Amanda Carpenter: Fake Emergencies

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Hello and welcome to the Bullword Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

So pumped to welcome back my old friend and colleague.

She's now a writer and editor at Protect Democracy and a contributor to their If You Can Keep It sub stack.

It's Amanda Carpenter.

What's up, Amanda?

Hey, Tim.

How are you?

I am doing, you know, pretty good, all things considered.

It was a beautiful morning in New York City.

Got to walk around, get a little coffee.

We haven't militarized the Big Apple yet, so that's that's good, I guess.

You know, you take small wins where you can get them.

What's happening with you?

Yeah, you know, I'm just sort of planning my next trip into DC, wondering what checkpoints I might be driving through in my truck, if it would be better for me to actually take the metro so I don't have to deal with that.

You know, it's pretty weird.

Our offices are, we have an office in downtown DC.

The idea of troops just kind of rolling around, checking people out, it's not a great feeling.

I saw some pictures this morning.

You want to think it's just for show.

Right.

Like they have these people sort of lumbering around the National Mall alongside joggers,

but it's, it's way more serious than that.

And so, you know, we'll get into it, but it's just, I feel really uneasy and I'm going to see it with my own eyes very soon.

And I don't know what to expect.

Yeah.

I saw there's some feds doing a checkpoint at Howard University.

Maybe just coincidence or near Howard University.

Doesn't seem like one to me.

And then, you know, also pictures of them rolling into the D.C.

Armory.

I guess I have some questions for you about the threat of it.

I will say, just before we do that, though, to assuage your concerns, the truck's got West Virginia license plates on it.

That is correct.

I don't think they're going to be shaking you down.

I don't know.

Andrew Egger in the Morning Shots newsletter this morning observed just kind of a little aside that Trump made at the press conference yesterday.

It hasn't gotten much attention.

And I thought it was pretty astute.

He said this, Trump said, people come from Iowa.

They come from Indiana.

They come and then they get mugged.

Not going to happen.

You can keep coming now because by the time you get your trip set, it's going to be safe again.

A revealing aside, right?

You know, it wasn't,

well, A, it wasn't obviously showing concern for the actual residents of the District of Columbia, like this ostensible military occupation is because DC is so unsafe.

It also doesn't show concern for, like, I don't know, people coming from Detroit, maybe, or Oakland.

You know, it's like, I'm going to try to think of the two whitest places I can come to in my mind and imagine them coming to D.C.

You know, there's a two-pronged element to this.

Obviously, there's the power grab part, but there's also kind of this idea of, oh, we need to protect the real Americans.

Yeah.

You know, obviously, you know, my top concern is the unjustifiable power grab, but I do think we should spend some time talking about, you know, where these ideas come from.

And,

you know, there are attacks on a lot of young Hill staffers.

Right.

Like, this has happened.

I think people should go read a longer profile in the Washington Post.

It's about a staffer for Rand Paul who was stabbed not that long ago.

And he faced a lot of pressure to, you know, make it a politicized issue, go to the media about it.

He didn't for a long time.

He's the son of missionaries.

He went home, healed, and has really just meditated on forgiveness and what he should do about this attack.

And so it's kind of this tortured thing.

And he did talk to the Washington Post reporter about it because he wanted to forgive his attacker.

And it turned out that person had

actually been just released from sex crimes and attacks the day before he attacked the staffer, was deemed mentally incompetent and just didn't really know what to do about it.

But there's a lot of stories like that.

When I was working on the Hill, I was on the Metro one day and actually got off the metro because there was a woman who was acting erratically and I felt threatened.

I got off, read the news two hours later, she stabbed an NPR intern.

So like, these are, it's anecdote, but there's a lot of this that goes on.

There's muggings on the hill, there's carjackings, the carjackings have been out of control.

And so just recognize where this is coming from and why there is such a well

of eagerness to do something about it.

And you saw that in the press conference yesterday.

When I was listening to Janine Piro and Pam Bondi, and they were so assertive and confident that we are going to do something about it, I know it's because they have all this backing in their ear.

This idea of taking away home rule from DC did not come out of nowhere.

Mike Lee and other Republicans have been thinking about this for a very long time because there is this feeling that DC

has been terrible.

It got cleaned up in the Republican Revolution when Gingrich came into power in the 90s.

It got bad again through Obama, despite the simulus spending when things were kind of bright and shiny for a while.

The pandemic and Biden, it got bad again.

They want to come and clean it up using the Giuliani method.

But this is turbocharged.

And so, yes, but the idea that

Staffers come from all over the country, tourists come from all over the country, and don't feel safe in their actual incidents of attacks and crime that has gotten out of control, although not comparably, you know, to other cities.

We can't dismiss that.

We can talk about that and better solutions to change it.

And at the same time,

understand this is a hugely unjustifiable power grab so that Trump can consolidate power, send in the troops, and they can accomplish those things that they always wanted to do all along.

Yeah, I'm just going to be candid on this.

Sometimes I

feel like I'm out of touch on this, just in the sense of,

or maybe not out of touch, but just unrepresentative of how other people feel, maybe is a better way to put it.

Because I was like, look, I was, you know, kind of reading some of the commentary on this yesterday, you know, on social media and other places from people who are like left of me, really, on issues talking about like their concerns about personal safety and, you know, how Democrats shouldn't be downplaying that, like that they feel worried when they're walking around at night.

Obviously, it's particularly different for women, you know, versus something that maybe I would think about.

I don't know.

Maybe it's just my laissez-faire attitude, or I don't know what it is.

But I just have never, I mean, like had like that's just never been an issue.

You know what I mean?

I like, I accept that we live in a free country and that there are going to be bad people and that we do need to have law.

You know, like, obviously, people should be held accountable for their crimes, but there's like a certain amount of risk that comes of living in a society.

And I would rather just enjoy my life than worry about it, like frankly.

And I've been lucky to not have any situations like that.

The one that the Rand Paul staffer had happened to me.

And I, and Liz was actually on this pod last week and mentioned this, and she's had issues in the New York subway, for example, Liz Smith.

I don't trust my own instincts, I guess, is the point of that long windup on telling Democrats what to say about this.

And I just wonder what you think about how you kind of balance that.

There's been some people that are like, well, like on the one hand, it's true the crime is down.

On the other hand, by saying that, maybe do you sound like you're not in touch with what people's concerns are?

I don't know.

What do you think?

Yeah, well, I think on one hand, there's just generally a huge disconnect between

big cities.

and how they have a tolerance generally for things like homelessness and open drug use and encampments that is shocking and unfamiliar to people who are from smaller towns where you never see something like that.

Okay, so like people coming into a city, I had this experience.

You come out of the metro and there's like, you know, lots of homeless people.

They kind of harass you.

You walk around.

It's during the daytime is generally fine.

At night, would I walk through there?

Absolutely not.

Like I worked at CNN for how long?

Where their offices are, it's one block from the metro.

You could not walk from the metro to out of there at night because you would have to go through encampments.

You'd have to call security and have get on a little bus to go to the metro if that's where you wanted to go.

And I think that's like a generally normal experience in D.C.

if you get outside of the federal zone.

And this is one of the things that is really odd about DC is that it is so heavily policed in many of the park areas, in the federal buildings, in the downtown from nine to five.

during the workday.

And after that, if you go outside those zones, it can be very dangerous very quickly.

It has gotten better.

There's been a lot of developments, like I said, but to kind of assume, to compare this to a place like New York where you can walk in the streets at all hours of the night, that is absolutely not the case.

And so I think it's just so unfortunate that Trump is able to seize this moment to, you know, send in the troops to solve a problem that absolutely shouldn't be solved this way.

But he sees a model.

I think he absolutely has looked at the model and he's kind of been, you know, looking at California and just kind of testing the waters and talking about places like Baltimore and Chicago.

And now he has the ability to think, you know, solve this problem in his mind in D.C.

And if it's successful, air quotes there for the audio listeners.

Okay.

Throw air quotes around, solve this problem.

If this is successful in D.C., I think he's absolutely going to try it in other cities.

And there'll be blue cities, to be sure.

I mean, the murder rates, we can say comparatively how it's higher in the red states.

You know, this isn't coming from a place of applying the rules evenly.

This is about control.

It's about power grabs.

It's getting undesirables, whether that may be homeless people.

You can fill in the blank of who he thinks undesirable people are off the streets and out of his sight so that he can have more control.

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Let's talk about the like now into your protect democracy space about what the

risks are here.

I was watching this, I guess it was on Fox last night.

I do Fox when I'm in a hotel room.

It's the only time I do Fox because, you know, I'm not subjecting my family to it.

You watch it.

You don't go on it.

Yeah, no, I don't go on it.

I watch it in hotel rooms just to kind of see what they're saying.

I can't subject it to anyone in my home.

You know, the pitch is essentially obviously bullshit, but let's just, here's the pitch.

They're only limited to be able to do this takeover for 30 days.

Okay.

It's a 30-day blitz, I think was the word they used.

Come in, clean stuff up.

Trump gets to declare a victory.

A lot of concerns about that, a lot of concerns about how they expand that model to other places, which we'll get to in a second.

But that's kind of the best case scenario at this point.

I don't like that.

To me,

that sets up a big showdown, though, in 30 days, right?

Which is like,

do they follow the law?

And because practically speaking, like, you can't reform a police department.

You know what I mean?

Like, if you took them at their word, they're like, we're going to, Pam Bonnie's going to run the police department and we're going to reform the way they do things and stuff.

It's like, well, you can't do that in fucking 30 days.

And there's not a real crisis.

Like, to your point, like, there's crime in DC and that is existing, but there's not like an acute crisis that's different from meaningfully from any time before, like, in the last couple of years.

It's better than the last couple of years, frankly.

So, it's like, okay, what do you think the game is here?

And how do you combat it?

My concern is that Trump is getting away with inventing all these fake emergencies, whether it comes to DC crime, whether it comes to his claims of an alien invasion throughout the country where he is justified using ICE to round up people in the streets, whether it's on college campuses and he feels like he has to freeze federal funding in order to combat it.

You know, he's

getting away with inventing all of these fake crises, saying emergency, emergency, emergency, so that he can keep seizing all this power.

And every time, yeah, tariffs is another great example.

That's the concern from a democratic perspective.

Maybe, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, this will go well because

people are so willing to give him a chance on this one.

And I don't understand it looking at his pattern of deception and telling lies over and over again to try to take drastic measures to send in the troops to California, to send them all over the country, to send them to DC.

The end game is send in the troops, right?

Like that's what he's doing.

And then at the same time, he's also doing, you know, weird things, having Tulsi Gabbard.

dig up claims about the 2016 election and Russian meddling.

Like, why are we revisiting that?

So I just want to take like a really zoom out view of this because I still do see most things through the lens of January 6th, where he told lies to try to use the levers of government to overturn the rightful election results to stay in power.

And the reason he was unsuccessful in doing that is because people inside the Department of Justice and otherwise said, no, you cannot use the military to say, to seize voting machines under the guise of a fake emergency where we need to investigate the election, right?

Like that is always in the back of my mind.

And so now he is successfully inventing all this fake emergencies to send in the troops to seize economic power through tariffs.

And now to sort of revisit the 2016 election and make it seem like, oh, there wasn't Russian interference in the election.

There absolutely was.

There absolutely was.

But now it's Tulsi Gabber's like full-time job to somehow say, no, it wasn't.

So what do you think they're trying to get away with?

What is the end game here if it's not to use the military to do things like overturn election results?

Yeah, this is the tough part about the politics of all this, like when you think about it, because it's like

he's just so abnormal and it's so outside the bounds of like our normal discourse, right?

Where it's like,

you know, if this was in a vacuum, if we all had dementia, right?

Like, or, you know, if we all, if like none of us had object permanence, right?

And we woke up every morning like a baby and it's our first day, you know, you'd be like, okay, well, this seems bad, right?

Like, but like violent crime is higher in DC than it is in a lot of cities.

And so like, I don't know, let's see how it goes in 30 days.

Right.

Like, there's a pressure in the mainstream media, like coverage of this, which I, which I've noticed, there's a pressure even among Democrats, like, to be like, well, you know, you want to

not, again, underplay the violence.

and the concern, the legit concerns people have about it.

Like at the same time, it's like, you can't take this fucking guy at face value, though.

Like, you can't possibly accept that this is a legitimate effort to deal with crime like it's just not like it is either propaganda and a show you know for his white base which is why you're out there talking about iowa and indiana like or it's an attempt to seize more and more power like going forward for who knows what i don't know like you're saying potentially shenanigans um in the future with regards to elections potentially they don't even know they just want to you know take this stuff over and that's why like, to me, it's like, it's like making the case,

if you're in the pro-democracy coalition, if you're a Democrat, like making the case on that turf, like talking about

not wanting unchecked power, you know, not wanting this person who's a fucking liar and want to be autocrat taking over institutions is a better place to fight this turf than saying, like, well, violent crime is down 30%.

You know what I mean?

Like,

that's that's maybe the right way to go at it.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And personally, I would like to hear some Democrats or anyone talk about

there are many other steps you could take to solve these specific crime issues other than sending in the troops to police the streets.

Like having the military on the streets to police U.S.

citizens is a bright line.

There is no justification to do that.

We know how to deal with carjackings, right?

Like make a task force, meet with D.C.

leaders, nominate a local czar.

You know, there are a million other steps that he could take, and he isn't doing them because that's just not what this is about.

This is about having a show of force.

Why did we have a military parade in the streets of DC?

It's the same reason.

I mean, it's all the same stuff.

He wants to say he's always wanted to be able to send the troops at his will.

to accomplish whatever small, big goals he likes.

And so he found this scenario and like everyone's taking it.

Everyone's saying like, oh, well, maybe he'll do a good job with it.

You know what?

Maybe 10 for 30 days he will.

But after that, everyone's accepted it.

And who knows what they're going to do the next time?

Well, we know what they're planning.

So here's the Washington Post story from this morning.

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a, quote, domestic civil disturbance quick reaction force.

This is composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests.

It's interesting that protests is the the first thing that they use there, not like riots.

Yeah, civil energy.

Mass shootings, mass shootings.

Like they use protests.

This is from an internal document.

Rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests.

According to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by the Washington Post, the plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times.

The costs could go up to hundreds of millions of dollars if they need air support.

Oh, air support for protests?

Yeah.

Well, I don't know why they would need air support, but that's that was on the the list.

So hey, Tim, what happened about spring this year?

There was like a mass movement of people gathering in streets under a no-kings sort of banner.

Yeah.

Why would we need a strike force against peaceful protest of U.S.

citizens?

Who is this for?

I mean, to me, this is,

I mean, I guess it's for looking back at a miss, what he thinks was his miss during the Black Lives Matter protests, right?

That, like, he wanted,

Trump obviously wanted to rough up protesters more and be more violent against protesters.

And he was stopped by Esper and others.

And, you know, like, like, Trump wanted to do what the, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, and all that sort of stuff.

And I think that that is just

like, like, they're just looking for a pretext, essentially, for that.

Yeah, well, I also think it's, you know, just, you know, from an analysis perspective, we have to think in Trump's mind

what are the protests that he has witnessed during while he's in political power that he hasn't liked the number one the feminist march when he came into power correct black lives matter protests on college campuses for gaza no kings

ice protests the only major protests that have happened

are things that are opposed to his political agenda.

And so now, when there are no math, there's,

I want to quit saying the word protest, because there should never be troops deployed against Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

It should only be deployed in cases of severe civil unrest, where things are out of control.

That has not happened.

So now we're,

while he's taking over DC, sending troops to the streets of D.C., he is contemplating a national strike force.

that can be used preemptively against American citizens for some unknown reason.

Yeah.

This is not good.

No,

I just want to make sure I have this right because I just kind of wrote my notes about the air support.

So I'll just show what is actually said.

Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Should military aircraft and air crews also be required to be ready around the clock.

Troop transport via commercial airlines would be less expensive, the documents say.

So that's not really clear.

So it may be to transport troops or it may be to buzz helicopters like they did outside Lafayette Plaza, where there's still no real accountability for that.

Remember what happened there?

There was people protesting.

They gave them essentially like five minutes notice to get out of there.

And then there was helicopters buzzing, smoke bombs going off.

Nobody had any accountability because it was such a mix of forces.

Nobody knew who was doing what.

People weren't wearing their badges.

And uh-oh.

Yeah, I wrote about this a bunch of the time.

That was back when I was, you know, writing and sort of just flapping my jaw.

And like, it was an extremely aggressive use of force in Lafayette Park during that.

You know, it was the same time that Trump ends up coming through and holding the Bible upside down.

And then

they tried to tell a separate story about how like the crowd wasn't dismissed because of Trump and how it was what.

And it was like totally, they just lied.

They totally lied and it was a violent dispersal of people peacefully protesting outside the White House and like that was his model like that is who knows what else they have in plans but like we know that that's the model yeah that they want to start deploying yeah at that time they really muddied the waters because there was dispute about which you know which force was responsible for lighting off the smoke bombs and they eventually they got sorted out but it was such a mix between capitol police and army and national guard nobody really knew who was doing what.

It was chaotic.

But that show of force is absolutely the model.

And the Trump defenders at the time, you know, the people who are trying to talk him down from that were sort of saying, well, that was better than invoking the Insurrection Act.

Well, I don't know.

Now that you have a strike force ready to deploy against American protesters at a moment's notice,

I don't know how much different that is from invoking the Insurrection Act.

I think I'd have to talk to some experts to see functionally

what's the difference.

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We're going to kind of circle back to all this because at the end, end, I want to talk about what we're supposed to do about all this as a free people to push back, but a few other news items first.

E.J.

Anthony was named the new commissioner of labor statistics.

I don't know if

it's an ominous choice or like a comically ridiculous choice.

Probably both.

A little bit of both, maybe.

Yeah.

Neither of us, like labor statistics, I'm not going to pretend like is my strongest area of expertise.

So I want to lean on a couple of the other economists we've had on the bulwark and tell you about their reactions to this choice.

Jessica Riedel, conservative economist, says, I've never met E.J.

Anthony because he's not seen in D.C.

policy circles.

However, the articles and tweets I've seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now.

Jason Furman, very middle of the road, kind of liberal economist.

I don't think I've ever publicly criticized any presidential nominee before, but E.J.

Anthony is completely unqualified to be BLS commissioner.

He's an extreme extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise.

Justin Wolfers from Michigan, Trump's nominee for BLS Commissioner E.J.

Antony, is disastrously terrible.

He's a 1,200, 1,300, 1,400% in the tank Trumper with few credentials beyond a long history of misrepresenting or misunderstanding basic economic statistics.

He has demonstrated no commitment to the truth.

There we go.

That's the person that will be in charge of putting out non-biased government statistics that folks use to determine how to invest and what's happening in the economy.

You know, going into Trump 2.0,

there were a lot of people, smart people, who believed

that

even if Trump was able to install loyalists and henchmen up and down all over the government,

he wouldn't be able to corrupt things like BLS data.

I don't know why they thought that or why they had so much confidence in that belief,

but I think this appointment shows like, okay, you need to rethink that.

And people interested in the economic space and really good data analysts, I think

we really need to find a way of compiling this data in a private sector way.

in order to have any kind of meaningful statistics about the economy.

Because once these people get a hold of it,

I don't think anything is safe.

It's all going to be inflated and bloated, like every press statement that comes out of that White House so that he is perceived to be the greatest in history ever.

And so

when it comes to all government systems, especially when they come to statistics and things that could be analyzed outside of government offices, I think we better get to work on that real quick.

And there are like some effort, like there are

different types of market analysis that you see, private and public.

But, like, the public sector has an advantage over the private sector in these things, which is just getting

like statistics from businesses because they have to report into the government, right?

So, like, this is not like a free market program where we need competition between different economists to get the best number.

It's like you just need to be able to get the most amount of information, and the government's in the best position to do that.

You know, in a free country in America, where there's transparency and where you have FOIA and where people can get information, it's never been a problem before now, right?

Like it's a problem in China, where, you know, it's a top-down authoritarian government.

And that's what, that is the trajectory we're on.

Like, it's the trajectory he wants to take us on.

Whether we get there, I don't know.

You know, we had Barrow on last week.

He made some compelling points about how, like, it's a little harder to cook the books than you think.

If you look at the actual, you know, process by which you go through it.

And it's like, if you cook the books one month, then you have to cook the books the other month.

So like, we'll see what exactly happens with this guy.

But, even if it's a little harder to cook the books than you think,

even if they're only doing it on the margins, even if they're only doing it the month before the midterm elections, that's horrific.

Even if he gets over, if he's too incompetent and gets overwhelmed by the handful of bureaucrats that are still left in the BLS, like that's still not good.

Like, you don't want to have a BLS commissioner that is a liar.

People in our economy rely

on getting unbiased statistics from the government to make decisions, you know, about investment, about a variety of things.

Like, that's, it is very alarming to have an incompetent lying boob in charge of this totally non-partisan job that should just be for a technocratic nerd.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And you're absolutely right.

It would be harder to replicate this in the private sector, but I don't think impossible.

Yeah, sure.

Maybe my conservative instincts are coming out.

But, you know, if a association of prominent businesses that had influence over the economy decided to submit their data to a third-party system, maybe that could be better.

I think parallel tracks for economic data should absolutely be explored.

Will it be as robust as something coming out of BLS?

Will the new BLS commissioner actually be able to cook the books or will he just send out glowing press releases and sort of hold back the data?

That's probably a little bit more likely, but the more time they have to corrupt the system, the more corruptible it will become.

And I think we need to be planning, you know, obviously, for some kind of backup to carry us through the next three years and hopefully not any longer.

One more thing on the economy, really quick.

Core prices and CPI rose by 0.3% in July.

So if you look over the last six months, we had a 2.4% increase in core inflation.

Three months, it's 2.8%.

One month, it's 3.1%.

So you can see the trajectory of that is inflation kind of ticking up slightly.

I was looking at a chart, a CPI chart this morning.

It's pretty funny, actually.

It's like darkly funny.

What a good way to wake up and spend time with CPI charts.

It's darkly funny, though, is that like the only thing that's down a lot in core groceries is eggs.

We all talked about egg prices.

It's like egg prices are down quite a bit because of the avian bird flu, you know, issue receding.

So promises kept.

Got to call balls and strikes for the Trump administration on that one.

The eggs prices are down.

I don't think they did anything, but hey, whatever.

Shoot what flies, claim what falls, so to speak, with bird flu.

Everything else is up though.

Meat up,

certainly coffee up big time, anything that has, you know, that's being imported.

And, you know, it's not the...

intense inflation spikes that people experienced coming out of the pandemic, but like it's not nothing.

And prices are consistently high.

And if you are a type of person that has had a static wages, you know, or maybe you're retired and you're on Social Security, or

you haven't had an increase in your salary, like

if you had legitimate reasons to feel like you were struggling because the inflation during the Biden era, having this, you know, not recover at all and continue to tick up slightly, especially in kind of these core areas,

that seems like a real threat for them i don't know what you think yeah it could be i mean i'm gonna say i'll admit i find the economy confusing right now because you see these things going up jobs reports aren't as good as they're supposed to be i think A lot of people, including myself, thought the tariffs would be biting harder right now.

We might be seeing things like being harder to obtain items on the shelves, things being a lot higher.

That didn't come true.

And

the AI boom that is happening behind the scenes is doing massive things for the economy that I think are not understandable in typical grocery shelf, kitchen table kind of ways, which is why the news the other day that came through that Trump had extracted a 15% share of NVIDIA sales to China, well, A, is abhorrent.

I mean, just absolutely abhorrent to see the government take a national stake in a company like this.

Did not go through Congress.

There was no debate about it.

It's just a 15%

cut to the government for NVIDIA in order to sell to China.

And it was very clear-cut if you read the reporting around this.

They were looking for the license to sell to China, which is complicated.

There's obviously concerns about selling these ships to China.

They made a lower power chip to get around other rules.

And anyway,

Jensen Huang, I might not be saying his name correctly, went to the White House.

They came to a deal to give 15% of all China sales.

They got the license.

I mean, that is authoritarian shakedown kind of stuff.

And they're calling it the golden share.

It's the same thing he did to Nipon Steel.

But considering the huge AI boom that's happening and the incredible power Nvidia has in the market right now.

You know, that 15% golden share, and there was no debate about it.

I don't think there was no debate in Congress, a huge corporate tax of the single company.

You know, there's just a lot of things happening in that world that I hate to admit I don't have a great understanding about.

Here are things we do have understanding about.

Export taxes are just flatly unconstitutional.

It is not allowed.

It is unconstitutional for them to do what they're doing with these AI chips.

All of our old bosses, if a Democratic president had said because of a climate emergency or whatever, that all of our exports of natural gas, you know, we're going to take a 15% vig for the government and, you know, give it to green nonprofits or whatever, or do carbon credits with it.

Everybody's hair would be on fire.

Everybody would be talking about how this is whatever, liberal authoritarianism.

Socialism.

Yeah, socialism.

It's like, so it's, it's just abjectly unconstitutional.

It's, and it's totally lawless.

And it's insane that.

that there are not any Republicans speaking up about it.

And then on top of that, like the more complex side of it, you know, which

is where I admittedly just have more mixed views is like, should we be selling these chips to China at all?

Right.

Like, I don't know, but like, we should at least be having a debate over that, right?

Like, there should be at least be a, like, before,

you know, the CEO of one of the hottest tech companies in the world worth gazillions of dollars goes into the White House and cuts a backroom oligarchy deal with the president, like this is Russia, so that he can sell these very advanced chips to our geopolitical foe, our biggest geopolitical foe, feels like we should at least have had a public debate about that in a free country, not like a private deal.

Yeah, and somebody should be calling Trump's BS on his China stance.

I mean, if this is all about we can't give these chips to China, oh, oh, wait, now for 15% you can.

For 15%, it's suddenly okay.

I mean, this is a thing.

When I read the news in the Wall Street Journal, when that came across the wire, my jaw legitimately dropped because this thing just happened, boom, in the paper, done.

And

the fact that it was done unilaterally, you know, maybe there's some legal recourse.

I don't know.

Like, is it a bribe when NVIDIA pays this so that they can get the license?

I'm not accusing.

I'm asking the question.

Do shareholders have a complaint that this was the venue in which they will now be going into China?

Like, it seems like there's there's a lot of questions.

And it's sort of the same questions I have about the universities and law firms and media companies all deciding just pay the money to make the problem go away because it is now happening in every sector.

And now that it's happened to Nvidia in this way, it's, it's, it's shocking.

Well, it quacks like a bribe is what I would say about whether or not it's a bribe.

The the thing that.

is the most alarming to me just about the way that folks have decided to accept this stuff.

And I don't, obviously not everybody does.

Sometimes when I paint with a broad brush like that, I hear for people that are like, I haven't accepted it.

I get it.

But just like broadly, I was preparing for another interview I've got coming up, and I was listening to a show that had Ben Shapiro on it.

It's not usually in my, not yet, not usually in my media repertoire, but I kind of like to know what's going on in real MAGA.

So I listen to like real MAGA podcasts, Ben's kind of fake MAGA.

And so I don't really listen to his a lot.

So yeah, I haven't really listened to him.

I don't think since the election, really.

He kind of just says matter of factly in this interview as a way of sort of alibiing trump that he's like you know i don't really like it but what i just foresee is that we are just going to go go through a period where we go back and forth trading power between like quasi dictators you know or like soft dictators i forget exactly what word he is but it was like essentially he was he was just saying that was like

We are where we are now.

We've just gotten to this place where like we're going to have a soft, you know, kind of authoritarian on one side then they'll trade it to the other side then they'll use the powers they don't trade power yeah and i'm like what are you talking about i was like wait i was like what i was like what are you talking about like stop it you're influential oppose it it's like even within now the trump world even the people that know that stuff like this is wrong

like rather than just fighting it which could potentially work in certain cases, not every case, but like it could certainly slow him down.

Well, how about trying to fight it?

How about just saying no?

How about just starting there, especially if you're a freaking podcaster?

No offense, but like

you're on a podcast, Ben, you can just say it's bad.

You can explain using all the constitutional knowledge that you had in your head from before.

You just have to apply it now because it's the same thing.

If you're worried about, you know, the venture socialism and Barack Obama investing in Solyndra, maybe you can get up a little bit of anger for the golden share model that Donald Trump is now using to take control of massive AI and steel companies.

Maybe.

Also, it's just such, like, it's such a weak intellectual move, an argumentation move to be like, well,

there's a hypothetical thing that the other guys are going to do in the future that makes this okay now.

We don't fucking know what the future holds.

Like,

let's try to just argue and fight and combat what is bad in the present.

Anyway, okay.

To the same point: the soft authoritarian movement within the actual president, not the imaginary president that Ben has in his head.

About what the Democrats are going to do.

Imagine the soft authoritarianism that Kamala Harris would have put in, by the way, with her brother that's on the board of Uber and her husband that was a corporate lawyer.

I'm sure they were.

I'm really planning on nationalizing the steel and AI industries, I'm sure, in the Harris administration.

All right, y'all, there's a lot to be unsure of these days.

You never don't know what's happening around the corner.

Donald Trump might be sending military into the streets of your city tomorrow.

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He's got a strike force that he's working on.

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The The Harvard stuff,

it's all happening so fast.

You've been kind of following this a little closer than me.

You wrote a subset called the Trump ransomware model.

Harvard was like going to pay a half a billion dollar payout to the mob boss, but then Saw Brown got a better deal, I guess.

And now UCLA is getting shaken down for a billion.

Like, what is your sense for what's happening?

Yeah, here's the thing.

So the reason why Trump is so successful with these various shakedowns, whether it be the

universities, the law firms, or the media companies, is that he is successfully isolating the targets and making them compete against each other.

And this is really demonstrated well with reporting around Harvard over the last week in the New York Times.

And the story was, just as you laid out, Harvard was prepared to pay a half billion to settle, to settle the claims of the Trump administration, but then saw Brown had a much cheaper deal and got mad.

And so they weren't even, it's like, don't you realize you guys are both getting effed?

These are not business deals.

Acting like the Trump administration is going to treat people fairly and apply the rules evenly is where you started off on the wrong foot.

And so then the latest news, while Harvard was giving side eye over to Brown, apparently, and trying to figure out how much they were going to pay, Trump looks at UCLA, the first public university he's targeted with this, and said, I want a billion, billion with a B, one billion

And two weeks ago, Axios calculated that to date, not counting the demand that is now on UCLA, Trump has extracted $1.2 billion in these settlement promises.

I mean, this is a hugely profitable model.

It's not going, it's not going to him personally, but it's going to his agenda.

It's going to things like his presidential foundation.

It's going to initiatives he wants.

And so he's shaking down these institutions to powerhouse his agenda, entrench more power, and then go after the next guy.

And so we see this happening.

It's like, well,

what is this like?

And it made me think about ransomware.

You know, when these attackers go against hospitals and they seize their data and they say, pay me the ransom to get it back.

And this, you know, they're also dealing with patients' real-world problems that the universities think that they're facing, although I don't think it's merely is life and death.

And when it comes to these ransomware attacks, the advice advice from cybersecurity officials is really clear.

Do not pay.

Do not pay.

And number two, develop a kind of firewall strategy where you share intelligence and information with other institutions in your sector, because they all have to understand that attack on one is an attack on them all.

If one hospital pays, the attackers get more knowledge, they get more sophisticated, and they go after the next one.

They understand this in the cybersecurity world.

For some reason, they're not understanding this in academia, in media, in technology.

But I think the same kind of advice is very practical.

And so until these institutions quit viewing each other as competitors, and there's a really good article in the Atlantic this morning.

I think the title is All University Presidents Hate Each Other or Something.

And it goes into the deliberations because they don't see themselves as in this fight together.

They see themselves as competitors to see who can get the best deal.

But these are not deals, they're shakedowns.

And until people realize that they have to work together to combat it, there's going to be systemic catastrophe like there would be in the cybersecurity sector.

Snaps for that rant, Amanda.

That's fine.

All caps, Amanda, rant of the day, Hun Ransom, where I have nothing to add.

I hate the college culture war stuff more than anything in the news.

Of all the things that I resent having to talk about, it's kind of like, oh, no, no.

Some kid was on the cusp of making it into Yale had to go to Virginia instead it's like who the fuck I don't care you won't die if you go to a public university

yeah

you did great over at where were you bowling green ball state ball state whatever same same exactly I went to George Washington or American the same same nobody knows who cares and it's like it's fine Everybody will survive.

It's not that big of a deal.

Also,

I'm sure that there are some students on campus who feel like they've been silenced.

But every time I go to speak to a campus, I ask this question to college students, and they're all like, we'll say whatever we want.

And they say weird things to me in the class.

So I'm not seeing it.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like it's a crisis, is all I'm saying.

There's some stuff that, sure, is unfair, could happen on the margins.

But this has been the only enjoyable, that's my wind-up for this has been the only enjoyable little nugget about this culture war that I've seen recently, is from Megan McCartle.

And she observed that,

you know, one of the groups that's really coming up on DEI right now and getting a lot of DEI and affirmative action at universities is boys

because girls' scores are so much better.

And she's like, and I feel like we can reverse this culture war somehow.

I don't know exactly how to do it, but I like

talking about how, okay, great.

Now with Mr.

Trump's new rules where, you know, they're going to investigate colleges that are doing too much DEI, like we might have to start looking into the DEI that boys are getting at state schools.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe the University of Florida.

Maybe.

Maybe the University of Florida, we should be looking into that.

And we should be making sure that the young women in Florida get fair accommodation at the universities.

I think that now the disparity is kind of big.

I mean, just as like, if you just look at scores and GPAs and stuff, you haven't read all the news about the about...

the young men and the lonely boys and how men are struggling and falling behind?

I mean, it's kind of been going for

the crisis of boys has been in the background, I think, for the last 15 years.

And I just haven't.

It's gotten any better.

It hasn't gotten any better.

Let me tell you.

The girls are scoring better on the ACTs and the SATs.

Send me something to.

I'll make sure my boy studies.

You should make sure he studies.

And I hope that he gets DE.

He said math can't be.

I hope that he gets QDI.

Good for him because the university should have a mix between, you know,

he's and she's and they're and everybody, you know, that's fine.

That's good.

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Here was JVL yesterday in his newsletter.

He was on vacation for a week and he came back and he's like, finally, he went on vacation?

Yeah, yeah.

And he said he didn't read the news.

Which made me feel bad because I made him read one thing for me, which I appreciate.

So thank you, JVL.

But besides that, he didn't read anything.

He came back, you know, with the clear,

you know, ocean air, you know, cleared his brain rather.

The ocean air.

Yeah, I don't know about happy.

Oh, arrested.

He has 19 children.

But he was at least more clear-eyed about things.

And here's what he wrote.

He said, this is unsatisfying, but here's the best we can do right now.

One, be clear-eyed about reality.

Two, analyze the problems and understand them as fully as possible.

Three, when we see opportunities to push back against fascism, take them.

Four, refuse to be quiet.

Five, hope that the accumulated weight of millions of people making good trouble eventually causes the authoritarian attempt to tip over.

I don't really disagree with any of that.

I'm wondering if you, with you, through your work in Protect Democracy, if you can put any more meat on the bones of that.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's all really sound and practical advice.

But, you know, the thing that I keep coming back to, you know, which was sort of what inspired the ransomware model piece, is that the only solution to these attacks is collective action.

Right.

And it does require organizing different sectors so that they actually do stand together in their own ways rather than viewing themselves as competitors.

And that sounds like sort of high in the sky, but really practically speaking, that is the most important thing that university administrators could be doing, people in the media could be doing.

You know, I've been looking for what are the successful models.

And I will say, our Protect Democracy newsletter has a really good series that looks at examples from other countries where these strategies have worked.

It's called the Democracy Atlas.

So if you go to If You Can Keep It, all our stuff is free.

It's an amazing series.

My colleague

Emily Rodriguez has written it.

Okay, great.

And so, you know, we can look at these examples, but some stuff that might be more applicable here here that I think of, I think about, you know, how the White House Correspondents Association, typically they were founded to protect press freedom at the White House.

And when they're working at their best, it's when someone has a question, an official refuses to answer, and they all keep at it.

And they keep badgering the same question because they're united on it rather than acting as competitors and just moving on to the next thing.

And what's sad is that you sort of see this break down now because the Trump White House has allowed so many of its sycophants to act as press in there.

And so you can kind of see that's a very just black and white example of like, okay, this is when that model works.

Here's when it doesn't.

And so any ways that we can find to work collectively like that to protect our own institutional goals,

that's the best time we could be spending right now.

I'm with you on that.

I'm with you on all that.

People should check out Substack and maybe we'll do more on that.

Maybe we'll do more of a series.

I've been meaning to have

my friend who was an ambassador in one of the countries that's currently fighting an autocratic movement on.

And so that should be on the docket for the

next couple of weeks or months.

All right, final topic.

Hector Mountain Dew Camacho come to life.

Idiocracy

is a documentary, as I've said many times.

It's a Wall Street Journal story I wanted to read to you.

Headline, White House cage fight is going to to happen, says UFC boss.

Dana White's octagon, Beamuth, gets a monster news $7 billion deal with Paramount.

Now the promoter is planning a surreal event for the South Lawn.

Is that what the ballroom is going to be for?

The ballroom people talk about?

Is that what we're getting?

The octagon?

Put an octagon in the ballroom?

It's high and low culture, you know?

We're going to have balls and get in our fancy tuxedos and have our tails.

And on Friday and then on Saturday, we're going to have a cage fight on the lawn.

Then on Sunday, we're going to pretend to go to church.

I think that's the Trump administration's

kind of weekend agenda.

Next RNC.

It's really something.

I don't know.

I mean,

UFC isn't really my bag.

They had a big UFC fight in New Orleans.

Folks are into it.

I'm

not cultural stuff.

I've never been to one.

Yeah, it's just not really my bag.

I was into boxing as a kid,

but UFC kind of came after I was out of the combat sport business.

I also have noodle arms.

I don't know if you noticed.

So it's not really

where

I focus.

That said, a lot of my buddies went to the UFC in New Orleans.

Obviously, it's a huge,

like, like folks love it.

And so, whatever.

I'm down for politicians.

So I kind of, whatever, engage with people and cultural events.

Do we need an octagon on the White House lawn, though?

I don't know.

It reminds me of-

You know what it reminds me of when Obama had a 4th of July barbecue and invited rappers and Fox had that famous headline.

God, can I pull it exactly right from memory?

Obama's hip-hop barbecue didn't create any jobs.

I don't know if that is that it was that it?

Obama's, we're going to Google it.

Obama's hip-hop barbecue didn't create jobs.

Let's see if we can find it.

Come on.

Here we go.

Fox Nation nailed it.

Obama's hip-hop barbecue didn't create jobs.

It has a picture of Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay-Z.

Not Diddy.

Diddy's not in the photo because Diddy was hanging out with Trump.

Diddy was more of a Trump man than Obama.

So there you go.

I don't know.

We've come a long way, I guess, is all I got to say.

Well, I mean, I guess creating the ballroom octagon might create a job.

And honestly, if Trump just spent his time doing the interior decorating that he truly loves, I would just support that.

Spend all your time on that painting all the walls gold bringing the fighters in and just can we keep him occupied doing that do a little truman show just build his little gold bubble and seal it off then what happens after to keep it all it's easy to repaint i don't know i as i as as the listeners know i don't hate the oval office the new oval office everybody can throw tomatoes at me the new rose garden is appalling and the outside the patio i still don't totally follow it's just a patio right so that he can have Mar-a-Lago parties with his women and the dresses and all the things that he's doing.

He wants to have calendar girl parties.

For people like Jeffrey Epstein, definitely never win.

He wants to have calendar girl parties in the White House with Jeff Epstein.

Epstein parties.

Yeah, but the other thing is like my only substantive thought about this is

like the ballroom,

which I did not realize, the square footage is like bigger than the entire White House.

The pictures that are going around are of the inside, but if you look at like the scale for the outside, it's insane.

He's like, he wants to like double the size of the White House.

Like the whole,

the whole vibe is going to be different.

It's like a new wing.

Well, I mean, this makes perfect sense because just doing events is more important to him than governing and legislating.

So, yeah, I think that tracks.

All right.

Well, Amanda Carpenter, thank you so much.

Have you done any running lately?

You got any other updates for us?

I have.

I'm signed up to do the JFK 50 again, but I had a 19-miler on Saturday and I did the strength exercise and pulled a little muscle.

So I've been off the last two days and it kind of sucks.

How'd you do on the 19-miler?

Fine.

It was just a training run.

Okay, we'll be keeping our eyes out.

Keep us posted.

That's Amanda Carpenter.

Appreciate you very much.

We've got a doozy coming for you tomorrow, so buckle up.

We'll see you all then.

Appreciate you.

Bye.

We are, yeah, I said it we are.

This is rhyme nation, pledge of allegiance.

Spit your baties on, all black, everything.

Black cards, black cars, all black, everything.

And I girls are blackbirds, riding with their diligence.

I get more in depth if you boys really rhythm.

This is like familiar, I'll explain later.

But for now, let me get back to this paper.

I'm a couple fans down and I'm trying to get back.

I gave another grip, I lost a flip for five stacks.

Yeah, I'm talking five, come, I six zeros, got zeros here.

Back to running surface realm, niggas.

Now we squid up.

Hold up.

Life's a game, but it's not fair.

I break the rules, so I don't care.

So I keep doing my own thing.

Walking call against the rain.

Victory's within the mouth.

Almost dead, don't give a shout.

Only thing that's on my mind is who won this down tonight.

Yeah, I said it BR.

You can call me Caesar.

In a dark Caesar, please follow the leader.

So every BBR, Michael Phone Fiend is the return of the God.

Peace, God.

Ain't nobody fresher.

I'm in Mason.

Mark and Martella on the table screaming, fuck the other side.

They jealous.

We got a banket full of broth, they got a table full of fellas.

And they ain't spinning no cake.

They should throw their hand in, cause they ain't got no spade.

My whole team got dough, so my bank and it's looking like millionaires from

trains.

Victory's within the mouth.

Almost they don't give a pound.

Everything that's on my mind is who won't run this down and light.

The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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