Noah Rothman on Pro-Palestine College Campus Protests & Congressman Issa's D-Day Remembrance Plane Jump
01:05:43 Share

The 2022 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2024. 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.votewebdomain from godaddy.com. Get yours now.

Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone. In studio with me today, Michelle Ugenti-Rita filling in for Chuck again. Thank you so much, Michelle. And our first guest up, senior writer at the National Review, Noah Rothman. He is the author of Rise of the New Puritans.

fighting back against progressives war on fun and unjust social justice and the unmasking of America. I think fighting back on the war on fun is kind of relevant this week. Right. So, Noah, you probably saw the news out of USC that they have just canceled their graduation over the conflict around the Palestine Israel conflict.

All that sort of thing. These are the same group of kids, if they're graduating in four years, who had their high school graduations canceled in 2020 due to COVID. And now here, this is supposed to be one of the most fun days of their life, and it's canceled once again.

Yeah, it just occurred to me this morning, and I decided to do some research into it and write it up, about the degree to which this generation, this particular class, the class of 2024, has been so tormented over the course of the last five years of their lives.

But they have been deprived of the kind of college experience that certainly their parents paid for exorbitantly through the nose. But they probably hoped to experience. And it's just been one disappointment after another, one promise broken after another beginning in 2020 with the COVID lockdowns.

They began their first academic year in September of 2020 with their school, USC in particular, but a variety of schools, most of them the most prestigious and elite institutions in the country, backtracking off of a promise to open up their schools to in-person education. It was just too dangerous.

And then when they finally did open up in the fall of the subsequent year, 2021, they did so with draconian regulations about being inside, about being six feet away from each other, about not eating exposed to anybody else, about if you have to drink, you've got to do so outside. The regulations that USC imposed on their students were really onerous.

Throughout the next two years, they had scandal after scandal. They cracked down in response to another panic around the conduct of students who actually engage in entertaining and joyful experiences with each other that happened to involve alcohol.

The crackdown on that led to the university to go after Greek life and try to impose restrictions on fraternities, and subsequently 10 of the national fraternities that had associated themselves with USC pulled out of USC, and the administration was very disappointed in that behavior. But what else could they do, given the restrictions they imposed on that life?

And then starting this year, their senior year, it began, the academic year began with the 10-7 massacre in Israel, and the protests erupted days later, having nothing to do with the operation in Gaza. That happened after the protests began. But now it's culminated in the shutting down of their campus and the end of their graduation. So for four years, these feckless administrators, utterly beholden,

to whatever exercise of power they see from restive student groups, however small they may be. They've deferred to those groups. The fragility and the menace that they see on display from those groups has always dictated their terms of the conversation, the decisions the administrators made. And any student who went to these schools just to have some fun and maybe learn something –

They got the short shrift, man. They had a terrible experience, a historically bad experience, owing entirely to a bureaucratic inertia. If I was those students, or most certainly if I was the parents of one of those students, I would be furious. I'd want my money back.

Yeah, I mean, we're going to go get it. Yeah, you're right. And it extends beyond just the protests. But talking to students now, the general campus environment created by wokeism is so restrictive of human behavior, especially for college students. Kids, I don't know how we forgot the kids will say stupid and awful things from time to time.

And that shouldn't be a life sentence. No, of course. Although a certain level of discretion is expected. Right. These are college kids. We're not talking about toddlers. Yeah. Yeah, they're young adults. And certainly behaviors that that verge on the criminal deserve to be prosecuted or that are criminal deserve to be prosecuted. And I don't think there shouldn't be reputational or professional consequences that follow you around.

if you are so miseducated that you believe associating yourself with terrorist organizations, declared so by the State Department, foreign terrorist organizations, these kids who are adorning themselves in the regalia of Hamas, tying these Hamas headbands to their head or waving Hezbollah flags, organizations that have killed Americans not so long ago, recently, then you should have consequences that follow you around for the rest of your life. But that is not what these administrations are doing. In fact, they're deferring to

This mentality that I wrote about in my last book, The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives, War on Fun, which imposes a level of morality, a public morality on public conduct and designed to ensure that all things that have an entertainment value are also didactic.

that they impart some broader social lesson and actually scold those who reject the idea that sort of a moral education should be, and the betterment of your world through your actions should be something that you are expected to do at all times of the day. Indeed, you're supposed to agonize over the condition of the world in which you're in and therefore resolve to commit yourself to making the world a better place in whatever small way you possibly can.

Usually progressives define that as the advancement of the progressive project in whatever forms it takes environmentally, racial rapprochement, the distribution of incomes, what have you. That is a puritanical outlook in the big P sense.

The 1600s, 1700s Puritans viewed art and fun in the very same way. Frivolity, indolence, idleness, all of this was proscribed, and expressions of fun and zeal and happiness all had to serve a utilitarian purpose, because anything else was to give oneself over to malign influences, indeed the devil's influence. This is a species of Puritanism that we see everywhere.

On the left in particular, it shouldn't be surprising because progressivism itself arose from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in mainline Protestant New England. This is just a continuation of a very long trend. It's an interesting point. And what I find most sort of disturbing is the dichotomy between the lack of

reaction from these administrations to students who are breaking the law, who are making campus a very uncomfortable place for their fellow students and professors and so forth, and the punishments they will drop on somebody for, for instance, misgendering another person, which then will carry around for the rest of their life.

Yeah, maybe. Or until this trend subsides. Yes. I can absolutely see that happening. I can see us looking back on this moment of cultural hysteria predominantly on display among one political faction. And looking back and saying, well, that was a misuse of our time and resources. What was fueling that outrage and the outsized consequences associated with it, you say? Yeah.

Does it seem to you like that dam is breaking? Because I do get some indications that maybe the walls are starting to tumble. People have reached their tolerance. They're not so afraid of it anymore.

Yeah, I go back and forth. I'll wake up one day and think that, and then another day I won't. And it has a lot to do with the news cycle. There's always an exogenous event that can breathe new life into this movement. But then in the absence of those exogenous events, it does appear like it's a very fractious, internecine movement that is

predominantly focused on policing the behavior of its own, in part because the people who you're most likely to influence are going to be the people who are predisposed to agree with you. So you see the social justice movement, for example, training at Spire on artists and food truck purveyors and comic book writers and movie makers and people who are usually all

already in the progressive fold, those are the people most likely to genuflect before the movement, which makes sense as an activist. You wouldn't want to train your fire on a hard target that's just going to ignore you. So you

So you have to slink away after three days having demonstrated your own impotence. You're most likely to get the satisfaction you want by drawing blood from somebody who's predisposed to agree with you. So sometimes I think, yeah, this movement is insular and focused on itself and just an Ouroboros devouring itself. Right.

And sometimes I don't. Sometimes it has the power to expand the frontier of its activism. So I don't think we're at peak woke yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if we were there in the not-too-distant future.

So possibly some glimmers of hope on the horizon, but we will see. I want to shift topics a little bit to a piece you had because I think this is misunderstood or not understood as much as it needs to be. Iran's attack on Israel was a political sea change. Can you tell our listeners what the premise of that piece is and why this was such a break from the norms in that region? Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Well, first, in just terms of the unprecedented nature of the event itself, Iran had never executed a direct attack on Israel from its territory. When it did so, it did so spectacularly with over 350 missiles, rockets and suicide drones in wave after wave in this assault. It was only through profound coordination with its partners and allies and technological prowess that Israel didn't suffer a bigger blow.

casualty figure as a result of this attack. And some of the more interesting features of that was the fact that shortly after, during the attack and shortly after the attack, we learned that some of Israel's emerging Middle Eastern partners in the Sunni kingdoms, the Kingdom of Jordan and Saudi Arabia in particular, and the United Arab Emirates,

participated in that defensive operation and did so openly. They're not shielding them. So that wasn't something that they did covertly, which is something you couldn't even imagine happening 10 years ago. Are you surprised? That shocked me. And I was surprised that there was essentially no outcry to that on the Arab street.

Yeah, I thought there would be more, slightly more outcry, but not a ton more, in part because the whole opening, the whole reason why we had the Abraham Accords and the predicate for it, which was a lot of diplomatic intervention prior to 2020 and 2019 by the Trump administration, was that

Iran had had such a free hand in the region under Barack Obama. The Obama administration lent a lot of power to the Shiite militias that Iran controls in places like Iraq in order to extricate U.S. forces from Iraq in 2010, 2011. They were the Iraqi Defense Forces.

Iraqi security forces, rather, were ill-equipped and undermanned. And as we saw in the rise of ISIS, they just dissolved in the face of a threat. And the Obama administration did that, and they allowed the Shiite militias to fill the vacuum. And this terrified the Sunni kingdoms.

Sunni kingdoms don't like Iran. They certainly don't like the Shia militias. And they began to organize themselves into a security alliance around the Sunni states and also to integrate Israel within that security architecture. Flash forward. Now we have the Abraham Accords, and we have something resembling a security alliance between Israel and its erstwhile hostile powers. Saudi Arabia was Israel's foremost ally.

tormentor sponsoring and supporting its terrorist elements. And that is something I don't think enough credit has been given for. We're going to be coming back with more from Noah Rothman in just a moment. Folks, stay tuned. Breaking Battlegrounds back in just a moment.

At Overstock, we know home is a pretty important place, and that's why we believe everyone deserves a home that makes them happy. Whether you're furnishing a new house or apartment or simply looking to update and refresh a few rooms, Overstock has everyday free shipping and amazing deals on the beautiful, high-quality furniture and decor you need to transform any home into the home of your dreams. Overstock, making dream homes come true.

Folks, this is Sam Stone for Breaking Battlegrounds. Discover true freedom today with 4Freedom Mobile. Their SIM automatically switches to the best network, guaranteeing no missed calls. You can enjoy browsing social media and the internet without compromising your privacy. Plus, make secure mobile payments worldwide with no fees or monitoring. Visit 4FreedomMobile.com today for top-notch coverage.

digital security, and total freedom. And if you use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month of service after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Visit 4freedommobile.com to learn more. All right. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Sam Stone. Joining me in studio today, Michelle Lugenti-Rita.

And you know what, folks? Why don't you go join the investors at YRefi and learn how you can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return. That's right, up to 10.25% fixed rate of return on a secure collateralized portfolio. It's a fantastic opportunity to do well for your family by doing good for others. When you invest with YRefi, you're helping students pay off their high-interest loans.

Wonderful opportunity. Check them out. Invest the letter Y, then refy.com or give them a call at 888-Y-REFY24. Okay, we're continuing on now with Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review. When we went to the break, we were talking about a piece you had done. Iran's attack on Israel was a political sea change. We were talking a little bit about the sea change in the Middle East.

But obviously there's more to that story because it touches here in the U.S. as well. So if you can kind of pick up where we left off, Noah, take it away. Yeah, so my supposition in that piece isn't just that Iran's entry into what had been a proxy war, an Iranian proxy war, against both Israel and the West. Iran.

Iranian proxies here involved Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Shiite militias, all of which began attacking both Israel and the United States and its Western partners up to and including the United States, killing three U.S. service personnel members and wounding scores more. Which is an underreported story. People do not realize that those attacks have been going on very regularly. Yeah.

There was a brief lull in February and March, and they've since restarted, unfortunately. But the Houthis never stopped, despite attacks on Houthi targets inside the territory in Yemen that they control. And it's been extremely disruptive and extremely threatening to the American position in the region.

So then Iran enters this war directly, changes the complexion of the war in the Middle East, has absolutely no effect, however, on the protesters who are making life miserable for American students on college campuses from coast to coast. And that's where I think the change of everything happens.

does apply to the United States because it has sort of washed over these demonstrators in a way that is really distasteful. The entry into Iran, first of all, Americans don't like Iran. Most Americans don't like Iran. Most of the planet doesn't like Iran. And we see the protesters redoubling their efforts to

to go after the Israeli government and to force their institutions to divest, even as the focus of the world has shifted from the operations that are ongoing in the Gaza Strip to the prospect of a regional war that would most certainly involve U.S. partners and could involve the U.S. directly.

And these protesters seem utterly indifferent to the circumstances that they're protesting against to a degree that I think discredits their cause in ways that they previously had avoided. Now, I've been suspicious of these protests from the beginning because I don't think they're they're protested.

There are arguments and their cause and what they marshal in support of their accusations against Israel are valid or well supported. But if you're not especially well initiated into the subject, you might assume that they're correct just based on what you see on the television screen every night. I don't think that's necessarily true after Iran entered this conflict.

It has become something much more conceivable to the average American mind who doesn't follow foreign policy, especially closely. Iran attacks U.S. ally. Iran has been attacking the United States and killing Americans for years. And now we have college kids on college campuses adorning themselves in the regalia associated with terrorist groups loyal to Iran and in support of.

of a cause that Iran is actively prosecuting militarily on the battlefield. They have positioned themselves not as anti-war demonstrators, but as pro-war demonstrators. They're just on the other side. Right.

And that brings us to another piece you did recently, the biggest lie fueling the anti-Semitic student uprising. What is the biggest lie, but also some of the others that are behind it that you were kind of just alluding to? This appears from the outside, if you're familiar with it, to be one of the most uninformed protest movements in recent history. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. No, I thought it was especially depressing because every once in a while you'll catch a glimpse of these college students, you can't call them kids, they're young adults, but college students mourning the extent to which they have been so miseducated.

woefully undereducated about the subject matter they're protesting. And it is almost always the case, and it's usually these elite institutions, the prestigious, most prestigious higher learning environments in this country, where you have these demonstrations, these poorly educated students who offer themselves up as cannon fodder,

subsequently experienced the consequences associated with their actions. Either they're arrested, maybe processed, maybe not, or they experience administrative consequences from the schools that they're disrupting. And then into the breach, rush the faculty that had previously held the hang, hung back, let

Let the students do the dirty work for them. And then they fill the void and they assume the mantle of the legitimacy of these noble protesters who are under attack by these institutions, these administrations. And it's so painfully obvious what we're watching here is the prosecution of parochial professional jealousies at the collegiate level.

at these protests, at these faculty members, who are themselves already quite powerful, given their occupations and the stations they occupy, that they just want more power. Their goal here is to assume and amass as much power as possible from the institutions they already control, but just don't control quite enough. And they're using these students as just chaff.

to take some of the flack, to take the slings and arrows, and then lay the groundwork for them to enter into the conflict when it's already engaged. It is a vanguard. It is Marxian in that sense, or perhaps more accurately, Leninist. Right. Because it demonstrates – these are the tactics –

That were deployed by Bolsheviks. And this is not some sort of a calumny. This is a direct historical analog, one with which I think every one of these professors is intimately familiar because they're probably fellow travelers themselves to some extent or another. The protesters on the ground certainly are. They make no bones about it.

So I would imagine that what we're witnessing here is, um, a very Marxian power play and the students themselves are mere pawns in a broader game that the, that they will not benefit from, but the professor at Shrilt certainly believes it will. And it's just tragic. We, we have only about two minutes left here. Uh,

Folks, you can follow Noah Rothman on Twitter at NoahCRothman, also at NationalReview.com. Noah, what should people be looking for coming up in the next few weeks around these issues or others that are potentially going to be at the front page of the paper?

Good Lord, I don't know. Sorry, I threw the tough one at you. Yeah, I certainly can't predict the future in that sense. But what we have been seeing, I mean, inshallah, what we have been seeing is mounting successes on the battlefield by Israel.

in its effort to pacify the parts of the Gaza Strip that control having removed Hamas from most of the Gaza Strip. And indications that the population is turning on Hamas somewhat. That's right. Well, we saw a piece in the Financial Times today which illustrated that, citing data

from local pollsters and also on anecdotes from on the ground people who are Gaza Strip residents, current or former, who are more bold in their criticisms of the regime that has so tormented them. Hamas rules with an iron fist and reliably meets out consequences to anybody who speaks out against its rule. But as they lose control, we've begun to see them becoming more bold. Mm-hmm.

And so, yeah, I suspect, and this is another reason why the protesters are so divorced from reality, but I suspect that will continue. And if that doesn't change any of the complexion of the protest against Israel, I think it would only further demonstrate that this has very little to do with Israel and everything to do with a broader hostility towards the West and its values. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Noah Rothman. We really appreciate having you on the program. Look forward to having you back in the future. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back in just a moment.

All right. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your Sam Stone in studio with me today, Michelle Ugenti-Rita. But folks, do you think I mean, just with everything's going on in the country, do you really want Big Brother and Big Tech spying on everything you read, send and say on your phone? Because frankly, they are.

That's why we have partnered with For Freedom Mobile. Listen, folks, visit forfreedommobile.com today. You can get top-notch coverage. You get real digital security and total freedom.

It is a secure phone. That is something you are not getting from the Apple Store or Verizon or any of those others, folks. So we go to 4freedommobile.com today. That's the number 4freedommobile.com. Use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. You get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Okay, Michelle. Yes. Real quick. Okay.

There was an article that came out in the New York Post today that I still have sort of not stopped laughing about because, you know, it's entirely true. And obviously they have to deny it like crazy. And it even says it in the article, the problem they're dealing with. But the piece is titled Inside the Failed White House Coup Against Press Secretary Corinne Jean-Pierre.

And she is awful. I mean, she is a terrible press secretary. And this is not like Jen Psaki had a couple of wrote phrases. Yeah. But she at least generally knew like the issue she was talking about. She had some clue.

You know, I imagine you want to obviously be prepared, but you got to be able to riff, right? You got to be able to be in the moment and play off of the questions and redirect. You have to understand the issues. You have to have a deep comprehension. Haley McEnany was great, right? I mean, there's been great press secretaries and they make a huge difference. And here we have a wooden dementia ridden president. Anyway.

Anyone can read. I mean, you might as well just put the talking points up on a whiteboard or something. So the central problem of this article, according to the reporter's source, is that she doesn't know anything about any of the issues, doesn't put any time in on them, and then just reads the notes that she's given. Right. My favorite part, though, is that she thinks she's doing an amazing job. You know, here's my thing about this.

This is totally unsurprising to me, that fact, because she is a DEI. She is a DEI hire. She has spent her whole life coming up through this. We used to call it CRT. Then that became a bad thing. So Democrats changed the name to DEI. Now that's a bad thing. So they'll change the name to something else. But when you've come up in that system and you are particularly a woman of color and in her case, a gay woman of color, you're

It does not matter what ridiculous drivel drops from your mouth. It is treated as if it is the wisdom of the ages. So the fact that she is thoroughly unaware of her deficiencies is the least surprising thing in that piece. What's the most? That it was a failed coup? Yes. Yes.

That is the most like here's the basically two things. One, I found funny and not surprising also was that they're like, well, Joe doesn't really have an opinion on this. The president. Right. Like, yeah, because he's not aware. Right. Right. He's not with us. Right. Right. So that wasn't surprising, except that it's sort of profound.

But yeah, the White House chief of staff wants to get rid of the press secretary and they can't just do it. A press secretary who's evidently very terrible. And the longevity of these press secretaries, you know, is short lived. And she's she's hit that mark. Yeah. It wouldn't be inconceivable that she would be moving on. No. And she was apparently offered the presidency of Emily's List, which is a very lucrative and, you know.

standing position for Democrats, the pro-abortion lobby. But this is everything about the Biden White House. Incompetent and they can't get rid of it because they're afraid that their staffers are going to revolt. Right. Right.

Well, because their staffers are probably incompetent. I mean, there's some protectionism probably going on. Oh, there absolutely is. OK, we have just a minute before we go to break. But I got to bring this up because you've been so lovely to guest host for us numerous times. You're also running for office. Oh, yes, absolutely. ElectMichelle.com. But yeah, I'm running for office for Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. They're infamous. You know, nobody knew that this level of government existed. But because of their epic failures, they're

There's now an opportunity to clean house on the board and get conservative leadership. It's sort of been over the years a sinecure for politicians who didn't do a whole lot and just kind of let staff run the show. That's not happening anymore because of their, again, their failures, whether it's on taxes, regulatory reform, elections. People have had enough. So the race is on July 30th, and I'm looking forward to beating my opponent.

Which he was an appointee. He's an appointee that does what he's told, brought to you by his handlers, takes his marching orders from the establishment. And that's not in line with my district. It's a conservative district that wants independent, thoughtful leadership and delivers and has results. I mean, why is that too much to ask nowadays? It's not, although I've got to bite my tongue here right before we go to break because this is folks. This is how incestuous local politics is.

Her opponent and I are in a fantasy football league together and have been for like a decade. I love that you brought that up. ElectMichelle.com. Go visit it. Make a donation. Yes, indeed. And it's a critical race. These local races are far more important in many ways than the presidency and some of these other things for you. It can really impact your government this way. Absolutely. Okay. Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be coming back with more in just a moment.

At Overstock, we know home is a pretty important place, and that's why we believe everyone deserves a home that makes them happy. Whether you're furnishing a new house or apartment or simply looking to update and refresh a few rooms, Overstock has everyday free shipping and amazing deals on the beautiful, high-quality furniture and decor you need to transform any home into the home of your dreams. Overstock, making dream homes come true.

Folks, this is Sam Stone for Breaking Battlegrounds. Discover true freedom today with 4Freedom Mobile. Their SIM automatically switches to the best network, guaranteeing no missed calls. You can enjoy browsing social media and the internet without compromising your privacy. Plus, make secure mobile payments worldwide with no fees or monitoring. Visit 4FreedomMobile.com today for top-notch coverage.

digital security, and total freedom. And if you use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month of service after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Visit 4freedommobile.com to learn more.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, if you haven't been to Y Refi, you need to go to their website right now. Check them out. Invest the letter Y, then refy.com. Learn how you can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return on a secure collateralized portfolio. When you invest with Y Refi, you're doing well for yourself and your family by doing good for others, helping students pay off their high-interest college loans. Again, enormous opportunity for you, a fantastic opportunity.

opportunity to do well for others. So check it out. Invest the letter Y then refy.com or give them a call at 888-Y-REFY24.

Okay, we're continuing on now. Our next guest, someone we are very happy to have joining the program, Congressman Darrell Issa represents the people of California's 48th Congressional District. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee, House Foreign Affairs, and House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. And he recently had a pretty cool experience. As someone who's 48, Congressman, how did your knees handle jumping out of a plane at this point? Yeah.

Oh, jumping doesn't hurt the knees at all. It just says, "Landing?" It says, "Landing, stop." Yeah, it's landing. No, it's one of the truisms about paratroopers is they don't stand up when they land. They drop and roll. So your whole body absorbs it. So it's the secret to landing 20 feet of a jump effectively is the speed you're going and not ending up breaking anything, hopefully.

Tell us a little bit about what you were doing and why. And then there was a little incident, apparently, in the jump, and I want to touch on that there. But tell us what's going on. Well, what's going on is that 80 years ago, on June 6th and 7th, a massive armada, the largest in history, descended on the beaches of Normandy. But simultaneously, hundreds and hundreds of

small aircraft, what we thought of as DC-3s or C-47s, brought in paratroopers who landed behind the enemy lines and began securing bridges and so on. So 80 years later, at Normandy, on June 5th, 6th, and 7th, eight of us veterans, in addition to thousands of others, including a few remaining World War II veterans, will celebrate the liberation of France and Europe.

And so you're going to be jumping there on that day? You're jumping into Normandy on those days? Yes.

Eight members of Congress who have all re-qualified. We were all paratroopers in our prior military service. We will jump out of a C-47 and land there where the 101st Airborne landed and sort of relive that along with several hundred other, almost exclusively veterans. Perhaps no World War II veteran will jump this year, but as

As late as five years ago, there was at least one 97-year-old who made the jump, you know, literally 75 years after he had done it before. That's amazing. Incredible. Now, as part of this jump, the story I read said you hit the ground between two airplanes. Yes.

Well, the landing zone was, in fact, an airport. So we had runways, taxiways. And yes, it was very important to miss the airplanes because it's not you might get hurt. It's the cost of the airplane. Yeah, right. Right. And we're spending enough money already. No need to add to it.

No, absolutely. I think for all of us who have served in the military and all those who have, and there are so many who had family a generation or two ago who served in World War II, those 10 million, almost 11 million, mostly men, who went away to war and died,

more than 500,000 didn't come home. That's America's greatest generation and this is probably the last time to celebrate these individuals while they're still alive. And I'm fortunate enough to actually have a World War II veteran, I was at his 99th birthday,

who not only was in World War II, but he went on to be one of the most unsung aviation heroes of the Korean War, shooting down six MiG-15s that were piloted by Russians over North Korean airspace. So these people are with us, but only for a little time longer. It's such an important opportunity to be able to spend some time with those folks. In meeting them, one of the things that I've found astounding is

is how often those folks came back here to this country and they became the backbone of the growth that led to Reagan's morning in America. They were the backbone of the Industrial Revolution here as it continued to move forward, creating businesses, working in key positions in industry across the country. They were really forged in fire and they came back stronger than ever.

They absolutely did. This generation knew the importance of freedom. The vote we just had in Congress, which seemed so difficult to support our allies under attack, Israel being attacked by Iran and Ukraine being invaded by Russia.

that generation wouldn't have thought twice because they went and gave far more than just money. They gave their blood to make people free. And that's an important part of, I think, what we're all seeing here today is that these reminders are important. And like I say, the eight of us who are jumping and another probably dozen members of Congress will go there to honor those who gave so much.

You know, one of the one of the interesting things, I think, in this conflict and you just brought up the vote is that generations now we've had a couple of generations who haven't had the experience of having a global adversary who don't understand perhaps the geopolitical stakes that we're facing right now. Right.

And kind of shrink from some of the sacrifices that are being asked. Particularly, I'm talking about with all these protests and everything that are happening on college campuses. I've talked to some students who really disagree with what some of their peers are doing. And they say, but I'm afraid to speak out. I'm afraid to sacrifice my future at that institution. And yet we're talking here about generations, kids the same age. Yeah.

Who went off en masse and had many of them had to sacrifice their lives to protect the freedom and future of the world. Do we need what do we need to do to start reinstilling that sort of belief, both in our party, but in the country that there are really things that we should stand for?

Well, I don't think you can, and this is going to sound less than optimistic, but I truly am optimistic. I don't think you can force people to care. I think you can inform people, and that's what's happening right now. For every protester who says, I'm Palestinian and ignores the thousand Israelis that were shot in their beds and their homes were blown up with them in it, there is...

another person who is awakening to anti-semitism who's a waking awakening to uh... what it's must be like to have not just uh... people who hate you on your border but you know the iranians who since nineteen seventy nine have created an exported a culture of hate all of that is is being learned because of these terrible event

I grew up and went to college. I went to Kent State right after the shootings there and the riots that occurred in the 69-70 timeframe. I was a ROTC cadet right after that. And so I got to see that there were people on both sides.

I was wearing my cadet uniform. Some others said, "Oh, I really don't want to do it. I just want to quietly get commissioned." There'll always be those who decide to be out front and those who decide to watch others. But we are awakening. I'm thrilled that there is so much debate. I'm not happy with some of our leaders joining in unpatriotic activity.

I'll take it all. And you know what? I think we're going to come out better for it because the Afghan withdrawal left a lot of people demoralized. A lot of Americans say, what's the use after we walked away after 20 years with an abysmal failure? But

I personally believe that we can recover from it just like we recovered from Vietnam. And that's what we're in the process of doing, saving the world again, as we did in World War II and as we have been the stabilizing force ever since.

One of the things I think a lot of people don't understand about that withdrawal is how bad the timing of it was, because we actually kind of were finally succeeding in our mission of restabilizing that country until Joe Biden's disastrous pullout.

Well, Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every decision he's ever made in foreign affairs. It's just that he wasn't in charge before. You know, I had an opportunity to work with him when he was a senator and when he was vice president. And it was it was frustrating because you'd have to say things to someone who obviously was well read. You'd say.

Don't you understand? Leaving a few thousand troops in Afghanistan is similar to the 25,000 that are still in South Korea because there is still an enemy there and we must still prevent that enemy from taking over. That's the mistake of Vietnam, the success of the Korean conflict where we have a democracy, by the way, a democracy that's giving generously to Ukraine and helping in this effort.

That democracy exists because we didn't withdraw even after the conflict ended. We said, no, we're going to stay there because, as Reagan said, trust but verify. We have an agreement with North Korea and we have no belief that they will keep that agreement if we let our guard down. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting.

That was one of the greatest strategic policy blunders in recent years because also now with everything that's going on in the Middle East, having Bagram and those air bases would have been really valuable right now, right? Yeah.

The geography of how long it takes to get there to see what's going on and how long it takes to get in the immediate surrounding area, we now have blind spots from the standpoint of close-in looking. And to be honest, satellites are great.

but they don't take the place of a raptor or a predator going in and really knowing what's going on in a house. Yeah, absolutely. I want to shift topics. We have just about three minutes before the end of the program here, but a news article recently came out. San Diego is now the top border region for migrant arrivals. How is that impacting your constituents? And I mean, obviously, San

As Texas steps up enforcement, as other states do, the flow shifts and California becomes an easy target. Absolutely. We've always been the special interest target. More Chinese, more people of interest, including people on the terrorist watch list, are likely to try to slip through the San Diego region, either by water.

or by land. But what really makes us so terrible, we, San Diego, because of Duncan L. Hunter, who served for many years in Congress, he was the founder of the wall. He was somebody who pushed to get it done. It was originally built by reservists and National Guardsmen.

uh... we became the safest area the hardest to penetrate and we would still be that way except unfortunately the gates are open and all they have to do is show up and they're welcomed in and now that they have that our fence and our whole system does us no good and that's

That's the shame of it all. San Diego was the safest large city. We are no longer that way. We are like most of the border cities. We're swamped with homeless. We're swamped with fentanyl and other drugs. And we are definitely swamped with crime.

You bring up the homeless, Congressman. This is one thing. Democrats never seem to be even willing to acknowledge the fact that when you import millions and millions of people in a few years' time, while you also have a housing crisis, a fentanyl crisis, you're making homelessness worse every single day you leave this border open.

Everything that's being done by this administration, and by the way, by my governor here in California, helps push larger and larger homelessness. The influx of people, the high cost of construction, all of that is doing it. And you mentioned fentanyl. Fentanyl killed over 100,000 of our young people, mostly 18 to 40 last year, and it will kill more this year. It is now the deadliest cause of death of our young and young adults. And

And it's only growing and it's growing because we have an open border. Unbelievable. Congressman, how do folks follow you and your work and stay in touch with everything you're doing?

They can go to Congressman Darrell Issa or they can just go to my initials, DEI.com, and it'll take them to... Al Gore may have invented the internet, but I got my initials early. That's good. That is brilliant. I love that. Thank you so much, Congressman Darrell Issa. Really appreciate having you on the program. Folks, Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week, but if you're not already, make sure you're subscribed and you get our podcast segment. You won't want to miss Kylie's

murder and mayhem update this week as always for sam stone for michelle legendaria thank you so much for tuning in the 2022 political field was intense so don't get left behind in 2024 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 your name.vote web domain from godaddy.com get yours now

Welcome back to the podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Your host, Sam Stone, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, joining me in studio today. And first up, the most popular thing we do on this entire program, the Blood, Guts & Gore segment, Kylie's Corner. Kylie, what kind of murder and mayhem do we have today?

Unfortunately, too many. But today there are three different stories that I have. But the first one I'm going to start with is about a athletic director out of Maryland, Dazon Darian. He's being accused of using artificial intelligence, AI, to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and anti-Semitic comments.

So Darian faked the voice of Pikesville High School's principal in response to a conversation the men had about his poor work performance. The principal's concerns included allegations that Darian had paid his roommate $1,900 in school funds under false pretenses of coaching the girls' soccer team.

so darian's response to this conversation was faking his voice um so darian found an audio clip in which it sounded as though the principal was frustrated with black students and their test-taking abilities and despairing jewish individuals and two teachers but after baltimore county detectives found that darian had used large language models such as open ai and bing chat to tell user which is

A system that people can use and it'll tell users step by step on how to create fake media. So all you need basically. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. No, this is a as I read this piece. This to me was was interesting because this is the tip of an iceberg. Right. This is the beginning of a lot of and kind of behavior. In this case, they found it. Kylie, do we have any information on how they found out that he used the the chat GPT or the learning language model to do this?

Yeah. So I'm assuming it all, you know, I'm assuming the principal was like, I actually never said this. They ended up. Yeah. So they ended up sending it to a professor from the University of Colorado, which they didn't. He did say that it contained traces of AI. And then they got a second opinion from the professor at the University of Cal Berkeley. And he also said the exact same thing. But those are going to get harder and harder to detect. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, there's no laws right now on how to try this guy.

So I was going to say, I mean, the laws need to catch up on this stuff. And this is yeah, this is the first of that's happened in the country so far. And so he's out on bond. It was a five thousand dollar bond. And he was actually caught because he was boarding a plane. No, we're not sure where he was going out of Baltimore.

And he was stopped because he packaged his firearm incorrectly, which led officers to see that he had a warrant out for his arrest. Criminals are not that smart. No. It's probably why they're in the business of criminality. Well, I've always assumed that because any smart person who's willing to work hard can make a decent living.

that in general that leaves a pool of idiots to become criminals for the most part, right? Like when you get a smart criminal, they are real trouble. Right, exactly, because they know what they're doing. Right, yeah, which I don't know if we have an update on the Colorado guy, or not Colorado, whatever, the forensic student. Oh, gosh. Oh, Brian Koberger? Yeah, but Kylie's been keeping us up to date on him. He offered an alibi or something? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he offered an alibi that he was stargazing that night and which I did hear a theory, totally a theory that he may have. He was getting his Ph.D. in criminology. So he may have created this entire perfect crime. Right. He may not have been the person that actually murdered them. And he's going to be able to prove possibly that he was actually stargazing at this park, which people are saying has bad service. So they're saying maybe he created this perfect crime, put himself in the middle of it.

And then he's going to use this system to prove how it wasn't him. And it's all just a game for him. Well, who comes? So he's saying someone else committed the murder that then he must have. He organized it. Yeah. He organized it to put himself in the middle as the murderer, although he wasn't the murderer. But he knows he hired to murder them. Yeah. I'm assuming. Yeah. Yeah. Well, see smart criminals. I guess we'll see. Yes. This is a Netflix series.

Oh, this is a multi-season. You get multiple seasons of this show. You do. Yeah. All right, Kylie, what are the other two stories we got? This one, when I came across it, was absolutely crazy. I don't even know how this happens. You're on the podcast. You can use whatever words you want. I know. I always forget that. But anyways, in January of 2022, sheriff deputies were called to Lazy J. Park in Nixon, Texas for reports of an unresponsive man.

According to investigators, the RV park owner checked this man after receiving a call from Holmes Food that one of their tenants did not show up for work for two days. The victim, Brandon O'Quinn Raspberry, was 32 years old, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in his bed. After speaking with possible witnesses, all the leads went cold and this was at this point was a cold case.

This was until two years later on April 12th this year. The sheriff's office received a call from a principal at Nixon Smiley Independent Schools. The principal told investigators that a 10 year old student at their school had threatened to kill another student on the bus the evening prior. When the sheriff's deputy arrived, school officials had told him the student claimed he's already shot and killed a man two years ago.

Investigators say. So an eight year old? Yeah. So he was actually it was a week before his eighth birthday. So he's actually seven. But investigators say that the boy was taken to a child advocacy center where he described the murder in detail. How was he? He was in the woods?

So it was an RV park that his grandfather lived at. And he said that he had taken a pistol from his grandfather's truck and it was unprovoked. He told the officers this was unprovoked. He doesn't even know the man. In the middle of the night, he walked into his RV, saw him sleeping and shot him in the head. Yeah. I...

I think that more than anything, it's one of the things that getting to know like a lot of the police officers at the city of Phoenix, the thing that sears their souls more than anything else is when you meet people and they do, even in their profession, it's still pretty rare, who are truly evil. Yeah, truly born evil kind of. Yeah. Whether it is something where they are psychopathic. Right.

Or they're just – I mean I think we label some people psychopathic who are just bad people. Right. There's a difference. Yeah. Psychopath doesn't emotionally understand the impacts of their actions like a sociopath. Yeah, like a sociopath. They can't understand. They have no remorse. The difference with a psychopath is that they like inflicting pain on others, right? Whereas a sociopath is generally indifferent to that. They just can't relate. Right.

But in talking to them, they said there's another group that kind of goes unreported, which are people who fully understand the impact that they have on others with their actions, but do them because they like doing bad things. That's evil. Yeah. Yeah. So he can't be charged for that crime because in Texas you can't be charged with that type of crime until you're 10 years old. Oh.

but he is in a probation center and they charged him with terroristic threat in connection to that school board incident. With a kid that age, that's a really minor, I mean, they're not going to be in the kind of facility that that boy should be in. I mean, do you think he gets out, blends in with society, then pops up as some lone wolf, you know, mass murderer when he's

18, 25. 30 years from now, if this kid hasn't been sent to jail or killed in something he did, I think you'll have a trail of bodies behind them. You don't kill at that age that indiscriminately and that remorselessly without something being seriously wrong. And being on a path of doing it again. It's just like a serial killer. It's

In the making. I think this to me is if I were a profiler at the FBI, I'd be all over this kid's case learning everything I could about him right now because you may be getting an insight into the earliest development of a serial killer. That's a good – well, it's a terrible one. But it's an interesting story. Crazy one. Yeah. It's insane. But it is morbidly fascinating. Yeah.

which is third okay i have one more story and then i will let you guys you know talk about whatever else you want to talk about well i don't know we're liking talking about this i know okay so this one's actually another disturbing case but this happened out of seattle um

Bruce Menley, he's a high ranking U.S. military official. He's a general practice and emergency medical doctor, a husband. He oversaw Guantanamo Bay's emergency combat medical operations under Bush and Obama. His official title is NATO role three international medical unit commander, and he retired as a captain in the Navy.

He was recently just shot and killed by Seattle police after he was trying to meet up with two young girls, 11 and seven year old, 11 and seven years old at the Double Tree in South Center Parkway in South Seattle. I want to talk about the body cam footage just for a sec, because I feel like we hear all the time about how, you know, people say, why can't cops just shoot him in the leg or use the taser or whatever. Right. So the body cam footage starts with the officers behind a hotel room door. As the door opens, you see the man standing there.

He then grabs his, um, grabs a gun from his jacket. You hear an officer, Thomas, say he tries to introduce himself to the guy, but then quickly gets cut off. He, when he sees the handgun, he goes towards the man, grabs the handgun. There seems to be a tussle and then shots are fired. There's a struggle. Another officer yells, "Gun!" Um, he's trying to hold him down. The officer is then shot. He's trying to get around the other side of the hotel down the hallway.

And then you hear an officer say shots fired, shots fired, suspects down, help the officer. And this all happened within 14 seconds. These incidents, people do not understand how fast they happen. The other thing is the idea the best marksman in the world will tell you that trying to go for leg shots is totally impractical.

Yeah. That's just not a thing. You cannot do that in that circumstance. There's a reason they train you to shoot center mass because that's where you're likeliest to actually get a hit. Yeah. But this is where like I feel the story gets a little odd and gross is prior to this incident. Menly Bruce has already been arrested and released for human trafficking during that incident. Yeah. When was this?

This was, it says, a year prior, a little more than a year before this incident. Human trafficking. Yes, he was also connected. Investigators said that his number popped up in at least two other sting operations, but he was never arrested. When he was arrested a couple of years ago, he had also told the investigators he was arrested in Texas where he was stationed for a similar crime.

Wow. So we have a repeat offender. This guy's a serial rapist of small children and engaging in trafficking them from the sound of it. Yeah. So right now we can. Oh, go ahead. No. Say, you know, I wonder if sometimes like when they get in those situations where they're literally just getting caught, so to speak, red handed, that they aren't also on some kind of like suicide mission. Yeah.

Just because you can make a very good case and people have the majority of police shootings are suicide by cop.

Really? Yeah. What we saw – They're not going to go through the trial. They've been caught now. That's over. Like the gig's up. Or in the case that they're just ready to commit suicide and so they engage in an action where they know there will be a police response and a use of force, right? I mean so if you go and – Because he pulls a gun, right, Kylie? Yeah. Right. Yeah. He pulls a gun. And he's a military. I mean he knows what that means. He knows the response. Yeah. Right. He knows the response. Yeah.

One thing that's interesting, I did talk to an Air Force colonel who said Gitmo was a very bad environment for the people working there because the detainees they had weren't just low-level terrorists. They were people who were connected to enormous international criminal syndicates. Right.

And he said it's very easy to become corrupt in that. So you're in a terrible place. You hate being there. You don't want to be doing what you're doing. Nobody does. Nobody wants – nobody joins the military to be a jailer at Guantanamo. And then you're exposed to these people who have access to millions and millions of dollars and connections all over the globe for criminal activities from drug smuggling to human smuggling, sex trafficking, so forth. He said it's very easy for people to get caught in that kind of thing and

And that they try to keep an eye on it, but they probably don't get enough attention. Yeah. So the child sexual exploitation task force that Seattle has said since 2019, cyber tips have increased 250 percent.

And then the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have received more than 36 million reports of suspected child exploitation in 2023. That is up 29 million reports since 2021. What do they contribute that to? Do they say? That was not reported, but I will look into that and fill you guys in. So, I mean, we're a more sophisticated society, not a less sophisticated society. And then there's more incidences of

Is it just reporting or there's actually an increase of incidences of child pornography? This says reporting, but yeah, I would assume it probably. So it's both. So this is obviously because we've been working on bills around child sex trafficking. I've had to educate myself even more than I did at the city of Phoenix where the Phoenix PD has kind of the lead investigatory role in the state of Arizona for a lot of criminal enterprise conspiracy type things just because they have more resources than everyone else.

The open border. Right. That's the first thing that came to mind. Yeah. I mean, that is a big driver of it. Two, there is more awareness. Right. And there's more focus on it than there was previously. Oh, God. For all the criticisms that have come down around the individuals involved with The Sound of Freedom, the movie about this.

it brought a lot of attention to an issue that didn't have any. Yeah. Right? I mean, and so let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when we're doing that. There should be more focus. So people are now more aware of this, right? The other part of it, as I understand it, is that it has been a very – it has been an industry that the cartels have consolidated. Right.

that it was far more diverse, if you will, and less organized in the past. And now the cartels have taken control of it. Monetizing at a different level, controlling it. Like you said, consolidating it so it's

And also expanding the market by increasing the variety of human trafficking activities. Disgusting. So you hear this stuff at the border about people who are paying $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 to the cartels to get brought here and then they still owe money and they're kept in essentially slavery and indentured servitude. That is a newer model.

Right. Where it's like you're making a down payment on your travel and the travel is not uncomfortable, by the way. So that's one of the things people are not getting. It is actually they offer luxury travel packages where you fly first class into like El Salvador or another Latin American country. You're brought in, you know, luxury buses. You stay at luxury hotels that are specifically for you along the way.

So it is not an uncomfortable process. For some. For some. Yeah. If you're on the poorer end and you're not paying as much, it's a different story. Right. But like Chinese nationals, they'll charge them like 100 grand, 50 on the front end, 50 on the back end. Right. So they've expanded. And one of the things is that if you're not paying them off. Right. There's leverage. Or they're looking for leverage. Right. And then now they have it with young women to push them into this and young boys and girls and boys too. So.

It is a business that has become professionalized in a terrible way. Yes. Well, and it should be met with a level of force that... There's a very good argument to be made that the cartels constitute a clear and present danger to the United States and we should treat them the way we do in Al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. Yeah. Because it's not just...

This smuggling, we know they're smuggling people who are... They've been smuggling people for decades. But the model of it's changed, right? The reach of it's changed. Propensity is changing, and that has to be dealt with... And we know with Iranian and Chinese nationals and Russians, I mean, there are, without any question, agents or sleeper cells that are coming in as part of this, right? I mean, this is...

The singular failure of the Biden administration. And it really is because it wasn't controlled under Trump, but it was close. As a Border Patrol friend said, he made it real easy for us to separate the sheep from the wolves. Now we can't. I mean, inflation, border. I mean, these are the issues. Border inflation. Yeah.

You're creating an economy with more and more people on the edge and more and more desperate. Right. And it's global. COVID had a big impact. People don't realize a lot of these countries that were teetering, that were developing countries on the edge, their economies – And then you shut them down. Yeah. And shut down trade. Right? Right.

And goods get more expensive for them. It has a bigger impact on them. Yeah, the supply chain is extremely expensive now. You've created a lot of desperate people around the globe. Right. And you see it manifest in this kind of way. Okay. We will – I apologize. We're not going to be able to have our sunshine moment here, unfortunately. We're doing this a little bit out of order. We just had an anti-sunshine moment. Yeah, we totally did. But we want to get to –

We filmed, we recorded this out of order and Congressman Daryl Isis is joining us for the final segment of the show now. So we're going to jump straight into that. And I apologize for leaving your segment out of this. Totally fine. It's totally fine. Jenna, just save it for next week. We can do two sunshines. I will. It'll be great. It'll be a super sunshiny moment. Perfect. Okay. Folks, make sure you stay tuned, download, subscribe. Everywhere you get your favorite podcasts, Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air for everyone next week.