From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Rachel At The Border: Investigating Christian NGO's Involvement With Human Traffickers

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

For years, Christian organizations have committed to helping those in need. However, at the Southern border, where countless migrants are illegally crossing every day, the help these organizations are giving could be doing more harm than good. The worst part? Many of them know it. Rachel joins live from the border in Arizona for a conversation with Senior Editor of 'The Federalist' John Daniel Davidson about whether Catholic migrant shelters at the border are potentially contributing to the largest human trafficking operation in history.  Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The housing crisis in the GTA has reached a critical point, with more than two in three residents being affected. ...reporting that almost nine million Canadians are living in food-insecure households. Over one million people in the GTA now live below the poverty line. ...just out today. Mental health support is the number one reason people are calling 2-1-1 for a... At United Way, we wake up to a different alarm every day. Help us end poverty and build a better GTA any way we can. Donate today at unitedwaygt.org. Welcome to From the Kitchen Table, and I have with me one of my favorite guests.

He's from The Federalist. He's a senior editor there. He just wrote a book, which we're going to get to and talk about as well, called Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. I'm going to tell you, my daughter got an early copy of this, and she's already gotten me excited about it. She said, Mom, this book is something you're going to want to read. So I'm excited about this book coming out, which I believe comes out March 26th. But, John, welcome to the kitchen table. I want to talk to you first about an article that I read that you wrote that's very interesting to me.

In fact, I have some firsthand potential experience with some of this from this week. You wrote an article called How Christians Help Human Traffickers. And was this at the Federalist, this article? This actually appeared at Compact Magazine. Compact. Yeah, I love that. I love that site as well. And that's right. That's exactly right. That's where I read it, at Compact Magazine. Compact. Yeah, I love that. I love that site as well. And that's exactly right. That's where I read it, at Compact, how Christians help human traffickers. I'm in Arizona right now, John, because I was able to breach an NGO called Casa Alitas, affiliated with Catholic Charities.

called Casa Alitas, affiliated with Catholic charities. And when I went in there, John, they panicked. They told me they were going to call the cops on me, which they did. And I said, go ahead. But what I should have said is I'm going to call the cops on you because I think these organizations are knowingly facilitating child trafficking. I can't think of anything more evil than that. And they seem to be okay with these policies, like no DNA tests, etc. Why don't you break down what you're seeing and why Christian organizations, NGOs specifically, would allow themselves to be complicit in this

kind of evil? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on to talk about this, because it's a complex issue that I think a lot of Americans don't fully grasp. And on the surface, it seems, you know, it seems like why would anyone ever fault Christian organizations for helping, you know, migrants who are vulnerable, give them shelter and food? And it seems like, you know, that's the obvious Christian thing to do is to help these people, right? And that would be true if illegal immigration weren't a massive global black market that is run and operated by cartels

and cartel-associated smuggling organizations for profit all the way throughout the world, through Mexico and deep into the United States. There is no way that these Christian NGOs that run these shelters cannot know what they're a part of and what they are facilitating. Americans have an excuse, right? If you don't study this stuff, you won't necessarily know. The people who run the Catholic charities in the Rio Grande or in these shelters in Arizona, they know what they're involved in. They know that the people who are coming through their shelters are being trafficked

and they are so ideologically committed to the idea of open borders that they are willing to allow their operations and their organizations to be complicit in what amounts to a massive global human trafficking black market. Well, that's so interesting because for some reason, I was not believing that it was ideological. I was thinking these organizations have become addicted to this government money. And that people at the highest levels of those, right? The people at the highest levels of these organizations, whether it's the Catholic Bishops Council and that whole division that is handling Catholic charities on the Catholic side. And the Catholics aren't the only ones with, you know, blood on their hands here. Lutherans have it too, non-denominational groups as well. I just figured they were getting addicted.

And when I really started to understand how grotesque this was, John, was when I realized that the few whistleblowers that we've had describing, you know, the fact that these groups are vetting or not vetting properly, because they can't, they're not, that they're not doing DNA tests to make sure that the children who are with these adults or connected to these adults, the ones who come alone with a piece of paper and says, my aunt is this, you know, call her and then this woman comes. We're doing no DNA tests. And as you said, we know these are criminal organizations. I guess I just I can't imagine that this is happening. It's just so it's so evil. I'm sorry. It's just so it's so evil. I'm sorry.

So so maybe maybe it will help your listeners to take a step back. As you say, rightly, you know, the Catholic Charities is sort of the agencies within DHS, as these other organizations and NGOs do. And they also, a lot of people don't realize the Catholic charities in the Rio Grande Valley, for example, have a contract with Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection to do intake. And they have for a number of years now to intake migrants who are apprehended directly from Border Patrol and to house them before Border Patrol or CBP can actually process them. So, for example, about a year and a half ago, I was down in the Rio Grande Valley and I went to a park, a public park that had been cordoned off with with tall yellow metal fencing that said no admittance.

And there was all kinds of security around it. And the the Texas National Guardsmen that were there told me that that was the Catholic Charities quarantine zone for migrants that apprehended crossing the Rio Grande River who tested positive for COVID. And it was a quarantine COVID holding area that Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley was running on behalf of Customs and Border Protection on a huge contract. And once they tested clear for COVID, then they were transported by another private contractor to the CBP processing station in Eagle Pass. And from there, they were just released on their own recognizance with a court date years in the future, right? So, the role that these Catholic and Christian charities play isn't just one of like giving sandwiches and blankets to migrants, right? Right. They are part of the mechanism, the federal mechanism

that facilitates catch and release policies and open border policies that have been enshrined in first the Obama and now the Biden administration. In other words, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol within the Department of Homeland Security

do not have the manpower or operational capacity to process, hold and then release in an orderly way the number of illegal immigrants coming over the border. And so they contracted out to charities in the Rio Grande Valley and other Christian organizations in other parts of the border region. and other Christian organizations in other parts of the border region. And it would not be possible to do what they're doing without the services that these NGOs provide. So people really have to wrap their minds around this. This is not just like giving them food and shelter. This is performing a government function to carry out a policy that was chosen on day one by the Biden administration to have massive illegal immigration. And to facilitate child sex trafficking by criminal cartels, because we've lost 80,000

children. We've lost in the system 80,000 kids. And the whistleblower, Sean, this was what really cued me. The few whistleblowers we have, and I kind of lost my train of thought when I was telling you this before. The few whistleblowers we have have not come from within these NGOs. Catholic Charities isn't the one going, hey, guys, wait a minute. We wanted to help here, but we're realizing that the cartels are using these kids and they're ending up in sex trafficking and sex slavery. They're not the whistleblowers. The whistleblowers are other people.

So a few brave bureaucrats who've come out of the government bureaucracy, not necessarily the NGO community, which tells me that they just want to keep this game going. Yeah, they do. And we should say a word about trafficking. I mentioned this in my piece. And this is the other big thing for for Americans to wrap their heads around, because I don't think most people realize this. Every person who crosses the border is being trafficked. Every person who crosses the border is being trafficked. It's not that the only people who are being trafficked are being held in a stash house in Reynosa. You don't cross the border now unless you pay the cartel. And if you try to cross the border without paying the cartel, they will hunt you down in the United States and they will hunt down your family in your country of origin. And the reason for that is because I hesitate to give too much information, but you have to go back. I mean, this is a long process. There's a very complicated pipeline here. When these migrants arrive in northern Mexican territories that are controlled by various cartels, every single one of them is shaken down for money. Their information is collected and verified. Contact information and location information of their family back in their home country is collected and verified. And this is put into a database. The cartels keep track of this. They are importing to the United States a black market tax base because when you pay the cartels to cross the Rio Grande, that's not where the payments stop.

Most of these people are indebted to the cartels after they're released into the United States, which is why so many of them are so desperate to get in and start working. They have to send money home to their families. They also have to send money to the cartels to keep their families safe. So they are debt slaves and their situation is highly precarious. And that's another reason why you see so many single males coming across is because they, they are, they're coming here to work. They cannot afford the fee. So they have to go into debt to very bad men. And then they have to get working as soon as possible to keep their families

back home safe. This is a phenomenon that happens up and down the border on a mass scale. And it's amazing that it's not being more widely reported. It's not really amazing. I know why it's not being highly reported because it's counter narrative. But you don't have to do like sort of like heroic investigative journalism to figure this out. You just have to go down to the border and start talking to migrants.

investigative journalism to figure this out. You just have to go down to the border and start talking to migrants. And their stories are almost uniform about what is going on. You just have to ask them the right questions. And they will tell you how much they paid, who they paid, how much they owe, what they still owe, when they have to start making their first payments, how many family members they have back home who are in danger. Many of them also experience horrific violence and abuse, especially women and girls are routinely raped and sexually assaulted in their journey through Mexico and into the United States. You know, that's the other thing people don't totally realize. The cartel operations reach deep into the United States. There are stash houses all over, not just the border region, but all over Texas and Arizona and New Mexico.

And a lot of these people, they don't realize they're being trafficked until they're well inside the United States. And they realize that they're not going to the place they thought they were going. Or they realize that they're being lied to about the direction of the place that they're going. They don't necessarily know where New Jersey is or how to get there. once they realize that they're being taken somewhere else it's too late so i you know this is uh we're not talking about small amounts of money because of the volume of illegal immigration and this and this gets to the sort of the crisis uh the the volume crisis, right? When you have 300,000 people cross the border illegally, as we did in December, 300,000, that's just the ones we know about who were apprehended on the US side. Let's say each one of them, and this is a low ball estimate, each one of those 300,000 people is

paying $5,000 to the cartel to cross the border. Talking about huge amounts of money every month. Talking about tens of billions of dollars a year. This is an industry that has been created just in the last five years or so. Didn't used to be this way. People would cross the border. I mean, workers in Texas routinely would put their clothes in a garbage bag,

swim across the Rio Grande, go to work for the day and come back home at night. You know, they were illegally crossing the border, but they were just coming to work. The border has been taken over by these cartels and they took it over because they realized that it was a huge source of income. And it's part of an evolution of the cartels in Mexico in which they have diversified their income streams and gotten into all sorts of things in Mexico. and gotten into all sorts of things in Mexico. But one of the big industries that they've created by creating a black market and by controlling the territorial routes into the U.S.

is that they have industrialized illegal immigration. We'll be back with much more after this. This is Jimmy Fallon inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at foxacrossamerica.com. So you talked about how much it costs. I did, when I was speaking to some of the illegals, migrants that I got to talk to in a soft shelter. So they arrived in the soft shelter

and I was able to talk to them because they had not yet been touched or you know bureaucratically touched by process by uh by border patrol and they you know some of them tried to lie and say they didn't pay anything but most of them were pretty honest about um what they had paid and how much they paid but that price john that price is is interesting because that price includes a plane ticket from us. I mean, it's just I mean, like this coordination between our NGOs and these cartels and the Democrat Party, this alignment of interest is is fascinating and it includes our tax dollars. And it's just mind blowing. And so I thought we could unpack a little bit is just what is an NGO? Because I think a lot of people don't understand that. Like, again, they have this idea that it's a charity, but perhaps the best way to think of it. Am I right, John, is that it's more like a shadow bureaucracy or a shadow political party,

a shadow piece of the part of the government. So they get to do things that the Democrats or the bureaucracy, the U S bureaucracy can't do because they kind of would have more oversight into what they're doing. Cause that was what was so fascinating when I walked into that, that Casa Alita's hotel was that it's like a black cia black side it's like it's so secret what they're doing and they so wanted us not to know what was happening in there yeah exactly you're exactly right you know these ngos it's best uh especially when it comes to ones like

catholic charities down at the border region is to think of them as government contractors with with less oversight. Because, you know, when you and you've you've probably visited Border Patrol stations and CBP facilities on the border. I've visited the many times during the Trump administration because Trump, Trump, the Trump administration wanted journalists to come in and see them as soon as Biden came into office. All that was shut down. Right. Right. So that tells you a lot. But no, these charities and the facilities they run are not run like Border Patrol stations, Border Patrol stations and CBP stations are like big police stations. You know, they are law enforcement centers. You know, they have holding facilities that look like, you know, their law enforcement centers, you know, they have holding facilities that look like, you know, jails. They are they are set up as law enforcement, quasi military law enforcement government, you know, sites. Right. And they have all the rules

and regulations that you might imagine at a place like that. Right. What they're not set up to do is hold large numbers of people. They never were. And so there's all these stories when a thousand people turn themselves into Border Patrol in downtown El Paso. Well, what the hell do you do with that with those people there's nowhere to put them i've talked to border patrol agents out in remote border patrol stations in arizona where they had 400 people show up in the middle of the night it's it's freezing temperatures they had to pull all of the atvs and trucks out of the heated garage so that and just put everybody in the garage so that they you know uh would have somewhere to spend the night right because there were there were five hours from the nearest border patrol station. So what these NGO government contractors provide is capacity. What they don't have is really any oversight at all. And so they are essentially, as you've discovered, like private entities that can order you off their premises with their private security. And they're not subject to the same kind of sunshine laws as you would expect from a government agency like the Department of Homeland Security. They're just given these block grants to take on duties that

otherwise would be taken on by DHS. And so the problem is there's no way to know the, the level of infiltration into these organizations by cartels and by smuggling organizations. There's no, and, and, and that's another thing, by the way, by the way, that, yeah, as I said before, the cartels are here, they're here in the United States. They run operations here, complex logistics operations. They traffic guns and drugs and cash.

The cash goes, people don't realize this either, the cash goes from the United States back into Mexico along with a lot of guns and the drugs and the people come north into the United States. And then there's what you mentioned earlier is the sex trafficking. The sex there's what you mentioned earlier is the sex trafficking, the sex trafficking and the labor trafficking too. It's not just women and children being sex trafficked. It's also men, women, and children being trafficked for labor as well.

But yes, to your point, there's very little oversight of these organizations and they're getting huge amounts of money. In fact, the Heritage Foundation recently sort of did a deep dive into into these organizations and kind of explaining how they work and how they what their relationship is with the government. Yeah, and it's hard to track the money because, like I said, they're pulling they're grabbing from different pools of money. And I think that that's purpose by the Biden administration, because it makes it harder for other, you know, outside groups, sunshine groups to try and figure out, you know, just how much money is going to the NGO. Again, just so shocking, a Christian, Catholic, Lutheran organization, you've yet to see a priest or a

pastor or a representative of these organizations saying, hey, I want to talk about the rapes of the women and children that are coming across the border. So our country knows, like, no whistleblowers doing that. No whistleblowers talking about, you know, the adults being, you know, partnered with kids that aren't really theirs. I mean, we know that's happening. But they're not the ones telling the story, which says to me that they're complicit. I never actually thought until you said that, John, that it's possible that the cartels have infiltrated these organizations themselves.

And we've really lost lost the story on this. You know, we hear all this. We go, well, what do we do about it? Could you lay out a little bit of what Attorney General Paxson in Texas is doing to try and get a handle and more transparency from these NGOs. Well, yeah, that was the sort of news hook for the article is that the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxson, announced last week that he was going to start looking into some of these charities that are providing services to the Biden administration and investigate them as possible stash houses, as possibly complicit in facilitating illegal immigration, not just, again, not just giving sandwiches and blankets to migrants when they show up,

but facilitating their illegally entering the country and facilitating holding them and keeping them at these shelters until they get the go ahead from criminal elements that these people can be released. And that's what we mean when we talk. You know, what is a stash house? A stash house is a place where cartels and smugglers bring clients, right? Bring migrants and keep them. And sometimes they take them to a stash house to keep them because they decide that those people owe more and they're going to keep them there. And so their family back home can come up with the amount of money that they're asking for. the amount of money that they're asking for.

Sometimes they keep them in the stash house because they're waiting for the green light to go over the border. Again, these cartels are doing a lot of different things. And so they're coordinating, you know, the massive crossing of people. If a mass number of people are going to cross just outside Reynosa, well, and the cartel also wants to bring

a large amount of drugs in through, you know, Starr County or wherever, then they're going to coordinate that so that all of the U.S. law enforcement resources are tied up processing these people and they have clear sailing to bring narcotics across the border without encountering law enforcement. Or they have a group of people who of illegal immigrants who do not want to be apprehended because they have criminal records, because they're coming here for ill intent. It's a whole group of people who of illegal immigrants who do not want to be apprehended because they have criminal records, because they're coming here for ill intent. It's a whole group of people. These are the people who don't turn themselves into Border Patrol, who aren't coming to claim

asylum. They're coming here for various criminal reasons, which is why they don't want to be caught. They pay more to not just to be sent across the border, but they have a smuggler or coyote with them who then takes them. You got to get about 75 miles inland to get past the Border Patrol checkpoints. And so they have routes that they go and then they have U.S. citizens in cars waiting to pick these people up north of the Border Patrol checkpoints. So it's very it's very logistically complicated system, right? But there's a lot of money involved. The people who want to cross illegally and don't want to be caught, you know, they don't want to be even detected. They pay tens of thousands of dollars

per person to come into the country and be taken past the border patrol, the inland checkpoints. So, so there is, there's a massive amount of coordination. So when we talk about stash houses, stash houses are just one piece in this in this puzzle. Right. And there's stash houses all across northern Mexico in Matamoros and Reynosa. And there's stash houses all across the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, McAllen and Brownsville in all these different places in Eagle Pass. And local police and Border Patrol are aware of that. They raid them from time to time. But the stash houses are always moving. And there's too many of them for police and Border Patrol to catch them all.

And the argument from Ken Paxton, one of the arguments is places like the Annunciation House in El Paso, which is a big shelter in El Paso. It's been operating for a long time and sees a lot of people come through there. A lot of migrants come through there, is functionally operating as a stash house. And what Paxton is suggesting is that this organization, Annunciation House, which is a Catholic organization, has been infiltrated. If it's a stash house, it means it has been infiltrated by criminal elements that are profiting off illegal immigration and that certain elements within the Annunciation House organization are part of that conspiracy. So,

it's a criminal investigation that he's talking about here. Yeah, I mean, I really hope that he gets to the bottom of it. I mean, just to give you a little exclamation point on just how brutal and cruel and evil these cartels and the illegal immigration has just, you know, gone through all these ranches. And this private security guy said that he'd been out on the Mexican side up to a lookout point to kind of check out what's going on. And he said what the cartels will do is they're on this lookout point and they will use an object to let people know when they can or can't cross and the object will be there when they can't or can sort of assemble the object they use is a baby's head um and he says and once that head uh sort of deteriorates they'll get another one um and that And that's to scare people to let them know what they're capable of. So these are very, very evil people. I was also told by some cowboys that I

met that worked on this ranch, that what was really breaking their heart, as bad as it was on our side, was that basically all the ranches, the Mexican owned ranches on the other side have now been, and they said over the last five months, it's it's it's accelerated. It's worse than it's ever been that the ranches on the other side of the Mexican owned ranches are now completely owned by the cartels. They have kicked everyone off. People have lost their land. And it brings me back to you because you were one of the first people that I got to speak to that, you know, I had been sort of thinking, hey, this could turn into a narco state. And then I got to talking to you on this podcast and people can go back and listen to that podcast in our library.

But you've been writing a lot about the fact that Mexico has turned into a narco state and that that's a national security threat to us. Yeah, absolutely. Mexico is a narco state. The penetration of the cartels into the Mexican government reaches the highest levels. There's really strong evidence that President López Obrador, AMLO, as he's called in Mexico, is and has been for a very long time compromised by the Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa cartel is the largest and most powerful cartel in Mexico. El Chapo, which everybody knows who El Chapo is. He was chief of the Sinaloa cartel.

ProPublica did a investigation into AMLO's connection to Sinaloa, going back to his 2006 presidential campaign. It was funded by the Sinaloa cartel. They gave him millions of dollars to run for president. After that, he lost narrowly to Felipe Calderon. But he subsequently became the mayor of Mexico City, you know, city of 25 million people. So, you know, his political career didn't go away after he lost that election. And there's subsequent to that, the New York Times recently reported on the further connections between the AMLO administration and the cartel organizations. And there's every reason to believe that there is a kind of cartel Mexican state synthesis afoot right now, where rather than fight the cartels, which is what the Mexican federal government did under President Calderon from 2006 to 2012. After 2012, the ruling party in Mexico changed hands. President Enrique Peña Nieto came into office in 2012.

And instead of fighting the cartels, the Mexican state decided that they would cooperate with the cartels and that they would accommodate them and graft them into the apparatus of the state on different levels. And that is what has been underway for the past decade in Mexico. And to the point now where in some parts of Mexico, it is impossible to tell where the state ends and the cartel begins. And we really saw this during COVID when whole regions of Mexico relied on cartels for basic services like water and food distribution in the enforcement of curfews. And I'm talking about cartels that would come to city centers with like trucks that had the cartel logo, like on the side of the truck and like guys with guns that would get out with like black vests that had the cartel logo on them,

distributing boxes of food that had the cartel logo on them, like as though they were like a UN relief agency or a political party. It's not something that is being hidden all that well, or that anyone is taking great pains to hide what's happening. You just have to understand kind of Mexican society and a little bit of the history to see this, to see what's happening. Now, to the extent that these cartels are making billions and billions of dollars on the border, well, that implicates the Mexican government at every single level, you know, including, you know,

obviously like local police in the border regions, but also the Mexican National Guard, which was created by AMLO when he took office in December 2018. The Mexican National Guard is the enforcement arm of the INM, which is Mexico's Federal Immigration Service. The INM and the Mexican National Guard, I have been told personally by people in Mexico that they are deeply involved in human trafficking with the cartels. These are the agencies that are supposed to be our partner agencies to help tackle illegal immigration and the war on drugs. It's a joke. The idea that there's any partner in Mexico that we can work with on this, which is why, and I don't know if you want to get into this, the only solution to the problem is to impose heavy deterrence

to illegal immigration so that people do not make the decision to come to the border in the first place and do not subject themselves and their families to the border in the first place and and do not subject themselves into their families to the horrors that await them there and heavy deterrence is is what like remain in mexico like you don't get through you don't get through it's going to be a wall it's going to be um yeah you you will not get through if you get through you will be immediately deported back to your home country when when people and i'll give you an example of how this of how deterrence works. In September 2021, the Biden administration had a huge crisis in Del Rio, Texas. About 15000 Haitians crossed the border and set up a huge encampment under a bridge outside Del Rio, Texas.

Del Rio is a small town. There's not even 15000 people there. Maybe maybe there's a little more than that, but the encampment. Del Rio is a small town. There's not even 15,000 people there. Maybe there's a little more than that, but the encampment was nearly the size of the town. It became, because all these people were concentrated in one place, a place for journalists in the corporate media to go take pictures because it was dramatic, especially photojournalists love a dramatic image, and this was a dramatic image. And so, the Biden administration realized that they had a PR crisis on their hands and that they needed to shut this camp down as soon as possible. Well, John, first they, first they shut down Fox news,

his drones using that's right. Remember? That's right. Because they didn't, they didn't want anyone to see. And then, and then that itself became a story. And, and Bill Malujan, I think, was one of the ones on scene there. He did a great job. And then it blew up in their face. And it was it was like, you know, and this is also this is where the where the mounted border patrol agents on horses were trying to stop people from, you know, and then they had the whole whip controversy. And so what the Biden administration ended up doing as quietly as they could is

deporting those Haitians to Haiti. Now, now this triggered an avalanche of people. The vast majority of the 15,000 Haitians in that encampment immediately crossed back into Mexico because they the last thing they wanted was to be deported back to Haiti because they hadn't been living in Haiti, some of them for 10 years or more. They had been living and working and had lives in various South American countries. And they had since the big earthquake in Haiti, you know, 15 years ago or whatever. And they had legal status in those countries, but they had discarded their documents. And you can go on the North Bank of the Rio Grande. You can find documents from all over the world.

They had discarded their documents in hopes because they believed that they could just get across the river, then they would be processed and released. Well, in this case, they started deporting. They only deported a few hundred of them. About 8,000 people in that camp of 15,000 people within a 24 hour period were back in Mexico. And the lesson there is that is that you don't have to deport every single person. You just have to show that you are willing to deport people back to their country of origin and people will stop coming. People will stop coming. You take away the incentive and you shut down the black market. We'll have more of this conversation after this.

That brings us full circle, John, to why these NGOs are so important, because they don't want a Del Rio bridge thing. So, you know, if they can quickly get into a hotel and sort of provide basically travel agent services, where do you want to go? Where do you want to go? How do I connect this kid with this whole process? What you see is, and the NGOs are sort of such a key part of it is a want this massive wave, but you can't have this massive wave unless you have the NGOs. Without the NGOs, this can't happen. That's right. You have to have that capacity, that logistical capacity. So you don't have a squalid encampment of 15,000 people with journalists flying drones over it, you know, and shining a light on the failures of the administration.

It was humiliating. And they only deported those Haitians as an emergency, you know, as it was an exigency that was demanded by the circumstances, but not as a matter of policy. Yeah, it's just so troubling. And sadly, it looks like we're not going to be able to do anything to solve this problem until until a new president is elected. If Donald Trump is elected, you know, it's a big question. But I don't see an end to this because there's no incentives from the NGOs. There's no incentives from the cartels to stop it. There's no incentives for the Democrats who are benefiting electorally. And now I think there are also international forces, Chinese, Iranian and Venezuelan forces who, you know, Venezuela allowed their their airline now to do flights. And that's facilitated a global wave.

And I think the global wave is key for hiding assets that they those three, you know, groups want to get into our country, Those three groups want to get into our country, which is why I think you're seeing this increase in Chinese and other enemy countries and illegals from enemy countries coming in. I want to move to your book because, again, it's gotten rave reviews from my daughter. She doesn't often say you have to read this book. She did say that about yours. And so it's on my to buy list. Pagan America, the decline of Christianity and the dark age to come. It's very ominous title. Break it down for me. Basic argument of the book is that America was founded as and can only function as a Christian country. The founders may not have all held the same Christian beliefs.

They may have not all been members of the same church. Some of them were not necessarily what you or I might consider a Christian. They were deists, but they understood that their deism relied on a Christian foundation and was only possible in a Christian majoritarian society. The republic that they put together was, and they said so explicitly over and over again, something that would only be possible with Christian people, a moral and religious people, right? Is what John Adams' famous quote, he said that our government is unfit for that of any other. And the argument is that as Christianity declines, as we move further into what is clearly a post-Christian epoch in the West, and in America specifically, we are going to lose that form of government that was bequeathed to us by Christianity, right? And instead of being a Christian society that has

a republican form of government that respects things like individual rights and freedom of religion and freedom of speech and consent of the governed, we will transform, and not over a long period of time, we will quickly transform into what all pre-Christian societies eventually ended up as, which is pagan empires. Pagan empires that were marked by absolute rule of the strong over the weak, rampant legal slavery and exploitation, and no limits on government power, right? That's the future that we face in post-Christian America. And we're starting to see that come into being right now. The idea, the doctrine, I should say, of Imago Dei, that man is created in the image of God, is the source of why we have a Bill of Rights at all,

right? If we're not created in the image of God, if there's no inherent dignity to human beings, if human beings don't have inherent rights that come from God, contra that Politico reporter the other day, then there's no reason to respect anyone's rights. The idea that you would have a right to life or liberty or the pursuit of happiness, much less the right to freedom of speech or anything else, is absurd. Of course, there's no basis for it. And as we become a post-Christian society, we are going to move very quickly in that direction. Yeah, it's so clear. look at the most tyrannical, like you see in modern times, you know, Marxism, communism, and these are all, you know, roots of atheists, really. And so I see that. So what, I want people

to go buy the book, but I also want to leave them with a little bit of hope. What's the answer? Because we seem like we're on that path. I mean, when you say the dark age to come, I believe you, it's coming. We're in it. There's more to come. But is there, what's the answer to take us off that path and something tangible? The pagan America that I describe and sort of chronicle in the book is not the kind of place that any American is going to want to live, whether you're Christian or not, right? And so, the idea of returning to a Christian America is one that potentially can appeal even to non-Christians if they understand what it is that Christianity makes possible for them and what Christianity does in terms of protecting them and their families and

their rights and protecting them from the violence of the state. and their families and their rights and protecting them from the violence of the state. So the answer, you know, I joke to people when we talk with friends, we talk about this, like there's an answer, there's a solution, but no one's going to like it. You have to return to a Christian society. We have to have a majoritarian Christian society, a civil society that is informed and molded by Christian moral virtues. That is what we have to do above all. And there are signs that there is an awakening happening among American people that they understand the blessings and benefits of religious life and of religious Christian morality,

and how that has to be infused into public life. Just as we have a movement toward the left, toward paganism, there's an awakening happening elsewhere in the country, where people are returning to an awareness that you cannot have a flourishing, self-governing society without a strong religious and moral people. And so to the extent that Christians in America begin to wrap their minds around that and begin to live as though that is true and begin to protect their families from the institutions that are being taken over by neo-pagans and build their own institutions and fight on ground they can win, right? And so that's, I tell people, you have to get out of the cities because most cities, that is not ground you can win on.

But in smaller towns and suburbs and exurbs, you can win on that ground. Take over the school board. take over the city council, take over the local library and reclaim ground for Christ. Right. And if you can reclaim ground for Christ, you reclaim it for America as well as a, as a happy by-product. You know, it works because you can see that the left, the pagan left that you talk about is afraid of it which is why they keep using this christian nationalism you see that coming up a lot now

they're afraid of exactly what you're what this trend that you're talking about people taking more responsibility for their families like i'm going to protect this family and make sure that this family is not going to be falling into those traps. It's the rise of homeschool and classical schools that are, you know, talking about Christian virtue and inculcating that. And this move, and you're a perfect example of somebody who said, I'm going to leave a place that I can't win on and move to a place where I can. And I think a lot of conservatives are either doing it or dreaming of doing it. And I think that's a good sign. I think they need to be emboldened. They can do it. They can do it. Well, hopefully this book, Pagan America, the decline of Christianity and the dark age to come.

If people read it, people start to understand what that other world will look like when we fall completely into it and get some hope on what they can do to fight back against it. John, it's always great talking to you. Always enlightening. And thanks for joining me on the podcast and giving me all your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Rachel. I always like to come on here and talk to you. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts.

And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Jason and the House, the Jason Chaffetz Podcast. Dive deeper than the headlines and the party lines as i take on american life politics and entertainment subscribe now on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts