JB Pritzker and Franklin Foer: Like Living in an Authoritarian Regime

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullworth Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome to the show the Governor of Illinois, J.B.

Pritzker.

How you doing, Governor?

Hey, Tim, doing well.

I'm not sure how to answer that question these days.

We're fighting it.

Yes, we are.

We're in the middle of it.

I was in your town.

I was in Chicago for Oasis a couple months ago, and I tried to get a long, you know, in-person hang with you.

You know, we're going to go to the bar, discuss favorite Oasis songs, you know, discuss who knows what you're picking up.

Drink some alert.

Drink some alert, maybe.

Drink some alert.

So we're going to have to postpone that for the future and get do news for today because there's a lot happening with you.

I was wondering if you could just start by telling us the latest from the ground.

You know, for those of us kind of consuming this via social media, you know, in the news, it's sort of hard to tell.

Like, are the ICE operations ramping up?

Are there more agents or fewer?

You know, what's the status with the troops?

Just kind of give us a lay of the land.

Yeah, so maybe I'll start with what I think most people are paying most attention to,

which is the troops.

The troops have been under a temporary restraining order kept on federal land, on a federal installation.

The Texas troops, the Illinois troops are on our state facilities, but they've still been federalized.

And then there are actually some California troops that are here well.

But all of them kept in place because of the temporary restraining order.

And that went through an appeal to an appeals court.

And we won that as well.

So at least for the time being, they are not on the streets of Chicago or anywhere else.

More broadly, I think it's important to recognize that ICE is not just operating in Chicago.

They're really operating in the entire Chicagoland area.

So we're talking about the suburbs and places that, you know, you would never suspect or see anything like what we're now seeing with ICE.

So, you know, there's now a whole bunch of people in areas across the region that are being affected by ICE.

And then I'll say, since we won the TROs, the TRO and the appeal, ICE has ramped up its operation and spread out to a whole bunch of new locations.

And they're doing things that we had not seen before.

They're waiting outside of churches for, you know, at a, at an all-Spanish language Mass or a bilingual mass, waiting for people to come out so that they can check their citizenship papers.

And I'm not exaggerating, or ask them for their papers.

We're seeing them

on the major areas where tourists and other people walk or run.

They're stopping people.

I know of one situation in a video of three Indian men.

They're Indian American.

but they were stopped and each one asked for their passports or some proof of citizenship.

And there's another video I just saw moments ago about these were three Hispanic women who speak only Spanish.

ICE agents came up to them.

They were selling burritos in a stand, their own stand, and they were asked for their passports.

Now, they all happened to be U.S.

citizens.

They happen to speak Spanish and be U.S.

citizens.

They produce their passports.

But the point is, we now live in a country where you must carry your citizenship papers.

And

maybe because you and I are white, we don't get asked as often, but it is happening to people who are U.S.

citizens.

I don't care how you look.

That is wrong.

And then you've seen all the videos of people being pelted with.

you know, pepper balls and tear gas and

people being tackled.

And it's pretty terrible.

It's worse.

They're running around in camouflage uniforms with automatic weapons, with masks on, in unmarked vehicles, and going everywhere in the city and in the suburbs.

What are you telling people about the show your papers thing?

I mean,

it's my impression that we still live in a free country where I'm not required to carry my papers everywhere I go if I'm just walking on the street.

And these guys can just go find a warrant if they want to

check for my papers.

But what are you telling people on how to handle that?

Because maybe that cowboy approach is not the right approach.

To me, this is un-American, what they're doing.

And this is not the country I grew up in.

First, I am telling people on the ground and

people who suspect that they might be asked, they should carry their passports if they're U.S.

citizens.

I've never said that to anybody else, anybody in my life.

I mean, that is, I can't believe I'm having to say that to people.

Because they're grabbing people

if they don't answer the question clearly, or they're coming up with pretenses to grab them.

Is that why?

There's no, I mean, pretense, it's because you're brown and you're not producing your papers.

They will detain you.

That doesn't mean they'll take you to a cell

or arrest you, but detain you.

And, you know, you could be held in their car, in the back of a car.

for what we've seen for like three hours while they spend their time, you know, whenever they get around to it, checking their databases to see if maybe you are a U.S.

citizen or maybe you're not.

So it's pervasive.

It's insulting.

That's the least I can say.

And honestly, it feels like we're living in an authoritarian regime.

I talked to Jacob Soboroff on Friday, and he was saying that some of the folks that said, because also CBP is there, Border Patrol is in Chicago.

That's right.

But

you're not a border state.

Last I checked.

My geography is just okay.

My second grader is learning geography, but you don't seem to be a border state.

So how is that legal, CBP being there at all?

It's an excellent question.

The CBP, as I understand the law says that CBP can only operate it within 100 miles of the border of the United States.

So you have to ask yourself, since Canada is far farther than 100 miles from here, how can they do that?

They are claiming that the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, like Oak Street Beach in Chicago, is the border of the United States.

And that's false, but that's what they're claiming.

So, you know, we're obviously deeply.

Now, I'm not a, again, I'm not a geography expert, but doesn't doesn't Lake Michigan end at the UP?

Yeah, I mean, it

it does go to Canada.

It does.

But, you know, they're using it as an excuse, right, to have CBP here.

When you saw, I'm sure you saw the video of the

guys in camouflage and carrying weapons walking in downtown Chicago, right, marching in downtown Chicago, which to anybody, you wouldn't have any idea what branch of any agency or military that they would belong to.

You would believe they were soldiers.

They're all being dressed up.

They're all being dressed up in camouflage and looking like soldiers.

There is a reason.

This is all, in my view, an effort to get people used to the idea of the militarization of our cities.

So even if we win the cases, and I think we will with regard to National Guard or Marines or others on the streets of Chicago or the suburbs, even if we win, they're just going to beef up, as they seem to be, ICE and CBP and make it seem like they've got soldiers on the ground.

The president this morning on Air Force One was asked about you, and he said that his advice for you is that you should beg him for help.

Just wonder if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, well, I would beg him to remove ICE to get Christy Noam the hell out of our state.

Tom Homan has nothing, you know, has no business being here.

And Gregory Bavino, that's the CBP leader who's running ICE and CBP on the ground here, who is ordering his people to do what they're doing, to harass people,

to violently shake them down, tackle them, et cetera.

That's what I would beg him to do.

I could say this.

The president has some very strange notion of what's going on on the streets of American cities.

You know, he kept saying Portland is on fire.

He thinks that Chicago is a, what did he say, a hellhole, a hellscape.

And the reality is every major city, if you've lived in one and he lived in New York, every major city has crime.

And I'm not excusing it or suggesting that we don't always need help to tackle crime.

We've cut our crime rate in Chicago in half on homicides.

It's down double digits on every category you can imagine, certainly on violent crimes, way, way down.

And it's in part because of the work that we've done building up our state police, supporting our local police, but importantly, community violence intervention.

We're the best city in the entire country at deploying that and becoming successful at reducing crime using it.

And it also just doesn't seem like, I mean, when he said, even if you took them at their word, like they're not trying to tamp down the situation, right?

Like the idea is that he hasn't come to you to say, hey, we're looking to deal with this specific crime issue or this neighborhood.

Like, that's not what they're trying to do.

They're trying to incite.

That's exactly right.

And FYI, they do not have a legal right to, you know, show up here with soldiers to fight crime on the streets of Chicago.

What they can do, and this is, and I've, I don't need to beg for this.

I've said it many, many times publicly over the last, I don't know, six, eight, 12 weeks, which is, look, if you want to help us, send us civilian law enforcement, FBI, DEA, ATF.

We'd love to get...

How about this?

Pass a bill through Congress, a cops bill that would fund that, you know, do things the way that we do in a free democratic republic.

That would be one idea.

That's right.

We would love to get more guns and drugs and gangs off the streets.

And we're doing a great job of it now.

It's reduced significantly.

But yeah, we'd love to get more.

And if you talk to people who've worked at the FBI, DEA, and ATF, they will tell you they've been asking for more agents to try to help us.

They want to do the work.

But you know what's happening to those three agencies?

They're grabbing people out of those agencies and pushing them over into ICE

and using them in the way that Gregory Ubivino wants to.

The president said you should be jailed.

As you mentioned, he has somebody that was under investigation for taking bribes, organizing the effort in your state.

So maybe you should be looking inside the house.

But J.D.

Vance was asked about whether he agrees with the president that you should be jailed.

He said that you have violated your fundamental oath of office.

That seems pretty criminal to me.

That's crazy.

It is.

It's insane.

And, you know, they're all working for a 34-time convicted felon.

So who now is going after the prosecutor?

And all I can say is that, look, he has no business even talking about that.

This is not the way the president of the United States should be behaving.

I do think he's got mental health issues.

And I'm not making fun of that either.

I want to be clear.

People need to help him, like his family, the people around him, like Stephen Miller.

You want somebody to hug him?

You want someone to hug him?

No, I think he genuinely, I mean, I mean, of course, that's funny, but I mean, I do think he needs help.

And I don't think anybody around him on a day-to-day basis wants to get him any help because they have more power based upon his diminished capacity.

Think about Stephen Miller.

I mean, Stephen Miller clearly is the one pushing the tactics at DHS, at CBP, at ICE.

He's clearly the person that is aiming to have Donald Trump become an authoritarian leader.

And I wish that

people could

at least recognize that Stephen Miller is bad for the country and he is abusing the fact that Donald Trump has diminished capacity.

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Another thing, it seems like the Silicon Valley, the tech leaders, are now in league with the administration on all of this.

Both Apple and Facebook have complied with the Trump administration's request to take down groups that are alerting people about ICE.

Facebook had an ICE siting group, Apple had an ICE block application.

Both have now taken that down at the federal government's request.

I wonder what you make of that.

Look, it's a frightening world that we're living in now, where you've got capitulation by major corporations, by major universities,

and important individuals who are frightened for themselves or their companies or their universities.

And they're giving in.

And FYI, it's also MAGA Republicans.

There are some that are sort of like, I don't know, used to be regular Republicans.

They're afraid.

That's why they're capitulating.

There are even some Democrats.

who, you know, they're leaders of their state or represent their state, who are afraid to speak up and say what they really think because they're afraid they're going to lose funding for something in their state or in their district, or they're just afraid of the president.

So I don't know what to say except that

I wish people would grow a pair.

But you do think people should have, I guess it related to the exact substance of this, like you do think that people should have a right to alert their neighbors if ICE is in their communities, right?

I mean, I don't know, you're dealing with that on the ground.

Oh, we fund programs to do that.

I've funded programs on the ground.

The community alert system that we've got here has been tremendously helpful.

Part of it is to provide support for people.

Imagine the trauma that you go through in a community as an adult, let alone as a child, when you're, you know, you've literally got these unmarked cars and mask agents and they're either beating down doors or, you know, tackling people in the neighborhood.

The great news is, and this is something I think I'd love for people to pay more attention to.

People are coming out of their homes.

People who probably, you know, normally don't, you know, interact or, you know, show up to do anything, you know, in the neighborhood, but now they're coming out of their homes to speak up and yell at the ICE agents and film them.

And that's vitally important.

And I've encouraged that.

And you're seeing more and more of it.

And more and more people are showing up.

And I think you're going to see that

on Saturday at the No Kings protest here in Chicago, not to mention across the country.

But,

you know, it all needs to be peaceful.

Sure.

But people do need to show up.

And I don't care what it is that you're yelling and what your sign says, as long as you're pushing back on the administration and what it's attempting to do in our cities.

You were mentioning you think the Democrats, you know, maybe at certain times are being scared and not doing enough.

I think you said recently that this is the exact moment for people to stand up.

I'm not seeing enough people doing that with regards to D.C.

Democrats.

Like, what do you think they should be doing more of?

What would you like to see more of from your colleagues in Washington?

Well, how about calling it out?

I mean, every day almost, there is something that the administration is doing in their states or in their districts or that is worthy of being called out.

And I got to say, I mean, I can name on maybe 10 fingers,

you know, the number of people who have a platform in politics who've been elected to public office.

Maybe I'm exaggerating.

Maybe it's, maybe I could include some toes also.

But we're not talking about a lot of people who are standing up and using their platform to speak out.

So you're just talking about rhetoric.

It's not like you wish D.C.

was doing more to support you in some specific way.

I mean, obviously the Republicans aren't going to do anything, but you wish the Democrats were doing something substantively.

You just want more aggressive rhetoric?

Well, to be clear, listen, if...

How many tools do we have right now?

I mean, we're not in charge of any of the branches of the federal government.

So we can do what we can do.

We're taking them to court.

That's certainly the number one thing we're doing.

And it is working.

I mean, we are winning in circuit and appeals courts.

We'll see what the Supreme Court does on a number of these things.

But I don't want you to think that I'm not aware of, you know, what feels like the powerlessness of the situation that Democrats are in.

That's why the critical thing for us all to focus on, honestly, is we have to win in 2026.

We have to.

And everything that we do right now, if we can mitigate the damage that Donald Trump is doing, we should be doing it now.

Well, so this is the thing that I have for you then that worries me a little about 2026 is, you know, this redistricting fight keeps going on back and forth.

There was news out yesterday that North Carolina, even though they have a Democratic governor, this arcane process, they're going to redistrict without go around the governor there and try to squeeze out another seat.

Missouri is doing that.

Your neighboring state.

Like, what is the status in Illinois?

I've been seeing that some of the Illinois Democrats don't want to redistrict anymore, but there are three Republican seats in the state.

So in theory, you could redistrict in a way that would help.

What's the status with that?

In general, I do not think mid-decade redistricting for political purposes is something that we should, any of us, any state should be doing.

We're not in general right now.

I get it.

I get it.

And so that's why I have to say that if we're forced into it, which

more and more they're pushing us into it, right?

When Missouri is looking at redistricting, you know, and Indiana is looking at redistricting and so on, we've got to consider it.

But yeah, I mean, we have a we have 14 Democrats and three Republicans from Illinois.

Can we draw lines that look like more like 15-2?

We can.

What's the timeline on that?

I mean, that's got to be something you do soon, right?

Yeah.

I mean, again, it's hard.

And remember, the legislature has to be on board with it.

Not the congresspeople, but the state legislators.

There's not a lot of enthusiasm for doing something like that.

In part because, and even if you talk to people about the federal map, the challenge is that people are worried about, you know, if you thin out districts that currently are held by Democrats, you know, you may end up with 13, four instead of 15, 2.

Probably not this time, though.

Probably not in the midterm, maybe in the future.

Yeah.

Why?

Because you're so confident about the outcome of the 2026 election.

I'm not.

I mean, I'm not trending my chickens, but if you just look at history, if you look at how 2018 went for Donald Trump, the first midterm of the Trump administration,

usually the opposition party would do better.

So, yeah, I mean, look, there are no guarantees in life, but I mean, shouldn't you be doing everything possible to try to squeeze out another district given the state of things?

I hear you.

I'm not suggesting that it's not something that's being considered by folks,

but I am suggesting this, that.

A lot of things that never happened in history seem to be happening right now.

So I do not think that 2026, anybody that's sitting back and thinking, well, the the winds are blowing our way,

I really believe that.

Like we

sitting back at the idea that, well, if we just do all the regular things, you know, we're going to do really well.

I don't think so.

I think we have to get everybody engaged and do more than we've ever done before.

I know you're busy fighting the invasion of your state, but maybe call down to Springfield and

give them a little kick in the butt on this one.

I hear you.

And

we all got to make sure that California gets the job done.

I think they're doing it right.

And I've now been in office six and a half years, and I decided the other day with my chief of staff to look at how many months that I've been in office have been precedented times, not unprecedented.

And the answer was like eight months.

Eight months.

All right.

I hear you, Governor.

Well, I'll just say this.

I want to have a longer conversation about this other topic another day, but I just want to make one last observation with you.

I was Jeb's communications director in 2016.

When I started working for him, his suits were looking a little baggier.

You know, he was getting hungrier.

He got a little cranky at times, but he wanted to be trim and fit.

We didn't exactly know what the fight was.

And I'm just noticing.

I'm noticing that maybe you're on the Jeb plan, you know,

thinking about such items.

So I must leave it there.

I just wanted to look good for you, Tim.

Thank you.

It's working, Governor Pritzker.

And you'll look especially good when we have a shot of Malort together in a couple of months.

Good luck fighting off these fuckers.

And we appreciate you out there.

And let's stay stay in touch.

All right, thanks, Jim.

All right, thanks so much to Governor J.B.

Pritzker for squeezing us in.

Lots happening with him right now, obviously, and appreciate his fight on the front lines of this attempt by the Trump administration to militarize some of our cities.

We'll be having much more from him in the months ahead.

Up next, though, we got some news with my friend Frank Forer from the Atlantic.

Stick around.

Man, it feels like every podcast like this one, we're talking about hostages, the singularity, Donald Trump, creeping authoritarianism.

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And we're back with Franklin Fohr.

Welcome back, man.

He's the staff writer at the Atlantic.

His books include The Last Politician about Joe Biden.

And I want to get at the end to your previous book, World Without Mind, about big tech from 2017, which is it's feeling more and more relevant these days.

So I appreciate you coming on the show.

Yeah, thank you.

But first, I wanted to talk to you about your Atlantic article from yesterday, The Existential Heroism of the Israeli hostages, and just kind of talk about the end of this chapter.

And I use that in particular chapter, obviously, because there's a lot more ahead.

I want to read the lead to your story for The Atlantic because it was pretty gutting.

It goes like this: In Eli Sharabi's first hours of freedom earlier this year, a social worker led him to a room stocked with shampoo, toothpaste, and soap.

In Gaza's tunnels, he had gone months without bathing.

Now he could scrub off the grime of captivity.

He had sustained himself through his 491 days as a hostage hostage by picturing the moment when he would rush into the arms of his wife and daughters, but the tunnels had sealed him off from the world.

Standing in daylight, he learned that Hamas had murdered his loved ones in their home safe room on October 7th.

The social worker hovered as he showered and changed to protect Sharabi from himself.

That's pretty gutting and tough.

He was not one of the 20 released yesterday.

He'd previously been released and wrote a book.

He kind of used his story to talk about the news and where we're at.

Right.

I was writing about what it takes to survive two years when you're shoved in a dark hole and you don't actually get to see daylight, and that you have captors who are continually messing with your expectations and messing with your sense of whether your loved ones have been killed or whether they're alive, whether your government is ever going to come to rescue you or whether the world has forgotten you, whether you're living off of the thinnest rations on a daily basis

as part of a sustained campaign of deprivation where you know you're getting kept alive as a political pawn, but you're barely being kept alive in that department.

And this war created, I think, filter bubbles of suffering that are terrible because one should be able to have empathy for the victims of this war on all sides.

And you know, we live in this world where our hopes and our optimism are so trampled because everything we see on a daily basis in almost every aspect of our political lives is so unrelentingly terrible that

I felt like it was worth just celebrating

this human impulse,

our resilience, our ability to be faced with the darkest, shittiest circumstances and to be able to step out on the other side and our ability to maintain this will to imagine what what home is like to imagine what family is like and uh i just wanted to celebrate kind of the radical optimism that survival mandates talking and writing about the um

coming around from the bleakest of circumstances there's one paragraph that you referenced from his book that really

put me into a dark place though though i know eventually we're coming out of the dark place is the point but uh my heart sank when i was reading this eventually the bathroom and then his room itself recalling with worms which inhabited his toothbrush.

For one stretch of captivity, he went eight months without seeing the light of the sun.

There's some discussions about how there was only one point where Shabi thought about killing himself, which is when they're kind of taking him down into the tunnels when he didn't ever think he was going to see the sun again.

And that is just unimaginable.

And obviously, you kind of see the images of the hostages coming out yesterday, and you can kind of look at their physical state and know it was bad in some sense.

But it's kind of different to see that and then to read the details.

The other image that we saw yesterday is Hamas executing rival clans and rival tribes and rival, rival.

And, you know, the Palestinian people writ large do not deserve everything that has befallen them in the course of this war.

But Hamas

was culpable of terrible atrocities.

in the course of this war.

And their treatment of the hostages was a terrible atrocity.

Right.

And to your point, in addition to the treatment of their own people, you know, various times.

And those images you said yesterday, I guess it was what, the public executions that were happening simultaneously to this release.

And talking about your filter bubbles, I was seeing, this is sad, really.

It's kind of a statement on ourselves, you know, because I'm sure I have a filter bubble of some level, but I try very hard to be filter bubble-less.

I follow a lot of people because I have to for this job to consume a bunch of stuff.

And so simultaneously, you were seeing in kind of the Palestinian advocate side, these videos.

I saw one that was pretty moving.

And I don't know who this guy was.

Maybe he was a bad person.

So I, you know, whatever.

But like the video itself was moving of a kid that was seeing his father who had been released, who was imprisoned by Israel, you know, for some terrorist allegations and how excited the kid was.

So you're seeing that in the kind of bubble of, oh, look at how nice this is for the people of Gaza, you know, folks that wanted to frame it that way.

And then on a lot of the pro-Israel, you know, kind of folks that I follow, they're showing this just horrible public executions that Hamas, that Hamas was engaging in.

And

it's challenging for the human brain to kind of like process all of the, like, especially at a time as fraught as this, to kind of process all of that together.

Yeah.

And even more challenging is that Donald Trump, who I think a lot of us regard as kind of an American pharaoh, is like stepping into this situation and not just being the agent that gets these hostages released in the end of this war, but the vision that he painted yesterday when he spoke to the Knesset

actually was a very powerful and compelling vision of coexistence.

And there are infinite reasons why that will never come to pass, including his inability to sustain his own attention on any sort of problem and like his whims and that, and Hamas, and like the fact that they are still in control of Gaza.

And the Israeli far right.

Yeah, and the Israeli far right.

Yeah, but there is this

kind of the magic moments where you're able to kind of imagine what a different possibility for the Middle East are rare.

We haven't really genuinely been in one of those moments for a very long time.

And structurally, there are reasons why optimism may not have an overwhelming shot, but it has a shot.

Give us the pitch for that.

I want to come back to Trump in a second, but I'm open to an optimism pitch.

You know, I'm thinking of kind of certain parallels with the 1990s.

And so in the 1990s, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq War.

And there were reasons why Palestinians had kind of lost a lot of their major patrons, which forced them to the bargaining table.

In this instance, I think Iran is so severely weakened that there's a possibility that Palestinians will kind of understand that,

you know, there needs to be some sort of alternative to armed struggle.

You have Trump, who's an authoritarian strongman, who other authoritarian strongmen can recognize as one of their own.

And he engages in this kind of language of humiliation and of flattery.

And for whatever reason, I'm a squishy human rights guy.

I don't like the idea of like dealing with somebody like Erdogan, but Trump doesn't care.

And so he's able to manipulate somebody like Erdogan or

understands how to deal with him in a way where Erdogan can apply pressure on Hamas.

Much like Bill Clinton was more popular than any Israeli politician, I think Trump is now more popular than any Israeli politician.

And so if he actually

could muster the will to do what he did yesterday on a sustained basis, he has the ability to talk over the heads of Netanyahu

to the Israeli public, to sell them on a different vision, and to maybe even force a different political constellation in Israel.

He mentioned this in the speech.

yesterday where he hinted that Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, needed to get together with Netanyahu.

And among the many terrible, irresponsible things that Benjamin Netanyahu has done over the course of the last two years is that he went to war with insane zealots as part of his government, who he was completely dependent on.

And that's a reflection of his own inherent corrupt circumstances, but in just like an evil political bargain that he committed.

But by going to war with these people who said,

you know, they do talk in genocidal language, and it does give credence to the worst accusations that one could hurl at Israel.

And they did force Netanyahu to sustain the war.

And so if he can liberate himself of that faction, it does open up some sort of space.

I was pretty good, but you had two ifs in there.

One was if Netanyahu can liberate himself from the far right.

And the other one was if Donald Trump can sustain his attention on this.

Those are both two pretty big ifs.

Yeah, this is, this is like, you know, but it's like what optimism requires in these sorts of circumstances, which is that you have to assume that unlikely things are going to happen.

Sure.

And Dan Shapiro, we'll talk to Sam Stein about this, folks, who want a deeper dive on this.

It was my ambassador to Israel about the ways in which like Trump's style was suited for a hostage negotiation more than it is suited for kind of the long term, like of what comes next.

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On the Trump thing, real quick, can I offer you just one rant really quick about the Trump side of this?

Ran away.

You've kind of fed this psychological need right now for people, so I hope they listen to that.

But there's a psychological need for someone, like the right to have anti-Trump folks say, say, good job, Trump, like pat him on the head

as if this like move justifies all their sins in defense of them.

And I just am not really troubled by that psychodrama.

It's good.

I think I can easily say it's good for the hostages to be out.

I'm happy to be talking to you about that.

I want to talk about it more.

I understand why their families and some in Israel are like grateful to Trump and everyone involved in the negotiations.

But like that fact just lives simultaneous to the fact that Trump is a nightmare that has caused untold damages for our country and the world.

And I like think about it in the same way.

I was reflecting yesterday on something when I was on a pod about a month or two ago, whenever it was that the political prisoners that we'd put in El Salvador got released, like basically because of Maduro and Bukele's deal.

And I just, I didn't at that moment have anybody pressuring me or feel any need to say, I really got to hand it to Maduro right now.

I didn't have to say, great job, Nicholas, maybe you get the peace prize.

So I was glad those prisoners were out and home, but Maduro is still awful and causing unimaginable damage to Venezuela.

Bad leaders do good things out of political incentive all the time or out of the fact that humans contain multitudes.

So I just like the Trump thing, because Trump causes such high passions, I guess, like there's this whole like, will they hand it to Trump watch?

You know, like, will the politicians put Trump's name in their statement on this watch?

I'm just kind of, it feels kind of dumb.

Like, nobody, nobody was doing that.

Like, no, it wasn't like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or.

Donald Trump or Mark or anybody put in their statement when the Venezuelans went home to Venezuela a couple months ago, like, congratulations, Nicholas.

I don't know.

Like, what do you make of like why that is like everyone is so wrapped up in that part of it?

Yeah, I'm with you.

I really don't care.

I don't care.

I know he's ruining my own country and there's nothing that he could do that would redeem him in kind of my final assessment for that.

But on the other hand, the world,

our stage is not the only stage.

And so if somehow his defects that are wreaking such tremendous damage on our own country turn out to be virtues in another setting.

That's life.

Things are complicated.

That's life, right?

Exactly.

And I think it is.

I was thinking about his corruption, right?

Which is the thing that is the primary driver of his assault on American democracy.

And in the Middle East, like that corruption, it turns out to be possibly an asset because the Qatari and the Saudis and all these countries that he's in bed with, it gives them certain leverage over him that causes him to maybe act in certain ways that are more virtuous than he would act otherwise.

And that his leverage over them gives him the ability to force them to do diplomatic things that may be, you know, for the good of the world.

But that doesn't excuse his corruption.

I mean, the corruption is corruption.

And over the long run, that corruption is corrosive, even in that international environment.

Yeah, this is my point in the long run.

There's also like unintended consequences to all this stuff, like downstream that it's like hard to predict, you know?

And I feel like the corruption is one of those things.

Like it certainly obviously helps for short-term dealmaking, but who does it empower?

Like what, you know, how does it affect, you know, the balance of power in the future, the opportunity of people that are earnest fighters for human rights to like get reforms in that region and those kinds of, you know what I mean?

Like there are lots of other.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, and with our own foreign policy, one of the things that the founders worried about most as it related to corruption was that you would have the hidden hand of a foreign government influencing the decisions of an American president.

And that's happening.

Yes.

Right.

That's that's been happening.

It happened in his first term.

That's happening in Spades in the second term.

I mean, the airplane is not an accident.

The investments in the cryptocurrency and in the Kushner and Steve Witcoff's family.

We can't be sure that the people who are representing the United States are actually representing the interests interests of the United States or their own business interests or the interests of a foreign country as refracted through their own business interests.

And

that's not just a fundamental threat to democracy.

It's a threat to our sovereignty.

I'll move on to some other topics, but anything else that you wrote about the hostages yesterday?

I know you'd also wrote about Hirsch Goldberg Poland a while ago.

He died tragically there.

You know, just about the scenes from yesterday.

Anything else you wanted to mention?

It's hard not to experience the end of this war in a very personal sort of way.

I spent a lot of time reporting on Biden administration diplomacy.

I wrote a very long piece chronicling the ins and outs of the way that they tried to end the war and all of the kind of relentless frustrations that they suffered and all the mistakes that they made in the course and their utter failure in the end to bring the war to a close.

But in the course of just writing about this, I ended up meeting people and some of them who I ended up having extended conversations with.

And there was one father of a dead hostage who I would hear from.

And he would, he would just, he'd text or call kind of out of the blue.

And those were some of the hardest conversations I've had in my life because you're dealing with somebody who just wants to retrieve the corpse of his son, but can't really accept the finality of his son's death and that the kind of this manic, frantic effort to persuade every journalist, every leader in the world that it's a necessity to retrieve his son's corpse so that he can get some sort of closure that you know is never going to come.

And just

the pain that

it would absorb on the other end of the phone.

It's so uncomfortable to sit with because it's so raw.

It's so infinite.

What do you make?

You mentioned the reporting of the Biden stuff.

There was some,

what should we call it, cope out there?

There's some people out there in defense of the Biden kind of work on this.

They were saying basically this is a similar deal than he had put forth and that Blinken had put forth.

And that, like, you know, the fact that it went on longer was basically just about BB and maybe even Trump corruption and not

about

the actual policies.

What do you say to that spin?

I'd say I've talked to so many people in the Middle East at the time.

And the thing that they said about Biden was that he was weak.

And I think ultimately that's the way that we need to assess his foreign policy in this

horrible episode was that he was weak.

He was conflicted about a lot of things as well.

That I think that his inability to achieve true moral clarity about what he wanted was another part of the problem.

It was kind of a muddle.

The objectives that he wanted to achieve.

And the same was true for Trump.

You know, Trump, Trump has been very muddled until he wasn't.

And Trump had lots of opportunities where he could have asserted himself more aggressively to stop the war.

But he didn't.

It took, you know, in a way, Israel bombing Qatar and his anger there to put him in a frame of mind where where he set out like deploying.

You can't be bombing these guys that gave me this nice plane.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

These are my friends now.

Yeah.

They gave me a plane.

Yeah.

I think I saw something like, if Trump had done what he did this last couple weeks in March or whatever, right?

16,000 people would have lived, possibly.

I mean, we can never make those calculations with any sort of certainty, but...

you know, there was cost.

That's sad.

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Couple other topics I want to pick your brain on.

There's a press revolt over at the Pentagon.

By 5 p.m.

today, outlets were demanded by the Secretary of War, excuse me, a former weekend talk show co-host, wanted these journalists to sign a pledge requiring them not to gather information that hasn't been officially authorized for release.

So not to do anything besides press releases.

The Atlantic, who you write for, put out a statement on this saying why they were not going to do it.

The Atlantic journalists will not sign this press policy.

We oppose restrictions, First Amendment rights, et cetera.

The Secretary of War and Kerry Lake and others posted dunking on the Atlantic, making fun of the Atlantic, waving goodbye.

And yet, in the following hours, it turns out even Newsmax won't sign this.

The Washington Times won't sign it.

Only One American News,

who has, was where Matt Gates has landed.

They're the only ones that have signed at this time.

So I don't know.

Maybe they're going to have an empty newsroom.

What do you make of what's happening over there?

I think about this in the context of everything else that the Trump administration is doing, which is that in an authoritarian regime, you have to be able to shape reality.

Controlling the press is part of a broader agenda.

So when they fire the woman who does labor statistics and guts the government's ability to create an objective vision of reality, they're doing something that is of a piece with trying to criminalize reporting, which was in effect what the the Pentagon was trying to do.

And it's not just a threat to the First Amendment, it's an authoritarian strategy.

And it's worked in certain regards.

Like that, the, that, you know, what we see happening with CBS and Skydance and the settlements with ABC and the lawsuits against the New York Times, that strikes to me as a much more effective strategy than taking on the press corps.

as a whole.

Because when you threaten the financial interest of an institution, that institution institution is vulnerable.

When you tell news organizations en masse that they can't do their job, news organizations can band together effectively and resist.

Yeah, right.

Because these guys, Newsmax and the Washington Times, whoever, Washington Examiner, was on there.

I've seen a fair number of pretty MAGA commentators posting in opposition to this.

It's hard to imagine them doing that if they had just come after the Atlantic, right?

And we saw this kind of, right?

Like the Atlantic is out out because of Jeff Goldberg's article about the signal text chain, or, you know, we're going to push out any

outlet that uses

whatever these three woke terms.

You know, like you can imagine them coming up with a way to kind of more narrowly target a certain segment of the press corps and have it be effective.

And this kind of feels like them stepping on rakes a little bit in their effort to clamp down on the press.

Yeah.

And I think the White House itself in the press briefing room deploys a lot of the tactics that you're describing, where they create a hierarchy of favorites and people who are out in the cold, and they use access in order to further their agenda.

They punish outlets they consider to be enemies.

And this is also entirely consistent with Hegseph's general ham-fistedness and his klutziness.

And he's just not a sophisticated actor.

Which is great news since we're bombing boats in the Caribbean.

So you want somebody that's ham-fisted and klutzy doing that, you know, without any

oversight.

Well, anyway, Too Far for Newsmax is an interesting place for the Secretary of War.

All right.

I want to get to your older book.

I'm not sure what else to talk to you about today.

And it's kind of funny.

I'm going to be honest with you.

I forgot if I read it in 2017 or maybe I read the Atlantic article about it or whatever, whatever I'm looking at at the end, which I think is what I actually did.

But I remembered the core arguments of it.

Again, it was called The The World Without Mind.

It was about how big tech power is threatening individual thought and creativity, you know, how in some ways, like the algorithmic stuff stifles dissent.

And like, you might think that it would create different types of ideas, but really it narrows the ideas.

There's a dehumanizing element to it.

You got into the monopoly side of that kind of debate about antitrust.

I just am like, looking at it now, eight years on, it's like it's so much worse than that, right?

the

AI stuff coming.

I mean, now like we're almost going to a place where like the elimination of humanism, forget the decline of humanism with AI, and the idea that instead of just stifling dissent, it's going to stifle truth.

It's going to be increasingly hard for people to know what's real and what's fiction.

So, anyway, I want to give you a chance to kind of revise and extend the argument from World Without Mind.

Our mutual friend Mark Liebovich is very good at saying that a book is excellent and then admitting in the next sentence that he hasn't actually read it, which is

very charming, in fact,

because most people never admit that.

But what I wrote about in the book was about how there is this deep fantasy within Western culture that Silicon Valley is kind of the end of, which is that they view kind of the most spiritual thing that can happen to a human being is to merge with a machine.

And the quest of Silicon Valley Valley has been to kind of find ways to kind of push that to the next frontiers.

And so we keep this device that is kind of that haunts us and we hold it in our hands and we're totally, it's an appendage of the human being.

And artificial intelligence is intended to be kind of an appendage of the human mind.

And then you have somebody like Musk who's pursuing this agenda where machines will actually have this interface that allows them to communicate directly with our minds themselves.

And so that we don't even need to mediate our thoughts through our keyboards or through our devices.

It will be completely intimate.

And that is kind of

the ultimate expression of totalitarianism, which is we become inhabitants of a system where we're not even sure.

what's us and what's the machine.

And the thing that we know now is that these companies are persistently trying to

manipulate us in order to capture more and more of our attention.

And that manipulation, which we submit to willingly, is the end goal.

I guess I'm just interested in your view on whether it's at all possible at this point to change the trajectory.

And just, again, looking at kind of the perspective from you writing about that into 2017 to now.

I mean, obviously the Peter Thiels in the world, there was, I mean, you wrote the book, there was like discussion of this stuff back then.

But like,

and if you listen to interviews, podcasts with the big, you know, with Altman and the people that are running these AI companies now,

they speak as if the path that you're talking about isn't is inevitable.

It's not just like the higher purpose or wish or,

you know, science fiction dream, but it's like, that is the path that we're on right now.

Yeah.

And

I mean, that's pretty alarming, I guess.

And I don't know if that's really sunk in with people.

It kind of does feel inevitable.

i mean i can outline uh paths of of resistance but you have optimum you have optimism for peace in the middle east but no optimism for avoiding the singularity frank

right i it's i you know that's pretty good yeah i really recommend there's a uh the the british novelist ian mc ewan has this great novel out called what we can know

and it's set in the future And it's told through this literary scholar who's writing a biography about a poet who lived in the year, who wrote a poem in the year 2014 that has become legendary that nobody can track down.

In the future, historians refer to the period we're living in as the derangement.

And like in this derangement, we have no idea how good we actually

have it.

And he's nostalgic for this period, but his students are all completely pissed off at him because they look back at us and they think of us as a bunch of idiots who squandered away their world.

And in 100 years from now, technology has changed because of climate change, because of some low-grade nuclear conflicts.

And all these things that we take for granted about our relationship with technology are totally disrupted.

So it is possible to imagine a different world.

I find it so bracing, this idea that we're living through the derangement and this idea that abundance is what we have.

And abundance is not a given.

And progress is obviously not a given.

And maybe it would take something kind of dystopian to kind of interrupt the dystopian path that we're on.

The best that I can come up with about to be about solutions,

like the ones that I came up with in my book, and I haven't been able to do any better since, are that we need to curb powerful monopolies in the realm of information and technology because we want there to be as many choices and as much competition as possible.

I think about

the Kindle and how that was something that everybody said was going to be inevitable, that e-books were going to destroy bookstores and they were going to destroy hardcover books and yet hardcover books actually managed to persist.

And that gives me some hope that maybe we don't want to go through this full process of merging with machines, that we want to maintain some independent spaces.

The only hope that I have on this front is, and that, you know, I can always bring it back to the things that I think about the most, which is actually the politics of all this, is that if we get to it before it's too late, it does feel like it was maybe a mistake for the populist right to unite with the Silicon Valley talk oligarchs.

And like you can imagine kind of a populist front opposition against them that extends from maybe even Marjorie Taylor Greene as early as yesterday, like all the way through left through people who, through the podcast bros that got along with Trump, through parents who don't want their kids to fucking, you know, become slaves to the phones.

And like you can sort of see the outlines developing of a...

anti-establishment populist front against, you know, kind of this merger of Thiel and Musk and Altman and Trump and like some Christian nationalists to try to join on their side.

I don't know.

Maybe that's fantasy, but I can kind of foresee it.

That feels more likely than your pitch for peace in the middle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well,

maybe.

But when I wrote my book in 2017, the people who were the most enthusiast, my book is explicitly anti-Trump because he'd just been elected.

And I was arguing that that was evidence of this breakdown of our informational ecosystems.

But the people who were most enthusiastic for my book really were like Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Beck and

even Tucker Carlson.

And they were

because they saw, they hated Silicon Valley, which they viewed as censoring them.

Got it.

And

they could see

the problem of having this massive private.

power that was dictating the terms of speech.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, there you go.

We'll leave it there.

I'm sure people really sleep well at night knowing to save the trajectory of society, we'll need an alliance between us and Tucker Carlson and Hughie Hood and Marjorie Taylor Creane.

Anyway, Frank Fohr, thank you so much for writing and coming back on the podcast.

We'll see you soon, man.

Thanks.

Thanks so much to J.B.

Pritzker and Frank Foer.

We'll be back tomorrow with one I think you all are going to enjoy.

So we'll see you all then.

Peace.

mind in

using the drowning

to the line

conditions around that can't get a sound of a darkness and carside love

me a burst of mind up to space streams.

All we want is one chance to talk.

See every hole in God on my

job.

Really leave

it.

But my trainers beware, say a prayer.

If you get the believer,

I see steam

to be

When I gave it to Saturn's round by the way of the

clouds

So it must be sure that it showed we had no memories

Only moment wants a chance to turn up

Every moment out of my

million miles we won't Feeling that the end of the day

is the civil day

with a beverage of school machine

and they're my tall

and really won't take tomorrow.

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