Air Date 3/11/2025

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#1687 Respite: Ceasefire in Gaza and the Legacy of Imperial Folly in the Middle East

 

Gaza Ceasefire Explained Reading Between The Lines Part 2 - The Socialist Program - Air Date 1-16-25

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BRIAN BECKER - HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: There's a lot to talk about. What does Biden say about the agreement? What does Donald Trump say about the agreement? What does Netanyahu and the Israelis say about the agreement? Again, what did the regional actors say about it? Okay, and we want to talk about what the Palestinian people say, and the Palestinian resistance forces. We want to hear their voices. You know, the United States characterizes every Palestinian resistance organization as a terrorist entity. So if you show solidarity with the Palestinian people, you're frequently labeled in the United States, as aiding and abetting terrorism. I mean, the U. S. said the same thing about the ANC and Nelson Mandela in South Africa up until 1988 and even beyond, actually. But I want for our audience to hear what the Palestinian resistance forces say about this agreement. 

Now, first of all, it's a three stage agreement. I wanna go over the three stages with you, [00:01:00] but let's first hear if you have it, what did Hamas say about it? What is Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian resistance group? What did the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? All of these organizations, again, identified as terrorist entities such that the US media and the US people never hear, or the US media never tells what they think, and the US people never hear what they think. But I want people to hear what they're saying about the ceasefire agreement. 

LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN: Absolutely. I think that's really important. Hamas has made (an) official statement and also has had a few speeches from different members of the political bureau. They have announced a ceasefire agreement. They have said, I'm quoting here, "The ceasefire agreement is the result of the legendary steadfastness of our great Palestinian people, and our valiant resistance in the Gaza Strip, over the course of more than 15 months. This agreement to halt the agression is an achievment for our people, our resistance, our nation, and the free people of the world. It comes as part of our responsibility towards our [00:02:00] steadfast and patient people in the proud Gaza Strip." They also announced in a speech just within the past hour that In their assessment, the ceasefire represents the achievement of all of their demands since the beginning of the genocide, and they laid out the framework of the ceasefire.

BRIAN BECKER - HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: Okay.

LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN: Now, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad had a very similar tone. They said, "Our people and their resistance are imposing an honorable agreement to stop the aggression, withdraw, and conduct an honorable prisoner exchange due to their legendary steadfastness and brave and valiant fighters." They also mourn the righteous martyrs, and they look forward to healing the wounds of the Palestinian people, and extend greetings to all of the steadfast fighters in the Gaza Strip.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine released a statement just before the official announcement of the ceasefire, where they condemned the ongoing assassinations and bombardments that Israel was still carrying out today. 

BRIAN BECKER - HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: They assassinated- the Israelis, using a drone, [00:03:00] assassinated a Palestinian journalist as he was announcing a ceasefire.

LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN: Just after. He was- those moments right before the ceasefire, you know, kept getting closer and closer. The whole world, people of Gaza were like, "It's going to be announced. It's going to be announced," over the past couple of days. No one has slept for the past couple of days. And this young journalist was speaking live on his social media saying, "I'm so excited for the ceasefire to be announced." And then just after that, he was assassinated. Horrific. 

BRIAN BECKER - HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: By a drone. A drone strike.

LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN: Yes. And over the past, I think, a couple of days, more than 86 Palestinians have been killed in bombardments. And it was going right up until the ceasefire was officially announced.

BRIAN BECKER - HOST, THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM: So the PFLP statement condemns that. And what, how do they characterize the ceasefire?

LAYAN SIMA FULEIHAN: They say that the- this is right before it was announced they said, "Amid this continued aggression," which is the ongoing bombardment, "the Palestinian resistance factions are intensifying their efforts to halt this aggression as soon as possible. [00:04:00] War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, mired in his failures and defeats, will ultimately find himself and his fascist government compelled to agree to a ceasefire after their catastrophic failure to achieve any of their objectives beyond inflicting death and destruction on unarmed civilians."

On the Situation in Syria and its Implications for the Region - Revolutionary Left Radio - Air Date 1-6-25

BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REVOLUTIONARY LEFT RADIO: So most listeners will have been aware that the Assad government has collapsed, but who are the forces and individuals that are attempting to replace him? And what is the current state of Syria overall in the wake of recent events? 

ANGIE: So I can speak to this a bit. Apologies in advance. My cat tends to be a little bit active in the background. In terms of actors, I would say we can go ahead and say everyone is a free Syrian today. I would argue primarily the actors that we have to focus on are Khayat al Tahrir al Sham, the HTS, led by Mohammed al Zawlani.

There's still confrontation with other forces, from the SDF to other Turkish groups, that are [00:05:00] continuing to, we can say, resist or experience skirmishes in different areas of the region, that are just still trying to establish what law is under what area, and what individuals are essentially permitted to remain in their homes.

There's still certain local militias within the Valley of the Christians that have not completely disbanded, despite orders for disarmament, but the actors that we have to focus on in Syria are Hayat Tahrir al Sham and everybody in the West. So I would argue this includes Turkey, this includes Israel, this includes actors like Iran and Russia, this includes France, this includes Germany, this obviously includes the United States.

But the actors that we need to look at in particular are puppet masters in Syria right now. And so what we're looking at in terms of the actual event is a performance at the moment. 

BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REVOLUTIONARY LEFT RADIO: Yeah, and would anybody like to follow up on that? And maybe even just tell us a little bit more about exactly [00:06:00] what happened, because I'm sure there are perhaps even some people in our audience that are totally unaware of exactly what even has occurred, so maybe setting that up could be helpful.

In terms of what happened, that's still being parsed out. The fact that the Syrian army just laid down its arms with no fight, that it kept receiving orders to retreat, And that Assad very abruptly left, is still something that everybody, every actor in the region is trying to piece together. What we know for sure is that Assad was declared the victor of the Syrian civil war for the sheer reason that it was launched to oust him and he remained in power. However, that victory that he had was an incredibly fragile one.

He presided over a country that had been radically, dramatically de-developed by bombing, by foreign intervention, by the US administered [00:07:00] occupation of a third of the country, which happens to be the most lucrative region in terms of its wheat and oil supplies. So, he presided over a very fragile Syria, whose economy had been devastated by, again, many of its major cities being decimated. By its breadbasket and its oil fields being largely occupied by the US proxies in the region as well as the US military itself. So that it collapsed so quickly is what I think surprised everybody. Because I sometimes I often think of how when the Berlin Wall fell not even the CIA was prepared for it. You know, so this resulted in such a stunning collapse as something that is probably going to be studied for the immediate future and probably well past that, but [00:08:00] again, anybody who wants to- 

MOHAMMAD: I just have a quick thing to add in addition to what Ed already stated, which is that all of this has to be taken within the context of the sanctions that have been placed on Syria as well, which these sanctions, again, have had a severe impact on the Syrian population and then perceptions of Assad as well. And on the region all together. So all of this is also not without taking into consideration the interventionist policies of the United States and other imperial forces. 

BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REVOLUTIONARY LEFT RADIO: Absolutely. And we'll definitely get back to that and talk about that in more detail. But Angie, go ahead. 

ANGIE: Yeah, I don't want to go too far into the sanctions at the moment, since I'm sure we'll circle back. But I think from that point that Mohammed makes, it's important to also recognize that the interventionism in Syria cannot, at any point, be separated from Syria's stance and position towards Israel and Palestine.

Prior to the fall of the Assad regime, if that's what we want to kind of conceptualize it as, Turkey and Syria spent the [00:09:00] summer and the fall and the beginning of winter essentially negotiating a reopening of their state's relationships. So Erdogan has been pursuing Assad for nearly six months at the point at which Turkey opens the borders for Hayyat al Tahrir al Sham to enter Syria.

And that order comes, critically, in the moment that Netanyahu is announcing the weak ceasefire on south of Lebanon and then also warning Assad to not play with fire. And I think it's really important to kind of reintegrate that tie that Netanyahu speaks and Erdogan moves when it comes to Syria. 

Egypt, Jordan Reject Trump Plan to Clean Out Gaza; Palestinians Return to N. Gaza in Historic Day

AMY GOODMAN: So, these comments of Trump, the last ones echo his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had said in the last year that Gaza is great beachfront property, talking about it as a kind of real estate deal. Trump, most recently, on Air Force One on Saturday night saying that more than a million Palestinians should be moved to Egypt and Jordan, that he spoke to [00:10:00] the Jordanian king. Meanwhile, Jordan and Egypt — talk about their responses and, most importantly, the response of Palestinians.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, both Jordan and Egypt have rejected this, and they’ve done so since the beginning of this genocidal assault. You know, these comments were welcomed by the far-right ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who said, you know, this would be the voluntary emigration that they’ve been dreaming about for Palestinians to be forcibly displaced outside of Gaza and for them to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza.

I think what’s — yes, we have to acknowledge what’s happening today, which are these incredible scenes of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians, who have withstood an unprecedented genocidal assault, returning back to the north. Now, we spoke at Drop Site to Mustafa Barghouti just a few days ago, and he said the return of forcibly displaced Palestinians to the north will be the ultimate defeat of Israeli [00:11:00] plans, because it means that the goal of ethnic cleansing did not materialize.

Let’s remember what happened. If we go back to October 7th, 2023, when Benjamin Netanyahu took to the airwaves and declared war on Gaza, he said, “Leave now,” to the, you know, 2.3 million Palestinians who are living in Gaza. Just a few days later, we saw this shocking directive for all 1.1 million Palestinians who are north of Wadi Gaza to flee to the south. And we saw this unbelievable, unprecedented aerial bombing campaign and many people forcibly displaced to the south, many of them to Rafah in the beginning. And let’s not forget that at the time, Western governments, including the United States government under the Biden administration, were trying to persuade Egypt to take in hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displace them in northern Sinai, offering economic incentives. There’s reporting that shows that this was taking place. Egypt rejected it at the time, but, more importantly, Palestinians rejected this.[00:12:00] 

And then we saw them build what’s called the Netzarim Corridor, which bisected Gaza. This was a six- or seven-kilometer-wide strip of land. They completely depopulated, forcibly displaced, ethnically cleansed that area, destroyed almost all of the buildings there, set up military bases. And this was, essentially — reporting shows in Haaretz this was called a “kill zone.” Any man, woman or child, unarmed, would enter — it’s unclear where the border was of the Netzarim Corridor — they would be shot and killed. And this was essentially the place that divided Gaza. Once you crossed there, you could not go back. We saw in October also a concentrated extermination campaign in the very north of Gaza, in Jabaliya, Jabaliya refugee camp, in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, where they completely did not allow any aid in and then very systematically started attacking these towns and cities and forcing people out on, essentially, what were death marches to the south, [00:13:00] across the Netzarim Corridor, and back.

And, you know, despite all of this, people withstood. They remained on their land. And now we’re seeing these incredible scenes of people returning home. And to think that, you know, Trump can just say they should move to Egypt or Jordan, I think, you know, is preposterous. And we’re seeing right now that this is kind of an ultimate defeat of the plans of ethnic cleansing, that have dated back to the 1950s for Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to that quote of Jared Kushner, made months ago — that’s Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser — weighing in on Israel’s war on Gaza, saying Israel should move Palestinians out of the besieged territory, which he said contains very valuable waterfront property, making the remarks during an event hosted by the Middle East Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

JARED KUSHNER: And Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable to — if people would [00:14:00] focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done. And so, I think that it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think, from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up. But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a pretty amazing comment, invaluable beachfront property. Earlier today, I was watching the Palestinian attorney Diana Buttu on Al Jazeera. When asked about what Trump said, you know, I think all agree it does look like a demolition zone. There’s no question about it. How can Palestinians live there? And she said, “OK, if there’s that question, rather than moving them to neighboring Arab states like Egypt and Jordan, what about moving them home?” She said 80% of the people of Gaza come from [00:15:00] places in Israel.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yeah, I mean, this is why Gaza has long been a site of resistance in historic Palestine and long been a place that Israel wants to ethnically cleanse, because it is the largest concentration of Palestinian refugees in historic Palestine. So, it has always been a restive place. These people, who 80% of them are their descendants, want to return to their homes, which are mostly the towns and villages around Gaza. And like you said, this is now — they are returning, in these really incredible scenes that we’re seeing right now — 

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is a flood of humanity.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: People hugging, who haven’t seen — they’ve been separated from their family members, from mothers and fathers, separated from their children, for 15 months, and they’re reuniting for the first time. They never thought they would see each other again.

But they are returning to, as you said, a devastated landscape. Nearly the entire — every house has been destroyed or badly damaged. The government [00:16:00] authorities are telling people to bring their tents with them. There are not even enough tents for people to set up on the rubble of their homes. And as we’ve been seeing in other parts, as well, while Israel has violated the ceasefire nearly every single day, killing Palestinians, especially in Rafah, the death count, the official death count, has been also shooting up since the 19th, when the ceasefire went into effect, because dozens of bodies are being recovered from under the rubble. And so, you know, I’m afraid we’re going to see a lot of this as people search for their loved ones as they’re returning to this devastated landscape. But they are determined not to leave their land, and many of them will set up tents on the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then we go to the West Bank and what’s happening there. We just spoke to Mariam Barghouti. You wrote a piece with her for Drop Site. If you can talk about intensification of violence against Palestinians there?

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, essentially, what we [00:17:00] saw soon after the ceasefire went into effect, a war on the West Bank, initially dubbed the Iron Wall. All of these things had been taking place already — attacks on Jenin, closures of checkpoints and so forth — but a massive escalation of this, to the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2002, an invasion of Jenin. Right now they are demolishing the refugee camp, not just with bulldozers as we’ve seen in the past. They are actually detonating, the way they have done in Gaza, parts of this. Two thousand families have already been displaced. Across the West Bank, there was usually around 700 military checkpoints. Now there’s close to a thousand. They’ve all closed down. Cities have been closed off from each other. People can’t leave their towns and villages to go to school, to go to work. They’re separated from each other. And so, this is — they’re laying siege to the West Bank. And a lot of what we show in the reporting and what has been said was that this was a trade-off that Netanyahu — trying to convince his ministers, like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, to sign [00:18:00] onto the Gaza ceasefire plan, that they would launch this kind of unprecedented military assault on the West Bank

#1693 Empowering Ethnostates: Ethnically cleansing Gaza and Trump's South Africa fixationTrump's Insane Plan To "Own" Gaza - Pod Save the World - Air Date 2-12-25

TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Shortly after we recorded last week, President Trump announced that in addition to his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, he also wants the US to occupy it indefinitely and deny those people he will displace the right to return home.

Trump advisors reportedly didn't know he was going to announce this Gaza occupation plan before he did it. And then they seem to try to walk it all back. But then Trump is just doubling down over and over again. Let's listen to a super cut of some of the things he said about this in the last couple of days.

CLIP DONALD TRUMP: I'm committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we're committed to owning it, taking it. 

JOURNALIST: Mr. President, take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.

CLIP DONALD TRUMP: Under the US authority. We're not going to buy anything. We're going to have it. We're going to keep it. And we're going to make sure that there's going to be peace. 

We'll build beautiful [00:19:00] communities for the 1.9 million people. We'll build beautiful communities, safe communities. It would be a beautiful piece of land.

JOURNALIST: Would the Palestinians have the right to return?

CLIP DONALD TRUMP: No, they wouldn't, because they're going to have much better housing, much better. In other words, I'm talking about building a permanent place for them. 

JOURNALIST: But what about the Palestinians who just won't leave? We've spoken, our team has spoken to millions of Palestinians.

CLIP DONALD TRUMP: They're all going to leave when they have a place that's a better alternative. When they have a nice place that's safe, they're all going to leave. It's a hell hole right now. 

JOURNALIST: But how are you so sure? Will the US force them to leave? 

CLIP DONALD TRUMP: You're going to see that they're all going to want to leave. 

TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: So, no surprise that this plan didn't go over all that well in Arab capitals, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan. 

On Monday, in advance of King Abdullah of Jordan's visit to the White House on Tuesday, today when we're recording, Trump also said he would consider withholding aid from Egypt and Jordan if they refuse to take in Palestinians. For those who don't know, Jordan and Egypt are some of the top recipients of US military aid, and have been for decades, in large part because both countries cut the first peace deals with [00:20:00] Israel, and the stability of those governments is seen as the cornerstone for peace in the entire region. 

So Ben, a lot of, there's a lot of debate about this announcement and people wondering if Trump's serious or if he's bluffing and setting up a negotiating position.

I think I'd argue that the reaction we're seeing in the Middle East and the pressure this conversation put on King Abdullah, who was like sitting there, literally -- he looked like he was being physically squeezed between Trump and his own population in the Oval Office -- that just shows that it doesn't really matter, in addition to being illegal and unethical, calling for the forced migration of Gazans into Jordan, is already destabilizing the Jordanian government.

And, Abdullah might've bought himself some time in this Oval Office meeting by saying he'd taken 2000 kids from Gaza who are suffering from dire medical conditions, but I doubt the Trump pressure campaign stops here. 

BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: No. And let's just point out for a second, Tommy, that a lot of people in the US have been in this kind of mode since the election [00:21:00] of taking Trump more seriously as this kind of dynamic political figure who was able to build a winning coalition, and have projected onto him a competence that he doesn't have. And this is clearly evidence of that. This idea is an absolute dead on arrival, crazy thing to be talking about. It's ethnic cleansing of 2 million people that don't want to leave. It is existential to Jordan and Egypt that don't want to take people in. 

But to gracefully plug something I wrote about this in the New York Times over the weekend, and the point I want to pull out of that is two things. And even if this doesn't happen, cause it's almost impossible to foresee how this would happen. And despite the fact that he's been taking questions, he hasn't, when he says he wants to buy it, it's not clear who he's buying it from. When he says he wants to own it, he's not clear how he wants to take ownership. They want to deny that US troops have anything to do with it. But how else could the US take possession of Gaza without troops?

But the two things that I want to [00:22:00] underscore are, first of all, just by talking about this in the way that he has the last couple of weeks, in addition to what he said about Greenland and Panama and Canada, I guess, he is completely ignoring the concept of state sovereignty, which is the cornerstone of the international legal system that was built after World War II to prevent big nations from just swallowing up smaller ones or grabbing territory like we used to do back in the colonial days.

And the reason that's so dangerous is because that interacts with what Vladimir Putin's trying to do in taking chunks of Ukraine, or what China might want to do in taking Taiwan, or what Israel might want to do in the West Bank and Gaza: it's treating land like real estate instead of sovereign territory where people live. That's the first thing. 

Then the second thing is just the total disregard for the opinion of the Palestinians. He has not even solicited the opinion of a single Palestinian to inform this plan to take over Gaza. And there are two million people that live there and don't want to [00:23:00] leave there. And it just suggests we're going back in time to this pre-World War period where big powers just took land and made deals over the heads of smaller countries or less powerful people. And that led to two world wars. That's why we set up a whole system of international laws to prevent things like this from happening. 

TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yeah. And just again to hammer this home. half the population of Jordan is Palestinian. The king doesn't want another huge influx of Palestinians into his country for a bunch of reasons, but starting with the fact that it could topple his regime.

But on top of that, Palestinians don't want Jordan to become the de facto Palestinian state because it could deny them the right to return home to areas where they were displaced from in '67 or '48 or wherever in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza. And then Jordanians don't want a huge influx of Palestinians because they want Jordan to be Jordan, not Palestine. So the Jordanians hate Trump's plan. 

And then he's also leaning hard on the Egyptians to take in a bunch of people. But Egypt is struggling from massive [00:24:00] economic problems. They're currently relying on big loans from the EU and the IMF, and in recent years have taken in a ton of refugees from Sudan, Syria, Yemen, name your country. And they're struggling with that burden. And they don't want Hamas to reconstitute. If you displace a big chunk of the Gazan population into Egypt, Hamas reconstitutes there and then attacks Israel from Egypt, that could lead to an Israeli response into Egypt. They don't want that to happen. And they also, and Sisi and the leaders in Egypt also don't want Hamas to stir shit up and build support for Islamist parties within Egypt themselves. 

So, Trump just rolled this grenade into the Middle East with this plan. And everyone else were just watching to see if this thing is going to explode. It's a disaster. 

BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yes, and you're right about what you said about Jordan. Look, King Abdullah is married to a Palestinian. There are millions of Palestinians who live in Jordan on the east bank, and that's often been a source of some tension because of Jordan's peace treaty with Israel. And so if [00:25:00] King Abdullah were to participate in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by taking in some of these two million Palestinians who don't want to leave Gaza, I really don't know if his regime could survive that. I just, I think that the boiling frustration with what is already not a very good economic circumstance, with already displaced Palestinians, could get out of hand. 

And similarly in Egypt, where you have a brittle military dictatorship with a lot of anger seething underneath, that could explode too, particularly if you have Hamas introduced into that equation.

It also is relevant, Tommy, that USAID funds a significant amount of assistance into Jordan that that government really relies on. And for all Trump's talk-- 

TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: That they've already budgeted.

BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: That they've already budgeted.

TOMMY VIETOR - HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: They think already have, yeah.

BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Yeah and so I guess it could go hat in hand to the Gulf states and ask them to fill this gap that USAID provided. But it's not just money that USCAD provides to Jordan, it's expertise. It's help in running certain government programs. That's being yanked away. [00:26:00] Trump talks about rebuilding life for Gazans. Guess which agency does that? USAID. And USAID already cannot really fulfill its obligations under the ceasefire agreement, just the short term ceasefire agreement. When you think about the long term needs in Gaza to clear rubble, to demobilize and destroy unexploded bombs that are littering Gaza, nevermind temporary housing and then long term housing. Without USAID, I don't know how that gets done.

West Bank Annexation Inevitable - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-6-25

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Can you talk a little bit more about that, Zach? Like, that being such an escalation because people that may not be as familiar with the distinction between like the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza's bombed all the time. The West Bank is bombed occasionally, but it's mostly this rolling violence and seizure of land and vigilantes and IDF people shooting people and killing them in a more targeted way. 

ZACHARY FOSTER: The West Bank is divided into three areas. These three areas being area A, B, and C as a result of the Oslo process. And area C, which has [00:27:00] about 150, 000 Palestinians, Israeli soldiers and Israeli settlers have been terrorizing Palestinians on a daily basis for decades. And, ramping up in the past year. We've seen dozens. I think two dozen communities uprooted and ethnically cleansed primarily from area C. We're talking more than 1, 500 Palestinians ethically cleansed from Area C in just the past 15 and a half months. Then you have Area B, places like Sebastia, in the West Bank, which are now also increasingly coming under threat. We're talking about, how many Palestinians in an area, would be about 500, 000. They're also now facing, these are the sort of semi-rural small towns of the West Bank, they've been facing increasing attacks by settlers. 

And now area A, the area with the overwhelming majority of the population of the West Bank, the urban centers, Ramallah, Beit Lahem, Nablus, Jenin, Tul Karem, Hebron, Khalid, these areas are now facing a new level of violence, a level of violence that Palestinians in these areas have not seen in decades. These are areas like Jenin, Annapolis, where the Israeli military [00:28:00] is sending multiple, we're talking thousands of Israeli soldiers on the ground, ripping up streets, tearing up civilian infrastructure, destroying the water infrastructure, destroying hundreds of homes, destroying roads, destroying hospitals.

In January, just last month, the Israeli military entered a hospital, I believe it was in Jenin, and killed three Palestinians. So, these are undercover operations taken, carried out by the Israeli military in civilian areas, dressed up as Palestinian civilians, carrying out the crime of perfidy in international law, which is feigning status as a civilian during armed hostilities in order to kill Palestinians. They're doing it in the West Bank. They've been doing it in Gaza, by the way, as well. Recall that in the Nuseirat refugee camp in this past summer, when the Israeli military entered that refugee camp to rescue four Israeli hostages, they killed 274 Palestinians at the same time.

And it was during that operation where they feigned status [00:29:00] as both Palestinian civilians and as Palestinian aid workers. And so they're doing that in Gaza, they're doing that in the West Bank as well. It's a very frightening time right now for everyone in the West Bank, not only because they're dramatically expanding the military campaigns in the West Bank, both in the tactics and in the methods and in the strategies and area A, B and C, as we already said, but we're also now getting a confirmation that the plan really is annexation. We've known this all along, but if you follow the reports of B'Tselem, and if you follow the reports of Peace Now, every week, every month, the Israeli civilian administration takes another step and people think annexation is like, one day it's not annexed, the next day it is. That's not how it works. It's an incremental process, every week, every month, there's a new policy, a new regulation, which gradually incorporates the West Bank into the Israeli civilian administration. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And It was announced this morning that the Israeli military has been told by higher ups to begin to plan to remove those remaining Palestinians from [00:30:00] Gaza. And what that removal looks like is going to be incredibly violent. Can you react to that instruction? And give us some historical context about how many times Israel has tried to ethically cleanse Gaza, and they've failed. So, bad record. 

ZACHARY FOSTER: First of all, what we hear and what we see from Gaza is that Palestinians have no intent on leaving. So any kind of relocation effort is going to be forcible. It's not going to be voluntary. And Israel always blurs the lines between forced relocation and voluntary relocation. They forced Palestinians historically, as you pointed out. Israel has attempted to relocate, i. e. ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Gaza on countless occasions. They tried to do it in '48. It was through American pressure, 1948, it was through American pressure, the American most senior diplomat in Israel at the time, told the Israeli military, this is the end of the war, in [00:31:00] late '48, early 1949: no, you're going to withdraw your troops from Gaza Strip and Sinai now. And it was only because of that American pressure in 1948-49, that Gaza wound up in the hands of Egypt rather than Israel.

And then in '56, when Israel re-invaded the Gaza Strip, they slaughtered, they went on a campaign, they slaughtered 150 Palestinians in Khan Yunis, they slaughtered another 100 in Rafah, with the goal to incentivize flight. The same thinking that they adopted in '48 was you slaughter a few hundred here, incentivize the rest to leave this They did the same thing in '56, except '56 was not '48 and the Palestinians did not leave. Only about a thousand left after those massacres and then when the Israeli prime minister at the time realized he could not compel Palestinians to leave by force, they started to develop plans to figure out ways of, ridding Gaza of its Palestinian refugees. When they reoccupied Gaza in '67, they did the same thing. They developed a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And this was at the highest [00:32:00] levels. The Israeli cabinet met on June 18th and June 19th, 1967. They made a few decisions. One of which was we will annex Gaza, after we can, after we're able to rid the population of most of its refugees. That was the decision made in June 1967, a week after Israel conquered that territory. And then from the period June 1967 to December 1967, Israel settled on a plan to depopulate this strip. And, basically from the end of the war in '67, until about the end of 1969-1970. Israel compelled 70, 000 Palestinians in Gaza to leave. And then from 1970-1972, Israel realized they weren't going to be able to compel more than that through these incentive programs, and so they did it by force.

And Ariel Sharon enters the Gaza Strip in 1971 with a plan to "thin out" the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. They enter the refugee... they first enter Jabali in 1971, they displace hundreds of families, they [00:33:00] expel 12, 000 Palestinian family members of fighters. So these are innocent civilians by Israel's own admission. They expel them to Sinai. They continue in 1972. They try more attempts in 1974 and 1976. But the whole plan all along, well into the 1990s, is to rid Gaza of its refugees. Anyone who leaves the Gaza Strip or the West Bank for more than three years is not able to return. They lose their residency rights.

Israel has been in a constant effort over the past 56 years in Gaza and the West Bank to figure out ways of getting them out, of pushing them out, because Zionism is a political philosophy that says, how do we create a Jewish state in a land that's mostly non-Jewish? How do we create Jewish domination and Jewish control in a land that is mostly non-Jewish? Well, the easiest way of doing it is just getting rid of all those non-Jews. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: By killing or by forcible transfer, and that is what Zionism is, folks. And I think people are starting to wake up to the contradictions of what liberal Zionism is and what we need to do. Although we still need, one, and I was saying this before the show, [00:34:00] the evolution in this conversation is an endorsement of a one democratic state from the river to the sea. And we have still yet to see a politician in this country make that case, even the good ones that are standing up for genocide, against genocide. That is what the solution needs to be. Like South Africa, it must be imposed upon them. 

Trumps South Africa Fixation - What Next - Air Date 2-12-25

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: You know, I hear theories about folks being motivated to behave in certain ways because of their childhoods, and it makes me slightly suspicious, just because, I don't know, people grow up and they change their minds. Do you think Musk could have other motivations for why he'd be so interested in South Africa, tweeting so voraciously about it?

CHRIS MCGREAL: I think certainly there are business interests involved for Musk right now. For many years, he paid little attention to South Africa and It's notable that he has started to latch onto this idea that Whites are [00:35:00] victims of discrimination, of being persecuted through a new kind of racist system, just as he's also been trying to get his Starlink into the country and run into South Africa's Black empowerment laws, which essentially require Black ownership of a chunk of the company. I think it's about 30 percent depending on the business you're in. Musk is portraying that as a racist law, as a racist anti-White law, when it's a legitimate attempt to make sure that Black people have investments in the economy and benefiting from the economy as White people have done.

But it's notable that Musk has ramped up this whole idea that there's White genocide, Whites are being persecuted, a new racist system, just as he's also trying to get the terms on which Starlink could do business in South Africa changed. 

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah, tell me more about what this Starlink contract could mean for Musk and his businesses and what it could mean for South Africa.

CHRIS MCGREAL: Well, the idea would be that Starlink... so, you [00:36:00] know, South Africa being a huge sprawling country with large rural areas that are difficult to get conventional kind of internet lines to and all of the rest, it would provide some kind of service for farmers and for others who live in rural areas.

So, there would be a few hundred million, I believe, would be invested in this and he would expect to get a good return from that. That's why we're going in to do it. it's interesting to note that he's being backed in this. There's a petition been raised by AfriForum, which is this Afrikaner rights group that's been accused of being essentially a White supremacist group and which has done much to make the false claims of White genocide here in the United States and to push them towards Trump.

It's now adopting Musk's language and saying that essentially he's being blocked because of his race and that actually having Starlink in South Africa would help save the lives of White farmers who don't have good communications. So, you can [00:37:00] see now the merging of those two things of this long term campaign by AfriForum to persuade the Trump administration that they're victims of the post-apartheid order, with their direct backing now of Musk's business interests and claims.

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Elon Musk and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke by phone last week. Do we know what was said on this phone call? 

CHRIS MCGREAL: Essentially, Ramaphosa was trying to get Musk to get Trump to dial back both the rhetoric and the threats and the cutoff of aid and all of the rest.

I'm sure Musk had something to say about Starlink. We know, from before this, that the South African government has been considering allowing Musk to bypass the Black empowerment requirement, for Black businesses to have a stake in his Starlink cooperation in South Africa, by allowing him to invest in other social programs to an equal value.

So, South Africa is saying, Well, look, maybe we can [00:38:00] work around that. And I would imagine that that would also have been part of the call as Ramaphosa tries to diffuse this whole thing. 

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: You know, I'm wondering if you can step back a little bit, because you reported from South Africa during the end of apartheid, right? 

CHRIS MCGREAL: I did.

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: I wonder how that experience maps on to what you're seeing now in the United States as someone who reports from here. Is there anything that strikes you about this transition to this new administration where you think, I was in this totally different place. I can understand what's happening here in a way that maybe the people who've been in this place the whole time can't. 

CHRIS MCGREAL: Yes, I suppose the closest parallel is with this narrative that turns the oppressors into the victims, I think. And you're now getting a narrative in the United States that is an attempt to say that people who actually have [00:39:00] often been in the best position in this country are the victims. Hence, the attack on DEI, hence the attack on people who aren't White in general in some ways. So I think that kind of massaging of the narrative, the flipping of who is really at a disadvantage here, who is really in charge, it's a clear parallel. 

But there are, you know, I'm kind of hesitant to draw parallels, direct parallels, with the apartheid system and years because that was such a complex and individual thing to South Africa. What you have to remember there is that more than 80 percent of the population was Black and 8 percent at that point of the population was White and they were ruling the country. So, there are different forces at work here. I do think that the attack on the courts and the rule of law that may be emerging in this country, we're just seeing the first flickers of it with the reactions from J. D. Vance and others to the judge's orders on the various actions that have been taken by Musk and his [00:40:00] DOGE, may also prove a parallel in time.

MARY HARRIS - HOST, WHAT NEXT: Yeah. it's interesting. I see this administration taking aim at diversity, equity and inclusion stuff, which really hasn't been enforced with a full force of law. And what I see with the Trump administration taking on South Africa is a country that really has tried to grapple with explicit racism and what made apartheid possible and do that through rules about Black business ownership and land ownership. And it makes sense that that country. would be a target for a place that's going so aggressively after DEI. You know? 

CHRIS MCGREAL: Well, I think one of the things you see with Musk and Thiel and others of these libertarians that emerged from apartheid South Africa is that they imagined that at the end of apartheid, it was some kind of level playing field and everybody was just beginning at the starting line and they should just pull their socks up and get on with it. And it's an insane idea, [00:41:00] given the huge disadvantages that the majority of the population had, not least in education. 

Musk benefited from an incredibly good education in one of the best schools in Pretoria. And the idea that the end of apartheid meant that he was on a beginning at the same starting line as somebody who grew up in a Black township just outside of Pretoria, is ridiculous. But this is very much the idea that Musk and Thiel push. And I think you see the re-domination of that idea in this country, too.

#1692 Ethnically Cleansing America: Trump's racist whirlwind of deportation and criminalization of immigrationTrump’s Unconstitutional Rampage Against Immigration - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 1-25-25

BISHOP MARIANNE BUDDE: I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once [00:42:00] strangers in this land. 

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what it was in that clip of the bishop just imploring Donald Trump to have some compassion. What was that a tripwire for? 

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: So when that clip went viral, of course, Bishop Budd showed that mercy is still an important part of the American public discourse, and the idea of compassion still has a lot of strength. And Republican representative Mike Collins stated that he believed the bishop should be deported for having the audacity to ask President Trump to show mercy. And my response was to highlight how far we have fallen from the discourse that we used to have in this country around compassion, mercy, and justice.

These are not terms of weak people. They are core to our foundations as a country. They have been written into our laws. They are in fact, an [00:43:00] immigration law. Immigration law contains multiple. avenues for compassion, where people may be allowed to stay in the United States even if they are undocumented, and that has always been the case.

And so I think what touched a nerve is calling out this anti-mercy, anti-compassion behavior as against the founding principles of this country. 

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: The other, I think, big disconnect that we're all just sitting in, and Mark Joseph Stern and I talked about this earlier in the week when the first executive orders started coming down, is this gulf between the announced actions and the dictates of the Constitution, or the many statutes that control how law is actually enforced. And, earlier in the week, I said, look, a lot of executive orders are just letters to Santa. They don't have any actual force. And we're going to talk about that in a second. But I think on this question of asylum, we already have CBS News reporting that border [00:44:00] agents are being deployed right now to summarily deport migrants crossing into the country without allowing them to even ask for legal protection. At the same time, there's actually no longer any way to cross legally into the country, because on Monday, right after Donald Trump was sworn in, the administration shut down the CBP One app, which threw tens of thousands of migrants trying to navigate a lawful way to enter the country into limbo. 

So I think what I'm trying to ask is this question of how much force did these -- on the one hand, these executive orders are just wish lists. On the other hand, at least in this context of immigration and asylum, they're very much effective and they're leading to action on the ground.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, immigration is an area where the president does have a lot of authority. But immigration is ultimately set to Congress. The Constitution assigns the power of setting rules relating to naturalization to Congress and not to the [00:45:00] president. And for the last couple hundred years, that has been interpreted as meaning that it is Congress that ultimately gets to decide who can enter the country and who cannot, and not the president.

When the president does get that authority, it's usually because Congress has given the president that authority, and not because it's an inherent aspect of the presidential power.

But Trump doesn't agree with that. And what he has already said is that he can, in his own view, simply suspend the entirety of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the laws passed by Congress about how to treat people taken into custody at the border. And he has said that he can simply sweep those aside and order border patrol to turn people away, despite the fact that they do have rights in the law, despite the fact that they have rights under international agreements that the United States is part of. And he says he can simply toss that all aside under his own power. 

So to some extent these things have already gone into [00:46:00] effect. And there is more to come. There's a travel ban that can come, restrictions on legal immigration are foreshadowed in the executive orders and will be coming in the future. And that's an area where he does have a lot of authority restricting legal immigration. 

But what he can't do, and what the courts are likely going to intervene on, is the idea that he can simply declare "I'm President, therefore, I don't have to follow the laws if people are crossing our southern border." 

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So I'm hearing you say that there's just this kind of "L'Etat, c'est moi," I am the president! I get to supersede everything: the Constitution, every statute, as you said, international law. And, in a strange way, by behaving as though that is true, even though it will all be tested in the courts, there feels like there's a bit of a knock-on effect where entities are starting to behave as though it's true, even if it's not yet.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, and we have already [00:47:00] seen a number of people who know better simply acquiesce to this kind of attitude towards constitutional authority and presidential authority. Of course, when it comes to things like his executive order to strip birthright citizenship for millions of non-citizens in the country, the Department of Justice is defending this. They have already filed legal briefings in court arguing that the consensus for centuries that birthright citizenship exists in this country is not real, and can simply be tossed aside with the stroke of a pen. So there are people going along with this. 

The imperial presidency is here, and it's in action, and the question is, how much will the courts push back on it? Because a lot of the institutional actors inside the government are, for the moment, being muzzled, pushed aside, or fired. 

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Can we talk for a minute about the purported legal authority that underlies the president's claim that he's just going to, on day one, effectively shut down the southern border? Because there's a kind [00:48:00] of a weird mishmash of public health claims and national security, anti-terrorism claims, and of course, the good old foreign invasion claim. We knew that was coming. Can you just walk us through what the basis of this claim that there is a catastrophic emergency at the southern border that allows him to set aside existing statutes and constitutional protections?

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, so President Trump invokes three specific legal authorities. Two of them are contained within immigration law. One of them is his claim that as president, he inherently can shut the border whenever there is an invasion, which is a pretty radical argument, considering, again, when the Constitution speaks of invasion, everyone agrees who has ever looked at this issue on a legal basis that it refers to a military invasion, an invasion by a foreign government.

And even if you [00:49:00] think that there is an argument that colloquially we are being invaded by migrants, I would disagree with that, but I can understand the argument from a colloquial standpoint. Very clear that there is not a military invasion at the border. And in fact, the vast majority of migrants who have crossed the border in the last four years have voluntarily turned themselves into law enforcement, to the border patrol, and are asking for protection. And I cannot think of a military invasion in the history of the entire planet that began with people voluntarily turning themselves into the law enforcement of the country to which they were invading.

Nevertheless, he makes a claim, first, that under the Constitution, in order to support the constitutional provision that says the executive shall protect the states against an invasion, that he can suspend the physical entry of individuals coming into the United States. Now, what that means as a practical basis [00:50:00] remains to be seen.

Separately, he invokes two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorize the president to suspend the entry of individuals. One is the travel ban authority, Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This is the authority that the Supreme Court said gave him extraordinary deference to suspend legal admissions into the country. And the other is a similar provision that operates for restricting visas. 

The travel ban authority, however, is already in effect at the border. President Biden invoked this authority in the past. President Trump invoked this authority at the border in his first term. But it didn't do anything on its own. The widespread agreement of the Trump's administration first term and the Biden administration was that this authority, when invoked at the border, had to operate along with another law that let them use that authority to restrict asylum. And the way that worked was that Biden and Trump [00:51:00] pushed out regulations saying, if you cross the border in violation of a presidential suspension of entry, we are deciding in our discretion not to grant you asylum. And they had a law on the books that says the Attorney General can set restrictions on asylum that they deem necessary. So there was a pretty clear legal fig leaf. 

Now, and there are good disagreements about how that authority was exercised and whether that asylum restriction was lawful, but nevertheless, they pointed to a specific law and said, this law authorizes us to suspend asylum. These new executive orders do not do that. They simply assert, I have put this suspension in effect under Section 212(f). Therefore, I am suspending not only asylum, but I am declaring that people cannot apply for any other benefit in immigration law that might permit someone to stay in the country. So that could mean a visa, that could mean applying for a green card through a spouse, that could mean applying for protection [00:52:00] under the Convention Against Torture. There are so many other things in the law that are not asylum that a migrant might be eligible for. And Trump is simply saying, I can come in and with a stroke of a pen say every one of these protections that Congress has written into law are no longer available for people.

And that is sweeping. He did not make this claim his first time.

Extraordinary Cruelty, Ordinary Policy: Immigration and Deportation Under Trump 2.0. - Unf*cking The Republic - Air Date 1-31-25

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: We can't talk about immigration without talking about why people come here in the first place. Enter the Washington Consensus. Now, we've covered it before. This was the brilliant idea to treat Latin America and the Caribbean like a commodity store rather than partners. Essentially, we've treated our neighbors to the south as a commodity source—labor, minerals, timber, oil, rather than a partner. We help build entire economies on the other side of the world, while ignoring the potential of the LAC to be more than a strip mine or cheap labor pool. 

Now, as we've said before, The Washington Consensus is a reflection of ethnocentric attitudes [00:53:00] rather than a suite of policy prescriptions and what contributes to this persistent narrative that these countries are filled with unproductive savages who just want to suck on the teats of our welfare programs.

The opportunities remain abundant and available if we only developed a more proactive and less racist attitude toward the region as a whole. And it looked for a moment during the global pandemic that we might wake up to the possibility of true partnership. One that would ameliorate trade, reduce the flow of asylum seekers, and reduce carbon emissions.

Sadly, the Biden administration ignored the opportunity even as the two largest economies in the LAC, Mexico and Brazil, moved further left and tried to open up more productive conversations throughout the region. No one represents this antiquated, paternalistic view of the Southern Hemisphere more than Joe Biden mind you. 

Biden could have moved to normalize economic relations with Venezuela and eliminate sanctions that only serve to [00:54:00] strengthen Maduro's authoritarian grip on the country and punish its citizens. I mean, for some reason, this dictator totally off the table. Every other dictator in the world we can do business with.

This is what led to the surge in migration that gave us Trump, because that was an actual crisis. And Biden could have also finished what Obama started in Cuba by minting it as a major trading partner and opened up the flow of tourism. He could have partnered more closely with new president Claudia Scheinbaum and returning president Lula da Silva to form an economic alliance that would reduce our dependence upon China.

All of this, all of his failures of diplomacy and foreign policy left a vacuum that is once again being filled by the bloviator in chief who's taking all of the wrong lessons from the strongmen in the region and ignoring partnerships with our two most natural allies who also happen to be the biggest trading partners.

Now, Trump once again designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Repeated his intention to implement [00:55:00] punitive tariffs on Mexico, threatened Colombia with sanctions after they refused to take in a military plane of 200 deported migrants, none of whom, by the way, were accused of committing any crimes.

And he's celebrating the brutal economic policies of Javier Millet in Argentina and authoritarian policies of Najib Bukele in El Salvador. Our policies and attitudes toward the LAC region are so short sighted, racist, and depraved it makes my blood boil.

In terms of who's being targeted in these roundups. The biggest threat I can see is in the characterization of criminality and status under the Trump regime. This is where it goes from business as usual, but with more teeth and video cameras, to dictatorship style pogroms. Consider the following scenarios.

MANNY FACES: About 35 percent of the deportations ordered over the past decade were for people who didn't appear in court under a deportation order. This goes back to Clinton's criminalization [00:56:00] catch 22. This person might be the breadwinner for a family here, sends money back home, is raising a kid born on U. S. soil, and is generally a productive citizen.

This person is also considered a criminal and might be rounded up by ICE. 

99 - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: According to an article in the Texas Tribune, currently nearly 3 million people have legal permission to work and live in the U. S. Under various federal programs that don't provide a path to permanent legal status or citizenship.

The programs can be renewed or scrapped at the discretion of each new presidential administration. End quote. These are the so called collateral roundups that Trump is proposing to include. 

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Okay, alternately, They could be a member of a gang, wanted for a violent crime here in the United States, or perhaps in their home country.

There are immigrants being targeted by ICE currently, and historically, that fall under this category, and this is the pretense under which this administration and most of Trump land media is operating. A few good eggs will be swept up with the bad eggs, but that's the price we pay for freedom, [00:57:00] right?

This kind of aligns with what the young man at the top of the episode said as well. But let's dig into this last part a bit more. Right now, Congress is debating the Lake and Riley Act, which would require ICE to also detain undocumented immigrants accused of lesser, non violent crimes. There's a lot going on here.

So, let's take the undocumented person, Wanted for a crime in their home country. Assuming we have extradition privileges and communication with the nation of origin, this is pretty straightforward path, right? 

MANNY FACES: Unless of course, this person is a political refugee wanted for protesting an authoritarian regime and demanding fair and open elections.

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Hmm, right. Well, I guess a proper procedure should be followed in this instance. But what about the undocumented immigrant that committed a crime on US soil? Surely they have to go, right? 

99 - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Unless, of course, this crime involved your family and this person stands a better chance of roaming free once back in their home country rather than facing our criminal justice system.

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Oh. [00:58:00] The Lake and Riley Act adds a bit of clarity by adding non violent crimes, which basically, just helps us weed out bad actors from our society. surely there's no harm in that, right? 

MANNY FACES: Sure, except for the part about only needing to be accused of a crime. In theory, you could press charges against someone you hold a grudge against for taking your parking spot, and suddenly they're in the system, and ICE is deporting them.

So, because you lost your parking spot at Trader Joe's and decided to make a false accusation against someone you don't know and it turns out that they're the only provider for an entire family, working nights and weekends in jobs that Americans won't fill, sending money home to El Salvador, so the rest of their family can survive and not seek asylum in the United States?

And one of the jobs is a caretaker to an old disabled lady whose kids don't live in the same state, so they pay this person off the books? Because her insurance doesn't cover the cost of an aid. And since ice swept up this person and the old lady wasn't notified, she goes three days without eating, gets dizzy, falls and hits her head and dies.

The family in El Salvador falls in a crisis and the entire family has to flee the country, but they're too [00:59:00] weak and hungry, so they die in the muddy waters of the Darien Gap. Everyone died, all because you got an honest immigrant deported. 

99 - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Way to go, Max.

MANNY FACES: Asshole.

ANCHORMAN CLIP: Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast.

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Point being, this level of nuance isn't being discussed anywhere on the left or the right. So it's important for us not to add to the confusion by getting it wrong.

Before we go, we should reinforce some facts that we've covered before to demolish some right wing bullshit. Now, you've heard it before. Immigrants are flooding across the borders to take advantage of our free social services. Really? Let's count what undocumented immigrants can't get and see there's Medicaid, TANF, Child Welfare Payments, SNAP, Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, Social Security, basically everything.

But here's the kicker. [01:00:00] Undocumented workers pay about 13 billion a year into Social Security that they'll never be able to claim. They pay property taxes through their rent that funds public schools. The only benefits they can access? Emergency room care and public education for their kids, that's it.

And with respect to public education, public schools are primarily funded by local property taxes. These are paid by homeowners or landlords. Tenants pay these homeowners for apartments and rooms or landlords for apartments and storefronts. See how this works? That leaves emergency rooms, which I'll address in the Medicare for All episode.

And it also leaves school lunches. So that's the last thing, right? On this latter point, I have to concede. Undocumented children receive free school lunches. And the federal government is on the hook for that. Let's actually do a little math. Let's see. The federal government spends around 17. 2 billion on school lunches.[01:01:00] 

About 7 percent of students are undocumented. That's 1. 2 billion per year Feeding undocumented children. Now the federal budget for 2025 is 7. 3 trillion. So my math is correct. School lunches for undocumented children represents 0. 016 percent of the federal budget. 

MANNY FACES: So she put it that way to port them all.

99 - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: Stop it.

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: These right wing talking points are garbage and the media outlets that repeat them are garbage outlets filled with garbage people, but as leftists, We don't get to pick and choose the facts that support our narratives either. Now look, I get it, we need to call out Trump's cruelty, his racist rhetoric, his intentional trauma infliction.

But we also need to be honest about something. The difference between Trump and Obama isn't in the numbers. It's in the cruelty of execution and the willingness to put it [01:02:00] on display for all of us to see. He's taunted us, for sure. And yet, the left needs to be morally consistent here. Yes, Trump's approach is more brutal, more racist, more cruel, but the machinery he's using?

That was built and maintained by both parties. Clinton criminalized existence, Bush militarized the border, Obama perfected deportation, Biden used it all and then some, and Trump? Trump just took off the mask. The real solution isn't in who can deport more people or build bigger walls. It's in recognizing that the entire fucking framework is broken.

We need to rebuild our relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean, create real economic partnerships, decriminalize immigrant status, and stop treating people like political footballs. But that would require admitting that both parties have blood on their hands, and in Washington, that's the one thing that's still illegal.

In the meantime, fuck [01:03:00] Donald Trump. Elon Musk is a Nazi. Protect those you love, and even some you might not. Because next time around it could be you

Trump's Mass Detention Plan for Guantánamo Harkens Back to U.S. Detention of Haitian Asylum Seekers - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-4-25

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The Pentagon saying some 300 additional soldiers have arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have begun constructing a tent city to detain up to 30,000 immigrants and asylum seekers. On Monday, the Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the Trump administration’s attack on asylum seekers. This is what he said.

PRESIDENT MIGUEL DAZ-CANEL: [translated] For Cuba, the violent and indiscriminate deportation of immigrants by the United States, arbitrary detentions and other human rights violations are unacceptable. These measures are also used as a political pressure and blackmail weapon against the peoples of our America. The establishment of a detention center at the American naval base in Guantánamo, where it is intended to imprison tens of thousands of people, constitutes a [01:04:00] barbaric act.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, that’s the president of Cuba. Miriam Pensack, your forthcoming book is on Guantánamo. Can you give us the history of how the U.S. has used it?

MIRIAM PENSACK: Sure. So, something that I should mention first and foremost is that before Guantánamo became what it was known for in early 21st century, the sort of “forever prison in the war on terror,” the way that its ambiguous sovereignty, as a U.S. base coercively held on Cuban soil, functioned was to hold tens of thousands of circum-Caribbean asylum seekers, first from Haiti, roughly 40,000 from Haiti, then 35,000 Cubans who fled the island during what was called the Special Period, so the collapse of the Soviet Union, which prompted the total collapse of Cuba’s economy in the mid-’90s. So, this is actually a sort of back to basics, unfortunately, for Guantánamo.

And [01:05:00] those initiatives, first the Haitian internment and then the Balsero crisis of Cuban rafters a few years later, what happened with the Haitians, they were, by and large, repatriated to extremely dangerous conditions in Haiti, where a coup had taken place against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And Cubans eventually made it to the United States, but not after — you know, after effectively being held in what were concentration camp-, detention camp-like conditions in Guantánamo. And they were allowed into the United States because — in part because of the establishment of what became known as wet foot, dry foot.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Yeah, I also wanted to ask you about the Dominican Republic, where Rubio will also be visiting. The Dominican Republic has for years been involved in its own migration crackdown against Haitians within [01:06:00] the country, massive attempts to deport Haitians from the DR. What do you sense might come out of Rubio’s visit there?

MIRIAM PENSACK: I think there will definitely be a willingness to collaborate on immigration and deportation. You know, the Dominican Republic has been building a wall between itself and Haiti, which it shares the island of Hispaniola with. You know, there have been these mass attempts to deport Haitians. There have also been efforts to strip Dominican citizens of their citizenship if they have what has been in many cases very flimsy proof of Haitian origin or provenance. You know, so it’s very anti-Black, because Haiti was the first Black republic, and Haitians are — there are plenty of Black Dominicans, I should say, but there is a [01:07:00] huge degree of anti-Blackness involved in that. And the Dominican Republic has, in fact, left some of its citizens who it deemed Haitian stateless, because Haiti did not recognize them as Haitian citizens.

#1688 International Decline: The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be BornYanis Varoufakis on Cloud Capital vs AI: DeepSeek, Technofeudalism, Capitalism and the New Cold War - DiEM25 - Air Date 1-26-24

YANIS VAROUFAKIS - HOST, DIEM 25: The gist of DeepSeek's arrival on the AI scene and the carnage in the American stock exchanges is a sudden transition from proprietary to open source technology. It is therefore no great wonder that the moment DeepSeek became the most downloaded app on the Apple store, it pulverized the market capitalization of the hitherto overinflated US big tech stocks.

How did this happen exactly? How is it that a private commodified service is suddenly offered for free? And does this mean that techno federalism is in trouble to begin with? It's important to note that AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code of all AI companies was [01:08:00] always open source.

What made American AI a quasi private commodity? Was the way in which these models were trained using huge amounts of privatized data, where I say privatized, you should translate Stolen data. Your data. My data. There was a Google memo that was leaked in 2017 that was widely discussed and refuted but it was a harbinger of what happened with DeepSeek.

In that memo we read the following words If an open source large language model, it said trained for a few million dollars, comes to outperform a proprietary model. Then there's going to be trouble. There will be no firewall, the memo continues, even to safeguard OpenAI. That's what happened. DeepSeek pierced the United States AI company's bubble by decommodifying the results of the model's training and doing it at a tiny, tiny cost to [01:09:00] itself.

Shifting the results of AI trained models from behind a paywall to the public realm. Within days since the release of the latest version of DeepSeek, developers around the world started building their own models On top of deep seeks. This was the nightmare of american big tech ai service providers who have been offering the results of prompts as a commodity in the form of subscriptions You see deep seek type applications can now produce high quality translations for free That's just an example.

And in so doing, they undermine the business model of companies like Deeple, the German company. In the broader scheme of things, this means that the morsels of cloud capital that Europe owned, like Deeple, essentially have lost their market value. Nevertheless, and this is a huge nevertheless, it is only AI as a commodity that has lost its grossly [01:10:00] exaggerated market price or value.

In sharp contrast, cloud capital utilized as Amazon, Meta, Google, and so on have been utilizing it. That is not as a commodity producing piece of tech, but as a produced means of behavioral modification. That business model is not at all threatened by companies like DeepSeek. And since techno feudalism is powered by cloud capital working that way, rather than commodity like AI services of the chat GPT 4 or 5 type, our techno feudal order is not threatened by competitors such as DeepSeek.

To help understand the difference between cloud capital and AI based commodified services, it helps to compare and contrast Alexa, take Amazon's Alexa, and OpenAI's Chat GPT. Alexa is not offering you a commodified service. It is your [01:11:00] free, pretend slave. Unlike GPT 405, you do not pay a subscription to Amazon for the right to order Alexa, to order your milk, or to switch off your lights.

Rather, you train Alexa to train you, to train it, to know you, so that it wins you over, it wins your trust, with good recommendations. So that it can ultimately modify your behavior, so that it can encourage you to buy a commodity from amazon. com with Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, retaining up to 40 percent of the price you pay for a book or an electric bicycle.

Money that will be retained as cloud rent by the owner of Amazon Jeff Bezos in short and this is very important The work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity that you buy unlike chat gpt Which works to sell you a commodity even in a subscription [01:12:00] form to put it in different words Once more chat gpt is subject to market competition and therefore vulnerable to companies like DeepSeek.

But Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT's maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek, but Amazon is not. That's my basic point. Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition, from DeepSeek like upstarts. Because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behavior and remove us from any market. For example, to shift us from real markets to cloud feeds like Amazon or Alibaba. To wrap this up, in conclusion, cloud's capital capacity to drive techno fidelism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much, and so foolishly I would add, in providing a commodified service, these companies [01:13:00] stand to lose enormously.

This, I believe, is yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital, while techno feudalism is going from strength to strength. And as it does so, it fuels even further the new Cold War between the United States and China, which in my book, Techno Feudalism, What Killed Capitalism, I have explained away, I have explained this new Cold War as the almighty clash between these two huge concentrations of cloud capital, the American dollar denominated super cloudalist power, and the Chinese one denominated super cloudalist power.

Now, speaking of this new Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fueled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek's success will have on the United States government, not just Trump, but the whole gamut of the American state and its government, Silicon Valley and Washington DC Until very recently and the deep sea arrival on the scene, they had convinced [01:14:00] themselves that America had the huge AI lead over China.

Now that the tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech and services than Silicon Valley had imagined possible. I don't know about you, but I can almost hear the wearing of the cogs and wheels inside the heads of people in authority both on the east coast and the west coast of the United States as they are thinking, trying to understand, to predict if the Chinese can do this out of the blue.

As DeepSeek did, only two days ago. What else can the Chinese do tomorrow? It is reminiscent, isn't it, of the Sputnik moment. So, it will be interesting to see how Donald Trump reacts to this threat to companies like OpenAI. Especially since Elon Musk understood some time ago, quite presently, I [01:15:00] should say, and has spoken out against companies like OpenAI.

He seems to have understood the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on techno feudal. Goodness only knows what happens in a White House containing both the thoughts of Elon Musk and someone like Donald Trump. These are indeed turning out to be interesting times, of course, in the traditional Chinese proverbial sense of the phrase. 

Trump, China, and the New Cold War - Macrodose - Air Date 12-10-24

JAMES MEADWAY - HOST, MACRODOSE: Over the past couple of weeks, tensions in the simmering trade war between the world's two major powers have escalated still further. President Joe Biden's outgoing administration has added around 140 Chinese companies to its expanding list of banned entities.

In response, China has hit back with its own measures, including bans on the export of key minerals essential for modern semiconductors, with gallium being the most critical. [01:16:00] Economist Prashant Garg and his team at Imperial College London have done some fascinating research highlighting just how vital gallium is to the entire semiconductor supply chain.

We'll link to that in the show notes, but the key takeaway is something we've covered before. Semiconductor manufacturing is arguably one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built, and these chips power virtually every digital device we own. Any threat to that system comes with serious economic consequences.

It's almost miraculous, though now we take it completely for granted, that some of the most advanced pieces of equipment ever created, tiny silicon fragments with billions of transistors etched into place, are produced in such massive quantities that even the most cutting edge chips are affordable enough to end up in devices we casually lose on the bus or drop into a puddle.

But that complexity, stretching from obscure, often quite rare raw [01:17:00] materials necessary for different stages of manufacturing, to the wildly sophisticated machines needed to etch purified silicon, to the distribution across a globe of billions of these devices, means that the supply chain also contains huge vulnerabilities.

A couple of months ago in the show, we talked about how Storm Helene hit the US and temporarily shut down one of the very few mines producing high grade quartz, the kind needed to make the super pure silicon used in semiconductors. For a while, it seemed like the world's chip supply might face serious disruption a few months down the line, but in the end, the mine has reopened and is now operating at nearly full capacity.

The Imperial Report uses AI techniques to analyse thousands of standardised product records, mapping the connections between raw materials and the goods they're used in. Gallium, for example, is often substituted for silicon in some cheaper semiconductors, [01:18:00] and serves as the light emitting component in LEDs.

This gives it a vast range of everyday applications. And here's the kicker, China produces 98 percent of the world's supply. Last year, even limited export controls by China caused the global price of gallium to double, and it's not easy for manufacturers to simply swap one critical mineral for another.

So this new export ban will have a significant impact, rippling across the economy. Donald Trump has, of course, threatened a far broader trade war against China, claiming 100 percent tariffs on Chinese products. But, as we've suggested before, this looks more like the opening round in a negotiating position than a firm commitment.

His senior advisors, along with others closely connected to big business, have made it clear that Trump sees today's big threats as just the opening move in a negotiation that will really [01:19:00] begin when he re enters office in January. China, for its part, has treated the Trump announcements with some public concern, understandably, stressing the likely cost to US consumers.

But the country's ambassador to Washington has, for example, been keen to underline that they know full well Trump is intending to negotiate on final tariff positions. The broader strategy here is one that Trump's pick for treasury secretary, Scott Besant, outlined in a speech over the summer. If the international economic order is being reshaped, he argues, and it is, the US should use all the levers at its disposal to bend this reshaping to its own advantage.

One obvious move is leveraging the sheer size of the US economy, with its 350 million consumers and their dollar purchasing power. Trump has, for example, boasted for months about how he would raise tariffs on imports from China [01:20:00] by 60 percent or more. Just last month, he said on social media that he would impose a 10 percent tariff above any additional tariffs on all products from China.

He's also talked about using the threat of tariffs to push China and Mexico to do more to help curb the U. S. opioid crisis, since the two countries are the top sources of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals. Now, China insists it has no role in the U. S. drug crisis, but this is where we see how the threat of tariffs is being used to achieve a broader policy goal.

Much of this policymaking is likely to be fundamentally reactive, all under the broad banner of America First. It's about responding to a world that's seen as increasingly hostile to the interests, as the new administration sees them, of US capitalism. The two key interests here are military strength and, tied to that, technological leadership in critical high tech sectors.[01:21:00] 

China has moved with impressive speed over the last few decades, threatening to erode the US's edge in these areas. So from the first Trump administration, extended under President Biden, and now likely to deepen in a second Trump term, we're seeing increasingly aggressive trade moves aimed at preventing China from gaining that technological advantage.

This may not work as intended. The evidence so far suggests that China has responded by putting more resources into its own domestic industries. As a result, Huawei, the high technology supplier heavily targeted by tariffs, can now build phones with homegrown semiconductors that are not far off the cutting edge of what TSMC in Taiwan is able to produce.

In other words, the restrictions and tariffs have created a kind of hothouse for Chinese innovation, exactly the opposite of what was intended by successive U. S. [01:22:00] administrations. By pushing hard on what it sees as its own interests, the U. S. is actually undermining them. But this will likely only strengthen the case in Washington for even more tariff restrictions.

Obviously, none of this is particularly rational. In theory, there is a better way through this. If America is concerned about China's trade practices undermining its own manufacturing, it could, for instance, use a threat of tariffs to secure a more favourable position in negotiations with China, like agreeing to a controlled devaluation of the dollar, which would make US exports more competitive worldwide.

This is something Vice President in Waiting J. D. Vance has argued for. Now, back in 1985, a similar deal was struck with Japan, the so called Plaza Accords, where, under the threat of increased tariffs on Japanese exports, Japan agreed to revalue the [01:23:00] yen upwards. This made its own exports less competitive, but eased pressure on U.

S. manufacturers in particular. Cyan Vallet, from the German Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the Financial Times this week, argues that the U. S. under Trump could be about to achieve the same deal in parallel circumstances with China. Vallet believes that the macroeconomic entanglements of China and the U. S. will force a kind of economic rationality to reassert itself. Both sides will recognize a mutual interest in backing down from dispute. If, as in 1985, the U. S. is prepared to use its capacity to threaten wisely and to set up, quote, a grand bargain with China, so the dollar is allowed to fall in value, China allows the yen to rise, and tariff restrictions are dialed back.

I think this is far too optimistic. [01:24:00] One wrinkle is Vallee's call for spending cuts in the U. S., necessary in his global rebalancing to prevent the U. S. demanding to borrow more and more from the rest of the world. The first Trump administration was very careful not to touch most Americans welfare benefits, and Trump himself was associated with significant, COVID.

Whatever the chatter about cutting the administrative state we hear now, Getting politically unpopular spending cuts past this President and this Congress will be incredibly difficult. The main difference between the 1985 deal and today is that whilst Japan was politically and militarily subordinated to the U. S., China most certainly is not. So while Japan eventually buckled and accepted a deal that, in hindsight, wasn't particularly beneficial to its own economy, China has no reason to do the same thing.

 

Will Trump Crash Economy On Purpose- Historian Explains DANGEROUS MAGA Plot - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 1-28-25

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM : Democrats are [01:25:00] pointing out that Trump's threats to increase our national debt by as much as 7 trillion, that is the cost of another round of tax cuts for billionaires, Shift billions of treasury dollars into crypto and impose tariffs on imported goods. Any one of those three things could cause an economic crash.

All three of them might be a perfect storm. And Trump seems unconcerned. And the Republicans. They're meeting down at Doral, at his shabby Doral Golf Club down in Florida today. Right now to, you know, plot what they're going to do. They don't seem to worry either. Now, to the average person, the idea of a recession is pretty grim.

I mean, you know, millions of people lose their jobs. People have to sell their 401ks at a loss out of desperation just to pay the rent and buy food. Uh, you know, it's, it's a horror show for average people, particularly in a country where 54 percent of Americans right now live paycheck to paycheck. [01:26:00] So why isn't Trump worried about this?

Why are Republicans not worried about this? Why are the billionaires who put Trump and the Republicans in power not worried about this? Well, the reason is very simple. There's three. big benefits to billionaires to having an economic crash. It's why Reagan had a crash. It's why Bush had a crash. It's, there's actually a benefit to it.

First, it's a great excuse to cut government services to, to, you know, and, and, and also to cut taxes on billionaires. You just say, hey, we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, we need to cut government services because there's no money to pay for them. I mean, Reagan did this in 81, George W. Bush did this in, in 2003, 2002, second, the second reason is the time, times of economic crisis increased the tolerance for strongman governments.

FDR ran a strongman government, now it was one that everybody liked, but he was just You [01:27:00] know, stomping all over Congress and doing things with executive orders that Republicans were screaming were unconstitutional. People were freaked out. They wanted a strong government. In Europe, Hitler used the Great Depression to, to, as the rationale for, for his enabling acts, which, you know, gave him rule by decree.

And it appears now that Trump IGs in violation of the law, these inspector generals. I'll get into that more later on in the program. But Uh, he's, he's defying the law or refusing to enforce the law in other cases right now, right in front of us, right in front of God and the world, and nobody is doing anything about it.

And he's getting away with it. And that promises that more will come and it'll get worse and worse and worse as time goes on. Secondly, times of economic crisis, uh, you know, increase the need or the demand for strong man government. And in fact, this is where it's getting wild, um, [01:28:00] 58%. of young people, generation Z people in the United States, say they trust social media more than traditional news.

45 percent now believe women have gained too many rights. The number of young men who believe that women have too much power in the United States has increased from 32 to 45 percent in just five years, while 52 percent say they trust what they, readers say, see on social media. And then third, and this is the big reason, billionaires love economic crashes.

I remember sitting in Gloria Swanson's apartment back in the 1980s having dinner with her and, uh, she was on the board of our, uh, children's village and, you know, every six months or so I'd go down to New York and we'd have dinner together in her apartment and she would just tell me these wild stories.

And she told me this story, she was a vegetarian and I was a vegetarian and the program we ran was vegetarian, so we had this commonality. So anyhow, she told me this story about, uh, Joe Kennedy. [01:29:00] John F. Kennedy's father, and he was her manager for a while, he was her lover for a while, and he robbed her blind, he ripped her off terribly.

But her story about him was that when the Great Depression started, he had bailed out of the market just a week or two before the crash happened, and that during the crash, as the market was going down, down, down, down, down, Joe Kennedy, who was really, really rich, was buying stocks. Why? Because it's a buying opportunity.

If you're really rich when the stock market crashes and all the little people are desperately selling all their stock just to pay for their rent and their food, you can buy that stock at a discount and suddenly you're the richest person on earth. Joe Kennedy made a fortune doing this. As did J. Paul Getty.

He left his parents golden anniversary In 1929 to run down to Wall Street to buy stocks during the collapse and ended up one [01:30:00] of the richest men in the world. In fact, the richest man in the world. He said it was the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing, which is exactly what he did.

And this is what we saw this during the Bush crash. During the Bush crash in 2007, home prices dropped 21%. This was when, you know, there's millions of homes now owned by big corporations, hedge funds and big corporations out of New York, investment vehicles. This was when most of them were purchased, or many of them.

Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to predators like Steve Mnuchin. The stock market lost over 50%. During the Bush crash, its all time peak was on October 9th, 2007 at 14, 164. It collapsed to 6, 594. While 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out, the billionaires came in and started buying stocks that were being unloaded by working class people from their [01:31:00] 401Ks, even though they had to pay a penalty.

Between 2009 and 2012, the bottom of the Bush crash and the beginning of the real recovery, The top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31%, 95 percent of all income gains during that period were the top 1%. If you, the S& P went up 462 percent by 2020. If you had invested in 2009 a billion dollars, just 11 years later, you would have 4.

6 billion dollars. And then they did it again 10 years later during the Trump COVID crash. And this was, you know, again, the, the billionaires, became insanely wealthy. And they don't have to pay taxes on this money. I mean, the, the, just that one year, 2020, the world's billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%.

So here you've got Republicans down at Doral planning what they're going to do economically, governmentally, whatever, and how they're [01:32:00] not going to hold Trump accountable for impounding money. I'll get to that in violation of the 1974 impoundment act. Um, and the They're planning to crash the economy. You got the debt ceiling coming, you got all this wild stuff, another tax cut.

They want to crash the economy. I'm telling you, hang on to your seat, it's going to get wild.

#1689 The Media and the Moguls: Corporate Media is not equipped for TrumpRevenge- Trump throws lawsuits at the media and demands compliance - The ReidOut w Joy Reid - Air Date 12-17-24

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT:  

Donald Trump ran for president for one reason and one reason only: to make all of his legal problems -- poof! -- go away. And for the most part, he was successful, with one exception. Yesterday, the New York judge who presided over Trump's hush money trial denied his bid to toss out his guilty verdict, meaning Trump will have to live with the infamy of being the first convicted felon president.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And yes, MAGA, you are still a convicted felon before you are sentenced. That's how it works.

But that isn't stopping Trump from trying to hit the delete button on every other bad headline ever [01:33:00] printed about him, going so far as to sue Iowa pollster Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines Register, saying he's seeking "accountability for brazen election interference" over a November poll that showed Kamala Harris up 3 percent in Iowa.

Never mind the fact that Trump won the election and won the state of Iowa by double digits. He's clearly feeling emboldened by ABC News agreeing to pay a $15 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit. Nearly every legal expert said that they would have won. And as others in the media show, they're increasingly willing to comply in advance, like the owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who Oliver Darcy is reporting, requested that the newspaper's editorial board outright take a break from writing about Trump and balance any critical editorials or articles with positive ones.

Yeah, but here's the thing: these CEOs who are thinking, "Let me just give him what he wants this one time and he'll leave me alone. He won't hurt me or my company or he'll give me [01:34:00] goodies like tax cuts or tariff exemptions or federal contracts. A pat on the head." 

That is not how it works with Trump. His ego is too fragile and his needs are endless. As any parent knows, if your toddler is having a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store, the solution isn't to just buy them the cookies they're screaming for. Because then they'll just do it again and again, and you'll be out of money and sanity, and their teeth will be rotten.

And right now, Trump is that toddler. And he wants nothing short of complete obedience, and constant adulation. For everyone to say they love him and praise him, and tell him he's the best president ever! And it'll never be obsequious enough, or vigorous enough. He'll always want more. And punish and humiliate even those who do comply, just ask Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and all the Black Republicans who went to the mat for Trump during the campaign, only to get snubbed as he builds his administration.

He will always reward weakness with [01:35:00] more humiliation. And that includes foreign leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who went to Mar-a-Lago last month to kiss the ring, behaving like Trump was already president, which he's not. And how does Trump reward him? By publicly mocking Trudeau on his social media sites, once again calling Trudeau "the governor of the great state of Canada." 

Joining me now is Tim O'Brien, Senior Executive Editor of Bloomberg Opinion and MSNBC Political Analyst. And I have to tell you, this Trudeau thing really bothered me. Let me just put up this tweet that Trudeau posted on his -- why is he still on X Twitter? But he posted this tweet of himself, Look at me next to Donald. Look, what is he doing? When will people learn, Tim, that emasculating yourself before Trump, as Ted Cruz did, as so many have done, doesn't help and just makes him worse. 

TIM O'BRIEN: And it's also a reminder, Joy, that he has been this way forever.

He came up, as you [01:36:00] know, and as I know, we've talked many times, at the knee of Roy Cohn, who taught him how to weaponize the legal system. And he's learned that you don't necessarily need to go to court. And you don't necessarily need to ultimately break people. If they're scared enough in the first innings of any action you take, to capitulate, whether they're politicians, members of the business community, members of the media, members of Congress, or members of the judiciary. And, we can pull down examples of each and every one of these institutions and some of their leading members, deciding in advance that the safest way and the most productive way to deal with Donald Trump is to kiss the ring.

And we see example after example of once they do that, he then shames them in public. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yes.

TIM O'BRIEN: And he is not ultimately delivering on some of the things they want. And he does it to the people he even holds close to them. I mean, think about how many days was it [01:37:00] after RFK Jr. got nominated for HHS.

And there was a picture of him eating fast food with Don Jr. and Donald on the presidential plane. Eat your food. Take your punishment. And for Trudeau, who you set up in your previous clip in the introduction of this segment, his government, his own government is fractured because of this. And, he could very well be out of a job because of this. 

So I do think that people in the near term right now are petrified. They're not sure how to respond to the fact that Trump was reelected again, other than to capitulate. But they should keep, I think, their eyes on the prize. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Well, I mean, yeah. And there's a game people play of mocking Canada. Well, now Canada has been mocked by its own prime minister. Justin Trudeau went down to Mar-a-Lago as if Trump is already president. He's not president yet. He didn't go running to the White House of the real current president. He went to [01:38:00] him as if he could just become a supplicant. And now Christia Freeland, who is his finance minister, she's out of there because she's like we need to come up with a strategy to deal with Trump's tariff plan. That is not a strategy and it is humiliating. And if I were a Canadian, I'd be absolutely disgusted.

it's interesting that it's said that there's a crisis of manhood, right? That is being said a lot on the right. There is a crisis of manhood. But it's on your own side, guys. It's people like Jeff Bezos, it's people like Mark Zuckerberg. Is this manly behavior to go and fall on your knees to Donald Trump? No! 

I want to show you one reason why people might be doing it though. Los Angeles Times wrote this. I'm sorry, not Los Angeles Times. I apologize for that. Robert Reich wrote this. Much better. he says that part of the reason the media is doing this, no large American corporation wants to be actively litigating against a sitting president, especially one as vindictive as Trump.

A $15 million settlement is chicken feed compared to the myriad ways Trump could penalize Disney, which is a $205.25 billion corporation that has other businesses [01:39:00] besides the media. So talk a little bit about that, because some of these media are actually owned by bigger conglomerates with other business that could be before the president, and so he wants to save his SpaceX and wants to save his other thing or not SpaceX. Whichever one is his. Bezos is one. Everyone's thinking about their other businesses. 

TIM O'BRIEN: Blue Origins. I think it's-- 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Blue Origin for Bezos. Yeah. Yeah. 

TIM O'BRIEN: I think that this is, in the American media model, it is always dependent on the integrity of the owners, because they're privately held concerns for the most part in less, or, publicly traded, but with close ownership.

PBS is the only media entity of note that is in there, some very powerfully funded nonprofits like ProPublica that do wonderful work. But when we talk about the legacy media and the mainstream media, we're talking about corporate media. In the era we're in now, corporations have multiple interests [01:40:00] that aren't only tied to their media holdings, and their CEOs are thinking about those things.

And I think you're seeing some media owners decide to dispose of media assets because it's troublesome. I think you have others doing anticipatory knee bending, because they don't want to go into battle in a courtroom with the president. it's bottom line thinking, it's strategic thinking, but it's not journalistic.

And, it's not tied to the idea, just that core basic idea, that the role of journalists in the world should be to seek the truth, and hold the powerful accountable on behalf of the public interest. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, at this point, the Los Angeles Times is essentially saying if you report a negative fact about Trump, you have to balance it with a positive fact.

I'm not sure how that is serving journalists, and I can tell you that people inside the Los Angeles Times apparently, at least allegedly according to the reports, are not happy. And inside of Bezos operation, it's difficult in this moment when you just want to do the [01:41:00] journalism. it's difficult.

 

Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again) - On the Media - Air Date 1-10-25

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA:  

Donald Trump, who says journalists are scum and thinks fact-checking is really unfair, won the election. Now, all those accused of scummily fact-checking are scrambling to adjust. After all, Mr. Trump has already vowed to seek retribution for media offenses by, say, suing CBS for $1 billion doll because of "biased editing of a Kamala Harris 60 minutes interview," suspending ABC's broadcast license because of fact-checked him during a debate and suing The Des Moines Register for printing a poll suggesting Harris would win. A poll that turned out to be, wait for it, wrong. There's more.

Donald Trump: We're involved in one which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward where he didn't quote me properly from the tapes. Then on top of everything else, he sold the tapes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This week, the Washington Post's budget was cut by [01:42:00] its stupefyingly rich owner, Jeff Bezos, two months after he killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris, and just as Amazon signed a big deal to bring out a Melania Trump endorsed Melania Trump documentary. He's also given $1 million bucks to Trump's inauguration, as has Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who just announced that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program, leading the president-elect to say that Zuck's company had "come a long way."

MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The point is fact-based journalism is in trouble. This hour, we're going to look at the plight of public radio, which we are, because who else is going to do it? First, a quick history. Back in 1967 when President Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam was trying to build the Great Society at home by passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, creating Medicare, and crucially, for the purpose of this story, creating the Corporation [01:43:00] for Public Broadcasting, which has been marked for death repeatedly. What is it?

President Lyndon Johnson: The Corporation of Public Broadcasting will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting. It will get part of its support from our government, but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free and it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people.

MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: It was a hard sell. Conservatives worried the CPB would promote liberal ideas. After all, Johnson's agenda was indisputably liberal. Some suspected its funds would flow more to some regions than others. Commercial broadcasters feared the competition. Even after the dust settled, well, actually the dust never really settled, it's been [01:44:00] kicked up by every Republican administration since. Yet through the decades, somehow every effort to slash or burn the CPB has failed, thanks to such battle-scarred warriors as Big Bird and this guy.

Fred Rogers: I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Despite Fred Rogers' appeal to empathy, Richard Nixon, not known for manageable feelings, viewed public broadcasting as an enemy to slay. In 1975, it was left to [01:45:00] Gerald Ford to set up a funding scheme to shield it, theoretically at least, from the immediate political winds. Congress was directed to appropriate CPB's funding two years in advance. Of course, Congress could kill future funding or even rescind what had already been allocated, but some insulation was better than none. Fast forward to 2017. Donald Trump tries to cut CPB's funding several times in his first term.

KAREN EVERHART: This morning, President Trump made public his proposed budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year. Among the items included, the elimination of all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He didn't get it done.

KAREN EVERHART: No, he did not. Those proposals did not fly in Congress.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Karen Everhart is the managing editor of Current, a nonprofit newsroom covering public media.

KAREN EVERHART: Members of Congress, particularly in rural states, recognize that public broadcasting is one of the only local originating sources of [01:46:00] news and information and programming, and they value that. Their constituents value that. What typically happens is the House goes along with a recommendation, especially when it's dominated by Republicans. The House will eliminate CPB's funding from its appropriations budget and then the Senate will propose an alternative number, and that number or something around that amount will end up in the final budget.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: More than 70% of CPB's annual appropriation goes directly to public media stations in the form of community service grants, CSGs, of which about 45% are rural. They can be used as they need to be to keep the station running and for programming, both local and national. They're not obligated to buy programs from PBS, nor do they have to buy from NPR.

KAREN EVERHART: Although most of them do because they're very popular with their audiences. They can choose to [01:47:00] buy programs from American Public Media or PRX or the BBC.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Last year, CPB received $525 million plus another $10 million in interest, about half of which went to local public TV stations and direct grants, about 15% to local radio stations. A big chunk went out in programming grants, mostly to TV. More went out to support the distribution system, et cetera. That said, the bigger stations are less vulnerable to attacks on CPB because it's not a significant part of their budgets.

KAREN EVERHART: They don't rely on CPB funding for essential services. That doesn't go towards their programming budget. It's the small stations where it really makes the biggest difference in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Those are the stations that are most at risk.

Fox News is Back at the White House. Plus, No Joke, The Onion Buys Infowars. Part 2 - On the Media - Air Date 11-15-24

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You also say that not everything can be fact-checked, that the political ether is lousy with [01:48:00] lies large and small, that reporters should concentrate on the ones with the highest impact, or liars, where everything is said to a large audience. But how do you curate Trump?

BILL ADAIR: Well, I think the solution for fact checking Trump is to get some funding to literally fact check everything he says.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Fact-checking all of those claims, hiring someone to do it, wouldn't that have a numbing effect?

BILL ADAIR: Well, yes, but there are also people who transcribe everything he says.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: So how exactly does more fact-checking help our current environment?

BILL ADAIR: People would say, with me, like, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Here's why. I think that, first, if you look at just the most basic thing, we talked about Trump, but this also exists at the state and local level.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Even more important, because those local papers have been hammered so hard.

BILL ADAIR: Exactly, and so here's proof of that. [01:49:00] My team looked at fact checking across the country and found that in half the states, there are no fact checkers holding governors, US Senators, members of Congress responsible for what they say. That's like driving on the interstate without any fear of getting a speeding ticket. You can go as fast as you want. Those politicians can say anything and never worry about getting fact-checked. We need more fact-checkers. The simple process of holding politicians accountable for what they say is a useful exercise that provides a ground truth. So that's step one. Okay, so is fact-checking working when it's done? No.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And part of that is structural. Our media is crafted so that we never have to encounter an idea or a fact that we don't [01:50:00] like.

BILL ADAIR: Exactly. So we have to get creative in thinking about how we might get fact checks to people who aren't seeing them. Two thoughts on that. One, I'm not sure that shouting pants on fire is going to have an appeal to conservative audiences. I'm not sure that Truth-O-Meters are going to have an appeal to conservative audiences because they're associated with fact-checkers that probably conservative audiences have been told not to trust.

In researching the book, I searched how often PolitiFact and its fact-checking has been mentioned in negative ways on Fox, and it gets insulted a lot. We probably need to think about how we package fact-checking for conservative audiences. The other thing we need to do is to get more conservative media organizations to do their own fact-checking. Now, this is already happening. The [01:51:00] Dispatch, a center-right publication, does fact-checking and it's very popular, and we need more conservative media organizations to do fact-checking. I think those two things could really help because what we're doing now is not working.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: In writing this book, you stepped away from the day-to-day role of fact-checking and you've come to the conclusion that maybe pants on fire isn't the way to go. But have you gotten yet any insights or any really compelling ideas about how to package the truth in a way that can cross party lines?

BILL ADAIR: Not yet. That's kind of next on my to-do list.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: To me, that's a sort of, aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

BILL ADAIR: That's a big task. I think that we need to figure out what could appeal beyond [01:52:00] this NPR listening, New York Times reading, New Yorker subscribing audience and so.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: But nothing yet.

BILL ADAIR: Nothing yet.

BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You got nothing?

BILL ADAIR: I got nothing for you, Brooke.

#1691 Democracy Emergency, Constitutional Crisis, Democratic Backsliding, Failing GuardrailsMusk's Coup and Trump's Christian Zionist Gaza Takeover - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-7-25

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Elon Musk is treating the U. S. government like a startup. He's treating it like when he took over Twitter / X. And here's a piece at Wired, a different piece, that reads like this. "While this takeover is unprecedented for the government, it's standard operating procedure for Musk. It maps almost too neatly to his acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Get rid of most of the workforce, install loyalists, rip up safeguards, remake in your own image. This is the way of the startup. You're scrappy, you're unconventional, you're iterating. This is the world that Musk's lieutenants come from, and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personal Management, the GSA, and on down the line".

But Dan, as you're saying, the U. S. government is not a startup. And [01:53:00] this is where you and I have always tried to make a point about this whole 'do the government like a business'. The point of business is to make money. The point of government is to help people's lives get better, to care for people, to help people thrive, to create systems that allow for people to make decisions not for them, and not so that they're just like passive agents, but to create systems where people have good choices about food, shelter, care, about infrastructure, about education. 

Do you think that Musk and the people working for him—and I can go down the roster if you all want, the 19 year old freshman at Northeastern University, the 25 year old eugenicist, the 23 year old who just graduated and had his first job at Meta—do you think that they're concerned with the fact that the trillions of dollars they now have in front of them in a code, and where they're just like slamming Red Bulls all night and [01:54:00] hamming it up, affects people's real lives? That non profits are shutting down because OMB cut off the money? They don't.

This is not a startup. It is the most powerful government in the world. It's one that oversees 350 million people. Dan, I live near Silicon Valley. Startups come and go. One out of a hundred make it. Most of them expend a significant amount of energy and resources, and then they die, and then you just start another one. That is how the kinds of young men that Musk is dragging around think. 

It's also a huge cyber security threat. There's a piece of the conversation by Richard Forno, who's a professor at University of Maryland, and what he talks about is when you have this kind of fiddling with the code of the U. S. Treasury, when you have people who are taking this data and putting it on private servers—do you remember Hillary [01:55:00] Clinton's emails, Dan? The private server? Do you remember that?—that's what they're doing with the data, oh, not of, I don't know, some emails that she sent, which, not great, Hillary, okay, whatever. Oh, I don't know, Dan happens to be perhaps every American and their financial records, the millions of federal employees on someone's server who's 23 years old and walking around like a hacker on the metro with his backpack looking like Mr. Robot. That's a problem, and it flies right in the face of what we talked about over the last couple of weeks.

Donald Trump: well, I know this was DEI with the plane crash, because I have common sense. J. D. Vance: if you just use common sense like real people, not bureaucrats, not technocrats, not those administrative state liberal career hacks, then you'll have a good government. Okay, cool, so who did you guys put in charge of the entire Treasury, and who are [01:56:00] you allowing to hack our entire government? Oh, you mean people with specialized knowledge who are 23 years old and led by a madman, the richest man in the world? That guy who just did the Nazi salute twice? You want to tell me that's common sense? You want to tell me that now you're just like a man of the people? One of the plebeians who lives in the life-world of the peasants and is thinking through everything with common sense? Like you would down at Ace Hardware? You put in charge childrenwith technical knowledge. You allowed them to download the entire code and data of the nation, and then you're gonna turn to us and tell us you have common sense about non-White people and women? 

This is an authoritarian takeover. It's an attempted coup. And we should treat it as such. And I'll close this out, Dan, I'll throw it to you and we can take a break, go to something else. The Senate Dems need to figure it out. And I don't usually go for the Democratic [01:57:00] Party by the throat on this show, not that often, but Chuck Schumer, you're not the man for the job, bud. It's time to go. You're out here introducing legislation to do stuff and Hakeem Jeffries is tweeting that Jesus is in control, that's not gonna cut it. You cannot do business in the Senate when the social contract has been broken. They're trying to take your job, Chuck. They're saying they get the purse and they're gonna spend the money. And you're out here saying, this has to be stopped. Why are you using the passive voice, Chuck? Go get arrested. Go demand, I want to know which Democratic Senator is gonna get thrown to the ground and arrested at the Treasury building, trying to get in and see what the hell's going on in there. That's what I want. Show me that guy. Show me that gal. Show me that person. And guess what? They got my vote, 2028. Because right now I see a lot of like hand-wringing soft-handed BS from some of the only people who have a [01:58:00] chance to do anything right now. And this is not a way to win back voters and do whatever you've been doing since Kamala Harris lost. This is a way to make people think you're a bunch of old folks who are not built for the fight.

Why Are Dems Surprised - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 2-7-25

SUNJEEV BERY: At a influencer conference, a political influencer conference last spring in DC, Cory Booker opened up the happy hour on the opening night of this conference talking about the importance of social media and messaging. As soon as he ended his remarks, he was hounded by a room full of some of the largest liberal TikTokers asking him why he supported banning the app that they message other young people on.

So it's odd that they have people like this, with these stances, with these actions, with this policy record, tapped to lead these critical pieces of infrastructure for the party in such a critical moment. It's, baffling to me. So I'm, wondering for both of you, how would you assess the democratic Party's leadership in this moment because you're both talking [01:59:00] about activism and organizing in addition to that Indivisible call There was a large protest outside the Treasury on Tuesday That was organized by Indivisible and Move On while members of Congress showed up that was from the outside. So what is leadership doing right now to restore faith in the party in their leadership and for the road ahead?

JORDAN UHL: I mean, I'll be blunt and say I'm not seeing it, and I'm just not seeing what needs to be done. And this is a moment for an asymmetrical challenge, right? Trump holds formal authority, but he obviously is going way beyond formal authority when it comes to things like abolishing agencies like USAID, that he doesn't technically have the power to do.

And meanwhile, Democratic leaders. They don't have a sense of what to do or how to operate. And the way you operate in a moment like this is by engaging in an asymmetrical challenge. Democrats don't have any formal authority, but they can build informal authority. I personally think Elon Musk is far more vulnerable than most people recognize.

And I could [02:00:00] imagine. A movement to call on Democratic senators to filibuster any legislation that provides any sort of appropriations or funding for any of Elon Musk's, financial interests, starting with SpaceX, a big chunk of his increase in wealth is just projections from the stock market of future earnings for Tesla and SpaceX, tens of billions of dollars could be subtracted from him very quickly.

But this kind of creative thinking isn't something that it. Democrats in office tend to be very good at because they're very well trained in, let's just be blunt kissing the ass of concentrated sectors of wealth in order to access that money to run campaigns. My personal opinion is any formal shift in how leading democratic politicians behave is going to occur because, people are leading from behind, movement organizations, concerned grassroots voters and donors are going to say, what the heck are you doing?

And then they're going to start listening, and then they're going to start quote unquote leading. 

AKELA LACY: Yeah, I agree [02:01:00] with 99 percent of that, I would say. I'm not sure that leaders, leadership in the Democratic Party is looking for feedback. I get the sense that they want to create the appearance that they're looking for feedback, but, maintain this practice of thinking they're the smartest people in the room and thinking that they have it locked down and, we'll listen to what you say, but we're actually, we know what we're doing.

I do think right now is an opening for some of that more creative thinking to come in. But I think that, you, really hit it on the head there. The idea that no one was prepared, that there was no strategy, and that they're playing catch up right now when this writing has been on the wall for months and months and months.

I mean, we can go back to June. We can, we can go back to October, November. But what possible reason could there be that Schumer doesn't have Democrats locked down to vote as a bloc against every single Trump nominee? He came out on Monday touting that they had 47 people, [02:02:00] including, the two independents, vote against the OMB chief.

But then you have other votes just this week, where it's like they have 22 people voting for a Trump nominee. They have 24 people in the Democratic Party voting for a Trump nominee. And they should be being held accountable for that. I think some of these outside groups are trying to do that. But when you talk about the sparks of potential openings for that creative thinking, whether it's from members of The Squad or members of the CPC, I think Pramila Jayapal has been very blunt that Democrats are not willing to learn from this moment, particularly on Gaza.

But you also see those ranks being decimated and whatever organizing has been done to build their capacity to do that creative thinking and fill that gap in Congress, since 2018, et cetera, et cetera, has been cut in half, every two years because of groups like AIPAC and these outside groups that Democrats continue caving to.

So that's the bigger, 30, 000 foot picture of the cycle of [02:03:00] why this seems to be impossible for people who say that they have all the information and all the answers.

Trumps American Takeover - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-1-25

KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: So, I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time. And this is the third time I've ridden this escalator from democracy into someplace very dark. And unfortunately, what we're seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia and particularly to what happened in Hungary.

And part of the reason why it's so alarming is that Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it's going to fail with tanks in the streets. It's going to fail with some radical rupture. It's going to fail with normal ceasing to be normal. And when you look at how autocracy works these days in the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the backs of a free and fair election.

So, somebody who is a, we call them populist, but you can call them whatever, charismatic leaders who [02:04:00] promise to shake things up, they get elected, often fair and square the first time. You go back and you look at the election monitor's reports from when Hugo Chavez was elected in Venezuela, or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Victor Orban was elected the first time in Hungary, the election monitors all said free and fair election, no problem. And then what happens is that as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power. And they do it while their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people.

So, now we're seeing immigration, we're seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we're seeing attacks on affirmative action, we're seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. But behind the scenes, what that's disguising, this was also [02:05:00] true in Hungary, it was true in Venezuela, it was true in Turkey, it's in all these places, inflammatory rhetoric disguises the real work of autocracy. And what's the real work of autocracy? Removing all checks on executive power. And a lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that's where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.

Now, America is a very big and complicated system. It's going to take a lot to capture all of it because we have federalism, because we have a lot of nooks and crannies where different sources of power reside. But Trump in his first term of office had not yet discovered this formula that you need the law to entrench yourself. So, he did a lot of horrible things, he caused a lot of pain, he was incredibly [02:06:00] arbitrary, he loves to sign executive orders, but when he left office, most of the U. S. government, it was battered, it was beaten, he dropped it on the floor, it cracked, there weren't people who were put into important positions, but he hadn't changed the legal infrastructure except for one thing, and that is the Supreme Court.

Hence, this podcast. So, now what I think Trump learned is what a lot of these autocrats learned. Victor Orban was in power once and lost power because he didn't learn this lesson. When he came back, and now when Trump is coming back, what they learned is that you have to learn to entrench yourself. And it helps if you compromise some institutions when you're in office the first time. But what Victor Orban did, and what now Donald Trump has done, is to use their time out of office to put together a team of people who will write all the laws you need to entrench yourself. And it's being written by private groups. It's not going through the normal lawmaking [02:07:00] process. Private lawyers are writing up all of these plans. And then as soon as you come into power, you start to shovel this stuff out the door as fast as you can. You take advantage of incredibly obscure laws already on the books that already give the executive tons of power. You override, you might declare an emergency, for example, we've seen two of them declared this week in the U S already, or I guess it was last week, or maybe it's, and who knows how many more will there will be. But, there's a lot of these emergencies being declared that give the president additional powers, but there's also new executive orders that are simply grabbing power right now. 

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: It sounds to me, Kim, like what you are saying is, and I know this is simplistic, but as you're trying to make sense of this flurry of executive orders that are coming at all hours of the day, and it's really hard for most of us to triage what's meaningful, what's important, we keep saying on this show, they are not the law, but they are certainly have [02:08:00] promises and instructions to agencies how to conduct themselves.

It feels almost like you're saying that there is one bucket that is distractions, chaos, confusion. There's another bucket that's really systematically shoveling power back to the executive branch and constructing an impermeable executive branch. Is that the best schema for thinking about this?

KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Yes, yes, and of course that bucket of distraction is also actually harming people. And what it does is it takes most of the opposition and pulls their attention over to that. So for example, we've seen, immediately lots of lawsuits on birthright citizenship, lots of people putting out advisories on what to do if ICE comes knocking on your door. All that's crucial and people should be working on those things because these kinds of initiatives are causing real pain. But there's another set of things that's not getting nearly enough attention, and that is the second bucket, which is all the [02:09:00] stuff that is consolidating power in the executive. 

So, let me tell you two things that look familiar from Hungary because these were really crucial in the early days. So, one thing Orbán did was to immediately suspend the civil service law in order to fire tons of governmental workers. Okay? And we've seen that. A lot of the things that Trump has been doing is to rattle the civil service. Now, the Biden administration saw this coming, they enacted a regulation that actually made it impossible to directly fire people who had civil service protection, which is why you see these new executive orders coming in. And what they're doing is they're reassigning people to jobs they can't possibly want to do. Or they're putting them on paid leave just to get them out of the way. So the Biden regulation is doing something to slow this process down. But in some of these executive orders, they actually say in our view, this Biden regulation is unconstitutional. And so we are going to ignore it, which is why they're just firing some people also, okay? 

[02:10:00] But attacking the civil service, it's a big chunk of what Orban did. And he fired a lot of people. He then terrified the rest so that they were afraid to go against him. So even if there wasn't anything he could have really done, he puts people in fear of their careers, their jobs, they're disoriented. It happens so quickly, they don't know what to do. So attacking the bureaucracy, making everybody either quit, be fired, or in fear, was a big chunk of what he did, and that's what we're seeing.

The other thing he did was he defunded everybody who could possibly push back. Okay? So, in the U S government, it's been random defunding of everybody. That was not, shall we say, precision guided. But what I'm expecting to come is more systematic defunding of all the places where they think the opposition will come from. So, let me tell you what happened in Hungary. It turns out when I was living in Budapest, there were 12 daily newspapers in a [02:11:00] city of 3 million people. It was wonderful. You could read papers ranging from left or right to wonderful objective journalism, all kinds of stuff, but it was unsustainable. It turns out. You got 12 daily newspapers because most of their funding came from state advertising. As soon as Orban came to power, he cut the funding to cut all the advertising to all the papers and actually all the TV stations and radio stations that actually had been critical of his party. And it turns out they started to fail, economically.

What happens? His oligarchs swept in, bought up the media they wanted, or they let them fail. And when the rest of Europe looked at this, because this is all happening in the European Union, there's supposed to be a club of democracies, Orban says, Oh, well, you know, it's just the market. They can't sustain themselves. And this is when newspapers are failing all over the world for financial reasons. Didn't look like he'd done anything. 

#1690 Oligarchy Unmasked- Why Billionaires Hate Democracy and How They're Dismantling ItIs Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Unelected Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept. & Other Agencies - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-3-25

WALEED SHAHID: If this story was taking place somewhere in [02:12:00] Central Asia or in Africa, the United States media, the United States State Department, international institutions would likely refer to this as a coup. A billionaire industrialist who donated $300 million to a campaign is installing his personal loyalists in key parts of the federal bureaucracy. This is essentially Viktor Orbán’s playbook.

And we need to know: Why does a billionaire industrialist, with millions in government contracts, military contracts for his private companies, need the Social Security numbers of every American, needs to know what every single check that the US government gives out to businesses, to charities? Why does this billionaire need to know this information?

He was not vetted or approved by the US senate. He has a history of corruption, for using public resources for private gain. He’s one of the wealthiest men in the world. In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it. But in the United States, we are [02:13:00] not used to this kind of level of creeping authoritarianism, of plutocracy, of oligarchy so explicit.

And we need to — as Representative Ocasio-Cortez said last night, this is a five-alarm fire. Senate Democrats need to be communicating to the American people. And last night, there was a call by Indivisible Action for people to visit their local — their senators and call for them to grind the Senate to a halt, to call for investigations and to know why does Elon Musk need to know this information. Why is he showing up on Saturday to the offices of the federal government demanding the private information of citizens all around the country?

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Well, Lindsay Owens, you say none of the reasons are good. Lay those out.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, absolutely. So, for most Americans, this is the first time that they’ve ever heard of the Treasury payment system. So, what is the Treasury payment system? This is, effectively, the piece of the federal government that cuts the checks. And they cut a [02:14:00] lot of checks. This is $6 trillion a year — money that goes to individuals as Social Security payments for seniors; money that goes for organizations like Meals on Wheels to deliver lunches; foreign aid; as well as the funding that the government sets aside for key programs, paying its debts, making sure that we don’t breach the debt ceiling and default on our obligations.

So, this is really unprecedented that Elon Musk has grabbed control of the keys of $6 trillion in payments infrastructure. There are a few reasons this could be happening. The first is, as your viewers know, last week, President Trump tried to end federal spending, just stop federal payments altogether. This was so outrageous and in violation of the Constitution that the courts intervened and said that he couldn’t do that. What may be happening here is that Musk may be doing an end run around the courts, going straight to the source so [02:15:00] that he can continue to stop those payments that the courts said needed to keep staying online.

The second thing that may be happening here is this could just be a good old-fashioned cyberattack. Elon Musk could be interested in the Social Security numbers, the tax ID numbers of tens of millions of Americans. We know that he has partnered with Visa and is considering spinning out a payment system of his own. What we may have here is Elon Musk’s attempt to get the private information for his own financial gain.

The other thing that is incredibly worrying here is $6 trillion in spending is not just a lot of money, it’s a macroeconomically significant amount of money. If Elon Musk starts tinkering with the code, you know, the underlying technology that makes sure these payments go out seamlessly and effectively, he could inadvertently, or on [02:16:00] purpose, bring the macroeconomy to a halt. I mean, this is an incredibly concerning seizure of government infrastructure, but it is also an economically significant moment in the country.

So, I couldn’t agree more with Waleed more. I mean, the word “coup” is the right word to be thinking about here. And Congress must intervene. I mean, if I was a senator, I think the most important thing to do is bring the secretary of the treasury to the Senate today to answer questions about what Musk has access to.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who could monitor DOGE’s activities, was among the 15 watchdogs who were purged by President Trump. Who’s now in charge of or overseeing Musk’s team?

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, Musk is in charge. So, that’s exactly right. Some of the key chokeholds here to make sure that something like this doesn’t [02:17:00] happen have been moved out of the way, studiously, exactingly moved out of the way. So, President Trump fired the inspector general of the Treasury, and the top civil servant of the Treasury Department, the man who was the acting treasury secretary between the time that Janet Yellen stepped down and Scott Bessent was confirmed by the Senate, has also been pushed aside, resigned over the fact that he didn’t want to give Musk, a private citizen, a billionaire, the keys to the Treasury payment system. So there is very little stopping Musk from taking this over. You know, Trump and Bessent have really given him a glide path.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Waleed Shahid, where is the Democratic Party on this? Where are the Democratic senators and congressmembers on this? I mean, you have Hakeem Jeffries, who holds an emergency meeting of the Democrats after a judge stops the [02:18:00] federal payments from going out to — you know, stops the ban on federal funding.

WALEED SHAHID: So, the Democratic Party in Washington is largely asleep at the wheel. They are acting as if they’re kind of a librarian shushing noise in a crowded room. They are still believing in the normal procedures, normal decorum, normal — that everything here is the normal transition of power. And they still believe that what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing is just a libertarian reform of the government, not an oligarchic, plutocratic takeover of a private billionaire who is seeking to know — potentially seeking to know what his competitors might be doing with government contracts. He has private information that — Elon Musk has contracts with international governments all across the world. But the Democratic Party is not able to put forward an [02:19:00] opposition message right now, because they are — they feel like this is normal.

And that’s why it’s so important for concerned citizens all across the country to twist the arm of your Senate Democrat. Go to their office. If you go to Indivisible.org today, you can find a way to join your local chapter all around the country, whether your senators are Republican or Democrat or independent. They need to hear from concerned citizens, because the Democratic Party doesn’t move on issues of oligarchy, of plutocracy, of taking action, unless their constituents show up in person and demand that they hold hearings, take the bully pulpit in the media and also grind the Senate to a halt until we know why does Elon Musk have this information, someone who was not elected.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, the Democratic National Committee on Saturday elected the moderate political insider Ken Martin as chair, despite calls from voters to urgently switch gears and respond to working people’s needs following the party’s crushing defeat, though it wasn’t a [02:20:00] major numbers defeat, but it was a defeat in November. What do you think of Ken Martin? Where do you think it’s going?

WALEED SHAHID: So, the DNC is largely, at this point, a fundraising vehicle for the presidential campaign. I hope that Ken Martin reforms the party to do things like what I’m describing. The Democratic Party should be holding daily press conferences every morning to explain to working-class and middle-class Americans why it might hurt their pocketbooks for Elon Musk to have this information from the Treasury Department and from the OPM, that Elon Musk has a history of wanting to use public resources for private gain, that Elon Musk is someone who is live-tweeting that he wants to cut the federal government’s debt every day by billions of dollars, and one of the only ways to do that would be to begin to privatize Social Security. This is what the DNC should be doing.

Now, Ken Martin, we had lots of members of the “uncommitted” movement at the DNC who were being personally bullied by their DNC state parties, and Ken Martin, [02:21:00] thankfully, did intervene to make sure that that didn’t happen. And so, that was my only personal interaction with him, and he went out of his way to make sure that our uncommitted delegation was treated with respect. Other than that, I don’t know that much about him, but I’m looking forward to — hopefully he can put together a working-class, populist agenda for the party that isn’t just a fundraising handoff.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Lindsay Owens, DOGE is not a formal government agency, right? Which means that it doesn’t fall into any category.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, look, I think when President Trump announced that Elon Musk was going to be running the Department of Government Efficiency, there was a sort of tempting fantasy that maybe Musk, a tech but successful businessman, could come in and restore some efficiency in government, maybe modernize some aspects of government that could use some updating. I mean, I think with this weekend’s seizure of the Treasury payment system, we can be [02:22:00] crystal clear in putting that fantasy to bed. This is Musk determining who is going to get funding in this country, what programs are going to be funded in this country. And remember, Musk isn’t a disinterested party here. As we’ve talked about, he has many federal contracts himself, billions of dollars this year alone to his companies — SpaceX, Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter.

But he also is interested in cutting this funding for a very personal reason, which is he is interested in paying for the tax cuts that Congress is teeing up this year. They are estimating $5 trillion in tax cuts, mostly going to the wealthy and corporations. And DOGE is the entity that is supposedly going to find the money, find the savings to pay for those tax cuts. So I think we can sum it up this way: Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security. That’s [02:23:00] really what we’re looking at here. That’s what DOGE is up to. 

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: What should people do right now?

WALEED SHAHID: People should go to Indivisible.org and visit their Senate office and demand an investigation of Elon Musk and that Senate business should come to a halt.

President Trump and the Power of the Purse - Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie - Air Date 2-5-25

JAMELLE BOUIE - HOST, TAKES™ BY JAMELLE BOUIE: However all of this ends, it should be emphasized that the president has no authority to do any of this. And he has sent us headlong into a genuine constitutional crisis. To specify, the president has no legal authority to freeze, suspend, or what's called impound congressional. appropriations. It is true that there is a 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, which sets up a set of procedures by which the president can request to Congress rescission of funds, meaning just withdrawing funds or reallocation of funds, but it's a very specific process. It's usually based on a rationale like "Oh, I found a more efficient way to do something for you." And in fact, when supporters of the idea of an impoundment power say that, Oh, it's happened [02:24:00] before what they're specifically referring to is a circumstance in the 1800s when Thomas Jefferson as president spent less than what was appropriated because he found a cheaper way to do it.

But even in whatever circumstances are outlined by the law, the president still has to contact Congress, explain to Congress what the president is doing, and give a timeline for when the funds are going to be used. Any attempt to impound funds outside of the parameters set by this law is on its face constitutional for the very, very simple reason that the Constitution gives Congress the full and unambiguous power of the purse. It is, in fact, the very first power enumerated under Article 1, Section 8, "the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, in post and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."

The issue of an impoundment has come up before it came up during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon, certainly a great American hero, wanted to stop spending congressionally authorized [02:25:00] funds, and various legal authorities popped up to say, no, you can't really do that. And in 1988, the Justice Department's office of legal counsel even put out a memo kind of reflecting. past empowerment controversies and stating outright that this power simply doesn't exist for the simple reason that it would contradict and undermine the constitutional structure itself.

It would be anomalous, said the Justice Department, for the president to both take care to execute the laws as per the Take Care Clause of the constitution, but also declined to execute the laws as Congress set forth. You can't really do both. You have to choose one or the other, and the constitution clearly lays out that the president's job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, which is generally understood to mean the president has to execute the laws as Congress writes them, unless Congress provides the executive with discretion as to how the laws are going to be executed. 

Now there's the plain text and logic of the constitution that makes clear that impoundment is not a thing a president can do, [02:26:00] but you can also look at the history of the constitution to make clear that impoundment is not a thing the president can do. During the fight for ratification, when supporters and opponents of the constitution battled it out in ratification conventions across the 13 states, supporters of the constitution had an answer for those who worried that the constitution gave entirely too much power to the president. "The purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people," said James Madison at the Virginia ratifying convention, responding to Patrick Henry's fears of military despotism. "They have all the appropriation of all monies." Of all money, this is a funny way to say that, yeah. 

Alexander Hamilton made a similar point when speaking at the New York Ratification Convention. "We have heard a great deal of the sword and the purse. Let us see what is the true meaning of this maxim, which has been so much used and so little understood. It is that you shall not place those powers, either in the legislative or executive singly. Neither one nor the other shall have both, because this would destroy that division of powers in which [02:27:00] political liberty is founded. It would furnish one body with all the means of tyranny. But where the purse is lodged in one branch and the sword in another, there can be no danger."

The principal aim of the 1787 constitution was to secure the future of Republican government in the United States. It's lowercase R republican, not the political party, but the notion of self government. Of self government bounded by rules and institutions. Of self government defined by scheme of representation. Of self government that rests on the virtue of the people. Of self government that is defined by separation of powers, and institutions that are meant to make sure that no one particular force can irrigate all the power to itself.

And this is not just me speaking here, Republican political theory at the time insisted on "the separate and distinct exercise of the different power of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty," that's James Madison, again. 

The president may have wide [02:28:00] authority to act across a number of areas, but the one thing the president cannot do is unilaterally decide what to spend and how much to spend. President cannot spend any more or less than what Congress mandates without the explicit approval of Congress. 

I'm going to quote Madison again, this time from Federalist number 58 written to the New York ratification convention to persuade them of supporting the "this power over the purse," wrote Madison, "may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people for obtaining a redress of every grievance and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure." 

To upset this balance of power, to, in effect, give the president the power of the purse, is to fundamentally unsettle and unravel the constitutional system of the United States. The system as it exists is built on the idea that these things are separate, that they have to be separate in order to preserve liberty and freedom.

A [02:29:00] Congress that cannot force an executive to abide by its spending decisions is a Congress whose power of the purse is a nullity. It doesn't matter. It effectively doesn't exist. It's not there. So if you read the memo announcing the freeze or the pause or whatever, it stated this was necessary so that officials could align their objectives with those of the President's will. And you see this type of phrasing all over the Trump government, that the president's will must be obeyed, that we must follow the president's will. But wait a sec. Let's hold up. Let's, let's stop. 

In the American system of government, the president's will doesn't direct the government. The people who serve the government don't pledge an oath to the President, they pledge an oath to the Constitution and to the American people. Everyone who serves in the government, career and political appointees alike, have a duty to obey the law and to follow the constitution. There is no mechanism in our system by which the mystical authority of the people flows into the President and [02:30:00] gives the president sovereign authority over everyone. It doesn't happen, that's not the United States system of government. 

President is a servant of the constitution, bound by its demands. Most Presidents in our history have understood this, even when they pushed for more and greater authority. But not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power. Or, as he once said, 

Donald Trump: an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as President, but I don't even talk about that. 

It's a thing called Article 2. Nobody ever mentions Article 2. 

More importantly, Article 2 allows me to do whatever I want. 

JAMELLE BOUIE - HOST, TAKES™ BY JAMELLE BOUIE: The freeze, the Elon Musk shenanigans, all of this is an attempt to make this a reality. He wants to take the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute authority. For lack of a better term, he wants to be a king. And the big question facing this country is [02:31:00] if we're gonna let him make himself a king, or if we're gonna try to do something about it.

Trump's Attack on Science Funding - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 2-21-25#1694 Unhealthy Discourse - RFK Jr. and the Anti-Science Movement Endangering Global Health

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Katherine, your piece lays out obviously an alarming picture of the Trump administration's impact already on science. What are the most significant changes that you're seeing so far?

KATHERINE WU: Oh, my goodness, do we even have time to go through them? There have been so many. I think this really comes down to the fact that it has been so many that it's actually difficult to point to the most significant ones. Certainly, the fact that funding has been frozen, that means that researchers are essentially not getting the funds they need to pay their staff to continue their studies.

That means participants in clinical trials are potentially being called and told, "Well, we can't continue to study anymore. This very important experimental drug that might be helping you stay alive may not be an option for your care anymore." We've seen thousands of federal workers fired from across government and that includes scientists doing vital work. [02:32:00] We have seen foreign aid abroad been totally dismantled.

People who need life-saving HIV treatments not getting the care that they need. I am sure I am missing things from this list only because the list is so ridiculously long. There truly has not been a sphere of American science or American science being done abroad that has not been impacted by this. It is the way that science is being done and who is allowed to be doing science right now, every aspect of it.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: One of your articles is called The NIH, National Institutes of Health, Memo That Undercut Universities Came Directly from Trump Officials. Remind us of that one.

KATHERINE WU: Yes, so this is one of the most important changes that has happened in the past two weeks. I suppose I hesitate to call it a change because it never actually fully went into effect. On February 7th, the NIH seemed to release a memo. They did release the memo saying that indirect [02:33:00] cost rates were going to be cut and indirect costs are basically overhead.

You get a grant. You apportion some of that grant to cover the day-to-day logistics of being able to do your research, paying rent for your lab, paying the utilities bills for your lab, making sure that administrative stuff gets done, all the logistical stuff that makes the research run on the side, not just the hard science that we picture or see in stock images. This is essential stuff.

Those rates can go as high as 60%, 70% at some universities. It's a very big deal for it to be slashed all the way down to 15%. For that to be a hard cap effectively overnight, which is what that would have done, that would have been devastating. That would have been an overnight salary cut for countless people and the work that they do. You can't sustain that kind of cut with no notice whatsoever.

This created huge uproar that has since been [02:34:00] temporarily blocked by a federal judge. We're going to see how that all shakes out once this is fully litigated in court. The larger issue here was that it was not NIH behind this memo, even though it was their website that released it. The Trump administration pushed that directive through and basically forced them to publish it on their website as what appears to be just a show of force.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Let's take a call from a scientist. Isabel in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Isabel.

ISABEL: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Columbia University. I'm also a proud member and steward for my union, UAW 4100. I wanted to talk about how these funding cuts to science, health care, and higher education are impacting my job and the jobs of scientists like me. I love that I get to come into work every day and study how our brain makes memories. [02:35:00] These funding cuts are putting my job and my science at risk along with the work of thousands of other hardworking researchers and educators.

I also want to talk about something that's giving me some hope right now, which is academic labor power. Academic unions are more prolific than ever. This Wednesday, we organized a national day of action, including a rally here in New York City that was co-organized by my union, UAW 4100, and other academic unions across the city. These rallies brought together thousands of researchers, academic workers, and allies to say no to these funding cuts. It's really empowering for me to see the collective labor power that we're building in New York and nationwide. I think this is going to be a powerful tool to fight for the future of science, health care, and academic jobs.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: [02:36:00] Isabel, thank you. I'm going to add another voice to yours, Isabel, as our next caller, I think, is another scientist also getting involved with the UAW actions. Alexa in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Alexa.

ALEXA: Hi there. I'm a lifelong scientist. I feel like I can talk to you about the ways that this has affected the prospects of my career and the ability to do science, but I'm really passionate also about us making the connection that what we're watching happening in science right now, what were victims of in science and in research and in higher education right now also is something that is part of the global or the US economy at large with the decline in manufacturing and that we should learn from history since we're organized with the United Auto Workers.

What they've experienced in the auto industry over the past 40 years is what we're experiencing right now in [02:37:00] research and higher education, and that when we talk about the funding of US science and US research at large, we can't pretend that it's been good. The past 30 years have been a major stagnation of research funding. That's come at the cost of workers where we haven't kept up with inflation.

That's why we've organized ourselves into unions. It's because of how bad it's been. The fact that this is happening should highlight to everyone across the US and internationally just how tenuous the system of research funding is. It's right now that we need to decide whether we believe that we are a country, whether we are people that believes in public knowledge production or not.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: What would you say to listeners who might think, "Okay, you're a microbiologist. The pharmaceutical industry is big and wealthy. If they want to develop medications--" I'm sure your [02:38:00] work isn't only on medications. If private industry wants to develop things that are science-based, that are going to be useful to the public, then they will make money on them. Why do we need taxpayers to subsidize this at the level that they have? What would you say to that?

ALEXA: Also get this question in another frame, which is, "You have a PhD. You're a microbiologist. Why don't you just work in private industry?" I just don't believe in that. I believe that there is such an important place for public research and for basic science research. I actually don't study anything in biomedicine. The research that I do actually is only valued by the Department of Energy right now. My PhD is in soil microbiology. I think it's so crucial. We have no idea what discoveries we make now will be important for innovation, technology, medicine, climate change 20, 30 years from now. We need to be investing in the big questions that really propelled knowledge [02:39:00] forward. Knowledge in and of itself is a public good.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: There isn't profit in basic research, thank you for your call. Katherine Wu, what are you thinking listening to those couple of callers?

KATHERINE WU: Yes, so much. I think it's worth reiterating just how important it is to keep training future generations of scientists. Discoveries don't get made. Drugs don't get developed unless there is rigorous training in place and funds to make sure that those young scientists have the training that they need, the support they need, especially scientists from underrepresented backgrounds.

I think the system now is so strapped that some universities are trying to figure out, "Do we need to pause graduate student admissions?" There could be multiple generations of young scientists at risk here. We will see the fallout of that loss for years and years and years. That is so much knowledge that is at stake here. Absolutely, I think the conversation about private funding is an important one.

I think if you think about the amount that the federal government contributes [02:40:00] to scientific research, if you're even to pair away at that a little bit, there isn't actually a really reasonable way for private funding to fill that gap. There's not enough of it. A lot of private funding comes with strings attached, right? It's what foundations want to fund. It's to their own ends. Certainly, pharmaceutical companies are doing their own research, but it's what's lucrative. What about rare diseases? What about things that don't have a big dollar sign attached to them?

It's incredibly important to work toward the public interest and not just where the money is. I also want to point out, we have so many examples of discoveries that were made totally by accident in the pursuit of basic research, penicillin maybe being the most famous one. There will be devastating consequences for everyone's health and well-being and our understanding of the world if any type of science is hampered by this continued pause.

Samoa's Health Chief Says RFK Jr. Spread Anti-Vax Misinformation Before Deadly Measles Outbreak - Democracy Now! - Air Date 1-31-25

DR. ALEC EKEROMA: In 2019, Samoa had a very low vaccination rate, and that was because of some problems back in 2018 [02:41:00] with a matching-mixing of vaccines that resulted in two deaths. And so, therefore, we had a low vaccination rate already. And then Kennedy visited, before the measles outbreak. Now, the measles outbreak, of course, it came from New Zealand across the islands, and because of a low vaccination rate, it just took off, and so resulting in so many deaths.

But the government responded quickly and demanded a vaccine campaign — vaccination campaign, and there was some international assistance to Samoa from all countries in the world, who came across — doctors and nurses came across to Samoa to help with the mass vaccination of our people. So, that drove the vaccination up, rate up, to 90%, within a few months.

So, Kennedy’s presence in Samoa a few months before that actually emboldened the anti-vaxxers locally and also from [02:42:00] New Zealand. And so, they were the ones, really, that tried to sow the vaccine hesitancy in the country. But, fortunately, our leaders did not believe that and mounted this emergency and mass vaccination campaign.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Why did Kennedy go to Samoa?

DR. ALEC EKEROMA: Apparently, he came to talk about some database that they could create. But when he was here, he talked to — well, he talked to the director — the then-director general of health and to the prime minister, but he also talked to local anti-vaxxers, as well. So, I’m not privy to what was discussed, but the result of his visit didn’t result in any improvements in our ICT or software capabilities in the country. None was promised.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: [02:43:00] I want to bring our other guest into this conversation. As we talk to the health director in Samoa, I also want to bring Brian Deer in, who was there in 2018 — in 2019 in the midst of the measles outbreak. He’s an investigative journalist and author of The Doctor Who Fooled the World. His recent New York Times opinion piece, “I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak.” So, can you elaborate further on what Dr. Ekeroma is saying?

BRIAN DEER: Good morning, Amy.

Yes, indeed, I was out in Samoa at the time, and I spent a great deal of my time there speaking to the mothers of children who died from measles. And it was the most emotional experience, and I ended my time there just crying, as I became overcome by the pain of these mothers. Eighty-three people died, overwhelmingly small children.[02:44:00] 

Now, Mr. Kennedy thinks he knows better than anybody else. He claims that he’s not anti-vaccine. I’ve been following what is now called the anti-vaccine movement for 25 years. And I can assure you that Mr. Kennedy is not only an anti-vaccine campaigner, he is the preeminent anti-vaccine campaigner in the world. And he went to Samoa, and after the outbreak began, he then wrote to the prime minister, trying to suggest that it wasn’t, in fact, the virus at all that was killing these children, but was, in fact, the responsibility of the vaccine itself.

And he didn’t stop there. Even this week, speaking to senators, he claimed that nobody knows what these children died from, even though the measles was — the vaccine there had collapsed as a result of other issues. And then, after a vaccination [02:45:00] campaign that followed the outbreak, or took part — occurred at the same time as the outbreak, the children stopped dying. But Mr. Kennedy felt that he should tell senators that nobody knows what killed those children — extraordinary thing for him to say.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: What do you think, Brian Deer — and then I want to ask the health minister in Samoa — of him being the health secretary, the secretary of health and human services of the United States?

BRIAN DEER: Well, I have to say, listening to him over the last couple of days, Amy, that I was shocked by the attitude he displayed. He was making it absolutely clear that notwithstanding him being the — hoping to become the head of an agency with a $2,000 billion budget and employing 90,000 people, he was going to personally involve himself in vaccine science, and it would be [02:46:00] he who would be deciding whether the research was conducted properly, even though he has no medical or scientific qualifications at all, and not the enormous staff he represents and the agencies, that have actually written to him previously telling him that the research overwhelmingly and conclusively shows that there is no link between vaccines and, for example, autism. He was making it absolutely clear to senators that he was going to — in that job, with those enormous responsibilities, for that massive entity, he was going to involve himself in the individual pieces of research and deciding for himself whether vaccines, for example, cause autism.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And before we leave Samoa, Dr. Alec Ekeroma, if you can talk about the significance of if he is confirmed as health secretary here in the U.S.?

DR. ALEC EKEROMA: It is quite significant. Someone who is prominent [02:47:00] in the world, with a [inaudible] , spitting out anti-vaccine sentiments, emboldening anti-vaxxers around the world and in Samoa, is going to be a public health disaster for us. Already, we’re going to have reduction in U.S. funding to United Nations and to WHO that is going to affect our capability here. And then you add in Bob Kennedy into this role, that is going to slow down the flow of vaccines to us, that is going to harm our public health state in this country. And so, therefore, it will be a disaster for us.

President Trump's second administration and Project 2025 - Trump's Terms - Air Date 2-11-25#1695 Trump's Corruption As A Matter Of Course

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Back in April 2023, without a whole lot of fanfare, a conservative political operative named Paul Danz laid out what was basically a political battle plan. 

What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially [02:48:00] weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state. 

It was called Project 2025, a 900+ page blueprint for a future conservative president, because it's worth flagging that at this point, President Trump had not yet locked down the Republican nomination, to hit the ground running on day one. It outlined a suite of very conservative policies that would, for example, outlaw the mailing of abortion pills and abolish the Department of Education. It even suggests a return to the gold standard. 

Democrats saw this as a vulnerability for Trump in the 2024 campaign, and so we saw social media videos like this one from then president and then candidate Joe Biden.

JOE BIDEN: Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up. 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: We saw Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson on the stage at the Democratic National Convention holding up a giant bound copy of the plan. 

COMMERCIAL: You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: After the plan became a Democratic talking point, Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025. Here he is on Fox News. 

Donald Trump: I have no idea what it is. It's a [02:49:00] group of extremely conservative people got together and wrote up a wish list of things, many of which I disagree with entirely, they're too severe. 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: But now that Trump is in office releasing his own detailed plans, a lot of them are strikingly similar to the ones laid out in Project 2025. And one of its chief architects was just confirmed to head the critical Office of Management and Budget. Here's Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

CHUCK SCHUMER: And make no mistake about it. Russell Vought is Project 2025 incarnate. 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Politico has been looking into where Project 2025's ideas are showing up in Trump's early executive orders, and this past week, they published a breakdown of 37 different examples. Megan Messerly covers the White House for Politico and joins me now. Welcome. 

MEGAN MESSERLY: Thank you.

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: So, let's start with that list. What are some of the areas where we have seen the clearest echoes of Project 2025 in the action of the White House?

MEGAN MESSERLY: The biggest category is in the area of social issues. And that's obviously a broad bucket of things like school choice and banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, prohibiting transgender [02:50:00] troops from serving in the military. But we've really seen this cover a broad swath of policy areas from social issues to immigration and government staffing, energy, foreign affairs, the economy. Like it really touches every area of President Trump's executive orders so far. 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: It wasn't just a policy plan, though, as well. This was a database of potential administration staffers. This was a conservative bench of people who are motivated to quickly dismantle big chunks of the government that they don't like. Have you seen that play out in the first few weeks of this administration? 

MEGAN MESSERLY: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the list in Project 2025, there's this lengthy list of folks who contributed to the project. And there is significant overlap between this list and the folks who are now joining President Trump's administration. Many of them are former administration officials themselves, and we're seeing them go back in for Trump 2.0. Some of them are even joining his cabinet. Russ Vought, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. His pick for CIA, John Ratcliffe. His border czar, Tom [02:51:00] Holman.

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: And it is fair to say that Vought did write a big chunk of this plan. 

MEGAN MESSERLY: Absolutely. He authored a whole chapter, in fact, on the executive office of the president. Vought is known for being really in the weeds, these nitty gritty details of really how to use executive branch authority to the fullest extent and even press that in terms of some separation of powers issues. He has this whole belief about impoundment, this idea that the president doesn't actually have to spend the dollars that Congress allows the federal government to spend. 

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: I want to stick on that for a moment because this seems like this is going to be a big fight of the Trump administration.

We saw this proposed freeze on federal funding. It got a lot of attention. It was challenged in court immediately. The administration eventually walked it back, at least for now, but they made it clear we want to do this again. You're saying that Vought has written about this, has talked about this, this idea that Congress appropriates the money, the executive branch, in his view and clearly in the view of many people in the Trump administration, doesn't necessarily have to spend it, can choose not to spend it. This is something that was in the plan? 

MEGAN MESSERLY: So if you look at the plan, he lays out this [02:52:00] theory of the case. I will say he doesn't go quite as far in Project 2025 as he has in other writings in fully laying out his legal theory here on impoundment, but he makes very clear in Project 2025 that he believes that Congress has delegated far too much authority to what he refers to as "the fourth branch of government," the administrative state, the career bureaucrats.

And so that's reflected in the federal funding freeze that we saw. A lot of folks I talked to, though, say the rollout of that freeze obviously threw Washington into chaos before the White House walked that back. But folks now close to Vought are telling me that they expect him to find a clear cut case where this can actually go to court and potentially make its way up to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they agree with the argument that Vought has made, that the president does have this authority to say no to congressional spending edicts.

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: What is the White House saying right now? Because as we laid out, there was such a clear disavowal of this during the campaign. And as you have reported, yet so much of it is actually part of the action plan. 

MEGAN MESSERLY: Exactly. When we've asked them specifically about the [02:53:00] overlap between many of these executive orders and Project 2025, we haven't gotten a lot of direct response. But in general, the argument that we're hearing now from the White House is this idea that, if you look at Project 2025, a lot of these are just longstanding conservative ideas or things that President Trump himself did do during his first term. And so I think the argument there is, okay, yes, these ideas may be in Project 2025 but these are also just reflective of President Trump's priorities.

SCOTT DETROW - HOST, TRUMP'S TERMS: Have you -- it's still early, Democrats are clearly struggling with how to respond politically to all of this. Democrats seem to think this was a powerful argument during the campaign. Perhaps it wasn't because they lost. Have you seen, have you come across this? Have you looked at this at all? Are Democrats focusing in on this again in this moment?

MEGAN MESSERLY: They are. I think it's to be determined what the impact of that is. I think a lot of the American public, this label of Project 2025 did stick in their minds. When I was on the campaign trail, people were bringing it up to me of their own volition. So clearly that messaging really broke through and that's why Democrats were leaning so heavily on it. 

On the other hand, President Trump is [02:54:00] moving forward. He is now elected. So if there are any concerns about Project 2025 from Democrats, from members of the American public, those aren't the folks that hold the levers of power right now. And so it's full steam ahead from the Trump administration.

The Gangster Presidency - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-15-25

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So I've been slightly snarkily describing executive orders as letters to Santa, right? They're not binding on their face. They are directives to agencies about new priorities. But these are being treated, as you say, like a fiat from the King. And then the authority of that is cited to say, well, you know, the King said that we have to turn off the taps on this or that, or we have to end DEI wherever we find it. And so I would love you to just tell me really explicitly, in a normal administration, what an agency would do with a really broad sweeping EO. In other words, what would the regular procedure be to try to effectuate something? Because as you said, President Biden had some big swing EOs. 

SAM BAGENSTOS: [02:55:00] So usually, first, and this has been the case since the Kennedy administration, before the EO were to go out, the Justice Department would review it and make sure that there was actually authority to do the things in the EO, that the President has authority to tell the agencies to do whatever the President's telling the agencies to do, and that the agencies would have authority to carry it out. And that clearly hasn't happened here. Even if DOJ has looked at these EOs, clearly there are so many provisions where there's no authority that they're just not applying the approach that they've undertaken since President Kennedy.

So, that's number one. Usually when you get an executive order—and I've been on both sides of this process, both the drafting of them in the White House and also receiving end at an agency—when you get an executive order, you look at it and you say, Okay, well, so this is the president telling us that we have to apply our statutory authorities consistent with a particular policy. What room does the statute give us? [02:56:00] What room has Congress given us to do this? How hard would it be to implement these things? Let's figure out a process for trying to implement the President's policy consistent with what Congress has told us. 

What we're seeing right now is this just incredibly ham handed, reckless effort to take what the President said and just do it yesterday. So, President says I don't like equity. I'm against "gender ideology". And so you have the apparatchiks throughout the government going through with a control F looking for the word "equity" or looking for the word "gender" in any grant application, in any grant notice, in any program, in anything on a website and saying, Okay, we're taking it down. We're taking the money back. We're not spending any more money on this because it's inconsistent with the edict about what's the right way to talk about things in the world. That's just not the kind of thing that happens in any functioning government. 

And [02:57:00] like we can talk a lot about norms. I'm really happy to talk about past norms, but that's not the fundamental problem here. The fundamental problem here is we need a government that works. 

The people through decades have elected officials who have passed laws that create a government to solve problems for the American public, to make sure that people get health care, to make sure that people are protected against predatory actors in the economy. And if what you do is come in and say, I'm just going to take that all down because I just don't like governance or I just don't like the words that people are using, then what that's going to do is mean that people are going to live shorter, worse lives, and I think fundamentally that's the important thing. And we as a society have decided we want an effective government to protect people, to provide for people's needs, to make sure our healthcare system works, to build infrastructure, to prepare us for the next economy. And [02:58:00] all of this breaking of norms, why it matters is because it subverts all of those democratic decisions we've made through the years.

DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And maybe this goes without saying, Sam, but it's not just norms because it's also a breaking of laws. it's also, as you say, some of these don't go by way of the Office of Legal Counsel the way they should have, right? There's a systematic failure to check if something is lawful. It's almost as though the presumption is not only have we lifted off without looking at the norms, we actually don't care whether the law provides for this or not, because we've decided that the President's priorities supersede that. 

But there's one other piece I want to talk about. The other paradox of this just implosion that we have seen in the last couple of weeks of the federal government is that they've made the choice to just shutter agencies the way you would do a hostile takeover, where they just... they could have said to Congress, just turn off the lights. We don't like USAID, we're not [02:59:00] super fond of CFPB. Like, they've tried to do this before, but instead of saying in some world in which they actually could do this lawfully, they just bring in this like unelected centibillionaire who just with a bunch of guys and some code are just shuttering entire entities. 

And, so I want to flag some reporting on Thursday night that came out of Wired that says that, Elon Musk promising, standing at the Resolute Desk, promising maximal transparency on the DOGE website, which it turns out is just being kind of run out of X.

So I think it matters for our purposes, and I need you to help illuminate why, that this is done entirely extra governmentally, Sam, because it's very fast and it's hard to catch that this sort of embodies a maximalist theory of executive power. But it's not confined to the agencies themselves. It's just a guy running around with no accountability in a non existent agency with a bunch of kids who may or may not have read-only [03:00:00] clearance. That is significant, but help me understand structurally why. 

SAM BAGENSTOS: Yeah. I think it's of great concern for all the reasons that you've talked about and many more. So, we have this very powerful individual, Elon Musk, who has very substantial business interests that relate to the federal government, who has been given the keys to the most sensitive systems within the federal government. He has been given the power to turn on and turn off particular payments to particular entities, and he is using that in some ways as a blunderbuss just to shut down entire agencies, which means we have examples of people who are providing aid to prevent infectious disease that could ultimately come back to the United States, who are being stranded in potentially war torn areas because their money has been shut off for them so precipitously.

We have this agency USAID being basically shut down, notwithstanding that [03:01:00] Congress created it. That's a big deal. The power to turn on and turn off these payments can be a tool of vindictiveness and oppression, but also it can be a tool of corruption. Elon Musk is a major government contractor. He relies on government business and so do his competitors, right? And so he is now taking the power without any accountability, without any transparency to decide, yeah, we're going to turn off the spigot on the competitors. We're going to turn on the spigot on these things. That is incredibly dangerous. 

And, the fact that at the same time, President Trump is getting rid of the ethical checks, getting rid of the head of the Office of Government Ethics and appointing a political appointee, Doug Collins, his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, as the acting head, trying to fire the special counsel who's designed to enforce the bar against using the government for political purposes. And again, appointing a political ally [03:02:00] as the acting head there, right? This is all of a piece of creating a massive risk of corruption and then hiding anyone's ability to find out what's going on.

 

See Trumps blatant quid pro quo with Eric Adams play out live on Fox News - All In w Chris Hayes - Air Date 2-14-25

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: We are right now in the midst of the biggest scandal of the Department of Justice. Since Watergate in the 1970s. So far, seven prosecutors have quit the DOJ in protest of Trump's corrupt deal with New York City's Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. In what can really best be described as a blatant quid pro quo, the charges in Mayor Adams federal bribery case have been conditionally dropped for now, in exchange for his full cooperation with Trump's plans for immigration enforcement and mass deportation.

In New York City. Now yesterday, six career prosecutors, people who signed up to work for Donald Trump resigned, rather than help facilitate such obvious corruption by dropping the charges. This morning, a seventh DOJ official, a man named Hagen Scotton, the lead prosecutor on the case, joined them. In a letter to Trump's acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, [03:03:00] Scotton called the deal with Mayor Adams a serious mistake, and he insisted that no system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges or the stick of threatening to bring them again to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

Adding that any assistant U. S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to follow your motion.

But it was never going to be me. The formal filing to drop those charges was finally submitted about an hour ago following an intense pressure campaign by the man you see there, Emil Bove, to find lawyers at the DOJ's Public Integrity Office, that's the folks that prosecute public corruption, that would be willing to sign the requisite motion.

Now he finally convinced a trial lawyer near [03:04:00] retirement, as well as a supervisor at the criminal division, to agree. But here's the thing, a judge still needs to sign off on the whole thing. Now, we should say, Mayor Eric Adams denies the charges against him, insists his deal with DOJ was totally above board.

In a statement today, he did not explicitly deny a quid pro quo, but he did deny any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. But even that denial is difficult to square with the language that Bove himself used in his initial letter demanding the Southern District of New York drop the pending charges against Mayor Adams, so that he can quote, devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.

Bove obviously understands how that could sound like, well, a quid pro quo, which is why he went out of his way to add a very funny footnote, preemptively insisting, it is not one. Citing an earlier memo from SDNY, as Mr. Bove clearly stated to defense counsel during our government, the government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams assistance on [03:05:00] immigration enforcement.

Heh heh. Perish the thought, where'd you get that idea? Except, federal prosecutors literally asked the judge to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. Everyone can see what's going on here. Of course, this all started earlier this week when Danielle Sassoon, she was Trump's pick to serve as the acting U. S. Attorney for SDNY. She's a prosecutor with sterling credentials among conservatives, clerk for Scalia. She, in response to being ordered to drop the case, sent a letter offering her resignation directly to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, right, bypassing Bove, who'd sent her this instruction, writing that, Adam's attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo.

Indicating Adams would be in a position to assist with the department's enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Adding, rather than be rewarded, Adams advocacy should be called out for what it is, an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.

In that same letter, Sassoon outlines a particularly damning anecdote in which Bove [03:06:00] admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting with Adam's lawyers and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion. Like, why are you writing things down, lawyer from the justice department?

Probably worth stressing here, it's standard practice for prosecutors to take notes at a meeting like this, and that demanding they refrain from doing so and then confiscating their notes? is not a sign that everything you're doing is on the up and up. Bove responded to Sassoon's letter with a blustery 8 page letter of his own yesterday, where he admonished her for refusing to drop the charges, accused her of participating in a partisan witch hunt against an elected Democrat?

Bove also mentioned by name two Assistant U. S. Attorneys under Sassoon, who worked on the case, and basically directed them to contact his office if they were willing to drop the charges. And it was one of those attorneys that he name checked. Hagen Scotton, the guy I quoted a moment ago, who resigned today and told Bove to go kick rocks.

There's one more back and forth in letters between Sassoon and Bove I think is worth highlighting because [03:07:00] it gets to the nut of the point. A perfect encapsulation of just how corrupt, how rotten this deal is that Trump is offering Mayor Adams. Sassoon in her letter invokes the case of Michael Flynn.

That was Trump's former national security advisor in his last administration. And in short, Flynn was indicted for lying to the FBI. He pleaded guilty to the charges. Then Trump's DOJ, under Attorney General Bill Barr, demanded the charges be dropped anyway after he pleaded guilty. Now, the judge overseeing the case refused to dismiss it, but the whole thing eventually went away when Trump stepped in and simply pardoned Flynn on his way out of office.

In her letter to Bove, Sassoon points out that the president could just do the same thing now, noting that With Flynn, the president ultimately chose to cut off the extended and embarrassing litigation over dismissal by granting a pardon. Bove responded to that with some more bluster, basically admonishing Sassoon for daring to question Trump's authority.

Don't tell the president who to pardon. Let's linger here for a second because that example raises an important point, right? All this is happening because Trump did not pardon Adam. In fact, [03:08:00] we have reporting in the New York Times that Adam's explicitly sent a letter asking for a pardon. He didn't get one.

That kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? Because it's not as though this president is particularly shy about wielding his pardon power, considering that on day one he pardoned 1,600 January 6th rioters, including a bunch of folks who have since been re-arrested for other crimes, others who've committed violence.

He pardoned a guy that was running like, the biggest drug trafficking website in the world. Pardoned him. Trump intentionally did not just pardon the mayor, which would be fully within his rights. Instead, what he chose to do was to dangle freedom in front of him, in exchange for his preferred policy outcomes in New York City.

The conditional dropping of the charges on a possibly temporary basis was the quid, right? Well, today, as all this is developing, in the shadow of this scandal, today we got the quo. We got the quo when Mayor Adams went on a media tour along with Trump's so called border czar, where he was forced to insist he is a willing participant in Trump's immigration crackdown and deny the existence of any sort [03:09:00] of shady dealings.

MAYOR ERIC ADAMS: Think about my attorney, Alex Spiro, one of the top trial attorneys in the country. Imagine him going inside saying that the only way Mayor Adams is going to assist in immigration, which I was calling for, since 2022, is if you drop the charges. That's quid pro quo. That's a crime. It took her three weeks to report in front of her a criminal action. Come on, this is silly. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Now, that denial, again, was a little undercut during that very same interview when Trump's border guy, sitting next to him on the curvy couch, issued a not so veiled threat against Adams if he doesn't do what the big boss wants. 

Tom Homan: I came to New York City, I wasn't going to leave without nothing. I did the last time, and I told him I'm not leaving until I got something. And now I've got him on the couch in front of millions of people, he can't back away from this now, right? If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we won't be sitting on the couch, he'll be in his office, up his butt, saying, where the hell is the agreement we came to?