A Radical Reset
Our Republic has been converted into a democracy which is just another name for mob rule. The mob is getting what it wants, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, good and hard. One day soon, the entire edifice is going to collapse under its own weight and what takes its place historically will be tyranny. A Radical Reset is the alternative and the system is called Antipolitism. It calls for a new republic based upon merit and not ambition. No parties, no money in politics, no careers in politics, and only serving the public good.
A Radical Reset
Why Both Political Parties Have Their Heads Up Their Asses About Immigration
The immigration crisis at our southern border has become one of America's most divisive political battlegrounds—but what if both sides are missing the obvious solution? Drawing from personal experience living in Southern Arizona and working alongside immigrant communities, I break down why current approaches from both Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally flawed.
When riots break out in Los Angeles with protesters waving Mexican flags and destroying property, it's easy to understand the call for stronger enforcement. Yet the Republican fantasy of "rounding up" 20 million undocumented immigrants ignores basic reality—even the most oppressive regimes in history couldn't accomplish such a feat. Meanwhile, Democrats who dismiss legitimate security concerns or pretend illegal immigration has no negative consequences are equally disconnected from reality.
The solution? A pragmatic "orange card" program that brings undocumented immigrants who arrived before a specific date into the legal system—allowing them to work, pay taxes, and live openly—but without a path to citizenship or voting rights. This addresses Republican concerns about changing voting demographics while recognizing the demographic reality that America's aging population needs more workers to support our welfare state.
For future immigration, I propose unlimited green cards for those who meet three simple criteria: financial self-sufficiency, no criminal record, and good health. This recognizes that Latino immigrants, contrary to Republican fears, often align with conservative values due to their predominantly Catholic, pro-life beliefs.
The missing piece in this puzzle is ending the failed War on Drugs, which has cost over a trillion dollars without stopping the flow of narcotics (even into our prisons). By redirecting those resources toward catching actual violent criminals at the border, we could create a system that works for everyone.
Our immigration debate doesn't need more shouting—it needs adults willing to acknowledge reality and find practical trade-offs. Listen in as I break down why both parties need to pull their heads out of their collective posteriors and embrace solutions that actually work.
Good morning dudes and dudettes. It is me, herbie, your host at A Radical Reset, the home of anti-politism, if you want to know what anti-politism is, which is a republic by lottery based upon merit in its most generic sense, which I know sounds weird, but you can pick up the book A Radical Reset on Amazon by me, herbie K, in Kindle paperback or hardcover. A Radical Reset Okay, the ad's out of the way. I'll throw in a share this with everybody and let's talk about what's going on in Los Angeles and let's talk about immigration again. And let's talk about why both political parties have their heads so far up their asses they can't breathe. Both parties.
Speaker 1:This is one of those cases where nobody's right, okay. So let's start with the immediate issue, which is the protests in Los Angeles themselves. Then let's talk about the underlying causation and what can be done about it, if anything. Okay. So let's begin with what's going on in Los Angeles In that particular case. Listen, when they start rioting and waving the Mexican flag in the United States, they being whoever these people are and I suspect a lot of them are paid by various anti-American groups out of the country I would say and I'm not saying that to be paranoid. It's just that this is the world we live in. That may or may not be true. That's an unfounded allegation, but whether it's true or it's not, waving the Mexican flag and burning Waymo vehicles and throwing rocks down from overpasses at police cars and all the other things they're doing is Trump is 100% right. Local police, by the way, are not designed to handle this kind of thing. But the only police force in the United States that can handle something as big as what's going on in Los Angeles major riots is New York City. New York City has a police force that's structured for that, but in Los Angeles they're just not. And it's completely appropriate for the president to send in the National Guard, and I'll explain why. The Democrats have their heads up their asses on this. But if there is an award for political malpractice in the short term, it would go to the Democrats for being so stupid as to play into Donald Trump's hands. That's all I have to say.
Speaker 1:And of course, I'll tell you what Trump's thinking about. He's not planning an insurrection. Let's not let our left-wing heads explode, any more than we're going to let our right-wing heads explode with stupidity. He's doing this because he remembers the riots that were taking place during the Biden presidency in Portland and in Seattle and in New York City, with the Wall Street nonsense and all. He's just not going to have it.
Speaker 1:And there is a long history of the president calling in federal troops to put down local rioting slash. Call it what you want, Use the words you want. I'm not going to use any of these inflammatory words because they're all just hyperbole. You know, this is not an insurrection, this is a riot. But anyway, having said all of that, he's completely in the right. I mean, let me just think of who I'm thinking of Douglas MacArthur. General MacArthur made his fame, at least, or made his reputation, by leading federal troops to displace people that were squatting on federal property during the Great Depression and the Hoover presidency. I mean, there's a long history of this. There's nothing unusual about any of this, about any of this, and that the Democrats are making an issue out of it is. You might as well just plan to give up power for a very long time with this kind of stupidity.
Speaker 1:But now let's step back from this. I spoke to my solution on immigration a while back and I'll restate that in just a minute for those of you who missed that podcast. But before I get into the solution, or let me say, a better trade-off, because, as Thomas Sowell, the greatest living economist in the United States and I think the world, says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, which is absolutely true, there is a better trade-off here and I will explain what it is again in a minute. I did a few episodes ago, but this is a tiny podcast and it bears repetition. So let's go do that. But before I do that, let me tell you why both sides have their heads up their asses.
Speaker 1:Okay, first of all, I'm going to start with why the Republicans have their heads up their asses. Okay, the Republicans underlying all of this storm and drang is number one. They consistently keep repeating. But the illegal aliens are all criminals because they broke the law to come into the United States. Okay, so let's just throw the hypocrisy flag on that one. Let's pretend we're in a football game. I'm throwing the hypocrisy, the brown bullshit flag of penalty on that one.
Speaker 1:Look, this is not some plot to get Democratic voters Republicans okay, which is I know what you think it is. But people who aren't citizens can't vote, and if they do vote, it's because local authorities are dumb enough to let them without IDs, and that's a whole nother debate. But no citizen is allowed, no non-citizen. It's already against the law for a non-citizen to vote in the United States. Further, if you Republicans are worried that when these people do become somehow magical citizens even though they're illegal and have no path to citizenship, but let's just pretend that magically they were able to vote in elections, I hate to break this to you guys, but Latinos vote Republican as often as they vote Democrat and increasingly more Republican, and I'll explain to you why. And I explain this to you as a person who I speak fluent Spanish.
Speaker 1:I live in Southern Arizona. I've worked around Latinos, legal and illegal, virtually all of my life. During the summers of my youth, I worked in the packing houses of Fresno, loading trucks and picking tomatoes and bell peppers, right alongside illegal aliens by the thousands. I have firsthand experience with this. I know what I'm talking about. They are deeply Roman Catholic people, they are absolutely anti-abortion and they are natural Republican voters. I'm sorry but it's true. And instead of whining about this, they're trying to foist, you know, illegal voting on us.
Speaker 1:If Republicans would simply get over it, as President Trump has to his credit, and embrace those Latinos that are here legally and are able to vote, they increasingly vote Republican. This is not, and this is why the Democrats are stupid. I think there are a lot of Democrats who really do think they're going to create a voter block out of this somehow, some magical way, and they're just as stupid Because as long as they advocate for abortion up until the final month of pregnancy, that you can abort a child up to the point it's coming out of its mother's vagina, then you are going to lose that debate with Latino people and Roman Catholic people and people that are anti-abortion. By the way, I want to make this clear I'm pro-choice, with reasonable restrictions. Just want to make that clear. When I say reasonable restrictions, I think the moment that baby becomes viable, that's it. Time's up. You don't get whether that's 15 weeks or 10 weeks or whatever it is. There's got to be. You know when the baby becomes and I realize that whole argument. I'm not going to go down the abortion train. I'm just pointing out that pro-life voters, anti-abortion voters, are going to be Republican, and that's a lot of Latinos, if not most Latinos.
Speaker 1:So, republicans, calm down, calm down. Okay, that's number one. Number two yes, they both broke the law coming here. But do you really think Republicans pull your head out of your ass here? How are we going to hunt down 20 million people? How exactly are we going to accomplish that?
Speaker 1:Ice doesn't have enough agents and neither does the military. There are about two and a half million people in uniform today around the world for the United States, and two-thirds of those work in support. You know supply and repair and all the things you know. You don't just send everybody into battle with nothing behind them. Almost everybody supports the very smaller, the much smaller number of troops that are actually fighting the war itself. So we just don't have enough people to come here and hunt down 20 million people. Even if we took the entire armed forces two and a half million people they're not going to all chase down 10 to 1 ratio from themselves if we pull them out of every base in the world and send them out.
Speaker 1:This is just stupid. Okay, it's stupid, stupid, stupid. Hitler. Hitler, for Christ's sake. When in May of 1945, when the war was over, world War II was over and Berlin lied in rubble and finally people could come out of hiding, there were over 5,000 Jews still in Berlin. Now, if the Nazis can't hunt down all the Jews in Germany during the Holocaust.
Speaker 1:What makes anybody here think we're going to hunt down 20 million people as a constitutional republic? And if you think that we're going to suspend the Constitution, then you're a bigger idiot yet. Ok, so we're not. This is not. This is very much akin to the drug war, and that and these two issues are directly connected no-transcript minds. What is wrong with you?
Speaker 1:And there are this mouthing statistics that, for example, illegal immigrants are by and large, more law-abiding than the legal immigrants that are here. That's probably true, but it's irrelevant to the family of Lake and Riley and people like her who were killed by illegal immigrants. And the fact of the matter is, if the border was being properly enforced, lake and Riley and people like her would be alive today. So this argument you make for basically, leave them all here and stop worrying about it, and it ices inciting the problem. Your heads are up your asses. Pull it out. This is a loser. You want to ever have power again? Stop it. Stop it. There's no way to make that reasonable. That's stupid. Okay, now let's talk like adults. Now can we all? I know I'm getting a little loud here. Let's calm down and talk like grownups.
Speaker 1:There is Thomas Sowell Again. I'm citing Thomas Sowell, by the way. I cite him a lot because I just I've read, if not everything he's written, almost everything he's written, and I just don't disagree with a word of it. I don't know what else to say. Anyway, and he is smarter than me and I always respect those who have bigger brains than me, and he has a bigger brain than me.
Speaker 1:One of the things he says is that before we do anything in government in particular, there are three questions that have to be asked. In particular, there are three questions that have to be asked. Whenever you present a new solution if you want to call it that, or a new trade-off, as I call it and Thomas Sowell calls it you have to ask three questions. The first question is as compared to what? So when the Republicans say we're going to round them all up, as compared to what? When has anybody ever rounded up the illegal population? And, as I cited, not even Hitler could do it. It's never happened. There is no historic example of rounding up illegal populations already in the country successfully in any country at any time in the world in history. Feel free to fact check me on this. So to sit there and think we're going to be the first in a constitutional republic and respect the constitution as it's written is nonsense. We couldn't do it if we were Nazis, let alone a constitutional republic. So just get over it. And that's where it stops.
Speaker 1:The other two questions are so let's pretend that you're a big enough dummy to believe that we somehow are going to think up the formula to do it. Okay, show me your data, show me any supporting data, any research, any properly conducted studies that would tend to make me at least think there's a possibility that we can round up millions and millions of illegal aliens. And there is no data. So there's no prior history of this being successfully done. There is no data that would support the way we're doing it being better, since the government. Basically, let's be honest, folks and I'm going to talk to you like grownups here, I'm going to use a bad word but the government fucks up everything it touches. It just doesn't do anything well because it has no incentive to do anything well, because it's a bureaucracy. Forget it, it's not going to happen. And, of course, the third question would be what's this going to cost? And we have spent, between illegal immigration and the drug war over a trillion dollars, not stopping anything over the years.
Speaker 1:So what do you say? We talk like reasonable adults about a reasonable solution that both sides can learn to live with if they stop behaving like children. So let's start with this premise we have to have a strongly enforced border, but we cannot round up the illegals that are already here, because it is literally impossible. That is a factual statement. Now what do we do about it? Number one we declare an amnesty.
Speaker 1:Look, put aside the immigration issue just for a minute and the voting issue just for a minute, and let's just look at demographics. The average American family is not having enough children to replace itself. We are dying at a faster rate than we are giving birth. Therefore, we have, over not a very long period of time, people grow up fast and become taxpayers in 18 years, typically speaking. So here's the thing we don't have enough taxpayers to support the welfare state that we've established and that most people like.
Speaker 1:When I say the welfare state, I'm talking primarily Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare are unsupportable without an increasing population, and we don't have it. And there's no. You know President Trump's proposing the $1,000 savings account. That's all again, as compared to what is the question on that one? Okay, as compared to what? When has a program like that ever succeeded in increasing the birth rate? And I'll save you guys a lot of research, because I've already looked Never. It doesn't work. It's not going to work. It's not going to work this time. It's been tried. It's not going to. It doesn't work. You can't bribe people with a thousand dollars in a tax deferred account to have children. I don't know. I don't know what nonsense is going through Trump's head, but that's a very nice thing. But we're depositing money we don't have we're already in a huge deficit into an account to support the birth of children, when the solution is sitting right in front of you, president Trump and all of us.
Speaker 1:It's the illegal immigrants that are here. Just because they came in and did bad doesn't mean they can't do good down the road. I speak to this as an ex-convict myself. I did something very, very bad, but does that mean that I'm bad for the rest of my life? Maybe some of you think that that's true, that I'm rotten to the core, in which case God bless you, but most reasonable people would say I made a horrible mistake, I paid a price for it. I served my time and I have know. I have four children, I have grandchildren, I have friends. You know I live a productive, good life these days. Now that doesn't erase what I've done and it's not an excuse and I'm not weaseling out of it those of you who listen to me regularly know that but it also doesn't mean that I can't do good going forward. Well, the same thing's true about illegals. They came here breaking the law but come on, now grow up.
Speaker 1:We all break the law. Jaywalk have littered in our past. When I say litter, I'm not talking about throwing the McDonald's back out the window. I'm saying, like spitting out gum on the sidewalk, that's littering. I mean, we all break the law in little ways. And yeah, crossing the border illegally is a bigger break of the law than spitting gum on the sidewalk, but it's still breaking the law. We all break the law all the time. You're supposed to stop on a right turn on red before you proceed. How many of us have just gone? How many of us eased through stoplights? How many eased through stop signs? I should say I mean, come on, we all break the law all the time. So these people broke the law coming in, but now the time. So these people broke the law coming in, but now they're here and we're not going to round them up because, again, as compared to what it's not going to happen. So let's declare an amnesty and we pick a day. That's the cutoff day. So, as I described earlier, let's just pretend right now it is June, the 11th of 2025. So let's say that we passed the law at the end of this month. Um, so we set it for June 30th.
Speaker 1:If you can prove you're in the United States prior to June 30th of 2025, okay, it has to be a date before the plan is announced, otherwise you'll create a rush to the border. That's called creating a perverse incentive. So you have to set a date. You can say June 1st in arrears, if you can prove you're in the country prior to that date. And you can prove it all kinds of ways. You can have a pay stub. You can have an affidavit from your employer that's notarized. You can have a utility bill. You can have a rent bill. There's all kinds of ways. Vehicle registration there's a million ways that you can prove that you were in the country. You don't have to prove if you were illegal. Everyone knows you're illegal when you're doing this, but prove that you were in the country.
Speaker 1:If you were in the country prior to the cutoff date, which means you didn't just come to take advantage of the amnesty, you're already here, you should be given a blanket amnesty. You're not guilty of anything anymore. You're pardoned the way Biden pardoned Hunter. But instead of getting a green card, you get an orange card. Biden pardoned Hunter, but instead of getting a green card, you get an orange card. Now, the orange card is the price you pay for the amnesty, which is to say you're never going to be allowed to vote and you're never going to be allowed to be a citizen. As a holder of an orange card, you're allowed to work here. You're allowed to buy property and sell property. You're allowed to live here the rest of your life. You're allowed to contribute to Social Security and benefit from it. As long as you're contributory, you have all the rights of a paying American citizen who pays their taxes, except that you're not a citizen and you cannot vote. Now, if you want to be a citizen, you can expatriate yourself and come back in the green card process, which I'll talk about in just one second. I want to reform that at the same time, but by the stroke of a pen, we've made all of these rough, let's say. No one really knows how many, but let's just use the number that's bandied about so much.
Speaker 1:These 20 million people are instantly legal Now. They're instantly paying more taxes. They're instantly participatory, they're instantly buying property. They're instantly doing all the things they had to hide out and not do. They can walk into a normal car dealership, not the payday payment one on the corner. You know that doesn't care if, as long as you're breathing, they'll take your money. But they can walk into a regular Ford or GM dealership and buy a normal. You know, do everything. They can go. They can open bank accounts. They can send money back to Mexico. You know, nice and easy. It's all advantages, no disadvantages, because they're expanding our tax base and supporting our welfare state.
Speaker 1:They can also leave the country and come back. One of the reasons that so many illegals are in the country at any given moment is because when you're illegal, you can't leave the country and come back without taking a chance that you won't be able to get back. So by giving them an orange card if they want to go back down, if they want to work here, let's say they're in the agricultural business. My family is in the agricultural business, as I alluded earlier, and the growing season is not 12 months a year, unless you want to travel with the growing season like Cider House Rules. If you've ever read that book, it's a wonderful book. But anyway, you can expatriate yourself, go back down to Mexico, live with your family, yada, yada, yada, and come back next year for the next tomato picking season in California or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1:A lot of fruits and vegetables can't be machine-picked, guys. I hate to break it to you. Tomatoes crush real easy. Think about it. So I'm just using that as one example. And, by the way, no American at any price is going to do that, unless you want to pay $20 a pound for tomatoes. Shut up, grow up Strawberries. Do you like strawberries? They can't be machine picked. Okay, just throwing it out there. So the bottom line is they're a benefit, except for this technicality and I realize how serious it was they crossed the border, but they're here. It's a reality.
Speaker 1:And now I'm going to talk about why the drug war links up. Here, it's a reality. And now I'm going to talk about why the drug war links up. We only have X number of dollars to spend on border enforcement and drug enforcement, which are largely the same thing. In one case you're stopping human trafficking, in the other case you're stopping drug trafficking. But it's mostly the same procedures, the same searches and a lot of times there's a lot of crossover. You know they'll stop somebody for drugs and they'll find illegals, and they'll stop somebody for illegals and they'll find drugs. It's all mixed up together and again back to as compared to what, there has never been a successful prohibition of anything in the history of mankind. If the public wants something, they're going to get it.
Speaker 1:The drug war is stupid, stupid, stupid. We've spent on it alone over a trillion dollars since it started in 1971, and we haven't stopped drugs. Oh, they arrest this one and they arrest that one. In the broad scheme of things, it means nothing. We created the fentanyl market, by the way, we being the law enforcement of the United States because fentanyl is much easier to transport than heroin. You get much more bang in a much smaller package, and it all comes about as a result of drug enforcement that if it weren't there, the fentanyl crisis would take care of itself.
Speaker 1:Okay, what I'm saying is and I was in prison with. 80 to 90% of the people I was in prison with didn't belong in prison in normal, in in in rational circumstances. In other words, all of their crimes were drug related. Now they might be there for assault and battery and they might be there for armed robbery, but these are all drug crimes because they are all taking place because of the illegal nature of drugs.
Speaker 1:By making drugs illegal, we make them artificially expensive but otherwise would be cheap. Therefore, the addicts, who are wasted, frankly, most of the time and don't make enough money, feel that they're forced to steal. Now I know that's wrong and I know you Republicans are screaming that's wrong, that's wrong and it's a problem with their morality. But let's get a grip on reality, not morality. Reality and the reality is these are people that are self-medicating self-loathing. That's what addiction is. Addiction is the self-medication of self-loathing. We're not going to make that illegal. How about we treat them like what they are, which are people with a severe mental and emotional health problem, and spend some money much less than we're spending now on first-class rehab, and meanwhile let people do their drug?
Speaker 1:Look, if a person wants to go into the privacy of their home and drug themselves into oblivion, it's their business, so long as they're not affecting their children or even, most of the times, they won't even have children and they're not affecting driving a car. If they're sitting home alone shooting up heroin, who cares? I'm not saying this to be funny. They should be able to go down to Walgreens or CVS and buy their heroin, properly cut, and their sterile needles if they're mainlining, or smoke it if they prefer. Yes, people do smoke heroin, guys. I'm just going to tell you it's not all mainlining. A lot of addicts don't like the idea of sticking needles in their arms. I digress, I only know this because in my whole life I never saw heroin in real life until I went to prison. Then I saw it every day.
Speaker 1:We can't even control drugs in prison. In Kingman Prison, where I was stationed I said stationed because I'm also a veteran where I was placed for the last roughly two years of my little over four-year sentence, I got to know the cartel guys pretty well. I speak fluent Spanish, like I told you, and I can tell you that there was about $3.5 million a year worth of drugs coming through Kingman Prison. $3.5 million a year and a population of 1,800 inmates. Let's think about that for a minute. Okay, and this is a fact. This is not a supposition, this is a firsthand fact. I know this for a fact and we're just not going to stop it.
Speaker 1:So we only have a dollar to spend. We're already spending more money than we have. What if we stop spending it on what can't succeed? The drug war cannot succeed. Rounding up 20 million people cannot succeed. What can succeed is bringing the 20 million people into the sunlight and making drugs legal, so that we can concentrate our resources that are limited by the very fact that money is not unlimited and concentrate on the real criminals, the people that killed the Lake and Riley's. If we can concentrate our resources on the genuine, we can round up 100,000 criminals across the United States or so that got in illegally with horrible crimes. That's what we're really talking about here. The other 19,900,000 or 700,000, whatever, let's not split hairs. The overwhelming majority of these people aren't committing crimes and they just want to live their lives. Let's stop chasing them down at all. Leave them alone. Give them their orange card.
Speaker 1:Now let's move along and talk about the green card. We need immigrants and we're very, very fortunate. Once again, the United States is lucky because the healthiest demographics in the world are in Latin America. It's a very young population. Not only should we let them come, we want them to come. The green card should be unlimited, with no quotas, so long as the following are true.
Speaker 1:Number one you can come here without any money given to you. In other words, you have enough money Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 on a coyote coyote, by the way, are the guys that are the human smugglers that bring these people across the border Instead of spending the money on that, you come here with your three or four or $5,000 and you support yourself while you go out and get yourself a job. You don't need anything. You're coming here to work. You have the means to come here to work. That's number one. Number two you don't have a criminal record in the country you're coming from, whether it's Mexico or El Salvador or Columbia or wherever it is. And number three, you're healthy. You're not carrying any communicable diseases. Otherwise, you should be allowed to come and work as many as want to come, and you know.
Speaker 1:As far as the welfare situation goes, that's the choice of a state. Welfare should be a state-run program, and if your state's dumb enough to hang out the free shit here sign to immigrants, then they deserve what they get. There should be no federal welfare program because it's so stupid it doesn't work. But if your state wants to keep trying it, that's fine, okay, because states can't print money, so that limits the damage they can do. And I understand my conversation here is far ranging, but that's my nature, you'll learn as you listen to me. But anyway, a rational adult let's sum this up and close out the podcast A rational adult would legalize drugs, declare an amnesty with an orange card, like I said, bring them all into the sunshine, okay, and then concentrate our resources on stopping the real bad guys and the world would be a better and happier place.
Speaker 1:And the Republicans would be happy because all of these green card people coming in when they lived here five years and they become citizens and they've worked themselves up and they're making a good living and everything's great they're going to, most of the time, be Republican voters anyway, because they're anti-abortion and the Democrats are not going to abandon choice, ok, it's just not going to happen. So grow up is the word of the day. Grow up let's talk about this like adults, not like children. With our fingers in our ears On both sides, everyone sounds like a bunch of idiots. It's just, it is mind boggling. Oh, one more thing. One more thing I want to comment on before I close out today, about immigration.
Speaker 1:We need to get rid of bilingualism Now. I've told you that I speak fluent Spanish. In fact, I spoke Spanish before I spoke English, because my mother, who had divorced my natural father, had a degree in Spanish with a minor in French. Language runs in my family. My sister has a degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, just to give you an idea, and I was a Russian linguist at the National Security Agency. We pick up language easy in our family. It's like a genetic thing. But anyway, my mother went to work at Miami Beach Federal Savings and Loan which is no longer there, but it used to be and she was the bilingual teller in those days and she hired a Cuban housekeeper to take care of me and I was just Thank you, thank you, thank you.