S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix

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Speaker 2 Hey, everybody, everybody. We had an awesome sold-out event in Arizona on Saturday where I interviewed Bill Crystal, which we're going to use for the Monday podcast today.

Speaker 2 We've got some plans for a bunch more events coming up later this year, hopefully bigger venues. We appreciate you all want to come out to see us.
I'm very much looking forward to that.

Speaker 2 So stay tuned for that. But up next on this podcast, Bill and I spoke a lot about this Time magazine article by Philip Holsinker.

Speaker 2 He's a photojournalist actually from Nashville, but he's been on the ground in San Salvador working on a book, and he got unbelievable access to these flights of Venezuelans that we've been sending to that San Salvador hellscape with no due process.

Speaker 2 And that article had broke right before we went on stage. So we start by talking about that.

Speaker 2 But since then, there's one other specific case I just want to bring up, and that is this gay Venezuelan kind of barber, makeup artist named Andri, Lindsay Tozlowski, who we interviewed over on our YouTube, if you want to check that out, is his lawyer and has been publicizing information about this man.

Speaker 2 And she posted a few pictures of him. And we'll put all this stuff in the link to the show notes.
And I've got to tell you, this one has hit me pretty hard.

Speaker 2 She wrote this when she posted the pictures. This is our client, Andree, who's been disappeared by the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 Tonight, he's in a Salvadoran prison, notorious for human rights violations. He is a brother and a son, a makeup artist.
And like many of us, he has tattoos. If you look at these pictures,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 2 who the hell knows, right? I don't know Andre. I don't know the story.
Maybe this is like a Westside story situation and he's a gay gang member.

Speaker 2 Maybe he's like Derek for real from the movie Blow, the hairstylist that was helping Johnny Depp bring cocaine in from Columbia. You know, anything in this world is possible.

Speaker 2 But if you look at these pictures, it seems like this man is being tortured and that he was rightfully fleeing from communism, fleeing from oppression, and coming to the country that

Speaker 2 throughout its history has been a beacon for people such as him throughout the world fleeing oppression.

Speaker 2 And the fact that we are the ones that are sending him to this hellscape without any due process is horrendous. And if he is Derek for real, then the government needs to fucking prove it.

Speaker 2 And Tom Homan was on the Sunday shows this weekend, basically saying, you just got to trust. I trust our guys.
I trust our guys.

Speaker 4 If they say he's Trendaragua, he's Trendaragua.

Speaker 2 And I'm sorry, that's not good enough for me. That's not how this works in a free country.
And so I don't usually ask you guys to do this because there's just so much outrage out there.

Speaker 2 For whatever reason, I think that some Democratic politicians are scared to speak out about immigration because they think it's a loser.

Speaker 2 And I think that's wrong on all counts, politically, ethically, morally. And so I know a lot of you guys live in blue states.
And even if you live in red states, you can do do this.

Speaker 2 I'd ask you to call your senators and ask them to publicly demand that DHS and the State Department provide documentation for their rationalization for removal of these individuals to the San Salvador hellscape.

Speaker 2 The number is 202-224-3121. It's easily Google-able.
The representatives need to know that people fucking care about this, that we actually still care about.

Speaker 2 America as a country that welcomes the oppressed throughout the world, that we care about human rights.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of them, because of the election of Trump for the second time, rightfully think that people don't care. We need to understand that they need to be made to care about this.

Speaker 2 So I'd ask you to do that. Call your senators today.
It will make a difference. It will matter if they start hearing from people about this, particularly the Democratic senators.

Speaker 2 I think they will be less scared.

Speaker 3 to speak out.

Speaker 2 But even the Republican senators, I gotta tell you, the Marco Rubio, there's a great Greg Sargent article this morning.

Speaker 2 Marco Rubio has been the point person on almost all of the most noxious shit from this administration so far.

Speaker 2 And, you know, there are people in the Cuban and Venezuelan communities that can have an influence on him.

Speaker 2 And the fact that Donald Trump kind of in an interview pushed this off on Marco and said, you know, when he was asked about the Alien Enemies Act, he said he didn't sign it, which is very strange in itself.

Speaker 2 I think there's more reporting to be done on that, but said that this was all something over at state. So, I mean, Trump has dumped this on Marco.

Speaker 2 Marco's boss has said he is the point man for these heinous deportations.

Speaker 2 So, Marco should have to speak to it. Tom Homan should have to speak to it, saying we just trust our guys.
That's not okay. We cannot disappear people on the word of Tom Homan and Marco Rubio.

Speaker 2 If there's something else you want to do, Lindsay works for Immigrant Defenders. You can go to immdef.org and support the work of their lawyers.

Speaker 2 The lead lawyers on the Alien Enemies Act case are at the ACLU. So, if you want to support them, we'll put these links in the bio.

Speaker 2 But go to the ACLU's immigrants' rights page and you can donate to them as well. So, I hope you enjoy me and Bill.

Speaker 2 We had some fun in Arizona, some dark topics, as you see at the beginning, but we got some laughs as well. I hope you enjoy it, and we'll be uh back here tomorrow with an old friend of the pod.

Speaker 2 So, we'll see you all then.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, what's happening?

Speaker 3 Good to be back in Arizona.

Speaker 3 Been looking for Carrie Lake around every corner.

Speaker 3 Making sure she doesn't come after me.

Speaker 4 Tim won't be able to stay at the reception because he's got a private little thing with Carrie Lake afterwards.

Speaker 3 For those who listen to the Bulwark podcast, me and Bill get together on Mondays. So

Speaker 3 going to do the Monday podcast on Saturday, if that's okay with all of you guys.

Speaker 3 So we're going to play a little pretend and I'm going to start it right now. Here we go.
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 3 I'm your host, Tim Miller, live here in Phoenix, Arizona with Bill Crystal.

Speaker 3 All right. So me and Bill were talking about what to discuss.
And

Speaker 3 do you want to do banter first or should we just get straight into the shit?

Speaker 4 I just have one question. I've been in Arizona a fair amount.
My college roommate from many years ago lives up here at North of Scottsdale.

Speaker 4 If you're from the Phoenix area, do you root for or against the University of Arizona?

Speaker 3 On the tournament. Oh, you do? For.

Speaker 3 Against.

Speaker 3 Oh, man.

Speaker 4 You don't hate Arizona the way people in other states hate the other school or whatever.

Speaker 4 Good. Well, good luck tomorrow against Oregon.
And then our oldest daughter

Speaker 4 and her husband, our son-in-law, went to Duke. So

Speaker 3 that'll be it.

Speaker 4 I won't be with you guys on next weekend.

Speaker 3 I will be.

Speaker 4 The rest of America will be rooting for you guys.

Speaker 3 All right. We could do a little Mike Bibby talk or something, but I guess we should probably move on.

Speaker 3 I want to, we'll end with some happy talk

Speaker 3 because we're starting really dark.

Speaker 3 I don't know if anybody has seen a story from Time magazine that just came out about one hour ago. It's about the most enraging shit I've ever seen, actually.

Speaker 3 Bill, have you had a chance to take a look at it?

Speaker 4 You know, I did.

Speaker 4 And we've both been angry and indignant about the deportation of the Venezuelans to El Salvador without any due process, without any proof that they're particular gang members, without anything, at the say-so of the president, I suppose, and his team of eager deportations

Speaker 4 fanatics. But even, I don't know, did we expect it to be this bad? I mean, we were alarmed and indignant, and also indignant that not enough other people were indignant.

Speaker 4 But anyway, remain that indignant.

Speaker 3 I'm going to read one little bit for you guys so you can understand why my blood is about to boil.

Speaker 3 The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor.
He said, I'm not a gang member. I'm gay.
I'm a barber. I believed him.

Speaker 3 But maybe it's only because he didn't look like what I had expected. He wasn't a tattooed monster.

Speaker 3 Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste.

Speaker 3 The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped.

Speaker 3 The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

Speaker 3 We're doing that shit to these people. That's us.
That's the United States that is doing that.

Speaker 3 This man, I don't know anything about him.

Speaker 3 We don't know because he didn't have due process. We don't really know what the truth is.

Speaker 3 His lawyer, we interviewed on our YouTube page, Sam Stein, did, and she is adamant that he's not a member of Trenda Aragua.

Speaker 3 The Adrian Carraschillo, who writes for us, has written quite effectively, actually giving examples of past cases, like dating back to the first Trump administration, where we misidentified people's tattoos.

Speaker 3 The most striking example he gave that I saw was of a guy that had a tattooed lyrics that were actually from a pro-Trump reggae artist. The fact that that exists is weird.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 it was like one word different from what the gang slogan was. And so the guy got

Speaker 3 arrested over it.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I just,

Speaker 3 like, this is the one to me that we absolutely have to speak out about and be outraged about and protest about. We cannot let this happen.

Speaker 3 There is, and Bill, I'm interested in your take on this, but there is, I think, a too cute view from some in the Democratic movement, never Trumpers, pro-Democrats, across the board, that like immigration is a loser.

Speaker 3 We can't talk about immigration. You know, Trump won a mandate on this.
Like Trump, like people support the deportations, you know, people support the wall.

Speaker 3 And I guess my view on this is I don't fucking care. I do not care.
We are how many days? Where's the sign? We are 590 days away from an election. Like that is so far.

Speaker 3 And if we cannot get up the passion

Speaker 3 to fight for

Speaker 3 this young man who has been sent to a fucking hellscape, like to this robocop dystopia with no due process, with no rights, if we can't be mad for him, then I think that everybody's going to be in for a rude awakening with what else is coming next in the next 590 days.

Speaker 3 So I don't know what you think about that, though.

Speaker 4 No, I'm totally with Tim.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 4 just two things, just one footnote. You realize these people were in detention.
This is not a case.

Speaker 4 Sometimes you arrest someone, it's a ticking time bomb, something horrible is about to happen, you can't follow every nicety of due process, perhaps.

Speaker 4 You get them off the streets first, and then you worry a little day or two later, maybe a week or two later even about exactly.

Speaker 4 But these people were in detention. That's how they could put them on the plane, right? They were not a threat to anyone.

Speaker 4 Most of them probably are gang members. They were detained in the United States.
We have good prisons. They weren't going to escape.

Speaker 4 I mean, so what was the hurry? What was the need to go?

Speaker 4 The hurry was to avoid the court order, to avoid judicial review, to avoid problems of due process, and to establish the predicate that they could do it.

Speaker 4 And I think that's so important because it starts with them, but now we know that 500,000 plus people are about to lose their temporary protected status, and they'll be undocumented.

Speaker 4 And, you know, a few of them will have some criminal record, I suppose, or maybe they'll have the same name as someone else who has a criminal record. So I think we're on a horrible slope down.

Speaker 4 And I totally agree with Tim about the, I'm just infuriated.

Speaker 4 I had a conversation with actually a Democratic member of Congress, a good guy, and a good member, actually, someone I agree with on almost everything.

Speaker 4 It was like, Bill, this isn't the hill we should die on. If I hear that phrase again, I'm really going to lose it, first of all.

Speaker 4 You know, someone else said at a recent conference I was at, well, you're playing into Trump's hands when you make a big issue of these immigrants.

Speaker 4 It's like, if I hear that, Trump's president of the United States, what does playing into his hands mean?

Speaker 4 He'll get 0.2% increase in popularity for two weeks, as you say, 18 months out from the election. It's so insane.

Speaker 4 So I'm very annoyed that everyone is overthinking the reaction and not having a genuine human reaction to really atrocious behavior by the government of the United States.

Speaker 4 It's our government that is sending people who have had no due process, done in obviously a very slipshod manner with people's names getting confused and so forth, and some innocent people put in.

Speaker 4 And some of the guilt, quote, guilty people haven't been, you realize, found guilty of a crime.

Speaker 4 They may be, you know, not the most savory characters in the world, but in America, usually, and maybe they should be deported if they're here

Speaker 4 without documentation. but that's very different from locking them up and sending them to this hellhole in El Salvador for a year.
I mean, who knows for how long, incidentally.

Speaker 3 Yeah, a few things on that. One is some of these people are legal, right? Like if you came from Venezuela under TPS, you're not actually an illegal immigrant.
You're not undocumented.

Speaker 3 And so we're sending legal residents, legal immigrants here, people that were made legal by a TPS that was supported by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, very passionately.

Speaker 3 He supported giving these people back a TPS back in 2019.

Speaker 3 The other thing to the playing into Trump's hands, you know what is actually playing into Trump's hands is just conceding that all these people are gang members and that we can't fight for any of their rights.

Speaker 3 That's what's playing into Trump's hands.

Speaker 3 Actually making him defend their actions is like something. Look at what happened the first time.

Speaker 3 Again, it's like people have, you know, it's like memento, like they've lost their memory from the first term. That we did fight him on immigration stuff.
We did stop child separation.

Speaker 3 There were victories on that. And it was not as good as it could have been.
But there were people who regained their rights because of the pushback against their behavior in the first term.

Speaker 3 So that pissed me off. And here's the other thing about what they're coming for people next.

Speaker 3 So there's this guy. I don't know if you know Mayflower American Chamoth Paula Hapatia.
He's on the All-In podcast with David Balsacks, who's now the crypto czar. He's friends with Elon,

Speaker 3 and he's become a big Trump supporter, huge donor to Trump. He was out yesterday, and we're kind of having a little Twitter fight about it, which I shouldn't be doing by the pool today.
But

Speaker 3 he's out there saying that's what you do when you come to Arizona to sit by the pool.

Speaker 3 Normal people might sit by the pool, swim, but Tim's up.

Speaker 3 I'm shit posting.

Speaker 4 Don't distract me with that pool. I might make a Twitter fight.

Speaker 3 I'm shit posting in my speedo this afternoon.

Speaker 3 But this guy, and again, it's not just a random,

Speaker 3 it's worth saying, this is not just a random podcaster.

Speaker 3 It's somebody that speaks to Elon, the co-president, speaks to David Sachs, who is in the White House, I assume speaks to Trump, and he's saying that the Tesla vandals or whatever,

Speaker 3 even if they are legal Americans, even if they're American citizens, should be denaturalized and sent to El Salvador.

Speaker 3 And that's where this is going.

Speaker 4 And Trump said, remember a week ago, he had this goofy tweet, you know, the Tesla vandals, that's domestic terrorism. And everyone dismissed that as that's Trump being Trump.

Speaker 4 And he's using the phrase he doesn't really understand what he's doing. And then it turns out, guess what?

Speaker 4 Pam Bondi is thinking about charging them, trying to increase their vandalism crime or whatever, you know, and destruction of property crime to a case of domestic terrorism.

Speaker 4 So all these things that are dismissed as Trump being Trump and don't make a mountain out of a molehill, and you're playing into his hands when you get too upset about something he says.

Speaker 4 It turns out in the second term, this wasn't true in the first term, where there were genuine guardrails within the administration and to some degree outside as well, even in the Republicans in Congress.

Speaker 4 Now there are no guardrails. And so you need to take what he says seriously because so far the evidence is everything he says they do a week later.

Speaker 4 And things are proceeding much more quickly through the stages of authoritarian takeover than even we expected.

Speaker 3 And they have real, and this is happening inside the FBI, inside the Department of Justice, they are like using resources for people that

Speaker 3 were, you know, whatever they were doing before, looking after drug smugglers or rapists or whatever other types of people the FBI was looking at.

Speaker 3 And instead, they're moving those resources to focusing on the Tesla vandals. So, by the way, I don't support Tesla vandalism, but again,

Speaker 3 once we start,

Speaker 3 I don't.

Speaker 4 Once I didn't do that, I'm going to be, oh my God, I'm not going to

Speaker 3 be hauled out of here in about 20 minutes.

Speaker 4 Associate of domestic terrorism,

Speaker 3 Bill's going to someone.

Speaker 4 I don't support it.

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Speaker 3 All right, I want to move on to what is going on in our negotiations with Russia.

Speaker 4 I want to get one cheery topic after another up here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, things are going great over there.

Speaker 3 I really want to dial in on Steve Witkoff. You know, there's so many ridiculous characters in this administration that it's hard to keep track of all of them.

Speaker 3 And I feel like Steve's fallen a little under the radar. So we're going to play a Steve Witkoff-related game here in a second.

Speaker 3 But before we do that, what's your biggest picture on the state of play with regards to the negotiations?

Speaker 4 I mean, it's terrible. We're negotiating against Ukraine and mostly on Putin's behalf with an occasional fake request of Putin, which he scornfully denies.

Speaker 4 And then Trump says, okay, I guess then I'm going to go back to beating up Ukraine.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's shameful to abandon, obviously, to abandon Ukraine, I believe, to Putin and the overall reversal of U.S.

Speaker 4 foreign policy and undermining 80 years of a foreign policy that basically has kept things a lot better than they were before and a lot better than they will be after we abandon this liberal international order and our role in sustaining it is just terrible as a policy matter.

Speaker 4 But then the particularly shameful treatment, the thing was, remember he was so upset with Zelensky in the Oval Office. Remember, J.D.
Vance and Trump, oh, he was so rude.

Speaker 4 Putin then goes out of his way to keep Trump waiting on the phone for an hour, right? Do you realize?

Speaker 4 Did you read the stories about it? He's speaking at a conference, some fake business leaders' conference or something, and his oligarchic friends and

Speaker 4 dependents in Moscow. His peskov, that press spokesperson, comes up and says publicly,

Speaker 4 Mr. President, President,

Speaker 4 you're scheduled now for the phone call with Trump. And he's he can wait.
He can wait. And he goes on for like 50 minutes then, just out of his way to just humiliate Trump.

Speaker 4 Trump's not upset by that rudeness, though. You know, Putin, what Putin does is fine.

Speaker 3 Here's why he's not upset.

Speaker 3 So our chief negotiator, which is, by the way, not the Secretary of State, not the President,

Speaker 3 not even the original person, Keith Kellogg, who's a military veteran, who had been set to be the envoy for this.

Speaker 3 No, instead, it's Steve Witcoff, a real estate guy from New York, whose kids are in a crypto scam with the Trump kids. So

Speaker 3 he's our point man in Amsterdam.

Speaker 3 He was on Tucker Carlson's show, which is naturally what you do after a big interview.

Speaker 3 And usually at this point on the podcast, I would play you a clip, but we don't have that ability here, so I'm going to do a dramatic reading.

Speaker 3 Tucker.

Speaker 3 What'd did you think of Putin?

Speaker 3 Witkoff. I liked him, man.
Tucker, yep, Witkoff. I thought he was straight up with me.
First of all, I thought it was gracious of him to accept me. Tucker, it takes balls to say that.

Speaker 3 Witkoff. Yeah, I mean, if you don't, you know, in our country, if you don't act like a lemming and just walk off a cliff like everybody else, then, you know, you get attacked.

Speaker 3 So that's the first part. I'm going to fast forward.
You have any thoughts on that before I keep going?

Speaker 4 Yeah, you're on such a roll, I feel like.

Speaker 3 Witkoff. He told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and he met with his priest and he prayed for the president.

Speaker 3 Not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him. And he was praying for his friend.

Speaker 3 I mean, can you imagine sitting there listening to these kinds of conversations? And I came home and delivered that message to our president.

Speaker 3 And I delivered a painting that was given to the president by the greatest Russian artist, and the president was clearly touched by it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, he'll do a good job negotiating, really, with tough guy, tough-minded negotiator, who our Mona Charon, who's coming up, I think, right after us, wrote a book 20 years ago, 25 years ago, called Useful Idiots about this was when Mona and I were conservatives, and this was an attack on

Speaker 3 Mona's still a conservative.

Speaker 4 A justified, yeah, good point.

Speaker 4 A justified attack, though, on people who were credulous about the Soviet Union, way back from the 30s and 40s, who pretended the purgers weren't happening and the famine and Stalin's horrible totalitarianism.

Speaker 4 And the phrase useful idiocy was coined. Mona could explain.

Speaker 4 I think it was coined a while ago, and Moda used it for the title of her book. But I mean, this is such a level of useful idiocy.
This is a more idiotic form of useful idiocy.

Speaker 4 But unfortunately, useful, right? I mean, he'll go, quote, negotiate. And it's suddenly the media, has that Witkoff interview with Tucker gotten much attention? I don't think so, right?

Speaker 4 A little, but like, it's not like, shouldn't that be kind of an unbelievable outrage?

Speaker 3 Sounds so different than Pesco.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting a painting of Trump that Putin has given him, and it's a deeply moving moment.

Speaker 3 I mean, what are you a Russian artist? It's like, could you imagine sitting there listening to these conversations? I'm like, no, I couldn't imagine sitting there in these conversations.

Speaker 3 I'd be like, what the fuck is this? Where am I? Like, what do you mean? Putin went to church? Putin is stealing children and killing people indiscriminately.

Speaker 3 Like, we're supposed to be this credulous to like think that Putin really went to his Russian Orthodox church and was praying deeply for Donald Trump because he cares about his soul and that Donald Trump was genuinely touched by this?

Speaker 3 Has Donald Trump been genuinely touched by anything in his life? How fucking stupid is this person? He is the point, man? Okay.

Speaker 3 It goes on.

Speaker 3 Tucker.

Speaker 3 Tucker to Witkoff.

Speaker 3 Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

Speaker 3 Witkoff, 100% not. Ha ha!

Speaker 3 Why would they want that? I wouldn't want those countries. Like, why would they? Witkoff, first of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? They don't want to.
What?

Speaker 3 They did. They did try.
They tried. And then Witkoff goes on to talk about how the big sticking point is these five territories, but he can't remember their names.
He's a point person that they want.

Speaker 3 And he's like, those Russian territories are the only ones that they want. And it's like they're bombing Kyiv.
They're bombing Kiev right now. They bombed Kiev last night.
Like,

Speaker 3 Does he even believe it? I think there's some evidence he believes it when we get to the next segment of the interview. But what do you make of all this?

Speaker 4 We need to get to the next segment.

Speaker 3 Well, here's what makes me think he believes it. Because he does the same thing when it comes to our friends in Qatar.

Speaker 3 In case you're not familiar, Qatar has been sponsoring Hamas financially and also protecting the Hamas leaders that are hiding in Qatar.

Speaker 3 Well, Witkoff, because we can't find anybody else, is also the point person for the negotiations with Qatar and Hamas and Israel.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 he brings up this and says to Tucker, Witkoff, and Sheikh Muhammad, the prime minister of Qatar, he's a good man. He's really Tucker.
He certainly is Witkoff. He's a special guy.

Speaker 3 He really is, and he cares. And I spent a lot of time with him and broken bread with him.
And he's just a good, decent human being who wants what's best for his people.

Speaker 3 Weren't all our friends, the neocons, really upset about the Biden administration's lack of outrage towards Hamas? This guy is just out there sucking off the guy that's funding Hamas

Speaker 3 and Putin. He's our point man.

Speaker 3 How do you feel about this?

Speaker 3 You're Jewish. These are your people, not mine.

Speaker 4 I'm Jewish and Tim isn't. That's what they're referring to.

Speaker 4 I am not defending Wikoff. No.
I mean,

Speaker 4 it's humiliating. It's embarrassing.
Can you imagine if one of our allies incidentally looks at this? What are they? I mean, honestly, it's a mirror.

Speaker 4 The Europeans have done pretty well, I'd say, given that Trump has behaved so horribly in the sense that they seem to want to step up.

Speaker 4 I'm not sure they can because they don't have, obviously, the resources we do to help Ukraine and to resist Russia. But they know that...
Yeah, they know the truth about Putin invading Ukraine.

Speaker 4 I was a Reaganite. I had a certain amount of disdain for the Europeans.
They were kind of, they didn't chip in as much as they should have on defense. They didn't want, they didn't understand.

Speaker 4 They were quite, they were cynical, sort of realpolitik. They didn't want to defend democracy.
I've got to say, I find myself rooting for the Europeans all the time in the last two months.

Speaker 4 And I won't say rooting. I hate, I wouldn't say rooting against our country.
I don't believe in that. But I mean, certainly agreeing with all these European leaders and not agreeing with Mr.
Witkoff.

Speaker 3 We're the French in this situation. We've become the French.
Yeah,

Speaker 4 at worst, we're the VG French.

Speaker 3 We're the VG French. All right.

Speaker 5 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 9 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 12 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 13 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 11 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 9 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 15 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 11 So I started searching.

Speaker 14 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

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Speaker 4 That was excellent, what Tim did. I did not know he had this imitation.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Tucker Carlson.
I'm surprised.

Speaker 4 Usually, when we've done a couple of these panties and Tucker comes up, Tim then reminds people that I gave Tucker his first job in Washington, that he worked for the Weekly Standard.

Speaker 3 Boo!

Speaker 4 This is why I'm just doing this here, but Tim was probably saving that for the end to make sure that

Speaker 4 I went off to a chorus of booze, you know.

Speaker 3 Never worked for Tucker. We're going to get to your evolution last.
Actually, we've got one more sad story first.

Speaker 3 I just kind of want to let you kick off on Paul Weiss. I had George Conway yesterday.
We had a conversation.

Speaker 3 Actually, I've never seen George that mad, I don't think, actually. I mean, like, he was,

Speaker 3 and his, he had smoke coming out of his ears. He was so fired up.

Speaker 3 I think, again, it's kind of like me talking about the Republican strategists that I know who I know know better, like the people that you, you know, the family feuds are the most personal.

Speaker 3 And so George knows these guys up all the weights.

Speaker 3 For people who missed it, this law firm that was being targeted by Trump, the head of it basically goes to the White House, grovels to Trump, says that we'll do 40 million in pro bono services for like Trump administration interests.

Speaker 3 So we'll see what that like entails. Boy, I mean, it's a pretty astonishing capitulation.
So I don't know. Do you have

Speaker 3 two minutes on that for Lee?

Speaker 4 I have, yeah, one minute on that. I mean, so Covington and Burling, the Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 firm, that was the first one Trump targeted because one of their partners was offering pro bono defense work to Jack Smith, who did his job as a Justice Department employee. He's a career employee.

Speaker 4 He doesn't have a huge amount of money that I know of. And so they offered to defend him pro bono if the government came after him, which surely it is.

Speaker 4 And so Trump went after Covington, stripped security clearances, tried to really ruin their business. You can't enter, you can't, the federal government isn't going to work with you, deal with you.

Speaker 4 Obviously, if you're a business and you hire a law firm, you might have business with the federal government, just

Speaker 4 routine business, not even Trump-related business, and you need to deal with various agencies, with someone from EPA, if you have an environmental issue, with someone from Congress, in an above-board way.

Speaker 4 I mean, just with legal representation, you know, and that really can cripple a law firm's business, what Trump is doing.

Speaker 4 And even if they can't legally do quite what he says, the notion that businesses get that, well, this firm is blackballed by Trump, and with all with Bondi and everyone else going along and all the cabinet secretaries being so servile, you know, you'd worry even about hiring Covington, even if legally they can go meet with people, because there'll be a huge, you know, like mark of cane on your forehead if you've hired Covington.

Speaker 4 Covington can resist this. There's a second firm, Perkins-Cooee, which Trump has gone after.
And so they got representation to fight back.

Speaker 4 They got a temporary restraining order stopping Trump from doing it because it's probably unconstitutional what he's trying to do to punish people for protected speech. And then

Speaker 4 Perkins-Boo is a relatively small firm, huge amount of government work. They will be put out of business if they don't succeed in overturning what Trump's done.

Speaker 4 They may get put out of business anyway. Because honestly, if you're running a company here, you've got issues in Washington, do you hire Perkins-Cooey? I mean, it's a risky thing, right?

Speaker 4 You have to be kind of courageous. Then, Paul Weiss, massive New York firm, wildly successful, well-established, long tradition of pro bono work.
They boast about it on their website, actually.

Speaker 4 Civil rights work, some really admirable stuff back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, actually, and even later, probably.

Speaker 4 They are the ones who don't, they could fight. They could have helped, and they could have helped get other people to stand together for Perkins Cooey and for not letting him target law firms.

Speaker 4 And again, once it's law firms, why won't it be a lot of other entities as well, right?

Speaker 4 And instead, they capitulate. I think the degree to which that has sent a signal to everyone to capitulate.

Speaker 4 Final point on this, I was on a text chain with a bunch of lawyers, and then they were outraged and horrified, but then it was like, but they're going to pay a huge price.

Speaker 4 I mean, people are going to leave. Parties won't put up with that.
Clients are going to say, what are you doing?

Speaker 4 And I've gotten so inured, partly because of the, what, nine years with the Republican Party at this point, but also seeing the last two months, I said, I bet no one leaves.

Speaker 4 I bet we see no high-profile resignations. I mean, Paul Weiss has Jay Johnson, former Obama cabinet secretary, Loretta Lynch, former Obama Deputy Attorney General, as senior partners there.

Speaker 4 I haven't heard a word from them.

Speaker 4 I haven't heard a word from anyone at most of the major firms to saying, you know, and in fact, the letter that's been circulated to try to get people to sign on to the Amicus brief on behalf of Perkins Cooey, they can't get signatures.

Speaker 4 Very respectable letter drafted by the former Solicitor General. And the firms are saying,

Speaker 4 we don't really want you, a senior partner, on this, on the do it if you know. It's a free country.
You could sign it, but it might hurt our business. The other partners are concerned.

Speaker 4 I bet they know here's the really sad thing. They will pay no price.

Speaker 4 They will make more money next year because clients will come to them thinking, well, they can deal with the Trump people.

Speaker 4 And then I'm going to abandon some some firm that has some people representing pro bono, immigrants, and so forth, right?

Speaker 4 And so the degree to which the authoritarianism is going beyond authoritarianism within the government to authoritarianism in society as a whole and institutions that deal with the government, universities, law firms.

Speaker 4 And then, you know, this is the really pernicious thing that's happening. And I do think that it's a law firm.
We shouldn't exaggerate it. It's one incident.

Speaker 4 But I think it could be when historians write this sad story of the first two, three, four, five months.

Speaker 4 I hope it's only that much of the Trump administration, but the real decline and the attempt to really impose authoritarianism, not just within the government, but on the society, this will be a big moment.

Speaker 4 This will be a big moment.

Speaker 5 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 9 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 12 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 13 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 11 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 9 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 15 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 11 So I started searching.

Speaker 14 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 13 It's not just a marketplace.

Speaker 6 It's a place where stories live.

Speaker 16 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 6 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 11 Listen to OnPurpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 3 I think it relates also to our point in the first topic, too, which is like courage is contagious. And this is why it's worth fighting Trump on every ground right now,

Speaker 3 not picking spots. Because

Speaker 3 if they have failures in certain areas, then that could give people in other areas areas the backbone to be like, wait a minute, I don't need to be scared of these guys.

Speaker 3 I don't need to do that, you know?

Speaker 4 So anyway.

Speaker 4 I mean, the judges have been pretty good so far, and some of the pro bono, some of the public interest law firms, the ACLU, again, 20 years ago, an organization I would have been arguing with all the time, fantastic representation in the El Salvador case.

Speaker 4 And Judge Bostad has really been courageous and hardworking and impressive.

Speaker 4 But it would be nice if more people spoke out and praised him, right? I mean, I I don't see a lot, yeah, former judges, former Republican attorneys general, former, I mean, Mike.

Speaker 3 Mike Roberts kind of did.

Speaker 4 What Roberts kind of did. No, I mean, it shows how far Trump has gone that Roberts felt he had to put out the statement he did.

Speaker 3 But anyway. Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right. Here we go.

Speaker 3 I got this text yesterday from a friend. Imagine showing this to Bill Crystal in 2003.

Speaker 3 And then there was a tweet I saw that said, how do you even begin to explain this to someone in 2004? The same tweet that these guys are both talking about, it's from this thing called Pop Bass.

Speaker 3 They wrote Bernie Sanders and AOC's fighting oligarchy rally in Denver on Friday night had over 34,000 people attending.

Speaker 3 The quote tweet from Pop Bass, it's interesting that Bill Crystal follows Pop Bass, is Bill Crystal with three clapping hands emojis.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Bill, what would 2003 Bill say about this? They probably think you're being sarcastic. 2003 Bill? What do you think? 2003 Bill would think about that tweet.

Speaker 4 I think he'd be impressed that I had was open-minded enough to have one.

Speaker 4 And you know what? I mean, I may have been wrong about some things back then. I suppose I probably was.
But I thought we were fighting for democracy.

Speaker 4 I do think what everyone thinks of Bush and some of the, obviously the torture and reddition stuff is very bad. But on the whole,

Speaker 4 the Bush administration respected actually court decisions and civil rights and didn't think we should deport Muslims because they were Muslims, right, if they were here in America and so forth, and gave gave a speech right 10 days after 9-11, explained saying that we can't be at war with a religion and so forth.

Speaker 4 So, I feel like there's some consistency there. But yeah, I think I didn't AOC and Bernie have a rally right in Tucson this afternoon.

Speaker 3 Were some of you there? Did you come from that?

Speaker 4 Look at this. Who would have thought that, right?

Speaker 3 Sarah, you should ask Sarah. What would you have thought in 2003?

Speaker 4 I wouldn't worry about Tim about that. What about 2003, Tim? He wouldn't have expected that people would come from the AOC Bernie Sanders rally to see me.

Speaker 3 To see us. Well, I wouldn't have known.
Me and AOC were both smoking pot back then, like hitting the bong, then we would have been in college.

Speaker 3 But yeah, it is a strange thing. What do you just kind of just briefly like make of the energy around them? Do you think it's ideological?

Speaker 3 Do you think it's just that they're out there channeling the rage that people have? A little bit of both?

Speaker 3 I mean, I'd say both. I mean, but I don't think it's that.

Speaker 4 If you listen, I listened to actually one of Bernie's speeches at one of the earlier rallies. It's not particularly left-wing.
I mean, it's just attacking Trump in exactly the same way we would.

Speaker 4 I mean, if he gets into his health care plan, it's more, you know, big government than I would like. But that's not what he's talking about.

Speaker 4 To his credit, I would say this compared to some of the moderates who are,

Speaker 4 we can't die on that hill. We have polling from four months ago that showed that actually people are in favor of deporting people to LSI.

Speaker 4 I mean, whatever they have, some bad polling or some stuff that might have been true four months ago, but isn't necessarily true two months into the Trump administration. Anyway,

Speaker 4 AOC and Bernie are more used to sort of ignoring the pollsters and fighting. And so I think that's a big advantage they have.
And fighting, and they hate the oligarchs and the plutocrats.

Speaker 4 And they're right too in this instance. They might not have been always right about that we have to be as against wealth as they are, but in this case, they are right.

Speaker 4 The other thing, someone made a good point to me about, I was saying, why are the most effective people like the ACLU and AACP,

Speaker 4 the Legal Defense Fund, and these people, as opposed to the mainstream legal types? And my friend made a very good point. He said, look, they're used to fighting the government.

Speaker 4 They don't have, most of us, including us liberals, not just conservatives, this is bipartisan, sort of respect the government.

Speaker 4 We mostly kind of think the government's probably doing things with good intentions.

Speaker 4 We might disagree with the policy, but you know, I didn't think the Obama administration was trying to destroy America. I thought some of the policy initiatives were bad.

Speaker 4 There were some legal interpretations I could have quibbled with. Their judicial appointments were a little different from Bush's or from others.
But I mean,

Speaker 4 one's used to sort of giving the government the benefit of the doubt if you're a mainstream liberal or a mainstream conservative. That's what you do in a healthy society, right? We have a democracy.

Speaker 4 It's our government. We hope it works out.
We're not always thrilled with every policy. They are, in a way, more suspicious.

Speaker 4 If you spent 50 years representing blacks in the South, if you were the ACLU and you represented really unpopular causes at different times, you're used to the government being not just ill-advised, but somewhat malevolent, and sometimes lying about what they're doing, and sometimes going outside the law to do what they do.

Speaker 4 And so, in a weird way, not a weird way, but I think the left actually at this moment has a little more grasp of the situation than

Speaker 4 some of our moderate friends.

Speaker 5 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 9 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 12 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 13 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 11 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 9 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 15 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 11 So I started searching.

Speaker 14 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 13 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 16 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 6 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 11 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 3 I think that there is more anger at the system, right?

Speaker 3 And it's anger at the Trump administration, but anger at the failures of the system that I think some in the, in us, like the Woolworth, but center-left folks too, Democrats have missed a little bit.

Speaker 3 And I thought it was interesting, like the connecting line, I interviewed Wes Moore, you know, on the pod this week.

Speaker 3 He's great, if you haven't listened to it.

Speaker 3 I really like Wes.

Speaker 3 But, you know, I mean, his ideologically is very different from AOC. And who knows, in 2028, maybe, you know, they'll be bitterly fighting each other about whatever this is.

Speaker 4 It'll be a good ticket after they fight in the primaries.

Speaker 4 They'll have to decide which one is on the top of the ticket and which one's number two. So that'll be a bit of an issue.

Speaker 3 But the interesting thing is that they both are channeling this. People are upset.
Like the system is not serving them.

Speaker 3 People are upset at the Trump administration for sure, but they're upset at the other ways that

Speaker 3 people have been failed. And we need to speak to that.
And that Democrats in the kind of Hillary through Kamala, through Biden era,

Speaker 3 weren't as maybe as sharp at that as was called for.

Speaker 3 It was interesting, I think, that like that two people that are doing very well right now politically, but who are of different sides of the party are both channeling that same

Speaker 3 kind of contrary, fighting

Speaker 3 tone.

Speaker 4 And I was struck that moderate Democrats tend to be somewhat more of my I have somewhat more contact with them than with AOC and some and Fernie Sanders, though I am fine with them too.

Speaker 4 The moderate Democrats were as angry about the Chuck Schumer interview. Not so much, the decision to close the government out was, I think, a tough tactical decision, to be fair.
But then

Speaker 4 he had the book tour, which he did cancel. But that's like, that's really good timing when Trump's destroying America to go off on a week-long book tour and all this.

Speaker 4 But then that interview he did with the New York Times, maybe you saw that, and that's where he talked, you know, it's going to work out. Trump's numbers are going to go down.

Speaker 4 And I work out, these Republicans, they're a little intimidated by Trump now, but I work out with them in the Senate gym. First of all, that's like something you can't unsee, right? So

Speaker 4 that's a problem. And secondly, and they're going to be okay.
And you really feel like he is not living in 2025 America. And I'd say the moderates I talked to were as indignant and as outraged.

Speaker 4 I didn't really see that there needs to be a change in leadership.

Speaker 3 And AOC and Connor Lamb were joint dunking on John Fetterman together. So, you know, the world is healing on the left.
All All right, everybody. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, get up for Bill Crystal.

Speaker 3 True,

Speaker 3 and never last and that's what you want.

Speaker 3 True,

Speaker 3 true,

Speaker 3 and everlasting, that's what you want.

Speaker 3 Don't say no, your breakfast eats a zone.

Speaker 3 This is the letter for your borderline with drone.

Speaker 3 Down the lid from the bottom, there's a mess. But better than it looks, better than than it looks.

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