Tommy Vietor: The 'Peace' President

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome to the show, host of Pod Save the World and also Pod Save America.

Not that successful on either account so far. It's Tommy Vitor.
What's up, man?

Hey, good to see you. Has the pod saved America yet?

I gotta.

We thought the name was funny. It was like a bit anyway.
It was supposed to be like a Reverend Wright quote or something. I know, it's tough.
I know.

I've got some regrets without podcast names myself.

We can do some navel gazing on that later. There's a lot of stuff happening outside in the world.
And as a worldo, as you know, I figured. I figured I'd bring you in to talk about it.
So

you told me you fall asleep to my show. So I just want to say that.
That's true. And I did.
And I did. On the flight here to DC.
I made it through about the first 26 minutes or so.

Great, before dozing off a little bit.

So I'm hoping you can educate me on the stuff that I missed. You missed the Cache Patel part, but that's whatever.
I did miss it. I heard the T's, but I missed it.

People can go over to Potsdam World and hear the Cache Patel stuff at the end. I'm sure it was gold.
Let's start with Venezuela. It's been obviously the big story all week.

We did this so-called double tap, the phrase I hate, kind of bloodless phrase to describe the murder from sky of two people swimming in the Caribbean Sea.

And yesterday, there was a briefing over in Congress where certain members of the House and Senate got to review the actual video of what happened.

Congressman Jim Hines from Democrat from Connecticut, for example, said, you know, it was one of the most, I think the word was reprehensible things he's ever seen or something to that effect.

You know, just the fact that we took out these two people who were just. you know, after their, after their ship had already exploded.

The senator from Arkansas, though, Tom Cotton, had a different take. And he went in front of the cameras wearing kind of like a scarf that you would wear if you were

you were kind of an antiques dealer in Arkansas, like a homosexual antiques dealer. And

he had this to say about the bombing.

Yeah, I want to thank Admiral Bradley and General Kane for coming to brief about the strikes on September 2nd, which were righteous strikes.

Narcoterrists are trafficking drugs that are destined for the United States to kill thousands of Arkansans and millions of Americans.

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs, bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight. What kind of boat was this? It was like a canoe?

These two guys, they must have had the cantaloupe calves, cantaloupe arms to be able to

flip the boat back over that was on fire. I thought Pete Hengsta said the boat was on fire and he had to leave because of the fog of war.

The boat was on fire for an hour, and then they could finally see these two individuals who were clinging to the wreckage trying to survive.

I guess the plan in Tom Cotton's mind was to flip the boat over, paddle to shore, buy a giant fan to dry out all the cocaine, sell it to the United States, use that money to buy an F-35, and then wage war on the United States as a narco-terrorist.

It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my fucking life. How are they even advancing it with a straight face? The whole thing is so ridiculous.

I mean, like, there's kind of the narrow outrage about what happened, you know, with this, you know, bombing of the two shipwrecked, you know, individuals, supposedly drug traffickers, their whole argument is absurd.

Like, he's going in front of the microphone. It's like, well, you know, they're going to kill thousands of Arkansans and millions of Americans.
It's like, how?

In a lengthier part of the code, he compares it to the same thing we would do off the boats of Somalia or Yemen if people still had bombs or explosives or terrorists still had bombs or explosives.

Like, they didn't have bombs or explosives. They're not even accusing them of having that.
You're saying that they had Coke. It's like, how is cocaine killing millions of Americans?

Like, what are you you talking about? Yeah.

I mean, they're trying to do this game where they're also suggesting it was fentanyl. And, like, every expert says there's no fentanyl coming out of Venezuela.

Fentanyl is coming from chemicals created in China, shipped to Mexico, produced there, and then sent to the U.S.

I mean, the OLC memo is basically saying that we are in the Office of Legal Counsel over at the Department of Justice, that we are in an armed conflict with these drug traffickers.

I guess either because

narco-terrorists, right? I'm sorry, I forgot we invented a term. Because we are

the latinx of the right.

We have to call them narcoterrorists now. We have a new narcoterrorists.

I guess the weapon is either the drug which kills the people or the money you make from selling the drug, which I guess you can then buy military equipment.

I mean, the problem with debating the second strike double tap thing is the entire policy is illegal. It's like it's blatantly so.
It's made up. It's crazy.
Narcoterrorists isn't a term.

They are just killing people. It's extrajudicial murder off the coast of Venezuela, full stop.
Right.

And everybody would know what to call it if it was, you know, if we were just yeeting people in Prospect Park who are like selling dime bags. You know, it's like, what are we doing?

Like, what are we doing? You don't get summary execution for drug dealing, even if that's what they're doing. Like the whole thing is, I've been watching Fox all morning, and it's kind of noteworthy.

Like, Fox isn't really like banging the drums of war war on this one i don't know where you're at i know that you you also like me monitor the mega media a lot yeah and i there's not you're not hearing a lot of criticism of them from people other than rand paul you're just getting a lot of anti-anti stuff from the right you know which is like these wussy libs don't want us to kill the drug dealers they just love drug dealers you hear a lot of that it's not really reminiscent to me of like you know, 02 Iraq war.

It seems to me like Marco is the only person that's for this. Maybe Stephen Miller.
Tim, I wanted to ask you this because you worked for Jeb. You know Miami politics.

Every time I reach, like, you know, you know, some of the people in the kind of MAGA world I reach out to. They're some of the same ones you do.

Whenever I reach out to them, I'm like, what the hell is happening off the coast of Venezuela? What is up with this regime change operation? None of them can explain it.

None of them think it's a good idea. None of them get the politics except for saying, like, oh, this is Marco Rubio's like 2028 play.
But do you really think that this would be popular in Florida?

Like, there was an entire politico story with a bunch of Republican, you know, Miami-based operatives saying that Republicans will never lose the state again if Trump does a regime change, which just seems a little short-sighted to me.

I think in both points, it's related to the immigration policy. And I think that the only reason why Marco has support for his

regime change war in Venezuela is because Stephen Miller, who I alluded to,

can use this as a rationalization for their most extreme desires on deportations, right?

That's why they're calling them narco-terrorists and in part to pretend like this is a justified war and also in part to give the emergency powers related to immigration.

And so I think that's why they're doing it. I think it would be very interesting to see what happens in South Florida in the midterms.

And I don't, you know, I did spend some time down there 10 years ago, but like the politics have changed so much, you know, that I think far be it from me to try to like

divine how the Cubans and also Venezuelans and Nicaraguans and others that have immigrated to Florida are like feeling about all this, both this war policy and the immigration.

But I will tell you, I was talking to somebody in the Haitian community down there who said that they, obviously, there's a ton of outrage about the taking away the TPS and the deportations, but they said that, you know, like it hasn't gotten as much attention, but the ICPB stuff is happening in South Florida.

And like some in the Haitian community have had some chuckles a little bit at, you know, people getting their comeuppance in, you know, the Trump supporting crowd or in the Cuban community down there.

I think it's a little bit not known. And I don't think anybody really predicted that

South Florida was going to go from being for Hillary in 2016 pretty significantly to being like Trump's like best metro area in 24.

Is it not possible that that could reverse? I think it is, or maybe the opposite, or maybe they're super excited. You know what I mean? Like, I think that it's a little bit...
harder

to predict than people might think.

Yeah, I mean, look, the political story kind of got my goat because the suggestion was you know, just deposing Maduro would be clean and it would make a bunch of Venezuelans happy.

And that was kind of the only equity here.

Like, like, we don't have a long history of getting dragged into quagmires and places or that, you know, the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan men to a torture prison where, you know, Andri was raped by guards, like that won't have an impact on how they feel about the Trump administration.

So it was just sort of like a weird kind of bloodless, sickening argument. I have talked to people, though, that worked for Trump in the first term who who said that he genuinely detests Maduro.

He genuinely wants the oil. But what's strange is it sounds like Maduro has offered him basically anything he wants.

Like Trump called him, it was like, you have one week to get the fuck out of the country. And Maduro offered all this access to, you know, Venezuelan oil fields or whatever.

And that wasn't enough for Trump. It's like someone is pushing him further and further to go for this kind of regime change option.
So what do you think? Will there be bombing on the land?

I think Trump wants to do it on the cheap. Like, I think Trump wants the pressure to force Maduro out.
So far, it has failed.

We'll see if the CIA starts messing around and doing things on the covert action side. Like, you know, if all of a sudden the power grid goes down, you know, maybe we'll know why.

Trump keeps promising to hit targets on the land in Venezuela. I don't know what those will be.
Is it going to be like anti-aircraft sites? It's going to be military sites.

Is it going to be like a drug processing plant? We don't know. There's no clarity.
There's no strategy. No one can explain it.
It's just drug processing plants? Like some cocaine facilitation.

like 10% or 8% of cocaine goes through Venezuela, so says the State Department, right? Like maybe something affiliated with that. I was interested to hear, I forget who it was, the economist.

Oh, no, it was David Fromm, not an economist, said the cocaine prices are down, actually. So it's been one area where Trump's policies are working.
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All right, well, amidst the war crimes in the Caribbean, I do have some exciting news for the president.

He's got got a name on a new building. Nice.
The State Department renamed the former Institute of Peace to reflect what they said in a statement is the greatest deal maker in our nation's history.

And it will now be called the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
Marco Rubio posted that President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace.

It's time our State Department displays that. So, you know, Mark, it's a big day for Marco.
It's like, in the morning, we're going to do some war crimes and bomb people in the Caribbean Sea.

In the afternoon, there's a little ribbon cutting where he announces that Donald Trump is the president of peace and he gets his name on a building. Wonderful.

Did you see the clip that Marco tweeted out of Donald Trump falling asleep as he was speaking? It's just like a funny choice for a thing to tweet out.

Dozing. Can we briefly just talk about the like Trump ended all war claims? Because I do find it incredibly galling.
Sure. So three things that he claims.

He claims to have ended a war between Iran and Israel. As far as I can tell, they still don't like each other.
And Trump wants credit. Trump was engaging in diplomacy with Iran, trying to cut a deal.

Then the Israelis started bombing. Then we started bombing them.
And then there was a ceasefire. I'm not sure that that's like the most Nobel Prize-y option.
That's not a W for you?

That's not a W for me. He also claims that he ended a war between Egypt and Ethiopia.
Little problem there is they never had an armed conflict in any way.

There's a diplomatic dispute over a hydroelectric dam that is ongoing. Okay.

And then he talks about... What about Ethiopia and Eritrea?

There's that Tigray conflict. Do we know what the the latest is on that? Well, I mean, you know, Eritrea and Ethiopia, they signed a peace agreement, but that was like back in 2019.

And then Abhiyamed, who got the Nobel Prize for that, started working with the Eritreans to slaughter his own people. So that was not great.
That's not really on the list.

But he does include Serbia and Kosovo, who, again, have never been at war during the Trump administration. This was all in the 90s.

And when they get pressed on what they're talking about, he says Rick Grinnell brought some economic agreement to the Oval Office in 2020, which, again, is that's just not ending a war.

It's an economic agreement.

Well, I guess I'm going to have to side with you on that one, Tommy. I don't have much to add.
I'm curious, I wanted to get your expertise on what exactly the Institute of Peace is.

It does feel a little Veepish. The whole thing is Veepish.
It's like, obviously, we're going to name it after Trump.

Can call him the peace president as Veepish, but the original name is also a little bit Veepish, the Institute of Peace. So, can you tell me like what happens over there?

That was kind of under your remit. Yeah, kind of.
I mean, it's sort of like a quasi-NGO. They train people in conflict zones on programs like how to prevent violence, how to do mediation.

They advise policymakers and have these like field teams in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. I thought we cut all that, though.
Well, I mean, they did. They fired.
They doge cut all that.

Yeah, they doged it in like March, right? I mean, it was created by an act of Congress in 1984. So blame your guy, Ronnie Reagan.
There is real programmatic work happening on the ground.

If he was really the peace president, then okay. Yeah, well, look, they're trying to tell people, ended the Cold War, no big deal, then whatever.

They're saying, like, here's how you train election officials. Here's how you train civil society groups.
Here's how you negotiate a ceasefire or mediate a dispute.

The idea was we have all these service academies teaching people how to fight wars. What if we have an organization that trains people how to end them? And you can call it Veepish.

That's a worthwhile effort. I guess I'm just struggling, though, to understand

why Donald Trump would want... his name on the building of an organization that's roles and responsibilities are something that he doesn't think the government should be doing.

It's just like an empty, it's like the Atlanta CETI Casino. It's like having your name on something that doesn't exist anymore, right? I mean, what's in who is the point? That's a really good point.

Like, what are they doing?

Who's working in the Donald Trump Institute of Peace?

It is so funny when you think about it. Like, yeah, Marco Rubio went to him and was like, sir, we're going to slap your name on this defunct organization and it's going to be great.
Sounds good.

Yeah, who does that benefit? Yeah, you know what it's kind of similar to is the FIFA Priest Prize, which he also is being awarded today, I believe. It's a storied prize.
It's a storied trophy.

You know, it goes back generations.

Pele, I think, was the first winner of it. Is that right? You're more of a soccer queen than me.

I don't know anything about whether Pele got the FIFA Peace Prize. I could tell you a little bit about FIFA.
I think we made up the FIFA Peace Prize. I think so, too.
I'm pretty sure it was made up.

The marriage between FIFA and the head of it, Gianni Infantino, and Donald Trump is absolutely perfect because they are just a staggeringly corrupt organization. I mean,

the last two World Cups include Qatar and Saudi Arabia, places that aren't exactly suited climate-wise to host a giant soccer tournament in the summer.

But, you know, you bring some bags of cash, you pay off the right people, and all of a sudden, here we go.

I thought you were going to pick up my sarcasm, but since you did, and I do have to deadpan for the audience, this is why Sam Stein's a better, a better match for me. He's always there with the facts.

You know, the FIFA Peace Prize was announced on 5 November 2025 by FIFA leadership. When was it? What is this? We're on 5 December.
December. It's a one-month-old award.

It's officially called the FIFA Peace Prize-Football Unites the World.

Its purpose is to honor individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and thereby have united people across the world. The award is meant to be annual.

Excited to see who's going to win next year's Peace Prize award. Maybe NBS.

Maybe we could

throw him there.

They do want to acknowledge people of different kind of gender identities too.

Maybe

NBS with this intersection. Nanyahu.

We're going to get to Netanyahu in a second.

I know what you think about Netanyahu over there. Vitor.
Why don't we just do it now, though? Fuck it. Who needs the fucking outline?

Your colleague at Pod Save the World, Ben Rhodes, wrote a New York Times piece headline was, this is the story of how Democrats blew it on Gaza. It created a lot of a stir, a lot of discussion.

Oh, yeah. I was like, you know, I should probably have been on the pod to talk about it.
I was like, I don't have it in me. It's Friday.
It's a long week. So maybe I'll have Tommy on to

talk about that. That's right.
Okay, great. So

tell me about the argument today is making first, and I'll go through a couple of things. I mean, honestly, I think the argument is like, let's just state reality.
Like, B.B.

Denton Yahoo is a corrupt, right-wing authoritarian who, before the October 7th attacks, was trying to shred Israel's judicial system to basically keep himself out of jail.

And Ben recommends that the United States stop providing military assistance to a very rich country, that we support the ICC, the International Criminal Court's work, no matter who they're prosecuting, whether it's Vladimir Putin or B.B.

Net Yahoo, that the U.S.

very loudly and clearly oppose annexation of the West Bank or the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and then take real steps to help develop an alternative Palestinian leadership that isn't Hamas, and then also just generally stand up for democracy in Israel, which I think is a pretty good list when you compare it to what's actually happening right now with the Trump administration.

Obviously, there's going to be people that want to color the history of what happened there in ways that benefits them politically. I'm kind of more interested in the forward-looking part.
Like a big

part of what Ben was arguing that was there was a discussion about, which I saw Rokana tweet about and others, was like like how democrats should talk about this yeah like going forward i'll talk about that a little bit i think it's worth pointing out that rokana tweeted ben's op-ed and then got savagely attacked by the apac twitter account and i i just think that like just savagely

i i mean like they're dunking on a member oh sorry fair enough they got attacked by the fucking apac twitter account like why why why is apac dunking on a member of congress for sharing an op-ed by someone else i think that speaks to how much some quarters, some critics of people like Ben or me or whatever, want to constrain the speech in like kind of the 40-yard lines of the debate on this policy, right?

I mean, I think that is kind of like the elephant in the room here, which is there are these voices who are just trying to shut you down and silence you all the time if you kind of break from the party orthodoxy.

And I think Ben is writing this because he's trying to give Democrats some courage in the wake of this catastrophe in Gaza. And again, like

the United States gives Israel like $3.3, $3.5 billion a year in military assistance.

They're about to renegotiate what is usually a 10-year memorandum of understanding that kind of governs how much we'll be giving the Israelis. The Israelis are this time looking for 20 years, right?

So as Ben is recommending we cut off this funding, they're demanding 20 years.

In the West Bank, there are these like constant settler pogroms where, you know, essentially like violent terrorists are attacking Palestinians and trying to take their land.

And that is enabled by the government. The plan for Gaza's future is basically permanent occupation and a leadership board that is run by Donald Trump, Tony Blair, Steve Witcoff, Jared Kushner.

Do you see Axios leaked the kind of board of peace leadership? You get a couple rungs down. There's finally some Palestinians in there, but it's just a permanent occupation.

And then also, Trump is trying to get Netanyahu a pardon. Like, that's his primary message he's advancing when he calls Netanyahu.
He's tweeting about getting the guy a pardon.

He gave a speech about it in the Knesset. So it's crazy.

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I want to get in a second to like what the potential criticisms or concerns are related to that.

But just first though, on the political side and on that advice that you're talking about, about going after the Trump administration on how they're handling this and like being on offense on this issue still, if you're the Democrats.

One thing that I've just noticed kind of out there in the debate, and there are a lot of weaknesses to this parallel, so just kind of bear with me and let's not nitpick it.

You'll kind of see where I'm going directionally, is that

like Trump benefited in 16 with a Republican base who was frustrated that Republican leadership was not speaking out enough about immigration. Right.

And Trump went out there and was like, I am going to take a hard line on this. This is an issue that I care about.
You can trust me that I'm going to fight on this.

And that like gave him a lot lot of room to kind of go against Republican Orthodoxy on a lot of other stuff.

And I do see like a little bit of a parallel to this, I'm noticing, in the, in the discussion on the Democratic side, where like there are Democratic-based voters who are just really upset with how the party handled the Israel-Gaza issue, and they feel like they're not being heard.

And that if there are Democratic politicians and leaders that go out and stake out a position on this that, you know, has moral clarity about what happened to the people of Gaza, then that might give them credibility with base voters to not toe the party line on everything else.

And I just find that kind of interesting.

And you see this a little bit with some of the lefty guys with like Platiner and Zoron, but I think that would also probably work for people who are not necessarily from

that camp. I don't know.
What do you make of that proposition?

I agree with the suggestion that there's just a threshold credibility or believability issue if you don't sort of state the obvious about what's happening.

I mean, look, there's been a clip going around this week of Hillary Clinton seeming to suggest that like all young people are kind of like brainwashed or getting bad information from TikTok.

And that's how, why they feel, how they feel about what happened in Gaza. And I just feel like,

like, do you really believe that? I just profoundly disagree with that. Like people.

who picked up the New York Times were reading articles about like tens of thousands of kids getting killed.

And people don't understand whether you're a base voter or moderate or whatever else, like why the United States was just funneling arms into this conflict.

And I do think if you can't be honest about that, if you seem like you are scared about upsetting like special interest groups in Washington, so you won't state the obvious or just do a better job explaining why it's in the U.S.

interest to funnel billions of dollars a year to a foreign country that, by the way, is rich for weapons that are being used to bomb Gaza. Like,

I I do think people kind of tune you out on other stuff. The Hillary thing was wild.

And it felt just representative of how people feel like that the Democratic establishment is just out of touch with what, with what other base is at on these issues.

Just like an election thing and being like,

misinformation on TikTok is the only reason that people are upset about this. It's like, that's, come on.
Like, that's just not real. And that's like a widespread belief, right?

I mean, there were a lot of members of Congress who talked about their motivation for voting for the TikTok ban was because of the anti-Israel content. Mm-hmm.

And I'm not saying there isn't like propaganda on TikTok on TikTok from the Palestinian side, but also like there's a pretty well-known reporting on the Israelis paying influencers to come, you know, report on their status.

Yeah, I mean, Bibi said that he was going to use TikTok as a weapon in an interview a couple of months ago.

Oh, sure. I mean, David From was on a couple weeks ago and pointed out that some of the viral videos going on about the atrocities in Gaza were actually things from the Syria war 10 years ago.

People weren't ever like, yeah, like that stuff is happening for sure. But, you know, the way that Hillary framed it, I'll put a link in for for people who want to see all of it.

I didn't know you were going to bring that up, so I don't have the audio.

But for people who want to watch it, who are not familiar, I think it's pretty representative of some of the tensions on the Democratic side.

Here's my worry about what I'm seeing, though, from kind of the more left anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, whatever you want to call it side on this. And I wonder what you think.

I talked to this a little bit with Chris Hayes a couple weeks ago. Like, do you have worries about

how you tread the turf of criticizing APAC, criticizing Israel without providing aid and comfort to actual anti-Semites or providing this sort of, you know, advancing more of the mindset that there's like a secret cabal of rich people that are controlling, of rich Jews that are controlling the Congress.

And I worry about sometimes about how, you know, the arguments against AIPAC end up, A, like leading people down a path towards like anti-Semitism and B, even worse, leading people down a path towards Nick Fuente system.

And, you know, and I talked about this a little bit with Chris and how the algorithms are

driving people who are watching Gaza content to Candace, we're going to talk about later, and to Fuentes and others. What do you think about that worry?

Yeah, let me start with APAC and then get the Fuentes thing because I think they're related. Like on APAC, they're not all powerful.

I don't think that. I've never said that.
They're not even close. But I do think we should just be honest about what this organization believes and the values they're advancing.

I mean, APAC endorsed dozens of insurrectionist Republicans who wanted to overturn the 2020 election. So I don't feel like they really give a fuck about our democracy.
So point that one.

They're a good company there. I guess my pushback on that would be short.
Yeah, that's bad. It's one of my

club. Welcome to the club of interest groups that supported the fucking insurrectionist Republicans.
It's not just the Jews that did that.

Pretty much everybody. But like, we're the Democratic Party, right? So it's like, do you want support from people doing that?

Also, they routinely interfere in Democratic Party primaries to attack progressive candidates almost exclusively on issues that have nothing to do with Israel.

That's just like a weird thing that happens. It's often through carve-outs like DMFI and other super PACs, but whatever.

And essentially, like they demand that their candidates offer full-throated support to Bibi Denyahoo.

And I just like, I don't think the United States should offer any foreign country or any foreign leader like unquestioned, unequivocal support. I think that's just bad.

And so like on the broader point, like

talking about this issue sucks, right? You get savaged. You get called an anti-Semite by people you've never met or never spoken to.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, he wrote this op-ed

that lumped me in with, you remember Daryl Cooper, the guy who said that Winston Churchill was the real baddie in World War II?

Yeah, he said that Hitler was the good guy and that Churchill was the bad guy in World War II. Yeah.
Martyr Maid, I think, is his hand. Yeah, right.

So he throws me in an op-ed with that guy in the New York Post because I said that Trump got manipulated into doing Netanyahu's dirty work when he bombed Iran. I would argue that is objectively true.

I remember Trump wanted a diplomatic deal with Iran. The Israelis started bombing them, and then we came in to like do mop-up work and took out Fordo.

So like there's also these insane groups that are attacking Miss Rachel. Were you in a Miss Rachel household?

No,

I have a, I understand my role as a parent, which is I get to propagandize my own children up until the age of nine or 10.

And so I don't, I didn't put on any annoying music or content in my house because she doesn't know that exists. So I love Miss Rachel might be a nice person, but I just

my child listens to Lady Lady Gaga. Okay, so like, look, Miss Rachel is a YouTube content creator for kids.
Zero of her content mentions anything, any issue.

It's like you're saying hop little bunny, right? It's like, give me a break.

But like, there's an organization that put her on a list of its anti-Semites of the Year because she posted on Instagram about like Palestinian kids. So my response to your question is.

The groups that are trying to police speech on this issue are making the problem worse with these insane, dishonest, hyperbolic attacks because it's choking off real debate.

And when that debate is choked off, it goes to a Nick Fuentes-type platform, right?

Like I watched a two and a half hour debate hosted by Alex Jones between Dinesh D'Souza and Nick Fuentes that was actually very substantive and interesting around the Iran strikes.

Honestly, Fuentes beat Dinesh. I would argue.
It's not surprising. Dinesh is an idiot.
And I'm not someone who wants Israel destroyed. Far from it.

I thought October 7th was a fucking evil, unjustifiable act of terror. They massacred civilians.
It is not some righteous anti-colonial event. Like, I find that argument abhorrent.

And Jonathan Greenblatt knows that, but when he like smears me and other substantive critics of like Iran policy and lumps us together with martyr made or

Churchill is the baddie guy, like I think that's a huge mistake to police speech.

And I think it leads to reactionary comments from people like Tucker Carlson, who clearly is just like, look, Tucker's got a lot of issues.

I don't pretend to get in his head, but you can tell he's really, really angry about the way

some of his policy disputes have been characterized as anti-Semitic. I hear all that.
I think, obviously, there's like absurd

arguments. I feel like anytime I talk to somebody who is extremely passionate about this issue on one side or the other, they drive me into the other side's arms.

And I think that's particularly true about the Jonathan Greenblatts of the world. Is that true right now? Is I retelling that? No, well,

you're on the fence. We'll see what your answers to this question.

When I talked to Hayes about this two weeks ago, I just got to tell you, we clipped some of it, put it on Instagram, put it on social media.

I mean, Chris Hayes is like, I think was calling this a genocide and saying that Israel should stop the war like three days after it started. And yet, even still,

you know, because our conversation was not as strident as some people would like, I mean, there was some stuff in the comments of our Instagram that ostensibly, just based on my judgment, like just looking at their accounts, like we're coming from lefty people, that were just like objectively anti-Semitic, like, you know, about like ending Israel and about how about how the, you know, the Jews are controlling us and all this sort of stuff.

And so, I just like, do you worry about that? Like, do you just worry about how you talk about this stuff without without either drawing or exacerbating, you know, from regular people?

Views that are anti-Semitic, drawing out or exacerbating their existing views. I see the same stuff you see.
I mean, I, you know, I get constantly.

do Instagram comments worry me? No, usually. I look,

does anti-Semitism worry me? Yes. My daughter went to a Jewish preschool for a while.
When I would drop her off, I would drive in one layer of security, past another, past a third.

And it was because this school had faced real threats. So, like, this is not an abstraction for me.

And it really, like, personally offended me when people suggested otherwise because my wife is Jewish. Like, my daughter went to the school.
Like,

the suggestion that, like, I'm okay okay with this is fucked up. Like, anti-Semitism existed long before October 7th.
It existed long before the state of Israel, before the Holocaust.

It is a centuries-old scourge that has plagued humanity, right? And we should just be self-aware about that.

I think that there are crazy people on the far right, and there are crazy people on the far left, and strident people who will, I mean, I hear the same things you do in the comment of being like,

like, why didn't you say genocide enough times in this clip? Or, right, you know, or why would you platform or talk about Miss Rachel because she does X, Y, or Z?

It's like a lot of it is just whataboutism. I think all we all can do is try to have an honest conversation about what we believe.
And I think like

it's troubling to me that this is an issue where some things should be treated out of bounds, like anti-Semitism and racism are out of bounds, but like debating whether we should be giving a foreign country $3 billion a year in military assistance is not out of bounds, in my view.

All right. This is good.
I want to get you in some more trouble next. I like it.

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I want to talk about the Minnesota welfare fraud story. Yeah.
Weird story. This is pretty complicated.

The gist of it is there's a welfare fraud scandal where that cost Minnesota taxpayers about a billion dollars for like these kind of concentric circles of corporations. And it was

centered around Somali immigrants to the country. A lot of folks on the right now have used that as part of the anti-immigration effort.
But there's also

very legitimate things. I mean, more than legitimate.
It's crazy the amount of money that's taken from Minnesota taxpayers as part of the scheme. Tim Walls is somewhat implicated in that as governor.

And part of the policies they put in place made it easier for this. They've been reporting on this for a while, and it kind of took them a long time to actually investigate it.

They ended up starting the investigation back in 2022 when Walls was governor, you should say. So the details of this, I think, are pretty bad.

My interest of it is more in kind of how do Democrats handle it. And

there seems to be not a full circling the wagons, excusing it, but

they'll pay lip service to the fact that this is bad. But you're not really seeing Democrats kind of rail against this.

And I'm sort of combining this with what I'm seeing with the Chewy situation in Illinois, where you had Marie Gluzen Camp Perez speaking out against him, trying to steal that congressional seat.

And then, and then we talked earlier this week about this pardon of Queyar and Hakeem Jeffries kind of defends

Quear after Trump pardons him. And I'm like, I kind of feel like there's room and demand right now

for some Democrats to be in the like McCain spirit.

And I mean this in the reform sense, not in the neocon sense, like when he ran against Bush and against corruption and against campaign finance reform, remember McCain Feingold?

And like, I would love to see some Democrats like not just say, oh, what happened in Minnesota was bad, but like, what happened in Minnesota is bad.

And this is, and like, we have a corrupt system that we need to fix. And like, we need to actually

have outrage over this and have, and, and have moral outrage about the people that that allowed this to persist for a while and have moral outrage about the machine politicians that are protecting each other.

Anyway, that's a little rant I have. I'm curious what your response is to all that.
Like, it's a no-brainer to me.

I was talking to the CEO of Swing Left the other day, and they have this program where they're just knocking on every single door in a community.

They're not going down like Democratic Party lists and doing turnout stuff. They're just trying to do like deep listening.
And the number one issue they heard was not cost enough. Deep listening?

Is that what you say? It's a term of art. I don't know, man.
Just let me be a lib for a minute.

Like 10-minute conversation.

I'm trying to think about what deep listening would sound like for me. That's hard.
Put on some Enya and you go like this. You do this, emoji.

That was like 10 or 15-minute conversations, the kind I've never had on a door in my life. I'm just like, are you going to vote? Are you going to vote?

The number one issue they heard was not about cost and affordability. It was about the system being corrupt and broken.
That was the number one thing they heard.

That is like the most pervasive political feeling they heard from Republicans and Democrats. So Democrats, we need, just like the Israel thing, we just need to be consistent here, right?

If we support the ICC, it's for Putin and Netanyahu, okay, not to bring it back. And so I like, I I gotta do 20 more minutes on Israel.
Nope, I don't.

Uh, I think identifying the problem, like, this fraud is awful, and they should prosecute the shit out of anyone involved, they should put more oversight in place.

It seems like there was some really lax oversight that allowed these numbers to balloon. It seems like it's spiraling out of a set of actions that happened after COVID that led to a lot of fraud.

I mean, like the PPP program, I think the inspector general said there was like 200 billion dollars in fraud there. So, like, yeah, there was some problem, problematic, fast spending.

Now, the weird thing, Tim, so I agree, like, Democrats should hammer this. The weird thing is, you've, I'm sure, seen, is Trump's response has been just demagoguing Somalis.

It's like collective punishment against all Somalis.

Like, he basically fell asleep in that cabinet meeting and, like, woke up and like startled himself awake so he could like spout off some racist thing about a Somalis.

And then he's yelling at Ilhan Omar for some reason. Like, as far as I can tell, she doesn't have oversight over these programs.
It would be the governor or the mayor of the city.

But I'm like, I'm with you. Like, Obama, McCain ran on ethics and lobbying reform really effectively.
Obama ran on ethics and lobbying reform in 2006 and 2008. Like I think it's absolutely critical.

It's core of our message. Back to your point earlier, it's like the thing that gives you credibility to talk about everything else.

If you cannot admit the system is fucking broken and not working for anyone, they don't believe you on anything else. Yeah.

I hear, I guess, is how I would sum it up is like what Trump is doing is obviously racist and his immigration policy is sick.

And I just want, you know, I'm like, I pulled up what Walls' response was and he said, we welcome support in investigating and prosecuting crime, but pulling a PR stunt and indiscriminately targeting immigrants is not a real solution.

Like, that's true, but I just like, I want you to be as mad at the people that stole the billion dollars from your, from your citizens as you are at Trump for being a racist, right?

Like, Trump is a racist. I'm mad at that too.
We're both mad at that. Okay.
I just also want you to be mad at, you know, at the way that the system was abused.

And that is the part where sometimes I feel like you're getting a little bit of punch pulling from Democrats. They don't want to get in trouble.

They don't want, I don't know if they they don't want like activist groups mad at them or like what is behind that or maybe they just aren't actually mad about it. So they need to kind of fake it.

I don't know. I don't know what it is.
But I guess that's my, that's my constructive criticism. No, no, they should be furious about this.

And this is why when like healthcare.gov, I'm sure people remember, we launched a website for the new ACA healthcare program and it collapsed and didn't work.

And that was the maddest Barack Obama has ever been because if you're going to be a liberal and say like we should have a bigger government because it helps people, it has to be effective and competent.

And there can't be fraud and corruption like this because it infuriates infuriates people and they will destroy you. And you're right.
We have to be mad about this shit. And there was some reporting.

I can't remember if it was like one of the Minnesota papers or like the Times report on this that some efforts to conduct more oversight on one of these groups got a response that was like, if you do this, we'll call you racist.

And that led them to stop that oversight. Right.
And I do think like.

Getting past that kind of cynical racial politics is very important because ultimately the people who were hurt here were like Somali kids in this community or like poor kids in Minnesota.

And that's what we should be focused on. That's what we should be outraged for.

Speaking of corruption, back to the Honduras pardon to get to earlier. Our guy, Juan J.
Oh, Orlando Hernandez, J-O-H. I mentioned this a couple times this week, but

a few more things have happened. One thing I didn't realize, I think I learned this from Pod Save the World, is he also is accused of murdering a witness in prison.
Yep.

Yeah, in addition to the drug dealing. SBF had a different experience with him in prison, the crypto fraudster.

He was tweeting this morning that J-O-H was the most innocent man he's ever met in his life. He's very gentle and soft-spoken.
And he said that

he never heard him say anything bad except for when he taught him a cuss word.

So

that's what SBF had to say. It's a strange situation.

There's a lot of layers. In addition to doing the drug trafficking and potentially the murder, he also is a big crypto guy, which is probably why SBF likes him.

A lot of Trump's big crypto friends, I'm sure, were lobbying for this because Honduras was going to, you know, trying to be a junior El Salvador and have like a little safe space for Peter Thiel to, you know, trade shit coins in exchange for Twinkblood.

What do you make of it?

Yeah, so you're referencing a thing called Prospera, which was this like charter city or that's a special economic zone where it was like an island that was considered like a libertarian enclave with low taxes and light regulation.

And it was supposed to attract a bunch of startups from like biotech and crypto. And they recognized Bitcoin as legal tender.

And it was backed by this VC firm that had investors like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen.

And then there was a change of administration, and the new president walked back the laws that allowed for these zones. And

the prosperous backers were suing Honduras for like $12 billion. It was like two-thirds of their GDP or something crazy like that.

So, yeah, it's clear that JOH JOH had friends in the MAGA world that include crypto billionaires, but also Roger Stone and Matt Gates for some reason, kind of getting back to the weird Miami thing.

But either way, like this is a pretty bad guy. You know, like JOH allowed, I mean, DOJ said that he facilitated the importation of 400 tons of cocaine into the United States over 20 years.

And so we're free to do it. By Tom Cotton's math, that would have killed 600 million Americans.
That's right. Or Christy Noam's math, 10x that.
And look at the the president of Honduras.

He also had a brother who was so corrupt that he stamped his own initials on cocaine he was manufacturing and went to jail. This is Tony Hernandez.
He went to jail. Like on the baggies?

I don't know. How did that work? I don't know if these are like pressed pills.

Yeah, I'm not sure what we're talking about. I never procured one myself.

I can't attest to the quality.

We must do a little follow-up on that. I'm not sure how that would work.
Yeah, I know. I bet you'll follow up.

I got in trouble earlier this week on the next level because I was spitballing and I was like, I mean, what? 15% of Americans? I heard that. I caught that.

The listeners are like, 15%. What's the real number? Did you get it real?

Two or three percent. Okay, yeah.
Sometimes people,

I was going off the cuff. I was trying to be generous to the Christy Noam argument about like, what is the potential number of people who could die? Sure, sure.
Anyhow,

smaller than we thought. Got it.

But, you know, the ironies are like, we're letting this guy out of prison as we're pushing maduro out of the country also trump's tweet about pardoning joh or uh orlando hernandez was in his endorsement of this guy tito asfora who was running for president in the same party as hernandez but like hernandez is loathed in latin america so it's just very the whole thing was very weird it made no sense politically i still can't explain it i guess he probably just got paid off somewhere and we'll find out eventually i know i always

You know, libertarianism was always attractive to me, obviously, as a young man.

Yeah, and and it's just like, it's one of those things that just never works in practice, kind of like communism. Libertarian Island in Central America, that seems nice to me.

I could feel like I could live a life there, you know, not as many rules, you know, you get the beach.

And then when you see it in practice, you're like, oh, okay, well, these are the people that I would have to live with, actually, on that island. And

that seems not as great. Yeah, it seems like the worst people in the world on your seasteading island.
Yeah, that's tough. What is the Democrats' obligation? How do you navigate this?

How do you talk about all this stuff? And it's all the bullshit, all the corruption. It's all happening so fast.
Like, do you lean into the pardoning part of it, to the drug trafficking?

I talked to this a little bit with Sam yesterday. Do you actually make it more about how Donald Trump is in league with these oligarchs and he's

doing pardons for their friends?

What do you think is the right angle on it? So, Tim, I was very surprised by the degree to which the East Wing teardown broke through and that people actually cared. And then it just went viral.
So

that kind of makes me think that talking more about the corruption piece is like, should be maybe the number one thing we're doing about Trump.

I mean, it's not just like the, you know, $300 million cost. It's like bribes from Palantir to pay for this new, you know, monstrosity East Wing building.
I think we need to focus on that.

I think we need to focus on all the crypto corruption, pardon the people like JOH.

You know, there was a guy the other day who just was pardoned as an insurrectionist, was just accused of molesting his nanny, is now going back to prison.

So I do think like the message is he's doing deals for his friends, the billionaires. They get off scot-free.
You know, the justice system doesn't work for them.

And you're the one getting screwed because he's focusing on these things. It's like that kind of message.
It's back to your McCain stuff. Yeah.
I knew what the other thing I was going to ask you for.

This is really a dark quiz coming at the end of the show. I always like to give you a world quiz.
Tito, the conservative candidate, seems like it might win. They're still counting.

What's the status on the votes down there in Honduras? Do you know? I think it was basically tied.

It was the right-wing party against the center-left, the sort of center-right party were essentially tied.

There's allegations of fraud now, so we'll see. I think it's sort of an ongoing process.

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Speaking of fraud, boom, how about that transition? I want to talk to our girl about our girl Candace.

You said you were watching the Dinesh D'Souza versus Nick Fuentes debate, which, boy, that's a Friday night for a dad. I didn't have time for that because I've been spending so much time with Candace.

I mean, man,

she is a talent. I got to tell you.

For folks who've been missing it, it's a big story both for me as a Candace viewer and also for you in the politics of the world context, because there's some real geopolitical implications for what's happening with Candace.

She has stated she has proof that the French Foreign Legion has sent a baguette-wheeling assassin and an Israeli John Wick type figure to kill her.

And that is following their successful action against Charlie Kirk. The French Foreign Legion was involved in that assassination as well.

She summed up the state of play on her show earlier this week, and I'll just as well let you guys hear, hear from her yourself.

Get comfortable, you guys, because it is going to be a long week. I have so many explosive relevations to share with you, revelations to share with you.
And now it feels especially urgent, right?

Don't you feel a sense of urgency right now? I do. Yes.

In the wake of me having learned that France apparently paid for my assassination and that the French Foreign Legion was apparently involved and on the ground at UVU on the the day of Charlie Kirk's assassination.

And we should probably begin there.

I agree. I wanted to begin there with you.
Yeah.

Did you see the man with the beret on the grassy knoll at UVU?

It is interesting how Candace's story just seems to merge with every other story she cares about. Tim, I do want to point out before we get going here that I'm looking at the Apple charts top shows.

Candace is at 16 ahead of Bill Simmons, the Bulwark podcast, and Pod Save America. So she's doing something right.
She's ahead of all of us? You guys aren't beating her anymore?

You guys had her beat for a while. I'm looking now.
Maybe this is old. Maybe this is wrong.
This is all categories.

What number are you at?

We were at,

well, in terms of news, we're seven. She's five in news.

Got it. Okay.
Boy, we're all neck and neck. Yep.
When I was last on Pod Save America, I told you this. That's why

I've been trying to continue to mention what I've been hearing about MBS being a hermaphrodite, and I don't have any evidence of that.

And I thought that our investigation and the calipers and all that,

not the calipers, little tincer we were going to try to use to help figure it out. I thought that that might help my spot in the rankings.
And it really hasn't.

And I've gone up a little bit since then, but

I'm not really doing Candace numbers yet. No, you need a feud.
I do think you need to just pick a Midas Touch brother and just go ham and target.

Candace's thing is so amazing. Candace's tweet about this was so amazing because she was like, I have heard that there was a French Foreign Legion trained assassin.

And by the way, there was an Israeli in there too. She just had to work in

her hobby horse, which is clear, back to our previous conversation, clear-cut anti-Semitism. Yeah.

Are you hearing anything from your friends in France? I know that you are, you know, kind of as a lib in the kind of foreign affairs space. I know that you and the French are probably talking.

I mean, have you heard any buzz, any chatter?

Not a lot of buzz. I haven't reached out to the Macrons lately.
We don't talk that often, but we check in every once in a while. I do have

a Frenchman married into the family and he was talking with him about this over Thanksgiving. And I think the French are a little confused why they're doing this lawsuit thing.

They're kind of like, why is our president suing this lady over in the U.S.?

But yeah, the whole thing is insane. She's a crazy person.
Do you follow Candace on Instagram? No. Should I?

Obviously. Her social life lately has been kind of interesting.
I want to pull up some of these pictures for the YouTube crowd. Here she is at a Nashville Christmas party last night.

She's with Theo Vaughn, Jason Whitlock, Michael Knowles, a couple MMA guys.

And then over the weekend, past weekend, we'll pull this up. Here she is taking a selfie with somebody at Dollywood.

This Israeli assassin must not be very good at their job.

I mean, like, you would think that if she was worried about being assassinated, she probably would not show up to a Christmas party with every other MAGA influencer in Nashville.

Like, that would, I, that might be the first place I would start looking, I think, if I was the Israeli assassin and I'd hacked her phones and, you know,

had any sort of idea where she might be. If I had the French Foreign Legion on my ass, I probably wouldn't be posting on Instagram.
You're right.

I would, I, I would, I would probably ditch my phone somewhere. I'd maybe move out to the desert, maybe to Death Valley, camp out with Ryan Lizza.

Apparently, that's where he's holed up, writing Telos. You know, maybe you can, you know, find some fellowship there.
I don't, I don't know what you're talking about with that. The Dollywood,

Dollywood, I thought maybe at first when she went to Dollywood, I was like, well, okay, you know, maybe your theory here is that the French don't understand our cultural heritage.

They might not be aware that Dollywood

has this kind of level of import in the country. But I don't know.
I mean, those are just two pretty high-profile places for her to go if she's on the run.

Now, I didn't realize that Dollywood had like a whole resort type thing where you can do like

rides and a whitewater rafting thing. I've never been to Dollywood.
Have you been? I haven't. I thought about doing it, taking Toulouse there last year when we had our live Nashville event.

It just was like a little too far. Should we all go? Do you want to go as a family? I'd love to go.
I love Nashville.

The only challenge in Nashville is every other car you see is a bus with a roof cut off filled with some sort of bachelorette.

Yeah, we could skip Nashville and like go to the Smoky Mountains for weekends.

That sounds good. I love Dollywood.
I'm there. She said that she debate TPUSA.
It doesn't seem like that's going to happen, though. I don't know.
I'm excited. If that happens,

are you going to be live streaming that, do you think? I'm going to be riveted. I will watch every single minute of this.
So I watched the TPUSA response.

I was hoping for a little more substance, but it was interesting to see that they're going to do this live stream. Now, Candace, I don't know if you saw her response.

She said, hey, you guys, you know, you scheduled this when I record my podcast every week, which apparently is immovable.

She also said she was going to have to find a substitute teacher for her children that she's homeschooling. Oh, no.
That makes me sad. Well, her oldest child's four.

Oh, well, you're not doing a lot of teaching.

Just, okay. Like, as somebody with,

I think your four-year-old can miss a day. Yeah, you can miss a day at kindergarten.
That's okay. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure if that's kind of like a one step below.

I have to wash my hair that day, as far as an excuse goes. That's crazy.
My four-year-old can't miss her homeschooling or his homeschooling. I don't know if it's a boy or girl.

Your guy, Will Summer, has been just dominating the story, by the way. And his piece a few months back about just how deep the legal trouble she is in was quite informative.

I got to say, though, Tim, like I'm not rooting for a foreign government to silence an American podcaster, like kind of no matter how crazy they are. It's a weird one, right? Okay, just to be clear.

I know that I may have expressed more Israel sympathies than you did earlier in the podcast, but I'm definitely on Candace's side over the Israeli John Wick and the baguette and the French Foreign Legion.

We do not want these foreign fuckers coming into our country and silencing podcasters. I don't mean silencing with a gun.
I mean the lawsuits and the lawsuits.

Oh, you were talking about the lawsuit.

I just wanted to make sure we were clear on whose side I was on. Okay.
I don't want Candace coming for me. No, me either.
Okay, I want her free to do her thing. She's scared.

I don't think that young people should be following her on TikTok. This is my Hillary Clinton moment.
Young people watching this, tell your friends, say no to Candace. Say no.
Say no to Candace, okay?

Block. Block Candice.
There's a lot of other good stuff out there on the internet.

All right, we're going to close with the quiz, the politics quiz. We always have one for you.
World quiz.

This is a long payback, long-running payback for the time that George Bush got criticized by the libs for not knowing the president of Pakistan.

Tommy has a world-based podcast. And so I've put in this morning the list of Central American heads of state.
I don't know. I'm going to have to give you Bukele.
We all know Bukele now.

And so among the other countries, we have Guatemala, Honduras,

Costa Rica,

Delise,

Nicaragua. Can we give you Nicaragua? Ortega.
You got Nicaragua, Ortega. Oh, are any guesses? Is I supposed to be going? You know, any guesses? I just want one from you.
Give me one. One of those.

Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala. I mean, Honduras is Shomara Castro until they figure out this election.

The former first lady, her husband was, what, Zalaya, who was deposed in a coup in I think 2009? I think it was during the Obama administration.

Do you say Belize? Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica?

Isn't King Charles the head of state in Belize?

I don't believe. I mean, I don't believe so.
Technically, aren't they

the official head of state?

Is that correct?

I think they are officials. I think that is correct.

Westminster models. Well, that is correct.
That is a good pull. The head of government would be Johnny Bricinho, the prime minister.

We all know he's not in charge. Yeah,

okay. Exactly.
Tim, how many people live in Honduras? Oh, boy. You're throwing it back at me.
This is like the Tech Cruise. This is the Tucker Cross.

How many people live in Honduras? I would say, so LA City has 5 million. So Honduras definitely has, what, triple that? So I'd say 13 million.

Close. I think it's like 10 or or 11.

That's pretty good. Okay, so now that I know how many people live in Honduras, my opinion on whether or not we should bomb them should be taken seriously.

But I don't think so because I honor Honduras. Tommy Vitor, thank you for this.
Thank you for not making me have to do this with Ben Rhodes today.

I love Ben. I love Ben.
I just,

it's been a week, you know. We had our all-staff bulwark meeting.
I had some, I had some kind of interesting podcast earlier this week. And I just, Ben's serious, you know, Ben's serious.

We can joke, we can joke, but he's serious. So, we're gonna have Ben on next next year to defend himself and his Hamas commentary.
Tommy Vitor, appreciate you very much.

Everybody else, we'll be back here with Bill Crystal on Monday. See you all then.

Thanks for having me.

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

The

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