Vivek Ramaswamy ignited a bit of a firestorm today on X.
Let’s start with the obvious: on November 5th we voted to secure the border and deport the illegals. Completely sealed: no more illegal entries. Total deportation: if you’re in illegally, you have to go back. But what we didn’t vote for was the termination of immigration. And so, Ramaswamy:
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.
I think most of the anger over this is twofold:
- nobody likes to be told that their country sucks. To say that our culture doesn’t promote excellence is to say that our culture is substandard.
- the American people, on the whole, are not keen to import workers – not even good workers. This is on the basic truth that American jobs should by and large be filled by American workers.
Ramaswamy does not go on to say that we should just keep importing workers – I think some people are misunderstanding what he said, and some are likely deliberately misunderstanding it because, remember!, there are lots of people who’s whole existence is based on disliking Trump…and this includes a lot of people on the Right. The rest of Ramaswamy’s post is a call to arms, as it were: that we can make excellence our focus as part of that whole Make America Great Again thing.
We do have to acknowledge our flaws. If we can’t, then we’re doomed. Do you know why South Africa is heading towards a Third World collapse? Because the majority doesn’t want to be told that they suck and if they want to get ahead they’re going to have to ask the Boers for instruction. They’d rather wallow in memories of Apartheid as the excuse for all ills with confiscating whitey’s farms as the cure. The only way a person, an organization or a country gets its act together is by acknowledging what’s wrong and then setting about fixing it.
Ramaswamy correctly states that we have been praising the second rate, the unimportant…and I’ll add that we also laud the downright self-destructive. Think about the number of movies and shows that hold up some psycho as the hero. We can’t deny that Anthony Hopkins played the psycho killer excellently in Silence of the Lambs…but the coda of the movie with him heading off to eat the pretentious psychiatrist is hideous. So, too, the end of No Country for Old Men with the bad guy getting away…possibly after murdering a completely innocent woman. Yes, of course, the bad guys sometimes get away with it…but sanity requires that in our story telling they don’t. Lambs should have ended with Starling arresting or killing Lecter…just as Bell should have killed Chigurh to finish up Old Men. This is not to take away the skill or artistry of those involved in those productions…but The Wild Bunch ended up with the bad guys all dead and quite uselessly over nothing. That was the fitting end to violent criminals…and the sort of story that is useful for society.
We need to start holding up the good, the true and the beautiful – popular culture is never a social mirror…it is what you’re aspiring to. And if we’re aspiring to bad guys winning and psychos being cooler than sane people, then we’re going to have some problems. Like, for instance, all the problems we have right now.
In order to Make America Great Again our first order of business is to fix our problems. Deporting all the illegals won’t resolve the fact that about 70 million Americans used illegal drugs last year. That is 20 percent of us. One in five! This does not include those who booze it up too much nor does it really cover marijuana as that is legal in a lot of places these days. We still must deport all the illegals…but the American drug addicts are a huge problem. So, too, things like people having sex before marriage, getting divorced, adultery…with our pop culture pushing these pathologies as positively healthy. That has to stop. No, you can’t say “first amendment!” and call it a day…do you want broken families and drug addicts or do you want sober people in healthy families? You can’t have it both ways – you’re going to get what you insist upon and if you don’t insist upon sobriety you’ll get drunks.
We can’t leave people lying around in the streets. We must do something with them. We must demand that people perform or punish them. Do you realize how tough this is going to be? Kicking out Jose and not letting Patel have a visa isn’t going to Make America Great Again. Its going to take a bit more than that. Do you have the iron in your veins to get it done?
So, yes, I firmly believe that American jobs should be filled by Americans…and that companies should pay wages that Americans want, not what some guy who doesn’t want to live next to an open sewer in Mumbai is willing to take. But this does mean we need Americans who are fit for the task. That means sober, stable, dedicated people who know that life isn’t a free ride. Hindu immigrants to America are doing very well – overall they make more money than white Americans. And its because they are stable, sober and work their butts off. Do you want that? Well, guess what…
Blogs For Victory 
In a similar vein, I ran across the following and it struck me, not from a political perspective but from a logical one. Here we have two men who are at the top of their field, which is law, making the most specious arguments as if they are making legitimate legal points. Their arguments struck me as proof of the mediocrity of our educational system, as the two men are touted for their positions in academia but illustrate poor thinking and lack of understanding of the legal process.
Trying to make the point that the 14th Amendment bars Trump from taking office, Evan Davis, former editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, and David Schulte, former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, cite the wording of Section 3 of the Amendment, and argue that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency because he supported an “insurrection.”
However, and I wonder if this is because their credentials are purely academic and not based on actual litigation, where evidence has to be proved and not just asserted, their alleged support for their position is simply ludicrous.
Think about it. Their first “authoritative source” for the charge of inciting an insurrection is an accusation that he incited an insurrection. No, Lawyer-Boys, an “authoritative source” would first based the claim on the legal definition of “insurrection” and then on a legitimate legal proceeding which found Trump guilty of this crime. Not a partisan legislative body voting on an accusation. (And no, adding a couple of putative Republicans to the Democrat vote does not make it “bipartisan”.)
Their second “authoritative source” is the finding of a hearing, in which Trump was not formally accused and had no way of mounting a defense, which also failed to provide a legal definition for the term “insurrection”.
Their third “authoritative source” is what is once more called a “bipartisan” committee but one that did not even address “insurrection” but merely “extensive evidence” of trying to “overturn the election” and “inciting violence against Congress”.
In other words, these men, who flaunt their credentials as legal scholars but who ignore the most basic requirements for producing proofs to support accusations, cite three accusations made outside the normal process for prosecuting a crime to support a claim on their part that violating the Constitutional rights of a citizen by finding him guilty without due process is supported by a different element in a Constitutional amendment, justifying the disenfranchisement of every Trump voter. They cite allegedly extensive evidence of trying to overturn an election ( which is based on the extrapolation that if the requested investigation into alleged election fraud showed extensive fraud then the election MIGHT be overturned) in their own effort to OVERTURN AN ELECTION.
This is the kind of distorted thinking, nurtured by a defective educational system, that creates the mediocrity cited by Ramaswamy.
But the plot thickens. Now it seems that the Left has redefined the term “insurrection” to mean it is “against the Constitution and not the government”. I’ve been trying to figure out just what this is supposed to mean, and I think I might have hit on the reasoning.
Donald Trump “incited” a publicly supported request of Congress to temporarily postpone final certification of the submitted vote tallies for the specific period of ten days, to allow Congress time to examine the election and votes to determine if further measures were called for. This was in complete compliance with the 1st Amendment’s right to petition the government for redress of wrongs. While some violence did ensue (and the question of who incited IT is still under investigation) there has not been a single statement that I have heard quoted, by anyone involved, regarding overthrowing the government, much less assuming its powers. That is why the Left has had to insert its new claim that “insurrection” is really “against the Constitution and not the government” because that lets them claim that the protest was an effort to overturn the Constitutional rules on certifying the votes and maybe even to assume the Constitutional powers of Congress to certify votes.
In other words, they seem to have abandoned any effort to prove insurrection in the normal, legal, common definition of the term and simply tried a lateral move to claim it is not an effort to overturn a government but overturn the Constitution, and not to assume the powers of a government but the powers granted by the Constitution.
It is still not borne out by the facts, but it is complicated enough to convince some people, especially given the massive media repetition that Trump was TRYING TO OVERTURN THE ELECTION!!!!! Once that idea has been drilled into the national consciousness, it is a relatively short step to claiming that trying to overturn the election is really insurrection as it is an effort to overturn the CONSTITUTION.
Two wholly separate issues, but an argument that can be made effectively to the politically illiterate, especially when they are already primed to accept Trump as the source and agent of all that is evil.
In addition, in the Colorado case the Supreme Court did address the underlying claim and rejected it – they both ruled that the States can’t enforce that provision and that the assertion was without merit…they nuked the entire case (had to, because if they hadn’t then each blue State, one after another, would have brought the case against Trump).
But these self-appointed legal arbiters are quite comfortable citing a complaint that was rejected as being without merit by the US Supreme Court because, after all, the Democrat legislature in Colorado approved of the complaint.
Sadly, this is the state of jurisprudence in our country these days. True, these clowns are not judges, but if the Left had its way they would be. Even just as former heads of college law reviews as their only credentials they still have enough respect in some circles for some people to pay attention to them.
The Death of Merit: How America’s Best Companies Lost Their Way
In the realm of Unintended Consequences, let’s look at a few facts and then see where they might lead us. “94% of new hires at leading public companies were so-called “people of color,” with black women taking the lion’s share of these roles.”
“Lion’s share”. Let’s say that is more than half, so go with 48% of this 94%, just for the sake of argument. I don’t have enough data to speculate about how many of these are pure diversity hires, or how many have college degrees, but the statistics indicate that many if not most were hired solely on the basis of their identity rather than qualifications. In any case, this is a very visible segment of the workforce.
Then look at“plummeting stock returns and organizational inefficiencies” and the inevitable conclusion is going to be that hiring black women is a bad idea because they will have a negative impact on production and growth. This perception is going to linger long after DEI is in its much-deserved grave, harming all future job seekers who are black women who are actually qualified for the jobs they want.
The really funny bit is that I bet it was expensive DEI consultants who told these corporations that they needed to increase “diversity”…which isn’t even an increase in diversity because its all about hiring people who think, talk and act in the exact same way.
Good point, if indirectly referenced—a lot of the new jobs were created to support the DEI initiative, not real jobs that actually produced anything but virtue signaling.
And you are right—they define “diversity” as “people just like us” if the “us” is in a select victim class.