https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/elon-musk-maga-white-nationalism/
Politics
The New Right’s Toxic Addiction to Racial Conflict
A former fellow with the Claremont Institute explains how white nationalist dogma sets the terms of political belonging on the MAGA right.
by Pedro Gonzalez
August 14, 2026
The Nation
The New Right’s Toxic Addiction to Racial Conflict
A former fellow with the Claremont Institute explains how white nationalist dogma sets the terms of political belonging on the MAGA right.
by Pedro Gonzalez
August 14, 2026
The Nation
PHOTO: Brothers in race-baiting: Donald Trump and Elon Musk attend a SpaceX launch in 2024. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.
Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.
Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”
The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.
This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.
It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.
Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.
Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”
The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.
This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.
Current Issue
With Trump’s takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump’s influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.
Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that outlined the “Southern strategy” to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti–civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about “crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order,” Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor’s incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.
Trump’s central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice. Take, for example, the case of Scott Greer, who was fired from The Daily Caller, the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson, for his ties to white nationalist groups. In an interview with The Ezra Klein Show, Christopher Rufo, the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for his crusade against critical race theory, argued that Greer should still be granted a platform, since Greer himself has since advocated against the white nationalist label. But this proves to largely be a distinction without a difference. Greer hasn’t so much reconsidered his core views on race; rather, the MAGA GOP has gravitated more closely to them—which means that he can rehabilitate his standing in the movement with minimal, and mostly cosmetic, changes to his rhetoric. He’s comfortable calling himself a “conservative” because that label now includes views that once were relegated to fringe white nationalist figures. Even the self-described “white advocate” Jared Taylor has criticized Greer and those like him for wanting to “have it both ways”—discarding fraught segregation-friendly labels for the sake of optics while claiming that the Trumpified GOP is the best vehicle for advancing the views associated with those labels.
On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown “right-wing identitarianism.” And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.
I know this firsthand, as a former enthusiastic recruit to the MAGA right. I watched this transformation happen in real time from the inside.
I traveled from the edge of the right to becoming a Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute—which, like virtually every other conservative institution today, has given Trump carte blanche under the belief that he is the only thing standing between the West and “race communism” or, more commonly now, “Third Worldism.” The nomenclature is always fungible; what’s constant is the invocation of a mortal racialized threat to civilization as we know it.
In a nutshell, the right understands itself as being in a struggle against a racial and demographic clock. Without some drastic intervention, a long line of demagogues on the right routinely lament, the United States will be swamped by a coalition of nonwhites, immigrants, and white enablers who will bring about a dark age of acute government dysfunction and naked corruption. The prime directive of this new regime will be the formal persecution of whites, who will become the victims of an ever-intensifying system of racial favoritism that places them at the bottom.
As the Musk episode showed, no one on the right can be seen as a backslider from this vision and still have a viable political career: It has bulked into a badge of right-wing identity, fulfilling much the same role that tax-cutting antigovernment ideology did in the 1980s and ’90s. Its status as an unshakable article of faith in the MAGA movement also means that it doesn’t really matter whether the leaders who’ve bought into it really subscribe to it; its instrumental value is simply too great, so long as these apocalyptic delusions have the movement’s base in their grip. Trump understands this instinctively, and Musk figured it out by paying attention to him. So did JD Vance. An empty suit is a reliable weathervane, as we’ve seen in Vance’s cunning reinvention from a Never Trump conservative who compared Trump to Hitler into an ardent purveyor of MAGA racial panics.
The price of this sort of cynical demagoguery is steep. The “civilization” that’s dogmatically held to be imperiled by brown and foreign-born hordes has degenerated under Trump’s watch into a kleptocratic kakistocracy without an analogue in American history. It’s impossible, in this compass, to detail all the ways Trump has made American life materially worse and more dystopian while profiting from the collective misery of millions of everyday people. A partial inventory would include monetizing the White House for Trump to make more money than he did as a businessman, Musk’s own colossally destructive and deadly reign at DOGE, unleashing new disease threats through sheer incompetence, the relentless onslaught against the environment and wildlife, the unprecedented weaponization of the Department of Justice, the killings of American citizens by federal agents with impunity, and the construction of a digital police state that groups like Claremont, prior to their own MAGA makeovers, would have decried as a civil-liberties travesty.
Yet all this criminal dysfunction is only part of the cost of doing business, so far as the white nationalist right is concerned. Within its charmed Caucasian chalk circle, there’s simply no price that’s too high for “saving” America from “Third Worldism”—even if the rescue operation turns America into the very sort of squalid authoritarian regime the right associates with that incoherent term. This is also why there is no reason to believe an internal course correction is in the cards. If there is hope, it is in an expanded Democratic coalition that is more amenable to dissent, disagreement, and defectors.
After the cavalcade of race panics, the second most powerful tool in the right’s arsenal is the fear of no return: the notion that the mandate of civilizational restoration means that there’s no alternative but to be locked in to the right—that changing one’s mind is irrelevant, or futile, because one’s allegiance is preordained in one’s genetic makeup.
Of course, this is another lie—one that appeals to the worst aspects of our nature. The truth is that America’s story, at its best, is one of reconciliation. Even George Wallace turned a hard corner later in life and found redemption. It’s high time that conservatives in America took due note of how Wallace turned his life around, rather than mimicking his opportunistic descent into bigotry and hatred.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pedro Gonzalez
Pedro Gonzalez is a writer based in Ohio. You can find him online at readcontra.com.
Wake the HEL* UP!
Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
August 15, 2026
VIDEO:
*New book: America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries get it here at this link: https://amzn.to/4uev5RN
"The Nerd Reich":
Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy
Democracy Now!
August 17, 2026
VIDEO:
A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”
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It’s a measure of the president's staggering corruption that preliminary approval of an application for a charter by Trump’s crypto firm is just another story. Also, Hakeem Jeffries finds a new low.
by MARTIN PENGELLY
August 17, 2026
First Draft
Zeteo
On this day in 1998, President Bill Clinton admitted in grand jury testimony that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, which he then told the nation “was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”
Good morning… Martin here, delighted as ever to wish you a Happy Monday. It’s almost late summer now, but summer it still is, so Congress is still on its extremely generous holidays. Fear not: Donald Trump is here to fill the news with yet more absurd corruption.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at two aspects of the second Trump administration that go hand in hand: the financial self-dealing allowing the president’s family and associates to rake in untold riches, and the obsequious yes-men who populate his Cabinet, ready to act with complete disregard for convention and the law.
Trump looks set to turn his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, into a bank, while his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, gets on with targeting the boss’s enemies and rigging the law in his favor, without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s staggering – as is Hakeem Jeffries, very possibly the next speaker of the House, opposing Medicare for All, a policy favored by nine in 10 in his party. We’ll look at that and more, including Trump’s continuing stalemate with Iran. Let’s read in.
 |
Trump before boarding Air Force One on Aug. 14, 2026. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images.
On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.
Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.
World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”
Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”
Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view...
On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.
Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.
World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”
Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”
Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view...
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