We devoted considerable attention to the subject of Mr. Ramaswamy last year, concluding — among other things — that he is an elitist, liberal, and con artist — not necessarily in that order — pretending to be a MAGA cheerleader. He was a registered independent while running in the Republican primaries and did not vote for Trump, or anyone else, in 2016. Yet he wants us to believe he identifies with American First.
Trump has not even been sworn in, and this clown is predictably making a mess. As we, and the folks at Yale School of Management have noted, when Ramaswamy gets caught in a lie or a faux pas, he typically pivots and pretends to adopt a different line of BS, acting like he never said what he just said. He also has a habit of making an extreme statement, then disowning it, if not rapidly contradicting himself, when he receives blowback. It was no accident that he floated his H-1B visa trial balloon over the Christmas holiday, hoping it would go unnoticed when the nation was distracted. How well did that work out? If anyone thought Trump could be moved toward abandoning his base, they were mistaken.
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As Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld concluded (which is obvious): “Attention-seeking is core to the Ramaswamy playbook. He thrives on it—whether that attention is positive or negative.” In other words, we are dealing with a narcissist. This is no place to digress into the pathology of narcissism, but these individuals crave power and will destroy those around them.
Readers might wish to pause here, and refresh their memories of Trump’s The Snake parable. It provides context for what lies below. Those with a low tolerance for bullshit might want to proactively consume any calming medications before proceeding.
The Conservative Treehouse has the receipts on Ramaswamy’s current anti-MAGA proclamation, and approaches this subject from a slightly different angle than is found here. Some of Ramaswamy’s offending content is below, with two American Flag emoji appended to the end, in case the text was insufficiently cynical.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken [sic] from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
Got that? Americans are not inherently dumb, it’s not their fault. This sort of vapid pontificating, trying to pass for legitimate discussion, is similar to spousal abuse. First tell the spouse they are crap. Set them up for additional abuse ahead. We had to hear this sort of empty happy talk from this clown during the GOP primaries, now he can’t wait to lecture us again, as soon as he was provided a platform. Using the same recycled buzzwords from his failed presidential quest: honest, truth, etc. He nevers tires of hearing himself sermonize.
Ramaswamy is such a full-blown narcissist that he does not realize the sort of mumbo jumbo reproduced above does not work at scale. It might work with the 5% he was able to con during the GOP primaries (a number which perpetually declined during the primaries as more people had their fill of him), but for all his supposed smarts, he is politically tone deaf. Paul Ingrassia accurately describes the problem with allowing tech bros to guide political affairs:
Though smart about technology, they have revealed themselves to be political neophytes. After all, political science is a science with its own set of rules and lessons, one that like any other science takes years to master and involves a totally different set of skills than what is needed to succeed in technology, or even business.
Ramaswamy should have stuck to his assignment to identify budget fat. We can speculate that he was a manchurian candidate, tasked with representing oligarchic interests while deploying a veneer of conservative values. Reconsidering his 10 Truths platform in retrospect, there is nothing relating to America First or hiring Americans. Opposing open borders (a no-brainer) is the closest he came to enunciating an America First philosophy.
We now hear Republican candidates utter phrases by rote like "America-First," "we need to make things here," and "we're the party of the working class" — without actually stopping to ask what these phrases mean, or why exactly we're saying them.
Amazon’s blurb for the book:
Today's conservatives know what they’re against. They’re anti-woke, anti-globalist, anti-big government. But what exactly do they stand for? The fact that this is a hard question to answer is a damning indictment of the modern Republican Party which has abjectly failed to articulate an affirmative alternative to the left’s vision. Ramaswamy calls on the conservative movement to articulate exactly what it stands for, or else warns of another illusory “red wave” in 2024.
In Truths: The Future of America First, Ramaswamy shows exactly how honesty about the most important issues will get our country back on track. The America First movement emphasizes the issues that bring us together, not what divides us. It asks that we put our country over politics, merit over grievance, and truth over lies. Ramaswamy tells us the truth about our political system, and the people who control it, and exhorts us to exercise our right to self-governance again.
Ramaswamy has clearly been tasked with a mission — to sow doubt on the Right and then tell us what we are supposed to stand for. This is hardly a difficult question to answer. We know how we got here and who was responsible. His close connection to an Obama insider suggests who might be pulling his strings. Ramaswamy is clearly in bed with the Murdoch forces, who tried to push him forward as a Trump replacement. His Amazon sales rank for his latest insipid book translates into sales of maybe 15 books/day, 5,500/year. Which suggests those still buying his bull represent an ever-decreasing population.
I would say that we are in deep agreement that the sole objective of US immigration policy should be to ask the question of what advances the interests of America, . . . But if I may just hone that slightly, not the interests of America in some vague sense. Because that runs into the circular question of what is America? Does it run into the immigrants who have come here as inclusive of them or not? . . . I would say what advances the interests of American citizens who are already here. That should actually be the sole purpose of immigration policies. There's a class of people in America, called the United States citizens . . . That class of people, who are the citizens of the United States of America, the sole purpose of our immigration policy, the sole question should be what advances the interests of those citizens who are already here? I think the meat of this comes to the question of what exactly is skilled immigration actually? What ought skilled immigration look like?
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He is suddenly singing a different tune. Trillions of dollars are at stake in this debate. It is difficult to find any statistical analysis or informed journalism on this subject in the corporate mainstream media. Those who control that media have the most at stake. Anecdotal accounts make clear that this is a massive problem, of long duration. The issue is not whether America has sufficient technical workers. It is mostly a question of their pay rates.
The good news is the overwhelming and powerful response the Ramaswamy/Musk trial balloon elicited. Yes, the H-1B visa system is long overdue for reform — particularly to remove its indentured servitude aspects — but the public has made clear it is not willing to allow in hordes of foreign workers so oligarchic corporations can enjoy further profits.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has extensively researched the problem of American decline, neatly encapsulated the issue:
Don't mistake the H-1B visa discussion for a ragebait culture war distraction or trolling. It gets to the heart of Trump's mandate, which is to restore dignity to working-class Americans. He needs to sideline the people in his orbit actively undermining that goal by unapologetically advocating replacing American workers with foreign ones. Unabashedly calling American workers or their culture too lazy and stupid to excel should be grounds for dismissal. It's not just wrong; it's galling.
This is the moment for a Left/Right coalition to emerge and commit to labor. The Left should abandon its hatred of Trump and the Right should abandon its love of Musk and both should unite around protecting American workers and restoring the American Dream for the working class.
Precisely. She comes to her conclusions from in-depth research and interviewing a cross-section of Americans. Her conclusion is that the broad American center is largely in agreement on all major issues, whether abortion, gratuitous foreign wars, immigration, crime, etc. Trump’s historical mandate was to recognize this and supply solutions with broad appeal across class, race, and economic divisions. His opposition is largely comprised of White, college-educated females.
The problem with importing much of the third world to America is they bring their cultures with them. How well is that working out for Europe, facing an epidemic of “Asian” (i.e., Muslim) violence? Below are the 50 leading H-1B sponsors.
Several principal subjects need to be addressed, beyond the predictable reversion to type of Ramasway. American First does not mean wholesale importation of foreign workers, including those from cultures entirely antithetical to the American ethos. These subject areas include:
Who brought Ramasway to the dance?
Will Trump eventually (hopefully sooner than later) be forced to fire the clown?
The liberal roots of Musk, Ramaswamy, and most of the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Just as the neocons fled the Democratic party when it became too peacenik for their liking after Vietnam, and perverted the Unitparty into sponsoring gratuitous wars for a quarter century, many who vociferously opposed Trump/MAGA only a year or two (or less) ago, have suddenly jumped aboard the Trump Train. Friction will inevitably ensue. It’s beginning now.
WHO BROUGHT IN RAMASWAMY?
Defeat is an orphan, victory has a thousand fathers. Many of those now flocking into the MAGA fold have previously said the most vile things regarding Trump. Some of the more notable names include Tucker Carlson or RFK Jr. Carlson is far too extensive a subject to explore here. Stay tuned in this regard. As Trump once said in regard to Rand Paul: “I never attacked him on his look, and believe me, there's plenty of subject matter right there. That I can tell you.” There is an embarrasment of riches regarding Carlson’s quirks.
The Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox obtained Carlson’s texts in discovery. Carlson dismissed the evidence that the 2020 election was obviously stolen from Trump. These texts included:
"We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait."
"I hate him passionately. ... I can't handle much more of this."
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest.” [Referring to the] “last four years.”
“But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.
Carlson fancies himself a kingmaker and has actively pushed forward various candidates to staff the Trump administration, most prominently J.D. Vance. Some of these candidates would be disastrous, such as RFK. Jr.’s daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox, a sensationalist author noted for passing fiction off as truth and being nutty in general.
Trump includes Carlson in his entourage for events such as UFC fights, which is an example of both men using each other. Carlson has hitched his wagon to Trump’s; Trump gains Carlson’s audience and free positive publicity. But allowing Carlson to call the shots is fraught with perils. Don’t think Trump does not consider this. Carlson has the historical revisionism gall to tell Roseanne Barr he has “always agreed with Trump's policies,” even “losing friends over it.”
Ramaswamy has been given a platform by Carlson and was undoubtedly pushed forward by him in conversations with Trump. Musk and Vance can be added to the list of those who despised and denoucned Trump before surrendering. Vance’s son is named Vivek and their two Ohio families socialize, sharing familial ties to India. The Ramaswany subject will be a key test for Vance to permit us to decide if he is 2028 presidential candidate material. Will he abandon his friend when Ramaswamy’s true colors become impossible to ignore?
Unlike those who in past political lives trashed Trump, Ramaswamy did not enter politics until after Trump was already in office. Ramaswamy, with no political background other than having contributed to a far-leftist candidate, was smart enough to plagiarize Trump’s act and claim he could improve upon it. It takes a special kind of narcissist to pull this off, but as the GOP primaries wore on, less and less were buying his blather (particularly older individuals who are not as naive as younger ones), to the point where he was polling in the 5% range before he withdrew. Ramaswamy craves power. This is obvious.
The question is how much Trump has already perceived about Ramaswamy. Some presidential appointments are strategic, to wall off individuals where they can do the least harm. If Ramaswamy shuts up and returns to focusing on government waste, he will be useful for Trump’s objectives.
FRICTION BETWEEN AMERICAN AND FOREIGN CULTURES
As is the case with racism, generalizing between individual members of culture, and the culture as a whole, is inappropriate. Kash Patel is an example of an individual of Indian descent who is wholly American in his affinities. Many individuals of Indian descent possess values antithetical to American ones. There is a reason the founders were wise enough to limit the presidency to only natural born citizens. Witness Kamala, who spent most of her childhood in Canada, or Obama, who was educated in an Indonesian elementary school. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal, but this does not mean all are. Witness incoming Trump White House deputy chief of staff for policy and the president's homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, i.e., Trump’s primary political aide. Or Lee Zeldin to head the EPA. Some of the strongest pro-American individuals, domestic and foreign, are former inhabitants of the various republics of the Soviet Union.
WHAT ARE MUSK’S TRUE COLORS?
No definitive answer will be provided to this question. As an insightful liberal friend points out, Musk is autistic, which means he lacks empathy. He drives his workers hard and is not afraid to fire them, including 80% of Twitter’s staff. He has powerful financial motivations. His political stances always seem to coincide with his financial interests. His net worth, post-election, has climbed by a hundred billion dollars or two. Tesla’s shares doubled in price over six weeks after the election. His wealth accumulation in recent weeks dwarfs his personal stake in the Twitter acquisition. Or any campaign funding, past and future, he might bring to the table. Twitter had a broken business model, antagonizing many (most?) of its participants by banning them and other forms of censorship. The value of a fully free speech platform must inevitably become greater than the original manifestation. It is an investment which has already indirectly paid off for him, and may eventually provide a decent ROI.
The modern Edison, Musk has revolutionized two major industries. His contributions to the American economy are profound. And to the cause of free speech. The question is how much of this is altruism or self-interest? He probably does not know himself. He said he got into electric cars to save the planet and predicted oil would rise to $200/barrel long ago. It is now at $70, below its midpoint in price for this century. He wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet. Its climate, 50% further from the Sun than Earth, is inhospitable to human life. He is obviously yoked to his childhood dreams. Which is fine. But with his vast fortune, now pledged to support primary opponents to RINOs bucking Trump, Trump has little choice but to humor him. Just as Trump declares some of RFK Jr.’s climate activism to be nutty, he will not allow any individual to usurp his agenda. He just needs to handle Musk more carefully than anyone else.
Musk, and his Silicon Valley colleagues are liberals. The fact that they have abandoned the self-destructive cult of the Democrats to flee to the only available option does not mean they have changed their spots. Take David Sachs. When he and his fellow liberal tech titans interviewed Trump for 49 minutes on their podcast, they were surprised to conclude: “We have been fed a narrative of what President Trump looks like.” Welcome to the Real World boys.
Laura Loomer is in a spat with Musk, and she accuses X of working to silence her. Musk is an active utilizer of H-1B visas, and wants even more. Online critics have pointed out how much he benefits from exploiting the program. Ramasswamy, who has been tasked with bulk of the gaslighting to allow Musk to avoid some of the kickback, did not coincidentally release this during the slowest news cycle of the year during Christman week. If they thought this would slip in under the MAGA radar unnoticed, they thought wrong. Ramswamy has provided himself a potential exit strategy. “. . . an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation)” Next he will tell us why Americans have been dumbed down, but there is insufficient time to do much about this. Which is essentially what he has already done. Unmentioned are the vast numbers of skilled American workers who have been laid off in favor of foreign replacements for decades. There is no lack of informed dialogue this Musk/Ramaswamy gambit deserves. It becomes clear the alleged worker shortage is largely for low-wage staff.
Silicon Valley has long abused the H-1B visa program, importing subservient foreign workers (especially from India) to undercut the wages of Americans. This problem is hardly confined to Silicon Valley. Teams of American software engineers have been replaced by immigrants or those residing abroad and working remotely. Call center employees and tech support staff too. There are reasons billionaires’ net worths have soared in recent years, while the rest of us tread water or sink. The billionaires are perhaps (maybe not) less reprehensible than the mass importers of essentially slave laborers imported to work in the meatpacking industry or the sex trade, assisted in by cartels and Alejando Mayorkas.
Because of its government contracts, Musk’s SpaceX corporation is mostly staffed with U.S. citizens. But somehow SpaceX is highly profitable, earning billions annually. The privately trades shares of firm reportedly have capitalization of around $350 billion, about 40% owned by Musk.
The myth that Americans (especially minorities) are too stupid to fill technical positions needs to be addressed. For far too many decades the teachers’ unions and their captured politicians have dumbed down the American education system, particularly in urban school districts. 50 years ago Jamie Escalera, a Bolivian immigrant teaching mostly Hispanic high school students in the Los Angeles school system, began teaching them advanced calculus. His remarkable results were first disbelieved, then actively opposed by the education/prison pipeline overseers. His story was popularized in the movie Stand and Deliver. Reagan touted Escalera’s achievements and in 1981 convened a panel to explore what was already considered a national crisis in the education system.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education produced a 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. The report was premised on the overwhelming belief that American education was faced with “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a People. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." It was a war waged by the Left against the nation. The results are visible in full prisons, and an active welfare state. Those trying to bypass the real reasons for a deficit of skilled American workers, and resort to importing replacements from abroad, only ensure continuation of the social costs and public sector burdens which gave rise to the MAGA movement. The Tea Party movement before that and Reaganism are older still. America has plenty of smart kids condemned to a life of crime and poverty by the educational system.
Soviet Union schools, unhobbled by teacher unions, routinely provided students with rigorous educations in the STEM subjects. After the Soviet collapse, a brain drain ensued, and many PhDs and others fled to the West. American schools were incentivized not to produce results. Things have degenerated so far that Chicago school board members no longer even bother to conceal the open corruption of the local teachers’ union. This is hardly a new problem. Mark Twain observed: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
The 1983 report recommended increased teacher pay and training, smaller class sizes, and longer hours and days in the classroom. Except for the latter, these reforms were tried and failed miserably. But teachers’ unions laughed all the way to the bank and political empowerment. If there is one constitutional amendment alongside congressional term limits which is obviously needed, it is a ban on public employee unions. They are among the reasons all democracies are temporary forms of government.
Education is too essential to leave to limousine liberals such as Diane Ravitch, who sent her children to private schools while pontificating regarding the virtues of public education. Cracks began to appear in the late 19th Century when states began enacting mandatory publicly-funded education. The states which traversed this path first began to see increases in teenage suicide and incarceration rates. This has metastasized today, thanks to connivance of the medical/pharmaceutical industry with schools, into the phenomenon of brain-altered students shooting each other.
Urban high schools routinely graduate illiterate students and those unable to perform simple arithmetic. It is difficult to conclude this is not by intent, to create an underclass dependent on state support and reliable Democratic voters. Mandatory public education was appropriate for a democracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when large numbers of immigrant children needed to be assimilated. After over a century and a quarter of increasing liberal insanity being implemented in our schools, combined with the pharmaceutical industry doping up students on drugs such as Adderall, Ritalin, Xanax, Celexa, Proloft, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Prozac, and Lexapro, is it any wonder that adolescent shootings and suicides are now routine?
It is hardly a secret that feeding SRRIs to adolescents, especially males, results in homicides. [But the pharmaceutical industry has obviously paid to suppress this information from online search results.] The one thing gang members have in common is that they all attended public schools where their self-worth was devalued. Democracies inevitably reach their expiration dates. One unique way developed in America to ensure national destruction was the public school system. The cost in local property taxes to perpetuate this scam is substantial. We need to abandon the socialist solution and bring in the private sector. Nothing could possibly be worse than the current situation.
Immigration into the core nation of any empire is mandatory. Citizens of the core exhibit a birthrate under the level necessary to maintain population levels. This is a historical truism impossible to ignore. Rural families produce a population surplus. Once the population becomes concentrated in urban areas a remarkable decline in birthrates arrives. This holds true for other species as well. When animal populations are held in crowded spaces, births decline. This is an organic process with a solid evolutionary basis for preventing overpopulation. America needs immigrants, the question is which ones are allowed in.
Musk is one of the very few sounding the alarm on the coming depopulation. The late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling was in the vanguard in demolishing the myth that the world was going to see unfettered population growth. By the second half of this century the globe will be experiencing an unprecedented population decline. Native-born Americans are already reproducing at a negative rate of sustainability. COVID “vaccines” only accelerated the rate of decline. Spengler:
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up [for] a while. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
Wholesale importation of fellah-types — rural, unsophisticated individuals, the detritus ledt behind by collapsed civilizations — has had extraordinarily negative consequences for America. How many of these will be deported in coming years is not yet known. As is the case for any poison, it is the dose which is determinative. America requires regulated immigration to remain dominant. Mass immigration would prove a disaster, as we know. We can follow Western Europe down the drain or begin deportations. This debate is about numbers as much as anything else. It is long overdue.
Let’s translate this discussion into an analysis of who benefits. Suppose 100 American software engineers making $150k/year are laid off and replaced by the same number of H-1B recipients who are paid $50k/year. That represents a net loss of to the U.S. Treasury of the income taxes on the $100k/year each, x 100 = $10 million/year and $100 million over 10 years. Some of those missing income taxes will end up being booked as increased profits by the employers and flow through to the Treasury and for purposes of state and local income taxes. On the whole, this represents a loss of tax revenue to government jurisdictions. Unemployment compensation for those laid off must also be factored in. The laid off employees will incur a lifetime loss of health benefits, pension benefits, etc. There is also an increased cost to the employers from the loss of skilled employees. Many visa recipients are hardly stellar workers. They can make up for their deficits by working longer hours. If this is not an example of the basis for the MAGA revolution, nothing is.
There are approximately 600,000 H-1B visa recipients. Over only a 10-year span, it is clear that trillions (probably far more trillions than anyone realizes) of dollars are at stake. If you wonder why the wealth of the oligarchic class soared over the past five years, through the pandemic and inflation, part of the reason can be attributed to utilizing third-world workers, whether they are imported into America or work remotely from their home nations.
America was built by the people who live here, and the generations which proceeded them. Every new arrival automatically qualifies for Social Security and Medicare. Which are ponzi schemes destined to soon reach the end of their rope. We can’t even provide for those who paid into the system, let alone new arrivals. A condition of any visa must be forfeiting any claim to future government benefits.
If you need further details why the H-1B issue is a scam, Raheem Kassam and Paul Ingrassia can provide them. Musk and other oligarchs are making the Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage to advocate for an issue near and dear to their financial interests. Ramaswamy moved out front first, absorbing most of the arrows. This allowed Musk to hang back and muddy the waters by conjuring an image of America falling behind because it is unable to compete for the brightest techies. Which is a fairytale.
Musk is resorting to painting the MAGA voices as racists. His brand, recently at all-time highs, is about to take a big hit if he does not back off. Laura Loomer, et al. accuse him of censoring their comments on X. As noted above, we are dealing with an autist, and all the negative consequences of such when they enter they enter the political realm. Musk has publicly stated he has Asperger's syndrome. This liberal recent convert to MAGAism is calling the MAGA base “unrepented racists” who should be booted from the Republican Party.
This issue is rapidly becoming entertaining. Trump must somehow find common ground and chart a middle course through the political shoals.
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