Dan Crenshaw defends his SEAL combat record against SNL’s mockery, contrasting military resilience—like surviving Hell Week with a broken tibia—with woke culture’s performative outrage and suppression of dissent. He argues U.S. overseas presence deters attacks like 9/11, critiques the Green New Deal’s impracticality, and champions fracking and nuclear energy for emissions cuts. On trade, he backs tariffs against China’s IP theft and state-backed initiatives while warning of social media’s biased censorship, linking left-wing policies to worsened race relations and immigration chaos. The episode underscores how real-world experience clashes with ideological dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
So you're struggling just to do all your last-minute things to get the vote out.
And so this was, it did not dawn upon me how big of a deal this was going to be at the time.
It felt more like an annoyance.
It felt more like, okay, I've got to come up with a statement.
I'm seeing people really upset about this, but I'm not going to lie to them and tell them that I'm emotionally upset, like I'm emotionally triggered by this.
That would be a false reaction on my part.
So we crafted, I think, the right statement, which was, listen, like, it's offensive doesn't mean I'm offended.
And you don't have to be offended.
You don't have to choose to be offended here.
And as just a general rule, we should try hard not to offend people and try hard not to be offended.
Okay, that's it.
And I'm going to demand some apology and kind of stand on my high horse and play this aggrieved victim role, which is the expected role to play these days.
And, you know, after having gone on the show and seeing how they do things and how carefully scripted it actually is, it's unclear to me, and it always will be, and nobody will ever come out with the actual truth on this on how that mistake got made.
I think probably, Pete Dave, if I'm just giving him total benefit of the doubt, and also after having met him and just having a general rule that we should try to give some people some space and assume that they're not the evil people that we might assume they are.
He probably just kind of looked at the line and didn't feel like finishing it and just said, ah, whatever.
And it just, but that caught and that created this, you know, what actually was a pretty offensive comment.
But, you know, did he mean it?
Well, we'll never really know.
Now, I'll back up and say the whole premise of that joke was ill-intentioned.
I mean, they said as much, right?
They said, look at these gross people.
We don't like them.
And just to appear somewhat fair, we'll make fun of one Democrat.
I mean, they did say that.
So, you know, this was the thrust of the entire skit was obviously not well-intentioned, but I'm not sure he meant to be as deeply insulting as it did.
You know, people look so deeply into why comics do things, but the majority of the reason why they say offensive shit is because they think it's going to work.
What was great about it, though, is that you came back after that, and he apologized to you, and you accepted it graciously.
But it also got, I mean, it was great for you because it got people to know who you are.
And then I started paying attention to you after that.
I started watching some interviews and watching some speeches and different things.
And I found you to be a very reasonable right-wing guy, which I think we need way more of in this world.
You know, it's like, and this polarization of left versus right, it just seems, it's so toxic right now that when you can find people that are reasonable and intelligent and think along logical lines that you could easily follow and go, oh, okay, maybe I agree or disagree with this guy, but I see where he's coming from.
Yeah, and what you're getting at is a problem in politics is politicians and political leaders, I think, forgot to explain why we believe what we believe.
And that's pretty important.
You know, well, I think too often talking points are relied upon.
And it's not that those talking points are false necessarily, but they're not persuasive because you haven't gone a couple layers deep.
Again, I think you talk about this a lot.
Why are podcasts so popular?
They're popular because people want to hear a little bit more information.
They want to get a deeper understanding of why you think what you think.
People are ready to hear that.
They're ready for some nuance.
That being said, being in politics, you wouldn't think that we're getting any closer to nuanced conversations.
And I think political conversations on podcasts are opening up a whole new door where you understand people like Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders, the people that I've had on this podcast.
One of the things that I've talked to people about, they said, I didn't know that Bernie was like a normal person.
You hear him talk, and it's always in these very quick sound bites on television.
He's always yelling about wealth or race or something.
He looks like a madman.
But then you sit down and talk to him in a long-form conversation.
We protected Saudi Arabia from invasion from Saddam Hussein.
That's his homeland.
And yet he hated us.
And when we left, we never occupied Saudi Arabia.
We left when they asked us to leave after we defended them and prevented another invasion from Saddam Hussein after we invaded Kuwait.
What is it we did to make this guy so mad?
And the answer is we didn't do anything, objectively speaking.
He hates us because of our Western ideology.
He hates us because he hates us.
And it's hard for us to understand because it's not logical, but it is the truth.
And it's the prime example of why this is a long-term fight, and it's not likely to go away anytime soon.
And the other last thing I would say, the world is a very small place.
When we pretend that we ignore things going on in the Middle East, we can pretend that they won't come here.
But the reality is that's a 12-hour flight.
And the speed of information travels even faster.
When we were seeing a lot of attacks in the U.S. and in Europe, when ISIS was at its peak, as its peak strength, that was because they were able to radicalize online.
Notice that they've stopped having that power, and it's because we actually took the fight to them.
And if you were one of the people that is in one of those countries and you had to deal with that and you saw the drone attacks in Yemen that have killed people and wedding parties and the kind of shit that we hope never happens again but has happened in the past, you can kind of understand why there would be a hatred against the number one superpower in the world.
So you feel like if we did pull out of all these countries, particularly pull out of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and all the bases that we have over there, that it would be very similar to what's going on in Iraq, what happened in Libya.
Good for you, before anything actually did happen.
Now, do you think that this is a political ploy, that this is a popular thing to say?
Because so many people that have a cursory understanding of foreign policy, they look at our military bases overseas and they say, hey, let's bring those people back.
Let's end these wars.
Let's stop spending this money.
But you're not the only one that's told me this, and particularly not the only one that's told me this that has a military background, saying it's virtually impossible to prevent any of this stuff without having bases over there.
People love to know, you know, even if they don't.
They love to be the person that has the information.
And one of the things that social media has done is allowed this sort of text-based debate format where people can shut people down wrong and say this.
The problem with that is this and this.
And everybody wants to be correct about things because they're married to these ideas.
If these ideas succeed, they succeed.
If they get a zinger off on someone in some sort of online political debate, they walk around like a fucking, like a peacock strutting.
They won.
They got one in.
And for many people, this is like the only form of competition that they participate in, which I think is a real problem in our culture.
Human beings desire competition, especially men.
And when they shy away from it, they usually become secretly, quietly angry.
And they harbor resentment and bitterness.
And they never understand the feeling of losing and getting better, the feeling of failing and improving, the feeling of not knowing something and then learning something.
Like these things are critical.
And to pretend that you know something when you don't, it's a terrible way to go about your life.
Yeah, we need to hear those things over and over again.
Sometimes you forget them.
Sometimes they just need to be cemented in your psyche.
And competition doesn't mean being mean.
It doesn't mean people, they're associating it and equating it with either violence or aggression or toxic masculinity.
There's all these words they kept throwing around for people feeling bad because they lost.
But that feeling of feeling bad because you lost something is extremely valuable in your life.
And I don't want to say it hardens you because it doesn't harden you emotionally.
You still are the same amount of emotional availability.
But you get, if you're accustomed to it, I always tell people, young men, get involved in martial arts, especially jiu-jitsu.
Because you can do it.
You're not going to get brain damage.
You get strangled a bunch.
You get your ass kicked all the time.
And it teaches you humility.
It teaches you humility.
And then you learn after that that you can get better.
And then eventually you become the hammer instead of being the nail.
And that's something you can actually apply to your real life.
You can understand that these lessons of failure and humility and humiliation and just getting pummeled, like all that stuff pays off ultimately if you just keep showing up.
And that's analogous to life.
In life, if you can just keep showing up and keep working hard, you're going to have setbacks.
But don't let them define you and you can move forward.
But if you don't, if you're just like, the world's toxic and we need to nerf everything and everyone needs a safe space.
Well, we're just going to make a whole island full of pussies.
The reason I like, I love the subject of psychology because it kind of tells us things that we already intuit to be true.
And it just makes sense.
And this is certainly one of those.
And there's a lot of studies that show people who have suffered deep trauma end up better for it as long as they're telling themselves the right stories.
And so I go into this a lot in my book too.
You have to tell yourself the right story about that trauma.
You have to tell yourself that you are resilient and that you are empowered to overcome it.
That's a very important narrative that you have to tell yourself.
If you tell yourself it just happened to you and it's not fair and everybody's out to get you, I wouldn't wish that psychological state on my worst enemies.
Because I can't think of any other movies that show Buds now that you bring it up.
Actually, Lone Survivor, the very end.
The first intro, I think, has some Buds.
Anyway, find it on YouTube.
Most people know what I'm talking about.
But G.I. Jane is not a realistic movie.
It's one of the least realistic movies in every single aspect about the SEAL teams.
But the point is that there's not just a hardening of the mind that occurs from Hell Week.
It's an increase in confidence in a pretty excessive way.
Like, if I can push my limits this far, imagine what else I can do.
And then you continue to push those limits.
I mean, just even after Hell Week, you do it when you're kind of what we would, what I would describe as controlled drowning in second phase, where we learn to be super calm underwater under the worst conditions, meaning you can't breathe and you're about to pass out.
And you're still going to go through procedures in a very specific way.
You have to learn that calming.
And then you've pushed another limit and you've pushed another limit.
So by the time we do get to combat, we have already suffered so badly in training that the combat doesn't feel all that bad.
And we're ready to get your eye blown out of your head, like I did.
You're ready for that.
You understand it.
And it's not surprising.
You don't react in an emotional way when it does happen because you've allowed yourself to be hardened and you've told yourself the right story about that.
What is a traumatic experience?
I mean, the hell week can be, it really is.
I broke my leg the first time through.
I had to do it again.
How did you break your leg?
Just a stress fracture that turned into a fracture and just snapped while we were running with the boats on our head.
So we run with these two or 300-pound boats on our heads.
They're basically the kind of boats you use in river rafting.
But we run everywhere with them.
Some estimates, maybe up to 200 miles in just Hell Week alone.
So it's one of the reasons older guys, you know, maybe 25 and older, have a lot of hard time getting it.
Yeah, I don't think there's a way you can get through what I've heard described while having a plan B. Like, I hope I get through this.
But if I don't, I've got, you know, I'm going to open this pizza place with my cousin.
And I always talk about it like bandwidth.
And I always say to people, like, if you want to really do something, you only have a, like, let's call, let's like pretend you have like a certain amount of juice.
Like, your juice is 100.
And when it's fully on, you have 100.
Well, if you take 30 of it and you put it towards this and another 20 and you put it towards that, well, guess what?
You think you're all in, but you're really only 50% in because you've got all this 50% of your juice is on all these different things.
You got to be 100% involved in what you're trying to do at your best.
And that guy's fuel for fucking millions of people in this country because his books and his videos and all the that video, good, you've seen that video?
But people like that that have real lessons because of real success and real failure in life and a real understanding of what it takes to motivate people, what it takes to be a leader.
I think those guys are extremely valuable, but they get watered down by so many people that are out there giving lessons and making a career out of being a motivational speaker when you just want to grab them, go, what the fuck have you done?
What have you done other than motivate people?
And with words that are, you've just, you're like collecting words out in the field and jumbling them together.
You're like a word harvester and you're putting them together, but they're not really coming from a real place.
And then the question is, are they even, are they successful?
Maybe they are.
But you're right.
If you're not backing it up with, I think, real experience and a real story to frame the argument that you're trying to make, and maybe the argument's the same as the other guy that you're talking about who doesn't really have the experience.
If it's going to be powerful and meaningful to somebody, I think it does have to come from a place of experience.
Well, it's one of the reasons why I really like politicians that have served.
I think it's so critical when you're talking about sending people overseas to have an honest understanding of what that really means and to have been there.
It's one of the reasons why I really like Tulsi, and it's one of the reasons why I really like you.
I think that is, it is a giant factor.
I mean, I don't want it to be mandatory, but goddamn, when people start talking about going to war and they have no understanding personally about what that means, it bothers me.
Because, again, what me and Tulsi really disagree on fundamentally, I think on a deeper level, is whether our troops out there are victims or not.
And I think there's a common misunderstanding that our troops don't want to be there, that our troops are being victimized by our bad political decisions.
And that's, to me, as one of those people who voluntarily goes out there, which is, by the way, everybody, because everybody volunteers to do it, you know, that's a deeply problematic opinion because it's just not true.
And it's a great way for people to get to know you.
I think there's a lot of value in that.
You know, the old political way of thinking is don't say too much because you'll get crucified for it.
And stick to your talking points because there's just, there was for a long time, there's still this argument to be made that there's no reward for being open and honest about things, for having that nuanced conversation.
Perspective is hugely important, and you're absolutely right.
But, you know, trying to, going back to the political culture, trying to move it into this a little bit more of an open and honest, nuanced discussion, I think is important.
And we just, I want to be part of that solution.
And it's why I come on a show like this.
It's why other politicians come on shows like this.
I mean, we are the first generation that's experiencing politicians having their own channels to express themselves.
You used to have to go to NBC or CBS or what have you in order to, and you had to be prominent enough to have a conversation with someone.
They're only going to talk to a select number of people.
And the only reason why they're going to talk to those people is because they think those people would be viable in terms of the amount of numbers of people that would tune in so they could get a good advertising money for it.
What is your take on what we're seeing now with social media in terms of algorithms that sort of accentuate that hate where they find the things that piss you off, whether you like to post about immigration or abortion and whatever it is?
And that's what you're going to find in your feed.
We do have to ask ourselves as a culture about that.
And it's this, you know, it's a lot of what I wrote about after the Saturday Night Live thing.
Like, let's, we have to get to this point, and it's a pretty low standard where we're attacking ideas and not people and not the intent and character of people.
And it's a low standard, frankly, as far as political discourse, but it's a good place to start.
And there is a problem with the gatekeepers of social media and that these companies are all left with their policies.
And they might be right in terms of their business practices.
And David Pachman came on here and argued that.
And it actually makes a lot of sense that in terms of how they still shuffle money overseas and avoid taxes.
And they do there's a lot of right-wing business practices.
But my thought on that is it's probably just compartmentalization and you're dealing with business people that have taken over some multi-billion dollar corporation.
And this is the business aspect of it.
And then you've got your social engineering aspect of it.
And the social engineering aspect of it is, it's very problematic for me.
There was an article that was written recently.
And one of the guys, he was saying something about me and that, no, silencing white nationalism and keeping them off your platform is not censorship, which is the dumbest way to sort of boil down my position on censorship and ignore the real problems of other people deciding what someone can or can't say and what is or is not offensive.
One of the best examples is a woman named, I think this is Morgan Murphy, Megan Murphy.
Megan Murphy is her name.
She's what's called a trans-exclusion, exclusive, exclusionary?
What's the word?
Exclusionary.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a turf.
And she was in a debate with trans-exclusionary.
But exclusionary is a weird word.
She was in a debate with people about whether or not trans women should be able to invade feminist women's spaces.
So a person who's biologically male, who becomes a female later in life, should be able to make decisions in feminist debates and decisions.
But it's woke culture in its most boiled down form.
It has nothing to do with white nationalism.
It has nothing to do with race.
It has to do with a person that feels like their own particular protected group, being a feminist, being a woman, and trying to carve out rules where women are protected.
And she's saying, well, I don't like the fact that these trans women are entering into this space and dominating it in certain aspects.
And it's an example of this intersectional coalition that they've created.
It's coming to terms with itself.
And a lot of the feminist groups aligned with us against the Equality Act because the Equality Act would have put into real practice this, into concrete terms, biological men getting into women's sports.
And so among other things, by the way, a lot of feminist groups are finally coming out and saying, no, this is not correct.
We're a feminist group, so let's protect women, which I fully agree with.
But on a deeper level, it's interesting to watch that intersectional coalition just implode.
And it stems from this desire on their part to divide everybody up into three categories of oppressed, the oppressors, and then the champions of the oppressed, right?
And the woke culture is the champions, of course.
That's how they label themselves.
They label their intersectional coalition as the oppressed.
And then they have this whole other kind of intersectional coalition of oppressors.
And they connect it all with the worst of the worst, which is white supremacists Nazis.
And so you're all, and they say you're all connected with that somehow.
Even if you're just making a pretty bland statement about biological men and women, somehow that connects to this.
And this is how you see them reason their way through it.
And what that does is it undercuts real basic arguments because you're attacking the intent of that argument because you're connecting it with the worst of the worst, right?
We kill Nazis.
That's what our country does.
We did it.
And so if you're connecting all of these things you disagree with with that, well, you don't even have to make an argument anymore.
This is a huge fissure in the culture war right now.
And, you know, when we, and I have a lot of fear that these things are boiling up and that we're destroying the things, the few things that hold us together.
You know, as a country, like what makes us Americans, it's not ethnicity.
It's not religion.
It's not even really geographic area because our geographic area has changed over time.
It is ideals.
It is ideals.
And those ideals are symbolized by certain things.
And that's the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, the national anthem.
These things matter.
And I think they're very important for a culture.
And this actually all ties back into this sort of oppressor-oppressed kind of ideology.
Because if you tell people that they're oppressed, well, then they have to look for an oppressor.
And that starts small.
It starts with your parent or your boss or somebody you don't like.
Okay, it's their fault.
That's why I have something bad happen to me.
It's somebody else's fault.
Then it grows into groups.
Now you get into identity politics and pitting identities against each other.
Then you're starting to blame institutions.
And this is kind of the, this is, this is, when we talk about Bernie Sanders, he's doing this often.
He's blaming institutions for our issues constantly.
That has morphed into blaming the entire country.
The entire country, as an American ideal, is to blame.
I just think that's really both.
I think it's historically inaccurate.
I think it's inaccurate objectively.
But I just think it's dangerous.
I don't think it can go anywhere good.
Unless you just want total revolution, which I think some people do.
It tears us apart, right?
And we're getting divided along, we're allowing the pop culture to get involved in this too, so we can't share pop culture anymore because musicians are getting involved in politics and comedians and late night shows.
And it's like, okay, well, now half the country can't even watch it because those people are just telling them how stupid they are.
We're losing these basic symbols that bring us together.
And then we're also losing the pop culture that kind of brings us together.
That should be something we can just share and then not talk politics, but that's been removed as well.
I'm hoping that this is an adolescent stage in the development of this strange country that's an experiment in self-government.
That's what I'm thinking.
And I think this experiment in self-government, which is a completely new thing in human history, that's redefined the way the rest of the world governs itself.
I mean, that's what America really is.
Is it perfect?
Fuck no.
But humans aren't perfect.
There's not a goddamn human anywhere that's perfect.
There's not a single culture anywhere that doesn't have something that's inherently wrong with it.
And it's a system based on the fact, the unavoidable fact that we are imperfect.
And that you cannot constrain mankind's nature to the extent that progressives would like to.
There's a belief from, and it comes from just Marxist ideology and kind of French Revolution thought that you can perfect human nature, that you can get people to be perfect eventually.
If you just give the state enough control and stop certain thoughts that are bad, keep those down, elevate these other ones, you can eventually get us to where we think we should be.
I think that's utopian.
I don't see how that's ever possible.
And I think our U.S. constitutional system understands that.
It's not like the founders got together and just made a bunch of stuff up, right?
They were very well versed in history.
They studied it relentlessly.
And they took ideas from Jerusalem and Athens and Rome and London.
They took all these best ideas and these best practices and they said, this is probably how we should govern.
We're first going to say why government exists.
We're going to say that in the Declaration of Independence.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, the Declaration of Independence wasn't just declaring its independence.
It was also declaring why government exists.
And it exists to protect inalienable rights, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
He gets these ideas from guys like John Locke who said, life, liberty, and property, those are unalienable rights.
And you protect rights.
You can't give them to people, but you can protect them because they're already inherent in you.
They are natural rights.
And then the Constitution told us how to govern.
He said, how do we live together?
Well, there should be checks and balances.
You should have an emphasis on local state control because the problems are closest to the people and they should be closest to the representatives down at that level.
51% of the population shouldn't be able to tell the other 49% what to do.
We should have an electoral college so that the biggest population centers can't tell everybody else what to do.
There's important structures embedded into the Constitution that have allowed us to actually last, I think, as long as we have.
We have the oldest political.
It's the oldest document in the world.
It's the oldest constitution in the world.
So we're the youngest, one of the youngest countries, but we're the only ones that had such a long-standing constitution.
It's very bizarre that they had the insight to realize that shit could go so sideways that they put all these checks and balances together that actually can reasonably well, in a reasonably well way, work today.
I mean, there's a lot of people that disagree with a lot of the aspects of it.
One person, one vote.
They would like that.
They don't think that representative democracy is as important now because we have this ability to communicate that we didn't have in the 1800s.
You know, you had to send a fucking pony with a letter on it in order to get your word across.
Now you could actually tweet and you could vote online if we so deem it and we made it legal.
But the Electoral College, do you feel like that, and especially with things like super delegates, do you think that that's still the way to do things?
And when people congregate in population centers, they also tend to start to think alike.
And I just think, and on a more fundamental level, look at the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
People just wonder what that difference is, and there's a lot of differences, of course.
But a really kind of simple heuristic to think about it is the word Democrat and Republican.
One believes in a pure democracy, one believes in a republic.
I'm saying Democrats believe in total pure democracy, but when you're saying abolish the Electoral College, you are saying pure democracy.
You're saying 51% of the population can tell the other 49% what to do.
The Electoral College is a check and balance against that that gives those states in the middle some kind of voice that they wouldn't have otherwise had.
It makes them why is everybody in Iowa right now?
Do you think they'd be in Iowa if we didn't have an electoral college?
Campaigning physically, but also who you're accountable to.
That's the most important thing.
Who are you accountable to?
You're not going to care if you're accountable to the rural areas like you should be, into the middle of the country like you should be, because if you only care about 51% of the vote, you're just going to go to those main population centers and you're only going to talk to them and you're only going to care what they think.
And I don't think that's good.
That's not good for democracy, especially when we have such a wide diversity of preferences and just styles of living across the country.
When you think about what are the problems that we're facing today in terms of voting and registering to vote and primaries and electing someone from your party to get to go against other parties and that this whole process is convoluted, gigantic, involved process.
Could that be simplified?
Do you think that in any way, doing something online and having your ability to register to vote when you get driver's license and that it automatically registers you to vote?
If you have to actually take the time to register and go to the polls, you're going to do at least a little bit more research on what's going on, I think.
But what I'm saying is, wouldn't it be a better thing if more people voted?
Or do you think that it's better if only the people motivated to vote and participate vote the way we're doing it now, where you have to register within a certain amount of time, you have to show up at an actual polling place?
Yeah, I mean, I can make a million things easier, but again, they remove safeguards that create safe elections and elections that we can have faith in.
And this is a very important thing.
And I think you see this when you have this discussion with people, they're already on edge about whether their vote really counts because some people think illegals are voting.
Again, there's not a huge amount of evidence for that either.
It does happen, but it's not.
It's not an illegals vote.
You can't register?
In places where there's no voter ID, you can make it a lot easier.
It's just a shame that we have so little faith in our ability to do things electronically that we're worried and that we wouldn't want people to vote online because we're worried about people hacking it.
That is a shame because I just feel like if you could watch, like maybe if you were going to vote online, you would have to watch a five-minute video explaining people's positions on things, explaining where they stand and why this makes sense and show that you, and after that five-minute video, then you get to vote.
Yeah, but again, it's not self-evident that that's a problem.
It's up to government now to force that into a fix.
I'm not sure I see that argument.
It's not self-evident that things would all be better if we forced people to vote or made it so easy that they didn't have to think about it at all and just got on their app and voted.
So yeah, it's an interesting question.
Do we want to increase voter turnout?
And then, yeah, sure.
But how do we do it?
I think civic education is a more appropriate answer to that as opposed to making it as easy as buying something at the grocery store.
Starting with our schools, we don't teach a lot of civic education anymore.
And I think that's obvious from our political discourse sometimes.
It's not required like I think it should be.
I mean, the basics, like where does government happen?
If you're concerned about your schools, should you go to your congressman or should you go to your mayor or who do you go to?
We don't even tell people this stuff.
It's like, no, you should get involved in your school board elections for one thing, you know, just as an example.
There's just a lot of things that I think need to be taught before we...
So I think we're trying to solve the wrong problem when we say, well, voting is not easy I'm not so sure that we're hitting at the heart of the issue when it comes to voter turnout.
When people talk about issues in this country, there's a giant divide with one thing in particular, and that is mass shootings.
Mass shootings and gun control.
There's a giant divide between people that are Second Amendment advocates and people that want to round up all the assault weapons and take away all the guns, and they think the guns are the problem.
When you see this pretty disturbing increase in mass shootings in this country, what is your take on it, and what do you think could be done?
And for different reasons, of course, or at least they attach themselves to some kind of reason.
But in the end, they're angry at something, and probably been taking some kind of psychotropic drugs over time.
And they've gotten to this point, and they'll attach themselves to whatever reason they need to to do this, and it's awful.
So, you know, how do you fix that?
We have to understand the problem.
We have to diagnose it.
And then we've got to and I think we have to be realistic about what the solutions really are and what our ability to influence those outcomes really is.
And that's an emotional conversation for people.
You know, we've been dealing with it for the last few weeks, of course.
I mean, you've got to draw the line somewhere and you've got to be able to analyze it.
If you're going to analyze it, you have to have to look into that.
But I think the dramatized shootings that these guys are doing, it all started with Columbine, and it's become this sort of copycat crime that has occurred over time.
And we didn't have this before that.
And I think that's interesting.
And I think it's something to take note of.
And it's not clear what you do about that.
You have to look for signs of people before they do it.
And so one bill that I'm on, I've taken a lot of fire for because people are just, I think, misunderstand what it actually is, is the TAPS Act, which is the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act.
All this does is give local law enforcement the ability to apply for grants to get training and behavioral threat assessment training and data analytical tools to identify these threats beforehand.
And red flag laws, depending on how they're implemented, could take someone who looks like they're erratic or who has a penchant for violence, and they would say, you do not have access to guns.
Aaron Powell, the only other controversial approach that I've heard is putting armed police or soldiers at schools, which is like, that seems incredibly disturbing to me that you have to have people.
I'm not opposed to it, but it's disturbing to me that you would have to have someone standing by ready for violence.
Well, they have this idea of guns, that guns bring violence and violent people want guns.
And that's just not true.
And one of the things that people like to gloss over is how many people have defended their life and defended the lives of their loved ones with guns in this country every year.
Unfortunately, one of the things that gets brought up during gun violence statistics, they talk about how many people die from firearms every year in this country.
They're also talking about people who are defending their lives and defending the lives of their loved ones.
People get their houses broken into all the time by armed criminals, and they shoot those people, and they live to see another day, and that person dies.
And that is the whole reason why people don't want to get rid of guns.
Well, and then the real conversation is how many of these people are on psychotropic drugs and what are those drugs and what are the effects those drugs have on people.
Well, when you look at the numbers, it's fucking stunning.
Whether it's anti-anxiety medications or SSRIs or amphetamines or whether it's whatever they're on that alters the chemical frequency or the chemical, the biological structure of your brain in terms of like what chemicals are in there, serotonin, dopamine, these speeds, so many kids are on Adderall and various types of speed.
That stuff radically changes the way you look at the world.
How many of those drugs contribute or are a factor in these mass killings?
I don't know if correlation equals causation, but I do know the correlation is phenomenally high.
And then, again, going back to the victimhood conversation, maybe they did word dealt a bad hand, but they also tell themselves the wrong story about why that is and who's to blame.
And that narrative just seeps within them and it creates this.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
When Bernie Sanders was on here, there was one thing I thought I agreed with him on, which is we have to look at the effects of these drugs and really what they are.
Based on a general court-martial conviction, a person who was convicted of a crime that is punishable by imprisonment for more than one year, including dishonorable discharge, is prohibited from providing it from.
Yes, okay.
That's what it is.
So it is true.
So if you're imprisoned, not just a dishonorable policy.
But there's also influence that comes with that on top of financial.
There's also influence in terms of just cronyism and people reciprocating, getting along with each other and working, establishing long-term relationships where they agree on things and they make deals and they make deals that might not necessarily be in the best interests of people, like deals in terms of what businesses get subsidies, what businesses don't get subsidies, what things get negotiated, what don't.
Well, I think it was Northwestern University did a study recently where they showed the public support for policies and public support for bills and how low the public support is in comparison to things that get passed.
And how when the public ⁇ it was things that the public absolutely wanted across the board had something in the range of a 30% chance of getting passed through.
Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not want across the board also had a 30% chance of getting through.
And they were talking about the various influences that lead to these policies getting passed.
Now, the argument is that you're electing representatives.
Those representatives don't do you justice and pass bills and enact policies that would help your community and help you.
Then you elect them out of office.
But the damage gets done while they're there.
And the idea is that these people would then go on from there once they've established that influence and once they've helped these people get jobs in the corporate sector, get jobs that represent what they've done for those corporations while they were a representative, supposedly, of the people.
So there's an argument to be made that the government should be able to negotiate prices, right?
The question is, what is the price?
And the other thing you have to point out is there's already a strong force against the pharmaceutical industry, which is the insurance companies.
Because they have an interest in making sure that price is as low as possible.
They're fighting all the time against the pharmaceutical companies.
In the healthcare industry, all of these groups are often pitted against each other.
And then as politicians, we kind of look at all of them and we say, all right, what are your arguments?
What are your arguments?
Is what you're saying really makes sense.
And then we have to make those decisions based on the overall good, but you're going to piss everybody off when you do that.
Especially with healthcare, because a lot of these groups are pitted against each other.
So you've got insurance already pitted against pharmacy.
And then it becomes a pretty good question, like what is government's role there?
Because when I first looked at this problem, I said, yeah, yeah, just negotiate it.
Well, that makes sense.
I learned a lot more.
I learned a lot more.
And it's not because I met with any lobbyists.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's because I meet with healthcare professionals and experts who know this issue really well and economists who it's very far from self-evident that this would work and it's far from self-evident that it would be beneficial at all and actually make a difference.
When we look at the differences in healthcare spending between us and other countries, the drug prices actually have very little to do with that.
They're able to negotiate those, but they also get last choice for medicine.
When you look at Great Britain and Canada, they're not getting the premier new drugs like we have in the United States.
We get screwed as Americans because the patent laws are not enforced in these other countries.
So our pharmaceutical companies, they immediately get ripped off in other countries.
At its core, a complete shift to wind and solar at its core.
So And an idea that if you do that, you will have zero emissions in the next 10 years.
But it's an obsession with wind and solar, which I think is interesting.
It bans nuclear.
Remember when the talking points came out from the Green New Deal?
Didn't like nuclear.
So that's how you know it's not an actual environmental plan, or at least associated with carbon emissions and climate change, because why would you ban the one reliable piece of energy that we have that has zero emissions, which is nuclear?
So you know it's not about that.
It also includes free health care for everybody.
It includes free college.
So it's like every socialist plan wrapped into one, and then they call it an environmental plan and ban fossil fuels and things like that.
they're not as good yeah we just it's true but we we do have the technology to make them good and they're And I think we should look at ways to research more the miniaturized modular nuclear devices that are being looked at.
Well, only if you have the batteries, only if you have the batteries to store it.
And so, yeah, in theory, and we don't right now.
If you want to shift the entire energy grid to that, we do not have the massive amounts of.
There's some good data on this.
I don't have it off the top of my head, but it's massive.
It is a massive amount of batteries and farms to actually hold that.
There's an energy density problem with wind and solar.
It's just a physics problem.
So the science can only go so far.
And even the theoretical limit to how much a battery can hold, which we're not even, we haven't discovered yet, but it's a theoretical capacity of a battery.
It would still make it very difficult to actually do this.
And so it's just not realistic.
Also, there's other consequences to wind and solar, like massive solar or wind turbines.
Some people don't like those things.
Massive amounts of space needed for solar.
And also, where are you going to get the special materials needed for solar panels?
There's other consequences to this.
And it's not self-evident that that's the only possible way to do it.
It's not like we should shun it.
Nobody's saying that.
We advocate for an all-and-above approach.
If our goal is less carbon emissions, then we need to be focusing on 100% of carbon emissions, meaning the world's carbon emissions.
A Green New Deal focuses on 15% of carbon emissions.
Basically says let's kneecap the United States economy.
We'll destroy fossil fuels.
We'll have a utopian society full of wind and solar, even though the batteries don't exist to make that work.
But hey, we'll make it work.
And then that solves 15% of the problem and has almost no effect on the actual climate.
So when I say 100% of the problem, what I'm saying is technological innovation, whether that's nuclear or carbon capture.
If the goal is less carbon, then let's actually focus on carbon capture.
So I just dropped a bill, Senator Cornyn did on the Senate side called the Leading Act.
And it basically repurposes grant funds in the Department of Energy to focus on carbon capture for natural gas plants.
So we have natural gas plants in Texas that are zero emissions.
They take in natural gas, they operate the facility, they create electricity, then they recapture that carbon, and they power the facility with it.
Zero emissions.
So if our goal is zero emissions, let's do what works.
And also, by the way, that plant can keep going no matter what.
So your take is that what the Green New Deal is, I mean, if I can encapsulate it, the Green New Deal is basically more of an emotional plea to people that are worried about the future and that see wind and solar as being free and clean alternatives.
When we decided that we wanted ethanol in our gasoline, well, I think it was, I want to say it's Indonesia or Malaysia, but they cleared tons and tons of forest to make room so that they could produce the ethanol oil.
Carbon emissions there increase rapidly because of that, all because of our good intentions.
And these incentives and these second, third order effects, they matter, and we have to think about them when we're talking about policy.
And if our goal, again, is if our goal is less emissions, then let's be thoughtful about how we approach that.
Let's not decide on a solution and then look for reasons to back up that solution.
Is there any other things that are on the horizon that make sense in terms of trying to mitigate all the problems that we have with carbon emissions in this country?
Is there anything else that people are working on?
Yeah, well, you want to focus something like carbon capture on the places that emit the most carbon.
That's why it's generally focused on the plants themselves, I think.
So something like net power just makes the most sense.
Yeah, so I think that's still the right way to go.
Natural gas, too.
So here's another statistic.
The Department of Energy has done a study on this.
If you replaced coal-burning plants or the boilers, coal-burning boilers in China and India with natural gas, meaning we have all the natural gas in the world, by the way, in Texas, we can export it for decades to come.
It's far cleaner than oil and coal.
If you just replace the China's India's boilers, you'd reduce emissions by 40%.
The reason the United States has reduced emissions by, I think, about 15% since the year 2000, it's largely because of the natural gas boom, the fracking business, because it's so much cleaner than these other technologies, and it's profitable, and it worked.
But I just still want to point out it caused a huge decrease in emissions.
And again, it's over, if we're looking to decrease emissions, why don't we focus on things that work?
And you have to hook people on, by people I mean the world, especially developing countries, that don't care about our dogmatic approach to wind and solar.
They never will.
But what can you do to help them get energy to keep their people out of poverty?
Because that's what they care about in a way that's reliable and cheap and market-based.
Because the only thing that's sustainable is market-based.
Sustainability is an important term here.
And I mean that not in the sense of like environmental sustainability, although we are saying the same thing.
I mean it in terms of what policy will last and what will implode.
And it's an important question.
And it's one reason I'm a Republican, because our policies, they don't feel good.
They're not based on emotional reasoning, but they are based on realistic reasoning and sustainability of that policy.
And this is a case like that.
And if you don't take into account market forces and incentives and just, I think, basic human nature, then we're not doing justice to the problem itself.
Now, one of the big issues that's in the news right now is the trade war with China.
I mean, this is a huge issue.
And it's made me dive into a lot of really weird stuff with Huawei and with Chinese governments involved in various corporations.
And it's a hard concept to grasp for the average American citizen that the corporations in China are inexorably connected to the communist government.
And that this is, they work hand in hand.
They do the bidding of the government.
They work together, even though they are profitable, radically profitable.
They also do things specifically at the bidding of the government, including inserting shit that can allow people to spy on people, which is why they're banning Huawei devices.
And it all comes back to what you were talking about earlier, too, in intellectual copyright in terms of pharmaceutical drugs.
The same thing could be said about electronics.
I mean, there's entire Apple stores in China that have nothing to do with Apple.
They don't even, they just make their own stuff and call it Apple stuff.
And I'm not overly sympathetic to trade wars, especially with our allies.
I was happy to see us getting to a deal with Canada and Mexico.
I don't see a point in strong-arming them.
But with China, I'm much more sympathetic to it.
And I think that should largely be bipartisan.
You don't even see Democrats slamming Trump too much for this.
But there are consequences.
And so I would like the President to be more forthright about, listen, we are going to feel some pain too, because when you implement tariffs, you're affecting people's supply chains.
When you do that, you're hurting American businesses, too.
There has to be a reason for that.
And the reason is the Chinese are bad actors.
And we are in sort of an economic Cold War with them.
The Chinese think in 50-year terms, we think in four-year terms.
They have a huge advantage in this sense.
They have a huge advantage that they can prop up their businesses and put forth their belt and road initiatives.
And made in China 2025, I think, might be getting that wrong.
But they can manipulate public opinion to encourage those statist policies.
And there's disadvantages to that, too.
It means they're much less dynamic.
The fact that they steal everything means they'll never be competitive.
They're not truly a great, you know, great nation the way they're making themselves out to be because they're thieves.
And I think we should point that out.
But we are in this cultural war with them.
We are in this economic Cold War with them.
And that's nothing new, but it is coming to the forefront.
And so we've got to be careful.
I would prefer we take fights to the WTO.
We actually have a good history of being successful in the WTO against the Chinese.
And we go after singular companies like Huawei.
I would like to see that.
Again, I'm sympathetic to the tariffs, but they do hurt us.
They hurt us.
There are a lot of people in my district.
Texas is a good competitive market.
We do well when there's free competition.
And so we tend to want more free trade and more free competition because we know we can handle it.
So when there's not that, it can tend to hurt because we have very complex supply chains throughout the world.
I'm realizing as we're talking that I never really continued my thoughts on censorship in the media.
And I wanted to know what you think could be done in terms of how you could stop particularly conservative voices from being silenced on social media and what could be done.
Do you think that government regulation should be enacted?
What should be done to stop, because there's a bunch of stuff that's gone on behind the scenes, shadow banning and what do you think about that?
You know, I mean, you were going to be responsible for it.
Like, where does the blame lie?
And so like, that's the first off of that, though.
As they should.
So that's that conversation.
It's the conversation of what is a platform, what is a publication, because you can sue the New York Times if they publish something that you don't like.
Okay, so the problem we're seeing is that Facebook and Twitter, they're acting like both.
They're trying to get the best of both worlds where they're this like open platform, but then they can also decide and kind of act like a publisher and decide what kind of content is allowed on that platform.
And the problem is the standards they're using are utterly vague and subjective and then politically biased, obviously.
And so that's a real problem.
And so I think this legislation might get at kind of removing that protection and basically allowing someone to say, hey, you're being libelous.
And once that incentive is there, it's like, okay, there's a better incentive now to say we are a pure platform.
We have to have much stronger standards in the sense of clearer standards.
Like now you can get banned for life for dead naming someone, which means like if I wrote something about Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels, if I wrote that, I could get dead name banned for life from Twitter.
Like literally, if I write Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels.
But Andy Rooney would, we were going to have him, O.J. Simpson, just give some sort of down-home anecdote at the end of every episode, sort of tie everything up and let you know that this fucking show is bananas.
Should we enforce the spirit of the First Amendment?
I certainly think we're encouraging it.
I'm definitely very vocal about encouraging it.
And I say, you don't have a...
And when Google was in front of me in a hearing the other day, I said, and it was Google, all of them were there, I said, you don't have a legal obligation to do what I'm telling you.
But I do think you have an American obligation to actually adhere to free speech standards and to adhere to the same standards the government adheres to, which is your speech is not protected if it incites violence directly.
It's a pretty clear standard.
Yes.
Everything else is entirely vague and only leads to a slippery slope and frankly a very dangerous situation where we're just at each other's throats even worse.
Because not only are you yelling at each other, but you're telling certain people that their opinions are just utterly unacceptable and can't be heard at all.
If you want to create civil war, that's a really quick way to do it.
Right.
When you really disenfranchise people.
And it's just so dangerous and we just shouldn't do it.
Yeah, but it's this convenient label that once you decide that someone is the other, you dehumanize them, their perspective becomes intolerable, and you can label them as being this target.
You know, Herbert Marcuse is sort of one of the original thinkers from the new left who said that the new way of progressivism needs to be dividing people up into that other, okay?
And then not only that, but labeling them and then suppressing their speech.
It was imbued into our universities, and now we're seeing it manifest again and amplified, I think, by social media.
And labeling somebody a Nazi is just really an old tactic.
They're just using a different word.
And I don't know if I think if we were, I think if we looked into history, there's probably other cases where they continue to call us Nazis, but it's obviously extremely prevalent now.
I mean, never to this extent, right?
And I just, I don't know why that.
Well, it's the rise of identity politics fundamentally.
And so, and then there were, and then I think it's fair because the left would say, well, there was kind of a white identity politics rise, and they were given some kind of voice by Donald Trump, right?
This is what they would say.
And I think that there's probably some truth to that.
And that's terrible, but I think that was a reaction.
You know, we should always point out that when you do surveys of what race relations are like in America, they were much better before than they are now.
And do we really think we've gotten more racist?
You know, like what happened?
And this is under President Obama's presidency.
And I think those identity, that identity politics just came to the forefront in the last decade in a really terrible way.
And again, I think identity politics is one of the worst things we could do to each other.
When you divide people up into different groups and talk about intersectional hierarchies of victimhood, I just think it's just dividing people, because fundamentally what it is is you're dividing people up and you're saying your group is oppressed by that group.
And if you vote for me, I'll give you power over that group.
And you can trace a lot of policies to that.
And this all stems from Marxist ideology where it was more socioeconomic division of groups.
But that has become an ideology of intersectionality, ironically put forth by a woman named Crenshaw.
So I'm definitely more open to just the federal legalization of medical marijuana and all the benefits that come with that.
I think the science backs that up pretty well.
Sure.
On the recreational side, I'm happy to leave that to the states.
Okay.
And then there's the argument of, well, the states are having trouble with some things, the banking laws, et cetera, because the federal government still makes it illegal.
My issue with recreational marijuana still is it's, and again, this is not a strong opinion I have.
This is not a hill I'm dying on by any means.
But if we're going to change it, I want to understand what the point is and what the benefits are of it recreationally.
I understand the benefits medically very well.
But I want to understand the recreational benefits.
And I want to see how this data plays out in places like California and Colorado.
I want to see if there's an increased use among young people because there's very good science that says if you use marijuana a lot under the age of 26, you're going to have cognitive issues for the rest of your life.
What you've done, though, is you've normalized it for teenagers because you said, well, yeah, it's 21, but it's legal, so there's nothing, there's no issues with it.
I could have smoked pot before this podcast and had the exact same podcast.
I could have had several hits.
If I gave you several hits, you'd be obliterated.
And you'd be so paranoid.
You'd start freaking out.
You'd think the government's coming to get you and they're going to close down Congress.
And oh my God, the Chinese are listening to my phones.
A lot of it is based on our own ideas and perceptions.
And I had a lot of these misconceptions in my own head.
I didn't really.
I smoked pot maybe six times or so, seven times before I was 30 years old.
And then when I was 30, I started hanging around with a guy who smoked a lot, my friend Eddie Bravo.
We started smoking pot together, and I realized, like, oh, this is an incredible tool for creativity.
Like, if you use it correctly.
And yeah, it makes you paranoid.
But I think a lot of what that paranoia is, is you being acutely aware of your vulnerability and your actual real place in the cosmos and your real place in society and the real dangers of driving cars and the real dangers of being in crowds of people.
It's a weird, uncomfortable feeling, but ultimately you get through that and you're going to be okay.
I mean, this is the same problem we had during Prohibition.
This is what propped up the mob, right?
We all know this.
This is the number one problem we have with the Mexican drug cartels.
The number one problem is that there's a goddamn customer base in the United States, and they're making billions and billions of dollars selling illegal drugs.
And what's the solution to that?
I don't know.
I mean, look, I have kids.
I don't want fucking heroin to be something you could buy at 7-Eleven.
I don't want you to be able to go to a store and buy meth.
And when you lie to kids and tell them that pot's the real danger and you shouldn't do it, then they start going, well, maybe you're lying about heroin.
Maybe you're lying about meth.
Maybe you're just square.
Maybe you're just some loser who just wants to be stuck in a cubicle all day and you want me to be living like you.
But we used to have thousands of years of experience of how to use cannabis, but it was suppressed in the 1930s by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger.
And it's more of an economic decision than it was a public health decision.
I think we need a strong education program to let people know, first of all, if you have a problem with reality, if you have schizophrenia in your family, if reality is already slippery, marijuana is not for you.
And I've personally seen people that have struggled that do have an adverse reaction to marijuana and they go off the fucking rails.
It does happen.
Particularly with edibles, edibles in particular, to knocks people for a loop.
But then there's other people that doesn't do that too.
And I think the way to study that is to have actual funding and make it legal where you could look at things across the board and figure out why.
I appreciate that conservative perspective and the slow approach to things.
And I understand what you're saying.
What bothers me more than anything is that American citizens are not doing any harm to anyone, could be criminals for something that's been used by human beings for thousands of years and doesn't show any real problems.
I don't think young people should drink, but I drank when I was young.
I mean, I didn't drink a lot, but I did occasionally.
I don't think young people should smoke pot.
I definitely don't encourage it.
Matter of fact, I deeply discourage it.
And I tell people, look, there's a reason.
One of the reasons why I enjoy it is I didn't start smoking really until I was 30.
And, you know, I take time off all the time.
It's not an addictive substance to me.
It's psychologically addictive to some people.
And there might be some evidence that a very, very small percentage of people, it's physically addictive, but not like alcohol is or not like a lot of the things that we can just buy anywhere are.
Well, I think anything for young kids can be a real problem, especially for young kids where their brain is still developing and they're trying to find their way through life and you give them something that severely distorts reality, whatever it is.
I wish we had that same due diligence, the way they prescribe psychotropic drugs to kids because we don't.
No, no, I have faith in my ability to just act responsibly.
And so that requires a lot of things.
And this a little bit gets to the war on drugs philosophy.
Like, do you just not do it because we're losing all the time?
And I actually disagree with that pretty strongly because, yeah, you might feel like you're losing all the time, but you are mitigating it.
And supply does create demand, especially with something like opioids.
If that one dealer gets into that one high school and gets those kids addicted at one party, like those, and those kids die 10, 12 years later, and I've watched this happen.
I've been to the funerals, and it's devastating.
And that supply, that demand was created by supply.
So, like, again, there's never a black and white to anything.
And so, when we say, oh, war on drugs is stupid or it's not stupid, like, no, it's complicated.
It's complicated.
And the opioid epidemics, I think, a good indication of that.
And that stuff's been slammed down pretty hard ever since.
And the pendulum maybe has swung a little too far because now pain patients are having trouble getting the opioids they want.
They're like, ah, here's two pills for your surgery.
And you're like, really?
Right.
So some people legitimately need this stuff.
And so we've got to find that correct balance.
And again, you've always got to know why there's a problem.
And as a general policy approach, we should always really question why the problem exists in the first place and what the characteristics of that problem are.
So a lot of people are dying.
Not necessarily, they're not overdosing on OxyContin.
They're overdosing from illegal forms of it or heroin that is laced with fentanyl.
So how do you tackle that?
Well, fentanyl is coming through the southern border.
That's where it's coming from.
You know, we could talk about immigration too, but what happens a lot is all these massive waves of immigrants who are turning themselves into Border Patrol, they're allowed to cross because the drug cartels say they can cross.
Okay, that's why they come across in organized groups and then they turn themselves into Border Patrol and they claim asylum.
They always bring a kid with them so that they know they can stay.
But what's also happening is just down the road, the drug cartels are moving the fentanyl and other drugs across, especially the bulky drugs, mostly like marijuana, things like that.
Fentanyl is so small, they can just bring it through trucks through ports of entry.
And so we need sensors to actually detect that, and we're getting those, getting those put in place more.
And we need to secure the border because this is where it's coming from.
And we need to deal with where it's coming from south of the border, which is China.
And so the administration actually did that.
We got the Chinese to say, at least, that they'll do it.
And you never know how much they're enforcing that.
You can play the statistics of how many people they sent back and telling people to not come over with their children, that they'll be separated from their children.
It's one of those things where people don't like that.
They don't like to see that.
It's deeply disturbing to them that Obama campaigned on this idea of protecting our border because they're not.
Not going to defend Trump's rhetoric on your show or on any show.
They contributed to it, sure.
But again, as a pretty unemotional person, I tend to look at what is the policy.
And so I have tried my hardest to move the debate towards, when it comes to immigration, towards a matter of sustainability, a matter of sovereignty, and a matter of rule of law.
Like, do we have standards or do we not?
Do we believe in this idea of a managed border or do we not?
And yeah, and Trump has made the Democrats so crazy that they've moved radically to the left.
And it's interesting to watch.
People always say, like, both sides have gotten so extreme.
I always find that interesting.
And I say there's two ways to measure extremism.
One is our voting record.
Like, how often do you really vote with the other side?
And you can measure that pretty carefully, actually.
And you've probably seen a YouTube video maybe where you watch all over time, all the red dots and the blue dots, and they sort of mingle together in their voting records, and then they slowly over time move to the sides.
So both sides are responsible for that.
Like a lack of actual compromise, a lack of deal making, where we say, okay, I'll vote for your stuff.
You vote for my stuff.
That doesn't happen anymore.
And there's reasons for that we could get into.
But there's another way to measure extremism.
And it's the actual policy changes.
And so we can observe that.
And I think, and in that respect, I don't think the right and the conservatives have really changed our policies.
I don't think we've gotten more extreme.
I think the left has gotten vastly more extreme.
They've changed their policies radically.
Medicare for all, open borders.
I mean, effectively open borders.
They don't like to use the word, but when you're saying decriminalize it, when you're saying no infrastructure at all on the border, when you're saying no more ICE detention beds, you're effectively saying open borders because you don't want to enforce it and you don't want to stop it.
So I don't know what else to call it.
And this is just some examples.
The Green New Deal.
Socialism is a good word now.
So I think that on that measure, only one side has really moved to an extreme as far as policy positions go.
And to your point, you look at Barack Obama and he's not the only one.
You can look at Chuck Schumer's old comments on this stuff.
I mean, Trump could have written those statements for them.
Yeah, I don't, I never, I actually never, when I talk about the immigration issue, I actually never talk about the drugs and the crime because I don't want to label these good people as criminals, drug dealers.
You know, that's the wrong.
That's the wrong, and most investment majority are.
But just because you're a good person and you want nice things doesn't mean you get to move to the front of the line on our immigration policy.
What the President proposed, I think, is absolutely right.
We have the opportunity to choose the best people from the world to come here.
And if you're a refugee, we have a system for that.
And if you're an actual asylum seeker, we have a system for that.
But what we should be totally opposed to is this idea that just because you made it to walk across the border, that all of a sudden you get to cut to the front of the line.
And that's exactly what's happening right now because of the loopholes we have.
If you bring a child with you, our laws are written so that we basically can't enforce it.
We cannot enforce these laws.
And this is for a couple of reasons.
One, the Flores settlement.
You might have heard that a lot.
What it means is you can't detain a child past 20 days.
So if a family comes across, or it's usually just a part of a family, because what they actually do is they split up.
They split their own families up because they don't want to deport one of the parents.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so the Flores settlement says you can't detain children, which effectively means we can never adjudicate these claims in time.
Whether it's an illegal crossing issue, like a criminal act of U.S. Code 1325, illegal crossing, or just their claiming asylum, either one, we can't adjudicate it in time.
So what ends up happening is a catch and release.
When they say, okay, show up for a court date, then what incentive do they have to show up for that court date?
And they just don't.
And we're talking, geez, in the earlier part of this year, we had over 100,000 a month.
So it gets to a question of sustainability.
Let's say all 100,000 people are perfectly good people.
But it's a sustainability question, and it's also a fairness question.
Why do they get to cut in front of the legal immigrants?
Why do they get so much more priority over all of the other people who want to be in our country around the world?
I mean, they don't have that opportunity to just walk across the border.
So it's utterly unsustainable.
And if we value a sense of sovereignty and rule of law, which I think we should, and we value the idea of having a managed system, then we have to put a stop to that.
And then have a good conversation about, well, maybe we need more workers.
Okay, well, then let's increase worker visas, if that's true.
Well, I think we show sympathy on them because they're poor people that are trying to do better for their life.
Whereas we look at people that are coming over from Canada, and if we had 100,000 people from Canada illegally immigrating into our country every year, we would go, hey, you fucks, get back over where you are.
Like, you guys have a great country already.
You don't have the problem of a lack of opportunity in Canada the way people do in Mexico.
There's a giant disparity between North America in terms of like the United States of America and Mexico.
And again, it seems like the only way that anyone could really truly fix that is if those countries could rise up to the level of Canada so they could be commensurate with the United States.
And this is what the left says we need to do, and I don't disagree with it at all.
The problem with what the left is suggesting is that's the only thing we need to do.
And that's just not true.
We also have to enforce our actual laws.
But it is a bipartisan, I think, agreement that we want to develop the countries closest to us.
I'm a co-sponsor on a bill that does just that.
It's a bipartisan bill.
And I think it encourages a more creative look at development in Central America.
The Bush Institute talks about this a lot, and I think it's a really good idea, which is basically economic empowerment through digital infrastructure.
So here in America, I mean, we make a lot of money just based on the gig economy.
Every individual can empower themselves and work towards that.
And that's really cool.
They don't have that opportunity down there.
And it's a lack of digital infrastructure, whether it's broadband or whatever.
So working towards investing in the right things as opposed to just, hey, here's some aid that your corrupt politicians can line their pockets with, and we can feel good about ourselves and pat ourselves on the back and think like we're doing good for other countries, but we're really not.
Again, feel good or do good.
It's always a good question to ask.
And so I think we're working towards those solutions in Congress now.