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Jan. 6, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:38
20250106_justin-trudeau-resigns-plus-elon-musk-supports-tom
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Musk vs MAGA Puritans 00:02:00
Pointing out atrocities by a certain group of people doesn't make you racist.
Ron for Malone, there were estimated 1,400 children were subjected to abuse between the 80s and 2013.
Why is it covered up?
Tomby Robinson has been deliberately amplified as a kind of hate figure.
But why is Elon getting involved now?
He's not wrong.
And actually, this scandal, I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg.
Elon is not even in it just for himself.
He is a show of the Chinese Communist Party.
I'm going to commend the right wing for having a civil war.
You're supposed to disagree.
Yes.
You're not supposed to be robots.
That means that they're thinking for themselves.
Hillary Clinton and George Soros got the Medal of Freedom.
And I can't believe it.
That is so ridiculous.
That's like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a Michelin star for outstanding diversity in cuisine.
I still can't believe it.
It is what it is.
Well, Happy New Year.
It's fair to say that a lot has happened in the brief interlude since our last big show.
And Elon Musk has found himself somewhere near pretty much all of it.
He's currently calling on King Charles to dissolve Parliament in Britain.
And he wants the British Prime Minister Kirya Starmer jailed.
He also threw Nigel Farage under a big red bus saying he should no longer be a leader of reform.
And he's turned the UK grooming scandal into a massive global story.
We'll have a lot to say about that one over the next few days, but it was a pro-immigration take that put Musk at loggerheads with MAGA Puritans.
Does the US economy need the brightest and best from around the world?
Or does America first mean no exceptions?
We'll debate that.
The US has also been rocked by two terror attacks, one using a cyber truck outside a Trump Hotel.
It's weeks before Trump's inauguration.
Is America safe?
And in an act of trolling that Musk himself might be proud of, President Biden doled out honors to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Bono.
We'll debate all that as well and more, but we begin with a massive breaking story.
The Prince of Woke himself, the pervert.
Working Class Versus Elites 00:10:04
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Player of people kind, Justin Trudeau has just announced he is quitting as the Prime Minister of Canada.
Well, I'm joined now by the CEO and founder of the Young Turks, Check Yuga, the opinion editor of Newsweek and the author of Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, Batia Ungar Nitagon, and the host of Gaines for Girls on Outkick, Riley Gaines, and Vinny Ashana from the PBD podcast.
Welcome to all of you and a very happy new year.
A lot going on, obviously.
Check, let's start with you with this breaking news that Justin Trudeau is to quit.
And this comes after a collapse in his popularity.
It also comes, of course, in a period of the last two years where pretty much every liberal, woke left-wing leader in the world has been kicked out of office.
What do you make of it?
Yeah, so I don't have a lot of strong opinions about Justin Trudeau or Canada, but I do about the very last thing you said.
It's not that the woke are being kicked out of office, very progressive leaders elected in Mexico, Brazil, and other places.
It's that insiders are being kicked out of office.
If you're an incumbent, God help you.
Because the world wants change.
They hate the status quo and the corporate rule that we live under.
So they're constantly looking for new leadership.
That's why they keep swinging wildly left to right, left to right.
It's because they're looking for populism and they're not getting it from the establishment.
Okay, Vinny, I'm not as convinced as Jake that that's the only reason.
Justin Trudeau was about as woke as you could possibly get.
I think we got a clip of him where a student tries to use the word mankind and Trudeau interrupts.
Let's take a look.
Unfortunately, in Canada, our volunteering as a charitable religious organization is extremely difficult.
Extremely.
That's why in actuality, we cannot do free volunteering to help our neighbors in need as we truly desire.
So that's why we came here today to ask you to also look into the policies that religious charitable organizations have in our legislation so that it can also be changed because maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind.
So we'd like you to look.
We like to say people kind, not necessarily mankind, because it's more inclusive.
There we go.
Exactly.
Yes, thank you.
We can all learn from each other.
Actually, we can't, can we, Vinny?
Because the last thing I want to learn is that we can't use mankind.
Can you imagine if we have to redo, re-film Neil Armstrong landing on the moon?
One small step for a person, one giant leap for people kind, etc.
Bullshit.
That's why one of the reasons I think he's gone is that this woke nonsense, people are sick and tired of it.
It's why Trump won big.
Yes, because of the immigration crisis.
Yes, because of cost of living crisis, but also because people are sick of this crap.
Hey, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
If you want straight talk on national security, foreign policy, and the biggest global stories going on of the day, this is the show for you.
We publish twice a day, Monday through Friday, once in the morning, again in the afternoon.
And on the weekend, we go longer with the PBB Situation Report with excellent guests, including national security insiders and foreign policy experts.
Check us out on Spotify and Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief.
I agree, Piers.
First of all, New Year's.
Happy New Year's, Piers, and thank you for always having me on.
I appreciate your work as well.
Yeah, Piers, it's like the proof is in the pudding.
Piers, people are just freaking done.
I'm on an app called Manek that Pat created a while ago where people could connect with professionals.
I cannot tell you how many Canadians I get.
I'm talking about in the hundreds peers that have been complaining about this guy for years.
Just he's horrible.
He's woke.
The policies, it's like you have to worry about the country first.
Put the people first.
Worrying about talking about the mankind to that girl.
I think it's just another example of enough is enough.
The people have finally spoken.
They are tired of it.
And they're moving on from people like Justin Trudeau.
And I think it's a huge plus for Canadians and on the global scale as well.
Yeah, I mean, Batia, apparently, the popularity collapsed was because of record inflation, an acute housing crisis, high food prices, voter fatigue, as Jenkin said, with incumbent politicians.
But recent polling had his Liberal Party at 16% support, the worst pre-election standing in more than a century.
And they have an election coming.
So no surprise, really, that he's gone.
But how much do you think there is a pattern here, not just of incumbents getting a shellacking, but also this, look, I don't like to use woke without explaining what I mean has happened to it, because I wrote a whole book about this called Wake Up three years ago.
Woke was in its original incarnation a great thing.
It was to make people more aware of social and racial injustice.
By that criteria, I'm woke.
But it's been hijacked.
And as somebody who's always in my head thought I'm more liberal than not, it got hijacked to an extent where I just felt I had nothing in common with these people.
You know, the whole trans debate of trans women in sport and so on.
And I think we saw that in the election result in America.
I think we're seeing it in Trudeau getting kicked out.
What do you feel here?
Am I right?
Is it really, is this part of the reason why so many of the progressive left are getting thrown out?
Thank you so much for having me, Pierce.
It's really an honor to be here with you and with all my fellow panelists.
I'm so looking forward to this.
Happy New Year to you and to your audience.
Well, how civilized of you?
And by the way, it's not normally that civilized.
In fact, normally, Chenk is screaming at me within the first five minutes.
So can I just say we've all reached a new place here?
Smiley happy panel.
It won't last, but I'll take it for now.
So thank you.
I love Shank.
We don't agree on much, but I'm so glad to be here with him.
He's my favorite person to debate.
So Shank, I'm so excited for this.
To the question of the woke.
So I am a little bit of a woke analysis skeptic here.
I think we are in a populist moment, like Shank said, where left and right are coming together.
This moment is the working class versus the elites.
And the working class, yeah, they don't like the wokeness, but they don't vote on that stuff.
They are voting on their pocketbooks.
They are voting on immigration, which if you are working class, is an economic issue.
This is what I learned when I traveled the country for a year interviewing working class people for my book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
I found that people did have conservative views on woke issues, but much more important to them were, first of all, a very tolerant view when it came to racial issues, when it came to gay issues.
They didn't want to see intolerance.
They didn't support abortion bans, even when they themselves were pro-life.
But also, immigration and economics were one and the same thing.
And that's what you're seeing here.
To me, Trudeau is being punished now for his COVID overreach, for his liberal authoritarianism that really hurt working class people.
Yeah, I think that's also true.
But Riley, you know, I remember after the U.S. election, that incredible report coming out in the New York Times about the power of one commercial.
And it was the They Them commercial, the infamous one, where the Trump campaign for the last three months bombarded Americans with this campaign ad, 30 Seconds, which went down as one of the most effective in history, where they basically laid out this whole trans debate and said, look, you know, you're either for They Them, Karmala, or Trump is for you.
Which one do you want it to be?
They reckon the New York Times, that could have moved the needle three points.
I mean, extraordinary power of one commercial.
So I think that the woke stuff did play quite a significant part.
And I do think it's also played a part with Trudeau.
I absolutely think so too.
I think of Trudeau and I think of, I think he was like the first world leader to appear in the RuPaul drag race franchise.
And I'll tell you, I had the opportunity to listen to a little bit of his resignation speech before jumping on here.
And the things he highlighted as his greatest achievements while serving as prime minister was funding for Ukraine and climate change.
Again, it just highlights how out of touch with reality our leaders, global leaders, are from everyday common sense people.
What I'm sure Canadians want, because again, I'm speaking as an American, what I know Americans want, we want lower taxes, we want affordable living, we want secure borders, we want world peace, we want to protect our freedoms.
So to highlight climate change and funding for Ukraine, I mean, I think largely this is a huge reason as to why he was ousted.
Let's turn to probably the biggest story of the last month, Cenk, which is Elon Musk, who is putting himself at the center of pretty much every debate now, not just in America, but here in the UK.
He's been on the assault all week on TweetStorm after TweetStorm, demanding the prime minister be jailed, hammering a previous prime minister, Gordon Brown, as well, calling for the king, Charles III, to dissolve parliament, which he can't actually do.
Elon's Thin Skin Politics 00:03:54
Some of it is ill-informed, like the example I just gave, but some of it, his attack about the grooming gangs, the rape gang scandal, which has engulfed Britain now for many years, I think he's got a point and he's certainly inflaming the debate to a point where there may be urgent national inquiry into what actually happened here, which is long overdue.
But Elon Musk, you know, he's gone from being this tech bro billionaire genius who does a range of amazing things to now he's Trump's right-hand guy.
He's unelected and he's now wanting to directly immerse himself into the politics of other countries.
We saw it in Germany last week.
We're seeing it in the UK now and so on.
Is this a good thing for Elon Musk, for Donald Trump?
What do you think?
Yeah, so I think Elon Musk is a complicated character.
So people can be smart in some ways and not so informed in other ways.
And so he might know how to run SpaceX and Starlink really well.
But we've seen his flaws.
We saw he way, way overpaid for Twitter.
But I think that one of the things that he discovered, Piers, is, oh my God, I paid $44 billion for an amplifier in the form of Twitter Now X, but for a quarter of a billion dollars, I bought the U.S. government because he gave a little over $250 million to Donald Trump.
And now he's in charge of all the spending in the United States with his so-called Doge thing, which is not a thing, really.
It's made up by Donald Trump.
It's just a way of telling, giving his biggest donor, the American government.
And so Elon Musk is doing something that's rational now.
He's going around seeing how many governments can he purchase, bully, intimidate, and do propaganda against and get his way.
And in a sense, he's A-B testing.
I can see it as a person who runs a digital media company.
He's putting out messages against the left, the right, the middle, every way you can, and seeing what reaction he gets back.
And based on the reaction, he then doubles down in one direction and then retracts in another direction.
Remember, he originally was against Donald Trump.
And after A-B testing on X, he decided to be for Donald Trump.
So does he really have an ideology?
No, not really.
His ideology is what makes Elon Musk richer.
So I think that if you're on the right, you've got to be concerned that you've got an out-of-control donor here who is kind of taking over the U.S. government and looking to take over more governments.
Right.
I mean, you know, you make the point.
He paid $44 billion for Twitter, now X, but it's estimated he's made $100 billion from a surge in the stock price of Tesla off the back of Trump's win.
And he helped Trump win by promoting him so aggressively on X.
So you could see there that just as a straight bet on Trump, he has more than made double his money back on the investment on X through his stock in Tesla.
So it's an interesting game that Elon is playing.
I mean, Vinny, you know, I think Elon's a genius, but he has that Trump-like, very thin skin.
We saw it with the extraordinary confrontation with Nigel Farage, who was posting pictures of a two of them at Mar-a-Lago only three weeks ago, like they were best buddies.
And there were reports that Elon may put £100 million into Farage's reform party in the UK, which is the most right-wing party, fledgling, but growing in momentum and support.
And now suddenly out of nowhere, because he won't support this character, Tommy Robinson, who, by the way, I think Elon is wrong to support, because he said that, Elon has immediately turned on him and said, right, in that case, he's the wrong guy to run reform.
Tommy Robinson Prison Myth 00:14:17
Do you feel comfortable with all this stuff that Elon's doing?
Well, Pierre, just to go back to what Chenk was talking about, let's talk about other billionaires who donated to the Biden administration, the $200 million Zuckerbucks, the Soroses, the Bezoses.
Listen, he spent $40 some billion dollars so that people like me and people like you can speak freely about these problems.
Okay.
And I think what he's doing, and I respect you, Piers, you know, the Tommy Robinson thing, people have mixed emotions.
Pointing out atrocities by a certain group of people doesn't make you racist.
I have a little fact.
So in Rothroom, and you know this, Rothroom alone, there were estimated 1,400 children were subjected to abuse between the 80s and 2013.
1,400.
And why is it covered up?
What's the purpose of hiding it?
Because you don't want to say that the certain groups were Pakistani Muslim men.
We have to say what it is.
That is what happened.
I mean, that is exactly what happened.
There was a massive cover-up.
It wasn't a cover-up by the mainstream media, though.
To be accurate about this, it was the Times newspaper in the UK who burst the story.
They exposed it originally at the start of 2011.
Tommy Robinson then latched onto it.
And he's not been wrong about the rape gangs at all.
The problem is, I think in America, there is a belief amongst many Americans, the Conservatives I've seen talking about this, that Tommy Robinson is currently in a British prison because he exposed the rape gangs.
It's got nothing to do with why he's in prison.
He's in prison for brazenly and repeatedly being in contempt of court over a young Syrian refugee boy who was bullied at school and lying about him.
So I just think it's important that Americans, when they debate this, understand there are two different things here.
One, Tommy Robinson and why he's in prison.
But secondly, that Tommy Robinson, along with many other people, has been absolutely right about the rape gangs.
Okay.
Let me ask you a question.
I agree.
I'm not going to be politically correct.
Let's blame all the Catholic priests for monstrous abuse.
So, I mean, let's not spare the Catholics and their leadership and their grotesque child abuse decade after decade, century after century.
So let's blame the Catholic priests most of all and then move on.
I agree.
Well, yeah, but the Catholic priests have nothing to do with it.
The scandal in Britain.
No, no, no.
The grooming scandal or rape scandal is what we should be calling it, because these girls were raped.
And tens of thousands may have been victims here.
It was horrendous.
And the people who were perpetrating this were almost exclusively British Pakistani Muslims, right?
And so that has been the issue that was covered up.
People from council level to police to other authorities to governments, they were not prepared to get properly into this scandal because they were terrified of the feedback and the bounce back and blowback they may get if they said who was actually doing this.
Vinny.
Okay, so Pierce, so great point, Pierce.
So these poor girls were raped and abused for all those years, but because you couldn't say that these guys were Muslim, and just everybody turned the cheek because of people's feelings, that's absolutely nonsense.
And I saw Tommy Robinson's documentary, Silence, and if anybody has watched it, you can't find it on YouTube, it's on X.
He goes undercover and questions all the people in that school of that Syrian kid, and all of the majority of them said that that kid was a bully.
He was mad at me.
Yeah, but hang on.
Okay, but here's the point.
Okay, but Vinny, Vinny, let me stop you.
Yes, he does.
I've watched Silence.
I'm in it.
He has a go at me, which is fine, because I was on Good Morning Britain at the time talking about this.
Here's the problem.
He repeats in the film a series of things which are lies.
That's why he's been found in contempt of court and that's why he's been put in prison.
And the reason we know he's lying is that he was sued by the Syrian refugee in a court and a judge in a very lengthy verdict and conclusion, which I read in full.
And I recommend, by the way, that you and everybody else watching this goes away and takes the time to read the full judgment from the judge.
All five of the witnesses that Robinson produced in court were discredited by the judge.
He said they're not credible.
He said a lot of them are making stuff up completely.
The attempt by Robinson to portray the Syrian refugee boy as the villain, not the victim, was a lie.
The boy who was accused of bullying him was thrown out of the school because of his previous prior record and this incident before it ever got made public, this incident, which came through a viral video.
So yeah, people in America do look at Tommy Robinson in a very different way to how we do here.
The reason Nigel Farage has disowned him and what's nothing to do with him is we see through him.
Tommy Robinson is a convicted football hooligan who was convicted of beating up a police officer, leading a riot.
He is somebody who's been guilty of mortgage fraud.
He's been somebody who was guilty of forging a passport to get into America because he couldn't travel because of his criminal record.
He's been found in contempt of court twice for nearly wrecking trials of the grooming gangs where he turned up and was saying defamatory things at the courtroom, which nearly led to the whole case being collapsed.
And now he's been found in contempt of court for repeating lies about this Syrian boy in this film Silence, which has been viewed over 150 million times.
So I understand why people in America have got a slightly warped view of Robinson, but I can tell you that is the reality.
And so it changes things when you know the reality.
Can I jump into me, Pierce?
Yeah, you can.
Okay, I'll bring in Betsy.
Chenka's left us to switch his camera.
He was having Problems with his camera, he will be back.
He hasn't fled in disgust.
So, yeah, Batsia, on this, on this point.
I think it's very important that we ask, why are Americans talking about this 10-year-old case all of a sudden with so much vigor and so much interest?
And the answer is because, as you led with, Pierce, Elon Musk decided that this was going to be his cause du jour.
And the reason that he decided that, it seems to me, is to distract from the massive debate that he launched about H-1B visas when he sided with foreign workers over American workers and the fact that in response to criticism, he has begun censoring people on Twitter in exactly the same way that conservatives used to be censored on Twitter under the old regime.
And in order to change the subject, he has decided to talk about this decade-old case in Britain and take up this character.
And you are right, you are both right, it's not Islamophobic for people in England to debate this.
But you know what I will not stand for?
What will make somebody my enemy is if people in America decide to talk about our Muslim neighbors and friends and co-Americans who have nothing to do with this?
And because a billionaire is throwing a tantrum and trying to change the subject, will suddenly start talking about people in a totally different country in a way that makes my neighbors feel uncomfortable.
My neighbors feel unsafe in America.
And I think that's a really important point to me.
Yeah, I do.
I think it is a good point.
I also think that Tommy Robinson has been deliberately amplified as a kind of hate figure by those who have a lot to hide in this scandal because it suits them because he is so discredited that he's the front man for this whole scandal.
When in fact, there is a genuine scandal that's been going on for many years.
I mean, you may say, why is Elon getting involved now?
I agree.
However, he's not wrong.
And actually, this scandal, I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg of accountability.
Not a single person in authority who was part of the cover-up has been held properly account or been put in prison.
That is a disgrace.
Riley, how do you feel about Elon Musk?
I mean, he's a complex character.
I've met him.
He's a genius.
He's very thin-skinned, but he's brilliant and he can be terrible, right?
It can be all those things.
Yeah, that's right, Piers.
Really quickly, let me just address what is going on with this grooming case, or as you said, this horrific, I mean, that's to put it my only really gang raping situation that has been going on in the UK.
Just because it's been happening for over a decade does not make it any less, I guess, condemnable.
And so I appreciate his efforts.
I appreciate how he has drawn attention to this.
As you know, Piers, I'm married to a Brit.
He came over to the United States about six years ago.
We've been married for just about three years now.
Even being married three years, he does not have his green card.
There's no even talks of getting his green card because he will not get the COVID vaccine, but that's a different conversation.
But what the UK has done is I think they've proven they're more interested in prosecuting you for a Facebook post that they don't like than a group of Pakistani men for raping, gang raping 1,400 young girls in one city.
Again, the reports, the excerpts of the transcripts of the trial are sickening.
It literally made me feel sick to my stomach.
I probably couldn't even repeat this stuff on your program.
But here's what I'll say about Elon to answer your question.
What I appreciate about him is he says his stuff openly.
There's transparency.
There's accountability.
That's very different than the other billionaires that were mentioned, like Gates and BlackRock and Soros, who do all of their stuff behind the scenes, behind closed doors, and they cannot be held to account.
So if we're talking about who we trust here, I'm trusting Elon 10 days out of 10 days.
Yeah, I mean, Shank, I think that is a valid point.
Elon Musk does it all right out there.
He's on his own platform.
He's telling you exactly what he thinks.
He's not always right.
And he's very inflammatory.
I mean, he said some things about some of the British politicians, which are truly shocking.
And you could argue they're quite dangerous.
He's gone after one called Jess Phillips in particular, who he's called evil and should be in prison, almost holding her single-handedly accountable for all this, called her a rape genocide apologist.
But the problem I have with that is it's not accurate, for one.
She's not a rape genocide apologist.
But more importantly, two British members of parliament have been murdered in the last 10, 11 years, including a young female member of parliament.
We don't want to have a situation where inflammatory rhetoric amplified to the extent that Elon's X feed is obviously huge.
All these things get gazillions of views.
We don't want to have members of parliament or members of Congress or anybody else actually having their lives threatened, as she has now had since this tweet, apparently, this post, having a life threatened in a country where two members of parliament in the last 10 years have been murdered by people who don't agree with their views.
Right.
There's one unifying theme in all the things that we've discussed, and it hasn't been mentioned yet, which is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So why did the Catholic priest scandal take so long to be exposed?
Because at the time, Catholic priests had enormous power in the UK, in the US, and all over the world.
I think what you guys are trying to point out with this idea that some were a little afraid to point out this Pakistani Muslim gang in northern England is that because minorities had some degree of power where they could challenge people of being racist or bigoted, et cetera.
And it made people a little bit reticent to call them out.
Now, the reality is, of course, you should call out wrongdoers, no matter what religion they're in, whether it's Catholics, Muslims, or any other thing.
But it also connects to Elon Musk, because now he has a lot of power bordering on absolute power.
And how is he abusing that?
Well, number one, by making wild charges against others, and that's a huge problem.
Number two, he's beginning to censor people on X, just like he said was the reason he bought it in the first place so that he could end that censorship.
And you can see a very clear pattern.
Whoever criticizes Elon Musk gets censored.
So we transfer power from Catholics to minorities, now to gigantic donors.
And by the way, to what Vinny complained about, he's right.
There's no reason why all these people should be getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, like Soros.
And by the way, also Miriam Adelson.
Trump gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her husband gave over $200 million to Donald Trump in different campaign contributions.
We're now giving out these incredible honors as tchotchkis, as little throw-in prizes like Ginsu knives, because the donors run the place.
And they're the ones with the most power.
And we have to keep in mind, whether it's George Soros on the left or Elon Musk on the right, that at the end of the day, they are donors who are in it for themselves and their own power.
Yeah, I mean, Vinny, I think you...
Can I just make one more point about that?
Just tagging on to what Shank just said, Elon is not even in it just for himself.
He is a shill of the Chinese Communist Party.
For all of his masquerading as some sort of maverick who always tells the truth and is always explicit in his views and out there and always says what he thinks, he has never once criticized the CCP.
The opposite.
He's constantly saying embarrassing, humiliating, bending the knee things about how great the Chinese Communist Party is, because of course his entire supply chain for Tesla is in China.
So when they asked him to build a showroom for Tesla in Xinjiang where the genocide of the Uyghurs is happening, he said, I would love to, and he went ahead and did it.
So this is a person who is totally in the pocket of the CCP.
To see him as anything else than an actual apparatchik of China is to really miss, I think, the forest for the trees.
Yeah, I think you make some points a lot of people have made.
I've seen it on X all day long, actually.
Visa Abuse and Wage Drain 00:11:32
Vinny, this whole civil war in the Republican Party over the visa issue, the H-1B visas, where do you sit with that?
Well, Piers, I mean, we've been saying this for the past, I think Patrick Medavis said it on the PVD podcast.
I want to say six months ago, he said that the Democrats are going to pin Elon Musk against Donald Trump.
They're going to say he's his puppet.
He's in charge.
He's doing this.
The administration hasn't even begun.
We still have to wait till the 20th.
He's in charge.
He's calling the shots.
For everybody that knows Donald Trump, including you, Piers, he is a freaking boss among bosses.
Okay, I understand the donor situation.
We haven't seen anything else.
I think everybody needs to relax.
I mean, at the end of the day, Piers, think about it.
Trump has said positive things about H-1B.
I mean, it started in the 90s with Bush Sr.
If we think about it, this is just another government program that people are taking advantage of.
All these people that are coming out, how much is it a year, Piers?
I think 85 to 100,000 H-1Bs.
Elon's, you know, an H-1B person himself.
I mean, but on the flip side, if you're pro-America and you're all for America, all those jobs should be given to Americans.
At the end of the day, you see Vivek, he's kind of flip-flopping.
If you're America first, American workers should get the jobs first.
If they want it changed, change the program.
Just like when Trump said, when he was debating Hillary and Hillary was like, what the taxes and this and that, and Trump takes advantage of it, what'd he say?
When you guys change the rules, I'll change the game.
Okay, but until then, again, and how did you feel though, Vinny, when Vivek Ramaswamy, he ignited this whole sort of firestorm over this?
He said a key part of it comes down to the C-word culture.
He said, truth, our American culture's venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s, likely longer.
Doesn't start in college, starts young.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the value dictatorium will not produce the best engineers.
Basically saying we've got to have all these people on these H-1B visas because Americans are too lazy and too mediocre.
That's what he said.
Oh, I heard it, Piers, and I wasn't a huge fan of it.
But, you know, it is what it is.
You know, these people, you know, everybody expects everybody on the other side to be perfect, Piers.
Trump's supposed to be perfect.
Elon's supposed to be perfect.
Vivek's supposed to be perfect.
By the way, and we're supposed to be all these Trump loyalists.
I'm not a big fan of it.
I'm America first myself, and I'm not a fan of what Vivek said.
Kind of throwing a little jab at Americans.
There is some, you know, there is some truth for it.
I mean, Piers, if you go on right now, if you call Chase or Apple and you get customer service, where are those people from?
Where are they from?
Pakistan, India, the Philippines.
They're from all over the world.
So until the system gets changed, billionaires are going to freaking take advantage of it because that's how they become billionaires.
Riley, your husband, I think, is on a visa.
I presume he is.
I've had work visas in America for many, many years.
It's a hard process.
It's not easy.
You know, I'm in the America when I come as an exceptional alien, which I've always taken slight offense at the description because it makes me sound like some of the weird extra terms.
You are exceptional, Piers.
Thank you.
It's just the word alien I have a problem with, Vinny, but thank you.
But that's what they call us if we come in on the 01 visa, certainly.
But what do you think of this, Riley?
Because it has caused a big split in the Republicans.
You know, a lot of the MAGA types like Steve Bann and others are really angry about this.
They think that the support by Vivek and Elon and Trump for these visas is going to be at the expense of American jobs.
And they say that flies in the face of MAGA, what it's supposed to be about.
Yeah, well, let me tell you, I call my husband an alien all the time.
And I find him every July 4th who the real winners were.
Look, I've enjoyed, truthfully, I feel like it's rare to actually enjoy political discourse, but I really have, especially over the downtime, over Christmas and New Year's.
I've enjoyed hearing from all perspectives.
And here's where I'm at.
I'm unapologetically America first.
As a capitalist, I believe in the free market and I believe in meritocracy.
And so here's the thing.
I think it would be naive to say that corporations are acting out of what's best for America and prioritizing meritocracy.
I believe corporations are naturally doing what is best for their pockets.
And so I think the bigger question is, can meritocracy exist without these sort of ulterior motives?
And largely what's been what I have been exposed to, a large part of my own personal experience and the platform that I have, and a big part of my passion, truthfully, is our failed Department of Education.
I think that's what we should be asking ourselves.
You know, why don't we look at the fact that we've had a Department of Education since the 1970s, which has not done anything to educate our children to be able to be competitive in the workplace.
Instead, it's been entirely corrupted by woke progressive liberalism, teaching children that men can have babies and that boys need tampons in the bathrooms at school.
And so I think they've taught that American exceptionalism is total BS and that we should be ashamed of ourselves as a country for all of our past transgressions.
And so that to me, as someone who just recently exited these large academic prestigious institutions, that to me is the bigger question that we should get to the bottom of.
And hopefully we can, at least start to over the next four years.
And I'm certainly hopeful with a new Secretary of Education, if confirmed, Linda McMahon.
That's what we need to be asking ourselves.
What in America can we do to better ourselves and put ourselves in a competitive position with these other countries?
Yeah.
I mean, Cheng, was Vivek Ramaswamy wrong?
I mean, he may have phrased it differently if you thought about it and the way the reaction poured out.
But was he necessarily wrong in what he said?
Yeah, first of all, I got a note.
I love this conversation.
And I'm going to do something really interesting here that I'm going to commend the right wing for having a civil war.
So us on the left, we're supposed to snicker and go, oh, look at them disagreeing.
But you're supposed to disagree.
Yes.
You're not supposed to be robots.
And the fact that they're disagreeing with one another is actually a great sign.
That means that they're thinking for themselves.
So in terms of what Vivek and Elon said, Viveka is both right and wrong.
So if he wants to celebrate nerds, I love it.
I was an honor student.
I went to good schools.
I was a nerd and I'm proud of it, right?
But he didn't have to put down jocks and other Americans, et cetera.
I was also a jock, right?
I also played middle linebacker for our football team, and there's nothing wrong with jocks.
There's nothing wrong with any Americans, right?
So in terms of the H-1B visas, look, they've produced some wonderful results here in America.
And I love that we're getting the best talent from all across the world and coming here.
It makes us stronger.
And you see that, and especially if you're a right-winger and you support Elon Musk, you can see, well, you know, he was an H-1B guy, so it made us stronger, right?
And by the way, Steve Jobs' dad was a Syrian Muslim immigrant.
That immigration made us stronger.
Now, having said that, I do empathize with what Vinny is saying.
We're getting a lot of people who are progressives, both from the audience, but then you're seeing it from Bernie Sanders and Rokana in Congress as well going, you know, this H-1B visa does get abused sometimes where they just use it to hire cheaper engineers from across the world.
So maybe there's a fix where we say, hey, you got to go maybe 25% above what the market is to try to hire Americans first.
And then if you can't find someone, then maybe we can go to an H-1B visa.
Maybe there's a fix where you unite the left and the right's valid criticism of the H-1B visa without getting into anti-immigrant rhetoric and way of thinking.
Yeah, I mean, Batsy, I saw you nodding there.
I've got to say, I've never heard Chenk sound quite so calm and reasonable.
I think his journey in the last few months has been absolutely riveting to observe.
But Batsy, I mean, I actually do agree with CHANK.
I do think that the conservatives in America are having a genuinely open and quite rigorous debate about this issue.
What's wrong with that?
It's the Democrats who seem incapable of having the same kind of reasonable debate with each other about anything.
Isn't it?
I mean, aren't we at a place where the more reasonable party has become the Republicans here?
I wish I could be as gracious as the four of you.
I am absolutely livid about this because Donald Trump was put into office by millions and millions of Americans who were Democrats two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, over one campaign promise.
And it was to significantly limit immigration, both legal and illegal, because of course, both legal and illegal immigration reduce American wages because labor is like everything else.
It adheres to the ironclad law of supply and demand.
The more you have of it, the cheaper it is.
And we should want, whether we are progressive leftists or whether we're in the MAGA movement, we should want American workers to make decent wages so that our neighbors are living the American dream, not just the elites.
So in general, this is a massive betrayal of his number one campaign promise.
But let me just address very briefly the H-1B argument specifically.
So H-1Bs are defended on the grounds that, number one, we don't have the talent here, so we need to import it.
And number two, that we're doing a sort of brain drain from the rest of the world.
Let's bring in the best and the brightest.
These are both nonsense.
And I urge your viewers to look the stats up.
I'm going to repeat a few of them, but don't take my word for it.
Look it up.
Right now, there are 17 million people living in this country who have a degree in STEM, and only 9 million of them are employed in STEM jobs.
There are a whole bunch of them, many millions who are employed in other jobs, and 3 million who are not employed at all in STEM jobs.
So we have the supply of labor here.
And if we went into the inner city and we went into Appalachia, by God, you would find brilliant Americans there.
The problem is, is that the industry has a massive downward pressure on wages.
So it is not attracting the brilliant and the brightest of homegrown Native American talent.
What we're doing is importing a whole bunch of people.
So what about this argument that these are the best and the brightest?
Well, Pierce, you already mentioned we have a visa for the best and the brightest, and you have it.
The H-1B visa is being used to import an indentured slave caste who are tied to an employer.
They make on average $40,000 a year less than Americans.
There are 500,000 H-1B visas here, and 30% of STEM jobs are done by foreign workers, people who were born somewhere else.
That is by definition not the best and the brightest.
This is not a brain drain of the world.
It is a wage drain of Americans who should be middle class and instead their wages are being sucked upward in a funnel to billionaires like Elon Musk.
Well, A, that was a fantastic rant.
New Year Resolution Goals 00:03:48
And secondly, it's the kind of thing you might have heard from a Republican a few years ago.
And I find what's really interesting about all the debates we've been having since the election, actually, is it's quite hard to pigeonhole people now into the traditional right and left.
And I find that the most interesting thing about American politics right now.
A lot of crossover going on.
And I think that's a good thing.
I really do.
I think the less tribal, historically tribal people are, the better.
So thank you for that.
Great to have you on Uncensored.
I think it was your debut.
Please come back soon.
I want to ask all of you actually before I let you go quickly, because we're running out of time.
But Vinny, do you have a New Year resolution?
My New Year's resolution, Piers, was to be more like you.
I just, every single day I wake up, I have a picture of you in my bedroom.
And I'm, you know, and all jokes aside, Piers, I just look at it and I go, I want to be just like that guy.
And Piers, in regard to your, what was your alien status?
What was it called?
Exceptional alien.
Alien?
Exceptional.
Piers, listen, I will, as an American, I will marry you.
Not, no, not to be funny.
I'll marry you just to bring you over here just so you could be here.
Thank you.
You're good enough to be an exceptional.
And I can't say, I can't say that.
If I can say one thing really fast, I can't think of a finer man I've ever wished.
Oh, I appreciate it.
I'll pierce just really quick.
I know, because Chank mentioned it, that Hillary Clinton and George Soros got the medal of freedom.
And I can't believe it.
That is so ridiculous.
That's like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a Michelin star for outstanding diversity in cuisine.
I still can't believe it.
It is what it is.
But Piers, I appreciate you.
And everybody on the panel, America is back.
And this is what we need to do, having civil conversations.
And America is great.
And I appreciate you.
I agree.
Riley, New Year resolution.
Yeah, I've got a couple.
I find it hard when you set too many goals, too many resolutions to really keep track of it and make sure you're getting it done.
So rather than doing that, I've kind of just set a goal for my health, a goal for my career, a goal for my relationship with Christ, which is central in my life.
So I've got a lot in a couple different realms of my life within my relationship with my husband.
So all really good things.
And I'm very, very excited for the year 2025.
Good.
So am I. Batia, New Year resolution.
First of all, thank you so much for having me.
This was so fun.
My New Year's resolution is the same as it was last year to be a better American and a better Jew.
And, you know, narrowing down, I would say like learning how to speak about populism in a way that someone like Shank, who I think has a pure heart and wants the same things as me, can hear me and that I'm not off-putting to the people who disagree, but welcoming.
Yes.
Hear, here.
Chank, New Year resolution.
First of all, Piers, you shouldn't feel bad about being an exceptional alien.
I dated an exceptional alien.
So there's a lot of talk about that.
It is a weird way to describe it.
It is a weird way to describe it.
Anyways, two New Year's resolution.
One is to dominate even more.
Get the whole internet to watch the Young Turks Live at 6 o'clock Eastern.
Come watch at 6 o'clock Eastern.
We do something interesting.
Young Turks on YouTube.
All right, and secondly, seriously, bring the right and the left populace together so that we represent the average American, get past the donor class, get money out of politics, and bring democracy back to America.
Hear here.
I completely agree.
What a civilized debate we had today.
What a great start of the year.
It probably won't last.
But while it does, thank you.
Restoring my faith in debate.
And happy new year to all of you.
Thank you very much.
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