Rent-seeking describes profit-seeking through the manipulation of the regulatory or legal apparatus rather than by  competing with others in the marketplace. Cronyism is a common form of rent-seeking, as demonstrated by the Solyndra fiasco. And if Americans could expend all their own health care dollars, rent-seeking would simply stop. When the California-based green energy start-up company Solyndra sought investors in the free market, every venture capital group refused. Solyndra leveraged its connections with the Obama administration to secure a taxpayer-funded loan of $535 million. The company went bankrupt and never paid back the loan. Rent-seeking has several adverse effects on society. It reduces dollar efficiency, meaning dollars are expended without producing value for consumers. It reduces the creation of true wealth and increases income inequality. Rent-seeking encourages cronyism and corruption and tends to reduce public trust in governmental institutions. U.S. healthcare is replete with rent-seeking examples and the adverse effects of this behavior. The recent COVID scam was used to justify several successful rent-seeking schemes. “Big Pharma” as Rent-Seeker The official narrative decreed that COVID-19 was an existential threat to our country. Americans needed a counter-agent, treatment, or preventative immediately. Big Pharma responded by releasing an mRNA genetic injection, assuring the public it was “safe, effective, and doctor-approved.” Their “vaccine” was never used before, incompletely tested, ineffective, and medically dangerous. Drug manufacturers convinced the Biden-Harris administration to require all Americans to accept no-charge mRNA injections, or else. Of course, the no-charge-to-consumer mandate meant the government had to purchase billions of doses for a fixed, no-compete price. There is no consumer choice, no competition that drives down prices, no free market forces. The federal government gave Big Pharma more than $25 billion in rent-seeking payments. Hospitals & Professional Organizations Too Bribery is a common method for individuals to entice government officials to give them preferential treatment, i.e., to rent-seek. During COVID, the reverse occurred. The government bribed private entities such as hospitals and professional organizations with rent-seeking profits to promote their false public health crisis narrative. Federal officials needed evidence of the alleged danger to defend the official story of the imminent viral threat. Washington paid hospitals and clinics a bonus for reporting every positive test for the COVID antigen as a “case,” even if the person was not ill. Deaths with a positive antigen positive test were listed as “COVID deaths” without autopsy evidence and despite the presence of end-stage heart or kidney failure. Even a motorcycle accident victim was listed as a COVID fatality because his blood tested positive for the antigen. Insurance Rent-Seeking The insurance industry has been successfully rent-seeking for decades because they have a captive audience of consumers called the American public. Nearly half of the U.S. population, 155.8 million in 2023, is insured by the federal government directly or by subcontract: Medicaid/CHIP (79.6 million), Medicare (66.7 million), and Tricare (9.5 million). One-hundred and sixty five million Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. In all cases, the premiums people pay are negotiated between insurers and the government, state and federal, and not by consumers spending their money in a free marketplace. For the nearly 80 million enrolled in no-charge Medicaid, the people who pay are not these individuals but taxpayers as a whole. The number of enrollees, the revenue that insurers receive from rent-seeking, and the cost to all taxpayers are likely to grow considerably since states like California and Oregon have made illegal immigrants eligible for Medicaid, which should be limited to American citizens. Federal Agencies Rent-Seek By far, the greatest rent-seekers are federal agencies that regulate healthcare. This refers not merely to well-known entities such as CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), FDA (Food and Drug Administration), NIH (National Institutes of Health), and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) but to dozens of others not well known but well-staffed and very costly bureaucracies. The rent-seeking behaviors of federal BARRCOME — bureaucracy, administration, rules, regulations, compliance, oversight, mandates, and enforcement — are the primary reason for dollar inefficiency in healthcare. Dollar efficiency refers to the amount expended on producing value for consumers. For healthcare, the “value” produced is (or should be) medical care. Dollars not devoted to patient care are inefficiently spent. BARRCOME spending comes first and can be taken from patient care allocations. To pay for Affordable Care Act infrastructure, President Obama took $716 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund, taking dollars from senior care to fund BARRCOME. Estimates of the cost of BARRCOME range from 31 percent to more than 50 percent. Since the U.S. expended $4.8 trillion on its healthcare system in 2023, $1.5 trillion to $$2.4 trillion was diverted from patient care to pay Washington’s rent-seeking. Solution to Rent-Seeking Solving the problem of rent-seeking cannot be done piecemeal, one at a time. It can only be fixed by addressing the system and dissolving the root cause. Rent-seeking can only exist when a third party makes payments rather than when consumers spend their own money. If consumers had the choice to buy (or not) COVID shots, Big Pharma could not make a fixed price, special deal with the government. If Americans could decide where to spend employer-sponsored insurance monies, there would be no rent-seeking by Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare. And if Americans could expend all their own health care dollars, rent-seeking would simply stop. Two trillion “healthcare” dollars could then be used efficiently — on care and/or reducing the tax burden or the national debt. The cure for rent-seeking in healthcare is called “Empower Patients,” where Americans, not third parties, control their health (medical) care spending. READ MORE from Waldman and Ginn: Harris’ Healthcare Destroys Health CARE Wait Times for Medical Care Matter –– Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Pathology, and Decision Science; former Director of Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; former Director of New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange; and author of 12 books, including multi-award winning, Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.  Follow him on X.com @DrDeaneWor contact viawww.deanewaldman.com.   Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is president of Ginn Economic Consulting, host of the Let People Prosper Show, and previously chief economist of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Follow him on X.com at @VanceGinn. The post Federal Bureaucracy Is Biggest Healthcare Rent-Seeker appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry By Dana Gioia (Paul Dry Books, 198 pages, $20) “People’s reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become a part of their soul.” I don’t remember the last time I read a book so full of sentences that read like apothegms. If you’re a fan of 1990s rom-coms, you’ll recognize this line of dialogue. The film, of course, is Pretty Woman (1990), and the speaker is Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), who’s flown Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a Hollywood Boulevard hooker, to San Francisco to attend an opening-night performance of La Traviata. Vivian loves it. When I lived in Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s, I had my own Edward Lewis. A friend of mine — who was then a promising young poet and who would later become the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under George W. Bush — was a subscriber to the New York City Ballet and Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. Now and then, when he was attending a performance but his wife wasn’t free to join him, he’d call me at the last minute — I lived on the Upper East Side, a quick cab ride across the park — and invite me to come along. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Revolution at the LA Times) I loved the ballet, especially the modern works choreographed by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. As for the operas, I enjoyed the arias in the standard repertoire. But some of the contemporary ones — as well as contemporary stagings of classics — left me cold. From time to time I read up on opera, but a surprising amount of what I read was over-the-top gush by fans with whose drooling zeal I couldn’t remotely identify. Most alienating of all was a book called The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum, a poet who’d attended Harvard and Princeton and who, at the time his book came out in 1993, was teaching at Yale (trifecta!). The Queen’s Throat was a staggeringly ridiculous piece of narcissistic nonsense that came adorned with blurbs by the then ubiquitous pseudo-intellectual Susan Sontag (“brilliant”) and by Queer Studies doyenne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (“brilliant”). Koestenbaum himself describes The Queen’s Throat as “my scrapbook,” and in it he seems to view opera as a means of bringing out — or legitimizing, or affirming — the hyperemotiveness of a certain type of effeminate, self-dramatizing male homosexual who’s in the habit of venerating opera divas. (“I worship her,” he writes about Maria Callas.) Since I’m not that type of gay guy, The Queen’s Throat entirely failed me as a point of entry into a love of opera. The new book Weep Shudder Die: On Opera and Poetry is an entirely different kettle of fish. Like The Queen’s Throat, it’s written by a poet and opera lover — namely, Dana Gioia. But whereas Koestenbaum’s garish scrapbook keeps dragging us back, tiresomely and mindlessly, to the supremely uninteresting fact of the author’s sexuality, Gioia’s book is a lucid, succinct, and serious contemplation of the opera, and especially the opera libretto (the text, of which Gioia has written five), as art. “No poetic genre,” Gioia writes early on, “ranks lower in literary esteem than the opera libretto. It occupies an inglorious position roughly equal to defunct genres such as the pastoral eclogue or verse sermon.” (Note: I love pastoral eclogues, but have not encountered enough verse sermons to render an opinion about them.) He goes on: “In the English-speaking world, the verbal component of opera is considered sub-literary. A libretto is a hodgepodge of implausible plotting, hyperbolic characterization, and incompetent versification.” Gioia starts with some history: opera began in 1598 when “a group of artists and intellectuals” in Florence sought “to recreate the performance practices of classical Greek drama.” Text mattered more than music; hence, “the earliest operas sound less like singing than intoned declamation.” Over time, however, opera developed into “a primarily musical medium in which the composer exercises controlling interest.” Still, Gioia argues, the libretto doesn’t deserve its current obloquy. While “every operagoer knows” that “half of the top one hundred works produced internationally generally come from only seven composers —  Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Gaetano Donizetti, Richard Strauss, and Gioachino Rossini,” with Verdi, Puccini, and Mozart far out ahead of the others — the librettists of the most popular operas are also a select group. Just under half of the operas in the standard repertory “are the work of only eight poets — Lorenzo Da Ponte, Felice Romani, Francesco Maria Piave, Salvadore Cammarano, Arrigo Boito, Luigi Illica, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Wagner.” There follow several chapters, each of which explores a different question in what turns out to be fascinating detail. Why is it that W.H. Auden’s libretto for Britten’s Paul Bunyan (1941) “reads better than it performs?” Why is Mozart’s penultimate opera, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), always rated higher than his last, La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus), even though the latter’s libretto is “indisputably finer” than that of the former? What’s the secret behind the success of the partnership between librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and composer Richard Strauss? Then there’s this: “Is poetry still the right medium for opera? Wouldn’t prose be a more direct and natural medium? What sort of writer brings more to the project — the poet or the playwright?” I wouldn’t have imagined that I could find a discussion of such questions absorbing. But I did, big time. One chapter compares opera, perceptively and engagingly, to other narrative forms. “Opera demands extreme narrative compression. It cannot present complex plotting as easily as film or fiction. If the structure of opera is narrative, its driving energy is lyric; it lacks the novel’s ability to communicate the duration of time. Opera excels at portraying peak moments of human emotion.” Boy, do I wish I’d read this chapter long ago, before I even saw my first opera: it would’ve helped me, a person who from childhood had been a lover of movies, novels, and popular songs, to adjust my expectations and expand my comprehension in such a way as to enable me to respond properly to opera. Then there’s this question: would I have become a lover of opera if I’d grown up in Europe instead of America? Gioia notes that while opera is an integral “part of the national identity” in countries like Germany, Italy, and Russia, it’s never played a major role in “shaping cultural consciousness” in America. “It is no coincidence,” Gioia points out, “that the most successful American opera, Porgy and Bess, premiered on Broadway and unfolds mostly by the theatrical conventions of the popular musical.” Indeed, opera “remains a foreign art form in the United States,” with American opera houses mostly staging “classics written by foreigners performed in foreign languages, often with the leading roles sung by foreigners.” (READ MORE: Remembering Greer Garson) Yes, there are significant American operas — Gioia discusses a number of them at illuminating length — but they’re “rarely performed…. Most new operas are premiered and never produced again.” For example, the Metropolitan Opera, albeit “a magnificent institution,” rarely commissions new works. “Of the three dozen operas premiered by the Met,” writes Gioia, “only one American work has survived, just barely, at the low end of the repertory — Barber’s Vanessa.” Indeed, although there’s now “a great wave of new opera in America,” opera remains “nearly invisible” — unless, that is, one counts as opera at least some of the works of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to each of whom Gioia devotes an entertaining chapter. Both men, he maintains, embody “the quest to create a new American opera from popular musical theater.” If I found this book engrossing, it’s because — despite being something less than a full-throated opera lover — I found the insights thought-provoking and was delighted by the beautiful writing. I don’t remember the last time I read a book so full of sentences that read like apothegms. Sometimes Gioia bangs out several in a row: “Song is a universal human art. No one has found a culture which does not have song…. Opera abandons song at great risk…. Opera will never be so sophisticated that it does not need song.” Great stuff. Weep Shudder Die also contains far more than its share of observations that compel you to pause and ponder before you move on: “A libretto can be too richly written. It can’t be coincidental that nearly all of the enduring operas based on Shakespeare have been done in foreign languages.” Once again, in short, this is the book that I should have read before I ever set foot in an opera house. I suspect that it would have made all the difference when it came to the question of whether I would become a lover of opera, like Vivian in Pretty Woman, or just someone who appreciated and respected it. What’s especially frustrating about this state of affairs is that the book’s author, Dana Gioia, is also the friend who, a million years ago, when we both lived in New York, invited me so often to be his guest at the Metropolitan Opera. If only he’d penned this marvelous book before I joined him inside that hollowed space! The post Dana Gioia on the Opera, From Tosca to Sweeney Todd appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Almost three weeks after the triumphant re-election of Donald Trump, the American left is still raging. In their quest to avoid self-reflection, Democrats and their lackeys in the legacy media have tried every argument in the book to explain the horror that lies before them. The wheels really come off the chariot, though, when you realize that Lysistrata and her comrades actually enjoy the company of their men. Radical feminists have now seized upon this moment, seeking to mold it into something through which they can exercise some power. Inspired by South Korea’s “4B Movement,” they have started calling for American women to avenge themselves on the evil MAGA men in their lives by refusing to date, marry, have sex, or bear children. (In Korean, the word “no” [as in “no sex”] begins with “bi” [“bisekseu”]. Thus, the “4Bs.” Those brave enough to endure a direct look at this phenomenon can click here.) Calls for political “sex strikes” are not new; the radfems made similar threats in both 2019 and 2022 to protest having to accept some basic limitations on their “right” to murder inconvenient children. To understand why these efforts are doomed to failure, we need to look at their origin story, which just happens to be one of the classics of Western literature. Aristophanes wrote his play Lysistrata in Athens during the waning years of the Peloponnesian War. When it was first performed in 411 B.C., the Athenians had suffered horrendous losses in their disastrous invasion of Sicily at the hands of the Spartans and their allies. Like all comedians (at least until very recently), Aristophanes sought to alleviate his fellow citizens’ pain by making them laugh at their precarious situation. In the play, the title character plans to stop the war by convincing the women of Athens and other city-states to refuse to fulfill their duties (sexual and otherwise) to their husbands. Raunchy mayhem ensues as the old men of Athens engage in a hilarious war of double entendres with their wives, who seize control of the Acropolis in an early version of Seattle’s CHAZ protest. Despite many obstacles (most notably horny dissension in Lysistrata’s feminist ranks), the plan actually works. Lysistrata negotiates a settlement (again the double entendres fly) and the two sides end up drunk as skunks singing a hymn to the goddess Peace (actually a distractingly naked female slave). Comedies, whether ancient or modern, are usually grounded in their time and place.  Lysistrata, however, transcends those limits because Aristophanes understood a basic human truth: the relationship between the sexes can be both serious business and incredibly funny. Sadly, because they have no sense of humor, our current Lysistratas have mistaken the play for a political manifesto. Their first error is also the first sign of bad comedy: poor timing. The women of Athens made their move when the war with Sparta was still raging, while the radfems only pulled out their (anti-)trump card when the battle was already over. Perhaps if they had spent less time preferring bears to men and swooning over Doug Emhoff, they wouldn’t have missed their cue. Then there’s the problem of recruiting enough women to the cause. For Lysistrata, convincing women to take the oath in the opening of the play was like pulling teeth and keeping women from sneaking off the Acropolis for a quickie was even more difficult. What hope can the radfems have for such gender unity in a country where 52 percent of white women voted for Trump and conservative women have promised a baby-making counter-protest? The wheels really come off the chariot, though, when you realize that Lysistrata and her comrades actually enjoy the company of their men. There’s a reason why both the cast of the play and the audience breathe a huge sigh of relief when the peace is signed; the natural complementarity of male and female has been restored. The same cannot be said for the radfems, whose hatred of men is well-documented. The most recent example of this contempt was the infamous “Your Vote, Your Choice” commercial which encouraged the wives of Trump supporters to vote for Harris instead, implying that the secrecy of the voting booth would protect them from spousal abuse. This insult to over half of American men virtually ensures that they won’t mind when the radfems no longer want to snuggle. There is one area where Aristophanes’ work and the radfem ethos connect, though it is no laughing matter. About halfway through the play, Lysistrata negotiates with an unnamed Athenian magistrate. As the talks collapse, Lysistrata reveals her views on political and cultural power: MAGISTRATE: Such awful oppression never, O never in the past yet I bore. LYSISTRATA: You must be saved, sirrah—that’s all there is to it. MAGISTRATE: If we don’t want to be saved? LYSISTRATA: All the more. All the pious claims these women make about the loss of their rights are just stage dressing; control and the pleasure that comes with it are the real goals behind this Americanized 4B fad, even if that control and pleasure do more harm than good to society. Try as they might, radical feminists cannot escape their authoritarian impulses. As such, these women feel compelled to “save” Trump voters from the mistake they made on Election Day and withholding their charms is now the only way they can think of to do so. But as with so much else on the left, the pretend chastity they claim to aspire to replaces virtue with virtue signaling, a move that makes them the real joke. READ MORE from Robert Busek: Is the Educational Establishment Finally Starting to Crack? Democracy Dies in Demagoguery The post Radical Feminists Misread ‘Lysistrata’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If you listened to the hysteria from the floor of the House of Representatives on November 21, 2024, you might believe that the bill HR 9495 entitled “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” is a radical bill designed to give President-elect Trump unchecked powers to label all of his political enemies terrorists.   The reality is that the same legislation designed to target non-profits who support terrorism passed the House with bi-partisan support in April of 2024. It is troubling that segments of the Democratic Party … have been swayed by entities actively undermining American democracy.   Last spring, neither Democrats nor non-profits were concerned with the strength of due process assurances built into the bill (179 Dems voted for the bill).  Then, Donald Trump was elected.  A bill selectively tailored to address the issue of foreign terrorist influence in American non-profits suddenly became known as the “non-profit killer” bill (only 15 Dems voted for the bill). (READ MORE: Pete Hegseth v. ‘Sam Hanna’ and the Left’s War Against the Jews) The number of Democrats that flipped their vote on HR 9495 and the sudden panic by the non-profit sector shows the firm grip that extremist groups have on the Democratic party and a large swath of the civil society sector.  The non-profits likely to be investigated under the legislation — those actively cooperating with designated foreign terrorist organizations — conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign, convincing advocacy groups and Democratic Congresspersons that the bill was dangerous and should be defeated. HR 9495 does not limit free speech. It does not give the Treasury Secretary the power to unilaterally declare any American non-profit a “terrorist organization.”  What it does attempt to do is something that should be quite uncontroversial.  HR 9495 affirms that groups that are presently coordinating with, financially supporting, or giving expert advice to terrorists should not also benefit from tax exempt status. During this week’s floor debate, Representative Jayapal, who had voted for the bill in April, proclaimed that HR 9495, “would give Donald Trump unfettered power to punish civil society groups, news outlets, hospitals, and universities with zero due process.”  In the days leading up to the House vote, the ACLU led a coalition of over 180 non-profits to oppose the bill claiming it left an accused non-profit without “meaningful opportunity to defend itself.” Yet, the actual text of the legislation gives organizations 90 days to respond to any accusation of terrorism affiliation.  An independent administrative appeals process is built into the bill, along with the right to seek review in Federal District Court. The five alarm fire on Capitol Hill proclaimed the legislation would be used to target groups ranging from the National Organization for Women, Green Peace, and the NAACP.  But, the text of HR 9495 only gives the Treasury Secretary the authority to investigate non-profits supporting terrorism within the meaning of 18 USC 2339B.  That section of the U.S. code makes it illegal to support an organization that has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Secretary of State. There is nothing in HR 9495 or supporting code that empowers the Treasury Secretary to question the tax exempt status of domestic non-profits who are not coordinating with a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization.  Furthermore, the Secretary of State only has the authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to label foreign entities, not domestic entities, as terrorist organizations. Section 501(c)p of the U.S. code already gives the IRS the power to take away the tax benefits of non-profits associated with terrorism.  HR 9495 ironically provides more due process and more layers of appeal.  The existing code highlights the irrationality of the opposition to the bill. Why the Shift on HR 9495? How did HR 9495 penned to stop the coordination of Hamas with student groups taking over University campuses come to be seen as authoritarian overreach?  How did a bill meant to address terrorist coordination in American city halls and on U.S. school boards come to be seen as “the death spiral for non profits?”  The answer lies in the political power of the very non-profits that HR 9495 was drafted to address. American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — all linked to extremist ideologies or terrorism — have fiercely lobbied against HR 9495.  SJP called HR 9495 a threat to free speech, while JVP labeled it part of the “MAGA assault on democracy and freedom.” (READ MORE: The UN’s Failure in Lebanon) CAIR, which has been linked to Hamas for over 30 years, claimed the legislation “gave the President fascist powers.” These are groups that celebrated the atrocities of October 7th and glorified Hamas and Hezbollah.  These organizations would be the first ones to legitimately be investigated under HR 9495. Using due process to investigate the tax-exempt status of non-profits linked to terrorism should be a bipartisan no-brainer.  It is troubling that segments of the Democratic Party and advocacy groups have been swayed by entities actively undermining American democracy and U.S. foreign policy. Executive power must have limits; but HR 9495 is not an authoritarian power grab. Rather, it is a necessary measure to counter the influence of terror-aligned organizations infiltrating American civil society to advance their own destructive agendas. Julie Marzouk is an attorney, author, and board member of Intelligent Advocacy Network. The post Democrats Flip to Protect Radical Non-Profits appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from X22 Report: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart: The former leader of the Ukrainian Armed Forces declared that World War III has already started, as tensions rise amid escalating strikes from both sides of the European conflict. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who served as Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief until being sidelined earlier this year by President Zelensky: “I believe that in 2024 we […]

Including Smith/Kotzen, Those Damn Crows, The Sheepdogs and five other riders on the rock'n'roll storm

“Since when do foreign provocateurs, promoting a banned Islamic terrorist organization, get to veto who can and can’t walk on a sidewalk? Or which journalists can film a news story? The only reason he was arresting me is because the Hamas thugs were upset by my presence,” reports Levant. REBEL News Founder and CEO Ezra Levant, […]

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said during an interview over the weekend that President-elect Donald Trump has the right to use the U.S. military to remove the millions of illegal aliens who are in the country. Barrasso made the remarks during an interview on “Fox News Sunday” about Trump’s agenda and the men and women he’s tapped to be in his administration. When asked about Trump confirming that he is considering using the military to conduct mass deportations, Barrasso said: “Well, I support the president.” “We have a national security crisis in this country right now because of our open border, and when he declares it a national emergency, he can appropriately use the military,” he said. “There are over 10 million illegal immigrants in the country right now.” “We are talking about drug dealers, people in criminal cartels,” he continued. “These are folks who have actually been murdering, raping, poisoning American citizens. When you take a look at the president’s magnificent victory, the decisive victory, I think it’s because people were scared about all of these people in the country illegally. People want to feel safe in their own homes.” Barrasso correctly noted that the overwhelming majority of the American public supports Trump conducting mass deportations. “Yet we still have some of these big city mayors and governors who unbelievably, are more concerned about the rights, the so called rights of illegal immigrants than they are about the safety of their own citizens,” he said. “We have to make America safe again, and what the president is talking about is the right thing to do.” WATCH: @SenJohnBarrasso discusses Trump possibly using the military to aid in mass deportations of illegal immigrants. pic.twitter.com/RLtveicvFw — Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) November 24, 2024