Dec. 29, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:31
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| But let's talk to Joshua, who is running for Congress in the District Court in Texas. | |
| I don't know if the transcription got that right or not. | |
| Joshua, are you with me, brother? | |
| Yes, I'm with you. It's District 14. | |
| District 14 in Texas. | |
| All right. So tell me a little bit about, well, I guess, why you run, how the process went, and how it's going. | |
| Well, so I'm running in the Republican primary against an establishment Republican who's been in office since 2012. | |
| My main concern is immigration. | |
| I've been working with the party for the past few years to try to get something done, and basically they confirmed to me that nothing's ever going to get done. | |
| And this summer, they passed through the House H.R. 1044, which is legislation to basically shift our H-1B program to Just totally over to India and then expanded on from there. | |
| And when my congressman voted for that and couldn't give me an explanation as to why, I kind of made the decision that the only option left for me was to run myself. | |
| Okay, and sorry, just for those who aren't aware of the, you know, Michelle Malkin-inspired acronyms, H-1B, just help people to understand what it is that you're talking about. | |
| So the H-1B is one of a number of guest worker visas, as you could call them, That are supposed to apply to people who have a certain ability for tech or a certain niche that isn't able to be filled here in the U.S. That isn't what actually ends up happening. | |
| What ends up happening is just massive amounts of people get brought over to do jobs that people in America really want to do. | |
| So when you hear about, like, I think Disney was the most recent case, or AT&T, where they were bringing over H-1B visa people from India And then have their workers here train them to replace themselves. | |
| Those are the sorts of programs I'm talking about. | |
| So, of course, sorry to interrupt, but when... | |
| So they say, well, we have to bring people in to do the jobs that Americans just won't do. | |
| Well, if Americans are currently actually doing those jobs, that's a pretty tough case to make. | |
| Yes, it is. It gets in a lot of gray areas about, like, you know, they're supposed to do their due diligence to ensure that these options are... | |
| That they've tried to hire Americans for these spots and those sorts of things, but it becomes difficult to impossible to basically prosecute companies for doing this, and you have to have an administration that's willing to do it. | |
| You have to have all the pieces lined up to get this stopped, and the bottom line is this has been going on for decades, and it's only getting worse. | |
| So S386 is the Senate version of HR 1044, and we managed to stop at the Senate, but if it goes through and if it gets implemented, You're going to see a massive expansion of the program, which is going to be by far worse than it already is. | |
| Well, and you have people... | |
| Was it Charlie Kirk was saying that he wanted to staple the green card to these... | |
| Did I get that? I don't want to misquote someone, but that's what I sort of remember seeing somewhere on Twitter, that this sort of path to becoming a permanent resident, to becoming a citizen, it's not just like bungee and guest workers go back home, but there's a sort of path to stay, right? | |
| Yes, we don't really have numbers as to how many of these people end up staying here permanently, but it's pretty close to 100% because once these people have children here, those children unfortunately are considered U.S. citizens in a lot of cases. | |
| And then a lot of these people who come over on, there's a program called OPT, which is sort of a derivative of the H-1B program. | |
| And you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people in our universities In the type of programs that we want our children to be in, like I'm an aerospace engineer. | |
| I have a bachelor's and master's in aerospace engineering. | |
| I want my children, if they choose to go to that line of work, to be able to do that. | |
| I don't want them to have to compete with literally hundreds of thousands of people from mostly India and China who are being brought over here and then put into those schools ahead of my children. | |
| I live in Texas. If you look at Texas alone, in our top universities, We have close to 20,000 of those students in our schools. | |
| 20,000 foreigners, you say, from India and China in American schools being educated with the goal, of course, at some point of staying in America and taking jobs away from people who are more native, right? | |
| That's just in Texas alone. | |
| Oh, that's just in Texas. Okay, got it. | |
| Yes, sir. Yes, the numbers are actually quite staggering. | |
| I mean, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. at any given moment, be it on an F-1 or on an H-1B type of visa. | |
| Yeah, and they're brought in here to fill these STEM program diplomas that we say we want our kids to go into from day one, and then we make it harder and harder and harder for our kids to go into those programs. | |
| And then if they manage to get into them and get through school, When it comes time for them to actually go to work, then they have to compete with those people, either the same people they went to college with or people being brought in from overseas again on just a straight-up H-1B program for those jobs. | |
| And those people, in my personal experience and opinion, the job that foreigners do when they're brought over here is vastly inferior to what an American-educated person will do, but they're still brought over here either because you can pay them so little in comparison Or just because the people in those companies want them brought over, just because they're easier to get rid of if you have to get rid of them. | |
| Well, and aren't they tied to the job based upon the visa, which means they really don't have much negotiating elbow room. | |
| Like you hire some American person, and if they don't like the way you're doing business, they could just go work somewhere else. | |
| But if I understand it rightly, they're kind of tied to the job, not completely, and it's not like a total medieval surf thing, but it's pretty hard relative to an American for them to negotiate or change jobs and that kind of stuff. | |
| That's exactly right. And these programs are just absolutely riddled with fraud, whether it's the people who are brought over are not really capable of doing the job they claim to be able to do, or it's the people bringing them over are basically, I wouldn't say holding them hostage, but they're basically forcing them to pay them in order to retain that H-1B status so that they can stay within this country. | |
| It's bad for the people who are coming over here and working. | |
| It's bad for our nation. | |
| It's bad all around. | |
| The only people that really benefit from it are these corporations that are hiring these people at a drastically lower wage, and in some cases the people who are brought over here on what's supposed to be a temporary status and end up staying here permanently. | |
| Well, and if it's technology, particularly, you know, my area of expertise is computer programming and managing programmers. | |
| I managed an entire research and development team when I was chief technical officer. | |
| It's really, really helpful to have people who stay and who are motivated because you get this big giant code base and it takes forever. | |
| It takes forever to get comfortable and competent with a big new code base. | |
| And so you want smart people who are invested and motivated and understand the code base because swapping people in and out is really tough. | |
| And you can get, as you say, you can get a whole bunch of code written fairly quickly. | |
| That's not the issue. | |
| Writing code is not the issue. | |
| Writing code that you can maintain, that is efficient, that is well documented, that is readable. | |
| All of that is a whole different kettle of fish. | |
| and just getting the code in, it's sort of like cocaine for happiness. | |
| I mean, it gets the job done, but you pay a price for it down the road, and you get a whole bunch of code written. | |
| But if it's spaghetti code, it's badly documented, the variable names are confusing, there aren't enough comments for anyone else to be able to follow it, then you get a kind of weird job security by writing bad code because nobody can afford to replace you because it's too convoluted. | |
| That's exactly right. And we're actually at a point now where I'm a full-stack developer now myself, and I'm still able to get a lot of work that comes to me. | |
| From companies who have previously hired out to an H1B type firm. | |
| But if the numbers are changed too much more, it's going to be almost impossible for me to compete at all. | |
| I mean, I already have to tell, like people come to me and I try to explain to them, you know, this is how much it costs to do this. | |
| And they tell me, well, this company over here is offering to do this for half the cost. | |
| And then those people will come back six months or a year later and say, okay, well, you know, I paid those people half of what you were asking and I got about half the product. | |
| Right, and then you're really behind the eight ball, because when tech starts to go wrong, there's a lot of cover-ups, there's a lot of promises, there's a lot of it's almost done, and it's really hard to know. | |
| Like, if someone's building a house for you, you can drive out and you can eyeball the damn thing, and you can see what the progress is, but if you've got a bunch of people building code for you, and you're not reviewing that code or a tech expert yourself, which generally is not the case, because if you were, you'd be running it yourself, It's really easy to flim-flam and pull the wool over people's eyes when it comes to code in particular. | |
| And then when you finally get it, it might work. | |
| It might work and then it breaks on the next security update or it doesn't work with a firewall or it can't be upgraded to whatever or it doesn't work on 32-bit or it doesn't work on Windows NT if you want to go far back or anything like that. | |
| So... You can get something up and running, but getting it to a modularized, documented, maintainable, upgradable path, I mean, that's a whole different kettle of fish. | |
| I mean, you don't really upgrade a house much, but code, you're going to be upgrading quite a bit. | |
| Or maybe it's written in such a way, oh, it works on Android, but good luck on iOS, or if it's a mobile thing. | |
| So, yeah, it's not portable or it's not transferable. | |
| But you don't really notice that. | |
| You don't really see that until you hit those limitations down the road. | |
| Yep. And then if you try to go back and have it done correctly, you're going to end up paying a fortune. | |
| Well, a lot of times you just dynamite it and start again, right? | |
| Yes, exactly. Now, do you have any ideas as to why you said, well, nothing's going to happen, right? | |
| Nothing's going to happen. Do you have any idea why nothing's going to happen with regards to immigration, why this stuff keeps getting pushed through? | |
| Well, my general opinion of it is that the Republican Party tends to look at it as sort of, if they try to make an effort to enforce immigration laws and they're unsuccessful, Then the various populations here who view that as targeting them will then start to view the Republican Party as, hey, you tried to do something bad to us, and so we're never going to vote for you again. | |
| So it's almost as if there's sort of like a political stalemate going on, where neither party wants to just flatly say, hey, we're not going to enforce the law on these people because we want their vote. | |
| But... But that's basically what's happening. | |
| I mean, do they not understand that the majority of the... | |
| I'm thinking China and India in particular, although not exclusively, statistically are much more likely to vote Democrat anyway. | |
| And so it's like, there's not a plan B here. | |
| Like, there's no hold the line as far as the Republican Party goes at the moment. | |
| I mean, as more and more people come in just to pick these two countries, as you pointed out, China and India, well, three quarters or so or more are going to vote for Democrats. | |
| And so, like, they might as well give it a try because... | |
| You know, probably after 2020, there's not really going to be a Republican Party that is going to work. | |
| I mean, already, you know, states are flipping, counties are flipping because, you know, mass migration is a form of gerrymandering, of course, right? | |
| And so I don't know what they're waiting for. | |
| That's always my big question. | |
| Like, what is the plan B here? | |
| Because statistically, they're, you know, if the plane's going into the wall, you might as well jump, so to speak, right? | |
| Yes, I have approached them about this extensively before I decided to run and showed them the numbers. | |
| And my district in particular is safe for another two or three election cycles, but there are a number of them that are directly around me, District 22, District 36. | |
| We had five or six Republican congressmen here in Texas not seek re-election, and if you look at why they chose to do that, One or two of them legitimately just decided their time was up, but the rest of them looked at the numbers and say, okay, you know, four years ago it was 60-40, and then it was 55-45, and then this last election it was something like 52-48. | |
| And so they looked around and they said, okay, the demographics are such that I might be able to win one more election, but after that there's no way. | |
| So they just chose to not seek re-election and not be embarrassed as opposed to admitting the truth. | |
| You can show them the numbers, show them what's going to happen in Texas, and they will admit that this is going to happen, but then in the next breath, when you ask them, okay, well, what are we going to do about this? | |
| What's the plan? This is one of the things that drove me to run for office was that I spoke to more elected officials than I can count. | |
| Anyone that would basically answer the phone And gave them these numbers to say, hey, what's the plan to do something about this? | |
| Because if we lose Texas, we've lost the nation. | |
| Like, there won't be another Republican president. | |
| There won't be a Republican Senate. | |
| There won't be a Republican House. | |
| What's the plan to stop this? | |
| And not a single person could even tell me that there was a plan. | |
| The only thing I ever got back was, well, we'll just have to work harder to convince these people to vote Republican. | |
| And I honestly, I don't even know what that means, like, work harder to convince them to vote this way. | |
| But everybody seems to understand what's happening. | |
| Everybody seems to understand it's going to happen in the very near future. | |
| But the only sense that I get from any of them is that, well, you know, they've had a good run, their time is up, and they're just going to ride off into the sunset when that happens. | |
| And that's great for them. | |
| But I have children, and I'm extremely concerned about the future for my children and my eventual grandchildren. | |
| And it boggles my mind that these other people are simply not – do not seem to be concerned at all about what's going to happen when the demographics get such that we can't vote a Republican into any office anywhere in Texas or almost anywhere on the national level. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe, I mean, I don't know what's going on in their minds, but I would imagine that it's probably something like, okay, well, maybe we can't really do much about it, but I don't want to get called a racist in every newspaper known to man and have my life destroyed that way for trying to enforce immigration law or trying not to invite more people in to take jobs that Americans are more than happy and willing to take. | |
| So maybe they're saying, well, the downside is, well, all the stuff I'm sure that you either are experienced or are going to experience as you run for office on trying to enforce immigration law. | |
| So I can't really change it, but it really could wreck my life if I get all of the slander pushed at me from the mainstream media, and maybe that's the calculation. | |
| I think that's exactly what it is. | |
| The worst case scenario when this happens is that they lose their office. | |
| The worst case scenario, if you try to stop it, is that you lose your entire livelihood. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And I think they look at that calculus and they say, I'd rather just lose my office than lose everything. | |
| So, given that you know that calculation, your reasoning obviously is different. | |
| How does that differ? Well, I think... | |
| From my point of view, I'm just a much bigger coward than these guys are. | |
| I look at what's going to happen in the future. | |
| So before I eventually went to college and became an aerospace engineer, I was in the military. | |
| And in my time overseas, you start to see signs of things that are happening in other countries that indicate bad things are going to happen in the somewhat near future. | |
| It can be ethnic strife, it can be economic strife, it can be any number of things from just the amount of propaganda that's being pumped into a society to various forms of societal strife. | |
| And I see every single one of those signs in this nation right now, and it scares me for what life is going to be like for my children. | |
| And I don't know, I don't believe that other people don't see these things happening because it's blatantly obvious. | |
| I think that they just have this sort of, we would call it a normalcy bias, which is just you have this belief that things can never happen, like really bad things can never happen. | |
| Like we've all heard the stories of like there's a hurricane coming and yet people are going to work as if it's perfectly normal. | |
| I think people just tend to look around and think that the worst case scenarios just can never happen. | |
| And my experience has taught me that more often than not the worst case scenarios end up being what actually does happen. | |
| Especially if there's mathematics and demographics. | |
| That's not even a roll-the-dice situation. | |
| That is an inevitability. | |
| Exactly. This is not something that could happen. | |
| This is something that will happen. | |
| And it will happen sometime within the next 10 years here in Texas. | |
| And if you look at the death situation in this nation, the other issues that are happening with the various forms of propaganda and both racial conflict and economic conflict in this nation... | |
| Those all have very bad signals for the very near future. | |
| And I think a lot of these people in office have just no real understanding of how bad things can get and how quickly they can get that bad. | |
| Well, it's a funny thing. I just was thinking about that today, about how when we get a certain amount of wealth in society, we, of course, no longer have survival on our minds, but we are a species that loves to solve problems and loves to have problems and loves to deal with problems. | |
| And so when our immediate needs are met materially, which is pretty much the case for everyone in the West these days, Then what do we do? | |
| I think once we solve problems that are essential, we start inventing problems that are inessential. | |
| And we just start saying, okay, well, now that we have our material needs met, now we have to have perfect equality. | |
| And now we have to have no bad thinking anywhere. | |
| And now we have to punish people who disagree with us because we're perfect or something. | |
| And it's like we just start inventing these predators once we tame all of the ones in the natural environment. | |
| We start introducing new ones Out of whole cloth, I think. | |
| And that has very dire consequences because there was a kind of elemental pragmatism that gave rise to this kind of wealth. | |
| And if you switch from pragmatism to this weird, almost wildly abstract platonic idealism that we can just make everything perfect, you end up squandering all of the resources you gathered in your pragmatic phase. | |
| And yeah, things get very messy very quickly. | |
| Yep. I worked in the space program for a fair bit, and one of the things I'm running on is ending affirmative action. | |
| And you see that there. | |
| You see just a – it's a complete shift from where things used to be, which is, you know, get the job done. | |
| There used to be a sign that was in one of the main rooms of mission control way back in the day, and the sign said, waste anything but time. | |
| And it was sort of indicative of, like, we've got to get to the moon. | |
| We've got to do it now. Whatever you have to do to get this done, do it. | |
| You've got to work nights, do it. | |
| You've got to waste some material, do it. | |
| And the mentality now has completely shifted, and I don't know how to best sum it up in a phrase like that, but let me explain to you how affirmative action plays out in the space program. | |
| So every government contract says that a certain amount of money has to be spent on minority-owned businesses. | |
| Well, in the space program, you can't really, like, farm out different, you know, little subcomponents to be designed by little companies. | |
| And even if you could, logistically, those companies just really don't exist. | |
| So what they've done is they've created subcontracting companies. | |
| And these companies, they just exist as a shell, basically. | |
| They're usually staffed by one or two people. | |
| And the government gives spots to these companies. | |
| And the owners of these companies are someone who can check one of those boxes. | |
| And so for me to work in the space program, I had to broker my labor through one of these subcontracting companies to work in one of these spots. | |
| So I have a master's degree in aerospace engineering. | |
| I'm always the most, and I do the technical side of engineering there at NASA. I'm a finite element guy. | |
| And whatever room I was in, I was always the guy that was designing or, you know, I was doing the math, that sort of aspect of it. | |
| Yet because I had to subcontract my labor, That meant I had to give about a third of my salary to that subcontracting company. | |
| So I was making about two-thirds of somebody who was not a subcontractor, someone who's a civil servant. | |
| I have no benefits in terms of if something's done wrong to me, I have somebody I can go to and do something about it. | |
| If I'm required to work 60 or 80 hours one week, I can't carry those hours over into the next week. | |
| If I'm required to work 24 hours in one day, I still have to be back at my office eight hours the next day. | |
| I can never be promoted because there's nowhere to be promoted to because I'm just hired into that spot. | |
| I'm not hired really at a company where I can be promoted. | |
| And when whatever project I'm working on, when that ends, which is usually somewhere between five to ten years, I'm out of a job and I got to go somewhere else to start somewhere else at a bottom rung as a subcontractor somewhere else. | |
| And so there's a lot of people like me who, you know, you work in a program for a few years and you look around and you say, I'm not really welcome here. | |
| Despite the fact that I love this job and I really want to stay, what's best for my career in the long term is for me not to be here. | |
| So we go off and we do other things. | |
| And that's happened with a lot of people. | |
| And what you end up with now is every time a program starts in a space program, you're basically starting from scratch. | |
| You've lost all of that institutional memory. | |
| Whereas before, a young guy would come in, he would be trained, and then he would move up a little bit. | |
| He would work on a few projects. | |
| And then he would start training the next generation that came in. | |
| That's gone now. | |
| Like when you come into the space program, you're basically thrown to the wolves. | |
| You know, there's nobody there who's been there long enough to teach you anything or to watch over what you're doing because all those guys have either moved on to do something else because they've come to that same realization that, you know, long term the space program is no good for them. | |
| Or somebody who's maybe senior to you has worked at various different projects, but he's never actually done what it is you're doing now. | |
| So you simply do not have the experience to go from one project to the next, to the next, to the next. | |
| So you end up solving the same problems over and over again and running into the same mistakes over and over again. | |
| Oh, it's horrible. And if you look at, of course, the space program as a whole, it's sort of like how... | |
| Orson Welles described his career, you know, the guy who did this famous War of the Worlds audio play and then did the Rosebud movie, right? | |
| The most sort of famous and best movie. | |
| He said, you know, I started at the top and I worked my way down, because he never matched his early energetic successes. | |
| Citizen Kane was the movie. | |
| And it's the same thing with the space program in America. | |
| Like, they started at the top and they worked their way down. | |
| Did the most amazing feats in the 60s and 70s, and since then, I mean, you had the space shuttle and... | |
| what? | |
| Some probes that were launched pretty early on that went past Jupiter and all that. | |
| And it's like, well, now what? | |
| And it just... I don't know. | |
| I mean, one of the things I talked about in the show years ago was how the engineers who came into the space program in the 60s came from the private... | |
| Sector came from the free market and had all of the energy and they had all of the work ethic and the dedication and the idealism that comes from all of that. | |
| And now you've just got a bunch of career bureaucrats who just don't have that same passion, fire, or discipline. | |
| It's like when you nationalize the healthcare industry. | |
| Well, you have all these doctors who... | |
| Grew up in the free market, who are used to servicing their patients, who go above and beyond the call of duty, who work late, who do whatever's necessary to go and help people, and that doesn't immediately vaporize the moment they start working for the government. | |
| So you get free market discipline with government funding, and the thing seems like... | |
| Pure paradise for a time, but then the institutional rot sets in, the laziness sets in, the inattention sets in, the lack of consequences set in, and then you have people who didn't develop their discipline through the free market. | |
| You have people who really want a big fat government job but no consequences, and those are exactly the opposite people. | |
| As you started the program and you get, of course, yeah, all of this diversity stuff and all of this egalitarian stuff and it's not focused on the job anymore. | |
| It's focused on hitting numbers and being politically correct and, oh, it's just tragic. | |
| But that first cocaine hit of free market dedication with government money, man, you know, literally you can hit an orbiting body, but it doesn't stay that way. | |
| I can give you a perfect example of that. | |
| But when I was in grad school and I was designing stuff, we had a shop in our basement. | |
| And I would get to a point where I was on a drawing or something, and I would think, I have no idea what this curve should be or what this angle should be, and maybe it doesn't really matter to me. | |
| So what I would do is just simply take the drawing down to the shop, to the guy who's actually going to build it, and say, what do you think I should do here? | |
| And he would simply say, well, does this matter to you? | |
| And I would say, no. And he'd say, well, the easiest thing for me to do here is this. | |
| Well, when I got to the main job I did in the space program, we had no shop. | |
| We designed all the components, but the actual building of those components had to be farmed out to someone else because of all these little requirements, because of all this bureaucracy. | |
| So when I ran into one of those issues where I would normally just walk over to the guy who was actually going to build it, maybe a guy who had been building that thing for 20 years and knew what he was doing, That option was not present for me anymore. | |
| I had to fill out all kinds of paperwork and triplicates and go to three or four different places before I could talk to anybody. | |
| Compare that to just walking downstairs and knocking on a door. | |
| That's where you are in the space program now. | |
| Okay, so I have a bunch of other callers on the queue. | |
| Can you just tell people about how to find out the information that you want them to find out for your running for office and your website and all of that, and give a brief description of other areas of your platform? | |
| Sure. So my website is foxworthforcongress.com, and that's Foxworth like the comedian but without the Y, and then forcongress.com. | |
| And I'm running on a platform of basically a pledge to immediately enforce immigration laws. | |
| Basically, if you put me into office, the day I get there, we're going to enforce immigration laws. | |
| The laws are already on the books. | |
| We don't have to work with Congress. | |
| We don't have to pass through legislation. | |
| All we have to do is enforce the laws. | |
| So we're going to do that. We're going to end affirmative action, and then we're going to rework the legal system to end these guest worker programs. | |
| I have all sorts of other plans as far as balancing the budget, health care, and everything else. | |
| In my opinion, everything is downstream of immigration, so that's what I start with. | |
| All right. Well, thanks. It was a very enjoyable chat, and I guess you can go and check out the website and learn more about his program. |
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