[A new elite is emerging in America and the question is whether the race-blind technocrats or the White ethnonationalists (represented here by Steve Bannon who describes himself as a “populist nationalist”) will emerge victorious. Clearly the Trump base is on the side of White ethnonationalism but as usual overcoming the money of the elite technocrats and, for many of them, their race-blind inclinations will be a huge challenge, as it has been with the current elite (many of whom are not at all race-blind but rather obviously ethnically motivated against the traditional White American majority). The new elite will be less Jewish, less tied to the legacy media and elite universities, and it’s already clear that many of the wealthy, including Jews, will jump on the bandwagon of whoever is in power. The question is whether it will really be on the side of traditional White Americans.

To Mr. Bannon, this chasm went deeper than some small-bore spat about visas. “These people are technofeudalists, and it’s a dangerous, dangerous thing,” he said. “Here’s what I’m glad about. It’s going to be the populist-nationalist movement that’ll take them on and break them. Because quite frankly, the established order is too gutless. The established order will go with anything that keeps their privileges.” …

“The thing about Elon,” Mr. Carl said, “is that it’s not really clear what he thinks.” Mr. Musk had defended the H-1B program by arguing that America needed to attract the “top ~.1 percent of engineering talent.” But he had also just waded into politics in Britain and Germany, where he’d promoted parties like the more-or-less openly ethnonationalist Alternative for Germany. “So that would seem to contradict what it looked like he was saying in the immigration debate here,” Mr. Carl said. “It might be that he kind of picked this fight as a way of showing he has complex views.” …

Mr. Vance once told me that he thought something “genuinely, seriously bad,” was coming to America, unless conservatives could “assemble a coalition of populists and traditionalists that can actually overthrow the ruling class.” The MAGA sphere has now managed to draw some of the richest people on earth into this project, with figures like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk casting themselves as unlikely allies in a populist overthrow of the American elite.]

NYTimes: “How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?”

Excerpt;

[Bannon] named a roster of major figures on the tech right whom he saw as enemies: Mr. Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the neo-monarchist writer Mr. Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and technologist who promotes the idea of “network states,” new countries run on blockchain.

Mr. Bannon accused the tech barons of promoting “technofeudalism” and “transhumanism”— bending human life into technologized and unnatural new forms. “This thing is all tied together,” he said. “They have a very well thought through philosophy and a very well thought through set of ideas, and they’re trying to implement that. And to me, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s scared because of their power.

“I’m a populist-nationalist, and I’m dug in on this,” he said. “I know I can take them on.” He had already seen criticism. “Everybody’s coming to me to say, ‘You can’t do this. Isn’t it going to show a rift?’ I said, ‘What do you mean a rift? It’s better to get it out now.’”

This disconnect between MAGA and the Tech Right has deep philosophical roots. The political theorist Patrick Deneen, in his book “Regime Change,” makes a point about the American right that has been plainly true for decades — that for most of modern history it has not actually been a conservative movement. He calls Republicans of the Liz Cheney or George W. Bush mold “right-liberals” and argues that their “unwavering support for a free market, ideally unhindered by regulation and political limits, frequently resulted in economic disruptions and dizzying change that undermined the stability of the very social institutions that conservatives claimed to prize.”

In a widely read 2022 essay titled “Why Conservatism Failed,” a young Catholic University of America assistant professor named Jonathan Askonas sharpened this point. He described how the old Republican guard failed to account for the power of technology, as they claimed to be standing for the American flag and family.

“When you descend from lofty rhetoric about ‘traditions’ and ‘values,’” he wrote, “a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of progressivism or socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology.”

When I spoke to Mr. Carl, the former Trump administration official, he brought up an infamous interjection into the visa debate by Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote a very long post on X in December describing an American culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” and extolling “nerdiness.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ,” he said, “or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Mr. Carl is the author of a book called The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. So it’s pretty obvious which side he falls on in these debates. But he’s intent on keeping the coalition together. “That post was silly,” he told me. Even so, he didn’t think Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy should be viewed as enemies.

“The thing about Elon,” Mr. Carl said, “is that it’s not really clear what he thinks.” Mr. Musk had defended the H-1B program by arguing that America needed to attract the “top ~.1 percent of engineering talent.” But he had also just waded into politics in Britain and Germany, where he’d promoted parties like the more-or-less openly ethnonationalist Alternative for Germany. “So that would seem to contradict what it looked like he was saying in the immigration debate here,” Mr. Carl said. “It might be that he kind of picked this fight as a way of showing he has complex views.”

On the flip side, some people have ended up finding a place in this new counterestablishment without even being necessarily conservative. “We’re all really trying for the same basic American dream sorts of things,” said Julie Fredrickson, a venture capitalist who backs crypto startups. A friend of Mr. Carl’s, she is also a kindred spirit with prominent figures on the tech right.

Ms. Fredrickson describes herself as a liberal, but she has grown increasingly frustrated by a federal government that she believes acts almost like a “moat,” preserving the power of huge established interests over both smaller businesses and technological innovation: big banks over crypto, giant, inefficient defense contractors over the new military-tech startups emerging in Southern California, oil and gas production over companies like a small-scale nuclear startup she’d just invested in.

She was still leery of the anti-immigrant talk that had emerged in the debates. “We should want the 1 percent minds,” she said. “And I mean that partially from a security state perspective, because I’m terrified by the prospect of China winning on that. I do actually think that ‘yeah, I want to win’ is a stronger message than ‘I want to do it with only people that look like me.’” She was voicing the twinned sense of possibility and frustration animating the Tech Right today: “Can we just get back to winning?”

When I spoke to Mr. Bannon, he articulated a criticism of the tech world that, perhaps surprisingly, is one that at least some right-wing tech figures share: “We haven’t created anything on the technology side like the airplane or the internal combustion engine or the steam engine or anything big,” he said. “It’s all been algorithms.”

Peter Thiel, who emerged in 2016 as the first prominent tech billionaire to back Mr. Trump, has described to me his view that technologies like social media or smartphones can offer an illusion of progress while offering dubious benefits, at best, to the world at large. After Mr. Trump’s first win, he led a quickly abandoned effort to begin dismantling the regulatory state.

But Mr. Thiel ended up largely sitting out of the 2024 election, skeptical that a second Trump administration could carry out a serious project to remake American governance. Now Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are leading a much higher-profile effort, through what they call the department of government efficiency.

“I think the Tech Right is going to win in the short-term,” said Razib Khan, a geneticist and tech consultant who is friendly with many figures in both the MAGA and Tech Right spheres. As he saw it, the talent and money were mostly on the side of tech.

“The Tech Right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage Americans” of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.”

Both sides see their path as the best approach to make America more dynamic — the MAGA intellectuals through a hoped-for “refounding” that would restore a sense of national identity and purpose, and the Tech Right through drawing the best talent from a worldwide pool, and letting competition and capitalism rip.

Mr. Trump himself has kept something like a kingly remove from the early squabbles of the aristocracy emerging in his shadow. His vice president, JD Vance, might be able to act as an intermediary between these rival wings. A former venture capitalist married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he nonetheless adopted the populist-nationalist style of politics.

Mr. Vance once told me that he thought something “genuinely, seriously bad,” was coming to America, unless conservatives could “assemble a coalition of populists and traditionalists that can actually overthrow the ruling class.” The MAGA sphere has now managed to draw some of the richest people on earth into this project, with figures like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk casting themselves as unlikely allies in a populist overthrow of the American elite.

For now, some within Mr. Trump’s orbit are happy to give them a chance. But others are already looking toward a struggle to decide who really holds the power as their revolution gets underway. “It’s time to have the debate,” Mr. Bannon told me. “You’ve got to hit them while you’re strong.”

In 2003, as Mel Gibson was directing “The Passion of the Christ,” his film about the crucifixion, Hutton Gibson gave an interview to The New York Times laced with comments about conspiracy theories. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, had been remote-controlled, he claimed (without saying by whom). The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was wildly inflated, he went on.

“Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Mr. Gibson said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”