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Feb. 5, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:25
TERRORISTS NEXT DOOR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1015
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'm going to update you on Trump's cabinet confirmations, by and large, very good news.
I'll talk about the scandal at USAID and the way in which USAID has been funding the left, funding the media, funding all kinds of crazy stuff.
National security analyst Joseph Humeyer joins me.
He's going to talk about the threat of the terrorist next door.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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I want to talk about several things in this opening discussion.
First, I'm happy to say that I think that all the three major cabinet nominees whose success was a little bit up for grabs,
I'm thinking specifically here of Kash Patel and Tilsey Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I'm happy to say I think all three of them are going to go through.
Now, it might be somewhat close because I've seen reports that McConnell is going to vote against all three.
What a disgrace.
I mean, this guy is just absolute.
But, you know, He has nothing to lose.
I think he has burned his bridges not only with Trump, he's burned his bridges with a lot of people in the Senate, and he's burned his bridges with the voters.
I don't think that this is a guy who could be re-elected to the Senate in Kentucky.
So he's a bitter guy.
He has had a not-undistinguished career, and I would not say that it's a career without accomplishment.
He's done some impressive things.
He has stopped some very bad things from coming down the pike.
He also is responsible for Merrick Garland not being on the Supreme Court.
So I'm going to give the guy credit where it's due.
But his day has come and gone.
And, well, he's become kind of an obstructionist.
He's kind of now the inheritor of the Mike Pence kind of...
Yeah, the Mike Pence Award, if you want to put it that way.
But nevertheless, fortunately, Republicans do not have as narrow a Senate majority as they do a House majority.
If they did, you couldn't afford to lose maybe even one vote, certainly not two.
But the Republicans have a margin.
They can afford to lose three, and then if they did, it would be 50-50, and they'd have to bring in J.D. Vance.
I'm not sure if it'll come to that.
It might come to that in one of the three cases, but it looks like all three are going to go through it.
In fact, I was looking at the betting side polymarket, and all of them have odds of well over 90% that they were all three.
So, that to me is excellent news because it means that Trump is pretty much going to get his whole cabinet, with the only exception of Matt Gaetz, who was forced to withdraw and has been replaced by the very capable Pam Bondi, who has already been approved.
Now, let me turn to the great rip-off.
And yesterday I did a tweet that was shared by Elon Musk, and I'm going to read it.
The simple truth is Elon Musk publicly exposed the great ripoff.
That's my term, the great ripoff.
Now the ripoff artists, the beneficiaries of the scheme, are furious.
So here's, I say, what they say, quote, we stand to lose civilization, our democracy, our very system of government.
And then I say what they mean, we stand to lose our racket.
And this is what Elon Musk shared yesterday, and it's gotten over 10 million views.
And I'm happy to see that our side, both this is the Trump Rapid Response Team, but here I have a post by Congressman Wesley Hunt.
They're just enumerating the shocking abuses of government waste.
And when we say waste, even the term waste is misleading because waste implies that I'm trying to do something good, but I'm wasting a lot of money.
I'm doing it inefficiently.
This is not what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is the government being infiltrated by leftists who are diverting money to their pet schemes.
They're raiding and looting the treasury.
For their own benefit.
And what they fund is, some of it is money that circles back to themselves or to their friends or to their favored NGOs.
Some of it actually, unbelievably, goes to media outlets.
The New York Times, Politico.
These are people collecting government money.
Who knew?
Well, now we know.
Now you know.
Here from Wesley Hunt is just a few items.
$20 million for Sesame Street in Iraq.
What?
Iraq is not even really our friend.
$56 million to boost tourism in Egypt and Tunisia.
Why are we paying for this?
$40 million to build schools, probably left-wing schools, in Jordan.
$11 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash.
This is ostensibly somehow related to the climate.
And $27 million for reintegration gift bags for deported Central Americans.
And this is a small list.
I could be doing the whole podcast by reading these kinds of items.
And we're paying for this.
So the abuse of the ordinary citizen and the taxpayer is just utterly atrocious here.
Now, the left, of course, is howling about this because this is their, it's like their piggy bank.
They have taken this system over, and they are the ones that are looting and raiding the Treasury, and now they're busted, right?
This is why they're so upset.
They're saying things like, I saw kind of an almost comical post by the Never Trump group called Lincoln Project.
They go, it's a coup.
What do they mean?
What they really seem to mean, if you think about it, is that the unelected bureaucrats that are running all these agencies Are seemingly the true government.
Because that's what the coup is supposedly against them.
And who is the coup being conducted by?
Trump.
So supposedly the elected democratic leader of the country is mounting a coup against these unelected bureaucrats.
So it shows you how inverted things are from the left's point of view.
They treat the permanent bureaucracy as the legitimate government.
And they treat elected leaders like Trump as usurpers.
Jamie Raskin is out there screaming, and he says, well, you can't do this to USAID. Well, actually, yes, you can.
USAID was not created by Congress.
It was created, believe it or not, by, you guessed it, executive order.
So if something is created by executive order, it can be dismantled by executive order.
The president, on his own authority, created it in 1961. It can be ended exactly the same way that it started.
So you can scream all you want, but this is not a case where you've got an agency set up by Congress.
And really, the USAID has long strayed from its mission.
By the way, the name is misleading.
USAID, people think, oh yeah, this is...
Providing AID, IEAID, no.
USAID stands for the Agency for International Development.
That's where you get the AID. It's not about providing genuine aid of the kind we normally think of for disasters and things like that.
If that is even done by USAID, it is a minuscule part of the budget.
Now Trump, to be very clear, has said, listen, the authority here is not coming from Elon Musk, it's coming from me.
He goes, there are times I'll disagree with Musk and then we won't do those things.
And he's also said that Musk himself is operating within the government, within the Trump administration.
So, for example, USAID is now under the supervision of Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State.
This fits right in with Rubio's portfolio.
And so it's Trump's authority flowing through Rubio down to Elon Musk and whatever group of technicians Elon Musk has brought in.
Now, that's, I'm really chuckling because out on social media, there is now almost a kind of cottage industry of jokes because so many of these AID projects appear to be related to turning, I won't even say people, but turning things gay. I won't even say people, but turning things gay.
And so there are projects to like promote homosexuality like in Kazakhstan or in other case there are projects to conduct homosexual experiments with animals or to see if you can transition animals from male to female and then measure the effects of that and see if it interferes with their sexuality.
And so you've got all kinds of jokes where people go, oh man, I've been laid off at AID, you know, AID and this is, I was trying to turn, you know, the Congolese frogs.
I made some progress, but the mission remains incomplete.
Now it's going to go neglected and so on.
Here's Representative Mike Collins.
This is actually funny coming from a congressman.
I got laid off at USAID today.
I was in charge of making the Taliban trans.
Was really starting to make headway too.
And then I commented on this.
Well, if they had tasked you with making them pedophiles, you probably could show some better results because mission accomplished on day one.
So, I'm going to see Debbie's kind of shaking her head like, did you really?
I mentioned this to her and she really chuckled, but she's like, did you really have to bring it up on the podcast?
And the answer is, of course, yes.
Of course you do.
All right.
Look, what's funny, I think, and so telling about the Democrats here is that, remember last year or the year before, Democrats were really excited about hiring 87,000 IRS agents.
Why?
To audit you.
To make sure that you're paying your taxes, to look into your numbers and make sure everything is legit and on the up and up.
So they're very happy to audit the citizens because after all, they're in the process of extracting wealth away from you.
But on the other hand, when it comes to auditing the government, which is to say extracting wealth away from them.
Let's think about this.
Whenever I see these congressmen and senators, I just saw Senator Kim, I think from New Jersey.
First of all, he's this normally kind of diminutive Asian guy, but he's getting really animated.
And I'm thinking to myself, what is he really animated about?
Well, what he's really animated about is this.
He has seen that from Hillary to Obama to Biden, To Elizabeth Warren, even Bernie Sanders, all these people get rich through government.
It is a self-enrichment scheme.
They create a kind of financial ladder where they all get into government and somehow 20 years later, they've got $35 million.
Nobody really knows how because they've got a salary that's a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but there is a pathway here to personal enrichment.
It is really this that is being disrupted.
And so the reason that a diminutive Asian-American guy gets all fired up is his own retirement is at stake.
He's like, what happened to my $35 million?
I was hoping for like, you know, Bernie got three houses.
I was hoping I'd get at least two.
And this is how these people are privately thinking.
This is not what they're saying, but this is actually what they are afraid of.
Have you seen the news from economists forecasting a depression, not a recession, a depression by the year 2030?
We're in a bit of a perfect storm as Social Security and Medicare hit a breaking point with the largest generation hitting retirement.
A smaller workforce means a smaller tax base.
Pair that with our growing national debt, rising cost of living.
We have a big problem.
So what are you doing now to protect your family for the future?
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast Joseph Humeyer, Director of the Center for a Secure, Free Society.
He's also a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
He's a foreign policy expert, a national security expert, and he focuses on these transnational and transregional threat networks.
You can follow him on X at jmhumeyer, H-U-M-I-R-E, the website.
Joseph, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I've got to begin by asking you, there seems to be just a flurry of things that are going on with the new Trump administration.
Have you been taken aback by the...
Acceleration and speed at which these people are operating?
And second of all, do you see the beginnings here of countering the consolidation of the global left in Central and South America in particular?
Oh, first of all, Dinesh, it's great to be back on your podcast.
So I'll start by saying this.
I think that for those of us that have, you know, considered maybe Latin American, those of us that focus on Latin America in terms of U.S. foreign policy, I think we've hit our moment.
This literally is the most Western Hemisphere-focused U.S. president that I've seen in my lifetime.
Everything from Greenland in the Arctic down to Panama and the Panama Canal, the now-called Gulf of the America and Mexico, Canada, and everything in between.
It seems like President Trump is now focusing on our near abroad.
This is something that was sorely lacking in U.S. foreign policy for whatever reason over the last decades, and maybe you could honestly say maybe even the last hundred years, the U.S. foreign policy has steered east or steered far abroad and has completely abandoned our near abroad.
And I think what President Trump is doing is he establishing a strategic map in the Western Hemisphere that looks at a security perimeter, basically everything from Greenland down to the Panama Canal.
And what he understands is that perimeter has been breached.
It's been breached by hostile actors, China most notably, but also Russia, also Iran.
And it's also been breached by transnational criminal organizations that are basically flooding across our southern border.
So I think President Trump has now repositioned the United States, or at least in the beginning of repositioning the United States, to have a grand strategy for the Western Hemisphere.
And I'm all here for it.
Joseph, let me...
Reformulate what you just said because I think that we're getting to something here that's really important in the big picture.
I think what you're saying is that going back to World War I and World War II and the post-war era, the United States began to see itself as a kind of...
Global player and a global referee.
And it would be quite normal for the United States to be very active in Europe, in the Middle East, later on in the areas surrounding Russia.
I remember Kissinger gets involved to resolve the Indo-Pakistan conflict, China and the Far East.
So the United States sees itself as this kind of global player and global referee, the manager, if you will, of the world's affairs.
I think what you're saying is that Trump is America first, but America first doesn't mean some kind of an isolationist, let's just draw a line at the American border, but rather Trump sees this as, look, America first means protecting your immediate neighborhood, right?
So that's Canada to the north, that's Mexico to the south, but it goes further.
This is kind of our...
Front yard and our backyard, and you can say our top yard, if you will.
And so Trump's point is that this should be the priority.
There are other things that we can do transactionally to help other people solve their problems, but the focus should be on protecting the ranch and protecting the surrounding territory around the ranch.
Is that an accurate summary of what you were saying?
That is very well said, Dinesh.
I think that's absolutely what's happening.
It's in many ways revisiting the Monroe Doctrine.
And you have to go 200 years ago to 1823, when the United States made a very bold claim, when it wasn't a world power.
Back in 1823, the United States wasn't a global power.
And we basically planted a seed of sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere that helped Latin America.
Many countries at that time were just starting to gain independence from Spanish colonial rule, and they blossomed into what they are today, as did the United States.
That led us to the Panama Canal in 1903, where we essentially built one of the biggest strategic waterways inside the world.
So I think President Trump knows what made America great back during the 8th and 19th century into the 20th century, and we need to go back to that.
We need to go back to that.
We cannot have a situation where all the countries in our affinity, in our perimeter, are basically run by narco-terrorists or with Chinese penetration, Iranian penetration.
I mean, just last year, Dinesh, just last year, we had a Russian nuclear submarine pass through the Florida Straits.
I mean, like, just miles off the coast of Florida.
That has not happened since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That should never happen.
We had a Chinese spy balloon two years ago pass through North America and through Latin America over the Panama Canal.
So basically, there's been signs that our adversaries, our biggest adversaries, Russia and China, have basically started to breach our near abroad.
And if they were able to fulfill those military ambitions, that would be a checkmate move against the United States.
I think President Trump is now playing chess and getting ahead of it so that we don't get into a situation where we have a conflict.
Can you say a little bit, Joseph, about...
How this kind of infiltration has taken place in Central and South America.
It seems like even in countries like Chile, which experienced free market prosperity, going back now to the influence of Milton Friedman and his disciples in the 1970s and 80s, and yet, hey, you have a Chilean election, Chile seems to pivot to the left.
The strength of the left in South America, Central and South America, appears to pave the way for these hostile actors to penetrate.
What is the symbiotic relationship between left-wing socialism of the kind that we've seen in Cuba, Venezuela, and the intrusion of outside forces like Iran and Russia and China?
So what we've seen, Dinesh, is essentially an effort to change the international system.
And China's at the top of the pyramid in this.
Obviously, Russia and Iran are working on this as well.
But what they want to do is establish new trade routes, new monetary systems, new currencies even, and the ability to displace the United States.
what they view as a world order that was led by the United States since World War II.
So if you look at Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, these are different chapters in the same book as Russia, China, and Iran.
And they basically collectively have gotten together to really try to change that international order.
And the challenge in Latin America has been, particularly when it comes to China, is a misguided vision that all China was interested in was in commercial endeavors, that all they wanted to do was trade and invest.
But those that have studied China over many years, including yourself, Dinesh, have been warning us that China's commercial endeavors, its financial portfolio is a means to an What is that end?
That end is military ambition in nature, geopolitical.
So in Latin America, while China was basically buying up all this property and making all these investments, what they were really doing was pre-positioning their military forces under the concept of military-civil fusion, which is a Chinese doctrine for how they blend their commercial with their military applications.
So I think most of Latin America misses.
And to give them credit, so did the United States.
For many years, our foreign policy had kind of a misguided view that China was going to somehow ascend into the world of democratic nation states.
It was going to become this free trade partner.
And while we continue to trade with China, they continue to infiltrate our critical infrastructure and use it towards their advantage.
China's done growing.
China has a demographic crisis, they have a housing crisis, they have a population crisis, and they have a political crisis.
Xi Jinping is coming to the end of the line.
So what was once 2049 in the 100-year anniversary of the revolution is now sped up to 2030, and they're moving very fast.
And one of the places where they're moving very fast, or they are moving very fast, is in our southern flank, in Latin America and the Caribbean.
So I think President Trump now understands this.
He understands that we let this happen.
He understands that our policies have been misguided, and we have to correct it.
And I think that's at the heart of what's behind his efforts to reestablish U.S. influence over the Panama Canal.
I was just going to say that it looks like what you get with Trump is that he comes out with something that, if you take it literally, Trump points in one direction, and then you suddenly realize that Trump is maybe after something a little different.
I mean, a good example of this is tariffs, right?
Trump goes, I'm going to put tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and then all these economists jump up and down and say, oh, this is going to start a trade war.
And then you suddenly realize, no, Trump's real goal is to get them to stop the fentanyl and to police the border.
And similarly with the Panama Canal, Trump's like, give it back to us or we're going to take it.
And people go, oh my gosh, he's...
We're going to send the Navy SEALs down to Panama Canal, and pretty soon the president of Panama steps up and goes, well, we've actually terminated our agreements with the Chinese.
They're no longer going to be running the canal.
So I think that that's what you're getting at, isn't it?
That what Trump is doing is he's using this diplomatic leverage, including in some cases outright threats, but the goal here is to separate out.
The sovereign countries of Central and South America from the efforts of the Chinese and others to use them as puppets.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, he's reimposing a U.S.-led global order.
When America doesn't lead, the world falls into disarray.
We saw this over the last four years.
We had a war in Ukraine.
We had a war in Gaza.
There's bubblings of conflicts in Latin America, even.
And so that's what happens when the U.S. is absent from all these things.
But the problem is that people assume that the other side of that is interventionist, basically deploying our military all over, democracy building.
That is not what President Trump is interested in.
What he's using is he's using diplomacy, he's using economic statecraft, and he's using Using other tools of national power to reimpose a U.S.-led global order.
The United States needs to lead the world.
That doesn't mean we need to build the world or police the world, but we need to lead the world to make sure that they understand that there are consequences for doing bad behavior.
Unleashing migrants and criminals from your countries and sending them through our southern border has to be met with consequences.
And I think that President Trump is making that abundantly clear, but he's using a big stick.
And that stick is access to U.S. markets.
Every country in the world wants access to U.S. markets.
Well, if you're going to have access to that market, it comes with responsibilities.
Part of those responsibilities are not sending us illegal migrants and drugs and fentanyl and all these other things.
So Mexico, get your act together.
Canada, get your act together.
It's called accountability and responsibility.
And it's something we've been lacking in international affairs for a long time.
Many countries have got used to basically getting away with whatever and having the United States foot the bill.
I think that time is over.
In Latin America, and I spend a lot of time in Latin America, the Latin Americans respect strength and respect order.
In fact, one of the main reasons Latin Americans migrate to the United States isn't just for economic opportunities, it's for rule of law and law and order, because they can't get it in their home countries, so they go to the United States to be able to get a fair shake.
So they respect it at the end of the day, even if sometimes they disagree at the onset.
Let's take a pause, Joseph.
When we come back, I want to pick up this idea of the United States as the world's desirable market and the way that Trump takes advantage of that.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm back with Joseph Humeyer, Director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.
The website is securefreesociety.org.
You can follow him on X at J.M. Humeyer.
You know, Joseph, I mean, for a long time, people would think about America as a To which other countries had a kind of automatic right.
In other words, the world is a big free trade zone.
And so if you're a Canadian or Mexican or Chinese, you have every right to sell to the American market.
Now, of course...
We realized at the same time that many of these other countries are closing their markets or imposing tariffs.
But economists in this country would say, no problem, they're only hurting their own citizens.
That should not affect us in giving them a right to our market.
Trump seems to take a more...
Almost a more proprietary view, somewhat similar to what you or I might do if someone comes and says, hey, listen, we want to play soccer in your front yard.
You're like, okay, well, but guess what?
It is my front yard, and I get to set the rules of what kind of soccer you get to play in my front yard, and I might ask of you a few favors so I can play soccer in your front yard.
So for Trump, it's territorial in that way.
Is that a right way to think about governing?
Yeah, I think it has to do with two big pillars inside America first.
The first is sovereignty.
Yes, our markets in the United States does very well, especially in capital markets, but those are sovereign capital markets.
I think many countries looked at our markets like the border, where they could just send whatever they want to get through, and those have no responsibilities.
I mean, when you do...
International trade, when you do free trade, there are responsibilities when it comes to nation states to protect that trade and make the rules of the game fair.
And so I think that's the first.
The second, I think, is the America First principle of reciprocity.
And you were hitting on it, Dinesh, that, you know, there are many countries that close their markets to the United States, particularly to our auto manufacturers, also to our farmers, and to other, basically, producers inside the country.
But then they lobby inside Washington, D.C. to open those markets for their auto manufacturers and their farmers.
And that doesn't make any sense.
I mean, we have to basically have a reciprocal trade balance with a lot of countries in the world, particularly with our allies.
And this is the thing where I think, you know, a lot of people have this kind of position that, well, we can't argue with our allies.
No, you're an ally.
That's why you can get in these kind of discussions.
If they were adversaries, it's a different discussion.
But the reason they're allies is because we can have frank, hard, sometimes difficult discussions to reach mutually agreed-upon end states.
So I think President Trump is doing absolutely the right thing.
I don't think he wants a trade war with all these countries.
I think he wants to impose a certain level of order.
In the case of Mexico and Canada, it's very easy.
It's called fentanyl.
I mean, fentanyl's killed over 100,000 Americans a year.
That's basically like a chemical poison, a WMD scale, and nobody's done anything about it.
And so you tell all the victims that lost their sons and daughters or lost their relatives, like, what are we going to do about it?
Well, President Trump's showing what we can do about it.
He's using all the muscle of U.S. statecraft to basically say, Mexico, Canada, it ends today.
And I think that they got the message, which is why you saw them start to apply more measures against border security and counter-narcotics.
Joseph, what's going on in Venezuela?
It looked like Richard Grinnell, at the behest of Trump, went down there.
Probably told Maduro, listen, you got to let these people go.
Maduro thinks to himself, I'd like to get on the good side of Trump.
I don't want some kind of SEAL team showing up here, or I don't want some kind of rocket visiting me in the middle of the night.
So let me play on Trump's good side here.
So the upside of it is the Americans are home.
But if I can reflect one of Debbie's concerns, her concerns are that...
That some of these really bad players, like Maduro, can try to at least deflect Trump's attention and maybe even his rage by, quote, behaving themselves.
And then this prevents the United States from taking structural efforts to undermine that very corrupt and vicious regime, which is in certain ways no less totalitarian than the regimes, for example, of Cuba.
Perhaps even North Korea.
If you were advising Trump, how would you advise him to approach a country like Venezuela?
Yeah, so I think the operative word of what you said, Dinesh, is Maduro is going to try.
So the operative word is try.
He inevitably is going to try to deceive us.
They have been doing that for the last 20 plus years.
They're inevitably going to try to fool us into some kind of, you know, bilateral agenda.
But fundamentally in the United States, nobody's going to be fooled, particularly not the administration of Trump and particularly not in the leadership of Secretary of State Mark Rubio or National Security Advisor Mike Walz.
Why?
Because we know how the Maduro regime operates.
And so my advice for President Trump would be continue to get our U.S. interests up front.
This includes the deportation flights, the reach of American prisoners.
But over time, I think the conversation is going to steer towards, look, Maduro wants to be a dictator.
He wants to steal elections.
He wants to abuse human rights.
Okay, fine.
He cannot do it with Russian weaponry.
He cannot do it with Iranian drones or missiles.
He cannot do it with Chinese satellite stations and intelligence.
That is a breach of that security perimeter that we were talking about.
And I think at a certain point, you're going to realize that Maduro is going to have to Basically, give in or get out.
And I think that that's the position that I think very carefully that President Trump is going to start to maneuver.
This is a game of chess, not checkers.
I think every move is carefully crafted.
I think the presidential envoy Rick Grinnell did a masterful job at going down there and basically got release of American hostages and deportation flights resumed for nothing.
For a picture.
That's all Maduro got, was a photo op, a picture.
Yeah, he's going to use it for propaganda purposes, but if you look at the balance, deportation places are sorely needed right now to get these illegal migrants out of here and also to be able to get that tren de Aragua out of here.
And American hostage is freed in exchange for a photo op.
That is a win inside America.
First, that is a win for President Trump.
It's a win for America.
So continue to do that in a kind of very gradually diplomatic way.
We don't want a conflict with any country.
We don't want a conflict with Venezuela.
But as the military says, your enemy gets a vote.
So if Maduro continues to do what we know he can do, then we're going to have to have that other conversation about great power competition.
It would seem that the success of that kind of approach would depend on whether it is...
Maduro, who is controlling the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians, or the other way around, right?
Because after all, if Maduro is the front man of those regimes, then they're going to be the ones directing these plays and not so much him.
Let me pivot for a moment to these transnational gangs, the cartels.
It looks like this is...
How does this fit into the picture?
Are these groups somehow allied?
Are they part of these terror networks?
I mean, generally I've thought of cartels as nothing more than just, you know, pure criminal operations, right?
Let's sell the drugs, let's traffic human trafficking.
I don't see the cartels as inherently ideological, but do they play a role in this ideological scheme?
So the cartels may not believe themselves to be ideological, but the cartels are proxies.
They're being used as weapons of warfare by these larger nation states, such as Venezuela, and they're using them as almost like soldiers on a battlefield to basically breach the sovereignty of other countries, to occupy territory of other countries.
And the cartels are only in it for the money, so as long as the money is good, they'll continue to do that kind of thing.
I think the other element of that is how cartels have basically merged with international terrorist organizations.
Very reflective in the executive order that President Trump signed, designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
So there's this concept that we use in the defense community called convergence.
And what convergence means is that, yes, cartels still have a profit motive and terrorists still have a political motive.
However, where they unite is in logistics.
Another refrain from the military was amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.
The service providers, the financiers, the fixers, the facilitators for a cartel...
Are the same service providers for a foreign terrorist organization such as Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or ISIS. Meaning that if you're Al-Qaeda and you go to Mexico and you need a truck driver or an accountant, you're going to go to that same logistical network that is servicing the cartels.
So that's bringing these two worlds together.
And that's the key.
Illicit economies in many countries in Latin America are overpowering free economies and shifting the incentives towards criminality.
That's why these countries are becoming collections of criminalized states.
And that's what we've got to stop.
We've got to fight this with all the tools of U.S. national power.
And I think that was at the heart of the executive order that President Trump signed, because as we know, for the last 20 years, counterterrorism has been at the spearhead of U.S. foreign policy and national security.
And now he just took countertransnational organized crime to that same level.
He modernized it for the 21st century with one executive order.
I mean, one of the things I've learned from Debbie that's very eye opening is that, Look at these similarities between the cartel modus operandi, a way of operating, and something like ISIS, right?
Or even Hamas.
Number one, tunnels, right?
The cartels dig tunnels to get across the border, avoid detection.
Of course, where does Hamas hide the hostages?
Tunnels.
Number two, beheading.
You know, you find, you know, the heads of, severed heads of people who oppose the cartels on, sometimes suspended from a bridge in Mexico.
What does Hamas do and what does ISIS do?
Beheading.
So you begin to see that these are people, I mean, either it's an amazing coincidence or they're somehow teaching each other the same techniques.
No, absolutely.
I mean, what we call in the military is TTPs, Tactics, Training, and Protocol.
The cartels are using the TTPs of terrorists because they know how effective they are.
But I go even further than that.
that.
I mean, really the systems in itself are starting to adapt and become more alike.
It is a term that we use called complex adaptive systems.
And what that basically means is both cartels and terrorists are no longer vertically structured.
It's no longer a kingpin or a terror leader.
They're franchised.
They're horizontal networks where they have small cells that are autonomous to some level and operate in different countries at different territories and create a supply chain.
The same supply chain that you use to move drugs and weapons is the same supply chain that you use to move terrorists.
And so that has to do with that logistical framework of And that's why I thought...
That executive order was so important because the complex adaptive system, which actually is a term that comes from social systems theory, is applied when there's adaptive agents, when there's basically adaptability to the conditions.
And ever since the DEA created the kingpin strategy, like almost 20 years ago, the cartels adapted.
And they said, okay, you're going to go after the kingpins?
Well, then we're going to adapt our structure so that the kingpins don't matter.
That's why when Chapo Guzman was arrested for many times and then finally extradited to the United States, the Sinaloa cartel did not miss a beat.
They did not drop $1.
They did not miss $1.
I think especially after what Israel did to Hezbollah, even Hezbollah is going to start to adapt to more of a criminal model than just like that vertical terrorist model that they had in the past.
And then hopefully what we're seeing, and I think we are seeing this with the new Trump team, is that they have adapted.
I mean, if you look at the enormous difference between Trump 2017 and Trump today, It looks like this is a whole different operation being carried out by the government on our side in response to all these changes that you've been describing.
Guys, I've been talking to Joseph Humeyer, Director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.
SecureFreeSociety.org.
Follow him on X at J.M. Humeyer.
Joseph, what a great pleasure and love to have you back soon.
Absolutely, Anish.
Always a pleasure.
Pleasure is mine.
I'm continuing my discussion of The Big Lie, now out in paperback, and we're beginning a new section.
This is the latter part of the book, and this one is called American Führers, F-U-H-R-E-R-S. Who am I talking about?
Well, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The chapter begins with a quote, an opening quote that is very telling.
Many passages in Roosevelt's book could have been written by a National Socialist.
One can assume he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.
So this is somebody reviewing Roosevelt's book, FDR's book, and saying, hey, this is a guy who is echoing the principles of Nazism.
In fact, he could very well be a Nazi himself.
Who is saying this?
Answer.
The Nazi official newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, this is a review of FDR's book called Looking Forward.
Again, notice how this kind of thing is never taught to us.
Even though, there it is, undisputed in the record.
Now, Roosevelt, as you know, came to power in 1932. And he made a decision very early on, we're not going to try to make America into a socialist country.
This seems like an outrageous thing to say.
The truth of it is that when the Great Depression started in 1929, by the time that FDR was elected in 1932, the American people were in an anti-capitalist frame of mind.
There were very powerful socialist movements in this country, and FDR could have.
Given the fact that people did not want, at this point, the Republicans, they blamed Hoover, even though Hoover was in his own way kind of a progressive, these days I guess you'd call him a rhino, but nevertheless, people were in the mood for something else.
Whatever we're doing isn't working, and so in comes FDR. But FDR decides we're not going to take over the means of production.
The government is not going to nationalize.
The banking sector, the communications sector, the energy sector, the healthcare sector.
And we're just not doing that.
But what are we doing instead?
Now, there's a conventional story here that has been told by the liberals and by the progressives.
And this story is that FDR decided to take a middle path between capitalism and socialism.
This is the path of the New Deal.
And FDR is lionized and canonized and celebrated for making this very pragmatic middle course decision.
And then subsequent progressives like LBJ are also trumpeted for continuing in the FDR path.
And to this day, FDR is the hero of the Democratic Party.
The Obama people talked incessantly about FDR. Look at the way that Obama himself engineered greater federal regulation of banking, of finance, not nationalization, again, not socialism straight out, but a kind of state-directed capitalism.
The government controls these industries, steers them, basically tells them what to do.
Also, Obamacare.
Obama establishes essentially state control over one-sixth of the entire economy.
So, what is the name for the policies that Democrats have been extolling and pursuing since FDR? Well, the correct answer to that is fascism.
Why?
Because this is what the fascists from Giovanni Gentile in Italy To Mussolini, ultimately to the Nazis.
This is what they not only advocated, but this is what they did.
They rejected the idea of the state running industry.
In fact, Mussolini made the point and Gentile echoed it.
They're like, bureaucrats don't know how to run industries per se.
The job of the state is not to try to run things, but it is to...
It is to provide the overall direction, if you will, the steering wheel, the compass.
This is state-run capitalism.
And it was all done under the rubric.
The Nazis themselves had a slogan.
I won't pretend to read it in German.
But the meaning of it is the common good over the individual good.
And notice how this is a theme that you can say is in common between communism.
Fascism and progressivism.
All three share this idea that not only is the common good over the private good or over the individual good, but the state is the embodiment of this common good.
Collectivism, that's the common idea here.
Before we embrace what I just said, we need to answer an objection, which is, wait a minute, you can't lump FDR with the Nazis.
Didn't FDR fight the Nazis?
What was the big...
Wasn't this what World War II was all about?
Wasn't it under FDR's leadership that we defeated Hitler?
And so from the left's point of view, it's really irresponsible, Dimesh, to allege some kind of a relationship between the sainted FDR and the genocidal fascists and Nazis.
Hitler's the one who...
Murdered Jews by the millions.
FDR liberated.
He took American troops into the death camps.
He brought the Jewish survivors from the Holocaust home.
He saved America from the Great Depression and from the Nazis.
This is basically the one-line epitaph.
At least historical epitaph of FDR. This is how he is remembered.
This is the FDR story as it has been made famous, not only in the media, in the History Channel, in popular culture, in the textbooks, by people like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Luktenberg.
These are the historians who have told us this story.
And my job, which I'm going to do not just today, but continuing tomorrow, is to show you that this is...
This narrative itself has serious defects.
But it's worth noting that even some on the right have fallen for this narrative.
If you look at conservative historiography...
Many times when people study LBJ or they study FDR, they don't go back to the original documents.
They will read Luktenberg's history or Schlesinger and they go, oh, that's interesting.
Well, that's interesting.
So if you don't go back to source documents, you can easily be misled.
Here's an article by Seymour Martin Lipset, conservative, in the Hoover Digest.
I used to work at the Hoover Institution.
How FDR saved capitalism.
First of all, this is a nonsensical concept.
FDR did not save capitalism.
But nevertheless, this is a conservative sociologist embracing the liberal narrative.
Here's another article in The Economist, which is these days moved left, but it used to be seen as a free market magazine.
The man who saved his country and the world.
Again, we're going to see that this is bogus on multiple counts.
FDR didn't save either the country or the world.
I'm not saying that he wasn't obviously the leader of the United States in World War II, but I'm going to make some important corrections and clarifications about what that means.
The progressive narrative, this is, I'm not quoting myself, contains a molecule of truth amid a whole slew of bunkum.
So let's begin with the bunkum.
And we'll continue with it tomorrow.
So I agree that FDR is the sort of, in some ways, the forerunner of the movement against fascism that developed at the time of World War II, the anti-fascist coalition.
Obviously, we call it the allies, the allied powers against the Axis powers.
So I agree with that.
I'm going to emphasize that before the war, there were deep connections between FDR and the fascists and the Nazis.
And this has not been admitted, and this has in fact been concealed.
It is FDR who set the modern left on the fascist trail.
And so we've got to dispel some myth-making before we see how he did this.
Let's start with the simple idea that FDR defeated Hitler.
Now, this is part of our kind of national mythology.
And again, it does have some truth to it.
The United States did play an important role in the defeat of Hitler.
But let's remember, when did the United States get into the war?
First of all, the U.S. only got in after the bombing at Pearl Harbor.
So notice that, directly speaking, it had nothing to do with Hitler.
The U.S. was not in the war.
The United States was moved into the war well into two years into the war.
The war began in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland.
Now, the war was, of course, ended with the dropping of the two bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But here's his story in Richard Evans in his book, The Third Reich in History and Memory.
The Soviet Union was the decisive force in the defeat of Germany.
It was Hitler's invasion of Russia that really turned the tables in the war.
It was the failed effort of the Nazis to take Stalingrad that turned the tide and essentially turned the Germans from the hunters into the hunted.
Now, FDR and the United States accelerated Hitler's defeat.
They opened up a new front in the European theater.
They provided the Soviet army with lend-lease aid and shipment of American military supplies.
But I don't want to give credit where credit is not due.
So the Soviet Union played the primary role.
America, you could say, played a secondary or supporting role.
Now, didn't America liberate the death camps?
Didn't America go into these death camps and discover Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka and Sobibor?
And the answer is no.
The key distinction here is between concentration camps.
There were, by the way, about 5,000 of these concentration camps.
Some of them were small.
Some of them were big.
These are labor camps.
These are not to be confused with the death camps.
So when we think about the gas chambers, Jews being sent to their deaths, these are the death camps, of which there were, by the way, only six.
Not a single one was in Germany.
And the number of these death camps that were, quote, liberated by the Americans is exactly zero.
The Americans went into some of the concentration camps, pulled out.
I mean, think about it.
The death camp, really, the people who are in that camp are dead.
They're not alive.
Not to mention the fact that the Nazis blew up the camps before the Soviets got there.
So there was really almost nothing to be found.
By and large, what you see now are reconstructed memorials on top of those venues.
But the images that you have of American soldiers pulling out people from the camps, A, those are not death camps, and B, in most cases, those are not Jews.
The Jews were sent to the death camps.
Other captive peoples, prisoners of war, and so on, were stuck into the concentration camps.
So these are just little historical...
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