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Going to go to a great local charity, Second Harvest Heartland, which helps feed people in the Twin Cities area. Very important because a lot of people can't leave their homes and a lot of people are losing their businesses because nobody else can leave their homes. It's great. Anyway, we're very happy to try to help, and we hope that if you're in the area and you can come out, you do. It's going to be great. A lot of laughs. It's going to be a real... You know, real... I don't know if it'll be the most uplifting show, but it is important to us to feel like we're showing up. Yeah. It feels like the least we can do. Because we're so fucking proud of all the people in Minneapolis. They've been amazing. Yeah, we are. The best of us. Okay. So the regime arrested its first journalist this morning. Donlin was taken. I saw you do a take with Sam and Catherine on it. You were great. You were in full righteous fury mode more than the two actual, like, longtime journalists. I loved that. Yeah. Yeah, I think part of it is we are starting to really feel the targeting of all kinds of people. You know, like it is quick. Like red lines are being crossed left and right. And I do think there are, you know, I'm not exactly somebody who thinks that everything's a distraction from everything else. I do think what it is, though, is they like to stay on offense and they like us all marching to their beat. Right. They put a lot more quarters in the machine and they keep the outrageous flowing and it's tough. you know, then it's sure it's a lot of stuff you can talk about on podcasts, but for a country, it makes it deeply difficult, right? This is how the authoritarians exhaust you. I sort of end every show that we do talking about how authoritarians want us tired. And like, this is how they make us tired. And so, and this is also part of chilling civic spaces, right? They do not want people like us. I think part of the reason maybe I'm angrier is that, or I don't know if it's that I was angry Sam was really angry. You know me. I just I was like wound up. So it's because I know Don Lemon. And like I said on the thing, like, I don't think they should have gone into that church. I think it's wrong to go into churches. That being said, I like that sort of doesn't negate at all. Like, just like he is a journalist who went and covered them. And, you know, if they've got evidence that, you know, he organized it. Even then, like they were already, okay, so I'm not a lawyer, not a lawyer, but they had already decided who they were arresting in this. And they did not specifically, they specifically did not do Don Lemon and his producers conceivably because they were journalists that were there covering it, interviewing people. Now, uh and so i i do need a lawyer i think to parse out um because church is private property if you're asked to leave you are trespassing this government that is lying about everything and who is trying to arrest like they're doing the don lemon thing as performance art right it is about making us scared and so i think the reason i'm so hot is that i just want to make sure that everyone hears me clearly about this should have the opposite effect. This should have the opposite effect of making people scared It should It won though You saw Pam Bondi she described what Don Lemon did as being part of a quote coordinated attack Again it it just wild the way language is perverted so that the people who defend the January 6th insurrection as being totally peaceful and defend the ICE murders of Americans as being like patriotic law enforcement They then turn around and say that a guy like Don Lemon or Rene Good, right? He's doing a coordinated attack and Rene Good and Alex Breddy are domestic terrorists. It's like living in the upside down. Yeah. And this is just about going after people who are critical of them. This is the third world country stuff. Yeah. Jail reporters who are being critical of the regime. Or Russia. And so- It's Russia. This is Putinism. And then on top of it, you said the tweeting and then the White House is tweeting about it with like – I am sorry. This is one of the reasons I was so mad. They tweeted out a picture from the White House of Don Lemon with a chains emoji. Like this is psychotic behavior. It is the behavior of people who don't even want to maintain the slightest facade of abiding by the accepted rules of engagement in a free society. I mean, here's why I think it'll work, because Don Lemon will probably be OK. I hope Don Lemon will be OK because he has a lot of visibility. He has connections. He'll be able to raise a ton of money for the best legal defense. The legal system, as far as we can tell from the magistrate judge who refused to accept a criminal complaint, the appeals court judge, which upheld that objection. The career prosecutors. The Bush appointed judge. Right. Who have been saying, I'm not touching this shit. I think he'll be okay. But Georgia Fort, who is a local independent journalist, is not super famous and may not. Do you see what I'm saying? Like at the very top, people can be like, okay, well, you know, hopefully the system will work and these people have access to capital and ways to support themselves while the system is working. But you move down the line to like a local reporter or photographer. That's a much heavier burden for them. and that's what worries me. Yeah, I do think that there's not a jury that would convict these people, but that's not the point, right? That's not the point of what they're doing. They knew they couldn't get a conviction, very likely on Comey or on Tish Japes, but they did it anyway. And here's the thing. To your point about hypocrisy, I mean, the hypocrisy, it is staggering, overwhelming in every way you can think of. They celebrate not just Kyle Rittenhouse who shows up with an AR-15 to a protest and kills people. That is where you get a visit from the president. You get photo ops with President Trump if you do that. If you are this Nick Shirley guy who showed up also to a private place where there's a lot of little kids and filmed them saying that you're an independent journalist. And this is I was trying to I mean, this is what we're going to have to make it a speed round because we could make a whole meal out of the discussion of like private property versus and like when children are president and how people deal with these things. But like the basics are. This administration is in no way acting in good faith on any of it. And they're like they're lying. We're in the middle of them lying about Alex Petty. We're in the middle of this is I just wanted to do today like a segment. Just go fast and it just be excuse me. If your kids are listening, turn the volume down. But I just wanted to be do a segment that was just like fuck off where we go through all of things like we've got Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of national intelligence, who is supposed to deal with with foreign adversaries. And they can't trust her with Venezuela. Yeah, they've sidelined her on that. So instead they've got her seizing the boxes out of Fulton County because they want to re-litigate the lies they told in 2020 about the election being stolen. And everybody's just going to roll their eyes at that one. But it is still insane. You do have a theory? A conspiracy theory. I have a crazy theory. I want it. My crazy theory is that Nicolas Maduro is going to at some point provide testimony that, yes, he did interfere with the 2020 election. And this is then going to be used as pretense for all sorts of shenanigans and attempts to make 2026. That Maduro interfered against Trump? Yeah. Why would he have done that? Well, this is part of the Hugo Chavez, Ghost of Hugo Chavez. This is part of the narrative has been that Maduro was in league with the Bidens Oh I see You think that what they going to trade trade for They let him go if he says he interfered in the election It be like the Ghislaine Maxwell trade It'll be like we can work something out here. And that that will then be used as, we'll see if we were right about everything. And CBS News will have two people on, one of whom disagrees and one of whom agrees. And, you know, 4% of the country will be like, I just don't even know what to think anymore. It's all very bad. Like, very, very, very bad. And fuck. Like, I don't even know what more to say about it. The way I don't like people going into churches is the same way I don't like that Nick Shirley went into these, like, childcare facilities. But, like, I don't think he should go to jail for it. I don't think he should be prosecuted for it. You know, and so like the idea that they would prosecute Don Lemon for the same like every coordinated. Yeah, they have weaponized the DOJ fully to have Pam Bondi tweeting about Don Lemon right now. Like it's hard. To explain how not well, people here on listening know this, how not like America this is. It's America now. Can I just say something to and you can at some point you just talk and make me stop here. But like the thing that I keep thinking about is Alex Preddy and Renee Good and the looks on their faces right before they got shot or like the way that they were behaving right before they got shot, which is that neither of them thought that they would be shot. Right. Like you can see the belief existing in them still that this is not a country where they would be executed for protesting. well it sure is we all know better now i uh so i did a little little interview with radley balco yesterday uh i'm sure you didn't watch it because nobody watched it nobody watched the lowest rated video i've done in months really made me angry because it was pretty good maybe angry is my fault radley's really smart and people should listen to him uh but i you know i just asked him I was like, so have you noticed that when, like if one protester like Alex Preddy has a gun, then, you know, he'll get executed on the street. But if a lot of protesters have guns and I because I went back and I looked at the video of the Michigan protest from April of 2020. I posted this thread about all the guns they've been bringing. You know, there was a lot of pushing and jostling of state troopers as they were trying to break into the House floor, the state House floor. I mean, by the standards which have been established, the state police should have opened up on everybody there, right? Wouldn't they have reasonable fear for their lives? And I, again, I look back at that protest and I think to myself, that's great policing. Here you have a really dangerous situation and the state police in Michigan, who I don't know anything about. I don't know if the state police in Michigan are good or bad. But on that particular day, those particular officers did a great job making sure that everybody was kept safe and nothing turned into a bloodbath, which is what police are supposed to do. The problem is that then created a whole set of perverse incentives for both law enforcement and for people on the right to believe that, like, oh, well, we can do anything and they're not allowed to touch us. Yeah. Right? And then law enforcement thinking that other parts of law enforcement like ICE and whatnot that, well, fuck, they can do anything they want. They just got to say, oh, reasonable fear for my life. Just saying leads to a dark place. So I don't know if you know this yet, but I did a take with Tim that I don't think is up yet. This is kind of like a mini focus group episode, but my team and I did 14 cops. I heard you talk about it, but I haven't seen it. Yeah. So we did two groups. We did a group of cops who voted for Harris, cops that voted for Trump. And I don't you can go watch the video with Tim for like you can hear the sound. You can hear us sort of break down. But I will say that across the board, there were sort of I mean, way more. I mean, then the Harris group, they were like bereft. They were broken hearted. They were taking it you know they were like it making me less safe in my job to have people behaving this way because then people lump us all together And just like they were very much putting themselves in the shoes of the rights of the individuals that they police They had a much more like servant, like we're there to protect people mentality. Whereas the Trump cops, although none of them said would say that the pretty shooting was justified. They didn't say it was unjustified. They were much more like wait and see. They did think that the administration coming out. Well, they did think the administration coming out and immediately saying he was a domestic terrorist or because he had a gun like that that was wrong. But they did do a much more, you know, we appreciate the administration has the back of cops like we want people to. Whereas the Harris group was like, Christy Noem should be gone. Like they are they are lying. She's a clown. She shot a dog. There was just a real like get her out of there. They were also like, we need to get ice. But across the board, I would say the things that they did have in common were the idea that training matters a great deal. And they're worried about the level of training. I mean, in the Harris cop group, they were like, these people are completely untrained. versus the Trump one where they were like, they were kind of grappling with the level of training, but they did talk a lot about how important training was and like the idea that you should spend a lot of time policing before you're put into these incredibly high stress situations because you have to like be able to manage your stress in those. I also just want to briefly talk about the, like the Trump cops brought up a lot of the second video that has come out of Preddy where he kicks the taillight out, which you see a lot of sort of the anti-antitypes or the magnet types using as evidence that he was an agitator. I looked at that and I was like, oh, so here he is behaving considerably more aggressively than he is at the point at which he got shot. And not only did those, like, he didn't get shot. They didn't shoot him. They shoved him to the ground. They did, like they had an altercation with him, But they didn't feel the need to shoot him. So to me, the evidence is actually these guys don't need to be pulling their guns out, you know, dropping 10 rounds into somebody just because they're protesting aggressively. To me, it raises the question of, huh, I wonder if these officers carried a grudge against this guy. yeah they i mean the the trump cops in the group were asking that like not did he have a grudge but like kind of did they recognize him did the cops recognize him did they right did they just decide oh this guy he's the worst yeah so i guess uh trump changing tacts really it's really it's all it's all gotten better and yeah do you remember that when we had 48 hours 36 hours of all that news coverage that was like trump looks to de-escalate and yeah not so much yeah i mean he's tweeting this morning uh they said something really you know idiotic like uh his his stock has gone way down now that we see what you know what an agitator he was uh i don't know man And it's all together. And then, I don't know if you've seen, but the Epstein files now, miraculously, after weeks and weeks of not being – Wow, it's wild. But suddenly, they've thrown that out there. Can't wait to get through that. Now they've been released. They document dumped today. My team is sort of going through them. Millions of files, supposedly. Millions of files. Did you see – and then there's reports. So then they clearly went to friendly reporters. And so there's already like a Fox News digital story. DOJ clears Trump of any wrongdoing. Oh, okay. Sure. Again. We trust you guys. Remarkable. Remarkable. It's all, it makes me very mad. I'm sort of in a very angry place right now. I don't know about you. Maybe you are as well. I'm also mad about, if you want to hear the rest of the show though, got to subscribe. Come and support us at The Bulwark. We're all in this together. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. it's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side.
