The Big Ben Show: Virginia's Dem Loss, Minnesota Corruption, and Can California be Saved?
Plus: Taiwan isn't spending enough to defend itself
The latest episode of The Big Ben Show is here, with Adam Carolla and Michele Tafoya as our guests for the week — watch and listen:
Does Taiwan Care To Defend Itself?
Taiwan in recent days passed extra defense money that had been stalled in the narrowly divided legislature. The roughly $25 billion falls short of the $40 billion proposed by Democratic Progressive Party President Lai Ching-te, as he tries to move the island’s defense spending to 5% of its economy by 2030. But the opposition Kuomintang and a third party control parliament.
The defense package appears to exclude some missile defense and domestic drone priorities crucial to persuading Mr. Xi that an invasion would be a debacle. Depending on how the money is allocated, Taiwan could spend about 3% of its economy on defense this year.
Yes, that’s insufficient, given the increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party. A trip to China last month by Taiwan’s opposition leader fueled suspicions that the country’s political class isn’t serious about defending its political and economic freedom.
But President Lai has to socialize the threat without terrifying the public, in a country that held its first presidential election as recently as the Clinton Administration. That is one of the heaviest lifts in global geopolitics, and compromises and incremental progress are a feature of democracy.
Three percent. Three percent! And they gutted their domestic drone program. Great job selling the world on your stubborn defense strategy, guys.
The Post El Chapo Civil War
A man’s body, hands bound and covered by a blue tarp, lies by the side of the road where it had been dumped minutes earlier. A blood-soaked sign says he was a “Chapito,” a member of one of two criminal factions fighting for control of this city, the cradle of Mexico’s transnational narcotics industry.
Such macabre finds are common in Culiacán—a city of luxury car dealerships, fancy malls, and makeshift fentanyl labs—marking the shifting lines of nearly two years of relentless civil war between the two main clans of the pioneering Sinaloa cartel.
It’s a war that the Chapitos, the heirs of Mexican drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appear to be losing, casting doubt on the future of a dynasty that once ruled vast swaths of the criminal underworld on its way to becoming the world’s top producer and smuggler of fentanyl.
The latest blow came last month with the U.S. indictment of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha and nine other current and former state and local officials, charging them with taking bribes from the Chapitos to protect their criminal enterprise.
On one level, the fall of the Guzmáns marks a signal victory for Washington, which pursued them across four presidential administrations. Since his 2019 conviction in a Brooklyn federal court, El Chapo has been serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Supermax prison high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
On another, it has cost Mexico dearly. The fight among criminal pretenders to Guzmán’s throne has unfolded like a Shakespearean drama, sparked by betrayal, ambition, greed—and rivers of blood. Since 2024, when one of Guzmán’s sons kidnapped the veteran head of a rival faction and handed him over to U.S. authorities, some 3,000 people, gunmen from both sides and innocent bystanders, have been killed in the fighting. Another 3,600 are missing.
The Marriage Crisis Is Worse Than You Think
In 1960, nearly 85% of prime-age adults (those between 25 and 54) were married. Today, that figure has collapsed to roughly 54%.
However, the topline marriage data conceals that America’s marriage rate is propped up by immigrants. While 64% of foreign-born adults in America are married, fewer than 52% of native-born American adults are married. That’s a 12-point gap. Without the steady arrival of immigrants who still prioritize marriage, America’s marriage rate would be even lower and, consequently, so would the birth rate.
At first, one may think that immigrants are more likely to be married because many of them arrive through marriage. But two facts disprove this argument. First, there was no gap in the marriage rate between immigrants and natives as early as 1970. And second, when we divide immigrants by how old they were when they first came to the United States, it becomes clear that the younger immigrants are when they arrive in the United States, the more they look like the average American when it comes to marriage. Culture is driving the decline in marriage, and immigrants and their children are unfortunately assimilating into America’s low-marriage culture.
When you look only at immigrants who arrived in the United States before turning 18, and thus well before marriage-based immigration could explain their presence, they still marry at a higher rate than native-born Americans. But when you compare immigrants who arrived before age 10 to those who arrived as teenagers, the pattern is unmistakable: the more years an immigrant spends growing up in America, the less likely they are to ever marry. The marriage gap between native-born Americans and immigrants who arrived as young children has completely vanished this century.
This is what assimilation looks like, except in this case, it is a bad thing. Immigrants aren’t bringing some exotic disease called “low marriage rates” with them. They’re catching it in America.
It raises a question that should haunt every American who still believes families are the building blocks of a free society: What exactly are immigrants assimilating to?
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🪶 Quote
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
— Ernest Hemingway