We’re seeing a range of headlines today about the “MAGA civil war” centered on immigration policy. Is the point to put America to work for Americans (MAGA-coded “real Americans,” of course)? Or is it to open the flood gates for engineers from Bangalore and Taiwan to achieve maximum efficiency and the global dominance of Silicon Valley? Vivek Ramaswamy baldly went there with a long post arguing that you simply can’t staff Silicon Valley with native-born Americans because the country is mired in a “culture of mediocrity.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he continued. It’s worth reading because it distills a specific viewpoint, at least parts of which many people agree with and which has powerful backers in Silicon Valley.

But let me suggest that a “MAGA civil war” isn’t the right frame to understand any of this. MAGA of the 2024-25 era is more like an electoral machine built around Donald Trump. Itr runs very well. Who gets to run it and who does it work for? Good white folk from Middle America or the best and the brightest from South Asia? MAGA never really had core policies. It had impulses. A huge amount of canonical Trumpism, as it was articulated during the Biden years, was a raft of policies and goals that were little more than payback over the Mueller probe. With Trump now tired and on the way out, there’s an increasing free-for-all over who gets the keys. Musk? Bannon? Ramaswamy? The Project 2025 Heritage Crowd? JD Vance and Josh Hawley and anti-cat ladyism?

Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyering that would not only defend Trump’s self-proclaimed “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment but affirmatively take the fight to Trump and MAGA’s legal corruption and abuses of power. Today I want to return to that topic. There’s good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. Your mileage may vary.

Let’s start with the good news. There actually are some groups mobilizing to do this kind of defense. I’m not going to get into particulars or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment — but groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit or whatever other form the harassment or abuse it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It’s a more general effort to defend civil society. So perhaps it’s the immigrants rights group which is targeted by a state attorney general. Or it’s the independent press outlet being targeting by the federal or a state government or your run-of-the-mill billionaire. This is happening and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts to this end, but also umbrella operations getting commitments for pro-bono work from law firms and much else.

But there’s a catch. For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.