Bill Kristol: People Should Be Mad
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I am here on a Tuesday with Editor-at-Large Bill Kristol. It feels unnatural. I know. It's good. I'm going to spend all day thinking today's Monday and missing appointments and going to the wrong places and stuff, and I'll blame you for having me.

I have to switch the normal Monday to Tuesday. When you get older, Tim, you get a little set in your ways. It's very hard to make these last-minute adjustments and audibles. Yeah, you have the same lunch every day. Right, 4.30 p.m. dinner. It's really great. Well, it's good to be with you. I'm sorry to disappoint the people who thought they had a break from Bill Kristol this week, but I need my dose of Bill every week, so we just moved it over to Tuesday. Yesterday's newsletter was about how

I always don't know how you judge this. You say we should be more alarmed. I don't know what your baseline alarm level is, but you think we should be more alarmed about what's happening in L.A. You wrote about Trump's usurpation proclamation, which is what you called it, which basically has three points. I'm going to try to summarize those and you can explain why you're even more alarmed than one might think. The first part was that

of the proclamation was that protests or act of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws and they constituted a form of rebellion against the authority of the government.

The second paragraph talks about Trump calling federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE. You note that that is only authorized when the United States is invaded or in danger of invasion by a foreign nation or where there's a rebellion. So that's why the rebellion and invasion terms are so critical here. And lastly, if the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular armed forces, we'll get into that in a minute. But

But talk about why this proclamation you felt was maybe even more ominous than people might realize. People

People were correctly alarmed about the deploying of the National Guard to the streets of LA and all the incendiary rhetoric that went with that on the heels of what had been an incendiary mass deportation effort focused in LA, including in Latino communities and going after people showing up for work, basically, to Home Depot parking lot to be assembled for their construction jobs or whatever. And the rhetoric by Trump, Hegseth, Noem has been

beyond irresponsible. But the actual proclamation, when I happen to read it, I just, well, it's only, it's very short. I think it's three paragraphs, is pretty striking. It never mentions California. It never mentions Los Angeles. It's not limited. And this is not true. I did look back for five minutes to most preceding proclamations that I could find of this type. It's not, we're deploying the National Guard. I authorized the deployment of the National, California National Guard in

in and around Los Angeles for no more than 60 days. It's no mention of any place. So this is an open-ended authorization for the Secretary of Defense, Pete Exeth, to use the National Guard and then also that one sentence that's added, regular duty military troops, which incidentally is very unclear, which is not related to the statute he cites. So who knows where that authorization comes from? I suppose they would say just Trump's Article II power under the Constitution. Anyway, the National Guard and active duty troops

at any time, in any place, in an open-ended way, when protests are happening. He doesn't specify that they have to be super serious or even, I think, violent. I don't know that that word's even, and or even that they have threat assessments that protests could be happening.

So I think people had slightly missed. This is three and a half years now. Trump's giving himself to tell like Seth, hey, send the National Guard here, send it there. Kristi Noem got a report that there could be big trouble in Wichita. Let's get a couple of thousand troops out there. That's why this is I think it's very important.

I'm worried that we won't be able to do it, but I'm very important to have huge pushback against Trump doing this. Once he gets away with this, let's assume the riots subside and the National Guard kind of leave the streets and it'll be weak. But once he's done it once, he can do it a second and third and fourth time. This is not a one-off proclamation. Yeah. I think you tie that to kind of just the historical context of doing this over the objection of Newsom, right? That was something that didn't occur to me just because I don't,

You don't think about stuff in this context, like a very unusual, you know, proclamations like this. But, but when I started to look into it, it's like, well, Selma, Alabama was the last time this happened, right? Where the president sent to the national guard against the objection of a, of a state governor, obviously we're kind of in an inverse type situation about, about who is, you know, acting in good faith in that scenario. And so to do something like,

That is this kind of extreme and unprecedented historically. It's only used during these civil rights protests with the segregationist governors in modern times. And to do so, like essentially willy nilly, whatever you think. I mean, obviously we talked about this yesterday. I've been talking about this, like you shouldn't throw rocks at cops.

At cop cars, some of these riots have, you know, there have been some ugly images. Of course, those folks should be arrested. But it's pretty minor, right? Like to do this in a pretty, like, this is not a mass mobilization protest right now. It's like two blocks in downtown LA. It's a couple of areas in the suburbs.

You know, I think just speaks to this point when you combine that, like just how quick the trigger finger was on this, so to speak, you know, to do so with the objection of the governor simultaneously with a proclamation that gives them an open-ended ability to do it at any time.

I think tells you a lot about what the plans are at any time and for any alleged possible protests that could be trouble, you know, no, it's a good, the civil rights thing is it's slightly annoying watching people. Sometimes they find one or two instances in the past where something sort of comparable, not entirely, but somewhat analogous has happened in this case.

Obviously, Eisenhower in 57, he did use the Insurrection Act to override Orville Faubus and send troops to Arkansas. And then Johnson and Selma in 65, maybe Kennedy in 62. But that was like the South was engaged in massive resistance to Brown v. Board and then to the Civil Rights Acts of 64 and 65. And they had murdered civil rights workers and activists and regular people.

people had been murdered, especially if they were black. You couldn't trust the police departments of some of these cities and towns. You couldn't trust Governor George Wallace and people like that to enforce the law of the land. So that's okay. Is Trump maintaining that's the case today? That because we have a lot of immigrants in the country, that there's sort of huge swaths of the country are

are in massive resistance to lawful authority. I guess that is what he's saying now that I say it. That's right. That's his line, right? That blue America welcoming all these immigrants, showing some resistance to mass deportation efforts by ICE. No resistance to normal, incidentally, very little resistance to normal enforcement of immigration laws. It's not like Biden didn't find people and deport them and adjust immigration things

But anyway, that is their claim. So, I mean, you do have to look at it all together, right? This is their attempt to create a crisis on the level of,

in reverse, in a sense, of the civil rights movement and its crisis, and then to justify authoritarian measures. I mean, again, to understand, you have to understand two things, both what he's doing with the military, of course, the National Guard and activity, but then also the mass deportation. I guess I've become a little more obsessed with that in the last week or two or three. How crazy that is and how much that is an incitement in a way that

Let's call it normal enforcement of tough anti-immigration laws that you and I might not like, you know, that enforcement or might not like those. That's just a whole different world from mass deportation. And having Steve Miller say, we're not getting enough. Here's another quota. How is that consistent with anything resembling the rule of law? Just really quick, because I want to get into the Miller thing next. I just want to dial in on one more thing on the troops.

Because again, in addition to the National Guard, like these Marines, like since we taped yesterday with Ta-Nehisi, like the military has been deployed. Like there was the exchange with Newsom where the San Francisco Chronicle writes a story and Newsom tweets out the picture of the troops like laying on the ground on each other because they don't actually have any place to sleep or there's no plan, no food or shelter for the troops that they've sent there. But

Anyway, Trump sends a bleat, all caps, bring in the troops, you know, showing how excited he is about that. You mentioned that in Morning Shots this morning. Heg Seth last night puts out a statement saying due to increased threats to federal law enforcement officers in federal buildings, approximately 700 active duty U.S. Marines from Camp Pendleton are being deployed. So, again, I...

There should be a law enforcement situation with the rioting, but it's pretty minor. Like the idea that they're using this to now say, okay, we sent in the National Guard, we had 500 troops, now we're increasing the number of Marines we need to send in, just shows how they're champing at the bit for this fight.

And then you have the letter from Nome to Hegseth that the Chronicle reported on yesterday requesting that the Pentagon give direction to DOD forces to detain, just as they would at any federal facility guarded by the military, lawbreakers under Title 18, until they can be arrested and processed or arrest them themselves. So, like, Nome basically saying to Hegseth,

formally requesting that the military do domestic law enforcement right which is separate from like again what you james langford and some of these quasi normal republicans on the sunday shows this weekend saying well you know the marines are just going to support it's like no it's very explicit like that gnome is requesting that they do domestic law like police law enforcement activities

Yeah, I mean, there's a legal reason based on this, I guess, OLC, Justice Department opinion from 71 or something, why they think it is okay under this law to send National Guard in, again, not necessarily active duty military, to defend federal, what is it, facilities and functions, I think. So that sort of limits it. They didn't want to run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which says you can't do law enforcement, you can't just become a police force.

The White House counsel remembered that when they wrote up Trump's Saturday night proclamation memorandum. Hex says people remind him to put it in his tweets. But that's not what they're doing. That's not why they're doing it. Trump's tweet that you quoted was send in the troops. It wasn't... That's not to like...

to make sure that some building isn't, there have been no buildings that have been overrun or close to it, but anyway, to defend a building or to defend, I don't know, an assemblage of ICE people or something like that. So that's their fake sort of argument. But Trump loves, of course, from both a performative point of view, kind of his childish, narcissistic point of view, but also from an authoritarian point of view, quote, sending in the troops. And suddenly, if you want to defend buildings, the Marines are like, that's not their role. It's really insane. He just, for me, the Marines thing is very big.

Not because I hope and pray that nothing happens with them. I don't think they're not big in the sense that they're going to go breaking skulls. Big in the sense that it just crosses another red line

And if he just gets away with it and it's just a little more than this, then we really are off to the races, right? Because then, you know, 700 Marines, two seven from from 29 bombs today and 4000 from Camp Leavenworth, you know, a month from now, if there's some more serious trouble or if they invent some serious trouble or if they cause serious trouble by having mass deportation raids. I mean, I don't want to get conspiratorial and I'm not really in this. I think it was sort of a one two punch that they made.

they like, but I don't know that they planned. But in a certain way, if you had in mind, you know, I kind of like to deploy troops here and test that and get beyond those red lines. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to have mass deportation, ICE raids in heavily Latino areas in and around Los Angeles, where we're not even pretending we're arresting criminals. We're just arresting people in a pretty rough way who are seeking a job or to say nothing of people going to courthouses to register and kids go to school.

Who knows what the motives were and who knows how much they thought things through. They clearly thought things through some. They were coordinating Homan and Miller and Noam and the Justice Department, so, and Pam Bondi and all that. But the one-two punch is very dangerous. I mean, if you sort of step back and read, what characterizes authoritarianism or democracies collapsing into authoritarianism? Usually demonizing of some subset of the population and legitimizing the use of military force at home.

I bet those two are on every list of five or seven or nine things to watch out for. And here they are both happening in real time.

What is the planning? What does that word mean? Right. Like, did they really intend that the Home Depot raid in L.A. was going to be like? No, you know, I don't think that they had plotted this all out and had thought about the 27. What is it? Twenty seven palms or twenty nine. Yeah. Twenty nine palms.

I don't know why it's called 29. I get there. There's some palm trees there, I believe, but I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It was going to be the one they're going to bring out. But the combination of no, we are going to up the raids on, uh,

nonviolent, non-criminal, undocumented immigrants, and that we are going to crack down aggressively if there's pushback against it. I mean, that is absolutely was their stated plan. And, you know, I think it just, you know, sprung up first in Los Angeles as far as the pushback is concerned. And you see this from, so I don't know if you have anything on that, but I was gonna go to the wall street journal story where they talk about this and Stephen Miller in a meeting and,

A couple weeks ago was saying to DHS and ICE officials that they're not arresting enough people, that they're not deporting enough people, that they need to go to Home Depots, they need to go to 7-Elevens, and they need to up the number of folks they're arresting. The whole Wall Street Journal story is pretty alarming. There's one section that really struck me just about this.

the militarization of ICE, right? It's not like the bringing in of the Marines, but the way that they're using federal law enforcement officials to go after extremely minor immigration offenses. In Coral Springs, Florida, eight agents in tactical gear, shields and rifles surrounded a home with guns raised to arrest a father with no criminal history. In Irvine, California, ICE agents drove a phalanx of military vehicles

into the Orange County suburb to arrest a person, not for illegal immigration. They were seeking a resident's son who had been allegedly posting flyers alerting neighbors to the presence of ICE agents. This is...

they want. This is the mass deportation element. This is not, oh, we're just going to go after criminals. We're going to go after people that got bad luck. You got a traffic violation and you happen to be undocumented and now we're looking at your papers and tough break. You're out of here, right? Whatever you think about all those kinds of policies. No, this is a proactive effort to go and sweep up people who are not doing anything illegally besides being present here.

And, you know, in the bulwark, Andrew Karaskios, he had a good conversation with him on Sunday. People should go check out. But he was talking to a source whose father had gotten rounded up at a garment factory in L.A. Right. So it wasn't it wasn't just like the Home Depot. Right. They were doing it all all over town, you know, going into workplaces and pulling out people, including this this woman's father who hadn't done anything, who had no arrest record.

who had been here for 27 years, working. Right. And I don't know that there were huge numbers of complaints about this in the localities or the city or county where this was happening, right? It wasn't like they were rushing to the rescue of beleaguered, you know, Los Angelinos. These people were working, so as one can tell, and paying taxes and

As you say, it's one thing if you catch someone for another crime and then use that to deport him. You can argue about whether the crime is serious or not and what rights he should have to contest the deportation and so forth. But this is a totally different level. I feel that I tried myself for not quite being as attentive to how destructive crime

The mass deportation stuff. I guess I knew it would be, but I couldn't quite believe they would really do it. But that's just my foolishness. You know, I wouldn't have believed that ICE agents would go around with masks. Incidentally, on the masks, which you and I both were slightly obsessed with.

Seems like the L.A. cops and the National Guard are confronting actual demonstrators who some of whom, you know, have are throwing rocks and being somewhat violent. So that's actually much tougher, if I could just say, than the typical situation these ICE agents are in when they go to a parking lot and seize people who are unsuspecting. They're not wearing masks. How come their families, you know, don't need protection? Right. I mean, no one. This is where the whole.

The intimidation side of ICE and really what's happened to ICE, unfortunately, as part of DHS under Nome, under directly under Miller, obviously, and Homan is really bad, actually. I mean, you see the spirit of it in the masking, I think, you know.

There was a local news story yesterday I saw come across, which is, this isn't surprising, JBL's been talking about this happening, which is a criminal went into some business pretending to be ICE, right? Masked in tactical gear, zip-tied a person, robbed them, assaulted them. And so you get this type of uncertainty, right, when people don't use normal law enforcement tactics. Yeah.

It is extremely alarming. I don't like, you know, as far as the ice tactics are concerned. And, you know, when you said that you, you know, maybe hadn't anticipated it'd be like this.

You hate to go to the Nazis. I know. You always have to pre-cave out that we're not sending people to concentration camps yet. I recognize this. But the parallel, I'm currently reading The Oppermans on the recommendation of Anne Applebaum. It's a story about a Jewish family in Germany. It's fiction, but it was written by a German at the time in the 1930s. I think it was published in 1934. And the main theme of it, I'm only about halfway through, but the main theme of the first half is that

Like the Jewish families didn't believe it was happening. Right. The main story is Jewish become a business owner. And it's like, okay, well, we're going to do a few things to protect ourselves, but they're not really coming for it. Right. And then all of a sudden it happens very fast. Right. And I do think that unfortunately, like just limiting it to that element of the experience is,

If you are in a family right now that has mixed immigration status, where you have some people that are undocumented and some people that are legal, I think probably the last two weeks has been a moment where they've started to realize, oh, shit, like I might have to really reconsider immigration.

where we live. Like, do we have to move? Do we have to change our behavior? You know, and I think that's a pretty gruesome, like, reality for people to come to realize if they have been kind of living here, working, raising a family, going to church, being part of the community, not breaking any laws, and now they realize they're being targeted. And I do think that that realization is starting to happen. And I think the Trump administration wants that.

Well, they want it, obviously. As you say, people have kids far away from school, and it's not so easy to just pick up your own. They've made lives here. But I haven't read the novel. I've heard of it, and I'm sure it sounds very interesting. But just to make the obvious point, 1934 was very different from 1933, and 1938 was very, very different from 1934. These things progress. Sometimes they stall out, you might say. Sometimes they get reversed, and Nixon, they get defeated. The authoritarian lose.

because there's a resistance from the courts or Congress or the public, but left alone, I guess the way I would put it, these authoritarian movements have a tendency to, I don't know what the right to say to self radicalize or to gain momentum to keep on going. And we're four and a half months in, you know, and we're already at the best deportation mobilization. If you were mobilizing the Marines, uh,

Four and a half months in for this, for this, he didn't wait for the really, you know, God forbid, but some really big terrorist attack or the, or natural disaster or, or real riots where I don't know, property is burned like the LA riots in 92 and 55 people are killed as I recall. So I'm not, God knows, I hope none of that happens. I'm just saying this is enough of a pretext already, not just call out the guard against the, over the objections of the governor, not just issue this proclamation, which is so open-ended, but to actually now call up,

So where we'll be a year from now, as you say, analogous to 33 versus 34, but I also come back to 34 wasn't 36 and 36 wasn't 38. And so from the country's point of view, in addition to those who were being targeted,

It's a scary moment, honestly. Do you remember the 92 LA riots and kind of like the decision making from inside the Bush White House at all? I do a little. I think it was a lot of legal talk about the right way to do it. I'd say ironically, Bush, if I'm not mistaken, used the Insurrection Act because he didn't think that this non-Insurrection Act law was strong enough. He was nervous. I think they weren't convinced about the legal argument that Trump is now making.

Everyone kind of agrees if you go all the way to the Insurrection Act, you can do what you need to do. But again, everyone wanted him to do it. Governor Wilson, I believe, at the time of California. But I think Senator Feinstein, I mean, the Democratic senators wanted it. There was no issue with the Democratic mayor of L.A. The city was burning. It was necessary to really – the LAPD was overwhelmed. But also remember the LAPD was kind of at issue, right, because the whole –

The riots were because of the acquittal of Los Angeles officers who had beaten up Rodney King. It made a lot of sense to say we've got to get some federal forces in there whom everyone can sort of trust to be fair brokers, as it were. I don't mean to impugn the LAPD, but still, that was the sentiment there.

And so anyway, there's a lot of this discussion, as I recall vaguely over 30 years ago. It was done in good faith. I bet if you look at Bush's statement, this I haven't done, it'd be worth doing, Bush's statement announcing it or Attorney General Bill Barr's statement. If you look at the statements made as they went through the next few days, and I guess it was weeks even,

the calls for peace and for, you know, the hope that this could be, we could restore order quickly and the expressions of good faith and, you know, wish to work together. I mean, night and day from today. So the people who are finding some sort of fake overlap or coincidence of the two, this is different. This really is unprecedented, actually. Nothing like what Bush did in 92 or like what, for that matter, Johnson did with Selma in 65.

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Just getting a little bit into some of the politics of this, which is obviously less important than the human impact. But, Chris, do you know him yesterday on TV? I just want to play one little clip of something she said. Well, they're not a city of immigrants. They're a city of criminals because she has protected them for so many years. And so we're coming in and doing what the president has said that he's going to do. Jim.

J.B.L. talks a lot about this, the kind of like imbalance between what Republicans are allowed to say and do and how Democrats are allowed to act. And the idea that Democrats would talk about some red state as, you know, a city of whatever, you know, derogatory word you can come up with and get away with it. It's hard to imagine. I think that they do.

see this as a political winner, right? They can just impugn LA, impugn all these cities and say they're full of criminals and whatever fentanyl and migrants and awful foreigners that hate America and not suffer consequences from it. TBD, I guess, but it's worth observing. No, it is. It's really true. From a normal political point of view,

I don't know. I mean, people visit LA, people have relatives in California. Maybe they don't want the whole city or state to be impugned in that way. You know, if even if the Olympics and the world cup in the next four years, isn't Trump going to go to the Trump likes that, right? He's going to go and revel in that. So how can you go to such a state? I mean, you know, and then there are people in Arizona who come from California and visit California and said, that's a swing state. So from a normal political calculus point of view, the part of politics you and I were somewhat involved in, Oh, that's a,

you don't do that. You say, I know most of the good citizens of California are horrified by all this violence that we certainly wish we didn't have to do this. But I will say I do one problem with coming out. I love your show, of course, coming out every week. But the fact that you do occasionally play clips of people like Kristi Noem, it kind of ruins my,

It kind of ruins my day. I'm sorry. I don't play Trump's voice. Even though it's only audio. I give you credit for the fact that it's mostly audio. Yeah, you don't want to see our new face. That's scary. I'm sorry. I don't play Trump's voice. The other voices we do have to hear on the podcast. It's okay. Just a couple of random political notes, odds and ends in my head around this. This is probably too focused on my Yimby obsession, but there was a video I saw of construction workers running from ICE.

outside a construction site in LA. In all these places where they're desperate to build, where this huge housing shortage costs so much money for people to rent there in LA, they said the fire since they need to rebuild. I don't know. It does seem like maybe there is some opportunity there when these guys have totally lost their eye on the ball of costs

what they were allegedly coming in to run on. And you see Newsom, I think, pushing back much more aggressively than really you've seen from any other governor besides Pritzker and that you've seen from him even over the last two days, full-throated, doing the media rounds, going right at them. I don't know. Anything on the political side of either of those things that strike you?

No, I mean, people should push back very hard. I make the points about housing and other things. It is very strange. Housing is just another, and we don't need, I suppose, another example of this. It'll be very brief, but a normal administration, even if it was committed to really, you know, a certain amount of deportation and strict immigration policies, would say, well, you know what, L.A.?

We shouldn't have gotten in the position where we need these undocumented immigrants to build all of our houses, to help build all of our houses. We are in that position. So we're going to pause the crackdown here. We'll go to other places which don't need the labor right now. And that's not even a thought. So I think they don't care about any of the other stuff.

why they think they can survive politically by not caring about the other stuff. I guess the answer is they sort of have so far and they have great faith in Trump's demagogic appeal. They have great faith, maybe excessive faith in how, you know, potent this issue is and just swamps everything else. I guess they think I'm a little doubtful, but like,

Again, he's the guy who won the presidency twice. So what do we know? And you can't argue they don't have a coherent vision. Correct. And on the one hand, they've got tariffs that, you know, you want to ensure that we are, you know, having factories here. We're screwing in the screws on iPhones, like Howard Lutnick said. We're going to run out the people that work in these factories.

And so, you know, they have a vision of America where there are American citizens working in the garment factories, screwing in the screws on the iPhone and intimidating anybody who is not from this country away from coming here to work those jobs. So that's a view. It doesn't really make sense appeal to me, but yeah.

They're pushing it. With a slight caveat that on tariffs, he backs off some when the markets don't like it. So there he understands it's a more normal, if you will. I mean, he has a stupid economic view. Sure. But he backs off as he wants a reasonably good stock market and he doesn't want it.

or a recession or whatever, and the people on Wall Street can have some influence on him. Not much or any real backing off on immigration. I do think that's very striking. And also with tariffs, it sort of kind of has to affect the whole country. You can't really... Whereas the thing about immigration, and this I really... I'm curious what you think of this. How much of this is about going after California? Yeah.

or immigration in California. We haven't really seen this nearly as much. There are an awful lot of immigrants. I mean, 350,000 Venezuelans were just made undocumented by Trump's idiotic retraction of their temporary protected status. What was that, about two weeks ago? I don't see a huge number of raids there in that red state or in Texas. So how much is this? And this is a JVL theme, and I've been a little dubious about this because it gives them a little more

I don't know, cleverness and mean spiritedness, I suppose, willingness to divide the country than maybe even I thought they had. But how much is this an anti-immigration, anti-blue state strategy as well?

I think it is definitely part of it that they want to demonize blue states and cities and they want to pick the fight with the blue cities and red states and blue states more broadly. You've seen a lot of raids in Massachusetts and Chicago and LA. I'll start to take these guys seriously when you see raids at Trump's golf courses because you know that there are some undocumented immigrants there. You've seen some in red states. I was looking at this this morning and I don't have a unified take on it yet, but you are like at some level,

I think the only weakness in that theory is that maybe the Trump administration wants that, but the red state governors and red state prosecutors, like they all got to put themselves up to, um,

You know, like they all have political aspirations. And they're going after typically just where immigrants end up. They're often going after blue areas in their states. So it has its own internal dynamic, which might override the say blue states distinction. But no, not a lot of farm raids. You'll know that they really are serious about it and that it's not just a political fight when Northwest Iowa and the pig factory, all of that, all those places start getting raided. Haven't seen haven't seen that quite yet.

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bulwark rules and restrictions may apply. I want to move on to something else. The RFK news. RFK on Monday dismissed an expert panel of vaccine advisors that had guided the federal government's vaccine recommendations. The entirety of the 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on the vaccine schedule and the required coverage of immunizations, will be retired and replaced with new members on

My senator, the illustrious Bill Cassidy, you remember he was vacillating back and forth on what to do about Kennedy. In announcing his decision to vote yes to confirm Kennedy, he said that the nominee had committed to him that he would maintain the advisory committee on immunization practices without changes. So another Republican senator getting cucked by the administration.

Andrew has a good piece on that in this morning's warning shots. And Jonathan Cohn's obviously been writing a lot about Kennedy's stewardship of the HHS, if that's the word. I assume they would confirm some of these other terrible nominees because they were Fox News people or they were

personally close to Trump or Republican governors like Noam or Republican AGs like Bondi. So Kennedy, I think it was the one guy that Mitch McConnell and Cassidy and people like that would stop. They care about these issues. Kennedy has no credentials on the right, no history on the right. I was wrong about that. Then I thought, okay, well, I guess Cassidy got these promises about him. Maybe Kennedy will just be a figurehead and go around giving idiotic speeches and he'll mostly let serious people kind of run the place.

with a little bit of interference. I was wrong about that too. I mean, he believes it all and he's doing it all.

And I guess Trump and the White House think it's fine for him to do this. That's another, well, that is, don't you think that's politically a little mysterious? Is there really a majority in this country for not having, you know, as good vaccine policies and production as possible? It also gets to the funding. It gets to the funding issues, obviously, with NIH as well. I find this part, honestly, just, I understand, I think, the power of the nativism. I detest it, but I understand it. I understand the authoritarianism, I think. I

This part, honestly, I can't even quite understand. I mean, what is their interest and why are people all worked up at destroying our medical and scientific establishments, you know? Well, I'm working theory on the vaccines. The cuts for the research is a little more, well, I guess it's a little, it's not mysterious. They're just, it's just part of their attack on elites and elite institutions. The vaccine thing is a little different. I think that like you, Trump and the people around Trump don't really understand MAHA.

I mean, Trump is not a maha person. He's not. He doesn't care about what's in his hamburger. He's a French fries guy. No, he's a McDonald's French fries guy. None of the people in the circle are, you know, maha people. And RFK kind of brings this.

mysterious to them group in of voters. And so they feel like they have to be responsive to it. Right. And, and so they're kind of like, okay. And they also don't care that much about all this, like go ahead and let RFK cook over here in his little silo. As long as he's not messing with the other silos, Trump said that several times, you know, they've all vaccinated their children.

They've all vaccinated their grandchildren, so they don't think that that's any meaningful threat to them. There is not an organized opposition to it that they care about, right? Like doctors, experts. These are not important constituencies in the Trump White House. And you have seen a little bit of pushback on some of RFK's efforts in the pesticide space because going back to the farmers, some of the red state, red parts of America are upset about that. And there was a, they're having a

I think some kind of summit later this month on this, on this topic where they're bringing in, you know, farmers and ag groups. And so, um,

As weird as it seems, like the vaccine thing is sort of the RFK pet issue that's part of Maha, that there isn't a constituency that these guys care about. They don't really understand it. And, you know, maybe things change if there's a bunch of dead kids, but a handful of dead kids from measles, I don't think is going to do anything to shake the conscious of the people inside the White House. So there you go. That's my unifying theory.

No, I like that. I think that's correct, actually. And one could work out a little, yeah, Big Ag is an interest group that Trump wants, basically, on his side. And maybe he thinks there is no such group, or the hospitals and the doctors are a little, they're not as well organized, maybe, I don't know. And he thinks that some of them are against him anyway. But, you know, one point that our friend Tom Johnson made to me, and I was making a similar conversation with him a few days ago, sort of saying a little bewilderment about why Trump puts, in a way, he's interested in this.

and he made a point that's a slight extension of what you were saying, which I'll test out on you, which is people like us,

fully understand the importance of these different overlapping but separate conspiracy groups, conspiracist things, one of which is Maha and obviously the whole food stuff and another QAnon. Why do they put up with QAnon? QAnon is nuts. No one believes it in Trump's White House. They probably look at it and kind of horrify if they are able to be horrified by anything. But you know what? It

It's kind of an important subgroup. Trump has always understood that you need to assemble all these subgroups. And the one thing that they kind of have in common

couple of things they have in common, the loathing of quote elites, even though a lot of them obviously are elite. And secondly, the love of conspiracies. You know, people have studied social media. The best way to recruit people for the 2020 election conspiracy, the big lie, was to find people who believed in other conspiracies. It wasn't actually to find necessarily ideological conservatives. And that's the Kennedy thing really brings that home, right? There were a lot of them on the left. Conspiracists like conspiracies. But

The degree to which the whole Trump movement, all of MAGA, is an assemblage of conspiracists and of conspiracy theories, which they don't always fit together perfectly. They can cut against each other a little bit even. But Trump sort of in some weird instinctive way understands that and doesn't want to alienate any of them.

So you've got the birthers and you've got the election deniers and you've got the, you know, when you think about it, these things are kind of orthogonal to each other. They're not really the same. But yeah, he's been very tolerant of conspiracies and more than tolerance. He said together, maybe you get to 51% of the population by just assembling a bunch of conspiracies.

conspiracists. That is, I think, very insightful by Tom Jocelyn. And I would just add to it that it also benefits them in the anti-establishment appeal. What is the appeal of, we talk about the Manosphere guys. I'm obsessed focusing on the guys who are not ideological.

The guy that Pete went on his podcast, Andrew Schultz, the guy from down here in Louisiana, Theo Vaughn. I've been listening to their podcast and these are not, they just aren't. They don't have deep ideological bearings. It's hard to grab onto what it is exactly they care about. What they think is that there is a group of

whatever, elite institutions that are failing people, that are out to get people. And for some of them, it's pharma. For some of them, it's the military. For some of them, it's whatever, you know, the federal police. And so if you are on the side of saying, okay, we're going to dismantle all this and we're going to uncover the truth, then that helps you.

you gain that group that's even a step out from the conspiracy group, right? Like they might not have a specific conspiracy that they care about. They just, they think that the system is rigged and that they want to be on the side of whoever's going to go after it.

That's very well said, or maybe to put it in a slightly similar way, is conspiracism is an important part of Trump's appeal and message. And Tulsi Gabbard, in a way, the conspiracies she believes that have nothing in common, in a way, with the ones Kennedy believes that which have nothing in common with the ones Trump himself has promulgated necessarily. And they've been on opposite sides of issues, therefore, not therefore for the last 10 years, obviously. But for Trump, a culture of conspiracism,

The stronger that is in the country, the better it is for him. And he does have an instinct that it's okay if it starts off on the left, the way Kennedy's and Gabbard's have. He can loop them all in. And so, and they're, I guess, maybe there are enough conspiracists and potential conspiracists floating around that you get a lot of votes that way and a lot of support that way and a lot of energy, I think, that way too. Well-

the necessary what would be recommendation resolution to this observation if it's true is that the democrats need a conspiracist of their own so we're not going to go there today but let's uh we'll just let that simmer in everybody's brain any thoughts in the military parade the no kings protests coming on sunday obviously we'll be talking about that a lot as the week goes on and end early next week but uh you'll be able to react to it next monday when you'll be back on your normal schedule but do you have any thoughts

I'm staying out of DC on Saturday. And, and I say that joke, you know, the traffic will be horrible and stuff, but also, I mean, wonder what the mood will be. I would say I've been in touch with some of the, and watch just a bit of a distance, the efforts of the protesters. No Kings, I think is kind of the, the, the, the umbrella term. They've been, they're really trying to be responsible. I give them credit. You know, everyone's supposed to buy American flag or buy,

They're giving them everyone American flags. It's supposed to really stressing if you look at their website, no violence, no provocation. And so the military is not their fault. They're being wrapped into this. And if you're demonstrating in another city, try not to cause trouble for the local authorities who are just managing the

you know, the demonstration. They put the main demonstration in Philadelphia against this because they didn't want to have it in D.C. because they didn't want to have a showdown and kind of excuse for Trump to do anything. And so I think, you know, for all that the left has obviously elements that are irresponsible, it's a huge country. How could it not? I got to say, as in that previous demonstration, what was that about two months ago now, which went very peacefully. I'm hopeful that's the case and I'm hopeful that they're big, those demonstrations.

And no kings is not a bad term to capture what's going on. I do think it's much more, don't you think it's more somehow potent or it seems more real? The notion that the military parade is distasteful, we already had that. But now with the deployment of the military across the country there in LA in real time, it does seem more urgent to make clear that this is part of a vision of America, militarized and personalized under Trump's command that we can't

should reject. I completely agree with everything you said. And I had the founders of that group, Indivisible, that umbrella group on a couple of weeks ago, Ezra and Leah. And I totally agree. Indivisible has done some stuff that is a little lefty for my taste, like getting involved in primaries and some of the stuff that activism that they've had on local issues is not stuff I would agree with or think was particularly strategically smart. But

But since the election, their stuff's been really good. And you have to acknowledge that and recognize that it's like when a lot of other people haven't stepped up, they were stepping up. And I agree with you absolutely on messaging and trying to be broad tent and the nature of what they're doing, I think is really important. So I'm going to be out there in New Orleans, as I've mentioned.

Leibovich has an Atlantic article today about Obama or maybe yesterday. The audacity of hope presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.

Got to love Leibovich. He's basically making the case that it's like, okay, I get that ex-presidents shouldn't typically have receded, but maybe this isn't the moment for that. Maybe the Democrats have this vacuum of communications ability. Maybe they pull in their best communicator to actually do something. Some of the pushback from the article, Eric Holder, a friend of Obama, said that they didn't want to regularize him and have it just be like Tuesdays with Barack, having him just be another podcaster competing with me on the charts.

I get that. I don't know. Cuts ball twice for me. What do you think? I don't know how much good Obama would do, but I agree with the spirit of the criticism, which is he's not so high in body. If he wants to, he should have a body. I mean, if he's, he's so important, if the country's at risk, maybe he could go to the trouble of doing a podcast, you know, for, for getting down to that level. I mean, we're going to the trouble of doing it, which we're enjoying, of course, but still we're not, I guess, quite at Obama's level, but I'm unsympathetic. I will say if we're going to criticize Obama, uh,

isn't there another president who's around now who really deployed the military abroad, really has affection for the military. Also, I think would be a good model of not misusing the military at home. And I think his name is George W. Bush. And I think maybe, Oh yeah. Remember him? He was president for like eight years. I think he's around. I think he would speak. I saw him at some SMU football games. He would speak at,

To some, I mean, I want to overstate it. It wouldn't speak to Trump supporters exactly, but there are probably some reluctant sort of Trump acquiescers and apologists who might still remember that they voted twice for Bush. I kind of think he and others like him.

could be doing a little bit more here. I agree. And I guess my main takeaway, I don't really care how often Obama talks that much. Here's what I do care about. And if the former president wants to come on the pod, he's always welcome. If somebody in his orbit wants to get my two cents and pass this along to him, I just would like to see him pissed.

I want to see people pissed. Like people should be mad. And I think that it contributes to the, to use Leibniz's word, lethargy, lethargy, however we're pronouncing that. It contributes to the kind of universal, universal,

limpness of the pushback the fact that a lot of the the most visible people don't seem to be that upset like they don't seem to be emotionally like enraged in a way that is called for given what we have seen over the first five and a half months and like that's the thing that upsets me and that is why i was giving gavin props yesterday like gavin seems actually pissed now

And my response to that is good. People should be pissed. There's a lot to be pissed about. Obama always had kind of a cool, you know, no drama Obama element to him. But like, this just isn't the moment for that. And there were times where you saw him get emotional and get and get upset and get angry and draw people in and draw people's attention to this and signal to people within with his own, you know, manner that this was something that really mattered. And I'd like to see that from him and and from everyone all.

Democratic leaders. It's my critique of a lot of Democratic leaders right now. And of course, of the Bushes and Republicans and all that. It's just the expectation is nil. And we haven't seen any Republicans, frankly, since the election. And that's

an ongoing shame and an ongoing disappointment. We have a New Jersey governor primary today. You want to make an official endorsement for any listeners just making a final decision who are desperate to know what Bill Kristol thinks they should do? You know, I have a huge clout there in New Jersey. I grew up on the west side looking at Jersey, of Manhattan, looking at New Jersey. So I'm sure they're waiting for me. I very much like and respect Mikey Sherrill, the

a congressman, Navy helicopter pilot who is running, very intelligent and sensible person. Others in the field are okay and fine, I think. I don't know them the way I know her personally, and so...

So I hear I'm here in Virginia. Abigail Spanberger is the Democratic nominee. And honestly, from the point of view, if you care about a vibrant and honest centrist, but also in this case, your just previous discussion, but also energetic Democratic Party. You know, if we could get Cheryl, Governor Cheryl in New Jersey and Governor Spanberger in Virginia beginning on January 1st.

I'd feel better about the future of the Democratic Party. Yeah, me too. The Focus Group podcast was super interesting on this. If people want some New Jersey primary day listening, I think the critique of Cheryl from some of those voters was similar to what I just talked for Joe Obama. Like a little more fire, a little more fighting energy against

Obama. I don't know. Mayor Steve Fulpop seems okay to me. Some of the other candidates are fine. I'm not the biggest Josh Gothheimer fan. Sorry if he's a listener. The rest of them, I'll seem fine. To me, it's an important race for this reason. And I do think that New Jersey...

should be taking this race very seriously because there's been a big backsliding towards Republicans in New Jersey. New Jersey was, I don't have it in front of me, but I believe New Jersey was closer than like Florida or Ohio or Iowa or some combination of them, right? Like the traditional swing states or former swing states. Well, the governor's race in 2021, the Republican who's going to be the nominee again, came within, I think, five points, right? So, yeah. I just pulled it up. I was right about all of them.

New Jersey was closer than all three of those former swing states. So that should be deeply alarming for Democrats thinking about how to reverse that. And I think it's going to be a competitive state. Virginia's going to move in the other direction. Not that Virginia residents shouldn't care about their governor's race, but just as far as the broader political impact.

And that New Jersey race is super important. So we will be monitoring it. I think that's it. Do you have any Texas redistricting thoughts? That's my only other note. These Republicans are trying to fuck around in Texas. And I guess the mid-decade redistricting is not the usual way that things go. But they're trying to figure out

how they can do anything to gerrymander some states they control to protect a few seats since the House is going to be in deep trouble. Or increase conceivably a couple seats in the House so they don't lose the House. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's just the fact that that's just routinely on the table now. It got onto the table a little bit, as I recall, in North Carolina and a couple other states in the last cycle, a couple cycles. But

A lot of the time it was because of lawsuits. But it was, yeah. It's been sort of a rule that now there's been a lot of gerrymandering every 10 years. Don't get me wrong. But, but yeah, the notion that let's just, you know, if we're going into a cycle where it could help us, we'll just change the, change the borders every two years. Yeah.

But it's of a piece, isn't it, with what we should expect in 26 and 28, which is a Trump administration and a totally compliant Republican Party that is not playing by the standard rules. And that doesn't mean that they literally will break laws. Maybe in this case, they can do it, quote, legally. But the notion of, you know, it goes beyond the strict rules and laws of free and fair elections, level playing field, let's call it, use that metaphor,

I don't know. We can't expect that, honestly. Indeed we can't. Thanks to Bill Kristol for doing a Tuesday edition. We lost Sly Stone yesterday. Funk, music legend, dead at 82.

Thank you for letting me be myself. You know any Sly Stone, Bill Kristol? It was big when I was younger. Yeah, Family Affair. I noticed that it was big. I didn't really personally know much about it. Ah, man. He was influential for me as a youth. So we'll take people out with some Sly Stone. Appreciate everybody. We'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullard Podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace.

Oh, can't you hear your mama callin'? I'm free. I'm strong. I'm alive. I'm free. I'm strong. I'm alive. Woo, woo. Ain't got a...

Oh, God!

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