So, the America First coalition celebrated Kwanzaa – a communist nonsense pseudo-holiday recognized only by Kamala Harris and her fellow oaky Chardonnay-soaked lonely middle-aged cat women who typically teach in public schools – with a giant dust-up about foreign worker visas. Welcome to our new coalition! We’re going to have growing pains. We’ve got different factions with different views. We’re going to have to work a lot of things out. And we should do it without ritually disemboweling each other.
It turns out that the tech bro contingent of the coalition that elected Donald Trump has very different ideas about importing foreign labor to work in Silicon Valley. Their pro arguments rely largely on the hoary old cliché about how there’s a giant labor shortage and we can’t find Americans to do the work and blah blah blah blah blah. But they also ignore the life experience of millions of MAGA Americans who noticed that not only is our educational system garbage, but there seems to be systemic prejudice against regular Americans, particularly white males, both in the colleges that operate as a gateway to employment and with the HR departments of the big tech companies. Whether it’s true or not remains to be seen – and I don’t know how much either side is being accurate rather than self-serving – but there are a lot of lived experience stories of regular Americans who just can’t seem to catch a break and claim to have been replaced by clannish foreigners who seem to hold them in contempt.
American Sucks seems an odd flex for America First, though that’s a simplistic distillation of the Vivek argument. Still, that’s how many people read Vivek’s take, ironically set forth on fellow tech bro Elon Musk’s former Twitter, America’s true free marketplace of ideas. Vivek echoes some old critiques of American workers, calling them lazy and entitled, and let’s face it – a significant number of our countrymen, countrywomen, and countrynon-binaries are lazy and entitled. He was criticized for drawing on some cultural references about how we prioritize jocks over nerds. However, the jocks versus nerds thing was played out before the first Revenge of the Nerds sequel. He seems to argue that every American should be a party-free grind overseen by a domineering dragon mom focused on nothing but achieving high SATs and admission into the prestigious University of College. This, of course, is a terrible idea. We already suffer from a foreign policy run by people who’ve never been in a fistfight. The last thing we need is a culture dominated by people who’ve never kissed a girl, never chugged a Coors, and can’t drive a stick.
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Unspoken is the assumption that these people should rule over us, presumably instead of the jocks ruling over us. Now, anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons remembers when the local nerds took power and became hideous tyrants. The idea that nerds are some sort of self-sacrificing moral paragons immune from the flaws of human nature is silly. I don’t want to be ruled over by nerds. I don’t want to be ruled over by jocks, either. Frankly, I don’t want to be ruled over by anybody.
The fact is everybody can’t be a nerd, and everybody can’t be a jock, and we don’t want everybody to be a nerd or a jock. In fact, we don’t want anybody to be just nerds or just jocks. You can be multiple things. You can be a jock who can read, and you can be a nerd who can do a push-up. The idea that we should engineer society into utter conformity is ridiculous. We shouldn’t be engineering society at all. We also shouldn’t be destroying American opportunity by importing Third World foreigners for indentured servitude at sub-market wages. Look, the real reasons that tech companies want foreign workers are 1) our educational system largely sucks, producing halfwits; 2) colleges and tech’s own HR departments discriminate against white male workers, which creates shortages; and 3) the tech overlords don’t want to pay what it costs to get Americans to do the work they want done. They seek minions to toil for long hours in total obedience. You can have that if you have the whip of potential deportation to crack, but you can’t talk an American into it. He’s not going to take that guff, at least without a huge paycheck. So, they seek to overcome that obstacle via government intervention. And when we recoiled at it, they got a little upset.
Now, we’re going to work this all out somehow. We’re going to come to some compromise that at least attempts to address the legitimate needs of Silicon Valley and the legitimate concerns of Americans who feel excluded from opportunity. Sure, there will be some ham-handed attempt to slide in some giant visa giveaway into some omnibus bill, but here’s the new reality – one made possible by Elon Musk himself. We’re going to catch it. We can’t be fooled anymore. Hordes of hypervigilant autists with Twitter bullhorns are a game changer.
The beauty of X is that it acts as a giant spotlight. Senator Joni Ernst found that out when she decided to posture for her own advantage against Pete Hegseth. People looked deeper at her positions and figured out that she was a giant squish. Then they publicized, it not in the regime media, which loves narcissist/maverick Republicans like Joni Ernst, but on X where the truth couldn’t be gatekept. That spotlight got her to change into a MAGA avenger but quick.
The same thing happened with the visa imbroglio. It came to our attention and thousands of folks on the spectrum immediately started researching visas and what they found was that the clichés were all baloney. These weren’t super-genius prodigies that we were bringing over, but mostly entry-level timeservers. And it wasn’t just in the tech industry. Did you know we have to bring in McKinsey consultants? Apparently there’s a shortage of eager Buttigieg clones that we must address by importing Third World peasants. How about accountants? No Americans can count? And did you know that giant law firms are somehow short of attorneys willing to work for a quarter million dollars a year? Hey, if America has any problem, it’s too few lawyers and too many unicorns.
The radical transparency made possible by X is going to change everything. No longer can secrets be kept or issues obscured by regime media, whose main job appears to be curating the debate by hiding inconvenient truths and promoting convenient lies. Of course, the media is trying to take advantage of these disputes within the America First coalition by pushing this as some giant schism. But you don’t need to be a historian – I’m sure there’s some visa listing for those to come in and do history for five dollars an hour – to understand how coalitions develop. Coalition partners work out their issues. That’s what’s going to happen here. The tech bros can’t really go to the Democrats who hate them with a passion. America Firsters can’t win without tech money and savvy. We need each other. We’ve got to make this work. And we will.
But one thing we need to do when we are debating is to understand that it’s a debate. It’s not personal unless you make it personal. You may feel strongly that Vivek's critique was wrong or even insulting. Get over it and grow up. We’ve been taught that disagreement must be a bloodsport, but that’s not true. Save the vitriol for the real enemy, the communists. You can have people tell you things that you think are wrong and survive. You don’t always have to go for their throat. Try going for their argument instead. And to their credit, many, if not most, of those of us within the America First coalition did just that. If you were on social media last week, you saw a bunch of facts and arguments used to respond to Vivek’s arguments. Yes, there were insults, and there was some emotion, and there was some critiques that crossed the line into ugly bigotry against Indians, but those were not the primary response. The primary responses were facts and arguments. That’s how we win. Not by becoming leftists. Not by trying to stamp out any hint of non-conformity but by confronting arguments, debating them, and figuring out a solution. We’re going to do that. And that’s why we’re going to win.
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