What Happened to America First? | Episode 93

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Speaker 2 happy thursday my fellow idiots how are you all doing gosh surely we are not doing as well as the foreign workers and hundreds of thousands of chinese students that donald trump is importing to the united states if oh if only we were smarter maybe he wouldn't have to do that

Speaker 2 Sorry everyone for that intro. I woke up feeling sassy today.
It is chilly. I am fed up, hence why I am here in my sweatsuit and we are ready to rant.
I am over it. I am done.

Speaker 2 I want to go back to last fall when we were excited, when we were hopeful, when we all thought that we were going to be entering the golden age of America.

Speaker 2 And yet here we are in possibly the worst week of any Trump administration. And in case you need a recap, I'm going to pull up this tweet from Wall Street Maverick.

Speaker 2 It has not been a good week for policy ideas floated by the White House. 50-year mortgages, $2,000 tariff stimmy checks.
Americans can't do jobs. More H-1Bs.

Speaker 2 600,000 Chinese students keeping liberal universities alive, guys. And don't worry, the damage control is already happening, so let's talk about it.

Speaker 2 Yesterday, we talked about the mortgages, we talked about the endless debt, and we talked about the stimulus checks that were in that tweet, but that was not all, hence why we are back today with another rant.

Speaker 2 Because in that same, now unfortunately infamous interview with Laura Ingram, Trump decided to come out and tell us all that American workers, the same American workers struggling to find and keep jobs right now, struggling to stay afloat in this economy, that actually those American workers, they just aren't good enough.

Speaker 5 and that is why the h-1b visa program is so important just take a listen does that mean the h-1b visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration because if you want to raise wages for american workers you can't flood the country with with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers also do have to bring in talent when we have plenty of talented people

Speaker 2 we don't have talented people no you don't have you don't have certain talents and you have to people have to learn you can't take people off an unemployment like an unemployment line and say I'm gonna put you into a factory or we're gonna make missiles or I'm gonna put how did we ever do it before good point good point Laura but let's go back to what Trump just said there she said don't we have American talent he goes no no actually we don't we don't have American talent and he said that right after he said that the affordability crisis was just a figment of our imagination it is a con.

Speaker 2 We have just made it up in our minds. He has no idea what we're talking about when we say that things are not affordable.
I mean, like, what is happening here? How was he allowed to do this interview?

Speaker 2 Was he not prepped for it? Like, it's kind of incredible, unfortunately, how a single interview can just blow up an entire political base because that is exactly what is happening right now.

Speaker 2 Barefoot student posted this and said, the Gen Z stare when they hear Trump wants more H-1Bs to build missiles. America has no talent.
600,000 Chinese students is just business.

Speaker 2 And the economy is the best ever. All in one interview.
Literally. That has been my face the entire week as I am scrolling on X.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, as the MAGA America First Conservative base is going up in flames online, Trump is spending his time writing letters to the president of Israel asking him to pardon Netanyahu.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm sorry, is this really the priority right now? You have a major PR crisis. Your base is absolutely furious with you.

Speaker 2 You're saying that you don't think Americans have any talent and you're focusing on this? Like, who is advising you? One person wrote this as a response and it just cracked me me up.

Speaker 2 He said, Dear Americans, you're too dumb to build anything, so we need to import a trillion Indians to fill the jobs in this country.

Speaker 2 We're also going to import 600,000 Chinese students per year because we can't afford to have some colleges that Americans don't want to attend go out of business.

Speaker 2 You'll be pleased to know that I'm rolling out a 50-year mortgage so you can essentially just rent your home from a bank. You'll still have to cover repairs.

Speaker 2 Isn't that a generous thing that I'm doing for you, retards? Now, it's time to focus on more important matters. Israel's intra-political conflicts, best Donald J.
Trump.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm not trying to just pile on here, but like, come on, on, we are, we're tired. We are exhausted.
And Americans having no talent was simply the cherry on top.

Speaker 2 Because what really has people up in arms right now is this issue of the H-1B visas, aka the program that floods foreign workers into our country and takes American jobs.

Speaker 2 And this has been a hot button issue.

Speaker 2 Because as young graduates around my age are struggling to find jobs, as they are trying to fight against AI and automation, the last thing they want is to also be fighting against skilled and cheap labor being imported from China and India.

Speaker 2 I mean, guys, this is the issue that effectively ended Vivek's entire political career and his relevance when last Christmas he posted this. I'm sure you guys remember it, but let's just read through.

Speaker 2 Let's just walk down memory lane to see how out of touch this was.

Speaker 2 He said, the reason why top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over Native Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation.

Speaker 2 A key part of it comes down to the C word culture. Tough questions demand tough answers.
And if we're really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the truth.

Speaker 2 Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer.

Speaker 2 And we're going to get to that because it might be interesting to know what happened in the 90s anyway. That doesn't start in college, it starts young.

Speaker 2 A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. Okay, but what if you can do both?

Speaker 2 I'm not even going to get into his tweet right now, but guys, that single post, it ended him. It was completely tone deaf when for years, young Americans like myself had been told, go into STEM.

Speaker 2 That is where the money is. That is where we need you to go.
Learn to code. This is the future.
And young Americans listened to that.

Speaker 2 So many young Americans, like we were talking about yesterday, did everything right.

Speaker 2 There are hundreds of thousands of students coming into the workforce every single year with health degrees, science degrees, engineering degrees, computer science degrees.

Speaker 2 and they are getting passed up for cheaper foreign labor.

Speaker 2 And Vivek's rationality is that they spent too much time focusing on the prom, and so therefore we can't get rid of H-1B visa program, which we know is abused.

Speaker 2 And if you don't believe me, take it from Palmer Lucky, who is the founder of Oculus.

Speaker 8 Of course, there's so much H-1B abuse. You would not believe what I saw when I was in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 8 It is insane. It's obviously a program to try and replace U.S.
workers with basically slave labor that can't ever escape.

Speaker 2 Slave labor, that is cheaper. How can young Americans expect to compete with that when that is the alternative?

Speaker 2 And by the way, what Palmer is laying out there is so far from what the H-1B visa program was created for, what it was intended to do.

Speaker 2 Because when it was introduced in 1990, Vivek, I don't know if that correlates. I just think that that is interesting.
But when it was introduced in 1990, it was supposed to be a temporary solution.

Speaker 2 But as we all have come to understand now, nothing in government is temporary. If they say that it is temporary, just expect it to be around for decades at this point.

Speaker 2 But the purpose when it was created was for employers to be able to hire skilled foreign laborers temporarily for jobs that they could not find Americans to do or jobs that Americans could not do yet, that they were not trained in.

Speaker 2 And at the time, those were usually jobs in STEM. Now, fast forward over 40 years, this system is completely abused.
It is no longer used in emergent temporary situations.

Speaker 2 And it is often preferred because, like Palmer said, the labor is cheaper.

Speaker 2 And it has allowed businesses to import millions of immigrants into our already bloated country where Americans are consistently getting the short end of the stick.

Speaker 2 That is what we voted to fight against. That is what we were expecting and wanting Trump to push back against.

Speaker 2 And so now, 11 months into this administration, we have Donald Trump digging his heels in and saying, no, actually, we do need this program.

Speaker 2 And it's so disappointing to hear him say that, to say that Americans have no talent, that we need these foreign workers, because Trump once stood against this program for the very reasons that I just laid out.

Speaker 6 I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use. We shouldn't have it.
Very, very bad for workers.

Speaker 6 And second of all, I think it's very important to say, well, I'm a businessman, and I have to do what I I have to do. And it's sitting there waiting for you, but it's very bad.

Speaker 6 It's very bad for business in terms of, it's very bad for our workers and it's unfair for our workers and we should end it.

Speaker 2 I miss this Trump. I miss this Trump.
He was aware. He was honest.
He was saying this is not good for America. It is not good for workers, for American workers.
It benefits businesses.

Speaker 2 He says I'm getting cheap labor. I'm using it because, you know, the loophole exists.
The program exists, but it shouldn't.

Speaker 2 And if we want a better country, if we want a better economy, if we want a more empowered, fruitful American workforce, this should be eliminated. He literally said we should not have this program.

Speaker 2 And it also sounds a lot like what J.D. Vance said just a couple months ago.

Speaker 9 I've heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that we're going to have a brain drain.

Speaker 9 If you go back to the 50s and 60s, the American Space Program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent.

Speaker 9 This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and

Speaker 9 professors to do these things. I just reject that.
I actually think we invest in our own people. We can do a lot of good.

Speaker 9 You've heard that criticism in particular as the president has talked about cracking down on foreign student visas and their abuses.

Speaker 9 But I think that's actually an opportunity for American citizens to really flourish.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think I speak for a lot of people, but I completely agree with what J.D. Vance said there.
So, what happened? What the hell happened?

Speaker 2 Because now we have our president sitting down for interviews saying, No, actually, Americans aren't good enough. We don't have the talent.
We can't build something out of nothing.

Speaker 2 We have to import the talent. And in that interview, right after he said Americans have no talent, he gave the example of people not knowing how to build batteries.

Speaker 2 And therefore, we need H-1B visa workers to build them. That is why they are here.
We need their skills, their talent. We need to bring them over.
Okay, interesting. But tell me why then.

Speaker 2 We have pages and pages listing the H-1B visa recipients, and the majority of them work in tech and have jobs like supply chain analysts, supply chain managers, supply chain specialists.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry, that's not building batteries. Are you saying that Americans can't do that? That we are way too dumb to be supply chain analysts? Like, is that too much for us dumbasses?

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Speaker 2 Now back to the main point of this episode. Obviously, this interview with Laura Ingram, all of the stuff about H-1B, it caused a massive uproar online.

Speaker 2 Again, like the entire base just going up in flames, especially because it came on the heels of him saying that he would not be suspending the program that imports hundreds of thousands of Chinese students into our universities because without them, some of the colleges would go under and therefore we have to protect them because that is just good business.

Speaker 2 No, I'm sorry, that is not good business. The government should not be bailing out these universities.
We need to let the free market do what the free market is going to do.

Speaker 2 If these colleges that are every day screwing over young Americans, if they can't survive without hiking up their prices and forcing students to take out insane student loans, if they can't survive without the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students that we are bringing in every single year, then I'm sorry they should close their doors.

Speaker 2 Goodbye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Like, seriously, that is how I feel. And also, it is just very ironic to me that on one side, we are all so dumb.
We are all not capable.

Speaker 2 We have no talent, but also people are coming here to be educated. But who knows? Maybe they're just coming here to be educated in lesbian dance theory and not in battery manufacturing.
Whatever.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the point being, this interview, it blew up for all of the wrong reasons. And now the admin is working overtime to do damage control and get everything back on track.

Speaker 2 So, in response, they sent out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett back out onto Fox to set the record straight. And this is what he said.

Speaker 11 The president's point here is, again, we can't snap our fingers and say, you're going to learn how to build ships overnight. We want to bring semiconductor industry back to the U.S.

Speaker 11 There are going to be big facilities in Arizona. So I think the president's vision here is to bring in overseas workers where these jobs went.
Who have skills.

Speaker 11 Who have the skills, three, five, seven years to train the U.S. workers, then they can go home.
The U.S. workers fully take over.

Speaker 2 They go home. Okay.
Hopefully that works out based on our previous immigration policies, based on what we are dealing with now.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry if I don't trust this idea that they will simply go home after five or seven years. Because again, temporary doesn't really mean much when it comes to the federal government.

Speaker 2 Anyway, that statement by the Treasury Secretary created a whole other debate online because it is true that there is a tech race that America needs to compete in.

Speaker 2 It also is true that for decades we have sent our manufacturing overseas and that America cannot just jump back in overnight. That is a fact.

Speaker 2 And so for many, this rationale, everything that Scott Basson is saying, made sense even if Trump was laying it out in all the wrong ways and said all the wrong things.

Speaker 2 They were like, okay, now I sort of get it. Like one person commented and said, this is how you rebuild the nation's workforce.

Speaker 2 Another person said, brutal truth, you do not instantly recover from more than five decades of very insidious people deliberately dumbing down your academia, offshoring most of your vital industries, and just turn around and bring all of that back and have more than enough highly skilled and trained workers ready to just step in.

Speaker 2 The great trade tariff reset Trump is doing is bringing those industries back here. But is it anti-American to recognize that the U.S.

Speaker 2 workforce isn't quite where it needs to be to make an instant rebound once those industries are back in the U.S.?

Speaker 2 Now, again, I understand that, but the way that Trump laid this out, the flippant way that he responded to Laura Ingram just saying that there is no American talent, obviously that was going to rub Americans the wrong way.

Speaker 2 And therefore, for other people, this still still just seems like a cope. Like Five Times August said, we had zero experience housewives making aircrafts and tanks in World War II.

Speaker 2 And POTUS acts like we can't train Americans to make batteries. This is very fair.
It is historically accurate. And this is also what J.D.
Vance was talking about in that clip that we just watched.

Speaker 2 Now, I also want to read this. I think that this is probably the most balanced take that I've read.
This person said, that's what we need, but the H-1B program is rife with abuse.

Speaker 2 and does not bring in only the best and the brightest. It should be scrapped.
And so should most other work visas.

Speaker 2 We also need strict control so that they don't just stick around much easier with fewer people.

Speaker 2 Like we should not just be importing thousands to millions of people and just shoving them in different jobs, allowing American workers to be passed over.

Speaker 2 If you do want to bring people in to train them temporarily, it needs to be a small selection of people for a very specific purpose for a very set amount of temporary.

Speaker 2 Temporary time, a certain amount of time.

Speaker 2 And so I guess my question is, and I think the question on a lot of people's minds, based on what I'm reading in the comments, is, is there a way that we can do away with this program that has been abused, that has strayed so far away from its original intent, and still steer American labor and innovation in the right direction and get workers and industries the training that they do need because we have abandoned that for decades?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I genuinely do not know the answer to that.
I am not a specialist. I am not in government.
These are just the things that I'm thinking.

Speaker 2 But to me, in order to solve this problem, it seems like it should be a totally new program and that H-1B still does need to be scrapped and addressed so that Americans, especially young Americans, can get those damn supply chain analysts and manager jobs.

Speaker 2 Because I have faith that us Americans are smart enough to do that. Hopefully we can convince Trump of that fact.

Speaker 2 And listen, if we do need help preparing people for those manufacturing and tech jobs, then let's turn our attention to education. Let's stop keeping failing universities afloat.

Speaker 2 Let's invest in trade schools and educators. And so again, I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I do think that there is truth on both sides of this argument.

Speaker 2 And I do think I understand what Trump was trying to communicate. We should be investing in Americans.
We should be investing in our workforce.

Speaker 2 And yes, that does mean educating and preparing them, but that also means ending the program that cuts them out of thousands and thousands of jobs.

Speaker 2 And this is something that Charlie was tweeting about just days before he was murdered.

Speaker 2 He knew the urgency of addressing H-1B because it and mass immigration directly impacts, continues to impact, the young people that he was speaking for.

Speaker 2 Again, just days before his assassination, he wrote, this is the social compact breaking down. We need urgency to restore it.
Number one, mass deportations. Number two, stop the H-1B scam.

Speaker 2 Dramatically reduce legal immigration that's important. end chain migration and the visa lottery, build 10 million homes for Americans, and crush the college cartel.
Charlie was spot on.

Speaker 2 This is what we voted for. Cernovich hit the nail on the head, as he often does.
I love him.

Speaker 2 And he said, Charlie Kirk was the last person who could walk into the Oval Office and speak on behalf of the base. Now it's all donors.

Speaker 2 I mean, as somebody who does feel like a bit of an outsider, like I don't know the Trump family, I don't know the administration. I've never been to the White House.

Speaker 2 I've never been in the Oval Office. Like, it does feel like that, especially when it came to being in touch with young people.

Speaker 2 But now guys, we have Trump attacking his voters, advocating for importing students and labor, and Christy Noam is on TV bragging about how they are fast-tracking legal immigration. Just watch.

Speaker 12 We've sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards, to all of that, but also more people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before.

Speaker 12 More people are becoming citizens because we're not just streamlining and building some processes back into our immigration policies.

Speaker 12 We're also making sure that these individuals that are coming into our country and get that privilege, that they actually are here for the right reasons.

Speaker 2 This is not what we need right now. Like, yes, yes, I mean, yes, the system needs reform.
It has always needed reform. We do need real pathways for citizenship.

Speaker 2 But can we also just like, can we press pause? Like, that is all we're asking. Can we press pause?

Speaker 2 Can we stop bringing other people in until we figure out what the hell is going on and get our own country back on track? Like, can we have stricter but clear immigration policies moving forward?

Speaker 2 Like, basically, every other country in the entire world, that is all we are asking for. All we are asking is for you to put Americans first.
And I feel like that's not asking for much.

Speaker 2 And again, I know that Donald Trump is under massive amounts of pressure. All eyes are on him.
I have empathy for the situation. He was handed an absolute dumpster fire of a country.
Thank you, Biden.

Speaker 2 But turning your back on your stated principles and calling Americans dumbasses really was not the move. And I feel like, and maybe this is the stretch, but I feel like that should have been obvious.

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