Sam Stein and Adrian Carrasquillo: We Are in a Simulation

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Speaker 9 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 9 Today, we have a two-part episode that wades into the splash radius from Monday's Executive Order Bukonki covering DEI, NIH, hiring freezes, and immigration.

Speaker 9 And first up, the right man for that job, it's managing editor at the Bulwark. You may have seen our two-man comedy routine on YouTube, and we're bringing it to the audio podcast.

Speaker 9 It's my newest work husband, Sam Stein. How are you doing, Sam? Oh, man.
Wow.

Speaker 11 I didn't realize we had hit that point in our relationship.

Speaker 9 We hit it yesterday when we were bickering. It was not a compliment to call you my work husband.

Speaker 9 That means that there's a love and bicker relationship that we are building.

Speaker 11 I feel touched. Good.

Speaker 11 An honored to be touched.

Speaker 9 Not touched by

Speaker 11 Mike Johnson. Not physically touched, emotionally touched.

Speaker 9 Well, we have have a lot of pressure today because I'm here at 30 Rock in the Hotel, California that I can never leave since I can't go home to snowy New Orleans until they figure out how to de-ice the runway.

Speaker 9 We have Bryant Gumble and Jane Pauley sitting over my shoulder here. And so they will be keeping an eye out for us.
That's like us. It's kind of like us.
Yeah, are you Brian or Jane?

Speaker 9 I guess I got to be Jane. Yeah, clearly.

Speaker 9 I love Jane, though. She was kind of a, she's kind of an icon.
All right. Of course.
Let's get to business. We're going to start unfortunately with Donald Trump.

Speaker 9 I gave all of you listeners a 72-hour respite from his voice, but the respite is over. Here he is last night with Sean Hannity on what he thought about the January 6th parts.

Speaker 12 Some of those people with the police, true, but they were very minor incidents, okay? You know, they get built up by that couple of fake guys that are in CNN all the time.

Speaker 13 Nobody watches.

Speaker 12 They were very minor incidents.

Speaker 9 I mean, my favorite part of that was Sean Hannity got mad that he was watching CNN. Yeah,

Speaker 11 nobody watches that.

Speaker 9 Very minor injuries.

Speaker 9 You know, it's like too trite at this point to do the, like, imagine if Barack Obama talked about the very minor injuries that cops suffered at the hands of a, you know, I don't know, violent mob of Black Panthers or something.

Speaker 9 But anyway. The new Black Panther Party?

Speaker 11 That's an old, that's an old one, yeah.

Speaker 9 Will there be any punishment for that? This is just whatever at this point.

Speaker 11 To me, it's, it's, we're at this point where it's like, I'm not like surprised he said this stuff. You know, I don't, I even think he probably believes some of it.
He's like convinced himself of it.

Speaker 11 Of course, these are not minor injuries. I mean, officers,

Speaker 11 you know, committed suicide

Speaker 11 after

Speaker 11 what happened. It was an incredible trauma, physical and emotional.

Speaker 11 We talked to one who was talking about seven straight hours of just being bombarded, worse than anything he had dealt with when he was serving overseas.

Speaker 11 And it's like to trivialize that, of course, is outrageous, but then at the same time, it's just, that's Trump, right? Like, it's all self-serving. It's all designed to rewrite history.

Speaker 11 You know, they say to the victor, go to the spoils, and you get to write the history. And I think that's what he's doing here.
And Hannity's kind of funny.

Speaker 11 I think Hannity's more interesting here, but not because he was mocking CNN's audience, but there's another part where they were talking about,

Speaker 11 I think Trump was like, you know, they were just there to protest the vote and they have the right to protest the vote.

Speaker 11 And Hannity kind of sheepishly realizes that this is ridiculous to say something like that. He's like, well, you know, they don't really have the right to like storm the Capitol, right?

Speaker 11 It's like Hannity's just got to be like, whoa, I think he took it too far.

Speaker 9 So I mean, our man Sergeant Connell sent you, right? He texted you the pictures.

Speaker 11 Sergeant Connell sent me pictures, and

Speaker 11 you look at his feet and his hands, and they're, you know, battered, they're inflamed, they're bruised, they're stitched up.

Speaker 11 You know, he's had pictures where the arrow, the red arrow is pointing at him.

Speaker 11 Imagine going through that for seven straight hours where you just have wave after wave of people coming at you with, you know, projectiles and flag poles and, you know,

Speaker 11 beams and they're just throwing them at you. And you're just like in

Speaker 11 what he called combat for seven straight hours. And to be like, ah, well, you know, just minor stuff that Jake Tapper is trying to take advantage of and make into a sob story.

Speaker 11 It's like, come on, dude.

Speaker 9 It's a piece of shit. Did you think Trump's ever been punched or punched anybody? I guess he was in WWE.

Speaker 11 That's not real, obviously, but you know, who cares? Like, who gives a shit if he's been punched or not?

Speaker 9 Even if you've never been punched.

Speaker 11 Yeah, but even if you've never been punched during a fight, it doesn't take much to realize that that's not, you know, what happened on January 6th is bullshit and you should never have that happen.

Speaker 11 It's not minor.

Speaker 9 I guess there was some ear injury.

Speaker 9 He's been shot. Let's be clear about that.

Speaker 11 He has been shot. Yeah.

Speaker 9 I'm just saying.

Speaker 9 Just compare it to what Sergeant Connell went through. It was a graze.
He also had some issues with President Biden.

Speaker 9 And you'll be surprised that his revenge against President Biden is not going to be governing well. Let's listen.

Speaker 12 He pardoned everybody, but he didn't pardon himself. And remember this, those people that he pardoned are now mandated, because they got a pardon, to testify and they can't take the Fed.

Speaker 14 Should Congress investigate that?

Speaker 12 I think we'll let Congress decide.

Speaker 14 Would you want the Attorney General to investigate it?

Speaker 12 You know, I was always against that with presidents and Hillary Clinton. I could have had Hillary Clinton,

Speaker 12 a big number done on her.

Speaker 12 And I didn't want to.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 I went through four years of hell

Speaker 12 by this scum that we had to deal with. I went through four years of hell.

Speaker 12 I spent millions of dollars in legal fees and I won. But I did it the hard way.

Speaker 12 It's really hard to say that they shouldn't have to go through it also. So it is very hard to say that.

Speaker 9 Yeah, remember like two minutes ago when Pam Bondi was going through a confirmation hearing over in the Senate and people are like, Pam, what are you going to do if the president directs you to do something inappropriately?

Speaker 9 It's like, that's a hypothetical. Donald Trump would never do that.

Speaker 9 Here he is on Fox two days later saying, yeah, I think that the Attorney General should look into former President Biden, apparently.

Speaker 11 Apparently, you know, it's ironic because it was his lawyers who successfully argued to the Supreme Court that you get broad immunity while acting as president from these types of things.

Speaker 11 So I think Biden probably will be in the clear. They also didn't try to impeach Biden.
James Comer did. Didn't really work out.
But look, you know what?

Speaker 11 I mean, again, I try to distinguish between what's real and what's not. And I'm trying to like

Speaker 11 be true to the idea that we should react to what's real and what's not. Obviously, this is not yet real, but it could be real.

Speaker 11 And it would look ridiculous, just as Joe Biden's pardons look ridiculous. In terms of the spending money that he had to spend on legal fees, yes, he did.
Trump did have to spend a lot on legal fees.

Speaker 11 He also basically raised a lot of that money from donors. And then he like sold some fucking shit cryptocurrency and made, you know, 20 times that.

Speaker 9 Mega Americans paid. Right.
MAGA Americans paid his legal fees. Regular the forgotten Man that was not invited to the inauguration.

Speaker 11 Joe gave to the PAC, who then covered the legal fees. So, you know, he didn't really spend that much money.
And then, of course, he made like 30 billion or whatever the fuck it is on meme coins.

Speaker 11 And, you know, maybe that's what Biden should do, honestly. Or any of these people who are going to be in Dragnet.
Like, launch some shitty meme coins to raise some cash for the lawyers.

Speaker 9 I don't think that anybody's going to buy Joe Biden's meme coin.

Speaker 11 A Biden meme coin?

Speaker 9 I don't know. Maybe

Speaker 9 a couple blue MAGA influencers. Is JoJo

Speaker 9 from Jurz still on the Biden train? I don't know.

Speaker 9 I don't think that that's going to be a very good selling meme coin. Back to the drawing board on Biden fundraising ideas for his legal fees.

Speaker 11 Wait, wait, sorry.

Speaker 11 Let's not go back to the drawing board. Let's think of some other idea.

Speaker 9 Biden should sell guitars or Bibles.

Speaker 9 I think that he's going to have to outsource this to somebody else. I don't know that there's a huge groundswell of people wanting to throw him cash right now.

Speaker 9 Because of the presidential immunity, you are correct that probably not a lot here. And because of the fact that Biden didn't break any laws.
So

Speaker 9 I don't think that he should be quaking in his night shoes in Rehobot's Beach.

Speaker 11 But also the idea that this hasn't been investigated before, I mean, he's going to talk about what the business dealings that Hunter had in Ukraine and China. It's like this has been

Speaker 11 the subject of an immense amount of scrutiny. I mean, Trump basically tried to,

Speaker 11 you know, get Zelensky to look into it by withholding aid, right? Like, this is, all this stuff has been litigated. So are we just going to do this for the next four years? Probably.

Speaker 9 Probably. But here's what worries me, though, is Trump specifically mentions that Biden gave preemptive pardons to people and that that and he kind of implies that lets them off the hook, right?

Speaker 9 In this answer, there's a longer answer that he goes deeper into this. And Hannity eventually tries to interrupt and say, My producers want me to talk about the economy.

Speaker 9 And Trump's like, I don't care about that. I'm going to keep ranting about this.
Like, literally. But Biden's probably fine.
It seems that Trump was not focused on the preemptive pardons.

Speaker 9 There's another category of people, though. You know, I think about like the Cassidy Hutchinsons of the world, people that were in there that testified to the January 6th Committee,

Speaker 9 who were not included in the preemptive pardons,

Speaker 9 who there is personal animus towards. This sounded like a man that wanted other people to go through hell.
I guess is my point.

Speaker 9 This sounded like a man who wanted other people to go through the supposed hell that he went through.

Speaker 9 And I find it hard to believe that they won't put a couple people through hell listening to that answer.

Speaker 11 Yes, to that question, I agree. And I don't think it's just Trump who feels this way.

Speaker 11 I think anyone who was brought in before the January 6th Committee, aides to Trump, lower-level staffers who were subpoenaed, whose records were accessed, you talked to them, and I have, they feel like they were subject to a politically oriented prosecution and that they didn't deserve to have all their records, all their time, all their legal fees taken over by the committee.

Speaker 11 And so they want to exact a bit of revenge. And I think yesterday, the big news yesterday wasn't whatever Trump said to Humanity.
It was

Speaker 11 Mike Johnson basically giving, you know, the go-head for this new select committee to investigate what preceded January 6th and what came after January 6th, which is basically just Barry Lautemerk is going to basically take Cassidy Hutchinson and anyone else who was involved in the January 6th committee and testify before it, make them come up, make them give records, make them sit for testimony, make them come to hearings.

Speaker 11 And that's a real burden. It's a real stress, and it costs money.

Speaker 11 You can't just do it. You can't just be like, oh, okay, I'm going to go through it.
You hire a lawyer to prepare for that stuff. It costs money.

Speaker 9 And it's tit for tat it is right and they're gonna try to find ways that they supposedly perjured themselves right like look for anything to to go after them for and and i think that's something that i'm it's very alarming anyway so we'll continue to monitor that i want i want to play one more bit from uh trump this was him talking about kill for there is this like even among some like quasi-normal people in the anti-anti-world, there's like this sense like Trump really did have some points about that he was on this with the fires, with the raking and the and the water coming down from the north.

Speaker 9 Yes. And honestly, not even MAGA people.
There have been people that are like, you know, you got to hand it to Trump on this one. I don't think you have to hand it to Trump on this one.

Speaker 9 He kind of expanded on what he wants to do with regards to the fires in this interview. Let's listen.

Speaker 12 I don't think we should give California anything until they let water flow down into their

Speaker 14 north to the south.

Speaker 12 This is a political thing. I don't know what it is.
You know, they talk about the Delta smelt. It's a little tiny fish like this.
I wanna. They say it's an endangered species.

Speaker 12 Well, how is it endangered? No wonder it's endangered. It's not getting any water.
How do you,

Speaker 12 if you have a fish and you're stopping the water, isn't that going to hurt the fish?

Speaker 9 I'm glad we can use the R word again. We had Elizabeth Weill on this podcast.
There are definitely things that California did with forest management that was wrong. Like this is not the issue.

Speaker 9 Like water coming from the north to the south, the smelt not having enough water. Like this is, this is not the issue.

Speaker 11 Yeah, but you should be honest, Tim, that you are a big fan of the Delta smelt and you're incredibly biased. And this is the same thing.

Speaker 9 I do want to protect the smelts. I do want to protect you.

Speaker 11 You won't shut up about the smelt, your favorite fish. No, it's madness.

Speaker 9 But this is insane, though. Again, he's threatening, and you got into a little tiff with some people about this, about what you with regards to this.

Speaker 11 I love this one because after the fire started breaking out, it was very clear that this was going to be a huge tragedy and a multi-billion dollar catastrophe that would require the federal government to help out.

Speaker 11 I had the audacity, I mean, I'm so stupid.

Speaker 11 I had the audacity to note that Trump has been in the past reluctant to give California aid because he believes it's a blue state that voted against him and they don't deserve it.

Speaker 11 And people were like, oh,

Speaker 9 how dare you point that out in this moment?

Speaker 11 You know,

Speaker 11 that's ridiculous. And now here we are where he's refusing to give California aid unless they do some weird water policy that he thinks would have potentially prevented this.

Speaker 11 It's absurd, obviously, because one,

Speaker 11 we don't condition aid, never have. This would be new policy.
And it's easy to see how this can get into a bad place fairly quickly for a lot of red states down the road. Two,

Speaker 11 anyone who you talk to said the issue is not the fact that water is not flowing more from the north to the south.

Speaker 11 It's a combination of climate issues and the inability to, like, you know, stop a massive expanding fire when there's 80 mile per hour winds.

Speaker 9 Even if he was right, it is insane to go on Fox News and say we're not going to give them aid.

Speaker 11 Yes, they can manage fires better, but when you have 80 80 to 100 mile per hour winds in completely dry conditions, a manageable fire quickly becomes an unmanageable fire.

Speaker 11 And nothing that California could have done at that point,

Speaker 11 there's nothing they could have done at that point. And so, you know, then the choice becomes: do you want to give them the help they need to recover or not?

Speaker 11 And it seems like he doesn't.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and nor did the Speaker of the House also. So I think this is going to be something that is going to end up becoming a massive fight that we're going to be monitoring.

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Speaker 9 There were 200 executive orders, and so like kind of getting to the splooge of all of it has been sort of challenging over the course of a few days. But

Speaker 9 we're starting to clean it up and kind of get a clearer picture here. So I want to walk through a couple of them.
There was a DEI executive order, like ending DEI across the government.

Speaker 9 And an email went out from Russ Vos OMB.

Speaker 11 He's not confirmed.

Speaker 9 Maybe

Speaker 9 the nominated director of the OMB had some influence on this. I can't say for sure.
Thank you for clarifying that, Sam.

Speaker 9 So this email went out to federal government employees asking them to snitch on anyone doing secret DEI or sifer wokeness. I want to read from this email a little bit.

Speaker 9 Dear agency employees, we're taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices. I guess it's like LGBTQ plus.

Speaker 9 They keep adding new letters, but they're ending all DEIA-related contracts in accordance to the executive order.

Speaker 9 The email extends: These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.

Speaker 9 We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.

Speaker 9 If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5th to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA Plus or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to

Speaker 9 Truth at opm.gov within 10 days.

Speaker 9 That is fucking insane. That is an insane email to send.

Speaker 11 They want people snitching. What can you say?

Speaker 9 It's like very evidence.

Speaker 11 First of all, the A is accessibility. I know that because I just looked it up trying to find the USDA's page on this.

Speaker 11 And then I clicked it, and lo and behold, I got a 403 error code because they've taken down all DEIA content. And yeah, they want people to snitch.
I guess I've been a little bit surprised.

Speaker 11 Maybe I shouldn't shouldn't have been, at how

Speaker 11 like monomaniacally focused they are on DEI stuff. I mean, it is like they are like passionately trying to rid every semblance of this from the government.

Speaker 11 It's probably like the most consistent thing that I've noticed over the past two or three days that they've been in office is they just really want to like go hard on DEI.

Speaker 9 I'd like to know a little bit more about what's the coded DEI. Like what's a diversity word that does not quite use the name of affinity groups, I guess? I don't know.

Speaker 9 I kind of have a rant about this DEI thing, if you'll indulge me, Sam. But

Speaker 11 let's stay with that. Like, if you heard your colleague say something like, you know, let's include Johnny at the lunch.

Speaker 11 Is that worth snitching?

Speaker 9 Is that you?

Speaker 11 Do you get in trouble? He used the word include. I don't know.
It's like, it's tough.

Speaker 9 I got it. I'm a guardian.
It's like we're looking for diverse perspectives. We're looking for a different

Speaker 9 watch out. Like, you know what I mean? Or if the job description, you know, lists very different types of attributes that you're looking for.

Speaker 9 You know, and some of those attributes code towards various races. I don't know.
It seems very, it seems very fraught, to say the least, as far as the snitching is concerned.

Speaker 9 And I don't think it probably creates a very healthy workplace environment. And we have a great workplace environment at the bulwarks.
So I know how that goes.

Speaker 9 And it's not by telling your colleagues to snitch on each other if they get a little too woke. But here's my DEI thing.
thing.

Speaker 9 On like three podcasts this week, I've done a throat clearing about how I find a lot of DEI pamphlets and resolutions and like trainings dumb. And I do.
And Robin D'Angelo's book was really stupid.

Speaker 9 That said, though, the pendulum has swung so far to me.

Speaker 9 And it is like wild to think that we're at a point now in 2025 where it's like the government should not have any interest in making sure that people from different diverse perspectives are involved in these jobs because, you know, we've already ended racism.

Speaker 9 And to have the representatives of that government be like a group where the inside circle has more white South African males than non-white women.

Speaker 9 The Republican Senate majority leaders race included, I think, four people named John.

Speaker 11 Yeah, a lot of John's.

Speaker 9 Four white guys named John, right?

Speaker 9 And behind Trump, they had had all the richest people in the world. Got a shout out, Sundar was there.
Besides that, it was all white guys. Sundar is also a man.

Speaker 9 I think he's still identifying as male. So, you know, I should also say, while some of the trainings are dumb, it does feel like we still have a little bit of work that we can do.

Speaker 9 And it's probably not too harmful to have a couple of positions in government where they're trying to say, hey, you know, I don't know, maybe in law enforcement, we should have more people from marginalized communities.

Speaker 9 Maybe in this, right? I mean, like,

Speaker 9 it seems on its face like that the Trump people would be the representatives of we have ended racism is a little galling, I guess. Of course.

Speaker 11 I mean,

Speaker 11 their point is that, oh, it's all about merit.

Speaker 9 It's all about merit. That's why we got to put a drunk, weekend, fox and friend host in charge of the military.
Merit only. This is a merit-based show.

Speaker 9 Speaking of merit, imagine if I want to get to Tulsi in a second, but like imagine if Tulsi had never been red-pilled and she just,

Speaker 9 you know, stayed as kind of like a lefty, Bernie type in Congress and did a lot of MSNBC.

Speaker 9 And then, you know, Bernie got elected and made her Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 9 Like the DEI conversation around her would be insane. You know, I'd be like, there is, how could this person get this job? They're so unqualified.

Speaker 9 How could you put a Hawaiian woman in there just because she has the spirit of aloha? Like

Speaker 9 it is crazy that the stupidest Americans could put together an organization full full of mostly South African and like D-rate white men and be like, we've solved this. We've solved this.

Speaker 11 We're in a post-racial society. It's even worse than that because.

Speaker 9 How could it be worse than that?

Speaker 11 Well, because you said it was just government, but the actual executive order, if you read it, is they told contractors, private companies, that you can't do DEI anymore.

Speaker 11 It's like, you know, if you contract with the government, you're not, and you have DEI in your pamphlets or on your website, you're in trouble.

Speaker 11 So it's like the government is like enforcing this vision on private companies, too.

Speaker 9 This is the first actual job creation idea I've seen from the administration because Deloitte has so much DEI material on their website. They're going to have to hire in a full team of

Speaker 9 technical experts to come in to scrub everything.

Speaker 9 And they are creating some new works.

Speaker 11 Hold on, there's a good story there.

Speaker 11 And maybe it's replaced by AI, but like there's got to be some engineer somewhere who we profile who's like, all right, I got this new tool that I'm going to plug in.

Speaker 11 It's going to do a thorough scrub of our company's website. You know, any word diversity is off.
We're going to replace it. Like, what's a synonym?

Speaker 11 Yeah, there's got to be, there's definitely a new cottage industry of people who are like consulting people about how to just not look like you're, you know, celebrating diversity.

Speaker 9 There's also a no pride flag

Speaker 9 initiative. Yeah, only one flag.
Only one flag.

Speaker 9 And this is what we voted for.

Speaker 9 I mean, I guess three flags. There's the thin blue line.
There's the Trump flag.

Speaker 9 Confederate.

Speaker 9 American flag. Of course.

Speaker 9 No, they're flags. All right.
We have some other serious business on these EOs. This is serious.
Oh, no, this was all serious. I mean, the flag jokes maybe are not that serious.

Speaker 9 We had another executive order. I've received a couple of emails from listeners flagging the shrapnel from the EO regarding the National Institute of Health.

Speaker 9 Trump issued an executive order that stopped all external communications in NIH, which might seem like, what is that? Is that just press releases? Well, here are a couple of things.

Speaker 9 One is something called study sections, which are the official proceedings to review new grant applications for funding. This effectively holds up all research that the U.S.

Speaker 9 government does, pediatric cancer, Alzheimer's, anything, like because you have to have external

Speaker 9 communications with whatever doctors and experts to kind of review what types of grants for new research should be done.

Speaker 9 So we basically had a freeze on all scientific research in the federal government, which is great. It also includes like alerts about things like bird flu, right?

Speaker 9 This is why your egg prices are going up because, you know, there's another avian flu outbreak, but right now the government can't put out alerts about various areas where we've seen outbreaks.

Speaker 9 Is that that big a deal?

Speaker 9 Yeah, what could go wrong?

Speaker 11 You know, I'd rather not know if my,

Speaker 11 you know, eggs are like going to kill me.

Speaker 9 Just eat them.

Speaker 11 Take a chance.

Speaker 9 Maybe it's like a kind of a word of mouth thing.

Speaker 11 Hey, don't eat the eggs.

Speaker 9 Just don't eat those eggs. We're going back to the before times, you know, where you just

Speaker 9 hear rumors, you know, through secret channels. We can have like an underground bird flu railroad going through.

Speaker 11 An underground egg exchange.

Speaker 9 These eggs are fine. Don't worry about these eggs.
I also think that...

Speaker 9 And this is, I guess, 90 days or whatever, so she could say, okay, well, whatever. But RFK, your boy, we've got his nomination next Wednesday.

Speaker 9 We'll be live streaming that on the Bork YouTube, so everybody can check that out.

Speaker 9 But he has

Speaker 9 said that he wanted to end all research being done by the federal government across. I don't have the quote in front of me, but he wanted to end it on infectious diseases.
All infectious disease.

Speaker 11 Yeah, he wanted to look at like, you know, chronic diseases and things like that.

Speaker 9 But like, I mean,

Speaker 11 in the totality, and I've done a bit of prior reporting in this world because I kind of like obsessed over it for a little while many years ago.

Speaker 11 But look, the NIH is the premier scientific research institution in the world, right? It's a $40 billion budget.

Speaker 11 It's done immeasurable good and produced incredible breakthroughs across a host of different fields. It is the gold standard.
And various presidents over the years have lauded the work it's done.

Speaker 11 George W. Bush was a huge NIH guy.

Speaker 9 Obama, big.

Speaker 11 Biden, he was, you know, he wanted to do the whole brain cancer moose hunt.

Speaker 9 How'd that turn out?

Speaker 11 Well, they made real progress, honestly, but obviously

Speaker 11 they need to do more.

Speaker 11 I anticipate that this is a momentary issue here, but I think the larger issue here is what we should focus on, which is they're going to create a climate, whether it's this, whether it's RFK coming on board, whether it's Doge looking for serious budget cuts, in which the young scientists in our country, many of whom are here looking for a pathway to just stay here, they will look elsewhere.

Speaker 9 They'll just look elsewhere.

Speaker 11 Because there's too much uncertainty. And in scientific biomedical research, you need certainty.
You need five to ten year funding funding windows.

Speaker 11 You need to know that the government's going to be there to communicate with you and not change course.

Speaker 11 You need to know the government's not going to pull your grants because Elon, like, you know, read something on, you know, from Catcher 2 about some shrimps on treadmills and shit.

Speaker 9 And they're like, oh, let's pull it.

Speaker 11 You know, like, you need certainty. And so my hunch is that we're just going to see what is

Speaker 11 in essence a huge brain drain.

Speaker 11 And people who would normally stay here and produce studies through the academic system, to the universities, are just going to look to, South Korea, to China, to Canada, to Israel, to other places where they will say, hey, cool, come on.

Speaker 9 We will take your work.

Speaker 11 We will take your expertise and we will build off of the breakthroughs that you produce. And we'll get screwed for that.

Speaker 9 Well, I just, I think that's probably going to be good news for MAGA because they're like, look, we're going to get rid of all these smarties.

Speaker 9 And like those jobs, going to open up jobs for like the Turning Point USA campus chairman at LSU. Like they might now get to go go work at NIH.

Speaker 11 I know you're being a little tongue-in-cheek, but like, yeah, I actually think they might think that.

Speaker 11 And also like the other thing is like there was an announcement from the White House two days ago where Larry Ellison was like talking about, you know, AI is going to like, you know, produce these like amazing MNRA, RNA vaccines that are personalized and can cure your cancer.

Speaker 9 It's like, wait a second, just,

Speaker 9 I thought MAGA was like...

Speaker 11 super opposed to vaccines, but maybe AI will just solve all these issues and make the NIH totally obsolete.

Speaker 9 Let's hope, right? I'm optimistic about AI in medical spaces. I'm pretty pessimistic about the American government's health research regime going forward.
So we'll see how all that turns out.

Speaker 9 We don't do Schotten Freud here, obviously, when people experience the consequences of their vote, but we do want to inform when things happen.

Speaker 9 One of the other EOs, I want to flag is there's just a cross-government hiring freeze. This is again,

Speaker 9 who knows whether Russ Vogt actually wrote this EO. He hasn't been confirmed yet to run the OMB, but it's certainly in line with his mission to cut down the government and to

Speaker 9 not bring in subject matter experts, to only bring in political hacks and to get rid of people through attrition.

Speaker 9 So there's been a cross-the-board hiring phrase with a few carve-out exceptions, national security, border security, of course. This is already affecting people.

Speaker 9 There was a tweet I saw from a guy named John Basham. Attention, please help at POTUS Trump and at Senator Ted Cruz.
My wife is a nurse and was recently hired by the VA. Our home is packed up.

Speaker 9 We have a new home. We've spent thousands to move our family to Waco.
Following Trump's hiring freeze EO, VA rescinded her job offer. My wife is in tears and inconsolable.
My family is devastated.

Speaker 9 That is unfortunate. It's a pretty devastating story.
I should note that John Basham has on his feed that he's a very big MAGA supporter. So there you go.
That shit happens, man.

Speaker 11 It's all fun and games until it actually happens. And you're seeing already reports, VA issues at the VA because they can't bring in new people to help.

Speaker 11 You're going to obviously see, we just talked about it with the NIH. You're going to just see it across the board, except for the border.
We're going to surge at the border and we'll have that.

Speaker 11 This is the thing. The government actually does stuff.

Speaker 11 And people always are talking about how stupid the government is and and wasteful but that's because they don't know that the government's doing stuff that they don't recognize and so when your eggs have you know deadly viruses or salmonella and suddenly you can't eat those you know omelets that you love because they don't have health inspectors like yeah that's because the government does stuff and uh it it's going to be a rude awakening for a lot of folks so yeah so we're only three days in and who knows how the policies will all shake out but just as a quick score scorecard.

Speaker 11 How are you feeling, by the way? Three days in. Three days.
How are you actually doing?

Speaker 9 I'm feeling better than I was on Monday.

Speaker 9 I was in a really dark place on Monday. Yeah.
Kind of contemplating my life choices in a very serious way.

Speaker 11 The tone of your YouTubes were bleak.

Speaker 9 Bleak. I was doing a personal inventory of the worst days in my life and trying to figure out where it fit.
Where was it? Top 10.

Speaker 9 Just even doing that. Just even doing that kind of inventory is not really a great song.

Speaker 11 That doesn't sound healthy, Tim. Jeez.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it was good, though. Yeah, it was useful for me to kind of process.
I do want to do a scorecard, though, for the final three days, because we've got skyrocketing egg prices.

Speaker 9 You know, who knows, maybe temporary. We've had quite a few people, it seems like, lose their job because of the executive orders.
So we have some substantive job losses.

Speaker 9 We don't have any EOs really seeming like that focus on economic gains. You know, we've had some crypto, some gains in crypto.
So if you're if you're investing in crypto, you're looking good.

Speaker 9 Other than that, more guns,

Speaker 9 I guess more criminals have purchased guns. You know, we had the shaman said that he was excited that he could go buy guns.
So we've released comp beaters. We have criminals purchasing more guns.

Speaker 9 We have higher egg prices. We have MAGA Americans that wanted to work for the VA losing their job.

Speaker 9 That's our scorecard so far. We'll see how it turns out.
We'll continue to monitor it.

Speaker 9 We mentioned the director of national intelligence from Aloha, who is sitting next to the CEO of a Chinese spy app at the inauguration, which seems a little bit, maybe it's kind of keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer-type situation, but I don't think so.

Speaker 9 Semaphore is reporting: Tulsi Gabbard's bid to become Trump's director of national intelligence is on shaky ground. Republican lawmakers raising private concerns.

Speaker 9 Trump now urging her she has to get more aggressive. Republicans are hesitant about her past statements that some have read as too warm towards Vladimir Putin.
You don't say.

Speaker 9 And former Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad.

Speaker 9 The disappointing part of this report from our friends at Semaphore was that the Gabbard confirmation was set in contrast to Cash Patel, who apparently has been impressing Republican senators with his children's books about the insurrection.

Speaker 9 I don't know. Any thoughts on that? We got Cash and

Speaker 9 RFK are set for next Wednesday hearings. I don't know if we have a date for Tulsa yet, but any thoughts on the remaining numbs?

Speaker 11 Tulsi's date uncertain so far. And yes, I have a lot of thoughts because this is the subject of today's press pass.

Speaker 9 I wrote with Perticone.

Speaker 11 So I was at a briefing with what we have to refer to as a GOP member of Congress, those are the conditions of the briefing, last week on Friday.

Speaker 11 And the member went through the list of, or there was pressed on the list of the controversial

Speaker 11 nominees. And, you know, it's like RFK Jr.
And he was like, well, you know,

Speaker 11 should be fine because we've got a lot of pro-lifers who are going to be surrounding him. So I think he's going to be fine.
Cash Fatelle.

Speaker 11 He's like, well, you know, he said some problematic things in the past, but he'll be fine because everyone thinks he's, you know, he'll get beyond that. And then they were like, Tulsi.

Speaker 11 And he was like,

Speaker 11 she's got work to do. And that sort of like really jumped out at me.
Like, it was totally different tone and demeanor with respect to Tulsi compared to the other two.

Speaker 11 You know, the issues are plentiful, right? It's like, it's not just Bashar Asad and Putin and odd stuff. I mean, I was like, well, I got to figure out like what's in the record book.

Speaker 11 So I went through the archives of

Speaker 11 her house website and looked at the foreign policy section. I mean, she's an odd fit for this Republican Congress, even though they are totally remade by Trump.

Speaker 11 But she was very, you know, she was critical of any aid to Saudi Arabia after the Khashoggi assassination. She has encouraged the pardons of Snowden.
She's encouraged the pardon of Assad.

Speaker 11 She's somewhat supportive of the BDS movement. She's been somewhat critical of Israel for how it's treated the Palestinians.
Things that, like,

Speaker 11 you know,

Speaker 11 not every Republican member of Congress is on board with. You combine that with the fact that, like, you know, she was very recently a Democrat.

Speaker 11 And honestly, someone mentioned this to me that she's a woman. I think that's not a great recipe for her.

Speaker 11 I did talk to one very plugged in GOP lobbyist about this, and they made the point that I think is valid, which is

Speaker 11 they think she'll get through because the establishment type Republican senators know that Jon Thune would be in real trouble with Trump if she didn't get through.

Speaker 11 And so they want to throw Thune a bone and keep him in his place because they can't, Thune's about as good as it gets.

Speaker 9 You got to have somebody like Jon Thune in there.

Speaker 9 You want to know that you have somebody you can trust that as a backbone, who, when he was asked about the Capitol Police to protect him, getting mauled by supporters, being pardoned, you know, he said, well,

Speaker 9 sometimes shit happens essentially with the Senate majority. So it's important you have him in there because he'll respect the interests of the establishment.

Speaker 9 The other thing that jumped out at me when you sent a memo about that briefing with the GOP lawmaker was that there still remains like kind of a delusion among certain types of GOP lawmakers, let's say, that Donald Trump isn't like really going to do anything that he says.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that was the gist. You got that from the memo.
He's like, oh, it's going to be all right. It's just like all the challenging things.
Like, what about the mass deportation? What about this?

Speaker 9 It's like, well, you know, on that thing. And it's like, on the other stuff, the tax cuts are going to happen.
So, anyway, I was intrigued that that delusion still persists. All right.

Speaker 9 I have to get you on the final topic, which is Sam Altman versus Elon Musk. There was an announcement.
Trump put out an announcement. Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Sam Altman runs OpenAI.

Speaker 9 If people don't know,

Speaker 9 there's a long personal rivalry.

Speaker 9 I don't know, probably related to some micro-dosing party they were at in Silicon Valley at some point.

Speaker 9 I actually don't know the backstory on why Sam and Elon don't like each other. But Sam said that OpenAI was going to be contributing $500 million to investing in the country for some AI project.

Speaker 9 Elon replies to the announcement with

Speaker 9 bullshit. Shocking.

Speaker 11 It's like, bullshit.

Speaker 9 Not going to happen. And so,

Speaker 9 okay, so he's undermining Trump's own rollout on this. And then there becomes.

Speaker 11 I've never seen anything like that happen ever. It was incredible.

Speaker 11 A senior official at the government, and he's a government official at this point, being like, That's what the president made yesterday is just bullshit.

Speaker 9 What the fuck? It's insane. We'll see how long that lasts with Elon and Trump.
But I was actually more interested by Altman's response. So, Altman's getting just

Speaker 9 skewered on X by all of the MAGA people. Yeah, he's gonna keep it.
Going back to all his old Never Trumper tweets, he was a J.D. Vance, Tim Miller type, you know, back in 2016.

Speaker 9 You know, I'm the only one still standing. So, Sam sends this tweet that I have to read to you.
Watching at POTUS Trump more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him.

Speaker 9 I wish I had done more of my own thinking. I definitely fell in the NPC trap.

Speaker 9 I'm not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he'll be incredible for the country. Like, this is the man running the largest AI operation.

Speaker 9 Like, this is the person we're entrusting our AI future to.

Speaker 9 Somebody who's either so stupid or so gullible or so shameless that he was like, you know, I just had to watch Donald Trump Trump a little more closely before I could.

Speaker 9 And I realized, like, he was criticizing him through 2022. It's like, what has he seen in the last year? And then that he's using this

Speaker 9 online, like, if you don't know what an NPC is like a mega poster, Reddit poster thing where they like make fun of people who just go along with the conventional wisdom on everything.

Speaker 9 And they say that, like, you're like a non-player character in a video game. Like, who talks like this?

Speaker 9 Like, Sam Altman is tweeting like he is a median, intelligent, like, whenever trumper turned mega internet personality and just this whole suck-up routine is pretty scary another tweet that he sent today which i thought which is had me laughing

Speaker 11 and this was obviously directed towards elon was just one more mean tweet and then maybe you'll love yourself like these guys are like out here in the open just embracing these like weird psychodramas and the fragility of their collective egos is remarkable i mean you are worth so much money you've been asked to have so much responsibility for like literally the future of society.

Speaker 11 And you're out there being like tweeting at each other and being like, you know, stop being mean. And, oh, I was so stupid.
And I should have known more about Trump and done my research.

Speaker 9 It's just like, go to fucking work.

Speaker 11 Go build your AI. Like, get off the fucking Twitter and do work.

Speaker 11 Like everyone else. Okay.
Like, they tweet more than me. And my job is to tweet somewhat and follow this stuff.

Speaker 9 Like, what the hell?

Speaker 11 Go do work and stop doing this shit. And if you have problems with Elon, call him up.
We don't need to see this whole thing play out over X.

Speaker 9 I'm tired of it. I can't believe these emotionally stunted video game boys are running our future.

Speaker 9 But it also makes me think we are in a simulation, though, because it probably is an emotionally stunted video game boy like Sam Altman that is like.

Speaker 11 laughing at us in the sky right now because like how could this be i mean it's pa it's possible it's possible possible that we're in uh west world type thing but it's like

Speaker 11 at some point you just you gotta like you gotta like think to yourself how do these people and maybe maybe that's the way that i thought about this philosophically like do you have to be built like this in order to be this successful like do you have to be this online and this strivy and this uh emotionally insecure to like build this type of wealth or or or is it working the other way where you become the successful and you you feel constantly on edge and hurt and that you have to like lash out at all your critics in weird cryptic posts like Elon was on this morning making like totally bananas in not really particularly funny Nazi jokes it's like dude go do doge go do rockets like do anything other than tweet we don't need this anymore or maybe get deported I don't know could be part of our new immigration regime

Speaker 9 we're having some new stricter rules so we'll we might have to review your documentation uh sam Stein, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 9 We can discuss existential matters about the existence of our society on another day. Everybody, follow us on YouTube if you haven't.
Me and Sam do funny little bits from time to time.

Speaker 11 Can't wait for the RFK hearing.

Speaker 9 We'll be live for that. Up next, our newest bulwarker, Adrian Karaskio.

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Speaker 9 All right, and we're back with the newest bulwarker. He's the author of our new newsletter, Huddled Masses, which is going to be covering the Trump deportation regime or whatever emerges from that.

Speaker 9 He's reported on politics and Latino issues for over a decade, including at Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Politico, and The Guardian. It's Adrian Carraschillo.
Welcome to the pod, man.

Speaker 15 Tim, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 9 I was ranting with Sarah and JVL on the next level yesterday about how, you know, sometimes in our biz, in the political commentary biz, there is a tendency to like, after you learn what happened about something, the next question is like, will this matter?

Speaker 9 Like, will people care about this? And I am going to try very hard to resist that temptation, at least over the next year, because who the fuck knows is partly the answer.

Speaker 9 And there's not another election for, you know, 22 months.

Speaker 9 I mean, not another broad national election and so you know immigration is one example of this where I think that people are going to fall into a trap of well Donald Trump had a mandate on immigration and people like this so whatever and I think that is just totally the wrong way to look at this and like the implications of what happens in this area I think are about as great as in anywhere besides maybe the federal government stuff we just talked about with Sam.

Speaker 9 But I don't know. So I want to go with you.

Speaker 9 I want to break through all of the executive orders one at a time with you, but the broadest picture, like what is is your sense for, you know, kind of the mood about how much of this is saber-rattling, how much is going to be real, and the extent of the impact?

Speaker 15 I think that we wrote even before Trump became president that there were multiple parts here. There is a PR campaign.
There is a like, we're pitting a new coat of paint.

Speaker 15 on the deportations that were happening before. You know, ICE released the report in the end of December at Joe Biden's last, you know, ICE report, basically.
They got 81,000 criminals last year.

Speaker 15 So the United States was already getting criminals.

Speaker 15 You get to put a new coat of paint, you get to have the bully pulpit, and you get to say, oh my God, look at Tom Holman saying, we're getting so many criminals. So that's one part.

Speaker 15 These executive orders that we're going to talk about, they really do look to transform immigration in America, to the extent that Trump can do it.

Speaker 15 Yes, laws need to be passed by Congress, but the first Trump administration already sort of took a hatchet to the trunk of like legal immigration, asylum, and things like that.

Speaker 15 So now they are just continuing and now they understand the levers of government better. So this really is an assault on the immigration system.

Speaker 15 They are breaking down a lot of pieces of it, which we'll get into at the border.

Speaker 15 And so, no, it really is a new day, and they have put in a lot of things that are going to cause strife, not just for people who've come here, but there's directives that they can now go into schools and hospitals and churches.

Speaker 15 So this is going to be a very challenging and it's going to be very difficult for a lot of people.

Speaker 9 Let's talk to the EOs. I think think the one that we've gotten to since Monday on this pod is the birthright citizenship executive order, which is just preposterous on its face.

Speaker 9 I did a reading of the 14th Amendment, I think, I believe on Tuesday's pod. It's about as clear as you can get, you know, as far as the sum you want changed.

Speaker 9 You're going to have to change the Constitution. We'll see if our wise and noble Supreme Court agrees with the plain letter of the law, I guess, over the next couple months.

Speaker 9 But outside of birthright citizenship, let's tick through what some of the other EOs have been.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so he declared a national emergency at the border, which unlocks for him the ability to bring troops. He says the Secretary of Defense is going to send troops.

Speaker 15 So already it's 1,500 troops that are headed to the border with the likelihood that they could go up as high as 10,000 troops. You know, we could break that down if you wanted to.

Speaker 15 The fact that three days ago, the New York Times had a story about how basically the border was quiet at the end of Biden's term, but they've declared an invasion and they say that we're sending troops to the border, so we're sending troops to the border.

Speaker 15 Part of that is the military sealing the border and putting more barriers around the border. So that's the first couple.

Speaker 9 On the emergency side, what was the pretense for the emergency? Because he did this the last term, but the pretense was COVID.

Speaker 15 You're right, you're right. And you bring up a great point, which is that, you know, in the past, they were using pretenses.
There's this disease, so no one can come. It's just explicit now.

Speaker 15 He's calling it an invasion.

Speaker 15 This is the same language that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxon used in Texas, which a lot of people felt inspired the shooter in El Paso at the Walmart who said, you know, there's an invasion, so I'm driving 10 hours to kill Mexicans and Latinos.

Speaker 15 I mean, so it's fully U.S. policy that there's an invasion at the border right now, and that's where the national emergency comes in.

Speaker 9 So what do the groups you talk to on this one, I mean, is there legal vulnerability here?

Speaker 9 Or is there a sense that like the president has a wide berth to kind of declare emergencies at their whim yeah look I mean I think from from the national emergency

Speaker 15 the invasion and what that what that could unlock legally to things like which we'll get into using the Alien Enemies Act to go after cartels and gangs that are he is now designated terrorist organizations these are laws that have been on the books you know the alien enemies act has been on the books since 1798 which says that like another country is doing an armed invasion of our country and so yeah there's there's concerns that U.S.

Speaker 15 citizens could get caught up if you're Venezuelan and the gang that they're going after is Venezuelan. So yeah, there are so many of those concerns.

Speaker 15 I think the groups when I first talked to them were sort of shell-shocked. They knew this was coming, but you're like sifting through even the legal groups and then are trying to figure out which

Speaker 15 they're going to go after first.

Speaker 9 So the emergency of the border, birds-right citizenship, what else?

Speaker 15 Yeah, one of them is just the military like sealing the borders and putting up barriers and things like that, designating criminal cartels as global terrorists. That's part of it.

Speaker 15 They're also suspending refugee resettlement for four months until such time as further entering of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.

Speaker 15 So that doesn't look like that's going to come back anytime soon. I know they were canceling flights of people from Afghanistan, 1,660 people from Afghanistan.
Their flights were cleared.

Speaker 15 They were on the way. As people say, no one gets more vetting than refugees.
You know, it can take sometimes take years. and he's just sort of unilaterally canceling these flights.

Speaker 15 Those are a couple of the other ones.

Speaker 9 The Afghan refugee thing is so sick. And imagine being one of these people.

Speaker 9 The work to get out of the country, the horror there, to go to another country,

Speaker 9 to be waiting to come, to have your flight ready. It's just like, it's a total nightmare.
Is your sense on the refugee things that they're going to reduce that number to zero?

Speaker 15 refugees? I think that's the sense. They said that they want to revisit that in 90 days and see if it's in the best interest of the U.S.

Speaker 15 And that just seems like they're clearly going to say that it's not in the best interest of the U.S.

Speaker 9 Yeah, great. Huddled Mass is a good, it's a good name for the newsletter.

Speaker 9 You can see it's kind of already on the nose there. What about in the interior? Has there been any, did any of the EOs affect people that are here on visas or anything such as that?

Speaker 15 Some of the people who were here legally,

Speaker 15 they are causing sort of headaches for them. One of the things that I found really interesting was on,

Speaker 15 I don't know if you know about the CVP1 app, it was this app that people always talk about law and order and coming into the border orderly, in an orderly fashion.

Speaker 15 And that's something that the Biden administration created where they said, we're going to have this app. You sign up.
If you come in without using this app, you're done, you're gone.

Speaker 15 But if you use this app, you can sign up for an appointment. And this great Washington Post reporter, Adelis Hernandez, she had video of migrants crying because their appointments were being canceled.

Speaker 15 And so

Speaker 15 this is a piece where people say, wait, you're the law and order president. People say, get in line and do it the right way.
And this was people getting in line and doing it the right way.

Speaker 15 This is where, you know, I say it's sort of an assault from all these different parts because there's so many pieces here when it comes to the orders.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that video was actually what I was referencing at the, at the top when I was talking about on the next level, something I was like, I don't know if this will matter to swing voters in the midterms, and I don't really care.

Speaker 9 Like it was just, it was a horrific, you know, just a human anecdote.

Speaker 9 I will put the link in the show notes if people missed it of just somebody that had waited, had decided that they're going to go do this the right way.

Speaker 9 They were three hours away from their appointment. They shut down the app.

Speaker 9 And just totally brutal. I want to talk about one other thing before we get into kind of what's next and implications.
In addition to the executive orders, we have the Lake and Riley Act.

Speaker 9 Lake and Riley was the young woman that was killed by an undocumented immigrant. It became kind of a flashpoint during the campaign.

Speaker 9 And a lot of Democrats worked with Republicans on this, in in part, I think, because on the face of it, it was kind of pitched in a sort of common sense way, which is like criminal, illegal migrants, you know, should be punished or deported or what, you know, like it was just if you commit a crime, in addition to being in the country illegally, that person should not be given leniency.

Speaker 9 But the act like had a bunch of other stuff in it, as is often the case. They stuffed these things through.

Speaker 9 One of the unintended consequences I saw was that it was like this litigiousness, like it makes it easier to sue on immigration grounds if you're in the States.

Speaker 9 And Steve Bannon was pushing like now red state governors are going to be able to sue the feds if they feel like they're being forced to take H-1B visas or immigrants that are here in various legal ways.

Speaker 9 So talk to us about what exactly the elements are of that bill and what the implications might be.

Speaker 15 So fascinating because I think there was something about doing it at the beginning of the year where it did seem a little bit like the sort of the groups in the advocacy world were caught a little flat-footed.

Speaker 15 There's been a lot of reporting. People felt that, you know, maybe some of the Democrats hadn't read the bill.

Speaker 15 I mean, you know, to your point, state attorney general can sue if they feel that the federal government's not doing something biting correctly on immigration.

Speaker 15 Federal government is the one that runs immigration. So now you're empowering the Ken Paxsons of the world to find issue with anything and to launch all these lawsuits.

Speaker 15 On top of that, I think that there is so much in the political space. You mentioned the word criminal, and people say, Oh, no, absolutely, criminals should be out, you know, Americans and politicians.

Speaker 15 But this is as simple as somebody shoplifting now can be detained, can have their due process rights taken away. ICE has already said this is going to cost billions, and they're focused on criminals.

Speaker 15 And now they're going to get shoplifters, or they're going to get people with nonviolent, smaller crimes. So, you know, it's not surprising that Republicans push this.

Speaker 15 It is more surprising that a lot of Democrats went along with it and that there's parts in there that really seem to be sort of undercover and emerged after advocacy and everyone stepped up and said, wait, what are you doing?

Speaker 15 How are you voting for this?

Speaker 9 You mentioned that Ken Paxton, the Attorney General in Texas, the ability to sue the feds.

Speaker 9 One thing I think a lot of commentators are missing about what is coming in the immigration regime is that it is going to push a lot of power down states and jurisdictions and let them loose to do enforcement as aggressively as they want, right?

Speaker 9 And I think that while it might be the strategic idea of the Trump poo-bahs that like we're going to do raids in Chicago and in blue states to make blue blue politicians look bad, all these red state governors and constitutional sheriffs and attorney generals are going to feel political pressure to butch up and like demonstrate that they're tough on illegal immigration too and that they're going to have crackdowns in their states.

Speaker 9 And I just, I think about that in Louisiana. I think that there's going to be a lot of issues happening in local jurisdictions that people haven't really kind of wrapped their head around yet.

Speaker 9 I don't know what you think about that.

Speaker 15 I think before Trump became president, we saw it from... from readers.
We saw it from people who were Trump supporters that said, it's not going to be this bad. Stop fear-mongering.

Speaker 15 Like, this is not what's going to happen. We don't believe that he's going to do all this stuff.
Well, a lot of these things are happening, right?

Speaker 15 And, you know, in December, for example, example, a Missouri legislator said, let's do $1,000 bounties on undocumented immigrants. You turn in immigrants, you get a thousand bucks each, you know?

Speaker 15 And so people hear that and they're like, oh, come on, that's, that's not going to pass. This is crazy.
You know, to your point, like Democrats have really lost the enforcement battle.

Speaker 15 Like that's a little preview of my next newsletter. So, you know, a Democrat was telling me, you know, you want alligators with lasers on their heads.

Speaker 15 Like, like at this point, Democrats are sort of giving up on the enforcement piece, which again, only has Republicans saying, licking their lips saying, how much further can we go in these states?

Speaker 15 And so, yeah, it's going to be, I don't think people are prepared for what exactly is going to happen here.

Speaker 9 You know, the Democrats do have to be strategic here, right? I don't have to be strategic on this podcast.

Speaker 9 I can talk about whatever the fuck I want, but the Democrats have to be kind of like pick their battles, like what is winnable, what is going to be politically salient, what doesn't make them look like they're on the side of violent criminal migrants or whatever.

Speaker 9 You're saying that they're kind of just going to let the Republicans have what they want as far as border enforcement is concerned.

Speaker 9 Where are they starting to look to actually try to pick fights and limit the scope of this?

Speaker 15 A source yesterday was telling me that, you know, the law and order piece is an area where they can say like, wait, Trump said he was going to come in and bring law and order.

Speaker 15 He's canceling things like the CBP1 app that actually brings some order to this process.

Speaker 15 You know, what's going on with birthright citizenship is very much an area that is fertile ground for Democrats where you can say, this is not right. This is in the U.S.
Constitution.

Speaker 15 The executive can't edit the Constitution like it's a Wikipedia page. This is not happening.
So those are some areas where they can fight back.

Speaker 15 I was thinking of this frame of sort of like where enforcement, they're giving up so much on enforcement.

Speaker 15 It's like, yeah, you can have a border wall, but leave immigrants in the interior the fuck alone.

Speaker 15 You know, and I think that there's going to be fights on you're trying to tear apart families, you're trying to go after small businesses.

Speaker 15 ICE used to, there used to be migrants, immigrants who would be able to claim, let's say, sanctuary in a church, right? And why are they able to do that? ICE is not going to a church to drag you out.

Speaker 15 Well, now there was a directive literally under the cover of night the other day that DHS is now, there's a memo where basically you can go into churches, you can go into hospitals, you can go into schools, and they told ICE to use common sense.

Speaker 15 So, you know, I had a great legal source telling me that ICE offices are like police precincts. They're very individual.
They very kind of do their own thing.

Speaker 15 And so they very famously don't listen to memos and directives, by the way. So this is one where now they can just do what they want.

Speaker 15 And if somebody maybe heads into a church, maybe they can go in and drag them out, right? There's a lot of fear around schools and things like that.

Speaker 15 So I think that's the slippery slope for Republicans in the Trump administration. Are you doing things like this, which I think will play into the Democrats' hands? You're right.

Speaker 15 They can't oppose Trump on everything. But this is an area that I think could be problematic for Republicans.

Speaker 9 Yeah, well, the Christian Party. It's like, yeah, we're going to start going into churches to deport people.
It's just kind of that is right out of the New Testament.

Speaker 9 If you just sort of read between the lines, it's exactly what Jesus was advocating for. One last thing on enforcement, and this is going to be me editorializing.

Speaker 9 I'm wondering if you have any reporting on this from what happens on the Hill. I'm worried a little bit, to your point, that Democrats, in their rush to

Speaker 9 want to seem tough on border security and to concede to Republicans on border border security that they are going to bail Republicans out of a couple of budget pickles, you know, because they

Speaker 9 don't want to be seen as blocking immigration enforcement. You know, you can already see this on the Hill.

Speaker 9 There's some conversations happening where Republicans might cut a deal, want to cut a deal where they can like increase the debt limit and

Speaker 9 keep the government open in exchange for

Speaker 9 border security. I just think it would be a massive mistake for the Democrats to go along with that.
And I'm worried that they are.

Speaker 9 So I don't know if you've had any conversations with folks in the Hill or advocacy groups and how they're kind of thinking about the coming budget fight.

Speaker 15 It's a great question because I did see that reporting yesterday as well that they're considering some like huge deal on all these fronts.

Speaker 15 I did talk to a senior Democrat yesterday, though, who said, we're not going to be bailing them out anymore.

Speaker 15 If Republicans can't govern, Democrats shouldn't come in to help them out with all the problems that they're having with their own side.

Speaker 15 So I do think that that's one piece that's interesting and something to watch. I don't know for sure.

Speaker 15 I know people are talking about this big deal, but there's definitely Democrats who don't want to do that.

Speaker 9 All right, thanks so much. Newest Bullworker, excited to have you on board.

Speaker 9 Adrian Carraschillo will be continuing to be talking, unfortunately, because I think there'll be a lot of news on this front.

Speaker 9 So, well, look forward to having you back soon, and we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast with our buddy David French. See you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 16 Pedro lives out at the Wilshire Hotel. He looks out a window with that glass.

Speaker 16 The walls are made of cardboard. Newspapers on his feet and his father beats him because he's too tired to beg.

Speaker 16 He's got nine brothers and sisters. They're brought up on their knees.
It's hard to run when a coat hanger beats you on the thighs. Pedro dreams of being older.

Speaker 16 And killing the old man, but that's a slim chance. He's going to the boulevard.

Speaker 9 He's gonna end up

Speaker 16 on the dirty boulevard. He's going out

Speaker 16 to the dirty boulevard. He's going down

Speaker 16 to the dirty boulevard.

Speaker 16 This room costs $2,000 a month. You can believe it, man, it's true.
Somewhere a landlord's laughing till he wets his pants.

Speaker 16 No one dreams of being a doctor or a lawyer or anything.

Speaker 16 They dream of dealing on the dirty boulevard.

Speaker 16 Give me, you're hungry. You're tired.
You're poor. I'll piss on them.
That's what the statue of bigotry says.

Speaker 16 Your poor huddled masses, let's club them to death. Get it over with and just dump them on the boulevard.

Speaker 16 Get them out

Speaker 16 on the dirty boulevard.

Speaker 9 Going out

Speaker 16 to the dirty boulevard. They're going down

Speaker 16 on the dirty boulevard.

Speaker 9 Going out.

Speaker 9 The Bullworth Podcast podcast is produced by katie cooper with audio engineering and editing by jason brown this is matt rogers from lost culture is with matt rogers and bowen yang this is bow and yang from lost culture is with matt rogers and bow and yang hey bowen it's gift season

Speaker 9 stressing me out why are the people i love so hard to shop for probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired except for the guide we made in partnership with marshalls where premium gifts meet incredible value it's giving gifts with categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn't have.

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