The Josh Hammer Report

Josh Hammer

Newsweek Opinion Editor And Host,
"The Josh Hammer Show"

This week, my column argued that the U.S. must adopt a concerted, full-throttle approach to once and for all decisively deal with the vicious, brutal drug cartels that operate with near-impunity in northern Mexico and de facto control perilously large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border. Whether it is kidnappings and killings, the humanitarian crisis that is our constantly besieged and overrun border, or the effective chemical warfare that is the cartels' dumping of unfathomable amounts of lethal fentanyl into the U.S. interior, it is past time for the U.S. to turn away from a faraway intra-Slavic conflict of dubious national interest and to turn to the transnational criminal gangs who comprise some of the vilest thugs in the entire Western hemisphere. Crucially, this should entail (limited) military action—the relevant precedent to follow is General John J. Pershing's (admittedly only partially successful) "Pancho Villa Expedition" of the late 1910s.

This week, I devoted my podcast episode (you can listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts) to the horrific incident last Thursday at Stanford Law School, where Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who was invited to speak by the Stanford Federalist Society, was heckled and unable to deliver his prepared substantive remarks. Even worse, Tirien Steinbach, the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was present as a law school administrator and did absolutely nothing to quell—and on the contrary, overtly sympathized with and helped further incite—the Jacobins who saw fit to act in such juvenile fashion toward an esteemed federal appellate judge. I know Judge Duncan personally, and I am simply apoplectic about this situation. I sincerely hope the Right views this as a watershed moment—a turning point in the war against on-campus wokeism. We must fight back.

In terms of media appearances over the past week, I was quoted in The Daily Signal regarding the ADL's vile attack on Jewish conservative (and "LibsOfTikTok" founder) Chaya Raichik, joined Newsmax's "National Report" to discuss the latest terrible incident of gender ideology indoctrination in an elementary school setting, joined my friend Jesse Kelly on The First to discuss the latest Democratic official to openly defend the sexual exploitation of children, made my debut on the new CenterClip platform discussing Judge Duncan at Stanford saga, appeared on both "In Focus with Addison Smith" and "Tipping Point with Kara McKinney" yesterday on One America News Network, joined the always-fun "Steak for Breakfast" podcast, and (as usual) co-hosted the Edmund Burke Foundation's most recent episode of the "NatCon Squad" podcast.

Regarding public appearances, I returned last Friday from my four-event trip to Houston and Dallas. I will be in Washington, D.C. this Thursday-Friday for a small, off-record event. Then Sunday night, I will fly back to the Lone Star State: I have Federalist Society events next Monday in San Antonio, and next Tuesday in Austin. If you would like more information on either of those two upcoming Texas events, contact me using the email address below. Also, in case you missed it, here is the full video of my recent CPAC panel on the controversy surrounding Israel's judicial reform proposal.

Our highlighted right-leaning Newsweek op-eds this week include selections from the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, Jonathan Tobin, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), John A. Burtka, and James Piereson.

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Spotlight

Destroy the Mexican Drug Cartels

The tragic killing of two U.S. citizens this week in the border town of Matamoros, Mexico, should, in a just world, refocus American attention on the glaring problem of transnational drug cartels' de facto control of large swaths of our perilously porous southern border. That the two Americans killed may have been mistaken by warring cartel clans for Haitian drug smugglers, as The Dallas Morning News reported, hardly ameliorates the awful situation or lessens our imperative to recalibrate attention away from faraway proxy wars of dubious national interest, and toward the very monsters in our own backyard who run the Western hemisphere's worst human trafficking rings and flood the U.S. interior with the most lethal drugs known to man.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S.-Mexico border, at this point, is one of the most chaotic, over-trafficked, and outright dangerous borders in the world. Vicious cartels, such as Sinaloa and Jalisco, engage in gang shootouts in outlaw fashion, with nary a Mexican law enforcement agent in sight—and even those in sight are more likely than not to be bribed, and in the cartels' pockets. Human trafficking rings, often working hand in hand with the cartels and opportunistic "coyotes" who promise to smuggle vulnerable migrants into the U.S., parade hordes of Central American and Caribbean migrants through the Mexican interior and right up to the border. The humanitarian conditions on these migrant "caravans" are typically abysmal; drugs are rampant, children are exploited, and far too many women are raped.

Drugs flow across the border like never before; the U.S. drug overdose crisis, which is primarily a fentanyl crisis, is nearly exclusively a phenomenon of the cartels. Drug overdose deaths in America last year reached an unconscionable 106,000-plus, or over 290 daily. That is the functional equivalent of a mid-size commercial airliner falling out of the sky each day; and here, as is the case with fentanyl, those proverbial airliners falling out of the sky would be predominantly packed with those under the age of 35. This tragedy is America's single greatest humanitarian failing, at the present time.

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