Dec 28, 2024 - Business

MAGA's new DEI fight

Mike Allen

Tesla CEO Elon Musk with his son on his shoulders and Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (C) arrive at the US Capitol on December 5, 2024 in Washington, DC. — Tesla CEO Elon Musk with his son on his shoulders and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (C) arrive at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 5, 2024 to discuss his plans for radical budget cuts. Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Nothing revs up MAGA like the chance to dunk on DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.

DEI-bashing is the core of the "anti-woke" theology. MAGA warriors want a true color/gender-blind meritocracy, they say.

Why it matters: MAGA's DEI unity has hit a big snag. Elon Musk — a MAGA fanboy and fav until this past week — and others on X are arguing forcefully that in a true meritocracy, you'd pick harder-working foreigners for high-skilled gigs over less-qualified Americans.

Steve Bannon and many MAGA originals consider this apostasy — basically another high-end, rich-guy way to screw the working-class voters behind the Donald Trump movement.

Welcome to the new frontier of the DEI.

Musk tweeted Friday: "The point was not to replace DEI, which is one form of racism/sexism, with a different form of racism/sexism, but rather to be a meritocratic society!"

The big picture: N.Y. Times columnist David Brooks points out this isn't a "discrete one-off dispute."

"This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy," Brooks writes.
"We're going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on."

The latest: Musk vowed last night to "go to war" to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers, branding some Republican opponents as "hateful, unrepentant racists," Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

Go deeper: Elon Musk pledges "war" over H-1B visa program, calls opponents racists

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MAGA's new DEI fight

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