Vivek Ramaswamy says America doesn’t have enough engineers because we mocked Steve Urkel

The unholy alliance between the Trump-loyal MAGA right and opportunistic tech-right scammers has found its first major clash: H-1B visa policies. As the two groups try to line up, stumbling new trends of racism and xenophobia along the way Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chief conman of the Ministry of State Efficiency blessed us with a new theory why America is supposedly lagging behind in its ability to produce elite engineers: we idolized Stephen instead Steve Urkel.

According to Ramaswamy, “our American culture has honored mediocrity over excellence,” and it all goes back to 1990s soap operas and America’s preference for the track and field queen over the “Math Olympiad” or valedictorian. ceremony.

“A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World, or Zack and Slater over Scratch in Saved by the Bell, or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in Family Matters, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy tweeted public in a message that can be read by other people and everything.

The reason leading tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over “native” Americans is not because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy and misguided explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions call for tough answers and if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024

This whole thing is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I guess it’s worth starting with the fact that it’s not even an accurate account of Family matters. Steve Urkel was so popular with audiences that the series was rewritten to center the character. It went from a simple family sitcom to a sci-fi comedy centered around America’s favorite geek. Even Stefan’s character was a product of all Urkel’s stupidity. (If you are not ready Family matters erudition, Steve alters his DNA to be a cooler version of himself and woo his love Laura and ends up creating a clone who can be the cool guy Stefan full-time instead of requiring Steve to transform between the two. Laura chooses Steve over Stefan anyway.)

To be honest, this isn’t even the most egregious example of Ramaswamy’s appallingly poor media literacy on display in this tweet. He says: “More movies like Whiplash, less reruns of Friends, probably because he falls into the camp of people who think JK Simmons’ character is abusing his young students in Whiplash is justified because he pushes them to greatness instead of seeing him as a tyrannical lunatic.

Also – look, I know I’m really pushing the media, but I swear this is the last one – what a wild intrusion by Cory from The boy meets the world. He has to try extremely hard to look cool and it just never takes off. After all, he’s a typically average guy who knows how to be himself. He’s certainly no jock or prom king.

Anyway. What prompted Ramaswamy to back out of that deal was the ongoing battle over H-1B visas, which allow U.S. companies to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations and have become a commonly used tool in the tech industry to attract global talent. The best H-1B visa issuers are almost all technology companies and while the visas undoubtedly bring skilled workers into the fold and benefit the economy as a wholebig tech companies were too accused of using the recruitment tool to assign jobs when reducing domestic staff.

The immigration hot topic is the biggest DKE situation I’ve seen 😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2024

Trump limited H1-B visas during his first term— a policy that the Biden administration reversed and changed to make it easier to hire immigrants. But as Trump prepares to take office again, the program appears on the cutting block.

The divide between Trump loyalists and tech industry players reared its head this past week after a16z’s Sriram Krishnan it was named senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence for the Trump White House. His appointment drew the ire of prolific racist Laura Loomer, who believes Krishnan wants to “remove all caps on green card caps.” This would lead to more international students coming to the US, which is bad in Loomer’s eyes. She too accused Krishnan for donating to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, but it turned out that she confused him with someone with the same namewhich seems fitting for her whole deal.

Now Ramaswamy and his fellow Trump-connected tech bros have taken to defending immigration programs for skilled workers and students as they find themselves at odds with the nationalist front of the MAGA movement. It was bound to happen, it’s just a little surprising that the war broke out even before Trump took office – and on Christmas Day, no less. I guess if your family has disowned you, you have a lot more time to argue immigration policy on Twitter during the holidays.

If there’s one thing that Ramaswamy identifies correctly, though probably accidentally, it’s the athlete-maniac divide. Writer Jon Ganz presented his The “Jock/Creep” Theory of Fascism. in 2023 and here it feels quite prophetic. The theory posits that Americans are particularly drawn to jock/bully archetypes for their authoritarian leaders, while creep/loser types plot behind the scenes. “The dull seek to give their actions the appearance of historical grandeur, while the gloomy look for a figure who embodies the power they lack,” he wrote.

Trump is undoubtedly a master at this alignment, so there’s no doubt that his supporters are drawn to this type of energy—the very kind that Ramaswamy argues should not be a lie in American culture. Before placing himself directly on the splitting earth beneath him, Ramaswamy serves as something of a mediator between athletes and nerds: able to captured MAGA’s imagination better than any other Trump surrogate, but still very much in touch with the people pushing the tech world’s right turn. Now it seems he has cast his fate with the geeks in the eyes of MAGA.