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April 12, 2024 33 mins

Robert Evans walks you through the history of Donald Trump's ambition to fire missiles into Mexico and maybe invade, in a doomed attempt to stop fentanyl trafficking.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alson Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to It could happen here a podcast
about things falling apart in this week, podcast about Agenda
forty seven, Donald Trump's plan for you know, what to
do if he winds up winning re election and being
back in all of our lives in the sense of
having political power as opposed to just back in all

(00:27):
of our lives, because he never shuts the hell up,
and neither do any of the journalists who report on him.
So we're talking about that all week. You've been listening
to the episodes put together one of my colleagues. Today,
I'm going to be talking about Trump's border policy, particularly
has promised to declare war on the cartels and use

(00:48):
the United States military to attack them. Before we get
into it, I do want to note, if you notice
this sounds a little bit different. I am in Texas currently.
My father has leukemia. He's being treated for on chemo
in the hospital. Just finished came out actually, but anyway,
I had to fly down to Texas last minute, and
I'm not recording this in my normal space. We should

(01:09):
be back to normal, you know, very soon here. But
I just wanted to explain if if you think it
sounds different. It's not me fucking something up. I just
had to fly across the country. So let's talk about
Agenda forty seven and the cartels. Back in two thousand
and eight, when I was still a baby and in
fact in Dallas, Texas, as i am right now, I

(01:32):
worked as the secretary for a financial planner named Al Jones.
I was bad at this job, and I didn't really
know much about financial planning then, but I have since
come to suspect that Al was not great at his
job either. The first sign at this might have been
the fact that when I took the job, Al got
excited because I mentioned during our little interview that I

(01:54):
wanted to be a writer someday and he was like,
I'm a novelist, and I was like, or a financial planner.
And then he hands me a copy of his self
published novel Operation night Watch. Now, the plot to this
motherfucker was barkingly mad. Spurred on by an epidemic of
inner city violence. The government sent in a team of

(02:16):
special Forces guys to take on the criminals. I think
it's the government who sends them. They may just be
a bunch like Green Berets and Navy seals who decide
to fight crime on their own. It's been a while
since I read the thing. I'm trying to have a
hardcover delivered to me, but there's not a lot of
them left, so you may get to hear more from
this book. But anyway, the idea of this is that, like, yeah,
there's all of these very much racially coded criminals in

(02:38):
the streets making life too dangerous for regular people, these
evil drug dealers and robbers, and we just need our
special forces guys to murder them, right. There was a
lot of uncomfortable fetishization of brutal violence from this very
mild mannered seeming dude who mostly held meetings at Texas
roadhouses with old people to try to get them to

(03:00):
invest in annuities or whatever a split annuity is. I've
since forgotten so again, obviously, even at that point in time,
mostly having lived either in the country the suburbs, I
had spent enough time in Dallas to know that his
description of inner city life was not precisely accurate. But
what I remember most about the book is that it
wasn't even really a story. It was and talking to

(03:23):
Al made this clear. A literal description of the policy
he wanted to see. The thin characters that he included
in the story were basically just there to help dress
up what was again a policy proposal, and that policy was,
we should use the US military to kill quote unquote
drug dealers. Right now, over the last fifteen years or so,

(03:45):
mainstream Republican policy has actually caught up to my old boss,
and now President Trump has included in Agenda forty seven
a promise to invade Mexico with US special forces. That's
not the extent of the promise. We will be talking
about that all through this fun episode. On Deceiver twenty second,
twenty twenty three, the Trump campaign uploaded a page titled

(04:07):
President Donald J. Trump declares War on Cartels to his
campaign website. And I don't know about you, guys, I'm
pretty sick in the motherfucker's voice, So I'm just gonna
read how this opens. But if you go to the website,
you can listen to him say this if that makes
you happier. The drug cartels are waging war on America,
and it's now time for America to wage war on

(04:29):
the cartels. In this war, Joe Biden has cited against
the United States and with the cartels. They're making more
money than they've ever made before. Times ten. There's never
been anything like it. They're major, major companies. They're bigger
than even some of our biggest companies. Biden's open border
policies are a deadly betrayal of our nation. He's definitely

(04:54):
got a unique diction. Yet you know, Trump came up
with that one more or less on his own. Didn't
need to be scripted.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Now.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Trump goes on to state after this that when he
is president again, the United States government will treat cartels
the same way they treated Isis, which you might recall
still exists and recently carried out an attack in Russia.
Republicans might note that this attack was by Isis k
or Isis Kruson, which is true. And boy, howdie does
Afghanistan come back into the story in a little bit.

(05:22):
So just keep that in mind. But first let's continue
with Trump. He claims that under his presidency we had
a quote very very strong border and in fact, the
strongest border in the history of the country, and quote
drugs were at a low for forty five years. Now,
it's important to fact check things that both Joe Biden

(05:42):
and Donald Trump say the use the diction he uses
here does make fact checking slightly difficult. The strongest border
kind of a meaningless term, right, But the claim about
drugs being at a low for forty five years can
be fact checked to some degree, although again his approach
to grammar makes it hard to tell what he's claiming here. Right,

(06:03):
is drugs at a low for forty five years? Mean,
like drug use is at a low, drug smuggling is
at a low? I don't know. He has made variations
of this claim often, though, including a note on his
campaign website in January twenty twenty three that under his presidency, quote,
drug overdose deaths decline nationwide for the first time in
nearly thirty years. So let's assume that that's kind of

(06:27):
what he meant to claim, that drug overdose deaths were
the lowest they've been for forty five for forty five years, right,
which is again, I mean, it's just wrong on its
face because earlier he said for thirty years, So like,
which is it? Donald? But whatever, Let's say that what
he meant to claim is that under his presidency, drug
overdose deaths were at the lowest point in a long time. Right,

(06:51):
If we're being fair. That's the fairest I could be
to him. And it is true that the overdose death
rate dropped during Trump's presidency for one year eighteen. That's
the only year that it dropped. During each of the
other three years he was in office, the overdose rate rose,
and in fact, it rose by record numbers in twenty twenty.
PolitiFact also notes quote looking at overdose deaths from synthetic opioids,

(07:15):
the closely watched category that accounts for the largest share
of all opioid overdose deaths, the rate rose every year
of Trump's presidency. This is worth noting because all of
the things he wants to do at the border to
the cartels, all of his justifications for really needing to
crack down on human trafficking, for wanting to use the
Navy seals or whatever to kill cartel guys to basically

(07:37):
invade Mexico, it's to stop fentonl which he describes as
an existential threat to the country. And you know, makes
the claim that basically when I was president, you know,
all that stuff was where we were taking care of it,
it was all all declining, and then when Biden took over,
it got a lot worse, No, the rate of finnyl use,
wrote in Finyl related deaths in particular rose every single

(07:58):
year of Trump's presidency, every single year anyway, Trump promises
no mercy to the cartels and that he will designate
the major Ones foreign terrorist organizations with the goal of
cutting off their access to global financial systems. Incidentally, this
would provide a pretext to basically charging every drug user,
whether or not their drugs had anything to do with

(08:19):
a cartel, with material support of a terrorist organization, and
thus allow night marrish penalties for people caught dealing weed
or LSD or whatever, on the justification that they're aiding
the cartels with whom we are at war. Trump also
states that he will ask Congress to pass legislation to
allow the death penalty for quote drug smugglers and human traffickers. Now,

(08:41):
He's made similar statements around drug dealers in the past.
Here's how this particular rant on the Agenda forty seven
website ends. The drug cartels and their allies and the
Biden administration have the blood of countless millions on their hands.
Millions and millions of families and people are being destroyed.
When I am back in the White House, the drug
king and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again. We

(09:03):
did it once, and we did it better than anyone else.
There's never been a better border than we had just
two years ago. It was strong, it was powerful, and
it was respected all over the world. And now we're
laughed at all over the world. And we're not going
to let that happen much longer. We have to take over.
We have to be tough, and we have to be smart,
we have to be fair. But if we don't do
something immediately, our country is gone. Now that's all ridiculous,

(09:24):
but it behooves us to look into the origins of
this particular violent fantasy. When President Trump was still in office,
he repeatedly floated variations of a single idea using US
missiles to destroy so called drug factories, specifically those producing
either fentanyl or methamphetamine. Obviously, cartels do operate sizable facilities

(09:46):
and where they prepare drugs for smuggling and sale. They
have places where they cut fentanyl, which generally comes from elsewhere,
into other drugs, or make it into pills, etc. And
they've got places where meth is cooked. Obviously, so as
best as the New York Times has been able to trace.
His obsession with military action against Mexico seems to have
started in late twenty nineteen. So while the coronavirus is spreading,

(10:09):
our president, rather than focusing on a response, it's kind
of obsessed with the fentanyl crisis, which is serious. But
his way of dealing with it was to hold these constant,
large oval office meetings that people absolutely had to attend.
Quote some part tennsis from the New York Times. Some
participants felt the meetings were of little use because officials
tended to perform for mister Trump, and he would perform

(10:31):
for them. And that does put the fun idea in
my head of Donald Trump and a bunch of friends
all dancing about like, I don't know whatever kind of
animal you would train to dance. I'm spacing on that
right now. So why don't we just roll to ads
for a second. Well, I think of animals. We're back

(11:00):
to continue that quote from the New York Times. When
the idea of military intervention was brought up at one
such meeting, mister Trump turned to Brett Geroor, who was
there in his role as the US Assistant Secretary for Health.
Mister Gerrore was also a four star admiral in the
Commission Corps of the US Public Health Service, and he
was wearing his dress uniform. His main point was that
the United States was unable to combat the crisis with

(11:21):
treatment alone. According to a person briefed on his comments,
it was clear from the way mister Trump singled out
mister Gerror that he had mistakenly thought he was in
the military because of his dress uniform. According to two
participants in the meeting, mister Geror, in his response, suggested
putting lead to target. The two participants recalled that seems likely.
Gerroor denies this right. He claims, well, the President knows

(11:44):
me really well. We met all the time. He would
never mistake me for a soldier. And like, sure, buddy.
For one thing, I totally believe he could meet with
Trump regularly and Trump not remember him. But also, it
kind of sounds assume I mean again, and these are
all maybe not the best sources, but assume the people
who are like he said we should put lead to
target are telling the truth. That sounds to me like

(12:05):
this guy wearing his uniform because he knows it'll impress.
Trump was also trying to use military metaphors because he
I think maybe was just trying to have this impact
on Trump, right, make Trump think of him as like
a military official giving advice. There's some claims that people
in the administration were so concerned about this and were

(12:26):
so terrified that like Trump might actually attack Mexico that
they asked Jeror to stop wearing his uniform to meetings,
basically being like, he's hypnotized by this shit man, Like
if you dress like a soldier, he'll take you seriously
when you say this crazy bullshit. Anyway, at the same
time this is all going on, Attorney General William Barr
had also started floating the idea to the President that

(12:48):
maybe the United States should consider carrying out some attacks
in Mexico to kill cartel guys to stop the fentanyl.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
His argument though, was not so much that we should
do it, but that if we threaten Mexi with military action,
that will force the Mexican government to be more aggressive
against the cartels. Now, William Barr is not a guy
I consider very smart, and this is in fact a
dumb idea because like Mexico's government has tried a bunch
of different ways to fight the cartels. They haven't destroyed

(13:17):
them right now. The current president of Mexico is is
more on the left, and he has a policy described
as hugs not bullets, right, which is not using the
stick to fight the drug cartels. But that doesn't mean
that hasn't been tried. The Mexican government and the Mexican
military have carried out a number of very high intensity
operations against cartels over the years. It's just like, it's hard.

(13:40):
The cartel problem is a massive, massive, complicated thing, and
the idea that like, if we threaten Mexico, they'll finally
do it kind of understates the degree to which Mexico
is capable of ending this epidemic or ending this problem
right of somehow taking back this territory and rendering the
cartels unable to function. I don't actually know that they are,

(14:02):
you know, I don't know that. I certainly wouldn't say
that the current president's plan is working. But no one
else has stopped them either, so I don't know. I
think Barr is rather silly when he thinks that it's
just a matter of threatening Mexico with an invasion that'll
force him to take care of this shit. I don't
really know that they have the ability to do that
either way. So for his part, Barr does not seem

(14:25):
to have actually wanted at military action in Mexico. Again,
he's thinking that the threat will do the trick. And
in fact, when Trump pushed back that like, well, maybe
we could just shoot some missiles into Mexico, Barr pushed
back on this and was like, well, if we fire,
missiles will hit, we might hit the wrong target, right, Basically,
civilian casualties you know, could happen, so we should avoid that.

(14:46):
And that really kind of showcases how fucking dangerous someone
like Barr is because his plan is he's thinking he's
playing forty chess or whatever. It's like, yeah, you know,
the Mexican government will get scared and they'll take care
of these cartels for us. But when you start floating
that adu to a guy named Trump, he's gonna be like, well, yeah,
let's just shoot him with missiles. And you may you
may push back against that initially, but when your stupid

(15:07):
plan to bully Mexico into destroying the cartel's doesn't work
because they can't or because they don't want to be bullied,
then what where are you, right, you can't step down
at that point. You can't back off once you've threatened
to bomb them, right, because if you threaten to attack
and they don't do shit and then you just kind

(15:28):
of like back off, you're gonna look weak. And that's
the worst thing in the world to these people. Right.
Trump's certainly not going to accept something like that. It's
part of why, like what bar was doing here is
just like incredibly irresponsible. Just with a guy like Trump,
you can't pull that shit. So this means again that
at some point, if this kind of process goes on,

(15:50):
if Trump wins office, if he's to carry out something
like what Bar was suggesting or something like what yourr
was suggesting, at some point, Trump's kind of need to
use military assets to strike Mexico if only save face.
And again, the safest thing for him to use would
be missiles to basically fire missiles, you know, guided missiles
at factories or whatever making drugs. This avoids risking US servicemen,

(16:12):
It certainly avoids the risk of them getting captured. Anyway.
I'm gonna quote from the New York Times against here,
at least twice during twenty twenty, mister Trump privately asked
as Defense Secretary mister Esper about the possibility of sending
patriot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs and
whether they could blame another country for it. Patriot missiles
are not the kind that would be used. They are

(16:32):
surface to air weapons, but mister Trump had had a
habit of colleg all missiles patriot missiles. According to two
former senior administration officials, I just find that fuddy, like, man,
you are the you're the commander in chief, and you
don't know, like you don't even know that. Like it's
I don't expect the President to say, like I want
you to fire this exact version of missile. You know,

(16:53):
that's maybe a little more granular than is necessary for
him to know. But like you should know that patriot
missiles don't get fired at ground targets. That's not what
they do. They're kind of a major part of like
our military or min anti missile defense. It's just it's
just very silly of him. All this nonsense came to
a head for the first time in twenty twenty when,

(17:15):
during one of these interminable fentanyl meetings, Trump looked over
to Defense Secretary Mark Esper and asked, can we blow
up these drug labs with a missile and make it
look like another country did it? Now? That's you know, bad? Right? Like?
It brings up a lot of questions, namely like what
other country is in a position to fire missiles into Mexico?

(17:35):
Right Like, if you're saying, oh, it wasn't US, are
you say it's Canada because they'd have to kind of
cross a lot of space to do that. He's saying
Guatemalas firing missiles into Mexico because it doesn't really seem
like a Guatemala move. You know, who are you going
to blame? Thankfully? Esper was one of those rare Trump
appointees who possessed a basic minimal capacity for rational thought,

(17:56):
and we never, thankfully got the answer to the question
what would have had happened if he'd fired a missile
into Mexico. Esper argued against the idea, and then he
wrote about it in his memoir, which I have an
issue with. He's one of these guys who, yeah, maybe
we should have noted about that when it happened, rather
than waiting for your fucking book. But people got to
get paid, I guess reactions from Mexico to these revelations

(18:19):
about Trump considering missiling them and now the fact that
he's got on his website like our plan is to
use military assets to attack the cartels. Reactions from Mexico
have been pretty universally negative for reasons I probably don't
need to elaborate on. President Lopez Obrador told reporters in March, quote,
this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an

(18:40):
offense to the people of Mexico, a lack of respect
to our independence, to our sovereignty. If they do not
change their attitude and think they are going to use
Mexico for their propaganda, their electoral and political purposes, we
are going to call for not voting for this party
because it is interventionalist and human, hypocritical and corrupt. I
don't know he's wrong there. I don't know how much

(19:00):
ability the president of Mexico has to shift votes in
the United States. But you know, it is interesting. You
don't often hear a world leader, specific particularly not of
the US's largest trading partners, say that they're going to
take sides in an election, not that openly at least,
but you know who never takes sides except for your side,

(19:21):
because they're always on your side. The products and services
that support this podcast and or program, we're back. So
the opposition candidate in next year's Mexican presidential elections also

(19:43):
made a statement that was it was a little bit
more moderated than obradors, but it belittled Trump's comments about
using military force on Mexico and stated, rather than threats,
we should work in a smart way. So nobody's really
happy with this down in Mexico. Not surprising to see why. Meanwhile,
in US politics, conservatives are now falling over themselves to

(20:06):
justify military intervention in Mexico. As soon as Trump adopts this,
it now becomes basically the standard Republican line that we
need to be sending our special forces guys in to
fight the fucking cartels. I'm not going to go over
a laundry list of all the dumbfucks who have embraced
this crap idea, but I do want to read one
quote from an ABC News article quote House Oversight Committee

(20:27):
Chairman James Comer, Republican Kentucky, on Tuesdays said that it
was a mistake that then President Donald Trump did not
bomb meth labs in Mexico after he had reportedly asked
his defense secretary about the possibility. In twenty twenty, One
of the things we learned post Trump presidency is that
he had ordered a bombing of a couple fentanyl labs
crystal meth labs in Mexico just across the border, and

(20:48):
for whatever reason, the military didn't do it. Comer said
on Fox and Friends, I think that was a mistake.
Now I want to discuss for a second how impossible
it is for this plan to work. Noted earlier, there
are drug labs in Mexico, quite a few of them,
making a variety and not just making but in many
cases taking drugs that come from elsewhere and basically packaging

(21:09):
them in a way that they can be sold or smuggled.
That is, those facilities certainly exist, but they are not
like the large centralized factories that I don't know, like
a military rival would used to produce tanks. Right, most
of this work, even if it is currently being done
in a sizable facility, can be done in smaller facilities
and can be moved pretty readily. And again, it's just

(21:31):
not very intelligent to think that you can cripple this
the same way you can cripple an enemy's ability to
produce missiles or tanks. And even then that's not easy.
We're actually really bad at it. We've repeatedly during wars
bombed countries to attempt to destroy their ability to produce
munitions and failed to really do that to a substantial extent.

(21:54):
And so something like the narcotics industry, which is even
more underground, even more hard to identify by nature of
what it is, it's it's a big ask on the surface. Right.
It's also worth laying out why it's dumb as hell
to conflate drug cartels with ISIS, because a big part
of why Trump, how Trump thinks things are going to go,
is like, well, Isis took over Raka, took over Mosel,

(22:17):
and then we beat them up, you know, we kick
the crap out of them, We destroyed ISIS. That's what
he I think, that's literally what he thinks happens, and
it's certainly what he wants his voters to think happened.
But that's not really what happened. Right when the physical
caliphate was liberated, ISIS went underground, and they are still
there and still have the potential to take in whold

(22:37):
territory again. ISIS attacks in both Iraq and Syria have
been raising steadily for years. There's a lot of reasons
for this. Big part of why things have gotten worse
in Syria is that the Biden administration has done fuck
all to stop the Turkish government from attacking the autonomous
region Rojava. Who are the folks who defeated ISIS in Syria,
and that has degraded their capacity to keep a fucking

(22:59):
little things. So number one, this victory he claims, wasn't
a total victory. And number two, the reason why ISIS
was knocked out of you know, Mosl and knocked out
of most of their territorial claims in a fairly short
period of time was because of a couple of things.
Number One, the US was providing support, but we were

(23:21):
not carrying out either operation on our own in both
Iraq and Syria. We were supporting other extant militant groups
that had a long history and a decent amount of
support in the region, right And number two, and maybe
you could make the claim that that's the case with the
Mexican army, But the other aspect is that ISIS were
not guys who had been in charge for forever in

(23:42):
that region and had deep bases. Most of them were foreigners,
and they were foreigners who had very quickly taken urban
areas and then started running them like dog shit. Cartels
have existed for a lot longer. They have effectively and
do effectively rule large chunks of Mexico and have done
so for longer than ISIS has existed. They have deep
networks of local ties and in many areas, a reputation

(24:02):
for providing services better than the Mexican government has done.
I don't say this to whitewash how horrible these organizations are,
but they are not ISIS, which just came up seemingly
out of nowhere, took over a bunch of cities and
then got fucking kicked out, and you know, never had
a huge base of support among the populace, particularly in Iraq,
because again there were just some assholes who showed up

(24:24):
one day as opposed to the cartels, which you know,
especially once the US starts bombing Mexico and killing Mexican civilians,
which will happen anytime we're bombing them, just the idea,
the amount of support it could potentially build for the
fucking cartels is substantial. But even beyond that, the idea
that you could knock these beat people out easily, they're not. Again,

(24:48):
they have a deep base of support, a deep history
in these areas. They have functioned for a long time,
not just running things, but also constantly fighting against a
military and the government that has a degree of capacity
and technology at its back. So the idea that like,
you're just going to be able to kick these guys

(25:09):
out of whatever, Sonora, the way that you know isis
was quote unquote kicked out of mosl It's fanciful, right,
It's it's it's a farce. Now, speaking of farces, I
want to talk about kind of the the thing that
we should all see as the model for what might
actually how it would actually work if Trump tried to
go into Mexico to take out the cartels. And this

(25:32):
brings me back to Afghanistan. Right during Trump's administration, the
Department of Defense was empowered by the president to use
vastly more force and their attempts to destroy Taliban drug labs. Obviously,
Taliban funded a lot of their war effort with the
sale of opium, you know, heroin, whatever, and it was,

(25:52):
you know, believed that if we can cut, if we
can destroy their ability to grow and process this stuff,
we can cut the lake out from underneath the Taliban.
And Trump really bought into this and allowed the DoD
to accelerate their efforts to do this. Our forces started
carrying out a mix of air strikes and special operations
attacks on Taliban drug labs in twenty seventeen. It is

(26:15):
the same plan that they executed that Trump is pushing
for the United States to use in Mexico and in Afghanistan.
This plan was such an abysmal failure that not only
did it not stop drug production, it actually accelerated the
production of opiates in fucking Afghanistan at the highest level
in recorded history. This program failed so badly that the

(26:38):
Pentagon ended their strikes on drug labs in twenty nineteen.
They gave up in two years because they didn't couldn't
do it. They were bad at it. Now, the fact
that this kind of plan that Trump is pushed would
undeniably fail to actually destroy the cartels to stop drugs
and human trafficking across the border, this does not mean
that it would actually be a failure. For the reasons

(26:59):
that Trump and many of the Republicans wanted to fail,
which is that declaring war on cartels allows them to
justify a major power grap and destroy or in the
lives of US citizens they already see as enemies. And
I don't mean to say that this is more serious
than the lives that will be lost in Mexico. It
certainly not. But this is very serious as well. Last October,

(27:22):
a think tank, the Center for Renewing America, published a
policy paper with the fun title It's Time to Wage
War on Transnational Drug Cartels. Paper makes it clear that
illegal immigration is just as much a priority as fentanel
in carrying out these actions, and in fact, it lists
the goals of this planned military policy in Mexico this way.

(27:43):
Number one, ending the illegal flow of people trafficking victims
and drugs across the southern border. Now, the paper suggests
creating a new classification that is similar but different to
foreign terrorist organization for the cartels. It lists a series
of escalatory stages that Trump's administration should take, starting with

(28:05):
putting pressure on the Mexican government to take care of
things themselves, and since the Mexican government is not really
capable at president of ending a present of ending either
migration or drug cartels. Escalation is inevitable. So after this
phase fails, phase two is to have the President start
deploying military units, initially to interdict the coast, but also

(28:27):
to coordinate with the DEA to target and kill cartel
figures and destroy their assets. US ports will be closed
whenever the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions that the border
increases past a certain level. Right, So they are also saying,
and again you get the feeling from this paper. While
Trump always harps on the drugs and the horror is
a fentanyl, it's very clear from this paper there is

(28:50):
concerned and if not more concerned about the fact that
non white people are entering the country quote well costly
to the economy. This closing sorts would incentivize the Mexican
government to crack down on human smugglers, migrant caravans, and
cartel trafficking networks. Now into the fourth and final phase
of this plan, the US government would basically carry out

(29:11):
a full scale invasion of parts of Mexico in order
to defeat cartels and secure the border. At no point
are there any suggestions made as to how this might
be done, or why it would be more successful than
the attempts that failed in Afghanistan. Instead, they just move
right onto the last phase, the victory phase, which includes
these suggestions. Congress should enact legislation that creates enhanced penalties

(29:35):
for US citizens found guilty of collaborating with the cartels.
Punishment should include mandatory minimum federal sentencing of fifteen years
in prison for working with cartels labeled as transnational criminal organizations,
and mandatory minimum sentencing of twenty five years in prison
for working with cartels labeled under the new Cartel statutory guidelines.
Congress should enact legislation that defines material and financial supports

(29:58):
for the cartels designated under the new statutory framework has
tantamount to engaging in terrorism against the United States. This
basically means, depending on how this is written, it could
mean that doing drugs, possessing drugs, having friends who sell
or use drugs could mean that you're committing terrorism by
supporting the cartels. It is not impossible that that is

(30:21):
how this law these laws should they be actually put
on the books. Ever, should this program be enacted, That's
not impossible that that's how it would be interpreted and
why wouldn't they want to write this would allow them
to lock up a shitload of people that they see
as being on the left. If you think back to
Richard Nixon. A big reason why, and this is a
stated reason why, you know, the war on marijuana was escalated,

(30:44):
is that it lets you arrest the fucking hippies and
anti war protesters and put them in prison. You know,
that is a big part of what a lot of
people in Trump's orbit want to do with this. And
I say that because the guy who wrote this fucking
thing is a dude named Kim Kochinelli is a major
anti left culture warfucker. One of his jobs under Trump

(31:05):
was he worked under Chad Wolfe, who was the illegally
the director of the DHS during the twenty twenty uprising.
In September of twenty twenty, he ordered the intelligence branch
of the Department of Homeland Security to downplay threats by
white supremacists and instead focus on the danger of Antifa.
Under his watch, DHS also compiled and tel reports on

(31:27):
journalists in Portland, Oregon might have some issue with this
guy personally, and defended the abduction by federal agents of
civilians in unmarked vehicles, right, you know, when people were
being abducted off the streets of Portland. He was a
big fan of that. Ken Guchinelli really likes that idea.
He is also essentially a white nationalist himself. In August
of twenty nineteen, he announced a revised regulation to go

(31:50):
into effect October fifteenth, twenty nineteen, that expanded the public
charge requirements for legal immigration, made it harder to get
green cards and visas if you were poor. Basically, he's stopped.
He made they basically, if we might need something like
food stamps, it's harder to get, you know, to immigrate
legally to the United States. He was asked, doesn't this

(32:11):
kind of contradict, you know, that poem on the Statue
of Liberty about welcoming you know, poor and persecuted people.
Kucinelli suggested a revision to the poem on the Statute
of Liberty, on the Statue of Liberty, give me you're
tired and you're poor, who can stand on their own
two feet and who will not become a public charge,
So that's that's cool. He also made a point that

(32:32):
the poem referred to European immigrants, so you know, fuck
those non white people, right, you know, like the poem
was never meant for them. He's a fucking nazi, right,
He's a white nationalist at the very least, like kN
Kuchinelli is the kind of person that a decent society
would google what the Romans did with the Tarpaian rocks
when they had someone who was a trader to their system,

(32:54):
and that's what should happened to Ken Cucinelli. But instead
he's trying to get the US military to invent Mexico.
So that's good anyway, that's a Trump's Agenda forty seven
policy on the cartels. I hope you all had a
lot of fun anyway, Bye.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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