On this episode of THAKE Crime: The Podcast, Andrew and Jack are joined by producer Blake Neff ( ) and Jack Posobiec ( ) to discuss the latest in the immigration debate. They also talk about the latest on the back of the bus debate, and whether it's better to be in the front or in the back.
00:03:12.400It was my show the day after the Iowa primary – after our live stream.
00:03:15.440And this sort of debate had been raging online and then you had mentioned it on air and, you know, you come on right before me.
00:03:23.980So, everyone was sort of having this conversation.
00:03:25.660It bled over into our shows as these things do on social media and then just sort of in the information space.
00:03:32.720And the question, of course, becomes what to do with the people who say they want to unite the party now that they realize that they were on the losing end of the primary.
00:03:43.600And, you know, the question is – I think it's multifaceted.
00:03:48.100And I had Raheem on and we had some great questions and some great repartee about this.
00:03:51.940And, you know, we've all been through a few election cycles at this point.
00:03:55.000So, it's not like this is the first time we've been – we've encountered this question.
00:04:09.480Some seats are in the back by the bathrooms.
00:04:11.260And, yes, I was obviously playing off of the MLK stuff earlier in this week.
00:04:16.200And then I said, you know, but there are some people who don't get on the bus because, you know – well, I should say, by the way, there's also strap hangers, you know, for the people who are standing on the bus.
00:06:24.340And I think you'll agree with me on that, that, you know, you should be out there every day defending your candidate, pushing narratives, responding to things in the news.
00:06:34.440And yet Jeremy Redfern posted a tweet today from, again, he's being paid by, I don't know, I don't think he was off today.
00:06:39.640So it looked like he was on the clock being paid by the taxpayers of Florida saying that Donald Trump was missing from the campaign trail.
00:06:46.360And not only was he missing, but the fact that he was in his basement.
00:06:49.800Yeah, there's a major news cycle over the past 24 hours that Donald Trump asked to be let out of court today so that he could attend the funeral for his mother-in-law, for his wife's mother, who died, his son's grandmother, okay, Amalia Kvas.
00:07:07.720And this was a situation where these same people, these very same people, maybe not Jeremy directly, but the DeSantis camp had been attacking Melania Trump because she didn't appear at any of the holiday parties for Mar-a-Lago over the holidays, whether it be Christmas, whether it be New Year.
00:07:25.040She was, you know, conspicuously absent from Christmas photos and things, and they were attacking her as missing and saying that she was on the outs.
00:07:31.740And there's something Brian Stelter had done as a conspiracy theory during the administration at one point as well.
00:07:36.140Well, it turns out that instead of just asking around, I mean, they're in Florida, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out if you had, like, actual sources.
00:07:41.600Um, she was attending her mother while she was on her deathbed.
00:07:46.320And so, you know, when I say no snakes on the bus, I'm, I'm thinking of people like this specifically, people like this, absolutely.
00:07:54.000You're not just off on the back of the bus, we're throwing you out the back door of the back of the bus.
00:07:58.060Uh, and people like Jamie Dimon, when they want to suddenly run around up there, plapping his gums at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, on CNBC, wearing his Ukrainian lapel pin, Ukrainian flag lapel pin, suddenly, suddenly this guy who, yes, was, did pay $75 million to Jeffrey Epstein's, um, uh, victims because JP Morgan, which he's the chairman of, was the banker for Epstein's money.
00:08:23.720You know, he's suddenly talking about how important it is that he loves MAGA and Trump's a great guy and we shouldn't insult Trump voters.
00:08:30.220And it's like, okay, I can see what's going on here.
00:08:41.880Well, I think, Jack, where this is coming from, people have to understand where this comes from in the context of everybody, at least at this table.
00:08:49.520We've, we've been through this in 2016, 2020, and I think universally there's a, a love, especially much, you know, I don't mean to talk for you, Charlie, but massive influencers within the MAGA movement, Jack, Charlie, you guys have a universal love for Trump.
00:09:07.680The person, you guys have sat with him, had dinner with him, like, there is a genuine affection, I think, that goes both ways.
00:09:13.720Where it starts breaking down, at least in past experiences, is there are certain people that glob onto power within the inner circles of the Trump orbits, right?
00:09:24.520And that has created a lot of consternation in the past, a lot of burned bridges, a lot of hurt feelings, not necessarily with people here, but we've all heard about it.
00:09:33.700And it is, on the one hand, something that's just necessary.
00:09:38.100It's inevitable, rather, that you're going to have certain people that you're close with, not so close with within the Trump orbit.
00:09:43.500But what we're saying is, listen, this has been a, a season where we know who our true friends are.
00:09:51.380You have seen the people that will stick by you through thick and thin in this last season, because it was very easy for a lot of people, because we saw so many examples of people taking the paycheck, people going on.
00:10:03.560I mean, for the record, you know, Charlie does not get paid a dime to say something nice about Trump.
00:10:09.540No, I get nothing but, you know, we've lost tons of donors.
00:10:11.840I, I'm going to, I'm going to just be very transparent with the audience, and I want everyone's advice.
00:10:18.180So I got a text message from somebody this week, and I didn't respond, and I prayed about it, and I wanted to respond a certain way, and I didn't respond a certain way.
00:10:27.720And it's, it's somebody that's actually being debated online of whether or not forgiveness shall be offered, and it's Steve Cortez.
00:11:40.640Usually when someone you, when someone you talk to, it would be like, it would be like if I suddenly went to work for DeSantis out of nowhere.
00:11:48.280And, by the way, hadn't, like, sent a message to anyone I talk to on a regular basis to say, hey, guys, by the way, I'm thinking of doing this.
00:12:00.440You know, none of, didn't pick up the phone to call anybody.
00:12:02.760And just one day, boom, this is all of a sudden happening.
00:12:08.120Raheem, who, you know, I think, as everybody knows, is another, what do you call it, co-host, guest host, you know, kind of on the war room roster.
00:12:17.960And, you know, he said something quite prescient, I think, on the show.
00:12:21.100He said, look, get out there and do the work.
00:12:24.080Get out there and do the work and show us that you're interested in actually winning and actually defeating Joe Biden.
00:12:45.520No, I'm just, I, so I'm, I'm battling and wrestling.
00:12:49.400Do we let him immediately back into the camp?
00:12:52.340Because it was all DeSantis, all the time, sudden shift as if nothing happens.
00:12:57.520But I would say, Charlie, and just on Steve, just on Steve, and I'll say this quickly, is that he, he did not comport himself the way that, like, a Jeremy Redfern did, right?
00:13:07.240I don't remember him getting anything personal.
00:13:09.320I don't remember him attacking Donald Trump personally.
00:13:11.960I don't remember him attacking any of us personally, calling us stupid, calling us names, saying things like Ashley Babbitt should have died, which Jeremy Redfern did say.
00:13:21.180So, you know, when I talk about people who comported themselves a certain way, that's kind of who I'm talking about.
00:13:27.760Now, the question of letting someone back into the camp, where do they sit on the bus, do they sit on the bus?
00:13:31.960Those are all different questions, but I would not put him in the category of, you know.
00:13:35.960Would you, would you let him back on the bus, Jack?
00:14:05.100I feel like that's probably the funny thing is, I feel like we'll get this MAGA bloodlust almost, like, don't let any of the traitors back in.
00:14:12.980And then we'll turn around, and it'll be a year from now, and we'll be like, why are there three Democrats in the cabinet?
00:14:17.880And why is he only giving interviews to the New York Times again?
00:14:25.560And I think the big fear a lot of people have is, what if all the mistakes that were made in 2017, that could easily be chalked up to inexperience.
00:14:38.320I'm not sure the easy way to answer that.
00:14:39.940This is what's driving a lot of this conversation is because there was really two pieces of it.
00:14:45.900There was the behind-the-scenes piece, right, people getting close to Trump, Jack, you know this really well, that would either block out or embrace.
00:14:53.200And we all sort of knew who the true believers were and who they weren't, you guys better than I.
00:14:57.900And then there was the front of house people, the people that were public that you were like, these people ended up being the biggest snakes in the grass that you can imagine.
00:15:06.620And I think, Jack, you tweeted out something like that these people that are trying to come back to Trump and cozy on up to Trump after Iowa are getting the snake in the grass poem.
00:15:15.160And from a personnel standpoint, we saw time and again how his policies were thwarted by bad personnel choices, right?
00:15:25.920So we're all saying like, hey, we've got a very hardcore agenda here.
00:15:29.160We're going to deport 10 million illegals.
00:15:34.440And we don't want these globalists that like secretly wish Nikki won the, you know, nom, but, you know, don't want to be irrelevant either, trying to cozy back up to the guy that's supposed to be leading the charge here.
00:15:45.680And here's the issue, too, is with appointments.
00:15:49.260And I'm not – by the way, I'm not talking even about appointments at this point.
00:15:52.380I'm talking just very loosely like, you know, I don't even know, like retweets, right?
00:15:57.480Like throwing somebody a retweet is, you know, what did we learn from the first administration that you cannot trust anyone?
00:19:26.680And it was like, okay, if Mike Pence, old, boring, you know, Mike Pence is telling you to come back and back this guy, okay, that's comforting somehow.
00:19:35.020And, man, the funny thing is, is when you said he had a feud with Mike Pence, I had to pause and think, why would he have a feud?
00:20:16.220What's funny is I feel like Trump can forgive too easy and not enough because what he really does is he fixates on these enemies.
00:20:22.580And this is what I worry about a bit with DeSantis is that DeSantis was not merely an opponent that Trump had to, you know, cast – drive aside in order to get the nomination.
00:20:32.440I think that's kind of what Ted Cruz was like in 2016, for example.
00:20:35.960DeSantis became the Jeb Bush of the 2024 primary.
00:20:41.820He became this figure that Trump, like, fixated on really early.
00:20:45.680He was attacking DeSantis even before the midterms.
00:20:48.620And he really seemed to relish, you know, coming up with all the nicknames, really humiliating him.
00:20:56.180And I feel like any person who gets in that role with Trump, I don't know that Trump has ever rehabilitated someone from that.
00:21:05.080And I could see that causing a good amount of long-term bitterness, at least in some quarters.
00:21:11.580Like, we talked about people getting nasty politically – you know, people saying nasty stuff about Trump supporters in support of DeSantis.
00:21:17.820But the Trump campaign implied – or at least people linked with the Trump campaign implied that DeSantis' wife faked having cancer and that DeSantis was a pedophile.
00:21:45.800There was a lot of bad stuff like that, but I do feel like things got very – there were some very wild allegations that were made against DeSantis' family from at least people pretty adjacent to Trump world.
00:21:59.940I can't remember if there was ever a truth about it or anything like that.
00:22:02.440I don't think that they went as hard at DeSantis as they did against Ted Cruz.
00:23:07.320And I feel like he could end up doing that to DeSantis just in the sense that he loves beating up on DeSantis.
00:23:12.120But if he doesn't perceive himself as having this feud with a person and there's only a few people that's really like, yeah, he'll just get over it immediately.
00:23:21.200And he'll have the dinner conversation with them and three hours later it'll just be, Nikki Haley is back in MAGA camp.
00:23:29.580We're going to appoint your secretary of state.
00:23:31.420Well, to that statement though, I mean look at the dust up with Vivek from the last time that we were on a live stream together.
00:23:40.020All four of us on a live stream, we were all talking about the dust up with Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:23:45.580We were talking about the fact that, oh my gosh, Trump is going so hard at him.
00:24:28.580Cause you know, my temptation, let me just say my, my fleshly temptation wanted to say, oh, Steve, thanks for the text, man.
00:24:35.980Where were you over the summer when you were pumping DeSantis for an unnecessary primary, probably being paid way too much money by a now defunct bankrupted super PAC.
00:24:44.240I didn't say that, but like I was tempted to, you know what I'm saying?
00:24:47.880Like I was saying like, but I didn't think while we were laboring through the fields of trying to get this nomination over with.
00:26:16.460Is someone like Steve Cortez more trustworthy than a silent establishment person that just lurks in the water and doesn't have any strong opinions?
00:26:33.180I would rather have Steve Cortez than all of a sudden the establishment figure that appears when Trump looks like he's going to be the nominee.
00:26:39.980There's a million people who just, yeah, stay below the surface, don't say too much.
00:26:44.640This is a cottage industry I have not – I'm going to write a piece on this, and I think it's so important.
00:26:49.740And I'm just learning – because all of a sudden as Trump's getting the nomination, I'm seeing texts and calls of people I haven't in a long time.
00:27:13.100I said, all of a sudden my phone is chirping more than the smoke alarm in Joy Reid's living room with people that I haven't heard from in years.
00:27:21.160But I wanted to get this out that Raheem had a great point about this, and Raheem and Steve have – I'm not going to speak for him, but they were obviously very close before all this war room posse, et cetera.
00:27:30.980And Raheem had a point, and he said, look, there was a time in my life where I would have said, screw them all and kick them all overboard.
00:27:37.880But one thing is, what are you bringing to bear?
00:27:41.440And I think, Charlie, this is kind of what you're getting at as well, is what do you bring to the table?
00:27:45.640And one thing that Steve Cortez had, and he still does have this, is that he was an excellent communicator, that he did have that communication skill.
00:27:57.620He had that ability to bring this to bear.
00:27:59.660Now, he never really was able to put it into play for DeSantis, which, by the way, is a whole interesting story that I'd love to get to because I remember he wasn't really doing these things for DeSantis.
00:28:09.820It's like they kind of put him on the shelf really, really far.
00:28:12.820And then the question is, do you want a guy out there every day making chalk talks like that for Donald Trump?
00:28:19.340And I was like, you know, on average, on net, I would rather have that on margin.
00:28:24.700So, Jack, as far as high-level appointments and things, that's, you know.
00:28:29.280Well, and Jack, I think what's interesting about 2020, 2026 versus now is 2026, it made sense to unite the clans, right?
00:28:39.220Like bring everybody home because Trump did not have an established backing.
00:28:43.440But what made 2023 awkward was, A, and I think, Jack, you know this better than anybody, is how vitriolic and obnoxious the DeSantis influencers became.
00:28:55.260And then, B, the mere fact that all of them used to back Donald Trump.
00:29:00.540So it was – but whereas in 2016, you know, the people that were anti-Trump, never Trump, they had never backed him before.
00:29:29.000If you're DeSantis, if you're – just look at a basic game theory here.
00:29:33.760If you're DeSantis, you need to convert Trump voters to win.
00:29:38.940And so if your team is running around calling everyone members of a cult, then you're not going to get those people on your side.
00:29:45.740Meanwhile, if you're a Trump supporter, yeah, you can shave off a couple of points of hardcore DeSantis supporters because, again, as you say, he is the presumptive nominee.
00:30:00.700So just basic game theory would say that the guy in the lead is able to do that.
00:30:04.340It didn't feel welcoming to be – they felt like it was an antagonistic – I don't know why – Blake, I know you disagree with me on this.
00:31:54.420He was Curtis DeSantis at one point because he was like, I want competency.
00:31:58.080He was like, I want – he was like, I get it.
00:32:00.460Like, I love the funny bad boy stuff, the funny tweets and all.
00:32:04.000But at the end of the day, sure, you can win an election, but what does it matter if you don't get anything across the board when you're actually in office?
00:32:11.600And, you know, he said this publicly, so I'm not putting words in his mouth.
00:32:16.920But it was more this idea that if we can get a guy in who's competent and also has all of these beliefs but without the drama, then maybe we can actually move the needle.
00:32:28.600And case in point is that you had people who were on staff acting this way online, on staff, Jeremy Redfirm and others on staff who were doing this – engaging in this type of behavior.
00:32:40.440I want to tell everyone – let's have a conversation really quick about one of our sponsors, this medical emergency kit with TWC.health slash CJ.
00:32:48.600CJ, that is quite a URL, isn't it, Andrew?
00:32:55.060So this is a really cool thing because when people get sick a lot and one of the things – I get text messages all the time and one of the things I'm most thankful and proud of and Blake is going to cringe and I don't care is that during COVID, I referred 50 to 60 people that were really struggling to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and we hit home runs every single time.
00:41:04.860But we can't – also, it's okay that they're more common than the population in professional sports or hip-hop or any of these industries.
00:41:36.320So you get people who either are veterans, and those go through a pretty tough winnowing process, or people who care enough about it and have the resources to be hobby pilots at a high amount of time.
00:41:48.060Or their parents paid for flight school when they're 16, 17, or 18 years old.
00:41:51.580Which is a thing of upper-middle-class society.
00:41:53.480And so, man, you have to be careful saying that because soon we'll get Congress just allocating $50 billion to the, like, women-in-flight program to pay for underprivileged people to just get flight hours.
00:42:05.120And then they'll just be crashing small planes all over the place.
00:42:07.960But this is – I think this is the red pill of the red pill.
00:42:11.620Every issue where anyone who's remotely normie in my orbit goes 10 out of 10, it's the flight one.
00:43:19.900And the truth is, this is a creation that the left wanted.
00:43:24.520And they think you can't say anything about it because they'll call you a racist.
00:43:29.180And this is where we really have to take the gloves off and say your name calling will not get in the way of people's safety at 35,000 feet.
00:43:38.100They're like, it's offensive to call someone a diversity hire.
00:43:40.160You guys are the ones who legally require diversity hires.
00:43:42.460You are the ones who say we need to hire people based on skin color.
00:43:46.000If we didn't hire people based on skin color, this wouldn't happen because every pilot would be qualified.
00:43:59.680And I said, am I supposed to just not notice that Fannie Willis is on the exact same Soros prosecutor trajectory as Kim Gardner was in St. Louis?
00:45:51.760Like, yes, we need the most diverse flight crew ever because obviously when – by the way, Rob Schneider has the best – I love Rob Schneider.
00:46:02.680But there's just not an acknowledgment of certain constraining limitations here.
00:46:07.100And I think that's what's so troubling is in that clip he doesn't acknowledge that there is structural and cultural reasons for this disparity.
00:46:13.980And so you're sitting here as, like, a potential victim in the back of the plane going, like, oh, my gosh.
00:46:19.640Like, he's just going to force this through.
00:46:21.520And there's – he doesn't seem to care about the fact that if some people can't fly so good.
00:46:26.060If Delta wanted to just dominate, they should do an ad and be like, Delta Airlines, excellence is how we hire our pilots.
00:46:45.020It's just someone's going to die because we could joke about this all we want.
00:46:48.260You cannot have – it's very, very sophisticated.
00:46:52.160You hire people for sophisticated, high-stakes, immediate call jobs with 50 checklist items, and you do not have competency as the core reason.
00:47:08.080Yeah, no, I actually looked this up recently when this whole sort of discourse began.
00:47:13.960And in the Soviet Union, it was known and it was well-known at the time that it was the worst air travel in the entire world because, again, pilots in the Soviet Union, Aeroflot, were chosen for political reasons.
00:47:27.820Now, it wasn't diversity reasons, but, again, it was another political non-quality, non-qualified reason.
00:47:33.820So you had to be – you know, you had to be of the right moral character, which, of course, was run through the KTV and run through the party and your family couldn't have any dissidents in it and all of this stuff.
00:47:44.560And you would get literally hundreds, almost 1,000 plane crashes throughout the history of the USSR, like something like 700, like this insane number.
00:47:55.080All the way up to the point where – and this is why people still, to this day, ride the train a lot in that part of the world because they're just used to that.
00:48:02.860They're used to air travel being incredibly dangerous.
00:48:05.800Up to the point in the 1990s, if anyone remembers this – I don't remember this, but I know about it because Michael Crichton wrote a whole book about this, but it actually took place – his book takes place in the U.S., but this is an incident that actually happened in Russia in the 1990s.
00:48:21.820So it's a couple of years after the Soviet Union fell, but you still kind of have this pilot corps that's made up of like political apparatchiks and such where – yeah, the pilot allowed his 15-year-old son and his 13-year-old daughter to take the controls while everyone's asleep on like a long-haul flight.
00:48:41.160And they accidentally disengaged the autopilot and were flying the plane itself and literally flew the plane into a mountain in Russia and killed everyone on board.
00:48:52.820And this was like Aeroflot, full commercial flight, just completely insane, completely insane.
00:49:00.880And sorry, by the way, I just spoiled the book for anyone who was reading it or wanted to read it.
00:49:04.640But this stuff has actually happened and like not that long ago in our history, which by the way – and you know this is going to happen next because whenever there was a whistleblower anywhere in the Soviet Union who wanted to like come out and actually explain what was going on, you can only imagine what happened to them.
00:49:20.860And I guarantee that's the exact same thing the federal government will do when it comes to the diversity hire captains on our end.
00:49:26.440If anyone's at Boeing or at United, that's why they've got to run to – and I implore you, please go to James O'Keefe and get the information out now because people are going to die.
00:49:34.760We are going to have planes raining, raining down on the United States before this is done.
00:50:01.360What you're really getting at – and see, this is why I've always been like migration, migration, migration, or illegal immigration, whatever you want.
00:50:07.500Because it's something that you feel very viscerally.
00:50:41.620Because people are like, I don't feel safe in my home.
00:50:43.820And we can see from the crime statistics that they're going up, inflation, it hits personally.
00:50:49.480And that's why I think this United story and the DEI story hits so hard because we've all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you're flying through a storm and you're like, I'm so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off.
00:51:06.480And I feel better now thinking about that.
00:51:08.100I mean, like, you want to go thought crime?
00:52:53.780For a short approach, if you're going to do a power up 180, that's my point.
00:52:57.720Well, OK, I will remember that from now on, no problem.
00:53:00.820Yeah, when you ask for a short approach, I expect you to turn your base between the numbers.
00:53:04.480All right, this will be a full stop for 6-5-Charlie.
00:53:09.900And maybe we need to talk about that some more because you're the first controller in 15 years that's ever said that.
00:53:15.300Well, I'm just, you know, if you ask for a short approach, a short approach is when you turn your base and mean the numbers.
00:53:22.840If I know you're a student asking for a short approach, I know you're out there practicing and you probably will extend.
00:53:30.500But if you're doing something other than a short approach, don't ask for a short approach.
00:53:35.840Well, I will definitely look up the definition of short approach because I've never seen where it says you turn base or beam the numbers because I don't see how you could possibly do that.
00:55:10.700And even they are like, I don't know how I'm going to be exempt from this one.
00:55:14.480Part of it, though, is that there's just simply more air travel, right?
00:55:17.980And so there used to be a rule in aviation, and I'm out of my depth here, but this was explained to me,
00:55:23.440that you used to have to fly 2,000 feet apart, like on top of each other, right?
00:55:29.020So you had to have 2,000 feet of clearance, plane over plane, if you were going to come within a certain proximity to one another.
00:55:35.860At some point, that was deemed to be too much trouble for the aviation industry, and so they lowered the threshold to 1,000 feet of clearance,
00:55:46.560which just means the planes are flying closer together midair, especially as you approach busy, you know, airports and things like that, cities.
00:55:55.580Because remember, it's not just commercial air travel.