If you’ve been ignoring U.S. politics, which is probably a healthy thing, then you might have missed this Oligarch Post piece on the Six Republican Factions. Don’t worry, it’s an archive, you won’t be giving Bezos any clicks.
I started a Maltego graph of MAGA world five years ago and it became a behemoth - almost 1,600 articles linked to 7,000 entities. I mostly stopped updating it last November, but there have been a few forehead slappers this year I just HAD to update. Given that we’ve got this information on the GOP’s divisions, we can get some mileage out of pulling that graph out and looking at the details.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Very detailed network analysis, a variety of high resolution graph images, you either love this stuff, or you don’t. I’m sorry, I’m a bit of an information hoarder …
Factions:
These are the names of the six factions defined in the article, bare of any connections, so we have a nice image for the email preview. Once I added the people from the MAGA graph, this is what we know. I find this first layout (force directed) to be most legible, but some of you might find value in the hierarchical layout. The graphs used in this article are available here in FactionsTemp, but you’d better save copies, they will not be there come October of 2025.
Here’s what the factions looked like when the named members and their neighboring nodes were extracted from the main graph. There are 183 articles that cover the connections between 291 entities. If you want to know who did what with whom prior to 2025, it’s in there.
And if you’re trying to suss out who will work with whom after Trump resigns, gets removed, or dies … those red lines denote conflict, the blue are alliances, green are where the money flowed, and the yellow ones are things that were important, but didn’t neatly fit into the other three categories.
Fractions:
Although the label “MAGA world” no longer fits so cleanly, the Republicans and their erstwhile populists are about to Change Partners. I’ve been dragging this graph around for at least twelve years, it first appeared in Imperial Alliance Networks back in 2013.
I’m able to look at this dispassionately, because I love all of them equally, but they lack meditative equipoise regarding each other. Here are the more notable red line relationships from the graph, with the caveat that this is 2020 - 2024 information. The highlighted nodes are the faction labels - only five, we do not have any Tech Right people involved in conflicts(yet).
The hottest fire on that graph was Lin Wood, who was having some sort of difficulty affecting his judgment, and there was an episode where he was dropping voice recordings with a variety of people. He’s off the board for 2025 as far as I know. Mike Lindell would like to be active, but I saw a report from Colorado’s 9News recently, and he’s going to end up living in a van down by the river. He’ll get a little play on slow news days, but he doesn’t have a fortune to piss away this time.
So there’s a much trimmed graph, with the factions highlighted. The big graph with its 1,600 articles is fairly objective, but utterly useless as a visualization tool, it long ago became a curious sort of graph database for me. When I pull out a snippet of it like this and pose it for your viewing pleasure, I’m trying to be your objectively neutral analyst, but it’s always going to be subjective. Examples of subjectivity - I know to leave that little shit Fuentes and blockhead Charlie Kirk, because they get along just as well as Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. Susie Wiles is Trump’s brain, it’ll be interesting to see where, or even if she casts allegiance once he’s down.
Contemplation:
Graphs like this are interesting if you’re trying to sort out what’s going to happen next. Shady Prance will be our next president, of course, but the list of people who are excited about that would fit on one short bus. Can he reposition as a technocratic caretaker? That would be best for the country, but would require him to realize he’s got no hope and set aside ambition. Maybe we need to find a lesser mountain, one of soft, easily weathered stone, and carve he and Gerald Ford together.
This is big picture stuff, things I can’t begin to get paid for as I watch, so as the MAGA breakup occurs my historic information will only become more so. And it IS breaking up, listen to Cult College’s YouTube for the particulars.
Conclusion:
This is NOT what we are doing for September, nor is it what is planned for Q4. You guys are getting a personal safety boot camp and then we’re going to go look at a weird, stagnant corner of things that needs some nice bright sunlight on it. But this was what was on my mind when I couldn’t sleep on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday morning.
Extinction burst before formal extinction of behavior