It may seem absurd, but the most important global political event since the US presidential election in November has been a Twitter fight between Elon Musk and anonymous groyper accounts.
Over the past week Musk has dramatically fallen out with the pro-White wing of the MAGA movement due to his open support for mass immigration of tech workers from India.
The result has been an increasingly hysterical series of posts from Musk demanding that the MAGA movement be purged of “racists”, and a mass banning of accounts critical of replacement migration.
Yet the dispute is far from being just another inconsequential Twitter fight between online lolcows. It vividly illustrates how the nationalist sentiment of White American voters has been hijacked by a small number of Silicon Valley and finance oligarchs in order to further an agenda that is diametrically opposed to their interests.
It also has valuable lessons for Australian nationalists who have been debating whether to engage in a tactical alliance with Libertarians, who support many of the same policies as Musk.
The mistake that many made was in assuming that because Musk opposes many of the same enemies that nationalists have, he must therefore support the same policies they do. Musk himself had deliberately played up this misunderstanding by courting figures such as Keith Woods and participating in explicitly anti-Jewish social media campaigns like #BanTheADL. Moreover, he backed his seeming convictions with action. Censorship of nationalists was massively reduced, and even the big names of the old Alt Right like Mike Peinovich and Eric Striker who had been permabanned multiple times from Twitter were allowed back in (under pseudonyms).
Unfortunately, Musk’s real agenda has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with class.
To understand why, we must go back in time to the genesis of the current US elite. Prior to the New Deal revolution of the 1930s, the most powerful faction in the US ruling class was the oligarchy. These were the great titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and JP Morgan.
As the US of the time lacked both a landed aristocracy and a large standing army, there was no counterbalance to oligarch power within the elite, and as a result their preferences were reflected in government policy – very high immigration (albeit from Europe), very little regulation of labour conditions, no anti-trust legislation, and no federal income tax.
These privileges were gradually chipped away as the abuses of the oligarchs led to a reaction in the form of the progressive movement. The generalised failure of capitalism after the 1929 crash and the discrediting of the oligarch class, led to the electoral victory of Franklin D Roosevelt in 1933.
FDR then enacted a far reaching set of government, social and economic reforms known as the New Deal. These are too complicated to go into here, but the end result was that the centre of power within the US elite shifted decisively from the oligarchs to an expanded bureaucracy known as the managerial class. Going forward they would strongly limit the freedom of private enterprise via regulations, as well as massively increase both individual taxes on the rich and corporate tax rates.
Managerialist power was also greatly reinforced by the emergence of the national security state during and after World War II, with its large permanent standing armies, military bureaucracy and vast network of semi-private contractors.
Oligarchs, of course, still existed in America and retained vast amounts of wealth. But they were unable to translate their wealth into serious cultural or political influence. Every major event, from the Cold War to civil rights to the space race, seemed to offer more opportunities for the bureaucracy (and its associates in academia and the NGO industry) to grow larger and expand its remit into new areas of life. The trend has continued up to this day.
The aim of Musk, and the team of Silicon Valley and finance oligarchs that he has gathered around him, is to cripple the managerial class and retake power for the new oligarchy.
Musk has waged this war on two fronts.
Firstly, he has taken aim at the culture of the managerial class by attacking “woke” ideas like transgenderism and critical race theory. These cultural issues appeal to the managerial class because they justify social engineering policies and large-scale expansions of bureaucracy (whether in the government or through NGOs). For Musk and other oligarchs “woke” is a threat to their ability to run their enterprises without government interference, an impediment to the recruitment of high quality “human capital” and a justification for higher taxes.
Musk has therefore subverted the vectors by which managerialist culture is spread to the masses by purchasing Twitter, boosting the reach of the online Dissident Right, and relentlessly criticising the mainstream media for hiding truths that are unpalatable to managerialism’s egalitarian ideology.
Secondly, he is attempting to destroy the material basis of the managerial class by cutting funding to the federal bureaucracy. This is why Musk demanded the creation of a semi-official “Department of Government Efficiency”(DOGE) to suggest ways in which the bureaucracy could be shrunk, and personally intervened earlier this month to try to stop a federal budget funding bill that he felt contained insufficient spending cuts.
There is nothing in this agenda that requires Musk to be pro-White. Backing mass legal immigration from India is entirely consistent with Musk’s goal of augmenting oligarch power. It drives labour costs down by increasing the supply of workers, and results in employees who won’t form unions or protest about poor working conditions.
The only problem that Musk has is that mass immigration is wildly unpopular, like the rest of the oligarch agenda. Simply having large amounts of money on its own does not automatically create cultural hegemony or political influence, even if vast sums are spent attempting to influence elite opinion.
Musk and Peter Thiel have therefore decided to use Populism and MAGA as a vehicle to create a mass movement to achieve their goals, tactically playing up areas of agreement and hiding the less popular aspects until Trump got re-elected.
This is not the first time that the US oligarch class have attempted to gain a mass support base by appealing to ethnonationalism.
In the 1980 presidential election Ronald Reagan went as far as implying that he would allow segregation to be reintroduced in the South, and was the first to use the phrase “Make America Great Again”.
During the 1990s Jewish anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard went even further in attempting to create a mass basis for his own brand of radical oligarch rule by engaging in Holocaust revisionism and attempting to court White nationalists.
The Tea Party movement of the early 2010s also married implicitly pro-White imagery with a program of tax cuts and deregulation.
Of course, as soon as any of these movements gained proximity to power the “racists” were purged, while the oligarch’s demands were implemented in full. It is never immigration that gets reduced, only taxes.
The lesson for Australian nationalists must be that there are no based billionaires.
Unrestrained capitalism is incompatible with nationalism due to its insatiable demand for cheap labour and refusal to place any limits on its pursuit of short-term profit. This extends to ideological manifestations of capitalist oligarchy like Libertarianism.
Like Musk, the Libertarian Party will talk a lot about those parts of their agenda that align with nationalism, such as free speech and dismantling the anti-White bureaucrat class. Also like Musk, they are hiding the unpopular, pro-oligarch parts of their agenda. Tim Matheson has done excellent work exposing the Libertarian Party’s horrifying mass immigration policy.
Australian nationalists must ensure that we do not get duped like our White American cousins into replacing one form of racial suicide with another.
The only way to do this is to build independent nationalist political organisations that will push our own agenda and nobody else’s.
