalists who make up the base. They’re fine with having a token sprinkling of people of color or immigrants in positions of symbolic power (it provides cover for their racism), but they’re too racist to accept people of color or immigrants wielding actual influence.
In response, Ramaswamy tweeted a sentiment he’s shared before, stating that he supports immigration for “a small number of hard-working, well-educated, highly skilled people.”
This didn’t sit well with the MAGA base, and here’s why: they’re less bothered by undocumented workers taking back-breaking, sub-minimum wage jobs because it keeps those workers “in their place.” What they can’t stand is the idea of immigrants taking the good jobs — those with great benefits packages — from white Americans.
Enter Elon Musk. Musk is white but also an immigrant, which can be disorienting for him until he remembers he’s an immigrant from a formerly apartheid country. When faced with the choice between class and race, Musk chose his fellow billionaire. “Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk tweeted.
Let me tell you: this did not go over well with the white nationalist base. Musk might as well have said, “I’m not talking about bringing in migrant workers to pluck chickens; I’m talking about paying brilliant Indians $75,000 to take jobs that currently cost two white Americans $500,000 a year!”
Laura Loomer, representing the MAGA base, came in swinging, basically saying, “We don’t want no immigrants telling us how many immigrants should be allowed in white America, especially not these rich immigrants!” She then spent the next 24 hours unloading on Musk and Big Tech, calling their MAGA alignment opportunistic. Loomer claimed she “shattered the ‘he can do no wrong’ spell” surrounding tech billionaires who, she argued, only backed Trump “when an assassin in Butler missed.” She railed against the H-1B visa program, accusing tech elites of “arrogance” and “Indian immigrants in tech” of scamming the system. She even took a swipe at David Sacks, questioning if his “best and brightest Indian boy” was behind these schemes to exploit America.
The shit-flinging escalated, and Loomer alleges free-speech advocate Elon Musk retaliated by removing her X premium account, limiting her character count, canceling her subscribers, and falsely claiming she deactivated her own subscriptions. She called it “retaliatory censorship” aimed at silencing her, branding it “pure censorship” against MAGA voices.
Here’s the tldr, according to Musk himself:
I’m not sure who is “winning” this war, but I do know that the MAGA base are outraged that a foreigner just called them all something worse than what Hillary called them. And Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and all the Leopards are eating each others’ faces.