← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone. This is JVL here with my best friend Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. We're talking about immigration today because there's some stuff happening that maybe isn't what was exactly promised, or maybe it was what was exactly promised really depended on what you wanted to believe. Back in November of 2024, we're going to start with a case in California where a newlywed couple showed up for what they thought was their final interview for the Brazilian born wife to get her green card. It turns out it was an elaborate sting operation in which US authorities lied to an American citizen and his wife in order to separate her from their attorney so that they could then detain her. Let's have a listen.
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B
We let her out of our sight. She never came back. We were lied to, we were tricked in order to have her separated from the attorney that we brought with us specifically for any kind of worst case scenario like this.
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C
Barbara was sent to a facility in Adelanto, California and then one in Arizona. Her husband sent her urgent court filings for signature. These would likely halt her deportation and he believes the detention center withheld them for a week and still isn't processing them in a timely way. He got a call at 4am Monday morning from his wife saying she's in Louisiana. He fears this is the last stop before deportation to Central or South America.
- [01:36]
B
There is a serious clock ticking here. If my wife is sent from this country, if we cannot stop that, it very realistically could be years before she's able to rejoin me here in the United States. We did everything by the book, as much as we could. This is how we treat the people who dream of becoming Americans.
- [01:58]
A
Sarah, does that call to mind any sort of historical examples where a disfavored group was told, oh, just come with us, we're taking you someplace nice. And then it turns out they were put to a camp of some sort.
- [02:12]
C
Boy, you went right there. Look, I do think this is not what people anticipated when they said, yes, we want something done about illegal immigration. I do think I hear this all the time in the focus groups where voters think. And again, I think you're right. The way you introduce this in terms of people telling themselves a certain kind of story, right? They told themselves that what Donald Trump was going to do was go after gang members and criminals and drug traffickers, but not like, you know, people who were just working or who were on a path to citizenship or people who were legitimate asylum seekers. I think that Americans have a certain amount of faith that I think was quite clearly misplaced that we would do the kind of immigration in their minds, right. And they. We would do it in a humane way. And I think that some people, especially the people closest to the process, like if you talk to Hispanic voters, which is one of the groups that Trump is now doing the worst with, like he did sort of overperformed with Hispanics during the election and they were as pro securing the border as any group I listened to. They were indistinguishable from other sort of MAGA voters. But now they do sound much more like, hey, I see a lot of this in our communities. Kids are seeing their parents get pulled out of schools. I didn't think they were going to go after the grandfather who lived here for 20 years. And I think that it's a little bit. We've had this conversation where I hear this and so I know it's true that people kind of had their own sense of what it would be like. I also know that's not really what Trump said. I mean, they did say they were going to do mass deportations, that they deport millions and millions of people, tens of millions.
- [04:14]
A
I mean, literally, that's what the line was going to deport 20 million people.
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C
I know the problem is, is that the average American thinks that there are 20 million. Thinks there are 20 million. 20 million criminals. And also I think the number of.
- [04:30]
A
Trend agua in the United States is 10 times the standing army.
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C
I don't know what you hear Trump say the other day when he was like, we saved 300 million lives. And you're like, did you. That's the, that's all of us, bro.
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A
It's all of us.
- [04:47]
C
You saved all of us from fentanyl. Fentanyl deaths. I mean, the way that they use statistics is often. And it does, it trades on the American people's literacy. Just. Yeah, like, I don't really know these, these numbers and what they mean or, or because you have to disaggregate. There's some people who will tell you, well, anybody who's here illegally has done crime, right? They, that that is the crime.
- [05:13]
A
That's the crime.
- [05:14]
C
And so those people have to be deported. But even if you start pushing on that, usually they say things like, well, if they've been here X amount of years and they're paying taxes, like Americans want to have lines around it. But of course it's like different person to person and it's sort of arbitrary in terms of what they think crosses the moral line that says, well, this person Shouldn't.
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A
Is it the person they know their church or is it the person from somebody else's church? Because if it's somebody from. If it's Carol who. Oh, I know Carol. I sit next to Carol in Bible study. Well, sure, Carol's one that goes. But if it's somebody else's Carol.
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C
But I didn't even know Carol was here illegally.
- [05:54]
A
Right. And if it. But if it's somebody else's. It's not Carol. But it's Jessica who is in the next town overs Bible study. Well, she lied. She should go. I want to, I want to push on all this a little bit by playing something from Joe Rogan's show where Rogan sounds a little bit choked up in his sort of like this isn't what I got into this for. Here's Joe Rogan.
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C
It's insane.
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A
We were told there would be no. Well, there's two things that are insane.
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C
One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not.
- [06:32]
A
Drug dealers, just construction workers showing up in construction sites raiding them gardeners. Yeah, like really. Before we break down Joe Rogan, I do want to read to you some replies on the Twitters. And these are from not nobodies. These are from people with blue check marks. And you know, they're James Kirkpatrick from vdare. It's far important sick to arrest construction workers than cartel members because that's what's destroying the blue collar job market for Americans. From the White Rooster. Why the White Rooster? Who could say? I mean those are the ones that work for slave wages and have drove out any chance for young American men to compete in the trades. I mean it goes on from there. I would say from the down South Patriot. Well, Joe, on this fuck you. They are parasites on the economy. I get that you have fuck you money, but us peasants don't. Get your head out of your ass and wake up. Anyway, it goes on like that. From. And again, these are. I assume if you've got a blue check, you're probably not a bot. Although who knows on Twitter these days. But I would say you do not see a lot of people in sympathy with Joe Rogan, at least on Twitter's.
- [07:57]
C
I do think there's a fair number of people who are sympathetic to Joe Rogan. I mean I think that there is a. Because here's the thing about Rogan. Rogan was a Bernie guy before he was a Trump guy, right? And so this guy is sort of a. A populist hint of he's red pilled Right. He's not a Republican. He doesn't have this idea like he, he, he sort of, he wants to be pro the working person, pro the average person. Right. That was kind of Bernie's Deal. And this is where a lot of these guys got really. And do. I don't want to, I'll say bamboozled, I'll say red pill. But they got sort of, they're like reactionarily radicalized by saying, oh, I hate woke and you know, we've got to do something about crime. But, but they all had their own personal moral lines that they were just sure Trump wouldn't cross. And now they're all like, well, do you know that Trump is especially cruel when he does these things? And I just think. And we're also, they, they, they are realizing, I mean, it's sort of like, I don't know if you've been following this Megyn Kelly deal. She's, she's really gets into it with a lot of us at the Bulwark on the Twitter, which you're not on, which is good on you, but her thing, you know, people have been like, hey, maybe you should distance yourself from, from the anti Semitism of Tucker and Candace Owens. I mean, Candace Owens, I don't know if you catch any of her show. She just did something with Weinstein the sexual predator Hollywood. And it's. Candace Owens is an insane person. Just an insane person. An anti Semite, a bigot. And she has an extraordinarily popular podcast. And like Meg and Kelly kind of the way Rogan does, right? It's like a quasi cultural but like fruited in conspiracy and just asking questions. Is McCrone's wife a man who could say, God, I hope they win that lawsuit against her. But anyway, Megan Kelly was like, I will not distance myself from these anti Semites on the right. And how dare you ask me to. And the more you ask me to, the more I dig in. But this, there is a period of time where I think Rogan was kind of basking in the fact that Donald Trump was going to come on his show and Donald Trump was buttering these guys up and telling them what they wanted to hear. Oh, no, he goes on the all in podcast. Sure, man. We're going to do HB1 visas. We're going to staple them to your, your passport or whatever your diploma that you get when you graduate from an American college. Well, of course, now he's like, yeah, you could have one of those if you pay me $100,000. And so Trump just lied to all of these people, and they should be. I don't. I think that they. What they need to do is think about how embarrassing it is for them, how they got sucked into a world where they tolerated a lot of really gross stuff because these other famous people who are adjacent to them, they felt like they were suddenly in their orbit, and now they're looking up and they're having to take some moral stock of where things are. And.
- [11:04]
A
So there are three possible pathways for people like Joe Rogan. Pathway number one is they can shift their views and decide, actually, yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't like it more in sorrow than in anger, but we do have to deport all these people. That's pathway one. Pathway two, they can say that they do not agree with this and just sort of turn their toe in the dirt and look down and shake their heads, but not. Not actually turn on Trump. And sure, Pathway three, door number three is they could actually do something. They could say, this isn't what I signed up for. This is wrong. This guy needs to be stopped. That begins with creating a check on him by getting at least one of the houses of Congress under control of the opposition party. And after that, it probably means getting the Republican Party out of the executive branch. Which door do you think they're going to choose?
- [12:08]
C
I think it's going to be person to person, and I think it's about where these things go. I do think that some of these guys have a little bit of their finger on the zeitgeist. And I think if the zeitgeist starts to move, they are both contributors to it as well as people with their fingers in the wind. And I, I believe Joe Rogan, that he has a genuine moral problem with what Donald Trump is doing. And it wouldn't shock me at all if he both just to keep people guessing to be like, heterodox when now that, like, Republicans are so dominant in the culture. And also maybe because it's genuinely what he believes. Um, and because the people attacking him right now start to piss him off. Like, that is what happens with these guys. Half of it is just like the online getting radicalized by who's yelling at you.
- [13:01]
A
Do they though, or do they. This is a real question. You're right. It is going to be person to person. There is also a like, hey, got to get back on side aspect. Like, sometimes they crack back because they don't like being yelled at by White Rooster number 27.
- [13:20]
C
But, like, Theo Vaughn was very upset about being used in that Department of Homeland Security snuff film about deporting people, you know, and so I think that, and for a lot of them too, like their, their reputations, like Epstein was a big thing for a lot of these guys. Like, no, you're going to show us the Epstein files. And so I think it depends on how much indignity, how much humiliation Trump can put them through and where they feel like the cultural winds start to blow.
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A
Well, we'll see. We're about to have CBS News under control. Barry Weiss?
- [13:59]
C
No, that's, those things are, those things are a real problem. But you know what, this is what I mean though. It's at what point does if you love to be heterodox and the mainstream media now that the corporate media is all sort of center right, anti wokesters, at what point are you like, oh, I'm not saying anything interesting now. I'm just on the dominant side.
- [14:22]
A
I do not believe that any significant proportion of those people ever actually enjoyed being heterodox. I believe that heterodoxy was an excuse that they constructed retroactively to explain why they were taking positions designed to get them power.
- [14:39]
C
Maybe, I don't know. I don't actually find being in these guys like these, you know, manosphere podcasters, brains like that interesting. They do have quite an outsized impact on our culture. But, like, it bores me. I'd actually, I want to talk real quickly about, I think that it's interesting. So like Rogan is for me, the, the Rogan backlash is more akin to, okay, so there's a, a chunk of voters who do, who think that the excesses of Donald Trump on immigration are bad enough that they're very frustrated about it. Right. We talked about Hispanic voters, we talked about now some of the big podcasters. It, but if you look, so the New York Times, this is just in this past week, they asked about immigration. And while Trump's overall approval rating on immigration is 46%. Okay, so he has that 46 approval. He's at 52% disapproved. So not great for being one of his signature issues. But a slim majority, 51% say. Mr. Okay, so 51% say Trump is going too far on immigration enforcement and only 44 think that the deportation process has been fair. So there's like a majority of people who are like, there are excesses here. There's too much happening that's bad. But and this is important, 54% say they support deporting illegal immigrants, compared with 44% who oppose it. 51% say that the government is mostly deporting people who should be deported, compared with 42% who say the government is mostly deporting people who should not be deported. And so this is the thing to understand when you're like, man, if Trump's underwater on this signature issue, why isn't his overall approval rating coming down on it? Or why isn't there more backlash? And the reason is, is that overall, the majority of Americans do want illegal immigrants deported. And that is like, I think that's a tough thing for a lot of people to swallow, but I think it's important that people sort of people will tolerate and they will push back against the excesses. They'll be like, don't keep the kids in cages, but do deport all their families. Like, there is a majority of Americans who want to see this deportation thing happening, which is why it's not hurting Trump as much as you would think. That is the, that's like, that's the tough medicine of all this.
- [17:19]
A
Yeah, it's, it's tough medicine because it's stupid. And it's unclear whether people really mean it. Right? I mean, do they, they say they. Because it's clear. They say they, they want this, but do they really, like, do they, do they want it in theory, but not in practice? Do they, do they really want the construction workers and the landscapers outside of IHOP deported? Is that what they want? And nobody knows. Do they understand the consequences to the macro economy? Right. Do they understand what happens to housing costs? Right. If they also want housing costs to go down, do they understand that if you start destroying the construction sector and driving up wage prices and housing construction, that housing costs go up?
- [18:06]
C
Well, this is where, this is where the comments you read about Joe Rogan are really instructive. Right. It's sort of the way that people think about the tariffs, which is they're just sure that if you get the illegal immigrants out of those jobs that they're going to be flooded with white working class men who are now, you know, working for that. This is, this, these are the opportunities that are being robbed of sort of American.
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A
It's like 4.1%. I mean, it is like we are in a 10% unemployment.
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C
Sure. I'm just saying, like, this is what they think.
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A
No, I know.
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C
And tariffs, understood tariffs are not going to bring American manufacturing back. And that doesn't stop a lot of people from being like, well, if you just stop making these things in China, they're just going to move the plant to Michigan.
- [18:51]
A
Yeah. If only we would have all of our movies shot on sound stages in Los Angeles and all of our watches made in Detroit, then everything would be fixed. Sarah, as always, the problem is the people, and the solution is the people. I don't know how we're gonna get through this, guys. Hit, like, hit. Subscribe. Follow the channel. We'll be back with more terrible news, like, any minute now. Good luck, America.
- [19:18]
D
All right, everybody. We are sold out of tickets to all of our shows on the fall Tour except for October 8th in Washington, D.C. i was on a call yesterday planning out what we've got in store for you. It's gonna be fun. Obviously, JVL will be there, so there'll be Elements of Darkness. We're also bringing in Sarah McBride for a conversation with Sarah Longwell that I'm super excited for. Maybe we might get Will Summer up to talk about some of the crazy shit that's happening on the MAGA ride. I've got some other plans in store for you, so it's not too late. Get your tickets now. Washington, D.C. october 8th. You go to the bulwark.com events. The bulwark.com events. I hope to see you all there. It's at Lincoln Theater. Awesome venue. Appreciate them for hosting us. And so I hope to see you all in Washington.
- [20:00]
A
October.