A (1:47)

Friends like these cool needs enemies of.

C (1:50)

Friends like these cool needs enemies.

B (1:54)

Welcome to Friendly Fire. We're all fat and happy after Thanksgiving. We're actually not so happy because the country is falling. AP A lot to get to, obviously. The tragic shooting of two National Guardsmen just a day before Thanksgiving by an Afghan national. A lot of people asking, why do we have all these Afghan nationals? Why do we have all of these Somalis committing fraud in Minnesota and sending their money to terrorists overseas? We'll get into the big immigration question because America's, I think public opinion has moved vastly to the right on this on immigration, and I give three cheers for that. Also, speaking of Latin America, our Secretary of War is just zapping drug boats left and right, which is a very, very beautiful thing in my view. Now the libs are taking the side of the narco terrorists and accusing him of war crimes. And even some on the Right. Want to say it might be a war crime? We'll get into that. And then the most important question raised by our very own Matt Walsh, why do restaurants suck? They didn't used to suck and now they kind of suck. Matt's words, not mine. We'll get into all of that. First though, you know what Cyber Monday means? It means the best deal of the year at Daily Wire. DailyWire plus is 50% off right now. DailyWire.com subscribe all right, before we get to the most important question, the restaurant question. This migration issue is brutal and it's truly, you read terrible headlines all the time and right before Thanksgiving, this was one of those stories that makes you personally very, very angry and it should make you personally very, very angry. These two young people, a young 20 year old woman, 24 year old guy, National Guard in Washington, serving their country right before the American holiday. And this Afghan national comes out and murders the woman, puts the man in critical condition. This following another attempted Afghan terror attack in Oklahoma last year, right on election day. This after we've seen a lot of crimes being committed by these Afghan immigrants or refugees, I suppose, taken in under Joe Biden. This on top of all of the Somalis in Minnesota apparently defrauding the taxpayer and sending their money to Al Shabaab. So clearly something's gone very, very wrong with immigration. Now President Trump talking about pausing immigration, maybe even deporting people who are ostensibly legal residents or citizens. What are we to do about it? I assume the most belligerent take will come from you, Matt. So what's your take?

C (4:17)

Yeah, well, look, first, on what Trump has said, I completely agree with the tweet that he put out over the weekend, shut off third world immigration. I've been saying that for a long time. A lot of us have been. We need to look at denaturalizing. So it's not just deporting illegals, but also deporting people who are, as you say, ostensibly legal citizens. Denaturalize them. And it's not just because we don't like them. It's because they are committing fraud. As we know with Somalis, this is a huge problem. It's a systemic problem. But also they're lying when they come here. They're supposed to pledge allegiance to our country. That's part of the application process. And we have, there's very good evidence that a lot of them just flat out lied. So they, that's a form of fraud and they should be kicked out for that. The one thing I will say with, with Trump, though, is that, you know, and this has been, this has been an issue with Trump going back to the first term is that if you're go, and I think he's done a lot of great things in the second term, but if you're going to say that you're going to take these kinds of rat, what I, you know, quote, unquote, radical steps, radical in, in comparison to what president of the past have done. If you're going to say that, then you actually have to do it. Because if you say it and then you don't do it now, it's the worst of all worlds because you're still going to get hit, you're going to get the blowback for doing it because you said you were going to do it, but you don't actually get the result of having done it. So if you, if you say it, if you throw down the gauntlet and say we're going to pot, we're going to shut off immigration from third world countries and we're going to denaturalize citizens who defrauded this country, you're going to get a lot of blowback. He's already getting it. Well, now you got to go and actually do it. And, and I think this, this case with the Afghans is a perfect, it's, it's, it shows exactly why it needs to happen. Because, you know, it's not just as you say, Michael, it's, we know the attacks on National Guardsmen. We know the terror attack that was, that was foiled. It's not even just that. There was, there was a case in Fairfax, Virginia this year of an Afghan, you know, quote, unquote refugee was pulled over, ends up opening fire on the police officers. Fortunately, none of them were killed. He was killed in the, in the, you know, in the gunfire, in the return fire. He says on the body, you can go listen to the body cam I talked about on the show today. He says it's picked up on the body cam, this Afghan refugee, after he's pulled over, it was just for a traffic stop. And he says, you stupid white people, you let me into the country. He actually says that. And then he, and then he opens fire. And the reason why this kind of, to me, it kind of encapsulates the whole problem because why, why are these people in the country in the first place? Right? They're here because we're told for, in many cases that like, we owe it to them. In some cases, they worked with American forces, they work with the CIA. So we owe it to them. Well, first of all, and this is the kind of thing that isn't said very often, but it's like, well, okay, so you were a turncoat and we paid you money and you worked for us, and so now we want to take you in. Well, I guess I appreciate it, but at the same time, that actually makes me trust you even less. But, but second, this idea that we owe it so you come here because we have some kind of debt to you. And this is. It's the same thing with the Somalis that come here. It's this. It's this perverse notion that in some way, like we have some kind of.

B (7:24)

Responsibility, the Somalis are even crazier. It's not like the Somalis ever helped us out in a war. At least I kind of get it with the Afghan sort of. I don't agree with it.

C (7:33)

It's the same kind of argument that, well, their. Their country is in. Is in tatters, and. And then. And then an argument will be made that, well, American foreign policy was responsible for this and that and. And. But it's always that. It's always about, they're not coming here to contribute to us. They're not even pretending that that's what they're here for. The argument isn't even that they're here that we should bring them in because our country benefits. It's that it's.

B (7:57)

It's.

C (7:57)

They benefit from it, and we should be nice and allow it, and that just doesn't. That doesn't work. It should always be. As Americans, the question is, what's in it for us? What's in it for our. For our people, for our children? And. And we don't benefit at all from bringing in a single Afghan or a single Somali.

B (8:13)

I think, then do we owe anything to these people?

A (8:15)

I mean, I think that obviously, when it comes to the Somalis, the answer is no. I mean, their country has been trashy for generations at this point, and the United States tried to get involved and tried to help on a humanitarian level, and then obviously, that didn't work out very well. The idea that we had to go from 2,500 Somalis living in the United States in 1990 to 175,000 Somalis living in the United States as of today as some sort of apology for what? Us not being good enough at bringing them food is pretty insane. And obviously, you have massive culture clash. You have lack of assimilation. You have mayoral races that are being divided by actual tribal loyalty in Minneapolis. That's what happened in the last mayoral race is that actually certain members of certain Somali tribes voted against candidates who are siding with other members of other Somali tribes. We don't need that sort of full scale tribalism in the United States. We got enough problems as it is. With regard to Afghanistan, I think it's slightly more complicated. Not that we should take in vast numbers of unvetted immigrants from Afghanistan because we screwed things up in Afghanistan. I think there's a couple of original sins. One of them, frankly, is just the pullout from Afghanistan the way Joe Biden did it. I think that, that if you pull out from Afghanistan and leave no governing institutions behind such that everybody who helped out the US army is going to be murdered where they stand, we should find someplace for them to go that's not the United States. But I do think that, you know, if we ever want to have alliances with anybody else on earth ever again, and we're going to have to work with people against regimes that exist, then we want to find someplace for some of those people to go. This, this case is a little bit weird because the guy not only worked with the CIA, he was pretty well vetted when he came in in 2021. And then the Trump administration did grant him actual asylum in 2025 on the basis of that prior vetting, presumably despite the fact that in 2023, we now know from the New York Post, he actually had been reported by other members of his community as having mental breakdowns. And he was, he was depressed and he was, he was going out like on these long drives and we knew where he was and all this kind of stuff. And so the idea that we got from the Department of Homeland Security is that actually when he came in, he wasn't nearly as much of a problem as obviously he would later become, and that he was radicalized. And to me, this is a separate issue, but both need to be dealt with. One of them is obviously, why are we letting in hundreds of thousands of people from third world countries we cannot vet? And I think we all agree that's insane. And then there's the secondary issue that I think is nearly as problematic, maybe just as problematic, which is the number of terror attacks that the United States has suffered from people who are radicalized while living in the United States is really, really high. This guy, according to dhs, was radicalized after coming to the United States. After working with us, he came here, he was radicalized. But I mean, I know that we all just sort of memory hold the fact that there have been a bunch of terror Attacks on American soil by ISIS affiliates. But there have. I mean, this year in January, you remember in New Orleans, there's a terror attack that killed 14 people where a guy had like, an ISIS flag on his truck and just ran people over. And we all memory hold that. We don't remember that. The single worst mass shooting in America to that date was the Pulse nightclub shooting. Obviously, there was Vegas afterward. The Pulse nightclub shooting was a radicalized guy who was radicalized by association with ISIS. There was a shooting in San Bernardino. 14 people were killed, again, radicalized by ISIS while living in the United States. And so I think it's the combination of both of these things. One is this mass migration. You don't know. You don't get to come here just because your life sucks somewhere else. Guess what? It turns out America. Amazing. I understand why everybody wants to get in. We have no obligation to take you in on that basis. But we also have a massive problem with institutions in the United States that pay people not to assimilate, that allow them to radicalize, and that foster their radicalization. I think that the biggest detail in that Somali case is that the government knew they were committing fraud, and many of these groups were going to the government and threatening to sue on the basis of discrimination if they were actually targeted by law enforcement. And Minnesota just went, oh, I guess, well, if you're going to call us racist, I guess we can't do anything but let you steal a billion dollars in taxpayer money. Unbelievable.

B (12:05)

You know, one of the things you're not allowed to say in this whole debate used to be you couldn't even advocate for drastically less legal immigration. Now I think you can advocate for that. One of the things I think you're still not allowed to say, though, is some groups are just less good at being immigrants, and there's nothing wrong with excluding them at higher rates than other groups. You know, this is ancient wisdom, goes back to Aristotle, goes through Thomas Aquinas. It wouldn't be an episode of this show if we didn't bring up those guys.

A (12:32)

We're nine minutes in, dude. You couldn't imagine this long, dropping it like it's hot.

B (12:37)

You know, Aristotle makes this point, and really, actually, I think St. Thomas does this really well. He reads the Jews in the Old Testament and he reads the writing of Aristotle, and he says, look, you can bring in immigrants, but you have to be very, very careful about it. You know, the Jews in the Old Testament, they did it cautiously, they did it very slowly. They wouldn't grant citizenship until three generations he's reading Aristotle here as well, you know, because immigration can reduce social solidarity. And he says the Jews in the Old Testament, some people, they felt they could assimilate. Others, it was a little harder. Some, you know, the Amalekites say you just can't let them in. And I think what's obvious is when we talk about immigration, we're pretending it's all exactly the same. No, we could take any number of Englishmen into this country and they would be just fine. I don't know if there were any Englishmen left in England, as a matter of fact, but it would be fine because they speak the same language, they look roughly the same. We come from England, we roughly believe in the same religion, we have roughly the same habits. And if we want to have chicken tikka masala, guess what, it was invented in England, so that's fine. And it's much harder to bring in Somalis or Pakistanis or Afghanis.

A (13:44)

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B (14:59)

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A (16:05)

Okay, so, Michael, I was gonna disagree with you. So here's the only thing I'm gonna disagree with you about. In that I don't think we can take in any number of Englishmen. See, I'm actually more pessimistic about our immigration status than you perhaps, at this point. Not that I think that. That it would not be easier to assimilate Englishmen than it would be to assimilate, you know, Somalis. But, but, but I do think that right now, if you said to me, we're going to take in 100,000 Englishmen, I'd think to myself, oh, because that is a lot of people who voted for the Labor Party and Keir Starmer, meaning that the ideology of the west has become so thoroughgoingly self defeating that I'm not sure that this is actually a good proxy for who can assimilate to American. Frankly, I think that a lot of Americans don't hold particularly American values at this point. But they are Americans. They get to stay. But, but, you know, if we're talking about whom to import and whom not to. Yeah, I agree. Obviously, not all groups are the same in terms of assimilability, their ability to Assimilate. But. But I. I think that we may be now at the point in American history and maybe just in Western history where we can only do it on an individualized basis. That. That. That's all we can do.

B (17:09)

How do you make a policy out of that, though?

A (17:11)

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, maybe you can. Maybe you can. I mean, really, like, we could have a better record than we currently have. I mean, I think that, you know, now maybe I'm being even more restrictionist than Matt would be on immigration, but it seems to me that pretty much every individual who comes into the country needs to make an affirmative case as to why they ought to be in the country. And we ought not do it by groups. We ought to do it just by. Should you be here? What are you going to offer us? And what do you. Actually.

B (17:35)

But I guess my point, Ben, I see all that. My point is, you know, especially assuming that the Afghan who committed. Actually multiple Afghans who have committed these horrible attacks were radicalized in America, let's say they were properly vetted and they said all the right things and they passed the test and they were radicalized here, however, they, you know, they act a little. A little more in keeping with their tribal origins than with regular old American leftism or something. It just seems to me that there is more to citizenship than passing a quiz. And it seems to me, you know, I'm with Thomas Aquinas and I'm with the ancient Jews, which is. It seems to me it takes generations, that there really is something that is inarticulable about identity within a nation that you can't totally write out, you can't totally explain. But it's something about how you appreciate apple pie on the 4th of July and hot dogs and fireworks, and there's just something you gotta kinda get into your bones. And it seems to me that people with traditions and religions and cultural practices and institutions that are closer to ours, like England, despite that a lot of them voted for labor.

A (18:37)

Listen, I agree with that, but I think part of that, honestly, is just a failure of what we have done as a society about immigration and about our own values. Meaning that one of the things that makes it easy for people to stay in these sort of groups that never assimilate is the fact that, number one, we're importing people as gigantic groups, and number two, we're then supporting them with welfare dollars and telling them they never have to assimilate. And so if you look at the nature of immigration for the first century and a half of America's existence. There's an awful lot of immigration for the first century and a half of America's immigration system. That what, what you see is because there were very few actual supportive structures for immigrants, that meant that you had to assimilate and become American. That when you went from Europe, you know, for my ancestors, Eastern Europe, for. For Michael's ancestors from Sicily, when, When they came here, I mean, I assume, Michael, that your family didn't come here rich. I mean, everyone's family came here basically dirt poor, and they didn't know the language, and then they assimilated as fast as humanly possible. So for my ancestors who came here at like 1900 or so, they came here and they all spoke Yiddish and, and within like, three years, they were sending their kids, like, immediately they said, you're not allowed to speak Yiddish in the house. You need to start speaking English. Right, exactly. Get. Get with it. Because if you want to integrate into the American lifestyle and economic system and take part of the American dream, you have to, like, actually take part in the American dream. And then in 1965, we decided that we were basically just going to throw the doors wide open and not only that, provide a gigantic social welfare net that people are going to take advantage of. And that's how you end up with importation of 100,000 Somalis who immediately start bilking the welfare system to the tune of a billion dollars. That can't happen in. In the absence of these governmental structures. So I'm not going to make it just about the immigrants. Human beings have, you know, terrible natures by. By, you know, the essence of who they are. I'm going to say that the incentive structures that we've created here are truly awful because we've been able to take in enormous numbers of Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans and Vietnamese Americans and Chinese Americans.

B (20:27)

The Cubans get a pass.

A (20:29)

Great.

B (20:29)

The Cubans are great. The other ones, I'm not.

C (20:32)

I think it's. I think it's kind of. It's. It's both. Because I. I agree with Ben that we need to evaluate each individually, but you can also make determinations based on groups as well by looking at, like, group tendencies. And I. I think. So here's one policy I like the idea of. If you're a third world country, we're not going to import anyone from your country. But maybe another way of putting that, because of course, then you get in the argument like, well, how do you define third world country? How about this? If your country has not figured out waste disposal, okay, if you don't have a system for waste disposal, then we're not going to accept anyone from your country at all. Which is just another way of saying third world country. Because you go to these third world countries, if you've ever been to one, and you see that of the many different forms of dysfunction, one of the most obvious ones that you can see and smell is that they've just got giant piles of trash everywhere. And also they just throw their trash in the rivers and their water is undrinkable for that reason now. I mean, there were societies 2000 years ago that figured out waste disposal, and yet you've got people in modern times who still haven't figured it out. This is just like the basic, these are the basic functions of a society that these people, it's not just the government, but the people have not figured out. And if you're one of those people, then you probably don't have a lot to offer us. And, you know, there's also talk about things we can't talk about. Michael. I mean, Somalis have an IQ on average of about 70. Okay, I've read that's, that's right. That's a, that's a real, that's a real thing. And so if you've got a group with an average IQ of 70 and you bring them into this country, what are you going to get? So I think you can make these kind of group level distinctions and then also narrow it down to individual. The other thing we also to keep in mind is that, you know, most people, there was a, there was a, there's a clip going viral right now of, from the whatever podcast, and it's a woman from, I think, Colombia. And she's got tattoos all over her face, which, number one, if you have tattoos on your face, you should be deported already even. I don't care if you've been here since your family's been here.

B (22:31)

I like him, right?

C (22:32)

Except for him, but everybody else but she, she, so, so she, she, he's, she's asked, well, if Colombia and United States were at war, who would you side with? She says, colombia. And the guy is like shocked by this. It's like, well, why would you side with Colombia? And she says, and she's almost confused by the question because it's obvious to her. And she says, well, because I'm from there. Like, I'm from there, of course, of course I'm going to side with Colombia. Let's say the United States went to war with Colombia. Who do you side with? Colombia why do you side with Colombia?

B (23:01)

Because I'm from Colombia.

C (23:02)

You've lived here for 10 years and you're now a citizen. And the reality is, like, the vast majority of immigrants, maybe not all of them, but the vast majority of immigrants in this country right now, first generation and second generation, if you ask them the same question, they give the same answer for the same reason. And it's not because if they, you know, the Somalis, they still feel this tie to their homeland. And maybe it's confusing to Americans because we say, well, Somalia is a total hellhole. Why do you care about Somalia so much? You came here. Why are you still proud of Somalia? Well, it's because they're from there. It's like they're tied to that by blood. And, yeah, they chose to come here. But your blood is stronger than your.

B (23:36)

Personal choice and heritage is enduring. Absolutely.

C (23:39)

It's no different than if I were to say, you know, I love my children. And you would ask, well, why do you love your children? I'm not going to tell you. Well, they get. They do well in their schoolwork and they're obedient and they're talented and intelligent. I think all those things are true about my children. That's not the reason. I love them because if they were stupid, I would still love them. I love them because they're my children. That's why it's the only. They're my children. That's why I love them. You love your homeland because it's where you're from. Your ancestors are buried there. And. And so it's kind of goes back to your point, Michael. There's something enduring that lasts for a long time. And so we've got a lot of people. When you bring these people in this country that I agree with a lot of that.

A (24:13)

But obviously we do have this notion in America that is historically true, that you can, in fact, adopt the American identity. And, Michael, maybe your solution is the right one, which is that we only start to see that over the course of a serious period of time that it's not like day one, you're here and then magically you're an American. And so it actually takes some time to integrate and we have to actually check back in and make sure that you're properly assimilating and all the rest of the. And sort of one thing that I would add to sort of Matt's analysis when it comes to judging by group. So Thomas Sowell talks about discrimination. One of the things he talks about is a type of discrimination that is Initially a judgment by group in the absence of individual information. So what he says is it's not discrimination to judge based on group identity so long as you don't know the individual. Because you have to operate based on best available data, right? If you walk into a room and in the room everybody is of a particular height, and, and you assume that all of them are therefore not amazing at basketball because they're all five, 10, then that's. That's like not the worst assumption in the world, to take an innocuous example. But if it turns out that one of those people happens to be, you know, Allen Iverson or Spud Webb or something, and now you know, that guy, you know, okay, now you know. So when it comes to, you know, looking at immigrants from, from places that suck, who, where they don't have running water or proper sewage disposal, you know, I think that there are individuals who obviously, and we can name them, who have come from crappy countries and who end up being tremendous Americans. I mean, like an example of a person who came from a truly crappy country, I think she was from Sudan and who ends up being like an indispensable member of Western civilization. Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to mind, right? Ayaan Hirsi Ali ends up basically running away from a forced child marriage and she ends up in Denmark, where she becomes a sort of gadfly anti Islamist there. And then she comes to the United States and. And she marries Neil Ferguson and she converts to Christianity and all this sort of stuff. You know, like, that's. That's an amazing story and that's wonderful. But if you're judging in terms of groups, obviously you have to. But. But then if we can get to the individual, that's maybe the best way to bring people in. Because one of the things we have to worry about when it comes to immigration and we do have to worry about this is, for example, you want a brain drain, right? You do want the smartest people to come to the United States. You do want the most highly motivated, gritty people to come to the United States. And this is why I think that the, the term of art that is most important here is mass migration, right? When we're talking about mass migration, large numbers of people coming in, it's almost impossible to do the kind of thing that I'm talking about. But I want to make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathroom.

B (26:35)

But think about this, Ben. Look, of course we all love Ayan Ursi Ali, and we want we want these exceptional individuals to be. To be part of our country. And immigration is like spice and Indian food. You know, a little bit goes a long way. You don't actually need a ton of it. But I saw Wajahat Ali, who's this liberal talking head. I think we've all debated him at some point or other. In some ways, he's this totally assimilated guy. His parents are from Pakistan, he was born in California, graduated Berkeley, bloviates, dresses like a slob. You know, he's like the perfect American lib. But he had this vicious rant the other day that he posted to social media, and he said, you know, ha, ha, you white people, you lost. And we brown people, we're gonna outbreed you, and your parties suck and everything about you sucks, and we're better at everything. And what was amazing was he's on the one hand, so liberal. On the other hand, it was this deeply tribal animosity at the native population of the United States. And I thought, you know, he's accidentally kind of telling on himself on the problem of migration, which is. Even to your point, Ben, even if we could examine each individual and pick them for their best qualities, you know, a kind of meritocratic immigration system at a large enough scale, I don't think it really works. Because Wajihat Ali says, you know, you bring one of us over and the thing about immigration is we're gonna bring our cousins and our uncle and our dad and our spouse and our this. And because people have these end bonds, which they should.

A (27:54)

But, Michael, I mean, it did work for a very long time. So we have to ask, what changed?

B (27:58)

1965, the Hart Cellar Act.

A (27:59)

I mean, I agree with you. That's the thing that changed. And so maybe the. The discussion, at least half. I agree with the. The. The argument we need to shut. Shut it all down until we know what the hell is going on. But maybe at least half the discussion that we're having should be about, number one, the sources of immigration, and number two, the gigantic welfare system that allows people to live off the public dimension and then integrate into our worst places, colleges and universities, and learn the kind of crap that Wajahad Ali was taught. Because the truth is. Yeah, exactly. I mean, by the way, the only difference between Wajahad Ali and a typical liberal Berkeley member from, you know, the middle of the country is the color of their skin. Like. Like truly what was amazing about.

B (28:38)

And the arguments that come from that.

A (28:39)

But, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, the clip. The thing that's really astonishing about it is that everybody on the right is constantly accused of. Of great replacement theory. If you said exactly the same thing in exactly the same words, that was. Jahad Ali said it. It's truly an unbelievable thing. But if you say it with a smile on your face about how it's good, then apparently it's no longer a great replacement theory. It's just the natural way that things should go. It's pretty amazing.

B (28:59)

Yes. This is what Mike Anton calls the celebration parallax. If you think it's good, you get away with it.

A (29:06)

It's not happening. And we're glad that it is.

B (29:08)

Yes. I mean, this, to me is. This is where it comes back biblically and philosophically. I want to be clear. I mean, we're kind of beaten up on the third worlders and everything. It's not that I am opposed to all immigration. I don't think that assimilation is always harmful necessarily, or it should be totally cut off, or it's impossible. But you have to be really, really precise about it. You know, Ruth, who is in the genealogy of Christ, is a Moabite who says to the Israelites, your God will be my God and your people will be my people. And so obviously.

A (29:40)

Well, actually, actually, Michael, this is important. The actual verbiage is your people will be my people and your God will be my go.

C (29:45)

Yes.

A (29:45)

Actually, your people comes first. Right. So I'm asking me, right, your people are gonna be my people. Yep.

B (29:49)

Yes. And so, you know, there's this, you know, look, we're living in time and space, and we're incarnate creatures, and so, like, these bonds of family and community really matter. Even the notion of patriotism comes from patria, and it means that it's an extension of the love of your family. And we've just become so, I don't know, disembodied or something in our. In our modern view of politics and ourselves. And this is really clear in the 1965 Hart cell remigration Act. You know, look at different times in American history, we had very little immigration, very restricted from where it could come from. Then we opened it up a little bit and it caused problems. And I'll say this. I'll bring up the old Italians. You know, immigration from Britain is one thing. Immigration from, say, Germany, you know, in the 19th century, it was okay. It was fine. It was a little harder to assimilate than the Brits, but okay. We still had memories of the Hessians, the Italian immigration. Look, it ultimately, I think, basically worked out even Though we got Pelosi's out of it. But it did introduce a lot of social problems. And I think it's because it's kind of harder to assimilate even Southern European people into America than it was Northern or Central European people. And so you take that to its extreme and you say, look, go to a place like Somalia, which has very, very little in common with us other than that we're all children of God. And you say, maybe they just don't really get to come that much except the one or two exceptional people.

A (31:05)

Well, if you want more quotations, by the way, from Thomas Aquinas and more Latin paraphrases from Michael, then you absolutely should become a subscriber. By the way, I should just mention that we do have an excellent deal on right now to become a Daily Wire subscriber. So go check that out right now. And we also have a lot of sales over at the Daily Wire shop. We have cyber deals that are live right now. It's like 70% off all of the conservative gifts for everyone on your wish list. So if you wish to either torture a lib in your family or you wish to help a conservative in your family, then you should go check that out right now. They've got the Golden Leftist Tears Tumblr and they've got the Collected poems of Donald J. Trump. That is a real thing that exists in the world, and it actually is really, really, really funny. And they've got the T shirts and the hoodies and all sorts of other stuff. So go check them out right now, dailywire.com shop and again, make sure that you actually subscribe, because when you subscribe, then you get all the goodies that we have. So much good stuff coming next year. Like, I can't even begin to describe all the good stuff that we have coming next year. Truly, like, it's kind of amazing now.

B (32:00)

I think we need to restore a little balance, Ben. I think we need to restore a little balance to this show. If you tell us about Balance of Nature, I.

C (32:08)

That was going to be. I was going to do that. That was going to be my transition. I was.

B (32:11)

Let me try that again.

C (32:12)

Hold on, hold on.

B (32:12)

Let me try it again. Take two. Don't cut this. This is good stuff. Hey, Matt, I think we need to restore a little balance to our show.

C (32:19)

If you. I was going to say. I was going to say the bit about the balance. Whatever, it's fine. Let's. Let's talk about Balance of Nature. You know, their ingredients are 100% whole fruits, vegetables, spices and fibers you can experience for yourself as I have the original balance of color, taste and smell. Their fruits and vegetable supplements include 31 colorful ingredients of 16 whole fruits and 15 whole vegetables. Ingredients include mango, pineapple, wild blueberries, banana, shiitake mushrooms, wheatgrass, spinach, kale, cayenne pepper, broccoli and. The fiber and spice supplement features stuff that I can't pronounce, but psyllium husk is what it's important to get. The psyllium, I don't know what that is, but I see that and I just feel like I need to have more psyllium husk in my life. Flaxseed, whole apple, and monk fruit. It also includes 12 aromatic spices such as cinnamon, turmeric and cardamom. I actually take the Bounce of Nature supplements. It's one of the only things I do for my health. I never go to a doctor. I refuse to. I pulled my hamstring over Thanksgiving break playing pickup football with my kids outside. I'm crippled. I refuse to go to a doctor for that. My wife keeps saying, why don't you go to a doctor? You can barely walk. I say, the doctor's not going to do anything for me. What am I going to get an mri? I got to be in that, in that tube. It's kind of weird and claustrophobic. Anyway, I won't do any of that, but I will take Balance of Nature, which you should as well. Plus, they're launching a fantastic new product. Balance of Nature's freeze dried snacks are 100% real fruit, bananas, mangoes, pineapple and strawberries. Freeze dried to lock in flavor and give that perfect Crunch. Go to balanceofnature.com and get a free variety snack pack plus a free preferred customer membership with your first set of Balance of Nature supplements. Go to balanceofnature.com to claim this limited time offer before it ends.

B (34:09)

Speaking of food, Matt, you focused on the real issues while we were all stuffing ourselves over Thanksgiving and you talked about why restaurants suck now. And I actually, I didn't catch it and I want to hear it.

C (34:24)

Well, you haven't caught a single piece of content I've ever put out since I've been here, including stuff we've done together that does, that doesn't surprise me. But yeah, so, so over, over the, the Thanksgiving break, we put up a video. I, I, you know, I told my team I want to do. I'm, you know, and maybe there was some skepticism, I don't know, because it's, it's, it's one of those topics. You don't know exactly how much it'll resonate. But I. I have this impression, and I think a lot of people have it, that everything sucks now. The quality of everything has gone down. And that's especially the case with food. And I was thinking about this the other day, because we got it. We ordered pizza and. And all these. I. I can remember when I was a kid that you'd order a pizza and you could pretty much order a pizza from almost anywhere, and it was pretty good. And not only was it pretty good, but it was different. Like, you could get a pizza from Domino's and that was one thing, or go to Papa John's. It was like a very different flavor. It was a different kind of pizza. You could go to Pizza Hut. You could even go inside Pizza Hut. They had a. They had a salad bar. You'd sit down. It was a whole thing with my family. We very rarely ordered out because we have a million kids in the family. And going to Pizza Hut was like, put on your Sunday's best and go to Pizza Hut. It was a night on a town. It was a lot of fun, and the pizza was great. And now you order from these places, and there are two things you notice. Number one, it all tastes exactly the same, and it's all terrible. It's like cardboard with ketchup smeared on it. Put in a microwave. That's what all pizza tastes like. And you go to these chain restaurants and, you know, I haven't been to a chain restaurant in. In a little bit. I took. We took my kids to. I guess I won't say that. No. We went to Outback and. And we sat down. It was, like, inedible. I could. I could. I actually could not finish it. It was solid.

B (36:03)

You get the Bloomin Onion and.

C (36:04)

Yeah, I got. Well, that I could finish, but I didn't. I finished it. I didn't enjoy it, though. I hated myself the whole time. And. And then we got, you know, the rest of the food. It was like, everything is really salty and it tastes bad. And that's the case with most of these chain restaurants. So this is what I've. What I've.

B (36:19)

Perceived.

C (36:20)

We did. I did a little video on it.

A (36:22)

Is there. Is there a theory attached to this, or is it just to be an old. This is just you being an old person. Yeah, exactly. Like, this is just a theory.

C (36:28)

There's a.

A (36:28)

You realizing that when you're eight years old, everything tasted great, including some of the trashiest food on earth.

C (36:34)

There is a theory. So this is what I'm saying. I said I want to look into this. Like, this is the impression I have, is that the quality has gone down. Is it just nostalgia? Or is there something real that's actually happening here? And there is something real. So quality has dropped. And I think it's across the board with many things in American life. But just focusing on food for a moment, it has gone down because a few things have happened as I researched this. And number one, a lot of these restaurants have been taken over by these private equity companies that come in. And this has happened especially over the last 20 or 25 years, where most of these places are not owned. They're owned by the private equity firms. And then part of that is that now they come in, it's like, we gotta cut costs. And so they go to these big distributors like Cisco. And so it's all the same food. Like, there's 80% of these places, they're ordering the food from the same place. Everything is frozen. None of it is fresh anymore. And it wasn't always that way. And it is now. The quality's going down. And then the third part of it is that none of the people involved, from like the person behind the cash register all the way up to the people that own the places now, none of them actually care about the quality of the food. It doesn't matter to them. There's no one involved who has any passion about the quality of the stuff that they're giving you. They're just there for the profit, or they're there for it because it's a job. And so if you complain about the quality, there's no one to even complain to because no one cares. No one that you're talking to cares about it. And so this is a real thing.

B (38:03)

So how did that part change the food part? Okay, I see they changed their supply chains or whatever. What happened with the employees?

C (38:12)

Well, I think. Well, part. Part of it is that if you go back again 20 years ago, a lot of these places, they were employing, like, high school students. That's why I. I worked at a pizza place when I was in high school. And that's happening less and less now. Now you've got also the, you know, the numbers of people who work in these industries now who have, like, substance abuse problems, who are older with substance abuse problems, that's gone up considerably as well.

B (38:39)

So.

C (38:39)

But, but also, if you're, if you're working for one of these. And look, I'm as capitalist as the next Guy. But you're working for one of these places that's owned by some conglomerate or owned by, by, by a private equity firm. It's like you don't, you don't feel a tie to it anymore. You, you don't really care that much about the product. And as I said, the people that own the place don't, don't care about it.

A (38:57)

Actually, I actually think it's a, it's, it's, it's not even, I think that it's corporate versus not corporate. I think it's family versus corporate meaning. So most people who start restaurants, right, like small restaurants, it's usually like you and your family members. So I was, I was making, we were talking about whether we should do this topic earlier and I was kind of making fun of you guys because I was saying in the kosher community, like, I kosher. So I'm coming from a different context from you guys. Like the last time I ate at a chain restaurant, like a normal, not kosher chain restaurant, I was 11 years old and it was Kentucky Fried Chicken. So it's been 30 years for me. And like, they have some chain restaurants in Israel and they are similarly not as good, but, but they're certainly better, I think, than the ones that are in the United States. In the kosher community, every single restaurant is a family owned restaurant. Even the, even the family owned restaurants that have like three or four different restaurants, that's like the extent of it. There's no such thing as a kosher chain restaurant because there are like eight of us in the United States. And so what that means is that the restaurant quality has actually gotten better and better and better since I was a kid. Because you're getting people who are aging into more income, and as they age into more income, they can spend more of their income on these restaurants. And the community isn't big enough to support a gigantic, like, chain of hamburger restaurants. And so instead what you get are like really good, excellent kind of locally sourced dishes where the, where the family owns it. Because that's, I think everybody in. And you guys have big families. I've got a big family. And so everybody has the aunt who's like, you know, she's a really good cook. She should really start a restaurant. Somebody should actually start. And then it turns out that restaurant is like the hardest business to succeed in, that they go bankrupt at an extraordinary rate. And so what that means is that particularly if you are a person who is trying to just keep your restaurant open, you got to work your ass off, right? You got to love doing it. You got to love the food. You got to bring your 14 year old in from middle school to like, get behind the counter and really work. I spent my entire life in restaurants, by the way. Like, my dad worked at a restaurant my entire childhood. He was, he played the piano at a restaurant. And so I was like in the kitchen with the waiters and like hanging out with the bartenders for fully 10 years of my life, 15 years of my life when I was a kid. So I, I love these restaurants. I'm big into kind of the local restaurants. And I will say that when it comes to kind of chain production, the people who get into the McDonald's business are there to make money. They're not there because they want to make a great burger. The people who want to make a great burger are starting their own kind of local. Their own local shots. I actually think there is something to that, and I do think that you can feel it in the food.

B (41:08)

Can I please interject some facts into this? Because you're both speaking in generalities that. And you're just missing it. Okay. And I don't, I don't know how I've been a little open about this, but I'm a pretty heavy user of fast food. I get a Mac attack pretty regularly. And I can tell you with certain. I'll just go down the list. KFC has gotten worse in the last 25 years. There's no doubt about that. Domino's, on the other hand, has gotten better in the last 25 years. McDonald's has gotten much better. I don't even want to eat McDonald's. The fries used to be better, sure. Now they use fresh beef for the double quarter pounder with cheese or for the regular quarter pounder. It's much better. Arby's was awesome, got really bad, is much, much better now. The double beef and cheddar was an absolute. It was a revelation. Texas Roadhouse, as good as it's ever been. Cracker Barrel. The food's a little sloppier now, but the service is still great. Outback, I grant you, has not really kept up with the times. The list goes on and on and on. Hardee's got worse and Carl's junior Got worse after Andy Puzder left. So, look, there are particularities here, but I think, Matt, you're feeling a little bit of nostalgia for your childhood. Because I grew up in New York, so my friends who grew up in the middle of the country or in the south or even a little bit on the west coast, they did not have. I had nice family, actual family restaurants growing up that were casual, that were cheap, but they were very, very good. And so I wasn't as. Yeah, I do the Applebee's every now and again. Yeah, I do the Outback every now and again. But if you look at the actual, like, not chain restaurants, I think they've gotten generally much better. With one exception, which is that hipsters made the plates get much smaller. They inserted like a bunch of dumb, like, adjectives into it like activated Brussels sprouts. But otherwise, I actually think this is the one area where I'd say things have gotten noticeably better with chain restaurants. I basically call you all ignorant on your use of fast food. I think the use.

C (43:06)

Hang on a second, Michael. So you said you're going to inject facts, and then all you did was just arbitrarily go down a list of which. Which restaurants you personally prefer more. I'm the one injecting facts in the discussion. I'm telling you that things that. There is a number of actual significant changes that have factually occurred. One of them is that these places, most of them do not use fresh food anymore. And they used to, like most of these restaurants used to use fresh food, and now they don't. Now they're getting the same frozen food off the back of the.

B (43:38)

Excuse me, Wendy's. Always fresh, never frozen. McDonald's used to be frozen, now fresh. You think you're injecting. I'm injecting fat.

A (43:45)

The level of passion, Michael, that you have for this is like, I never. You're big on the aquinas, but I think that your actual area of specialty and interest lies in fast food.

B (43:55)

I'm a secret fat guy.

C (43:56)

It's. Look, first of all, I'm not disagreeing. I actually think that McDonald's, of all the fast food options gets a bad rap. But it is like, it's Burger King.

B (44:03)

Is like a homeless shelter.

C (44:04)

Now that one got McDonald's is pretty consistent. If you want fast food, you should go McDonald's. It has by far and away. If you want a fast food breakfast, you're not going to get better than McDonald's. All 100%. It's like five guys is great, but guess what? It's fresh. They actually use fresh ingredients.

B (44:17)

You also have to take out a second mortgage to get five guys.

C (44:19)

I mean, but that's. That, See, that's what you got to pay because it's actually fresh. They don't have a freezer in the place. You're getting fresh ingredients. What you pick up when you go to, like, Applebee's or Chili's, the food, it's literally the same food, okay? The Cisco truck goes with the frozen food to Applebee's, and then it goes across the shopping center to Chili's and unloads the same damn food that then's put in a microwave and served to you with a 6,000% markup. Okay? It's a scam is what I'm telling you.

B (44:47)

But when this matters, replace this is quality of life. You know, they accuse us, they say, you know, conservatives, we're just conserving the liberalism of 15 years ago or whatever. This is a good example of that. You know, when Chili's came, I'm not just blaming Chili's. I actually never got that into Chili's. But when Chili's and the similar restaurants came in, they displaced old, like, mom and pop diner type things. And there were all sorts of reasons. One of my favorite diners growing up constantly was failing health inspections was gross, like getting people sick. But I loved it. It was good. And so I think, all right, now, if the chains are being bought up by private equity faces, corporations, and they're all no good anymore, does this offer an opportunity? Am I being too hopeful? Does this offer an opportunity for more rancid mom and pop diners to fail their health inspections and delight customers like me?

C (45:32)

Well, maybe. But the problem is, I mean, you just point out, like, five guys obviously is not a mom and pop place, but it. It's so. It, you know, it's expensive. Like when everyone is going the frozen food route and they're getting the same. They're just. They're, you know, wholesale frozen food and everything. Put it in a microwave, and then you come in and say, I want to do fresh food. You're going have to charge a lot more. And then that's up to the consumer to choose the more expensive thing, which unfortunately most. Most consumers won't. I mean, and that's what it comes down to. And I also think the fact. I mean, like we said, like we said before, the fact that one of the biggest differences is that you're dealing with people who don't care. I just thought I had to. This is not food. But I had a. I had a problem with my. With WI fi and I had to call the Internet company. And it's like one of those things where, you know, you know, you have to make this phone call. You're gonna be on the phone for seven hours of your day. And you gotta go through all the automated messages. Finally you get to talk to a person. I talked to, like 10 different people. And I'm aware of the fact while I'm talking to all these people that nobody I'm talking about gives the slightest shit about the problem that I'm having. None of them care at all, even a little bit. And there's no incentive for them to solve my problem. Whether my problem is solved or not means nothing to them. They don't benefit from it being solved. It doesn't hurt them if it isn't solved. And so it's this utterly hopeless feeling you have while you're on the phone shouting at some person in India who doesn't care at all. You're like, I need WI Fi. My family's coming over. They need to be able to watch tv. We want to put a football game on. And you're talking to someone doesn't even know what American football is. Okay? And this is everywhere you go now.

A (47:07)

I'm just telling you, we're Gonna Fast forward 20 years and it's just gonna be. Matt Walsh's show will just be called Old man yells at Clouds. I mean, my, my God, that's the.

C (47:16)

Show now we're talking about 20 years.

A (47:17)

I know you're just, you're not old enough. So now it's Middle Aged man yells at Clouds. But, you know, one aspect of this that may be worth asking is when we were all growing up, maybe it's because none of us, I think, grew up rich. Going out to dinner was like a big deal, right? Like, going out to dinner was like a super big deal. There were four kids in my family. You really didn't go out to dinner unless there was a special occasion in some way. You didn't just go out casually to dinner. And I feel like people just go out to dinner much more or order in much more. And so it's possible that the market has, has decreased in value in terms of, like, what people are paying for their dinner just because people are ordering in more. Like, everything when I was growing up was home cooked, like, everything. And, and I think that more and more people have accessed eating out or shipping food in as a, as a normal mode of eating. And that means the prices have to go down because otherwise you just can't afford it. If you're, if you're, if you're a family that has a couple of kids and you're bringing in restaurant food every night, it can't be really, really good restaurant food every night. Or you're going to be poor. And so I assume that that's why all these big, you know, chain stores continue to churn out not very good food but make decent money off, because people are just too lazy to actually home cook or they don't feel like home cooking. I mean, I would imagine that if you check the stats here, and we'll have to check it now, that the people are eating significantly more, you know, takeout food than they were when we were growing up.

B (48:32)

You know, the salient point of Matt's rant, I think, other than his, I think, absolute calumny against fast food restaurants, which have got compared to fast casual, the really salient point is the feeling that this happened to me at Burger King the other day, which again, is not just like a homeless shelter, but is a literal homeless shelter in most cases. I went up, I was standing there and wanted to order a Whopper, and there were two women behind the counter and one employee had just gotten off and no one would take my order. And the employee who had just gotten off was laughing at me. He was laughing at me that no one would take my order. They didn't care. I went, I got a sandwich somewhere else. You know, I'm reminded of Barry Goldwater in his book Conscience of a Conservative Ghost, written by Brent Bozell, who said, we conservatives, we're not just against big monopolistic government, we're against monopolies in all of their forms because they're not as responsive. And that kind of power can take away our rights as well. So I agree, we need a political missile, a legislative missile perhaps, to fix that problem. And we have literal missiles that are currently blowing up Venezuelan narco terrorists by our Secretary of War. Now, some people, mostly on the left, but a little bit in the Republican Party, are accusing the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, of committing war crimes by taking out the narco terrorists. Before I get the educated opinion of a Harvard lawyer, Matt, what's your. I think this is totally fine and awesome. What's your take?

C (49:54)

Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, please kill more. I think. Here's what I'll say. Blowing up a boat full of narco terrorists or bringing poison into America and are part of a, you know, billion dollar criminal enterprise that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans over the past decades. You know, doing that is more defensible, I think, legally, but certainly morally, than anything the United States of America has ever done in the Middle east, like, ever. Which is also why it's funny that to have someone like Mark Kelly out there complaining about this when this, again, is more defensible than anything that he did when, when he was in the. In the Middle east, when he was part of the Navy. I think he was talking about. He was on msnbc, I think, or cnn, one of the two talking about when he was in the Navy. Well, they. They blew up. You know, he. He was responsible for blowing up some Iraqi ships. But that was okay, he said, because, you know, they.

B (50:56)

They were.

C (50:56)

He was trying to kick them out of Kuwait. And so it was a good reason. It was a good reason to blow up the Iraqi ships, to keep them out of Kuwait. Well, okay, so that's okay. To keep the Iraq out of Kuwait so we could blow up ships, but to keep poison out of America, that's killing actual Americans, that's a problem. So to me, it's like, very clearly, this is where the United States military should be most activated, is in defending our actual homeland, like our actual physical country, from things that are actually hurting and killing Americans directly. And once we've done that, then we could talk about the stuff that's happening thousands of miles away. But this, to me is just pretty obvious.

B (51:38)

Now, the alleged war crime was, according to reporting, so take it with a grain of salt. But they said there was an oral order, not a written order, but an oral order from the Secretary of War to kill them all, to not go and try to arrest them or give them a.

C (51:54)

That's what you do with a missile. I don't know that it's true that he said to kill the survivors in the water.

B (51:59)

Yeah. He denies it. The White House denies it.

C (52:01)

But even if he did. But so what? I mean, you hit the boat with a missile, obviously you're trying to kill everybody. So what if some of them survive? You're just to be a good sport. You're supposed to send a rescue boat out to rescue them. The whole point, I'm pretty sure the missile. The point was not like a practical joke or a fun prank. The point was to actually kill the people on the boat. If any are alive, then of course you kill them, too. It's like if you blow up a building, do you have to have firefighters on standby to put out the fire and rescue anyone who happens to be inside the building? The whole point was to kill the people inside it, I would think. And assuming those people are actual terrorists who want to kill Americans, then it's totally legitimate.

B (52:36)

That's the Matt Walsh addendum to the Geneva Convention.

A (52:38)

Yeah, exactly.

B (52:39)

What?

A (52:40)

So, yeah, here's where it gets a little dicey. So there's the moral question of whether we should blow up drug boats. And the answer, of course is of course you should blow up as many drug boats as humanly possible. Like that is an affirmative. Good for us to blow up drug boats with hellfire missiles. Very much pro. Then there is the legal question. There are really two legal questions here. One is whether you need some sort of authorization from Congress to continue to blow up drug boats in the Caribbean when they're not like directly off of America's shores and their international waters and all the rest of this sort of thing. That's sort of question number one. You know, I'm of the legal opinion that you can totally blow up those, those drug chips and that, that, that seems to be fairly well predicated at the very least. And then there's the secondary question which came up because of this Washington Post story. Under American domestic law, you're really not supposed to be killing people who are deemed to be out of combat. Right? That's the actual legal terminology. So for example, if you're on a battlefield anywhere in the world and you shoot somebody and you've incapacitated them, they're unconscious on the battlefield. You're not allowed to like walk up to them while they're unconscious on the battlefield and put two in their head. It's just not something that you're supposed to do because they've been rendered non threatening. And so now there's kind of a debate over whether the boat was completely destroyed or whether it theoretically could have been salvaged. Whether they had the ability to call up their other drug trafficking friends and have them come out and pick them up. That was kind of the best defense that I saw of this order if it was given. I find it kind of hard to believe just on the merits that Pete Hegseth would say kill everybody. And nobody in the military line of command would say, okay, I just need some clarifications. You mean that we're supposed to, you know, just like kill floating bodies in the water? Or like, what are we talking about here? And to me, a lot of this report, something smells about this. Here's what smells about this. It feels like a coordinated op. And what I mean by that is that the Democrats started with this, you're not allowed to follow illegal order stuff last week, right? They put out this video the end of the week before last in which a bunch of Democratic congresspeople and senators said, if you're a member of the Military, we're telling you, you're not allowed to follow any legal order. And everybody went, what illegal orders are you talking about? Right. Like you should actually name the order because it actually is pretty counterproductive. If the idea is that we're only going to find out whether an order was illegal, in your view, when you gained power, how does anybody ever carry out an order at all? Right, because it could be a Democrat gets elected two, three years from now and then turns around and says, oh, by the way, every order that you carried out for the last 10 years was illegal. All of you are going to jail. And so what you're really doing is creating a sort of bizarre Ferguson effect for the military, where you remember, by the police, the idea was that if you enforce the law, you might go to jail. So the police stopped enforcing the law. So our Democrats trying to tell members of the military that if they don't want to go to jail, they need to not actually do the thing they're supposed to do, which is carry out the orders of the commander in chief. It feels coordinated because they released that video. And within a week and a half, there's a story in the Washington Post about Pete Hegseth issuing a quote, unquote illegal order to, you know, blow people out of the water. The whole thing kind of stinks to me. As a general matter, do I think that it's illegal? Again, we'll have to see what the fact pattern is. This is where Congress has Article 1 authority to actually investigate and determine who said what and when. Our sponsor Kalshee shows prediction markets regarding, for example, which cabinet member is most likely to go? Pete Hegseth right now, like 29%. But, you know, the reality is that I think this is a tempest and a teapot. And it also, on the other hand, kind of feels like that time when Trump deported a wife abuser, and then the entire left was like, how dare he violate the law by deporting the wife abuser. And, you know, I just don't think that plays politically. How dare, how dare you kill the narco traffickers who are trying to murder Americans with fentanyl? Doesn't seem to have, I don't know, it doesn't seem like a political winner to me.

B (56:06)

You know, Walter Kern, I thought, had a really good take on this. He said he thinks that maybe the war on drugs failed. And actually, I don't think the war on drugs failed. I think it actually was quite successful for a time and the history has been rewritten. However, he says if it Failed. You know, he thinks it failed because people, they're not used to seeing it like an actual war. In this case, we are fighting the war on drugs as very closely, like a war. Where it gets really weird to me, though, is even in international law, which a lot of conservatives say is just bunk anyway. But if you grant some legitimacy to international law, we're not signatories to the Rome Statute, so the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction here. We recognize the Geneva Convention. But then you ask, okay, what's the point of the Geneva Convention? The Geneva Convention exists in large part to protect civilians in times of war. And so part of that is if you play by the rules of war, then you can have certain privileges. And if you don't, like, if you're a terrorist and you target civilians and you act outside the norms of war, you don't really get those privileges. Marc Thiessen years ago made the great point that if you extend Geneva Convention protections to terrorists, you actually totally undermine the Geneva Convention protections. So I think that's kind of interesting, though, even for terrorists, I guess you're supposed to afford them some basic, you know, privileges, notably not killing them if they're out of combat. And then to your point, Ben, on U.S. domestic policy, you have the Uniform Code of Military justice, which says, okay, US Troops are not allowed to do X, Y and Z. What's very interesting about this, though, is it would not really apply, in my understanding, to the Secretary of War because the Secretary of War is not one of the troops. He's a civilian who is in charge of that department. And so it's all very, very murky to me. And then I think, okay, well, let's get down to the brass tacks of it all. These are foreign terrorist organizations, formally declared. So they're shipping poison into our country, killing 75,000Americans a year. We have exercised control over the Western hemisphere for over 200 years. And now the Democrats are on the side. First they were on the side of the wife beater who got deported because he was an illegal alien, maybe a gangster. And now they're on the side, the narco terrorists. Is this really going to play well in the midterms or in 2028?

A (58:14)

Right. That's the big issue, I think, for the Democrats politically here is they keep glomming on to what they think are temporary wins that end up being long term losses. Because they're so into the idea that, oh, my gosh, we've got them a procedural tic Tac foul. And because we got them on A tic tac fell. The American people are going to be really, really upset with Trump. Name the American who's truly upset with Donald Trump for blowing narco traffickers out of the water. I cannot imagine who those people are unless, you know, they went to Berkeley. That's pretty much like the entire constituency for that argument. It does raise, you know, one other question, which is it looks very much as though the Trump administration is trying to force Maduro out in Venezuela. And I'm, I'm kind of for it. I mean, like, I think that if we can do it without very much cost, you know, low blood and treasure, not a lot, you know, no boots on the ground or not a lot of boots on the ground, good things happening with very little cost is my game. I kind of enjoy it. I think it's a good thing. Yeah, I really hope. Let's put this way. I hope that the CIA really does have somebody inside the Venezuelan government who's ready to push Maduro off the cliff here, because if not, then this is an awful lot of resource expenditure for very little payoff in the end. And typically, if you're talking about a coup in Latin or South America, you have to have somebody inside the army, or at least elites inside the kind of top echelon who are willing to push the guy out. Otherwise Maduro's just going to sit there and be. And be okay.

B (59:31)

Yeah, you know, Americans are sick of regime change, certainly in the Middle East. It's a little different in Latin America because we've been doing that for a very, very long time, and it's closer to our interests. Matt, I don't know. Where do you fall on this? Are you ready, Are you ready for a regime change in Latin America?

C (59:45)

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm always, I'm always skeptical of regime change. I do. I kind of agree with you that it's. If it's closer to home, you can make a, a better argument for it actually advancing American interests. And when I say American interests, I mean the interests of actual Americans, like American families. Still, I think it's still, still kind of hard to make that argument. And if you were. If someone was going to make that argument, I wouldn't be the one to make it. I think, just politically. Well, practically and also politically, I think the focus should stay on the narco terrorists. That's a, That's a winner. It's a winner for Americans, most importantly. And as you already pointed out, it's just a, it's a political winner because this is the genius of it from a political standpoint is that they're kind of backing Democrats into a corner of being defenders of drug traffickers. And I don't know what polling has been done on this, but I just, I'm sure there's been some polling on it. I just find it hard to believe that there's any American in the country, like actual American, who's waking up at night worried about the fate of narco terrorists. I think we all have the same feeling of, we're just like, we're sick of this. Why are we allowing, why are we allowing this scenario where these billion dollar criminal enterprises are able to kill tens of thousands of Americans? We don't have to allow it. I mean, we're the United States of America. We have the most powerful military on the planet. This is a choice. We don't have to allow this. And I think that's where almost every American stands.

B (61:16)

Yeah, this is, you know, this gets down to a deeper divide that's within maga, which is there even people talk about, like the neocons versus the populists. And that's an interesting divide too. But at an even deeper level, there is this debate over what America first means. And there's America first, which has this hard nationalist, bordering on isolationist point of view. And I don't think that's what Trump is. I think Trump has an America first, much more imperialist kind of view, which is different than the neocons who were kind of liberal imperialists who wanted to sprout up Madisonian democracy everywhere. I think Trump is much more like a big leader of the global hegemon. And I think that's why he wants Greenland, I think that's why he threatened to invade Canada. And I think that's why he throws his weight around on the world stage for the benefit of Americans, not for abstract ideology, but explicitly for the benefit of Americans. And I think, look, we are the world empire and that's just a fact. And we've exerted control in our hemisphere for a very long time. And so if Maduro is willing to play ball with us, that's one thing. If he's not, if he's gonna work with our enemies, if he's gonna ship drugs up into our country, well, then maybe we don't need to tolerate him.

C (62:25)

And also the other thing too is, and I think you alluded to it, that you know the argument against it. And I said, I think most Americans are not up at night worried about narco terrorists, but there are Some people who have this libertarian view that while the. The war on drugs failed and that. That is a very common view.

B (62:41)

Yes.

C (62:41)

And. But my. My view of that is like, well, the war on drugs. The war on drugs was never tried. I mean, we. We never actually went to war against drugs. And I think it's kind of like that scene in. In Breaking Bad where, you know, where. Where Mike says, you know, no, no more half measures. If you're gonna do it. It's got, like, either do it or don't. You can't have a half measure. And when it comes to the quote, unquote, war on drugs, it strikes me that it was. It's kind of been a. At most a half measure.

B (63:09)

It worked a little in the 90s.

C (63:11)

Again, adding drugs means you gotta take the war to the. To the actual drug traffickers.

A (63:15)

That's a royalty, right? I mean, I think that every time we declare a war on a concept, it is bound to fail, Right. If you declare war on poverty, you can't defeat poverty. If you declare war on drugs, that's an object. War on terrorism, right? Like, it has to be a war on the drug traffickers, right? War on drug cartels. Like, these are material things that the material that our military, which is excellent at finding things, breaking them and destroying them, that they can actually go and do, like, not so good at stopping people's drug habits. Really, really good at blowing up narco terrorist boats in the middle of the Caribbean. And so it seems to me we should, you know, do what. What our skill set sort of suggests that we should do with the American military, which is, you know, break things. I think that we're really good at breaking things and we're less good at putting things back together, which is why I say about Venezuela that I really hope that there's something waiting in the wings to take over when there is or if there is a regime change. I don't think, by the way, my ideology of regime change is not that we have to have democracy everywhere. I think we need a regime that's better for America, everywhere, that it's possible for there to be a regime. And again, the key word there is possible. And there you have to calculate risk, reward, right? What are we risking and what's the upside?

C (64:13)

Reward.

A (64:14)

I think any realist would suggest that there are certain rewards that are not worth the risk, and there are certain risks that are not worth the reward. And so I think that when you look at Venezuela, if you're talking about a very small pinprick, military intervention and then Maduro goes bye bye and suddenly you have a friendlier regime there that's going to denationalize the oil industry, for example, and crack down on the narco traffickers. That sounds pretty good to me. If you're talking about 100,000 troops, that's a completely different story. And the same thing is true about interventions literally anywhere else on earth. If what you're talking about is one bullet finishing a problem, I'm very much for it. If what you're talking about is 100,000 troops finishing the problem, I'm very much against it.

B (64:49)

But then the question of course becomes, I mean, you mentioned CIA activities within Latin America and maybe within Venezuela. The question then becomes, is the CIA James Bond, Jason Bourne, efficient, ruthless, controls everything, or is the CIA burn after reading? Every time it tries to do something, it just gets worse and worse and no one has any idea what's going on. And no knock. Look, there are very heroic people who have worked for the CIA. CIA has also done very bungled things not to be like a huge cop out here. There's evidence for both, I think.

A (65:24)

Let's put it this way, the evidence from the 50s of the former is much better than the evidence today for the former. I'm much closer to the burn after reading version of the CIA today than I would have been prior to the last 25 years of American history for sure.

B (65:39)

All right, so I guess we're not. I do want the oil though. I want the oil and I actually love that Trump is open about it.

A (65:44)

This actually is one of my favorite things about Trump. I really, I really like that. I like when he, when he was talking about the war in Iraqi and he's like, it wasn't a war for oil, but maybe it should have been.

B (65:51)

Maybe it should have been. You want to deal with affordability? Let's get that oil. Exactly.

C (65:54)

How about that?

B (65:55)

Why do we give everything away to the whole world? Okay, all in the spirit of Thanksgiving, give us your oil. Okay, that's it. That's our show. When are we back on? I think we're doing another one tomorrow. Is that right? No, no, I can't catch you too? Okay, maybe within two weeks. Good to see everybody, everyone else out there. See you next time on Friendly Fire. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.

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