Podcast: "The Hard Country," Ep. 15, on the unfolding crisis.

Perhaps our most-important episode yet.

This is arguably one of the most-consequential episodes of The Hard Country to date: don’t be misled by the title card. (Of course violence in Mexico is the “new normal,” and it’s the old normal too.) In this hour, we discuss several items of surpassing importance, including: the social and Constitutional crisis that the federal government is courting, perhaps deliberately, with its approach to the border; U.S. media’s perennially misleading reporting on border and immigration affairs; and who, exactly, actually cares about the migrants and Mexicans caught in the web of traffickers and their own criminal state.

Here’s a spoiler on the last point: it’s not the open-borders crowd, and it sure isn’t Washington, D.C. Have a watch —

A friend called recently to propose an idea — one so good I wish I’d thought of it long before — in which the federal government, having failed to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, simply delegates the role to the relevant states and block-grants the necessary funds, so they may do the job. It won’t happen, of course, but that isn’t the point: the point is in the thought experiment, and asking why it won’t happen. If the goal of policy is to secure entry and exit to the United States, assure humane treatment to migrants, and defend the basics of national sovereignty, then you will get one set of outcomes. What we get is the opposite on all three counts. We can ask why, and in doing so, we ought to start with the understanding that the outcome — from a particular perspective — is rational.

The Hard Country can be found on YouTube, quite obviously, and also at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and no doubt elsewhere.