Purely Political: Bob Smith (Part II)

By Jim Buckley

An unnamed midshipman checks Rep. Salud Carbajal during Trump 2025 Inauguration ceremony. WARNING: salty language. Courtesy of @RedPilledGirly

(U.S. Navy Commander (Ret) Bob Smith has chosen to take on 5-term congressman Salud Carbajal in the upcoming November election. If Bob can post big numbers in the June 2nd Primary, he believes he’ll have a chance to overtake Salud in November.)

Commander Bob Smith (Ret) Is Running For Congress

Q. This week, Bob, we need to find out what your priorities are and/or would be if elected to Congress. Can you give me three things that might represent that itinerary?

A. Well, we can look at essential things that we need [in the 24^th District]. If you’re a remote employee software engineer, for example, we don’t necessarily need you here on the central coast, right? I get it. You want to live here because it’s amazing, but that’s not something we need here.

There are things we can do [for the things that we actually need]. Look across California and look at how many military bases are gone or dilapidated, with barracks sitting around on them, unused.

Even the land territory that we have. Do we think we’re going to be in wars where we’re driving tanks across vast swaths of land and stuff anymore?

Not likely, right? So, we can take and rehab some of those places into housing areas that won’t take away from the ag land, or anywhere else. It’s already federal land. It’s just being wasted.

Is there something or someplace you have in mind in this district?

There are old barracks up near Cuesta, places down near a naval base in Ventura County that we could look at. There are places outside the district, but adjacent to, and some of the people that work in our district live there.

What else?

Carpinteria is one of the only school districts that does not have a [indoor] pool. And the one here outside – the community pool – is dilapidated. It needs a million dollars’ worth of repairs, but it wasn’t budgeted in Carpinteria’s city budget. We have a water polo team here. They’ve got to use Cate School for their tournaments.

Why? Why is that? Because it’s a blue-collar town with a large Mexican population? I don’t know who Salud Carbajal says he advocates for, but our kids here are not meeting standards, especially the Hispanic population in Carpinteria, and our pool is the one that’s dilapidated and being left behind.

Will there be a debate between you and Salud?

I don’t think Salud will [agree to] debate unless we can show a good turnout in the midterm or in the primary, but I do think he has to answer for his record.

We’ve got to hold our elected officials accountable here, but unfortunately, with no one ever challenging [Democrats], they’re never held accountable. They just get to say whatever they want. They get printed in the local media, whatever they want. You can see objectively that we are falling apart in every category that affects a middle-class person.

We’re 50^th of 50 states in opportunity, 50^th of 50 in home ownership, 50^th of 50 in cost of living. We’re now doing math worse than Mississippi. I don’t want to hear any more California liberals telling me that how “amazing” education is in California. Mississippi is now reading better than us.

Do you have a plan for Immigration?

If we are unwilling as Republicans, to do some commonsense things here in immigration, we’re not going to win any big races. Take DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) kids. If you were two years old and you were brought across the border, and you’re now eighteen, and you’ve graduated, you’ve been through a whole public school system and everything. You probably didn’t even know you were illegal until you went to go get your [driver’s] license at seventeen and a half years old.

How can we hold a two-year-old who’s now eighteen accountable for a decision they never made? They never had a choice in doing it. The person’s never been to another country. Where are you going to send them?

Those are the gray areas where I think if those things are cleaned up, I think that [Republicans] can be on the moral high ground.

Here on the Central Coast, I go to the County office and ask them why they are not enforcing the law on migratory visas and the County tells me, “We don’t ask immigration status.”

Well, I want to know that if I’m paying for it, that money is going to the person, and not a cartel labor organization.

We need to get rid of some of the red tape that makes it so that people don’t want to use E-Verify. The farmers know the families they’re working with. If we have an E-Verify system where they check the person in on this side, they check in on that side. The E-Verify system is constantly running state and federal background checks and all those other things. Those people are checked in both on both sides. We know that person. They come here, they go do the planting season, they have a certain amount of time where they have to get back to the border, check back into the electronic system.

I think that this works so much better than the current system that we have, which is bureaucracy added to all of it where farmers are forced to do all this nonsense.

A large portion of the California coastal politicians want full open borders, right?

Yes, but, that’s not the answer either. There are already some moderate Republicans working on some commonsense immigration reform. I think this is something that can get done with smart people working on the problem.

Have you ever considered running as a Democrat?

No. I’ve been a Republican my entire life. I believe in small government. I think that the local level is where decisions are made best and where democracy happens best.

Look at Carpinteria with these high rises they’re going to put in here for low-income housing. I think the only people that should be determining what Carpinteria looks like are Carpinterians. I don’t think Sacramento should be able to [force] mandates over the top of Carpinteria for what their housing should look like.

The Democrat Party here is for this government-subsidized and socialized housing. I think they want to put everyone in high rise apartments. Tenant, Serfdom, Rent: that’s exactly what a lot of the party stands for.

If you make regulations on rent stabilization and rent freezing, you now need an army of humans in your local city government tracking that and maintaining it and whatever. Regulation in government causes this bloated bureaucracy. I think we can get rid of a bunch of that waste.

I’m for law and order and I’m for national security. These are the reasons that put me on the conservative side of the spectrum. And there are things on the Democrat side of the spectrum that I could never support, especially here in California. So, there’s no possibility that I could ever be a Democrat here.

Before we let you go, do you have any comments on the current situation in the Middle East?