The Ben Shapiro Show - December 01, 2025


The Trump Administration CRACKS DOWN on Third World Migration


Episode Stats

Length

58 minutes

Words per Minute

192.6596

Word Count

11,216

Sentence Count

658

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

38


Summary

President Trump pledges an end to third world mass migration. We get into it all the details surrounding the Afghan national terror attack against two members of the National Guard. Also, Somali welfare fraud. All of it tying together. This is it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 President Trump pledges an end to third world mass migration.
00:00:03.000 We get into it.
00:00:04.000 All the details surrounding the Afghan national terror attack against two members of the National Guard.
00:00:10.000 Also, Somali welfare fraud, all of it tying together.
00:00:13.000 We'll get into it first.
00:00:14.000 This is it.
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00:00:26.000 Well, over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend, President Trump went into high gear talking about the necessity to deport all migrants from the third world and to stop further third world migration into the United States.
00:00:38.000 This has been a long time coming.
00:00:39.000 Obviously, the president of the United States had said this all the way back in 2015, 2016.
00:00:44.000 When he took office in 2017, you'll recall that one of the very first things that he did was attempt a migration moratorium from a series of countries where it'd be very, very difficult to vet people.
00:00:55.000 Well, now all of this is coming to a head.
00:00:57.000 On Thursday, President Trump said he would permanently pause all immigration from what he called third world countries, according to NBC News.
00:01:04.000 He demanded a program of reverse migration as he intensified his rhetoric after a National Guard shooting that happened in Washington, D.C. While we were out on Thanksgiving break, there was a horrifying shooting, two National Guard members shot in Washington, D.C. by an Afghan refugee who had apparently been working with the CIA while he was in Afghanistan and then migrated to the United States as part of Joe Biden's gigantic shipment of Afghan refugees into the United States.
00:01:30.000 The vetting process could have been flawed or he could have been radicalized.
00:01:33.000 We'll get into that in a moment.
00:01:35.000 President Trump said, quote, even as we have progressed technologically, immigration policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many.
00:01:42.000 I will permanently pause migration from all third world countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden's auto pen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, end all federal benefits and subsidies to non-citizens of our country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilization.
00:02:09.000 These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal auto pen approval process.
00:02:18.000 Only reverse migration can fully cure this situation.
00:02:22.000 Other than that, happy Thanksgiving to all except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for.
00:02:27.000 You won't be here for long.
00:02:29.000 Again, all this happening in the aftermath of a dual set of stories, one of them being the Afghan national shooting up a couple of members of the National Guard and killing one.
00:02:38.000 The other story being this unbelievable story of Somali welfare fraud happening in the state of Minnesota.
00:02:46.000 Christine Ohm of the Department of National Security, she said that President Trump is determined to stop all processes from third world countries.
00:02:54.000 Here is what the Secretary of Homeland Security had to say.
00:02:58.000 The president is absolutely determined to stop all processes at this point in time from third world countries until we can have a thorough opportunity to go through these individuals, know that they're here for the right intentions, and that they even should be in our country to begin with.
00:03:15.000 The State Department then announced immediately that they would pause visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports and said, quote, the department is taking all necessary steps to protect U.S. national security and public safety.
00:03:26.000 Again, all of this is happening in the aftermath of that terror attack by an Afghan national who worked with a CIA-backed group during the war in Afghanistan.
00:03:35.000 According to the Washington Post, that National Guard shooting suspect was in one of the CIA's so-called zero units.
00:03:42.000 The zero units were units that were working with the CIA in order to ensure security in Afghanistan.
00:03:50.000 According to the Washington Post, the person whose name was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, apparently drove across the country to carry out Wednesday's attack and was detained moments after opening fire on Sarah Bextrom, 20, an army specialist from West Virginia and Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, used a 357 Smith and Wesson revolver.
00:04:09.000 Beckstrom died of her injuries.
00:04:11.000 Wolf is critically injured as well.
00:04:14.000 Now, apparently, he came to the United States in September 2021.
00:04:18.000 You'll remember that is when Joe Biden disastrously withdrew from Afghanistan in the most ignominious defeat in modern American history.
00:04:24.000 He just decided to pull out full scale and hand the country back to the Taliban with no plan for transition, no security protocols followed nothing.
00:04:33.000 And then, because the United States was abandoning 38 million people to the predations of the Taliban, the United States under Joe Biden decided to bring in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees.
00:04:42.000 Be very difficult to vet all of those people, considering, again, the security situation in Afghanistan, a terror-rich haven, not particularly good.
00:04:50.000 Apparently, this person worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA.
00:04:56.000 He entered the United States in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program.
00:05:03.000 And then he was actually granted asylum under President Trump this April, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.
00:05:09.000 He had worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA.
00:05:11.000 CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that the shooter was a member of a partner force in Kandahar.
00:05:18.000 He was part of one of the CIA's zero units.
00:05:20.000 They were involved in combat missions to seize or kill suspected terrorists.
00:05:24.000 They were involved in anti-terror raids.
00:05:28.000 Now, as we're going to discuss in a moment, unclear whether he was a radical when he was shipped to the United States or whether he self-radicalized while in the United States.
00:05:35.000 Elliot Ackerman, writing for the Free Press, describes what the Zero units did.
00:05:40.000 He said the CIA-sponsored counterterrorism pursuit teams, later known as Zero Units, were created in the days after 9-11 to hunt senior members of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
00:05:48.000 The Zero units, unlike the Afghan Army, work directly for the United States government.
00:05:52.000 They're recruited from throughout Afghanistan, given specific military training, and performed many dangerous missions, among them night raids against high-level targets.
00:05:59.000 The zero units existed for the entire duration of the war, and given their classified nature, they allowed administrations of both parties to have more troops operating in Afghanistan than was reported to the United States public.
00:06:09.000 At any given time, the number of zero unit soldiers numbered in the thousands operating from bases all around the country, including Kandahar.
00:06:16.000 So, as Elliot Ackerman points out, the zero units were people who were working closely with the United States military.
00:06:25.000 Also, this person would have been vetted, according to Elliot Ackerman, to join Elite Zero Units.
00:06:30.000 He writes, Afghan volunteers were subjected to extensive vetting, including background checks and polygraphs.
00:06:35.000 This shooter first entered the Zero Units in 2012 and served under both the Obama and Trump administrations.
00:06:40.000 He was granted humanitarian parole into the U.S. in 2021, and then again was granted asylum when his case came under review in 2025 under the Trump administration.
00:06:51.000 Christy Noam, Department of Homeland Security head, she says actually that when he was shipped in, he wasn't a problem.
00:06:57.000 He was radicalized later through connections already in the country, which, by the way, is significantly more dangerous.
00:07:03.000 Okay, that is a massive problem, like a much worse problem than just bringing people in from cultures that are non-communicative and non-coalescing with Western civilization.
00:07:15.000 That you can stop, right?
00:07:16.000 That you can do what President Trump is saying, just stop immigration from third world countries, as he says.
00:07:21.000 But if, in fact, there are people who are being brought in who initially are somewhat friendly to the United States or have worked with the United States and then are being radicalized in the United States, you have to start asking some pretty serious questions about which organizations in the United States here, like at home, are actually radicalizing people.
00:07:37.000 And again, this would fit with a different pattern.
00:07:40.000 The pattern would not be, we're bringing in migrants who are then committing crimes, right?
00:07:44.000 An illegal immigration problem.
00:07:46.000 Then what you'd really be talking about is an Islamicization problem, a radical Islamicization problem inside the United States.
00:07:52.000 And it would fit with lone wolf attacks, ISIS-inspired attacks, or ISIS-connected attacks.
00:07:58.000 And there have been a whole list of people in the United States who have been radicalized inside the United States by ISIS, associated groups, social media.
00:08:06.000 And that ranges from the Fort Hood shooting all the way through the 2025 New Orleans truck attack, in which an ISIS-inspired person killed 14 people.
00:08:14.000 It's amazing how terrorist attacks like that get completely memory-bohl.
00:08:17.000 Like you don't even remember that happening in 2025, but it killed 14.
00:08:21.000 I mean, that was again the beginning of this year, and it killed 14 people.
00:08:25.000 And we've already forgotten about it because the way that the media works, if somebody is inspired by ISIS or a radical Islamic group and they commit a terror attack in the United States, we just memory hole it.
00:08:34.000 The same thing happened in 2016 by the Orlando nightclub shooting, in which a shooter killed 49 people.
00:08:41.000 You remember at the Orlando Pulse Nightclub, the deadliest mass shooting in American history at that time.
00:08:47.000 And the shooter, in that case, pledged allegiance to ISIS.
00:08:50.000 And instead, we got a national debate about whether Christians were too intolerant toward gay people, even though it was an Islamic terror attack, or the 2015 San Bernardino terror attack, in which a couple of people who communicated with ISIS via encrypted messages killed 14 people and injured 22 others.
00:09:06.000 Okay, so radicalization in the United States is a massive problem.
00:09:09.000 And by the way, requires the FBI and the DOJ to actually do the thing that they are supposed to do.
00:09:15.000 Track down the groups doing the radicalizing, follow them around, monitor the places where the radicalization is occurring.
00:09:22.000 And that is a significantly harder problem to solve, really, a much harder law enforcement problem to solve than just shutting the borders, which is what President Trump is attempting to do.
00:09:30.000 By the way, these are not mutually exclusive.
00:09:32.000 You can shut the borders to immigration and mass migration from third world countries, and we should.
00:09:37.000 But also, in this particular case, it seems like the problem, maybe he was letting the guy in the country in the first place.
00:09:43.000 That's a fair argument.
00:09:45.000 But at the time, if he was working with the zero units and had been vetted, then the real problem is how he got radicalized after he came to the United States.
00:09:52.000 Again, you can say he shouldn't have come in anyway, because if you're coming from a third world country, why is your first place of respite the United States?
00:09:58.000 Go somewhere else.
00:09:59.000 There are plenty of other countries on planet Earth.
00:10:02.000 We believe he was radicalized since he's been here in this country.
00:10:05.000 We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state.
00:10:09.000 And we're going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, talked to them.
00:10:14.000 So far, we've had some participation, but anyone who has the information on this needs to know that we will be coming after you.
00:10:24.000 Apparently, there are warning signs.
00:10:25.000 Apparently, there are always warning signs.
00:10:27.000 The New York Post reports that a leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times.
00:10:32.000 The Afghan terrorist suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023.
00:10:39.000 Again, that goes to the theory that this person was, in fact, vetted when he came into the United States.
00:10:44.000 That's why presumably he was granted asylum by the Trump administration in 2025.
00:10:49.000 Remember, entered in 2021 under Joe Biden.
00:10:52.000 Four years later was granted full asylum by the Trump administration.
00:10:56.000 And we'll get to Christy Noam's kind of non-response response to that problem in a moment.
00:11:01.000 Apparently, the shooter's behavior was so disturbing, a local community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, according to emails to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants seen by the Associated Press.
00:11:12.000 The community member wrote, quote, Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father, and provider since March of 2023.
00:11:18.000 He quit his job that month.
00:11:20.000 His behavior has changed greatly.
00:11:21.000 The community member said he feared that LeConwal had become suicidal.
00:11:26.000 The 29-year-old Afghan refugee, of course, was brought to the United States in 2021, and he moved to Bellingham, Washington with his wife and their five young sons.
00:11:34.000 Apparently, he struggled to assimilate, which again goes to mass migration from third world countries, failed to hold down a steady job or commit to learning English.
00:11:42.000 Apparently, alternating between periods of dark isolation and reckless travel, he sometimes spent weeks in his darkened room not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or his older kids.
00:11:50.000 These manic episodes, he would take off in the family car and drive non-stop.
00:11:55.000 He failed to stay in contact with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services as was mandated by the terms of his entry into the United States, except for interim weeks where he would do the right things according to the email.
00:12:07.000 And apparently, when his wife would leave him with the kids for a week, traveling to visit relatives, his kids would go to school unwashed in dirty clothes without even having eaten.
00:12:17.000 Apparently, there were concerns raised about his kids.
00:12:20.000 So red flags, aplenty, and nothing was done.
00:12:24.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:14:52.000 Now, Kristen Welker over at NBC News was asking Chrissy Noam about this, and she points out, you know, you're pointing out he shouldn't have come in 2021.
00:14:58.000 That's fine, but you guys granted him asylum in 2025.
00:15:02.000 I just want to be very clear about this because his asylum was approved in April of this year on the Trump administration's watch.
00:15:10.000 So just to be very clear, was there a vetting process in place to approve that asylum request?
00:15:19.000 Yeah, the vetting process all happened under Joe Biden's administration.
00:15:22.000 Was he vetted when he was granted asylum?
00:15:25.000 Are you saying he wasn't vetted when he was granted?
00:15:29.000 Vetting is happening when they come into the country, and that was completely abandoned under Joe Biden's administration.
00:15:38.000 Okay, so, you know, again, yes and no.
00:15:42.000 I mean, the answer here is yes and no.
00:15:45.000 And two problems can be problems at once.
00:15:46.000 One can be the original vetting procedure or whether the initial place for Afghan refugees to go in the aftermath of Joe Biden's cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan should have been the United States.
00:15:55.000 My answer there would have been no.
00:15:57.000 It should not have been the United States.
00:15:58.000 We should have figured out someplace else for people to go.
00:16:00.000 But then again, I was also not an advocate of withdrawing precipitously from Afghanistan in the first place without any sort of transitional plan for the government to remain.
00:16:10.000 And then there's the second question, which is the radicalization question, which remains a very, very hot topic.
00:16:16.000 Meanwhile, again, this is a bigger issue than just this one shooter.
00:16:20.000 Apparently, according to the Department of Homeland Security, investigators arrested an Afghan national over the weekend who allegedly made a social media post about building a bomb and threatening to blow up a building in Fort Worth, Texas.
00:16:32.000 Mohamed Dawouk Alikoze's arrest took place on Tuesday, according to Trisha McLaughlin, an assistant secretary with DHS.
00:16:39.000 This person was arrested on state terror charges and is now being held at a corrections center in Terrence County, Texas, according to court records.
00:16:47.000 Apparently, this particular would-be bomber posted a video of himself on TikTok indicating he was building a bomb with an intended target of the Fort Worth area.
00:16:55.000 So at least he picked up the American custom of posting all your worst ideas on TikTok.
00:17:00.000 At least that.
00:17:00.000 That's how he was caught.
00:17:02.000 He was arrested on Tuesday by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI as well.
00:17:09.000 So even Democrats are on the defensive about this at this point.
00:17:12.000 Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona was asked about the vetting of Afghan immigrants.
00:17:16.000 He said, Listen, I don't think there's any question that everybody needs better vetting.
00:17:19.000 There's no question about that.
00:17:22.000 Are you saying that all 190,000 Afghans in America should be revetted, that the process...
00:17:28.000 No, I am not saying that.
00:17:31.000 People should be vetted.
00:17:31.000 Okay.
00:17:32.000 Hey, if you identify a certain number of individuals that you have another question about, I think that's fine to do that.
00:17:40.000 There needs to be an investigation and find out, you know, why did this guy do this?
00:17:44.000 Was he radicalized in Afghanistan or here in the United States?
00:17:49.000 And if it makes sense to change some things, I think we need to do that.
00:17:55.000 Okay, so obviously that is true.
00:17:57.000 Now, this connects with another gigantic story that broke over the course of last week.
00:18:01.000 And that, of course, is a big story from the New York Times about a huge amount of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota.
00:18:08.000 Now, of course, there have been serious questions to be asked about the widespread fraud and, yes, terrorism connections in the Somali community in Minnesota.
00:18:16.000 My checks with our friends and sponsors over at Comet, that is a project of perplexity about the history of Somali migration into the United States.
00:18:23.000 How many Somali immigrants have entered the U.S. since 1990?
00:18:25.000 Where do they live?
00:18:26.000 According to Perplexity, between 1990 and 2025, the U.S. has seen significant Somali immigration, with estimates suggesting between 140,000 and 167,000 Somali immigrants have settled in the country over this period.
00:18:40.000 Okay, that is up from 2,500 total Somali population in 1990.
00:18:46.000 It has grown due to refugee resettlement and family reunification.
00:18:50.000 Minnesota has the largest Somali community.
00:18:52.000 Ohio and Washington state also have large Somali communities, 21,000 and 15,000 Somali residents, respectively.
00:19:01.000 Well, the New York Times did a bit of journalism, like an actual bit of journalism, when they went ahead and actually reported serious welfare fraud problems in these areas of Minnesota.
00:19:12.000 According to the New York Times, the fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.
00:19:17.000 Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:19:25.000 At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency, but as new schemes targeting the state's generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.
00:19:36.000 Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota's Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that build state agencies for millions of dollars worth of social services that were never provided.
00:19:49.000 Federal prosecutors say 59 people have been convicted in these schemes so far and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers' money has been stolen in three plots they are currently investigating.
00:19:58.000 That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its entire Department of Corrections.
00:20:02.000 Minnesota's fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans, and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
00:20:12.000 Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans.
00:20:14.000 Fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season.
00:20:17.000 Governor Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are now being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch.
00:20:24.000 President Trump weighed in, calling Minnesota a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity and saying that Somali perpetrators should be sent back to where they came from.
00:20:32.000 So apparently, there are about 80,000 people in Minnesota, Somali Americans in Minnesota.
00:20:38.000 And debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state's Somali community and other Minnesotans and has left some Somali Americans saying they're unfacing a new they're facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them rather than the small group accused of fraud.
00:20:51.000 But of course, the reality is that importing gigantic waves of Somali immigrants into Minnesota of all places might create some culture clash, actually.
00:21:03.000 Now, when you read down in the story, one of the things you find hilariously is that when allegations were first made about welfare fraud in Minnesota, the first response was, we can't look into this.
00:21:11.000 It's racist.
00:21:13.000 I know.
00:21:13.000 I can't believe it either.
00:21:14.000 According to the New York Times, the first public sign of a major problem in the state's social services system came in 2022 when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children.
00:21:27.000 The prosecutors focused on a Minneapolis nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future, which became a partner to dozens of local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites.
00:21:35.000 State agencies reimbursed the group and its partners for invoices, claiming to have fed tens of thousands of kids, but all of it was fake.
00:21:41.000 The meals were non-existent.
00:21:42.000 Business owners instead spent the funds on luxury cars, houses, even real estate projects abroad.
00:21:49.000 Behind the scenes, federal investigators realized that this was not an isolated incident.
00:21:54.000 In one case, hundreds of providers were reimbursed for assistance they claimed to have provided to people at risk for homelessness, but apparently none of those services were actually provided.
00:22:02.000 The program's annual cost ballooned to more than $104 million last year from a budgeted projection of $2.6 million when it began in 2020.
00:22:11.000 So again, some of this is culture, for sure.
00:22:14.000 Some of this is migration, for sure.
00:22:15.000 And some of this is gigantic sacks of cash very often tend to be stolen by malign actors.
00:22:23.000 So again, much of this was ignored, specifically because of the culture clash issues, because of concerns about racism, concerns about bigotry.
00:22:34.000 When we talk about the Rotherham scandal in the UK and the fact that the authorities literally covered up grooming and raping of children for years, white kids, at the hands of largely Pakistani immigrants.
00:22:46.000 And it was covered up for fear that that story might lend gravitas to anti-immigration folks on Britain's national party right.
00:22:55.000 When we talk about, understand that same sort of sentiment exists on the left in the United States.
00:23:00.000 According to the New York Times, red flags in the meals program surfaced in the early months of the pandemic.
00:23:04.000 The money kept flowing anyway.
00:23:06.000 In 2020, Minnesota Department of Education officials who administered the program became overwhelmed by the number of applicants seeking to register new feeding sites and began raising questions about the plausibility of some invoices.
00:23:17.000 Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit group that was the largest provider in the pandemic program, responded with a warning.
00:23:23.000 In an email, the group told the state agency, failing to promptly approve new applicants from minority-owned businesses would result in a lawsuit featuring accusations of racism that would be sprawled across the news.
00:23:33.000 And then Feeding Our Future sued the agency.
00:23:38.000 So, again, perfectly obvious what was happening here.
00:23:41.000 Kaisa Magan, a Somali American who formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota Attorney General's office, said elected officials in the state were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations in the Somali community.
00:23:54.000 McGann said, quote, there's a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting block for Democrats, saying the quiet part out loud right there.
00:24:07.000 Pretty incredible stuff.
00:24:08.000 President Trump responded to this again by doubling down on his suggestion that third world migration be reversed.
00:24:15.000 President Trump actually suggested that Ilhan Omar be thrown out of the United States.
00:24:20.000 She's the representative from this area, of course, over allegations that she married her brother.
00:24:25.000 He said while speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Somalia, where you have a congressman, goes around telling everybody about our constitution, but she supposedly came into our country by marrying her brother.
00:24:35.000 If that's true, she shouldn't be a congressperson.
00:24:37.000 We should throw her the hell out of the country.
00:24:39.000 And then he said, we don't need people coming into the country telling us what to do.
00:24:44.000 Which again, the president is right.
00:24:46.000 The president also went after the governor of Minnesota, who is presiding over all of this and called him retarded in the process.
00:24:57.000 In that same post, you mentioned Tim Walz, and you called him what many Americans do find in a fixed word retarded.
00:25:05.000 Do you stand by that claim of calling Tim Walz retarded?
00:25:08.000 Yeah, I think there's something wrong with him.
00:25:09.000 Absolutely.
00:25:10.000 Sure.
00:25:11.000 Do you have a problem with him?
00:25:13.000 You know what?
00:25:13.000 I think there's something wrong with him.
00:25:15.000 Anybody that would do what he did, anybody that would allow those people into his state can pay billions of dollars out to Somalia.
00:25:23.000 We give billions of dollars to Somalia.
00:25:25.000 It's not even a country because it doesn't function like a country.
00:25:29.000 It's got a name, but it doesn't function like a country.
00:25:32.000 There's something wrong with Walls.
00:25:35.000 I mean, he ain't wrong.
00:25:37.000 And I understand the media are now going to call a ticky-tack foul on President Trump for using the word retarded, which, again, I'm sorry, but has re-entered common parlance.
00:25:46.000 Not to get into a linguistic dispute about the word retarded, but every time in the United States there is an attempt to wipe out of the language some term that people use that is edgy about people who they believe are stupid, it is then replaced by another term.
00:26:02.000 That's just the history of these terms.
00:26:04.000 But Tim Walz is attempting to grasp onto that to avoid the consequences of his own failed governance.
00:26:10.000 Here he was being very offended by the use of the word retarded in relation to him, but apparently not all that offended by billions of dollars in fraud from the Somali community that votes consistently Democratic.
00:26:22.000 Donald Trump insulting me is a badge of honor for me, but I think we all know as both as an educator for a couple decades and as a parent, using that term is just so damaging.
00:26:35.000 It's hurtful.
00:26:36.000 We have fought three decades to get this out of our schools.
00:26:40.000 Kids know better than to use it.
00:26:41.000 But look, this is what Donald Trump has done.
00:26:44.000 He's normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language.
00:26:51.000 I'm sorry.
00:26:52.000 So your defense here is that it's offensive to use the word retired.
00:26:56.000 Like this is not a top 100 priority for Americans.
00:26:59.000 I'm sorry.
00:27:00.000 If you're trying to avoid responsibility for what just happened in your state over the course of years by saying that the president is a bad man for using the word retire, good luck to you on that one.
00:27:09.000 Douglas Murray has a great column over in the New York Post talking about this.
00:27:13.000 He says, you cannot just leave borders open or allow in large numbers of people with totally different value systems from your own.
00:27:18.000 This is the mistake many European countries have committed in recent years.
00:27:21.000 They've opened their homes up to people from almost every part of the world where there is civil strife, war, or just a lower standard of living.
00:27:27.000 The results can be seen everywhere.
00:27:28.000 It's the reason why a country like Sweden, that used to be such a placid, decent place, has become one of the most violent countries in the world, not actually at war.
00:27:35.000 Grenade attacks and gang warfare, these things were recently alien to Sweden, not anymore.
00:27:41.000 It's the same here in the United States.
00:27:43.000 The effects are more dispersed, so the problem can be covered up for longer.
00:27:47.000 But Douglas Murray says all of this begs the question: why should a group of people be given sanctuary in the United States, presumably saying they were fleeing from terror, only to use their time in the United States committing fraud to send to terrorists?
00:27:59.000 How does that make any sense?
00:28:01.000 The president of the United States, of course, is right about this particular issue, and Democrats are freaking out about it, as they should.
00:28:08.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:29:29.000 Now, I have to say, there is a clip that is going around of a New York Times contributing op-ed writer named Wajahat Ali, and it is so telling and astonishing.
00:29:39.000 He basically spells out the United States, why the United States failed in allowing mass migration from third world countries.
00:29:47.000 He means this as a sort of, as a sort of brag, I suppose, a sort of audacious statement in the face of Trumpian racism.
00:29:56.000 But what he actually ends up doing is justifying Trump's entire program.
00:29:58.000 Here's Wajahat Ali.
00:30:01.000 You have lost.
00:30:02.000 You lost.
00:30:03.000 The mistake that you made is you let us in in the first place.
00:30:06.000 That's the thing with brown people.
00:30:07.000 I'm going to say this as a brown person.
00:30:08.000 There's a lot of us.
00:30:10.000 Like a lot.
00:30:11.000 There's like 1.2 billion in India.
00:30:13.000 There's more than 200 million in Pakistan.
00:30:15.000 There's like 170 million in Bangladesh.
00:30:17.000 Those are just the people over there.
00:30:18.000 I'm even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants.
00:30:21.000 There's a bunch of us.
00:30:23.000 And we breed.
00:30:24.000 We're a breeding people.
00:30:27.000 I mean, my goodness, my goodness.
00:30:32.000 So, all of the white supremacists who've been talking about so-called replacement theory, the idea that migrants are going to be brought into the United States to replace the domestically born population, you're just saying the thing they're saying, but in the reverse way.
00:30:45.000 What in the hell?
00:30:47.000 And of course, this speaks to the reality, which is forget about the color of the people coming in, because that is irrelevant to character.
00:30:55.000 The character of the people coming in, the cultures from which they come, the countries from which they come, the concepts and religious beliefs they hold dear.
00:31:05.000 These things, of course, matter to the definition of a country.
00:31:08.000 And when you bring people in en masse, that is going to change the cultural fabric of a country.
00:31:13.000 Duh.
00:31:14.000 That's the whole point, apparently, according to Wajahat Ali and people like Wajahat Ali.
00:31:19.000 That's incredible.
00:31:20.000 You've lost?
00:31:21.000 What is the thing that they lost?
00:31:23.000 What is the thing they lost?
00:31:24.000 Seriously.
00:31:25.000 Presumably, what he means is you've lost the country.
00:31:30.000 You've lost the country to people like Wajahad Ali and their belief systems.
00:31:36.000 I mean, has there ever been a stronger case made for restricting mass migration and reversing much of the migration that's happened into the United States?
00:31:47.000 All this is coming to a head for a reason.
00:31:48.000 It's coming to a head, not just because of isolated incidents like what's happening in Minnesota, which was more systemic than isolated, or what happened in Washington, D.C. with the shooting of the National Guard members.
00:31:59.000 This is happening all over the West because the West, apparently, many in the West have decided to wake up to the fact that they never should have allowed, through their niceness and their kindness, their civilizations to be eaten from within by people who enter and then take advantage of all the benefits on offer only to fight that civilization and destroy that civilization.
00:32:21.000 And again, I go back to the original point with regards to the shooter in Washington, D.C.
00:32:25.000 That person came to the United States after working with the United States in Afghanistan, apparently, according to what we know.
00:32:31.000 And that person was radicalized in the United States to hate the United States.
00:32:36.000 Something is deeply wrong.
00:32:39.000 There are cancerous centers inside the United States that are spreading nasty and terrible anti-American ideologies and radicalizing people in the United States.
00:32:48.000 So now you have a cancer from without and within.
00:32:51.000 People attempting to enter who have the wrong ideas, who have bad ideas about the world and bad ideas about our civilization, and then come here and take advantage.
00:32:59.000 And I talk about in my book, Lions and Scavengers, the Barbarians.
00:33:02.000 And then you have people who are radicalized by people in the West.
00:33:08.000 These are existential problems for the West.
00:33:09.000 When President Trump talks about ending third world migration and reversing the migration and fighting this growing cancerous problem in the United States, and again, I'm not talking about humans as cancers, I'm talking about ideologies as cancers here.
00:33:25.000 Then, when you talk about reversing the process that has happened, which is the hollowing out of the American body politic by sectarian groups seeking to destroy Western civilization from within, then when you talk about that, no wonder that is an increasingly popular political program, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well.
00:33:50.000 So, meanwhile, Democrats are attempting to spin up allegations that the president of the United States is issuing illegal military orders.
00:33:56.000 So, you'll recall that Senator Mark Kelly, along with Senator Alyssa Slotkin from Michigan and a bunch of other Democrats who had served in the military or in the CIA, that they put out a video calling on members of the military to reject what they called illegal orders.
00:34:09.000 The problem with that argument is that they are going to post facto determine what an illegal order constituted.
00:34:17.000 So, that's kind of risky.
00:34:18.000 If you're a member of the military and you follow an order, any order, and then later Democrats get elected to the presidency and determine that the order was in fact illegal and they move to prosecute you based on following that order, that is a problem.
00:34:30.000 That is why it's kind of dangerous what's happening with these Democrats.
00:34:33.000 So, the president of the United States, the DOJ, they've talked about the possibility of court-martialing Mark Kelly because, of course, he's a veteran.
00:34:40.000 And here he was responding.
00:34:42.000 In my case, Secretary Hegset said, prosecute him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for, by the way, reciting the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
00:34:53.000 It's obviously ridiculous.
00:34:54.000 Dana, I'm not backing down.
00:34:56.000 These guys don't scare me.
00:34:58.000 They're not serious people.
00:34:59.000 I mean, the president of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, neither of them.
00:35:04.000 Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Holland, perhaps the dumbest member of the Senate outside of Maisie Hirono of Hawaii, says that when Democrats say they should disobey orders, members of the military, they're just citing the law of the land.
00:35:16.000 So we have here six real folks who have been dedicated to our country in the military who simply cited the law of the land, which is that our men and women in the military should follow lawful orders, which clearly has become more important than ever right now, now that we have this disclosure about Secretary Hegseth essentially saying kill them all.
00:35:39.000 Now, the reality is it's going to be very difficult to punish these senators for saying what they are saying because, again, they can hide behind the shield of the sort of rhetoric of the law, which says, of course, of course, no member of the military should obey any legal order.
00:35:53.000 As the Associated Press reports, some say the Pentagon is misreading military law to go after Kelly as a retired Navy fighter pilot.
00:35:59.000 Others say the Arizona Democrat can't be prosecuted as a member of Congress.
00:36:02.000 And then, of course, there are former military prosecutors who say that he didn't do anything wrong.
00:36:07.000 Now, again, there have been courts martial of retired service members in the past decade.
00:36:12.000 However, this would be pretty unusual, obviously.
00:36:15.000 And again, Kelly is going to claim that he didn't do anything illegal.
00:36:18.000 He just said don't follow illegal orders.
00:36:19.000 The problem, of course, lies in how do you define an illegal order?
00:36:22.000 And is it, in fact, dangerous for members of the military or past members of the military to go around telling current members of the military, quote unquote, don't follow illegal orders without actually defining what that means.
00:36:34.000 And this issue is coming to a head over alleged war crimes that have been committed by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
00:36:41.000 And so all of this is being fostered by an article in the Washington Post about the destruction of these Venezuelan drug boats.
00:36:50.000 According to the Washington Post, the longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
00:37:00.000 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation.
00:37:05.000 The order was to kill everybody, one of them said.
00:37:07.000 A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern.
00:37:11.000 For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed.
00:37:14.000 As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt.
00:37:16.000 Two survivors were still clinging to the smoldering wreck.
00:37:19.000 The special operations commander overseeing the September 2nd attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions, according to two people familiar with the matter.
00:37:27.000 The two men were then blown apart in the water.
00:37:29.000 So the argument is that the second strike here amounts to a war crime.
00:37:34.000 That once people are in the water, once they have essentially been disabled, that at that point, killing them is a war crime.
00:37:42.000 According to the Washington Post, the alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an armed conflict with the United States, according to officials and experts.
00:37:52.000 Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats amounts to murder, according to Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised special operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaigns.
00:38:04.000 There's two separate arguments being made.
00:38:05.000 One is you can't blow up the drug boats without authorization from Congress because you're not at war.
00:38:10.000 So if you kill those people, it's happening outside the purview of an authorized action by Congress, and therefore this is illegal.
00:38:16.000 And that's a pretty weak argument considering the use of drone warfare by the Obama administration all over the world, for example.
00:38:24.000 Then there is the secondary issue, which is killing people after the boat has been disabled or destroyed.
00:38:31.000 So Secretary of Defense Hegseth, he put out his own statement, quote, as usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.
00:38:41.000 As we said from the beginning and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be lethal kinetic strikes.
00:38:47.000 The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people.
00:38:53.000 Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.
00:38:57.000 The Biden administration preferred the kid gloves approach, allowing millions of people, including dangerous cartels and unvetted Afghans, to flood our communities with drugs and violence.
00:39:04.000 The Trump administration has sealed the border and gone on offense against narco-terrorists.
00:39:08.000 Biden coddled terrorists.
00:39:09.000 We killed them.
00:39:10.000 Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command.
00:39:21.000 Our warriors in Southcom put their lives on the line every day to protect the homeland from narco-terrorists.
00:39:25.000 I will always have their back.
00:39:26.000 Okay, so you will notice that in that statement, there's nothing that denies the charge that he said kill everybody.
00:39:31.000 So the question becomes, is kill everybody here a war crime?
00:39:36.000 Democrats, of course, are immediately saying that it is, which, by the way, would mean that the officers who carried out the strikes engaged in war crimes, right?
00:39:43.000 This is how it ties into their argument that you can't carry out illegal orders.
00:39:48.000 Because now, presumably, everybody who's in that chain of command who followed the order would be guilty of a war crime and could theoretically go to federal penitentiary.
00:39:56.000 Senator Chris Van Holland is making that argument.
00:39:59.000 Here he is.
00:40:00.000 Oh, I think it's very possible there was a war crime committed.
00:40:03.000 Of course, for it to be a war crime, you have to accept the Trump administration's whole construct here, which is we're in armed conflict at war.
00:40:13.000 But even if you accept their legal theory, that it is a war crime.
00:40:17.000 And so I do believe that the Secretary of Defense should be held accountable for giving those kind of orders.
00:40:23.000 Okay, the problem is once you say that he gave an illegal order, then everybody who carried out the illegal order is also subject to prosecution.
00:40:30.000 And this is a left-wing attempt very often to basically hamstring any military in the performance of its duty.
00:40:38.000 There's always a battle in all kinetic conflicts, always, between the legal side and the people on the ground who actually have to do the fighting, who actually have to do the thing.
00:40:47.000 This is why rules of engagement are really important in war zones.
00:40:50.000 What are our forces allowed to do?
00:40:53.000 What are they not allowed to do?
00:40:55.000 How do you ensure that they don't commit human rights violations while allowing them the ability to protect themselves and protect others and carry out their mission?
00:41:02.000 These are very, very murky boundaries because war is a foggy place for sure.
00:41:07.000 Senator Markelli is also claiming that this is a war crime.
00:41:11.000 Do you believe if there was a second strike to eliminate any survivors, that that constitutes a war crime?
00:41:20.000 It seems to.
00:41:23.000 If that is true, if what has been reported is accurate, I've got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over.
00:41:36.000 Okay, so there actually is an open and interesting debate over whether there was, in fact, some sort of war crime here.
00:41:43.000 According to Andrew McCarthy, who writes for the National Review and who is, of course, a fan of President Trump generally, he says that if all of this happened, as described in the post report, it was at best a war crime under federal law.
00:41:54.000 I say at best because as regular readers know, I believe these attacks on suspected drug boats without congressional authorization under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime, not terrorist activity, much less an act of war, are lawless.
00:42:10.000 And therefore, the killings are not legitimate under the law of armed conflict.
00:42:14.000 Nevertheless, even if we stipulate, arguendo, that the administration has a colorable claim our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors.
00:42:21.000 The laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered or to combat, meaning out of the fighting, including by shipwreck.
00:42:29.000 So if the boat gets hit and now the thing is just kind of floundering in the water and there's no threat, you can't just nuke them again.
00:42:36.000 So that's Andrew McCarthy's claim.
00:42:38.000 He says it is not permitted under the laws and customs of honorable warfare to order that no quarter be given, to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.
00:42:48.000 Echoing Andrew McCarthy's statement is a group of former U.S. military lawyers, the former JAG working group, saying, quote, that they unanimously consider both the giving and execution of these orders to constitute war crimes, murder or both, right?
00:43:01.000 So that would mean that every member of the military chain of command who is involved in the carrying out of this order would now be subject to criminal penalties.
00:43:09.000 Okay, so the other side is being taken by Professor Brian Cox, who is a professor of law at Cornell.
00:43:16.000 And he says, let's start with the decisive flaw in their statement.
00:43:20.000 Not once does it use or consider the term military objective.
00:43:25.000 He says, if the boat were destroyed, there would be nothing serviceable left of it.
00:43:29.000 But if it's disabled, that is, if the decision maker believed it could still be used to call other narco-traffickers to retrieve their cargo, the boat still qualifies as a military objective, and military objectives can be intentionally attacked.
00:43:40.000 So he's saying is: okay, if the thing is floating and it has a radio and they can call the other narco-traffickers to come pick them up as well as the drugs, then the thing is still a threat, and that means you can nuke it.
00:43:50.000 He says, quote, a military objective is any object which, by its nature, location, purpose, or use, makes an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization in the circumstances ruling at the time offers a definite military advantage.
00:44:04.000 So, how about a disabled boat?
00:44:07.000 He says, if the commander believes it can call for assistance and allow it to continue its mission, it is by definition an object which makes, by its use, an effective contribution.
00:44:16.000 In short, according to the factual scenario reported in the Washington Post story, the boat still qualified as a military objective after the initial attack, and therefore the second strike was not a war crime.
00:44:27.000 So, again, the basic idea is that, well, these people may have been on a boat that was blown up.
00:44:36.000 The boat wasn't totally blown up.
00:44:37.000 It wasn't destroyed.
00:44:37.000 It was disabled.
00:44:38.000 And therefore, it still could have been used as a military objective or for a military objective by the narco-terrorists.
00:44:46.000 He says that if they were shipwrecked, then they were out of combat.
00:44:50.000 But again, if they are not shipwrecked, meaning that, you know, again, they can call for help and then they can get back in the battle, then you can presumably still hit them.
00:45:00.000 So this is going to be an open legal debate.
00:45:03.000 And again, these debates, I don't want to pretend that these debates aren't serious or that we shouldn't be having debates over this.
00:45:07.000 We certainly should.
00:45:08.000 But we are now in, shall we say, dangerous territory, ideologically and legally.
00:45:14.000 The reason being, if you're a soldier and you receive an order from a member of the chain of command, and that order lives where such orders usually live in the murky area that is war.
00:45:25.000 And in the murky area that is war, you are afraid that a Democrat is elected president in three years and you find yourself on the wrong end of a prosecution.
00:45:32.000 Basically, what you're going to end up with very often is a version of what we had in policing called the Ferguson effect, where cops decided they were simply going to stop enforcing the law because they were so terrified that if they did, they would end up prosecuted.
00:45:44.000 And you can't have that for a successful military.
00:45:46.000 You just can't.
00:45:47.000 That's why it's quite dangerous what Democrats have been doing talking about illegal orders and not illegal orders.
00:45:52.000 If they can name an illegal order that should not have been followed, then they presumably should go ahead and do something about it with the full investigative power of Article 1 of the Constitution.
00:46:00.000 If not, then these sort of broad statements not only are not helpful, they do a disservice to members of the military who have to make the hard calls as to what to do every single day with deadly force.
00:46:12.000 Okay, meanwhile, all the targeting of the narco-terrorists in the Caribbean, all of that has to do with an attempt to box in Venezuela.
00:46:20.000 So the Trump administration is clearly now making an attempt to pressure the Venezuelan regime into folding.
00:46:26.000 That is what is happening here.
00:46:28.000 Over the weekend, President Trump apparently told Venezuelan dictator Maduro, Nicolas Maduro, that he should leave.
00:46:35.000 According to the New York Post, Trump gave Maduro a strongly worded ultimatum as tensions flared with the South American nation, telling him to resign and leave or else, according to a bombshell report.
00:46:44.000 According to the Miami Herald, during a call between Trump and Maduro, the socialist president demanded that he be allowed to maintain control of Venezuela's military if he paved the way for free elections there.
00:46:53.000 He also reportedly sought global amnesty for all of his alleged crimes.
00:46:57.000 Trump's refusal on both counts was said to be swift as he followed up with an offer that Maduro may not be able to refuse leave now or else.
00:47:04.000 The question is what the or else looks like at this point.
00:47:08.000 U.S. Senator Dave McCormick told Fox News Sunday: we have a war that's coming through fentanyl, through opioids, through cocaine.
00:47:14.000 It killed 100,000 Americans last year.
00:47:16.000 That's twice the number of people that died in eight years of Vietnam: 4,000 Pennsylvanians.
00:47:21.000 The president then announced he was closing the airspace around the South American country.
00:47:27.000 The USS Gerald F. Ford, which is America's biggest warship, and a Marine expeditionary unit capable of amphibious invasion are floating offshore as well.
00:47:34.000 And he warned that military operations inside Venezuela could begin very, very soon.
00:47:39.000 Unclear what those would target or how the targeting would happen.
00:47:44.000 Now, how exactly that no-fly decree is going to be enforced?
00:47:48.000 That is an open question.
00:47:49.000 We do have F-35s that are there.
00:47:51.000 We don't have international authority to really be over Venezuelan airspace.
00:47:55.000 However, it is also clear that everyone is being very, very careful.
00:47:58.000 Venezuela has revoted, revoked, apparently, operating rights to Iberia, TAP, Avianca, LATAM, Colombia, Turkish Airlines, and GOL.
00:48:08.000 So they're basically now locked down.
00:48:10.000 They're in a state of complete lockdown.
00:48:12.000 Maduro and his allies are saying this is American colonial aggression, saying the United States wants to seize the country's vast oil reserves, which, of course, is untrue.
00:48:19.000 It is Venezuela's nationalization of oil resources that has led to the complete impoverishment of the country in the first place.
00:48:27.000 So clearly, the Trump administration would love to see the Maduro regime fall.
00:48:33.000 Ordinary Venezuelans are preparing for the possibility that there will be some sort of kinetic action inside Venezuela, not just off the coast.
00:48:41.000 According to the Washington Post, U.S. fighter jets escorted a strategic bomber near the coast one day this week.
00:48:48.000 State-controlled media showed video of Venezuelan soldiers firing into the sky, which, again, that is always the mark of a strong military power, is firing rifles at F-35s and such.
00:48:57.000 A supermarket in East Caracas filled with people raiding the shelves to lay in supplies.
00:49:01.000 The next day, the sky was quiet.
00:49:02.000 The capital returned to normal.
00:49:04.000 People don't know exactly what to expect at this point.
00:49:07.000 Maduro has mobilized his troops.
00:49:09.000 He's called on citizens to join militias to defend the country.
00:49:14.000 And where'd things go from here?
00:49:16.000 Open question for sure, given the fact that Maduro, apparently, his jet has now flown to Brazil.
00:49:23.000 That is according to the Express.
00:49:27.000 So, you know, things are getting spicy.
00:49:30.000 President Trump issued a statement over the weekend to all airlines pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers: please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety.
00:49:38.000 Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
00:49:42.000 And again, the presidential jet in Venezuela, that's Maduro, who's the dictator, flew from Caracas to the border of Brazil.
00:49:48.000 So it hasn't actually entered Brazil.
00:49:50.000 Lula, of course, is friendly with Maduro because Lula is a horrible leader.
00:49:55.000 Now, what should the United States do?
00:49:58.000 What are the options here?
00:49:59.000 So, pretty clearly, the United States is playing chicken with Maduro at this point: ratcheting up the tensions, closing the borders, fostering the possibility of military action.
00:50:11.000 In order for there to be a true change in regime, it's not going to be enough for people to get out in the streets.
00:50:16.000 We've already seen that.
00:50:18.000 We already saw years ago when Juan Huaido was elected in an actual election.
00:50:25.000 So, Juan Huaido was probably elected in 2018.
00:50:28.000 There were disputed elections.
00:50:30.000 Huaido was leader of the opposition, and that led to a crisis that lasted for approximately three years over Maduro retaining power, despite the fact that he almost certainly was not the person who won the election or was wanted by the people of Venezuela.
00:50:44.000 But it turned out that getting people out in the streets between 2019 and 2021 didn't actually do much.
00:50:50.000 That in the end, Maduro just consolidated his control.
00:50:53.000 And so, the question now is whether there is something more.
00:50:55.000 So, the fact that the United States is blowing up a source of revenue, those narco-trafficking boats, that the United States is closing the airspace, that the United States is doing all these things ratchets up the pressure.
00:51:05.000 You have to imagine the only reason the United States would be doing this is if they have actual allies they can work with inside the business elite or the political elites or certainly the military elite inside Venezuela, because the mark of regimes that tend to be able to withstand Western pressure are ones that have a very solid chain of command in the pay of the dictator.
00:51:24.000 That is true in places like Russia.
00:51:26.000 It's true in Iran.
00:51:27.000 It's true in North Korea.
00:51:29.000 The question is whether it's true in Venezuela, because if you look at the history of coups in Latin and South America, if you look at the history of regime changes or dictators who are removed, what you will see is a few factors in common.
00:51:42.000 Usually there is a split or a defection inside the security forces surrounding the president or the dictator.
00:51:48.000 That the president or dictator relies on the ability in the end to point guns at the people and tell them to stand down.
00:51:53.000 And if there is a break, then the regime tends to fall.
00:51:57.000 Usually you have to have somebody, a regime elite, right?
00:52:00.000 Somebody second, third, fourth in command, who's willing to take the lead in the opposition, which of course is risky because if you lose, you die typically.
00:52:08.000 And then international pressure and economic crisis points can create the impetus for the overthrow of a regime.
00:52:15.000 So you have to imagine that the only reason the Trump administration would be pursuing this is if they have some sort of serious intel that there is in fact a break inside Maduro's security organization, that there is somebody who's willing to take up the baton and that additional pressure forces Maduro to flee and the military to make a move to defenustrate him, replace him with a transitional figure, or to hold free and fair elections.
00:52:39.000 Again, there's a long history of this in South America, Paraguay in 1989 or Panama in 1989, Haiti in 1986, Bolivia in 2019.
00:52:48.000 This sort of stuff is not infrequent in Latin and South America, but those preconditions better be there.
00:52:53.000 And I will say that the Trump administration is up the ante so much that if Trump backs down at this point, it's going to look pretty bad for the United States.
00:53:02.000 Okay, meanwhile, negotiations continue over at Ukraine.
00:53:05.000 One of the theories is that what's going on in Venezuela is connected with what's going on over in Ukraine in a couple of ways.
00:53:11.000 One is the idea that the United States is, in sort of soft fashion, acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe while simultaneously solidifying its own sphere of influence in South and Latin America and even a Chinese sphere of influence in the Far East.
00:53:27.000 That is the most cynical and negative view of what's going on.
00:53:30.000 Another view is that by freeing up the Venezuelan oil supply, and Maduro goes down, suddenly the oil supply from Venezuela kicks back up again, and the United States is no longer as dependent on Russian oil or can facilitate the flow of Venezuelan oil over to Europe so that Europe is less reliant on Russian oil, which would be a good thing.
00:53:48.000 The United States has been making a very hard push to get to the end of the Ukraine war, largely by putting serious pressure on Ukraine.
00:53:54.000 There have been no indicators that I have seen thus far that the Russians are willing to make any sort of deal that is doable for the Ukrainians at this point.
00:54:02.000 Nonetheless, there were meetings in Florida between U.S. and Ukrainian officials for hours of talks.
00:54:09.000 According to NPR, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward the session was productive, but that work remains in search of a peace deal.
00:54:16.000 Here is what Secretary Rubio had to say.
00:54:18.000 So this is not just about ending a war.
00:54:20.000 This is about ending a war in a way that creates a mechanism and a way forward that will allow them to be independent and sovereign, never have another war again, and create tremendous prosperity for its people.
00:54:33.000 So the question is whether that is true or not.
00:54:36.000 Meaning, the original plan that was proposed by Steve Witkoff last week was a bleep show.
00:54:41.000 It was a plan that basically was a list of Russian demands, and the Ukrainians were very upset with it.
00:54:47.000 And now it seems that Rubio had to step in, and so did Jared, in order to push back against what was a bad plan and come to something that appeared to be in the middle.
00:54:55.000 Rustem Umarov is head of Ukraine's Security Council, and he responded to Rubio by expressing his country's appreciation for U.S. efforts.
00:55:02.000 He said, U.S. is hearing us.
00:55:03.000 U.S. is supporting us.
00:55:04.000 U.S. is working beside us.
00:55:07.000 Unclear what progress has been made in the talks.
00:55:10.000 Now, again, all this is happening at the same time that there is serious pressure on the Ukrainian government to make changes at the top.
00:55:19.000 A person named Andrei Yermak, who is the top aide to Vladimir Zelensky and one of the key peace negotiators, he apparently has now resigned after anti-corruption agencies raided his home.
00:55:29.000 I mean, it is well known, by the way, that the Ukrainian government is rife with corruption.
00:55:32.000 This has been true for legitimately decades, not a shock at all.
00:55:36.000 The top members of the Ukrainian government made their war profiteering off of this war.
00:55:40.000 That would not be surprising at all.
00:55:42.000 Zelensky said, I want no one to have any questions about Ukraine.
00:55:46.000 Today, we have the following internal decisions.
00:55:47.000 There will be a reboot of the office of the president of Ukraine.
00:55:50.000 The head of the office, Andrei Yermak, has written a letter of resignation.
00:55:55.000 Apparently, he said that he was cooperating with the authorities.
00:55:59.000 Now, let's just be clear: corruption in Ukraine does not mean siding with Russia.
00:56:03.000 Corruption in Ukraine, if the United States uses the excuse of corruption in Ukraine to side with one of the world's most corrupt and evil regimes in the Russian regime, that would be a giant failure.
00:56:13.000 We work with corrupt and terrible regimes all over the world against people who are even worse than they are.
00:56:19.000 The Saudi regime is not famous for its non-corruption or non-violence.
00:56:23.000 The United States must work with the Saudi regime in order to hem in, for example, the threat of Muslim Brotherhood takeovers or against the Iranians.
00:56:32.000 That's just the way international politics works.
00:56:33.000 It's a series of terrible choices.
00:56:38.000 With that said, the Ukrainians, of course, are still very concerned that the United States may put too much pressure on Ukraine and not enough on Russia.
00:56:46.000 Here is the former Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmitro Kuleba, talking about the U.S. peace plan.
00:56:53.000 I don't think it's a revelation to anyone that just copy-pasting Russian ultimatums, as it was done once again, clearly tells you where all this comes from.
00:57:06.000 You know, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
00:57:09.000 So if it looks like a Russian ultimatum, then probably it comes from Russia.
00:57:16.000 Okay, so, you know, again, we will see whether that is the case and what is pushed forward here.
00:57:21.000 A bad deal that leads to a further war between Ukraine and Russia two years from now is not a win for the United States, nor is any sort of cap on the Ukrainian military forces.
00:57:32.000 I haven't seen what sort of pressure is being applied on the Russians thus far to get them to the table, because all I've seen is the Ukrainians giving and giving and giving and the Russians not giving a single inch.
00:57:41.000 The Ukrainians have been saying they're willing to do a ceasefire since February.
00:57:45.000 The Russians have not ceased fire for a single second.
00:57:48.000 So at some point, we're going to have to ask a pretty simple question: what is Vladimir Putin willing to do?
00:57:54.000 All righty, as we continue here on the show for our members, we'll get into the question of when Social Security is going to go bankrupt.
00:58:02.000 Because remember, we as a country are still running a gigantic debt.
00:58:05.000 And the big drivers of our debt are those social welfare programs.
00:58:08.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
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