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The Joy Reid Show
BONUS CONTENT: Broken Clocks: Nick Fuentes Sees Trump & MAGA Republicans Playing Angry White Men | Sep 01, 2025
00:32:36
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- [00:05]
A
Okay. Hey, guys. So it's been interesting watching the right meltdown over Donald Trump's announcement that he is going to approve 600,000 new visas for Chinese students, Chinese nationals who are going to be students in the United States. Here's the announcement.
- [00:32]
B
Look, we're getting along very well with China, and I'm getting along very well with President Xi. I think it's very insulting to say students can't come here because they'll go out and they'll start building schools and they'll be able to survive it. But I like that their students come here. I like that other country's students come here. And you know what would happen if they didn't? Our college system would go to hell very quickly. You'd have. And it wouldn't be the top colleges. It would be colleges that struggle on the bottom. And you take out 300,000 or 600,000 students out of the system. I like having. And I told this to President Xi, that we're honored to have the students here. Now with that, we check and we're careful and we see who's there. And Marco wants that. We spoke. We're in the same position and. But we have a tremendous college system, the best in the world. Nobody even close. That's why China sends them here. And you can call it an industry if you want, but you're talking about millions of people. And I'm honored to have the students from China come here. And we're just getting along very well.
- [01:40]
C
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4,4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [01:51]
A
Oh, come on.
- [01:52]
C
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [02:01]
A
Whatever.
- [02:03]
C
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [02:12]
A
Now, this isn't new. In June, Donald Trump made virtually the same exact announcement. In that case, he did say 500,000, but he said basically the same thing. Here's that.
- [02:24]
B
I've always been in favor of students coming in from other countries. That includes China. And we have 500,000 Chinese students coming in. I've always been in favor of it. Does it mean you that you have to watch people? Yeah, you have to watch students, but you have to watch other people also. I've always been strongly in favor of it. I think it's a great thing. It's also, it's good for our schools. It's good for, I think it's good for our country. I'm also in favor of having them stay. I've been in favor of letting them stay. If you get educated for four years, you're willing to get educated for four years. I like people being able to stay. You know, they have some great students. You have some.
- [03:07]
A
Now, the meltdown over this has been pretty epic. On X Twitter, all the, you know, racist magazines are screaming and howling about more Chinese people being in the country. And aren't they all supposed to be spies? And what the hell? What is Trump doing? I didn't vote for this. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And using some pretty racist language to do that, which is prompting a scramble in conservative TV world to mount a pushback, including getting Howard Lutnick on the job and getting, getting Fox News on message.
- [03:40]
B
Well, the president's point of view is that what would happen if you didn't have those 600,000 students is that you'd empty them from the top. All the students would go up to better schools, and the bottom 15% of universities and colleges would go out of business in America. So his view is he's taking a rational, economic view, which is classic Donald Trump.
- [04:04]
A
Nick Fuentes has given some of the most interesting commentary on this. And by the way, I'm just going to sidebar here watching some of, like, Nick Fuentes's black stands, his black conservative stance gush over him on YouTube is actually gross. Y' all snap out of it. Stop riding his jock. It's really gross. You know who you are. You know, just. Oh, my God. He's so. Oh, my God. I can look aside some of the things he says, but who cares? I'm. I'm more concerned about people who, who are lying to my face and pretending they like me. Then, you know, Nick Fuentes speaking facts. Okay, well, you know what? Y' all get off his jock. I don't know if you're trying to get clicks by being his fans, but he don't need black stands. Okay? I'm sure he doesn't want them either. Okay, but he's one of those broken clocks that is right sometimes, right? Every broken clock is right once or twice a day. Marjorie Taylor Greene found her way to the right side on Gaza, et cetera, et cetera. It can happen. Tucker Carlson did. So the right, you know, they ain't always wrong, right? Sometimes they get some things right. And in Nick Fuentes case, he's, he's sort of a Smarter, younger. Tucker Carlson. Right. He has similar views, but he's Sharper. He's like 25 years old. He's, you know, a white supremacist. I don't think that he would disagree with me saying he is. I think that's what he considers himself. Right? The groiper guy. But are you. When you. Sorry, I just want to make sure. Do you say I'm a racialist or I'm a racist?
- [05:23]
D
You know, for a long time I would say I'm racialist. Now I just say I'm racist.
- [05:27]
A
Okay. But he's caught on to, to a couple of things that I think are actually true. And it's game recognizing, or he's recognizing the game Republicans have been playing specifically with young white men, because that's who he speaks for. He speaks for young white men and their anger about a lot of things, but specifically about immigration. Take a listen to a little bit of what his commentary was on the 600,000 visas.
- [05:56]
D
And all we're saying is, you know, we want what we were promised. We want the America first immigration agenda. We want Trump to follow through. But I, and many people like me, knew that it was never gonna happen. We knew last year that it was never going to happen. This is why I take immense satisfaction in the disappointment. Because last year, Republican influencers were paid to lie. They were paid to disregard the truth and ignore the evidence and to. They were effectively complicit. Maybe they were the most responsible for creating this perception that we were going to get something other than what was realistic. They said mass deportations enthusiastically. Last year, when Trump said he would staple green cards to diplomas, they said to disregard that. They said, pay no attention to that. That's not real. Now that we're getting the real realistic immigration agenda of an administration that is beholden to Wall street and Silicon Valley and the needs of capital. Now you say, well, we told you so. Did you get what you voted for? It looks like you fell for it. Again, the Republican Party, which is controlled by the wealth interests, the special interests that profit from the labor, once again, they tricked you. They lied to you. They used nativist rhetoric. They used xenophobic rhetoric. And by xenophobic, I mean that in the colloquial sense. They played up this talk about immigrants and deportations, Haitians eating cats and dogs. They did that self consciously to trick you. It was a calculated deception. They knew that white people had been radicalized by the millions of illegals that Biden brought in. And so they leaned into those sympathies they leaned into those feelings and that antagonism, and they did that deliberately, knowing that that would make you enthusiastic about voting. And they knew that was a bait and switch because they all, realistically, they did not ever want mass deportations. The billionaires, the oligarchs. Trump, in his heart of hearts, does not really want mass deportations, is not really committed to that. And as a matter of fact, what they really want is more cheap labor. Just the kinds of labor that they need. The high skill tech labor, Indian programmers, illegal immigrant berry pickers, farm workers, meatpacking workers. They knew all along they needed and wanted the labor. And they knew that they would say one thing to get your vote and then once they got it, they would do something else. You fell for it. You fell. And that's the oldest trick in the book, by the way. They've been doing that forever. The Republicans forever have been pandering to the nativist sensibilities of white people and telling them law and order. They're all going back, we're gonna make America great again. In, in different words, they've been doing this forever. And then when they get in, they govern just like Democrats. And you fell for it again, like you fallen for it many times, like you fell for it in 2016. That's what we say now. I see all of the COPE online, this announcement is made and like, look, I, I don't know what to tell you. 600,000 Chinese international students is not America first. It just isn't. And I'll tell you why. Because at the Ivy League universities, their student body is like 24% from other countries. Those are all seats that could go to Americans. Why would we fill up spots at Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT with foreigners? That's not America first. So there's finite resources here.
- [10:10]
A
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- [10:39]
D
They get those seats, Americans don't. And we're not saying you have zero foreign students, but a quarter of them.
- [10:46]
A
Okay, now let me unpack a couple of things. Thing one, Donald Trump, when he said in his commentary that if these colleges did not admit these Foreign students, a lot of them would go under. He's actually right. That's Donald Trump being a broken clock, right? That's right. Once in a while. And the reason that Trump is right about that is that these foreign students. I used to teach at Syracuse. I've taught at Howard, and I've always had Chinese Nationals in my classes. At both schools. In both schools, I had them. And they were not full English speakers. They were very dedicated students. Very sweet, very wonderful. I got a lovely note from some of my Chinese students at Syracuse. But the reason that they're there is because the foreign students pay full fare. They're not on scholarship. They're not on student aid. When I went to Harvard, I was on almost entirely scholarship. I had an academic scholarship to Harvard, which means. Which meant that out of the $22,000 a year at the time, which is crazy, because it's like 80 or 90,000 now, but it was 22,000 a year when I went to Harvard. But of that, I walked away with a debt, a total debt of $15,000, because I was on all these different academic scholarships. I got scholarships for my psat. I took the PSAT and got a big scholarship for that. I got all these other scholarships. They were all academic. So I wasn't paying full price. That now, by the way, what I had to pay every, you know, every semester was onerous for me. I was an orphan. I had no parents. I had no one helping me. They gave me my mother's contribution. So I had to, like, work four jobs to pay my way through Harvard. But I could escape with only, like, 15 grand in debt. The eight, the students who come not just from China, but from all over the world, international students pay full price. They don't get scholarships. And so these schools aggressively recruit foreign students because that's how they keep their bottom line. Right. Between that and a lot of the government grants that Trump is trying to take away from these schools, that's a lot of the way they pay their bills. Because a lot of the American students are on student aid or on loans. A lot of kids are on deeply. They come out deeply indebted because of student loans. Right. My husband went almost entirely on loans and came out with, like, a house. He could have bought a house with the amount of money of debt. Right. That he owed when he left college. So bottom line, the foreign students are needed by the colleges because they help pay the bills. That's a very important thing. Also, the foreign students then go back to their countries, in many cases, and help Their countries advance scientifically. You know, they. A lot of them are in technical, you know, fields, et cetera, or they stay here, and then they get H1B visas. They stay, and they form industries in the United States. Elon Musk being one of them.
- [13:42]
C
He and his brother at Panasonic, we build technologies that turn complex data into smarter decisions, helping you prepare for what's next. From the factory floor to 40,000ft in the sky, our solutions streamline operations and reduce waste. We're building the future so you can lead it. More than a solutions provider, we're a committed partner that can help your business move forward. With intelligence, stability, and vision. Panasonic, create today, enrich tomorrow, brother.
- [14:13]
A
We're here on a student visa. Stayed in the United States from South Africa.
- [14:17]
B
Here, we'll give you $3 million.
- [14:21]
A
We thought they were crazy. Like, why would they do that?
- [14:23]
D
It was literally like, these people are insane.
- [14:26]
B
They obviously do not realize you're sleeping in the office.
- [14:29]
D
In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants.
- [14:34]
A
Well, yes, we were. I'd say it was a gray area.
- [14:37]
B
Yeah. Yes, we were. We were illegal immigrants.
- [14:41]
A
Stayed in the United States and built Tesla as a business. They bought it. They didn't create Teslas. They bought Tesla and they, you know, got involved in PayPal and other industries. All these South African members of the PayPal mafia. You come in on some sort of student or other visa, and then you stay here and you build US industries. And so that's number one. Right. Then Fuentes says those 300,000 seats that are currently held by foreign students, or the 600,000 Trump is going to increase it to. Those should go to American students. But here's the problem. The American education system is deeply broken at K through 12, and the Republican Party's making it worse. American students are less educated and less qualified in many cases to get into these colleges, the elite colleges, especially, yes, Harvard student body is probably a quarter or more foreign students. They come in more qualified. If you spend a year outside of the United States in K through 12 school, you'll probably be left back a year. Or if you come in from Europe and then go to an American school, you'll probably be put ahead a year. Right. Because foreign education, international education, they invest more in it. And their young people tend to be more educated than Americans because Americans don't emphasize education. Our K through 12 education system is based on the property taxes where you live. So if you live in a poorer area, the property taxes funding your K12 schools are less. And so your education is probably diminished because it's just not funded the way that kids who live in rich zip codes are. So we're handicapping our kids. I'm not sure how many American kids would be able to replace the foreign students at Harvard because a lot of them just aren't qualified. You know, you get one JD Vance for every thousand Appalachian white kids who just aren't qualified to get into Yale. That is the fault of the United States choosing not to invest in education. So this is the, the challenge. If you want the America first, the America first system when it comes to education, you are going to wind up with schools that are not as well funded, that are actually going to be less and less attractive to foreign students because they're self. They're selecting who can't come. So they're selecting out anyone they think might be anti Israel and saying you can't come. They've canceled like 6,000 of their visas because they fear that if you come from the global south, you'll be anti Israel, which is a crazy thing for an American government to do, to say if you might protest this foreign government, you can't come to school here. Or if you do protest this foreign government, we're going to kick you out. But we want students from China because Donald Trump is cutting a deal with China for like six months of access to rare earth minerals. It is a crazy system. And I think white America, you've got to realize that you guys are getting played because the angry young white men who think that they are going to replace those, you know that they're. Those 600,000 seats should have been theirs, y' all weren't going to get in anyway because your own side, the right, is telling you not to go to college, telling you college is a waste, and then under educating you in K through 12 because they don't give a shit about you, especially if you don't live in a rich neighborhood, your property tax base is too low for you to get a good education. They're diminishing the quality of the education that you're getting. They're making it less factual, less accurate, less scientifically based on race. They're erasing all of the history that would actually make you understand the history of this country. They're dumbing it down because they want to dumb you down, because in their mind, you're not going to replace the 600,000 seats at Harvard and Yale and Columbia. If there was a true America first agenda, then this country would actually invest in K12 education. But they're doing the opposite. And in red states, they actually spend the least on education. The state with the worst education system in the country is Oklahoma, where they are handing out mandatory Bibles in classrooms. They're not improving their STEM education in Oklahoma. Do they even have STEM education in K through 12 in Oklahoma? No. They're giving you Bibles to read. They're doing the same in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas. They're deleting education. They're making it less accurate, less scientifically based, less historically accurate. They're basically focusing on making sure that you don't feel bad having to read about slavery. White America, that's what they're giving you. What they're saying is we're just gonna erase everything that makes you sad about the antebellum south and make you read a Bible. They're not trying to prepare you to go to Harvard and Yale. Are you serious right now? The reason there's a mediocrity, the reason y' all are so mad at me and Wajahat Ali is we're trying to tell you they want you to be dumber and they want you to be angry. Nick Fuentes ain't wrong that white American men are radicalized by immigration. And note that Donald Trump has even shifted on that. Suddenly his masked armed police. They're supposed to be about crime, not immigration. Have you noticed that shift? It was about rounding up all the illegals. Now it's about crime. And it's about occupying American cities in red states, too. It's about making sure that there are armed police and armed military on the streets when the election happens. Just in case y' all are not still red pilled enough to vote for Republicans. Do you not see what he's doing? If America wanted to make an education system that would put 600,000Americans, even white Americans, in those seats that international students have, then red states would invest in education. They don't. There's a reason so many students at Harvard and Yale come from New York. Have you noticed how many of them come from the Northeast? The reason that affirmative action came and looked for me in Denver, Colorado is because I wasn't in New York. It's like, ooh, we could find somebody that's of a different state that comes from Colorado. That's rare. Let's get this smart black girl from over there. That's why so many colleges wanted me, because they're so full of New Yorkers because they have a great education system. So does Massachusetts, so does Vermont. Right? So you guys have to wake up to the game. What the billionaire class wants is not 600,000 white American, you know, working class Appalachians in Harvard. What they want, what the billionaire class wants is cheap labor in the fields, Cheap labor in the meatpacking plants that they control that have no rights, no voting rights, no unionization rights. They want cheap labor at the Amazon warehouse, and they want that to keep coming without those people being able to get any rights, so that they can never stand up to them. Now, they may want some of y' all angry young white men for the meatpacking plans. They know full well that you're not going to be any good to them in the fields because that's why there was slavery, because white American farmers couldn't handle working in the fields. The first time y' all burned up in the sun, and they were like, ooh, we can't do this. Let's get the blacks. They can stand the heat. They literally said that in the articles of secession for the states that seceded from the union. Black people are the only ones who can handle the work in the fields. And now it's brown people that can handle the work in the field. That's why they're here. They are being pulled here because the big farm industry wants them here. That's why farmers need them. And so the billionaires are not going to let that go. But they're happy to have it be incarcerated, right? They're happy to detain these brown people in private prisons, make money doing that, and then put them in the fields by force. Or they'll do that in a heartbeat. They would happily have back an indentured servitude system. All they care about is profits, and they do not care about you either. And so all of the angry white men, all the groipers who are just being suddenly opening their eyes because, you know, Nick Fuentes is telling y' all the facts. Yeah, y' all are getting played. Because the influencers who are getting paid to tell you to keep voting Republican, they're being paid to get you to vote Republican, not to help you, to make you richer or wealthier or better off in America, they don't care about you either. They don't care about you any more than they care about the blacks or the browns or the Asians. They don't care about none of y'. All. They don't care about any of us. What they care about is their profits, their endless profits. And what's gonna happen is the rich billionaires who came in, many of them on student visas, hello, Elon Musk are gonna keep getting the H1B visas they want, y'. All. They're gonna keep getting all the immigrant labor they want. And all of the foreign students are gonna keep getting those spots at Harvard, Yale and all the colleges and elite universities because they need the money. And right now, Donald Trump has so ruined America's reputation that foreign countries don't even want their kids coming to our colleges. They're too afraid they're going to get rousted on the street. So we're actually going to lose economically, lose college attendees. The tariffs are going to kill us. Like we're literally being destroyed. And what is Donald Trump getting for that? He's getting to be one of the billionaires. Game, set, match. He played y' all and he's reaping the financial benefits while all of you are out there screaming, he lied to me. Yeah, he did. He played ya. If you don't watch yourself, capitalism will hand you a Trump bible made in China, a couple of out of context lines from MLK and tell you that it's all good and you need nothing more. You will get nothing but the wages of whiteness. They will say, don't worry about it. Watch these brown people get screwed up on the street. Watch them get arrested and thrown to the ground. That's enough for you. They're not going to give you jobs. They're not going to make anything affordable for you because they don't care about you. They care more about making sure that no one protests a foreign country, Israel than about you. If you can't see that, I don't know what to tell you. They want you to be prayed up, angry, enraged and focused on being mad at brown and black people. Now they're pretending that they're going to fight crime to satisfy you. You need the military to fight crime, particularly in cities where crime is already going down. The black and brown communities who are the, who are experiencing in many cases, the under policing and over policing aspects of crime, they didn't ask for the military to come in there. They asked actually for decent policing. And so since that's not happening, you're saying the military is going to do that. But that's all to entertain you. That's to entertain you on Fox because they know that the Fox anchors will go with it and they'll make it hot for you. They're entertaining you by harassing and destroying and ruining people's lives for your entertainment. But in the end, it really does nothing because you're still struggling. You're still broken. You still can't go to Harvard or Yale. You're still not going to be a billionaire. You're not going to have a trophy wife like Melania. Trump gets all of that and you get nothing. He and his kids get crypto billions. They get to grift and grift and grift. I promise you his son's going to be his successor if he even leaves office ever. And they're going to keep grifting and grifting off of your rage, off of your anger, and they're going to keep you focused on who's eating the dogs and cats when nobody is, because they know it's easy to get you angry with stuff like that. And they know that. They don't want you to be excellent, they want you to be mediocre. Because if you're mediocre and mad, you'll keep voting Republican. Note that the people who tend more to vote for the other side tend to be college educated because they kind of recognize the game. Even a lot of them college educated folks go for it because they think they're going to get paid. Everybody's going for the money. They think the Republican Party equals money. But the Republican Party is just the biggest liar on earth. The Democrats really aren't that much better. But the reality is this country needs some system where people can get outside of that binary and actually vote in their own interest. I mean, the interests of white, black, brown, Asian American people are really not all that different. People want living wages. They want to be able to take care of their families, get the education that they desire and live a decent life. They want to not have to worry about paying light bills and rent and not have to worry about being out on the street if they miss one paycheck. Like that's what people all want, right across the board. And people are easily directed to say the reason they don't have that is immigrants. The reason they don't have that is trans girls playing sports or something. It's easy to redirect your anger when you're not focused on what's really behind it. And what's really behind it is capitalism. And the way capitalism works is it tries to feed the people with the most and give them more and take from the people with the least and give them even less. And so the reality is, until we get somehow beyond this binary where the Republicans play particularly white people by getting you afraid of everybody who isn't white people. And then on the other side, Democrats promise the world and then can't deliver it because they don't know how to use power. We're really stuck in a mess where the American people are angry mainly at one another and not at the people we should be angry at, which is the billionaire class who are stealing and taking everything, and they already have everything. How much more do they freaking need? And so this is the challenge that we're facing, and this is the reason you're seeing, like, black people stanning Nick Fuentes who can't stand black people. It's just wild. The answer is not to, like, become more, like, racist, follow around the idea of groipers or try to incarcerate women in the bedchamber and make them have babies that we can, you know, reverse the decline of. Of the white civilization. Like, this is all. It's so beside the point. It's so beside the point. So anyway, that's it. That's my rant for the day. That's my rant for the day. If you want more of what I'm having to say, you can please support me at the Joy Reid show. I would appreciate that subscription there on my YouTube channel. But look, all I'm trying to tell y' all is we fighting the wrong fights, and we fighting them wrong, okay? We need to do better. And by the way, watch for that military, military force and that mass police force to be all on your streets when that next election happens, because Trump ain't leaving. Good luck.
- [28:49]
D
We were illegal immigrants.
- [28:51]
A
Well, yes, we were.
- [28:53]
B
I'd say it was a gray area.
- [28:59]
A
Okay. Yeah.