The media now routinely runs with false stories (Russiagate), covers up inconvenient facts (the Hunter Biden laptops), and maligns people who are both public figures and private individuals. Lies and errors are rampant, and they never get corrected. We are a long way from 1964 or even Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein supposedly agonized for weeks over a small mistake they once made in their reporting. This is why Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against TheNew York Times is moving forward, as is a lawsuit against CNN’s Jake Tapper. It’s why ABC and George Stephanopoulos just had to pay Trump $15 million for falsely claiming that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll.
It also might be why David Enrich is having an attack of conscience even as he prepares to do battle with the right as a defender of journalistic integrity. I wish him luck pulling it off. But it would be more convincing if he would first come clean about what he did to Brett, to me, and to our friends.
Keir Starmer needn’t be personally implicated in the grooming-gangs scandal to be part of the problem. He belongs to a generation of politicians and officials who could not compute these crimes when they were first brought to their attention, because they didn’t fit their simplistic, multiculturalist script; who have failed to tackle this scourge since then out of a mix of cowardice and self-preservation; and who even now seem more concerned about how some people on the internet are talking about the rape, torture and murder of poor and working-class girls, rather than the rape, torture and murder itself. Today, surely, the phoney moral superiority of our elites is smashed beyond repair. Those who would prefer to look good, rather than do good, should never be allowed near power again.
So if I understand this thing going on in England, it's like the Vatican cover up but this time it's okay because it's the government, and community cohesion or something
Those with all the power need January 6th to confirm everything they’d been warning the public about. It was so perfect, almost too perfect. I might be among those cheering on Liz Cheney had I never escaped the unreality of the Left. But I did escape, and I got to know Trump world well enough to see that what happened on January 6th was not in the plan, certainly not by Trump, and was out of character for MAGA.
Liz Cheney did not deserve a medal for her disgraceful behavior around January 6th. Rather, the people still deserve the whole truth about everything that happened that day.
I know what happened on January 6th was not typical for MAGA. They don’t break windows. They don’t beat up cops. Whatever happened on the steps of the Capitol was used to wage war on American citizens. We should not rest until we know why and how so many were convinced that this was the only way to be heard by our government.
It was never up to them to decide whom we should vote for. That’s always been up to us. And now, the American people have spoken and said we’ll take Trump, January 6th and all.
As for me, I learned I am built of much stronger stuff than I previously thought. I learned that I care more about the truth than my own reputation. I learned that standing against corruption and mass conformity is not easy. I wish I could say nothing bad has happened to me, but of course, I live with the consequences of being an outsider and a pariah every day. But it is still better than the alternative. And anyway, as Bob Dylan once said, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Speaking of the Obama Unreality Machine, here’s a show produced by ABC News on January 6th:
What an insult to every Jewish person on the planet, past and present. Breathtaking minimizing of one of the worst things to happen in human history. ABC will have to apologize, I bet. https://t.co/e0t1nYvB3v
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column in 2008 on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.
“In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.
“In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.”
NBC’s Kristen Welker has a long history embracing the Democrats’ conspiracies related to Trump-Russia collusion. Would she write off the sources who fed the public bogus narratives embarrassing her own network? Of course not. The moderator of NBC’s flagship weekend political program would go on to platform the Democrats’ conspiracist-in-chief related to Kremlin interference on the eve of President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral certification.
On Sunday, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who was formally censured by the lower chamber two years ago for weaponizing the Intelligence Committee to run the Russia hoax through Trump’s first term, joined Welker on “Meet the Press.” After Schiff condemned “the federal justice system” for having “really let down the country” over Trump’s triumph above the serial lawfare campaigns, Schiff said the incoming president’s new pick as FBI director, Kash Patel, was “unqualified” based on allegations of plans to pursue “political vendettas.”
* * * * * * * * *
Welker never pushed back on Schiff’s claims about Patel in her Sunday interview. Instead of pressing Schiff with additional questions related to his outlandish claims against Patel, the NBC moderator thanked him for his time, and ended the interview.
NBC’s Meet the Depressed attempted the impossible: discussing President Joe Biden’s mental decline without mentioning the media’s role in trying to hide what the American people saw with their very own eyes. It goes without saying that this effort failed miserably.
The gaslighting began during host Kristen Welker’s interview of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Click “expand” to view transcript:
* * * * * * * *
The tell here with Welker is that she did not interrupt Schumer as he proceeded to respond to her question on Biden’s mental decline and Schumer’s own furtherance of the phony “sharp as a tack” narrative. Schumer was allowed to deflect and kill time undisturbed. No “to put a fine point on it” or “but that’s not what I asked”, as is her modus operandi with Republicans.
More importantly, Schumer was confronted only with his own statement. Welker did not bring up the devastating Wall Street Journal exposé (which specifically mentions Schumer’s visit with Biden in Delaware ahead of his dropping out of the presidential race) that confirms what we all suspected when it comes to Biden’s decline- that his fast fade was deliberately hidden from the American public. Welker offered no follow-up and moved to her next question.
The tell here with Welker is that she did not interrupt Schumer as he proceeded to respond to her question on Biden’s mental decline and Schumer’s own furtherance of the phony “sharp as a tack” narrative. Schumer was allowed to deflect and kill time undisturbed. No “to put a fine point on it” or “but that’s not what I asked”, as is her modus operandi with Republicans.
More importantly, Schumer was confronted only with his own statement. Welker did not bring up the devastating Wall Street Journal exposé (which specifically mentions Schumer’s visit with Biden in Delaware ahead of his dropping out of the presidential race) that confirms what we all suspected when it comes to Biden’s decline- that his fast fade was deliberately hidden from the American public. Welker offered no followup and moved to her next question.
The subsequent panel addressed Schumer’s remarks. Of note, former Biden campaign spokesperson and MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend was allowed to run out the clock by quadrupling down on “sharp as a tack”, and running Trump whataboutism (click “expand” to view transcript):
The tensions at NBC News demonstrate how tricky it can be for news networks to hire former politicians and Washington insiders as contributors—a common practice. While many hires provide insights into the inner workings of the government, there has been concern about the revolving door between news channels and politicos as well as partisan politics that creeps into analysis.
As Nick Arama wrote in March at RedState, “It’s pretty hilarious that any of these folks are upset about McDaniel, but they’re cool with the things like Russia collusion that MSNBC has spewed out over the years.”
And the burying of Biden’s mental decline by virtually the entire DNC-MSM. Will there be any reconning over their collective attempt to hide the decline?
EMPEROR ZOOLANDER TO FINALLY ABDICATE?
BREAKING: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announce resignation this week, according to the Globe and Mail
Justin Trudeau is expected to announce as early as Monday that he will resign as Liberal Party Leader, three sources said Sunday, as the Prime Minister faces a caucus revolt and dismal public opinion polls that show his party will likely be swept out of power by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a landslide victory.
The sources stressed that they don’t know definitely when Mr. Trudeau will announce his plans to leave but said they expect it will happen before a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss internal party matters.
One of the sources, who spoke recently to the Prime Minister, said Mr. Trudeau realizes he needs to make an announcement before he meets the Liberal caucus so it doesn’t look like he was forced out by his own MPs.
The three sources said they are unsure about what the Liberal Party national executive plans to do to replace Mr. Trudeau as leader. They said it remains unclear whether he will leave immediately or stay on as Prime Minister until a new leader is selected. The Liberal Party national executive, which decides on leadership issues, plans to meet this week, likely after the caucus session.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.
All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.
What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.
These men targeted the most vulnerable girls—the poor and the fatherless, children in care homes—with candy, food, taxi rides, and drugs. They raped the girls, passed them around family and friendship networks, pimped them into similar networks in other cities, then discarded them as they reached the age of consent.
This pattern was repeated in as many as 50 cities across the country, including in leafy Oxford and liberal Bristol. A 2014 inquiry estimated that 1,400 girls had been serially raped in Rotherham alone.
The details are established beyond doubt in the small number of prosecutions that eventually made it to court. The suffering described in the court papers is sickening to read: The girls were drugged, beaten, sodomized, gang-raped, trafficked, and tortured.
One night in Oldham in 2006, for example, a 12-year-old girl named “Sophie” entered a police station and reported that she had just been molested in a graveyard by a man named “Ali.” A desk officer told her to come back with an adult when she was sober. Two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for bus fare home. A man named Shakil Chowdhury pulled up in his car and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men repeatedly raped her.
[I]n the fall of 2015, ESPN made a 30 for 30 documentary entitled simply, “First Pitch,” about the impact of that George W. Bush first pitch for sports fans.
I thought about that movie, even went back and watched it, this Saturday morning as I was contemplating how a sports network like ESPN could have failed to cover the national anthem and the moment of silence in New Orleans the day after the Sugar Bowl was postponed in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack on Bourbon Street.
Even though it was just nine years ago, it feels like a totally different era at ESPN, a time when the sports network existed to unite sports fans of all races, sexes, ethnicities, and, yes, political beliefs in common love of competition, before the network became infested with identity politics, before woke sports destroyed the ESPN brand.
How in the space of less than a decade did ESPN go from making a documentary about the importance of a first pitch in the wake of a terror attack to not even acknowledging a moment of silence the day after a terror attack that required the very game it was covering in that city itself to be moved by a day?
And, in so doing, how much does this decade represent a lost unity, the collapse of sports as something that brought us together, and became instead yet another political wedge of divisiveness?
If you haven’t heard about it, on Thursday afternoon in the Superdome in New Orleans, ESPN failed to cover the national anthem, the moment of silence for terror victims, the incredible USA chants echoing throughout the stadium and Notre Dame running on the field led by a player carrying the American flag.
Each of these moments was iconic and important, a symbol of the people in that stadium, the players and coaches, and the city of New Orleans, rallying as one and letting the terrorists know they would not defeat us, that the spirit of America is unconquerable.
Will Howard thanked his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ after winning the Rose Bowl. He was then the only player on the team physically blocked from going on stage. pic.twitter.com/y6YedgspQR
Speculation abounds, and some of them point to ESPN, others point to the NCAA, but the prevailing theory is that they were attempting to restrict Howard’s access so that he wouldn’t bring up Christ on the stage. This is, of course, currently unconfirmed, but it seems to be the most popular of the guesses.
The Home Office is refusing to publish figures for the number of grooming gang members that have been deported.
The department has declined to put the figures in the public domain despite an outcry over child sexual exploitation and demands for a fresh state-backed inquiry into the abuse.
Labour last week refused to launch a public inquiry into historic sexual abuse by gangs in Oldham, saying it was for the council to decide whether one was necessary.
The Home Office’s refusal comes after calls from Suella Braverman, a former home secretary, for a “zero tolerance approach” to the deportation of foreign child sex offenders.
She said: “We need to have a zero tolerance approach when it comes to deporting those foreign nationals who have been found guilty of these heinous crimes.”
If the Home Office is refusing to publish their data, I would take that answer is “no one has been deported” until there are real numbers on the table.
The New Orleans terrorist attacker visited the Louisiana city twice in the weeks before the attack and recorded video of the area using Meta smart glasses, the FBI revealed Sunday.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, stayed at a rental home in New Orleans at the end of October and again in November, just weeks prior to his attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people. He wore the smart glasses to record video as he rode a bicycle through the French Quarter during that trip, FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil said on Sunday.
“Meta glasses appear to look like regular glasses, but they allow a user to record videos and photos hand-free,” Myrthil said. “They also allow the user to potentially livestream through their video.”
Jabbar wore the glasses during his New Year’s Day attack, but they were not activated for a livestream, according to Myrthil. There was no indication he was recording the attack at all, though the glasses were found on Jabbar.
It’s an interesting angle (and could have been a much more chilling one had Jabbar been live streaming his attack), but given that New Orleans is a massive tourist destination, Jabbar very likely could have wondered through the city planning his terrorism filming on an iPhone, and no one would bat an eye, given the ubiquity of smart phones in a major city.
Because the GEC could not operate against Americans directly, it did so indirectly by funding entities like the British-based Global Disinformation Index, which compiled a list of publications and individuals that said things the regime did not like. That list was consulted by advertisers wary of winding up on the wrong side of the government. The Washington Examiner made the list. So did RealClearPolitics, Reason, The New York Post, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the American Conservative, Newsmax, and many conservative entities. Result? Millions of dollars of ad revenue dried up, imperiling the future of those outlets.
Funding for the GEC was in the original 1500-page obscenity that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had the temerity to bring to his colleagues as a “continuing resolution” last month. That monstrosity instantly drew some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserved, not least from Elon Musk, whose fingers got a workout on the platform formerly known as Twitter. A 120-page, slimmed-down version of the bill was hastily cobbled together minus the GEC funding and other objectionable features (a raise for the legislators, for example). That passed, and so a putative “government shutdown” was avoided.
There was modified joy over this seeming victory. The fact that funding for the GEC was cut was one of the principal goads to celebration. Here at last was proof that a bad government activity could actually be zeroed out. No money, no activity.
But the joy was short-lived. Deploying a pragmatic version of the Juliet Principle (“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”), the deep staters in the State Department just cooked up a new name.
Allow me to introduce you to the “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub,” a polysyllabic, “rebranded” version of the GEC. Many of the people employed by the GEC are now employed by the new “hub.” They’ll need new business cards, stationery, and signs for their offices. Doubtless, there will be other expenses. But since much of the GEC’s budget has been “realigned” to the new shop, that won’t be a problem.
Jan Crawford of CBS News said last week that Biden’s “obvious cognitive decline” was the most “underreported” story of the year. Liberal journalist Matt Yglesias conceded that his prediction that Biden would “prove his doubters wrong” at the now-infamous CNN debate in June 2024 did not pan out. “In a lot of ways it’s more embarrassing to have been gullible and wrong when so many people with no sources and no inside info could see it clearly, but that’s what happened,” Yglesias wrote, pretentiously.
Well, we tried to warn you. The Washington Free Beacon was neither gullible nor wrong in our assessment of Biden’s health, and we didn’t need “sources” or “inside info” to tell us what we could see very clearly with our own eyes. We launched a weekly video series documenting Biden’s “senior moments” back in July 2022, nearly two years before he bragged about beating Medicare on the debate stage. We sounded the alarm in April 2022, when Biden shook hands with a ghost, and again in September 2022, when he tried to converse with a dead congresswoman, and again in October 2023, when he froze at the podium, and on numerous other occasions.
[NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen] Welker asked, “What do you say that you and top Democrats misled them about President Biden’s mental acuity?”
Schumer said, “Look, we didn’t. Let’s look at President Biden. he’s had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, putting 235 judges of record. He’s a patriot. He’s a great guy, and when he stepped down he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party for America, we should all salute him. We should all salute him.”
The question about misleading the American public about Biden’s declining mental acuity could also be asked about NBC, of course:
The story revolved around Biden and other world leaders being greeted by a skydiving demonstration last Thursday at the Group of Seven meeting in Italy. Video shows Biden walking away from the leaders and toward a group of parachutists who had just landed, giving them two thumbs-up.
But conservative media outlets and the Republican National Committee posted videos shot from angles that cut out the parachutists. Some of their posts said incorrectly that Biden “wandered off.” Without the skydivers Biden was addressing included in those videos, viewers could be left with the impression that he was walking absentmindedly.
The misleading videos were an example of so-called cheap fakes, in which low-tech editing or other minor changes to videos, along with incorrect context, can amplify false but convincing messages.
The episode illustrated the dynamics of the new information ecosystem, in which tech platforms are hesitant to emphasize vetted, factual information during an election year for fear of appearing partisan — even as partisan operatives take advantage of the platforms’ attempts at neutrality.
President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will end his presidential re-election campaign, bringing an abrupt and humbling conclusion to his half-century-long political career and scrambling the race for the White House less than four months before Election Day.
Biden, 81, could not reverse growing sentiment within his party that he was too frail to serve and destined to lose to Donald Trump in November. He backed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee.
She will follow in the footsteps of Al Gore, vice president to Bill Clinton, who had to certify his defeat to Republican George W. Bush in 2001 after weeks of legal wrangling about hanging chads and small margins in Florida.
Before him, Richard Nixon (then vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower) had to sign off on the results of his loss to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 election.
But there is a dodge. Just don’t turn up.
In 1969, Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey recused himself and skipped certification. Instead it fell to the Senate president pro tempore (usually the majority party’s most senior member) to announce that Humphrey had lost to Nixon’s second run.
On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that she expected Harris to attend the joint session of Congress [on Monday].
I noted on Friday that it wouldn’t surprise me if Biden awarded Kamala the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a consolation prize before leaving office. After all, Barack Obama did the same thing in 2017 by awarding Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, and literally calling him “the best vice president America has ever had” during the ceremony.
* * * * * * * * *
It’s well established that Barack Obama was the one who convinced Joe Biden not to run for president because it was Hillary’s turn. Biden’s Presidential Medal of Freedom was, without a doubt, a consolation prize for his vice president, who was sidelined by Obama so Hillary could run… and eventually lose to Donald Trump.
So, why didn’t Joe Biden award Kamala with a Presidential Medal of Freedom? Is it possible he’s waiting for a particular moment, as Obama did? Possibly. But, to me, this appears to be more of an insult. Biden has never been one to shy away from nominating people for his administration or to the judiciary based on diversity checkboxes, and it seems on-brand for Biden to award Kamala, the first woman-of-color vice president in history, the medal.
Biden certainly does have time to do so before he leaves office, but something tells me he won’t. There is clearly quite a bit of bad blood between the Bidens and Kamala, and if he doesn’t award her the medal before leaving office, you just know it was a deliberate insult.
Biden and Jill Biden certainly went out of their way to throw Harris under the bus in every way imaginable, so his snubbing of her on the way out the door certainly isn’t at all surprising.
It is important to be clear that in an ocean of indifference, there were people who did a lot to make this happen, like the whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, and the victims who had the astonishing courage to speak of what they had experienced.
But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal wentviral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.
It is about time that there was a cultural and institutional reckoning. Of course, it is important to be clear that such crimes could still be happening today. It is important to be clear that such crimes can be, and have been, carried out by white people as well (and not for the sake of political correctness but to stop it happening).
Yet if Britain’s state and cultural institutions are allowed to forget what happened in Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and Oxford, and Bristol, and so many other places, there will not be meaningful attempts to tear off the ideological and institutional blinkers that have blinded them to atrocities in the past and could blind them to atrocities in the future.
The British media are furious about having to cover this story, and are in full shooting-the-messenger mode. Even the London Times, which is seen as many as a nominally center-right paper is in full “a pox on all their houses” mode: Excusing the child rape gangs only gives Musk’s ideologues more fuel. On one side, the proto-fascists. On the other, the hyperliberals. It’s hard to know which pose a bigger threat.
Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire investor, has funneled more than $15.2 billion through his Open Society Foundations (now run by his son Alex), which has awarded more than 50,000 grants worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum.
Soros bankrolled the “rogue prosecutor” soft-on-crime movement by funding the campaigns of local prosecutors who oppose the death penalty and use prosecutorial discretion to avoid charging crimes they consider minor.
Crime rates have spiked across the country, particularly in Democrat-led cities, where murder rates have increased.
Yet it makes a perverse amount of sense that Biden would grant Soros the highest civilian honor—not because the billionaire has funded a movement that puts Americans in danger but because his massive funding network enabled Biden’s allies to implement their radical agenda through the administrative state.
As Tom Cotton tweeted in response to Biden’s handlers awarding Soros on the way out the door:
Giving Soros the Medal of Freedom is outrageous but not surprising.
Democratic politicians support criminals more than cops. They want violent criminals back on the streets.
A teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage,” educators have been saying for the last 30-ish years. Now AI is making it possible and . . . Is this really a good idea?
Unbound Academic Institute has received the OK to open a Tucson charter school without human teachers: AI will provide two hours of day of interactive, individualized lessons in literature, math and science to fourth- to eighth-graders, reports Radhika Rajkumar on ZDNet. Human “guides” will provide emotional support and, presumably, keep students from goofing off.
In the afternoon, students will attend virtual “life skills workshops” on topics such as “financial literacy, public speaking, resilience, and critical thinking led by what Unbound calls ‘community mentors,’ who range ‘from local entrepreneurs to civic leaders’,” she writes.
“The AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues [via webcam] to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” Unbound’s charter application states. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”
It feels like there are two points [Vivek Ramaswamy is] making here, one subtle and one obvious.
The subtle one, which is at the heart of why so many tech companies REALLY want H1-B visas so badly, is that some cultures are poorer and hungrier than others. I hate to tell you this if you’re American, but as a general rule, Indians WANT IT more than you do. Why? Because the average salary in India is about $382 per month. So, if you’re Indian, educated, smart, and because of the wonders of the modern world, can do work or even remote work in America, you have an incredible opportunity.
If you have pretty good English, can take instructions, work hard, and have a good attitude, you may be able to get very “rich” doing what most Americans consider fairly mundane work. Think about it – if you can just make the minimum wage in America, that equates to $15,080 per year. Americans consider that “barely surviving.” Meanwhile, if you’re in India, that’s three times what the average person makes.
How much bullsh*t would you be willing to put up with at work to get paid lots of money to do a simple job? Personally, I’ve hired people from India to work remotely for me before, and do you know what my experience was? There were some communication issues, but generally, they did the job, they did it well, and they had a work ethic you just don’t see in America. What do I mean by that? Well, I am 100% not exaggerating when I say that I’ve had Indians tell me out of the blue they intend to work for me through their honeymoons or reach out to tell me they just had a heart attack and are in the ICU but will be back at work in a couple of days. It’s not like I’m a slavedriver or ask them to do these things either, this is just their attitude.
In my experience, Americans who are that hungry tend to be few and far between as compared to it being common somewhere like India. This is one of the few advantages poor people have over the rich. Being deprived makes them hungry for success in a way that it’s hard to be when life is easy.
Getting beyond that, it’s impossible to deny that Ramaswamy is right about America’s culture emphasizing the wrong things.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
