Best of the Program | Guests: Arthur Herman & Mayor Don McLaughlin | 6/20/19

Welcome to the podcast.

Today, Glenn is still in Idaho at the ranch, and he's got a little bit to say about Alexandria Casio-Cortez, who is blabbing on about the Holocaust and or excuse me, concentration camps that definitely were not from the Holocaust.

I'm sorry, my mistake.

We also have kind of a controversial clip from The View

where Megan McCain is being yelled at by Joy Behar.

Finally, we also,

I mean, it's really kind of a lot of the same stuff today.

Everyone's yelling at each other, and we try to sift through the mess here to get to the truth when it comes to reparations and our history.

Arthur Herman, a historian, joins us to kind of go through what are the things that we need to preserve from our history, and also what are the conflicts of our history when it comes to slavery all the way till today?

What is the actual truth?

We also talked to a mayor in Texas whose...

town of I think 17,000 is being overrun by illegal immigrant drop-offs from the border because no longer do we have any facilities to hold people on the border.

He's looking for help from Texas and Chuck Todd, who comes out and actually seems to call out Alexandria Casio-Cortez and other Democrats for not criticizing her.

It's an interesting day, and we will get to that today on the podcast.

You know, it's amazing to me.

Chuck Todd is going after AOC, and you have to give him credit.

I mean, when somebody does something brave, no matter if you agree or disagree with them,

you should come out and say, hey, Chuck Todd don't normally agree with you, but you're being brave, and that is good.

Here's what Chuck Todd said about AOC calling these

holding facilities concentration camps on our border.

Listen.

If you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our southern border, fine.

You'll have plenty of company, but be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because they're not at all comparable in the slightest.

But here's where it's upsetting as her comment.

Some Democrats have been reluctant to condemn her remarks.

They don't want to get criticized on Twitter.

Fellow New York Congressman Jerry Nadler tweeted in response, one of the lessons from the Holocaust is never again.

We fail to learn that lesson when we don't call out such inhumanity right in front of us.

Jerry Nadler surely knows migrant detainment camps are not the same as concentration camps.

So why didn't he just say that?

Why are we so sheep as calling out people we agree with politically these days?

Obviously, this isn't a Democratic Party thing.

It's an even bigger problem on the Republican side of the aisle when it comes to President Trump and the reluctance there.

Are we really so ensconced in our political bubbles, liberal versus conservative, that we cannot talk about right versus wrong anymore?

Some things are bigger than partisanship, or at least they used to be.

That is amazing to hear from him.

Now,

I disagree that the problem is even bigger.

I mean, you have people now saying, I want to dismantle the free market system.

You know,

maybe you all agree on that.

Maybe that's what it is.

But I would think that would be something that would be pretty big, you know.

But maybe it's just me.

But congratulations to Chuck Todd.

Now, Nancy Pelosi, not so brave.

Here's Nancy Pelosi.

These members of Congress are, they come and represent their district and their point of view, and they take responsibility for the statements that they make.

I'm not up to date on her most recent one.

I saw something in the news, but I

know I haven't spoken to her about that.

I do have some comments to make to my caucus writ large about the political nature of how politically charged the atmosphere is.

So understand

that while the Republicans have no interest in holding the president accountable for his words, they will misrepresent anything that you say just if you have one word in the sentence that they can exploit.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh.

Oh.

Okay.

So

let's let's let's just see.

Let's just see.

Let's go to Don Lemon, the audio.

Don Lemon on airing Trump speeches.

Now let's just see.

This is politically charged and we'll take everything out of context.

So you got to calm down because you don't want things taken out of context.

Go ahead.

See, Think about the despicable people we've had in history.

Okay, and I'm going to use an extreme example.

Think about Hitler.

Think about any of those people.

Would you say that that person is allowed, or let's put it this way, if you could look back in history, would you say, well, I'm so glad that that person was allowed a platform so that they could spread their hate and propaganda and lies.

Or would you say it probably wasn't the right thing to do to spread that?

Because you knew in the moment that that was a bad person and they were doing bad things.

Not only were they hurting people, they were killing people.

And so I just think that

I think that the example matters.

And that's a very extreme example.

Rhetoric that you don't like.

Rhetoric would it be a slippery slope towards violence and policy

detrimental to people and it also

looks at people like so now he's comparing Donald Trump to Hitler.

Literally, Hitler.

Would we give Hitler a platform?

Why are we giving this guy a platform?

First of all, the German people were not all that sold that this was a bad guy.

Okay.

And yes, I'm actually happy that

the New York Times and Time Magazine and others gave him a platform so we knew his words.

The problem I have was the journalist we sent over, just like the journalist from the New York Times that was sent over to Stalin, said that he was a wonderful guy.

So, yeah, you probably shouldn't have given him the New York Times and Time magazine, you know, saying how great he is.

That's probably a bad mistake.

But

letting someone be heard?

Yeah, I think that's what our First Amendment is all about.

And I think the only way we stop people like Hitler is by knowing what he's saying.

If we wouldn't have read Mein Kampf, it would have been a little harder to spot him.

Oh, no, wait a minute, wait a minute.

What is he saying again?

Should we have published that book?

Yes.

I want to know what people are thinking.

I want to know the other side.

I want,

it does no good burying our heads in the sand when it comes to evil.

You need to know about it.

So now he's called him, now he's called him

Hitler.

Now he's called Trump Hitler.

Okay, we got it.

We are getting closer to the time.

Remember, I said, this is 15 years ago, we're a long way away from a civil war.

You'll know when we're closer to a civil war, when they just start beating each other in the Senate.

Okay, that's what happened before the last Civil War.

They just started going after each other in the Senate.

Well, we're starting to go there.

I don't know if we have, do we have the audio from the view yesterday

from Megan McCain?

Okay,

play this.

This is an argument between Joy Behar, Megan McCain, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Listen to this.

I'm trying to explain because one of my producers this morning was saying, why do people love him so much?

And I was like, sometimes it's not just that they love Trump so much, it's that they hate the same things Trump hates.

That's what's going on.

A lot of people.

No, I mean.

Who do they hate?

Who do they hate?

You know what, Joy?

I really come here every day, open-minded, just trying to explain it.

And it's not a fun job for me.

I know you're angry.

I get it that you're angry that Trump's president, like a lot of people.

I get that every single day.

I know you think yelling at me is going to fix the problem.

Okay?

I just said that it was hard for me

to watch.

Yes.

I just said it was hard for me to watch Lindsey Graham, who I considered an uncle for a long time.

I'm trying to do it.

It don't help you.

2020 is not in the bag for you.

But it is not.

Okay, guys.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Woo!

It's a great discussion, and we can go back to it.

I just need everybody to take a beat.

But being a sacrificial Republican every day,

I'm just trying to.

Don't feel bad for me, because I paid to do this.

Okay?

Don't feel bad for me.

Before he headed to Florida,

hold on.

Stop.

Stop.

You hear that?

Don't feel bad for me, bitch.

To Whoopi Goldberg trying to calm things down.

And I completely side with Megan McCain.

Megan McCain takes a beating every single day.

You don't win in that position.

You are the token conservative, and they beat you every single day.

But when they can't hide it anymore,

now this is also yesterday.

Can we play, did we get the audio by any chance yet of

the subcommittee hearing on the Constitution and civil rights and civil liberties?

Yesterday,

they had H.R.

40 that they were debating, and it was the path to restorative justice, which is a reparations bill.

Now, I I can think of a lot of things that would be helpful to fix the country.

Reparations is not on the list.

But I want to play some of the audio of what happened in this.

The temperature is being turned up.

And

yeah, Chuck Todd is right.

And yes, Nancy Pelosi is right.

We should watch our words.

We should watch our words.

We should watch what we're doing to stir things up.

I'm giving you a warning here

as a nation.

Look

how far we have advanced.

These things would not have happened a year ago.

They certainly wouldn't have happened four years ago.

Look what's happening to us.

Look where we are as a people.

I'll give you that audio.

Pretty remarkable audio because they turn on their own again.

I want to play just a little bit of this audio

of

somebody standing up who is testifying, who is a Democrat, who says, reparations, this is crazy.

What are we doing?

Now listen to his case.

This is

Coleman Hughes.

He is a writer for Quillette, which is fantastic.

He came out and said this.

Listen.

Nothing I'm about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow.

Racism is a bloody stain on this country's history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S.

government.

But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present.

Think about what we're doing today.

We're spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times, but incarceration only once, in an era with no black slaves, but nearly a million black prisoners.

A bill that doesn't mention homicide once at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men.

I'm not saying that acknowledging history doesn't matter.

It does.

I'm saying there's a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery in Jim Crow.

In 2009, the Senate did the same.

Black people don't need another apology.

We need safer neighborhoods and better schools.

We need a less punitive criminal justice system.

We need affordable health care.

And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today.

They told me that even though I've only ever voted for Democrats, I'd be perceived as a Republican and therefore hated by half the country.

Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans, I would end up angering the other half of the country.

And the sad truth is is that they were both right.

That's how suspicious we've become of one another.

That's how divided we are as a nation.

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today.

We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors.

And we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction, from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.

What we should do is pay reparations to black Americans who actually grew up under Jim Crow and were directly harmed by second-class citizenship, people like my grandparents.

But paying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake.

Take me, for example.

I was born three decades after the end of Jim Crow into a privileged household in the suburbs.

I attend an Ivy League school.

Yet I'm also descended from slaves who worked on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation.

So reparations for slavery would allocate federal resources to me, but not to an American with the wrong ancestry, even if that person is living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs to support a family.

You might call that justice.

I call it justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living.

I understand that reparations are about what people are owed, regardless of how well they're doing.

I understand that.

But the people who are owed for slavery are no longer here and we are not entitled to collect on their debts.

Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims.

So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent.

Not just that, you've made one-third of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent.

And black Americans

don't agree with him necessarily on everything he says, but so rock solid.

So rock solid.

Since when does the sin of the father get passed to the sin, to the son?

It's immoral.

It's wrong.

And he's right.

It will divide us even more.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Arthur Herman, who has been one of my favorite historians for quite some time, and I'm going back and I'm reading all of his back catalog, and it's just, it's, it's so fantastic.

He's such a good storyteller and teaches, teaches history in a way I think it needs to be taught.

He is, in my opinion, I don't know if anybody knows who Daniel Borston is, but he was one of my favorite historians.

He was the guy who was the head of the Library of Congress, and I loved his Discoverer series.

And And Arthur is the same kind of guy

with just

a gift for bringing history to life.

Welcome to the program, Arthur.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

You know, I met Daniel Borston when I was a young scholar, right after my first book, The Idea of Decline

in Western history was published.

He invited me to lunch at the Cosmos Club, as a matter of fact.

And we met and

talked about various kinds of matters, writing history.

In fact, the book,

How the Scots Invented the Modern World, was really kind of inspired by that conversation because we were talking about Adam Smith.

He said, you should really do a book on Adam Smith.

And it planted a seed, which, you know, two years later, three years later, really became the seeds of that, too.

Yeah, he was an amazing man.

You know, it's funny, Arthur, that you would say that that was the book that was born out of inspiration because

I felt this way about you with Daniel Borston for a while, but I happen happen to be reading How the Scots Changed the World right now.

I'm going through your library, you know, your back catalog, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

And it's very, in some ways, it's very Daniel Borston.

It is.

And, you know, Borston in that lunch explained to me how he wrote those books.

Those books have,

you know, The Discoverers and the others in that series really sprang from his reading of the philosopher Henri Bergson, the French intuitive philosopher.

And those all come out of the way in which Bergson talks about how we experience the world through our senses, through our intuitions, and through our connections with nature.

So there's a,

I don't have to go, I'm not going to walk your readers through the philosophy of Henri Bergson.

You can read about that in Cave and Light.

But there was, in other words, that wasn't just sort of book titles, like, what am I going to write about next?

That's the kind of intellectual that Borsty was.

Yeah, he was great.

He was great.

So I wanted to to get you on, and I wanted to talk, we're talking about reparations now in Congress seriously having this debate.

They were tearing each other apart yesterday.

People were booing, you know, blacks who were testifying and saying, no,

I think this is wrong, and I'm a Democrat.

And they were being booed.

I haven't seen this level

of vitriol.

And it gets worse every day.

You know, last night we had somebody on CNN, a host, compare Donald Trump to Hitler.

Why are we giving this man any platform?

Now, this is not a guest.

This is a host.

We wouldn't do that to Hitler.

Why are we doing it to him?

You have

Casio-Cortez comparing what we have happening on our border to a Nazi concentration camp.

And people like Chuck Todd are being hammered because he said,

this is ridiculous.

And

have we, can you give me a framework of where you think we are in history?

Have we been here before?

Yeah, well, I think that, you know,

this is a

very strange kind of development that, you know, you and I have talked about kind of where the country is right now.

I think that

it would be good to mention that about four years ago, I wrote a piece that appeared on Fox Opinion called America's Coming Civil War.

And it was about what I felt was, and I'm going to use a term that you'll recognize, Glenn, because it comes out of that period just before 1860, that there was an irrepressible conflict that was coming between those for whom the growth of government and of government control

versus those for whom government control required extracting

resources, including money,

but also

our own cultural identities, as a conflict that could be as serious as the one that broke out over slavery.

And you were just talking very correctly about how what we saw there was that

the impossibility of finding any kind of clear middle ground between those two sides.

That piece went viral.

There was a lot of criticism of what are you talking about, you know, American Civil War.

I wrote a follow-up piece after Barack Obama's inauguration because I sensed that the Obama administration was

and his re-election in

2012 was really a turning point

in this discussion and what was going to take place here.

So with all of this, now everybody's talking about America's coming civil war.

Everybody is

debating

these kinds of questions about are we really reaching an existential moment in terms of American identity?

And I think what you see on the media and particularly on the social media suggests that I was right that the Civil War may not come in terms of actual violence.

You know, we're not going to be re-fighting the Battle of Gettysburg.

But I think we're moving very quickly into a space where

it's going to be harder and harder to find sensible compromise, even on fundamental kinds of issues, which in the past would have been considered beyond politics.

Well, because we're not talking about,

but we're not really talking about those issues.

We're talking about reparations.

How does reparations,

on all of the problems that we face, the politicians always pick the ones that are absolutely the most divisive and, with an exception of, I think, abortion, the least consequential at this point.

No, exactly.

And this is, and reparations is a classic example because you know

it's never going to become reality.

You know that this is simply done by the Democrats as a way to try and increase the African-American vote, which they sense disaster looming ahead in the 2020 election.

And so the scramble is on.

You actually really believe that, that they're headed for a disaster?

I do.

Yeah, yeah, I do.

And

I think that the disaster is reflected both in the pathetic field of candidates that have come forward here, but also the kinds kinds of issues that they're reduced to

addressing and putting out there in the hopes that they'll be able to collect votes.

You know, of course, what will happen is when Trump is re-elected, there'll be all kinds of claims that the election was stolen.

Yet again, this is also part of the Democrat playing book now: is that any election that doesn't return a Democrat, and particularly a liberal Democrat, is illegitimate,

been manipulated either by voter suppression or by collusion with foreign governments or some other kind of underhanded means.

This too works to undermine people's confidence in our institutions on both sides of the aisle, Glenn.

I mean, this is the other point, too, is that the increase,

the hyper-exaggerated rhetoric that we're getting out of the left also convinces those on the right that there is no grounds for compromise.

People are out of control.

And that if they were somehow to gain power, that we would be staring a proto-totalitarian state in the face.

The equivalent of, you know, Mao's culture revolution is on the way.

And whether that's true or not, the degree to which the excessive rhetoric on the part of the left requires

an equally

exaggerated response from many of the voices on the right is all pointing us towards the idea that this is we're in we're in dangerous dangerous territory

Arthur I want to I want to ask you

a couple more questions

as a as a historian

to be able to and I know this is almost impossible to take yourself out of today

and try to put yourself in the future and look at what's what's happening

to us right now and and

what the what the, you know, there's always these turning points.

There's always these roadmarks where, you know,

the easiest place to find is in the Bible because they've summarized civilizations into, you know, a chapter.

And so you'll see this rise and fall of a civilization and then the next rise, and you're like, okay, well, they're going to get it right this time.

And then they, you know, they fall again.

And you're like, didn't you?

All you had to do is read the last chapter.

And

I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the things that you see

that are road markers,

if you do.

And I also want to talk to you a little bit about socialism and this growing state of technology and the silencing of voices.

Have we been here before?

And what does it mean?

And what should we preserve?

Back in a second with Arthur Herman.

He is a tremendous, tremendous author.

And I think

he's my favorite historian.

And I can't believe he listens to this show because I'm a little embarrassed

to have somebody as good

at history as he is listening to me blab on about it.

But we'll be back in just a second.

One minute, and we're back.

So we're with Arthur Herman, and I just read a new study, and I'm going to go through this hopefully today.

The overwhelming ratio of adults,

12 to 1, say they prefer a nation with individual ownership of private property and where all the property is owned, and where none of the property is owned by the government.

That is 82 to 7.

6 to 1 ratio, Americans want a government that takes its direction from the people rather than live in a nation where the population takes its direction from the government.

That's a margin of 76 to 12.

Economically, six Americans who want a country featuring the prices of goods based on the free market for everyone who prefers the price price of goods determined by the government, that's 75 to 12.

And yet, overwhelmingly, people say they support socialism.

This is a problem with history.

Nobody is educated, nobody really understands history, nobody even knows what socialism is or capitalism.

The study found out that most people don't even know what capitalism is.

So, Arthur, have we been this close to

this

where people are coming out and saying, who are in power?

I want to destroy the free market system.

And if they win, I think they will.

Have we been here before?

Well, I don't know if we've been in this country here before.

But if you look at the experience in Europe

between the world wars, and I'm not really so much thinking about Nazi Germany because that's such a cliché and the differences are really profound.

I think a better model for thinking about where we are and where we could go if we're not really careful and began to

take some serious steps

backwards to rethink the way in which political debates have shaped up is France.

You know, France, like the United States, you know, emerged from World War I as a victorious power.

It seemed that to the rest of the world that it was Europe's, you know, superpower on the continent of Europe, just as Britain was

still a major superpower in a global sense.

And yet,

with the 1920s and 1930s, the French squandered everything that they had achieved in fighting that war.

And they became so politically divided

between Marxism and the extreme right and a political establishment which was too corrupt and unable to address the most significant issues confronting France and Europe during those years, that when in 1940 the German invasion came,

both the left and the right were so determined to see the other side lose so they could say, I told you so, I said that you guys were leading us to a disaster, that they refused to unite.

And so France collapsed.

Wow.

And their entire system of government.

Does this sound familiar at all, Glenn?

Am I talking about a situation which bears amazing resemblance to

where we are today in many respects?

You could see that happening with China.

You could see that really happening with Russia.

I mean, you know, we could have

just the border.

You could lose the country, and there would be a lot of people that would

want to be right so bad that it would allow it to happen.

Sure.

And, you know, and in the French Chamber of Deputies, at a time in which the Nazi war machine is gearing up, when the Spanish Civil War is threatening to embroil the world in an ideological conflict,

the big debate in this Chamber of Deputies was how many days of vacation should French workers get?

I mean,

talk about the irrelevancy of an issue like reparations.

Fortunately, you know, there was a man.

His name is Charles de Gaulle.

And he came, he was able to to be the man of the hour who, alone, with everybody else in France, had basically given up with

the armistice, basically handing France's fortunes

over to Hitler.

He was the one that said, no, France is going to continue to fight.

Even if I have to do it entirely alone,

I will do so.

And what he managed to do was to save what was left of France's honor in World War II and to really take upon himself the mission of saving his country from the disgrace and the humiliation and the collapse that had gone through in the last two decades.

We always talk about Winston Churchill and you know I've written about Churchill.

I'm a great admirer of his.

De Gaulle, I think, is a figure who we might want to think about looking at more closely.

I wrote my first college paper on him in 1971 and I've always been fascinated by de Gaulle.

He got a bad press because he pulled France out of NATO and chased out American bases in France during the 1960s, during the Cold War.

But he was a man who looked at his country, saw the state of intellectual and moral rot that had set in, and said, you know what?

There's more to France than this, and there's more to my country, and I have a patriotism to which I will sacrifice my career, and to which I will sacrifice all of my resources, even if I have to do it alone.

And it became a symbol of strength that

really made him a revered figure,

a savior, and really pulled France out of the abyss that it was in,

thanks to the Vichy episode.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Let me give you some

illegal immigration stats.

Okay.

Now, these are just between 2011 and 2016.

Between 2011 and 2016,

there have been more than 500,000 criminal offenses, 996 homicides done by illegals, 996 homicides, 59,200 assaults, 14,000 burglaries, 58,000 drug charges, 605 kidnappings, 36,000 thefts, 39,000 obstructing police, 3,000 robberies, 5,000 rapes,

7,000 weapons charges.

That's just between the years 2011 and 2016

in Texas alone.

What are we doing?

The flood of illegals into Texas is going to kill Texas.

It's going to.

It is strangling these small cities, especially these little teeny cities on the border.

They're not getting any help from the federal government, and people are coming hundreds a day.

And what are they supposed to do about it?

Don McLaughlin, I've been trying to talk to him for about a week.

He's been up in Washington testifying.

He is, he's really a little outspoken on this.

And when you hear his story of his town, what's happening in his town,

you'll see why he's outspoken.

Welcome to the program, Mayor McLaughlin.

How are you?

He dropped.

Are we going to get him back on?

I heard him speak in front of Congress.

And when you hear somebody who is

actually living this,

and you hear him talk about, I mean,

a lot of the people in his town town are Hispanic, and

they don't want this either.

You know, this is not a race thing.

This isn't a phobia.

This is a real problem.

Mayor, welcome to the program.

How are you, sir?

Good.

Thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity.

How are you today?

Very good.

I heard you speak.

I think it was to Horowitz on the Blaze, and

your story is amazing.

Can you tell me what's happening in your town?

Sure.

Well,

as we've been saying, the Border Patrol is just unundated with these family units that are crossing the border.

And the misconception that

is out there is that everybody thinks this is strictly just South Americans that are from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador.

Well, it's 29 different countries are crossing the source the southern border,

not just from there.

And they're coming from all over.

And it's just they're coming in family units.

And it's un the Border Patrol is just slammed.

And these family units, so

as they're getting slammed, they're having to come out and start releasing these family units because they have no place to put them.

They're at capacity and all their holding facilities.

And so they came to us in May and told us, oh, we're going to start releasing

immigrant families in your community.

We're going to to release them up here at the Stripes Convenience Store or at your HEB or your Walmart.

And we said, whoa, whoa, whoa.

No, we're not set up to handle that.

It's not that we don't want to help them.

We're a town of 17,000 people.

We're just not set up to handle that.

How many a day were they talking and how many a day are actually coming?

Well, when they first started, we were talking about getting 10 to 20.

Then it went to 20 to 40.

Then we ended up up to date, we've got

122.

We haven't got any in the last week only because only because the facility that we have here in Uvalde

is used for unaccompanied miners, and right now they are at capacity.

So many unaccompanied miners have come in the last week that they are full.

They cannot process any family units here in Uvalde now because so many unaccompanied miners have come across in the last week.

Now, I've heard you I heard you talk about how

there's one family who won't the kids won't go swimming unless dad is in the in the back by the pool with a shotgun because things are so crazy.

Well, what's happening?

What's happening?

The Border Patrol that usually

is watching for the

whether the coyotes that are bringing the immigrants through or where this particular landowner is out by the train by the train tracks, his property is, and these immigrants get on these trains coming out of out of uh Del Rio or Eagle Pass or even Lareda.

It's a it's a main East and West uh railroad that comes through here and so they get on this train.

And so the Border Patrol has a uh

facility here where they stop the train and check it for immigrants.

Well, usually they have a pretty large contingency of Border Patrol when they stop that train and check it.

Well, they're so spread out and spread so thin now with these family units that they're all doing that, that when they stop it, there may be anywhere from thirty to forty people on that train, and you've got three Border Patrol agents trying to to capture all these immigrants, and they don't have the manpower.

Uh, since then, uh, since this last incident, we're we're trying to fill in with with our police department and the sheriff's department when when they ask for it.

But what's happening, they're they're jumping off off this train and running, and this particular landowner is starting to

it's been going on at his property, he said, for the last 60 days, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.

And about a week ago, he had one that jumped off, or a group that jumped off and came to his property, and one particular individual got real aggressive with him, threatening and

real aggressive.

And he did everything he could to try to catch him and get him.

They brought a helicopter out and tried to find him and didn't find him.

But the man threatened him and told him he was going to come back and get him and different things.

And he said he and his wife, you know, didn't sleep a wink that night because the guy told him he was coming back that night to get him.

And we didn't catch him in town either.

And we looked.

But, you know, and then that's when he said it.

That's when I was talking to him.

He said, you know, it's gotten so bad that my grandkids won't even come out to the house and go swimming unless I sit out in the backyard with a shotgun because we never know when they're going to show up.

It's crazy.

It is.

And

you're a town of 17,000.

So you're not a town that, you know, has Starsky and Hutch kind of car chases ever, right?

No, we in in

the last twenty-five years,

we've had maybe two car chases.

In the last two weeks, we've had five.

Two of them have bailed out in town where we've had to lock put our schools on lockdown.

The first one, there were eight individuals.

So they jumped out in the middle of town right by our schools.

So we had to lock all our schools down.

We spent most of the day, we caught those eight individuals.

The other day, we had four that jumped out of a car.

The lady that was transporting them claimed that one of them had a gun, and that's why she was transporting them.

The Board of Patrols says that they don't think that was probably true, but we didn't know, but we didn't catch those four.

But again, we had to put another school on lockdown because it was in close proximity to where they jumped out.

And we're seeing this more and more.

So, so

we're talking to Mayor Don McLaughlin,

a border town here in Texas that is, and this story is not unique.

It's happening where the people of the town are paying a price.

And Don, I've talked about the Bubba effect for a very long time that the government just

stops doing what it's supposed to do.

And the people of the town, you know, become really angry and start to take things in their own hands because the government is not doing it.

And I'm not saying that you're there or anything else, and God forbid we ever get there, but what is the attitude towards the federal government from your citizens?

Both Republican and Democrat.

Well, they're fed up with both sides because, like I said, like I said before, this isn't a Republican problem or a Democrat problem.

It's an American problem.

It's an American people problem.

I mean, it's both sides and both sides are and and people in my community are fed up.

They're frustrated

with us as local government because we're having to use city funds and county funds when they drop these immigrant families off here in Uvalde.

We're having to take them and we're having to pay for a bus to take them to San Antonio because we don't have the facilities to do it.

So we're spending

right and San Antonio doesn't have the funding either.

And San Antonio's dealing now, as you said, these people are not coming from Guatemala.

They're dealing with people coming from the Congo, which is the Ebola hotspot and a place where ISIS has been recruiting lately.

I mean, we don't know who's coming in and bringing what into our communities, and they're being dumped.

Well, I asked our federal, I asked, I sent all our elected officials an email when this first started the other day.

When in Del Rio, Texas, the first wave, 115

immigrants from the Congo showed up in Del Rio, Texas.

I mean, if you look on the map and see where the Congo is, and then you look on the map and see where Del Rio, Texas is, how did 115 Congolese get to Del Rio, Texas?

Then two days later, they got another 350 from Congolese.

Right.

And they also don't speak a word of English or Spanish.

How did they get here?

How did they get here?

And nobody can tell us that answer.

And we, like I said,

up until the last day or so, we have seen nothing from the federal government as far as any answers, any help.

We've asked for help to get reimbursed.

We've asked what we're going to do.

And until yesterday, it's the first time that we've seen anything that there's been a bill to reimburse communities for the expenses they're out.

I mean, Del Rio, Texas,

which is 60 miles from us, they're getting unundated.

I mean, they're getting 140 to 160 people released in their community every day.

And before they got a coalition going, they were just taking them and dropping them off at the local stripes.

And it's not the Border Patrol's fault because they're being told

by Washington, this is what you're going to do.

I mean, our local Border Patrol in this area, they work with our communities.

I mean, they're good people and they work hard.

I mean,

but they're just

strapped.

I've only got about a minute left.

Is the governor's office, is Texas doing anything?

Are they doing enough?

Where's our leadership from Texas?

Well, you know, again, we're just starting to hear rumblings that the governor is going to deploy more DPS troopers and that.

We haven't seen it yet.

I haven't seen anything to that effect.

I was told that last night.

I haven't seen anything in writing of that.

But, you know, like I said,

we have written letters, called to all our elected officials, and we're just not getting responses.

We're just not getting

it's like it's falling on deaf ears.

That's amazing to me.

Don, thank you so much.

And my best to your community.

And please stay in touch with us if there's any way we can help or if you need to bring shine a light onto something, please let us know.

And we'll be there for you.

I do appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you.

You bet.

Thank you.

Mayor Don McLaughlin.

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