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Feb. 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:26
CORRUPTION LOBBY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1018
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll reveal how the Democrats are attempting to recruit federal judges to protect their corruption lobby that routinely steals from the American taxpayer.
And author and cultural commentator Larry Taunton joins me.
He's going to report on some mind-blowing stuff that's going on in the Darien Gap, ways in which USAID has been enabling the whole illegal trafficking operation on the U.S. southern border.
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I don't know if you watched the Super Bowl...
You most likely did.
Debbie and I, well, didn't.
Although we kept track of who was winning and who was losing.
I really chuckled when I saw this on social media posted by someone called Lone Star Chica.
The real Super Bowl is going on in D.C. right now.
It's the Patriots versus the Steelers.
Yep, we're the Patriots, the MAGA side, and the Steelers are the Democrats.
And what is underway is the exposure of a massive theft operation.
And no wonder the Democrats are unnerved by this.
They are spooked by it because they have been running this theft operation for a while.
Some Republicans, I will admit, are also in on the take.
And so the very party that has been pushing for 87,000 new IRS auditors and agents to look through your finances, make sure you're not doing anything that's not on the up and up, these same people are now in a frenzy because they're being audited.
And they're being audited by someone who knows how to do it, knows how to drill down, knows how to identify where all the corruption is going on.
So, all of this is opening our eyes to the fact that this is a kind of criminal enterprise that has infiltrated our government at an enormous level.
It's criminality marries ideology.
And so, for example, one of the things that Elon Musk reported this morning is that he's discovering that all the government programs have massive DEI components.
So it's not like there is a DEI wing of the government.
No, DEI has seeped into, under the doors, so to speak, of every government, department, and agency.
And every program is run in a DEI sort of manner.
So you can see the kind of rooting out that needs to go on here to clean this thing up.
And everything is scandalous to the level of detail.
Smallest things that you see are like, how outrageous is this?
And how obvious it is that nobody could normally get away with this.
So here's a small example.
This is Musk.
Just learned that the Social Security database is not deduplicated, meaning you can have the same Social Security number many times over, which enables massive fraud.
Think about this.
They don't even bother to run a program pulling duplicate numbers.
Because think about it.
If you have the same number that appears five times, they're going to be sending out five checks.
And the people who run the Social Security Agency and the Democrats in general don't care.
Why?
Because it's not their money.
So they allow this kind of stuff to go on.
Twelve people, I believe, have been found who are receiving Social Security checks even though they are 150 years old.
Now, think about that for a moment.
It seems insane, right?
I mean, obviously, they're not alive.
If somebody is 150 years old, let's remember the Social Security Law was passed in 1935. You would have to be born in 1875 to be 150 years old right now.
That means you were about 60 years old when the Social Security Law was passed.
You started getting it, but guess what?
Now, all these years later, 90 years later, You're still getting it, or you're not getting it.
Somebody else is cashing the checks.
But this is the point.
This is the kind of fraud that goes on, and nobody bothers to correct it, at least until now.
Here's something else that has been a puzzle for a long time, and a puzzle for me, and indeed for many others.
How do these government officials, some of them elected, some of them unelected, They get salaries of $180,000, $200,000 a year.
And when you look at their net worth, it's $35 million or $17 million.
And you think there's no way to get there on a government salary, right?
Just do the math.
You make $150,000 a year, $170,000.
You pay 35% of that in taxes.
So you clear $120,000.
You pay rent.
You pay car.
You pay for your mortgage.
Your kids have a college fund.
How much can you possibly save per year?
And there's just no way to get to those numbers at all.
There has to be another way that these people are on the take.
Now, in some cases, there is an explanation.
Okay, Nancy Pelosi's husband is an investment banker.
The money is coming from there.
But in other cases, there's just no explanation whatsoever.
Here's Samantha Powers.
She's the head of the USAID. Recently fired by Trump.
Evidently, she earns $180,000 a year.
But her net worth has gone up from $6.7 million, let's leave aside how we got to the $6.7 million, but let's say she inherited it, to $30 million.
Now again, how is that possible?
How do you get to $30 million on a $180,000 salary?
Well, the answer is now being supplied by Elon Musk.
And the answer is...
You do it through an elaborate racket that you create through NGOs, non-governmental organizations.
Here's the point.
The government has strict limits on how much you can get paid, but the NGOs don't.
So let's say, for example, you're Mr. X, you're working in the government, your wife starts an NGO, and she is paid $800,000 a year, and USAID or some government agency funnels this money to her.
Once the money goes outside the government, and think about it, think about the misnomer of the very concept of NGO, right?
What is NGO? A non-governmental organization.
So what would you call a government-funded NGO? It's a contradiction in terms.
It's an oxymoron.
It's a joke.
But this is the workaround.
This is the way that the government has figured out, or the bureaucrats in the government, how to...
Use the ladder of politics to get rich, and more importantly, to steal from you.
Because that's what this is.
This is a larceny operation.
And so, I tweeted this out.
Thanks to Elon Musk and Doge, we can now answer the question, how do elected officials and bureaucrats making $200,000 a year accumulate multi-million dollar fortunes?
Answer, they're thieves.
So Elon Musk retweeted that yesterday.
I was telling Debbie, what did I say, honey?
It's 12 million views.
So I appreciate Elon Musk helping me get the word out.
Now, all of this is being busted.
And if the bust is successful, then we're going to have a change in the way we do government.
Because right now, everything that they tell you about government is a lie.
People go into government for public service.
This was the old JFK. And maybe when JFK said it, he was being sincere.
But now people go into government not to do good, but to do well for themselves.
They pretend to do good.
They use the rhetoric of doing good.
And in fact, when they defend their larceny schemes, they do it by saying, children will die, people will suffer, blah, blah, blah.
The truth of it is, they don't care about any of these people.
These are the greediest, most selfish, most self-aggrandizing, laziest, most vicious people you will ever meet.
They're far worse in some ways than criminals, because their criminality schemes, first of all, criminals don't generally loot the taxpayer.
These people do.
And what makes it particularly egregious is they're supposed to represent the taxpayer.
So the taxpayer is putting these people into elected office, or they're appointed by elected politicians, They're entrusted by you.
That's the meaning of a representative democracy.
We entrust them to protect our interests, whereas in fact we're discovering that the only interests they care about are their own.
It's not even right to use the term government waste.
This is me.
It isn't government waste.
It's corruption.
The Democrats aren't incompetent.
They're thieves.
They aren't stealing government money.
It's your money.
And I think that this scandal, which is not even really at its peak, this is just the beginning.
I mean, Elon Musk has picked one corner of the government and basically shone a light there.
But there is so much of the government that is unexplored, unexamined.
This would be like taking a map of the United States and, you know, conducting an audit of Rhode Island.
Well, the rest of it is still to come.
I think the implication here is that if all this works, it means that a very different kind of person will be needed to go into government.
You want to do public service?
You should not be going in it for the money.
You should genuinely be motivated by the desire to help the public.
Right now we have such a person, and it's Elon Musk himself.
Because all the stuff that's being said about him, Elon Musk may gain access to your social security number.
Well, first of all, maybe.
But the government already has my social security number.
Tons of bureaucrats whose names I don't know have access to my social security number.
Why do I trust them?
I don't trust them any more than I trust Elon Musk.
Besides, what would Elon Musk do with my social security number?
Tweet it out?
Use it to get a loan?
No, it's absurd.
So, that's not a concern.
This is a genuinely, in some ways, ironically, even though they question his government credentials, Elon Musk is more public-spirited than pretty much anyone we can think of in the government.
Now, when we come back, I want to talk about a judge, or two judges, really, and there will probably be more, who are attempting to block temporary restraining orders or temporary freezes on Trump's executive orders and actions.
Even though these actions are entirely within the province of the executive branch, this is essentially judicial activism of a familiar sort.
Judge shopping, finding an Obama judge or a Biden-appointed judge.
This guy, of course, is a complete hack.
He doesn't really even follow any sorts of law.
He doesn't bother to invoke any sort of law.
He just basically blocks what Trump is trying to do.
And the real question is, what do you do in this situation?
Have you seen the news from economists forecasting a depression, not recession, depression by the year 2030?
We seem to be in a perfect storm.
Social Security and Medicare hit a breaking point.
We have the largest generation hitting retirement age.
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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Debbie and I are kind of chuckling here in the studio, and so is Tony, who's behind the camera.
One of our granddaughter, Little Marigold's favorite sayings is, oh no.
She says, oh no.
And we're joking that that's the reaction of these government bureaucrats.
Oh no, my hands have been, I've been found with my hand in the cookie jar.
It's not good.
So the question is, what are these Democrats doing to protect their racket?
And one answer that I mentioned is running to liberal judges.
They do it, first of all, with judge shopping.
And this is key.
The New York judge, for example, who has put a TRO, a temporary restraining order on Trump, The way the Democrats got that guy is they sort of figured out that if they file their motion on a Friday, when the judges, by and large, are out, there is a kind of emergency judge who takes on the Friday docket.
And so the Democrats know it's going to be this guy on Friday.
So if we file on Friday at a certain hour, we're going to get...
A judge.
So this is really not how the law is supposed to work, right?
You're supposed to file a motion.
By lottery, it goes to a judge.
It could be a Trump appointee.
It could be a Biden appointee.
No, the Democrats make sure they get their guy because they know what the result is going to be.
They know that their people are hacks.
And so, sure enough, the judge goes, temporary restraining order granted.
Now, we have to pause here to think about the impact of what these judges are doing because In one case, you have a judge who stops an order to deport illegal gang members, Venezuelan gang members, to Guantanamo.
And the question is, where is the authority for a judge to do this?
This is executive action.
The president is the commander-in-chief.
The president has complete executive authority to enforce the laws on the border.
This is entirely within Trump's authority, but a judge goes, stop.
Now, the judge, in fairness, is not putting a permanent stop.
It's a temporary stop.
But the temporary stop is still a stop.
And let's go further.
Another judge has said that Elon Musk and his Doge team cannot collect data from the Treasury Department.
You have to destroy the data you've already collected.
Now, again, this order, again, a TRO, a temporary restraining order, is so broad that it even prevents the newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury.
From taking action to carry out what Elon Musk and his team have done.
Not only is Elon Musk and Doge prohibited, the Secretary of the Treasury is prohibited from doing something entirely within the domain of the Treasury.
You have a judge basically saying that a president can't be a president and his cabinet appointee cannot run his own department.
This is the...
The level of seriousness that we are dealing with.
Now, the judge says very carefully, I'm not stopping it.
I'm just delaying it.
File a motion.
Come see me next week.
But the question is, how can you do this kind of thing at all?
We're not talking about disputed areas of the law.
We're not talking about something that raises a controversy.
There are some controversial issues involved here.
One of them, for example, is birthright citizenship.
I don't dispute that this is an area where we need the judges to weigh in, interpret the provisions of the Constitution.
Ultimately, perhaps it'll go to the Supreme Court.
But there are plenty of things that Trump is doing that are entirely within his authority.
Let's say, for example, Trump decides to take a military action in Syria.
He's the commander-in-chief.
He can do it.
The Constitution could not be more clear.
Imagine if a judge steps in and says, you can't do it.
Come see me next Wednesday and explain to me why you want to do this.
Does Trump have to wait till Wednesday to go see this guy?
And who is this guy?
We're not talking about the nine justices of the Supreme Court.
We're talking about some dude in Austin or some dude in Berkeley, California or Manhattan who has been put up to it by the New York Attorney General.
So this is not how our system is supposed to work.
The Democrats, of course, know this, but this is their delaying tactic.
It's their way of gumming up the works.
It's their way of slowing things down.
And the question is how we should respond to this.
We have three co-equal branches of government.
The executive branch has clear authority to do certain things, and the judge is interfering with this.
Here's J.D. Vance.
If a judge tried to command the Attorney General how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's illegal.
And J.D. Vance is right.
But somehow the Democrats are acting as if judges can do whatever they want.
Sure, they can stop the Education Department from changing its policies.
They can stop the Treasury.
No, they can't.
They actually cannot do that.
And my precedent for this is, in fact, Abraham Lincoln.
When Abraham Lincoln was confronted with the Dred Scott decision, His response was to ignore it.
Let's digest that for a moment.
Lincoln's view was this.
The Constitution does, in fact, tell the legislature you can do this, the executive you can do this, the judiciary you can do this.
But Lincoln says it doesn't mean that one...
Branch of the government or the other can start telling the other two branches exactly what they can and cannot do when the Constitution itself could not be more clear.
Or to go even further, Lincoln said that if the Constitution is ambiguous, who is to say who has the final word on it?
Now you might say, well, that's obviously the judiciary.
Well, even if I grant you it is the judiciary, my question to you is, does the judiciary apply to some local judge?
In other words, let's look back at the early 1860s.
Do you think that a judge in the South, let's say Alabama, could have said to Abraham Lincoln, you cannot ask for 75,000 volunteers to create a militia to stop Southern secession?
That's illegal.
Come see me next Wednesday and we'll talk about it.
Lincoln would have regarded this as utterly preposterous.
In fact, he would have completely ignored it, and he would have been right to do so.
Why?
Because the ability to call forth a militia is within the province of the President of the United States.
It is entirely within his executive power.
And the idea of submitting to some local Southern judge, obviously with a partisan agenda, is something that Lincoln would not even have entertained.
And yet here we are.
We're facing a similar situation.
So what should Trump do?
Well, should he appeal?
Of course he should appeal.
But the question I'm getting at is somewhat different.
What should Trump do in the meantime, like now?
And Trump himself was asked about this, like, what do you do when a judge does this?
And Trump says correctly, when a president can't even look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don't have a country anymore.
So Trump is really saying, Something somewhat similar to what Lincoln would have said around the time I described, which is that we are dealing with fundamental issues that have to do with having a country.
Trump has said if you don't have a border, you don't have a country.
If the government can't function, if he can't lead the executive branch, you don't really have a country.
Now, here's Pete Buttigieg this morning.
In America, decisions about what is legal and illegal are made by courts of law, not, he's rebutting J.D. Vance, not by the vice president.
Now, this is Pete Buttigieg.
There's a certain surface appeal to what he's saying.
In America, decisions about what is legal and illegal are made by courts of law.
But I want to submit that this is, in fact, utterly wrong.
In America, decisions about what is legal and illegal are not made by courts of law.
Who are they made by?
Well, let's think back.
Who in a democracy makes laws?
Congress.
The legislature.
Congress decides what is lawful, which is another word for legal, or unlawful, which is another word for illegal.
And so the difference, the decisions about what is legal and what is illegal are made entirely by Congress.
So then what is the job of the court?
Well, the job of the court is merely to take what Congress decides or what the president does in his enforcement or executive capacity.
And see if there is something in the Constitution that says you can't do it.
If there is, then that law is unconstitutional.
So again, the Supreme Court is not determining, quote, legality.
It's determining the compatibility between a law or an action and the Constitution itself.
That is a power that is, in fact, assigned to the court.
So the problem we have is that a local judge can say something is lawful.
But it doesn't mean it is.
They can say something is unconstitutional, but it doesn't mean it is.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide.
I suspect that what the Trump people will need to do if they don't get some immediate resolution on this is make an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, have the Supreme Court step in and slap this down once and for all.
So Trump has nothing to worry about in terms of the ultimate vindication of his position.
This is just a very predictable tactic.
It's the gangsters in desperation mode using the law and using their buddies in the judiciary and handpicking the judges that they want to deliver the outcome that they want to protect the regime, to protect the corrupt system that they have taken, I wouldn't even say years, decades to set up and that is now in danger of being dismantled.
Hey guys, tons of stuff going on.
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Guys, the last time, and it wasn't very long ago, I had my friend Larry Taunton on.
He was here to report on goings-on at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
But Larry is a man on the move.
He's currently in Cairo, and we're going to connect with him right now.
He's an author.
He's a cultural commentator.
His work has been covered by the BBC, the New York Times, and many others.
You can follow him on x at Larry Taunton.
Larry, thanks for joining us, especially from so far away.
You are doing a kind of unique type of work because...
Not only do you investigate things, but you show up, you put yourself on the scene, and you discover things very often that other people haven't figured out.
Talk about what you've discovered about USAID from Cairo, and then a little bit later, we want to do a second segment with you and talk about some of your findings.
the border.
But let's start with Cairo and USAID.
What have you found out and how did you come to find this out?
Well, first of all, Dinesh, it's good to be with you.
All of this is connected.
Part of what I try to do in my work, Dinesh, is on the one hand, I'm looking at the level of ideas, the level of policy, and then I'm going downstream to see how those policies are affecting ordinary people.
And that usually is most profoundly experienced, felt, in the third world.
So, So as you point out, you rightly point out, I was at the World Economic Forum.
And these are people, again, Ursula von der Leyen, she shows up in an Audi A8, a 12-valve, 585 horsepower, 11-mile-per-gallon beast.
But then she lectures the rest of us on how we need to watch our carbon.
And that really, to me, sort of encapsulates who these people are, because they insulate themselves from these policies and they're not affected.
Well, one of these issues, of course, deals with the corruption of USAID. And when all of this first hit the headlines last week, when Doge, Musk, Trump were talking about the corruption of USAID, I said, hey, guys, I have been telling you this for quite a while, and you're seeing only the part of the iceberg that is above the water.
That is to say, they were chiefly focused on how USAID was funding anti-American, anti-Trump propaganda around the world.
But I showed them, and ultimately the President of the United States, how USAID has been funding the invasion of America.
And I'm kind of maybe going in slightly different...
Order than you wanted to go, Dinesh.
But I had seen throughout South America that USAID, what to me is quite astonishing, Dinesh, is that they didn't do it secretly.
They were arrogant enough to put their logo on any number of things.
And so, for instance, I was following...
Migrants from the Venezuelan border, and I would say not a majority, but a plurality of South American migrants are Venezuelan who are making their way across Colombia, through the Darien Gap, Panama, and then north to Mexico, where they board the train La Bestia, the Beast, also known as the train of death, a freight train that they ride 600 miles north to the North American border.
I was following them all along the way.
Well, what you discovered was that, and I heard you in the earlier segment talking about NGOs, USAID was using a series of NGOs, 25 NGOs, to do what Congress would not do, which is to say enact an aggressively anti-American policy, an invasion of our country.
And the primary NGO that they used...
Again, their logo, prominent everywhere, is the UN organization, IOM, International Organization for Migration, sometimes shown as OIM, Organization for International Migration.
So I would wander into Nash to, say, a migration office in Columbia, where I was told by the head of that office.
And by the way, with the logos of USAID and OIM, and USAID gives hundreds of millions to OIM, where I was told by the head of that office that they were loading these migrants, they were instructed to do so by the United States government onto planes and then flown in to the United States and to destinations unknown.
But also, and here's to me really the smoking gun, Dinesh.
I flew a single prop plane into the Darien Gap, and then I went on both the Colombian side and the Panamanian side.
And for those who don't know, Darien is the Hotel California of jungles.
It sits like a cork on top of South America.
People think that you can take the Panamanian Highway from Anchorage, Alaska, all the way to the tip of South America.
You absolutely cannot, because there is no road through Darien.
And people just disappear there.
Well, what you discovered was on the very beaches, Dinesh, I have photographic video evidence of all of this, on the very beaches where cartels are loading people onto ferries, which are really zodiacs that, say, maybe, you know, hold 30 or 40 people, right there is an IOM USAID banners.
That are right there.
And if you were to look them up, and now Musk and his team have taken down since a week ago, they took down the USAID website.
But if you were to, you can still find in Time Capsule and other articles that USAID, all of the articles about them and the money that they would pass along to OIM suggests that they're trying to stem the tide.
They were doing absolutely the opposite.
And what I really want to drive home here is USAID was running the largest human trafficking, because that's what this is, human trafficking op in modern history, Dinesh.
And they didn't care at all what happened to these people from point A, we'll say from Venezuela, to point Z, the United States, where children were disappearing.
I was watching this.
Children disappearing.
I talked to women who were raped.
People eaten by jaguars, killed by paramilitary groups, indigenous people in Darien.
And all of this was going on, and it was encouraged by the Democrat Party and their globalist allies.
I mean, Larry, this is so eye-opening because in some ways it gives a different answer to a question that I've pondered about, but pondered about merely spectatorially or theoretically.
Because I was always under the impression that, look, there is a kind of scissors operation.
Or a kind of wink-wink collaboration between the cartels and the Biden administration.
It's the cartel's job to get these people from faraway places in Central and South America all the way to the Mexican border.
But I thought somebody else was paying for all that and was doing that for their own purposes.
And then the Biden people were just waving them in also for their own purposes so that this was a case where you had two groups.
The Biden administration, the cartels, they have different motives.
The cartels are out for money.
The Biden people are out for long-term voters in the United States.
And they're kind of working in tandem.
What you're saying is something even more shocking than that, which is that a big arm of the U.S. government, USAID... has been bankrolling this human trafficking operation on the other side of the border.
Now, presumably they can't do it directly.
So what do they do?
They identify these large NGOs.
The NGOs go, we'll do it.
So you have a case of the U.S. government undertaking projects that it perhaps cannot do either legally or maybe politically in the open, but they...
Subcontract those projects to these NGOs, and the NGOs do it.
Is that a good summary?
Very well said.
Yes, very well said, Dinesh.
And they're doing it.
Listen, I've made, since 2019, I've made about 12 to 15 trips to South and Central America.
I mean, I have gone into cartel country.
I've gone into Darien, both sides.
I've engaged with Centerfront, the Panamanian.
Border Patrol, which are nothing like our Border Patrol.
They're more like Special Forces.
And these were people who were telling me, and again, I can show you photographic evidence of this.
It's quite shocking.
But these were people who were telling me, the Senate Front Outpost Commander in Darien told me that U.S. officials from an unknown agency were sent down and told them to keep the human trafficking train rolling.
So he takes me into the back, Dinesh, to their, you know, kind of their lecture hall where they, you know, they gather their troops.
And they have presentations.
They had all these banners on the wall that were showing the number of contacts they were having of people coming through Darien.
And in, say, 2019, you know, the bar chart, you know, is here.
And then 2023, you know, the bar chart looks like this.
It was half a million.
And they were projecting that it was going to be – I was there in 2024. Yes, 2024. And so they didn't have the data for all of 2024 yet.
But they said it's going to be north of a million.
And they said, look, your country is committing suicide and they're telling us to do it.
So we put them on buses and we take them northward to Costa Rica and tell them America is that way.
You see, one of the things that people don't quite realize, Dinesh, and your wife, Debbie, would get a chuckle out of this and know the truth of this.
It's that most Americans think of everything south of Texas as Mexico.
It's just all Mexico.
They don't make any real distinctions here.
And what people don't understand is that these illegals are illegal in every country they pass through other than their country of origin.
And none of those countries want them.
The Panamanians do not want the Colombians.
They see Colombians and they think Pablo Escobar.
And it just keeps going.
And they say, look, if you want...
You want to go to the United States?
Go that way.
But we do not want you in our country.
And all along the way, what I discover is USA, Catholic Charities, and OIM are playing a key role in keeping it going.
And one more thing I want to point out, Dinesh, when I first started going down here, these groups, again, chiefly at the time, coming out of Venezuela, and that's because, I mean...
They're desperate people.
They couldn't feed themselves.
They had no choice.
I was talking to these people.
You feel nothing but compassion for their situation.
These people initially, it was all ad hoc, meaning they were trying to organize themselves and help each other via Facebook groups.
But then once the Biden administration took over, it became a well-oiled machine.
And the numbers...
Just grew.
And what you discovered is now it was no longer ad hoc.
You now had a series of agencies that were involved, not to stem the tide, but to keep them going.
Let's take a pause.
We'll come back for more with Larry Taunton speaking to us from Cairo, but uncovering the role of USAID in South and Central America.
Guys, I'm back with my friend, the one and only Larry Taunton.
He's giving us the scoop on the role of USAID in not just facilitating, but really providing the support, the transmission belt for human trafficking from the deep jungles of Central and South America all the way to the U.S. border.
Larry, you know, Debbie has a cousin in Venezuela who would tell her...
That there is the word on the street that there's an open invitation from Biden to come to America.
And not only that, but if you come, you will get a car.
You will get food.
You will get pharmaceuticals.
You will get what you need.
And so the idea wasn't merely...
That you would have hungry, starving people on their own initiative.
It's almost like we are running an advertising campaign on the street.
And I would not be surprised, given everything you're just telling me, that not only is USAID catering to a demand in Central and South America, it is working to create that demand in the first place.
That is 100% true.
The way I put it, Dinesh, it's like they declared America a great Black Friday sale, and they told everyone to line up at the border.
Now, it's interesting to note that the immigration officials working for USAID and IOM that I spoke to in Columbia, off record, again, they want to keep their jobs, but they said the Biden administration, and let me take screenshots of their computer.
I mean, the things...
That they were being sent.
That they were looking for specific nationalities.
Venezuelans they were interested in, the Biden administration, not Colombians.
They were interested in Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Afghans, some Indians.
These were the nationalities that they were looking for while denying others.
Now, we can theorize as to why that would be so, but interestingly enough, Dinesh, to your point, to Debbie's point, I went into these migrant camps, and one of them, one of the most dangerous ones, is called Caracitas.
Caracitas is in Barranquilla, Colombia.
It's very, very dangerous.
It's Little Caracas, as it's known.
And it's kind of funny, Dinesh.
I pull up with my translator in a Ford.
I think it's called a Picante.
It's not even worthy to be a Ford Escort.
And we get out of this thing, and my translator, who is himself Colombian, a grizzled old reporter, he says, look, he's dropping F-bombs right and left.
He's saying, this is dangerous.
I said, look, I'm not a newbie at this.
Just follow my lead.
So we get out.
You can feel the hostility of the people there, but I'm quite obviously a gringo.
I mean, you know, there's no getting around the fact that I'm a gringo.
And as these people were approaching, I tell them, hey, generalista, generalista.
And quite frankly, Dinesh, it's just a nuance between the two of us.
I consider myself a writer, not a journalist, but anyway.
So I say this to them, and my translator said they think we're from the cartels.
And I turned and I pointed at the little picante, and I said, well...
Wouldn't we be in a G-Wagon?
And these people understood G-Wagon.
They all started howling.
They started laughing.
And so I started talking.
I said, look, if I'm a cartel, I'm not good at my job.
I mean, clearly.
You're a very low-level, recently recruited, three-days-old cartel guy.
Okay, go on.
Yes, they decided to start recruiting senior citizens in the cartels.
But anyway, I started talking to them, and I said, look, I just want to hear your stories.
How did you get here?
And Dinesh, this makes some people on the right upset, what I'm about to say.
But he shouldn't be.
These people, and I'm weeding out, you know, the cartels and the military types, they are victims.
And they're victims of the Biden administration who promised them all these things.
And what was very interesting is I'm listening to them telling heartbreaking stories of rape, of exploitation of every kind, by every predator known to man.
All along the way, I said to them, the Biden administration, and Biden was president at the time, I said, the Biden administration, they are not your friends.
They were shocked.
And I said, they're not your friends.
I said, these are people who are using you.
And, you know, it's interesting because these are not people, and this is a whole different conversation we could have, and Debbie would have some interesting things to say about this, but they're not naturally Democrats.
They know what socialism is.
They hate socialism for the most part.
These are people going through Darien without any government assistance, you know what I mean, other than what's being provided by USAID, and they're broadly Catholic and family-oriented, meaning that I think we have to change sort of our messaging and our posture.
But two things can be true at the same time.
One is having a proper...
Border security.
I want lethal force on our border, and I want a proper immigration policy.
And on the other hand, we have to make life tolerable for these people in their own countries.
Dinesh, in recent years, we have seen, and I'm just going off the top of my head, Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, Chile, the most stable democracy in South America, and Honduras all fall to Marxists in very dubious 2020-like elections.
Where, by the way, the CIA was said to be involved in USAID? Wow.
I think that matters.
Yeah, it does matter.
And I think also the point you were making a moment ago that where do you point the primary finger of blame?
I mean, certainly someone who is an illegal is breaking the law.
But there is an element of ambiguity that is introduced when the government, whose laws you're breaking, Is waving you in.
I mean, I make this point in a little different context in January 6th.
All right.
It's not, you know, you're not on a capital tour.
You go marching in on January 6th.
But guess what?
There's not a single uniformed officer with a bullhorn saying, everybody clear out of this building.
None of you are authorized to be here.
It's kind of like a museum, right?
You see some paintings down the hallway.
There's a museum official sitting there.
You attempt to walk across and go.
They don't stop you.
They don't say, no, this is a forbidden section.
So you go, sure, I'm obviously allowed to go because somebody in authority isn't telling me no.
So the point here you're trying to get at is that we...
We do blame, and perhaps to some degree rightly, the illegals themselves, but the primary culprit, the head of the snake, the initiator and perpetrator of these policies, are people like Samantha Power and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
January 6th is a brilliant analogy, Dinesh.
That puts it exactly rightly.
And again, these people are, for the most part, they are fleeing socialist Hell holes.
I mean, the stories I heard, the composite story I heard coming out of Venezuela, for instance, goes like this.
Ten years ago, I could feed my family.
I was a mechanic, and my wife was at home with our children.
Then both of us had to work.
And then both of us had to skip a meal to make sure the children could eat.
And then both of us were only eating one meal a day to feed our children and working multiple jobs.
At some point, they had to leave.
They had no choice.
And so they went through the very dangerous, what are called the trochas, the illegal pathways between the various countries.
And they were in no man's land because the Colombians don't want them.
The Peruvians don't want them.
The Chileans don't want them.
So where do they go?
They take the risk and go through Darien.
And as I say, Darien is the Hotel California of jungles.
No Colombo, no monk is coming looking for you.
When you disappear there, there's no record of you ever having existed.
And the horrors there are real.
And we're talking about a quarter of a million to half a million children just evaporating.
And this is to say nothing of, you know, the real tragedy are the women.
I mean, there are men killed too, but I think of when I was in Nicoclea, which used to be sort of a Fort Lauderdale, Colombian, you know, beach resort town.
You know, now it's run by the DeGolfo cartel, and U.S. AID operates there, and OIM operates there, and you see Colombian immigration there.
And I see two fresh-faced Colombian girls who are, I don't know, 15, 16. They've got their yoga pants on and a ball cap and their ponytails, and they're getting on a Zodiac like they're going on a Disney ride.
And I'm saying, girls, please don't get on those boats.
I know you've been told.
I know my government is telling you that America is the magic kingdom.
You will not make it through Darien unscathed, if at all.
But there was no way I could make a dent in their thinking.
And I promise you, those girls did not make it through either alive or without being raped.
Horrifying.
Guys, I've been talking to Larry Taunton.
Follow him on x at Larry Taunton.
Larry, I'm really glad.
I know that your reporting and information is making its way up to Trump.
And hopefully this will enlighten the policymakers on our side who will get to understand the degree of complicity here and just the evil doing on the part of these agencies like AID. Because as you can imagine, there is a massive squid-like cloud of rhetoric coming out now from the left.
Oh, we're saving lives.
We're providing life-saving medicines and so on.
And so any effort to investigate USAID is going to be horrible for people around the world.
It's all propaganda.
And I think people know it.
But you're helping to put the details on it, which is indispensable.
Thank you very much, Larry Taunton, for joining me.
Hey, Dinesh, say this very quickly.
I crashed the USAID office here in Cairo yesterday.
When you get a chance, take a look at that thread I sent to you.
It's astonishing, their reaction.
Place is a fortress.
Thanks for having me, brother.
Really appreciate it.
And by the way, I shared your feed on MyEx, so people can go onto MyEx feed and check out Larry Taunton.
Larry, thank you very much.
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