TRIGGERnometry - ICE Riots, Iran Strikes and Reflections from a Week in America - Konstantin Kisin

Starting point is 00:00:03 Last week was a rather eventful week for America, and having just returned from spending that very week in Washington, D.C., I thought it might be worth sharing a few observations. First, for the very online audience that I have no doubt cultivated over the years, America is mostly fine. It isn't on fire, people are not, for the most part, at each other's throats, and Washington, D.C. managed to host a Pride March and a Trump military parade in the same week without incident.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Relaxing one evening in a bar, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a conversation between several black Democrats, a couple of white Republican staff as taking a break from working on the big, beautiful bill, and a second-generation Palestinian-American realtor. The conversation mostly focused on the NBA finals and which of the two nearby bagel shops is better. The Indiana Pacers seem to be the popular choice for NBA honors,

Starting point is 00:00:51 while the bagel debate was finally settled by the Palestinian American, who said something no one could object to. They're both good, man. Jews make the best bagels. As we all went our separate ways, jokes, smiles and warm handshakes were exchanged by all. The polarization and acrimony you hear so much about on social media and in the news are certainly there too. In a single 20-minute Uber ride, I got a real feel for how hard tackling illegal immigration will be for any country which attempts to reverse decades of

Starting point is 00:01:20 open border policy. My driver spent the entire journey listening to some kind of mainstream radio station in which the anguished narrators told story after story about the impact of the ICE immigration raids. mother of one told us that her husband has been here for 20 years. He never even got so much as a ticket. The son keeps asking for his dad. He doesn't understand, she said. He still thinks daddy is at work. This is one of the reasons why allowing illegal immigration is cruel and immoral. Inevitably, many people get fed up with it, express that democratically, and the migrants who were allowed to enter or overstay illegally end up being deported, separated from their

Starting point is 00:01:58 loved ones and having their lives appended. Some want to celebrate that this has happened. But this is not something to celebrate. At a human level, what's happening is objectively awful. Others want to pretend that the solution is simply to allow illegal immigration to go un-prosecuted and uncorrected. But that can't happen if you want to have a country. You cannot have some people spending years and thousands following all the rules, while others simply skip ahead.

Starting point is 00:02:23 What incentive does that leave for anyone to respect the system? The fact that Western countries have allowed so many people to enter illegally is the reason for what is happening now. happening now. When those decisions were made, these outcomes became inevitable. It's the same reason that failing to teach children right and wrong by setting clear boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior is cruel rather than kind. A child who grows up without limits will eventually learn those lessons from life, which will be far harsher than loving parents. It's always better to do the right thing as early as possible, or the problem gets bigger and bigger and bigger correction is then necessary.

Starting point is 00:02:58 President Trump appears to have confronted this reality last week. He pulled back from the maximalist position with a senior ICE official sending out new guidance. According to the New York Times, it stated, Effective Today, please hold on all worksite enforcement investigations and operations on agriculture, including aquaculture and meatpacking plants, restaurants and operating hotels. The email went on to clarify that investigating human traffic in money laundering, drug smuggling, etc. in these industries is okay, by agents. must not arrest, quote, non-criminal collaterals,

Starting point is 00:03:32 i.e. illegal immigrants not suspected of such crimes. Polls conducted at the start of last week showed that 54% of Americans support Trump's policy on illegal immigration. But I'd be surprised if what those people imagined was quite what they've been seeing on their TV screens over the course of the last week. This is also to say nothing of the fact

Starting point is 00:03:50 that illegal labor is now so deeply embedded in the American economy that fixing it requires treading on a lot of toes of people who, unlike the illegals themselves, have money and power. Over the weekend, President Trump conceded on this too. Our farmers are being hurt badly, he said. They have very good workers.

Starting point is 00:04:07 They've worked for them for 20 years. They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be great. We're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. We're going to have an order on that pretty soon. We can't do that to our farmers. In the meantime, President Trump appears to have played an absolute blinder in the

Starting point is 00:04:28 Middle East. I say President Trump and not Benjamin Netanyahu because not a single person with any inside knowledge I met in D.C. thinks Israel acted alone. Yes, the Trump administration very publicly did its best to dissuade the Israelis from bombing Iran, but once it happened, Trump, in characteristic fashion, found himself unable to avoid the desperate urge to take credit, somewhat giving the game away when he posted on Truth Social. Two months ago, I gave Iran a 60-day ultimatum to make a deal. They should have done it. Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn't get there. Now they have perhaps a second chance. Officially, the administration was not involved. This gives them plausible deniability with both Iran and their own isolationist voters,

Starting point is 00:05:13 while ensuring that Iran would not cross the final hurdle on its journey of uranium enrichment. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, it was estimated that Iran had accrued enough highly enriched uranium to quickly produce material for at least nine nuclear bombs. We'll see how this plays out. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available as articles on my substack at constantincision.com days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. Head on over there now and subscribe. The world is changing fast and it's not enough to just know what the news is. You have to know how it's being reported because the truth often depends on where you're That's why I use Ground News. It's the only website and app that gathers and compares news from over 50,000 sources around the world.

Starting point is 00:06:00 It doesn't just show you the headlines. It also breaks down the political bias and who owns the media outlet you're reading or watching. When you know where the money is coming from, you start to understand how power and influence shape the stories we see. Their blind spot feed is my favorite feature. It shows you which stories are being ignored by either the left or the right. so you can actually spot media bias as it's happening and stay ahead of the narrative. They surface around 20 of these a day and some of them are pretty eye-opening. This story on the UK developing a predictive tool to determine if someone will become a killer barely showed up in left-leaning outlets. It's a major story when you think about how far governments might go with AI and surveillance.

Starting point is 00:06:39 And on the other side, this story about how more than 60% of CEOs expect a recession in the next six months currently has no coverage in right-leaning media at all. That's a pretty big blind spot when you're trying to understand where the economy might be headed. If you're someone who values nuance over noise, Ground News is essential. It's no wonder they have over 10,000 five-star reviews. Right now, Trigonometry Viewers can subscribe

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TRIGGERnometry - ICE Riots, Iran Strikes and Reflections from a Week in America - Konstantin Kisin

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