Episode 365 Scott Adams: Brandon Darby Talks About Border Situation

You might hear my ducks at some point. Seriously, They've been coming out.

We're live right now. People coming in and. Hello, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. We have a very special coffee with Scott Adams this morning. I'll tell you in a moment after our simultaneous sip. Come on in here, everybody. Hey, Beth. Hey, Hugh. Hey, Mark. You're all in time. And now you know what time it is. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. And I'm going to introduce our special guest for the morning, Brandon Darby, an expert on all things about the border with Mexico. And we'll do the fuller introduction in a moment, but I wanted to let him join us for the simultaneous sip. So please, if you're prepared, grab your mug, your glass, your cup, your stein, your tankard, your chalice, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous sip. All right, Brandon Darby, can you tell us your current job and background? So people who are not familiar with you know the context here?

Yeah. So I run Breitbart's border team. We're a team that's very separate from Breitbart's political coverage, but I also run Breitbart's Cartel Chronicles project. So several regions along the border in Mexico City, journalists get killed for writing about cartels. So what we do is we allow them to write under a pseudonym, and then we publish their writings about cartels and corruption in English and Spanish. So that's what I do. So it puts me traveling the border about a third of every month on both sides of the border for the last probably seven or eight years.

So I did a provocative tweet this morning. I want to get your fact checking on it. And I said that because the cartels own so much of the territory on the Mexican side of the border, in other words, they're armed people who essentially control that territory. When we're building the border wall, would it be fair to say that we're building a wall between the US And Mexico, or are we building a wall between the US and the drug cartels because they actually own the land that we would be dividing between them and us? How close to true is that?

Well, it's pretty close. I think that there are. You know, first off, no one is really proposing a wall or a wince or a fence between all of Mexico and all of the United states. There's roughly 2,000 miles of border. They're proposing about 1,000 miles of barriers. The reasons where those are being focused upon are areas that are heavily controlled by cartels. It doesn't mean the cartels control the border, but they do control portions of the border region there. Right. So the border region being the US side and the Mexican side composing the entire border region. I think what you said is largely true. It's largely true. You know, there's. Someone could say the border safe. That's a half truth. Someone could say the border's unsafe. That's a half truth. Someone could say cartels control the border. That's mostly true. You know, there's nuance and a lot of, there's a lot of room for nuance and a lot of details, a lot of differences between the groups and what have you, but largely what you said is true.

So let me just take you down to another level. So if I walked up to the border from the Mexico side, and I'm not on a river, so I'm not on the portion of the border that's a river, what are the odds that I'm in cartel controlled territory?

Well, okay, so the Texas border is about 1200 miles of the almost 2000 mile border. And the Texas border has the Rio Grande. So it is a river. Some places it's, it's pretty powerful. Some places it's a stream that's maybe 10ft across and 4 inches deep. It just depends what we're talking about. Most of the really bad cartels, and I say bad in the sense that they kill journalists, they allow their violence to spill over into the average person. Most of those groups are south of the river, so they're south of Texas. If we were to go Arizona, California, most of New Mexico, those transnational criminal groups tend to not allow their violence to spill over. For instance, in Tijuana right now, they have the highest murder rates of all of Mexico. But the vast majority of the people affected are drug dealers or drug smugglers or cartel connected persons. Now, if you were to go to Reynosa, Mexico, south of McAllen, Texas, the murder rate's about half of Tijuanas. However, most of the people murdered are innocent people, tourists, business leaders or what have you, journalists, politicians, or what have you. So even though the violence is higher in Tijuana, it's actually much more dangerous for the average person in Reynosa. Right. So most of the problems that we're really having with cartels trying to control migration, that's happening south of Texas where there's a river.

Okay. All right. Now some people say that walls and border security doesn't work because of tunnels. And you're probably not seeing any tunnels wherever there's river. Are there other places where you're likely to see tunnels and where you're likely not to?

Well, okay, so this is interesting. There are tunnels, and those tunnels do happen, but they generally happen with tunnels. You're looking at Arizona and California, and the reason you're looking at that is there has been one tunnel under the river in El Paso many years ago that was discovered, but it wasn't a very good tunnel. The actual tunnels that are of concern, those things happen where there's a wall already, right? So you're looking at city centers. When you have an urban area in Mexico next to an urban area in the United States where there's already a wall built, and that's when we see tunnels. And they usually get discovered pretty quickly due to human intelligence. So informant programs or what have you. Our technology hasn't actually discovered any tunnels to my knowledge. It's always been human sources that have given them away. But you're really only looking at, if we were to go west of where the tunnels happen is you're really dealing with them in Douglas, Arizona, Nogales, Arizona, and then you don't deal with them again until you get to Mexicali, California, and El Centro, and then, of course, San Diego and San Ysidro. That's where you're dealing with the tunnels. But it's not the Texas border. Most of the border doesn't have that problem.

How many tunnels would you imagine there are active at any given time? Does anybody know?

Nobody knows. We've discovered hundreds in the last decade. But again, the tunnels thing's a bit tricky because the transnational criminal groups put a lot of money into building a tunnel and ventilating it and what have you, only for it to get discovered shortly thereafter. So it isn't the major push. The major push and the major ways that they go around border security. We've already seen this before because we've already put walls and barriers in places like El Paso, where the crime rate went way down. When Democrats say, hey, El Paso, look at the low crime rate, the border safe. Well, that's an example of how malls work.

Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I have to challenge that because I have mocked the El Paso claim that the wall worked. Now, I think it probably does work for reducing crime and immigration in El Paso. But doesn't it just make people say, okay, we won't cross here, we'll just go down the road?

Well, it sort of does. What it tends to have to do is the reasonable criminal group. I'm trying to avoid speaking in broad terms like the cartel, because there's like hundreds of different criminal groups that we call the cartel or cartels. But what they do is they tend to turn to being a little more professional. They tend to start shying away from illegal immigration and migrant smuggling, and they start to turn towards harder drugs, but they start to turn towards doing those harder drugs at force of entry. So like in El Paso, what happened was instead of people coming over the border barrier and committing small crimes, coming over the border barrier and committing robberies, coming over the border barrier and bringing loads of drugs on their back, they turned towards public corruption and they started to target CBP officers and they started to engage in different efforts to get drug loads through legitimate ports of entry instead of across the border. It changes things, which makes it a little more easy to deal with, but it changes things. It doesn't stop things, it just changes things.

Right, so would it be safe to say that if we're only putting strong borders in some places, even if those are the places we think we need it most, as long as you have lots of porous areas, it really doesn't matter in terms of the overall effect because the cartels will just. And the immigrants will just adjust. In other words, do you need to be pretty good all the way on the border for all the places that are easy to pass, or it doesn't make any difference?

Right. So this is a discussion debate I have oftentimes with, with people who are actually open borders advocates and they do exist, like people in the Cato Institute or, you know, there's a professor in Hawaii that we have discussions on social media about the issue. So an open border doesn't really kill people, per se. A secured border doesn't kill people. What kills people and makes it really, really dangerous is. Is a half secured border. Partial measures, half measures. We've already had this happen during the Bush years and some in the Obama years. Actually, Obama built border barriers too. During those years. What we did was we put barriers between two urban areas, like most of the cities in California and Arizona, like Nogales, and in Arizona, Nogales, Mexico, Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta. Like, we put barriers between them in certain areas, and the point was to funnel the traffic into other areas with the belief that that would make it easier to catch them, to assign resources, and then with the belief that there were some areas that were just so desolate that people would not try to cross. Well, that turned out not to be true. The funnel thing did work, but it Turns out that people are so desperate to have a better life here. A lot of people that they do, in fact, try to come, regardless of how difficult it is. That's why we've seen the two miners die. I believe in the El Paso sector in New Mexico is because people want to be here that badly.

All right. I know that you're doing a good job because I'm seeing some anxiety in the comments for people who can't tell if you're for or against the wall because the world is divided into these. These artificial binaries. So let me ask the question. Because they're asking the question, which I probably would not have asked actually, but for their benefit. Would you say you're for the wall? And let's say the wall equals, you know, fence in some place, wall in other places, and let the engineers decide. But are you for it or against it?

I am for border barriers where they are needed. And I think that, you know, that's not. People want to hear, are you for the wall or against it? I'm for border barriers where they are needed, and I'm for border barriers in urban areas. I'm for border barriers in the most remote areas. But I'm also for building more roads so agents can get there more quickly, making sure there's more medical care for our agen, which translates into for migrants, and for taking a more aggressive stance against transnational criminal groups in Mexico by going after their money and their money people, rather than what we're currently doing, which I think amounts to token gestures. And I'm also for. I'm for making a humanitarian argument for border security. And I recognize that even if we build the wall to the moon, at the end of the day, this all boils down to economic opportunities. It really does. Until Mexico is okay, until Central America is okay, we're going to keep having problems in and around our border. These transnational criminal groups have grown past the point of Al Capone and Prohibition. These guys have grown to a point where they. They are so integrated into Mexican political culture, into Mexican officials, agencies, that, you know, that even if we legalize drugs tomorrow, it's not. It's going to impact them, but it's not going to stop them. And what they're doing, well, say for border security and physical barriers are part of that.

Okay, so say more about the question of legalization. I don't have an opinion on this yet. I'm more along the lines of, you know, there are things that you can try small and see if it works. I understand that Portugal had a good experience with drug legalization, so there's. There's some track record. But why, so people ask me, wouldn't it solve pretty much all of our problems if at least the drug problems part of it, if we just made them legal?

No, I don't think so. I think it would. I tend to be. I tend to lean more towards that, towards legalization. But I think that we need to be honest with ourselves. And this is something that, you know, most people, again, it doesn't fit anyone's narratives perfectly. Let's talk about marijuana. I think it's absurd that marijuana is illegal in a lot of places. I think it's absurd that it's illegal federally. But let's talk about what happened when. When we began to decriminalize marijuana. It did a lot of good, I think, for people in California who are dying of cancer. I'm not taking away from that. There's a lot of young men and young women who are not getting, you know, horrible things on their criminal records preventing them from getting into schools or getting good jobs because of it. Like, I get all of that. But there are also consequences that we don't discuss. Like, whenever we began to decriminalize marijuana, and marijuana could be grown in the United States and grown very professionally, and we got the kind bug right, we got the hydro and the good stuff that's grown indoors. What happened was we took a large chunk of the profits that Mexican cartels were depending upon. They have vast amounts of acreage devoted and hectares devoted towards marijuana cultivation. Well, what did they do when their Mexican swagweed could no longer compete with the Kanban in the United States? Did they go away? No, they didn't go away. What they did was, is they shifted to human smuggling to replace their profits. And that's part of why we saw the minor crisis in 2014, and it's part of what's happening right now and why we have so many people entering our country. They also began to stop cultivating marijuana on their fields, and they started cultivating, what, poppy. So then they began to saturate the United States with black tar, cheap heroin that no one really wanted. So then they said, hey, our heroin can't compete with some of the Asian heroin, so what can we do to make our heroin better? So they began to utilize fentanyl with their black tar heroin so that their heroin was and could compete with Asian heroin. Now we have a lot of overdoses of people because of fentanyl, because they're taking heroin. That's really not that good. But it's laced with fentanyl, so we have some consequences. There are good consequences to legalization, but there are also unintended and bad consequences. So by legalizing without first going after the heart of these transnational criminal groups, what we've done is we've actually hurt ourselves. We've actually created an opioid epidemic, and we've created a fentanyl epidemic where people are overdosing.

That's interesting. So as long as the cartels want to make money and their path of least resistance is more illegal stuff, all we can do is push them from one illegal thing to another illegal thing.

It depends. So we're in a tricky situation in Mexico. The U.S. state Department determines how hard we go after cartels, and they largely determine, or influence is really a better word, who we go after. So what US agencies will say is that they are told that they need to balance their law enforcement priorities with the State Department's diplomatic concerns. Diplomatic concerns matter. Trade matters. I get all of that. But what we've largely become is a situation where in Mexico, like there's a. And we've talked about this before, but I'll tell you, there's an organized criminal circle, okay, like this. And part of that circle is El Chapo, or whatever drug boss, cartel boss there is, right? He's part of that circle. But the other people in that circle are politicians, financiers, bankers, you know, the money people, the lawyers, what have you, and the launderers. And so what we generally do is we go after El Chapo, but we leave the rest of that circle in place. And because those are the diplomats and those are the people who are politically connected, we don't go after the rest of that circle. And until we go after the rest of that circle and actually go after some big fish in Mexico, they're just going to keep replacing El Chapo indefinitely.

So I saw a news story that we, we got some kind of a convictions of a high level government official. I forget the details, but I hadn't seen that recently. Do you know that story? There's some high level.

There's a bunch of them. The last two governors of Tamalepa, south of Texas are indicted. One's in US custody, one's in Mexico custody, Mexican custody, fighting extradition to the U.S. there are instances once that political leader falls out of favor with that organized criminal circle, they're more than happy to give them to us. But this isn't us challenging the organized criminal circle. This is us playing ball with the organized criminal circle, who are also the very diplomats that we have to negotiate trade with. Right. With whom we negotiate trade. So those aren't really examples. Those are more token examples. What I was hoping more for and what Steve Bannon was promised and didn't happen, and it's not his choice. Right, I get that. But what I was hoping for was for specific factions of Mexican cartels, like one faction of Los Zepos, one faction of the Gulf Cartel, to be declared as foreign terror orgs, because they are, in fact, foreign terror orgs, and they've crossed those lines. And I was hoping that going after them that way, which would allow going after any bankers who handle their money. I mean, just going after them that way would then cause all of the other criminal groups in Mexico to step in line and tone it down, so there could be security, so there could be more economic growth, so what have you. I thought that was really the best way to go about it, but that's not what's happened.

How much do the cartels earn in a year collectively? And could we pay them to do our border security? In other words, if we said instead of making a billion dollars a year by sneaking people across the border, we'll give you a billion dollars a year to prevent them from coming across the border?

No, it depends because, well, first off, we already do pay them for border security. Like, we have informants. Our governmental agencies have informants all throughout different transnational criminal groups that we call Mexican cartels. And there's a lot of incentives. If there's someone from the Middle east, for instance, or who's speaking Arabic or who's what they call a special interest alien, there's a lot of incentive and financial incentive for those people to turn those special interest aliens in. Right. And for people to tip off U.S. authorities. So we already do utilize members of criminal groups for security, just as we do in the US Right.

I've never heard that before. This is the reason I love talking to you. I hear things that I've literally never heard. So let me just say this again, make sure I understood it, that our worry about actual terrorists, let's say, from the Middle east, coming across the southern border, order is mitigated by the fact that the cartels themselves can make a profit by turning them in. Is that true?

People in those cartels? Yeah, people in those cartels for sure make a profit by turning them in. I don't think we're there. You know, this is a complicated deal because we've had a couple of. And I Say we, and I'm not taking ownership of that. In fact, I spoke out quite loudly against it, and it was very unpopular because of who I am and I'm on the right and I make some people mad. But, like, there was a false report about an ISIS terror training camp in Warhols. There was a false report that there were a hundred ISIS fighters in the migrant caravan and people ran with this. And those kind of things just really don't help. We're at a point right now where the more likely scenario when it comes to terrorism is that people are still going to fly into the US or they're going to fly into Canada, and then they're going to come into the US on visas or what have you. We're getting to a point with our technology that we're able to recognize who's connected to whom, and people are going to stop coming in that way and they're going to start trying to sneak in illicitly. And that might be a problem on the southern border. But for the most part, from what I understand, the people that we do get who are connected to a terror org or on the terror watch list are usually Somalis or they're people from Kurdistan, they're Kurds. And if you're someone who's a Kurd, it's almost impossible to not be connected to a terror org because someone in your family fought in your war for independence with the pkk. And because of our relationship with Turkey, we call the PKK a terror org. However, when we're over there fighting, our military forces are more than happy to work with, with the peshmerga are more than happy to work with because we understand the nuance. So it gets kind of complicated. I do think that there is a bit of a threat of bad people entering that way, but I don't know that those bad people are as much of a threat as what we're already dealing with with certain transnational criminal groups. So that's where it gets tricky, right? We can talk about it all day long, but the bottom line is there are people. More people are dying, have died in the border region of Mexico. If we just look since 2009, go look at the numbers of people who have died in Afghanistan, look at the numbers who have died in Iraq during the war. And now let's talk about Mexico's drug war numbers. Anybody's free to Google that and look at the different estimates. The best estimates from probably Molly Malloy from the University of New Mexico, who's not a right winger by any Means, and I think she estimates that we're rocking 200,000, 250,000 people dead since 2009 in the drug war, in the cartel wars. We're looking at 50 to 60,000 people missing who are just gone. Nobody knows where they are. And that's just what we know about. So we're looking at. There are real threats along the border, not only to us, but also to migrants, also to the people who are. Many of the people who are trying to come here to work. There are real threats to address. And I think that sometimes people on the right, by focusing on the possible terrorism instances or what have you, it's effective at riling people up, but it's not very honest, you know, so if you.

There's an issue in the news right now where the president claimed, or I guess Homeland Security call claimed that X thousands of people are captured every year trying to come into the country who are on the terrorist watch list. And then when the numbers were broken out, it turns out that basically it was all at the border. Basically, almost all of it was just. I'm sorry, almost all of it was in airports. So that even if you control the border, it wouldn't. The, the implication here is that it wouldn't stop the terrorists because we're, you know, most of them are coming in through airports. To which I say, and here's my question to you, how would we know how many people came across the border and didn't get caught? Because it seems to me that it's easy to catch people coming in through an airport because the process requires them to show their face and identification. So one would expect we would catch all of the terrorists coming through airports or a lot of them. Whereas if they were actually coming across the border, they get away with it because nobody's asking for id. They're literally undetected. Could we have any idea how many watch list terrorists are crossing the southern border, or is it just something they don't do? So it's not a problem.

I don't think it's. See, this is where it gets tricky. We do have people. We do have instances where, you know, five men from Pakistan, one from Afghanistan were caught 17 miles into the US after illegally crossing the border. Like, these kind of things happen. The problem is, and we don't know who are those people connected to. I have no idea. What it does show is that I'm not someone who thinks the majority of people from that region are trying to kill us. I don't believe that. That's just not, you Know, my veteran friends who fought in wars tell me that a lot of those people fought alongside them for their own country. Right. Like when we're talking about the Middle east or the Greater Middle east in the case of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Yeah, So I agree with you on that. But let's, I just want to drill down on what can't be known.

That's the thing is we don't know. Like that's the catch is that we have mechanisms in place to try to figure that out and try to know when people are coming. But clearly some people get through and we don't know. And that's why, again, it is an important discussion to have when we talk about terrorism. But there are so many more applicable. That is one of them that should be discussed. But there are so many more applicable reasons. Like for instance, this isn't Breitbart numbers. Anyone can Google sexual assaults of Central American migrants. Google it and look at the Wikipedia page. Look at the sourcing. So we have a situation where up to 70% of the women and girls who come from Central America to get to the US Illicitly are sexually assaulted along the way. That's a significant situation. That is a much more applicable situation. And when we talk about persuasion, yes, we need security, we need to make sure terrorists don't come across the border. But the people who that appeals to that argument is appealing to are already on fire about border security. Let's broaden it out with our persuasion. Let's talk about the humanitarian consequences of an unsecured border. Let's talk about the 70% of migrant women who are sexually assaulted, the expectation of multiple rapes along the journey from Central America through cartel territory to our border. These are significant arguments that just are not made enough so people can accept something that's out there and narrow it into something that's more applicable.

So let me see if I can frame this using what you said earlier. Would it be true that the two safest situations just in terms of crime would be complete border security or a completely open border? Those two situations would have the least amount of crime, at least involved with border related crime. Is that true?

Correct.

Then the argument is that we're in the worst situation and the decision we should make is open borders versus full control.

Correct.

Interesting. I've never heard anybody say that.

It's the half measures that. And that's why I get very offended when I get offended at Republicans and Democrats, honestly, because I do focus on this issue. I do have, you know, just in a few days, I'm going into Mexico and I'm going to meet with families whose daughter's innocent, you know, and so I, you know, and they have no hope of justice. None whatsoever, aside from the US Targeting the bad guys who did it to their children. Right. They're no hope of justice. The police work in those regions work for the cartels. So, you know, for me, I just listen to, you know, maybe it's our media system and the way it's set up like this is great because we can have a discussion, but most of the people talking about this issue are giving 30 second sound bites on television and they have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

So let me ask a couple more quick questions. Do we have any kind of a special forces who are operating either legally or illegally in Mexico who are directly targeting the cartels?

No. No, we don't.

Why not? Just political.

The way it works out in Mexico is everything's done through consulates, everything's done through our, through the State Department. We have contractors who work there gathering information. Most of them are there for your assignment or longer. Some of them don't even speak Spanish. Most of them are retired law enforcement from law enforcement agencies in the US who then go work there on a contract basis. Our U.S. marshals do go out with Mexican authorities oftentimes, but they're in a support role. They're not able to engage.

Well, but let me ask you this. Can't we tell with our various intel things and drones, etcetera, don't we kind of know where the cartel headquarters are?

It's not that. It's not that simple. We do know, I think, where most of the bad guys are. But you have to manipulate our government in order to get anything done with that. So obviously in my situation, I mean, let's just look at it like Breitbart is largely seen as a voice for, for border patrol agents to tell their stories on the US Side. And we're largely seen as a voice for journalists and law enforcement, good law enforcement officials on the Mexican side, we come across so much information. Half of that information I share with the public. Half of that information I call various law enforcement agencies. With the amount of frustration in Mexican officials who contact me and who I deal with regularly, who say, hey, we found this guy and we want to arrest him. But if we arrest him, this guy is going to get out immediately unless the US Extradites him and wants him. And then the US People in the US Say to me, hey, we don't have the paperwork ready for that guy. Sorry, not interested. That's not a priority.

But what's the problem? What's stopping us from just taking him out, Just. Just killing them on their side of the border? What is stopping us from doing that?

Well, what stops us from being more aggressive in general is our State Department. Our State Department has a lot of sway in how to. Again, like I'm going to tell you, Scott, I'm very aggressive toward cartels. I'm very aggressive especially towards Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. I routinely identify. I use all kinds of creepy mechanisms to find their cartel bosses, human sources, technology. We write about it quite a bit, and a lot of it I share. I make public where they are. I write about where they are publicly. I write about the corruption my team does. And still, unless we create a public outcry, the US Government does not prioritize those individuals. It's a real problem. But it all still, it really goes back to our State Department. The biggest obstacle to border security isn't Mexico. The biggest obstacle to border security is the U.S. state Department. They have nothing to do with whether or not we're building a wall or a barrier. They have nothing to do with whether or not we hire more border patrol agents. But they have everything to do with how our intelligence and law enforcement agencies operate and interact inside of Mexico. Again, again, that's where the real border security is, the real serious stuff and the real border security and the real change. If we talk about holistic border security. Right. Recognizing the border region is two parts. Recognizing that most of that border security is actually having to do with how we deal with cartels so that we can create more economic opportunities there, get the security situation under control. But that's.

Wait, well, hold on. Well, hold on. There's no hope of us increasing the economic situation in Mexico. As long as. As long as that's not true. No, hold on. Let me, let me finish it. Because the cartels will. Will essentially own those businesses, won't they?

No, not necessarily. So. So that the issue really becomes one of it. Okay, here's the reality of Mexico is this. They're very resource rich. There's plenty of resources in Mexico. The problem is that many of the regions along the border, those resources can't be exploited because of the security situation and because of the corruption situation, which is largely due to the security situation. So, though I don't suggest that we engage in direct economic development in Mexico when we need it in our own country so badly, in so many areas like you, inner cities, in the rural Area, we could go down the line. That's a whole other talk. But what we can do is we can address those security situations. We can more aggressively go after the rest of those people in that organized criminal circle so they fall in line in other places so that businesses are more able to invest in Mexico and invest in resource exploitation and what have you. It's all about the same security situation. Security is along the U. S. Mexico border, along the Texas border, tons of oil. But we can't exploit the oil because in order to exploit the oil, the cartels are going to steal the gas, the car.

Yeah. Wait, so. So the pinch point here is the State Department. And, and why. And are you saying that the State Department is prioritizing trade over everything else? Is that the problem?

They prioritize diplomacy, et al. Diplomacy ahead of law enforcement and intelligence priorities. Yes. Yeah, yeah. One of our writers, one of our team members, is the former projects coordinator for the INL for the State Department in northeast Mexico, which composes most of these. Most of Los Zepos in the Gulf cartel territory fell under his. And now that he's no longer doing that, he got very frustrated with that. And, you know, so we give $2.5 billion to the Merida Initiative, which is to deal with the cartels, how the State Department deals with the cartels in Mexico and the drug war. And so he was a senior person in that effort, and he writes with us, and he's written quite extensively about issues with the State Department, Mexico. I deal with it myself, like I said, I understand diplomatic concerns are important, but maybe the balance of diplomacy over law enforcement priorities, maybe we need to shift that a bit.

Yeah, that's why I was wondering if we. Hypothetically, and I'm not suggesting this is a good idea, I'm just thinking it through. If we were to locate a cartel headquarters and we dropped, Dropped a drone on it, Mexico would complain like crazy to our State Department. And then what? Would they stop trading with us? I mean, I can't, I can't see the consequence.

Well, the consequence would be like a lot of our economy is based upon trade with Mexico. A lot of, A lot of Trump's numbers, for instance, with the economy are based upon Texas.

All right, well, hold on, hold on. Let me, let me make sure. I'm saying the question question right. Would Mexico shoot themselves in the foot to punish us for solving their biggest problem?

No. They would probably begin to get closely aligned with Russia or China, and then we have a whole nother problem. I think that it's Unnecessary. That. So here's.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not buying that. I'm not buying that because Mexico's, you know, they're just too entwined with the United States, right?

So. Well, first off, it's really unnecessary because here's the deal. There are good men and women in Mexico trying to do something about cartels and about the corruption. Okay? What we could do and what would be the smartest thing to do is if we were to take, like, one Mexican border state that's divided into six regions in their state, okay? Each state has a regional SWAT commander, state police commander, who's going after cartels. Their salaries are about $1,500 a month at most. If we were to take a situation where our intelligence agencies were to give resources to those individuals and actually go after cartel bosses, if protected cartel bosses were. If. If people in Mexico dumped those people, like across the border who were wanted in the United States, right, But the US Wasn't going after, and Mexico wasn't going after, those kind of things would be very effective. And those are things that we could accomplish for, you know, you could have that relationship with every regional SWAT commander in Mexico for 3.6, $3.4 million a year. I mean, that's nothing. Nothing in the drops of governmental resources, right? So there are other ways to go about doing this and going after cartel bosses. But the most effective thing we can do is just to declare two factions of the two most violent cartels, the two dominant factions, just to declare them as foreign terror orgs. And that would in itself accomplish this goal.

Wait, so what does that bias, what does that buy us if we just simply change their designation? How does that change the activity? What do we do differently because of that?

Well, what it does differently is it causes everyone involved with them in any manner to also be subject to having their resources seized and to be gone after by the United States. It reprioritizes them. It takes the State Department out of having the driver's seat on how they're dealt with, and it puts other agencies at the forefront. So, for instance, bankers who deal with them. I mean, let's be honest. Like when we talk about Los Zetas or the Gulf Cartel who operate along. They're headquartered on the US Mexico border. There's multiple factions. There's cbn, which is the main faction of the Zetas. There's the Reynosa faction, Los Angeles Metros of the Gulf Cartel. These people, it's all. At the end of the day, it's about Money and power and their money is being, and their money is being laundered in US Banks and US connected banks. So if banks launder money of a terror organization, it's a very different situation for a bank than debt laundering drug group.

So let me see if I can summarize this for the viewers and then we'll, we'll wind down here in a minute. So the summary is that our own State Department is keeping us from being aggressive with the crime on the other side of the Mexican border because they want to keep good diplomatic relations with Mexico. But if we were to declare the two biggest cartels or the two most problematic cartels as terrorist organizations, which, which would be legitimate, then the State Department would have to take a step back because they would not be the lead, the lead group. Would that be Homeland Security or just the military? I'm not sure.

The State Department would still be involved, but it would be different factions within it. Our FBI would obviously be able to handle it more aggressively. DHS as a whole, like our, you know, which is part of ice, but like the Homeland Security investigations would be able to handle it more aggressively. Our Treasury Department would be able to handle it more aggressively. We could go down the line on how that would change. But see, I don't advocate declaring the Gulf Cartel as a foreign terror organization. I advocate declaring a faction, the most dominant faction, as a foreign terror org. If we, you know, a lot of people don't recognize the nuance between criminal groups and it's very important that we do like. So if we took two regional factions of these cartels and made an example of them, it would cause the other groups in Mexico to fall in line. That's my thinking. If we just declared cartels as that, obviously that would be very problematic and it would crush Mexico because of the intertwined nature across the country. So we have to do an example. But I think one of the most important things is that I'd like to express here is that we continue to treat Mexico as though they're at an equal table with us as a government, as a country. Like they're Canada or like they're Germany. But the truth about Mexico is that it's 32 districts, 31 states, one federal district, and over half of those territories are actually under the direct control or direct influence of drug cartels. Drug cartels that when the Mexican military, you know, in the United States or Canada, when we want to deal with bad officials in a region, we send in our FBI or our federal agents in Mexico, they can't send in the police, they have to send in the Marines to go into patrol areas. Over half of Mexican states are patrolled by the Mexican military because they are dealing with people who are fighting back against them with RPGs in armored vehicles, some cases with helicopters, with drones. This is a paramilitary situation. It's not a law enforcement situation. In over half of Mexico, yet we still try to deal with them.

As.

Though they are not a failing narco state, which they are.

Okay, so let me ask the question that I keep getting on social media. It's my position that the border security. No amount of border security will make much of a difference to the amount of drugs coming in from below the border. True or false?

I think that's false. I think that According to the DEA's National Drug Threat Assessment, the vast majority of hard drugs coming across the border do come through ports of entry. But 10 or 11% of heroin.

Is.

A significant amount of heroin coming into our country.

So let me drill down on that. So if the 10% that are not coming across the border crossings could no longer do it the way they were doing it, wouldn't they just move to the border crossings, which apparently works well, or just throw it over the wall and have somebody on the other side?

Right. Well, so this is why it's so important that when we talk about border security, we talk about holistic border security and not just a wall. That's one of my objections to that. That's why you can't tell. What I support is because I have an objection to. Just like I did with the caravan, right? Like we said, we're going to stop the caravan. And I'm like, okay, there's. There's more people coming across our border every week that are in the caravan. And by identifying the caravan as a victory point, you really take the steam out of the movement to better secure the border and to change policy by talking about the wall. If he gets his wall. It is one component. The physical barriers are one component of a comprehensive border security plan. One component. It's an important component. It's a symbolic component, but it is just one component. And if it's done alone, it has very little effect. It has to be done with a lot of other things. And that's what I'm trying to tell people is that those other things just are not happening. Right. Most of those other aspects are just not happening. And that's why I don't really think that we're that serious about securing the border, because if we were, we would be doing a number of other things instead of focusing on. On one or two aspects of it.

All right, I'm going to wrap up. Is there any final thing that maybe you'd like to restate or haven't said yet about borders?

I would just say that a couple of points I hope people take away from this is that the border region is the US and the Mexico side. Right. I would like to really impress upon people that we need holistic border security, multiple steps done, some of which could be done very easily by the president and by the State Department without any work from the Democrats or from an opposing party. And then finally, I'd like to say that there is a humanitarian argument for border security. There is a good humanitarian argument. And if people would begin to make that argument, they would find that it had a lot more support than the current arguments being made.

All right, very good. And thank you for that. I'm going to say bye for now. I'm watching the comments and people are loving this discussion. So thank you.

Thank you for having me.

All right. And we'll talk again. All right, those of you who are wondering, his vaping was not marijuana. I know some of you are wondering that. I asked them before we went live. So I hope that was useful. I learned a ton about that and I'm not going to bring up any other topics on this. I think I'll just keep this periscope on the single topic. We'll talk about climate and other things later. So the, the takeaways are that if we, if we were to declare the, the worst of the cartels, the factions within those cartels as terrorist organizations, we might be able to beat the other terrorists into line to be just regular criminals. So apparently taking it down from DEFCON 10 to DEFCON 5, normal crime would be sort of a win. The other thing that was useful is that the safest two conditions from a humanitarian perspective, humanitarian meaning the people coming across themselves would be complete border security or no border security at all. But half of a border security is the most dangerous, least optimal situation, and that's the one we're in. So maybe we should just have that conversation about getting rid of it all or having a complete border security, because those are the smart choices for the benefit of the immigrants. Because, remember, it's a moral argument. So let me put this in Nancy Pelosi terms. It is immoral to have a partial border. Am I wrong? Because the worst case scenario for the immigrants themselves is, is what we have, a partial border. The two ways that you can be morally, let's say acceptable would be to have no border at all, which has its own problems, but it's at least morally acceptable. Or to have a really good border where people are not trying to get across. That's a fascinating reframe of things, and I'm glad we had that conversation. I'm going to end it here and I will talk to you later.