4/1/25: Trump Threatens To Bomb Iran, Elon Election Takeover Plot, Bernie Tea Party, Elon Baby Mama Drama
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Cyrus the Great of Persia was a conqueror, and he tried to increase his empire by marrying Tamyris, the widow of the king of the Massengedi people. She refused his offer, and so he decided that he would invade her kingdom instead.

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Let's talk about Iran, shall we? Let's go ahead and start with this. We have got President Trump threatening to bomb Iran. Let's take a listen. He said, and I quote, if they don't make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before. If they don't make a deal, we're going to bomb them. Okay, well, bad news for everybody because let's go and put this up there on the screen. Things continue to go in a very bad direction here. Donald Trump yesterday tweeting or truthing

I guess is how he says it. The Iran-backed Houthi terrorists have been decimated by the relentless strikes over the past two weeks. Not true. Many of their fighters and leaders are no longer with us. We hit them every day and night harder and harder. Their capabilities to threaten shipping and the region are rapidly being destroyed. Our attacks will continue until they are no longer a threat to freedom of navigation. The choice for the Houthis is clear. Stop shooting at U.S. ships and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun and the real pain is yet to come.

for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran. So remember that little signal chat debate, all of that, or that little signal chat debate, that preceded the first of what has now been a week or so of strikes. The attacks from the Houthis have not stopped literally at all. There does not appear to be any end game. Trump said that he would hold Iran responsible. Now, I mean, he's basically, as I think we said that here at the time, now you're stuck

between Iraq and the hard place because you issued the threat. You said you will pay for this and they didn't stop at all. As we also have tried to talk about here is what? They don't have nearly the amount of control that we in the press or whatever, that America seems to believe that these people do. It's ridiculous that these- You mean Iran, peace of- Yes, like what? Do they provide them some weaponry and a little bit of support? Yeah, they've also been an independent-ish type organization fighting against the Saudis and all them for more than a decade.

Yeah, they have their own capability. Think about these people survived literal bombing, starvation. Like you think that these missiles are, you know, miraculously can just solve the problem like this. There's like a theory that, oh, the Biden administration didn't bomb them enough.

despite looking at the statistics. If bomb could have solved this, the Saudis would have solved it eight years ago. So yeah, it's not good because you're setting us up for confrontation. And as he said at the original, he said that we will bomb Iran if they don't make a deal. Well, guess what? They said, yeah, we don't really want to talk to Iran.

Yeah, that was the argument that was basically made in the Signal chat, if I'm remembering correctly, of like, oh, well, the Biden administration, they just let them get away with it, completely ignoring the way that the Biden administration pursued, like, basically the same strategy. And now, I mean, we already see the results. Like, they've been bombing them in whatever more aggressive way and leveling apartment buildings and whatever. And has it worked? No, of course not. You could put D3 up on the screen in terms of Iran's response, obviously.

So NBC News says Trump's threat to bomb Iran would spark retaliation, according to their supreme leader. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Monday the U.S. would receive a strong blow if it acts on Trump's threat to bomb Tehran unless it reaches a new nuclear deal with Washington. Trump reiterated his threat on Sunday. That's what we were talking about. And the supreme leader says the enmity from the U.S. and Israel has always been there. They threatened to attack us, which we don't think is very probable.

But if they commit any mischief, they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow. And if they are thinking of causing sedition inside the country, as in past years, the Iranian people themselves will deal with them. Speaking to, you know, some of the theoretical stirring up of domestic violence.

unrest within Iran that they believe that we are guilty of. Maybe we are, I don't really know for sure. Well, this is the problem, is that we have set ourselves up now for potential confrontation where the president has spoken out and said if we don't make a deal, then we're going to have bombs. Now, we also have an idiot national security advisor who continues to be in his job, who constantly is advocating for bombing Iran.

And is somebody who we saw in the chat who's a brain-dead moron talking about freedom of navigation, who obviously is trying to set us up for some sort of future military confrontation and, quote, holding them responsible, as Trump has said. So at a certain point, we have to take responsibility.

trumping them seriously. And you are in a tight timeframe. You have the Gaza, you have the Gaza war, which is popping off. Things are only going to get worse if we see mass expulsion, which we talked about previously. Then you add on top of that with the Iran section and you look

at all of the people in the administration, at the White House, like Mike Wallace, Marco Rubio, and others who have talked a big game about bombing Iran. And what else can you conclude? And you see here from the Iranian response where they had their own domestic political situation. Us pulling out of the deal burned them at a domestic political level.

and made it much more difficult for any Iranian leader to try and pursue that in terms of their own internal politics. So you really have two things coming here. I guess all you can hope for is that we're all bluffing, but that's not a good hope. That's not a good bet to make. I think also what was revealing within the Signal chat is you definitely do not get much sense that there's going to be much pushback on this.

on whatever the hawkish direction of the Trump administration was. The only voice that raised any concerns at all was J.D. Vance, and he quickly backs down once he realizes there's no one else in this chat that is, Jeffrey Goldberg is not coming to bat for me. Yeah, that's right.

on my side on this one, nor are the people who are leaking to Jeffrey Goldberg going to go to bat against taking any sort of hawkish actions and escalatory actions. Quincy Institute over for Responsible Statecraft over on their blog, which is excellent, by the way. They write really fantastic analyses that are definitely worth reading. We can put this up on the screen. They have been tracking the increasing beating of the war drums. And the headline here is the war over...

The war over war with Iran has just begun. Trump says he wants a deal, but stakeholders in and outside of his administration are pushing for conflict. The first paragraph here reads, in recent weeks, many of the same neoconservative voices who pushed the U.S. into Iraq are calling for strikes on Iran. Groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy are once again promoting confrontation, claiming that there may never be a better time to act.

but this is a dangerous illusion that risks derailing what Donald Trump himself says. He wants a deal, not another disastrous war in the Middle East. I think that's a little pretty charitable to Trump, given that he said he wants a deal, but also threatened to bomb them. But, you know, they're trying to write this in a way that would appeal to him and potentially, you know, some of his allies

allies within the administration. But in any case, I thought it was important that they were tracking the way that these influential think tanks within Washington were increasingly pushing towards this confrontation because as much as we would like those people to be irrelevant, they are not.

They have a lot of allies within this administration, within every administration who are listening to the case and making a similar case internally. Well, what I like about this Quincy Institute article is that it points out the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Washington and New York Institute for Peace, and the op-ed war that's currently happening in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere to shape a media environment. What

What people need to understand here, too, is, you know, when we previously had talked about the Jewish Insider publication and a lot of the war against these America First appointees, people who are more restrainers, do you know why they do that? It's all about shaping the environment to make it so that those people are uncomfortable in their meetings or that people can use it as an excuse to silence them or even, you know, if their names are mentioned in a policy document to begin to attack

And then to create this alternative ecosystem in the journal and on Twitter, you know, Barry Weiss and all these other folks who can just gin up the impression for a lot of these people that the public is actually on their side. So, look, right now, I mean, are we going to war with Iran? Let's really hope not. But the point is, is that the ground is laid for something to pop off.

is that Trump has now made several decisions and the people around him are obviously advocating for this. There are off-ramps. Steve Witkoff, send Steve over there. Send him to Iran. He made some comments in this Trump-Tucker Carlson interview, apparently, which were noticed by the Iranians and they might be willing to talk with them. But watch how Steve got sidelined by the Israelis. I mean, they attacked.

the shit out of him. The reason why this ceasefire fell apart, I believe, is because they were successfully able to sideline Wyckoff and Adam Entous. Same with a lot of the other voices in Washington. I mean, remember the guy who said, we're not a client state of Israel. He's been, you know, he's with the... He's disappeared. He's down in that ICE facility in Louisiana. Like, I wouldn't want to be him for the rest of my life. No, it's not funny, but it is like...

There's something to it, right? He hasn't been on television since. And you are watching as those people and the war on that is successful. And then the administration voices and all these other people in the more, there's no accountability for folks like Mike Waltz. It would be very easy to see many of the mistakes of the first term get repeated. And then you're never coming back from that.

Well, and most of these people internally, like they're, you know, they're strivers. They want to stay in good standing. And they see the way that that dude, Adam Boller, is that his name? Yeah, that's Boller, sorry. Was disappeared and the way Steve Witkoff was sidelined. So they're watching, they're reading the tea leaves of, you know, who's able to sustain their position. And Mike Waltz, with this giant fuck up,

Still gets to stay in place. I know. So they're reading all of those tea leaves. Just last thing in this block, because it's just too good. Can't resist. So you guys know there's a number of special elections today. There's the Wisconsin Supreme Court one. Yes. Ryan and Emily will have full coverage of what happens in this. And then there's these two Florida special elections. One to fill Matt Gaetz's seat, which looks like that's a done deal for the Republicans. I don't see any nervousness around that one. But the other one to fill Mike Waltz's seat.

has had a little more intrigue. You want to set this up, Sagar? Yes, absolutely. This gentleman who is looking to replace Mike Waltz on the Republican side in a plus 30 Trump district, and now this race is apparently close. I still think the Republican is very likely to win here, let's be clear. But the fact that there's nervousness about this at all is totally insane. Let's go ahead and put it up there on the screen. Senator Randy Fine, he is a state senator there,

Some of you may know that name if you spend any time online. Guys, go ahead and put D5, please, up on the screen just so people can take a look. So here, Trump says, America first patriot, Randy Fine, is running to represent the wonderful people of Florida's 6th Congressional District. Highly successful, blah, blah, blah. He has my complete and total endorsement. Now,

Let's look at some past statements from Mr. Fine. Quote, it's time for Israel to destroy Iran. This was on October 1st of 2024. Hashtag bombs away. Hashtag bombs away. Go to the next one so you guys can see. Here he is. He put this out. He's not even ashamed. This is a photo of him in his office where he has the Israeli flag prominently next to the American flag. I would note, actually, the Israeli flag is actually in a more prominent position in the picture than the American flag.

And then second is- America First Patriot. There's somebody who says, you should be ashamed of yourself. How do you sleep at night? With a photo of a dead baby in Gaza, to which he replies, quite well, actually. Thanks for the pic. So that's who we're dealing with. That's who is Mr. America First Patriot and gets to some of our-

I debated earlier about the whole anti-Semitism task force and how this term has become effectively meaningless in the Trump administration. There's major war, obviously, online. There's a lot of influencers who are willing to call him out. But let's be honest. I mean, Trump has endorsed this guy. And just the other day, he endorsed Lindsey Graham. Yeah.

This is the reality of who we're dealing with here. There's no ideological consistency. It's just about who, you know, he thinks is going to be the most loyal soldier. And so, yeah, Randy Fine is America's first patriot, even as he's, you know, got his Israeli flag. Bingo. Front and center and is monstrously, totally comfortable with babies being killed in Gaza. My name is Harry Houdini.

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This week, Elon Musk took time out of his vote-buying spree to announce a new lie about supposed Social Security fraud. Now, this lie happens to kill two birds with one stone, serving as it does to feed his attacks on Social Security, which he of course derives as a Ponzi scheme, and his attacks on our electoral system, portraying it as being rife with fraud.

Take a listen to Elon's longtime close associate and new Social Security official, Antonio Gracias. He is claiming that millions of non-citizens are receiving Social Security cards and that the existence of these immigrant Social Security cards is proof that they are receiving fraudulent benefits and that Democrats were allowing non-citizens to vote in order to rig elections. Listen to what he has to say, and then I'll tell you the facts on the other side. This is what jumped out at us. When we saw these numbers, we were like, what is this?

In 21, you see 270,000 people goes all the way to 2.1 million in 24. These are non-citizens that are getting social security numbers.

Yeah, this is a mind-blowing charge. People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep at the switch. He wasn't asleep. They weren't asleep at the switch. It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent, deep blue, one-party state from which there would be no escape.

Look, if I hadn't seen this myself, I'm not sure I'd have believed it. I went through it myself and mapped it. And Ilana's right. This is true. The defaults in the system from Social Security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, max pay for these people and minimum collection. That's what's happening. We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example.

We've gone through every benefit program we went through. We found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs. And then what was really, really disturbing us was why.

We're asking ourselves why. And so we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records. And we found people here registered to vote in this population, yes. And who did vote. And we found some by sampling that actually did vote. And we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation Service. Already. Already. That has already happened.

All right. So you should take all of those claims with a lot of skepticism. But here's what you should know about the facts with regard to immigrants and Social Security. So legal immigrants can apply for Social Security numbers through a program. One of the programs is called Enumeration Beyond Entry. So they can work and pay taxes, which, of course, you want people to be paying taxes.

Here is what those particular Social Security cards look like. You can see that they say valid for work only with DHS authorization, meaning that they explicitly bar voting in elections, which is, of course, a right reserved in our Constitution for citizens. Having a Social Security card also doesn't guarantee you Social Security benefits. Only those who qualify, pay into the program, are then eligible for benefits.

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars into Social Security every year, but they don't receive Social Security numbers and they are not eligible for benefits. Grassis also claims that some of these non-citizens with Social Security numbers are voting and have been referred for prosecution.

I'll believe that when I see it. Republicans have been on a decades-long quest to find mass voter fraud, especially among non-citizens and undocumented immigrants, and they have completely failed. You might recall in Trump's first term, he was very salty that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote. So he claimed that millions of illegal immigrants had voted illegally for him, and he went so far as to appoint Chris Kobach to a commission that was charged with locating this fraud.

They completely failed. In the end, the commission quietly closed up shop without finding a single instance of illegal alien voting, let alone the millions that Trump claimed. A draft of that commission's final report was revealed. It contained nothing more than a list of blank categories of potential fraud. Not one instance had actually been identified.

Now, Elon's lies about Social Security and voter fraud, though, are not out of stupidity. They're part of a larger coordinated plan, the other piece of which clicked into place last week. So somewhat lost amid last week's Signalgate debacle, Trump signed an executive order on elections.

Now, the bulk of what the order demanded is actually illegal. In particular, the order requires that voters not only attest to their citizenship, which they must already do, but also provide some documentary proof, something like a passport. This is directly at odds with the National Voter Registration Act. In fact, Arizona previously tried to add such a requirement and had their law struck down by the Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling.

What's more, Constitution makes clear that what election rules are not left to the states are to be handled by Congress, not by the executive branch.

But what really caught my eye in the executive order wasn't so much the proof of citizenship requirement, which, like I said, is probably going to be blocked from being fully implemented. It was the announcement that Trump is putting Elon Musk's doge at the center of our elections. So the TLDR is this. This executive order would put the richest man on the planet, who is obviously a radicalized partisan, in a position to say who can't

Who gets a vote and who does not get a vote? And his say would be enforced by a Trump administration that has already proved itself ready and willing to put states through hell in order to force their compliance. It's a playbook for shifting the country from a democracy towards what some experts call a hybrid regime, where we may still have democratic institutions in form, but not really truly in substance.

Now, Elon's repeated lies about non-citizens voting and Trump's executive order giving Elon's say over who can vote are a coordinated effort to hobble democracy. All right, here is the key provision. You can see it there up on the screen. Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Doge administrator, shall review each state's publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning Voter List Maintenance Act

activities as required by this section alongside federal immigration databases and state records requested, including through subpoena where necessary and authorized by law for consistency with federal requirements. So what that means in plain language is that it's directing the Doge administrator to review every state's voter registration list using subpoenas if necessary to force the states to hand over their data to identify lists of supposedly noncompliant voters.

Now, similar efforts have been tried at a smaller scale on the state level. And so we can know what the expected results would be. Here is investigative journalist Greg Pallas talking about how state efforts to match voter rolls and make sure the same people weren't registered in multiple states has ended up in practicality in mass disenfranchisement. One of the things that they want, apparently want to resurrect is a Chris Kobach. Again, this is the right wing AG who's really the brains behind this.

the Heritage Foundation and Trump administration attack on voter rolls. And he had a program which was struck down by the courts, and I'll take some credit for that because of my expose in Rolling Stone, called Interstate Crosscheck. Now, what this is, is they take lists of voters from two states, Arizona and Texas, and they say, oh,

Jose Hernandez voted in Arizona and there's a Jose Hernandez who voted in Texas. It must be the same guy voting twice. So we're going to remove their registrations because we have a double registered voter. Now you might say, well, Jose Hernandez is a common name. It's not necessarily for a Republican. But so here's the story. So they were literally, Chris Kobach-

created lists, cross-checked lists of names state to state. For example, they said one guy named James Brown in Georgia voted 238 times. I'm not making this up, by the way. So they remove all these James Browns. They know what they're doing. By the way, fun fact, 90% of all of the 100 most common surnames in America, 90% are majority minority names,

So what's more, Kansas also instituted that proof of citizenship requirement back in 2011. The goal, the stated goal was to root out mass voting by immigrants. They found next to none of that, but they did keep 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens from being able to cast ballots. That was 12% of the entire population that was trying to register during the relevant period.

Now, Doge and AI, obviously, they could put those efforts on steroids. And remember Elon's mindset here. His ketamine-addled brain thinks he's on some civilizational mission to save humanity. He's already demonstrated his willingness to do anything from letting the elderly starve without Social Security payments to sacrificing kids with HIV in Africa to defying court orders and running roughshod over our constitutional system in order to accomplish his goals.

Now, in the same way Doge hacked into the Treasury, Doge has been given now the green light to hack into our national election systems and bend the voter rolls to Elon's will. Do you think he's going to carefully root out fraud? Of course not. We've seen the insane, dishonest, and bungling ways that Elon and Doge operate. They claimed millions were going to condoms in the Gaza Strip. Complete lie. They claimed research money was funding transgender mice.

Another lie. They claim the Department of the Interior spent a billion dollars on a single survey. Also a lie. He is literally the number one liar on his own platform in the entire world. And trust me, people, it is a very high bar over there. So he and his apparatchiks will get access to all his voter data, spin a remarkable fairy tale of mass fraud, and we get a huge purge of legitimate voters.

Now, traditionally, these voter suppression efforts target Black voters because they are the most likely to vote for Democrats. But if Elon wanted to, he could use AI to get even fancier. He's got plenty of data pulled from across the federal government to discern who is a Democratic voter and who is a Republican voter with a very high level of certainty. He will run through the data, and in an intentionally dishonest and idiotic way, as Doge has done at Social Security and other places, he will then present to states a list of voters that they should block.

Now, Republican-led states, they are likely to go along enthusiastically with this plan and with Elon's efforts to purge voter rolls of suspected Democrats. And there are plenty of swing districts in Republican-led states.

So what about the Democratic states? How will they react? Well, Trump has already proven willing to use the entire federal government apparatus to bully Democratic states into going along with his dictates. He and Elon will likely provide the narrative fuel by loudly and repeatedly claiming that the resistance of these states to purging voter rolls is because they're corrupt and want to keep their elections rigged. This is, of course, a complete inversion of the truth as Elon and Trump's efforts will be directly aimed at rigging the results for Republicans.

Now, I don't know how these states would ultimately react. I guess most will resist, although civil society and Democratic Party resistance to Trump 2.0 has been less than inspiring. But 27 states have Republican governors. They're going to try to do whatever Trump and Elon want them to do. And

And if only these states fell in line, you could be talking about tens of millions of voters kicked off of the voter rolls and blocked from the ballot box. Not to mention that the whole loud effort amplified on X and by every brain-dead MAGA influencer in the world to cast every race as rigged is going to be deeply damaging to our ability to persist as a democracy since that status does depend on people broadly accepting election results as fair. And that, too, is really part of the goal.

Now, watching the Trump administration in action, you sometimes get the feeling they really don't think they're ever going to have to face voters again. After all, they are brazenly attacking the most popular programs in the country, like Social Security and Medicaid. They are pushing an economic policy that is threatening a system-wide collapse. They are threatening new, wildly unpopular wars in places like Mexico and Greenland and a complete ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Yet not only are the midterms just around the electoral corner,

But Trump himself is promising to run for a third term. Elon's lies and Trump's executive order are the first hints of a potential playbook to make sure voters never truly get the final say. And I thought the way that the executive order was covered last week... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. My name is Harry Houdini.

Harry Houdini could make elephants disappear, walk through walls and escape the Chinese water torture cell. But he was also on a mission against mediums. I have never seen one genuine medium. Join me, Tim Harford, for a cautionary tales trilogy on the world's most famous magician. It takes a flim flammer to catch a flim flammer.

Houdini wanted the world to see reason in an age of spiritualism. He went undercover to seances, exposed fakes and charlatans, and even tried to convince Washington lawmakers to ban mediums for good, a campaign that cost him friends and made him many enemies. They're going to kill me. Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you are more concerned about what your fellow racists think about you, you've already lost. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on the Fighting Words podcast. Listen to my new episode with the iconic Gabrielle Union.

We clear the air about a recent controversy with actor Matthew Lawrence, who claims she reported him on set for refusing to run lines with her. This is like two husbands ago. Like, what are we even talking about? And I ask her what it's like raising a trans daughter during Trump's second term. When you offer up the trans community as a sacrificial lamb, if you open the doors to say, well, take these people, now the door is open and they coming for everybody.

Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Chiquis, and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Chiquis and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys next week.

And I know a lot of people are going to attack me. Why are you going to go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it. I'm going to tell you guys right now. I know my mother and I know my mom had a very forgiving heart. That is my story on plastic surgery. This is my truth. I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom. Like that, like yelling. I was like, no. I was like, oh, and I thought, what did I do wrong?

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So Bernie and AOC have been out making huge waves with their Stop Oligarchy tour. So to talk about that and the future of the Democratic Party and all things in that direction, very lucky to be joined this morning by Fass Shakir. He is an advisor to Bernie Sanders and also the founder and executive director of More Perfect Union, a fantastic news website. Great to see you, Fass.

Always great to see you, Kristen. Yeah, of course. So let's put some of these images up on the screen. I mean, this has been extraordinary to see the number of people who have come out for these rallies really coast to coast. You're talking tens of thousands of people. You probably know the numbers better than I do, but my understanding is one of the rallies was larger than any of the ones that Bernie was giving when he was running for president either in 2016 or 2020. Just

Talk to us a little bit about what the energy has been and who it is predominantly that is showing up to the Stop Oligarchy tour. Yeah, when we were in Tucson, we had about 23,000 show up, and Senator Sanders and I were driving the car along the line, and he was shocked to look at the line and say, there's a lot of older people here, too, because we're used to a very progressive audience, people of color, younger people, working-class people. And then we saw a lot, a lot of older people. And I think

And when you look at older people, too, it's across the board of their ideological spectrum. You can sense at some of these rallies when Senator Sanders is talking, you see some older white men kind of standing there, arms crossed, not really angry, not really excited, but just like observing and listening. And you know that they voted for Donald Trump or they didn't vote at all. So I think we are reaching people that we just didn't reach in the 2020 primary. And I think

you know, the observation on that there's many fold. One is if you have that many people, 34,000 show up in Denver, why? They know that Bernie Sanders is running for president of the United States. What's going on there? In the sense that these people, the people are not dumb. They're almost, they're making, they're registering a vote at a time when there isn't a vote to say,

Hey, there's a populist revolt in this nation. You guys in D.C. might not see it. You don't care. But I'm going to show up for this guy right now in this place to tell you, to the extent you care, that you are off course. And that's a message to both parties, I think. And then related to that is the sense that we've got politics all wrong. We get into this discourse, which is the left-right prism of understanding politics versus the top versus bottom.

99% prism, which is the way we should be observing politics. But too often we get into this left versus right, which suggests that Bernie is quote unquote far left, right? Really, no, you're missing this. He's an iconic class of a top versus the bottom fighter. And that's why he's very popular at the moment. Fazz, let me ask you this basic question. What is the purpose of these rallies? Is it a political movement? If I think back to the Tea Party, it was a revolution against

the Republican Party establishment. But I haven't seen yet any calls for primaries. If anything, I've seen not explicit. We've seen some call out of leadership, et cetera, but nothing even approaching 2010 levels. What is the goal? They may be coming. Okay. Well, break it down for us. So I don't want to get too far ahead of where Senator Sanders is on this, but I promise you he's in a mode

of wanting to recruit candidates to run for office all the way up and down the ticket. And you may be seeing more from us in that regard, not just, to your point, in primaries against Democrats, which is certainly an area of interest for him, and also as independent candidates. I mean, he was very

enamored by and supportive of, you know, Dan Osborne when he ran for Senate. We're hopeful he'll do it again. But as an independent, are there other working class people who would be able to run, would want to run, throw their hat in the ring? And obviously, you know, I think he'd be interested in trying to support those candidates to the extent that they wanted Senator Sanders to support. So that's a kind of a raise your hand ask that's going to be coming, I think, in the near future from Senator Sanders.

But also, like, you know, I think he's been urging and I don't get too far ahead of him, urging people to run in various open primaries, whether you look at some of the Senate seats that are up, they're going to be primaries, as you know. And so he's making calls, talking to people, saying, hey, get into this race.

offer an alternative. Let's not assume the establishment has their pick and it's just going to run down the line. And behind the scenes, he's also telling the Democratic caucus, Senator Schumer, hey, I'm going to get involved in these. We're going to have primaries. I don't want to see super PACs dumping millions of dollars to put their finger on the scale and fight progressive candidates again. And so that conversation is also happening behind the scenes. Interesting.

Faz, my sense, and I'd love to get your reflections on this, is that, you know, the energy in the Democratic Party, which is increasingly, the base of the Democratic Party is increasingly disgusted with Democratic leadership for what they perceive, and I think accurately so, as a lack of fight. And I don't think that that is particularly ideological.

But since it is, you know, Bernie and AOC, among others, Jasmine Crockett, who is progressive on some issues, but not as much as a like firm lefty as Bernie and AOC are. But they are predominantly the ones who are filling the void. So how do you think this shakes out in terms of the direction of the future of the Democratic Party, both in terms of 2026 and the type of candidates that are likely to find appeal in 2028?

AOC has been a fantastic partner, no doubt. And she's been huge for getting us, you know, the attention and focus on this. I would also say some, some things that overlook sometimes in the way we built these events is, you know, you had Mark Pocannon, one in, um, uh, when we ran out in, uh, Wisconsin and Kenosha, and Sean Fain in Warren, Michigan with us, Jimmy Williams, who's the head of the painters union spoke in Denver. We had Alvaro Bedoya fired by Donald Trump speak in Denver. You get out, you know, I think, um,

Adelita Grijalva, who's now going to run for Congress, spoke at our Tucson rally. So we're trying to do our part. And I promise you, when we get into some of these other states, we're going to L.A. on Friday or Saturday, April 12th. Then you've got some others coming shortly after that. I want to preview some of those. But there's going to we're trying to make sure those who are interested in

in a kind of populist revolt, populist fight, see the issues of concentration of wealth and power, the door is open. I mean, we do know that there's some people who may not have supported Bernie Sanders in 2020, may not have been their cup of tea. You take somebody like a Chris Murphy, you know,

clearly moving in the direction of wanting to suggest, you know, they're interested in fighting concentrations of wealth and power. And if that's the case, you know, the door is open. Please contact me if you don't know. If that's at BernieSanders.com, always welcome. You know, you want to be in it. But we're trying to make this as expansive a movement as possible to the point that Sagar was raising. You know, it is an opportunity to do recruitment, especially knowing that, you know, unlikely Bernie Sanders wants to

president again. But he said he's been trying to build his class consciousness in America. Now's the moment. Let's expand.

Faz, where does your confidence come from that this can become an ideological project? There was, I mean, yeah, I mean, if I'm being blunt, it seems to me like a lot of people just hate Elon and hate Trump. I think that's fine. It's America. You can do whatever you want. But you guys have been doing and working on this for, what, 15, 20 years now at this point. So where does your confidence come that somebody who shows up with the I hate Elon sign or something like that actually cares at all about, let's say, taxing the rich?

I'm not fully there on the level of confidence, but I would say to you, Sagar, we lived through Occupy and other things where you did see moments of a populist revolt of a kind. I do think in this moment that if you take those as moments where you're building, building, building, I think we're at a higher moment now in understanding the hubris moment.

The kind of exploitation, the greed that slaps you across the face in the form of Elon is particularly galling and it has a way of mobilizing people to your point. We're not doing our job fully, though, if we haven't gotten to the place of how and the ways in which you have a rigged corporate power over the economic structure of America. How are we best confronting that?

you see the discourse on tariffs now ticket master. It's still, I worry a little bit that a liberal left who gets angry about, rightly so, about wrongful deportations,

isn't as enervated and motivated yet about the outsourcing of jobs problem, the tax code issues, the deprivations of healthcare. I think people are ahead of the Democratic Party, but you do need leaders. And Bernie Sanders has been an iconoclastic leader and Sean Fain, there's some others stepping out.

I'd like more of those. To your point, Sagar, if I'm raising an appropriate level of skepticism alongside your comments where I'm saying we don't have enough of them yet, but this is an opportunity to be a breeding ground. I will say that Josh Wheel, who's running in Florida, when he called and asked for Senator Sanders' endorsement, I mean, this is a guy who's running in a very kind of –

class-based populist way that I think if you're running in Florida any time over the last decade, and I don't think you even call Bernie Sanders an answer endorsement. I don't know if you even run in this particular way. So I'm like, okay, there's moments, there's glimmers, there's ways in which people are talking and thinking in different ways. I'm hopeful that there's more leaders though who want to build a class-based movement. Got it. So there are a few different strains that

that are competing for ideological space within the Democratic Party. And it's not even that these strains are necessarily mutually exclusive, but you have the stop oligarchy frame, which really, you know, it is the 99% versus the 1% top versus bottom, you know, that I think explains a lot of what's happening in our country and specifically with regards to what this administration is doing. There's the, um,

A variant of that, which focuses more on antitrust and corporate monopolies, is sort of embodied politically by Elizabeth Warren, by Lena Kahn, that wing of the party. And then you have a sort of new entrant, which is the abundance movement.

concept, which is co-authored, the book co-authored by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And Ezra has been, both of them have been doing media tour. We had Derek here to talk about the books and his ideas as well. And Ezra explained some of the concept behind this in a recent interview with Jon Stewart that got a lot of attention. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a bit of what he had to say. So for rural broadband, for instance, what you end up having is a 14-stage process. Like there's a period

where the Commerce Department needs to draw up a map of which parts of the country don't have the right amount of broadband. And then there's a challenge period on the map and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And 56 states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money. And again, this passes at the end of 2021. They have time. By the end of 2024, three have got into the end of the process. They were trying. Three of these 56. Yes. Yes.

End of the process, meaning they've actioned it, they've built it, or they've now they've got. Oh, no, of course not. I didn't mean they've built it, Sean. Sorry, I was so confused. They just got to the point where in theory.

they could get the money to build. They had been approved for the money. Yes. Yes, basically. So Faz, basically, I'm asking you to wade into the abundance discourse. What are your thoughts? And do you see it as complementary to the framing that you and Bernie and myself share? Or do you feel like this is a competing project that could supplant the top versus bottom framework that you have been talking about?

It could be either. TBD, I haven't read the book. I talked to Ezra a little bit about it. I tend to agree on the bureaucratic morass that we do have. We have inefficiencies in government. We have inefficiencies in the corporate sector that often, you know, the middleman economy that we've talked about, you know, Ticketmaster as a middleman just jacking up fees, junk fees that we've talked about for many times. It also happens in government. You've got middlemen doing things that are stopping people

And I tend to see a lot of those middlemen, the bureaucrats, as in the corporate sector, the profit-seeking, and government, they're risk aversion. They're just like, oh, well, I don't want to get blamed if we built broadband in the wrong place. So like your 18 lawyers will descend on the scene and give you different judgments about how best not to get something done. There is a problem in government. But I will say that if we're rank ordering things,

about the major things I want to tackle. It is the prevalence of corporate power and its greed over both the economy and the political system. And to some degree, when I hear some of the Abundance Friends talk, I'm like, are we getting at the political corruption problems?

Do we understand that some of these are Joe Manchin working with his corporate actors to write in provisions that make it near impossible to execute a bipartisan infrastructure law? Do we understand that? There's corporate corruption at play, political corruption. And I want to see a good progressive as one who wants to tackle not only corporate concentrations of power, but

When government is inefficient, and I think we've lost that DNA. I mean, I know Bernie Sanders has it, but there aren't many who say, I want to come in and tackle government's inefficiency. That's why Bernie has called long call for cutting defense budget, auditing the Fed. These kinds of things are not in the mainstream of democratic thought, but I would urge them to be, to dig in and understand democracy.

Having a good idea is only half the battle. You've got to execute that idea and understand that there's going to be a lot of choke points that have now been created by economists, by lawyers, by accountants, and by moneyed interests to prevent good things from happening. I think that is all well said. Faz, thank you so much for checking in with us. We really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks, man. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you guys.

Time to check in now on the tabloid section of Breaking Points. Just can't resist this one. We have got the baby mama drama involving Ashley St. Clair, who alleges that she has a child fathered by Elon Musk. She recently called the paparazzi, well, people are speculating that she called the paparazzi as she sold a Tesla that was given to her to Carvana, saying that she needs to make up for the cut child support from Elon Musk. Let's take a listen.

I'm selling it because I need to make up for the 60% cut that Elon made to our established childhood. Why do you think that he did that? That's a great question for him. You feel like he was sort of vindictive against you in some way? Yeah, that's his modus operandi when women speak out. When was the last time that you spoke to him or tried to speak to him? February 13th. But he's just not responding to you at all?

How would you characterize the way he's got you in the face? You can check this box. I'm not the only one who has a talk about race and sexism.

Looks like a Tesla Model X they're selling to Carvana, one of many Tesla people who is trading in their car currently. And checking the stock price, apparently. And checking the stock price, that's right. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen from Elon. He responds, I don't know if the child is mine or not. I'm not against finding out. No court order is needed. Despite not knowing for sure, I have given Ashley $2.5 million and I am sending her $500,000 per year. Okay, let's go to the next one. This is from Ashley. She retorts,

But you're really only punishing our son.

So that's where we are, Crystal. After St. Clair. I think they kind of deserve each other, to be honest with you. I think they deserve each other as well. You're absolutely right. That is, wow, I don't know. I am in a tough position, you know. Ugh.

People know I've got a very conservative disposition, so would I act myself like Ashley St. Clair? There's never in a million years where I could endorse that type of behavior. However, you know, you father a child with somebody, you are signing up for a contract with that person for life. So openly sitting there and going to war over monetary payments and paternity. Litigating a child's paternity on Twitter is just...

It's too much for me. So look, I mean, Elon, to say he's like a paragon of good character is ridiculous.

with somebody who has fathered children with like multiple different women and often has like insane relationships with them and his ex-wives. I also thought it was funny or insightful the way she tries to needle him with the Tesla in particular. Because yeah, I mean, obviously all these photographers happen to be there when she's selling the Tesla to Carvana and having it, you know, loaded up to be towed away. Do we not feel bad for the Carvana guy? He's like, what the fuck?

He's like, what did I give myself into today? He's got a good story. Poor guy. He's got a good story. But it definitely made his work day much more interesting. But yeah, she clearly like she wanted him there. She had planned out the things she wanted to say about Elon. The Tesla stock thing. Like clearly that bothers him a lot.

And so she's trying to use that to get at him. And, you know, yeah, it's wild. I don't know. Like you said, you were asking me, like, who do we cheer for? Yeah, we're not cheering for anyone. No one to cheer for in this whole situation. And it is, I guess the part that to me was the most grotesque was him jumping in and being like, I don't even know if the baby's mine. Right, yeah, exactly.

- Hmm, that is ugly. And this is a human being who is gonna grow up and be able to see these things that you said. So yeah, that is pretty disgusting. - Yeah, and he's got adult children, literally, who could go in and were looking at the behavior of your father. Man, there's a lot of lessons for life and basically don't act like either of these individuals and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble. But unfortunately, if you look at the data, pretty common situation. All right, we will see you guys later.

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