DOUG MCVAY: The following program, Cultural Baggage, is sponsored by DrugTruth.net, publishers of Forever Salem, America's Eternal Wars, Drugs and Terror. Written by the Reverend Farrell Dean Becker. Hello my friends, thank you for being with us on this edition of Cultural Baggage.

REVEREND BECKER: I am Dean Becker, the Reverend Most High. Trump has just declared war on Iran. I want to first introduce my guest.

He is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. With that, I want to welcome back to the show our good friend, Professor Jeffrey Myron. How are you doing, sir? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: I'm great. Thanks for having me back. 

REVEREND BECKER: And I'm sure you've heard the news that Trump and Israel are now attacking Iran, and Iran is attacking some of the surrounding countries as well, right? Correct. Yes. Your thoughts on this? I see it as a distraction from the Epstein files. Your thought, please. 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: I don't even begin to guess as what the exact motivations are. It just seems horribly motivated and likely to have huge unintended and adverse consequences.

It is not being done in the normal procedure of asking Congress for a declaration of war. The reasons that are being given for why this might make sense has changed multiple times. Sometimes it's protecting the protesters.

Sometimes it's reducing Iran's ballistic missile capabilities. Other times it's about their nuclear facilities. I guess this Trump administration might say, well, it's all of the above.

But even setting aside this somewhat mixed messaging and the problematic aspect of it constitutionally, we can ask is this likely to lead to beneficial effects for the US or for Israel or for the world? And my strong answer is no, that when rich powers intervene in countries elsewhere, they end up doing far more harm than good. There are going to be counterattacks from Iran that are going to affect US military capabilities, destroy bases. There are going to be bombs that accidentally destroy civilian targets within Iran.

Most importantly, who's to say what kind of government we might get if the current leadership of Iran is deposed? We may get the Iran Revolutionary Guard, which is every bit as authoritarian and violent and repressive. And so how is that an improvement? So the one thing that I had said during Trump's first term and his election campaigns about his being somewhat very slightly libertarian camp was he repeatedly said how much he opposed US foreign policy interventions. And so that was a small saving grace. And yet, since he's been in office the second time, we've been intervening all over the place. 

REVEREND BECKER: Oh, exactly right. And you mentioned some of the reasons why I've also heard this morning is for regime change. Trump now is calling upon the populace to rise up and to help in this endeavor and to overthrow their government. Jeffrey, as I indicated to you earlier, I wanted to do a show about hope that there is potential on the horizon. There is a possibility for things to change.

And it comes from people with great authority. This is a preacher speaking from the pulpit here in these United States. And I want to share this with you. This is Chuck Baldwin. He's pastor with Liberty Fellowship. 

PASTOR CHUCK BALDWIN: Forgiveness and understanding, because we all know that Jesus was forgiving and understanding toward us.

That's not what we're talking about with Donald Trump. That's not it at all. Donald Trump is a lifelong gangster.

He's a lifelong Zionist. He's a lifelong philanderer. He's a lifelong cheat. He's a lifelong hedonist. He's a lifelong felon. He's a lifelong blackmailer. He's a lifelong bully. He's a lifelong malignant narcissist. And he's a lifelong sexual predator.

And since he's been president, he has now joined the ranks of international war criminals and mass murderers. If you have taken the time to look at even some of the newly released, I'll call them e-files, you know what I'm talking about. If you have taken the time to look at even some of the newly released e-files, you know that Donald J. Trump, along with the rest of the rich and famous predators in those files, should spend the rest of his life in prison.

And even if he did, that would not balance the scales of justice owed by this degenerate monster. And yet knowing all of this, there are still thousands of pastors and Christians who continue to give Trump their undying support. From a moral, ethical, legal, and spiritual perspective, how can these pastors and Christians not be party to Trump's corruption? By supporting him, lauding him, defending him, excusing him, they are party to his criminality.

REVEREND BECKER: All right. Again, I preach those thoughts each week on this show, but to hear it from another pastor with a congregation applauding him, it gives me hope that Americans are beginning to see through this, what he called a monster. Your thoughts there, Professor? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: So I guess I keep being torn between not so much the thoughts about Trump, but the thoughts about the voters, the citizens who support Trump.

On the one hand, I'm sort of stunned that as many people have supported him as has been the case, because my assessment of Trump is extremely similar to what the pastor just described. But what I find very counterproductive, and which I don't agree with, is that all these people who are supporting him are themselves evil, malintentioned, or any of that. The people who have supported him include a huge numbers, maybe a quite substantial fraction, who were quite understandably, incredibly frustrated with the Biden administration, or key parts of the Biden administration, or the democratic perspective, or the progressive socialist perspective more generally.  

So when they felt like they were sort of stuck with that approach to government, and society, and culture, and didn't see any good opportunity to move away from that, and then Trump came along and provided that opportunity. While I didn't agree, I guess I thought it was understandable that some people embraced it initially. And I think many people thought that he would not be in practice as extreme as he's been.

They thought that a lot of the rhetoric of the kind of over-the-top nutty stuff from his campaign back in 2016 was just kind of entertainment, trying to get votes, trying to be in the public eye, getting free advertising, and all that. And that once he got elected, he would sort of calm down and move toward the normal conservative sort of perspective, but he didn't. And in the second term, that's been true sort of doubly, triply.

So I think there are two issues. One is not for the people who criticize Trump, not to criticize or assume his supporters are badly intentioned, or not good people, or anything like that. It's a respect that they have a different view.

They had legitimate reasons to be frustrated with the alternatives to Trump. And it's to recognize that the Democrats are no great fix. The Democrats endorse all manner of nutty policies, perhaps not necessarily quite as evil as the excessive ICE enforcement and things like that.

But still, the kinds of massive redistribution, the controlling prices, this fixation with redistribution is not healthy for an economy, for society. And so I think a lot of voters are just stuck between a rock and a hard place. They genuinely don't like Trump and a lot of the things he stands for, but the alternative, the mainstream Democratic Party, not so great either.

REVEREND BECKER: Thank you for that. Again, we're speaking with Professor Jeffrey Myron out of Harvard University. Professor, I want to drop in another clip I picked up that's part of my hope for hope scenario.

This is former ICE attorney and instructor, Ryan Schwenk.

ICE ATTORNEY RYAN SCHWENK: I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution when I joined ICE on August 1st, 2021, as an assistant chief counsel. I followed that oath for four and a half years, working side by side with ICE officers.

And I followed it when I resigned on February 13th, 2026, a little over a week ago, so that I could speak to you today. I am here because I am duty bound to report the legally required training program at the ICE Academy is deficient, defective, and broken. Five months ago, I was asked to teach the law to new cadets at the ICE Academy in Glynco, Georgia, where ICE is training its new, inexperienced recruits.

I volunteered to take on this assignment based on my experience. On my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant. For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program.

Classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officer's authority. For example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. This means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable, the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force.

Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well that they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life or death situations. Yet, in the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job. All to satisfy an administration demanding they train thousands of new officers before the end of the year.

REVEREND BECKER: I don't know. When the government runs amok, it's hard to reel it back in, and I've been talking to cops and politicians and all kinds of people over the last, since Trump's been in office, about his mechanism, the means by which he's ruling, if you will, as wants to be a king. And this gentleman worked for ICE, was instructing these ICE agents, and sees the horrors that has flowed out of their academy and is willing to speak boldly about it. That gives me hope. Your thought there, professor? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: I guess I'm a little bit less hopeful that focusing on that issue is going to resolve the controversy. I think what's fundamental is that if a Congress or state passes a law that bans something that lots of people want to do, and when they do it, they do not have any direct negative or significant harm on anyone else.

That is, they cross the border and look for a job or try to rent an apartment, or they purchase currently banned drugs, or they purchase the services for sexual pleasure of someone who willingly wants to supply it. When you ban any of those sorts of things, and similarly, then you have the question of enforcement. One approach is, well, you have these laws in the books, but you do basically nothing to enforce them.

That has some benefits because then that activity continues to happen in a relatively peaceful way, but it's not perfect because it irritates parts of the citizenry that they see the law being disobeyed, and the people who disobey it getting rewarded relative to those who do obey it. So the people, for example, with immigration, the immigrants who say, well, I guess I'm not legally allowed to go under the current rules, so I'm going to wait my turn for years or decades in some bureaucratic queue, are harmed relative to the people who just decide to cross the border illegally. Or you can have vigorous enforcement, but if you have vigorous enforcement, you're going to have incidents like those that have happened in Minnesota.

You're going to wrongfully deport people who shouldn't have been deported. You're going to disrupt the activity that was otherwise perfectly productive and reasonable, even if technically illegal, of immigrants who are not documented working to harvest crops, working in fast food restaurants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think what people don't quite want to accept is that you can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you allow lots of legal immigration, that has a lot of benefits, but it has some effects, which some people don't like. If you try to significantly restrict immigration, you're also going to get a bunch of negative effects, which people like me would regard as far worse than any negatives that might be attached to the immigration itself. So I would advocate legalizing far more of the immigration, and that would do far more than insisting that the ICE officers be properly trained.

There's nothing wrong with the ICE officers being properly trained. That's certainly a positive thing, but I don't think it's really going to change much. 

REVEREND BECKER: And one of your associates, Professor Roland Fryer, recently had a piece talking about this commentary he had in the Wall Street Journal. Were you able to see that, sir? I have read that piece, yes. And it seemed like, I don't know, is he a younger guy? Did he learn this from you? This is your forte. You've been doing this for decades, am I right? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: No, he did not learn it from me. He and I both basically got it from the same source, which was Milton Friedman, as sort of passed along by Gary Becker and another Chicago economist. But regardless, what he said there is a perspective that a pretty broad fraction of economists find quite convincing, and yet have long had a very, very hard time convincing many non-economists, but not zero. We have certainly modified the degree to which we are enforcing marijuana prohibition in the United States.

That's mainly been state-level legalization or medicalization, which is a clumsy approach, but it's better than nothing. And now more recently, even Donald Trump is talking about moving marijuana to what's called Schedule 3 of the Controlled Substances Act, which would not fully legalize it, but certainly make it closer to being legally available by prescription under federal law. And that would probably further reduce some of the negatives of the underground market and so on.

REVEREND BECKER: And I don't believe him. They've been talking about moving marijuana for decades. I think it's just a bit of obfuscation. Just believe it might happen, y'all. You mentioned Milton Friedman. And back, I guess, 26, 27 years ago, I began this work. I learned from Drug Policy Forum there on the New York Times. I'm sorry for stumbling here. And through that, I was able to get the home number of Milton Friedman.

I invited him to come on the New York Times Forum, and he did. He came on a couple of three times, had his phone number. I'd call him about once a month and talk drug policy with him. And he was fundamental to a lot of people moving in this direction. I just wanted to agree with you that the man was a pioneer. 

There's a judge in West Virginia. He's a U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Goodwin. And this is just a simple quote from him. He's talking about the ICE officers, the mask agents.

And he says they're indistinguishable from lawbreakers. He also said that they are, in essence, eliminating the constitutional accountability itself. And this is, look, I'm in these protests. I've been in them for, well, most of my life, since my 20s. I see these people as brown shirts, these ICE agents. They're goons.

As this gentleman, Swank, had said, they are untrained and set loose just like hyenas, as far as I'm concerned, because that's how they seem to act on the city streets. 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: So I'm less interested in criticizing ICE agents than in rethinking about the right policy. I mean, of course, some of the ICE agents act excessively.

That happens for any kind of law enforcement. It's not unique to ICE. But it happens partially because we've asked law enforcement and ICE to carry out something which is sort of impossible to do.

How do you walk down the street or arrive at a particular part of town and say, these people are the illegal aliens and these people are not? These people have criminal records and these people are not? You have to detain them. You have to ask for ID. And that is going to lead to a lot of the frictions.

So again, I think the only really significant modification is to change the law, to legalize far more immigration than we currently do. Now, on your issue of hope and the quote from the judge you mentioned, I think that pretty consistently since Trump's second inauguration, lower court judges, appellate court judges, have definitely voted to impose various limits, to roll back many of the things that he's tried to do. And until recently, the Supreme Court had not really taken a strong stand on the limits of presidential power because it had sent all those cases back to lower courts to work their way up rather than issuing injunctions which stopped them while the cases were being resolved.

But with the tariff case last week, the Supreme Court very clearly said there are limits on presidential power. Certain things are left to Congress. Congress did not say the president has this power and so the president doesn't have this power.

So is that a basis for hope? Absolutely. It's not going to necessarily prevent the tariffs. Trump will try to enact the tariffs in some other mechanism and there will be more court cases, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think the judicial branch of government has done itself quite proud by, and that is a basis for hope, by asking the right questions, by placing limits, by following procedure, by not rushing or anything like that just to get to a certain outcome. On the other hand, Congress has in no way, shape, or form stepped up and passed laws that make explicit that there are limits on presidential power to clarify any ambiguities and take them back from the gray area from which Trump has grabbed them in case after case after case. So I think there's basis for optimism and there's basis for serious concern as well.

REVEREND BECKER: Thank you, Professor. Yeah, I'm aware there have been hundreds of cases brought forward that challenged the Trump administration's avoidance of the rule of law and that they have been spat upon in many cases and just pushed aside and hopefully forgotten by the Trump administration. Would you agree with that, sir? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: Yeah. I'll give an example that's near and dear to my heart. There are all these cases against Harvard without taking a stand here on the validity of any of those cases. Harvard pushed back.

It had some initial victories at the lower court level. We expected there to be appeals and further actions. But it seems, as best one can tell from the newspaper, that the Trump administration's attention has focused elsewhere, such as on Iran or Venezuela or Israel or the election rules. And so the pushback using the judicial system has at a minimum granted some delay in the implementation of these extreme Trump policies. And so that is possibly a basis for hope. 

REVEREND BECKER: To me, his idea that he wants to control Harvard University and many other universities, he wants to control the mechanism of the media, that sounds to me like communist control of the nation. Your thought there, sir? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: I think that both sides accuse the other side of using government to control academia, the arts, research, et cetera, and claim that it's illegitimate because of the specific way in which the party in power is at that point using its power to control, say, higher education. But they're both guilty of wanting government to be in control of higher education in any way, shape, or form. The way to get government out of the business of saying which grants can happen and which grants cannot is that the government makes no grants, that all the funding comes from private sources, possibly from for-profit companies, possibly from private foundations, possibly from individual donations to universities.

And so you're absolutely right that the left is horrified at what Trump is doing as are libertarians, but the left should be horrified at what the left had been doing for a long time before Trump as were libertarians. So there's only one, in the libertarian view, thoughtful and consistent approach, which is the government shouldn't be involved in funding, choosing, monitoring education at all, and then these issues simply do not arise. 

REVEREND BECKER: Thank you. And getting back to the situation in Mexico specifically, a week ago we killed, let's see if I can get this right, Nemesio Cervantes el Mencho, him and 70 other members of his cartel were killed. It seems he was confined in his location, he had kidney disease, and the government said he was an easy target. There will be another boss, there probably is already another boss. The trade continues, they have not stopped the trade by this killing of this man, have they? 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: No, the attempt to stop out the drug trade will always fail. There is a demand for the use of the currently illicit drugs. Government policy can have at most a modest effect in reducing that demand as long as there's substantial demand, there's a profit opportunity for someone to supply it, and that will happen.

Governments have had modest success at shifting where the production and supply takes place. If the government clamps down on Colombia, well, then maybe some of the cocaine production and distribution comes from Peru or other neighboring countries, but it doesn't go away, it just moves its location. The evidence on these taking out kingpins is quite consistent that when governments go in and take out a kingpin, that leads to an increase in violence because the people who have not been assassinated or jailed are now fighting each other to see who gets control of the empire of the cartel, whose leader was just killed or removed in some other way.

And so it's just ridiculously counterproductive to engage in this. There's only one thing which will substantially reduce the violence, and that's to legalize. 

REVEREND BECKER: Thank you. Chapo Guzman, he's 100 feet underground under the Rocky Mountains somewhere, but his grandkids are now running his cartel, his venture. Maybe some of them are dead or who knows if they've been replaced, but it just continues, even generation after generation. There were, and I don't have the exact number, it keeps changing day to day, but I think 109 people have been killed in the oceans around Venezuela in their boats because the government said they were hauling drugs, and I've seen some of those pictures.

They don't look like they're hauling much drugs, if any, but at his State of the Union, he chuckled that people are now afraid to go fishing in those waters. It's an outrage in so many ways. Your thought there.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: I would agree more. I think it's utterly despicable. It's probably, the factual claim seems to be completely wrong that fentanyl was coming from Venezuela.

It seems that the fentanyl was coming through Mexico, not Venezuela, but it's always a little hard to tell because this is an underground activity. They're not great, but let's assume that all the fentanyl was coming from Venezuela. Going after that by bombing, targeting these boats isn't going to stop it.

It's simply going to mean that the fentanyl distribution will move to some other country. Again, the only way to eliminate the trafficking is to legalize the trade and allow fentanyl to be bought and sold in the same way as aspirin or Tylenol in the local CVS. Then it will be packaged in dosages that people can understand and so they will not overdose nearly as often.

There will be no violence associated with the fentanyl trade. People also don't recognize that there are millions of people who have fentanyl every year because it's used quite successfully as an anesthesia. If you have various procedures that require you to be sedated but not actually put under, there's a very good chance that you had fentanyl, but a doctor administers it, you get a small dose, it's well titrated, and it all goes perfectly fine.

REVEREND BECKER: There you have it. Thank you, sir. Once again, we've been speaking with the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Economics at Harvard University, Professor Jeffrey Myron. Thank you, sir. 

PROFESSOR JEFFREY MIRON: Thank you for having me. 

REVEREND BECKER: Yes, sir. Again, folks, I remind you that because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag. I urge you to please be careful and always remember that euphoria is a blessing, not a crime. 

DOUG MCVAY: The preceding program, Cultural Baggage, is sponsored by DrugTruth.net, publishers of Forever Salem, America's Eternal Wars, Drugs and Terror, written by the Reverend Farrell Dean Becker.