(DCNF)—CNN’s Scott Jennings broke down Republicans’ arguments on Friday after a feud broke out online over the use of H-1B visas.
Department of Government Efficiency co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy came under fire this week after a debate over H-1B visas erupted on X. On “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Jennings was asked about the feud highlighting a division on policy within Trump’s base and whether it could harm the unity within the party so far.
“Look, there’s always been a push and pull on this in the Republican Party. I think there’s a way to work this out and solve it,” Jennings said. “I think what a lot of people would say is, Elon Musk was making this point, if you take the top 1% or the top 0.1% of the most talented engineering people from other countries, that’s perfectly fine. H-1B visas for that, they’re unique, they have unique talent, unique innovative skills, fine.”
“If you’re using the H-1B program to abuse it, to recruit interns, accountants, other people that easily could be recruited from the United States of America, all because you just want to do it cheaper, that’s not fine,” Jennings added.
Jennings went on to say how there could be a way to “retain” top visa performers, but he called out Ramaswamy for his take as it had “rightfully” angered supporters.
“So I think what a lot of people in the party want to do is eliminate the fraud in this H-1B program, retain the top engineering talent, and there’s a way to do this,” Jennings said. “What Ramaswamy did yesterday was not a great communications exercise, and it did anger a lot of people in the president’s coalition, and I think rightfully so.”
The debate over H-1B visas, one of the largest visa categories in the country, began with their use in the tech industry by users on X. According to the Department of Labor, the visas allow employers to hire skilled foreign workers and authorize “the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the U.S.”
While Musk simply commented “correct” in response to an X user’s claim that a slowdown in skilled immigration would ultimately hinder American innovation, Ramaswamy elaborated, saying how American culture uplifts “mediocrity over excellence.”
“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,” Ramaswamy wrote.
Since Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign, Democrats have begun to ramp up their criticisms of Musk and his role in Trump’s second administration, with Democratic lawmakers like Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut referring to the billionaire as “President Musk” after he called out Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s original 1,574-page continuing resolution (CR).
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/CNN/”The Lead with Jake Tapper”)
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Far too many H1B visas are being issued. I witnessed it first hand while working in the oil industry. Here is how the scam worked. We would send employees (mainly engineers and HR managers) to the United Kingdom for training in their offshore operations and take UK employees in exchange, who came in on US work visas. When US oil companies dumped most of their North Sea assets when their production declined, the Americans in the UK came home, but the Brits in the US clung on. They formed protective cliques with their fellow HR comrades to discourage repatriation. I saw Brits in engineering and HR VP roles that could have easily been replaced by Americans, but they were not. It was blatant discrimination against US talent.
No. The disagreement is not JUST to eliminate fraud. It is to eliminate H1.B period. A tech job isn’t just a way to make money…technology develops and workers are educated in tandem with progress. H1.b puts brain trust in the heads of foreigners, leaving Americans behind. Not OK…ever!
My experience with H-1B’s over the last 30 years is that if the fraud was eliminated then 99% of the H-1B’s would have to be fired. The companies have been cheating the law since the early 90’s. There was a report from some technology think tank that there was a big shortage of engineers coming. I remember on the front page of early 1990’s EETimes there was coverage of a hearing by some congressman challenging that methodology of that report and clearly revealing that the report was a fraud. And then congress a year or two later pretending the fraud didn’t exist and phenomenally increasing the allowed number of H-1B’s. I wish I could find that report and remember the name of that congressman. I seem to recall it was Ryan or something like that. But online EETimes past issues don’t seem to go back that far. I wouldn’t be surprised that they were pushed into hiding those issues.
Ultimately the lower salaries of H-1B’s have pushed down the salaries of American engineers to an effective constant dollars of 1/2 to 1/3 of what they were in 1980. So many young Americans are not seeking STEM degrees since the wages are nothing special.(starting salary should be 150k instead of 60k) And thus the shortage has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
It is my conclusion that instead of helping the rest of the world to achieve a higher standard of living, instead the powers are bringing down the standard of living in America to a 3rd world level.
While there are a large number top class Indians when it comes to IT, because of the huge population of over 1.4 billion there are also huge numbers of poor performers and chancers who get into the top companies. These are a burden because other people in these companies have to continually help to fix up their mess. Ask your friends working in these companies about their experiences of people who have not been appointed on merit but to meet the diversity standards.
H1B visa program isn’t America First.