Bill Kristol: The MAGA Elites Are Such Frauds

Hello and welcome to the Board Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Groundhog Day. It doesn't feel like Groundhog Day with Bill Crystal. You know, you know, Bill Crystal's always keeping me fresh. Sad to report that Punxie Tony Phil has seen his shadow. So we will have six more weeks of winter, which the people of the South we know that already. And I think it's an underappreciated abdication of this administration right now that like red state Republicans don't have heat and electricity and their schools aren't open for weeks. And like Mississippi and Tennessee and Texas and the administration and DHS is, you know, their folks don't know the matters. I don't know. Not really constituent service oriented. We blue state Virginians don't have our Fairfax County schools are staying close to again today. But I don't blame them. I mean, honestly, it's not safe. I mean, that the kids have no place to wait on the sidewalk for the buses and stuff because it's like piles of ice everywhere. But somehow Fairfax County should have like, is it impossible for them to have ice breakers as well as normal snow plows. I don't know. I guess it's very unusual to get honestly a week of some freezing temperature and stuff. Anyway, it's been cold. Yeah, some local government failures, but I will say just in a normal administration. Right. You know, you would see DHS and FEMA and the president and vice president even and the national guard troops surging towards the places where they've been weather-related deaths and then people are out of their home. They don't even talk about it. Is that even a thought? Right. And the old days would be like, well, maybe they could deploy some national guard to help out with some of the tasks to free up war. The cellplow operators zero. No, they're busy. They're arresting the worst of the worst temperament, deporting until cell-bound stuff. It's really making us safer as a country and better off, I think. And Kristi had another nipped-tuck appointment last week so she couldn't be focused on this. All right. Well, we have much bad news to discuss. And a little bit of good news, too. We thought about getting some political good news, which we get to. But I want to start with Minnesota. Pro-publica got the names of the agents who shot Alex Predey. It should be worth saying that the government still is not confirmed this. At the time of his taping, you know, the Minnesota Governor Walls' office, the mayor's office can't confirm this. This is I guess from a leak to Pro-publica. But the agents in question are Border Patrol agents, Haysus Achoa and Raimundo Gutierrez and both are CBP. CB is not releasing any additional information about the deadly incident. I think worth noting that they joined CBP respectively in 2018 and 2014. So this is not really a training story of, you know, somebody that just joined. And he thought on the drip drip of information about this killing. I think we've all learned a little more about Border Patrol on the one hand and I, some of the other than at least I have than I do before. I was in a sense of what they were up to. Border Patrol really turns out to be a, I mean, a problematic agency. Maybe you have to be problematic if you're roaming the border and dealing with gangs of coyotes as they call them and, you know, human traffickers. I mean, you know, it's a tough job. They were never meant to be deployed into cities. They were never meant to be dealing with peaceful demonstrators. They were never meant to be dealing with people who are, you know, harassing them a little bit in the way demonstrators do but within their constitutional rights. This was to be dealing with people who are arrest them if they're breaking law. I mean, I would say they're not the people you want policing the streets of nature cities. And we've seen that now. And I do think they're it's not a recruiting thing. It is the nature of that rage and see it. A little more so in the last 10, 15 years as the border stuff has seen you drop obviously than before. I was more of a not a big, you know, contact with the people agency. I picked up the people in jails who were undocumented immigrants who was finished serving their term perhaps and some local prison or whatever. Dropped into the airport, put them on the planes out there. I'm being a little too glib but it's sort of basically what they did. And of course there, there's been massive recruiting. We know the nature of that recruitment. Very white nationalist and, you know, ridiculous macho kind of stuff. And so the combination of the two is really bad. I mean, in this case, it is to say it's not new border patrol agents. It's people have been around for a decade. I think guys, if I've seen the numbers correctly, like half their agents will have been hired in the last year. Who's volunteering for ice now? I mean, so the combination is very bad. These are not people who are into disciplined law enforcement on the streets of our cities and, you know, being respectful of both citizens' rights and immigrants' rights. It puts the lie as Andrew R. Arguide this morning's warning shots. I mean, I think even if Trump was sort of sincere about the de-escalation thing, which I don't think he is, these agencies have a momentum with their own now. Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. I know Edgar was really going to focus you check that out in the newsletter. But he just flags one story. This is from Saturday in St. Peter, Minnesota, spend an hour south of the Twin Cities. You have a legal observer driving behind an ice vehicle recording them with their dash cam. Ice vehicles box are in, agents pile out of a car. They draw weapons, they screen matter, get out of the car, get out of the car. That just doesn't sound like the type of behavior of a group of people that have been told, you know, that they need to de-escalate calm down. And so, you know, we haven't had any killings over the last week, of course. But there isn't a ton of evidence that things are like meaningfully different in Twin Cities or in the other places where these agencies are deployed for that matter. That's an important point to make too. It's not as if they're not doing stuff elsewhere. We've seen stuff on videos online that are pretty horrifying. The thing for me that really, by striking to me is they love breaking windows. Their first reaction seems to be if someone's in a car is a little confused about whether he or she's being asked to get out or whether maybe she should pull over first or whether she doesn't have to get out. They bash in the passenger side or the driver's side window. And this is true, not just in cars, but it seems to be true in houses that it now wasn't there at car dealership or some kind of dealership in Utah, of all places where they just they love breaking glass. That has not historically been a good predictor of like lawful and respectful and behavior that's respectful to citizens, which is only to minorities, right? The other part about this and they'll become more conversations with this over the next couple of weeks as we get to funding is I think that is like the key fact what you've mentioned what I got wrote about just about how these agencies have a momentum of their own. They have rules their own like Donald Trump is an overseeing every action that they take, right? And so if you have this huge surge in funding to the orgs and they're hiring these people and you're putting border patrol in the place where they shouldn't be and you have all these new ice agents, right? This stuff is going to naturally happen even if they do try to reign it in a little bit. And so I think as these negotiations go on in the Senate, like to me, it would be great to get some winds on demasking them and to change some of their policies and that I think those negotiations are happening. But if they still have this level of funding that's greater than the US Marine Corps, like this stuff is going to continue to happen. And I think that's the key point of the funding debate and why it has to be defunded, clawed back. I think that coming to some sort of deal that doesn't claw back the funding in some ways, I think it's going to be pretty misguided. Yeah, I agree. And they just need to fight the funding thing throughout the year too. Whatever deal happens in the next two weeks, which doesn't happen, it's still all that money they got in the bill and reconciliation bill year. But that money, people talk about it as if it's, well, that money is just obligated. It's not obligated. It's it's it's authorised, but it can be unappropriated for next year. And this happens all the time. Weapons get multi-year appropriations, but of course you can't build a jet plane in one year. So they have a five year schedule. But then they set us change their mind to cancel the jet plane. And so they they they kill the last three years. That could that should happen. It really needs to happen. They need to defund and also de-deploy if I can if that's a word. I mean, they need to sort of it's not just matter of the masks, which is important and all that. They just need to get them out of the streets of the city is basically now. Yeah. There's no ice agent ever set foot in some street somewhere if he's doing you know, it's something sure, but the notion of these roving patrols, huge numbers of them, all geared up and in the kit. I mean, they are eager to break the glass and to push the people down to the cement and to get the handcuffs on and to hold them for several hours without explaining what they're doing or send them was 100 of them were sent from Minneapolis to Texas to be processed and examined. And then they're released in Texas until they make their own way back. I mean, it's just cruelty is the point in some respects. On that point, with the cruelty being the point, you can't let yourself get too upset about what a few random assholes say. On social media, but the degree to which the mega ghouls were like kind of delighting. Yeah. In the fact that it was two Hispanic officers that killed a white liberal, you know, the right has really, you know, taken on the worst elements of identity, and as an identity politics as well. And I, you know, I hate to like even think about it in that frame, but it's was pretty crazy. Like the number of people who are basically like trying to rub it like own lips rub it in their faces. Like see, it's a show on Gutierrez. That's pretty bleak. I guess this is my only thing to say. You follow the mock at ghouls more than I do. Yeah. I get myself annoyed by reading occasional either Trump acquiescent types and the anti-antihized and all this. They have been amazingly unconcerned about this. These sort of high toned intellectuals, very civilities, very important to them and all the constitutional government. And this is really with the Republican Party stands where against those mobs on the left. And here we have, I see you saw the rich lottery energy soon. I didn't actually, but I just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm going to confirm my point. I was doing a high-minded defense. He's like, it's getting a little ugly out there. You know, some of this is impractical. You know, some of this is impractical. It was his concern. The Wall Street Journal is more like, I heard them in 2026. So they probably should cut it out. But I mean, if you actually want to be restriction of send immigration, I don't, but I mean, you need to be very tough on this. If this is the price to be paid and there are scholars who written about one of the cases against the kind of mass deportation type efforts is that inevitably it brings these civil liberties to abuses. You can't do mass deportation without at the various scholars who made these points based on studies in the whole bunch of different countries. But if you want to claim that you can do it, you've got to be tough on these abuses. Right? It's sort of like when we defended, when I was a defender of the, of the, of the, of the Rampor, even on the federal of the, of the Iraq War, of the Iraq War, you know, I was appalled by Abu Ghraib and all these things. And I was genuinely appalled. It wasn't like a matter of tactics. But also if you wanted to be a defender of the war, you couldn't be acquiescent in the excesses and the war crimes that happened. You have to be tough on it. And to be fair, the Bush administration was, once they found out about these things mostly, I think. And the military itself was, the military understood this is zero of that. I mean, zero of that in ice and water control. Right? I mean, think of the military. I think what the military did when they found out about things, moving people, trials, court marshals, people, Trump, of course, later pardoned 200 now, have high positions in excess defense of our word. Still, they did their best to discipline these people. This night, we're pretentious of any of that now with border patrol and ice. So it's really, it's really bad. It's bad for civil liberties. And so I've been obsessing about for the last week or so. It's very bad for 2026 and the threats that poses to free and fair elections. So very bad. We're talking about that. They need to be tough on the hill. They need to not obsess about every detail as you were saying, you know, about what the masks this and the body cameras that look, they should fight all those fights, but they need to basically curb ice and border patrol as much and as thoroughly as possible. What are your midterm concerns at this point? You're on one of the lawyer texts and I am. Mine is simple that if you step back and say, if Trump's not going to do well in the midterms, which I don't think he is, they're not going to what can they do? Well, they can put their thumb in the scale. What's the best institution to put the thumb in the scale there are a bunch of things they can try, obviously, but they've got this paramilitary force roving around that can be deployed to cities, to blue cities, including blue cities in red states, which are particularly important places for some house elections and for some key senate elections, if the Democrats are going to pick up, senate seats and it can be deployed, the governor won't resist the deployment. And they can do a lot to make the playing field unequal in the month or two before the election. Speaking of which, there's some limits to that. You know, here's the positive side of the coin, which is voters will have their own say in this and some level. And how about not talking about a blue city in a red state? How about a red city in a red state? Fort Worth and Territ county over the weekend, Taylor Remitt, as an Air Force veteran and Union guy won a special state senate seat. We've been a Trump plus 17 seat in the last election. Obviously, you know, this is a off-off year, you know, special election on a Saturday, cold right? Like the turnout is very low. That said, you know, Territ county, Texas is not exactly, you know, a hotbed of liberal thought. And for him to win that seat is pretty meaningful, I think. I think it was a big deal. And it's certainly, it's precisely because the electorate is going so much against Trump that I worry the most about them trying to overcome the wishes of the electorate in November. So these are big districts that I'm going to realize. They're 31 members of the Texas state senate, so they're 35. I think Texas members of Congress, so these state districts are each as large literally, I mean, the same size as a congressional district. They don't always come inside with the pressure, but the same size. Now, it's a special election on Saturday, so they got to turn out of just under 100,000. They'll get 250 or something in November. But 100,000, it's not one of these special elections is 7,242 to 6,109. I mean, you know, we're talking, we're talking 100,000 voters. This particular district is red, as you said, it's a huge swing from 17 plus 17 Trump to plus 14 for the Democrat. This time, it was held by a Republican who would resign. I think to run for some other office. Territ county as a whole is a swingish, reddish swingish district. I think Biden carried a very narrowly in 2020 and then Trump in 24. It's suburban, ex-urban, Fort Worth, Dallas, a couple of detailed things. I got two puts on the weeds on this. People who tried to see what was really happening, it wasn't, it doesn't seem to have been a particularly a differential turnout. It wasn't that Republicans were bored and were busy watching college basketball or something and the Democrats, so all knew they were supposed to get out. The electorate seems to have been a Republican-ish as you would expect in that district, but a lot of some Republicans had a lot of independence voted Democratic. And there was a good Democratic candidate, a young guy, a veteran, kind of ran a centrist campaign. He was outspent by a lot. So it does seem to have been de facto a referendum on Trump-ism and the Republican party. And certainly the Texas Republican party is a very Trump-y Republican party. So I think it's pretty meaningful. And again, it's meaningful because of this and Tom Hatter now, special elections and of the Virginia and New Jersey elections. Possibly the only district with low oil prices is hurting Trump. In the country, maybe that one, but some oil folks down there are going, what is happening? Why are we going to to Venezuela? The price of air oil is already too low, but it is absolutely meaningful. Another meaningful thing for me and folks are oftentimes reaching I'd be like, where do you have advice? What races matter? Where should you help? I'm getting texts from Democrats all the time. And that district, to me speaks to what you're writing with a little bit of the news that you mentioned it. The Democrats are going to housebaring some crazy thing happening at this point, right? And some crazy thing might happen, whether that's election interference or the hell knows. Some like outside force that comes in and changes the dynamics. The Senate is a much different animal. The places where the Democrats had to compete are very tough, we talked about this a bunch. But you'd look at some of these stretch states now that you mentioned. Iowa, Kansas, Alaska, Tautola, Ohio, maybe also Texas, depending on how that primary checks out. But those states are not any less red than this district was. Again, this is not an apples, apples comparison, but since a special election on a Saturday. But it does mean that if the political environment keeps getting worse and worse for Trump and the Republicans that one or two of those might be winnable for the Democrats. And to me, that is where there's going to be less resources. There are plenty of resources in the North Carolina and Maine center races, and in these big house races. But some of those guys might not have as much. And so I look to that. Just one other thing. We're doing a live show in Texas in Dallas, March 18th, and Austin, March 19th. And the tech is going to say, oh, this week, people need to jump on them because the Minnesota event sold out in one day. That's unbelievable. We had no idea. A big huge venue. We appreciate everybody. We're looking into other ways that people can be involved in Minnesota because we are car-off guard. How excited you guys were to come support Minneapolis. We appreciate everybody. Anything else in Texas before we talk about a little St. Jeff Island? The only thing I would say is that it is suburban for Earth, mostly suburban, sub-exurban. It's not that different from the suburbs of Wichita or of Des Moines. I mean, Texas is a little further south, but maybe a little more public. Anything close to this degree of movement going, you put a lot of Senate seats in play. Winning the Senate as well as the House would be so much bigger than just winning the House. I mean, just a practical matter what you could do with control of both bodies in 2020, 27 and 20, 28. Yeah. All right. If you ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of learning new language, you're not alone. Studies show that 70 to 90 percent of people trying to learn new language give up. Fortunately, Babel's built so that it's really easy to get started. Their bite size lessons to easily into your daily routine and are also easy to remember. Just 10 minutes a day is enough to start seeing real results. 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Get up to 55 percent off at babel.com forward slash bulwark spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com forward slash bulwark rules and restrictions may apply. On Epstein. I'm hating this story now. It's just so gross, you know, I'm reading the emails and it's like, who isn't in Epstein's emails? And like everyone is emailing this guy over various things. Most of them, like Elon Musk wants to get invited to the most wild party on the island. You can read between the lines and what he expected. It was going to happen to that party. Some other people got maybe kind of wrapped up on necessarily former Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson was in there. There's a big lot of discussion about this in social media and then he had to post to do is like talk about rich people problems. It was like somebody like a intermediary was I told them to find me a plane and the intermediary went to Epstein on my behalf to the plane. It's I don't know. Maybe we'll let Russell off the hook and no. And I'm not, you know, all these guys are in there. Let Nick, you know, lie about it, musk lie about it, Trump lied about it. Obviously, when you've Democrats, there's Kathy Rumler, the Obama lawyer, who is now Golden Sachs lawyer, who was like getting presents from Epstein and her emails are insane. I'm not really sure what to make of all of it. I feel very gross and yucky about the elite networking set. And I feel like my biggest takeaway is like non-political. It's just that people are so desperate to like want to hang out with other rich and famous people that they, you know, that they don't use any judgment or, you know, moral rectitude at all in these sort of situations. And then there's kind of like a second, obviously even grosser category of people who seem to be involved with the women and girls to be clear. I don't know. Like as a political matter, I'm not sure kind of where the stance I'll own or what you make of it. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm very much agree with you on what's called the sociological, cultural side of things. And I do think, look, all elites have corruptions and problems. And, you know, if you pick up the rock, it's not quite what it looks like on the outside. And I'm sure it was true at first side. It was true. God knows the truth of the gilded age. But it's bad. And I do think, yes, I think I think it tells us something about our country and our society that's not good. It didn't have to be this bad, right? And this permeating everything. And after he's convicted, I mean, this isn't one thing where kind of people kind of knew in 2002, we're talking 2017 and people are hanging out with him cheerfully and stuff. So that part's creepy. And I do think it'll politically have some effect of pushing people in a, I don't know, left wing or social democratic or anti-ritual elite. Not just living in bubbles, but being protected from the law. I mean, which gets to the second point. I mean, the second point is the administration's behavior. And I do think some of the critics are missing the point. Six million pages, three million pages. Look, they have done nothing to clarify what actually happened. They have not released the documents that everyone agreed would be the most helpful ones, the 2007, 2008 draft indictments, the charging documents of 2019, the 302s, the FBI inquiries. They have not released what the survivors were released. They have purposely gone out of their way to not really comply, but sort of comply with the law in the most unhelpful way possible, the administration. Any normal administration, you have to release a bunch of documents. You release some order with an index, with some explanation. Maybe you have the experts who worked on them, not Todd Blanche, but some work would be, say, here's what we found about A, B and C. A lawyer who has experience dealing with sex crimes and sex trafficking, the type of people that they fired, like Jim Comey's daughter, would put out a memo. They've got out of their way not to cooperate with, or coordinate with, the survivors. For others, had no idea this thing was coming on Friday. So the whole administration strategy has catched them off guard. Maybe we confuse everything in the first 72 hours. Maybe the story goes away. So in that respect, the bad faith of the administration is really striking. They have bad faith about everything. So maybe that's just the way they operate. But generally, it is striking how much they don't want people to see what some of the obvious questions are. And I guess they want to stick with their original assertion that basically no one should have been charged with that anything. All those people we see on the emails are ranging in the flights and are ranging in the meetings. And then the people about whom the victims testified in the 302s, and we're in the original 2007-2008 and died draft indictment. I guess they just walk free. So I find that both disheartening and kind of repulsive. It's important that the administration not get away with this, I guess, or what I would say. These people may clearly they are not cooperating in good faith. They do not want to get to the bottom of this. They want this to go away. I think that is important. I'm clarifying. You know, you just point my arrow the right direction on this because I said this at the start of that I was like, look, this will be all-sanded, very, very signifying nothing if there aren't co-conspirators that are charged or, you know, that are brought to the forefront even may as they don't have enough information to charge them, right? Because it's like it's impossible and impossible to imagine that that was just formerly Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein and Galaine that were involved in, you know, elicit sexual behavior with young women and girls, right? Like it's impossible to imagine that. And given all the circumstantial evidence we have pointing to other people being involved. And if they met and cash patrol testified that there weren't any others, these emails do not do anything to support that narrative. And so we'll continue to, you know, kind of play that out. But if they don't, right, then there is really no other way to look at this, but kind of like a big cover-up in their in their haphazard way also, you know, dealing with, you know, the minor amount of pressure they have on their right flank. Just the only other thing should we mention that leaked out with this with Epstein is the ban and interview of him. The interview quote unquote, it was a media training where ban and pretended like he was 60 minutes and he was interviewing Jeff Epstein for an alleged effort to do a 60-minute interview. This is like before he gets re-arrested. The second time, I've tried to watch some of it. It is really, it's a really tough watch because ban and is very like almost smitten with Epstein, you would say. And like asking Epstein to explain to him all of his brilliant insights and why he has these maths imposiums with Stephen Hawking and all these brilliant people and how he gets around the task code. And the only thing that is potentially relevant to that is just any potential notion that the Maga guys were not just totally mobbed up with him and are totally interested in protecting him is completely revealed to be false by this. I mean, just given all the Trump administration officials in there and like Bannon's just a sequious like treatment of him, they're preferred narrative of oh, this was all Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. I think has been pretty fully eviscerated. I wouldn't recommend watching it. No, I did. You handled the ban and the ban and be excellent. So you don't need any help on that. But you know, is there a single actual authentic populist like Trump supporter? I mean, I suppose there was a few out there in the country that we've never heard of. I mean, is there anyone who actually believes any of that stuff? Or is it just a whole bunch of corrupt elites who just wanted to get rid of the current the central liberal establishment or the central Republican establishment, I suppose? So they could get their hands on everything. Bannon, Tucker, all these people. I mean, yeah, this is one of my favorite hobby, or says thank you Bill. Let me go off on a good faith nationalist populism has never been tried. It's like the communist of thing where it's like there's some real communists out there. There's some good communists just waiting around the corner. And it's like supposedly there are good faith nationalist populists, people that just have conservative social values and you know, want the government to be more responsive to the economic needs of the Volk and you know, want to go after the corporate elites that are preventing people from being able to achieve their hopes and aspirations. And like they all turn out to be France. All of them either a want to be elites or are really more excited about doing right wing conspiracy mongering. There's no across the board like this happens time and again, where you would imagine that in theory, maybe that you know, what a authentic like right wing populist policy platform would look like. But I can none of the leaders of the movement actually care about any of that stuff. And by the way, and most of the voters don't want it like Israel when it comes down to. And I guess the two leaders that we've seen who do care about it, I guess would be Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene and their poetry out of favor with the movement because they took some part of it seriously, you know, what I suppose economics, the might be one or two people who took seriously the notion that he cared about the work in class. It was going to bring manufacturing jobs back and all this. I think about like there's that guy, the commentator Orrin Cass. He does kind of the white papers that we need to put in the tuxedo mag of stuff. But it's like, there's a reason why he is doing that like in having symposiums and rust vote and Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent are right running the government. And why JD Vance is the person. I think who most encapsulates this. Like you could have imagined after Hilbert allergy like decided like he saw something about the white working class and working class broadly and how they're being left behind and he thought that the old free market fundamentalism was wrong and he wants to pivot to focus on them. And it's like he never talks about any of that stuff. All he does is lie and like make up stories and do right wing culture war nonsense. Like that's that is what is actually animating him. And it's what he animates the voters like really all of them being JD Vance and all these guys just fundamentally wish that they were the like elites in charge and that they were the gatekeepers and that they could hang out with fancy elites. If that's literally becomes well known by writing a book called Heal Billy, Elegy, you know, and it's about this. And now there's not a trace of it left really. I mean occasionally tiny rhetorical traces but very very few and now he's hanging out with Peter Teal. Stephen Miller who becomes famous as the super militant they're taking the immigrants and taking jobs of all these hardworking native, you know, Native Americans. Again, he and his wife there are they even pretending to be interested in I mean they're interested in being brutal authoritarian, I suppose, but again with them they're enjoying the you know the high life so forceful can tell here in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago and stuff. All things such a fraud such a con. Okay, that was a good point. I know it is obvious but I'm going to do it once a week. Vance is a good example of that really. Because they're going to try to like do this. Like they're going to try to turn Vance into the authentic nationalist populist economic populist cares about the working man and I just I refuse to let it happen. Like you cannot you know shit on my head and tell me that it's a hat. Okay, like I know it's I know it's happening. Tulsi Gabbard. It is Groundhog Day actually I lied at the top where I said it's not Groundhog Day with Bill Kirstell right now it is Groundhog Day in our society because once again we have a whistleblower complaint. This was apparently against Tulsi and late May of last year. This is a Wall Street General Report. This complaint is so highly classified and sensitive that it's currently locked in a safe. There have been months of wrangling on how and whether to present it to Congress. I guess the whistleblower and their attorneys just kind of reading between the lines got sick of the stall and decided to alert the reporter. I don't know that but that seems like the most likely way that this got out. It is obviously extremely reminiscent of the Christopher Steele dossier. It's turned out to be a lot a lot of bullshit and the you know report from the Ukraine call which turned out to be extremely legit and so here we are again I don't know who knows if this is related to Russia or otherwise it's a decent place to suspect with Tulsi. I guess my other observation is that Tulsi did seem to go very quiet for a while and we didn't hear a lot about from Tulsi and then she showed up in Georgia last week looking into the ballots from 2020 and now we have this report. That's eyebrow raising and maybe conceivably eyebrow raising and potentially related to the thing you were talking about earlier about election concerns. Yeah, my only comment on Tulsi which is really courtesy of our friend Tom Drossler who noticed this. Trump when he says it was fine for Tulsi, it was important that Tulsi be there in Georgia. He said because she's got to make sure the elections are legit or not rigged or something going forward. I mean to the media coverage in a way of all this is Trump's revenge, Trump's obsession about 2020 hates the people in Fulton County which he does and it's erased it so he hates Fulton County and so he hated what happened in 2020 so he wants revenge for that. I take all those points but he is thinking a lot about 2026 and 2028 and the fact that Tulsi did it was DNI, Director of National Intelligence is there in Georgia and it's sort of part of the team working to prevent election interference and make sure we have unregistered elections. Put that together with the ice stuff we were discussing earlier and her being able to, hey, there's far into interference here. We need to send a lot of federal troops into Georgia because they're busy, you know, doing God knows what they're on the ground. These people who watered if he Trump. I mean, Tom Drossler made this point on Twitter. I think I mean, I'm blue sky. It's ominous the way Trump put that is a forward-looking thing for Tulsi. Yeah, Tulsi wants election interference. I think you can just say bluntly that's pretty alarming to have somebody that wants foreign election interference, being a point person looking into these absurd 2020 claims. We'll see. Anything more we learn about this whistleblower complaint, obviously we'll be following it. This is probably unrelated but again, it's hard to keep track of all the different corruptions and ways that there's foreign influence in our politics right now. Another Wall Street Journal story. They're doing a great job over on the news side at the Wall Street Journal worth pointing that out. Not as high marks on the opinion side, but the news side, they're doing real reporting over there. Shake to noon, the spy shake they call him. He bought a secret stake in Trump's crypto company. It was a $500 million investment for 49 percent of it, world liberty financial. That came a few months before a UAE won access to American AI chips. These tightly guarded AI chips who weren't selling to foreign governments. This is so unprecedented and crazy. This is something that would be in another time like wall to wall, the only thing that any news organization would be covering. The sitting president of the United States sold a secret stake in his company to a United Arab Emirates spy. Now we're doing simultaneously doing a bunch of deals that matter to our national security, matter our economic security, Trump and his family is literally in financial bed with the UAE's spy chic. And the deals, I guess benefit China right these AI deals through the UAE. Yeah, I love it China. Yeah. It's become so routine of course. We don't really barely, I got to admit I barely read the story because I got another $10-$100 million for one of these governments for Trump, you know, but it's amazing. And should the United States President really be for sale to like a bunch of Arab mollus? I shouldn't know, Christian conservatives be concerned about this. I'm like we have a bunch of guys that are doing to re-a-law countries that have various backend deals with terror organizations as well. Are we not financially secure enough as a country? We need to accept bribes from Arab shakes. It's totally insane. I mean, it's turning me into Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, like, taking me one of your fucking libertarian. Like, what? Like, how, how is that acceptable? Or like in any way something that, you know, can serious folks on the right who are concerned about national security, like, what don't have problems with? I like, can you imagine the Tom Cotton press release of Hunter Biden did a $500 million investment with the UAE and we sold the May I chips that also went to China that like, I mean, there would be total hair on fire. And rightly, by the way, it should be. I haven't noticed a lot of press releases from hawkish Republican senators and members of Congress or hawkish editorial boards, hawkish think tanks, FDD and all our friends there, very upset. I'm sure by all this, so stupid to even say it, so obvious. But the degree to which they haven't been able to, they've just totally capitulated. I mean, there was a while there. Maybe this is more of the first term, I guess. I have to go back and think about this. They were able to hold sort of for a while the, I don't really approve of A B or C, but I think he's doing a good job on DE and FDs better than those horrible liberals and then Hillary Clinton or Biden. That was like a tenable position for a while, I guess. It is utterly and completely vanished, right? I mean, Hillary Clinton thing is a good example, right? Like, just, just for context. So there's a big, I think, legit scandal related to a Clinton, and the Clinton global initiative. This happened like, oh, actually, when she's in Secretary of State kind of and then after she leaves, right? Where Bill and Hillary and their staffs are flying around the world, you know, they're having these conferences and they're taking money from foreign interests, right? Now, that money wasn't going to them. Wasn't going in their pocket. I mean, a lot of it ended up doing some good work. Like they were doing, buying mosquito nets for Africa and stuff like this, right? But just like the notion of having your nonprofit be funded by all these foreign interests was something that like, it's a, it's a bad look, right? Like, if you want to be the president, if you want to be the Secretary of State, like you can't, have this kind of influenceability, right? Like, you don't want to be, you don't want to kind of, you know, tilt the scales a little bit because somebody has been a big donor to your nonprofit, right? Like, you just need separation from this. That's part of the like public service. The amount of ink that was spilled going back to our friends in Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Edward over this or at Fox, the amount of talking head times, like talking about this horrible corruption. And here's Trump taking money for himself from UAE spies. It's not going into a nonprofit that's going to mosquito nets in Africa. It's going to, you know, Don Juniors, you know, new club in Washington, DC and like their new hunting ranch that they're buying or then, you know, whatever, the new golf course that they're building somewhere, like they're pocketing it. Like they're pocketing money from foreign interests. It is a totally different category from what Hillary was, was doing. And, you know, anyway, well, you know how the story ends. Nobody even pretends to be upset about it. It's fucking outrageous. Let's talk about the arts. That was a good segue there. I just going to be so fucking that. And it mostly makes me mad that nobody else is mad about it. And I guess, and then that just makes you wonder, I guess people are just basically happy. I guess fine. If I, if it's like a train's run on time, all of it to this, like, would you want to become a banana republic? Like, am I supposed to be upset that my leaders, you know, are doing backroom deals with foreign shakes? You know, I guess, I guess most people don't care. They're happy to live in a bin or a public until they start getting gunned down on the street until the economy takes a turn. Our inflation gets all too high. Back to the arts. The Kennedy Center is going on a two year hiatus. Our friend, Rick Grinnell, your friend and mine was given this important role. Something he'd always dreamed of his whole life is Trump's top gay. He was going to be in charge of a Kennedy Center and not started to the arts portfolio. You know, they were going to do all of these non-woke events and, you know, bring back traditional values to the sound and stage. And nobody actually wants to go to the Trump Kennedy Center when he puts his name on the fucking building. It turns out. And Rick Grinnell is not capable of managing a theater. It turns out. And so rather than just continuing to have, like, half empty events and, like, random balls on behalf of Trump family members, they've decided to solve this problem by taking it on a two year hiatus. So shutting down the Kennedy Center for two years, it's really kind of a piece of Trump's life. I mean, Trump puts his name on something and then it fails. It's like, it's something that's been a lot of buildings with Trump's name on them that have ended up failing, casinos, et cetera. So he puts his name on the building and immediately fails two year hiatus. He says they're going to renovate it. You're more of a Kennedy Center man than me. So I'll just kind of let you take it from here. I mean, we went into the operates. One of the two places. You go to the operand. Do you see they have done that many. They have a few of the Washington National Opera and good though in November. So I'll figure out an Iida. And then I didn't really like going there because Trump already had taken it over head of the board, but it wasn't his name wasn't out of yet. So I thought, look, we're penalized to hardworking people there at the opera and there are any orchestras and the ticket takers and so forth. So we went, but then he put his name on it so we decided we wouldn't go to the two or three things we have tickets for in this ring. But so yeah, I guess we're one of those who contributed to the fact that maybe it's not going to be doing too well with Trump's name on it. And so now they're closing it for two years. Allegedly though he's redoing it all. It's going to be grand. It's going to be the best ever. It's going to be a monument to America and stuff. It's also go to asking. Some of you had a good part of it. I hadn't really focused on it, which it's also it's also disgusting. It's hard to tell which part of it which disgusting part to be most obsessed with. I mean, the Kennedy Center wasn't tribute to Kennedy. There's that big statue of him when you come in to the lobby. I mean, it's not the link in Memorial. It's not the Washington monument, but it was a tribute to John Kennedy. The putting his name on it is much more grotesque in a way than I mean, it was grotesque always, but the supplanting Kennedy, putting his name over Kennedy. It's the John F. Kennedy Memorial. Five and that's your center for the arch or something, right? I mean, and Kennedy was assassinated and so forth. And Trump just sticks his name on it because it's a big thing in Washington. He wants to have his name on it. As you say he sticks his name on everything and then half of these more than half fail Trump University. You and I were obsessed about that in 2016. I remember he is. We were. For good reason, because he fucked over regular people again. He's a long story. He was damn. And you know, which would you pay no price? So where's like the I guess what you're trying to say is there's something meaningfully different about the grotesquery of like the arc to Trump that he wants to build. What about building a new thing and putting his name on it versus like co-opting the legacy of John F. Kennedy for himself. They do. We do parts of the Kennedy Center. I think the opera was closed 10, 15 years ago. We went for a year to constitution always something to watch it because you know, they were redoing the stage or something or the sounds of the acoustics or whatever. That's not why he's doing it. That's not why he's doing it. But he is going to build this unbelievably massive or wants to build it. I don't think it's not that vulgar, you know, triumphal arch. I mean, I don't know. I'll think the fact that he gets through ruin Washington as well as ruin the country. It's more important that he's ruining the country than ruin it Washington. I agree and those west should be pampered feel, you know, it's in which person problems feel. Sit live here in the Washington University. I don't like to look at that or something or I can't go to the Kennedy Center. Having said that, it is somehow indicative of just the utter disregard he has for anything beyond his own personal vanity and wellbeing. It's also on American. It's just on American. It's just not what any other president has done. Nobody else has done that. For good reason because it's vulgar and gross. Here's a thought. I can't tell if this is a dark thought or a funny thought. Maybe a little both. But so he makes this announcement. This is in two years. There's going to be a grandery opening. You know, because he'll still he'll still be president two years. Is that right? Yeah, we just look at my calendar here. Yeah, great. He'll still be president two years. I'll fucking have gray hair and a stroke by then, but he'll still be president. I mean, I should have thought the country is going to be in two years. I just like you just think about the damage that is done in the last year and think about this notion that two years forward, think about all of the other additional damage that will done all the other records that he will have brought and the notion that then in February of 2028, he will reopen the Kennedy Center to some like grand celebration of you know, the Trump redecoration of the building. You get really quick into, you know, kind of Hunger Games-esque imagery there when you project out two years. So that's a little nice stop for people on a Monday morning. I want to talk about the Grammys also a little bit too. I kind of hate the Grammys. I don't want to talk about it too much, but a couple of things happen there of interest. One is that Trevor Noah told like a kind of not that funny joke about how Trump wants Greenland because he can't go to the little St. Jeff's Island anymore. It's fine, because nothing special. That's not going to be in the joke books for history, but wasn't horrible, wasn't great. Trump lost his mind over it because despite the fact that he'd been on Epstein's plane many, many, many more times than he said, including a time when he was on with just Maxwell and a victim of Maxwell's. In fact, at him and Epstein were very, very good pals for a long time. It does seem like he never did go to the island. So he posts that Trevor Noah, total loser, looks like I'll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor pathetic talentless dope. I'm suing him for plenty of money, ask George Sloppy Doppler. This is the fucking president of the United States and others, how all that worked out. Get ready, Noah. I'm going to have some fun with you. Yeah, my two initial thoughts are like that is a totally deranged thing for any human to write for that to be the president of the United States is pretty concerning. Another thought is like there's a whole category of comedians, like podcaster comedian, bro comedians who are unhappy that they were cancelled. None of them actually got cancelled as best I could tell, but that they were criticized and that free speech was in threat because they were criticized. I guess it feels like they missed the mark, I guess. The real concern was that the free speech rights of comedians were in threat. Getting on board with Donald Trump, who is trying to sue and bully a comedian from the White House because he didn't like the joke. It's the second time they're trying to punish a comedian because they didn't like their jokes. Obviously, he did it with Jimmy Kimmel and failed to successfully bully him. But it would seem like those free speech absolutists, first amendment absolutists, people who care about legalizing comedy would be upset about this. I'm not holding my breath. I'll go look at Accent, see if Elon Musk and all of his minions are really defending free speech. Also, it's a free press. I assume I don't look at the free press usually, but I assume the home page is just four or five articles for free speech against Donald Trump's attacks on him. Nothing yet. There are main stories about a 16-year-old who got him a sect to me. So anyway, that's what's happening for now. We'll see. You never know. We'll pop up this afternoon. So that is Trevor Noah. The other thing that happened that was good at the Grammy is let's leave people with something good. I know you're a huge bad bunny man, big fan. Which of his records would you say is your favorite? I, Adrian, I defer all bad bunny matters to our colleague, Adrian Karsky. He's much more up on bad bunny. I've noticed. And you, you of course, because of your deep connection with him. I see it's kind of an oon verano synth team, and we'll see. He's going to be the Super Bowl next week. And people are mad. The MacBooks are mad. He sings in Spanish. And so they add an English speaking act, Green Day, which has like multiple songs dedicated to, you know, right-wing Americans, essentially. And they change with their old songs. That was like a Bush protest, making a Trump protest. So I'm not sure that that's really going to achieve what the Macafox want by adding Green Day to it. But bad bunny will be at the Super Bowl next week. And so it's pretty notable that a week out, or a week before that, he won a Grammy last night, and that this was his message. I'm going to say ice out. We're not savage. We're not animals. We're not aliens. We are humans. And we are Americans. Went on for a while longer, but that was the gist of it. You know, pretty powerful, pretty clear. Not ducking it, you know, leaning straight in right before a Super Bowl performance. Hard to know exactly what the potential impact of that will be, but not nothing, better than nothing. I should bring him to the Hill and have him talk to the Democratic senators and House members about how to deliver an effective message. You know, I thought that was, that was powerful. The voters of Tarant County understand this. I've got to say it's an at least more than, you know, all these elites in Washington who are still cowering before Trump. They do not like what's happening. And bad money doesn't like what's happening. And if only we could have some of the business leaders and corporate types and big shots caught up with them. But maybe they will. Maybe they are gradually. What do you think? We're a little. I'm a little helpful. I'm a little helpful. Are you not doing that? Yeah, not too much. I gotta tell you, I was pretty surprised. I was talking to some folks over the weekend who are not nearly as Trump, TDS riddled as us. Right? Not happy about it. Not happy about it, but like in general, you know, just a little bit more at remove, more familiar with the business world types. And I was struck by the fact that they also were kind of surprised by just like how we wimp the CEOs have been. You know, the CEO class has been. And I do think that it's starting to crack a little bit. And the fact that they a number of them put out statements after the Freddie killing. None of the statements were up to my standards. But the fact that they were put out at all was pretty noteworthy. And so hopefully that there's a little crack. And I mean, that's the thing with that money. Like I saw some some right wingers saying like, oh, it's so brave to go in front of a room of liberals and say, I sound. But it's like Trump is actually threatening people. Like Trump is like real, like they are threatening using the government power to go after people. They jailed Don Lemon. Last week Don Lemon was in jail overnight. That it is still extremely meaningful for people to be speaking out in this moment. And hopefully there'll be more. And hopefully bad money will do some stuff next Sunday too that makes people upset. So it makes the right people upset. I never ever watched the Super Bowl. I will say I have time shows. I'll never ever. But I don't go out of my way to watch the Super Bowl. I have time shows. I guess it's a bit of time. It's out of the background. But I don't really care about the Super Bowl, honestly, but I am going to watch bad money. One of the biggest excuses people use not to speak of. There's just too many of our friends from the Bush administration firm, Republican foreign policy world and from Democratic administrations too, is that well, they'll discount it. It won't matter because, you know, they just they know what I think and they know I'm just speaking to a friendly audience. I'll just say I'm speaking to my own little bubble, bubble, bubble, you know what? Concerners aren't going to speak out of liberals don't speak out. And other legislators aren't going to speak out if entertainers like the gentleman who seems to sincerely care a lot about it doesn't speak out first. And then the ones who are a little more just go along get along, speak out. I also found the Bruce, I'm going to say the Bruce Frings, Kenny back to my generation every second. Yeah, sure. I found the Bruce Frings, Dean song kind of moving. I actually that I mean, I don't know if it's his best song ever or whatever. It's great music. Sure. I give him credit for going out of his way to do it. He didn't have to do it. He's sitting around wherever he is. It is sub-very nice house somewhere, you know, it doesn't need to do this. It is with 70s. And he went out of his way to do it. So I can you do have to give him credit actually and say with bad body, I think. I agree. We'll leave people with little Bruce. We'll be playing bad bunny later in the week. So we'll leave people with that Bruce song. It was nice and Bill Crystal. Happy Groundhog Day. It's going to be Groundhog Day all over again next Monday. So we'll see you there. See you then. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. Peace.