The brutal, appalling murder of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, allegedly by an illegal immigrant, has laid open the bloody consequences of President Joe Biden’s open-border policies.

That’s the view of Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who spoke about the tragedy, as well as the looming government shutdown and artificial intelligence, in an exclusive interview with The Heartlander Wednesday.

“All the problems associated with [the porous border] are brought home by the murder of Laken Riley,” Schmitt said. “It’s one very tragic example, but we’re seeing this across the country. You have tens of thousands of criminals from Venezuela who have made their way to the United States, you’ve got fentanyl streaming across the southern border — people are dying from that every day because the cartels are being enriched by Joe Biden’s policies. 

“It’s wrong, and he owns it. I mean, he opened up the border, reversed all the successful policies under President Trump. We had a 40-plus-year low in illegal immigration in December of 2020. And now we see record high numbers.”

Americans see Biden’s failure to secure the border against the backdrop of the president’s insistence on first providing billions in aid to Ukraine to fight its war with Russia, Schmitt noted, as Congress struggled to avoid Friday’s government shutdown.

“Well, here we go again. Another kicking the can down the road with this ‘deadline-politics,’” he lamented. “No one’s seen any [budget] language. And my guess is we’ll get closer to the deadline and Chuck Schumer will say, ‘You either support this language that you can’t amend, or you support a government shutdown.’ 

“So, it’s a false choice. I’m going to continue to fight for reform where we actually vote on individual appropriations bills, people have the ability to amend them, and then you have a budget. We don’t do that right now, and I think that’s a great frustration. 

“I don’t think anybody wants to see the government shut down Friday, but it’s perfectly avoidable if we actually went through the process of passing appropriations bills.”

Democrats and Republicans have been at loggerheads over whether to include border security in any deal to fund foreign wars.

Americans can’t see why that’s so hard, Schmitt says.

“I think the disconnect, when it relates to Ukraine funding for example, is Americans don’t understand why Joe Biden is so obsessed with making sure we send another $60 billion to another country to secure their border, but doesn’t do anything to secure our own. And I think that’s a real source of frustration, and people see it.”

In the absence of some other rational explanation for that juxtaposition, stories are circulating online that the administration is trying to fund the war in Ukraine to cover up prior CIA activities there. While he didn’t address such claims, Schmitt said the situation cries out for more transparency.

“One of the things I’ve been fighting for in this debate about Ukraine funding is, there needs to be more oversight [by Congress]. There just does. And that has been blocked every step of the way.  

“And I can only surmise that people who support a blank check [for Ukraine], that they’re afraid that more corruption would be exposed. The American people deserve better than that. And so I think we have to fight for that kind of accountability, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

As for the debate over artificial intelligence, or AI, Schmitt last week filed a bill called “the AI and Critical Technology Workforce Framework Act, which would strengthen America’s workforce pipeline in artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, and other critical technologies and ensure that these jobs are kept in the United States rather than being outsourced to other countries.”

The bill would “direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop an AI workforce framework” to ensure American workers are schooled in AI and other emerging technologies.

It remains that many Americans’ familiarity with AI may be the fact that early versions have made a mess of things with a bizarre political and racial bias – for instance, reframing the nation’s Founders as nonwhite and showing an anti-white bias, not to mention an odd case of amnesia regarding the fact that Donald Trump has served as president.

“Yeah, that’s sort of garbage in/garbage out in this woke AI model,” Schmitt laughs, “and Google’s reaping the whirlwind on that now. I mean, it’s totally nuts. But look, if you’re going to have these gender-study Ph.D. folks who’ve been infected by the woke mind virus programming all this stuff, then you’re going to get garbage out. I think that the market should demand better than that.”

When presenting the Founding Fathers on AI platforms, Schmitt says, there should be some connection to reality.  

“We ought to expect that. I think you see this sort of bias against conservatives or a certain viewpoint in Big Tech in general. And this is just the latest iteration of it. But my hope is that, because people are going to demand better than this, that we end up in a much better place.”