ICE agents are surrounded by screaming protesters in a restaurant in Minneapolis and the local police refuse to help them. Bill Flippin' Flickt explains why this is happening and what we can do to stop it.
00:14:51.960It's merely an acknowledgment that these are not life's winners.
00:14:55.880These are people who 100 years ago would probably be middle class Americans engaged in the workforce and married and doing something.
00:15:01.260But for a bunch of different reasons, this is what we have now, which is a lot of extremely frustrated young people who are not physically or psychologically healthy at all, who are spiritually dead, and who have been brainwashed, hypnotized, convinced somehow to give their lives up in the service of what?
00:18:12.400They have a mission, but the real mission is to bring to themselves more power and control.
00:18:18.100So if you're an American law enforcement agency or intelligence gathering agency, chaos is an opportunity for you to get more power.
00:18:31.860So those are the two groups, fundamentally, who are benefiting from the chaos.
00:18:38.000The rest of us are not only not benefiting, we are watching all the good things that we have on the brink of being eliminated.
00:18:46.920So let's start with the first group that benefits from this destruction, from what could be a much larger and much more destructive version of the 2020 George Floyd riots, which really helped no American whatsoever.
00:19:06.520Certainly didn't help black people, but made these same groups much more powerful.
00:19:12.700Well, first among them is the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walls, the man who ran for vice president a year and a half ago.
00:19:21.780This is a guy who is in the middle of the biggest political scandal in a state's history.
00:19:28.860It's the Somali welfare scam that has just been exposed.
00:19:34.640And a month ago, Tim Walls was in disgrace.
00:19:38.280And now Tim Walls is the leader of the insurrection against the orange man.
00:19:43.500So you can see already the benefit is there.
00:19:45.840So it probably shouldn't surprise you that Tim Walls is on television, social media, constantly encouraging the kind of violence that you've been watching on Instagram.
00:19:59.420We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside.
00:20:07.380Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.
00:20:11.780Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota.
00:20:15.420Someone's going to write that story about Minnesota.
00:20:18.360Now, he's referring to Anne Frank, of course, the little Jewish girl who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding for more than a year with her family in the secret alcove from the Nazis.
00:20:30.780It's a story that most American children are very familiar with, and it's the most terrifying possible thing you could ever say to a population, that the president of the United States and his armed agents are going to kill you like they did Anne Frank.
00:20:48.800So the people I'm opposed to are not simply Nazis in some theoretical sense.
00:20:55.740They're coming here to round you and your children up and take them to a death camp.
00:21:02.300That's what the governor of Minnesota is saying in public in the middle of the most volatile rioting his state has seen maybe ever, maybe even more than what we saw five years ago.
00:21:31.560In order to gin up fear, which is, of course, the fastest way to control people by terrifying them, making them so afraid that they will believe anything you tell them, they will follow any command you give them.
00:21:46.380And, you know, like the Japanese in the South Pacific, they'll jump off the cliff into the sea because they've been so convinced that the invading army is going to eat them and rape their children that they will die before they submit.
00:22:00.240That is what he is telling his people in the state.
00:22:05.660Christmas feels like just yesterday, but in fact, it's already time to think about Lent.
00:22:31.500Transformation does not start with improvement.
00:22:34.280No, transformation starts with repentance, the courage to admit that you are lost and change direction.
00:22:41.740Pray 40 forces you to confront that responsibility, forgiveness, and what it means to truly repent and live a life of meaning by following Jesus.
00:28:05.700And thankfully, there is someone in Minnesota who's even less restrained and even more obvious about what's actually going on than Tim Walz,
00:31:03.880But it produced, as these things always do, an awful lot of refugees.
00:31:09.160And some of them were legitimate, I guess, people who'd helped the United States over 20 years in Afghanistan, interpreters, people who worked at the embassy, worked with U.S. military, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:08.460Unfortunately, Minnesota nice too often means that we gloss over the deep inequities that exist in our states.
00:45:19.100We're one of the happiest states in the country.
00:45:22.620Our schools and healthcare systems are at the top of the list on all the lists that you want to be on top of.
00:45:28.380We've got a really incredible state if you're white, if you are a person of color, if you are indigenous, if you are an immigrant or refugee, the opposite is true.
00:45:42.860As a Native American woman, it is not lost on me that I work in a system that was created in many ways to eliminate and erase me and our community as a whole.
00:45:58.620So I'm not interested in just making policy change here and there, but we also need to be in a place where we call white supremacy, white supremacy.
00:46:13.060So you could sit and parse this like how Native American is Peggy Flanagan?
00:49:33.480The long-term problem is, ooh, if you keep, if you're trafficking in race hate, and then you get power, what happens to the people you hate?
00:51:27.500And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected.
00:51:36.980And so that people, for a religious reason, you know, cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers.
00:51:46.540So how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious leader is beyond me.
00:51:59.120Oh, Keith Ellison, who's the attorney general of the state, charged with enforcing the laws of the state,
00:52:08.680can't get his head around the concept of universally applicable standards, principles, or laws.
00:52:17.220Oh, no, that doesn't apply to people I don't like.
01:02:45.920And then you would have to kind of deal with the aftermath, but maybe it would be worth it.
01:02:52.620Two, you could, and this makes some sense too, you could target the people in charge of this rather than their foot soldiers.
01:03:01.580Because if you think about it for a second, punishing the human waves that have been mobilized by the attorney general, the governor, the mayor, and the lieutenant governor probably isn't the right way.
01:03:14.720When you have war crimes tribunals, you don't put infantrymen on trial.
01:03:17.680You put their commanding officers on trial.
01:03:22.800So you could arrest the governor, the lieutenant governor, the mayor, and the attorney general, and you would have grounds to do that, ample grounds to do that.
01:03:34.260The lieutenant governor has been coordinating, according to the ICE signal chat, apparently, has been coordinating attacks on federal officers.
01:03:47.460If that is indeed her, if the alias on the signal chat is the lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, and it looks like it is, she's a conspirator in this, in an insurrection.
01:03:58.100You could arrest her, and they could arrest the governor on the same grounds.
01:04:00.580They could arrest the attorney general.
01:04:05.400So go after the people who are fomenting chaos, not just their agents, not the kind of sad, pasty face tattoos on the neck people, but the actual generals in this war, and it is war.
01:04:31.720It's the law of the land, basically, in all blue states.
01:04:35.000And the third possibility is that you quarantine Minnesota, effectively.
01:04:40.760You say, okay, you want to live with Somali fraudsters, foreign-born murderers, tons of child molesters, people convicted of child rape, and you want to call them folks and your neighbors, and you want to pay for their lives.
01:05:00.640The U.S. government, federal tax funds are not going to be used to pay for child molesters and murderers to get food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, whatever.
01:05:19.600And that might be very effective because, in the end, money is power, and people like Fry and Walls and Lieutenant Governor Peggy and the Black Separatist Attorney General, they want the money.
01:05:58.960The problem, of course, is that you will immediately find a federal judge who says, as they always do when the Trump administration does something, you can't do that.
01:06:07.660And so for it to work, you'd have to say, well, we're ignoring the federal order.
01:06:11.840So at almost any turn, and this is why it's a pretty clever and diabolical trap that these Democratic politicians have laid, at almost any turn, the Trump administration is, unless you can think of something else, likely to have to say, I'm sorry, we can't go along with this.
01:06:33.700We know these are the preexisting rules, but no.
01:06:38.620Or what is obviously their intent, this color revolution, which will hurt a lot of people, destroy a lot of property, and change the country forever.
01:06:55.080Praying for an end to chaos, but unknown.
01:06:57.120So this is one of the most significant moments, also one of the most complex moments, and one of the most distorted moments any of us have lived through in a long time.
01:07:09.240And so to help make sense of it, we're proud to have someone who I think of as one of the greatest journalists, really, of our time.
01:07:15.940Certainly one of the clearest observers and most honest observers I know.
01:07:19.960And that's Michael Schellenberger, who joins us.
01:07:21.780Now, Mike, thanks so much for doing this.
01:07:24.300I'm just going to stand back and let you assess what you think we're watching right now in Minneapolis.
01:08:27.980And one of the things that I found disturbing about the media coverage of this is that they're stripping all the context away.
01:08:33.700And so you just see a particular moment of Alex Preddy on the ground.
01:08:40.340You're missing a broader context here.
01:08:43.200You know, I think it's really important to understand that these are incredibly well-organized efforts to interfere with law enforcement operations
01:08:53.000by a very sophisticated group of individuals, of people that have the support from Democratic officials in the state of Minnesota.
01:09:04.140We saw a manual that they have created for activists to disrupt law enforcement operations.
01:09:11.800That manual describes how people should, for example, call 9-1-1 on ICE officers and deceive the 9-1-1 dispatchers into thinking that they're reporting a kidnapping by armed men.
01:09:33.580You're provoking confrontations between different law enforcement officials with malintentions, an intention to get people hurt, to create disruption and violence.
01:09:44.340So I think the important thing to know about both Renee Good and Alex Preddy, these deaths are obviously tragic.
01:09:51.220I actually view both of them as victims of the left and this broader strategy to create violence and chaos as a way to ostensibly disrupt ICE operations.
01:10:01.080I think there's a larger strategy here, which we should talk about.
01:10:05.260But the context is, is that they're interfering in law enforcement operations.
01:10:09.500And the claim that they were simply observing is dishonest.
01:10:14.640And you can see Alex Preddy waving traffic in from the middle of the street.
01:10:18.360He then intervenes when an ICE officer is engaging with a woman.
01:10:23.720Now, I say all this with, you know, no, I'm not defending the behavior of any of these ICE officers.
01:10:31.080You know, if I, you know, if you have you pressed me, I think that this was not great behavior.
01:10:36.900I think we can all look at it and see a lot of things that we think are inappropriate.
01:10:41.500This is a force of ICE agents that was not well prepared.
01:10:46.480And other things can be true, which is that Alex Preddy put himself right in front of that officer, stepped into the street, you know, got himself involved in this altercation that he didn't need to be involved in, certainly not to film it.
01:11:03.260And, of course, Renee Good, you know, drives perpendicular into blocking the street.
01:11:09.020Her partner was outside the vehicle taunting ICE agents.
01:11:12.800I think it's just obvious that these are behaviors aimed at interfering with law enforcement operations.
01:11:18.040And, again, that's not justification for the behaviors of the ICE agents or anything else.
01:11:24.700But I think this effort to kind of strip away all that context and suggest that somehow these were, you know, observers or journalists that were keeping safe distance is just false.
01:11:36.060I think the other point I wanted to make about this is that there's two separate strategies that people should be aware of that left-wing activists use.
01:11:47.240Incredible tradition from Henry David Throe to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King to nonviolent civil disobedience I was involved in.
01:11:54.220The first priority is to keep people safe and prevent any physical altercations or any conflict with law enforcement.
01:12:01.600Those efforts, in fact, should and do use a lot of communication between the protest leaders and law enforcement to avoid any physical violence.
01:12:14.260That's the point of it, but to be arrested in a peaceful way.
01:12:17.540What we're seeing in Minneapolis is not that strategy.
01:12:20.500It is a strategy aimed at provoking an overreaction.
01:12:23.840It's much more similar to the guerrilla strategy that was developed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the Cuban government, which is to make an attack and then get an overreaction from your opponent that hurts many people on your side deliberately in order to foment a larger revolution or reaction.
01:12:44.080Notably, that tactic, you know, it's a neutral tactic.
01:12:55.800So I think that the tragedy here is both the deaths of these two individuals who I think are used as cannon fodder by the left wing leaders of this movement.
01:13:04.940I mentioned before there was a manual that was being used.
01:13:07.760We now know there was a signal group that had at least a thousand people in it.
01:13:11.560We now know there's, you know, Democrat leaders in Minnesota had been calling for people to put their bodies on the line.
01:13:16.940That was the specific language of the lieutenant governor.
01:13:20.560And we've now seen other evidence come out.
01:13:22.780For example, there's a young reporter on the scene named Haley West.
01:13:27.360She was she documented on video how she was being followed by anti-ice left activists in Minneapolis.
01:13:34.780And when she confronted them, they said that they had her driver's license or sorry, they had her license plate in their database.
01:14:04.840The definition of having a functioning state is that it is the state is defined, at least by one of the great sociologists, as the legitimate monopoly on violence.
01:14:16.560Well, they are trying to take the right to take the policing powers away from the state, take it upon themselves as left self-appointed left wing activists.
01:14:26.600That's that's just straight up thuggery or gangsterism.
01:14:30.220And what's so disturbing about it is that you sort of say, well, we don't see any of them using weapons or it's not armed.
01:14:36.220Well, they've created an entire militia structure with a communication system, legal system, a policing effort.
01:14:44.620They're somehow able to run license plates.
01:14:47.900They're able to get information from rental car companies.
01:14:53.300And I think they got what they wanted in the sense that they got they got they got two people killed.
01:14:58.300They have successfully persuaded the media to focus extremely narrowly on the particular moment and eliminate the broader context of the ways in which the left is using people as cannon fodder.
01:15:14.300The way in which the left is getting people killed.
01:15:20.180I think that the Trump administration needs to exercise great care, greater care so as to not actually participate in the radical left's agenda to sow more discord, to create more violence, because I think so far they've succeeded in doing that.
01:15:37.080They've made the issue around ICE rather than about the fact that they've effectively got a militia structure organized in Minneapolis that is taking over normal policing functions and then sending out people to basically get hurt and killed and disrupt operations.
01:15:57.420Look, at a legal level, you know, one might agree or disagree with what the with President Trump, with his policies on migration, with ICE enforcement.
01:16:12.080Whenever there's a conflict between federal law and state law, the federal law applies.
01:16:16.420There's no sort of debate about any of that.
01:16:20.780And so I fear that, unfortunately, we're in a situation where the Trump administration finds itself in a bind, where it's got a situation in Minneapolis that's spiraled out of control.
01:16:30.860But if it now runs away or backs off, then, of course, there's the risk of sending the message that really anything goes and that state and local authorities should have supremacy over federal law.
01:16:44.460And I think that's an extremely dangerous precedent.
01:16:46.340It feels in some ways like the bill is coming due on a tab that we've been running for a long time, where states have been in open violation of federal law for decades, as sanctuary cities, for example, sanctuary states, the state of Oregon decriminalizes fentanyl, lots of states decriminalize marijuana.
01:17:07.740But all of this is in contradiction, contravention of federal law.
01:17:27.620And I think I'm sure you've had the experience, too, where we remember back to 2020.
01:17:32.440And obviously, the killing of George Floyd is different than the killing of Alex Preddy.
01:17:38.360But there's so many different similarities to this.
01:17:41.080I mean, the first one is that they're looking to create autonomous zones.
01:17:45.260Recall that they created an autonomous zone in Minneapolis, but they also created one in Seattle.
01:17:51.700The political leadership in Seattle, the mayor and the city council allowed that autonomous zone to exist.
01:17:59.880And so these autonomous zones are essentially, I mean, they're illegal ceding of power from the state, our democratically elected and controlled state, to unelected left-wing activists, militias.
01:18:15.780And, you know, two kids got killed, you know, two black kids got killed in the Seattle autonomous zone.
01:18:21.660It took the, you know, they didn't even shut it down after the first kid was killed.
01:18:25.040They only shut it down after the second kid was killed.
01:18:38.320I was slow to come to this because, of course, when you focus on that specific incident, you ignore the broader context.
01:18:44.740But when you go and essentially turn over several city blocks, when you allow, you know, riots night after night, as Minneapolis did after the killing of George Floyd, you are abdicating your responsibility as responsible, you know, political officials who were duly elected by the people to keep them safe.
01:19:04.940It's essentially undermining not just Locke, but also Hobbes, which says that we need to the first function of the state is for physical security.
01:19:14.540And so you're seeing a very disturbing, I think, partnership between these radical left activists who are interfering in law enforcement operations, working with elected Democrat officials to essentially, you know, end or or sort of pull back from providing basic security to citizens and residents.
01:19:37.540It's it's hard not to look at this and feel like you're headed or we're headed towards some kind of civil conflict or civil war.
01:19:42.880You know, heaven forbid, but I think it's just I can't underscore how dangerous and reckless the current situation is, you know, people, you know, the mark of a civilized society is that we protect our vulnerable.
01:19:54.940And we're obviously failing to do that.
01:19:59.520Well, Kay, I mean, I've seen it in person.
01:20:02.680The first victims of chaos are the are the defenseless or the weakest, of course.
01:20:06.380And so, yeah, everything about it is is is is evil and certainly uncivilized.
01:20:41.080It's viewed Western civilization as having committed the sins of indigenous genocide, slavery, you know, leading up to in the in this story, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons.
01:20:53.100It will all end in, you know, climate change, apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse.
01:20:58.920So these are extremely radical views that that come from the assumption and a priori assumption.
01:21:05.520I mean, this goes back to Rousseau and through Marx and other radical thinkers that, you know, Western civilization is evil, that all of the problems that we have from inequality to suffering are a result of a particular system that we have.
01:21:18.920That there's some radically different system we can put in place, you know, whether it's anarchism or communism or some other system they want to name where there won't be these problems.
01:21:31.720You know, when I was on the radical left, that was a very specific thing separate from the Democratic Party.
01:21:38.140We thought the Democrats were sellouts.
01:21:40.560We were all, you know, fairly far to the left of the Democrats.
01:21:43.960I think what we've seen that's maybe the most understudied and undertheorized issue in political science is the radicalization of the Democratic Party.
01:21:53.840And so you used to see the, you know, mainstream Democrats distancing themselves from this kind of radical behavior.
01:22:00.860Well, now they're participating in it.
01:22:04.680It's it's, you know, extremely radical agenda.
01:22:07.140It's notable that, you know, in both the George Floyd and the Minneapolis case, the argument that's being made by the left is that there's too much policing, that there's too much law and order.
01:22:18.720And, you know, as you pointed out, I mean, we see it everywhere.
01:22:21.300I mean, you know, you lower the penalties and the consequences and the enforcement of laws around all sorts of crimes, using drugs in public, camping in public, public defecation.
01:22:33.620You know, even things like, you know, reducing traffic stops.
01:22:36.980I think you were one of the first people to report on this actually results in more death.
01:22:43.240And so, you know, I had a public safety officer from Denver, actually, who said to me, he said, you know, he said, Mike, it's pretty simple.
01:23:06.540It's clear that people that are doing this, you know, believe in open borders, believe in mass migration.
01:23:11.600They're doing this to, you know, undermine, you know, controlling our own borders.
01:23:17.220They're obviously, you know, want to get rid of Trump at a minimum.
01:23:19.980But I think more maximally, you know, if you get a Democrat as president, I think we're going to see, you know, a kind of this kind of anarchy and chaos at the physical reality level.
01:23:31.300And then at the, you know, level of the Internet in terms of speech, you're going to get increasing censorship.
01:23:36.300So with this kind of chaos that gets created in the neighborhoods, the only way you can sustain that is by controlling information and making people think it is something that it's not.
01:23:45.980This obviously worked in terms of fueling the drug and homelessness epidemic.
01:23:50.940I think it's also working now to make people think that somehow, you know, the underlying problem is law enforcement.
01:23:58.280And that was the ideology that, you know, was behind Black Lives Matter, you know, an organization that, you know, false that spread disinformation, led people to believe that police brutality was increasing.
01:24:09.900And also that there was greater use of the great there were more police shootings of black Americans and white Americans.
01:24:15.520That was disproven by Harvard professor Roland Fryer.
01:24:19.480We knew that also just police killings, like all killings, had been going down since the 70s.
01:24:24.520So the entire thing was based on a lie.
01:24:27.100And so I think that's the that's the fundamental.
01:24:46.840The comparisons between ICE and, you know, the Gestapo, the Nazis.
01:24:52.360I mean, you're comparing, you know, someone pointed out it's like migrants get, you know, illegal migrants get three thousand five hundred dollars, you know, and a flight back home.
01:25:04.540They have better due process than I think any country in the world has ever offered migrants.
01:25:08.780We allow in more migrants than any other country in the world.
01:25:12.220The United States is the most anti-racist nation that's ever existed.
01:25:16.440So when they compare ICE to Nazis, I don't think it's just hyperbole, or at least if it started as hyperbole, it's become something much more dangerous, which is that it's basically saying that ICE officers and other law enforcement are worthy of being killed.
01:25:32.820Because the only proper treatment of Nazis, as, you know, 80 years of Hollywood films and television and movies have shown is to murder them.
01:25:41.540You know, that's what Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards is saying.
01:25:46.560And there's heroism and excitement and glory in that promotion of that idea.
01:25:51.800So you put those two things together, that the only proper treatment of Nazis and fascists is to murder them.
01:25:58.120And then you call law enforcement officials, your political opponents, Nazis and fascists.
01:26:04.400Well, we shouldn't be surprised that we see, you know, two assassination attempts on President Trump, you know, the murder of Charlie Kirk.
01:26:10.520And now, you know, essentially turning, you know, left-wing, naive left-wing activists into cannon fodder, essentially, for these very radical goals.
01:26:23.040Unfortunately, it just keeps getting worse, and I'm afraid we haven't hit the bottom yet.
01:26:28.900But I don't think there's any question about what their goals are.
01:26:32.080I mean, maybe I'm too pedantic, but to hear people who worship violence describe themselves as nonviolent activists grates on me, since I believe in nonviolent protests as a Christian strongly.
01:26:47.780I don't know if these same people were organizing protests against shoveling hundreds of millions to the Ukrainian war machine.
01:27:35.660I mean, I'll say something else, Tucker, which is that, you know, I think a year ago, shortly after the 2024 elections, I found with many people on the left, both ones that I know personally and also just, you know, reading, there was a moment of, it seemed like we were headed towards a moment of introspection.
01:27:52.800There was some sense among, you know, mainline Democrats that they had been misled by the media, which had claimed that Biden was fine, for example, and the border was, they were doing everything they could to close the border.
01:28:07.160You know, you kind of get into January, February, Trump closes the border.
01:28:43.000I mean, they don't want to leave there.
01:28:44.680And so I'm afraid that all of that, that moment of potential awakening or reckoning with just how radicalized the left had gone, I think that's all gone now.
01:28:54.940And you can see it in people like Gavin Newsom, who, you know, at first, you know, had conversations with Charlie Kirk and with, you know, people on the right as a way to try to, apparently try to understand, obviously, in a performative way.
01:29:08.440But nonetheless, there was some sense in which that was good politics a year ago.
01:29:14.620And now we're back to, I just think, a really profoundly anti-civilization, anti-American, you know, hatred that is giving them pleasure, that makes them feel important, makes them feel powerful, gives their lives meaning and purpose.
01:29:31.040And, you know, that, for me, it just, it's just a huge concern because that's part of the forces that are leading us to, I mean, I think we just have to be honest about it, that appears to be what's leading us towards civil war.
01:29:46.780And I do think people who are for civilization underestimate the seriousness of these people.
01:29:56.320I mean, they're serious and they're not stupid at all.
01:29:58.900I watched yesterday an anti-ice protest forum in a small town, thousands of miles, over a thousand miles from Minneapolis, and every, and was not on social media, and every woman in the town received a text about it, right?
01:30:31.880But it's not really about that, is it?
01:30:34.660Well, no, except for the part of the fact that it's, that this is clearly the kind of, this is the, this is what they wanted.
01:30:43.540I mean, they were inciting this, they're, they're telling people to interfere with law enforcement operations, knowing full well how dangerous that is.
01:30:51.240And so I think it's a mistake to view these things as unintentional.
01:30:55.240I'm not saying that there were, we're going to find messages with them saying we hope somebody gets killed.
01:30:59.900But the recklessness that they were advocating, I mean, again, it's like night and day.
01:31:04.780When you look at the tactics being used by the anti-ice left right now, and then you look at the really noble tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, it's day and night.
01:31:15.900They really have nothing to do with each other.
01:31:18.100The tactics that are being used in Minneapolis now are just much more similar to what's being used for guerrilla warfare, for example, rather than in the tradition of King Gandhi and Thoreau.
01:31:28.040I think the Trump administration is in a very tough spot right now.
01:33:15.860I think it's very hard for, you know, people, certainly in the heat of the moment, to deal with the fact that many things can be true at the same time.
01:33:26.340Look, the ICE operations were just not, obviously, they were not well organized.
01:33:31.380And they've recruited a lot of people that don't have the experience they need.
01:33:36.140I mean, whenever things go terribly wrong, you know, including like, you know, in Uvalde, New Mexico or elsewhere, I think everyone wants to blame the individual officers.
01:33:45.020And they certainly have responsibility, but they're part of an institution, and the higher responsibility goes to the people in those institutions who had a job of training them and preparing them for that context.
01:33:58.380Next, I think Alex Preddy also has responsibility.
01:34:01.540It's very, there's a lot of demagoguery on this issue where, you know, I pointed out on X, I'm like, I think that, you know, women should have the right to walk through any neighborhood in America in scantily, scantily clothed.
01:34:23.760I'm a professor now, I actually took my students, undergraduate students, you know, 19-year-old students, to interview people on the street here in Austin.
01:34:34.700They told stories of witnessing homicide, you know, drug dealing, assault, you know, is extremely, you know, it was a, they're living in extremely violent, dangerous circumstances.
01:34:45.020And I take that responsibility very seriously of making sure those students are safe and understand my surroundings.
01:34:51.480And that means that Alex Prady also has responsibility.
01:34:55.760And it's certainly not speaking ill of the dead to say that.
01:35:00.620I think he had a sense of entitlement that they were somehow, he should be able to interfere in a law enforcement operation and have no consequences.
01:35:08.120You know, again, it's not a justification for what happened to him.
01:35:11.560But I think people need to understand that you are responsible, ultimately, for your own physical security.
01:35:16.700And the first part of that physical security is where you put yourself.
01:35:21.020And that, you know, people, because of Hollywood, I think they sometimes think that your security is all about your ability to fight once you're in a dangerous situation or how to react in those situations.
01:35:31.640No, it's actually about not being in that situation in the first place.
01:35:35.600And we've got a situation here where you've got leading Democratic officials in Minnesota, you have major NGOs in Minnesota, you have very skilled organizers that create manuals and have lawyers waiting who are encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations.
01:36:09.520And sadly, I don't think we saw the Trump administration at its best over the last few days.
01:36:14.280I think there is time to turn it around.
01:36:16.340And I think Tom Homan is somebody that should bring that experience.
01:36:20.300It's I have my own views of of how to kind of what should be the policies around migration and what to do about it.
01:36:28.460But I think the administration is pursuing a strategy to focus on the criminal element.
01:36:34.040I think 64 percent of all of the ICE arrests and detainees since Trump took office had been people with either a criminal prosecution or charges against them.
01:36:46.100And I think that like to see that number be even higher and, you know, much more care taken in these operations, much more focused.
01:36:55.000You know, I think you've got to find a way to get local police and state involved from the beginning.
01:37:00.100Otherwise, I kind of wonder whether it should be done at all.
01:37:03.520Again, you have federal supremacy, but but, you know, we're trying to be practical here, too.
01:37:07.960So I hope it's a wake up call for everybody.
01:37:10.400I know there was some calls between the president and the governor and the mayor, you know, president was I think I will say again, I think the president was elected on a particular agenda.
01:37:20.880And it would be really a bad precedent for a president's agenda to be undermined by people that are pursuing a strategy to essentially, you know, break the law, violate the law, you know, undermine that strategy because, you know, we're a republic and, you know, the president was democratically elected.
01:37:41.240And there's a lot of policies that a democratic president might have that you don't like.
01:37:46.820But I think saying the president, the precedent whereby you're going to abandon your policy agenda because you've encountered violent resistance.
01:37:56.740I worry about that a lot as a precedent.
01:37:59.060And I'm sure the Trump administration is as well.
01:38:01.520But I think you should be able to do both.
01:38:03.220I think you should be able to pursue your agenda and do a better job of of protecting and maintaining security in those areas.
01:38:11.240You can imagine, though, that it might soon become impossible.
01:38:17.360I mean, I don't know how you could continue doing the same thing if you're bumping up against local law enforcement that won't protect federal officers, local elected officials, statewide elected officials who are promoting the conditions that inevitably produce violence.
01:38:35.000Because, I mean, I mean, it seems like if they keep doing what they have been doing without changing it at all, we're going to get a lot more Alex Predis.
01:38:46.180And so should I mean, is there like a dramatic change in their approach that you think would work?
01:38:52.840I mean, I if I were advising, you know, I'm not advising them, but if I were advising them, I'd say you need to keep pursuing the agenda you were elected to pursue.
01:39:02.840You just need to pursue it in a better way, in a more practical, safer way.
01:39:08.780I mean, I think it's so interesting, Tucker, also, I think, under remarked upon is that the last time we saw, I think, this level of federal state clash was when, you know, Kennedy and Johnson were desegregating institutions in the South and they faced significant resistance.
01:39:24.000Yes, I think. And they did not hesitate to use, you know, force to, you know, to send out the National Guard to protect children and students as they desegregated educational institutions.
01:39:36.420I think most people also recognize that some of those efforts did go too far.
01:39:41.400For example, the forced busing, you know, and you start to get to you start to have to kind of a practical view of this.
01:39:48.040I mean, at the end of the day, I think public opinion is paramount, you know, and as Lincoln says, you know, with public consent, you can do anything.
01:40:35.560I felt the need to respond to it as quickly as I could.
01:40:39.340The president needs to address the country.
01:40:41.480I just think you need an Oval Office address at this point to, you know, explain to the public what he's trying to do.
01:40:47.740You know, that it hasn't always been perfect, that he has, you know, feels the pain of these deaths.
01:40:55.140And at the same time, you know, he's pursuing a particular policy agenda that he was elected to pursue.
01:41:00.340And it would be dangerous to not pursue that because of, you know, both mistakes at the federal level, but also through this violent aggression by these radicalized left groups.
01:41:11.380You know, I think we need to hear from him in a really, with a serious address from the Oval Office as soon as possible.
01:41:17.740Michael Schellenberger, thank you for your wise assessment of all of that.
01:41:24.940And I'm grateful, especially right now.