Jacob Soboroff and Sarah McBride: Democracy at the Ground Level

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Hey, everybody, we're going deep in the scenes from Chicago with Jacob Soboroff today, who's been on the ground doing amazing reporting.

But I wanted to also hit on a couple of news items.

This morning,

the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Machado,

noticeably not Donald Trump.

She received it for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela, which is in contrast with bombing people from Venezuela and also in contrast with sending people from Venezuela to foreign gulags.

So you can maybe see why her resume was a little bit better.

So congratulations to Maria Machado.

It's a tough break for Mr.

Trump, who really wanted one more trophy.

The man wants trophies

more than a five-year-old.

I got to tell you, my daughter, God love her, was this last year, two years ago, so either age five or six, demanded to do track because she wanted a medal so badly.

Did track, is fast, got two medals.

This year, when we asked her if she wanted to do track, nope, didn't want to.

No, box was checked.

And that is, I feel like that's the depth, the same depth at which Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize.

It's like the way that a five-year-old wants a medal,

is how Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, but he hasn't received it yet.

So maybe they'll keep him on good behavior up until 2026.

Fingers crossed on that.

And I think the more significant news from last night, New York Attorney General Tish James was indicted on charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution.

was indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia, which is worth noting.

This is about the second mortgage that she had on a home in Norfolk.

We've been covering this.

This guy, Bill Pultey, who is a random apparatchik that in the housing, one of the housing departments, has decided to

try to go after all of Trump's foes and dig deep in any resistance figures.

mortgage history.

And so this is what he came up with.

It is worth reminding you, reminding us that

the U.S.

Attorney for that district, Eric Siebert, who is a Trump appointee, left his post after deciding that he was not going to succumb to the pressure to indict James and Comey.

And he has been replaced by a hack with no prosecution experience.

So we'll see how things go forth of this.

You know, part of this is, you know, the punishment is the indictment in some cases.

And I think Donald Trump really wants to see some of his fellow go to jail for sure.

I think he would take a lot of glee out of that.

But the punishment is

the hassle, the cost, the embarrassment, the chilling effect on other people, right?

Like that is what they're trying to do here.

I don't think that anybody suspects, you know, there'll be a lengthy prison sentence for someone based on their mortgage paperwork, which

I can't even weigh in on the merits of whether or not there's even any there there.

But, you know, I think that

the

direct effort by the government to target people personally from the top because they are political foes and to do so after a public directive.

Maybe it should have been private directive, but it was was it was intended to be a private directive, rather, but it was a public directive from the president to the attorney general that the Department of Justice go after his political foes for ticky-tack shit.

It is new.

It is chilling and alarming, and it is a place that we haven't been before.

And I think that I saw some discussion of this, and I'm sure you guys guys did, about how,

you know, maybe this isn't that different, right?

Because Tish James did go after Trump on, I don't think it's fair to say, like a relatively ticky-tack charge after saying that she was going to go after Trump.

I mean, this was something that we talked about a lot here at the bulwark during that period between 2020 and 2024.

That the January 6th charges were very serious against Trump.

The classified documents charges very serious against Trump.

The charges in New York were less so, right?

And

so, you know, you saw some people I even saw in CNN last night, some neutral pundits being like, well, you know, just what's good for the goose is good for the gander, et cetera.

And it's like, well, this is actually, no, a completely different story.

This is the president of the United States directing the power of the Justice Department to go after his political foes widely, right?

That is different than one local prosecutor deciding to go after someone.

It is not to argue that that's okay or that it's appropriate or anything.

It's just, it is a complete category difference.

It's a complete category difference.

This is why we have the system that we have, you know, where there are local prosecutors all over the country.

Some of them have better judgments than others.

People have the opportunity to appeal.

You know, you can go up the ladder.

There are judges, they're juries.

Like, there are a lot of opportunities for people to remediate issues.

And that is not what we're doing now.

And that is very different than having the President of the United States and the Attorney General of the United States go after foes

purposefully

based on essentially nothing, like based on essentially nothing, and having show trials in order to intimidate and chill their political opposition.

That's a new thing, at least in the modern times, and it is pernicious.

And we should all speak out against it, regardless of what anyone's feelings are about what was happening in New York with the Trump trial in New York.

Obviously, we'll have much more on that in our show.

We're in New York tomorrow night, Saturday night.

And that will be out for you guys at some point on the Borg YouTube feed and the Borg takes feed.

So keep an eye out for that.

A couple other scheduling notes.

As I mentioned, we got a double header today.

I got Jacob Soboroff up first.

In segment two, I'm going to play for you the interview between Sarah Longwell and Sarah McBride from our live show in D.C.

It was really great and appreciate so much Sarah McBride coming out to our show.

And I think that she has some really insightful things to say about the Democratic Party and also, obviously, trans issues, which became a big issue for Democrats back in 2024.

But much more broadly than that, she is super astute on this stuff.

And I think that you'll like the interview very much.

I also did an interview last night with George Redis, which maybe I'll talk about a little bit today on this show, who is the American citizen that was jailed for three days.

I actually didn't even realize before I talked to him just how heinous his treatment was.

So I'd appreciate it if you went and checked out my conversation with him over on the Borg Takes feed or over on our YouTube.

Appreciate you all very much.

Up next, Jacob Soboroff.

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome the senior political and national correspondent for MSNBC.

You might see him on with Nicole Wallace and me sometimes.

He's been reporting live from the streets of Chicago.

He's also got a forthcoming book, Firestorm, about the devastating LA fires.

It's Jacob Soboroff.

What's up, man?

What's up, man?

Thank you so much for being here.

First time caller, long time listener, as they say.

I am so pumped to have you.

And,

you know,

you've like developed a brand.

I've got to tell you, I'm doing this live, so I'm forgetting this person's name.

I was at a Knicks game with an absolutely famous actor.

It's very handsome from like the Good Wife or something.

And he was talking to me.

And he was like, hey, you're on MSNBC, right?

do you ever get to hang out with that jacob sobaroff guy max i want to go around with max greenfield

one of the all-time great humans because i think i saw a picture of you guys sitting there because you know when i when there are people courtside i notice and i said to him courtside so max greenfield he wanted to of all the people that he wanted to to to you know chew my ear off about uh it was it was jacob soboroff so there you go wonderful human as is his wife uh tess sanchez who wrote a very good book uh by the way that people should go check out well there you go look at that A little promo.

We've got so much to discuss.

I want to hear mostly about what you've been reporting on.

I mean, some of these stories have just been so tragic and traumatic, but we have kind of a little bit bigger picture news to get to first.

Last night, U.S.

District Court Judge April Perry said that she sees no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois and said that deploying troops anywhere in the state would only add fuel to the fire that the defendants themselves have started.

That was her ruling and blocking the troops.

What have you heard since that ruling?

And what's your sense for what's happening on the ground?

Well, you know, what a surprise.

And I should say in full disclosure, I'm in New York for the MSNBC live event.

I left Chicago on Thursday, but what a surprise to hear from the judge that there is no risk of rebellion in Chicago or in Illinois.

I think big picture.

It was really like deja vu from being in LA, almost exactly four months to the day that it all started in LA.

You know, I found myself on the street, literally marching down Michigan Avenue live with Chris Hayes as people mobilized and came out into the streets, not because they're just dissatisfied, but because they're disgusted by the behavior of these federal agents on the streets of their city.

And what is happening is large-scale, indiscriminate picking up of people off the street because of the way that they look or the way that they sound or the jobs that they have, not because that they are the worst of the worst or have criminal records.

Forget about being murderers and rapists and drug dealers you know these are people going about their cotidian activities in everyday life and dhs says a thousand people have been taken since the beginning of september in the chicago operation and i i'm not surprised one bit by the reaction of the people of of chicago who who really are outraged and by the way it's possible that they're both outraged and don't want to see crime in their city but i think the majority of people that i have met this week especially think that this is not certainly not the solution to a crime problem in Chicago.

So the kind of scary overhang to this, I think, is the possibility that if Trump keeps getting rebuffed by the courts, that they invoke the Insurrection Act.

There's been a decent amount of public scuttlebutt about this.

I was speaking to somebody who has

a friend that's been deployed to Chicago that is a pretty senior level that says that that's kind of the scuttlebutt internally, that that might be something that is coming.

I think this ruling, the judge, has made that possibility more acute.

Have you heard anything about that?

Did you hear any kind of discussion about that when you were in Chicago?

Trump has basically said as much, and Stephen Miller said that thing the other day about plenary authority that the president has before he kind of like froze awkwardly.

That was such a weird question.

Why do you think it's so weird?

He was on, for people who missed it.

He was on CNN and he was being asked for this, and he says that I have total plenary authority.

I'm not a legal scholar, but my understanding is basically meaning that the president can do whatever he wants when it comes to defending the homeland.

And And then he kind of like totally froze.

After using that phrase.

Yep.

And then they were cut to break and saying they had technical difficulties.

And then I don't know.

Did he come back?

I don't even know if he came back after that.

But I guess what I would say about it is like they don't make much of a secret about any of this stuff.

And they're sort of saying everything that they want to do out in the open.

And so that's what Pritzker said, too.

This all seems like a big pretext to invoking the Insurrection Act when I talked to Pritzker the other day.

And what does it do to put federalized, militarized police on the streets of a city like Chicago or L.A.?

It pisses people off.

And what is the reaction of sort of some of the fringey elements in those places is to have small pockets of clashes with these law enforcement officers.

Or to speak from their side, they feel like they're being provoked by the officers who are shooting pepper balls.

You've ever seen the video of the priest who got shot in the head.

They're being provoked by the federal law enforcement in order to get into a clash.

And the worry that I think everybody on the street has, and Pritzker openly, is that Trump will use that as justification for saying that this is an insurrection against the United States of America, which obviously it is not.

What was Pritzker saying about that when you were interviewing him?

Because that is the sort of obvious thing here that's just worth stating plainly, which is that the federal law enforcement seems to want the clashes, right?

Like generally in this sort of situation, if you were going to send in federal troops because you were concerned about disorder in the streets, what you would want is for the troops to calm things, right?

Like that would ostensibly be the plan.

But it seems like they sort of want the opposite so they can excuse themselves to be more aggressive.

Yeah, and so what did Pritzker say about that?

What's this?

Well, and on that, just based on what I saw myself, why would you roll down a residential street in Cicero, 90% Latino, with 12 kitted up, masked up, armed guys with a videographer following behind you to take a 53-year-old mother going to buy ingredients for a stew on the side of the road if the intention was not to send a message or provoke or scare the shit out of people.

You know, it just isn't commensurate with the level of force that they're bringing in, the people that they're taking.

And so the obvious reaction is for people to be pissed off or provoked by seeing behavior like that.

Pritzker said that he thinks that's the whole point.

Karen Bess essentially said the same thing to me four months ago, that LA was the petri dish for wide-scale federalized takeover of power from local municipalities and states and local local law enforcement agencies, and to be able to take charge over the citizens of the United States with a federalized force on the streets of the country.

And Prisker took it a step further and said he believes Trump's going to have troops at the ballot box in the 2026 midterms if he's not stopped now.

It didn't work out.

I think that's too cool.

You said this on TV.

Go ahead, sorry.

No, no, go ahead.

I want to hear what I said that was smart.

Well, everything you say is smart on television.

Every once in a while.

By the way, I have never been cooler to my mother-in-law, Gail Carey, than appearing on your podcast.

So you're giving me major credit within myself.

I got Gail Carey, you got Max Greenfield.

There we go.

It's a mutual love.

She's a wonderful human.

Now, as soon as I think about my mother-in-law, I lose track.

Oh, on TV, what did you say?

You said that this is as much about democracy as it is about immigration.

I mean, immigration is the side story.

It's the main story for everybody who's caught up in this, but it's one pillar of a larger story that's about how our democracy functions in this country.

And it's been interesting to see it from on the ground level because it's about the people that are being taken and the lives that are being ruined.

But really, it's about checks and balances on power in the United States.

And we're seeing them sort of crumble before our very eyes right now.

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Just going back to Bass real quick, then I want to fast forward to what you're seeing, you know, and Chicago.

But I guess it's noteworthy that it didn't work there, right?

Like if the stated plan was that, you know, they wanted to send in troops and, you know, create.

Pick up every undocumented person.

This is such a good point, Tim.

Pick up every undocumented person in LA.

Well, guess what?

There's a million undocumented people in in L.A.

and Greg Bavino bounced after a month and they got several thousand.

It didn't work.

And there wasn't the fires.

It wasn't Rodney King either.

That's right.

Yeah.

Like they didn't have that.

They didn't get that reaction either.

Why do you think that was?

People came out into the streets.

No King's Day protest was, I think, June 14th, like week two and a half of this thing happening.

20,000 people were out in downtown Los Angeles.

I think far more all over the city.

And there were lingering effects of that, I think, even after that protest.

People came out every day with their video cameras and were tracking every one of these operations every time they happened.

And my personal belief is, they haven't said this, you know, why did they pick up and leave the city with the most undocumented people in the country, the most populous county in the United States of America?

I think it's because they were faced with an incredible amount of opposition from Bass, Newsom, but most importantly from the citizens who every day were bird-dogging these guys, telling them, get out of here.

You know, the stuff that they were screaming at them.

And whether or not it was because they're screaming, you're a fascist, or because the human stories were getting through on the news, or they felt like they couldn't operate with the support of the local government, whatever it was.

Now, Grape Bavino's in Chicago.

I want you to tell us more about that story that you'd referenced.

It was Maricella.

Am I saying that her name right?

Maricella?

Yep.

And this is a 53-year-old woman that got taken.

For listeners who haven't seen that, tell that story that you witnessed firsthand.

So on, I think it was

Tuesday, I was in the Cicero neighborhood.

So let me back up.

There's a, in all of these cities, there's a team of, they call themselves rapid responders, who are basically community-based groups that organize to follow these federal agents the minute they leave, wherever they're staging from, into the communities so that they can alert their fellow community members that people are being taken or about to be taken on the streets.

And so, you know, I've got sources in these rapid response networks, and one of them was telling me Cicero today looks like it's going to be hot.

And I had never, frankly, my wife's from Chicago, but I've never been to Cicero before.

She grew up in the Cicero.

Where is that?

I don't know.

I actually don't.

It's a western suburb of Chicago, but it's probably a 20-minute drive from downtown Chicago, 25-minute drive.

And Cicero is, I learned about it too on this trip, is the largest Hispanic population, 90% in all of Illinois.

When you drive around there, you see, you know, Mexican supermarket, signage in Spanish.

It's obviously low-hanging fruit for the Border Patrol, just like when they show up in Highland Park in LA or East LA or whatever, you know, in larger Latino neighborhoods.

And so the first place that we responded to was a bakery where these two guys were taken out front as they drank cups of coffee when these agents rolled up in their unmarked cars and with their videographer and snatched them and put them in the car.

And so we were reporting on that corner.

And as we were reporting on that corner, I heard from the rapid responders that around the corner in Berwin, which is another town, but literally like a block and a half away, an older lady had been taken.

And so I went down that street.

I ran into another group of rapid responders who showed me the video.

And I just said, Hey, can you send me the video so I can have it?

Maybe we can connect later.

And

actually, let me just play a little clip from that right now for

Mr.

Lumbers.

It's her.

I'm so sorry to be the one to show you this picture of your mother.

What's it like for you to see her there with her ponytail and her backpack and her pink sweatpants talking to these guys with guns and masks and their bulletproof vests?

I mean, based off her facial expression, she looks ready to cry.

And that saddens me because

she just wanted to go to the store.

She was going to make some

albomnigas, which is basically a meatball stew.

So that video, I basically had in my pocket all day as I went back and I did live shots on MSNBC.

And after I cleared a live shot, I was actually on with you and Nicole, I think.

And after I cleared that live shot, around the corner walks a young woman who says, who looks distraught or sad and is walking with her boyfriend and says, excuse me, can you guys help me?

And I said, what can we help you with?

And she said, I'm looking for my mom and I fear that she was taken by ice

nearby here.

And I mean, immediately I just thought of what I had seen, you know, an hour before.

And I said, well, I have a video.

Can I show you?

Maybe this is her.

And sure as hell, it was her.

Honestly, in my 10 years working at MSNBC,

I don't think I've had an experience like the one that I had in that moment where as she watched, I don't even think we were filming initially.

The security guys with us were crying.

The camera guy was crying.

She, of course, most importantly, was bawling because she's seeing her mother taken into custody for the first time by these guys.

And she said to me after that, Samantha, 21 years old, all my life, I've prepared for this moment.

All my life, my mom, 53 years old, who was just going to get meat for a stew, has told me one day this could come and we have to be prepared.

But who the hell would have thought it would happen today?

And it was just gutting.

It was awful.

Did you, and what else did you learn about

her from her daughter?

That night,

she was taken to

the detention center, Broadview, where that's been the site of all those clashes where the priest got shot in the head.

And since then, she's been transferred to Springfield, and she'll have a hearing on the 21st.

But all indications are that she's going to get deported to Mexico unless she can put up some kind of legal defense.

And even if she does, who knows that they won't send her.

The other two guys that were taken on that same day, one of them's already in Georgia on his way to being deported.

I mean, they're doing this stuff so fast.

Do you know how long she'd been here?

Or did Samantha tell you about her story at at all?

30 years.

She came in 1995, and she has an entire family here.

Exactly.

Right?

It's like you can't make this shit up.

You can't make this shit up.

She has been here for 30 years, has an entire family here.

And what was her crime she committed walking down the street to get food for dinner?

I understand the comments that will come in, people will say, no, the crime is that she's...

illegal.

Well, first of all, no human is illegal.

She's undocumented.

And she came here all those years ago looking for a better life for her family.

That's a civil offense, not a criminal offense.

And as far as I know, she doesn't have a criminal record.

She's lived here and been an upstanding citizen for all of those 30 years and raised a wonderful family.

People have seen her daughter Samantha on the air.

And they take her off the streets.

Is that the worst of the worst?

You know, if they go around, they send out these press releases.

I'm sure you get them to saying, here's all the horrible people that we took off the street.

Why don't they send a press release out about everybody else?

Because I guarantee you, it's much longer than the one about the violent criminals that they're grabbing.

The other other thing is there are other remediations for various crimes, right?

It's like, it's just, you know, if somebody steals a loaf of bread now, we're not cutting off their hand still.

You know what I mean?

Like, and there are plenty of things that,

you know, even if you're somebody's strong law and order person and feels like there should be, you know, somebody like that, that, you know, could.

There could be a fine or a public service or warning.

Like, you know, you could say, I would not be for this, but at least it would be humane to say, hey, you have a deportation order now.

You have six months to get your fares in order, right?

Like, and you know, we'll have, we'll send it, we'll send somebody by, right?

Instead, let us snatch you off the street while we wear masks and have all these, you know, big long rifles on us and all this stuff, throw you into a unmarked minivan, take you to the detention center, and kick you out of the country within, potentially within days, weeks, you know, a month or whatever.

And maybe make a snuff film out of it.

Yeah.

So people can laugh and point at you.

But that's what they're doing.

I'm so glad you pointed that out.

They're literally, by the way, the same videographer that filmed the dudes

in the bakery was on the street filming the arrest of Marcella.

What are they doing with that stuff?

And in fact,

as a reporter, I shouldn't say this openly on the pod, but somebody's got to FOIA all these videos to see

what all those cameras have on them because they have to have captured violations of people's rights in some way.

And they're the ones documenting it and putting out 10, 15, 20 second social media clips that look

like a Michael Bay film.

But that's not what it looks like in real life.

I can assure you that.

i guess that's the other thing so they're going through the street they're picking up people at random like they're just harassing people asking them for papers or like how what was like the actual process i mean obviously they're as you mentioned they're masks they're in unmarked cars have you ever driven through a like a checkpoint down south like

where they'll say they'll say are you a u.s citizen and then they'll let you go that's what they do to people on the street and they walk up to them and say are you a u.s citizen and at any

they they call a probable cause but trisha mclaughlin from dhs outlined this yesterday but if they do anything that seems suspicious to them, this is what they're saying, grip a steering wheel funny, walk away, look nervous, they'll detain them.

And as we've seen, they've detained American citizens too who do that, only to release them later in LA and in Chicago.

You mentioned like, what's a more humane way to do this?

You know, I've said this before, but I think it's important to repeat.

The American immigration system for the better part of our lifetimes has been based on a deterrence-based, punitive-based system, punishing people and criminalizing people for being immigrants and coming to the country.

The modern history of it is Bill Clinton built the first wave of border walls and people died trying to come around them, and they knew that.

It was a strategy called prevention through deterrence.

George W.

Bush, after 9-11, you know, supersized the Border Patrol because they created DHS, deported a lot of people through Operation Streamline at the same time.

Barack Obama deported more people than anybody in the history of the United States as a president, and Trump is still trying to catch up to that.

Obviously, Donald Trump instituted the family separation policy, and he was able to do it like that because the system was set up that way.

Biden kept in place a lot of the same policies.

Now here's Trump with an even more supersized version of what he wanted to do.

The last time anybody tried anything different was Ronald Reagan, who did what?

He gave amnesty to people who were here legally and met certain criteria and were contributing to American society.

I'm not saying that that's the solution, but what I am saying is objectively, punishing people and hurting people for being immigrants has never stopped people from coming to this country.

And so there's got to be another way.

And the Trump administration is doing the opposite of another way.

They're going back to the tried and true stuff and only making it worse than ever before.

The other thing you said that was interesting, you mentioned that the border patrol is there in Chicago.

Yes.

Because they've rationalized this by saying that

Lake Michigan is, I guess Lake Michigan is Canada.

Trump was saying that he's going to annex Canada, but Canada's kind of annexed us a little bit, turns out.

Well, Pritzker's the one that Pritzker said this to Rachel the other night on Monday night on the air, and it kind of like my ears perked up.

And then then I think I mentioned it on the air the next day, and people were messaging me being like, Hey, dude, Lake Michigan.

So the rule is the Border Patrol can operate anywhere within 100 miles of a border, land or sea border.

And what Pritzker had said was, well, they're using Lake Michigan because of its connection to Canada or because on the other side is Canada as their justification to saying the coast of Lake Michigan is the border.

But people were messaging me being like, dude, Lake Michigan doesn't touch Canada.

It's the only great lake that doesn't touch Canada.

We shouldn't be mentioning the governor of Illinois, maybe fact-checking JB Ritz.

I said it to him when I saw him the next day and I said, Are you considering suing the Border Patrol based on that justification?

Because it didn't occur to me when you said it, but people have said to me since.

And he said, you know, we're going to look at everything.

But yeah, I wonder if it, I wonder if it actually occurred to him or not, because it didn't to me.

And then people pointed it out.

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You're working overdrive in 2025.

This might be neat hazard pay for therapists in 2025.

Things are getting dicey out there.

You know, I mentioned this before, but therapy, I went through a period where therapy was really so important for me.

I was doing a lot of time in the fetal position in the bed.

I just kind of needed to work through some of my issues with somebody.

I never really thought I'd be a therapy person.

For young Republicans, I think therapy is weak.

That's fucking stupid.

Young Republicans can be weak and stupid.

It's something that I've learned as I've grown, you know, as I've gone to therapy.

Growth is important.

That's something you learn in therapy as well.

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What about the troops side of it?

I mean, like, we've been talking about these kind of ice agents that you've seen, like the National Guard guys in the streets.

I, um, I was some rare free time away from my child.

I got to see a movie last night.

I went to see one battle after another.

It's my first time in a movie theater in like a year.

It's amazing.

And I was walking out of the movie theater and gallery place, you know, and DC still has, you know, there's a couple of four National Guard guys like standing outside the metro in Gallery Place, just kind of hanging out, talking to a

couple drunk guys, just sort of just chatting, just chatting them up.

And I just like, I mean, this is so fucking weird, like that they're just standing here doing nothing.

Next time you pass by them, ask them how they feel or if they want to be there.

Like in LA,

I talked to people who were inside the guard.

I had sources literally on the inside.

I want to disclose much more, but they were not happy to be there.

When you talk to Marines, a lot of these Marines are coming from places and from communities that are now policing or standing in between the people who are being taken by ICE and the protesters.

It's, I don't want to say many, ones that I have talked to, especially formers who are put on the air, feel extremely disrespected by being used in this way.

You don't sign up for the Marines or for the National Guard to go terrorize your neighbors, literally your neighbors, you know?

And I guess these Texas guys are coming into another state, but I'd be curious how they feel as well.

Or forget the terrorizing part.

You also don't sign up to stand outside the metro and do selfies.

Because that's like half of their job is.

I mean, they're like Disney World characters, you know, it's like they got to get the picture taken I think that the consensus is from the people that I've talked to is that it's it's a level of disrespect for members of the service that they have not felt before for people putting them in that position and humiliating I think to a lot of them to have to be there and in the case of California literally see neighbors or peers screaming in your face because you are put in between the thing that these people are protesting the deployment of the federal immigration agents and the community members that want to stop it.

You were at the protest last night.

Can you give us any color?

Like,

how big are they?

What are you seeing?

It was electric.

It was electric.

It was amazing.

The organizers said it was about 7,000 people.

And I say it was amazing because it wasn't a long-planned protest.

It came together really spontaneously.

In the morning, they called for an emergency protest.

And by 5:30, everybody's out on Michigan Avenue at IW Wells and marched up Michigan Avenue all the way to the Trump Building and turned around and came all the way back down.

And

to me, it's in such stark contrast to what happened on Michigan Avenue earlier in this deployment, which was those troops marching up and down one of the big commercial districts in the United States of America.

It's not a hotbed for MS-13 or Trende Aragua or whatever.

It's a place where tourists go to go to the Apple store.

And so I think that these protesters really felt like they were taking back the streets.

The other thing that was cool was it was the night of a huge Cubbies game.

And

if anybody knows anybody from Chicago, I feel like a lot of those people, including somebody, this woman, Brie, that I interviewed live on the air, wearing her Cubs gear, would have rather been sitting watching the game.

But they came out and expressed their anger is not even a strong enough word about what's going on there.

6-0 win for the Cubs last night, so they didn't miss much.

They're looking good.

You know, I'm a Dodger fan.

Is that where we're headed, Cubs Dodgers?

I hope so.

I hope so.

I want to just talk about a couple couple of your other stories really quick from LA, from your time there.

There's the one of Estello Ramos and Nori Ramos.

And this is just a tragic story, but for folks that missed it, I thought I'd be interested to hear you kind of rehash it.

Yeah.

Again, like, I think it's so important to focus on these particular individual stories because this is...

This is who gets caught up in all of this.

And Nori Santa Ramos is an 18-year-old who is an honor student and and star athlete on the track team at Miguel Contrero's Learning Complex Public High School in L.A.

And around the 4th of July, her mom, Nori came here with her mom when she was little, her mom, Estella, went for an immigration check-in, and they had asked Estella, who had done this many times before, to bring Nori with her.

And when they did, they detained them and ultimately deported them.

And Nori to Guatemala, where Nori hadn't been, and they fled

when Nori, I think, was six or seven because of threats from local gangs to literally kill her mother.

This is a very common story at that time in Guatemala.

We had a lot of asylum

around that era.

And I was living in Oakland for a while, and there's a big Guatemalan community and people that had been fleeing gangs.

Exactly.

And yeah, I talked to there were a bunch of, I did a little, I had a little tutoring thing I was doing with a bunch of, a couple of Guatemalan kids who were in the same boat as Nori.

We probably would have been five or six when they came.

Like, you go back to Guatemala for what?

You don't know anybody.

You were a baby.

So she knows nothing.

So she's back there.

and we go visit her, I think, a month maybe after she was deported or later in the summer.

What city?

Do you remember?

Quetzaltenago, the second biggest city in Guatemala.

And two weeks after we went there and filmed an interview with her and her mother, her mother died suddenly.

And so Norrie, 18 years old,

17 when she arrived in Guatemala, turned 18 when she got there, was in a country that she didn't know without the family that she grew up with, with basically no place to go or nothing to do.

And

she says that Estella died because of a lack of her medication that she needed for blood pressure issues that she had.

And she said that they took them away when she was in ICE detention and she was too scared to go out of the house that they were staying in in order to go track down and find the medication.

And so she was stressed.

And the family back in LA too says the deportation is what killed her, not her underlying medical condition.

And so, you know, how many of those stories are there?

There are countless noris.

I met some of them in Chicago, and there are probably more Estellas as well.

People who have died because of this.

Tom Holman said to me at the beginning of all this in L.A., people are going to die because of this.

And I don't think that he meant people are going to die like Estella died, but we have seen people shot by border agents.

We have seen people fall off roofs in California, running away from people on freeways, running from a raid at a Home Depot.

He was right.

People are dying.

And by the way, I should say, there have been awful incidents of people targeting federal law enforcement and the shooting that happened in Texas.

And I mean, that stuff is heinous.

He was right, I guess is my point, that people are dying.

It's just not the people that he said would be dying.

It's people who are being targeted by these operations.

Have you heard from Nori?

That's just.

Yeah, we've been talking.

And I'm very...

happy to say that based on sort of the outpouring of support that we have gotten since the story aired, you know, she's raised quite a bit of money for a legal defense.

And I know you know Lindsay Lindsay Toslowski from Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

Like

everybody offered to help.

And I just don't know if she has a chance of getting back in.

But what I do know is she's got a lot of good people in her corner now finding on her behalf.

Thank God.

The other story that you did, and we're all watching this because it's just, it's on video.

It was that story of Narquiso Baronco, who's this.

Crazy, right?

Narciso Barranco, the landscaper.

Yes, he's doing landscaping outside an IHOP.

Is that where he was?

Is it an IHOP?

I'm going from memory.

Something like that.

I was doing landscaping outside of a restaurant, and

he's he's got three sons that were all

in the Marines.

Serving the country.

And he gets menaced.

And these guys in masks

jump out and harass him and beat him up.

I think they beat him.

Yeah, they basically beat him up.

He was literally cutting bushes at an IHOP.

And these dudes roll up in Santa Ana, California, chase him.

They say he tried to attack them with his weed whacker.

The footage to me looks like he's retreating with the weed whacker.

Scared in between.

Masked agents are running at him when all he was doing was his job outside an IHOPS.

That's what Alejandro told me,

his son.

Alejandro said that if he, when he was in the Marines, would have treated, and he was in Afghanistan, he said, if I would have treated a detainee the way that those guys treated my dad, I'd be tried for a war crime, the way they beat him when they threw him into that car.

And

he is lucky.

He got out before they stopped bonding people out who were detained, but he still faces deportation.

And yeah, I got the opportunity to go to his house for Nicole's podcast, actually, and sit down with him and talk to him.

And it just is truly sickening to speak to somebody who

raised three boys to go into the Marines because of how much he loved and believed in this country, only to be treated like that by guys who, in the words of his own son, you know, clearly don't even have the operational training that his boys do and that they got, you know, going into the U.S.

Marines.

So what is the latest with that story?

Do you know?

He just has an immigration process that's

unfolding now.

And he's lucky enough to be on the outside of an ICE detention center.

He was sent to Atalanto, one of the most notorious ICE prisons in the United States that I've been inside.

I went inside during family separation in the high desert outside of L.A.

And the conditions there are awful.

And

Mr.

Barranco said to me when I met with him at his house that he wanted to use the opportunity to speak out to talk about the other people that he met inside the facility and how much of an impact that those people meant too because the things that stuck out to him were the guy that was a father and had a little daughter who had a disability i mean these are all real people with real stories and we the humanity is just totally extracted from all of this when it's talked about out of washington and sometimes out of new york or la or you know our own news studios um and so i just feel blessed to uh to get to spend time around a lot of these guys.

I appreciate you, man.

I'm slightly jealous.

I mean, it's horrifying and traumatizing.

It's also a little soul nourishing to actually meet people and be out there.

I kind of miss doing the circus versus like being in my hole, you know?

Dude,

come with me anytime.

I will say, and you know, being part of the MSNBC family, the resources that my bosses put towards this, I think are pretty unparalleled.

And I feel really lucky that, you know, this is what they want to be showing on the air.

I think it's so important to put this in context because there's nothing like the facts on the ground, and you can't argue with what you're seeing with your own eyes.

Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Aaron and Carissa.

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High key.

Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, and unfiltered culture podcast coming at you every Friday.

You better listen.

What I'm really high-key obsessed with is Sinners.

I just saw it.

It's so good.

It's so good.

It is one of the best horror movies in a good minute.

And I like it because it was allowing me to get into arguments with strangers on the street being like, oh, so you didn't like this, but you like the substance.

And then you made a friend.

Exactly.

And I made a friend who blocked me.

I'm actually a person that avoids horror.

And the way that I was the loudest in my theater, and I don't even think that was like all the way as scary as it could have been.

Someone came over to my house and they like asked to come in i said what what do you mean excuse me yeah don't play with that and it was a white person well i got minced garlic in my fridge right now if you really want to

chewing on that garlic listen to high key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Just one other story on this.

Did you have, have you had a chance to talk to George Redis yet?

You know, then the security guard?

I interviewed him last night, and that's going to be on

our YouTube page today, folks.

Go check out.

I can't wait to see that.

I was blown.

I did not have any idea.

And I knew the story was crazy.

He's an American citizen who gets detained, right?

And he's going to his job as a security agent outside that weed farm where they were raiding the weed farm.

And

obviously he's racially profiting.

In Ventura County, right?

In California.

Yeah, yeah.

That's where the guy died falling off the roof, exactly.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So George is racially profiled.

They take him to

lock up.

I forget where he said they took him.

And he's there for one day.

And then they,

no lawyer, no phone call.

They They have him meet a nurse for a wellness check.

The nurse says that he's on suicide.

He should be on suicide watch.

They put him in a hole for 48 hours, 24-7, lights on, naked.

He's a U.S.

citizen.

He didn't do anything.

It's depraved.

That is depraved.

To hear that.

I mean, when I wrote Separated, the book about family separation, the reason I wanted to.

The subtitle is Inside an American Tragedy is, sadly, this is in line with how our country has treated.

I mean, this is a U.S.

citizen, but the way they're treating undocumented people people is in line with the this chapter of American history will fall in line after these other ignoble chapters like slavery and genocide and

Japanese American internment, turning the St.

Louis back and sending Jews back to the Holocaust.

I mean, you name it.

Our country has long treated people who are seeking a better life here or a new life or obviously in the case of slavery, not coming by any choice of their own, abhorrently.

And now they're doing it to U.S.

citizens as well.

And I think that I'm really glad you interviewed him because I think that that is an undertold part of all this that there are so many U.S.

citizens getting caught up in this now, too.

Yeah, it was true in Chicago, right?

Like that, that apartment building that the helicopter was over and the people were pelled in.

And it's like, there were some undocumented people in that building, but there were obviously U.N.

citizens in that building, in that apartment building, and they had their doors knocked, you know,

kicked in.

Yeah, they're

zip-tied.

Crazy.

I want to ask before I lose you about

the fire and your book that's coming up.

There's actually a news item on this, I guess it was yesterday that the Palisades fire was arson.

I think they've basically decided it was an Uber driver, I guess.

And so I'm just, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that and whether that puts any different context on the book and what else you've been working on.

Yeah, so the book comes out in January.

And it's, as you said, it's called Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster and shameless plug that people can go pre-order it now.

The reason I wanted to write it,

just like was separated and family separation, was to experience something so massive, you know, so up close, it's hard to understand what happens in real time.

And in the case of these fires in LA, this was my,

not just my city, but literally my town that incinerated before my very eyes.

My childhood home burned down, the house my brother was living in burned down, houses of friends, of just people I love very dearly, and on the other side of town in Altadina, where I spend a lot of time now living closer to there.

You know, it has long been suspected the prevailing theory was that this was sort of a rekindling in the Palisades of a fire that burned seven days earlier, the Lachman fire.

And it was like directly behind the house my brother was living in.

And the federal government, the federal prosecutors are now saying, alleging that a young man intentionally set that fire and it wasn't fully contained or extinguished and that an ember became what's called a firebrand and that firebrand lit a root system system of some vegetation on fire, and the roots burned under the ground for six or seven days.

And when those insanely ferocious Santa Annas kicked up, it unearthed the burning roots.

And I didn't know anything about the science of all this.

I learned a lot and reported out the book that set all this chaparral on fire, and that became the Palisades fire.

And so they're charging this guy with arson for starting what became, yeah, ultimately the Palisades fire.

And,

you know,

I'll talk more about this when the book comes out.

but the thing that I've really taken away from this is it really was like the fire of the future.

And I think we'll only see more fires like this, not just because of climate change and infrastructure problems and changes in the way we live, you know, electric car batteries exploding, but the politics of misinformation and disinformation.

The stuff that Trump and Elon Musk and all these guys were saying as the fires were burning did nothing but pour

more

proverbial fuel on the fire.

And I think that that's sort of the environment we live in now with natural disasters: is that the conversations that we have around them are as political as anything else, and it makes everything all that much worse.

So, did you read?

Uh, did you read The Deluge by chance by Stephen Markley?

No, I haven't read as good as other people that said it.

No, I know it's like that's a bunch of people were posting it.

It's fiction, but it was kind of about an LA fire of the future, and it's like one of those creepy things.

Shout out to Stephen Markley, who like you know, well, Octavia Butler, as well, you know, like people say predicted the Eaton fire in Altadena.

And if you read Mike Davis, you know, Ecology of Fear, City of Courts, he maybe is the foremost scholar that sort of dove deep before he died into the Los Angeles wildland urban interface, how it intersects with politics and our fissures in society and how something like this could one day happen.

And sure as hell did.

Book is Firestorm, man.

I appreciate you out there in these streets working.

We're noticing the grays, you know.

Dude, look at that.

It's because they're right there, right there in the sun today.

But we need you out there.

And thanks for coming on the pod.

I really appreciate it.

Appreciate you, Tim.

Thanks, man.

Sure, folks who want to see you.

We're taping this on Friday.

Tomorrow, Saturday, you're doing an MSNBC live event with a bunch of our other MSNBC friends.

It's going to be great.

Hammerstein Ballroom.

Yeah, here in New York City.

That's why I came to New York after being in Chicago.

MSNBC Live 25, all of us are going to be there in person.

It's going to be really awesome.

I didn't get to do it last year.

I have a major FOMO about missing it, but I think something like 4,000 of our closest friends will all gather together and talk about the stuff that we see happening and get to know each other.

And it's going to be awesome.

So I think there's still some tickets left.

People should grab them if they haven't yet.

Yeah.

We have Bulwark Live, which is sold out.

You know, but that's at night.

I don't know who to blame about the fact that it's the same day, but you could do both.

You could do a double header, like a baseball double header, because that MSNBC stuff's during the day.

So it's possible.

I'll do so.

I might dip in.

Okay.

All right, Prophet.

Good to see you again.

Appreciate it very much.

Thanks, Ben.

All right.

Thanks so much to Jacob Sobaroff.

Before we get to the Sarahs, I wanted to touch on one more melancholy topic here at the podcast and in my family.

My husband's grandmother, his mama,

died earlier this week.

She had her funeral yesterday in Beckley, West Virginia.

And given my travel schedule, I was

disappointed to not be able to make it to it.

And I was thinking about her a lot yesterday.

And I received such this unbelievable note that I'd like to to share with you all if it's okay um it's from it's from one of you actually it's from one of our listeners who was reading an obituary for an old teacher of theirs uh in west virginia and they're reading the obituary and saw me and tyler and talosa's name in there and and realized that it was you know my family that nancy was part of and so uh she sent me this this note about nancy jamison which i'd like to read for you Mrs.

Jameson, as I knew her then, was one of the kindest and most caring people I had the pleasure of interfacing with in high school as a scared kid with multiple then undiagnosed varieties of neurodivergence.

I'll personally never forget her sitting with me on the kindergarten bus to help keep me calm and always take the time to check on me individually when she could read fear or frustration on my face.

And my gosh, could she ever make me laugh.

As I've spoken with a few other schoolmates this morning about her passing, the one common thread was something along the lines of, I don't even recall any other teacher's aid from all the school, but I will never ever forget how funny and nice Mrs.

Jameson was.

She made an impact on so many students.

Peace to you and your family during this difficult time.

I appreciated that note so much.

I appreciate that you all reach out to me with stories.

I've received a bunch this week about personal stories around the shutdown, etc.

Obviously, this one touched me in a special way.

And, you know, Nancy, she was just an amazing in-law.

I mean, you can imagine as a gay, you know, going to whatever we want to call Beckley, small town, West Virginia, rural West Virginia, I guess we call it small town, West Virginia, to meet the in-laws, meet the grandma and the grandfather.

You know,

you don't know what to expect.

You don't know what to expect.

And I think that there are certainly some families where the welcome would not have been as loving and easy and exciting and engaging as it was for me.

I just, I love chatting with her.

And she was a great, great grandmother to Toulouse and obviously just a deeply good person who was engaging and interesting and wanted to grow late in life.

And she was just a little dynamo.

She came down to our wedding at whatever, age 85, 80, 90 at a gay wedding in New Orleans, had her walker and was out there partying as much as the 28 and 29 year olds.

So she'll be missed.

I appreciate very much this note for Amber that allowed me to kind of connect and reflect on Nancy while I was away from the funeral yesterday.

So, much love to all of you.

Up next, Sarah McBride and Sarah Lamba.

High key.

Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, and unfiltered culture podcast coming at you every Friday.

You better listen.

What I'm really high key obsessed with is Sinners.

I just saw it.

It's so good.

It's so good.

It is one of the best horror movies in a good minute, and I like it because it was allowing me to get into arguments with strangers on the street being like, oh, so you didn't like this, but you like the substance.

And then you made a friend.

Exactly.

And I made a friend who blocked me.

I'm actually a person that avoids horror.

And the way that I was the loudest in my theater, and I don't even think that was like all the way as scary as it could have been.

Someone came over to my house and they like asked to come in.

I said, what do you mean?

Excuse me?

Yeah, don't play with that.

And it was a white person.

I got minced garlic in my fridge right now.

If you really want to play.

Chewing on that garlic.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

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So I do have a surprise.

Sarah McBride is not our only congressional guest tonight.

We do have another one.

Please welcome to the stage Nancy Mace.

You know how.

I'm just kidding.

Calm down.

Calm down.

You know how I know that would never happen is that Nancy Mace would never knowingly walk on a stage with me because when we are at the Capitol, every single time she sees me, she turns around and goes the other way.

It's so funny because she's so tough on Twitter.

She is, she is very vocal on Twitter, but when we're in the garage and we're walking in, she'll see me, she'll stop, she'll start rummaging through her purse and wait for me to go.

I'm on an elevator, the door opens, she's there, she will just turn right around.

You know,

that level of cowardice doesn't surprise me at all.

Does it surprise you, though?

I guess, like, this this is a new feature of our politics where just like normal human civility seems to have gone away.

Like it didn't used to be like that in Congress.

I know you're new-ish, but like

do other people come up to you, like other Republicans, and they're like, we're really sorry about Nancy.

She sucks.

They don't say her name, but yes, they do.

There are a number of Republican colleagues who have come up to me and said, I am so sorry with the way that they are treating you.

And, you know, right now, I would

love to take on some bullying just to have my Republican colleagues back so that they would actually do their job during the shutdown.

So very charitable.

Yeah.

Let's talk about them not doing their job.

We're a week into this shutdown, as I just laid out for everybody.

It's been a big week.

How would you, how do you think Democrats are like, do, because right now we talk about the shutdown, like it's a, who's winning the shutdown?

And there's actually, for the first time, I don't know, the Democrats are showing some signs of life.

They seem to have found talking points they're comfortable with on healthcare.

Like, how do you think Democrats are doing in the context of the shutdown politics?

I think Republicans are in disarray, and I think Democrats feel like we are in a righteous fight right now.

Look, we have been ready

from August onward as this deadline approached to work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to fix the health care crisis and to keep the government open, but Republicans have consistently refused to engage with us.

And,

you know, I think, one, it's because they are committed to cutting health care, but two,

they cannot grapple with the fact.

that they have to engage with anyone but themselves and Donald Trump in this moment.

My guess is that when Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week ahead of the shutdown, it was probably the first time in nine months that someone said no to Donald Trump's face.

And they cannot handle that, but they're going to have to deal with it.

That's nice.

Good clap.

I do, I'm curious, do Democrats ever think about saying like,

I get why they've chosen healthcare as the place to stand?

Sure, righteous cause.

But also what about just like, hey, man, we're not going to fund your totally corrupt government that's sending troops into the streets?

And like,

let's say there's a deal on healthcare.

Like, if they came and they were like, yeah, it's unpopular to raise everybody's premiums or whatever,

would you give them that?

Or do you ever want to be like, all right, look, guys, yeah, we'll reopen the government, release the Epstein files, pull the troops back?

Well, first of all, one of the reasons why they're keeping the house shut down is because they don't want to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, because she would be the 218th signature on the Epstein discharge petition.

And when there is a vote, there could be an overwhelming vote that makes it an unstoppable force in the Senate and ultimately gets it to President Trump's desk, and he would have to choose whether he would veto legislation.

What do you think he'll do?

Yeah, big surprise.

Big surprise.

But look, I think

I know in this room right now,

it's understandable and easy for all of us in this space to be consumed with the authoritarian power grab.

And

it is that, there is no question.

But when I go back to Delaware and I talk to my constituents who don't have the luxury of spending their evening in a space like this,

they need their health care.

They don't have the luxury of us holding out for the moon in this moment.

They need us to deliver tangible results that would result in them being able to get life-saving care.

And

we have in this moment a responsibility to not only deliver for them something that they urgently need, but we also need to show that we can fight and we can win.

That is important as we continue to have the energy and the momentum necessary to push back against this president.

It is necessary to continue to shift public opinion because the reality is in this moment, the main lever we have at our disposal to throw sand in the gears of his authoritarian machine is public opinion.

And we know on this fight we have the public with us.

But the final thing is we can't separate the Republican effort to raid people's health care.

and cut people's health care.

We cannot separate that from the authoritarian power grab because the reality is they are inextricably linked.

Donald Trump made an unholy alliance in the last elections, in the last election with tech oligarchs and billionaire donors.

He said, you fund my campaign and facilitate my consolidation of power, and I will pay you off with massive tax breaks.

And when they passed the big ugly bill in July, it was to pay them off.

And they just partially paid for that by raiding people's health care.

And so when you cut off Donald Trump's capacity to raid people's health care, to fund tax breaks for billionaires, to pay them off for them facilitating his consolidation of power, you are also addressing the authoritarian consolidation of power in that moment, too.

That's one of the better explanations I've heard from a Democrat about how they're connected.

I gotta say, I think one of the reasons you guys are sort of, it feels like you're winning, is that there are kind of cracks in the Republican coalition.

You say they're in disarray.

Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be maybe on your side, which is that uncomfortable?

How do you like?

Listen, I've long talked about welcoming imperfect allies.

That big tent's gotta be big, guys.

Gotta be big.

It's gotta be, hey, all the Jewish space lasers have to fit under there and all that stuff.

Tell me, how do you think it ends?

Well,

I think.

Not Marjorie Taylor Greene, but

the shutdown.

Look, I...

I think Republicans are really feeling the heat in this moment.

And we are about to get to a point where troops aren't going to get paid.

And Mike Johnson has made clear he's not going to bring the House back to pay our troops.

I think there is going to be, as these letters

that will

show skyrocketing premiums for millions of Americans arrive in people's mailboxes, I think there's going to be increased pressure from that.

We're already starting to see cracks, Marjorie being one, but there are other cracks that are showing in the Republican caucuses.

Sorry, that sounds really weird.

Sue on, true on so many levels.

I believe that they, I actually believe now in a way that I wasn't sure a week ago, I think we could see them cave.

I think we could see them cave, and

I think if they do, not only will some people's lives be saved, but I think we will show that the emperor has no clothes, that so much of this president's power is rooted in the perception of his invincibility.

And when that stops, when there is a crack in that,

a lot of his

power falls away.

Not a lot, not all, but some.

Listen, I think the idea of just getting a win on the table for Democratic voters who feel like you are doing something to stand up and fight, because you know, when I listen to voters and the focus groups that I do all the time,

it doesn't matter if they are Democrats who want the party to be more progressive or they want it to be more moderate, they all agree they want to see Democrats fight this guy and feel like it's not happening.

And this is really the shutdown is the first time I've seen that spine in a way that I think is starting to make people feel like, hey, we might get somewhere.

I just drank someone else's coffee.

That was disgusting.

It was my coffee, so that's fine.

That's fine.

Yeah, I see.

Some LRC.

Yeah, yeah, that's, you know,

we're very clean, lesbians.

Unlike Tim, who doesn't even wash his hands.

I promise you, it's true.

You know, I want to.

I've been in men's bathrooms.

That is very true.

Yeah.

Oh, I mean, you don't, you're.

Oh, he's back there.

Yeah.

My staffer in the back is like, oh, my God.

You know, speaking of bathrooms,

no, I'm just kidding.

I want to ask you something.

I have been a great admirer of the way that you message.

So, like, when I was coming up in the, it was like 2005, I'm coming out of the closet.

Like, that's when all the, that was when the marriage equality passed in Massachusetts.

It was the first time.

So, like, it's, it's...

interesting when you and your identity is like in the crosshairs politically, which is just like what your life is right now.

But you have been very vocal about the need for a big tent for people who don't necessarily agree on all of those issues.

And so

I've listened to you talk about this a bunch, but for people who haven't, maybe you could explain just what your theory of the big tent is.

I mean, does it include Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Does it include people who are hostile?

And

it's not just about the big tent, it's also about what do you build a big tent, purity tests kind of can't dominate everything.

So how do you think about that?

Sure.

Well, as I mentioned, the main lever that we have at our disposal in this moment is public opinion.

And if we are going to win the next election and win the election after that, and hopefully win with margins that allow us to govern and deliver,

we are going to have to build a mass movement

of diverse,

ideologically diverse, Americans who I believe unite around essentially two fundamental principles.

One, that working people need more help, and two, that freedom and democracy are good.

And if you can get behind that, then welcome to our cause.

Welcome to our coalition.

If everything is truly on the line, which I believe it is,

then we have to engage in this moment with the ruthless survival skills of an LGBTQ kid in Florida or in North Dakota who does not have the luxury of prioritizing purity and perfection over goodwill and good intentions.

We have to

recognize that a big tent, which is what we need to win to,

yes, it means welcoming in people who are maybe to the right of some of us, maybe not as far as Marjorie Taylor Greene, but to the right of us.

You know what, I think that's fair.

Everybody's got to have limits.

But, yeah.

But it also means a big tent goes both ways.

And it also means that we have to be welcoming to folks who might be to the left of us.

And I think if we can do that, if we can be the most welcoming, the most joyful, the most inclusive tent, I believe that that's a coalition that people will want to be a part of.

Politics is fundamentally the art of addition.

And I think voters ask two questions when they're considering who to support.

The first question is, what does this candidate, what does this party think of me?

Do they like me?

Do they respect me?

And the second question is, what does this party think?

If you can't answer that first question to a voter's satisfaction, they will never get to the second question.

And I think that

we can disagree.

We can have very different views on a whole host of issues, but in this moment,

in this moment, we need all of the help that we can get.

And I think part of the challenge that

we have found ourselves in on our side of the aisle and our coalition is that for the last decade or so, we have started to treat relationships as a tool to reward or punish people who hold positions that we view harmful or hurtful.

One of the most common ways that we see people perform allyship is when someone says something that they believe is offensive, they cut them off as a form of punishment.

And I get the instinct, but one, that's just performative allyship.

If

I want

people to stay in relationship, you don't have to be the best friends with the person.

You don't have to validate everything about them, but I want people to stay in conversation and remain proximate to people.

who hold positions that not only we disagree with, but that we might find offensive, so that someone can be there to educate them and even to hold them accountable.

But because we've started to treat relationships as a tool to reward or punish people based on their positions, we've then conditioned ourselves into thinking that being in relationship or being in coalition with people means that we are condoning everything they believe.

And that is

counterproductive, it's unfair, and it treats those relationships as a transaction rather than the starting point for a conversation to actually open hearts and change minds as we build that mass movement.

I like that answer.

That's a good answer.

But I'm going to push just a little harder on this because I want to put a finer point on it, which is, look, there was a point at which like gay people were the wedge issue, and now trans people are the wedge issue, right?

and so you get a lot of people I hear it in focus groups all the time they're like man I really hate the way that Donald Trump is like approaching immigration he's not doing anything on the economy but I like what he's doing with not letting those trans kids you know change their genders

and so when when you've got like

I guess, how do you see your role in trying to get the Democratic Party to understand, like, if you've got an 80-20 issue, this is like a hard question.

It's a hard question.

It's a hard conversation, but I feel like people need to have it.

I think we understood

back in the day, it was like, okay, Barack Obama was not for gay marriage in 2008.

And there was an activist community that understood you couldn't make politicians walk the plank on an issue that the public wasn't there on.

And so you had to have sort of an activist class that was slowly bringing people along.

But I feel like right now, people on the trans issue, they don't want to throw trans people under the bus.

They want to be good allies.

They want to be good people.

They learned a lot from the gay marriage fight where they're like, this is how we are good allies.

And so they don't want to give give comfort to people, or they don't want to say, I'm not going to say trans people can't play in sports,

but when it's a wedge issue like that, how do you approach it?

Like, what's your advice to Democrats who will take your answer more credibly than they will anybody else's?

So, first of all, I think that we can maintain our values, stay true to our values, and defend vulnerable communities, including vulnerable young people who are being fear-mongered and scapegoated around by Donald Trump and Republicans, we can defend them and meet voters where they are at the same time.

I do not believe that those are mutually exclusive in this moment.

I think the marriage equality example is such a good and profound example.

In 2005,

the LGBTQ community found itself in a position where many people thought that rights for members of our community had lost Democrats the last election.

States had just overwhelmingly passed marriage bans, red states and blue states alike, by overwhelming margins.

And our community had a choice in that moment.

Do we turn inward?

Do we write off the Americans who had just overwhelmingly voted against our rights?

Or do we engage in the art of persuasion?

Do we invite people in for a conversation?

Do we extend grace?

And I think Democrats in that moment, they didn't throw gay people under the bus.

You saw Democrats united in opposing, for instance, the federal marriage amendment that would have banned marriage equality under the Constitution.

But you had a range of positions on whether they supported marriage equality or supported civil unions.

And I think whether you are someone in our coalition

who

believes that

every single student needs and deserves an affirmative right to extracurricular programs consistent with who they are in every grade, or you're someone who has concerns or questions about trans young people participating in sports consistent with their gender identity across all sports and all ages.

Regardless of where you are organizing.

You know, lesbians, we care a lot about sports.

You do care a lot about sports.

And I always say, if you want to prove that trans people don't have a competitive advantage advantage in sports, throw me in.

Put me into the game coach because we will lose instantly.

But I think regardless of where you are there,

regardless of where...

So you're not good at basketball or anything?

No.

Oh, God, no.

Like, I can't drive.

I can't do anything.

I can barely play t-ball.

Like.

But regardless of where you are

on the specifics of that question,

I think we can get most people in a place where they are willing and ready to defend trans people while meeting voters where they are.

Because at the end of the day,

whether you have concerns or not, I think most people can agree

that

the best people to decide how to balance respect and fairness in sports are not politicians in Washington who know nothing about school sports and even less about trans people.

And it's individual athletic associations that are best capable of making those rules themselves, free of politics.

Okay, last question.

Did you guys know that Delaware only has one congressional seat?

Did you?

Did you really know that?

I represent more people in the House than any other member of the House who votes.

Do you know?

It's the one time Delaware's the biggest at something.

It's funny.

I lived in Delaware for a few years, but I'm from Pennsylvania.

The best years of your life.

They were the worst years of my life.

Do you know that I worked...

Well,

I'm about to leave right now.

That was.

See, I had to work on Rick Santorum's bookdore while I was living in Delaware.

There's a conservative think tank there.

It's not worth getting into that.

Yeah, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

That's right.

That's where I worked out of college.

My best friend in high school lived across the street, and we used to have great high school parties at his place.

Yeah, so I know that Intercollegiate Studies Institute well.

Okay, well I worked there and yeah, it was cool.

It was cool.

It was a great place to be.

I was working there?

Yeah, for three years.

Wow, you really are a Republican.

Jesus Christ.

It was a little different back then, you know, like now J.D.

Vance rolls up to be like, we're going to wage civil war over manufacturing.

Like he has all these weird theories.

Like that's not what we were just reading, you know, Road to Serfdom by Hayek.

It was just nerds.

Now it's like really weird out there thoughts.

But anyway, my point is: I'm from Pennsylvania, so I'm a Sheets person.

You're a Wawa person.

You like make this whole big deal out of it.

I get it, whatever.

Do you like ever talk to John Fetterman about this?

We have actually never, we've met once, very briefly, and we did not talk about Wawa and Sheets.

Is it because you were like, John, what the fuck, man?

No, that's not what you said.

It was a very brief conversation.

Okay.

Guys, Sarah McBride, who was awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Oh Sarah, here we go again.

I can't get past the pain what don't set you.

Too old now to learn how to let you in.

So I run away just like I always do

She said if there's something I should know tell me now.

Or I go

and give my heart away.

So I can get on with my life,

and you can go on with your strife.

Wish you'd speak the words those eyes are trying to say.

Sometimes this life feels like

a big old dream I'm floating around on the cloud inside.

When my cloud starts coming apart at the scenes, oh Sarah,

that's when I sigh.

Well, there's gonna be times that I gotta go away,

but don't worry, baby, I'll come home

out on the road where I'm gonna find my way.

But I'll always find the time when I'm alone

So forgive me if sometimes I seem a little crazy

But goddamn, sometimes crazy's how I feel

And my brain's starting to swirl down drain this over

It's the love that I feel in your arms

It's the glow you wear around me like a charm.

It's the tender in your eyes.

Keeps me safe and warm at night.

Pray on this tonight.

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

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