David French

The rationale that I have heard is that by liberating itself from the law of war and doubling down on cruelty and lethality, that the Trump administration is trying to deter drug smuggling.

That by taking off the gloves, it's going to deter drug smuggling.

You know, and he keeps doing this extremely dishonest thing where he's talking about the horrible toll of fentanyl.

And applying it to what are pretty obviously, if they're drug smugglers at all, cocaine smugglers out of Venezuela, when fentanyl is coming by and large from Mexico.

So he's not even hitting at the number one driver of American overdose deaths at all here.

He's doing something else.

And look, I'm so glad you brought up the history.

This is the first time we've really launched a lethal undeclared war where our own forces are engaging in the combat.

But we have been providing military assistance and intelligence support to South American militaries for a long time, including in large scale operations.

We actually had an effort where the CIA cooperated with local air forces to shoot down drug smuggling planes, which was something that really wasn't on the headlines until.

the operation shot down an American missionary rather than a drug smuggler.

And so these attacks are imprecise.

Rand Paul, you know, I have a lot of beefs with Rand Paul, but God bless him on this issue, produced a study last week where he showed that when the Coast Guard does interdiction, which is actually the best way of trying to stop drug trafficking, is you stop the boat and

You seize the boat, you grab the drugs, you arrest the crew, and guess what?

You then get to question them.

Who's your supplier?

Who's your distributor?

All of these things, right?

You can't question people blown up by a missile.

But what he found was that there was more than 20% of these interdictions, these stops, there were no drugs at all.