A day before Thanksgiving, two members of the National Guard were shot and killed by an Afghan national. Why do we have all these Afghan nationals in Minnesota? Why are they stealing from the public and sending their money to terrorists overseas? And why do restaurants suck?
00:01:15.840Obviously, the tragic shooting of two National Guardsmen just a day before Thanksgiving by an Afghan national.
00:01:22.840A lot of people asking, why do we have all these Afghan nationals?
00:01:25.520Why do we have all of these Somalis committing fraud in Minnesota and sending their money to terrorists overseas?
00:01:30.600We'll get into the big immigration question because America's, I think, public opinion has moved vastly to the right on this on immigration.
00:01:40.940Also, speaking of Latin America, our Secretary of War is just zapping drug boats left and right, which is a very, very beautiful thing in my view.
00:01:50.480Now the libs are taking the side of the narco terrorists and accusing him of war crimes.
00:01:54.020And even some on the right want to say it might be a war crime.
00:04:02.100But also they're lying when they come here.
00:04:04.040They're supposed to pledge allegiance to our country.
00:04:05.920That's part of the application process.
00:04:08.000And we have this very good evidence that a lot of them just flat out lied.
00:04:11.000So that's a form of fraud and they should be kicked out for that.
00:04:13.520The one thing I will say with Trump, though, is that, you know, and this has been an issue with Trump going back to the first term, is that if you're going, and I think he's done a lot of great things in the second term.
00:04:22.960But if you're going to say that you're going to take these kinds of radical steps, radical in comparison to what presidents of the past have done, if you're going to say that, then you actually have to do it.
00:04:34.000Because if you say it and then you don't do it, now it's the worst of all worlds.
00:04:36.800Because you're still going to get hit.
00:04:38.500You're going to get the blowback for doing it because you said you were going to do it, but you don't actually get the result of having done it.
00:04:43.560So if you say it, if you throw down the gauntlet and say we're going to shut off immigration from third world countries and we're going to denaturalize citizens who defrauded this country, you're going to get a lot of blowback.
00:05:14.800There was a, there was a case in Fairfax, Virginia this year of an Afghan, you know, quote unquote, refugee was pulled over, ends up opening fire on the police officers.
00:05:24.480Fortunately, none of them were killed.
00:05:25.600He was killed in the, in the, you know, in the gunfire, in the return fire.
00:05:30.320He, he says on the body, you can go listen to the body cam we talked about on the show today.
00:05:34.080He says, you can, it's picked up on the body cam, this Afghan refugee after he's pulled over, it was just for a traffic stop.
00:05:40.400And he says, you stupid white people, you let me into the country.
00:05:47.380And the reason why this kind of, to me, it kind of encapsulates the whole problem because why, why are these people in the country in the first place?
00:42:15.060I basically call you all ignorant on your use of fast food.
00:42:18.720First of all, Michael, hang on a second.
00:42:20.200Michael, 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.
00:42:29.000I'm the one injecting facts in the discussion.
00:42:30.800I'm telling you that there is a number of actual significant changes that have factually occurred.
00:42:37.460One of them is that these places, most of them, do not use fresh food anymore, and they used to.
00:42:44.920Like, most of these restaurants used to use fresh food, and now they don't.
00:42:48.360Now they're getting the same frozen food off the back of the same truck.
00:42:58.960God, the level of passion, Michael, that you have for this is, man, like, I never say, you're big on the Aquinas, but I think that your actual area of specialty and interest lies in fast food.
00:43:38.780What you pick up when you go to, like, Applebee's or Chili's, the food, it's literally the same food.
00:43:43.560Okay, 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's put in a microwave and served to you with a 6,000% markup.
00:44:29.940And 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?
00:44:47.200But the problem is, I mean, you just point out, like, Five Guys, obviously, it's not a mom-and-pop place.
00:44:51.060But it's so, you know, it's expensive.
00:44:54.480Like, 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.
00:45:02.500And then you come in and say, I want to do fresh food.
00:45:04.520You're going to have to charge a lot more.
00:45:05.700And then that's up to the consumer to choose the more expensive thing, which, unfortunately, most consumers won't.
00:45:11.380I mean, and that's what it comes down to.
00:45:12.480And 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.
00:45:20.580I just thought I had to, this is not food, but I had a problem with Wi-Fi.
00:45:25.920And I had to call the internet company.
00:45:28.700And it's like one of those things where, you know, you have to make this phone call.
00:45:31.460You're going to be on the phone for seven hours of your day and you got to go through all the automated messages.
00:45:39.760And 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.
00:45:49.320None of them care at all, even a little bit.
00:45:52.380And there's no incentive for them to solve my problem.
00:45:54.940Whether my problem is solved or not means nothing to them.
00:45:58.000They don't benefit from it being solved.
00:45:59.720It doesn't hurt them if it isn't solved.
00:46:01.460And 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.
00:46:47.520You really didn't go out to dinner unless there was a special occasion in some way.
00:46:50.640You didn't just go out casually to dinner.
00:46:52.520And I feel like people just go out to dinner much more or order in much more.
00:46:55.920And 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.
00:47:03.860Like everything when I was growing up was home cooked.
00:47:06.240And I think that more and more people have accessed eating out or shipping food in as a normal mode of eating.
00:47:14.180And that means the prices have to go down because otherwise you just can't afford it.
00:47:16.600If 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.
00:47:25.220And 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.
00:47:35.540I 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.
00:47:45.800You 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.
00:47:55.660The really salient point is the feeling that, this happened to me at a Burger King the other day, which again is not just like a homeless shelter but is a literal homeless shelter in most cases.
00:48:05.240I 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.
00:48:11.640And no one would take my order, and the employee who had just gotten off was laughing at me.
00:48:16.280He was laughing at me that no one would take my order.
00:48:18.280They didn't hear, I went, I got a sandwich somewhere else.
00:48:20.540You know, I'm reminded of Barry Goldwater in his book, Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, who said,
00:48:26.420We conservatives, we're not just against, you know, big monopolistic government.
00:48:30.160We'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.
00:48:37.020We need a political missile, a legislative missile perhaps, to fix that problem.
00:48:42.960And we have literal missiles that are currently blowing up Venezuelan narco-terrorists by our Secretary of War.
00:48:50.920Now, some people, mostly on the left but a little bit in the Republican Party, are accusing the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, of committing war crimes by taking out the narco-terrorists.
00:49:00.760Before I get the educated opinion of a Harvard lawyer, Matt, I think this is totally fine and awesome.
00:49:09.660I think, here's what I'll say, blowing up a boat full of narco-terrorists or bringing poison into America 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.
00:49:27.820You 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.
00:49:39.660Like ever, which is also why it's funny to have someone like Mark Kelly out there complaining about this, 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.
00:49:53.720I 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 blew up, you know, he was responsible for blowing up some Iraqi ships.
00:50:06.180But that was okay, he said, because, you know, they were, he was trying to kick them out of Kuwait.
00:50:11.940And so, it was a good reason, it was a good reason to blow up the Iraqi ships to keep them out of Kuwait.
00:50:16.920Well, okay, so that's okay to keep the Iraq out of Kuwait so we could blow up ships.
00:50:21.280But to keep poison out of America that's killing actual Americans, that's a, that's a problem.
00:50:28.320So, to me, 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.
00:50:45.220And once we've done that, then we could talk about the stuff that's happening thousands of miles away.
00:50:50.080But this, to me, is just pretty obvious.
00:50:52.080Now, the alleged war crime was, according to reporting, 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.
00:51:03.780You know, to not, not, like, go and try to arrest them or, you know, give them a court.
00:51:07.460Yeah, that's what you do, that's what you do with a missile, that's, I don't know that it's true that he said to kill the survivors in the water.
00:51:12.840Yeah, I see, no, he denies it, the White House denies it.
00:51:16.880I mean, you, you hit the boat with a missile, obviously you're trying to kill everybody.
00:51:20.700So what, if some of them survive, you're just to be a good sport, you're supposed to send a rescue boat out to, to rescue them.
00:51:27.200The whole point, I'm pretty sure the missile, the point was not like a practical joke or a fun prank.
00:51:31.900The point was to actually kill the people on the boat, if any are alive, then of course you kill them too.
00:51:36.360It'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?
00:51:43.000I mean, the whole point was to kill the people inside it, I would think.
00:51:45.140And assuming those people are actual terrorists who want to kill Americans, then it's totally legitimate.
00:51:49.440That's the Matt Walsh addendum to the Geneva Convention.
00:52:09.180There are really two legal questions here.
00:52:10.900One 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.
00:52:23.520You 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.
00:52:30.300And then there's the secondary question, which came up because of this Washington Post story.
00:52:33.800Under American domestic law, you're really not supposed to be killing people who are deemed to be out of combat, right?
00:52:41.420So, 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.
00:52:47.320You're not allowed to, like, walk up to them while they're unconscious on the battlefield and put two in their head.
00:52:51.360It's just not something that you're supposed to do because they've been rendered non-threatening.
00:52:54.960And 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.
00:53:05.800That was kind of the best defense that I saw of this order if it was given.
00:53:08.840I 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.
00:53:16.700You mean that we're supposed to, you know, just like kill floating bodies in the water or like, what are we talking about here?
00:53:22.160And to me, a lot of this report, something smells about this.
00:53:28.100And what I mean by that is that the Democrats started with this.
00:53:30.700You're not allowed to follow illegal order stuff last week, right?
00:53:33.980They 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.
00:53:43.440And everybody went, what illegal orders are you talking about, right?
00:53:47.360Like you should actually name the order because it actually is pretty counterproductive if the idea is that we're only going to find out whether an order was illegal in your view when you gain power.
00:53:55.160How does anybody ever carry out an order at all, right?
00:53:57.860Because 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.
00:54:06.900And so what you're really doing is creating a sort of bizarre Ferguson effect for the military where you remember by the police.
00:54:12.440The idea was that if you enforce the law, you might go to jail.
00:54:14.860So the police stopped enforcing the law.
00:54:16.700So 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.
00:54:25.960It feels coordinated because they released that video.
00:54:28.080And 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.
00:54:36.160The whole thing kind of stinks to me as a general matter.
00:56:00.120But then you ask, OK, what's the point of the Geneva Convention?
00:56:02.580The Geneva Convention exists in large part to protect civilians in times of war.
00:56:08.000And so part of that is if you play by the rules of war, then you can have certain privileges.
00:56:12.860And 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.
00:56:19.020Mark Thiessen years ago made the great point that if you extend Geneva Convention protections to terrorists, you actually totally undermine the Geneva Convention protections.
00:56:27.100So 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.
00:56:35.300And 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.
00:56:43.840What'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.
00:56:52.460He's a civilian who is in charge of that department.
00:56:55.600And so it's all very, very murky to me.
00:56:59.140And then I think, OK, well, let's get down to the brass tacks of it all.
00:57:02.660These are foreign terrorist organizations, formally declared so.
00:57:06.640They're shipping poison into our country, killing 75,000 Americans a year.
00:57:10.760We have exercised control over the Western Hemisphere for over 200 years.
00:57:14.880And now the Democrats are on the side.
00:57:17.140First, they were on the side of the wife beater who got deported because he was an illegal alien, maybe a gangster.
00:57:21.340And now they're on the side of the narco terrorists.
00:57:23.540Is this really going to play well in the midterms or in 2028?
00:57:28.040And 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 foul.
00:57:40.060And because we got him on a tic-tac foul, the American people are going to be really, really upset with Trump.
00:57:44.460Name the American who's truly upset with Donald Trump for blowing narco traffickers out of the water.
00:57:48.240I cannot imagine who those people are unless, you know, they went to Berkeley.
00:57:52.200That's pretty much like the entire constituency for that argument.
00:57:55.160It 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.
00:58:03.760I mean, like, I think that if we can do it without very much cost, you know, low blood and treasure, not a lot of, you know, no boots on the ground or not a lot of boots on the ground.
00:58:11.120Good things happening with very little cost is my game.
00:58:15.280But, you know, 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.
00:58:24.900Because if not, then this is an awful lot of resource expenditure for very little payoff in the end.
00:58:31.040And 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.
00:58:40.100Otherwise, Maduro is just going to sit there and be and be OK.
00:58:44.300Yeah. You know, Americans are sick of regime change, certainly in the Middle East.
00:58:47.900It'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.
00:58:53.500Matt, where I don't know, where do you fall on this?
00:58:55.360Are you are you ready for a regime change in Latin America?
00:58:58.420Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm always I'm always skeptical of a regime change.
00:59:02.160I 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.
00:59:11.620And when I say American interests, I mean the interests of actual Americans like American families still.
00:59:15.760I think it's still still kind of hard to make that argument.
00:59:17.960And if you if someone was going to make that argument, I wouldn't be the one to make it.
00:59:21.180I think just politically, well, practically and also politically, I think the focus should stay on the narco terrorists.
00:59:29.000That's that's a winner. It's a winner for Americans, most importantly.
00:59:33.620And 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,
00:59:39.300is that they're kind of backing Democrats into a corner of being defenders of of drug traffickers.
00:59:46.560And I don't know what polling has been done on this, but I just I'm sure there's been some polling on it.
00:59:50.740I just find it hard to believe that there's any American in the country, like actual American who's waking up at night worried about the fate of of narco terrorists.
01:00:02.200I think I think we all have the same feeling of we're just we're just like we're sick of this.
01:00:05.560Why are we allowing you know, why are we allowing this scenario where these billion dollar criminal criminal enterprises are are able to kill tens of thousands of Americans?
01:00:17.180We don't have to allow it. I mean, we're the United States of America.
01:00:20.620We have the most powerful military on the planet. We don't we don't. This is a choice.
01:00:24.260We don't have to allow this. And and I think that's where almost every American stand.
01:00:29.660Yeah, 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.
01:00:39.260And 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.
01:00:46.340And there's America first, which has this hard nationalist bordering on isolationist point of view.
01:00:52.880And 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.
01:01:04.560I think Trump is much more like a big leader of the global hegemon. And I think that's why he wants Greenland.
01:01:11.000I 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.
01:01:21.640And 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.
01:01:27.700And 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.
01:01:38.260And 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.
01:01:48.240But there are some people who have this libertarian view that, well, the war on drugs failed. And that is a very common view.
01:01:54.780Yes. And my view of that is like, well, the war on drugs, the war on drugs was never tried.
01:01:59.980I 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.
01:02:11.380If you're going to do it, it's got like either do it or don't. You can't have a half measure. 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.
01:02:23.940Right. Well, again, I think it means you've got to take the war to the to the actual drug traffickers.
01:02:27.780Well, 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.
01:02:33.120Right. If you declare a war on poverty, you can't defeat poverty. If you declare a war on drugs, that's an object.
01:02:36.820War on terrorism. Right. It has to be a war on the drug traffickers. Right.
01:02:41.000War on drug cartels. 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.
01:02:52.620Really, really good at blowing up narco terrorist boats in the middle of the Caribbean.
01:02:56.380And 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.
01:03:02.900I 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's something waiting in the wings to take over.
01:03:10.780When there is or if there is a regime change. I don't think, by the way, my ideology of regime change is not that we have to have democracy everywhere.
01:03:17.040I think we need a regime that's better for America everywhere that it's possible for there to be a regime.
01:03:20.940And again, the key word there is possible. And there you have to calculate risk reward. Right.
01:03:25.020What are we risking and what's the upside reward?
01:03:27.900I 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.
01:03:34.040And 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 friendly regime that it's going to denationalize the oil industry, for example, and crack down on the narco traffickers.
01:03:47.660That sounds pretty good to me. If you're talking about 100,000 troops, it's a completely different story.
01:03:51.980And the same thing is true about interventions literally anywhere else on Earth.
01:03:54.840If what you're talking about is one bullet finishing a problem, I'm very much for it.
01:03:59.320If what you're talking about is 100,000 troops finishing the problem, I'm very much against it.
01:04:02.080But then the question, of course, becomes, I mean, you mentioned CIA, you know, activities within Latin America and maybe within Venezuela.
01:04:09.560The question then becomes, is the CIA James Bond, Jason Bourne, efficient, ruthless, controls everything, or is the CIA burn after reading?
01:04:20.440Every time it tries to do something, it just gets worse and worse and no one has any idea what's going on.
01:04:25.520And I, no knock, look, there are very heroic people who have worked for the CIA.
01:04:29.820The CIA has also done very bungled things.
01:04:31.280Not to be like a huge cop out here, there's evidence for both.
01:04:38.460The evidence from the 50s of the former is much better than the evidence today for the former.
01:04:44.580I'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.
01:04:52.900All right, so I guess we're not, I do want the oil, though.