What we're not saying about the MAGA feud

A quick history of Rich Bigot, Poor Bigot

If you’ve missed the recent MAGA infighting, good. It’s so humiliating. The short version is that it’s a little game of Rich Bigot, Poor Bigot. Rich Bigots like Elon Musk and Trump are embracing something called H-1B visa, allowing them to employ people from other countries—the vast majority of which are not white—to work for lower wages and longer hours. Then, by comparison, there’s what we’ll call the Poor Bigots, who don’t have enough wealth to massively benefit from their racism and want all non-white immigrants gone.

Disharmony ensues. Team Rich Bigot claims its exploitation of foreign workers is actually good for (white) America. Team Poor Bigot expresses the familiar concerns about such-and-such marginalized group already having it too good, how they’re going to push white people out, take over the country and so on. You’ve heard it before.

How will this all play out? Well, Rich Bigot, Poor Bigot is a game they’ve been playing in this country for longer than you might think so, there are plenty of clues!

Carrie Chapman Catt, women’s suffrage leader and unfathomable white supremacist.

In 1832, a politician named Thomas Marshall delivered this speech to the Virginia House of Delegates calling for an end to slavery. Marshall was “Opposed to slavery as a practical evil,” and while you might guess that evil had something to do with moral turpitude or the actual sin of slavery or its demoralizing tendencies, “He objected to slavery, not because it implies a moral turpitude, or because it is a sin to be the owner of a slave… Nor is it because of its demoralizing tendency that slavery should be abolished.”

Even though Marshall was speaking not even five months after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, he somehow had the fucking audacity to say, “The negro here is perfectly happy—he is treated with the most indulgent kindness—he is required to do the same work, and no more, that is performed by the white man—he is clothed with the best fabrics of the factories, and he is fed literally with the fat of the land. It is not for his sake, then, nor to ameliorate his condition, that abolition is desirable.”