American Democracy at a Point of No Return

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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, and I'm joined this week, as every week, by the inimitable Norm Ornstein, who is, I don't know, someplace warmer than this. Where are you, Norm? I am in Palm Springs, California. and it's a little family gathering. It's not what you would expect from Palm Springs. It's in the 60s, going down to the 40s at night. But compared to Washington, although Washington now is having a little bit of a flowering, right? It's in the 40s. Well, the last two days. Today it's a little chilly, but yes, the last two days. There will be less snow when you get back. There's a lot for us to cover. So I'm just going to do this lightning round. I'll throw out something. You can respond to it. Then I'll move on to the next one. I was just talking to some friends who were in the meeting of the Democratic caucus today as they were talking about the prospects for a government shutdown. They came out and they said a couple of interesting things. One was they think there will be a shutdown. Two is they think there will be a shutdown because Democrat after Democrat said that they are getting inundated with calls saying, if you show any weakness on this, we will primer you in a second. So apparently this issue, DHS, Trumpian overreach, fascistic Gestapo wandering the streets, does seem to be striking a nerve within the electorate. But the question, Norm, is do you agree that there will be a shutdown? And if so, where, if anywhere, will that lead? So I do think there'll be a shutdown. The remaining question about that right now, David, is whether Democrats are going to be able to get a vote on whether they can take FEMA and the Coast Guard out of the DHS funding bill, the Department of Homeland Security funding bill, and fund them separately so that as we go through these snowstorms and other bad events, FEMA can still operate. and the Coast Guard can deal with catastrophes at sea. If they are able to do that, their leverage is much, much greater, because then what they're left with is not providing funds for ICE and Border Patrol, which means, of course, they will still operate, but they will not get paid, and there will be other glitches along the way. May I just interject? There's one other group in there that they have to deal with, and that's TSA. TSA, my mistake, yes. So, you know, we had the shutdown before. These elements were shut down. People come to work. They're, you know, seen as vital. uh and of course we can imagine donald trump and his minions um including christy noem deciding that they will actually shut down tsa so that we will have a complete uh chaos over air traffic and the like um which might leave me out in california for a while oh poor poor norm yeah but uh either way, there will be a shutdown for this reason. The demands that Democrats have made are, by any reasonable, rational standard, fair ones. They're to treat the ICE and Border Patrol thugs who are out there the same as police are treated everywhere in the country, meaning body cams that are always on, identification on your person and visible, and no masks to keep you from being identified, along with abiding by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which means you do not do a search of a house or break into a car without a judicial warrant. And one of the things that's most stunning is that you're having Republican after Republican in the House and Senate say, along with, of course, the Christy Noem, and I spell that now G-N-O-M-E, and her minions saying, how can we possibly abide by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution? And no masks, that's a non-starter. IDs, that's a non-starter. If Democrats don't hold firm to those minimal elements, they are going to suffer among the members of their own electorates. And so therefore, there's a shutdown, and then what? We don't know how long it will last and how much Trump and his people will put the screws on to make life difficult. And of course, what they would also probably do is decide that they're going to keep TSA from performing at airports in Minneapolis and New York and Washington, D.C., but keep them operating in some of these other cities, which would not work to their advantage, I think. and whether Democrats at some point, at least enough of them, will cave in. And frankly, I can't say that I am entirely confident that Senate Democrats will be able to hold enough votes. And remember, basically- Very charitable way of- Yeah. To overcome a filibuster, if all the Republicans vote to restore funding, then they only need seven Democrats. And we already know where John Fetterman will go, but there are enough, to use the archaic term, nervous Nellies out there that we can't be confident that it will last for any length of time. What's most important here, David, is not just standing firm, but it's also getting the message out there to the broader electorate and making it clear that the ones who are creating and extending the shutdown are the Republicans who will not do the minimal things to keep this from being a group of official lawless thugs terrorizing Americans and others in this country? Yeah, you know, I heard the DHS hearings the other day, watched. And the Republicans were pretty on message, which is if there's a shutdown, it's because Democrats don't want to make America safe. They don't care about American safety. Democrats were all over the place. But let me just pick up on one particular development. And maybe we can riff a little bit off of that. Today, Tom Homan stood up and he said, we are ending Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. We have been a success. We have rounded up lots of criminals and it's over. Now, when I heard him say it, and by the way, he said, we have nothing to apologize for and all sorts of other offensive things. and on top of that he looks scarily like Mr. Potato Head to me but I think if I were Democrats I would be standing one after another in front of a camera and a microphone saying the resistance has triumphed the occupying force has been driven out of Minneapolis This is a victory for the rule of law in the United States. Credit to the people of Minnesota. This will happen elsewhere. The line has been drawn. And celebrate the victory. And I'm not hearing it. Now, maybe you've heard it from somebody, but again, I think, you know, I hate when Washington gets to be about messaging and not substance. But this is a case where there is substance here as well as message. And I just don't think we're handling it right. I think on that part, you are spot on. And I'll come back to one of my favorite hobby horses with Democrats in Congress, which is my push over and over to have a single coordinated message. It gets back to what you were saying about the Democrats and the Republicans in the hearing. But right now, message is really important. you have to make it clear first that they have committed atrocities and that by standing firm and having courageous citizens, some of whom had never been involved in politics before, going out on the streets and saying, no, we will not allow this. By having people say, we are going to film you, we're going to use our cameras to show your lies, that you need to be able to say exactly what you said. Now, I disagree with you on a couple of things. Mr. Potato Head is a benign character, actually a lovable character. If you go to Toy Story and all of its sequels, you see that. Tom Homan, I view not as looking like Mr. Potato Head, but looking like a prison guard at Buchenwald. And remember that Tom Homan is a serial liar and an outrageous grifter who was, as we all know, captured on tape, taking $50,000 in cash in a kava bag from the FBI in return for the promise that when he took power, he would steer valuable no-bid contracts to the friends of the FBI agents posing as the bribers. Now, we also know that he's gotten away with that and that a lot of his former clients and friends, like the Geo Group, are raking in tons of taxpayer money while running concentration camp prisons all over the country and to imagine that Tom Homan is not getting more cash perhaps not in kava bags maybe in Louis Vuitton bags would be to be naive beyond belief. We also know that he lied about how he was going to tamp down the excesses of the Border Patrol and the CBP. And in fact, they have gotten at least as bad, if not worse, including just this past week, a group of these thugs leading a high speed chase through St. Paul, endangering pedestrians, running into a number of cars before smashing into a car and sending somebody in critical condition to the hospital. We know that they have lied about going to schools and spraying tear gas on students when the videos show it, Columbia Heights in particular. So these thugs, despite what Tom Holman promised, have behaved the same way. And until they actually withdraw. And by the way, we also know that the detention facility, using that term loosely, that they set up in St. Paul has been like a concentration camp, deeply mistreating the people who are there. I do not believe until we actually see it that they will withdraw these troops and they're paid thugs from Minnesota. And we also have to remember that Tom Homan, like all of the rest of them, have been saying we're only going after violent criminals when we know that that is a trace element of the number of people that they have hauled away and sending many of them, not only sending them to a concentration camp in Texas, but we also know that they have been picking up people in the frigid weather in Minneapolis and St. Paul. and after determining that they were citizens, driving them out into remote areas without their IDs or phones and dumping them where they could freeze to death. These are inhuman, sadistic monsters and Tom Homan is leading them, period. 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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. What's interesting to me because I notice because I follow you on social media that you're one of these folks who plays Wordle in the morning, and it's always these five-letter words. Are there clues, or do you just have to guess them out of the blue? It's been interesting. I started to do this on Twitter and Blue Sky and developed a very substantial number in the hundreds of followers who do the same thing. They look at your score, they look at their scores, they talk about what words they start with. It is a game of logic, frankly. You put in five letters, you see whether they're in the right place, and if those particular letters are actually in the word, you have to try and figure out what the vowels are and where they might be. So there's no clue. It's not horrific Buchenwald guard who looks like Mr. Potato Head, and then the five letters would be H-O-M-A-N. No, no clue. Because you would get that pretty quickly. I would get that immediately. And if it were six letters, it would be Bovino. But if it were four letters, it would be Nome. And if it were five, but here's a five-letter word. Let me give you a clue and let me see if you can guess it. Horrific, arrogant woman with no respect for the rule of law in the United States. B-O-N-D-I. You got it. See, you really are. You really are. I'm a wizard at the word games. You are a wizard at the word games. But do you want to say anything about B-O-N-D-I? You know, I'd say something about her and I will, but I also want to say something about the failures of Congress. And let me start with that. This was an oversight hearing. Oversight is one of the core responsibilities of Congress. What do you do with oversight? The Constitution says Congress makes the laws, and the executive branch and the executive are pledged to faithfully execute those laws. And by execute, I don't mean kill them. I mean to carry out their responsibility within the letter of the law. With oversight, you bring in executive officers and members of Congress, using as a template the law and the Constitution, probe to see whether they are in fact following their oath of office and their pledge. we do not have oversight anymore. The Republican cult in Congress has made Congress itself a joke. And if you look at this particular hearing, where you had Democrats trying to do oversight, and I will say, I think if there were any mistake here, it was focusing almost, not quite, but almost entirely on the Epstein files, which is a huge, horrible failure of government. But all the other things that are within the purview of the Justice Department, the pay-for-play pardons, the destruction of the Civil Rights Division and turning it around to where the Civil Rights Division tries to destroy the civil rights of minorities and people of color, the failures of the FBI, which is a part of the Justice Department, the role of Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who is an embarrassment and should not have a license to practice law. But the Epstein files are critically important. And the failures there, that includes, by the way, when Pam Bondi was the attorney general in Florida and turned a blind eye to what Epstein and others were doing, were critically important. And Pam Bondi, instead of doing anything, even to address, even if in a hostile manner, to address the legitimate questions being asked by the Democrats in Congress and by the Republican Tom Massey, we know had a book in front of her, which is called a burn book, where her minions had done opposition research on all of the Democrats so that she could take any question that was asked and turn it into an insult and throw those insults out. And it was the most disgraceful performance I have seen from a cabinet member ever. And there are plenty of them, including many of those that we have seen in this administration leading up to this. I have to say, I totally agree with you because she avoided a lot of answers on the Epstein thing. And I think, frankly, bringing that up was fine. But in terms of the operations of the Department of Justice, there are a lot of questions where she couldn't have avoided the answer quite as easily. The number of people who've quit the department, the people who got fired from the department, the recent cases where they've tried to bring retributive justice cases where grand juries have rejected them, the obstruction of justice with regard to Tom Homan and some other cases that exist within the Trump world. They did bring up, by the way, the fact that she hired a January 6th insurrectionist. And I thought that was quite effective. But it was disgusting. And it suggested to me, or at least led me to ask myself, well, why doesn't this happen typically? Why are, you know, why is this something new? And in the past, of course, I got the impression that cabinet secretaries were concerned that, you know, Congress does appropriations. And if they pissed off the people that, you know, underwrote their agencies, that they would not be able to operate. And I think Pam Bondi thinks, well, that's, you know, that's not, you know, the Republicans will go ahead and do whatever they want. But, you know, the Democrats, if they win the House or the Senate, are going to be able to use the leverage of the purse on these departments. And it's one area where presidential vetoes won't save them. And I was just wondering if you might want to talk about that. I agree completely with that. I do think what Pam Bondi did yesterday was a response to Trump leaking the story that he was not happy with Pam Bondi because she hadn't gone far enough in her lawless behavior. So this was all about pleasing the cult leader. But as you say, it was knowing there would be no consequences with the sheep who are the Republicans in Congress. They're not going to do anything about this. They are frankly not offended at what was not just a middle finger to the Democrats, but it was a middle finger to the core responsibilities of Congress. And it's very clear they don't care about any of that. And no one cares less about it than the worst speaker by far in the history of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, who every day soils himself even more and has made clear that he is not the Speaker of the House. He is the lick spittle to Donald Trump. And the rest of them are either scared or are themselves true believers. and, you know, there's not much at this point we can do about it except double down on everything we need to try to make sure we have a reasonably fair election, which at this point would be a major win for Democrats, at least for the House of Representatives. But of course, that can lead us to another topic which is everything they now doing to try and suppress those votes or take them over That also includes the involvement of the horrendous Russian tool Tulsi Gabbard in voter suppression to try and make sure that doesn't happen. And they will go to any lengths, no matter how illegal and unconstitutional, to do so. Well, let's turn to that because it does intersect with the last subject we were talking about. Tulsi Gabbard was in Fulton County exercising a badly written general warrant that apparently was founded on long ago debunked theories, but was really a predicate for the Justice Department being able to seek voter rolls and medal in elections. But the quarterback for all this, according to Trump, is Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi and the Justice Department are going to get deeper and deeper into this the closer we get to the elections. And then at the same time, the House just passed the SAVE Act, which is a badly misnamed effort to keep tens of millions of Americans from voting by requiring that they show passport or a birth certificate that matches their current name before they can vote, thus making it very difficult for people who don't have the resources, for women whose names have changed because they were married, etc., etc. Calculated step that is part of a whole set of steps, like the Fulton County thing, like court cases that they are bringing, like sending troops into the cities that are designed to try to suppress the vote. Is it your sense that people in the streets, courts making sensible rulings, etc., will be able to push back on this sufficiently that we can get a free-ish, fair-ish election in the fall? So I just wrote a piece on the Save Act in The Contrarian. People can Google contrarian or insane to find it. Um, this is not about a photo ID, by the way, which is what a lot of Republicans are trying to say. Proof of citizenship is a different matter. Proof of citizenship before you can register to vote. And not only do we have the dilemma that you mentioned, which is millions and millions of women who took their husband's names, whose birth certificate doesn't reflect the same name. And we've had instances before where people have been rejected because that's the proof they've offered. And there are other things that we know. To get proof of citizenship, you fundamentally need the proof that they're asking for, as you say, a passport, a passport card, or a birth certificate. A passport costs $165 plus the cost of the photos you need to bring in, plus whatever travel you have to make to go to a passport office. A passport card, which is effective for traveling to Mexico or Canada, costs $65 plus the photos. A birth certificate, if you don't have one in your hands, can cost up to $40 or more to get a duplicate. But what we also know is large numbers of Americans not only don't have passports or passport cards because they either are too poor, don't travel, or traveled in the past but are older now and have not renewed passports and old ones do not count. We also know that millions of Americans not only don't have a birth certificate, I suspect most Americans, if you said to them, produce your birth certificate, would have no idea where it was. Many of them don't have any record because they were in small towns or on reservations or elsewhere. And I will tell you that since I wrote this piece, David, I'm getting all kinds of communications on email and text and in social media saying, I lost my birth certificate. I wrote to get another one. They sent me somebody else's. They wouldn't send it to me. They sent one that said it didn't have a place of birth on it. There are all kinds of glitches. And you can bet that in red states, especially, or red counties, people who they think will vote the wrong way trying to get a birth certificate are going to find that the authorities drag their feet or won't let them happen. They also, as part of the SAVE Act, want to eliminate almost all mail-in voting except for military overseas, and we know that there are millions, many millions of non-military Americans living abroad who have to vote by mail. And by taking away vote by mail, they're trying to do something else, which is to force people, of course, to vote in person. They're going to try to limit the number of days of early voting. But they've also, in many places, in Harris County, Texas, for example, a big county, they have tried to limit the number of precincts and polling places where one can go so that there will be long lines. And in those long lines, we know what they're going to do. They're going to send their ICE and Border Patrol people in, drag a few citizens out of line, beat the crap out of them and haul them off for three days before they release them to try and keep people from voting. And they are likely to send their, if not military, FBI agents to forcibly enter polling places and seize the ballots before they're counted on the pretext that there has been massive voting fraud, which is a complete lie, and then throw out ballots or miscount them so that they can prevail. And it is on governors, attorneys general in states to call out their own national guards and protect those polling places. And, you know, we are dealing with something that I believe is absolutely unprecedented in American history, which is a genuine attempt to completely overthrow democracy. It failed on January 6th, 2021. They're trying to carry it out in a different way now, and it is utterly chilling. 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. 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. It definitely is. I would encourage people, by the way, yesterday we did a Need to Know podcast with Miles Taylor, but also with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who is part of a group of district attorneys who are working across the country to ensure that laws are enforced properly and to stand up to this kind of thing. There are other kinds of consortia of secretaries of state and others who are working on this. And it's going to take a pretty concerted effort by Americans, particularly if the SAVE Act goes through, which is possible, to help each other get to elections that are free-ish and fair-ish. And, you know, I don't think it's reasonable to expect at this point that they will be totally free and fair as they have been in the past, because it is the express objective of the president of the United States and the people working for him to put their thumb on the scale and to, you know, try to push things. so that the president's party is not defeated. And that, you know, I mean, he has said, they will impeach me if that happens. And of course, they will and they should. But let me ask a different question that's associated with this. You know, Donald Trump is 79 years old. Donald Trump, you know, I was just watching this. I mean, unbelievably dumb and dangerous announcement where they're revoking a 17-year-old provision designed to keep greenhouse gas emissions down in the United States to protect the environment. Why? Because they work for the fossil fuel industry. And Trump yesterday got a little award for being a friend of clean coal. And this is just one more step in that regard. But as I was watching this, I was looking at this president. He was half asleep when Lee Zeldin, the EPA commissioner, was talking. And he is clearly on his last legs. I've read some of his recent truth socials. He's losing his marbles. He is a lame duck. He's losing his marble. The last remaining marble is lost. But he is a lame duck. He can't run again. I don't understand why so many Republicans are still, and his popularity is cratering on virtually every issue, including many of his signature issues. I don't understand what the Republicans are thinking in continuing to blindly back this guy. So let's first talk about his own strategy, which gets back to circles back to what we talked about before. Any normal president seeing approval cratering, seeing that the policies they're pursuing, the tariff policies, the immigration policies and more are backfiring, seeing that the prospect exists for a bloodbath at the polls in November would change the policies, would start to ameliorate some of them, would try to reach out to people who are upset with him. He's doubling down. What does that tell me? It tells me that he doesn't care about this because he will do whatever he can to destroy a free and fair election. At the same time, we have two words that matter here in response to your question about why they're going along. Tribalism and cult Tribalism is your enemies are the worst possible and are trying to destroy your way of life So anything you do that might satisfy their objections or objectives anything you do that might give them aid and comfort, you are against. and anything that your fellow tribesmen do, no matter how offensive, you will feel compelled to support or get maybe a tiny bit of distance from, because if you don't, then you're giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That's one part of it. The second is it's a cult. And a cult, you know, think of Jones, Jim Jones. Think of Scientology. Trying to leave the cult, trying to take on the cult means at minimum you get shunned, ostracized, embarrassed, and that means your friends and your fellow supporters and your own career ambitions. It also means that you're scared to death if you go too far, that they will come after you. And that means coming after you physically as well, or as we've seen with criminalizing any activities that you're doing. So we have a group of people who are all in on the cult and the tribe and the nihilism and the anti-democratic moves. Think Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, even if there's some cynicism in that, and all of these House members who are just absolutely lunatics. And then you have a lot of others, like the Bill Cassidy's of the world, who are cowardly and scared. And even if they have legitimate concerns about their physical safety, if that's how you feel, and you're going to violate every principle you hold, every moral standard you have supported in the past, leave, get out. But no, they stay. And, you know, Bill Cassidy, who is the single individual most responsible for measles deaths, for the anti-vax movement now because he provided the decisive vote for RFK Jr. to be the secretary of HHS and knew it. And now every once in a while does a timid tweet. You know, you should all get vaccinated. You know, what's happening with measles is too bad. They're not leaving him until it reaches an even greater crescendo. And that means that even some of the members of his tribe, who, as he famously said, would support him even if he shot somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, decide that what he's doing to the economy, what he's doing to some of the people in their own communities is too much for them. And even there, I'm not sure he wouldn't double down. Lame duck, yes. Is it past the thinking of Donald Trump if somehow he stays alive beyond 2028 to find a way to cling to power, blowing up the rest of the Constitution? Yes, it is certainly something that he is perfectly capable of doing. I've got to say, it's not terribly comforting that he has decided to build a vast, luxurious underground bunker for himself beneath the ballroom that he's building at the White House for reasons which are hard to understand. But, you know, he's been able to withstand everything. I mean, another shocking element of this discussion yesterday with Bondi was she said, well, there's no evidence against the president. And Raskin or somebody said, well, actually, here's a piece of evidence. Here is a credible piece of sworn testimony saying Trump raped somebody, threatened to kill somebody, a young woman, and you haven't investigated it. And I thought as I was listening to myself, the fact that there was, in the past, a whiff of such a thing would have been the end. And here is Trump day in and day out with more information associating him with the most heinous acts. And, you know, the only conclusion I can draw, and I hate to end on the Epstein files, but I can't help it. The only conclusion I can draw is he is still desperately trying to cover this up. Three million pages are not released. And we know that in the ones that are released, he's been mentioned a million times. that, you know, this is, as somebody else has said, these aren't the Epstein files. These are the Trump files. This is about Trump. But I can only conclude he knows there are things in there worse than what we have seen. And what we have seen is horrific. Absolutely true. And let's point out one other element to this. Howard Lutnick, who I refer to as Howard Nutlick, who I have frequently said is the best of the Trump cabinet and he is an idiot. We now know that he is more than an idiot. First of all, we know that this is the guy who ran Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment company that was devastated on 9-11, losing, I think, probably more of its own people than any other organization in the towers, who then cut off payments to the families of those who were lost from the Cantor Fitzgerald presumed family. We know that this is a guy who said, I moved in next door to Epstein. I went into the house, I saw what was there, and I said, I'm never going to go anywhere near him again. We now know that he bought that house, a very big, expensive mansion, for $10 from Donald Trump. That he said in 2005, I never had anything to do with him again. That he and his family went to the island years later. That he went into business with Donald Trump. And why do I mention all this? Because he's still in the job. We did not have an administration that said, you're a liar, you're a phony, you're a cheat. And by the way, he's also steering business, government business and money to his sons who are in charge of the company that he ran, which itself is a blatant violation of ethics. And this guy, who is an idiot, who is a caricature of a commerce secretary, is still in office. Why is he still in office? Trump is not going to let go of anybody who then might be able to provide even more evidence, given his intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Notlick's relationship, who might then reflect on him. and also to send the signal that I don't care what you did, if you are loyal to me, you are staying in place. And that is unlike anything I believe we have ever seen in the history of the country. It is a violation of every ethical standard, of every element of decency in humanity. And let us end also by noting that most of this just gets shrugs by our media. I don't know. It is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. But I also think, listening to what you're saying, that it is potentially the most perilous year for American democracy in those 250 years. because even at the height of the Civil War, and as it happens, we're recording this on Abraham Lincoln's actual birthday, even at the height of the Civil War, there was the promise that democracy would continue to linger on in the Union states, but also in the Confederacy to some degree, not for everybody, but to some degree. But nobody was saying we shouldn't be a democracy then, an incomplete and deeply flawed one. But here we have overt authoritarianism, overt efforts to steal democracy. And effectively, we've got nine months to determine whether they kill it or not. And I mean, we go through elections and people are constantly saying, oh, this is the most important in American, that's the most important in American history. But I have this chilling sense that this is the most momentous, the most fraught, the most perilous moment that we have faced for our democracy in our history. I think that is absolutely the case. If we don't turn this around, It will be who knows how many decades before somehow we get the restoration of some level of decency and fundamental democracy, and that means a Republican form of democracy, back in the country. And we will go through a horrific hellscape, as will the rest of the world. I would note one other element before we go. we just had an announcement that Susan Collins is running for her sixth term. A woman, by the way, who promised when she first ran that she would abide by a two-term limit, but put that aside for the moment. Susan Collins, who has had remarkable electoral success in Maine, running as a kind of independent figure, a moderate, a center-right person. But we need to note one element here. A vote for Susan Collins is a vote for Pam Bondi. It's a vote for Tom Homan. It's a vote for Kristi Noem. It's a vote for J.D. Vance. It's a vote for Donald Trump. It's a vote against decency. It's a vote against democratic principles. It's a vote against freedom. It's a vote for discrimination against people of color, vicious discrimination and assaults on individuals. It's a vote against anybody who is not a white Anglo-Saxon male. And that's the set of stakes that we have out there. There may be more votes cast by Susan Collins that were reasonable votes than most other Republican senators. None of that matters at the moment. A vote for her is a vote against decency. Norm, you put it extremely eloquently, and I think you framed it exactly as it needs to be framed. I hope everybody's listening. We, of course, will continue this conversation next week. You can hear more perspectives on the political situation. Go to our need to know conversation yesterday with Simon Rosenberg and Tara McGowan. Go to our conversation that I mentioned earlier with Miles Taylor and with Philadelphia DA, Larry Krasner. Listen to our daily, listen to the podcast we produce for the New Republic, The Daily Blast, which covers these things at Great Link. Every day, several times a We've got something for you. We hope you'll listen. We hope you'll subscribe on YouTube, where our subscriber base is growing rapidly. We hope you'll become a member of thedsrnetwork.com and help support what we're doing. The next few months are going to be telling for all of us, and we are going to be fighting the good fight, hopefully with you along with us. Until then, until the next time, thank you, Norm. Thank you, everybody. bye bye