Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#693 Faith, Borders, and Reality: Addressing Immigration with your Liberal Neighbors and Pastor
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This conversation delves into the complex issues surrounding immigration, particularly through the lens of Christian teachings and historical context.
Tom and Jack discuss the misuse of the Holy Family as a symbol for open borders, the implications of immigration policies on society, and the challenges posed by human trafficking and exploitation. They emphasize the need for prudence, order, and a balanced approach to immigration that considers both compassion and the rule of law.
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Today we're taking on one of the most emotionally charged issues in public life right now: immigration, borders, recent illegal immigrants roundups through the lens of not just the secular culture, but also through a Christian perspective. I see so often right now the Holy Family is being summoned as some kind of moral trump card that's standing up for just illegal immigrants, just open border policy. Let all these, let everybody that wants to come into the nation, come into the nation. Even the Holy Family at Christmas time, they were illegal immigrants is the kind of idea there. But it's not true. Too often these references they obscure Christian teaching rather than clarify it. I want to begin today on grounding us in history and theology and bring uh Tom Hampson in to shed some light on this too. Tom, welcome. I'm going to go a little longer before I bring you in, but good to see you. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_01:Good to see you. I'm doing great.
SPEAKER_00:So you've probably seen this, Tom, right? The Holy Family being used by these bishops of ours in the Catholic Church and some of the priests, even giving sermons on this. They they won't stand up for anything else, but anytime they could come in and sound good about something. And then you have Catholics and Christians, right? And of course, Catholics are Christians, Tom. I've had that come up. Are you are you guys Christians? Yeah. It's very, very, uh, very interesting points, right? But it shows how the culture gets twisted and distorted. But nearly every modern Christian argument about emigration begins with this flight of the Holy Family. So you got Joseph, Mary, and Christ, the Christ child, as undocumented immigrants. When they left, they were persecuted by Herod in Judea, and they they flee to Egypt. And you say, well, yeah, they f they they went into Egypt and they're hiding there. But it that's not a historical accurate thing. At the time of Christ's birth, Egypt was not a foreign nation in the modern sense. It had been a Roman province since 30 BC. Joseph did not cross into an alien civilization order. He moved within the same imperial legal framework that governed Judea. The Holy Family fled a local tyrant, we knew this, while remaining under Roman authority. They did not violate the law. They did not demand political accommodation. They did not attempt to go into Egypt and change Egyptian society or culture. They were displaced persons, not ideological symbols. And when we turn them into symbols to silence prudence and silence conversation, we don't elevate a scripture. We use it as a weapon. We weaponize it. This misuse reveals a deeper confusion in Christian thinking today, one that Pope John Paul II made very clear in many of his documents. What happens when you open borders up and you allow just a flood of people who no longer understand, they're not under the umbrella of the United States. They don't understand the laws, the customs, etc. And you bring over, unfortunately, along with many good people at the same time, you bring rapists, drug traffickers, and create people that that don't see our culture, don't want to assimilate into our culture, and uh and and just want to create havoc in in so many different ways. And so so this becomes a very interesting topic at this point, Tom, and and I know that you and I have talked about this a number of times, but again, uh using the Holy Family uh as a symbol of illegal immigration or undocumented people, it's it's it's uh it's just not true.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Ross Powell Well, no, it's not. And they're uh one of the that story is also in the book Welcome to Stranger by I can't remember who the guy what the guy's name is, but he's a vice president of World Relief, and then of course that organization got millions, tens of millions of dollars in government grants for uh helping uh illegal aliens, moving them into the country, helping them find places to stay, knowing that they're illegal aliens. It really benefited their own bottom line by supporting the idea of that we should allow all these illegals into the country.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we saw, and and people have pointed this out many, many times, that there's the these were these were young men flooding the border so often. You know, there were families for sure in there. There were women and children for sure in there. But the majority, when with this open border policy, you saw a lot of military-age young men come in. What uh Catholic social teaching would say is not only look at the immigrants that are coming in and look at them as the perpetrators of a crime alone, that you have to look at where are they coming from and what uh type of situation are are they fleeing? If they're coming into this country, Tom, and their perspective is to invade, right? To invade the country to bring their own ideologies in, let's call it maybe Islam for an example, certainly not the only example, but do they come into the country? And I'm questioning this, why are they fleeing? You know, are they coming from an area that's really being maybe in war? Maybe uh they're being persecuted for some reason, but if they're not, we need to have an open mind to say, okay, why are you coming? From what countries are you coming from? And if you're not fleeing anything, if you have a stable country, then maybe f if we had if we had borders that were closed and uh borders that were allowing a certain uh number of immigrants coming in, we could look at their at those countries that they're fleeing from and say, yeah, there's there's really some pain and suffering. There, there's famines there, there's wars there, and we have to think about letting more of those type of people in. But if it's just a bunch of young uh men, say, that are fleeing some country that's fairly stable, why are they coming here then? Is it an invasion? And I think these are things that we really need to look at, but you can only do that when you when you uh have control over the border, and you can systematically look at these types of things and think about it. I I think, Tom, um when you had this open border flood coming in, we just lost all control. And what you're doing to our society is creating chaos, violence. We know this again, sex trafficking. We s we saw this, especially child sex trafficking, the drugs flowing in. These are real issues that and we are creating a certain chaos, and and we have to to say, hey, if you're coming into this country, this is a host country. We have our values, our morals, our laws, and you have to you you have to agree that you'll take responsibility when you come in here, not to go on welfare, that that you should have somebody that you're you're coming in, and if if it's Islam again or or if it's Polish or whatever, that you have people within those communities that are going to help you, not put this burden on the tax dollars. You know, it's it's not up to us to literally give billions of dollars to these illegals coming across. If I have family here, if I have friends here, they're they're supposed to, just like they did to my grandparents, etc., help you and then help you get a job. And so that you become a productive, taxpaying uh person in society, responsible for our society, and to build it up and and not to tear it down. So I I know there's a lot we can unpack in there, Tom, but I know you talk a lot about disruption uh disrupting trafficking, the exploitation going on, etc. Maybe you want to bring a couple of those issues.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think one of the one the foundational point is that when Jesus said, welcome the stranger and help the poor, he wasn't talking to Herod and Caesar. And and all these organizations that are promoting this kind of thing that that say we should endorse it and embrace it, are are taking millions of dollars of government money to support their own operation. It isn't from they aren't supporting themselves with, you know, by Christians working together to solve these problems. They're they're using government money. And so it has to you have to look at this as a political issue, not one that is really a religious one. And so it's it's political or secular kind of issue. I think the church has some words to say about it. And one of the things that's happening in these in this cross-border trafficking that's been going up is is the is the total uh effect impact of human trafficking both for adults and for children. The the cartels are making between uh four four thousand, I I think it was uh Heritage Foundation or something. One of the Cato Foundation, I think it was, found that it was between$4,000 and$20,000 per person to bring somebody across the border. Now during the Biden administration, there were there were somewhere around 12 million that were brought across the border. That uh many of them, uh or some of them anyway, went back. I think there was something like eight million that stayed in the four in the four years he was here. But they had they charged all 12 million of those uh people between four thousand and twenty thousand dollars each.
SPEAKER_00:You know, the the traffickers, the cartels, were dealing in drugs. They they didn't want to deal with people. People are messy. It's uh much easier for me to bring a small package of of heroin in than it is to traffic people until until what you're describing, this open border policy, right where the money was just so huge because we're letting so many in, they changed, they actually embraced now human trafficking, which which was being done on some level before, but now it became very lucrative, didn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Very lucrative. And and of course they have to they have to pay this back to the cartel. Most of them don't have the money up front to pay for it. Or if they do, they get a loan, they give the cartel, and and whoever it is that uh paid the paid for the uh for them to get across the border, they want their money back and they use the cartel to do it. And so when they come up when they come into the United States and they find work, they wind up becoming indentured servants, virtual slaves for years, because in addition to the money that the original charge that they have, say fifteen thousand dollars, they have to pay interest on that. And it's usually a high usurious rate of interest. Credit cards in this country, you you have to pay like twenty percent. Imagine what they're paying the cartels. I don't know what the figure is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But here's an example. Just a few months ago, Glasshouse Farms was rated by by ice. There are a couple of locations that were rated by ice out in California, and it was a Now what is glasshouse farms? Well, they they are a fairly large marijuana growing business. It's legal in California to grow the grow they have these marijuana farms, and so it take it requires a lot of work to grow these things, and so they have to hire farm workers to to tend uh to their crop, which is which are valuable. That's a valuable uh crop. Uh there was something during these raids last summer, I believe it was, there were about 300 illegal aliens that were rounded up by ice in one raid. Of those, there are 10 to between 10 and 14, the the numbers vary, of them were unaccompanied miners that came across the border. Now, some nonprofit organization got forty two thousand five hundred dollars for each one of those kids to bring them in because that's what the government was paying to bring unaccompanied miners in and get them set up somewhere. Well, they got them set up with whoever got them got them into the country or took care of them immediately. They got them set up as uh as workers in a marijuana farm.
SPEAKER_00:So think about this. So now the cartels, Tom, that are that they they have relationships with these farms. Right. And now they're supplying labor. They're supplying.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know about Glasshouse, but a lot of them do.
SPEAKER_00:And so now you have a supply of labor coming in. So the person that's working there has to pay the cartel up front. That's right. So so they're not getting a bonus for coming in and working. They're paying to do that, and then they're being used by these farms. And and then when you mentioned that the young people, think how many women that didn't have the money had to give you know sex uh favors and or were raped at the borders. And how many of these young people, as you know well, were used over and over and over again for sex trafficking, even worse than working on these farms. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, even uh just because they're working there as uh as you know uh as labor on the farm doesn't mean they're also not being used for sexual sex trafficking as well. It's not one or the other. They kind of combine a lot of these things, and you got to remember that that most of these farms, glasshouse farms didn't get in any trouble over the at least so far, over the finding all these illegal aliens there because they the workers were provided by an outside contracting agency. Now it's those contracting agencies. I don't know if it if it applies to glasshouse farms because the case hasn't gone through yet, but it's the contracting agencies that wind up being the ones that collect the money from the workers. Because for glasshouse farms would pay the contracting agency, and the contracting agency pays pays the worker, and that's the way these the human trafficking operations work as well, where they're if there's uh labor trafficking, it's whoever controls the labor gets the money, and they keep they hold their piece back and and pay the worker whatever they they feel like paying them. And they might be that way for years, with with no recourse. They can't they can't complain because not only do the to these cartels have control over them because of the money, they have control over them because they're threatening threatening to harm or or kill family members here or back home where they came from. So they they you know they really bec they really slave labor for all practical purposes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and so now we have the NGOs again. Uh are these bishops and or other religious organizations, etc. Are they complaining now? Are they using the Holy Family as a model to allow immigration and and to open up our borders again and say you shouldn't clamp down on this? Is it because of money or not? And we certainly know that there's there's quite a bit of money flew into uh these NGOs and came into dioceses around the country. And so how many how much money was used, and then we lost these kids. And uh so, anyways, the point being you can't just allow chaos, these open border situations. And I know Tom, you follow ICE, and I want you to talk a little bit about ICE, if you don't mind, because they're they're getting a bad rap, and and look at this is a messy situation, we know this, and and some innocent people will get probably rounded up while we're trying to round up the criminals, but but I think we need to continue to stay focused at the same time at least, while we're looking at the individual people, that these open border policies created this chaos in the first place, that that ICE is reacting to a problem that uh that was put in front of us. And uh and and so these are tough situations, again, caused by chaos and and by all of these different groups that are trying to profit off of this. You know, there there's immigration uh should be allowed, a certain amount of immigration should be allowed, especially if people are being persecuted and hurt in their own uh home countries. But again, when you have these mility uh military age young men coming on, you really have to ask where are they coming from? What are they doing? Why are they coming? And you cannot do this with open borders. And now ICE has to react because we know that these gangs, these cartels, etc., have come into the United States and are causing uh a lot of uh chaos and and violence.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the thing the thing is that um many of these NGOs and the e even our own, like in the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, they're characterizing the California, the governor of California, the governor of New York. They're characterizing these ICE agents, these police officers as being some kind of gestapo agents that are um or you know, they're equating them with Hitler's Gestapo. When in fact, uh, you know, these agents are dedicated people who risk their lives constantly in service of our country, just like people in the military. They're not operating illegally, they are enforcing laws that are on the books. Now, if you don't if they don't like the laws, they should change them. But nobody won't nobody's gonna change them because the people that are in in Congress and in the legislatures couldn't get away with just wiping out these laws. We require national borders. There's a multitude of reasons why you can't allow this uh free crossing of the border, because not only do you have the trafficking problem, the the human where where you have labor trafficking and sex trafficking, but you also wind up uh hurting our own businesses here because these people will work for lower wages than than Americans can can work for. So ICE is trying to maintain a healthy standard of living for U.S. they're they're keeping our borders secure. They are protecting us from human trafficking networks and from from drug trafficking networks. They're they're product uh they're they're protecting vulnerable communities from employer abuse, where maybe some of the poorer c people in our country made entry-level jobs, they're not being taken away by foreign laborers who will work for half of what uh the minimum wage is. And and the other thing that they're they're doing is that they're removing known threats from our country. These are people that are known to be engaged in criminal activity, and since they're already they're already known to be illegal aliens, they don't have to g make a criminal case against them, they can just pick them up and and get rid of them. And the reason that's important is that criminal cases are hard to make, and there's limited resources for people to be able to do any kind of investigations. As an example, in Chicago, the city of Chicago has only 1,000 um detectives on the police force. Last year there were 28,000 violent crimes committed in Chicago, the ones that are committed in Chicago. And that means that if just the violent crimes they investigated, it would be 28 violent crimes per officer, per detective to to investigate. Well, there's no way that one officer can make those cases in order and and be able to put them in before a judge. It takes a lot of work to to do that. That's like that would be you'd have to do each each guy would have to do two cases per month. And trial ready cases. Well, you can't I used to do investig big big investigations can take weeks.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we don't have that. And and and and you're this is a great point because when you're talking about ICE and the chaos that's here now. Right. Done for all these different reasons we unpacked already, political votes, getting in bed with these big uh corporations who are looking for cheaper labor. So you have crony capitalism in bed with uh corrupt political system that creates chaos. And it's so important what we're talking about because you know this goes back. I remember reading about Saint Augustine of of Hippo, you know, and and so he's in the third going into the fourth century, living in in North Africa, again under uh the jurisdiction of Rome, and now the barbarians are coming in. And so now that it's being invaded, Rome is starting to to lose uh control of Of its borders, especially on outlying regions, very quickly. They're being invaded. Chaos is coming in. So he actually lived through through this. And he would talk about to recover balance, Christians have to return to this classic moral realism, starting, he said, with peace. Peace, he said, wasn't just the absence of conflict, it was the tranquility of order. You have to have order. It's part of charity, it's part of love, it's part of the truth. He said a political authority, Rome, the Romans in those days, say the United States government, exists so that the families can flourish, truth can be pursued, and the innocent can be protected. We've seen the breakdown of all of those things with these open border policies. He said a society that refuses to defend itself doesn't become more loving, it becomes more fragile. And in the city of God, you know, where in he wrote this big the city of God was two orders, you know, the order of God and love or chaos, the order of man, who just blows everything open for his own good, not the good, not the common good. What is the common good of the of the United States and the United States citizens? And he says it this has to be part of it. He said a society that refuses to defend itself doesn't become more loving, it becomes more fragile. And he said it again in The City of God, he rejects the idea that rulers sin by restraining disorder. Rulers, like the Trump administration, they they they sin by they don't sin by restraining disorder. The authority is legitimate precisely because it protects the vulnerable, it protects the citizens here, it protects the average person that takes the subway on the street. Hospitality that dissolves order does not produce peace. So there's a balance there, uh, isn't there, Tom?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, and look at just a few of the examples that we've seen in the publicity in recent years where you'd have one illegal alien committed a couple of murders and really just devastated the lives of families because of this one murder. And you look back and you see the multiple examples before he ever committed the murder of being arrested for serious crimes and released and nothing happening. So this is just if they just removed them immediately, there wouldn't be that problem. These people would have been still alive.
SPEAKER_00:How do you get arrested? You you were in crime, you're in you were in crime fighting all these. How do you get arrested, you know, 22, 24 times and then allowed to go? Now, this is cashless bail here, the Pritzker uh administration in in Illinois just releases them. Now, talk about a uh you know a hypocrisy. If a white Christian male would have done this, look what happened to Daniel uh Penny. And here's somebody defending someone on the subway. The perpetrator uh lost his life. Daniel Penny didn't mean to kill him, right? But he's choking him out, is trying to put him out. And and uh and so look how they came down on him, and yet this guy, he never had an arrest record, nothing ever in his past, right? He would if if he was if he was of the of the immigrant or illegal or a color that these guys were you know the color of the day that they were pushing their politic political agenda, he would have just been released, no problem. You know, even even even with violent crimes, these guys. And to your point, these do you ever you saw the girl Tom that was on the subway that the guy just came by and he just cut her throat and she just died? Yeah. And so again, you you create disorder. So these are very dishonest people, and and when we look at this, it has to come down to uh when you have order, but then you then you have time to look at the family that was being persecuted, say, or can't make a living in their country. You you try to make sure that young people are coming across with parents and families intact. But when you have disorder and you just allow this disruption, this is very hard to control, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, it's actually not that hard, and I would dispute that, because the problem is there's two reasons for this happening. Because you have to look at the crime problem in this country. Part of it is caused by people who are just stone cold criminals. They have every intention of being criminals, but a lot of the crime problem this in this country, including serious crime, is being committed by people who are mentally ill. Like actually that guy that s uh slit the girl's throat uh um had a lot of has a lot of mental issues. He's not not out there just to be a pure criminal. In both cases, prosecutors have just vast authority to decide whether or not to prosecute. So you gotta realize that first the police have to catch the guy. They have to they have to build enough evidence in order to present it to a prosecutor that they could get a conviction. And then the prosecutors gotta decide, well, do I want to take this or don't I? In the federal system, the prosecutors take less than less than 5% of the cases that are presented to them. 95%, they say I'm not gonna prosecute. So now you have people that have actually committed crimes, they're not gonna face any kind of justice. They have a they have a an arrest on their sheet, but they they will not face any kind of justice because the prosecutor won't take it. And this happens in the state system as well. I I had a case where a guy, I had a rock solid case of embezzlement of a guy half a million dollars in Cook County, and the Cook County prosecutor wouldn't take the case because it wasn't enough money involved. I had to, you know, you know, my client had to had to deal with it in civil court, which is useless because the guy had no money left. But so you see this all the time. Now the other side, the people who aren't who aren't criminals, the people that are maybe mentally ill. Back in the 60s and 70s, we emptied all the mental institutions and we and and we shut them all down. So there's no you pick these people up and a prosecutor looks at him and says, This guy is mentally ill. What am I going to do? I can't really get a conviction against him because you have to show intent. We had a case where a guy had just been released from Madden Mental Health Center years ago when I was still with the state, who had committed a who had who had raped a woman. And the both of them, the man and the woman, had just been released from Madden, and so both of them were kind of mentally off. And the woman said that she had been raped by Jesus Christ because the guy had a long hair and a beard. And so she said Jesus Christ had had raped her. And so the the prosecutor looked at that case and says, Well, yeah, she identified him, but I can't get a conviction on it because the woman, there's no credibility with this woman in her description of the guy. There's just no case that can be taught, uh, can be brought. Both of those people, the the offender and the victim, should have remained in Madden mental health, but they kicked them out because there wasn't enough room. And the reason for this is that our society has decided that it doesn't want to it doesn't want to bother taking care of them. That and and uh they use the excuse that, well, people need to be free, they have a right to be out there. If they're a little bit mentally off, you know what we have to be able to tolerate and understand it, understand their their mental problems, and that's fine until they commit some terrible crime against somebody. Then what do you do with them?
SPEAKER_00:It's a little uh different than that, Tom, but it's the kind of same situation. When you have people crying for disorder for allowing, again, uh anybody that wants to come into this country to to to come into the country, and that's really what these liberal politicians are saying. What uh you know, yeah you have to really sit back and say what what are they really doing and why are they doing this, right? And and so they're bringing chaos and disorder. You really see this in Europe, don't you? You see it in the UK, but you see it all over, even Scandinavia now, where the rapes and the crimes and stuff have gone up. And again, I don't want to just pick on it.
SPEAKER_01:They actually have less a problem than we do because in in the United States we have I think it's like half the number of police for the population that Europe does. Europe has almost twice the number of police for the population, and that additional presence actually subdues and deters more crimes than what is deterred here in this country. Because the presence of police it should actually does now.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, but what's happening now, and you see this, Tom, is that there things have been flipped on their heads there where there is an anti-Christian war going on in Europe. And you you actually see the police now coming to arrest the citizens of the UK and other countries too, that are just on their social media posts are saying, hey, you know, we have to control this immigration that the uh the Muslims that are coming in, say with with the radical Muslims, let's call it, that really follow um i you know this Islamic um ideology, they're they they have no they have no desire to be responsible to that country. They have no desire to uphold those laws. But what you're seeing now is a weaponized police force that is actually coming in and silencing the actual citizens that were there in the beginning. So there's something very nefarious going on.
SPEAKER_01:Uh well, yeah, look at all of the resources, the federal resources that were expended to go after the tens of thousands of protesters that were on the Capitol Mall and marched to Washington, and and a few of them went into the into the Capitol building itself. You know, in order to track down all those people, they used photographs, they used video cameras, thousands of hours of video cameras, facial recognition technology, they used uh these phone tracking software that was available there, what phones uh were pinging off of the towers nearby, and they sent agents out to interview people, anybody that was identified, tens of thousands of them. Do you know how much time that takes? Most of that was even the even the people that broke into the capital, they were such minor crimes compared to what's going on in the world today that it was just a just an unbelievable waste of resources.
SPEAKER_00:Unbelievable waste again, it was weaponized, and we saw this very clearly, you know, and and you know, when I you know when I'm having conversations like this, and you try to have civil conversations, you know, and I I really miss Charlie uh Kirk at times like this because he he really did listen and he and he came back and he really wanted to promote dialogue, and I love that because a lot of people are just confused the way they grew up, etc. But you know, I hear, you know, aren't you a Christian, Jack? I I you know, don't you want to just help all of these people? And you know, you we have to realize if you step back, you know, Christianity is universal, uh, but it's not abstract. You know, the gospel doesn't float above history, it becomes very particular, it comes right into a culture. You know, God saves the world through particular people in different places and in different cultures. Nations are not idols, but neither are they illusions, right? So when you're building up a nation to love humanity in general, you must first love someone in particular. You you have to look at people. You you always hear this, right? Everybody should come over. No, no, no, you gotta you have to look at people, you have to look at situations. You know, that's why parents have primary duties to their own children, and governments then, at an extension of that, have primary duties to their own people. You have to be able to look at the people first. You know, what are we trying to do? And this is where the culture is trying to, you know, that you really see a political class, Tom, a secular, but worse than secular, it's really an atheistic, a violent, in many cases, atheistic move against uh Christians and Christianity. You know, so universal charity doesn't erase moral responsibility, it presupposes it. So if I'm going to allow people to come in, I have to take the time to vet those people to make sure that they're not criminals and that they're not here in furious reasons. Look at some people will fall through the cracks. We know this isn't always perfect, but but a nation that refuses to govern itself, it doesn't become more Christian. It becomes morally unserious and you create chaos. This is a really a battle uh between truth and lies, between, you know, who are these people coming in? And yeah, do we have empathy for a person trying to come in, a father trying to come in and make money because he has a breakdown in this country, it's in a certain country that he's fleeing from, say? Or or not. And you have to look at these individual situations. You can't just say, hey, we're gonna open up the borders, we're gonna flood this in, because we do have a country, and we Donald Trump is right. We do have to defend our children, our families, our livelihoods. Uh people, young men have to have a way to make a living. And you can't just take all the labor jobs away from them, you know, if they're 17, 18, 19 years old trying to find their way through. They have to be able to work a job where they can, you know, buy a car. Uh they have to be able to to rent an apartment. And you know, when you just flood people and rents go up and food goes up and violence comes in and people take wages down, this is not helping your your children, right? Your your the nation's children in the culture. So uh these are very serious uh issues.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and many of the people that are promoting this, even Christians that are promoting that are this are are practicing a secular morality that is devoid of any virtue. Yeah, they are. They don't include the virtues that even the ancient Greeks said were were essential for a civilization to exist. Justice is one of the things that has to exist. How can you have justice? How can you say that you're on the side of justice when the people that are enforcing the laws are being demonized by you? That's a contradiction that can't stand on its on its on its face. Um this is a this is a problem that we have in our in our society that everything today anyway, that everything is well, what is how do how do I feel about it? Well, your feelings have nothing to do with what truth is or what what is virtuous and not virtuous. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And as as we start to uh unwind here, you know, you start to think about uh, you know, prudence. What is prudence? You know, what uh you know what is the judgment of the state? Why are we here? We have to get back to those things again. And I think Trump is is in a uh a precarious situation, you know. He's he's trying to you know make uh make America first again. Could sound very selfish to some of these uh uh uh liberals, right? Um But here's the thing. I just posted something, it was actually uh on Joe Rogan, and it was uh it was this liberal man, he had a Biden shirt on. This interviewer went up to him and he was talking to his wife first. The interviewer said, hey, just talk to your wife, and you were about open border policy. You were about anybody that wants to come in should be able to come in. And he shows him the shirt, right? Biden, you know, open border policy, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, kind of love your neighbor type of thing. And he goes, uh, okay, he says, okay, these three guys, I'm so glad you said that. He hands him a package of medicine, and uh, it's got these pill bottles in it, and he said, There's and there's three guys that are coming up the the sidewalk up to this guy, and he says, Because I've got three guys here from I think it was Ecuador or something like that, right? And he said, I have these three guys, they just came into the country now. Here's his medications. Can you make sure that he understands how to how to take these medicines? And they have to just use the washroom. So let's just let them go into to the washroom there. And he goes, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You just they can't just come into my house. And he said, Well, they're they'll they'll be staying with you just for a few days. No, no, no, they can't stay here. What are you talking about, right? And he said, Well, you know, I I'm gonna introduce you. We'll sit down, of course, they'll talk to you, I'll I'll translate, uh, etc. etc. They won't be here for too long. It's just until we get uh a place for them. But they just came across the border. And he said, Well, they can't be here. And he says, Okay, where are they gonna be then? They're gonna come across here, where are they gonna be? Or do you want just the taxpayers to put them up in a hotel? Is that what you're thinking? You know, or whatever. You know, it Tom, it it falls apart very, very quickly because what happens is uh, you know, it's one thing where you say, hey, the taxpayer's paying for it. Well, I am the taxpayer and you are the taxpayer, but this gets down to conversations we had before. When Christ came into the world, he didn't say it's the government's job to love their neighbor, it's your job to love the neighbor. And if you have some uh somebody that's coming across from another country and you know them, it's your responsibility to take them in. It's your responsibility to say, I'm responsible. And this is the way it used to work. That I know for my grandparents when they came in, they had to document, they had to show where they were going, who they were gonna live with, who was who was gonna be responsible for feeding them, housing them, and helping them get a job and become acclimated to this country. But you know, to these liberals, Tom, that this isn't a you know, this is a big picture. This isn't about the person, the dignity of the person. This is also humanity. This is Bill Gates, you know, let's save humanity, but he never sees the person, you know, and the people are actually getting hurt by all this.
SPEAKER_01:Your your example illustrates why courage has to be the first virtue. There's no other virtue that can stand without courage. And that guy, if he actually believed in what he if if he believed that what he said was right, he would have enough courage to take them in, right?
SPEAKER_00:Of course.
SPEAKER_01:But he didn't have.
SPEAKER_00:Christ came in and he never said abolish authority, did he? He never suggested that love means abandoning prudence or truth. He never said feeding the hungry and welcome the stranger are are just issues for the government. He said these are personal issues, these are church issues. You go love your neighbor. You know, confusing these categories doesn't deepen compassion. It devolves just into sentiment, to your point. You know, these are just sentiment and feelings. You know, but because charity, love without truth, is not mercy, it's moral confusion. And these people have no they're moral relatives. Yeah, relativists. He told us to feed the poor. Yes, yes. And and that's what's getting crazy because once the government just doles out this money. You see this in Chicago, Tom.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:That's uh, you know, that they're they're they're not feeding the the uh just you know the poor citizens. You know, they're taxing us more and more and more. Look how how many billions of dollars in a bankrupt state and a bankrupt city, billions of dollars spent on housing being sanctuary cities for illegals, that did what? It destroyed the actual communities that these people, uh that the people that were living there already were working in, trying to make a living, trying to scrounge around, and now they're living in total chaos where they it was worse than before. And if they do to try to find a job, how much are they going to get paid for these entry level jobs, Tom, when you have a a whole line of illegals coming in that'll that'll work there? It's really it's some issues you have to stand back and say, you know, what's the right thing to do here?
SPEAKER_01:Well, and that's th there most of these most of the money the government is spending these. Days isn't to solve a problem, it's to acquire more political capital.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01:So it's not they don't it it it's no wonder that things keep getting worse when you're directing your money at an area that that's gonna give you more power.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna take it a little out of context as we close up here, Tom. But I always ask these liberals, I said, you know, you're worried about people, right? Yeah, I'm worried about people. And I just cut down to the chase, Tom. I said, where do you stand on abortion? Because this is always the cutting thing for me. Where do you stand on abortion? You really care about people? And no, I'm pro-abortion. You're pro-killing the life of the innocent, and now you're going to tell me you're worried about the people coming in across the border where you can't you know, you'll destroy the life of the most pure and innocent in the world. To me, it's always, hey, if if we can't decide anything here, let me let me answer this question for me. What what do you think about actual human persons, actually human life, or do you just throw them in a category of let's just take them out because they're inconvenient to us, can't have them live here, you know? It's gonna disrupt my lifestyle. It's no different than that liberal saying, Oh, those three guys from Ecuador are gonna disrupt my lifestyle. Now I gotta pay for them, now I gotta do something inconvenient. It's the same thing, Tom. It's it's uh such an illusion. Uh it it makes me sick, you know. But but again, our heart goes out to all these young people that were sold a lie to. How many young people uh and young families came across the border because they they were sold this lie that they can just come into this country, it's gonna be the milk, uh, you know, uh land flowing of milk and honey. They don't have to do anything, they're gonna get handouts, everything's gonna be okay. And it and it wasn't. It's not that they didn't they didn't even try, Tom. They put them up in these hotels, and you started these hotels after a few weeks, they were just garbage pits run by gangs again, uh where where the where the actual families with kids couldn't even walk around anymore because they were being actually victimized by the the same people they came across the border with.
SPEAKER_01:So you know, well they were they were invited in. They were invited in U.S. law by people who by uh uh public officials who were who were violating the law. This is the thing that's so frustrating, and nothing's gonna happen to them.
SPEAKER_00:No. And I I think we end it like like we ended the last one when we're talking about the crisis in the in the in these food banks and stuff. It's not working. You repeat it over and over again, it's not working. And here again, open borders, flooding our country with people that have never we we've never even had a chance to assimilate them, or nor do so many of them don't even want to be assimilated into our culture, understand what our our constitution is, the Bill of Rights. They need to know all of these things and they have to accept them and say, Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna live by your laws, you know. And you know, how many people were victimized then, you know, by these lies? So you can't have disorder. So at the end of the day, I'll just say, Tom, this isn't working, and we have to fix it, and we have to kind of do a reset. And unfortunately, you know, there's gonna be people that get hurt with this. But they were hurt by the lie in the beginning that you can just flood over here. How how many people that you and I talked about in the past that were, you know, thought they can just come across the border and then were met by the cartels that told them that they had to pay all this money, which they didn't have, brought in uh and and were trafficked and raped, and then used uh, you know, for subminimum wages, which they'll never be able to pay this these cartels back, and they know this, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and they the even the the um the rape trees that they showed, multiple there are multiple different sources that showed the rape trees, the women's panties hanging on on trees down down at the border where the women and children were being raped by the by their by the coyote that was bringing them in. They had no they could do nothing about it. And oh well that's just gonna few that's gonna happen to some people, just uh uh you know that that is that kind of attitude just makes me sick.
SPEAKER_00:You know, prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues, you know, very important, right after the theological virtues, right? Faith, hope, and love. And then prudence is one of the four uh cardinal virtues. And prudence is is moral intelligence, and it's informed by reality. What is reality? What, to your point, what works? Is this working? You know, how are people actually being treated? What is the overall effect on the common good? And and you have to have your reason, your prudence, and you have to have politicians that again, their their primary responsibility is to the family of America, the people in America. And we have to get that we we are, what,$37 trillion in debt right now, and people are just blowing this money on this. It's not sustainable, it's not working, it doesn't work for anybody, and and you have to have common sense come back in. And unfortunately, when you get corrupt politicians to care about garnering votes, this is what happens. That's right. Thomas, good to be with you, brother. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.