War between the faces
Steve v Elon: when ratbags fall out.
Donald Trump’s one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon warned Elon Musk Tuesday that he and other MAGA diehards are going to “rip your face off” unless Musk smartens up and stops pushing visas for skilled foreign workers to take
good-paying[well paid] tech industry jobs away from Americans.
He told Musk to sit back and study. That sounds very likely, doesn’t it. Both Musk sitting back, and Musk taking orders from Bannon.
“They’re recent converts,” Bannon said Tuesday on his War Room podcast, referring to Musk and other tech-world Trump supporters.
“We love converts,” Bannon noted. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.”
Don’t “come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be,” Bannon added. “If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”
But he’s Elon Musk. Don’t nobody get to rip Elon Musk’s face off.
Musk and Ramaswamy have suddenly strongly spoken up in recent days on behalf of protecting special H-1B visas for skilled foreigners to fill high-level tech jobs, including in Musk’s businesses because American simply aren’t up to the task. The South African-born Musk last week endorsed a post on X that referred to American workers as “re***ed,” which is widely regarded as an ugly slur (Musk has since deleted his support for the attack post).
Ramaswamy has also complained that Americans are not up to snuff when it comes to competing with brainy foreigners. He blamed the dumbed-down culture of the U.S.
But without the dumbed-down culture of the US, Trump would never have been elected. Not for a second. You can’t have it both ways – getting an ignorant and stupid crook elected to the top job and un-dumbing the culture of the US.
“Good-paying”
Just imagine it being said by Marlon Brando. You know the role.
“How dare they recruit foreigners when we’ve not seen any need graduate from highschool!”
I recall that as well as endorsing that tweet, Musk called MAGA supporters ‘contemptible fools” in a tweet of his own. It doesn’t surprise me. Ideas that derive from eugenics seem to be fashionable in certain unpleasant quarters. If you’re wealthy you must come from superior stock with superior genes and have a high IQ (listen to Trump boasting of his illustrious breeding), whereas if you’re born into poverty, you have inferior genes and are therefore congenitally stupid and feckless and deserve all the difficulties you face.
Ramaswamy might preach about how immigrant families (at least those from certain backgrounds) get their children to study, but the mess that has been made over the years of public education (a mess that is going to be made worse over the next four years – not that Musk or Ramaswamy will care) has certainly not made life easier for children from poorer backgrounds.
The infantile obsession with wealth as the only index of the value of a human being is throroughly destructive.
Steve Bannon … “rip your face off”
So Bannon really *is* part of the Leopards Eating Faces Party.
But why has the culture become dumbed down? Has it something to do with what has been happening to public education?
But – more important – I wonder whether the Supreme Court’s decision in the ‘Citiizens United’ ruling is not much more important than the ‘dumbing down’. It has allowed billionaires & corporations to pour enormous amounts of money into elections of a number of kinds at all levels, from township to nation. As Anne Applebaum makes very clear in Autocracy Inc, it is readily corrupted élites who bear far greater responsibility for the general corruption of democracy than a dumbed-down populace.
And, I should add, institutions like Fox News and ‘X’, who serve these élites, not to mention the enormous number of right-wing podcasts, websites, etc, bear a huge responsibility.
I think more attention should be paid to these factors.
So Bannon is admitting that MAGA is a faith? Interesting.