S2 Ep1008: Jon Lovett: A Worst Case Scenario Comes Into View

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Speaker 5 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 5 Delighted to have back former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and Barry Obama, co-founder of Crooked Media, host of Love It or Leave It, as well as the YouTube show taking the world by storm called Speech Center.

Speaker 5 He does it with me. Go check it out if you haven't.
It's John Lovett. How you doing, man?

Speaker 4 Hi, Tim. It's good to see you.
Our show, Speech Center, by the way.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 it's the hit of the channel. It's actually kind of hurting my feelings.

Speaker 5 It's the hit of the Love It or Leave It channel?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 5 I like praise, just as a general manner, but this type of positive feedback is particularly meaningful to me because the other guests you have on the channel are like way more famous than me and like more talented.

Speaker 5 Like you have all these like A-list celebrities, you know, kind of people famous on gay TikTok you have on, and you make jokes together,

Speaker 5 and yet the people still want me. That's nice.

Speaker 4 They want you.

Speaker 4 they want the

Speaker 4 the gay republican versus gay democrat anti-trump i don't know what you'd call it uh the frisson you know they want that

Speaker 5 they want the the kind of faux tension right you know that we offer okay well that's great i love it everyone should check it out if they haven't uh last time you were here on our side of the the inner tubes on the bulwark side it was one week after the election you cried famously uh as covered by fox news primetime they didn't discover it you put it in the fucking thumbnail So

Speaker 4 they were like Columbus discovering America.

Speaker 4 It was set up for them. It was ready.

Speaker 5 So, you know, there's only a couple times to play on Fox. Personally, I'm pro-crying, so I didn't think I was insulting you.
I've yet to cry myself since the election.

Speaker 5 I'm assuming that that means I'm going to completely break down at Bourbon Pub and Parade at some point this year. It hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 5 But I wanted to take the lens back today instead of getting specifically into the fucking Signalgate news and the micro,

Speaker 5 and just see what you're feeling and seeing after 67 days of this shit. What's most acute to you? Are there any surprises, any changes since you cried?

Speaker 4 So, first of all, that was sort of my one and done. I regret that it happened with you, but

Speaker 4 it sort of hit me in that moment and haven't felt that come since. It is strange, right? Because we had that conversation

Speaker 4 before we saw what is now unfolding, which is basically a worst-case scenario. Like I was talking about this with

Speaker 4 John and Tommy yesterday because

Speaker 4 obviously there are many ways in which what we could be seeing unfolding.

Speaker 4 There are many ways it could be worse. There are many ways it could be more destructive.
They could be more vile, more

Speaker 4 feckless about basic rights and due process. But it's hard to imagine a version of the Trump administration unfolding in which they are doing more and bad things

Speaker 4 without getting the blowback that might hurt them, right? They're like, they are on this sort of razor's edge. They're pushing the bounds, obviously, of

Speaker 4 due process and deporting people without evidence, including people that have nothing to do with the Roundups they're claiming. that they do.

Speaker 4 They are playing footsie with the Constitution and just sort of claiming they're following orders, not following orders. They're ignoring Congress completely on spending.
They're putting on tariffs.

Speaker 4 They're taking tariffs off. It's all very destructive, but it is like,

Speaker 4 in a way,

Speaker 4 I hate to say that it feels designed.

Speaker 4 It's really much more of a kind of gut instinct on Trump and a bunch of lackeys at random kind of operating on what they think he wants.

Speaker 4 But the end result is they are marching us down this path towards authoritarianism in a way that is not eliciting as big a response as you would hope, right? I like that's how I would feel about it.

Speaker 4 I'm just angry all the time, I think, more than I am scared. And maybe that's because I can't accept what's happening or can't really feel where it's going.

Speaker 4 And then yet the strangest part about all of it is then you go out to dinner with some friends, right? And then you have a great night. And then you buy new placemats for the table.
And you,

Speaker 4 it's as bad as it could be plan a wedding. Things are as bad as they could be without it feeling insane that normal life is still happening.
And normal life is still happening.

Speaker 4 And I don't think it should stop. And I don't think it's wrong.
But it is, there is a dissonance there.

Speaker 4 There is something confusing there because we have spent years saying this is how bad it could get. And it is getting that bad.
And yet, like, you know, the life carries on around it.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And yet the reaction is kind of less than you would have expected.
Frankly, I guess.

Speaker 5 on the surprises standpoint for me from now versus when we last spoke is like the surprises are more is more about the mundane reaction than about the actions. Because

Speaker 5 I really do think it's about as bad as it could have been for now. I mean, like, I think it's going to get worse.

Speaker 5 And I think if you asked me to predict what 2027 would look like, it's not as bad as I would have predicted when we talked.

Speaker 5 But I mean, to think that in two months and a week, they would have already like created this type of economic instability is pretty shocking. Already had a scandal as stupid as

Speaker 5 Signal Ghazi that would already be like putting people in a foreign gulag that didn't without due process. I mean, I had the Elon stuff.
I mean, I went back and actually listened to our whole pod to

Speaker 5 level set myself. And you mentioned, I guess, it's kind of funny, actually, in retrospect, you were mad about the fact that Elon was on the call, a call with Zelensky.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I don't even really remember that happening now at this point. That was only four, three months ago.
But we didn't talk at all about like the Elon dismantling of the government, right? Like

Speaker 5 the total destruction of any sort of research, you know, for medical research, the firing, the willy-nilly firing of people. Like we didn't, you know, we didn't, we literally didn't like project that.

Speaker 5 So in some ways, it is worse. And yet, that is kind of the dissonance, right?

Speaker 5 Like that is sort of why I'm like yelling at my phone sometimes and like doing like selfie videos where I'm where you can see my like anger veins popping because it's like, it does feel like that, like the reaction is not matching the action, I guess.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, there's like, there's the parts that I actually do think feel like what you would have expected. I honestly, them, sure.

Speaker 4 Them texting about imminent bombings over Signal with Jeffrey Goldberg in the chat does feel very 2017 to me.

Speaker 5 You can imagine Reince actually being the one to have invited Jeffrey Goldberg.

Speaker 5 Like a total clean switch there.

Speaker 4 And then, you know, Donald Trump threatening tariffs, turning them on, turning them off, causing the markets to be roiled, but not so much as to create a true crisis.

Speaker 4 Like, that does feel like what we could have expected. Doge going this quickly, I think, was it caught everybody by surprise.

Speaker 4 Their willingness to just claim an authority they do not have over the budget and just start eliminating agencies. That to me is shocking.
We obviously knew that was the plan.

Speaker 4 It wasn't really fully expressed, but presumably Congress was going to be involved.

Speaker 4 The deportations, the deportations, you know, like the idea that we are sending people to a Salvadoran prison without due process, that seems like a joke, right?

Speaker 4 Like that was the kind of thing that would seem like the kind of thing people would make as a kind of dark joke about Trump 2.0 a year ago, right?

Speaker 4 That was the kind of thing people would say, oh, Trump's threatening that, but he'll never do it. That's the kind of thing Trump just says.

Speaker 4 And then not only are they doing it, they're doing it without anyone ever coming before a judge.

Speaker 4 And they're claiming these broad authorities over non-citizens without giving those non-citizens an opportunity to prove who they are or who they're not.

Speaker 4 And obviously that is a disgusting, vile, immoral, dangerous act, even if it only ensnares non-citizens who have rights in this country.

Speaker 4 There's the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, due process, these things don't apply to citizens. They apply to people.
If you read the diet, it's for people.

Speaker 4 But that's both because we understand that human beings have basic rights, but also if non-citizens never get a chance to say to a judge, hi, here's who I am. Here's why this is wrong.

Speaker 4 What about a citizen who has a tattoo? What about a citizen who came from Venezuela or for whatever country they target next?

Speaker 5 We also aren't 100% sure that there are no citizens.

Speaker 4 Right, of course. How could we be? How could we be? They won't tell us who these people are.
Even the most recent reporting says around 261 people.

Speaker 4 Around. Around.
You don't know the number? You don't know the exact number of people you've sent to a fucking gulag in Central America that you have Christy Noam posing in front of?

Speaker 4 I mean, those things are moving faster, right? Like, this is a line that a lot, like, I regret to use it. I regret using it only because Elon Musk, I think, also thinks it's a great line to use.

Speaker 4 But, like, you know, the future right now is not evenly distributed. Parts of what we are seeing are what we would have expected.
Parts of it are actually moving slower.

Speaker 4 And then parts of it it are racing ahead. There hasn't been some great rise in deportations, right?

Speaker 4 They are not implementing their broader policy very quickly that they claim they were going to implement, right?

Speaker 4 Which is removing undocumented people to remove whatever their economic claims about what that would do.

Speaker 4 They are targeting people and they are doing it in such a way that only makes sense if what they are trying to do is build a permission structure for a host of deportations and efforts to lock people up without due process, not just non-citizens, but citizens too.

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Speaker 5 I have some very detailed thoughts about the El Salvador thing I want to get to, but I want to play a clip of you because this is actually very quite related. No, no, it's good.
This is a compliment.

Speaker 5 We're going to, this is a mutual compliment society today. It's us praising each other.

Speaker 5 This was you when we talked right after the election, and I think that it is prescient about kind of the problems that you're talking about right now. Let's listen.

Speaker 4 My like main fear right now is

Speaker 4 that in facing a million different versions,

Speaker 4 a million different threats from a million different directions, we will win some battles, lose some battles, but by the end of this four years, we won't really recognize the country.

Speaker 5 To me, I think that is like kind of what we're getting at, right?

Speaker 5 Like any of these individual things, like we can obsess over kind of the particulars of them, but like you're seeing this come into reality like very fast.

Speaker 5 Like the fuck, everybody hates the fucking word normalization.

Speaker 5 I hate it. But like you, like you can just see just everybody becoming accustomed to all of this very fast.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the thing that's making me the most crazy about this, like where there is not,

Speaker 5 you know, like they've backed off some of their things, right? Like, you know, they touched the stove on the nuclear guys, they fired them and brought them back.

Speaker 5 And well, everybody will talk about, you know, what's happening on the signal chain for a couple of days and then who knows what happens next.

Speaker 5 But like, meanwhile, that, like, that's what you're talking about, like that the country will just be unalterably changed because so many of the underlying things that held it together will have changed.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 4 A couple years ago, it was early 2017, 2018, maybe 2019, I don't know, but we were at a live event and this woman asked a question and it stuck with me.

Speaker 4 And she said, are we really going to have to hang Donald Trump's portrait with all the other portraits of the president?

Speaker 4 And I understood what she was saying. She's like, can we just get past this and pretend it never happened? Right.
Can we just.

Speaker 5 Now hang it twice? Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 Now we got to hang it twice. And I remember saying, no, actually, we're not going to get to do that.
Like, this is happening. It does reveal something important about the country.

Speaker 4 And we can't pretend that it was some anomaly. Like, yes, this is changing the country.
But I think what I'm realizing too is it's revealing something about the country.

Speaker 4 And not in the way we're like, oh, wow, I didn't know this many Americans would love what Donald Trump is doing. Of course, of course.

Speaker 4 But realizing that we have made a lot of assumptions about democracy, due process, the rule of law, that we've treated as if they were like self-reinforcing, right? That, oh, like kids get a good,

Speaker 4 they get a dose of democracy, of education when they're growing up and they learn about the Constitution and the founding fathers.

Speaker 4 And then we just assume people are kind of immunized against fascism because they love America and they love American principles.

Speaker 4 But then we watch this unfold and then you see Mike Johnson, someone who I am sure thinks that he is a patriotic American who loves our founding principles.

Speaker 4 And then he says, well, if these judges keep it up, we're going to have to think about defunding parts of the courts that don't do what Donald Trump says.

Speaker 4 Or, you know, the national security advisor goes on Fox News and says, actually, I think Jeffrey Goldberg snuck into our signal chat. And we're going to investigate him for that.

Speaker 4 Espionage. And so there's like two big pieces of it.
First, there's,

Speaker 4 actually, let me say there's three. First, there is just the fact that these Republicans are willing to go along with this or are starting to fully embrace it, right?

Speaker 4 It's like they weren't in the mood for sex when it started, but by the end, they're having a blast. You know what I mean? It's like they,

Speaker 4 that seems to be like kind of their vibe.

Speaker 5 Had to get warned out. They didn't think he was their type.
Right. You know, until they got in the middle of the act.
And all of a sudden, they're like, I love Mushroom Dick, actually.

Speaker 4 That's right. That's great.
That's perfect. That's the image we want to create right now.
Then there's the like capitulation of institutions, the Columbias and the law firms.

Speaker 4 And what's what's interesting about what Trump is doing there is, yes, he's like finding the issues where there's divisions inside of these institutions, right?

Speaker 4 Like there are the, you know, the lawyers that represent the big, like the ExxonMobils, and then there are the litigators taking on the pro bono clients or the kind of political clients that, and these lawyers that just want the money.

Speaker 4 You're like, what the fuck are you doing? Like, stop jeopardizing my bag.

Speaker 4 And then at Columbia, I'm sure there are tons of alumni who are sick of seeing the protest, hate the fact that Columbia has been the center of this controversy. But even in a deeper way,

Speaker 4 these are institutions that have not had to defend their basic values that they claim to hold, right?

Speaker 4 Columbia claims to be this institution of higher learning, of kind of small L liberal values, freedom of expression, exploration, curiosity, like core kind of values about what an educational institution is meant to do.

Speaker 4 But they violate them all the time. But like these institutions have, are illiberal in many ways that they don't really grapple with or think about.

Speaker 4 And all of a sudden they're called upon to live up to their values and they don't know how. They just don't fucking know how.

Speaker 4 And then you have the broader public who are either, you know, some are fully fucking engaged. That's on the right and that's on the left.
They're people listening to this. They're fully engaged.

Speaker 4 They're fully bought in. But there are millions of people that are just not paying attention and don't really understand why they should.

Speaker 4 And we've done a terrible job of building credibility with those people. And they're just watching this unfold.
And the big challenge is figuring out how to wake them up.

Speaker 4 But we've spent years waiting for them to wake up on their own and it's just not fucking happening.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And I mean, this is one of his advantages of just beating people down and wearing people down.

Speaker 5 You know, like there's this critique of the media and the left that's like, oh, if you're, you know, the boy who cries wolf or whatever, if your hair is always on fire, if you're always at 11, you know, you can't,

Speaker 5 you can't rouse people when there's a real alarm. Like, the problem is, like, we have been at 11 for like a while now.
And like, that's not our fault for observing it.

Speaker 5 I don't know what the solution is to getting people to understand that it's 13 now or whatever yeah i don't know either and and part of the problem is

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 there's so many places where this had to this required decades of like softening of the defense systems yeah one of which is obviously the right-wing media that is not now has has slowly shifted and then quickly shifted from accusing the mainstream media of being liberal to accusing it of being fake right that was a transition that was happening and then donald Trump really accelerated it, especially around January 6th.

Speaker 4 But then there's how the mainstream media has reacted for decades. And one of the ways they fought against that is by either explicitly or implicitly believing that legitimacy comes from the right.

Speaker 4 That on a Sunday show for years, and this is like years and years ago, like when I was a kid, you would turn on the Sunday shows.

Speaker 4 And when they did a roundtable of journalists, it would be mainstream journalists, mainstream journalists, mainstream journalists, conservative.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 4 It would never be somebody from the far left, but you'd have somebody as

Speaker 4 it used to be Crystal. It used to be Crystal.

Speaker 4 My boy. My boy.
And by the way, Democrats do this too. Like when we're trying to prove that we're strong on national defense, we say, well, even Republicans like Colin Powell, right?

Speaker 4 Or even Republicans like John McCain. Right.

Speaker 5 Economist Mark Zandy.

Speaker 4 Sure.

Speaker 4 And you end up with Democrats claiming and mainstream media claiming that legitimacy comes from being seen as legitimate from the left and from the right.

Speaker 4 And now you have Republicans that even when they agree, even when they want to say that Democrats have a point or the media is correct about something, like in the case of this signal chat, they know that if they withhold that support, if they withhold that honesty, the story remains murky.

Speaker 4 That's true about the debt ceiling. That's true about tariffs.
That's true about a bunch of different policy questions.

Speaker 4 And we talk about the value of shame and how much shame played a role in our politics. And when people realized if if they abandoned it, there was nothing to stop them from doing whatever they wanted.

Speaker 4 That's obviously a big part of it. There's a word I come back to over and over again, just in my mind, which is forbearance.
Like, I didn't understand

Speaker 4 how important forbearance was in our politics. That basically, if a judge ruled against you, even if you were pissed, you didn't go to the cameras and say you were going to defund that guy.

Speaker 4 There was an understanding that in our system, you're going to win some, you're going to lose some, and you just, you can bear it. You can take it.
You don't have to rant and rave about your enemies.

Speaker 4 You don't have to declare war on anybody. You don't have to look around the corner, right?

Speaker 4 If you lose a budget fight and you don't get to end the Department of Education, you don't get to do it administratively. You wait.
You wait. You show patience and restraint.

Speaker 4 And that a lot of what we build in this country was based on a collective understanding that people would be patient, that they would show restraint, that they would have forbearance.

Speaker 4 And these people have abandoned that. And that's why Christy Noam is standing in front of a group of prisoners shooting a video.

Speaker 4 That's why Pete Hegseth can go to the cameras and claim it's all a hoax. They have no sense of, yes, they're shameless, but they have no restraint.

Speaker 5 There's one other element to this I want to add, which is, you're right. And some of this is that we came to believe that all these things that like made America unique are somewhat unique.

Speaker 5 At least maybe we had, there are a lot of Western countries and some others that started to adopt a lot of these same principles. But

Speaker 5 that they were upheld by some kind of

Speaker 5 the document of the Constitution or these people that practice forbearance or the rule of law or the robed people or whatever, like that there were, that there were people out there that protected this system.

Speaker 5 So that led us to a place where, when there were other examples of these types of corruption where people did not show forbearance, where people acted inappropriately when they acted unconstitutionally, that they would be restrained in some way or they would be held to account, right?

Speaker 5 That Nixon eventually has to resign, that what we did at Abu Ghraib, like there would be investigations into it that would be bipartisan investigations, right?

Speaker 5 That if the Bush administration decided to follow the John Yu interpretation of the Constitution, that there would be

Speaker 5 people, you know, either within the administration or within the courts or within the National Security Courts that would check it, right? That there would be some other thing within the system.

Speaker 5 And like to me, like over the first 67 days,

Speaker 5 in addition to having these guys totally getting rid of shame and forbearance, that's the other thing that is broken is that I don't have any faith that there will actually be any check or any accountability on anything they do and that they could do Abu Ghraib.

Speaker 5 They are doing Abu Ghraib again in San Salvador, and

Speaker 5 there's no option.

Speaker 5 I interviewed Mark Warner yesterday for YouTube, and I was like, what are you guys doing about this? And the answer is basically nothing.

Speaker 5 We hope that the courts will intervene, but it's like the courts have no jurisdiction here and TBD on whether the robed people actually side on the side of the Constitution.

Speaker 4 Well, you had people like John McCain who had been tortured. Right.
And people who had a value set and a mission that was not connected to their Republican politics. They were Republicans.

Speaker 4 They were Republicans, but they were also

Speaker 4 Virginians and Arizonans and veterans and

Speaker 4 whatever, Irish. They were, they had, like, they had a core set of values and principles that had led them into politics in a different age.

Speaker 4 And they also, by the way, consumed a bunch of, as individuals, they consumed the mainstream media. I mean, we've talked about this before.
It was always a bit of theater, right?

Speaker 4 Like, Republicans would bash the mainstream press, but they would read it and care about it. And by the way, it was left.

Speaker 4 It was biased towards the left. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And the mainstream press to this day, it treats Republicans like antagonists and Democrats like protagonists.

Speaker 4 Democrats are inherently the heroes, and Republicans are inherently there, kind of trying to stop their foil. Yeah, sometimes villains, but mostly just foil.
Fine. All of that was true.

Speaker 4 But they read it. They consumed it.

Speaker 4 There was a basic understanding of reality. And what happened is the right-wing fringe through the media slowly started eating more and more of your party, Tim.

Speaker 4 And its whole ethos is we are a rebellion within the Republican Party and within politics. Go look at Newt Gingrich's speech to the college Republicans in 1978.
It's about being outsiders.

Speaker 4 inside of a broken system. They are pilgrims in an unholy land.
And everything about it is are not in charge. So we can go a little further.
We can make crazy claims.

Speaker 4 We can say we're going to do things that if anyone actually did them would be country destroying. And now they are in charge.
And it's all the way down, actually.

Speaker 5 It would be better if it was in charge, but they're not just in charge. They are in total control.
Yes. Right.

Speaker 5 Like there's no like mid-level DOJ person that's like, I care more about my of the political appointees, right? Like that was part of the Project 2025, right?

Speaker 5 They have now the deputy fucking FBI director is a is a meathead mega talk show host, right? Like

Speaker 5 the attorney general is in a mini skirt today, like at the arrest of somebody for a PR, you know, effect. Like it's these people all the way down.

Speaker 4 And these are people that their whole sense of the world, of themselves, of their politics, it was all about being people who didn't have power. that were kind of throwing spitballs at the system.

Speaker 4 They were teenagers. They were teenagers with a curfew who were like, I want to stay out late and mom and dad won't let me.

Speaker 4 And it's because they hate freedom and it's because they don't understand what it's like to be me, and they're terrible and they're stupid, and there's no reason, nothing makes sense.

Speaker 4 There's all crazy, and then all of a sudden, their parents go away, and they stay out too late, and they destroy the car, and they ruin the house, and they come to realize in the movie version, oh, maybe some of these rules, maybe mom and dad weren't so stupid after all.

Speaker 4 Maybe all my yelling and screaming wasn't actually totally fair. But these people are never going to realize that.
Mom and dad aren't coming home. The house is burned to the ground.

Speaker 4 It's a sad version of that movie.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they're no, but there are the grown-ups to beat the metaphor to death. I guess that's my point.

Speaker 4 They said their parents sell Salvador.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's the point.

Speaker 5 Even in the Nixon era, there was Larry Hogan's dad. And as you said, in the Bush era, there's McCain.

Speaker 5 Like, there were still, like, you know, even when bad actors took over or people that had bad intentions for a particular, you know, agenda item, there were others around that were responsible.

Speaker 5 And I I think going back to your original point, it's like that's the thing that feels like it is that is lost.

Speaker 5 Is that like, I think when we were living through all that, we felt like, well, that's just how it is.

Speaker 5 Like, there are always going to be some responsible people around, and there's always going to be the rule of law, and there's always going to be, right?

Speaker 5 And so, there might be bad actors, but it's always

Speaker 5 resolvable, right?

Speaker 5 Like, we are always going to be able to, as a country, overcome it because, you know, these other strong institutional powers and people's individual forbearance will come to the fore eventually after some damage is done.

Speaker 5 And like it feels like that is all rotted now.

Speaker 4 All of these people, everyone, every one of them, right? Like why can RFK Jr.

Speaker 4 become the head of HHS while being anti-vax? Because we live in a world where vaccines work so thoroughly that people don't fear enough what it would look like to live in a world without them. Right.

Speaker 4 Why can we put someone like Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice?

Speaker 4 Because people take as a baseline, as table stakes, that they don't live in a world where political prosecutions are happening left and right.

Speaker 5 The government can throw you in jail because you're tattoo. Like, that's not a risk that they, that's not an acute risk to them.

Speaker 4 Right. Like, Luttnick, Luttnick can say, oh, buy Tesla stock, right? Because he takes for granted that America is a society where there's been tons of corruption.

Speaker 4 There are tons of ways where big businesses buy influence. There's lobbying.
There's a whole bunch of problems.

Speaker 4 But for the most part, we know that if there's somewhere where you got to give somebody a million dollars to get a permit for a building, or you need to know the right people in order to do a startup, if that became the normal in this country, it would destroy the thing that made America's economy the envy of the world, the economy where he got personally rich.

Speaker 4 They are children who don't respect or understand the systems that were built and how it made this country so great.

Speaker 4 And now they are tearing at the foundations of that thing because they are either stupid or careless or vile. And we will live with the repercussions.

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Speaker 5 I promise you, people, we've got a little bit of, I don't know if I want to call it light, but we've got some actionable things that we can do about this.

Speaker 5 It's not utter despair, this podcast.

Speaker 5 The end will have some stuff that's not utter despair, but we've got to go deeper into the muck before we get there.

Speaker 5 What I really wanted to have you on, my original plan actually was I was like, Love it cried a week after the election.

Speaker 5 I want to have him on for the 100th day episode to like get an update on whether he wants to cry again after 100 days. But I texted you earlier this week because I was having dinner with my friend.

Speaker 5 As you mentioned earlier, like life is going on. I do find joy.
I do have joy in my life, other things I was doing. I usually, when I'm at dinner with friends, am not like talking about Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 Like I'm just finding other things in life where we can celebrate each other's company. But I was so upset about the particular case.

Speaker 5 of this Venezuelan named Andri, you know, who is the makeup artist who've now seen the pictures of,

Speaker 5 who has been sent to the San Salvador Gulag.

Speaker 5 And my friend was saying this in a nice way because he's also mad, but he's like, it feels like you're particularly mad about this because, like, as a gay person, you know, you can like feel in a more, even more personal way the plight of this young man, right?

Speaker 5 And like, and that's true.

Speaker 5 I was having these visions of like what it would be like to just be like pulled out, to just be like grabbed by some cops and have your head shaved and like clothes stripped from you and like and shackled and slapped like he calls for his mother.

Speaker 5 And it's just, it's unimaginable and even and so i was like i need another guy to talk about that with but even but since then we have a couple of other examples that have come up a guy a refugee guy that was a refugee em

Speaker 5 went to columbia came here the right way came to america in the houston airport gets detained because of a tattoo no record just today miami herald is reporting this guy friendl mota you know similar type story there's the guy that had the uh autism awareness tattoo i don't know if there's a ton of gang members with autism awareness tattoos.

Speaker 5 It

Speaker 5 feels a little out of, you know, out of type. And like the whole thing just has me so

Speaker 5 wrapped around the axle. And we're doing this.

Speaker 5 And we have now, as you mentioned earlier, Christy Noam goes down there last night, stands in front of a cage with all of these shirtless men that we've, that are shackled and used as props.

Speaker 5 And it's like, we may have done these types of things before with internment, but like doing this like type of propaganda, like this is what the Viet Cong did, right?

Speaker 5 Like this is, this has taken from me what is fundamental about the country.

Speaker 5 And that, combined with this particular story of Andri, like me both losing my naivete about America as a shining city on a hill and imagining what it might be like as a gay makeup artist to be sent to this gulag.

Speaker 5 I don't understand

Speaker 5 how like it can be tolerable. I wonder where you you are on it.

Speaker 4 Just think about what had to happen, right, for Gnome to get that shot, right? They made those prisoners all line up and face the cameras and stand there under, you know, God knows what, only threat.

Speaker 4 By the way, those pictures in front of the Salvadoran prisoners, right? Salvador prisoners. Those are Salvador prisoners.
Those are not the prisoners that she sent there or was part of sending there.

Speaker 4 And you're just going to use them as props to film this video. And what does she say in that video? She says some version of, if you're a violent immigrant, this could happen to you.

Speaker 4 This is where we might send you.

Speaker 4 Now, that prison, it's only been open for a couple of years, was opened by this right-wing government as part of a state of emergency to crack down on

Speaker 4 gangs.

Speaker 4 We have now sent some unknown number, let's say it's like 260, some odd people there, because they are claimed by this administration to be members of this gang, but not because they were convicted of a crime that resulted.

Speaker 4 And by the way, they may have, these people were in detention. I don't know what they did.
I don't know who they are. We haven't been told anything.

Speaker 4 Some of these guys, I'm sure, are terrible and unsavory figures, but they are now in a prison.

Speaker 4 They've not just been deported to Venezuela or their country of origin or deported to another country for some reason. They're in a prison.
How long are they going to be there?

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 4 The Salvadoran administration of this prison about the Salvadorans, they are holding people indefinitely as part of this state of emergency, right? They're just holding people.

Speaker 4 They're just saying these people are not fit for society. We're holding them.
In America, we don't do that.

Speaker 4 We don't do that.

Speaker 4 If someone's in a prison, it's.

Speaker 5 Sometimes you get a fucking wrong.

Speaker 4 But even if you get a fucking right,

Speaker 4 you get a right.

Speaker 5 That's part of the reason why we don't do that. Of course.
Sometimes you get a wrong.

Speaker 4 People commit crimes. That's what makes them criminals.
They're not instinctively, inherently criminal. We don't lock people up because they are criminals.
We convict them of crimes.

Speaker 4 That makes them a criminal. And they serve some kind of a sentence, maybe a long sentence, maybe a life sentence.
But we have now sent a bunch of people to a Salvadoran gulag.

Speaker 4 The government has not said who they are, hasn't said how how long they're meant to be there, right? They have no sentences, right? We don't know what they're accused of.

Speaker 4 They weren't a public safety threat, right? Because they were in detention, the members of this gang that they're claiming they have, right? And I'm sure many of them are members of this gang.

Speaker 4 So they're just down there now. We'll see how long.
We have no idea with no information.

Speaker 4 And then it turns out that part of the way they've been doing this roundup is by just grabbing Venezuelan men who are non-citizens who have tattoos, even if they've applied for refugee status, even if they've applied for asylum the one example about autism awareness that you mentioned that's exceptionally chilling is he was cleared he did the background check they looked over the tattoos it's for autism awareness it's a rainbow

Speaker 4 ribbon it's a rainbow ribbon right it's not like it's not this you know i'm not a tattoo person uh but when i see a rainbow ribbon I don't think hardened gang member.

Speaker 5 I'm sure there's some gang member somewhere in the world that has a brother with autism that cares about autism awareness, but I'm going to need a little bit more evidence than the rainbow ribbon tattoo before we send the guy to a fucking concentration camp in another country without any due process, without access to a lawyer.

Speaker 4 And, you know, and there's this aspect that's been playing out when these stories break, which is that they grab somebody off the fucking street. They don't give you any information.

Speaker 4 They don't get due process. Suddenly they go to El Salvador and they're like, these are hardened criminals.
And then you say, well,

Speaker 4 show us, prove us. And then you're, and there's a little part of you, right? That's saying, like, well, I'm going to say they got the wrong guy.

Speaker 4 And then they're going to provide the evidence that says, actually, this person's terrible. Right.

Speaker 4 And it's like, well, fuck you. These people should be innocent until proven guilty.

Speaker 4 And yeah, maybe that, whatever the, whatever the standard may be legally for deportations, which is different, right?

Speaker 4 That should be our American instinct, which is, no, we don't throw people on a plane to a foreign country without putting them in front of a fucking judge.

Speaker 4 And until you give us that information, we'll assume you got it wrong because that's what we should do.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and that's what conservatives should do. And this whole like we're just, it's just like, oh, trust us, the jackbooted thugs can come into

Speaker 5 you know, can go onto the street and pull somebody off because they wrote an op-ed.

Speaker 5 I can only get to the tough scale later, but just like one more thing on this, they are trying to do what you're saying, right? Like, where they're trying to chill the criticism, right?

Speaker 5 Like, the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Trisha McLaughlin, you know, is like, I quote, is quote tweet. I think she quote tweeted Sam Stein.

Speaker 5 She's quote a couple of other people, like, oh no, we've got more info than the tattoos.

Speaker 5 But it's just that. And it's like, okay, well, show me.
Show us the receipts. Bring it to a court.
Bring it to a judge.

Speaker 5 A judge actually remanded you to not do this until you offered evidence that you flew these people to San Salvador anyway. So like, I mean, like, the whole thing is, it really is.

Speaker 5 Like, it's out of a communist. like regime and it's just fundamentally like oppositional to what america is supposed to be about.
We've disappeared, these people.

Speaker 5 And I don't know, man, like the pictures that the Time magazine reporter and the story that he wrote about this, where it's like, you can't imagine what is happening to the people in these prisons if they were beating.

Speaker 5 Andree, that we assume it's Andre, we don't know. I guess maybe there's another gay person that was that was kidnapped.

Speaker 5 But if it's Andre who's like yelling for his mother, like imagine how dark of a place you have to be in. If you're like, it's not helping you to yell, to scream out, I'm gay.
I'm a barber. I'm gay.

Speaker 5 This is not me. And crying for your mother.
If they were doing that in front of a reporter. So like, imagine what the fuck they're doing to him behind the bars.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 He's still there. He's still there night after night.
I mean, that is like

Speaker 4 this person, right, is now scarred. I mean, just scarred in a way we can't.
comprehend, right? He just was, by the way, doing everything we said to do, right?

Speaker 5 Applying legally following the rules doing what he was supposed to be doing he got on the app the CBP1 app we created an app where you sign yourself up this guy was not swimming not that it'd be okay but it's not like he swam across the Rio Grande or climbed the fence or whatever he did everything right and then this is the

Speaker 5 it's

Speaker 4 the combination of cruelty and the kind of chaotic incompetence, which, you know, you can know about and read about in history and then you see it unfold in front of you and you see the way these things work together, right?

Speaker 4 Like, did they sweep this guy up because they're stupid dummies?

Speaker 4 Did they sweep this guy up because they actually want to make sure that among this group of gang members that they send to El Salvador, that there are a few people who applied for asylum, a few refugees, a few green card holders to scare the fucking shit out of anybody that might apply for asylum or claim refugee status, right?

Speaker 4 Or are they just so careless that even once they find out they make a mistake, nobody really owns fixing it because they don't really give a fuck what happens to people in their charge?

Speaker 5 Or is somebody just a sadist and didn't like this guy when they held him?

Speaker 4 Like, who knows? Just doesn't believe people from Venezuela should be in our country.

Speaker 5 Or humans.

Speaker 4 Right. Either consciously or subconsciously, just doesn't care what happens to these people.
We just don't know. And it doesn't really matter, right?

Speaker 4 Because this guy's life has been destroyed by these people. He's trapped.
He doesn't know.

Speaker 4 right that there are lawyers fighting for his release he doesn't know that his family has gone gone to the press he doesn't know that there was a time magazine story explaining all this this is a place where there's you don't go outside there's no visitation there's no there's nothing he is just locked in a cell he is locked in a prison he has no idea why he has no idea how long he's been there that is a that is a nightmare and it could genuinely we are now heading towards the place where it could happen to any of us and once again that sounds like the kind of thing that will be seen as trump derangement syndrome or or hyperbolic but if they can do this to people that applied legally, they're slowly marching towards doing this to citizens.

Speaker 4 They're already talking about wanting to denaturalize citizens for ridiculous reasons. You know, this is a small thing that's not getting enough attention, which is, so they grab Mahmoud Khalil

Speaker 4 without evidence of anything other than just having views these people don't like. And then they say, actually, we're looking at his application for his green card.

Speaker 4 And we think there are real problems there. They know, right, that correctly, if you lie to get a green card, if you commit fraud to become a legal resident, they can withdraw your green card.

Speaker 4 That's, of course, the way it should work.

Speaker 4 But again, back to like forbearance, it was understood that the government wouldn't go after you and start combing through your records just because they don't like you. They don't like what you said.

Speaker 4 They don't like that you were out of protest. They don't like your point of view, right? This is what happens, right? If the DOJ, the process is the threat.

Speaker 4 Like when you have Pam Bondi and the Bonginos of the world in there going after Trump's enemies,

Speaker 4 you start having the FBI go through all your records as a business. You have the FBI going through all your information.
All of a sudden, you're in some kind of discovery.

Speaker 4 All of a sudden, you're like, they will find shit, right?

Speaker 4 And they are going to start making green card holders across this country terrified. They're going to make citizens who were naturalized terrified.
You don't think this leads to citizens?

Speaker 4 You don't think this leads to people who were born here, right? Or they claim birthright citizenship isn't valid. So now they're going after American citizens who were born in this country.

Speaker 4 They are working their way up the ladder to anyone and everyone. They are now changing vandalism into terrorism.
All of a sudden, citizens

Speaker 4 are going to start getting, these are terrorists. They're going to be rounded up and sent to this Salvadoran gulag.

Speaker 5 DHS is working on this. Yeah, DHS is working on this.
Christy Noam with her little fucking Rolex watch standing in front of our prisoners.

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Speaker 5 Rumi has a Oz Turk, because I haven't talked about this yet on the pod. Tufts University student.
This is just exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 5 There's a video that has come out of plainclothes officers, some of them masked, like six of them, descending on her, handcuffing her. They're in unmarked cars.

Speaker 5 A guy in a hooded sweatshirt grabs her, puts her in the back of an unmarked car. This person is a 30-year-old Fulbright scholar who is here legally.
They have not provided any,

Speaker 5 even in the case of Khalil, totally wrong, but like he was the organizer of the protests, right? Whatever. But in this case, she just wrote a piece paying for the school paper.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And by the way, like, why are they in plain clothes? Why are they not in a fucking uniform? Like, what? What?

Speaker 4 She's some kind of threat, right? This is just a student of Tufts, a very bright person at Tufts who has a point of view you don't agree with. And you're grabbing her on the street.

Speaker 4 She says, like, should I, can I call the police? And they say, we are the police.

Speaker 5 Again, it just, I mean, look, like, fundamentally,

Speaker 5 just

Speaker 5 if you care about humanity, if you believe about the dignity of every human person, like this is outrageous, just in that case.

Speaker 5 But I do think this layers on to me, like these are the things, there may be things that are going to cause more damage broadly or worse things, whatever that happened.

Speaker 5 Like these are things to me that just go at the heart about what the country is supposed to be about.

Speaker 4 Can I just say, look, look, this is all.

Speaker 4 horrible. And I'm sure a lot of your viewers and listeners agree.
And it's like, I know. that's why I'm here.
I know it's horrible. I know it's horrible.
And

Speaker 4 there's a lot of debate about how Democrats should or shouldn't respond. And it's very tactical.
And it's also,

Speaker 4 even when it is not tactical, even when it's sort of broader, it's still quite political. And like, you know, my general feeling right now is more is more.

Speaker 4 Everybody should be talking about everything and getting out there. I think what AOC and Bernie have been doing is inspiring.
You know, John and Tommy went to this Rokana event.

Speaker 4 I think what Rokana is doing is great. I like what Chris Murphy is

Speaker 5 saying.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I was just in Wisconsin for the Supreme Court race. It was great to see a lot of people come out.

Speaker 4 And I just like, part of what we need to do, there's two bigger, kind of more broad than politics pieces of this. One is

Speaker 4 how do Democrats, or anyone that believes in democracy, build credibility with people that aren't paying attention, just as trusted voices, right?

Speaker 4 And that's a big, hard problem, but it's actually quite a political problem. I think the other big and deeper problem is

Speaker 4 so much of what I think is happening, like social media, the phones, the atomization of our society. It is like the atmosphere in which all this is unfolding.
And I think a deeper question is

Speaker 4 how do we build not just political solidarity, but social and empathetic solidarity between people again.

Speaker 4 And to me, part of what has to happen with this movement, this small D democratic movement, movement, is it has to not just be about politics and about winning and defeating these people.

Speaker 4 It also has to be about what kind of world we want to live in. I'm getting like emotional again.
I can't believe they fucking do this to me.

Speaker 4 We have lost something fundamental about like how we treat each other, how we gather, how much of our time we spend looking at.

Speaker 4 a screen and how much of our time we spend in public spaces not interacting with one another anymore.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I don't know what it looks like and I don't know how it goes, but I do believe that part of what our politics is going to have to turn into is not just saying, hey, I need you to knock on these doors.

Speaker 4 Hey, I need you to make sure you get your friends to vote. It's going to be like, I need you to go and get a group of friends together and sit in a park for a while.

Speaker 4 I need everybody to like, we're all going to read a book.

Speaker 4 We're all going to choose a book together and we're going to read a book together. We're going to, we have to learn.
not just political solidarity, but like a kind of human solidarity again.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 again, like, I'm just, I'm rambling about this.

Speaker 5 Let me try to direct it because it relates to what you're saying about the politicians, because this is my frustration, is

Speaker 5 you can't do that without showing real emotions about this, right? Like a bloodless, you know, kind of opposition is not going to achieve anything, you know?

Speaker 5 And say what you want about the MAGA movement. Their emotions are probably, you know, the part of the emotional color wheel that we don't want to incentivize, but they do touch people's emotions.

Speaker 5 They make people angry. They make people prideful.

Speaker 5 And I just like, in situations like this, maybe I've missed it, but I've not seen a single Democrat or any politician, obviously no Republicans, like talk about what is happening with San Salvador with any sort of like depth of feeling.

Speaker 5 And how are you going to draw people in if you don't, if you don't do that? Like, how are you going to draw people in if you don't have that?

Speaker 5 And sometimes some of these Democrats, like it's one of these things where I ask them to to show feelings and they do. And I'm like, ooh, maybe not that feeling.
And I'm conscious of that.

Speaker 5 But like, I don't know. I'd like to see some people try.
And maybe it doesn't have to be the goody two-shoes empathetic feeling about this.

Speaker 5 Maybe it can be anger on the free speech side representing the woman from Tufts.

Speaker 5 I mean, there were supposedly a lot of guys that listened to guy podcasts that were very mad that their free speech rights were being trampled on from the government.

Speaker 5 And they wanted to say fuck you to the man.

Speaker 5 Can we not channel off some fuck you to the man energy to the man that is pulling people off the street with six plainclothes cops because they wrote an op-ed we don't like?

Speaker 5 Might that not resonate with maybe not everybody, but with some

Speaker 5 of the people who claim to be upset about their free speech rights being trampled on during COVID? I don't, I maybe not.

Speaker 5 I don't know, but I just think that trying to channel people on a more emotional level

Speaker 5 can't fucking hurt, I guess.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 4 Part of it it too is it's

Speaker 4 there's like a feedback loop here, which is,

Speaker 4 I think voters obviously don't trust politicians. That's a big part of why we're here.
But politicians really don't trust voters either.

Speaker 4 And so they feel like if they go to that place, right, that just purely moral, ethical, kind of not political place of like, this is wrong. This is why it's wrong.

Speaker 4 Like, I need you to join me, that the people won't be there. Right.
And they're not wrong right now. They're just not wrong.
They're not wrong. And so, like, what do we do?

Speaker 4 Like, one of my favorite political speeches, probably I would say my favorite political speech, what I view as the best political speech, is FDR's 1936 convention speech.

Speaker 4 It's the rendezvous with Destiny speech. That's what people know it as.

Speaker 4 But he talks at the end of that speech about people in other lands who once fought for freedom have grown weary of the fight.

Speaker 4 They've sold their democracies for the illusion of a living, something like that.

Speaker 4 And we have to take on that fight for them. And

Speaker 4 that is what is now happening here, right? A lot of people, a lot of Republicans have given up their core values for the illusion of a living, whatever that means.

Speaker 4 For Republican operatives, it's for power. For a bunch of other people, they're buying this deal, right?

Speaker 4 Which is we need a strong guy like Trump to come in and fix things because things are so broken.

Speaker 5 It's cultural power. It's taking back

Speaker 5 some cultural power that they feel like has been lost from them.

Speaker 4 I think it was actually in a conversation you had with a historian about Ukraine, which is that the Ukrainians were so willing to fight for their democracy in a way that surprised Americans.

Speaker 4 Snyder, I think that was. And it surprised us.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that stuck with me, too, because

Speaker 4 I think what undergirds a lot of the fear right now,

Speaker 4 the unspoken fear is

Speaker 4 it's not that millions of people will show up in the streets of DC to stomp this. It's that they won't, right?

Speaker 4 It's not that this will culminate in some great democratic movement that will be ugly and scary. It's that that democratic movement won't coalesce.

Speaker 4 And I do think our project over the next six months, next year, is to try to figure out how to reawaken that spirit of democracy.

Speaker 4 And that's why, like, you know, I've been struggling to articulate this too, which is like why I find the kind of Luigi fanfic

Speaker 4 so disgraceful. And by the way, why I think throwing fucking Molotov cocktails at a Tesla is so stupid.
It's not because I'm some liberal squish, although I am, and I view those things as wrong,

Speaker 4 though I do.

Speaker 4 It is because fundamentally, I remember there was this historian, Richard Evans, I believe his name. I may be saying his, I may be having his name wrong, but he wrote these three books.

Speaker 4 The coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. And he gave an interview about the books and about one thing he learned from them.

Speaker 4 And he said, you will never out-violence the fascists. Why? Well, because at root, what is right-wing authoritarianism?

Speaker 4 What is the kind of the final form of right-wing authoritarianism? It is one person deciding how the rest of us live. And that's what an assassin does.
That's what a dictator does.

Speaker 4 That's what a person who commits violence at a rally does. It is someone deciding for themselves what's going to happen to the rest of us.
What is the core fundamental left expression of power?

Speaker 4 It is solidarity. It is millions of people coming together to make a choice for themselves and choosing what happens to the country.
That is a protest, that is an election, that is a Congress.

Speaker 4 And so what we have to do is build towards that kind of mass mobilization, that kind of solidarity.

Speaker 4 And violence, individuals taking it upon themselves to decide what happens and where, is anathema to that and makes that harder because it will enable the crackdown that we are already seeing unfolding.

Speaker 4 And what we have to think about every single day is how do we get to the point where millions of people are in the streets to send a signal to Republican politicians, to send a signal to their fellow Americans, or, by the way, a big enough protest that in and of itself can help is power, in and of itself can shut down a city, in and of itself can stop authoritarianism or force authoritarianism to reveal its horrible nature before the country.

Speaker 4 I don't know where we're heading, but that's one of the places where we could be heading. And if we are, it requires forbearance on our side too.

Speaker 5 The other thing that would do, it would stiffen the spines of the people that are folding, and whether that be at Columbia or at the law firms or across the board. Like

Speaker 5 if they felt like there were people that would have their backs, they would act differently.

Speaker 5 And I think that it would also be the case for any Democratic elected officials that you feel like are not living up to the moment. And that's why that is my ask for today.

Speaker 5 And as I have before, is I just, I think that people need to call and pressure these folks to speak out more clearly about

Speaker 5 what is happening, particularly in the Tufts case and with regards to the Gulag in San Salvador.

Speaker 4 Where are the protests right now?

Speaker 4 There were student protests at Columbia. Agree with them, don't agree with them, as people standing up for what they believed in.

Speaker 4 Colombia just gave in to the most flagrant attack on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime.

Speaker 4 The president of the United States declaring himself basically provost of Colombia, dictating specific departmental rules, dictating specific policies on a private university's campus.

Speaker 4 Where is the protest? Where is everybody? Why don't people care enough? Why isn't there a politics that is inspiring people to take to the streets when these kinds of things happen?

Speaker 4 Why are we more geared towards the political fights we've had for 30 years than the biggest fight we've ever seen in our lives happening right in front of our faces and people aren't showing up?

Speaker 5 There are some rallies coming April 5th. Hands off America.
People can Google those.

Speaker 5 But I know I'm with you. I'm not.
I'm saying that because I'm trying to be helpful. I'm not that.
I think it's going to take time to brew, and we're going to have to rally people to

Speaker 5 shake them from their slumber.

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Speaker 5 You were in Wisconsin? Yeah, I have not covered it. And this is bad on me, but I want to explain why, because maybe this will resonate with some listeners.

Speaker 5 I thought it was great that James Malone won the state Senate district in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He's this Democrat that won as a Trump plus 15 district in this place in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 It's kind of between Philly and Harrisburg in a rural Pennsylvania. And I thought that was great.

Speaker 5 And I think it's great that people are out there like you in Wisconsin, that you flew out there, that Ben Wickler and others are rallying in this, in this, in this state Supreme Court race between Susan Crawford, who's the Democratic endorsed judge, and Brad Schimmel, who's the Republican Attorney General.

Speaker 5 Like, it's just, it's like, we've fucking been here, you know, we just have been here. And it's just like we had this brutal loss that is going to cause so much damage over the next four years.

Speaker 5 And it's like tough for me to get my dander up about state senate races when all the the shit we've been discussing for the last hour.

Speaker 5 You know, you only have so much room in your heart for action and for anger. And yet these local races do matter.

Speaker 5 And they're actually a place where people can have more control and can rest back control in their lives and in their communities. So talk about your trip to Wisconsin, what you saw there, and

Speaker 5 what you think folks can do.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So

Speaker 4 this is a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. This is not just about a signal.

Speaker 4 This is incredibly incredibly important. Basically, last year, or I'm losing track of time.
I think this was last year, the beginning of last year, there was a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 This judge, Janet Protosewitz, she won. That shifted the balance of the court from right to left.
That's why Republicans were so upset. That's why they've tried to stymie this court now at every turn.

Speaker 4 What that court has been able to do is kind of put in place fair maps for the assembly. Right now, the Republicans had a supermajority because they drew their own maps, right?

Speaker 4 Wisconsin is a 50-50 state, currently has six Republican House members, two Democratic House members. The Assembly was gerrymandered towards the right.

Speaker 4 They put in place fair assembly maps. They could put in place, if we win this race, fair, ungerrymandered congressional maps.

Speaker 4 Also at stake is whether or not they put it back in place this 1849 abortion law.

Speaker 5 Just to be clear, so if... If Schimmel is to win, if the Republican Attorney General is to win, that would flip the balance back to 4-3 Republican.

Speaker 5 And in theory, they can enforce the old abortion law.

Speaker 4 In theory, they can enforce the old abortion law. They can put back in place the gerrymandered assembly maps.
They can prevent fair maps from redrawing the congressional districts.

Speaker 4 They also will now have somebody in place that will rubber stamp basically anything they do to try to rig the electoral system towards Republicans, right? This is a MAGA guy.

Speaker 4 We got so close to their being able to toss out Joe Biden's win in Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 If you have someone like Brad Schimmel in place, who knows what could happen, but now they would be in a position to throw out election results. We're seeing this unfold in North Carolina right now.

Speaker 4 Republican judge lost that race. They are now trying to throw out votes they don't like purely based on the fact that they want to steal this thing.
That could happen in Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 But more than that, so Elon Musk has put $13 million into this race. It's fucking crazy.
He's just dumping money into this race.

Speaker 4 Wisconsin came out and voted for Judge Protosowitz because they didn't want the 1849 abortion law. They just didn't want a right-wing judge.

Speaker 4 If Donald Trump is able to buy this seat for Brad Schimmel and they're able to put in place gerrymandered maps, have somebody in place that's going to rule and favor Republicans when they question the outcome of elections, that sends a signal.

Speaker 4 First of all, that's terrible on its own, right? It makes winning the presidency that much harder in the future. But also, this sends a message, right?

Speaker 4 Right now, there are squishy Republican House members who are not sure what's more dangerous to them. Should be more afraid of Elon Musk or their voters, right?

Speaker 4 Should they vote for reconciliation, cut Medicaid, cut taxes for rich people, and hope that Elon Musk's money protects them in the fall?

Speaker 4 Or should they buck Elon, bear the attacks from the right, and trust that their voters will protect them?

Speaker 4 If Elon Musk can buy this seat, that's a big proof point for these Republicans to just stick with the program. And we don't want them to stick with the program.
We want them to be afraid.

Speaker 4 We want voters to overwhelm and overcome the advantage that comes from all of this money.

Speaker 4 So the stakes for Wisconsin are incredibly high, but the stakes for the country are very high, both in terms of how this court could rule in future elections challenges and also the message it sends about whether or not Elon Musk's money can buy a seat.

Speaker 4 So if you're in Wisconsin, make sure you cast your vote. If you know somebody in Wisconsin, shoot them a tax.

Speaker 5 Election is on Tuesday.

Speaker 4 Election is on Tuesday.

Speaker 5 How did it feel to be out amongst the people out of the studio?

Speaker 4 It was great. We were in Madison.
We were in Milwaukee. A lot of that is just about making sure everybody gets their ballots in.
It was reassuring going to the doors.

Speaker 4 We went to, I think, 150 doors, something like that. And everybody knew the election was coming.

Speaker 4 Every, every lefty had gotten their ballot in and was making sure everybody in their life got their ballot in. That's what we have to do in Wisconsin.
So who knows what that means?

Speaker 4 The other little moment, too, there were just moments of being out there with people that were just so gratifying and inspiring.

Speaker 4 And a reminder that even that just being among people is good for you and good for the movement. It's good for people to be out there talking to each other.
Get off your phones, get out of your house.

Speaker 4 You will feel better about things. Just, you know, you're knocking on doors and you walk by a house and there's just an older woman out there gardening.

Speaker 4 And she says something like, Oh, what are you doing? What are you guys doing? Oh, we're knocking on doors for Judge Crawford. Oh, like, thanks for doing that.
We got to help Judge Crawford win.

Speaker 4 And then there's just a moment of like, you know, I can't believe what's happening. You know, I'm like so scared.

Speaker 4 And you realize that, like, in our asymmetrical politics, it is completely normal for a Republican politician to just go on television and say that people that live in Madison, Wisconsin are fucking communist, anti-American disgraces.

Speaker 4 And obviously, Elizabeth Warren never goes on

Speaker 4 on Pod Save America and starts talking about the rubes down there in Alabama, right? Like, that's not acceptable. But, like,

Speaker 4 it was like, oh, you know, the cities are out of touch.

Speaker 5 You can criticize Alabama on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sure, but just outside of it.

Speaker 4 But what I'm just getting at is like,

Speaker 4 oh, you know, the liberal enclaves, like, we already have them. They're out of touch.
Democrats are out of touch with the real people. All that fucking shit.

Speaker 4 And it's like, okay, yeah, we got to do work. A lot of political work we have to do.

Speaker 4 But like, can we give some due to the progressives in Madison and Milwaukee that have been doing their best organizing, who, if more people voted the way that they wanted people to vote, the country would be a much better place.

Speaker 4 People that are like scared and worried for their country and really fucking care. Like, yeah, I get it.
We have the engaged people. We need to do better than that.
Thank God for the engaged people.

Speaker 4 Thank God for the people paying attention. They're doing the best they can.
Just because their votes are assumed and accounted for doesn't mean they don't deserve a little bit of fucking love.

Speaker 5 We'll leave it there. That's nice.
That's uplifting. I'm smiling.
Good. Thank you, John Lovett, for coming back on the podcast.
We'll do it again in 67 more days. See what dark things are then.

Speaker 5 Everybody else will be back here tomorrow with an old friend. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 5 You

Speaker 5 love

Speaker 5 so tapping,

Speaker 5 break

Speaker 5 down

Speaker 5 the government,

Speaker 5 let us speak for us.

Speaker 5 I'll take

Speaker 5 a quiet

Speaker 5 lampshake

Speaker 5 of carbon oxide.

Speaker 5 And no,

Speaker 5 no surprises.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 no surprises.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 no

Speaker 5 surprises.

Speaker 5 my final fact,

Speaker 5 my father

Speaker 5 belly ach with

Speaker 5 no

Speaker 5 love,

Speaker 5 so no

Speaker 5 surprises,

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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