Mike Baker's Problem with Russia Collusion, AOC, and Open Borders | Joe Rogan

When people talk about Russia collusion and they talk about, we kind of lost our way, right? And, you know, everybody's kind of guilty of it, whether it's Mueller and his investigative team or whether it's Congress or whether it's just the general public. We all kind of lost our way over the past couple of years, imagining somehow that the big story here was Trump's collusion, right? Well, that was a political dodge, right? That was a shell game that was being played on us. It was the big story is what did Russia specifically do, right? What exactly did they do? How did they do it? How successful were they? Show us some case studies of specific examples. That's what an investigative team should have been doing for two years. And then deliver that information and keep throwing it out at the public and keep talking to the public about it. I guarantee you, the GRU and others, the FSU at the Intel services in Russia, they're happy that we didn't do that, right? Because again, they've been advancing. They've been improving their capabilities. They're going to do it again. So I guess that's why I keep beating on this is that I don't think we really focused our attention to where we needed to because we all get lost in this political bullshit. And... Well, I feel like this is the most easily manipulated we've ever been as a culture. I think it's so easy to spin these narratives and to get people upset about anything. And I feel like a lot of these are test cases. They're trying to see what happens when we spin up this story. How outraged do they get at that story? Yeah. Well, look at this. Look at the issue of racism. Look at... I mean, that thing gets thrown out there now to the point where it's... I hate to say it, but it's almost losing its meaning in a sense, right? They just keep hammering away. Anybody they disagree with, and I'm talking about the hard left, the progressives, you're a racist, right? It's not possible that you could possibly disagree on policy, right? Like the... Whatever, that's a squad, you know, AOC and her compadres. I don't give a shit about where they're from. I care about the fact that their policies, from my perspective, other people I'm sure love them, you know, are screwed up. What's screwed up about their policies? Well, I'm not a democratic socialist, right? So I have a problem with everything from... You look at the Green New Deal, right? And this idea that we're going to roll this out and fuck the economic impact, you know? Or I don't specifically... What is specifically... I don't even thought about the economic impact. I think what they're doing is they're just... They're playing to a base and they're doing it successfully and people hear about it and everybody wants to be righteous. Everybody wants to think, sure, if I care about the environment, yeah, let's get rid of emissions. That'll be a great idea. And whether it's that or open borders and the idea that somehow we're... Do I think we're running concentration camps down south? No, I don't think... That's fucked up that we would... That's the terminology that we would have, right, for... Detainment centers. For detainment centers. And you know what? You want to make it better? Well, great. Let's actually do what your job is. Let's make some changes to the immigration rules and to asylum laws. Let's put some more money down there and make conditions a little bit better. There's things that we could... In terms of concrete steps, but we don't seem to want to do that. We seem to want to just throw shit around at each other. But the open borders thing is worrisome. There's a guy named John Norris who's just on my friend Steve Rinnell's podcast. It's called the Meat Eater podcast. And he's a warden. He's a game warden. And one of the things that they had to deal with somewhere along the line was they had to become enforcers for illegal drug marijuana growing these establishments in public lands, in national parks. So these guys that were supposed to be just catching people with too many trout on the stringer are now being forced to stop illegal grow-ups. And it's all cartel members. And what he's saying is that 80 to 90% of all of the marijuana that gets sold illegally in this country, in the Midwest and all the different places where it's illegal, is coming out of these grow-ups. And a lot of it is tainted with dangerous pesticides because these guys are trying to... They're actually using poisons to keep animals from eating the marijuana. So these kids that are... Who the fuck is buying it? They're buying this pot from these illegal places. No one's testing this stuff. You don't know what the fuck you're getting. And you very well could be smoking pot that's poisoning you. Yeah. A guy that I know, a really good guy, he's a huge landowner here in California, to the point where you can spend all day on an ATV and still not get to the end of one of his plots of land. I don't know if you call it a plot of land. And anyway, he's had those incidents, right? He's had where it's such a massive piece of property that a small element from a cartel will set up a growth spot there. And they'll camouflage it. It's very well done. You bring in the piping for the water, because a pot uses a huge amount of water, right? This guy was talking about water that they brought in. They had a pipe that went for three miles. These kids carried it on their back. Yeah, that's what these guys do. And then eventually, you got to go in there and bust it up. But it's people that stumble across it that are just out there doing their regular ranching job. And it is fascinating. I feel like we should take those guys and reprogram them. You get a guy who's willing to carry 100 pounds of piping on his back and walk eight miles into the backwoods. That's a fucking industrious individual. You got to lure him away from the cartel with a better deal. If that guy worked for a competing corporation, he'd be like, look, I like the way you do business. Right, give him a job on the ranch. Yeah, give him a job. Grant found this guy, and he was working for Verizon. They'd be like, hey, come on over here, man. You're fucking putting in the time. This guy's carrying three miles of hose on his back. That's work. That's what we call work. That's fucking real work. Yeah, so use your power for good, not evil. That's what I tell my boys. It's hard though, because evil is fun, I think. It's getting away with stuff. In the short term, it could be more lucrative. Yeah, from their perspective. There is that. And they have a record and probably murderers. There's a lot of reasons. All right, so maybe we're not talking about somebody you're going to hire as a landscaper there, your home. But your point is- Open borders are not a good idea. Open borders are not a good idea. There's a lot of bad people that are getting in already. And it's not a stretch. This is not, if anybody imagines this to be a stretch or is going to take offense at this, every nation maintains borders. Every nation maintains some element of immigration controls and borders protection. The idea that we shouldn't or that we should somehow feel exceptionally bad about it is, I don't quite understand that mentality. We should feel bad when we see someone who's just a poor mother who's trying to come over to America to get a better job because she's stuck in Guatemala and it sucks over there and there's no opportunity whatsoever for her to excel. That's a different animal than someone who is a member of some fucking terrible cartel gang that comes over. The question is, how do we differentiate and how do we make it so that that woman who's a mom can come over here? How do we make it so it's legal? That's the real question. But that's not what they're addressing, right? How many decades now have we heard about immigration controls and immigration process and regulations and policy? And then nothing ever gets done. And so maybe, and again, I think one of the things that's interesting about Trump is as strange as it is, the environment, I mean, maybe the fact that he is disruptive and sometimes doesn't seem to give a shit, maybe that's a good thing because it gets us talking and gets us talking in areas that we haven't before and in ways that we haven't before. So maybe that results in something maybe like the Chinese, the public's just going to wait for him to go and then we'll get back to business as usual. That may happen. But even business as usual, the concern is like, how do you differentiate between someone who's coming in illegally because they want a better life versus someone who's coming in illegally because they're literally going to commit murder and sell fentanyl and deal, you know. And that's an incredible harm to whatever community they wind up in and they're a member of MS-13 and they're going to, there's both things that are going on at the same time. And you're a heartless person if you don't want that lady with a child from Guatemala to come over here and do better. And she's probably going to work as hard, if not harder, than any good old fashioned red blooded American that's over here trying to make their way through this world. And why should we be able to have this opportunity when they can? One of the beautiful things about America, right, is like if you're a poor person and you live in Baltimore, you can get your shit together and get out and you can move to maybe Silicon Valley. You can move somewhere where there's more prosperity, there's more opportunity and you can get something. I'm sorry, are there poor people in Baltimore? I heard there are. Oh, okay. I heard there's some sort of, there's a word, what is the word you used? Infestation. A rat infestation. Yeah. You can't use infestation when you're talking about certain neighborhoods, people get mad. Even though he said infested with crime and rats, he's still, you're racist. Doesn't matter. The key here is, and it's a democratic talking point, right? I mean, this is a strategy and that's fine. Both parties use different strategies. Sure. But the Dems have obviously decided in this period of time because it's so intense, there was clearly discussions within wherever, the DNC or elsewhere, that this is our policy. We are going to push this and you just keep hammering that word, racist, racist, racist, no matter what. And it's going to stick and it does. Yes. You're hit by that hammer and you're staring into the light. You don't know how to respond. Sure. Right? And you think, oh my God, I'm not a racist. But then you're like, Senator, you're still beating your wife. So it's one of those things you can't answer. But I think it's bullshit because it's like calling everybody a Nazi. It loses its importance and its meaning. And anyway, it's a strange, strange time. But I think you can do both. You can take care of that woman with the kid or kids and you can also look at the issue of border security and enhance your ability to understand who's coming across the border. It costs money and it requires effort, but you can do both. I think you can do both, but I think the real big picture, the real big picture, if you had to look at the solution objectively, the real problem is Mexico has real economic situations that we don't have here in America. They're far worse off in a lot of the areas. And as is Guatemala, as is El Salvador, neighboring countries are economically devastated. Until they are not, until they come up and until they experience prosperity, you're always going to have people that are committing crime because they want to try to get by and you're always going to have people that are going to want to try to get to America because it's a place where there's more opportunity. That's the real issue. The real issue is that it's so much better over here. Right. And that makes sense and you get the same thing with immigration and movement of people over in Europe coming up from wherever. Which is the Brexit argument, right? Which is the Brexit argument. In part, I mean, it's not just based on immigration, but it's more control of your own nations, security and destiny, et cetera. But I think that that's, you could argue that national security from a US perspective would warrant improving your ability to impact nations like Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever, and working with Mexico to not just improve sort of the security, the liaison that goes on and improving that, but you're right. I mean, working conditions, criminal, you know, or crime and instability, that's in our national security. I know people get, you know, they get very upset. They say, why should we give countries money? Right. Well, in part, you're right. I mean, sometimes you give them money and it just goes down some shithole and it doesn't, you know, and I don't mean to, I'm not talking about the country. I'm just starting to literally, it goes into a hole and it never comes back. A bad person gets in corruption and they absorb it at the highest levels of government. Yeah. And so there's no, there's no controls over how that money is spent. There's no, there's no metrics to say whether it's spent wisely at the end of the day. So you can, but I would argue that, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's in our national security interest. And we're talking about border security, immigration, to view that as sort of the top line issue. Why are they, why are they on the move? Right? Well, like you said, they're on the move because they want a better life because where they're at ain't good. Yes. How do you work with them? And that's, you know, that's, I think people sometimes look at that and think, well, that's pushing a rock up a hill. It's never going to happen. And so maybe they just stop. Right. We've ignored Latin America, Central America, South America for decades, right? Which is how we ended up in part with Chavez and, you know, Maduro to follow and some of the horse shit that went on down there because we ignored it. We didn't give it the resources. We didn't give it the attention. We didn't treat it seriously as a national security concern. We were all focused on wherever, improving relations in Southeast Asia or elsewhere. So yeah, we need to refocus. And I think ultimately, do we see it immediately? No, but I think you're right. So anyway, it's, you know.