The War of Buzzards: Neo-Nazis, Tech Fascists, and the Future of MAGA

We're living in a weird and crucial moment. A battle over the future of the Right is being fought and there will be consequences

Thank you again for all your support as I took some time off to recuperate and prepare for the thrust into the 2024 Election. I’m back and raring to go. I’ll be continuing my analysis here at Dispatches From A Collapsing State and offering exclusive coverage of the Democratic National Convention and the major events of the election at The Muckrake Podcast.

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The 2024 Presidential Election has already had so many twists and turns. Those hard weeks following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in which the Democratic Party gnawed at itself and all seemed lost. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life that led to our media class clamoring for a “pivot” from Trump so that they could rally behind him. A generational war within the Democratic Party leading to Biden stepping aside and Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive nominee, creating an upswell in hope and optimism and an effective cult of personality.

Now, as Harris and her running-mate Tim Walz gain momentum, Trump’s campaign is lost. Trump is desperate. His attacks are failing. His VP pick JD Vance is flailing like no one we’ve seen before. The struggles are so bad it is entering a sinking ship phase in which his staff is attacking one another, openly wondering if he’s sabotaging his own candidacy, and even reaching out to Leftists like myself to plead their case (I discuss this in the most recent episode of The Muckrake Podcast). We’ve predictably seen the rise of conspiracy theories as they are created to explain uncomfortable and contradictory ideas.

These conspiracy theories range from internal strife and subterfuge to this incredible development showcased in a recent “discussion” between Candace Owens and Andrew Tate in which they seem to reach an agreement: Trump has been bought off by the “Deep State” and is throwing the election for profit.

In this blisteringly stupid conversation, they wrestle with the idea that Trump “isn’t the same,” leading to Tate to claim “something happened.” Trump traded power for protection from his legal troubles that…well…were already kind of taken care of?

Sure.

It’s dumb. But telling. The Right and its collection of ridiculous influencers and personalities has lived in its own universe for years now, believing things that empirical evidence easily dismisses, writing off electoral defeats with coordinated conspiracy theories, and even telling themselves that popular movies and musical artists are “psy-ops” and that their preferred brands are actually much, much more popular.

These are mostly trivial things and concern the experience of life in alternate reality America. What matters, though, is that the 2024 Election and the changing fortunes of Trump and the MAGA Movement will have reverberations. Again, as I have said in the past, defeating Trump in this contest is necessary, but will not end the threat posed by the authoritarian movement. They are not concerned with electoral results. They are not interested in democracy working its way through. They will not simply throw up their hands, admit defeat, and “wake up” from their fever dreams.

The more important battle, at the moment, is playing out over where the MAGA Movement will go, possibly beyond Trump himself. As I’ve detailed over and over, Trump is an avatar, a gathering point, a puppet who has been used by GOP heavyweights, antidemocratic donors, white supremacists, Christian authoritarians, and Tech Fascists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Moments like this one make the rifts in this ramshackle alliance more obvious. Musk hosted Trump on a Spaces event. That conversation was rambling and bleak. Trump struggled to stay even close to coherent and Musk angled to manipulate him in full view of the audience, pushing Trump to create an “efficiency committee” and put Musk in charge of the federal government’s resources and tailor his entire presidency to supporting pet projects like a moonbase, tunnels like his debacle in Las Vegas, and the big goal: a mission to Mars.

It was sweaty and sad and disturbing. But, again, illuminating. Musk has bought into the Trump Campaign along with his fellow Tech Fascists and isn’t interested in MAGA beyond how it can give them almost total control of the government and country. It is an aggressive takeover of the faux-populist movement and, in essence, another generational war between the tech industrialists and the aging donors who have overseen the dismantling of the U.S. since the 1970’s.

MAGA, itself, is a mess. It has always existed by lashing together disparate elements of the Right and relied on uneasy coalitions. The Evangelicals are different from the Industrialists. The GOP is a different animal from the Tech Fascists. And the white supremacists, well, they have always trafficked in these circles without being completely embraced or welcomed for fear of reprisals.

Trump’s ascendance in 2016 set loose a whole host of bigots who had felt orphaned in the process. The alt-Right of this period (represented by people like Richard Spencer, seen below getting punched) took advantage of Trump’s reliance on bigotry and demagoguery to build up their ranks and seize more power.

Spencer’s act failed because he became too big of a target and because, deep down, Americans are repulsed by these assholes. The energies have moved within the GOP and around Trump, creating a white supremacy that attempts to enjoy some plausible deniability while activating a project absolutely mired in and powered by it. One of the benefactors of this transference has been Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denier who regularly capitalizes on these trends and pushes hard to make Neo-Nazism a regular component of American life.

Fuentes has carved a niche for himself within the Right Wing ecosystem by pushing the envelope beyond where others feel comfortable. With Alex Jones, whose entire grift is based around stoking white grievance while claiming not to be racist, Fuentes has regularly pushed back on Jones’s assertion that he isn’t prejudiced against people of color or Jews by saying the quiet part out-loud. His worldview is barely restrained Neo-Nazism, which makes the fact that he has met personally with Trump all the more disturbing.

In recent weeks, Fuentes has taken an interesting turn by warring with the campaign and the MAGA world at large. He has taken aim at JD Vance, the campaign apparatus, and recently declared “war” on the GOP and MAGA by mobilizing his upsettlingly large audience into changing the tone and tenor of conversations in the online space. Knowing full and well what he’s doing, he’s released one message after another asking “what has the GOP done for white people?” and claiming they are as guilty of attacking the white race as the Democrats.

Fuentes and others in the white supremacist space have also taken aim at Musk and the Tech Fascists, communicating critiques where people like Jones and the GOP have been reticent to go. They make points, actually, saying unrestrained wealth and power within the Tech Class is dangerous, while also sprinkling in their signature hate. What is happening here is a fracturing of the MAGA coalition, informing us where the relationships are waning and self-destructing.

The point is this: the Right is a minute group of individuals and organizations. They rely on a base of rural and working/lower-middle class voters, motivated by apocalyptic fears and racial prejudices, to bolster their ranks and make them electorally and politically viable. When the shit hits the fan, as it is now, we see glimpses of where their agendas and ambitions begin to separate and war. The white supremacists are interested in establishing an ethnostate and eventually removing people of color and vulnerable communities from the playing board altogether. The Tech Fascists want to control every apparatus and link them together by an internet of things-like system that they alone control. These are not compatible, at least not in totality. Sure, Musk and Thiel can espouse white supremacist ideas and traffic conspiracy theories, but the world they are seeking runs counter to what the other coalitions are seeking.

Fuentes will not win. He is a minor figure in a much larger game and his audience is nothing compared to the resources these Tech Fascists enjoy. Not only do they control large swathes of discourse, but they are historically wealthy due to the tech industrialization of the 21st century. It’s like a gnat warring with an asteroid.

What is more likely is that this battle will lead to yet another shift within the MAGA World and a reconditioning of the ideology. Musk and the other Tech Fascists will, over time, incorporate more white supremacist rhetoric and ideology into their appeals, ripping the vast majority of the white supremacist world from pissants like Fuentes and incorporating it into their larger worldview. After all, they agree on the lens. It’s just the direction that Fuentes and others insist on that is the problem.

Trump’s failures are continuing to mount. If he loses in November he will have been defeated in two consecutive elections and will likely retreat into being the figurehead he has always been. The MAGA base will love him until he dies and then they die. There is nothing that will change that. But the post-election environment, should he lose, will be a free-for-all for control over the movement itself. And the betting money is on the Tech Fascists and their ability to harness what has been created and the separate coalitions. This means a renewed push for Christian Nationalism. Further antidemocratic actions. A more vocal opposition to liberal democracy in general. Misogynistic patriarchy on steroids. And, yes, white supremacy as a foundational belief.

The moment now is fraught. We can and must defeat Trump at the polls, but elections are not the end of things. This is a battle we are going to be fighting possibly for the rest of our lives. It’s best that we pay attention to what is happening and how it is happening. Because these people are telling us everything we need to know.