12-1-25 - 10am - St Thomas Aquinas & Immigration

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Michael Get You're spot on on this. The
point is eliminating the threat. Sometimes that means loss of life,
other times it doesn't. If the threat is eliminated, the
combat stops.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Period.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Yes, the text I really want to move on, but
there are a couple of texts that I want to address.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, let's go back.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
And as I said, my opinion about a violation of
the War Crimes Act of Title eighteen is holy fat
dependent because we don't know all of We just know
general facts right now, and based on those general facts,
I believe that this could be a violation of the

(00:48):
War Crimes Act. It's certainly enough that I'm not going
to just react, have a reaction that just says, oh no, no, no,
it actually is not. That leads me to what really
bugs me. And you know, when you have time off
like you do during the holidays. I had a really
nice holiday, Dragon, You have a good holiday.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
You had a great time with the family.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
My brother came in to see as you know, his
kids and the kids that don't live in Colorado came
from out of state, and it was you know, it
was it was great and they didn't our kids. You
actually on Thanksgiving it was a good time, very good time.
But then as I would kind of swerve back into
the news a little bit, just kind of keep up
with what was going on, I came to this conclusion.

(01:36):
We are so unwilling, and your texts show this. Your
position is set in concrete. Now you may say, well,
who are you to talk? Because yes, some of my
positions are pretty pretty damn strident, But I'm always cognizant

(01:58):
of trying to be away are of nuance involving issues. Now,
sometimes in a in a three or four hour does
I mean an all day a twelve hour talk show,
it would be I could literally take this one subject
and spend the entire day on it, because there are
so many nuances to it, and there's so many different

(02:21):
facets to it. My only objective is to prepare you
to be thinking about the different nuances when this blows
up as a giant story and or both it blows
up as a giant story and we have a congressional investigation,
then we have a Pentagon investigation, we have an FBI investigation,

(02:44):
we have all we have investigations out the wall zoo,
and everybody's going to run to their corners and everybody's
going to decide that my position is right.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yours is wrong.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
This is a great example of American political debate that
rewards certainty outrage, and it's my team versus your team
more than curiosity, doubt, and two other words which I
think are totally lacking in our discourse, complexity and nuance,

(03:21):
And that dynamic flattens these intricate policy questions into moralized binaries,
making nuance feel not just rare but risky. I knew
coming in. I knew that I wanted this to be
my first story this morning. I had another story. But

(03:41):
I as I'm driving in, I'm thinking, no, I'm gonna
boom right off.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
The bat with that story about this.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Thing that happened way back in September September two, and
it's just now blowing up into a story because the
cabal is starting to investigate. You know, there's another thing
that bothers me about this story. I spent an inortan

(04:14):
amount of time on both the weekday program and the
weekend program, going through the going through the Military Code
of Conduct, going through the War Manual, and everything about
the process of obeying or disobeying illegal orders. Because I

(04:38):
think what those what they call the sedition six, although
as I explained, is nowhere sedition is absolutely inappropriate what
they did. It is not seditioned by any definition in
Title eighteen or elsewhere, or even in the case law.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
But what but this incident may do.

Speaker 4 (05:07):
Is give.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Ammunition, no pun intended. Is it may give ammunition to
those six that made that video because if, indeed it
turns out that this was an illegal act and it
was in violation of the War Crimes Act, now we
have played into their hands.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
And that really.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Pisces me off because I believe what they did was irresponsible.
I think that it was unnecessary, and I think it
put lives and careers at risk because, as I've said before,
you take a grunt that's just in, you know, in

(05:54):
his first few weeks of basic training, and he's online
and he sees this TikTok and he's mad at at
his drill sergeant and he thinks the drill sergeant is
making him do something that's illegal, and he goes and
shoots off his mouth. Next thing you know, he's lost
his career, he's got a dishonorable discharge.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
And he's out.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
That's how irresponsible I think that video was. Nuance in
our politics means that you can have layered and sometimes
conflicting views. You can see the trade offs, you can
acknowledge the uncertainty, you can distinguish between empirical questions and

(06:37):
moral judgments. But in the current environment, those mixed positions
are often interpreted as weakness or disloyal or you're part
of the problem, or you've gone to the dark side,
and then that pressures people to capitulate and go to simpler,
more absolutist stances, which really destroys all the concept of

(07:00):
nuance and the whole thing about complexity of issues. You know,
the research this is just off the top of my head,
but research shows on US politics in particular, shows that
the elites in Congress have grown steadily more ideologically polarized
over the past couple of decades, and that's reduced overlap

(07:24):
and encouraging sharper, clearer conflict cues. Why we don't have
a problem with sharp, clear conflict cues. I'm all for that,
but I also recognize that to get to a really
sharp conflict cue, you have to have gone through all
the nuance and complexity of an issue to get to
that point. And many people just are failing to deal

(07:49):
in nuance. And that's what bothers me. And I want
this audience because I got so much respect for this audience,
even those of you you would disagree with me, my,
you know, you know how I love doing this, doing
talk radio and soon to be in my twentieth year

(08:10):
doing it. It's because it gives me an opportunity to
just to a wide audience all across the country just
to tell you, you know what, here's an issue, and
here's what I do think about the issue, and here's
why I think about the issue, and because of my
stupid lawyer brain, and here's why other people may think

(08:31):
differently about the issue. And here's why I think those
different points of view may be wrong or right. And
even if I think that someone's opposite point of view
may be correct, it doesn't mean that I've adopted that
opposite point of view. It simply means that I'm cognizant
of it. I'm aware of it, and I'm willing to
take it to the court of public opinion to see

(08:52):
which side you fall on. And I want you to
do the same. Our failure to grasp that nuance, the
failure to grasp and just immediately run to the corner.
And I'm on the Red team, or I'm on the
Blue team, and I make no bones about it about it.

(09:13):
I'm on the Red team. But when I think the
Red team does something wrong, I love and respect the
Red Team and Conservatism so much that I'm willing to
point out when we do stuff that is wrong, and
I just want people to do the same. I want
people to recognize that nuance is an inherent part of

(09:35):
what we do every single day, and the lack of
it does bother me. I think Trump has had enough.
That's the segue right there. Trump has had enough. He
had the somber duty on Thursday evening of last Thursday,

(09:56):
Thanksgiving of announcing the passing of Sarah Bestro Sir was
one of the two National guardsmen was the shot on
Wednesday by an Afghan terrorist who had been allowed into
the country by the EVA handlers of old Joe Biden.
He made the announcement, which I need to plug and
if you'd like to hear it, m hmude.

Speaker 5 (10:23):
It's a great radio right there.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Michael Well, I'm trying to make excuses. I couldn't get
to it because somebody was sitting there earlier and busy
doing stuff.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Of course, somebody else's fault, yes, got it.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yes, yes, that's my liberal reaction to my forgetting to
plug in the cable.

Speaker 6 (10:41):
I must, unfortunately tell you that just seconds before I
went on right now, I heard that Sarah Bestrom of
West Virginia, one of the guards men that were talking about,
highly respected, young, magnificent person I started service in June
of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 7 (11:03):
Outstanding in every way. She's just passed away.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
She's no longer with us.

Speaker 5 (11:08):
She's looking down at us right now.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Her parents are with her.

Speaker 7 (11:14):
This just happened. She was savagely attacked. She's dead now
with us. Incredible person, outstanding in every single way, in
every department.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
That's horrible. He's really distraught over it, as he should be.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
He published a pair of really long posts on his
truth social feed addressing this atrocity that occurred on American soil,
and in those two posts he details the ruinous impacts
that mass third world migration, mass third world immigration has
had on American society, on our economy, on our social

(11:58):
safety net programs.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Of course, is the Democrat goal. It's the very.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Targets of the Cloward pivot strategy that they very first
implemented in the early years of the Obama presidency, although
Cloward Piven certainly predates Barack Obama. So after slamming Minnesota
Governor Tim Wallas's looting of a state's budget by tens
of thousands of unvetted Somalis that Biden's handlers concentrated in

(12:24):
a state, Trump concludes with a promise to halt all
immigration from any third world country and in federal benefits,
at least for non citizens.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
His goal.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
His goal is to achieve long term reverse migration immigration
via deportations and programs designed to encourage those people invading
the country to leave voluntarily. I think that is actually
a worthy goal. I won't go through all of the

(13:02):
full text of both posts. Rog can you find those
and put those up on the website?

Speaker 5 (13:06):
Sure, Michael says, go here dot com.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
Thank you, because I don't want to read through all
of them. But when Trump announced his hault on Islamic
immigration to the United States alongside a policy of promoting
remigration for certain Islamic refugees and immigrants, that gets routinely
denounced as somehow being xenophobic, un Christian, and in some

(13:31):
quarters even called fascists. Well, those kinds of charges are
really serious. They're also philosophically incompetent, sloppy, theologically uninformed. If
we take Saint Thomas Aquinas seriously in his writings, the

(13:53):
picture looks entirely different. Because Saint Thomas Aquinas offered a
structured framework for thinking about immigration. It is a lot
more charitable than all the stupid contemporary slogans. Yet I
think it's more realistic than contemporary wishful thinking. And within
the Aquinas framework, Trump's policy is not only permissible, I

(14:16):
think it is morally and prudentially justified, absolutely justified. One
thing that he did right, which I do want to
share with you verbally, is this he wrote, even as
we have progressed technologically, immigration policy has eroded those gains
in living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration
from all third world countries to allow the US system

(14:38):
to fully recover. Terminate all of the millions of Biden
illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden's autopen
and remove anyone who is not a net asset to
the United States or is incapable of loving our country
in all federal benefits and subsidies to non citizens of
our country, de naturalized migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and

(14:59):
deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk,
or noncompatible with Western civilization. These goals will be pursued
with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal
and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and
illegal autopin approval process. Only reverse migration can fully cure

(15:22):
this situation.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Other than that happy Thanksgiving.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
To all except those that hate steel, murder, and destroy
everything that America stands for, you won't be here for long.
Pretty powerful stuff. Now, Can I nuance what he wrote
for just a moment? Or is that going to send
you off the deep end? Because when he says that

(15:46):
those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal autopen approval process,
I happen to disagree with that, the autopen is getting
blown way out of portion. But I'm not going to
follow that squirrel right now. We'll follow that squirrel some
other day. But I just want you to know that

(16:07):
I know that what he wrote about unauthorized and illegal
autopin approval processes is not entirely correct. But to see
why that statement is correct, start with Saint Thomas Aquinas's
basic question. He asked whether the judicial precepts of the

(16:28):
old law, including the rules about foreigners, whether or not
those rules were reasonable. Aquinas noted that Israelite law distinguished
very carefully among different kinds of foreigners, and he described

(16:48):
these foreigners in different different categories.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Tom.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
He said, we're just passing guests, and they deserve protection
from horror. They were just traveling from one part of
the world to another part of the world, and they
traversed your country. He says, those people, those passing guests,
deserve protection from harm. He says others were resident sojourners
who lived among the people but didn't share all the

(17:16):
full civic standing. And still others, he said, wanted to
be admitted fully into the community's quote fellowship and mode
of worship. For that last group, Saint Thomas Aquinas stresses,
the law imposed an order, and I think that order

(17:38):
is what we need to get to.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
I'll explain it next. Renie.

Speaker 6 (17:42):
I hope you had a good time off, because boy,
it's up listening to that holiday programing.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
At one point you why, well, because there was and
this is and I don't mean it to be macabre,
but there was a trucker that lost his breaks and
had a wreck, and.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
There was something in the news story about it that
said the sole driver. And when they said the sole driver,
I thought about him.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
It's okay to love and like the goobers out there,
but that one, that one, he makes me laugh because
of his laugh.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
He makes me laugh because he's such an ass kind
of like you. You make me laugh. You know what, what'd
you tell me just now before we came back on air.

Speaker 5 (18:45):
I'm immensely talented. I can do two.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
You're immensely talented. You can do two things at once.
And I said, that's fine, I'll check with Missus Redbeard.
The sad part is Missus Redbeard is now working while
I'm on the air.

Speaker 5 (18:56):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yeah, yeah, So I'll just have to text her and say,
you know what he said today? And yeah, I can
just say anything now. I can just tell her anything. Hey,
you know what he said about you today?

Speaker 2 (19:05):
What she gonna know? She won't go back and listen
to podcast. Who's gonna believe me or you? True? True? Right?

Speaker 3 (19:13):
So you know what you got to shape up and
treat me with the respect.

Speaker 5 (19:18):
That you deserve. You got it.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
No, I didn't say that. I didn't say that the
respect to which I believe I deserve.

Speaker 5 (19:29):
Oh, I ain't nobody gonna give enough respect for that.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
So back to Thomas Aquinemas. Now, where where where else
on radio to day do you think they're talking about st.
Thomas Aquinemas nobody and trying to relate it to immigration.
Remember he had he had three groups of people that
he talked about, the passers through just you know, we're
just traveling through, the sojourners who lived among the people

(19:57):
but didn't share a full civic standing standing. Then in words,
there was this third group. And this is where I
want to I want to address the third group in depth.
They wanted to be admitted fully into the community's fellowship
and mode of worship. And Aquinas wrote that for that
group of people, the law imposed in order they were

(20:18):
not They were not to be admitted to citizenship immediately.
Admission came only after the third generation, and hostile peoples
were to be excluded altogether, and they were to be
deemed as foes in perpetuity. That might be a little extreme,

(20:41):
but that Saint Thomas Aquinas, when you read these these
rules are not expressions of ethnic hatred. They're actually rational
instruments for preserving the constitution, worship, and the common good
of the people that have constituted themselves in a nation.
And his laws is precise because a political community is

(21:03):
defined by its shared way of life, its laws, it's worship.
So citizens are those who, in a very robust sense,
actually participate in shaping and sustaining that common life. Foreigners,
by contrast, are outsiders to that project. Now, sometimes they
come in peace and sometimes they don't. Aquinas thinks the

(21:25):
law needs to distinguish between those in a way that
keeps charity and prudence in balance.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
He really does believe.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
In hospitality, but that hospitality has limits to it. Justice
to one's own people has priority, and that explains both
the generous protections for the sojourners and the strict limitations
on citizenship. You know, you got three generations and on
hostile groups that very same moral framework, I would argue

(22:00):
licenses a Christian defense of Trump's Islamic immigration halt and
the remigration policy. Consider first, Saint Thomas Aquinas's position on
proportion of immigration and gradual assimilation. For him, immigration was
not this unqualified good. It is a contingent good. It's

(22:24):
good only when it serves peace and the common good.
So when munch of newcomers arrive in huge numbers they
can be absorbed, and when they can be recently expected
to adopt the host nation's way of life and worship,
then he believes that immigration can really benefit both sides.
But Aquinas also believed that when the inflow was so

(22:48):
huge and so culturally alien, that integration was improbable, not impossible,
but improbable. He believed that immigration.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Was then harmful.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
And we know that harms not abstract, because we know
what has happened to this country. It becomes fracture, civic trust,
parallel societies little you know, communities operating within themselves, you know,
claiming to be not subject to our rules and laws
and our morays and our norms, rising crime rates, conflicts

(23:26):
over basic norms of justice. And in his view, he
believed that the law should welcome foreigners only in a
way that would permit them to be genuinely incorporated into
our national family. His national family. Well, that implies there
are limits. It implies that there must be a seiling

(23:47):
on numbers. It implies that there must be a preference
for groups that are culturally compatible, and it requires patients.
A first generation of immigrants will often remain looking inward,
you know, they just congregate and look inward among their
own community. But yet even though they do that, they

(24:10):
obey the laws. Yet they still think, worship, and live
largely according to the patterns of the country from.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Where they came.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Then a second generation kind of begins to straddle the identities,
neither fully of the old country nor the new country.
He claimed that it's only by the time you got
to the third generation that Aquinas believe that full assimilation
became likely. Hence his rule that citizenship normally is a

(24:39):
third generation privilege, not a first generation entitlement.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Now I know, I know.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
Some of you might object to it. Well, we're different, Michael,
that we've always welcomed immigrants, we naturalize them quickly. That
the American experiment is is immortalized on elis is Lad,
not on Israel's harsh caution. That objection really is superficial,
because the deeper historical record is actually friendlier to acquining

(25:13):
us than to all the modern slogans that we hear
that the cabal and all the immigrant groups shouted us
all the time. For most of American history, citizenship was
treated as a very closely guarded honor, not just some
cheap commodity to be given out at will. We had

(25:35):
residency well, and in fact, some of these things we
still have, we just don't enforce them. Residency requirements, tests
of language, tests of civic knowledge, and actually an expectation
of cultural assimilation. So that's why, over the course of
this country had we've had immigration pauses, we've had restrictive

(25:57):
regimes put in place back in the nineteen twenty because
those were largely regarded as legitimate tools for safeguarding the
character of the United States of America. That insight is simple.
A political community has a right to say that not
everyone at once, and not everyone at all, and we

(26:19):
will decide who, where, when, what and how. And that
brings us to a very distinctive challenge when it comes
to Islamic immigration. Why is that because Islam when practiced
faithfully as a comprehensive law for society, which is what

(26:40):
Islam is. I know it's often couched as a religion,
but Islam is actually a comprehensive law for how society
will operate. It's not just some private spirituality. It is
a total civilizational project, and that means it needs to

(27:02):
be treated differently.

Speaker 8 (27:04):
Hey, goober's congratulations. You have now entered the classroom of
Professor Michael Danger Brown. Pay attention, take notes. It's going
to make you a smarter, better goober.

Speaker 5 (27:15):
Trust me.

Speaker 8 (27:16):
Hi wait, I just thought about that talk back, I
just left. Do we really want better smarter goobers? I
don't know, might as well get a shot.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
What the heck? That's actually a good question. Do we
is that the smarter they get, the smarter after.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Work and I we can't have that. We can't have
that because my smart all pretty much gone. They're just
kind of So let's go back to the challenge of
Islamic immigration. Islam, as I said, is a comprehensive law
structuring their society. It's not really a private spirituality like

(27:59):
Christianity or you know, Catholicism. It's it's a total civic project,
if you will. Traditional Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic law claims authority over.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Family law, criminal law, and even the political order.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
It rejects the separation of the Mosquan state that totally
undergirds that concept of separation in church and state is something.
It really undergirds our constitution. And in many Muslim majority societies,
apostasy from Islam is punishable by death, blasphemy against the prophet,
that's a crime, and the legal status of non Muslims

(28:41):
is subordinated. Now none of that, No, one single thing
I just described is compatible with the core commitments of
a liberal constitutional order in which religious freedom is guaranteed,
law is made by elected representatives, and all citizens are
equal before a sin civil code of law and criminal

(29:03):
code of law for that matter. So a quad Saint
Thomas Aquinas insisted that a nation must preserve its mode
of worship and its constitution if it's to survive as
a distinct people. So he praised the old law's refusal
to admit historical law, hostyle and religiously incompatible nations to

(29:25):
his Israeli citizenship. Now that's not to say that we
can't assimilate those who want to. How would I say
this out offending Catholics, Like a non practicing Catholic who's
a little you know over here. I don't buy all
of the dogma. If you can show me a Muslim

(29:47):
that is like that, or a non Christian contestant or
non practicing Catholic, I don't I don't care. But you
know non practicing Jews who are willing to absume. Now,
I'm not saying that you have to give up your beliefs,
that you have to, you know, compromise your faith. But

(30:08):
we live as Christians knowing that we answer at least
our souls do answer to a higher power. And yet
we subsume ourselves to civil law, and that civil law
is based on our constitution in this country. And if
you can show me Muslims who are willing to do that,
then I say they can possibly be assimilated. But if

(30:31):
they're not and they're unwilling and they're not going to
and they're going to go around and create these no gozones,
then you can't assimilate and you can't be here. And
no greater an authority than Saint Thomas Aquinas recognized that difference. Now,

(30:52):
if my diagnosis is even approximately riot, then Saint Thomas's
category of oh some perpetuity becomes pretty relevant today. He
does not mean that every individual born into a hostile
nation is personally damned to be an enemy forever. Conversion
both religious and political, and religious or political, either one

(31:17):
is actually possible, and that's what we need to learn,
that that's what we want in this country. I don't
care if you're Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, can do seek. I
don't care what you are. As long as you assimilate
into our country. If you practice certain things in your

(31:39):
own home that don't violate civil law or criminal law,
then I don't care. I'm sure every single one of
us we have certain things in our home that we
do based upon my grandfather's Cherokee Indian heritage.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
I mean we don't. We don't have pow wows or anything.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
But there are certain foods and things that we do
that we do in celebration of that heritage. But yet
we assimilate. And I think that's what's required of all citizens.
And no greater of authority you, I don't care what
those on the left say. No greater authority than Saint
Thomas Aquinas