Sheriff Mark Lamb, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's an honor to be on.

It's an honor to have you.

I just. This is. I love what you do. I love all the people you talk to. I love the different. The different expertise and knowledges they bring. So this is truly an honor to be on your show today.

Well, thank you for saying that. You know, I've been following you for several years now and I've been wanting to talk to you, but I've been waiting for the right time and reaching out to people always, always get a little. It takes me a minute. And then we just hired this guy that's in your district who's running our social media. JD.

JD or something like, hey, you wanna.

What did you call him?

Nightclaw.

Nightclaw.

Nice.

He's never gonna live that one down now. But, yeah, JD connected us and here we are, man. And I love your message, I love what you're doing. You keep it positive, you speak truth, you speak common sense, which is a rarity now. And we got a lot to cover, man.

I'm looking forward to it.

So what I want to do is cover some of your life story and then go into a lot of the stuff that's going on in the world. Why are all these criminals being released back onto the streets? You know, your run for senate, how's that going? The border, we got a lot of stuff to dive into, but everybody gets an introduction first. So here we go. Sheriff Mark Lamb, the american sheriff. You're a father of five, a grandfather of three, married for almost 30 years to your wife, Janelle. Grew up outside of the US, not military. We'll get into that stuff. Worked as a police officer, officer for six years before transitioning to the sheriff's department. Elected as the 24th sheriff of Penal county, currently serving. You are currently running for the 2024 US Senate seat in Arizona. Deeply religious, with a strong faith, you established the American Sheriff foundation. What is that?

So I started a charity my first year. When I got into. Right as I became sheriff, I knew I wanted to do something, so I started a charity called the American Sheriff foundation, which our goal was to bridge the gap between communities and law enforcement just through service. And it's been great. It's given me an opportunity to give back to the communities, to help people who in need. We do a lot with veterans and so it's been. It's just another tool that gave me the ability to do things in my community without having to go through the bureaucracy of government to where I could actually make actionable change in people's lives right away.

That's awesome. You did that when?

I did that in 2018, 2018. So I took office in 2017. By the beginning of 2018, I had figured out what I had wanted to do, and I started that charity, man.

More people need to do that. And the author of two books and one children's book, American Rules to live by, american sheriff, traditional values in a modern world, and the adventures of Seymour clues.

That's right. And Mister Mouse.

Nice. Nice. But a couple things we're going to knock out real quick. So also, I have a Patreon account. Patreon is our. That's a subscription account. They are our top supporters. They've been here since the beginning. They're the reason I get to be here. My team's here, and they're the reason you get to be here, too. And so.

Well, thank you, Patreon.

Yeah. And so one of the things I promise them is I offer them a opportunity to add, asked the guest a question before they come on. And so we got a couple of good ones here. This one's from Gregory Lawton. What is the most pressing, excuse me, what is the most pressing issue affecting law enforcement officers in Pinah county and throughout the state of Arizona?

So I think it's the same thing, not just for Pinal County. I think it's not just the same thing for Arizona, but the entire country. And that is the border. And I know we're going to dive into the border a lot, but just give you the cliff notes of it. I think national, when we talk national security, the greatest threat to national security, the greatest threat to the undermining of the rule of law is beginning right at the open border situation, not holding people accountable, letting them come in here and break the law, then flooding our communities with unknown people. You know, the border patrol is vetting, like, 5% of those people. And so now these people, they don't, once they come across the border, they don't just stay on the border. They filter into communities like mine or in Arizona or across the country. And it creates a real challenge for us as law enforcement, because the federal government allowed people, unvetted people to come into my community. And not only that, we're taking people from third worlds and expecting that we're not going to turn into a third world when we bring them into our communities.

So the other piece to that is the fentanyl, not just the drugs, but I think the fentanyl has become probably, I mean, methamphetamine is still a big issue in Arizona. But the fentanyl poisonings that are going on in this country, and I know we're going to dive into that deeper, but when we talk about the most pressing matters, I think, are they're all combined national security threats to american lives, threats to our communities. It's starting at the southern border.

Well, we got a, you know, I hate diving into that, but I love diving into it because. Because it needs to be heard. And I can't wait to dive into that discussion because I just, I don't know what to believe anymore. You know, I don't. I don't believe really any media sources anymore. I think they're all over embellished, and so it'll be great to talk to somebody like you.

They're over embellished, they're underreporting, and they're telling you the facts that they want you to want. They're telling you things to spin it their way. Yeah, and look, I've been accused of that, but today I'll give you truth and then let people decide as to whether or not they. But I don't give you things that I, if I don't know it, I'm not going to give it to you. I'm giving you things that I know because of being on the ground, the people I work with, the things that we see that we talk to, all these things. So I think hopefully in the end, there's going to be a lot of people listening today that, you know, are maybe for it or against it, you know, and I hope to just give more information, truth about it, and then people can make up their own mind as to the severity of the problem.

I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. And the next question is from Lucas Carrion. Do you have any context behind the tunnel system that the cartel has built to funnel in drugs and potentially supporting a systematic attack against America with weaponry and high value targets relying on that infrastructure?

Well, Lucas, great question. It's not just a single tunnel. It's many tunnels. The cartels are flush with cash. They have the ability to build all sorts of stuff. You see a lot of tunnels down in places like Nogales, Arizona. And the reason I mentioned Nogales, not that Nogales is, it's just that Nogales is right on the Mexico border. On one side of Nogales is 50,000 residents or 30, 30 to 50,000 residents, and on this other side is 500,000 residents in Mexico. And literally, you can have a house here or a business here a road of 15ft, the wall, a 15 foot road and businesses right there. Again, so within 30, 40ft you have businesses or houses in Mexico and businesses and houses in Arizona. And so a lot of times those tunnels will go from one factory in Mexico and then pop ups in somebody's business or somebody's home. On the us side, there's also, there's tunnels out in the middle of nowhere too, in the deserts. But right now, the tunnels, they don't need to use them as much because the borders are wide open. And so they're pushing people through more conventional routes as opposed to the tunnels, but they still exist.

And whenever they find, and they usually destroy them.

How do you have an estimation of how many tunnels there are? Maybe just in Arizona.

I mean, it's always changing. I mean, look, I think that you've probably got hundreds, I don't know, hundreds of tunnels. I mean, you're at least got. Every cartel is going to have their own pieces of tunnels. Every smuggler within those cartels has their way of being able to smuggle the product. You remember, it's not like the cartel ushers these people down themselves. They have different smuggling units that work for the cartels. And those guys, well, the money they make is based on their ability to successfully smuggle drugs or people into this country. And so if you're going to make a ton of money, why would you not put a tunnel in place that would give you the best opportunity to smuggle people and drugs across the border so that you can make the most money.

How are they digging these tunnels?

By hand?

How big are they? Can they walk?

Some are very like. Some of you could take a railroad little box through which they do. Most of them were built at least to where somebody, a grown man could walk in it. They're probably not built to my height, but many of them are built, they're fortified, just like you would go into a mine and you would see these tunnels. And some of them are more rudimental, some would be just, you know, like you could crawl through it and get to the other side.

Do you have any footage of this stuff?

No. I mean, there's plenty of footage from border patrol and stuff. In my county, we don't get the tunnels as much because I'm not on the border. I'm one county off the border. Okay, so I'm 52 miles off the border where the. On the indian reservation, the Tono Dominion Nation, and then I'm 71 miles off the border where the. I tend where the county line intersects with the I ten. And so what we've got is problems of them pushing them through. Backpackers, drugs, all that coming through the reservation predominantly, and then anything that comes across the southern border. Pretty much everybody that comes through Cotiz County, Pima County, Santa Cruz county, those people eventually are going to get in a car, whether it's the drugs or the people that are being trafficked, they're going to get on one of our highways and head up to Phoenix. And Phoenix becomes a distribution hub for human trafficking, drug trafficking. So they never. Almost all of them will make it through Pinal county at some point either on our highways or through our deserts to try to get to Phoenix, where there will be distributed throughout the rest of the country.

Man, I just. I get we're going to dive into this a lot more later, but I'm curious about these tunnels. How are they able to. You're saying they go from. From wherever mechs go, right into a living room or some type of a business. How are they locating that?

They are good at it.

How are they able to navigate into that business?

A lot of it is just a compass. You can just go with the compass underground and just look and see if you're still on the heading, the right heading.

I guess they would probably start in the US and go to Mexico.

They start. They do it both ways. So they'll start in the Mexico. And a lot of these people, you got to remember, they can pass freely on day visas, or some of these people can come back and forth. And so you might get somebody that goes from us side and goes over to Mexico and walks into a factory, and they, all day long, they dig underneath to try to get to that. Over there. There's some very intricate tunnel. Tunnel systems that they've done, man. And I don't think the US even fully knows how many tunnels there are. Especially now, we're so overwhelmed that you don't have time to dedicate to going and finding all these tunnels. And right now, the cartels, like I said, they don't really even need to spend a lot of money building these. These tunnels because they're having so much success just walking them through the gaps in the fence or, you know, or on the reservation where there's no wall. There's not a single foot of wall on the reservation. At best, it's three strands of barbed wire fence or some Normandy barrier.

That's it.

That's it, man.

Well, we got a lot to cover.

I know, but before you scratching the surface on that.

Yeah, before we get into that everybody gets a gift.

All right.

I don't know if you have any guesses?

I guess zero guesses.

Oh, Mandy. There you go.

Oh, nice.

Vigilance elite. Gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all 50 states, so you don't have to arrest yourself on the way home.

I love it. That is cool.

Yeah.

Thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome.

Two bags of it.

Two bags.

Nice.

So let's dive in. You're welcome.

I appreciate it.

Just some swag for you. Put that on the sheriff's car.

Oh. I'm going to see if anybody notices it. Thank you. You're welcome.

But, well, sheriff, you're running for Senate. I think that. I personally think that we've really gotten away from hearing who the individual is that is running for office. And so I did this with Eli Crane. I've done it with who's. You know, you guys are buddies, both from Arizona. I'm getting a lot of people from Arizona. Maybe I should move there. But anyways, what I was saying is, I think people want to know who the man is behind the candidate. Who are we electing? And so I'd like to get a snapshot of your life story before we go into a lot of the issues that we're facing in this country today. And so give us a better idea of who you are, who your beliefs are, how you were raised, what kind of a person you are. So.

And I agree with you. I think that's the most important piece. You know, we're actually. We're asking people to represent us in the constitutional republic that this country is. And yet we oftentimes either don't get an opportunity or the media is telling us who that person is, as opposed to us finding out for ourselves who that person is. And so I appreciate the opportunity, because that's one of the hardest things to deliver, is the message of who am I and what do I bring to the table? And I think once you get into that, people say, man, I like this guy. But without the way politics is designed, it's just not. It's very tough to find out who the real person is. And I'm different from everybody. I'm a different cop. I was actually born and raised in Hawaii. My dad was from Arizona. My family was pioneers of Arizona. I mean, frankly, I'm a pioneer period. I'm a descendant of eight of the occupants of the Mayflower that came here. And then the lamb side came in 1630 on the Winthrop fleet.

No way.

Yeah. Most of my ancestors on all sides of my family have been in America since probably the 16 hundreds, 17 hundreds. And so when people ask me, where are you from? I'm like, I'm american. Like, I've been hundreds of years in this country. And so that's part of my love of this country, is it's a deep, I think generation after generation of being in this country, you start to develop a real deep appreciation and love for it. But I was born and raised in Hawaii. My dad was a businessman. He was a graduate of Thunderbird Business College, which is a global business management school, probably one of the premier international schools in the country. And so we were raised to other places. I grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, and didn't know anything different. We were raised there. I was just a little holly kid in Hawaii, which makes for a good upbringing, because you learn to be tough real quick, I'll bet. I mean, Hawaii is a warrior culture anyway. And then being a minority in a warrior culture, you're forced to be raised right there with those warriors. And so we grew up at eleven.

My dad moved to the Philippines, so we all went there, spent a year in the Philippines. We didn't have a lot of money, so we lived like most Filipinos do, riding the jeepneys, and really got to look at poverty at that point. I remember at a young age, at eleven years old, I got a real glimpse of poverty in my book. My first chapter in my book, american share of traditional values in a modern world. The very first chapter is, welcome to America. And I talk about the different places I've lived and the different things that I learned from each one. But every time you come home to America, no matter where you've been, no matter how beautiful those countries are, you just feel like kissing the ground, you know that. Welcome to America.

What brought you to, what brought your dad to the Philippines?

So my dad was, he was doing some government contracts for, you know, they would leave equipment for. They would leave equipment in India, they would do a project in India, leave equipment in India, and then they would put it out to a contract to say, okay, if somebody will contract with somebody to go pick up the equipment in India or government surplus stuff, we also were scrap metal. So we did scrap metal. That was our primary business as I grew up. So we would collect scrap metal and then we'd ship it off to different places and they would remake steel out of it. So we did a lot of that as kids. Most of my life was spent doing scrap metal. What we did in the Philippines didn't work, and so we were there for a year and moved back to Arizona, kind of a regrouping. And so I went to junior high and high school in Arizona, Chandler, Arizona. And then my dad decided to move to Panama. My dad loved Panama. They used the american dollar. There's a lot of real american influence. And at the time, Panama still had all the american bases.

They hadn't turned it over to the panamanian government yet. Thanks to Jimmy Carter, they hadn't done that yet. And so we loved living there. I started. I spent all my summers there. I was there during operation just cause, which I write about in my book.

That's crazy.

I'll dive into that.

How old were you?

I was 17. Operations.

So you remember that?

Not only do I remember it, we'll dive into it now.

All right.

Like, I was a kid who wanted to be in the military, so I loved all that stuff. I was. My dad never owned guns, but I kept buying guns. Like, I bought a lever action 30 30. And so I was into guns and all that stuff anyway. And I'm in Panama and tensions are rising. They had roughed up a marine and his wife. I think they had killed somebody else. And so Noriega. And was getting at odds with the american government.

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And I think, you know, you hear about it. I can't say why, but Noriega finally just told the government, I'm not your whipping boy anymore, and decides he's not going to listen to him anymore. And as we know, Noriega was a big part of trafficking cocaine and all those things through Panama, all that stuff. And so Noriega had his dignity battalion and the us tensions were rising. And so went to bed one night, I think it was not long before Christmas and just a couple days before Christmas, and my mom comes in, wakes me up at like one in the morning and she says, mark, they're bombing. They're bombing. And so we had the 10th floor on this place called Punta Paitia, which is out on the point of part of Panama City that overlooks the bay into old Panama. And so I run out to the balcony and sure enough, I mean, I'm watching trace arounds hit these buildings, skipping off into the ocean. I'm watching gunships shooting, machine gun fire on all, we had all four views we could go see. I could see there was four navy seals that died that night on the airstrip in Punta Paitia.

I could see that firefight going on from my, from our apartment that night. And so it was a full on just right in the middle of this war. You know, there's this, you know, somebody says it wasn't war. I mean, but it was certainly a military exercise. And where they're bombing, shooting and you're 17. I'm 17.

What are you thinking?

I'm thinking, cool. But then it was, we didn't have any. So where the building we were in that night, I remember looking over the balcony, and I see this limousine down at the bottom of our building. And I'm watching this guy load an rpg into the trunk of the car, this limousine. Little did I know that night, we found out the next day they had a list of all the Americans in our building. There was Americans on the third floor, there was Americans on the fourth floor, there was Americans on the 10th floor, which was us, and there was Americans on the 11th floor, and most of in Panama. When you're an American and you're not military, they think you're CIA. So they come into the building, and they bust into the third floor. But the people on the third floor had managed to jump over the balcony down to the second floor. So then they take and they go to the fourth floor. They bust into the fourth floor, and they cap. They kidnap the guy that's in there on the fourth floor. They take him, which, by the way, they found him a few days later dead in a ditch, shot to death.

They believed him to be a CIA, but he was a professor at the college, which I think he was probably CIA, too, but they found him dead a few days later. So the next Americans from the fourth floor were us, and the power went out, and so they couldn't make it up any further. It was too much stairs. They were on a time crunch. And so, unbeknownst to us, we dodged a major bullet that night.

Wow.

So then the dignity battalion leaves.

When did you find out that the.

We knew the next day they had taken them because all the residents in the building said, hey, there's looters and dignity battalion are breaking into people's. They came in, they took. They took this guy from the fourth floor last night. We need to stand guard of our own building because there was no. The military wasn't coming by. We didn't see the military for four and a half days. Nobody. They came and took Americans from our building. We didn't see anybody for four days, not to mention Noriega's girlfriend lived next door. And nobody came to his building, which is where I think he was the whole time, by the way. But that. So what they said was, hey, we had all these people in the building that actually, there was a couple jewish guys and some other people that had guns. They had an Uzis, they had 9 mm, they had a lever action 30 30. And so they said, look, we got to guard our own building. If not, they're going to come back for more. The looters will come, or the dignity battalion will come and take more people. And so they decided that we were all going to pony up and we were all going to guard our building.

I'm 17 years old, and my job was from midnight to 06:00 a.m. every morning. I spent Christmas morning that year with a gun standing out front of our building. And I remember one time over the radio, they said, hey, they're coming. They're coming. And I'm like, I know enough about guns to know that they have AK forty seven s, and I have a lever action 30. 30. And I'm like, I thought, well, I may only get one shot off, but I'm gonna make this shot count.

Shoot from COVID my friend.

Shoot from COVID I'm thinking, where am I even gonna go? And luckily, they didn't come. But I spent four days going back and forth or every night doing a patrol or doing a survey security detail at our building, holding a gun at 17 years old from midnight to 06:00 a.m. until the military showed up for five days.

How long did this go on for?

So the military showed up about four or five days later. And they had kind of gotten things under control by then. But for the first three or four days, it was chaos. My dad left within the first 30 minutes of them bombing because my dad was kind of crazy like that. And my dad went out and he got stuck out there and had to hide in the bushes in a ditch until the next morning when he was able to work his way back to our building because of all the dignity battalion running around. I mean, it was craziness that first night.

Holy cow, man. I had no idea.

17 years old.

That is quite the experience for a 17 year old.

Yeah, but I loved. I mean, honestly, there was parts of it that I loved, but there was other parts of it that you're thinking. But once again, what it did was it reestablished the love of America. That you can put your head down on your pillow at night, and for the most part, up until recently, know that you're going to be safe. You can sleep good at night. You know how it is. You've been in there. When you go to these places, you just never sleep good at night because you just don't know what's going on. And per case in point, you know, it went from full on blown invasion one night. So it makes you appreciate America and the stability that exists in this country, really, because hard men and are willing to hold guns and go out and protect our communities at night.

Do you have any brothers and sisters.

So I have two brothers and a sister. I'm the youngest of four. My two oldest brothers, then I have a sister, and then there's me. I'm the baby of the family.

Right on, right on. What were they doing? Were they.

My sister was there that night, but my two brothers. My one brother, Washington, on a mission in Ecuador. And then I think my other brother was. He was there, too. He lived there, but he just lived in a different part of Panama. So we were all. He was there with his family, and we were in our apartment in Punta Paitia. And so. And then from there, when I was 19, I lived. Moved to Argentina. I was a missionary in Argentina for two years.

How was that?

Buenos Aires. Loved it.

What do you do on a mission?

So you preach the gospel, you go down and you just go and talk to people about God and Jesus Christ and tell them about scriptures and everybody's looking for something. I think this life is about finding our way back to God. And I think being able to go be a missionary is a really amazing experience because, yes, you go through some hard things, but at the same time, you find people that are really, really at a point in their life where they're vulnerable and they're ready. They're waiting for something. And to be able to be that person that shows up and shares with them a message of God and Jesus Christ and see their life change and see that empty cup fill is an amazing thing. But look, it puts hair on your chest, too. At a young age, I was 19 years old, and I basically just got on a plane and flew to Argentina. And the first guy that I was a companion with was this little short Argentine of italian descent with red hair, didn't speak. He was a first generation Argentine. He didn't speak a lick of English.

Did you speak Spanish?

I mean, rudimental. I mean, what they teach you, like, in a. In a couple months of, I could say my name, I could sell, I could do those things, but. And I had learned a little bit of Spanish in Panama, having spent a lot of time there. But you show up and here's this guy, that's your companion. Now you don't know. And we went 4 hours into the countryside into a place called Saladicio in Argentina. And I remember that first night, the night the lights were getting ready to go out. I don't know who this guy is next to me. I am looking at two years. I'll be here for two years. I'm laying on a bed. My mattress was this thick. It was on a door that was propped up on boxes of books. And I remember laying down, the light goes off, and I thought, what am I doing? Where am I at? Because there was no cellphones, no nothing. I mean, we wrote letters. I got to talk, call home three times or three or four times in two years. Mother's Day and Christmas. That's it. You don't speak. Other than that, letters.

We had to write letters. And you'd send a letter. It took three weeks to get home, so if you needed any money, there was no sense asking, because by the time the letter got home and by the time you got anything back, it was six weeks.

Six weeks, man.

So you learn how to be on your own.

So when you go on a mission trip, how do you determine who you're going to talk to? And actually, let me. We'll get to there. How do you figure out where you're going? Who decides that?

So the church does. So typically, they'll have all these aboard, full of all the missions throughout the world. And there's all over the world. I mean, Mongolia, all Central and South America, Europe, all throughout the United States. For example, my two boys have gone to Boise, Idaho, and Philadelphia. So that's where they did their missions. But I was. So what they do is they have this whole board full of missions, and they know who's miss, who's lacking, where they need to fill it. So they might take your name and Shawn Ryan puts in, I want to go on a mission. And you tell them a little bit about yourself and submit the paperwork, and then they look at it and say, well, we think we should put them in Ukraine. And then they put you in there, and then they pray about it. And if they feel good about it, they leave it there. If they don't, they'll take you off and put you somewhere else until they feel good about it. So, obviously, my name got thrown in Argentina, and they felt good about it, and I ended up there, and it was absolutely the place I was supposed to be.

And so it was a great experience because every day we go out and we just look for people. We knock doors, which, out there, you actually don't even knock doors because you usually stand out in front of their house and clap, and they come out and usually tell you to pound sand.

What? I mean, what is. What's your opener? What do you start talking? I mean, so you're clapping outside somebody's door. They come out. They don't tell you to pound sandhorn. What do you say?

You know, usually we just say, look up. We're missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ latter saints, and we're just here to share a message about God. Do you believe in God? You know, immediately you want to get into questions and get them to answer, because if they'll answer questions like cells, if they'll answer questions, you know that you've kind of got them on the hook a little bit. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean it in a good way, but in the sales way. This is why I end up in sales. Laughter that because you're just. And then if they say, yes, I believe in God and Jesus Christ, and you'll start asking them, what is your relationship? Can we come in and talk to you some more about this? And then we won't go into the house and begin to talk to him. And it's one of those deals, like, you're not going to be successful most of the time, but when you are successful, it's worth it.

Yeah. Yeah. Is this a, is this like a. I interviewed another gentleman who's in the church of Latter day Saints, Brandon Fugal. He was a big, he's done a lot of mission stuff as well. Is this like a rite of passage in the church of Latter day Saints?

It really used to be. Nowadays they're a little bit more, you know, it's not as they still have more missionaries now than ever, but back in the day, like, it was in, it was a non negotiable.

You have to do it.

I wanted to do it.

Yeah.

Like, my life was geared towards going on a mission. Like, every decision I made, the friends I chose, everything was designed to keep me in a position to where I was qualified to still go on a mission. So I avoided people that were going to take me. I've never drank alcohol in my life. I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't do any of that stuff, never have. And I surrounded myself with friends that would take me to the same goals, you know, like, hey, here's. And trust me, I had friends along the way that I had really good friends, but they started to deviate from where I wanted to be. And so you don't change course. You just have to shift and they move on and you pick up people that are going to really get you to where you want to be. And I was fortunate enough to have friends that we all believed the same thing. We all had the same goal. We were all going to go on our mission. I really love it because I think it makes men and women out of kids nowadays, these kids are still living with their parents into their twenties or they don't even know anything about life.

I got thrown in a country the other side of the continent and I had to fend for myself. There was nobody there. There was no mom and dad telling me what to do or how to do this or that. I had to learn Spanish, like we say, a fuerza. I had to learn how to speak Spanish, like, the hard way, and. But I wouldn't change it for anything. And you meet people that are still. I'm still close to people from Argentina. Just because you just become so ingrained in who they are. You live, you're in their houses every day, you're experiencing things that you just don't get. That's a. It's a two year portion of your life, wherever. You'll probably have more spiritual experiences in that two years than you will the rest of your life.

Interesting.

And it really gives you some fuel to kind of stay on course throughout the rest of your life as well.

Is that true for you?

That's absolutely true for me.

Spiritual experiences in those two years?

Absolutely. I mean, I just had some really amazing experiences. I mean, granted, I've been able to do a lot, but I challenge myself consistently. I think when you're challenging yourself and your greatness and you're trying to push yourself outside of the. The comfort levels that we all have inside of us, the boundaries of comfort, when you push yourself outside of that, you will find that you will have more spiritual experiences because you're on faith at that point.

What is your most profound spiritual experience while in Argentina?

I have not told this one to very many people at all, probably. I don't even know if my kids will know it, so when they hear it, they'll have. We were. There was three of us, actually. Normally it's just two of you, but we happened to be three of us at that point. I had one guy from Argentina and one guy from America. They were new, and so I was training him and we had a rough day. Everything had gone wrong that day. The appointments had all been canceled. We're just like, let's just go back to the pension, which is the apartment. Let's go back to the pension and let's just call it. Call it a day. And as we were kind of. We cross this road, we see this old man, just old and dirty, and clothes are all tattered, long hair, head down, beard, just old bum, like just what you would think is a bum. So he's crossing the road, and we get to the other side, and we stop, and we all three look at each other, and we're like, do we just go home or should we turn around and help this guy?

What should we do? And so finally we said, let's just go help this guy. So by the time we crossed back across the street, he was trying to get up over the curb, and he started to fall. And we got there just in time, and we catch him. And so we couldn't. We kept asking him, where are you going? And he was just kind of mumbling. So there was a. For about 30, 40, maybe 30 yards away, there was a kiosk, which is where it's a little store in the side of a building, somebody's house, where they sell milk and candy and food. So we start walking towards the kiosk, and it literally takes us 30 minutes or more to walk 30 yards because this guy can't walk. He's just shuffling along. And so by the time we get to this kiosk, the sun has gone down. And now we're standing under this kiosk, much like we are in this room. And there's a light above us. And the guy, none of us had seen the guy's face. And so we asked the kiosk guy, we're like, who is this guy? He says, oh, he lives right over there, just a couple doors down at that house.

And he said. We said, well, what does he usually get here? And they said, he gets milk and candles. And we said, okay, well, give us the milk and the candles. So we're standing there, and he looks up, and it's the face of Christ.

Whoa.

Clean, clear. Doesn't say anything. And I look at the other two guys with me, and we just looked at each other, and we were just like, what are we seeing? He put his head back down, and we never saw his face again. We took him, we got his candle, we got his milk, and we're freaked out at this point because we're just thinking, what did we just go through? I mean, he just locked eyes with me, just looked up, looked at me like this and look back down. So we walked this guy over. We put him in this little. We walked through this gate, and in this room was a little storage closet. And this is where he lives. It was no bigger than he had a chair and the storage closet, a bunch of junk behind him. He had a table with old candles, and we put his milk on his table and his candles, and on the way there, he's like, who are you? We just said, we're just angels from our lord taking you home. So two days later we show back up, we're knocking on the door, nothing. We asked these kids out playing.

We're like, hey, where's the guy that lives here? And they said, oh, he died two nights ago.

Can you go back? How many days had passed?

Two days. Two days. So we would gone, that was like a Monday night. Wednesday we went by his house and he had died Monday night. And to this day if I see those two missionaries, every now and then I talk to one of those guys and we'll always say, do you remember that old guy?

Wow. Wow.

And what it was for me is it taught you a lesson that Christ is in the things that you least expect. God is in the things that you least expect. If you judge a book by its cover, if you see it for the dirtiness and the bum and this and that, you miss the opportunities you miss where Christ truly is. And for us in that moment you realize I'm going to do, I'm going to be treat everybody the same because you never know who you're talking to, you never know who it is.

It's a great lesson, man.

And you can see why I don't tell the story very often.

Yeah, that's profound. Wow.

So things like that, that was, you just have one experience after another that just truly tell you that God and Jesus Christ live. And it really puts into perspective everything that we deal with in life, which is really what helps me get through my profession, politics, I understand that's not what life is about. Life has a whole different thing. Life is about your relationship with God. You come here, you get a body and your ability to prove yourself, your ability to show who you are, whether you're going to push through and find the greatness that you have in you or whether you're not. And the key is, are you going to be distracted by all what life gives you? The bills, the family problems, the jobs, the politics, all the terrible stuff you see in this life. Your job is to realize that's not what's important. What is important in the purpose of this life is to establish your relationship with God and to develop who you are as a person. And everything else is designed to build that. The experiences you go through build that.

How long did it take you to come to this conclusion?

You know, I've always been a person that's born with faith. Like I've been a faithful person that knows that God exists and those types of things, but just over time, you know, when you get in and you test your faith and you start to see that. That there is something on the other side of that, then it becomes less and less faith and more and more knowledge that these exist, and it's really just a lifetime of it. Now, don't get me wrong. You get those times where life will continue to throw harder and harder things at you and to really test, to see if you can dig down deeper and deeper. And so, yeah, over time, it's just polished up.

When did you. When did you know? When did you. When did you. I mean, for me, it was, what, 40? We kind of talked a little bit about my journey to faith at breakfast this morning. But with you, when you were born into the church of latter day Saints, you had this experience in Argentina. When did you. No, for a fact, like, this is. This is real.

I would say I've. I know this is gonna sound funny, but I've always known, really, like, I've just grown up with this, no doubt as to what it was. So by the time I go on my mission, I feel like I was ready for experiences that were gonna only add to that knowledge. And so I. While I knew there's knowing, but then there's going and learning even more, understanding the scriptures at a deeper level, sharing with it, sharing your testimony with other people, putting your. Putting your, you know, your. Putting your money where your mouth is. Actions. You know, how many times have you told, you got people that tell you they know and they. They act like they know, but who actually goes out and does it? You know, that's really what matters is, are you a person that can actually show me? Does your actions tell me that you are that person? And so I knew it, but it gave me the ability to develop it. And I feel blessed, because I feel like I was blessed. And I know a lot of folks like yourself that it came later in life. And for all of us, the timing is different.

And, you know, you might say, well, I wish I would have known sooner. Well, knowing sooner doesn't always, isn't always the best thing, you know, because it presents itself for the lifelong of challenges that now, like, you've come to it and you've already kind of sowed some life, you've lived some life. I have to now try to. I know it. So I'm expected to live a certain life that throughout my whole life, because I know what's right, I know what's good. I know I'm not here to disappoint God or Jesus Christ.

Makes sense. Well, thank you for sharing that. That's.

Very few people know that story. So.

Not anymore. Yeah, not anymore, but. All right, so what happens after you leave Argentina?

So I come back home and I wanted to Panama. Went back to Panama. I actually went to school for just a few, like a month or two months. I was like, this ain't for me. I remember I wrote a paper in English about guns, about the second amendment, and I got a c. And the notes on there, it wasn't because of the grammar. It wasn't because of the writing style. It was clearly that my teacher disagreed with me politically. And so at that point, I said, college isn't for me. I don't need it. So I go back to Panama, and I'm working in Panama. I actually got scouted by the giants and by the royals, playing baseball in Panama.

No kidding.

And so I'm in Panama working, and I had just met my wife two weeks prior to going to Panama, kind of through a wrench and things. So I meet her at a dance and I take her out, like, the next day. And we dated for two weeks straight. So then I go to Panama and I'm in Panama for, like, four months. And I tell him, I thought I said, you know, I'm going to go back and date my date, Janelle. And so I went back, dated her for two more weeks and then asked her to marry me.

No kidding. And you guys have been married for 30 years?

30 years.

Congratulations.

Thank you. But I was going to join the military, and when I lived in Panama, I was playing softball and baseball with all military guys, and I was like, hey, so what do you guys do when there's nothing going on? They're like, ah, you know, I don't know. And I realized I probably wasn't with eleven Bravo guys. I wasn't with infantry guys. I wasn't with Navy Seals. I was probably more with, you know, transportation, clerical guys, that type of thing. And they're like, ah, don't bother, don't bother. So I missed that one window. That's one regret I have in life, was I wished I would have gone into the military because it's really what I wanted to do as a kid anyway. And so instead, I come back, I get married, and next thing you know, boom, I got five kids. It wasn't that fast, but, I mean, it felt pretty fast. I had five kids in six and a half years.

Man, you had mentioned that at breakfast, and I don't know how you did that.

My wife is a saint.

I got two. We get no sleep.

Oh, it's a lot. And then as they get older, there's different sets of challenges that present themselves, but, yeah, so next thing you know, 30 years old, I got five kids, and 911 happens. So now I'm back to looking at going to the military, and I'm 30, and I'm thinking, how do I make this work financially? But I couldn't. But I knew I wanted to do something. I wanted to do some type of service. The thought of being a cop never crossed my mind. Never. I'd never grown up thinking I was going to be a copy. I was drive by cops, and I was like, those freaking cops. I was not a police officer guy. And so, 30 years old, I'm looking at the military, and financially, I just couldn't make it work. It just wasn't to leave my wife with five kids, small kids, to go into boot camp. And I probably. I was looking at. I wanted to do special forces. And so, you know, there's just. There's a lot of time that you're not going to be with your family. I just couldn't do it. And so went back to owning. I worked on a dairy at the time.

I worked on a dairy, and then I knocked out my boss.

What?

Yeah.

Like a dairy farm?

Yeah. So I was working on a dairy. My brother was a processor for the dairy, where they process the milk, and he gets me this job on the dairy. I'm actually where I milk the cows. And I'd been there for a few years and loved the job. My wife had just had our fifth baby five days before this experience, and so we had this owner, and the owner was hard to deal with.

Does your wife work? Did she work at the time?

She didn't work at the time, no.

So you're raising.

Five kids, you're supporting.

A wife and five kids. Milk and cows.

Milk and cows.

What is.

I've been my own business owner, but I decided to go with the cow, you know, the dairy stuff. And so it didn't pay anything. It paid like, I don't know, three grand a month or two.

Why did you leave? What kind of businesses did you run?

I had sales business, pest control businesses, marketing stuff, that kind of stuff. And it had been good, but.

I.

Was trying to find myself. I was trying to find where I was supposed to be, and I was struggling with that. And so I loved agriculture stuff. I loved cattle. I thought, let me go be a dairyman. I want to be a rancher anyway, and I can learn about cows and I can learn about cow health. No better way to do it than at the dairy. So I loved it. It was a great job. But the owner was tough to deal with, and so the owner had two brothers, and his dad is who I worked with. The owner lived in Salt Lake city, and so the owner would come down on the weekends and just cause nothing but grief. Ton of work, extra work, and treated his brothers like crap. For my sister in law, who's listening to this, I'm gonna apologize ahead of time because it was her dad. But he comes down, and he's always talking to his brothers. And so at one point, he goes to my. He says to his brothers, we were there that day, and we had lost, like, three cows. It wasn't a good day. And each cow is worth $2,500.

It's cold. It's not going well. And he shows up, and he's mad about something, and he calls one of his brothers, and he tells his brother. And I kept telling my other brother, I was like, if he takes the lord's name in vain one more time, I'm gonna knock him out. And he. He shows up, and he's yelling at his brother on the phone, and I'm sitting there taking a leak. And as soon as he hangs up, his brother's like, man, I knew we shouldn't have done this or that. I didn't say a thing. I zipped up. I walked out, walked straight up to that office, opened the door, and I said, is there a problem here? And he said, you're damn right there's a problem. I said, hey, hey, we didn't need you down here today anyway. He said, what did you just say to me? I said, you heard what I said. I said, we didn't need you down here today anyway. And he goes, don't you tell me. And I said, don't you stick your finger in my face. And he looks at me, and he has this moment of like, what am I going to do now?

Insubordination. And so he gives me one of these little four finger pushes right here in my chest, and I shove him back, further back than what you are. And he comes back, and now he's in my book. I have a chapter called it's not a fight until you meet resistance. And so he now has a choice to make. Is he gonna let me? Is pride gonna take over? Or is he gonna come to his senses that this is not gonna be good? What is gonna happen? And I'm watching him process this in his face as he's. I've been in fights before, so I'm watching him process this in his face, and he comes at me with. With that look in his eye, like he made the decision that he was not gonna let me disrespect him. Pride won out, and he had his hand clenched, and he got within striking distance, and I bam. And I hit him up clean, right? And knocked him down. Knocked him out, and he hit the ground. And when he hit the ground, he kind of came back to, and he's trying to struggle to get to his feet, his hands and knees.

And then he kind of gets up, and his glasses are all crooked, and his face is bleeding. And I steady him and ready to just crush him with another right. And he says, get out of here. With defeated. Get out of here. And I said, I'm out. I quit. Walked out, went home, walked in the door. And my wife has a five day old baby, number five. And she looks at me and says, what are you doing home so early? I said, well, I don't work at the dairy anymore. She goes, what happened? I go, I just knocked out Gordon. And so.

So, hold on. You said, this is who, your sister in law?

This is my sister in law's dad.

So does that mean that's your wife's dad?

No, it's my brother's father in law.

So good.

Yeah.

Wow.

And my brother called me, he was angry. And he's like, what are you doing? And my brother's a fighter, too. And my brother calls me, he's really angry. And I said, john, I said, I told you I wasn't going to be disrespected. And I said, he wrote the check, and I cashed it. I didn't come in here looking for a fight, but I certainly was. I told you, I'm not dealing with this anymore. And so he's like, all right, all right, all right. And so I ended up leaving there and started getting back into private business. Started a paintball store.

A paintball store.

I started a paintball store in that town. That down.

No kidding. How'd that business go?

It went great till Walmart came in.

I mean, what does your wife say when you got a five. A five day old baby and you just got fired? And you said, I mean, my wife says, I'm gonna start a paintball.

My wife's the same. I had been playing paintball, so I loved it. And so when I knocked, when I punched him and had to leave the job, she said, what are you gonna do now? And I said, I don't know, I'll start a paintball store. And so we did. And what did she say?

What did she say to the paintball story?

My wife is one of those women that just cut from a different cloth.

She's good with it.

She's on the team. Like, we're a team. And she was. She was like, okay, I'm sure internally she probably is angry, but she's a supporter. So we did that. Then Walmart comes into town and overnight killed my business.

How so?

Well, the Internet was on the rise because this was, like, in 2003. So the Internet sales were rising, and so was Walmart starting to carry paintball stuff. And so immediately, you know, like, Walmart doesn't have the same markups that I have, and the Internet, same thing. They didn't have the same markups. And so it really just kind of killed my sales overnight. And we were at a point where you just couldn't sustain yourself with multiple bad months. Ultimately, I had to protect my brother, who was kind of an investor with me. I had to declare a chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Oh, man.

And the problem with 13, if you don't know 13, is you. You pay back your debts. I had $17,000 in debt when I went into bankruptcy court. It was one of the most. To be able to go to bankruptcy court was one of the worst things. We had a van, and the van had. The week that I paid the van off, I had to go and get a title loan just so that I could drive. I had enough money to drive back to Utah for bankruptcy court. And everybody in there had boats and toys and all these things. And I literally had $17,000 of debt from the business, and I had to declare bankruptcy, and I had to pay $900 a month. So my wife and I had to move back to Arizona and live with my mom in a three bedroom apartment while I paid $900 a month with five kids. Five kids. We had five kids. Four of my kids were in one room, and the baby was in our room, and my mom was in the other room.

Wow.

And so I felt pretty low at that point. You know, you're just thinking, I've completely failed. Yeah, I've completely failed. And I remember one day, my wife hadn't come back yet, and my mom was like, hey, it's time to go to church. And I went to go to church. And I was getting ready, and I did something, and I ripped my pants, and I sat down on the chair and I was like, I'm not going. I'm done. I'm sitting right here. I'm not doing anything. And it was at that low of feeling sorry for yourself. And then, frankly, nothing changed, other than I just had this attitude of, like, it's your fault. Stop having a negative attitude. See things for what the world is trying to do for you as opposed to against you. And in that moment, it changed my entire life. Ripped my pants, didn't go to church. And instead of being a victim, I just said, you know what? I'm no longer a victim. I'm taking life. And so nothing dramatically changed, but everything changed for me at that moment.

Man, that's a great quote that you just said, and I could use that advice a lot in my life, even to current day. Think about what the world is trying to do for you instead of what it's doing against you. Yes, I think a lot of us could use.

Little do we know. We are so blinded walking down a dark hallway that you don't realize that God or the universe or whatever you believe in is opening one door after another. But you're too caught up in your own emotions to see what's going on. You're angry, you're unhappy, and you're failing to see the open doors that if you would just walk in any one of those rooms, the lights on in there, and there's good stuff in there. And so I chose to start seeing things different. And at that point, everything changed. And within us, within months, I was out of my mom's house. I had started a landscape business with some friends, and within a few years, I bought a house. And then I ended up in law enforcement. That's a different story. But that was the point where I needed to be, to get where God needed me to go. I needed to be. I needed to have that wake up moment, because when you look back on your life, you realize everything was happening the right way. You just didn't want to see it. And don't ever look back and think, I shouldn't have done that.

There's a show of Vikings. If you ever watch vikings. One of my favorite parts of vikings is Ragnar has two boys. His two youngest boys and his two youngest boys are finally at an age where they get to go out and do the pillaging and all that stuff. So he gets them in the boat, and as they're sailing away from the shore, the two kids have their hands on the edge of the boat, looking back towards the shore where their mom and where safety is. And then with Ragnar, is looking forward, and without even missing a beat. He doesn't even look back at his boys. And he said, don't waste your time looking back. You're not going that direction. And it's the truth. Don't waste your time looking back. You're not going that direction. You're going forward. And so what we. What I've always done is just, since then, I've just looked forward and everything that happened, I'm going to take what I needed to learn from that. And now I look back and I see the things that needed to happen, the way they happen, so that I would end up right here where I'm at today.

I wouldn't have gotten here if I wouldn't have been through all those things.

What was it that. What was it that changed your attitude in that moment?

I don't even know what it was. I really can't even remember. It was just. I was so low that I think something inside of me just said, stop being a pussy. This is you. This is your fault. And I realized, I was like, it is me. You know, my favorite book is as a man thinketh by James Allen. If you haven't read it, it's a short book and it's an amazing book, and I'll probably share a quote from it later on in the show, but really, the book is about, you are the master of your faith. Everything you have in your life is because of you. Or whatever you don't have is because of you. There is nobody else that is the artist in your life. It's you. So if your life is not going great, it's not circumstances you blame. Circumstances only reveal to the man who he is. They don't make the man. Circumstances reveal the man to who he is. And in that moment, instead of looking at the circumstances as making me, I looked at it and said, those circumstances have now made me see who I am and what I need to change.

And so then I started moving forward from there, and it was really nothing in particular other than me just having a moment with myself saying, you want to change it? You change it. That's the only thing that can change it. Nobody can do it for you. And the only people that are the masters of your life and your fate are you.

That's amazing. One more question. What happened to your dad?

So my dad, and, you know, it's kind of sad because my dad lived in Panama, and my dad was a crazy, kind of a genius type guy. He loved to read, and he was kind of challenging the federal government. He was challenging him on how they obtained the Panama Canal, and they didn't like him. The Obama administration didn't like him. And so he was constantly fighting with him. Because when you really look at, this is a whole nother conversation, but you look at the history of the Panama canal, and we basically just took it. We just took it. We took the land, we took the canal. We bankrupt Ferdinand de Lesseps, the frenchman who was building it. I'm not going to get into all that, but suffice to say, my dad loved all that. So he would read congressional records and he would read all these things. And he spent a lot of time in Panama. Well, my dad actually got a pair of boots, a new pair of boots, and he had diabetes. Old farm boy didn't really take care of himself. Got a blister. That blister didn't go away for years. Almost lost his foot a couple times.

Ultimately, one day my cousin found him in our apartment in Panama, and he had had a stroke. And then he went to the doctor and never came out of it. Between stroke and heart attack, he died in 2014. My brother called me and told me, he says, hey, dad's not doing good. And I had been. I'd gotten these calls before, and I said, this is different. I'm coming. So my wife is a flight attendant. So I jumped on a flight. I was able to fly. This was like, I don't know. I think it was Sunday or Monday. So Wednesday I'm able to get on a flight. And he said, I said, how's dad doing? He's like, he's not doing good. So I fly from Phoenix. I land in either Houston or Dallas. I think it was Houston. And I call and I found out my dad had passed away.

Oh, man.

So I finished my flight, got down to Panama, was there for, you know, the day that he died. Was able to go to the hospital, and we did the funeral and all that stuff. But, yeah, he's buried in Panama. Died from ultimately kind of complications from diabetes, but stroke and heart attack. But I started to tell you the hard part is, my dad would have been really proud of what I've done being a sheriff, because he didn't see that he knew I was considering running in 2014, that I was kind of laying the groundwork that I decided in 2011. So by 2014, he knew where I was, what the goal was, the end goal. He would have been. He would have loved to see it and. Right. He'd be tickled pink knowing that I was running for Senate as well, that I do Fox interviews all the time and newsmax, and, oh, man, he would have been proud as a peacock.

Right on, man. Right on. So you gotta. You go into law enforcement.

That was happenstance. I was back to owning my own businesses, and I knew there was something I was missing. There was just. I've always known that I needed to play a larger role in America and whatever. And here I own my own businesses, but just wasn't quite content. And my neighbor says, hey, you want to go on a ride along? I'm like, sure, let's do it.

How old are you?

I'm 33 years old at this point. 33 years old. Made pretty good money, self employed. I go on this one ride along, and it was on an indian reservation, the Salt River Pima Maricopa indian community. We go on a graveyard shift. And so one of the calls we go on is a dad who had found a 20 year old with his 14 year old daughter. So the dad and the guy get into a scuffle. The guy runs out the back, and if you're familiar with how the res is, it is the res will have, like, a house, and then behind it will be nothing. And then maybe an old abandoned travel trailer. Well, that's how this was. So I don't know why, but they let me out of the car. I'm out there armed with a flashlight and courage, you know, walking around like I know what I'm doing. I walk up to this old abandoned travel trailer, and I see what I think inside of all this travel trailer. There's all this trash and clothes and just old junk in there, but I see what I think is a quarter size of skin in there, and I'm like, hey, I think this guy's in here.

So they go in, move all the stuff. Sure enough, he's there. They grab them, they rough them up, tase them, put them in cuffs. I went home that morning, woke my wife up, and I said, honey, I'm be a cop. Six months later, I was in the academy, and on my way to being a cop and what I've always loved MMA. I've loved, you know, the UFC. And so I thought, man, wait a second. You get to carry a gun, you get to drive fast. If people get out of line, you get to rough them up, and that's the job. I'm like, sign me up. And then when I got into it, I really realized that I found my place. I'm a believer in this country, and the founding fathers were very specific as to what I think the rule of law and law enforcement is. The backbone of America. So you could. There are other countries with that are democracies. Ours is not. We are a constitutional republic. These politicians will tell you all the time, oh, it's a threat to democracy. It's a threat to. No, we're not a democracy. Democracy is mob rule.

Democracy means that the loudest voice gets the attention. A constitutional republic is different. The constitutional republic is the consent of the governed. We get to dictate what happens. We send representatives back to DC or to the state to do so. We are a constitutional republic. But there are other countries that are democracies, and there are other countries that have constitutions, albeit their countries tell them what their constitutions tell the people what they can and cannot do. Our constitution tells the government what they can and cannot do. And so really, what defines America is the rule of law, our ability to maintain order, our ability to live by a set of principles and rules. That's what makes America different from these other countries. And that the fact that you can have, for the most part, you know, I think there are people who distrust police. But trust me, in this country, you can trust the police far more than you can in other countries. But the founding fathers said something in the preamble. The very first charge of the constitution is not found in the articles. It's not found in the Declaration of Independence, excuse me, in the Bill of Rights.

It is actually found in the preamble of the Constitution. When the founding father said, we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, they knew how important that would be to a functioning republic. And so when I got into the rule of law, when I got into law enforcement, I understand, and I understood how important the job I was doing was, and I loved it. I felt blessed to be able to do that job on a daily basis and be able to go out and protect my community and do something that I think was imperative and vital to America and our survivability.

Where was this? Was this in. Was this in Arizona or Utah?

So it was at the Salt River Pima Maricopa indian community, which is right next to Mesa Tempe in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Okay.

And spent six years, a little over six years there, and most of that was as a gang and drug detective.

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I end up spending like seven plus years there.

So you were at a PD?

Yep, that was at a PD. And if you know about the reservations, it can be a little wild that it could be. Gang activity was pretty prevalent on those. And we did some really big stuff to shut it down. I mean, when I got into the gang unit, they said, hey, your job is drive by shootings. And I was like, okay, well, let me put it into perspective how bad of a problem we were having. Mesa, Tempe and Scottsdale combined for about a million people. They had in from 2007 to 2010, they had 58 drive by shootings in those three cities. Our reservation has 5000 people that live on it. A million versus 5000, 5000 people. We had 200 drive by shootings in the same time.

Are you serious?

Yeah. It was every night. We were out cleaning up casings on the roadway, drive by shootings. And so they said, this is your responsibility. So I started looking into all the cases, started looking at, you know, ballistics on the casings that we were finding. And I started realizing, hey, man, like, this is one gang that's the aggressor, and the other gang seem to be responding. I think if we go after this gang, we can eliminate a lot of this activity. So we put a list together, a target list. We went and talked to the FBI. We went and talked to the ATF. Ultimately, we partnered with the ATF because they're a little bit, they work a little bit faster. And we had a lot of straw purchases. So we went and put a federal RICO case against these guys. But to give you an idea of how effective we were, in 2009 we had 76 drive by shootings.

Are you serious? So how long?

What's the time frame here, this is 2009. So we had, from 2007 to 2010, we had 200. 200. But in 2009, we had 76 drive by shootings.

Wow.

When I took over in 2010, we went down to ten drive by shootings. In 2011, we had zero drive by shootings. And in 2012, we had zero drive by shootings. When I left in 2012, we had no drive by shootings. We went from 76 to ten to zero to zero. Why? Because we targeted our law enforcement efforts and we put our boot in their throat and we weren't going to allow them to dictate. We weren't going to be on the defensive anymore. We took offensive posture and we went after these gangsters. And when they committed crimes, we held them accountable. And we literally just changed the dynamic on the reservation in a matter of years by just being aggressive and going after these. And so, you know, you can, that's one of the things when you have the rule of law gets out of control. It's not rocket science. Uphold the law, hold people accountable. If you do that, it will stabilize things. But the longer you let it go, the harder it is to get it under control.

We're going to talk about this later, but I want to know why everybody seems to be just letting it go nowadays. I mean, we hear all about it, but we'll get into that in a bit. So you left the PD.

So in 2011, I just didn't like the direction of the country. I thought they were undermining the rule of law and that, and remember, the rule of law to me is the most important piece of America, stabilizing it. And they know that, which is why they said they were going to fundamentally transform America.

What was happening in 2011 that made you think that Obama.

What they were doing was really creating a rift between communities and law enforcement anytime we did something, and mind you, this is all kind of timing at the same time with people having cell phones and being able to record things on the streets of this is all coming about. You know, iPhones are kind of coming out in the late two thousands around 2010. And so now you're seeing videos of police out there doing their job or roughing somebody up. And I'll be the first to tell you, we're not in the business of good optics. I mean, when you call us, we're expected to deal with problems, or if we find problems on the streets, then we're expected to deal with it. We can't just look the other way. And so we're not in the business of good optics usually. And so what you see, a lot of times is, you see, we were seeing the politicians really start to create a rift between community and law enforcement, and that undermines the rule of law. And so what happens then is you start getting people, and this kind of goes to your question, it kind of starts getting people elected into office on the basis of we're going to hold the police accountable, or basically saying to the people, you're not wrong, the cops were wrong, and that's dangerous.

And then what happens is you start undermining the rule of law. You stop holding people accountable, and then you want to only hold cops accountable. Putting body cameras on us, which we're okay. I think we should have body cameras on all the politicians in Washington, DC. Right?

I've never heard that before.

That's genius, putting them on them. But we have body cams, and now everything starts to change. And so I could see where we were going. I thought it was dangerous. And so instead of being the guy that sits and just bitches about it, I thought, I'm gonna do something about it. So I'm standing there in my, in our gang unit, you know, little room, and I just said, I'm gonna run for sheriff. They said, yeah, you're crazy. I said, no, I'm a run for sheriff. They said, get out of here. And I said, okay. I put in my application to go to Pinal county. Six months later, a year later, I was over there at pinal counties with the intention of running for sheriff eventually, but this is 2011. I said I would run for sheriff. I went to Pinal in 2012 and spent two years there and then told my wife one day, I said, honey, I think it's about time to leave and start to lay the groundwork. I got to go make money so that I can run for sheriff. And so I went to reserve status, and then I went back out into the private sector and built a marketing company, and we ended up being a solar company right before I ran for office.

But that was what was able to get me financially to be able to do the sheriff thing. But really it was large, in part because I couldn't stand to see what was going on. I couldn't watch as our country was changing, fundamentally changing, and I wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Why did you pick Pinal county?

Cause I lived in Pinal county. So you have to live in the county. You have to, if you're gonna run for sheriff, you gotta live in whatever county that you're gonna run for sheriff in, okay?

The way you'd articulated it meant, I thought maybe you had moved to Pinal county to run for sheriff.

I moved to Pinal in 2008, but I decided to run for sheriff in 2011.

Okay.

Yeah.

And how did that go?

A whole new experience. You know, I told you earlier, I think life is about challenging yourself, you know, finding your greatness. You know, Governor Bradford, this goes to politics. You know, Governor Bradford was on the Mayflower, and he wrote the Mayflower compact, and he has a quote that says, all great accomplishments are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage. And so getting into it, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. But this is where you find out what your courage level is. You know, I've been doing it as a gang and drug detective. You're running into buildings that you. Everything inside of you tells you don't run into that building, or, you know, you're dealing with people with guns, and you're running towards the fire and the problems, as opposed to running away from it. And so you condition yourself to continue to look for opportunities to test your courage level. This is a different type of test, but, you know, putting yourself out there into the public, putting your family on the line, that was a whole new thing. And it's probably better you don't know fully what you're getting into, because you probably wouldn't do it if you did.

I could imagine. Who were you? Who were you running against?

So we had a sheriff that, at the time, his name was sheriff Babew. He had done a lot of great things in the office, but I was banking on the fact he was going to run for senate or Congress. So I put in my paperwork, and sure enough, he was going to run. He ran for Congress. I almost didn't do it, though. I was in Utah. I was running my company, my marketing company. A lot of the work we were doing was in Utah. This was in, like, probably August of 2015. And I called my wife one day, and I said, honey, I've been reading a lot about running for sheriff and politics and business is going good. I don't think I'm gonna do it. I don't think I'm gonna do it. We can do it again in four years or eight years. Let's just see what happens. And she said, in true, typical fashion, she's like, I understand. I support you. Well, for the next two days, I could not shake the feeling I would wake up in the morning. All I could think about is running for sheriff all day long, working all I could think about was sheriff, sheriff, sheriff.

And so two days later, I called her back and I said, screw it, let's do it. And so we jumped, and we jumped into it and just worked hard. And I had this feeling that if I would do it the way that I needed to be done and I put in the work that God or whatever you believe in, for me, it's God would take care of the rest. Work hard, have a good attitude, he'll take care of the rest. And so I was outspent. I was the underdog. I had to completely build name recognition. Nobody knew who I was, and I had to do it all. And it was just grinding it out, hard work. I had to go to all these events. I had to speak in front of them. I had to just shake as many hands as I could, pass out flyers. I did everything. And up until the day that we, the election, the other guys thought they were going to beat me. So this is his chief deputy running. They thought they were going to beat me. I said, we're not losing. We're going to win 60 40. And we won 63% to 37%.

No way.

Wow. And it was just hard work. Grinding it out. Being a candidate and doing the job are two completely different things, though. Then the rubber meets the road. You can say whatever you want as a candidate. Let's see how you actually do it when you get the job. And over the last eight years, just really a lot, in part because of the people I've surrounded myself with and the type of leadership I bring to the table, I think we've created something really special in Pinal county. We have people from all over the country that know who we are. As a matter of fact, for law enforcement, for Facebook followers across the country, the number one agency for Facebook followers is the FBI. Number two is the Pinal county sheriff's office. We passed up the NYPD.

Man, that is pretty incredible.

But it's because we decided to take a different approach, a marketing approach. I took a business approach to it. I looked at it as if it was a business where the shareholders are the taxpayers, and I'm expected to give them return on investment. I'm expected to give them reports as to how we're doing. And instead of you being afraid of social media, which a lot of law enforcement people are, we embraced it. We said, okay, we're going to use this to our advantage. And I have to recruit. I'm competing with the Phoenix market. I'm competing with agencies that pay a lot more. So we had to make our. We had to create a product that people, cops, wanted to be cops again. And they need to be willing to take a pay cut to be able to come and work for the sheriff's office. And we have never lacked in people wanting to come and work for us because of how we allow our guys to be cops.

No kidding.

We tell them, you want to be a cop? Come here. You want to drive, chase people, you want to go find the bad guys, we support you here. And then you have to go out and actually show your people. That's the case, and that's what we did.

How long did it take you to really gain the respect of your county? I mean, your county loves you. The whole country, as far as I'm concerned, everybody that I never see anything bad on you. People just love you. And so what? Was there a turning point or was it gradual?

So live PD. I mean, LivePD came to us right after we started, and I'm like, dude, I'm like a baby deer on ice here. Like, I don't even know. I had to get my feet underneath me here. I don't even know what I'm doing yet. So about six months into it, I told my chief, I go, hey, call LivePD back and see if they want to do this.

What's live Pde?

Live PD is like cops, but it was live, and it was the number one show on tv at the time. It was getting there. Eventually it became the number one show on tv, and so. But, you know, you gotta put your putting yourself out there. You're showing everybody live how your guys do. And so we took on LivePD, and that really is what got us moving. And we did a show called 60 days in and 60 days in. During COVID it had already been out, but during COVID Netflix put it on their platform, and millions of people watched 60 days in at that point. And so we started really gaining a lot of notoriety there. But really where the leadership piece came in is it took me about two or three years to get my agency to believe in us. They had battered wife syndrome. They had that flinch every time something happens. And so we would say, why do you think this is going to happen if you do this? Well, because that's what used to happen. No, that's not what we're doing here. You need to trust us. And we had to push that trust, and we had to earn it on the captain level.

We had to earn it on the lieutenant level. Probably. The lieutenants was the hardest level for us to gain. The guys on the line level, we did things like saying, hey, you don't have to cover your tattoos. As long as they're not obscene, we're good. You can wear facial hair. We started to make these little adjustments, so we earned. So we started getting the support of these. The line level guys. Same with the sergeants. We struggled with the lieutenants. The messaging was. We were delivering the messaging, and it was getting jacked up between captains and sergeants. So lieutenants were. So we had to earn their trust. Took about two, three years. And after that, once they realized, and we proved time and time again, if you're in a shooting or you rough somebody up and that we had their back, that we were gonna. That they were part of a family, that we were not in a way that we were not. We're not condoning. If you broke the law, then we're gonna hold you accountable. But in a way that said, you did your job, you did it right. We're with you. And so that took us a few years.

And then the community, they started getting on board pretty much right away with the live PD. And since then, we've just continued to build on it. I look at it as, like, a bank account. You're in law enforcement. There's. You can make deposits. That's your good stuff. You do your little videos. You're saving a dog, pulling a cat out of a tree, you know, saving somebody from a fentanyl overdose. Those are the little deposits, because the withdrawals will come, and the withdrawals are heavy. You take it like what happened in Minnesota in 2020, if they would have had a better bank account, that withdrawal would have probably not hurt as bad. But it ended up not only hurting them, it hurt the rest of the country in law enforcement. And so what we've always believed in is you got to build your bank account of trust with your community. Small deposits constantly. And when the big things come, it's okay. You got enough to cover it. Your community trusts you enough to know that that's a one off. That's not normal. And so. But that started years before with us making those small deposits.

Man, that's smart thinking. When you took, other than the trust of your agency, what were some of the. What were some of the challenges you were walking into, criminal wise, maybe crime wise, problems you needed to address in your county.

Crime wise, there was still the border. You know, the border was a problem. We had drugs coming in. I mean, this where we are in Pinal county, marijuana was a. This is a marijuana corridor. So it was not uncommon to get 2000 pound loads of marijuana. Backpackers coming across the border packing 50 pound packs of marijuana into your community, not to mention meth and other things. And so we were struggling still with the border when I first came in. Internally, not crime wise internally, budget relationships with the government within the county, the morale amongst the troops, those were all the internal things we had to deal with. And then on the outward stuff, we had to deal with reducing crime. Between myself and the county attorney, we've successfully reduced our crime index every year when crime has been on the rise, we've been reducing our crime index. And there is no secret sauce. It's hold people accountable when they need to be held accountable and treat people with respect and dignity and protect their constitutional rights when nothing. So if you do that, then people want to live in your community. I don't want to live in a community where they don't hold people accountable.

That's lawlessness. You're asking for a problem. I want to live in a community where I know that they treat me good. The cops are our friends, and they're going to go after the bad guys when they need to. And that's kind of what we, in a nutshell, in a very simplified way, that's what we've done.

Congratulations.

I just get to take the credit for the work that the other people do. I set the vision. But, you know, look, I still get out there and work with the guys. I put the vest on, I go out, I do traffic stops, I help these guys look for smugglers on the freeways, and I'm still out there getting my hands dirty.

How do you identify a smuggler on the freeway?

Our guys get really good. You know, it used to be under. Under the last administration, it was a lot easier because the cartels weren't making as much money. They've gone from making 500 million to $13 billion a year. In a large part, pretty much 2021. I mean, that's. That changed, right then.

Are you serious? Can you say that again? So from 2021, they went from $500 million.

2020, they were making 500 million a year to 2021, now making ten. $13 billion a year.

Wait, we're talking one year?

That's how quickly it changed. And they're consistently making that kind of money now. Why?

Holy shit.

Because of the human trafficking and the drug trafficking. So fentanyl is a big part of it, but the other. And the other part is they've become global. What we did with. With the open border policies, what happened is that you gave them the ability to grow their businesses why? Because you gave them cash on hand. Where does the cash on hand come from? It comes from the people who come from all over the world who now are going to give the cartel five, $6,000 up to $50,000, depending on what country you come from. The cartel now has a influx of business coming in, and people are paying cash on hand. Their business model was different before. Their business model wasn't based on people coming and paying to come into the country. That was a part of it. But their business model was on selling drugs within the country. So what did they have to do? They had to pay out money to get the drugs into America. Then you got to pay to get the drugs to Omaha, Nebraska. Then you got to pay somebody to sell it. They take a cut of it. Now you have to pay somebody that's going to stay out there and recover the money.

Because they don't just work on good faith, you know, the cartel doesn't say, hey, Sean, sell the drugs. Whenever you finish selling them, send them back, send me the money. It's not how it works. So now you have somebody that they get paid to recover the money, and now they got to ship the money back down to Mexico and run the risk of getting caught. So that was a lot more heavy. The business model of how they made money was a lot different. Now they have so much cash, you don't know what to do with it. So what are they doing now? They're expanding their operations globally. Now they're becoming the people that are providing the drugs and the fentanyl to places not just in America, South America, Africa, Europe, not also. They have become armies. They have enough funding now, billions of dollars to buy the best guns, the weapons, the weaponry, the, the, you know, the personnel carriers. I mean, these guys have miniature armies down there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I, I've interviewed a couple of investigative journalists on this subject. Quite a few of them, actually, one of them being Luis Chaparro. And that guy he talks about the last time he was on, he was talking about these armies. And I just, I never realized that at some point it had changed from basically, I mean, what seemed like bigger than gang violence, but along the same type of thing, too, straight up. I mean, they have uniforms and gear and chest rigs and optics and this isn't gang violence anymore.

No, these are.

It's a military.

They're military operations and they are designed to protect billion dollar operations. And the real, they make even more money now because before, if I were to sell you a pill, how many times can I sell you a pill or a gram of coke or a gram of meth? Once. Once you consume it, it's gone. How many times can I sell you a woman or a child? Hundreds. Hundreds of times. So not only do these people pay to come in, if they can't pay, then the cartels give them credit. And the way they make them work it off is either labor, which is you're going to see more crime across this country because these people paid the cartels to come in here. Even if they showed up from other countries, the cartels are making sure they're getting their money. I mean, there's parts. The Gulf cartel, the cartel de Golfo, these guys are putting wristbands on people to make sure that they know they paid. So they're charging you to come across, and if you can't pay, they'll do it on credit, and then you have to work it off. So now you're seeing a lot of breaking and enterings and stuff because people owe the cartels they don't want to owe.

So I got to go steal something. If I can't find a job to pay for what I owe the cartel, then I'm going to steal it. The women end up working it off in the sex trade, the children, which, by the way, are about 150,000 unaccompanied minors a year right now. 150,000. Our government has admitted they don't know where about 100,000 of those children are. I mean, how are Americans not outraged to know that 100,000 children who came here alone without parents? We don't know where they're at. I'll tell you where they're at. They're in the cartels. The cartels are using them for hard labor and sex trade. And if you don't think so, let me just give you some statistics on child sexual abuse material. CSAM. CSAM is any photo or video depicting a child being raped or naked. So in 2014, we had 4 million reports of CSAM, 4 million to the NCMEC, the National center for Missing and Exploited Children, 4 million reports of that. So that means people called and said, hey, this image, this whatever, 4 million times. That's a lot. Last year was 32 million. See? Sam reports 32 million.

So don't tell me that these children are not being trafficked in this country. And we have become the biggest place for slavery, and we have been the biggest place for perverse things like child sexual abuse material.

Yeah, we're the number one. The United States of America is the number one consumer of child pornography in the world.

Yes. And the cartels are willing to meet that and they make a lot of money off of it, and it's continual money. They sell these women over and over again. We had a woman that was coming across the border, we caught her and she had a baggie full of pills, which by the way, eight of ten women are raped when they come across, but she had a baggie full of pills.

Eight of ten women are raped, eight.

Of ten women, and 50% of gay and trans people are raped by the cartels when they come across. So she had a baggie full of pills, like 50 pills. And we said, what are these pills? And she said, well, when I was going to cross the border, I knew I'd be raped multiple times. These are morning after pills. Where do we get as a country to where we put politics in front of people? Because that's what's happening. Because politically your side says we want open borders, we're allowing eight of ten women to be raped as they come into this country, or children to just disappear into, back into the hands of the cartels.

Let's dissect this a little bit, because what I don't understand is how the cartels are making money trafficking people into the US, when there essentially is no border. So what exactly is the cartel facilitating and how are they able to control our border and who's coming across and who's paying and we're not.

So this is somewhat of an intricate thing, part of it, because there's the other part of it's the NGO's, the non governmental organizations, the non governmental organizations or charities that are being funded by taxpayer dollars. And so those charities have an incentive to continue to have a problem because they will continue to get money for their charities. Some of them well intentioned, many of them are aiding and abetting in human trafficking. So the cartels know that these NGO's are willing to bring people to the border, to bring them into this country. I think the flow of people would be greater into America if the cartel had the ability to handle more people coming into the country. You must pay the cartels, if they find out you don't pay them, it's you could end up dead in the desert. And so most people will not take the risk. Every now and then you might find somebody which are very, very few and far between, who did not pay the cartels some money to come across.

How, how would they, how would they know though?

Because as soon as they get into the border state of the countries, and the cartels know who. They watch the airports when they land on the plane, these planes at the airports in Mexico, they know these large groups coming up. You only have to shoot one or two people in front of a large group of people before they'll all get in line and say, yep, I'll pay you, or I'll, you know, I'm going to make sure that you get your money. The cartels have plenty of people. They have an army of people to ensure that you are not crossing the border unless you've paid the cartels. So the cartels control the flow of people into this country.

But they're not actually smuggling. Are they actually smuggling people in?

They have, they have smugglers. They have smugglers that work that will get them right up to the fence. I was flying our helicopter just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and we were flying along, which, by the way, we went from the reservation to Nogales, which is probably 100 and something miles, maybe more, 200 miles. We didn't see a single border patrol agent in that time. No MSc trucks, which are your radar, your, your. They've got the sonar systems and stuff. We didn't see any of those. No border patrol agents. We did see mexican military on the other side. And then we saw some guy walk a group of people, line them up at the fence, check everybody, let the first group come across lines. The second group up, checks everybody again. We're flying right overhead. We're flying right overhead. They have no care in the world. And they're leading right into the country. And we filmed them as they walked in, into the country, right through the opening in the fence. And that cartel guy walks back, gets in his car, drives back.

Can we overlay that video?

Yeah, I'll get you the video. Yeah, I'll give it to you before we leave here.

Perfect. Everybody needs to see this.

And this is what happens every day. This is not an uncommon occurrence. This is every day in my county. We have had a 371% increase the 366% increase in traffic stops involving human smuggling. We have had a 471% increase in pursuits involving human smuggling. We chased a guy the other day. We actually pulled him over, and the deputy's talking to him, and all this stuff isn't lining up. And so finally he says, hey, can I search your car? Boom. Guy takes off. So then we go after him. We ended up spiking his car three times, and we. I think we popped at least three of his tires, if not all four. He was still driving 80 mph on the rims. Of his vehicle. We finally pitted him, we got him off to the side and we hear this pounding on the trunk after we take him into custody and he had a juvenile in the trunk of his car and illegal that it was there against his will. We pull over cars all the time. We've seen four runners with 16 people in it pull over cars all the time that are people in it.

So it goes back to your. You asked me before, how do we know who's trafficking? And what I started to tell you was it used to be easier because the only the people that were trafficking worked for the cartels. They changed their business model. They have so much money they were able to change the business model and it was genius. What they said was, let's employ Americans to do it. So now they go on Snapchat and TikTok and all these things. And they employ primarily kids we've seen as young as twelve years old and they'll employ 14, 1516 year olds, 1718. Why? Because they know that if they're under 18, the chances of getting charged are low because they're juveniles. And so what they do is they get these kids, they pay them a body. So if you put five people in your car that you're in, camouflage clothes and carpet, shoes and backpacks, some of these gotaways you hear about, you put five people in your car and you drive them to Phoenix, you're gonna get a person five k for a kid that's 1516 years old. So now it's hard because what we used to look for were temp tags and other things.

Now it's really hard to find them because they're just grabbing grandma's car or their own cardinal and the cars don't fit what we used to be used to. And so that's just Americans going down and taking their car down. We've had them fly in. We busted a lady the other day. She flew from California, rented a turo, which is like Airbnb for cars rents. This turo drives down to the border, picks up, I think she had three or four, picks them up, drives back. I was actually with Mike Glover that day. Mike Glover was in the car with me when we got the stop on that car. And she's like, I don't know who they are, they just needed a ride, I don't know. And it turned out they were all illegals. They were in their camouflage clothes and their carpet shoes. And she had flown in just for that reason, rented a car, drove down and picked them up, was going to go back, drop them off, turn their car back in, and fly back home and have made $4,000. So how do you combat that? How do you combat that in law enforcement?

How do we look for cars when they're employing Americans? And there is no, how do you investigate up if I bust you, Sean? But you have no idea who's above you. How am I going to work that investigation up? I could go on to social media, but social media is not really helping. They're aiding and betting in it. They're the ones providing the platforms for this, for the cartels to be able to recruit Americans. And so I was testifying in Congress, and you had these politicians kept saying to me, well, you know, it's Americans doing it, not the cartels. And I said, hold on. You keep saying that like that's a good thing. I don't see that as good as all what I see is you've allowed the cartels to make so much money that they can now employ Americans to come in and do their transnational criminal activity in America. That's not okay. Like, we. We are allowing them to recruit our teenagers because they're paying them so much money. So, I mean, look, it is a cluster. It's a cluster beyond what people can imagine.

They think that this is a. They think that this is a good idea.

It's a good idea for what they want. What they want is to reinvent America. They want it fundamentally. Those are not my words. Those are their campaign slogans to fundamentally transform America and to reinvent America. And whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or independent, that should set off alarms in your head, if that you want to reinvent America. And so what we saw immediately was the undermining of the rule of law, because that's the fabric of America. And what better way to undermine the rule of rule of law than to open the borders? You begin to flood our communities with. They don't end up dealing with the end product. The federal government doesn't go out and respond to 911 calls. They don't pick up the mess. They don't clean up the house. When. When we have to go over and find a 15 year old who just died from a fentanyl poisoning. Mom's there crying, dad's crying. And we have to explain to them how this happened when we know good and darn well where it came from. The feds don't clean that up. We clean it up. And what it's doing is it's undermining the rule of law.

It's destabilizing society. It's reinventing America, and it's changing the demographic of America. Now, people, when I say that, they say, oh, you're talking white people. No, I'm not talking about that. American demographic is whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, people from all over the world. If you are an american, then that is who I'm talking about. But what you're doing is allowing all these people that are coming from countries and they're not Americans. And you're basically now, I mean, there's estimations that there's anywhere between 40 to 60 million illegals in this country right now that have come over here over the last, you know, not just the last three years, but for many years. And so what allegiance do they have to America? You're basically changing the demographic. You saw it in France, you saw it in Germany, you saw it. So when they look at it, if that's your end goal, is to destabilize America, to reinvent America, to change all aspects of it, or to change the voters, to be able to get them to vote, then yes, they look at it probably is that their plan is succeeding.

Wow. I mean, how back to the smugglers and then the cartels hiring Americans? I mean, how do you combat that if you come up with any solutions? I mean, the only thing that can come to my mind, off the top of my head would be roadblocks. But then you have traffic issues.

So we used to have roadblocks. It wasn't us, it was border patrol had these checkpoints. And the checkpoints were typically 2030, 40 miles off the border. And then they would catch a lot of this stuff at the checkpoints. This administration closed those checkpoints down immediately. Some of the checkpoints have been reopened. Most have not. So you don't have the checkpoints in place? We're in triage mode. Law enforcement is in triage. There's so much going on. There's so many things happening that we're not able to stop and target the source because we're triaging the consequences of what's happening. We're triaging that border patrol is triage it. They're not even, they're not even out there on the border for the most part, because they're busy triaging all the amount of people coming in. You got 10,000 a week showing up. I mean, across the border, it's probably close to 10,000 a day. You can't vet them. How do you process them? You're bogging our courts down. They're giving them court dates now for 2032.

What?

2032 is when people who are claiming asylum, which, by the way, 75% to 90% of those asylum claims will be overturned when they finally go to court.

You know, I just. Speaking of asylum, this is a side. This is a. This is a sidetrack here. But I just spoke to somebody that's relatively high up in the border patrol, and they had told me that now that the. I don't know if it's the government. I don't know who created this app.

Have you heard about this CBP one?

Yes. There's an app. They now have an. Who created that app?

The DHS. Department of Homeland Security.

Department of Homeland Security.

They love it.

Created an app where now people can claim asylum from their, what, home country? And we will actually fly down there and pick them up and bring them here.

300,000. They caught this administration having flown, like, what, 300,000 Haitians into our country directly. I mean, your government is flying them in. You know, Michael Yan talks about that. Even if you fix the border issue, they're still going to be flying people in from other countries because they filed. They went through the CBP one act. The cartels have completely learned how to abuse and use the CBP one app to benefit them. They extort people and say, hey, look, we'll do all this stuff. We'll help you get through the CBP one app. Tell you what you do. There's how much you have to pay us, man. I mean, it is extremely broken. I mean, we're just barely glossing over things, too. And, I mean, the cartels are. We haven't gotten into the violence. We had a girl in our jail that. But when she came in, we always interview. We do a health assessment, and she's like, I'm taking. I think she was taking 70 plus fentanyl pills a day.

70 a day.

She was taking these fentanyl pills. Her body had become so accustomed to it. And when she was detoxing, she dies. While we were talking to her about why she was taking so many before she died, she said, I used to sell drugs for the cartel. My girlfriend and I did. And one day, we came up short, and the cartel cut my girlfriend into pieces in front of me. And since then, I've been self medicating, taking these pills. I mean, this is the brutality that we are. We have let the devil in the back door. We've let the devil in the back door. And yet we still, even Americans don't seem to grasp the severity of the problem that exists in our own country.

When you talk about the sex trade and the human smuggling, where are the women being utilized in the sex trade?

So a lot of it is the cartels will have brothels. They'll have, you know, they'll pimp them out. I mean, they've got organizations set up here where you got a guy who might sell drugs, and he also manages the women that are. They sell for sex. A lot of it. You know, the Chinese, which, by the way, we've had 37,000 chinese nationals, came in last year, mostly predominantly military age men. In 2021, there was only 450. Last year was 37,000, and this year is probably already about 30,000. Their year ends at the end of September. So we will probably hit close to double what it was last year for chinese nationals. But I remember watching this investigation where the border patrol was doing one or DHS, and they were following a guy that was running like these, like the asian or the chinese or vietnamese massage parlors, and following him across the country and all the way from California to Florida, all the different stops he made, and every time it was at a different massage parlor. All across the country. A lot of them were in those massage parlors, nail salons. I mean, humans are being trafficked in all sorts of places.

There's plenty of people that are criminals and have criminal operations in communities that, you know, pimps, people that are, you know, running, you know, how do I say it? Running sex trade. And they just get these women that are vulnerable, that need to pay the cartels, that owe the cartels, or they work directly for the cartels. I mean, the sex trade's off the charts. It's all over the country, spread like a disease across this country.

What about the kids?

The kids are ended up. Doctor Phil did something recently where he even talked about it. He was on the view. Not that I watched the view. I don't want anybody to.

You a big fan of the view. You'd go great on that.

I have to preface this by saying, I don't watch it. I happen to see this clip. And doctor Phil has been doing a lot of work understanding the border and really looking into the trafficking of these kids, because the kids will come with the same address, and nobody's taking the time to say, hey, this is all the same. The agents are. The agents are saying, guys, we're noticing that everybody, all their addresses written on their arms or the papers they have, say it's the same address in Chicago or wherever, and don't worry about it. Just process them through. And doctor Phil was talking about how a lot of these kids are ending up in, like, factories and doing hard labor labor in factories here in this country or in the sex trade. And he was telling us on the view, and one of the hosts actually said, well, is it all of them or some of them? It's like, it doesn't freaking matter if it's one of them, it's a problem. And yet. But that's the mentality. The mentality is, if it's not affecting me, then what do I care? That's not okay. Like, as Americans, we should say, even though it doesn't affect me, I can't watch children be trafficked into hard labor or sex trade.

And you have 100,000 children that they. That they admit they don't really know where they are. They admitted to 85,000. That was a year ago. It probably. The number could be much higher now.

Have you seen anything in your county?

Oh, we see it every day. Luckily, we don't see as many of the women and the children. The women and the children are typically snatched up by the government because they come in unaccompanied. For the most part, I still get children. I mean, I have. You know, we had a car that you can go online, where we go to pull it over, and it just starts to slow down and boom, it shoots off into the desert, just straight up off road and running over cactus. And. And we're chasing it. And right as we pull to a stop, I jump out, and the door is open. The driver, because the driver and the passenger fled. And it's a. It's a, like a extra cab truck. So it's not a full quad cab, it's just the extra cab. And those two guys had run off, and they're running down the hills into the desert. And then I pull up my gun, and I'm looking in quick glance, I see two females, a baby or a young girl and a man in the back of the truck. And then I took off and started chasing those guys. But the girl had committed.

She had on credit. She owed the cartel 13,000. And the other guys had paid, I think, 6000 to come into the country. And what you don't see on camera is her feet were completely blistered out. They were wet, like, you know, marching on wet socks. And her feet were just blistered out. And what you don't see is me and my sergeant taking her shoes off, taking her socks off, treating her feet, bandaging up her feet, getting her, you know, because at that point, the adrenaline's off and you're just. She couldn't even hardly walk on her feet for good reason. Darn near lost the whole bottoms of her feet. You don't see the humanity that we bring to it. I always, the politicians will say, well, it's just really, you guys are really inhumane. I said, that's funny because I've never seen you down here, I've never seen you down here in the desert pulling people out that the cartels leave for dead. I don't see you here stopping these people from getting trafficked by the cartels into the sex trade or whatever else. I don't see you down here expending all your resources and energy trying to save these people from the cartels.

But we do that every day. Our guys go out every day. Border patrol does it every day. And we treat these people with kindness. And we understand that in many ways many of these people are victims of the cartels, victims of our failed policies and what we're looking for, we're looking for those bad guys, the terrorists, those things. And the terrorists are there too. Talk to the FBI, and I know we're rolling into a different subject on it, but talked to the FBI guy recently and he says, I'm not concerned, as concerned about the terrorists as I am about the secondary. And the tertiary's the people that are technically not on the terrorist watch list. It's like a biker gang. You have a biker gang and you got your patch members, you got your prospects and you got your hangarounds. The patch members very rarely put in work. The work is usually done by the prospects and the hangarounds. And that's much how it is in these organizations. You've got secondary and tertiary people that are still part of those cartel or those terrorist organizations. They just are not on our list yet. But they're still willing to put in the work.

I mean, even if they are on the list, what happens now?

The government's letting them in for the most part.

I mean, the FBI is a whole other subject.

I know.

I mean, I don't even know. I gotta calm myself down.

I know, and I'm trying.

I just watched the director of the FBI talk about how our power grid, water treatment plants, all of these are compromised by chinese hackers. I've been talking about this for years on the show, and this asshole shows up in front of Congress or wherever, maybe the Senate. I can't remember which one to talk about shit I've been talking about here for two years. It's like, good fucking job, buddy.

Yes.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Good. Great work. Fucking asshole.

I feel the same way you did. I was at a month and a half, two months ago, I was in DC, and he and Mayorkas both show up and he starts talking about the same thing, the threats to our elections, the cybersecurity threats. And one of the sheriffs, Sheriff Butler from, Sheriff Jones from Butler County, Ohio, he puts them on blast. He says, hey, the FBI is saying, get ready. We're going to have all these things. So the media calls me and they go, sheriff, what do you think about this? You know, about the, about the sheriff saying that the FBI is saying there's major threats. I go, first of all, I don't need the FBI to tell me that we've got threats going on in this country. I've been telling them for two to three years that what we're facing, and now they're finally admitting it. Like, this is a real, like, where were you?

What did they say? What does the FBI even do? I don't know. I don't even know what this point go out.

You know, at this point. And look, some people are going to watch this and say, you know, there are good FBI agents. Unfortunately, where those guys are timing out a lot of these good FBI agents, we're not going to. We put a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a lawyer in charge of the FBI, not a line level guy who understands what it is to do the work and do investigations. They put a lawyer, Chris Wray, in charge of the FBI. They have a political agenda. And, you know, these good FBI agents on the ground, they're just being. They're being told which direction to go in. And frankly, I see more effort on the FBI going after american citizens. We see him going after the parents at school boards. And this is not, if you're listening to me and you're thinking, oh, he's just saying that political bull crap. No. Two years ago, I was in a meeting at the Greenbrier in West Virginia for a sheriff's conference, and we did an intel meeting. And the DHS chief comes on, not Mayorkas, but one of his guys comes on over this zoom, and he starts to say, hey, our primary concern are domestic violence, terrorism, terrorists.

And I'm thinking, whoa, what is he about ready to say? And he goes, now, these are going to be the parents at school boards, people who don't believe that the election was, you know, legit. And he starts going on veterans, he starts going down this list of people. My blood is boiling. He finishes. And I. The second he finished, I hit that thing. And I said, how dare you not. How dare you say that the american person is your greatest threat? I said, not only did you describe me, you described many of the people that believe contrary to what this administration thinks. I said, then you felt that that's your greatest threat. Not once did you mention Antifa or BLM, and they literally wreaked havoc on this country over the last few years. You didn't mention them. You didn't mention the cartels that are trafficking tens of thousands of people into this country every month. You didn't mention the fentanyl poisonings, which has become the leading cause of death in America. You didn't mention any of that. You think that the primary threat to America is Americans. I said, I don't have any cases with Americans of what you're telling me.

And I'm on the ground, boots on the ground. And he says, well, you know, sheriff, we try to apply the law equally. And I said, well, your actions say otherwise. And I knew at that moment, many of us are the enemy to them.

Yeah.

And it's sad. It's sad because we're just patriots. We just love this country. We love God, family, freedom, and the constitution. That's what we're trying to protect. And I see how the country is being weakened by the border, how we're putting ourselves at tremendous risk. And now we got the FBI finally showing up ten years late to the party.

They're not showing up. They're not gonna. What are they gonna do? He's just regurgitating shit that I talked about two years ago. Now, even the fentanyl shit. You know, the fentanyl stuff. We had this, the same guy, Luis Chaparro. You know, he was. He came on this probably three years ago now, and I broken the story that China is essentially aiding the cartel and is a big part of the. They're behind the whole fentanyl crisis.

They are.

Now, just now, they're starting to talk about this in mainstream. I hear election, I hear elected, sorry. People running for office talking about it. I hear the media starting to report it, and it's. But I did. Oh, Mandy. It's just.

Can I talk about the terrorism thing for sure? In America, we've been conditioned to view terrorism a certain way. We've been conditioned. Let me back that up. Let me explain real quick why this is different than what it's always been. First of all, the border used to be predominantly people from Mexico coming across. They'd come over here, they would work. The cartel had some of their people in there. They were trafficking some drugs across, but a lot of those people were just coming to work, and they would go home after a while. So the majority of what you had was people from Mexico. And at the very top of the graph, you had a small percentage of people that they. That border patrol and the government refers to as OTMs, other than Mexicans. How this has changed is the last three years that flip flopped, that changed. Now, what we see are predominantly people coming from 170 different countries.

170.

That's the total different 170 different countries. You got them coming from all over Central and South America. You got them coming from Haiti, you got them coming from all the countries in Africa. You got them coming from Syria, the Middle East, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere. Now, what you see is predominantly OTMs, with the smaller percentage of Mexicans that are coming across. That's a national security threat. Now, rolling into the second thing I was going to tell you, we've been conditioned as Americans to see terrorism as a bomb going off or as a plane crashing into a building, or somebody walks into a crowded building with a gun and shoots people. That's how we've been conditioned to see terrorism. Terrorism. We are under a terrorist attack. And I'm going to tell you how. And it just looks very different. And it sounds very different. Over the last three years, the leading cause of death in America between the ages of 18 and 45 for american civilians is fentanyl poisoning. China is putting the fentanyl in the hands of the cartels. The cartels are put into the hands of Americans, and they are successfully, without setting off a single bomb, without firing a single shot, have killed more Americans than any terrorism has ever killed in the history of our country, more than any army has ever killed of american civilians.

And they're doing it right in our own, right underneath our nose, without firing a single shot. How can you tell me that this is not the greatest terrorist threat that we have ever faced? What kills more Americans now than anything is fentanyl. Now we are under a terrorist attack. It just looks very different, and it sounds very different than what we're used to. But they're killing Americans. And in my book, that's how you determine if it's a threat. And if families are up at night wondering if their children are going to come home or if they're going to wake up and find their children dead because of a fentanyl poisoning, then I think that's enough of terrorism. Which is exactly why we should call these cartels the terrorists that they are. If we deem them terrorists, we can actually use military force to deal with them because we don't have in law enforcement. It's beyond our scope. It's beyond our capabilities. We don't have the firepower to deal with the cartels at this point. And the only way you can deal with them is to declare them the terrorists that they are. And China is behind this.

These are the opium wars of 1893. While we were not part of that, they consider the west to be England, America, all of them, us. We're all in the west. And so they're exacting very patiently. They have waited a long time, and we are under that attack right now.

Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. Let's take a quick break.

Let's do it.

We'll come back, maybe we'll talk about.

We'Ll try to do some positive stuff.

How we can solve this, this mess with the cartels, the fentanyl and the border.

Awesome.

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If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Shawn Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Mark, we're back from the break. We just delve into cartels, human trafficking, fentanyl, how miraculous and effective the FBI is and, but let's. I want to talk about some solutions now, you know, and so everybody has an idea on how to fix this. I've heard a lot of different takes. I'd like to hear if you have maybe some solutions. Look at what they are.

It's simple. You know, anytime you have a problem, the idea is to simplify it as much as possible. If you simplify it, you're more likely to get through it. And the reality is it's as simple as just enforcing the rule of law. You can't just come across here illegally. That's not okay. And if you do it again, we should be holding you accountable under title eight. We should restore the remain in Mexico program. We just don't let you wait for your court date here in America before asylum stuff. You got to stop funding these NGO's, stop sending them money. You know, part of the reason I was against the recent border bill, first of all, it wasn't a border bill, it was a global assistance bill. They were taking money from Americans and they were giving it to other countries and still they were not fixing the problem. They were throwing money at band Aids on the backside of it. They were talking about money for DEI programs within border patrol. That's not going to fix the problem. So stop fund. And part of that bill had $2.3 billion that was going to go towards NGO's here in this country, and those are the non governmental organizations.

And then they had 9.3 billion, I think it was, but over $9 billion they wanted to give to global assistance through the State Department. Ultimately, a lot of that would go to the UN. I took a lot of heat because back when we were talking about the border stuff, I said, look, they're giving these folks, when they process them, they're giving them cell phones, they're giving them plane tickets to wherever they want to go in the country, and they're giving them gift cards with up to $5,000 on it. And immediately the media went crazy and they tried to debunk me as like, verify, said I was spreading false information. And I had a couple of the reporters ask me like, well, you know, where'd you get this information? Where'd you get yours? From the same people in Washington, DC who been lying, telling you that the border is secure, that nobody's just crossing over the border. Is that where you got your information from? Cause I got mine from boots on the ground, actual border patrol agents and my own two eyes. And whenever I go to the airport and see all these people flying in brand new clothes and see that and the government admitting they're giving cell phones, and then about three weeks later, four weeks later, which ironically vindicated me, the UN admitted they had given $1.6 billion to 248 NGO's in the way of cash and gift cards for the trafficking of people into our country.

So you can't fund the NGO's, but really it boils down to just enforcing the law, turning the, taking the handcuffs off border patrol, letting them secure the border. You don't let anybody come in here. No more false asylum claims, none of that stuff. It has to be shut down. That's really the simplest way to regain control of it, because immediately that starts to have a financial impact on the cartels. And when the cartels are making less money, they're going to have to transition into different things. And I think you also have to declare them the terrorists that they are. Like we talked about. You've got to be able to deal with the cartels once and for all.

How would you deal with the cartels? I would declare, let's say the border is secured. Let's say, let's. Let's say the border is. I mean, I don't know how you secure the border. I mean, beyond some type of a barrier, a wall, a fence, whatever you want to call it. Then we talk about the tunnels and all the other ways that they're getting in, flying them in through the app, you know. So how do you, how do you affect the cartels?

Well, you affect the money. It's first and foremost. So anything you do needs to be, has a, needs to be geared towards eliminating their sources of income. And as if you stop letting people come in, they'll stop showing up. They're not going to fly of halfway around the world just to end up in Mexico and be stuck there. The majority of these people coming, a, because they're being funded by NgO's, b, because they know that they're going to get into our country. But if they know they're not going to get in, that's naturally going to reduce the flow. It's inevitably going to affect the income that the cartels are making. It's going to increase the price of drugs again, because now the supply reduces and the cartels are going to want to make money off of the drugs that they're bringing in. It makes it easier for us to find the drugs because now, instead of processing 10,000 people a day, CBP and border patrol are able to actually look for what their job is. People coming into the country illegally and bringing drugs into the country illegally. But you need to declare them terrorists, because then you can actually apply military force to them.

I'm not saying you do it without Mexico's permission. I think you can engage Mexico as a partner and say, look, we're committed to doing this. Why would Mexico do anything right now? We're not committed. We have a weak presence. We have a weak administration, whether you like them or not. They just have shown weakness on the global level, and people are taking advantage of that, you know? And so I think what we need now is more strength. And if you had somebody strong with resolve, I think Mexico would say, okay, let's go after them. It wouldn't take much. Some special forces units, you know, hell, we bombed Zarqawi. He doesn't affect hardly any Americans yet we're not willing to bomb the cartels, and they're killing Americans to the tune of 100,000 a year.

Well, the whole, yeah, it's.

You have to meet force with force. Like, this is the only way that we're gonna have to. We're gonna have some hard times. We're gonna have to get. We're gonna have to get tough with the cartels. We're gonna have to get tough with letting people into this country.

I mean, one thing we learned in the global war on terrorism is if we send in the SOF units to get these leaders right. Just another leader. Yeah, just another leader. I mean, I think that the, you know, the global, the gwata was, what, 2020 plus years? But I remember a time when I was in, and I don't remember exactly which period of time it was and how long this period of time lasts, but I remember getting intel reports saying that the number two had about a two week life expectancy, and it was just boom, boom. Every two weeks, there's another number two. And so how do you really affect the cartel?

You know, that's a great. That's a great question. And you're always going to have somebody backfill it, but I think it's different in the sense of what you deal with in the terrorists over in the Middle east. You know, it's driven by a whole totally different thing. What drives it here is financially. I mean, these guys are fighting over the money. I mean, you still. When they took Chapo off, it created instability amongst the Sinaloa cartels. You got Zambara, you got Los Alazares, you got the chapitos, you know, and every time you take those people off, it does create a vacuum, but it also creates instability. Right now, they're just. Everything's working for them. The only people benefiting from the open border policies right now are the cartels. I mean, that's who's benefiting. And we can't continue to fund people coming to this country. We have people. We have veterans that are being not looked after. We have people that paid into Social Security their entire life, and they might get a check for $1,700 a month. While you're giving illegals right now, a month, you're giving them hotel rooms, you're giving them food. Like, this is a.

That's a slap in the face to Americans.

I mean, what do you think? I've thought about this a lot. I've talked to, you know, Eric Prince thinks we should go after China when it comes to the fentanyl stuff, because that's where it originates. You know, a lot of people I interviewed, deSantis, he thinks we should send in, you know, teams to get the military to get into it with the cartels. I think the. I think the way to do it is the psyop war and turn these cartels against each other because they're always at war with each other. Right? And so if we. And we're great at propaganda, that's pretty damn obvious at this point, we are really fucking good at spreading propaganda and bullshit lies, especially in our own country. And so if we inserted some operatives down there or just recruited some assets, you know, maybe if the, I don't know, the FBI actually did their fucking job, or, I don't know, maybe the CIA could get involved. Anybody, man the border patrol, although I'm pretty sure that's out of their scope. But I mean, if you were to send in and or recruit some assets and start a psyop war and you make these cartels think that each other is the enemy, the problem probably.

I mean, I think there's a high potential it would take care of itself with minimal, with minimal funding, with minimal exposure. I mean, we do this shit all over the world. You know, we do it all over the world.

We could have done it with these guys too. And I agree.

It'S a lot of ego.

Yes.

In there too.

It's a machismo thing. And really it's about the money. That's what makes it different. I don't think it's fundamentals. It's not religion. It's not. It is about money. It's about making money off of humans and drugs. And so I think if you can create instability in that and let them fight each other, it would be a huge benefit to us. Now, inevitably some of that could flow over into America, likely, but if you create an unstable situation there, you're a lot less likely to get all these people showing up as well. But right now everything's just perfect. Everything's setting. Not perfect in a good way, perfect for the cartels, perfect for people who are trafficking humans into this country, perfect for globalism. I mean, everything that could take advantage of this situation is happening right now.

Are you familiar with how it works when it comes to. Look, I go to Nashville airport, I see these, these people that don't speak English are very obvious, not from the US. And they get shuffled through security, they get shuffled to the front of the line, they get shuffled onto the airplane. Nobody really knows who they are or what's happening, who's facilitating that.

I mean, our government, I mean, our government's the one facilitating it, but it's designed to create globalism.

I mean, where do they, where do they, where do they round these people up from?

They show up to get checked in at Border patrol and you have NGO's waiting to scoop these people up as soon as they're released. And the NGO's are financially incentivized to send these people around the country to help them get to different places, to get them clothing, to get them shelter, then they send them off to New York, Chicago. Look, all this was happening for years and I've been saying it was happening for years. They kept talking about DeSantis and Abbott over in Texas bussing people up to Chicago and New York. For every bus they sent, there was at minimum ten busses and ten plane loads coming from our own government sending them to Chicago and New York. The problem is at first they were spreading it out and it was fairly undetectable. And we kept saying, wait, you're going to see it's happening in your area. Well, now you have places in Kansas with a population of 12,000 where there's a thousand illegals in there. I mean, this is what's happened is we filled the cup, it's overflowing now. And places like Chicago and New York are feeling the effects. Everybody wants to blame somebody too.

And, you know, they want to blame Governor Abbott and DeSantis when in reality it was their own policies, their own sanctuary city policies that encouraged people to come there. They talked about how great they were, how much better they were than the rest of the country, how self righteous. They took that self righteous stance and now they got caught in their own words.

I don't want to say who cares about Chicago and New York? But I mean, technically they did want this, correct?

Yeah.

I mean, they did. They, they wanted this. They wanted to be a sanctuary city. They wanted to support this. Now they don't. That's the semi problem. Like now you have exactly what you want and you can fucking live in that forever. But what about, what about all the people in the areas that aren't a sanctuary city? Why are these governors taking this in?

I don't know. Look, I mean, I think they think they're doing a good thing and a lot of them are incentivized by federal dollars. We saw this during COVID During COVID I'm like, look, I'm not doing the lockdowns, I'm not doing the mask mandates and I'm not doing the vaccine mandates. I'm not doing it. And the county kept saying to me, well, the government, I said, what are they going to do? The only thing they can take from you is your funding. That's it. That's where the federal government gets all these states and communities over a barrel because they offer you grant funding. If you, if we're going to give you this Covid funding, we're going to give you. Once you take the money, you're done. And so I kept telling them, I don't care. They can take all the federal funding. I don't need it. I will adjust my sheriff's office. What little federal funding I get if I have to lose it, I'll adjust what we do, and I'll deal with it accordingly. But if you can't take their power away from them and their power is federal funding, then you're screwed. And a lot of these governors and a lot of these places are more interested in the federal funding that the government gives them, and then they end up falling into taking things in like this where they normally wouldn't.

Like, how much funding are we talking about? Because. So you bring. You bring in a bunch of illegals, the crime wave goes through the roof, and then you, what? Take. Take that federal funding, just a attempt to lower the crime rate.

Look at Chicago and New York. What do they do? What's the first thing they started doing? We need help with this. We need some federal funding to deal with this problem. They want more funding, and the government is like, okay, we'll give you more federal funding, but then they own you after that. And that's the problem is that's where the federal government.

Where's the funding even going, though?

It goes.

Funding for what? What are they doing? They're just giving these people an allowance every month in a. In an apartment.

None of this is designed to fix the problem. That's the problem. None of it's designed to fix the problem. Take homelessness. You take a guy in San Francisco, gets a job. His job pays him $250,000 a year to deal with homelessness. Homelessness. And he goes out and he gets. Tells the government, hey, I can fix this with $2 billion, we can fix all the homelessness problem. What incentive does he really have to fix the problem? He doesn't, because he loses his $250,000 a year job if he does, plus all the funding that comes in. So a lot of these government people, they're incentivized by just keeping the program going or the problem going because they make good salaries dealing with the problem. Second of all, the government takes it, and they use those funds for different programs within their states, within their communities, within their counties. So the funding goes towards fixing, like, drug addiction problems. But you can mop the bathroom floor all day long until you turn the tub water off. Your efforts are futile. So my point is, stop spending the money on trying to fix the band aid, put band aids on the problem, and actually take the money and apply it to the.

To the source of the problem. If we would actually take money and put it towards fixing the border problem. Then we would spend less money and then we could deal, we could eliminate a lot of this back end nonsense that goes on. But everybody is got a piece of the pie and everybody, whether it's an NGO that wants some more funding and they've got their. When Tucson was going to lose their funding, a bunch of the NGO's, because they hadn't passed the government budget yet, a lot of these ngo's were getting in the media and crying about how they were going to lose their funding. And now we're going to have to kick people on the street and this and that. The second they signed that bill, I haven't heard a thing from those ngO's about funding anymore. Why? Because they got their money and they were. The city of Tucson was actually contemplating allocating some of the money to deal with the back end issues of it from taxpayer dollars. It's just, it's all, it's all about money. And there's a lot of people that. And I don't know what the motive is because it doesn't feel like there's a motive, but they are on their own little level, they are incentivized to continue to treat the symptoms of the problem as opposed to treating the actual problem.

Damn. Let's talk about your, your run for senate.

That's why all of this is part of the reason why I decided to do it. Like I, when I ran for sheriff, I'm not a politician. Like I tell people, I. I'm a patriot who loves God, family, freedom and the constitution. That's why I do what I do. I love the rule of law and I'm willing to fight for it. But as a law enforcement guy, you know, when the building's on fire, it's not in my nature to just stand there and watch it burn to the ground. Or when you see a problem, you just stand there and wait for somebody else to deal with it. What I saw in this country was a problem. The building's on fire. And really it's the main issues, no matter where I go in the country are border. The economy, crime and national security. Those are the preeminent issues no matter where I go, especially in the state. And that number one and two are always border in economy. And so when I was coming to the end of the last election cycle, I wasn't running. I was making fun of everybody who was running a statewide race.

This is what you get from making fun of people. Don't do it. My wife and I are looking at these idiots running for a statewide election. Here I am. So my wife and I actually decided that we were going to come up with a list of reasons of why not to do this. And in that process, we started feeling very compelled to do it. I'm going to share a couple personal stories with you that kind of drove me to this. I have five children. My middle son, Cooper, when he was 14 or 15, started hanging around the wrong people, got into drugs, eventually started getting into even fentanyl. And at one point we were said, we said, you can't drive our cars. You cannot drive our cars. And we went to a charity event, and I get a phone call from my son Cooper. He says, dad, I just hit a guy on a bike. And so we hustled out of there, drove over to where he was. I get out of the car, I check on my son. I look at him, I'm like, hey, are you okay? Yes. I walk over to the guy, I see the guy laying on the ground, and I'm just praying this guy, and, you know, they're working him, the firefighters are working him, and I'm just praying he doesn't die, because if he dies, I mean, we got problems.

We got problems anyway, but. So I go back to my son, and one of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life was my son standing there. There's eight cops standing around him. And I looked him in his face and I said, I have to leave you here. If I stay here, they're going to say that I influenced this case in some way. So you're on your own. He was 18, or I think he was 18 or 19 at the time. And so one of the hardest things to do was to walk away from him, get in my car and drive away and let consequences, let him deal with the consequences of his decisions. And ultimately the guy did not die. The guy survived. My son got sentenced. The way the law works is by the time you get sentenced is usually two years later. So he had some more struggles. And part of the reason my wife and I wrote our first book, my first book, american sheriff, traditional values in a modern world. I wrote that book, and my wife wrote her book, sheriff's wife, traditional values in a modern world.

So I could pay for the legal fees and these and the lawsuit of getting hit. Because he lived in my house, he was driving one of our cars, and he hit the guy. So we became financially responsible for it. So to be able to pay for that and be able to pay the lawyers fees, my wife and I wrote books. And we went and sold those books every weekend at gun shows and any other event we could go to so that we could pay for my son's legal expenses. So by the time, about six months, eight months later, my son actually starts pull out of it and he cleans his life up and he goes cold turkey, from fentanyl to cold turkey. And he had been clean about a year and a half, and he ends up going and doing six months in my jail. You want to know how you treat your inmates? Put your own kid in your own jail and you'll find out real quick. But my son had to do his own time, and I made him do his time straight up like anybody else would. And so my son gets out of jail and I tell you this whole story because it's part of why I'm running for the Senate.

When he gets out, I tell him, I said, look, I'm considering running for the Senate. This is October. And my son says, I said, but if I do it, they're going to drag everything about you hitting the guy on the bike. It's going to come back full front, full force. They're going to trash you, they're going to trash me. And he's like, dad, I know, I understand. But I think you got to do what you got to do. You're doing it for the right reasons. And so I don't know that I would have done it. Fast forward to December. He's working. He's got his fiance, his baby is eleven months old. And my son goes to work one day, it's December 16. My wife and I were that. I was out at a dinner and I'd been out wrapping or been doing some Christmas shopping. My wife was out wrapping presents at our house. And I get home about 30 minutes later, 830 at night. I get a knock on the door and we open the door and it's the sheriff from the neighboring county, Sheriff Benzone. Two of my chiefs and two guys from Gilbert PDD, and my chief, who's known my kids for a long time, since they were little kids.

He just looked at me and all he could say is, Cooper and the baby are dead in an instant. I lost my 22 year old son, my eleven month old granddaughter and my soon to be daughter in law died a few days later. She was like a daughter to us because we had had her, she had come out of drugs and she lived with us for two years while we brought them out of drugs. Drugs. And so all three of them died in the blink of an eye to a guy driving in the influence of alcohol and drugs. At that point, my wife and I weren't interested in doing anything. I wasn't interested in running for Senate, wasn't interested in running for a sheriff. I didn't want to get out of bed. We were just, we were devastated. And so finally, about three weeks after we do the funeral, and I don't remember what it was, but somebody said something to me and just like that, boom, it sparked me back in. And what I realized, I looked at my wife and we knew immediately this is what we had to do. And what it reminded us is there is no guarantee for tomorrow.

And the only thing you take with you in this life is what you do. And so we looked at that experience and said, we're going to get up, we're going to dust ourselves off and we're going to move forward. We're going to do what the lord's asking us to do. And so at that point, we were full force. We didn't want to do the Senate thing. I'm not a politician. Like somebody said me the other day, they said, so now, sheriff, your goal is to go to Washington, DC and do this and that. And I stopped him. I said, my goal is not to go to Washington, DC. My goal is to save God, family, freedom in this constitution. If that means I have to go to DC to do it, then so be it. I can get all dressed up for nothing. So let's do it. So we get into the senate race, and that's why we're here. Now, you know, it's not tough, like being in the politics is rough, man. They say you want to know what you did wrong in life? Run for office. You'll find out whether you did it or didn't do it, you're going to find out.

That's how politics is. But I believe what Aristotle says, that he says the only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing, say nothing or be nothing. Well, I refuse to not do anything. I refuse to not say anything, and I certainly refuse to not be anything. So my wife and I made the decision that we were going to do this, and we don't know what the outcome is, but what we do know is if we have a good attitude and work hard, God will take care of the rest. And I'm in the arena, I'm slugging it out, and I don't know what the outcome will be. But for me and my kids, it was about getting in the arena and doing what you can to save this country.

Damn. Mark, I'm sorry about your son.

Thank you.

And your grandkid.

Yeah.

And your daughter in law.

Thank you. It happens, you know, you get a lot of people, and I know you've probably faced it. I get people all the time that get angry with God because they think God in some way had something to do with it or could have stopped a bad thing. And we kind of talked about this earlier. At my core, what I love is freedom. I love it. What happens in this world is not because God doesn't care. What happens in this world is because God does care. He gave us freedom. He cared enough to give you freedom. With freedom comes the good and the bad. There must be opposition in all things. If you want freedom, you can't take the good and not expect the bad to come. The way I look at bad things in this world is I actually take it. And to me, I give God even more credit that he has the ability to sit and watch us eff it all up and treat each other horribly and to hurt one another and to do these things. But the principle of freedom is so great that he has to step back and say, I have to let these things happen.

And I'm okay with it. I lost a son and a granddaughter and a daughter in law, but I'm okay with it because the alternative is to have no freedom for everything to be crafted in a way where none of us get hurt. And to me, that's not what freedom is. If you want freedom, there is pain. That's where the growth is. But freedom comes with risk and pain. And I think more than anything, we shouldn't be angry with goddess. We should be happy that God is willing to stand aside and let us exercise our freedom and make the decisions for ourselves, good or bad. So in this life, I don't blame God for bad things happening. I look at it and say somebody used their freedom and made a bad decision. It took something from me. But I get it because I exercise my freedom in different ways and I don't want anything to jeopardize my freedom. That same passion is what drives me to fight for my country. And yes, do bad things happen that I have to sit by and watch happen? Do I have to listen to people that I don't agree with when I want to protect the first amendment?

Yes, I do. I hate what they say, but I'll fight anybody for their right to do it. And so I think we took that experience and instead of being angry with Goddesse, we said, thank you, we will move forward and we're going to use this experience as fuel to drive us in the direction we're going.

That's a lot of strength, man. Thank you for sharing that.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Let's talk about, we had spoken on this earlier, but I think it's important for everybody to hear. I had asked you at breakfast, what is the process for running for Senate?

You know, I don't know what the, if there's a set process. I actually had a guy call me the Friday before I turn in my signatures, and he says, hey, you know, we really could use you on the campaign trail talking about the border being a real mouthpiece for that. But to do that, you need to step away from the Senate race. And mind you, this gentleman had called me at least once or twice before. I've probably had at least eight to ten people come and try to talk me out of doing it.

Who are these people?

People that are with the people I'm running against, you know, people coming from other political worlds, you know, from DC. But they came to me and said, hey, you know, we want you to do this, but you got to get out of the Senate race. I said, well, I mean, I appreciate that, but I can't get out of the Senate race. You know, I support Trump. I'm not getting out of the Senate race. I'm in it because I feel the need to do this. And they said, well, we should just all get behind one person. I said, I agree. I think I bring the skill set for that. I understand the border. I've been a sheriff. I understand what it means to be in politics. I understand what it means to serve Republicans, Democrats and independents, everybody. I think I'd be the right person for it. They said, well, you didn't get permission to do it.

Permission from who?

That's what I immediately, I said, I don't need permission. I don't need permission to run. You know, what I need permission from is my wife. That's it. Or the people. That's who I need their permission for. If they sign my petition, that's their permission that I get to do this for them. I don't need permission. He's like, well, you know, I didn't need permission. And, you know, like, I said, no. Yes, you did.

Do you know this person?

Yeah, I do. Yeah.

Can I ask who it is?

I don't want to blast that, put the guy on blast, but, you know, it came from, from Trump world. And look, I've always been a very big, strong supporter of it, of Trump. And his policies. And it was kind of disappointing. And I said, look, I did talk to President Trump about running. I did talk to him. We met at Mar a Lago and I talked that night. I talked to my opponent now, Kerry Lake, she was one of the ones that talked me into running. And I said, okay, I think I'm going to do it. Then we walked over to President Trump's table and we told him, and he goes, well, that doesn't constitute getting permission. I was like, look, man, I don't need permission from anybody.

Good for you, man.

And so when we talk about the process, the process is really no particular process. You just have to go out and get the signatures, 7500 signatures or 7000 signatures to get on the ballot. So what you have to do is you've got to file your paperwork for your campaign, federal campaign, then you got to go out and get the signatures. And you're the, I mean, I've been stumping. I've given speeches, hundreds and hundreds of speeches in the last year and a half all over the state and outside of the state. And what you're trying to do is raise money. But the worst, and we kind of talked about this, the most disappointing part of it is when you go to DC, they say, hey, how much money can you raise? That's the first question they ask. Not like, what's your background? What kind of strengths do you have? How much money can you raise? And if that doesn't tell you the state of our politics in this country, that it's all about money. You know, I was telling you earlier, there's the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And I saw somebody else had a different take on it.

It's not that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's that absolute power is a magnet for the corruptible. And so in politics and in DC, what we have is people that have been drawn to the, to the power, that magnetized towards the power, but they are corruptible people. And when they get to DC, the money corrupts them. And whether it's, you know, you took money to, to get your campaign going or maybe they have blackmail on you, maybe you were, you know, you went to the wrong party and they got video of you doing something or whatever it is, you know, they tend to get something on you to where you now are over a barrel. And so the trying to stay out of that is what I've been doing. Here's what I said to my wife. I said, I'm gonna run an honorable race. I'm gonna win with honor, I'm gonna lose with honor. I'm not gonna be negative. I'm gonna stay focused on who I am and what experience I bring to the table and why I think I'm right for the job. And then I am going to work hard. And everything else is outside of my fate.

You know, it's outside of my control. And so what? That's what we've done. And I've actually gotten rid of a couple different consultants because I didn't want to go down the negative road. And like most politicians, the second they get their back up against the wall, they want to attack, they want to lash out, as opposed to just having the cool, calm, cool temperament to say what kind of problem I am and how do I get out of it. And I think in politics, Americans are hungry for somebody that's authentic. And the way they get out of it is just tell me who you are and let me decide if I want to vote for you. And so the process has really just been a lot of hard work. Speaking to a lot of people, going out and getting the signatures, being a positive person, addressing the issues, talking about the experience I have. There is no other candidate in this race with more experience on the border, on crime. I run an agency with a budget of over $60 million. I'm expected to balance that budget and stay within that budget that understands national security.

Frankly, I will be the most knowledgeable senator in the Senate as it relates to the border and crime.

At breakfast, you had mentioned that they wanted you to leave the Senate race and run against my friend Eli Crane.

Yes.

Who wanted you to leave the Senate race and run against Eli Crane.

So I got a call from a guy that knows me and he's in DC. And he said, hey, look, some powers that be in DC want to know. And he didn't tell me who they were. I suspect that they were probably the McCarthy guys. Like. Cause Eli Crane went against McCarthy. What Eli Crane did was go, he went for the american people. And then people in politics take offense to that when you're not on their team or whatever. So Eli does the vote, they get rid of McCarthy. Well, these people call me and say, hey, there's some people in DC. They say, you are wildly popular in your district, your congressional district, which is where Eli Crane is. Would you consider running against Eli Crane? And I said, let me stop you right there. I said, first of all, unlike you people in DC, I'm loyal and Eli Crain is my friend. So, no, I won't run against Eli Crane. Number two, I have zero desire to run for Congress. I barely want to run for Senate. Why would I want to run for something I have to run for every two years? I don't want to do that.

And number three, if I win, if I step away, that's as good as giving that race over to Gallego in Arizona. And, honestly, we cannot do that. So those were my three reasons. And they said, okay, message received. We'll send it back. And I never heard from them again. But I thought it was sad that they were out trying to recruit people to run against good people like Eli Crane. And, you know, everybody wants somebody to stand up for them, but then they get a little bit uncomfortable when the work gets. When it gets a little hairy, when it gets a little scary, when the bullets start to fly to. And Eli Crane was actually in the middle of it, doing what he was supposed to do, defending Americans and saying, look, you're out. You're broken. We got to fix it at some point. We can't keep kicking can down the road. And a lot of these politicians want to just keep kicking can down the road. They want to keep up with the system that they've created for themselves. And he was not willing to do that. And that's what we need are elected officials.

And, frankly, to fix what we're going to fix is going to take extreme, courageous.

Yeah.

And if you know what courage means, courage is defined as not deterred by danger or pain. That's what the definition of courage is. And so if you want to fix this country, you have to understand there's dangers with it, and there's pain that comes along with it. But if not, we're gonna. We're gonna drive ourselves into the ground, and we're almost there.

I want to go back just a little bit. So, carrie Lake. I don't want to say endorsed, but supported your decision to run for senate, correct?

Yes.

And then she's decided later on to run against you.

Yeah. We met at mar a Lago, December 2, 2022. Gave me a call. I was out there speaking calls and says, hey, come on over to Mar a Lago, and let's have dinner. So we go over there. Really cool. I didn't bring a coat, so they gave me some funky little tuxedo coat I had to wear in there, but it's got, like, a tail on it. So I'm walking around with this tuxedo jacket on, but you have to have a coat to eat at the Mar a Lago restaurant.

Right on.

And so we go in there and we sit down. It's my wife and I and her, and her husband and two of her campaign people, and I, we're talking about the race. They're just like, hey, you gotta run. They were all excited. Nobody else can do it. You're the guy. You got the name recognition. We can do, like, this Yellowstone theme and all this stuff. And I'm telling them, like, look, I'm pretty close to doing it. I haven't lost my kids at that point. It was two weeks later I lost my kids. And I said, I'm pretty, I'm pretty. I'm pretty confident I'm gonna do it. So then we walked over, and it's funny, because if you sit in Mar a Lago, President Trump, he creates a playlist every day. And when he goes to dinner at night at the restaurant, he does the playlist. And when the song comes on that he likes, he turns the music up really loud so he can hear the song. But we walk over to his table between songs, and she says, hey, you know, and I met Trump plenty of times. And we'd gone to the White House several times, and she says, hey, sheriff Lamb's considering running for the Senate.

He says that, right? I said, yeah, you know, I think I'm gonna do it. And. And that was pretty much it. You know, then I went back, and then I lost my kids. And then January or February or March is when I really got serious about it again and filed the paperwork. And so then she decided to run after that. And I looked, you know, I don't get too emotional about those things. You know, you decide if you're gonna get in the arena. At that point, it doesn't matter who your opponent is. You know, if you're gonna. If you're gonna go do this, you're gonna go do it, no matter who they throw at you. And so we went in there knowing that that might be the case. And it's not gonna affect how I run my race, because I'm not running my race geared towards somebody else.

Yeah.

I'm running a race about me and about what I think I can do and why I think I'm the best person for Arizona and because I do it that way. It doesn't matter who you put in there with me.

Do you have any inclination on why she decided to run against you after basically supporting your decision?

I do. I think it was because I went to Congress and testified in front of Congress. And during those testimonies, one of the congressmen, Daniel Goldmand, not my favorite.

Don't know him.

I doubt he watches your show. But if he does, Daniel, you're not my favorite. It's a nice way of saying it. So anyway, he immediately starts in on the election stuff. And at one point, he's like, well, is there fraud in the election? I said, yeah, there's fraud in every election. What? There is? And I said, yeah, people voting for dead people. People voting too many times if you drop off the wrong, you know, ballots in a box that you're not supposed to. And he says, okay, okay. But do you have evidence of large scale material fraud? And I said, I have zero evidence of large scale material fraud. Now, I'm under oath. I'm not gonna lie. I don't have evidence of large scale material fraud. If I did, I would have recharged it already. What I didn't quantify it with was pinal county. And I've heard through the grapevine that was their reasoning was, oh, he's not America first, and he doesn't believe in that. The election was not right and whatever. Look, I just totally testified to the truth, and none of us had evidence of large scale material fraud. If we did, we'd have charged it.

That's different than onesies and twosies. And having large scale material fraud means you have evidence that you can prove in a court beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't live in the world of feelings or what you think might have happened. I live in the world of what you can prove and what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And unfortunately, I didn't have that. And so when I testified to that, that I think was the catalyst to getting her in the race.

Interesting, interesting. Have you had a lot of personal attacks?

Ah, you know, one of the blessings about. One of the frustrating things about this race is they're pretending like I don't exist, or they're pretending that it's a two person race that doesn't include me. And we see it very different. We've known that. I've always seen myself as the Titan. Like, I'm the twice elected official. You know, I've got all the experience in the border and all these things. And so we have always seen ourselves as the having an advantage. When you have 100% name recognition, either people hate you or love you, it's very hard to move the needle either way. And so those are things that we knew going into this, and so we felt pretty comfortable about it. There's been personal attacks. They attack your family. I've been accused of running child pedophile rings. My wife's been accused of being a drug addict. You know, they go after my kids. They go after everybody. But, you know, it's part of the business, which is not, shouldn't be part of the business, but it is. And I don't look for sympathy for anybody. I knew what I was getting into. But, you know, the worst attacks come from, they don't come from the other side, they come from my own party.

Yeah.

Republicans are the worst about attacking themselves. And all of the big things that I've been hit on have been things that Republicans have come up with.

Interesting. What a shame.

It's such a shame, you know, and it's, look, all I'm trying to do is try to better my country. I don't know. I'm not, this isn't what's most financially advantageous to me. It's not that I want to go back and be in DC and that cesspool, you know, that viper pit, that's not what I want to do. I'm doing it because I felt like, why should I wait for somebody else to run in this building, especially when I have the ability. There's an old danish saying says whoever has the ability has the responsibility. And if you read the Declaration of Independence, in the Declaration of Independence in those, I don't remember exactly how it goes, but basically it says that if you can do something about it, you should. And so that's why I'm doing it. I'm not doing it because it's going to make me money or any of those things. I'm doing it because I'm trying to be a true representative of the people like I have been as sheriff. I just realized I can't, I can protect my herd from the wolves, but at some point, if somebody doesn't hunt those wolves, they're going to multiply and replenish and eventually I won't be able to stop them.

And so what I realize is for me to hunt those wolves, I got to go to DC and I got to deal with those problems on a national level because I can't fix them on a, on a local level. So we're in it.

Yeah. Yeah. Are you worried at who might take your spot as sheriff?

That was one of the biggest worries I had. I wouldn't have done this and had not found somebody. It was probably one of the most important things I'm concerned about, really. Three main races in this cycle. I'm concerned about who wins the sheriff. And they go in this order by the way. I want to make sure that my friend Ross Teeple, who we handpicked to run for sheriff, when his name came out, it was immediate. I knew immediately that was the right person. And he has done an amazing job of fighting for it. But I'm very concerned about him getting in. I want to make sure the county attorney that we have gets in because he's been amazing to work with and he gets the balance of the rule of law where you should be kind and where you need to be tough. And then the third thing is my election. I'm number three on the list because I think our lives are more affected by our local politicians than they are by federal politicians. And so that's why I think getting a good sheriff and getting our county attorney, who's great, getting them reelected is what's really important for me.

Man, it's interesting you say that because that's where I was going to go next, was, you know, I heard, I'm going to be honest, I'm about this close to thinking DC is completely gone. Maybe I'm already there and I'm not admitting it. I don't know. But, and you hear all the time that the local politics is what affects your everyday life. And it seems to be, it's starting, for me, it's starting to look like local politics is where you'll have the biggest impact. And you just said it. And so I'm really curious now to hear why are you going to give up your seat in your county, where you're making a huge difference, to go to DC with all the rest of the scumbags?

You know, we asked ourselves that question a lot because when I got into being the sheriff, I thought this country was heading to a place where there would be pockets of freedom. And what I tried to create and what I tried to foster was a pocket of freedom in Pinal county. But we are in a good place. And it's not necessarily that I wanted, I want to stay there. I would have liked to have stayed there, but I probably would have only stayed there one more term anyway, because financially I still have a family that I need to care for. I want to make sure I can retire at some point. And so I was either at that point where you're the sheriff for 2030 years, or you're going to have to move on to the private sector. And so I was at a point where I felt like our county was good, that I could hand the baton off onto somebody that was like minded, who believed in the constitution, second amendment, the rule of law and wasn't afraid to stand up to the government because I've always said my job as a sheriff, I'm not the government, I am your county sheriff.

My job is to protect you from the bad guys and from government overreach. That's my job. And so it was really hard, I mean. Cause I think that we are in a place where DC might be gone. You know, I have to hope. Like how many people stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square?

I don't know.

One. One dude went out and stood in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square and changed a dynasty. So I have to believe that one person can still make a difference. Whether I'm that person or not, I don't know, but I felt compelled to do it. And if I am that person, then I'll stand in front of the tanks if that's what it takes to restore this country. Well, he may be too far gone. I don't know. What I do know is in the end, if you're a Christian, you know how this story ends. In the battle of good and evil, which is exactly what we're in. In the battle of good and evil, evil does not prevail. And so I'm going to do everything I can to try to save the constitution and restore it and hopefully turn DC around. I don't know. It might be too far gone. I'm right there with you, but I have to try. It's not my nature to raise the white flag, especially when you're in a position to do something about it. And so that's why I'm doing it.

Good for you. Good for you. We need guys like you up there. I want to segue into. Back into some of the stuff that's going on in the country and the crime wave. You know, I thought this stuff was only happening in certain places, like California, New York, Illinois, these type of places, you know, where you have these criminals, they commit a crime and then within a couple of hours they're released back into society. Even yesterday, I had a good friend was eating dinner with him at my house, and he lives in St. Louis. And he told me that his daughter, his 17 year old daughter, was. It was a drive by shooting. Somebody drove up next to her, stitched four shots right into the side of her car. He told her to go, go to the nearest hotel. They called the police. Parents showed up. Police didn't do anything. They weren't. They nothing. They didn't even want to write a report. They wound up writing a report just to give to the insurance so that they could get the car fixed through insurance. But they said, we're not going to go after them. We're not even, we're not going to, we're not going to do anything.

And here's why. Because we'll go get them, we'll put them in jail, and then they'll be back on the street just a matter of hours. And you hear this. You hear this all over the country.

Now, it predominantly resides. What you got is you had guys like George Soros and those guys that actively were out trying to get, they know that sheriffs are a little bit harder. Guys that are, sheriffs are typically rule of law guys, police of chiefs, kind of the same thing. So what they did is they started going after county attorneys, attorneys, attorney generals, district attorneys, and getting those people elected. I can go arrest people all day long, which is what the cops are basically saying. If the county attorney and the judges are releasing people, because you've now appointed a ton of ton of judges that don't want to uphold the law, and you've appointed or elected district attorneys or county attorneys or attorney generals that are not going to hold people accountable based on DEI standards or because they had a tough upbringing or because they were raised in poverty or whatever it be or their skin color or whatever, that's a problem. And what you're doing is that goes back to democracy because you are mob rule. You're more afraid of what the mobs will come in and do and their havoc, they will reap on you if you arrest the wrong person.

So you're, what you just do is you just release them and it creates just chaos. And what it does is to us, it disincentivizes us, makes us not want to go out and do our job. And then you take places like Illinois or St. Louis or some of these places. I don't know if St. Louis is, but, you know, they tried, states are trying to remove qualified immunity from police. Well, qualified immunity, they've now painted as this, oh, cops can do whatever they want and nobody ever holds them accountable. That's not true. Like, if qualified immunity protects you when you do your job, if you break the law, qualified immunity does not protect you as a police officer. But if you are doing your job, if I go and I'm doing CPR on an elderly lady and I crack her rib cage while I'm doing it, I am doing my job, they can't come back and sue you and take your house and take everything you've tried to build over the last several years or throughout your career in an instant. That's what. When you take away qualified immunity, what you're doing is you're exposing police officers to civil lawsuits.

When we do our job, if I walk in, I rough somebody up. Now all of a sudden my agency determines or the county determines I was out of line or I didn't follow policy, they can sue me. And now I'm at the risk of losing what I've tried to build. My house, my car, my money, my bank account. So what incentive do cops have to respond to calls anymore if they're going to let you out? And frankly, you're going to make me be liable civilly if I do something wrong. We got cops getting charged for doing things, doing their job. They're getting charged. Why? To appease the masses. Because you have police chiefs and other people that are too, they're not too cowardly to stand up and go, no, my guy was doing his job and that's the problem. And I see it more and more. We saw during COVID people taking a knee, you know, after what we saw in minnesota, the George Floyd incident, you saw these police chiefs going out and taking knees and all that stuff. Let me tell you something, when you show weakness, you, they will come after you.

They don't stop coming after you. They think of, well, if I appease the masses, they'll leave me alone. No, once they know you're weak, they're going to come after you hardcore. They'll continue to push on you. Once you pass one law that is geared towards police reform, then they're going to continue to go. There's no appeasing these folks. You got to go, you got to stand up for what is right. I, regardless of how hard it is, that's what honor is. You stand up for what is right no matter what the consequences are, no matter how hard it is, you do what is right. And people say to me, well, sheriff, you say that because you're a sheriff and you're elected every four years and that's, and I always tell people that's true. But police chiefs can say what they want too. They may lose their job, but you can say what you want. Nobody's gonna stop you from saying it.

Well, that's one thing I get tired of hearing is I'm just doing my job.

I do too.

That shit doesn't cut it anymore.

Not for me either.

You know, I don't care. I hear that shit with all kinds of law enforcement agencies federal agencies as, oh, I'm just doing my job.

I hate it.

You're just doing your job.

Your job is to get to people. Your job is to protect their constitutional rights, and your job is to stand up for what is right, regardless of the consequences, and right. Go get a new job. That's the thing. And I always tell these chiefs and tell you guys, it wasn't the police officers in this country that didn't hold the line. It was the leadership in this country or the supervisors in this country who kowtowed to the mob. And then it changed our profession in a way. And you just frankly can't throw a blanket of reform on the entire country. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, I mean, you asked me to do a hard job. I'm out there doing it. I'm running towards evil, I'm running towards danger. My people are, and I need some. I'm going to do it and I'm going to do it the right way. And I prefer that you not come out like the old Jack Nicholson thing. Don't question the manner in which I try to do it.

Yeah. Let's talk about the defunding the police movement.

Oh jeeze.

Probably your favorite topic, right?

I actually like talking about it because I think it's preposterous.

What do you think? Do you think there was a long term goal with this?

It goes back to what I said before. If you're going to change America, you must start by weakening the rule of law. You must turn the people against the police. You must create instability and chaos in community. What it does is it creates a need for government. People look to government as the answer. And I'm not here to tell you government the answer for nothing. Like don't ask them to be the answer for anything. They're usually the authors of the chaos. They feed into it and the media feeds it. This was by design to change the country. And to change it, you have to undermine the rule of law, let people out, get rid of bonds, get, you know, if you taken into, I mean, there's people that are hardcore criminals that are attempted murder, murder that are getting released without bonds. I don't get this.

I don't. So with the def, I've talked about this several times. I feel like the defund the police movement was a way to restructure the entire organization. Get out the old, bring in the new. They demoralized cops, they demoralized sheriffs departments, they cut the funding. And now you have this new wave of people signing up.

They dont want the lions anymore. Have you ever heard the Aesop fable about the lion and the farmer's daughter?

Uh uh.

So this Aesop who writes all these fables, and just to tell your listeners, Aesop's fables don't always end well, but Aesop, he writes all these little stories. Well, one of the stories is a lion and a farmer. So this lion falls in love with this farmer's daughter, and the lion comes around to the farm and the farmer sees the lion and he's like, oh, I'm really uncomfortable with this. You got sharp teeth and you got sharp claws, and I, I don't know about this. I don't know if I want you dating my daughter. And the lion's like, no, no, no, my teeth and my claws are for to protect your daughter. That's what I use them for. I would never hurt your daughter. And so the farmer's like, I don't know, I'm still not comfortable with it. But he sees that the lion and his daughter just fallen deeper and deeper in love. And so finally the lion comes to the farmer, he says, hey, listen, I would love your daughter's hand in marriage. And I'm embellishing the Aesop fable, by the way, but he comes and says, I'd love your daughter's hand in marriage.

And the farmer says, on one condition, because I'm really uncomfortable with you, that you remove your teeth and your claws. And the lion goes home and he thinks about it, but his love is so deep for his daughter that he's not seeing clearly. And so he goes, and he has his teeth and his claws removed, and he comes back and he tells the farmer, hey, I remove my teeth and my claws, and the farmer picks up a club and clubs them to death. The moral to the story is, I use it all the time with the second amendment. Never give up your teeth and your claws. And this lion, you need people out there with sharp teeth and sharp claws. We are what defend your daughters from the evil, from the people and the very same people. You know, the other saying is, you know, the, the sheep will spend their entire life worrying about the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd. You know, and that's kind of where we're at. We've got to really kind of see who is the wolves and who is who's really out to get us. And so you cannot give up your teeth and your claws.

Law enforcement, yes, we have sharp teeth and we have sharp claws, but we are used them to protect the people we're not going after the people. What they want us to do is declawed d teeth only to club us to death after.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it carried on through the military with the vax mandates, with all kinds of stuff. And now. Now you see what's happening. Lowest recruitment numbers and they're not lying now. You know, the army, the US army wants to bring. The US army wants to bring back retirees up to 70 years old.

Jeez.

That's how bad. That is how bad recruitment is right now.

And they don't accept it. I watched the. The congressional hearings where they were beating that lady up about it. You know, Josh Hawley was talking about it and they think they're okay. I mean, that's the thing, is they convinced themselves that what they're doing is okay, that everything's still alright. And they don't realize that they're weakening us. You know, the rest of the world looks at us and laughs at us. Our friends don't respect us anymore and our enemies don't fear us.

Why would you?

Why would you?

It's a joke.

And so now everybody's running amok. And that's what that defund the police movement is. It's designed to weaken everything and nobody wants to be held accountable anymore. Everybody wants somebody to blame. It's frankly, unmanly. And it is disgusting. Like, I just can't. I can't stand it when people always have to make excuses of why things are happening without accepting any personal responsibility.

It's just. It's just. It just. I wish I had more positive stuff to say, you know, but I just see everything falling apart. I mean, I just read this article the other day about how the country's elites are now. Like, the big thing now is dual citizenship and getting out of here.

I get it.

That's how bad it's getting.

Look, I sit at night and look at properties all over the country and all over the world. I have no desire to leave. I've never abandoned this country. But I get it. We're losing what this country was. We're losing what they built here. But it's not the first. You want hope, and I always. We talked about it earlier and I'm. This is still the greatest country in the world. There is no other place like America. Freedom still exists here. While it is fleeting, freedom still exists here. This is the Alamo of freedom, and it is incumbent upon us to defend it. This is not the first time we've hit a crisis like this in this country. We've had many of these, the founding fathers. Imagine what they did. They broke away from England at the time, the most powerful country. When they decided, we've had enough, they sent them the Declaration of Independence, saying, we're done. A guy named Thomas Paine, who wrote the book common sense, but he was one of the founding fathers, great things. But Thomas Paine wrote a series of pamphlets because he knew that they needed to motivate that percentage of Americans who did not want to go against England, to motivate them to do something about it.

And so he wrote something called the american crisis. And in there he put, these are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country. But he who stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. We're in another crisis. And this is where the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots are nowhere to be found. And there is a movement of good that is happening in this world. As much bad as we are seeing. There is opposition in all things, and there is a lot of good happening, and there's a lot of good people stepping up to take the helm. And so I'm optimistic about us, our ability to save this country. I also understand that the Bible, things are probably going to get worse before they get better, but I am optimistic that good things are happening. There's good men like Eli Crane and other people who are willing to fill the gap, to step up and say, I will go.

I will save this country because it is redeemable, it is worth saving. But it's going to take men with the fortitude to do it, men that are courageous and that are willing to get in the battle.

We'll get to some positivity here in a minute, but I want to, before we close out the crime and all this other stuff that's going on, you know, I never used to pay attention to local elections because I didn't think they matter. Now I pay a lot of attention, and I think that the sheriff's office is probably maybe the most important elected official and communities. And so I pay a lot of attention. I talked to some people at the sheriff that I know that work at the sheriff's office to ask, like, who do you guys want to work for and why? And so where I'm going with this is, what can sheriffs be doing to better their communities? How do they stand up to this. I mean, what would your, if you were standing in front of all of the country sheriffs, what would you tell them?

It's the little things. They're not even little. Covid. Covid was a perfect example. Don't be afraid to stand alone and stand up for what is right. There's a saying that where a man stands for freedom, he stands for God. Where a man stands for freedom, he stands with God. And where a man stands alone for freedom, he still stands with God. And you've got to know that you may be alone, but you got to stand up for what is right. So my mantra is fear, not do right. And so I always tell, you know, I started something called Protect America now, which was sheriffs coming together across the country to stand up for the rule of law, to stand up for the constitution, and to fight against bad policies and government overreach. And really it's designed not to. We're not here to cause trouble, but the job of, our job is to stop bad, you know, we're here to stop the bad guys and stop government overreach. So my message to sheriffs is don't be afraid to do what is right. And you may not. It may be hard. It's probably going to be very hard, but it's worth it.

It's worth standing in there and fighting for the people. It is one of the most important positions in the government because the sheriff is the last line of defense for freedom. If they ever come to take guns, it'll be your sheriffs that will either allow it or won't allow it. If they ever come to take your freedom of speech, it'll be sheriffs who will allow it or won't allow it. It's probably going to be sheriffs that are going to have to stand up and tell the FBI, nope, we're not doing that here. Get out of my county or the ATF or whatever it is. If they're there for, you know, immoral purposes or for anything that would violate somebody's rights as a citizen, where a law really, where a law has not been broken, then they need to be standing in the gap for the people. And so I would just. My message to sheriffs is now we need you now more than ever, stand up for what's right. Stand up for the people because they are the last line of defense.

Thank you for saying that. Let's move into the positive portion, other than you running for Senate. But, you know, we've spoken about this at breakfast. I think we spoke about it downstairs a little bit. And, you know, the one thing that I do see that's positive that's happening is you see this massive wave of believers in God and Christ happening right now. I mean, it is a wave of it, and I'm part of it, you know? And, you know, ever since I've come to, I've. I'm starting to come to the realization that this is. I personally believe that this is bigger than any of us can even fathom.

And I'm with you.

And it seems to be. And I think this is a good thing, is it seems to be the only thing that we can all come together on, because we can't come together on anything else. We can't come together on race, we can't come together on gender, we can't come together on politics, we can't. You know, it's just division everywhere you see, right? And. But this is the one thing, the one thing that people seem to be coming together on. And that's pretty damn powerful.

It is. There's a scripture I always share. It's first or second Timothy one seven. For God hath not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. And really, the power in this country is we the people. That's the power. I often tell the story of why zebras have stripes. You know why zebras have stripes? Why? It's not for camouflage. Because some people say, well, it's camouflage for their surroundings. Well, no. A lion is tan. It can be 2ft in front of you, a Zebra you can see from a mile away. So the scientist wants to understand it. So he goes out, he's watching this herd of Zebra, and he's watching one of the zebra, and he looks down to make a note. And when he looks back up, he can't find the zebra he was watching mixed in with all the other zebras. So he's like, I got this. I got an idea. I'm gonna take a can of paint, goes out the next day, takes a can of paint in his jeep. He's like, I'm gonna paint an x on the butts of a few of the zebras.

That way I can watch him. So he goes out, takes a jeep, does it, paints the x on the butts of a few of the zebras, comes back and he's like, thinks he's pretty slick. Gets up the next morning, the predators ate those zebras. What he realized was that the predators couldn't hunt the herd. They had to be able to identify one of the zebras to be able to hunt them. What he also realized is that the zebra stripes were not camouflaged for their surrounding. It was camouflaged for each other.

Interesting.

The power of the Zebra stripes was we the people, the herd. As long as they stood together as a herd, then nobody could attack them. The predators had trouble, but the second they were able to start petitioning off, they were able to get them. And you still need zebras like me that are going to paint a big red x on my butt and walk out in the field. That's I'm running for office. That's what you need. But mind you, we're not being hunted by lions. We're being hunted by jackals and hyenas. And our ability to stand together is our power. That's we the people. And I agree with you more people are realizing we're in more of a spiritual battle than anything. And our ability to win this is to stand together regardless of whether we agree on all aspects of the government, the media, everything they do is designed to divide. They divide you on race, religion, politics, social, ideology, Covid, whatever. Whatever they can divide you on, they do. Like we were talking earlier, I always explain about a flashbang. Flashbang, little grenade canister that has no shrapnel, but we use it when we serve in search warrants or make an entry into a building.

You take the pen, you throw it in there, boom. It's a loud noise. It's a bright light and percussion. Well, it's designed to take away your hearing. It's designed to take away your vision temporarily. And it's designed to discombobulate you so that we can come in and take control of you. We have all been flashbanged and if we don't get our wits about us real quick, we're gonna be in big trouble.

Yeah.

And it's we the people is the power. And that starts because people are realizing we're coming together under a different concept of, hey, this is a battle of good and evil. We may not agree on everything, but I'm on the side of good and I want to come together to do what I can to fix it.

Thank you for sharing that. Well, we're going to wrap it up here. Do you have any last words?

I do, I do. It's a tough world. I mean, things are not easy. You know, we go through personal struggles. We're going through struggles within our own country. We go through challenges as we try to better ourselves. Going back to the book, as a man thinketh by James Allen, my favorite part of that book is at the very end, he has a quote that says, keep your hand firmly upon the helm of thought in the bark of your soul. Reclines the commanding master. He does but sleep. Wake him. Self control is strength. Right. Thought is mastery. Calmness is power. Say unto your heart, peace, be still. We all have a commanding master inside of us. You need to wake him or up and get him up to the helm of the ship. To navigate these difficult waters, these stormy seas will subside at some point, but it's our job to make sure that we keep the ship on course, and each and every one of us have a responsibility to do that. And you got to wake the commanding master inside of you up. And the other thing, too, is when I talk to kids, I always tell them three things.

I tell them, be authentic. The world is hungry for authentic people. Every single one of us have different DNA, different fingerprints. Our irises are different. It's probably your most different thing about you. There is nobody else in the world like you. If that doesn't tell you of the godliness or the majestic ness of who you are and what your purpose here is on this earth, I don't know what to tell you. And the fact that you woke up this morning, whoever's listening means that your purpose on this earth is not done yet. So embrace your authenticity. Your job is to share it with the world. The second thing is, don't be afraid to do the uncomfortable work. One of the books I love is called u Squared by Price Pritchett. And in there, he talks about taking quantum leaps in your life, not the 10%, not the 20%, taking huge leaps. But to do it, you got to take risk, and you got to get into the uncomfortable area, and you got to do things that you don't know what the outcome is going to be. That's what faith is for. You just got to do it sometimes.

But all the good stuff in life comes from uncomfortable and hard work. That's where the gold is. That's where the diamonds are. So you got to be willing to do the uncomfortable work. And the third thing, my last piece of advice, is surrender the outcome. Everybody who is angry and frustrated and sad or depressed in this world is because you are trying to control an outcome that you have no control over. We are becoming a victim of what has happened, as opposed to accepting the fact that you couldn't change any of that. Like, when I lost my kids, I carry a badge, a gun. I do Dui stops all the time. There was nothing I could do to stop them from dying that night. So I can either be angry or frustrated or sad or I can decide to take control of the situation and surrender the outcome. And we can't control what's happening in DC and we can't control whatever all what's happening in the world. Don't worry about that. Surrender that outcome to something else. But what you can control is your attitude and your work output. And if you can maintain a good attitude and keep the control of the helm of your own ship and control the area, the aspects of your life, like your home life, your work output, your whatever bailiwick you have, you will find that you will be much happier and that you will not get into what happens as much as you are about having the right attitude and having working hard.

That's really what's going to define your life. So be authentic, don't be afraid to do the uncomfortable work and surrender the outcome.

Great word, brother. So thank you.

Thank you.

Well, Mark. Sheriff, I just marks good too. It was, it was an honor to have you here. I've been really looking forward to this interview and I'm going to link all your books in the description and your campaign. I just wish you the best of luck and I hope to see you up there.

I appreciate it, brother. Thank you.

Really do. Thank you.

Thank you. God bless you too. Thanks for all you do.