Saved by the Bell

Vivek Ramaswamy could never get it

Zach Morris. AC Slater. Screech something or other (did he even have a surname?). Kelly Kapowski (Kelly Kapowski!). Err… Lisa? The leggy one who did Showgirls and was never seen nor heard from again. (Or was that Lisa?)

It’s been a while, I’ll admit, since I watched an episode of Saved By the Bell. So forgive me: I’m working from memory here.

As a ‘90s kid, Saved by the Bell was a fixture of my early mornings while I got ready for school and had a second bowl of Corn Flakes with about fifteen spoonfuls of sugar on top. I didn’t like The New Class much, and by the time of The College Years the magic had gone, even if the new theme song was pretty good, and besides Johnny Bravo had come along on a different channel and that was much funnier.

I can’t say I predicted Zach and co. would have a decisive role to play in politics on a national stage in 2024–it wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card, as they say—but 2024 was a year of delightful surprises, some shocking ones too. And so it was that Saved by the Bell became national news the day after Christmas, when Vivek Ramaswamy decided to deliver an impromptu homily to the American people on their moral failings.

Generally, this is something I’d caution against, even if you’re not a politician. People don’t like being told they’re morally unworthy and, even worse, that they deserve their misfortune because of it.

It’s a tale as old as time. Literally. It’s what makes Cain kill his brother Abel, after all: God knows Cain doesn’t work as hard as his brother and he tells him so, to his face. Cain doesn’t like it. The first murder ensues.

But Mr Rathersmarmy clearly thought he sounded smart and convincing. That’s been his act from the beginning, since his rapid ascent to prominence in the primaries: sound smart and convincing.

And December 2024 was a time to feel confident in his position and his ability to speak his mind, since he had just ridden Donald Trump’s coattails to victory and a place at the head of DOGE—the newly minted Department of Governmental Efficiency—with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

And so Vivek took his foot, contorted himself, and shoved it full down his throat and right out the other end.

Just to remind you how bad Vivek’s intervention was, here’s the whole thing in full. If you’ve read it before, you can just skip past the italics.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

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.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

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.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.

The reaction was about as bad as you’d expect. I’m sure you remember. I can’t think of a single prominent person who defended Vivek.

I wasn’t the only one to think “classic case of revenge of the nerd,” and then it came as no surprise to be reminded that Vivek had been seriously bullied as a teenager and had to change high schools; although it wasn’t because of anybody who looked like Zach Morris or AC Slater. Aha.

Now isn’t the time or the place to talk about the Indian character—Richard Nixon had some interesting things to say about that—but there’s clearly also an ethnic component at work here too.

In fact, if you step back, what Vivek was saying about the replacement of Americans in their own nation sounded a lot like the apologies for demographic replacement you hear across the Western world today, usually from the ones doing the replacing themselves. On Twitter, I called this “the cruelest trick of the will to replacement,” which maybe sounds a bit high falutin’, but what I basically mean is that it’s not enough simply to replace the native peoples of the West in their own countries: They have to suffer the blame for it as well. We don’t reproduce. We’re lazy and we don’t want to work. We lack the skills to compete. Ergo, we must be replaced.

Sorry: You deserve it!

We hear it in the UK, the French hear it, and the Vivek Ramaswamys of American politics make sure you know it too, at least when they’re saying what they really believe.

Of course, nothing is said of the real political or economic reasons for replacement, which have nothing to do with the social or economic capital of the native peoples of the West and much more to do with undercutting wages and creating new voting blocs with guaranteed loyalty to the regime.