5/13/25: Rand Paul Rips Trump On China, Airport Safety Collapse, Hasan Piker Detained & MORE!
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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Breaking Points. We have a very special show this morning because we're being joined by a celebrity guest host. Tim Miller is host of the Bulwark podcast. You can find that on YouTube, and he joins us now. Great to see you, Tim.

Hey, Crystal, I'm excited to dialogue. I heard yesterday you're going to be dialoguing today. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Hopefully I'll be a little bit more engaging than I was at that particular moment yesterday. It's funny that you're watching the show, though.

No, I know I have to be on my toes. I had to do my oppo before I came on. Well, I read your book. I was telling you, I read your book up through the Elise Stefanik part because I just like, you know, sometimes I feel like like I was trying to read Elon Musk's biography and I just felt like there was too much Elon Musk in real life and I was kind of overwhelmed by it. So that's a little bit how I felt when I got to that section of your book.

I hear that totally. It's a slog for me to read political books. I try to read mostly gay fiction or like autocratic history, which is a little bit close to our reality. But that's what I'm reading now. So I'm with you and I give you dispensation for quitting the book during the early Stefanik section. Well, you can fill me in. We're going to talk to you a little bit about the book, which I love the title. You called it Why We Did It.

A little OJ nod there about your years as a Republican hatchet man and how you sort of transitioned and, you know, ended up where you are. And also you you dig into the personality types.

that really populate this town. And this is not necessarily a right or a left thing, but the type of mindset that political operatives can get in and end up justifying things. And that you yourself talked about, you know, you were a compartmentalizer, how you justified, um,

flacking for politicians who are anti-gay, even as you yourself were a gay man. So I want to talk to you about all of that stuff. And then we got a bunch of news stories to get through. I want to get your take on the China trade war, on the latest failures at Newark airport. Sean Duffy knows exactly who to blame. It's definitely not him. Um,

I want to talk to you about some Democratic Party stuff, too, with David Hogg and the back and forth with regarding Jim Clyburn. There's some news out this morning from that Alex Thompson, Jake Tapper book, too, about how staffers were concerned Biden would be so physically frail that he may have to use a wheelchair were he to be reelected. And then—

We'll say goodbye to you, unfortunately, because you have other things to do with your life as well. And David Stroud is going to join to talk about Trump's fake prescription drug executive order. And I'm going to talk about Hassan Piker being detained for hours and grilled about his political views at the airport. Did you catch that story? I was wondering if you had a...

No, I was excited to watch your segment on it because I saw like he sent a tweet or whatever about it. And I guess he was grilled. But I have not like heard all the details. And I'm very intrigued to know because I'm immigration stuff.

to me, on a list of things that I'm not thrilled about from the Trump administration, just the treatment of folks, especially over, I'm not a big Hassan fan, right? Especially, but like the idea that we are going to grill people over their political activism in this country or jail somebody over an op-ed, insane. So I'll tune in for it, even though.

I'm checking out perfect. All right, let's go ahead and get to the latest with regard to Trump's trade war as you guys know we covered yesterday that he backed off some of the Largest terrorists that had been levied against China yesterday in a press conference. He explained his view of what's going on here Let's take a listen to that in addition yesterday. We achieved a total reset with China after productive talks in Geneva

Both sides now agree to reduce the tariffs imposed after April 2nd to 10% for 90 days as negotiators continue on the larger structural issues. And I want to tell you that a couple of things. First of all, that doesn't include the tariffs that are already on, that are our tariffs. And it doesn't include tariffs on cars, steel, aluminum, things such as that.

or tariffs that may be imposed on pharmaceuticals because we want to bring the pharmaceutical businesses back to the United States. And they're already starting to come back now based on tariffs. So, Tim, I saw you fighting with Stephen Miller yesterday online over all of this. So, I mean, what is your view of what's unfolded here?

Well, I mean, it's a reduction of tariffs from the trade embargo that he had put in place that had, I don't think, any really achievable end or objective. Moving the tariffs up to 145 percent. And then it's like the dear leader has granted you relief. We're down to 30 percent now. But the tariff on Chinese goods before he came in was 10 percent.

So now we have a 20 percentage point or 300 percent increase on the amount of tariffs that consumers are going to pay. So, you know, if you're a new mother, a new parent, new father that is buying a stroller or a car seat that has components made in China, that's going to cost more.

you're going to have to pay a 30% tax on that that you wouldn't have had to last year. So, I mean, this stuff is going to cost more for working people. Stephen Miller's pushback to me on this was that, like, I want all manufacturing to happen in Asia, which I don't. I'm supportive of American manufacturing. There's a lot of ways to encourage manufacturing,

here in America. I don't think a totally insane trade war that is haphazard, that doesn't have clear objectives, where the numbers, it's 30 one day, then it's 80, then it's 140, then it's 70, now it's down to 30 again. How is that helping to create manufacturing in America? If anything, it's creating uncertainty for businesses that might want to

uh open a plant here manufacturing was down in april according to you know the government's uh kind of uh assessments we had a slowdown to manufacturing which isn't surprising again because there was all this uncertainty out there so i don't you know look if you if you're gonna do targeted tariffs on microchips or on certain pharmaceuticals because we don't want to be reliant on china

We could talk about that. I'm open to that. But like this, like just sort of totally haphazard tariff regime has been a disaster. And the evidence of the disaster is that they've had to walk down from it without getting any concessions. Yeah. I mean, there's so much there because –

you know, his supporters keep going back and forth from like, oh, this vast tariff regime is going to create all these manufacturing jobs, which to your point is not true, at least not in the short to medium term. We already see manufacturing investment declining. And then when he rolls the tariffs back, then it's, oh, it's art of the deal. He got all these great concessions. There isn't

There's not even anything that's like face-saving in this. They talked some about fentanyl. That's the most that we got out of this. In the meantime, you know, you've had all this chaos, all this uncertainty, small and medium-sized businesses. Some of those are not going to be able to make it through this period. We still have quite significant tariff increase on China. We still have him saying in 90 days we may revisit this. So you still have this climate of vast uncertainty. And to your point, one of the things that drives me crazy here is like, you know, I'm

not a total laissez-faire free trader. I'm open to some protectionist policies. In fact, I think what the Biden administration did, while I have critiques of them in other areas, on trade actually worked, was having the intended impact.

And was bringing back those manufacturing jobs that the Trump administration claims to care about. And instead, they've taken a hatchet to some of the most effective legislation and tools that were passed during the Biden administration to actually effectuate the outcome that they claim to want. Which gets me to, you know, you raised the, in your exchange with Steve Miller, you kept referring to Trump as like the dear leader. And they float all of these different things.

potential reasons for the tariffs. Oh, the tariffs are going to pay down the debt. Oh, the tariffs are going to bring back manufacturing jobs. Oh, the tariffs are going to make the dollar weaker. Oh, the tariffs are going to rebalance trade globally. All these different, sometimes contradictory, by the way, potential goals and impacts of the tariffs. But I've always thought the real core of this, at least vis-a-vis Trump, is just he likes the power of it. He likes the

to have everything centered around him. He likes to be able to go in and say, you get your, you know, you have to come and petition the king and you get your little carve out. Every country in the world is going to have to come to me and on bended knee and have to make a deal with me, et cetera. And so while there may be these other ancillary goals or different people in the administration, we have different ideas about what the tariffs are supposed to achieve. I really think for Trump, it's just part of his broader power play.

For sure. And I am probably more, definitely not probably, more sympathetic to you than you to free market, laissez-faire economics.

And so this is why, to me, it's insane that it's like only Rand Paul of the ostensible free market Republicans that have pushed back on this. And this is, Trump wants this to be a state-managed economy. To your point, that's why I was joking with Stephen Miller calling him Chairman Trump and Dear Leader Trump. That's what he wants. He wants to wave, you know, sign an executive order and I'll set the rates for prescription drugs and sign an executive order.

I'll check the rate for how much people pay for our soybeans and, you know, how much we pay for the upper babies that are coming in. It's crazy. It is the opposite of any free market economic principles that these guys are that are instituting. And again, there are certain moments or certain industries that might call for this.

We can have negotiations about this. But that's how the American system is supposed to work. Congress is supposed to have power of the purse. There isn't supposed to be an aspiring autocrat that puts his finger on his tongue and decides what the tax rate is going to be on various products. And just back to the working people side of this, just our small businesses, one example. I met a woman a couple weeks ago. I was at Jazz Fest.

And she comes up to me and she's like, here in New Orleans, she owns this tchotchke shop of touristy goods, you know, beads and other kind of Mardi Gras stuff you would want if you go to New Orleans.

It's been here for 65 years. A lot of their stuff comes from China. And she's like, my business is going to shutter over these tariffs. Like I certainly can't afford 145 percent. Maybe they can survive 30 percent. But on these little goods, that's still going to be a huge increase in cost for her.

That is a small business. You know, that is not one of these oligarchs that can get a carve out from Trump. And they're going to be screwed over this. And there's no rationale for doing it. I mean, does Trump and Stephen Miller want us to be manufacturing Mardi Gras beads here in America, like little tchotchkes? Is that the key chains? That's the future of our economy. It's crazy. And so I

You know, look, I think that obviously the incentive of this is that Trump wants the power. But the ramifications, I think, are going to be very real for people who are kind of outside the corridors of power who can't, you know, get the Tim Cook carve out. So to your point about Rand Paul, he was on with Jesse Waters leveling some, I would say, relatively mild, but

still a criticism, which is noteworthy at this point from the Republican Party. Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he had to say. If he succeeds in lowering tariffs and lessening the obstacles to trade, I'll be right there. I think it's unknown with China. We started out at 145%, then we went to 80%, now we're at 30%. But that's 30% more than we have on currently. So this will be a 30% rise in any goods who are coming from China, and somebody will pay that, and it will be the consumer.

If the consumer's happy to pay more when they go to Walmart or more when they go to Target in order to get fairness or to teach China a lesson, then so be it. But the proof is in the pudding. We'll see what happens over the next six months to a year. You know, going into Trump 2.0, I saw a lot of, I would call it, cope from the Wall Street types and from, you know, the like total free trade Republican types who

who said some of it was, oh, you know, this is just campaign trail talk and it won't be any big deal. And in fact, the tariff regime that he put in place was way larger than what he ever floated on the campaign trail. And the other thing that I heard a lot was, well, he's going to use these tariffs to actually negotiate to have zero tariffs. So it's going to achieve more of a free trade, you know, a free trade regime than we had previously. And I'm just

Curious from your years inside the right and knowing some of these individuals and the staffers and the dark money groups that are involved, etc. Are you surprised that it's just Rand Paul effectively who has anything to say about the complete insanity of the way that this has unfolded?

If you would have asked 2017, Tim, I would have said, yeah, I'm surprised. I mean, I'm not surprised that people went along, but that there were so few who didn't. It was surprising to me at the start of this. I've been pretty beaten down by a decade. And frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised that Rand Paul is on Fox doing this rather than just kind of sending out one press release and checking the box. So good on him for doing some economics education on primetime Fox. But no, look, I don't...

I do. I guess I was more surprised about the business community a little bit because they don't have I understand if you are a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page or you are a staffer at the Manhattan Institute or you work for one of these super PACs or lobbying firms like you, your your career is tied up.

in finding out post-talk rationalizations for whatever the Republican Party is doing and arguing for them, right? Right. I've been kind of surprised that the business community hasn't pushed back on this harder because if you just – can you imagine – you almost hate to do this game because it's so cliche at this point, but had Obama put in place a unilateral 10 percent across-the-board tax on every good coming from around the world,

30% on China, something that is practically speaking the largest tax increase in either of our lifetimes. Yeah. Like...

The business community would have been, their hair would be on fire. I mean, like Obama would be- It would have been a coup, let's be honest. I'm not even kidding. I mean, or if this was like President Bernie Sanders, like forget it, he would be removed from office weeks ago. CNBC would be like, you know, one of those, you know, like chaos scenes from a cafeteria in a 1980s movie. People are throwing chairs, like throwing desserts at each other and CNBC would be on fire right now.

And so these guys have rationalized this in a way that I think is only because of the team jersey. I think it's also, Tim, because he is so dictatorial.

And because businesses are they do want their car found. Right. They do want to be able to go pay their million or five million dollars and go down to Mar-a-Lago and make their case. And they want him to take their calls and get their little exemption so that they can survive the slings and arrows. I think that's the other thing, because you see, you know, you see the way even when they do try to criticize, they'll front load it with like.

oh, you're so amazing. You're so brilliant. This is so incredible. You're such a genius. And certainly in all of your glory, you'll understand why maybe we need a 90 day pause, please, sir, you know, and frame it in terms of or the other go to move that I see a lot is it's never Trump's fault. It's like, oh, some staffer has misled you and there

undermining you, dear sir. So I think it's number one, the team jersey, certainly for the Republicans. I think for the business community, because the bottom line is the bottom line, they see it as in their best interest to suck up to this guy and overtly bribe him in certain instances as much as possible.

Yeah, it's Lutnick. It's Lutnick's fault. Right, exactly. And I do think that the rationalization element is powerful. You saw the folks, like your co-host, there's folks on the nationalist side. They're like, we wanted the tariffs. This is what he's going to do. And then meanwhile, the free marketers and the Ted Cruz's, the Wall Street Journal's like, this is all a big game to get down to zero. And I think that's part of Trump's political power, which maybe some Democrats could learn from is it's actually good to be a little bit vague about

and to allow people to project their own hopes and dreams onto you. And so I do think that's a political strength for him. But again, I don't, I do, I do kind of blame the rich guys a little bit on all this. Maybe now I'm going to sound like the former Republican who's being radicalized, but it's like, you really were that scared about a 2% increase in the taxes? I mean, Kamala wasn't exactly trying to push forth, you know, some 1970s tax regime. You know, it's like,

Think about how much money you could lose from the economic instability if you're rich. I just would have thought that the rational capitalist take would have been to oppose Trump because you'd rather pay two more percent in taxes than

you know, in exchange for just having some economic stability and having grownups, you know, in charge. But I guess not. Yeah, they wanted their tax cut and they just chose to mentally discount everything else. And yeah, I mean, you make such a good point. Let's put A3 up on the screen. You can see like the stock market surged a thousand points and it's up 20% from its prior lows. It's still lower than it was in January when he was inaugurated. And also, by the way, you know, the odds of recession have also gone down but are still significantly

significantly higher than they were and all to accomplish at this point, nothing but like pain and suffering. But, you know, to the Wall Street point, I think there's a few things to say there. Number one, I think it was Joe Weisenthal who made the point of, you know, if you polled Wall Streeters, like, would you rather have a Bernie Sanders style millionaire tax or would you rather have all this money?

They would all prefer the Millionaires Act. So not even like the Kamala Harris, more moderate, like just, you know, oh, we might do a little bit of reining in price gouging, which was the most radical thing she proposed on the campaign trail. And there was a whole meltdown from the Stephen Millers and the Trumps of the world about price controls, etc. Not even that, like even a more maximalist lefty position.

would have to be vastly superior to the economic carnage and chaos that Trump is creating here. And I do have to say, like, I'm not—the stock market is beyond me. I think a lot of it's just based on, like, vibes and feelings and emotions. And I think that's pretty apparent by the fact that, you know, you have such a huge rebound

when you still have 30% tariffs imposed on China. Like if we just started with that, there would have been a huge freak out about that. But because you start at 145 or you get to 145 and then you back off, then there's glee and celebration on Wall Street. I still feel like they're underestimating the impact

that this is going to cause. And we saw this some in COVID, the way that, you know, when things get messed up, it takes a while for them to get ironed out. We saw the way that, you know, four percentage points of inflation, how dire that was for American consumers. And now you're talking about a 10% at the best kind of across the board tariff around the world. Yeah, I...

Once again, we agree, Crystal. We're going to find something to fight about in a little bit. But the I think that the kind of day trader types like the volatility. Right. So it's good for them. Like the hedge fund guys, like the volatility is in a certain band. They can time the market. Well, especially the ones who are talking to the Trump administration and getting inside tips about when they're going to spike the market, et cetera, which I definitely think is happening. Absolutely. It's happening. And then on top of that, like the biggest companies are insulated.

Right. You know, again, the Googles and the apples. Right. And so that's driving also a lot of the prices going up. A lot of these big tech companies are insulated from this. So, you know, I think that the pain is going to be seen elsewhere. And I also agree there's going to be delayed pain. Look, I have Justin Wolfer as the economist on the Bullock Pod today. And it's like there's a delay in, you know, there will still be a delay in getting stuff onto the shelves. So there'll be some stuff that is missing because, you know, it takes a while for ships to get across the ocean.

And then now we're going to have a pile up, you know, like we saw post COVID at the ports, because folks are going to try to get stuff in just in case, you know, Donald Trump's feelings get hurt by something, some random, you know, Chinese diplomat says, and he decides, okay, we're back up to 90%, right? Like you want to get the, you know, the material in while you at least know it's only going to be 30% rather than more. So, you know, I,

it is causing, it's going to cause a lot of disruption. Maybe it's not the worst case scenario, which I guess is good. Right. I'm not out here rooting for a recession where everybody, you know, where regular people suffer. But like, there's still going to be real pain. And again, like he was handed an economy that was not perfect, but was directionally pretty good. I mean, I was laughing at, you know, Ross Douthat, the New York conservative, New York times the other day, that was like,

that was like Trump was delivered a pretty good economy that he had a chance to build on. And I was like, were you guys saying that last year? I don't remember that. I don't remember that. You don't know what you got until it's gone, Tim. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I mean, he was delivered like what? There was two, three percent growth and just they zeroed it out in one quarter over this dumb trade war. So, yeah.

I definitely think we might not be in a worst-case scenario, but I also think that people are a little sanguine because, like you said, it takes time for this stuff to, not to trigger you here, Crystal, but to trickle down through the economy.

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I remember some things about shooting the pilot. Right. I have some memories I can fill you in. And that you're going to fill me in. Yes. But then you forgot about it. I completely forgot about it. In the very long time they took to pick us up. And she reveals what she thought when she read the script for Sex and the City the very first time. He said he wrote this like I was in his head in some way, which I found really interesting. And does she think Carrie is too good for Mr. Big? She had inexplicable feelings. Got it. It is the human being that...

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In 1978, Roger Caron's first book was published, and he was unlike any first-time author Canada had ever seen. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Has spent 24 of those years in jail. 12 years in solitary. He went from an ex-con to a literary darling almost overnight. He was instantly a celebrity. He was an adrenaline junkie, and he was the star of the show.

Go-Boy is the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. I had a knife go in my stomach, puncture my spleen, break my ribs. I had my guts all in my hands. Only to find himself back where he started. Roger's saying is, I've never hurt anybody but myself. And I said, oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong on that one, Roger.

From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on to the dire state of our nation's airports, the center of which has been Newark Airport, which is, I mean, it's just, it's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,

It's so disturbing and terrifying that things you used to be able to take for granted, like being able to fly on an airplane without it crashing and, you know, fiery wreckage or running into another airplane are just not things you can really take for granted anymore. Let's put this tear sheet up on the screen. I don't know if you've seen this latest reporting from the New York Times. They're saying that in addition to the multiple equipment failures that we just experienced at Newark Airport over the past, like, week and a half,

They, on Monday, had three controllers on duty. The goal is 14. Let me read you a little bit of this report. They say as few as three air traffic controllers scheduled to work on Monday evening at the facility guiding planes to and from Newark International Airport. The FAA said far fewer than the target of 14 controllers. The staffing crisis added strain to an already troubled aviation system, with flights to Newark delayed by as much as seven hours on

on Monday because of that shortage. The FAA said in a statement it had at least three controllers scheduled every hour on Monday evening, but four people familiar with problems at the airport said the number of fully certified controllers on duty was at times one or two.

Staffing shortages affected flights at the airport for much of the day, forcing the FAA to hold up incoming flights from taking off. The delays primarily affected flights coming to Newark from the contiguous U.S. and parts of Canada lasted on average more than an hour and 40 minutes and up to almost seven hours, according to an online FAA advisory.

So on top of that, as we know, and we'll talk about a little bit more, there were multiple three different equipment failures, complete failures at Newark Airport. Sean Duffy, the head of transportation, is trying to spin and redirect the blame anywhere he possibly can. And he thinks he's found the culprit. Let's go ahead and take a listen to him. We've all been reporting and seeing what's happening at Newark Airport.

And I think it is clear that the blame belongs with the last administration. People to judge and Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken. Your thoughts, Tim? I mean, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on the air traffic controlling system. And I'm sure that the Biden administration wants to pretend to be one. He is an actor.

A reality show actor, at least. So, like, could the Biden administration have done more stuff on this? Maybe. I don't know. But I think the important context here is that

We're just going through a period where Elon Musk is going to the government, running roughshod and randomly cutting a bunch of employees based on essentially nothing, not based on performance, but just based on what their employment status was or based on whether they had a DEI description in their job description. Right.

And so I think that, you know, these guys need to take responsibility for what's happening. They're in charge now. It's been a while. It's it's I guess it's only been three and a half months. It feels longer. But I do think it's their responsibility. And I just want to say, like, as the whatever former Republican stand in here.

So there is something to be said for like we want to make more efficient government. We want to make sure that we're not bloated, that we're not wasting people's money. I'm for all that. But is air traffic controllers the right place for that? I mean, that seems like a pretty essential service. And it is. And for me, somebody that actually cares about this stuff.

Thinks that our debt is out of control, thinks it's crazy that we're paying $100 million a month in interest in our debt. They're not even doing it. They're not achieving anything on this. Like the guys on the Hill simultaneously to what all of this disaster happening at Newark, the Republicans on the Hill are proposing a tax bill and a budget bill that's going to add $20 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.

So we are cutting all these people and putting ourselves at risk, putting our own citizens at risk who are flying around the country because we don't have enough air traffic controllers in service of nothing. It's just like the tariff situation. It's like it'd be one thing if we had – if the objective was being met.

You know, and we are building more manufacturing plants here. We are cutting the debt down. I mean, I still don't think it probably would be worth it to cut the debt to have only one air traffic controller on in Newark. I don't think so. It would be one thing if we were actually achieving the objective, but they're not doing that. They're going to add to the debt and they're cutting people just, again, I think in service of power and wealth.

wanting to make sure they have political loyalty. Yeah, I mean, the most obvious place to cut is the Pentagon, and they're increasing the Pentagon budget. They want a trillion dollar Pentagon budget. Cutting various government staffers is actually going to end up costing you money, especially in a place like if you think of the most clear-cut example is the IRS.

where, you know, if you're slashing and burning the IRS, guess what? You're not going to be able to collect as much tax revenue from especially rich tax chiefs because they're the hardest ones to go after because they've got lawyers and tax shelters. And so it requires more resources. And so, yeah, you're going to end up actually spending more money after you've

after you cut and fire all this workforce. And to your point, they did fire hundreds of FAA employees. Now they swear, oh, they had nothing to do with safety. But if you talk to the actual, the air traffic controllers, the people that work at the agency, they say just because they're not like directly an air traffic controller doesn't mean that they're not an important support for that system. So that's point number one. Point number two,

Russ Voten on the Project 2025 people, like Carter Ciarvan, who's one of the intellectual, I guess, architects of this regime, he asked, air quotes, very much merited. Their whole program is to traumatize federal government employees.

So you go in with an agenda explicitly stated of traumatizing all federal government employees, and then lo and behold, you have a staffing crisis that is causing massive safety risks for the American people, and you want to wash your hands of it. Like, sorry, you don't get to. You don't get to. And the other piece of this is, you know, this goes to sort of like a broader ideological point, which is,

Everybody hates government until you want to like land your plane safely. And then suddenly you would like there to be air traffic controllers. You would like there to be a new system in place so that the copper wiring isn't like, you know, burning out and causing the radars to go out for, you know, for long periods of time. And I do think that Republicans have had obviously the most sort of vigorous just across the board anti-government ideology. But it

It's also something that Democrats starting dabbling with Jimmy Carter, but really starting with Clinton embraced as well. Bill Clinton famously, the era of big government is over. I think that that assault on government, which has stripped government capacity and made it so the government is less effective and is actually less efficient at delivering services to people, creates a doom loop.

where then because government isn't working, then it justifies more cuts to government. And next thing you know, you're here at this situation where there is a chronic staffing crisis. And it does, in fairness to Sean Duffy, it actually does predate the Trump administration. They've just exacerbated and made it worse.

Yeah, there's a couple of things with that. One, they definitely are trying to try to intimidate people to get them to quit. I mean, getting people to self-deport from the government was like a stated objective of what they're doing with Doge. And I also agree with you, in addition to the IRS, just on the costs, the way they did it was illegal. So a lot of the people they ran out of government, you know, are going to end up suing the government.

and getting back pay for not working. So that's not efficiency, right? So I don't, you know, again, I don't know how many of the people that quit, if any, were actually air traffic controllers, but the idea that they were trying to push people out of the federal workforce rather than recruit the best people, that is just their own stated objective. And, you know, look, when it comes to that broader mission of undermining government that you're talking about, I

I'm more sympathetic to that than you are. I still think that there's bloat in the federal government. You talk to anybody that works in the federal government, they'll say there is. By the way, you talk to anybody that works in any big organization, they'll say we've got bloat in our organization. But to me, the right thing to do is to balance that with how do we modernize it? How do we actually make it more efficient? Not like fake 1984 efficient, like Doge, right? And the Obama administration actually put some effort into this, maybe not as enough.

And to me, that's like the craziest thing about Trump surrounding himself with all these tech geniuses. I mean, he's got Elon, who I hate, but say what you want about him, like figured out better than the existing companies, you know, how to get the low orbit satellites going so that people can have Wi-Fi. I mean, he wasn't like the inventor of that, but his company was able to do it.

Mark Andreessen, who's around Trump, literally was the inventor of Netscape, the browser. So he's got all these tech bros who've come around to him. And rather than using their expertise to figure out how can we make the government more efficient, how can we make services better, how can we perform at a higher rate?

Like they decided to take a blowtorch to the place and now and then they want to wash their hands of it when there are problems associated with that. And to me, I think that's the craziest part about it. Yeah. Well, they I mean, it's much easier to destroy than to build.

And I think you see this in real time. I think Sean Duffy genuinely would like to improve the air traffic control system at this point. But that's building out and refurbishing the system. It actually will take a congressional appropriation. You're going to have to deal with Congress. It's going to take time. It's going to take money, et cetera. Whereas just Elon Musk coming in with the chainsaw and not caring that it was unconstitutional and let the courts catch up after the fact –

Like that's much easier to do. The reality for these guys, I think Andreessen and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and those types, is they want to completely defenestrate government so it can't regulate their businesses so that they can do whatever they want without getting hamstrung by like, oh, I discriminated. Now the Department of Labor is mad at me or, oh, my Tesla auto driving didn't really work that well. And now, you know, people have been killed in a car crash and I'm having to answer the federal government.

They want to get all of that out of the way. And especially in the context of, you know, both of these guys are major players in terms of the rapid development acceleration of AI. And that really, I think, is a big part of their motivation is they want just total Wild West, no regulatory regime whatsoever when it comes to AI. So it serves the interest of this specific handful of oligarchs.

And that really is their goal. I mean, if you go back to the FDR era, you had a bunch of industrialists who were engaged in the government. And there's a point that Ro Khanna makes. They were engaged in the government in service of building out capacity and actually making the government work better and deliver more for the American people. And here you have a complete reverse scenario.

And they'll even describe it this way, frankly, that Curtis Garvey might be— They don't even talk about doing that. Yeah, and they actively talk about wanting to do a reverse FDR that strips down the capacity of the government and traumatizes those federal government employees so that oligarchs can have more control and can operate with total and complete impunity.

Yeah, look, and you could imagine a alternate universe, you know, a bizarro world where you had Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen in there grabbing the best people from Silicon Valley and figuring out how do we modernize our FAA system? Like, how do we figure out how we can get the Acela to go from D.C. to New York faster than

three hours and 45 minutes or however long it takes now. How do we update all these things in ways that will actually allow America to compete better in the 21st century? And they're not even paying lip service to that. All they're there to do is deregulate AI and crypto, frankly.

Like that is what... The cash grab. It's like a smashing grab. Yeah, they're putting Andreessen once out of this and they're getting it, right? Like the DOJ is no longer investigating crypto scammers. That's right. Like there's not a real effort, you know, to regulate AI. Though Elon's position is a little more complicated on that, but Andreessen's position is clear, like wanting total deregulation of AI so that they can have, you know, that power for themselves. And that's just...

Like, unfortunately, that's just like the reality of what we're dealing with with these guys. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. It is why I always I thought that the project needed to be opposed on principle because having the richest man on the planet unelected.

given vast control over the entire federal government is just even if even if he did have worthy goals, which he doesn't but even if he did have like goals that I thought were noble and could be good I think that project has to be opposed in principle because of the the damage that it does to our democracy and because you know We don't want to be ruled by oligarchs then there, you know have to deal with their conflicts of

interest and wonder whether or not whatever they're doing at the FAA has to do with modernizing the system or whether it has to do with like stealing a contract from Verizon, which is something that SpaceX is accused of doing while they're in there. Or pulling other countries to using Starlink. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, it was a great report from Jeff Stein at The Washington Post about all of that.

All right, let's talk a little bit about you, Tim. So we can put your book jacket up on the screen, which I really recommend to people, you know, wherever you are on the ideological spectrum. I think it gives a really great insight into, like, the very particular D.C. mindset of political operatives. The headline here is Why We Did It, Travel On From the Republican Road to Hell. And you wrote this article.

about, you know, your own journey from being inside the, you know, the belly of the beast during the Republican Party, working for Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John Huntsman, you know, working for some dark money groups as well, into being a very vocal Trump critic. So just sketch out for our audience who may not know all of your background a little bit of like what you were up to and what it was about Trump that really, you know, turned you off and made you into this very vocal critic.

Well, I appreciate that. Some folks came to me to ask me to write a burn book, like Mean Girls style, about all the people I worked with in the Republican Party. And I was like, that wouldn't feel good unless I also burned myself a bit. And so that was basically how the format for the book came out. I was like, I'd be excited to reflect on my own choices before I started taking the fire torch to other people. And look, yeah, I mean, I was...

in Republican politics from the time I was a kid. Like I was, my neighbor was a friend of a guy running for governor of Colorado and I was just a political dork. I wanted to be in politics. I was 16 years old. I volunteered on that campaign. I looked like I was 12. I hadn't gone through puberty yet. Everybody asked me who my parents were when I was at the campaign office. And I was like, I don't know my dad's, you know, working at his mutual fund. So, you know, I was just kind of a precocious politics nerd.

That guy won the governor's race in this very exciting kind of close late night race. And I got very addicted to, you know, kind of the competition of politics. Yeah. Almost like it's a sport, right? Yeah, like it was a sport. And so there were some earnest things we could talk about. Like there were some earnest things that drew me to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. But like pretty quickly, I became just kind of like a hired gun, right? Like a hatchet man. I enjoyed the competition of it.

And, you know, I had some directional political beliefs that you just laid out people I worked for. I worked mostly for the moderate Republicans. I have a few people that I worked for that are on my shame list that I did, you know, because you have, you know, if you're a political operative, sometimes you got to take clients, but or you don't have to. Sometimes you choose to take clients in order to help yourself succeed. So, you know, that was basically my background. And then Trump comes along.

And honestly, it just was not a close call for me. And he was just so far beyond the pale. His rhetoric around immigrants in particular was my red line. But even beyond that, he just did not appeal to me in any possible sense of the word. He was unethical to the earnest parts of why I became a Republican.

And so, you know, after Jeb lost, I got asked by some of those dark money guys you mentioned to be the point, the spokesperson for a group opposing Trump. And I did it without really even thinking about the consequences, honestly. Jeb and my dad both said to me, like, you're being crazy. What if Trump wins? And I was like, yeah.

whatever you know i gotta i don't he's he can't win and and so uh bad judgment there maybe by me if you had thought he was gonna win do you think you would have still i would have still done it i was very much in kamikaze mode i i i found trump repellent and so i always say that whenever sometimes i get liberals will come up to me or democrats longtime democrats particularly like older mother figures and they'll be like i'm so proud of you like you did the right thing and i'm like

I actually don't like I feel uncomfortable with that compliment because honestly, if it was Ted Cruz, I don't know. It would have been a closer call for me. Like I might have gone along with it. You know, I don't I don't know. My husband might have divorced me, so I might not have done it because of him. But Trump was Trump was something unique about Trump.

That I just thought everything about him from his personal life to his ideology, to the way he spoke about immigrants, the way he spoke about people was just unacceptable to me. And so, you know, so I dove in immediately. I was one of the OGs on the Never Trumper side. Yeah, you know, to be honest with you, some of what you just said in Trump 1.0, I would have been a little resistant to, like the idea that he was this particularly unique threat.

And then it wasn't just sort of like, you know, revulsion, oh, the norms and oh, he's uncouth and whatever. But in this way, you know, I also think I've politically evolved recently to feel like, you know, the liberals who were like really concerned about the norms and really concerned about the rhetoric and really concerned about his character, they had a point. They had a point. Like the most deranged Trump derangement syndrome person ever.

ends up looking like they were kind of mild. Yeah. In comparison to what has unfolded. And, you know, I was really raising alarm in advance of this election. I thought because he, I thought that he would be in basically YOLO mode. The Supreme Court had given him complete and total immunity. Um,

And they had spent four years trying to figure out how to move out of the way any even moderate guardrail that had kept him even somewhat hemmed in in the first administration. And even I have been...

horrified and shocked by the speed of the dissent in this particular administration. So, you know, I certainly have also tried to learn from what has unfolded and, you know, evolve in my own political views. Let me ask you to respond to what the haters would say about you, which is that, you know, you previously, you were doing what you needed to do and saying what you needed to say in order to serve the Republican side and your Republican bosses. And

And now are you just doing the same thing to serve your liberal audience and to appeal to the MSNBC folks that you're speaking to on a regular basis? I love talking to the haters. That's fine.

No, I mean, look, just for so just on the money side of things, not that I'm doing great. I'm fine. But like the amount of money the people around Trump are making right now is going to shock the conscience. I mean, like Jason Miller also opposed Trump like me. Initially, he was with Ted Cruz. I was with Jeb. But I hung out with Jason Miller and he opposed Trump. So did Kellyanne. And Jason Miller just got a contract from India that's like 100%.

a hundred thousand dollars a month or something, or I forget, I don't have in front of me under $50,000 a month maybe. And so, you know, I'm not bringing in that much on YouTube. I'm telling you, we're doing okay. And so I'm not looking for sympathy, but like the way to whatever I do well in, in the Trump Republican party was to stay. And a lot of my friends have, have, you know, expanded their houses. Well, a lot of my former friends have expanded. So,

So, you know, there's that. I hear what you're saying. And I think, look, anybody that is in the business of talking about the news, I'm sure you guys think about this. We especially in this day and age, you see what your audience likes and doesn't like, you know, even if you don't read the comments, you see it in the metrics. Right. And so I understand that people would be skeptical of all this.

But I really I've I try my very best to just say what I want, what I think, and I only care about what I care about and not be pretend outraged about things I'm not outraged about. And, you know, and during the campaign in twenty twenty four.

People were very upset at us over our thoughts about Joe Biden, which maybe we can talk about in a second. I was horrified by Joe Biden. And I have not. The Bulwark audience is pretty Biden-y, you know, center left, center right.

So like there are a lot of big Biden fans. To the extent that big Biden fans exist, a lot of them were Buller consumers. The Biden super fan. A lot of them were unhappy. Yeah, a lot of them were unhappy with my views on him. And I just I didn't move an inch. If anything, it radicalized me more because I was like, screw you guys. I was like, are you kidding me? Are you seeing this? Yeah.

I, you know, I was pressured into lying on behalf of Trump back when I was a Republican and I refused to do it. And now I've opposed Trump and you're trying to bully me into, you know, arguing, you know, trying to tell people that to not believe their lying eyes about Joe Biden. Like, no, I'm not going to do that. I so, you know, look, I mean.

I think that we're doing the best we can to to give people what we honestly think every day. I think that there's no doubt in the YouTube game. You know this, you know, sometimes that the little thumbnail has to be a little more crazy. Yeah. But that's just like part of doing all this. And so, you know, I mean, I think that there's a little bit of that. That's probably a fair criticism for my haters. But no, I'm not I'm not changing my views on anything. Have you?

have you ideologically, like, do you see your political views, your political ideology as having shifted? Or, yeah, just talk a little bit about that. How would you describe yourself ideologically? Emily on that yesterday says that I've gone fully native with the left. And I was like, I was hoping Emily was going to be on today so we could hash that out. I was going to say, well,

I'm hoping. I mean, that's the whole reason you're here is so I can win you over to being a social Democrat by the end. Bill Kristol might be full social Democrat, but that's for another day now. I noticed that, actually. Him and Nicole Wallace, I'm like, hmm, okay.

OK. You know, look, I've changed on some things. I guess I'll just say this first. Yeah. When I said I was earnest to get into politics, I was and I was a Bush kid. I was like the compassionate conservative thing, which, Crystal, maybe you saw through the way I saw through Trump. I believed it. Like, I really did. And obviously the Iraq war, it's you know, it's eventually I got disillusioned by it. But initially, like as a kid, as a high school kid.

I believed it. And I was radicalized by the Elian Gonzalez thing. I was like one of my first political awakenings. I was like, I was four people coming to this country. I believed the land of milk and honey, Reagan, you know, shining city on the hill stuff. Like that was what moved me as a kid and drew me to the Republican Party. And so when you see the Janet Reno thugs, like putting a gun in front of the kid's face who was fleeing communism, that was like a thing that got me excited when I was young. And so that, you know, confirmed for me that,

Whatever. I'll be on the side of the compassionate conservatives, whatever you want to call it. So to me, in a lot of ways, like the Trump movement is a total rejection of the things that brought me into the Republican Party. You know, like I was into like the kind of altruistic jingoism rather than this horrible, cruel jingoism that they have now. And and, you know, so I think the core of the Trump movement is an ethical to what what brought me to being a Republican. That said, I.

Once you're freed from, you know, I think it's like anybody, right? If you there are a few issues that you really care about. And then if you're in a party, a lot of people, particularly political junkies or operatives, kind of like sign up for the rest of the stuff. Like that's a pretty common thing. And so I think that there were a couple of things.

And the two that jumped to my mind right now are taxes on the wealthy and guns. Like there were two things in particular that I was kind of just signing up for the program on that was not what I was really there for that I've like kind of changed a hard on, right? And then I'm like, okay, now that I've had some distance from it, I'm like, it's some of this stuff is crazy, right? And so, you know, I have changed my views on a couple things for sure. But I also think that

Trump ran as a rejection of the kind of Republican politics I liked. Right. So it shouldn't be that surprising then. To me, it's more surprising that there aren't more me's and more Nicole Wallace's. He literally ran as a rejection of us. We feel rejected. In a sense, yes, but.

But also, you know, if you look at the first Trump administration, his big accomplishment is the tax cut for the rich. You know, very George W. Bush-like, very Ronald Reagan-like. And the other thing I wanted to ask you about is,

I think the people that I have the most difficult time with the transition are the people who were most vocal in supporting George W. Bush's constitutional abuses, you know, indefinite detention and torture in Guantanamo Bay. And I am thinking of like, you know, Bill Kristol and David Frum and Nicole Wallace.

Because to me, there's such a direct line from that to where we are now. And I'm not saying that they're the same. I think Trump has taken the legal pretextual justifications of the Bush era in particular and has expanded and radicalized on them aggressively. But, you know, the whole thing of shipping people off to this foreign gulag with no due process is like, well, they're terrorists, so we can do whatever we want with them.

The whole thing of arresting students and, you know, deporting them because they write an op-ed, God forbid, is same thing. Well, we see them as supporting terrorists, so we can just do what we want with them. No due process. And so do you feel like there has been any grappling? You were young. We're actually basically like the same age. I think we're both 43. But in any case, do you think—

Aging me publicly on YouTube. Can we cut that? It's on the wiki. All right. Listen, do you think that there has been a grappling with with the way that that abuse of the Constitution leads directly to similar, more expanded Trumpian abuses of the Constitution?

Probably not enough. And I'll ask David from this question the next time he's on the board podcast and see what he says about it. Probably not enough. I don't know. It's funny. I get this criticism from sometimes Glenn Greenwald likes to tweet at me and be like, he was a bushy. I'm like, okay, like...

I'm happy. I have plenty of sins that I'm happy to try to atone for, but I was hitting the bong during Guantanamo in college. I was not part of the administration. I was not even really paying that close of attention. I was partying. And frankly, this was one of those issues that I would put alongside politics.

the ones I mentioned earlier with guns in Texas, where I was like casually for Guantanamo, I guess, which is wrong as somebody that was not involved in politics. But I took a pretty radical shift against it, you know, late in the Bush term. I remember getting into a big fight with my parents over this one Thanksgiving. I remember getting into a big fight with my friend, Jamie Kirchick. Maybe you've had on the show about this sometime in the late Bush administration. Um,

And John McCain really changed my views on a lot of this stuff, who, to his credit, based on his experience, really spoke out quite passionately against the Bush administration's policies when it really didn't benefit him that much politically. So I think that that's a totally fair criticism. I think some people have grappled with it more than others. But you haven't seen a really kind of

I can't at least think of one, like kind of a full-throated, you know, reflection upon the degree to which some of the civil liberties abuses during, you know, the Iraq war and the associated kind of war on terror, I guess, you know, drew a little bit of a pretext for what we're seeing now. And I think that's a fair critique. Last question for you, and then we can talk a little bit about Biden. Then I know you have to run. But

You talk a lot. What's that? We're good. You got time? Okay, you don't have a hard hour? Okay, good. Great. You talk a lot in your book about the various characters. Like you have different sort of archetypes.

of the flavors of justification that people used who went from, you know, being sort of repelled by Trump like you were to being in his inner circle, having positions of power, going on TV and justifying every last thing that he does up to and now including sending people for life into foreign gulags from which there is no escape with literally zero due process based on a tattoo that says mom and dad as one example.

I was curious if you have any updated archetypes. Is there a difference between the Trump 1.0 personnel who sometimes had this like, oh, well, if I wasn't there, then someone else would be and I'm reining things in and had those sorts of psychological justifications versus Trump 2.0. It really does feel like it's like the true believers who are all in at this point. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a good question. You're putting me on the spot a little bit because I do think it's different. And my one kind of self-criticism of the book is I wasn't really planning on Trump coming back. And so it does feel like a little bit dated, like when you're reading some of it, because it's like, man, some of the people who had these really complex rationalizations the first time around are pretty much full bore this time.

I guess I would say that the updated rationale is really based on what I guess I would call amnesia. I guess I would have the Trump amnesia category this time probably, which is –

Really just focusing on the biggest picture view of the Trump first administration. Like, well, you know, there was a lot of crazy stuff day to day. But like the things, you know, our democracy didn't totally collapse. Right. The the economy generally got went the right direction until covid. He was like basically right about some of the covid stuff. Right. Like you hear this. I'm sure you hear all this from where it's like.

None of that is really right. I mean, like we we got we got through it by the skin of our teeth. Right. I mean, I think that many of the people who give the amnesia defense now, if you brought them in, if you went back in time to 2015 and brought them a newspaper with a picture of what happened on January 6th and said, you will support this, they would tell you you have Trump derangement syndrome and you're crazy. But now they would say, no, you have Trump derangement syndrome for acting like that was such a big deal. Like it was a little it was bad. Yeah, it was bad. But

it wasn't as bad as you guys say, you're obsessed with it, you know? So I think that there is just, and on COVID, right. They're like, well, they focus more on how there was some overreach on the left, which I agree with on, on some of the COVID rules or they focus on, uh,

the discussion about the wet market versus, you know, whether it was from the lab, right? And there's, again, there's some legit points here. But then they don't focus on the anti-vax stuff or the way that Trump downplayed it for so long or like all the other, like the crazy press got, right? So I do think that there's a little bit of rationale now that's based on kind of like

people's memories fading and like trying to tell a story of the Trump 1.0 that's better than it was and telling a story of the Biden administration that's like the worst possible story you could tell about it rather than, you know, a more clear eyed version of what its strengths and weaknesses were.

Well, that's a good transition to talk about the latest news with regard to Biden. We can put this up on the screen. So Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are coming out with a book that's kind of meant to be like a tell-all of what was going on on the inside and who knew what and when with regard to Biden's significant decline. And the big scoop that's out this morning is that his father,

physical deterioration most apparent in his halting walk had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election. And I mean, I do want to say like his physical deterioration

was not really my concern. The mental deterioration was more of the concern. But, you know, this is of a piece with the decline that we were all watching. And as you said, you know, the Democratic Party was asking us and much of the media, too, by the way, was asking us not to believe our lying eyes at this point. And I think there's, again, a direct line between Biden deciding to run

No one within the mainstream Democratic Party really challenging him. You did have Dean Phillips jump in there. You had Marianne Williamson in the race as well. But they blocked even having primary contests in a number of states. So there was really no chance for anyone to succeed. Direct line from that to the reelection of Donald Trump in the world that we now live in.

Yeah, I had to do my Dean Phillips mea culpa a couple months ago because, you know, I still stand by I don't think the way he prosecuted his campaign was the most effective, but I was a little too mean to him because the premise of his campaign was correct. And, you know, it was then later in the summer where it was very clear to me that that was the case. And look, I don't I'm with you. I don't care that much about the wheelchair, like whatever. But to me, it's just one part of this broader thing, which is relationships.

But regardless of what you think about some of the smaller arguments about whether Biden should have stuck around and the debate and whether he could have done it and whether he could do the job or how much had he really declined, was it just one? Right. Regardless of all that, like to me, the biggest possible picture is it was ridiculous for them to try to sell us on the fact that Joe Biden could be president in four years from now when he's 80 years old.

It was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous proposition. The American people saw through it and we all saw it with our own eyes on the debate stage. And the fact that it took them so long to then come around to it.

And the fact that then even once they did, you know, we had to have the Biden tribute day at the Kamala convention and that she was pressured to not distance from him. And like all this sort of stuff to me, I really think their actions are

have been shameful, absolutely shameful in the last year. And, and it makes me very upset, actually. And so I don't even know. I hope Jake and Alex aren't watching this. I keep going over my head. I'm like, Can I even have Jake and Alex on the podcast? Mostly because it makes me so mad. I kind of just want to pretend I just want to move forward. So I probably will.

Because, you know, you have to grapple with this sort of stuff. But it makes me so upset that, you know, they're asking a lot of other people to sacrifice and then not and then not doing it, not only not sacrificing themselves, but really making an extremely selfish decision. And I say they because it was really the full family.

And his closest advisors made a decision that was very, very selfish. And and we're dealing with the consequences. And I wouldn't say he's the number one reason we have Trump right now. I definitely would put that on Mitch McConnell and the Republican senators who didn't convict him after January 6th when they all knew they should have.

But he certainly plays a role. Very central role. Very central role. And listen, Kamala Harris could have decided to distance herself from him even in spite of the fact that he pressured her not to. But it does just show a level of ego and selfishness, to your point, that is quite extraordinary. I remember him making some comment at the time in an interview. He was asked, well, what happens if you lose Trump? He's like, well, as long as I tried my best, it'll be fine. It's like...

I mean, this guy's a fascist. I was doing a work beach vacation there. I was going to a Matt Gaetz event in the panhandle, but also my family was at the beach and I went out back to the beach to watch that interview. I mean, you're triggering me right now just thinking about it. I was so enraged.

I don't know if I've ever been mad at somebody. And also to do the thing where it's like our democracy is on the line. Right. And also – I get a participation award for trying my bestest. It's like, no, it's not good enough. You have to win. You have to win. And if you aren't the person to do that, you needed to have stepped aside a year ago so that someone who was more able could carry the torch. And I guess –

The big question is if they've learned from this, and I think some have and some haven't. This is, you know, in the context of, so David Hogg was elected vice chair of the DNC, and

And David, first of all, I think is very impressive in terms of there aren't a lot of Democrats who really understand new media, know how to grab attention, whatever. Just on that metric, he is very effective. But also, he's obviously really trying to shake things up within the party. He was on with Bill Maher this past weekend and made some comments that he doesn't mention the name Jim Clyburn, but this is clearly directed at Jim Clyburn, who previously made some statement about like, oh, what do they want me to do, resign and end my life?

from Congress. So this sparked a lot of dialogue within the Democratic Party. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of David Hogg here on Bill Maher. What I'm trying to do with this initiative with Leaders We Deserve, the organization that we're working with, is to challenge Democrats that we feel like are failing to meet the moment in safe congressional seats that don't risk us losing the House and say to them, look, nobody is entitled to their position of power because ultimately,

The positions of power in this country don't belong to any member of Congress that is out there. They belong to the people that vote them into office. Part of what happens in politics is people want to do two things at the same time that are incompatible.

They want to keep the same people in the positions of power that they're in that are individually beneficial to them, and they want to get back to winning. But we're not going to be able to do that with the same cast of characters that got us here. And the answer to that is to use democracy within our own party to give voters the option of voting for somebody new so that they at least have the option. Right. So you want to get rid of the dead wood. Effectively, yes. But it's not just a matter of age, to be clear. There have been a few members that have come out that have said,

Well, you know, if I retire, my life is effectively over. And what I would say is get over yourself. This isn't about you. This is about our country and it's about your constituents. Nobody is in. I don't care if you've been there for decades or just one term. That seat is not yours. It is your constituents. That is who you're there to serve. And if they choose to serve somebody else, so be it. That's all what all we're trying to do with leaders we deserve.

So the quote that he's referencing there, I'll put the next piece up on the screen, is this from Jim Clyburn. He said, Nancy left her seat. Steny left his seat. I left my seat. What the hell am I supposed to do now? What do you want? Me to give up my life. And so Clyburn is saying, listen, we step back from our leadership positions. But, you know, he continues to hold the seat and run for reelection. And that appears to be what David Hogg is referencing here. What do you think of what David Hogg is trying to do at the DNC and also the pushback that he's received for it?

Yeah, we might finally get to our disagreement in the last block. I don't know. I think everybody can get over themselves in this story. I don't know. The David Hogg thing. Look, if David Hogg had not run for DNC vice chair and decided to start a group that was primarying

older Democrats and saying we want to get new youthful Democrats in. And it's ideologically, I don't care. Maybe in some scenarios, it's a Dan Osborne type. Maybe it's a moderate Bulwark type. Maybe it's a DSA type. I'm okay with that program. That's a good program, getting a younger, more diverse, both ideologically and racially

group of people into the party, I'd be for all that. But he decided to run for DNC vice chair. And to me, this is like the thing about all this, about how just pathetically incompetent the DNC is. And I do, I look at the story and it's just like,

There are conspiracy theories out there about how the DNC is orchestrating things. The DNC can't orchestrate a two-car parade. The DNC can't do anything. It was insane for them to put somebody who was vastly more famous, and to your point, vastly more online and in the public eye than the chairman as vice chair.

And and and have him be a total loose cannon. Like what was like, what is the point of that? Like, what was like, what did they think that they were going to get? And so, you know, now you have somebody in the DNC who's like firing, you know, inside the house and going on to Bill Maher and going on to all these shows and like critiquing other people within the party. Like, that's not the job of the DNC vice chair. It could be a job of an outside group that wants to do this.

But it's not his job on the inside. And so now, like the DNC, rather than focusing on what they should be focusing on, which is how to beat as many Republicans as possible in the midterms, they have this internal firing squad going on. And they're having a struggle session about whether the gender balance is right. I mean, it's like the most pathetic, embarrassing organization that I've ever seen.

And so to me, like, that's my takeaway from the story is that, like, the eye is not on the ball for basically any of the characters in this story. See, I hear what you're saying, but I would say that I support the internal firing squad, and I think the lack of an internal firing squad is exactly how Democrats ended up as Democrats.

pathetic and losing as many races as they did. Because what did we hear when it was Biden? It was, oh, we can't have a primary. We can't be critiquing each other. We don't want the internal firing squad. Everybody's got to, you know, stay unified and stay united, not criticize each other. And in the end, that ends up in disaster. Whereas, you know, to give the counterpoint,

The Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama primary was pretty vicious. You know, there was – it was raucous. You go back and watch. They were taking some real shots at each other. And guess what? You end up with, you know, a –

candidate who was able to not only win, but win handily and run for reelection and win quite handily there as well. I know you remember that one here because you're on the other side working for Mitt Romney on that particular campaign. But, you know, I hear what you're saying about like maybe this wasn't the place for David Hogg to be to make his stand. But I think he's thinking about it of if you want to improve the party,

The goal of the DNC should be, to your point, winning races. And part of that is rejuvenating this party and making sure we don't have another Dianne Feinstein cover-up or Joe Biden-style cover-up, that we have people who are actually effective and responsive and embracing those small-D democratic values.

It's a fair counterpoint. I would support strategic competition. I would just say to me, this looks like a total clusterfork, not strategic competition within the party. I just don't. Again, what I was seeing from David Hogg was, hey,

I'm recruiting all these new people who are, you know, going to be the future face of the party and are more reflective of working class voters. And I'm going into red states and I'm going to recruit people that can actually win in these districts. And, you know, we're going to go into deep blue districts and we're going to find people that are younger with more vigor to challenge voters.

then okay, I would be for that. But I see mostly like tweets and press releases and bickering at James Carville and Jim Clyburn and media appearances. So I just, I don't know. I think competition can be good, but being strategic and smart can also be good. And I don't think either the DNC or Hogg

over the past month have demonstrated a lot of smarts or strategy. Well, far be it for me to defend the DNC. So we can end on that note. Tim, thank you so much. And just tell people where they can find you and follow your podcast.

Thanks, Crystal. Yeah, no, check us out with The Bulwark over on YouTube, The Bulwark Podcast. You can check us out on Substack also, thebulwark.com. And, you know, I'm here in my hole all the time talking. So, you know, just come find me. All right. Thank you, Tim. It was great to chat with you. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Crystal. Appreciate you having me.

So we covered a bit yesterday how Trump announced this big executive order with regard to prescription drug prices that he said was instantly going to reduce all of prescription drug prices by 30 to 80 percent. Joining us to break down the reality of this executive order is David Sirota, founder of The Lever. Great to see you, David. Good to see you. Yeah, of course. So let me go ahead and start with Trump's comments today.

at the press conference yesterday, which were quite a bit different than the way he had sold this executive order on prescription drug prices to start with. Let's take a listen to that. First, I'm directing the U.S. trade representatives and Department of Commerce to begin investigations into foreign nations that extort drug companies by blocking their products unless they accept bottom line drugs.

and very low dollar amounts for their product, unfairly shifting the cost burden onto American patients. And we'll be taking a look at that very strongly. The biggest thing we're going to do is we're going to tell those countries, like those represented by the European Union, that, you know, that game is up. Sorry. And if they want to get cute, then they don't have to sell cars into the United States anymore.

It's a very big subject. And they won't get killed because I'll defend the drug companies from that standpoint. He's going to defend the drug companies and force the Europeans to pay higher prices. That's actually the plan that he's announcing here. Yeah, it's a little weird in that he's saying that America needs a better deal, but other countries shouldn't be negotiating for a better price deal. I don't really understand the logic there.

because he's touting the idea that the United States should use its power, its purchasing power, its market power to get a better deal for Americans, which I actually think most Americans probably agree that it's not fair at all that the United States is funding with tax dollars a huge amount of the research and development that goes into creating lots of medicines across the world.

And our return on that investment is being forced to pay the highest prices in the world. I think his executive order is aimed at pointing out that problem. And it is a problem. Unfortunately, the solution that he's put forward isn't a solution at all. And you don't have to trust me. You can look at the price of pharmaceutical industry stocks on the day that he announced his executive order. They actually went up.

And so the pharmaceutical industry does not think that what Trump is proposing, and it's not even entirely clear what actually that he is proposing, that the industry doesn't even see it as anything real at all. Yeah, actually, we can put E2 up on the screen. Stoller tweeted this, but I checked the stock

prices at the end of the day, they were up even more than this. So Pfizer ended the day up 3.6. Merck was up 4.4. Eli Lilly was up 2.8. Bristol-Myers was up 3.7. And Sanofi was up 2%, so 2.3% by the end of the day. And also analysts are putting out guidance saying that they do not see this drug pricing executive order as a material event.

meaning that it doesn't matter at all. Let's put E4 up on the screen because you break down some of the back story here over at The Lever. You say Trump already disarmed the war on drug prices. So not only do we have this executive order that doesn't have really any force of law, we have Trump saying actually he's going to defend the drug prices. You have the stock market reacting in a way that was positive for the drug makers ultimately. But we also have other signs from the Trump administration that they're not serious about this.

Yeah. So there is one tool in the toolbox that the government could use to lower drug prices right now. It's part of a longstanding law that's been around for more than 40 years, which says that when the government licenses, when the government funds research and development that is turned into, for instance, medicine, patented medicines,

that the government can march in. That's the term. The government can march in and license to other companies the patents, the rights to make those drugs, if the current producer of the medicine is not offering them online.

on reasonable terms. Essentially, if the Americans cannot get access to the innovation that their own tax dollars funded, that's been on the books for 40 years. Now, to be clear, it's never been invoked, so-called margin rights.

But successive administrations have been under pressure to use march-in rights under that longstanding law to say, hey, if you're charging other countries one-tenth the price for the medicine that taxpayers developed and American taxpayers essentially don't have or have very limited access to the medicines that they're

taxpayer money, their public money supported, we can march in and

offer the license to other generic drug producers to make lower priced versions of the same medicine. Successive administrations have been under pressure to use that power. Unfortunately, they haven't used that power. The Obama administration rejected congressional Democrats' pressure to do that. Donald Trump, to your point, not only didn't use march-in rights, Donald Trump tried to permanently prevent any future president

from ever using those powers. Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want any president to use those powers. The Biden administration, it did reject a request to use march-in rights on one particular drug. But the Biden administration also put forward a set of guidelines and rules to create more clear ways to use those march-in rights. But now, here in the present, we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who...

told people on Capitol Hill that he would be interested in using march-in rights. But ultimately, when put under confirmation scrutiny, he said using march-in rights when drug prices are too high is not something that he is going to do. And how does...

the Biden era reforms, they did some modest reforms that allows Medicare to negotiate on a handful of prescription drugs. How does that play into this? Does that give the Trump administration any potential powers that they could expand upon? Well, look, certainly Medicare is a big buyer of prescription drugs, has purchasing power to try to negotiate lower prices. The Biden administration program deals with 10

10 particular drugs. It's called a formulary. Certainly, the Trump administration could push to expand the formulary. It is statutory law. It would have to go to Congress to do that.

Medicare can also try to essentially demand so-called most favored nation pricing. That is to say, if you're going to charge a lower price in another country, the United States should get access to that. There's a question about how could Medicare actually pressure –

those prices down for drugs covered by private insurance. Frankly, Crystal, it's not really clear what this executive order really is beyond Trump saying to RFK and to saying to a couple of other agency, you know, go lower the price of prescription drugs. But again, I go back to this idea that HHS under Trump has, has essentially said, we are not going to use

The one weapon in our arsenal, margin rights, to do any of this. So when I look at the stock price jump of pharmaceutical stocks, what I see is a pharmaceutical industry that was wondering whether margin rights was going to be in this executive order.

knows that RFK has already said he's not going to use those powers, knows that Trump has tried to permanently prevent any president from using those powers. I see a pharmaceutical industry that says, oh, that's not in the executive order. Well, another example of Trump saying a lot of things, but there's not really anything here that is going to bring down the price of medicines in the United States and not really anything going to cut into their profits. And I want to make one other point that's really important here.

It's not like these drug companies aren't making big profits and revenues in other countries. That's the part that just should get to everybody, which is to say they're making profits in Europe, in other industrialized countries when they're charging those consumers there one third the price of drugs.

the price that they charge Americans. They're making healthy profits there, which means that what they're doing here is profiteering. And they're profiteering off of, this is so important, they're profiteering mostly off of medicines that we, the public, we, the taxpayers, already funded. That is such a great point. And the other thing that I noted yesterday is that

This is very similar to an executive order that he signed also in the first Trump administration. So I think the other reason why the drug makers have so much confidence that it's not going to matter is because they went to court and successfully were able to enjoin and get an injunction against that executive order. And so they already know effectively how this story ends. And I suspect Trump also knows how the story ends.

doesn't really care about prescription drug prices because if he did, he could put pressure on Congress. He has margin rights that he could use. You've got Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna out saying, hey, we've got a bill that would do what you want to do. Why didn't you work with us on it? He shows no interest in doing any of that. He just effectively wants the headline here because his poll numbers have been dropping and he wants to distract from the fact that they're also set to do gigantic cuts to Medicaid in service of cutting taxes for the rich. That's exactly right. I mean, listen,

Ro Khanna has been out there saying, let's just take Donald Trump's executive order and put it into statute so that,

if and when he tries to do, for instance, most favored nation pricing via Medicare, it won't be invalidated by a court. That's what happened the last time. So let's put it into statute. You've got a Republican president, Democrats in Congress willing to put it into statute. Let's do that. There's no sense that Trump is engaged with Congress at all to do any of that. So again, I agree with you. It's like a show.

It's like a circus. It's like, let me get a headline. People will, I guess, momentarily think that at some point in the future, drug prices will come down. And hopefully, I guess the hope is what? Everyone will forget about this? Will forget that he made this pledge? That everyone has a goldfish brain for getting their entire world every 15 minutes? I mean, I

I don't think that's really going to work when it comes to something like prescription drug prices, which are a constant expense for millions and millions of Americans. Yeah. Well, some of us have goldfish brains, but you're not one of them, David Cerrone. You remember all the details. I had to go back and look up this example. I was like, didn't he do that?

and similar in the first administration. Before I let you go, we're going to have Arjun on next week to talk about Tax Revolt, your new podcast series. But just give everybody a preview of what you guys have been up to, because this is some extraordinary investigative journalism.

Yeah. So listen, this week is tax week in Washington. Donald Trump's tax bill is coming down the pike. A big question. Are they going to cut taxes on are they going to essentially make permanent Trump's tax cuts, including tax cuts for billionaires, corporations? There's some talk in the Republican Party that they're going to try to raise some taxes on millionaires. And and I think that's a response to the fact that, according to polls, 70 percent of Republican voters now want taxes raised.

on the wealthy. Our series, Tax Revolt, it's an audio series. People can find it at levernews.com slash tax revolt. Our new series takes a look at the history of the anti-tax movement.

where it came from, how it grew into such a political force, and as important, why it is potentially fraying right now, which is kind of shocking. I mean, you know, the last 50 years, tax cuts have been the dominant religion of the Republican Party. And why is the movement fraying? Where did that movement come from? That's what our series is about.

All right. People should definitely go and check that out. And like I said, we're going to have Arjun Singh on next week to break down some of the specifics there. David Sirota, so great to see you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thanks so much.

So guys, there was one more story that I wanted to make sure and cover today because it is deeply troubling. Hassan Piker, who is one of the most, if not the largest, most prominent pro-Palestine voice in the country, was detained for hours by Customs and Border Patrol as he tried to reenter the country. He was flying in from France and he was questioned.

On his views on Israel-Palestine for hours, Hassan recently spoke about this experience. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of what he had to say. I'm sitting there and they're asking me about Trump. They're asking me about like Hamas. And he kept saying stuff. He kept saying stuff like...

Do you like Hamas? Like, do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a resistance group? Do you think Hamas is a terrorist group or a resistance group? Like he just kept asking over and over again, right?

And I kept repeating the same statement over and over again. And every single time he asked me a question leading a leading question about Hamas, I kept saying the United States state department recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization. The fact that a lot of the shit that like,

the Ethan Clines of the world have like cried about over and over again were unironically brought up in that fucking conversation the Houthi like did you interview a Houthi it says here that you interviewed a Houthi and I was like or was he actually a Houthi and I was like he's not you can look to all of the reporting that came up afterwards and before I interviewed him that he is not a he's not a Houthi the very fact that that was like a point of contention that could have

fucking gotten me arrested is insane. And I genuinely in that moment was thinking like these fucking dumb ass slop tubers are actually playing with fucking fire.

So there is a lot to say about this. So first of all, he's referring to the quote unquote hot Houthi that he interviewed a while back. Turns out the guy was not even a Houthi, which is what he's talking about here. But clearly CBP grilling him on his political views and stances over the course of hours.

And what Hassan points to there, he mentions Ethan Klein, who's his former podcast host, so he's had a falling out with primarily over some personal things, but also primarily over their respective views on Israel-Palestine. And so Ethan has been going in and criticizing Hassan for things like his interview with the quote-unquote hot Houthi. And so he's pointing to the fact that these CBP agents –

seemingly knew about the nature of this online critique. And it reminded me of the fact that you have this, you know, extreme Zionist radical organization called Beitar that has been claiming credit for giving the Trump administration lists

of students that they want to be arrested and ultimately deported and have been tweeting out these lists. And there's some indication that the Trump administration is using social media for these types of operations. That's certainly what Betar Worldwide is claiming. There's no confirmation of that from the Trump administration. But the fact that Hassan was targeted in this way

and questioned in this manner, obviously deeply, deeply troubling. And Hassan himself, in another portion of his commentary here, talks about how he thinks this was very intentional to create a climate of fear and to try to get him and others to shut up about their views that differ from the stance of this administration. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. The reason for why they're doing that is, I think,

To try to create an environment of fear to try to get people like myself or at least like others that would be in my shoes that don't have that same level of security to shut the fuck up. And for me, I'm going to use the privilege that I have in that moment to try and see what the fuck they're doing.

So he talks there about how they're trying to create a climate of fear. Hassan is not the first person who has been seemingly targeted by Customs and Border Patrol, by the Trump administration in this manner. An immigration attorney who was returning back to the U.S. was similarly pulled aside for hours and questioned. With him, it was specifically about the work that he does, and they wanted to seize his phone and get a hold of his clientele.

client list, again, an immigration attorney. And this ties in with the larger project of the Trump administration, where they have been either overtly or floating the idea of labeling as domestic terrorists anyone who supports

the Palestinian cause. So Hassan, again, being one of the most, if not the most prominent pro-Palestine voice in the country getting targeted is deeply, deeply troubling. So that's one category of people. We've seen, of course, the way that they've applied this to students who are here on visas, even legal permanent residents like Mahmoud Khalil, not for any sort of criminal activity, but literally just for their speech.

for penning an op-ed or being involved in a protest movement that is pro-Palestine. So Hassan appears to have been directly targeted because of his views on that issue. But that's not the only group that they've been going after, as evidenced by the immigration attorney who was pulled aside, Sebastian Gorka, who is the White House's counterterror czar, and Ken Kluberstein has done great reporting on this.

He has floated that anyone who opposes the Trump administration's deportation policy should be seen as a domestic terrorist. And of course, we saw a judge who was arrested in that context. And AOC and others have been threatened with arrest for advising immigrants of their rights and the rights that they can avail themselves of in this country. He's also floated labeling as domestic terrorists people who are just immigrants.

critical of the Trump regime. So the hands-off protesters he mentioned as well. Of course, Pam Bondi gave a press conference where she officially said that people who harbor ill will against Tesla, that they should be treated as domestic terrorists. And we know they really threw the book

at some individuals who are accused of vandalizing Tesla's or Tesla property. So this is part of a larger pattern. And it seems like Hassan handled it incredibly well. I don't know that I would have been so cool under fire as he was, gave answers that they couldn't really use to do anything with. But he had the sense that

They were trying to get him to express some sort of support for Hamas or for the Houthis, both of which are labeled terrorist organizations by the State Department, as he rightly points out, so that they could have some sort of pretext to potentially detain him, arrest him, and hold him for a longer period of time. So I don't know, guys. This is, I think, another escalation when you're targeting prominent media figures simply for their speech.

on a topic that is dissonant from the Trump administration, from their regime. There were a few other things going on here that I just wanted to make sure and highlight. There's a video that recently went viral of a Massachusetts ICE raid where they are trying to arrest

A mother, her teenage daughter is obviously very upset. She's also holding a young child. There's a crowd that gathers at the scene. The agents, I'm not sure if these were ICE agents or local police also got involved with this, even though they are not supposed to be involved whatsoever in immigration enforcement. But in any case, the teenage daughter ends up getting slammed and her face pushed into the ground. Let's go ahead and take a look at that footage.

Stop, ma'am! Stop! Stop!

Definitely a chaotic scene on Eureka Street Thursday as Worcester police and ICE agents detained a mother and her 16-year-old daughter. That girl's face slammed into the ground as she was taken into custody. They have not been identified. Worcester police said officers were dispatched to the area for a report of a federal agent surrounded by about two dozen people. When police arrived, they say the teen daughter was holding a newborn baby in her arms and standing in front of the ICE vehicle that was trying to leave with their mother inside. Officers

Officers told her she was endangering the baby, so she handed the newborn to a relative. But police allege as the ICE vehicle drove away, she ran after it and kicked the side of it. She was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

These are the types of scenes that are increasingly playing out across the country, including some of the public pushback. You can see there there's a crowd that forms that is very concerned about what is happening, that is attempting to intervene. The police claim they were called in because this is their line since they can't be involved directly in immigration enforcement. They were called in for crowd control and that their actions were consistent with trying to get the crowd that had gathered there under control.

But, you know, there has been increasing pushback from the public on these draconian tactics that are being utilized, including against, you know, a teenage girl here who gets thrown to the ground. This is I was reading the local Massachusetts press. I think you pronounce it Worcester. Sorry, Massachusetts people, if I get that wrong. But in any case, there's a local up

roar about the way all of this went down. And we've seen in other towns where actually public protests led to the release of some other immigrants who had been arrested and detained, including a child who had been arrested from school and the principal and others pushed back and they were able to secure the at least temporary release. Some good news I did want to share with you, though, in light of the especially consistent with the news about Hassan here is

We've been tracking all of the students that have been arrested for their speech, their pro-Palestine speech. One of those is Ramesa Ozturk. We all watched the video of her getting snatched and kidnapped up off the street, her crime. The only thing that this administration has ever accused her of is...

is penning an op-ed for the student newspaper calling for divestment from anything associated with Israel. That's literally all that she's ever been accused of. She's never been accused of any crime, even of saying from the river to the sea, God forbid, none of that. Just

this op-ed in the student newspaper. She was arrested for that. The Trump administration shipped her down to Louisiana because they thought that the judges there would be harsher vis-a-vis immigrants and that they would have a better chance of being able to secure Ozturk's continued detention and eventual deportation for what is very clearly just on the grounds of speech.

They lost that battle to keep her in Louisiana. So that was a significant win for Rameza Ozturk. She gets transferred back to Vermont. They hear her case in Vermont. And ultimately, this has not been fully decided yet, but they did decide

while the case, the trial is pending. They did decide to release Rameza Ozturk. So she is now free for the moment while that case is pending. She spoke out about everything that's going on, including why she appreciates and respects this country, which I'm not sure that I would be big enough to say at this particular moment. But just take a listen to her comments upon her release. I will continue my case in the courts.

I came to the United States to pursue my graduate studies, learn and grow as a scholar, and also to contribute to the child development field with my teaching, research, and applied work. America is the greatest democracy in the world, and I believe in those values that we share. I have faith in the American system of justice.

This has been a very difficult time for me, for my community, for my community at TASS, at Turkey. But I am so grateful for all the support, kindness and care.

I was really struck there by, first of all, she says America is the greatest democracy in the world. I believe in those values that we shared, like the ability to hold on to that sentiment at this particular time when those democratic rights are

very much under assault and that she is bearing the brunt of that assault, I thought was pretty incredible. And also that even in this moment, when she's going through such a trying ordeal, she's still thinking about the other women that she saw and the pain and the anguish that they were suffering inside the immigration center. And I was actually talking to producer Mac before this segment. It really is incredible the people that they have made an example of

Every one of them appears to be just the most kind, big-hearted, like, incredible people that you can imagine, whether it's Mohsen Madawi, if you listen to what he has to say about the need for justice for everyone and human rights and dignity for all. Mahmoud Khalil, we can actually put—he just penned an op-ed. We can put this up on the screen. Remember, this is a guy who—he is still being held in detention.

He was denied the ability to be present for the birth of his firstborn child. And that's who he's writing to here. And again, all because he was just involved as a facilitator and a negotiator in the Columbia pro-Palestine protest.

He says to his newborn son, Dean,

Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life. Babies are born every day without their fathers, not because their fathers choose to leave, but because they are taken by war, by bombs, by prison cells, and by the cold machinery of occupation. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations."

And again, here he is still detained, still being held for the crime of participating in a protest and barred from being able to be there for the birth of his child.

and still is thinking not just about himself, but is thinking about the broader cause and those who he says are suffering even more greatly than he is and his wife, too, by the way, who is an American citizen. I mean, his child is an American citizen. His wife is an American citizen. And so while Mahmoud Khalil's rights are being denied here because of his speech,

So are those of his wife, of his American citizen wife is also having her life turned upside down because he dared to speak out against genocide being committed with our U.S. tax dollars in Gaza. So extraordinary individuals and deeply troubling times, you know, to go back to Hassan here.

I do wonder if the timing of this questioning and detention has to do with, you know, he was recently the subject of a New York Times profile, like his...

Hasan is huge, has a gigantic audience. I think he's the largest Twitch political streamer that is out there. But he's also had more and more sort of mainstream crossover lately, which has also raised his profile. And so I wonder if that's also part of what made him a target. Kudos to him for not buckling under the pressure and speaking out about everything that he experienced, because the goal here, like he said, is to create a climate of

And you cannot allow that to happen. You have to continue to speak out on issues of importance. And he also spoke about how having this large profile and having this level of national fame also gives him a sort of privilege. So very admirable that he's thinking about that under those circumstances and not buckling under the pressure.

All right, guys, that is the show for today. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and Tim Miller and David Sirota. Emily and Ryan are going to be in tomorrow for CounterPoints. Thank you also to all of the premium subscribers out there who have been supporting us and enabled our expansion to the Friday show. Super, super grateful for all of your support. And we're going to have some more big news for you guys coming soon. So stay tuned for that. And I'll see you soon. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.