Ep. 243: HOLIDAY SPECIAL! The Great H1B Visa Debate! Jay z Gets Scorched! Attack in Germany! & MORE!
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You want us sick, you think we're dumb.
You want us blind, then you want us drug.
You want us poor while you get more of everything.
But you don't get to tell me what to think and what to do.
You don't get to tell me what is true.
You're just liars, cheats and cooks.
You changed the mood and you burned the books.
And so I don't believe a single word you say.
You're all liars, fakes and cons.
Watch out and we want you gone.
So don't believe this time you'll get away.
You want us tricked.
You want us numb.
You want us scared and you want us stung.
You want us shot and you want us thought in every way.
You want our minds.
You want our time.
You want us friend up in your crimes.
I hope you know that it's time to go.
And we're taking names.
You don't get to tell us what to think and what to do.
No, you don't get to tell us what is true.
Short lies, fakes and crooks.
Change the rules and you burned the books.
And so we don't believe a single word you say.
You're all liars, fakes and cons.
Watch out and we want you gone.
So don't believe this time you'll get away.
Cause we see la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, all your lies.
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, all your lies.
You don't get to tell us what to think and what to do.
Enabling Michael.
I'm going to see if this works.
What time is it, people?
It's not 4 o'clock yet.
Let me go see if I can hear my own voice.
All right, we're going to put this on pause and let me see because...
Let me make sure I'm back to the original.
Okay, lighting is terrible, people, for obvious reasons.
I've got to remember, I'm on this camera right here.
I'm using ear pods?
Air buds?
Whatever the heck these things are, I don't like them.
The question is, can you hear me?
And is the audio good enough?
It's not going to be good, good, but it's just got to be decent.
Let me see here.
We got nice hair, says Dashman91.
Good day, Viva Peeps.
Before I play the actual intro video of the day, I want to just respond to something which I saw in the chat, which I don't know who's responding to who.
Let me just go up here and see if I can actually find out who is responding to who.
Because there's some negativity about a boot.
I'm not going to get in.
I'm not going to get too far down to it.
I have not been able to post these short videos to locals because uploading where I'm at takes forever.
I mean, literally forever.
I uploaded overnight, and then I found a secret internet which allowed me to upload a video much faster.
It only took like an hour and a half.
For whatever the reason, on locals, it just doesn't upload.
And so I have not been able to upload to locals, but I've been able to upload to Twitter, Rumble, and Commutu.
Let me just put this on.
Do not disturb.
And so there's that.
I'm not in ideal internet connectivity situations.
And we're doing an early show today because I'm with, we're going to be about 20 some odd people in close proximity having dinner tonight.
And it's going to be amazing.
Let me just go down here and see if we're all good.
Okay, good.
So this is the Sunday show.
It's a little bit earlier than normal.
And we're going to have a good show tonight.
Barnes is, well, not popping in, but Barnes is doing this early.
And we're going to go over some...
Developing news of the week.
But... I'm going to get into the actual...
I'm going to do a test.
I wanted to play this because it's hilarious, but I think it's going to get copy claimed on YouTube in a matter of seconds.
This was to be the other intro song of the day because it's a work of freaking genius.
Kiffness is the man who did They're Eating the Dogs, They're Eating the Cats.
And he's got 40 seconds of, it's not comedic genius, it's Mona Lisa level works of art.
Listen to this.
Me ready for the new year 2024 coming up to you.
Smashing the window.
That's the actual clicker.
Unnecessary drama.
Gaslighters. He's South African, by the way.
back Classic, classic humor.
Let's see if I've played enough to actually get copy claimed by abusive copy trolls on Commitube.
Good evening, everybody.
This is going to be the early edition of Viva and Barnes Law for the People on a Sunday night.
What the F?
Why so early?
Because I've got a family dinner.
And better early than never.
Because it would not be something we could do at 6 o'clock and miss a family and friends who have come in from all corners of the world to celebrate the holidays together.
How goes the battle?
Everybody's seen the...
It's an amazing...
I put out my video.
We're having the discussion.
We're going to talk about it tonight, the H-1B, to be or not to be, debate of the millennia.
Like, you'd never known this was such a key, core, election-defining MAGA movement issue, because it never came up during the election in the detail in which it's come up over the last week, but we'll get there.
Oh, how dare you, Viva, have a life, says Planteus Flavis.
So, yeah, that's it.
I'm going to start with something else, and we're going to get into it a little bit when Barnes gets here.
There has been other news going on in Canada, and it's caused people to get on social media and act like the most holier-than-thou hypocrites on Earth.
Period. Let me play you the video, then we're going to get into this.
What's for dinner, Viva?
Helton, aka Fasterman, says, what is for dinner?
I don't know.
I'm not cooking it.
I know that much.
Marion and I did dinner yesterday, and by Marion and I did dinner yesterday, I had very minimal input into the dinner.
No, okay.
We're going to start with something right now.
I haven't been able to clip stuff as freely as I want to because it doesn't matter.
Up in Canada, apparently the internet is as unreliable as the government.
Bada bing, bada boom, people.
Speaking of Canadian government being bad, unreliable, listen to this here.
I'm going to play this.
Apparently it's from Desi Media on Instagram.
I couldn't find Desi Media having posted it on Twitter.
I'm not trying to give credit or deny credit.
Because where I was able to find it was on 6Buzz TV, which is number one in Canadian entertainment.
And they've played this video.
And you will not believe the virtue signaling firestorm that this has triggered on social media.
We'll play it uninterrupted.
And I'll tell you what I think in a second.
But by the way, these are microphones on the earbuds.
I don't know what it sounds like.
I'll have to listen to it in a second.
For context, for those who are listening on podcast.
We're looking at a video filmed vertically, which is very, very annoying, but I think it's how the kids do it on Instagram, of Justin Trudeau seemingly getting into a vehicle, and I don't know where security is.
We'll get there in a second.
And this is the confrontation, and I'll put that in quotes.
This is the, quote, abuse that Justin Trudeau has to deal with from, quote, rabid Canadian citizens.
I'm being facetious here.
Listen to this.
Mr. Prime Minister.
Please get the fuck out of BC.
Have a wonderful day now.
Yeah, you suck.
That's the outrage, people.
Even in the trolling, Canadians are more polite.
That's the clip that has caused a firestorm on social media.
Let me play it again, because we want to talk about a few things in this video and then thoughts.
This is a woman who's confronting, put it in quotes, Justin Trudeau while he's on vacation.
Because if you don't know, by the way, we talked about it before they went on a six-week vacation for Christmas.
This is the same Justin Trudeau who has lost confidence of the Canadian government.
Same Justin Trudeau Liberal Party who had their Minister of Finance resign two hours before she was supposed to provide the fiscal update, which would show that they were 50%, $23 billion over their projected deficit, resigns.
The fill-in for Minister of Finance resigns as well.
And then they go and break for six weeks for Christmas because nothing's too good for the government.
Imagine people breaking for six weeks if they're not employed by the federal government people.
Listen to this.
One more time.
She approaches him.
Mr. Prime Minister.
How did she know?
I wonder.
Please get the fuck out of BC.
Have a wonderful day now.
Yeah, you suck.
I've got to tell you something.
The virtue signaling that that triggered on social media, It was the most astonishing thing on earth.
Oh, he's on vacation with family.
Leave him alone.
Oh, this is not the way we behave.
First of all, if I may have a word of advice for Justin Trudeau's security, it is kind of concerning or disconcerting that there would be such lax security around Justin Trudeau that the woman could have been much more malicious than telling someone to get the fuck out of BC.
She could have been crazy.
She could have been violent.
And she got...
Right up in Justin Trudeau's face to shake his hand.
All it takes is to be smiling at first and then Justin Trudeau's security will let anybody get through.
Okay. Set aside the security lapse and it's an absolute egregious lapse of security because Justin Trudeau, I mean, he needs it.
You don't spurn and scorn tens of millions of people and then not think you've made a few enemies and rightly so.
But the bottom line, this woman's greatest transgression, the most The emblematic symbol of Canadian political hatred is a woman telling Justin Trudeau to get the fuck out of BC because nobody likes him and he sucks.
She said it quite politely.
And you get on social media, and the amount of people saying this is just terrible is obscene.
I would not do it personally.
And not because I wouldn't tell him to go F himself.
I'll tell him to go F himself every day of the week.
I wouldn't necessarily approach him in person in front of his kid.
While he's on...
I couldn't care less if he's on vacation.
I wouldn't do it if I saw him in Parliament.
But the idea that this guy...
Don't bother him while he's on vacation skiing in British Columbia while Canadians are going through what Canadians are going through because of him.
Don't bother him while he's on vacation for six freaking weeks so that they can then pro parliament when they get back and probably have a new election called right in time for a bunch of his other partners in crime to get their federal pay.
The man is on vacation with his family.
Do you know how many people that man in particular prevented from vacationing with their family by way of their vaccine mandates for air travel, train, and bus?
Can you imagine?
The guy who prevented people from traveling unless they submitted to an experimental medical procedure.
Now other people aren't there feigning outrage that you might interfere with his family vacation.
Go to hell.
This man has not just ruined lives through policy, prevented other people from having the same freedoms to vacation with their family, both policy-wise and financially-wise.
Leave him alone.
He's on vacation.
There are people who have been injured.
And killed as a result of his federal policy, but don't tell him to get the fuck out of your province because you don't like him because he's not welcome there because he is hated and he is not welcome there.
Give me a break.
I made a joke.
He deserves far worse than this.
I say politically, maybe even legally.
I do believe spiritually he's going to be damned to hell if he's not already in hell on earth because he can't walk anywhere without angry Canadian citizens telling him to go fuck himself.
So, yeah, bottom line.
You're not going to score any points on social media by feigning outrage that someone had the audacity after that man ruined the lives of millions of people, ended the lives of thousands, if not maybe a little more, harmed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
Outrage that someone told him to get the fuck out of their province because he's not welcome?
He isn't welcome.
And that's the reality of what happens when you act like a filthy tyrant and abuse your population.
All right.
Well, on that note, how goes the battle, people?
Let me see what we got here by way of tip questions.
And Gadfit is in the House of G. Imagine a candidate running on, quote, make America great again, end quote.
And then two of the most prominent and vocal members of that campaign saying Americans are too stupid to do tech jobs while paying and hiring immigrants and paying them less.
From two immigrants, no.
Why on earth, Viva, an immigrant would homegrown...
I'm not sure if I understand this here.
Let me go read this over in Locals and make sure I can read the entire thing.
Where is Locals here?
I'll get the tip question because I like this one when Barnes is going to get in here.
Ganthin. Okay.
No. Why on earth, viva, an immigrant, would homegrown Americans who've watched their jobs sent overseas for the last 40 years be outraged?
Are you seriously that tone deaf on this I love having, first of all, Ganthit systematically rude and systematically strawmanning people's arguments.
It might make you feel good, but it's not how discussions are had or intellectual discourse.
So let me see here.
Why on earth would Viva want homegirls who've watched their jobs sent overseas for the last 40 years be outraged?
Are you seriously that tone deaf on this issue?
What is the issue?
We'll talk about when Barnes gets here.
But the straw manning of my position on the issue, which has only been to understand the respective positions on all of this.
Interestingly enough, nobody cared.
Everyone was very happy to have the immigrants.
I love how you're reducing.
I'm pretty sure Vivek Ramaswamy was born in America.
Vivek Ramaswamy, born...
He was, because he was running for president.
Where was Vivek Ramaswamy born?
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And you still call him an immigrant.
I'm not sensitive, but that's not even not rude.
I mean, it is rude.
It's also just factually incorrect.
So you look at Vivek, and because he's Indian descent, although born in America and been an American citizen, you call him an immigrant.
Okay, that's interesting.
Everyone was very happy to have the support of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy until they had a policy disagreement on what is not, as far as I'm concerned, a core issue of the presidency or the election, to the point where it was never really discussed until now.
Illegal immigration was.
Open migration was.
Open borders was.
Drug smuggling fentanyl was.
The potential arguable abuse of the H1B1 visas was not.
So with that said, Ganthet, it would be nice and equitable to fairly represent everyone's respective positions on this.
Mine was not taking a position one way or the other, but rather just understanding the respective arguments and coming to the conclusion that H-1B probably has been exploited and abused by corporations.
But the issue is also there are good arguments to support having something of a skilled policy in American politics.
Let me scroll up here.
I've been in IT for over 20 years.
Ready when you are.
And have hired hundreds of H-1Bs during most of my tenure.
I have never once seen an H-1B replacement match the skill set of an American engineer.
If the demand for IT skilled labor was so high, companies would not be forcing skilled American engineers to train their non-skilled foreign replacements.
Those of us living with this could not feel more abandoned and discarded right now.
With Elon, Vivek, and Trump, we have no champion.
This text master says, I've been in IT for over 20 years, worked with hundreds of H-1Bs.
During most of my tenure, I have never once seen an H-1B replacement match the skill set of an American engineer.
Okay, fine.
Now I understand the tenor of what you're saying.
We're going to talk about it with Barnes.
There's a debate here because I think, obviously, with some of the examples of H-1Bs that have been brought up, it's quite clear it's not necessarily a skilled immigrant.
type thing, replacing, or at least finding as an alternative that which you cannot find here.
The interesting thing is where there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance is that when it comes to the H-1B, or at the very least the output of American universities, we all agree they're woke institutions that are outputting crap.
The all I don't want to be mean to theology or philosophy BAs that lead nowhere and that indoctrinate children.
I mean, we all agree on that.
And then when the argument is, one that Vivek is kind of making, that, well, the product of the universities of America is inadequate for what we need, and therefore we need H-1B visas for certain issues, well, people agree on the first half and not on the second half, which is understandable as well, because in a country of 350 million people, not every single person graduating from university or getting trades is going to be a broken, woke, indoctrinated individual.
But that is to say that there is a discussion here as to whether or not it's being abused, whether or not it has any purpose in the first place.
And the debate, which was during the election, immigration is not about importing illegally cheap labor to pick the fruits and vegetables in the fields.
We want skilled labor that benefits the country.
I mean, that was the debate.
And that is a logical thing to say.
Yes, immigration has to be...
On the one hand, good for the immigrant, but good for the country.
And are you going to bring in skilled labor?
You make sure that you're bringing in skilled labor who are going to work, pay taxes, and not be a drain on society.
That was the discussion.
And then overnight, it turned into the, I say, straw man or oversimplification that the H-1B one was always the immigration debate during the election, which it wasn't.
There are arguments for and against.
And when it comes to Elon's experience in big tech, whether or not he can find the skill that he needs, you can believe him.
You can believe him but think he might have economic interests which might be affecting his bias, or you can think he's lying, and the only reason he's saying it is because he can get the labor for cheaper through H-1B visas.
Okay. But it is...
I think that everyone treating this like this is the litmus test among the right, among MAGA.
This is what I think happens when people get whipped into a frenzy.
And I genuinely believe that there are actors whipping this into a frenzy.
And you just know that the T-Pains of the Twitter world are loving it.
The AESs of the Twitter world are loving it.
I bet Pac-Man's loving it.
Watching, I don't want to say allies in a cheap sense, watching teammates fight among each other really, really makes the opposing team very happy.
Here's what Elon actually said.
This is from Judy Hodgkins over in our Locals community.
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I've been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform, and that is, let me see if I can bring this up here, the tweet from Elon.
I appreciate, by the way, the degree to which you actually hear.
The tapping on the keyboard.
Here, this is what Elon has since said.
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly, adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive.
The other argument that I think people should appreciate is that there is a benefit to capturing skilled labor from overseas.
Two things can be true at once.
You can have the skill here, which I have no doubt exists, and it can also be worthwhile to bring over the skill from other countries and to make sure that...
Other countries don't benefit from that skilled labor.
And that you bring over skilled immigrants who will work, pay taxes, contribute to a functioning economy.
That was the discussion when it came to the immigration debate during the election.
It's since been oversimplified and I would dare say falsified.
Entry required says she should have handed Trudeau an antler hat.
Tony the Hat, 12 bucks, is raising a huge glass of dark Jamaican rum to my beloved, gentle Staffordshire Bull Terrier.
Ooh, I love those dogs.
Baby, who took the Rainbow Bridge last week.
Would you gentlemen care to join me?
I can't drink yet.
It's still too early, but I'm going to have a good one later.
Those are beautiful dogs, Staffordshire Terriers.
Gantzit says, this course liked the richest man in the world threatening people who disagree with him on the issue.
Mr. Free Speech shutting off people's blue checkmark?
Don't spit in my face and tell me it's raining.
Gantt, do you know?
I mean, this is another thing where you have people who go out and allegedly, Laura Loomer's blue checkmark was removed, as were a bunch of other people.
Some people, them, say it's retaliation for political disagreement.
Others say no, it's because Laura Loomer allegedly doxxed the ex-employee.
Others say that there's other reasons for this.
Go check out Greg Bolden's recent thread about this, that there might have been A pay-to-post scam going on.
So Gantt is systematically oversimplifying and systematically misrepresenting will not make it true.
You'll spit in my face.
Don't call it rain and expect me to believe it.
Laura Loomer, from what I understand, had her checkmark removed because she posted a doxing of the Twitter employee, from what I understand.
If that's factually wrong, then correct me.
But if it's factually correct, don't misrepresent it.
Ryan PD 911.
It says, America first equals Americans only, Americans always.
If there is a qualified American who wants the job, they get it over a foreigner, no matter what, full stop, the end.
Yeah, I can tell you what ends up happening with these applications, is that they post the application, and if they don't get a response from an American, or they don't get an adequate application from an American, that's how they go, from what I understand, with some of these visas.
But absolutely, if there is a limited number of provisions...
You go with an American-born, obviously, first.
Why would you not?
Am I here?
Do you see me?
You're there, Robert.
We both look like we've been thrown into dungeons of commie natures.
You're looking good, though, Robert.
How are you doing?
Doing much better.
Amazing. Look, I'm taking shit for things that I never even said on the H-1B issue.
And then someone accused me of having a conflict of interest because I'm aspiring, you know.
To reside in America long-term.
First of all, it's not a conflict of interest because it's not an undisclosed element for the purposes of influencing a decision.
You all know what I'm doing, and I have no decision-making power in all of this.
I'm just trying to accurately frame the two sides of this discussion without it entering into the vitriol that it's entered into.
Robert, maybe people will listen to you, or maybe they're going to cancel you, depending on what you have to say about this.
You've been following the H1B1 visa debate all week.
What is your insight?
I'm going to pick your brain as you go.
So first of all, Trump's position has always been clear.
There's people suggesting that he's somehow moderated his position.
He's always been crystal clear.
He's all for legal immigration.
He's completely against illegal immigration.
He's made that legality his drawing line.
He has said he has hired people on various visas every year at Mar-a-Lago and at others of his operations around the world.
Idea that, you know, people are pretending that somehow Elon has influenced his position.
This has always been Trump's position.
He wants the best and the brightest in America.
He wants the smartest and most skilled in America.
He's made that clear repeatedly.
His issue is with illegal immigration, not with legal immigration as a general rule.
Now, what he did do in his first term, as Stephen Miller highlighted, who is his primary aide on immigration issues, founder of America First Legal.
One of his best allies was former chief of staff to Senator Sessions and was key to Sessions endorsing Trump because of issues of war, trade, and immigration.
And what he did, what Trump did when he was in the White House was make H-1B visas work the way they're supposed to, which is when you have a unique set of skills outside the country, you can in America get the benefit of those unique set of skills through the H-1B visa program.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Most of the complaints that I have seen, 80-85%, are that the H-1B visa program is not working as intended.
And even Elon has come around on this.
Trump tried to fix it when he was in there.
Biden undid everything Trump did.
And Elon says he agrees with everything Trump attempted to fix the program.
So Elon is for the program in its intended form, not for the program in its current form.
There is a percentage of people out there in Trump world that are opposed to all immigration, period, with no exceptions, no carve-outs, nothing.
I get it, but they're in the minority.
They're in the minority of the Republican Party.
They're in the minority of the Trump coalition.
They're in the minority of the Trump cabinet.
I understand where people are coming from.
They're like, we've tried immigration and it's failed for 50 years.
So why don't we try no immigration for a while?
I get their position.
But it's not one that is likely to get through Congress at this point.
It's not one that Trump himself agrees with.
Some people just haven't listened to Trump.
He's been saying for six years now, let's build a big, beautiful wall and then a big, beautiful door in the middle to make sure people can get through that are lawfully entitled to be here.
They go through the proper process to be here.
He's always felt that way.
I'm probably a little bit more skeptical of immigration than Trump is.
Legal immigration, in part because of how easy it is to abuse.
It's because I'm skeptical of the state.
It's where my disagreement is with both him and Vivek and Robert Kennedy and others, and Ralph Nader, is they have confidence that government can fix things if you put the right people there or the right policies there.
My view is government always creates more problems than net good, and it's just sort of built in.
So I think the debate is a healthy debate, I think, to have.
I think some people are a little over the top on both sides.
I don't agree with Vivek that the problem is one of American culture.
That's one that is common to a lot of Indian immigrants, what he was expressing.
And you're seeing it pop up in other people that Trump has nominated.
They've said things like Americans are low IQ and things like this.
I mean, a lot of the Indian immigrants, almost all H1B1 visas go to Indians, people from India.
Dots, not feathers, as an old friend of mine used to say.
India has a historic problem of caste problems.
In other words, they even think, based on your re-evolution, based on prior lives, that you are an inferior human being, based on your intellectual capacity, as they see it.
The Brahmin caste is the elite caste, where Kamala Harris' mother came from.
That's where a lot of the immigrants come from.
Vivek won't say it out loud, but there is a...
An underlying snobbery, in my experience, within the Indian community towards Americans and others.
And I get it.
They come here.
They're very successful.
Indian immigrants, migrants are some of the most successful.
They're more successful than white Native Americans in terms of wealth, in terms of income, in terms of wages, in terms of job status.
So part of what you're seeing is an underlying...
You know, complain about the 7-Eleven, you know, stereotype, right, that Babylon Bee made fun of, that Vivek is all excited he's going to get to be in the White House 7-Eleven because of all the Indians that managed 7-Elevens or the stereotype that they do.
So some of this is underlying cultural conflict, and that's part of my issue with immigration, that people who look at immigration through a purely economic filter don't understand how societies work, because historically...
It's cultural clashes between groups that undermine a society, more so than economic disturbance.
And the issue here is you have people that have come from a very different culture, very different background.
Will people from India really bleep twice about censorship?
Probably not.
It's not something that's ingrained into their cultural identity.
In American, it is, even no matter which part of your political spectrum you're a part of.
So I think that the net effect is that I would be for reducing H-1B visas even more along the lines of what Trump was thinking about in his first term.
I get the point that we want to recruit engineering talent from around the world, and we don't want companies leaving the United States to try to recruit that talent.
So I get where Musk is coming from.
There's some credence to that, but it's overstated because it undervalues the cultural conflict problem that he doesn't solve.
Sorry, at the risk of, I don't know if it's going to be a rude joke, but there are people observing, like, if the concern is we've got to get all that talent from India, you know, why does America look the way it does?
And what tech companies are actually in India versus other countries?
And so, I mean, I appreciate the argument that it's been stereotyped to some extent where we need to get those...
Skilled Indian talent that we don't have here.
But meanwhile, big tech is in Silicon Valley, not necessarily India per se.
Knowing that, what people have been documenting online is it's become a massive scam.
You have these companies set up that are Indian companies that bring in people to get access to the U.S. that they're often not the ones doing the work.
They're often not as qualified as Americans who would be able to do that work, but at a higher market price.
And it's like all the immigration arguments I've heard over the years, like, well, you won't have strawberry farms if you don't allow mass Mexican and Central American immigration, because Americans aren't going to work for as cheap as they want strawberries to be.
And my view has always been, well, then what you end up doing is you end up either increasing, either you have a good that cannot be made with the wages allowed in the country, in which case that good probably shouldn't be there.
In other words, that's the consequence of having a minimum wage policy, having minimum labor policies, so on and so forth.
What J.D. Vance said is absolutely correct.
Immigration has been driven by greed of big corporations and wealthy people.
And there's a balance.
I mean, do I want the Elon Musk to come to America?
Yes, I do.
Do I want the Viveks to come to America?
Yes, I do.
Do I want the guy that's the cheap knockoff that's just stealing jobs and lowering wages?
No, I don't.
And the question is, how many of the H-1B visa applicants are the next Elon Musk, and how much of them are the next person's just hurting America's jobs and wages and creating cultural conflict that doesn't need to exist here?
And I think it's a good debate to have, is my take.
I'm probably in between the positions.
I think as it operates currently, it's a crock.
It's not the expertise that it should be, that it's intended to be.
Golf instructor coach, golf professional.
These are not what's going to be one basis.
And you can go through 90% of the H-1B listings are not looking for the next Elon Musk.
They're looking for how can we hire somebody here in America because the work needs to be done here in America.
We can't outsource it overseas.
So that we can outsource it inside our own country, and we recruit foreigners to do it.
And this goes all back to the war conflicts, right?
I mean, historically, societies and civilizations, somebody even mentioned, well, let's have an H-1B visa for the Army.
And that's an interesting thought process.
I knew someone who had proposed that people could become legal if they joined the Army, served in the military.
I get that idea, but there's a reason why we quit using mercenaries as a general rule.
Mercenaries are a risk.
Anybody that's studied mercenaries over the centuries, different civilizations, they flip sides with ease.
They're not loyal for the same reasons.
They may run and cut bait when they feel it's necessary.
So I'm patriotic in that sense, and I want more people that are patriotic and loyal to America to be in those key positions of power and influence.
So I think there's a balance, and I think Trump will find that balance.
It will not be to abolish the program.
And Elon's point was he doesn't like the residual remnant of bigots that are in the United States.
And there's clearly some of those people.
And then I think Vivek's fascinating.
Vivek's still annoyed because he grew up in America, for those that don't know.
And what he's talking about is an Indian subculture that comes to America.
It's important to emphasize.
Other people say, well, the Indians must be really smart.
It's the Indians that come to America, that make it to America.
There's a certain cross-threshold that you have to get there.
It was similar for a lot of Jewish immigrants.
You had to have a certain skill set, acumen, and be above average to make it here in the first place.
So we're getting the top 1% of Indian society.
But I'm sure people like Vivek, where he grew up in a subculture that celebrated intelligence, celebrated academics, the average American public school does not.
He's right about that point.
He overstated his point.
But he's not entirely wrong.
I mean, everybody that grew up in American public schools, it was the athlete that was celebrated.
And the model, the woman, the girl with looks, who was celebrated.
It was not the smart kid, boy or girl, that was celebrated.
And in fact, normally, they were treated very badly.
And that's what Vivek is, it's kind of a revenge of the nerds kind of statement.
Now, what he's not admitting is that a bunch of people that are in India...
What happens is Indian people from India get put in positions of hiring.
And what do they do?
They hire whom they know.
They hire fellow Indians.
They don't hire other Americans.
They've been caught discriminating repeatedly in lawsuit after lawsuit, case after case.
So the idea...
Elon is saying that the ideal...
Of H1B1 he is for against bigots.
He has specifically gone out of his way to say, in its current form, it's unmanageable.
So I think it was a lot of...
And, you know, Laura Loomer's always looking for controversy.
I don't like Laura Loomer.
I'm never going to like Laura Loomer.
I don't trust Laura Loomer.
Laura Loomer's looking...
Every time I turn around, she's trying to create conflict within the movement, not conflict with people outside the movement.
Why doesn't Loomer spend more time researching Bill Gates than worry about Elon or worry about Vivek or worry about Robert Kennedy?
RFK Jr. before the election.
She's always doing off on somebody.
She's an idiot.
She's always been an idiot.
She's always going to be an idiot.
And she's a quasi-grifter.
So her having an opinion, I could care less to be blunt about it.
She's attacked me repeatedly.
I mean, she's always trying to cause trouble.
I mean, does anybody really think...
Would you put Laura Loomer up in a debate with Vivek?
Does anybody think Laura Loomer would win?
Or with Elon?
Now, there are some smart immigration people out there that would do numbers, would run numbers, would run around Vivek and Elon, to be frank, because what they both revealed this past week is they are both uninformed on the legal immigration problem.
They're informed on the illegal immigration problem.
But they don't realize, I mean, that Disney story that Steve Bannon was talking about, and I respect Bannon's perspective, and Bannon was more blunt about it than I am in that regard.
I'm not all the way to where Bannon is at.
But Bannon is like, I'm not going to attack Elon as a globalist.
Elon has been attacking globalists now for two years straight and has done more damage to globalists than Steve has ever done because of how he handled Twitter and what he's done globally.
So I think that was excessive.
But so was some of the commentary that anybody who questions H-1B is somehow bad.
Somebody should be censored because they're questioning H-1B.
There's people that are being censored just because they're affiliated with that conservative organization, influencer organization called Conservative OG.
Too many of them, and I think Elon thought he was getting rid of the racists, the bigots.
He got rid of people that, you know, he took away blue check marks of people that are not, don't have an iota of racism in it.
Some of them had not even talked about the H-1D visa issue.
It's a good, robust debate that needs to be had.
How much legal immigration makes sense?
That's a cultural issue.
That's an economic issue.
It's a political issue.
It's all of those things.
I think Trump has the right position, some balance.
We want to bring people in that are the best, but we want to make sure they're the best.
And I think that's the logic that makes sense.
It's going to be a difficult application process.
No, and not that I'm going to get particularly irritated with Ganthit, because he's a member of our community, and it's consistent, this type of rhetoric.
But to Stroman, I've raised even a concern that I don't think has been raised in the context of this debate, where if the idea is you want this highly skilled labor from foreign nations, either because you can't get it here or because you want to hog all of that skilled labor.
It does pose national security issues if you have H-1B visas going to China, India, countries that are not necessarily on amicable terms with America.
And so there's even a national security element to it that I don't think has been fleshed out properly.
And what people on our board have said that are in tech have said it's been badly abused.
So it's where it's like, okay, Vivek, did you not know it was being badly abused when you decided to go on this rant?
Elon, did you not know it was being badly abused?
They need to be...
But what's amazing is these are billionaires.
Elon allowed his own platform to be used to attack him.
I mean, I got to give credit to a guy who does that.
I mean, he's got a billion dollar platform.
He could just take everybody off.
And he doesn't.
Instead, he engages many of them.
So I don't have any...
I've been a skeptic of Elon.
Going back, people can go back and watch the hush-hushes that are progressive.
I have buddies of mine that had sworn by Elon.
They ended up right.
I ended up wrong.
So I'm not going to come back and bash the guy because he thinks the policy that helped get him here to America, he doesn't want to see closed.
That's a pretty reasonable position for a guy in his position to have.
I'm going to bring this one up.
This is Spam Ranger from our local community.
It says, it's a psyop.
Democrats have tricked oblivious MAGA Republicans into fighting over 65,000 H-1B visa recipients as they flood the border with 10 million illegals.
MAGA Republicans are gullible.
I can't say that I disagree with this observation because I do think a lot of this infighting has been...
Illegal immigration is far more important than illegal, number one.
The H-1Bs, I mean, it's 65 to 100, maybe 130,000 every year.
So you could say over 10 years, it's a million plus.
But the fact that this has become the new litmus test, and it's true, to the distraction of the potential for Biden...
I don't know, mass amnesty of illegals.
I mean, it's such a drop in the bucket as to the actual problem of the immigration problem that to merge this as though it was always the immigration problem feels like a PSYOP, and it feels like there are people out there who are directly participating in exacerbating this strife among MAGA.
And now is not really the time to do it.
It's like, you know, I love Mary Bowden.
She's done a fantastic work on the vaccine, fantastic work throughout COVID.
I get her concern that she wanted to see more discussion by all of the Maha Make America Healthy Again folks of let's ban this COVID vaccine.
That has never been Bobby Kennedy's view.
I got into this debate in court in the Fifth Circuit where a judge said, oh, you just want to ban, you want to prohibit people from me even to have access.
That has never been Bobby Kennedy's view.
He wants informed consent, pure and simple.
That no vaccine should be made available that doesn't provide informed consent.
He's always at that position.
But that's the universal medical position since 1947 with the Nuremberg Code.
That's all Robert Kennedy was affirming.
And that's all any of them have done.
And like some of them now, I get they want the COVID vaccine to be a debate topic with the nominations.
I get that.
All that's going to do is get our best people not nominated at this stage.
There's plenty of time to work on that.
And there's plenty of ways to work on that.
I'm more aggressive than most, obviously, on it.
But I'm not for things that backfire, things that aren't.
I'm for things that work, that get you better solutions.
The things that don't work, I'm not in favor of.
And obsessing over H-1B visas is not the priority on immigration.
And so it's all the criminals that are here is priority number one.
Priority number two is sending a message to everybody, hey, don't come here.
That's the reason why Trump will do high-profile...
Will he be able to deport 10 million people?
No. Will he do some high-profile ones that the media finds shocking that they blast all across global media?
Yes. Why?
Because Trump knows that will keep everybody from getting in those lines to come all over again.
He knows that people are like, uh-uh, Trump's up there now.
I get up there now, I'm going to jail for 10 years.
God knows where I'll end up.
Trump wants people to think that, so they stay home.
So that's how he can solve the immigration problem without having massive expenditure of resources.
But, you know, part of that is cleaning up H-1B visas, cleaning up our visa program.
All of that absolutely needs to be done.
And some of the people that see immigrants as just a bonus because of economics are forgetting the cultural and political change.
I mean, I get Vivek and some others.
Indian Americans still voted for Harris.
So they are a very democratic leaning group.
So why do you want more of them easily accessing American society?
Because what happens is they come here and then they become citizens down the road.
And if you look at how it's working, many of them aren't even doing the work and aren't even that specially skilled.
It's often being subcontracted after somebody in India is actually doing the work anyway.
So you already have that dynamic.
It's the people that are in the tech industry, that are in the immigration field.
For example, I strongly support asylum applications.
The abuse of asylum by the left has utterly gutted the ability to get people who have legitimate...
We've talked about it with some of our cases.
I remember there was a...
I think it was a Chinese guy who was persecuted for being Christian in China.
His asylum claim was denied, but everyone who crosses the southern border is deemed to be an asylum seeker.
Give me a temporary protected status.
But then you have people with real asylum claims that because people are mad about abuse of asylum claims, now they don't want there to be any asylum claims taken seriously.
There's always going to be people that have legitimate asylum claims.
And so I think it's been a good, mostly good debate.
You saw some people pop up that just love controversy.
Laura Luman loves conflict.
Let me know when she goes a month without conflict.
I mean, that's why I don't take her seriously.
I never will.
There's that crowd that you can just ignore, frankly.
But the more impactful people, you know, both in Trump world and in Musk and the rest, and I thought Cernovich made a lot of good, insightful comments on both directions.
I think there's a robust, healthy debate to be had, but they can't be dumb about it.
They can't start calling them all, what's this woke right stuff?
Everybody, it's like their new popular phrase.
I don't even know what it means.
If I don't know what it means, it's a useless phrase.
Well, it's a useless phrase to begin with.
I think it started with James Lindsay who pulls some of the same tactics that the left does and then they call him a woke.
The bottom line, woke, by definition, needs to be progressive and overly progressive.
So you can't have overly...
I mean, it has to be another word, anti-woke, on the right.
But I think what we mean is people who thrive off...
Conflict to some extent.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what they build their whole MO on.
That's what they do.
So I think there was a little bit of that this past week.
But I thought what was interesting is this debate was really only happening on Twitter.
For the most part, it was not happening anywhere else.
Now, Cheryl Atkinson, if you have access to her full measure news show that's available on various cable networks all across the country, also I think her site, they interviewed me up at Amos Miller's Farm.
So that's being broadcast today.
So we'll see how that goes.
Tucker Carlson did a documentary that he's yet to release.
He's waiting to find the right time to release his Amos Miller documentary.
But to me, those kind of topics, like, for example, why we're obsessing now over trying to get Bobby Kennedy.
Kennedy's been very clear what he thinks about the COVID vaccine.
It's not like he's been bashful about it.
He's taken all kinds of heat for his willingness and readiness to be critical of it.
He's saved all kinds of lives.
By being critical and skeptical of it.
To demand that he make that his one calling card for his confirmation is just dumb.
I mean, you know, and again, I like, I don't want anybody to confuse me.
I'm a big fan of people like Mary Bowden and others.
I'm saying politically, what you have is a lot of amateurs, right?
Most of these people have never been in Washington before.
They don't, now Bobby Kennedy does.
I mean, you know, going way back to the time, he hired a grasshopper, quite literally.
But, you know, these people know how Washington works.
Trust them that they have the best instincts at heart.
And, you know, don't immediately turn on Trump the moment you don't like something he says or does.
Don't immediately demand Bobby Kennedy endorse all of your positions or all of a sudden you're not going to embrace him.
He's got enough enemies already.
So let's get these people nominated and through.
And then we can debate the next set of policies.
But these are some of the best people that have ever been nominated to the positions they've ever been nominated to.
Same at the NIH.
Same at the FDA.
Now, I've said I think the USDA could use some upgrades.
But interestingly enough, people on our board at vivabarneslaw.locals.com know the Secretary of Agriculture.
And they say that she grew up on a farm and is very farm-oriented and will be good for small farms.
So that's very positive.
I just didn't know that.
So I hope that is the case.
But as a whole, people are nitpicking a little too soon.
I get what they're concerned about.
Be concerned a little bit later.
These are still the best of the group.
I mean, you're going to have the most anti-immigration since 1920 in Homan.
You know what I mean?
So it's not like, you know, immigration won't be tackled.
It will be.
But I think it was a good debate, though, for people like Musk and Vivek to remember, economics is not everything.
Culture and politics matter.
And Americans being excluded from tech is not okay.
And it's never been okay.
And they needed to be slapped around a little bit to remind them of that.
In the end, Elon comes right back to the same position Trump has.
H-1B, great idea, terrible in action.
Let's fix it for good.
And I'll bring one up from Gantet here, which says, the education system in America sucks.
It's funny how four of the five top universities in the world are U.S. In which 30% of the students are immigrants.
Explain that.
Viva with it being a strawman.
Well, that wouldn't be a strawman criticism.
That would be throwing other stuff out from the discussion.
I just Googled it as we're talking.
Three of the top five are in America.
Oxford is number one, apparently, according to this list.
Say it again?
And probably Sorbonne is up there.
There's no question the U.S. higher education system is very good in STEM, in the STEM industry, STEM fields.
That's why they all come here.
You know, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, about 90% are from China and India.
75% from India, if it's H-1B visas.
Now, there's issues, because China, with its Confucius Institute, has been bribing professors and others as they got caught by Trump, and then Biden came in and just let them all go, incredibly.
But that's the issue where we have to be concerned about, protecting of trade secrets.
China is a maestro at stealing other people's inventions.
No, they're open and proud about it.
There's no question about that.
And then the rest of his comment was H-1B's paid $30,000 less than the median wages.
I think we agree that that's part of the problem.
He's got sticks here.
Musk agrees that H-1B in a minute has to have a hard cap and it has to have a hardcore bottom of payments.
That's got to be people being paid really well.
Because if they're not getting paid really well, then they're not really unique.
There was, here we go.
Well, okay, while I find that, one other question people are asking me.
Robert, Biden can provide, Biden can, what's the word, pardon, blanket pardon all illegal immigrants.
It wouldn't be granting them citizenship.
It would be pardoning them for the federal crime of having crossed the border illegally.
I'm not wrong in that he can do that, but he can't fast-track or mass-grant citizenship to illegals?
They can't give him citizenship.
I mean, the courts have all recognized that Obama's dream proposals, when he did it unilaterally, were not within his constitutional authority.
It was only what was subsequently passed in the Dream Act that was found to be legal.
Everything else was ultimately found not to be legal, but how you enforce it, the courts went back and forth on during Trump's era.
So, yeah, there's...
What was your question, though?
Oh, no, it was whether or not he can...
Oh, yes, preemptive pardons.
Yeah, just go back and look at the Jimmy Carter pardons of everybody who fled to Canada and elsewhere to avoid the draft.
Hypothetically, though...
No, but if he pardons illegals, he pardons them for the crime of having crossed the border illegally, does that mean, one, they can't be deported?
Hypothetically. And two, does it facilitate any acquisition of citizenship?
It doesn't prohibit citizenship.
It doesn't provide for it either.
And in terms of deportation, that's been applied to U.S. citizens in the past.
So go back and look at the Palmer Raids and Rosa Luxemburg and others.
There have been people that have been deported without being found to have committed a criminal violation.
So I find that problematic, personally.
But I can tell you that there is court precedent that you don't have to have committed a crime for deportation to be a legal option of the U.S. government.
Now, I think the easier way for Trump to do it is to offer money if they leave, trouble if they stay.
And sometimes that gets people to come back and apply legally.
I don't remember what happened when Angela Merkel, I think, offered something of a similar thing to all of the Syrian refugees in Germany.
Let me just get the remaining questions here so that we don't skip over.
The tech bros were behind the degradation of our education system, promoting sexual deviance to kids and censoring parents who tried to prevent it.
Won't H-1B benefit a system that's used against us?
It varies.
It depends entirely on its implementation.
But if they limit it to high-end earners, With unique skill sets, then the cultural concerns wouldn't apply.
I would note these tech bros are opposed to woke.
That's what David Sachs, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, they all have in common, is they were enraged by what took play Elon personally, because it happened to one of his kids.
The woke gender identity, all that stuff.
So they have not promoted that at all.
The people who are talking about that have promoted it are people that are anti-Trump.
In the tech world, and so it's not valid.
But it's not these Trump supporters that are secretly Wilksters, that they're not.
They just know economically, this works really well.
That's how they're looking at it.
In the tech space, you go get your engineers from India.
That's been sort of the policy now for two decades in the tech world.
And they have a lot of assumptions that I think are mistaken.
That they go into that.
Eric Weinstein has also done a great breakdown of the history of how H1B came about.
And it was a secret conspiracy of corporate America to, in the guise of recruiting the best and the brightest, be able to lower the wages and reduce the American demand, including inducing Americans to not seek out postdoctoral degrees.
And it feels like engineering, etc.
Because their goal was to not have those people competing with them.
So they would have an easy excuse to pay somebody a third of the price from India or China.
If I can, Robert, I'll read that.
It was actually from Brat Disatva over on Rumble.
What's your opinion on Eric Weinstein's view that H1B was an attempt to crush American top talent from the beginning and in fact was a primary reason for America losing its technological edge?
Makes a very good argument.
Very, very good argument.
And now, to be fair to get, I'm going to bring up...
I was going to say it was delivered by China and India.
China and India wanted to...
I mean, like natural economic competitors, they wanted to dominate the tech space.
They've been unsuccessful, I would note.
And it was like India had to drop out of certain global testing competitions because the Indian population as a whole tested below average globally.
So the idea that that's where Vivek doesn't really make a lot of sense.
What he means is the Brahmin culture that came to America had a different set of values than what he ran into in the middle-income American public school.
And that's true.
But it ignores the broader points that are well made by Eric Weinstein and others.
I almost said a joke, but it's not a joke.
If you watch the first Harold and Kumar, go to White Castle, and you'll get an idea for the stereotype of the cultural differences between Indian Americans and Americans, or Native, European, Middle America, and the Indian immigrant who has a certain conception of America and what's required for an Indian immigrant to succeed.
And the movie's freaking hilarious, so you should watch it.
But look, I want to read Gantz.
Let me read this one.
The religious aspect?
Because there's an interesting gap.
So, like, there's Hindu and then there's Buddhist, as I recall, right, with India.
Most are Hindu, but there's some that are something else, like what Harmeet Dillon is.
But I'm blanking.
Whatever that religious sect is that's not a majority in India, they have been trending very Trumpy in America.
The other Indian Americans have been trending anti-Trump.
So I'm curious where they came from.
And which background they came from as to which is which.
But Trump has occasionally made this point that we need people that are culturally simpatico.
He goes, we don't need America haters coming in.
And he suggested that that's why we have to be doubly careful with Islamic immigrants.
He's like, at least something's going on.
It ain't working out right.
You keep seeing these Islamic immigrants keep causing problems.
We see what's happening or not happening in Poland, and you can either be apologetic for making decisions in the best interest of your people, or you can be unapologetic, like I think it was the...
Well, I forget what his name is, but he was on an interview.
It was great.
Let me read this one.
Seek or trending Trumpy.
We should let in more seek and exclude the others.
I can't say that.
Gantt says, Gantt in our community says, I watch you because you seem to be authentic.
I'm a stubborn Southern redneck.
I fight hard and play hard and I'll argue my point right or wrong passionately, maybe even a fight or two after the first rounds on me.
So feel free to throw a punch figuratively my way.
I'm not polite or diplomatic and I don't expect it in return.
I say what I mean.
If you want to say, I'll say only this to that Gantt.
You can be impolite and you can be undiplomatic, but if you're unfair in how you approach a I don't care if you're polite when you're unfair or impolite.
Mischaracterize what I say so that you can then punch.
And then, you know, that unfair is not a question of diplomatic.
You create a fake version of your opponent's argument until it's easy to knock down.
That's where the word strawman argument comes from.
It's a sign of a weak argumentative style.
So someone should be ashamed of themselves if they're doing that.
I'm going to say, has Viva addressed the fact that Angela Merkel named her book after me?
It's called Freiheit.
Oh, boy.
Should we be concerned?
I didn't know that.
That's classic.
Yeah, sorry, if I'm touching these earbuds, they don't stay in my ear, and I hate these things more than anything, but I think it cuts out the background.
Uncle Marco was the first trans president, but, you know, I guess not.
No, but apparently Candace Owens is still going to convince me that Macron's wife is a man, and there's a lot of people who seem to believe it, and I'm not even saying that to make fun.
I just, I need very, very solid proof on that.
Subcap says, I have a buddy in Pennsylvania who has been constantly passed over for unqualified women when he is more qualified and tenured, doesn't have a lot of resources to pursue.
Could you help Barnes?
Yes, figure out how to prove it.
I mean, yes, it's illegal to be discriminated against, and yes, I suspect universities and schools are doing it routinely and regularly, but it's not easy to bring suit to prove it.
That's the short answer.
Now, I'm going to get to a bunch of the rumble of the comedy rants on Tube over there, but I prefer they get rid of DEI so people hired based on merit, says Benny D, then create tech school pipeline, eliminate all the fluff and graduate techies in two to three years with a degree, help America first.
I was going to say one caveat there.
All these people saying, hey, you should believe in merit, then that means you should believe in a global labor market.
I don't agree.
That people have floated the argument.
If we believe in merit and you believe in competition, then you believe in competing with the best from abroad.
I mean, I understand the argument, but...
No, our country is for our citizens.
It is not for other people's citizens.
So we make accommodations to have new people come here because it improves the lives of our citizens.
It does not improve the lives of our citizens.
I ain't for it.
I don't care if I'm more skilled or more talented than commie China.
And that is the question, is to say, like, the immigrants that come in who are going to be value-added, if it's to the detriment of the local population...
That's why Trump always makes that point.
It's another point that people miss.
He'll often say about immigration that it's not only that they're economically at the top 1%, but he goes, they've got to love America.
That's what he means by that.
In other words, he'll take an Elon and a Vivek.
He's not going to take these others.
And I think that he, because he's on to something there.
That immigration is cultural.
Immigration is social.
Immigration is political.
Immigration is religious.
So the idea that you can just look at it from an economic filter and say, well, we want the best and the brightest from the whole world to compete for the American jobs.
No, we don't.
We want those people competing for American jobs that are going to make American citizens' lives better and promote America's societal values.
And the smartest Muslim terrorist doesn't fit that category.
Also, I will refuse to believe that in a population of 350 million, you're not dealing with the same cream of the crop that you get from a population of 0.7 billion and that you need to import them.
If you're a country like, I will say, a territory like Greenland, or a small country, I don't know.
Statistically, you might have a better argument.
360 million people, you've got the smartest people on earth there, and if you need to import them, that might be pretextual and not an actual necessity.
Let me bring this up.
Someone sent me this here, and let me see if I can refresh.
When it comes to immigration, my view is we need an immigration system that selects for your readiness to assimilate, your ability to speak English, your ability to know something about the country through civics exams, your love of the country, your ability to make contributions.
That's one view of immigration, and we'd probably have less immigration in the near term as a result of that, but it's because it's based on the principle of what stands for pro-American values.
But the protectionist view is I don't care about any of that.
I just think if a company can hire somebody to do a job for $20 an hour versus being able to hire two immigrants to do the same job for $10 an hour, we should stop those immigrants from coming in so the American company has to hire the American worker.
The problem is that results in fewer workers being hired.
So the reason I stand for the national libertarian perspective, which is to say that I don't want to replace the left-wing nanny state with the right-wing nanny state.
I want to dismantle the nanny state.
That, I believe, should be the future of America first.
Okay, so the person who sent that said Vivek exposed hiring cheaper immigrant labor.
And listening to that argument, I'm not sure that that's what I understood.
I'm not trying to defend Vivek.
It sounded like we were saying if we have more employed, it's somehow better for the economy than having fewer employed but with higher wages.
I'm not sure that the math on that maths.
He agreed with the cultural requirement as a precondition for immigration, but then otherwise opposed the economic argument.
In other words, what he was really saying was that he doesn't think economically it works to do what Trump is going to do.
So we'll see.
I mean, he's not going to have any role in that.
His role is to figure out ways to make government more efficient.
Same with, and they could fix up the immigration program as part of that, he and Elon.
They would have some credibility in that regard if they came forward and said, here's a more reasonable compromise plan.
But that's where they're going to be.
They're not going to be making tariff decisions.
They're not going to be making immigrate.
Most of the sophisticated studies that have been done show that the immigrants net cost working class people.
That's a net loss.
So people, they're looking at it from a global perspective.
Yeah, you add your GDP.
There's another person involved that's going to increase your GDP by definition.
The question is not, do you measure your society's success by GDP?
Or do you measure it by its values?
Do you measure it by the well-being of its citizens?
And there, Vivek is being inconsistent.
Now, what he's really suggesting is, our citizens are going to be better off when we have maximum GDP.
That's kind of what he seems to be saying.
I disagree with that.
I disagree with that entirely.
It was like, if you want to see another version of this, look at Tucker Carlson's debate argument with Ben Shapiro about, because this is another place where Elon is on a different side.
Elon's on the automation side.
So what does that mean?
Automation poses a greater long-term threat to America's good jobs than immigration does.
Because automation, our best-paying working-class jobs out there right now today in America, we're one of the best truck drivers.
Elon's looking at making trucks automated, such that there's nobody there.
There's nobody driving.
I have doubts about whether that will ever come about, but he's achieved more than I thought he would achieve anyway in other areas, so maybe he will succeed there too.
Problem is, as Tucker pointed out to Ben Shapiro, Shapiro's like, shouldn't we be for that?
Tucker's like, absolutely not.
You're going to destroy one of the mainstays of working class culture.
And have you thought about the long-term consequence of that?
A friend of mine had a tweet about it today saying, look at how it's destroyed the whole marital life and social life.
How working class men's jobs being destroyed is destroying our entire culture, is destroying our way of life, leading to drug abuse, leading to a host of other issues.
And that's what they miss when they only measure material well-being.
And I was going to say, you know, the steel man retort to that is, well, the jobs can go automated and that'll, you know, the company should pay a certain amount for the people who have been cut out of that market, sort of like a UBI.
But my response to that is, you know, getting money for free while you sit at home, it's not going to lead to good things.
We're doing that right now with Social Security disability payments in working class culture.
And they use it to buy opioids.
I mean, it doesn't work.
People need pride in what they do.
Particularly working class men, probably more so than anybody.
It applies universally.
But it really applies, at least historically, to working class men.
When working class men lose the ability to provide and protect, the entire culture collapses.
It does.
Within a generation.
All of a sudden, family marital rates will decline.
Divorce rates will spike.
Church attendance rates will decline.
Community participation rates will decline.
Suicide rates will rise.
Anxiety rates will rise.
Depression rates will rise.
Life expectancy will shrink.
We already know what taking the economic approach, the Walmart approach, to solving problems has done.
And so the grief event celebrates the Walmart approach.
He can go back to India because that ain't an option here.
That ain't going to be an option here.
And needs to pay more attention to what J.D. is saying.
His buddy, who named his kid after Vivek, which is, we've got to look at culture.
When he first wrote Hillbilly Elegy, Vance partially blamed the culture.
I think he blamed it too much.
The issue is obvious.
That culture was there 200 years ago when everybody was working hard.
So it's not like the culture changed of Appalachia.
They have the same set of values.
They believe in revenge.
There's a lot of things like that that are unique to Appalachian culture.
I mean, I grew up on the southern tip of it, in Chattanooga.
It literally means east of the ridge, Missionary Ridge, which is one of the last mountain regions in the Appalachians.
And it destroys their culture.
I mean, what happened to—I noticed this throughout Europe.
You can see it with African-American culture.
African-Americans had lower unemployment in 1960.
Lower unemployment, African-American men, than white men.
And so what happened?
We demanufactured America's urban core that we had built up during World War II.
And all of a sudden, these people that had fled the South and come up North for jobs suddenly didn't happen.
What happened?
As their ability to provide and protect disappeared, criminality spiked, divorce spiked, children born out of wedlock spiked.
This is not a sustainable model.
Not everything is based on dollars and cents.
And that's where sometimes the libertarian perspective, the Vivek perspective gets lost.
Or you have to measure it monetarily over a longer period of time or factor in other costs which are intangible but nonetheless directly correlated.
Let me bring this up.
I'm going to go through a bunch of these just real quick and we'll get on to another topic in a sec.
Meredith G says when you import an immigrant population, you import their cultural problems and we should...
Be discriminator.
Discriminating. See the Haitian problem.
If we need more U.S. talent, we should think apprenticeship.
Absolutely. And by the way, everyone's like, Viva, what do you think about Canada being the 51st state?
The joke.
And I'm like, first of all, I still think it's a joke.
But if you think Canada is a liberal snowflake hellhole communist region, do you want to amalgamate that into a 51st state?
Like, good.
You'll get Quebec.
You'll get a very progressive separatist Quebec.
You'll get a very liberal Ontario.
It seems that the only...
Provinces America might want to amalgamate or probably to the West and maybe the Maritimes to a lesser degree.
But yeah, go annex Canada and you'll see the population that you have there after having done it.
I'm going to resolve to be...
Don't let them vote.
That's what we gotta do.
Take all their labor, take all their property, don't let them vote.
Old school.
I'm going to resolve to be more active this year, says Cheryl Gage Good.
Crash Bandit says, when I went through mechanical engineering school, I had to take three...
Art classes and zero business finance classes.
What would that fluff, fluff?
Okay, scroll down here.
So basically, the liberal idea has been you can be any person from any part of the world, and when they make contact with secular liberal capitalism, they will abandon their cultural practices.
Yeah, that's the old fuyukama end of the world routine that turned out to be dead wrong.
And the critics said so from the get-go.
They said after the Cold War is over, That as things globalize, things will tribalize.
And that's exactly what's happened.
It hasn't led to this George Soros, open borders, wondrous, everybody hug each other, a ceaseless wealth kind of environment that they predicted.
Because it's contrary to human history.
This was not on our menu, Robert.
Pick your brain if you have any insight about it.
But another fight among...
I mean, Michael Yon has been very critical of Trump for a long time, but fighting with Jack Posobiec over the Trump talking about taking over the Panama Canal.
As it's said in the great movie with Pierce Brosnan, the tailor of Panama, as one American general says, gentlemen, there's a star missing from our flag.
what is what What's your take on the debate about how Trump or America taking back control of the Panama Canal, how it works, what the problem is, and who's to blame for it?
Well, legally, Trump is correct that if there's any jeopardy to the operational security of the Panama Canal, we can go take it back.
That's part of our treaty agreement with Panama.
When we restored the Panama Canal to Panama, even though Americans were the ones who built it and died building and designing it.
I understand what Carter was up to.
He was trying to have a little bit less of an imperial footprint in Central and South America.
And most Americans are in complete denial or lack of understanding about how bad American intervention has been.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that in the 60s, every country in Latin America had a dictator.
Every single one.
They had no democracies in the entire continent.
And that's directly connected to the United States of America.
So, you know, there probably never is a Che Guevara if we don't overthrow Arbenias in Guatemala.
If we don't overthrow him, he probably stays there and becomes a little lefty doctor instead of a radical communist.
So we should be careful about, you know, like take Venezuela.
We decided to screw around Venezuela a lot over the last decade and a half.
So what did they do?
They decided to pull Castro.
And empty their prisons and say, here's the quid pro quo, we'll give you free tickets to America.
You can get out of jail as long as you go right to America.
And they'd already built up some of the nastiest, most brutal reputation in the world.
And now we're seeing that consequence all across the United States.
That should be, by the way, Trump's priority.
Number one priority, get the Venezuelan gang deported.
I'd deport them right back to Venezuela.
I don't care if they take them.
I don't just say, get off the plane, we're out of here.
This was Venezuela's idea in the first place.
Now, maybe we could stop messing around in Venezuela.
Let the Venezuelan people figure out their country, not us, for the love of the good Lord.
But that's where a lot of that is coming from.
I'm going to read one here.
This is from Crash 105 because it's going to segue into another discussion.
Viva Barnes, I have a theory that the amount of pardons being given up by a Biden regime and the fact that Biden is mentally delinquent at this point, that the people behind him, the deep state, are selling pardons.
What are your thoughts?
I'm like, delinquent it up.
Every single administration sells pardons.
Every single one.
So did Trump.
Trump didn't do it himself, but people around Trump did.
I mean, it was part of my annoyance.
There were a group of us that deliberately did not take any client seeking a pardon or commutation so that we could promote the pardon of Julian Assange.
And I was annoyed, and we almost got that through, because Trump took us more seriously.
Because he knew none of us were getting paid by anybody.
And so that gave us some credibility.
But historically, what happens is all the big law firms pitch people that are in serious criminal difficulty of any kind huge fees, and they guarantee them, or they get as close as they can to guaranteeing them pardon or commutation.
And Biden, when he was vice president, was pitching this to people.
Except he was pitching that he could get a declination of prosecution for a donation.
So I guarantee you the entire Biden crime family is looking to cash.
This is their last cash in.
They know Joe's done.
This is it.
There's no more money on this money train.
It is all gone.
So now is the time for them to get out and about and cash in one last time.
So I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of people on that list.
But Joe is so mercurial.
You never know who he's going to pardon and who he's not.
Now, there's people on that list that you should pardon, but there's people on there that you shouldn't.
I'll give an example who don't and don't pardon.
Don't pardon the guy that rapes the mother and then the young daughter.
That is who we pardoned this past week.
If we're going to pardon the worst criminal in the entire federal prison system, pardon everybody, because two-thirds of them have probably got railroaded anyway.
Well, hold on.
Not to be, just so that nobody accuses of inaccuracies.
Was it a pardon or a commutation from death penalty for that particular guy?
So what's interesting is right now in the parlance, that's a very good point you make.
They're calling everything, like we go to Couchy, you look at who, there's betting options on who Trump will pardon, Biden will pardon.
I was curious how they defined it.
They're defining any kind of legal relief as a pardon.
And that was commutation.
But you're right.
I think Trump, I think Biden did not issue pardons to any of these people that most recently, the 37, he just commuted their death penalty sentences to life.
Yeah, which is, I mean, because this is, you know, like, this is where, you know, fighting with or listening to people who are ideologically disaligned has its benefits.
Someone on Twitter says, oh, it's not like you let them go.
He just commuted their death sentence.
Like, okay, so first of all, Let's operate on the basis that that's what he did, because that's what I understood he did as well.
He commuted the death sentences of these violent murderers, but not terrorist or race-motivated ones.
The guy who shot up the white dude there and the son of Charney of Brother.
So what's he basically saying?
Terrorism and race-related murders are really bad.
You don't get the commutation of a death penalty, but just egregious murder.
Is there a steel man as to the process that these individuals were found guilty and sentenced to death?
Or is it just he doesn't believe in the death penalty unless it's for terrorists or race-related crimes?
I don't understand the logic behind it.
It was just to satisfy liberals.
Liberals are fine with race-related groups not getting the benefit of it.
But they think everybody else, they're opposed to the death penalty generally.
So they would be for commutations for everybody.
But Biden was like, well, the ones the liberals hate, I won't commute.
Everybody else he did.
On the death penalty side.
But there weren't that many.
There's only 37. First of all, I just had a thought.
We're going to call it commutations for commies, but...
Okay, so the pardons, the Biden...
I wanted to touch on that.
While we're on the topic of Biden, Robert, the thing that I don't know what's going on...
What's the Biden...
Oh, geez, Luis.
The subject that we're going to talk about with Biden.
There was a ruling that I'm not familiar with.
What's interesting is...
So this was one of the Biden administration's latest policy efforts in the past year, was to force people to disclose the beneficial ownership of all their small businesses and disclose who else was an investor.
That got a lot of controversy, because that'd be a lot of intel and information for the federal government to have.
And they were going to require, as an IRS rule, you disclose that.
A group sued and got an injunction, but the injunction only applied to the parties to that case.
So the question was, what was the government going to do?
Were they going to push it anyway?
Well, they decided last week not to push it.
They've decided that based on that decision, it is purely voluntary whether you disclose beneficial ownership information in your business.
So that's a big win for those that value business privacy and don't think the government should have all that kind of intel and information.
But it kind of went under the radar because of his commutations and other things.
People didn't notice some of the...
Some of the good wins that came out this past week.
What was the basis upon which they were alleging beneficial ownership?
Was it side letters or was it some form of formal contract?
You were required to disclose who is the beneficial owner in any entity that you're a part of.
It's like the $600 thing where all of a sudden you had to say when you're paying the plumber and when you paid the babysitter.
All of a sudden you got to issue 1099s for all of them.
Now they wanted the same thing.
You were obligated, if you had any ownership interest or knowledge of ownership interest, to disclose information about that ownership interest.
So it was intended to prevent all forms of financial privacy in the United States from the U.S. government.
Oh, that's interesting.
Hold on a second.
Before, we're done with Biden.
Okay, so we got the issue about mass pardons, potential...
Oh, sorry, that was it.
Selling the pardons or selling the commutations.
It's an investment at this point.
He is on record now for being the president in modern history with the most pardons commutations within just a single day, or is he now breaking records for overall?
I'm actually for that part, breaking records overall, because I think our federal criminal system puts too many people behind bars.
So the review just did it randomly.
There's a better than 50-50 chance somebody you pardon doesn't belong in federal prison, in my experience, in the view of the system.
But yeah, so I think so.
And I hope Trump gave far too few pardons.
I get he wanted to be tough law and order, but now he's seeing how law and order can get abused.
And he needs to issue a mass pardon.
And I think he will.
I think every January 6th, the defendant's going to get pardoned.
I don't think he's going to limit it.
It's a violent, nonviolent.
He's just going to say, ah, it's a bunch of crap.
The whole case was, all the cases were crap.
They were crap.
They didn't get a fair trial with the judge.
They didn't get a fair trial with the jury.
They didn't get a fair trial process with the grand jury.
Information was seized from them that was illegally seized.
Information was failed to disclose.
The entire process was contaminated.
And I think on that predicate, he can say, look, we got a mass party.
Now, if he wants to avoid spending two weeks defending January 6th all over again.
That include high-profile names in that pardon list.
Maybe a Leonard Peltier, a Native American that's long been in prison.
He'll be disinclined to pardon anyone that's accused of anything violent other than the January 6th defendants because he has doubts about whether the violent allegation is really true.
But there's plenty of nonviolent people he could pardon.
He could pardon Ed Snowden.
He could pardon Julian Assange.
He could pardon Roger Ver.
Ross Ulbricht?
Ross Ulbricht?
You know, the FBI is so annoyed by it.
They were bragging about how they prosecuted Ross Ulbricht this week.
And I was like...
And I can't seem to find where you guys talk about when you stole other people's Bitcoin for your personal enrichment.
I'm trying to find where is that part of your Ross Ulbricht case there, FBI?
IRS? Did you forget that one?
They just kind of missed that.
What about the falsified allegations where they claimed he was trying to get people killed that they totally made up just to scandalize them in front of the judge and the jury?
Completely bogus allegations.
One of the people who was behind his defense to make sure he got a defense because what do they do when they do these kind of cases?
They seize all your money so you can't pay any counsel.
Well, Roger Ver was Bitcoin Jesus.
It was the guy who came to Ross Ulbrich's defense.
He helped get a buddy of mine, Joshua Draytel, by the way, he's a hardcore lefty, to defend him.
And Draytel said it was one of the most abusive cases he'd ever seen.
So, you know, and there's a long litany of these cases across the country.
And if I was the president, I would pardon as many of them as I could to send the message that the wayward rogue days of lawfare is over.
And the only way to do that is mass pardons, in my view.
I hope he sets a record for pardons, and I hope he starts early and often.
It's a great presidential power.
I'm glad Biden is using it.
I disagree with how he is using it, but I'm glad he is using it, because I think it's an underutilized presidential power for too long.
I'll bring back up this tweet from the FBI, which was the weirdest tweet that I'd ever seen.
The FBI tweets out today, December 20th, yesterday.
On the Silk Road, a darkness site run by American cybercriminal Ross William Ulbricht.
Bargaining for illegal goods and services was as easy as clicking a button.
Hashtag FBI investigators.
A true free market existed.
What a horrendous thing.
That's what they really just said.
A true free market existed.
That was what he did.
It was so terrible.
He allowed there to be a pure free market.
That's what that is.
It's Michael Moore's point that if Republicans believe in a free market, then Coca-Cola could sell crap.
Nobody really does believe in a free market.
They pretend they do, and then they recognize their inconsistencies and contradictions later.
Ross Obert was a guy who had no such contradictions.
It's like people should be able to buy what they want to buy from one another in a volunteerism society, and it's up to them whether it's good or bad for them.
And that's that.
That's what he did.
And mostly what it was is it was very easy to get drugs.
It wasn't like they suddenly made it harder to get drugs, that much harder to get drugs when they got rid of them.
All they did was prevent a mechanism of challenging their control over the markets more globally because the drug market didn't go away.
It just, in fact, they probably got more profits because with a Silk Road, drugs were cheaper.
Because there was competition.
In ways there's not when it's illegal.
You're looking for your buddy or pal that can get you something.
But another case where the procedures utilized were badly abused.
And that should be the common denominator.
It was the common denominator with Trump.
I mean, you saw how ridiculous that judge's ruling was.
I mean, there's a lot of those that happened to people other than Trump.
So, mass pardons.
And mass commutations need to be coming down the pipeline.
I was going to say in terms of Jan 6th, by the way, I'm going to be in, I'm going to definitively be in January, in D.C. on January 6th for the press conference, you know, pardon all the Dan Sixers that Jake Lang is putting on.
The other one, as I'm just looking up of the Jay-Z case, and I see that Judge Annalisa Torres's name come up, and I go back to see where I heard of her before, and then I get into Brian Colfage, the We Build the Wall triple amputee American hero veteran.
Sitting in a fucking medical detention center because of his medical issues, I presume.
He was sentenced or pleaded to three years, and he's sitting up there now, rotting away in a detention center.
I hope to God that Trump pardons Colfage.
I bought a lot of the other day.
I'll actually pardon right up there.
I mean, frankly, you could just pardon everybody in the Southern District of New York, an 80% chance you've got an innocent person.
But the other one is Douglas Mackey.
Remember the new guy?
He should be pardoned day one as well.
It's ridiculous that these people ever had to face any risk of prison time.
Steve Bannon should be pardoned right away.
Peter Navarro should be pardoned right away.
All these people should be pardoned right away.
So there's no more nonsense about all this stuff.
And the American people get educated about problems in our legal system and the remedial power of the pardon to fix that upon occasion.
And I hope Trump takes full advantage of it.
Let me, I saw a big one come in here that is a member of our community.
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You know who swears by Biltong now is Richard Barris.
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He's never eating beef jerky again.
He says, so much better.
Better for you and so much better tasting.
There is no question that biltong is like prosciutto made out of beef.
It's soft, delicious, and the peri-peri, this is not a sponsored ad whatsoever, the peri-peri is the perfect level of spice.
The ghost wagyu might be a little too spicy.
He's the king of biltong, so if he's the king of it, he's got to do it.
And we got the rest of those.
And we're going to get to the locals' side of this in a bit as well.
Okay, so that's good.
That damn well better.
It seems like Biden had laid the...
He's softened up the playing field to Trump coming in and bam, all of them, no questions asked.
Throw in Hillary Clinton, throw in Bill Clinton, throw in Joe Biden, throw in some of those names.
There's a lot of people who deserve it.
Oh, Rudy Giuliani.
But the Clintons and the Bidens don't deserve it, but do it to screw with the media's head.
Because how's the media going to even handle that?
You've got to control the narrative.
Trump is brilliant at it.
Make sure to pardon January 6th people, all the people we listed, because they deserve it, and throw in a few Democrats to screw with the media.
Nobody's going to go prosecute Clintons anyway.
No one's going to go prosecute the Bidens anyway.
Pardon Tina Peters?
You can't because it's a state-level crime.
Bannon out of the New York prosecution?
You can't because they brought it to a state-level crime.
What you could do is have Harman Dillon, as head of the Civil Rights Division, open up a civil rights inquiry into whether state governments, including state courts, have been roguely using their power to target their political critics and...
I think those would be four compelling cases for opening up federal civil rights investigations.
To run the Civil Rights Division or the Justice Department.
So we'll see.
I mean, I know a lot of those people listen and process information.
You've got to prosecute somebody, folks, because you have almost half the country no longer believes in our legal system.
To preserve our legal system, you have to prosecute the George Soros, the Bill Gates.
There's got to be somebody in that list that they recognize and say, OK, good.
Our system is back.
To being an impartial system.
You're not targeting them for partial reasons.
You're targeting them because they violated their constitutional oath and violated the law.
That's why they need to be prosecuted.
At least some of them have to be, or there's going to be a large number of Americans who give up on the legal system.
And that usually never ends with...
It's not half of America that doesn't believe in the system.
The majority of America that thoroughly believes the system is thoroughly corrupt, partisan, and goes after political adversaries in a way that is...
Wholly violative of civil rights.
So we're going to clip this portion right here for a one minute short and get the message out, sir.
Prosecute the good ones and prosecute the ones that deserve it, not as vengeance, but as justice.
Yeah, so that the American people can believe, the people around the world can believe.
There's a cool, these African kids put on a play and they recreated the Trump assassination.
And so the little kid in the middle is doing the fight.
Fight, fight, think, right?
That's how global this is.
Our legal system is global.
People used to believe in it.
They don't anymore.
It's going to be up to Harmeet Dillon and everyone else there in the Justice Department to restore that faith and cash to tell and the rest.
And letting everybody walk won't restore that faith.
Speaking of which, I mean, the faith in the judicial system, this is not going to be any sort of...
Transition. But Annalisa Torres, the judge who locked up or sentenced Colfage to three years in jail.
Colfage, triple amputee war veteran.
Zero people complained about it.
He raised money to build a wall.
Nobody who gave him money complained about it.
And yet they prosecuted him for fraud.
That was the Colfage.
And this week she dismissed Jay-Z's attempt to have his civil suit that names him along with P. Diddy as...
Rapists, alleged rapists in a civil suit.
Underage, somebody underage too, right?
Yeah, 13 years old at the time, the allegations.
There are some inconsistencies in the story, and the plaintiff will have some issues to deal with in terms of historical inconsistencies at the time.
But Jay-Z filed a motion which was to...
It was to...
And preclude the plaintiff from proceeding anonymously, failing which to dismiss the claim.
And now I struggle with this because I do believe the lawsuits should be public and people should not be able to be shielded when they decide to use the court system for justice.
Flip side, I can understand in certain cases where there would be egregious, overt intimidation, to say the least, or tinkering with the system just by virtue of making the plaintiff public.
In this case, from what I understand, Jay-Z, Puff Daddy, they know who the plaintiff is.
The allegations are rather specific, and they know who the plaintiff is.
So it's not like they're being prejudiced, except for the fact that pressure and public scrutiny would not be put on the individuals who are the plaintiff's lawsuit, but the I mean, any hot take on Jay-Z's suit?
I think it was a correct ruling, because when I sued on behalf of the Covington kids, I sued all as John Doe's.
And the same issue arose, and the court correctly ruled that until trial, they don't have to disclose their names.
To the public.
There's no special public interest in knowing their names.
And there is a strong individual interest under the circumstances of that case in remaining anonymous.
The way I put it in the Covington Kids case is they shouldn't have to sacrifice their rights to enforce their rights.
And in this case, sacrificing their rights to be anonymous unless you lose that once it's at trial because trials have to be public proceedings and then you can no longer be anonymous.
And that becomes...
But typically, you should be allowed to be anonymous up until that point if you have good grounds.
And they did have good grounds.
You do have to wonder, there's a lot of photos of Jay Z and P. Diddy.
You gotta wonder about the whole story with Jay Z at this point.
But was he another R. Kelly?
Maybe that's why nobody in the rap industry cared that much about what R. Kelly was doing, as a whole bunch of the others were doing the same thing.
Clearly, there's, you know, the P. Diddy list and the Epstein list are two lists I would like to see publicized.
Oh, you're on mute.
Thank you.
Still on mute, I think.
I don't know how, but at least I can't hear you.
the pod sticking out, but that's it.
I see the pod sticking out.
Don't know how that happened.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
other people can't hear you either Dos minutos.
Viva's gonna figure it out.
Maybe. Viva hit the wrong play button, you think.
Oh, that's interesting.
You somehow muted yourself.
You somehow muted yourself.
Hop back in, maybe hop back out.
Turn it off and back on again.
That's what somebody recommended.
Viva just sent you links.
Okay, we'll take a look at that.
What is it I'm supposed to be right about?
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
You might have to see how this works.
Any luck?
Check, check.
No, no, nada, nada.
Check all mute buttons.
Oh, Airbnb scams.
Yes, I can talk.
I'll talk about the Airbnb scams while Viva figures out the volume.
So Airbnb started as a company that pretended, like a lot of these companies, to be tech companies, like Uber, really a cab company disguised as a tech company.
Airbnb was the same.
They were just hooking up people who wanted to rent out their houses or apartments as vacation rentals.
I was one of the very first members of Airbnb.
Used it for many, many years because I prefer those kind of accommodations to hotels.
Also, we were doing trials.
Usually it was multiple people.
It was more affordable to put four people in a house than it was to put four people in four separate hotel rooms.
And then also, rather than having to rent a conference center or something else where we could store legal materials, we could It's very easy to use some part of the house, the kitchen, wherever, as the sort of centerpiece of operations.
And so, big Airbnb fan until lately.
So, there's been increasing criticisms of Airbnb because a lot of people thought they could make easy money in Airbnb.
So, you saw this explosion, particularly in really hot markets like Dallas and Austin, Vegas and Phoenix and Florida.
They would just be easy money makers.
Didn't realize the more the supply went up, unless demand matched it, they were going to actually start suffering issues.
And they have started suffering issues.
So what Airbnb has done, Airbnb makes almost half of their profit solely from getting people to advance pay their rent, is effectively what happens.
People, let's say they're six months out and they rent a place.
They pay Airbnb.
That money doesn't go to the owner.
Airbnb then takes that money, invest it in the market.
Doesn't protect that money, as really should be the case.
Like if that was a true landlord, They have to safeguard any security deposit in a separate bank account.
Not Airbnb.
They're investing that money.
Over half of their profit comes from the time delay of when they have to transfer funds to the owner.
So they're right away kind of sketchy in terms of their operation.
But the second aspect of what Airbnb figured out was that they could gain an edge over their competitors by having a robust review process.
So the owner gets to give a review.
The tenant gets to counteract that review.
The tenant gets to give a review.
The owner gets to counteract that review.
And the confidence is, if you're a customer out there, you can see whether anybody's ever had a problem with either that tenant or that host.
The issue was, as you dig in, the problem became that host got exposed.
Because people could look up the tenant and see that that tenant...
Let's say he's been around for 10 years, has all good reviews, has always made good reviews for the most part.
If they're saying something bad about an owner or a host, that means there's a real problem with that owner or that host.
So in order to counterbalance that, Airbnb, unbeknownst to the public, because it continues to lie to people about its reviews, it says a review can only be taken down for rule violation.
Well, I know from personal experience.
Go ahead.
You're still on mute somehow.
So the...
Is the...
So I know from personal experience, because I've used it for many, many years.
Ran into a landlord that the property wasn't as described, like the lights, you know, it felt like going to a Deliverance movie sequel or something.
Yeah, going to bowl at the hill with no lights.
Then you get there and things aren't exactly, they aren't really the way they described it as.
I usually don't care too much as long as it's manageable, sustainable.
But this person kind of agitated me, so I was going to give an honest review.
As soon as he figured out, as soon as I gave that review, he made a review that was false.
That completely misled about what he was going to do, about what happened, and what happened to the property.
So I point out to the people at Airbnb, this guy just wrote a fake review, and that's an issue, and I should have a chance to respond.
Airbnb has now removed the ability for guests to respond to false post posts on the guest page.
Which what that can do is that can effectively prevent the guests from ever being able to rent on Airbnb again.
The second thing that they're doing is they're prohibiting the guest from responding to what the host says.
But what they're also doing is anytime the host is requesting a takedown, they are increasingly granting removal of negative reviews.
Even a negative review that didn't violate any of the rules and direct contravention of their public promises.
And so the other thing they're doing is they're still covering for these hosts who have decided to do disguised fees as cleaning fees.
So in this particular case, the host charged me a cleaning fee of $180 for just a two-day stay.
And when I left, the only thing I left is I forgot to pick up things that I'd left in the basement where the movie room was.
That was it.
It'll take you 20 minutes.
And 30 bucks to pay someone to clean that up.
He had already paid, charged 180 bucks for the cleaning fee.
I don't even think he pays 180 bucks to clean.
I know people that they just charge a cleaning fee.
They do the work themselves.
There's no independent cleaning fee really at all.
So the clean fee.
So what's happening is you have multiple levels of fraud.
You've Airbnb pretending they're a tech company when they're not.
They're really a mass landlord.
Number one.
Number two, and they're really employing their host.
Their hosts are not really independent contractors the way their relationship develops.
Second, they're misleading everybody about the nature of their review process.
Their review process is completely controlled behind the scenes.
So if you see somebody with 100 perfect reviews, probably fake.
Some of those reviews probably fake.
Some of the reviews that were given that were honest were probably taken down because that's the nature of the animal, what they've done.
And then third, last but not least, Airbnb scam, one of their many scams, is allowing their host to charge cleaning fees.
And then bill you later for you not doing the cleaning.
And it's like, what was the cleaning fee for then?
So it just, I think Airbnb is on the clock.
I think they got 10 years of operation.
They continue to be sleazier and sleazier and sleazier.
Here you have someone like me who's one of their founding guests, right?
One of their founding members, if you will.
And yet they wouldn't respond with anything more than an AI-driven...
Email response.
I was like, okay, how exactly did my review, which got taken down, said, how did my review break any of the rules?
Cite the rules.
Can't cite it.
They just responded with, well, your post broke the rules, that's why we removed it.
Like, okay, how did my post break the rules?
Your post broke the rules, so that's why we removed it.
How did it break the rules?
Your post broke the rules, so that's why we removed it.
Now I can hear you.
Yo! Okay, look, guys, guys.
The joke about to get an H-1B Visa guy to help me with the tech.
I don't use Bluetooth connection.
I don't like it.
I believe it will cause brain problems.
Those are my kids' earbuds.
I was only using them because there's some background noise and they cut out the noise, so I'm on the native mic now, so you might hear some background noise, but I'll mute it.
Robert, now I can talk.
When you describe your Airbnb, I had a similar experience with my wife where we went to...
I won't name it because I'm not trying to put anybody on blast.
I could have destroyed the person.
We go there, we take our dogs, and it was not at the time the paralyzed one.
It was like the functional dog, just a good dog.
And we get there, and the guy says, no dogs.
I was like, first of all, we booked it, and it said dog-friendly.
We drove 12 hours.
It's like, it was, well, you can drive into town three hours away and maybe put the dog in the kitchen.
So, bottom line, the guy allows, you know, he, what's the word?
Makes a concession.
There was no concession because we booked it anyhow.
We cleaned up the place ourselves.
We spent three hours cleaning it up.
We paid the, whatever it was, the fee.
And then the guy, after we left a positive review, left a negative review of us.
We've never had a negative review at an Airbnb in our lives.
And I felt...
Genuinely violated.
It's such a first-world problem, but when you're describing that, that was my experience.
You pay for the cleaning fee and then get charged extra.
You leave a positive review, and then after your review is in, they leave a negative review of you as an Airbnb patron.
It was a broken process, but that was my insight.
Airbnb is basically a big fraud.
All the criticism you can make of Uber, you can make of Airbnb times 10. They encouraged and incentivized a bunch of people to go out and get these properties, promising them, look at how much money you're going to make, knowing that it's good for Airbnb because Airbnb just wants volume.
It doesn't care whether you, the homeowner, make any money at all.
It only cares about whether they got more property online that they can market that will increase their net profit.
And so they deliberately induced a bunch of hosts.
To purchase properties and use their properties for Airbnb purposes, and many of them have found it doesn't work.
Because you do have, obviously, the reverse version.
You have the bogus tenant who extorts hosts into preferential treatment on the grounds they'll give them a negative review unless they get certain things.
So I get where it came from, where the concern was, but now it's gotten so bad that they're just basically...
Airbnb is just a walking, talking, fraud operation.
They're currently being sued for a bunch of other fraud scams.
They're facing class actions in multiple courts that could bankrupt them because of how systemic and systematic their fraudulent behavior has become.
I've used them for 12 years.
I was like, that's it.
If they won't even give me the time of day to talk to me on the phone, they won't even review the underlying facts or data at all.
If it's that fixed, I don't want to be a part of it.
And so I canceled my review membership.
I know.
And first of all, I brought up that comment before as a joke where it said, that's what I get for leaving a false positive review.
I wasn't trying to buy a positive review.
I thought the guy had made a genuine concession to allow us to stay there with the dog.
The place was beautiful.
It was on the ocean.
Where was it?
It was in the Maritimes.
It was beautiful.
It wasn't a false positive review.
And we paid a lot.
But the bottom line, I tell Marion now, I would rather just take my chances with the hotel.
At least, in a sense, you're dealing with a corporate structure, but you're dealing with, on the one hand, Shady business dealings.
A-holes.
And also, like, I can't rely on the fact that there's no video cameras recording me walking around the house naked.
Like, I don't trust these things anymore.
People run into all those problems.
Crimes being committed towards either the host or the guests that are undisclosed.
I mean, it's just, Airbnb is a disaster.
And I kind of ignore these increasing complaints, and then I experienced it firsthand.
And I was like, okay, I'm done.
I won't be part of something that's just become, that is becoming.
A fraudulent enterprise.
And I think Airbnb is.
What people didn't realize about Uber and a lot of these companies, their sole goal of charging low amounts was to monopolize the market.
And then as soon as they monopolized the market, they were going to charge more than it had ever been charged.
And people are starting to experience the backlash with that.
But I think that means some of these big tech businesses may not survive.
Because once they unleash who they really are, people aren't liking the experience.
Now, Robert, we're going to do our locals-only portion, but I'm not doing this.
I had an issue downloading the stream from last week, and I want to snip and clip it.
It makes it very difficult.
So I'm going to leave this up live, but we're going to go over metaphorically to locals-only because I don't know.
First of all, I'm not going to be able to upload this and then snip and clip, so I'm going to leave it where I can get it from.
But let me go over to Rumble because locals, we've got...
First of all, what else do we have left on the menu?
Do we have anything left on the menu?
I mean, those are the main topics that I remember.
Thank you.
I'm going to get to the tipped questions over on Locals because I see we got Little Rock, Arkansas attorney is back in the house.
Little Rock attorney.
I own several short-term rentals in Branson, Missouri.
Some states require us to pay a, quote, professional, end quote, cleaner to come in and change all betting.
I've been getting screwed by my manager host for a little over a year.
They are at the point of not being worth staying in unless it's for more than four days.
And, oh, by the way, that's what I wanted to bring up before I forgot.
Where was it?
Here, Justin Trudeau.
There are more than 200,000 short-term rentals across the country, like Airbnbs and Vervos, that could be turned into housing.
So we're giving cities more resources to crack down on those rentals and unlock more homes for Canadians.
I mean, they're going to turn them into hotel rooms.
Yeah, there's been criticism along those lines, but at least New York hasn't proven out so far.
So New York, a lot of cities are just banning Airbnbs, but those cities are not suddenly experiencing a decline in rental price.
Because it's just too global a phenomenon throughout the country.
And with the mortgage rate issues on top of that, the ability to reduce Airbnb and these other vacation rental footprint most likely won't have a big impact on the local real estate market, at least if New York is an example.
But it is one of the ongoing issues is there are so many of those homes converted in that way that it probably increased price a couple of years ago when it first started.
How much it's indicating price now is up in the air.
Let me do...
You know what we'll do?
We're going to do the locals portion only on Rumble and Locals, so that way I can be sure that I can get the video if I need to upload a clip.
But hold on, let me just close some stuff in the backdrop here and read a couple of the super chats over on Commitube from Marcel Cheka.
Oh, no, that's from last week.
Where are the ones from this week?
We got...
I prefer to get rid of DEI so people are hired based on merit than create a tech school.
Benny D, I got to that one.
There was another one from International Golf.
H1S, our job security for those that can't get fired.
That's from Commitube, and this was much needed.
Thanks, Barnes.
Yeah, we had people who really...
First of all, we needed to do this before the New Year.
Bring it in.
Everybody, I'm going to give everyone the link.
You got the link over to Rumble.
Commitube, come on over to...
Locals or Rumble.
And we're going to have the, what would otherwise be the Locals only portion, only on Rumble and Locals.
So I'm going to end it.
Well, for everybody out there, even on Commitube, if you're not coming over, Happy New Year if we don't see each other before then.
But Robert, it's been fantastic and it's great that you're back and back to health.
So what we're going to do now, Rumble and Locals, Commitube, come on over.
And Twitter, sorry about it.
And this way I can make sure that I can pull everything that we need if I want to snip and clip something for tomorrow.
Updating the stream.
Bada bing, bada boom.
Robert. Over on Locals.
So I got a Little Rock, Arkansas attorney.
Then we got P. Hans.
It says, Viva, leave and rejoin the stream with your locals mic and speaker.
That's what I did.
It was those stupid Bluetooth things that I couldn't figure out.
Entry required says, somebody give Viva and Barnes small whiteboards so they can communicate better.
Pam Walker.
Hey, Barnes, do you think that list of all congressmen that use the slush fund to pay off scandals should be made public?
I think I know your answer to that.
Of course, of course.
Absolutely. They're members of Congress.
They're not...
This isn't some private company activity.
It's not just public.
It should be...
I say it should be legal, but I won't be accused of asking people to commit illegal acts on employees.
I'd like to know when there are representatives.
No, and paying off those claims...
With our tax dollars.
I mean, it's egregious.
It's egregious.
Castro. No, sorry, not Castro.
It's PatriciaCarrie82 in Local says, Castro Jr. is trying to silence him.
Don't make jokes.
Things have been smooth sailing thus far.
Pauliella. Thanks, Barnes.
Thanks for talking about Airbnb scans.
I wrote you a few times in 2023 about Airbnb cheating after my husband and I were robbed of $1,100 in an unsafe Milwaukee flat where the house's front doorknob fell off and wouldn't lock.
The apartment door wouldn't lock.
The AC wouldn't work on a 100-plus degree day.
There were only two tiny defective windows.
Holy shit, that's a nightmare.
The other wouldn't open at all.
We had to move to a hotel.
Say that again.
I didn't hear you.
More of that's popping up.
So I live in Chattanooga.
The first Airbnb I rented, I'm from here.
I didn't realize it was in the old neighborhood that I grew up in.
We went and took a tour of the little church in, East Lake.
But that has some real rough sections to it.
A lot of shotgun houses.
And they had managed to mask that.
Not only that, they had put things on the house to make it look bigger than it was.
Like they put fake windows up higher up.
So it made it look like there was a second floor.
There was no second floor.
It was just fake windows.
I've also noticed a lot of Chinatowns, you'll find really good value across the country.
There's a reason it's really good value.
God bless trying to sleep or sit in those places.
Slumlords have discovered Airbnb.
Boopsie says, will Barnes be talking Harmeet?
Please, we did.
Boopsie says, also, I hope Trump's blanket January 6th pardon doesn't include FBI, Pelosi, D.C. Mayor Byrd, the guy who shot Babbitt.
It won't, obviously.
Oh, sorry, another question about the blanket pardons, Robert.
Do you think, I predicted that Biden is going to blanket pardon the FBI agents.
Do you think he's going to do it?
Well, apparently he's being advised by Norm Eisen.
Because Norm is...
Not been bashful about this.
So it's a lot of the private lawyers who are really coordinating everything as part of the deep state operation that were not government officials that really want the pardons.
So I think that will be the top priority of pardons.
And some of them will be named, is my prediction.
Some will not, but some will be.
Norm Eisen will be on my list of named people, I'm sure.
We'll see if he has, like, Bill Gates, George Soros.
We'll see if he includes some big names on that list.
That have been up to a lot of crime lately.
I'm just going to go to Kalshi and see if there's a market for the...
For those, but we'll do that right now.
I'll do that afterwards.
We got Judy Hodgkiss says, I'm afraid you're giving the luddite argument.
Those who smashed the automated weaving machines in the early 1800s in order to save their jobs.
If we actually have a mass mobilization program to colonize the moon and Mars, including crash programs to educate and upgrade our workforce, we can afford to lose some proportion of jobs because we will be creating more demand for truckers and everything else needed in the process.
That's what they claim.
NAFTA didn't work.
It's what they claim.
We brought China in the WTO.
Didn't work.
So this has been tried again and again based on that theory, and that theory has proven to be false because it doesn't understand human nature, is my take.
So there's plenty of it because I've heard the argument my whole life, and so far those on that side of the argument have been wrong.
The Luddites were right.
Jackson says Carter Center is reporting that Jimmy Carter passed away.
P. Hunt says we need...
He was, I mean, I think he was struggled as a president, but I always thought he was a pretty good person, the Jimmy Carter.
I always had respect for him.
Let me double check here.
I'm going over to...
Yep, Jimmy Carter's dead.
But he got to vote for Kamala before he died, and as much as that...
Sorry, I don't mean to make a joke.
No, that his vote was a legitimate constitutional vote of a man who probably had no idea what era he was in.
We just need to take enough Canada to join to Alaska.
It just happens to be the area with the oil and resources.
And the Canadians who would be very happy to become the 51st state.
Yeah, and you can move to British Columbia.
Move to a decent part of that country.
Dred Roberts.
I don't want to make enemies while I'm in Quebec, Robert.
Dred Roberts says, except Vivek did make a cultural argument as well, even if people think it was dumb.
One part that was left out of the argument was the other likely corporate response.
Several years ago, Microsoft was denied more visas.
They did not hire Americans.
Instead, they built and massively expanded in Vancouver, Canada, and hired the same people they wanted anyway.
Robert, please comment.
No doubt.
Sorry. ThinksNow40 says, Robert, please comment about extraordinary measures.
Do you know what that means?
I'm not sure what they're referencing.
Okay, and that was all there was to that one.
Type of jobs will be changed.
Say that again?
Oh, yeah.
There are extraordinary measures that can be taken under certain legal circumstances, but I'm not sure which one they're referencing.
Okay. We've got the type of jobs we're changing.
We cannot stop automation to save jobs.
We will just not be able to compete with the world.
RyanPD11 has a screen grab.
Let's see what this is and see if I'm going to get into trouble.
Donald John Trump.
I just heard about the new...
Oh, this looks like a truth post.
I just heard about the passing of President Jimmy Carter.
Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as president understand that it is a very exclusive club and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the greatest nation in history.
The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country, and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans.
For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.
Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter family and their loved ones during this difficult time.
We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and pray.
I bet the Carter funeral becomes very political.
Democrats won't be able to help themselves.
C-Wave Drive, or C-Wave DR, says the U.S. population has been over-medicated, over-vaccinated, and poisoned by corporate food for 40-plus years, so it makes sense that out of workforce production and the ability to perform at a high level are affected.
In my opinion, this is a big reason we don't compete as well with foreign workers at the STEM level.
No one seems to be talking about this except RFK Jr.
Will SCOTUS take the TikTok ban, says Janine Melnitz.
They're going to take it up, Robert, eh?
I think Trump is going to reverse it, so that's going to end it anyway.
Probably make it moot for a ballot.
Okay, interesting.
Back to the screen here.
Do we have a meetup planned?
I have been crazy busy, Alice asked Little Rock attorney, to get my office to survive and having additional surgeries on my leg.
Great to catch you guys live and look forward to more Viva videos.
We're going to plan something good for the new year, right, Robert?
Yeah, yeah.
There'll be a fundraiser event, you know, 51st birthday party, probably in April.
If we can get it, you know, this is the tricky part, but we're going to try to get it at Mar-a-Lago.
If not, then we might go to somewhere else either in Florida or Texas.
The Austin was the second most popular pick, assuming we could get a certain guest.
To join us for that get-together.
We'll do one in Austin at some point anyway.
We'll do one up with Amos Miller in the summer as well.
But you're waiting to see if we can get Mar-a-Lago to do one in the spring.
That would be the next one.
I was going to say something.
I don't know what's feasible that I can do when I'm in D.C. There's going to be the Rumble event on the inauguration day.
Any chance, Robert, you pop in for the inauguration?
Maybe. I thought about it, but I haven't yet decided.
Is your reason for not going the potential for...
Say it again?
You're definitely going up there?
The 20th for sure, because there's a Rumble something or other.
And then on the 6th for sure, because now I've committed to that.
On the 4th...
Yeah, on the 4th, I'm going to be moderating.
I'm going to be the moderator or moderating a panel on Lawfare.
Eastman's going to be attending it, and some of the other guests are unclear yet at Mar-a-Lago.
And I get a plus one, so I finally get to take my wife up to Mar-a-Lago, which should be fantastic.
So it's going to be a busy January, but we're trying to get something like a meet-up or a meet-and-greet once in...
I was going to say, one of our first founding members was a member of Mar-a-Lago.
Oh, okay.
Well, I sort of knew that because you told me, but I had no knowledge of that beforehand.
That was Little Rock asking the question, Jackson $1, Vivek is taking the absolute libertarian option of removing borders, which most people don't know that they expose, and which is why some people don't like libertarian or libertarian policy.
I think I got a bunch of these up at the top.
Robert, I would encourage you to look at this.
This is from Tesla.
This is not top 1% or 0.1% talent.
These are regular tech jobs that can be filled by U.S. citizens for the most part.
Elon and the tech bros, at best, have been disingenuous in the past few days.
No, look, I say if there's side benefits for the corporation, don't expect them to pay more if they don't have to, much like Trump shouldn't pay more in taxes.
Reform tax law, which if Elon says he's open for, I think the guy could be taken at his word for certain things right now.
Patty Weber?
Also one of the oldest Christian churches.
I was referencing, and there was a member of Mar-a-Lago.
It is Cleopatra.
But I haven't heard from her for a while.
But yeah, we need a Mar-a-Lago member.
There's some people we both know, but I'm sure there's other people out there that know.
We need a Mar-a-Lago member to sign on so that we can do an official Viva Barnes 1776 Law Center fundraiser birthday party.
At Mar-a-Lago.
But it seemed apropos to do one at Mar-a-Lago.
Oh yeah, for sure.
I'm going in the pool when we do this.
I'm going to do a double backflip.
I don't think there's a diving board, but there's a pool.
Patty Weber says, also one of the oldest Christian churches started by one of Jesus' disciples, Thomas the Apostle, is in India, founded by Thomas in AD 52. Evan T says, Vivek stated hiring cheap immigrants to dispute Americans helps the economy.
He said it.
I played that video back before.
Has Viva addressed the fact that Angela Merkel named her book?
I got that one.
Rock on Robert.
Gant it.
I got that.
Red Sox, 1983.
HB, one man massively abused in IT.
Oh, yeah.
It's been massively abused.
It's used to suppress wages in the IT outsourcing.
Set the salary for H-1Bs at $300,000 a year and don't tie it to a single employer and you'll fix it overnight.
What's your opinion on whether Biden will pardon Trump at the last minute for political cover to pardon others such as family?
I think his need to pardon Trump as an excuse to pardon his family has had that ship has sailed.
So he might do it.
As like an act of grace to try to go down as a good president, but he might also just not do it.
Pardon himself, maybe.
The fact that the jocks were celebrated in my high school and I was not, did not diminish my intelligence or affect my abilities, so bullshit, says Adam Wasserman.
And then we've got Viva.
This is from Crash Bandit.
I have a theory that the amount of pardons being given out by...
Okay, I got that one.
All the way to the bottom, yet again.
Net Jess says, can we please get 10 seconds and 30 seconds forwards and backwards buttons when watching videos on Locals?
Screen grabbed and I will ask.
Odin of the North says, oddly, Viva Frye sounds best when he mutes himself.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
And I know Odin is joking because that would be a weird thing to support us on Locals to say.
Gray 101, will Trump in Congress remove the IRS power to penalize citizens as guilty until proven innocent?
Robert, I say no.
There will be massive IRS reform, but that's going to be a wait and see at this point.
But I know it's one of those things, shrinking and making more efficient the tax service.
Barnes, Alien Baby says, what happened to Barnes' interview with Michael Malice, or by Michael Malice?
Oh, I was in the hospital.
Michael was trying to reach me, and I had no idea he was trying to reach me because I was in the hospital.
And so he posted on his board, he goes, oh, Barnes is, I don't know where Barnes is.
And somebody let him know, I think he's in the hospital.
And then he reached out, and he's like, sorry, when can we reschedule?
I was like, oh, man, I was just, you know, literally taken out.
But I will be back on in the new year with Michael Malice to discuss the whole legal and political landscape.
He's interested in, like, the Snowden-Assange.
Roger Veer set of cases because he wants to see, he's skeptical of the Trump administration.
Are they going to deliver?
I mean, he's an anarchist by heart, so he should be skeptical of all government officials.
But yeah, I'll be back on with Michael.
I just missed it.
Not for reasons of my own choosing this past week.
And we got Ganthet.
Oh, hold on.
Before we get to Ganthet, Woodwork1999 says, have you heard any talk by Trump administration to eliminate the D.C. federal courts?
No? We got Mike on board, and he has a lot of juice there in D.C. So hopefully we get more people talking about it, get more people moving in that direction, because it needs to happen.
gant it says what happens as of the first to us local users who do not create a rumble account are we just shit out of luck maybe uh make a rumble account or viva la viva not intending to incite animosity but i feel many of us are being forced to create a rumble account and we do not want to My understanding is they're going to keep prompting you.
I don't think they're shutting off any spigots on the first.
They're going to try to gently nudge.
For reasons that they've made a business decision that it's going to be optimal for everything.
But they're not, as far as I understand, they're not shutting off...
You're really not creating...
You're really creating a backup account, not a new account, because Rumble owns Locals.
So everybody...
They've owned it since...
Through Locals.
It's just that Rumble wants you to create one using their infrastructure so that they can streamline interconnectivity.
So I get people that just don't want to start a new one.
That's fine.
But for everyone else, all you're doing is creating a backup.
It's really not problematic, in my view.
You don't need to start a new one.
You don't even need to use...
It doesn't even need to be the same account address that you have.
I understand people just don't like being told what to do.
Neither do I. And they're suspicious.
But the reality is, Rumble has owned locals.
Since the merger.
It's the same company, but I understand people are skeptical and just, as a matter of principle, don't like being forced to do things.
Then we've got Susie C, who says, Thank you, Viva and Robert Barnes.
Let me see here.
We've got Cherlun says, BC is beautiful, but a walking PSYOP.
More progressive pride flags, Ukraine flags than Canadian flags.
All drugs illegal, under 2.5 grams.
Walker, I'm a fentanyl legally, but Ministry of Finance are running investigations and charging farmers for selling raw milk.
Quebec is the only province where raw milk cheese can be.
Yeah, they legalize hard drugs in British Columbia, then also expand maids, medical assistance in dying to drug addicts.
It's like almost by design.
How can a president pardon someone for something they have not even been charged with?
I thought the point of a pardon was to correct some sort of miscarriage of justice.
You can pardon somebody for anything.
There's no limitation.
You can pardon them for crimes they haven't even been charged with.
Uncivil says, I don't know if that's uncivil law, but it's a good question.
Given SCOTUS legalized false reviews, basically extortion with the Yelp case several years ago, what recourse is there with the Airbnb reviews?
There isn't at the moment.
Robert, because you are fading into darkness.
Sorry, go ahead.
Airbnb and host for fraud, which I am looking at as a possibility.
And I found a bunch of other lawyers that are doing the same.
So I think expect Airbnb to be facing a bunch more class action suits in the next year.
I want to show everybody what my setup is here.
It's a highly sophisticated setup.
You see, I got a nice little light right behind the computer.
I took this thing off of it because the lighting was too yellow.
Robert, you're fading into darkness, which means the sun has set even where you are, which is several hours earlier than me.
I personally thank everybody for being here.
Robert, I thank you for being here.
I thank God that we actually met in the internet world, what it's blossomed into.
We are now entering the fifth year, which blows the mind.
We've got an amazing community.
You are a national, international, international treasure with a mind that is matched only by your spirit and your integrity.
And I thank...
Every power out there that we've met and that we've managed to accomplish what we've accomplished here, it's beautiful.
I agree with the comment, the tipper that says Stephen Donzinger should be on that partner commutation list.
I agree entirely.
He was railroaded.
So Stephen Donzinger is the environmental lawyer who proved massive corruption by, I believe, Exxon, but one of the big oil companies in Central and South America.
So they came to the U.S. courts, got the U.S. court to set aside the verdict and lock him up instead.
Lock up the lawyer for exposing their corruption.
Robert Kennedy has done an extensive interview with him that's very informative.
The judge is the judge presiding over Trump's fake rape trial.
So that's even more reason for Trump to issue a pardon to Stephen Donzinger.
It would be a nice way to thank that corrupt judge for being who and what he is.
Mother effer.
Lewis Kaplan is the judge in the E. Gene Carroll case.
It's unbelievable, eh?
He's a brilliant man.
I have great respect for his intellect.
He's just political as all get-out and corrupt as corrupt you get when it comes to being political.
What I mean by corrupt is he lets politics dictate his verdict rather than the law or the facts.
Intellect without a moral compass is a weapon and not a tool, period.
He's a dangerous, dangerous man on the bench.
Yeah, it's not the nipple judge.
Nipple judge is Engelron.
That's Judge Engelron.
Then you got Judge Kaplan in the E.G. Carroll case.
You got Juan Marchand in the Hush Money case.
Then you got all the other corrupt judges.
I mean, I guess they could all sit next to the Luigi there, who's now been back in New York, who most young people believe did the right thing.
Gives you a sense of where the mic is about young people.
And I'm not trying to laugh at this.
I'm not trying to laugh at this.
If it comes out that he is in fact a patsy in that he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and all of these people out there celebrating him for something that he actually ultimately didn't do, that'll be the ultimate irony in all of this.
I'm getting a little skeptical now that they may have found someone who was mentally unstable, who they knew was easily compromised, and he could come out and scream that he's innocent all day long and no one would ever believe him because they found him with a manifesto, a 3D printed gun.
If he's a patsy...
And he did actually pull the trigger.
All of those people celebrating him as a righteous murderer are going to look real, real stupid.
But thank you for outing yourselves.
People I don't want to have as friends.
Robert, we're going to end this.
We'll say our proper goodbyes because you are...
Did I miss anything in terms of the...
I think I got everything.
I mean, there's a couple more coming in.
Have a great New Year's, guys.
Cover the landscape.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody out there.
Will we be live next Sunday?
We're back to the regular schedule.
Six o'clock Sunday?
Yep. And I will, touch wood, I'll be back in my studio in Florida.
So I don't want to, I don't want to jinx fate right now, but Robert Sickram will say our proper goodbyes to everyone out there.
Thank you very much for everything.
Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year.
Nothing but health and wealth in the new year.
Health, wealth, and happiness, but it typically goes health, then happiness, and then wealth.
And I may or may not go live.
I don't think I can because the incident is that bad, but I'll try to upload a very short video, you know, vlogs.