Season 11, Episode 8 April 27, 2025

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This is the listening tube.

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Hello. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. If you're really old, see if the other ear works better. On this episode, on this episode, we'll hear about cricket, book burning, and a guy from El Salvador.

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But first, not the headlines.

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If there's one thing we can be relatively sure of, it's that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a lot more aware of security measures now than he was in March. That's when his texts about the pending air attack on the Hooties in Yemen were accidentally shared with a journalist who works for a left-leaning publication. That was definitely a major screw-up, but it didn't have any adverse effect on the mission. The mission has continued now for weeks, and there has been significant damage done to the Hooties and their operations, while there have been no American lives lost. By all accounts, the attacks have been precise, effective, and uncompromised. Clearly, Secretary Heggseth has the wisdom to delegate authority to his admirals and generals to get the job done, then stand back and watch as it is. Communication is still essential, though, and keeping in touch an important part of the equation. Problems can occur if communication is compromised, so you have to be careful with whom you communicate. That's why it was a big deal when a reporter was included in the communications about the Yemen operation. And now we find out that there was an additional thread of communication during that same time that included similar information about the attacks on the same publicly available app the sec def used to pass information to a reporter. Luckily there was no reporter on this other thread, but geez, Pete. As Joe Biden would say, Come on, man. Granted, the communications did no harm, and there was no journalist included, but there's no reason your wife should be in on it. Tell her over dinner at home, not in a text for goodness sake. Secretary Heggseth, I don't know when your first vacation as Secretary of Defense will be, but try to not share pictures of you and your family on the beach while you're still at the beach. Because if you do, everyone will know you're not at home, which will make your house vulnerable to burglary. You know, because there are common sense things you can do to maintain security. I realize you're not an Air Force guy, so I'll cut you some slack. But like I said, that was a month ago. However, the media just discovered the second text message thread, so they have to make a big deal out of it. Even though it's old news now and had no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the mission. The headlines they use to inflame your emotions are a lesson in activist journalism. The urgency with which the stories are being written is emblematic of the desperation the media has when it comes to nurturing any seed of discontent they can plant in the minds of the opposition, even if it's completely irrelevant. The second group of chats were recently discovered, so the media thinks they merit a whole new round of inquiry into who was in the loop with the Secretary of Defense. But we already know, so there's no inquiry needed. The only thing needed is another barrage of stories critical of Pete Hegseth, even if it's about stuff that happened a month ago. But the media knows that just telling us about something that happened a month ago isn't enough, so they have to come up with another way to present the newfound information that, although irrelevant, is useful for promoting an anti-government agenda. The best way to do that is to allege that there's now a rift between the president and his secretary of defense. Those hopes seemed to be diminished the Monday after Easter when both the President and Secretary were at the White House where any rift was quickly denied. When asked about the job Pete's doing, the President said he's doing a great job. Ask the Hooties how he's doing. But that's not the headline NPR went with. No, NPR's story about the new chat group said this. Exclusive! The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. Despite the fact that nobody at the White House even hinted at such a move. Despite everybody at the White House denying there was any such search going on. All of which is included in the story. The story said the president called the question of newly discovered chats a waste of time. The press secretary confirmed Pete has the full support of the president. But still, the headline says the opposite, attributing their conclusion to an unnamed U.S. official who is not authorized to speak publicly. For all we know, NPR wrote their headline based on the opinion of a janitor at the Pentagon.

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And if that wasn't enough.

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That didn't stop the New Republic from taking the NPR story and running with it. The headline for the New Republic story blared. White House lashes out after report Trump wants new defense secretary. But then spent the first five paragraphs quoting several Trump administration officials as saying there's no desire for a new Secretary of Defense. They quoted Donald Trump as saying, Ask the Hooties how much dysfunction there is. There's none. Pete's doing a great job. Everybody's happy with him. We have the highest recruitment numbers I think we've had in 28 years. No, he's doing a great job. It's just fake news. And now you and I both know it is, because we just heard about the origin of the story and how it was attributed to an anonymous source, which, as far as we know, means it could have been made up. And that's a big part of the problem. We can't trust the media anymore because they use each other as sources. One publication puts out a story that they say came from a confidential informant or whistleblower, then the next publication comes along and perpetuates the story with an attribution to the original, making it seem more legitimate at each step in the process. After spending five paragraphs contradicting the headline with quotes from the only people who really know, they then rehash the fact that they just discovered another thread of text messages that occurred at the same time as the last batch. Similar enough to draw the attention of the legacy media looking for straw through which to breathe life into a story that was given up as expired. The New Republic spread the NPR story and added its own layer of commentary to the issue. So when the next publication writes about it, they'll be able to attribute to the New Republic that Pete Hegseth is under fire and that the president wants to replace him. But the New Republic goes a step further than quoting the NPR story. The last paragraph begins with, according to other reports, and claims the Pentagon is in disarray. And not just because of the Secretary's text messages, which they called signal gate, but also recent firings of Pentagon officials because of a leak investigation. There are several highlighted phrases and words in the story as well, and each of them takes you to another story about the subject. Where disarray is highlighted, it links to an opinion piece by a writer for the New Republic. So they write an opinion piece, then use it as justification to write more stories that can then be used as the basis of writing more stories about the same subject, always reinforcing the message and adding whatever they can to further the cause. The New Republic is really good at it, though. The last sentence of the story is a wonderful demonstration of self-serving self-prophecy. Let's break it down together. It says, if the NPR report is true, in other words, everything we just wrote up to the very last sentence may or may not be true, we're just relying on a report from another news organization that makes the claim based on a statement from an unnamed source. It goes on to say, the president may be getting fed up with Hegseth's constant flow of bad news. I'll point out that just because it took the press to discover another text chat that happened at the same time as the one we already knew about doesn't really qualify as a constant flow of bad news. So why did you write that? There's no constant flow of bad news. The president even said he's happy with Pete. The Hooti are running scared, leakers are getting exposed, and recruitment numbers are better than they've been for a long time. Where's the constant flow of bad news? Then the writer ponders, perhaps his narrow confirmation was a sign that Hegseth shouldn't have gotten the job. Now the next guy who comes along and writes a story can say that people are questioning whether or not Pete Hegseth should have become Secretary of Defense in the first place. That's what's called a news cycle. But this Pete Hegseth cycle has become a trike, and the media will write it until it ends up in a ditch or hits a wall.

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The 1700s.

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This week in 1751, the first cricket match is played in America. I'm sure it's gonna catch on any day now.

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The 1900s.

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This week in 1945, during World War II, a German newsreader officially announces that Adolf Hitler has, quote, fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany, unquote. The truth was he committed suicide and convinced his wife of one day to do the same. Nor was he at his command in the Reich Chancery, but in an underground bunker. Soldiers from Russia were closing in from the Eastern Front, and the Americans and Brits were closing in from the West. The war Adolf Hitler started in September of 1939 was ending on the continent where it began. Berlin would remain an occupied city as a result of the war until German reunification in 1991. Let me take a moment right here to point out the stark differences between what was then and what is now. Many on the American left often compare conservatives to Nazis and President Trump to Hitler. There is no basis for such a comparison. You know how liberal media will often use the term baseless accusations? Well, this is a perfect example of one, but they don't make the comparison here. There is no legitimate way to compare America's Republican Party nor any of its leaders to Nazism. Donald Trump is anti-war and has demonstrated as much during his first term with the Abraham Accords, and in his second term with his efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Quite the opposite of Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump is worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Adolf Hitler started wars, Donald Trump ends them. Donald Trump will never end his own life while an international force of soldiers surrounds his bunker. He won't be needing a bunker. I can think of only two ways Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are the same. They're both men, and they both see the world in a way the rest of us can't. But when it comes to politics, morals, war, and philosophy, there are no similarities. Don't be fooled into thinking there are. This week in 1950, Guam is organized as the United States Commonwealth. Before I was stationed in West Berlin, I was stationed in Guam. Guam was my first duty station after broadcasting school at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. By the time I got there in the mid-80s, it had been reclassified as an unincorporated territory of the United States. There's a large military presence there, with several Navy bases and Anderson Air Force Base, the only strategic air command base outside of the continental United States. I was blessed to serve our country there. Living on a tropical island as a disc jockey for American Forces Radio was a pretty sweet gig. Guam is a very strategic base of operations for its proximity to the Far East and Southeast Asia. The island itself is only eight miles from top to bottom, and its hourglass figure goes from four to eight miles wide. I haven't been there for a long time, but when I was there, it was a tropical paradise, and I still feel an emotional connection to it. The beauty of the island and the culture of its people make me miss it still, and maybe someday I'll get to go back. This week in 1986, a fire at the Central Library of the City of Los Angeles Public Library damages or destroys 400,000 books and other items. Losing so much history, wisdom, and knowledge. It reminded me of the library in ancient Alexandria, once the focal point of all the world's knowledge. It too burned during Caesar's reign, but back then there were no backup files or duplicates of stuff. It always makes me wonder how much we're destined to have to learn all over again what we lost to a fire at a library. Sure, we may not lose much if the fire is confined to the fictional romance section of the library, but we can't always be that lucky. Today, the Internet is what the Library of Alexandria was then. It's the key repository of all the world's knowledge. Unlike Alexandria, our wisdom is no longer recorded on scrolls of papyrus, but digitally saved in millions of different places and formats where we believe it will last forever. That's not likely. Unlike a scroll of papyrus, a digital copy of something requires electricity to exist. The entire internet is rendered useless without power, making a papyrus scroll stored in the right conditions more permanent and recoverable after centuries and even millennia than anything we preserve electronically. Even the recording to which you're listening right now will no longer exist without electricity. But if I print the transcript and put it in a container and store it somewhere, it could be discovered and understood without any form of energy but the food eaten by the person who finds it. A lot of the knowledge of the United States accumulated during the race to the moon has been lost. There's stuff we can't quite figure out again. Computations that were done on a slide rule have to be done all over again. Wisdom may be forever, but knowledge is fleeting. Our ways of recording our knowledge has evolved so quickly that we often leave a lot of our knowledge behind in the transfer of it from one format to the next. From magnetic tape to the floppy disk to thumb drives to the cloud, all we've done is find new ways to leave information behind in an obsolete format. The only one that endures is the written word.

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Send email to thelising tube at outlook.com.

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So where do you stand on the issue of this man who was arrested in Maryland and sent home to El Salvador? Well, the Center for American Rights, which is a group that promotes conservative viewpoints, has filed a complaint with the FCC about the coverage provided by ABC, NBC, and CBS concerning the so-called Maryland man. They say the networks have disseminated false or misleading information, which they claim is a failure of their responsibilities under the public interest standard mandated for broadcast licenses. Here's a guy who entered the United States illegally in 2011 at the age of 16. That means he's been a legal adult for more than a decade. Along the way, he got a judge to declare he couldn't be deported back to El Salvador because he would be subject to violence from rival gang members there. His situation prior to being deported was that of a sheet metal apprentice. Approaching 30 years old, only an apprentice. The U.S. government contends he was a gang member as well and prior to becoming a sheet metal apprentice. Not just a gang member, but a leader in a gang that has been declared a terrorist organization because of their tactics and ruthlessness. The Department of Homeland Security says he has no ruth. So they arrested him and sent him back to his home country. But because of an administrative error, everyone on the left, including the legacy media, has made his case a rallying point for what's wrong with the Trump administration's efforts to deport illegal aliens, beginning with the most egregious and associates who get caught in the Roundup. Most Americans don't have a problem with that. Most Americans saw what happened to our borders during the Biden years and realize that there's a huge mess that needs to be cleaned up. And it may feel inhumane at times, but it can't be ignored or left to fester. Some see it in a different way. There are those who believe that this man was denied his due process and he should be brought back to the United States. Judges have made rulings indicating as much, and the Supreme Court even weighed in, saying the Trump administration should facilitate his return as soon as possible. It's now being claimed that the Department of Justice is disobeying the Supreme Court by not arranging for his release from an El Salvador prison and transportation back to the United States. The reality is the U.S. has already said they would supply a plane to go get him if El Salvador releases him to U.S. custody. As far as the Trump administration is concerned, that's the definition of facilitating his return. We have a plane ready if he needs it. But he won't be needing it. He's in a Salvadoran prison and he's a Salvadoran citizen. What claim does the United States have to him? What American judge thinks they have jurisdiction in El Salvador? As it turns out, there are a couple, but their opinions are irrelevant. Nevertheless, they keep trying to dictate to the executive branch about international relations. Even while the president of El Salvador made it clear in the Oval Office of the White House that he has no intention of releasing this guy to the U.S. As far as I know, there isn't an American judge who can tell the president of El Salvador what to do. It's not like he's holding an American citizen hostage anyway. We're talking about a citizen of El Salvador who's now in El Salvador. True, he wasn't supposed to be sent back to El Salvador, and that's the administrative error the press keeps harping about when they say he was mistakenly sent to El Salvador. He wasn't supposed to be sent back to El Salvador because he's a gang member and would be subject to violence from other gangs if he were to go back to El Salvador. Or at least that's what he convinced a judge to believe in 2019. If he wasn't a gang member, he would have no reason to fear members of other gangs. But now the legacy media and leftist politicians want us to believe he's just a dad from Maryland who was mistakenly sent to a dangerous place where he'd feel like a baby bird among a herd of cattle. The press and the Democrats have tried to portray this man as a victim instead of a criminal. But there's no actual evidence of either. He hasn't been convicted of any crimes in the U.S., but that could mean that he hasn't been caught. There is evidence of his gang activity and physically abusing his wife, but it's being downplayed as much as possible by the media. The same media that keeps reminding its consumers that the man is married to a U.S. citizen and has a five-year-old who is also a U.S. citizen. Under normal circumstances, that might get you a pass, but this guy is also said to be a member of a gang that's been deemed a terrorist organization, so his relationship to U.S. citizens is overruled. Being married to an American woman doesn't get you immunity from anything. In fact, it's usually the opposite, am I right? You get blamed for everything. How come the lawn isn't mowed? Why is there no toilet paper in the bathroom? Why is our bank account empty? Yet the media continued to call him a Maryland husband and father when they knew full well that he was a Salvadoran husband and father who'd been identified as a leader in MS-13. There is one thing I don't understand about this guy's plight. If he was in the US illegally and was deported back to El Salvador, why was he put in prison when he got there? Why wasn't he released into the general population of his home country? He had no convictions in the United States and no convictions in El Salvador. It seems to me he should have been deported back to civilian life, not prison life. Let him live free in El Salvador unless he proves unworthy there. The president of El Salvador doesn't seem interested in letting him out, as he also considers him a terrorist, and said so in his meeting with President Trump. Let his wife and kids go there and be a family, if that's what they really want to do. Give him a chance to keep his nose clean in his home country. It's the only chance he's gonna get. It's been made clear by the Trump administration that this guy will never live in the United States again. Even if the government of El Salvador sends him back to the United States, he'll be deported again to a third country, a country to which he has no connection, no knowledge, no history. Regardless, that seems to be the goal of many Democrats in the United States Congress. Oddly enough, it's the goal of those who profess to be his supporters. What are the Democrats trying to do to this guy? Five representatives from the United States Congress, all Democrats, have gone to El Salvador to lobby for the release of the man in question. One of them got to meet with him, the other four were turned away. The only goal these Democrat performers have is to bring this citizen of El Salvador back to the United States so that they can say they beat Donald Trump. What happens to the man after that is irrelevant to them. They kind of hope he'll be able to stay, but deep down they already know he won't be able to stay, and he won't be sent back to El Salvador, where he's a citizen, but to a third country, a country where he probably won't be welcome or perhaps not even speak the language. The administrative mistake the U.S. made was sending him to El Salvador. The mistake the man made was telling the United States he was a gang member who would be subject to violence from other gang members if he returned to El Salvador. He thought that would prevent him from being deported at all. As it turns out, if he ever leaves El Salvador, he might not be allowed to return there either. But even if El Salvador welcomes him back, he'll have to get there on his own from some other country. Since the guy ruled out going to his home country, if he were to get deported from the U.S. again, maybe he'll end up in Ukraine or Italy. Perhaps China will take him. A federal judge was demanding daily updates on how the United States government is facilitating the return of the man to U.S. soil. The U.S. government says the best they can do is go get him if El Salvador wants to release him. The judge and the left-wing politicians are demanding due process for anyone being deported. They now say they're not defending the man arrested in Maryland, but the rights of due process. The fact is, this man had due process already and was deemed a gang member by two judges. But that notwithstanding, he was still in the country illegally. Once that is determined, your due process is met. Nothing else needs to be proven. The only thing left to be determined is where you'll go from here. There isn't another country on the planet that would allow anybody from anywhere to just walk in and stay. There are processes for immigration. They must be followed. For four years the Biden administration didn't follow the immigration rules. Instead, they claimed nothing could be done without direct action from Congress. Then they tried to pass a bill that had very little to do with immigration and even less to stop illegal immigration. Then they blamed it on Donald Trump when it didn't pass, even though Donald Trump was a private citizen and didn't have a vote on the bill. It was just a bad bill. I know because I read it. Barack Obama deported millions of illegal immigrants and nobody batted an eye. They even called him the exporter-in-chief. But when, after four years of rampant illegal immigration under the Biden administration, it's suddenly inhumane for Donald Trump to do it. This isn't about one man, and the Democrats will tell you that. But they claim that if this can happen to an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, it can happen to any of us. That's not true. That's fear mongering. If you were born in the United States of America and you're afraid that you're going to be picked up by ICE agents and shipped out of the country, send me a text from the Listening Tube homepage and we'll talk about it one on one. So if it's not true that it can happen to any of us, why are some on the left so adamant about representing this guy instead of all of their constituents? They think they're standing up for a principle. And certainly they are. The question they want us to ask is, do I agree with this principle? But they never really define the principle they want you to support. Are you in favor of illegal immigration? Are you in favor of domestic abuse? Are you in favor of human trafficking? Are you in favor of organized gangs who extort and abuse and murder for control and financial gain? Are you in favor of harboring the people who have chosen to lead a life of crime? My guess is you're not in favor of any of those things, but there are at least five representatives in the United States government and probably more who are in favor of those things. But they tried to disguise it as support for due process. All they want to do is stretch out the process of due process as long as they can. That's really the initial goal. Stall for as long as the courts allow, hoping that something will happen to stop the process of removing illegal immigrants entirely. For the Democrats right now, it's a waiting game. For the Republicans, it's a race to beat the clock. Joe Biden spent four years letting people in, and Donald Trump has less than four years to get them out. The more the Democrats can do to make that window of opportunity smaller, the more they'll consider the Biden administration a victory. So do you support making it harder to establish and maintain boundaries when it comes to the enforcement of immigration to your country? The Democrats seem to believe that as long as you can get here, you should be able to stay, even if you didn't come here legally. The Republicans want to maintain our sovereignty and welcome only those who agree to contribute to society. Ultimately, it's going to come down to the Supreme Court. Like it or not, the Trump administration is going to clear up a lot about the powers of the three branches of the government. Right now, the federal judges have all the power, having brought injunctions to stop Trump's moves in unprecedented numbers. Without control of the House, Senate, nor the executive, the Democrats have only the judicial to offer resistance, and they're certainly putting it to work. Much of it is stalling tactics, as is the case with immigration. The Supreme Court is and will continue to have to act quickly to adjudicate these impasses. I see a limiting of the powers of federal judges, if not from the Supreme Court, then from Congress. The law is being used to undermine the executive branch, and the courts need to get themselves in order while they still have any credibility. Judicial activism has no place in the political dynamic under the U.S. Constitution. We can't have one judge prohibiting the executive branch from doing its job. Oh, but if it were only just one. This past week, two judges were arrested for the harboring of or inhibiting the apprehension of illegal immigrants who are not just in the country illegally, but have committed additional crimes or are part of a criminal organization. In New Mexico, a judge and his wife were arrested for allowing one and perhaps three illegal immigrants and members of the terrorist organization Trendearagua to live on their property and even allow them to practice using semi-automatic rifles at a shooting range. The judge resigned his position prior to being arrested. And in Wisconsin, a judge is charged with several offenses for her role in aiding an illegal alien who was to stand trial in her court for domestic violence charges to escape out the back door of the courthouse after sending ICE and FBI agents to an office down the hall as a distraction. As it turns out, there was another officer who watched what was happening, and the suspect was caught after a foot chase outside the courthouse. There are too many judges abusing their power in an attempt to stifle the executive branch and by extension the will of a majority of Americans. So there's an FCC complaint about the news coverage of the issue, and activist judges working to keep illegal immigrants in the country by using rights that only exist once someone is in the country, even though they're not allowed to be in the country in the first place, and the judges are being arrested for supporting illegal immigrants to the extent of becoming criminals themselves. Meanwhile, lawsuits have been filed to prevent the Trump administration from cutting off funds for sanctuary cities and states. People actually are suing to keep protecting illegal immigrants, and they still want to take federal government money despite pledging to not cooperate with them when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. It's the same as a teenager who refuses to do his chores but still expects to get his allowance. Cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are setting up perimeters inside which criminals can operate without repercussion. It's not surprising that opponents of the Trump administration would advocate for not holding people responsible for their actions. Nobody in the Biden administration was ever held responsible for failure. From the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan to the hundreds of pardons and commutations in the final days of the Biden administration, nobody was ever held responsible for anything, and excuses were made for anyone who needed one. The Democrats set a precedent for irresponsibility, and now they have to stick with it by supporting a gang-banging, wife-battering, human-trafficking, illegal alien instead of the American citizens who vote. They now have to take it upon themselves to hide and aid members of illegal terrorist organizations, even if they've taken a vow to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America as a judge. How brainwashed do you have to be to disregard the laws to which you once agreed to uphold? How misguided must you have become to go out of your way to jeopardize your career and reputation to protect someone by leading them out of back door of the courthouse instead of proceeding with the hearing, which was supposed to take place so that they could defend themselves? I hear a lot of people say that Donald Trump is defying the law, and only the federal judges are in his way. But what Donald Trump is actually doing is forcing the Supreme Court to define the roles of each branch of our government. Right now, there are federal district judges who think they're in charge. The left is using them as a stall tactic. Right now, it's working. The Supreme Court will decide for how much longer. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Support the show or text me from the homepage. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou Ad Infinitum.