Gaby Del Valle on ideological conflict in MAGAworld
Our next preview from Issue Fifteen
Sporting a black hat that read “DOGE” and a black eye to match, Elon Musk left the Trump White House last week with an appropriately undignified bit of Oval Office pageantry. The balance sheet on his brief tenure: one new child, with his Neuralink subordinate Shivon Zilis; some 300,000 lives lost already due to his cuts to global health programs, according to one Boston University researcher; the title of world’s wealthiest individual lost and recaptured; the alleged impairment of his bladder function from excessive ketamine use. To quote the man himself: “Concerning.”
Elon’s departure is a reminder of the tensions that pervade the MAGA coalition, despite the show of force with which Trump opened his new reign. In her exploration of these fault lines, Gaby Del Valle shows how “competing moral visions” divide Silicon Valley oligarchs from family-values traditionalists, even as they have made common cause. Del Valle gives us a portrait of a powerful political alliance that is nonetheless, like Elon Musk’s urinary system, struggling to hold itself together.
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Competing Moral Visions | Two Paths for Pronatalism
GABY DEL VALLE
All is not well in the house of MAGA. There are profound ideological disagreements papered over by similar outward goals: reshoring industry, valorizing the family, ridding the body politic of undesirable immigrants. Today’s right-wing factions have very different visions for how to achieve these lofty aims, to say nothing of underlying values. The coastal tech moguls and heartland ethnonationalists inhabit fundamentally separate moral universes that intersect only in the person of Donald Trump.
Great article, as far as it went...And to be honest, there's really no way to explain or quantify the mass epidemic of gross imbecility of the part of the American electorate that sent the MAGA dumpster fire to a 5-alarm level. We are much in the same boat as academicians of the 14th Century trying to explain plague by way of astrological charts-after all, what causes otherwise rational people (on every income level,( not just trailer-dwellers in Alabama) who see that the Kool-aid is laced with poison and go ahead and drink it anyway? The only short-term response I can think of is for the news media and various world leaders to stop treating Trump like a rational player and start working on a quarantine playback that doesn't mince words; call it " lies", not " misinformation, and refuse to meet with him under any circumstances. Send a 3rd-level rep. Call a spade a damn shovel when you trip over it in the graveyard at midnight...The less serious attention he gets, the weaker he becomes. Failure's not an option here, people....
C.W.Renfield