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Language: en
This is coming out of the Summit. Mike
Lee's proposal to make Pirates of the
Caribbean uh legal again. Literally, I
can read this, but I feel like you have
this like queued up. So, I'm gonna pass
the mic to you, Tom. Like, walk us
through this. What did this mean
exactly?
>> So, all right. Here's what's going on.
Senator Mike Lee wants to treat cartels
like pirates. So, you got to respect
that. A new Senate bill would let the
president issue letters of Mark
officially treating cartel members as
pirates. Letters of mark are a
constitutional tool that are used to
authorize private actors in warfare. The
bill would classify cartel members as
pirates under international law. This
allows private security or contractors
to target cartels legally. It bypasses
traditional military deployment and
congressional war declarations, which is
turning out to be something that Trump
is very good at finding like those
things like the old laws that like, oh,
I can just use my EO powers to get this
across the line.
>> Duct taped it together. Okay, now I got
a new law.
>> It's [laughter] wild. The last US
letters of Mark were issued during the
War of 1812 to give you an idea on this.
So yeah, this quite literally brings us
back to the age of piracy where what we
realized was, okay, this is way too hard
for the British Empire to track down all
this stuff. So we're going to start
writing these letters of mark so that
privateeers, as they were known, had
official sanction to go and like
>> shoot cannons at these pirates and take
the stuff back, confiscate their ships,
confiscate their bounty. I mean, it is
this this one is wild to me. Like, I
really saw in some ways that history
moves in like this linear fashion
>> and now I'm realizing, man, this stuff
really just loops on itself like
endlessly.
>> I feel like this is the start of your
One Piece journey now. We get we get a
crew. We could we could get around. We
just need a Nami and we'll be good.
Like, we just we can start going around
and just looking for
>> You're saying it to be funny, but that's
what this actually that's that's the
actual law. There's a guy, if you look
in the I can't remember if it's on the
White House one, but somebody posted
about this. There's a guy who I guess is
uh part of he says in his Twitter bio,
part of Parka's, which is Mark Andre,
part of his like tech inroup
>> and he makes military weapons and he was
like, "Hey, to any of you privateeers
that are going to do this, so all you
Luffies, all you Namies, all you Zoros
out there, we've got the weaponry that
you need and we're ready to supply you."
And I was like, "Oh my god."
>> Okay, joke jokes aside, what this is
saying is it's almost kind of like the
uh like a citizen's arrest, but like in
the in the Caribbean Sea. So that way if
you see a narco boat or anything that
seems I guess ter in under the
definitions that Trump outlined, you can
not you can seize from them, you can
shoot at them, you can
>> we would have to look we'll do some
research into the actual specifics of
what's legal and what's not. Don't want
to give people a legal opinion here, but
yes, there would be a set of known yeses
and nos. So things you can do, things
you can't do, rules of engagement, all
of that stuff. And as long as you file
them, then it would be considered a good
seizure. I don't know what percentage
they're allowed to keep of the stuff
that they get. I that we'd have to look
into.
>> But this is one of the ways that the
golden age of piracy was ended was
privateeers just like came out of the
woodwork. This is also, by the way, how
the west was won. You had all of these
militias that the most famous would
morph into the Texas Rangers, but it
started as these groups realizing, oh,
the way that the government is
officially going about fighting the
Native Americans is nonsensical. Native
Americans, they'll always exploit a
moment of weakness and the second that
the odds are matched, they bail. It's
actually quite brilliant. It's very the
kinds of strategies that we would use
during the Revolutionary War, the kind
of strategies that insurgents use. It's
like you don't fight in a headlong
trench warfare kind of battle. And so
all of this allows for that sort of
monoemono type thing where it's going to
be what started private citizens
amassing what will look like militias
going out and stopping these narco
boats. But like how they qualify like
how do you prove that this is a narco
boat? What happens to you if it's not a
narco boat and you blow it up and you
kill somebody? like that's gonna happen.
This is one of those things that like
the writer in me is like I can't believe
this is real. This is incredible. And
then the like realworld version of me is
like this is psychotic and this is going
like this is the kind of thing I wanted
to believe that we moved away from. This
is why we have the military. Like you ha
both having a big country where you pay
for everything and you have this
gigantic uh standing military and
unleashing private citizens to build
their own militia and go off halfcocked
is like guys let's pick a lane here.
Either we're going to pay for everything
and we're going to be a military that's
going to police the seas or defund to a
reasonable extent a lot of this stuff
and say cool privateeers have at it.
Here are the laws. Keep in mind, you can
go to prison, so be careful if you do
this wrong. So, this one is I will be I
I will reserve my judgment to see how
this plays out, but I cannot see this
playing out any way but badly.
>> The real like domino to fall will be
when Pete Hegsth drops a drone on a
narco boat, but it was a narco boat
commandeered by a privateeer and ends up
killing an American citizen who just
killed a narco person. That's
>> that's the kind of chaos. That's the
thing that like will really kind of
sober a lot of people about this law.
So, it's interesting and going through
it. There's a part that we skip over.
Yeah. I'm making all the pirate jokes,
but it does say to seize cartel property
and persons on land or sea outside the
US. Yeah.
>> So, this is very interesting to see what
happens in Mexico, in Colombia, in
Venezuela, and some of these other
places where
>> they will be subject to those
jurisdictions, though. Let's be very
clear. This is just the US saying,
"Don't worry, we won't prosecute you."
Until I hear Mexico or Venezuela or
whoever say, "No, no, no. We're good." I
will assume that we're going to have an
international problem here. Now, back in
the day of piracy, I imagine people were
way more on board with this because you
really couldn't police the seas. And so,
the only way to do this was to finally
say, "Listen, every ship now that's out
in the sea might be coming for you, so
you might want to rethink your piratey
ways." At one point the average life
expectancy of a pirate was something
like 3 years. Like you were just toast.
Once you became a pirate that was game
over. You were going to get killed. And
this is one of the reasons that now
piracy is only something that happens
like off of third world countries
because bro that that is just for so
long it was just a one-way path to an
early grave.