In the world of social media, things escalate pretty quickly, especially if you’re of the terminally online type that has apparently nothing better to do than troll. That’s what Elon Musk was, until he managed to buy himself a president. Then he set about to picking and choosing what bills the pathetic Republicans would be allowed to pass.

But now he’s hit a wall. All that money he spent on the election may have bought him Donald Trump’s ear, but it didn’t buy Trump’s MAGA followers. And for all the times that Donald himself has been able to mask his racism, his fanbase has never been any good at that.

What Trump has been running on since 2015 is a steady stream of hate for immigrants of any flavor. He was going to ban Muslims, he was going to build a wall, and now he’s promised his hungry cultists mass deportations on day one of his new administration.

His appointees have been gleefully telling every news outlet that will stick a camera in their face that not only are they going to Make America Milk-White Again, but that they’re going to deport entire families, down to the last newborn, to do it. Even if they have to change the Constitution, they’re going to get rid of the folks that red-blooded voters in the Deep South think aren’t American enough.

But Trump may have bitten off more than he can chew by promising that AND creating the fictional Department of Government Efficiency.

It was a recipe for disaster from the beginning. Either Trump was completely clueless, or he wildly underestimated the size of Elon Musk’s ego when he put him in charge of DOGE. He thought he was still just a troll. After all, the richest man in the world could be doing anything he wants. He could be on the beach getting a tan, the way Trump always wistfully imagined on the campaign trail. Why would he concern himself with actual policy?

You’ll have to ask him. He seems to respond quickly on X.

That’s the guy who literally wants to own space telling his detractors that H1B visas — like the one he got to come to America after inheriting a fortune from his father’s slave-staffed emerald mine in South Africa — are essential because Americans aren’t American enough.

And when Elon says he’ll go to war, he’s not messing around. He means he intends to bring the full weight of the government to bear to get his way. We know he can do it, he already single-handedly tanked an essential budget bill that would have kept Americans on SNAP from having to eat the wrapping paper from their empty presents on Christmas.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed in that fight and Elon backed down. But he made it very clear he has the influence to get what he wants from our elected officials.

This fight has been ongoing. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other reptile-brained taker that Trump is allowing to run DOGE with the First Buddy, are up in arms about deporting undesirable brown people but importing tech workers who they can pay pennies and will simply be grateful to be in America.

That may seem like a universally Republican Good Idea™, but MAGA doesn’t care if the tech bros make money. They just don’t want immigrants, period. If we told them that immigrants would come here and work for free and live in mud huts and eat bugs, they’d complain that those bugs are for Americans only, dammit.

And Elon’s war has already begun. Prominent right-wing and MAGA social media accounts on his platform X have been waking up this morning to a missing blue check mark and nearly all their followers gone. Musk, the self-described “free speech absolutist,” is literally silencing his critics one by one.

These aren’t small names: Laura Loomer, Owen Shroyer, Ryan Fournier, even Gavin Wax — the president of the NY Young Republicans — have all lost their “verified” badges and a significant percentage of their followers.

In fact, NBC News reported that an entire right-wing brand, ConservativeOG, had seen its media emissaries being taken down. That’s right, it’s not organic. They all collaborate and decide what messages they’re going to amplify. Right-wing populism is as manufactured as the turf at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk faced accusations of censorship Friday from fellow conservatives after several prominent right-wing accounts who had criticized Musk’s views on immigration said that they subsequently lost access to premium features on Musk’s social media app, X.

At least 14 conservative accounts said late Thursday or Friday that X had revoked their blue verification badge, cutting them off from a variety of premium features, including the ability to monetize their accounts through subscriptions and advertising revenue-sharing, according to a review conducted by NBC News. Some accounts said the number of those affected was far higher.

Many of the affected accounts said they were affiliated with one media brand in particular, ConservativeOG.

Preston Parra, a 23-year-old influencer and head of ConservativeOG, said he considered the actions by X to be a “political takedown” in retaliation for publicly disagreeing with Musk’s pro-immigration views.

Musk is going to find out soon that MAGA won’t go down without a fight. That 23-year-old influencer from the NBC quote above said exactly what MAGA was feeling: “If anyone thinks for one minute the REAL backbone of the right wing and MAGA is gonna stand idly by while these big tech gillionaire Silicon Valley dweebs who didn’t get bullied enough in high school, steal our country, they’re mistaken.”

Musk is going to war. Now we’ll find out which side Trump will take — money or MAGA.