Jon Favreau: Foundational Freedoms

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We're in a different studio today. I'm in Los Angeles, and our friends at Crooked Media had allowed us to rent this out.

We're paying union rates. They're going to round up on the hours, which I appreciate.
You know, we want to support everybody and kind of win and roam kind of vibes is what I'm thinking about here.

And I'm delighted to be joined by one of the founders, Crooked Media, host of Pod Save America, John Favreau. What's up, man? Welcome.

I heard that when we were setting this up, you actually asked if you needed to rent this space. I was like, what the fuck is he talking about? Who's offering? That's really nice of you, Baba.

It's you.

We love it.

We're pals. I know, but you know, just want to make sure that everybody's kind offer.
Yeah, everybody's.

We want equity, you know? That's important.

Not diversity, equity, and inclusion anymore. We're just the E.
We're only doing the E now. We are taping this on Tuesday afternoon, I should say.
I usually tape in the mornings.

So by the time this actually comes out, who the hell knows? Right? I mean, Donald Trump might have actually taken down his pants and shit on someone, like in person instead of just in AI.

And if so, I'll get to that on the Thursday show. So we're just going to try to do the best we have with the information on the table now.

You run into this on your show from time to time. All the time, especially since we recorded three on Mondays and Thursdays.
Yeah, that's brutal. So we always have news.
Lots happening.

I want to start with you since you actually won some campaigns and made it into the White House, which I never have, so I don't really know what it looks like in there.

We're bulldozing the East Wing now. We sure are.
It's just going straight to the ground.

Trump said he was going to add a new, it was like, at first, it was like, we're going to add a new space to ballroom. Yeah, a ballroom to host foreign dignitaries.

It's not like in my head, I'm imagining like, yeah, kind of a new room, right? You know, something that you can add or maybe rearranging a little bit.

But no, it seems like they're like tearing down the East Wing and building up a new gilded monstrosity. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't understand that either because it's like I could see adding a ballroom.

I couldn't. You don't need a ballroom.
You have state dinners at the White House all the time. Those are like the biggest events.
And where would they be? They'd be in the East Wing.

There's a large room in the East Wing where the president can do press conferences, hold big events.

And then when it's a really big event, like sometimes for a state dinner, you hold it outside and you tent it. Right.
And, you know, you have heaters if it's in the winter and it's no problem. Yeah.

There's no reason to have a ballroom. Not an urgent matter.
Yeah. So what else is it? Like, walk us through the East Wing.
I don't know.

I just, I'm seeing the images of, you know, people's mouths just being

torn to shreds. East Wing is where the First Lady's office is.
It's where the social offices.

So nothing happening there. Somebody else.
And it's not there. Crucially, it's where a lot of the tours go, too.

Because you can get a West Wing tour, but you can all get an East Wing tour because that's more of

the history of the White House. And you see portraits of other presidents and first ladies and China and all that kind of stuff.
So it's just very historic, the East Wing.

But it's kind of insane that they're doing it. Yeah.
I mean, does it give you any emotional feelings? Like, when you look at the images, or just do you laugh?

You know, I think it's dumb, and I think it's ridiculous that he's also doing this in the midst of a government shutdown. Just like, we're going to just create a new ballroom and

we're not paying the people doing TSA, for example.

We're not paying government workers right now. Are we paying the guys that are bulldozing the East Wing? That's a good question.
I guess we're contracting someone.

But I have to say, I don't have a lot of faith in his taste either. So that's going to kind of...
You're not impressed with the kind of au bon pan

patio? Yeah, they were all out there today. The rose garden? It was the

up.

But like, it doesn't bug me as much. I mean, on the list of awful things that Trump is doing, like, if he

called off the masked agents rounding people up in the streets, I would let him bulldoze the entire White House. Yeah, good.
That'd be afraid of it. You know what I'm saying?

So it's very low on the list of things that get me.

Are you with me secretly on liking the new Oval Office decor? No.

That's a crazy opinion. But the old one was pretty drab.
Well, that's Protestant and dragged. Yeah, that's fine, but I don't think this was the answer.
Me neither.

I'm just not gonna be able to do that. I don't think the Saddam Corps

with

drawings

is better.

And look, I thought that Obama had a coffee table in that White House, in our White House, that I thought was fucking weird. Did he? Yeah,

somebody had a blue carpet, one of the old presidents. I was watching some old videos, and I kind of liked it.
W, maybe. No, I think it was.
Or was it Bill? It was Clinton. Yeah.

A little blue, dark carpet. JV, one more thing on this.
JVL is particularly strident. I saw

you seen this. Yeah, I'm I'm a triad reader.

Well, everyone should be a triad reader. Thebork.com sign up.
It's a great newsletter. Sometimes, you know, he lets it rip a little bit.

You're writing a daily newsletter, a lot of A-plus takes, some A-minus ones, and then you get into some weird territory. Maybe people like this.

The stated policy of every Democrat seeking the presidency should be that the first thing they will do is demolish the Trump ballroom and restore the east wing of the White House to their pre-Trump state.

What What do you think?

Here's what I think.

If I was at a debate, a primary debate, and someone asked me if I would do that, sure,

fine. Yeah, I'm joking.

Sure, I have no problem with that position. I don't know that it's, again, it's not high on my list of priorities.
I think there's a lot of other things we're going to have to clean up.

Woof.

I'm joking on that. Gonna have to demolish

most of the appointments. Yeah.

A lot of the people working in the ballroom they probably want to get rid of they can leave for sure yeah i don't know i'm kind of a count me as a maybe on that i don't know that i'll be mad if a democrat decides that they want to demolish it but also i i don't know i don't think it'll be on the my first day no you know they ask you that thing what are you gonna do

day one signing an eo demolishing i'm gonna be out there

fucking sledgehammer demolishing the eastling though that might do well i don't know in a democratic primary we'll get to that in a second we have some more serious matters you mentioned the ice the masked ice thugs Our friends at Puck have new polling on this.

Indy's opposing the ICE efforts. Independence, 49 to 40.
Most Republicans are for it, unfortunately. You know, I was maybe

hoping, but you know, there's lots of interest. Honestly, 11% to me was like, that's pretty, that's that's high.
It's pretty good. Okay.
50 to 34, the numbers against masks. Again,

pretty good, I guess. 34 seems pretty high

for secret police, but okay.

47-42, 42, so very small majority agree that they're mainly targeting peaceful people who are not a threat.

That to me was probably the

most hopeful number in there.

Because to say that mainly targeting peaceful people, which I agree with,

you sort of have to know you're following this somewhat closely and you're seeing the images and you're seeing the footage. So I was like, that number surprised me in a positive way.

Where are you at on the whole convo of like whether this is a political winner? And there's me and the Matt Iglesias argue about this. Iglesias is in the Democrats just shouldn't talk about this.

It's a losing issue. Where are you? I strongly disagree with that.

I think we Democrats fucked up immigration under Biden for sure. I think that most people in the country want

policy-wise or rhetoric? Policy-wise and rhetoric.

Because I think that the idea there, again, was we're going to do all this stuff, but we're not going to talk about immigration because that's not the best issue for us.

So now we've this is basically how Democrats have handled immigration for some time now,

which is a tough issue. So let's do the policy.
Let's say that we're for a path to citizenship and then helping the dreamers and then make a nod to border security.

But when immigration just happens or there's waves of new migration or an influx of migrants, we're just not going to talk about it because it's not a good issue for us.

And I think that is a mistake because

the Trump Republican Party is always going to make it an issue. It's going to be the centerpiece of their agenda.

So why are we just having their story out there and not telling ours and just pretending that when they do really extreme things on immigration, we hit back with like, but cost of living.

Like, I just don't think that works.

Even though I agree that cost of living is a more favorable terrain for us than immigration.

But I think that Trump's numbers on immigration and the change in his numbers on immigration since he took office the second time proves that it's not their best issue.

And if you actually go make the case and share a lot of these videos and stories and images of ICE, it's going to change people's minds.

And I still think a lot of people would say, we want a strong border.

We want an immigration system that is fair, that people who've been standing in line and waiting, they should get precedent over people who illegally crossed the border for sure.

But they don't want ICE in the streets grabbing innocent people and American citizens and legal residents. Yeah.

And the 50-34 against masks, I think it's encouraging because it also shows there's room to grow there, probably.

Like a lot of people probably don't know, like haven't been following that closely, don't know about it.

I was talking on a different project to some MAGA folks who, like, you get a lot of the defense of this.

It's actually not really on the merits, but it's a lot of like, you know, a couple examples are falling through the cracks. Like, that happens in any policy, right?

You know, and the liberal media is obsessing over these outliers. And so to me, like, that.

is an argument for talking about this more and and and bringing up the examples more because I think that the more examples there are, the harder it is to kind of get away with that.

I also find that, I mean, I've been angry about this for months now, and I know you have. And you interviewed George Redis,

U.S. citizen who was detained for three days for no reason.
Both of us were madder than he was. I mean, which was also incredible to me.
It was just like the grace that he has.

And then I, you know, talked about it too and shared the story and just the reaction from people who are like, I can't believe this is happening. I didn't know this.

And these are people who, you know, pay attention to you and me and all the content we do, which means their political job is. They're engaged.
They're engaged.

And so just the number of people out there who probably don't realize this, I think there's huge room to

persuade people in this. Yeah.
We got to get George on like the Yvonne show or something. You know what I mean? Like one of those types of things.
You mentioned this about how angry you are.

I've talked about this a lot, about what the origins are, like why

people might expect on the surface like that the thing that I would get the most upset would be about gay stuff or whatever. You know what I mean?

Like something, and like I don't, I'm not an immigrant, my families aren't immigrants, but it's just been, it was very core to kind of why, you know, it's just so weird now, but like why I was attracted to Republicans in the first place, like the kind of you know, Shining City on the Hill element of this that's like part of my pride of being an American.

What, what is it that, like, why are you so in your feelings on this? I feel like we're like extremely aligned. Yeah, it's a good question.

I think, I mean, look, Barack Obama in that 2004 convention speech that I didn't work on because I didn't know him yet.

You know, one of the riffs at the beginning is that one of the promises of this country is that you can walk down the street without being harassed by the government or you don't get a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

I mean, these are like basic foundational freedoms in this country. And it is genuinely scary that there are federal agents on the streets now who will grab people and your citizenship won't help you.

Carrying an ID doesn't necessarily help you. Your fucking passport may not help you because they're now saying that like they don't believe people who show them their passport.

They have to go like run the social security number after they detain you for five hours. It's legitimately terrifying.
And I'm like,

if we can't expect that our government won't wrongfully detain us and potentially physically assault us and take us away from our families without being able to call a lawyer or being able to like call our families, What else is the country for?

What else is the government for? That's like the most basic, basic freedoms. And so I think it really that bothers me like more than anything.
And it's, and look, I know, you know, we

did deportations in the Obama administration, and there were plenty of stories where someone gets deported and you're like, you know what, that person has been here for 10 years.

They've like done it all right. And yes, they crossed illegally, but like you feel really bad.
And that's going to happen

even in the best immigration system. So I get that sometimes that happens, but this is just

another level. Aaron Powell, when you talk about how it's like one of the fundamental

like the fundamental elements of America, I mean, the immigrant story is a fundamental element of America, right?

But in addition to that, right, like this, the fact that this is not an authoritarian country, it's a free country. We all have basic fundamental freedoms.

I do think that maybe why this is an issue that kind of aligns people coming from my background and yours is that you actually care about that and still believe in it.

And I do think, not to pick on anybody on the left in particular, but there's a category of left folks that are kind of like, I don't know, America is not that great actually, right?

And that we need to fundamentally change it in a way that there are elements of America that are good and that we like, but

we should go a different route. And I think that this issue cleaves off people that

just genuinely care about the foundational documents of the country and the points and then maybe have some disagreements on how to live up to those, right?

Is that a majority still in the country, do you think?

I think so. I think so.

And it's one of the reasons the interminable debate within sort of our coalition about do we talk about democracy, but democracy is a loser to talk about, or we talk about kitchen table issues drives me fucking insane because I agree that talking about democracy and the rule of law and using

and using words like that is not going to land with people. I 100% agree with that.

But I also think, do you want to be, do you want your family to be able to walk down the street without worrying that they're going to be taken by massed agents?

I think that resonates with people.

I think that's a kitchen table issue. Yeah.
I do. Okay.

And I also think as we're talking about the political prosecutions, like the political prosecutions right now are like up here and people who've pissed off Trump and who are on legal teams that went after him and stuff like that.

And then the ICE stuff, the immigrant stuff is like, it's like down here. It's people who, you know, maybe they crossed illegally.
It's sort of getting to meet in the middle soon.

Because like the political prosecutions, they're going to go down the list. And then on the ICE raids, they're grabbing American citizens.
They're grabbing legal residents.

And now with the everyone who disagrees with the president is Antifa. Right.
And we're going to go after left-leaning groups.

It's broadening. Starting to touch a lot.
And we're only, you know, nine months in. Yeah.

To your point on

broadening on their bottom-up attacks and what ICE is doing, they're trying to add 10,000 more deportation officers,

which is alarming on the one hand. Something I'm very concerned about.
I think this is going to get worse

before it gets better. There's one little positive silver lining, though, on that front.
I don't know if you saw in the Atlantic. I want to read a little bit from this.

More than a third of those who have applied to join ICE have failed the fitness test so far, impeding the agency's plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers.

That's a crazy sentence, by the way. We're trying to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers.

But that plan is getting impeded by the fact that recruits are not able to do 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and run one and a half miles in 14 minutes.

So I'm just curious what you think about the fatties who

are not able to get into ICE, who just, they want to rough up, they want to rough up some mexicans but they're not able to do the 14 push-ups yeah like if you uh if you looked at all the the image the pictures of the people who are in the the nazi group chat yeah

those would be the kind of people who uh apply to ice and probably couldn't couldn't swing yeah 32 sets they might not be able to do that in the full 14 minutes and that's that's you know if you're doing one setup per 30 seconds you know that's going to take up the whole time look i would i i ran track in high school for three seasons and four years, and I was not the fastest.

What was your mile time? My mile time was like 5.45

at the best, which is like middle of the past. It's fine.

So you've gotten older. But let's call it 14.
Let's call it six minutes now. You've gotten older.
You've gotten older. So you've got eight minutes

to do 15 push-ups and 32 setups right now. Let's do it.
Let's see. Let's see.
Can we square down? I definitely do starting. I can definitely do the push-ups.
Here's the thing.

My first reaction when I read that was that, oh shit, they're just going to lower the standards. They're just going to get rid of the fitness standards at some point.
Because they just want

the thugs. They want anyone.
And especially want people who want to rough people up.

And the standards will be lower. It's always the concern about ICE.
You know, the guard, the military, they all have much higher standards anyway.

And ICE's standards are lower.

Most local police forces as well. So when you lower the standards because you want a lot more people, you're going to get a lot of unqualified people.

And their physical fitness, to me is the the least of my concerns it is the least of my concerns but it does it does paint a mental picture of the type of person that's coming and at this point you're like I you shoot you're watching the videos of the masked agents like harassing the old guy with the weed whacker outside of IHOP and you're like I want to be one of those guys okay and so you're driving the type of person who's into that you know who has who's a little sadistic and then they're also the type of person that can't do 32 sit-ups in tracks so like you're picturing that person and you're thinking, man, 10,000 of those guys can cause a lot of damage because they've got a lot of bitterness inside them.

Yeah. And you know what? They're not going to have to chase people down because they have guns.

Right. Well, there was the one video you saw, the Chicago one of the ice people chasing the guy around the plaza.
Okay, do you think Dean Kane made it?

Could we FOIA for that to see if Dean was able to do it? That was a tough video. Did you see the video of Dean Kane? Oh, my God.
Yeah. I tried so hard.
I literally started Googling New Orleans

dog training centers, and I was gonna go tape a video of myself doing

doing the Dean Kane, like where he's like, can barely crawl through the tunnel.

But I couldn't find any place to do it. It's weird that he was doing that knowing that there were cameras on him, and he didn't, he didn't even try.

He barely made it through that course in 14 minutes. I don't know.
Maybe Dean will make it. We'll see.
I'll ask the Piers Morgan producers to follow up with him on that. See if he made it.

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I want to do some part-in news with you, unless you had any other ice talk. Do you have any other ice thoughts?

A couple pardon news items. On the first one, one of the January 6th rioters that was pardoned, he was arrested over the weekend for threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Court documents said that Christopher Moynihan was arrested after saying in text messages that he planned to eliminate Jeffries when he was at an event in New York City on Monday.

So I'm glad they got ahead of that thoughts.

He also said in a text message, this terrorist cannot live. Who's been calling Democrats terrorists?

The Republican leaders, the White House, Republican Speaker of the House. Republican Speaker of the House.

Hamas terrorists, Antifa terrorists. It's been like this for now several weeks, since, honestly, since Charlie Kirk's assassination.
They've just been calling Democrats terrorists.

And are we surprised that the guy that Trump pardoned, who was convicted of

entering the Capitol building and threatening,

apparently this was a guy who was on the floor of the Senate during the 2020 certification and was opening the desks in the Senate saying, there's got to be something in here we can use against these assholes.

So he wanted to cause harm to politicians. And then Trump said, no, that's okay.
You're free.

And now he wants to kill a Democrat after hearing Donald, that same man that pardoned him and all the people who were allied with him call Democrats terrorists. So that's where we are.
Yeah,

I don't like the whole discourse around, you know, like we've got to tone down the rhetoric so we don't have assassinations like that much anyway.

And I think everybody should be more responsible in their rhetoric. Like the idea that after the Charlie Kirk assassination, people are like talking about the Democrat, like Chuck Schumer called

Donald Trump a fascist, and that's why this guy killed Charlie Kirk. It's just like this guy was like playing video games and he was mad about trans stuff.

And it was like, this guy was not watching like Face the Nation and was unhappy with the Democrats' rhetoric, right? So sometimes like that connection is kind of tenuous, right?

But not so much in this case. Yeah.

Not in this case. And, you know, and it's particularly true when coming out of the No Kings protests, right? We're like, you had, thank God we didn't have any violence.
Like, thank God.

Like, you have gathering places, you have a point where you know people are going to be, and you have leaders like essentially putting a target on their back,

it is totally irresponsible. And it's going from the same people who are like, anytime you call Stephen Miller a fascist, like that means that the government should be able to go after you.
And

it's double speak, but it's also alarming. Yeah, I think that they have broadened the aperture on what constitutes inciting violence, what speech constitutes inciting violence to be like,

you can't call them authoritarian anymore.

Like I saw them go back and forth on this on Fox the the other day, and they're like, well, if Donald Trump's an authoritarian, why shouldn't people try to

resist him with violence? It's like, easy.

I think it's an authoritarian regime that we have to take down non-violently. Yeah.
Protest. And opposed to protest.
That's just not the same.

That's happened throughout history.

Authoritarian does not mean or excuse violence against the regime. Yeah.

Some other examples of GNSXers have gotten pardoned. There's at least like double digits.

Another guy got out and began soliciting a minor. Multiple people have done burglaries.
Others have gotten arrested for past violent crimes, carrying a weapon.

Feels like they let loose some people that are violent criminals from the law and order regime. And again, they is the president of the United States.
Yeah. Personally did it.

Even over the objections of people who are like, do you really want to

pardon and commute all of them, all the sentences? Including the vice president. Yeah.
And like, why about the ones who like really beat the shit out of cops in like a really violent way? Yeah, sure.

Let's do it. And

when Trump talks about it among Democrats, it's like, oh, some judge had someone serve their sentence and then didn't keep them in jail. Right.
And they get blamed for that. Right.

And this is just like so much more direct. Yeah.
And it's also this, it's like, you know, it's

the hypocrisy thing is like annoying to do after a while, but it's like, he doesn't care about crime. Right.
He cares about crime when it affects him and his supporters and people he's close to.

And he doesn't care about crime when it's committed, places he doesn't have to see. He cares about it kind of aesthetically, too.

He wants a clean city. Yeah, he wants a clean city.
He wants the buildings to look beautiful.

He doesn't want people doing drugs in the street. He cares about that,

not really about the victims of crime. Which is a very authoritarian thing.
I'm thinking about the Washington Post story over the weekend about Rubio and Bukele.

and you know it was talking about how bukele made deals with ms13 when he was coming to power and basically said you can keep killing people but just no more public executions we need to be private because i want the crime stats to go down yeah right that is that is donald trump yeah right it's the same idea like i want the cities clean i want it to look good i want the crime stats to be down i want to say that i solve the problem if the murders keep happening I don't want to hear about it.

That Bukele story was crazy.

It's insane that we gave them, and just to this point of, like, hypocrisy is the wrong word for it because it's like, if you actually took them at face value took their argument at face value which i do think that some mega people do which is like i care about drug trafficking fentanyl has affected my life we should go after the gang members so if you take that in good faith like the fact that we traded to el salvador people that were informants were helping us get actual top level you know gang uh leaders and drug traffickers we traded those informants to el salvador in exchange for being able to use their prison to send these venezuelans there like the hairdresser and the the the guy with the autism awareness tattoo.

And it's like, and now the prison is, we can't use it anymore because they fucked that up so bad. So we essentially traded them MS-13 informants for nothing.
And for what purpose, right?

What was the purpose of sending them to the prison? It was for propaganda purposes. Right.
And it was to send a message. Yeah.
There was no reason to put them in that jail. Right.

Could have put them anywhere else. Could have deported them.
We had already sent them back to Venezuela. They were already detained.
Where they ended up. Yeah.

Yeah, they were already detained, actually. They weren't out on the streets.

So we sent a bunch of people that were already detained to a meaner El Salvador gulag in exchange for giving them nine and foremost MS-13.

Which hurt our efforts, law enforcement efforts, that started even under, that were happening under the first Trump administration to go after MS-13 gang members in our country.

I'm glad I got you riled up on that.

One other piece of pardon is from TMZ.

Donald Trump is considering commuting Diddy's sentence

as early as this week, according to a high-ranking White House official. The White House is denying, but TMZ says they stand by their story and their sourcing.
Good for them. And so, who knows?

The freak-offs could be back any minute now. Like, are we surprised by this? Trump and Diddy were pals.
Right. Trump and Diddy were pals.

Trump also likes having, you know, celebrity, especially like hip-hop stars, like, so he could be like, look, look at this, look at this rapper who's friends with me. You know, he likes me.

I got a black friend here. Yeah,

the blacks love Diddy. You know? So it's a little bit of that, right? And he's got a history with him.
He probably looked at what he was convicted of, right?

Which is, you know, it was basically prostitution across state lines. That's all they could get him on, even though there are these horrific videos of him beating the shit out of women.

It's just awful, awful stuff. And he's only, I think, like...
two or three months, four months maybe into a like a 50-month sentence. Yeah.
And we're going to just

spring him from jail for what? Well, that's not a real crime, I don't think. Violence against women.

I mean, there's certain crimes that he's focused on when it comes to law and order, and I don't think that that's one of them that he's worried about.

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You guys, I guess Tommy handled the Graham Platiner interview yesterday. Sure did.
I think folks should listen to the whole thing. It's interesting.

There's one news item that I want to start by talking about. I want to talk about the race more broadly.

He had a tattoo. And I had mentioned on a podcast last week that there's been a lot of little scuttlebutt going around about Platiner in the political class.

And I was like, I just, you know, I wasn't sure what was true or not. One of the pieces of scuttlebutt was that he had a Nazi, like a swastika tattoo going on.
I'd heard that from multiple people.

And it turns out that was not it. What he had was like a skull and crossbones tattoo that

I'm not deep on nazi insignia but that was like i guess the symbol of some one of the units of one of the nazi units i guess and um anyway tommy asked him about that what was the what was the takeaway so i would encourage everyone to listen to the entire interview tommy did with with platiner and it is uh it's a long one but i thought it was fascinating partly because of how he handled all the questions which was very like matter-of-fact i don't know who the strongest candidate is in main

but I found him very believable in his interview with Tommy.

And his story there is: he was in the Marines, 23, they were in Croatia, and they all got really drunk, and they went to the tattoo parlor, and they all, and there was a bunch of like skulls on the wall, and they were like, oh, give us the scariest skull and crossbones you have, because they were Marines who were drunk.

So that's what he got. And he said, I'm not that surprised that in Croatia, there's some Nazi-loving tattoo artists.
That does

believable.

And then he said to Tom, he's like, and I, it's like, it's not like I've been trying to hide it my whole life. Like, I have a shirt off at the pool and stuff like that.

And he's like, no, and no one has said anything to me about it. And he didn't look it up.
Now, his, you know, his political director who left was like, he's a history buff. He should know.

Like, maybe he didn't know at first, but he had to have known later.

Jewish Insider has some story that I can't access because I'm not a subscriber that says that he that there was some former acquaintance acquaintance of his who said he used to call it his totenkampf or whatever.

Former acquaintance of the main Senate candidate, somebody sent this to me, said that he called the tattoo my totenkampf. Right, but it's like, I don't know when that was.

I don't know what that was.

To believe that this is nefarious,

you would have to believe that he has all these Nazi beliefs. that he has not expressed to anyone in all of his Reddit posts that have got got him in trouble, some of which he said, I'm a communist.

So I was like, is he a communist? Is he a Nazi? It just feels like a weird thing to be like, but this is me. This is my Nazi tattoo.

And actually, these are all the beliefs in this tattoo that I didn't know meant what it meant. Right? The Totenkampf is German for death's head.

Yeah, I don't fucking know. That's what I guess I would say.
Yeah, sure. It does feel strange.
I mean, you know, to have it on his, like, he has it like right on his chest, It's not like hidden.

So anytime he would be going to the pool or the beach or whatever, people would see it. I definitely, if I saw it, wouldn't be like, oh, that's a Nazi tattoo.

I do feel like that's a test for people who might be critical of this. It's like, if you saw that, would you have known?

Are you a buff on Nazi symbols? I definitely wouldn't have known. Like, based on what I had heard about it, once I saw it, so then you guys played a video.

I guess he also was shirtless singing Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball

at his sibling's wedding. At his sister-in-law's wedding.
Sister-in-law's wedding. Yeah.
Who's Jewish? Great,

great rendition of Wrecking Ball, a great song. I do recommend Ann Hathaway's version of Wrecking Ball on that lip-syncing show.
That is good show. It's really nice.

The lip-sync battle. So, you know, he's doing, he's saying the Wrecking Ball and the picture is there.

And, like, when I saw it, I was like, okay, based on what I'd heard, I expected that the skull would have like a little swastika inside of it or something.

But, again, it's just like the symbol of this.

Not just. I mean, it is the symbol, I guess, of this Nazi

military unit. I probably would have tattooed over it by now.
I mean, for that reason, I guess. So I don't know.
If I had known, I guess. I don't know.
I mean, I

turned into a universe. There's no state of me.
There's no universe where I'm getting a tattoo anyway. Me neither.
I'm scared of needles.

It's a great gift that the Lord gave me. I hate getting my blood drawn.

Yeah, it's like I've learned to live with needles, but I'm like, it seems unnecessary to get a whole bunch of them for a tattoo that it would be hard to remove to now.

So like I'm all set with tattoos, so I can't really get get inside of his head on that one.

I think my broader issue with all of this is like I very much want and think it is super important for normal people to run in politics.

I just do.

And I think that part of the issue right now is we have very abnormal people in politics, obviously on the Republican side. But I think like self-selecting for deranged people,

a lot of like front of the classroom, call-on-me teacher people. And that's fine, place for them.
But I think we just need people to run who are normal human beings.

To get that, to be a normal human being, you're going to have... plenty of faults.
You're going to have made plenty of mistakes.

You're going to have plenty of skeletons in your closet, particularly now that we're getting elder millennials running. Pretty soon it's going to be Gen Z running.

And these people, their whole life is on the internet.

And I kind of thought that over the last year or so, we were past the like, you posted something that, or you have an association that's a problem, or you posted, I thought we were kind of past that in terms of like disqualifying people.

So it's like,

I guess my complaint about that is that like, it feels like it's a lot of motivation to reasoning all the time in this case.

Like in this story, like I see a lot of, because Klattner, for now at least, is sort of.

I guess somewhat from a policy standpoint, but also kind of from a vibe standpoint and from like who his consultants are standpoint, has kind of aligned himself more with like the Bernie left populist wing.

And so you see the types of people that are kind of in that wing online, like going full-throated, defending them that you could imagine, you know, if like Josh Shapiro had done a Reddit post where he had said something sexist about a woman, you would imagine that what they would be saying about that and vice versa, right?

And I don't even pick on that. And so that is, I guess, my problem with that, or my concern about that, which is like, it does feel like people want to have it both ways.

Where like, if it's somebody that they like did something bad in the past, then it's like, whatever, no big deal.

But then if it's someone that is on the other faction within the party, then it's like, oh, well, this is disqualifying them. Yes, for sure.
And this, and where I am on this is

my universal principle

is if you have done or said something bad in the past and you show contrition

and you talk about why you did it and you feel and you say, I've grown and I've done this, like, I am in favor. I am more likely to buy someone who has done it, apologized, and moved on.

If you have no contrition,

not a lot of people in the Hitler group chat were apologizing.

A few were, a few were more apologetic than the vice president of the United States talking about the Hitler group chat, who said it was all pearl clutching.

A few of them were like, I can't, I remember read these things personally. Do I really believe them? I don't know them.

But at least on the Democratic side, let's say, whether it's a centrist, a leftist, whoever it may be, if you've done something and you want to apologize and you are like, I am just more inclined to cut that person a break.

Steve Shaley is a consultant from Florida. I like him a lot.
Me too. He's really smart.
He was posting about this, and it was one of the rare interesting posts I saw about the Platiner.

A lot of bad posts out there on both sides of the Grand Platinar discussion. And he wrote this.
He goes, there are two separate conversations happening.

Number one is we should create the space to allow people to grow from youthful mistakes as a part of an effort to build a broader coalition. That's what we're just talking about right now.

Everybody agree. That's not true.
Not everybody agrees. You and me and Steve Shaney agree on that.
Many people agree on that.

Like the Democrats need to broaden their coalition and bring some people in who have some rougher edges and who can like hang with non-college voters who are not as attuned to the most recent woke speak and, you know, who are not, who are not front of a classroom people, right?

Like, I think that that is really important. And I think that's important as a principle for Democratic candidates, no matter where they are ideologically.

You agree? We can move on from point one. 100%.
Point one, we all agree. Point two is there's a separate conversation.
What do we need to do to win in Maine? Because that's really important.

And that is where I get a little bit more iffy.

And I'm not really falling on one side of this at this point or not, but it's like, man, I would be more into the idea of like, we should try a wild card candidate in Texas because we've tried a bunch of stuff in Texas or Florida, right?

In Florida. Try somebody down there.

Democrats want to nominate a Florida man, you you know, who's got some weird tattoos and who's done some strange stuff with bath salts in the past or wears jean shorts.

Like, I'm like, I'm interested in that because the Democrats haven't won in Florida in a while and it feels unlikely they're going to win anytime soon. And so it's like, why not try something new?

In Maine, like Kamala just won in Maine. And this, and if the Democrats have any chance to get even to parody in the Senate, they have to win this race.

So is it like a little bit of a risk in Maine

that might be greater than in other states or not?

So So what Steve said is absolutely right. In fact, I'm in the camp that winning is the only thing that matters in this environment right now.

I truly believe we are facing an authoritarian threat and therefore, yes, we have to win. This is why you and I were on the

Joe Biden should not be running again.

Don't bring that up. Surely.

Right? And it will. We covered enough of that this week already on the pod.
That was covered on yesterday's pod, pretty thorough.

We know the Biden defenders, you know, we were offered, it was like personal, it was this. No, it's not.
I think Joe Biden, like, like I said, he treated me well, my family well.

I think it was really hard to do that. Yeah.
But it is about winning because we are in, we are facing a real threat.

So that is the most important thing in Maine. So if Graham Plattner absolutely cannot win, and there's a lot of evidence of that, then fine.

Great candidate. I'm glad that we can, you know, that people can grow and learn from their mistakes, but no.
My contention is I, and I'll tell you how this whole thing started.

Before Mills, before Platiner, I was looking at Maine and being like, okay, we have to win Maine.

And then I was like, I hope that the, I hope that this governor runs. I didn't know that Janet Mills might run because she's a governor.
She's somewhat, she's won statewide twice.

So that's a real, that's great. And then it's like, oh, well, do you know that she's 79? 77.
77, 77.

She does look great for 77.

It's not Biden.

Not to beat a dead horse on Biden, but there's 77-year-olds and 77-year-olds, and we all aged different. And she,

by all accounts, every time I've seen it. There was a show I was on recently, and I was like, Mitt Romney, for example, he looks better than Russ Vogt.
Russ Vogt is, I think, our age somehow.

And I mean, he looks like he's on death's door. So, you know, everyone ages differently.
I will say that wasn't, I was like, huh, interesting. Not a deal-breaker for me, but that's a

data point.

You know, then she's saying, she has a quote about Susan Collins and is like, she's doing the best she can. And I really appreciate everything she's doing.

And I I was like that's also not very helpful

in an environment and then she said she wants to preserve the filibuster Janet Mills and I'm like okay that's another one where you know Ruben Gallego won Arizona very tough state John Osoff Raphael Warnock won Georgia very tough state none of them are talking about preserving the filibuster so and that's a you know pet peeve of mine the filibuster so I'm not really I'm not really got to that because my last topic I don't know what time to get to is do John and Tim agree on everything now because I've been agreeing with you way too much lately now that you're coming to full duster maybe yeah maybe we can disagree on the files anyway so i don't know if janet mills would be the strongest candidate against susan collins if by june it seems like she will be then i am happy to support janet mills yeah i really am and but i don't think that any i guess where i disagree is i don't think that anything we've learned about graham plattner obviously makes him uh less competitive what other thing than uh mills one of the thing on main you spent you spend a little time up there.

My in-laws live there full time now. Maine's weird and like as an independent senator and

obviously in Collins.

Jared Golden got a Democrat winning one of the only Trump districts with a Democrat now. See, and that's where I was hoping Jared was going to run for Senate.

And so for that reason. But the other thing to think about is

We have a long time to do this campaign, but maybe Maine is a place where you need a different type of candidate.

And we were talking about this the other day, where it's like Susan Collins beat last time a pretty traditional style of Democrat. Very close.

Sarah Gideon was the Democratic leader of the legislature, well known and very well funded, known as a cautious campaigner at the time. So people thought this is perfect.

It's a Democrat who's just a little, you know, more mainstream Democrat, moderate Democrat, and then loses by nine points

in a state that Kamala won by nine, I think.

Seven. Seven.
Yeah. She won by seven.
Yeah, she won by seven. That's a huge fail that I don't think the parties reckoned with.

That our candidate in 2020, when Joe Biden won the national vote by four and a half points and won the Electoral College in Maine, who was one of the best funded candidates, lost by nine points and was just an establishment Dem in Maine.

And Janet Mills now, she's won twice statewide. She won in 18 and she won again in 22.
In 22, she did win against Paula Page, who's pretty extreme and crazy. Yeah, not Susan Collins.

But she also has one of the lower approval ratings of any governor right now. And so like these are, yeah, these are just like flashing warning signs to me where I'm like, I still think

solid candidate, but I don't think she's like bulletproof here.

I don't think she's like the, you know, like Roy Cooper in North Carolina, I think, is probably an even stronger candidate because he left office like very well liked. Sure.

And I think Janet Mills is sitting at like, you know, 49, 50, 51% approval. And Roy's got some good old boy energy, which I like.
I don't know, and I am very happy to like see how the race unfolds.

But I don't, I very much disagree with the fact that he is obviously the weaker candidate. This is super interesting, just as a politics dork.

I wish we weren't like doing a political science experiment with the state of our democracy on the line. It's kind of like,

I would love to run them both, see how it goes. But this is why, like, luckily, we have till June

for this. I mean, the idea that this is all coming out now and the primary is not till June, like there's a lot of campaign left to run.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl. Let me tell you something.
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What fundamentally underlines all this is that the Democrats have to do better with working class people. Yes.
And that's just like what it comes down to.

And as like a former Republican and like a commentator now that doesn't have like a dog in the internal Democratic factional fights, really, I get to sort of observe it more as an anthropologist.

Yeah. And it's like a lot of people are really certain what the right answer is, right?

Like you have popular populist left types, like some of your favorites, you know, who I'm thinking of, who wrote for the bulwark recently, are sure that the answer is, you know, we need kind of socialist left, populist left policies.

And like, that is the answer. It doesn't, all the other stuff doesn't matter, the cultural issues, and you know, like, we just need a populist leftist.

They also have to be on the right side of Israel-Palestine, right? And as long as they're right on both of those, then we can do better with working-class people.

Then you have some, you know, in the more of the Iglesias camp, name-checking him twice in this podcast, you know, who are like, you know, you have to do cultural right.

You have to do cultural right. You know, you have to moderate on specific issues, like, you know, energy, guns, you know, the trans,

that argument.

Some people kind of argue that it's more about vibes, you know, and having the types of candidates that are more able to sort of mix it up and go into those communities and like give off the aesthetic, a working-class aesthetic.

Do you have a take on that or any thoughts? I think it's very dependent on the region, the state, the district, the candidate, the race. Like I just, I don't think there is one obvious formula.

And I think that is evidenced by the fact that you have Democrats of all different stripes and backgrounds and beliefs winning all across the country in different places. I think you have.

We have Democrats losing in lots of places across the country. I'm thinking about the House right now.
You know, That's the only thing because we've had a lot of experiments.

If we're talking about political science experiments, we've had it in the House, less so in other places.

And some of them have not moderated on social and cultural issues at all. They've just not focused on them as much, and they are moderate Democrats.
Some are more,

you don't see a lot of like DSA types winning outside of cities or deep blue areas for sure, but you see candidates who emphasize more, I would say, populism, not just in the we need Medicare for all, but populism in the like, you know, running hard against corporate malfeasance or, you know, corporations taking the right thing.

And the right to repair and like that kind of stuff.

And I actually think that that is, if you look at polling, that stance, let's call it like the Lena Kahn stance, that is more popular with voters and especially working class voters than the type of populism that is like,

let's just tax the rich a lot and spend it on government programs, which is something I like. But I realize that a lot of people in

swingier districts might not care about that as much as they care about holding corporations accountable.

I'm not satisfied by that answer, so we're going to have to do a little more.

I just think that the Democratic brand is so broken

in blue and red and purple states that there actually is a table stakes part of this, that you have to be

separate from them and separate from the Democratic established the party brand, and you have to be opposed to them in tangible ways.

That's where people get in trouble. Yeah, to even get to the, to get people to listen to you.
And it's hard. Part of it gets people in trouble because Democratic activist types don't like this.

You know, I've talked to several candidates, like more conservative type candidates, will call me and be like, what do you think I should do to run as a Democrat?

And I'm always like, I don't care what it is. Just pick, find whatever issue it is that

you agree with the MAGA side of the argument on and like talk about it a lot actually like talk about that one thing a lot and criticize the Democrats directly on it and they're like ooh you know but when I go to the Democratic County group meeting you know they get mad at me about that and I'm like yeah that but that's just the only way to get the other people in the state I'm talking again not about Maine I'm talking about like red states like winning back in Florida again for example like this is what you'd have to do and people don't want to do that And maybe you can do it from the left, too.

I'm open to the fact that it's possible to do it from like a populist, anti-business, anti-corporate left. I think that's probably less effective in red states, but it's worth a try, I guess.

You know, it's kind of what Dan Osborne was trying to do a little bit in Nebraska, for example. I think that's worth a try.
But I don't know.

I just, I think it has to be tangible separation with the party to have a chance. I think you can do a running against the establishment, the Democratic establishment in Washington.

And now the problem is when you... scratch the surface of that and then dig in a little bit like, oh, so what has the establishment done? Yeah.

They'll be like, lose yeah right they don't feel like okay well we need a fightier fighter i was like i agree we need fightier fighters i just i don't think that's like enough though to win over people that voted for donald trump and matt gates or whatever look at the hon and the the honest challenge here is even when you look back at the biden's four years right if you take the age thing out of it and you say okay well everyone was pissed about inflation so what did he do wrong what should he have done differently to help fight inflation and i haven't heard a lot of answers on that yeah for many

there was one person kind of surprised me damn i'm as i'm annoyed as i'm forget who it was one person did say maybe we went a little bit too hot on the second step on the second step

i forget a little bit of that but it's like a little too hot yeah it's okay we have a couple couple hundred billion dollars left and then we would have joe have tamal harris or joe biden as president i think you just got to be honest if you're a candidate you just got to be honest about what you believe yeah and honest about like where you think the party is fucking up and where you think it's not and what do you think the establishment's done wrong, and you should have a whole story about it that just actually comes from you and doesn't come from like whatever is going to pull well.

But I do think that most voters, especially people in red states, appreciate that. And I think starting by being like, yeah, the National Democratic Party is

not outside of the 2028 context, just in just broader. Like you mentioned Rubin earlier.

Is there anybody that you're like, they're doing a good job with navigating that line, just like being candid, talking about things they believe in, you know, being honest about the ways in which the Democrats have fallen?

to 2028?

No, I meant even broader because I knew what your answer was 2028, and I don't want to depress people towards the end of the podcast. I just mean like in general.

It just is a model of like how to do this,

how to talk about this stuff better. Yeah.
It is funny because

I go to the House because I feel like by the time these candidates get statewide and then get national, they all start. doing the cautious thing.

But I interviewed Jake Auchenkloss

here, and I thought he was like really thoughtful. I think Sarah McBride is one of the more like thoughtful, strategic, pragmatic Democrats who also is like, I don't know.

I mean, it's funny that a lot of the people I like, unsurprisingly, are like they around my age, around our age, and like grew up in the Obama era.

So they have very Obama-like politics, even in like, you know, different iterations. Sarah's like that, Jake's like that.
So those people I appreciate. Not Ruben.
I gave you a T for Ruben.

Like, I think he's been pretty good. Like, they're thinking, you know, I'm not saying like Ruben 2028.
I just feel like it's like, just because you mentioned him, I think.

Yeah, I just feel as like as you're learning from people who's like, he's pretty blunt now, like, when he's talking. I like him a lot.
I like him a lot. I think Osoff's been doing great.

Good, strong anti-corruption message. Just

waiting for him to accept my invitation to come on the pod. I'm just like, I'm like,

outside his house, shouting in the window. John, John, Mr.
Senator Osoff, come to New Orleans.

He came here, Tommy interviewed him, and we realized we hadn't talked to him since like 2017 when the podcast first started. Warnock, too, is also, I really like Warnock.
Yeah, Warnock's great.

It's always good to have a pastor.

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Okay, we're running out of time, but we're getting kind of down about the democratic future there. It was sort of a lukewarm answer, I think, I would say, when I asked you who's doing it well.

Like I said, it's important to just be honest. It is important to be candid.
The MAGA future, though,

I don't know.

JD,

sometimes I worry that

I find him so loathsome and unappealing that, like,

maybe I'm not seeing things straight clearly. Sometimes I'm worried I'm not assessing him clearly because I just find him unappealing in every possible regard.
Another place where we strongly agree.

Strong agreement there. But, you know, I think I might be right about this.
So, anyway, he was speaking at Camp Pendleton.

This was the speech where they shot off some cannons to welcome him, and they almost took out one of his Secret Service details by accident, even though Gavin Newsom warned them not to do that.

Shrapnel flying down on highways here.

But

in the speech, he was trying to. Let's just watch.

Over my four years in the United States Marine Corps, I probably learned about a hundred jokes about United States Marines.

And every single one of them, Marines, would mean the end of my political career if I told it up here today.

I sent a few of them last night to my communication staff, and I said, Can I tell this one? And they said, please, no, sir. Please, please do not tell that one.

Oh, that is good.

One sure sign that someone is not that funny is that they talk about humor more than they actually tell funny jokes.

And I have now heard many clips of J.B. Vance talking about himself being funny, telling jokes, and humor in general without ever hearing anything funny from him.

He's been on the Katie Miller podcast, the in-house podcast for the White House, talking about how Marco Rubio is a big jokester.

Everyone just can't stop laughing at Marco Rubio, and then he told some story that Marco Rubio told with a joke that didn't even make sense. It was really fun.
It's just terrible, terrible joke.

He's talked about him joking around with his friends in a group chat.

He's just painfully unfunny. How'd you like when Tucker Carlson laughed there? I don't know what's Tucker Carlson.
He's trying to do Tucker.

He's also, if you notice there, he's telling Sur stories now. So, you know, he's trying to do it all.
He's doing Sur stories. And

I don't know. Say what you want about Trump.
A couple people on the board radicot got mad at me the other week when I said this, but like

Trump doesn't really make me laugh that much because I hate him so much, but objectively, he's funny. Of course he's funny.
I don't even know why that's like the controversy.

It bugs people when you say that. But he was up there speaking to the troops.
It was inappropriate a lot of times. It was gross.
It was like, I can't believe this is our country.

Scary a little bit at times. He's getting the troops to, you know, shout for his authoritarian desires.
And yet, like, some of the jokes make you chuckle.

Gross, scary people can be funny. Yeah, right.
We contain multitudes. And it's, and the funniness, though, is a weigh-in for him to a certain demo of people that I don't, I guess, I don't know.

It might be limiting for JD as far as their future is concerned. And that's, that's, that's one hopeful thing that I have.

I was, um, reading a piece that Noah Smith wrote the other week in his sub stack.

And it was about what happens after Trump. It was about the Nazi group chats.

And he made the point that you cite the reason for optimism, which is post-Trump cult of personality, it's going to be much harder to find Republican candidates out there who are as charismatic.

And so electorally, that's a good thing.

But when you don't have a charismatic leader and you don't have the cult of personality, then movements become more ideological because you have ideology that substitutes for

bulwarking material

for you know for like cult of personality kind of stuff. And if you look at the young, these young Republicans

in these group chats and JD Vance

and

that whole crew,

the national conservatism crew, which when they had their conference, everyone was like, well, it's a lot more boring than CPAC. And it's like, yeah, because they're all fucking nerds.

But they're very dangerous. And the ideology is much more dangerous than Trump's ideology, who you could say doesn't have an ideology.

And so So that does worry me.

I know the national review crowd will get mad at me for saying this because it's like, you know, they'll make fun of people that are like, you know, have Trump TDS like me.

And then we'll say things like, well, in certain ways, J.D. Vance is more

dangerous. Because, well, everybody, I thought Trump was the worst ever.
And it's like, yeah, Trump is the most dangerous in the sense that he is a megalomaniac and he has mental health issues. And so

the line I always use is like, it's hard to imagine people storming the Capitol waving Ronda Sanctimonious flags or J.D. Vance flags, right?

So like Trump is the scariest and like the, you know, because you kind of do need a cult leader to successfully do a full toppling of the of democracy, right?

But but just purely on an ideological standpoint, like Trump tamps down what a lot of these guys want to do in various ways. And Trump was joking.
What was it? He made a joke.

Trump being funny again. The other day he made a joke about Stephen Miller.

He's like, I kind of want to hear what's inside

Stephen's darkest thoughts. He's like, it might be scary.
Potentially, not the darkest thoughts.

Maybe don't talk about everything he believes.

We're just like, you know that he, he, I mean, it's a failing of Trump, obviously, but he knows right now that he has surrounding him a bunch of fucking lunatics. Like, even Trump realizes that.

Yeah, right. Especially with Miller and Russ Vought and some of these people.
So I worry about that. But I think electorally that it's going to be trickier for them.

But also, we're in a pretty divided country, so it's like you don't, there's no landslides here. Like J.D.
Vance is not going to be so uncharismatic that he loses in a landslide.

And who the hell knows who the Democrats could put up? So, all right, final thing. Huh, okay.
The dark prospect of the, of the young, the MAGA youth taking over. That's a pretty dark place to go.

I think it was the last time you're on my pod was

when I was at TPUSA

last year. Because I remember I was taping from Arizona.

I go every year. I think I might skip this year.
Yeah. I just don't know if I'm going to have it in me.

I think that's fair. Yeah, I think maybe next year I'll go back.
But I try to go every year because I think it's important to like hear what the mega youth are saying and like actually hear it because

there's some ways in which it gets caricatured by like

just seeing the worst quotes from every event on Twitter. And it's like, it's interesting to see the full speeches, you know, the boring parts, the like weird ideological niches they have.

Like I knew in advance that they were going to try to redesign all of Washington, D.C. because they're obsessed with architecture.

And Tucker Carlson gives long speeches about how architects are very fashion. Yeah, about how it depresses the spirits to look at some of the buildings in Washington and all that.

I've heard that before. So, anyway,

Mussolini-ish.

So, anyway, I was there and we were talking, and it was like, I guess, a month after Trump had won again, and we were like talking about what our thoughts were about, like, what it says about what we think about the country.

And remember, we were both talking about

how it was hard on us to think about the fact that for our kids, when they go to the classroom, like Trump's face is going to be on the president's list twice.

And like, that's a weird thing, but like, for whatever reason, that affects me.

I'm just like, I kind of want to go tear it down from the social studies classrooms in my kids' school, which is not the thing to do. Not a sane parent.

So I won't actually be doing that. Anyway, we talked about some other stuff.
You know, there is a boiling frog element to all this. Like, it's a lot less raw than it was then last December.

I'm just kind of wondering what you think, like 10 months in, how you're feeling about, you know, the American experiment.

I think the feeling I've been having lately is just this

sort of

extreme frustration with the fact that I think so many people in the country are just not paying close attention to what's happening.

And I think the reasons for that are both understandable and varied. And some of it's just like, I tried to check in once and now it's brutal and I'm tired, and I got to live my life because

it's too dark to pay attention to this all the time. And so it's like, on one hand, I understand that.

On the other, I'm like, we will lose the country if we just all turn away and stop paying attention. I genuinely believe that, which is why I'm still at this, which is why we just keep slinging takes.

One of these days it's going to break through. Figure it out.

So

part of my thought process has been. Are you slinging takes because you think it will break through? Are you slinging takes because there's nothing else to fuck?

You don't know what else to do. No, I do.

This could be completely naive of me. I don't think that my takes are breaking through, but I think that I

hopefully, in a small, small way, am trying to wake up every day and persuade people that things are bad and we got to get involved and we got to fix it.

And don't know if that will work, but it's like the only thing I know how to do.

And so I'm going to keep doing it and try to do it as effectively as I can and as persuasively as I can because I take words and persuasion seriously, part of just being in politics and also what I did in politics.

And also a big part of that is figuring out like how to reach those people who aren't paying enough attention and convince them that it is worthwhile to do so.

You seem like less of an emotional wreck than me and Love It, but are you ever doing any like Sundays just in bed where you're like, I can't do the pod tomorrow. I don't want to do this.
No.

Fuck this. I get, and I'm not, I am, anyone can tell you, I am not an angry person.
Yeah. I don't show a lot of anger, but internally, if I'm like by myself,

it's anger in the rage that fuels me more so than I'm so sad and doomer and everything's going to hell. I'm just like, I can't fucking believe we're losing to these people.
Yeah. Who's more than that?

Who are you mad at? Are you mad at JD and Trump? Are you mad at the voters? Are you mad at the people working for ICE? Are you mad at

everybody? Fuck them all. Democratic Party.
Yeah. You know?

The most firing hot rage is for.

I mean,

what we went through in 2024.

That would be up there. That would be up there.
And I, you know, I'm also a,

I was just talking about how angry I am, but I'm also like a very empathetic person, and I try to be as empathetic as possible with everyone.

So I get mad at them, and then I put myself in their shoes, whether it's Democrats, whether it's voters. And I'm like, okay, I can see why they they got to this.

You're not getting Stephen Miller's shoes, though. No.
No, I'm not. No, there's some people's

tiny shoes.

I pretty much

get a pointy devil's shoe. It's like, you know what? I feel like I got it.
I got where you're coming from, and I know where that, you know.

Sorry.

I get where he's coming from. It's not a good place.
Stephen Trump knows. No, he just is, you know, he had a tough experience in Santa Monica in high school.

Bully Luis or Leo.

told his friend he wasn't going to be friends with them anymore because he's Latino.

I started screaming about Janner's not picking up trash. I get it.

All right, fals. I appreciate it.
I appreciate you slinging takes with me anytime. This is fun.

Everybody else, hope you enjoyed that. Right here at the Crooked Media Studio, what's happening here? What

art? You know what? You know who you need to ask? Who do you love it? Yeah. Because you know who doesn't like that? You.
Me. Tommy.

Great. Jane.
All right. time, next time, Love It's on the podcast.
Most of the staff. First question is: artistic aesthetic.

Do you think this depresses the spirit? A Crooked Con. Everybody on a Crooked Con, but I'm going to get your tickets.
I'm going to bulldoze this.

You're going to get your tickets. Okay.

You're going to get your tickets for Crooked Con, and John Farrell's going to come out and do a Tucker Carlson speech about how there's certain types of art that depresses the spirit.

It's the shit that Love It puts in my videos.

All right, everybody, come back. We'll see you all tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.
Peace.

I will always want you.

I can never lie running for my life.

I will always want you.

I came in like a rainy ball.

I never hit so hard in love.

All I wanted was to break your walls.

All you ever did was red

me.

Yeah, you, you red me.

I put you high up in the sky. And now

you're not coming down.

It's slowly turned. You let me burn.
And now

we're ashes on the ground.

Don't you ever say I just walked away. I will always want you.

I can't ever lie. Running for my life.

I will always want you.

I came in like a racky ball.

I never hit so hard in love.

All I wanted was to break you up.

All you ever did was

red me.

I came in like a ranking ball.

Yeah, I just closed my eyes and slowed.

Let me crouch it in a blazing fall.

All you ever did was

The Borg podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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