Just Stop Oil protesters spray paint ancient historical sites in protest against climate change and demand the UK government commit to phasing out fossil fuels by 2030. Meanwhile, the Louisiana governor has declared that the Ten Commandments should be displayed in every public school in the state, and the left is losing its absolute mind, according to a new law passed by the state legislature. This is an edited version of an essay I wrote for the New York Times Magazine last year, which you can find here. It's a bit longer than I had hoped, but I think you'll agree that it's worth it. If you're a student at the University of Oxford, and you want to know what's going on in the world, then you'll want to listen to this. I'm 21, and I'm taking action with Just Stop Oil to demand that the UK Government commit to signing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and promises to stop burning fossil fuels. To refuse to do so is to warrant death, destruction, and suffering on an immense and immeasurable scale. And then my name's Niamh, I m 21 and I want to take action at Stonehenge. Here's a clip from a video I made by a student from Oxford, where I explain what I'm up to, and why I think it's a good idea to do just that. You can watch the whole thing here: Click here to watch the video here. And if you're interested in supporting the Just Stop Fossil Fuels campaign, click here to find out more information about Just Stop the Climate, here's a petition I'm working on it here: bit.ly/StopTheClimateChange. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast, and if you like it, please consider supporting it! I'll be looking out for more episodes like this in the future episodes of The Climate Change Project, and we'll be checking out your comments and reviewing it in the comments section on the Apple Podcasts app, too! Subscribe to the podcast. Timestamps: 0:00 - What's the deal? 5: What's going to happen next? 6:30 - What do you think of the future of the climate? 7:20 - What will the world look like in 5,000 years from now? 8:15 - What does it look like? 9:40 - What are you looking for? 11:00
00:00:00.000One of the great lies that is told by the international left, particularly the American left, is the idea that if you have no religion, if you are an atheist, if you are somebody who is in the post-Christian world, well that really means that you have an alternative ideology called secularism.
00:00:14.000And the secularism is in fact not a form of religion.
00:00:22.000There are a wide variety of belief systems across the world, and one of them is, in fact, secularism.
00:00:28.000And secularism has turned into a weird version of paganism in which nature is to be worshipped.
00:00:34.000And one of the ways that you see that is in protesters against the climate, against the heating up of the world, which, again, some of that is anthropogenic, meaning human cause.
00:00:46.000Well, these protesters believe that they are going to make the world a better place by destroying or defacing monuments.
00:00:54.000Whether it is the Mona Lisa, or whether it's the Eiffel Tower, or now, whether it is Stonehenge.
00:00:58.000So yesterday, environmental protesters decided it would be an amazing idea to go and spray paint Stonehenge in order to demonstrate that oil is bad.
00:01:08.000So they are deploying all sorts of chemicals into the air in order to show that it is bad to deploy carbon into the air.
00:01:15.000The group posted on X that Just Stop Oil protesters demanded the incoming government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030 because you can magically declare that alternative sources of energy are not going to impoverish the world and make people sicker, poorer, and live longer.
00:02:36.000And then My name's Niamh, I'm 21, and I'm a student at the University of Oxford.
00:02:48.000Today, I'm taking action with Just Stop Oil to demand that the UK government commits to signing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and promises to stop burning fossil fuels by 2030.
00:02:58.000To refuse to do so is to warrant death, destruction, and suffering on an absolutely immense and immeasurable scale.
00:03:08.000Today, we'll be taking action at Stonehenge, the day before the solstice.
00:03:13.000For thousands of years, people have come to Stonehenge on the solstice to celebrate our natural world, to celebrate the beauty of our natural world.
00:03:23.000But I can't help thinking, what does it look like today?
00:03:29.000These stones have stood here for 5,000 years.
00:03:34.000What will the world look like in 5,000 years time?
00:03:37.000Will our legacy be becoming ever more clear that we end the fossil fuel era or the fossil fuel era ends us?
00:03:44.000Well, the new religion here obviously involves defacing monuments.
00:03:50.000It also involves gender non-binariness.
00:03:53.000It's this sort of Gnostic religion that exists out there.
00:03:56.000The reason I point this out is not because I think that it is wildly important that these morons keep gluing themselves to walls and floors and paintings and streets and all the rest of this stuff.
00:04:05.000I think that actually they're doing their cause a great disservice because it turns out most people object.
00:04:11.000The reason I point this out is because the great lie that I talked about a couple of minutes ago, this great lie that secularism is not its own form of religion, is a lie that has been telescoped into American law.
00:04:22.000This comes up today because the Louisiana governor has now declared that he is going to put the Ten Commandments back in schools and the left is losing its absolute mind.
00:04:32.000According to the Associated Press, Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom.
00:04:39.000It's the latest move from a GOP-dominated legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor, which is usually what happens when you have, you know, Republicans in the legislature and also Republicans as the governors usually get a more conservative agenda.
00:04:51.000The legislation, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry into law on Wednesday, requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in large, easily readable fonts in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.
00:05:02.000Landry said, if you want to respect the rule of law, you've got to start from the original lawgiver, who was Moses, who got the commandments from God.
00:05:09.000Opponents naturally jumped into action, suggesting that this was wildly unconstitutional.
00:05:14.000Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate.
00:05:17.000The posters will be paid for through donations, so it's not state money.
00:05:20.000It's just going to say that there has to be a display there.
00:05:22.000It also authorizes, but does not require, the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, Well, very quickly, the ACLU, which is a trash organization, they used to stand for free speech.
00:05:37.000Now they just stand for radical leftism.
00:05:39.000They immediately announced this was unconstitutional and they were going to stand up to it.
00:05:44.000CNN's Eli Honig, who is one of their legal analysts, he says this is clearly unconstitutional.
00:05:49.000We'll explain why he's wrong in just a moment and why it matters.
00:06:12.000If you wanted a perfect example of what the First Amendment prohibits, I think this is it.
00:06:17.000The First Amendment says, Congress, government, shall make no law respecting establishment of religion, meaning state entities can't do things that endorse any particular religion or religiosity in general.
00:06:28.000And if you look at those ten, there are some, I know one of the defenses is, well, these are themes that are consistent throughout civilized society and throughout religion.
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00:08:00.000The problem is that the United States is not a fundamentally secular country.
00:08:06.000What I mean by that is that it is not the French Republic.
00:08:09.000This is a point that was made by Justice Scalia in a dissent in the 2005 case.
00:08:13.000In which the Constitution of France says France is a secular republic in which religion is to be excluded generally from the public forum.
00:08:22.000That is not the United States of America.
00:08:24.000The First Amendment was designed to guarantee the practice of religion against the federal government.
00:08:30.000So just to do the history of the First Amendment very quickly here, this idea that there is a separating wall between church and state in the sense that religion is never supposed to impact People's values and how they vote.
00:08:41.000Or religion can never be promoted in the public square.
00:08:43.000Or, in fact, religion generally can never be promoted against irreligion generally by the government.
00:08:53.000The First Amendment specifically says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
00:09:01.000Number one, this was never supposed to originally be implemented in the states.
00:09:05.000It took all the way until the 1940s for the Supreme Court to declare that this was now going to be applied at the state level.
00:09:10.000It's one of the weirdnesses of constitutional law.
00:09:13.000The first rule is stop looking at the Constitution when you do constitutional law, because the Bill of Rights is specifically applicable to the federal government, not to the state government.
00:09:22.000In fact, 9 of the 13 colonies had established churches at the time of the Revolutionary War.
00:09:29.000Connecticut maintained its Congregationalist church, like a state-sponsored church, until 1818.
00:09:46.000Because again, the goal here was to stop the federal government from establishing its own generalized religion that would prohibit people at the state level from having their own religions.
00:09:57.000The idea that secularism was supposed to predominate in the United States is obviously untrue and none of the founders believed that.
00:10:03.000Even the founders who tended toward atheism.
00:10:05.000tended to believe that religion had an extraordinarily positive effect on the body politic, and so the promotion of religion generally was considered a good thing by the Founding Fathers.
00:10:17.000As President John Adams wrote a letter to the Massachusetts militia, quote, we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.
00:10:25.000Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
00:10:30.000Our Constitution was made only from moral and religious people.
00:10:33.000George Washington said in his first inaugural address, quote, Even James Madison, who wrote the Non-Establishment Clause of the Virginia State Constitution, for example, he did so because he thought he was strengthening religion.
00:10:41.000in the economy and course of nature in an insoluble union between virtue and happiness.
00:10:45.000Even James Madison, who wrote the non-establishment clause of the Virginia state constitution,
00:10:50.000for example, he did so because he thought he was strengthening religion.
00:10:54.000He thought that if you established a religion in Virginia, it would prohibit the flowering
00:11:12.000Now what the courts have done, or had done, for the last several decades, is something that is completely unprecedented and stupid.
00:11:19.000They have read the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as in opposition to one another.
00:11:24.000Remember, the Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
00:11:31.000There are two ways to read that, and the Supreme Court has read this in the dumbest possible way.
00:11:34.000One is that Congress shall not prohibit you from freely exercising a religion, and the second is Congress shall not establish any religion, and it has read them completely separately.
00:11:46.000And what that's done is it has put them in conflict with one another, because it turns out that if you express your religion freely in the public square, then the Supreme Court might say you're violating the Establishment Clause.
00:11:56.000But that's never how this provision was meant to be read.
00:12:00.000The basic idea was you can't establish, say, Catholicism as the official religion of the United States, because in doing so, you will quash the free exercise of people of other religions via compulsion.
00:12:12.000That is what the Constitution was designed to prohibit, was compulsion in religion.
00:12:17.000Well, there's nothing compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall.
00:12:24.000If there was something compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall, there'd be all sorts of serious free speech issues in a classroom, because it turns out classroom walls are filled with all sorts of stuff that's on the walls.
00:12:35.000Is it violating my free speech if somebody puts up on the wall a sign that says something I disagree with?
00:12:43.000I'm not sure how that violates my free speech, but the same argument is made about religion.
00:12:47.000That if I walk into a public school and there is a sign that quotes the Bible, in a non-denominational way, by the way, because it turns out that the three major religions, traditionally, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all agree that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, and they agree on the content of the Ten Commandments.
00:13:04.000So in 1971, the Supreme Court took up a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, and they came up with an incredibly stupid test to determine whether some sort of government action violated the separation of church and state.
00:13:17.000They said that any law had to fulfill three conditions.
00:13:19.000One, it had to have a secular purpose.
00:13:21.000Two, it had to have a predominantly secular effect.
00:13:24.000And three, it had to not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion.
00:13:28.000Now, when you read that, that is on its face nonsensical.
00:13:31.000It basically doesn't set any standard at all.
00:13:34.000Because I can make an argument for virtually any religious display that it both violates the Lemon Test and also does not violate the Lemon Test.
00:13:43.000In 1980, the Supreme Court, this is the case that Eli Honig was referring to, in a case called Stone v. Graham, there was a law that required the classroom display of the Ten Commandments.
00:13:52.000And the Supreme Court found that it was unconstitutional because it had no secular legislative purpose.
00:13:58.000They said the Ten Commandments convey a religious undertone because they include the religious duties of believers, worshiping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord's name in vain, observing the Sabbath day.
00:14:08.000But again, that is based on a fundamental misreading that again is enshrined in Lemon, that the government of the United States has to take no position between religion and irreligion.
00:14:19.000That the government of the United States has no, none, interest in promoting public morality via generalized religion.
00:14:28.000That the government has to be absolutely agnostic about whether it is promoting the Ten Commandments or whether it is promoting just stop oil.
00:14:37.000That these are paganism, Judeo-Christian religion, the Ten Commandments, all these things are of a piece according to the Supreme Court from 1971 on.
00:14:46.000We'll get to more on that in a moment.
00:14:53.000I don't know why God did that, but that's just the way that it happens to be.
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00:15:45.000In 2005, there's a case that's very similar about a public display of the Ten Commandments.
00:15:49.000And Justice Scalia dissents in this case, and here's what he writes.
00:15:52.000What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority
00:15:56.000is the absolute indispensable requirement that judicial opinions
00:15:59.000be grounded in consistently applied principle.
00:16:01.000He, by the way, is ripping the lemon test.
00:16:03.000He's saying there's no consistently applied principle.
00:16:05.000Besides appealing to the demonstrably false principle that government cannot favor religion over irreligion, today's opinion suggests the posting of the Ten Commandments violates the principle that the government cannot favor one religion over another.
00:16:17.000If religion in the public forum had to be entirely non-denominational, there could be no religion in the public forum at all.
00:16:22.000One cannot say the word God or the Almighty.
00:16:24.000One cannot offer public supplication or thanksgiving without contradicting the beliefs of some people that there are many gods, or that God and the gods pay no attention to human affairs.
00:16:32.000With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
00:16:45.000In other words, every time Joe Biden finishes his speech and says, God bless our troops, why isn't that an establishment of religion in the same way it would theoretically be an establishment of religion to put the Ten Commandments on a public school classroom?
00:16:56.000And the answer is, because it's not establishing religion.
00:16:59.000Joe Biden isn't forcing you to do anything, and neither is the sign on the public school classroom.
00:17:03.000It is encouraging you to abide by the central, fundamental, moral premises of the West.
00:17:09.000The attempt to remove the Ten Commandments says more about the society than the attempt to replace them.
00:17:16.000All of Western civilization is based on a merger of Judeo-Christian ethics, found in the Old and the New Testaments, and Greek reason.
00:17:24.000Well, in our modern society, we've decided to basically call all of those things dispensable.
00:17:29.000We're just gonna get rid of all of them, and that's why you end up with morons who are spray-painting orange on the Stonehenge Monument.
00:17:36.000Because it turns out that when you move into a post-reason and also post-religious society, religion and reason, by the way, for most of human history, were thought to bolster one another.
00:17:44.000Because as it turns out, there is no basis in evolutionary biology for the notion that there is this thing called right reason that ends in actual, factual, truthful statements, like capital T truth, independent of your mind.
00:17:59.000That is a fundamental faith principle.
00:18:02.000And it is necessary in order to pursue things like science and reason.
00:18:06.000This is why everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides believed that there was a consonance between faith principles and rationality.
00:18:16.000But first society decided to divide those two things to say that there was faith principle and that was irrationality.
00:18:22.000And then there were reasonable principles and that was reason.
00:18:24.000And then they decided to dispense with both of those because it turns out that without the grounding of particular faith principles, reason collapses in on itself.
00:18:32.000Because you simply cannot make, it is not possible to make a case for the idea of secular reason and logic absent certain basic premises.
00:18:40.000It's not my argument, it's an argument made by a philosopher and mathematician named Alvin Platinga.
00:18:45.000That the sort of fundamental argument in favor of human reason is that your brain is capable of grasping higher truths.
00:18:53.000But what in the meat package that is your brain allows it to grasp something called truth rather than something called adaptability, like whatever makes you survive?
00:19:04.000It is that move from the adaptive to the true that is something that cannot be bridged without a fundamental faith assumption.
00:19:12.000In any case, as it turns out, a society that takes down the Ten Commandments Tends to be a society that does not obey the Ten Commandments, and does not believe that the Ten Commandments are important.
00:19:21.000And it turns out the Ten Commandments are really, really important.
00:19:25.000Not because secular societies, meaning non-Judeo-Christian religious societies, are going to involve themselves in murder necessarily, or that people will simply decide that without a sign on the wall saying, Thou shalt not kill, that is totally fine to kill.
00:19:37.000But it's the idea that without an absolute moral arbiter sitting at the top of the hierarchy, That that becomes a matter of argument.
00:19:47.000The whole point of having a sort of higher morality that is non-appealable, there is no debate about it, is precisely that.
00:19:57.000That once you start having debates about the rightness or wrongness of killing, you end up in some pretty dicey moral territory pretty quickly.
00:20:06.000On a sort of constitutional level, this is why the Constitution was written in order to enshrine certain principles and to put them beyond the realm of debate.
00:20:12.000It's why you have to have a supermajority in order to change the Constitution, for example.
00:20:16.000When it comes to godly commandments, even from a secular point of view, let's say that you're a total atheist and you believe that there is no God.
00:20:22.000Why might you believe that the Ten Commandments are important?
00:20:24.000Because it takes certain fundamental principles and puts them beyond the scope of debate.
00:20:29.000And it's pretty good that those are beyond the scope of debate.
00:20:31.000You don't want to live in a society where thou shalt not kill is not beyond the scope of debate.
00:20:36.000Well, that really is like a debatable proposition.
00:20:41.000It turns out that that one has been put to the test in the United States, and it's ended pretty poorly.
00:20:46.000Actually, it turns out that many of the central principles of the Ten Commandments have been put to the test in the United States since we've decided not to obey them, and it's ended really, really poorly for the United States and for Western civilization in general.
00:21:00.000I think it's almost, not almost, it is completely inarguable that a society that abides by the Ten Commandments is going to be better than a society that does not.
00:21:24.000We live in a society now in which you are totally allowed to bear false witness so long as the political motivations of the person against whom you are bearing the false witness are suspect.
00:21:33.000Has that made this society better or worse?
00:21:36.000Do not covet other people's possessions.
00:21:39.000We live in a society that's totally done away with that, in which covetousness is now seen as an actual political program.
00:21:44.000Bernie Sanders' new party, if he ever decided to start one, should be called the covetousness party.
00:21:51.000Because that's all he does, just covets other people's stuff, believing that it is his own.
00:21:56.000It turns out that a society has to have a centralizing philosophy.
00:21:59.000The centralizing philosophy of the United States used to be grounded in Judeo-Christian virtue.
00:22:03.000That is why it is good to put the Ten Commandments back up on the wall.
00:22:06.000Not that everybody's going to start abiding by them, but to remind people that, in fact, a functional society has to have a functional philosophy.
00:22:12.000And the most functional philosophy over the last several thousand years has sprung from those Ten Commandments.
00:22:16.000And there is nothing wrong with that constitutionally.
00:22:18.000There's nothing wrong with that legally.
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00:22:47.000Now, I'm about as pro-Second Amendment as it gets.
00:22:57.000If somebody invades my home, I'll do everything in my power to protect my family and take out the bad guy.
00:23:01.000But I'd rather be able to resort to non-lethal measures if I have that ability.
00:23:05.000They're emotional and psychological ramifications to using force, and it turns out that in today's culture, there might be legal ramifications to self-defense as well.
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00:23:50.000And again, no one's being forced to pray in the classroom.
00:23:54.000In fact, even when prayer in the classroom was a thing, no one was being forced to pray in the classroom.
00:23:59.000You were allowed to sit it out, for example.
00:24:03.000But beyond all of that, it turns out that a functional society understands that freedom exists because of the virtue upon which it sits, and within the confines of the virtuous institutions that also exist.
00:24:20.000We're a society that's basically decided that freedom can destroy everything else around.
00:24:22.000It can be used as a sort of universal acid to get rid of virtue.
00:24:27.000And then it turns out freedom without virtue is just vice.
00:24:30.000And that's effectively what we have seen in the United States of America.
00:24:32.000So good for the governor of Louisiana.
00:24:34.000I have a feeling the Supreme Court is going to uphold this this time.
00:24:38.000Mainly because, again, in 2022, Justice Gorsuch correctly pointed out that Lemon was unworkable.
00:24:43.000He said that it creates, quote, a vice between the establishment clause on one side and the free speech and free exercise clauses on the other, which is a point that I made a little bit earlier.
00:24:52.000So, I think the United States will be a better place for having displays like this in public places.
00:24:57.000It turns out that having displays about innate Judeo-Christian morality in public places, in a non-denominational fashion, is a pretty good thing.
00:25:08.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden is running an election campaign that at the very best is dicey.
00:25:13.000It shows that Joe Biden is up 50 to 48 on Donald Trump.
00:25:16.000That's his first lead in the Fox News poll in quite a while.
00:25:18.000It's still well within the margin of error.
00:25:20.000And if this is a margin of error election, it doesn't look like that's going to go particularly well for Joe Biden.
00:25:25.000But it is a reminder to Republicans, this thing is not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination.
00:25:29.000I think there are a lot of Republicans out there who, because Trump is outperforming his polling data in 2020, and because the 2020 election was really, really close, he ended up losing by about 7 million popular votes, but he ended up losing in the Electoral College by a grand total of like 43,000 votes spread over a few different states.
00:25:47.000Well, it's still a really, really close election.
00:25:52.000If you're a Republican, don't be fooled into complacency about this election.
00:25:56.000Joe Biden has decided that he is going to run the Barack Obama 2012 strategy.
00:26:01.000The Barack Obama 2012 strategy is present a bunch of give-outs to particular constituency groups and claim that your opponent is pure, unbridled, malicious evil.
00:26:13.000The fact that it worked in 2012 against Mitt Romney, who, again, is like the most milquetoast human being on planet Earth, is one of the great amazements of politics, as I've talked about before.
00:26:20.000But that is, in fact, the Joe Biden strategy.
00:26:23.000Right now, again, just to repeat the polls, the polls, as of today, in the RealCourt Politics Polling Average, show Donald Trump up about five points in Arizona, more than five points in Nevada, which is just a blowout Nevada.
00:26:45.000So again, those are good numbers for Trump, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, he's going to wallop Joe Biden numbers.
00:26:52.000So, Joe Biden's strategy, apparently, is to, again, just pursue giveouts and handouts, no matter what that does for the broader body politic.
00:27:01.000So, in other words, concentrated benefits for particular groups that Joe Biden needs in order to win, and diffuse costs across the population, except sometimes those costs are not so diffuse.
00:27:11.000As, for example, in the case of the Maryland mother named Rachel Morin.
00:27:15.000According to CNN, a months-long investigation into the 2023 murder of a Maryland mother has led to the arrest of a 23-year-old man, according to local authorities.
00:27:23.000Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, a citizen of El Salvador, was arrested at a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to the Tulsa Police Department.
00:27:30.000The suspect lied about his true identity, denied any knowledge of the crimes, for which he is wanted.
00:27:35.000When they ran his information to the authorities, they found he was wanted in connection with a rape in Maryland.
00:27:40.000He faces charges of first-degree murder and first-degree rape in that case.
00:27:43.000But as it turns out, he is suspected of multiple crimes since he illegally crossed the border into the United States in February 2023.
00:27:49.000One of those crimes is the murder of Rachel Morin, who was killed along a hiking trail in Bel Air in August of 2023.
00:27:56.000Apparently, Rachel was not his first victim.
00:27:59.000And according to the police, this person fled to the United States illegally after committing a brutal murder of a young woman in El Salvador a month earlier in January.
00:28:09.000So how exactly did this person get into the country?
00:28:12.000That has not been made clear at this point.
00:28:13.000Did he just show up at the border and claim asylum and they let him right in?
00:28:27.000What do you say to critics who blame the administration for allowing something like this to happen?
00:28:32.000Obviously, this is something that you hear in right-wing media all the time.
00:28:38.000Jim, first and foremost, of course, our hearts break for the children, the family, the loved ones, the friends of the individual who was the woman, the mother.
00:28:55.000Jim, a criminal is responsible for the criminal act.
00:29:03.000The criminal who committed this heinous act should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law and forcefully so.
00:29:21.000That's the entire question here, especially as Joe Biden now pursues a mass amnesty.
00:29:26.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:30:29.000According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, cynicism, thy new name, is immigration politics.
00:30:34.000And President Biden is proving it again with his Tuesday announcement he will bestow legal status on the undocumented spouses and children of U.S.
00:30:41.000It could be reversed by a new president next year.
00:30:42.000It will further poison the immigration debate.
00:30:44.000But hey, any port in an election year storm.
00:30:46.000The plan offers a new path to citizenship for an estimated half million migrants who entered the country illegally but are now married to U.S.
00:30:53.000The Department of Homeland Security says this will apply to anyone who has lived in the country for 10 years as of Monday, is married to an American and poses no security or criminal threat.
00:31:01.000Some 50,000 children of these spouses will also be eligible for citizenship.
00:31:07.000So as the Wall Street Journal points out, This order is legally uncertain and might boomerang on spouses who apply for legal status.
00:31:13.000Biden is asserting an authority known as Parole in Place, which allows DHS to let illegal immigrants remain in the United States while they apply for citizenship.
00:31:21.000The statute specifies it can only be prescribed on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian or significant public reasons.
00:31:28.000The administration says it allows blanket parole.
00:31:31.000So he is effectively now daring the Republicans to basically try to deport these people.
00:31:37.000That is the goal, according to Politico, like openly the goal of the Biden administration.
00:31:42.000According to Politico, Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled major new actions, but in issuing a new policy granting legal protections to undocumented spouses, the president was trying to lure Donald Trump into a very specific debate too.
00:31:53.000Inside Biden's team, advisors are betting that the new policies unveiled at the White House on Tuesday will reignite a larger conversation about one of the most controversial chapters of the Trump era, the separation of families on the southern border.
00:32:02.000Now, as you recall, it was Barack Obama who originally put the kids in cages.
00:32:07.000It turns out that under the Flores Settlement, families cannot be held together in custody, so children are generally released into the interior of the United States to a family member, maybe, we hope, and then the parents are kept in custody if they immigrate illegally.
00:32:21.000Now, Joe Biden is attempting to dare Trump to get into this.
00:32:25.000The problem for Joe Biden is I'm not sure this is a political winner.
00:32:27.000I mean, the reality is that most Americans are just not all that interested in Joe Biden's sympathy-first approach to illegal immigration.
00:32:37.000Joe Biden advisor Tom Perez, he says this immigration policy is incredibly smart.
00:32:43.000What makes the White House confident that this plan is going to survive legal scrutiny and actually go into effect later this summer when so many other immigration plans from Trump, from Obama, have been struck down by the courts?
00:32:57.000Well, I think it's the right thing to do, it's the legal thing to do, and it's the smart thing to do.
00:33:01.000What the president did two weeks ago was to secure the border because we have to both secure the border and provide lawful pathways.
00:33:10.000That's what a balanced approach is all about.
00:33:14.000Well, I mean, a balanced approach would involve closing the border, which is the thing that you are not, in fact, doing.
00:33:19.000You can tell how radical this program is by who is backing it.
00:33:22.000Pramila Jayapal, who's the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a far-left radical, she says this is the biggest thing that we've seen in the United States since DACA.
00:33:30.000Not shockingly, DACA also happened to happen in the middle of the 2012 election.
00:33:53.000And these are folks who are married to U.S. citizens, have been here for at least 10 years,
00:33:58.000have U.S. citizen children in some cases, not in some cases.
00:34:02.000And to be able to say to them, President Biden is keeping your family together.
00:34:05.000He is making sure that you do not have to leave the country and go through some arcane
00:34:09.000process and maybe not be able to get back and not even be able to get back in, which
00:34:12.000is why most people didn't do it, because I didn't have that guarantee.
00:34:15.000OK, so Joe Biden wants to engage in this conversation.
00:34:17.000I'm just telling you, that's not how this conversation is going to go.
00:34:20.000Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who's deeply involved with the Biden campaign, he was asked about the killing of Rachel Moran.
00:34:27.000And he says, well, yeah, it turns out that the migration crisis is really affecting Americans all the way across the spectrum, including in Democratic states.
00:34:35.000When people think about the border crisis and they think that this is only impacting a handful of states, you know, Hartford County, in our state, where this, where this, where this brutal happened, is 1,800 miles away from the border.
00:34:48.000And so when people think this is only impacting a few states, this is impacting every single one of us.
00:34:52.000This inaction that we continue to see to get any form of sensible immigration policy done is impacting all of us, because all of us in local jurisdictions deal with the consequence to this.
00:35:03.000Again, that is a Democrat, and that's going to be the actual argument.
00:35:06.000The argument's going to be about Lake and Riley, and it's going to be about Rachel Warren, and it is not going to be about the immigration status of people who are already living in the country and have been doing so for a very long time.
00:35:17.000Because it turns out the top of the heap for people's concerns about illegal immigration is first close the border, and then decide who gets to stay and who gets to go.
00:35:25.000One of the things I notice whenever Joe Biden will roll out a proposal like this, he'll bring up a dreamer, some kid who was born in Mexico or something and arrived in the United States illegally at the age of three and then grew up and became a nurse.
00:35:37.000And the answer to that is, OK, that person can stay, but the person who's on welfare cannot.
00:35:42.000It turns out that the United States does have the single capacity to go through all the people who have illegally immigrated and decide whether they are of net benefit to the United States and its population or whether they are not.
00:35:53.000Senator Joni Ernst correctly points out that Joe Biden is rolling out the red carpet for
00:35:56.000once again, President Biden has rolled out the red carpet for illegal migrants.
00:36:05.000So we're hearing the double speak again.
00:36:09.000Out of one side of his mouth, he's saying, look at me, I'm doing an executive order.
00:36:17.000And then on the other hand now, he's offering basically mass amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants that are currently within the country.
00:36:31.000Again, you're gonna get more and more of these stories leading up to the election.
00:36:34.000Because it turns out that when you let millions of people through the border unvetted, some of those people are going to be criminals.
00:36:39.000And when you hear the argument that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than kind of natural born American citizens, the answer to that is, so what?
00:36:46.000What does that have to do with anything?
00:36:49.000That's a stupid argument because we are not saying that they have a natural right to be in the United States.
00:36:54.000We're saying there should be zero crimes from the people that we voluntarily allow to be in the United States.
00:37:00.000Meanwhile, on the international front, everything seems to be collapsing around Joe Biden because it turns out that weakness in the foreign realm is quickly met with strength by America's enemies.
00:37:11.000Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed an agreement that pledges mutual aid if either country faces aggression, a strategic pact that comes as they face escalating standoffs with the West.
00:37:22.000I'm unclear exactly what the details of the deal are.
00:37:25.000Both leaders are describing it as a major upgrade in their relations.
00:37:28.000So to all of those people on both right and left who seem to be standing for Russia these days, I'll just point out that they are the ones who are allied with an absolute hellhole slave state called North Korea on the one hand, and then another hellhole slave state called China on the other.
00:37:43.000It turns out in the world there are some bad guys and there are some good guys, and Vladimir Putin is not one of the good guys.
00:37:49.000The summit came as Vladimir Putin visited North Korea for the first time in 24 years, and the U.S.
00:37:52.000and its allies expressed growing concern over a possible arms arrangement in which Pyongyang provides Moscow with badly needed munitions for its war in Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that could enhance the threat posed by Kim's nuclear weapons and missile program.
00:38:06.000Now, one of the things that's truly amazing about the modern world is that most of the countries we would consider allied countries are countries that rely extraordinarily heavily on tech, like real battlefield tech.
00:38:18.000You're talking about high-tech drones, you are talking about JDAMs, you're talking about laser-guided munitions, you know, all sorts of sophisticated weaponry that are specifically designed in order not to waste shots and really to, in the main, distinguish military from civilian targets.
00:38:35.000And meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, these folks, they don't care.
00:38:39.000They're using really, really cheap munitions against really, really sophisticated and extraordinarily expensive munition.
00:38:46.000And so the order of battle over time is going to change radically in favor of the people who are fighting a more basic form of warfare because they don't care about these things.
00:38:57.000And let's better just acknowledge that reality.
00:39:02.000When the bad guys are willing to kill their civilians and yours, and you are spending extraordinary amounts of money, yes, you're doing the more moral thing in order to not kill their civilians, the civilians they're hiding behind, and in many cases sympathize with them.
00:39:15.000But by the same token, that requires a higher level of willpower and a higher level of expenditure.
00:39:21.000And that's just the way that it's going to have to work.
00:39:23.000Because it turns out that Russia can churn out munitions like nobody's business so long as they are World War II era munitions.
00:39:29.000And originally the theory of the war was that Ukraine's technological advantage would allow it to fight Russia to a standstill.
00:39:35.000But it turns out that Russia's way of war has always been to grind down its opponents through extraordinary use of bloody brutality to its own soldiers and others.
00:39:45.000So that is consolidation number one between Russia and North Korea.
00:39:50.000Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has been purging his own military.
00:39:53.000Supposedly he's doing so to fight corruption.
00:39:55.000In reality, the reason that Xi Jinping does anything is to consolidate his own power.
00:39:59.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a redoubled campaign to eradicate graft and enforce loyalty in the military.
00:40:06.000Suggesting no end to a purge in the country's defense establishment that has raised questions about Beijing's ability to wage war.
00:40:13.000She used the first military political war conference in a decade to warn against the dangers of corruption and ideological slippage in the PLA.
00:40:19.000That's the People's Liberation Army cautioning that decaying discipline could torpedo efforts to field a fighting force capable of taking on powerful Western militaries.
00:40:28.000He said the gun barrel must always be grasped by people who are loyal and reliable to the party.
00:40:32.000So he's tightening his grip on the party.
00:40:34.000Again, as China enters a state of serious economic and demographic decline, they become more dangerous, not less.
00:40:39.000Meanwhile, Iran is signaling its own major boost in a nuclear program at a key site.
00:40:46.000It turns out that when the United States draws a major contrast between itself and its allies in the Middle East, and that's not just Israel, it's also Saudi Arabia, basically everybody who's been boxing in Iran, it turns out Iran gets pretty frisky, as they've been doing at Israel's northern border, as they've been doing via Hamas, as they've been doing via the Houthis, as they've been doing directly from Iran when they sent 300-odd missiles at Israel, as they've been doing from Iraq.
00:41:09.000They've been activating their forces everywhere in the region, and now they're upping the ante on their nuclear program, which is weird because I was informed by the Biden administration that they were going to be able to come in and cut a deal with those nice Iranians.
00:41:19.000The absolute level of naivete of the foreign policy establishment on the left is, it's truly awesome to behold.
00:41:27.000The belief that the Iranians, they're just, you know, a little misguided, but you can negotiate with them, and they're going to come to an agreement because, you know, you negotiate with people you disagree with.
00:41:36.000Well, yes, and then the negotiations fail when the people you disagree with actually want to murder you and your family.
00:41:41.000It turns out it's very difficult to come up with a negotiating tactic that ends that particular demand.
00:41:46.000According to the Washington Post, a major expansion underway inside Iran's most heavily protected nuclear facility could soon triple the site's production of enriched uranium and give Tehran new options for quickly assembling a nuclear arsenal if it chooses to, according to confidential documents and analysis by weapons experts.
00:42:01.000Inspectors with the IAEA confirmed new construction activity inside the Fordow enrichment plant just days after Tehran formally notified the nuclear washrock of plans for a substantial upgrade at the underground facility built inside a mountain in north-central Iran.
00:42:15.000Iran also disclosed plans for expanding production at its main enrichment plant near the center of Natanz.
00:42:29.000They believe that so long as they ratchet up the pressure, From Hezbollah, that the thing that Joe Biden wants more than anything else is not to have an ongoing war in the Middle East, and he doesn't have a lot of leverage with Hezbollah, he doesn't have a lot of leverage with Hamas, he doesn't have a lot of leverage with Iran, but he does have some leverage with the Israelis.
00:42:46.000Because he can simply hold them back in the middle of a war where young Israelis are going and losing limbs and dying in order to defend their homeland.
00:43:23.000You have the Iranian mullahs who are openly declaring that they are moving forward with their nuclear weapons development.
00:43:28.000Hezbollah, the head of which, Nasrallah, just gave a speech yesterday in which he declared that he would effectively destroy the state of Israel if he's threatened, which is a bluff tactic because if he actually thought he could do it, he would actually go ahead and do it.
00:43:40.000You have Hamas still declaring they will not give up hostages in order to gain even a temporary ceasefire.
00:43:45.000And meanwhile, what is the comeback of the Biden administration?
00:43:48.000Donald Trump's a mean man who's orange.
00:44:42.000That's the picture that we should all focus on right now.
00:44:47.000Arguably the most important part of this unfolding political campaign is that the Republican nominee wants to be in that frame.
00:44:58.000He wants to be walking through squares like that.
00:45:03.000By his own admission, he admires that.
00:45:06.000He admires the authoritarianism, he admires the toughness No, he just acknowledges what they are.
00:45:14.000And he knows that you guys don't understand them, which is certainly true.
00:45:17.000The reality is that the left, they've all become Jane Fonda.
00:45:19.000It used to be, there was a time when the foreign policy establishment among Democrats was significantly tougher than it is today.
00:45:26.000When people like Zell Miller or Scoop Jackson were Democrats.
00:45:29.000And now it turns out the foreign policy establishment is basically Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda inside the Democratic Party.
00:45:34.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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