It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.

Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.

Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”

The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.

This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.

With Trump’s takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump’s influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.

Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that outlined the “Southern strategy” to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti–civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about “crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order,” Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor’s incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.

Trump’s central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice. Take, for example, the case of Scott Greer, who was fired from The Daily Caller, the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson, for his ties to white nationalist groups. In an interview with The Ezra Klein Show, Christopher Rufo, the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for his crusade against critical race theory, argued that Greer should still be granted a platform, since Greer himself has since advocated against the white nationalist label. But this proves to largely be a distinction without a difference. Greer hasn’t so much reconsidered his core views on race; rather, the MAGA GOP has gravitated more closely to them—which means that he can rehabilitate his standing in the movement with minimal, and mostly cosmetic, changes to his rhetoric. He’s comfortable calling himself a “conservative” because that label now includes views that once were relegated to fringe white nationalist figures. Even the self-described “white advocate” Jared Taylor has criticized Greer and those like him for wanting to “have it both ways”—discarding fraught segregation-friendly labels for the sake of optics while claiming that the Trumpified GOP is the best vehicle for advancing the views associated with those labels.

On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown “right-wing identitarianism.” And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.