Steve Robinson exposes how Chinese mafias, backed by Quantic Bank’s taxpayer-funded loans and PRC-linked loan officers, seized Maine’s marijuana market—300+ unlicensed grows, prostitution rings, and toxic chemical dumps near schools—while law enforcement under Governor Janet Mills’ appointees ignores raids, reopening operations under legal loopholes. His investigation ties Mills’ brother to suspicious real estate deals and a Chinese consulate official at her inauguration, revealing systemic corruption where media blackouts and no-bid contracts shield cartels exploiting Maine’s passive culture. With fentanyl enforcement sidelined, these networks profit from unregulated grows, environmental hazards, and bribed officials, forcing Robinson to warn of vigilantism as federal inaction turns a local crisis into a national security threat. [Automatically generated summary]
We recently had a remarkable conversation with a man called Steve Robinson, one of the last independent journalists in the state of Maine.
And he told us a story that stunned us.
It's about the Chinese takeover, the takeover by Chinese drug cartels of the largest state in the Northeast.
It's a story about what happens when immigration laws are ignored, when state and local governments fail to do their duty.
We have a documentary out about this right now.
It's on TCN.
The documentary is called High Crimes, the Chinese Mafia's Takeover of Rural America.
It's shocking.
Watch it now.
It's available only at TuckerCarlson.com.
Thank you for doing this.
You're the best journalist in Maine.
You're one of about six journalists in Maine.
So, I mean, I don't know.
But if it weren't for you, I don't think anybody would have any idea what was happening in the state of Maine.
So let's go to the story that has kind of defined your coverage over the last couple of years, and that is the, I don't think it's too strong to say, the takeover of rural Maine by Chinese drug cartels.
I'll just stand back and let you describe the scale of this and what it is.
I would say there's probably 300 to 400 properties throughout the state of Maine that are under the control of what the Department of Homeland Security under President Biden called Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations.
Chinese mafia, I think is a better term and an easier way to understand it.
This first came to light in the end of 2023 when a reporter from the Daily Caller News Foundation, Jenny Terre, who's a fantastic reporter, got a leaked memo that said, hey, there's 270 plus of these sites in Maine and there's another 800 in other parts of the country.
And that caught my eye.
I grew up in Maine, spent my whole life in Maine, and I figured if there were 270 sites in Maine where this criminal activity was occurring, I would be able to find it.
And so I contacted Jenny and I worked with her and eventually got more information about some of these sites that she knew about, identified the property owners, and we visited some of the sites, started identifying some of the patterns.
And I basically looked at every mortgage record for the past six or seven years in every county in the state of Maine and all the electrical records for electrical upgrades, for commercial grade power, which is required for these marijuana grows,
some other financial records and mortgage documents, and was able to identify well over 300 Chinese marijuana grows unlicensed operating in the state of Maine just from looking at records and piecing the puzzle together and then decided I need to go visit them to see what the story is and to confirm it.
And so I drove, I mean, easily 10,000 or more miles around the state of Maine to very, very distant, remote places, schools, factories, former shoe factories, former scrap metal yards.
You know, there's one of these next to my high school basketball coach's house.
One of these next to, you know, the guy who ended up marrying my high school girlfriend.
He's got a Chinese marijuana grow next to him.
There's a Chinese marijuana grow next to the first place that I got drunk with my high school friends.
There's a Chinese marijuana grow on my camp road that has since been busted.
There's a Chinese marijuana grow on my dad's road in St. Albans.
They're everywhere.
They're in former schools, former nursing homes.
And we were able to find them.
It was easy to find.
And it turned out that one of the first things I would do when I showed up and scoped something out, I mean, you can smell it.
You can see the upgraded electrical work.
You can see the license plate out front from New York City.
And you go and you talk with the neighbors.
And the neighbors, you know, you just knock on the door and say, hey, I'd like to talk to you about your neighbors.
And they kind of get this look in their eye like, finally, like finally somebody wants to come like hear what we've been going through and what we've been seeing.
And they're eager to share their story.
And the story is always that in the middle of COVID, a young couple that spoke decent English, were of Asian descent, showed up, bought the house, came over, introduced themselves, gave them a bottle of wine or a bottle of cognac and introduced themselves and said, you know, we're getting away from Boston or getting away from New York because of COVID.
And, you know, this is just going to be our family getaway.
And then they never saw that couple again.
And from then on, it was a steady stream of other individuals of Asian descent who did not speak English, were not personable, seldom left the house.
And every 30 to 40 days, a U-Haul would arrive, usually at dark hours, you know, 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and be there for about an hour and leave.
And then there obviously was the smell of cannabis, very pungent, and all the windows blacked out and the electrical work and odd chemicals being dumped in the backyard and some other indicators.
Sometimes they would burn to the ground because they were trying to pass through too much electricity through.
But I guess it was a period of seven or eight months I spent driving all around the state of Maine and seeing story after story after story and interviewing all of these people and seeing how scared people were, how terrified people were, how well-known the story was amongst people.
I found that they were willing to tolerate behavior from their Chinese neighbors that they would never have tolerated from Irish or French or English neighbors.
Like absolutely, you know, illegal dumping, breaking the Transformer every other week and causing blackouts in the neighborhood.
They would never have tolerated this behavior from white neighbors.
But because of this inclination to not be smeared as a racist, they were willing to tolerate it.
But they were also scared Because they knew the signs of a criminal organization.
You know, they knew what was going on.
And the marijuana economy in Maine is big.
It's bigger than blueberries, potatoes, and lobsters.
So there are enough people in the industry who are talking about this.
And so there was this kind of secret hidden knowledge of what was happening in this state, but it was like, you can't talk about it.
I think that we unintentionally created a system that was so ripe for exploitation by criminal groups that you have to wonder if it was done intentionally.
Well, they have the advantage of not paying taxes, no regulatory compliance.
They're not paying their labor a significant amount of money.
They're using pesticides and fungicides illegally that reduce their product loss.
They can also export marijuana.
About two-thirds of the product that they grow illegally leaves the state of Maine.
Legal growers aren't allowed to do that because it's not federally legal yet.
So they can sell into black markets like New York for a period of time, which was a black market early on into Maine's development of triad weed.
Later it was a gray market where they legalized it, but didn't really have a formal system for the sale of marijuana products.
So anytime you can bring your product from Maine to a black market state, you're going to get three or four times the price.
And this is something that a Chinese criminal organization can do, but the mom and pop trying to run a cannabis edible store or whatever can't do.
They can't export their product out of state.
So if you have all these built-in cost advantages, you can get a significant amount of money off of it.
And they also consider it very low risk.
And they were right to consider it low risk because when the state of Maine legalized marijuana, just like what happened in Washington state and in Oklahoma and in California, it changes the culture in law enforcement.
We sent a signal to law enforcement that marijuana was no longer a problem.
It was legal.
People voted, stopped paying attention to marijuana.
And cops who busted significant marijuana busts were kind of laughed at.
Like, that's just pot.
That's legal.
Why are you doing that?
Fentanyl is the priority.
And we also have all kinds of legal marijuana grows happening.
And that functions as camouflage for what the Chinese are doing.
So it might not be the most lucrative activity, but it's pretty damn lucrative.
But it's low risk, very low risk for them.
Because at worst, you know, they're going to, you know, you're going to get arrested.
You're going to get a mugshot taken.
You're going to get $2,000 bail and you'll be released and probably never have to show up at court, go to New York, get a new driver's license with a new name, come back and find a different marijuana grow to work at.
So really no one suffers any consequences from this incredibly lucrative activity that they're engaged in.
I mean, there's, I think, seven Chinese marijuana grows that were operating in Dexter, despite the fact that Dexter opted out of the state's legal programs.
So these were de facto illegal.
You could look at them and tell that they were illegal, that they weren't licensed because Dexter did not participate in that marijuana program.
Yet for some mysterious reason, the Dexter police know where they are and haven't taken any action on that.
And it kind of, it limped along for a little while.
And there were some other attempts.
There were some other businesses in Dexter.
It was a town of about 4,000 people at the time.
I think it's now down to 3,500.
But when I go home, I don't recognize anybody in Dexter anymore.
And, you know, my family, my friends, for the most part, have all moved away.
I see Dexter in the headlines a lot for fentanyl raids and busts.
But the town has really been hollowed out.
And I think it was the collapse, the economic collapse and the despair in the town just created low real estate prices for entrepreneurs from foreign countries to take advantage of.
And we've actually, we, as in the United States, have created programs that help them.
We've taken money from United States taxpayers to help both the, I mean, we don't necessarily need to get into the Patel Hotel cartel, but they're taking advantage of small business administration loans.
And it took until just recently with the election of Trump to stop SBA loans to foreign nationals and non-citizens.
I don't know why we were giving SBA loans to non-citizens.
And they're also, I mean, they're selling cannabis product derivatives that were legalized by the farm bill that legalized hemp and unintentionally created this huge world of dodgy, unregulated drugs that are available for miners.
And in many instances, it's these specific convenience stores that are selling these hemp-derived products, which are, I guess, THC or marijuana adjacent.
We'll give you kind of the similar experience, but are wildly underregulated and untested, dangerous.
So I've seen that, and I hate to get sidetracked, but it's such a big question in rural America, who runs the general store, the convenience store, the gas station store, whatever you call it.
It's the center of every little town.
And if all of a sudden, in the space of five years, they're all run by non-citizens from India and they're all getting worse and they're all engaging in business practices that are almost like intentionally degrading of the people who live there.
Like, no, we only sell generic cigarettes, illegal Chinese vapes, and some kind of weird non-regulated narcotic and bongs and crackpipes.
Well, they're certainly not making money off the hotels that they operate in the general stores.
If you look at a town like Lincoln, Maine, something similar has happened where one family from away, from out of state, has come in and purchased competing rival gas stations.
But there's one gas station that's still owned by a local.
And so naturally, the people who know the guy who owns the store and don't know the guy who owns the other stores will go and patronize the guy that they still know.
So as business has declined To these other general stores, somehow they're still thriving.
And initially, their employees are locals and Mainers, but then eventually there's a new class of employees who are brought in, who are brought in very likely on visas, who are also from away.
So I think that if you look at some of the from India, I think that if you look at some of the cases that have been filed, even under the Biden administration against operations that look a lot like what's happening in Maine, they're immigration scams.
They're using these businesses as a pretext to get SBA loans and also to get access to visa programs so that they can sell legal entry into the country to people back in the middle.
To be clear, I don't have proof that that's happening in Lincoln or Dexter, but there are indictments in, there's one I know of very well in Texas, where that's exactly what was happening.
So that's kind of, you know, okay, there are a million scams, but like if you roll into somebody's town and degrade it on purpose and make it much worse, you know, I think that's a moral crime.
So you may have seen a recent story about a smartphone that got smuggled out of North Korea.
The device is programmed automatically to take a screenshot every five minutes so the government and Pyongyang knows exactly what its subjects are looking at.
There's no privacy at all in a police state.
So that seems like something that only happens in North Korea, but unfortunately it's not.
It happens here too, all over the so-called free world.
In the United States, for example, data brokers monitor everybody's online activity, what you read, click, buy, more, everything you do, and then sell information about you without your knowledge or permission to advertisers and even data scammers, and by the way, other governments.
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There's a reason for that.
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But that's only one aspect of how the United States taxpayer is subsidizing this, what's happening here.
About, I would say, a third of the properties in the state of Maine that would go on to become illegal Chinese marijuana grow houses were purchased using mortgages through a program called the Community Development Finance Institution.
It's a designation that you give to banks.
The entire purpose of the program is to help marginalized communities access financing.
The idea is that if you were an immigrant in the 1990s, you couldn't prove regular income.
You had irregular finances and trouble accessing a mortgage.
So they created this special program to take away some of the risk from the lender.
So there's one bank in New York, Quantic Bank, that has the CDFI designation.
And on their website, they advertise that they'll help non-citizens, foreign nationals, buy property in the United States.
Why would we be helping foreign nationals buy in places where there's a housing crisis and the people who are born there can't find a house to live in?
In looking at the mortgage records, having to actually look at the physical records themselves, I cottoned on to this Quantic Bank pattern.
And it's just a quirk of how the registry of deeds records work that you can search by the lender.
And so I searched Quantic Bank just to see, do they loan to everybody or are they just suddenly a new domain?
And I would say 95% of their loans were post-2019 and exclusively to people with Chinese names from New York and from Boston.
And in further reviewing those records, I found there were two individuals, two loan officers who were originating almost all of those loans, 95% of those loans.
And one was a Taiwanese national and the other was a Chinese national who graduated from a university in China that's affiliated with the PRC's economic warfare program.
I actually got phone interviews with them.
They're on our X page.
You can go listen to them.
I asked Ying Chen Wang, I said, did you know that these properties of all these loans that you're doing were becoming illegal marijuana grow houses?
She said, what?
No, no way.
Well, I'll have to say something about this.
We'll have to put a stop to this.
Did they?
I don't know.
I'm unaware.
I am unaware.
I know that there's been a lot of letters written by politicians about the CDFI program, about why we're doing this, but the horses left the barn at this point.
I mean, they have the properties now, and they have the means to generate as much cash as they want.
This was a gold rush in Maine.
That's what it was.
When we legalized marijuana, there was a vote in 2016.
The state came out and said, yes, we want adult use marijuana legalized.
They formalized the program in 2020 and created an adult use program and a medicinal program, which are very distinct.
And the medicinal program is vastly under-regulated compared to the adult use Recreational program, which is counterintuitive, but the medicinal program is like the Wild, Wild West.
But when we did this, we created just a pig scramble for a $5 to $10 billion market for this drug.
And the forces that we unleashed and the forces that were brought to bear on Maine to access that money, we weren't prepared for.
There's never been any arrests made in connection with that facility, which functioned, according to the state police, as an illicit marijuana grow controlled by Chinese gangs from New York.
The Office of Cannabis Policy, which regulates all of this, has suspended numerous licenses for Chinese marijuana growers from out of state who are affiliated with that property.
There's never been any arrests made at that property until December, last December.
A guy named William Robinson, no relation, was shot in the head there by a drug dealer.
And the guy who shot him was later, allegedly, was later arrested, hiding at a marina in San Diego.
I've knocked on the doors of a lot of marijuana facilities, but in Greenbush, in Greenbush, Maine.
Where's that?
It's about 35 minutes north of Bangor, very rural.
But there's an area where there are multiple adjacent properties, all controlled, all fenced off, motion sensors on the road so that they know if someone's coming well in advance.
And blue-collar workers I've talked with who have had to come out and do some service at those properties have talked about being surveilled by crews of, you know, eight young Chinese men, close-crop haircuts, fatigues, and fatigues?
What there was described to me as fatigues.
Standing around the perimeter of the property.
And when they need to access the property to do some load testing, if they're, for example, an electrical worker, they're physically stopped and prevented from accessing the property.
And they're escorted off the property and two crisp $100 bills tucked into their back pocket.
And they say, coffee, money, coffee, money, coffee, money.
So it's kind of genius the way they've set up the scheme in that the property owner is never the one who is there growing the marijuana or picking up the marijuana or trafficking the marijuana.
And so they're never held culpable for the activity happening at their property because they can always have plausible deniability.
Oh, I was renting to my cousin.
I was renting to a stranger.
You know, I found this guy on WeChat and rented the property to him.
I had no idea this was going on.
I'm so upset that this is happening.
Thank you, law enforcement, for doing this for us.
So in January, the director of the Office of Cannabis Policy, handpicked by Governor Janet Mills, a guy named John Hodak, admitted.
And he is in front of the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee testifying for the first time this year of this session.
And he admits that he's been giving licenses, medicinal marijuana licenses, to individuals that he suspects have ties to Chinese organized crime.
Or he's giving licenses to people who provide addresses for their grows at properties that have been previously raided for their connections to Chinese organized crime.
And if you look at like, you know, where I'm from, Dexter, you had Dexter, Ripley, Kernock, Cambridge, all these towns, three different counties represented, but you've got one criminal group that's operating in three different counties.
So three different sheriffs have jurisdiction and multiple different local police departments.
And some of these towns don't even have police departments, but they're not, as a matter of course, sharing intelligence.
So in order to take down a criminal operation that's straddling three counties, you need to get cooperation amongst these three sheriffs who don't like just always cooperate.
So it requires a Herculean effort amongst law enforcement to coordinate one of these crackdowns or one of these raids that are going to be effective at actually arresting people, detaining people who could be witnesses who could explain more about what's ultimately happening.
But by and large, there's no effective enforcement.
They've been involved in three raids, and two of them were in Belgrade, about a mile from the state police headquarters.
And the reason they raided those is because six months before we started drawing attention to them, one of their troopers had been inside, seen 500 or 600 marijuana plants, talked to the Chinese individual who voluntarily let the trooper in, so all this is admissible, talked to the Department of Agriculture, talked to the Office of Cannabis Policy, confirmed that it was an illegal grow and didn't do anything to it for six months and allowed it to continue to operate.
So it's my belief that those two operations in Belgrade were CYA.
They didn't want it later to look like a cover-up on their part.
We don't even know how many people have been killed.
In Freedom, Maine, there was a house 555 Belfast Road, been busted by the sheriff out there for functioning as an illegal marijuana grow, subsequently turned into a flop house, and there was a carbon monoxide poisoning incident.
There were, we think, four or five Chinese migrants living there, poisoned by carbon monoxide, hospitalized.
Two of them died.
Somehow, the exhaust of the heater just piped back in through the window.
It was an accident, officially, on paper, is what law enforcement have determined.
Somehow the propane heater, the breeze must have caught it and piped it back in through the window.
And there was no outpouring of progressive goodwill or mourning for these poor Chinese migrants who died at a flop house in Freedom, Maine.
But I mean, it was an attempted mass murder, in my opinion.
There's no way the exhaust just accidentally pipes back into the house.
No, this was an attempted hit on Chinese migrant workers at a flop house.
This was triad on triad violence, which we've seen, we've documented.
There have been burglaries.
There was the shooting I just talked about at the marijuana grow in Turner.
And that individual, after he shot who was his friend in the head, turned to one of the witnesses who I've talked with and said that he was a hired hitman for the triad and that there were 40 more just like him.
Maybe he watched too many video games and or pulled too many movies or whatever and he was lying or maybe he was telling the truth.
She was an attorney general under Governor Paul LePage.
She was a district attorney Before that, she's been a government employee for basically her entire life, came out of Farmington, dropped out of Colby, she claims, on her own free will, and then graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1970, although she's not listed in the program for that graduation ceremony.
It's the weirdest thing.
But she's been governor now for about six, seven years.
The state under Governor Mills has embraced restorative justice and harm reduction and the idea that if you stop enforcing laws against drugs and you pass out needles and Narcan, that that is going to be good for society.
I think the plain objective evidence is that that's been a complete failure.
But on the, I guess, the Chinese criminal conspiracy in the state, we've approached her at events and tried to ask her about it, and she won't answer questions directly.
It could just be that it's the main wire and we are the conservative outlet in the state.
And maybe if she acknowledges the problem of Chinese criminal organizations in this state, it's in some way validating the work that we've done to expose the problem.
And if you accept that the work that we've done on Chinese criminal organizations in the state is legitimate, valuable journalism, then you have to ask, well, what about the other investigative projects that we've worked on, which I also think are valuable journalism for the state?
I am increasingly of the belief that there's a lot of bribes being paid in the state.
Small stuff to code enforcement officers, police departments.
It's really the only way that explains the lack of action.
And we did discover in reviewing property records, there was a raid.
This was in 2024 in February that kind of targeted the area around my hometown.
The town that my mom grew up in.
I mean, from this marijuana house that was raided in Corinna, you can see the church that my brother was married in and that my grandmother used to go to.
It's a big, beautiful Maine house that will probably have to be destroyed now because of the poisons and the mold and everything that afflicted the house as a result of it becoming a marijuana grow.
But there was this coordinated raid with the sheriff's very effective law enforcement action.
And in the days after that, there was a real estate transfer done for a property in Corinna, Maine, in this same town, for a 12-acre property, a teardown, really like a hunting camp.
And it was a transfer of a property from a Chinese woman living in Massachusetts to another Chinese person living in Guangdong province, China.
And then on the real estate transfer document, it said that this was a gift to mother.
And my mom was from Corinna.
And so I thought to myself, if I told my mom that for Mother's Day, I was giving her 12 acres in a teardown in Corinna, Maine, she would probably slap me.
So again, this is an unusual gift to your mother.
But what really struck me as unusual about it was the fact that the attorney who processed the real estate transfer was Paul Mills of Farmington, Maine, who is the older brother of Governor Janet Mills.
The governor's brother has been involved in notarizing deeds for individuals connected to Chinese organized crime and was the real estate transfer attorney specifically for this property, which he helped transfer as a gift to the ownership of a Chinese national who owns multiple marijuana grows in the state of Maine.
And it was done days after a law enforcement action in that area.
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So if you had said I'm calling from Guangdong province and I'd like to open another illegal drug operation in the state, you think that would have been different?
Or I don't know if he was maybe a useful idiot or maybe it was an element of Chinese culture where they think that they need to pay some kind of a tribute to the elected official in charge, to their family members, in order to get some kind of purpose.
And I printed off copies of the real estate transfer record with his name on it, with the address in Guangdong province, China, where this new owner of 12 acres in a teardown in Carena, Maine.
And I have the code enforcement officer on the record saying this is an illegal marijuana grow and we would not authorize it because Carena opted out.
We went to the state house and we passed out, I printed out 50 copies of this real estate transfer record.
And I passed them out to politicians.
I passed them out to other reporters.
I sat in the governor's lobby with a camera focused right on the door, just waiting for an interview.
And they actually canceled one of her meetings with school board members and snuck her out the side door so that she wouldn't have to answer questions.
And even though I scattered, I blanketed that place.
I was like South Korea flying over North Korea, dropping flyers, trying to get people to pay attention to this stuff.
And no other element in the state of Maine covered it.
Before I'd even reported anything on this, I had an Excel spreadsheet working on a database, you know, track, keeping track of records of sites we'd flagged from financial records, tax records, electrical records, sites we'd visited and confirmed, sites where we talked with the neighbors.
And at that point, I'd identified maybe 150 or 175 of these sites and actually sent it to the Bangor Daily News.
I hadn't reported anything about it.
But I was scared.
And I thought that if we all reported it at the same time, it would kind of diffuse the attention.
And I was like willing to give up the, I guess, whatever the prestige of being the one who gets the scoop to have us all come forward and report on this problem.
And they've never used it.
They've never reported on it.
They've never touched it.
I don't know.
I mean, it's just maybe their pride of not relying on, you know, I'm not a journalism school graduate.
So maybe they don't want to use it or some dirty trick by the conservative media that I'm trying to pull on them, but they haven't used it.
And I realized, I was like, man, this is a real vast conspiracy.
And it just kind of dawned on me how insane this entire thing was that this was being allowed to happen in Maine.
And I was like, law enforcement has to be on this.
And I don't want to be the guy who comes along and reports on this and like dicks up this big investigation that they're about to close the loop on.
So I drove to the Maine State Police Headquarters and I walked in with my laptop and I told the receptionist, I have evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy currently operating in the state of Maine.
And I would just like to turn over some information to somebody, to anybody, because I don't want to interfere with some active criminal investigation.
And I waited in the lobby for 15 minutes and then some woman came out and said, there's nobody here who can talk to you.
It might have been a Friday, so they'd probably clocked out by that time.
But I contacted the director of communications for the state police and reiterated what I'd said.
And I contacted some other members of the state police that I knew through family connections, some fairly high ranking who used to be very big fans of mine when they heard me on conservative talk radio, but don't want to talk to me anymore, and reiterated what I'd said.
And, you know, I was, I was, the communications director told me somebody would call me on Monday.
And that was must be 120 Mondays ago at this point.
So they have no interest, no interest in talking to me or hearing from me.
The troopers I've talked with are they're mystified by the decisions that their leadership are making as well.
Well, Michael Sausschuck, former police chief of Portland, who everybody in Portland was glad to see him leave when he got picked to be the head of the Department of Public Safety.
So he runs the Maine State Police and the Maine DEA, Michael Saschuk.
I mean, just hearing this story, which is one of the most shocking stories I've ever heard in a lifetime of hearing shocking stories, it makes the hair on your arm stand up because it feels like there's this great evil.
I mean, they'll cover something if there's a press release, you know, if there's a raid that a sheriff does.
I mean, Sheriff Dale Lancaster in Somerset County is probably the best sheriff in the state of Maine, probably the best law enforcement official in the state of Maine.
Old school, no excuses, no BS, kicking doors in.
He's been responsible for the vast majority of the successful search warrants that have been executed and a lot of the arrests.
He's been very successful, and he'll put out a press release, and there'll be some coverage, but they'll be very careful not to note any of the patterns.
They're very diligent about not recognizing the patterns.
You've put online, and unfortunately, since it's Maine and it's considered far away and remote and people don't pay attention, it hasn't gotten the coverage it deserves, in my opinion.
But you've put the facts out there.
They could follow up on that at any moment, and they've decided not to.
So reprinting press releases is not journalism, of course.
So the largest newspaper company currently is owned by the Maine Trust for Local News, which is a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, which is a nonprofit funded by George Soros.
He specifically funded the transaction to acquire these papers from Reid Brower, along with Hans-Jörg Weiss, who's a Swiss national who made his fortune doing illegal bone cement experiments on humans, who's been in trouble in the past for illegally donating as a foreign national to U.S. political candidates, so has a knack for trying to influence American politics as a Soros want to control the media in Maine.
Yeah, so Maine's, going back to the 1980s, Maine's been a cheap date for people looking to trial political ideas.
You know, beginning with the shutdown of Maine Yankee, our nuclear power plant, there's really just three media markets.
Like you said, just a handful of newspapers.
And if you want to get a ballot initiative done or something like that, it doesn't take a lot of money.
So you can come to Maine and you can close a nuclear plant.
You can get a gay marriage referendum passed.
You can get marijuana legalized as a referendum for a small amount of money.
And then you can go to another state and say, well, we've already done it in Maine.
We can do it in this state.
And so we become kind of a petri dish for political experimentation that particularly the progressive left has taken advantage of in a very successful way.
Working class people, and then adjacent town Auburn, frequently referred to as LA, Lewiston-Auburn.
It's, you know, I would say it's the second biggest metropolitan area in the state.
But now I would say it's a no-go zone.
It's not something that people feel safe.
You know, the people who supported turning Lewiston into a sanctuary city for Somalis have now spent as much money as they can to get as far away from Lewiston as they can.
And there are people who will be partisans for Lewiston that it's on the verge of a comeback and you get in trouble if you criticize Lewiston.
But we cover police reports.
We cover crime reports.
We talk to Lewiston police officers.
We know what's happening in Lewiston.
There are 16 and 17-year-olds engaging in gunfights on the streets.
And when the police show up to talk to people, nobody will talk.
People are getting shot and nobody will talk.
People who get shot won't talk about who shot them.
So the police are frustrated and they're all just, you know, looking at the clock and wondering when they can start collecting their pension.
But it's just a symptom of the law enforcement is just retreating across the board, whether it's the crime that's happening, the drug crime that was happening in Portland when they were basically allowing open opioid use and not arresting people, including people who are selling narcotics, whether it's the gun crime in Lewiston or the Chinese organized crime, all of this.
There's just law enforcement have they've pulled back.
What's so scary to me is that Maine is now considered a blue state.
A lot of the state is not blue at all.
It's not in favor of this.
It's the southern parts of the states, coastal parts of the states, the first district that has been completely changed demographically and now is totally in the hands of the Democratic Party.
But what's interesting is the Republican candidates in Maine, the ones who are lining up to run for governor, for example, in this coming election, none of them, from what I can tell, have even mentioned demographic change, crime, and drugs.
Those are not issues that Republicans want to talk about, even though they are the issues.
I think that the gay race communists increased the social cost of participating in the public sphere during COVID, helped by COVID, to such a significant degree that good conservative people who might not be explicitly political, but who just are conservative inclined, they have a conservative disposition, withdrew from politics.
Because if you went to a school board or you went to a town council meeting and you spoke out, spoke your mind about what you wanted to see happen in your community, it wasn't just that you disagreed with somebody.
It was that you were a bad person.
And if you owned a business, well, there's going to be a Facebook mob that was going to go give you one-star reviews and you were a bad person.
We're going to drive you into the ground if you don't want, you know, porn books with cartoon, you know, blowjobs in them in your kindergarten classroom.
If you don't want that, you're a bad person.
And so conservatives just said, you know what?
Screw it.
This is, it's not worth my time.
The cost is too high.
I'm just going to go take care of my family, my church.
I'm going to go fishing.
I'm going to hang out with my Rotary Club.
We ceded the public square to the gay race communists, and they took over with zeal.
Yeah, I mean, if we had the resources and could find the people, I could keep a team of 15, 20 reporters busy around the clock, full-time, and pursuing stories.
A list of investigative stories that we have to work on that are maybe not the same size and scope as triadweed is long, but there's so much organized crime and it's so overlapped with government.
Virtually every government program is being taken advantage of.
The government itself is handing out no-bid contracts in a way that's hard to separate from organized crime.
Yeah, I mean, it's been very difficult to find people to move to Maine.
I had really a heartbreaking moment hiring my most recent producer to do our own podcast and substack project.
And I'm talking with him.
He grew up in Bangor, did everything right, went to high school, stayed out of trouble, went to Hussin, got a degree in film production, and is getting ready to propose to his girlfriend.
They've already proposed, so I'm not spilling the beans here.
And I said, so what's keeping you in Maine?
And he said, we just haven't been able to save up enough money to get out.
And that was like a fucking dagger in my heart.
Imagine that.
Just haven't been able to save up enough money to escape Maine.
And it's like, where do you escape to even?
I guess Texas, Florida, Tennessee, some red states, some free states maybe you can get to.
But hearing that from him was like, man.
So, I mean, that's, I think that's part of, you know, I would like Maine to be a place where people want to live.
But right now it's not.
And it's very hard to hire people who want to come here.
It's like a deployment to a war zone.
You know, one of my reporters lives in Portland.
I gave him a gun when I hired him.
And he said he was going to be living in Portland.
But that phenomenon, by the way, has trickled down into all of the legal marijuana businesses who invested in some cases their life savings to build a business, do it legally, do things the right way.
Now they're seeing that the laws are being enforced only against white people.
The marijuana laws are only being enforced against white people.
So increasingly, you're seeing more people adopt the same tactics that the Chinese mafia is, shipping out of state, blowing, you know, growing more than their licenses allow, you know, cutting corners.
There's a pretty famous case, a guy named Lucas Sorois in Farmington, Maine, who was, he set up a business called the Shoe Factory, which was in an old shoe factory building where he built these rooms and people who wanted to grow marijuana could rent from him and they would grow their marijuana at this property.
And he got reported to the Office of Cannabis Policy.
And the Office of Cannabis Policy immediately referred him to the drug enforcement agency, the federal drug enforcement agency.
And the DOJ got on top of him and they wiretapped his phones, recorded his conversations with his father, and are still to this day pursuing a case to try to send him to prison for doing a smaller scale version of what they knew they knew.
And I can prove they knew because there's public documents and documents I've obtained through Freedom of Access Act requests, what they knew the Chinese organizations were doing at the same time, including at that facility in Turner where William Robinson was shot in the head in December.
So they are, if you've got a French-Canadian last name, they're going to stick the DOJ after you.
They're going to try to lock you in a cage.
But if your last name is Wu or Huang or Chen, you don't get the laws applied to you.
You get arrested.
you get $500 bail, maybe, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 if it's Somerset County.
And then who knows if you show up at your trial or if you, Has To the governor's brother who's profiting, who has provably profited from this, is anybody in Maine state media mentioning this?
Is anyone following up on this?
The governor's never responded to this.
It's just like you report this and then it just disappears.
I mean, it got plenty of attention in the national media.
You know, I've done a segment with CBS to their credit.
Peter Schweitzer, who's a great author, journalist who spent a lot of time working on the China topic and the drug topic, you know, helped me get in touch with CBS and they came up and did a segment on it.
NBC later ripped off that segment and basically plagiarized all of my journalism, but that's fine.
It's gotten national attention, but not the Paul Mills part of it.
And the local newspaper reporters don't seem to be interested in it.
It's weird.
I've been accused of xenophobia for reporting on this huge criminal organization that took over my state and that's ruining all of these buildings.
Oh, just idiots online, progressives, elected officials.
The only time I've ever testified on a bill was when there was a lawmaker who introduced a bill that would have given Maine a little RICO statute to help crack down on organized crime operations like this.
And I figured I'd testify because I've seen more of these than anybody in the state.
At this point, I could be a self-anointed expert witness in Chinese marijuana.
I've got a degree in Chinese marijuana.
And so I testified neither for or against this bill and just was there to answer questions about how this operates.
And as we included the clip in our documentary, they didn't want to hear.
They shut down my testimony and said, can we hear from an actual expert about this?
And they pushed me out and they voted down the bill, voted against the only piece of legislation that would have empowered law enforcement to do anything about this.
So they've reacted very negatively and hostily to my attempts to just show them what's happening in the state.
I think we've gone above and beyond in terms of the evidence that we've provided, the documentation that we've provided, because we know that not being an established, being independent media, being conservative media, there's going to be a higher standard of proof that we have to meet.
And I think that we've met it and gone way beyond it over and over and over and over and over again.
And still they will not acknowledge it.
And specifically when it comes to Paul Mills, who his clients are involved in more marijuana grows than the one we've reported on.
There's a building in Sangerville, Maine right now.
It's the biggest building in Sangerville.
It started construction in August of last year.
And it's just now finished.
And it's coming online.
And it's going to be a big, big, productive marijuana grow owned by the client that Paul Mills transferred the property in Trenton to.
The governor, Janet Mills, who really can't overstate really, it's shocking the more you know about Janet Mills, but they have bulldozed, chainsawed, flattened, clear-cut forests in Maine for solar panels because that's like environmentally positive or something.
Every single house that has had one of these Chinese marijuana groves, the best use for it is potentially practiced for the fire department.
They all need to be torn down.
They're super sites, super fun sites.
We don't even know the extent of the damage that's been done as a result of the Chinese pesticides and fungicides that have been imported from China illegally into California and then shipped to Maine and used at these sites as fumigants.
In the Siskiyou National Forest, they have what they call hoophouses, massive greenhouses.
And they are operated by Chinese criminal organizations there, often in concert with the Central American cartels.
And they've been investigating these from an environmental perspective because they've weakened their drug laws so much that no one cares about illegal marijuana, but they do care about water diversion to supply the cannabis.
And they care about the contamination of these pristine wildlife environments with the chemical runoff.
So they have the environment police out there working to fight the Chinese mafia.
They've found pesticides, fungicides, fumigants in Chinese-labeled mylar bags.
And they found some shipping labels that they were able to trace back to a property in California, which they obtained a postal warrant on, and found that this particular house was also shipping to a grow supply store in Massachusetts and a house in Monmouth, Maine, which is in Kennebec County, maybe 20 miles away from Augusta, the state's capital.
It's on Academy Road.
It's about maybe 1,000 feet from a school.
We went to the house and knocked on the door to try to see if the owner wanted to talk.
No one was there.
It very clearly had been turned into a marijuana grow at one point, but was not active.
And we went and talked with the neighbor who was a firefighter.
And he says, oh, no, it's active.
There's people there in the mornings around two o'clock in the morning to five o'clock in the morning, and there's activity there.
So we kind of drew the conclusion that potentially this was a shipping hub or receiving hub for these pesticides and fumigants and chemicals that were being sent, imported from China to California and distributed to Chinese marijuana.
There's no licensed regulated use for many of these pesticides and fungicides.
because they're so deadly for humans, but it's even worse than that.
So they're using chemicals that are not licensed for use in the United States and are deadly.
Some of them aren't even licensed for use in China, which is not notorious for their concern for environmental rights, you know, human rights, environmental degradation.
But they're also not very well studied, used together in like eight of them together, 12 of them together.
They're not studied when you burn them.
They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana and eat the marijuana.
They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana and smoke the marijuana.
They're not studied when you use them in all these different combinations and then do a gas extraction process to extract the THC oil and a more potent version of this pesticide fugant.
They're not studied at all.
They're unknown.
They only identified a lot of these chemicals.
Seriously?
They only identified a lot of these chemicals in California because they brought in the weapons of mass destruction unit from the Army National Guard because the conventional labs couldn't test for them.
And there's no lab in the state of Maine that can test for them that I know of.
None of the cannabis labs can take cannabis grown at a Chinese marijuana grower that has used these pesticides and test it and determine that it's contaminated.
They may be now because I've shared the information with them directly from the chemists in California who are identifying them and trying to lead the fight against them.
They may be able to test for them now.
But the consequence of it is that you could take a bit of marijuana from one of these grows that's been treated with these heinous, deadly chemicals and test it at one of the labs and get an A-plus.
And these, so these mylar bags, well, first of all, the house where we knew these products were being shipped, we knock on the door and do a story about it.
And a week later, the house hits the market for sale.
Not suspicious at all.
And the following week, I get a call from a grandmother who had just taken a tour of the house as a prospective buyer with her two grandchildren.
And she was calling me because she and her grandchildren immediately developed respiratory symptoms after walking through the house.
And they were concerned enough that they Googled it and they found my article and they called me and they wanted to know, what do we do?
You know, we've just been exposed to dangerous unknown Chinese neurotoxins.
I mean, if she's supported by the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Maine Renewable Energy Association and all the other corrupt trade groups that turn around and profit from the sale of solar panels made by Chinese slaves in western China.
Yeah, sure.
She would position herself that way.
And presumably future Democrats will position themselves that way.
But these same Mylar bags, by the way, that we've seen in California, that we've identified, we know to a certain extent what these chemicals are thanks to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Lab.
The most recent bust in Somerset County by Sheriff Dale Lancaster, he had photographs that he distributed with his press release.
The same exact bags.
They're coming here from California, shipped here illegally from China, being distributed here.
And if they're in that one grow in Somerset County, you could assume that they're in all these grows and they dump mad science concoctions of pesticides with sawdust and ammonium nitrate in a little fuse and a half cup beer can and they let it smolder and the smoke fills the house and it covers the marijuana plants.
And so the mites won't grow and the mildew won't grow.
It's very effective at mitigating any kind of pesticide or pest damage to your marijuana product, but it coats every corner of the house and these dangerous chemicals.
So we have no way of testing for them.
There's no real estate disclosure.
There are houses right now for sale by the same real estate agent who tried to sell this fucking house to the grandmother I talked with.
There are houses that are for sale right now on the market that have very likely been contaminated with these pesticides.
Or at a minimum, the black mold that comes with a house that's kept at 99% humidity and 80 degrees so that marijuana can grow.
They're on the market right now being sold with no disclosure whatsoever.
And this is a state with one of the most profound housing crises in the country because of immigration and Airbnb and big companies buying up residential real estate like people can't afford houses here, period.
I've got some dirty jokes on that subject, but I'm not going to share them.
So it's reducing the amount of available housing for Maine people.
It is poisoning the state's environment, which the government claims to be a steward of.
And they know what's happening, right?
I just want to, this one point I just want to be totally clear on.
You're a journalist working with other journalists trying to expose the scale of this disaster, this crime, but it's not like government officials don't know.
I'm not even talking about the governor, like people who run the town managers in all these little towns, the selectmen in all these little towns, they've got to know too, right?
I mean, I know that the Lincoln County Sheriff has videotaped surveillance evidence of illegal dumping going on out behind these sites.
There's at Matrias out in Washington County and a marijuana girl I visited there.
You could Almost study the ages of marijuana cultivation there by looking at the strata of the styrofoam or I guess fiberglass substrate that they start the marijuana plants in because they were just layers and layers and layers and layers where they'd been growing marijuana.
Because they just take it when they're done with it, they throw it out in the backyard.
And so just the entire property is a beautiful farm in Machias that overlooks the water just like could be someone's paradise.
And the soil will be permanently contaminated with, you know, God knows what chemicals and fiberglass.
It's everywhere distributed throughout the property.
Every single one of these places has like an unknown level of contamination, water contamination, soil contamination, the danger to people.
The processes that are used to extract the THC and the CBD, the psychoactive useful chemicals in marijuana, these same processes also can collect the oil-soluble pesticides and fungicides in higher concentrations.
So when you concentrate the vape pen to 99% THC, you're also concentrating some of these pesticides and fungicides.
And then those are being sold.
I mean, from the Chinese grows to two-thirds of them are leaving the state.
They're being sold New York, Massachusetts, the Southeast, United States, all over the place.
And people are unknowingly consuming these substances that have just not been studied at all.
So we wouldn't even really know if somebody was experiencing side effects of unintentional exposure to some of these carbamate poisons.
I mean, there's so much that we don't know about the dangers of these chemicals, and you can't help but wonder if that's intentional.
They explicitly contemplate environmental destruction and unrestricted warfare.
The book written by Chinese colonels in 1999, which basically laid out exactly what they would do to us over the next 25 years.
And we know, thanks to Philip Linzicki from the Daily Color News Foundation, who reported just last week that there was reporting we did in Dexter, my hometown, about a mile from where I grew up, out of illegal marijuana row.
We found an abandoned BMW there, and there were two shirts over the driver's seat and the passenger's seat that had Chinese writing on them for the Sichu Association of New York.
I was like, huh, that's weird.
Took some pictures of it, didn't really think anything of it.
This place, by the way, is like a mile from a military facility, a U.S. Army Reserve garrison.
And later, Philip was able to connect the dots between two individuals arrested in Carmel, Maine.
One of them was Weizan Huang.
And film from a Chinese Communist Party event in New York where two of these individuals who were arrested, their mugshots, they're on video at this event.
And then Weizan Huang is featured, while he's out on bail, by the way, is featured in Chinese state-run media, back in his hometown, doing classic United Front work, talking about how he's going to come back to the United States and he's going to bring home the bacon for his hometown, bring home American investment for his people.
And he is the executive director of the association that those shirts were linked to.
So thanks to, I guess, you know, the work we did on the ground and Philip's advanced knowledge of Cantonese Mandarin, the culture, the language, and how these Chinese benevolent associations work.
They're all front groups, by the way.
You know, the Chinese consulate in New York should be gone.
It should not be allowed to be operating in the United States.
Like the president of the United States should close it down immediately.
All those Chinese consulates, they're like military bases from a hostile foreign power.
They should be gone.
And New York should not be allowed to issue licenses to foreign nationals because it's hurting every other state.
But thanks to driver's licenses, their identity documents, the state of New York is printing false identity documents for criminal organizations, aiding and abetting them.
They're all coming here with driver's licenses from New York.
And a month later, they get a license to grow marijuana here in the state of Maine.
But we're spending our time arguing about Israel and Iran and all the rest when the country's dying.
It's the amount of energy that's being expended on things that don't really matter that much to the exclusion of things that really do matter, life and death questions like the ones you're describing is really upsetting.
And Iranians never come taking a shit in my hometown like the Chinese communists are.
You know, nobody from my high school class has died from Iranian fentanyl.
You know, I guess, you know, I guess if we take out their nuclear program, are we committing ourselves to a permanent technological subjugation of the Iranians forever?
Are we for going to forever?
Are we going to 100, 1,000 years from now, going to be keeping them no nuclear weapons?
Is that what we're going to do?
Because they're going to be pretty pissed off if you go take them out now.
But if you were caught doing that, I guess let me just say, you're busted by the police, the same police who didn't bust the Chinese drug cartel that was running the police, what would happen to you?
So a foreign drug cartel can come to your town, destroy the town, commit crimes in plain sight.
There's nothing anybody can do about it.
But if having watched the total collapse of law enforcement, you decide to enforce the law informally by getting rid of the drug house, not hurting anyone, but just destroying the property, you go to jail.
Or what would happen if I went to China and decided, hey, I'm going to go grow a bunch of pot and sell it illegally all around?
Oh, and it's going to be poisoned too with poisons that I've illegally shipped in from the United States.
Not saying we want to become any more like China, but the unequal application of the laws is so obvious that it is going to encourage this, what you're talking about, vigilanteism.
Because you have it's marijuana in Maine is such a huge business.
You know, we're known for lobsters, blueberries, whatever.
But if you look at it in terms of economic value, and if you add the gray market and the black market to what's actually being taxed, it's way bigger than blueberries, lobster, and potatoes combined in terms of its economic value for the state.
And there are a lot of people who spent a considerable amount of their time, energy, and treasure trying to build businesses around this, following the rules, doing the right thing, trying to follow these weird, murky, hard to follow regulations that change all the time.
And the regulators are putative.
And if you complain about them on Instagram, they're going to give you a surprise inspection and write you a ticket, only if you're white.
And all of these business owners are being put under because of the unequal enforcement of the laws, because the dumping of the Chinese grown marijuana, which comes with all these built-in cost advantages, you don't have to pay your laborers.
You can steal electricity.
You can use pesticides and fungicides.
You can grow way over the plant limits.
You have no regulatory compliance costs.
So you can go sell your product for half what the legal main business owners can sell.
So they're going bankrupt and they're looking at a government that's not enforcing the laws equally.
And if you don't think that they're contemplating vigilanteism, you're crazy.
According to Chinese state-run media, taking meetings with Senate President Troy Jackson, Matt Dunlap, the current state auditor, former Secretary of State, had just returned from a trip to China, handling the inauguration of the first female governor of the state of Maine.
Objectively, I think that we have yet to devise a measure of political science or social science by which you could say this state has improved under Janet Mills.
I think that the best example of the people of Maine lacking the immune system to repel something like this is Woodville, Maine, which is a town of maybe 300, 350 people.
And it's Penobscot County, northern Penobscot County, maybe 45 minutes to an hour north of Bangor.
It was a prosperous business that made lumber and wood for people to build homes so that middle-class families could live in them instead of growing marijuana in them.
And this place was obnoxious.
There was effluent always running across the road.
The people were angry and mean and nasty.
And they wouldn't pay their taxes.
And then someone would show up from New York and just slap $100 bills on the counter until the clerk said, okay, the taxes are paid, and then leave.
And at one point, they had to call the animal control officer because there was a Cantonese speaking individual out in the front yard beating a border collie with a stick.
When the animal control officer showed up, the guy just picked up the dog, threw him over and said, take him.
No good.
No good.
And I could see going into the town council meetings that I could see this happening, like the lack of an immune system to repel what was happening and cross the line from journalist to like, I don't know, local activists.
And I was like, why don't you guys just write an ordinance that says that you can declare that an illegal cannabis business and start fining them $10,000 a day until they shut it down.
And if they don't pay the fine, then you put a lien against the property and turn off the electricity because if they can't have electricity, they can't grow marijuana.
If they can't grow marijuana, they can't make money.
They will leave.
Just write an ordinance and do that.
And they were like, geez, that's not a bad idea.
And they wrote the ordinance and they passed the ordinance.
And then 30 days later, I reached out and they were like, well, how do we enforce the ordinance?
Well, get your code enforcement officer, as the ordinance says, get your code enforcement officer to go declare it from an exterior inspection and illegal cannabis business and start issuing the fines.
And they're like, well, geez, I don't know if our code enforcement officer will do that.
She's got a couple of towns she deals with.
I don't know.
I still don't know what the status of it is.
But these guys, this particular marijuana grow ended up applying for a license with the Office of Cannabis Policy to grow legally.
And when the inspector showed up, they were already growing hundreds of plants.
And they couldn't explain to them that that's illegal and you're disqualifying for getting a license.
But this is like the one place that ended up not getting a legal license after being caught growing marijuana illegally.
But it's still owned by Chinese nationals because these are effective real estate investments, too.
The real estate's an effective way to hide capital from the Chinese government itself.
That's happening all over the United States, and it's really affecting residential real estate prices, of course.
And it's not just China that's dumping money here as a safe haven and destroying the ability of our kids to buy houses.
You said something off camera, which I hope you will elaborate on a little bit.
So one of, I think people listening to this who aren't familiar with Northern New England might say, well, wow, you know, the people sound pretty passive in the face of the total destruction of their state, their way of life, their culture, their economy, the land itself.
How could they put up with that?
And you said something, I think this is fair.
You said the best part of Maine is that people are instinctively hesitant to bother other people, but that's also a weakness.
You know, and I'll say that there, there are I was more scared knocking on some of the doors than I knew Mainers own the properties because they might answer with a gun.
You know, for sure.
The Chinese, the individuals who are at these facilities growing marijuana, it's my belief.
In most cases, they are victims of exploitation by criminal organizations.
They're being paid maybe $1,000 a month.
They're being exposed to chemicals that they have no idea what the consequences of that will be, the mold.
They're living in conditions that any American would look at and be like, that's slavery or that's human trafficking.
That is unreal.
But they could be doing it voluntarily.
I still think that they're victims, but they're very servile in most cases when you try to ask them questions or interview them and they can't speak English or they pretend they can't speak English and they call someone in New York and do an interview over the phone and they don't want to answer any questions.
But they very much, the people who are operating this know about that culture in Maine and they exploit it for a reason.
They're very, like they came to Maine with a playbook that they'd run previously in Washington State, in California, in Oklahoma to camouflage themselves with illegal marijuana programs.
But they knew that once they got to Maine, there was going to be this live and live type culture.
The Yankee Reserve that, you know, it's got the highest incidence of English ancestry of any state is what the world has done to Great Britain, you know, in the same dynamic.
Like you come in living off the charity of the people who built the country, and then you give them the finger, then you destroy what they built, then you take more money from them, and then they do nothing.
And the only people who speak up about it get arrested for speaking up about it.
Like, because you're leveraging Anglo-politeness against the Anglos is what you're doing.
And I mean, they even have a word for, what is it, like Baizo, the white liberals.
They're very strategically taking advantage of this hesitant, this deep-seated fear amongst white people in Maine to be labeled as a racist or described as a racist.
And there's even this stereotype about this rural redneck, and it's true of Maine and it's true of any other state.
Yeah, these people are just racist.
And I encountered over and over and over again In every county that I went to, people who went out of their way to be as fucking nice to these people as they possibly could.
In Franklin County, there was a guy who plowed them out for like two years because they needed to have the driveway clean.
No, they later, they later abused that relationship to the point where the woman who was living at that property, I think she's in her 60s, a young Chinese man, maybe 20s or 30s, came over and asked the elderly Chinese woman if she would go mow the lawn for them.
They need to treat it like a national security threat, first of all.
I think that there's maybe an illusion that Maine doesn't have anything that's a vital national security interest, but there are internet lines that run, international internet lines that run through Maine.
There's Bath Ironworks, a defense contractor here.
There's some military facilities.
And there's a huge, like a 5,000-acre, I guess, a National Guard complex in Woodville, the town where the Border Collie was being beat.
It needs to be treated like a national security threat.
And the northern border needs to be treated with the same seriousness that the southern border is, particularly our northeast border.
Right now, we have basically the thin blue line protecting America from illegal aliens from Jordan or from Algeria or from China from sneaking across the Maine border are like 19 and 20 year old cops from Fort Fairfield, Maine, happening to pull somebody over and see something that's not right and bring in CPU.
And the scope of things that are affecting the quality of life in the people of Maine, the transgender athletes, with all due respect to the female athletes who lose to the male athletes who are pretending to be women, it's not as big as this.
I'm talking about like the organized money interests in the United States who are constantly lobbying the federal government for their own economic benefit.
Well, I would say, you know, Bobby Kennedy should treat this like a national health emergency.
It is.
Whatever your feelings are on legal marijuana, it's here.
It's happening.
People are consuming it.
It's more popular.
There are more daily active marijuana users than daily active alcohol users.
This happened just, I think, within the last year or two.
So it's happening.
And to the extent that these illicit Chinese poisons are making it into that supply, it is a national health emergency and it needs to be responded to it just like that.
But there's also, there are powerful economic interests that align with what the Chinese are doing in the Baptists and bootlagers fashion.
Like there are marijuana companies that want to become the Bud Light or Coors Light of marijuana.
A harsh, strict regulatory environment that they can comply with easily, costs that they have the capital to deal with, but the little mom and pop cannabis producers don't.
So they tolerate and allow and maybe encourage this kind of wild, wild west of which the Chinese marijuana growers are a part, because they know that the Chinese criminal organizations polluting the marijuana environment in Maine will lead to calls for greater regulatory crackdown and a compliance regime that works favorable to their long-term economic interests.
So there are wealthy companies that give a lot of money to politicians.
I would look into who were the biggest donors to Governor Janet Mills' inaugural committee in 2019.
Honestly, Tucker, you're like my psychotherapist because I feel like I'm Mugatu and Zoolanders.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
As I drive around and I see all these marijuana sites, I'm like, how has it taken this long for somebody to tell this story?
So for finding for somebody else to be like, yeah, that is a fascinating story.
It feels gratifying to the work that we've done.
And I have to say that, I mean, it's been like a team, a team-wide work that my reporters have had to tolerate me just disappearing into the woods of Maine where there's no cell phone signal for days at a time to do some of this work.
And our digital media producer, Graham Pollard, he's one of the best in the country.
And he single-handedly put together the documentary that we made on this.
And he's just so wildly talented.
And a lot of this I don't think I could have done without their help and their assistance.
And also the readers and supporters of our organization, The Main Wire, and a lot of the people who were very brave and gave us tips anonymously.
People in government, people who work for utility companies, town officials.
You know, once the initial story started coming out, people came to us with a lot of harrowing information that they were too scared to put their name to, but ended up being very useful to us in connecting the dots and being able to tell the story that we've told.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
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