Mark Joseph Stern and Dave Weigel: A Bad Day for Jack Smith

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Speaker 9 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 6 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 9 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 15 Hello, and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm here today with Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate, covering courts and the law, prominent figure on X.

Speaker 15 He was at the Supreme Court today for the immunity arguments, and he's coming at us live from outside the Supreme Court. So if you hear the birds chirping, that's just spring in Washington.

Speaker 15 Hey, brother, thanks for doing it.

Speaker 16 Hey, of course. A pleasure to come on.

Speaker 15 If we're coming out a little late today, guys, we wanted to wait until this testimony was over. So critical to both Donald Trump's legal prospects as well as the future of our democracy.

Speaker 15 So we've got a long interview with Dave Weigel coming on the second half of this. But Mark, I feel like we're going to start people off some bad news.

Speaker 15 I saw you're kind of live tweeting this, and basically, you sum this up: bad day for Jack Smith. Explain why.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it was not a great day for the special counsel because it sounded like at least five justices are pretty skeptical of this prosecution, at least particular details of the prosecution that really go to the heart of the case, which is Donald Trump's effort to abuse his powers of office in order to overturn the 2020 election and secure an unearned victory.

Speaker 16 You had all five male conservatives, it was an interesting gender split, really pummeling the government's lawyer, Michael Driben, with these hostile and aggressive hypotheticals, essentially suggesting that the real threat to democracy is not January 6th or the events that preceded it, but the efforts by the government now to hold Trump accountable for that.

Speaker 16 I think that Brett Kavanaugh, Sam Alito, and Clarence Thomas think this entire prosecution is basically unconstitutional.

Speaker 16 I'm not sure about Gorsuch and Roberts, but they too sounded profoundly worried about the very idea that a president could be charged for conduct that he committed while in office.

Speaker 16 And frankly, even though I'm a skeptic of this court, even I did not think it would be that bad.

Speaker 16 This was not a shining moment for SCOTUS when it comes to understanding the gravity of January 6th and the importance of holding holding Donald Trump accountable for it.

Speaker 15 I mean, so you follow these cases every session way closer than I do.

Speaker 15 Is it not possible that, you know, some of this was performative, you know, wanting to give the Biden administration the business a little bit, asking tough questions, and that, you know, when it comes to decision time, like, does that happen sometimes where the questions don't match the decisions or not really?

Speaker 16 Yeah, absolutely. And I think there might be some hope, especially for Chief Justice John Roberts, who often wears two different hats, right?

Speaker 16 He can be the institutionalist who approaches with caution, but he can also be the aggressive conservative who cut his teeth in Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice, who has some scores to settle.

Speaker 16 And here, I felt like he was switching them on and off, you know, at points he seemed to understand that, of course, someone could be held accountable for crimes, even if they're the president.

Speaker 16 You know, no man is above the law. law, that good stuff.

Speaker 16 But then he would sort of suggest to Driben, the government's lawyer, that this was a grave peril to the president's ability to carry out his duties because he would always be worried about the next guy prosecuting him and throwing him in prison.

Speaker 16 So I think the most interesting justice really was Amy Coney Barrett.

Speaker 16 You know, she made some interesting points about a compromise position here that would essentially send this case back down to the lower court and try to draw out some of the official acts.

Speaker 16 So for instance, threatening to remove someone at the Department of Justice because he wouldn't investigate voter fraud, that kind of thing.

Speaker 16 Drawing that out and saying, look, this can't be criminalized, but everything else, you know, talking with GOP strategists, creating these fake slates of electors, all of this private conduct, that can be criminalized and that can be tried.

Speaker 16 I mean, I think that's better than the alternative that Brett Kavanaugh was proposing, which is essentially chucking the entire case.

Speaker 16 But of course, it would mean more months of delays and probably another appeal to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 16 So I fear that even the best case scenario, which is a kind of compromise by Barrett and Roberts, would ensure that this case is not going to trial this year and maybe not even next year.

Speaker 15 Wow.

Speaker 15 The fact that it wasn't going to come to trial this year is something that I kind of expected, but the idea that it would be pushed back down to court for future review, that that was the best case option, I guess I was maybe a bit naive coming into this just because to me, the argument is so preposterous that Trump is making the idea of blanket presidential immunity.

Speaker 15 And that was, I think, highlighted very succinctly by Elena Kagan in this question of Trump's attorneys. Let's listen.

Speaker 17 He wasn't impeached. He couldn't be impeached.

Speaker 17 But he ordered the military to stage a coup and you're saying that's an official act.

Speaker 18 I think it would depend on the

Speaker 18 power of the Zeppelins whether it was an official act. If it were an official act, again, he would have to be impeached.

Speaker 17 What does that mean depend on the circumstances? He was the president. He

Speaker 17 is the commander-in-chief.

Speaker 17 He talks to his generals all the time, and he told the generals, I don't feel like leaving office. I want to stage a coup.

Speaker 17 Is that immune?

Speaker 18 If it's an official act, there needs to be impeachment and conviction beforehand because the framers viewed the that kind of thing.

Speaker 17 If it's an official act, is it an official act?

Speaker 18 If it's an official act, it's impeachment.

Speaker 17 Is it an official act?

Speaker 18 On the way you've described that hypothetical, it could well be. I just don't know.
You'd have to, again, it's a fact-specific, context-specific determination.

Speaker 17 That answer sounds to me as though it's like, yeah, under my attest, it's an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn't it?

Speaker 18 Well, it certainly sounds very bad, and that's why the framers have, and that's why the framers have a whole series of structural checks that have successfully, for the last 234 years, prevented that very kind of extreme hypothetical.

Speaker 15 All right, Mark, I mean, you can maybe do a coup.

Speaker 13 There's certain cases where you can do a coup.

Speaker 15 This is where we're at.

Speaker 16 So, yeah, I think Justice Kagan was pointing out that this alleged distinction distinction between private and personal acts leads to absurd results because at the end of the day, what this case is fundamentally about is Donald Trump trying to marshal the power of the executive branch to overturn a free and fair election.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, the idea that there can be some distinction here, I think it has some facile appeal because it promotes the idea of shielding a president from prosecution for, I don't know, ordering a drone strike somewhere, an invasion of another country.

Speaker 16 You know, some of the conservatives were saying, well, we wouldn't want Ronald Reagan to be prosecuted for Iran-Contra, maybe, or

Speaker 16 even sending troops into Central America without authorization. Okay, whatever, set that aside.

Speaker 15 Someone mentioned the Obama drone strike. I figured if that was Kavanaugh.

Speaker 13 Yes, he did.

Speaker 16 He did.

Speaker 16 And Trump's lawyer kept talking here and also in his briefs, claiming that Biden was illegally inviting undocumented immigrants into the country and allowing them to distribute fentanyl and that kind of nonsense.

Speaker 16 So, you know, there's like this idea that, okay, we want the president to be able to act freely, but this was not a president acting within the bounds of a normal kind of office holder.

Speaker 16 On January 6th, in the weeks and months that preceded it, Donald Trump was fully acting like he wanted to stage the kind of coup that Alina Kagan talked about.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's unclear what would have happened if the military had been more amenable to his demands.

Speaker 16 And so, I think that she really shattered this idea that you could just neatly kind of draw a line here.

Speaker 16 And that's gonna lead to a lot lot of tension and confusion behind the scenes that might boil over into the eventual opinion.

Speaker 16 Because the hope is for you know a majority opinion that sets a clear rule.

Speaker 16 I don't know if the court can get there, and a fractured opinion with a bunch of different kinds of ideas floating around that's just going to culminate in more delays in the lower courts.

Speaker 15 Geez, Alito made what seemed to be one of the more absurd arguments from the bench, not unusual.

Speaker 15 He said that you would encourage peaceful transfers of power by giving immunity in the future because incumbents will then know they can leave and not be worried about being prosecuted.

Speaker 15 What say you to that?

Speaker 16 Classic Sam Alito. I mean, he sounded enraged that this prosecution is even occurring.
I think I have to push back on his reasoning there.

Speaker 16 I do not believe that allowing Donald Trump to be prosecuted for what I think everyone pretty much acknowledges, unless they're totally brain poisoned by Fox News, was like at least illegal conduct on the civil side, if not criminal conduct.

Speaker 16 I mean, this was bad stuff that he did. I don't know if Alito is even there, though.

Speaker 16 He seems to think that this is some kind of retribution by the Biden administration, and he went to extremes to make that point.

Speaker 16 I'll just note, you know, of course, Clarence Thomas is married to a woman who was at the ellipse on January 6th, who herself pressured state legislatures to overturn the results of their election and appoint a fake slate of electors.

Speaker 16 And it was striking to me to sort of watch his poker face as it was pointed out during arguments that that is what Donald Trump himself tried to do.

Speaker 16 You know, one of the things in the indictment that's at issue here was pressuring state legislatures in places like Arizona to overturn the results and the question of whether that was unlawful.

Speaker 16 Well, Ginny Thomas herself was sending emails to individual legislators saying, I know you'll find it in your heart to overturn the results of this election.

Speaker 16 And it was just so outrageous to see him sitting on this case. He may well cast a decisive vote, even though, in my view, he's hopelessly conflicted.

Speaker 15 Yeah, let's make Donald Trump a soft autocrat who can't be held accountable and is above the law. And that's the way to save democracy.
That's the Alito case. That's interesting.

Speaker 15 One other thing that several people have mentioned, and I know you agree with me, I agree with this, but I'm just going to read Chris Hayes's take on this, which is something that drives me a little insane, I'll admit, is that Trump's own lawyers at his impeachment told senators not to vote to convict him because he could be prosecuted if it came to that.

Speaker 15 Now they're arguing the only way he could be prosecuted is if they had convicted him. Mitch McConnell also at the time said, we have a criminal justice system in this country.

Speaker 15 We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

Speaker 15 It's almost like these guys have all memory hold all that, and the justices have, and Donald Trump just gets to have both sides of this argument.

Speaker 16 The minimization of the events of January 6th that I witnessed in court today were truly disturbing.

Speaker 16 It really almost felt to me like, and I'm just, you know, hypothesizing here, but it feels to me like these justices know Clarence Thomas. They've all socialized with Ginny Thomas.

Speaker 16 I am concerned that in their minds, they have decided maybe these were just tourists who happened to wander into the Capitol on the wrong day. Maybe these were just misguided patriots.

Speaker 16 And that attitude really came through last week in arguments about the obstruction charges against January 6th rioters, as well as Donald Trump, a case called Fisher versus United States, where over and over again, the conservative justices questioned, you know, did these folks really obstruct a proceeding?

Speaker 16 Did they really engage in any corrupt behavior? Can they really be subject to prison time just for that?

Speaker 16 It feels like on the right side of the bench, like they are increasingly living in this Fox News universe. And so the question remains, like, can Chief Justice Roberts come to his senses?

Speaker 16 Or is he now fully under the malign influence of his colleagues to the right, who are drawing him closer and closer to this kind of MAGA jurisprudence that starts from the proposition that Trump must be allowed to do whatever he wants and works its way backward from there.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Mark Caputo wrote a great story about that other case called The One Weird Trick Trump Could Use to Get Away with January 6th. We're going to put that in the show notes for you.

Speaker 15 Mark Joseph Stern over at Slate. Follow his coverage.

Speaker 15 It's something I follow really closely in Supreme Court season. It's always spring when I'm following MJS.

Speaker 15 But thank you so much for coming on and for doing it right outside the courthouse here on a very busy day.

Speaker 13 I appreciate you very much.

Speaker 16 Of course. Thanks so much for having me on.

Speaker 15 All right, back on the other side, we've got Dave Weigel.

Speaker 15 We're going to be talking about what is happening in both the MAGA right and the progressive left, a little bit about Biden's signing ceremony yesterday. So stick around for that.

Speaker 20 Some moments in your life stay with you forever. In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey.

Speaker 20 and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later. There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 20 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me. Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.
I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 20 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one. So I started searching.
And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.
It's not just a marketplace.

Speaker 20 It's a place where stories live. Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.
eBay, things people love.

Speaker 20 Listen to OnPurpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family.

Speaker 10 with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 4 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 6 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 9 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 15 And we're back with my friend Dave Weigel, politics reporter for Semaphore, author of the Americana newsletter, because Dave actually gets out into America and reports on what's happening in our political scene from there, which is why I like talking to him.

Speaker 15 Hey, Dave, what's up?

Speaker 13 I'm doing great, although I'm in D.C. now, which doesn't count as America, according to one of our breeds.

Speaker 15 It does not.

Speaker 15 Hopefully you're not filing the Americana newsletter from D.C.

Speaker 13 I'm going to cross state lines, just to be careful.

Speaker 15 Okay, going to real Maryland, you know, Bethesda. I want to start with something that has nothing to do with our subject matter today, but that I thought you found amusing.

Speaker 15 On yesterday's podcast, I had Dana Mattioli, who wrote an interesting book about Amazon. We discussed that.
I received the following note from Amazon PR. Could you reflect this statement somewhere?

Speaker 15 Quote, Amazon's success is the result of continually innovating for consumers and small businesses over three decades to make their lives better and easier every day.

Speaker 15 The facts show that Amazon has made shopping easier and more convenient for customers, spurred lower prices, enabled millions of successful small businesses, and significantly increased competition in retail.

Speaker 15 There you go, people. That's the other side of the story.
Dave Weigel, I got this email and a chill came up my spine about the fact that this was the alternative life me that I was sending that email.

Speaker 15 And I'm just so happy I've come over to your side of things. Did I ever send you anything this embarrassing?

Speaker 13 No, I get those from. I don't want to dump Oppo on people, but I do get those.

Speaker 15 Yeah, don't dump on anybody. You've got to.

Speaker 13 I do get those sometimes, but it'll be something where I quote from a show. I can't believe the PR department wants me doing this.
They'll email me and say, hey, we saw you quoted from the show.

Speaker 13 Could you refer to it with this longer title that would have ruined the sentence and maybe people stop reading it? And I'd usually say, Oh, well, thank you, but here I linked it and we're done.

Speaker 13 That does look like a dark existence. Sorry to anyone in PR who listens.

Speaker 15 I love you, PR people. I love you.
It just wasn't right for my soul. I'm sure you'll have a nicer retirement home than me with Amazon shares.

Speaker 15 And I do concur that Amazon has made my life more convenient at times. Okay,

Speaker 15 I want to again get out into America for most of this conversation, but we have to start with Joe Biden yesterday.

Speaker 15 He was speaking to me. It was like singing Tim Miller's song in this final statement as he was signing the deal that provided the aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Gaza, and the Tech Tok Bam.

Speaker 15 Let's just take a quick listen.

Speaker 19 At the end of the day, most of us, whether we're Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, believe that America must stand up for what is right. We don't walk away from our allies.
We stand with them.

Speaker 19 We don't let tyrants win. We oppose them.
We don't merely watch global events unfold. We shape them.
That's what it means to be the indispensable nation.

Speaker 19 That's what it means to be the world's superpower and the world's leading democracy. Some of our MAGA Republican friends reject that vision.

Speaker 19 But this vote makes it clear there is a bipartisan consensus for that kind of American leadership. That's exactly what we'll continue to deliver.

Speaker 15 Dave, is he right? Is that resonating, do we think? I mean, that's really working for me. Is that going to work for Nikki Haley voters?

Speaker 13 I know that Republicans don't love when he says MAGA Republicans, but I think he was identifying the faction of the party that feels this way. They're pretty clear about it.

Speaker 13 There's not a MAGA faction that says, I want America to be weak.

Speaker 13 The faction says, hey, every time we get into a foreign entanglement, it's not worth it, so let's get out of them and let the chips fall.

Speaker 13 The new nationalism that the intellectual side of MAGA has been working on, yeah, that's basically it. You get frustrated sometimes.

Speaker 13 I should say I get frustrated sometimes with the conversation of the campaign because that's a pretty stark difference.

Speaker 13 This is a bigger difference even than the one that I think Hillary and Trump articulate in 2016 because that framework wasn't built yet for Trump yet, and it is now.

Speaker 13 This is very different from the previous 70 years of Democratic-Republican consensus on foreign policy.

Speaker 13 So when he brings that up, I get the sense that some people zone out, but that's one of the stakes of the election. You could have a nationalist president who says, yeah, let's just...

Speaker 13 shrink inside our borders and let everybody handle their own foreign policy and hopefully we'll end up with something pretty good. That's the new Trump approach.

Speaker 15 Maybe they don't want it to be weak, but they certainly don't want America also to be indispensable. I like that word, right, that Joe Biden used.

Speaker 15 And they're kind of like, well, maybe they like America the best, but being indispensable requires being, you know, relied upon. And they don't really want to be relied upon.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so you get this paradox of we're spending this money in Ukraine, but not here without the follow-up of, well, what we should spend the money on here. That's the populism that's missing.

Speaker 13 Well, so maybe that. That's something I think gets lost in some of the Biden coverage is the Biden take is quite popular.

Speaker 13 Most people do like the idea of being part of the country that, when something awful has happened in the world, is ready to mobilize and build a coalition and spend money.

Speaker 13 So, this is one of the more popular things he talks about.

Speaker 15 Do you feel like that's breaking through? I mean, Biden's theory of the case, right, is that upscale,

Speaker 15 you know, ranging from bulwark to dispatch to Nikki Haley types will like this, you know, sort of foreign policy, this vision of America.

Speaker 15 Some category of Obama Trump voters will like the investment side of things, you know, the chips, the building, et cetera. Question is, are either of those groups, you know, is it landing with people?

Speaker 13 Do you think? No, I was dealing with this yesterday.

Speaker 13 I was talking to a Republican Senate candidate in Massachusetts, so long shot, but he was making this critique about Democrats not focusing on the right kind of infrastructure.

Speaker 13 And that's the dodge I've heard more often is, yes, Democrats have implemented and funded a lot of what people talked about funding for 20 years, but they did it wrong. It's too green.

Speaker 13 The idea is that the Biden version of things is doomed and not going to work, or it's a boondoggle in some way. And therefore, the TBD Trump version will be better.

Speaker 13 I hear that pretty frequently. That's a way to say it without giving credit to Democrats who did it.

Speaker 15 To me, that feels like the upscale version.

Speaker 15 To me, that feels like the fancy Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo argument. We're like, really, I think what's happening, right, is like, they're like, okay,

Speaker 15 like the Biden agenda, you know, except for to the super voters that are showing up in these special elections, but like to the next layer down, like what Biden's trying to do is not really landing.

Speaker 15 And all they're seeing is like whatever he did yesterday, or was it two days ago where, you know, he read the teleprompter where it said pause.

Speaker 15 Like they're seeing that video clip on TikTok, but they aren't actually listening to the clip that I played at the top.

Speaker 15 And I think that's got to be a bigger worry for Biden than like the actual substance isn't breaking through and they're not investing in the right types of things.

Speaker 15 I don't think that that feels right.

Speaker 13 I don't know. They are still getting outplayed on optics, and it's annoying people in the media talk about optics like we have no ability to control them whatsoever.

Speaker 13 I think that you can cover everything that's said beyond just the part that goes viral. I guess that's the modern temptation: I covered a speech, but this part went viral.

Speaker 13 Does that mean that's the thing that mattered? You can avoid that impulse. But Trump just today had a drop-in

Speaker 13 at a construction site where he talked to union workers who love Trump. And it was a prefab event.
It was set up for TV cameras, mostly Fox News cameras. He took questions.
And will that circulate?

Speaker 13 If you're looking at your phone and you're looking at pro-Trump news, will that circulate as while Biden was giving a prepared speech and screwed it up to union workers who won't vote for him, Trump was with the real union workers?

Speaker 13 Yeah, sure. If you don't want to go and check out, was this real? Did he meet with people that were spontaneous? This happened with his

Speaker 13 Chick-fil-A visit in Atlanta. And I wouldn't say I fell for it, but I didn't pay a lot of attention to that initial visit.

Speaker 13 But the woman who was most excited to see Trump at that was was set up, was supposed to be there for Trump.

Speaker 13 And this is the thing that Trump gets away with that I think many candidates, many campaigns I've covered, if it turns out that somebody who is at your campaign event and is high-fiving and loves you was planted, that's the story.

Speaker 13 The story is that you're dealing with plants because you can't handle real pressure.

Speaker 13 I think the last time Trump dealt with that was his attempt to end run around Biden by having a rally in Michigan with union workers. And

Speaker 13 there was so much hype that most of the reporting focused on how those workers actually were not even mostly union. They just were people who loved Trump and got selected for the crowd.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that one did backfire. That's a good point.

Speaker 20 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 20 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 20 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world. I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 20 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again. I wanted the same edition back.
Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 20 So I started searching, and that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.
It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 20 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 13 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 20 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 9 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 6 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 9 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so the Pennsylvania primary was Tuesday. I didn't get around to talking about this yesterday.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Nikki gets, you know, 16% despite the fact that she's been out of the campaign for multiple months. There's some people that are very excited about this in the Biden world.

Speaker 15 I'm like maybe mildly encouraged by it. It's a closed primary.

Speaker 15 So this was not Indies crossing over. This was not the Democrats crossing over.

Speaker 15 How do you kind of navigate how encouraged Biden and how discouraged Trump should be by Nikki Haley getting 16% in a closed primary in Pennsylvania?

Speaker 13 Yeah, you know it was 8%.

Speaker 13 And the voters who went for Haley, they were mostly concentrated in Allegheny County, that's Pittsburgh, and then the Collar counties of Philadelphia. It's funny.

Speaker 13 There are parts of northeast Philly that are very pro-Trump where he destroyed her, and then you drive 10 minutes to a suburb with Whole Foods, and she got like 30% of the vote.

Speaker 13 But those people have been Republicans, and they voted. They've had to choke down nominees they don't like very much for a while now.
They had Trump, they had Doug Mastriano.

Speaker 13 They've just been voting for Democrats without leaving the party because if you're in Bucks County, for example, where Haley did, he got about 19% of the vote, they all voted for Brian Fitzpatrick for Congress in the same primary.

Speaker 13 And that's one reason her vote was pretty big is because the most competitive primary with a MAGA guy getting like 38% of the vote was in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, those are not new gettable voters for Biden. I think it was significant, though.
There wasn't much of an anti-Biden vote. I saw the uncommitted boycott Biden vote.
It got a... Not that much.

Speaker 13 It got about 6% of the vote. It did very well around college campuses like you'd expect.
But you're already seeing in this primary a fade of that.

Speaker 15 I think I saw it got like 30% at Penn. And it's similar, in like the opposite dichotomy of what you're talking about with the Trump votes in the suburbs.

Speaker 15 If you're in Philly, it was like got 30% in the Penn precinct. And then, you know, five minutes away in the black, you know, urban district of Philly, it got 3%.

Speaker 15 Yeah. You know, just a total flip.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's what happened, but that's that's leading to what's going on in the larger universe of Democratic politics is that as the protest movement just vote in the primary and vote against Biden, that's, I think, plateaued or sputtered a little bit and direct action has picked up, which is what Democrats are more worried about.

Speaker 13 The protest vote they can handle more than what we're seeing every day.

Speaker 15 Just to credential you, because I know this, but maybe some of our listeners don't. You've been covering the, well, can we call it the weirdos on both sides? I don't know.

Speaker 15 You've been calling the activists.

Speaker 13 Let's call them the earnest activists on both sides for a long time, but you were going to net roots, like back in the mid-aughts and doing this sort of stuff right i mean you've been kind of deep in this world for a while yeah i have it's changed a lot one of the things that i if i need to try to impress somebody i'll say i covered aoc very early on i was interviewing her in 2017 when to be fair there's a documentary crew following her so it wasn't just me but my coverage has always gone through grassroots politics and in the last 20 years before that but in the last 20 years of stuff i've covered that has meant people who have trouble getting taken seriously by let's say, CNN or New York Times, but end up being very relevant.

Speaker 13 Sometimes they're irrelevant. Sometimes they peter out.

Speaker 13 But every once in a while, somebody wins a primary and they're look at the coverage of Marjorie Taylor Greene before and after she won her primary.

Speaker 13 It was, well, obviously there's somebody running who can't possibly win. We don't need to pay attention to this.

Speaker 13 I'm always in the let's pay attention to everything business because who knows how it could metastasize.

Speaker 15 Oh, has it changed? You piqued my interest with that question.

Speaker 15 I do feel most out of my element in like progressive activist world. What are the ways that things feel different now than they did in 2007 or in the Obama years even?

Speaker 13 So in the progressive world, there's a split. You mentioned Netroots.

Speaker 13 That's a good place to start it because that 2007 Netroots, the sort of people who were there, the progressive activists who were anti-Iraq war, organized for Howard Dean or for Wesley Clark in 2004, they are very happy.

Speaker 13 They were largely suburban Democrats or big city white liberals. There was racial diversity, but this is mostly a white liberal movement.

Speaker 13 And they wanted policy changes, and they didn't get ⁇ they got some from Barack Obama. They got a lot from Joe Biden.

Speaker 13 The voter who ended up voting for Elizabeth Warren, basically, has been pretty happy with Joe Biden. But that changed over time, and I noticed this with Netroots.

Speaker 13 Netroots is the ⁇ there is no liberal CPAC, but this is the closest thing to it. It's all these progressive groups that meet up.
It started as something for people who had web logs, i.e. on the net.

Speaker 13 Now it's other groups. By 2014 and 15, it became more of a clearinghouse for all sorts of progressive groups, and identity politics became a bigger part of this.

Speaker 13 So Netroots became famous, and this is now nine years ago, for getting candidates to show up who'd get interrupted by protesters. And Bernie Sanders was interrupted.

Speaker 13 Martin O'Malley was interrupted and he said all lives matter and he was basically heckled off the stage.

Speaker 13 That part of the movement has been largely less satisfied by Joe Biden and more happy working outside the party and protesting. That has changed.

Speaker 13 The Biden White House has brought a lot of people into this tent. That's one of the stories.
That's one of the things I think Republicans are correct when they attack him for.

Speaker 13 They wish it was the 1996 Joe Biden who was governing, and it's not. It's a more progressive Joe Biden.

Speaker 13 But those activists, you've started to see people who have drifted away from electoral work saying, there is no point to this. When we tried to elect Bernie Sanders as our moonshot, it didn't work.

Speaker 13 So we're going to stay outside the party.

Speaker 13 And this includes everyone from people who are in a safe state and just won't vote for them or accelerationists who believe, I don't know how many times you need to

Speaker 13 learn that this doesn't work, believe that if you get another Trump term, then the capital R revolution is going to come and people will be so angry that they will obviously overthrow Trump and start a new progressive era.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think that Fissure is interesting.

Speaker 13 Yes, it's true.

Speaker 15 The Biden has brought in a lot of progressive ideological folks into the administration.

Speaker 15 Also, his inner circle is like 65-year-old white men from the DLC and his chief of staff is like a former corporate executive.

Speaker 15 His staffing is kind of reflective of his coalition, this very broad ideological spectrum.

Speaker 15 And so, in doing that, Biden is necessarily the agent here, but like how it has happened is that the people that were not kind of brought in or wanted to be more adversarial are now like really outside the tent.

Speaker 15 AOC is like just doing a selfie with Biden yesterday, right?

Speaker 15 And then there's now another kind of more radical group that it's like the relationship with Biden feels different than it did with Obama, where like the activist types are like trying to push him left, push him.

Speaker 15 And now it's like the activist types are pretty adversarial and more, I don't know, maybe more outside of the party mainstream.

Speaker 13 On certain issues, Biden has done a pretty good job of keeping the climate movement happy. But what changed, and that you bring up the Earth Day event is a good way to get into this.

Speaker 13 That's with Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, AOC. These are all people who worked a lot with the Sunrise movement, which is this progressive startup in the end of the Obama years.

Speaker 15 Were Sunrise the ones that Diane Feinstein, R.I.P., was like shouting at me like, I will not get lectured by you. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Okay. Yeah, they're the ones who most famously protested inside Nancy Pelosi's house office and AOC joined them.
I was there for that when that happened.

Speaker 13 But anyway, they got a lot of what they wanted.

Speaker 13 But if you look at what Sunrise is is working on now, it is mobilizing around ceasefire in Gaza, stopping the Israel's war in Gaza.

Speaker 13 Progressive groups, they either were working on Israel Gaza issues before, or especially these younger progressive groups, have pivoted to make that the central mission.

Speaker 13 And a lot of that is staff-driven and volunteer-driven. If you have a young membership in one of these organizations, chances are they went to college.

Speaker 13 Chances are they're progressive and they're very, I'd say, this is a loaded term. I keep, I almost said anti-Zionist.
I don't think that's the wrong term.

Speaker 13 These are people who say, can't we just do to Israel what South Africa did 30 years ago and replace this government with one that's secular and nice?

Speaker 13 That attitude, I think, is the one that's most prevalent on the left.

Speaker 13 And a lot of the organizations that were, you know, working with Biden sometimes, opposing him sometimes, they have been moving towards opposition because of Gaza.

Speaker 13 We will oppose you until you move on this.

Speaker 15 And meanwhile, AOC and the folks that are still trying to get the climate stuff done are engaging. I guess that's the contrast I was trying to make.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I think the most dramatic example of that, dramatic if it can be an X post,

Speaker 13 but AOC's comments on Colombia

Speaker 13 have been measured. And also, when Mike Johnson was there yesterday, her post on X about him being booed was that he wants to take away the reproductive rights.

Speaker 13 So AOC is trying to bring the conversation from an issue that divides Democrats to an issue that unites Democrats.

Speaker 13 And if you're an outsider who wants to blow up the party and bring about the revolution, that's bad.

Speaker 13 Like you want, you want Democrats to be divided so that Trump can come in and then you can have a bigger protest.

Speaker 15 By 2038, me and AOC are going to meet in the middle. I don't know.
Like, there's just a lot happening with AOC. Okay,

Speaker 15 we kind of went down a path I didn't mean to there, but

Speaker 15 I think that's interesting context is now we get to the actual politics of all this. So there was Summer Lee is one of the lesser-known squad members.

Speaker 15 For listeners who don't know her, she won a primary. There was some scuttle butt that she might lose.
I think that smart observers like Dave didn't really think that that was going to happen.

Speaker 15 So talk a little bit about that primary. Summer Lee's been not like AOC, actually,

Speaker 15 more forceful on the Gaza issue in particular. There are a couple other primaries still to come on the squad that maybe are more competitive.
Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman.

Speaker 15 So anyway, talk about the Summer Lee race and then we'll get on to the other ones.

Speaker 13 Yes, Summerlee won in 2022. She represents a reformed district that's most of Pittsburgh and then some more conservative suburbs, but it's a huge Biden-landslide district.

Speaker 13 John Fetterman won up by 30 points. It's a safe seat.
It's one they shouldn't lose.

Speaker 13 But in 2022, APAC and its allies were trying to prevent more Israel critics from winning, and they spent $4 million in the primary, their UDP, their PAC, to beat her with a Jewish Democrat who was more moderate.

Speaker 13 He almost won. He went from basically 3% in the polls to a few thousand votes short of winning that primary.
And then they came back in the general election and spent more money against her.

Speaker 13 And this year, this cycle, I would say in

Speaker 13 October 8th last year, if you talked to Mark Melman and AIPAC, they said, yes, we'd love to unseat every squad member because they're now in favor of a very unpopular Israel-critical position, and that's going to be a loser, and we're going to beat them.

Speaker 13 And they've, I'd say, tacked back their ambitions since then because,

Speaker 13 as we were talking about, among Democrats, just this is this is not popular. The war is not very popular.
Funding the war is not popular. Funding Ukraine is.
Funding Israel isn't.

Speaker 13 And this is not just everyone who's joining Protestant College campus or pitching a Coleman tent. These are average Democrats saying, I don't like the video I'm seeing from there.

Speaker 13 So Summerlee was in a much better position there. She also just ran in a very AOC way as a Democrat who is getting stuff done with a Democratic president.
And so in 2022, APAC et al.

Speaker 13 said, this crazy leftist is going to undermine Joe Biden. And this year they said, well, she's part of a movement that's undermining Joe Biden.

Speaker 13 She hasn't denounced the uncommitted movement, the protest movement. And she also, she could be divisive, but her ads were all her talking about the money she brought in, that her in supporting Biden.

Speaker 13 She almost was with him. Biden was in Pittsburgh a week before the election, but he was, she was in D.C.
for votes, but he called her out from the stage. They used that.
She ran as a normal Democrat.

Speaker 15 Welcome to the machine, Summerlee. Welcome to Establishment Wins.

Speaker 13 Yeah, she ran as a normal progressive Democrat who disagreed with Biden on one big issue. If she was a challenger, could she pull that off? I'm not sure.
As an incumbent, she definitely could.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 In my circles, the Scuttle was never optimistic about that race from the, it's not really my circles, but from people in the Democratic Majority for Israel world, the center left folks that would rather have the squad lose in primaries.

Speaker 15 When I talked to them, they were never that optimistic about that race. They are more optimistic about Jamal Bowman in New York and Corey Bush in St.
Louis.

Speaker 15 What say you about the state of those races?

Speaker 13 Yeah, they're pretty honest about this, too. Not that political operatives aren't always honest, but

Speaker 13 sometimes they'll be on the record this, off the record something different. In this case, they'll say on the record.

Speaker 15 On the record, I feel very confident about we have all the momentum. The wind is at our back.

Speaker 15 Off the record, Dave, if you hear anybody looking for a new staffer, I think I'm going to be out of a job in six weeks.

Speaker 13 No, totally. In this case, again, Melman, APEC, they'll say, Jamal Bowman and Corey Bush are famous for things that unrelated to Israel that they have screwed up, and that has made them unpopular.

Speaker 13 And we have opponents in those districts who've raised a lot of money.

Speaker 13 So in Bush's case, it's her use of campaign finance money for security that may have benefited her family, which is under a house ethics investigation. And in Bowman, it's the fire alarm.

Speaker 13 It's that he pulled a fire alarm and delayed this vote last year, which it's one of those things. I mean, you've worked on the campaign side.
That's the dream.

Speaker 13 You want your opponent to have the voter who hears about him is immediately associating him with something negative. And that's what happened with Bowman.
Oh, Bowman, the fire alarm guy.

Speaker 15 And he lied about it. And also in the context of the January 6th, I mean, it was bad in any context, but it's particularly, I think, it made it worse.

Speaker 13 Since then, more opposition research has been done on him, and he's reposted or said some things about Israel about October 7th, about 9-11. He's just had some left-wing,

Speaker 13 I'm not trying to minimize him just without getting too much into them, some left-wing foreign policy views that are not mainstream among Democratic voters in Westchester County.

Speaker 13 And so he's been vulnerable. Yeah.
I can put it in my words, some conspiracorial shit. That's why you're the host.
Much more succinct. But he said more stuff that made him vulnerable.

Speaker 13 Summer Lee was much more careful than that. AOC is much more careful than that.
I remember AOC had a crazy anti-Semite at her victory party who

Speaker 13 did one volunteer day for the campaign and then showed up to get on TV. And the campaign said, nope, that's not us.

Speaker 13 She's always been very clear about that. You maybe even see the video of her being chased a couple months ago by protesters demanding that she call what's happening a genocide and she tells them off.

Speaker 13 They're more careful. They're just better politicians at that level.
than Bush and Bowman. So if you talk to these Israel groups, they see Bush and Bowman.

Speaker 13 They also see Ilhan Omar, who they see as vulnerable and the same sort of potential ethics issues, but not Israel.

Speaker 13 They don't say they are going to lose because in their district their position on Israel is unpopular. They acknowledge that it is not unpopular.

Speaker 13 For them to be ceasefire candidates in Minneapolis and St. Louis and Westchester County, that is not.

Speaker 13 Bowman's is the least. There are a lot of Jewish voters who disagree with him about that.
That's been an issue for him. But it's not a winner among Democratic voters.

Speaker 13 You need them to screw up in some other way, which is what's been happening with, especially those first two, a little bit with Ilhan Omar.

Speaker 15 Any other primaries you're looking at?

Speaker 13 On the Republican side, I am watching the next few weeks of primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska, where there are members who voted for Ukraine aid and they had opponents already, and their opponents are running really hard on that.

Speaker 13 In West Virginia, it's Carol Miller, who represents kind of the southern tier of the state, who's running against Derek Evans, who's most famous for being elected to the state legislature, then being in the Capitol on January 6th, then resigning from the state legislature and now running as a former political prisoner.

Speaker 15 A friend of a friend is doing working on a AG race there and I guess him and the other guy, you know, they had an event together and it was like multiple people who were in the car going to January 6th.

Speaker 15 So anyway, real MAGA.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and then in the last few days, his message is not just that. It is, I want to bring money to West Virginia and my opponent's giving all your money to Ukraine.

Speaker 13 I mean, he has memes of the incumbent waving a Ukraine flag.

Speaker 13 If you pay attention to conservative media, that image of members of Congress taking these flags from Seth magazine in Rhode Island and waving a Ukrainian flag, that's something I think a lot of Americans probably moved on from and didn't hear about.

Speaker 13 That's very well known if you are like a rumble watcher. And so that, and then in Omaha, polling says that Don Bacon is fine, but his opponent is doing the same sort of thing.

Speaker 13 And the chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party just endorsed Don Bacon's opponent. Same sort of reason.
The Democratic primaries I'm watching through August, we just discussed.

Speaker 13 With the Republican ones, I'm wondering how quickly opposition could be ginned up but i'd also mention texas west texas tony gonzalez's race against brendan herreira that's been a real flashpoint for this and mike johnson went to campaign for gonzalez and gates campaign for the other guy yeah and there are a number issues there there's immigration there's guns but ukraine is the new one where it's how dare this guy show his face in this district after voting for money for ukraine which Among Republicans, it's not toxically unpopular, but it's less popular than with most of the country.

Speaker 13 And with a primary voter, with somebody who votes in a runoff in May, might be a very popular issue. Yes, I too am angry about this Ukraine thing.

Speaker 13 The one thing they've got going for him is that obviously Donald Trump doesn't care. He doesn't talk about it.

Speaker 13 Once he had a good meeting with the president of Poland, he said, eh, but Ukraine, whatever.

Speaker 15 I mean, he's not saying nice things about it, but he's not trying to kill people over it. And that's a category difference.

Speaker 15 I'm wondering just your thoughts generally. You know, this kind of sparked a question for you since you're in these worlds.
Like, to me, maybe the momentum on this is starting to shift a little bit.

Speaker 15 Throughout most of the year the energy in these primaries like on the democratic side like you said are oh it's best to kind of say you're working productively with joe biden and that you know not tack to the middle really but tack to the competent at i'm getting things done and on the republican side the momentum continues to be to tack to being craziest son of a bitch in the race i i do you see that contrast still or is that overstated at all no that's that's basically true there's also i think a slight slant for democrats in primaries the If you're a woman, if you're not a white guy, that's still sort of a plus.

Speaker 13 But look at the primary ads. You can look at ads in a Democratic primary right now, and they are not, I'm the Democrat who's going to bring us Medicare for even a safe seat even.

Speaker 13 Look at the districts around Baltimore that are open. They're just running on, yeah, I want to fight for health care and gun control and abortion rights, but I'm...
better at it than my opponent.

Speaker 15 I'm more of a fighter.

Speaker 13 And whereas every Republican ad that you watch, because I watch them all and I love this part of my job, every ad is a version of I will support Trump the most.

Speaker 13 And here is something my opponent said about Trump in 1993 when he had a bad us weekly cover. And because of that, he is a traitor and you can't vote for him.

Speaker 13 It's very Trump-centric, and it's very, I'm the one who's going to blow up Washington. That is not the attitude with Democrats.

Speaker 13 As frustrated as Democrats are, they want members of Congress, even they want their challengers to go and do things. And that's why AOC does not have a left-wing primary challenger.
You tweeted her.

Speaker 13 People are welcome to tweet her, but there's no one in the district who says, I'm the radical who's going to not do things.

Speaker 13 The fact that she's in that position in Congress and bring money back, the least popular she ever was is when she, I wouldn't say blew up the Amazon deal, but when she was a driving force against bringing Amazon to Queens,

Speaker 13 that was unpopular among Democrats. Like they were not demanding that she, yes, stop that and bring the Pullet Borough here.
No, that's not how Democrats in Prime Murray's vote.

Speaker 15 We might need to brainstorm and just think about how you watch all these Republican ads.

Speaker 15 We don't need to brainstorm on a YouTube segment with Dave and Tim where you pick an ad and then you get to show it to me and I get to, and I react to what has happened to my former partner.

Speaker 13 It's like half of YouTube now. I love that.

Speaker 15 I know. I'm out of one bonus dessert.
We'll see how long this goes. But you have a great story this week, which is what prompted this because it was a question.

Speaker 15 I saw my book editor, actually, Eric Nelson, sends out this tweet. It's like, will somebody tell me why these protesters are wearing masks outside?

Speaker 15 And because you've been going to Netroots Nation for 20 years, Dave Voggo's like, well, I can report this out. People want to know why are the protesters wearing masks outside? And so what happened?

Speaker 15 You called them and

Speaker 15 they told you why? Talk to us about why are the Gonzale protesters wearing outdoor masks?

Speaker 13 No, I called a lot of people and

Speaker 13 not everyone responded. This is part of the story, is that there are a lot of people who are taking part in protests right now who don't want to talk to media and be identified.

Speaker 13 But I called the organizers of the March on the DNC, the people who met in Chicago a couple of weeks ago to plan how they're going to disrupt the DNC in the streets in Chicago with the National Lawyers Guild.

Speaker 13 And I talked more more for background with other protest groups because I had just kind of scanned and said, okay, I'm noticing that a lot of these protesters outside with their arms linked, closing a bridge or something, have masks on.

Speaker 13 Why is that? So all the ones I could talk to, they said, well, it's a combination of things.

Speaker 13 A part of this is that In our movement on the left, there is a lot of solidarity with people who have comorbidities, who have compromising immune systems, and we do take COVID seriously.

Speaker 13 The DNC marchers were most clear on this. Yes, our movement still believes in the COVID emergency, even though Biden doesn't, and that's one of our problems with Biden.
That was one reason.

Speaker 15 Not so seriously. They don't take it so seriously that they follow the recommendations and the guidelines.

Speaker 15 We take it even more seriously than the folks that say you should mask indoors in tight space. Anyway, okay, we take it so seriously, we're going to wear it outside in the open air.

Speaker 13 Got it. All right, continue.
Yeah, I'm giving that preamble, though, because I don't think they're all lying about this.

Speaker 13 If you go to Berkeley, are you more likely to see somebody wearing a mask outside than you are in Oklahoma City? You are.

Speaker 13 The main reason, and like this is the National Lawyers Guild, which is sort of the official, unofficial legal clinic for all left-wing protests, they said, no, this is something we advise because people don't want their identities to be exposed.

Speaker 13 And I talked to left-wing groups that have dealt with activists being doxxed, right-wingers showing up, taking their photos, putting their faces on Twitter, and then they get harassment.

Speaker 13 They said, no, this is a thing that we recommend people do.

Speaker 13 If you're going to do direct action, wear a face mask, and you're allowed to because since COVID, face masking in public, which a lot of states had banned or limited, is basically still illegal everywhere.

Speaker 13 You've started to see a rollback of this. And Philadelphia is an example.
Philadelphia was having a problem with just kids robbing stores, wearing masks, so they put in a mess.

Speaker 13 This was happening in Oakland before I moved.

Speaker 15 Like dudes are just going around wearing the balaclavas everywhere.

Speaker 13 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 13 I don't blend the two too much, but the commonality is that you couldn't do that in 2019.

Speaker 13 Like there were people who were protesting in Charlottesville in 2017, protesting Occupy Wall Street, and they'd get arrested because they're wearing masks, and the law said you couldn't do that.

Speaker 13 And in 2020, very quickly, every the one I focus on the story is New York, where Letitia James, the Attorney General, points out, hey, the governor just put in this mask mandate.

Speaker 13 However, we have this law on the books from the 1870s that you can't wear a mask in public. So what do we do about that? And the legislature within days votes to get rid of the mask ban.

Speaker 13 And so the Lawyers Guild is very clear on this, that there is a new right to privacy that was given to people because of COVID, and people should use it.

Speaker 13 And I've linked to a legal clinic that I can watch where they say, hey, if you are taking place in direct action, this is great.

Speaker 13 You can wear an N95, you can wear a face mask, and it will be harder to identify you. So that is why you're seeing the face masks at protest.

Speaker 13 It's not that everyone in the quad at Columbia has no immune system. It is that people are very cognizant.
I've been told I should conceal my identity. I shouldn't just blab out who I am to everybody.

Speaker 13 I've been told by lots of people that if I'm identified as a protester at this rally, I might have my job offer rescinded or my legal clerkship taken away. So that's why they're doing it.

Speaker 15 I guess I would just say friendly advice to my progressive friends.

Speaker 15 If you want to go to one of these things, you're concerned about your identity and you are an earnest supporter of the plague of the people in Gaza, which I totally respect, just find something else to wear.

Speaker 15 The N95 is triggering. The rest of us, the rest of us do not not want to remember the times where we had to wear an N95.
I see you in N95 and immediately I'm like, oh, in an airport, I get it.

Speaker 15 I get it. Okay.
Comorbidities, et cetera. But if I see you in an outdoor N95, it triggers me.
It brings back bad memories and

Speaker 15 it does not bring me to your cause. Let's just put it that way.
Okay, I'm over time with Dave. I wanted to celebrate the end, the demise of Gateway Pundit.

Speaker 15 People that don't know Gateway Pundit, they went out of business thanks to...

Speaker 15 work of some good progressive activists actually who are suing them and who are going after their advertisers. Shane Moss and Ruby Freeman were suing them.

Speaker 15 So, we will send people out to some music celebrating the demise of Gateway Pundit. Another win for the righteous and the good against the anti-democratic forces in our country.

Speaker 15 Dave Weigel, Semaphore, Americana Newsletter, do sign up for it. He's the best.
Come back soon.

Speaker 13 Thank you very much. Yeah, Gateway Pundit's gone.
So, read me instead.

Speaker 15 All right, we'll see you tomorrow on the Friday edition of the Bullwork Podcast with a much requested guest. See you then.

Speaker 16 This ain't the first time I've been hostage to these teams.

Speaker 21 I can't believe I'm I'm finally moving through my fears.

Speaker 21 At least I know how hard we tried both you and me.

Speaker 21 Didn't we, didn't we?

Speaker 21 So I grabbed my stuff, carty just put up in the driveway.

Speaker 21 It's time

Speaker 21 bye-bye,

Speaker 21 boy-by,

Speaker 21 bye-bye.

Speaker 21 It's over, it's over, yeah.

Speaker 21 Bye-bye. Only convert mine.

Speaker 21 Bye-bye, it's over, it's over, yeah.

Speaker 21 You know, I'm stronger than I think.

Speaker 21 Usually I join you on the floor, but this dance ain't for me.

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Speaker 21 Now it's just too late to choose me.

Speaker 21 The stuff caught me just put up in the driveway.

Speaker 21 It's the inside.

Speaker 21 Bye-bye.

Speaker 21 Boy-bye.

Speaker 21 Bye-bye.

Speaker 21 I'm looking at my letter.

Speaker 21 Bye-bye. It's over, it's over, yeah.

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