We get it. You tech bros are trying to help us. You see America languishing compared to its global competitors. That’s why some of you pitched in at some point to help defeat Kamala Harris and her coalition of grabbers and smashers. A few of you even openly endorsed Donald Trump, as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy did, to their credit. Many more of you now are stepping up to offer your services and your advice, as the transition continues.

But some of that advice is frankly misplaced and aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it has offended core Trump supporters, especially the populists and activists who fought against savage lawfare, served time on trumped up Jan. 6-related charges, battled election fraud, protested the COVID panic lockdowns (for which I got arrested), and otherwise a paid real, tangible price for supporting a MAGA movement that Joe Biden labeled “quasi-fascist” in a nationally televised speech.

People like us were particularly put off by Ramaswamy’s tin-eared comments concerning H-1B visas, and the cultural deficits that allegedly make American workers less competitive. He wrote on X that

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.

He praised hard-driving immigrant parents by comparison, and called for

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.”

Now, some conservatives interpreted these comments as tough love, a call for Americans to return to old-fashioned virtues and the Protestant work ethic, or something. Many others were deeply offended and said so. They were duly labeled “racist,” “woke right,” or worse.

Ramaswamy didn’t make clear how letting corporations import indentured workers from the Third World, who can’t quit working for the company that got them into the country without getting deported, would help solve any of the cultural problems he diagnosed among Americans. Maybe via brutal, Darwinian competition? Or perhaps he meant to say that Americans had no business restricting the import of driven, hungry migrants until we cleaned up our act and parented like Tiger moms.

Whatever he meant, on behalf of my fellow Americans I’d like to call on him and his allies—including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—to turn their attention to a nation which needs their help more urgently than we do. A place where cultural problems waste human potential on a much vaster scale, and cause enormous, needless, suffering and division. I’m speaking of India.

Through my nonprofit, the Vulnerable People Project (VPP), I try to help those around the world who belong to groups that are targeted for oppression or singled out for neglect. We advocate for Afghans who allied with the U.S. who now face persecution; for civilians in Gaza caught up in Israel’s war of retribution; for Nigerian Christians and Jews who suffer for their faith. And along with all of those, we work on behalf of Indians abused by their extremist, ethno-nationalist government because they are either Christians, or Dalits (“Untouchables”).

India’s 300 million Dalits continue to face widespread discrimination, violence, and oppression. According to the United Nations, almost a third of the Dalit community, or some 100 million people, still live in poverty.

Dalits continue to be assigned to the most undesirable tasks like manual scavenging — cleaning excreta from toilets by hand, skinning animals, and disposing of dead bodies. In 2023, at least 90 sanitary workers in India died on the job. From 2017 to 2022, 373 people are reported to have died cleaning hazardous sewers and septic tanks.

Every year, thousands of Dalits, especially women, are subjected to rape, torture, acid attacks, and murder. The stories are so common, and the practice is so endemic that news media don’t bother to report most of these atrocities because it is not considered to be “news.”

As I wrote at The Stream, India’s Christians (whose communities date back to the first century A.D.) are equally oppressed for different reasons.

Open Doors categorizes the persecution of Christians alongside “Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan — and worse than Saudi Arabia or China.”

The signatories highlight the anti-Christian violence in the state of Manipur, which has displaced more than 65,000 believers and seen more than 400 churches bulldozed or burned down “with the sanction of the Indian state.”

Moreover, more than 2,500 Christians were forcibly displaced as Hindu mobs attacked, looted, and destroyed homes between December 2022 and February 2023 because residents refused to convert to Hinduism.

Beyond the Christians and Dalits, India is home to some 200 million Muslims, one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, but since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reelection in 2019, the government has pushed controversial policies that trample Muslims’ rights, restrict religious freedoms, and are intended to disenfranchise millions of Muslims.  

A 2019 report by India-based nongovernmental organization Common Cause found that half of police surveyed showed anti-Muslim bias, making them less likely to intervene to stop crimes against Muslims. 

In recent years, state, and national courts and government bodies have sometimes overturned convictions or withdrawn cases that accused Hindus of involvement in violence against Muslims.

In addition, authorities have turned to extrajudicial means to punish Muslims, through a practice critics call “bulldozer justice.” In 2022, authorities in several states destroyed people’s homes, alleging that the demolished buildings lacked proper permits.

What drives a putatively democratic, multi-religious society such as India to tolerate such horrors? A religiously based racism more appalling than anything we ever experienced in America.

So far as the Hindus are concerned, all power has remained for many centuries in the hands of a small group of hereditary exploiters whose life and interests even today are antagonistic to the welfare of the masses in India.

So wrote Swami Dharma Theertha, a high-caste Hindu who rebelled against the caste system. In his History of Hindu Imperialism, a landmark text of resistance, Theertha explained:

Brahmanism is the name used by historians to denote the exploiters and their civilization. It may be defined as a system of socio-religious domination and exploitation … based on caste, priestcraft, and false philosophy.

The racial slur Untermensch (“subhuman”) borrowed by the Nazis from the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in their campaign to dehumanize Jews and other non-Aryans would be an appropriate category to understand how the Untouchable (Dalit) is regarded in the Hindu caste hierarchy.

A flurry of academic studies in peer-reviewed journals and books by university publishers have demonstrated the infiltration and dominance of caste hierarchy, hegemony, and discrimination by Indian Hindu high caste individuals in American companies, especially in the IT sector. Are those the kinds of companies we want to see expanding in America?

Which nation needs a thorough cultural conversion, to stop wasting the talents of countless people — America with its phone-preoccupied Zoomers, or India with its hundreds of millions of people oppressed for their religion, or the imaginary taint they inherited by getting born in the lowest caste?

So the Vulnerable People Project is calling on Ramaswamy, Musk, Thiel, and every tech entrepreneur concerned about maximizing innovation and enhancing human potential, to pressure the Indian government on this long list of abuses. Furthermore, we call on the U.S. government to accept migrants from India only from groups currently being oppressed by its bigoted government — not from the Brahmin elites who crack the whip, and sometimes have the gall to accuse blue- collar Americans of “racism.”

The hypocrisy is not lost on us.