Big Mike, I love it. Oh, wow. That's a good nickname. It's been applied to other people in politics, but I'd like it to be referring to me.

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for the invitation. It is a true pleasure to be here. Thank you to Yaff, especially thank you to Yaff, for the honor of allowing me to participate

in the William F. Buckley Jr. lecture series.

I'm a great admirer of the great man.

I've tried to perfect his accent over the years.

I'm not quite patrician enough.

I spent too much time in the Bronx, but I'll work on it over the course of this lecture

series.

It is always so nice to be here in San Diego.

I feel even better about it now that we have a functioning southern

border again.

We are less than 20 miles from Tijuana, but since January 20th, our odds of running into face-tattooed foreign gangsters have dropped precipitously.

I suspect they will drop even further as this administration goes on.

Now, the gangsters from other countries who are still here are most likely in hiding

right now. They know that at any moment Tom Homan might leap out from around a corner with a big

butterfly net and just drag them all back to Latin America. So this is a happy turn of events.

But some on the left seem not to realize it. Some on the left argue, some even on the squishy right, I'm afraid, argue that rounding up

and deporting even the very worst illegal aliens in our country, is somehow anti-American.

That's very strange to me.

Because whatever you think of mass deportation, it's quite silly to argue that it's not American.

Deporting people is a tried and true American tradition, actually.

This is whether we're talking about the 1830s or the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920. That was when we deported foreign communists.

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