Ryan Grim: An Unconscionable Reaction to a Summary Execution

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You're expected to think clearly, write confidently, and get it right the first time, and every message counts. That's where Grammarly comes in. It gives you everything you need to think, write, and finish in one place, or anywhere you type and text. You'll never have to switch tools or tabs. Grammarly's AI agents are built for how you work and where you work. So you can find the right words, adjust your tone, and predict how your message might land before you hit send. Your ideas will get a boost, while still sounding natural, credible, and just the way you want. For nearly 17 years, Grammarly has been the standard for responsible AI. It's the premier writing tool that 93% of users trust to get more work done. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Hello, and welcome to the Bollard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted welcome. For the first time in the show, reporter and co-founder at Dropsite News. His books include The Squad, and Deformally with The Intercept, as well as Suffering the Indignity of Working with Sam Stein at The Huffington Post. It's Ryan Grimm. What's up, man? No indignity. It's Ryan Grimm. What's up, man? No indignity. It's Ryan Grimm. It's Ryan Grimm. It's Ryan Grimm. It's Ryan Grimm. It's Ryan Grimm. It's Ryan Grimm. No indignity at all. Man, I'm jealous that you get to work with Sam. I miss my time with old Sam. He's annoying at times. It's about a decade that we were partners in crime over there. Is that right? Yeah. It's like almost 10 years. Time flies. Yeah. We got a lot to get to. I want to do a little bit of like at the end, just for the real sickos, like, you know, intra-democratic party narrative wars between the Liz Cheney's wing and the populist lefties but unfortunately the news gods have given us a bunch of sad shit to talk about. So first yesterday morning during a nice encounter in Minneapolis, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother was murdered by an ICE agent. She is sitting in her hunt to pilot, waving officers by when three masked agents descended on her car, tried to open the door. They're shouting instructions at her. She tries to pull away. One of the agents draws down on her and shoots her three times in the head. She leaves behind three kids, including a six-year-old son who had previously lost his father and is now orphaned. I want to give you kind of the reaction, but just on the actual events of what happened, I was wondering what your thoughts were. I've done a lot of police shooting reporting over the years and this was sadly a very familiar scene, which is where you have a situation where a person is trying to comply, but tense, nervous and angry officers are shouting contradictory orders at them. This happens unfortunately way too often. In this case, if you look closely, you have one person saying, get out of the car and pulling on her door handle. You have another officer saying, get out of here. It's hard to, I think, put yourself in a place where you have masked armed men surrounding you and your situation has gone from zero to 60 because, as you said in the video, right before that, she was waving some ICE officers past her. Then she's about to leave and then somebody cuts her off so she lets that person go. She's waiting to exit this area and then this other vehicle comes storming up and the officer that killed her was not in that vehicle. He's off to the side filming. This is what really struck me. I didn't notice it until this morning. I'd seen this video like two times before we published yesterday and did a little commentary on it. It was like the ninth time I was watching. I was like, wait, what is in his left hand? He has his phone. Yeah, it looks like he's, I don't know if he's filming, but his phone is off. His phone is out. He's either scrolling or filming and it's so cold. You can tell from the video it's so cold. He's got his bare hand. One of those phone addicts that is willing to get hypothermia to have his phone out. So there are a couple stills where you can see he's pointing the phone at the driver's window while he's drawing his weapon. Set aside that you're not supposed to shoot at a moving vehicle for many obvious reasons. This is like the Department of Justice policy. And all local police forces have it too because shooting a driver of a car does not stop the car. Most people don't need to be trained. Opposite actually in a lot of times. Right, yeah, exactly. It does the opposite. They usually like their foot hits the gas pedal and they accelerate. But there's no training manual that would say, oh, and also you should have your iPhone out in the other hand. Like looking through your, like just absolute rank amateur nonsense. Attorneys who have defended police officers and police involved shooting cases have almost unanimously been coming out and saying, this is indefensible. What I would try to do is cut some kind of a deal if this were my client. Like the fact that she's turning the wheel, but also like why are they harassing this American citizen? There's no reason for them to be there. That's kind of why like... There's no authority to deal with her. Yeah, I spent a lot of time like, which I shouldn't have probably getting in social media fights with people like going through the frame by frame and all the stuff you just broke down. And, you know, and I can do the most generous possible, maybe it is possible that the officer ended up shooting her the agent, the charter was scared. In that moment, it does happen fast, but like, you know, then the car does turn because you turn the wheel, then he shoots her two times to the side window when he's out of any danger. The point I kept trying to make to people was like, it's stupid to even get into the frame by frame analysis argument. Like what was happening here? This is a 37 year old woman in her Honda pilot. She's got stuffed animals for a kid sitting in the passenger seat. The car is not moving. It's stationary. And a bunch of masked officers, like storm the car and start shaking her door. And then one of them draws their weapon. It's like there was no need for any of this. Right? Like she was not a dangerous criminal. It's not like they were like that she was a suspect. And this is one of these tragedies where like, you know, they were told that a murder is in a Honda pilot or something like this and they converge on a car, right? Right. She's not a criminal suspect. She's not even an undocumented immigrant. If that's the purpose of them being their ice, like she is, I guess maybe protesting. We don't know the whole backstory at this point about like what she had been doing, but the car is not in any way a threat until these guys converge on it. I think you're right that in some ways that the frame by frame analysis is a trap because it almost acknowledges like the legitimacy of what they're doing to begin with. And then says, well, but they made some mistakes here. And so that rises to, you know, some type of homicide. But no, like they have no business confronting an American citizen on an American road, just going about her business, like leave her alone. Like you don't have any business being there. Like stop. The administration's reaction is just unbelievably unconscionable. And I just want to read through a couple of the things the president said this, the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting. She then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ice officer who seems to have shot her in self-defense based on the clip. It's hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. So Trump said he's recovering the hospital. This is obviously not true. You watch the officer walk away. Vance this morning says every congressional Democrat should be asked a simple question. Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over? This is again this woman, American citizen who gets murdered. Vice presidents now calling her names and making accusations about her motives without knowing anything. And then we had Christie Nome dressed up as Indiana Jones yesterday in a press conference. Let's listen to that. It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ice officers were out in enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. That's just a totally hallucinated story. That isn't even anything resembling what happened. And it's also what's this keystone cop nonsense of like getting your car stuck in the snow? Your cops, like cops are supposed to be out helping people who can't handle inclement situations. These are absolute amateurs. So they started the traffic jam by getting their car stuck in the snow in Minnesota. You were surprised that there was ice and snow in Minnesota. You don't have snow tires on your car in Minnesota. If you have snow tires, you should not be stuck in the snow in Minnesota. So what are you doing? So you started this entire thing. Now you've created a traffic jam. It's chaos. These waving people through, instead of going through, you run up on her and surround her vehicle and give her contradictory orders and then shoot and kill her. This was like 2004 or something and there was no video of this. The lie in some ways is less offensive. It's more absurd because all of us know it's such a blatant lie. Imagine if we didn't have the video and all we had as eyewitnesses versus what Noam is saying and Noam is saying she tried to ram them with her vehicle and she's a domestic terrorist. People would be like, wow, I guess in such a situation we know there are such things as car rammings that happens. This is terrifying. I feel for those officers. Then you see the actual video. It's like, no, it's a traffic jam that these idiots created that she's trying to get out of and then they murdered her. I guess I'm going to have to quibble with you on it being less offensive because for me it's more offensive because it's like... Interesting. It just washes over me. What is truth? What is anything? It's pernicious. This idea that they can just make up a totally false story when we all have seen it. Again, she's in the range left. She's trying to ram them. There are a lot of right-wing accounts that are posting and coming out for me this morning and saying things like, well, the car is rolling up on them and they didn't say, what are they supposed to do? I'm like, this is one of those situations. The car stopped. I don't know when you were a teen. If it's one of those situations, you're standing in front of your buddy's car and they hit the gas a little bit to give you a little start. You're like, that's what this was. The guy easily got out of the way. It's on ice. He could push the car backwards. The idea that this is not a car going 35 miles an hour swerving at a cop or a car that started and then presses the gas and jams across the parking lot aiming at the cops. This is a stopped car and they are yelling at her. The idea that our government would call this person names and smear them. It's not like this is unprecedented. Obviously, I went through this all before. It's a white woman. It's a little bit different than some of the past situations. I don't know. It seems like especially egregious to me in this case. Back when Sam and I were at HuffPost, we published a viral essay that described the term that comes from hip hop for this phenomenon. It's called fuckery. It's when you tell a lie that you know as a lie, you know the person hearing it knows it's a lie and they know that you know it's a lie. It's a power move. It's beyond a lie. Because a lie implies some attempt to deceive. In this case, there really is no intent to deceive because we can all see what happened. Fuckery is an expression of your power, the power imbalance. I can say this completely outrageous thing and all you can do is just spit and rage about it. I like fuckery a lot better than gas lighting if I'm just going to be choosing a word. It feels more on point. Yeah. I don't know, man. There's definitely fuckery happening from the administration, but I was pretty shook by the amount of people, real people, not bots, people I know in my life on social media who were basically just like, yeah, she deserved it. I'm sorry. If a cop tells you to do something, you should do it. I was thinking I was kind of shook when Charlie Kirk was killed and there were a lot of people who were kind of like, well, he deserved it. He had what was coming to him. People in my life said that. I should say jarring to me that there are a lot of our citizens out there, a lot of people in the country, a lot of people in the political space who basically think the punishment for not listening to a cop's orders in a stressful situation is that you should be summarily executed. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this psychological status of our fellow Americans, but it's pretty disturbing. Extremely disturbing. That element of it is dark. Seeing people who you disagree with on some things, agree with on some things, defending the indefensible for no reason. You don't have to do this. Her kid is orphan. She has a six-year-old orphan. Why are you doing this? She didn't... You could just grab her license plate. Right. When you're defending something that most police officers won't defend, you've taken a wrong term. Any police officer who's gone through training watching that would say, none of that is how this should be done. This is an embarrassment to us. This is a shame this person should be punished and prosecuted. To not agree with those police officers, because you hate... And I think this is where the darkness comes in. They might not even agree with it. They just hate that woman so much that they don't care. Like a 37-year-old liberal poet who may or may not... They assumed that she was an observer at the protest. I don't even know if that's true in this case, but that's what they believe, that this was a protestor. It seems like she probably was, but even it doesn't matter. So let's say she was. They hate those people so much that they're okay, that they're glad that this was done to her. That's where the darkness, I think, is seeping in. I have escalation concerns from all parties here. I see people are right to be raged. I'm fucking enraged. I was living in Minnesota protesting. I saw some videos of protestors who'd reason righteously shouting at some of these ICE and CBP officials. One of those guys gets upset about that, administration cracking down, reliving Kenosha or other things for 2020. There are some 2020 elements to this. This is January, not the summer, which is maybe in some ways going to tamp that down, but do you have concerns about escalations from all parties? Yes, because we're early 2026 now. We're looking at three years at least until this term expires, who knows what comes after that. Time is moving much more slowly than I think we would like it to if we do believe we're going to move through this period. This is a dark moment. Your point about DHS and the others rallying around, you had people just immediately and Trump immediately defending him rather than we're going to look into this. We're going to let the investigation play out. Tom Hohman was like, we're going to let the investigation play out. Tom Hohman is the moderate actor in this administration right now. Right. When Tom Hohman is a voice of reason, we're in a bleak place. I'll move on to a couple of other things. We'll talk about Venezuela in particular. You guys wrote analysis what you think things are from an admin policy and what's next for Dropsite. Give us a little summary of what you think the state of play is. It's a really bizarre situation. It's not a regime change operation. It's a president change operation, which ahead of time, there were people that were predicting that he would do something like this because he had built up such an armada and now had got himself stuck and had to climb down somehow. The only way out would be through. Those predictions seem to have been pretty on point. What he's doing right now with the oil is so bizarre. In some ways, it's very Trumpian as well. Usually the United States, when it goes around the world extracting resources from people, because so with glossy language about democracy, we'll say we're doing a great thing for people and in fact, we're actually doing a pretty cynical thing for ourselves. Sometimes both. Sometimes both, sure. Sometimes the cynical thing for ourselves is a great thing for people. Sometimes. Every once in a while. In this case, it's the reverse in that they have so much oil stored and blocked because of US sanctions and because of our blockade, not allowing it out, they're in a crisis because they're making oil and they've nowhere to send it. This is an engineering crisis that we have created. They need to sell this oil, but we took their license, took the Chevron license at the request of these South Florida members of Congress and pushed by Rubio and his gang. Now, what he's doing is reinstituting that license without doing it. The terms of this oil seizure are weird and unprecedented and the money is going to go on offshore accounts before it goes to pay the debts or this, that, but it is not that dissimilar fundamentally from what the terms would have been under the license. We're going to steal all your oil, but what he's actually doing is reissuing the license, but without issuing the license. His license implies some type of law and regulation being followed. This is just gangster stuff, but for PDVSA, the oil company, this is a lifeline. They need that oil out of their storage tankers. Trump's saying they're going to sell it and split the proceeds, which is exactly what would happen under the licensing regime if you then lift sanctions because if Rubio is running the country and Trump is running the country, then why would you sanction Rubio? Trump said to the Times this morning, we might be running it for a few years. Yeah. So, got to lift the sanctions at that point. The South Florida crowd is actually very upset about all of this because they're like, no, no, no, no, we don't want the US running Venezuela. We want to run Venezuela. But then that doesn't pass the sniff test for the American people because it's like, what do I mean? Who's we? I thought we is the US government. Aren't you Americans? It's like, oh, no, you're not. You're like Venezuelan right-wing folks who want to take the country back over. And then it exposes the entire scheme. You and Rubio are trying to use the American government to settle your own scores over in Venezuela and Cuba, which nobody, that's not something the American people are on board for. American people, you want to steal the oil? Okay, fine. And separately, Trump is destroying the domestic oil industry. If you read the oil press the last several months and now accelerating, he's pushing supply so high because he wants to push oil prices down that it is making the Texas oil industry basically go bankrupt. This would be like the final nail in the coffin of the Texas oil industry. Well, and Dairy, depending on how much oil we're actually taking out of Venezuela. But even his pressure on OPEC to increase supply and drive down prices is killing the domestic shale industry. Having an impact, yeah. Which is fascinating. I don't think he's doing it on purpose. He's just kind of an idiot. No. The same way the way the tariffs are destroying the farms and destroying American manufacturing. I don't think he's trying to destroy American manufacturing. I don't think he's trying to destroy the American oil industry. But that's the consequence of his policies. Is your takeaway from this that this is like a confluence of events where Marco has this ideological ambition and Stephen Miller wants to use an excuse for his immigration stuff and Donald Trump is just like will to power. I just want to have the pictures for my TV show of this guy who attacked me in handcuffs. And it's kind of this one off and like we'll see kind of how things stabilize or do you see this as part of a broader, you know, there'll be follow-ups on this. It's Rubio. I think this was a unique historical circumstance where if Rubio himself, like if any other secretary of state comes in, you probably don't get this. And also Rubio was boxed out of Ukraine, Russia and boxed out of Israel, Palestine. People talk about all the work that he has. It's almost compensating for the fact that as secretary of state, he's not actually involved in what were the two most important issues, those two. And so he was then able to just focus exclusively on his pet project, which is exercising the grievances of the South Florida human community and the Venezuelan community and go after those countries. legitimate grievances, very legitimate grievances, I would say. Yeah, they're upset. Not our problem, if you ask me. That's between all. Why are we being asked to settle these scores for you? In Magda World, there's a lot of fake grievances out there. So I sometimes like to distinguish between the imaginary made up grievances and the real grievances. That's all. Yes, sure. But they're un-American. They're non-American grievances. There are different beefs within the Minneapolis Somali community that are literally organized around tribal beefs from back where they came from. Imagine if they became so powerful as a lobby that they could then get the American military to go into Somalia and smash their rivals for them. Yeah, that's good. I think we'd be like, no, actually, yeah, I'm sure that there were human rights abuses carried out against your family and your people there. And I don't really want to get in all the details, because they've got their side of the story too. We're not going to send the American military to Somalia to enact your vengeance. Adjudicate that. But doing it on behalf of South Florida, Cuban, and Venezuelans is just an acceptable use of the American military for whatever reason. And then the second thing is the obvious one, which is like China is a rising power and we're backing off our global hegemony. So we're focusing on what we call our backyard, which is such a weird term. It's not our backyard. These are our neighbors. Imagine if you called your neighbor's house your backyard. It's not even really my neighbor. I mean, it'd be like me talking about people in Shreveport and saying, that's my backyard. I'm deep in the heart about what's happening in Shreveport. Right. Shreveport would be like, yeah, this is not your backyard. You're welcome to visit and hang out and come watch a game. I want to talk about the political, like what this says about what's happening on the right. You've kind of lived at this nexus of the horseshoe, if you will, with breaking points, people don't know it, has hosts that are kind of populous righties, populous lefties, essentially, for shorthand. Also some other, some of people with weird heterodox politics in there as well. But part of the populous right that has been kind of rising is folks that are rhetorically saying, sounding out like, how you just sounded. We shouldn't care about stuff that's happening over there. I don't care about tribal conflicts in the Middle East or Africa or South America for that matter. And we shouldn't out with the neocons. And there's been some common cause. We've seen people like Glenn Greenwald as a populous leftie become very friendly with the populous right crowd on mega media. And now we're a year into the Trump administration where he was supposed to be kind of representing that populous right form policy. And we're bombing people everywhere. Basically, we just deposed a leader in Venezuela and it has revealed some strains of people that were legitimate in that view. But a lot of these folks have turned out to be fake. And one of them was a daily wire guy named Matt Walsh, who's on your show talking about how he is non-interventionist, non-interventionist by nature. But also he's like really thrilled that we're fucking up Venezuela. So you're living in this world even a little more than me, actually. How do you assess that kind of strain of what's happening on the right? With the Matt Walsh strain, I think there is a, there's like a macho element to his politics that is going to like dominate over whatever claims he has to non-interventionism. Where are they saying, they're against previous wars that didn't go well. Like Vietnam and bad, you know, didn't go well. Iraq, bad, didn't go well. Afghanistan, bad didn't didn't go well. We should not be in these forever wars that we're not winning. But you show them like a military adventure that like, that you go in, you do some bang bang and you get out. They're like, oh, that's great. Like there are four military adventures that they think are working, which is not a, that's not a principle. That's just just being a thug. Well, in part because you can't predict what's going to work and what's not going to work. Libya looked great at the beginning, you know, for example. Yeah, Saddam Hussein fell in like three days or something. Right. Ukraine looked terrible on the other hand for the Ukrainian site, like for the first couple of days, right? And it was conventional wisdom that Russia was going to run rough shot over them. So, you know, that shows the limits of that kind of mindset. Right. And then you've got people like Tulsi Gabbard, who just did pure cynical power plays, like, where is she? Have you heard from her? You and Tulsi are pals. Is she around? She doesn't respond to me anymore. I covered her first congressional campaign. So I knew her before she was even in Congress in like 2014. And she was a very strident and principled opponent of like regime change wars. Now, the fact that she always qualified it as regime change wars and was always comfortable with basically drone campaigns against what she saw as like its lamest forces and her links with like the right wing Modi folks who are like virulently hostile to small Muslims, basically, that was always like a red flag in her politics. I think she finally said something about Venezuela, where she figured out some way to applaud the thing that she like, she's the classic case, because you can go back and find all of these posts 2019 slamming Trump for trying to do a coup in Venezuela. There's a Tulsi tweet for everything. There is a warmonger and a isolationist faction in both parties. And they're jockeying for position constantly throughout history. I guess my question is on the right. Is it even possible for the isolationist side of the party to ever truly succeed? I guess my point is there's just something about the nature of being a right wing party that sure, like you could move away from the type of foreign engagement that Bush and Reagan and others engaged in because you don't care about democracy abroad, etc, etc. But it does feel like there's some you sort of machismo is just something about the strain of kind of a will to power right wing nationalist. Like it's kind of hard to imagine at the end of the day than ever being fully pacifist as well. Right. When the chips are down, it's very difficult, I think on the right, to stand up for the like, let's not do this war. Right. But there are people, no, the American conservative, for instance, like they've been, they've consistently, the last couple years, like really pushed hard against that, you know, that magazine has pushed hard against like, look who's in the administration, you know what I mean? It's like, it's not Kurt Mills. Right. And J.D. Vance was like their lead champion, like he was their guy, and he's just completely defanged on all of this. One of the things, and this kind of gets us into a couple of different topics. So like one of the groups that bought into that was kind of this like, manosphere, comedian, culturally right kind of podcast universe, however you want to describe that. And they bought in to like Trump as being a non-interventionist candidate. And they also were, in most cases, like following the Epstein stuff very closely, which you guys have been following. You went on one of those shows recently, Tim Dillon, which is what inspired me to invite you over here. I was like, fuck, if he's going to be on the Tim Dillon show, we got to expose him to the Bullrock audience. But so I want to talk about kind of both, like how that intersects with both those worlds. And when you're talking to Dylan, like, do you think, well, actually, let's table the foreign policy status. Let's talk about the Epstein side of this first. Like, did you sense that like that world is really starting to become disillusioned with Trump over the Epstein stuff and that you think that there's something there? Extremely, extremely, because these are also the kinds of people who don't really believe that the government is going to deliver materially, you know, for people. Right. Somebody like a Rogan, and I don't actually know Dylan's like Tim Dillon's domestic politics, but like, you know, Rogan, you ask him, he's for, he's for like Medicare for all, he's for higher minimum wage. He supported Bernie in 2020. And now he's drifted right. I saw, I don't know where he stands with that stuff now. But he's also very American in a sense, he's very cynical that the government is actually going to deliver on those things. And maybe he's right. Like maybe that cynicism is grounded in something. But what that means is that giving us the Epstein stuff and doing those things, that's what they want because that, they're like, you can actually do that. Like, why don't think you're going to lower, you know, healthcare costs. I don't think you're going to actually reverse climate change. You're not going to do any of this stuff. You should, but you won't. But you have the files. Yeah, you've ran on transparency and against pedophilia. Because that's the other thing, like, you know, these aren't QAnon people, but the QAnon vibe around like there are these, this is Kabbalah pedophiles that are like running the world. Like that's seeped into broadly MAGA. A lot of MAGA wouldn't adopt the whole QAnon thing. They might not even know what Q is. But that idea, sure, that these reptiles are running the world, has purchase. And so it's like, okay, you're not going to, you're not going to do anything to necessarily make the world and my life better, but you're going to expose these reptiles. Like you're going to lock up the pedophiles, or at least you're going to shame the pedophiles, even if you're not going to prosecute them. And so to have that, which is the thing that they actually thought he was going to do, to see him become an obstacle to that, I think is extremely demoralizing. And for many of them, radicalizing, taking them not to just a place of ambivalence around Trump, but like, de-postility. And then embarrassment too. Embarrassment, I think is key. Embarrassment. Yeah. Right. Because like, you know, they have listeners too. They see the feedback, see the comments, right? Like they've been promising this. You know, and like in MAGA worlds, you get away from the embarrassment because you just be like, oh, well, the other guys are bad. You know, you get straight back into team sports, if you're like a Fox News wing or, you know, they don't have that. Right. They don't have that. So let's just talk about the Epstein stuff more broadly, and then we'll get back to the politics, because you've been going through these files really closely. What's your sense for what we've learned from the limited amount of information we've got that is new or maybe different from what, you know, maybe conventional wisdom would be from people who are only kind of following this lightly? Ironically, I think what we're discovering probably actually affirms people's conventional wisdom around this. Because I think people assumed that this was a guy who operated in the gray area of the kind of the elite political economy as an asset for various intelligence services. That was kind of an assumption about him. I mean, in certain parts of the universe, though, there are other places that they would say that's crazy, like that he is an intelligence asset. That's a conspiracy theory. Right. New York Times readers. Well, that's a pretty big audience. Yeah, it's a very big audience. But for the like, what I think of now as the centrist person, which who has like, wildly eclectic politics and listens to like Joe Rogan or Tim Dillon, like that to me is the actual American center. Not you. Like, you're not like you are. I think like for in Washington, like the epitome of like a centrist or center leftist. This is so this is such a good point. I always like whenever I do like a panel with rich people, which I tried to do as little as possible because I hate them. But whenever I whenever I do for whatever reason, like the question like always the first or second question is like, why can't we have a center party that is like somebody like you? It's like socially moderate and conservative. And I'm just like, A, like there are those people do exist right now. They're just Democrats. Like that's the governor of a couple states, like for starters. And like B, like if you were to get a third party center person, they would be who you hate. Like they'd be the opposite of you. Right. Like they would be somebody that is socially kind of conservative and fiscally a little Bernie, flavoring and right. Yeah. I mean, so I agree with your political assessment on that table. And so for that type of person, I think they assumed, I guess you could call it a conspiracy theory, but I think they just assumed that that's who this guy was like, that's what they sniffed on him. Is that there's no way he gets away with all of this stuff and has all these major connections without some type of relationship and how that relationship was defined remains a mystery. But what we find in his correspondence in particular are deep ties to Israeli government figures and American intelligence figures. Like doesn't mean he's like getting a W nine from the CIA, but like, sound like on staff for a massage necessarily. That's not how it works. Like he also has his own personal agendas that are overlapping. And he's a figure within this Davos set. And he is at times deploying massage or his own assets, like in the American government, for the benefit of himself or his allies. I think people looking for like a room where global strategy is like set and then executed upon and him being like taking notes there and being part of it, that's not how the world is organized. The world is organized around these competing factions of oligarchs and elites who wax and wane in their power within that set. And he kind of swam in that world and did so since the 80s. The stuff is all kind of murky and gray, but I'm going to try to kind of create a line between what I think is maybe conspiracy mongering and true a little bit, right? Like on the conspiracy side of the line is like the sort of puppet master thing, like the puppeteer theme, right? Where there is the government, whether it be the US or Israel or France, if you're Candace Owens, right? That it's like puppet mastering him and like telling him, you go after this guy and you co-opt them and then blackmail them because we need that. I don't think we have a lot of evidence for that yet. We don't have that. Yeah, no evidence for that. And then the other side of the line is like this kind of human frailty that does seem to be particularly common among kind of elite networking sets, right? Which is if somebody says that they can do a solid for you, you kind of look the other way about their behavior, even if that behavior is like disgusting. Or especially if you've engaged in that behavior with him. Right. So now this is where the gray area parts the line. And that's what I think has been frustrating about the release. It's like, okay, but who are the other guys that have engaged in the behavior? Because like Peter Thiel is on these emails with him on the networking side of it. Based on what I know about Peter Thiel, I don't think he was raping young girls. You know what I mean? I think we can safely acquit him of those charges. Yes. Right. So some of the people are on these emails, I assume are raping young girls and some of them just like the fact that this is a rich guy who's giving them favors. What have we learned? I think what people need to understand and add to their under or add to their understanding of who Epstein was was that he was able to deliver material benefits to his allies that were not raping young girls. Like if you wanted like a who Barak, for instance, when he as he's leaving the ministry defense, Epstein gets him a million dollar, two million dollar bonus, a million dollar retainer with Renovah group, the Victor Vexelbergs, who's a giant oligarch and close ally of Putin, like he gets him that deal and he helps get him like a million bucks from Wexner to not write like a memoir. So if you're a who Barak, like he delivered that for you. He even set up Barak with a meeting with Sarcozy, set up Barak with a meeting with Putin after declining Epstein himself declining a meeting with Putin because Putin wanted to meet him on the sidelines of this conference. He's like, no, no, no, Putin wants to meet. It's got to be in his palace and we need like 90 minutes. We've got serious business to talk about like that's the level of guy that we're talking about like chiding world leaders. And he bailed on this Sarcozy a who Barak meeting is in Paris and they're having dinner last minute. He's like, I don't feel well, you guys go. And that's where the disgusting like layer of his life gets into what do you think he did in Paris instead that night. I think he was feeling fine. He wanted to do something else. But the point is that because he was this like college dropout, fired from Bear Stearns, that not really a tax guy, giving all this tax advice, people are like, he's not doing anything of professional value to these people. So therefore, the only thing he can be doing is like delivering them young girls. And what we found in his correspondence, that's not true. He had deep ties with all of these shadowy networks. And if you were somebody who wanted to operate in a gray area, which is most of these elites, he was helpful to you. How many people in the world can get you a meeting with, you know, the president of France, the president of Russia, or the former president of the United States? Like, there are not a lot of people who have that level of proletics and ability to get people to respond to them. So I think the fact that he was engaging in this foul behavior with so many men meant that they implicitly knew that if something went south, he had dirt on them. Or if he asked them for something like they should probably just go ahead and do it. Because they know what he's got. Yet, you don't even need that to explain a huge amount of what he was able to accomplish. Because he was making these people rich and getting them meetings that were leading to security agreements that were even like state level security agreements between Israel and the Code of War, Israel, Mongolia, these Nigerian diamond mines. He's like getting things done for people. And I think that has been missing from the understanding of Epstein. And when you understand that, then you can maybe contextualize the sex trafficking a little differently. So it takes us to the cover up and the question of whether this is just a straight Donald Trump. There's embarrassing information about him in there. The degree to it is unknown, but obviously he was engaged in gross behavior with Epstein at some level. And he's like, oh, we've learned at least he's on the plane more times than he said. The lie about how many times he's on the plane, that he's on the plane with a girl who is a victim of Maxwell's. There's only four of them on the plane. So the cover could just be straight Trump, right? Or when you tie it into the security services conversations or other people out there that kind of say, well, no, I mean, the cover up is related to that. And like that CIA and who the hell knows, BB and Sarko, who knows, like is leaning on Trump as well and saying, no, bro, you got to hold the line here on this. Like, where do you, where do you fall on that? I think it's a combination of both. You know, and Melania knows new Epstein as well. What do we know about that? I've not followed the Melania Epstein line that closely, if I'm being candid. We know that they knew each other. She's very litigious. I think we can, we can leave it at that. Can we leave, can we do one more sentence between that and litigiousness? I don't know. I don't think, I don't think I want to do any more sentences on, on that in particular. We're working on some angles and, you know, when we, when we know more, but there's been some contention about whether or not Epstein was the one who introduced them. There's other people who said, no, actually somebody else introduced Melania and, and Trump. And she also knows that world of like exploitative modeling from her own experience in it. Which they both engaged in. Again, when you're talking about the bad things that Trump did, like the exploitative modeling, something both Trump and Epstein. Exactly. Yeah. And also the part that makes me think there's got to be other people leaning on him is that he's very hard to shame. Like this, this is a guy who bought Ms. Teen USA and went on Howard Stern to say like he bought it so that he could like creep on these teen girls naked in their locker room. Yes. Like he said that out loud with the cameras running. It wasn't joking. No. And the teen girls in the locker room have testified that he did that. Exactly. Yes. They have said like, and his daughter, they asked, they asked Ivanka and she's like, yeah, like that's the kind of thing he does. So at that point, you're like, what, what mystery is left to how this guy interacts with teen girls? You know, what more is going to embarrass him? You know, he also has a virtue of often being like open about how he's thinking. When he was asked during the campaign, if he was going to release the, you know, the Kennedy files and the Epstein files, he was like, I think we should definitely release the Kennedy files and we should release the MLK and RFK. Moonlight. Yeah. I think it was on NPR or somewhere. They followed up and like, notice that you didn't, led ledgers a little short there. What about the Epstein one? And he's like, you know, there's a lot of people are in there. They're going to be, there's going to be some guilt by association and not everybody in there did something wrong. And it's going to be embarrassing for people like he, he even during the campaign, he was giving this rationale for why he didn't want to release all of the Epstein files. While saying like Epstein's a creep, I never liked him. I, we had a falling out. I think you should take him seriously in that when he says that, that like he's trying to protect people whose names are in there and who he, who he knows. I want to do some, I don't want to do some white people discourse with two white guys. Is that okay? Can we do some white people? Representation matters. We have the, we have the right white people here, right? I'm going to tie two items together that are in the news. And I just want to say very clearly up front, I am not creating an equivalence between these two people. I just want to talk about two news items in the context of identity politics and, and the dangers of identity politics from my point of view. Are you ready for this? Okay. Here we go. Elon Musk, see where you're going with the biggest donor to the president, one of the richest men in the world is a owner of X.com. He posted this this morning, or maybe overnight. Seems like he might have been on a catamine binge. I don't know, allegedly. He writes this, or someone else writes this, if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non whites openly hate white men, while white men hold a collective majority, then they'll be a thousand times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive. Elon Musk posted that with like a 100 sign, totally agree. So that's where Elon Musk is. He wants white solidarity, the white South African. We'll just start there and just have a brief sentence. That's very bad and alarming. You concur with that? It's an 1850s like Southern white, we should end slavery, but if we do, they'll kill us all. Like it's that level of like fear and projection too. It's 1950s South Africa maybe. 1980s, while he was in school there. He's bringing the bad elements of Africa. Turned out that wasn't true, by the way, even in South Africa. White solidarity is the only way to survive. This was the top donor to the president. That's pretty alarming. So that's bad. There's also a scandal going around around one of Zoran's staffer, much less prominent person, but I just want to use this story as kind of a way to talk about some live concerns about C.O. Weaver's surname. She posted to a housing role in the Mundani administration. We have a milkshake duck situation where they go back through all of her past Twitter accounts, something generally not that fond of, but she wrote a bunch of things about whites. She's white. She writes, private property is a weapon of white supremacy. I endorse a no more white men in office platform. We should impoverish the white middle class. Home ownership is racist. I wish I believed in God, so I believe that all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn. I came across a mob of 11-year-old white boy children. I don't know why we keep procreating. Delta should kick all white people in Christmas outfits off planes. All right, that one's funny. I'm not saying that it's C.O. Weaver's fault that Donald Trump's top donor and advisor is a white supremacist. I'm not. I think that we get into a very dangerous spot sometimes with folks on the left who get very comfortable in the identity politics space and then start just throwing around pejoratives about white people all the time. I think that it's right to be a little judicious about this both because we're in a pluralistic society and it's just wrong, but also because the backlash, I don't think we want to encourage white identity politics. I think that we want to disencourage that as much as possible. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that. That certainly does encourage white identity politics, which I don't think anybody other than Elon Musk and his fans think is a good idea. Yeah, or Nick Plantas. Maybe, unfortunately, there's a growing number of people actually who think it's a good idea. That's why it's very important to be conscious of trying to disincentivize it as much as possible. Yeah, and the left took several wrong turns to find themselves in this place where they're attacking 11-year-old white children. You probably need to retrace your steps at that point and figure out how you got there. One way they got there was this academic jargon taking over the left and the idea of white supremacy as a structuring force of society being kind of divorced from whiteness itself, that things could become white, how the Irish became white, how the Italians become white, how whoever, that non-white people can become white because whiteness is not actually a racial structure anymore. It stands in for the oppression of people within American society. So you've got that academic argument, which then you get loose with and then you start just talking about white in this because now you've defined the structure that you're against as white. You've tried to explain in your seminar that you don't actually mean white. It can be lots of other things that fall under this rubric. And then you start doing what she's doing, which is going after actual individual white people or 11-year-old white boys. And you can trace backwards how you got there, but you should probably head out and take a different turn, even if it's just pragmatically for the reason that you're talking about. But also just because it's like a moral and ethical framework, which just judge people's individuals. Yeah, people just judge as individuals. And I just think if you get into a place where you're getting reckless with doing pejoratives about people based on their group identity, and obviously white people can have a thick skin, as a white person I could say we can have a thick skin, but it's just, you know, I mean, it's a lot. It becomes a lot. Yeah. Why are you going after the 11-year-old white boys? Come on. What were those kids doing? Like now on the other hand, middle schoolers in general are awful. 11-year-old boys can be tough. Yes. You're some experience with that. I get it. I'm not there yet. But come on. I'm about to be coaching a seven-year-old girls team. And I'm very excited about that. We want to chill out. But so anybody who was a millennial or trying to act like one throughout starting in the 14-ish, but like accelerating in like 2020, up into say 2022 or three, is going to have all sorts of like bananas posts, including Mayor Mamdani. And so I do think it's an interesting moment where I think there's an argument for Mamdani or let's say see, we were like, I think it'd be fine to say, look, this is embarrassing and this is, I don't actually hate white people. But then Mamdani standing behind the person and being like, look, we all said a lot of crazy things and we're not going to eliminate everybody from public life who said crazy things during the late teens and early 20s because that's the entire like left everyone for the most part. Okay. Well, do you feel like there's been enough of a reckoning within the left part of the left about that? I mean, that's what you just said was that's a pretty common opinion among like center-left abundance bros, right? Well, you just laid out, right? It was like a lot of people got kind of crazy in 2019 and started saying too much identity stuff. We should stop doing that. But on the left of the left, I don't hear people saying that quite as explicitly and I think it's a potential danger. I think if I was a populist leftist or a squad person, I'd be like AOC's, I could crush an AOC presidential campaign. I mean, her like rhetoric kind of weaves back and forth between more of a burniest, you know, kind of populist left, culturally neutral. And then she goes through phases where she starts sounding very identitarian, you know, woke, ultra woke, you know, if you're watching some of her old clips. Yeah. And on that point, then I, yeah, I proudly bear the scars from being somebody who's on the left throughout that period. I mean, people can search and try to prove me wrong. I did not do that. And I pushed back pretty consistently against it. And if I had to do over again, I would push back even harder than I did, even though, you know, back before Musk bought Twitter, I was getting dragged multiple times a week for like pushing back against against this kind of thing. I even remember I defended in 2013, this poor young lady told a joke about AIDS in Africa. She'd lived in Africa for years. And she tweeted. Justine or something? She's on a plane. Soco, Justine Soco. Yes, Justine Soco. Right. Whereas, why am I wasting my brain on that knowledge instead of like learning Mandarin? Yes. She tweeted, go to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. She was satirizing like a provincial racist American. Yeah, right. And then didn't have service until she landed in Africa and was a global name. Correct. By the time she landed, fired from her job. And I remember, I even defended her at the time, like, guys, you're being idiots. She was telling a joke about racist provincial Americans. So do you worry about that? They're just, it was a political item that like the squad types haven't really embraced. I don't think there's been a reckoning. I think there's been a Homer quietly walking back into the hedges. Got it. And there has been some reckoning. Like after, and I saw that on the rundown, you had my, the story I did in 21 or 22, whatever it was about the elephant in the zoom about all of these. We're running out of time already, but this is such a good story. So I'll just put a link in it and show it so people can go read it. But yeah, it's for three years ago. It's about how these activist groups basically all the infighting over various woke arguments. They were imploding over this kind of thing and they were weaponizing this language for their own internal grievances. And so there was a reckoning there among organizations of like, how do we continue to be an organization? Like, I was more than one person function collectively together. Because if they can't, like there's no left. So there's been some reckoning, but nowhere near enough. But yet on the other hand, I actually think mom, Donnie should like hold the line. If you start firing this, I agree. Don't give scalps. Right. Yeah, don't give scalps. I mean, I don't know anything about this person. Maybe she was she was bad hire and would not be good for other reasons, but like, you know, not over. I've heard great things about her, like other than the, like, you know, mouthing off crazy anti white stuff. So great. Okay. I have a whole list of things I want to argue with you about, but fucking an ice agent shot a woman inside a car, which is something we passionately agree about. So we're going to have to do a little rain check to argue later about Yimbyism or various things. But can we just do two minutes on Liz Cheney discourse? Because I have to do it with you. Can we do two minutes on this? Where are you on Liz Cheney like? So here's what I get very frustrated with. Okay, this is, and for folks who are not very online, it's been a great show. We'll see you back tomorrow. I've got some great guests lined up for folks who are very online. There's like this argument between kind of the establishment or whatever, Democrats and like the left populist types where you spend a lot of time where like a big criticism of the Kamala campaign was that she allowed Trump going back to this where we are at the top. She allowed Trump to get to the left of him on her on foreign policy. This is this is part of the argument I agree with and that she allowed for and the Democrats broadly allowed for like the Tim Dillens and Joe Rogan's of the world and all the people they represent just regular people that don't want war throughout the country to believe wrongly that he was going to be the peace candidate and that a series of choices reinforce that. That narrow argument I agree with and I wasn't saying this at the time. So I'll just say I'll tell myself on the mercy of the court. I was wrong about that. I should have been saying that I think more clearly at the time but I think that obviously like Trump was able to to pull the wool over people's eye on this. The area where I become when I get in disagreement is part of the reason Trump was able to pull the wool over people's eyes because a lot of big prominent people on the left were going along with his fake bullshit argument and I get very defensive and get my backup when it's like Liz Cheney and me and my fellow never Trumpers and Bill Crystal and whatever. We did everything we could to help Kamala win because we saw Trump for who he was and we're just like put me in coach. Liz Cheney wasn't like I need to be in the cabinet and Kamala must support bombing the Middle East for me to be on her campaign. Me to be on her campaign it's a litmus test. Liz Cheney was like I support Kamala Harris and I know personally from being behind the scenes that like the Harris campaign didn't even call Liz Cheney for months and she just like endorsed her and just and then eventually at the end of the campaign they made a strategic decision to have an event with her but like all the folks that came from more of a interventionist side recognized Trump for the threat that he was, opposed him, tried to help and a lot of people on the left spent the whole campaign pissing in the tent and then at the end of the campaign they're like fucking Liz Cheney's fault and I'm over here going no it's fucking your fault, Hassan for saying that they were going to be the same and it's your fault like other Glen Greenwald for going on Fox and shitting on and you know this was all predictable we all knew who Trump was so anyway now you seem to be getting my blood pressure up so I'm wondering I would like for you to adjudicate that dispute between me and your brethren. All right so the counter argument would be well and I don't blame Cheney for being Cheney either like blaming a leopard for being a leopard that's it's Kamala for putting her on stage who would be the one to blame and who you put on stage matters so here would be the counter argument if you talk to and you know Waleed, Shahid, I'm sure I do know I like you probably know other people who are involved in the uncommitted movement in Michigan this was a very precise strategic move that was criticized on the left for being too friendly and too open to the Democratic Party because what they were and they have said this very publicly they have said we cannot deliver for you these left anti-war votes just by virtue of our charisma like Waleed is an amazing person but him just going on Twitter and saying please vote for Kamala Harris because I Waleed say that you should is not actually going to deliver those votes he needs and the people that he was allied with need something to tell them something like some argument that he can make that she is better when it comes to foreign policy and in particular Gaza than Trump will be because Trump is saying things that some people can glom on to and say he's going to be better and so they came up with this idea they're like how about you give a Palestinian-American lawmaker a two-minute speech at the DNC that is vetted by you and that is supportive of Kamala Harris how about you do that if you do that then that gives us a way to say look you don't like everything she stands for but we're in the tent she's listening to us and we and so we can fight for the change that we want when she's in office the speech you can find the speech it's online here's the speech it's slobbering over Kamala the whole time by a Georgia state lawmaker who's Palestinian-American and she said no and gave nothing else like okay you're not doing that like okay what give us something here that we can tell people whose sole issue here is ending this genocide give us something and and they decided to give nothing in fact every time she was asked about it she would lead with a long recitation of October 7th like the and I at the time I could verbatim I can't do it anymore but at the time I could verbatim give you her answer every single time she was asked about it um and that was it that was the decision that she made I agree with the decision I agree with you I agree with the critique she should have let that person speak she should she should have let the Georgia lawmaker speak I've since texted with that lawmaker and uh like that she should have let the person wash one wash I also just think fundamentally like the change in speaking at the convention and she didn't go with lesser demands and I want a pro-life activist to be on stage at the convention before I support you like at the end of the day she went out and gave speeches that was like Donald Trump is a great threat and at the end of the day there was not a lot of folks from that uncommitted movement and from the left who are prominent who are out there saying you know what you know who Donald Trump's best buddy is bb and this sucks and I hate the Cumbulists doing this and I wish that we had done this and that but like we have no choice here like you have to vote for her because Donald Trump is about to turn Gaza into fucking you know high-rise buildings and let Israel Israeli settlers do whatever they want in the west bank and blah and that wasn't that they didn't do that they didn't do that and said they're like ah sorry let's change his fault and I that's because because that wouldn't have landed with people because Netanyahu is already doing that like Netanyahu is doing it so like I'm sorry they won't let a palestinian speak sorry they won't make any commitments to doing anything differently than Biden anything even Kamala says she was wrong on that school yeah no she was obviously wrong I asked her that when I interviewed her I was like why didn't you distance her more yeah if you elect trump x yz terrible thing is going to happen if x yz terrible thing is already happening that's my point like you could have surrogates who would go out and say that but it's not going to land for people who are watching it like in real time unfold on their phones and so yeah that's why we get the well I guess we need to buy tiktok and you know have instagram censor everything so my point is like even if like Hasan piker is out there begging people to vote for Kamala would have been a try would have been a try I guess I hear you no I hear you I hear you I hear you I'm just saying that like sitting in sitting in my boat it's like I would get calls all the time from political reporters who are like what are the demands of the never trump movement on Kamala and I was like nothing win that's the demand and like I don't you know there might have been a handful of might have been two or three commentary writers who or whatever who are extremely pro-israel that would have abandoned her if she said that but like Liz wasn't going to I you know what I mean like the people that were supporting her weren't going to because we were supporting her because we didn't like trump and so I get I get frustrated by that so then yeah it's mystifying to me like how she didn't see the importance of it given the stakes you know tanasi coats has said it better which is that it's all a proxy for this if you won't stand against genocide how do I trust you to stand up for democracy like and that's the point like you have to convince people that you are worth voting for and you have to do something to earn that you like you just ah it's a it's a fact that there are people in the country that need to be convinced like you could say that you don't like that that they that they should already be convinced by the terribleness of the opponent but it is a fact and if that's how I feel it is how you feel and throughout history there are there's a chunk of people who do not fit in that category there always will be and you can't hector them to be otherwise you have to either decide okay I'm gonna try to do something that will win their votes or I will find votes elsewhere but just like wishing that those kinds of people don't exist is not gonna is not gonna do it yeah I'm not wishing they don't exist I just think that the people that were that influence I just think you're overstating that I genuinely think you're overstating their influence and an ability to change those people's minds but then I think the counter is true like sure maybe I'm overstating their influence but then simultaneously like doing one event with Liz Cheney where they had a round table or whatever when she didn't even speak it also over states okay sometimes I feel like okay really like what's Liz Cheney's name ID in the country 30% like it was like you know that was the thing also you know what I mean I think that could work that cuts we embed symbolism in these moments that's why like is a two-minute speech from a Palestinian speaker like that big of a deal no she should absolutely she should of course not but like we embed it with extra significance so the fact that and I think that that actually that Liz then getting the stage not after not giving it what's that the convention she was not the convention not at the convention it's important getting a so some things people don't remember I just want to which I know if if common was like look the look the convention is booked and I heard from DNC people that are like that there were all these pedestrian reasons they couldn't do it because oh the climate yeah somebody or the Oregonians are gonna want somebody it's like okay fine then say we'll do an event next week with her sure and we'll I go to Georgia together you could do that and be like oh and and then the uncommitted first we're all right you know what annoying that you can't find two minutes in this like endless affair but okay you're gonna get on stage then fine like that's that's something but my point is like the second that Hassan if you don't give Hassan anything to tell his audience and he still then comes and said well look Trump's so bad he then stops being the person that's going to influence them like he's now a different person so now you need other more radical people to do the thing that you want them to do so there's a reality to these people's like views of the conflict that aren't going to be changed by influencers influencers don't have the influence that we think they then get it rejected by their audience I'm glad we did that that was a 14 minute I should put this behind the paywall 14 minute sickos only bonus discourse over the D.I.T. convention right I appreciate you taking me extra time my fighting list includes Yimbi it includes other Middle Eastern policy stuff includes the investor houses the big investor houses I'm gonna create a whole list for us we'll just do a little we'll figure something out it's on all right drop site news everybody go support it that's Ryan Grimm we're back tomorrow it's gonna be a good one I promise you we'll see y'all then peace