Can Democrats Win a Shutdown Fight?

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Welcome to Podsafe America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm John Lovitt.

I'm Tommy Dietor.

On today's show, Trump promises more political prosecutions and retribution.

The military has arrived to liberate war-ravaged Portland.

Stephen Miller wants to investigate people who promote progressive causes as domestic terrorists.

The president of peace says he's close to a deal to end the war in Gaza.

And an AI version of Trump is offering all Americans a non-existent medical technology that QAnon believes can bring you back from the dead, which we know about thanks to a post from the real Donald Trump.

We'll get into it.

We'll get into it.

But let's start with a government shutdown that has moved into all but certain territory.

We've gone past looming.

We've been barreling towards it for a while, and now it's all but certain.

We're on the brink.

Yeah, we're on the brink of it.

Funding runs out at 12.01 a.m.

on Wednesday, and so far, Trump and Republicans have refused to make any concessions to Democrats whose votes they need to keep the government open.

Democrats want to stop health insurance premiums from going up and Medicaid cuts from taking effect.

A White House official told Politico that Trump's response to Democrats' health care asks was, quote, go fuck yourself.

Cool.

Not inaccurate.

No, no.

Spot on.

And in fact, his actions since then have borne that out.

Trump is also threatening mass firings of federal workers who are furloughed during the shutdown.

His press secretary said that, quote, food assistance programs for women and children in impoverished communities will come to an end, end quote, if Democrats don't drop their demands.

And one Republican senator suggested Trump would use the shutdown to inflict pain on Democratic areas of the country, saying,

I'd be much more worried if I was a blue state.

Meanwhile, a new morning consult poll of about 2,000 voters shows that 45% would blame Republicans for a shutdown versus 32% who would blame Democrats, with Independents blaming Republicans by an even wider margin.

Leaders of both parties met at the White House Monday to see if they could reach a last-minute agreement.

And from what they said after the meeting, it doesn't seem promising.

Laid out to the president

Full stop.

They have some crazy ideas.

Giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens for health care, that's a crazy idea.

Funding transgender surgeries in Peru, that's a crazy idea.

Let's work on it together, but let's do it in the context of an open government that's providing essential services to the American people.

That's all that we're proposing to do, and the fact that they refuse to do that shows how unreasonable their position is.

I think we're headed to a shutdown because the Democrats won't do the right thing.

I hope they change their mind, but we're going to see.

You know, Senator Eric Schmidt referred to Guatemalan sex changes, but the ones that J.D.

Vance is concerned about seem to be taking place in Peru.

Right.

This is just interesting.

Quint.

We're spreading the money around.

Yeah, it's just sort of a,

I don't, just not aware of Medicaid covering all of these Latin American gender-affirming surgeries.

No, I think that's, I think it's U.S.

left of U.S.

USAID cuts.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess because he also referred to DEI in Burma, Eric Schmidt did.

Just as a note, they really will never acknowledge what they actually passed in the one big beautiful bill.

They never will.

They never, like, no Democrat, the, the, just the out-and-out lie of Democrats who are trying to use a trillion dollars or $1.5 trillion for undocumented immigrants, just brazen and false and makes me actually more receptive.

Like, we've all debated whether or not healthcare was the right fight, but the way it plays out when they talk about it after makes it feel like it's more the right fight just because the Republicans are so willing to lie about it.

Yeah.

I mean, well, let's get, let's get it.

I just was, that was just my question.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, watching the J.D.

Vance.

People have strong reactions.

I'm glad you raised the many South American countries that transgender surgeries funded by the American taxpayer may be taking place in.

Can I raise a reaction?

Yes, please.

Speaker Johnson looked really short there.

Wow.

And I thought, it's funny, you went to Johnson because I was like, what's Lurch doing standing behind J.D.

Vance there?

Who is behind?

Oh, Thune's talk.

No one lets Thun talk.

No one lets Thun's talk.

The man hasn't spoken since 2002.

Honestly, I don't know

I think he seems happy about it because he's like, how the fuck did I get it?

I don't know.

I was like a Tea Party-ish guy back in the day and pretty right-wing.

And now I'm just like, what has these people done?

Yeah, if you stand still enough in the Republican Party, you will be the reasonable one.

Right, that's true.

It's just a matter of how long you wait.

How are you guys feeling about the Democrats' position heading into the shutdown?

Tommy?

Not great.

I don't want to talk more about South American surgery.

Honestly, that's more uplifting.

I mean, I feel like we're kind of like the New York Jets right now.

We're not looking good.

I think Trump is shown that he can run circles around Democratic leadership when it comes to messaging and communications.

I think I believe Russ Vogt, the OMB director, when he says that he would use a shutdown to speed up Doge cuts and the destruction of the government.

They also have demonstrated that no matter what we negotiate with the Republicans, the Trump administration will use the rescission process to just claw back money.

even if it's illegal.

Trump is clearly saying, I will punish Democrats in blue states if this happens.

I think the ACA subsidies that we're talking about are really important to a lot of people.

Like if we don't extend these ACA subsidies, tens of millions of people will see their premiums go up as much as 75%.

And

that's a huge deal and it's really bad.

But I think almost no one knows what I'm talking about right now who's listening to this show, let alone like the broader electorate.

And so I'm just, I'm worried.

Like,

I was talking to a smart friend today about government shutdowns, someone who'd been through a few of them.

And this person made the point to me that

we were private conversation.

We're fucking, we're the,

same in our office.

What did we say?

I thought it was smart too.

Go on.

Yes, we, Dan, said, no, it wasn't Dan.

This person said to me, a shutdown is never a vehicle for legislative victory.

At best, it's a vehicle for messaging.

But usually

voters just want the government to be open and to function.

Love it.

What do you think?

So I just want to say that I feel like

I don't know.

I really don't.

And I watched your conversation with Faz and Matt Glassman.

I thought they were both very smart.

I came away more uncertain.

I will say though, I also came away with a better appreciation for why healthcare might have been the right choice.

Because

there was a debate, should it be about democracy or should it be about tariffs?

And I do see one argument for why healthcare is the right fight, is it is a place where you could see some concessions not feeling like a dramatic identity ego wound to Trump, right?

Like there is the possibility of an ACA deal, right?

Whether it comes in this debate or this negotiation or the one that would follow.

The CR, where I find myself nervous is the way in which the strategy and leverage around kind of old school normal political leverage gets muddied with what Tommy's talking about.

And so you have what part of what Tommy's talking about.

So you have

just the old school Mike Johnson's height, Mike Johnson being a short king.

So you have the old school sort of negotiation around a shutdown, who's going to give in, the party in power is forcing the votes, the party that's out of power that's making the demands is seen as unreasonable.

There's also,

I think it still counts as normal politics, going to be the question of how long the filibuster holds, which I think is not getting enough attention in this, given that Republicans in just the past, what, two weeks, undid part of the filibuster, and they've been playing a lot of games when they passed the one big, beautiful bill.

I don't think that's been getting enough conversation as to what happens in a multi-week shutdown as Republicans come up with some way in which they can honor Thun's promise to not get rid of the filibuster on legislation while creating yet another exception and passing whatever the fuck they want, making our negotiation even harder for the longer-term spending bill to come.

I'm worried about that.

But then that gets combined with Donald Trump can start firing people.

Donald Trump can target his political enemies.

And there's two problems with that.

One, he's already doing that.

Yeah.

He's already doing that.

And so he will do that regardless.

He did not need to shut down.

You can get more authorities, I think, is the concern and make it happen faster and deeper cuts.

Allegedly.

Yeah, Schumer doesn't think that's true.

I know this person I was talking to today, not you guys,

had real concerns.

Clearly no one in Schumer's office either.

But I do think the concern goes beyond, oh, he's going to have these added authorities, which he does have.

He's going to abuse his office even further during a shutdown to speed up what he's already done when the government is open.

And I do think it's a trap to concede that that's leverage.

against us because it allows his extra legal powers to make him more powerful in the actual legitimate arena.

And I do think it's important to not concede on that front.

But even if you don't concede anything on that front, Democrats are just in a really tough position.

So I have a couple of thoughts on this.

One, I think back to Tony Fabrizio's memo in July.

He's Trump's pollster.

And

this was mid-July.

I think he came out with this memo, and he said, while the 2024 outcome for these districts, these are the most battleground districts in the House, was even, the generic Republican is down three points right now among all registered voters, among those most motivated to vote, Republicans down seven points.

If the Republican candidate lets the premium tax credit expire with the ACA, the Republican trails the Democrat by 15 points in these districts.

And if the Republican supports the extension of the tax credit for the ACA, they're leading by a couple points.

Now, this is mid-July.

Tony Fabrizio was like working for a coalition that was like hired by the insurance companies.

Obviously, the insurance companies want the tax subsidies because it helps them in addition to actually helping people not have their premiums grow up.

But it made made me think like,

okay,

what if we win?

What if there is

some kind of a deal with some kind of extension for ACA subsidies?

There's never going to be a deal on reversing the Medicaid cuts, right?

That's like a fantasy.

That's what they passed.

That was their main legislative accomplishment, right?

So, but what if there is a deal on ACA?

Because some Republicans, especially Republicans in frontline districts, are nervous, substantively amazing, right?

People's premiums don't go up as much.

We've like probably 20 million people get some help on premiums.

Do Democrats in any way benefit politically from doing that a year before the election?

Do Republicans benefit from doing that a year before the election and having that off the table?

And was the shutdown fight at that point worth it for Democrats in any way?

Right.

In the near term, I don't want anyone's premiums to go up.

I don't want anyone to get hurt, but we are bailing Trump and the Republicans out of their own political problem.

And at some point, if we want his approval to go down, he needs to touch the hot stove.

Zooming out a little bit, like part of the meta conversation and what activists are telling Schumer is that this government is doing illegal, unconstitutional, terrible stuff, and that we should not fund it.

We should not be a party to ICE raids and rescissions and all the terrible things.

Where is the strategy that goes from shutdown to an end game that gets Donald Trump to change his behavior?

No one can articulate one because there isn't one.

Look,

I sound like I'm super negative on this because I think it's better for us to debate this.

I'm genuinely torn.

I don't know what the right thing to do is.

I know that Chuck Schumer is getting tons of incoming from activists just like us, in part because of rage we all had several months ago about the failure of a strategy the last time there was a funding fight.

But I'm just like, I'm not seeing a clear end game when it comes to policy or communications, especially with the leadership we have.

So it's funny you say that because my other points that I was going to make is that I've started to think about this in terms of like go big or go home.

And the go big strategy that you referenced that activists are pushing on is to say that, like, we're not voting to fund this government.

Illegal tariffs, illegal like detention of American citizens, illegal troop deployments, all kinds of ways that he's abusing his power.

And until you meet with us so that, you know, you can have the policies you want, you won the election, but what you are doing is illegal.

And if you don't meet with us and you don't want to help us on that, then you figure out a way to fund the government because we're not voting for it.

And guess what?

You are free to change the Senate rules.

You've abused power in a bunch of other ways.

If you want to change the Senate rules to get rid of the filibuster to pass the budget, you're free to do that as well.

But you cannot count on our votes for this.

And we're going to make sure that the American people know how illegal this is and we don't want our names on it.

Like I think that, and then to answer your question, then there is no way out, right?

Like their way out is that Republicans decide to reopen the government on their own, but at least Democrats then take a stand and make a big fight.

Then my next most favorite option here is maybe just like not doing it at all because i i do think that i'm worried about what you say tommy which is like you start getting in this negotiation about health care and there's a couple outcomes i see one is we do it for a couple weeks they don't give in on health care at all and then we just fold the most likely outcome is like a five-day shutdown and then we cave and look even weaker right and and then maybe we get a fig leaf right which is we cave but they say oh we'll give a vote on aca at some point and then who knows then it passes maybe and then again we've we've saved their asses or or what or they negotiate an ACA thing, and I guess we get a short-term win, but again, we take it off the table.

So I don't, I think that the small ball, which is what they're doing now, I think that is the least chance of any kind of either substantive or like political victory.

And again,

I'm doing this for the sake of argument too, because I've gone back and forth a million times.

Yeah, I don't know.

I also just like,

is that right?

Right.

Like, let's say Democrats fight on healthcare.

They get some kind of a concession.

It reverses some chunk of the ACA

clawbacks on the subsidies.

They declare a victory.

We're still hammering Republicans next year on healthcare.

We can claim we force them to do this.

And to the point that Faz made in your conversation, like people don't like Donald Trump.

They don't know what Democrats stand for.

They haven't seen Democrats stand up and fight.

And here's a moment where Democrats are standing up and fighting for something.

And then you say, well, that's not the real central

galvanizing concern.

Like our democracy is under threat, so we should fight across everything.

But fighting across everything, I do think all but guarantees, right, that Republicans justify getting rid of the filibuster by saying Democrats will never give us their votes.

We want to reopen the government.

Then we've lost any leverage we have to do some good in a negotiation over healthcare.

And you're right.

In some sense, helping Republicans out of the ACA subsidy shortfall does kind of get rid of a political disaster for them.

Absolutely true.

But like, man, like, I just,

that's a hard, that's not, that's like, that's the, that's a, that's a tough position for us to take that we've that like we want to teach the controversy.

I don't know.

I don't think it's teaching.

I mean, I think to, to Faz's point, I think instead of just being like, this is bad, this is bad, it'd be like, we want to end an illegal tax on Americans that's tanking the economy.

We want to make sure their premiums don't go up.

We want to make sure that we can walk on our streets without being detained, even though we're citizens of the United States, or that we don't see troops in our streets and our tax dollars aren't going to, you know, like, there's, there's a couple things.

I know what you're saying.

Like it is definitely broader, but, you know, have the fight.

I mean, Chris Murphy was on Colbert and, you know, he was like, why would we fund a bill that literally destroys our democracy?

And I was like, good line.

I liked it.

And then I saw this guy, Con Carroll, who was like a Republican Senate Communications Director, and now he's like a Washington Examiner opinion guy.

And he said, quote, we can't vote for a spending bill that literally destroys democracy, but if you extend one existing health insurance subsidy, then everything is fine.

And I was like, honestly.

Yeah, I know.

I know, I I know, I know.

When I talked to Warren about this, I asked her version this question, and her point was just like, we have to prove we can win a fight.

We can win something here.

This is the one, this is the issue.

There is a place where there is a path to some kind of a genuine victory for Democrats.

And it would be nice to use what limited power we have before the Republicans decide to take it away to use it to prove that we can actually do something.

And like, I worry the same way Faz is worried about the fact that our leaders in this feel as though they're being pushed towards it.

That is a problem.

Like, there's all kinds of reasons this is not ideal.

I don't like any of the options, but I am coming around to why if we can get a victory here, it's the one place we could.

Now then the question is, was this the right time?

Because a ticking clock around these subsidies is going to fall in November, December.

The subsidies end on January 1st, right?

This bill is just to carry you through to the bigger negotiation to come.

Was this CR the right moment?

I don't know.

Well, it's like a seven week, yeah, we'll do this again in seven weeks or something, right?

Yeah, and we should also say that to your point earlier, Tommy, that no one knows what the fuck we're talking about.

One reason that they're doing it now and not later is the insurance companies will be sending out the notices soon to people that premiums will go up.

And by the way, those notices aren't just for people who use subsidies to help afford insurance on the exchanges.

Everyone's premiums are going up because if there are, if there's less money for people for subsidies, then that means that insurance companies in general, that means some people will lose their healthcare coverage, which means everyone's premiums goes up because the pool of people are sicker, right?

So it's like, this is a, people are going to get these notices and that's going to be a thing.

So, you know, it's good to fight.

But I am, I am like noticing J.D.

Vance there when he was like, and we sat down and they did have some good ideas.

I'm like, oh, he's thinking the good ideas are extending the ACA.

Yeah, look, this is a maximally cynical.

perspective.

And I, again, I don't want anyone hurt, but just like in pure political terms, I think people are far more likely to notice and be angry that their premiums went up than they are ever to hear a Democratic Party argument about why we have shut down the government.

Because

election comes.

Our side sucks at communicating, and their side lies about everything.

They're saying it's about sex changes in Peru.

It's like, what, what?

Right.

And if the election was next week and we saved it, maybe, but a year from now,

we'll see what happens.

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Okay, right after we finished recording on Thursday, Trump finally got the indictment of Jim Comey that he personally ordered, though it took a former insurance lawyer who had never prosecuted a case before and couldn't find the courtroom to actually get it done, which she had to do alone because not a single lawyer in the office of 300 people that she now runs would agree to help her because of lack of evidence that a crime was actually committed.

Even then, the grand jury rejected one count and only 14 of the 23 jurors approved the other two.

None of that mattered to Trump, of course, who told reporters on Friday that he thinks there will be other indictments.

In addition to the investigations he's ordered of Adam Schiff, Tish James, John Brennan, and others, Trump told NBC over the weekend that he, quote, would imagine the DOJ is also investigating former FBI director Chris Wray over a completely false conspiracy that the FBI staged the January 6th riots, which even Cash Patel had to partially debunk.

The DOJ has also subpoenaed Georgia District Attorney Fonnie Willis's travel records, and Trump is personally pressuring Microsoft to fire Biden's former deputy attorney general, our friend Lisa Monaco.

So Trump said his success would be his retribution, but I guess he's ultimately decided that his retribution would be his retribution.

The three of us haven't had a chance to talk about Comey yet.

What do you make of that indictment, Lovett?

I think, you know, broken clock.

No.

It's so brazen, right?

Like, he, he, he,

he,

86 Comey here.

I know it's spelled on shells, buddy.

I was saying this to the guys beforehand, but if ultimately I do end up sharing a cell with James Comey, just know I did kill myself.

But this, like, the brazenness of it, right?

He posts over the weekend, we're not going quickly enough after my enemies.

He gets this guy, Siebert, out of there.

He appoints this unqualified person who's a loyalist into this job, the looming deadline of the statute of limitations.

This person comes in, gets the indictment together, despite the fact that the declination memo from the Department of Justice said there's not enough evidence to charge, and rams this thing through, couldn't even get all the indictments done in front of a grand jury, and that anyone, anyone you consider, look, all the fucking Trump loyalists love it.

They think it's great.

He's going after his enemies.

So I think that anyone is trying to do any kind of defense of this is so fucking embarrassing.

It is so obvious and brazen.

It's the most brazen thing any of us ever seen, have ever seen at the Department of Justice.

There's no even pretense that this is anything other than a political prosecution.

It's happening right in front of our eyes.

It's fucking nuts.

Yeah, so it's just clearly about a revenge, and Trump told us as much.

And Comey is going first only because the statute of limitations is about to run out, but there is a long list that we are just going to tick through.

And the goal is not just to punish Comey, although that's part of it.

I mean, I think there's a very good chance that this case gets tossed.

You could imagine a scenario where the judge scolds the prosecutor for bringing something this ridiculous.

Like, to only get 14 out of 23 grand jurors to support this indictment is an incredibly weak case.

It's embarrassing.

And then Halgut is like, I object.

Did I do that right?

But it's about, you know, scaring the shit out of Democrats

and political opponents and, you know, making sure that big Democratic donors no longer want to support Democratic organizations and, you know, putting fear in the heart of his enemies.

And like the exchange with ted cruise that this case is ostensibly built off of is confusing at best best but like in reality i don't think any reasonable person would read that given the facts that we know and assume a crime was committed no

a crime like for it to it has to be like willful intentional corrupt right like those are the some of the the words used for uh to make false statements uh or obstruction of congress like a real crime and it's like Comey answering a question over Zoom in 2020 about testimony that he gave in 2017.

And Cruz kind of confuses the question that Grassley had asked before him.

So Cruz confuses the question.

And then no one even knows if Comey was talking about Andrew McCabe or his other friend.

And I don't like, we could go through the details of the whole thing, but I don't even know.

I don't think it's worth it.

It's an incredibly weak case, which is, and you know that because the 300 people in the eastern district of Virginia who declined to bring any charges until Lindsey Halligan showed up thought the same thing.

Yeah, it's absurd on its face.

James Comey, not a perfect person, the guy is fucking by the book and he was going to testify, honestly.

Maybe he's parsing his words, maybe he's being careful, but the guy was being by the book, some would say.

And then also occasionally, extremely not by the book, like announcing

investigations days before an election.

But the thing that I'm coming back to is, you know, the Bill Pulte, the Trump housing aide, starts drumming up.

Mortgage frauds are.

Mortgage frauds are.

He keeps drumming up mortgage fraud allegations against everybody from Adam Schiff to Lisa Cook.

And then people go through and like, actually, look, see, Lisa Cook maybe didn't do this.

And maybe this person didn't do this.

And like, people should do that.

They should dig into whether these allegations are fair or not.

But it is beside the point.

So Ruth Marcus posted an excerpt from this speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.

It was about being a prosecutor.

and I thought it was really well said.

It said,

We know that no local police force can strictly enforce the traffic laws, or it would arrest half the driving population on any given morning.

With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.

It is in this realm in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecutorial power lies.

Like, that is the threat.

You can dig into anyone.

You can find a technical violation on the part of anyone.

That's why this is dangerous.

Whether or not people want to parse and say, well, maybe Comey did lie, even though that's bullshit, is it is giving in to what is so obviously dangerous about what the Trump administration is doing.

They are finding the people and then looking for the crime, not the other way around.

One like bitter.

irony or frustrating piece of context around all this is I'm pretty sure we are talking about conversations about leaks to a reporter who was writing something about investigations into the Clinton Foundation.

And those investigations went nowhere because there was no illegal activity or wrongdoing.

But the FBI and DOJ seem to have been working overtime to blame each other in the press because the other side didn't want to get called up to Congress to get berated by someone like Ted Cruz to say, why aren't you prosecuting the Clinton Foundation?

And I think that's why there was all this talk via intermediaries or whatnot with this reporter about these articles that led to this stupid outcome.

So that's one of the fact patterns in this.

And again, it's confusion over which one they're talking about.

The other is that

when Comey had those meetings with Trump where Trump demanded his loyalty,

and then Comey took notes,

he had said before publicly that he gave those memos and notes to his friend

Daniel Richmond, who was a professor who had worked for a time at the FBI.

And then the question is, oh, did he authorize Richmond to leak those memos?

And Richmond has previously said, no, he didn't.

He just talked to me about how the press was getting on him, and I decided to do it myself.

And also, Richmond apparently didn't work at the FBI at the time that he got the memos.

He's like a special government employee about some random thing, like surveillance technology or something.

Yeah.

It does seem like Daniel Richmond was a bit of a carve-out for Jim Comey when he wanted to work the media on a certain thing.

But like, that doesn't mean it's a crime.

Nothing about that is crimy.

You'll be surprised to know Republican politicians and pundits are mostly all on board, except Andrew McCarthy.

He's written a couple nice,

strongly worded pieces in the National Review saying this is preposterous, so good for him.

But the rest of them are on board.

Some say Comey was indicted by a jury of his peers.

That's the Jon Thune sort of explanation.

It's like, hey, you say it was political, but there was a grand jury and they gave the indictment.

Others have just been more open that this is just revenge for Trump being indicted.

And they don't seem all that worried that this, in the words of the New York Times, quote, risks ushering in a cycle of retaliation in which each new administration takes aim at the last one.

What do you think?

Yeah, it's the trick they all have to pull here is that Trump wasn't indicted because he's unusual.

Trump was indicted because Democrats went too far.

Trump was indicted because he broke the law.

Joe Biden's Department of Justice did not behave like Trump's Department of Justice.

There is no post by Joe Biden saying, go after my enemies.

It's more aucus, aucus, aucus.

And so you end up like, like, like they're trying to claim claim somehow that, well, you know, we saw them target people like Donald Trump, but Joe Biden's ZOJ also prosecuted Hunter Biden.

That was just a smokescreen.

Because he was always going to pardon him.

So I draw it.

Also, some of the, like, you know, Joe Biden isn't the state of New York and the state of Georgia.

And it's like different.

I mean, come on.

It's just fun.

So their position is Donald Trump is allowed to break the law.

If you hold him accountable for breaking the law, then

you're going to get prosecuted as well.

Look, also,

Cash Patel clearly lied to Congress in his confirmation hearings.

If they want to set a precedent where people like Cash Patel are going to get prosecuted after the fact for that behavior, that's okay.

That's a road you can go down, but it's not a great one for anybody.

Well, the New York Times piece, I know I was reading, and Peter Baker, I think, wrote it.

And at the beginning, it says, there will presumably come a time when the Republican Party is is no longer in control.

It's like, presumably, yes.

The way that they're acting and the reason that they don't seem worried that it'll come back around to Cash Patel or anything else, one reason could be that they don't plan to relinquish power.

Yeah, but also, look, I think that

the people working for Trump view it themselves as having no choice.

They have to do his bidding or they get pushed out.

So

I think like there's a little bit of the future.

We don't want to be like fatalistic.

Yeah, I think they're one of them.

But they could also just

do it for sure.

Well, they cannot do it.

Yeah, but the people that won't do it are now all being fired, and the people that will do it are being put in place.

Look, I think it's somewhere in between.

I think there are people that

are open to the idea that Donald Trump has no choice but to stay in office.

And it's a sad state of affairs that we have

a Democratic Party that has become an agent of terrorists, and we have no choice.

I think there are people that are working their way towards that for sure.

A lot of these people are just one day ahead.

And

might not have been there at the beginning that Trump's going to stay in power forever, but well, these Democrats are now threatening us for these prosecutions.

So what are we to do?

Yes.

Well, the other part of this is, you know, the other side of

for my enemies, the laws, for my friends, everything.

And so it's also the pardons and all the rest that feeds into this, but the pardon power remains.

And we do not need to concede that there will never be a Democratic president again.

And a Democratic president will have to, nor should we.

And so Democrats will be able to reverse any political prosecutions that happen under our public administration.

And I don't know how open we'll have to be about that or should be about that.

but as we get closer, I think like the more brazen Trump is, the more honest we have to be about the fact that part of our job is to kind of clear out the brazen politicization of these prosecutions, including people convicted for them.

The chant at Democratic rallies in fall of 2028, win this one for Comey.

Yeah.

Free garland.

Trump's government's also moving full speed ahead on his broader war against immigrants, Democratic voters, and Americans who live in cities.

On Saturday, Trump said, quote, I am directing Secretary of War Pete Hagseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.

I am also authorizing full force, if necessary.

I mean, what imagine

hearing years ago that like that would be a statement from the president?

Like, how everything about that.

Secretary of War Pete Hagseth, war-ravaged Portland.

Scary stuff.

The war he's referring to, of course, is a long-running protest outside a single ICE facility that will now be protected by 200 troops for the next 60 days, though Oregon officials are already suing to stop the deployment.

There were also dozens of armed masked ICE agents patrolling downtown Chicago in a show of force this weekend.

And at this point, too many stories to count of ICE detaining and assaulting American citizens or legal residents, including a Chicago journalist, American citizen, who is just sitting in her car outside an ICE facility with her window down when a masked ICE agent shot a pepper ball that burned her face and made her vomit.

There were no protests in the area.

There were nothing else.

It wasn't like they meant the pepper ball for someone else or a crowd.

She was just sitting there with a window down and got shot.

And did you see the video of the ICE agent?

This woman was begging him to just tell her where her husband had been taken, whatever.

And all of a sudden, he just throws her to the ground.

It's like physically assaulting this woman in a hallway in front of all these reporters.

Now this man was actually suspended, which is like the first time.

Bad news, bad news.

Right before we recorded, the ICE officer from CBS, the ICE officer relieved of his duties after being captured on video pushing a woman outside an immigration court in New York City, has been returned to duty.

Two U.S.

officials tell CBS News DHS had called his conduct unacceptable three days ago.

Trisha McLaughlin was on the record, I think.

The man just beat this woman up for no reason.

I'm sure someone internally did something, right, to suspend him.

And then fucking Stephen Miller probably found out, got on the phone, and was like, get that fucking person back on.

Well, there's blowback online about it from the right.

There's blowback online saying, well, look, I thought Trump was going to go hard and they're going to use all the full force.

Then all of a sudden there's one little incident of somebody finally standing up for ICE and then we're off to the races.

Can't admit any wrongdoing.

On Portland, this is a much smaller deployment than we saw in LA or D.C.

And,

you know, so they're suing the Oregon AG and the city of Portland think that it's different than the lawsuit in LA.

Of course, you know, they have to say that either way.

They think they have a better legal case here.

Why do you guys think Trump's doing it?

And what does he want to get out of it?

He wants the message.

I mean, there was a recent AP poll that had Trump at 53% approval on crime.

It's better than immigration, the economy, other big issues.

Portland's been caricatured for years on Fox as like a crazy, lefty bastion of Antifa violence.

And it's a liberal, you know, soft target with the Democratic governor.

So I just think this one is exactly the message they want to be portraying.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think it'll feed into what we're about to talk about, which is, I do think

they want the conflict a little bit between

Democratic governors saying, get out of our cities, and Trump saying, I'm just here to protect our,

you're giving your cities over to these violent Antifa protesters, and we're going to stand up to it.

And then these places become flashpoints where they can use the images to forward the debate about the left and the broader sort of

claim that this is a mass half that smear half the country as being part of some vast uh violent movement yeah i i think you could argue that um portland is because politically l a and dc did not go as well for them as they thought i don't think it was a massive loss for them but all the polling shows that people are against the deployments in dc against the deployments in la

um it got the polling got worse for him over time and when you ask people now do you want it in your city would you be against it in your city it's even worse for them.

So I think what it's a win-win for him in Portland because either nothing happens and then he can say, oh, we did liberate Portland.

It was wonderful.

Or you get the reaction that he probably hoped he got in either DC or LA when there is a violent, a more violent, destructive reaction to ICE and the National Guard and the troops being there.

Yeah.

And which, you know, you probably think, Portland, come on, give it to me, Portland.

This is you, you almost burned down a couple summers ago.

Yeah,

without us even being there.

The

like the federal deployments becoming a flashpoint for protest, which then are used to justify why the federal deployments were there in the first place, this sort of vicious circle is exactly what they want.

It's what they got in LA, even as much as it may have blown back on them.

That's it.

Oh, sorry.

That did sound like my sentence was not continuing.

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One other thing to keep an eye on here is Trump's latest executive order on what he's calling domestic extremism.

Over the weekend, Stephen Miller tweeted, quote, we are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government.

The JTTF has been dispatched by the Attorney General pursuant to NSPM-7.

All necessary resources will be utilized.

For those of you who don't speak fascists, the JTTF refers to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and NSPM-7 stands for National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.

For those of you who still don't know what the fuck that means, the order calls for, quote, a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation, including, quote, the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.

Ken Klippenstein has been reporting on this and says that sources tell him that this will likely cause the FBI's domestic terrorism watch list, which is currently at 5,000 to double within weeks or months.

He also reports that a number of big law firms are taking it seriously enough that they've issued guidance for left-leaning nonprofits and other organizations.

Have you guys looked into this?

And what's your level of concern here?

I think it's a piece of a larger puzzle that will let the administration essentially designate certain liberal or leftist organizations and frankly, like policy views as terrorism.

And then that this will give them the pretext to use federal agencies to investigate, prosecute, otherwise harass organizations that are funding these alleged domestic terrorist groups.

Because the the memorandum mentions, quote, institutional and individual funders and officers and employees of organizations that are responsible for sponsor or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors in engaging in the criminal conduct.

So, my guess is this is just another way to go after like the Soros folks or other, you know, big kind of democratic progressive funders.

Yeah.

So, first of all, the kind of branding it as NSPM 7

and declaring it.

Look, I'm loath to

use a Star Wars reference, but the really does feel like a reference to Order 66.

And I'm sorry to be a person doing that.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I know you don't.

And that's okay.

I'm a stick nerd.

But

you should learn.

You should learn.

Maybe that new AirPods, the translate, can help you.

But

he's always situating his conduct in this sort of a grand nationalist history.

You know, you always feel that.

Like, this is NSPM7, a great historic moment in the history of our fight against the left.

That's what he's got to say to his wife to get her to go.

30 talk in the morning, yeah.

That's what she says.

That's what she says.

Yeah, no, that's not what we said.

That's not our character.

He's a matador.

Yeah.

Which is an ironic term, right?

Because it's like, isn't he trying, you know, it's like, that sounds like

ducking colours.

Well, it just sounds like a,

are you welcoming that kind of culture?

I can't tell.

Who are we going?

Who's getting gored here?

Anyway, what I was going to say is, so the problem.

Sounds like us.

Yes.

Right now.

Yeah.

Throw me out in the clown suit.

Yeah, throw me out in the clown suit.

I'll run distract for you guys.

All right.

But the

part of this is that, like, you read this order and it has this grandiose language, and then you get into the specifics.

Some of it is extremely vague and hard to understand what it could mean.

I do think that's on purpose.

Tommy pointed to the ways in which it goes after funding.

You get to this moment where it just, you get to this, there's a part where it describes what they're characterizing as domestic terrorism.

And it says the Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, which, by the way, they've included desiring the unmasking.

They've described unmasking ICE agents as doxing,

swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.

Trespass and civil disorder are the two that stuck out at me there.

I'm like, those are pretty broad and just like, oop, you walked onto federal property.

I'm sorry, but like, look, destruction of property can mean a lot of different things it can mean it can mean burning something it could be it could be burning portland to the ground it could be whatever just lighting a simple waymo on fire yeah

it could be anything

yeah well all of this is meant to be vague right like it's meant to be like applicable to a wide range of activities and just the intimidation that people will feel not knowing what this will apply to i think is part of what will make it dangerous and then you look at this and you say like well this they could go after anybody with this it's just such clearly a

such a clear suppression of speech and they're talking about anti-capitalist anti-american views like you can famously be anti-american in this country it's called freedom of speech i mean i i don't know how this is not a pretty drastic first amendment violation huge huge first amendment problem i think the point is to get the investigations going and make people's lives miserable and make them lawyer up which is probably why all those big law firms yeah the point is either to read hoffman to be too scared to donate to progressive causes that's exactly right that's exactly right and by the way to hope that if they start digging in based on these frivolous, these kind of specious reasons, again, as we talked about earlier, you get into somebody's books, you get into somebody's finances

or emails, whatever, and all of a sudden you've uncovered something that you can use.

Ken Klippenstein, in his piece on this, his first piece, was talking about it's like they're going after pre-crime, like in minority report, because it says the strategy is to disrupt any individual groups, quote, that foment political violence, including, quote, before they result in violent political acts.

So part of this, too, is if you, they want to let people know that if you're in some organization that donates to someone else and then like months later, that person, someone in the place that you donated to commits some act or whatever, it could come back to you because you made the, I mean, it's fucking insane.

Well, by the way, he's saying that Gavin Newsom describing something as authoritarian is

terrorist,

is a terrorist threat.

Yeah, it says they can be identified by any of the following indicators of violence.

Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race, gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family.

That's a good one.

It's just so good.

Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality?

The fuck?

It's nonsensical.

They're bad, bad people.

Of course, we had another horrific shooting over the weekend where a deranged man who appears to be a Trump supporter shot up a Mormon church and set it on fire, killing four people.

J.D.

Vance called the situation just awful and called for prayers.

I assume they'll be getting to the bottom of who funded this domestic terrorist and calling for everyone who didn't say the right thing to lose their job about it.

Is that what's going to happen now?

Is that part of the anti-doxing under NPSM 7 or whatever?

Notice that hasn't been a big fact that the guy's wearing like a Trump 2020 t-shirt and he's got a big Trump pence flag.

I saw Benny Johnson from TPOSA was fast out of the gate saying this is an attack on Christianity itself.

And then, you know, quickly there was an inconvenient set of facts.

Yeah.

Look, this is exactly what we were talking about when we were in the last round of the politicization of these shootings and accusing the entire left of being complicit in a murder, which is, so now if a person has a Trump yard sign, they're deranged, but if they have some evidence of having left views, they are part of a vast left conspiracy.

They will make the motive important and central to a collective punishment if they don't agree with the person.

But if it's on their side, it's of course a deranged person.

When really what we see over and over is how people are getting radicalized online, whatever the underlying kind of political views that are part of the justification.

And like,

we just, we will never figure out how to get out of a cycle like this unless we collectively view these as a shared threat around people becoming,

taking these sort of violent acts based on radicalization on these forums and wherever else.

And you, of course, saw all those Democratic politicians saying, this is right-wing violence.

The right did this.

One of yours did this.

Donald Trump.

You saw all that, right?

Oh, yeah, that's right.

No one did that.

No one said that on the left.

Not one Democratic politician.

But like,

you know, Zainab Tufechi, who you've talked to, like, talks about, like,

there's just no...

The putting this in politics means there's no talk about the contagion of it, right?

We saw like people writing on bullets, right?

That's clearly from one event to the next, there's a surge of these things.

Like, violence is contagious.

We know that.

Like, we've learned about this on suicides, on mass shootings, on political violence like this.

There is clearly something happening, and we can't fucking figure it out because everything is polluted by this, like the way in which they're using this for political purposes only somewhat related here but you guys see the daily caller column last friday uh explicitly calling for violence against the left yeah good stuff the uh jeffrey ingersoll there it was uh it was published as quote an editorial uh in the daily caller longish op-ed it says um here's some quotes from it quote today i choose violence literally And then another quote, I know calls for violence are generally frowned upon.

The issue is, I simply don't care.

Then again, just in case you weren't sure, is this a call for violence?

Yes, explicitly it is.

And then finally, quote, choose violence.

So is someone going to, now, I remember J.D.

Vance gave a

big speech when he was on Charlie Kirk's podcast complaining about a nation editorial, I think we talked about it, that condemned violence and simply said that they didn't agree with Charlie Kirk and didn't say nice things about him.

And he threatened to, you know, investigate everyone who's ever funded the nation, including made it up the Soros Foundation, which didn't even fund the nation.

And should we, are they going to now investigate who funds the daily caller?

Hold on, I'm Googling who funds it.

If it was Foster Fries, I'll figure it out for you guys.

Foster Fries did, and also the Kokes are connected.

I'm going to send him a stern letter.

Yeah, Foster Fries is dead now, but there's a couple of, there's a whole, Charles Koch Foundation,

the Bradley Foundation, dude.

They're crazy.

Scafe Foundation.

Okay.

Yeah.

So every people.

New lines.

I assume everyone's going to look into that.

They should.

It's like it's a good one for the NPS, NSPM7, whatever the fuck.

Nipsum.

Nipsum.

Nipsum.

Nispum.

Nipsum.

Nipsim.

Nispim in the bud.

It's also just like all these people, it's

brain rot.

Everyone has brain rots.

They are watching things online.

They're getting very angry and they're writing it up because they're seeing so much shit online.

It's making them kind of crazy.

And they're like, I have to try.

Look at what they're doing and they're getting away with it.

The Daily Caller also just conducted a one-hour interview with Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Imagine, imagine an outlet that just conducted a full interview in the Oval Office with a Democratic president and then leaves and then has an editorial that says, I call for violence.

It's just

stuff's real annoying.

It's just unfucking.

I know.

I know.

It's just unfucking believable.

It's not even the hypocrisy.

It's just like that.

It's their

bullshit is just like, they should not be taken seriously.

Yeah, I mean, I just more, it's more to the, like, I am more, I, I like, I, maybe it's too sociological, but I'm like just looking at people.

I'm watching people, people, I'm watching people that were once, I don't include this person who I never knew, I'm watching people that they were, you know, maybe Trump curious, maybe somewhere in the middle between being anti-Trump.

Like, I think I'm watching people that used to be a bit more reasonable radicalize in real time.

Like you're watching that happen online.

And I do think it's from people kind of exposing their brain to like the sewer of the internet and getting a warped view of their own side and a warped view of the other side.

And only seeing, I mean, like the same problems with polarization.

They're not just for people that are voters.

It's for the actual producers of content and influencers and everybody else on these platforms.

Like they're not immune to it and you see it every day.

And the fact that it's not just one guy that thought this is made it through a whole editing process and onto the website by a bunch of people who said, yeah, let's get that out there.

The brain rot comes for content creators.

Clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks.

I mean, look, the only thing we say is it's a very fringe view to support violence.

This guy is one of a tiny swath of the country that believes this is an appropriate response.

Most people don't.

Everyone should condemn it.

It's all we can do.

Yeah.

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Okay, we have some other breaking news on Monday.

President of Peace Donald Trump has solved the Middle East.

Trump called September 29th, quote, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.

Yeah.

As he stood next to another great product of civilization, Bibi Netanyahu at the White House, and rambled through the points of a peace plan that we have no idea as of this recording whether Hamas will accept.

While the plan includes some promising aspects, including an end to the act of fighting and the return of all the hostages, its crown jewel is definitely this.

My plan calls for the creation of a new international oversight body, the Board of Peace, we call it the Board of Peace.

Sort of a beautiful name, the Board.

The leaders of the Arab world and

Israel and everybody involved asked me to do this, so it would be headed by a gentleman known as President Donald J.

Trump of the United States.

That's what I want

some extra work to do, but it's so important that I'm willing to do it.

Tommy, do you think you're going to be asked to be on the Board of Peace as well?

Oh, that'd be cool.

I'm not on any boards.

I wonder if it's paid or unpaid.

Do you think Trump is going to spend more time on the Board of Peace or the Kennedy Center Board?

Good question.

He's on both.

both.

What do you make of this plan, this 20-point plan that they released and its prospects?

It's kind of been floating around for a while.

I mean, like, the event today was exactly what I expected, which is Netanyahu and Trump talking about agreeing to something vague that they can call a peace deal that Netanyahu knows he will never have to implement because it's basically designed to

look and sound maximally reasonable but be rejected by Hamas.

And that's what I expect will happen.

I did like his typically understated self calling it the greatest ace ever in civilization.

This isn't a two-state solution plan.

It's a ceasefire plan, just to be clear.

But I like, again, I think that Netanyahu, like,

he tried to sound like he was on board with the big picture while reserving the right to renegotiate or delay every actual detail.

I think it's probably a non-starter for Hamas.

Why do you think it's a, just, I have no idea.

Why do you think it's a non-starter for Hamas?

Because they have to trust Netanyahu generally to implement it because

they don't think Trump can control him because they watched, you know, the last year.

The plan calls on Hamas to release all the hostages within 72 hours, which means they give up all their leverage immediately and then have to trust that the rest of the plan gets executed.

The plan basically calls on Hamas to disband as an organization and they'll have no role in Gaza going forward, which is, of course, a totally understandable position for the Israelis to want to take.

But from the Hamas perspective, you could imagine that'd be hard to agree to.

And then finally, like this is an organization.

Their DNA is resistance to occupation and trying to get land back and they're going to be cool with gaza being governed by donald trump and tony blair that's the best you guys could do trump and tony blair i saw i thought unfortunately it's the best we could do do you think tony blair new is on that tony blair was on that list he's like what

yeah what is the fuck is tony blair doing and i was like america first now means donald trump is going to chair an organization governing the gaza strip we're giving argentina a 20 billion dollar bank bailout

Trump is now talking about retaking Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

So I guess we're going to reinvade Afghanistan and we're blowing up every ship off the boats of Venezuela and talking about airstrikes both within Venezuela and Mexico.

This is now America first, I guess.

Yeah.

I just was, there was a story in the Times in the last couple of days about

the IDF moving back into parts of Gaza City, parts that it had already been in and then left back and forth.

Like three times.

And now,

as they're moving through, they're kind of raising whole parts of the city and holding territory and not letting it go.

And the beleaguered people that have been there, some of whom are leaving as they're being told, others have no place to go and have left and come back and are now kind of giving up on having anywhere to go or seeing any purpose and kind of leaving.

And

it is so ugly and evil what is happening.

And then you have the president and

Bibi standing in the oval, kind of patting each other on the back, declaring the the greatest day in the history of civilization,

while kind of inflicting this collective punishment on Gaza, even as they say that Hamas is responsible and doesn't care what happens to the people of Gaza because they use the people of Gaza like human shield.

And so, like, the whole thing is disgusting.

And

that's all I got.

Were you excited to learn, though, that Jared was involved?

I'm so mad about this.

Thank you for prompting this.

Thank you.

Jared Kushner is not a government employee.

He has no role in this administration.

He did the Abraham Accords back in the day.

Those are holding on by a thread.

Abraham.

Abraham's.

Abraham.

Abraham's trust.

Because he mispronounced it in the own them.

Well, apparently it's closer to the Israeli, the Hebrew pronunciation.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But he just couldn't read.

He's a gooper.

But Jared Kushner, he's sitting on, I think, $5.4 billion

in almost exclusively foreign money.

But is he happy?

Saudi-linked, Emirati-linked, Qatari-linked money in his investment fund that they're using to buy EA sports.

It's in the game.

It's like one of my favorite video game companies as a kid.

Like that, it's just like insane conflict of interest that is never mentioned in any of the coverage.

What is Jared Kushner doing there?

He doesn't work there.

He just sort of popped back into it, by the way.

Like a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, he was not even part of it.

And all of a sudden, it was he was thanking Jared on social media.

And you're like, wait, Jared's back?

He's walking in with Tony Blair, slapping him on the ass saying, good job.

Right.

He's probably pretty bored.

He wasn't happy.

I was on vacation once in Hawaii, and

who walks into the restaurant but Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, and a bunch of other people sitting around the table at that restaurant.

Next thing you know, you wake up.

That's a polycule for you.

I look one thing, it was a one thing led to another.

The Kushner part of it made me so mad.

I found that preemptive attack.

A thousand tweets that got no engagement.

I'm so mad about Jared Kushner just

$2 billion from the Saudis.

It's crazy.

At least he's doing Gaza Gaza.

Whatever.

The corruption is just...

No one cares about it.

I know.

It's like,

to your point,

this war is about to have gone on for two years.

Like, most scholars think it is a genocide.

Like,

thousands of kids have been killed.

And it's like, there is no serious effort to get the Israelis to stop.

Right?

Like, everyone, like, all the people were like, Hamas could end this war today if they released hostages.

I actually do not think that that would get the IDF out of the Gaza Strip.

I think if Hamas released the hostages, it's not clear at all to me that

given what the ministers around Netanyahu say about their desire to ethnically cleanse and occupy Gaza in perpetuity, would actually get the IDF.

So I think it's going to have to be a deal where both sides do some really hard things and there's just no serious effort to get there.

And it's so demoralizing.

All right, last thing.

President of the United States posted his first ever AI-generated video of an AI-generated Fox News segment featuring his AI generated daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, throwing to an AI-generated Donald Trump in the Oval Office, promising every American access to a non-existent medical technology known as med beds that have become an obsession in QAnon circles.

I can't even believe I said that whole sentence.

Let's take a listen.

Breaking now.

President Donald J.

Trump has announced a historic new healthcare system, the launch of America's first medbed hospitals and a national medbed card for every citizen.

Every American will soon receive their own med bed card.

With it, you'll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.

These facilities are safe, modern, and designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.

This is the beginning of a new era in American healthcare.

Don't even get the lips right.

Holy shit.

Can we like this?

I love AI.

It's great.

The politics of the like the far right were like, it's cool as long as Donald Trump is for universal fake health care.

But real healthcare, we're going to cut dramatically.

But fake healthcare, everybody gets it.

It's going to be amazing.

When you get in your fake medbed and you'll have your fake card, it's for everybody in our beautiful new hospitals.

I can't wait.

Let's share with our audience.

What a medbed is.

Tony, I know you've tell us more.

I know you've become an expert today, right?

Yeah, I did a call with a medbed CEO.

You talked to a friend who's treated medbed.

Yeah.

Doing reporting.

Medbedev.

That was good.

That was good.

Medbed Ev.

Okay, that was nice.

I don't want to bring the conversation.

So apparently, a medbed is a mythical thing made with alien technology that will cure every ailment.

When this was first pitched to us by someone whose name rhymes with Beli Jamon, I was like, what's the big deal?

Who cares if they do like AI fanfic, stupid medbed garbage on the Donald trump twitter feed now you're looking for your card but then i listened to the q anon anonymous podcast episode about med beds great show by the way and the reality is so much darker because what's happened is there's q anon grifters sell people like future access to med beds and they charge them like hundreds if not thousands of dollars and in some cases it's not just that people are getting fleas for their money but they're delaying treatments in real life because they're waiting for a med bed.

So it's really bleak.

There's also, there's a couple funny versions.

There's one organization that's selling, I think, what they call like a 5D med bed, which is that they promise to get you access to a med bed that is quantum entangled with your current bed.

So you like upload a picture of your bed and you imagine it, and then you're quantum entangled with this technology.

So basically, you pay like three grand to this company to imagine.

things.

So the promise of the med bed, and there are many promises, because of course it's not real.

It reverse aging, right?

You can wake up 30 years younger.

Some believe they can actually resurrect the dead.

Some believe

that.

Some believe that JFK Jr.

and Princess Diana

are alive somewhere and that the med beds have brought them back to life.

And the reason this is a QAnon thing is because

they believe that, of course, the elite have been using the med beds, right, to resurrect themselves.

Oh, you can regrow amputated limbs, missing organs in minutes.

Well, the big one is reversing vax damage.

Vax, of course.

Oh, yeah.

You can reprogram your DNA

and you can cure all diseases, including cancer, obviously.

So, and what they do is they eliminate the need for vaccines, right?

Or anything like that.

So you see.

Well, there is no need for vaccines.

Of course.

Well, you wait for the med bed.

You don't need the vaccine.

And what happened is the elite cabal has these med beds and had for a while.

But once Donald Trump became, they believe that once Donald Trump became president,

that he's storing them now in an underground military base and he will give the green light any moment, which it seems like cats out of the bag.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Cats out of the med bed, you know?

Hexeth.

Man.

Some people think that Trump's already using med beds.

Not long enough.

Because

of his youthful energy.

And his weird hands.

Get in that med bed a little bit longer, my friend.

First of all, med beds are also in the film Elysium.

And I do think that

weird.

Oh, yeah, Emprometheus.

Passengers, too.

I would just say there was a time when conspiracy theorists used to go to the library, pull out the microfiche, put something really interesting together.

And that was a simpler and better time.

Conspiracy theories took some fucking work.

They piece it together you had to actually have the string and now people see elysium they take a quote from hunter s thompson and next thing you know we got ai medbeds tough here's something i'm interested in learning uh the answer to i hope someone does some reporting on this where how do you think this got from like qnon conspiracy to donald trump to him thinking i'm gonna post this thing he has since taken it down he's he's deleted it someone must have been like hey the med beds that's too far i don't know how that happened either i love that story like what what do you think happened?

I bet someone sends it to him.

Yeah.

Or he's literally scrolling and he's seeing it online.

Like, I'm sure he has a feed and he's seeing stuff and he thinks, oh, this is people saying I'm good at healthcare.

Yeah.

Like me on healthcare.

It's a quick retreat.

Yeah, it was a quick retruth.

And all of a sudden,

sorry, I said retruth.

I told him I wouldn't send that.

I don't know.

He posted it.

But yeah,

he also posted about medical marijuana for seniors this weekend.

He also posted about how

his gold trim, the Oval Office, just decked out in 24-karat gold.

It's like every foreign leader who comes now is just telling him, This is fucking amazing.

You're the best.

Now, hadn't we determined that he, in fact, was buying most of these little accent pieces from like Home Depot and spray painting them?

We don't, we don't know.

But then if you put them in the med bed, it becomes real.

Yeah.

Remember like that episode of Captain Kangaroo where somebody gets remember that when it said everything could turn into gold?

But actually, they didn't seem to have they had a silver one and then a gold one, and the gold one was a different shape, and it really bothered me as a little kid, but that's because my mother took Tylenol.

So the

but uh, she actually didn't.

I texted and asked

she didn't.

And she's she's on vacation.

I won't hear this.

So double check that one.

I did.

I texted her.

I said, are you sure you didn't take Tylenol?

And she said, nothing.

Just prenatal vitamins for you and your sister.

I was like, I don't know.

I'm going to ask your dad.

He'll tell the truth.

Maybe he crushed it and put her in mashed potatoes because she was complaining.

But the point being, what are we talking about?

Oh, yeah, fucking gold.

Yeah.

So people did find that some of the

things attached to the wall are from Home Depot, and it was assumed that they were spray-painted gold.

It is not, it is possible that there's someone doing gold leaf.

It could be Leaf.

It could be Leaf.

It could be Leaf, but it could be Spray Pan.

We just don't know.

We just don't know.

I think that at the next press conference, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffrey should stand up and say they have added another demand.

They want medbed cards for all, like Trump promised in his Truth Social post as part of the government finance.

That's great.

You know?

I'm just sad.

That would be fun.

It is so sad how conspiratorial.

Yeah, that would be fun.

I would love to have, yeah, get in there with the fucking med beds.

It is just so, I'm just so sad.

Like, you think about the people that are falling for this, and it's like so conspiratorial and so sad and so isolate.

You have to be so isolated from the world to believe that this is real.

And there's, and it's like, it's like alien technology, they think.

Did you see the alien technology?

Did you see that footage, though, where they were, someone was carrying the med bed into Jeffrey Epstein's cell?

No.

Yeah.

That's also.

I don't understand.

If the med beds are real, why do these billionaires, why did, what happened to Leona Helmsley?

Like, where are all the rich billionaires that were famous and who died?

That's the thing.

It's like they never explain why they haven't been deployed yet.

I mean, whatever is this is stupid.

Anyway, something to look forward to.

Medbeds.

There's a woman in Canada who claims to be the queen of Canada who says she's going to make them free for everybody.

This is going to be a great segue.

Two quick announcements before we go.

First, we've got some new merch up in the store.

It's medbeds.

Congratulations.

No, there's some fun anti-anti-vax items that we're selling, so that's good.

Check them out at at cricket.com/slash store.

It's a great way to help support what we do here.

Also, Vote Save America, as you may know, running a first-of-its-kind pilot program to recruit candidates from Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas, school board, city council, state legislature, all up and down the ballot.

We love that.

Even if you're not from those states, if you're interested in running, they'll connect you with our incredible national partners at the National Democratic Training Committee and run for something to get you set up and ready to run anywhere in the country.

We've already had thousands of people sign up over the past couple months.

Vote Save America is hosting a live call on Tuesday, October 7th at 5 p.m.

Pacific, 8 p.m.

Eastern Time to welcome new folks to the program.

Our own Tommy will be there with Vote Save America's partners, and they'll talk about

what this work's all about and how we're going to support you every step of the way.

If you've even thought about running, this is where to start.

Sign up for the call and learn more at votesaveamerica.com/slash run.

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Guys, breaking news.

Just before, that was a lot of

breaking news.

Google-owned video site YouTube will pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over the company's decision to spend his account in the wake of January 6th.

The agreement says that Trump has directed YouTube to contribute $22 million to help construct the new White House ballroom.

Oh, my God.

Steal at twice the price.

The rest of the money will go to a handful of other plaintiffs who accuse YouTube of censoring them.

I'm sure that's a sundry list of wonderful fucking people getting money from Alphabet.

Terrific.

Terrific.

I hope that ballroom's nice when it's ready for Trump's third term.

Anyway, that's our show for today.

Thanks to no one for coming on.

Thanks to all the

ladies who said no.

Yeah.

Some really big people did not make time for this today.

We want to say how grateful we are.

They're so busy.

We get it.

Hey, guys, we get it.

We get it.

Look,

we know on the list, it goes Brian Tyler Cohen,

the gals in Nebraska, uh uh a couple midas touch guys maybe a somebody who was at the doj for biden five you know there's a long list of people that you got to get to there's a historian or two on the list after that i don't know i don't know what's happening with that trios but maybe they're still around fire dog lake and then you get to us pod save america fire dog remember fire dog lake yes of course Fire Dog Lake, what happened to Echeton?

Good pull.

Are they doing Echeton before they're doing us?

What happened to Echeton?

I feel like in 2005, Tommy probably had to yell at Fire Dog Lake on behalf of then Senator Obama for some posting on the Daily Coast.

Obama probably posted like a 5,000-word rebuttal on the Daily Coast.

Joy Reid has a YouTube now.

We're after Joy.

Put us wherever you find it.

We'll be here.

They know it.

What happened to the Ozzy guy?

He ceased doing content?

Because if he's so, he's ahead of us.

Perhaps.

Unbelievable.

See you when we see, I guess.

Hope you stop by CrookedCon.

Perhaps all of these people, all these people who are interviewing the politicians after they interview them, they can come on and talk about their interviews with the politicians.

What are they like?

Politicians, what are they like?

Anyway,

I'm out for the later part of this week, but Dan and Alex Wagner will be back with a new show on Friday.

I will be looking for a new medbed.

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