MAGA civil war ramps up as Trump ally Laura Loomer lays into Elon Musk — and loses her blue check
“[Musk] has removed my blue check mark on X because I dared to question his support for H1B visas, the replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants,” Laura Loomer tweeted Thursday.
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Your support makes all the difference.Another volley has been fired in the ongoing MAGA civil war that’s been playing out online between hardcore “America First” acolytes and Trump-backing Silicon Valley oligarchs over an immigrant worker visa program — and now Elon Musk is being accused of personally punishing his critics.
Laura Loomer and other far-right activists who have railed against the X (formerly Twitter) owner and his DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy for supporting H-1B visas and criticizing American work culture allege that Musk removed their X verification badges and ability to monetize their accounts in an act of retribution.
“[Musk] has removed my blue check mark on X because I dared to question his support for H1B visas, the replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants, and I questioned his relationship with China,” Loomer posted on Thursday night.
Loomer also claimed in a X Spaces chat on early Friday morning that the social media platform had temporarily locked her account for 12 hours, claiming it was due to her sharing private information in a tweet.
A self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” who was famously banned from Twitter before Musk purchased the social media platform, Loomer also took the Tesla CEO to task for boasting he’s a “free speech absolutist” while simultaneously silencing his critics — a pattern that’s played out before.
“Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for supporting original Trump immigration policies,” she wrote. “I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.”
Loomer added: “Elon has decided to retaliate by removing my blue check and demonetizing me. I guess he doesn’t really believe in Free speech after all.”
The failed Republican congressional candidate wasn’t the only “OG MAGA” critic of Musk’s who said they suddenly saw their X account privileges stripped amid the Trump coalition rift over high-skilled immigrant workers.
Dozens of other far-right influencers and pro-Trump activists, including Infowars host Owen Shroyer, the MAGA group ConservativePAC, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, and Women for America First executive director Kylie Jane Kremer, claimed that Musk had taken their blue checkmarks away.
“X removed my checkmark. I have no clue why,” Students for Trump chair Ryan Fournier posted. “I didn’t update anything and my @ConservativeOG badge was removed. I’ve been verified since 2016. Odd.”
Loomer also pushed back on claims from Musk allies that her verification had been temporarily removed because she had changed her profile picture, calling it “a lie by X to cover up the fact that they just nuked the checkmark on my account and my subscriptions because I dared to criticize H1B visas today.”
Additionally, during a X Spaces conversation which featured a number of other accounts who lost their verifications (and an account that has been accused of being Musk in disguise), Loomer said X locked her account for 12 hours because she shared private information. According to Loomer, the tweet in question included an FEC document that blurred out the address.
A representative for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Musk has not responded directly to the claims he stripped Loomer and others of their X privileges, he did tweet on Thursday night that “any accounts found to be engaged in coordinated attacks to spam target accounts with mute/blocks will themselves be categorized — correctly — as spam.”
X Spaces host and Musk acolyte Mario Nawfal claimed that the world’s richest man was essentially saying “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” prompting Musk to agree with him.
The National Pulse editor and War Room co-founder Raheem Kassam responded to Loomer losing her blue tick with a sentiment that seemed to be shared across the MAGAsphere. “This is unreal. ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,’” he tweeted.
“We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender - and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline,” disgraced former GOP congressman Matt Gaetz noted. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”
The uneasy and tenuous alliance between the grassroots Trump faithful and the late-to-the-party tech bros was almost certainly going to splinter at some point, especially considering the tech industry’s reliance on engineers and other high-skilled workers from foreign countries.
However, this week, the tension simmering under the surface quickly boiled over when Trump named Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an artificial intelligence adviser. Soon enough, Loomer and others brought up Krishnan’s advocacy for removing country caps on green cards, specifically India.
Besides criticizing H-1B visas, which Trump had long said he wanted to severely limit, Loomer also lobbed a number of racist and bigoted attacks against Indians, including a suggestion that people from India generally have low intelligence.
Meanwhile, in their defense of Krishnan, Musk and Ramaswamy have only infuriated the far-right base further by doubling down on the need to import foreign workers, running counter to MAGA’s anti-immigration position. Making matters worse, Ramaswamy argued that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” while blaming Saved by the Bell for the lack of qualified American engineers.
Musk, whose sudden ascendence as Trump’s “first buddy” has made him a target within the MAGA tent, also continues to walk into minefields with his nonstop commentary on the issue.
At one point on Thursday night, the mega-billionaire agreed with a pro-Musk conservative account that “tech is right” to hire foreign engineers because American workers “are r*tarded,” not exactly endearing himself to the “America First” crowd in the process.
“That pretty much sums it up,” Musk stated. “This was eye-opening.”
Meanwhile, Trump himself has yet to weigh in as the online war has exploded into public view — though cracks have already started forming in his relationship with the tech mogul.
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