MAGA Civil War Escalates as Steve Bannon Targets Elon Musk

The “civil war” in MAGA world is ratcheting up, with longtime Trump supporter Steve Bannon joining the fray by calling tech entrepreneur Elon Musk a “truly evil guy” who must be purged from the political movement led by the president-elect.In an interview with the Italian Newspaper Corriere della Sera, the former White House adviser during Trump’s first term expressed how he was seeking to “have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day.”“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”The former head of Breitbart News said in the interview that he takes issue with H-1B visas, something both Mr. Musk and his partner heading up the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, have supported in posts on social media.“This thing about the H-1B visas, it’s about how the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon said.The H-1B visa program, the largest in the United States in terms of the number of guest laborers it supports, allows American employers to hire foreign laborers in “specialty” occupations. The program, which is backed by many in Silicon Valley and high tech, is aimed at those with specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent of work experience. There are annual caps on the number of visas offered, currently at 65,000, plus an additional 20,000 allocated to those graduating with master’s degrees or higher from an American school.The program has been criticized, among other things, as a form of corporate welfare since it can save companies money because it allows them to pay foreign laborers less than their American counterparts. Opponents also argue that it depresses wages and causes Americans to stop pursuing degrees in certain specialized fields.The rift between MAGA supporters over the visa program began after Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy made comments recently supporting the endeavor.“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Mr. Musk said in a post on X last month. In a separate post, he pointed out that a “shortage of excellent engineering talent” is a “fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”The next day, Mr. Ramaswamy faced a backlash after posting a lengthy missive on his X account about the need for foreign laborers and the inadequacies of American workers.“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,” he wrote. “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.”The statements led some of the most devoted MAGA supporters to lash out.“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,” a former Congressman and Trump’s since-departed pick to head the DOJ, Matt Gaetz, said on X. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”Bannon also took issue with a recent reply to a post on X by Mr. Musk suggesting that Americans are “retarded.” The post has since been deleted.“He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost,” Bannon said to Corriere della Sera. “We blew him out of the water. He won’t fight. He’s got the maturity of a little boy.”He also claimed that Mr. Musk’s “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,” Bannon said. “His aggregation of wealth, and then — through wealth — power: that’s what he’s focused on.”Bannon was recently released from federal prison after serving a four-month sentence on two counts of contempt of congress for not complying with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.He had claimed executive privilege back in July 2022 and refused to provide the committee with documents and appear for a required deposition.

MAGA Civil War Escalates as Steve Bannon Targets Elon Musk

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