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Dec. 28, 2024 - The Charlie Kirk Show
47:14
THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 67 — Saved By The Bell and the H-1B Debate
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Hey everybody, the mass migration debate with Jack Posobiec and the gang.
It is thought crime.
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Here we go.
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Okay, everybody.
It is thought crime.
It's not Thursday.
It's just a floating day here.
By the way, before we get to Saved by the Bell, we have Blake, who is an undisclosed location in South Dakota.
Am I right?
That I guess the state, right?
Yeah, you are right, Charlie.
We are in furthest South Dakota, and no one will find me from there because it's a big state with very few people.
Did you see the sun today?
Maybe.
You look like you've seen some sun.
I was going to say, you're looking very tan.
Great to see you.
I don't know where Jack is.
He was just on.
In the meantime, can we talk about Tyler?
By the way, Tyler's huge ASU fan.
I totally support him.
I have nothing against ASU. I'm cheering for ASU big time, by the way.
They are the first game on New Year's Day.
Blake, no eye-rolling or interrupting, okay?
We're going to have real men conversation here about college football.
How screwed up is the college football playoff this year that Oregon has the hardest path despite being the number one seed?
So I'm torn because I love the college football playoff because for guys like us...
Love!
Love it because...
But it's been a total failure so far.
ASU could not be in this position, right, with a bye if it wasn't for all this.
But I totally agree.
I think the seeding for the 12 is screwed up.
So I like the expanded 12-team playoff.
I like the general consensus of you take basically the four champions, the top-rated.
I even think the bye schedule is kind of okay, where usually it's going to be the big four that get the bye.
But Oregon is getting totally shafted.
It's terrible.
Oregon has the hardest game.
Oregon's the number one team.
So they have to play a team they've already beat in the Rose Bowl.
In the hardest.
The venue of the Rose Bowl, you could argue, is the most difficult, most pressure.
A lot of pressure.
I agree.
It's not like loud.
It's just like it's playing in a Super Bowl.
Well, the Rose Bowl people are very happy because it may not have worked out that a Big Ten, because they were going to try to honor a Big Ten team.
This is all rigged.
They did this to try to get ratings on New Year's Day.
Totally.
So they're taking a former PAC team against a Big Ten team.
So now it's two Big Ten teams in the Rose Bowl?
Like, this is what they wanted.
And this is going to be the biggest pressure.
If Oregon were to be successful, they go to Dallas to probably play Texas, but maybe ASU. ASU or Texas, they would get very lucky.
And you're going to the ASU game, right?
I'm going to Atlanta.
I think it's hilarious.
Oh, it's front row seats on the Texas side.
I bought them before we even knew.
They were cheap over on that side.
So my whole family is front row.
We've got eight flags.
Are you serious?
Oh, we're hanging over.
You're going to get on TV. Oh yeah, because we're in the TV shot because it's on the side.
I think that's great.
And then Texas is 13.5 point favorites on New Year's Day.
Oh yeah.
Which could happen.
Yeah, it could happen.
But Arizona State will give it its best thing.
Scataboo.
So get this.
If Oregon wins...
They advance to the Cotton Bowl to then play Texas in Dallas.
So they play the toughest first round bye game.
Despite being the number one seed.
Despite being the number one seed because Ohio State is arguably one of the best teams in America.
Who they've already beaten.
Yeah.
Ohio State may be like the third best team in America.
By the way, they might beat Oregon.
Like, just to be clear.
They might be the second best team.
I think they're the second best team in the country.
They might beat Oregon.
Like, no doubt.
It's like right in there.
And then they're going to have to play like an on-fire Texas in Dallas.
In Dallas.
In Jerry Stadium, which I will go to.
Which is going to be like 90% Texas fans.
90%.
And if they are lucky enough to win that game, they go to Atlanta to likely play Georgia in Atlanta.
In Atlanta.
This is what the number one seed gets you.
Does anyone else think this is pathologically insane?
Well, this is why with NIL, and with the new playoff, you actually are at a disadvantage now being a team.
You used to be at an advantage being a team like Oregon in a small town like Eugene because you dominated, you didn't have competition.
So you just got all the money.
Now with NIL, now it's shifted.
So not only are you having to compete in a small town with big town people with big town donors, but then you have big town fans that show up to these big town games.
You're never going to have a game in Portland.
You're never going to have a game in Seattle.
That's a really smart point.
So as far as a fan base, we're cooked.
By the way, who's in the Fiesta Bowl this year?
Oh, it's Penn State, Boise State.
I was ticked off that ASU didn't get slotted in the Fiesta Bowl.
Well, think about how great that would have been for us.
I mean, it would have been unavoidable.
It would have been us versus Penn State.
So in some ways, you wish they would have been rearranged.
Anyway, all screwed up.
Needless to say, Jack, should we have more H-1B visas in this country?
Yeah.
No, absolutely not.
The two most important things happening on the planet.
Zero or at least net zero.
So Jack, for the audience that was enjoying their loved ones, not staring at Twitter all day long, what happened?
Did we experience MAGA Chernobyl?
Well, we experienced a MAGA dust-up, but MAGA Chernobyl is ridiculous.
That sounds like something that some George Soros operative would want to put out into the ether to try to give the Democrats some glimmer of hope that this country is possibly interested in coming back towards them again.
No, there was no Maggie Chernobyl.
And no, the country is totally over all you, the woke Arati and the wokeness that got us into the situation that we're currently in.
But what happened was probably a predictable and generally, I think, forthcoming argument and debate between members of, shall we say, the tech right and members of the MAGA base as pertains to the level of immigration, particularly we're talking about legal immigration now to the United States as pertains Interestingly enough, directly to the tech right.
So do people remember that when Trump went on the All In podcast a couple of months ago, it was during the campaign, and at the very end of it, he said, oh, well, you know, I think that when a graduate comes out of high school, we should staple a green card on the back of that diploma and then put them into college, etc.
And I mean, you just saw people from War Room and Steve Bannon at the time completely push back on that.
And I believe Caroline Levitt Had said something about like, oh, he was just making a suggestion.
And, you know, kind of never went anywhere from that.
Well, we have another dust up around the very same issue of H1Bs wanting to come in or really tech CEOs wanting H1Bs to come in because they're incredibly cheap.
They undercut American labor, they undercut American tech workers, American STEM, etc., etc.
And Then, you know, people are going back and forth with Elon, Mike Cernovich got involved, and then Vivek Ramaswamy put out a post saying that it's not actually economically based, that it is in fact culturally based, and essentially that American culture is wrong.
And since the 1990s, it has been wrong for favoring essentially entertainment and fun and life and, you know, kind of jocular culture and athletics and charisma over like, I don't know, spelling bees and math studies.
And he made some really I wouldn't say obscure, but really pointed and plucked out 90s and a little bit of early 2000s TV and Movie references, like the film Whiplash, which is like, by the way, it's a film about child abuse, if anyone hasn't actually seen it, in regards to a kid who's at a school that's kind of like Juilliard.
I've seen it, by the way.
But then also talked about Friends, Boy Meets World, and Saved by the Bell, and essentially offered those as things that we should not emulate.
And, you know, see here, More math tutoring, more sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books, less TV, more creating, less chillin', more extracurriculars.
By the way, less chillin' from the guy who can sing Eminem verbatim.
Most normal Americans look skeptically at quote, those kinds of parents, more normal American kids watch those kinds of kids with scorn.
If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you achieve.
Now close your eyes and visualize the families you know in the 90s or even now who raised their kids according to one model versus the other.
Be brutally honest.
Yeah.
So a couple things.
I need you to educate me on Saved by the Bell.
Blake, how old are you again?
I am 34 years old.
And Jack, you're like 36, right?
80,000.
You're 80,000 years old?
Yes, I am.
Do you not share your age?
Is this some sort of woman thing?
I'm actually curious.
No, I'm 40. You're 40. Tyler's right on the...
I'm on the bubble.
I'm younger than Jack.
This is not some sort of trick.
I'm just saying I'm 31, so the Saved by the Bell thing...
You missed it.
You guys were kind of teasing me.
It legitimately wasn't my thing, so I need you to educate me on it.
But let me just first just say...
Teen comedy.
No, no, it's great.
No, I'm not even criticizing it because we had our own stuff.
We had Full House, right?
We had, I don't know if Full House was as much in your guys' demo, but we had Full House, we had Even Stevens, right?
We had That So Raven.
Even Stevens is your issue.
Yeah, so that was my, like, strike zone.
Beans.
But what I think Vivek was trying to say, which if I was advising him, I would have not sent that tweet.
And Jack, this is where I want you to go into explaining Saved by the Bell, is that it could be read, and I don't think he meant it this way, as he was crapping on people's beloved culture and country, especially the Gen X generation that wants America to get back to that reference point.
Is that fair to say, Jack?
Because the Gen X kind of roar was the undercurrent of MAGA.
Gen X was the most pro-MAGA demographic this election cycle.
And they look at that America's like, no, that's actually what we want to get back to.
Don't crap on that.
Jack, respond to that and also explain what is Saved by the Bell and the cultural significance.
Yeah, no, you're generally accurate.
So I think Vivek, JD and myself are all pretty much like within a couple of months of each other.
So this is actually that really sweet spot of like late 80s, early 90s.
So it's technically like most Gen Xers probably didn't watch Saved by the Bell because it would have been considered too young for them.
But also, you know, older than yourself.
And it really is that sweet spot.
I call it centennials.
I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole.
But essentially what you're saying, Charlie, is correct.
Is that it is not just the...
And by the way, Mario Lopez, of course, is still, you know, pretty much a mainstay of daytime TV. Somehow he still looks the exact same age.
We all got to find his doctor, right?
And there is an aesthetic element here as well.
Because this is it's not quite So Gen X would be more like John Hughes, which is something that got referenced earlier on War Room today by Gavin Waxx.
And by the way, John Hughes movies from the 16 Candles, Breakfast Club, Home Alone, these are all movies that myself, guys like Still Boneless and others were making memes of in 2024 to describe the America that we were trying to return to.
And so Saved by the Bell, yeah, it definitely kind of fits in that canon because it's America before it became whatever we are now.
And so attacking this, not only did it shift the, I think, the current of the argument, but it just really hit on a nerve for a lot of people who are like, wait a minute, this was a beloved TV show.
And yeah, you know, Screech was the comedic relief or the Stephen Urkel character in Family Matters, another thing that they've mentioned.
But nobody hated Screech, right?
He was always portrayed as a character that was a member of the Friends.
And even though he was always getting into trouble, people would always treat him with respect.
And a lot of the episodes were like, hey, how do we help Screech out of a jam?
There was never a, this is the guy we pick on and hate.
It was never like that at all.
And I don't really think there were any of those types of things in the 90s, even in the 80s with John Hughes movies.
Anyway, there's this whole undercurrent of MAGA is turning America back into this.
And it felt like that was what was getting attacked.
Well, and the history here, too, is like, I mean, there's so much sacred here in Saved by the Ball, because you encapsulated it correctly, which is like, it's tail end Gen X older millennials.
So the oldest millennials were the early 80s born millennials.
Those are the ones that...
Guarded Saved by the Bell.
Like, it's their life.
All of us, really, throughout our entire lives here at high school, modeled our lives, basically, after Saved by the Bell.
Is that right?
It was that big of a deal.
Oh, that big of a deal.
And our first guy, and we were saying in the chat...
Huge!
Huge!
What's the premise of the movie?
Of the movie, the TV show?
It's a slapstick.
It actually started as a show called Good Morning Miss Bliss, which started early in junior high.
So you actually followed the character Zach as he kind of built this friend group throughout high school.
And it was the entire...
That's an element of his entire high school.
So you actually have an entire fake built high school culture that's a centered American 90s high school culture that basically for over a decade every American modeled themselves after.
Your first crush wasn't Jennifer Aniston and friends.
It was Kelly Kapowski in Saved by the Bell.
Your friend that you knew.
Kelly Kapowski, let's go!
And by the way, Tiffany Amber Thiessen, who has actually connection to Arizona.
Great person.
Great family.
They're trying to raise their family the right way.
Great example.
But you have Zach, who's the guy.
And then you have the jock.
And then you have Screech, rest in peace, who's now dead.
Which, by the way, is also an element of this.
How dare you, you know, incite the name of Screech, who's dead.
But everybody basically modeled their friend group.
Friend groups, I would argue in America, became friend groups modeled after Saved by the Bell.
Keep on educating me, guys.
So what would be the cultural ethos?
And Jack, let's connect to the H-1B debate.
What did Vivek say?
Again, Vivek is a dear friend.
I'm dialoguing with him right now as I'm doing this.
And you guys know that.
I've been giving him fair and honest feedback on this.
And he's great.
What did Vivek say in his tweet about Saved by the Bell?
And why do you think that was a miscategorization?
Blake, Jack, whoever.
I think it was a miscategorization big time.
What did he say first?
Please, start with what he said.
He said that, well, prefacing that to explain what he said, is that he essentially was saying that We idolize or emulate the two main characters are Slater and Zack, and Zack is sort of like the preppy pop-collar cool kid, whereas AC Slater is your typical athletic jock, and he's on the wrestling team, etc.
Whereas Screech is your geek.
These are all archetypes, and the John Hughes Breakfast Club plays into that as well.
But what Vivek was saying was that essentially he didn't view this as a play on just a group of friends and, hey, these are a bunch of different identities.
He was saying that we are venerating, you know, the jock and the preppy cool kid over the, you know, the sort of nerdy, geeky character of Screech.
And I mean, I've never viewed Saved by the Bell that way, to be honest.
I don't know that we, you know, And on the above hand, he says here, a culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers.
And so, I mean, I could go on about this, but, you know, I would also say that, you know, that really is American culture in a lot of ways.
Neil Armstrong is one of these guys.
Yeah, let me just get to the nerd here.
So, Blake, what do you make of this?
Because, Blake, you're the smartest person.
Come on!
That's why I had to interject.
I was going to be nice about it.
No, no, no.
Blake knows I introduced him as the smartest person I know.
He went to Dartmouth.
No, no, seriously.
But what do you make of this?
Because do you err on the side that the Spelling Bee champion should get Pamela Anderson?
Where do you stay on this whole conversation?
It definitely is...
So first of all, I can't say too much about Saved by the Bell.
I'm in that perfect age range where I remember Saved by the Bell as it aired after Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which is what I was watching when I was four years old, of course.
Wait, you saw Saved by the Bell, the new class.
That's a totally different thing.
No, the new class is totally...
It did also have Screech, though.
Yeah, it did, but you're talking about something totally different.
You know, I guess I don't remember.
I just remember the voice that was like, Saved by the Bell.
I can't remember how it went, but it went like that.
No, you want us to sing you the whole entire theme song?
Jack and I can promise you the whole thing.
No, I don't.
I've heard you try to sing it.
When you wake up in the morning and you...
No, but culturally, I guess, I think what really stood out, the reason that this went and it got, we're currently at 73 million views on this tweet from Vivek.
I think what stood out to people is it wasn't just, it was the fact that it was so locked into this 90s cultural thing, and I think what people picked up from it, it was almost this sense of, honestly,
the word that comes to mind is resentment, that There are people who are essentially they're like angry that they weren't more popular in high school or something and it's America's job writ large to be punished for this and also this tone of like You watched Saved by the Bell,
or your parents watched Saved by the Bell 30 years ago, and as a result, America needs to have more H-1B workers who will fill this or that job.
And if you pause and think about that, that is completely insane and doesn't make any sense, but it's a type that you run into.
You can see accounts like this, where people will just overtly say, basically, we need to have more immigration because I am bitter and resentful towards you.
There was this book that got profiled a few years ago in NPR. It was called, This Land is Our Land.
An Immigrant's Manifesto and the author was an NYU journalism professor named Suketu Mehta and he basically said we need lots of immigration to America because the British colonized India and basically like I'm angry about that and this is a form of reparations.
If you scratch at it you can very easily run into this almost resentful attitude at ordinary Americans and I think that is really what set people off with what Vivek was saying.
It's that you could pick up this thing of like, yeah, like basically, why didn't we, you know, venerate people like me more when I was in high school?
And that's a problem.
And as part of it, he's also just indulging these weird myths because in real life, the jock versus nerd thing is not Jack and I talked about this.
The jock versus nerd thing is not really that real.
I believe jocks on average actually, like high school athletes, get better grades than other people do in college.
Well, and that's actually- College athletes get better grades than other kids in college.
so there's there's actually a plot line in saved by the bell that where the zach morris who's essentially the main character of it i think it's like towards the end of the run because it's he's it's a senior year in high school and he takes the sats and it's it's portrayed as kind of comedic but he ends up getting like a 1500 on the sats without even studying for it so it's like No, it actually does show things that can happen and that gets accepted to Yale and all this stuff.
And it turns out that, no, as a matter of fact, there is high achievement and that's not necessarily tied towards, you know, performing the specific set of weights.
Like it's not an Excel spreadsheet that you can be talented and you can be smart and also play sports or like you could play lacrosse or you could be track and field, you could play baseball, whatever.
That doesn't like one doesn't negate the other.
And this is kind of a strange sort of like very Hollywood imposed kind of identity archetype that, you know, we do then seek to use throughout society.
But real life doesn't always match up with that.
Now, just to steal man of Vivek's argument, for the record, I'm very much against H1Bs.
And I think this tweet could have been worded differently.
But don't we see some truth in what Vivek was saying?
And I'll start with with Blake, that there has been this slow motion decline in the mediocrity, that there has been this acceptance that we're no longer going to pursue excellence, that we're no longer going to be the best at things anymore.
or Would you agree there's some truth in that, in the larger theme of what Vivek was trying to touch on here?
Absolutely.
I definitely think it's a big problem.
And as conservatives, we've noted this over and over.
A lot of liberalism is trying to convince people to accept failure and mediocrity.
Oh, our cities are just supposed to not be well run.
What I will note is a lot of that is downstream of the same ideology that gives us massive amounts of immigration, which is the DEI agenda.
It's like the HRification of America.
Why are we so okay with so much mediocrity?
Well, one thing is we have...
So much of that is we're not able to handle the fact that different people have different amounts of talent and this manifests in terms of people getting different grades, different test scores, and ultimately working in different jobs.
And where have we seen this?
Who's been most affected by this?
Well, we know from the Harvard admissions lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court that probably the people who get discriminated against the most, we have A lot of East Asians.
And we just have ordinary, nerdy white guys from Iowa or wherever who like engineering.
Those people get massively discriminated against by colleges, by employers, by government, for that matter.
And...
So the DEI agenda, the same thing that says we have to have tons of immigration and we have to think that basically is going to vilify the historical population of America, that's the same ideology that's saying we need race-based school admissions, we need race-based hiring, we need to get rid of standardized tests because we don't like what standardized tests tell us.
And I think the obvious downstream effect of that is you're getting jaded people who aren't caring as much about You know, success.
They aren't getting the message that if I work hard, I will be rewarded because instead they're being told, if I work hard, I will still just be vilified for who I am and preferences are going to be given to other people who work less hard, who have less ability because they're a politically favored group.
You can't just suddenly throw out that that happens and say, oh, well, no, we broke America's culture, and the only way to fix it is we need to have a bunch of H-1Bs for my cousins from Bangalore.
I have a little bit of a thought-crimey statement to make.
I'm going to be careful about how I say this so I don't end up causing everybody self-harm here.
But I actually think that the hypocrisy in the tweet is that Steve Urkel and Screech are both very American.
They're not transplants.
And they're not family members of transplants.
They're not kids who are here on Visa.
They're not family members of first-generation Americans, as far as we can tell.
Screech is a very American nerd from Bayside High.
And Steve Urkel is...
And they're both in love with very similar characters.
This is really weird.
Both named Lisa.
So you have this whole situation...
I actually think that by inviting in cultures that are outside of America that are not integrated, you are actually displacing the screeches and the Urkels of the world.
And that's what's causing so much chaos, depression amongst young men and women, high school women, because they don't really have a place.
And that's the whole point.
And I actually think Nicole Shanahan's tweet that I think you retweeted, Jack, was so pertinent, which is like, hey, we should be really kicking the tires on Americans first who can do these jobs that can go into the STEM categories here.
Should we not have the conversation about how many Americans we've displaced from high school and college that could be great engineers that now are not?
And then think about the societal effects, and I was saying this, and I won't be as cavalier about saying where I think that this has led to, but I think, I'll just say straight up, I think part of the reason why we see so many trans kids and furries in high school and people who are socially displaced now from those friend groups, think about it, in that very Saved by the Bell friend group, if all of a sudden you no longer have a screech that has a place in that friend group.
Right?
Because you have people who are from various cultures that are now taking those spots because Screech's entire identity was becoming valedictory.
Screech's entire identity was being good at school and being the nerd and doing all those things.
That's really problematic from a cultural aspect When you talk about, yeah, we want to return to that.
And to go back to Charlie's point, the Gen Xers want to go back to that.
The Gen Xers want to think about high school from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to through the time period of Saved by the Bell.
That's the American that we want to return to.
to, they want to return to.
And part of this is the problem culturally.
It's not just the fact that they're taking jobs.
They're taking culture that seeps all the way down into the very element.
That's what's so hypocritical about this entire thing that I think is kind of-- I don't know.
I want to say hypocritical.
I don't think it was trying to be hypocritical.
I think it's more...
Of a curious point to this is that those are Americans.
Those are American friend groups that are being destroyed.
Those are American lessons and classes and identities that are being destroyed in this process.
And it should be looked at.
I would go so far as to throw out that if you look...
I'll even say, I don't think this is how Vivek meant it, but I will say that the problem with it is that it falls also, or I should say not the problem with it, but the reason that it made people so upset Is that this falls into the exact same types of woke arguments that you hear as anti-white culture,
that they will say, oh, you know, the the toxic white males fighting over a, you know, the cheerleader and the the white student who goes on to become the valedictorian, like with Screech or, you know, and all the rest of it.
You know, this is like Quote, unquote, what Joy Reid would call white America and say, oh, we're against all of this.
And it's like, guys, this is just the type of stuff that we're trying to get back to in a place where, by the way, Saved by the Bell does, if you look at it, as it turns out, have a fairly diverse cast, certainly for the early 90s, but also nobody cares.
There's no sit-down episodes where we're going to be like, what is the ethnic background of A.C. Slater?
Is Lisa Turtle, where are her parents from?
Nobody cares.
It's just everybody going through high school and being normal kids and going through it.
You know, Charlie, you talk about this with your high school all the time.
It's like, yeah, you can have that stuff, but you don't need to make it your entire identity.
That's what everyone in society does now, and it's destroying everything.
And that's why the tweet comes across as anti-white culture, too.
I got it wrong, by the way.
It's Laura from Family Matters, not Lisa.
We have Laura and Lisa.
So, Jack, this only begs, this then kind of goes into three or four different directions.
This tweet was only one piece of a larger mosaic of chaos.
What else was going on around this discussion, and where are we as of right now?
Yeah, so I mean, yeah, funny about it.
It's like, Jack, do you plan to have a do a podcast with Charlie about Saved by the Bell over Christmas break?
And it's like, no, but here we are.
This is really all about the H1B situation.
And that early on, people were saying that and I guess there was this guy who was appointed to some AI position, which isn't even like a real position.
It's like an advisor thing.
But people found comments of him saying there should be no cap on H1Bs.
And that's what really pushed a lot of the MAGA base into high overdrive to say, wait a minute, President Trump campaigned in 2016 on ending the H-1B immigration system because number one, it's not high-skilled immigration.
That's a lie.
And number two, it's not immigration at all.
It's this weird like indentured servitude kind of system.
And what I think got a lot of people really riled up is the fact that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and sort of the tech bros, if you want to put it that way, they were throwing down hard saying, you don't know what we're talking about.
You don't know what this is all about.
This is about the best and the brightest.
Elon has said over and over, we're going to lose.
We're going to lose to China if we don't do this, which it's interesting because, of course, China, as anyone knows, does not import It's just
the best and brightest.
You know, the Einsteins.
It's, you know, just the, you know, the Von Braun's and Operation Paperclip has been talked about.
And it's like, nobody's talking about that.
And so, you know, Elon has posted another tweet saying, maybe this is a helpful clarification.
I'm referring to bringing in, by legal immigration, the top 0.1% of engineering talent, which is like a huge difference from what Everyone was talking about it first, because when you're talking about people that are at that level, we already have a visa category for them, and that's called the O visa.
So Raheem Kassam, by the way, is here on an O visa.
And that's something where, yes, you do have to work for it.
You have to show accomplishment.
You have to show that you have received awards, membership in organizations, things like that.
Look, there's abuse in the O system as well.
But it's way, way different than this just flood of jobs that keeps the middle class out of these STEM fields and out of the tech sector and biotech as well.
like h1b is and there's a slew of other issues here it's you know h2b there's j1 there's all sorts of things we can talk about but the reason that this one has come up is because h1b It is a program that a lot of these tech firms really do rely on because it brings in the cheap labor.
Well, and Charlie...
And another thing...
And I'll just say this while on this topic.
Hold it just for just one second.
Blake, here in Arizona, we have a company.
I'm not going to say the company's name.
It's a big company that brings in a lot of...
I know, but I'm not going to say it.
Yeah, I just don't want to get in trouble and have to deal with people.
But like...
But there's a company that has basically run roughshod over, this is part of the reason why Arizona's in the place where it's in today.
And that's not because of the foreigners that are voting in our elections, although it is very clear that some municipalities are allowing foreigners to vote in our elections, but they have completely dismantled the culture of this given big city, large city in Arizona.
Because they've brought in a ton of families.
And this goes back to the cultural elements of it.
So we no longer have, for example, there's unsustainable little league teams in certain areas because this culture has now invaded these neighborhoods, right?
So you're talking about actual, you now have schools that are completely turned upside down because it changes the dynamics of the entire neighborhood and area.
You now have different stores and shops.
I'm not going to say anything.
That go into different...
And again, I'm not saying that there's not big cities.
Arizona, Phoenix is a big city, so you're going to have different cultural pockets for sure.
But we're talking about a one entity, one corporation that's a big multinational corporation has completely turned...
Upside down, the culture of this one city in basically the span of a decade.
And this impacts politics.
So now the politics of the entire city are different because people don't have homes.
So now it's less conservative.
You now have other companies that have come in, like 10 or 15 other companies that go back to Jack's point here with H-1B visas, where they're flooding Yeah.
jobs from international folks that are coming in that they're saying that we just need we don't have enough it's like arizona state's the largest university in america you don't have enough people that you can hire give me a break this is the the outcome that happens and it completely changes the dynamics of your entire community so so blake let me ask you this and we only have about 20 minutes Before I do, let me, and I'm cool staying on this one topic, guys, because it's so rich.
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Remember, I have to tell you something.
Look at your tat.
I got to text you something.
Blake, you and I both are friends with some of these tech bros, of which are very good people.
Can you explain to our audience, though, that their insistence on the H-1B, how passionate they are for it, and what is behind that?
Well, so part of it is, I think there's different universes of H-1B, and you think about where they come from in tech.
I mean, some of these guys are very wealthy.
They're a part of a literal global elite.
And I think once you get high up enough into that sphere, you are a little detached from the life ordinary people live.
Elon Musk, super talented person, has built some enormously successful things.
But if you get down into the brass tacks of it, You could say Elon Musk is almost homeless.
Does he even have a community that he lives in where he would have to reckon with the practical implications of extremely high levels of immigration from any place to it?
Elon Musk is a guy where he gets fed up with California and he'll just leave and he'll go to Texas and then he can go anywhere else he wants.
He can basically be a true nomad.
But And ordinary people aren't like that.
And also just a lot of H-1B isn't like that.
I've seen some interesting numbers.
Like if you look at it, there's H-1Bs that are for US tech companies like Google, Facebook, Oracle.
But then you can also look at what are the other companies that are getting it.
We've had, if you look at H-1B sponsors from 2013 to 2023, and you look at everywhere outside California, the number one sponsor is Infosys.
They have almost 36,000 approved H-1B visas.
What is Infosys?
Infosys is not SpaceX.
It's not Tesla.
It's not some advanced, cutting-edge medical research firm.
It's an IT company.
Infosys is an IT company, and they're based in India while we're at it.
And they've had 36,000 H-1B visas approved for the US. And I believe a majority of their overall employees in the US are just Indian H-1B visas.
So do we really not have the ability to fill IT jobs in the US? And even if the H-1B people are slightly better at IT, is it desirable to fill all of these jobs with H-1Bs?
And I don't think there's much public discussion of this, but this is what people are seeing when They get set off by this, oh, we need more H-1Bs and all of them should specifically come from India.
They've seen these operations where an entire company's department is actually just staffed with people from another country.
And people are like, why do we need to staff any company, any department of a company with people who are not from here?
And it's driven people up the wall.
And I think if you're maybe Elon Musk, if you're Or if you're Jeff Bezos, or if you're at one of these truly extremely cutting-edge companies, they might be thinking in terms of who I hired for my genuinely cutting-edge company, and they would assume I'm hiring the top handful, because they probably are hiring the top handful in their case.
But this is a system that's led in hundreds of thousands of people, and most of them are not the absolute cutting edge.
Most of them are rank-and-file employees in a major sector of the US economy, where our priority should be.
We think that that sector of the US economy should primarily benefit Blake, is there enough brainpower to be able to staff our AI Manhattan Project domestically without having to go to foreign workers?
Because they say no.
The tech bros say there's not enough American brainpower.
Well, like I said, I think you could unleash a lot of America's brainpower if you got rid of the stuff we actively do to sabotage us.
We borderline use the DOJ and its civil rights division to make it illegal to focus entirely on merit in America.
We actively egg on our companies and our schools and our government to not hire based on merit.
We encourage them to have de facto, not public, but de facto quota systems based on race, based on sex, based on who knows what.
I mean, we literally had the Department of Justice sued SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees, even though as a military contractor, They're really not supposed to hire non-U.S. citizens in the first place, but they're getting sued for not having enough refugees at SpaceX.
Can I add, hold that thought, because it's not just the meritocracy of who they let in, but it's the meritocracy system that is our de facto college system, which is run like a socialist nightmare.
Where they're incentivized to actually pump more useless degrees into the program instead of creating an americratic system around...
Yeah, Tyler, you're on the regent system.
Explain how that works, international students.
I want Blake to keep going on his thing, but I just wanted to add in to interject.
It's also the fact that we don't prioritize even our engineering degrees.
We say, oh, you know what?
Oh, let's create more social democracy-focused degree patterns because that way you get more money from the federal government because you have more students.
So ASU is a great example of this, and I would love to have Michael Crow who has done this.
Come on the show.
It's like, in a real world, what you would do is you would set this aside and say, Our business degrees, our really great business school, the degree's worth more, so we're going to charge a little bit more, and we're going to give them the best resources that they possibly could have.
Instead, what we have is all the degrees are all the same cost.
So tuition's all the same, whether or not you go get an underwater basket weaving degree that we always use as the example.
North African lesbian poetry.
North African lesbian poetry.
Or if you go get a degree in engineering or applied biosciences or whatever else it may be.
In fact, oftentimes they'll actually, to your point, Blake, is they'll take the less capable person because of those quota systems into those systems.
So it's a completely backwards operation that they have at the universities in America.
Meanwhile, China's killing children that don't fit into their...
Russia, this is what Russia was known for in the USSR. They would force you your entire life to learn one skill, and if you weren't good, they would just send you away and you'd never be seen again in Siberia.
Blake, wrap it up here as we're running out of time.
Yeah, so to circle back, if you want America to get the most out of its people, we should encourage our companies to get the most out of Americans.
It's almost like we've created a system where we tell companies it's basically illegal to focus on merit.
But if you come out and say...
We just can't find anyone in the U.S. who can do this, and we have to go abroad.
Then we'll let you do it, almost because the powers that be are so pro-great replacement, so pro-immigration, that then we'll let you do it.
Okay, we'll let you hire who you want to hire, as long as they're not American, because then we can say it's for diversity or what have you.
And that's how we'll do it.
We're creating a sixth system where we almost incentivize finding foreigners to do a job.
And if we were just to say, we should have a meritocratic revolution in America, throw out the HR parasites, throw out the DEI parasites, throw out that whole apparatus and say, you're allowed to hire who you want to do the things you want to do, and you don't have some BS quota to hit.
I think you will suddenly find there is a huge amount of talent in America to go and tap.
We went to the moon on a bunch of guys who went to Iowa State University to study aeronautics.
All of our early astronauts were just these random dudes from Ohio.
A lot of those dudes still exist, and it's probably our most underexploited group of talented people.
And to simply say that American culture is so rotten that that can't exist, I think is demented.
I think we've done a lot of damage to America's culture with what liberals have done, but I think there's a lot we can draw on to revive that.
And I don't think the solution is just this...
I think Bill Kristol said this, where American culture is just so bad, we just need to import the people from abroad with better cultures.
I think American culture has a pretty great legacy of success that we can draw on to revive our country.
Make it great again.
Well said.
We got a dash.
Go Ducks.
What do they say?
Forks up?
Forks up.
Horns down.
That's going to be fun.
Forks up.
Horns down.
I think it'll be 60-40.
I think ASU's going to have a big, big presence there.
Don't you think?
I hope so.
I mean, there's a lot.
I mean, I'll just say this.
Shout out.
I just know and love and want to believe Kenny Dalyham's a great conservative.
He's gotta be.
I think he's a winger.
He's gotta be.
He's gotta be.
And he's an incredible...
That guy is an enigma.
And we need more of that in college football.
He's okay.
He's fine.
He left Oregon.
But we need that in college football.
We need more of those type of guys that are just crazy.
Anyone that leaves Oregon doesn't succeed, so we'll see.
We need crazy people willing to kick on-site kicks before halftime against BYU. It's incredible.
Keep committing thought crimes, everybody.
Have a wonderful new year.
We'll see you guys in the new year.
God bless.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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