Talk Easy with Sam FragosoAs a fourth generation border resident in El Paso, politician Beto O’Rourke has long been making the case for immigration reform. He’s continued to do so this summer, as the humanitarian crisis at the Texas-Mexico border has accelerated under Gov. Greg Abbott.
After a check-in with Dad Fragoso (4:08) we sit with O’Rourke to unpack the severe anti-migrant tactics carried out under Operation Lone Star (15:50), the dangerous rhetoric that delivered this crisis (28:00), and the checkered history of immigration reform in Texas (31:10). We also walk through the focus of Beto’s new book, We’ve Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible (35:47), the four-year aftermath of the El Paso shooting (38:38), and why he continues fighting for change in the state (42:45).
On the back-half, O’Rourke reflects on his recent Gubernatorial campaign (46:36), how the Texas electorate has shifted since his 2018 Senate run (49:53), his unwavering belief in people (55:55), how he hopes President Biden mitigates the cruelty at the border (1:00:00), and to close, a story about fatherhood (1:05:10).
Join the fight down in Texas alongside Powered by People. To watch Sam's film, Sebastian, visit our show-notes.
Pushkin, this is talk easy. I'm standing Forgoso. Welcome to the show. For more than two years, Governor Greg Abbot has taken an increasingly hostile approach to defending the Texas Mexico border. But this summer, Abbot somehow has gone a step further. According to interviews with state officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times, Texas law enforcement line the river banks with razor wire, denied water to migrants, and in some cases intentionally refused to alert federal border agents who might assist arriving groups seeking asylum. Now, this treatment, while unquestionably abhorrent, is not exactly new. Growing up as a second generation Mexican American in Chicago, I'd often hear stories about what my grandfather faced as he left Mexico for America. In fact, a couple years back, I made a short film about him called Sebastian, and in that it told the story in part of his journey through America in the nineteen fifties and even then, the brutality, the discrimination, the fears some had that he was here to take their job. It was all part and parcel of the immigrant experience. And so today I wanted to have a different kind of conversation about what's happening down in Texas. And to do that, I thought we should call up one of our most beloved recurring guests on Talk Easy. Of course, I am talking about my father. Just give him a call back, by popular demand, my father, Dad, welcome back.
Hey, let's see who's sweeting me? Is it?
I think?
Come?
Ou may have you beat Doctor Jaw came on a lot.
Yes.
To be fair, doctor Jaw stop returning my emails once the Biden administration hired him, So I appreciate you haven't You haven't done that. What does a teacher do on summer vacation right now? You're usually teaching middle schoolers. You have these couple months off. Are you okay? Are you getting by? Do you miss them?
Yeah?
No, I do really because that silence felt like you really didn't miss them.
Well, because I'm going back in about a week. But honestly, I mean, I decided to do this, and I really wanted to do it. Here now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sitting on my mom's couch and all summer, for the most part, I've been taking care of her, and I'm sitting on the couch where she sits for hours, watching her masses and watching and doing her rosaries and all that. And I'm trying to feel my surroundings. And then she has like twenty thousand photos around here, photos of you when you were little. And then we're going to talk about this situation about immigration, and I think about all these people who want to have this and how unfair this is. It's just odd.
It's funny because I wanted to call you up because obviously what's been happening down in Texas where there's been this humanitarian crisis as more and more people try to get across the border separating Mexico and Texas. As I'm looking at you right now, you're enveloped by a bunch of photos of my grandmother, your mother, who is ninety seven and sick but still ninety seven in here, and of course in most of the photos that I'm looking at, it's of her and my grandfather Sebastian.
Yeah.
And so with all of that, given that this is such a personal issue, a familial issue, when you look at what's happening right now down in Texas, how are you holding all of it?
What's it's fear mongering, and what the Orange Buffoon created was this fear that these people crossing their border were these you know as you call them, and I'm not going to go into the names because they're ridiculous, but the majority of the people coming here are here to find that whatever they want to call American treem. You know, your uncle Kwan is an engineer. Your auntie Bertha was a manager of a bank. You know your auntie Rosa, she had an amazing job at Come with Edison, with a great pension, and she's happy. And they all found partners for life. And my father gave up everything. And unfortunately, the way we're being perceived and the lies and the false truths of whatever media source that these white people want to get into are taking over their lives. So people are afraid of the unknown. You can call it racism, you can call it whatever. I mean. It's just it's pathetic. It is what it is.
The way you're framing our family's story, that we all came here, that we made a better life for ourselves, that we got married, we had jobs with pensions, it sounds like a fairy tale. And it's odd to me because I've never heard you describe the journey in such picturesque terms. Are you doing that because we're on a podcast right now.
No, No, it's about opportunity. So we had an opportunity. The opportunities didn't just come and fall into our laps. They came with crazy amounts of work and always thinking or saying that we are equal, or we are the same, or we are capable, always proving ourselves more. My sisters would speak a little bit of Spanish or in school and they would get hit. So the journey, yeah, I clossed right over it. But that we hit a bunch of bumps, yeah, and then we ran them over and then we just kept going. And that's all all these people want is just give me a chance. I'm going to prove myself. You can't just bitch and moan about what this country didn't give to you. We can only look at what's there and what can we take, And we're not taking it from nobody because nobody wanted to drive a forklift for twenty five thirty years. Nobody wants to do that shit, and yet my dad did. And then from there, I can do better, and that's what you need to do. And my brother did better. And that's what he needed to do and everybody else and all these people are coming over. Be honest with you, they're coming over in a harsher manner than my dad did. I mean, yes, he was caught a couple of times, he was thrown back, he was marked and shaved head and did all these things. And I'm sure he went through a lot of racism, but he wouldn't talk about it. It's almost like a World War Two veteran who doesn't want to talk about the war. He'd have stories, but there were always lighthearted. He didn't want to get into living in a box in Baker's Field. He didn't want to get into that. But you know, I can see why that would be painful for him and why it was painful for him. But you know, these people coming over who are just being I think bullying and harassed and just abused on the other side of Mexico. Some of them are falling into traps of taking drugs on the other side, or we're going to kill your family. There's so many stories, and so their desperation is being shown. And that joke of a governor in Texas is that he's just trying to get votes that's all it is.
And I think that's key because these people that are coming from all over.
Central America, South America, from Mexico.
And from all those places, they're often leaving even more dire conditions. They're fleeing political upheaval, all kinds of violence, yep, and now come here as their last resort. And to then be treated the way they are being treated, it is almost unfathomable. And yet it is happening, and it is happening in large part because of policies created and carried out by Governor Greg Abbott. And so I think with that, we should talk to someone who challenged Governor Abbot in the last election this past November, and someone who's been outspoken about why and how we can do better in this moment. What do you think about that? We should I make a call? Who do you have Auntie Rosa? Should we call her up?
For sure? Let's do it. Boy, she's gonna have a hell over.
Imagine I call her up. She's got like three pages ready to go against Abbot. No, we're gonna call an old in front of the show, someone who has been on before, but not as many times as you. Let's call up the former congressman of Texas, the author of the new book We've Got to Try in a recent gubernatorial candidate for the state.
Of Texas better. I like that guy.
I like him too. I'll make sure to share the message. I'll call you back in a little bit, cool Betto. It's good to see you.
It's good to see you. It's been a little while.
I think we last spoke back in April of twenty twenty, right around when the pandemic began. To say that you've been busy these past few years feels like a colossal understatement. You ran for governor, you wrote a book, You did a little teaching at the University of Chicago, which all of us Chicagoans were very excited about. Before we dive into the bigger stuff, how the hell are you doing.
I was thinking about this, not because I anticipated the question from you, but I've just had a great string of days and weeks and probably months, and I feel incredibly lucky. You know, our kids all started school on Monday, and they're all just in this terrific place. Our oldest is sixteen, our youngest is twelve, our middle child, our daughters fifteen. They are becoming who they will be and we can see that, and it's fucking awesome. They're just amazing people. Not that they don't have problems, because everyone does, but man, we've lucked out there. And my mom, who since you and I last talked, found that she had cancer, and a serious cancer in different parts of her body, including in her liver, and she just got, you know, a blood and body scam and yesterday met with her oncologist and these two lesions in her liver are shrinking, which is beyond what we could have hoped for, and the cancer and other parts of her body has stabilized and maybe in some places even begun to recede. We don't know. And the doctor was really clear about this. This may or may not hold. The next three months will be very telling. But I got that news yesterday, Sam, I've just been on this high. So the stuff that matters most we can talk about the governor's race and other things that are important and truly do matter and matter to a lot of us, but personally in my life, the things that really matter most to me my family, my wife, our kids, my mom, my sister. We're doing really good. Well.
I think we're going to have to try to carry that positivity and optimism as we work through in the next hour. What you've professionally been talking about actually throughout the summer, you know, you spend a whole lot of time raising awareness for what you've called a humanitarian crisis at the border. For context, Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker writes that in the past two years, millions of migrants, spurred by political and economic turmoil in their home countries and by President Joe Biden's welcome stance, have come to the southern border and crossed into the United States. Though hundreds of thousands have been denied entry, hundreds of thousands more from countries as far away as China and Tajikistan have made their way in, often by claiming that they will face persecution or violence if they return home. As a resident of a border town like El Paso, and as someone who has spent a lot of time these past five years across Texas at these ports of entry, what have you seen this summer that has made you call this moment a humanitarian crisis? What's different about right now?
The level of barbarism that we are seeing at the Texas Mexico border, the absolute inhumanity, This disgusting way that we are treating our fellow human beings is shocking to me. Right now, in the Rio Grande River outside of Eagle Pass, Texas, it's a really small town in Maverick County in South Texas, across the river from Piedras Negraas the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has deployed this floating wall. It's a barrier comprised of large orange buoys that are strung together with netting below the surface of the river, and in between each buoy is literally a saw blade, like the serrated edged disc, so that if you were to try to grab onto it, you'd slice your hand open. It is medieval. It's something you might expect in like a Mad Max movie or a apocalyptic TV show, and you see that and you're like, well, shit, I can't believe that anybody would do that to anybody, and yet we're doing that to people right now. And in that part of the Rio Grande River that joins the United States and Mexico that we know of so far, twenty eight people have died just in this one little section, and over the last week they recovered two bodies, including of a child that were caught up in this booy barrier. I spoke to a member of the Texas Guard who has been deployed down there yesterday, and he talked about coming upon a woman who had one hand on this Concertina razor wire on the shore to pull herself out of the water, her other hand holding her little daughter, to try to pull her out of the river. As this is happening, Department of Public Safety troopers, that's our state police in Texas are yelling at the woman and this guardsman to get back in the water. And there are substantiated cases of children and moms and being pushed into this river in one hundred, one hundred and five hundred and ten degree heat. So you've got this governor who has almost mastered the art of cruelty here in Texas, and you might throw up your hands and I know we'll get into the governor's race that took place last year, and you say, you know what, we were unable to defeat him at the polls. This is our future for the next four years. The thing is, we know that there is a higher power in this country, and that's the president who, through the Constitution and US law literally has jurisdiction and purview over the border, over immigration law, over the river, and over our connection with Mexico. And what I hope that we are going to do as a country is push Joe Biden literally give him the power to do the right thing and intervene before we lose any more lives unnecessarily. And that's the crux of it. That kids, that moms, that people are dying right now unnecessarily, and they're dying to come here to do better for themselves and their kids, for sure, but also to do better for all of us. And I know that's a story you have told about your family. It's why you are here in the United States right now, and it's a story of tens of millions of our fellow Americans. We are people from the world over who have chosen or who have been brought here in some cases against their will, but by their very presence made us a better, stronger, safer place. And we are not just ignoring that history right now, we are literally trying to go backwards against it and losing the essence of what makes us so special.
Well, I want to talk about what President Biden can and what I think you and I both believe he should do. But before we do that, you mentioned these troopers down at the border. The director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steve McCraw, responded to some of what you just alleged, and he said, the purpose of the wire that you talked about is to deter smuggling betwey in ports of entry and not to injure migrants. He said, the smugglers care not if the migrants are injured, but we do. So on that side, you have someone like McCraw and a whole bunch of people from the Texas Department of Public Safety saying the wires not to hurt people, that we care about the migrants and the cartel does not, that we are actually trying to be helpful. What do you say to that.
I don't know another way to put it other than this guy is so full of shit, and not just on this because one of his own troopers has blown the whistle to describe everything that I'm sharing with you right now, and then it's been substantiated by other troopers who work under him. But this is the same guy who had dozens of troopers outside of rob Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, May twenty fourth last year, for more than seventy seven minutes, when an eighteen year old man was inside of a classroom with an ar fifteen hundreds of rounds of ammunition and was free to kill, destroy the lives of nineteen children and to teachers seventy seven minutes before those DPS troopers who were fully armed themselves and literally that is the job they signed up for while they waited outside. And since then it's been more than a year, we have yet to get the facts, the truth, answers, and accountability from Steve mccroff, from the Texas Department of Public Safety, from the governor of the state of Texas. So in my opinion and certainly for the people in Ubility and throughout much of the rest of Texas, this guy has zero credibility right now. And the other thing is he and Greg Abbott both have acknowledged that this barrier that they've put up and the concertina wire, that's not just on the shores, it's literally wrapped around barrels and submerged under water, so that as you try to cross, you will become entangled, ensnared, cut up, and very possibly drown when confronted with that, they're like, yeah, you're right, but maybe, just maybe this will deter people from making the journey in the first place. So they concede that this is likely to kill, to maim, to injure, and to produce suffering, But they say that is worthwhile as long as we're providing a deterrent for people to cross in the first place. That is what is just so galling. But it's going to take us doing everything we can to persuade President Biden that this is not just the right thing to do, but the right thing to do that will not compromise or cost him the election or political power to do other important things. And I feel like I can make that case.
Everything you've described has come under what has been called the Operation Loan Star that began in the summer of twenty twenty one as Texas saw a historic upswing of illegal border crossings. Now Texas legally cannot enforce federal immigration law, but Abbott, in turn has imposed misdemeanor charges on people for crossing the private property of ranchers along the border who choose to participate in his program. Some of them have not chosen to participate, but the fact of this operation is that they have already spent four point five billion dollars in the first two years. Your state has already committed another five point one billion dollars through twenty twenty five, costing taxpayers of Texas roughly two point five million dollars a week. But that brings us to, you know, the taxpayers themselves, four point four million, of whom voted for Governor Abbott in this last year's election as you attempted to unseat him. Now, this is a man who you've called a thug, a murderer, and a ghoul before I go on, Now that I have you here, do you want to tell me how you really feel about him?
You know, the facts speak for themselves in this case. And to maybe open the aperture a little bit wider. We've described what's happening at the border, but Sam, we also lead much of the developed world in the rate of maternal mortality. It's three times as deadly in Texas for a black woman, in fact, to give birth or to be pregnant. And it has a lot to do with the most restrictive reproductive healthcare ban in the United States of America, that is Greg Abbott. And then two years ago, we had a major winter storm in Texas, and because the governor had allied with the energy producers, the pipeline companies, the billionaire CEOs who run the energy operations of this state and not the people of Texas, and didn't weather rise and prepare that grid. Seven hundred people died in this state, many of them literally freezing to death in their home. So, you know, sometimes politicians will traffic in hyperbole or will speak in charge terms to try to get your attention. In my opinion, this is an accurate description of who this guy is and what he has done. But your very good question is, well, why in the hell did people vote for him and why is he the governor once again in Texas? And you know that answer is little complicated. Part of the answer is that we are the most challenged state in the nation when it comes to voting. So it's harder to cast a ballot or to register to vote in Texas than it is anywhere else in the nation. And those attacks on voting rights are most often focused on black voters, Latino voters, young voters, the very old, and increasingly the disabled in the state of Texas. So that's part of it. Republicans have held a monopoly on political power for three decades. Ann Richards was elected governor nineteen ninety. She was one of the greatest governors we've ever had, but was the last Democrat ever elected to that position, And since then, Republicans have had a stranglehold on power and the privilege that it affords, from partisan and racial gerrymandering and redistricting to the election laws that effectively disenfranchise and freeze out such a large part of the electorate. So every bad thing that I just described is reflective of Greg Abbott and people in power, not necessarily the people of this state, because they don't look like the electorate that we have right now. So my mission, and it's been this for a long time, is to do what I can through voter registration and voter engagement to make sure that those two are the same that the people of Texas look like and act like the electorate of Texas, and right now, those are two different groups of people that have produced the outcomes that I that I've just described.
In the state of Texas, there were seventeen million plus voters registered. There's almost about twenty two million that are eligible. But you got seventeen million. Of those seventeen million, eight million turned out, the turnout rate effectively being forty five percent. But I want to narrow in on what was a chief concern in this past election and what it means now, which is border security, because you have said in a whole bunch of recent interviews that Abbott has blood on his hands, but many on the right, including former chair of the Republican Party of Texas Matt Ronaldi, claim Abbot won the election because of not in spite of his policy on the border. Voters across the Texas An exit poll after exit pole repeatedly emphasized that the migrant crisis was the most important issue to them. And so if Abbot was imbued with this governing mandate, why then do you squarely put the blame and the blood on his hands.
This is such an excellent question because it's a tough one and it's a hard answer to give. But the responsibility is all of ours, right, and the accountability comes home not just to the governor who is taking these actions, but the people who've enabled him to do that, and those of us on the other side of this who'd been unsuccessful in making the case or overcoming the challenges of voter suppression and voter intimidation everything else that I laid out earlier. You know, you wonder over the course of human history and even modern human history, how some otherwise modern enlightened states could condition their people to hate some group based on religion, or ethnicity or immigration status. And I think that same question is very relevant today in America and in Texas, when you have four years of Donald Trump talking about Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, describing them as animals, as an infestation, and warning of an invasion, and those are all words that President Trump used. Greg Abbott, our current governor, traffics in that same language of invasion and people coming to kill us and to rape us and to do terrible, terrible things to us. And so look, you I those perhaps listening to this may have the luxury of doing and their homework on this or reading deeply. Others are working too many jobs, have too much going on, or for whatever reason, have one source of information and news, and that might be Donald trumpet maybe Greg Abbott. It may be filtered through Newsmax or Fox or some other medium like Twitter. It was a perfect foil for Abbot. If we questioned him on why nothing had been done in the months following the mass shooting and uvality in a state that leads the country in the number of school shootings, he would point to the border and say, watch out for those Mexicans. If we said, what are you going to do about the outflight of talent from public schools in Texas and our poor performance against public schools and almost every other state in the Union, he could point to the border and warn of invasion and Sam that is such an emotionally resonant issue. It scares the shit out of people because they've been conditioned to be afraid of folks who are brown, who are coming from another country, who speak a different language, who because of the failure at a presidential level for as many presidents as I can think of in my adult life, we don't have an immigration system that allows them to come here safely, legally, in an orderly fashion, and they are effectively functionally forced into crossing through that river in between the ports of entry, just the very side of which can send shivers down the spines of some who've been warned about these people coming to get us. So, I mean, that's a long answer to a tough question, But I think it's pretty close to the truth of the explanation for how someone doing this horrible stuff to our fellow human beings is able to win political power in Texas.
I want to unpack a few different moments of what you just said, and in part because I think it explains how we got here. You just said that every president has and in some ways failed to deliver comprehensive, sensible immigration reform. Now, this is something that Biden talked a lot about on the campaign trail back and tw It's something most Democrats running for president, including yourself, talks about when they're running for president. But legislation actually hasn't been a focus in Washington since the summer of twenty thirteen. This, of course, came on the heels of Obama's landslide victory over Romney, which was delivered in part by Latinos, who overwhelmingly voted for him at seventy one percent. Come June, the US Senate, led by the Gang of Eight, which boasted four Democrats and four Republicans, passed a bipartisan bill sixty eight to thirty two, in what Politico called the most monumental overhaul of immigration laws in a generation. The bill was then kicked back to the House of Representatives, which I imagine you remember since it was the same year that a young freshman congressman from Texas sixteenth District was elected by the good people of El Paso. When you look back at that time, how do you make sense of what happens next?
Well, I'd have to go back even further. The last time a president was actually successful in doing this was in the nineteen eighties, and it was Ronald Reagan nineteen eighty six. You might say, look, that was a different time. We were a different country, that was a different Republican party. All that is probably true, and yet since then, no president has been able to or willing to, And I think that's an important distinction to marshal the political capital and power necessary to get this done, because it's not easy, it's not broadly popular. And in President Obama's case, he chose instead of doing this to focus on healthcare in two thousand and nine, but that essentially was the choice, and he knew it was going to take everything he had. Probably didn't know that he was going to lose his majorities in both chambers ultimately and be severely constrained in his political power going forward, leading up to the moment you describe in twenty fourteen, where he was no longer working with a Democratic majority in the House. He had Speaker Bayner there at the time, who was in no position to deliver his majority in the House, and so it was a nice effort on the part of those members of the Senate. There were many of us who were in the House at the time, myself included, who wanted to work on that, but politically at that point impossible. You fast forward to twenty twenty one and President Biden again with majorities in both chambers. This is not the issue that he chooses to move forward on for whatever reason.
What do you think is the reason.
I don't think there's anything nefarious or malicious. I want to make that clear. The President chose to focus on the very real crisis born of the pandemic, a crisis of public health and life and death. He chose to focus on infrastructure and making sure that we make the investments in roads, bridges, water systems, internet connectivity that are causing us to fall behind some parts of the world and some parts of America. To fall behind others. He chose to focus on the climate crisis and was able to pull together really an extraordinary coalition of congress people to get that done, the most far reaching climate legislation this country's ever seen, well short of what is needed, but perhaps about as far as he could have taken it with the very slim majority he had in the United States Senate. But in that mix, we didn't have things like voting rights, which I've made the case are really important if you want to see a democracy work in a place like Texas. And in that mix, we didn't see immigration, which is going to continue to be both a humanitarian crisis and Sam, I'll argue right now to you, is going to be a political crisis for Democrats. If we cannot fix this, I guarantee you we will own this because the other side is content with their cruelty. They'll build walls and put up razor wire barriers in the river, and they'll say when people die and drown, well, maybe they shouldn't have tried to cross in the first place. That's their case. They're comfortable with it. The people who support that understand it. What is ours? I don't know what it is? Right now, because I haven't seen a leader of our party actually get something meaningful done on this.
In your book, we've got to try you connect the dots and make the case that perhaps some of the GOP's comfort with barbarism, with antagonistic, derisive language towards Latinos really can be brought back to Trump's announcement to run for office in twenty fifteen. Why don't we take a look at that for a second.
They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, their rapists, and some I assume are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting, and it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. This its en us, not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South in Latin America, and it's coming probably from the Middle East. But we don't know because we have no protection and we have no competence. We don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop, and it's got to stop fast.
When you watch that clip, now, how much of his rhetoric, that comfort with criminalizing and brutalizing specifically Mexicans, does that really begin to take hold of the GOP.
In that announcement, it marks this very clear break with the GOP of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. I just watched a clip of a debate between the two of them when they were running against each other in the Republican primary in nineteen eighty They're in Houston, Texas, and both of them are like fighting each other to show how open hearted and humanistic they are about immigration, acknowledging that the system wasn't working, but that the answer couldn't be simply turning people back or deporting all these folks, and lo and behold, Reagan is able to lead that effort in nineteen eighty six, and there's still a strain of that within the Republican Party coming in to this announcement speech that Trump makes in Trump Tower in twenty fifteen. I guess there's this moment in the Republican Party and probably in America like who the fuck is this guy? On the part of some and others saying to themselves, finally he is saying out loud exactly the way I feel inside and have been afraid to say for fear of not being politically correct or being shot down, or I didn't know that I had a home in either of these political parties. And seeing Donald Trump's rhetoric acted out by Greg Abbott and these DPS troopers on defenseless asylum seeking children and mothers, is our chance to stand up in the face of this act and stop it from happening.
You know, we can go back and forth on rhetoric and theory, and people say this then, and what did it mean and how did it play out? But I want to go to something that is real. On August second, twenty nineteen, Governor Abbott sent out a fundraising email accusing Democrats like yourself of quote plotting to transform Texas and our entire country through illegal immigration. The email continues, if we're going to defend Texas, we'll need to take matters into our own hands. The next day, and a Walmart in your hometown of El Paso, that's maybe eight nine miles from where you live, a twenty one year old gunman drove, as you said earlier, six hundred miles across Texas. He went into that Walmart, took matters into his own hands, killed twenty three people. Those people were children, They were mothers, they were fathers, they were grandparents. And he did this according to his own manifesto, as a response to the quote Hispanic invasion of Texas, citing the Great Replacement theory, the gunmen claimed to be defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion. Those words that we've been batting around on that day, almost exactly four years ago, as we're talking right now, wasn't just words. It produced real action, and it produced real lives lost. And I wondered, as a father, as a resident of El Paso, how you hold the weight of all this four years later.
I think the connection you draw between the rhetoric and language used by people in positions of power and the actions that that rhetoric inspires is so important, because you just made the case that El Paso, that massacre on the third of August twenty nineteen would not have happened otherwise. It was fully animated by the Great Replacement theory, by Donald Trump's warning of an invasion, by Greg Abbott's demand that we take matters into our own hands. And yet, as an El Paso and as someone who's lived here my entire life, I've known that long before Donald Trump, the border was the focus of so many of our fears of people who did not look like or speak like the majority of Americans coming into this country and changing this country as as they came, much as you know, the Irish did in the nineteenth century, and Southern Europeans and people from all over different parts of the world did at different times, inspiring that kind of fear and anxiety. But for much of my life it has been here, literally in El Paso, where we meet the rest of the world, where the rest of our country in at least the language of these populace and demagogues, is supposed to be afraid. You know, Donald Trump would routinely talk about El Paso as a dangerous place, literally lying no basis in truth whatsoever. But those lies were able to take hold because people had been conditioned for so long to think about immigrants in this way and to think about the border in this way. And so I just knew that it's really important, and I know now that it's really important that we understand the power of that language and that rhetoric, and we don't just say what those guys are telling you is wrong, and it's important to do that, but that we also share our own stories, because if we don't tell our story, somebody else will tell it for us. And that was what Trump and Abbott and others were so successful at doing. And so the things that you and I have been talking about today, they can seem intractable or impossible. Like we haven't had immigration reform since nineteen eighty six, We'll never get it. We have school shootings and they only seem to increase. It will never get better. The planet is warming. We're incapable of mounting a political response. We might as well give up. But in this book, I tell the story of people, including those from El Paso, who were denied the ability to vote because they were black, and fought for decades to win voting integration in Texas by nineteen forty four, inspired LBJ to pass the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five. That took generations to get done. And so when it comes to this question of rhetoric and the damage that it does to very real human lives and places like El Paso, we can't give into this, and we can't allow that massacre in twenty nineteen to be the end of the story. It must push us to do better, to do more, to engage with our fellow Americans, offer them the truth about who we are, what we mean, and what we contribute to the rest of this country. I think that has to be part of the conditioning that sets the stage for who else, however, the president is that ultimately leads on immigration reform and ending the tragedy and the needless death that we're seeing on the border today.
After the break more from Beto or work, you keep coming back to this, this need to tell a new story, and looking at how you ran your race for governor this past year, it seemed like you were trying to tell a new story. But I wonder because back in twenty eighteen you had this quote you said, the morning of election day, every part of me knew that we were going to win in and the opposite happened. You come two and a half points short. It was a loss that was hard to accept and understand. This past November, when the results came in and you lost to Governor Abbott by a little more than ten percent, how did you process and begin to understand how and why that happened.
It's almost like a law of physics of this inertia you've been for the past year pushing at almost unbearable speed to connect with enough people that you can win this election so that you can do the good things you've been talking about and stop the bad things that you see happening all around you across the state of Texas. And there's never time to really wonder about the odds or to ever even entertain the notion that you're not going to prevail, because that can defeat the entire enterprise before it's decided, Like, how can you mount this effort? If some part of you thinks that this is not going to work, you just wouldn't do it. It's like you're running this crazy race where you're killing yourself over the course of it. So you come through this, the elections decided, you have lost, and you've stopped physically moving, but everything inside of you is still pushing forward. You care just as much about the next school shooting, which is bound to happen because we are not changing the laws in Texas to match our values. You still care about the people who can't get an abortion or even just see a reproductive healthcare provider and are likely going to lose their lives because of it. And yet you no longer have this vehicle or platform to change that in the near future, and that Sam is the toughest thing in the world. Where does this energy go? And I'll tell you the last you know, eight nine months have been spent working through that, and a lot of that is reaching back out to folks across the state of Texas and finding out where I can be useful and helpful, and getting back to something that we have done very well over the last five or six years, which is engaging with prospective voters, helping them to get registered, bringing them onto the roles, and fighting back against this significant voter suppression and voter intimidation that we see here. So if this is all worth fighting for, and it very clearly is, then you can't give up and you just have to find a different role and way to be in this fight.
I think anyone listening to this right now when you ask the rhetorical question, where do you pour this energy into? Well, you've poured it into this podcast most certainly, and you've poured it into going on every kind of cable news program and talking about what's happening in Texas. But I want to say with the data, because you know this past election you won nineteen counties in twenty eighteen, you won thirty two counties. In the intervening four or five years. What has changed in the Texas electorate that precipitated that dip? Do you think the divisions have grown deeper between left and right? Was there something in your messaging that you would do differently? Now? How do we unpack that?
There's a lot to it. I got time you mentioned another factor earlier, which is at twenty eighteen, was the first referendum on Donald Trump's election of twenty sixteen, And to the credit of the good people of Texas, they knew that Ted Cruz was Donald Trump's partner in the Senate, and they knew that we could do better, and they turned out at historic levels. I think the largest voter turnout in Texas in forty years. It almost eclipsed presidential election turnout levels, and we very nearly won. So all of those were factors that made twenty eighteen really an exceptional year. And then there's Ted Cruz. I mean, believe it or not, there are a lot of people in Texas who love him because he's their guy, and he's willing to do any outlandish, stupid thing necessary for their cause, including inciting insurrection and rebellion in the Capitol, but he also inspires extraordinary energy and effort and voting. On the other side, Greg Abbott, though, I would argue, is just as if not more dangerous to the people of Texas than Ted Cruz is able to put across such a lukewarm milk toast persona in complete contrast to what Cruz does that just on superficial indicators for people, there's not as much to hold on to or to hate or to be against. But you ask another important question, are there things I could have done differently? Absolutely? I mean it's not all on those factors that I just described. Some of that is my responsibility as the candidate to have a message that was better at cutting through the fear mongering about immigrants and asylum seekers and invasions that were taking place at our border. And I'm one of those people who believe that in a contest like this, you either win or you learn.
What did you learn?
I think one of the most powerful things that we were a part of in twenty eighteen was direct, physical voter engagement. So you may or may not see the TV ad or remember the mailer You'll never forget that another human being in one hundred and five degree heat, which is how hot it is in El Pasa today, took the time to knock on your door and have a conversation to say, Hey, Sam, this guy Betto is running for Senate in that case, and these are some things that he would like to do for Texas. But I showed up here today to ask you what is most important to you, and that two way conversation I believe produced that historic turnout. We had a version of that in twenty and twenty two. I don't know that we prioritize that in person connection the way that we did in twenty eighteen and the way that I think could have helped us to achieve at a much much higher level. I think there's also a case to be made for a greater focus on voter registration. You read out the numbers and the statistics earlier. There are a lot of potential voters out there who literally aren't on the roles and cannot participate in an election. It is tough work, It is the shit work of a campaign, and nobody wants to do it so it doesn't get done. And yet people like me organizations like ours, powered by people. We need to be doing that work or we're not going to correct for the imbalance produced by voter suppression and voter intimidation. And then lastly, money's not everything, but money's a lot. And if you're outspent one hundred and forty million plus to eighty million, and you're already going against the person in power, right, you need need additional support and help. And if you look at sam what's been invested in Texas from outside of Texas over the last six years that I've been running statewide campaigns, it pales in comparison to what's been invested in Georgia, which is a third the size of Texas, to Wisconsin, to Pennsylvania, to you name a state that is a battleground state. And then you look at Texas. We are the future of this country, whether you like it or not. Forty electoral college votes, thirty million people. It's the future of energy production, it's the future of immigration. And I think we have a case made that national donors and everyday Democrats should be contributing to causes in Texas to give candidates here a fighting chance to win, because it's good for the people in this state and it will be terrific for the people in this country.
Well, you know that iPhone banked for you by way of powered by people. So I need no convincing on a personal level. And yet I have to say there's like this nagging question that's like eating at me that I imagine many people listening are thinking, and it's not one they want to ask, and it's not really one I want to ask, But I feel like I gotta because we've done a good job here. I think of trying to tell the truth, and the truth is whether it's the crew's loss in twenty eighteen, the Abbot lost in twenty twenty two. You mentioned Georgia where Stacy Abrams, who has come on this show, she lost in twenty twenty two as well, after having lost the last time in twenty eighteen to Brian Kemp. And I just wonder, this optimism you hold, this hope you have in people, has it not been shaken by these results, by these past elections.
I think, then, what's the alternative? Do you you give up? Do you give in? Do you accept everything that I've just described that's taking place in Texas as our permanent future? And fate. I can't do that. Ultimately we will prevail. I believe that in every bone in my body. The question is how long is it going to take? And I think that's a matter of effort, it's a matter of resources, it's a matter of luck. But those things that I can control, like effort and raising the resources and using whatever platform I have, to direct people's attention and volunteer hours and dollars to those activities that will shorten the amount of time between now and when we ultimately win. That's my job, that's my role. And I mentioned these stories that are so inspiring to me. If people who are in the trenches for decades, sometimes generations, you know, those civil rights leaders from the end of reconstruction towards the end of the nineteenth century till nineteen sixty four to the Civil Rights Act in sixty five, the Voting Rights Act. Imagine if they just said, you know what, fuck it, it's just too hard. We're never going to overcome Jim Crow will never overcome white supremacy and racism in this country. This is just something we got to live with. And of course they didn't, and they pushed the people in power, including most famously Johnson, who told Martin Luther King Junior at the end of sixty four, I just don't have the power to do voting rights. I wish I could, you know, God bless you, good luck. And King leaves a meeting and he says, we got to go get this guy some power, and they go and get him some power. John Lewis, most notably almost losing his life in Selma, Alabama. Within eight days, Johnson is convening a joint session of Congress, and he's pushing this country forward. We give credit to Johnson, he deserves much of it, but he wouldn't be there without John Lewis, without doctor King, without the generations of civil rights leaders who preceded them, right whose names we don't even know. But they never gave in. They never gave up. They told themselves, I've got to try. And that's the spirit that animates me. And I hope this moment and brings us to where we need to be as a country and as a state.
Here in Texas, you can see my frustration. I am tired of losing. I can't stand this. As a Chicagoan created in the image of Jordan, I am so fucking tired of losing.
Yeah, and again, I just got to tell you. You know, the folks we mentioned civil rights and voting rights, they didn't win for decades, for generations, Like some people didn't see that victory in their lifetime, no matter how hard they fought, but ultimately they won. There is a lot of evidence in our shared history that's staying in this fight. As frustrating as it is to those like you, Sam, who have been film banking and fighting for and voting for candidates you believe in, only to see them lose. If we give up up after a given number of election cycles, it's just going to prolong the amount of time that we're in this fight those who are left to fight it before we win.
Do you consider yourself a masochist?
You know what, I have a high tolerance for pain.
Is that why you're a runner?
Yeah, I'm a runner. I'm a cyclist. I'm a hiker. I'm a backpacker. I like to put the miles on and I like to push myself physically, mentally, probably emotionally, which is what you're doing in a campaign, or at least in the campaigns that I've run. And you have to like that because if you don't, you'll be destroyed. And so yeah, I think some part of me is good with that.
I think that's probably our shared connection. Then to bring it to where we started in this moment, in this fight against the brutalization that Operation Lone Star has been driven by. What do you want President Biden to do?
I want him to come pull up that buoy barrier, this drowning device in the middle of the Rio Grande River outside of Eagle Pass. I want him to pull up the razor wire wrapped barrels that are submerged under the waterline that are entangling and drowning these migrants and asylum seekers. I want him to resolve the conflict between state DPS troopers who are pushing pregnant mothers and children back into the river and Federal Border Patrol agents who are trying to do their job and process these asylum seekers as they set foot on American soil, follow the law of the land. This is his responsibility, and I don't think the Department of Justice lawsuit that is requesting that Greg Abbott pull up that barrier is enough. We don't know when it will be resolved. We do know that people will die in the meantime, and we need to see leadership from him. And so I think it is really that simple and that clear and that necessary for the president to act and to act right now.
Do you think you will?
I don't know. I'll say this. I had the chance to get to know him a little bit when I was in Congress and he was a vice president, a little bit when I was on the campaign trail with him in twenty nineteen, and everything I gather from that is that he is a good moral man who wants to and often does, do the right thing at the right time at these moments of truth. So I have some confidence that he's going to come through. I also know that there are countervailing political pressures from those around him, warning him of the danger of tangling up with the governor of the state of Texas on an issue that is difficult to explain that is politically popular. On the other side, you know, build the wall, send them back. Who cares if they drawn? And there's a very important civilizational, defining level presidential election taking place, and they don't want to fuck this up. And I understand all of that, But fear of the politics around this is not going to be a good look going into twenty twenty four. Fearlessly doing the right thing. Whatever the polling suggests to the contrary, is going to be something that, by the time this election is called in November of twenty four, will, to the president's credit, engender confidence in the American public that this is the right guy, the guy with the strength and the moral clarity to do this job for America. And the basis for my case is this is literally what he ran on in twenty twenty when you had a president who had just put kids in cages, separated babies from their mothers at the US Mexico border, referred to them as animals, and inspired the shooting in El Paso that killed twenty three people. Candidate Joe Biden said, we're going to get back to the moral center of this country. We're going to do the right thing, and we're going to make sure that our policies and our actions match our values. Here is his chance to act on that and show the American public he was serious about it, and to win yet another election against Donald Trump on this same issue.
And yet when I pose the question of whether he'll do it or not, it was the first time in our entire hour together that you paused before giving an answer.
Trying to be honest with you, and in all honesty, I am troubled by the fact that the president has yet to act, and that in part informs that pause that you noticed. But I also, you know, as a student of American history, I know that presidents can't do this on their own. They have to be pushed or in Johnson's case, given the power by those of us in California, Texas and the other forty eight and our territories to do the right thing. And we've seen it time and time again in American history. You know. Apocryphaly, there's a story told that FDR is meeting with the NAACP and they're making the case to him about civil rights and voting rights, and he says to them, you're right now, make me do it. And I wonder if Biden isn't saying to us in Texas, you're right now, make me do it. And so I'm not judging him, I'm not faulting him, but I am going to do everything I can to help produce the pressure and the popular will to help him do the thing that I think he wants to do. Deep down inside, and.
Before I called you up, I was talking to my dad about the border. And obviously, as you know, my personal familial connection to this issue is why I made that short film that you saw, and why in part I wanted to sit with you again. And in many ways this conversation has really been about convictions, why we do the things we do, why you've done the things you do, and in so many ways, I want to ask the question that a very very young Ulysses asked of you back in twenty thirteen, which came about, I believe in the first few weeks of you being elected to office and the House Representatives, and you fly back home because of a government shut down led by none other than Senator Ted Cruz, and that night, as you're back home for a twelve hour visit, you put him to bed and he says.
What he says, Dad, why do you want to have a job where you never see us?
And what did you say?
I mean, I did my best to make senseive it for him, and I think, as I've told you before, or to make sense of it for myself. Because he asked the question for both of us, it caused me to ask the question on myself, what the fuck am I doing here? Like, literally, the government that I am a part of is shut down. I'm in the minority, I'm a freshman. Am I going to be able to get anything done? And is the little I am probably going to be able to get done worth the sacrifice that this kid who had no say in the matter is paying right now? Yeah, And it wasn't a slam dunk. It wasn't a like, well, this is just what we do in the our household. You know, I'm so glad just to tell you, Sam, that I did stay in Congress, I ran for reelection, was actually able to do far more than it looked like like I would be able to achieve at that moment. But You're right, it comes at a cost, and it comes at a cost to the volunteers and the staff and the people who have made whatever success I've had. But you know, it's all relative, right, and you think about the sacrifices that other families are making to serve this country in other ways. I served on the Veterans Affairs Committee for six years, and there was not a veteran or an active duty service member I met who wouldn't tell me that their entire family was effectively serving with them, right, And that responsibility is one that I take very seriously when we think about what powered by people will do next. For example, I want to make sure that what we ask our volunteers, what I ask of myself and my family, is going to be the most effective option to shorten that period of time when we're living in this brutality and this deep evil that defines the government of the State of Texas right now, because it's going to take a lot of effort, a lot of pain, a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of service, and we've got to make sure that it's worth it. And so yeah, great, great, great question that Ulysses asked and that you just report.
I guess my last question as a follow up to him, which is, after these past ten years since he asked that question, is your answer as to why and how you stay in this fian has it been clarified in the intervening decades since your son asked you that?
Oh?
Yeah.
When I started out in Congress, the community I represented had the worst weight times for a veteran to see a mental health care provider, and that was directly connected to very high rates of suicide, self harm, and suffering that we were seeing in El Paso, focusing on that issue, building coalitions of Democrats and Republicans, and even working with President Trump, with whom I served for a couple of years towards the end of my time in Congress, we were able to make people's lives better, to shorten those weight times, and to avert tragedy for these families who'd already given so much for this country. There are so many other instances and people that I have been able to help. Despite some of the defeats that we have suffered, we have made this a better place for the service that we provided, the effort that we've expended, the struggle that we've been a part of, and I feel so goddamn lucky to have been a part of that and to still be a part of it in some way. And my hope is, because we started with my kids, and you're asking this really good question at the end of the interview, my hope is that later in Ulysses' life, and he's sixteen now, so I hope he's seeing it now he understands that. And I asked this rhetorical question earlier in the interview you know, these kids and moms who are drowning in the Rio Grande River right now because of the cruelty of our governor. At some point, future generations will look at our generation and say, well, what the hell were you guys doing when this was happening? Were you powerless to stop it? And this is that future generation, and I want him to look back on this moment and say, you know what, I'm proud of what my dad did, not just for the effort, but because he was part of a larger movement that ultimately stopped this inhumanity and replaced it with something that we're proud of, a system by which people can come here legally, safely, without losing their lives, and in an orderly fashion so it doesn't freak people out in other parts of the country. I'm working for that, for him and for the world that he will inherit based on what we do or what we fail to do.
Well. I sure hope for my generation for his generation, we're not that far off, but we're a little far off that we can both look back and see a change that we desperately need. I hope that happens, and in the interim, I so appreciate all that you have done and what I imagine you'll continue to do well.
Thank you and thanks for having this conversation and focusing on the things that are just so important and are not going to change unless we take that action, unless we're focused on it, unless we understand the stakes and the opportunities before us to do the right thing. So very grateful to you and looking forward to the next time.
As am I Beto or Work a pleasure.
Adios.
That was my conversation with Beto or Work, as you heard him mentioned throughout the episode. His organization Powered by People helps organize volunteers to reach eligible Texas voters to register, vote, and volunteer. If you'd like to get involved, you can visit poweredexpeople dot org. Earlier this month, they sent a letter to President Biden with sixty five thousand signatures pleading with him to stop Governor Appa It's cruelty at the Texas Mexico border. As of today, President Biden has yet to take executive action. If you'd like to take action, we've included links to the Texas Rio Grand Legal Aid, the Texas ACLU, and Mission Border Hope and Eagle Paths all on our website at talk easypod dot com. We've also included that link in the description of this episode on your phone. Now, before we go, why don't we call my dad back for a second and just check it on them. Dad, you there, I'm here. Don't sound so excited, are you.
In your little room there, your little little dungeon?
Yeah, I'm you know what, your father, my grandfather, Sebastian worked long and hard for me to work in this little box, taped this podcast. Okay, I've never called it a dungeon, but but what the hell, we'll call it a dungeon.
You do have his his typewriter there, so that's.
That's that's a good start, and his middle name.
Yeah.
But really, though, how did it go with the with mister Petro Rourke?
It really went well. The thing that struck me about him, and it's probably why I liked him so much, you know, four or five years ago when he first ran for Senate against Ted Cruz, is he just has this irrepressible spirit about him, this dogged determination to fight the good fight. Yeah, to make the case for that fight in clear and stark terms. And towards the end of the episode, I had found in the research that about ten eleven years back, when he was first a congressman in Texas, his oldest son Ulysses, one night after work asked him a really tough and kind of profound question, and he said, Dad, why do you want to have a job where you're never with us? Because being a congressman, of course, means that you have to spend a lot of time in DC. You had to spend a lot of time on the road, on the trail campaigning.
Oh every two years here was campaigning, And I.
Just thought that question to bring us full circle. Was it one that you ever asked your father Sebastian when he came here in the early sixties, became a citizen and had to work tirelessly as a forklift driver for thirty forty years, did you ever ask him that question?
No? And you know, it's the questions to his life, unfortunately came out towards the end of his life, and it it's interesting, if I could do it again, I wish I asked what did he give up? I knew what he gave up, but at the same time, how does it make you feel like, you know, giving up his parents, giving up his family, because back then. I mean, there is no video calls, there are no FaceTime and all that. You have the letters, but the connection it wasn't there. The Thanksgiving is, the Christmases, the whatever I mean that was lost. He created his own family and so selfishly those questions on my part never came up. It does haunt me. And unfortunately, my last conversation that I had with him, it was at an ihop after he did this chemo. This it was like a procedure they were doing. They were isolating this cancer and his body. And he came out fine because he loved and we went there and I just turned on my recorder and my phone and just started asking him about and that's the first time I heard about his adventures in Denver, and not adventures, but he was working in Denver and how he was separated by four years from his own family because he knew that if he could make it here, and the only way that he was going to have them come over here was the right way because they came with visas. They didn't have to cross that border, that desert or river or running going into whatever situation they had. They came here, you know, on a train, but with a passport. That's a big difference.
He came here mostly illegally, though there were a couple of work visas so that you could come here legally.
Yes, just to give them an opportunity. Imagine you're telling your three kids to come to this country. They have they've never spoken English in their lives into a situation in nineteen sixty sixty one where racism was rampant, into a neighborhood that was just starting to change, but the schools were not changing, and they were welcomed. But at the same time, you better simulate fast, and the only way you can do that is by speaking the language. And there was no bilingualism. There was no you know, affirm amount of action, there was nothing like that. It was just you got to tough it out. We're here. The idea is to be here. And that's why I've always had this hard nose kind of attitude, like the biggest step is to get here. After that, what do you do with it? And if you don't do shit with it, then why did you waste these people's time?
You know, when you're talking about having that hard nose attitude, I keep going back to that story when you're eleven years old in Chicago and you're out with your friend at a grocery store. Is that the beginning of that hard nose attitude?
My friend, my friend Martin, he had these He had these food stamps, which I had never seen before in my life. My family didn't have them. And I looked at them and I thought there was monopoly money. It literally looked like monopoly money, and the different colors would represented different bills twenty ten to five and things like that. So he's showing me this stuff, and I'm like, what is this. You know, it's like play money. He's like, no, we can buy food with this. Like come on, let's you're messing with me here. He's like, watch, let's go to the grocery store pick out whatever you want. I'm like, well, let's do it. So he took like fifty dollars out of this pack because you could just rip them right out like coupon's almost And we walked over right across the street from right right I live, and he's like, get whatever you want. We're walking around and I'm getting like a bunch of American food because Mexican food. I love Mexican food, don't get me wrong. But after a while, you just wanted to You wanted to have some Slobby Jos or something different. And so I'm like picking in out all these different items, and then I got some candy, and all of a sudden, he goes like, no candy, No, you can't get the candy. I'm like, okay, fine, But at the moment, I honestly thought he was joking. I said, well, let's see how far we can go with this joke. And so I fill up the card. He's adding it up. It's about forty something dollars, and now we take it to the cashire. The cashire does all the items. He pulls out the money and I'm looking at her. I'm looking at the cash here. I'm like, okay, I can't wait to see her face. All of a sudden, she takes the money. I'm like, wait a minute, she's taking the money. This is wow. And then all of a sudden she opens up the register and she pulls out change using more of that colored money. I'm like, what fun money? Was like, what is this like monopoly money? And then she pulls out some coins. They were like little blue chips for fifty cents and a bunch of different colors. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. This is real. So I'm like okay, and Martin's like, let's go. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. So I had two bags of groceries going to my house. I see my mom. I'm like, Mom, look at look at all this groceries. She's I'm all excited. He's like, where did you get this? And then I see my dad coming from you know, from the side drive, and I go Martin, and look, we use this money, and oh boy, she said something like he has to call me that gey oh no to Papa. Oh oh. It was like that. It was like oh, it was like boom boom boom, and I'm like uh. And then I don't know what. All I knew was that we were getting good food, and so I wasn't really listening to her, and I got excited and I showed it to my dad.
Your mind was blank except for the thought of sloppy Joe's that's.
Right, and getting some like pizza I had. He's in there, this this stuff you put on the end of the oven, all kinds of nonsense, right, And I see my dad and I so I show him all the grocery. He's like, okay, and we use this. I'm showing him the money. He looks at me, looks at my friend Martin. He goes, Martin, mete tu casa Martin. Go home. Martin's like okay, oh bye bye. Because my dad was a little bit he's intimidating. So Martin left. I'm like, oh, what what's going on? He goes, Okay, back up all the you know, put everything back in the bag. Go back to the grocery store. My dad goes to the manager. His name was John, real nice guy, like, okay, John, can't have this. John's like, is there something wrong with it? No, just can't have it. Here's my receipt, here's all the food. Don't want it. And John, all of a sudden he's like he really, he sees the receipt, he sees that. He it's you know, I don't know what he's looking at. All of a sudden, he's like, okay, let me give you back your money. And he was going to pull out some of that money. And my Dad's like, no, I don't want the groceries. I don't want the money. Let's go again. Let's go and that's it. We left and we're walking. It's a big old parking lot, and then he looks at me. He stops and he just says, look, we don't take from this government. I have to work for this. You want this, I'm gonna work for it. You have to work for it. But I'll be damned if I'm going to take anything from this country that I hadn't earned. You get it, and I didn't get it. All I wanted was just food or whatever. But years later I got it. I got the idea that if I'm not going to earn it, well, then you better figure out a way. You got to look at the angles of everything to try to get what you wanted in this country. And so I don't believe in that kind of mentality of taking something that you didn't earn. And that's the hard nose, like the starbbornness. I mean, my father refused government cheese for buying out loud.
But you love a deal more than anyone, I mean not since George Costanza has a man loved a deal like you.
I love a good parking spot and a deal.
Have you ever valied your car?
No? Well, one time, one time, and they still and they stole my gum. I'm still very upset about that situation. I don't know why people valeate. There's parking right down the street.
It's Los Angeles. You have to you have to valley some times. But this is the thing to bring it full back, like the generational divide is, Yes, he came to this country the way. So many people right now as we are talking are trying to come to this country, and at this very moment, we are not only making it difficult for them to come, we are punishing these people. We are physically abusing these people.
Yeah, when you have medics who aren't saying, hey, governor, stop stop abusing, that's ridiculous. You know, the border patrol are saying this is inhumane. You know there's something wrong. That's their job every single day to stop people coming over the border. But if you just do it humanely, I got no issues with that. When you do it inhumanely the way they're doing it to try to scare other people away, that's just a bullying bullshit that these people are creating. Look, I've seen some abuse, I've seen some things. When you feel it, when you can when you can smell it, man, it's not cool and it's unfortunate that Biden or some people in the administration are so afraid to get their hands dirty when right is right and wrong is wrong. You know, I sit here in my mother's living room, surrounded by a whole history of family, nieces, nephew's grandchildren, and I just think about all these people who that's all they want is an opportunity.
And I suppose the reason we wanted to make this episode to help tell the story about this moment is to remind people that maybe just see a fleeting headline or a bit on cable news, that there is real pain and real lives that are being deeply, deeply affected in this moment, and all they want is a shot. As your father, my grandfather, Sebastian very much did opportunity. And you know, when I think of the long arc of our family's history, for it to end up with me in my dungeon here, it just feels like I'm not sure I've done it right, but.
Well, you know it. Look, it's surrounded by memories. My dad is there, that's right, and that's all he needs.
He is here, and I think he has been very much with us in this conversation, so to him to you, I thank you both, and uh to our guest Betta Rourke. The future forever uncertain, but we can try to do the right thing, Dad, I thank you.
Antime, thanks, and that's our show.
If you enjoy this special, somewhat unusual episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. If you want to go the extra mile, sharing the show with a friend, sharing it on social media. All of this really helps new listeners find the show special. Thanks this week to Gina Inajosa, Eric Boseman at Star City Studio Productions, my father, and of course our guest today, betteau or Work to purchase his new book and support the work he's been doing with Powered by People, along with a bunch of great organizations mitigating what's happening down at the border. Visit our website at talk easypod dot com. If you like today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with Stacy Abrams to Lauras Werta, Julian Castro, Gloria Steinem, Congressman il han Omar, Congressman Maxwell Frost, Noam Chomsky, and doctor Cornell West to hear those and more Pushkin Podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. I want to give a very very special thanks to our team this week, without whom today's episode would not be possible. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenik Sa Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's Talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editors are Claris go Vara and c J Mitchell. Music by Dylan Peck, illustrations by Chrishushenoy, Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrazak, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Snars, Kerrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Jordan mc millan, Isabella Navares, Kira Posey, Tara Machado, Maya Caning, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Lee Talmulan, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. I'm san Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.
