Latest / Pod Save America / Empire State of Mind

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Empire State of Mind · Pod Save America

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• 1:20
  Speaker 4: Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
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  Speaker 1: I'm Jon Lovett.
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  Speaker 3: I'm Tommy Detour.
• 1:23
  Speaker 4: Welcome back, guys.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: Happy New Year, guys.
• 1:25
  Speaker 4: Happy New Year.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Great to be back.
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  Speaker 4: Welcome to you and welcome to our New compatriots in
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  Speaker 4: the southern colonies.
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  Speaker 3: In our vassal state. Yeah, who will soon.
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  Speaker 4: Have the honor of pumping crude to fund His Majesty's
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  Speaker 4: Palace renovations.
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  Speaker 3: Viceroy Miller's.
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  Speaker 1: A new Majesty's Palace renovation. Yeah, exactly.
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  Speaker 4: So yeah, we got a lot to cover today. We'll
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  Speaker 4: get into the latest with Venezuela and all the other
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  Speaker 4: countries that Trump now wants to invade. We'll also talk
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: about Tim Walz's decision to end his campaign for a
• 1:54
  Speaker 4: third term as governor. because of the fraud scandal that's
• 1:57
  Speaker 4: become the latest MAGA crusade. We'll get into what we've
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  Speaker 4: learned so far from the DOJ's release of the first
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: batch of the Epstein files and some other news you
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: may have missed over the holidays. And then Arizona Senator
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: Mark Kelly talks to Lovett about all the latest news,
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  Speaker 4: including Pete Hegseth's decision to cut his pension and demote
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  Speaker 4: him because of that video he made about following illegal orders.
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  Speaker 4: But let's start with the biggest story of the week.
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  Speaker 4: Donald Trump's campaign to become emperor of the Western Hemisphere,
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  Speaker 4: which follows a well-trodden path of authoritarians who respond to
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  Speaker 4: economic and political failures at home by pursuing imperialist ambitions abroad.
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  Speaker 4: Now we have it right here. Trump has chosen to
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  Speaker 4: start with Venezuela, where he ordered the military to capture
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  Speaker 4: the oil-rich country's tin-pot dictator, Nicolas Maduro, along with his wife,
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  Speaker 4: in a raid on Caracas last weekend. that has killed
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  Speaker 4: at least 80 people. The former first couple of Venezuela
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  Speaker 4: was brought to the U.S. and arraigned in a lower
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  Speaker 4: Manhattan courtroom on Monday, where they pleaded not guilty to
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  Speaker 4: various drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. And in case anyone
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: still thinks the people of Venezuela have been liberated from
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  Speaker 4: Maduro's brutal regime, the U.S. government has decided to leave
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  Speaker 4: that regime in place, which will now be led by
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  Speaker 4: Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who seems to have cut
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  Speaker 4: a deal with the Trump administration where She gets to
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  Speaker 4: stay in power as long as she gives American oil
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  Speaker 4: companies access to her country's vast but underdeveloped oil reserves.
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  Speaker 4: Realizing that the American people may have some questions about
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  Speaker 4: the wisdom of this novel arrangement and the motivation behind
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  Speaker 4: all this, the Trump administration sent Marco Rubio, one of
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  Speaker 4: the masterminds behind this operation, out on the Sunday shows
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  Speaker 4: to give some answers. And here's Marco giving it his
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  Speaker 4: best shot.
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  Speaker 1: Why wasn't congressional authorization necessary?
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  Speaker 5: It wasn't necessary because this is not an invasion. We
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  Speaker 5: didn't occupy a country. This was an arrest operation. This
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  Speaker 5: is a law enforcement operation that we have a quarantine
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  Speaker 5: on their oil. That means their economy will not be
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  Speaker 5: able to move forward until the conditions that are in
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  Speaker 5: the national interest of the United States and the interest
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  Speaker 5: of the Venezuelan people are met. And that's what we
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  Speaker 5: intend to do. So that leverage remains. That leverage is ongoing.
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  Speaker 5: We'll set the conditions so that we no longer have
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  Speaker 5: in our hemisphere a Venezuela that's the crossroads for many
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  Speaker 5: of our adversaries around the world, including Iran and Hezbollah.
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  Speaker 5: And as far as what our legal authority is on
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  Speaker 5: the quarantine, I'm very simple.
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  Speaker 2: We have court orders.
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  Speaker 5: I don't know, is a court not a legal authority?
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  Speaker 6: So is the United States running Venezuela right now?
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  Speaker 5: What we are running is the direction that this is
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  Speaker 5: going to move moving forward. And that is we have leverage.
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  Speaker 5: This leverage we are using and we intend to use.
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  Speaker 5: We started using already.
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  Speaker 4: So that's Marco Rubio kind of sort of answering.
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  Speaker 3: Who looks just comically exhausted. I feel for him. He's
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  Speaker 3: got like four jobs.
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  Speaker 1: He's got an archivist. South American viceroy. It's a lot
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  Speaker 1: of jobs.
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  Speaker 3: And then you see him at Mar-a-Lago doing like this
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  Speaker 3: to like a Vanilla Ice concert, just wanting to kill himself.
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  Speaker 4: And watching a football game. Did you see Katie Miller?
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  Speaker 4: Katie Miller has been just tweeting out a whole bunch
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  Speaker 4: of videos that I'm sure that her friends in the
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  Speaker 4: administration probably wouldn't like. There was also Kristi Noem and
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  Speaker 4: Stephen Miller dancing, I guess, to Vanilla Ice at Mar-a-Lago.
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  Speaker 3: Hell is having to hang out with that crew for punishment.
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  Speaker 4: So Rubio gives these carefully constructed non-answers and then Donald
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  Speaker 4: Trump just hours later, does the thing that he does
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  Speaker 4: where he removes the lipstick that one of his advisors
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  Speaker 4: just tried to put on some pig.
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  Speaker 3: Let's listen. Don't ask me.
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  Speaker 1: Who's in charge because I'll give you an answer and
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  Speaker 1: it'll be very contrary.
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  Speaker 6: What does that mean?
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  Speaker 3: We're in charge.
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  Speaker 4: Have you spoken with her?
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  Speaker 3: We're in charge.
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  Speaker 1: What do you need from Delcy Rodriguez? You've threatened Delcy.
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  Speaker 1: Total access. We need total access.
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  Speaker 3: We need access to the.
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  Speaker 1: Oil and to other things. In their country, we.
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  Speaker 6: Were prepared to do a second strike if we needed.
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  Speaker 6: We're totally prepared.
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  Speaker 4: But that's off the table.
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  Speaker 3: We're still prepared.
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  Speaker 4: That's off the table now.
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  Speaker 6: No, it's not.
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  Speaker 1: If they don't behave, we will do a second strike. Also,
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  Speaker 1: as you're watching that video, you watch the kind of
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  Speaker 1: flush slowly come across Lindsey Graham's face.
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  Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: She's never been more kind of psychosexually aroused by a president.
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  Speaker 1: It's just so, I cannot believe how horny I am for.
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  Speaker 3: What this guy is saying.
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  Speaker 7: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: Since Iraq, since 2003.
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  Speaker 6: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: Speaking of Iraq.
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  Speaker 1: Speaking of Iraq.
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  Speaker 4: He actually went to the bathroom right after that. Anyway,
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  Speaker 4: where to begin? Let's take Rubio's argument, which is clearly
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  Speaker 4: the argument the White House wants to make, that this
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  Speaker 4: whole thing is just about, as Rubio said, I think
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  Speaker 4: I'll meet the press, no more drug trafficking, no more
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  Speaker 4: Iran-Hezbollah presence in Venezuela, and no more using the country's
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  Speaker 4: oil to enrich America's adversaries like China.
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  Speaker 3: J.D.
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  Speaker 4: Vance also took a cut at a version of this
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  Speaker 4: argument on Twitter where he writes all his best stuff.
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  Speaker 4: claiming that we just can't let communists nationalize oil facilities
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  Speaker 4: that belong to American companies, which Venezuela did about a
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  Speaker 4: decade ago now. Tommy, what would you say to these arguments?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, Marco is trying to say it's just
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  Speaker 3: a simple law enforcement operation, one backed up by 150 warplanes, 15,000
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  Speaker 3: troops in the Caribbean, a couple of aircraft carriers. And
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  Speaker 3: his argument seems to be that all you need to
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  Speaker 3: invade a country is a simple indictment of its leader,
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  Speaker 3: and then you can just invade. That's his argument.
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  Speaker 4: Which is easier to get when you control the DOJ.
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  Speaker 3: When Pam Bondi works for you, it's easier. I think,
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  Speaker 3: I'll get to the drug stuff in a second. I
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  Speaker 3: think what this is about is Trump thinking that he
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  Speaker 3: is the king of the Western hemisphere and that he
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  Speaker 3: gets to dictate events in Venezuela. And in practice, that
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  Speaker 3: means if you don't like Maduro, you take him out,
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  Speaker 3: including the military force, and then you make Rubio and
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  Speaker 3: Stephen Miller the viceroys. It means that if you want
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  Speaker 3: Venezuela's natural resources, not only can you claim them for America,
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  Speaker 3: but you can decide that you deny China access to them.
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  Speaker 3: That is explicitly part of their national security strategy that
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  Speaker 3: they released last year. And it means that in other situations,
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  Speaker 3: Trump has used US diplomatic and economic power to prop
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  Speaker 3: up leaders he doesn't like in Latin America. Remember when
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  Speaker 3: he gave Javier Mille a $ 40 billion bank bailout in
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  Speaker 3: advance of an election there. So the fentanyl argument is bullshit.
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  Speaker 3: Fentanyl is made in Mexico with chemicals from China. It
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: is most fentanyl interdictions, according to the CBP, according to
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  Speaker 3: the government's website, is at the border crossings, cartels pay
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  Speaker 3: American citizens usually to smuggle it across the border in
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  Speaker 3: their cars. Venezuela is not a major producer of cocaine,
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  Speaker 3: but it's a transit point for like 10% of the
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  Speaker 3: world's cocaine. That's not nothing, but if you really cared
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  Speaker 3: about cocaine, you could take a big whack at the
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  Speaker 3: supply problem through enforcement in Colombia and Ecuador. Trump has
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  Speaker 3: said over and over again, and he said it there,
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  Speaker 3: that he wants Venezuela's oil. That is what this is about.
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  Speaker 3: He doesn't care about democracy, doesn't care about human rights,
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  Speaker 3: doesn't care about the 2024 election that was stolen by Maduro.
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  Speaker 3: He wants to decide who leads the country what oil
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  Speaker 3: companies get access in Venezuela, what banks get to finance those,
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  Speaker 3: you know, oil fields going forward in which of his
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  Speaker 3: cronies are going to get to play in that sandbox
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  Speaker 3: and the kickbacks that he will get along the way. So, um,
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  Speaker 3: you know, like we can do all the throat clearing
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  Speaker 3: we want about Maduro being a bad guy. It was
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  Speaker 3: admittedly an incredible military operation. The fact that they pulled
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  Speaker 3: this thing off without a single casualty, without a single
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  Speaker 3: aircraft going down is astounding, but sometimes removing a bad
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  Speaker 3: guy can lead to an even worse outcome. And so
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  Speaker 3: we're a long way from knowing how this is gonna go.
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  Speaker 4: Well, what was your reaction to this shit show?
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  Speaker 1: You know, when I saw the photo of Maduro on
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  Speaker 1: the plane in that sort of Nike athleisure, sort of
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: a shocking image in part, well, yeah, in part because
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: this administration has told us repeatedly how important it is
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  Speaker 1: to dress well for flights.
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  Speaker 3: Sean Tuffy would be pissed.
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  Speaker 1: And just like another example of the kind of hypocrisy
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: that we've been... Seeing, yeah, look.
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: Delta couldn't have brought a suit? The team, not the
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: Air Force.
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  Speaker 1: We're trying to elevate the flying experience. We all have
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: an obligation, including deposed heads of state, woken up in
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the middle of the night by the Delta Force, unable
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  Speaker 1: to get into their safe room. This is fucking, what's
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: happening is insane.
• 9:44
  Speaker 4: You're going to want a lighter door on that safe room.
• 9:46
  Speaker 4: You're going to want it to be user-friendly.
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  Speaker 1: You want it to open and close, you got to
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  Speaker 1: get it closed quick. You know what I mean? Yeah, look,
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  Speaker 1: it's all, it's insane. Like, uh, now we've had, uh, uh,
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  Speaker 1: administrations that have lawlessly toppled, uh, uh, South American, uh,
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  Speaker 1: and Latin American regimes in the past and then claim
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  Speaker 1: they did not need congressional approval. That's something the U
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  Speaker 1: S has done several times. One of our favorite things
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  Speaker 1: to do at the, like what makes this all so
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  Speaker 1: strange is it's done with the kind of mix of
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  Speaker 1: like neo-con logic kind of layered on top of it.
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  Speaker 1: But like underneath that is Donald Trump, whose motivations are egotistical, personal,
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  Speaker 1: kind of capricious, based on whoever spoke to him last, right? Like,
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  Speaker 1: let's say you take the best version of this that
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  Speaker 1: Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance would lay out. It would
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  Speaker 1: involve Donald Trump saying, we're not running Venezuela. The leaders
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  Speaker 1: are running Venezuela.
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  Speaker 2: Why?
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  Speaker 1: Because it's in the interest of his policy for that
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  Speaker 1: leader to seem strong at home. But he doesn't care
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  Speaker 1: about that. So this is like old school, old school
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  Speaker 1: American imperialism in the hemisphere run by a corrupt group
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: of clods and buffoons. And it would be dangerous if
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: it was the best and brightest that Republicans had to offer.
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  Speaker 1: They have failed when they have done this in the
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: past with their smartest guys. But that's not who's running this.
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  Speaker 1: It's Pete Hegseth. and Stephen Miller, and a bunch of
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  Speaker 1: fucking jokers. It's a small thing, but Pam Bondi put
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: out this statement after we found out that this was
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: all because it was a law enforcement operation. And she said,
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  Speaker 1: Maduro will face the wrath of the US justice system.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: there is no wrath at the US justice system. It's
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: actually not supposed to have wrath. It's supposed to have
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: justice because it's not a wrath system. It's a fucking
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: justice system. And what happens when you go to the
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: justice system is it's not up to you anymore. It's
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: up to the judge and the jury and the process, right?
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  Speaker 1: But like, they're so kind of unserious and immature and
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: not thoughtful about any of this.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, they're just honest about how they feel.
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  Speaker 1: For sure.
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  Speaker 4: The mask is very much off. They're not mincing words.
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  Speaker 4: Everyone remember the the no blood for oil signs from
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: the first Iraq war. And you'd be like, oh, you know,
• 12:02
  Speaker 4: I'm against this war, but those lefties saying it's blood.
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  Speaker 4: Now he's just like, oh no, it is blood for oil. Fortunately,
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  Speaker 4: we didn't spill any of our blood this time, but
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: you know, it's definitely for the oil.
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  Speaker 3: Venezuelan and Cuban blood for sure.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: And we were told it was, you know, Maduro is
• 12:14
  Speaker 4: this brutal dictator and we should be glad he's gone.
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: But it's like, well, as you said, there was a
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: legitimate winner of the 2024 election there. There's the opposition leader,
• 12:24
  Speaker 4: Maria Machado, who had just won the Nobel peace prize. Though,
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: I don't know if you guys saw in the Washington
• 12:28
  Speaker 4: Post that two sources close to the White House said
• 12:31
  Speaker 4: that even though she dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: Donald Trump, the fact that she didn't actually give it
• 12:39
  Speaker 4: to him really stung. And if she had, she'd be
• 12:43
  Speaker 4: the president of Venezuela right now.
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  Speaker 1: Just the fact that we live in a world where
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: that is a possible thing to say out loud. Or that,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: by the way, that there's somebody betting on the polymarkets.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: to make a couple hundred grand off the fact that
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Maduro is not going to be in power anymore. All
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: of this is so brazen and despicable and all the
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: intellectual layers on top of Donald Trump just being a
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: kind of careening maniac.
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  Speaker 4: And the hubris that none of this is ever going
• 13:12
  Speaker 4: to come back to bite us in the ass. We
• 13:15
  Speaker 4: are the strong ones. We are powerful. We have the
• 13:17
  Speaker 4: big military. And so we can do whatever the fuck
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: we want. and consequences be damned, and if I get
• 13:22
  Speaker 4: the short-term win and the good headlines and this episode
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: of The Trump Show ends well, then no problems. And
• 13:28
  Speaker 4: if there's a huge problem down the road, if there's
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: a terrorist attack or a war or a country that
• 13:34
  Speaker 4: falls into civil war and mass migration crisis, all this stuff, yeah,
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: someone else will deal with that. I don't have to
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: deal with that. One more point on the oil. Basically,
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: as soon as we learned about the operation, we started
• 13:44
  Speaker 4: reporting that American oil companies were getting ready to go
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: back in. And on Monday, their stocks were way up. Also,
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: Trump on that flight said that we just watched.
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: That someone else.
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: So did the oil companies, did you tip off the
• 13:57
  Speaker 4: oil companies about the operation? And he said, yeah.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it sounds like they got a better briefing than Congress,
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: including the gang of eight leaders.
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: Gave a heads up to the oil companies. Maybe that
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: was one of the traders that made that account. Who knows?
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  Speaker 3: Smart.
• 14:09
  Speaker 4: But there's been other reporting about how hard it would
• 14:11
  Speaker 4: actually be to rehabilitate Venezuela's oil infrastructure. Venezuela, of course,
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: does have the biggest oil reserves, I believe, in the world.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: There's some question about that, right? Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: Well, so this number you always see is 300 billion gallons,
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  Speaker 3: 17% of the world's known reserves. But there's some question
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: as to where that number came from.
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  Speaker 1: Maybe Hugo Chavez's ass is potentially one of the sources.
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  Speaker 1: And it's literally, there's a great example of just how
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: stupid everything is, because it's like, nobody seems to know
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  Speaker 1: where that number came from. And they're all kind of
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: basing all this stuff around it. But it may be
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: something that would just sort of inflated decades ago.
• 14:44
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: They have a lot of oil. We don't know if
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: it's the most, but they seemingly have a lot. Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: And so, but like now we're finding out that maybe
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: big oil isn't as enthusiastic about this or maybe they
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: don't because it's just going to cost so much money.
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: So I've heard competing views on this too. I think
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: the most honest answer is we just don't know yet
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: and we won't know for sure until, first of all,
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: oil companies need to get on the ground. They need
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: to see like, what do the fields look like? What
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: do the wells look like? What equipment needs to be upgraded?
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: They need to figure out what contracts have already been negotiated.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: Like the Chinese have contracts with Venezuela for a lot
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: of these oil fields. Are we going to negate those? Also,
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: like the political situation is going to matter a lot.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, so just on the investment side, the estimates
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: you see are this could take years. It could take
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: tens of billion dollars a year investment to really ramp
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: up oil flows. And that but. To get there, like
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: the oil companies are going to want legal certainty. They're
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: going to want licenses or sanctions relief or something to
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: ensure that.
• 15:34
  Speaker 4: I'm sure they'll get that from Donald Trump.
• 15:35
  Speaker 5: Well, yeah.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is where he'll probably like dole out
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: licenses one by one to companies that, you know, pay him.
• 15:41
  Speaker 4: Show up at the Oval and give him a peace price.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: Exactly. But they don't want that rolled back by either
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: the Venezuelan government or by Democrats if we take power, inshallah.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: They want political stability.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: And power.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: What is that? I don't know. I've read about it.
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: So the political stability part will be key, too, right?
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: Because that's clearly, I think, why Trump chose Delcy Rodriguez,
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: who is Maduro's VP, is now the acting president. She
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: is seen, first of all, as a competent administrator who
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: has done a better job overseeing the oil industry. And
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: then also installing her isn't a threat to the entire
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: patronage system that Chavez and then Maduro have built up, right?
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: You imagine if you install the opposition leader, that is
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: going to rile the powerful officials running the military or
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: the interior ministry who could be displeased. They might be
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: displeased anyway, but we'll find out.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Also, by the way, people that have been part of
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: a brutal crackdown on civil society, on dissent, there's murder,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: horrible sexual assaults.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: Like there's an.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Abusive and despicable regime that they are leaving in place.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: Yes. And are also corrupt. I mean, there are people
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: in that government facilitated with drug cartels, et cetera. But,
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: you know, there's other things that could go wrong. I mean,
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: there are remnants of these guerrilla groups on the border,
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: like the ELN or the FARC that could stage attacks
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: and like scare off oil companies. And the big question
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: I have is like, who's going to defend all this infrastructure?
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: Is it the US military? Is it Blackwater? Is it
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: the Venezuelan troops? Like, we don't know.
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: I mean, let's even take it a step further and
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: say that everything goes perfectly well and the oil companies
• 17:07
  Speaker 4: all get there and then they are just pumping away, right?
• 17:11
  Speaker 4: Hugo Chavez was right. And that's, it's the most oil
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: in the world.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: So, uh, that's what, that's what a very handsome man
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: whispers into Lindsey Graham's ear before hitting him.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: A whip. Oh my gosh.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Getting all the oil, Lindsey.
• 17:27
  Speaker 8: Smack.
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: Austin, you should be confused.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: I know, I know. Um, As soon as you said
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: pumping away, I knew it was coming. There we go again.
• 17:36
  Speaker 4: So it's like $ 100 billion to get this thing going.
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: You probably don't get oil until, I don't know, like
• 17:41
  Speaker 4: a decade maybe, years.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: Well, you might be able to increase production in like
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: a year or two. Right.
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: But like to really get the most out of it.
• 17:47
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: You could double it from 1 million barrels a day to,
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think the peak in the 70s was 3.5
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: million barrels a day.
• 17:54
  Speaker 4: For sure. But my point is the way that the
• 17:56
  Speaker 4: world oil market works is, is that there's a lot
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: of oil coming from a lot of places, including the
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: United States.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: It's global, yes.
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: And so maybe by 2030, your gas prices are a
• 18:06
  Speaker 4: penny or two cheaper. Because if all goes perfectly in Venezuela.
• 18:10
  Speaker 4: And it is very ironic to me that it's very
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: like old Trump brain that he is obsessed with taking
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: the oil, which of course he's been obsessed with taking
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: the oil forever. He used to say that about Iraq.
• 18:22
  Speaker 4: They should have taken the oil in Iraq. So he's
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: been obsessed for a while about taking it. He's like,
• 18:25
  Speaker 4: He has this obsession with the most important resource from
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: the last century at the same time, and China potentially
• 18:33
  Speaker 4: getting access to it, when we were just talking right
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: before the break of how he just lifted the export
• 18:38
  Speaker 4: ban on the AI chips that we sell to China,
• 18:41
  Speaker 4: that we're now going to sell to China, which is
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: the most important resource of the next century.
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: Got nothing for that, by the way.
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: Got nothing for that. That was for free, but we're
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: taking the oil, even as the rest of the world
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: is moving away from oil as an energy resource.
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: Good stuff.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: Just wanted to, we're all like, oh, but the oil,
• 18:56
  Speaker 4: is the oil going to be, is that going to
• 18:57
  Speaker 4: help us? Like, no, the oil's not going to help us.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Well, it could help a couple. It will, you know.
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: It will help some oil companies.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: It will help a privileged few make a ton of money, potentially.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Of course, that depends on a lot of people going along,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: including China and Russia and others who will have a
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: lot of, could have a lot of fun making trouble
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: for us down there.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Which, by the way, again, a nice part of our
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: history of countries having little proxy battles is, to slow
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: us down, terrific.
• 19:23
  Speaker 4: But you see a lot of the maggot chuds out
• 19:25
  Speaker 4: there being like, oh, you guys wanted him to focus
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: on affordability, affordability, now he's gonna bring down gas prices. Like,
• 19:31
  Speaker 4: this is not gonna bring down fucking gas prices unless
• 19:33
  Speaker 4: he's Donald Trump's president. It's just not.
• 19:44
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• 22:31
  Speaker 4: So maybe the most ominous news that came after the
• 22:33
  Speaker 4: Maduro raid is that Trump seems like maybe he wants
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: to conquer the entire Western Hemisphere.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Who doesn't?
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: Here he is again on Air Force One, musing about
• 22:42
  Speaker 4: other regimes he'd like to change and territories he'd like
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: to take.
• 22:47
  Speaker 6: Colombia is very sick, too.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Run by a sick man. who likes making cocaine and
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: selling it to the United States, and he's not going
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: to be doing it very long. Cuba is ready to fall.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: By the way, you have to do something with Mexico.
• 23:00
  Speaker 6: Mexico has to get their act together.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: the place. We need Greenland. The Don Roe Doctrine.
• 23:11
  Speaker 4: The Don Roe Doctrine, guys.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: The Don Roe Doctrine.
• 23:13
  Speaker 4: That's where we are now. The Don Roe Doctrine. What
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: a dumb fucking world we live in.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Really reminds me of.
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: He took it from the New York Post. Did you
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: see that?
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: No.
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: A year ago in January, they had a, I think
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: when he was first musing about Greenland, they had a
• 23:29
  Speaker 4: Don Roe Doctrine front page and he's trying to make
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: it happen ever since. And there, here it is. He's
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: got it now.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: Cool.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: It's a niche reference, but there's a movie called Ronin
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: starring Robert De Niro and Sean Bean. is in the
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: movie and he's sort of a gung-ho, but a little
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: too gung-ho, a little too into the fight. And it's
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: because he's not totally prepared for it and he gets
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: kind of exposed in it. But there's this moment when
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: he's like hopped up on the adrenaline of the fun
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: of the action. He's like, oh man, this is going great.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: And the action slows down and he has to puke
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: outside the car window. That's what that reminds me of.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: They're high right now.
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: Lindsey Graham was bouncing.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: You could see him. This is shock and awe. This
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: is the immediate aftermath of the U.S. military is able
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: to do what it is ordered to do, and they
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: are high on that. And let's see what happens next.
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: And so people know, because obviously Trump has had quite
• 24:17
  Speaker 4: a few gaggles on Air Force One where he just,
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: you know, shoots his mouth off and says something kind
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: of crazy that then the rest of the White House
• 24:25
  Speaker 4: and his advisors try to clean up. Like, you know,
• 24:28
  Speaker 4: the Trump team account tweeted out a picture of Trump
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: astride the Western hemisphere.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: Taking a shit on it.
• 24:36
  Speaker 8: Yes.
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: Stepping over. So with one foot and basically Greenland and
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: the other in South America and over it and caught
• 24:41
  Speaker 4: to saying the Donro doctrine. And then, uh, I think
• 24:44
  Speaker 4: just on Monday, the state department has just a picture
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: of him that it says like, this is our hemisphere.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: So I think there's something happening by the way, where
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: the social media people in each of these departments are
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: the kind of like biggest Trump freaks. And they spin,
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: they spin the whole media and left up. That's what
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: happens when the, that they're posting out of DHS. That's
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: what the state department posts, the white house posts.
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: And like, these are the people who excitedly read the,
• 25:06
  Speaker 4: I love Hitler group chat story in Politico.
• 25:08
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: The, the one that, the one that wasn't released that
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: they're in, but, but, but no, like, I think like
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: they are, they are there to spin everybody up and
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: they just don't see a cost to, to, to acting
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: like this and getting everybody worried. Cause I think they
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: can do their little reassurances to the serious people in
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the kind of deep within the article, the Susie Wiles
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: style articles where they can get into the deep of like,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: actually it's a smart people really running things carefully.
• 25:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and in case you're not like a meme person,
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: but you like sort of the rhetorical flourish of a
• 25:35
  Speaker 4: C-plus Santa Monica fascist, Stephen Miller, who apparently is going
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: to have a big role in governing Venezuela, perhaps? Viceroy
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: Stephen Miller?
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: He's finally got that class presidency he's been gunning for
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: for half a century.
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: He took to Twitter in an attempt to expand on
• 25:52
  Speaker 4: the thinking behind the Donro doctrine, where he argued that
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: the era of empires and colonialism, quote, built the modern world,
• 26:00
  Speaker 4: and then when it ended after World War II, the
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: West engaged in, quote, self-punishment by sending aid to its
• 26:06
  Speaker 4: former territories and opening its borders to immigrants, thereby betraying our, quote,
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: native citizenry. So do we have to make the argument
• 26:15
  Speaker 4: now that colonialism was actually bad?
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: You know, Stephen, you know who didn't love colonialism? The
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: founding fathers. Oh, okay. I might I might point you
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: towards a document once stolen by Nicolas Cage called the
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: Declaration of Independence that was specifically against it. I mean,
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: the biggest fact check for Steve there is he says
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: he says suggests that empires and colonies were dissolved out
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: of the goodness of their hearts. I think there was
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: some armed conflict in there that Stephen seems to be forgetting.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: And it is it is shocking that we do have
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: to argue that colonization was bad, but it seems like
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: we do.
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: The most prosperity this country has ever seen came immediately
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: after World War II and the decades after when we
• 27:00
  Speaker 4: welcomed immigrants into this country and had sort of like
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: built the greatest economy and the biggest middle class the
• 27:06
  Speaker 4: world had ever known. That's just some interesting history as well.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: Notable.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: It's not like everybody was walking around 1945 and being like,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: things are great. We got to keep this going. You know,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: we'd just been on the other side of the. greatest
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: conflict in the history of human civilization, and then what follows.
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: Which, who knows, maybe not the right side anymore, according
• 27:26
  Speaker 4: to the history books that Donald Trump wants to write.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Whatever reason this reminded me of, it was, you know,
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: those people were critical of Grant because they're like, he's
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: an alcoholic. Your general there is an alcoholic. And Lincoln,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: you know, apocryphally says, well, whatever he's drinking, send it
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: to my other generals. It's like, okay, you have a
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: problem with the way in which we welcomed immigrants from
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: 1945 to 2025. the greatest period of economic transformation in
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: the history of planet Earth, not just for the United States,
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: but for vast numbers of people all around the world.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: And by the way, not just for the richest people.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: If you look at the bottom 80%, talking about an
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: incredible improvement of.
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: Quality of life.
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: Neoliberalers, neoliberalers.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: That has never before been watched.
• 28:07
  Speaker 4: Lefties, clip this and get them. You're right, you're right.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Like air conditioning, decline in maternal mortality and infant mortality, wealth, cars. NAFTA.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: And so like, what are you talking about? It's so,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: it's such a pathological point of view and it points
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: to something so deeply broken about him in this worldview,
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: which is you care so much more about preventing people
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: you don't like from having anything that you'd be willing
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: to hurt the people you claim you're advocating for, which
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: are Americans. Because we built this system and benefited from
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: it tremendously. Problems, flaws. Of course. But the idea that
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: you're going to tear it all down and that's for
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: us and not just to hurt people that you don't
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: like for reasons that have to do with the color
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: of their skin or where they come from or who
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: was mean to you in high school, it's all so
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: perverse and obvious.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: It is just frightening that you would have to actually
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: argue with Stephen Miller that taking away someone's self-determination through
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: colonization is bad. Treating a race or a country as
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: inferior is bad. Extracting their resources is bad. I don't
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: I don't know that he would agree with me when
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: I said those things. And like the rest of the
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: world is taking this very seriously. Like the UN Security
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: Council met Monday about the United States. We were condemned
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: by a bunch of our allies at that meeting. Leaders
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: across Latin America, the Brazilians, the Colombians, Mexicans, especially leftist leaders,
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: they're holding emergency meetings about how to deal with the
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: threat from the United States. The prime minister of Denmark
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: has said she thinks the Greenland threat is a serious one.
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Like that conversation was kind of tinged with like, oh,
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: he's just, you know, Don being Don, he's trolling, whatever.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: Like you said, like the social media idiots were just
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: like having fun with it. No, I don't think so.
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: I think everyone in Panama is probably thinking, oh, that
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: all that Panama Canal talk, that was pretty serious. Like
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: We are still in the midst of a diplomatic and
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: economic rupture with Canada because Trump kept threatening to annex
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: their country. And like everything, what he just did in
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: Venezuela is terrifying people around the planet.
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: It's also, I think I remember, I can't remember if
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: this is the 2016 or 2020 campaign or whatever it was,
• 30:20
  Speaker 4: but there was like, oh, Trump's trying to take us
• 30:22
  Speaker 4: back to the 1950s. Remember that was the thing, you know,
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: either Hillary said it or Biden said it. I can't remember. But, um,
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: this is way beyond, this is way before that, where
• 30:30
  Speaker 4: this is like night, this is even like before 1900s, 1800s.
• 30:33
  Speaker 4: I mean, this is like, you know, the strong do
• 30:35
  Speaker 4: what they can, the weak suffer what they must. That,
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: that is the, that is the Trump Miller worldview. And
• 30:42
  Speaker 4: it's not, it's also seeding some power and influence to
• 30:46
  Speaker 4: China and Russia in this, like China gets to control Asia.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: Russia can, that's the question.
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: That's the question. Can Russia, does Russia control Europe? And
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: then we get the Western hemisphere, but it's like, So
• 30:56
  Speaker 4: it is not a world anymore of it's not a
• 30:59
  Speaker 4: rules based international order anymore. There is no international law.
• 31:03
  Speaker 4: It's just the strongest country, the strongest countries with the
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: most nukes get to divide up the world. And hopefully
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: then once the world is divvied up, Trump and Xi
• 31:14
  Speaker 4: and Putin, you know, can get along pretty well.
• 31:16
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: You're saying that this is our hemisphere and that's your
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: hemisphere is actually a much weaker position for the United States. Yeah, look,
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: you know, Vance says this in one of his various
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: defenses about it. Like, I don't think living in a
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: palace in Caracas should protect you from the law. I
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: don't think that lends you any special legitimacy. I actually
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: think there's some truth to that, right? Like, no, like
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: claiming you own a country, that you run a country,
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: even though you stole the election. Like, I actually don't
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: believe that makes you legitimate. I believe in democracy. I
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: believe in those things.
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: The question is what to do about that.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: The question is what to.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: Do about that. Justify killing 80 Venezuelans and 30 Cubans
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: on the ground.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Well, the reason you say that, you say, well, what
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: does lend legitimacy? And it's a legal order, a rules-based
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: order that we defend that has certain values and precepts
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: in which individuals with the most power don't get to decide.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: What happens?
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: Letting the opposition that was the rightful winners of the
• 32:03
  Speaker 4: election take power, that would be one.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Or even suggesting that you're doing it on their behalf,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: which of course they don't. And the reason that's important
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: is not just because it's right and just and all
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: the rest. And I actually find people saying like, oh,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: this is going to be permission for China to go
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: into Taiwan or Russia to do more in Ukraine. They've
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: already taken that permission because they don't believe in these rules.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: Well, I think it's different. I think for the Russians,
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: they have gotten every signal they ever could have wanted
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: that Ukraine can be theirs. At least 20% of it,
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: maybe more. The China piece is an open question, I think.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: I think Trump would trade away Taiwan for an economic deal.
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: We don't know that yet. It gets a little more
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: complicated when we're talking about the Senkaku Islands, like some
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: disputed territory between them and Japan, a treaty ally of ours.
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: What happens then?
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: But the point I'm making is, yes, I agree with that.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: My point is only that these are other places that
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: do believe in a power-based system. And perhaps the only
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: reason they're not going into Taiwan is because they're worried
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: about the consequences, but the deal we made and what
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: made our system attractive. And by the way, one argument
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: that the Soviets made and that our enemies made in
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: the Cold War was that our ideology was inherently expansionary
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: because freedom is expansionary and democracy is expansionary because we
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: believe it is something fundamental people deserve. And the deal
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: we offer, right, is you get to become part of
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: this order. And not only will you be protected by
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: our power, you'll be protected by these rules. These rules
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: will be good for you because you will be safe
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: inside of them. And when we attack that, we attack
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: the thing that allowed us to become not only like
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: this hegemon, but also incredibly wealthy because we built a
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: system in which you didn't need as many walls, which
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: meant you could have trade and you could have bridges
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: and all the rest that came along with the success
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: of America of half a century unprecedented in human history.
• 33:38
  Speaker 4: And I think that the aging of that system and
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: the failures of that system has now left people who
• 33:46
  Speaker 4: are in favor of that system making a lot of
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: arguments about like, but the rules, but the international order,
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: but the institutions, right? And this is the need for
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: a renewal of that argument because the arguments that start
• 33:59
  Speaker 4: crazy on their side become like their main open public arguments.
• 34:04
  Speaker 4: Like in the 2028 primary on the Republican side, if
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: there is one, like they're going to be making the
• 34:08
  Speaker 4: case that like, what's so bad about a world where
• 34:11
  Speaker 4: Russia and China and the United States split up the
• 34:14
  Speaker 4: world and there's, and they, and the strong countries make
• 34:17
  Speaker 4: sure that the weak countries don't cause any trouble and
• 34:19
  Speaker 4: everyone lives in peace. What's so bad about that? And like,
• 34:22
  Speaker 4: we're going to have to have an argument.
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: The other part of this, I was thinking about, I
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: don't know, Tom, if you remember this, but like for
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: whatever reason it came to mind, because maybe it was
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. I remember there was the Summit of
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: the Americas in 2022 and Biden decided not to invite
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba and And then there was
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: this revolt by Mexico and a few other countries, and
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: those leaders refused to come. And this summit that was
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: supposed to be about American leadership in the region became
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: a story about conflict and American weakness and Biden's fecklessness.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: And in the story, Kamala's on the phone begging the
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: head of Guatemala to come to the United States. And
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: it was just pathetic.
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: It was just pathetic.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: And I look at all this and I say, all right,
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: I am against... regime change wars. I am against this
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: kind of like empire. But what is the Democrat?
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: What is this?
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: What is like the policy that Democrats offer? What do
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: we say about what it means.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: For us to lead?
• 35:12
  Speaker 4: And not just. Democrats as in the Democratic Party, but
• 35:14
  Speaker 4: like pro-democracy forces, liberal democracies all over the country. Because,
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: I mean, you mentioned the UN too, and my mind
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: went to like, oh, is the UN going to write
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: some strongly worded letters? Because we have like, the UN
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: has become toothless at this point. Well, I mean, yeah,
• 35:26
  Speaker 4: were they going to censor us at the Security Council
• 35:28
  Speaker 4: or going to veto it, right?
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: It's like just silly.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: It's a bunch of people saying, illegal!
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, but it's bad. I mean, we like, you know,
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: every once in a while you look in the mirror
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: and I'm like, am I the baddie? And like, we're
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: pretty firmly there. And like, before people well actually mean, like,
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: I the Obama administration made a bunch of mistakes. And like,
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about this from the experience of watching the
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Libya operation and thinking it was launched with good intentions
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: to prevent Gaddafi's forces from massacring everyone in Eastern Libya.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: And then watching over the years as how it is unraveled.
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: It has led to a horrible security situation for people
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: in Libya, but also destabilize all of Northern Africa and
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: parts of the Middle East. I mean, like these are
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: these things, Once the toothpaste is out of the tube,
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: you have no idea what is going to happen. And
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: I think all the triumphalism on day one of a
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: regime change operation is so short-sighted and stupid and it
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: feels like a rock all over again. The oil is
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: going to pay for itself kind of bullshit arguments are
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: just like everywhere. And it's hard to watch this happen.
• 36:23
  Speaker 4: And all of that is true. And I completely agree
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: with you. I think there is a difference too, which
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: is a lot of times, debates over the use of
• 36:31
  Speaker 4: force and whether to get involved are like tough calls.
• 36:34
  Speaker 4: I think Libya was a difficult call. And I think
• 36:36
  Speaker 4: you're right. It turned out like a fucking disaster. But,
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: you know, Qaddafi was like in the process of massacring
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: his people. And, you know, so it was like, do
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: we stop it? Is that going to get worse if
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: we stop it? Or is it going to be worse
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: if we don't do anything?
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 36:47
  Speaker 4: And You can go through all the different interventions like that.
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: And some should have been easier calls than others, for sure.
• 36:53
  Speaker 4: But this one is like, oh, no, no, no, no.
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: We just want the oil.
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: There's no national security interest.
• 36:58
  Speaker 4: We just want the oil.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: The rationale changes every other day. Sometimes it's fentanyl. Sometimes
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: it's drugs. Sometimes it's Hezbollah.
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: Or now, which I hear Steve Bannon was like, I
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: don't fucking know what Rubio was talking about with Hezbollah.
• 37:09
  Speaker 4: He's off message there. We got to make it about the...
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: Because then now.
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: Bannon's full of shit on this, by the way. He
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: was opposed to this. And now he's like, oh, it
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: was masterful. Right, right.
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: But it is the oil thing, and now it's the
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: we want to control the Western Hemisphere. Now they're just
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: going for brokenness.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's the Donro doctrine. I mean, that was
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: in the national security strategy. So we all, in some sense,
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: should have seen this coming. I know we're going to
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: talk about the politics for Trump. I know you want
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: to talk about the polling there, too.
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: Let's do that. It's obviously too early to know how
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: all the politics are going to shake out, but early
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: clues in some polls. We love polls. A Reuters poll
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: out Monday found only 33% support for the operation and
• 37:44
  Speaker 4: 72% worried that the U.S. will become, quote, too involved
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: in Venezuela. The Washington Post conducted a poll by text
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: message of 1,000 Americans that was about evenly split on
• 37:52
  Speaker 4: the question of the U.S. sending the military to capture
• 37:55
  Speaker 4: Maduro with 42% opposed and 40% supportive, though more lopsided
• 38:00
  Speaker 4: on the question of whether Trump should have gotten authorization
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: from Congress, 63% said he should have, and Trump's plan
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: to take control of Venezuela and choose a new government,
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: which only 24% support. To me, that's like the key number.
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: You also have your Marjorie Taylor Greene's and Candace Owens's
• 38:17
  Speaker 4: and Thomas Massey's out there criticizing this, which is driving
• 38:21
  Speaker 4: a new round of, you know, is the MAGA base
• 38:24
  Speaker 4: dividing over this? What do you guys make of the
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: politics on this issue for Trump and for other Republicans?
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: And you can take it separately if you want. Is
• 38:31
  Speaker 4: this something that further divides MAGA or brings Republicans together?
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: So. I'm very worried about the political lesson that Trump
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: is going to take away from this operation and from
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: the Iran strikes, no matter what the polling eventually says,
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: because so far there has been no cost to him politically, right?
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: From like relatively limited military actions, at least in terms
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: of timeframe, like no US service members were killed. Congress
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: hasn't done shit about it. Most voters probably don't know
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: this is happening, right? Like most people just, it's crazy
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: it is to people who listen to this show or
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: just checked out. And so- Meanwhile, Trump himself is surrounded
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: by hardline anti-Maduro, anti-Cuba forces every time he's in Mar-a-Lago.
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: Bibi Netanyahu visits him like every other day, wherever he is.
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: And I fear that Trump is going to take these
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: military actions, love the wall-to-wall press coverage, love being told
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: how bold and daring he was and historic this action was,
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: and then decide that, you know what, I actually love intervention.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: I love like helping the Delta Force guys solve our problems.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: And that could mean, like he said earlier, like toppling
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: or doing something else to topple the Cuban government, maybe
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: does something to fuck around with Colombia. He's already threatening airstrikes.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: In Iran, if the Iranian regime cracks down on protesters,
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: we've talked about Greenland.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: He did airstrikes in Nigeria over the break.
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: Did airstrikes in Nigeria over the break, like for no reason.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: And so, you know, look, if these military actions are
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: limited to like one night of airstrikes and he walks away,
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: I honestly, I don't think there will be a MAGA revolt.
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: I think they'll mostly be fine with it, even though
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: he's basically adopted the Lindsey Graham foreign policy after years
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: of calling him like a bloodthirsty, lunatic, neocon warmonger. But
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: if this turns into this prolonged... occupation of Venezuela, I
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: think that will be a massive political problem. And that's
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: already showing up in the polling. 70% of people are like,
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: what do you mean run Venezuela? We don't want that.
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: You're right though. He's very, um, because he's a TV president.
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: I mean, he's, he said, he's like, oh, I was
• 40:28
  Speaker 4: watching the whole operation on TV. He does think he's
• 40:31
  Speaker 4: playing video games that, and so these interventions, because everyone's like, oh,
• 40:35
  Speaker 4: the hypocrisy of, you know, he, he said he was
• 40:38
  Speaker 4: going to be a peace president, but he's doing all
• 40:40
  Speaker 4: this war. Well, in his mind, probably, What he doesn't
• 40:43
  Speaker 4: like is quagmires, right? Where we're spending a lot of
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: money and we lose a whole bunch of American lives.
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: Or lose, period. Or lose, period. That's where Americans land
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: on wars. We don't like losing. We don't like looking humiliated.
• 40:55
  Speaker 4: And Donald Trump, the TV president who just watched politics
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: on TV, that is where he is. And so he
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: thinks to himself, now that he's got all his toys
• 41:03
  Speaker 4: because he's in the White House, well, I can bomb
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: this one and that one and fire this and, you know,
• 41:07
  Speaker 4: airstrike here and I look strong and it gets me
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: some good headlines. And then that's it. I mean, I
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: don't—when people say, oh, is he going to send in
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: American troops to Venezuela? Like, I can't see him— who knows?
• 41:18
  Speaker 4: Who knows what will happen? I hope this doesn't happen. But, like,
• 41:20
  Speaker 4: I can't see him sending in a huge ground force
• 41:22
  Speaker 4: in Venezuela. If things go bad there, I can see
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: him just being like, eh, let it— Why is he leaving?
• 41:27
  Speaker 4: I mean, he's leaving— Who cares? Let them deal with it.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: He's leaving the regime in place, in part because he
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: doesn't want to put troops on the ground. I think
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: he draws a hard line in his— between— I think military
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: interventions that include troops are very different to him than
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: just bombing or raids like this. I think he views
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: the raids, this is exciting and daring. And luckily nobody
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: was killed on the American side. So it looks like
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: a perfect success to him. And air raid, you know, he, Soleimani,
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: the most recent strikes in Iran, like he'll keep doing that. Yeah,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: I think the question is what happens if this doesn't
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: go as planned and all of a sudden there's chaos
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: in the streets. And the only way you can get
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: what you claimed you were getting is with troops.
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: What happens there? And I agree with you.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I think he is extremely reluctant. to deploy American troops.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: That is the big question. What happens if Delcy Rodriguez,
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: the acting president, says, fuck you, and doesn't let Exxon
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: get access to the oil field Donald Trump wants? He
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: said the stakes for her could be even worse than Maduro.
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: Was he threatening to kill her? Because that's sure what
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: it sounded like to me. What if there's some rogue
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: general in the Venezuelan military who stages a coup, like
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: Polta Chavez? Are we going to reintervene then to disrupt that?
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: What if the FARC or the ELN or one of
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: these groups just does a bunch of things to make
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: political instability. So there's just, you know, it's chaos down there.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: There's more migration, like things get worse. There's just so
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: many ways they could break badly.
• 42:40
  Speaker 4: If I'm Trump and that happens, I send in another
• 42:42
  Speaker 4: round of airstrikes and then say, let them deal with it,
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: screw it. And then the migration problem that you're talking
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: about is real, but it happens, you know, then he
• 42:50
  Speaker 4: closes the borders and he gets tough on migrants, right?
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: I even like, God forbid that there is some kind
• 42:56
  Speaker 4: of a terrorist attack, either here or abroad against Americans
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: and American interests. Even then, he's going to be like, well,
• 43:03
  Speaker 4: that's not my fault. That's the fault of these foreigners.
• 43:06
  Speaker 4: That's why we got to bomb them more.
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: I mean, this is what happens.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: But like most of it, like something like 8 million
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: Venezuelans have left the country. I mean, Hugo Chavez and
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: Maduro ran the country into the ground. I think their
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: GDP was cut by like 75%. People were impoverished. They
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: went from the richest country to impoverished. Most of the
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: people who left Venezuela, though, went to Colombia or Ecuador
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: or Panama or Brazil or other countries in the region. Like,
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: if more people flow out of Venezuela, it's going to
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: further destabilize the entire, all of South America and reverberate
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: in ways that we just can't see right now. In
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: the same way, like we didn't see in the early
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: days of the Syrian civil war, the way it would
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: lead to like the rise of right-wing neo-Nazi parties in Germany,
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: you know, a decade later.
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: So yeah, that happens. And suddenly the Donro doctrine ends
• 43:51
  Speaker 4: at the Southern border. I meant the quadrant. So Democrats,
• 43:58
  Speaker 4: unsurprisingly have been roundly critical of this, but obviously, because
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: it's the Democratic Party, there's some drama. Axios had a
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: story about some Democrats having misgivings about this whole thing.
• 44:09
  Speaker 4: They quoted three centrist and or vulnerable House members, anonymously.
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: Of course. Emotionally vulnerable, yeah.
• 44:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, emotionally vulnerable, and they courageously went on background here.
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: One of them said to Axios, quote, I think it
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: looks weak. If you don't acknowledge when there is a
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: win for our country, then you lose all credibility. Another said, quote,
• 44:28
  Speaker 4: as Democrats, we can't just condemn what happened. And then another,
• 44:32
  Speaker 4: the third one said, Maduro is bad. Glad he is gone.
• 44:35
  Speaker 4: You can't have it both ways. Anyone want to respond
• 44:39
  Speaker 4: to the to the centrist House Democrats?
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: Not really.
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, I just think like there is no doubt
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: that Maduro is a bad guy.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: He's corrupt.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: He stole elections. He locked up the opposition.
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: There's no doubt the U.S. military is the most dominant
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: fighting force in the world. They will win every battle
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: we put them up against. But what I'd say to
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: this House Democrat is like, you have no idea if
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: this was a win for our country. No one does.
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: We can't tell the future. It felt like a win
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: when Saddam Hussein was found in a spider hole. How'd
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: that turn out? It felt like a win when Gaddafi
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: was toppled. How did that turn out? Again, Trump has
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: said we want to run the country of Venezuela going forward.
• 45:16
  Speaker 4: To take their oil and left the regime in place
• 45:20
  Speaker 4: of the guy he just replaced. If you can't look
• 45:23
  Speaker 4: at that and say what Seth Moulton said, which was
• 45:25
  Speaker 4: this is This is crazy.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: Seth Moulton was great.
• 45:26
  Speaker 4: He said, this is insane. What the hell are we doing?
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 45:29
  Speaker 4: That to me, that should be everyone's. Ruben Gallego was
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: out there. He was excellent.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: Cory Booker had a good statement.
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: What did you guys think of the other Democrats who
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: were out there from the statements you've seen?
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: I thought the Cory Booker statement, I think, stood out
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: if only because it put it in the broader context
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: of what got us to this moment, which is a
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: completely slovenly and pathetic Republican Congress that is not been
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: willing to assert its constitutional authority in any way at
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: any time, right? That Donald Trump couldn't even do the
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: courtesy of the briefing, the leaders of the Intelligence Committee
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: and the leaders of Congress the way you would about
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: a covert operation they're claiming because those people would leak. Meanwhile,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: he's telling us he told the oil companies in advance,
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: or at least they may have known it was coming.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Although I think that's probably him just, who knows what
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: he fucking means. But regardless, like, The reason we are
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: in a situation where Donald Trump feels so emboldened is
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: because he knows that he will face no accountability from
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: Republicans in Congress. And so I do think when people
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: go out there and say like, this was illegal, this
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: was illegal, it sounds pretty feckless and silly because to who?
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: And to what end? And so what? And at least
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: pointing out like there is a world in which we
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: have a Congress that's willing to hold an administration accountable
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: is a world in which doing illegal things could have consequences.
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Unilaterally launching a regime change war is a bad idea.
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: We know this from a lot of pretty recent history,
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: and I don't think we should be scared to make
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: that case. I also think like the key on these
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: statements is to make it bigger. Like Seth Moulton was great.
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: Like this is insane. Mark Warner made strong points about
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: China and Russia. He talked about the hypocrisy of pardoning
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: Juan Orlando Hernandez, the actual narco kingpin from Honduras that
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: Trump just gave a pardon to. Tim Kaine was good.
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: Thomas Mastey was strong. But like, again, go big. Like
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: this is not about whether Maduro was a good guy
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: or a bad guy. There are a lot of bad
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: leaders in the world. We are not going to depose
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: them all. I thought we'd agreed that we don't want
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: to be America's policeman. And then you start to wonder, okay,
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: how are we picking and choosing? Why aren't you deposing
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: Kim Jong-un? Well, it's because of Trump getting love letters
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: from him, but also because he has nukes, right? So
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: if we want every country that is scared of us
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: to suddenly race to get a nuclear weapon, like this
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: is a great way to do it. Yeah.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: And by the way, also just pardoning the Honduran leader,
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: who was a drug trafficker, right? Like just the lack
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: of any standard, any kind of ideology behind any of this.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: It's just, it's all so capricious and dangerous.
• 47:53
  Speaker 4: I totally understand focusing, if you're a Democrat in Congress,
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: focusing your ire on Trump not going to Congress. You
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: are in Congress. It's your job. It's your prerogative. I
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: think that is important. I do think that when something
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: like this happens, the focus of the statement at the
• 48:09
  Speaker 4: beginning is just, what do you think of this? Because
• 48:12
  Speaker 4: I did see a lot of like, you know, throat
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: clearing about the congressional authorization. But then you can tell
• 48:18
  Speaker 4: they're too scared to say that this was just a
• 48:21
  Speaker 4: bad fucking idea. And it's like, you know what? Donald
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: Trump's never going to Congress. It's not happening. And we
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: don't control Congress. Democrats don't control Congress anyway. And Republicans
• 48:28
  Speaker 4: are shameless.
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 48:30
  Speaker 4: The most important thing you can do right now is
• 48:32
  Speaker 4: to help shape the public debate by telling people exactly
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: why this is such a fucking horrible idea. You know,
• 48:37
  Speaker 4: like that to me is like number one. Yeah.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: But this is where I do like, I know it sounds,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: I like, I was like, actually before we even recorded,
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: I was like, am I just like, is this a
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: bias that I have to just like think about the
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: ways in which Joe Biden failed? But, but I do
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: think that like one of the reasons you see Democrats
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: kind of like unmoored a little bit, I do think
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: for the most part, people have been critical and this
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: is a few random people speaking on background, but I
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: do think there is a kind of, well, when they
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: say it's weak, what they're really getting at is, well,
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: Maduro was bad and it would be a better world
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: if Maduro wasn't in power and that election had been
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: allowed to carry through to the rightful winner. What did
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: Democrats do to make that happen? There was Democratic backsliding
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: in South America while Joe Biden was president, while claiming
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: all of these values, claiming to speak for all of
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: these values. So what is a full-throated, like moral, righteous
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: policy that Democrats would embrace that doesn't seem kind of
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: feckless and weak in the face of authoritarian rule of
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: China's expansion, of Russia's expansion? Because I don't know the answer.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: I'm not an expert, but like that does seem missing.
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the challenge is, you know, military action.
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: Things getting blown up. It looks strong. It looks decisive.
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: And Democrats have all these scars from the Iraq war
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: in 2003. And, you know, thinking that like the military
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: actions automatically coded as strong and diplomacy is weak. But
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: I just think voters are actually smarter than that. And like,
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: so it's like, you know where they should have scars.
• 49:56
  Speaker 4: For all the ones who cast the vote in favor
• 49:59
  Speaker 4: of Bush's war, which is a vote that haunted most
• 50:01
  Speaker 4: of them for their political careers.
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: Exactly. And like, you know, to your point about the
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: kind of mealy mouth process focused statements, like a lot
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: of Democrats made those kinds of statements about the Iraq war.
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: And they were like, well, actually what I voted for
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: was for him to go back to the UN with
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: firmer footing. And it's like, guys, history is not going
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: to remember you that way. Are you for this? Are
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: you against it? Are you for the Don Roe doctrine
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: and the next phase of toppling the Cubans and the
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: Colombians and taking Greenland and Panama and whatever else?
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: And I would also say like, this is, this to
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: me is an easier one. And I know Dan wrote
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: about this in his message box. This is an easier
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: one than the, than the bombing of the Iran nuclear
• 50:35
  Speaker 4: sites for Democrats, which some Democrats were like, you know,
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: it's good that he did that because that was about like, okay,
• 50:41
  Speaker 4: there are these nuclear sites. We bombed them. Did we
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: get them all?
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: Do we not?
• 50:43
  Speaker 4: That's, you know, the question. But, The Trump administration told
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: us after the Maduro raid that it wasn't really about Maduro,
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: that it's about the oil.
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: Iran with a nuke threatens us. People can die if
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: Iran has a nuke. There's no threat to the United
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: States from Maduro. They're trying to call fentanyl a WMD.
• 50:59
  Speaker 4: But yeah, this whole thing is like Maduro's a bad guy.
• 51:01
  Speaker 4: But they're not saying that it's because Maduro was a
• 51:04
  Speaker 4: bad guy. That's not what they're saying because Maduro didn't
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: give them the fucking oil.
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: The regime's still in place. The same group of people.
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: They're down one guy.
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: I will say, too, I haven't seen a lot of
• 51:16
  Speaker 4: 28 contenders that have put out statements.
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: Pritzker, I saw, tweeted.
• 51:20
  Speaker 4: Gallego, all the ones in Congress said something because it's Congress.
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: A little quiet out there from the rest of them.
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: Kamala had a very long statement.
• 51:27
  Speaker 4: That's right, Kamala did.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: And we think of her as a 2028 candidate.
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: For now, for now we do, yeah.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the other part of it, I just, what would
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: we have, what would have this, like, as you both
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: were going back and forth about how quickly we'll be
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: able to exploit the oil reserves of Venezuela, I was saying,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: what would this show have been about otherwise, right? And
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: what would we have been talking about today?
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: And it would have been our.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: Next topic, but it just like, like he has decided
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: that he wanted us all like he, he did, he
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: chose this. He chose the timing of this. We're all
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: now talking about this rather than the failure on to
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: get any kind of, uh, Obamacare extension through the failure
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: to attack any of the problems he claimed he was
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: going to attack. And like, that doesn't go away. Yeah.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: He gets a couple of days of, of, of tough guy,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: bomb guy news stories, but like the.
• 52:06
  Speaker 4: The, the, apparently he wanted it. He wanted it to
• 52:08
  Speaker 4: happen on Christmas day. Cause he likes the dates. But
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: then there was some weather stuff and they had to,
• 52:12
  Speaker 4: they basically had to, the weather sort of and the
• 52:15
  Speaker 4: conditions and the political reality is also kind.
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: Of like determined. It was wet and it was windy
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: and you can't fly helicopters in that kind of weather.
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: But what a dickhead. There's a lot of service members
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: and government officials who have to work when you invade
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: a country and do it on Christmas just.
• 52:27
  Speaker 4: Because you're a real screw situation. I guess this is
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: my fucking consolation prize. I'll bomb Nigeria instead because I
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: couldn't get the Venezuela thing done on Christmas.
• 52:35
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  Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one
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  Speaker 1: slash crooked to save 10% off your first purchase. Speaking
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: of Democrats, Tim Walz made a surprise announcement on Monday
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: that he will be ending his campaign to seek a
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: third term as governor of Minnesota. Walz said that he
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: decided to step aside because of the political attacks he's
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: been facing over a massive social services fraud scandal in
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: his state that's become a MAGA obsession and spawned all
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: kinds of right-wing conspiracies. We covered the fraud scandal briefly
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: in a previous episode. I honestly can't even remember when,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: but we did. But basically, a nonprofit stole tens of
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: millions of dollars in pandemic relief funding from the government
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: by saying the money was going to meals for kids.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: It was called Feed Our Future. It was the nonprofit.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: And some futures were pretty handsomely fed.
• 55:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. Not the correct ones, but yeah. Biden's
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: DOJ investigated. Dozens of people were indicted in 2022. This
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: is an old one. Many were convicted and Walls announced
• 56:02
  Speaker 4: new oversight policies. Then right after Walls announced his reelection
• 56:07
  Speaker 4: bid in September, this September, Trump's DOJ announced investigations into
• 56:12
  Speaker 4: other Minnesota social services programs. And they are currently arguing
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: that as much as nine billion may have been stolen.
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: And so far, 90 people have been charged altogether, both
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: in the feed our future bill. original case, but then
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: there have been a couple other cases. All these investigations
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: are kind of blurring together, but they are separate cases.
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: But what made this an even bigger deal in MAGA
• 56:32
  Speaker 4: world is that most of the people who've been charged
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: are Somali Americans. And then the day after Christmas, a
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley released a video that's since
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: gone viral where he made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims
• 56:45
  Speaker 4: about alleged fraud at Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota that
• 56:49
  Speaker 4: he visited. That led to the Trump administration announcing a
• 56:53
  Speaker 4: freeze in child care funding nationwide while they investigate, as
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: well as just a general freak out on the right
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: among everyone from Donald Trump and Elon Musk to nearly
• 57:06
  Speaker 4: every Republican and conservative influencer. It was just like the
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: couple of days on Twitter and online and on YouTube
• 57:13
  Speaker 4: before Venezuela were just this is all they were talking about,
• 57:16
  Speaker 4: including by Elon Musk, who has jumped back into posting
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: about politics. calls for all Somali American citizens to be
• 57:24
  Speaker 4: denaturalized and deported, including Ilhan Omar, and for Tim Walz
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: to go to jail and be tried for treason. That
• 57:31
  Speaker 4: was one that Elon Musk also promoted. Trump continued the
• 57:35
  Speaker 4: attack in response to the Walz news on Monday and
• 57:37
  Speaker 4: accused the governor and Ilhan Omar of, quote, stealing tens
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: of billions of taxpayer dollars, which, of course, isn't true
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: at all. Now that Walz is out, Amy Klobuchar may
• 57:47
  Speaker 4: jump into the race, where she may have the honor
• 57:49
  Speaker 4: of facing... My pillow guy, Mike Lindell, if they both
• 57:52
  Speaker 4: win their respective primaries.
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: Amy Klobuchar holding a hairbrush, tapping against her hand as
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: a bunch of fraudsters come and bring cash back to
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: the governor's mansion and just put it in front. That's awesome.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: I think that's cool.
• 58:07
  Speaker 4: That is cool.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: She'll clean it up.
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she should do that.
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: What do you guys make of the fraud story and
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: the MAGA obsession over it?
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: So there was fraud. It was very serious. The people
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: that committed the fraud should go to jail. Many of
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: them have. Not only that, they've recovered tens of millions
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: of dollars as well. Not all of it. Can't recover
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: all of it, but they've tried to recover a lot
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: of the money. That's what you do. You find people
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: who committed crimes and you prosecute them. You don't punish
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: communities because we don't believe in collective punishment. Just because
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: somebody that committed a crime is the same ethnicity as
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: you doesn't make you in any way whatsoever responsible. That
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: was sort of a, to me, a kind of status
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: quo ante that I came to the table with, but
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: apparently others no longer have it. Also, there was so
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: much pandemic fraud. There was so much. This is one example.
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: This is the top of the list now.
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: I get maybe, maybe.
• 58:55
  Speaker 4: The PPP fraud.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: PPP fraud.
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: Very huge. That's like way up there as well.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: Tons of other small business administration fraud. Remember, there are
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: all kinds of reports about people taking millions of dollars
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: from the government, really wealthy people taking millions upon millions
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: of dollars from the government. But this is what they
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: care about. This is what they're focused on.
• 59:14
  Speaker 7: Why?
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Because it affects a community of immigrants they don't like.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: And so they are making this the issue. Does that
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: mean that it wasn't a situation in which given the
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: scale of the theft, it shouldn't have been caught earlier
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: or I guess more to the point once it was
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: seemingly exposed, stopped earlier? Like what were the reasons it
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: was allowed to continue? Some of that is legal and judicial,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: but some of it clearly is administrative. Like these are
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: all really important. We don't support fraud. But the idea
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: that now this pain needs to be visited on every
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: daycare in the country or every Somali immigrant, it's just racist.
• 59:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it really is combining the two passions right now
• 59:52
  Speaker 4: of like the, because Elon and like the all-in boys
• 59:56
  Speaker 4: were all over this. And it's like, Their thing is,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 4: you know, Doge 2.0. They want this to be Doge 2.0,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 4: even though when they were running Doge 1.0, they didn't
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 4: seem to find any of this fraud.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: Weren't so good at doging.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 4: No, they weren't so good at doging, but now they're back.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 4: And they are saying things now like, most of your
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: tax dollars now go to fraud. The government is just
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 4: one big, 30% of all your tax dollars go to
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 4: fraud now. This is the greatest scandal in the history.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 4: If we just cut out the fraud in the government,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 4: we would balance the budget and no one under $ 500, 000
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 4: would have to pay any taxes anymore. This is the
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 4: shit that they're all pushing. And then you've got Stephen
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 4: Miller pushing the like, oh, this is a great way
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 4: to show that any immigrant in this country, even those
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 4: who've become citizens, are bad and should be deported.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's sort of like a three-part MAGA obsession.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: And yes, like the fraud is, it's horrendous, right? It's
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: a ton of money, like billions of dollars at all.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: So it's like you're pretending to feed hungry kids. You're
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 3: pretending to provide services to kids with autism. Like, fuck
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: these people.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 4: It's disgusting.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: Lock them up. Throw them away forever. Make sure it
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: can never happen again. The MAGA obsession, though, I think
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: it's like, one, it happened in a blue state, right?
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: So you can blame Democrats and you can blame, you
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: could use it to attack the social safety net and
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: the welfare state generally, right? And that is part of
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: their project. You attack the value of government in service
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: of slashing taxes for the richest people in the country.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: That's like Republican 101. Second, because, you know, it's a
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: bunch of Somali people. dissent, people of Somali descent are, uh,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: have been arrested that gets right. The Stephen Miller, like
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: nativists going, it also gets the racist going. And then third,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: like social media algorithms are designed to explode stories like this,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: especially on Twitter. Like if you, if, if a right-wing
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: anti-migrant anti, you know, liberal video appears on Twitter, Elon
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: Musk is going to find it and retweet it and
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: respond to it and juice the fuck out of its reach.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: And then I think journalists are scroll past that video
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: and they see like 170 million views, a totally made
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: up number, by the way. I do not believe a
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: single metric that man puts out about view counts on
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: social media or his businesses or whatever. But then they
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: decide like, oh, this has been under discussed. This has
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: been ignored by the mainstream media. Meanwhile, like Google, three
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: weeks earlier, a month earlier, the New York Times had
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: a bunch of really great reporting about this fraud. Minnesota
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: news outlets have been covering the story.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: Often they say, why won't the media cover this story
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: I learned about from the media?
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: There's a link, yeah. The other part of it too.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: And the Justice Department, which has been on the case
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 4: since 2022. Exactly.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: The other part of this too is I do think
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: like one of the reasons there should have been more
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: enforcement and checking is because it was a pandemic emergency
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: and they were trying to A, get money out the
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: door and B, they were worried about sending, they were
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: worried about people interacting. Like that was part of a
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: lot of the decisions that were being made in the
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: early days of the pandemic to try to kind of
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: help people in the crisis. And part of what we're
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: seeing is just a desire to rewrite the history of COVID,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: which is all of this was unnecessary. All of it
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: was fake. The social distancing, the protection, the need for
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: people to stay home, which is why people couldn't work,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: all of it was manufactured, right? Like that is part
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: of this too, erasing what was happening during COVID.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: The other thing that feeds into this is, you know,
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: I saw that Tim Walz gave an interview back when
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 4: this happened in like 2022. And someone in his, I
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 4: believe it was Department of Education or Health and Human Services,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 4: whatever it was there, in the state flagged the irregularities.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 4: And they were like, we're going to have to stop this.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: And then Feeding Our Future sued them. And then in
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: court and said it's because they were racist that they
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: were trying to do this, which is even more disgusting.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: So that's feeding into it. Now, the right takes that
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: as like, Tim Walz fucked up because he, no, no, no.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 4: The Walz administration actually tried to stop it earlier. And
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: then there was a corridor.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: It was like a hole.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: But this feeds, I do think this feeds into a, like,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: what is the kind of deeper critique from the right
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: that they want Americans to absorb, which is Democrats are
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: afraid of being called racist. And they'd rather money go
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: out fraudulently than deal with racism. And by the way, like,
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: I don't think that that is a totally unfair allegation.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: In some cases, right? Like there is absolutely Democrats who
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: are afraid to attack a problem like this because they
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: were afraid of being called racist.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: Certainly this auditor who reached out to these communities was like, look,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: if you don't want to see headlines all over the
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: place calling you racist for targeting our nonprofit, then let
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: us go. I do think it's really important for Democrats.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: You're seeing a lot of like, what about ism? Well,
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: actually look at Trump, look at the crypto corruption. And
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: that is 100% right. And it is totally valid. There's
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: this most corrupt white house we've ever seen. I do
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: think Democrats, we need to take this really seriously first,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: lean into prosecuting the hell out of the perpetrators, fix
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 3: the oversight problems, fix the social safety net challenges. Because
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: this is like when healthcare.gov went down. If you want
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: to sell people on the role of government in your lives,
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: being good and helpful and being worth your tax dollars,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: we have to go that extra mile. Whereas Republicans have
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: a much easier task, which is they just attack, attack, attack.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 3: and then say, I see government's worthless, let's drown it
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: in a bathtub, cut your taxes. Couldn't agree more.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: When Kathleen Sebelius opened up that computer and there was
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: just an exhausted pterodactyl trying to connect the wires, that
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: was such a bummer.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, as a Democrat, you don't care about fraud because
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: it's an issue that Republicans are going to attack you with.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: You care about it because if you want to propose
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: policies like this that change people's lives, you have to
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 4: make sure that people trust you with their tax dollars, right?
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: The better example of that is the Recovery Act. Remember,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 4: we made a big show of appointing Joe Biden as
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: the remember, he was like the inspector general. He was
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 4: going to make sure that none of the money was
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: wasted on the Recovery Act. And, you know, they found
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 4: like there's a million how much money they found Solyndra.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: And that was like the big thing. But we took
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: that seriously because we're like, if this much money is
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: going out the door, you better fucking believe we're going
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: to make sure that it's not wasted and that there's
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 4: not fraud. And I do think that's an important like,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 4: you know, lessons for Democrats to learn as they're proposing policies.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the energy department loan program that Solyndra was a
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 3: part of ultimately turned a profit, but whatever. I can't.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: The idea that if you're going to bet on, the
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: whole point of betting on companies is some of them
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: are going to go down, but on the whole, it's
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: going to work. Solyndra was not a, I don't want
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: to do a Solyndra thing.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 4: Also, a guy with a cool car startup ended up
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 4: benefiting from that as well.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he did okay. What was that guy's name?
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know where he went. What do you
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 4: guys think about Walz's decision and Klobuchar jumping in the race, possibly?
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, look, I respect anyone who, like, decides that
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: for the good of, you know, the team to step
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: back when there's time. Yeah, I do too. Not referencing
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: anything specific here, but, you know.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Well, why not? I think it's better than, yeah,
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: other people hanging on. But the, yeah, like I do
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: think it's a little bit of an admission against interest here, right?
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: Because he's saying it's because of right-wing attacks and that
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: it's important to continue fighting right-wing attacks, but you're also
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: conceding to them by stepping aside. And like, I've seen
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: some people say some version of like, I can't believe,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: Tim Waltz is giving into this kind of right wing attack.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: And I think two things can be true. One is this.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of unfair shit being circulated a lot
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: of ways in which is being exploited completely unfairly. But
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: also he's the governor of the state. And this is
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: a massive fraud. And the scale of it compared to
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: what they expected the program to be is just so
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: gobsmacking that I understand why he would step aside.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 4: But it's clear he cares about cares about the seat.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 4: He cares about the state and that he wants a
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: Democrat to win that. And he thought it would be
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: harder to do for reasons that are fair or unfair.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: And then on Klobuchar, just so people know. So there
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 4: if she runs in 26 and she wins, there's also
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 4: a Minnesota Senate race. Right now, there's a primary with
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 4: Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and Representative Angie Craig. And so
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: that's for Senate. And then if Klobuchar wins and she
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 4: wins as governor, she would be able to appoint her replacement.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 4: in the Senate that would then be up in 28,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 4: I believe. And she also wouldn't have to get rid of,
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 4: she wouldn't have to step down from her Senate seat.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 4: So it's a freebie if she wants to run. And
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 4: then if she loses, then she'd go back to the Senate.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: I wonder how that affects the primary. If you let
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: that primary play out or you sort of, now there's
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: an extra slot.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 4: There's an extra slot.
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: Oh, I guess you let it play out and then
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 4: maybe potentially the loser of that primary could be appointed
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 4: by a potential governor Klobuchar. So we'll see. Getting ahead
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 4: of ourselves there.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: Strong candidate. I mean, I also think Wallace stepping back
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: probably speaks to how miserable politics is if you get
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 3: in like Trump's glare, like the eye of Sauron. I mean,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: do you guys see like over the weekend, Trump retruth
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: some video that had basically alleged that Tim Wallace had
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: had some role in the murder of Melissa Hortman, the
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: Minnesota state legislator who was killed. along with her husband
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: last year. I mean, sick, sick stuff.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 4: Because she spoke out about immigration or something. I think
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: about the scam. I think she spoke out about the
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 4: fraud and was like one of the few Democrats. And
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 4: so this has been, I remember they, this was going
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 4: around when she was first murdered that like, maybe this
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 4: was a left-wing person because she took this unpopular stance
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: among Democrats. It's fucking crazy.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, her kids were like begging Trump to remove
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: the video. And as far as I can tell, he's not,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: I mean, he's just the cruelest person on the planet.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 4: All right. So we knew this was going to happen
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 4: because of where the deadline fell. But the Department of
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: Justice released the first big batch of Epstein documents on
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 4: the Friday afternoon before Christmas week. And we haven't had
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: a chance to talk about it because we were like,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 4: peace out.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: See you later.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 4: The new law gave the Department of Justice until December
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 4: 19th to release what they have. on Epstein. That day,
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 4: they posted a searchable database containing hundreds of thousands of files,
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 4: including redacted documents, emails, photos, and more, most of which
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 4: lack context or order. Some of the quote unquote highlights
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 4: from the trove, photos of Epstein with celebrities like Michael
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 4: Jackson and former President Bill Clinton, investigations into 10 co-conspirators
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 4: of Epstein's and revelations that Trump, despite claiming otherwise, flew
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 4: on Epstein's plane at least eight times in the 90s. However,
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 4: DOJ admitted that it hadn't been able to get through
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: all the files by the deadline. And there were reports
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 4: just before New Year's that they're trying to borrow at
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 4: least 400 government lawyers to help process over 5 million
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 4: more Epstein documents.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: It kind of bought my lawyer off you. It's such
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: a weird way to phrase it. Clearly, they're not doing
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: a lot of work in the rest of the government.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 7: They're lawyers, right?
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: Not a lot of legal.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: I don't think they were doing a terrible job redacting
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: because apparently you could just highlight the black text and
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: get the actual information.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: Any takeaways from the documents that we've seen from you guys?
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: I mean, you highlighted the three big ones I took away.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: It's pretty notable that this federal prosecutor was flagging in
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: January of 2020 that Trump was on Epstein's jet many,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: many more times. Why was he sending that email? What
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: was he doing on that plane? The 10 co-conspirators point
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: seems to completely contradict Kash Patel's claim that there was
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 3: no client list or other group of people that he
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: could have charged. And then I think you just come
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 3: away thinking, like, the FBI screwed up this case so
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 3: unbelievably badly over the course of decades because there's all
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: these credible tips and witness testimony, even including from, like,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: the sister of one of the victims that could have
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 3: been used to arrest Jeffrey Epstein so much earlier, and
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: they just completely screwed up.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The fact that this all begins with Palm Beach
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: police basically having this guy on sexual abuse of minors
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: from the jump, from the beginning, multiple victims, and that
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: it never moves forward. It gets, it gets, uh, pled
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: down from the beginning and never leads to anything else.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: The other thing that jumped out to me, uh, first
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: of all, the, the fact that he was on the
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: plane that many times was, was news to me. I,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: maybe I, I, I like, I didn't know if I
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: had a real view of it before, but I suppose
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: I had internalized that he hadn't been on the plane
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: because there just hadn't been evidence of it. We hadn't
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: seen it, right? He denied it outright.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 4: The first we heard of it was Susie Wiles saying it.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he was on Manifest in that interview, yeah.
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: And the fact that he was one of the people
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: that was just on the plane over the time. There
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: were people that had just a rationale of like, of
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: course he wasn't on the Epstein plane. That's not his style.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: He would fly himself. He wouldn't go to a place
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: like that. He would do things like, there was just
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: a whole story about how Donald Trump wasn't on the plane.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: That's a lie, many, many times.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: Do you also, just the Wall Street Journal article that-
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just a frequent visitor at the Mar-a-Lago spa.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: The spa would send young women to his house on
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 3: house calls for massages.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 4: I mean, it is, if you're wondering like, why is
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 4: Trump trying so hard to cover this up? Why has
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 4: he tried so hard to cover this up for so long?
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 4: That does not, where the explanation is not that he
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 4: was in on it, that he was, you know, participating
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 4: in this. It's, that there's so much bad behavior from
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 4: him around it, being on the plane. Marjorie Taylor Greene
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 4: said over the break, too, that Trump told her his
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 4: friends would get in trouble, friends of his would get
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: in trouble if the files came out. This whole thing
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 4: about the Mar-a-Lago, right? Like, there's enough behavior that's maybe
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: not chargeable criminal, you know, but, like, pretty fucking embarrassing.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: He's part of the problem. Yes, exactly.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: The cover-up has always had to be the second worst
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: outcome for Donald Trump. I will say, also, one other
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: part of it is... just as a sort of a, whatever,
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: a silver lining to the Epstein cloud is only that
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump does not believe he has the power to
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: cover this up. They don't believe they can delete the stuff,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: erase the stuff that there's too many people that are
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: not loyal to Donald Trump that have the information, which
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: is why they feel so stuck, right? Like if they,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: they would obviously love to shred this. They would obviously
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: love to make this disappear. They have no compunction about,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: they're not into records retention, but they are trapped because
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: inside of DOJ, it is not MAGA one, one inch down.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: It is a bunch of people that are not going
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: to go along with a cover-up, which is, I do think,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit heartening.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: All right. There's plenty of other news from the last
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 4: two weeks we haven't had a chance to cover. Way
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: too much. But we did just want to mention a
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 4: few items that probably flew under your radar unless you're
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 4: one of the real sickos out there, which is why
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 4: we asked Crooked's biggest sicko, Elijah Cohn, to help us out.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 4: One of Elijah's many roles here is host of Terminally Online,
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 4: which is our most hilariously unhinged pod for subscribers only,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 4: which is yet another reason you should all become subscribers.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 4: at crooked.com slash friends. Become a friend of the pod.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 4: We're going to have a lot of new, awesome stuff
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 4: behind the paywall this year. So you're going to want
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 4: to sign up for that.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: The number one way you could help independent media is
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 3: to be a subscriber. So if you like the show,
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 3: please subscribe. If you really, really love the show, go
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: to crooked.com slash friends. Consider becoming a friend of the
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: pod member.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah. And so because Elijah spends his days never taking
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: his eyes off the internet, he gave me a list
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 4: of stories, takes, and tweets. None of them had flown
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 4: under my radar because I'm just as much of a sicko.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 4: but I'm curious how familiar you guys are with some
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 4: of these.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: I was pretty offline by the way. And every once
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: in a while I would like go into my, my
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: phone and I would see that like, that like, it's, yeah,
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: it's also just sort of like.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 4: Realizing your head up on Normandy and private Ryan, that
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 4: opening scene. I always think about that with Twitter. It's
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: like they're in there, they're under the water and they
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 4: go back under the water.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: Well, it's sort of like, it's, it's almost like I like,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: you guys have just been in the casino the whole time.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: I went to bed.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 3: There are definitely days where it's like, and you're like, I,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: it's about a, I've been off for like two weeks,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 3: having a great time with my kids, like spending great
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 3: family time. Saw my mom, saw Hannah's parents. And then
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 3: you just like log into Twitter and you're like, it
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: is designed to enrage me. And I'm like ignoring my
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 3: daughter to like fire off. Who's that? The hedge fund asshole?
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: Who's Bill Ackman? Stop drafting, stop drafting.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 8: I know.
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: Put this away, Tommy.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 4: I was good until Elon and Chamath and fucking the
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 4: All In people and Bill Ackman, they all got, they
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 4: started doing it with the fraud stuff. I was like, ugh.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: And I had like a good week and a half.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: I'm proud of you.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: I'm proud of you. I was out.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: I was out.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 4: All right, first one. Did anyone catch the marble armrest story?
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: Does that mean anything to you guys?
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: I actually missed this.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: I missed it.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: I didn't really care about the Kennedy Center stuff.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 4: Okay, so Donald Trump, can we put up the, for
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 4: people who are watching on YouTube, you should all watch
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 4: on YouTube. Donald Trump decided to post right before Christmas,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 4: what's next for the Trump Kennedy Center, which is marble armrests.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 4: He said nothing's ever been done like this before.
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: It sounds really uncomfortable.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, no shit.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 8: Unbelievable.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 6: What?
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 3: That is the craziest. Marble armrests?
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: You want a wood, a nice soft wood there.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: Or something padded.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 4: This is what the Venezuelans are going to have to
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 4: be pumping oil for.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: I can't believe people don't think he's focused on their problems.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 7: I know.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 4: Okay, here's a tougher one. If someone asked you what
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 4: you thought about Gen Z looks-maxing influencer Clavicular's take on
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 4: Gavin Newsom mogging J.D. Vance in 2028 because Newsom's a
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: Chad and Vance is subhuman, what would you say?
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you something. I don't know that that interview,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't know about that interview, but I sadly do
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: know all those terms.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: I do. I do. I'm a little too deep in
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: this one, unfortunately. So looks maxing, as I believe when you,
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: it is what it sounds. You just do all the
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: things to make yourself look better, including testosterone injections, plastic surgery.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: You know, remember the dude who got calf implants on
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: that MTV series? I do remember that.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: Remember the end of that? He and his calf implants
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: are still along. He never got that girlfriend in that episode.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 4: Vinny's older brother.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 3: Who is that? Apparently the looks maxing is kind of
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: an ideology that is adjacent to kind of white nationalism
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: or the right wing. Because you always see clavicular talking
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 3: to like Nick Fuentes and their buddies. And then clavicular
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: like ran over a guy, hit a guy with his car.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 4: Allegedly.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: Didn't get prosecuted.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 4: It was a cyber truck.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: He took a cyber truck.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 3: So anyway, so he thinks JD Vance is ugly.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 4: We have the clip.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: Oh, great.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Let's play the clip.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 7: I mean, like this next election cycle, who's going to win?
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 7: It's going to be Gavin Newsom against JD Vance because. J.D.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 7: Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom mugs.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: J.D.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 3: Vance is subhuman? Yeah. What makes you say that?
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 7: He's got a very short total facial width to height ratio.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 6: He's obese.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 7: Very recessed side profile. Whereas Newsom is like 6'3 Chad.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: So I just want to say.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 3: That's manly, by the way.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: 6'3 Chad.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 4: That was Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: I want to just.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 4: Inducting that interview.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: The, the, the, the, the, look. All you people out
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: there with your horoscopes, I just want you to know
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: that you and phrenology are coming into the light together.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: But yes, the return of phrenology was inevitable in our
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: kind of demon haunted world. But yes, JD Vance has
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: a recessed chin. Therefore, he does not have what it
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: takes to be a leader.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: I also saw that guy saying that he takes so
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 3: much testosterone that he no longer produces it. So I'm
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: not sure that he is able to have sex. Like, look,
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 3: we've all lived in a world where Obviously, optics and
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 3: looks of a candidate is like seen as part of
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 3: how they get elected, right? Like Barack Obama is a
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 3: good looking guy. Like there was all this thing about
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 3: the taller candidate always wins. But this guy seems to
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 3: have turned looks maxing into a political ideology. And I
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: think that was new to me in the last couple
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 3: of weeks.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 4: Did you see that Newsom got in on this? The
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 4: Newsom press office account? Did he mock him? They posted
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 4: a picture of J.D. Vance's face, a little fatter than
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 4: it is today. And not the fake one, the meme,
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 4: like an older picture of him when he was a
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 4: little heavier.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 3: Got it.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 4: So that's something that happened.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what they do. Total Chad.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: Try mewing.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: Total Chad.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: You got to get that mouth tape.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: Mogging means someone looking significantly better or outshining others in attractiveness, style,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 3: or confidence.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 4: That's Gavin.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 3: Didn't really know that.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 4: Mogging the competition. How about the phrase globo homo?
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 3: Oh, all up in that. Give you a hint.
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 4: It's related to the Maduro raid.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: I do know. Is this about the homo nationalists?
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 7: Maybe.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 3: Elaborate.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: So there was a report about increasingly right wing gays,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: not the right wing gays where you wish somebody had
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: higher cheekbones and filler lips, but right wing homosexuals. who
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: are embracing anti-immigrant rhetoric because they are homo-nationalists who want
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: to be free to be gay, but also don't want
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: to be surrounded by immigrants. That's what I thought this
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: was related to.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: Fascinating.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 4: Didn't know about that.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: Different thing.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 4: Let's take our friend Tucker Carlson.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 3: You're not going to believe what this was.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I know.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 8: I'm not going to go kill Nicholas Maduro because we
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 8: don't like the way he's treating his people. It's possible
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 8: we're mad that he doesn't allow gay marriage. That is
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 8: a distinct possibility, but no one will say that out loud.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 8: Not defending the regime, just saying. And by the way,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 8: the U.S.-backed opposition leader who would take Maduro's place if
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 8: he were taken out is, of course, pretty eager to
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 8: get gay marriage in Venezuela. So to those of you
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 8: who thought this whole project was globo homo.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: Not crazy, actually.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: What's global homo?
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 4: Nope, definitely crazy.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: What's global homo?
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: Global homo is him thinking there is an international conspiracy
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: to take out Nicolas Maduro because it's a conservative country
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 3: that didn't allow gay marriage. That's his theory, that I
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 3: guess a super gay deep state forced Donald Trump to
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 3: launch this military operation to take out Maduro.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: Wow. Sadly, it wasn't the gays, it was the Jews.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: Why not both? Why not both?
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: Why not both?
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 3: Remember the kind of like the Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 3: moment when he was like, I don't give a fuck
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: about Maduro being a conservative. He was sort of referencing
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: that in the.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: Conversation with Tucker. Right, the idea that that doesn't matter.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: Socially conservative. That's right. It's crazy. Finally.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: Because his point, by the way, was we should remove dictatorships.
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: That's what Ben's point was there.
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 3: Well, Ben's point was like, he's a terrible guy. Like
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 3: we shouldn't like him because he's super conservative on social stuff.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 4: Right, right, right.
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: All right, finally.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: Zoran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 4: City just after midnight on New Year's Eve and has
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: already increased discourse supply to record levels. Which one of
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 4: these mayor Mamdani takes aren't real? One, the buses aren't
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 4: free yet. Mamdani lied. Two, Mamdani needs to free Maduro. Three,
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 4: Mamdani defeated abundance by implementing Yimby policies.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: Wait, one of those is not real? Are the two
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: of those are real?
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: I got to guess. What?
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: I think the bus one is fake.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 3: I think that one's fake too.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 4: They're all real.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: It's a trick question.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: Because I saw in the wild a couple of versions
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 3: of the free Maduro tweets. Okay.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 4: Amazing.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 4: The defeated abundance by implementing, because he said the word
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 4: abundance in his speech, in his inaugural speech. And so
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 4: then the lefties were like, yeah, he's basically, he's taking it.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 4: He's co-opting it because he's now he's using the word,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 4: but it's like the socialist version of it.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: He's getting, he's getting democratic. He's like, Hey, you're getting
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: socialism all over my abundance. I wasn't done with that
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: abundance yet. And now you've got your socialism all over it.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: That's gross.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: There's another big, like abundance dust up right before Christmas.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 3: And like, I didn't know any of the people involved,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: but like it's, I kept thinking, I'm like, Tommy is,
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: what did you say on the pundies?
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: He was so right.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: The fever pitch of it, like the rage compared to
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 3: the stakes.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: We got to build more houses.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 3: So much rage.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: We got to build more houses.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 4: However we get it done, it's great. I'll just be
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 4: bad about a new book in 2026. I was just,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 4: you know, build more houses. Sometimes it's going to be
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 4: zoning and regulations. Sometimes there's rich people doing some bad shit.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: I don't know. It's both. What the fuck?
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: Just build more houses.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 3: It's a fucking problem. I don't even care about the
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: underlying policy. Just fight about another book. Just get another book.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 7: Oh, boy.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: I read The Candy House by Jennifer Egan.
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 4: You did?
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 6: Great.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 4: I loved that book.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: It's a good book.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 4: It's one of my favorite books.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: It's one of the books you've read.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: That's it.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 4: So I'll have five.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 3: I've been reading Fort Bragg Cartel. It'll give you a
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 3: very different window into the Delta Force community.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 7: Oh.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: It's very good.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: Finished Dead Wake.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: Oh, great. Great book. Really great. Really great.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: God damn it.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 4: I'm halfway through George Packer's novel, The Emergency. I interviewed
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 4: him on Offline and told him I was going to
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 4: read the book, and I started it.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: You know a book I read that I read, Why
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: Nothing Works? Is it Dunkelman?
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: You got through that? Yeah, that is the racheless abundance.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 4: But that's the supercharged abundance. That's the longer abundance. That's
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 4: an abundant abundance.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: I want to have a conversation with that author about
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: how many times you're going to say the phrase, is
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: it Hamiltonian or is it Jeffersonian? I got it. I
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: fucking got it, man. I'm reading your book.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: I'm here.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: You've got me. Stop saying it. It's very niche. It's
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: worth the read. I'm learning a lot, but how many
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: fucking times you get to reintroduce the thesis?
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: An abundance of thesi.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a thesis abundance. How stupid do you think
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: I am? I'm following your logic, man.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 3: Trust me.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: It's like genuinely getting annoyed at that professor.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: I'm also reading the interesting history of the intelligence war
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: between East and West. Wow, you're really- Well, it's just
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 3: on Kindle. You flip around.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: Let's keep the escalation going. I'm also reading the Steven
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: Pinker book, When Everybody Knows That Everybody Knows.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 3: Oh, Epstylist guy. Good for you. Who else are you
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 3: celebrating on Epstein's list?
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: Everybody did not know that. Did not know that. Well,
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: it does not come up. You might find it hard
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: to believe it's not in the book. And also, by
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: the way, before I even knew that, which was at
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: this moment, I wasn't going to recommend it.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 4: So good.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: Good shit. So good.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 4: Okay. When we get back from the break, you'll hear
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 4: Lovett's conversation with Senator Mark Kelly. But one reminder before
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 4: we get to that. We're headed to New Zealand and
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 4: Australia in February.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 3: I think it's like five weeks away. It's crazy.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 4: What?
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: Gotta make sure we get the visas.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 4: Again, we might be staying.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 4: Which sphere of influence is Australia going to be?
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: I don't think Australia's going to like it.
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 4: Is that going to be the she? The she sphere
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 4: of influence?
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: It depends on how much money they're going to put
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: in crypto in the next two years.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 4: How west does the Western Hemisphere go?
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: Are we crossing the dateline?
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: Are we crossing the dateline?
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 4: Are we moving the dateline? I can see Trump moving
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 4: the dateline. Anyway, we're going to be there. The Pod
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 4: Save America Hopefully Just Visiting Tour comes to Auckland on
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 4: February 11th, and then three cities in Australia after that.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 4: Melbourne on the 13th, Brisbane on the 14th, and Sydney
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 4: on the 16th. If you're a listener in one of
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 4: those cities, or if you want to fly there, we'd
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 4: love to see you. Tickets are on sale right now.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 4: Head to cricket.com slash events to grab yours. When we
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 4: come back, Mark Kelly. Pod Save America is brought to
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 4: you by Bilt.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: It's 2026, and if you're still paying rent without Built,
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  Speaker 3: so they know we sent you.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: Joining me now is Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Senator Kelly,
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: welcome back to the pod.
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 6: Thank you for having me back.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: So Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted today that in
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: response to what he called seditious statements and a pattern
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: of reckless misconduct, the Defense Department is moving to censure you.
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: to potentially reduce your rank, cut your retirement pay, also
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: threaten further action. The claim here is not just that
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: you called on service members to refuse illegal orders in
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: that video, it's that you've also described lawful orders as illegal.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: What's your response to this?
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 6: That's a bunch of bullshit, the entire thing. It's ridiculous
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 6: and it is stifling the First Amendment rights of all Americans,
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 6: especially retired people like me. You know, I said something
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 6: that the president didn't like. He said I should be hanged,
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 6: I should be executed, I should be prosecuted. And then
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 6: his minion, Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified secretary of defense
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 6: we've ever had, you know, he makes a decision that
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 6: he's going to court-martial me under the Uniform Code of
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 6: Military Justice for saying what is in the UCMJ, saying
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 6: something that is lawful, telling service members they need to
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 6: follow the law. They didn't like that. In that censure letter,
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 6: by the way, they also put all these other things
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 6: that I said that they didn't like. Now think about
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 6: this for a second. What message does that send to
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 6: other retired service members or people who have left the military,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 6: people on active duty, or just any U.S. citizen? Don't
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 6: cross this president. He might try to get you hanged,
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 6: but if that doesn't work, he's going to demote you
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 6: in the military if you're a service member or take
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 6: away your pay. You know, this is, I got to say,
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 6: I mean, I spent 25 years in the United States
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 6: Navy and I've been retired now for another, well, 15.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 6: I've never seen anything like this. I mean, this is
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 6: what we've become as a country where people can't speak
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 6: out against the government, can't disagree.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: So did you find out via the tweet? Is that
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: how you found out? Yeah. notified in any other way?
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 6: Well, so I found out initially today via the tweet,
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 6: they did send a letter to my attorney. This is
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 6: the first time they've actually corresponded with my legal folks
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 6: at all. But I think this shows the unseriousness of
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 6: these clowns here. They're more concerned about getting likes on
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 6: Twitter and views than they are running, seriously running the
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 6: Department of Defense.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: Were you surprised that this was the attack that they took? Obviously,
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: you know, Trump has threatened all kinds of things. They've
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: threatened you with court-martial. This is an administrative attack.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 4: Action.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: They're making all these claims about how what you've done
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: is so dangerous and now they're going to kind of
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: come after your pay.
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 3: It seems.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 6: Even seditious in this central letter, sedition, right? Well, I
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 6: think they realize if they put me in front of
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 6: a jury, they would have been laughed out of court,
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 6: even by a military, you know, whatever military case here.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 6: So I think they reverted, you know, to this option
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 6: where they don't think I have a lot of recourse,
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 6: but I'm going to You know, I've got to stand
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 6: up for the American people here. This is not just
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 6: about me at this point. They're trying to shut everybody up.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 6: If you're a retired guy like me in the military
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 6: or you're a former service member or you're just somebody
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 6: speaking out against this president, Donald Trump wants you to
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 6: shut up. That's not acceptable.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: So you made, what set this up was the video
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: you and several of your colleagues made basically saying that
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: members of the military have to refuse military unlawful orders.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: Clearly you knew this was going to spur this kind
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: of a fight or fight of some kind, right?
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 6: No, I thought that even this guy, even Donald Trump
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 6: would say, if he said anything in response to what
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 6: we said, he would say, of course, of course, members
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 6: of the military shouldn't follow illegal orders. That's what I expected.
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 6: I actually expected him to ignore it.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: So I guess part of this is that, look, like,
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: We've watched over the last several decades as presidential authority
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: has expanded, Congress's role has been minimized, and presidents operate
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: in this kind of a gray area about what is
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: the lawful use of military power. Some of this, there
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: is a genuine philosophical problem here of When presidents aren't
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: going to Congress at all, what is an election?
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 6: Yeah, well, these are different things, though. You're talking about
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 6: constitutional authority of a president. And you're right. Over decades,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 6: we've seen an erosion of Congress's role and an amplification
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 6: of the president's. There are some exceptions to that. The
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 6: first Gulf War, 1991, I flew 39 combat missions over
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 6: Iraq and Kuwait. That had an authorization for the use
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 6: of military force by Congress. That's the way this is
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 6: supposed to be done. But you're right, presidents often just
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 6: kind of go it alone. And this Congress especially, my
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 6: Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate have abdicated
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 6: to the White House. Basically, carte blanche, do whatever you want.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 6: We're not going to get in your way. That's not
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 6: what the founding fathers intended. We are the Article I
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 6: branch of government. We come first for a reason. And
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 6: most of the power was put there. They're giving this up.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: But that's not what you're referring to.
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: No, no, no.
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 6: What I was referring to are those things that are
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 6: so obvious to a reasonable person that, hey, I'm being
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 6: ordered to do something specific and that's got to be
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 6: against the law. That's what we're getting at. We're not
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 6: talking about big constitutional responsibilities and roles that the president
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 6: has over Congress.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: And Do you think that there are specific orders that
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: members of the military should have already refused?
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 6: Well, I mean, sometimes you don't know, right? So what
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 6: we did was a friendly reminder. We repeated the Uniform
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 6: Code of Military Justice. It is the law. When a
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 6: service member gets in a situation, they can go to
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 6: their chain of command and say, hey, I've got questions
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 6: about this. Can we talk about this issue? That never
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 6: happened with me. I mean, in the early 90s, you know,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 6: Desert Shield, Desert Storm, every order I ever got, even
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 6: sinking two ships, very obvious we were well within our
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 6: rights to do this. But it has happened historically where
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 6: members of the military have been ordered to do things
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 6: that people should know that's against the law. And when
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 6: the law and orders are in conflict, it says this
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 6: right outside of West Point on a plaque. You go
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 6: with the law. That's all we were trying to do
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 6: is remind members of the military because we have a
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 6: president who has talked about killing the family members of terrorists.
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 6: Family members. That means women and children. He has talked
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 6: about shooting U.S. citizens, protesters in the legs. He's talked
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 6: about sending troops into U.S. cities to use those U.S.
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 6: cities as training grounds, which means... You're going to use U.S.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 6: citizens for training for the U.S. military? So that's why
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 6: we did the video. Now, you know, afterwards, you know, well,
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 6: at the same time, those had strikes that already started
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 6: in the Caribbean. And I do and continue to have
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 6: a lot of questions about the big picture legality of that.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 6: But we were, you know, our goal here was just
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 6: to remind people service members because I don't want to
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 6: see some young Navy, Marine, Air Force guy, Guardian. I
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 6: don't want to see these people finding themselves in a
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 6: really bad situation.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: Well, aren't people already in that situation? The reason I'm
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: pushing on this is only because we don't need to
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: be hypothetical. We have reports in the Washington Post that
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: the administration ordered uh, uh, people to be killed who were, uh,
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: clinging to the wreckage of a ship. And there are
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: people that had to execute that order. Should they have
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: gone to their, uh, uh, superiors and say, I worry
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: this is unlawful.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 6: Well, I've been briefed, you know, on that and in
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 6: the skiff in a secure facility about that strike, I've
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 6: seen the videos. I have more questions coming out of
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 6: that than I had going in. And, um, I think
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 6: the American public needs to see that video. We need
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 6: to have an open hearing on this, and people need
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 6: to answer some hard questions about why we are taking
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 6: those kind of actions. But that's kind of an example.
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 6: We didn't know about that when we made the video,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 6: but that could be pointed to as kind of an
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 6: example of one of the things we're getting at.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: We talked about the broader issue of Congress not being
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: involved in military action by the White House. Obviously, this
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: is we're days after the intervention in Venezuela. Axios got
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: a couple of Democrats to say on background, of course,
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: that criticizing Trump looks weak on this. You've been very
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: critical of the administration for what they've done here. What's
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: your response to that?
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 6: I think when it's appropriate, it is our job. to
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 6: be critical of this president, any president. I was critical
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 6: of Joe Biden on things. It's our constitutional responsibility. And
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 6: when it comes to the military, I sit on the
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 6: Armed Services Committee. I'm the ranking member of the Air
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 6: Lands Subcommittee. I'm on the Strat Forces Subcommittee as well,
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 6: and others. I sit on the Intelligence Committee. One of
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 6: the reasons I actually enjoy, you know, this job is
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 6: the military stuff, the intel stuff. It's consistent with my background.
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 6: I understand, you know, stuff about this, but it's also
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 6: my job. When this administration is doing stuff that makes
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 6: us less safe, less prosperous, putting service members at risk,
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 6: it's my job to say something. I mean, does this
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 6: make us look weak, strong? We're in the beginning of
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 6: whatever this thing is going to turn out to be.
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 6: He extracted Maduro. Maduro is a bad guy. He needs
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 6: to be prosecuted. It would have been better if maybe
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 6: he was overthrown. We're extracting a foreign leader out of
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 6: his country. What precedent does that set? But Donald Trump
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 6: has a habit of breaking shit. And he has no
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 6: plan here. He says he runs the country. We're running
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 6: the country. These guys behind, he's pointing at like Hegseth
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 6: and Rubio. We're running the country. They're not running the country.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: What would you like to see? So there was also
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: a report, by the way, in the Washington Post that
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: the White House is potentially planning a larger role for
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: Stephen Miller in, quote, running Venezuela.
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 6: I didn't see that.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: So what should happen? I mean, look, we're in this now.
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 6: What should happen?
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: What should happen?
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 6: I think we should push for an election in Venezuela.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 6: We pretty much know who's going to win. I think
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 6: at this point, the opposition party won 70 percent of
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 6: the vote in the last election. Venezuela was a democracy
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 6: for decades until Chavez and then now this joker showed up.
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 6: So we need at this point to try to help
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 6: them get back to that. Us running Venezuela, how does
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 6: that help Americans with the cost of their rent and
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 6: their groceries and their healthcare? This president has destroyed the
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 6: prospect for Americans to have affordable healthcare. Millions of Americans
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 6: are going to lose their health insurance because of this
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 6: president and Republicans in Congress because they wanted to give
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 6: a big tax cut to billionaires. And now his whole
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 6: plan is, well, we're going to take over the oil
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 6: operation here, more profit for more rich people. What are
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 6: the consequences to US service members if they have to
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 6: go in there and try to really take control of Venezuela?
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 6: When this happened in Iraq and we toppled Saddam Hussein,
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 6: remember the jubilation in the streets, the statue coming down,
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 6: The Iraqis are all happy. How long did that last
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 6: country winds up in civil war and we're in the
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 6: middle of it. And there's a lot of dead Americans.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 6: I do not want to see that happen here.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: So I remember in 2022, uh, president Biden held a
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. And there was
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: this debate about excluding Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, then a bunch
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: of leaders from other countries refused to intend in protest
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: because those leaders have been excluded. And it was supposed
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: to be an assertion of American leadership in the hemisphere,
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: and it became a story about conflict and weakness. And obviously,
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: there's just one summit. But to me, it does speak
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: to some kind of a vacuum of American leadership that's existed.
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: And I wonder, in seeing what Trump has done and
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: how dangerous it is, have we offered an alternative of
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: what it looks like to really stand up for American values,
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: democratic values in the region.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 6: Well, this isn't standing up for values.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 3: I agree.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: I agree.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 3: But I'm saying, what is our alternative? Do we have
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: an alternative?
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 6: Principles when they're convenient. And if they're inconvenient, screw it.
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 6: That's what we've seen from this administration. Threatening Canada? Do
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 6: we have a closer ally than Canada? Who is the
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 6: moral authority in the Western hemisphere at this point? I
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 6: don't know.
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, what?
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: No, I, I agree with you. What I'm saying is this, look,
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Trump is doing a regime change. He's, uh, pardoning, uh,
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: drug trafficking leaders. He's, uh, he's obviously entering into all
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: kinds of corrupt bargains here. He's, he's, uh, playing footsie
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: with Bukele.
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 3: He's terrible.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: There's no moral leadership and no kind of ideological leadership whatsoever.
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: I'm saying, what is our alternative?
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 6: What's the alternative now?
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, what's an alternative vision for what American leadership
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: in this region should look like?
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 6: The alternative vision. I get it. So the alternative vision
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 6: is what is in the best interest of the United
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 6: States of America and our allies and our partners across
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 6: the globe today and into the future. We need to
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 6: be thinking, the Chinese think out a hundred years. We
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 6: can't be about like, what is in the best interest
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 6: of us right now this second. We've got to be
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 6: thinking decades into the future. evaluating all the time, what
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 6: are the threats to our national security? What are the
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 6: threats to our economy? What are the threats to our future?
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 6: How does this thing that Donald Trump just did in Venezuela,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 6: how does this affect us five or 10 years from now?
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 6: And I can tell you this, it's going to have
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 6: an effect. Is this a justification that Xi needs to
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 6: go and take Taiwan, kick out the leader? He'll say, hey,
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 6: you kicked out Maduro. We've got interests here. This is
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 6: This is 90 miles from our shoreline, a lot closer
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 6: than Venezuela is. So is that the justification? Or is
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 6: this the justification that Putin needs to go beyond Ukraine
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 6: and say, hey, you know, Kazakhstan used to be part
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 6: of the Soviet Union, and they've got a lot of
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 6: oil that they're not exploiting the way they should. We're
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 6: going to work on that. And by the way, Donald Trump,
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 6: it's kind of the same thing you just did in Venezuela.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 6: So what should we... We need to have a government...
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 6: that is playing chess and not checkers. I mean, Stephen
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 6: Miller running Venezuela? That guy's a moron. I mean, you
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 6: talk about you want to ruin that country? You want
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 6: to set this up for a situation that is not
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 6: going to be in our best interest? Put him in charge. So,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 6: I mean, we have to be thinking ahead. We've got
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 6: to have serious people in these jobs. We can't have
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 6: a bunch of sycophants and yes-men. Pete Hegseth? Is he ever?
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 6: under any circumstance, going to speak truth to power? I
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 6: don't think so.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: So there's something so obviously ugly about somebody like Pete
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: Hegseth going after you, somebody like Donald Trump going after you.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: You've served your country for decades. You've sacrificed a lot.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 6: And Donald Trump's a draft dodger, right? Five times.
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: We see a lot of stories about the ways in
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: which Trump is politicizing the military, deploying National Guard into
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: into American cities, doing these kind of lawless raids in
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: the Caribbean. They're coming after you and other service members
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: who have spoken out. What are you hearing from people
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: in the military who are maybe not hardcore Democrats, but
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: are certainly not MAGA, about their response to this, about
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: what it's like seeing the military being used and abused
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: in this way?
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 6: Well, it's quiet, right? they're not doing a lot of
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 6: this stuff publicly. And I've been told by a more
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 6: than one occasion, there are folks inside the Pentagon. There's
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 6: the Donald Trump people, the MAGA people, and they're the
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 6: quiet people. And when they see them go after a
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 6: U S Senator for something I said, that shuts them up.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 6: I mean, are they going to speak out when they
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 6: see some defense contractor? That's a buddy with Donald Trump,
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 6: you know, fleecing the U S taxpayer, or are they
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 6: going to be afraid? And they're going to think, wow, man, they,
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 6: They went after that U.S. senator over something he said.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 6: I can't speak out about this. So they're stifling, you know,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 6: free thought and speech. And what I hear from people,
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 6: I mean, I was, you know, on a military base
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 6: not too long ago. I'm not going to say where.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 6: And as I got into the car, one of the
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 6: very senior people thanked me. You know, thank you for...
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 6: speaking out, thank you for what you're doing.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 2: We need it.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 6: So yeah, there are people that, you know, that, that,
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 6: that they get it and they understand the situation we
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 6: are currently in. And we have a president that doesn't
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 6: obviously doesn't listen to anybody and he's got a bunch
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 6: of yes people around them and that's dangerous.
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: So last question, there's also now a move in Congress
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: to try to reassert some kind of congressional authority over
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: military involvement in Venezuela and beyond. There's going to be
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: a war powers vote that Senator Schumer is going to force.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: Is there any hope that you'll be able to get
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: Republicans on board to pass it? Behind the scenes, are
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: Republicans questioning the administration's refusal to even let members of
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: the gang of whatever it is, five or eight, know
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: that this was coming? Like, is there any hope that
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: Congress is going to reassert its authority here?
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 6: There's a serious lack of spine on the Republican side
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 6: of the aisle right now. There will be some people, obviously,
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 6: that will speak out against this. I mean, Rand Paul
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 6: being an example. There will be others, Lisa Murkowski. I
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 6: think you'll see a few other people. But is that enough?
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 6: to really put pressure on the administration? Probably not. But
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 6: I do show up every day for work being optimistic
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 6: and hopeful things will turn around. That's what we need.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 6: I mean, if we're going to keep this administration in
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 6: check and possibly keep them from... A few days ago,
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 6: I would not have said this, but keep them from
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 6: invading Greenland? I mean, it sounds crazy, but in the
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 6: last couple of days, you know, after we just saw
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 6: what happened here and then he's talking about Greenland again
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 6: and Stephen Miller's wife saying soon Greenland is gonna be
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 6: part of the United States. If we're gonna prevent things
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 6: like that happening or maybe even going after Canada, I mean,
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 6: how crazy does that sound? But who knows at this point,
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 6: we're gonna need the Republicans in the Senate and the
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 6: House to stand up and say something.
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: I was once at some sort of fancy conference that
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: I had no business being at, and somebody was talking
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: about what would happen if someone tried to invade Greenland.
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: And this, I think, Danish academic was describing the mile-high
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: sheets of ice and the temperature and the conditions on
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: the ground. And he said in his Danish accent, if
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: someone were to invade Greenland, we'd begin immediately an effort
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: to rescue them. Senator Mark Kelly, thank you so much
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: for your time. Really appreciate it. And good luck in
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: the fight.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 6: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 4: That's our show for today. Thanks to Mark Kelly for
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 4: coming on. Dan and I will be back with a
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 4: new show on Friday. Talk to everybody then. If you
• 1:48:26
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