S2 Ep1055: Bill Kristol: The Grotesqueness of It All
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Deploy your career in IT today. Learn more at mycomputercareer.edu slash CWP. SkillBridge and other VA benefits are available to those who qualify. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is June 2nd already somehow. It's summer of 2025 and June is when you get fascist hell and it's Monday. And so that is why I am here as usual with Bill Kristol. How are you doing, Bill?

Fine, Tim. How are you? I'm doing pretty darn well. We had just a wonderful week of events. It was great to see everybody last week in Nashville and Chicago. I was a little weary, but I got a day of rest yesterday, and so life is good. And we have some good news to start with for once. Russia experienced what's being called Russia's Pearl Harbor yesterday. A little brief on what happened, if people missed it. Ukraine launched an unprecedented drone strike deep inside Russia, targeting dozens of

strategic bombers at several different bases they launched 117 attack drones from trucks that had been covertly placed near russian air bases as far as siberia around 40 russian military planes were reportedly hit zolensky said 34 percent of russian strategic bombers were hit and they were supposed to have another uh in the so-called peace talks in istanbul today and zolensky had announced that like putin he's sending his flunkies this time as well so uh

a change in momentum, if you will, and what has happened there. I don't know what your reaction was and what you're hearing from folks. I mean, I was excited and pleased and awfully impressed by the military capabilities of the Ukrainians, but also not just military, but kind of intelligence and covert. You know, it's not, a lot of this was, I guess this was a year and a half long planned operation, getting the truck into place and all the coordination of it. It's really something

impressive and heartening. And, you know, generally, I was saying this to someone just over the weekend here in New York. I mean, I'm very worried about Ukraine. I wish we had an administration that supported it. Obviously, it's terrible and it's a disgrace that Trump isn't doing so. And yet, if you told me on January 20th, what it looked as if, you know, Trump was just going to go all in for Putin and there might other Europeans might not step up and there might be an actual kind of almost catastrophe of the front in Ukraine.

if you told me that we would be where we are now here on what is it june 2nd i would be a little surprised i mean pleasantly surprised right turns out they've been underestimated all along the ukrainians they continue to be underestimated

We are doing at least the intelligence cooperation. Still, there's some arms flowing. Europeans have stepped up more, but mostly the Ukrainians. I mean, all honor to the Ukrainians who are fighting this underdog fight with such courage and resiliency, but also intelligence and ability. Yeah, that was a funny David Frum tweet yesterday. I was like,

Pretty soon Europe's going to have to worry about whether they're going to get Ukrainian security guarantees. I guess they did this operation also without telling us, which is also interesting and noteworthy, given the fact that obviously a lot of what was needed in the first few years was like our support was required, particularly on the intelligence side. So I think that is also interesting.

Just a positive sign about their capabilities. Maria Avdeeva, who I follow, who does kind of security and war updates, gave a pretty astonishing sort of blow by blow of what they did. They kind of moved these mobile cabins into Russia and the drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins.

kind of a Trojan horse type situation. And then when the signal hit, all the roofs opened remotely all over Russia. And they took out these bombers that Russia can't build anymore. They're kind of old Cold War era bomber planes. And so obviously it has the implications as well because we've seen

the degree to which they've been pummeling Ukraine in the last week or two. I did a YouTube interview with my guy Kalen from Kiev last week. People can go check out just about the degree of their Russia's attack on Ukraine. So it has that positive development as part of it as well. If you want to put it in a broader context, I don't want to get into too much wishful thinking. I mean, God knows the Ukrainians are paying a horrible price and all of us will if Putin continues to sort of be able to

fight this war unmolested, except for direct Ukrainian counterattacks. We could certainly be doing so much more. But I mean, maybe it suggests that the forces of liberal democracy, the forces fighting against tyranny and against brutality and against invading one's neighbors, you know, can be reasonably strong, even if the U.S. sits it out, basically. I mean, I do think if the U.S. goes full in on the other side, that's just a terrible problem. But maybe there's enough

ambiguity in Trump's own mind, enough resistance from some of his administration, maybe from Congress, not to put too great hopes there either, but a little bit of a sense that he can't go all the way to Putin, you know, and Lindsey Graham has 80 co-sponsors for this resolution toughening sanctions on Russia. I mean, maybe the forces of liberal democracy and decency can at least hold their own despite

The fact that the U.S. is sort of absent from the playing field for the next four years. And that would be the hopeful, the hopeful big picture version of what Ukraine is accomplishing, right? I appreciate that you went there because I had some darker thoughts associated with it. But I agree there's something to what you said. It is pretty alarming to me about the implications for the future of war. Like I went from immediately being quite excited as I was, you know, deep diving on the various social media threads of military accounts that I follow.

about how cool this attack was.

On the other hand, all credit to Ukraine, of course, for plotting this and ingenuity, but it does take us into a whole new world where these kind of retrofitted Chinese drones can just pop over a target. And I don't know that we have, let's just say, the seriousness of leadership that might be required to combat that future. I don't know if you had any of those feelings as well. No, I mean...

I do. And I had my version of that was reading up a little bit, just a little on AI stuff this weekend, which is scary and provides some great opportunities as well, obviously, in medical research and other things, but has many scary activities, both in terms of war, but also in terms of surveillance and other anti-liberal measures here at home.

And, you know, with a serious administration that was, I don't know, center right or center left, honestly, I don't know if it would make much difference in this case, that sort of tried to grapple with this new technology in terms of regulations and what to encourage or what to discourage or where to try to create some barriers to China getting stuff and other places where it's foolish, you can't do it. Serious administration thinking seriously about this, we could be fine. We're pretty good at adapting to new technology and possibilities.

hopefully sort of taking some of the upsides and minimizing the downsides, but there will always be some downsides. Three and a half more years, more than three and a half, what is it? Three and two thirds, still more years of Trump and his people in there. Tulsi Gabbard running intelligence and Trump and Hegseth. And I mean, it's really risky. I mean, that's, I guess what people, I just don't feel like even people on our side are fully appreciated for,

where we could be at the end of 2028. If just, if they just continue on the path, they naturally kind of like to go on, which is both very dangerous and damaging to the country in many ways, but also just so foolish and short-sighted and stupid. One pays a price for that too, right?

Yeah, the tail risk is definitely something that I was talking about a lot last year to people. Not effectively enough, I guess. And also just kind of the potential for national suicide for no reason. But to this point about kind of the stupidity of the people that are supposed to be minding the store here, this is an NBC article.

Over the weekend, Tulsi Gabbard is exploring ways to revamp Trump's routine intelligence briefing in order to build his trust in the material and make it more aligned with how he likes to consume information. That's very delicately put by NBC. They go on, one idea that's been discussed is possibly creating a video version of the presidential daily brief that's made to look and feel like a Fox News broadcast.

There are five sources with direct knowledge of the discussions that provided this information to NBC, I think, which shows that there's some alarm on the inside about what kind of material is getting to Donald Trump. This was not in the NBC story, but a kind of a related news item was

was that maybe last year, folks don't remember, Mark Caputo wrote for us about Natalie Harp, the human printer, the printer that just prints out random shit for Trump. And I was reading an article about how Laura Loomer has been getting her info to Trump is that Natalie prints out her tweets and puts them on Trump's desk. He can't read the presidential daily brief because that's too long and there are big words, but he can read 280 characters from Laura Loomer.

So, I don't know how much there is to say about this, but in contrast to the Ukrainian ingenuity, Donald Trump needing a security briefing via Fox and Friends is a little alarming.

It's terrible. I mean, I gather since my day, the PDB, the presidential briefs and all the other intelligence documents, of course, incorporate video. That's not the issue. We incorporate video and book work, you know, as we're here, right? I mean, that's not, obviously, that's fine. It's the kind of dressing it up as a fake Fox News broadcast. That's the only way Trump will assimilate it. It's pretty, it's not great. We're going to have some characters from Fox News, we'll have some pundits.

Laura Ingram's like ambiguously gay sidekick, whatever that guy's name with the painted on hair. You know, you got to get him in there. Maybe Greg Gutfeld, you need a little bit of a comedic relief.

I think that's going to be important, that you have people playing roles. Remember when Tom Nichols got to be a character on Succession? He was a pundit on Succession. So you have one of those situations. You have a bad guy character, somebody for Trump to be like, oh, whatever that person says, I'm a no on that. They're a never-Trumper. I think I'm looking at that guy. I think you have a great future there. I don't know. Maybe you, Bill. Maybe me. Maybe I'm worse generation. Yeah.

We're going to negatively polarize Trump into making the right decision by putting a fake pundit on Fox that he doesn't like to tell him to do the other thing. We have to be careful what we say, right? I guess. All right. Well, you can at least laugh at it.

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You, on Sunday, the Crystal Sunday conversations, which I recommend, you had Jonathan Cohn, our colleague, on yesterday to talk about kind of a wide range of things in the health space and what's happening with HHS, what's happening on the Hill, with the Medicaid cuts. What struck you most from that convo? You know, beneath the goofiness of RFK and the people around RFK,

I mean, there's real damage being done both right now in terms of what vaccines are being recommended, in terms of the near and medium term future, in terms of the cuts to Medicaid which spill over into Medicare, into health care more broadly. And then really in terms of the medium and long term future, in terms of vaccine development, for example, it's like it's not just if you

don't approve this vaccine or don't approve that one for the right for certain people, or you send weird mixed signals on vaccines. Vaccine makers tend to then make some decisions, vaccine producers rather, you know, will make some decisions about what vaccines to produce. Will there be a steady market for them? Is the U.S. the right place to be the base for doing them? Maybe they should do more abroad. And then, of course, you put it together with all the craziness about the universities and the immigration stuff.

I was talking with someone about this last night who knows that world pretty well here in New York, actually. I mean, you have real damage being done to our future, I mean, to our medical future, to our future in innovation and technology, to our competitive future. Is there a single complex of policies, universities, immigration, RFK Jr. in charge of health, the Medicaid cuts, the healthcare cuts in general? Is there a stronger case of self-inflicted damage to

to the future of this country. And it's all unambiguous, incidentally. Like there's no downside to having the most professional treatment of vaccines possible and the best scientific and medical knowledge. There's no downside to having more and more people come and study here and participate in scientific and medical progress and also just medical, providing medical care for people.

You know, there's no downside to what we've been doing, honestly, with universities in terms of biomedical research and leading the world for 40, 50 years. Sometimes policy areas, as you well know, have tradeoffs and this kind of like, oh, it's a little bit of a tough call. And maybe we governments expanded too much here. So this is like one of the least ambiguous policy areas, broadly speaking.

I think, what could think of. And we're doing what we can to damage ourselves, I think. Even steelmanning their side, they don't even really present a downside. The only thing I can think of, and unfortunately, I follow an increasing number of MAHA accounts, so I feel like I know what their arguments are. There's the attack on the gain-of-function research that's happening in China, this idea that there's some risky type of research that led to...

you know, conceivably the lab leak of COVID. And so, but that's like a very narrow thing, right? That's like, who we look into, is there a very specific type of research that like maybe the risks outweigh the benefits, right? Like the university research here in America, like they haven't even presented anything like that. Like what, like the only, like the argument is essentially we don't like,

like how the university's handled campus protesters and so we're going to punish their research arm right like it's not as if there's like and i guess there's some argument maybe about waste like some of this stuff is being wasted but i mean that is just like the number is so tiny compared to the the budget um it's hard to take that seriously when they're

you know, going to just explode the deficit with their bill. So it's like, what does what Cohn and others say about that? No, I think he would agree. I mean, the conventional when I was in actually the George H. W. Bush White House, Vice President Quayle was in charge of something called the Competitiveness Council. One of the things we tried to do was speed up the approval of drugs to sort of make the whole NIH, CDC, FDA process, which is a complicated process,

but important, obviously. You want safe drugs and drugs that are effective, as promised, and so forth. But to speed that up and to streamline it a bit, I guess, that was a more traditional conservative approach

critique of big liberal bureaucracies or just big bureaucracy let's just say and it was a reasonable one at the time and i think we did a fair amount that's kind of a technocratic critique right like obama administration had an effort to do that same thing right right and people like us pointed out and i think people pointed this out both on the left and the right and this is very much of a case where you could have a centrist agenda going forward that would be quite you know healthy that you know

why is it that we suspend a lot of these regulations where we really have an emergency and want to produce drugs, whether for the pandemic or for AIDS? I mean, that's what suggests that you're not going to act like everything's a super emergency. And so you're going to have some more standard procedures, but maybe you do want to look at your standard procedures and make them a little friendlier to the new drugs, even if they're unusual or, or haven't, you know, been gone through 22 years of, you know, controlled trials and so forth. So that's all a reasonable debate to have. And if we had a healthy, uh,

politics we would have. But I guess I do, I don't know how much Biden may have done a lot of this behind the scenes. He had responsible people running, I think, these agencies. I do think it was, just as a political point, but I've just been sort of stewing over it recently. The Biden administration's failure to explain, even when it was doing probably some good things, to explain those good things

Yeah. Caused huge damage. It made it seem like the alternative was status quo, big government bureaucracy, no one in charge, no one reforming anything, or Trump.

Now, for all I know, Ashish Shah, who I know actually somewhat, who has been on some conversations with me and I think maybe on some stuff with you. And he was at Deed at Brown and then he went into the Biden administration to run the efforts against the pandemic. I've talked to him. He is in favor of reforming certain things, you know, and some of the most intelligent people in this area. And for all I know, he did, sadly. But the fact that I have to say for all I know,

I think, an indictment of the Biden administration and its communications people, but also the broader effort on the pro-Biden Democratic side over the last four years. The reform agenda just got lost in the kind of returning to normalcy agenda, which was a reasonable agenda, especially for the first little while. Was there anything specific I know that Cohn talked about or wrote for us about

about the cancellation of this bird flu vaccine and how that is like a very great risk. I don't know. Was there anything else specific or was there anything that struck you about that? So I think both the cancellation of that research and then also the kind of totally wobbly and inconsistent guidance last week on,

on COVID, on the COVID shot for pregnant women, yes or no. And that's dangerous, obviously, in some way. But the cancellation, just on that one, I think people, if they want to watch that discussion I had with Jonathan, would be very interesting. What was being funded was, in effect, Moderna, which was the key in developing mRNA, the pandemic, the COVID vaccine, is trying to set up a platform to use mRNA vaccines

I don't even understand this well enough to say the words right, but research or production, you know, for many other vaccines. And that's very promising just as in fact, they got a COVID vaccine much faster than they thought they might be able to get a lot of other vaccines that work much faster than one would have thought thanks to mRNA. And that's what we're doing. I wanted research. So he canceled the program that was, Kennedy could have still said, Hey, look, we're going to do this program so we can really see what we could do. Now we're not going to approve these drugs without extremely careful, uh,

these vaccines without extremely careful tests. And I don't think the tests have been careful enough in the past. And we're going to have twice as many tests and be super alert to all side effects, all the kind of Kennedy stuff, most of which is nonsense. But still, he could have done some of that, you know what I mean? And still gone ahead with this funding, this platform that, as I understand it, would provide for very fruitful research. At one point, Jonathan made is, you know, if we don't fund it, others will. And one of the others that will is China.

Do we want to be in a position in five or 10 years when there's a bird flu outbreak and there's very, very promising mRNA vaccines and China has them and we don't? We have to ask China, hey, could we have some of those vaccines? We're the ones with the shitty ones like Russia was in last time. Exactly. Right. Right. We were so...

You know, we're so used to being kind of number one in a way and getting treated well, as it were, by our allies and to some degree by the world, that we took it for granted that we would get the vaccines when they were developed in January of 2021. Right. A lot of them were not developed in the U.S. I mean, literally not produced in the U.S. A lot of them were produced in Europe for various reasons. That's the way the drug companies had facilities and so forth. But everyone understood, look, we were going to get a very good chance

chunk of them at first and other countries did too. And it seemed like it was distributed pretty fairly, but do we want to be in a position five or 10 years from now when a, our European allies of course, aren't very feeling terribly well disposed to us because we seem to be picking fights with them all the time. And they're thinking, you know what? I love, we love the people of the U S but we'll just make sure that every single person here in the EU gets the vaccines first. And especially do you want to be dependent on China? So I think that the kind of, again, the way in which we're just hurting ourselves for the future is,

totally pointlessly is what's striking. You know, I don't think I got to tell you about this game-changing product I use before a night out with drinks called Zbiotics Pre-Alcohol because in Chicago and Nashville at our events last week, several of you, several of our listeners came up and asked me if I was taking my pre-alcohol. And so the brand awareness has

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Jonathan Cohn's newsletter is so good, by the way. Go to thebullock.com and check out the breakdown. It's been a really important ad for us as he kind of digs deep into the policy stuff. He's particularly strong in the health area, but we've got a bunch of other policy things.

Somebody who's not that strong on health care policy is Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa. You like that transition? She taped a psychotic selfie video in a cemetery that mocked the people who were upset with her previous comment during a town hall that everyone's going to die, so we shouldn't worry that much about the Medicaid cuts. I want to play part of the audio of that selfie video for our listeners' audio pleasure. Made an incorrect assumption.

that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. So I apologize. And I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the Tooth Fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life,

I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Bill? Yeah, if you're in a hole, stop digging and all that. I guess not in her case. If you're in a cemetery, you can keep digging. You want to go six feet under. When I first saw, maybe it was your tweet, honestly, that said, oh my God, she's now doing an audio from a cemetery to kind of where she's kind of not really apologizing, but almost making fun of people who thought her earlier comments were a little insensitive. And she's like doubling down. I thought, well, it's kind of tasteless actually to make jokes about a cemetery. I mean, I assumed she was just done a

video from her office, you know, and someone was saying it's like from a cemetery. But in fact, it's literally, I guess it is, right? I mean, a cemetery. Yeah, no, she's walking through a cemetery, taping this video. And that's unbelievable. The tooth fairy, how does the tooth fairy come into this? It's confusing. I think what she's trying to say is that people, like grownups, understand that eventually they die and they understand that the tooth fairy is not real, but it doesn't, the metaphor doesn't really work, you know, because...

She was trying to say to people that they need to come to terms with something that does happen. And I guess she's trying to say that's similar to being aware about something that doesn't exist. It's pretty strange. It's quite strange. Pretty strange. Tooth Fairy is a nice little thing about teeth, not about death. I mean, it's a little weird. I was just discussing the Tooth Fairy the other day with one of our granddaughters, actually. Yeah, it's...

I am glad the tooth fairy is going strong here. I kind of would have thought this is an issue, right? The 21st, I know you would know, but I suppose like you think quarter way through the 21st century, I'm not saying this critically. I'm just sort of struck that maybe it's one of those things that would have been big in 1940 or 1970 and have evaporated by now, but it seems to be doing fine. Right. I find the tooth fairy deeply creepy as a quick aside.

what is this person doing? She's stealing children's teeth. She's bringing them to an imaginary land. She's building a home with the children's dirty teeth. I find it creepy. And I was against, I was going to be a no and, you know, take the joy and steal the joy from my child. But,

My husband wisely suggested that that was probably not right and we should just go along with the ruse for a while. And she likes it, right? Yes. They all love the tooth fairy. I think they don't overthink it the way we do. But then the final thing, I mean I don't want to get too earnest, but I don't know. Using this as an opportunity, I don't know. I guess who paid for this video, whether this was the taxpayers or her campaign. I don't know. Toot.

proselytize, if that's the right word, in favor of her particular Lord and Savior, is also a little bit, like once upon a time, actual sitting government officials thought they should keep their religious, they went to church fine, and they, like Biden, certainly is a good Catholic, and went to Mass a lot, and would occasionally talk about what it meant to him, obviously, his religion. I don't think he went around telling everyone else, you know what, if you want to really improve your life, you should become a

a member of the Roman Catholic Church. It's worse than that, actually, Bill. I appreciate that you're being gentle in that critique, but like, it would be inappropriate if you were doing a video that was something like, let's say it was about a culture of life in society and how you want to protect the unborn and then when they're

born, you want to make sure that they have the support that they need and the mothers do. Let's say you're doing a video about, if you're a democratic Christian, you're doing a video about how USAID should be funded. And as Christians, we should care about people throughout the world. And I'm a Christian. And again, at the very end, being like, you should join my faith would still be not in our tradition and a little inappropriate. But in this case...

She's using the Christianity as a shield for an effort to cut health care funding for poor people. Like, that's not a Christian. There's nothing that's like, oh, Jesus really wanted you to understand that we should let the poor die because they would be welcomed into the bosom of heaven afterwards. And so there's no sense for us to worry about the sick.

and the indigent. We shouldn't worry about them because you get eternal life with me. That was not the fucking message. I went to Catholic school. We didn't read as much of the Bible as the evangelicals did. They're more Bible-based than us, but I got the gist. And it wasn't like, let the poor sick people die because it doesn't matter because heaven exists. That's not actually the point of the faith. And it wasn't, let's make jokes about

to help poor people from being sick and possibly dying. But, you know, let's, it wasn't like those jokes are fine because we all believe in heaven anyway. So what does it matter? Yeah. It's very condescending. What she's really saying is of course, people like me and many of my donors and, and wealthy backers don't have to worry about this because it's Medicaid and we don't do that. We don't do, you know, we don't need Medicaid. I mean,

I mean, don't we think that subtext of this is a kind of creepy, we don't care that much about the people on Medicaid. Yeah. Well, and I think the subtext is you shouldn't listen to my critics because they're godless. Yeah. Like don't listen to them. They're godless. Don't listen to them.

Yeah, I guess my last comment on it is just the tone is also so condescending. Like, had Kamala Harris ever taped a video that had that level of sneering condescension? Honestly, Fox News would never stop talking about it. I mean, it would still be talked about into the 2080s. There would be an AI Fox host talking about Remember That Time. I mean, just think about the...

like Obama clinging to the guns and religion, which was like he was intending to provide an explanation for people, and he's doing so in a condescending manner.

She is sneering at the people that showed up to her town hall and mocking them. Honestly, it would just be wall to wall forever. And Democrats, and by the way, if it was a Democratic senator or Kamala or whoever that had done something like this, all of the Democratic media would be attacking her and saying, oh, we're so condescending. We need to have some self-reflection. I can't imagine that's what's happening on Fox today.

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This is just...

not really related, but it came across my feed today. Your friend, Peter Thiel, um, he had an interview. This is an old interview, but just, it was re-upped. Uh, he's talking about how he's trying to extend his lifespan. He's taking nicotine as a nootropic drug because it raises IQ. He's, he's got HGH pills to promote muscle mass. He's taking semaglutide, uh,

He's changed to a weekly injection of Monjaro. He's taking another drug that he thinks will have a significant effect in suppressing the cancer risk. I do think it's kind of weird that the Magas have created a coalition that extends from let people die because heaven awaits evangelicals to like atheist gay vampires trying to defeat the linear passage of time. It's a pretty broad coalition.

It's a pretty broad group. It is. And Peter, I mean, thinks, I think sometimes, used to think sometimes that he was a Catholic or had certainly his friend leaders or parts of Catholic thought. And so that's been a surprise to me, the extent to which they've,

knit together a coalition that, as you say, is full of, I mean, intellectually incoherent, to say the least. Again, Nietzschean strong man, you know, will to power and Christian, you know, sanctity. Those, I mean, whatever you think about either,

each serious people in each tradition knew that they were opposed to the other right serious christians were not really on board with nichinism and nicha was not on board with with earnest uh christian humility and and so forth and so i don't know it's a good lesson actually about political coalitions i think especially true and umberto echo makes his point this fantastic essay on fascism which i recommend you can google it uh and um people can google it and the um

Fascism or quasi-fascism is a funny combination of a lot of different emotions and psychological aspects. And they don't cohere. They cohere in their hatred of society.

i would say freedom and liberal democracy and some aspects of just modernity and all of that the bourgeois society that's what that's the coherence but the rest of it is is mishmash but it doesn't make it less powerful and that's a very important deal there's a lot of our friends and i fall into this trap sometimes too you know aha i pointed out an intellectual contradiction in trump world you know well that's not look it's not nothing it's important to point out and sometimes it shows the way to a political cleavage that can be exploited

which we should do more of. That's another discussion. But the aha intellectual contradiction point doesn't mean that they can't cheerfully go ahead and, you know, the Nietzscheans can try to send the dark-skinned immigrants away because they believe in race science. I mean, every element, they can come together in very bad and hateful policies, I guess you could say.

Yeah, well, and then the evangelicals can go along with it because of the belief in now Christian nationalism. I think part of the reason why it does go here is that most of the Christians have refashioned their Christian belief to eliminate some of the humility and some of the other elements that you mentioned. And another one of those topics is on immigration.

And we do this every week, but I don't want to lose it. I think it's important not to stop mentioning the horrors of what they're doing on immigration because otherwise people just begin to accept it. Just two snapshots from the weekend. In San Antonio, three migrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties.

The children, two boys and a girl, were between the ages of nine and 12. They were detained after an immigration judge had dismissed their case. The immigration judge had dismissed their case. ICE didn't know what to do with them. They were zip-tied. There's a reporter from San Antonio that's been covering it. They're eventually released. But again, what do we know?

What are we doing? In Boston, Marcelo Gomez, age 18. He's an honor student. He's going to a volleyball tournament ahead of his high school graduation, which was to have been yesterday. He spent his high school graduation...

in a cell with 30 other men. He was the youngest one there. He's not a criminal. They did not accuse him of any crimes. He was brought to America from Brazil at the age of five. And on the way to the volleyball tournament, ICE detained him. They chained his ankles and wrists and put him into the cell where, as far as I know, is when we're taping it here this morning, he's still there.

This is just madness. Like this is madness. It's inhumane. It's not keeping me safe. It's shameful. Like whatever you think about like what we should do with folks who are brought to this country. Yeah, horrible. And this is, I guess, so they can hit their quotas and it's easier to hit your quota of deportations or...

detentions, you know, I'd move to deportations. If you go hang out outside courthouses where people are actually showing up for legal, you know, been told to show up by ICE and are showing up per instructions from the authorities, then they have this gimmick. I don't know if they did this in the Texas case, but they dismissed the case. They asked actually the judge dismissed the case. But then if you're only been there two years, you can be deported in an expedited way. You're in a way you're, you don't have as many protections. Um,

And so it's the dismissal is actually a kind of fake way of letting them just seize you. Yeah, the Massachusetts case is horrifying. An 18 year old, you know, honors high school student who's been there since he's. There's a case also of a woman from the Philippines, I believe, and I think a nurse maybe who's been here for decades, like 40 years or 50 years or something, who was detained for three months by ICE. I mean, the degree of just idiotic cruelty. But also let's talk about use of resources.

My impression is the entire DHS and FBI are now – and a large chunk of other law enforcement agencies are focused on maybe including some FBI agents since they seem to show up at some of these detentions – are focused on immigration, but especially on the mass deportation. That's their agenda.

Yeah. You know, maybe they should focus a little more on individuals who are possible domestic terrorists. I know the Trump administration doesn't let you use the word domestic terrorist. Some can be native-born Americans. That was the case of the shooter here in D.C. less than two weeks ago who killed two Jews in front of the Jewish Museum in D.C. after a peaceful meeting there. And, of course, the weekend yesterday in Boulder, it was someone who had come from Egypt who

had been, I guess, had overstayed a tourist visa, then had gotten to work, had applied for asylum, so he got a work permit, that had expired. Maybe if they had more people looking at middle-aged single men whose work permit had expired and making sure those people aren't a threat and maybe, if appropriate, even deporting them back to their countries if they're safe or at least having an eye on them, that would be a better use of resources. So apart from the moral...

the grotesqueness of it all.

The misuse of resources of going after these students and nurses and people who have been here for decades, people who are manifestly no threat to anyone. And now we've got 350,000 Venezuelans, I'm going to just say off 98% of whom are no threat to anyone and are living in Florida and their neighbors would probably report them if they were a threat. And they're going to waste, apart from the, again, inhumaneness of it, waste resources going after them instead of focusing on

some people who should be focused on in terms of possible threats. Yeah. I mean, there's the opportunity cost side of the resources, right? To your point, particularly, I think it's very relevant to bring up, especially with this guy from Egypt, which I'm going to get into more in a second in Boulder. But there's also just the financial resources, right? I mean, Kristi Noem, this is like the kind of thing that

It would be a huge scandal in another administration that just gets lost. But DHS is spending way more than has been allocated. So we have the supposed fiscal responsibility. We're doing doge. We're doing government efficiency. Well, DHS keeps spending money. It's part of the deportations and other things that they're doing that have not been authorized by Congress.

And, and Christie, no one was in front of Congress. I think it was last week, maybe two weeks ago and was asked about this and is basically just like, whatever. I,

Like, we're just going to do what we want, right? And so they are overspending. It is going to be a boon for the private prison industry, which is, I guess, one of the prime domestic industries now under the Trump administration. But it's not fiscally efficient, right? Like, we're spending more than we had allocated to spend. And also, like, why are we doing this? Like, some of these people, a lot of times this is used as an excuse for deportations, right? Which is like, well...

you know, the cost of the healthcare services for undocumented immigrants is just too high and we can't afford to pay it. So we got to send them back. But in a lot of these cases, these are people that are working in the country that are paying taxes that are not on the government role that actually we're making money from them because they're paying into social security, but not taking it out because they're illegal. So we're taking people that are contributing to society and, you know, at some marginal number, like actually adding to the intake on the budget. And we're,

We're putting them in a prison where we have to monitor them 24-7, feed them, right? Like all the lawyers that you got to pay for to deal with all this, right? It's crazy. It's insane. Like what is the point of having an 18-year-old in prison? You're worried he's going to flee? You're trying to get him to flee back to Brazil. It's insane. And the budget reconciliation bill has tens of billions, maybe even over $100 billion in

for DHS basically for both prison capacity basically or detention capacity as well as for some immigration judges and so they can re-invite these things to move faster. Maybe the immigration judges isn't a bad idea. That's something I think the Biden administration may propose. But again, some of that money could be used to beef up counterintelligence at the FBI for example.

But Kash Patel is busy firing, so far as I can tell, everyone at the FBI who knows anything about this. And showing up to random immigration raids and just like kind of standing there in his costume. He's got these offices focusing more on immigration, not on counterterrorism. Those things could overlap at times, maybe as in Boulder. But again, in a normal administration, there are ways –

reallocate resources, obviously in light of changing conditions. I never know which cabinet member to get most outraged about, you know, Hexaf had his moment in the sun and that was pretty unbelievable with the signal thing. Uh,

then Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I can't believe this guy is in charge of HHS. And then I think about Kristi Noem for one minute, and I think, well, she's the worst. She wins that competition. I don't know. Rubio overseeing an international campaign of death, like taking away medicines from the world's poorest people, maybe, and while also jailing random students in this country because he doesn't like their opinion on the Gaza War. That's a pretty good nominee. Nutlick, also.

And Pam Bondi's got some really wonderful people there at Justice, doesn't he? That guy in Gracia. Oh, yeah. We're about to get to him. You're a good judge of these kinds of things. Who's the actual most repulsive and reprehensible cabinet secretary? I keep changing. So this is a good question. Repulsive and reprehensible is different from worst. We did this game at the Chicago show. And for worst, I said Nutlick just because he's so bad as compared to what another Department of Commerce secretary would be. He's creating so much damage.

But most reprehensible, I don't know how you can not pick Rubio. Maybe it's just because I expected more from him. But I mean, he has abandoned everything that he argued for in his 2016 campaign about his view of America's role in the world. And like the result is tens of thousands of deaths. There's a Nick Kristof column. Yeah.

this weekend about how Rubio accused him of lying about the deaths that are resulting from the cuts to USAID and PEPFAR. And Christoph's like, no, I'm not lying. Here's pictures of the people, of the kids that are now dead because they weren't getting their medicine. If they want to say America first, we can't be responsible for every kid in Africa who might have a disease.

And so we're cutting back on all this humanitarian stuff. It's not a pro it's not something I like. It's not something I don't think the American people would support because I think we're wealthy enough to run a USA ID program and PEPFAR, but it's not an intrinsically insane position. Obviously you can't do everything. And there are other things we don't do abroad in terms of humanitarian. So, okay, we're going to cut back on this. We've overdone it. We're, we're,

america first that's sort of and i'd say on health care too we can't you know it's just we can't have as big a medicaid program as has grown up over the last decade or two so we're going to cut back and we're sorry we're going to try to make sure that to limit the damage but that's not what they say they just lie no one is being hurt by usaid guts no one is being hurt by medicaid cuts

That's literally impossible. I mean – It's actually we're taking money away from these people that are scamming you, right? Like that's what they're saying. I mean, as I said, there's an honest conservative argument for doing less abroad and at home, for the government doing less. And they're scared to make even that argument though. And so it's all – yes, you say it's either we're just stopping fraud and abuse or –

or where um or there is no effect i mean so what's his name voss speaking of reprehensible characters the omv director goes on tv it just says there's no what did he say i think no one is going to be hurt by these medicaid cuts it's literally impossible the way they're saving money is by having some people not get coverage who are currently getting coverage

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I'm glad I got you riled up here before the end. All right. You don't have any thoughts on the Glenn Greenwald sex tape or on former Washington Post reporter Taylor O'Lantern's quasi-endorsing 9-11? I didn't even know about the second and the first. I'm kind of leaving. I'll leave to some of our colleagues here at the Bulwark. Okay. Don't leak people's sex tapes is my opinion on Glenn Greenwald. That's fucking rude. And 9-11 was bad.

What is this? What is this Taylor Lorenz? Yeah, she's that social media reporter that's kind of crazy. That's like still wearing an N95 mask everywhere, even like outside in the park now in 2025. And she was the person that was covering the social media beat for the Washington Post and other places. And she's gone crazy. And she did a post about how old people don't understand that young people have a different view on 9-11 and have come to understand that the terrorists had some points. Anyway, I don't know.

This is what's happening on TikTok right now, Bill. It's ugly out there. I mean, we do have 9-11 truthers, if I can just point out, who have welcomed at the White House, had dinner with Trump, probably in the administration, maybe not at the very top tier. I guess even Patel didn't quite go there. But certainly at the second and third tier, they've mingled with those people, right? For sure. So why are we surprised that, I mean, that this is all now respectable? We shouldn't be surprised. It's a great point. All right. Let's end with some anti-Semitism talk.

I've got kind of a rant about anti-Semitism and also kind of about how media, how we've been covering some of this stuff, particularly related to the Nazi salutes. So before I get into my rant, do you have any additional thoughts from what you shared earlier about what we saw in Boulder yesterday? I mean, anti-Semitism is an awful thing. And it really, it's just a terrible curse for Jews, obviously, but really for all of us. But it should be combated. But no, I want to hear your rant. Okay, here's my rant. You can react to it.

So there are very serious threats right now to antisemitism. It's like very obvious to Jewish folks listening and probably most folks listening. You know, it is across the ideological spectrum. You have a shirtless guy trying to globalize the intifada in Boulder yesterday, like lighting a Holocaust survivor on fire.

That's very serious and horrible. And like, we should be dealing with it. As you mentioned earlier, this guy, Paul Ingrassia, he's a supporter of Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes and other right-wing anti-Semites. He was named to lead the office of special counsel in the Trump administration.

Jews are being harassed at synagogues. We've got a wide range of threats that are coming from folks. When I see that, we want to make sure that we are covering it and that folks are aware and that – and I think it's particularly true for young folks. You look at polls of younger folks and what their views are of Israel, of anti-Semitism, of Jews broadly is like quite alarming.

And so like one thing I don't really love about people in our world is the comedic overemphasis on pointing and calling people Nazis in other contexts. And the thing I'm particularly thinking of right now is like the Elon Musk and ban and Nazi salute thing. I don't know if you saw this, but Cory Booker was over the weekend in California and he did the same thing. It was like he's putting his hand to his heart and then doing the hand like the wave and

I would recommend the politicians not do that, the hand over the heart and the wave. But as a result, like Elon is on Twitter this weekend, like gleefully mocking all the people who called him a Nazi by like comparing the...

The video of him and Cory Booker. And I just, I'm sorry to say that like you hate to hand it to Elon or anything, but he has a fucking point. And like on this podcast, like I tried really hard not to do that. And I think that there are a lot of news people like, like just straight news people who covered that.

and tried to do it to inform people and maybe did it in a way that didn't inform people that well. And there were a lot of resistance media people that were doing it in a way that they thought they were helping by being like, see, Elon's a Nazi, Elon's a Nazi. The thing is, these guys are doing actual terrible shit. There is...

SS style shit happening with some with ice targeting not Jews, but like targeting groups of people and sending them to foreign prisons like that's happening. It's a real thing that's happening, as we mentioned, like the cutting of USAID, like then Bill Gates's line about the richest man in the world being responsible for the deaths of the poorest people in the world. That's the thing to go after Elon on that is legitimate.

Like the hiring this guy into the administration who seems to be a legit Nazi sympathizer. Like that is a...

thing to criticize these guys about. And so I think that like when we do the silly stuff, it like undermines all of that. Right. And, and like, and people who think they're being helpful are actually like helping Elon now do propaganda and be like, see that you guys, you should just reject them anytime that they make the level this attack on us because they would never make that attack on Cory Booker when he did the same hand motion that I did. And

And so like, that's it. I just, sometimes I get people who are like, who want me to do more of that kind of stuff. I think that it is actually does harm to the cause. And I think that it, it creates an unseriousness about the threat of antisemitism when it's really serious. And this is not an argument that we should not fight and we should not try to fuck with the,

with these assholes when they're trying to fuck with other people. Like I'm for all that, but like, I just think that we should be smart about it and that we should give the fascist hell in a way that is helpful. And I just kind of ignored this when the Elon, uh, see Kyle thing was happening. Then retrospect, I feel like I should give Sarah Longwell credit. And I think it was Sarah that was like, I think that we should focus on other things. And I think that she was right about that.

that. So anyway, it's my global hot take on anti-Semitism. That's interesting and I think correct and a good reminder beyond anti-Semitism too. I mean, so just on Elon and the Nazi thing, I mean, he endorsed the AFD, the neo-Nazi party in Germany. That's

when he was a senior White House official. And in fact, the vice president, Vice President Vance did as well. And then Rubio had to, your favorite cabinet member, had to chime in and follow along. That's serious. Like the US government is endorsing a party that entire the European, Europe as a whole, not just Germany, and European conservatives as a whole have said repeatedly is beyond the pale and has obvious Nazi and extremist elements deeply embedded in it. Maybe you could even say at the heart of it.

so that's a real thing and as you say have giving these people jobs in the trump administration that's a real thing and the policies they're pursuing god knows immigration and others that's a real thing and to be fair you can say on the left there are some real things that are very depl you know very well that should be deplored i believe in terms of votes and and and policies they endorse and so forth uh but yes i think focusing on deeds and policies

is better than focusing on the symbolic. And just real shit. Yeah. Like also make him defend that just as a strategic matter. Like make Elon defend the fact that like, that this is this America first party doesn't care about what's happening around the world except for, Oh wait, no. The only times we do care is when we're endorsing the neo-Nazi party and in Germany and welcoming white Afrikaners to America. And besides that, we want to,

let everybody around the world die let make them defend that like make like elon was a sputtering mess trying to defend the bill gates attack on him in this uh this interview he did i think it was in cutter that i was watching like he was at some economic forum in the middle east and he's a sputtering mess trying to defend that it's like there's plenty of shit to attack them on and so criticize so do that right and then you don't have to get into this fucking situation where

Cory Booker's in Sacramento doing a thing and now they feel like they have a get out of jail free card now. It's not smart. It gets quick. I see why people do it. Everybody should maybe be a little bit more wise. Do you have any wise final words for us, Bill? The obvious one, the threat is real and

it's fine to make fun of these guys to some degree, obviously it is for sure. It's more fine. Even I would say, and this I think is where actually we're not doing enough. The liberals aren't doing enough in general, uh, for democracy forces to accept, to use politically, to use the gaps and the, the, the possible rifts to open up, uh,

cleavages among them that's just as a political matter a prudent thing a sensible thing to do our colleague joe perdicco had an interesting piece that musk criticized the big beautiful bill in congress the reconciliation bill democrats haven't really used that much

Now, Democratic officials don't want to quote Musk, and I kind of agree with them as a source, because then it sort of legitimizes him. But third, this is why we have third-party groups in existence to sort of say, hey, to say to MAGA types, especially to Musk-friendly MAGA types, hey, your guy Musk doesn't like this bill either. So you can do a lot of accentuating the cleavages. But yeah, simply the mocking...

it sort of reduces the seriousness of the situation, I think. Yeah, or mock when it merits it, right? Like rather than like mocking away that like let's say that otherwise you're just like a cog in this big fucking content game like where you're doing one thing and your people are cheering and then he's doing another thing calling your people stupid and his people are cheering like nobody's fucking achieving anything about any of that.

Anyway, the globalized Zendifada stuff is alarming. It's concerning and related but separate from this conversation about Elon. And so our thoughts got to the victims there. And just like the idea that one of the women that was targeted was a Holocaust survivor just –

It darkens the heart. It's pretty sad. So anyway, that is that. We're going to keep giving fascists hell here. It's Bill Crystal. We'll see you back here next Monday. We've got a good lineup this week, so stick around. We'll see you all then. Peace.

Oh, my.

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

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