Dr. Everett Piper on Wokeism in Schools and Brandon Darby on the Border Crisis
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The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it. Welcome to Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren.

On the line with us today, fantastic guests as always, but first up, Dr. Everett Piper, author of the national bestseller, "Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth." Dr. Piper served as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University for 17 years, during which time he led the school from relative obscurity into a position of national recognition and influence.

He is currently a contributing columnist for The Washington Times. He has a podcast. I'll let him tell you all about how to follow him. I do want to say, Dr. Piper, I lived in Oklahoma briefly when you were at Oklahoma Wesleyan, and that was one of the talks of politics in Oklahoma was your transformation of that university. So we are thrilled to have you on our program today. Welcome.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, and thanks for your kind words. That was a great ride at Oklahoma Wesleyan. We were blessed. Absolutely. So some of the things you've been talking about lately I think are things that we've talked about on this podcast a little bit, but you come at it from obviously a more in-depth perspective in a certain sense than we do. Two articles that you wrote recently that I kind of wanted to highlight. One, liberals are lying to you while turning America upside down.

You tell us a little bit first about how to follow you, but then about that piece in particular. Well, you can follow me on Twitter, and my handle there is Dr. Everett Piper. That's D-R-E-V-E-R-E-T-T-P-I-P-E-R, at Dr. Everett Piper. I have a Facebook page under the same tag.

And you can just Google podcast Everett Piper, The Rebellion. That's my radio show and et cetera, et cetera. Washington Times, go to the Washington Times opinion section. And I'm one of the contributing writers there. So thank you for allowing me to make that pitch. Thank you for being here. Anyone who is fighting the fight you're fighting is running a rebellion in the world of academia right now.

Well, and frankly, the tagline for my radio show slash podcast is this. In times of universal deceit, truth is the only rebellion left. And I'm basically playing off of a quote from the philosopher Peter Kreeft.

And he said something very similar, and I'm giving my Piper paraphrase of that. We live in times of great deception. We live in times that the prophet Isaiah warned of, where good is evil, and evil is good, bitter is sweet, and sweet is bitter. Essentially, we've come to a point in our culture today where we've abandoned truth, and we're suffering the consequences for it. And the article that I wrote

that the last two articles actually are going after the same thing, and it's the consequences of stepping away from an objective standard that allows you to measure the debate. C.S. Lewis told us that without a measuring rod outside of those things being measured, you can do no measuring. And what he was saying was this. Late

Lady Justice is blind for a reason, because she can't lift the blindfold and peek and still administer justice, because she'll be tempted to put her thumb on the scale. You have to have an objective standard outside of you or me in order to decide who's wrong or who's right in any good, healthy debate. And traditionally, in Western culture, that

standard was truth with a capital T. Our Founding Fathers called it self-evident truths that are endowed to us by our Creator. The Apostle Paul called it the truth of God written on every human heart. M. Scott Peck challenged this decades ago when he wrote People of the Lie, and he challenged us to recognize that we were

becoming a people that have lied to ourselves so consistently and so persistently that we've come to believe our own lies. The proof? We now believe that men are women and women are men. We claim to be pro-woman,

But yet we blackface women in exaggerated makeup and costume and then pretend that men can actually be women. That's misogynistic. That's not pro-woman. That's anti-woman. You can't be a feminist if you deny the biological fact of a female. We've become the people of the lie. So this is Chuck here, Dr. Piper. Question for you is this then.

This is nothing government can solve. So is this an abstract failure of churches and families? Because, you know, we talk, you know, one thing the press loves to talk about is how Washington used to work, right? Churches, families and schools. Yeah. But 20, 30, 40 years ago, they had the same common principles. They may have gone about it some differently, but there was this commonality of faith of what's right, what's wrong.

And right now, it seems to me you have two sides that just think opposite of what's right and wrong, which you have pointed out. So how do you go and sort of shift this luxury liner around to get where we have these common principles again? Because like you said, unless you have common principles, you're just you're talking to a wall. Right. So is this a failure of churches? Is this a failure of families?

The answer is yes. You may or may not be aware that I've been very critical of the evangelical Church. And I'm an evangelical. I am one of those conservative Christians that believes in the inerrancy of the Word of God. I believe that that is the standard that's been revealed by God and not made up by government, and that standard is the thing that has given us the greatest measure of human freedom in all of human history.

So how did we lose that? Well, the woke Church, the emergent Church, the Church that embraces critical race theory, embraces intersectionality, embraces this argument of judging people by the color of their skin rather than teaching them to be men and women of character, that Church has let down our culture.

And I would argue that a woke church is a failed church, and it's a joke church because it's not teaching our progeny that there is an absolute standard. And you know what? It's not you, and it's not me. And that you better start worshiping the God you see in the Bible rather than the one you see in the mirror. Yes, the church has let us down because it doesn't

teach, preach, and promote the truth with a capital T any longer. It wants to affirm people and make them feel good about their sin, rather than telling them that they should confess it. So what, if you were hired to consult the evangelical community, we'll just point out that there's, you know, there's Protestants and so forth, what

So what would you tell them to do? Because they're losing church membership, so obviously their desire to woke up their sermons on Sunday are not really picking things up at all. We have now a society where you have two sides that view right and wrong completely, utterly differently.

If you're a consultant, what do we need to do? Because you're right. Unless you have these common foundations, which this country was built upon – I hate to break that to everybody, but this country was built on some common foundations, which you could have serious substantive arguments, but you had a foundation we all understood. You can have a long range of beliefs. What do these churches need to start doing?

Well, in many ways, your question is not hypothetical to me, because when I was hired at Oklahoma Wesleyan back in 2002, it was a failed institution. It was 12 months away from bankruptcy because nobody cared about it any longer. Enrollment had plummeted and debt was astronomical. It was ready to go bankrupt, and it had 12 months left before it declared itself so. I was hired to come in and turn that big ship around,

if I could, because it was thinking. So what did I do? I raised a banner, I raised a flag. I said, "We're going to stand for the truth, the truth of Christ and the truth of Scripture, and if we win waving that banner, great, that's God's grace. But if we lose waving that banner, I don't care, it's the right banner to wave, and at least we'll go down fighting."

And as the result of that, people started listening. Secular folks started listening, not just evangelicals. I started getting interviews on Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends and Dennis Prager. I started getting interviews with Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin is a married, quote-unquote, homosexual, but he believed in what I was saying and that it had merit because I was saying this.

G.K. Chesterton told us, Mr. Rubin, that if you get rid of the big laws of God, you don't get liberty, you're going to get thousands and thousands of little laws that rush in to fill the vacuum. And Dave Rubin wanted to talk about that for an hour on his show because he recognized that there was some truth in that that meant something. I would argue when you wave the banner of God's objective standards, his objective truth, you might lose, but it

It's worth waving that banner because it's worth going down fighting. Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Piper, I'm Jewish. Chuck's LDS. You're evangelical. But I think we could all agree, if you look back at history, that Christianity was the fundamental force that allowed the world to progress forward.

from the age of darkness into an enlightened society. And those foundations crossed all peoples and all religions.

And Dennis Prager, as you well know, would share your view. And I think Ben Shapiro would share your view. I think there are others out there, like even David Horowitz, who's a secular Jew. He doesn't embrace the faith, per se, right now, but he's converted from radical leftism and being the intellectual powerhouse of the Black Panthers in the 60s to a talking head for conservatism today. Why? Because he agrees with what you just said, and that

that Christianity and the Judeo-Christian way of thinking that there is a standard, there's a referee that's blowing the whistle on the sidelines of the game, and you can't play basketball or soccer or football without that referee, nor can you engage in life with the same thing. Somebody outside of you and me that has an understanding of the rules

and will decide if somebody's out of bounds. That's the only way that you're going to have the freedom, the liberty, to engage in the game of life. And if you take those standards and take that referee out, you're not going to get liberty. You're going to get more and more laws to restrict you because something will have to fill the vacuum, and that something is always a despot.

And that something is not just a despot, but it's desperate, right? Because at the end of the day, it's unfulfilling and it's a constant quest for control and power rather than substance.

Yes. I think of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and this guttural growl of Gollum as he wants his precious. I want my precious. Gives me my precious. What's he talking about? The ring of power. He wants to control other people. And as we watch the daily news, I feel like I'm watching a bunch of

golems in Washington, D.C. right now that have their power, they got their ring of power during the COVID crisis, and they will not relent. Whether it's Pelosi, whether it's Fauci, whether it's Schumer, or unfortunately, even some of the Republican, quote-unquote, conservatives don't understand that they've grasped power, not because they believed in principles, but they just wanted to control other people.

We have to go to break here in just a moment. We are talking with Dr. Everett Piper. Dr. Piper, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really enjoying this conversation, having you on the program. We're going to keep you on when we come right back. Folks, Broken Potholes, back in just a moment.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Be sure to tune in here 3 p.m. every Saturday on 960 AM The Patriot. You can also catch us on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

All the fun stuff is out there. Follow us on Twitter. Right now we have a fantastic guest on, Dr. Everett Piper. He is the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and the author of Not a Daycare, The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth. I'm a big fan of his work personally.

And Chuck, you had a question I thought was fascinating. So tell our audience, what is it like being a university president? And what was your biggest surprise being a university president? Well, do you remember Peter Drucker? Yes. And for the sake of your audience, I'll answer the question here. Yes.

Peter Drucker was the guru of leadership. In fact, in post-World War II, he became the sage. He became the guy. He counseled prime ministers and kings and princes. He counseled and lended advice to presidents of the United States and presidents of Fortune 500 companies for decades. He lived until his 90s, didn't die until around 2010 or thereabout, and in his later years,

He was at a major university making a presentation. Let's just say it was Harvard. I don't know if it was or not. But at the end of the presentation from Dr. Drucker, Dr. Peter Drucker, there was a Q&A. And one of the people in the audience asked him this question. Dr. Drucker, you've counseled everybody. You're the guy.

Have you ever stumbled across a situation that you thought was impossible to correct, a situation that was impossible to lead? He immediately answered, yes. Yes, the college. And his point was this. His point was really rather shrewd. You know, at a company, a corporation, you know who the boss is, and the boss makes decisions. Leave

Leadership is understood. But at a college or a university, nobody knows who the boss is. Is it the faculty? Is it the student? Is it the parent who pays the bill? Is it the donor that paid for the gymnasium? Is it the alumni? Is it the board of trustees? Everybody within those groups will raise their hand and say, yeah, I'm the boss. That president sure isn't.

So what's it like being a university president? It's like herding cats and trying to figure out how to make them go in the same direction. Well, it's not only cats. I have this line. It's like herding feral cats. It's worse than that, right? Fair enough. Spot on. Good one. Hey, but you know what? You asked what did I learn. Yes. What I learned is this. It's not about men and it's not about money. It's

It's about mission, and it's about message. If you've got a mission, and you've got a message, and you repeat it over and over and over again, if you stay on task, and you keep telling people what your university stands for, what your church stands for, what your synagogue stands for,

What your company stands for, what your radio show or your podcast stands for. If you've got a mission and you've got a message and you stay on task, you say it over and over again, the men and the money will follow. It's not about men. It's not about money. It's about message. Get your message and get your mission and say it. Get people to believe it. You'll even start believing it yourself, and that's when you'll turn around and see a bunch of people following you and willing to give you money.

That's interesting. I have a question. It may be a little bit of a landmine. Do you think Liberty University has a real mission or have they diverted from it? And I'm not trying to pick on Liberty University, but they seem to have had some problems lately, maybe putting too much of the toe into politics and not enough on their mission of raising value-oriented students.

Well, I think they're a failure. Yeah, Liberty has a problem, or at least it had a big one, and his name was Jerry Falwell Jr. And Jerry Falwell did a great job financially for them for decades. He built up a behemoth, a powerhouse financially. But Jerry Falwell fell away from the very...

standards that the university was built upon in his personal life. And because of power and because of the public platform that he enjoyed, he started sacrificing that mission and that message. He started attending to men and money more than the message of the institution. He got his priorities reversed. He put second things first rather than first things. And C.S. Lewis told us,

When you put first things first, you get the second thrown in to boot. But if you put second things first, you're not going to get either. And I would say that was the downfall of Jerry Falwell Jr. Fascinating. Yeah, that's an interesting analysis. Dr. Piper, how do we – because we all know what's going on with our schools right now. K-12 education across this country, if your kid is in a public school, frankly, they're not getting a very good education. They're getting a lot of misinformation online.

Same thing in many or most of our universities where even pretty much every major university in the country is teaching the 1619 Project, which is just a complete fallacy. It's entirely made up, and they're teaching it as history. How do we turn this around?

Well, I'm not going to give you an optimistic answer. And I'm an educator. I made my entire career in the ivory tower. I believe in liberal arts education. I believe in the liberty that comes from teaching the liberal arts. I believe in the freedom, the academic freedom that's grounded in that 1,000-year tradition. But here's the pessimistic response. That tradition has been lost.

Our colleges and universities are a joke. I can't think of more than three, and I'm not exaggerating that I would even consider sending my own kids to or my grandkids to. All of the rest of them have sold their souls to critical race theory and to social justice and to this argument that one group of people

people is privileged just because of the color of their skin and the content of their character makes no difference any longer. We're teaching kids to be racist, and we're proud of it. We're teaching kids to define themselves by their inclination sexually. They're defined by their libido now rather than their lord. They can contrive and manufacture a fake identity, and it's going to be celebrated at a university where they don't even believe in proper pronouns any longer.

But unfortunately, this is also true in your local public schools. I honestly think the public school system is lost, and I think the solution is to figure out a way to homeschool your kids while they're that age and then find one of those two or three universities to send them to and don't sell their soul at these other institutions just because of prestige or money.

It's sad to hear that, but you're not the first guest we've had on the program with a background in education who said the same thing. How would someone because you built, you know, took a university that was on the edge of bankruptcy. We only have about a minute and a half left here. But how does someone go about how do we create that second system, that parallel system?

Well, I think you need to support the handful of institutions that are doing it right right now. Give them your money, give them your time, give them your students, your kids, and stop pretending that sending them to some place that really is nothing but wolves in sheep's clothing—I think there's an old Catholic cardinal that once said, wolves in sheep's clothing—

are dangerous, but wolves in shepherd's clothing are downright deadly. So I think the first thing you need to do, and I know I've got limited time, is to send your kids to the schools that are doing it right. Fantastic. Dr. Piper, thank you again for joining us on the program today. We have about 30 seconds left. Tell folks again how they can follow you in your work.

My Twitter handle is Dr. Everett Piper, D-R-E-Z-E-R-E-T-T-P-I-T-E-R. Go to Dr. Everett Piper Facebook. Go to the Washington Times opinion section. And don't forget my books, Not at Daycare, The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth, and the sequel to that, which was released in April, and that is Grow Up, Life Isn't Safe, But It's Good. Fantastic, doctor. Thank you, Dr. Piper. Broken Potholes coming back in just a moment. All right.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Fantastic first guest on the program today. Thank you again to Dr. Everett Piper. Our next guest I'm very excited to talk to.

Brandon Darby, he is the director of Breitbart's Border and Cartel Chronicles projects, reports on the border both on the American and Mexican side, has contacts and reporters in Mexico that he keeps unidentified because if anyone knew who they were, they would not be alive for very long.

And you've written some, Brandon, some really, I think, important pieces that probably have not gotten the exposure nationally that they need to, including very recently Mexican Army loses 30 percent of weapons purchased from the U.S. What's going on there? Yeah.

Well, what's going on is that Mexico is a failing narco state. That's what's going on. Out of Mexico's 32 states, one could argue that 17 of them are really under the direct control of transnational criminal organizations that we call cartels. We call them drug cartels, but they're actually much more than that.

And that's what's going on. People don't realize that even along our border, there are the majority of regions, if the Mexican government wants to go arrest someone, they can't send police like we would send in the U.S. They have to send in their Navy. They have to send in their elite military units and convoys to go and perform basic governmental functions of law and order because of how corrupt

Their nation has become. So that's what's going on. Well, and they even have a sort of tradition there of those military units as they, you know, serve their time in the military, then going on and becoming, as I understand it, the enforcers for a lot of these cartels.

Well, what's even scarier is that a lot of them are the enforcers for the cartels while they're in the military. That's the problem. You know, oftentimes when you hear of journalists who are killed in Mexico, the family will say, well, it was the state police who showed up and took them, you know, or it was the army who took them. And then the army says, well, we took them, we let them out, we don't know what happened.

And it's like, yeah, okay, that's where they are. And that's why people often say to me, well, you advocate for security along the southern border, but not the northern border. You're a racist. I'm like, no, there's a complete different socioeconomic situation occurring on the northern side of our northern border than what we have occurring on the southern side of our southern border.

It's a very different situation. And again, people can say, well, I went to Playa del Carmen or I went to Rocky Point in Arizona, right? Or south of Arizona. I went to, and it was fine. And it's like, well, it's fine for most people in certain areas where cartels have economic engines based on tourism. Right.

but it's not fine for most of the people who live in Mexico, nor anyone else who goes to those territories. So this is where we get into tricky situations. Someone from California will say, "Well, I went to Tijuana and I didn't see any problems." And if you go, "You went to Tijuana and you didn't see any problem," that's because the Tijuana cartel doesn't cause problems on a routine basis with tourists.

But if you were to go to other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border, there are nine sectors on the southwest border, U.S. border with Mexico, and each one of those sectors is dealing with a very different transnational criminal group. In Texas, we're dealing with the Gulf Cartel, and we're dealing with Los Detes, a group called CBN.

And they are very different in how they control and how they rule than the groups who control South of California. So it's very different depending on where you go. Well, and that again shows the absolute insanity of people who try to make that comparison. It's like saying, well, I went to Miami and didn't see any cocaine. Or I went to London and didn't see any poverty, so it must not be there. It's amazing people even try to spout that talking point to you, frankly.

Well, you know, it's a strange situation because I, in my situation, I, in my position, I've, I've been studying and writing about and traveling online sectors of the border for many, many years, right? So we're going back to 2013, 2000, you know, back in the day. And so,

So traveling that and also traveling in Mexico and the south side of that and you know, I see a very complete picture. But a lot of times in our society people want to make monolithic statements, right? They want to say the border's safe or the border's unsafe. Well, both of those are half true and half not true, right? Some places are safe, some places are not. It just depends.

Brandon, we have to go to break here in just about 30 seconds. But when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about this. I actually had a chance to meet this week with the head of the Department of Public Safety here in Arizona, and he obviously echoed a lot of the concerns you're bringing up. Appreciate you being on the program. Brandon, how do people follow you real quick?

The best way to follow me is to follow at Brandon Darby on Twitter and to go to ballparknews.com. Perfect. Broken Potholes coming right back. The 2020 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote web domain from godaddy.com. Get yours now.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host, Sam Stone and Chuck Warren on the line with us, our second guest of the day. Thank you for joining us, Brandon Darby. He is the director of Breitbart's Border and Cartel Chronicles Project, painting a pretty terrifying picture of what is going on south of the border right now. Sam's going to ask you a question about his conversations this week with law enforcement. Is Mexico even fixable?

I believe it is fixable, but it's not a quick fix. It's definitely a very complex problem.

And I think the biggest obstacle that we face as the United States in fixing Mexico is we have to balance the need for, you know, taking a very strong, using a very strong hand to fix problems that are affecting our country, while at the same time realizing that there are global political concerns we need to be aware of. We need to realize that, you know, China is making a major play

to be the dominant force in Mexico. And so Mexico, Mexican politicians and Mexican leadership are playing that, you know, like a child whose parents recently divorced, and they're saying, well, mommy will buy me this. Well, daddy will buy me that. Mommy said this. Well, daddy said that. And so...

It's a very tricky situation. I mean if we anyone who would argue with that if we look at Mexico's Infrastructure when it comes to data and communication it was China, you know, it was Huawei who got the contract to To do all of Mexico not the United States and it was China a lot of their infrastructure. That's China, you know, so We're in a very tricky situation

And unfortunately, the political situation that we're in is one where politicians from both sides of the aisle are speaking about it. The issue is, though, it's there are these simplistic fixes for what is occurring. Right. There are these some build the wall like or allow people to do this and now allow people to come, allow people to invest in infrastructure in Mexico. Do that. And it's a really simple one liner that fit on bumper stickers would

When the truth is, a lot of those things are very necessary, but they're just one small piece of a much-needed multi-tiered solution to a very complex problem. But it is a very complex problem, much more so than people are acknowledging in the halls of Congress and in the White House, for sure. Brandon, thank you for the answer. We're with Brandon Darby. He covers the border for Breitbart.

My question for you then is this. What is something conservatives don't understand about the border and our relationship with Mexico? I think we always try to make things a little too simplistic. And just by your response, I can tell you understand there's you know, there's it's not simplistic. What what do conservatives not understand and what type of policy should they be truly undertaking to start reversing course down there?

Well, I think that one of the things, and I'm going to say this very clearly because I want to be very clear about this.

It isn't just conservatives who this is affecting, right? It's all of us as a nation. It's all of us as a country. And so I think the biggest thing that we can do right now is to be aware. When we see stories of what's occurring in Mexico, we need to share those stories. But we also need to have evidentiary standards, right? So if somebody comes up with a story about an ISIS terror training camp on the border,

there's not an ISIS terror training camp on the border. There's just not. Those kind of stories that are not based on evidence, that are not based on facts, you need to go, well, this person I respect says there's an ISIS terror training camp, but this other person I respect a lot says there probably isn't and that there's no evidence to suggest that's true. So

So maybe that's not in the realm. Maybe I need to wait on sharing that story, right? Because those kind of stories are actually, though they might temporarily boost a lot of attention, they're actually quite detrimental to the cause of telling what's going on there. But people being aware

of what's going on there is very important. People say to me often, they're like, "Well, when you first started writing about this, you were the only game in town. Now there's 20 people writing about it." And I'm like, that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. That's what we need to happen. We need the fact that there are paramilitary transnational criminal organizations controlling territory

just south of our border, we need that to be known by Americans. We need Americans to realize what they're dealing with on both sides. And so I think that the biggest thing I would say is that conservatives need to share a story

need to inform each other and need to exhibit evidentiary standards in the process. I think that's true on the left as well, though, right? Correct. But for conservatives, that's what your question is. I think that that's what we need to look at, and we need to start talking about not only the short-term immediate need, but the long-term reality, which has... And then long-term realities are this. It's politically...

we're not going to have a North Korea style border between the US and Mexico. It's just never going to happen politically. You can advocate for that, but if that is the entire solution,

that you have to fix this problem, it's going to fail miserably. And we're going to have four years where we build barriers and secure the border and four years where they let everybody who's been waiting there in. And then four years where we kick them out and four years when they all come back in. And we're going to do that perpetually to where there's millions and millions and millions and millions of more people who are coming into our country. We are going to do that.

But if we look at it and go, okay, here's the real deal. The real deal is this. People who live in places where it's horrible to live

don't stay there any longer. It's not the old days. They leave and they go to places where it is more pleasant to live, where they have more opportunity. The solution is to ultimately increase the number of places around the world where it is pleasant. If Mexico were okay, and if Mexico didn't have a stratified economy, if Mexico had jobs, if Mexico...

was okay, then people who came from Central America through Mexico would just stay in Mexico, and it would share the burden of what we're dealing with. So then we get into how will Mexico be okay? Well, Mexico cannot be okay until the corruption and the transnational criminal organizations we call cartels are dealt with.

How do we best deal with them? These are the kind of things we need to be thinking about. Brandon, I'm going to throw out something that I think probably sounds crazy to a lot of folks, but you're obviously thinking very deeply about this and how we eventually could solve this problem. I go back to a book I read a long time ago called Supermob by Gus Russo. It tells a story of actually a Jewish lawyer who kind of pulled together all the criminal syndicates in the U.S. in the 30s, 40s, and 50s

and kind of organize their finances. The result of that, what he did was actually transform a lot of those organizations into a lot of the biggest companies we know today, companies like Hilton Hotels, MGM, so forth and so on. Given the scope of these cartels, their finances, their power,

Is it possible to shut them down or does Mexico need to start figuring out how you integrate them into a legal economy and move them from illegal operations into legal moneymaking?

Well, okay, so this is, you know, we get into an interesting thing. Most of the cartel people I know, the former cartel people I know, were young guys raised in a society where they were very poor, they had no opportunity,

Their mother was spending her time washing other people's underwear. Their sisters were no doubt going to get sexually assaulted and taken by some criminal group. Horrible situation. And then someone comes and says, hey, you want to make $500 a month? You want to be powerful? You want your mom to not have to wash people's underwear anymore? You want to have a vehicle? You want a gun? You want to have nobody mess with you? You want to have economic security for your family? And the young guy's like, yes, I do.

When that young guy got to a place in life where he could have other opportunities, yes, there are some psychopaths who want that lifestyle, but most people don't. And they go, you know what? I'm going to take this other opportunity. And they try to start getting away from that lifestyle. So...

The ability of cartels to function as they currently do in Mexico is completely dependent on them having vast swaths of young men, and women in some cases, but mostly young men, to pull from and have no other opportunities. That's where you get into how do you get to a point where Mexico can have opportunities and these communities can have them. And you get to that point by...

dismantling the criminal groups who are preventing the economic development in the first place and the corrupt politicians they're tied to. You know, everyone talks about going after a cartel boss. Okay, go after El Chapo. But El Chapo's not the problem.

here the part of the problem problem is all of the other people help top of connected with the business leaders the attorney attack the final here uh... politicians and uh... the you know that head of mexico former head of mexico uh... the pet uh... you know that uh... department those kind of people are the will institutional problem and the cartel head is really just

one of the pieces of the pie. If you're looking at a pie, he's one of the pieces, a very significant piece, but he's not the only piece of the pie. And what we do as a country, we kind of play into it, is our State Department goes after the cartel head, and it leads all of those other people in

in place. And they just, like, put a new cartel head in there, right? Fill that piece of the pie back up with a new piece of pie. And we just keep leaving the overall corruption problem alone. Even recently, during the Trump administration, we had arrested

You know, since Pueblo, Mexico's former secretary of defense, who was way behind most of the cartels, the drugs that came through Mexico. And then we released it because of political concerns, geopolitical concerns, like with China and others. We released them. And we, you know, we let it go. And so...

It's a complex issue, but ultimately, if we don't go after the people behind the cartels and the people leading the cartels, we're not going to be able to create a scenario where other people in Mexico who are not psychopaths can actually turn what they're doing into legitimate businesses. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense. I mean, look at what happened to the Italian-American community.

When they first began to enter here, there was a lot of organized criminal activity. Once there were more opportunities for the most brilliant people in the Italian-American community, they became neurosurgeons or they became attorneys or they became other doctors or they became accountants.

They became legitimate people, legitimate business money-making ventures for themselves and careers instead of a life of crime because they had those opportunities that were available to them. And that's what ultimately we can talk about how heavy-handed the word of Elliot Ness is once. And ultimately what changed that culture was

was the fact that there weren't these opportunities available to the most brilliant minds. And that's the kind of stuff we have to start talking about. I know it doesn't sound as sexy and as much of a political slogan that fits on a bumper sticker to have these deeper conversations, but we actually have to have them if we want to fix the problem. And if we want to fix the problem in our country, in our communities, if we don't want a reservoir of fentanyl coming in, I mean, I don't know any family

who haven't been either touched personally by a loved one, overdosed on one, sent to them, or knows a family that they're close to who has, right? In this country. It is a major problem, and if we want to do something about that, we have to have these deeper conversations. And there's just not a lot of people having them. You guys are having them. I appreciate that you're having this conversation.

But most of the time, the way conservative media does it is we have one minute hit on Fox. And you're not going to get this conversation out there in a one minute hit on Fox or a two minute study. We only unfortunately have a minute and a half before we have to wrap up our program here. But real quick, one of the things and I've studied Mexican history a little bit.

But you have a history, and frankly, the colonial history of Mexico was incredibly damaging. And you have a history of bandit worship where traditionally in Mexican history, the good guys were the bad guys. So how do you turn that around? Well, you turn that around, like I said, you have a people who have historically been

The authorities that be have historically been very bad. You know, they've experienced a very bad form of, not that our government's great, to be honest with you, but in relative terms it is, in comparison. They have that history. And so what you begin to do is go after the worst offenders, right? And then you begin to provide opportunities for,

to those people. And you have to just let that kind of sort of stuff out in time as what happened in the Italian American community, as what's happened in other nations. I mean, we could go through a host of nations in the world that have done better than others after colonialism. Fantastic. Brandon Darby, follow him on Twitter at Brandon Darby. We appreciate you being on the program. Broken Potholes will be back next week live on air, but tune in for our podcast only segment coming up.

Welcome back to the podcast-only segment of Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. In the studio with us as always, the irrepressible Kylie Kipper. Kylie, nice pickup on that last guest. Brandon Darby was fantastic. Thank you. He was good. And I appreciated my point to him about the conservatives is we have a segment of the conservative base that feels, well, if you build a wall, this solves everything. And-

It doesn't solve everything. No. And the thing I appreciate about Mr. Darby, as a person who's actually been living this since 2013, I think he said, he understands the complexity to it. I was also shocked that he said it's fixable. I mean, I expect sometimes you say, oh, hell no. It's burning down. I mean, he was much more optimistic about Mexico.

than our previous guests about universities, which I don't, which I think can be, which for example, I think public schools be turned around by parents. I'm not even putting in conservatives, moderates, parents just taking control of school boards. Right. Just go take back your day at school. I disagree with him on that. I do too. But Mr. Darby, yeah, it's fixable. Which is fantastic. It's fascinating because you don't hear that from almost anybody. But he sees it. You know, you and I have talked about this before. Um,

The Mexican people, those families that come here, they're the one demographic group that still believe in the American dream. That's why they come. Oh, they deeply believe in the American dream. And I'm glad to see them transitioning over to conservatives and Republican Party because they are entrepreneurs by nature. They are a deep-held belief of family. Well, I know this will be shocking to some people, but four years ago we pretty much stopped talking about deporting people.

Yes, we did. I mean, you can talk about building the wall and border security and controlling immigration all you want. That doesn't bother them. But when you talk about deport, you're getting into trouble. We stopped talking about deport. And all of a sudden that movement is happening. And Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, are coming over. And you're right. They align with conservatives pretty much across the board. Right. No. So I appreciate him understanding the complexity to it. And there's many tentacles involved.

In Mexico, they're a problem. And as he said, you know, we all have Netflix. We watch the what's what are the shows? Narcos, you know, about we go after Choupo or these people. But there's just so many more people. There's judges, there's attorneys, there's the accountants who handle the taxes. Right.

So he's wonderful, and we really need to have him on the show more. I think our audience and us will learn a lot from his reporting. Yeah, I definitely want to have him on for the full hour program at some point here. I would actually like to have every candidate for governor in the state of Arizona talk to him for an hour. Yeah, no, me too. I mean, I think this would change the conversation a little bit.

Well, you know, it's fascinating just to get a little bit of a different perspective outside of law enforcement, outside of traditional media. And Breitbart has clearly given him a lot of room to explore. Well, and kudos to Breitbart because you would not have the type of freedom he has with any other paper. And I know everybody's always on Breitbart about X, Y, Z. But I again, I was quite stunned by it. Me too.

Me too. And it was refreshing. Yes, absolutely it was. And Breitbart has allowed him to cover it the way he sees cover it and understand the complexities of it. So kudos to somebody I'm going to be following a lot more on his writings and so forth. Yeah, I am definitely going to be paying attention to what he puts out. And I love the part about the ISIS trading cap. There's not an ISIS trading cap. But we do, and that's the other thing too, and I hate it. The press –

You know, I don't know what to call them. Corporate press, legacy media. I don't have to call them. But let's just call them cable news. They're so quick. Looks like a school shooting. Within 30 minutes, they have some assumption why somebody did X. Right. And we just got to stop it. You got to take a deep breath. Pretend you're back.

in the 1970s where you're not going to know the full, you're not going to start getting a bigger picture until the next morning when it drops on your doorstep. They just, they need to start doing this more. We do. Nuance is important. I mean, you know, again, I met yesterday with the head of DPS was talking about these issues, about actually the fracturing of the Sinaloa cartel that's leading to a lot more violence along our border here in Arizona. You know, but one of the things that

I think we do too often in this country is look for U.S.-based solutions or money-based solutions rather than really trying to go and frankly do what China is doing and help build up some of these other countries. I mean, this is another part with conservatives that drive me nuts. So if you and I went to any precinct meeting

Boy, most of those precinct captains and things of that nature would say, you know, we're spending 10 percent of our budget on giving money to foreign countries. It's not true. No, it's not close to being true. But the reality is that's how China is doing their footprint without even firing a bullet. Right. And we don't have to understand. And this is where I guess some people call me an internationalist. You have to build up your diplomatic corps. You have to do these things if you want to keep.

I would ask people whether they think those dollars are more important or a future guided by the U.S. and the West or one guided by China. Exactly. Or the rekindling of a true Cold War. We're sort of

propping up that way. We're there, but not to that point yet. No. And you can, it's like, and I would argue, like Brandon said about Mexico is fixable. I think it's fixable still. But unfortunately, we have Keystone cops in the White House right now. The previous administration didn't want to participate in any of it. I'm sorry, folks, that's a big role for an administration. And I would add one other thing there. In the age of giant world-spanning corporations...

Right.

Correct. Correct. You know, it's really interesting. I've said before, and I say lots of things on this program to get myself in trouble with, but I've said before, honestly, I think the worst thing the U.S. ever did to Mexico was give it back. Because there was a time you had U.S. generals camped in Mexico City having conquered the country. When I was in high school, I had this history professor, Professor Callahan, and he was liberal. Right.

But we went back and forth all the time. And after the end of every essay I wrote in class, I put, we should have kept Cuba. Right. Right.

I believe that to this day. Oh, no, look, I think we should invade and take Cuba right now. I mean, I literally, folks, I'm not being facetious. This isn't a joke. I know we're laughing. Jamie, here's your clickbait for this week's social media. Yes. Chuck and Sam should have kept Cuba, and Sam's going a step further and saying, no, we just need to go do it now. No, yeah, absolutely. Look, you kill the Castros, you get rid of all of them, and then you throw a giant, giant mojito-fueled street party...

And that population is happier than clams. Right. I agree. I agree. I think something political had an article yesterday, the day before I found interesting talking about Ducey running for Senate. And I just think this is a press fantasy that's never going to happen. It's a press and lobbyist fantasy. You know, here's you and I talked about this with Ducey yesterday and.

I like Ducey. I think he's been a pretty good governor. Even folks I know who don't love Ducey, I like he's done COVID pretty well. It's been a tight rope, but he's done what he's done. But he's been fine. They always act like Governor Ducey is some moderate. There's nothing he's governed that way. Now, by training, he's an accountant. And you and I have talked about this.

You know, he's not preaching fire and brimstone, but they always act surprised whenever Ducey gives a state of the state as a conservative agenda, which he does every state of the state. They're like, oh, my goodness, what's he running for? That's what he believes.

Well, and this was, I thought, his strongest state of the state that he's done. And I was incredibly appreciative of the things he said. I think in general, he's done a good job. I disagree with him on some of the COVID stuff. Well, of course you do. And it's like if we want to agree with a politician or an elected official 100 percent, we should run ourselves. Well, that's right, because otherwise you're talking to a liar. I mean, if you're talking to a politician who's telling you everything you want to hear, you're talking to a liar. Exactly. So, you know, so Politico did this article and –

People are saying he's going to run. I just don't. I would be that would be my biggest surprise this year, frankly. I don't see it. And I think the electorate, as well as he's done, I think they're ready for and they're ready for new. Yeah. And that doesn't mean he can't come do it in two years or four years. Right. But I have a hard time believing a governor who's still navigating covid.

who wants to leave with a 50% plus approval, I think, and who's heading the RGA has time to say, you know what, I'm going to run for governor too. I mean, senator too. Yeah. I don't see it. I don't see it. Now, one last thing before we wrap up today, Chuck, is I'm going to – I guess I've risked my reputation already, but I'm going to risk getting us thrown off of every platform this program is on except this radio station, which isn't airing this portion of the program.

I still can't believe it. Project Veritas, which I did not know. And I just recently learned. I mean, they get sued all the time and I was always a little skeptical of them. But the fact is they've won every lawsuit, every single one. They now, when they do videos, they put out the full unredacted video. They had a report that they got from a whistleblower inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on COVID.

on the origins of COVID, on the government's response to COVID. And it is perhaps the most damning document I have seen in a long, long time. I think my biggest disappointment with the journalist during COVID is

It's the fact that they have just not focused like a laser on the origin that it came from a lab. Look, I understand their hand-wringing about hospital numbers. I get all that. They're scared. They see these numbers. They're talking within a bubble. I have a friend who's a nurse. She sent me this text this morning. She's working 14 hours a day. There's five, six nurses short. There's no breaks. There's no food breaks. I mean, she's exhausted. She said...

Is this what I went to school? Did I make the wrong career choice was what she wrote. Right. So, you know, I've never faulted them or elected officials, especially in the beginning, who took certain ways. Right. It doesn't mean I had to agree with it, but I didn't fault. I could understand. But the fact that they continue to really ignore and not put their resources on this, because I'm telling right now.

I truly believe it came from a lab. Now, the question is, was it nefarious or not? Right. Right? And I'll say, I'll get in the benefit of doubt. It came from a lab.

The wrong thing happened. Right. Period. And bad things happen when you start playing with that. Tear in some researcher's suit. They got it and started spreading it. It doesn't have to be a deliberate release. Oh, and I think they're silly for just not even – you know, they always want things to be fit in this nice little tidy pot. It's not mutually exclusive that, A, it came from the lab and then it wasn't for nefarious purposes. But what you see in that document that I think is perhaps more pernicious than anything else is two things. One –

I mean, obviously, they pretty much know it came from a lab. But two, you have in that document all the scientists, Fauci, his little group, saying, look, we have to suppress all this information that we have about it because it will damage science.

That is bull crap. Fauci needs to be terminated. Even if you're Biden and you love Fauci, sky's falling. You've got to say he is not a good messenger for this anymore. If Fauci worked for any corporation in America, he would be fired because they're saying he's not reaching the consumers. They're not listening to his message anymore. If he was an influencer, which is what he is, let's call him what he is. Fauci is the ultimate government-sponsored influencer.

He would be canceled. Yes, because he's not selling any product anymore. Right. Yes, that's absolutely true. Then the other thing from the report that I I have said this over and over, you and I and others have said this. But as the report makes clear, early treatment for covid works well.

And it doesn't even need to be the stuff that's been controversial, although the document itself does say ivermectin, HCQ and interferon work as curatives. And the problem is because they keep trying to do sort of this Kansas City shuffle and get people to focus on other things and not focus on those facts is why you have half of America don't believe anything about it anymore. Right. And so therefore, that dishonesty.

That propaganda is what it is, is just as responsible for costing lives as they can go and attribute it to anything else. Absolutely. You're killing people with it. And even leaving that aside, one of the other things the document touches on is that standard cold care. You know, go take go take your NyQuil with with, you know, the stuff you got to get behind the counter, not the stuff on the main floor. Right. Go take that.

Take vitamin C, take all those things that you would normally do to keep yourself breathing and functioning and not getting a sinus infection from your cold. Those things actually work to help with COVID, too. And you should be doing them if you get it. Let me as we finally show I want to read this text I got from a friend who's a nurse. She obviously got home late and sent this.

Five acute patients today, one that should have been ICU but no room, had one aspirate into his lungs and stopped breathing while another was delirious and pulled off his O2 and desadded to the 60s and almost didn't recover, all while another didn't get his blood pressure pills and was 230 over 99 while bed alarms were going off. Not to mention one of them told me all day he was dying, and he's right.

He probably won't make it through the night. His wife hugged me for 20 minutes as I was trying to leave. Today, I question my career choice more times than I can count. I don't get to eat, didn't get to the restroom until 6 p.m., got one glass of water, and cried in the supply room. I was there over 14 hours today. There's no mental break, no time to breathe, or come down from redlining. There's no time to hydrate, eat, or go to the restroom or sit. It's mentally debilitating, and I come home and just stare at the TV.

And that's, folks, what's going on in the hospitals right now. And by the way, she is a Trumper. I mean, this isn't some progressive nurse. This is a Trumper. No, look, one of the things I think we have to be honest and respectful about what is going on in the hospitals, that Omicron, even though it is less deadly, even though it has lower rates of hospitalization and so forth, is still putting pressure on the system. I would feel a lot better.

I think all nurses, including her doctors, they have to rebel at some of these rules. The idea that if you actively have COVID but have been vaccinated, you can go work in the hospital. But if you're not sick and unvaccinated, you're fired. They need to just hire all those people back immediately. I mean, everyone they fired for not being vaccinated in a hospital, they just need to hire them back immediately because the vaccine, whatever else you can say about it, is not preventing transmission.

Yeah. So so they need to give her a break. They need to hire her colleagues back. Yeah. And she would agree with that. Matter of fact, she got a religious exemption. Right. Right. But again, yeah, I look, I.

We need to get into health care another time. We're out of time here. Yeah, we've got a long program today. But this was a great one. Really would love to have. We've got to get Brandon Darby back on soon. We need to have him on more. And actually, what he needs to write up is a newsletter for candidates to read on Mexico. Oh, jeez. Yes. All right. Well, folks, have a great weekend. Please remember to visit us at brokenpotholes.vote and share us on social media. And we always love to hear your comments. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend. Turn my darkness gold.

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