SCOTUS Blocks Trump’s Deportation Efforts

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarlove.

So, Jess, you kept texting me over the weekend, and I know exactly what was going on.

You were looking to debrief and do a victory lap of our 90-second Y.

You were so hungry to like just kibbits with your girlfriend, Scott.

That you had to ignore me the entire weekend.

I even sent you good articles.

I was like, can we be New York Times link sharing people?

And you were having none of it.

Yeah, no, I'm

just.

I'm a man.

Yeah.

I'm not,

I'm emotionally distant and unavailable to everybody.

So let's talk about it.

I'd love to get, so just FYI, Jess and I, as you've probably heard a million times, hosted minority leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Y,

the 92nd Street Y, which is basically like, I don't know, Jewish Mecca, Jeka.

I don't know what you would call it.

I got so many text messages from my Jewish friends like, my parents are coming.

So give me, give me your sense of what went down, what you thought of leader Jeffries kind of, anyways, your cliff notes.

My cliff notes are

like best night ever.

I had such a good time and I was so nervous.

Yeah, I don't do much in front of a live audience like that.

It's one thing also if you're talking to a corporate group, right?

That's less than 900 people anyway, usually at least for me.

And you're not trying to entertain that way, right?

Like it really felt as though we were supposed to put on a show.

And we only had the front 10 minutes to do that ourselves.

And I think that definitely could have gone for even longer.

But we obviously want to make sure that we have our conversation with leader Jeffries.

And it was a big deal to get him to come and do that.

I'm still kind of shocked that he said yes.

Like the second we got out there and sat down, I felt comfortable.

And I was like, this is so cool.

It's funny because I think what you do on the five is actually a lot more difficult.

You're dealing with, you're overwhelmed by people who either back shit crazy or I think totally fucked up on their third bottle of wine.

And you manage to,

seem very...

She doesn't drink.

Don't be sexist.

I wasn't immediately saying it was the judge.

I could say Greg Gutfeld

is drinking wine.

I love how I didn't bring her name up.

I think that's really telling.

Well, I'm sorry.

I am alive and I have seen SNL and I know what the memes look like on the internet.

So I do know who you're talking about.

But anyway.

What are your general takeaways?

From.

That was, I think that was one of the longest interviews I've seen Leader Jeffries do.

I always feel like he does two or three minutes.

You don't really get a sense for him.

I feel as if if people watch it, they would get a sense for him, good or bad.

Stack rank the positives and the negatives of your impression of Leader Jeffries coming out of this interview.

Positive.

I thought the Mayor Adams joke was really funny and was a good way to start and kind of signaled that he was in the mood to hang out.

versus I'm showing up on, you know, Meet the Press or this week, right?

He does the Sunday shows.

And you're right.

He usually gives one-segment interviews versus sitting down with someone for, you know, 45 minutes to an hour.

So there was an openness to whatever the night was going to bring that I thought was really good.

And he's a pretty stiff guy, right?

Traditionally, you don't like he has these moments where he does fun musical stuff over the years, but in general, it's not,

at least it's not the perception that I have of him that he is a really chill, laid-back guy.

You know, he's not Nancy Pelosi, but he's someone that keeps a caucus in line.

He knows how to count votes.

He knows what the big topics are that you should focus on, but he doesn't color outside the lines.

And it felt like he had a willingness to go with wherever the night was going to take us.

So Mayor Adams' joke, number one, positive.

Number two, positive, which I think was the most important thing that we saw, is that he definitely has an awareness for all of the frustrations that Democrats have with the party right now, right?

He knows that we have this fine print versus talking and headlines issue.

He knows that people generally feel like the electeds are out of touch with the American public.

He understands that people feel as though we're in a constitutional crisis.

I

am still

scared.

And I think that this is directly related to how enormous I think the threat is of what's going on, that we are not ready to meet the moment.

And I'm not even talking about winning back the house in the midterms, right?

Like that is so far away.

All of this has been coming so fast and so furious that I'm concerned about what's going to happen next week or the week after that.

And so

the acknowledgement of the problem is definitely a good thing.

I'd say some solutions.

And, you know, when he talks about things that we've accomplished and all that, huge rounds of applause.

People are proud of the things that Democrats have delivered on, but it's still felt like there's a bit of a missing link, I guess, between how do we convert understanding what the problem is to actually having a solution that we can implement and get us out of this quicksand, which is political quicksand is what I feel like we're in at this moment.

So that was like a positive and a negative put together.

What about you?

I thought about it a lot over the weekend as I was just dodging your texts.

You could have texted me while you were thinking.

I was available.

First off, I think character matters.

And the guy reeks of character.

And the little time we had backstage with him, you know, I asked him what he's doing in Brooklyn.

And the next two days, he's going to church.

You know, he's just, he's been married for a long time.

He has two boys.

He was raised

by

in a fairly kind of middle, if not lower middle class household by a dad who served and was a social worker.

He saw the crack academic up front.

I think a lot of his friends were impacted.

And he kind of,

for lack of a better term, made it out.

And you just get the sense the guy's heart is in the right place, that he has good values, that he's a good man.

And I think that counts for a lot.

And I've seen him lately.

I think he's starting to get his footing around the issues and talking points and being a little bit more forceful.

I like the fact that at 53, he feels like he's 14, rest of the fossils pretending to be elected representatives walking around the rotunda.

I don't know if you saw that picture of us.

First of all, you're tall and very striking.

I'm tall.

And he sat in between us, or he stood in between us.

And it looked like we had just adopted a child from the Bahamas.

I mean, he just

looked like our child.

He's very youthful looking.

He's very handsome.

I remember, I remember thinking, wow, this guy's really good looking in person.

And I like the fact he showed up kind of dressed down.

You're going to spend any time with this guy, you're going to like him.

And I think that's important in politics because I think people are more inclined to work with people they like.

The issue I have is that, and this is more of a general issue around our leadership kind of broad strokes, is that

Donald Trump, I think he's taking the prosperity of America down, defying the Constitution, acting in a means, you know,

with a texture of cruelty that just doesn't reflect well on our brand

and has stuck the knife so far in the economy's back at this point that even if we're able to get it to pull it out, the injury is kind of there.

And at the same time, he's much more popular than the Democratic Party.

And I think the Democratic Party has hit a new low in terms of popularity.

And right now, there really isn't a leader.

There's no one, there's no one sort of, I mean, everyone was excited about the senator.

Who is the senator who went on every talking head show this weekend?

Van Holland.

Van Holland.

They're just excited to register a pulse, right?

Okay, there's some life in there.

And AOC and Bernie's tour.

And I'm not sure.

I think Jeffries could be not the one-two-punch, but the two-punch.

And that is he's thoughtful.

My guess is he's good at wrangling votes.

But I think right now the obvious leaders of the Congress are Senator Schumer and Leader Jeffries.

And quite frankly, I just don't think they're what we need right now.

I think Jeffries is a good actor.

I think he could be the two and the one-two punch.

It just struck me that we are not up to the task, that we are not hitting back hard enough.

That it was a lot of very rousing, kind of Obama-esque, flowery rhetoric, but not enough specific solutions and not enough strategy for how to more immediately counteract.

The entire thing can't be, our response can't be, we're the good guys and we're not him and just wait till 2026.

It's just not enough.

And I would like to see, I think Senator Schumer has been a disaster for us.

I think it has been Mike Tyson versus,

I'm trying to think of a really weak boxer.

Chuck Webner was rocky.

I can't say that.

I don't know boxing well enough.

But this is, I think that Mitch McConnell was the aircraft carrier and we're apples.

And I think Senator Schumer has been a disaster for the Democratic Party.

And I think leader Jeffries could be a great sort of internal behind-the-scenes person wrangling votes.

But in general, I think our leadership is not up to the task and has not really outlined anything other than we're not him, we're good folks, everyone everyone should have access to health care.

I mean, all the same shit we've been hearing for a long time.

I thought it reflected well on him.

I was happy because I think he was happy he showed up because I think it gave him some running room.

One of the things I like about podcasts is that while we did provide pushback, I think, at some critical moments, I generally find the thing I like about the podcast medium, and this bothers some people, is that we're not there to create a TikTok moment of calling people out.

We're trying to present them in their best light.

And I think we did that.

And And then just overall,

just personally, it was a nice moment for both of us.

I know you were really excited to be there.

I was really excited to be there.

I didn't, you know, I didn't, I'm not sure I was ever going to make it to the 92nd Street Wire.

Because for those of you who don't know, in New York, that is like, I don't know, that we really are quote unquote the cultural elite now.

We are the enemy.

I should be embarrassed, but honestly, I'm so excited.

Oh, love it.

Leaning in.

It's like, I hate Harvard.

I got in.

I'm going.

I'm going.

Who would say no?

Yeah, who would say no?

Why would you?

Unless you prefer Princeton.

There you go.

So I

I was really excited about it, but trying to bridge to talk about today's news, my 14-year-old came in and woke me up last night and said, Dad, in my group chat, it says we're attacking the Houthis at 1400 hours.

Should I be concerned?

Is he in the signal chat?

Yeah,

he's in the chat.

They found him?

By the way, I think that from this point forward, anytime I'm doing this on every text and chat now, anything I'm signing off with,

and also supposedly F-15s are coming in from the southeast and attacking attacking Yemen.

I'm signing off every text, every email

with military coordinates and the specific cache.

That's your official signature at this point.

Can I, because I know that we need to move on, but can I say something about the leadership point that you made?

Sure.

I feel as though we're in an Avengers assemble moment versus we need one guy.

And there are so many attacks coming from so many different fronts that I think that there is ample opportunity opportunity for leaders who are not even technically in leadership

position to be able to be taking control, if you know what I mean.

Like, I think that having someone pragmatic, someone knows the mechanics of things, how they actually work.

I mean, I really got that off of Leader Jeffries, that this is somebody who knows the House rules inside and out, right?

And he has good relationships across the entire caucus, from the most conservative members to the most liberal members.

And those kinds of things are are important when you're actually trying to do the business of getting legislation passed or making sure you have the votes for this or that or dealing with internal squabbles.

But it really, it feels like I know that you and Tim Miller were talking about, you know, someone needs to start running.

And I think that that might be a good thing to happen at this moment, that there's someone that you can look to for that.

But we are fighting a multi-front war at this point.

And so when we think about what you need in a quote-unquote leader, it feels different to me at this moment than in previous times because you need someone honestly on like healthcare and you need someone on immigration and you need someone on the Constitution and you need someone on academic freedom and you need someone on foreign policy.

Like there's so much that's on fire that I think it's almost too much to ask of one person to be the guy.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think in World War II, we were fighting a front on multiple, fighting a war on multiple fronts, and we had FDR and he had his generals.

I mean, who's our?

Okay, we don't have an FDR.

I'll give you that.

Let me, yeah, I was going to ask you, who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now?

Well, Hakeem Jeffries and Choc Schumer.

I'm not saying are they?

Yeah.

The Senate.

You're right.

Okay, Senator Schumer, do you think he's the leader of the Democratic Party?

Do you think he's showing leadership?

No, no.

And we're very open.

The guy brightens up a fucking room by leaving it.

Literally, Senator Schumer, go go home.

Yeah.

Well, he's awful.

He's awful.

I wouldn't be surprised if he was not running for another term when push comes to show.

Your idea is the right one, in my view.

I'm sorry, let me interrupt you.

No, we're talking.

Your idea is the right one.

I think Representative Conna, AOC, Westmore,

Governor Newsom, I think they should all announce they're running for president and do daily firesides, take an issue every day.

This is the latest thing.

You know, Witkoff's meeting with Putin.

His son owns 75% of the Trump

crypto grift.

What do you think they're talking about?

And then if they announce they were running for president, they immediately become, quote unquote, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, because I don't think either leader Jeffries or Senator Schumer are.

Although if Christian Gillibrand can run for president, I guess anyone can.

Look,

somebody needs to stand up and say, I'm ready to lead.

Well, we do need that.

I mean, it ended up badly, but Andrew Cuomo's energy during COVID, those daily briefings that became,

you know, programming for the entire country, no matter your politics, is something that we need.

And we talk about we have a social security war room, right?

We have like the DNC warroom.

We do need someone, and maybe it's Peepoo to judge, someone who is really good on TV, someone who has good relationships with the press, someone who

doesn't annoy everybody, I think is also an important part of this because you need folks who maybe supported Trump, people in the middle to feel comfortable with this person, but you do need a daily update on the multi-front war.

So yeah, weir P would be great at that.

Yeah.

And he needs a job.

And these guys still haven't learned.

They're all waiting to go on Jimmy Kimmel or Colbert.

That's not what you do here.

You raise a few million dollars and you get two turntables and a microphone.

And I'll come back to why I said two turntables and a microphone.

That's a bit of a tease.

And you create your own media and you go on every day.

And if these people did something with a reasonable amount of production value, a great producer and writer, you know, like we have here, and every day came out with three, five, 20 minutes and just hit these guys hard in the nuts every fucking day.

And it would be hard.

You'd have to absorb all the news, distill it.

It's a full-time job.

Yeah, it's a full-time job.

And all these guys are looking for jobs.

And every day came out with something.

And also, I think Mayor Pete, Mayor Pete has already announced he's running for president.

He's not fooling anybody.

He's running for, he's been running for president since he was eight.

Since, yeah, I was going to say since sixth grade, roughly.

So, okay,

just

for lack of a better term, come out of the closet and say, I am planning to run for president.

I think what's going on here is outrageous.

I'm going to be talking to you every day about some of the issues at hand and what I think we should do.

Instead of just complaining, it needs to be an update.

All right, we have the person who's the father of the guy who owns a disproportionate share in Trump's crypto coin running around to foreign leaders.

Why is that happening?

What do you think they're talking about?

And then move to policy.

We're going to move to a Singaporean model where we're going to pay representatives a million a year, senators $2 million a year, but there's absolutely no tolerance for any corruption, any stock trading, any movement to industry.

You need a five-year sunshine period.

You know, this is what's going on.

This is why it is so fucked up and so contrary to every American value we hold dear.

And here's the policy recommendation I would suggest.

Please comment below.

And the comment section would go absolutely crazy with interesting ideas and bad ideas and bots and all kinds of shit.

And this person could say, oh, by the way, if you're interested in donating, I'm not taking money from PACS.

Here's the link.

And they would raise millions.

And then every goddamn station would start calling them every day.

And they could pick and choose where they wanted to go and they would also start getting in shape for the fight.

They'd figure out their talking points.

They'd figure out what works, what doesn't work.

And they're all just sitting around waiting for fucking leadership from the golden girls.

I mean,

come on.

Well, I think it's also a great opportunity to

take away a little bit of a clout from influencers that I don't think are putting out particularly good information for folks.

Like people are desperate to know that the Democrats Democrats have a spine, backbone, and a plan, right?

They want someone that they can connect to.

They are also ready to keep, what are they, like blasting, hitting that donate button.

There's like a funny term for how you do it.

But the money is rolling in.

You see, in these special elections, like it's a seat that Trump won by 30 points.

And people are like, let's give 10, $11 million.

You know, we'll do anything to feel like maybe we have a shot at it.

We're doing something.

And, you know, there is a ton of people out there creating content that is poorly researched,

ridiculously biased.

I mean, where they're feeding people this false hope.

You know, Leader Jeffries was talking about Obama and that, you know, yes, we can and hope and change and how those six words made all the difference.

And that's actually all you needed for a campaign because people wanted to believe in something so much after what had gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Bush years.

And they're turning to the darkest places for

content, for their information, and for some of that hope.

And if that was more organized, we would be in a better position.

And then that could be one of your credentials.

If you were going to run for president, you can say, I've been the shadow president for the last two years, right?

I have been running this operation.

You know, there's a reason Bannon's show is the war room, right?

Where is our war room?

And the synchronicity between their think tanks, their media, their elected representatives,

they really are finely tuned.

I would put forward that in my eyes, the leaders of the Democratic Party right now are Tim Muller at the bulwark.

He's the only one with any fucking testicles coming out and saying this is bullshit.

And David Hogg.

David Hogg's the only one to stand up and say, get these.

Don't David Hogg me.

We're talking about this at the end of the show, but we're going to fight.

Get these

seniors out of here.

I mean, at least he's got a plan.

I'll outline what we're doing here.

The Supreme Court blocks Trump's immigration policy, Ukraine war talks, and David Hogg's plan to target older Democrats.

We'll take one quick break.

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All right, let's get into it.

Over the Easter weekend, while nationwide protests broke out and Vice President J.D.

Vance was shaking hands with the Pope hours before he passed away, can't wait for the conspiracy theory on that one.

The Supreme Court stepped into one of the most explosive immigration battles yet.

In a late-night order, the court temporarily blocked President Trump from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law from 1798 that's rarely been used in modern times.

Trump's legal team had argued the law gave him sweeping authority to remove non-citizens from enemy nations without the usual legal review.

But the court had paused, prompting a furious dissent from Justice Alito, who called the move unprecedented, hasty, and legally suspect.

This comes as Trump faces mounting legal challenges, not just over this case, but over the wrongful deportation of Amanda El Salvador.

And as critics warn this could open the door to mass deportations with limited oversight, justice alito called the court's intervention unprecedented and slammed it for acting without a full briefing or lower court input.

How unusual is this kind of late-night order?

What does it tell us about how the court is handling Trump-era immigration cases?

Well, he's right that it's unprecedented or almost unprecedented.

This happens very rarely, but

it is also rare that I would make the case that it seems as though the Supreme Court actually understands the moment that we're living in.

And that if they wait even an extra 10 minutes, that there are going to be more innocent people on a deportation flight to El Salvador for a life sentence with perhaps having committed no crime.

And the administration is trying to defend itself by posting pictures of some of the people who were supposed to be on this flight.

They show evidence of nine people of the 177 that were going to be on it.

And they want us to walk away from that saying, oh, yeah, well, then it would be totally worth it, right?

If there are nine people that deserve to end up in that prison, you can hold them for an extra couple of days and make sure that people get their due process.

And I'm overwhelmed by how lawless, sloppy, and cruel this administration seems to be.

And I thought that was a wonderful answer from Leader Jeffries when we said, you know, what makes you rage?

And he's talking about how mean and cruel these people are.

The lack of humanity that they display on a daily basis.

And I hate to make this about gender, but I'm even more appalled at the women.

that you see like Christy Noam, Caroline Levitt standing up there

talking like

monsters.

And I think you, you both have created life.

You, I'm Christy Noma is a grandmother.

And I know that I'm in some ways a bleeding heart liberal, and I don't have the constitution for those glorified videos of, you know, people walking in front of the prison cells in Seacot with what seems like 50 men caged in there.

You know, they have one toilet for them to share.

They're sleeping on bunks, you know, six, six high, no mattresses.

Like, that's not for me.

I get that.

But

it hurts me as a woman, frankly, to see people,

to see these women who know what it means to have children and to raise someone and to love someone, not give a damn if an innocent person ends up.

in these cells.

And I know that there is a political calculation conversation that that we need to have.

And Governor Newsom was out there saying that Albrego Garcia, the man, the Maryland constituent that Van Holland went to see, it's a distraction.

And we need to be talking about the tariffs.

And I think people are talking about the tariffs.

You know, we know what's going on in the economy.

We know about the value of the dollar tanking.

We know about the bond market.

We know about these small businesses.

We know about the layoffs.

Volvo is laying off a ton of people.

plants aren't opening, et cetera.

But

the humanity aspect of this is just almost too much for me to bear.

And this started out as a slow trickle.

And I've been having this fight constantly with my colleagues on the five where I bring something up and they go, well, that's one guy.

And now you have like 10 guys per day.

And I think that this story from Arizona is going to break through because an American citizen was detained for 10 days by ICE.

So he was walking in Tucson by a border patrol headquarters and they picked him up.

And the story that they fed the media was that they had actually picked him up in Nogales.

So at a border town, which is not true.

The man says he's never been to Nogales in his entire life.

He didn't have identification on him, but he didn't get to talk to a lawyer.

He didn't get to make his call.

And that's the theme that we're seeing over and over again: that these staples of American due process, which everyone has defended, including Antonin Scalio, says the Fifth Amendment is,

I should say, he said, because he is obviously not talking that much anymore, that the Fifth Amendment is clear, the people who are here undocumented have these due process rights.

And then when you say, guys, you want to say that anyone who entered the country illegally to begin with, even if they came through a port of entry, went through the asylum system, that they don't belong here.

What are you going to say when we talk about an American citizen that spent 10 days in lockup?

So I love, first off, I love, I appreciate the gender stuff.

I think that the majority of us have certain predispositions and sentiments that are, I don't know, somewhat dictated or influenced by our gender.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I think that I understand how you feel as a mother and as a woman.

And I would argue as anyone as a human.

And a lot of men have wonderful feminine instincts around care and nurturing and protection that's horrified by this.

As a man,

When I see Christy Noam sitting in front of a prison cell with all that surgery and what looks like a Sephora that exploded on her face and the expectation it's about to turn into a Cinemax film where she brings one of them into a private room and asks them if they want more prison yard time and then they they start fucking.

Gotta be honest, I kind of like it.

I kind of like it.

Is that wrong?

Is that wrong?

No, nothing is wrong.

Is it weird that my mind goes to that place?

Doesn't it feel like no, because you led with it as a man and then we got to Skinemax?

You're too young and honorable, but there was this genre of films, these women prisons film, or they were Andy Sedara's films.

And it was all these women with, I'll just say, a great deal of surgery with guns, just shooting anything and walking around in short shorts.

Christy Noam, it's like, next thing you know, she's going to be killing dogs.

Oh, wait, she did that.

She did that.

This is her standing in front with guns and in her full ice garb.

It's just so insane.

But back to, but seriously, folks, back to the law here.

Both Alito and Scalia have said, and I forget which one is credited with these basic themes,

but I think it was Scalia who said, every nation has a fantastic Bill of Rights.

Everyone always refers to the Bill of Rights and reads it and have this fidelity to it.

Russia actually has a really strong Bill of Rights.

It says you're allowed to protest, and anyone who gets in the way of free speech or protest will be locked up immediately.

That's not what makes a nation great.

What makes a nation great is your willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights.

And that's kind of where we are right now, is we're not entirely sure.

We're now not even,

it used to be that when

a judge made a decision, that was the judgment and it was over and everyone complied.

That's no longer the case.

We keep calling it a constitutional crisis, but it's more of a zeitgeist where it appears that the Trump administration is sort of saying, well, maybe we'll live up to that decision.

Maybe we won't.

So our willingness to support our laws and our Constitution for the first time, I would argue, is no longer a given.

It used to be, oh, they made a decision, it's done, we can expect them to comply, or people with guns and badges will show up and force them to comply.

And that's no longer a given.

The other basic norm about our Constitution and our justice system is the following: that we have decided to err on the side of rather than locking up unfairly one or two innocent people, we'd rather let dozens of guilty people not be locked up.

We've had that bias.

It's the burden of proof, the presumption of innocence.

It's not the presumption of guilt and the burden of innocence.

It's the other way around.

We've decided that occasionally, you know, OJ gets off.

I mean, we have decided that we would rather err on the side of some guilty people not being imprisoned than having wrongful people imprisoned.

And a lot of people will push back and say, Scott,

now do black Americans, right?

That there's

a lot of people in prison, probably

likely

unnecessarily, unjustly, and there are a lot of nonprofits trying to work on this, on what is obviously an enormous issue.

But in general, some basic tenets of our system are: one, we enforce the Constitution, and two,

we're willing to err on the side of making mistakes around innocence as opposed to guilt.

And this is exactly the opposite.

We're saying, well, you know,

people are actually, Republicans are actually going on media and saying, well, if a few people get locked up, that shouldn't have been, it's worth it.

No,

that's not.

That's not how, that is not the decision we as Americans have made.

We have decided that if we're going to make mistakes, it's going to be around some people don't get incarcerated that probably should be, as opposed to locking up people for having the wrong tattoo or because the administration never wants to admit a mistake and say they can't bring them back.

These things are totally contrary to how America has operated for the last 250 years.

Yeah.

All right.

Senator Van Hollen visited Obrego Garcia in El Salvador and said his main goal was to check on Obrego Garcia's health and rights, but he was blocked at the prison gates before meeting him hours later at a hotel.

What does it say about the U.S.

and our relationship with El Salvador and our leverage when a sitting U.S.

senator is denied access like that?

Well, I actually think that this is a bit of a happy story with how it ended up.

And you could see President Bukele, the El Salvadorian president, almost in real time

come to grips with the fact that they are losing the PR battle on this.

And that's why they had to present Albrego Garcia.

And then it's also come out now that he has been moved to, I guess, country club prison, El Salvador style, and he's no longer in Seacot because his name has been publicized everywhere.

It's the story that's leading all the newscasts.

And they know that if something happens to him and if he shows up looking beaten, bruised, or there was an expectation from a lot of people that he was probably dead, that it's going to be a massive issue.

And El Salvador is completely dependent on America for aid.

And if Bukele is smart, he's thinking in come 2028, we could have a different president, right?

Who doesn't share my passion for authoritarianism.

And maybe we get cut off, right?

There has to be life after Trump.

I mean, not according to Steve Bannon, but for the rest of us that live here on planet Earth, we have an expectation that we will have an election and that we will get someone new.

And hopefully that new person is a Democrat.

So

what he did, though, was so classic

dictator.

in terms of the propaganda, right?

Setting up Albrego Garcia.

So he's dressed very casually like he would be on a normal day.

They have him wearing a hat to cover up the fact that they've shaved his head.

And they put out the drinks, the so-called margaritas, in front of them.

And Van Holland said, which I thought was a very interesting detail, that they made sure that Albrego Garcia's was a little bit less full than Van Holland.

So it looked as if he had actually been enjoying alcoholic beverages.

And originally they had proposed them meeting by the side of a pool.

Because that photo op would have obviously made, you know, the right say, well, this is like paradise, right?

The guy's just hanging out by the pool, sipping margs with his hometown senator and everything's fine.

Liberals get over it.

So Van Holland, you know, it was very clear about it.

We didn't touch anything, made sure that they met in a more official looking room.

And I thought

one of the things that he said on the Sunday show circuit, Van Holland, was really important because people were pushing him.

Dana Bash was pushing him.

Shannon Breen pushing him.

You know, is this guy MS-13?

What's the real story here?

And he said, I'm not vouching for the man.

I'm vouching for the man's rights.

And there are going to be people who deserve to be deported that have been sent extrajudicially to Seacot.

And they deserve to go in front of an immigration court and for them to deem that they are in a gang, that they have committed crimes and then send them out of here.

But everyone's brain is so broken because of how how fucked up our politics are that they can't just acknowledge that a president, of course, has a right to deport, but this is not what's going on here.

Obama, Clinton, George Bush have sent millions out of this country.

No one is refuting your ability to deport.

But if you can't tell the difference between being sent to your home country and being sent to a life sentence in a foreign gulag,

then I think that it's beyond repair.

And that's what I'm really concerned about.

You know, as a Democrat, always up for the self-flagellation, you know, what did I do to make this outcome happen?

And they will say, well, you let millions of people stream across the border, right?

I think it was 8.7 million is one of the counts.

I saw there was a CBO estimate that actually reduced the deficit by $900 billion by having those people come in here, but that's neither here nor there.

So Biden lets in all of these people.

And they now think that they have license to do whatever whatever they want because two wrongs make a right, I guess.

I thought it was, you know, an eye for an eye, it makes the world go blind, et cetera.

And I don't know if that is actually fixable.

And the New York Times did an interview with 13 independent voters who had gone for Donald Trump and, you know, about how they think the administration is doing, talking about tariffs, Elon Musk, immigration, et cetera.

All of them used pretty harsh language for some aspects of how Trump is governing and talking about, you know, being depressed, sad, et cetera.

Not a single one would change their vote.

And this 29-year-old black construction manager, I thought this was

really

important or explained a lot of what's going on.

He said that the second term is much more about power and loyalty.

And then when pushed about how he feels about that, he said, although there are some hard decisions, a couple of friends that have been deported, stuff like that.

So I'm sad at the same time and also not regretting my vote.

So these are people who have friends that are being deported and are still saying they don't regret their vote.

I think Democrats are doing a little bit of an idiotic dance about all of this.

If you're thinking in pure electoral terms, and there's a moral argument obviously to be being made about this, but I feel like this is going to go on for months and Trump is still going to be leading on immigration by 10 points.

Well,

there was a TikTok that really struck me.

And at first I didn't get it and then I thought about it.

And the guy said, he said, just keep in mind one thing.

Auschwitz was in Poland.

And

me being kind of thick, I didn't put two and two together.

And I thought, wow, you know, suddenly I figured it out that it's easier.

to escape any sort of moral standards that have been or barriers to maintaining or preventing you or guardrails from

exercising those moral standards by putting centers of depravity outside of your borders.

And it takes a different complexion.

Rounding people up takes a different complexion.

The targets are obviously different, but this is what we're doing.

We are rounding up people and we're sending them to the equivalent of kind of black sites outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S.

And this is where I am so disappointed in the Democratic Party.

I believe that Senator Schumer and Leader Jeffries or someone running for president should say the following on their media platform every day.

Okay, dear El Salvador,

you get a billion dollars in aid from us.

You get tremendous help fighting rebels.

You get

in terrorism.

You have tremendous economic aid from us.

We are a trading partner.

You continue this shit and you don't acknowledge,

you don't acknowledge or at least invite some Democratic representatives to express their concern and you don't show any respect or reverence for those opinions in 21 months, I am going to so fuck with your nation.

You want to see inflation?

You want to see what it's like when I literally turn off.

This is,

in my opinion, Leader Jeffrey should have the legislation drafted.

The El Salvador liber, call it something flowery and wonderful, like we're, like we're helping them.

Like where it rhymes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In 21 months, if we take Congress, which we will, this is the legislation I'm passing.

And I'm going to fucking bankrupt your country.

And when countries go bankrupt, they come for their dear leader.

And that's you, my friend.

This is my phone number.

Give me a call.

But in this nation, we have elections.

And if you think what he's doing to you feels good, right?

The reach round he's giving you, I'm about to snap it off and eat your fucking testicles in 21 months.

Who is saying that on the Democratic side?

Instead, we're talking about liberty and constitution, and these guys with, you know, these poor men.

I get it.

It's time to go

gangster.

This guy's not going to respond to

AOC talking about humanity.

We are going to incite a revolution against you.

You don't think we can do this?

When we're in charge of the CIA, do you know how much really fucking crazy, nasty shit we have imposed and levied on Central American and Latin American leaders?

That's going to look like a fucking Easter Day parade compared to what Democrats are going to do to you in 20 months, three weeks, and three days.

If you don't start have a countdown clock on Mayor Pete's daily updates or whatever 100%.

Enough already.

Let's actually,

let's actually, it's like, okay,

do they make that for a man?

And when I say a man, I mean Senator Klobuchar or anyone or AOC is showing more balls than anyone right now.

Someone has to stand up and say, all right,

all right, El Salvador, this is what we have planned for you.

This is what is coming your way.

And we absolutely have, you think this feels good right now?

Enjoy it.

You know, anyway, and we're, we don't seem to be capable of doing that.

When the Germans rolled into Poland,

They met the Polish cavalry.

The Polish army decided to fight on horseback.

That's us.

We're the Democrats fighting on horseback right now.

Enough already.

Enough already.

Yeah.

I mean, that was definitely the vibe that I felt the audience was giving us at the Y, right?

Where they were saying, I want to get in a tank.

I don't want to be on horseback or on a little scooter, that these are, this is war, what's going on.

And I was thinking about you mentioning how the first big company, right, that comes out to push back against Trump is going to be a sea change.

And and then i said it should be more than just one right you're going to have these universities now band together and i don't know if you saw david brooks's op-ed in the times but he's call love him but also he's calling for a comprehensive national civic uprising He says it's time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits, and the scientific community and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement.

Trump is about power.

The only way he's going to be stopped is if he's confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

And that's what you're talking about, right?

These representatives that are going, and we should note, another four congresspeople just landed in El Salvador.

Max Frost, the youngest guy in the House, is part of that delegation.

But

I feel like David Brooks is saying something out loud that a lot of us have been discussing around our dinner tables.

This kind of like, what can we do and what would an uprising that is meaningful actually look like?

Because we have very little at our disposal.

And Leader Jeffrey is, you know, saying, well, to enforce the Supreme Court, you really need the executive branch and we need to look at what would happen to U.S.

Marshals, et cetera.

Like

none of that is going to be allowed.

The person in charge of the executive branch is the one causing the five-alarm fire.

So what is

what are, what options are left for us.

And I think taking to the streets is a big part of it.

And we saw that there was this case up in Sacketts Harbor, New York that I mentioned last week, where

the ICE picked up an innocent family and a thousand people came out and marched, and that family was returned.

And though we've seen these,

they're not uprisings, but these marches.

Sorry, I'm like losing my English.

I'm like so upset about this.

Like, I feel like I can't even find my words.

And I don't even have people screaming at me as I'm talking.

But people are taking to the streets.

And I think it does make a difference.

And I think that is why you see Bukeley actually presenting Albergo Garcia and letting Van Holland see him and knowing that he has to be kept safe at this point.

But I really liked what Brooks was suggesting.

I don't know if you have a view.

Yeah,

I think he's fantastic.

I had David on

the Property Pod last week.

And I just have.

He's a role model of mine.

I think he's just so eloquent and has such humanity.

And I love a guy who talks about economics and then his, like, you know, I always ask people who they'd want to go back and meet.

He'd like to go back and meet Jesus.

And he had sort of a reawakening spiritual.

I just think he's just such a,

he just kind of reeks of humanity and he's so fucking smart.

He's literally everything we don't have in our leadership right now.

Ridiculously high IQ, coupled with this peanut butter and chocolate of humanity.

But the thing about, I was really heartened.

The protests,

symbols are important, visuals are really important.

And all the protests that have sort of organically busted out all over the nation are really inspiring.

My fear is it's just a different horse, though, in terms of the cavalry initiative.

And that is, look at where these protests are breaking out, right?

New York, Chicago.

It's just the thing that's more effective, I think, is these videos of what's happening in some of these Republican town hall meetings.

But also,

I'm just more of the,

I want to be more gangster.

I want to figure out a way to crash the tenure unless he starts showing up.

I want to figure out a way to shut down the government.

I want to figure out, I want to outline the exact laws that were going to come for these folks

under the exact law.

I'm not talking about

prosecuting your political enemies.

I'm just saying.

start completing a list of we believe this a law has been broken here i mean basically adam shifted this he was the first one to say,

oh, you realize there was a ton of insider trading today, and we're going to investigate it.

I don't think they're going to respond to anything else.

I think a big turnout of a crowd on the streets of Chicago, I don't think, I almost think that kind of tickles their sensors.

Like, look how outrage these people are.

It's fucking hilarious.

I think they, I think they actually enjoy it.

I think they believe that that is

confirmation that they're doing something right.

And we have a tendency again

to move to peaceful protest, to meet with nonviolent protest.

And my attitude is at this point, no,

no, we need brass knuckles.

We need brass knuckles.

Okay,

let's take a quick break.

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Welcome back.

Big developments and even bigger ultimatums on the war in Ukraine.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S.

could walk away from peace talks within days if there's no progress.

It's the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is losing patience with stalled negotiations.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Putin announced a surprise 30-hour Easter ceasefire, but Ukraine says Russia broke it almost immediately, using the pause to reposition troops and clear routes for heavy equipment.

That's so unlike Putin to lie.

President Zelensky called the move a PR stunt, pointing to a spike in attacks by Sunday.

All of this came just after the U.S.

threatened to walk, raising questions about Putin's timing and intent.

And yet, there are signs the U.S.

isn't fully stepping back.

Vice President Vance remains optimistic, and a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal appears to be moving forward.

Jess, how seriously should we take Rubio's threat?

And what would moving on actually look like?

I have no idea what moving on looks like, especially at the same time that they say that they're close to getting this minerals deal done.

And as usual with the administration, you have two different signals going up at basically the same time.

Rubio saying that, and then Vance coming out of a meeting with Giorgia Maloney, the prime minister of Italy, saying saying that we feel optimistic.

So I hope that that, I hope Vance is right and that Rubio is wrong.

Like no one texted him or, you know, signaled him and said, hey, actually, it's going well over here.

But I think that the good news is that

we are meeting with our allies

and we are not in the Middle East.

meeting with the Russians.

So this meeting with Ukraine, the UK, Germany, and us, that's a very good thing.

That makes me feel more optimistic than I have in a very long time.

And I'm choosing, because I feel so negative about everything else that's going on, to lean into the possibilities that even if this is just like a straight pure economics deal, that they want those rare earth minerals.

And even if it squeezes Ukraine a bit, but it keeps us in the fight with them and supporting them with the weapons and the money that they need, that that's where we'll end up.

But it's crazy,

it's crazy how quickly everything is going.

But, you know, this new round of scandal around Secretary Hegseth that dropped last night, that there was apparently a second signal chat about your favorite

Yemen attack that you sign all your text messages with, but he was in another one with his wife and his brother and his personal lawyer, apparently, where the confidential, the top secret information was being shared came out last night.

And then there was also a big op-ed in Politico by someone who was the Pentagon spokesperson, and he was in the first Trump administration as well.

So, this isn't someone who, you know, just got here.

This is someone that knows the administration inside and out.

And he wrote, he's resigned from his post and wrote this long op-ed about the level of chaos that's going on within the Defense Department.

And there have been a few resignations in the last couple of days from Hexeth's immediate team over quote-unquote leaking having to do with.

Remember when Elon Musk was apparently going to a top-secret briefing about China?

And Trump apparently got wind of it and said, What the fuck is Elon doing there?

Make sure he doesn't go.

So it is nice to think actually that Trump understands that there are some things that Elon Musk shouldn't be in on.

But anyway, so Hegseth has pushed out a few of his top people as a result of that quote-unquote leak.

But it seems like he's in some degree of trouble.

It won't be an immediate thing.

Trump has said, I'm standing by him this morning.

That was the latest I saw on Monday morning.

But I guess this isn't surprising, right?

Well,

so are you familiar with Jessica Yellen, News Not Noise?

I love Jessica.

Yeah, so do I.

And whenever I see her pop up on Reels, I immediately watch it because it's kind of the quickest way to get an overview of the world in two minutes or less and a fairly non-noisy,

you know, just the facts.

I think she's fantastic and I love that.

And by the way, if you want to, just a quick shout out, I signed up for, I think I bought 50 memberships or something.

I think it's only 100 bucks a year.

Anyway, Jessica wrote up something

and it made sense to me that I heard the term taking out the trash that essentially the

current phase we're in with Secretary Hagseth is he's lost all kind of faith and supposedly he didn't build any goodwill with his team.

And they're leaking like crazy against the guy.

That's clearly someone leaked this, this whole second Signal gate, that

the guy is just incredibly sloppy.

And I love all these videos of him saying that

Secretary Clinton would be tried and put in prison for exactly a fraction of what he's doing on a regular basis.

It's also kind of the best out in the world for Signal.

It appears that people have decided Signal is nearly as good as a SCIF.

But

it is striking

that essentially

it seems to me his entire staff has turned on him.

And some, remember in Animal House, the guy, I forget, was it Niedermeyer?

They show what happened to them.

It was like killed by his own troops in Vietnam.

I think Secretary Hegseth is being killed by his own troops right now.

I think his entire team is clearly turned against him.

They're like, this guy's an incompetent and an asshole.

And it appears that there's there's just leaks everywhere.

And supposedly once that happens, there's no, there's no recovery.

You can't plug that hole.

Right.

And then

as it relates to

Ukraine, I just see stuff as

when you think about what a manager does, a manager's only charge is the following.

He or she has to allocate capital to a greater return than his or her peers.

So the cruel truth of capitalism is every organization and entity in the world has a finite amount of resources.

Even if you can print money, that money is supposed to be represented by something that's the transfer of work and time, and there's only so much work and time globally.

It is finite at some point.

And your job, if you're Tim Cook, is to figure out a way: how do I allocate my finite resources that I'll get a greater return than the CEO of Samsung or the CEO of Apple when they allocate resources or the CEO of Meta to their own devices and their own operating systems?

The president, at the end of the day, is the largest allocator allocator of capital in history.

He is allocating $7 trillion a year on $5 trillion of receipts, I would argue, but he's allocating $7 trillion.

And part of the reason that we've been able to allocate capital more efficiently to a greater ROI is because we have better information, we have better culture, we have better human capital.

But I would argue that Ukraine at 60 billion a year, 180 so far, is one of the best allocations of capital in history.

And that is, and I've said this before,

with we've taken out a third of the kinetic power of the Russian army.

We've defanged their brand and this, you know, ferocious, this brand of this ferocious military machine.

We have distracted them from essentially any sort of foreign adventures elsewhere.

We have unified Europe.

NATO's out of a brain coma.

And we've done this with less than...

less than, what, 8% of our military budget and with no boots on the ground.

And by backing a group of people who the Ukrainian army are literally a dream come true for the West.

And that is, they're incredibly brave.

They're willing to make enormous sacrifices on the behest of the West.

They're incredibly technically sophisticated.

And all we have to do is essentially give them some money, some drone technology, and get out of the way and let them do their thing and provide them with intelligence.

And to give you a sense for just how unreasonable Russia must be in these negotiations, essentially

Vance and Trump appear to be on the side of Putin.

And even they can't figure out a way to have bring this to an end when they are willing to, they threatened Ukraine, pulling intelligence, pulling arms, which really neuters Ukraine.

We thought, maybe not as much as they'd hoped, because I'd like to think Europe is filling the void.

But even with the withdrawal of the premier ally and siding with Russians, we can't figure out a deal because clearly Putin's demands

are just so over the top.

They include for Ukraine to drop its ambitions to join NATO, for Russia to control the entirety of four Ukrainian regions it has claimed as its own.

Currently, Russia controls about 20% of Ukraine.

Over 3 million live under occupation.

For the size of the Ukrainian army to be limited, Ukraine's forces are already smaller than Russia with about 900,000 soldiers for Russia's 1.3 million.

I've heard he's demanded they basically de-arm or de-escalate.

By the way, this has just been a terrible lesson in the incentives are every nation should rush towards a nuclear bomb because people remember Ukraine had

some of the greatest cash or armament or number of nukes, and they agreed to give them up.

And they're probably regretting that now.

Putin would have invaded Ukraine if they'd had nukes.

He just wouldn't have gone in.

So the fact that you have

what was the premier ally of Ukraine now on the side of Russia, and Russia still isn't able to come up with what are seen as acceptable conditions of surrender, just show you how unreasonable

and difficult it is to negotiate with Russians.

And it was like Churchill said, you can't negotiate with a tiger when its head is in, when your head is in its mouth.

And just along the same lines, and it's a bit of an adjacent around capital allocation.

This shit for brains is the worst businessman in the world, the worst manager in the world.

He does not understand capital allocation, both in terms of foreign policy in Ukraine, but also in terms of innovation and business.

And I won't even talk about tariffs.

Everyone's been talking about tariffs.

They understand it's the most elegant way to reduce prosperity.

His going after universities and withdrawing their RD budgets,

we get between 20 and 60% ROI on investments in our universities.

Because if you look at some of the world's greatest innovations, whether it's vaccines or HIV cocktail or splitting the atom, if

the greatest innovation in history, probably the last, not history, last hundred years, most people would have to zero in.

Maybe it's, I don't know, something that helps malaria or maybe it's vaccines.

Most people would probably zero in on the fact that we figured out how to split the atom before Hitler did.

If Hitler, with his scientists who are outstanding, had gotten there first, the world would look like a very different place.

We might be having this conversation in German right now.

And what did we do?

We brought together the following.

Oppenheimer is about great scientists, but what the only place Oppenheimer, in my opinion, fell short historically is that the Manhattan Project was this concerted, coordinated project that brought together, and I'm going to miss some, Caltech, Berkeley,

University of Chicago, WashU,

Purdue,

Rochester, Princeton.

I believe it was Columbia.

We had the University of Minnesota, and all of them were doing different things, looking at the effects of radiation, looking at the risk of turning into a firestorm, lighting the atmosphere on fire that

would ruin the world.

All of these universities had the brightest people in the world focusing on a very narrow topic.

And basically, the government with the private sector, with universities, said, we're going to coordinate all these incredible centers of excellence, and we're going to do the most amazing thing in history with respect to science and innovation, and then save the world.

and then we're going to go on to create a very cheap source of energy.

That continues to happen every day in this private-public partnership where the government gives money for R D to universities.

And it has continued, continued to yield enormous economic benefit in areas where private sector can't justify to their shareholders that we're going to go really deep around mRNA vaccines.

We're going to go really deep around LED lighting for flat screen TVs.

We're going to go really deep around the ability to triangulate signals off of a satellite such that you can have video uploaded to a handheld device really efficiently.

This is the greatest capital allocation in history.

And this is, in addition to the depravity and the cruelty, this is the real, in my opinion, Achilles heel of this current administration is at the end of the day, they're just shitty managers.

This is a rich kid who continually leaves a trail of bankrupt companies and unpaid subcontractors because he does not understand the most basic thing a manager does, and that is allocate capital to its greatest return.

He doesn't understand

the most basic premise in business, which is capital allocation.

Anyways, thank you for my TED Talk.

No, it was a good one.

You should actually suggest to them.

that you come do it as a TED Talk and you can win best talk of the year again.

I'll just say,

oh, go on.

Go

That's right.

That's right.

Did you hear we've adopted a small child from the Bahamas?

He literally looked like our little brother, didn't he?

I mean, yeah, I did have, I didn't need the heels necessarily.

We could have.

Oh, you saw it.

Yeah.

You're like, I'm 5'10.

No, I'm 6'2 ⁇ .

Put up with it, bitches.

I like the younger.

I've 11 to 6'1.5, if we want to be precise.

But

I would just add to it, besides being bad managers, they're also completely red-pilled.

Like they've taken everything that they've read on the internet

and they just doom scroll all day.

And it makes them feel stronger and capable of things that are just impossible.

Like the amount of things that they've said, I will fix it on day one.

So day one to day 100, which we're coming up on, they're going to solve all the world's problems, right?

Cost of living issues, no big deal.

We're going to get rid of DEI, CRT, all this stuff.

We're going to end the war in Ukraine 100 days.

We're going to get the hostages hostages back.

Maybe that was like day 10 that we were supposed to, that are being held by Hamas.

And they've created such a powerful internet ecosystem that they're generally impervious to all of these very real things that we're talking about.

And that's getting exposed through these crazy quotes out of the reporting that Trump is saying.

I could handle being in charge of a recession, but I just don't want to get into a, I don't want a depression.

So that's his line.

A recession would be fine, but the depression is the issue.

And this is directly affecting what's going on with the perception of these universities.

And you did try to push Leader Jeffries on the DEI question

and just kind of having a better way to talk about how important diversity and equity and inclusion is to making and maintaining the U.S.

as the powerhouse that it is.

But this will just straight come down to the fact that we're not going to have as many Nobel Prize winners that are coming out of the U.S.

because people are not going to come here to do their research, A, because the funding won't be here, but B, because they're going to have to be afraid about being picked up off the street.

They are running around going after anyone that holds a visa.

And

why would you come to an American university for your graduate work to do it if you thought that there was a chance that DHS had

worked with your university to find out if you had participated in a protest or written an op-ed in the case of the Turkish Tufts PhD student, and then that they have license to just throw you in the back of an ICE van.

You know, ICE-like

customs enforcement,

not just a cold truck.

I realize every time I say that, it kind of sounds like I'm talking about actual ICE.

But

it's like everything

that makes us great, the internet said was bad or had gone too far.

And when your council of elders is Charlie Kirk and Cat Turd and Bill Ackman sometimes, you end up in this preposterous mess.

And Ukraine ends up in this terrible position that they're in.

And returning to the positivity, hopefully we will continue to help them.

But yeah, like there's a reason Germany wants to be friends with other nuclear powers because we're hanging back here fighting about, you know, Tuskegee airmen and DEI departments.

And they're out there in the real world having to fight these wars.

Yeah, again, it goes, I go back to the economic argument.

The way you garner the most capital and are able to create margin and then allocate those investments is you attract the best human capital.

That's kind of job,

I would almost argue it's job, is it communicating a story to attract low cost of capital?

Probably job number one or job number two for a CEO or a leader is to attract and retain the best human capital.

The team of the best players wins, full stop.

That's where I focus the majority of my time, whether it was giving a lot of reviews, showing empathy for people, getting to know them, establishing fake friendships with them, whatever it was, pretending to like their spouses, you know, anything to hold on to the best people.

America, let me, you know, having spent 20,

a lot of time in school and graduate school, as you did, and then seeing it from the faculty angle for the last 25 years, the undergrads in our elite university are essentially the freakishly remarkable, the children of rich people, and then some

really talented and sometimes wealthy people from foreign countries.

Once you get to business school, it's Americans.

I can just speak for MBA.

I can't speak for the other, the other guy.

It's MBAs.

The MBAs are what I call the elite and the aimless.

Good kids, smart.

Know they want to make a lot of money, have no fucking idea what they want to do.

So they go back to business school to try and figure it out because they hated their first job.

They hated investment banking and they hated consulting.

So the investment bankers think they're going to be consultants.

The consultants think they're going to to be investment bankers.

You'd think over the course of those two years, we'd get together and say, hey, it sucks over here too.

But anyways,

but the foreigners, the foreign students in the business school, I always say, I have them stand up and I'm like, you want to get to know these people because they're the richest people in the world.

Their dad owns the brewery or the license for Unilever in Paraguay.

And they're smart kids and they're going to run their country.

And it makes sense that they're here, but they're the funnest to party with and they're the richest, which is a lot of fun over the holidays.

So get to know them.

And then there's the PhD students.

And the PhD students are some of the most impressive people in the world.

We're not cashing the $72,000 check of the kid who's in business school from the dad who has the Unilever contract in Paraguay.

We have decided that this person is so fucking impressive around a very narrow topic that we're going to bring them here, ask them to teach the children of Rich Kid, and we're actually going to pay them.

And we're actually going to pay them.

We're going to give them a special visa.

PhD students, and you want to talk about a selective process.

These young men and women are so ridiculously fucking impressive.

They are the number one draft choice out of their college if their country was a college.

And the team that gets every number one draft choice in terms of PhD students,

the University of Wisconsin and Madison can compete with Oxford.

It can compete with NSEOD.

It can compete with the best, with the Boccone.

It can compete with St.

Andrews because people know if they come as a PhD student to to the U.S., they're going to slipstream into what is probably one of the best jobs, a society that really, really protects and values intellectual property.

And the idea that we have said to the number one draft choices,

yeah, come here, but there's a good chance we're going to clean out your locker in the middle of the season and arrest you and tell you to go back to your hometown.

It just, again, couldn't be more fucking stupid from a management standpoint.

These people, the fact these people want to come here, it's like, oh, Tom Brady wants to come play for our NFL team.

Oh, no, let's create a level of insecurity where we might disrupt his and his family's life for no real reason for some sort of political statement.

It all fundles it all reverse engineers to the fascist playbook of go after the cultural elite, go after institutions that represent progressive thought, as opposed to thinking, well, how does this impact economically?

It doesn't matter how it impacts us economically as a nation, because I got the Trump coin.

And those of you who are loyal to me i will figure out a way to get you your tens of millions of dollars i mean it is so void of any sort of empathy for the economic prosperity of not even the lower 99 but anyone who's not you know not in on the grift

or is whose brain is not broken and doesn't understand the real implications of what's going on.

I want to say quickly, I know we have to move to the next topic, but on the PhD front and attracting people, one of my favorite stories and one of the most interesting things that happened to me when I was in London doing my PhD was going down to Croydon to the home office to renew my visa.

And I was supposed to get another year to, I had, I was in my defense year and then I was going to go back home and I make my appointment and I go, I get my visa back and they've given me five years.

to remain in the UK.

This is pre-Brexit.

And I went back right away away and I said, oh, there's been a mistake because I don't want to be the person that has a visa that I'm not supposed to have, you know, anxiety about they're going to come after me.

I'm in a foreign country, et cetera.

And the person who worked for the home office said to me, oh, no, it's not a mistake.

And I said, well, it is.

I'm only entitled to an extra year.

And he said, no, you got accepted to the London School of Economics to do a PhD here.

We want you to stay.

We want you to work here.

and contribute to our society.

And that's a message that we have never gotten here.

I mean, all of the nuclear programs of our biggest enemies, Iran, China, those are all people who have been trained here in the United States that we sent back home.

And we just don't get it.

That was one of the most impactful experiences that I've had in my entire life: that conversation with that home office agent.

I've had something similar happen.

I got a tech talent visa to come here to the UK.

I just sent them some links to my media stuff and some of my books.

And they're like, oh, we're thrilled.

Here's a five-year visa.

And also, the UK,

the last UK government, put in place a program that if you graduated from any of the top 100 universities in the U.S., you can immediately get a visa here.

What does that tell you?

What does that tell you about the strength of our universities, right?

And do we want to start cutting the funding from them?

It's really, it just...

Distinct are the moral arguments, which the Democrats are good at.

They're not able to connect it to economic issues and prosperity.

Anyways, before we go, David Hogg, the Parkland shooting survivor turned Democratic National Committee vice chair, is stirring up waves inside his own party after pledging $20 million to support primary challenges against older Democratic incumbents in safe seats.

Hogg is now extending something of an olive branch.

His outside group, Leaders We Deserve, just donated $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a gesture some see as an attempt to ease tensions, but the move isn't stopping the blowback.

Critics say he's putting his own agenda ahead of the fight to flip the House and that his plans to shake up seniority politics could undermine Democratic unity heading into 2026.

Jess, Hogg said his push isn't about age, but effectiveness.

But critics, especially those in swing districts, argued his plan pulls focus and resources away from winning back the house.

How do you see it?

I agree with the representatives from swing districts that actually know what it takes to win.

David Hogg went through a life-changing and completely tragic experience,

having been there for the Parkland shooting, but he has no on-the-ground experience of what it actually takes takes to be able to get this done.

And it's great that he gave the $100,000, but he essentially threatened his own party with $20 million worth of ammo, which is a lot of money when you think about what it takes or what people are trying to fundraise, I should say.

And there's a reason that Ken Martin, the head of the DNC, isn't into this, that Leader Jeffries isn't into this.

And I know that he has specific targets that hasn't been released yet of who he's thinking about.

But there's a way that you can talk talk about our age issue.

And look, we were two seats down until the fall because we had a 77-year-old and a 70-year-old congresspeople, one in Arizona, one in Texas, who passed away.

Those are open seats.

We would be that much more effective if we had younger representatives in there.

You know, God forbid.

I mean, they had cancer.

I don't want to be.

diminishing someone's life or their ability to do their jobs, but it's obvious that a 77-year-old, a higher likelihood that they're going to pass away than a 50-year-old.

And we are moving slightly in the right direction.

We did have leadership contests for judiciary, agriculture, where the younger person ended up winning Jamie Raskin and Angie Craig for agriculture, Jamie Raskin for judiciary.

But I don't like this.

And I've never heard David Hogg say anything about how blue dog Democrats overperform by five percentage points and that justice Democrats or our revolution Democrats, which are the far lefties, underperform by three to five points.

That's not part of his pitch.

And I know you want the fire and you want the fight and all of that, but it's a lot more complicated than just who has the best social media videos.

And it bugs me.

I think it's a good argument.

And I'm finally, I'm thrilled we finally found something we disagree on.

This was, he's more eloquent, but he's doing essentially a couple of weeks ago, I said, any candidate under the age of, you know, 100 who's running to unseat an incumbent,

I said, unseat an incumbent Republican, reach out to me and I'll give you a thousand bucks.

And I've had about, I don't know, 30 people reach out to me.

I'm a former Marine.

Yeah.

And I've been, but I'm running out of money.

I'm giving away about 20 grand.

So I'm going to

Hogg's doing this in a more thoughtful way.

I absolutely fucking lutely love this.

And a lot of the arguments in the tone,

the very logical, the very practical, we agree with you, but hold the course, stay the course, is the kind of the same tone I got from people who told me to sit the fuck down when I was saying Biden was too old to run for re-election.

I cannot tell you how many party elders reached out to me directly and said, do you understand the assignment?

He is going to be our nominee.

And all you are doing by highlighting his age and your critical comments is you're going to put Trump back in office.

And

we're at 25%.

We have decided that the prefrontal cortex of a woman or a man at 34 does not have the cognitive ability and maturity to run for president.

30 for Senate, I think 25 of the U.S.

House of Representatives.

But we can have a guy who looks like he's about to go into hospice run for president.

We can have the people who are supposed to push back on incredibly complex issues and work 17 hours a day and weaponize new technologies and new mediums.

Oh, it's okay that they're 73.

What is Schumer now?

73?

You used to have to retire at 65.

So I am totally down with this.

I also like David Hogg.

He reached out to me right after the Parkland shooting when I went on, I forgot it was, MSNBC and COVID and said young people need to get off their phones and get outside.

And I got a ton of pushback and he called me and said, there's something nihilist about all this.

I thought he was very impressive.

And I am totally down with this.

And if it forces,

if it forces Democrat,

status quo is not working.

That is what basically the Democratic message is.

We're the good guys.

We want to go back to where we were.

Stay the course.

Wait until 2026.

And we're going to take things back to where they should because we're not him.

That is not the mess.

The message they're putting out there

has us at 25%.

We need to shed skin.

We need disruption within our own party.

And it's not only about youth as

it relates to age, but it's about ideas and youthful thinking.

And some of these people are just not up to the task.

I absolutely adore and love this.

David Hogg, reach out to me.

I think we should bring him on to talk about this.

I'm going to give him some money, but I am done.

I am done with these, with this, with this weak, neutered seniors' home where the most they can do is get outraged that Jello Knight's been canceled.

I just, I'm done.

I'm an ageist enough already.

We need churn.

I'm happy for there to be thoughtful churn.

I'm not happy for people to take sledgehammers to the system without fully thinking it through.

And young progressives are famous for screaming about how we need this new blood.

I'm the right person for it.

And their campaigns are anchored in issues the American public does not care about.

This was an election where the only color that mattered was green, right?

You were talking about stop with the identity politics.

It's It's all about money.

And guess what young progressives tend to talk about all the time?

Climate change, gun control, LGBTQ plus rights.

They're not the ones out there with their platform for addressing wealth inequality in a thoughtful way that could actually get implemented.

And I'm not talking about AOC anymore.

AOC does a very good job, certainly in this incarnation of, or...

Right.

I always struggle with that word.

Like every week, I feel like I have an incarnation problem.

But my point is, when you go out, look at the Justice Democrats challengers that more often than not are losing their races and the kind of campaigns that they're running.

And then think about the campaigns that are resonating with people and are actually leading to wins.

And I know that a lot of those people, you know, they've been in there too long, maybe some of them, or they're just not as exciting.

But the voting public is saying that they're talking about the issues that actually connect with them and that that's what they want to hear from their elected representatives.

So that's where I struggle with it because, you know, March for Our Lives

enormously impactful, right?

And I would, I think it is an incredibly important and salient issue.

It is not driving anyone to the polls on a broad level, right?

These are niche issues on a comparative basis.

And so if David Hogg's criteria for who he's going to invest in has some sort of age component, but also that they have a three-point plan that addresses healthcare, the economy, and education.

I think that that would be much more persuasive than what I've heard so far.

I think those are really powerful points.

And I agree.

So you're backing down?

Now we're

on the same stream again.

I think the whole.

But we should talk to him about it, for sure.

The whole point of Evan It's an army is and being civil with the other side is such we can shape better solutions.

But I think of a lot of what you said that was really powerful and makes a lot of sense.

All right.

Jess, spoken like a person who's six foot one and a half.

That's all for this episode.

Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Our producers are David Toledo and Shenenye Onike.

Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday and Friday.

That's right, its own feed.

That means exclusive interviews with sharp political minds you won't hear anywhere else.

This week, Jess is talking with Representative Jared Moskowitz.

He's from my home day.

He's from Florida, right?

Yeah, he's the best.

I'm so excited.

He's such a treasure.

Make sure I loved, I loved when he

proposed that they impeach Biden after a year and a half.

And he's like, I'm waiting.

Oh, what?

I'm waiting.

I'm waiting.

Here we are.

We've been here 18 months.

He wants the second.

Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcast.

You don't miss an episode.

Jess, have a great rest of the week.

You did so well at the nine years ago.

We're inviting little Jess up to give the show or whatever it is.

Our bar and our bot mitzvah.

It was so nice for us.

We're now a man and a woman.

We have the rites of passage.

We've had our moment.

We've had our moment.

I mean, I've already given birth, so I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that I was already a woman.

Yeah.

But

it was awesome.

And it was so nice to be in person with you.

So hopefully, we'll do more of that.

Thanks for saying that.

Likewise.

All right, everyone.

See you next week.