Ep 1286 | Maduro Detained, Minnesota ICE Altercation, Can Trump Save Single-Family Homes? | Ron Simmons

Well, hello everyone. It's so good to see you and I know Allie has already wished you a happy new year. 2026 were in the first week of the year and things are starting out busy as I'm sure they are in your life as well. Probably your kids have gone back to school if you have kids in school, which is good and bad. I know that we enjoyed our vacation time when when our kids were in school, but you know, we were always a little also excited to get back to a routine and kids get back engaged in what they had going on every day and have things calm down a little bit. So hopefully that's happened at your house as well. Now I'm recording this before the last college football semifinal game is played. By the time you watch this, you'll know who is going to be in the national championship. You know, for the first time in a long time, there's no SEC teams in there. So that's kind of disappointing for some of us that follow that part of it. For those of you that follow the teams that are in the finals, congratulations to you. Watch the Miami Ole Miss game here last night and it was fantastic game. It didn't turn out exactly like I wanted it, but that's the way it goes, right? But we'll have a good season. The NFL playoffs are starting and so I don't know. We have a lot of ladies that listen to this that are football fans. So hopefully your team is in there and guys hope we have a lot of related bros that are listening to this podcast that we're going to be doing now and Ali announced it. We're going to be doing I'm going to be doing two episodes a month throughout 2026. And I think Ali and I'll probably still have a couple of episodes during the year where she's interviewing me or we're talking together about stuff. But I'm going to be hosting two on my own every other Saturday is kind of how we're doing it. And we're looking forward to doing that. It's going to be news related topics primarily also answering some of your questions. You always have such great questions. And then on the two Saturdays a month that I'm not hosting, there will be two episodes that will be what we would call evergreen episodes that Ali's done in the past that have been the most popular, maybe some interviews or things like that that people responded to. So if you have some episodes of the past that you would like to be played again in the future, let her know that on Instagram. Just send her a message on that and we'll look back in the archives and see what we can find. So you'll have four episodes a week of relatable. You'll have Ali's three that she does and then you'll have something that comes out over the weekend usually on Saturday. Two of those will be mine a month and then two will be previous episodes that have been very popular that Ali has done that maybe you missed. I know I sometimes I can't listen to every single one of them and then I've missed some of them. So that'll be good to be able to do that. We're also going to in this, we'll always talk about political implications of things and what it means to you. What should you do if anything related to the stuff we're talking about today? Sometimes there's not anything we need, we can do. We just need to understand it. The worst thing that we can have is lack of knowledge. So my goal is to try to just educate all of us and I'm learning as we go as well. I certainly don't have all the answers, but just to educate us on, educate you and myself on what's going on in the world and how that might have an effect on you and your family. Then once we go through the new sections, we're going to do something that we call words from the wagon and it kind of relates to my book, Life Lessons from the Little Red Wagon, which you can see behind me. And by the way, this book is now available in the Ali's merchandise store. I can't say merch guys. I just can't do that. I mean, I'm 65 years old, so merch is not a real word to me. I'm sure it's now in the dictionary, but where you get Ali's merchandise and relatable merchandise, you can now buy this book and I'm selling it about a 25% discount on what you could get it from another provider. So feel free to go on there and buy that book. I think you'll enjoy that. And again, we'll post that in the show notes or maybe end up having a graphic of it later in the show. The words from the wagon are really going to be questions from you as well as something to ponder, something that I would like for you to think about, you know, over the next several days or weeks or months or what have you. And I think that'll be fun. All right, let's get started today with the hard news stuff. And it seems like the biggest thing that's been in the news this week. And of course, there's something new virtually every day in the Trump world. There's always things going on. And he's not I don't know how the guy sleeps at all. Honestly, I mean, the guy, there's no way that he gets more than four hours of sleep because he is one busy man. Interesting. I had a really close family member that was at the White House this week. And it's just kind of and they interacted with President Trump with a group of other people. This person wasn't there seeing seeing President Trump individually with a group of people. But he said the guy is amazingly intelligent and how he communicates and his thought process. He certainly hasn't lost anything mentally at all whatsoever. And that's always encouraging, especially with the experience of the last president that we had that really sadly was declining during that period of time. And people around him were just trying to cover for him. So that was a that was a sad case. And it also hurt our country, which is even more sad. So let's talk a little bit about the Maduro. And I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but hopefully I am. Nicholas Maduro was the alleged leader, alleged leader of Venezuela. And when I say alleged, United States and several other countries never recognized the last two elections that he says he won. So we did not recognize him in an official capacity as the president or leader of Venezuela. He we did not do that. And and Anthony Blinken, who was the Secretary of State during the last election, was very clear on that that we did not recognize him. We recognize the opposition person at the time. We'll talk about them in a minute. But there is some parallels that go in this case to what we've done before in precedence. And a lot of you listening to this may not remember Manuel Noriega, who was the head of Panama. And in 1989, when President Bush 41, so the first president Bush, who is someone that I think as far as a man, I have some of the most respect for not saying he was the best president. Certainly he wasn't the worst. He was a good president. But as a man, I think that the person was a man of honor and probably the most qualified person to be president. When you look at the history of what he had done, he had served in Congress, he had been vice president, he had served as head of the CIA. He had been in private business. So he kind of knew his way around. But anyway, Manuel Noriega in 1989, we had an operation called Operation Just Cause. And we were going after him for essentially, you know, cocaine trafficking and racketeering. And what we did is we went into Panama. Now, remember this, this is crazy. Can you imagine if President Trump would have done this? Went into Panama with 27,000 troops. It wasn't, you know, in the middle of the night, we're going to go in and lift this person out. 27,000 troops. There was a 10 day standoff. But we finally got him. And he was in diet. He had already been indicted in US courts. That's what happens. The courts can indict people that, you know, aren't here. But if they've committed crimes against the US, so they've been in diet, he would have already been indicted. We did, we did, we thought that he stole the elections in 1989. And so we went down and got him and sent it. And then he had a trial. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He served in our prisons for quite a while. And then he had some crimes against him in France. So he sent him to France. They did some stuff with him. Eventually sending you back to Panama where he died in 2017. So President without congressional approval, sends in 27,000 troops because this guy has committed crimes against the United States, brings him out, brings him back to the US, puts him on trial, convicted. That's what happened with Noriega. Okay. And here's what happened with Maduro. Maduro has been as seen as what we now call a narco terrorist. So they're using narcotics to terrorize US and US citizens. And also has obviously been charged with exporting out of Venezuela, cocaine and other drugs to the United States. And we went in there in the stealth of the night with the Delta Force team, which is some of our most elite special forces, and took him out. We had very, very precision. We didn't send in 27,000 troops. I don't know exactly how many people were involved, but it was a very small force, took him out in the middle of the night. He and his wife brought him back to the US. He had already been indicted, put him before a judge. He's going to have a trial. He's going to be convicted. He will be convicted of his crimes. There's no question about that. And then we'll see what happens to him after that. Now, a couple of the legal ramifications behind this, again, both of them have been previously indicted in federal courts. Noriega in 1988, Maduro in 2020. So he's been under indictment for the last five, almost six years, with both in disputed elections. Both were not recognized as winning their elections. Now, what they're going to claim, and what Maduro is going to claim is head of state immunity. And there is precedence that says, if you are the recognized, elected head of state, that a foreign government can't come in and arrest you. But because we didn't recognize him, just like we didn't recognize Noriega, we don't think that applies. And the courts agreed with us on that. We consider him an illegitimate ruler. Some legal scholars have said that's not the case, but we absolutely believe that's the same thing as a Noriega precedent. A couple of other things that we think will happen is that well, a couple of things that have happened is that there was a $25 million bounty placed on him. And who do you think placed that bounty on him? Joe Biden. So Joe Biden had said, look, we'll pay you, we'll pay producer Tom $25 million. If you'll go down there, take the weekend, go down there, bring Maduro back to us, you'll get a $25 million check from the US government. How is that? Why wasn't there anything said about that? And we didn't even have to pay the bounty. We just sent our troops down there, which are already paying. They brought him back here. So where was the Democrats' outrage on the bounty that Biden had put out on him? I mean, that's just, and I'm glad he put the bounty out. I think that was the right thing to do. Nobody took him up on it because as you can imagine, Maduro was pretty well protected. Now, you might think, how in the world did they get into his wherever he was staying and get to him? Well, again, I don't have any particular inside information. I do have several friends in Congress that have been in on multiple meetings. But they had to have had some coordination with some of the military down there that there wasn't a big firefight. They had to have had that in some former fashion. You know, we've had this. We haven't had an ambassador there in a long time, but the CIA is all over the place down there. In fact, there probably are top people down there is our CIA operatives in the head of our CIA organization that works out of the embassy there. So they bound to have had intelligence on the ground and they bound to have had some agreements with some of the head military leaders that said, hey, we're not going to get into a big fight with you, right? And so that that I don't see how it would have happened without a big, you know, firefight without doing that. So that's what I think has happened. Now, interesting, you think, well, why did we even do this? What we're, you know, we've heard about Venezuela for the last, you know, few years. And we know that ever since 2012, when Hugo Chavez came in and essentially stole that election, and then he was a narco terrorist, you know, and we we got him and indicted him and then he died. We captured him and he died and what have you. And then Maduro takes over and we've been fighting with them the whole time and their economy has gone down. As a matter of fact, my wife and I, Lisa and I have some really, really close friends who had to fled, who fled Venezuela probably, or they probably fled Venezuela in, you know, after Chavez came in because her, the my friend's wife's father was an admiral in the Navy and was very much against the Chavez takeover. So he was kind of on the Chavez hit list and he had to get out. So he got out as well. He lives here in the U. S. Somewhere. But the stories that they told about Chavez and what how he was oppressing his people and what have you were just pitiful. And our friends were outspoken about it. So they basically were on the government hit list. And, you know, and Maduro and according to what they've told us on how they've monitored since then, is that Maduro is just as bad as Chavez and, you know, very anti-American had cut deals with Hezbollah, the terrorist organization of the mid east had cut deals with Iran. There is a, there was a rifle manufacturing company out of Russia that was based there. And so we were very, very concerned that these forces from Europe and Asia and the other continents and actually China has put in about $60 billion there to help them with their refineries and take a lot of their oil. But we were very concerned. And you think this is something that's new, but it's really, really not. James Monroe, who was one of the early presidents of our country, had something called and you may have heard this term, the Monroe Doctrine. Well, the Monroe Doctrine at the time, and again, this was in the early 1800s where there was the, the British, the United Kingdom, Britain was obviously the superpower, the superpower of the world, but certainly the superpower of Europe. And then there was the United States and the Western Hemisphere. And by that time, it was pretty clear that we were going to be the strongest nation in the Western Hemisphere. And so, excuse me, essentially the Monroe Doctrine says, look, Great Britain, you take care of everything in Europe and we will not mess with you over there. All right. But in the Western Hemisphere, we're going to take care of everything and you don't mess with us over here. And that includes the Latin American countries, the Central American countries, because there's a lot of concern that Spain might want to come back in and establish themselves in Latin America and things like that. So that was the Monroe Doctrine. Well, now that's being called the Donro Doctrine, which only President Trump, I'm not sure he even said it, somebody probably else made it up, but only would this happen under President Trump. And what the Donro Doctrine essentially is, is that, look, if you're threatening America, especially in the Western Hemisphere, where you, you know, the Iran could have put ballistic missiles in Venezuela and got to the United States pretty easily. So we're going to pay attention to things that are very close to us. And if we think there's some country or some person that is a threat to America or is harming America, then we're going to do something about it. And I, for one, applaud that. And I would hope that you would applaud that as well. We need to do that. Now, nobody wants to see the men and women in uniform lose their lives no matter what they're doing. Unfortunately, that is a part of being in the military. That's the risk that that is taken by people. And, you know, in this particular instance, we didn't lose any lives or anything like that on our side of it. But that is people that signed up for the military sign up knowing that that could be one of the risks that they have. So the Donro Doctrine is in place. And we were just in Venezuela alone, we're very concerned about what other countries like Russia, as I said, and China and Hezbollah, the terrorist organization has been involved in that. This hasn't happened just yesterday. The Drug Enforcement Association launched Project Cassandra to investigate Hezbollah's growth into a crime-significant syndicate, tracking cocaine, being trafficked from Latin America, including Venezuela, to Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. through and also through weapons muggling and money laundering and believed to have profited a billion dollars annually. Now, our good friend President Obama, his administration, they and with Biden and them, they didn't want that to continue because they had cut the deal with Iran. So they shut down that organization. And, you know, therefore it continued to operate. And then, of course, Russia is an ally of there. We talked about China. Now, there's been a little talk about this oil. You know, we're just doing it for the oil. All right. Now, Venezuela does have huge oil reserves. I was reading about it the other day. I mean, it is some of the largest in the world. Now, their oil is interesting. It's real, what they call Black Tar oil, real heavy. Not every refinery around the world can actually even process that oil. We have some experience that in the U.S. because Canada's oil is very heavy as well. And we've been processing Canadian crude for a long time, especially down along the Gulf Coast that comes in through ships or what have you should be coming through a pipeline. But again, we've had issues with that with the previous Democrat administrations. Before Chavez came in to the world, we had agreements with Venezuela, our private companies like Chevron and maybe Exxon and some of the others. I don't know all the names where we invested almost $20 billion to build refineries there, to do exploration there. And we would share the profits with the country of Venezuela. And they got a royalty on that, so to speak. That's how we shared the profits. Well, when Chavez came in, he basically took all that over. He took all that over. We didn't get anything out of it. You know, our companies didn't and therefore our United States didn't get anything out of it. And so all we've done is saying, okay, look, no, we're going to repatriate that, meaning we're going to take that back because that's what these companies had invested to do. And they are, you know, some of those are American companies or they have American offices here. So we're going to protect that. Now, these tankers that we have now, I don't want to say confiscated, but now that we have retaken, that are full of these, like, I think some of them had like 50 million barrels of oil or something like that. So a lot of oil on these tankers that, and these tankers have already been sanctioned because we believe they were, because they were using that oil, you know, they were selling it to countries that we had had a no sell to. And so we have taken over those tankers that wasn't a Russian ship. It was basically a ship with no official status as far as flying under a country flag, although I think one of them was in from Ghana. But they just put the Russian flag on it, Christmas Eve. And you can tell the Russians, they've put up a little bit of fight. But basically, they said, look, we know you've taken over the ship, but just treat our people nicely, would you? And so that's coming back now. We're not even, we're actually, even though we're taking those ships back of what we believe was ill-gotten gain oil, we're actually buying that from Venezuela. I hope we're buying it at a discount. And no one, President Trump, were buying that at a discount. But we're actually buying that. So the country will get some benefit out of that. Venezuela will get some benefit out of that. But we weren't just confiscated. Those were ships that had already been sanctioned in the US courts and international courts. So that's where we are. And let's talk about a little bit of the legality. There's, you know, the left has just been screaming about and we'll go over. We've got some really kind of funny video on some of this stuff that's just amazing. It's only funny because it's so crazy. But here's the legality. In 1989, the Department of Justice had sent out a memo that the 1890, okay, that's why you have presidents, in the Rhee Ray Nagel case suggests that the president has the inherent authority to use troops for protecting federal functions, including arrest. And because at the time, Noriega, now Maduro, had been indicted, we had the right to arrest them. And the, and the president has the ability, the inherent ability to use our troops to protect our arresting officers. I don't know exactly what happened in there, but chances are it wasn't a soldier, but it was someone else who actually put Maduro under arrest. Again, I wasn't there, but kind of following this line, that makes sense, that the soldiers were protecting the arresting officers. And that's how they, that's what that's one of the justifications we use to be able to go down and arrest Maduro. Also, some people are saying, well, you know, we've extradited, we've, we've abducted him illegally, but let's just say that that's the case. Supreme Court cases already indicate that even unlawful extraterritorial, which means foreign countries, abductions, do not bar the U.S. courts from prosecuting defendants. So because he'd been indicted here in the U.S., even if us going to get him was illegal, that doesn't do away with our ability to convict him, which is kind of interesting. And then the last thing that I thought was interesting, only because of who was involved in it, is that in 2015, when President Obama was our president, and John Kerry, which I'd even forgotten about him, was our Secretary of State, that in the case of Zivotosky versus Kerry, the Supreme Court affirmed the president's exclusive authority to recognize foreign governments. So if President Trump did not recognize Maduro, just like President Biden didn't recognize Maduro as the legitimate president, then he's not legitimate. I mean, that's kind of the, that's kind of the way it is. So very interesting on how this is all going to play out. There's going to be a lot of back and forth and what have you. And, but my opinion is, as far as this is concerned, I just think it's something we should observe. There's nothing you and I can do about it individually. We should observe it and see what happens. I'm more interested in not so much what happens to Maduro, because I'm pretty confident what happened there, is what's going to really happen in Venezuela. The president just came out today and said, there's no more military actions or anything planned on that. But I don't trust the Vice President at all. I don't trust all the military leaders because here's something, and I think Allie actually mentioned this the other day, I heard one of her podcasts, is that there's no vacuum when it comes to power. Remember that. There's, there's never a time, well, somebody's out of power, so nobody's in power. It doesn't work like that. The vacuum of power is always filled. The question is, is it filled with the right people or not? And that's what we're going to, I think that's going to be the most interesting thing to monitor. Now, let's put up on the screen what the, what we would think to be the legitimate president of Venezuela said. I think his name is Edmondo Gonzalez. So you can see here, I'll let you read it, but you can see here that he is essentially saying that Venezuela, they're, these are decisive hours, know that we are ready for the great operation of reconstruction of our nation. That's who we believe is the legitimate president as well. And then there's also an opposition leader, if we put that back up, who named Maria Machato. And she says, Venezuela's the hour of freedom has arrived. I hope so. Now, I do, I did also hear a story where the current government that remains there, the vice president, the, I think her last name is Rodriguez, where she is seeking out the people that help the U.S. with this takedown of Maduro. So I believe that is probably muting some of the protest and conversations going on in Venezuela. If you're just a regular Venezuelan citizen, you're probably just trying to stay under the radar and hoping it all gets worked out to where you return to one of the great democracies of our time. Now, let's take a look though at what some of our Democrat friends are saying about the arrest and how ridiculous, how ridiculous they are. I wanted to, you know, the great thing about the internet is everything's there forever. The bad thing about the internet is everything's there forever. And sometimes it comes back to bite you. Let's see what Chuck Schumer is saying then and now. And the president brags about his Venezuela policy. Give us a break. He hasn't brought an end to the Maduro regime. The Maduro regime is more powerful today and more entrenched today than it was when the president began. That's what he said back when President Trump was there the first time. In other words, you hadn't done anything, do something. Let's see what our good friend Chuck Schumer says now. You don't treat lawlessness with other lawlessness. And that's what's happened here. The American people this morning, George, are scratching their heads in wonderment and in fear. No, Chuckie, they're scratching their heads on why you're such a hypocritical liar. Sorry. Now, if you want to come sit on this couch and let's have a discussion about it, we can do it. That's fine. We, in fact, I will pay for your flight to come down here. Now, I'm not going to pay you pay first class because you're a man of the people. So we'll, but we'll pay for you a nice coat seat to come down here and we can talk about it. So just let me to have your people, you know, give us a, give us a reach out to us and we'll see what we can do. Now, also the senator from Chicago, from Illinois, who is actually, I think, retiring this time, Senator Durbin, we've got him on what he said before and now. And he said, the people of Venezuela, this was in 2019, those are better than this. We can't allow the president's short attention, this is about Trump, from, stop us from delivering our promise to help the Venezuelan people rebuild their country. Well, the only way you're going to help them rebuild their country is if you get the other guy out. All right. Let's see what he says now. Now he, yes, Nicholas Maduro basically was a bad guy and two thirds of them voted to put somebody else in there. But I disagree with Trump on the use of military forces. What did you think, Senator Durbin, that we were just going to ask him nicely to leave and he was going to leave? What were you thinking? Do you care more about the Venezuelan people and about the people in the U.S. that are being harmed and killed by the narcotics that they're trafficking? Or do you care more about Maduro? Who you've said is not a legitimate leader. You can't have it both ways. You can't have it both ways. So good riddance in your retirement. All right. Next we have the always popular, is this the same guy that was a Margarita drinker with the guy that went down to Nicaragua or San Salvador with a guy that went to prison down there and had the Margarita with him? Oh, yeah. This is our good friend, Chris Van Holen, not to be configured, confused with the great guitarist Van Halen, by the way. This is why Secretary Blinken did, in my view, the right thing, recognizing the real winner here, Gonzalez. And this is why the United States is now going to use its levers and influence to push for a negotiation to have a transition to the truly elected leader, Gonzalez. Now, obviously we know Maduro and his cronies do not want to go quietly into the night, but the United States needs to work with our partners, allies in the region to ratchet up the pressure on behalf of the Venezuelan people. Wow. He said clearly Gonzalez was the winner. And I'll just tell you, folks, here's the deal. When negotiations break down, you either walk away and whatever, you know, you just give up or you take the action that you believe is the right thing to do. And that's really what happened here. Negotiations didn't go anywhere. Maduro wasn't going to give it up. You could negotiate him out of that power. Now, let's see what our senator from Maryland said recently. He says that his cronies can try to dress this up, but it's an illegal act of war to replace Maduro and grab Venezuela's oil for this billionaire buddies. What a ridiculous statement. This guy's ridiculous. Move on. All right. And then we have the senator from Virginia who was Hillary Clinton's running mate. Let's see what he has to say here. This is in September 2024. This is deeply concerning development for Venezuela and for the entire region since, and this is the election, it's a quote unquote the election. The impacts is here at home and to Venezuela have the right to decide their own future and they chose Gonzalez. So he's saying it wasn't legitimate, right? Now, let's see what what did Mr. Kane say today. President Trump unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro. However terrible he is sickening return to a day when the United States asserted the right to dominate the internal political affairs of nations in the Western Hemisphere, which actually is we're not internal, but it is part of the Monroe Doctrine that we're going to pay attention to that. But he said that the person wasn't a legitimate leader. So it and Supreme Court said, clearly, we're the ones that can decide that the president's the ones that can decide that. So people are crazy. That's the way it is. Not going to change. But again, on this situation with Maduro, follow the case. That's okay. He's going to get he's going to get convicted in my opinion. But let's pay more attention to what's going to really happen in Venezuela. That's really what's important. We want a stable democracy to come out of that. It's going to be messy between now and the time that happens, but hopefully sometime over the next few years that they're well on the road to having free and fair elections, that that would be a great, great victory. All right. The next thing we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about what happened in Minnesota. And it's very tragic and very sad. None of us like to see one of our fellow citizens pass away. And the lady passed away. They had, I think, I think someone said that she had two or three children and what have you. So it's no, it's no good. And what was going on, you know, what's been going on in Minnesota, the ICE agents have been up there, which is our Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They have been up there trying to eradicate the illegal aliens that are in the Minneapolis area. And there are thousands and thousands of them. And this is the ICE rate is not related to what we've heard about their fraud case for the Somali community that did the Medicare and fraud during and the childcare payments during COVID. And since then, these are not related, although some of that community might be here illegally. So there could be some crossover. But this is this is a separate issue. This is just finding primarily criminal illegal aliens that are living in this country illegally and mainly in our big cities and eradicating them from the area. And, you know, there are groups out there that protest this, there are groups out there that try to stop it. You know, they had the deal in in the in this area where the local Hampton Inn at the time, not Hampton Inn anymore, did not allow ICE agents to stay at their hotel, if you can, if you can even believe that. And that's been, you know, that's been taken care of. But this particular incident, a lady and an ICE agent got into an argument. She was in her car and it ended up with her attempting to what it looked to me like and will look like to you to run over one of our agents. And then he shot into the car and she passed away. Let's look at a couple of videos. The first video is the one the Democrats are putting out and the second video shows a little bit more fuller picture of what happened. So let's look at the videos. And there's no sound to this, but this is the one, this is the first video. And you can see the ICE agent getting out of the out of his car, going over to talk about her, talked to her. Now, she's obviously trying to block something going on and he's trying to tell her, don't do that. And then she pulls off and it looks like in that video, he shot from behind. All right. Now, let's look at the other video. So here we go. Oh, and can we let's run that again, please. Pay real close attention because he's in front and you see he hits, she hits him one more time. There we go. And then she crashes. So watch it really close. So she hits him. And, you know, the Supreme Court's been clear or federal courts have been clear that a car can be considered a deadly weapon. Now, interesting thing about this gentleman, he had been hit in the past doing his job as an ICE agent and had been dragged and I think had 33 stitches. Let's listen to DHS Secretary Kristi known what she had to say about this. Salon is facing a 1300 percent increase in assaults against them and an 8000 percent increase in death threats against all of them. In fact, the very same officer who was attacked today had previously been dragged by an anti-ICE rider who had rammed him with a car and drug him back in June. He sustained injuries at that time as well. Wow. I mean, these guys have in gals have very, very tough jobs. And when they have their own citizens that they're trying to protect going against them, that's a difficult, I can't imagine the trauma that goes through them on a daily day, day to day basis. But thank goodness for them. And no one likes to see someone get killed, but I'm not going to condemn them. I mean, they're doing their job. They have to make decisions pretty quickly. He had no idea where they're not. She was trying to, you know, kill him or what, but the evidence shows that she definitely the car was towards him and then veered away. So see what happened now. Again, we're in Minnesota. I don't know how many of you thought about Minnesota that much in the past. I have been through Minnesota a few times, been there, played golf there, I think once. It's beautiful state, especially in the summertime. And for those of you that like winter sports, I'm sure that's beautiful there then. But man, Minnesota has been in the news last year and a half or two. And some of it's been because of this Yahoo! That's their governor, Tim Walts, as we remember a liar about his military service. Remember that? Remember the fumbling that he did on the campaign trail and what have you? But listen to what he does now. It sounds a little bit insurrectionist to me in this statement. My primary responsibility as governor is the protection of the people of Minnesota. And you can be assured whether it's the state patrol or whether it's the National Guard, their deployment is there to protect Minnesotans from whatever it is. If it's an act of nature, if it's a global pandemic, or in this case, if it is a rogue federal agent, I don't know at this time. Right. So he almost started trying to back up a little bit, but he essentially said, I can put the National Guard in there to go against federal agents. That is, well, I tell you, a federal law, it's very clear, federal law, Trump state law. And I don't mean that Trump to use that way. It supersedes state law, I should say. We don't always like that. I don't always like that as well, because I think it takes away some state sovereignty. But in the case of international borders and illegal immigration, that's obviously a federal issue, not a state issue. And so you're pretty close to the line there, Timmy. Be careful. Be careful. And of course, we know he's not running again because this whole Somali fraud thing is on his watch. And, you know, I think in that particular, it's kind of a side note in that particular situation. I think they probably knew what was going on, didn't want, didn't really want to address it or know how to address it because they didn't. The last thing they wanted to be do was to be called a racist. And that's toxic empathy. That's exactly what Allie's latest book talks about, that we're so afraid of, you know, being seen incorrectly or we're so afraid that we, our heart just goes out to them so much that even when someone's doing wrong, then we're afraid to say something or do something about it, which is pitiful. We're not going to show anything on it, but the mayor, believe it or not, the mayor of Minneapolis is even crazier than Tim Walz because he goes on a profanity lace tirade about getting ice out of Minneapolis. This guy, he is a nutcase. He is a total nutcase. So, Jacob Frey, or Frey, F-R-E-Y, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, is the Frey, is the person. Those of you that are in Minnesota that listen to Allie's podcast, I hope that if you're in the Minneapolis area that you will be active on the ground in your local political races. It's not right for you to complain about it and not do anything about it. I don't want to put you in physical harm's way, but I do want you to band together. And again, you don't have to have people that agree with you on everything. Find people that you have some similarities with in your beliefs and your values and begin getting small groups of those together because small groups, those end up being large groups. Just ask, look at what Charlie Kirk did over his career. And you can change what's going on there in that city because if you change what's going on in that city, the rest of the state's going to go along with it because they're already pretty conservative, right? But again, we want to, as Allie says, we want to raise the respect for Ruckus. And I say also do the next uncomfortable thing. And sometimes that's getting out of our own little cocoon in our lives and getting out there for the betterment of society. So I hope that you'll do that. Now, the Democrat leaders have echoed calls for federal agents to leave the state. And I don't know if we have any of those we can put up, but they've made several different statements and what have you about. And they've claimed that Ms. Good was a legal observer, that she was a legal observer, which means that she had a legal right to like block the road and be there and what have you. They were trespassing on a federal law enforcement activity. In fact, one of the producers for Glenn Beck, which is Ricky Ratliff, we have her statement up here, she tells us rightly that the ACLU, which is the far left organization, and NLG, another one of those organizations, emphasized that the goal is to document incidents, arrest an official misconduct during protest, and not engage in arguments or interfere with law enforcement. Now, what do you think that lady was doing before everything happened? She was, she was, she drove up to that guy, rolled down the window, arguing with that person. And, and she was not, they're supposed to also be typically wearing clothing such as vest buttons or hats to acknowledge themselves as a legal observers and stand at a distance from protest enough to document what's happening, not the case. So once again, our Democrat friends, they just spout off about stuff of which they know nothing about. So we'll see what happens on that one. It's a sad story, but we need to stand behind our law enforcement. Obviously, if you have a law enforcement that's gotten out of hand, you know, they need to be taken care of according to the law as well. Now, let's move on. One other quick item before I get into kind of your questions or whatever is the housing affordability. And we can talk, we'll talk more about this whole issue in the future, but I wanted to bring up the fact that Trump has brought out, along with some members of Congress, that should we really have these big corporations like BlackRock, which is a huge investment company, buying thousands and thousands of homes that allows them to more, have more control over the market, they essentially corner the market in some areas. And there's a lot of people that believe we shouldn't do that. I'm not sure legally what we can do about that. Maybe there's some local ordinances or laws or whatever that could be passed that says no single person or corporation can own more than 10 homes or something like that, right? I don't know what we can do, but I do think it's something interesting. Now, I also believe that Senator Howley, who I agree with on a lot of stuff, a few things I don't, is where, I don't know if we have this to throw up there or not, but to be able to take money out of your 401k to buy a house or down payment for it, and we should be able, you know, you should be able to use your 401k to help buy a home and it shouldn't cost you a penalty. Right now, if you take money out of your 401k plan and you're not 59 and a half yet, there's, you have to pay tax on it, and then you have to pay an additional 10% penalty. So it's very honorous to do that. He's saying don't charge a penalty, don't charge taxes if it's going towards your house. I think that's a pretty good idea. Now, I don't think someone should take all of their retirement savings and put it in their house either, all right? If we're talking about making it for a down payment or something like that, probably okay with that, especially with the ability, I'd like to actually see it even done in a loan with the ability where they could pay it back over time if they chose to, which I think would be a kind of a cool thing to say. We'll follow up on that. There is a lot of concern about housing prices. I understand that. I will remind you again, and I know you don't like to hear it, and I apologize up front. It's not meant to offend anybody, but long term mortgage rates at 6% are not abnormal. That is normal. The abnormality came of mortgage rates a few years ago at 2% and 3%, which allowed people to buy a lot more home than they could normally afford. The 5% to 6% number is probably what we're going to settle into long term. So we need to make sure that our housing prices reflect the cost of money. And therefore, I do think we can have, we'll have some reduction in the valuation of real estate in a lot of places. Now, in the hot places around the country where there's more people moving, there's more demand than there is supply, it's just simple economics, the prices of how homes aren't going to go down. In a lot of other places, I do believe you'll see the market adjust back to that so that people, even with a 6% mortgage, can afford to have a reasonably nice home. All right, let's see here now. Let's go straight to the questions and answer session. And I call this Words from the Wagon. Again, a reference to my book, Life Lessons from the Little Red Wagon, which is a great thing to start the year reading. I think you'll really enjoy. It's got some great stories in there that are funny and sad, some of them, but funny and just life, right? It's kind of like probably a little bit like your life. All right, we've got some questions here. Tom always loved doing these questions. These are fun to do. First question, what authority does ICE have over citizens versus non-citizens? Well, they have the right to detain someone that they suspect are a non-citizen, or a non-citizen, even though they might be a citizen. Once that's verified, they have, obviously, they'll let them go. Now, they do also have the right if a citizen is interfering with a legal federal law enforcement act, they have the right to arrest them as well. Now, they might end up being prosecuted locally or by the state, but they have the right to arrest them and remove them if necessary. They're perfectly legal to be able to do that. Second question, how do Christian parents endure kids who have walked away from Christ? I think it's a very interesting word in doer. And I think part of that is the answer, is that you love your kids unconditionally. Now, that doesn't mean there's not consequences to actions, right? And they're walking away from Christ doesn't mean that you don't love them, and it doesn't mean that you don't interact from them. It might mean that the interactions that you have with them change, meaning that if they're living a lifestyle that is way outside of what you believe is the right lifestyle to live, that might mean instead of them coming and saying that your house for three days during the holidays that you'll meet somewhere for dinner. Or if your dad and his son plays golf, go play golf. But it doesn't mean that they're necessarily under your roof for those time engaging in things that you just don't agree with. But obviously, you just have to, you can't not keep showing them love and affection because trying to push them away or put them, you know, give them the silent treatment, it's not going to bring them closer to Christ, right? We have to treat our people, our kids a little bit like the prodigal son parable, and that when they're away, they've chosen to be away. And our love hasn't changed for them. Now, we may not chase them. But when they're when the when the Holy Spirit opens up their heart again, and we have to pray that He will, then we have to be ready to accept them without any I told you so or anything like that. And that's that can be hard to do. I do understand that. But I just I think you look for little moments that you that they can see your genuine love for them. It's your love for them that's going to bring them back from their ways, along with the Holy Spirit, as opposed to you continuing to tell them how wrong they are and what have you. But you also don't have to put yourself in the position to be engaged in that also. Number three, how should we handle family members who won't talk to us due to politics? I would say, and we have that in our own family, not in our immediate family, but in our extended family, we we have that. I think that if you when you have the opportunity to be around them at all that, you know, you don't talk politics, all right. And you don't try to listen. People believe what they want to believe. And so you don't want to try to, you know, push them over the edge. You and if they want to keep talking about that, you just going to have to say, look, you know, we're obviously not going to agree on this. Let's talk about something we can agree on. Right. Let's talk about, you know, you know, why the Cowboys haven't been in the playoffs or won a Super Bowl in 30 something years. We can agree how stupid that is, right? Or why are my my team the Razorbacks? Why will they probably never be a top team in the SEC? Right? I don't know why, but we can talk about that. We don't, we don't need to always talk about politics, right? I get that. And so try to look for things that you can talk about. And you might want to have an agreement. You might want to just say, hey, can we just agree not to talk about politics? Let's just because the relationship is important. So you don't want to lose that relationship. All right. Number four, will the GOP be able to keep up momentum through the midterms? Well, that's a really good question. I will see. I'm going to, I'm actually, while the episode comes out tomorrow, I'll be out of town and I'll be meeting with some of my friends that are congressional people. They're having a pow wow somewhere and I'm happened to be in the same area. I'm not going to be in the middle of their pow wow, but I'm going to be seeing a couple of them. I sure hope so. It's tight. I mean, it's, it's, it's tight. And if we get our act together and we focus on those races that are kind of toss up races and put all of our efforts into them, I think we can keep the house, but it's going to be a, it's going to be a pretty slim margin. If we can avoid so much intra party squabbling, the purity test of our politics drives me crazy. Why we can't say if you are 80% with me, then you're a friend of mine as opposed to I'm going to push you and make you 100%, right? And that Democrats have the same thing, but man, oh man, that drives me crazy. So I think we can, but we'll just have to see a lot can happen between now and November. Now on the political side, I'll tell you, Texas, the primaries are coming up in less than 60 days. March 2nd is the primary in Texas. So if you have candidates, if you're a Republican or even if you're a Democrat, where you vote just in your primary, this is where you can really find the candidate you like. Which candidate do you like? And my advice to the Republicans, I don't give this advice to Democrats, I think you should do the opposite. But to Republicans, pick the candidate that has the best chance to win in November. It doesn't do you any good to pick a candidate that you might personally like the most for whatever reason that has absolutely no chance in November. Because when November comes, it's a binary choice. You're going to pick good, in my opinion, conservative, Republican, or evil, okay, not as good on the Democrat side. So make sure that you're picking a person in your primary that has the best chance to win in November. Federal taxes are up this year. Why? I'm not sure where you get that. The tax rates that were supposed to go up actually are staying the same as they were under the original Trump tax cut from his first session. So the only reason that taxes may be up is because revenues are up. In other words, people are making more money in real wages are up. We're also sales is up. So sales taxes are up and whatever, but that's a state tax. So federal tax would be income tax tariffs, things like that. But tax rates have not gone up in 2026. So I'm not sure if you've got some more information, you can email me about that Ron at RonSimmons.com. As a Minnesota resident, what I do about fraud, you got to get involved in your local government. You really have to get involved in your local government. You have to make your state representatives and your elected state officials answer the questions. You go to the Capitol, sit in on some of those hearings, sign up to be a witness. You can testify. You can go to your representative, make them answer the question. And if they, if they're a Republican representative that may not be involved in this particular scandal, have them go, make sure they're asking the right questions and what have you. Make sure that the tough questions are asked, but you have to get involved locally to be able to do that. And then finally, how does it feel to have the coolest daughter in the world? Well, she's pretty special to us and obviously we're biased, but I bet your daughters are cool too. You know, everybody's got a different form that they are able to show their talents and what have you. We're especially proud of Ali, but we're also proud of our two boys and in different ways. And they're doing some things that are very unique, unique also. And then we got those, you know, granddaughters and grandsons. We, oh man, we love them. There's no, there's no question that God's greatest gift to us outside of his son is our grandkids. And there are total payment for not killing our own kids when they were acting up so bad. But very last thing I'm going to leave you with is at the end of every year, I learned this from a friend of mine, a fellow, he's an author, John Maxwell, who sold over 30 million books. So he's quite a bit more accomplished author than I am, but he's a good friend of mine. And he actually wrote the forward in my book. He told me this a few years ago, said, Ron, between Christmas and New Year's, he does a lot of thinking about the past and then looking for the future, which I think we all do. And he says, I always come up one with one word that's going to be my word for the following year. And I thought, well, that's really kind of neat. And so I've been doing that for a few years now. And this year, my word is peace. And what I mean by that is I want to have peace. I want to have an inner peace, not let the everyday things of the world maybe get me stressed or get me too excited one way or the other. Just that I want to make sure that I'm relying on the peace that passes all understanding which God promises us and He's given us. It's just a matter of not we accept it. Now, sometimes we have to give up our understanding in order to have the peace, which is a quote that golfer Aaron badly said a few years ago that I heard. But think about this. What's what's your one word for the year? And tell us what that is in the comments. That'd be kind of fun to do. Again, if you have questions that you want me to answer personally or privately, and I've got a few in my inbox, folks, if you're listening to this, that I haven't answered, that I'll get to you on, just email me Ron at Ron Simmons dot com. And I will see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks for listening.