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Aug. 10, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:18
Sunset in the Golden State - Ep 3: Immigration
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*music* *music*
*music* Oh yeah, it's amazing.
The guy's right up there among these shark-teeth pines.
Well, here we are, up in Twin Peaks, which actually is a real place, and it's very cold here.
I don't know if you can see my breath or not, but we've come down from Canada.
We're here to speak to Tim Donnelly, who's a member of the House of Representatives in California, to talk about issues in California, particularly to do with illegal immigration.
And it's a pretty wild landscape.
I really was not aware how cold and snowy it can be here in California.
When we were driving up from Los Angeles up this real spiral staircase of a winding road, you can see up top here that the trees have ice all along the very top.
But we're going to go and talk to Tim, which I'm really looking forward to.
And I am, of course, ridiculously underdressed, as I was in Poland sometimes as well.
Yeah, pretty much. You can't see your breath in California in February.
Jim, so nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.
Great to meet you. So, we're going to talk to Tim Donnelly.
Tim, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Can you just give us a little bit of your background and how you ended up as the master Republican Avenger in the California legislature?
I read the resume.
I know how it works. I don't think I've ever been called that.
I ran for office in 2010 for the first time and was elected with no money on the immigration issue.
Prior to that, in 2005, I had been the leader of the Minutemen.
And if you don't know who the Minutemen were, we were the Paul Revere's.
We were sounding the alarm about this coming scourge of a mass invasion, a very quiet invasion, that was impacting California probably more than any other state.
I won the election, you know, because I had taken a stand and people were waking up, at least in the West.
Washington, D.C. had no clue.
So that's sort of what got me into politics was just this whole issue that had come to roost in our little town here in the mountains, here in Twin Peaks and Lake Arrowhead.
Immigration had become a mass issue.
Now, this is something that because we're not really taught much about our history, we're not really taught how many people in Mexico view America's occupation of California as a temporary embarrassment and something that needs to be rectified.
And so the motivation that is often ascribed to the immigrants is, you know, well, their lost souls looking for a better life and a free future and so on.
And that's certainly true for some of them.
But there is a bigger or deeper motivation around reconquering.
The intellectual elite in Mexico have nullified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1846.
They've said that we stole the land.
America stole the land.
California and virtually the entire southwest Is really part of Mexico.
And we need to annex it again.
And so what we want you to do...
We're never going to be able to defeat America in a war.
So what we're going to do is we're going to quietly creep in and have a creeping invasion.
And when we've taken over enough of the land, then we'll take over the institutions.
It's very much like what the communists tried to do.
Take over the... A slow walk through the institutions.
Sure. Well, if you control the...
The schools, if you control the education industrial establishment, you control the next generation.
So you see the ideologies coming out of the schools.
You see it through the media.
Now you see it everywhere in movies, in music, because we're finally having the discussion.
Before it was happening very quietly and the only real resistance to it was in 1994 when the Republicans passed a very stringent law that would have maybe saved California.
And what was the content of that law and why did it fail?
It was Proposition 187.
It said that people who had come into the country illegally had absolutely no right to collect any taxpayer subsidized benefits.
And that included public school.
The measure, passed by 59% of the state's voters, would deny educational and health benefits to illegal immigrants and force the providers of those services to report the names of those immigrants to federal authorities.
This created a great deal of consternation among not those who had come here illegally.
It created consternation among those who were behind the scenes, standing behind the throne, choreographing the invasion.
Because without the schools, it would have ended.
People would have gone home. Today in court, lawyers for civil rights groups argued that Proposition 187 was an unconstitutional measure which would be especially hard on children and people who are sick.
Federal Judge Matthew Byrne issued a restraining order which will prevent California from enforcing parts of the proposition.
And it's a funny thing too because when I was growing up, the story of illegal immigration was, you know, the people living under bridges, living in the shadows, no access to public services.
And I remember when I first began researching it, it was really quite astonishing just how many public services can be accessed by people who have no legal right to be in the country.
Yeah. The media has told their story time and time again.
It's always a sob story.
It's always the noble immigrant.
They never tell the story of the illegal alien who came here, had been deported four or five times, and then most recently had been living in Utah, where one of his neighbors there was quoted, after he had murdered at Point-blank range.
Assassinated two sheriff's deputies right near Sacramento, California.
The comment was he was the nicest gardener we ever knew.
He was such a great guy.
And the media never wanted to know how did an illegal alien, A, get a driver's license, and then B, get a firearm that is verboten in California.
I mean, the gun that he used.
And they had no curiosity.
Because the story, it's always a one-sided story.
It's a one-way street and there's a point to it.
And the point is not that they care about the plight of people in Mexico or Central America.
That's obvious. They could care less.
What they care about are future voters who are the key to holding power in perpetuity so that they can oppress the people in California who would dare to think and live free.
So let's talk a little bit about this old saying that's quite common in America that if you want to look at the future of America, you look at California.
And the one thing I can't help but notice is that California used to be overwhelmingly white and significantly Republican.
As the white population has declined from the high 80s to the high 40s, the fact is that it's virtually impossible to get any kind of significant political power.
Coming out of a state that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and lots of other great conservatives, is this the future for America?
What can America learn from by looking at what's happening to California, what has happened over the last 50 years?
California is clearly the canary.
We're the canary in the coal mine.
There's a reason I haven't left, in part because I haven't been called to go anywhere else.
I love California and I have a passion To see this loss of freedom and this demographic socialist takeover.
And I say demographic slash socialist because it's not just the demographics.
You have to understand that the state that produced as great a conservative mind as President Ronald Reagan, he wasn't just a conservative mind.
He gave voice to what was in the hearts of Americans.
And now it's almost offensive to use the term American here.
People will look at you funny if you're in Hollywood and in certain places.
This didn't happen overnight.
Let's talk a little bit about some of the economics.
Of what's going on with immigration, because I don't think people understand the degree to which Mexico loves sending people to America.
Because they send people to America, those people get a lot of money, often from the welfare state, and then they send it in remittances back to Mexico, which then gets its coffers swelled without having to provide any services to its citizens.
It's unprecedented in human history, this paying for your own invasion, this paying for your own replacement, and the incentives that the Mexican government has to send people over is enormous, as well as their own families.
Go to America, get welfare, send it back here.
In the days, in the dark days, before anyone was covering this topic, we discovered That the Mexican government itself had actually produced a little flyer, a little brochure. It was sort of in comic book style of how you can get to the United States.
They've showed you out on the border with the coyote.
They showed you inside and how you could get benefits.
And how you could fight for your rights so that you wouldn't lose your toehold in the country.
And as soon as we exposed it, it was taken down off the website.
It was before the media would even cover the topic.
But it's not just an economic issue.
It is, even though it now accounts for, I don't even know what the modern number is now, but back when I was an activist, it was something like $22, $25 billion a year.
I think it's closer to $30 billion now. Yeah, so $30 billion a year in a country where maybe their budget is, you know, a couple of hundred billion, that's a lot of money.
What are we talking about?
150, 160 million people in Mexico?
That's a lot of money. That's creating a relief...
Well, you could call it relief.
We used to call welfare relief, but it's basically welfare.
Because you're taking jobs that should not be held by people who are in the country illegally.
You have entire industries that have been taken over, like construction and in places like manufacturing and others.
And that money is not going to build up our cities.
It's not going to build up or conduct business here.
It's going to a foreign country to support an oligarchy that is anti-American.
We saw, as I described earlier, the last great resistance was Proposition 187.
I attempted to bring the Arizona law into California.
I got elected. And I got elected in a place, partly in Los Angeles County, where I didn't expect to have that kind of support.
But there was this silent majority of Californians who were ticked off, who were so pissed that the California Republicans had abandoned Defending against illegal immigration, as if somehow they bought into the lies of the leftists who were counseling them on how to be a better party.
Here's how you win, Republicans.
Well, I don't know.
If a socialist is telling you how to be a better capitalist, you might look in the mirror and say, self?
The coach for the enemy team is telling you which plays to use.
You're not going to win the game, right?
Well, and it's been textbook.
The decline of the Republican Party can be traced to the, I almost want to call it the pussification of the Republican Party, where they stop fighting, they stop believing in anything.
And in politics, unlike business and the corporate culture and sort of the media where everyone thinks they have to be politically correct, You need to be politically incorrect.
You need to take a stand for what you believe in.
And they stopped.
They said, no, we don't want to offend the Hispanic population and the future of the state is Hispanic.
And so they brought in all these consultants who are essentially the open borders wing of the Republican Party.
Look at what's happened.
We've gone from being able to win elections and send our governor...
To become the next president of the United States to becoming the laughing stock of the country as our numbers are now under 25% of the people in the state of California are willing to identify with and admit that they're Republicans.
Well, this is the great challenge.
And your relationship with the media, I'm sure, was as exciting as mine has been, perhaps even more so, because there's this great terror of being called a racist, if you point out some very basic demographic facts.
So, for instance, Hispanics are going to vote for the left.
Significantly, and if you're even further from Republicans towards the free market and you're libertarians, there are almost no Hispanic libertarians, there are very few Hispanic Republicans, and the majority of Hispanics are going to vote, significantly vote for the Democrats.
Now that's just a basic fact.
So if you are a Republican, having a lot of Hispanics move into the state legally or illegally over time is going to be between you and your political objectives.
Now pointing that out is a basic fact.
But I think people are terrified to point that out because then you get called a racist and then you get called a xenophobe and a bigot and so on.
But these are demographic and statistical realities.
Sure, but that doesn't tell you the whole story.
Please, tell me the whole story.
That's what we're here for. Because there are a tremendous number of Hispanics who love freedom, who love America, who are willing to sacrifice their lives in our military and everything else, but they are treated as if they don't exist.
They're the invisible man.
Do you have any sense of proportion in the Hispanic community?
I don't know what all the numbers are. I'm pretty bad with numbers.
And then if I got any numbers from the government, I would know that they were completely false.
Let's just take the number that we get for how many illegal aliens are in the country.
They always say between 11 and 20 million.
They've been saying that for a decade.
And obviously it's got to have changed one direction or another, so I don't believe it.
But here's what I would say.
If you take the dividing line, forget the demographics, forget race, and start dividing on legal versus illegal when it comes to immigration.
Legal immigrants Tend, as a whole, to be much more conservative, to be much more patriotic, to be much more self-reliant.
They have had to come through the legal process.
They've had to have a sponsor.
They've had to pass a citizenship test.
They have to speak English.
You take better care of a car you bought than a car you stole.
Sure. Great example.
Okay, so then when you look at the illegal population, the illegal population is much more likely to favor socialism.
They love the idea of redistribution of wealth because they're so poor.
So you bring in poor, illiterate people who have always lived under tyranny and oppression.
You can't describe Mexico and South America without using those words.
The drug cartels essentially control the politicians and the media, and therefore they control Mexico, our neighbor to the south.
We have a welfare state here.
So it's the perfect solution for Mexico and for the people who want to see America taken over by Mexicans or by socialists.
When you have this massive influx through the back door and now, oh, let's give them free education.
Let's give them a driver's license, which is the gateway to everything.
I mean, I was in the California State Assembly when we debated that.
State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly says the people he's spoken to are just as outraged that the police chief of LA would support the notion of providing illegal immigrants with driver's licenses.
They're saying, is this guy nuts?
I mean, they want to see the chief recalled.
They want him thrown out of office.
They think he should be put up on charges for even suggesting that we give driver's licenses to people who are in the country illegally.
I believe that we should license undocumented immigrants in the state of California.
I think it makes motoring safer.
I think it makes the public safer.
Having a de facto class of illegal drivers, all that does is ensure that they don't get insurance, ensure that they don't have their cars registered to them, ensure that they aren't responsible when they become involved in a traffic accident.
You know, all those things can be addressed by having a two-tiered licensing system.
What I am saying is very, very simple.
We need to cut off The magnets that are drawing people to come here illegally.
They called me all the names that they always call people who stand up for principle.
But I asked a few really hard questions.
I said, okay, we just had a terrorist attack and they used California driver's licenses to board airplanes.
Now you want to give California driver's licenses as a form of identification to people who are in the country illegally and by By default, we don't know anything about them because they're here illegally.
So you're going to give them a gateway identification.
They could board aircraft. They said no.
Never happened. It will never ever happen.
Boom. TSA admitted in 2015, about two years after we debated, that you could actually use an illegal alien AB-60 driver's license in California to board aircraft.
No vetting, no background checks, no criminal checks, nothing.
So we're undoing all the national security.
We've got people dying in wars across the world trying to defend our national security and you're gonna give an unknown person And let's say that only one out of all the illegal aliens in the United States is a terrorist who is willing to go on a plane and blow it up just to show that we could, even after all the freedom we took away from Americans, to protect aircraft and air travel.
Think about that. Immigrant rights activists at City Hall celebrate a milestone, the one millionth California driver's license issued to undocumented immigrants under Assembly Bill 60.
The measure was supported by L.A. City Councilman Gilbert Cedillo.
His fight for the right goes back more than 20 years to his days in the state legislature.
So they create a driver's license for people in the country illegally, and then they immediately Require everyone that has a driver's license to be registered to vote.
And they said, absolutely, unequivocally, nobody who is in the country illegally will ever be able to vote with this system.
And then, boom, the news media reports, even the news media, even the actual fake news media reported when 1,500 people had been registered to vote with the illegal alien driver's licenses.
This is all by design.
Even on the Secretary of State's website, it says, if people return the card, because they automatically register you to vote, but they send you a signature card, so you have to sign that and return it to literally be registered.
They said, if somebody sends it back and doesn't affirm that they are a U.S. citizen, they have to check a box that says, I am a U.S. citizen.
They said, put them on the voter rolls anyway.
Treat their registration as normal.
There's no backup verification.
Well, that tells you that their goal and their design is actually to register people to vote who are in the country illegally, and so you have to ask yourself, why?
Well, this goes all the way back to the 1920s.
If you want to look at what the Communist International wanted to do, was they wanted to weaponize racial conflicts and cultural incompatibilities and so on in an attempt, and I think quite a successful attempt, to bring down the capitalist system, to bring down the free market.
And if you look at what's happening in California, you have north of a 20% poverty rate.
You have Hispanics making 75% what whites make, even after third, fourth, and fifth generations, dropping out of school at twice the rate.
And all of this creates a lot of conflict, a lot of resentment.
And then, of course, the underperformance of certain minority groups is always ascribed to white racism, white bigotry.
White privilege. White privilege, which drives resentment and conflict and anger.
And then, if the system falls apart, they can say, well, you see, the free market just didn't work.
Now did it? Whatever future you're going to see in America is going to play out right here in California.
And unfortunately, I think we are headed for a civil war.
That is something that...
People have seen the storm clouds gathering on the horizon because it seems like the rhetoric continually escalates.
The spread and size, power and reach of the state continually escalates, and people will either get plowed under or fight back.
Now, of course, it is my dear hope that the fight back can be rhetorical, language-based, philosophical, passionate, argumentative, and so on.
But should all of that fail?
Should free speech fail?
Should the First Amendment not be enough?
The second seems inevitable.
I'm always early to predictions.
In 2005, I predicted that by 2006, we would elect a president on the issue of illegal immigration because I could see the impact that it had on every aspect of our lives in this country.
And I was wrong.
It took a decade.
So I don't know when that's going to happen, but historically, it has never happened.
That you have transferred territory and power and freedom without either a treaty or war.
And there is no treaty with the left.
They are out of control.
They want to take all the freedom.
These are all the things that happen before wars.
Think of the burning of books.
You want to get rid of ideas.
You want to keep the people down.
You make sure they have no way to resist.
Take all their guns away.
Hitler did that. And he did that because he knew what he wanted to do.
He wanted to erase portions of the population and exterminate them off the face of the earth.
And the guns they always come after, it has nothing to do with whether a gun can fire a lot of bullets at once or anything like that.
Because they're always taking the guns from the law-abiding who would never commit any of those crimes.
Now that we've thoroughly depressed and frightened everyone out of their jammies, let's talk a little bit about what people need to talk about, the facts that they need to get into their heads, the conversations they need to have, and what they can do to wake people up to what seems like the slowest glacier of infinite disaster that has ever approached the West.
You know, I've been at this a long time trying to wake people up and get them to see it and the only thing that's really worked is self-interest.
I think what people ought to do is they ought to just take these little tiny examples And start sharing them with friends and talking to people.
That's the only thing that's going to change things, I believe, is when enough people begin to resist those in power for their insane policies that are favoring people who have no legal or lawful right to be in the country, who have now become such a burden that they are living a better life than Americans at the expense of the American dream.
The West made allies out of international socialists in order to take down the national socialists in Germany.
And it was, in fact, the Russian efforts in the Second World War that largely defeated Hitler.
In order to make that alliance, the horrible, predatory, violent, coercive, totalitarian, destructive nature of communism had to be obscured.
Churchill said, If Hitler invaded hell, I would find a few good things to say about the devil himself.
Now this alliance with totalitarian communism in order to defeat Nazism created a cultural portal through which leftists, socialists and communists could pour into the West and continue their destructive work of undoing the rational empiricism of the Western mind which they had achieved in Europe and now wish to also achieve in America.
So, the collectivists, the communists, the socialists poured into the West, poured into America, and where did they settle?
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