Senator Rand Paul challenges COVID-19 narratives, citing China’s early data and Sweden’s approach showing minimal child risk while exposing Fauci’s $450K salary and conflicts of interest—like his wife’s NIH ties—amid vaccine mandates and unproven efficacy claims. He warns federal hemp laws could crush a $25B industry by November, criticizes militarized U.S. actions in Venezuela as unjustified regime-change tactics, and pushes a "penny plan" to cut the $2T deficit while opposing welfare-funded unhealthy food purchases. Paul argues automation historically boosts employment but insists work remains vital for prosperity, even as AI reshapes labor. His calls for auditing refugee programs and sanctuary city accountability clash with Rogan’s concerns over ICE impersonation risks, underscoring tensions between enforcement and civil liberties in immigration reform. [Automatically generated summary]
So here's your book, Deception, The Great Cover-Up.
You were a lone voice of reason during the pandemic that, you know, for me, you were extremely valuable.
And I was cheering you on every step of the way when you were grilling Anthony Fauci.
With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about.
That guy was driving me fucking crazy.
It was mind-numbing how many people were going along with it and how many people just accepted what he was saying, ignored all the evidence that pointed to gain of function research, didn't freak out when it was quite obvious that he was lying about gain of function research.
And the point is, is that we knew this in China in the first couple of weeks, and we could have left the schools open.
And some countries left the schools open.
For the most part, Sweden left their schools open and treated this completely different and turned out with a similar, everybody wound up with a similar death rate with primarily the people dying were people who were older and overweight or both.
In the beginning, they were lying and they were saying that, although we now know that there was no data that showed that the vaccine stopped infection and stopped transmission.
But most of the people, the death rate we already knew in China was very, very small once you added in the kids.
Initially, they were saying it was a 3% death rate, which would have been, instead of 1 million people, you know, would have been significantly more.
3 million people may have died.
But they knew the death rate was less than that in China early on.
But part of the reason they thought it was so high is they weren't counting all the asymptomatic cases.
You know, they knew how many people were sick and how many people died, but the denominator was the number of people who actually were sick or who actually got the infection, but they weren't counting millions of people.
But Anthony Fauci denied this at every step.
He denied that natural immunity would protect you.
And one of my favorite quotes was from a guy named Martin Koldorf.
He was an epidemiologist at Harvard who ended up getting fired.
But recently he tweeted out, as about a year or two ago, he said, well, we knew about natural immunity from the time of the Athenian plague in 436 BC.
And we knew that knowledge until 2020.
Then we lost all knowledge of natural immunity.
But the good news is in 2025, we're starting to get back that knowledge.
But this was, Anthony Fauci knew better.
You know, he couldn't even read his own basic immunology books about the fact that you do develop immunity.
I think he just thought he was going to come in here and CNN was going to send their medical mercenary in with all his knowledge.
But you can't argue with someone when you can't use facts.
So he didn't have any facts at his disposal.
And he was working for a network that was openly lying about me taking veterinary medicine.
Like the whole thing was surreal.
And for someone who is, you know, up until 2020, I mean, I was reasonably distrustful of mainstream news, but in a normal way, like I'm sure they bend things a little bit or twist things a little bit.
I would have never thought I would watch a campaign against me like that, where every night it was horse dewormer, horse dewormer, Joe Rogan, dangerous conspiracy theories, COVID denier, vaccine denier.
I think it brings up a broader question, too, that when people tell you there's a consensus, and because the consensus exists, you cannot object.
I think that's a real danger to openness, to new ideas, but it's also a danger in medicine.
And in medicine, to say this is the consensus, and we're not going to do this.
So in the first month of this, maybe first or second month, Fauci comes in and I said, you know, many people who die from the flesh-eating bacteria, which is not the same, but it's a serious illness.
What they give them to try to treat them to prevent death and loss of limbs is high-dose IV steroids.
And I had a friend whose life was saved.
He didn't lose any of his limbs and he had this terrible illness.
And so I asked Anthony Fauci, I said, Do you think there's a chance as they're getting very, very sick and their lungs are filling up with fluid that we could try high-dose IV steroids like we do in other infections?
And he says, oh, no, no, we've tried that.
Turns out, and we mentioned this in the book, the best treatment when you were just about to go on the ventilator or on the ventilator, when you have a 50% chance of dying at that point, was IV steroids, an old generic medicine that a big pharma doesn't make much money off of.
Well, I mean, he has a history of using medicine that has already been through the approval rating with, you know, what they did with AZT during the pandemic of AIDS.
And the other thing about natural immunity that needed to be brought up is: so all the people that were declared essential kept working.
Like if you worked in a meat processing fact, these are hardworking people.
Many of them, you know, they're busting their butt all day long.
And there'd be like 296 people at a meat packing place in Missouri.
All of them got COVID.
Most of them survived, but what we should have been telling them is two weeks after you got it, come back to work.
You don't have to wear a mask now.
You've had it.
You have immunity.
You won't spread it to your family.
And guess what?
All the unknown about whether you're going to die or not, you survived and you're done.
But instead, we told people you might get it again and you still might die and you've got to wear a mask all day long when in reality we should have been celebrating the people who recovered and letting them have their freedom back.
I met a man in Orange County and his mom was like 83 and she was very sick and she ultimately died from COVID probably.
But she went to the hospital with COVID.
They wouldn't admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID while she had COVID, which is actually against all recommendations.
And this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing.
If you're going to Walgreen, do you think they ask you if you've had COVID recently before they gave you a shot?
And so really the best medical recommendation for a young person is one, you don't need the COVID vaccine, but you certainly shouldn't be taking it close to when you've had an infection because you've got an immune response that's going against the disease.
Then you add in another stimulant to it.
That's actually related to an increase in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of the young people.
Well, there's also the weirdness of what happened during the Reagan administration with vaccines where they're no longer liable for any vaccine injuries.
And when you call this a vaccine, it's very different than any vaccine that had ever been used before.
But yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse to.
But, you know, the disease aside, what was it like for you to watch this play being run?
Because that's essentially what it was.
It was like there was a play being run, and you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T, or you'd be attacked.
And you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for the pharmaceutical drug complex.
I mean, they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how there was blood on your hands.
Well, the belief in the vaccines and the belief that you should do it was like a religious belief.
And that's the way they treated it.
So if you didn't believe in it, you were someone to be demonized as a non-believer.
You were to be cast out.
And you weren't patriotic if you weren't wearing a mask.
And even after I've already had it, I'm walking down the hallway, you know, between the office buildings and the Capitol.
And all those reporters, they're 22 years old.
Most of them are journalist majors.
They never had a science course in their life.
And they're lecturing me about why I should be wearing a mask.
And it's like, I already had the disease.
I've been field up three weeks.
I don't need to wear a mask.
I've got immunity.
Well, how do you know that?
But even in the beginning when they said they didn't know, they did know.
We had an outbreak in 2003.
It was a different coronavirus.
It was the first SARS virus.
But we knew that those people 17 years later still had T cells and still had immunity to it.
One of my favorite stories, and we include this in the book, was there was a woman, and she was 102.
She goes to the hospital, and they bring her family in.
They're talking to her daughter, who's 85, says, we don't think your mom's going to make it.
And she said, have you met my mom?
And they said, well, and she survived.
But while she was there, they decided to test her for antibodies to the Spanish flu because when she was six months old, her mother was coming across the Atlantic.
But what was it like being in the government and seeing all this play out and that it was illogical, it didn't make any sense, but yet everyone was following the playbook.
One of my favorite scenes was there was a musical performance where there was a bunch of flutists and they had masks on with a whole cutout so they could play their flute through the mask.
And now the recommendation, even from the American Pediatric Association, who are terrible, they're the worst people in the world on vaccine mythology and religiosity.
The Virus Has Progressively Gotten Less Dangerous00:04:55
And it isn't based on risk-benefit analysis or anything.
It's this devotion that you're a good person, but you're also a smart person if you believe.
But it's in all vaccines.
And they've made the mistake because sometimes they had the first rotavirus vaccine 15 years ago they gave.
They'd take it off the market because six months later, they learned that something called intosusption, where the intestines go inside each other, which can be a real problem for a child, was happening more often with a vaccine.
They had to pull the vaccine.
But vaccines are like anything else.
It's like you and I would sit down and we'd talk about your drugs, and I'd talk about the side effects of each one, what your disease is, and what we can do.
Like, I'm not completely, like, for example, with the COVID vaccine, I don't think children should take it because they think the risk of the heart inflammation is greater than the chance of the disease.
Early on, they said for old people and overweight people that reduced hospitalization and death.
But I've been talking to the CDC because I want to know is that still true.
So let's do a new study.
The virus has progressively gotten less dangerous.
The community's progressively gotten more immunity.
So what was true in 2020 may no longer be true.
I want to know if you're over 65 and I give 1,000 people the vaccine, the brand new one, whatever it is, and I give 1,000 people no vaccine, is a reduction in hospitalization and death?
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Well, it's also this weird binary thing where it's like there's one thing that you could take and that's it.
There's no talk about strengthening your immune system with vitamin supplementation and what are the other options that you could have once you actually get sick.
Like what can you do?
IV vitamins are fantastic.
There's a lot of different things that people can do that are never recommended.
And really the two things that were controversial, at least among a lot of things, but ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, people will ask me about it and I'll say I don't know.
The government refused to study it.
And so it's very difficult because if you took in, let's say 2020, the virus was dangerous, and let's say you took 5,000 people under the age of 50 and you gave them ivermectin, and you did 5,000 people and you gave them nothing, almost nobody died in either category.
So it was hard to prove.
But I don't think ivermectin was harmful.
I don't think hydroxychloroquine was harmful either.
But they wouldn't study it.
And you need a big study.
So to figure out, since the death rate was so low for healthy people, you might need 10,000 people in each arm of the study to figure out what works and what didn't work.
And he writes back to her, no, we've done all the studies and there's no evidence that for a respiratory virus, it works.
And it turns out almost all the masks, the cloth masks, you know, you've heard all this.
The pores were bigger than the virus.
The virus goes through them.
The surgical mask, a little better, but if you have these big gaps on either side, do you think the virus isn't going around the mask?
And it probably goes through that mask also.
The N95 mask, if you're a doctor or nurse and you're going in and out of a room and you wash your hands and throw away the mask, there probably is some value.
So in the hospital, they recommended this.
But one of the reasons Anthony Fauci was such a danger is what he recommended was actually dangerous.
So he's wearing a Washington Nationals cloth mask to show people, or he's wearing a Black Lives Matter mask to show people he cares.
But if that's the advice and you're 75 years old and your wife has COVID and you're going in her room to take her food and you wear a cloth mask, you're risking getting COVID and dying yourself.
He gave us the wrong advice.
And then people thought they were safe with the cloth mask, so they're actually doing something they shouldn't do.
Or they're 85 years old and they're going to church, but they're wearing a cloth mask.
Well, no, that.
You probably shouldn't go to church, frankly.
You shouldn't be told you can't go to church.
But actually, the advice early on to avoid crowds and stay home if you were older or vulnerable.
But the kids should have just gone to school and tried to stay away from people.
The flu vaccine doesn't really stop with it either.
And I'm trying to get more statistics on the flu vaccine as well to see if it's accurate.
Because I think they lie to us every year about, you know, they say, oh, well, it wasn't this, it wasn't even the same category or type, but you're getting some crossover effect.
I think most of the time that is being inflated.
What they're telling you is not actually true.
And I'm trying to get them at the CDC to study all of this again because they have the power and the numbers to look at large numbers.
And let's be objective and tell people, you know, what is the odds next year the flu vaccine will work for you.
And we used to say, well, it may not work, but if you're at risk, go ahead and take it.
So it used to be over 50 or over 65.
Now they want everybody to take the flu vaccine.
And it probably is probably better unless your child has an immunodeficiency disease to go ahead and get these and develop immunity over time.
I think if they were here, they would argue that it's science and it isn't for profit.
But they argue vigorously against revealing if they're receiving money from big pharma.
So what I ask is if you're on the vaccine committee and you're going to recommend that every child get a COVID vaccine, shouldn't you have to release whether you get royalties from big pharma?
And Anthony Fauci in committee said, we don't have to do it.
The law, and he quoted the law, says we don't have to do it.
So for two, three, four years now, I'm still trying to get this passed.
I've gotten all the Republicans to agree to it, and I've gotten all the Democrats but two or three.
And I'm still trying to get it passed unanimously.
But it would say if you're a government scientist and you get royalties from Pfizer or from one of the big companies, you have to actually list it on a form.
And really, you should be then recused from voting.
And it's the one sort of exception to we have all these things preventing kickbacks to doctors, except for vaccines, and that's somehow exempt.
So, yeah, no, we've looked at whether legislation could fix this, and I don't think we've found a good answer, but I have definitely looked to see if there's a way Congress could try to fix this.
So in the book, I tell the story of George Washington.
One, to let people know I'm not against.
And the smallpox vaccine was amazing.
And in George Washington's day, it was actually live.
So what you did is, if you'd had smallpox and you were doing pretty well and you survived, and you didn't have a bad case, you had a minor case, you had four or five POCs, not a lot, as you were recovering, that open a scab, take pus from your arm, stab somebody else's arm, and take the pus from your infection and stick it into somebody else.
That's a live vaccine.
That's crazy.
But, and they did have some people die from it.
But the death rate from smallpox is one out of three.
And when it would show up in Boston, you'd have like 20,000 people die and the whole town would get it.
It was terrible.
And so people actually chose, but people weren't being forced to do it.
But the George Washington case is very instructive.
Martha wants to come visit him at the camps, at the war camps, and there were more deaths in the Revolutionary War from disease than there were from bullets.
He says you can't come until you're vaccinated for smallpox.
It wouldn't vaccinate.
It was called inoculated because you're getting stuck with the disease, not a vaccine.
But people say, well, I guess Washington took it too if he believes so much in this.
I was like, no, because he already had smallpox.
He got smallpox when he was 15 in Barbados.
They understood immunity.
We have understood immunity for thousands of years, and yet it just went out the window with Anthony Fauci saying, well, we just don't know.
We just don't know.
We do know.
We don't always know how perfect it's going to be, but we do know that nobody got COVID the second time around and had a worse case the second time around.
Well, one thing we do know is that when Biden left office, he was granted this very bizarre pardon where he got a pardon that goes back to 2014 for crimes he was never accused of.
Never convicted.
I mean, it's got to be one of the first times that anybody's ever been together.
And so we have under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for Anthony Fauci to Merritt Garland twice, and I sent them evidence that he had lied to Congress, which was a felony.
They just ignored me.
I've been working with Bobby Kennedy, and he's been very helpful on this.
I have a good relationship with him.
He's given us a lot of information, and we've looked at the communications.
And in Anthony Fauci's communications, we now have evidence that he was telling people like Francis Collins, read this and destroy it.
Well, you can't do that.
The executive branch, when they communicate, they're required to keep their communications, and they're required to do it on government devices.
So we have this evidence, and I've summarized it again in a criminal referral to Trump's Attorney General, and I still haven't gotten action.
But there's a couple reasons we should do it.
One, he shouldn't get away with lying.
He shouldn't get away with destroying records.
But two, we should check the pardon.
Is an auto-pen pardon valid?
And is a pardon a retrospective pardon back 10 years that doesn't mention a crime?
Can you give people a pardon for everything they did in a 10-year period?
I can't imagine.
And I think the court might narrow that.
But it doesn't happen unless the Trump Justice Department will do something.
And I've been sending them referrals, and I can't get them to do anything.
When you were having that conversation with him about gain of function research, which clearly gain of function research was being done at the Wuhan lab.
And he was just standing in front saying that under the definition of gain of function research, that that does not qualify.
We all knew he was lying, and he was parsing words.
He was trying to have a semantics type of argument.
But one of the reasons we know he's lying, and one of the things that I've presented as evidence, is there was a group text chain on February 1st of 2020.
So you have all these virologists who are saying privately it came from the lab and publicly it didn't.
You have them all communicating.
But one of the things Anthony Fauci says about the Wuhan lab is he says, we know it's dangerous and possible because we know they're doing gain of function research.
So we're funding them.
He would never admit we're funding him because we were funding EcoHealth, this intermediary.
So he said, oh, we're not funding them.
Well, we're funding them through EcoHealth.
It's not gain of function.
Except for then he says the experiments they're doing are gain of function.
And so I think everything about it was dishonest.
He got away with it because people in the scientific community still to this day defend him.
And people on the left made it a partisan.
I don't know why this is a Republican-Democrat issue, but all of the main networks still defend him.
You know, he was given a million-dollar prize.
Some nonprofit gave him a million-dollar prize.
How's a bureaucrat get to accept a million-dollar prize while they're working for the government?
Then when he leaves the government, he gets 24-7 limo service and security.
He's got people in front of his home stopping traffic like you do for a president getting in the car, which I'm okay for former presidents, but that's about it.
You know, Anthony Fauci should have never got this.
I will say that Trump ended it.
And everybody said, oh, he'll be killed.
And it's like, you know, I guarantee a lot of us have more threats than Anthony Fauci has.
And none of us have a limo picking us up every day.
We know he made more than the president towards the end.
He was making $450,000 a year.
But his wife, if you ever had an ethical problem, you know who he went to, his wife.
His wife was in charge of bioethics for the NIH.
So if there was a question of whether or not his royalties were a conflict, he would ask his wife to find out if he was acting unethically.
She made about $250,000.
So they're really making a combined $700, which I'm not against money.
You work hard, people pay you money.
I'm all for it.
But I am against the government paying bureaucrats that kind of money.
And so, and he really, there should be term limits for people in those positions.
You shouldn't be there for 40 years.
So he appointed all the people beneath him, and he stacked the deck.
And, you know, I asked the question, and this was an email from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci.
He says, take them down, talking about Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH now, talking about Martin Kaldorf, and then an epidemiologist from Oxford.
Take them down.
And so when I have scientists come before my committee, I'll ask them the first question.
Have you ever or would you ever send another scientist a note saying to take down a fellow scientist you disagreed with?
My goodness, that sounds like the mafia or something.
It doesn't sound like someone who's supposed to be above the fray, objective scientist.
I don't think with the current one, we don't know all of his royalties.
He would say, oh, I got $25 or something.
That's not, it might have been true for a year, but there are years in the past that he was getting more.
I think Open the Books or the Open Secrets, that group has gone through and through Freedom of Information, has gotten information that like 1,500 doctors got $1.5 billion or 1,500 scientists got $1.5 billion in royalties.
So it's not an insignificant amount of money.
It's a lot of scientists.
And once again, I'm not even sure I'm forbidding it.
I just want to know if any of them are on a committee voting for the drug that they got money from that particular drug company.
The woman that was appointed for the NIH under Biden and never got approved, you know, she may well be an ethical person, but I think she's done research grants of $231 million from Pfizer, and it was listed.
And it doesn't mean she's a dishonest person, but I wonder how she could be objective with Pfizer if through her career.
And all that money didn't go to her, it was grants that she oversaw, and some of the money went to her.
And that doesn't mean it's illegal or unethical, but I think it's hard for her to judge objectively a company that has been the main financer of her entire career.
Now, Bobby Kennedy has put, you know, and the left-wing people hate all the people he's put on there.
I think he's doing a good job of getting the people out who were so pro-vaccine that it was a religion for them.
And I think they have better people.
And I've noticed as they go around the room, I don't know if you've seen this when they vote, they start by saying before they vote, I have no conflicts of interest.
They are verbally announcing I have no conflicts of interest, which is a big improvement.
But I really want to see all the scientists, who they get it from, how much, and then let, you know, part of oversight is not just Congress, it's the public.
And I think that, you know, and this was sort of the problem and how Anthony Fauci became so prominent.
You know, there was, you know, the president was out speaking, and the president speaks off the cuff and doesn't always say things that are always exactly accurate.
And so as he was saying stuff, many of these sort of establishment senators were saying, we need somebody else.
We need a scientist at those press conferences.
So it was actually many of my colleagues who pushed Anthony Fauci, pushed them through Pence and pushed them through the president to accept him.
And one of the things that's still inexplicable to this day is that as Anthony Fauci leaves government, President Trump gives him a gold medal, a presidential medal of honor, you know, as he leaves, which, you know, knowing what we know, I think should have never happened.
The people that were so vehemently opposed to your position and the people that were so pro-vaccine and pro-mal, like a lot of them are still in the government.
Yeah, and a lot of them are still in the news media, too.
I was called all kinds of names by people.
And it turns out that almost everything I was complaining about, turns out in retrospect, I was right about most of them.
The masks, really, most of them didn't work.
And even the ones that work, a lot of people don't realize this.
An N95 mask works to a certain degree, but once you've touched it, you've contaminated it.
And also, after you've worn it for four hours, the moisture from your breath gets rid of the electrostatic charge and it doesn't really work very well.
If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you see someone out by themselves and they have an N95 mask on, you can probably guess their party registration.
Yeah, one of them called me a bloviating ass, and I haven't been back on since about four years ago and said I was so awful to Anthony Fauci and that everything I said was dangerous and I was endangering lives.
But I was right about the masks.
I was right about natural immunity.
But I was also right about this six feet of distance.
It's actually the opposite of what they told you.
So let's say you were 80 years old and you and I were coming together in March of 2020.
And well, let's say even worse, we're going to go to choir practice, but we're going to spread out six feet apart.
Yeah, it was made up, but it was made up in the wrong direction.
So what he did is encourage people to stay six feet apart from people, go to a crowded room, go to choir practice, and just stay away from people.
But if you're at risk, you shouldn't be a choir practice.
Not by law, but by advice.
So he actually gave you unsafe advice on the masks.
Cloth masks don't work, so he's giving you unsafe advice to go help and feed your wife or your husband with a cloth mask on.
Natural immunity does work, and he told you it doesn't work.
It was the opposite of everything he told you.
But he also never got, and I kept saying this in the hearings, he needed humility, humility to know that there's a possibility he's wrong in what he's saying and it should be advice.
And this is what they don't get about public.
If I were the public health doctor and a new pandemic came up, I should give advice, not mandates, advice based on the best things we know, and other doctors should give advice because there might be other doctors that disagree with me on it.
So you can choose.
It's sort of the idea of getting a second opinion.
You go to your doctor and you think something's not quite right and he or she wants to operate on my leg and maybe I want to wait another three weeks, see if my leg feels better in three weeks.
You get another opinion or you go home and wait three weeks and see if you get better.
When you're one of the rare people that's in the government that does have a background in medicine, and at least in medical training, and you're experiencing all this illogical shit, what is that like for you?
Three years into this, the doctor of the Senate was still recommending there are 16-year-olds that are pages, they're 15, 16 years old, that they get three vaccines.
And I absolutely steadfastly think that that's malpractice and a risk to them.
So I fought it, and I would come to the floor, and this is weird.
No one's ever done this.
I would ask on the floor of the Senate for unanimous consent to pass a rule of the Senate that they can opt out of this program.
You know, they can listen and write, check something and opt out.
Because it turns out that the myocarditis increases in prevalence the more you take.
So if you take one COVID vaccine, it's less likely you get myocarditis.
If you take a second one, it's a little more likely a third one.
So it's the opposite of what you should be telling children.
And the death rate for a healthy 16-year-old really is essentially zero.
I mean, it is so close to zero.
Somebody might be able to find a healthy year-old that died at 16.
Almost everybody that was on CNN, not to keep mentioning CNN, but they would put these people on there and they would hide the fact that they had terminal cancer.
And it is sad that a child dies any time, but they were dying from their cancer and they just happened to have COVID, you know, and it was dishonest because they were trying to scare regular people.
Also, there's a giant incentive that in this country and in New Zealand, they're the only two countries in the world where they allow pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise.
And it's a problem.
I very rarely watch regular television, but every now and then I'll just go, what are these fucking crazy people up to?
And I'll watch MSNBC or CNN and see a million drug ads.
And the number of drug ads is staggering.
And the weirdness in those ads, the calm tone of their voice as they list off these horrific side effects.
Well, and the thing that's hard to imagine is there's sometimes for a disease that like 5,000 people in the country have, a disease that, as a physician, even though I know the names of most of the diseases, I'll be kind of uncertain about that.
I don't remember seeing anybody ever with that disease, and yet it's being advertised on MSNBC.
And then the question is, do you think that affects what the newscasters are saying on the news?
And you wonder who's buying a drug when they say, well, you could die, you could become paralyzed, you could have a stroke, you could have a blood clot.
He is very, very powerful, and a lot of people owe him.
You know, he raised money for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars, passed it out to the lesser-known senators and helped them get elected when they would get challenges.
And so then they all owe him.
And so I forced an amendment.
And it's funny, then people in there are going, why are you doing this?
The government's shut down.
Why are you gumming up the works with a vote on hemp?
Because they stuck it on the bill to reopen the government.
It's not my choice to talk about hemp at that time.
That was my only choice.
And so I brought forward an amendment.
I got like 20-something votes, and 70 of them voted.
But they voted to set the limit and to change the amount of THC in the plant.
So all the plants are illegal now.
All the seeds are illegal.
There's a real industry of farmers who grow this.
And the thing is, who are we to tell somebody who can't sleep at night that an ambient is better for them than taking a hemp gummy to go sleep at night?
Or a veteran who could take Percocet or some kind of psychotropic drug or who has anxiety or post-traumatic stress, and we're going to tell them they can't take a hemp gummy.
I think it's insane and very much this presumption that we know what's best for everyone.
I'm for the freedom to take it, but I just sleep pretty good.
So it's not really something I can attest to exactly how it works.
But people who do take it to me that have one of the drinks say it might be like drinking a beer or maybe not even drinking a beer when you drink one of these THC drinks.
So the cannabis businesses in the states where it's legal don't want it legal nationally because then it would interfere with their business because you'd be able to order it through the mail.
Yeah, the McConnell language says you can't have more than 0.4 milligrams, which is such a low number that I don't think it will have any effect.
I mean, frankly, the THC is the effect.
And so if you make the THC number so small, I don't think people will take them.
The CBD oil people might still take some of that, but I assume the effect that people are getting from the CBD oil, if they rub it on, has to be the THC.
What I was going to say was, my mom, not my mom, rather, my wife's mom, uses CBD with THC, and she's found that that's more effective for arthritis and aches and pains than CBD without it.
She's done both, and she says the CBD with THC is more effective.
And there are some people, and once again, I'm not here to tell you to take it or not take it.
I'm for the freedom for people to make their own decision.
There's some people with children who have seizures who take medications and the kid still has 100 seizures a day, which isn't good for your brain and for the child.
And some of them have added some CBD drops they give to the child CBD oil with the THC.
But anyway, they go up to Romney, and it's a person in a wheelchair with MS. And they said, are you in favor of making it illegal?
I take marijuana at night to sleep.
Are you in favor of making that illegal for me to take it?
I have MS. Would you be for making it illegal?
Romney looked right at him and said, I sure would.
And I was like, what kind of person says that?
What kind of person is so presumptuous of their moral position that they're going to tell you it's immoral to take that, but fine to take some antipsychotic drug or some kind of narcotic that the pharmacy, pharmaceutical companies sell, but we're not going to let you use marijuana?
My joke when I tell people who's opposed to this, like McConnell, who's older than older than dirt, is that they all watched Reefer Madness in 1937 at the matinee, and they'll never forget what happens if you get that reefer madness.
And some of them probably were alive in 1937, could have actually seen the movie.
But that's it.
It's an irrational sort of fear.
But on the other side of this, we're on a program that a lot of people hear.
I don't want people at home thinking I want everybody and every 15-year-old out there smoking marijuana after school.
I think there are some side effects to smoking marijuana all the time, particularly for the brain.
William Randolph Hearst was responsible for this whole terrifying craze of people thinking that marijuana was driving people nuts and jumping out of buildings.
In 1930-something, I forget the year, they came up with a new product called the Decorticator.
And it was in Popular Science magazine, Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop, because they had this new machine that allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber.
William Randolph Hearst owned Hearst Publications, but he also owned paper mills.
Hemp was a far more effective and far more durable form of paper.
He was going to compete with hemp, and he had forests that he was using for his paper, where they were, you know, for paper mills.
And hemp was going to replace all that.
It was a competitor.
So they were arguing against it as a commodity.
Marijuana was never a name for cannabis.
Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco.
And so they started saying in his newspapers, they started printing these fake stories about how blacks and Mexicans were taking this new drug and raping white women.
And that's where reefer bandis came from.
And they call this new drug marijuana.
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Most things that come out in government, if you look beneath the surface, they all have pretty names.
They have acronyms, say Patriotism, the Patriot Act.
You must be anti-patriotic if you're not for the Patriot Act.
But most of the things they say, it's the opposite, or someone has put something forward that really is about, like, let's say it's a banking regulation.
You say, this is going to protect the poor people.
But it turns out the banking regulation is easier paid for and absorbed by big banks.
And so what happens to your small local bank, and you say, how come all the small banks get gobbled up by big banks?
It's because you put regulations on that who favored?
The big banks favor the regulations because it puts the small bank out of business.
They get absorbed by the big bank.
And then the new banks trying to come in can't afford the compliance cost.
Right now, one of the extraordinary things we're doing with banks, and I don't think many people know this, the Federal Reserve is now paying interest to big banks on keeping reserves at the Federal Reserve.
There's $3 trillion there.
Last year, the big banks, primarily the big banks in New York, got $187 billion in interest.
Previously, that interest would go back to the Treasury to offset the debt.
That's about 10 percent of our debt.
So our debt is 10 percent worse because we're now paying, and we never did this.
Before 2010, we never paid interest on reserves.
And what it means to pay interest on reserves is that it's an incentive for the Fed just to leave it there.
Why loan it to you if you're expanding a business when I can just leave it here and get 4 percent?
It also keeps interest rates from going down.
Because if the Fed pays the big bank 4 percent, are they going to loan it to you for 3.5 when it can just sit at the Fed and gain 4?
So it's kind of, you know, President Trump always wants what he wants, and sometimes he wants good things, but he, you know, may not go about it the best way.
He wants interest rates to be lower.
I think most people do.
But one way to make interest for her is tell the Fed they can't pay interest to these big banks.
I've been trying for like three months to get out of conversation with Besant.
And I held up one of their – with the Secretary of Treasury.
I held up one of their appointees last week, which is one of the things you do to get the attention of the people you want to talk to.
And they've agreed to meet with me, but we're already halfway into January.
But I'm trying to get a meeting with Besant to talk to him about this idea of paying interest because they said, oh, it will only take $30 billion to set up the system.
He's actually studying contents of what you exhale to look for cancer markers.
So, I mean, they're really minute.
But he's going to try to diagnose things like, you know, you'll hear of a friend, you know, is like 45 years old and has pancreatic cancer.
Or we actually have a former senator right now, Ben Sasse, who says he has stage four pancreatic cancer.
And the reason it spreads before you know you have it, but he's trying to get a – and he has a test that measures markers just from what you exhale to try to pick up on cancers before they be detected.
But it's either way, just for responsible use for adults, it just doesn't make any sense that they would change it from what it is now and make it more restrictive.
Well, it's also – you're enabling the cartel to make money off of it.
That's the real problem.
I had a gentleman on my podcast named John Norris.
He was a game warden in California and, you know, just checking fishing licenses and making sure that people are following the laws.
And wound up chasing down a dry creek and trying to find out like had a farmer diverted the creek, like what had happened here.
Well, it turned out there was an illegal grow operation by the cartel because when California made marijuana legal in the state for adult use, what they did was make it a misdemeanor to grow it illegally.
So it's just a misdemeanor.
So the cartel just started growing it in state parks and forests.
And so they would find these heavily armed cartel operations in the middle of national parks and national forests.
And, you know, his group became – he's got a great book called Hidden War.
And his organization became essentially a tactical group.
You know, they had Belgian Malinois and bulletproof vests and they were having shootouts with the cartel in the forest because these guys were growing this stuff.
And 90 percent of all the marijuana that's sold in these states where it's illegal was being grown in a state where it's only a misdemeanor to grow it.
So they're growing it in California.
And they were using all sorts of horrific pesticides and herbicides that are illegal everywhere else.
But they would use them.
And so you'd get pesticide poisoning, herbicide poisoning.
You know, it's crazy.
It's like we're – it's just responsible adult use.
We're curtailing.
And the way we're doing this is by propping up these illegal drug cartels the same way that during alcohol prohibition, they propped up the mob.
It's one year from when we passed it, and I think we passed it in probably November.
So this coming November, the entire hemp industry will go bust.
This is a twenty five billion dollar industry.
This is not a small industry.
And there's a lot of jobs.
There's a lot of people using it.
Like you say, these aren't reefer madness people out there committing crimes.
It's your grandmother, your mother.
It's people who have difficulty sleeping.
It's, you know, there's still hope.
And I'm trying to reverse it.
I have several bills that we're working on and going to introduce in the near future to either try to extend the deadline and or change it.
I'd like to change it where if your state has regulated it, the federal government would accede to your state regulation or allow your state to regulate it.
Yeah, and, you know, it's like, how can someone effectively govern if you haven't experienced life outside of the government?
It just doesn't seem even rational that you could be a person that would be a good representation of all these hardworking people if you've never actually had a job.
Yeah, and I'll give you an example of what I think is bizarre.
So we've been blowing up these people in boats off the coast of Venezuela.
They're accused of running drugs, but nobody knows their names and nobody's put up any evidence.
When we've had them September 2nd, two of them were still clinging to the wreckage.
They're shipwrecked.
They blew them up.
And so what I think is bizarre is I hear mostly my Republican colleagues say, well, we shouldn't have to.
How do we know they're not armed?
And it's like, but there's this thing called presumption of innocence.
They say it doesn't apply.
Well, it actually always has applied on the oceans.
We have always – we've had drug interdiction, but we have always stopped boats and asked to search them.
If they flee or shoot at the Coast Guard, they will get shot and blown up, but it's usually an escalatory sort of steps.
We know that when the Coast Guard boards vessels off of Miami and off of California, one in four of the boats they board don't have any drugs on them.
So I look at my colleagues who say they're pro-life and they value God's inspiration in life, but they don't give a shit about these people in the boats.
And are they terrible people in the boats?
I don't know.
They're probably poor people in Venezuela and Colombia.
And really they say, well, we're at war with them.
They're committing war by bringing drugs into America.
They're not even coming here.
They're going to these islands in the south part of the Caribbean, the cocaine, and it's not fentanyl at all.
The cocaine is going to Europe.
Those little boats can't get here.
No one's even asked this common question.
Those boats have these four engines on them.
They're outboard boats.
You can probably go about 100 miles before you have to refuel, 2,000 miles from us.
They have to refuel 20 times to get here.
They really – it was all a pretense and a false argument.
But I guess what I don't feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don't matter at all and we just blow them up.
And against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we never have blown up people who were shipwrecked.
It's against the military code of justice to do that.
And we're doing it and everybody just says, oh, well, they're drug dealers.
Why do you think they were attacking those people?
Because I've heard a bunch of different theories and one of the big theories was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out of office.
But the weird thing about it is they really care about drugs except for the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, who was given a 40-year sentence, was tried, was found guilty.
He was given 40 years in a U.S. jail, and he's let go at the same time we're arresting Maduro because he's attacking the United States with drugs.
And then I get this stuff.
I had this on air from a respectable journalist the other day.
She said, well, don't you care about the kids in our country dying from fentanyl?
That's why I've opposed it because, look, I have no love lost for Maduro.
I wrote another book called The Case Against Socialism.
I think the socialism, historically, there's been a link between socialism and state-sponsored violence.
And so in the book, we talk about a 16-year-old girl who has a gang, and her gang's turf or territory are the dumpsters outside of restaurants to scavenge for food.
That's what Maduro and Chavez did to Venezuela.
And so I'm glad he's gone.
I'm glad.
You know, I hope they choose wiser.
But at the same time, if the predicate is we're going to snatch people, why don't we snatch da Silva from Brazil?
Some people say Bolsonaro is unfairly in prison.
It may be true.
And they say da Silva cheated in the election.
It may also be true.
But should the president of the United States, no matter who he or she is, have the ability, without a vote of Congress, the people's representatives, just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in it?
One, it doesn't usually work.
I'm hoping it's successful here.
But, you know, we've tried it in other places.
It's one of the things I liked about Donald Trump.
Because, you know, they don't have free elections.
It's an authoritarian government.
The people are suffering.
So it's this idea that that's wrong and government should.
But and I think that's a noble concept to want better government, more freedom for people.
But I could probably list for you a dozen different countries that have autocratic rulers right now.
And we could go in and we could arrest them all and put people in place.
But it sometimes backfires.
For example, I think one of the things I think there's a good feeling towards America from a lot of Venezuelans right now that are happy that Maduro is gone.
But ask them again in six months if we're still controlling their oil and we're doling out a little bit of money.
But the money is not going to the people.
It's going to the socialist government.
So you realize we've traded one socialist for another.
Maduro is gone, but his second in charge, who is elected with him and holds all of his beliefs, is there.
And if she graciously or fearfully decides to accept what they're telling her, that we're going to confiscate all the oil and we're going to sell it on the international market.
We're going to give her a little bit back if she behaves.
And let's say that austerity doesn't lead to a real vibrant economy.
I think six months from now, the people will be just as upset as they were.
And they'll still have the same government, essentially.
So one of the things that I've read was one of the primary reasons why we went in was because Russia and China were also interested in Venezuela's oil.
And China had met with Maduro literally the day that he was kidnapped by the United States, right?
The best way, I think, is not through war to keep China out of South America.
It's through trade, cooperation.
That's why threatening to bomb Colombia was a bad idea because we should continue to trade.
We buy coffee from them.
We buy bananas from down there.
We should have trade.
So this Monday, I sent the president a text and he responded to him.
I said, the ambassador called me and he said their president's been trying for several months to get a phone call through and he'd love to talk to President Trump.
And the good thing about President Trump, and this is something I always really like about him, he'll make decisions on the spot.
It's one of the things I really enjoyed about him.
When you see these things at play, like the kidnapping of Venezuela and the bombing of the boats, how informed are you about why they're making their decisions?
Are you – do you have conversations with the people that are making the decisions?
And the only way they can make war with the drugs is if they're hitting you over the head with the drugs and then making you take the drugs, all right?
So I think that's ridiculous.
And I think that there is a difference between crime and war.
And the reason why they have to get it is it normally – like if – let's say the boat came all the way here.
That speedboat got all the way to Miami, offloaded it into a U-Haul truck and it's going down the road.
Do we stand on the side of the road and hit it with grenade launchers?
Nobody would be for that.
All of a sudden, we're going to believe that, well, gosh, there might be the wrong – we might blow up the wrong truck or maybe we got the information wrong.
We would stop and search them.
But why don't we do the boats?
The Coast Guard actually still does.
Amidst all this, Coast Guard is still stopping dozens of boats.
But they tell us we're only blowing up the ones that are related to the terrorist, the trend de Aragua or whatever.
I don't know how they can know that with certainty.
I don't know how they can know with certainty that some of – I think most of these probably were drug boats.
They wanted regime change and I think Rubio has wanted regime change.
He's been itching for it for 15 years and I think he has a great deal of influence with the president.
And they have convinced – and it's selling someone like the president that he can use his power for good is an argument that I think a lot of people would succumb to.
He believes that he's doing good.
And if it all works out and freedom rings true in Venezuela, people will say, well, gosh, yeah, I think he did.
And that's why now people think he did the right thing.
I think people don't know yet what's going to happen, whether or not people are going to be happy keeping the same socialist government, whether they'll have a free election and somebody else to win isn't known yet.
But I do think that while he's done that and it seems to have worked, it's my job and others to say that really invading Greenland is not a reasonable thing, invading Cuba, invading Colombia, that there has to be pushback.
But I get a lot of flack.
I mean there are people that rally behind the president that are telling me I need to pipe down, that I need to be quiet.
So the threats – Who tells you that?
Well, a lot of the – the mob, the internet mob is angry.
It is kind of war and we're going to take people as if it's war but it's not really war.
It was an arrest warrant.
And they've actually persuaded some otherwise good people in my caucus to say, well, normally I would be against bombing another nation's capital and removing the leader.
Oh, but he was indicted for the indictment.
Most people don't know this.
Part of the indictment is for drugs.
He's breaking a U.S. law.
How do we indict foreigners in their country?
They haven't broken a law in our country for breaking a law.
But other than drugs, they've also indicted Maduro for possessing or conspiring to possess machine guns.
And it's like what leader in the world doesn't have security guards with machine guns?
But the – what I had read about the extraction was that the oil that is in Venezuela is almost like asphalt and that it requires all these – That could be.
And so there may be more difficulty than Saudi Arabia.
But I think also the system, you know, so when you look at Venezuela and you look at what happens under price controls, you need prices to go up and down based on demand because if you don't, you have shortages.
If you set the price too low and I'm a manufacturer, I'm not going to sell it for that.
So you also can get shortage.
If you set the price too high, then it just sits on the shelf and a black market develops.
There was a story in Behind the Iron Current, and I think it was in Poland.
They get into some problem where they don't have money.
But if you say it can be 10 percent, what does that tell me about my behavior?
I just keep borrowing at 10 percent.
I might have to stop someday at 30 percent.
You know what I mean?
And so the marketplace develops these things.
But that price is sending signals back to people.
It's the same way with interest rates on houses.
The president's always like, we need lower interest rates.
Houses are so expensive.
Why don't we just fix the price at 2 percent and tell the banks they can't get more than 2 percent?
The problem is this.
If there's a boom and everybody's buying houses and the demand goes up for houses, prices will go up.
The demand for the money goes up.
And as the interest rates rise, then the economy will slow down.
So in 2000, from 2000 to about 2007, the Federal Reserve kept the interest rates low.
It's like 2 percent.
You could get money.
It was free.
And there was this boom in houses.
And there was some dishonesty, too, in the subprime market.
But the boom kept going.
If interest rates had risen to 4 or 5 percent, home sales would have gone down and people would have lamented that.
But you wouldn't have gotten such an enormous boom in the crash.
So the cycle of the economy going up and down is dictated by interest rates.
And you want interest rates.
You don't want high interest rates.
Nobody wants that.
But if you don't allow them to move, that sends a signal back that we're buying too many houses and we're building too many houses and we'll slow down.
If you just send the signal to keep interest rates at 2, you get the boom so high up here that the crash is devastating like it was in 2010.
What are your feelings about corporations buying up personal homes?
Like there's Blackstone and there's a bunch of different corporations that have bought – I don't know if it's Blackstone, but I heard that Blackstone – there was a drop in their stock price because of this thing that Trump is trying to do now to stop corporations from buying individual family homes and then leasing them out to people.
So in a free market, in a free world where you can choose a hemp product, you also make contracts with who you sell to.
So for me to tell you – to me it's a freedom issue.
If I tell you you can't sell your house to Blackstone, that's me limiting your choices.
Maybe Blackstone is going to give you 5 percent more.
I'm stealing 5 percent from you.
And it's not a given that it's going to be bad.
It might be bad.
But I think if you look at this carefully, for example, what's – one of the impediments or one of the costs of buying a house is the real estate price.
So the realtor takes – they used to take what, like 6 percent.
But now sometimes you can get 3 percent and you go through a bigger company.
So corporatization or making something bigger where a bigger entity owns something sometimes leads to lower costs because they can actually lower costs.
So to me it's just a freedom issue.
I don't think actually probably – I think the price of homes has gone up because the value of the dollar has gone down.
We are destroying the dollar.
It's like is gold more precious?
No, people are freaking out about how many dollars have been printed and how much debt we're incurring.
So the dollar loses its value.
And prices are home.
I don't – I'm not making light of the problem.
You know, I have kids of the age of trying to get into houses.
Yeah, I think the fear is like people are terrified that these enormous corporations are going to buy up all of the single-family homes and you won't be able to get one and you'll be forced to lease a home and you'll never be able to own a home.
I think I would probably want to study it more thoroughly to find out if that's actually the result because some people talk about a fear of it happening.
You know, if I'm Blackstone, I'm not doing stuff just to hold them around.
I'm not like, you know, Mr. Potter on, you know, It's a Wonderful Life and wringing my hands together and I'm going to wait.
They don't make any money holding on to a bunch of houses.
They're going to have to sell them.
And it may be – what if Blackstone does have 10,000 homes?
Maybe they'll do it with a reduced – you go directly to them by website.
Goldman Sachs owns homes.
There are entities like this – Buffett, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway owns homes as well.
So I don't think it's a brand new thing.
But I would explore it.
I think the – it's a reaction to think big is bad and that these big players are going to rip us off.
But if it's a free contract, I think more of whether or not I should infringe on your liberty and tell you you can't sell your house to Blackstone.
I think that's me limiting your ability to contract with whoever you want.
It's – I think the fear is – well, the only reason why they would be doing it is that they could make more money leasing the homes out than – Yeah, I don't know.
I'm guessing they bought apartments too because kids are staying in apartments longer and the apartment business has been a really good business for like the last 10 years buying apartments.
But corporations own apartments.
I mean the real disaster isn't stuff like that, the marketplace.
The disaster of like rent and homes and not having enough places like to live in Manhattan, which is very expensive, or New York in general.
And I'm positive the socialist is going to make it worse.
Rent control, what does that mean?
So if you're in the middle of Manhattan and you can get apartments for $300, you're like, oh, that's great.
But if I'm the landlord and all the stuff is broken in there and there's holes in the walls, I'm not fixing it for $300 a month.
I need $3,000 a month to keep the place up.
So what happens is the apartments go to – into ruin and also there's a shortage.
You need money and you need big people with money to build apartment complexes, particularly in New York where you got to tear something down and build something new.
I'm not doing it if you're going to tell me what my rent is going to be.
So socialism doesn't work.
And the one thing people don't understand about it because they fear somebody being ripped off and how expensive something is, is there was an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, and he put it this way.
He said the miracle of capitalism is not that the queen can buy silk stockings, but the factory girl can.
But in the beginning, the first person and the only person to buy them will be queens and kings and rich people.
So the story of calculators, my dad had a calculator.
He was a doctor and we were well-to-do.
We weren't extraordinarily rich but well-to-do.
He had a calculator for $300 in the 1970s.
All he could do was add, subtract, and multiply and it was about this thick and this big.
But you can go tour a condo and pretend to buy a condo and the real estate agent will give you a calculator now.
But in the beginning, only rich people got them.
But if you forbid rich people from getting them at a high price, the only way it gets to a low price, like Tesla started with more expensive cars at a high price.
They're coming down, but they only come down because rich people bought them first.
So we can never be of the notion that we're going to make things better by preventing prices from being too high in something.
So the queen may have bought the first silk stockings, but eventually capitalism brings the price down enough that you have mass distribution and actually a factory girl can buy them.
I think the first thing to acknowledge is both parties are equally guilty.
The debt is the problem of both parties and the spending is both parties.
And there is a compromise.
I tell people it's a dirty little deal that's going on right in front of your nose.
The right, Lindsey Graham and the Warhawks want more military money.
The left, Chris Murphy and Booker, they want more welfare.
What's the compromise?
You scratch my back, I'll scratch you.
I'll let you have more military money if you let me have the welfare money.
So the compromise of the last 50 years is they've both grown enormously.
But the budget we vote on is only one-third of the spending.
Two-thirds of the spending is mandatory spending that's just on autopilot.
We never vote on it.
The one-third that we vote on is about $2 trillion.
That's what the deficit is.
So when I vote for spending and I vote against most of it, almost all of that is borrowed.
What would be the compromise that would fix it?
The reverse.
I would go to, you know, the left, my buddy Ron Wyden, who I am good friends with, and I would say, look, we're out of money.
The interest is killing us.
It's crowding everything out.
What if we spend 1% less next year on welfare, and I'll tell my party they have to spend 1% less on military?
If you do that across the board, but you'd have to include the mandatory programs, you can balance your budget gradually over a five-year period.
And I've called this the penny plan.
And I think it's a compromise because instead of what conservatives have typically done is they've said, it's Sesame Street.
If we can get rid of public TV in Sesame Street, we'll show those liberals that we'll balance the budget.
Well, it's not enough money, and I'm not against doing it.
I voted to reduce the money.
But there are some people on the left who live and die by public TV, and they think it's the greatest thing, and it's an offense to them.
So rather than cut 100% of it, let's cut the – and you can balance the budget right now if you cut 6% of the military, 6% of Sesame Street, 6% of everything everybody wants.
And I think you could actually do it.
And I try this message out sometimes.
Everybody that comes to Washington wants money, and there are usually things that you can have sympathy for.
So one week they come, and they wear the purple ribbons, and it's for Alzheimer's disease.
Well, I have family members who have Alzheimer's.
I have a great deal of sympathy, but we're $2 trillion short.
So what I usually say to them is we're a rich country, and we should be able to spend some of our money on Alzheimer's research.
But you got $100 million last year.
I'm making up the number.
But let's say you got $100 million last year, and because we're short of money, everybody has to get less this year.
Would it be okay if I only vote for $94 million for you next year?
And when you put it that way – and they're usually in there with tears running down their face talking about their mom and their grandmother and Alzheimer's, and they're worried they're going to get it.
But to a person, you look around the table, and they say, well, that sounds kind of fair.
Everybody has to take a hit, right?
94%.
Almost everything that is like, for example, food stamps.
People say, well, the people are going to starve without food stamps.
Well, why don't we just get rid of Coca-Cola and Pepsi?
But would you spend less, or would you just limit the purchasing to non – We'll probably be lucky just to limit the purchase, but I would spend less.
But you couldn't spend – but how could you spend less?
You would have to give them less, and you'd say, hey, not only can you not buy sugary drinks, but now you'll have less money to buy healthy food, which is more expensive.
Well, what you would do is – Do you know what I'm saying?
Well, maybe.
If you had a budget, let's say it's $100 million, and next year the food stamp budget is going to be $94 million, and you say you can't buy Coca-Cola and Pepsi and sugar drinks, they would still have to make their decisions with a little bit less, but they, on average, are spending 6% or – yeah, I think it's about – no, I think it's about 10% of the dollars are going towards these sugar drinks.
They would have to make decisions to do it.
But I think even something like food stamps, there's a strong argument, oh, people will be hungry.
So I would have the old concept of home economics in schools and here's what I would teach.
Some of this comes from a book.
There was a book written by Charles Murray years ago called Coming Apart.
And it compared people and said these are the rich people in your society and these are the poor people.
It was just divided into two groups and the two main statistics that put you in either rich group or poor group, having kids before you were married, and education.
This was based on whether or not you – we're in one of those two categories.
But I would teach this in home economics.
I wouldn't teach morality.
I wouldn't teach people that it's evil to have sex.
I would say that the odds are, the statistics are, if you have not had your children, you have a choice.
The statistics are overwhelming that if you have your kids before you're married, you'll be poor.
And the thing is, it is true.
Why not teach that?
But in that same class, I would teach how to go to the grocery store, what to buy, and also how to prepare it.
I would do this for obese people in our country.
So Medicaid pays just gazillions of dollars for diabetes and all that stuff.
I would pay for dietary training.
But I actually think you need to go to the grocery store with people and show them all the crap they're putting in their cart that they shouldn't be putting in.
And I actually don't want – you know, the goal is – see, people think the goal is we need more Medicaid.
No, what we need is less people on Medicaid.
The goal should be an economy where 5% of the economy, really in a good functioning world, 5%, 6%, not much more than that, shouldn't be able to take care of themselves.
There really should be health care that almost everybody can afford except for a small percentage of people.
You know, once you have kidney disease, you're on dialysis, it's a story on expense.
So almost everybody is on Medicaid.
It's a little more understandable.
Diabetes, if we fed people right, 80% of adult-onset diabetes is curable by loss of weight.
If he only does one thing, and one thing he's remembered for is treating sugar as a – not a sin, as a bad food.
Sugar added to convince us that adding sugar to cereals and all these things that we add sugar to, that it's bad for your health, that will transform the people who accept that.
I mean, look – but again, if you're a kid and you work and you've got a job, you're working at a corner store and you're making whatever you make, $15 an hour, whatever – not even.
So if you're a kid and you make $7 an hour, let's say, working at a store, and you want to use that $7 to buy a Coca-Cola and a pack of ringdings, who cares?
But the point is when the government is giving you money, I think it's very reasonable to say this money can – like we're supposed to be helping you get back on your feet.
This is the problem with social safety nets, where I'm a big believer in it.
When I was a child, my family was poor and we were on welfare and we were on food stamps.
But they worked their way out of it and then when I was in high school, they were doing really well.
So it's like – it's a very valuable thing for families that are down on their luck and things aren't going well.
And I'm a big believer in – I think we should treat this country like a community.
And when you have the downtrodden and the people that aren't doing so well, I think it's really important to help them.
I think to let abject poverty and starvation exist in a country that has such extreme wealth is abhorrent.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
But I also think people get very dependent on social safety systems and social safety nets.
And when you have people that have generation after generation have existed on welfare, then it becomes a problem.
And it becomes a problem where we have to figure out how to motivate people or educate people as to choices that they can make that will be more beneficial to their lives to provide for themselves and be outside of it.
Another thing that's going to mess with that motivation is unhealthy food because one of the surest ways to keep people unmotivated and have no energy is to keep them unhealthy.
Healthier people have more vibrancy.
You have more energy to go pursue your dreams and do the things you want to do in life.
If you're constantly dealing with type 2 diabetes because you've been eating sugar all day and garbage all day and you're morbidly obese, you're not going to have the same energy as a person who's eating healthy food and getting up early and drinking water.
So food stamps when they started were really primarily for mothers, single mothers with many kids who can't work.
So mom can't work.
We don't want them all to starve.
She has four kids.
And once you've had the kids, I'm not against that.
They're there and you've got to do some of the kids.
But we didn't give it to able-bodied, you know, 21-year-old men who are in college didn't get it or able-bodied men who are out of high school didn't get it.
You didn't do that because they need to work and they still can work.
There are jobs everywhere for able-bodied people.
So we have to look carefully at all these programs.
And this is what some people on the left complain about.
Able-bodied people, if they get something, should be very, very temporary, if at all.
Like when I first moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1993, one of my patients was head of the local welfare.
And there was a local welfare department.
And there was some real degree of the people had to come in on certain deadlines.
They had to prove that they were looking for work or why they couldn't look for work.
And there would be some people that still have four kids at home will come back and won't be able to work again.
But the able-bodied people come back in six weeks and she would show them, here's the newspaper.
Here's a job.
I want you to go here tomorrow.
And she'd make them do that.
And not because she hated them.
She worked with welfare because of the beneficial part of it.
But we've gotten away from that.
And so if I propose something like that, it's like, oh, you don't like the poor.
No, I want them to become rich.
But we also do have, and this is a fallacy, people are moving up and down from rich to poor all the time in our country.
20% of the people born in the bottom 20% make the top 20%.
60% of the people who make a million bucks this year will not make a million bucks next year.
People are going up and down.
We have great income mobility.
And the reason you have to express that is otherwise you lose hope.
If you live in a poor area of town and, you know, you're a single mom and everybody tells you, you know, you're just never going anywhere, that's when your reaction is I might as well steal or sell drugs or something.
But instead, the message to our young people is it should be.
There's never been a better time to be alive.
I believe that so strongly and that we're doing a disservice to our young people by saying you're a victim.
But there's never historically been a better time to be alive.
And you can do it.
I mean, you literally can do a manual job, earn enough money to start your own small business.
You know, if you're in high school and you're a decent student but you're not a rocket scientist and you don't love reading books and you don't love math but you're pretty good and you're intelligent enough, if you do HVAC, you'll have one hell of a career.
You go to a technical school in Louisville, all of the people in the class – I went to one recently.
There was 100 people in the class for HVAC, fixing air conditioners.
Every one of their tuition was paid for and they had a job if they completed the course.
And HVAC – if you're an HVAC worker, I'm guessing – I'll bet you you could make $80,000 to $100,000 a year fixing air conditioners.
But if you start your own HVAC company, you'll be the richest man or woman in town.
They're – in my town, the people in the HVAC companies are some of the richest people in our town.
Well, it's a good argument also with automation and AI because automation and AI is going to do a lot of jobs that people are going to school for unfortunately.
A lot of people are getting degrees that are going to be irrelevant when automation and AI takes whatever percentage of jobs it's inevitably going to take.
But trades, being a carpenter, being a plumber, those are always going to be valuable.
I think things like that – you may have technical assistance when you get there that a computer helps diagnose the problem and helps fix the air conditioner.
But I talk to everybody every day and they're scaring the world saying there will be no more jobs and everybody will just sit around looking at each other.
And I really – I don't – I hope that's not true.
And I – you know, they're richer and smarter than I am maybe, but they all say it's going to happen.
But I say if it happens, what will also develop is secret societies.
And they'll be like speakeasies and you'll go down the stairs.
You'll knock on the door and someone will decide.
You'll do the password and you'll go inside and you'll be able to build shit in there.
You'll be able to like grout bricks and put them together.
You'll be able to nail wood together.
Secret work because people will still want to work even though there are no jobs.
He thinks that we're going to need universal basic income.
And he thinks it won't actually be universal basic income.
His rose-colored glasses version of it is universal high income because he believes that AI is going to create so much wealth that there will be so much money that people won't have to work anymore.
Which – so hear me out here.
So the question is like is it essential that the only way you take care of yourself and feed yourself and house yourself is through work?
And can people find meaning outside of work?
Can they find things to do or will they just be sitting around playing video games all day?
So the first thing that I'll probably just acknowledge is he may be smarter than me and he's probably a little bit richer than me.
So I don't discount his opinion, Elon Musk.
But I hope he's wrong.
And with regard to work, I think work is something so necessary that the problems we have in our society are with the people who aren't getting the benefit of working.
And so I see work and I would mandate work for welfare programs.
I don't – if you're able-bodied, you would have to work.
I wouldn't give you a penny.
Everybody would have to work.
But I tell people I don't – I'm not in favor of that as punishment.
That is reward.
Work is a reward.
I can tell you that I've never been unhappy.
Maybe I'm lucky in the work I've had.
But I've always wanted to go to work.
And I've done hard jobs.
I've roofed houses.
I've worked on lawns.
I've done every job that a kid growing up in the 70s, but I was never unhappy to do it and always felt better.
If I sweat off five pounds, ten pounds in the hot sun, I felt great.
But in 1820, 98 percent of people live in abject poverty, less than $2 a day.
Today, not just the United States, the entire world is less than 10 percent live on $2 a day.
Constant dollars, controlling for inflation.
We went from 98 percent to less than 10 percent.
AI is going to continue that.
And maybe it's exponential.
But when you have more leisure time, you have time to think of other stuff to do.
We have time for our idle brains, which are pretty big.
To come up with new ideas.
So I think it's not yet known what we will think of, what may pass as work.
Maybe art is work at some point and everybody's an artist.
But maybe there also are people who like to – you know, even now, there's automation and we can grow with pesticides and fertilizers and stuff.
Just an enormous amount of food.
And actually, that's been good for the most part in supplying more food for people.
But there are still people who have organic farms who don't use pesticides or any of this.
There are people who have cattle with no antibiotics and no vaccines, chickens.
And that's sort of labor intensive and not as cost effective.
But the only way that can exist is you've got to let them charge more, you know, so that niche market, you know, can still exist.
So it's the same with AI.
There probably will be some things that maybe AI could do it, but maybe you'd rather a human do it.
Even now with art, my wife, Kelly, has written a children's book and she's looking at art.
She looked at the AI and it was pretty darn good, but she really wanted an artist because she wanted something to be – to have real meaning, you know, and to be something that people connect with.
You know, for children's books, a lot of it is connecting with the pictures.
Well, I certainly think there's going to be a lot of value in art that's made by humans.
Just like there's value in music and even films, you know, that's the argument that – you know, I had Bradley Cooper in here the other day and we were talking about the concern that a lot of these artists that create films, they're really worried that they're going to start using digital actors and doing everything through computer-generated AI prompts and films even being written by AI prompts.
One of the things I want to talk to you about is what's going on in this country right now.
Well, one of the big ones, one of the big things that's in the news is this whole Minnesota thing, particularly – a lot of things to cover.
But particularly fraud and that they're uncovering a lot of fraud that it seems like not only was there a lot of fraud, but a lot of these people that were getting a lot of money from this fraud were donating to politicians.
There's I believe $35 million by daycares was donated to Democrats in Minnesota last year.
Well, they're looking into California fraud now because of Minnesota fraud and it's – look, just the homeless thing alone, just the fact that California spent $24 billion on the homeless can't account for where the money went and the problem just got worse.
So according to our AI search, it says, Fact-checking organizations review campaign finance data and public records report no evidence that Minnesota daycare or childcare operators donated anything close to $35 million to political campaigns.
One fact-check notes that the supposed charge circulated online misrepresents or fabricates contribution totals and far exceeds what small childcare businesses would realistically give.
When you say small – just I don't like the way they phrase that, small childcare businesses, because you're talking about a large number of these businesses.
And so the total, the all told, what is the number, especially compared to large corporate donors, that's fact, right?
Also, they're listing Snopes as a source, which I don't like.
McCain said we should admit all these people who were interpreters in Afghanistan, all these people that are interpreters in Iraq.
And my response to him was this.
If they can speak English and they're pro-Western, they need to stay in their country and be the founding fathers of their country.
If the people who speak English and are pro-Western all leave, then all the crazy jihadists are the ones going to run the government.
So part of the reason the Taliban runs Afghanistan, again, is 80,000 of the best people probably came over here that speak English and have some kind of knowledge.
What I'm saying is from the perspective of the people, the government that was in place for the 20 years that we were there was a moderate government that was friendly to these people.
I think them leaving was them.
They should have been the founding fathers of their country.
I don't fault people for taking advantage of a system that has giant loopholes in it, especially when you come over here from a war-torn country and there's a bunch of people that are already doing it.
This is this one weird website that we found the other day, Just the News.
So this website, Just the News, published a report saying – a report recently that revealed Transportation Security Administration has flagged approximately $700 million in declared U.S. cash.
But the question is like where is Just the News getting this information from?
But why is it one weird right-wing website that is reporting this that everybody refers to when they're talking about this – the number attached to this fraud?
Yeah, we tried to find that the other day too, but we couldn't find any – we tried looking at different money that was like, how much does a TSA flag over the entire course of the year all over the country?
We couldn't find that data.
But that might just because nobody's published it.
One of the things I was reading recently is interesting because Minnesota has this one group of immigrants in the Somalis, but they also have another group in the Hmongs.
And they have a completely different result in terms of the amount of people that are on welfare, the amount of people that graduate from college or high school, the amount of people that are on Medicaid.
Their original name – they didn't call themselves Somali pirates.
They called themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia because the Europeans were dumping toxic waste off the coast and killing all their fish, and they were fishermen.
So they started kidnapping the people that were in these boats and then, you know, to try to get a ransom because you've destroyed our fishing ground.
And then they went, oh, well, you know what?
It's probably easier to just kidnap people than it is to be a fisherman.
So the Hamongs versus Somalis, why are 86 percent of the Somalis still on Medicaid and why are the Hamongs doing better?
So they used to always make this argument that Sweden is so great because it's socialist and that Swedes are all just doing fine.
They're all so happy.
Everybody's happy in Sweden.
And so they were talking to Milton Friedman about that, and he was over there, and they were bragging about the country, about how great Sweden was and everything, and they were attributing it to socialism.
And he looked at them, and he says, you know, the Swedes are very happy.
They're also very happy in Minnesota.
If you look at the statistics of people from Sweden who immigrated to Minnesota, they're kicking butt.
They're in the top 1 percent, and it gets back to what is the argument.
Why do Swedes do so well?
Many people say it's this northern Scandinavian work ethic.
They brought it with them and kept it in their families, and it's transmitted down.
So you've got to give less money to the refugees, and then you have to have more scrutiny of it.
But the interesting question is if I put forward a bill that says we're going to audit all the welfare, not just the refugee program, we're going to audit all the cash transfer programs for every state, do you think any Democrats will vote for that?
But you could argue you're actually making it better for poor people because I'm trying to get rid of the Somalis stealing it so more of the dollars actually go to people who are poor.
So speaking of which, what was your take on the border being wide open for the last four years?
And not just wide open, but they were encouraging people to come to America, telling them how to do it, and even helping them get across, giving them EBT cards, giving them cell phones.
I do believe that they understand that most of the people coming across will ultimately be voters and that two out of three will vote Democrat.
So it's all power politics.
They say it's about, you know, humanity and being humane and all that.
It isn't that.
It's all about voting demographics, and they want these people to come in because many of them are suffering, you know, through sex trafficking, all the other crap that went along with this mass migration.
So I don't think it's necessarily a best place to be, but I'd say it's one of the most extraordinary accomplishments.
You know, as you know, I occasion on the other side with Donald Trump, we don't always agree on everything, but on the border, I think he did a fabulous job by sheer force of personality.
He fixed it before any money was allotted.
He fixed it in the first three months, and it went from whatever the number was down.
He reduced it by 98 percent.
He relocated some people there, but by sheer force of personality, before any money was even spent, he fixed the problem on the border.
Right, but it's not a crazy law to begin with where you can get congressional seats based on the amount of illegal aliens you have in your area, which is crazy because then it encourages you to bring in illegals so that you get more congressional seats.
And it's part of the answer to immigration that makes it less of a burden on us is if we base our society on work, we put a wall around our welfare system, and we don't give it to people, refugees or immigrants, legal or illegal.
Let's find a thousand people who are in Texas illegally and do a poll and say, would you accept this?
Would you accept that you don't get to vote during your lifetime, but your kids will get to vote if they were born here in exchange for not having to worry about being in a car accident or being sent back to Mexico?
I'll bet you 80 percent of the people who are illegally would take work without citizenship.
But you know who wants the citizenship and doesn't care about work?
Democrats.
All they care about is the voting part.
See, what I'm trying to propose is something humane on the work part.
Plus, I think we need some workers.
And I think the people would actually accept it, but they give up.
They don't have to give up the country and leave and come back, which might never happen.
And that's one of the craziest things that California has passed where you're not allowed to show ID when you vote, which is just – you're essentially saying you're encouraging fraud.
It's insane that they could say that with a straight face and have any sort of a weird, you know, gaslighty answer as to why that would be a good thing.
And if you can't force them to do it, if they don't agree with it, and if the people in the state largely, if they vote against it, and if you have a large percentage of population of illegals, like, say, California, not just a large percentage of populations that are illegal, but a large percentage of people that think that those illegals are a part of the community.
I think that local police is better than national police.
But the only way you can have local police is the local police have to enforce the law.
And so they are breaking the law and having an obscure – a bizarre way of interpreting the law to say we are going to defy the national immigration laws.
So I think it would be better done by the local cities.
But if the local cities aren't going to do it, then you have to have national agents going in.
And it is a tragedy.
But like I say, I also have sympathy for the people that are in law enforcement trying to do a very difficult job.
You know, I don't know that I want to go too much into the specifics of it because I don't want to pass judgment like a jury would because really someone will have to go into and look specifically at every fact and every angle and every angle of camera.
So I don't like to judge criminal things that happen in our country and say, well, that person needs to go to jail or that person is innocent.
How many people have been sent back during the time of this administration?
So in the year now that this administration has been operational, how many illegals have been rounded up and sent back?
I know a lot of people self-deported when Trump got into office because I think they were probably worried about being sent somewhere that they didn't want to be, which was a thing.
Right, but I think the deportations under Obama, what they're counting is people that snuck across the border and were turned back, not people who were snatched up at Home Depot and then brought to some country that they didn't even come from.
Public estimates indicate the Trump administration has removed on the order of a few hundred thousand people since returning to office January of 2025, not millions.
So here's the problem with that.
What was the numbers of people that were sneaking in every year?
The numbers are in the millions, but I think it's hard to estimate because some of them didn't get, you know, if you're not getting caught, how do we estimate how many there are?
But I think millions of people came in and I think it was a tragedy.
And like I say, you know, it's one of the things Donald Trump has been an absolute success on is controlling the southern border.
Yes, and it should have been done a long time ago.
But the question is, like, how effective is the removal process?
And is it do they have a quota that they have to meet?
Is this why they're being so aggressive about it?
So it says here, October 2025 Homeland Security Update referenced in one overview stated more than 2 million people were removed from the country in 2025.
But that total combined formal deportations, which were 527,000 with roughly 1.6 million people who voluntarily left or lost status rather than being physically deported.
Separate NPR report described about 600,000 deportations in 2025, along with about 1.6 million immigrants.
So similar off by, you know, OK, let's see here, reflecting broader crackdown.
OK, here's the question.
What what is the estimate of the amount of people who came in illegally between 2020 and 2024?
Okay, it says from 2020 to 2024, government data shows roughly 11 to 12 million encounters in italics with people crossing the U.S. border illegally and mainly at the southwest border because many people try to cross multiple times.
The number of individuals is slightly lower than the number of encounters.
U.S.
And also that's but then you have to factor in the people that they didn't encounter, which were numerous, right?
So by saying the number of encounters is the accurate representation of the amount of people that got in illegally is kind of crazy.
That doesn't make any sense.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts encounters, which includes apprehensions between ports of entry and people deemed inadmissible at ports of entry.
Okay.
So we don't know.
So but that number was 10.8 million encounters nationwide between 2021 and 2024 alone.
That's just encounters.
I think it'd be safe to say that whatever the encounters are, the actual number is probably higher, even if you have, you know, people getting caught multiple times.
That's a that's a that's way bigger than the city of Austin snuck in illegally in four years because they wanted them to be here and they didn't want to enforce it.
So I saw this terrible story about this family that was killed where these guys pretended to be a UPS driver and they showed up and they made their way into the house and killed people because they were dressed up as a UPS driver.
If you could pretend to be a UPS driver, for sure, you could pretend to be an ICE agent, especially since they're completely anonymous.
So think about how many people can get arrested or robbed or by criminals.
Right.
Because you could just have people pretending they're like, it's not like it's impossible to fake their logo.
Right.
It's pretty easy.
Just as ICE.
You know, how hard is that?
You could easily imagine armed gangs pretending to be ICE agents robbing people.
I think you could make an argument when you're working right along the border or at night with large groups that there's a lawlessness to the cartels that hiding the identities of ICE along the border.
It's a little harder to make the argument.
And I saw this image in a courthouse in Chicago where it's a big elevator and the ICE agents all have masks on and they're arresting people and it's all women and children in a big elevator in a courthouse.
It's like, really?
I don't think you really need to be wearing a mask.
Right, but the police have always been there and police are there for a reason.
If you call the police, if someone's breaking into your house, you're assuming the police are going to come.
You don't call ICE because you don't self-report.
You don't say, oh, I'm having an issue with some immigrants.
Let me call ICE.
No, they're a new factor in the community and they're wearing masks.
That's a big difference.
It's not the same comparison.
Like most people, except the kooky people that went nutty during 2020 after the George Floyd riots that were like, defund the police.
And boy, did they change their tune as soon as they started getting riots and their buildings burned down.
They're like, where's the police?
Well, you fucking defunded them, stupid.
Like people, most people believe that police are necessary.
Most people believe that crime is awful and you can't have murderers and armed robbers roaming the street.
You should arrest them.
And you're going to need police officers to do that.
But those same people that believe that might also believe that once someone is here, they should be able to stay in this country.
And ICE is operating illegally and we shouldn't have militarized groups of people roaming the streets, just showing up with masks on, snatching people up, some of them U.S. citizens, and shipping them to countries they didn't even come from.
So that's why they have to wear a mask.
If you want them to do that job, if you want them to be able to deport 500,000 people over a year, which is a lot of people, if that's the real number, you know, they're going to be – their life is going to be at stake.
You're not going to be able to get people to do the job unless you allow them to be anonymous.
And then, again, allowing them to be anonymous creates a whole host of other problems where you could have people pretend to be them.
Some people have offered sort of an in-between where they wear badges that have a number or a first name on them such that when you're arrested, if I think you've abused my rights in arresting me, Steve, you know, and a number, 324.
But I get back to my initial sort of argument about having local police do it.
They're not doing it.
But in an ideal world, the way we fix this and have less ICE agents in cities where they're having a very difficult job is the local people do their job and they're not sanctuary cities.
I'm saying – but what I'm saying is that some of the blame for ICE being there is the left and their policies of sanctuary cities.
So when they want to just say, oh, we hate ICE and we don't want ICE in our city, maybe they should be reflecting that ICE is in your city because you're disobeying the law and when someone is arrested and they're clearly not a citizen, you're not reporting them to ICE.
See, it's defiance.
It's nullification.
They have been nullifying our laws on deportation for years and years.
And so now there's something they really dislike.
But who brought it upon?
My point is the left brought this.
It's not an answer, but it's an explanation that the left is bringing this to their cities because they're refusing to enforce the laws.
They think that once people are here, they should be able to stay.
And this is what my friend Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy.
And I think there's a balance to be achieved.
I just don't know how it gets done because I see both perspectives.
I see the perspective of the people that say, hey, there was an illegal program moving people in here to get votes, moving people in here to get congressional seats.
And we've got to change that.
We've got to take those people that got in and send them back to where they came from or do something because if we don't, they're going to keep doing it if they get in office again in 2028 and it's going to accelerate.
And you're going to have to take away some of the damage that's been done to a true democratic system because you've kind of hijacked it.
And they kind of have.
And then I can also see the point of view of the people that say, yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them.
Are we really going to be the Gestapo?
Where's your papers?
Is that what we've come to?
So it's more complicated than I think people want to admit.
People want to look at this as a black and white issue if you're a compassionate person or if you're a pragmatic person.
But I think the argument needs to be made again and again.
And the left needs to hear that they have created this situation by disobeying the immigration laws, by ignoring the deportation orders, by not reporting people who are committing crimes.
Now, we're not talking about some guy mowing lawns.
We're talking about somebody who stole a car, somebody who raped somebody.
They are in jail.
So this isn't the ordinary working person who's here illegally.
We're talking about the criminal illegals in our country.