Welcome Back Kotter, 1975

Source: Public Domain

This was gonna be my end-of-the-year wrap-up (it was written and proofed and everything), but the Vivek “mediocre culture” thing got me fired up, so I’ll run the New Year’s column next week.

Am I enjoying seeing MAGA turn on Musk over his push for more cheap imported labor?

Heavens, no, I’d never harbor ill will toward the plate-lipped albino who banned me for life from X because an anonymous Holocaust denier came at me aggressively on a morning when I was grieving for a lost friend and I told the denier, “If you ever come to Beverly Hills, I’ll kill you myself” (that’s the tweet that got me banned).

I’m bringing this up to make a point. Bengali geneticist Razib Khan is exactly the kind of “skilled immigrant” Musk wants to import. And no question Khan’s smart (he was raised here); hell, he even wrote four pieces for Takimag in 2009!

He’s also written for Unz.

Okay, I take back the “smart” thing.

But now he’s gone full Kipling; the Gods of his far-off land have repossessed his blood.

The day before Vivek’s tweet, Khan tweeted “i hate nazis, and i will literally kill you if you come for my children,” which he followed with “the reason the retard right thinks i’m anti-white is because i said i was going to kill ppl if they were going to try and deport my children out of this country based on their race. i still stand by that. I’ll kill you.”

Khan’s being performative; his kids are anchor babies, they’re safe (even if Trump finds a way to end birthright citizenship, it won’t be retroactive). More important, Musk not only didn’t ban Khan for saying “I’ll kill you” (aimed not at one denier troll as in my case, but all ICE agents and immigration restrictionists), X won’t even make him delete the tweet!

This double standard, along with reports that Musk is removing blue checks from Xers who defy him on H-1B, suggests that he’s reverting to Dorsey-era tactics in which “favored” groups get to say things disfavored ones can’t. Worse still, Khan’s tweets prove that even the best of ’em, the “highly skilled” (which Khan certainly is, plus he leans right, or at least he used to), will revert to “I keeeeell you” tribalism regarding deportations of their people.

What man-child Elon doesn’t get is that nobody trusts Big Tech. Elon and Vivek say, “We’ll only bring in the top .01%,” and MAGA—paranoid as it is (too much in my opinion, but not in this case)—ain’t buyin’ it. MAGA sees “only the best” as cover for “everyone who applies,” and if Elon would stop treating MAGAs like British cave divers to abuse, he’d realize that the problem is not racism but lack of trust.

Back to Vivek.

I’ll quote the relevant passage from his now-infamous Dec. 26 tweet:

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. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

Vivek’s belief that we’re defined by the TV characters we enjoy is absolutely retarded, and he’s retarded for espousing it. It’s such a stupid way of thinking. As is his claim that enjoying a fictional character means you “venerate” that character. Vivek might’ve closed 2024 with the dumbest tweet of the year.

And before you say, “No, Vivek’s a genius!” may I remind you…well, I’ll just quote this tweet from a guy who stated it perfectly:

Here’s Vivek Ramaswamy in 2015, scamming the public on his Alzheimer drug that had already failed drug trials four times before he bought it for pennies. He rebranded it & took the company public in an IPO. Then he & his family dumped $2 billion of stock before it failed again.

Vivek’s no genius. He’s a glorified “Microsoft security” phone-scammer.

The idea that unintelligent sitcom characters in some way “train” kids to be underachievers is lunatic. I’m not talking about the “kids watch too much TV” debate. I’m speaking about what Vivek was speaking about: TV characters. He says you can judge an entire society by the sitcom characters people enjoy. He claims that those characters shape a culture and a nation.

So imbecilic. Kids who grew up with Welcome Back, Kotter in the 1970s loved John Travolta’s dim-witted Barbarino. That doesn’t mean they became underachievers like the “Sweathogs.”

I’d ask Mr. Swarthyvishnu to produce data. Has he done any research to prove his assertion? It would be simple enough to do (he has the money). Poll a few thousand highly successful professionals who were children in the 1970s. Of the ones who regularly watched TV, ask them if they favored the “dumb” characters on their favorite shows…Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter, Ted Baxter on Mary Tyler Moore, Rerun on What’s Happening!!, Lenny and Squiggy on Laverne & Shirley, Chrissy on Three’s Company. That would help determine if “venerating” (appreciating) an anti-intellectual TV character leads to real-life anti-intellectualism.

But of course Vivek has no data (just like with his phony Alzheimer’s cure). And he has no need for any. He simply wants to feel superior to you.

TV characters are a sore spot for Indian-Americans. For Subcontinental men in general. Vivek knows that men who look like him were never on TV back then, because Americans don’t want to see ’em, and more to the point, American women don’t want to see ’em. Subcontinental men are unappealing to white women to a degree that even surpasses Oriental men, who at least can sometimes have a kind of kung fu masculinity (what they lack is the, um, “nunchucks” in the pants).

Vivek is angry at you because he knows your women wouldn’t give him a second glance on the street. So he bitterly attacks you for liking the “wrong” TV characters, the “pretty” ones. What he’s actually saying is, “Why don’t you people find my kind attractive?”

Which brings me to another point. To again quote:

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

And to again say, retarded.

It’s exactly the feeling of having to compete with jocks that drives many boys to excellence. Bud-Bud has it backwards. If women fawned and fainted over nerds, nerds wouldn’t try as hard at life. It’s exactly the dynamic he despises that breeds success.

If you know anything about the great rock & rollers of the 20th century, you know that half of ’em say they first started playing music as a way to compete with handsome jocks for the attention of women. Vivek’s hated hierarchy not only gave America some of its greatest music, it’s a factor that contributed to America defining music for the entire fucking globe since the advent of radio.

That same principle applies to nerds, who realize that they can’t compete with jocks in the looks department, but, being smart, they know that high school romances with dumb surfers fade and the pretty girls will start thinking about their future and might just seek a guy with a good job and good prospects.

If nerds were “venerated,” it would lead to them exerting less effort, not more. It’s struggle that forges people.

Me? The fact that I was always the short kid led to me developing a dominant and very verbal personality. It also helped develop my abstract reasoning skills, as I was forced, by circumstance, to figure out how to circumvent my physical shortcomings (though not in the nunchuck department, but you can’t just jump to that in polite society) in order to be popular with the ladies. As a result, I never had any problem attracting girls.

As I often mention, I never even graduated high school. My senior-year final semester I ditched every day with my gal pals. I didn’t need a diploma, because there are two places I won’t be caught dead: a gym and a college classroom.

And by age 21 I was on national TV back when that meant something (the era before the internet), and I was speaking on college campuses rather than enrolling in them. And today, on X, my early-1990s work is discussed dozens of times a day, even though I wish it weren’t, even though I realize I inadvertently spawned a cult of morons who argue with other morons over stuff I did as a kid in 1992 that’s long been surpassed by my later work. But I’ll say this: When it’s 33 years from today, nobody’s gonna remember Vivek. He’ll be a taco fart, a big stink vanished in the wind, a long-forgotten joke.

I don’t particularly like being remembered (and tweeted by Elon’s favorite idiot accounts, one of which recently posted an old clip of mine and it got 5.1 million views in one day) for things I did when I was young. But the bottom line is, this high school dropout with no college education who watched Welcome Back, Kotter and Laverne & Shirley has made a good living through verbal skill, personality, and abstract reasoning ability, and to whatever extent I’m the product of environment as well as IQ (I’d seek Steve Sailer’s counsel on that, but he’s busy chasing after Vivek with calipers), I can say that the part of me that was forged by environment was forged by the nerd/jock hierarchy Vivek claims makes America “mediocre.”

He’s gaslighting you. He’s using something you do that’s perfectly normal—watch and enjoy fictional characters—and he’s claiming that you and your children are so weak-minded you become the characters you enjoy, and the reason America needs more Indians is because you’ve gotten mediocre, and your kids are mediocre, because you’re favoring the wrong TV characters.

As if Indians aren’t obsessed with the lamest, most mediocre movies and TV shows imaginable, nothing but macho shirtless action heroes beating up rooms full of people, then dancing for no explicable reason.

Gaslighting at its finest. He’s calling you mediocre because you occasionally enjoy anti-intellectual fictional characters, and he’s suggesting that the remedy is to import millions of people from a culture where the favored content is almost totally comprised of anti-intellectual fictional characters.

If you know Indian movies, you know what I mean.

In fact, the most successful “Indian” film to break through into the U.S. market was Slumdog Millionaire, an intelligent film…made by white Englishmen.

Because only Westerners have the smarts to make a truly mediocre culture appear magical on screen.

That’s the Western gift…not just intelligence but creativity. And neither Barbarino nor Urkel can kill it.

But replacing our workforce with Indians can.