Adventures in H1B-Human Capital

Talk given at the California Weavers' Dinner in Sacramento, California

It always feels like I show up for these events with a speech that doesn’t quite match the spirit of the occasion. This is the New Year, and everyone wants to refocus their efforts on the real world. 2024 was a banner year for the project we have undertaken. This last year there was more IRL organizing, more events, more charity, and more direct action. And really, this is amazing.

For instance, in the last week, the Old Glory Club and its affiliates have raised another large sum of money for the Hurricane Hellene relief efforts, supporting the work being done on the ground with both supplies and volunteers. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, as many other organizations around us are starting to take real steps towards developing intentional communities, new publishing houses, fraternal organizations, and many events, both large and small.

All of that would probably make for a great talk for New Year, but then again, so too would just addressing the numerous new stories that characterized 2024, which we will see play out in full force in the coming year: the ascendancy of Donald Trump, increasing political and economic instability, or recent terrorist attacks.

But, really, let’s be honest, these real-world issues are not what anyone really wants to talk about. What people want to talk about is online drama, specifically, the online drama surrounding the Christmas H1B Visa war.

The Christmas H1B Visa War

Perhaps the H1B debate on Twitter is just a futile piece of internet trivia? But perhaps not.

It’s true what people say; sometimes, whole decades of discourse happen in a week on the internet. And the H1B debate certainly followed this pattern. It changed the face of discourse on X, ended the political careers of several politicians, and even seemed to shake the otherwise unshakable public image of the great tech overlord, Elon Musk.

But how did this all happen?

The answer to this question is that our ruling class does not understand the nature of politics, history, or the complex systems they presume to manage. Almost no one does in the present year, not the government or deep state, or the people who think they are going to reform the goverment or deep state.

Instead of a realistic understanding of power and history, our ruling class has a simulacrum of how they think American politics should work based largely on their experiences from the 1990s. As it turned out, these experiences don’t match up with reality in the 21st century, which causes leaders on all sides of the political spectrum to regularly slip up and make fools of themselves.

And the example doesn't get much better than the proposed expansion of the H1B visa program to remove country-caps and bring even more people into America (specifically from India) to do the jobs that Americans “just won’t do.” The policy has problems; everyone on the ground can see that it has problems. But the ruling class still doesn’t know what the score is.

On the surface, “more H1B visas” is the classic slam-dunk technocrat policy idea. At one point, in fact, expanded elite immigration was the default “common sense” idea about how a more open approach to the “free movement of people” could improve a modern economy. And the idea has support from all the right people in the ruling coalition. Big tech likes it. Big gov likes it. Libertarians and leftists like it. The only people who don’t like this idea are disorganized middle Americans who can’t follow arguments and are easily distracted.

I think this is how the current controversy began.

Elon saw H1B-expansion as a way to increase his own political clout and signal that, indeed, his new brand of technocratic liberalism was the real power behind MAGA while improving the financial conditions of his business operations. The only thing he needed was to push through a pro-tech, anti-nativist policy proposal over the objections of Trumps “Red American” base.

And what better way to push this policy proposal through than a big social media blitz on Christmas while most middle American Chuds were carving up their Christmas goose? Even if things went south and Elon got caught trying to pull a fast one, he could just offer a retraction and be back to square one. After all, H1B visas weren’t even an issue that Red America cared about, so no one would get too angry. Right?

Well, not exactly.

Musk didn’t count on a few critical realities that had changed since this expanded “elite” visa policy emerged as a political issue in the 90s and 2000s.

First, Elon didn’t count on the fact that the economic case for H1Bs was much weaker than it had been in the 1990s. In 2024, America was not in the middle of a “tech boom,” and for the last decade, highly skilled natives had a very hard time finding jobs, a situation made even more depressing by the constant threat of AI to remove certain low-level positions entirely.

Elon also didn’t understand that ordinary Americans had more information about what H1Bs actually were. Propaganda about new “Einsteins” and VonBrauns” (the "0.1% of top TOP TALENT) being brought in from the H1B expansion were transparent bullshit since exceptional talent was brought in under an entirely different system (see O-1 Visas). Further horror stories about how America was going to be “locked out” of a competitive marketplace by China and Russia were equally risible since, very notably, these rival countries were not seeking to import a new tech elite, not least from under-developed countries. It was also easy to verify, through public data, that H1B visas were commonly granted to workers in mid-tier entry-level positions, the very jobs that middle-class Americans felt locked out of. The only benefit was that the foreign employees worked for less money.

Musk and his friends also didn’t realize that Americans in 2024 had much more experience with these kinds of immigrants, primarily from India, and their experience was not positive. This is an easy oversight for people with brains stuck in the 1990s when a “point-based system” was the holy grail of immigration policy. But we tried the point system, at least in Canada, and the results were not stellar. Far from getting a new tech elite, the country was just flooded with mid-skilled pushy migrants whose economic benefit was swamped by their catastrophic impact on the housing market and social services.

And needless to say, these immigrants did not “assimilate” into Canadian culture, although often their cultural deracination would presented as assimilation by the ruling elite.

To date, I haven't met a Canadian (even a Canadian liberal) who thinks the last decade of immigration from India has been a good thing. Even uber-liberal centrist squishes like Mikaela and Jordan Peterson can barely hide their knowledge that Canada’s merit-based immigration policy has been an abject failure. And it’s not hard to see why.

You cannot go anywhere in Canada without seeing the native population actively displaced by newcomers, supposedly brought in on the basis of merit and doing otherwise middle-class jobs. And, for some reason, despite all of this "high skilled immigration," Canada didn't become the new Silicon Valley.

I guess the new immigrants didn't have any Einsteins among them? Maybe we just need to import more people. Maybe, as Sam Hyde joked, we can import everyone in the entire world, into America, and then we would be guaranteed to have the next Einstein, assuming that this age has an Einstein to produce.

Seemingly unaware that the economic logic for H1B expansion had totally collapsed out from under them, the liberal defenders of more immigration resorted to their most tried and true tactic: status shaming their opponents as low-IQ idiotic chuds.

But, with an unbelievable lack of self-awareness, the two sides of the pro-H1B debate couldn't keep their story straight. Instead, the multiple groups defending H1B expansion worked at cross purposes and caught each other in a hilarious crossfire.

The contradiction was easy to see. Whereas the white liberal defenders of H1B-expansion wanted to status-shame middle America for being racists and not sufficiently “color blind”, the Indian defenders of H1B-expansion wanted to status-shame middle America for…well …being white.

Needless to say, this didn’t work. Platitudes about how we needed to welcome “The Huddled masses yearning to work free in our struggling multinationals”, didn’t feel particularly appealing when it was buttressed by hundreds of Indians screaming about how whites were an inferior race that deserved to be conquered and replaced.

Maybe this is just what assimilation looks like?

But the conversation only ever got more ridiculous, more insane, and, somehow, more Boomer.

It got to the point that the pro-H1B team started calling all native-born Americans, of any race, lazy and uneducated. On the one hand, there were the likes of Joel Berry from the Babylon Bee claiming that Americans just couldn't match the talent of imported Indian labor because "we" had somehow systematically miseducated “ourselves”. On the other hand, there were hordes of online internet users from the subcontinent bloviating about how American natives didn't have the “will to power’ necessary to work 80 hours a week and on holidays like Christmas.

Keep in mind that this battle largely took place on Christmas. So, I guess the people writing these tweets were all hard at work doing their highly technical jobs American natives were unqualified to do. Was their job to post anti-white, anti-Christian diatribes online constantly?

Perhaps, but that is certainly a different take on “hard work” than the one we hear about from Boomers.

But hey, maybe this was just a case of “internet crazy”. After all, for the most part, all of these sentiments were just tweet fights between online personalities.

And it might have stayed that way had not one Vivek Ramaswamy intervened with one of the worst X-posts of all time. Embodying how the WORST aspects of the pro-H1B side could exist in one brain, not on the internet, but in the real government officials that expected to rule us.

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. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

What was wrong with Vivek’s tweet? Well, to start, Vivek sought to blame Americans for what was done to them by their government. It was also supremely condescending. But more to the point, Vivek’s words were impossible to divorce from the anti-White racial angle of the rest of the online discourse, not least because he implicitly brought race into it.

There was even a sort of pseudo-sexual contempt in Vivek’s tweet that could be felt in his expressed bitterness against the football stars who dated the prom queen. The jokes wrote themselves. But it got worse.

Substantively, the steelman of Vivek’s idea was nonsense. The notion America needed more nerds who didn’t play sports or have fun did not stand up to ten minutes of considered thought.

At its height, Western countries always had leaders with BOTH the qualities of the sportsman and the nerd. The warrior scholar was always the Faustian ideal. America had only recently become comfortable with the idea of pure technocratic rulers and the supremacy of the nerd, and this over-specialization directly corresponded with society’ss decline. The idea that the key to success in the 21st century was just grinding tech knowledge harder and going full “tiger mother” on American kids was ridiculous.

After all, that’s what South Korea did. And how did it work out for them?

The Vivek tweet put the cherry on top of the H1B sunday by highlighting almost all of the misconceptions of our ruling class and how they still couldn’t quite see the problems right under their noses.

This was very cathartic, but what did we actually learn? What does this mean for the future of politics?

Well, the first thing that I think we have learned is just the nature of the vibe shift that we have been experiencing over the last several years. The standard political categories that we have grown up with don’t make sense anymore, which was readily apparent if one observed the H1B controversy play out in real time.

The Irrelevance of the Progressive Left

For instance, as many have already asked, where was the left in all of this H1B controversy? This was one of the most decisive conversations we have had in this last year about class dynamics and free trade, something that, back in the before time of the 1990s, the left actually cared about. So what were they saying now?

Oddly enough, there was no consistent leftist narrative. However, that’s not to say that a lot of progressives didn’t try.

Many lefties naturally attempted to play the class DEI/social justice angle on nativism, but this didn’t work. Every time a progressive tried to call the MAGA camp racist for objecting to a new wave of Indian workers, they just ended up sounding exactly like the technocratic capitalists they hated. Furthermore, the left’s participation in the cavalcade of elite voices calling right-wingers bigots for having objections to an economic issue just reminded everyone else how progressive egalitarian moralism was central to modern corporate America’s institutional control. The H1B controversy inverted the story that the left had about itself and made it impossible for anyone to believe.

In fact, the standard progressive messaging was so awkward that a lot of the left-wing meme accounts tried to invert the dynamic and temporarily join the right wing. This time trying to out-flank MAGA by making fun of TRUMP for NOT BEING RIGHT-WING ENOUGH and his supporters for getting duped by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

But how do you outflank MAGA for being insufficiently MAGA when you have had an established track record of supporting mass migration as well as anything and everything woke?

Does that make sense? Does it even need to make sense?

Well, it doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to go viral and seize the moment.

“Oh man, look at those MAGA chuds who couldn’t even close the borders and deport the immigrants. What idiots they are. Don’t they know that … IF THEY REALLY wanted secure borders and an end to mass migration, they should have voted for Bernie Sanders!”

To be fair. You have to have a pretty high IQ to see that Bernie Sanders was the real racist candidate all along.

Theses perspectives were inhabited by the inescapable feeling that modern progressivism is just the politics of delusion and bitterness. They, seemingly like our good friend Vivek, just can’t get over the L’s that they all took in high school and are playing out some psychotic revenge fantasy online.

Left-leaning people always follow narratives, and once the narrative shifts, they always try to find some way to stay on the right side of the new story. But what happens when the leftist perspectives are not only unpopular but irrelevant? What happens when the left's bad ideas don't render it objectionable but just boring? Well, it starts losing energy, its theater kid followers move to greener pastures, and the motivating organization of the system begins to crumble.

What we are experiencing, almost certainly, is a short-term collapse in the progressive narrative as such. While the core things that drive the leftist impulse are eternal, and their power structures are still very much intact, for the next several years, we might see a complete evaporation of the progressive movement as we have known it, a radical political realignment before leftist perspectives inevitably emerge again.

The Incoherence of the Technocratic Right

However, the left is the less interesting part of the H1B story.

Anyone who has been paying attention to politics, especially after November, understands that the primary and most interesting fight in the next two years was never going to be “left vs. right”, but rather “right vs. right” settling the question of who actually defines the anti-progressive movement in America.

In this frame, it was also apparent that the real contenders against what we might call “dissident right”, or “true right”, or “classical right” ideas will be pushback that comes from the remnants of the neocons, the based centrists like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, or the “New Secular Right” thinkers like Anatoly Carlin and Richard Hanania. But really, only one of these groups really matters.

The neo-conservatives have been completely discredited for almost a generation of American politics at this stage. And their most recent effort to rebrand themselves by joining with the Democrats hasn’t had the desired positive effect on their public image. At this late stage, their attempt to now sneak back into the Trump coalition is transparently self-serving and expected since it is absolutely apparent to anyone with two brain cells that these people are snakes. Neoconservatism is a spent political force if ever there was one in 21st-century America.

And perhaps a similar thing might also be said about our centrist friends, who were, heading into 2025, well on their way to total ideological incoherence even before James Lindsay and the rest of his friends went on their Scooby Doo Mission to expose that double secret Hegelian dialectic angel-summoner: Auron Macintyre. Really, I am sure there is a market for this kind of paranoid Boomer ramblings you get from Lindsay and his friends, just like there is a market for post-breakdown Jordan Peterson. But no one serious is still thinking this way, and anyone who tries to float Lindsay's ideas among serious company at this stage is going to get laughed right out of the room.

Still, if there was a future for the anti-progressive movement in this country that was not “dissident right”, it was naturally going to be found among those post-right technocrats, the group I like calling the “New Secular Right” constituted of people like Richard Hanania and Anatoly Karlin who put themselves forward under the brand “Elite Human Capital” As this new category of post-rightwing thinkers would have it, it was just a return to these more technocratic perspectives that might save America from all of those scary religious people. Instead, what America needed was an intelligent, considered, and data-driven approach to solving its modern woes, and, of course, leaders brave enough to become advocates for this perspective.

I have already written several articles about this group in 2025 and have done more than a few podcasts discussing the steel-man version of these ideas and arguments. But now, especially in the wake of the H1B visa debate, I see their brand completely collapsing, not because they have received some critical counterargument in the abstract, but because the pretensions that they have used to sell their brand were revealed to be fake.

All of a sudden, when the H1B visa debate emerged, people began asking questions of these “Elite Human Capital” types.

What granted these thinkers their elite status? What gave these technocratic thinkers the wisdom to make decisions over new issues like AI, genetic engineering, and immigration? What made them more likely to be right or to have opinions that aligned with the overall interests of Americans generally?

All you ever heard from these types was how they were “elite” and connected, and how great it was that Americans could work obscenely long hours in the pursuit of money and technical excellence.

But, other than just words, how exactly were these luminaries connected to the success of Silicon Valley?

Did they know how to code well and work really, really hard?

No. They generally didn’t. From Vivek to Hanania to even Trump's incoming AI czar, none of these leaders had experience with a deep technical field. They weren’t coders. And they didn’t get their money or their funding by working 80 hours a week. They just knew how to sweet-talk investors.

Ok, sure, but perhaps these guys were still domain experts? Maybe they deeply understood the nature of the technology they talked about and the economic systems they worshiped?

Again, not really. This group had almost entirely soft skills. They weren’t particularly well-read, and the systems that they claim mastery over (like AI and world economics) are so complicated that almost none of the people who talk about these issues are expected to understand them.

Alright, so maybe these Elite types aren’t actual experts. But they AT LEAST know how to use data and evidence to argue their cases, right?

Maybe not.

As we saw in the H1B-visa controversy at Christmas, these technocrats don't have arguments, just presumptions. Moreover, these writer’s Pollyanish assumptions are questioned (or even challenged), everything about their worldview just falls apart. The second they encounter real push-back, theirpretended logic and data disappears, and they are left angrily sputtering cliches.

What is clear at this stage is that very few of these "Elite Human Capital types" actually have the intelligence or intrepid bravery that they claim as their brand. In fact, in light of these developments, I have suggested that we might want to change the preferred epitaph for Hanania and Karlin from “Elite Human Capital” to “H1B Human Capital” so that at least the people understand that "Elite" is just a marketing tactic rather than a descriptor of anything in the real world.

However, the more glaring failure is just the obvious fact that these post-right personality types don't have any ability to participate in a real conversation.

They can't debate their points without collapsing. They can't be consistent with their own ideas. They can't even accurately restate the arguments of their adversaries.

The Rise of Reasonable Millennial Politics

At this stage, I know that I might be accused of meandering. I started with a story about our enemies humiliating themselves, asked what we learned, and then just provided more details about how our opponents humiliated themselves. But the fact that most non-right-wing philosophies are "running out of road" is indicative of something we all need to understand: the crown of America is lying in the gutter.

I often say that 2020 was the year when millennials got old. but 2025 might be the year millennial perspectives in politics finally become relevant, the time when we can actually be the ones driving discourse in a meaningful way. And, as you might expect, the meaningful expression of post-Boomer politics is definitively right-wing.

When everything is said and done, the H1B-debate came down to a very simple question:

“What does it mean for us, as Americans, to win?”

And it's amazing how few of our contemporary political leaders could answer this question, the question whose answer should be the necessary precondition for political leaders. However, our current elites are mystified by this query. They don’t know who “we” are. what “America” is, or what “America is for”, the necessary teleological concepts for a proper understanding of victory.

Our ideological enemies don’t have answers to these questions. But we do. And we can answer them succinctly.

What is America?

America is a nation that comprises many people. America was built by great men who were guided by principles only insofar as they led to the well-being of their posterity. America is not an idea. It is not an economic zone. It is not a scapegoat for progressive grievance politics. America is a nation and a home. And all politics is just the historical reality of this greater collective responsibility.

Who are we?

We are the many different peoples of America. The peoples who built this country. The peoples who defined its culture. The peoples whose ancestors sacrificed to make it what it is today. To be sure, this is a diverse set of groups ranging from the WASP and European stock who constructed the nation’s cultural and economic foundation, to the native tribes who defined its prehistory, to the descendants of the slaves who labored to build some of its early prosperity.

All of these constituent collectives have a right to their own sovereignty and to see their posterity thrive. And to the extent that newcomers become American, they become American by the consent of these native peoples and through sublimating their identities into these collectives through marriage or total religious and ethnic conversion.

This is a standard that very few modern immigrants meet.

What is the American project designed for, and where is it going?

This is perhaps a more abstract question, but one that's increasingly necessary in our post-cyberpunk world. America’s ultimate project is humanity's ultimate project, namely, to pursue two core objectives: the survival of the species and its communion with God. Within the pursuit of these objectives, it is meaningless to question moral motives. God cannot fail, only be failed. And the project of continuing the human species cannot morally fail but in reference to God.

In this context, it is nonsensical to claim that cultivating humanity “isn't worth it anymore” or question whether bringing up a new generation is “economically viable”. The cultivation of new and better humans is the purpose of our project itself. This project might involve building more intentional local communities and a return to the land, or it might mean conquering Mars, or both. Either way, it is the goal of human excellence in strength and morality that we are always pursuing, provided even that objective does not fall into anti-human traps as described in CS Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

The concept of total human thriving is what defines "Salus" or "health" in the famous Roman adage “Salus populi suprema lex esto” (the health of the people is the supreme law)

And it is for this larger purpose that both the ideas of America and its government are bound. This, as our founders felt intuitively, is what gives a ruling class the right to rule, and, to the extent that the structures of government and ideology become harmful to these ends, those structures must be destroyed, disbanded, and replaced. These structures DO NOT get to disband the PEOPLE THEMSELVES as a means of shoring up their own moral and financial insolvency.

This is what always struck me as fundamentally misguided about the guys who endlessly talk about “Elite Human Capital,” especially in the wake of the H1B-visa debate. These people talk about humanity as if it is just an ingredient that is (for the moment) necessary to drive up a number inside the machine of global capitalism.

We see this idea in Korea, where every child is viewed as just another economic input. In Korea, the economy is a god for which all sacredness and quality of life must be sacrificed. It has even gotten to the point where the native population can't breed anymore, so, subsequently, the god of GDP will devour the biology of the Korean people.

And I wish I could say Korea was unique. Now, it seems that most modern nations believe humans are just capital material inputs, a resource to be farmed, perhaps conserved but never respected.

But this attitude misses the core error of the modern age, the same mistake that the early distributist authors like Hillair Belloc and G.K. Chesterton called out explicitly. The point of good governance is not to make our people “Elite Human Capital” but to make our people (elite or not) moral and loyal capitalists or (to use a more accurate language) to make our people aristocratic, noble, and capable of self-governance. That is what humans really want, both for themselves and their children. And it starts with the concept of loyalty.

It is this core understanding of loyalty and morality that makes our particular corner of modern politics relevant when most others are falling by the wayside. We can practice politics as reality because we understand our loyalties, and only inside that understanding can we define our desires and actually BE FREE.

This is a concept that neither the progressives nor the ‘Elite Human Capital” types will ever understand. What defines a man is his constraints. And you can’t have freedom until you answer the question, “Freedom for what?”

What defines real human politics and human liberty is always moral constraints. Real politics is about what you can’t leave behind. This is why the praise of power, wealth, and intelligence is meaningless in understanding what a person ACTUALLY believes.

This is also why I immediately check out the second I get the sense that a commentator is trying to “join the winning side” of an argument. In order to UNDERSTAND a political actor, I need to know his loyalties. And “I like power,” or “I am Elite Human Capital,” or “I f-cking love Science!” Doesn’t tell me anything about a man other than that he is willing to simp for power.

I don’t want to hear about how smart you are, or how powerful your friends are, or how inevitable your ideas are, or how you are the people who are on the right side of history. Ultimately, this tells me nothing about what you are loyal to, what you live and die for, or what you are fanatical about.

And that’s because,, in the words of The Young Pope, fanaticism is love, love for something that is real.

Here, in this room, we are bound to the American project not because it makes us powerful but because we love what it is. In that commitment, there is a type of strength and freedom. Because true strength and freedom only happen when you stop worshiping the false idols of power, and become loyal to something that is outside of yourself.

For all the vitalists whining about Christian “Slave Morality”, the only REAL slave morality is the worship of POWER itself. That’s what distinguishes a free man from a slave. A free man chooses the good. A slave always follows power and seeks to be its sycophant. A free man looks for what is GOOD for his descendants and people. A slave only ever cares about looking like he is on the winning side. A free man looks to genuine spirituality and philosophy, whereas the slave only cares about marketing.

Needless to say, the early 21st century is dominated by spiritually enslaved people. And this is where I think we come into the picture

It is 2025. People are looking for something different. People are waking up and smelling a new spirit in the air. We have been told our ideas are extreme and fringe for most of our lives. But I don't think they are. We are expressing the same energy now that most Americans feel welling up in themselves. Our notions are the emerging common sense. And I am tired of pretending like it is not.

Here now, in 2025, our task is to be the vanguard for this spirit of fidelity, to find new and positive ways that we can bring it to our friends and neighbors and help them through the many difficult transitions and hard decisions that will be ahead of us. This will certainly be a challenge.

While I think 2025 is going to be a very good year, it is impossible to overstate the enormity of the work that there is to be done. Our enemies are entrenched inside the institutions and have money on their side. They will not be easy to unseat even if their arguments are manifestly insane. Furthermore, as time goes on, we will be less able to count on fairweather allies like Trump, Vance, and Elon, who are largely driven by ulterior motives.

Still, I have faith.

I also have confidence, when looking at the people in this room, that we will be up to the task ahead of us, to build a better world for our posterity, to create new and better ways of understanding truth, and to be the leaders to guide our communities in these troubled times.

And as always, God is with us.