9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkopf. I'm joined this week as every week by the man we really need right now in this moment. That's Norm Ornstein. How are you today, Norm? You don't even have to ask, David. Well, I feel it's kind of like a running gag at this point. One of these days you're going to go, I'm great and I'm going to fall over dead in my chair. But, you know, when Stephen Miller, Christy Noem, Bovino and Kash Patel and all the others are brought up in the dock at our Nuremberg, I will tell you I'm feeling great. I'm feeling relieved, at least. I've no got time, however I can't promise anything Well, I understand and frankly I share your view on that I wish other members of the opposition felt strongly about this and that's what I sort of want to come to Once again, we're at one of these weeks where the Venn diagram of all the issues we want to discuss overlaps into a little space called NORM because we have Minneapolis, we have the Congress facing a shutdown and another debate over, you know, funding DHS and ICE and so forth. And then we have, you know, the righteous indignation that we need and ought to have in the wake of essentially public executions by gangs of masked thugs on behalf of the president of the United States. And, you know, You are the place that overlaps. So let me just start with a question. You know, the president seems to be backtracking a little bit, saying, well, I want, you know, we're going to relax things a little bit there. And Bovino got fired. But the president said he supports Noam. Noam says, I was just following orders from the president, Miller. and the president lashed out at the mayor of Minneapolis today when the mayor of Minneapolis said that he wouldn't follow, you know, all federal immigration guidelines. And then, you know, on top of that, a representative of Congress from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, was attacked last night. So, you know, people are confused. They're like, you know, is the government pulling back? Are they not pulling back? What am I to believe? Where are we in this saga? So what am I to believe? And the answer is, there is not a single word coming out from anybody connected to the Trump administration, anybody connected to Customs and Border Patrol, the ICE organization, the Department of Homeland Security, or any other entity It is to once again borrow the phrase that Mary McCarthy used to characterize her archenemy Lillian Hellman. Every word out of their mouths, including a and the, is a lie. And when Donald Trump, we'll step back for a second, it was interesting to watch at least some of the quite unusual pushback from some right wing sources. After now, it's become as clear as it could possibly be that this was an assassination at close range. This was a young man shot in the back and then shot within five seconds, 10 times by Customs and Border Patrol thugs. It's a nice term to use for them, one of the nicest, who then, instead of standing around stunned that they had shot somebody, exulted in it, one of them clapping his hands, kept a doctor from coming close by and basically counted their bullet holes to see what they had done. then blocked the Minnesota authorities, who are the ones who are expert in murder scenes, from getting close to that scene and the body, even though they had, in fact, a legitimate judicial warrant, took some of the witnesses and abducted them, threatened some, apparently even went to a couple of their homes, went off with Alex Freddie's phone and most likely have erased whatever was on his phone. And Bovino, I can't say yet was fired. He was reassigned. And that Donald Trump said, well, I'm not a big fan of his, and then said, we want a thorough investigation. I'm going to get a thorough investigation. It's a bunch of horseshit because they won't even release the names of the two men who shot Alex Preddy. And of course, what we see on right-wing media is not we're appalled at what they've done. It's we're appalled at the PR campaign that the White House and the Department of Homeland Security have used. And they have to change their rhetoric, not that they have to change their policies. So the idea that they're pulling back in Minnesota, last night, a bunch of these thugs went to raid a Zips dry cleaner. Zips, for those who are unfamiliar, is now a broader national chain of discount dry cleaners. Started out with 99 cent shirts and $1.99 dry cleaning. Now the prices have gone up. You sound like a happy customer. I'm listening to you. You sound like a kind of Zips customer. I do go to Zips, I have to say, here in Washington on Connecticut Avenue. But you had a bunch of people standing on the sidewalk doing nothing. And a truck came by, and one of their thugs sprayed this crowd just standing there with mace. Then, let's go on with the litany of horrors, they tried to invade the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis. As you know, and many of our listeners and viewers know, consulates, embassies are basically the territory of those countries. Once you set foot inside the Ecuadorian consulate, you are in effect in Ecuador. This was an attempt to invade a foreign country's territory and they threatened the employees with arrest. So this has gone to a place hard to imagine. They're now doing some of the same things in Maine. invading houses and telling them they don't need warrants, beating up people on the streets. But thank God we have Susan Collins, who has expressed concern. And that concern, boy, will that make a difference, even as the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee has said, well, I'm going to fund them fully. I'm going to recommend the full funding for ICE, because I don't want to shut down the government. So giving, and with no restrictions, what Democrats appropriately are trying to do in the Senate is not just stop the funding, but when there is funding, some will go through, put on appropriate restrictions to keep them somewhere close to the law and the Constitution, having cameras, no masks, no going into houses without a judicial warrant, all of the things that we would expect from a law-abiding organization, even if they're going after people who are not here with documentation. and she's not even going to go for any of that stuff. I mean, you know, we're dealing with a Republican Party that is now unhappy with the way that they're handling the PR, but with only a tiny handful of exceptions, perfectly okay with what they're doing. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR Network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR Network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com slash buy. Thank you and enjoy the show. Yeah well right Those exceptions include Senator Tillis and Senator Murkowski calling for the resignation of no But it seems like what the administration is doing here is trying to create the illusion of dialing down their intensity in Minneapolis us. But it seems very purposeful because it seems like the reason they're trying to do it is so that they can get to a vote on this funding legislation and get the full funding for DHS, which, as we've discussed here, will give DHS more money than all but three or four militaries in the world. It will effectively make it one of the world's best funded militaries for deployment in the U.S. against the American people. And I think they're trying to get past that hurdle. Within the Democratic Party, you know, there are, you know, a variety of degrees of people saying, well, I'm not going to fund all of this, which is encouraging. And even Schumer said that. But then about what they want in exchange, you hear a variety of things. People saying generalities like reform, other people, Chris Murphy and other people saying, well, we need to see those things that you just enumerated, Norm. How's it going to play out? Are we going to have a shutdown? And will the Democrats have the, I don't know, common sense? Because they're not doing it right now. If I were a Democrat, I would be out there saying, look, if the government gets shut down, it's because they want ICE to continue occupying our cities. It's because they want to continue violating your rights as individuals. That will be the reason it shuts down. The Republicans will say, oh, well, Democrats are shutting it down because they're soft on immigration. We have a chance to shape the narrative here. The public is outraged. How's it going to play out? So I'm pretty sure we will see a shutdown. One of the reasons being that even if there are any changes in these appropriations bills, they will have to be approved by the House and the House is going to be out of session when the deadline occurs, how long the shutdown lasts, how much they package together with funding for the Department of Homeland Security in programs and areas that Democrats care about, how much in the middle of a shutdown Trump will violate the law by shifting funds to ICE from other areas and claiming that they are essential. Although even if they're declared essential. You're not allowed to pay any of these people during that time. That's uncertain. What's also uncertain is how stiff and firm the backbones of Senate Democrats will be. You go for a shutdown, how long does it last? How firm will they be? How much will John Thune be able to hold on to without making some concessions, at least to get the government reopened. Now, one other point, David, on the narrative issue. We now have three quarters of the Democrats in the House signing on to an impeachment resolution against Kristi Noem. And that means when the House comes back, they are, once they introduce the resolution, going to be able to get an expedited hour of debate and vote. The vote will probably be on whether to table this. But let's keep something in mind here. Kristi Noem now is unpopular even among some of the Republicans. You mentioned that we have two Senate Republicans, at least, who've called for her to be fired. She is appropriately viewed as a monstrous figure, which is accurate. The Republicans in the House have a margin of two. Some of those Republicans are in dicey districts, districts where very likely, since the larger share of the population has turned on the way in which these monsters are handling this. It's not an immigration issue. It is a authoritarian, violent shakedown to try and destroy their opponents. It's entirely possible that an impeachment resolution against Christy Noem could pass. she could actually be impeached by the House. Now, the Senate, probably not going to do anything about it, not even bring it up for a trial, but that can have an impact on the narrative. And they have to vote, even if it's a vote to table, on every article of impeachment. So I'm hoping that House Democrats will have multiple articles of impeachment, which would be appropriate because she has committed many high crimes and misdemeanors here. And that may turn a different kind of spotlight here and put some pressure on both House and Senate Republicans and maybe cause Trump, who, despite the fact that Noam has tried to wriggle out of this by saying, I was only following orders from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. And we know how well the excuse I was only following orders, as worked in the past, that despite that, Trump wants to keep her, doesn't want to shake things up and get rid of her and her boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski. But he may be forced to do so, and we may see some greater changes involved here, which are not likely to alter the course of their behavior. And let's keep in mind that when Trump sent all of these agents, 3,000 of them ultimately, into Minnesota. He said, this is for retribution. This is not, we're going to go in there and just get those violent criminals out, many of whom were in prisons and were offered to the ICE people. And one of their home invasions was to, in which they dragged this Hmong American elderly man in half naked into the freezing weather was to pick up somebody who had already been in prison for two years. The ineptitude combined with, this is like the Keystone Cops with unholstered assault weapons that, you know, we may be able to get at least some change in the narrative as a consequence of all this. That's all we can hope for at the moment. Yeah, the question is whether we're going to get any change in the behavior, because, you know, until Stephen Miller goes, and Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan, as well as Greg Bovino, you're not likely to see a major change on this. And indeed, even if they all went, it's unclear whether those who replaced them would not simply recreate the conditions that we've seen here. But, you know, one of the things that strikes me, and I talked yesterday about this in a podcast I did with our friend Dahlia Lithwick, who is extremely smart and thoughtful on legal issues. One of the things that strikes me here and something I think you're uniquely able to comment on is that whereas we see the Congress being a wobbly guardrail at best, and we see the courts being a wobbly guardrail, particularly at the Supreme Court level. And as we've seen different arguments being made for why and how to stand up to Trump because of constitutional issues and so on and so forth, we're finally seeing something that actually works. We're finally seeing something that puts Trump on his back foot. And that is the courage. And make no mistake about it, it's courage. These people are going out into the streets of Minneapolis knowing that they could die. Alex Preddy went to a memorial service for Renee Good. They're highly conscious of what these goons are capable of doing. But they're going out in the street to fight for their own rights. They're going out in the street to fight for their own communities. They are resisting an occupation by the federal government. They are pushing back on terrorists who are trying to use terror to intimidate them into silence. And so far, here's what we've seen works against Trump. The European Union stands up and says, you want to play this game? We'll play this game. China stands up against Trump. They say, you want to play this game? We'll play this game. And now the American people are saying, wherever you go, we will push back on ICE and we will push back on CBP. We do not want you in our communities. And I think we're seeing it in Minneapolis. We're starting to see it in Maine, up next, Philadelphia. I just wonder if this is a turning point where as all the guardrails have failed, we finally turn to the one group that holds the most power in our constitutional system, and that is voters. Amen. And I think the next step, if Trump does invoke the Insurrection Act, or if he reacts to all of this by a PR shift, but doubling down on these horrific behaviors the next step will have to be a general strike We have to have a public demonstration that that draws a line But we already seen just as you said the right way to respond to all of this It to bear witness And my friend Al Franken is in Minnesota to provide some moral support He went to one of these trainings where they train people on how to observe and all of that. They're calling themselves the upstanders. They're standing up for the Constitution and for decency. And the number of people in Minnesota who've never been involved much in politics, who are not political in any of the usual senses, who have never demonstrated before, seeing what's happening in their own community and saying, I've got to get out there, is what's best about American society and best about Minnesota. And I will say as a Minnesotan, the history of the state, going back, is a very checkered one. Minnesota was a leader in virulent anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s, right up until the 1950s. It was racist in the way it handled redlining and the treatment of African Americans and of Native Americans. But it changed, as much of the rest of the country did, something that Donald Trump and his minions are trying to whitewash as they try to rewrite American history. And the culture in Minneapolis, the culture of the Republican Party when I grew up in Minnesota was a model culture for the nation. The Republican Party began to change in Minnesota before many others did. long before Trump, it was turning into a radical, conspiracy-driven right-wing party, not a conservative party. Look at Michelle Bachman, look at Pete Hegson going back. But that culture has stayed. And the one thing that's disappointed me in the treatment of all of this in Minnesota is the corporate culture. We used to brag about it. Minnesota has a large number of Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies. It's General Foods and General Mills, it's Honeywell and Medtronic, and a number of others. And the CEOs of those companies and the corporate management of those companies pretty much stayed silent through all of this. And then finally, the companies, along with a number of others, issued a statement, which basically was, we need to damp down the divisions here. It wasn't condemning these actions. And this is what we've seen, and it's one of our Achilles heels when it comes to recapturing the fundamentals of our decency and our democracy. The corporate sector writ large is cowardly and greedy. And look at the tech sector. Look at the disgrace that after Alex Preddy is murdered, assassinated, other horrible things are happening. What do we see? The White House doing a big party to do a screening of the documentary Melania, which Amazon purchased for $40 million, created by an accused sex offender. And Tim Cook, among others, the CEO of Apple, attends, pals around with Trump, gets a picture taken with this vile producer director. And the signal basically is everything's okay here. And the $40 million we paid effectively protection money, along with Jeff Bezos, even as he is hollowing out what's left of the Washington Post, guarantees for many millions of dollars, 1,400 screens around the country showing Melania, no doubt most of them having one or two people being there, but giving more bribes protection money to Trump to protect his other interests. We cannot count on some of these institutions in our society stepping up to do what they need to do to protect us. Well, it goes back to your general strike point, and it goes back to the point of the red line in American society being individual Americans who are standing up. You and I talked about this a year ago. We said it's going to be high schools. It's going to be town councils. It's going to be people who see the impact of this on their neighbors, who are ultimately going to be the dividing line. And I believe these are the people who are going to determine whether or not, in the wake of ultimately defeating Trump and MAGA, we take the direction that some in the Democratic Party have taken in the past of, well, let's move on. Let's overlook this. Let's be bigger than this. The Michelle Obama line, which I think has done more damage than good. Or whether they'll say no. We do want to see Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino and Tom Holman and Donald Trump in the dock. And no, we do not accept the complicity of these corporations in the business of the government. I mean, you mentioned a bunch. I was thinking as you were about Peter Thiel and Palantir and how they're actually helping via AI ICE right now. And the question is, what happens to these entities? and the American people, to me, I need to stand up and say, you know what, guys? You know what, Tim Cook? You know what, Peter Thiel? You know what, Elon Musk? You know what, Mark Zuckerberg? You made a bad business decision because we're not going to do business with you going forward. We're going to hold you accountable for helping to underwrite and normalize the occupation of American cities, the public execution of American citizens, and the undermining of our rights at every turn. And, you know, I mean, to me, I just, I don't know when the penny drops for these companies and they realize what a terrible miscalculation they've made. But I have hope that it will come to that. Am I, you know, just viewing the world through rose-colored glasses? I hope you're right. Let's point out a couple of other outrages that they have engaged in. And the fact is, you know, most people are unaware of the degree to which these billionaires have seized control of major communications outlets and are using them to perpetrate horrible things and to block actions that would try to right the boat back towards the journey to justice. So we have Meta, which has now blocked sites that were pointing out and identifying who the ICE agents are. We have TikTok, now purchased by Larry Ellison, who with his son, of course, bought CBS and is trying to buy, among others, CNN, and has turned TikTok, which they purchased, frankly, illegally because it was not supposed to even have an American entity after we had determined what the Chinese were doing with it. Now trying to turn TikTok, which is a huge platform, especially for young people, towards more right-wing propaganda. Palantir, which is using its face recognition stuff to get this body of what the ICE people are now calling domestic terrorists, people who are just filming or witnessing or blowing whistles at these agents doing what is appropriate under the First Amendment. And this is so close to what we saw with Speer and IG Farben and other big entities in Nazi Germany going along and basically furthering the role of the horrific dictatorship. So if we end up in a place where we have a Democratic president, and it cannot be when they go low, we go high, it's got to be we are going to use every official appropriate tool we have to strike back against these entities that have taken over major communications networks and turn them into propaganda outlets. for right-wing extremists. And we're going to have to see a Nuremberg-type investigation into the wrongdoing that was done and who was involved. And that includes people in government and others who are complicit. I just saw a story on another front where the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team has a company that is basically having its work used by the Russians for the drones that are killing civilians in Ukraine. I mean, we just can't let this stuff pass by. In the end people who have committed horrible crimes need to be brought to the bar of justice And it not just those in government And it not just those who are openly trying to distort the system to promote dictatorship, autocracy, and evil. It's the cowards who refuse to intervene and use their positions. Watching Jamie Dimon at Davos when he was asked about corporations criticizing Trump and refusing to get involved and trying to deflect it, you know, it just reminded me of the degree to which we have some of the most powerful people in the country turning their backs on decency. And, you know, let me circle back for a moment to Susan Collins. If Susan Collins, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, had stood up and said, you know what, what these people are doing in my state of Maine, in Minnesota, is way over the line. I am not going to support giving them funding right now until we see wholesale reforms written into the law. it would have had enormous resonance. And instead, what we get is, well, I'm concerned about what they're doing. I wish they'd pull out of the state. But in the meantime, I'm going to fund them without conditions. At the end of the day, what this all comes down to is power, which these big corporations have. And greed. But because they can move from one side to the other with relative impunity. And that allows them to always have influence, regardless of who is in political control. And that's why it's so important, if we want to give people a voice in the future of the country, to wrestle it back from those companies by saying, no, you can't play both sides against the middle. And if you attack us on one side, you're going to pay a penalty. But the other, which is related to the Susan Collins point is, we can't treat what is happening now as politics as usual. I wrote a sub stack on this yesterday. You and I talk about it all the time. What Trump is doing, what these companies are enabling is resulting in death, and they know it's going to result in death. It's violating the law and they know it's going to violate the law. What he's done overseas is resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and will result in the deaths of millions with AID. And they knew it would result in those deaths. When supporting the Israelis in Gaza, they knew what the cost would be of that. In pulling back our aid for Ukraine and causing, you know, we now have an estimate that perhaps two million people have died in this war. And we are enabling the Russians to turn that into a victory. That we knew that. We know that when Robert Kennedy cuts funding for children's cancer research, the children will die. We know that when we round up people and throw them into prisons here or overseas that they will suffer. And for me, it all came down to a discussion about how is this different from politics as usual. The reality is that what Donald Trump is doing is evil. And this is not something you can compromise with. Hannah Arendt and others have written about that. If you meet evil halfway, it's a victory for evil. And when you go back into the definition of the term evil, it comes from an old English word, ephiel. And what does the word mean? It means transgression. It means knowing there is a boundary and violating it anyway. And that's what makes them different from others. And the death toll makes them different from others. And the threat to each of us makes them different to others. And that's why they have to be stopped, defeated, held accountable, so it can't happen again. That was our conclusion. That's why we had the Nuremberg tribes. It's why we stood up, defeated the Nazis, and then eliminated them, made it impossible for them to regain our footing. And I think a lot of Americans are like, well, this isn't like that. But every day it's clear it is like that. And I want to end with your reactions to that. So, well, you're absolutely right. I want to point out a couple of things. that we had now a judge who was asked to send out an order demanding that the administration not destroy any evidence related to these murders. The Trump administration filed a brief challenging that, challenging the idea that they must preserve evidence. So we have gone to a point where they are openly saying, yeah, we can destroy evidence. I want to point out two things that people may not have seen if they're not following a lot of this very closely. One is ICE is now taking citizens off the street and sending them to Texas, to Dallas, to examine whether they're actually legal. And when they find out they're legal, they release them in Texas with no way to get back to Minnesota. This is just plain meanness. This is evil as you've defined it. It's one thing if you mistakenly pick up somebody who you believe is evil, find out, I believe it's illegal, find out that they are in fact legal and take them back home. They are just punishing citizens for no reason other than their own sadistic happiness. The second is, actually three things. The second is a six-year-old African-American girl who had sickle cell disease and another ailment, put in a detention camp, denied her medications, and she died. They killed a six-year-old girl because they wouldn't give her the medications. The third is reports that there are as many as a thousand people sent to the Alligator Alcatraz, this makeshift concentration camp in the Everglades, missing and unaccounted for. We found out about this because a woman who is a veteran, whose husband was picked up and sent to Alligator Alcatraz, and now they say, we have no record of him, we don't know where he is. We are ignoring, as we look at the horrors happening on our streets and in our neighborhoods and its schools, what they're doing in their private prisons and concentration camps, which is treating people the way people were treated in concentration camps. And if a thousand people are missing, and some of them, who knows, might be with alligators in the Everglades, it's mass murder. And so there's a lot more going on here. And you're absolutely right that we have to find the best ways to respond to evil, and we have to be prepared. If we get out of this intact, and we don't know if we will, but if we do, if we do not hold the people responsible for this accountable in every way that they deserve to be held, if we go back to. We're just going to demonstrate to the American people what it's like to have decency and the rule of law and respecting the Constitution and let them off the hook. If we let judges like Aileen Cannon and John Roberts and his partisan cronies in the Supreme Court block the way in which justice can prevail after all of this, then we are going to reap the whirlwind because the next time around, it will be even worse than the hellscape that we're facing right now. Absolutely right. Why it's so important to people to listen to you, why it's particularly important at this moment. I really appreciate it each and every week. Everybody who is listening now, I implore you, if you find this kind of discussion useful and you're watching it on YouTube, subscribe. Subscribe to the DSR Network. We've got a lot that's coming to each and every week like this, and we think it's valuable expert perspectives that are independent and fact-based. If you want to help support us, go to thedsrnetwork.com, click on membership, a few bucks a month. Helps us provide the kind of independent perspectives that are so essential when so many media outlets are, as Norm described, being bought, co-opted, hijacked for political purposes of the president and his supporters. We've got a lot more to come. We will, of course, be here each and every week with Words Matter with Norm. And until then, we appreciate your support. Thank you, Norm. Bye-bye.
