And I would say in that moment right there is probably what I flipped the most to becoming way more conservative. I mean way more conservative about my belief system about a lot of things because people were trying to take something away from me.
When I saw you popping up and being a little bit more—you can say—conservative transparently, I thought that's a shift and I worried for you a little bit. It's like, oh no, they're going to cancel him. After 10 years of being their number one show on their entire network, and they could argue, but the numbers are the numbers.
That I felt like I needed to get my voice back.
Well, you may know him for his business expertise on The Profit or his brand new series, The Fixer, on Fox, where he turns struggling businesses into success stories. But beyond television, he's a serial entrepreneur, an investor, a philanthropist, and leader who believes in the people, the process, and the product above all else. From Bed Bath and Beyond's revival to the future of small business in divided America, he's here in studio with me to break it all down. Please welcome Marcus Lemonis. All right, Marcus, I have to jump right into news of the day. All right, Jimmy Kimmel canceled, the shortest cancellation of all time, coming back. I struggle with this because I'm a very free speech absolutist type person. I would never want it to be that the FCC jumped in and was like, 'No.' But I also understand from a business perspective, if the folks that syndicate your show know that you're offending half or more of the audience and they don't think you're funny, I also understand the business side of it. But I'm very curious where you land on that.
Well, I think there's a terrible misnomer going out there that the FCC caused this to happen. And I think that's just a bunch of nonsense speculation. At the end of the day, Disney has a business to run and their affiliates are essentially—that's their bank account. And when the affiliates decide that whatever messaging is being delivered, whether it's sports or comedy or the news, doesn't match their viewers, they can make a choice to say, 'You guys can make it. We're not going to air it.' And so I think the preemptive strike that Sinclair took, which is a Utah-based company who has a very strong belief system, just said like we don't like that kind of thing. I think there's been a lot of criticism around Disney—did you react and are you censoring things? And the answer in my opinion is your employer when you work for them has an obligation to deliver to their constituency and their constituency isn't their viewers, it's their affiliates who pay their bills. And if the affiliates say that we don't want to do this, you have a decision to make. And it was a little unclear. Was it a suspension? Was it a cancellation? It was a little murky, but I don't think the FCC came in and said to Disney, to Bob Iger, you need to make them go away or we're going to pull your license. Do you believe that happened?
Yeah. So, we all probably need to stop with that. If you or I were working at Chick-fil-A or anywhere else and we said things at the counter that offended the guests who write the checks, the owner, the manager would say to us, 'Hey, you could have your beliefs, but not while you're serving nuggets.' And I think that's the respect piece that we have to understand is when we accept a check from an employer, they set the rules. And you could call it free speech, but it's not free. People are paying money to air it. And if they don't think it's funny or they don't like the content, they can say, 'Thank you for coming.' No different than you can cut the quarterback from the team if he's not making you money and filling the stands.
Right? Well, my perspective on it is that Jimmy Kimmel along with Colbert and a lot of the late night hosts, they've lost their audience because I think their audience is people like me that are from middle America that don't live in New York City or LA or Chicago, not going out every night to dinner or to clubs or to bars. They're staying home with their families and they're watching TV. That's the end of their day. And more than half this country voted for President Trump. So if you go on nightly and you not only mock the president, but now you're trying to use the assassination of a young father and husband as a punchline.
You're really turning off more than half of your audience.
I would disagree with that. You're turning off your entire audience.
Well, unfortunately there may be some people, okay, there may be some people that are idiots and they're celebrating what happened, but the bulk of people on both sides, and I know a lot of people that are on the left, that think that it was horrible, that it was terrible that a wife would lose her husband, a father would lose their child, and somebody would get assassinated for free speech. And so this idea that only the right was offended by what Jimmy Kimmel said, I don't think is correct. I think a lot of people just said like that was inappropriate and it was tasteless and you got sent to timeout. It'd be interesting to see what he says tonight.
Well, the reports last week before the announcement that he was going to come back on, the reports were that he was planning to go out the next night and triple down and continue to blame MAGA and that's what was the straw that broke the camel's back. But at the end of the day, my husband asked me this last night. Well, Disney decided that they wanted to have him back and all this and is it because they were going to lose money? I don't think it's because they were going to lose money without Jimmy. I think Disney is more beholden to woke than they are business.
I don't disagree with that. I think Disney's also beholden to their affiliates. I do believe that.
But do the affiliates want Jimmy back?
I think the bulk of them may and they may have a different ideology. I don't know what his contract says. I don't know what the payout is. I don't know how much longer he's going to be on. I don't know if he compromised and said, 'The ratings are bad and it may be time to go. I need to apologize. I need to own up for it. My family, my wife, my kids are upset that I said that.' I have no idea. And maybe there's a proper exit stage left that is done with, I don't know, a little more dignity for everybody. And maybe he just says, 'I'm sorry. I was wrong.'
That's an optimistic view. His guest tonight is going to be California Governor Gavin Newsom. So, I have a feeling there's not going to be a lot of 'I'm so sorry, I respect this country.' I have a feeling it's going to be some middle fingers.
Would you put him on as your first guest if you were coming back on to try to make some sort of mend of something you did that wasn't right?
No, but I don't think that's his goal is to make amends. I think his goal is to just do double middle fingers. I'm back. You couldn't cancel me and now I'm going to have California Governor Newsom on. Which I think all of this, as somebody who's been a victim of cancel culture, not only targeted by the Biden White House, but just—I'm sure you have as well. For me, it's so funny because now it's the right is canceling people.
Well, I don't think the right is canceling anybody. We're not ABC. We don't run ABC. So, I don't know how the right made that decision.
Yeah. But to me, as somebody who has been canceled and censored and up until maybe a year ago on YouTube, we couldn't talk about men and women's sports and we couldn't talk anything about COVID whatsoever because you would just be completely locked out of your account and you would cease to exist online. And Instagram wasn't much different. You'd be flagged, couldn't say this, couldn't say that. To an extent, it's still there. They've loosened it a little bit with the election of President Trump. But this whole 'the right is canceling people,' I find interesting.
If he shows up tonight and does the opposite of what he should do, you'll lose advertisers and that's more impactful than losing affiliates. And I think at the end of the day, American companies want unification and we have a president that was elected by more than half the country and it needs to be supported and you can have a different ideological belief. I went back and looked at a debate between Ronald Reagan and Mondale a long time ago. Two very different ideologies. And Ronald Reagan used to poke fun and Mondale would poke fun, but there was a reasonable discourse, much like Charlie had a reasonable discourse around we could disagree about everything, but we could still be okay with each other. And God forbid anybody got shot. Your party line should go away and you should just be horrified by the fact that that happened.
Yeah. Well, I wish it was like that, but unfortunately, we saw a little bit of the opposite. I want to talk about that a little bit with you as well. The memorial was huge this past weekend.
Nearly 100,000 people, 20 million streams or 25 million streams, people watching. We covered it on Fox News all day long. We discussed it on the big weekend show.
For me though, and Erica talked about this in her speech. When you saw that many people come together, and it was not out of anger, it wasn't anything—love. Yeah. It was all love. And after Charlie was assassinated, we didn't see riots. We didn't see burning. We didn't see fighting. We just saw people come together with candlelight visuals. And on the other side, it hasn't always been that way. In fact, I can't really think of a time where it was really that way. And it didn't break out into mass chaos and violence. So, for me, it's frustrating when I hear the both sides argument. That annoys me a little bit.
Should upset you more than annoy you. Yeah.
Because it's a victim culture.
And that's the piece that I think I'm most troubled by than anything else.
I did feel though that some people in universities and workplaces celebrated it and were terminated.
And so I think people are starting to recognize the necessity to acknowledge it. But the challenge is that there is a big faction of the left who believes that if something bad happens to them, it's your fault or it's my fault or it's somebody else's fault as opposed to accepting responsibility. And that's troubling. And I've gone back over the last couple of nights and I've looked at old clips of David Letterman and old clips of even Jimmy Kimmel where David was inappropriate with Jennifer Aniston and getting near her and touching her or Jimmy Kimmel was making comments in the airport. Nobody's bothered by that back then, right? And they were all able to make a lot of money. But if any of us had said anything like that, done anything like that, it'd have been a problem.
Yeah, for sure. It'd have been a problem.
It feels inconsistent. It feels inconsistent. And the one thing that I don't think you and I have ever talked about is my belief system has changed over time.
I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah. My belief system has changed.
Now, I will say this. I've been watching you since whenever the first show came out, I've watched them all.
I've watched all of them. Every move from The Profit to The Fixer to all of it. I've watched them all. And as someone who is a conservative, I could recognize that you had conservative principles and values because you're a capitalist and you're a business owner. To me, that lends itself more to conservatism, especially now.
I'm fiscally very conservative.
When I saw you popping up and being a little bit more—you can say it—conservative transparently. I thought, what happened? That's a shift. And I worried for you a little bit. I was like, 'Oh no, they're going to cancel him.'
Yeah. They actually... So, we could talk about that a little bit actually. You know, I have always been—I come from a very conservative family. I was born in a different country, so I had an opportunity to come here. So, I'm super grateful for that. But I had a different ideology when I was 14, 15, 18, and 19. I was young and I was dumb and I didn't make money and I didn't pay my bills and I didn't understand things. All I knew is my parents were strict and that was it. But I had a different belief system. And my belief system was based out of a little bit of naivety and a little bit of lack of education. And I'm not embarrassed to admit, and I think most people are, is that until you experience it yourself, until you see it yourself, until you manage it, until it's done to you, you tend to be a little bit more—liberal isn't the word, but you tend to be a little bit more forgiving of things that you shouldn't be. You tend to be a little bit too generous around things.
And I would say that as I got into making The Profit, my life and my perspective changed because I would run into situations where I wouldn't feel good about it or I wouldn't feel like things worked out the way I thought it was going to be or I would feel that even outside of the show people would take advantage, particularly outside of the show more than inside the show. And over time I started to think that my perspective was wrong. And I spent a long time at CNBC, a long time, and had a number of things happen to me there that I think misportrayed how I really felt. And when I decided to leave, I left after 10 years of being their number one show on their entire network. And they could argue, but the numbers are the numbers, that I felt like I needed to get my voice back.
And it really started to come out in 2017 in Statesville, North Carolina when I was for the first time attacked about the flag, right? And said, 'You have to take it down.' And I was like, 'I'm not doing that.' Well, it's dangerous or it's distracting or you're not following the rules. And I would say in that moment right there is probably what I flipped the most to becoming way more conservative. I mean way more conservative about my belief system about a lot of things because people were trying to take something away from me. Forget about speech. They were trying to take something away from me that was the most important thing to me in my business that serves this country. So that's probably more where it flipped than anywhere else.
Did you think it was weird in 2017, 18, but especially in 2020 where if you had an American flag that was not only a symbol that you were a conservative, but also they attached a lot of other things to that. The American flag was oppressive. The American flag was racist. The American flag was Islamophobic. The American flag was transphobic. Everything that they attached to that American flag in 2020—or burning it, right? Burning it. And that's in my opinion that's protected speech and I don't like it, but I think it's protected. But in 2020...
I can't get there on that.
I understand that it's protected speech, but it's not with your mouth, right? You're literally taking something that I love and you're burning it. And so, I guess you have the right to do it, but we're not going to be friends anymore, right?
Oh, I agree with you on that. But that American flag in the election of 2020, I remember there was a New York Times article that was written, somebody saying, 'I saw all these American flags and it just made me distraught because it's all these conservatives with this oppressive flag.' And they really likened it to being—
Confederate flag. I mean, it was all of it. Confederate flag, Nazi flag, all sorts of crazy things that it now became a different symbol for a faction of the country who thought it was a bad thing.
Right. But the left didn't want any ownership of the American flag for a good, I would say, five years. That flag to them was oppressive. It was representative of President Trump in their mind. And that correlation, they drew the correlation as if the flag belonged to one person or represented one person as opposed to everybody. And I would argue it's still that way today.
Yeah. Well, they gave it up. I said it on Outnumbered on Friday. It's such a weird thing to give up for the left—to cede the American flag to the other side when you are an American political party is weird to me.
That's a bad strategic decision. Like we don't want it. This is ick to us. I thought that was very weird. You want us to own the American flag? If that's a symbol of the right, I mean, we'll take it, but it's a little weird that you're going to give it to us that way.
I would almost want to say to somebody, 'Thank you for offering it.' But it does belong to you, too, right? And you should study the history of it and how it came to be and why it matters because we can disagree. What that flag represents is our ability to disagree. We don't have to go to dinner together even though we should because we could talk more about what we don't agree about. But when you start to do things to it or do things around it or pin it on me as if it's a scarlet letter, that's when it's a problem. That's how it became for me.
I want to talk about Governor Gavin Newsom because you guys went back and forth and I thought that was when he was in his real phase of the rage tweeting trying to be President Trump and he said some rude weird things to you that didn't land. Mocking Bed Bath and Beyond.
Bed Bath and Beyond. Yeah.
And you reviving it and your decision not to open in California for business reasons. Were you surprised that he decided, as the governor of—he likes to tell us—the fourth largest economy in the world, that that was his message to Bed Bath and Beyond and a business?
It started a long time ago for me in California. I own a bunch of businesses there and everybody said please don't say what businesses you own there because it'll be bad for the business. But it's obvious there's Camping World stores in California. They do very well. They've always done well. It is more expensive to do business there than it is anywhere else. So I had a bit of a road map. I used to live in a very—I made a terrible mistake—but I used to live in a town called Montecito part time and I left there and my wife who is liberal said we have to get out of here. These people are nuts. She owned a business there during COVID and she owned a business in Illinois during COVID and then she owned other businesses in non-COVID and sort of non-liberal places. And she said to me like, 'I think I'm going to change parties because I just am trying to run my business and feed myself and pay my employees and I can't operate and I can't do this and I can't do that.' She goes, 'This is nuts. Let's get out of here. Let's get out of here.'
And so when I left California and I wasn't there full-time, but when I left California and we closed our business there when we left, I looked back when we decided to open up Bed Bath stores and I said, 'I feel like I have to say something.' So I wrote a really—I mean I really thought about it in the middle of the night. I wrote it out, wanted to post a statement. It wasn't meant to be personal. I didn't even mention the governor's name. I didn't mention an elected official. I didn't mention liberal or conservative. Just said fundamentally it is too expensive to do business in California. It is too expensive to rent. That's because it's beautiful and there's a lot of people. I can get over that. It's too expensive to have labor. And people lost their mind. And they said, 'You don't want to pay people.'
It's not that I don't want to pay people. It's a free market. I want to pay people what I think the market tells me I should pay them. And if the market says I have to pay them $27 an hour, then that's what the market is. If the market says 14, but then you tell me that it has to be $25 an hour, right? You're telling me how to run my business. You're telling me how to pay people. You're telling me all these things. I don't want to be part of that because I believe in capitalism and I believe in a free market just like everybody believes in free speech. Capitalism and a free market is no different than free speech to me.
What about the retail theft? Because you know, they passed Prop 36. The governor opposed it and still won't fully fund it, but Prop 36 was supposed to be the antidote to Props 47 and 57, which basically said all those felonies are now misdemeanors and you can steal $995 and it's still a misdemeanor. And not only can you steal 995, you can do that at CVS and then you can go to that Macy's and then you can go there and it's still going to be a misdemeanor and we're going to treat it as such, like it's jaywalking. Prop 36 is trying to remedy that. Has not been fully funded. But as somebody who has not only invested in retail businesses, but Camping World is a retail business, did you see the impacts of that with the smash and grab and just come in and take it and leave?
I think it's bigger than California. I think it's in the blue states where they believe that people have the ability to take what they want and forget how we got there. And I've had people say to me, when COVID happened, Illinois became a bigger challenge than it is today, downtown Chicago under Lightfoot became an absolute war zone. And I was the dumbest person who moved from the suburbs to the city. And I moved to the city because I just didn't want to be out like looking at my grass all day.
My wife owned a business in our building and she had about $600,000 of inventory in her business. And when the riots—I'm going to call them riots, people have been mad—when the riots broke out and they drove cars into her building and they took all of her stuff and then we repaired it and replenished it and they took it all again twice. She lost a million dollars doing it. She just said to me like, 'I don't want to live here anymore. I don't want to do business here anymore. No one's protecting me.' We would have people come in and hold our staff up at gunpoint and the police would come and say, 'Did they steal anything?' Yes. How much was it? It was a $2,000 handbag. Well, I'm sorry. That doesn't meet the minimum. And my wife would say, 'That took me a long time to make $2,000.'
What do you mean? And when I was a small child or when you were a small child and I got in trouble one time, I went to the 7-Eleven. I put a pack of gum in my pocket. I think I was six or seven on my bike. They caught me. They called the police. My parents came. Aside from getting whooped by my family, as I should, the police were there. It was a serious thing. There was consequences. If they would have said to me, 'Oh, it's just a pack of gum,' and they would have let me go, I would have then said, 'Well, if it was a pack of gum, I could get away with, what can I get away with next? Can I steal a whole case of gum and then can I steal the whole store?' And so if there's no consequences to bad behavior and the left believes that people are entitled to things that don't belong to them, then don't get mad when everybody wants to have a gun to protect their family, to protect themselves, to protect their livelihood. Don't get mad.
It's so interesting to me.
God, I get so fired up about this.
In 2020, you had we must be locked down. You must shut your businesses because they're dangerous. And then a couple months later it was but people can come and loot your business for George Floyd and that's acceptable. And they had all the journalists and the medical experts saying yeah you know COVID is dangerous but we don't want to infringe on a civil rights moment. So it was a hiatus in which you could gather but only to loot and riot. And for people like me who were mad about the shutdowns from the very beginning—and I want your take on that as well—that thought that never should have happened ever and was stunned that it actually did in America, and then well but people can come and loot and it's for justice—that to me was the dumbest time in American history at least in my lifetime. But this whole left trying to do this mental gymnastics of opening your business dangerous, you're going to grandma, stealing from your business. Okay.
Yeah. And burning it to the very ground. That was okay.
Yeah. And we're talking black business, white business, brown business, any business, they were destroyed.
Yeah. If you talk to people in the black community, and I have a chance to do that often as an advocate for small business, they're tired of it. They're tired of it. They're tired of having stuff taken. You go on to 79th and Essex on the south side of Chicago, which is a rough area, which has historically been very blue. They will tell you that they don't support the mayor anymore. They want President Trump to send in reinforcement. They want all of that.
During COVID, the benefit for me in having Camping World is that it's a necessity. So, I didn't shut my businesses down anywhere. And I ran into a number of places across the country that were challenging why we were open, that we weren't a necessity. I had to convince people that people lived in their RVs and they needed to travel and people wanted to get out, didn't want to get on airplanes. Separate from that, other businesses that I have, I didn't shut them down either. And we were fined and we were told that we're violating all these rules and I keep coming back to my wife's business because she's just a small business owner. You just said, 'If I didn't have the blessing of having a household where we could afford to do this and I had to pay my bills, you're essentially telling me to go out of business, to lose my life savings, to not be able to pay my rent or my mortgage or my car payment, to educate my kids, to eat food. What do I do? What do I do?' And I understand that you want me to stand six feet away from people. No problem. I understand that you need me to wear a mask. I don't agree with it, but no problem. I'll comply with whatever the precautions are because I want to be a law-abiding citizen, but telling me that I can't have my business open. And she just said, 'I'm not going to close.' And I said the same thing in our businesses.
I think I recently sold my place in Chicago and I closed my business at the same time. I'm no longer a resident because I couldn't take the insanity. It's the same insanity that exists in California and still does.
I think it's worse. I think it's worse in Illinois than it's ever been with Pritzker and Johnson. I think it's getting worse in California. This idea that Governor Newsom wants to tell ICE agents that they have to remove their masks because what's—not presenting themselves as law enforcement and they're just taking people captive and hostage and shipping them out to El Salvador. I mean, that's the whole—
Do we have evidence of that? They don't, but they—
So people are scared because somebody has a mask. Well, when you threaten ICE agents' lives, right, and they're caught on video and there's facial recognition and then you could find out who they are and you could go to their house and hurt them or hurt their family. Why wouldn't you want to have them protected?
Well, I think we know the answer to that. Or at least I do.
But what is it, though? Oh, I don't think—in Gavin's particular case, I think Gavin so desperately wants to be president and he realizes that he has to be the anti-Trump of the anti-Trump and so if President Trump wants secure borders and President Trump wants mass deportations, he's going to go out of his way to be the opposite of that. I also think California doesn't want to deport anybody. I think that they realize that if they have all illegal aliens deported out of their state, their state's going to be in real trouble because they rely on a lot of under-the-table illegal alien labor. And I think they rely on it for population so they can have seats in Congress. And I think they're terrified of losing both those things. And you hear Mayor Karen Bass say that. She admits it. She says the quiet part out loud. 'Well, if you deport these people, then our businesses will close.'
Why don't they close other places?
Well, that's a great—well, because California is so dependent on illegal alien labor. And to me, that's how little Karen Bass and Governor Newsom think of immigrants.
Why are they dependent on illegal labor?
No, because it's cheaper. They can pay him under the table.
Because a business can actually survive under that premise, right? So, you regulate at the top and you're forcing bad behavior at the bottom as opposed to letting a free market just determine what it is.
But I think that's why they're terrified. And I think they have no problem demonizing law enforcement. I don't think that's a new thing. I think they've been doing it, especially in 2020, watching what they did in California, watching them disparage law enforcement, whether it's ICE or whether it's Border Patrol or regular police officer. I think that the left has anti-law and order and the people who enforce it.
Do you think California flips red anytime soon?
I think it's going to take a while. I think LA will.
I think the fire infuriated people, made them scared, made them feel abandoned, has hit their pocketbook. And I think very wealthy people who particularly were probably supporters of the left before who still don't have a permit, still can't get answers on their house, still can't get their insurance paid. When you hit people in the pocketbook, it changes their mindset very quickly.
Enough to vote Republican, though.
I think so. I think it will take a moderate Republican. I think it'll take somebody just a little off of center, but I think it will take somebody who says we are going to protect our borders because it's the right thing to do. We are going to deregulate business because businesses need to flourish. We are going to attract other businesses to come here by sitting down with them and finding out what it takes. We are going to do these kinds of things that allows everybody to prosper. I do think that'll happen. It would take somebody like me in California. Yeah.
And I say that jokingly, but it would take somebody like me who says, 'Look, I have certain views about certain things, but my views around fiscal conservative and policy conservatism are not too far. I'm not extreme, right? And I'm not in the center. I'm sort of like in the middle of both of those.' I think it would take somebody like me who could say to people on both sides, 'Cut the nonsense.'
What do you think about Rick Caruso?
I have been a fan of his in the past to be candid with you and I met him. He had his hotel when I was living there and I belong to his club and he actually asked me to come to some of his events. He's a capitalist.
He's a capitalist and I'm surprised that he lost to Karen.
I was really surprised that he lost to Karen.
He'd almost be better as a governor to be honest. I think he'd be more effective.
Right. Steve Hilton's a friend of mine. I think that Steve Hilton could fit that. He's still Republican, but I think he comes with a perspective that's a little bit more moderate. Yeah.
That people can believe in. But I think it's going to take a while to do it.
Do you think the person who runs for office has to modify a portion of their views to properly represent their constituency or do you think they need to stay firm in theirs and try to pull people to them?
I'm someone who's socially more moderate. So, I think in California, I think that common sense could win the day. I don't think there are very many people, even on the far left in California, that if they're honest with themselves, think that men should be in women's sports.
Nobody should think that.
But they will say that and they will defend that to the death. I call it—
Well, I think they're beholden to what I call the Rainbow Mafia the same way Disney is beholden to woke.
But I know a lot of gay people who don't think it's okay.
No, but that's why the fringe has completely hijacked that entire movement. And in California, they are so emotional about trans. It's not even the rest of the letters. It's the T. They are so beholden to the T that they might privately know that it's wrong to have men taking accolades and spots away from women, but they will never say it because they are so beholden to the T of the LGBTQ that I think that they—and at the national level, the Democrat party, I think as much as they know it's a loser for them, they will still cling to it.
I think they're just beholden to it. I think that they think that that's where their base is. And once they've gone so far in that direction, I think it's almost to them an admission of stupidity. If they say, 'Yeah, we did say men should be in women's sports, but now we're saying maybe not.' I think that that's an admission that their entire party platform for the last 5 years has been moronic.
Parents that I talk to—and these are men, the men of the household. When I talk to them about this particular topic about men in female sports, particularly when they have daughters, they could be the most liberal friends that I have, and they will all say to me, 'I don't want some guy knocking my daughter over, or I'm going to punch him in the nose. I don't want some guy taking the trophy stand away from my daughter. I don't want that.' And I understand that that's the life they want to live, and I have a respect level for that if that's what they want to do. But nothing's going to get in between me and my daughter. And I think it has to be personalized for people for them to feel a certain way.
Well, and I think they'll vote that way. But the platform is not going to change for me on the Democrat side. I think that they've learned nothing and they're going to lean all the way back into woke. I think they've learned absolutely nothing. And there's no doubt in my mind if we have a Democrat president in 2028, the border will be open wide up again. But, you know, if they do, I don't think that they're going to. Their party is in shambles. But there will be a Democrat again at some point. And unless the party has a major revival, the next Democrat president will open that border wide up again to 20 million people just like Joe did because it was by design. There's no other way to look at it.
It's a form of gerrymandering.
It's cheap labor and they need the population because they need to keep their seats and they need to keep their power.
I'm a little—Where were you born?
So, I'm a little conflicted in this topic and I'm probably more passionate about it than I should be, but when I came to this country—and my parents were born in Ohio—when I came to this country, my parents were very clear with me, and I'm an only child. Early on, this is where you came from. This is how it works. This is the blessings you have to be here. I used to have to go to—when I got my confirmation I had to go to Bible study and CCD and do all those things as I should. When I wanted to become a US citizen, my parents made me go to class. I had to learn everything. I was a little boy and I had to learn everything. And the day that I became naturalized, I remember I had like my little brown suit and my bow tie on and I went down and I got my citizenship papers and from that moment on I realized what a privilege it is.
I think the left is a little confused and I have this debate with people and Cubans by the way don't say enough about this and I want to talk about that. I think the left is very confused that nobody is saying immigration is bad. People are saying illegal immigration is bad. If you want to come to this country and you want to do so by following the process and filling out the paperwork and doing whatever the law says you're supposed to do, they'll determine if you can come or not. It's just sort of what it is. I'm still a believer that immigration is not a bad thing, but it can't be mass chaos. It has to be controlled. It has to be done in a way where you are respecting the country. You understand what the rules are. I could never be president. I understand that's what it is. Even if I wanted to be, I couldn't be. But I can contribute to society in a way that shows that I'm grateful for who I am and being here and I have to follow the rules.
I think there should be some degree of just expected assimilation. And I say that because there's a viral video going around of the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, telling an American citizen and longtime resident of Dearborn, who happens to be a Christian, who spoke at a city council meeting saying, 'Hey, naming this street after somebody who is on video supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. That is not the way we should be going here in Dearborn.' And the mayor told him, you don't belong here and I will throw a parade when you leave.
I saw that. And when you look at Dearborn and you look at some other places in America that don't really look like America and there's zero assimilation and people that have been in this country for 20 plus years who don't know more than two or three words of English that for American citizens particularly on the right is frustrating. And it's not because we think anyone should abandon their culture. I believe in having a rich culture but when there's no degree of assimilation—and look at Europe, I mean the president talked about it this morning at the UN. They're losing their culture and they're seeding it. They're like, 'We don't want to be European anymore.'
We don't want to be German. We don't want to be whatever it may be.
Under the guise of political correctness.
And being nice to everyone, we'll completely lose our culture and we'll completely take on yours and we will let the guests dictate the rules in our own country. And I think that that is so insulting. And Europe is to me a cautionary tale of that.
It's a simple way. When we were young and our parents would take us to their friend's home or our aunt's home, we would go into the house and our parents would say to us when we got out of the car, "This is in your house. Clean up your dishes. You go into somebody's house, whatever food they put on the table, you say, 'Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Thank you.'" All the rules. To me, the way I look at it is I could never imagine saying to somebody who was born in South Dakota, 'You should leave.'
I would say thank you for allowing me to be here. I'm grateful for that. I would like you to think differently about a particular topic or I'd like you to think, but I understand that we just don't agree. But thank you for letting me be here and for giving me the ability to have an opinion.
Yeah. Well, in a lot of places in this country that is not happening and it's startling in some places. To me, Sharia law is not compatible with the United States Constitution or American values. So the fact that some cities in America are now implementing different notes of Sharia law into their communities or into governance, to me that's horrifying. These are the same people who claim to be queers for Palestine and they don't get it and I don't understand it. You know, there's a lot of things as a conservative I can look at the other side and disagree but I can understand their perspective. That one you lost me. I also don't understand how the same people who are saying horrible things about Charlie Kirk, calling him a racist and an Islamophobe and a transphobe and all these things, at the same time will also be the queers for Palestine. They can't reckon with that in their mind and it doesn't make any sense to me.
