Speaker 1: Here's what you're really asking. See, you're not asking what
Speaker 1: scholarly work some reading. You were saying, are you reading
Speaker 1: Saint Basil the Great? Yes? Yeah, are you reading that right?
Speaker 1: John Chris System on wealthy poverty? Yes? These are all libs.
Speaker 1: By the way, like there's not one of these guys
Speaker 1: that isn't I mean, it's not one of them.
Speaker 2: Well, I've been saying for a long time the only
Speaker 2: people who can rightfully talk about social justice or the
Speaker 2: medieval Catholics and everyone else should shut up.
Speaker 1: These are late antiquity right, lovely apostolic bothers. You know,
Speaker 1: that's good one. That's that's a pastern.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 2: what you can do for your country, mister Gorbachew, Tear
Speaker 2: down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward and Rob Long.
Speaker 3: I'm James Lilex. Today we're going to talk to Mark
Speaker 3: recorying about of course immigration exilettes I was a podcast.
Speaker 1: You say to those that you're using a two hundred
Speaker 1: year old door, it's a circumvent you an.
Speaker 2: Old law not as well as constitution. We still pay
Speaker 2: attention to that, don't we. But someone take this man.
Speaker 4: We're going to be returning education very simply back to
Speaker 4: the states where it belongs.
Speaker 1: And this is a.
Speaker 4: Very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it's
Speaker 4: a common sense thing to do and it's going to work.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's going to work.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number seven hundred and
Speaker 3: thirty three. And do we have a surprise for you today?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got me James Lodax in Minneapolis. You got
Speaker 3: Stephen Hayward probably in California. But we have Rob Long,
Speaker 3: who I guess has come out of the monastery on
Speaker 3: the East coast. Tom Seward in his robe with a
Speaker 3: little you know, white.
Speaker 1: Benefiting belt and the rest of it.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, Rob, It's always good to see you.
Speaker 1: And you know, I have to say, it's like I
Speaker 1: know that says seminary is a Princeton theological seminary, and
Speaker 1: so people have this idea of it like that, you know,
Speaker 1: we're walking around in robes. When I had dinner I
Speaker 1: don't know last year round this time with Greg Gottfeldt
Speaker 1: on our one of our regular dinners, and I was like, hey, listen,
Speaker 1: by the way, I'm just going to this Prinson Theological Seminary,
Speaker 1: and he's like, really, wow, it's amazing. So what does
Speaker 1: that mean for the show. You can't do the show anymore?
Speaker 1: I said, no, I can, Greg, I can do the show.
Speaker 1: It's Princeton, it's not that far away. So they'll they'll
Speaker 1: let you out for the show. Say well, Greg, isn't
Speaker 1: like you. They don't let you out like you. I
Speaker 1: can leave anytime. It's a school. As I'm getting a graduate,
Speaker 1: it's a graduate school. Oh okay, But even now he
Speaker 1: doesn't quite figure out. When I show up at the show,
Speaker 1: He's like, so, like, are you like out now? How
Speaker 1: does that work?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: No, So, yes, it's a normal graduate school in the
Speaker 1: sense that I'm surrounded by younger, young people, and I'm
Speaker 1: learning that I.
Speaker 3: Would never assume, even in an old monastery, that they
Speaker 3: would keep them on the grounds. I mean they were not.
Speaker 3: It's not like they were forbidden to go out. It's
Speaker 3: just for to stay where they were made their job,
Speaker 3: their life, the contemplation easier. But yes, of course you
Speaker 3: can go. I mean it is a bit red. Does
Speaker 3: he think perhaps that you would be chained to a desk,
Speaker 3: you know, doing an illuminated manuscript with a quill or
Speaker 3: something like that.
Speaker 1: I think he was hoping for that, and I think
Speaker 1: he could kill That was his goal, like to like
Speaker 1: to have me come a bald head except for one
Speaker 1: little thing of hair coming out? What do you mean?
Speaker 1: That was my goal too.
Speaker 3: We're going to trouble you with worldly matters now and Stephen,
Speaker 3: any worldly matters or the last oh, I don't know,
Speaker 3: seventeen minutes they're broken or something like that.
Speaker 2: The place right well, I have refresh Twitter about every
Speaker 2: thirty seconds to see the latest federal judge imposing some
Speaker 2: kind of restriction on the Trump administration, because they seem
Speaker 2: to come at about.
Speaker 3: Three or four a day. Right now, Well, are they
Speaker 3: going to stand up? Is Robert's going to say? And
Speaker 3: you know the guy, he's got a point. What is
Speaker 3: going to be the end result of all this? Are
Speaker 3: the judges discovering brave, bold, new powers previously not allocated.
Speaker 1: Or is this something that they are entirely entitled to do?
Speaker 2: Well? For a very quick points, one is Trump has
Speaker 2: had more I think federal judges interfering with his plans
Speaker 2: than happened in the entire twentieth century. In other words,
Speaker 2: temporary restraining orders or injunctions. Second, there's three parts to it.
Speaker 2: One is his power to fire people in the executive branch.
Speaker 2: That's one of the legal issues. The second one is
Speaker 2: his power over spending, and that has many parts to
Speaker 2: it as well that depend a lot on what the
Speaker 2: specific language of a congressional statute might be, so that
Speaker 2: gets tangled in a hurry. Then the third is, and
Speaker 2: this is the most controversial part, is can a federal
Speaker 2: judge who's supposed to just be a trial judge in
Speaker 2: their district, can they issue nationwide injunctions and restraining orders?
Speaker 2: And this has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: Several justices have said they don't like this practice. And
Speaker 2: so I think that's the big question right now, and
Speaker 2: I think that's the one that they're going to have
Speaker 2: to confront at the Supreme Court. Yeah, very soon.
Speaker 1: Actually, I think it's also the good I mean, all
Speaker 1: these things aren't the same. I mean, I really don't
Speaker 1: think that the chief executive has the right or the
Speaker 1: power to to change the way Congress has chosen to
Speaker 1: spend money. I mean, in a way, Congress has got
Speaker 1: to do that. I think, on the other hand, why
Speaker 1: the chief executive can't hire and fire everybody in the
Speaker 1: executive branch of government is baffling to me. That's the
Speaker 1: that has to be one of the chief definitions of
Speaker 1: a chief executive of a branch. Right, you get to
Speaker 1: like pick who your staff is, all the way down
Speaker 1: to the guy who, like, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: what makes the coffee. So that so all these things
Speaker 1: need to be teased out. We have been so lazy
Speaker 1: as a country for so long and basically allowing if
Speaker 1: you're on the left, you think it's great that the
Speaker 1: president has all these powers because he's my guy. And
Speaker 1: then if you're on the right, like it's great at
Speaker 1: the president of lege powers because he's my guy. In
Speaker 1: the minute that changes, everbody acts like, my god, how
Speaker 1: did this happen? You fascist dictator? You know, it'd be
Speaker 1: good for us to sort these things out. And I
Speaker 1: think sort them out along the lines that you know
Speaker 1: the founders originally did, which is that, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: you got a bunch of people elected, did they get
Speaker 1: to choose how they're going to spend, raise and spend
Speaker 1: your money? And then you have an executive chief executive
Speaker 1: who gets to you know, CEO, the whole thing. I
Speaker 1: don't know that that system seemed to work. I mean,
Speaker 1: people blaming Trump for this, as much as I would
Speaker 1: love to blame Trump for everything bad, it's like, no,
Speaker 1: he's this is the logical conclusion of a thing that
Speaker 1: began in nineteen thirty when was that FDR elected whenever?
Speaker 2: Yeah, thirty three act pretty much, but it is some
Speaker 2: that's older than that, though, Rob. I mean, the question
Speaker 2: about whether the president could withhold funds that Congress had
Speaker 2: appropriated starts with Thomas Jefferson, so and it has never
Speaker 2: been entirely sorted out. A simple way I think for
Speaker 2: listeners to think about it, because it can't get technical,
Speaker 2: is to say the Constitution says that, or we say
Speaker 2: that the Constitution says that Congress has the power of
Speaker 2: the purse, and what that really means is the power
Speaker 2: to put money in the purse, and the president is
Speaker 2: the one who takes it out of the purse and
Speaker 2: spends it for the purposes to which it's been appropriated.
Speaker 1: If the appropriation is.
Speaker 2: Vague, and many of them are, then I think there's
Speaker 2: more latitude for a president to say, no, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to spend it on this or that or this
Speaker 2: is a mistake or something like that. That's what Jefferson
Speaker 2: did two hundred plus years ago. If Congress is specific
Speaker 2: and we're all familiar with the scandals of earmarks, you know,
Speaker 2: a clauset a bill that says I want six million
Speaker 2: dollars for a post office in my district. That's specific
Speaker 2: enough that the president has less discretion. And so it's
Speaker 2: somewhere in between heres where we are a bit of
Speaker 2: a no man's land. And finally, after as I say,
Speaker 2: two hundred years of intermittent empowerments by presidents, I think
Speaker 2: we're now going to finally clarify this and Congress will
Speaker 2: either have to do this job better or you know,
Speaker 2: we're going to have to sort it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean everyone's afraid of the answer, right, and
Speaker 1: the left is afraid of the answer, and the right
Speaker 1: is afraid of the left is afraid that the answer
Speaker 1: is going to be the people don't want to need this,
Speaker 1: and the right is going to be is afraid the
Speaker 1: answer is going to be the people want all of it.
Speaker 1: They want all of it, And that is that's why
Speaker 1: we kept a murky for so long. I mean, I
Speaker 1: would actually be willing my grand bargain to everybody is
Speaker 1: to say, look all earmarks, pork barrel spending all okay, fine,
Speaker 1: go right ahead, one knock yourself out, in exchange for
Speaker 1: never writing in any spending or spending authorization bill to
Speaker 1: phrase the Secretary shall or at the Secretary's discretion check
Speaker 1: that to me is I'll I'll give you. I'll give
Speaker 1: you the Robert Byrd Memorial Traffic Safety Building Members one
Speaker 1: through ninety seven in West Virginia, in exchange for never
Speaker 1: ever saying again the Secretary shall right.
Speaker 3: People don't in general want all of it. They want
Speaker 3: their part. They want the part that comes to their community.
Speaker 3: Perhaps they want their social security, their Medicare, and the
Speaker 3: rest of it. But when it comes to many the
Speaker 3: things that we learn government are spending on, I don't
Speaker 3: think they're very popular. And I'm very happy that the
Speaker 3: other side has chosen a variety of hill on which
Speaker 3: to die which are not particularly attractively aesthetically, politically, intellectually.
Speaker 3: You want to make the argument that it is necessary
Speaker 3: for somebody to work half the year so that the
Speaker 3: entirety of the money they contribute to the tax coffers
Speaker 3: should go to an agency. On the other side of
Speaker 3: the globe, which then pumps it into an NGO that
Speaker 3: is studying disinformation technique in Scotland. No, not going to happen,
Speaker 3: And when people realize this is what's going on, we think, well, how.
Speaker 1: Did this happen?
Speaker 3: Exactly? Well, because we haven't had specific budgets, but we've
Speaker 3: been ruled by continuing resolutions, which is like stuff in
Speaker 3: a burritle full of something, eating it halfway and then
Speaker 3: putting it aside, and then restuffing it next year, and
Speaker 3: everything gets rolled over and rolled over until the ingredients
Speaker 3: are all intermingled and it's a mess and no one knows.
Speaker 3: Burn it down and then build it up. That seems
Speaker 3: to be the idea. Now, no one's ever tried this before,
Speaker 3: but if they, you can actually find speeches by Bill
Speaker 3: Clinton and Barack Obama talking about the need to go
Speaker 3: through government line by line. You, I mean, Bill Clinton
Speaker 3: was all about that government efficiency project. Barack Obama said
Speaker 3: he was going to go line by line. Is it
Speaker 3: only bad when the other side does it well? Or
Speaker 3: did you just know that nobody really meant it at
Speaker 3: all in the first place, which I think is the case.
Speaker 3: But you know, we'll see education department is going to
Speaker 3: be the big argument now, and this one is shaping
Speaker 3: up to be as clearheaded and as non inflammatory, and
Speaker 3: it's rhetoricaus everything else. I love the fact that people
Speaker 3: say seventh graders can't read, fourth graders can't count beyond five,
Speaker 3: college students can't write a paragraph, and this is the
Speaker 3: time to destroy the Department of Educators. That well, no, actually,
Speaker 3: that's the argument for perhaps changing what we've been doing
Speaker 3: thus far. Where do you think this is going to go?
Speaker 1: Guys?
Speaker 2: Well, I think there are many programs in that the
Speaker 2: Department of Education oversees that are driven by statute. So
Speaker 2: Trump can't just wipe those away at the stroke of
Speaker 2: a pen or with Obama's phone if he borrows in.
Speaker 2: But he could move them to other departments. I think
Speaker 2: that's what's happen in the executive orders. Let's move certain
Speaker 2: student loan programs and certain other grants and aids to
Speaker 2: other departments and break up the monopoly the Department of Education.
Speaker 2: By the way, the rump you leave behind is some
Speaker 2: of the really bad and ideological stuff, and that might
Speaker 2: make it easier for Congress then to kill it. Or
Speaker 2: the latest idea is see if you can't wrap getting
Speaker 2: rid of the Department of Education in the reconciliation budget
Speaker 2: process later in the year, that will require only fifty
Speaker 2: one votes, so it will get around the inevitable democratic filibuster.
Speaker 2: Maybe that will work and we'll just have to see
Speaker 2: how it goes. As Trump likes to say, but I
Speaker 2: think Trump as usual is on the attack and has
Speaker 2: the back on their heels, and that's fun to watch.
Speaker 3: I haven't heard anything you said since you use the
Speaker 3: phrase of the rump you leave behind. Yeah, well he
Speaker 3: was actually a torch song from nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: Rob. Yeah. I think it's I mean, look, it's this
Speaker 1: is a thing that I mean, this is a thing
Speaker 1: that conservatives have been like about, like this is crazy,
Speaker 1: and then and now that it's happening, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, is it really happening. I mean, I
Speaker 1: kind of don't I kind of I will not believe
Speaker 1: it's happening until the I see the for rent you know,
Speaker 1: office space sign in the building. But it's you know,
Speaker 1: and I have no doubt and no lack of confidence
Speaker 1: that the Trump administration can fumble this and make this
Speaker 1: a disaster for them, and also not accomplish it just
Speaker 1: toxify the topic, because they're toxic in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But this simple argument is, you know, is your child,
Speaker 1: is your children, as George W. Bush said, is your
Speaker 1: children being educated?
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it better or worse? Do you think that it's
Speaker 1: better for there to be a pot of money in
Speaker 1: DC that's sort of sprinkled around the nation, or you
Speaker 1: think it's better for all that to go back to
Speaker 1: your neighborhood and your school. And I just don't think anybody.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look at all the surveys and
Speaker 1: people and their education, they generally believe in school choice.
Speaker 1: Like that's actually a very popular idea at school choice
Speaker 1: school vouchers. That tends to be popular. And then when
Speaker 1: you say to those parents who are in favor of it, okay,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a little chaotic. Obviously for the
Speaker 1: first two three four years, they always say, well that
Speaker 1: I'm against it because I have jury rigged and sorted
Speaker 1: out my kids school and I don't want to mess
Speaker 1: it up because I figured it out and I don't
Speaker 1: want to mess it up. And then that's usually when
Speaker 1: the school choice of initiatives go down. Arizona is a big,
Speaker 1: big Arizona is a fantastic you know, Governor, do you
Speaker 1: see in Arizona's great hero for this right? So the
Speaker 1: question is whether people are going to have that psychology
Speaker 1: is going to be applied to this too. Like I
Speaker 1: generally agree with your idea, say some voters, and the
Speaker 1: Department of Education is foolish and hasn't really accomplished the mission.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sure I want to throw it away.
Speaker 1: And I think there's subtle argument that the Trump people
Speaker 1: are gonna have to make.
Speaker 3: It's something that I see all the time on Twitter.
Speaker 3: There are two ideas. One in the Department of Education
Speaker 3: is a tremendous waste of money and we should give
Speaker 3: it back to the localities. And two, when you look
Speaker 3: at these craziest school boards and the things they're saying,
Speaker 3: so okay, right, fine, so we'll have to do something
Speaker 3: about the local school boards then too. If they really,
Speaker 3: if the Trump administration really wanted to get everybody on
Speaker 3: board with destroying the dismantling the Department of Education, they
Speaker 3: would push through an America first, classical Western aesthetics, patriotic
Speaker 3: agenda that must be filtered down to every single school
Speaker 3: district and taught and the follicles on fire would be
Speaker 3: extraordinary all across the spectrum. This would be seen as
Speaker 3: another attempt Nazi like to take the culture and indoctrinate
Speaker 3: it from the top down winds. I tend to suspect
Speaker 3: is to being done nowadays anyway, just from a different direction.
Speaker 3: Stephen anything, before we go to the guest portion of
Speaker 3: our piece.
Speaker 2: Well, let's just remember that federal aid education didn't start
Speaker 2: till the nineteen sixties, which is relatively.
Speaker 1: Recent, when it had started getting really better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and I mean, how do generations of American
Speaker 2: children ever get educated without federal dollars? Then? Second, I
Speaker 2: sometimes challenge people or defy people. Tell me one thing
Speaker 2: about public education that the Department of Education has improved
Speaker 2: with data, right, They've like lots of data, and you
Speaker 2: can't They've had no effect on it. And finally, the
Speaker 2: constitutional point, you know, the point that's starting in the sixties.
Speaker 2: It was the late James COO. Wilson used to say,
Speaker 2: because there's nothing in the Constitution about education, it's not
Speaker 2: in the enumerated powers of Congress, it was left to
Speaker 2: the states. And that was he said. That was the
Speaker 2: moment when we crossed the line constitutionally to saying Congress
Speaker 2: can now appropriate money for anything and blur, and it
Speaker 2: wrote federalism further and so forth. So I think it's
Speaker 2: long overdue to get rid of the department, and then
Speaker 2: it will get better, as I think, for all the
Speaker 2: reasons Rob knows and has advocated for so long.
Speaker 3: True, well, at least in bluryers will be happy about
Speaker 3: it because they'll get better workers. And doesn't that sound
Speaker 3: like some horrible thing you just want a bunch of drones. No,
Speaker 3: they just want people who can make change without having
Speaker 3: to consult an app on their phone. I mean, if
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Speaker 3: frustrated with hiring, or you just might feel totally lost
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Speaker 1: Gone so long, I forgot how these these segways go.
Speaker 3: I hope you had. I'm glad I'm not going to
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Speaker 3: we thank bamboo hr for responsoring this the Brigachet Podcast. Now,
Speaker 3: welcome back to the podcast. Mark or Korean, executive director
Speaker 3: of the Center for Immigration Studies and the host of
Speaker 3: the Parsing Immigration Policy podcast. A lot of plosives in
Speaker 3: that one, and you can find that excellent series right
Speaker 3: here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Mark, how are you.
Speaker 5: I'm doing very well.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me speaking of plosives and peas and
Speaker 3: all the rest of these things. We have a new
Speaker 3: paradigm in town. It seems Customs Border Protection released report
Speaker 3: seventy percent drop and encounters at the southern border. What
Speaker 3: massive government program was put into place that did that?
Speaker 3: Did they actually build a wall that we were looking?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 5: No, a climate change ended, poverty, all of those things ended,
Speaker 5: and magically the flow just stopped. In fact, what happened
Speaker 5: was the policy changed. The reason people were coming is
Speaker 5: because they could get away with it, and they could
Speaker 5: succeed under Biden. It was worth paying smugglers, it was
Speaker 5: worth taking the risk of going through Mexico because your
Speaker 5: odds of being released into the United States were very high.
Speaker 5: Now they're not. So why, you know, why spend the money,
Speaker 5: Why take the risk? I mean it's in fact, we
Speaker 5: had a couple of guys to go down to different
Speaker 5: parts of the border last week and there were parts
Speaker 5: of the border where there were days where there were
Speaker 5: zero got aways, zero attempts to cross, you know, particular
Speaker 5: sections of the border.
Speaker 1: Zero.
Speaker 5: It's not clear that's ever happened, at least not in
Speaker 5: the twenty first or twentieth century. So it's a huge change,
Speaker 5: There's just no question about it. And it's you know,
Speaker 5: elections of consequences. Market's Steve Hayward.
Speaker 2: Actually, James, I'm in Dallas today, I'm on the move
Speaker 2: as always, So Mark, I actually want to do it,
Speaker 2: say congratulations, this is your moment. You've been toiling away
Speaker 2: on this issue for as long as I can remember,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure all kinds of frustrations over the years
Speaker 2: with both parties, but especially the last administration. One question
Speaker 2: just for information, because I do tend to leave this
Speaker 2: to you and don't chase the numbers myself. How has
Speaker 2: the composition of illegal immigration changed over the last ten
Speaker 2: twenty years. I mean years ago it used to be
Speaker 2: we thought, anyway Mexicans. Because in the last few years
Speaker 2: it's been people from all over the world right who
Speaker 2: managed to get themselves first to Central America and the
Speaker 2: Darien Gap and then caravan up to the US. I
Speaker 2: was always amazed by the way that the media wasn't
Speaker 2: more curious as to what that was all about and
Speaker 2: who was organizing and paying for that, because that did
Speaker 2: not happen spontaneously. But anyway, I mean, what is the
Speaker 2: composition and how has it changed over the years, and
Speaker 2: what should we learn from that?
Speaker 5: I mean, the stock of illegal aliens here are still
Speaker 5: mostly Mexican, just because a lot of them came a
Speaker 5: long time ago. But the new illegal flow is actually
Speaker 5: less than half Mexican. There's still some Mexican illegal immigrants coming,
Speaker 5: still a significant number, but you know, there's no it's
Speaker 5: just not that many people left in rural Mexico. The
Speaker 5: transition from the countryside to the city has now they've
Speaker 5: gone through that. Now half of those people came to
Speaker 5: our cities but the fact is that transition is done,
Speaker 5: and so the Central Americans obviously made up most of
Speaker 5: the flow at one point, and it's diversified beyond that.
Speaker 5: Now we've got South Americans, Caribbeans, and we have increasing
Speaker 5: numbers of people, or we did under Biden coming from
Speaker 5: what they call extra continentals, you name it, they were
Speaker 5: coming from there. I mean, one of our guys went
Speaker 5: down to various parts of Central America over the past
Speaker 5: few years. He was running into people from Tajikistan and
Speaker 5: Eritrea and you name it, large numbers of people from
Speaker 5: China and India, just because there's a lot of people there.
Speaker 5: But yeah, they're coming from all over in a way
Speaker 5: that really wasn't the case before.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean the reason I thought to ask that
Speaker 2: is I recall, gosh, thirty years ago now around the
Speaker 2: time of Prop one eighty seven in California, some economists.
Speaker 5: At Stanford forty years almost right time, man, Yeah, feel yesterday.
Speaker 2: I remember some economists that I think at Stanford maybe
Speaker 2: at Hoover saying as Mexico economy grows and their people
Speaker 2: moved from the rural areas in the cities, Mexican illegal
Speaker 2: immigration will will will diminish thought. Well, maybe that's happened,
Speaker 2: and that's why I asked that question. The second one is,
Speaker 2: as I say, in general, you must be looking with
Speaker 2: some satisfaction at an administration determined to do something about this.
Speaker 2: So give us, you know what we're at day sixty,
Speaker 2: Give us a balance sheet. What do you think that
Speaker 2: Trump people are doing well? What do you think they
Speaker 2: should do better or differently?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, if you ever have a problem like this,
Speaker 5: the first thing is you turn off the faucet before
Speaker 5: you start mopping up the floor, and they've done that
Speaker 5: very well. At the border, I mean, that's just the
Speaker 5: border crisis is over. It doesn't mean no one that
Speaker 5: was ever going to cross illegally, but the border crisis
Speaker 5: is over. The jobs that are now ahead of them,
Speaker 5: and it's not so much that they've fallen down on
Speaker 5: the job. It's just sort of like the next steps
Speaker 5: is and this is something people don't think about. New
Speaker 5: illegal immigration is now going to be mainly visa overstairs,
Speaker 5: and so dealing with that issue of people coming in
Speaker 5: legally and then just never leaving is something that one
Speaker 5: administration after another has never really grappled with. These guys
Speaker 5: are going to have to and then the people who
Speaker 5: are here illegally. Can you unwind you know, eight to well,
Speaker 5: probably more like nine, ten eleven million illegal immigrants that
Speaker 5: the Biden people let in. I don't think they're going
Speaker 5: to be able to unwind all of it, but the
Speaker 5: point is unwind as much as you can. And this
Speaker 5: is where the challenge is going to be. Not just
Speaker 5: looking for the rapists and murderers, because you know they're bad,
Speaker 5: every one of them should go. But most illegal immigrants
Speaker 5: are just working stiffs. They're not rapists and murderers. That's
Speaker 5: why what they need. Work site enforcement has to be
Speaker 5: stepped up significantly, and part of that needs to be universal.
Speaker 5: Everify the online systems.
Speaker 1: When you hire.
Speaker 5: Somebody, you actually check whether they're telling you the truth
Speaker 5: about who they are and what their Social Security number is.
Speaker 5: Those are the jobs ahead of them. It's not that
Speaker 5: they have fallen down on the job because they just started,
Speaker 5: but those are the things that they're now going to
Speaker 5: have to grapple with.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm really glad you mentioned the visa overstairs, because
Speaker 2: one of the terms that's driven me nuts for years
Speaker 2: now is no, no, we can't call them illegal immigrants,
Speaker 2: they're undocumented it and I always raise my hand and say,
Speaker 2: wait a minute. Many of them have documents. They're in
Speaker 2: violation of those documents. That's called illegal. Okay, let me
Speaker 2: shift gears for a minutes, because I know Rob wants
Speaker 2: to get in with some more general questions. I want
Speaker 2: to take us overseas for a minute. And I don't
Speaker 2: know how closely you follow the immigration controversies in Europe,
Speaker 2: but it seems to me they're behind us. But I
Speaker 2: just read the headlines and I see that. I think,
Speaker 2: is it right that Sweden last year had net out
Speaker 2: migratory outflow. You see various countries starting to realize, boy,
Speaker 2: we've made a big mistake. We have we can't assimilate
Speaker 2: all these all the people we've let in. Some of
Speaker 2: these cultures are actively hostile, whereas you know, I mean
Speaker 2: Mexican immigrants. They may not speak English, but they're kind
Speaker 2: of from a Christian or American, you know, American continental culture.
Speaker 2: So we have it a little bit better off than
Speaker 2: than Europeans do. But are you involved at all or
Speaker 2: following in Europe? And what do you how do you
Speaker 2: expect that story is going to unfold? Is it going
Speaker 2: to follow ours.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I always tell Europeans, look, we have
Speaker 5: real problems in the United States, but holy moly, I'd
Speaker 5: rather have our problems than your problems. Yeah, we actually
Speaker 5: have a network of restrictionist think tanks. We've got one
Speaker 5: in Paris, one in Jerusalem, one in Budapest. And yeah,
Speaker 5: so we do follow it. And the interesting thing is
Speaker 5: the one country in Europe, well, yeah, the one Western
Speaker 5: European country that does not have a kind of so
Speaker 5: called far right whatever however you wanted to find that
Speaker 5: movement is Denmark because the left of center government there
Speaker 5: is actually restrictionist. So, in other words, they co opted
Speaker 5: the issue that the and look, I'm a right winger.
Speaker 5: I mean I'm not capolic, but I'm saying, you know,
Speaker 5: they don't have They've taken it with oxygen out of
Speaker 5: the room for those guys. And you would think that,
Speaker 5: you know, the British and the French and the Germans
Speaker 5: would understand, and they just they just don't seem to yet.
Speaker 5: And I got to say, if you're Victor Orbon, you're saying,
Speaker 5: fellas I told you so, hey, go listen to me,
Speaker 5: and you didn't, I think how much just.
Speaker 1: A concrease of weird alphabets that they seem to get
Speaker 1: it right.
Speaker 2: You must have seen that New York Times story that
Speaker 2: noted the Denmark experience and saying, huh, maybe Democrats should
Speaker 2: take a look at that anyway, Sorry, Rob, go ahead.
Speaker 1: I was to say, you know, Mark was going to
Speaker 1: get on here with his socialist Scandinavian axe to grind
Speaker 1: you love Denmark so much. I got to quit some
Speaker 1: over a general question because it just, I mean, it
Speaker 1: seems to I mean, although it has been exhausting and
Speaker 1: it feels like it's been ninety thousand years. Trump has
Speaker 1: only been president for two months, right, right? How does that?
Speaker 1: How does it work? Just in terms of the hose
Speaker 1: where I just get this idea that you know, there's
Speaker 1: a it's a you know, it's a garden hose with
Speaker 1: a big sprinkler on one end, and that's the north,
Speaker 1: that's the border of the Rio Grande, and that people
Speaker 1: come up and how where do they hear and how
Speaker 1: do they hear and how and what effect does it
Speaker 1: have on them when they are or wherever they are
Speaker 1: trying to make the decision. I'm really just speaking about
Speaker 1: just to just about people in Mexico and Latin American
Speaker 1: South America. I don't. I don't the other people. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming you're a sort of a longer tail, right, How
Speaker 1: do what? What is it that discourages them? Is it
Speaker 1: that they see something in that they read the news?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it rumor? How does that work? Well?
Speaker 5: I mean, look, every single one of these people has
Speaker 5: a smartphone, so that you know, word travels fast. I mean,
Speaker 5: it doesn't. It's not that hard to send out a
Speaker 5: message to people that the party is you know, the
Speaker 5: party is over. And in fact, when Trump took over,
Speaker 5: there were a lot of people kind of in the
Speaker 5: pipeline coming up to take advantage of Biden had created these,
Speaker 5: frankly i think unlawful programs to corroll people into the
Speaker 5: United States, so that, in other words, instead of them
Speaker 5: jumping the border illegally, the Biden administration admitted them illegally.
Speaker 5: And so a lot of these people had appointments and
Speaker 5: what have you. But then that was just canceled. They
Speaker 5: stopped at all at twelve oh one on inauguration Day,
Speaker 5: and you know they're going.
Speaker 1: Back if you could, if you could, you know, there's
Speaker 1: an unfair question about percentages to what percentage? What percentage
Speaker 1: of the problem is solved by boots on the ground,
Speaker 1: actual border enforcement, the things that physical things happening IRLA
Speaker 1: and yeah, walls, And to what extent is it? Can
Speaker 1: you leverage the smartphones and the rumors and the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: if I'm in some village somewhere and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to take a chance to come all the way to
Speaker 1: the warder and not get in, and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to give them some coyote five thousand dollars of my
Speaker 1: hard earned money because he thinks he can. Maybe what
Speaker 1: I'm hearing is that I'm not going to get in.
Speaker 1: To what extent are you does that have an effect?
Speaker 1: Just the fact that the federal government has made a
Speaker 1: credible argument no more, and is that going to step
Speaker 1: on the hose? Now, what percentage of that is going
Speaker 1: to stop the flow?
Speaker 5: I can't come up with a percentage, but you can't
Speaker 5: have one without. They're both necessary and they're but neither
Speaker 5: is sufficient. Because if you just tell people, Okay, you're
Speaker 5: not going to get in, but then if they walk,
Speaker 5: they can just wander across the river or wait across
Speaker 5: the river. I mean, I've waited across the real grand
Speaker 5: into the United States. Myself. It's not that difficult to do.
Speaker 5: There are parts of it there's no water at all.
Speaker 5: You just walk over a dry riverbed depending on the
Speaker 5: time of the year. So you need you need.
Speaker 1: But you did it just as an experiment, right, that's
Speaker 1: exactly Okay.
Speaker 5: Actually I stopped right. I didn't go into the Mexican
Speaker 5: side because there was border patrol agents watching, and I
Speaker 5: might have had that.
Speaker 1: You may have made me.
Speaker 5: Go to the port of entry all the way and
Speaker 5: across anyway. But the fact is you need to have that.
Speaker 5: But on its own it's not going to do it.
Speaker 5: There is this idea as well, we just build a
Speaker 5: wall tall enough and to moat deep enough and all
Speaker 5: the rest of it, and it'll all work. No, you
Speaker 5: need to have all of it. You need to have
Speaker 5: enforcement outside the country where the state Department makes it
Speaker 5: tough to get a visa and all of that. You
Speaker 5: need to have enforcement at the border, and you need
Speaker 5: to have enforcement inside the country too, so that for
Speaker 5: those people who do get by, they make it as
Speaker 5: difficult as possible to live a normal life here. You
Speaker 5: can't get a job, you can't get a bank account,
Speaker 5: can't get a driver's license. You need to do all
Speaker 5: of that stuff. I can't come up with a percentage.
Speaker 5: Let's just say it's thirty three and a third percent each.
Speaker 1: You know it's pretty good though.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So my other question was that I remember when all
Speaker 1: of these arguments are happening, this is the pre Trump
Speaker 1: right and the immigration hawks, and you said something like
Speaker 1: e verify, they would kind of roll their eyes again.
Speaker 4: No, no, no.
Speaker 1: No, that Jesus you slow down, my friend, has Trump
Speaker 1: in a way kind of cut the Gordian knot here
Speaker 1: by being incredibly tough both verbally and also you know,
Speaker 1: administratively on border crossings, And has that given him, or
Speaker 1: given the Trump administration the kind of I don't know,
Speaker 1: leverage or credibility among the other folks to say, okay,
Speaker 1: now we actually do need everifying, because I can remember.
Speaker 1: I'm old enough to remember that when you people talking
Speaker 1: about everify were like, you guys are that that's it
Speaker 1: sounds like amnesty to me? Is that is that helped politically?
Speaker 1: Are we are we really in a different moment or
Speaker 1: or is it just a moment? I don't mean.
Speaker 5: Look, the point of everify is to keep people from
Speaker 5: getting jobs. I mean, in a sense, what potentially could
Speaker 5: happen the kind of thing you're talking about, where do
Speaker 5: you build up credibility so that you can then be
Speaker 5: Nixon and going to China kind of thing, you know
Speaker 5: what I mean, that's sort of the issue. And we
Speaker 5: are just you know, we're not We're nowhere near that.
Speaker 5: We're not even at the beginning of the end where
Speaker 5: that may be the end of the beginning, you know,
Speaker 5: as Churchill said in other words, the kind of thing
Speaker 5: where And I look, I'm a squish on amnesty, honestly,
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm not as much of a squish as
Speaker 5: you are in a lot of things, but I am just.
Speaker 1: You know, Rober talking about there no one really is.
Speaker 1: So they get close, I get it, I get I
Speaker 1: go farther. So it doesn't mean it's no way to win.
Speaker 5: But but the point is you can't do it until
Speaker 5: you've solved the problem. And we haven't solved the problem.
Speaker 5: We've just literally we literally just stopped making it worse
Speaker 5: and are beginning to solve the problem. So I actually
Speaker 5: the way I would kind of game it out in
Speaker 5: my head is that in the second jd Vance administration,
Speaker 5: after the illegal population cut and shrunk by half or more.
Speaker 1: The earth is lava again and a smoking ruin, and.
Speaker 5: We have in place. We have in place the enforcement
Speaker 5: systems necessary, not just everify, but like a checkout system
Speaker 5: for foreign visitors we don't have. It's amazing we've tamed
Speaker 5: sanctuary cities. And then is the time for a Nixon
Speaker 5: going to China deal. But the deal is not the
Speaker 5: deal that they've always talked about, where we promise to
Speaker 5: enforce the law tomorrow for a Hamburger amnesty. Today the
Speaker 5: deal is we amnesty the people who are left, rip
Speaker 5: off the band aid, not a lot of bs about
Speaker 5: thirteen years of jumping through hoops, just get it over
Speaker 5: with in exchange for deep permanent cuts in legal immigration.
Speaker 1: So I guess my question is, like, if you split
Speaker 1: it into two groups, right, there's the I mean not
Speaker 1: the one is more legal or more illegal than another,
Speaker 1: but there are the visa overstayers, And that seems to
Speaker 1: me to be that's actually where Europe and all those
Speaker 1: lacks European countries seem to be excelling. They are really
Speaker 1: really strict about that stuff, and they're really really strict
Speaker 1: about where you can work and where you can't work.
Speaker 1: That doesn't seem like the hardest problem for us to solve.
Speaker 1: The factually seems like the easiest, like low hanging fruit. Right,
Speaker 1: it's basically a computer. I mean, it's you know, you know,
Speaker 1: and and then some kind of government you know, oversight
Speaker 1: on employment and payroll attack, which they already do. Like it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like like it should be. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously it's a greater higher scale than say what happens
Speaker 1: in France, but it's basically what the French do. You
Speaker 1: cannot work here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, yes, we're a bigger country, our rules
Speaker 5: are looser, we have a more decentralized system, so it
Speaker 5: is harder for us to deal with. But yes, the
Speaker 5: key is employment, making it as difficult as possible to
Speaker 5: live a normal life here as an illegal alien. And
Speaker 5: jobs are number one, but also driver's license and what
Speaker 5: have you. Look, states are authorized to give driver's licenses
Speaker 5: to illegals, they just have to be different from the
Speaker 5: ones acceptable for federal purposes, you know, getting out your plane,
Speaker 5: for instance. So are the challenges are are different here,
Speaker 5: but and it's not quite you know, Belgium or whatever
Speaker 5: is just easier to control even though they don't have
Speaker 5: the will to control their own country. We're a bigger place.
Speaker 5: It's harder to control. Have you been to the border.
Speaker 5: I mean, holy moly, there's no way you can stop
Speaker 5: everybody everywhere from coming across. I mean, it's a gigantic thing.
Speaker 1: So that's always been the argument about employment control. But
Speaker 1: I just mean that the the spicott of airport arrivals, right,
Speaker 1: that hose is so much narrower. Yeah, And it just
Speaker 1: feels to me like that shouldn't be that hard.
Speaker 5: It shouldn't be because and we have done better since
Speaker 5: nine to eleven at the check in part, at screening
Speaker 5: people before they get in and knowing who people are.
Speaker 5: Really is the checkout part that's the problem, because they've
Speaker 5: done some experiments on when you would check people out
Speaker 5: when they're leaving. Do you do it at the Jetway?
Speaker 5: Do you do it at TSA? It's not in Superbowl problem.
Speaker 5: No one has really ever wanted to bother with it.
Speaker 5: In fact, Janet Napolitano, who was Obama's first DHS scretary,
Speaker 5: actually testified that, yeah, you know, we really don't care.
Speaker 5: We're not working on that. Even though Congress has mandated
Speaker 5: I don't know nine times now that they come up
Speaker 5: with an electronic checkout system for visitors. So yes, it's
Speaker 5: not that hard, but you have to have the will
Speaker 5: and want time and the money into doing it. And
Speaker 5: that's my point to Steven's question, is that that's a
Speaker 5: challenge that is lying down the road for this administration.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about the deportations which have been very high profile.
Speaker 3: Put a bunch of guys on a plane, taking them off,
Speaker 3: shackling them, shaving their head, and shoving them in an
Speaker 3: Al Salvadoran prison. The effect of this perhaps has been
Speaker 3: to concentrate the mind of people who might otherwise have
Speaker 3: just lulled around the country and thought they wouldn't be
Speaker 3: caught or not. Do you think they're just going to
Speaker 3: be better about not being caught or is this one
Speaker 3: of those things that encourages self deportation on a with
Speaker 3: alacrity but the quick.
Speaker 5: Hopefully it will. And but the thing is the president
Speaker 5: always is talking about getting you know, gang members, rapists,
Speaker 5: criminals out of the country. It's all good, obviously, everybody's
Speaker 5: for that, but most illegal aliens are not you know,
Speaker 5: raping gang members. And so if you're not a criminal.
Speaker 5: You figure, okay, well, you know, I'm okay, I'll just
Speaker 5: keep my head down and it's not going to be
Speaker 5: a problem. That's my point about why you need work
Speaker 5: site enforcement, because if you raid, first of all, you
Speaker 5: get much higher numbers because you send five ICE agents
Speaker 5: to go after one criminal because it's labor intensive. The
Speaker 5: same five ICE agents raid a warehouse or something like that,
Speaker 5: you can come up with twenty illegal aliens and most
Speaker 5: of them are going to be normal people, I mean
Speaker 5: gang members. You'll still find some criminals because gang members
Speaker 5: often have day jobs as well, but most of those
Speaker 5: people are going to be ordinary folks. That's how you
Speaker 5: can get some self deportation going, not if you're just
Speaker 5: talking about TDA.
Speaker 1: You know, gang.
Speaker 5: Members and rapists and murderers. So that's the challenge that's
Speaker 5: ahead of them.
Speaker 3: And we're told constantly that if we do do that,
Speaker 3: then we're going to suffer a labor shortage. That means
Speaker 3: the vegetables and the fruits will rot in the fields,
Speaker 3: and that nobody will be able to get anything from
Speaker 3: the back of the store because there's nobody back there
Speaker 3: to stock it in the first place. It doesn't even
Speaker 3: particularly compelling argument for unlimited, untrammeled immigration. But is that
Speaker 3: the case too. We have a period ahead where we
Speaker 3: have to adjust and figure out new ways to do
Speaker 3: things because the pool of illegals can be paid under
Speaker 3: the table quietly and not enough is going to shrink.
Speaker 5: No, I mean on a national scale, that's a ridiculous argument.
Speaker 5: There will be particular places, particular companies that will be
Speaker 5: I mean, somebody is going to be inconvenience frankly, by
Speaker 5: trying to change the way we're doing things. But the idea,
Speaker 5: first of all, this is a process. It's not an event.
Speaker 5: There was this movie number of years ago, a day
Speaker 5: without an immigrant, and everybody wakes up one day and
Speaker 5: all the immigrants are gone. I think maybe it was
Speaker 5: just in California, and they're joking about people in alleys
Speaker 5: with raincoats selling vegetables secretly, you know, under the cable,
Speaker 5: all that kind of nonsense. It's that's I mean, it
Speaker 5: was a funny movie, but it's not the way things work.
Speaker 5: You would have a gradual process of shrinkage of the
Speaker 5: illegal workforce, and you know, the market would adjust. And
Speaker 5: I know that because Uncle Adam Smith told me that's
Speaker 5: the way things work. And you know, we've seen that
Speaker 5: in all kinds of areas where let's say, you know,
Speaker 5: there's fewer people working, you know, available for a bakery
Speaker 5: to hire. In Chicago, that happened there was a raid,
Speaker 5: they got a lot of illegal aliens out. Well, guess what.
Speaker 5: They hired locals who were in this case were black
Speaker 5: who weren't able to get hired because the workers were
Speaker 5: all Mexican. They raised the wages, they passed the net
Speaker 5: wider for looking for employees, and they look into new,
Speaker 5: less labor intensive ways of doing their work. It's this
Speaker 5: isn't rocket science. And so I yes, if eleven million
Speaker 5: twelve well actually now it's more like sixteen million illegal
Speaker 5: aliens if they disappeared tomorrow, Yeah, absolutely, it would be
Speaker 5: enormously disruptive. There's literally no way that's going to happen.
Speaker 5: And so it's one of those things that you know,
Speaker 5: it's a hypothetical that's irrelevant to even respond to because
Speaker 5: it can't and won't happen.
Speaker 3: Mark, thanks for joining us again, and would you please
Speaker 3: come up with a book or something so we can
Speaker 3: push it here. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I got to come up with a new one. I
Speaker 5: have a book from before, but it's too old and
Speaker 5: Penguin ran away from it. So maybe when, maybe when
Speaker 5: Rob gets ordained, because I outrank him now I'm a deacon,
Speaker 5: but if he gets ordained, then.
Speaker 1: I'll be a You're digging to the Armenian Church, so right.
Speaker 5: Yes, I am, but we're all part of the Holy
Speaker 5: Apostolic and you know, right, yeah, you guys have that
Speaker 5: those great hats.
Speaker 1: Though I might be I might be looking at that.
Speaker 1: You got better outphabits. I know that's a reason to
Speaker 1: do it, but you know it's not not a reason
Speaker 1: put it that way exactly.
Speaker 5: Although I don't have to wear one of those. I'm
Speaker 5: just a deal.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you, Deacon Mark, and we look forward to
Speaker 3: talking to you again about something that will no doubt
Speaker 3: be four front for the next two, three, four five years. Marcu,
Speaker 3: Corny and ladies and gentlemen, see you later.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Oh it's a pleasure. The Armenian apple. Okay, let me
Speaker 3: get this straight. Is there an Armenian Orthodox Church that
Speaker 3: is separate from other? Correct me, Rob, No, I don't
Speaker 3: know much.
Speaker 1: I don't know much about the I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: all the Armenian churches I've ever heard of are pretty Orthodox,
Speaker 1: but it's a different from the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, okay, all right, because I know that, you know,
Speaker 3: there's the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and I think recently, if
Speaker 3: I remember correctly, they did some calendar adjustments so that
Speaker 3: Easter was not as far off. You know, am I
Speaker 3: right there? And I think it the same with with Christmas.
Speaker 3: I think they adjusted it so that it's a little
Speaker 3: closer to the to the Western traditions because you know,
Speaker 3: all the Yukes I know would say Merry Christmas and
Speaker 3: then they'd have their own like fourteen fifteen days later.
Speaker 3: Same thing with yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Easter. Orthodox Easter, though, is actually one of the
Speaker 1: great chaotic scenes in world religious sort of celebration. You know,
Speaker 1: they are now on the show like scenes from Devali
Speaker 1: or something, or the water festival in Vietnam or even
Speaker 1: you know, parts of Ramadan. I e to the end
Speaker 1: of Ramadan. And I mean it looks crazy, but if
Speaker 1: you've never seen you go on YouTube the Orthodox Easter
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that
Speaker 1: the banana's quality of that is so incredibly inspiring. Crazy.
Speaker 1: It's like this fire everywhere. The idea that nobody dies,
Speaker 1: nobody gets immolated multiple times in that celebration is just
Speaker 1: crazy to me, and somehow it all works.
Speaker 3: Well, you mentioned these other, these other ceremonies and celebrations
Speaker 3: in other religions around the globe, you know, roughly the
Speaker 3: same time. Why do you think that is? I mean,
Speaker 3: you go back to Roman times and you will find
Speaker 3: that there's particular, you know, celebrations around at that particular time.
Speaker 1: What do you mean you mean spring or spring? Yes, spring, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a there are I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: everybody has a different kind of spring, right, so if
Speaker 1: you're in the Southern hemisphere, Global South, your spring is
Speaker 1: different from our spring. It's a different month. So it
Speaker 1: doesn't really work in the same time of year. But
Speaker 1: we as Christians believe that the year, the Church year,
Speaker 1: is both symbolic and meaningful, and that it coincides with equinoxes.
Speaker 1: Right that aren't necessarily on the twenty fifth of December
Speaker 1: or the or the twenty first of March, whenever the
Speaker 1: spring one is. But they're meaningful. I mean there's a
Speaker 1: the actual day, specific days, sick days of Good Friday
Speaker 1: and Easter Sunday are they're not consistent in the Gospels, right,
Speaker 1: but you know how you read it? Good Friday could
Speaker 1: be Thursday.
Speaker 3: I think it's in John well what but but it
Speaker 3: all appears it's all within the same time. It's all
Speaker 3: these equinoxes, it's all the shifts. There are things globally experienced.
Speaker 3: You know, spring for example, it's got massive temperature swings
Speaker 3: at least up here, and that can leave you waking
Speaker 3: up with the sweats.
Speaker 2: I knew it.
Speaker 1: I knew it.
Speaker 6: I was just I was searching for this and I
Speaker 6: was looking through that one like going with it, strolling
Speaker 6: me and I is this an episode of the Prisoner
Speaker 6: where we don't know who is Dan?
Speaker 1: Who's to dance?
Speaker 3: I threw that five minutes ago, and I've been.
Speaker 1: Just man, sinker. Good for you. I knew what was
Speaker 1: going on, but I kind of was looking at you, Steve,
Speaker 1: like what Steve's face is there?
Speaker 3: Anyway, if I may reset and tell you about cozy Earth,
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Speaker 3: Before we go here, we've got a few minutes left
Speaker 3: to discuss amongst yourselves. Let's see, Oh war, that's right,
Speaker 3: one of the old hoothis, didn't we How is that
Speaker 3: ongoing at the moment? Don't think so? Was the point made?
Speaker 3: Doesn't seem so because they're still saber rattling. And but
Speaker 3: there's a space two or three days ago where people
Speaker 3: were convinced that something big was going to happened to Iran,
Speaker 3: and there was the usual contingent of people who say, no, sorry,
Speaker 3: nothing ever happens. And when it comes to Iran, what
Speaker 3: do you guys think?
Speaker 2: Well, Okay, this hoothy business is tiresome. At this point,
Speaker 2: remember that the Biden administration came in took the Hoothies
Speaker 2: off the terror sponsored list of our State Department because
Speaker 2: we thought if we were nice to them, maybe they
Speaker 2: behaved better.
Speaker 1: They didn't.
Speaker 2: Biden escalated a little, but it seemed like Vietnam style.
Speaker 2: Let's shoot a few rockets at them and a couple
Speaker 2: of bombs and maybe they'll behave better. And they didn't.
Speaker 2: Israel has struck some hard blows against them several times
Speaker 2: now following rocket attacks, and now Trump seems to be
Speaker 2: saying we've had it with the disruption of shipping there
Speaker 2: around the Red Sea. So and then supposedly people say,
Speaker 2: what Trump is really doing is signaling the Iranians, because
Speaker 2: Trumps keeps saying the Huthians, the Cuthians, right Uthians, and
Speaker 2: the blowfish or the blow of Heart's eye anyway, that
Speaker 2: they're the cat's paw for Iran. And look, James, I
Speaker 2: do think that if there's an attack on it run.
Speaker 2: It's going to come out of the blue. And whether
Speaker 2: it's going to be Israel or Israel and US or
Speaker 2: Israel with our help, who knows. But I think that
Speaker 2: will be at a time of hour in Israel's choosing
Speaker 2: because left out of course, and I know you know
Speaker 2: about it is the Israel has turned the guzz of
Speaker 2: war back on in a big way in the last
Speaker 2: seventy two hours or so.
Speaker 3: Did they turn it back on or do they just
Speaker 3: resume the I mean, if Gaza had released all the hostage,
Speaker 3: if the if the Hamas had released everybody, do you
Speaker 3: think that would be resumption of the hostilities or do
Speaker 3: you think this is a reaction to Hamas not doing.
Speaker 2: Oh well, I think it's the latter, I think. But
Speaker 2: they've sent troops. Ground troops are back in Gaza. It's
Speaker 2: not just air strikes. So I think it's it's on again.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean, there was some possibility that if
Speaker 2: the Hamas had released all the hostages, that we might
Speaker 2: have made a ceasefire stick and postponed it for another day.
Speaker 2: That's unpopular in Israel, but Hamas is so determined to
Speaker 2: go down with all fours flying and all people dying,
Speaker 2: that Israel had no choice but to start it up again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I also figure that they know more now. I
Speaker 1: mean there's every single one of those hostages that's given
Speaker 1: them intelligence, and they have a better map of Gaza
Speaker 1: now and they have a better understanding where to look
Speaker 1: for hostages. So they may be going in to perform
Speaker 1: you know, some percentage of rescues, and which would be
Speaker 1: a disastrous for Hamas, right, I mean, like you you
Speaker 1: have you every every rescued hostage is one chip you
Speaker 1: can't bargain with. And that is clearly, that's clearly the
Speaker 1: the the Israelis preferred position, which is understandable. The strangest
Speaker 1: thing here is that I feel like we we we
Speaker 1: keep getting into this strange trap as Americans, sort of
Speaker 1: American policymakers for foreign policymakers, where we think that the
Speaker 1: people who are orchestrating the terrorism, you know, Hamas or
Speaker 1: Hoodies or whoever, or Iran, they what they have an
Speaker 1: agenda of policy, positions have goals, they need to be addressed,
Speaker 1: and the problem with that is that they don't when
Speaker 1: the reason the Whodi's attacked is because we haven't been
Speaker 1: paying attention to them for a while, and they want
Speaker 1: some attention. And it's not just the childish attention kind
Speaker 1: is that those those organizations only work if their own
Speaker 1: population is subdued and cheering for them, so they need
Speaker 1: to be attacked. I mean, Hamas doesn't see this disaster
Speaker 1: in Gaza as a disaster for Hamas. It's exactly what
Speaker 1: they want. They don't care that all these Gosins are dead.
Speaker 1: They really don't care. It wasn't the point that those
Speaker 1: have always been pawms that you sacrificed for a larger point,
Speaker 1: which is power. So when we when we treat them
Speaker 1: as we say them, treat them with respect, or when
Speaker 1: we try a different diplomatic attack on all of these groups,
Speaker 1: we actually end up encouraging them to be more and
Speaker 1: more incendiary. And then the only alternative really is to
Speaker 1: attack them with They also makes them stronger, but that
Speaker 1: is or makes them feel stronger, but that is That's
Speaker 1: been the Israeli position all along, is that you have
Speaker 1: to you have to keep going. You know, the blood,
Speaker 1: the cold blood at Israeli position is Hamas and its
Speaker 1: members must be destroyed, All of them must be destroyed.
Speaker 1: And we don't like to say that. It just doesn't
Speaker 1: sound right, but their argument, and you talk to Israeli politicians,
Speaker 1: really policymakers, and they're almost always go to a kind
Speaker 1: of a public health metaphor, a viral metaphor. The virus
Speaker 1: has to be destroyed. And unfortunately that's us people, and
Speaker 1: it's horrible to hear, it's horrible to think. It's a
Speaker 1: horrible position to be in. But the people that you're
Speaker 1: dealing with aren't operating under any other set of priorities.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you're playing a game and the
Speaker 1: person you're playing with is playing by different rules, guess what,
Speaker 1: you're playing their game because they're playing by different rules.
Speaker 1: That's how that works. And there's no there's no effort
Speaker 1: on the yet I don't know, or no public effort
Speaker 1: on the part of Hamas's paymasters to change that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sorry, it's not very uplifting.
Speaker 3: And Steve and you are.
Speaker 2: Well sorry, Well, I don't know if we want to
Speaker 2: continue on this or not. James, I'll just chime in
Speaker 2: this way. You know, the mistake that the American foreign
Speaker 2: policy makers have been making for decades with with just
Speaker 2: about everybody is we think that everybody is going to
Speaker 2: be rational in more or less the same way we are,
Speaker 2: and I think we're very slow to realize that while
Speaker 2: people can make rational calculations in the ordinary sense, there's
Speaker 2: often much deeper currents of thinking. So I could go
Speaker 2: back and give you examples from the Middle East for years.
Speaker 2: But what's on my mind right now is you may
Speaker 2: have caught the story a week or so ago where
Speaker 2: Trump sent some new guy with no experience in foreign
Speaker 2: policy and negotiation to meet with Hamas in Qatar, and
Speaker 2: he said publicly, gosh, they turned out to be really
Speaker 2: nice guys, really foolish, stupid things, and in fact that
Speaker 2: Trump people have since pulled this guy back because he
Speaker 2: was an embarrassment. But you know, I can give you
Speaker 2: lots of examples where people in the Middle East to
Speaker 2: Hamas Amas thought, by the way October sixth, that hes
Speaker 2: blow is going to come in from the north, the
Speaker 2: West Bank would rise up, and they were going to
Speaker 2: crush Israel at a stroke.
Speaker 1: That's sort of their view of how the world would work,
Speaker 1: or should work.
Speaker 2: I could easily imagine some Hamas people thinking, ah, Trump
Speaker 2: secretly wants to put distance between himself and Israel. We're
Speaker 2: not on the ropes, after all. All we need to
Speaker 2: do is hold out and we're going to win. Or
Speaker 2: and as I say, this is the sort of a
Speaker 2: deep conspiratorial thinking, or deep sort of perverse contrarian thinking
Speaker 2: that's very deeply embedded in a lot of these really
Speaker 2: cult like groups of people like Hamas and so forth.
Speaker 2: So and by the way, gee, Trump is't He's easily
Speaker 2: capable of confusing people on purpose or quite by accident,
Speaker 2: or both. Right, So I got to think that the
Speaker 2: Hamas people are they say, I mean, we think, and
Speaker 2: I think it's right that Trump is very pro Israel,
Speaker 2: very supportive of net and Yahoo. But I could easily
Speaker 2: imagine certain certain precincts of the radical air of mind thinking, no,
Speaker 2: there's something else going on here, and it's all very
Speaker 2: strange and byzantine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yes, it makes me think that if you
Speaker 3: stuck a Queers for Palestine bumper sticker in the back
Speaker 3: of a tesla, right when I make some people's heads,
Speaker 3: smoke would come from their collar like a computer that
Speaker 3: Kirk could arg get into an a logical position. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is one of the more interesting developments in the
Speaker 3: last week is the is the transfer of hatred of
Speaker 3: everything Doge related and Musk related onto the vehicles of
Speaker 3: the car company. So that now what used to be
Speaker 3: a sign a virtue that I care about the earth,
Speaker 3: I am not consuming the awful hydrocarbons. Look at me,
Speaker 3: I'm electric, is now proof that you somehow are that
Speaker 3: you are, if not a Nazi sympathizer or tall, an
Speaker 3: actual Nazi yourself. And when you have these coordinated protests apparently,
Speaker 3: I I forget what days is it, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Speaker 3: Everyone is going to rise up and go to the
Speaker 3: deal to They're going to go protest at the car dealership,
Speaker 3: which I find an odd thing. Now I can imagine
Speaker 3: if this was Ford in the nineteen twenties and people
Speaker 3: were concerned about some of his policies in regards to
Speaker 3: the Holy Land.
Speaker 2: You know, but this is ridiculous, Well, James, I mean,
Speaker 2: this just shows you Trump's genius. Trump has accomplished one
Speaker 2: thing that Republicans have tried without success for sixty years,
Speaker 2: and that's get Democrats to hate the Kennedys, or at
Speaker 2: least one Kennedy right. And it's now managed to get
Speaker 2: many people on the left to hate and get rid
Speaker 2: of their electric cars. Was that Senator Mark Kelly dumped
Speaker 2: his test life and bought a Chevrolet Suburban?
Speaker 1: I mean, I love it.
Speaker 3: I was reading we had there was apparently there was
Speaker 3: a Tesla charge at charging station around Fargo or something
Speaker 3: that was vandalized, and the people on the reddit were saying, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really weird, man. I mean a couple of years ago,
Speaker 3: as all the rednecks who were vanalyzing the EV charging
Speaker 3: station and wait a minute, did I miss that part? Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think they cared one bit of the other.
Speaker 3: They laughed at them. Laughterism vandalism, unless, of course it's
Speaker 3: language in case by violence.
Speaker 1: But I don't.
Speaker 3: I can't know. I think the people who were probably
Speaker 3: chopping it up were going for the copper. And I
Speaker 3: don't see the good old boy sitting around saying, well,
Speaker 3: we're done, We're done being sarcastic about bud Light. Why
Speaker 3: don't we go vandalize a test list. I just don't
Speaker 3: see it, No, I don't. What I do see is
Speaker 3: that all of you are going to go to Apple
Speaker 3: Podcasts didn't give us five reviews. What I do see
Speaker 3: is that you're going to go to ricochet dot com
Speaker 3: and click on the member feed. Oh you can't. Sorry,
Speaker 3: that's right, you can't because you're not a member. But
Speaker 3: if for just you know coins, for just a pittance,
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Speaker 1: You can read the.
Speaker 3: Main page and listen to the podcast all you like,
Speaker 3: but you join and there's lots of stuff, including the
Speaker 3: right to comment.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: As Rob has said for seven hundred and thirty two
Speaker 3: podcas asked, you get skin in the game, and that
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Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: Also cozy Earth for the sheets. You want to regulate
Speaker 3: your temperature and make for a nice spring and bamboo
Speaker 3: hr which will help you with the difficult parts of
Speaker 3: running a business. You really don't want to think about
Speaker 3: what you got to do anyway, Stephen, thank you, Rob,
Speaker 3: always a pleasure yourself. Give regards to everybody back in
Speaker 3: the you know, in the monastery, in the cloisters, and
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