The Matt Walsh Show - Friendly Fire： Hegseth. Homeland Security & Happy Meals

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00:00:14.740 If your country has not figured out waste disposal,

00:00:18.920 we're not going to accept anyone from your country.

00:00:21.240 Michael, your area of specialty and interest lies in fast food.

00:00:24.720 I'm a secret fat guy.

00:00:26.040 It's a scam is what I'm telling you.

00:00:27.480 Matt Walsh's show will just be called Old Man Yells at Cloud.

00:00:30.000 That's the show now. What are you talking about?

00:00:32.040 Friends like these, who needs enemies?

00:00:35.200 Friends like these, who needs enemies?

00:00:39.300 Welcome to Friendly Fire.

00:00:41.100 We're all fat and happy after Thanksgiving.

00:00:43.160 We're actually not so happy because the country is falling apart.

00:00:46.500 A lot to get to.

00:00:47.300 Obviously, the tragic shooting of two National Guardsmen

00:00:50.620 just a day before Thanksgiving by an Afghan national.

00:00:54.240 A lot of people asking, why do we have all these Afghan nationals?

00:00:56.600 Why do we have all of these Somalis committing fraud in Minnesota

00:01:00.040 and sending their money to terrorists overseas?

00:01:02.000 We'll get into the big immigration question because America's, I think, public opinion

00:01:07.020 has moved vastly to the right on this, on immigration.

00:01:10.140 And I give three cheers for that.

00:01:12.000 Also, speaking of Latin America, our Secretary of War is just zapping drug boats left and

00:01:18.680 right, which is a very, very beautiful thing in my view.

00:01:21.880 Now the libs are taking the side of the narco terrorists and accusing him of war crimes.

00:01:25.440 And even some on the right want to say it might be a war crime.

00:01:28.200 We'll get into that.

00:01:28.880 And then the most important question raised by our very own Matt Walsh,

00:01:31.960 why do restaurants suck?

00:01:33.560 They didn't used to suck and now they kind of suck.

00:01:35.780 Matt's words, not mine.

00:01:37.060 We'll get into all of that first, though.

00:01:39.420 You know what Cyber Monday means?

00:01:40.700 It means the best deal of the year at Daily Wire.

00:01:43.740 Daily Wire Plus is 50% off right now.

00:01:46.000 Dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:01:49.420 All right, before we get to the most important question, the restaurant question,

00:01:53.540 this migration issue is brutal.

00:01:56.860 And it's truly, you read terrible headlines all the time.

00:02:00.700 And right before Thanksgiving, this was one of those stories

00:02:03.820 that makes you personally very, very angry.

00:02:07.660 And it should make you personally very, very angry.

00:02:09.600 These two young people, a young 20-year-old woman, 24-year-old guy,

00:02:13.600 National Guard in Washington, serve in their country right before the American holiday.

00:02:19.100 And this Afghan national comes out and murders the woman, puts the man in critical condition.

00:02:25.200 This, following another attempted Afghan terror attack in Oklahoma last year, right on Election Day.

00:02:31.600 This, after we've seen a lot of crimes being committed by these Afghan immigrants,

00:02:35.800 or refugees, I suppose, taken in under Joe Biden.

00:02:38.520 This, on top of all of the Somalis in Minnesota,

00:02:41.840 apparently defrauding the taxpayer and sending their money to al-Shabaab.

00:02:44.920 So, clearly something's gone very, very wrong with immigration.

00:02:48.740 Now President Trump talking about pausing immigration,

00:02:50.940 maybe even deporting people who are ostensibly legal residents or citizens.

00:02:55.080 What are we to do about it?

00:02:57.140 I assume the most belligerent take will come from you, Matt.

00:02:59.780 So, what's your take?

00:03:01.620 Yeah, well, look, I, first on what Trump has said,

00:03:05.580 I completely agree with, you know, the tweet that he put out over the weekend.

00:03:10.360 Shut off third world immigration.

00:03:12.100 You know, I've been saying that for a long time.

00:03:13.280 A lot of us have been.

00:03:14.540 We need to look at denaturalizing.

00:03:16.380 So, it's not just deporting illegals,

00:03:18.640 but also deporting people who are, as you say, ostensibly legal citizens, denaturalize them.

00:03:24.080 And it's not just because we don't like them.

00:03:25.560 It's because they are committing fraud.

00:03:27.680 As we know with Somalis, this is a huge problem.

00:03:31.140 It's a systemic problem.

00:03:33.500 But also, they're lying when they come here.

00:03:35.420 They're supposed to pledge allegiance to our country.

00:03:37.320 That's part of the application process.

00:03:39.400 And we have, there's very good evidence that a lot of them just flat out lied.

00:03:42.400 So, that's a form of fraud, and they should be kicked out for that.

00:03:44.900 The one thing I will say with Trump, though, is that, you know,

00:03:48.180 and this has been an issue with Trump going back to the first term,

00:03:51.180 is that if you're going, and I think he's done a lot of great things in the second term,

00:03:54.360 but if you're going to say that you're going to take these kinds of radical steps,

00:04:00.140 radical in comparison to what presidents of the past have done,

00:04:03.780 if you're going to say that, then you actually have to do it.

00:04:05.400 Because if you say it, and then you don't do it, now it's the worst of all worlds.

00:04:08.240 Because you're still going to get hit.

00:04:09.880 You're going to get the blowback for doing it, because you said you were going to do it,

00:04:12.860 but you don't actually get the result of having done it.

00:04:15.300 So, if you say it, if you throw down the gauntlet and say,

00:04:18.280 we're going to shut off immigration from third world countries,

00:04:21.540 and we're going to denaturalize citizens who defrauded this country,

00:04:25.160 you're going to get a lot of blowback.

00:04:26.240 He's already getting it.

00:04:27.220 Well, now you've got to go and actually do it.

00:04:29.440 And I think this case with the Afghans is a perfect,

00:04:33.140 it shows exactly why it needs to happen.

00:04:36.380 Because, you know, it's not just, as you say, Michael,

00:04:38.980 it's, we know the attacks on National Guardsmen.

00:04:42.580 We know the terror attack that was foiled.

00:04:45.340 It's not even just that.

00:04:46.240 There was a case in Fairfax, Virginia this year of an Afghan,

00:04:50.120 you know, quote-unquote refugee, was pulled over,

00:04:53.520 ends up opening fire on the police officers.

00:04:55.860 Fortunately, none of them were killed.

00:04:57.000 He was killed in the, you know, in the gunfire, in the return fire.

00:05:02.040 He says on the body, you can go listen to the body cam we talked about on the show today.

00:05:05.560 He says, it's picked up on the body cam, this Afghan refugee, after he's pulled over.

00:05:09.900 It was just for a traffic stop.

00:05:11.540 And he says, you stupid white people, you let me into the country.

00:05:16.000 He actually says that.

00:05:17.120 And then he opens fire.

00:05:19.080 And the reason why this kind of, to me, it kind of encapsulates the whole problem,

00:05:22.720 because why are these people in the country in the first place, right?

00:05:25.920 They're here because we're told, in many cases, that like we owe it to them.

00:05:30.540 And in some cases, they worked with American forces.

00:05:36.020 They worked with the CIA.

00:05:37.180 So we owe it to them.

00:05:38.220 Well, first of all, and this is the kind of thing that isn't said very often,

00:05:42.740 but it's like, well, okay, so you were a turncoat,

00:05:46.000 and we paid you money, and you worked for us, and so now we want to take you in.

00:05:50.540 Well, I guess I appreciate it, but at the same time,

00:05:53.000 that actually makes me trust you even less.

00:05:55.940 But second, this idea that we owe it, so you come here because we have some kind of debt to you,

00:06:01.980 and it's the same thing with the Somalis that come here.

00:06:04.360 It's this perverse notion that in some way, like, we have some kind of responsibility.

00:06:10.560 The Somalis are even crazier.

00:06:12.100 It's not like the Somalis ever helped us out in a war.

00:06:14.340 At least I kind of get it with the Afghanis, sort of.

00:06:16.780 I don't agree with it.

00:06:17.620 It's the same kind of argument that, well, their country is in tatters,

00:06:22.320 and then an argument we've made that, well, American foreign policy was responsible for this and that.

00:06:29.280 But it's always that.

00:06:30.400 It's always about they're not coming here to contribute to us.

00:06:33.160 They're not even pretending that that's what they're here for.

00:06:35.560 The argument isn't even that they're here, that we should bring them in because our country benefits.

00:06:40.880 It's that they benefit from it, and we should be nice and allow it.

00:06:45.200 And that just doesn't work.

00:06:47.100 Like, it should always be, as Americans, the question is what's in it for us, what's in it for our people, for our children.

00:06:53.800 And we don't benefit at all from bringing in a single Afghan or a single Somali.

00:06:58.380 Ben, do we owe anything to these people?

00:07:00.360 I mean, I think that, obviously, when it comes to the Somalis, the answer is no.

00:07:04.100 I mean, their country has been a trash heap for generations at this point.

00:07:07.620 And the United States tried to get involved and tried to help on a humanitarian level.

00:07:12.160 And then, obviously, that didn't work out very well.

00:07:13.980 The idea that we had to go from 2,500 Somalis living in the United States in 1990 to 175,000 Somalis living in the United States as of today

00:07:22.740 as some sort of apology for what?

00:07:24.720 Us not being good enough at bringing them food is pretty insane.

00:07:29.020 And obviously, you have massive culture clash.

00:07:31.960 You have lack of assimilation.

00:07:33.380 You have mayoral races that are being divided by actual tribal loyalty in Minneapolis.

00:07:37.780 That's what happened in the last mayoral race is that actually certain members of certain Somali tribes voted against candidates

00:07:42.760 who are siding with other members of other Somali tribes.

00:07:46.340 We don't need that sort of full-scale tribalism in the United States.

00:07:49.300 We've got enough problems as it is.

00:07:50.840 With regard to Afghanistan, I think it's slightly more complicated.

00:07:54.240 Not that we should take in vast numbers of unvetted immigrants from Afghanistan because we screwed things up in Afghanistan.

00:08:01.060 I think there's a couple of original sins.

00:08:02.760 One of them, frankly, is just the pullout from Afghanistan the way Joe Biden did it.

00:08:06.740 I think that if you pull out from Afghanistan and leave no governing institutions behind such that everybody who helped out the U.S. Army is going to be murdered where they stand,

00:08:15.160 we should find some place for them to go that's not the United States.

00:08:17.580 But I do think that if we ever want to have alliances with anybody else on Earth ever again,

00:08:21.920 and we're going to have to work with people against regimes that exist,

00:08:24.720 then we want to find some place for some of those people to go.

00:08:27.100 This case is a little bit weird because the guy not only worked with the CIA,

00:08:31.840 he was pretty well vetted when he came in in 2021,

00:08:33.860 and then the Trump administration did grant him actual asylum in 2025 on the basis of that prior vetting,

00:08:40.600 presumably, despite the fact that in 2023, we now know from the New York Post,

00:08:45.180 he actually had been reported by other members of his community as having mental breakdowns,

00:08:49.400 and he was depressed, and he was going out on these long drives, and we knew where he was,

00:08:53.980 and all this kind of stuff.

00:08:55.360 And so the idea that we got from the Department of Homeland Security is that actually when he came in,

00:09:00.720 he wasn't nearly as much of a problem as obviously he would later become, and that he was radicalized.

00:09:04.660 And to me, this is a separate issue, but both need to be dealt with.

00:09:07.720 One of them is obviously, why are we letting in hundreds of thousands of people from third world countries we cannot vet?

00:09:12.480 And I think we all agree that's insane.

00:09:14.200 And then there's this secondary issue that I think is nearly as problematic, maybe just as problematic,

00:09:18.980 which is the number of terror attacks that the United States has suffered from people who are radicalized

00:09:23.720 while living in the United States is really, really high.

00:09:27.500 Okay, this guy, according to DHS, was radicalized after coming to the United States.

00:09:31.160 After working with us, he came here, he was radicalized.

00:09:33.340 But, I mean, I know that we all just sort of memory hold the fact that there have been a bunch of terror attacks

00:09:36.980 on American soil by ISIS affiliates, but there have.

00:09:40.160 I mean, this year, in January, you remember in New Orleans, there's a terror attack.

00:09:44.200 He killed 14 people where a guy had like an ISIS flag on his truck and just ran people over.

00:09:48.820 And we all memory hold that.

00:09:50.080 We don't remember that.

00:09:50.920 The single worst mass shooting in America to that date was the Pulse nightclub shooting.

00:09:55.700 Obviously, there was Vegas afterward.

00:09:57.080 The Pulse nightclub shooting was a radicalized guy who was radicalized by association with ISIS.

00:10:03.120 There was a shooting in San Bernardino.

00:10:04.980 14 people were killed, again, radicalized by ISIS while living in the United States.

00:10:08.640 And so I think it's the combination of both of these things.

00:10:10.980 One is this mass migration.

00:10:11.980 You don't get to come here just because your life sucks somewhere else.

00:10:15.420 Guess what?

00:10:15.700 It turns out America, amazing.

00:10:17.020 I understand why everybody wants to get in.

00:10:18.560 We have no obligation to take you in on that basis.

00:10:21.220 But we also have a massive problem with institutions in the United States that pay people not to

00:10:26.020 assimilate, that allow them to radicalize, and that foster their radicalization.

00:10:29.880 I think that the biggest detail in that Somali case is that the government knew they were committing

00:10:33.540 fraud.

00:10:34.400 And many of these groups were going to the government and threatening to sue on the basis of

00:10:38.580 discrimination if they were actually targeted by law enforcement.

00:10:41.880 And Minnesota just went, oh, I guess, well, if you're going to call us racist, I guess

00:10:45.020 we can't do anything but let you steal a billion dollars in taxpayer money.

00:10:48.960 Unbelievable.

00:10:49.660 You know, one of the things you're not allowed to say in this whole debate used to be you

00:10:53.180 couldn't even advocate for drastically less legal immigration.

00:10:56.520 Now I think you can advocate for that.

00:10:58.340 One of the things I think you're still not allowed to say, though, is some groups are just

00:11:03.340 less good at being immigrants, and there's nothing wrong with excluding them at higher

00:11:08.160 rates than other groups.

00:11:09.840 You know, this is ancient wisdom, goes back to Aristotle, goes through Thomas Aquinas.

00:11:14.320 It wouldn't be an episode of this show if we didn't bring up those guys.

00:11:17.320 But nine minutes in, dude, you couldn't, you couldn't, man.

00:11:19.300 I'm shocked it took me this long.

00:11:20.840 Dropping it like it's hot.

00:11:21.940 You know, Aristotle makes this point, and really, actually, I think St. Thomas does this

00:11:25.840 really well.

00:11:26.220 He reads the Jews in the Old Testament, and he reads the writing of Aristotle.

00:11:30.160 And he says, look, you can bring in immigrants, but you have to be very, very careful about

00:11:34.540 it.

00:11:34.720 You know, the Jews in the Old Testament, they did it cautiously.

00:11:36.800 They did it very slowly.

00:11:37.980 They wouldn't grant citizenship until three generations.

00:11:40.840 He's reading Aristotle here as well, you know, because immigration can reduce social solidarity.

00:11:46.960 And he says the Jews in the Old Testament, some people, they felt they could assimilate.

00:11:51.180 Others, it was a little harder.

00:11:52.620 Some, you know, the Amalekites say, you just can't let them in.

00:11:55.540 And I think what's obvious is when we talk about immigration, we're pretending it's all

00:12:01.300 exactly the same.

00:12:02.380 No, we could take any number of Englishmen into this country, and they would be just fine.

00:12:07.240 I don't know if there were any Englishmen left in England, as a matter of fact, but it

00:12:10.520 would be fine because they speak the same language.

00:12:12.840 They look roughly the same.

00:12:14.000 We come from England.

00:12:15.040 We roughly believe in the same religion.

00:12:17.040 We have roughly the same habits.

00:12:18.900 And if we want to have chicken tikka masala, guess what?

00:12:21.360 It was invented in England.

00:12:22.200 So that's fine.

00:12:23.640 And it's much harder to bring in Somalis or Pakistanis or Afghanis.

00:12:28.780 You know, Michael, I'm going to argue with that in one second because I enjoy doing that,

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00:13:43.200 Ben, I'm not going to let you argue with me yet.

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00:14:45.940 Okay, back to how Somalis probably can't become Americans.

00:14:50.020 Okay, so Michael, I was going to disagree with you.

00:14:52.060 So here's the only thing I'm going to disagree with you about in that.

00:14:55.220 I don't think we can take in any number of Englishmen.

00:14:57.460 See, I'm actually more pessimistic about our immigration status than you, perhaps, at this

00:15:01.620 point, not that I think that it would not be easier to assimilate Englishmen than it

00:15:06.160 would be to assimilate, you know, Somalis, but I do think that right now, if you said

00:15:11.900 to me, we're going to take in 100,000 Englishmen, I'd think to myself, uh-oh, because that is

00:15:17.760 a lot of people who voted for the Labor Party and Keir Starmer, meaning that the ideology

00:15:22.380 of the West has become so thoroughgoingly self-defeating that I'm not sure that this is actually

00:15:27.640 a good proxy for who can assimilate to American...

00:15:30.240 Frankly, I think that a lot of Americans don't hold particularly American values at

00:15:33.220 this point, but they are Americans, so they get to stay.

00:15:35.360 But, you know, if we're talking about whom to import and whom not to, you know, I agree,

00:15:39.740 obviously, not all groups are the same in terms of assimilability, their ability to

00:15:44.560 assimilate, but I think that we may be now at the point in American history, and maybe

00:15:49.300 just in Western history, where we can only do it on an individualized basis.

00:15:53.360 That's all we can do.

00:15:54.520 How do you make a policy out of that, though?

00:15:56.320 Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, maybe you can.

00:15:58.460 Maybe you can.

00:15:59.020 I mean, really, like, we could have a better record than we currently have.

00:16:03.100 I mean, I think that, you know, now maybe I'm being even more restrictionist than Matt

00:16:07.140 would be on immigration, but it seems to me that pretty much every individual who comes

00:16:10.260 into the country needs to make an affirmative case as to why they ought to be in the country,

00:16:13.900 and we ought not do it by groups.

00:16:15.080 We ought to do it just by, should you be here?

00:16:16.880 What are you going to offer us?

00:16:17.860 And what do you actually believe in?

00:16:20.000 My point, Ben, I see all that.

00:16:21.520 My point is, you know, especially assuming that the Afghan who committed, actually multiple

00:16:27.700 Afghans who have committed these horrible attacks were radicalized in America.

00:16:31.560 Let's say they were properly vetted, and they said all the right things, and they passed the

00:16:34.580 test, and they were radicalized here.

00:16:36.380 However, they, you know, they act a little more in keeping with their tribal origins than

00:16:41.620 with regular old American leftism or something.

00:16:44.420 It just seems to me that there is more to citizenship than passing a quiz.

00:16:49.700 And it seems to me, you know, I'm with Thomas Aquinas, and I'm with the ancient Jews, which

00:16:54.240 is, it seems to me it takes generations, that there really is something that is inarticulable

00:16:59.120 about identity within a nation that you can't totally write out, you can't totally explain,

00:17:04.740 but it's something about how you appreciate apple pie on the 4th of July and hot dogs and

00:17:08.460 fireworks, and there's just something you've got to kind of get into your bones.

00:17:12.000 And it seems to me that people with traditions and religions and cultural practices and institutions

00:17:17.520 that are closer to ours, like England, despite that a lot of them voted for labor.

00:17:21.480 I agree with that, but I think part of that, honestly, is just a failure of what we have

00:17:26.140 done as a society about immigration and about our own values, meaning that one of the things

00:17:30.680 that makes it easy for people to stay in these sort of groups that never assimilate is the

00:17:36.180 fact that, number one, we're importing people as gigantic groups, and number two, we're then

00:17:39.540 supporting them with welfare dollars and telling them they never have to assimilate.

00:17:43.120 And so if you look at the nature of immigration for the first century and a half of America's

00:17:47.160 existence, there's an awful lot of immigration for the first century and a half of America's

00:17:50.760 immigration system, that what you see is because there were very few actual supportive structures

00:17:56.740 for immigrants, that meant that you had to assimilate and become American.

00:17:59.760 That when you went from Europe, you know, for my ancestors, Eastern Europe, for Michael's

00:18:05.120 ancestors from Sicily, when they came here, I mean, I assume, Michael, that your family didn't

00:18:10.340 come here rich.

00:18:11.260 I mean, everyone's family came here basically dirt poor, and they didn't know the language, and

00:18:15.040 then they assimilated as fast as humanly possible.

00:18:16.920 So for my ancestors who came here at like 1900 or so, they came here and they all spoke

00:18:21.140 Yiddish.

00:18:21.740 And within like three years, they were saying to their kids, like immediately, they said,

00:18:25.260 you're not allowed to speak Yiddish in the house.

00:18:26.500 You need to start speaking English.

00:18:27.540 Right, exactly.

00:18:28.340 Get with it, because if you want to integrate into the American lifestyle and economic system

00:18:32.600 and take part of the American dream, you have to like actually take part in the American

00:18:36.120 dream.

00:18:36.720 And then in 1965, we decided that we were basically just going to throw the doors wide open.

00:18:40.800 And not only that, provide a gigantic social welfare net that people are going to take

00:18:44.520 advantage of.

00:18:45.440 And that's how you end up with importation of 100,000 Somalis who immediately start bilking

00:18:49.680 the welfare system to the tune of a billion dollars.

00:18:52.100 That can't happen in the absence of these governmental structures.

00:18:54.840 So I'm not going to make it just about the immigrants.

00:18:56.620 Human beings have terrible natures by the essence of who they are.

00:19:01.280 I'm going to say that the incentive structures that we've created here are truly awful, because

00:19:05.620 we've been able to take in enormous numbers of Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans

00:19:10.020 and Vietnamese-Americans and Chinese-Americans.

00:19:12.320 The Cubans get a pass.

00:19:13.440 They're great.

00:19:14.000 The Cubans are great.

00:19:14.820 The other ones, I'm not totally sold out.

00:19:17.080 I think it's kind of, it's both, because I agree with Ben that we need to evaluate each

00:19:22.420 individually.

00:19:23.600 But you can also make determinations based on groups as well by looking at like group tendencies.

00:19:29.140 And I think, so here's one policy.

00:19:31.060 I like the idea of if you're a third world country, we're not going to import anyone from

00:19:35.040 your country, but maybe another way of putting that, because of course, then you get in the

00:19:38.240 argument, well, how do you define third world country?

00:19:40.020 How about this?

00:19:40.940 If your country has not figured out waste disposal, okay, if you don't have a system for waste

00:19:48.640 disposal, then we're not going to accept anyone from your country at all, which is just another

00:19:53.460 way of saying third world country, because you go to these third world countries, if you've

00:19:57.160 ever been to one and you see that of the many different forms of dysfunction, one of the

00:20:02.040 most obvious ones that you can see and smell is that they've just got giant piles of trash

00:20:07.480 everywhere.

00:20:08.320 And also they just throw their trash into rivers and their water is undrinkable for that reason.

00:20:13.240 Now, I mean, there were societies 2,000 years ago that figured out waste disposal, and yet

00:20:18.900 you've got people in modern times who still haven't figured it out.

00:20:21.160 This is just like the basic, these are the basic functions of a society that these people,

00:20:27.160 it's not just the government, but the people have not figured out.

00:20:30.280 And if you're one of those people, then you probably don't have a lot to offer us.

00:20:34.820 And, you know, there's also talk about things we can't talk about, Michael.

00:20:37.940 I mean, Somalis have an IQ on average of about 70.

00:20:41.760 Okay.

00:20:42.500 I've read that.

00:20:43.500 That's, that's a, right.

00:20:44.260 That's a, that's a real, that's a real thing.

00:20:46.200 And so if you've got a group with an average IQ of 70 and you bring them into this country,

00:20:51.360 what are you going to get?

00:20:52.320 So I think you can make these kind of group level distinctions and then also narrow it down

00:20:55.900 the individual.

00:20:56.720 The other thing we also need to keep in mind is that, you know, most people, there was

00:21:00.340 a, there was a, there's a clip going viral right now of, from the whatever podcast.

00:21:04.340 And it's a woman from, uh, I think Columbia and she's got tattoos all over her face, which

00:21:10.420 number one, if you have tattoos on your face, you should be deported already.

00:21:12.840 Even, I don't care if you've been here since your family's been here since 65, I like him.

00:21:16.320 Right.

00:21:16.900 Except for him, but everybody else.

00:21:18.200 But she, she, so, so she, she, he's, she's asked, well, if Columbia and the United States

00:21:23.700 were at war, who would you side with?

00:21:25.020 She says Columbia and the guy is like shocked by this.

00:21:28.180 It's like, well, why would you side with Columbia?

00:21:29.720 And she says, and she's almost confused by the question.

00:21:32.020 Cause it's obvious to her.

00:21:33.240 And she says, well, because I'm from there.

00:21:35.160 Like I'm from there.

00:21:35.960 Of course, of course I'm going to side with Columbia.

00:21:37.900 Let's say the United States went to war with Columbia.

00:21:41.340 Who do you side with?

00:21:43.400 Columbia.

00:21:44.060 Why do you side with Columbia?

00:21:45.640 Because I'm from Columbia.

00:21:46.760 You've lived here for 10 years and you're now a citizen.

00:21:49.220 And the reality is like the vast majority of immigrants, maybe not all of them, but the

00:21:53.060 vast majority of immigrants in this country right now, first generation and second generation,

00:21:57.340 if you ask them the same question, they give the same answer for the same reason.

00:22:00.600 And it's not because if they, you know, the Somalis, they still feel this tie to their

00:22:04.740 homeland.

00:22:05.500 And maybe it's confusing to Americans because we say, well, Somalia is a total hellhole.

00:22:09.320 Why do you care about Somalia so much?

00:22:11.100 You came here.

00:22:11.980 Why are you still proud of Somalia?

00:22:13.780 Well, it's, it's because they're from there.

00:22:15.740 It's like, they're tied to that by blood and yeah, they chose to come here, but your

00:22:19.880 blood is stronger than your personal choice.

00:22:21.700 And heritage is enduring.

00:22:22.980 Absolutely.

00:22:23.840 It's, it's no different than if I were to say, you know, I love my children and you were

00:22:27.920 to ask, well, why do you love your children?

00:22:29.320 I'm not going to tell you, well, they get, uh, they do well in their schoolwork and they're

00:22:32.900 obedient and they're talented and intelligent.

00:22:34.920 I think all those things are true about my children.

00:22:37.060 That's not the reason I love them because if they were stupid, I would still love them.

00:22:39.800 I love them because they're my children.

00:22:41.400 That's why it's the only, they're my children.

00:22:43.600 That's why I love them.

00:22:44.260 You love your homeland because it's where you're from.

00:22:46.940 Your ancestors are buried there.

00:22:49.240 And, uh, and so it's kind of goes back to your point, Michael, there's something enduring

00:22:52.300 that lasts for a long time.

00:22:53.920 And so we've got a lot of people when you bring these people in this country, they, that,

00:22:57.220 that, that, that, a lot of that, but obviously we do have this, this notion in America that

00:23:00.520 is historically true that you can in fact adopt the American identity.

00:23:04.700 And Michael, maybe your solution is the right one, which is that we only start to see that

00:23:08.500 over the course of a serious period of time that it's not like day one, you're here.

00:23:11.880 And then magically you're, you're an American.

00:23:13.760 And so it actually takes some time to integrate and we have to actually check back in and make

00:23:17.120 sure that you're, you're properly assimilating and all the rest.

00:23:19.300 And sort of one thing that, that I would add to sort of Matt's analysis when it comes to

00:23:23.520 judging by group.

00:23:24.560 So Thomas Dole talks about discrimination.

00:23:26.560 One of the things he talks about is a type of discrimination that is initially a judgment

00:23:30.680 by group in the absence of individual information.

00:23:33.020 So what he says is it's not discrimination to judge based on group identity.

00:23:37.520 So long as you don't know the individual, cause you have to operate based on best available

00:23:40.820 data, right?

00:23:41.380 If you walk into a room and in the room, everybody is of a particular height and you assume that

00:23:48.220 all of them are therefore not amazing at basketball because they're all five, 10, then that's,

00:23:52.120 that's like not the worst assumption in the world to take an innocuous example.

00:23:54.760 But if it turns out that one of those people happens to be, you know, Alan Ivers or Spud Webb

00:23:59.080 or something, and now, you know, that guy, you know, okay, now, you know, so when it

00:24:02.600 comes to, you know, looking at immigrants from, from places that suck, uh, who, where

00:24:07.080 they don't have running water or proper sewage disposal, you know, I think that there are

00:24:11.980 individuals who obviously, and we can name them who have come from crappy countries and

00:24:16.080 who ended up being tremendous Americans, right?

00:24:17.880 I mean, like an example of a person who came from a truly crappy country, I think she was

00:24:21.720 from Sudan and who ends up being like an indispensable member of Western civilization, Ayaan

00:24:26.580 Hirsi Ali comes to mind, right?

00:24:27.920 Ayaan Hirsi Ali ends up, you know, basically running away from a forced child marriage and

00:24:33.280 she ends up in Denmark where she becomes a sort of gadfly anti-Islamist there.

00:24:38.180 And then she comes to the United States and she marries Neil Ferguson and she converts to

00:24:42.320 Christianity and all this sort of stuff, you know, like that's, that's an amazing story

00:24:46.340 and that's wonderful.

00:24:47.040 But if you're judging in terms of groups, obviously you have to term, but, but then if we can get

00:24:51.420 to the individual, that's maybe the best way to bring people in because one of the

00:24:54.720 things we have to worry about when it comes to immigration, and we do have to worry about

00:24:57.340 this is for example, you want to brain drain, right?

00:25:00.340 You do want the smartest people to come to the United States.

00:25:02.500 You do want the most highly motivated, gritty people to come to the United States.

00:25:06.680 And this is why I think that the, the term of art that, that is most important here is

00:25:10.080 mass migration, right?

00:25:11.660 When we're talking about mass migration, large numbers of people coming in, it's almost impossible

00:25:16.100 to do the kind of thing that I'm talking about, but I want to make sure that we don't

00:25:18.800 throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:25:20.020 Think about this, Ben.

00:25:20.960 I look, of course we, we all love Ayaan Arsi Ali and we want, we want these exceptional

00:25:25.500 individuals to be, to be part of our country and immigration is like spice and Indian food.

00:25:30.560 You know, a little bit goes a long way.

00:25:31.840 You don't actually need a ton of it, but, but I saw Wajahat Ali, who's this liberal talking

00:25:36.760 head.

00:25:37.060 I think we've all debated him at some point or other.

00:25:39.360 In some ways he's this totally assimilated guy.

00:25:42.420 His parents are from Pakistan.

00:25:43.360 He was born in California, graduated Berkeley, bloviates, dresses like a slob.

00:25:47.600 You know, he's like the perfect American lib, but he had this vicious rant the other day

00:25:51.980 that he posted to social media and he said, you know, ha ha, you white people, you lost

00:25:56.440 and we Brown people, we're going to outbreed you and we're, our, your parties suck and

00:26:00.900 everything about you sucks and we're better at everything.

00:26:03.160 And what was amazing was he's on the one hand, so liberal on the other hand, it was this

00:26:07.600 deeply tribal animosity at the native population of the United States.

00:26:11.540 And, and I thought, you know, he's accidentally kind of telling on himself on the problem of,

00:26:16.300 of migration, which is even, even to your point, Ben, even if we could examine each individual

00:26:20.880 and, and pick them for their best qualities, you know, kind of meritocratic immigration

00:26:24.740 system at a large enough scale, I don't think it really works because Wajahat Ali says, you

00:26:29.600 know, you bring one of us over and the thing about immigration is we're going to bring our

00:26:32.840 cousins and our uncle and our dad and our spouse and our this, and because people have

00:26:36.200 these enduring bonds, which they should.

00:26:38.620 But Michael, I mean, it did work for a very long time.

00:26:41.160 So we have to ask what changed.

00:26:43.000 1965, the Art Seller Act.

00:26:44.200 I mean, I agree with, I agree with you.

00:26:45.700 That's the thing that changed.

00:26:47.020 And so maybe the, the discussion at least half, I agree with the, the, the argument we

00:26:51.920 need to shut, shut it all down until we know what the hell is going on, but maybe at least

00:26:54.820 half the discussion that we're having should be about number one, the sources of immigration

00:26:58.660 and number two, the gigantic welfare system that allows people to live off the public

00:27:02.780 dime and then integrate into our worst places, colleges and universities and learn the

00:27:07.640 kind of crap that Wajahat Ali was taught.

00:27:09.600 Because the truth is-

00:27:10.260 And be subsidized in it.

00:27:11.180 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:11.800 I mean, by the way, the only difference between Wajahat Ali and a typical liberal Berkeley member

00:27:16.620 from, you know, the middle of the country is the color of their skin.

00:27:20.220 Right.

00:27:20.640 Like, like, like truly.

00:27:22.100 What was amazing about that Wajahat Ali-

00:27:23.180 And the arguments that come from that.

00:27:24.380 But yeah.

00:27:24.640 Yeah.

00:27:24.940 No, I mean, the Wajahat Ali clip, the thing that's really astonishing about it is that

00:27:28.680 everybody on the right is constantly accused of great replacement theory.

00:27:32.180 If you said exactly the same thing in exactly the same words that Wajahat Ali said it, it's

00:27:36.500 truly an unbelievable thing.

00:27:37.660 But if you say it with a smile on your face about how it's good, then apparently it's

00:27:40.900 no longer a great replacement theory.

00:27:42.280 It's just the natural way that things should go.

00:27:43.860 It's pretty amazing.

00:27:44.640 Yeah.

00:27:44.880 So that is what Mike Anton calls the celebration parallax.

00:27:47.960 If you think it's good, you get away with it.

00:27:50.160 It's not, it's not, it's not, yeah, it's not happening.

00:27:51.900 And we're glad that it is.

00:27:52.940 Yes.

00:27:53.380 Yeah.

00:27:53.820 Exactly.

00:27:54.140 I mean, this to me is, this is where it comes back biblically and philosophically is

00:27:59.740 I want to be clear.

00:28:00.820 I mean, we're kind of beaten up on, you know, the third worlders and everything.

00:28:03.580 It's not that I am opposed to all immigration.

00:28:06.760 I don't think that assimilation is always harmful necessarily, or it should be totally

00:28:11.720 cut off or it's impossible, but you have to be really, really precise about it.

00:28:16.500 You know, Ruth, who is in the genealogy of Christ is a Moabite who says to the Israelites,

00:28:21.900 your God will be my God and your people will be my people.

00:28:24.500 And so I'm actually, actually, Michael, this is important.

00:28:26.360 The actual verbiage is your people will be my people and your God will be my God.

00:28:29.780 Yes.

00:28:29.940 So actually your people comes first, right?

00:28:31.420 So I'm asking me, right?

00:28:32.420 Your people are going to be my people.

00:28:33.800 Yep.

00:28:34.220 Yes.

00:28:34.580 And so, you know, there's this, you know, look, we're living in time and space and we're

00:28:38.420 incarnate creatures.

00:28:39.040 And so like these bonds of family and community really matter.

00:28:41.940 Even the notion of patriotism comes from patria and it means that it's an extension of the

00:28:46.560 love of your family.

00:28:47.740 And we've just become so, I don't know, disembodied or something in our, in our modern view of

00:28:52.840 politics and ourselves.

00:28:54.060 And this is really clear in the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act.

00:28:57.840 You know, look at different times in American history, we had very little immigration, very

00:29:01.880 restricted from where it could come from.

00:29:03.400 Then we opened it up a little bit and it caused problems.

00:29:05.740 And I'll say this, I'll bring up the old Italians.

00:29:07.800 You know, immigration from Britain is one thing.

00:29:11.920 Immigration from, say, Germany, you know, in the 19th century, it was okay.

00:29:15.660 It was fine.

00:29:16.120 It was a little harder to assimilate than the Brits, but okay, we still had memories of

00:29:19.200 the Hessians.

00:29:20.000 The Italian immigration, look, it ultimately, I think, basically worked out, even though

00:29:23.620 we got Pelosi's out of it.

00:29:24.900 But it did introduce a lot of social problems.

00:29:27.760 And I think it's because it's kind of harder to assimilate even Southern European people

00:29:32.760 into America than it was Northern or Central European people.

00:29:35.780 And so you take that to its extreme and you say, look, you go to a place like Somalia,

00:29:39.800 which has very, very little in common with us other than that we're all children of God.

00:29:44.440 And you say, maybe they just don't really get to come that much except the one or two

00:29:49.200 exceptional people.

00:29:50.300 Well, if you want more quotations, by the way, from Thomas Aquinas and more Latin paraphrases

00:29:55.540 from Michael, then you absolutely should become a subscriber, by the way.

00:29:58.440 I should just mention that we do have an excellent deal on right now to become a Daily Wire

00:30:01.820 subscriber.

00:30:02.700 So go check that out right now.

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00:30:34.180 And again, make sure that you actually subscribe because when you subscribe, then you get all

00:30:38.200 the goodies.

00:30:38.660 We have so much good stuff coming next year.

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00:30:43.000 Truly.

00:30:43.320 Like it's kind of amazing.

00:30:44.700 No, I think we need to restore a little balance, Ben.

00:30:47.120 I think we need to restore a little balance to this show.

00:30:49.280 If you tell us about balance of nature.

00:30:52.600 That was going to be, I was going to do that.

00:30:54.420 That was going to be my transition.

00:30:55.720 I was.

00:30:56.040 Let me try that again.

00:30:56.900 Hold on.

00:30:57.180 Hold on.

00:30:57.460 Let me try it again.

00:30:58.340 Take two.

00:30:59.520 Don't cut this.

00:31:00.240 This is good stuff.

00:31:01.320 Hey, Matt, I think we need to restore a little balance to our show.

00:31:04.720 If you can tell us.

00:31:05.180 I was going to say, I was going to say the bit about the balance, whatever.

00:31:07.820 It's fine.

00:31:08.520 Let's, let's talk about balance of nature.

00:31:10.060 You know, their ingredients are a hundred percent whole fruits, vegetables, spices, and fibers.

00:31:15.060 Uh, you can experience for yourself as I have the original balance of color, taste, and smell.

00:31:20.440 Uh, their fruits, vegetable supplements include 31 colorful ingredients of 16 whole fruits and 15 whole vegetables.

00:31:28.460 Uh, ingredients include mango, pineapple, wild blueberries, banana, shiitake, mushrooms, wheatgrass, spinach, kale, uh, cayenne pepper, broccoli.

00:31:37.160 And the fiber and spice supplement features, uh, stuff that I can't pronounce, but psyllium husk is what you get.

00:31:43.760 It's important to get the psyllium.

00:31:44.820 I don't know what that is, but I see that and I just feel like I need to have more psyllium husk in my life.

00:31:49.960 Uh, flax seed, whole apple, and monk fruit.

00:31:52.760 It also includes 12 aromatic spices such as cinnamon, turmeric, and, uh, cardamom.

00:31:58.540 Uh, I actually take the balance of nature supplements.

00:32:01.200 It's one of the only things I do for my health.

00:32:03.860 I never go to a doctor.

00:32:05.060 I refuse to.

00:32:05.820 I pulled my hamstring over Thanksgiving break, playing pickup football with my kids outside.

00:32:11.420 I'm crippled.

00:32:12.200 I refuse to go to a doctor for that.

00:32:13.720 My wife keeps saying, why don't you go to a doctor?

00:32:15.340 You can barely walk.

00:32:16.120 I say, the doctor's not going to do anything for me.

00:32:18.340 What do I got to take?

00:32:18.780 Get an MRI.

00:32:19.720 I got to be in that, in that tube.

00:32:21.500 It's kind of weird and claustrophobic.

00:32:23.580 Um, anyway, I won't do any of that, but I will take balance of nature, which you should as well.

00:32:28.840 Plus, they're launching a fantastic new product, Balance of Nature's freeze-dried snacks are 100% real fruit, bananas, mangoes, pineapple, and strawberries.

00:32:38.160 Freeze-dried to lock in flavor and give that perfect crunch.

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00:32:49.120 Go to balanceofnature.com to claim this limited-time offer before it ends.

00:32:54.180 Speaking of food, Matt, you focused on the real issues while we were all stuffing ourselves over Thanksgiving, and you talked about why restaurants suck now.

00:33:04.900 And I actually, I didn't catch it, and I want to hear it.

00:33:08.660 Well, you haven't caught a single piece of content I've ever put out since I've been here.

00:33:12.720 Including stuff we've done together.

00:33:14.020 That doesn't surprise me.

00:33:15.600 But, yeah, so over the Thanksgiving break, we put up a video.

00:33:20.980 I, you know, I told my team, I want to do, you know, and maybe there were some skepticism.

00:33:26.040 I don't know, because it's one of those topics you don't know exactly how much it will resonate.

00:33:29.640 But I have this impression, and I think a lot of people have it, that everything sucks now.

00:33:35.440 The quality of everything has gone down, and that's especially the case with food.

00:33:40.580 And I was thinking about this the other day, because we got it, we ordered pizza.

00:33:42.920 And all these, I can remember when I was a kid, that you'd order a pizza, and you could

00:33:51.380 pretty much order a pizza from almost anywhere, and it was pretty good.

00:33:54.720 And not only was it pretty good, but it was different.

00:33:57.020 Like, you could get a pizza from Domino's, and that was one thing.

00:34:00.100 Or go to Papa John's, it was like a very different flavor.

00:34:02.440 It was a different kind of pizza.

00:34:03.600 You could go to Pizza Hut.

00:34:04.880 You could even go inside Pizza Hut.

00:34:06.420 They had a salad bar.

00:34:08.020 You'd sit down.

00:34:08.640 It was a whole thing.

00:34:09.440 With my family, we very rarely order it out, because we have a million kids in the family.

00:34:13.880 And going to Pizza Hut was like, put on your Sunday's best, and go to Pizza Hut.

00:34:17.660 It was a night on the town.

00:34:18.680 It was a lot of fun.

00:34:19.860 And the pizza was great.

00:34:21.300 And now you order from these places, and there are two things you notice.

00:34:24.060 Number one, it all tastes exactly the same, and it's all terrible.

00:34:28.380 It's like cardboard with ketchup smeared on it, put in a microwave.

00:34:31.120 That's what all pizza tastes like.

00:34:32.380 And you go to these chain restaurants.

00:34:34.340 And I haven't been to a chain restaurant in a little bit.

00:34:37.060 We took our kids to, I guess I won't say the, no, we went to Outback.

00:34:42.140 And we sat down.

00:34:44.040 It was like inedible.

00:34:44.900 I actually could not finish it.

00:34:47.360 It was salty.

00:34:47.700 Did you get the bloomin' onion?

00:34:49.500 Yeah, well, that I could finish.

00:34:51.260 But I finished it.

00:34:52.880 I didn't enjoy it, though.

00:34:54.040 I hated myself the whole time.

00:34:56.480 And then we got the rest of the food.

00:34:58.600 It was like everything is really salty, and it tastes bad.

00:35:01.120 And that's the case with most of these chain restaurants.

00:35:02.940 So this is what I've perceived.

00:35:05.140 I did a little video on it.

00:35:06.720 Is there a theory attached to this?

00:35:08.200 Or is it just you being an old person bitching?

00:35:11.020 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:12.020 There is a theory.

00:35:13.260 You realizing that when you were eight years old, everything tasted great, including some of the trashiest food on earth?

00:35:18.560 There is a theory.

00:35:19.660 So this is what I'm saying.

00:35:20.840 I said, I want to look into this.

00:35:22.860 This is the impression I have, is that the quality has gone down.

00:35:25.300 Is it just nostalgia?

00:35:26.420 Or is there something real that's actually happening here?

00:35:29.180 And there is something real.

00:35:31.240 So quality has dropped.

00:35:33.140 And I think it's across the board with many things in American life.

00:35:35.660 But just focusing on food for a moment, it has gone down.

00:35:39.220 Because a few things have happened as I researched this.

00:35:41.420 And number one, a lot of these restaurants have been taken over by these private equity companies that come in.

00:35:48.880 And this has happened especially over the last 20 or 25 years, where most of these places are owned by the private equity firms.

00:35:56.000 And then part of that is that now they come in.

00:35:59.420 It's like, we've got to cut costs.

00:36:01.300 And so they go to these big distributors like Cisco.

00:36:05.660 And so it's all the same food.

00:36:07.800 Like, 80% of these places, they're ordering the food from the same place.

00:36:11.700 Everything is frozen.

00:36:12.660 None of it is fresh anymore.

00:36:14.320 And it wasn't always that way.

00:36:16.500 And it is now.

00:36:17.940 The quality has gone down.

00:36:18.900 And then the third part of it is that none of the people involved from, like, the person behind the cash register all the way up to the people that own the places now, none of them actually care about the quality of the food.

00:36:30.280 It doesn't matter to them.

00:36:31.320 There's no one involved who has any passion about the quality of the stuff that they're giving you.

00:36:36.760 They're just there for the profit or they're there for it because it's a job.

00:36:40.520 And so if you complain about the quality, there's no one to even complain to because no one cares.

00:36:44.600 No one that you're talking to cares about it.

00:36:46.620 And so this is a real thing.

00:36:48.180 So how did that part change?

00:36:49.840 The food part is, okay, I see they changed their supply chains or whatever.

00:36:53.660 What happened with the employees?

00:36:57.180 Well, I think, well, part of it is that if you go back, again, 20 years ago, a lot of these places, they were employing, like, high school students.

00:37:06.140 I worked at a pizza place when I was in high school.

00:37:08.980 Subway sandwich artists.

00:37:09.780 And that's happening less and less now.

00:37:11.580 Now you've got also the numbers of people who work in these industries now who have, like, substance abuse problems, who are older with substance abuse problems.

00:37:21.080 That's gone up considerably as well.

00:37:22.880 But also, if you're working for one of these, and look, I'm as capitalist as the next guy, but you're working for one of these places that's owned by some conglomerate or owned by a private equity firm, it's like you don't feel a tie to it anymore.

00:37:36.300 You don't really care that much about the product.

00:37:39.360 And as I said, the people that own the place don't care about it either.

00:37:42.160 I actually think it's not even, I think, that it's corporate versus not corporate.

00:37:45.880 I think it's family versus corporate.

00:37:47.540 Meaning, so most people who start restaurants, like small restaurants, it's usually, like, you and your family members.

00:37:52.260 So I was making, we were talking about whether we should do this topic earlier, and I was kind of making fun of you guys because I was saying, in the kosher community, like, I eat kosher.

00:37:59.700 So I'm coming from a different context from you guys.

00:38:02.040 Like, the last time I ate at a chain restaurant, like a normal not kosher chain restaurant, I was 11 years old, and it was Kentucky Fried Chicken.

00:38:08.240 So it's been 30 years for me.

00:38:09.900 And, like, they have some chain restaurants in Israel, and they are similarly not as good, but they're certainly better, I think, than the ones that are in the United States.

00:38:18.220 In the kosher community, every single restaurant is a family-owned restaurant.

00:38:21.560 Even the family-owned restaurants that have, like, three or four different restaurants, that's, like, the extent of it.

00:38:26.060 There's no such thing as a kosher chain restaurant because there are, like, eight of us in the United States.

00:38:29.020 And so what that means is that the restaurant quality has actually gotten better and better and better since I was a kid because you're getting people who are aging into more income.

00:38:37.040 And as they age into more income, they can spend more of their income on these restaurants.

00:38:40.580 And the community isn't big enough to support a gigantic, like, chain of hamburger restaurants.

00:38:45.040 And so instead what you get are, like, really good, excellent kind of locally sourced dishes where the family owns it.

00:38:52.120 Because that's – I think everybody in our – and you guys have big families.

00:38:55.720 I've got a big family.

00:38:56.700 And so everybody has the aunt who's, like, you know, she's a really good cook.

00:38:59.620 She should really start a restaurant.

00:39:00.820 Somebody should actually start – and then it turns out that restaurant is, like, the hardest business to succeed in.

00:39:05.680 And they go bankrupt at an extraordinary rate.

00:39:07.760 And so what that means is that particularly if you are a person who is trying to just keep your restaurant open, you've got to work your ass off, right?

00:39:14.220 You've got to love doing it.

00:39:15.280 You've got to love the food.

00:39:15.920 You've got to bring your 14-year-old in from middle school to, like, get behind the counter and really work – I spent my entire life in restaurants, by the way.

00:39:22.960 Like, my dad worked at a restaurant my entire childhood.

00:39:24.860 He played the piano at a restaurant.

00:39:26.700 And so I was, like, in the kitchen with the waiters and, like, hanging out with the bartenders for fully 10 years of my life, 15 years of my life when I was a kid.

00:39:33.720 So I love these restaurants.

00:39:35.240 I'm big into kind of the local restaurants.

00:39:36.940 And I will say that when it comes to kind of chain product, the people who get into the McDonald's business are there to make money.

00:39:43.540 They're not there because they want to make a great burger.

00:39:45.960 The people who want to make a great burger are starting their own kind of local – their own local shop.

00:39:49.760 So I actually think there is something to that.

00:39:51.140 And I do think that you can feel it in the food.

00:39:52.700 Can I please interject some facts into this?

00:39:55.260 Because you're both speaking in generalities that – and you're just missing it, okay?

00:40:00.160 And I don't know how – I've been a little open about this, but I'm a pretty heavy user of fast food.

00:40:06.700 I get a Mac attack pretty regularly.

00:40:09.280 And I can tell you with certain – I'll just go down the list.

00:40:12.120 KFC has gotten worse in the last 25 years.

00:40:14.660 There's no doubt about that.

00:40:16.040 Domino's, on the other hand, has gotten better in the last 25 years.

00:40:19.300 McDonald's has gotten much better.

00:40:20.820 I don't even want to – McDonald's, the fries used to be better, sure.

00:40:23.760 Now they use fresh beef for the double quarter pounder with cheese or for the regular quarter pounder.

00:40:27.560 It's much better.

00:40:28.240 Arby's was awesome, got really bad, is much, much better now.

00:40:32.460 The double beef and cheddar was an absolute – it was a revelation.

00:40:37.800 Texas Roadhouse, as good as it's ever been.

00:40:40.040 Cracker Barrel, the food's a little sloppier now, but the service is still great.

00:40:44.040 Outback, I grant you, has not really kept up with the times.

00:40:46.680 I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

00:40:51.020 Hardee's got worse and Carl's Jr. got worse after Andy Puzder left.

00:40:54.100 So, look, there are particularities here.

00:40:56.780 But I think, Matt, you're feeling a little bit of nostalgia for your childhood.

00:41:00.800 Because I grew up in New York.

00:41:03.520 So my friends who grew up in the middle of the country or in the south or even a little bit on the west coast, they did not have –

00:41:08.780 Look, this is a – I had nice family – actual family restaurants growing up that were casual, that were cheap, but they were very, very good.

00:41:17.340 And so I wasn't as – yeah, I'd do the Applebee's every now and again.

00:41:21.480 Yeah, I'd do the Outback every now and again.

00:41:22.880 But if you look at the actual, like, not-chain restaurants, I think they've gotten generally much better with one exception,

00:41:30.920 which is that hipsters made the plates get much smaller.

00:41:33.680 They inserted, like, a bunch of dumb adjectives into it, like activated Brussels sprouts.

00:41:37.700 But otherwise, I actually think – this is the one area where I'd say things have gotten noticeably better.

00:41:45.380 With chain restaurants?

00:41:46.460 I basically call you all ignorant on your use of fast food.

00:41:50.100 First of all, Michael, hang on a second.

00:41:51.620 Michael, so you said you're going to inject facts, and then all you did was just arbitrarily go down a list of which restaurants you personally prefer more.

00:42:00.400 I'm the one injecting facts in the discussion.

00:42:02.200 I'm telling you that there is a number of actual significant changes that have factually occurred.

00:42:08.860 One of them is that these places, most of them do not use fresh food anymore, and they used to.

00:42:16.300 Like, most of these restaurants used to use fresh food, and now they don't.

00:42:19.760 Now they're getting the same frozen food off the back of the same truck.

00:42:23.600 Wendy is always fresh, never frozen.

00:42:25.840 McDonald's used to be frozen, now fresh.

00:42:28.000 You think you're injecting facts?

00:42:29.280 I'm injecting facts in this conversation.

00:42:30.360 God, the level of passion, Michael, that you have for this is – I never – you're big on the Aquinas, but I think that your actual area of specialty and interest lies in fast food.

00:42:39.800 I'm a secret fat guy.

00:42:41.280 Look, first of all, I'm not disagreeing.

00:42:43.360 I actually think that McDonald's, of all the fast food options, gets a bad rap, but it is –

00:42:47.520 Burger King is like a homeless shelter now.

00:42:48.960 Yeah, McDonald's is pretty consistent.

00:42:51.300 If you want fast food, you should just go to McDonald's.

00:42:53.100 By far and away, if you want a fast food breakfast, you're not going to get better than McDonald's.

00:42:56.800 I'll 100% agree with you there.

00:42:57.720 It's like Five Guys is great, but guess what?

00:43:00.360 It's fresh.

00:43:00.980 They actually use fresh ingredients.

00:43:02.000 You also have to take out a second mortgage to get Five Guys.

00:43:04.220 I mean –

00:43:04.380 Well, I know, but that's – see, that's what you've got to pay because it's actually fresh.

00:43:07.800 They don't have a freezer in the place.

00:43:09.100 You're getting fresh ingredients.

00:43:10.180 What you pick up when you go to, like, Applebee's or Chili's, the food – it's literally the same food.

00:43:15.320 Okay, the Cisco truck goes with the frozen food to Applebee's, and then it goes across the shopping center to Chili's and unloads the same damn food that then is put in a microwave

00:43:25.780 and serve to you with a 6,000% markup, okay?

00:43:30.200 It's a scam is what I'm telling you.

00:43:31.860 But what did Chili's replace?

00:43:33.180 This is quality of life.

00:43:34.120 This is – you know, they accuse us.

00:43:35.760 They say, you know, conservatives, we're just conserving the liberalism of 15 years ago or whatever.

00:43:39.520 This is a good example of that.

00:43:40.920 You know, when Chili's came – I'm not just blaming Chili's.

00:43:44.120 I actually never got that into Chili's, but when Chili's and the similar restaurants came in, they displaced old, like, mom-and-pop diner-type things.

00:43:52.820 And there were all sorts of reasons.

00:43:53.960 One of my favorite diners growing up constantly was failing health inspections.

00:43:57.920 It was gross, like, getting people sick.

00:43:59.520 But I loved it.

00:44:00.320 It was good.

00:44:01.080 And so I think, all right, now if the chains are being bought up by private equity faces corporations and they're all no good anymore, does this offer an opportunity – am I being too hopeful?

00:44:09.900 Does this offer an opportunity for more rancid mom-and-pop diners to fail their health inspections and delight customers like me?

00:44:17.440 Well, maybe.

00:44:18.580 But the problem is, I mean, you just point out, like, Five Guys, obviously, it's not a mom-and-pop place.

00:44:22.240 But it's so – you know, it's expensive.

00:44:25.920 Like, when everyone is going the frozen food route and they're getting the same, they're just – you know, wholesale frozen food and everything, put it in a microwave, and then you come in and say, I want to do fresh food, you're going to have to charge a lot more.

00:44:37.280 And then that's up to the consumer to choose the more expensive thing, which, unfortunately, most consumers won't.

00:44:42.720 I mean, and that's what it comes down to.

00:44:43.820 And I also think the fact – I mean, like we said before, the fact that one of the biggest differences is that you're dealing with people who don't care.

00:44:51.980 I just thought – I had to – this is not food, but I had a problem with Wi-Fi, and I had to call the internet company.

00:45:00.100 And it's like one of those things where, you know, you have to make this phone call.

00:45:02.900 You're going to be on the phone for seven hours of your day, and you've got to go through all the automated messages.

00:45:08.240 Finally, you get to talk to a person.

00:45:09.520 I talked to, like, ten different people, and I'm aware of the fact, while I'm talking to all these people, that nobody I'm talking about gives the slightest shit about the problem that I'm having.

00:45:20.720 None of them care at all, even a little bit, and there's no incentive for them to solve my problem.

00:45:26.360 Whether my problem is solved or not means nothing to them.

00:45:29.400 They don't benefit from it being solved.

00:45:31.120 It doesn't hurt them if it isn't solved.

00:45:32.860 And so it's this utterly hopeless feeling you have while you're on the phone shouting at some person in India who doesn't care at all.

00:45:42.020 You're like, I need Wi-Fi.

00:45:43.420 My family's coming over.

00:45:44.460 They need to be able to watch TV.

00:45:45.760 We want to put a football game on.

00:45:47.360 And you're talking to someone who doesn't even know what American football is.

00:45:49.680 Okay?

00:45:50.020 And this is everywhere you go now.

00:45:51.600 Matt, I'm just telling you, we're going to fast forward 20 years, and it's just going to be – Matt Walsh's show will just be called Old Man Yells at Clouds.

00:45:58.820 I mean, my God, dude.

00:46:00.420 That's the show now.

00:46:01.280 What are you talking about?

00:46:01.900 You're not old enough, so now it's middle-aged man yells at clouds.

00:46:05.960 But one aspect of this that may be worth asking is when we were all growing up – maybe it's because none of us, I think, grew up rich – going out to dinner was like a big deal, right?

00:46:14.980 Going out to dinner was like a super big deal.

00:46:17.500 There were four kids in my family.

00:46:18.940 You really didn't go out to dinner unless there was a special occasion in some way.

00:46:22.040 You didn't just go out casually to dinner.

00:46:23.920 And I feel like people just go out to dinner much more or order in much more.

00:46:27.300 And so it's possible that the market has decreased in value in terms of like what people are paying for their dinner just because people are ordering in more.

00:46:35.260 Like everything when I was growing up was home-cooked, like everything.

00:46:37.640 And I think that more and more people have accessed eating out or shipping food in as a normal mode of eating.

00:46:45.600 And that means the prices have to go down because otherwise you just can't afford it.

00:46:48.100 If you're a family that has a couple of kids and you're bringing in restaurant food every night, it can't be really, really good restaurant food every night or you're going to be poor.

00:46:56.100 And so I assume that that's why all these big chain stores continue to churn out not very good food but make decent money off it because people are just too lazy to actually home cook or they don't feel like home cooking.

00:47:06.920 I mean I would imagine that if you check the stats here, and we'll have to check it now, that people are eating significantly more takeout food than they were when we were growing up.

00:47:17.280 You know, the salient point of Matt's rant, I think, other than his, I think, absolute calumny against fast food restaurants compared to fast casual.

00:47:27.040 The really salient point is the feeling that, this happened to me at Burger King the other day, which again is not just like a homeless shelter but is a literal homeless shelter in most cases.

00:47:36.660 I went up, I was standing there, I wanted to order a Whopper, and there were two women behind the counter and one employee had just gotten off.

00:47:43.020 And no one would take my order, and the employee who had just gotten off was laughing at me.

00:47:47.660 He was laughing at me that no one would take my order.

00:47:49.680 They didn't hear, I went, I got a sandwich somewhere else.

00:47:51.920 You know, I'm reminded of Barry Goldwater in his book, Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, who said,

00:47:58.060 we conservatives, we're not just against, you know, big monopolistic government.

00:48:01.540 We're against monopolies in all of their forms because they're not as responsive and that kind of power can take away our rights as well.

00:48:07.840 So I agree, we need a political missile, a legislative missile perhaps, to fix that problem.

00:48:15.100 And we have literal missiles that are currently blowing up Venezuelan narco-terrorists by our Secretary of War.

00:48:22.480 Now, some people, mostly on the left but a little bit in the Republican Party, are accusing the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth,

00:48:28.640 of committing war crimes by taking out the narco-terrorists.

00:48:32.000 Before I get the educated opinion of a Harvard lawyer, Matt, what's your, I think this is totally fine and awesome.

00:48:37.520 What's your take?

00:48:38.780 Yeah, I think it's great.

00:48:39.800 I mean, please kill more.

00:48:41.240 I think, I think, here's what I'll say.

00:48:43.900 Blowing up, blowing up a, a, a boat full of narco-terrorists who are bringing poison into America

00:48:51.360 and are part of a, you know, billion-dollar criminal enterprise that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans over the past decades.

00:48:59.220 You know, doing that is more defensible, I think, legally but certainly morally than anything the United States of America has ever done in the Middle East.

00:49:11.140 Like, ever.

00:49:11.900 Which is also why it's funny to have someone like Mark Kelly out there complaining about this.

00:49:18.220 When this, again, is more defensible than anything that he did when he was in the Middle East, when he was part of the Navy.

00:49:25.120 I think he was talking about, he was on MSNBC, I think, or CNN, one of the two, talking about when he was in the Navy, well, they, they blew up, you know, he was responsible for blowing up some Iraqi ships.

00:49:37.760 But that was okay, he said, because, you know, they, they were, he was trying to kick them out of Kuwait.

00:49:43.300 And so it was a good reason, it was a good reason to blow up the Iraqi ships to keep them out of Kuwait.

00:49:47.960 Well, okay, so, so that's okay to keep the Iraq out of Kuwait so we could blow up ships, but to keep poison out of America that's killing actual Americans, that's a, that's a problem.

00:49:59.260 Um, so I, to me, it's, it's like very clearly, this is, this is where the United States military should be most activated is in defending our actual homeland, like our actual physical country from things that are actually hurting and killing Americans directly.

00:50:16.640 And, uh, once we've done that, then we could talk about the stuff that's happening thousands of miles away, but this to me is just, uh, pretty obvious.

00:50:23.460 Now, the alleged war crime, uh, was according to reporting for, you know, so take it with a grain of salt, but they said there was a, an oral order, not a written order, but an oral order from the Secretary of War to kill them all.

00:50:35.120 You know, to not, not like go and try to arrest them or, you know, give them a court.

00:50:38.840 Yeah, that's what you do, that's what you do with a missile, that's, I, I don't know that it's true that he said to kill the survivors in the water.

00:50:44.240 Yeah, I see, no, he denies it, the White House denies it.

00:50:46.440 But even if he did, but, but so what? I mean, you, you hit the boat with a missile, obviously you're trying to kill everybody.

00:50:52.080 So what, if some of them survive, you're just to be a good sport, you're supposed to send a rescue boat out to, uh, to rescue them.

00:50:58.600 The whole point, I'm pretty sure the missile, the point was not like a practical joke or a fun prank.

00:51:03.280 The point was to actually kill the people on the boat, if any are alive, then of course you kill them too.

00:51:07.760 It's like if you blow up a building, do you have to have firefighters on standby to put out the fire and rescue anyone who happens to be inside the building?

00:51:14.400 I mean, the whole point was to kill the people inside it, I would think.

00:51:16.540 And assuming those people are actual terrorists who want to kill Americans, then it's totally legitimate.

00:51:20.840 That's the Matt Walsh addendum to the Geneva Conventions.

00:51:22.780 Yeah, exactly.

00:51:23.640 Okay, so, uh, so yeah, here's where it gets a little dicey.

00:51:26.680 So there's the moral question of whether we should blow up drug boats.

00:51:30.160 And the answer, of course, is, of course, we should blow up as many drug boats as humanly possible.

00:51:33.680 Like, that is an affirmative good for us to blow up drug boats with Hellfire missiles, very much pro.

00:51:38.900 Then there is the legal question.

00:51:40.580 There are really two legal questions here.

00:51:42.300 One is whether you need some sort of authorization from Congress to continue to blow up drug boats in the Caribbean when they're not, like, directly off of America's shores and their international waters and all the rest of this sort of thing.

00:51:53.200 That's sort of question number one, you know, I'm of the legal opinion that you can totally blow up those drug ships and that that seems to be fairly well predicated at the very least.

00:52:01.980 And then there's the secondary question, which came up because of this Washington Post story.

00:52:05.200 Under American domestic law, you're really not supposed to be killing people who are deemed to be out of combat, right?

00:52:10.800 That's the actual legal terminology.

00:52:12.820 So, for example, if you're on a battlefield anywhere in the world and you shoot somebody and you've incapacitated them, they're unconscious on the battlefield, you're not allowed to, like, walk up to them while they're unconscious on the battlefield and put two in their head.

00:52:22.460 And it's just not something that you're supposed to do because they've been rendered non-threatening.

00:52:26.660 And so now there's kind of a debate over whether the boat was completely destroyed or whether it theoretically could have been salvaged, whether they had the ability to call up their other drug trafficking friends and have them come out and pick them up.

00:52:37.040 That was kind of the best defense that I saw of this order if it was given.

00:52:40.240 I find it kind of hard to believe just on the merits that Pete Hegseth would say kill everybody and nobody in the military line of command would say, OK, I just need some clarifications.

00:52:48.100 You mean that we're supposed to, you know, just, like, kill floating bodies in the water or, like, what are we talking about here?

00:52:53.560 And to me, a lot of this report, something smells about this.

00:52:56.880 Here's what smells about this.

00:52:58.000 It feels like a coordinated op.

00:52:59.500 And what I mean by that is that the Democrats started with this.

00:53:02.020 You're not allowed to follow illegal order stuff last week, right?

00:53:05.380 They put out this video the end of the week before last in which a bunch of Democratic Congress people and senators said, if you're a member of the military, we're telling you you're not allowed to follow an illegal order.

00:53:14.840 And everybody went, what illegal orders are you talking about, right?

00:53:18.760 Like, you should actually name the order because it actually is pretty counterproductive.

00:53:21.860 If the idea is that we're only going to find out whether an order was illegal in your view when you gain power, how does anybody ever carry out an order at all, right?

00:53:29.260 Because it could be a Democrat gets elected two, three years from now and then turns around and says, oh, by the way, every order that you carried out for the last 10 years was illegal.

00:53:37.120 All of you are going to jail.

00:53:37.980 And so what you're really doing is creating a sort of bizarre Ferguson effect for the military, where you remember by the police, the idea was that if you enforce the law, you might go to jail.

00:53:46.240 So the police stopped enforcing the law.

00:53:47.920 So our Democrats trying to tell members of the military that if they don't want to go to jail, they need to not actually do the thing they're supposed to do, which is carry out the orders of the commander in chief.

00:53:57.360 It feels coordinated because they released that video.

00:53:59.400 And within a week and a half, there's a story in the Washington Post about Pete Hegseth issuing a quote unquote illegal order to, you know, blow people out of the water.

00:54:07.560 The whole thing kind of stinks to me as a general matter.

00:54:09.860 Do I think that it's illegal?

00:54:11.780 Again, we'll have to see what the fact pattern is.

00:54:13.880 This is where Congress has article in one authority to actually investigate and determine who said what and when.

00:54:18.360 Our sponsor, Calci, shows prediction markets regarding, for example, which cabinet member is most likely to go Pete Hegseth right now, like 29%.

00:54:26.640 But, you know, the reality is that I think there's a tempest in a teapot.

00:54:30.600 And it also, on the other hand, kind of feels like that time when Trump deported a wife abuser.

00:54:37.460 And then the entire left was like, how dare he violate the law by deporting the wife abuser?

00:54:42.240 And, you know, I just don't think that plays politically.

00:54:44.160 How dare you kill the narco traffickers who are trying to murder Americans with fentanyl?

00:54:48.500 Doesn't seem to have, I don't know, it doesn't seem like a political winner to me.

00:54:51.460 You know, Walter Kern, I thought, had a really good take on this.

00:54:53.520 He said he thinks that maybe the war on drugs failed.

00:54:56.800 And I actually, I don't think the war on drugs failed.

00:54:59.040 I think it actually was quite successful for a time.

00:55:01.000 And the history has been rewritten.

00:55:03.180 However, he says if it failed, you know, he thinks it failed because people, they're not used to seeing it like an actual war.

00:55:10.700 In this case, we are fighting the war on drugs as very closely like a war.

00:55:15.940 Where it gets really weird to me, though, is even in international law, which a lot of conservatives say is just bunk anyway.

00:55:21.240 But if you grant some legitimacy to international law, we're not signatories to the Rome Statute.

00:55:27.220 So the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction here.

00:55:29.740 We recognize the Geneva Convention.

00:55:31.680 But then you ask, OK, what's the point of the Geneva Convention?

00:55:33.960 The Geneva Convention exists in large part to protect civilians in times of war.

00:55:39.380 And so part of that is if you play by the rules of war, then you can have certain privileges.

00:55:44.260 And if you don't, like if you're a terrorist and you target civilians and you act outside the norms of war, you don't really get those privileges.

00:55:50.420 Mark Thiessen years ago made the great point that if you extend Geneva Convention protections to terrorists, you actually totally undermine the Geneva Convention protections.

00:55:58.480 So I think that's kind of interesting, though, even for terrorists, I guess you're supposed to afford them some basic, you know, privileges, notably not killing them if they're out of combat.

00:56:06.700 And then to your point, Ben, on U.S. domestic policy, you have the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which says, OK, U.S. troops are not allowed to do X, Y and Z.

00:56:15.240 What's very interesting about this, though, is it would not really apply, in my understanding, to the Secretary of War, because the Secretary of War is not one of the troops.

00:56:23.780 He's a civilian who is in charge of that department.

00:56:26.980 And so it's all very, very murky to me.

00:56:30.540 And then I think, OK, well, let's get down to the brass tacks of it all.

00:56:34.040 These are foreign terrorist organizations, formally declared so.

00:56:38.020 They're shipping poison into our country, killing 75,000 Americans a year.

00:56:42.160 We have exercised control over the Western Hemisphere for over 200 years.

00:56:46.260 And now the Democrats are on the side.

00:56:48.540 First, they were on the side of the wife beater who got deported because he was an illegal alien, maybe a gangster.

00:56:52.740 And now they're on the side of the narco terrorists.

00:56:54.940 Is this really going to play well in the midterms or in 2028?

00:56:58.920 Right.

00:56:59.440 And that's the big issue, I think, for the Democrats politically here is they keep glomming on to what they think are temporary wins that end up being long term losses because they're so into the idea that, oh, my gosh, we've got him on procedural tic-tac-fowl.

00:57:11.460 And because we got him on a tic-tac-fowl, the American people are going to be really, really upset with Trump.

00:57:15.860 Name the American who's truly upset with Donald Trump for blowing narco traffickers out of the water.

00:57:19.640 I cannot imagine who those people are unless, you know, they went to Berkeley.

00:57:23.600 That's pretty much like the entire constituency for that argument.

00:57:26.560 It does raise, you know, one other question, which is it looks very much as though the Trump administration is trying to force Maduro out in Venezuela.

00:57:33.000 And I'm kind of for it.

00:57:35.160 I mean, like, I think that if we can do it without very much cost, you know, low blood and treasure, not a lot, you know, no boots on the ground or not a lot of boots on the ground.

00:57:42.520 Good things happening with very little cost is my game.

00:57:45.300 I kind of enjoy it.

00:57:46.120 I think it's a good thing.

00:57:46.660 Yeah, I really hope, let's put it this way, I hope that the CIA really does have somebody inside the Venezuelan government who's ready to push Maduro off the cliff here.

00:57:56.440 Because if not, then this is an awful lot of resource expenditure for very little payoff in the end.

00:58:02.440 And typically, if you're talking about a coup in Latin or South America, you have to have somebody inside the army or at least elites inside the kind of top echelon who are willing to push the guy out.

00:58:11.480 Otherwise, Maduro is just going to sit there and be and be OK.

00:58:15.760 Yeah. You know, Americans are sick of regime change, certainly in the Middle East.

00:58:19.280 It's a little different in Latin America because we've been doing that for a very, very long time and it's closer to our interests.

00:58:24.900 Matt, where I don't know, where do you fall on this?

00:58:26.740 Are you are you ready for a regime change in Latin America?

00:58:29.820 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm always I'm always skeptical of a regime change.

00:58:33.540 I do. I kind of agree with you that it's if it's closer to home, you can make a better argument for it actually advancing American interests.

00:58:43.020 And when I say American interests, I mean the interests of actual Americans, like American families still.

00:58:47.160 I think it's still still kind of hard to make that argument.

00:58:49.360 And if you if someone was going to make that argument, I wouldn't be the one to make it.

00:58:52.560 I think just politically, well, practically and also politically, I think the focus should stay on the narco terrorists.

00:59:00.400 That's that's a winner. It's a winner for Americans, most importantly.

00:59:05.020 And as you already pointed out, it's it's just a it's a political winner because this is this is the genius of it from a political standpoint,

00:59:10.700 is that they're kind of backing Democrats into a corner of being defenders of of drug traffickers.

00:59:17.960 And I don't know what polling has been done on this, but I just I'm sure there's been some polling on it.

00:59:22.140 I just find it hard to believe that there's any American in the like actual American who's waking up at night.

00:59:30.400 worried about the fate of of narco terrorists.

00:59:33.460 I think I think we all have the same feeling of we're just we're just like we're sick of this.

00:59:36.960 Why are we allowing you know, why are we allowing this scenario where these billion dollar criminal criminal enterprises are able to kill tens of thousands of Americans?

00:59:48.740 We don't have to allow it. I mean, we're the United States of America.

00:59:51.880 We have the most powerful military on the planet. We don't we don't this is a choice.

00:59:55.560 We don't have to allow this. And and I think that's where almost every American stand.

01:00:01.040 Yeah, this is, you know, this gets down to a deeper divide that's within MAGA, which is there even when people talk about like the neocons versus the populists.

01:00:10.620 And that's that's that's an interesting divide, too. But at an even deeper level, there is this debate over what America first means.

01:00:17.760 And there's America first, which has this hard nationalist bordering on isolationist point of view.

01:00:24.160 And I don't think that's what Trump is. I think Trump has an America first, much more imperialist kind of view, which is different than the neocons who were kind of liberal imperialists who wanted to sprout up Madisonian democracy everywhere.

01:00:36.200 I think Trump is is much more like a big leader of the global hegemon. And I think that's why he wants Greenland.

01:00:42.400 I think that's why he's threatened to invade Canada. And I think that's why he throws his weight around on the world stage for the benefit of Americans, not for abstract ideology, but explicitly for the benefit of Americans.

01:00:52.780 And I think, look, we are the world empire. And that's just a fact. And we've exerted control in our hemisphere for a very long time.

01:00:59.500 And so if Maduro is willing to play ball with us, that's one thing. If he's not, if he's going to work with our enemies, if he's going to ship drugs up into our country, well, then maybe we don't need to tolerate him.

01:01:09.660 And also the other thing, too, is and I think you alluded to it, that, you know, the argument against it, I think most Americans are not up at night worried about narco terrorists.

01:01:19.620 But there are some people who have this libertarian view that, well, the war on drugs failed. And that that is a very common view.

01:01:26.200 Yes. And my view of that is like, well, the war on drugs, the war on drugs was never tried.

01:01:31.380 I mean, we never actually went to war against drugs. And I think it's kind of like that scene in Breaking Bad where, you know, where Mike says, you know, no more half measures.

01:01:42.780 If you're going to do it, it's got like either do it or don't. You can't have a half measure.

01:01:47.300 And when it comes to the quote unquote war on drugs, it strikes me that it was it's kind of been a at most a half measure.

01:01:53.640 Worked a little in the 90s.

01:01:55.340 Right. Well, again, I think it means you've got to take the war to the to the actual drug traffickers.

01:01:59.180 Well, that's that's that's the real key. Right. I mean, I think that every time we declare a war on a concept, it is bound to fail.

01:02:04.500 Right. If you declare a war on poverty, you can't defeat poverty.

01:02:06.540 If you declare a war on drugs, it's an object. War on terrorism. Right.

01:02:09.700 Like it has to be a war on the drug traffickers. Right. War on drug cartels.

01:02:13.660 Like these are material things that the material that our military, which is excellent at finding things, breaking them and destroying them, that they can actually go and do like not so good at stopping people's drug habits.

01:02:24.000 Really, really good at blowing up narco terrorist boats in the middle of the Caribbean.

01:02:27.220 And so it seems to me we should, you know, do what our skill set sort of suggests that we should do with the American military, which is, you know, break things.

01:02:34.300 I think that we're really, really good at breaking things and we're less good at putting things back together, which is why I say about Venezuela that I really hope that there is something waiting in the wings to take over when there is or if there is a regime change.

01:02:44.540 I don't think, by the way, my ideology of regime change is not that we have to have democracy everywhere.

01:02:48.540 I think we need a regime that's better for America everywhere that it's possible for there to be a regime.

01:02:52.660 And again, the key word there is possible.

01:02:54.600 And there you have to calculate risk reward. Right.

01:02:56.420 What are we risking and what's the upside reward?

01:02:58.760 I think any realist would suggest that there are certain rewards that are not worth the risk and there are certain risks that are not worth the reward.

01:03:06.140 And so I think that when you look at Venezuela, if you're talking about a very small pinprick military intervention and then Maduro goes bye bye and suddenly you have a friendlier regime that is going to denationalize the oil industry, for example, and crack down on the narco traffickers.

01:03:19.300 That sounds pretty good to me.

01:03:20.360 If you're talking about 100,000 troops, it's a completely different story.

01:03:23.040 And the same thing is true about interventions literally anywhere else on Earth.

01:03:26.260 If what you're talking about is one bullet finishing a problem, I'm very much for it.

01:03:30.740 If what you're talking about is 100,000 troops finishing the problem, I'm very much against it.

01:03:33.700 But then the question, of course, becomes, I mean, you mentioned CIA, you know, activities within Latin America and maybe within Venezuela.

01:03:41.100 The question then becomes, is the CIA James Bond, Jason Bourne, efficient, ruthless, controls everything?

01:03:49.000 Or is the CIA burn after reading?

01:03:51.800 Every time it tries to do something, it just gets worse and worse and no one has any idea what's going on.

01:03:56.740 And I, no knock, look, there are very heroic people who have worked for the CIA.

01:04:01.220 The CIA has also done very bungled things.

01:04:03.600 Not to be like a huge cop out here, there's evidence for both.

01:04:08.340 I think, let's put it this way.

01:04:09.840 The evidence from the 50s of the former is much better than the evidence today for the former.

01:04:15.280 I'm much closer to the burn after reading version of the CIA today than I would have been prior to the last 25 years of American history, for sure.

01:04:24.120 All right, so I guess we're not going to.

01:04:25.160 I do want the oil, though.

01:04:26.140 I want the oil.

01:04:26.800 And I actually love that Trump is open about this.

01:04:28.380 This actually is one of my favorite things about Trump.

01:04:30.000 I really like that.

01:04:31.060 I like when he was talking about the war in Iraq, even.

01:04:33.120 He's like, it wasn't a war for oil, but maybe it should have been.

01:04:35.860 Maybe it should have been.

01:04:36.820 You want to deal with affordability?

01:04:38.020 Let's get that oil.

01:04:38.900 How about that?

01:04:39.480 How about that?

01:04:39.940 Why don't we give everything away to the whole world?

01:04:41.640 Okay.

01:04:42.740 All in the spirit of Thanksgiving.

01:04:44.000 Give us your oil.

01:04:44.760 Okay, that's it.

01:04:46.300 That's our show.

01:04:47.400 When are we back?

01:04:48.400 I think we're doing another one tomorrow.

01:04:49.660 Is that right?

01:04:50.220 No?

01:04:50.500 No, I can't catch you two.

01:04:51.340 Okay.

01:04:51.740 Maybe within two weeks.

01:04:52.860 Good to see everybody.

01:04:54.260 Everyone else out there, see you next time on Friendly Fire.

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01:05:22.360 exciting.

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The Matt Walsh Show - December 02, 2025

Friendly Fire： Hegseth. Homeland Security & Happy Meals

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