UNZ: 03-07-2025,
Credit Image: © Vincent Isore/IP3 via ZUMA Press
Alain de Benoist, Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market, trans. F. Roger Devlin, Middle Europe Books, 312 pp., $30.00
Last December, a rift opened in the MAGA coalition over legal immigration. Elon Musk, a white South African turned US citizen, wrote on X: “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.” Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-generation US citizen whose parents were born in India, agreed with Mr. Musk and defended companies that look outside the US for workers.
Mr. Ramaswamy even went so far as to suggest that American workers weren’t worth hiring: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
The MAGA victory of November was beginning to look like it might turn out to be the revenge of the nerds. But pushback was swift and decisive. Laura Loomer, Ann Coulter, and even Nikki Haley, among others, attacked the two “tech bros,” insisting that the US must prioritize hiring its own people. After all, what does “America First” mean if it does not mean “putting Americans first”?
In general, MAGA Republicans felt betrayed. In response, Mr. Musk backed away from the topic of legal immigration,