We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Tashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today,
I'm so happy to be joined by my colleague John Daniel Davidson, who's out
with a new piece in The Spectator called the Case for Cartel Wars. And
I think I tread lightly and approach any subject that I disagree with John Daniel
Davidson with the utmost humility. But I think John, this might be maybe
the one thing non religious thing that we disagree on. So I'm eager to
break this down and I think you might be able to convince me by the
end of it. So welcome to the show. First of all, thanks
for having me, Emily. Always a pleasure to talk with you. I
thought you were going to say this might be the worst thing you've ever written.
Thought. I literally thought that's what you were going to say, and
I was gonna be like, yeah, let's get into it. Why is
the worst thing I've ever I would have said that privately first, Okay,
Okay, well I never know it, but yeah, yeah, just give
me a heads up. Yeah, let's talk about it. So, by
way background, our listeners should know that I've been to the border many times.
I've written about the border. I think I started writing about the border
about ten years ago when there was that first influx of unaccompanied minors that showed
up during the Obama administration, and everyone sort of didn't understand what was happening
or why, and I didn't understand what was happening. So I started writing
about it and researching, and you joined me at the border. When was
that a year and a half ago? I lose track of time. I'm
very old. I really hate to bring this year. I think it was
two or three years ago. Okay, two or three years ago. When
you get to be my age. Things happened between two and ten years ago.
So between two and ten years ago you joined me at the border.
We did a little border documentary called Cartel Country, and we were in McAllen
and Brownsville on the US side, and Reynosa and Madam Morris on the Mexican
side. We were joined by our friend from Mexico City, David Agren,
who helped us out, and we kind of chronicled how the border crisis was
being controlled and really made worse intensified by the cartels who were using it for
profit. That this was not just a spontaneous surge of foreign nationals from all
over the world seeking a better life, but it was an intentional money making
scheme by cartels and elements within the Mexican state that cooperate with the cartels and
benefit from mass illegal immigration. So some people might not know this, by
the way, but you have done reporting basically for your whole career on organized
crime, like going back to the earliest days of your career, and so
I imagine John, I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the
podcast before, that there is when you're covering cartels, you're taking something domestically
from organized crime, and there probably are some things that you learn from that
reporting that apply that apply here too. Yeah, it maybe be too It
may be too glamorous to say I reported an organized crime. My first jobs
in journalism was a cops and courts beat reporter, so you know, covering
murders and court cases and going down to the police station every day to get
the police blotder. You know, driving around like literally with a police scanner
in my car, you know, listening for chatter. Stuff like that.
Basically Cold War era journalism, right, free cell phones, smartphones, pre
computers. I actually worked at a newspaper where we still like had to like
piece the page together manually, like the broadsheets. That was back before World
War One, though, so things changed after the war. I can tell
you it was telegraph. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I would get
on the phone and you know, dictate over the phone back to the head
office. You know, now we're getting off track here, you know,
indulging in nostalgia about the past, and that's not what we do here at
the Federalist Radio Hour. So yes, I have reported on crime for many
years, and it took me a while though to your point, it took
me a while to even after going to the border and reporting on it and
doing multiple boarding reporting trips to the border, it took me a while to
fully wrap my head around the fact that what we were seeing unfold along the
border was not this organic thing, that it was an orchestrated thing. It
was a money making scheme. It was and is a massive black market,
and very powerful interests are involved, both on the cartel side and on the
Mexican state side. You know, within institutions of the Mexican State, going
up to very high levels. It took me a while to figure that out,
and I was actively trying to figure it out. And so I think
this is a big blind spot for a lot of Americans. They don't realize
what illegal immigration has become. This is no longer what it was like during
the Bush and Clinton years when you had high levels of illegal immigration, but
it was mostly Mexican nationals coming across, and they were coming across to work
in seasonal jobs. Right what is happening now is totally different. It's a
completely different phenomenon. It's driven by different interest The people who are coming are
different, They're coming for different reasons, and the whole dynamic at the border
has changed such that there is control over the border, but it's all the
control is on the south side of the border. The cartel's control who crosses,
when, how much they pay, and then what happens to them when
they get inside the country. It's a very sophisticated system. It is designed
to make billions and billions of dollars for the cartels and the criminal elements within
the Mexican regime. And I don't think Americans understand that. And this is
kind of a premise in your spectator piece. And obviously folks should read your
coverage of the border at the Federalists. You have a piece out just today
as we're talking on some dumb thing, Senator Chris Murphy said, just idiotic
thing that you could only be said by somebody who knows nothing or cares nothing
about what's really happening, but or deeply at least so John, the premise
kind of what you're just talking we're talking about is this there is an invasion,
and that word very specifically applies for all of these reasons that get lost
in the media conversation, the Democratic parties conversation, the sort of elite conversation
about what's actually happening at the border. You include some numbers that you know
the cis one of the experts over there estimates about thirteen million gottaways. This
is an incredible number. One of the other numbers was thirteen based as well.
That I really liked you included the thirteen billion, So like a raise
of five hundred million dollars to thirteen billion dollars in cartel profits from human trafficking.
You say that takes Starbucks's profits from the pumpkinspice latte and it just becomes
Starbucks profits. That comparison between what was that was the five hundred Obama administration
or Trump administration to the thirteen that it is now under Biden. That was
Trump administration. I can't remember the exact year, but in a very short
number of years, the profits and these are estimated profits. All these numbers
are low. They're certainly higher than what the estimates are. But yeah,
there's been an explosion in the pro and part of the reason for that is
the cartels and their partners in the Mexican state figured out how to monetize mass
illegal immigration. In the years between twenty about twenty fourteen to about twenty eighteen
or nineteen, that four or five year period when you saw the first migrant
surge in the Trump administration in twenty nineteen and these huge caravans started coming and
Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all Mexican goods unless they shut down the caravans.
That was the point when the cartels and their partners in the Mexican state
figured out how to monetize illegal immigration, and the profits from there just exploded.
Not just monetize it, but really get organized about tracking who comes across
when they come across, and then tracking them once they're inside the United States
as well, you know, people, not like as a means to the
end of the drug war, right, so like it wasn't just that you
could have mules, no, no, ye, surely pay they could get
money for the people. Yes, this is these The illegal immigration situation that
the cartels have created is not primarily about drugs. It's they figured out how
to monetize illegal immigration like on its own, and not just the immigration part.
The people who cross into the United States who pay the cartels. Once
they're in the United States and are working, they still owe the cartels money.
So they're sending remittances back to Mexico. But some of those remittances are
going to their families in their country of origin, and some of those remittances
are going to cartels in the inside Mexico, And so it's a revenue stream.
It's an ongoing. It's like they're building a tax base in America and
the people that are crossing in many cases are what amounts to debt slaves to
these criminal organizations. That's part of the reason so many of them are so
intent on getting out of federal custody and getting to where they are trying to
get to in the United States because they have a job lined up. They
need to start making that money and send it to the cartels to keep their
families back home safe. Because the cartels collect all that information and they verify
it before they allow anyone to cross the border, and that there's a whole
ecosystem and logistics and databases. It's very sophisticated. That is something I think
the American people don't realize about what's happening here, is that this is an
international money making scheme on its own. The monetization of illegal immigration is massive
and sophisticated and ongoing, and that's largely what accounts for the increased numbers right
there. Once they figured out how to monetize it, then it's a numbers
game. The more people you can get to cross, the more that you
can increase your profits. It's a lot lower risk than trafficking drugs, which
is why some cartel elements have switched over to the majority of their revenue streams
now come from illegal immigration and not from drug trafficking. In some ways,
is like the perfect black market business because the demand is always there. They
work with partners back in the in the sending countries to extend these loans and
these these offers to people. You pay this amount upfront and we'll get you
over the border in the United States, and then this is this is what
you owe to us after you get there. And it's working, and it's
working, and this is this is the important thing. It's working because we
are allowing it to work, partly because not just the American people, but
the American policy making apparatus doesn't fully comprehend like this dynamic that I'm describing,
well, in the dynamic you're describing. Again, correct me if I'm wrong,
But I feel like this this argument for essentially military action against the cartels.
And a lot of people will probably say, you mean military action against
Mexico. I don't know that that's a helpful conflation, but we can maybe
debate that in a bit. I think I think you know you are specifically
calling for military action against the cartels, which is a very important distinction if
people were just trying to say, oh, you want to invade Mexico or
whatever it is, Yes, but but but it's premised on the idea that
the cartels. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but the cartels are
organized, they are embedded into the Mexican government, and this is an organized,
intentional quote unquote invasion of the United States. So invasion, like one
of the working definitions for like legal constitutional reasons, we should define invasion that
is physical entry with ill intent. Right. And I think that what's going
on with the cartels and elements of the Mexican state meets those definitions, right.
Yes. A big part of it, and another deeply misunderstood part of
it is the degree to which the cartels and the Mexican state are have fused,
have become simotic, and the distinction between cartel operations and state actions is
very confused in a lot of parts of Mexico. Right. I mentioned in
my piece and the Spectator that former US Ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau,
who I met in Mexico and talked to in the United States as well,
a few years ago said that thirty five to forty percent of Mexican territory is
controlled by the cartels. Now, when he means the territory is controlled by
cartels, he doesn't mean that cartels. He means both the cartels have their
own parallel like militias and police forces, but also that that territory that's controlled
by cartels, the civil and military and police apparatuses of those areas are also
controlled by the cartels. So the politicians, the police, the National Guard,
the elements of the I in m which is the Mexico's federal immigration agency,
all of these things are in various ways connected to the cartels, depending
on which part of the country you're talking about. So, and it goes
right to the top, right. We had news reports back in twenty nineteen
of the head of what amounts to Mexico's FBI was arrested in Dallas. He
was for six years from two thousand and six to twenty twelve during Mexico's War
on drugs during the administration of President Philippe Calderone. This guy, General Garcia
Luna, was the head of the equivalent of Mexico's FBI. It was his
job to fight the cartels. He was arrested in twenty nineteen in the United
States because it turns out all that time he was in the pay of the
Cinelo cartel. So the people who are in charge of the of fighting the
cartels in Mexico have been co opted by the cartels right like, at the
highest levels of the Mexican government. And this is across administrations from Enrique Panonet
now in ricapanonetto to Opez Lobrador right now, and they are complicit in what's
going on. They're benefiting from what's going on. And so when we say
go to war with the cartels, that does mean go to war with cartels
inside Mexico. That's one of the things it means. And you say,
well, what if Mexican military forces then to try to stop you, Well,
then you take care of those Mexican military forces. They are acting on
behalf of the cartels. We need to treat the cartels the way we would
treat al Qaeda or isis there as a terrorist organization, but in this case
a terrorist organization that has infiltrated and fused with the Mexican state. And the
other big key thing that I argue in the book is that to do all
this requires us to shift our thinking, and especially to shift out of a
Washington of bipartisan consensus way of thinking that's been entrenched for decades, which is
that Mexico is like our partner and our friend, and we're going to work
together to solve these problems. That's totally wrong. Mexico should not be thought
of as a partner. It should not be thought of as a friend.
They should be thought of as what they are, which is an antagonist that
is working against the interests of the American people, and they should be treated
as such. Debt it keeps you tossing and turning at night. You can't
get away from it. But the truth is the system is designed to trap
you. Insanely high interest credit cards and loans make it nearly impossible to pay
off your debt. There's a new way out of the trap, Pivotal Debt
Solutions. Pivotal Debt Solutions isn't like the old school debt relief companies that string
out your debt for years. They have new, aggressive strategies that can end
your debt faster and easier than you thought possible. Pivotal Debt Solutions can cut
or eliminate interest, find programs to write off your balances so you owe less,
stop those threatening phone calls, and do it all without bankruptcy and without
a loan. Bottom line, They find every solution possible to end your debt
permanently. Before you do anything, contact Pivotal Debt Solutions first. Talk to
them for free. Find out how fast they can help you get out of
debt. Visit zapmidebt dot com. That's zapmdebt dot com. Zapidebt dot com.
So what about Onlo compromising with Trump on uh remain in Mexico MPP.
He did that because Trump threatened to destroy the Mexican economy. In other words,
he treated him as an adversary, not with caros, but with a
stick. So you can get Mexico to jump, but you got to prod
them, right, you don't you don't offer to play nice with them.
Trump basically said to Amlo, I will destroy the mexicanomy in a matter of
weeks if you don't stop these caravans and lo and behold the caravans stopped.
I don't disagree with that, although, but I mean, I think there's
something interesting there, and you know, Amlo has been very upset with like
the DEA and the American government for planting what informants in various cartails probably Seenaloa
exposing the connections between the cartels and the Mexican government. That's what he's upset
about, right. Well, actually, John, you have been pretty clear
minded about the connections potential connections between Omlo and Sinaloa. Can you flow yeah
that a little bit, because that's also I think really relevant to the case
that you build in the spectator piece. Yeah. Amlow, which is the
acronym for Lopez obrador Is, has never spoken a bad word about the cartels
and certainly never spoken a bad word about Sineloa. The Cinelo cartel is the
most powerful cartel in Mexico. Everybody knows El Chopo, right, he was
the leader of Cineloa until he was arrested. Amlo famously went to visit El
Chopo's mother in her hometown and shook her This during COVID, sort of paid
a special visit to El Chopo's hometown, met with his mother, shook her
hand, allowed himself intentionally to be photographed doing it. It was meant to
send a political message inside Mexico, that Amlo wasn't going to do anything to
touch Cineloa, that the deal that his predecessor Pinnetto had with Cineloa remained intact.
And not only that, but the ties between the Morina Party, which
is AMLO's political party, and Cineloa have deepened over the course of the last
five years, five or six years of AMLO's presidency. Such a last year
when there was there was elections in Mexico in Cinela, the day before elections,
cartel gunman went out and kidnapped all the political operatives and election poll workers
and canvassers that worked for all the other political parties and took them hundreds of
people, took them to warehouses and different places and held them there until the
election was over. So the only political operations that were in the field in
the day before the election was the Marina Party, am Loo's party, and
Lo and behold Morena swept those elections in Cineloa, those state elections and ousted
the pri from power, and now Morena is in power in Cineloa State.
So there's clearly a relationship between AMLO's political party and the Cineloa cartel that goes
largely unreported even in Mexico because nobody wants to talk on the record about it
because they'll get killed. But it totally flies under the radar in the United
States, where none of this is really discussed or barely even understood. But
the connection is real, it's persistent. If you talk to people who work
in Mexico and who cover Mexico, everyone knows about it. And this is
what I mean when I say that there's a symbiotic relationship from the presidency of
Philippe Calderon, who was the Conservative pan president in Mexico from two thousand and
six to twenty twelve. He's the one that started the drug war in Mexico,
right he said, we're going to go after these cartel leaders with the
military. We're going to assassinate them and dismantle their organizations. It unleashed a
flurry of violence years long in Mexico. It was very unpopular in parts of
Mexico because a lot of people preferred the peace of the cartels to the war
that Calderon unleashed. And after that period two thousand and six to twenty twelve,
again during which as we mentioned earlier, that the head of Mexico's interior
federal police was in the pay of Sineloa, so it was sort of you
know, even Calderon's effort had been infiltrated. His successor, Pionetto, who
was president from twenty twelve to twenty eighteen, totally changed strategies and instead of
fighting the cartels, they decided that they would partner with them, and that
they would make peace with them, and that they would cooperate with them.
And that is the reality has been the reality in Mexico for the past decade
or so, is that there's a partnership and there's cooperation between the Mexican state
and the cartels on major issues, and one of them is the border.
And another historical parrel that you write about in this piece that I thought was
fascinating is the Mexican Civil War and the way that the United States responded to
it at the time, much to the pleasure of Woodrow Wilson. Little did
I know. John, Can you tell us a little bit about why you
thought that example, or tell us about the example and why you think it's
so relevant here. Yeah, this was about one hundred years ago when the
Mexican Civil War was spilling over into border communities in the US, and after
Ponchovilla and his men raided a US military garrison in Arizona in nineteen sixteen,
Woodrow Wilson ordered General Pershing to invade Mexico and go on this punitive expedition to
try to capture or kill Ponchovilla. They failed in that effort, but they
were in Mexico for upwards for almost a year, with like ten thousand men.
It was the first use of aircraft by the US military, of motorcycles
and vehicles. A lot of a lot of the technologies that would be deployed
in Western Europe during World War in the subsequent years of World War One were
used during this operation, which is fascinating on its own, but it was
the response was, and the thinking was, and this is the parallel to
our time right now. The thinking at the time was, if Mexico cannot
exercise sovereignty over its whole territory, then that implicates US national core national security
interests. And if Mexico cannot or will not do it, then the US
military is going to exercise sovereignty in place of Mexico to secure our borders and
our communities and there was no hesitation about that. It was understood to be
a core national security interest that the people who lived in border communities in the
United States could live in peace and safety. And if the chaos and violence
could not be controlled by the recognized Mexican government, then the US military would
do it. And I think that we're in that situation today. Clearly,
the Mexican state is unable or unwilling to control all of its territory to impose
sovereignty over vast suahs of northern Mexico that bordered the un United States, and
our border communities cannot live in peace and security and safety while this situation persists.
So if Mexico won't exercise sovereignty on its own behalf, then the United
States, as its neighbor, should step up and say we're going to We
have a far greater core national interest in imposing order and security on our own
border than we do anywhere else in the world, including Ukraine, Israel,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Taiwan, any of the other places in the world that
we've been involved in in the last forty years. None of them hold a
candle to our interests in Mexicans stability you mentioned the Lebaran family, and I
actually I don't know how many people are remember that. At the time,
it was big news, and people probably remember it if you explained it a
little bit drawn. But the case of dual US Mexican citizens and what happened
to them. You also use this as an example of why to the point
you just about whether Mexico is unable or unwilling to control the violence that's affecting
people here in the United States. It's affecting our national interest. Talk to
us a little bit about what happened to the LeBaron family. It was just
documented in a new HBO series. It was pretty good. But tell us
you know why it's important here. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the
documentary, but I want to. It was big news at the time,
and a lot of people talked about it, and then so we all moved
on, right, which we too often do when it comes to things that
happen in Mexico. But this happened during the Trump administration, and I write
about it in the piece as an example of what we could have done and
what kind of policy thinking we should apply to Mexico. This there's these communities
of Mormons that live in Mexico that are dual Mexican US citizens. They've been
there since like the nineteen forties or something. I think Mitt Romney's dad was
founded one of these communities, so you know, obviously the most sympathetic group
of people, but his grandfather or his grandfather, and I mean, there's
they're well, I think one of the victims was actively in a plural marriage.
Yeah, yeah, they're like, yeah, they're like fundamentalists Mormon communities
and they the old The reason they're in Mexico in the first place was because
they wanted to practice polygamy and they couldn't do the United States. So they
set up these these communities in Mexico and they've been there for generations and they're
still there. And this this one community, La Baron Family. It was
a convoy of cars like moms with small children, children and babies, and
for whatever reason we don't know, cartel gunmen associated with the cartel and Sonora,
which is not far from from the Arason, Mexico Arizona US bord Is
like seventy miles from the border, opened fire on these vehicles, killing the
women, killing many of the children, including babies in their car seats.
One of the kids and a handful of his siblings managed to escape and hide
and then walk back for help and stuff. And so the whole story came
out right, and it was horrifying. You know, the car, the
cartel gunman torched the cars. It was a horrifying story. And at the
time, President Trump came out and said, We're going to hunt these cartels
down and wipe them off the face of the earth. And we can't allow
this to stand. These are US citizens who were massacred, women and children
massacred by cartel gunmen seventy miles from the US border. It was an outrage.
It remains an outrage. Trump came out, talked a big game,
did nothing, and then after he made his comments, AMLO came out and
said, we don't want any interference from the United States, will handle this
on our own. And of course nothing happened. A couple of local sheriffs
were like arrested, and I'm sure some cartel members were killed by their higher
ups who punished them for caring an international incident and hitting the wrong convoy.
But officially the United States didn't do anything. And I write about this as
a missed opportunity. What we should have done was a punitive expedition into Mexico
without advance, without the cooperation or even knowledge of the Mexican state, which
clearly was crushed any efforts to bring accountability to the people responsible for this,
by launching a military incursion into Mexico to secure the American citizens who are still
in Mexico at the time, the members of this Mormon community whoever wanted safe
passage back to the United States, and then conduct basically a capture or kill
mission against the cartels in that area, all cartel elements. It's something that
could easily have been done in and out, you know, five or six
days. The military assets in Texas and in nearby in Arizona were there and
were available. They are there and are available for something like that, and
it would have been widely popular. That's the other thing, Like an American
president who did that would that would be the most popular thing a US president
could do, especially after something like the Liberian massacre right in the midst of
the outrage. It's just say, after they launched the operation, come out
and have a press conference. US forces are moving into this area of the
Sonora Desert to secure the American citizens that are in harm's way, and to
conduct a punitive raid against the cartel elements that the Mexican state refuses to act
against. And this is my policy. This is the policy of this administration
from now on. And Mexican military and police are advised to stay clear of
the area. And if not, then they'll they'll get fired upon, they'll
get shot down. That's the kind of posture we need to have toward Mexico.
You do that one time, and the people in Mexico who are in
charge, who are in the state, in the National Guard, in the
Navy and in the Marines and the army, in the presidential administration, who
are liaising with elements of the cartels, they will figure out very quickly how
to stop things like this from happening, like the Labaron massacre, from happening.
They are interested in making money, right, we should treat them like
terrorists. But they're not like jihadists, right, They're interested in making money,
and so you have to you have to treat them with a heavy hand
and make them to understand that they're not going to be allowed to make money
in this way, not anymore. They're not going to be allowed to make
money with a massive migrant trafficking operation. They're not going to be allowed to
make money faring fentanyl into the US. They're not going to be allowed to
carry out these, you know, these massacres of US citizens on Mexican soil.
In nineteen eighty five, when the DEA agent Kiki Camarina was kidnapped and
tortured and executed by Mexican cartels, we impose such a heavy cost on the
cartels and on the elements of the Mexican state that we're working with them that
it sent a message, and the message was, it costs you too much
to kill an American DEA agent. The costs are the costs are intolerable,
right, we should make the costs intolerable. We can do that. It's
just a matter of will. It's a matter of political will and determination,
and it has the added benefit that it would be wildly popular. Is this
kind of where I want to go next? You start wrapping up the piece
by sketching out what this would look like, and you mentioned Fallujah. You
have some really specific ideas about what the military strategy should be. And here's
probably where we disagree the most, and that the mention of the word fallujah.
As a kid born, you know, in the early nineties, I
think of what I saw growing up in Iraq in Afghanistan, and it really
scares me. I don't think I could get drafted at this point. I'm
probably too old for it. But the word quagmire sort of looms very large
in my imagination. And John, you're so old that you've seen even more
quagmires than I have. So sketch out for us a little bit about how
you think this would actually work, or like why it wouldn't be a quagmire.
The main reason, and I think I addressed this in the piece,
is that the purpose here is totally not nation building, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan,
where we had this sort of idiotic mission that we were going to go
bring democracy to Iraq. You know, I was still quite young when all
of that was happening, so, you know, I'm old enough to have
been young during that time. I'm and but was that always the mission or
did it turn into the mission? Because that scares me too. No.
I mean that was in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. That
was the rhetoric that the Bush administration was pushing. They're like, where we're
going to be a conservative project. Yeah, we're going to be greeted as
liberators. You know, we're going to have you know, I mean and
then and then it became the long term mission in Afghanistan to bring sort of
like, you know, a horrible version of uh, you know, post
Christian Western paganisms to Afghanistans. They were going to have gender studies in Afghanistan,
and we're gonna uh, you know, uh, we're gonna have you
know, feminism and women's liberation in Afghanistan. It's gonna be the greatest thing
ever. Uh. That was explicitly part of the motivation for those conflicts.
What I'm proposing here is the opposite of that, punitive expeditions that are meant
to change the behavior of the people who run Mexico. We are I'm not
calling for stationing troops in Mexico. They're close enough that we don't need to.
We can just launch our operations from our US military bases and for boots
on the ground though, yes, but not to stay in other words,
not to set up these permanent kind of military occupations. Right. The whole
approach here is to go in break things, send a message change behavior,
not to nation build. This is decidedly not a neo conservative project that I'm
proposing. It's much more of a Jacksonian foreign policy than a Neocon foreign policy,
and that is why I think it would be popular. You know,
I agree with you. The last thing the American people want is another quagmire
or another nation building project. We hate it, clearly, that's what we
see. The aversion to sending more funds to Ukraine is connect to americans anxieties
about getting trapped in an unwinnable quagmire that's just a sinkhole of treasure, blood
and treasure. So so no, it would not be that the involvement the
military side of this, and it's not just a military thing. This would
have to be a diplomatic Trade is a huge part of this as well,
that I don't deal with in the piece, But there's a whole separate piece
that could be written about trade because that's the thing that the Mexican elites really
care about as when you put the screws to them, you know, that's
this enormous leverage that we have on the trade front as well. So it
has to be a whole you know strategy that you apply to changing the behavior
of the Mexican elites. And there's a domestic element, a diplomatic, domestic
elements of it as well. All these Mexican elites have property and assets in
the United States. They send their kids to school here, they come here
for medical procedures. You could do targeted sanctions against those people, seize their
assets, you know, expel other kids from school, ban them from coming
to the US for you know, to go to the doctor or whatever.
There's ways you could put the screws to them on that front diplomatically as well.
But the military side of it is very much not a Neocon project.
It is a Jacksonian project. It's about punishing bad actors and forcing a change
in behavior. Now does it worry you though, that the apparatus, the
military app the Pentagon is still the neo conservatives still cling to the Pentagon.
So just from like a explain to me from realist perspective, Let's say you
have another Trump administration and implement this policy, but you still have you know,
I don't know what Donald Trump can do to like actually clean up the
Pentagon. So say step one, cleaning up the Pentagon doesn't come first,
and you still want to implement this policy. Does it worry you that the
fingers on the triggers are are probably still going to be in some significant part
the neo conservatives who have botched all of these other operations. Yeah, not
just the neoconservatives, but like the you know anti American you know, spy
agencies and intelligent community, you know, the intelligence community that wants to spy
on and manipulate and rule over American citizens, to destroy the constitution. Evil
people who hate our country. Right, No, that's that's of course,
anytime we talk about policy and about what we should do, we have this
problem, right And the problem is people who actually operate run the American government
are bad, all of them. So what can what can you do about
that? You know what I mean? Like you, Yeah, so I
think that something like what I'm describing, and this is beyond the scope of
my article, but something like what I'm describing, I think you have to
sort of clean up and clear out of our military agencies and intelligence agencies,
these these these neocon elements that, as you say, still have their fingers
on the trigger and to still kind of run the show. There's a lot
of things that we have to do to sort of get to the point where
like our government isn't evil and like making war on us. But I think
that, you know, purely operationally, a lot can be accomplished with you
know, with a few pointed actions, you know, military diplomatic trade that
may not require like a complete overhaul of the Pentagon to accomplish. I mean,
Trump did accomplish a lot in his relations with Mexico. And he had
the entire administrative bureaucracy at war with him during his entire presidency, and yet
he was able to renegotiate NAFTA, he was able to get AMLO to shut
down the caravans, and he was able to bring illegal crossings at the border
down to historic lows through these these programs that he implemented over and against the
desires and wishes of the deep state that was working against him, even inside
the Department of Homeland Security. Right through remain in Mexico and Title forty two
and some of these other measures that he put in place, illegal crossings plummeted.
Right, So it's still possible to like move the needle forward even when
you're dealing with like a hostile deep state. Sure, and maybe, well,
I guess you kind of just touched on this. But you know,
one of the things a concern that I would have is that, you know,
you have all of these people who are in favor of occupations or honestly
they're just so incompetent. That's another thing you hear from military whistleblowers, people
like Woyd Austin are just not good at this, that the top brass,
literally the top brass is just not good at what they do. And you
end up creating a situation where you have suddenly not just Honduran Venezuelan migrants coming
through Mexico, but another wave of Mexican migrants who are fleeing this lack of
stability, and then we still have our de facto open border, and it's
just a recipe for catastrophe. So to talk about that a lot. Yeah,
No, that's a good point, you would it would have to go
hand in hand with like changes to the border, right, Like we couldn't
unleash a war against the cartels without essentially saying we're not going to have an
open border. You know, we're not going to have catch and release,
we are not going to create a refugee crisis in Mexico. So this this
is also why like these these would need to be like targeted operations. Everything
about this is targeted because the point isn't too like you know, have like
a occupation or a sort of a Neocon nation building project here a debasification of
Mexico. The point is is to change the behavior of the Mexican political and
military and corporate elites. And so your trade sanctions and your trade actions would
be targeted, Your diplomatic actions would be targeted, and your military actions would
be targeted. Limited in scope, but very sharp nevertheless, and we would
have to change how we deal with people who show up at the border.
Right. One of the things I think that Trump administration should consider, if
there is another Trump administration, is letting border governors and their law enforcement apparatuses,
giving them free reign. Tell Greg Abbott in Texas, Yep, you
are authorized and you will get no pushback from federal law enforcement and immigration officials
to go ahead and arrest and deport any illegal immigrants that your personnel encounter.
Right, which is what Greg Abbott is saying that he needs to do,
and what the Texas legislature has authorized him to do. And the Biden administration
is obviously fighting that. But if we had a miministration in the White House
that supported and cooperated with the state authorities, that would that would disrupt the
cartel operations. Right the cartel operations are only possible the border operations, the
money making scheme that we talked about earlier, is only possible with a complacent
administration, a complacent federal apparatus on the US side that creates an opening for
the cartels to make money. As soon as you as you send people back
across the Rio Grande to Mexico, then it destroys their whole system, right,
for they need to be able to get people into the United States,
and they need to be able to persuade people that it's possible to get into
the United States and get these much higher paying jobs to send money back.
If people are instead of being sent into the United States and released by federal
authorities, if they keep getting sent back to Mexico, word very quickly gets
back to the sending countries that you actually can't get through. And so don't
sell your house and go tens of thousand dollars in debt and put your family
in danger for something that's not going to work, and the demand you control
demand that way, and the number of people who are going to sign up
for that is going to plummet dramatically. So so that's another That's another piece
of the puzzle, is that you have to actually change our policy at the
border, uh for for for this to work the way the way it could
work. John, before I let you go pick up your plywood, because
I know that's what you have on the I got to pick up some plywood
today on the doger for this afternoon. Is there anything we haven't covered that
you think is important to making this case or to knowing you know why this
case is important or plausible or not plausible, whatever it is. Yeah,
there's one important thing that I want to touch on, and I just in
passing and the piece. But it's too often lost people who are listening to
us, to us who might disagree, who are who might think that what
I'm proposing is extreme, might also think that what I'm saying is that the
problem here is the Mexican people, or the problem here is the individual migrants.
That is not what I'm saying at all. Our complaints and our problem
is not with the Mexican people. And it's not even with the individual migrants.
And I've said this many times before, and we've talked about this Emily.
If I were in the position of some of these guys in Honduras,
I absolutely would come to the United States and send money back to my family.
It's a given what US policies are. It would be a no brainer.
Right. So they are acting rationally, and they are acting in their
own best interests and in what they believe is in the best interests of their
families. And so our complaints is not with them. It's with the people
who actually control the Mexican state and the people who actually control the cartels,
who are sort of the malign actors here. And we need to be very
clear about that because too often our debates kind of like on the left,
if you talk about the stuff, you just get accused of being a racist
and a xenophobe, right, And too many people on the right are too
quick to be like, yeh, screw all Mexicans, you know, like
we don't want them here, which isn't whatever the you know, that's like
a separate discussion like the value or the benefits or or not of mass immigration.
Legal and illegal is almost like a separate debate. Right, This has
to do with what's going on at the border, which is not organic,
which which is a which is something that is being orchestrated for the benefit of
very few people in the cartels and in the Mexican government. And if you
want to stop it, then you have to be very clear about what you're
doing. But nothing that about what we're talking about should leave anyone with the
impression that the problem is with the Mexican people or with the individual migrants that
are showing up at the border. Now, some of the migrants showing up
the border are bad people. You know why, because there are millions of
them. Any group since Biden took office, like ten million people have been
coming to the country. Any group of ten million people is going to have
thousands and thousands of really bad people in it. Right, So, as
long as we have mass, uncontrolled illegal immigration on our southern border, we
will have large numbers of really bad people coming in along with a bunch of
normal people who are coming here to work. Right CC, Senator Murphy,
Oh yeah, that's right. CC stands for carbon copy. It's something that
you're very good. I know what I know what carbon copy means, but
you don't. You've only my high school jobs. They didn't have a credit
card machine. I worked at the local boutique, and so I absolutely made
I typed the number of the credit card numbers in uh and ye made a
little card. You had to had to call the president of the bank,
you know, on the on the phone. You had to dial them up.
Is missus Johnson good for this fifty bucks? Yes? Yeah, john
No. I was going to say the one of the in terms of the
rational actors, one of the things that comes to mind is that there was
a woman we talked to. I think she was in Motomoros Musson Duran and
was absolutely the pinnacle of rational actor archetype. She had been fleeing gang violence
that killed her brother. Threatened her that if they didn't pay or cooperate with
the gangs, and they would kill her and take her house and her family.
And uh. To the point of what you not being a bigot or
an over Zell's extremist. I remember you prayed with her and she was definitely
not an invader, though she was being used an ex by the cartel as
a tool of broader invasion. Project. It's a super important point. These
people are being used by the cartels to make money. They are victims of
this scheme, even though they're acting rationally and they are sort of acting in
their own best interests or what they decide is their own best interests, which
they're a lot better at deciding what is in their best interest than policymakers in
Washington are, I can assure you. But yeah, she this woman and
other people, many other people we talked to, it becomes very clear,
you know, that they are caught up in something that they don't even fully
understand. This particular woman who asked us to pray with her after we interviewed
her, and we did you know she was trafficked. She was being trafficked
inside Mexico and didn't realize it. And a lot of people are trafficked inside
Mexico and they don't know it until they try to leave the house they're staying
in and they're not allowed to and then they have to daughter. Yeah,
they took her daughter. This is dark, terrifying stuff, but it's happening
on a mass scale in Mexico. And to think that, as people on
the left do, that this is all just wonderful people just chasing their dreams
is the opposite of compassion. The compassionate thing to do is shut down this
black market. Shut it down and stop allowing the cartels to victimize These millions
and millions of people that are transitting through Mexico in hopes of getting into the
United States. They are all being trafficked. And that's one of the things
I say in the piece. I think a lot of Americans don't realize that
every single person who crosses the border today is being trafficked, every single one.
And they're not just being trafficks while they're in Mexico. Many of them
after they get to the United States are still being trafficked, and they're essentially
debt slaves in the and they are enthrall to the cartels. So we need
to get real about this stuff and start talking about how to put an end
to it. And the article in the Spectator proposes one solution, which is
to make war on the cartels. John Daniel Davidson is the author of Pagan
America and a senior editor at The Federalist. But the plywould alate awaits,
so John, I'll let you get to it. Thanks Emily always a pleasure
to talk with you. You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour Emile Dashinski, culture editor here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, be the lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.