From Goldman Sachs to God’s Ears
This from the Dec. 28 message from Axios (“Presented from Goldman Sachs”):
| The one big thing: New DEI fight |
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| Via X |
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 last evening: “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.” Lead story of today’s N.Y. Times, front-page story of today’s Washington Post💣 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.Why it matters: The MAGA-DOGE civil war that erupted over the last 48 hours has hit a tipping point, with President-elect Trump’s new techno-libertarian coalition of billionaires taking full aim at his base.Trump faces a deepening conflict between rich, powerful advisers — and the people who swept him to office.Steve Bannon, one of the longest-tenured voices in Trump’s orbit, had multiple guests on his show this week to talk about his hardline anti-H-1B views. Bannon tells Axios he helped kick off the debate with a now-viral Gettr post calling out a lack of support for the Black and Hispanic communities in Big Tech. |
Facing MAGA 