The Tucker Carlson Show - Steve Robinson Exposes the Chinese Mafia’s Secret Drug Empire in the US & the Politicians Involved

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Chinese crime gangs are flooding rural America with drugs. Steve Robinson of the Maine Wire is one of the only journalists who’s noticed. A shocking story. (00:00) The Takeover of Maine by Chines...e Drug Cartels (06:53) How the Legalization of Marijuana Made Illegal Drug Trafficking Way Worse (12:11) How Warren Buffett Paved the Way for the Chinese Mafia (17:37) The Immigration Scam Destroying Rural America (26:36) Corrupt Politicians Allowing Tons of Chinese Crime Operations (39:45) Are US Politicians Being Paid off by the Chinese? (57:00) Why Corporate Media Refuses to Cover the Story Paid partnerships with: Pique: Go to https://piquelife.com/tucker to get up to 20% off for life when you start your first month ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! PureTalk: Go to https://PureTalk.com/Tucker to make the switchPolicygenius: Head to at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker to see how much you could save Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 We recently had a remarkable conversation with a man called Steve Robinson, one of the last independent journalists in the state of Maine. And he told us a story that stunned us. It's about the Chinese takeover, the takeover by Chinese drug cartels of the largest state in the Northeast. It's a story about what happens when immigration laws are ignored, when state and local governments failed to do their duty. We have a documentary out about this right now.
Starting point is 00:00:27 It's on TCN. The documentary is called High Crimes, the Chinese Mafia's Takeover of Rural America. It's shocking. Watch it now. It's available only at Tucker Carlson dot com. Thank you for doing this. You're the best journalist in Maine. You're one of about six journalists in Maine. But if it weren't for you, I don't think anybody would have any idea what was happening in the state of Maine. So let's go to
Starting point is 00:01:16 the story that has kind of defined your coverage over the last couple of years and that is the, I don't think it's too strong to say the takeover of rural Maine by Chinese drug cartels. I want to stand back and let you describe the scale of this and what it is. Well, I mean, it's shocking. I would say there's probably 300 to 400 properties throughout the state of Maine that are under the control of what the Department of Homeland Security under President Biden called Asian transnational criminal organizations. Chinese mafia, I think is a better term and an easier
Starting point is 00:01:51 way to understand it. This first came to light in the end of 2023 when a reporter from the Daily Caller News Foundation, Jenny Tehr, was a fantastic reporter, got a leaked memo that said, hey, there's 270 plus of these sites in Maine and there's another 800 in other parts of the country and that caught my eye. I grew up in Maine, spent my whole life in Maine and I figured if there were 270 sites in Maine where this criminal activity was occurring, I would be able to find it. And so I contacted Jenny and I worked with her and eventually got more information about some of these sites that she knew about,
Starting point is 00:02:29 identified the property owners, and we visited some of the sites, started identifying some of the patterns. And I basically looked at every mortgage record for the past six or seven years in every county in the state of Maine and all the electrical records for electrical upgrades, for commercial grade power, which is required for these marijuana
Starting point is 00:02:51 grows, some other financial records and mortgage documents, and was able to identify well over 300 Chinese marijuana grows unlicensed operating in the state of Maine, just from looking at records and piecing the puzzle together and then decided I need to go visit them to see what the story is and to confirm it. So I drove easily 10,000 or more miles around the state of Maine to very, very distant remote places, schools, factories, former shoe factories, former scrap metal yards. The detritus of the industrial economy. factories, former scrap metal yards. There's-
Starting point is 00:03:26 The detritus of the industrial economy. Yeah. Yeah. There's one of these next to my high school basketball coach's house. One of these next to the guy who ended up marrying my high school girlfriend. He's got a Chinese marijuana grow next to him. There's a Chinese marijuana grow next to the first place that I got drunk with my high school friends. There's a Chinese marijuana grow on my camp road that has since been busted.
Starting point is 00:03:50 There's a Chinese marijuana grow on my dad's road in St. Albans. They're everywhere. They're in former schools, former nursing homes, and we were able to find them. It was easy to find. And it turned out that one of the first things I would do when I showed up and scoped something out, I mean, you can smell it, you can see the upgraded electrical work, you can see the license plate out front from New York City, and you go and you talk with the neighbors and the neighbors, you know, you just knock on the door and say, hey, I'd like to talk
Starting point is 00:04:18 to you about your neighbors. And they kind of get this look in their eye like, finally, like finally somebody wants to come like hear what we've come like, hear what we've been going through, what we've been seeing. And they're eager to share their story. And the story is always that in the middle of COVID, a young couple that spoke decent English, were of Asian descent, showed up, bought the house, came over, introduced themselves, gave them a bottle of wine or a bottle of cognac and introduced themselves and said, you know, we're getting away from Boston or we're getting away from New York
Starting point is 00:04:49 because of COVID and, you know, this is just going to be our family getaway. And then they never saw that couple again. And from then on, it was a steady stream of other individuals of Asian descent who did not speak English, were not personable, seldom left the house, and every 30 to 40 days a U-Haul would arrive, usually at dark hours, you know, 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and be there for about an hour and leave. And then there obviously was the smell of cannabis, very pungent, and all the windows blacked out and the electrical work and odd chemicals being dumped in the backyard and some other indicators. Sometimes
Starting point is 00:05:25 they would burn to the ground because they were trying to pass through too much electricity through but I guess it was a period of seven or eight months. I spent driving all around the state of Maine and seeing story after story after story and interviewing all of these people and seeing how scared people were, how terrified people were, how well known the story was amongst people. Why were people afraid? They were for a number of reasons, I think. I think there were some people who were afraid of being called racist. If they were. Everyone in Maine is afraid of being called racist, I've noticed. It's the main weakness of the state.
Starting point is 00:06:01 Which is what I found was the exact opposite. I found that they were willing to tolerate behavior from their Chinese neighbors that they would never have tolerated from Irish or French or English neighbors. Like absolutely, you know, illegal dumping, breaking the transformer every other week and causing blackouts in the neighborhood. They would never have tolerated this behavior from white neighbors. But because of this inclination to not be smeared as a racist, they were willing to tolerate it. But they were also scared because they knew the signs of a criminal organization. They knew what was going on.
Starting point is 00:06:37 The marijuana economy in Maine is big. It's bigger than blueberries, potatoes, and lobsters. So there are enough people in the industry who are talking about this. And so there was this kind of secret hidden knowledge of what was happening in this state, but it was like you can't talk about it. I'm a little bit confused for a couple. I mean, there's so many questions. I'm glad we have time.
Starting point is 00:07:01 Maine has effectively legalized marijuana. Okay. Maine has effectively legalized marijuana, okay? So there are weed and some kind of criminal enterprise has funded all these weed dispensaries, medical marijuana dispensaries are in every town. They're the only new buildings in those towns, as you well know. And the idea of the way that was sold, your dog's getting mad about this. Yes, he's very upset with what's happening to Maine. The way this was sold to Maine voters was, we're gonna take the crime out of marijuana.
Starting point is 00:07:32 Like we're gonna regulate it. If you want marijuana, you want cannabis, you can go and get it. It's got no weird chemicals. It's gonna be safer. It's gonna be safer. Yeah, and the tax money too. The tax money is,
Starting point is 00:07:42 our schools are gonna be so much better. Our streets will be safer. There'll be so much more revenue for all these wonderful things. No bigger group of liars than the marijuana peddlers. I have to say they're liars. I know a lot of them, they're liars. Anyway, whatever. This is the opposite of what was promised, correct? Yes.
Starting point is 00:07:57 I think that there, we unintentionally created a system that was so ripe for exploitation by criminal groups that you have to wonder if it was done intentionally. So, why would they, I mean there's so much marijuana in Maine, you know, everyone you know grows marijuana in Maine. Its value has fallen dramatically. I don't know if they're selling an ounce of weed for right now, but like not, you can stuff your mattress with it. Forty or fifty dollars.
Starting point is 00:08:21 That's crazy. If it's triad weed. Forty or fifty dollars an ounce. If it's triad weed. Forty or fifty dollars an ounce. If it's triad weed. I don't smoke marijuana, but I did as a child. In 1983, it was a hundred dollars an ounce. Yeah. In 1983 dollars.
Starting point is 00:08:32 So it's dramatically cheaper than it ever was. So what's the motive for illegal weed grows? Well, they have the advantage of not paying taxes, no regulatory compliance, they're not paying their labor a significant amount of money, they're using pesticides and fungicides illegally that reduce their product loss. They can also export marijuana. About two-thirds of the product that they grow illegally leaves the state of Maine. Legal growers aren't allowed to do that because it's not federally legal yet.
Starting point is 00:09:05 So they can sell into black markets like New York for a period of time, which was a black market early on into Maine's development of triad weed. Later it was a gray market where they legalized it but didn't really have a formal system for the sale of marijuana products. So anytime you can bring your product from Maine to a black market state, you're going to get three or four times the price. And this is something that a Chinese criminal organization can do, but the mom and pop trying to run a cannabis edible store or whatever can't do.
Starting point is 00:09:35 They can't export their product out of state. So, if you have all these built-in cost advantages, you can get a significant amount of money off of it. And they also consider it very low risk. And they were right to consider it low risk. Because when the state of Maine legalized marijuana, just like what happened in Washington state and in Oklahoma and in California,
Starting point is 00:09:54 it changes the culture in law enforcement. We sent a signal to law enforcement that marijuana was no longer a problem. It was legal, people voted, stopped paying attention to marijuana, and cops who busted significant marijuana busts were kind of laughed at, like, oh, that's just pot, that's legal, why are you doing that?
Starting point is 00:10:12 Fentanyl is the priority. And we also have all kinds of legal marijuana grows happening, and that functions as camouflage for what the Chinese are doing. So it might not be the most lucrative activity, but it's pretty damn lucrative, but it's low risk, very low risk for them because at worst, you're going to get arrested, you're going to get mugshot taken, you're going to get $2,000 bail and you'll be released and probably
Starting point is 00:10:38 never have to show up at court, go to New York, get a new driver's license with a new name, come back and find a different marijuana grow to work at. So really no one suffers any consequences from this incredibly lucrative activity that they're engaged in. So the more you learn about what's in the products, the food and the drugs that you put in your mouth, the more terrifying it becomes. All kinds of ingredients you can't pronounce, you don't know where they're from, you probably don't want to know actually. It's bad and the effects are obvious in people's physical health and in life expectancy. So it's probably dawn to you by now, it is critical to seek out alternatives you can trust.
Starting point is 00:11:14 As an alternative to this synthetic garbage that people put in their mouths, we strongly recommend RE Fountain from Peak. It's a clean electrolyte designed for rest. It's got triple biomassax magnesium and no sugar, no artificial sweeteners, all real ingredients. Restless nights can destroy your ability to function and RE Fountain can help.
Starting point is 00:11:33 It's not a sleep aid, it's not a sedative, it's not a narcotic, it's what your body actually needs to recover overnight and thrive. Everyone here on this show raves about a difference it makes. We wake up feeling sharp and clear and ready to dominate the day thanks to peak. Big, big difference. So if you care about real health,
Starting point is 00:11:52 peak could be and should be part of your daily regimen. Right now you can get up to 20% off for life when you start your first month. Go to peak, that's P-I-Q-U-E dot com slash Tucker, peaklife dot com slash Tucker. You'll feel great in the morning. Nuclear power keeps America running, from our homes to our military.
Starting point is 00:12:16 But the enriched uranium that fuels our reactors, we're dependent on foreign state-owned enterprises. Now, they wanna use our tax dollars to manufacture their centrifuges overseas. Centris Energy has a better solution. Centris is restoring our ability to enrich uranium here at home with American technology built by American workers. Let's secure our energy independence.
Starting point is 00:12:38 Learn how at fuelingourfuture.us. It's me, your brain. And I, your mouth. I act on logic. I act on taste. For me, Pizza Hut's Nashville Hot Chicken Pizza with Spicy Fried Chicken, Pickles, and Creamy Ranch Drizzle is confusing. To me it sounds good.
Starting point is 00:12:58 Pickles on pizza? Amazing. It shouldn't work, but it's so good. Try the Nashville Hot lineup at Pizza Hut. Your mouth will get it. You said there were illegal Chinese cartel grows all around where you grew up. Where did you grow up and what does your family do?
Starting point is 00:13:15 I grew up in Dexter, Maine. It's kind of in the center of the state, southwest Penobscot County on the border of Somerset. And my mom worked in hospital, she was a medical assistant, and my dad worked for a period of time at Dexter Shoe until our good friend Warren Buffett bought it and closed it and ruined the town of Dexter. And then he worked in car sales for pretty much the rest of my life. Your father worked in the shoe plant, your grandfather worked in the shoe?
Starting point is 00:13:44 Yeah, my grandfather also worked in the shoe factory as well. Yeah, Dexter Shoes, it used to be a prestige brand, probably 800 to maybe even higher than that if you include the Milo factory. So probably well over a thousand union jobs making shoes. But Warren Buffett thought that he could do it better. Did he? No. And what happened to Dexter, Maine? The town has collapsed.
Starting point is 00:14:11 It's scary. It's sad. It's heartbreaking to return to. The public school is the largest employer in the town. My high school, my little league baseball coach used to own one of the general convenience stores in town. Not anymore. It's owned by a member of the Patel family.
Starting point is 00:14:31 Crazy Bob's Discount Tobacco, also owned by a member of the Patel family. Have they made it a lot better? No. No. Yep. I knew that. Yeah. I mean, there's, I think, seven Chinese marijuana grows that were operating in Dexter, despite
Starting point is 00:14:48 the fact that Dexter opted out of the state's legal programs. So these were de facto illegal. You could look at them and tell that they were illegal, that they weren't licensed, because Dexter did not participate in that marijuana program. Yet, for some mysterious reason, the Dexter police know where they are and haven't taken any action on them. Wait, so the town's economy collapsed when Warren Buffett came in and over time,
Starting point is 00:15:15 shut down the factory. And then it was invaded by people from Asia who took over the businesses and then started seven illegal marijuana grows, seven? Didn't happen that fast. Didn't happen exactly that fast. So I think Buffett's acquisition of Dexter Shoe was in like 96 or 97. I remember it, yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:37 And it kind of, it limped along for a little while and there were some other attempts. There were some other businesses in Dexter. It was a town of about 4,000 people at the time. I think it's now down to 3,500. But when I go home, I don't recognize anybody in Dexter anymore. My family, my friends, for the most part have all moved away. I see Dexter in the headlines a lot for fentanyl raids and busts, but the town has really
Starting point is 00:16:02 been hollowed out. And I think it was the collapse, the economic collapse and the despair in the town just created low real estate prices for entrepreneurs from foreign countries to take advantage of, yeah. And just bleed it of whatever was left. Yeah. And we've actually, we as in the United, have created programs that help them. We've taken money from United States taxpayers to help both the, I mean, we don't necessarily
Starting point is 00:16:32 need to get into the Patel Hotel Cartel, but they're taking advantage of small business administration loans. And it took until just recently with the election of Trump to stop SBA loans to foreign nationals and non-citizens. I don't know why we were giving SBA loans to non-citizens. That's interesting. I just want to, because I'm familiar with what you're talking about, I just want to say emphatically that there's been not only no improvement, so these stores, which are
Starting point is 00:16:58 often very often the only store in a town. Best pizza, best pizza, coffee, the centerpiece of the town, the town common. It's the town hall. Yeah, of course. Everybody's there. And they've been taken over almost exclusively by foreigners from the subcontinent and they have, I've been to many of them, they've all gotten much worse, much worse selling drug paraphernalia, just garbage products, hostile.
Starting point is 00:17:25 Have you seen any improvement? No. And they're also, I mean, they're selling cannabis product derivatives that were legalized by the farm bill that legalized hemp and unintentionally created this huge world of dodgy, unregulated drugs that are available for minors. And in many instances, it's these specific convenience stores that are selling these hemp-derived products which are I guess THC or marijuana adjacent will give you kind of the similar experience but are wildly under-regulated and untested dangerous.
Starting point is 00:17:57 Every illegal Chinese vape is for sale. I mean it's the most degrading thing I've ever seen. It makes me want to get a gun every time I walk into one of these places. It's such a, it's just parasitic behavior in the most obvious way and a hostile. So, and there's no, there's, we have no, we have no immune system as a state to repel what's happening
Starting point is 00:18:19 because there's not enough capital to come in. There's no, there's no competitor to foreign money coming in with an SBA loan and buying up to its delicatessen index there. There's no one else who could possibly buy that store. And there's no one who would want to, frankly. So I've seen, and I hate to get sidetracked, but it's such a big question in rural America who runs the general store, the convenience store, the gas station store, whatever you call it, it's the center of every little town. And if all of a sudden in the space of five years,
Starting point is 00:18:49 they're all run by non-citizens from India, and they're all getting worse, and they're all engaging in business practices that are almost intentionally degrading of the people who live there. Like, no, we only sell generic cigarettes, illegal Chinese vapes, and some kind of weird non-regulated narcotic and bongs and crack pipes.
Starting point is 00:19:08 That's literally what's happening. And there's garbage piled up outside. The whole thing is like beyond belief. You have to sort of wonder like, what actually is this? Are these incredibly profitable businesses? This seems like a scam of some kind. But last thing I'll say, I know this for a fact, a lot of these places, if you look at the tax records, they trade for 300 grand or something.
Starting point is 00:19:31 But most of the transaction is off the books in cash. So they're dodging taxes actually. And they shift around from one trust to another trust and then back to another trust. There's very complicated, very complex financial schemes at play. So what is, this is clearly a scam. There's a criminal scam. I don't think it's just in the state of Maine. I think it's probably all throughout. I know it's in New Hampshire as well in Vermont. What is the scam? Well, they're certainly not making money off the hotels that they operate in the general stores. If you look at a town like Lincoln, Maine, something similar has happened where one family from away, from out of state, has come in and purchased competing rival gas
Starting point is 00:20:12 stations. But there's one gas station that's still owned by a local. And so naturally, the people who know the guy who owns the store and don't know the guy who owns the other stores will go and patronize the guy that they still know. So as business has declined to these other general stores, somehow they're still thriving. And initially their employees are locals and mainers, but then eventually there's a new class of employees who are brought in, who are brought in very likely on visas, who are also from away. So I think that if you look at some of the, from India, yeah, from, I think that if you look at some of the cases that have been filed, even under the Biden
Starting point is 00:20:50 administration, against operations that look a lot like what's happening in Maine, they're immigration scams. They're using these businesses as a pretext to get SBA loans and also to get access to visa programs so that they can sell legal entry into the country to people back in. So they're selling, they're selling those visas. To be clear, I don't have proof that that's happening in Lincoln or Dexter, but there are indictments in, there's one I know of very well in Texas where that's exactly what was happening. It's made every town where I've seen it, and it's a dozen or more worse.
Starting point is 00:21:27 So that's kind of, okay, there are a million scams, but if you roll into somebody's town and degrade it on purpose and make it much worse, I think that's a moral crime. And there's been no response at all. Yeah, and I was asked about a food pantry operation that they were trying to set up in Dexter. They were trying to raise some money to help give out food to poor people.
Starting point is 00:21:53 And I asked, you know, how much of the new owners of Dexter Variety and Toots Delicatessen contributed to this charity operation? Their new pillars of our community and small business owners, how much have they given? And I was never given a very good answer on that. Yeah, the answer's zero, of course. So you may have seen a recent story about a smartphone that got smuggled out of North Korea. The device is programmed automatically
Starting point is 00:22:13 to take a screenshot every five minutes so the government in Pyongyang knows exactly what its subjects are looking at. There's no privacy at all in a police state. So that seems like something that only happens in North Korea, but unfortunately it's not. It happens here too, all over the so-called free world. In the United States, for example, data brokers monitor everybody's online activity, what you read, click, buy, more, everything you do, and then sell information about you without
Starting point is 00:22:41 your knowledge or permission to advertisers and even data scammers, and by the way, other governments. ExpressVPN is a way for you to fight back. ExpressVPN is an easy-to-use service that hides your IP address and encrypts all your internet traffic that makes it unreadable to people who would steal your information and then sell it. It works on every device.
Starting point is 00:23:00 A single subscription covers up to eight devices. Tech experts consistently rank ExpressVPN among America's top VPN services. There's a reason for that. You get an extra 4 months of ExpressVPN for free just by scanning the QR code on the screen or go to expressvpn.com slash Tucker and get your 4 extra months for free. Expressvpn.com slash Tucker. It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So what should we talk about?
Starting point is 00:23:44 No sugar added. Neutral. Refreshingly simple. You may have noticed that this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten. It didn't used to be this way. Take chips for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out
Starting point is 00:24:09 of bed the next day. And the change of course is chemicals. There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body. Seed oils for example. Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat, totally passive, and out of it. But there is a better way, it's called masa chips. They're delicious, got a whole garage full of them. They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients,
Starting point is 00:24:38 corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils. What a relief, and you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy convenience stores. You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish. Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.
Starting point is 00:25:03 It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try. Go to mosa, M-A-S-A, chips.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order. That's moshachips.com Tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order. Highly recommended. But that's only one aspect of how the United States taxpayer
Starting point is 00:25:24 is subsidizing this, what's happening here. About, I would say, a third of the properties in the state of Maine that would go on to become illegal Chinese marijuana grow houses were purchased using mortgages through a program called the Community Development Finance Institution. It's a designation that you give to banks. The entire purpose of the program is to help marginalized communities access financing. The idea is that if you were an immigrant in the 1990s, you couldn't prove regular income, you had irregular finances and trouble accessing a mortgage.
Starting point is 00:26:05 So they created this special program to take away some of the risk from the lender. So there's one bank in New York, Quantic Bank, that has the CDFI designation and on their website they advertise that they'll help non-citizens, foreign nationals buy property in the United States. This bank advertised on- I'm trying not to use the F word. Why would we be helping foreign nationals buy in places where there's a housing crisis and the people who are born there can't find a house to live in?
Starting point is 00:26:33 What is going on? And then why under COVID would we supercharge the program with an additional transfer of funding? Why would we put that program on steroids? I don't know. I know, but I know that it was exploited. Because you want to kill the people, because you want to kill and replace the people who populate your country. That's why. Replace them with other people. Obviously. Yeah. In looking at the mortgage records, having to actually look at the physical records
Starting point is 00:27:00 themselves, I cottoned on to this Quantic Bank pattern. And it's just a quirk of how the registry of deeds records work that you can search by the lender. And so I searched Quantic Bank just to see, do they loan to everybody or are they just suddenly a new domain? And I would say 95% of their loans were post 2019 and exclusively to people with Chinese names from New York and from Boston. And in further reviewing those records, I found that there were two individuals, two
Starting point is 00:27:34 loan officers who were originating almost all of those loans, 95% of those loans. And one was a Taiwanese national and the other was a Chinese national who graduated from a university in China that's affiliated with the PRC's economic warfare program. I actually got phone interviews with them. They're on our X page. You can go listen to them. I asked Ying Shan Wang, I said, did you know that these properties of all these loans that you're doing were becoming illegal marijuana grow houses? She said, what? No, no way. Well, I'll have to say something about this. We'll have to put a stop to this. Did they? Not, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:28:06 I'm unaware. I am unaware. I know that there's been a lot of letters written by politicians about the CDFI program, about why we're doing this, but the horses left the barn at this point. I mean, they have the properties now and they have the means to generate as much cash as they want. This was a gold rush in Maine. That's what it was. When we legalized marijuana, there was a vote in 2016. The state came out and said, yes, we want adult use marijuana legalized. They formalized the program in 2020 and created an
Starting point is 00:28:43 adult use program and a medicinal program, which are very distinct. And the medicinal program is vastly under-regulated compared to the adult use recreational program, which is counterintuitive. But the medicinal program is like the Wild Wild West. But when we did this, we created just a pig scramble for a five to ten billion dollar market for this drug. And the forces that we unleashed and the forces that were brought to bear on Maine to access that money, we weren't prepared for. The local police weren't prepared for it. The sheriffs weren't prepared for it.
Starting point is 00:29:21 No, because they were told this was going to solve the crime problem associated with illegal drugs. If you legalize something, there's no more crime. Yeah. In 2021 in Turner, Maine at 57 Conant Road, there's a hanger right next to Twitchell Airport. It's a disused airport. I know it. The police have been there many, many times.
Starting point is 00:29:43 We got police records from early 2021 where they had been called there for what they were told was a hostage situation. And when the police show up, there's Chinese individuals who only speak Cantonese running out in the woods, total chaos. They can't really discern what exactly is going on, but it's a civil dispute and they decide it's not their problem. But in their notes, they say that they believe it's the properties under the control of a quote Chinese gang from New York. That was in early 2021. That was in their notes? In the incident
Starting point is 00:30:11 report, they say that they believe- Wasn't it their job to do something about it? You think? There's never been any arrest made in connection with that facility, which functioned according to the state police, as in illicit marijuana grow controlled by Chinese gangs from New York. The Office of Cannabis Policy, which regulates all of this, has suspended numerous licenses for Chinese marijuana growers from out of state who are affiliated with that property. There's never been any arrests made at that property until December, last December, a guy named William Robinson, no relation, was shot in the head there by
Starting point is 00:30:46 a drug dealer. The guy who shot him was allegedly was later arrested hiding at a marina in San Diego. You say there are, you believe, around 300 Chinese gang controlled drug operations in Maine. There are grow houses, there are flop houses, there are prostitution houses masquerading as massage parlors, there are some, I guess, financial hubs that you might say in Kittery and Old Orchard Beach and southern parts of the state, there are other facilities that seem distinctly militaristic in character. What does that mean?
Starting point is 00:31:33 Your hair stands up on end when you go by. I've knocked on the doors of a lot of marijuana facilities, but in Greenbush, in Greenbush, Maine, it's about 35 minutes north of Bangor, very rural. But there's an area where there are multiple adjacent properties, all controlled, all fenced off, motion sensors on the road so that they know if someone's coming well in advance. And blue collar workers I've talked with
Starting point is 00:32:01 who have had to come out and do some service at those properties have talked about being surveilled by crews of, you know, eight young Chinese men, close crop haircuts, fatigues and… Fatigues? What there was described to me as fatigues, standing around the perimeter of the property and when they need to access the property to do some load testing, if they're for example, an electrical worker, they're physically stopped and prevented to access the property to do some load testing, if they're, for example, an electrical worker, they're physically stopped and prevented from accessing the property
Starting point is 00:32:29 and they're escorted off the property and two crisp $100 bills tucked into their back pocket and they say, coffee money, coffee money, coffee money. And they push them off the property. Things are completely out of control in Maine, obviously. Yeah. Completely out of control in Maine, obviously. Completely out of control. I should say for the record, it's the prettiest state out of 50, nicest people, lowest crime
Starting point is 00:32:51 rate for my whole life. I'm 56, so a long time. And you're describing like something that's really, really dark. How many of those facilities have been shut down by state or local law enforcement? It depends on what you mean by shut down. You can execute a search warrant on one of these facilities. You can go in, you can arrest some people, you can destroy their plants, but the very next day it can get spun up and all they have to say is that they're getting a license.
Starting point is 00:33:25 They're in the process of getting a license to operate legally and then law enforcement can't touch them. I saw this exact thing. This exact thing happened in Franklin County. There was a raid at a location in New Sharon and I showed up the following day because I wanted to document it and there was a big white truck from Grow Generation, which is a marijuana growing supply company, a fairly big one in Maine, backed up.
Starting point is 00:33:50 And there was a crew of workers offloading material. So it had been raided the day before by the sheriffs. And the following day, they're spinning it right back up. And I emailed the sheriff and said, hey, just so you know, these guys are right back at it. I'm watching them. You can come over here. And he said, they say they're getting a license now.
Starting point is 00:34:08 So I can't touch them. And what we learned in January. So if I get pulled over without a driver's license and I say, I'm gonna get a driver's license, they let me go. I don't think so. No, no. They take my car actually.
Starting point is 00:34:21 So how is that, I mean, with respect, with actually with no respect at all to the sheriff you're referring to, how is that. So how is that, I mean, with respect, with actually with no respect at all to the sheriff you're referring to, how is that? Like how is that? So it's, it's kind of genius the way they've set up the scheme in that the property owner is never the one who is there growing the marijuana or picking up the marijuana or trafficking the marijuana. And so they're never held culpable for the activity happening at
Starting point is 00:34:45 their property because they can always have plausible deniability. Oh, I was renting to my cousin. I was renting to a stranger. I found this guy on WeChat and rented the property to him. I had no idea this was going on. I'm so upset that this is happening. Thank you, law enforcement, for doing this for us. So in January, the director of the Office of Cannabis Policy, handpicked by Governor
Starting point is 00:35:07 Janet Mills, a guy named John Hudak, admitted... What's his name? John Hudak. John Hudak. He came from Colorado. He has a long career. He's been a huge success there, the cannabis legalization. He's been involved in cannabis policy.
Starting point is 00:35:23 Brookings... Totally destroyed Denver. He came from the Brook legalization. He's been involved in cannabis policy. Brookings has literally destroyed Denver. He came from the Brookings Institute. If you use Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, then you're overpaying for your phone. That's just a fact. The companies don't want you to hear that, but it's absolutely true.
Starting point is 00:35:35 Why is that? Well, think about it. Your monthly payment funds thousands of retail stores, their retail stores you're never gonna go to. You're also probably paying for unnecessary perks you'll never use. There's a better way. Buy what you need.
Starting point is 00:35:49 It's called PureTalk. PureTalk uses the same 5G networks as those other companies, literally the same cell towers, so it's not off grid or done with a wire between cans. It's the highest tech available. But PureTalk doesn't charge for the add-ons that send most bills to the roof.
Starting point is 00:36:05 Instead, PureTalk gives you unlimited talk, tax plenty of data for 25 bucks a month. 25 bucks a month, that's probably less than half what you're paying. You get the same service, exact same service. Go to puretalk.com slash Tucker, you save an additional 50% off your first month. The switch can take less than 10 minutes.
Starting point is 00:36:23 They do not hassle you. And you don't have to switch your phone or your phone number. You don't give up anything. You only save money. PureTalk.com slash talker Pure Talk. Wireless by Americans for Americans. On July 18th, get excited. This is big!
Starting point is 00:36:39 For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurfed my pants. That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs, only in theaters July 18th. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express.
Starting point is 00:36:57 Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. How do you spell his last name? Houdak. H-U-D-A-K. John Houdak. Okay. And he is in front of the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee testifying for the first time this year of this session. And he admits that he's been giving licenses, medicinal marijuana licenses to individuals
Starting point is 00:37:25 that he suspects have ties to Chinese organized crime, or he's giving licenses to people who provide addresses for their grows at properties that have been previously raided for their connections to Chinese organized crime. And his hands are tied. There's nothing that he can do about it. He somehow finds a way. How about say no? That would be racist.
Starting point is 00:37:47 The state has no immune system. That's it. Exactly. That there's no immune system. We have no defense. And if you look at like, you know, where I'm from Dexter, you're at Dexter, Ripley, Cornyn, Cambridge, all these towns, three different counties represented, but you've got one criminal group that's operating in three different counties.
Starting point is 00:38:04 So three different sheriffs have jurisdiction and multiple different local police departments and some of these towns don't even have police departments, but they're not as a matter of course sharing intelligence. So in order to take down a criminal operation that's straddling three counties, you need to get cooperation amongst these three sheriffs who don't like just always cooperate. So it requires a Herculean effort amongst law enforcement to coordinate one of these crackdowns or one of these raids that are going to be effective at actually arresting people, detaining people who could be witnesses, who could explain more about what's ultimately happening.
Starting point is 00:38:41 But by and large, there's no effective enforcement. And the main state police have been AWOL. Totally, totally AWOL. The one police force. But how can, okay, so just to be, I just want to make sure I understand this. You were tipped off the story by a Daily Caller News Foundation reporter who had a state generated list. CBP. This was generated by Customs and Border Protection. I'm so sorry. Okay, so it was the feds. But it was, I mean, a government agency identified these places.
Starting point is 00:39:13 So it's not like you're just guessing. And the main state police, that was a couple years ago. They've done nothing? They've been involved in three raids and two of them were in Belgrade, about a mile from the state police headquarters. And the reason they raided those is because six months before we started drawing attention to them, one of their troopers had been inside, seen 500 or 600 marijuana plants, talked to the Chinese individual who voluntarily let the trooper in, so all this is admissible, talked to the Department of Agriculture, talked to the Office of Cannabis Policy, confirmed that it was an illegal grow and didn't do anything
Starting point is 00:39:53 to it for six months and allowed it to continue to operate. So it's my belief that those two operations in Belgrade were CYA. They didn't want it later to look like a cover up on their part. So this is just corruption. I mean, you're describing corruption. I mean, what else, what else explains it? The governor of this state has yet to utter a single word about a vast criminal conspiracy operating in her state as a result of this conspiracy.
Starting point is 00:40:19 We don't even know how many people have been killed. In, in freedom, Maine, there was a house, 555 Belfast Road, been busted by the sheriff out there for functioning as an illegal marijuana grow, subsequently turned into a flop house, and there was a carbon monoxide poisoning incident. There were, we think, four or five Chinese migrants living there, poisoned by carbon monoxide, hospitalized, two of them died. Somehow, the exhaust of the heater just piped back in through the window.
Starting point is 00:40:53 It was an accident, officially, on paper, is what law enforcement have determined. Somehow the propane heater, the breeze must have caught it and piped it back in through the window. And there was no outpouring of progressive goodwill or mourning for these poor Chinese These must have caught it and piped it back in through the window. There was no outpouring of progressive goodwill or mourning for these poor Chinese migrants who died at a flophouse in Freedom, Maine. But I mean, it was an attempted mass murder, in my opinion. There's no way the exhaust just accidentally pipes back into the house.
Starting point is 00:41:22 No, this was an attempted hit on Chinese migrant workers at a flop house. This was triad on triad violence, which we've seen, we've documented. There've been burglaries. There was the shooting I just talked about at the marijuana growing Turner and that individual after he shot, who was his friend in the head, turned to one of the witnesses who I've talked with and said that he was a hired hitman for the triad and that there were 40 more just like him. Maybe he watched too many video games and or too many movies or whatever and he was lying or maybe he was telling the truth. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:42:00 So there's more than one Chinese criminal organization. Yeah, there are multiple families for sure. Multiple regions I think is safe to say, yeah. And the governor has not said one word about this? No. Who is the governor? Janet Mills. She was an attorney general under Governor Paul LePage.
Starting point is 00:42:20 She was a district attorney before that. She's been a government employee for basically her entire life. came out of Farmington, dropped out of Colby. She claims on her own free will and then graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1970, although she's not listed in the program for that graduation ceremony. It's the weirdest thing. But she's been a governor now for about six, seven years. So it makes you wonder, like, what is her position on illegal drugs, which are destroying the state?
Starting point is 00:42:53 I think any fair person would say that. The state under Governor Mills has embraced restorative justice and harm reduction, and the idea that if you stop enforcing laws against drugs and you pass out needles and Narcan, that that is going to be good for society. I think the plain objective evidence is that that's been a complete failure. But on the, I guess, the Chinese criminal conspiracy in the state, we've approached her at events and tried to ask her about it and she won't answer questions
Starting point is 00:43:31 directly. Why? So that is a, that's the million dollar question. So do you have any evidence that suggests a motive for ignoring something this destructive? Well, part of it could just be ego. It could just be that it's the main wire and it's, you know, we are the conservative outlet in the state. And maybe if she acknowledges the problem of Chinese criminal organizations in the state, it's in some way validating the work that we've done to expose the problem.
Starting point is 00:44:01 And if you accept that the work that we've done on Chinese criminal organizations in the state is legitimate, valuable journalism, then you have to ask, well, what about the other investigative projects that we've worked on, which I also think are valuable journalism for the state. So maybe it's just a simple- Is it the only journalism in the state? Let me just correct you. The only journalism in the state. Well, all due respect to your friend Steve Collins.
Starting point is 00:44:26 There's no journalism in Maine at all. It's 1.3 million people, largest state in New England, bigger than the other five New England states combined. I mean, it's a real place. No journalism. A lot of stenography. Of what you're doing, yeah, and propaganda. But I'm interested, like, that's a huge footprint across a huge state.
Starting point is 00:44:47 So a lot of people know this is going on, and she hasn't said word one, much less done anything to stop it. It does feel like someone's getting paid. I am increasingly of the belief that there's a lot of bribes being paid in the state. Small stuff to code enforcement officers, police departments. It's really the only way that explains the lack of action. We did discover in reviewing property records, there was a raid. This was in 2024 in February that kind of targeted the area around my hometown, the town that my mom grew up in.
Starting point is 00:45:27 I mean, from this marijuana house that was raided in Carinna, you can see the church that my brother was married in and that my grandmother used to go to. It's a big, beautiful main house that will probably have to be destroyed now because of the poisons and the mold and everything that afflicted the house as a result of it becoming a marijuana grow. But there was this coordinated raid with the sheriffs, a very effective law enforcement action. And in the days after that, there was a real estate transfer done for a property in Corina,
Starting point is 00:45:52 Maine in the same town for a 12 acre property, a tear down, really like a hunting camp. And it was a transfer of a property from a Chinese woman living in Massachusetts to another Chinese person living in Guangdong province, China. So it struck me as unusual. Oh, did it? Yes. A little weird? It was a little weird.
Starting point is 00:46:15 And then on the real estate transfer document, it said that this was a gift to mother. And my mom was from Carinna. And so I thought to myself, if I told my mom that for Mother's Day I was giving her 12 acres and a teardown in Carina, Maine, she would probably slap me. So again, this is an unusual gift to your mother. But what really struck me as unusual about it was the fact that the attorney who processed the real estate transfer was Paul Mills of Farmington, Maine, who was the older brother of Governor Janet Mills. What?
Starting point is 00:46:46 Wait, the governor's brother is involved in this? The governor's brother has been involved in notarizing deeds for individuals connected to Chinese organized crime and was the real estate transfer attorney specifically for this property, which he helped transfer as a gift to the ownership of a Chinese national who owns multiple marijuana growers in the state of Maine. And it was done days after a law enforcement action in that area. That's shocking. That's shocking.
Starting point is 00:47:21 Here's a depressing but true statistic. Nearly half of American adults, they would suffer financial hardship within six months if they lost their primary income earner. That's a telling sign that people are living on the edge, many of them. The economy is fragile. That's true for millions and millions of people. What do you do about it? Well, life insurance is one of the best ways to protect yourself from potential hardship.
Starting point is 00:47:43 We recommend Policy Genius to get it. Policy Genius' plans offer life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for a million dollars in coverage. It feels complex to buy life insurance, they make it really easy. They help you compare different quotes from the market's top insurers
Starting point is 00:48:00 so you get the lowest possible price, the best deal for your family. Policy Genius lays out all of your options really clearly. Coverage amounts, prices, terms, no guesswork at all. It's all very clear. They handle the questions, they handle the paperwork, they advocate for you throughout the process. So if you don't have life insurance
Starting point is 00:48:19 because it seems too complex, they are the answer. Your family's future could be guaranteed to a great extent with Policy Genius. Go to policygenius.com slash talker to compare free life insurance quotes from top companies, see how much you could save, and to what extent you could protect your family. Policygenius.com slash.
Starting point is 00:48:38 I'm here for Bet Rivers online casino and sports book with poker icon Phil Hellmuth. Thanks to Bet Rivers, I'm also a slots icon. Great. And the same game parlay icon. Cool, cool. A blackjack icon, a money line icon, a roulette icon. If you love games, Bet Rivers is the place to play and bet.
Starting point is 00:48:55 Bet Rivers. Games on. Must be 19 plus and present at Ontario. Void were prohibited. Terms and conditions apply. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConX Ontario
Starting point is 00:49:04 at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge." Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Roger Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fares, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday, anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go pass ahead of the show at gotransit.com slash tickets. Sucker.
Starting point is 00:49:38 I don't know what the fee on a real estate transfer document is. Well. a real estate transfer document is. But I'll tell you, I called Paul Mills and told him that I was from Massachusetts. I was looking to do a gift transfer in Corina and I was wondering if you'd help process this real estate transfer for me. And he told me that he didn't do work in that area. But you had evidence he had just done work in that area.
Starting point is 00:50:03 Exactly. So if you had said, I'm calling from Guangdong province and I'd like to open another illegal drug operation in the state, you think that would have been different? I don't know. I don't know who called him or I don't know if he was maybe a useful idiot or maybe it was an element of Chinese culture where they think that they need to pay some kind of a tribute to the elected official in charge, to their family members in order to get some kind of protection. When have they done that before?
Starting point is 00:50:31 Right. But I actually, I called Paul Mills as myself and we had a 10-minute interview about this property. And he said their friend asked him to do it and couldn't remember who. Couldn't remember who? Couldn't remember who the friend was who asked him to do it and couldn't remember who. Couldn't remember who? Couldn't remember who the friend was who asked him to do it, but he remembered a lot of details about it. He's the governor's brother. Yes.
Starting point is 00:50:52 The sitting governor. Yes. And I printed off copies of the real estate transfer record with his name on it, with the address in Guangdong province, China, where this new owner of 12 Acres and a teardown in Carinthan, Maine. And I have the code enforcement officer on the record saying this is an illegal marijuana grow and we would not authorize it because Karenan opted out. We went to the state house and we passed out, I printed out 50 copies of this real estate transfer record. I passed them
Starting point is 00:51:21 out to politicians, I passed them out to other reporters. I sat in the governor's lobby with a camera focused right on the door just waiting for an interview and they actually canceled one of her meetings with school board members and snuck her out the side door so that she wouldn't have to answer questions. And even though I scattered, I blanketed that place. I was like South Korea flying over North Korea, dropping flyers, trying to get people to pay attention to this stuff. And no other island in the state of Maine covered it. Nobody else covered it but you?
Starting point is 00:51:51 No. I have so many questions. Okay, I just want to sort of pause and ask the obvious question. So that suggests such a deep level of coordination and terrifying corruption. I mean, are you worried for your safety? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know how worried you should be in a situation like that.
Starting point is 00:52:16 Of course. You know, what exactly is the not the level of danger. If they're allowing Chinese drug cartels to control huge swaths of Romaine and people are dying. A governor herself is saying not one thing, we're trying to stop it. And the entire rest of the state's media is ignoring it. That sounds like a level of corruption that would have been unimaginable in this country
Starting point is 00:52:36 five years ago even. And if you're the one guy saying something about it, which you are. I don't know. I mean, where does that leave you? Before I'd even reported anything on this, I had an Excel spreadsheet working on a database, keeping track of records of sites we'd flagged from financial records, tax records, electrical records, sites we'd visited and confirmed, sites where we talked with the neighbors. And at that point, I'd identified maybe 150 or 175 of these sites and actually sent it to the Bangor Daily News.
Starting point is 00:53:10 I hadn't reported anything about it. But I was scared. And I thought that if we all reported it at the same time, it would kind of diffuse the attention. And I was like willing to give up the, it would kind of diffuse the attention. And I was willing to give up the prestige of being the one who gets the scoop to have us all come forward and report on this problem. And they've never used it.
Starting point is 00:53:35 They've never reported on it. They've never touched it. I don't know. I mean, it's just maybe their pride of not relying on, you know, I'm not a journalism school graduate, so maybe they don't want to use it or some dirty trick by the conservative media that I'm trying to pull on them, but they haven't used it. And I, at the same time-
Starting point is 00:53:52 Because it reflects poorly on the democratic administration that runs the state. Maybe that's a- That's a- Yeah? Yeah, I mean, that's a, sometimes the simplest explanation is the correct one. It's also could just be laziness, a lack of curiosity. And this is a story that can't be told merely sitting or discovered merely sitting behind your computer.
Starting point is 00:54:14 You know, you have to actually be going out and talking to people and knocking on doors and taking some risks. But it was around the same time though that after I'd been out like the entire day, knocking on fields a lot in Madison and that area and beautiful town, used to be. And I realized, I was like, man, this is a real vast conspiracy. It just kind of dawned on me how insane this entire thing was that this was being allowed
Starting point is 00:54:44 to happen in Maine. I was like, law enforcement has to be on this. I don't want to be the guy who comes along and reports on this and like dicks up this big investigation that they're about to close the loop on. I drove to the Maine State Police headquarters and I walked in with my laptop and I told the receptionist, I have evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy currently operating in the state of Maine and I would just like to turn over some information
Starting point is 00:55:08 to somebody, to anybody, because I don't want to interfere with some active criminal investigation. And I waited in the lobby for 15 minutes and then some woman came out and said, there's nobody here who can talk to you. And I contacted the... Where was this? This is right in Augusta, the Department of Public Safety building. Augusta is the capital of the state? Yeah. And then I contacted the... There's nobody here who can talk to you? This is in the public safety building in the state
Starting point is 00:55:41 capital and you say, I have evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy and you're a sober sane person, probably the single most famous journalist in the state of Maine at this point. In fact, you are. And no one can talk to you? Granted, it was 425. Oh yeah, right. Okay. It might have been a Friday, so they'd probably clocked out by that time.
Starting point is 00:56:03 But I contacted the director of communications for the State Police and reiterated what I'd said. And I contacted some other members of the State Police that I knew through family connections, some fairly high ranking who used to be very big fans of mine when they heard me on conservative talk radio, but don't want to talk to me anymore and reiterated what I'd said. The communications director told me somebody would call me on Monday and that must be 120 Mondays ago at this point. So they have no interest in talking to me or hearing from me.
Starting point is 00:56:41 The troopers I've talked with, they're mystified by the decisions that their leadership are making as well. Who's making those decisions? Well, Michael Soschuk, former police chief of Portland, who everybody in Portland was glad to see him leave when he got picked to be the head of the Department of Public Safety. So he runs the Maine State Police and the Maine DEA, Michael Sosschuk. Michael Sosschuk. Yep. And he runs the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Maine State Police,
Starting point is 00:57:15 and he's a cabinet nominee of Governor Janet Mills. He also has yet to utter a single word about this criminal conspiracy. I mean, just hearing this story, which is one of the most shocking stories I've ever heard in a lifetime of hearing shocking stories, it makes the hair in your arms stand up because it feels like there's this great evil, there's this great destruction of human life, there's this great crime taking place in public, everyone can see it. Chinese drug cartels control a lot of the state of Maine and it feels like everybody's in on it. And you're the only person saying
Starting point is 00:57:51 anything about it. I mean, do you have trouble sleeping? Sometimes. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's been, it's been a battle for sure. Why are you doing this? I feel like I owe it to my state. I feel like I had such a great childhood, a wonderful childhood as a latchkey kid and I loved Maine and I loved being able to grow up and ride my bike anywhere and be safe and I feel like the people, my people are being taken advantage of by powerful forces that they're unequipped to repel. We don't have an immune system for this.
Starting point is 00:58:49 The only thing that I can do to fight back is to put a spotlight on it and to expose it. It's like my riding around with my grandfather in a pickup truck in Ripley, Maine, and he sees some garbage on the side of the road and we stop and I ask him what are we stopping for? He's like this garbage be able to pick it up. It's not our garbage. We didn't leave it there It's like yeah, but I got trash bags and we get time and it's our town. This is our community You know, it's my version of that We're taking out the trash We're picking up our backyard.
Starting point is 00:59:27 That's what needs to be done. And there's no one else who's doing it. You know, I love this state. I don't want it to become, you know, just like a festering gangbang for third world criminals. And so it's becoming very fast, faster than I've ever seen anything change. Okay, so now to the question of the watchdogs, the constitutionally protected watchdog class, we call the media in Maine. There are three big papers, one in Bangor, one in Lewiston, one in Vegas to Portland,
Starting point is 01:00:00 Press Herald Daily News, Sun Journal. And they, you know, they've been around a long time. They had big staffs at one point. Like where are they? Why no coverage? I can't, it's blowing my mind. I mean, they'll cover something if there's a press release, you know, if there's a raid that a sheriff does.
Starting point is 01:00:22 I mean, Sheriff Dale Lancaster in Somerset County is probably the best sheriff in the state of Maine, probably the best law enforcement official in the state of Maine. Old school, no excuses, no BS, kicking doors in. He's been responsible for the vast majority of the successful search warrants that have been executed and a lot of the successful search warrants that have been executed and a lot of the arrests. He's been very successful and he'll put out a press release and there'll be some coverage, but they'll be very careful not to know any of the patterns.
Starting point is 01:00:58 They're very diligent about not recognizing the patterns. You've already done the reporting. You've put online, and unfortunately since it's Maine and it's considered far away and remote and people don't pay attention, it hasn't gotten the coverage it deserves in my opinion, but you've put the facts out there. Like they could follow up on that at any moment
Starting point is 01:01:16 and they decided not to. So reprinting press releases is not journalism, of course. It's a transcription service. Who owns the media in Maine? Who's responsible for this? Deliberately ignoring a crisis. So the largest newspaper company currently is owned by the Maine Trust for Local News, which is a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, which is a nonprofit funded by George Soros. So George Soros controls the media in Maine. He funds it.
Starting point is 01:01:53 He specifically funded the transaction to acquire these papers from Reed Brower, along with Hans-Jorg Weiss, who's a Swiss national who made his fortune doing illegal bone cement experiments on humans, who's been in trouble in the past for illegally donating as a foreign national to US political candidates, so has a knack for trying to influence American politics as a foreign national. Why would George Soros want to control the media in Maine? Yeah, so Maine's, going back to the 1980s, Maine's been a cheap date for people looking to trial
Starting point is 01:02:24 political ideas. Beginning with the shutdown of Maine Yankee, our nuclear power plant. There's really just three media markets, like you said, just a handful of newspapers. And if you wanna get a ballot initiative done or something like that, it doesn't take a lot of money. So you can come to Maine
Starting point is 01:02:42 and you can close a nuclear plant. You can get a gay marriage referendum passed, you can get marijuana legalized as a referendum for a small amount of money. And then you can go to another state and say, well, we've already done it in Maine, we can do it in this state. And so we become kind of a Petri dish for political experimentation that particularly the progressive left has taken advantage of in a very successful way.
Starting point is 01:03:07 The Maine was always the whitest state in the United States, has long been, and was a target for that reason too. They said that out loud, Maine's too white. There is a sense in which it was targeted because of its demographics. I mean, they've said that, I'm not guessing, at all. Yeah, I mean, going back 30 years, I mean, under Governor John Baldacci, Lewiston famously became a sanctuary city for Somalis.
Starting point is 01:03:34 And- Can you describe Lewiston? What does Lewiston mean? The Atlantic, I think, described it as Little Mogadishu. Lewiston, it's on the, it was a mill town. Yeah. It used to be a, it was a Franco-American town defined by the immigration of French Canadians coming down to work in factories.
Starting point is 01:03:56 So it was a urban Franco town. Textiles and paper. Yeah. And biggest mills in New England there, right on the Anderson-Goggen River. Working class people and then in the adjacent town Auburn, frequently referred to as LA, Lewiston-Auburn. It's, you know, I would say it's the second biggest metropolitan area in the state. But now I would say it's a no-go zone.
Starting point is 01:04:20 It's not something that people feel safe. You know, the people who supported turning Lewiston into a sanctuary city for Somalis have now spent as much money as they can to get as far away from Lewiston as they can. We almost lost him in Lewiston. I have to drive through it frequently for work. How's it look? Yeah, third world. I mean, it's not doing great.
Starting point is 01:04:43 And there are people who will be, you know, partisans for Lewiston, that it's on the verge of a comeback and you get in trouble if you criticize Lewiston, but we cover police reports, we cover crime reports, we talk to Lewiston police officers. We know what's happening in Lewiston. There are 16 and 17 year olds engaging in gunfights on the streets.
Starting point is 01:05:04 And when the police show up to talk to people, nobody will talk. People are getting shot and nobody will talk. People who get shot won't talk about who shot them. So the police are frustrated and they're all just, you know, looking at the clock and wondering when they can start collecting their pension. But it's just a symptom of the law enforcement is just retreating across the board, whether it's the crime that's happening, the drug crime that was happening in Portland when they're basically allowing open opioid use and not arresting people, including people who are selling narcotics, whether it's the gun crime in Lewiston or the Chinese organized crime, all of this,
Starting point is 01:05:46 there's just law enforcement have, they've pulled back. What's so scary to me is that Maine is now considered a blue state. A lot of the state is not blue at all. It is not in favor of this. It's the southern parts of the states, coastal parts of the states, the first district that has been, you know, completely changed demographically and now is, you know, totally in the hands of the Democratic Party. But what's interesting is the Republican candidates
Starting point is 01:06:19 in Maine, the ones who are lining up to run for governor, for example, in this coming election, none of them, from what I can tell, have even mentioned demographic change, crime, and drugs. Those are not issues that Republicans want to talk about, even though they are the issues. They're the only issues. I think drugs, that I've seen a lot of them have talked about drugs, but there's a lot of focus on the cultural war issues, you know, trans athletes, you know, the governor is very focused on making sure that boys can participate in girls sports and dominate girls sports. But again, this isn't an issue that-
Starting point is 01:06:54 I'm against that? Okay, obviously, I think it's, you know, it's a humiliation ritual, like so many of these things. However, is that what destroyed Lewiston? No, exactly. That's not the big issue. Right. So how many Republicans are willing to say like, hey, how about no more Somalis in our
Starting point is 01:07:09 state? Like no one voted for that. Why are you doing that? By the way, there are no jobs here. So like, why are you bringing poor people into a place with no jobs? Yeah, that is a fringe radical opinion. There is, again, there is a tremendous fear of being socially ostracized. I think what happened, these people,
Starting point is 01:07:30 I mean, I think you kind of popularized the term gay race communists. I stole it from someone else, but I do- Well, okay, well, I love it too. I think that the gay race communists increased the social costs of participating in the public sphere during COVID, helped by COVID to such a significant degree that good conservative people who might not
Starting point is 01:07:50 be explicitly political but who just are conservative inclined, they have a conservative disposition withdrew from politics because if you went to a school board or you went to a town council meeting and you spoke out, spoke your mind about what you wanted to see happen in your community. It wasn't just that you disagreed with somebody, it was that you were a bad person. And if you owned a business,
Starting point is 01:08:11 well, there's gonna be a Facebook mob that was gonna go give you a one-star reviews and you were a bad person, we're gonna drive you into the ground if you don't want porn books with cartoon blowjobs in them in your kindergarten classroom, if you don't want that you're a bad person. And so conservatives just said, you know what, screw it. It's not worth my time. The cost is
Starting point is 01:08:29 too high. I'm just going to go take care of my family and my church. I'm going to go fishing. I'm going to hang out with my rotary club. We ceded the public square to the gay race communists and they took over with zeal. I think that's a really crisp and accurate analysis, but there's also the problem of how the state of Maine's government acted, right? So I have a friend, lifelong friend here who got into an argument with the state about COVID regulations at a restaurant, and he came on my show on Fox and mentioned Janet Mills and she and the other women who run the state, I think the state is run entirely by women pretty much.
Starting point is 01:09:12 It's a matriarchy. Almost every single official in the state is a left-wing woman, angry left-wing white woman, some angry left-wing Somali woman. And gay white men from Portland. And gay white, same thing. The rainbow bullies. Yeah. They descended on him and drove him out of the state. They said, inspectors armed to shut down his business for criticizing her. And he's
Starting point is 01:09:35 now operating a business in another state. He's been here his whole life, multi-generational. So people are afraid of the state government under Janet Mills. Do you think that? It's the biggest problem in our state. I mean, there is a… But it seems like a… She seems… Janet Mills seems like a criminal.
Starting point is 01:09:53 The state seems to be run like a criminal enterprise. That's my view. Every main wire reporter gets the spiel, forget what you learned in civics class. We're reporting on a criminal organization. They steal from people and then they hand out money to their friends and to a dependent class in order to buy votes. That's how you approach reporting on state government in Maine if you're a reporter from the main wire.
Starting point is 01:10:16 How many reporters do you have working for you? We have eight, we have nine full-time employees including myself at this point. So I'm not overstating it because probably unlike a lot of people watching this, I actually come follow news from the state. I'm interested and horrified. You really are the only organization covering not a, so you came from talk radio where you're like giving opinions. Now you're really just a pretty straight news reporter.
Starting point is 01:10:42 Like here are the facts that we found we got in the truck we drove around. Here's what we saw. Yeah. I mean, I'm an opinionated guy. I can't- A hundred percent, but you're bringing new facts to the table. I try to do the investigative journalism, but I also just try to be honest about my opinions about it.
Starting point is 01:10:56 I try to be, yes, I'm conservative. Yes, I think it's a bad thing that Chinese criminal organizations have taken over my state. Yes, I think that's a bad thing, but I'm also going to be able to report facts objectively. So how hard is it to hire reporters? Where do you get your reporters? Could you be bigger? I mean, why wouldn't you have a hundred reporters working for you?
Starting point is 01:11:17 Could you do that? Yeah. I mean, if we had the resources and could find the people, I could keep a team of 15, 20 reporters busy around the clock, full time, and pursuing stories. A list of investigative stories that we have to work on that are maybe not the same size and scope as triad weed is long, but there's so much organized crime and it's so overlapped with government. Virtually every government program is being taken advantage of.
Starting point is 01:11:53 The government itself is handing out no-bid contracts in a way that's hard to separate from organized crime. Yeah, I mean, it's been very difficult to find people to move to Maine. I had really a heartbreaking moment hiring my most recent producer to do our own podcast and substack project. And I'm talking with him, he grew up in Bangor, did everything right, went to high school, stayed out of trouble, went to Husson, got a degree in film, and is getting ready to propose to his girlfriend. They've already proposed, so I'm not spilling the beans here.
Starting point is 01:12:32 And I said, so what's keeping you in Maine? And he said, we just haven't been able to save up enough money to get out. And that was like a fucking dagger in my heart. Imagine that. Just haven't been able to save up enough money to escape Maine. And it's like, where do you escape to even? I guess Texas, Florida, Tennessee, some red states, some free states maybe you can get
Starting point is 01:13:00 to. But hearing that from him was like, man. So I mean, that's, I think that's part of, I would like Maine to be a place where people want to live, but right now it's not. It's very hard to hire people who want to come here. It's like a deployment to a war zone. One of my reporters lives in Portland.
Starting point is 01:13:20 I gave him a gun when I hired him and he said he was going to be living in Portland. I gave him a gun when I hired him. He said he was going to be living in Portland. All legally transferred, by the way. Yeah, whatever. I mean, when your government is committing crimes like this, it's hard to take seriously their laws, which is part of the problem. Everything degrades. It's like, really, you're totally corrupt. You're allowing Chinese drug cartels to control my state, and you're worried about whether I have the right license to carry a firearm up yours
Starting point is 01:13:48 but that's it that that phenomenon by the way has trickled down into all of the legal marijuana businesses who Invested in some cases their life savings to build a business to it legally do things the right way now They're seeing that the laws are being enforced only against white people The marijuana laws are being enforced only against white people. The marijuana laws are only being enforced against white people. So increasingly you're seeing more people adopt the same tactics that the Chinese mafia is, shipping out of state, growing more than their licenses allow, cutting corners. There's a pretty famous case, a guy named Lucas Soroes in Farmington, Maine, who was, he set up a business called The Shoe Factory, which was in an old shoe factory building
Starting point is 01:14:34 where he built these rooms and people who wanted to grow marijuana could rent from him and they would grow their marijuana at this property. And he got reported to the Office of Cannabis Policy and the Office of Cannabis Policy immediately referred him to the federal drug enforcement agency and the DOJ got on top of him and they wiretapped his phones, recorded his conversations with his father and are still to this day pursuing a case to try to send him to prison for doing a smaller scale version of what they knew. They knew and I can prove they knew because there's public documents and documents I've obtained through Freedom of Access Act requests, what they knew the Chinese organizations were
Starting point is 01:15:21 doing at the same time, including at that facility in Turner where William Robinson was shot in the head in December. So they are, if you've got a French-Canadian last name, they're gonna stick the DOJ after you. They're gonna try to lock you in a cage. But if your last name is Wu or Huang or Chen, you don't get the laws applied to you. You get arrested, you get $500 bail, maybe, maybe $10,000 or $20,000 if it's Somerset County. And then who knows if you show up at your trial or if you're making me really radical. Has to the governor's brother who's profiting who has provably profited from this. Is anybody in
Starting point is 01:16:09 main state media mentioning this? Is anyone following up on this? The governor's never responded to this. It's just like you report this and then it just disappears. National media reported on it. Yeah. I mean, plenty. I mean, they got plenty of attention in the national media. You know, I've done a segment with CBS to their credit. Peter Schweitzer, who's a great author, journalist, who's spent a lot of time working on the China topic and the drug topic, helped me get in touch with CBS and they came up and did a segment on it. NBC later ripped off that segment and basically plagiarized all of my journalism,
Starting point is 01:16:45 but that's fine. It's gotten national attention, but not the Paul Mills part of it. And the local newspaper reporters don't seem to be interested in it. It's weird. I've been accused of xenophobia for reporting on this huge criminal organization that took over my state and that's ruining all of these buildings. That's one thing. What's the use of that? Oh, it's just idiots online, progressives, elected officials. I actually, the only time I've ever testified on a bill was when there was a lawmaker who
Starting point is 01:17:22 introduced a bill that would have given Maine a little RICO statute to help crack down on organized crime operations like this. And I figured I'd testify because I've seen more of these than anybody in the state. At this point, I could be a self-anointed expert witness in Chinese marijuana. I've got a degree in Chinese marijuana. And so I testified neither for or against this bill and just was there to answer questions about how this operates. And so I testified neither for or against this bill and just was there to answer questions about how this operates. And as we included the clip in our documentary, they didn't want to hear, they shut down my testimony and said, can we hear from an actual expert about this? And they
Starting point is 01:17:56 pushed me out and they voted down the bill, voted against the only piece of legislation that would have empowered law enforcement to do anything about this. So they've reacted very negatively and hostilely to my attempts to just show them what's happening in the state. I think we've gone above and beyond in terms of the evidence that we've provided, the documentation that we've provided, because we know that not being an established, being independent media, being conservative media, there's going to be a higher standard of proof that we have to meet. And I think that we've met it and gone way beyond it
Starting point is 01:18:36 over and over and over and over and over again. And still, they will not acknowledge it. And specifically when it comes to Paul Mills, who his clients are involved in more marijuana grows than the one we've reported on. There's a building in Sangerville, Maine right now. It's the biggest building in Sangerville. It started construction in August of last year, and it's just now finished and it's coming online and it's gonna be a big, big productive marijuana grow owned by
Starting point is 01:19:06 the client that Paul Mills transferred the property and credit to. The Cheney's client. Yeah. So the point of Maine is its majestic nature. The governor, Janet Mills, who really can't overstate really, it's shocking the more you know about Janet Mills, but they have bulldozed, chainsawed, flattened, clear cut forests in Maine for solar panels because that's like environmentally positive or something. I mean, it's like strange.
Starting point is 01:19:37 It's part of the criminal organization. It is and they hate nature. They hate nature amazingly. What's the environmental impact of these grows? Every single house that has had one of these Chinese marijuana grows, the best use for it is potentially practice for the fire department. They all need to be torn down. They're super fun sites.
Starting point is 01:20:01 We don't even know the extent of the damage that's been done as a result of the Chinese pesticides and fungicides that have been imported from China illegally into California and then shipped to Maine and used at these sites as fumigants. Actually? Yes. So, California has a really bad problem with this. In the Siskiyou National Forest, they have what they call hoop houses, massive greenhouses. And they are operated by Chinese criminal
Starting point is 01:20:30 organizations there, often in concert with the Central American cartels. And they've been investigating these from an environmental perspective because they've weakened their drug laws so much that no one cares about illegal marijuana, but they do care about water diversion to supply the cannabis and they care about the contamination of these pristine wildlife environments with the chemical runoff. So they have the environment police out there working to fight the Chinese mafia. They've found pesticides, fungicides, fumigants in Chinese labeled Mylar bags. They found some shipping labels that they were able to trace back to a property in California, which they obtained a postal warrant on and found that this particular house was also shipping to a
Starting point is 01:21:21 grow supply store in Massachusetts and a house in Monmouth, Maine, which is in Kennebec County, maybe 20 miles away from Augusta, the state's capital. It's on Academy Road, it's about maybe a thousand feet from a school. We went to the house and knocked on the door to try to see if the owner wanted to talk. No one was there. It very clearly had been turned into a marijuana girl at one point but was not active. And we went and talked with the neighbor who was a firefighter and he said, oh no, it's active.
Starting point is 01:21:54 There's people there in the mornings around two o'clock in the morning to five o'clock in the morning and there's activity there. So he kind of drew the conclusion that potentially this was a shipping hub or receiving hub for these pesticides and fumigants and chemicals that were being sent, imported from China to California and distributed to Chinese marijuana. And they're not legal here because they're poison. There's no licensed regulated use for many of these pesticides and fungicides. They're, because they're so deadly for humans, but it's even worse than that. So they're using chemicals that are not licensed for use in the United States and are deadly.
Starting point is 01:22:42 Sometimes, some of them aren't even licensed for use in China, which is not notorious for their concern for environmental rights, human rights, environmental degradation. But they're also not very well studied, used together in like eight of them together, 12 of them together. They're not studied when you burn them. They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana
Starting point is 01:23:03 and eat the marijuana. They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana and smoke the marijuana. They're not studied when you burn them. They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana and eat the marijuana. They're not studied when you apply them to marijuana and smoke the marijuana. They're not studied when you use them in all these different combinations and then do a gas extraction process to extract the THC oil and a more potent version of this pesticide fumigant. They're not studied at all. They're unknown. They only identified a lot of these chemicals.
Starting point is 01:23:23 Seriously? They only identified a lot of these chemicals in California because they brought in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit from the Army National Guard because the conventional labs couldn't test for them. There's no lab in the state of Maine that can test for them that I know of. None of the cannabis labs can take cannabis grown at a Chinese marijuana grow that has used these pesticides and test it and determine that it's contaminated. They may be now because I've shared the information with them directly from the chemists in California
Starting point is 01:23:53 who are identifying them and trying to lead the fight against them. They may be able to test for them now but the consequence of it is that you could take a bit of marijuana from one of these grows that's been treated with these heinous, deadly chemicals and test it at one of the labs and get an A plus. Test it approved. No bad chemicals. This is safe for consumption. Because you're not capable of testing these chemicals.
Starting point is 01:24:18 Yeah, because it's just a different process. It's not like you put a sample of cannabis in a machine and it says, here's everything that's in it. There's each different pesticide or bacterium or arsenic. There's different processes to test what's in each of them. And people are putting this in their bodies? Yeah. Well, they don't know. They don't know.
Starting point is 01:24:38 And these, so these Mylar bags, well, first of all, the house where we knew these products were being shipped, we knock on the door and do a story about it. A week later, the house hits the market for sale, not suspicious at all. The following week, I get a call from a grandmother who had just taken a tour of the house as a prospective buyer with her two grandchildren. She was calling me because she and her grandchildren immediately developed respiratory symptoms after walking through the house.
Starting point is 01:25:08 And they were concerned enough that they Googled it and they found my article and they called me and they wanted to know, what do we do? You know, we've just been exposed to dangerous, unknown, Chinese neurotoxins, what do we do? Like, fuck if I know, man. I'm just a journalist. So, Janet Mills is the steward of the environment, the big environmentalist governor. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, if she's supported by the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the
Starting point is 01:25:37 Maine Renewable Energy Association and all the other corrupt trade groups that turn out in profit from the sale of solar panels made by Chinese slaves in Western China. Yeah, sure, she would position herself that way and presumably future Democrats will position themselves that way. But these same Mylar bags, by the way, that we've seen in California, that we've identified, we know to a certain extent what these chemicals are, thanks to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Lab. The most recent bust in Somerset County by Sheriff Dale Lancaster, he had photographs
Starting point is 01:26:09 that he distributed with his press release, the same exact bags. They're coming here from California, shipped here illegally from China, being distributed here. And if they're in that one grow in Somerset County, you can assume that they're in all of these grows and they dump mad science concoctions of pesticides with sawdust and ammonium nitrate and a little fuse and a half cup beer can and they let it smolder and the smoke fills the house and it covers the marijuana plants and so the mites won't grow and the mildew won't grow so you have minimal product loss.
Starting point is 01:26:40 Are you serious? It's very effective at mitigating any kind of pesticide or pest damage to your marijuana product, but it coats every corner of the house and these dangerous chemicals. So we have no way of testing for them. There's no real estate disclosure. There are houses right now for sale by the same real estate agent who tried to sell this fucking house to the grandmother I talked with. There are houses that are for sale right now on the market that have very likely been contaminated with these pesticides or at a minimum the black mold that comes with a house that's
Starting point is 01:27:14 kept at 99% humidity and 80 degrees so that marijuana can grow. They're on the market right now being sold with no disclosure whatsoever. And this is a state with one of the most profound housing crises in the country because of immigration and Airbnb and big companies buying up residential real estate like people can't afford houses here, period. Yeah, also just assholes from Massachusetts and New York moving here. Well, I didn't want to say that, but yeah. True.
Starting point is 01:27:41 So- I'll just say for the record, if we're talking about mass deportation, like the Massachusetts and New York. Mass deportation. Exactly. Yeah, I get it. I've got some dirty jokes on that subject, but I'm not going to share them. So it's reducing the amount of available housing for Maine people. It is poisoning the state's environment, which the government claims to be a steward of.
Starting point is 01:28:11 And they know it's happening, right? I just want to be totally clear on. You're a journalist working with other journalists trying to expose the scale of this disaster, this crime. But it's not like government officials don't know. I'm not even talking about the governor. People who run the town managers in all these little towns, the selectmen in all these little towns, they've got to know too, right?
Starting point is 01:28:35 Yeah, I would assume. I know that the Lincoln County Sheriff has videotaped surveillance evidence of illegal dumping going on out behind these sites. There's at Machias out in Washington County at a marijuana grow I visited there. You could almost study the ages of marijuana cultivation there by looking at the strata of the styrofoam or I guess fiberglass substrate that they start the marijuana plants in because they were just layers and layers and layers and layers where they'd been growing marijuana because they just take it and when they're done with it, they throw it out in the backyard.
Starting point is 01:29:15 And so, just the entire property is a beautiful farm in Machias that overlooks the water, just like it could be someone's paradise and the soil will be permanently contaminated with you know, God knows what chemicals and fiberglass. It's everywhere distributed throughout the property. Every single one of these places has like an unknown level of contamination, water contamination, soil contamination, the danger to people. The processes that are used to extract the THC and the CBD, the psychoactive useful chemicals in marijuana, these same processes also can collect the oil soluble pesticides and fungicides in higher concentrations.
Starting point is 01:30:00 So when you concentrate the vape pen to 99% THC, you're also concentrating some of these pesticides and fungicides and then those are being sold. From the Chinese crows, two-thirds of them are leaving the state. They're being sold in New York, Massachusetts, the Southeast United States, all over the place. And people are unknowingly consuming these substances that have just not been studied at all. So we wouldn't even really know if somebody was experiencing side effects of unintentional
Starting point is 01:30:30 exposure to some of these carbonate poisons. There's so much that we don't know about the dangers of these chemicals and you can't help but wonder if that's intentional. Of course it's intentional. You know, I've read unrestricted warfare, you know, they explicitly contemplate environmental destruction and unrestricted warfare. You know, the book written by Chinese colonels in 1999, which basically laid out exactly what they would do to us over the next 25 years. And we know know thanks to Philip
Starting point is 01:31:05 Linzicki from the Daily Caller News Foundation who reported just last week that there was reporting we did in Dexter, my hometown, about a mile from where I grew up, at an illegal marijuana row. We found an abandoned BMW there and there were two shirts over the driver's seat and the passenger's seat that had Chinese writing on them for the Shih Shiu Association of New York. I was like, huh, that's weird. Took some pictures of it, didn't really think anything of it.
Starting point is 01:31:38 This place, by the way, is like a mile from a military facility, US Army Reserve garrison. And later, Philip was able to connect the dots between two individuals arrested in Carmel, Maine. One of them was Wei Zan Huang, and a film from a Chinese Communist Party event in New York, where two of these individuals who were arrested, their mugshots, they're on video at this event. And then Wei Zonghuang is featured, while he's out on bail, by the way, is featured in Chinese state-run media back in his hometown doing classic United front work, talking about how he's going to come back to the United States and he's going to bring home the bacon for his hometown, bring home American Investment for his people. He is the executive director of the association that those shirts were linked to.
Starting point is 01:32:30 Thanks to, I guess, the work we did on the ground and Philip's advanced knowledge of Cantonese Mandarin, the culture, the language, and how these Chinese benevolent associations work. They're all front groups, by the way. The Chinese consulate in New York should be gone. It should not be allowed to be operating in the United States. The president of the United States should close it down immediately. All those Chinese consulates, they're military bases from a hostile foreign power. They should be gone and New York should not be allowed to issue licenses to foreign nationals because it's hurting every other state. But thanks to –
Starting point is 01:33:04 Drivers licenses. Drivers licenses, their identity documents, the state of New York is printing false identity documents for criminal organizations, aiding and abetting them. They're all coming here with drivers licenses from New York and a month later they get a license to grow marijuana here in the state of Maine and it's a mess. But we're spending our time arguing about Israel and Iran and all the rest when the country is dying. It's the amount of energy that's being expended on things that don't really matter that much to the exclusion of things that really do matter, life and death questions like the
Starting point is 01:33:33 ones you're describing is really upsetting. And Iranians never come taking a shit in my hometown like the Chinese communists are. Nobody from my high school class has died from Iranian fentanyl. I guess if we take out their nuclear program, are we committing ourselves to a permanent technological subjugation of the Iranians forever? Are we going to forever, are we going to 100, 1,000 years from now going to be keeping them no nuclear weapons? Is that what we're going to do? Because they're going to be pretty pissed off if you go take them out now. Is that the position? Not to stray outside of my lane of expertise. I don't think that anybody advocating for this cares because they don't care about the
Starting point is 01:34:17 country in the first place. Yeah, well, war is profitable. I wish that it was as profitable, how do you make it profitable to just enforce the laws that we already have here in the state of Maine? Like, how do you just enforce the laws against people who are engaging in tax evasion? They're breaking the marijuana laws, they're breaking the environmental laws. In some cases, they're jumping their meter
Starting point is 01:34:40 to steal electricity. There's not one Indian-owned convenience store that I've ever been to in Maine that's following tax laws. I mean, that's just a fact. Why aren't they being audited? We have the Maine revenue services. They should be following up on that. So here's my question.
Starting point is 01:34:57 You were speaking earlier about the unequal application of the law in the state along racial lines. So these grows are just proceeding unimpeded. There's no real penalty. People are dying. Nobody cares. State's being poisoned. Nobody cares. Jan Misal's brother's making money from it. It's great. Media won't report on it. What would happen to you if you torched one of these places? Like it's in your town, it's next to your house, there's a grow. You burn it down. No one's hurt, but you eliminate that problem from your town.
Starting point is 01:35:28 What would happen to you if you did that? I would have a very good alibi. Let me rephrase. And I want to say, I'm not even going to bother to save the record. I'm not encouraging that. It's not up to me. So I'm not getting involved in what people would do or not. One of them burned down, by the way, just last Friday.
Starting point is 01:35:46 Yeah. In Wilton. Yeah. A big one. A big one. And I was inside it. And... After it burned. Yeah, after it burned. I have an alibi for the time. Wait, let me finish my question. I'm just saying, anytime something happens to one of these, I have an alibi.
Starting point is 01:36:01 I'll just state that for... I don't know what it is yet. You're out of state. I was with Tucker. But if you're caught doing that, I guess let me just say, you're busted by the police, the same police who didn't bust the Chinese drug cartel that was running the place, what would happen to you? I think I would go to jail for a very long time and probably under hate crime statutes, my jail sentence would be increased.
Starting point is 01:36:25 It would be a racist act of violence against a marginalized community. Marginalized community being the Chinese drug cartel. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what I think would happen. How long has your family been in Maine? Six, seven generations. Since it was in Massachusetts, as far back as-
Starting point is 01:36:48 It was 1820, 200 years ago. As far back as we care to look at that stuff. I don't know. One of my grandfather's, my grandfather's father was adopted, so there's some empty spaces there, so we don't know. As far back as we've been able to research. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:37:07 So, a foreign drug cartel can come to your town, destroy the town, commit crimes in plain sight. Yeah. There's nothing anybody can do about it. But if, having watched the total collapse of law enforcement, you decide to enforce the law informally by getting rid of the drug house, not hurting anyone, but just destroying the property, you go to jail. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:37:28 That's tyranny, right? Or what would happen if I went to China and decided, hey, I'm going to go grow a bunch of pot and sell it illegally all around. Oh, and it's going to be poisoned too with poisons that I've illegally shipped in from the United States. Not saying we want to become any more like China, but the unequal application of the laws is so obvious that it is going to encourage this, what you're talking about, vigilantism. Because marijuana in Maine is such a huge business. We're known for lobsters, blueberries, whatever, but if you look at it
Starting point is 01:38:04 in terms of economic value, and if you add the gray market and the black market to what's actually being taxed, it's way bigger than blueberries, lobster, and potatoes combined in terms of its economic value for the state. There are a lot of people who spend a considerable amount of their time, energy, and treasure trying to build businesses around this, following the rules, doing the right thing, trying to follow these weird, murky, hard to follow regulations that change all the time and the regulators are punitive. And if you complain about them on Instagram, they're going to give you a surprise inspection and write you a ticket, only if you're white. And all of these business owners are being put under because of the unequal enforcement
Starting point is 01:38:48 of the laws, because the dumping of the Chinese grown marijuana, which comes with all these built-in cost advantages, you don't have to pay your laborers, you can steal electricity, you can use pesticides and fungicides, you can grow way over the plant limits, you have no regulatory compliance costs. So you can go sell your product for half what the legal main business owners can sell. So they're going bankrupt and they're looking at a government that's not enforcing the laws equally. And if you don't think that they're contemplating vigilantism, you're crazy.
Starting point is 01:39:19 They absolutely are. They absolutely are. Why wouldn't they just pay off Janet Mills his brother even more than the Chinese drug cartels are paying him. I Don't know. I don't know what that would accomplish You know, I mean, I don't know if they've considered it I don't know if I don't know if she's open to to bribes from the other side I do know that the highest ranking official in the New York The Chinese New York consulate was here for her inauguration in 2019.
Starting point is 01:39:45 What? Can you restate that? The highest ranking official for the Chinese consulate in New York was at her inauguration. Janet Mills' inauguration. Janet Mills' inauguration in 2019. What in the world would a communist Chinese official from New York be doing at Janet Mills' inauguration as governor of Maine? That doesn't make any sense at all. According to Chinese state-run media
Starting point is 01:40:08 taking meetings with Senate President Troy Jackson, Matt Dunlap, the current state auditor, former Secretary of State, had just returned from a trip to China handling the inauguration of the first female governor of the state of Maine. How's that gone, by the way? Objectively, I think that we have yet to devise a measure of political science or social science by which you could say the state has improved under Janet Mills. If they found one, I can't tell you. Oh.
Starting point is 01:40:42 You know, nothing's gotten better. I think that the best example of the people of Maine lacking the immune system to repel something like this is Woodville, Maine, which is a town of maybe 300, 350 people. It's Penobscot County, northern Penobscot County, maybe 45 minutes to an hour north of Bangor. Pretty town. Pretty, very rural, you know, really just like one road going through it and a lot of dirt roads and they've got a three-person selectman, Manfred's the chief selectman, great guy, no-nonsense man, or you'd love him, he'd fit in around here.
Starting point is 01:41:19 And they had an obnoxious Chinese marijuana grow right next to their town office. And you can see right next to their town office. You can smell it. In Woodville, Maine, an hour north of Bangor, which itself is like far from the Massachusetts border, the New Yorkshire border. It's a long way. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:41:36 And this used to be a lumber mill or a sawmill. It was like the days mill back in a former main. It was a prosperous business that made lumber and wood for people to build homes so that middle class families could live in them instead of growing marijuana in them. This place was obnoxious. There was effluent always running across the road. The people were angry and mean and nasty and they wouldn't pay their taxes and then someone would show up from New York and just slap $100 bills on the counter until the clerk
Starting point is 01:42:10 said okay, the taxes are paid and then leave. And at one point they had to call the animal control officer because there was a Cantonese speaking individual out in the front yard beating a border collie with a stick. And I- Beating a border collie? With a stick. And- So why didn't the townspeople shoot him?
Starting point is 01:42:35 You'd have to ask Manfred. Look, I'm not, I don't want to be judgmental, but you can't, I mean, that like crosses so many lines that you give up your right to life at that point, I would say. They took the dog away. I mean, the dog is, you know, it was clearly very severely abused. When the animal control officer showed up, the guy just picked up the dog, threw him
Starting point is 01:42:56 over and said, take him. No good. No good. And I could see going into the town council meetings that I could see this happening, like the lack of an immune system to repel what was happening and across the line from journalists to, it's like, I don't know, local activists. And I was like, why don't you guys just write an ordinance that says that you can declare that an illegal cannabis business and start fining them $10,000 a day until they shut
Starting point is 01:43:31 it down. And if they don't pay the fine, then you put a lien against the property and turn off the electricity because if they can't have electricity, they can't grow marijuana. If they can't grow marijuana, they can't make money, they will leave. Just write an ordinance and do that." They were like, geez, that's not a bad idea. And they wrote the ordinance. They passed the ordinance. And 30 days later, I reached out and they were like, well, how do we enforce the ordinance? Well, get your code enforcement officer, as the ordinance says, get your code enforcement officer to go declare it from an exterior inspection and illegal cannabis business and start issuing the fines. They're like, well, geez, I don't know if our code enforcement officer will do that.
Starting point is 01:44:11 She's got a couple of talents she deals with. I don't know. I still don't know what the status of it is, but these guys, this particular marijuana grow ended up applying for a license with the office of cannabis policy to grow legally and when the inspector showed up, they were already growing hundreds of plants and they couldn't explain to them that that's illegal and you're disqualifying for getting a license. But this is like the one place that ended up not getting a legal license after being caught growing marijuana illegally.
Starting point is 01:44:46 But it's still owned by Chinese nationals because these are effective real estate investments too. The real estate is an effective way to hide capital from the Chinese government itself. That's happening all over the United States and it's really affecting residential real estate prices, of course, and it's not just China that's dumping money here as a safe haven and destroying the ability of our kids to buy houses. You said something off camera which I hope you will elaborate on a little bit. So one of, I think, people listening to this who don't, aren't familiar with northern New England might say, well, wow, you know, the people sound pretty passive in the face of
Starting point is 01:45:23 the total destruction of their state, their way of life, their culture, their economy, the people sound pretty passive in the face of the total destruction of their state, their way of life, their culture, their economy, the land itself. How could they put up with that? And you said something, oh, I think this is fair. You said the best part of Maine is that people are instinctively hesitant to bother other people, but that's also a weakness. Yeah. and to bother other people, but that's also a weakness. Yeah, I mean, you, Mainers don't want people up in their shit so they don't get up in other people's shit.
Starting point is 01:45:51 Yeah, nicely put. You know, and I'll say that there are, I was more scared knocking on some of the doors than I knew Mainers owned the properties because they might answer with a gun. You know, for sure. The Chinese, the individuals who are at these facilities growing marijuana, it's my belief. In most cases, they are victims of exploitation by criminal organizations.
Starting point is 01:46:17 They're being paid maybe $1,000 a month. They're being exposed to chemicals that they have no idea what the consequences of that will be, the mold. They're living in conditions that any American would look at and be like, that's slavery or that's human trafficking. That is unreal. But they could be doing it voluntarily. I still think that they're victims.
Starting point is 01:46:39 But they're very servile in most cases when you try to ask them questions or interview them and they can't speak English or they pretend they can't speak English and they call someone in New York and do an interview over the phone and they don't want to answer any questions. But they very much, the people who are operating this know about that culture in Maine and they exploit it for a reason. about that culture in Maine and they exploit it for a reason. They came to Maine with a playbook that they'd run previously in Washington state, in California, in Oklahoma to camouflage themselves within legal marijuana programs, but they knew that once they got to Maine, there was going to be this live and let live type culture and they took advantage of it and that's what pisses me off so much.
Starting point is 01:47:22 And the Yankee reserve, it's got the highest incidents of English ancestry of any state is what the world has done to Great Britain, you know, in the same dynamic. Like you come in living off the charity of the people who built the country and then you give them the finger, then you destroy what they built, then you take more money from them and then they do nothing. And the only people who speak up about it Get arrested for speaking about it like because it's you're leveraging Anglo politeness against the Anglos is what you're doing. Yeah, and and I mean they even have a word for what is it like bizo? Yeah, the white liberals they they they're very strategically taking advantage of this
Starting point is 01:48:01 Hesitant to this deep-seated fear amongst white people in Maine to be labeled as a racist or described as a racist. And there's this, even the stereotype about this rural redneck, and it's true of Maine and it's true of any other state, like these rural people. The deep south, yeah. Yeah, these people are just racist. And I encountered over and over and over again, in every county that I went to people who went out of their way to be as fucking nice to these people as they possibly could. In Franklin County, there was a guy who plowed them out for like two years because they needed
Starting point is 01:48:39 to have the driveway clean. Explain what plow out means. Sorry, it snows in Maine for people who are unfamiliar, it snows. The Chinese were apparently unfamiliar with that. So this was one of the challenges they had to surmount as they're trying to make a marijuana pickup. When the U-Haul or the Sprinter van is coming to pick up 500 pounds of marijuana, you can't have two feet of snow in the driveway.
Starting point is 01:49:03 So there was actually a marijuana grow that was on the Department of Homeland Security's list and this is in Chesterville, Maine. It was I think 200 West Road and they needed help plowing. So this Chinese guy walks up the driveway of their neighbors and holds out a phone and it's a woman in New York who? Negotiates an arrangement where they plow the guy out and so they'd bring their tractor down and plow the driveway and They did that for them for free like for they didn't even negotiate like a price They were just like yeah, we'll go plow you out. You're a neighbor. They did that for them
Starting point is 01:49:39 That's what they're like because they were just like it was a guy who and then returned the Chinese poison their children Because they were just like, it was a guy who- And then returned the Chinese poison their children. Yeah. Sorry, it's just true. But you've described the way every rural community, probably in the country, but certainly- No, they later abused that relationship to the point where the woman who was living
Starting point is 01:49:57 at that property, I think she's in her 60s, a young Chinese man, maybe 20s or 30s, came over and asked the elderly Chinese woman if she would go mow the lawn for them. So last question, it doesn't seem like, and you're the expert on politics in the state, but it seems like it's pretty hard to make a change. The governor's leaving in the next election, thank God. However, there are a lot of people like the governor in state government, like the whole state government, not the whole, but a lot of it is truly corrupt.
Starting point is 01:50:42 So I don't know, I'm not that confident that anyone in Maine is gonna fix Maine's problems. Can the feds do anything? Can the Trump Justice Department begin to fix this problem? Yes, absolutely. And I think that you're seeing glimmers of that. I mean it's fun to fight about the training stuff, okay? Yeah. But if you've got got military age male Chinese in uniform, you know, throughout the state, you've got thousands of Chinese here illegally working for drug cartels, like that's a national security threat, no? They control the former main National Guard base in Gardner.
Starting point is 01:51:16 What? Yeah. It's a former main National Guard base. It was decommissioned and sold to a big brick military garrison surrounded by barbed wire But there's an illegal Chinese marijuana grow operating out of that. It's about two miles from the state house Actually, yeah And just down the road from there There's another one that is operating out of an old meat walker used to be run by Johnny Wu Johnny Wu lost his license Ben Wang came in and now it's operating under her license.
Starting point is 01:51:50 Okay, sorry. We've been talking for almost two hours and every sentence shocks me. So, well, okay. I think you've established this is an imminent national security threat. So what could the feds do and why haven't they done anything? They need to treat it like a national security threat, first of all.
Starting point is 01:52:10 I think that there's maybe an illusion that Maine doesn't have anything that's a vital national security interest, but there are internet lines that run, international internet lines that run through Maine. There's Bath Iron Works, a defense contractor here. There's some military facilities and there's a huge, like a 5,000 acre, I guess, National Guard complex in Woodville, the town where the Border Collie was being beat. So I know- Well, there are also like training facilities in Maine that are not like widely known.
Starting point is 01:52:49 Yeah. There's the longest runway I think in North America, bomber runway in Bangor. It's also has an incredibly long international border. Yeah. Plus it's an American state. Yeah. So there's- One of the oldest American states.
Starting point is 01:53:02 It needs to be treated like a national security threat and the northern border needs to be treated with the same seriousness that the southern border is, particularly our northeast border. Right now we have basically the thin blue line protecting America from illegal aliens from Jordan or from Algeria or from China from sneaking across the main border are like 19 and 20 year old cops from Fort Fairfield, Maine. Happening to pull somebody over and see something that's not right and bring in CBT. Well yeah, especially China controls Canada. I mean Canada is now a colony of China which can be used for its resources obviously. And they're
Starting point is 01:53:44 exploiting that border. So to answer the question about what can the feds do, treat it like a national security issue. That's what you can do. They've moved to see… Is that more effective than fighting about trannies? You know, a tranny has never, you know, tried to kill me. Yeah, I mean, I'm not for trannies.
Starting point is 01:54:03 Not that I know of. Not that I know of. Spent many many hours on TV barking about trannies kill me. Yeah, I mean, I'm not for trainees. I mean, I've spent many, many hours on TV barking about trainees, but like, okay. I know, I know, yeah, I get it. Now this is real. Let's get real. In the scope of things that are affecting the quality of life in the people of Maine,
Starting point is 01:54:16 the transgender athletes, with all due respect to the female athletes who lose to the male athletes who are pretending to be women. It's not as big as this, not at all. No, it's not. And yeah, exactly. It needs to be treated like a national security threat
Starting point is 01:54:33 and there needs to be a whole of government response to it. You need to use the environmental protection agency to go after these facilities that we know are using unregistered poisons. The problem is, is that the weed scammers are not just Chinese, they're American too. And there's a lot of, there's so much money. I know, I know, I know.
Starting point is 01:54:51 I mean, I have a million friends who grow marijuana. I'm not against everyone who grows marijuana. I'm saying, I know a lot of people who grow marijuana. I think because they're afraid to smoke marijuana from the Chinese drug cartels because it's poison. With good reason. Or whatever. This is an agricultural state. A lot of people grow marijuana. I think because they're afraid to smoke marijuana from the Chinese drug cartels because it's poisoned. With good reason. Or whatever.
Starting point is 01:55:07 This is an agricultural state. A lot of people grow marijuana. I don't use it, but I get it. I'm talking about the organized money interests in the United States who are constantly lobbying the federal government for their own economic benefit. Yeah. Right? There's a lot of that.
Starting point is 01:55:23 Yeah. Billions of dollars of that. Well, I would say Bobby Kennedy should treat this like a national health emergency. It is. Whatever your feelings are on legal marijuana, it's here. It's happening. People are consuming it. It's more popular. There are more daily active marijuana users than daily active alcohol users. This happened just, I think, within the last year or two. So it's happening. And to the extent that these illicit Chinese poisons are making it into that supply, it is a national health emergency and it needs to be responded to it just like that. But there's also, there are powerful economic interests that align with what the Chinese
Starting point is 01:56:01 are doing in the Baptist and bootleggers fashion. Like there are marijuana companies that want to become the Bud Lighter Coarser Light of marijuana. What do they benefit from? A harsh, strict regulatory environment that they can comply with easily, costs that they have the capital to deal with, but the little mom and pop cannabis producers don't. So they tolerate and allow and maybe encourage this kind of wild, wild west
Starting point is 01:56:28 of which the Chinese marijuana growers are a part because they know that the Chinese criminal organizations polluting the marijuana environment in Maine will lead to calls for greater regulatory crackdown and a compliance regime that works favorable to their long-term economic interests. So there are wealthy companies that give a lot of money to politicians. I would look into who were the biggest donors to Governor Janet Mills' inaugural committee in 2019.
Starting point is 01:56:58 Who were they? Big cannabis companies. companies. I should just say, you're the son of a man who worked at the shoe factory, but you have a fancy college degree. You've got a million different potential life paths, and you've chosen to stay in Maine and do this job, making much less than you could have made if you'd left with your college degree. And I'm just grateful that you did that. Well, thank you.
Starting point is 01:57:24 This is making a difference. Thank you. I'm grateful for the help and encouragement that you've given me and the attention to be here. Well, no one else is doing it. I know. It's crazy. Why is it falling to you to do this?
Starting point is 01:57:38 Honestly, Tucker, you're like my psychotherapist because I feel like I'm Mugatu and Zoolander so I feel like I'm Mugatu and Zulander's, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills as I drive around and I see all these marijuana sites. I'm like, how has it taken this long for somebody to tell this story? So finally for somebody else to be like, yeah, that's a fascinating story. It feels gratifying to the work that we've done. And I have to say that, I mean, it's been like a team wide work that my reporters have had to tolerate me just disappearing into the woods of Maine where there's no cell phone signal for days at a time to do some
Starting point is 01:58:13 of this work. Our digital media producer, Graham Pollard, he's one of the best in the country and he single handedly put together the documentary that we made on this and he's just so wildly talented and a lot of this I don't think I could have done without their help and their handedly put together the documentary that we made on this and he's just so wildly talented. And a lot of this I don't think I could have done without their help and their assistance. And also the readers and supporters of our organization, The Main Wire, and a lot of the people who were very brave and gave us tips anonymously, people in government, people who work for utility companies, town officials.
Starting point is 01:58:45 You know, once the initial story started coming out, people came to us with a lot of harrowing information that they were too scared to put their name to, but ended up being very useful to us in connecting the dots and being able to tell the story that we've told. Godspeed, man. I think you're in danger and I know that you are in danger. So thank you for doing this anyway. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify,
Starting point is 01:59:17 a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.