‘Make America Urkel Again’: Jonathan Lemire Mocks Vivek Ramaswamy’s Screed Against Mediocre Americans
Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire had some fun at the expense of Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent screed against America’s “mediocrity” Friday morning.
Ramaswamy caused quite a stir within the MAGA world when he argued that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” adding against “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
The former GOP candidate turned advisor to President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk added: “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.”
The argument for why tech companies hire foreign-born engineers on the H1-B visa debate angered many on the right and started a significant internal battle between Musk, Ramaswamy, and many MAGA influencers.
MSNBC contributor Pablo Torre joined the discussion and called Ramswamy’s comments a “horrible decision” politically, adding that the coalition that Ramaswamy joined was “mostly interested in him because of how he enabled their own grievances. And when I say ‘they,’ I mean the core of the MAGA base, which is America first in a way that means white America first.”
“And so he’s going to talk to that base, a nativist base, the same way that, I don’t know, White people have been talking to Black people in America for a really long time,” Torre added. “I don’t think they’re going to like it. And so what we’re seeing now is this coalition that is fractured that wasn’t actually all that incentivized in the same direction when it came to what does Silicon Valley want and what is, quote unquote, the America First movement.”
“You know, reading the post here, he not only takes a shot at Friends, but he praises Screech and Saved by the Bell,” Lemire said. “That’s right. The Steve Urkel character as well — “Make America Urkel Again,” might as well have been the title of this post.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
