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A social media spat over worker visas had talking heads lapping up the “inevitability” of a supposed “MAGA civil war” with Elon Musk at the center.

(Video: MSNBC)

All was neither well nor bright after Christmas among certain circles on X as a disagreement cropped up about the the extent to which the United States should be utilizing merit-based visa programs versus relying on the domestic workforce for staffing.

As such, rampant Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers like Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson couldn’t help but elevate the dispute as somehow being proof of discord within President-elect Donald Trump’s circles to their own delight.

“Rick, that did not take long,” began MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin after introducing the panel that included Politico’s Eugene Daniels and Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast. “And I’d love to start with you and get your reaction to this Christmas immigration MAGA civil war that is playing out. We all could see it coming over the last several months and now it has fully exploded into the wide open on X nonetheless.”

“It’s an inevitability that the hyper-populist, non-college-educated part of Trump’s base — which is the plurality at the minimum, a majority in certain arguments — were always going to be preconditioned to believe that the word immigration or the word visa always in their minds means ‘brown people bad,’” asserted Wilson, injecting race into an argument about a national versus international workforce.

“And so, they have this belief that, you know, the guy with the GED and his fake Oakley sunglasses, his goatee and his pickup truck, you know, the universal Twitter bro that you see in every avatar on Twitter, that guy’s thinking of himself, I could have been the senior software designer at Google if only it weren’t for DEI or immigration,” he continued. “It’s absurd.”

Suggesting there was somehow a conflict with national sovereignty and legal means of immigration, the Lincoln Project co-founder added, “But now you see these people that rely on that as a core part of their business — just like Donald Trump does also, by the way, for service staff at Mar-a-Lago and other resorts — you see this conflict. It’s gonna to eventually be that the hyper-populists, they don’t really care about the more sophisticated arguments about H-1B or O-1 visas. They care ‘brown people bad.’ That’s their whole driving conditioning they’ve had from Fox for years.”

Amid disputes that saw Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heads of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency defending H-1B visas, commentator Scott Jennings had made note of the proper use as opposed to those who might abuse the system “to recruit interns, accountants, other people that easily could be recruited from the United States of America, all because you just want to do it cheaper, that’s not fine.”

Still, MSNBC’s pundits maintained there was more to the strife as Mohyledin said, “And it’s so rich, Molly, when you see Elon Musk was, you know, pretended to be a free speech warrior or free speech absolutist, barely tolerating the criticism of Laura Loomer.”

Pushing the idea that Musk’s endorsement and campaign support for Trump was “transactional” for his own benefit and not the broader benefit of the country, Jong-Fast asserted, “Now what they want is skilled workers for their companies, right? And you’ll see, I mean, Tesla is like the third biggest user of H-1B visas and there is a reason for that. They need the workers. So, here’s the question now.”

“Donald Trump has a problem, right? He has a base that has elected him on ‘mass deportation’ now — they had it on signs — and then he has, you know, billionaires who paid for this campaign who want workers,” she went on. “And I think this is gonna come to a head pretty quickly.”

Meanwhile, Musk had pinned a post to the top of his timeline on X that read in response to a claim about the limited number of new jobs going to white males in recent years, “America rose to greatness over the past 150 years, because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth. I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it remains that land of freedom and opportunity.”

Kevin Haggerty
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