A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an economic one. But in his defense of the program, Ramaswamy turned the conversation to culture, arguing that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he wrote on X. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
What America needs, according to Ramaswamy, is “more movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’ Most normal American parents look skeptically at ‘those kinds of parents.’ More normal American kids view such ‘those kinds of kids’ with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.”
This is clearly a personal essay about Ramaswamy’s high-school unpopularity masquerading as a political manifesto but never mind that. What we need, apparently, is a country of “those parents”—Tiger moms—the sort of parents who see childhood as an 18-year-long college application process, better spent doing extra homework and practicing the violin than playing football or making friends.