#1699 A Government Of the People, By the People, and Weaponized Against the People

At Columbia University, my understanding is, he's a recent graduate of one of their grad schools there, the School for International Public Affairs.

And on Saturday night, as he was returning from an Iftar dinner with his eight month old pregnant wife, Mahmoud, who is a green card holder, and his wife, who is an American citizen, were intercepted in their building by plain clothes officers who turned out to be with ICE and told that he was going to be taken into detention, in which according to his wife and his attorney, or one of his attorneys, he was taken with a dubiously legal warrant for his arrest.

It's unclear if that arrest was in fact signed by a judge. And also, the housing that the Khalil family lives in is Columbia University housing, raising a lot of questions about the extent to which Columbia is allowing ICE on their campus and their campus extending to its facilities. Khalil was in fact taken into custody. There had been confusion for a while on Sunday and early Monday about where in the ICE detention complex he was.

The ICE detainee locator function on their website did not immediately, as I understand it, register him, to his currently determined place of detention, which is an ICE facility in Louisiana.

It should be noted here that while a lot of concern for his whereabouts was using terms like "disappeared," and I think while those concerns about not being able to locate him make it valid to use that word, it's important to note that that is a lot more normal in the ICE detention complex circumstance, then I believe is generally known.

There is an opacity about where detainees are, for days after, and they're transferred from one place and before there arrival in another, and there is a lag on that that has persisted for so long that it's clearly by design to obscure access to what passes for due process in the immigration system. We're gonna leave that aside for a second.

Khalil has not only been taken into detention, but, according to Secretary Rubio, president Trump, and White House Press secretary Caroline Levitt, he faces deportation. He faces deportation and this extraordinary -- at first, I called it detention, then DHS started calling it an arrest, so I'll use that term -- arrest without presenting or feeling the need to present any evidence that Mahmoud Khalil has done anything violent, has broken any laws of the United States or anything like that.

Instead, what they said was that Khalil was arrested because of "activities" -- this is a term the Department of Homeland Security used that we'll unpack in a second, but it's important to put this out -- "activities aligned to a banned terrorist organization," in this case, meaning Hamas. That's an ominous construction that we can get into in a moment.

But before we get there, it also became clear and of all places, it was Barry Weiss's The Free Press that I saw report this first, that the White House said that they did not take him into custody and attempt to defend that custody because they're accusing him of having violated any law, that they are instead relying on national security authorities, which means in this case, as they will seek to apply them, terrorism authorities, and that is an exceptionally dangerous moment

for everyone in this country, regardless of their politics and regardless even of their citizenship status. This is a moment of unbridled lawlessness and it's one where it makes it really important to refer to Mahmoud Khalil as what he is, which is right now a political prisoner of the United States. On Saturday, Trump used the order to deport 137 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, claiming they were all members of Tren de Aragua, a gang which Trump has labeled a terrorist organization.

The deportation flights came despite a temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said, quote, “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. Those people need to be returned to the United States,” he said. But the Trump administration appeared to ignore the order and allowed the planes to continue to El Salvador. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, tweeted, “Oopsie…

Too late.” The comment was then retweeted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House communications director Steven Cheung. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, quote, “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft … full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” she said. We’re joined now by Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.

On Saturday, he argued the motion that led to the temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from removing the immigrants from the U.S. using the Alien Enemies Act. Can you respond what the Trump administration said, that this judge doesn’t have the right to stop these people from being deported? This is a very, very dangerous statement. I think we’re on very dangerous ground, generally.

Federal courts have the right and the duty to police what the executive branch is doing, if they violate the law. And that’s exactly what’s happening here, is this is ultimately a separation-of-powers case, as you were talking about with the congressman before. Congress could not have been clearer.

They’re granting this authority to the president — I mean, it’s over 200 years ago, but granting this authority to the president, only — only — if there’s a foreign government or foreign nation involved. That’s not what’s going on here. So the president has overstepped the authority Congress has given him, so it’s creating a classic separation-of-powers question. The federal courts have to be able to say, “You have overstepped the

law.” So, federal courts can review whether the Alien Enemies Act is being used illegally, and they have to. In terms of defying the court order and sending the planes anyway and not turning them around, you know, we’re trying to get to the bottom of that. The government filed what they called a clarification notice yesterday, that left more questions than it answered.

And so, we filed something at 2:15 in the morning last night asking the court to order the government to file sworn declarations stating whether they had defied the court’s order by not turning around planes after the court issued the order. In both cases, the federal court is on solid, established ground to review what the administration is doing. Didn’t the same thing happen with the Brown assistant professor? She is from India. She had been in this country for years.

And she was coming from — rather, she is from Lebanon. She was visiting family. And she was deported when a judge said no. Yeah, so, I’m not involved in that case, so I don’t know the specifics, but I know that there are serious allegations there, and the judge is looking into it and is very concerned. So, you know, we hope that the administration is not outwardly, explicitly defying court orders and claiming they have the right to do that.

That would put us on — you know, one step further to what many people would view as a constitutional crisis, just deciding they are not going to listen to the federal courts. So, you know, we will try and get to the bottom of what’s going on in the Alien Enemies Act case. We’ll see what the government files, what the court does, you know, and we’ll leave it there for the moment. But all the indications look like they defied the court order.

But the bigger question, as you’ve noted, is: Can the Alien Enemies Act now be used? It’s only been used three times in our country’s history, all during

Lee Gelernt, can you also talk about the ACLU’s work fighting Trump’s use of Guantánamo to hold immigrants? On Friday, you argued on behalf of foreign nationals the Trump administration is trying to send to Guantánamo. Now, it looks like they have cleared people from Guantánamo at this point. And I’d like to ask if you know why.

And is El Salvador, this supermax prison that is run by the president, a Trump ally, where gross human rights violations have taken place — has this new prison in El Salvador become — has this prison in El Salvador become the new Guantánamo? Yeah, well, thanks for asking about that, Amy. You know, as you mentioned, I argued the Alien Enemies Act case on Saturday. But the day before, I argued the Guantánamo case in a long, long hearing.

And ultimately, the judge decided not to rule for us, only because Guantánamo had been cleared out at that point, and there was no imminent — at least imminent indication to him that people were being sent back to Guantánamo. It’s very coincidental that every time we’re going to go before a federal judge on Guantánamo, they clear it out. So I think that the litigation is having the effect of forcing them to back down in a way. And so, we’ll see if they send people back there.

But your point about is El Salvador the new Guantánamo? It may be. And I hope not, because as bad as Guantánamo is, sending these Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison is really going to put them in immediate harm. I mean, we stressed that to the judge, and the judge, fortunately, understood that and acted quickly. And as many of you have probably seen, there was a video released of how the men were treated when they got to El Salvador.

And I think that only reinforces that the judge was correct to act quickly. I think that there’s probably going to be, if this — if this Alien Enemies Act invocation is upheld, anybody can be designated an alien enemy, because the government is making the dangerous argument that federal courts can’t review, so any immigrant can then find themselves in a Salvadoran prison. You know, we will try to stop this, obviously, and we need those men to be brought back if the court order was defied.

And is the U.S. responsible if they are abused there in Salvador? I mean, this goes to Democratic and Republican presidents of the United States in charge of Guantánamo — right? — and the whole call for Guantánamo to be closed, is that it’s used as an extrajudicial place where people can be sent, and it’s not clear who’s in charge of them. But that’s the same with Salvador. Once they’re put into this prison, who’s responsible? Does the U.S. bear any more responsibility?

Well, I think the U.S. always bears responsibility if they illegally deport people and then they’re ultimately put in danger and harm. You know, we’ll see how the court reacts to this, if in fact they defied the court order. But I think the key for us, going forward, is that no one else is sent, and we also try and deal with the people who were sent, to get them back any way we can, especially if the court order was defied.

But yeah, the United States is under strict obligations not to send anybody to be persecuted or tortured anywhere. It would have been bad enough if these people were sent to Venezuela, because they were fleeing danger there and have asylum claims, you know, most of them that we know, or at least our named plaintiffs. We obviously don’t know all the people, because the government is doing it in secret. But absolutely, it’s the government’s obligation not to send people to persecution or torture.

There’s no question, in these Salvadoran prisons, these people are in imminent danger. Are nonviolent protestors now labeled terrorists? Really? Corporations are trying to use the Patriot Act in ways that have nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden, because the Patriot Act gives transnational corporations the power to snuff out the activism of anybody who opposes them.

Terrorism, as it is commonly considered, is the use of violence against civilians to achieve any number of political ends: the destruction of the federal government, the overturning Roe v Wade, the restoration of a caliphate. If you try to kill people or succeed in killing people for a political purpose, you're a terrorist. If you blow up the Alfred P. Murra Federal Building and Kill 168 civilians like Tim McVeigh, you've committed an act of terrorism. Seems pretty self-explanatory, right?

Ehhh, not according to TransCanada Corp, the Canadian-owned energy conglomerate that is the backer of the Keystone XL Pipeline extension. A new set of documents obtained by a progressive group, it's called Bold Nebraska, shows that this foreign corporation is encouraging American law enforcement agencies to treat anti-pipeline protestors as if they were terrorists. Yes, terrorists.

The documents which Bold Nebraska got a hold of through a FOIA request -- Freedom of Information Act request -- were part of a briefing given to Nebraska law enforcement agents about the, quote, "emerging threat" end quote of groups like Tar Sands Blockade and Rainforest Action. And what are the terrorist activities that TransCanada is so concerned about? They include things like monkey wrenching, tree sitting, and tying yourself to a construction vehicle with a device called a Dragon Lock.

If this seems familiar, it should, because what groups like Tar Sands Blockade are engaging in is classic civil disobedience. This is not terrorism, but this foreign corporation, trans Canada, wants American law enforcement agents to start looking at it like it is. By far, the most damning document obtained by Bold Nebraska urges Nebraska authorities to consider using, quote, "state or federal anti-terrorism laws prohibiting sabotage or terroristic acts against

critical infrastructures." End quote. Another is TransCanada thinks American police should treat blockading construction vehicles just like blowing up a bus in downtown DC. And I would add, they think that doing anything to harm a pipeline that's taking oil down to the Gulf Coast so it can be refined and exported is somehow "critical infrastructure." I don't see how you can justify that definition.

Now, on the other hand, if a group of Tar Sands Blockades activists were in fact planning to bomb TransCanada's Calgary Alberta headquarters or assassinate a CEO, God forbid, then they would absolutely be terrorists. But right now they're just protestors or vandals, and should not be treated as terrorists. So what makes TransCanada think it can get the American police to treat people sitting in trees like Muhammad Atta?

The Patriot Act. The US Legal Code definition of terrorism was expanded to include a new meaning of domestic terrorism by Congress in 2001.

This new definition considers domestic terrorism as, quote, "activities that involve acts dangerous to human life, that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce civilian population;" -- I don't see the word corporation in there -- "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily

within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." End of sentence. According to the ACLU, this definition, this is a verbatim quote from the ACLU, quote: "This definition is broad enough to accompany the activities of prominent activists, campaigns and organizations." End quote.

In other words, given the right lawyer, TransCanada can convince a federal judge that monkey wrenching or tying oneself to a construction vehicle is dangerous to human life and intended to intimidate a civilian population.

We already know, thanks to Edward Snowden, that our government has used the broad powers of the Patriot Act to amass a large collection of American citizens' telephone records, something think that even one of its authors, Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner has said, goes beyond what he thinks was its original intent. Do we really want to give corporations this sort of power to misuse our criminal justice system?

Our founders envisioned a society in which all were held accountable to and by the law, not a society in which vague and overly broad statutes empower foreign private corporations to persecute American activists. So bottom line, let's repeal the Patriot Act, not only to preserve our civil liberties, and not only to protect our democratic republic from the predation of transnational corporations, but to protect our right to protest. "Calling Trump corrupt and a threat to America are not opinions.

They are objective statements of fact. I never expected to reach this point when I became a journalist 47 years ago, I did not pursue opinion journalism for a reason. My model was my father, Richard Harwood, who built his stellar Washington Post career on fearless reporting and news analysis. "But Donald Trump is different. He has gained power by catering to his party's darkest impulses and his own. So I've become quite comfortable asserting these facts.

Donald Trump is a racist, a grifter, and a crook. He is a liar, and a cruel one. He governs as an authoritarian, not as a leader of a democracy. He weakens America and its global standing. "I once could not have dreamed of describing a president this way, but the truth remains the highest journalistic value, and those objective realities sit in plain sight." End quote.

In a similar vein, First Amendment scholar Maryanne Franks argues that in an era of disinformation, access to the truth and the promise of the First Amendment have become even more muddled and untenable. In the face of Trump's encroaching authoritarianism, Franks argues that what is needed is fearless speech, speech which boldly speaks truth to power. Franks writes, quote, "Fearless speech has three fundamental characteristics. It is sincere. It is critical. And it is courageous.

The fearless speaker seeks to hold those in power accountable, and she is undeterred by the risk of harm to herself that her speech creates. Fearless speakers use speech to challenge power and vindicate the rights of the oppressed. "In contrast to a reckless speech culture that fetishizes speakers who endanger others for selfish ends, a fearless speech culture valorizes speakers who endanger themselves for the collective good." End quote.

It feels like anybody saying anything that is not in line with governmental thinking today, the bar has been lowered now. We're all practitioners of fearless speech, at risk of being arrested, fired, exiled, or, what have you. I think it's certainly true that we're all now at risk.

I don't know if necessarily everybody is now speaking fearlessly, but certainly the stakes for even mildly disagreeing or even accurately pointing out reality, the stakes have certainly gotten higher, and it certainly is a testament to just how far we have fallen down the authoritarian rabbit hole. So the other side of your argument, though, is that we should be more fearless in our speech? We have these protections and we must use them?

Well, honestly, the argument is to say that the reason why we have to be fearless in times like this is because we don't necessarily have those protections. We have told ourselves as Americans that we, because of the First Amendment, we would never end up in a moment like the one we're in right now, where people are being disappeared because of things that they have said.

Vague accusations are being made about people simply because they happen to fit a certain kind of profile that's been dehumanized for the last several years. But no one should have to be fearless in order to speak up and say the truth. But the most important thing for any democracy, any kind of society that actually does believe in equality, is to be able to speak out against the people in power. We have to be able to criticize those who have power over us.

And we should be able to do that without any cost to our liberty. Unfortunately, that is not the case, but that means that it's more important now than ever for us to be able to do that. John, you and I have both come up in a world largely surrounded by business and economics journalism. Interesting, didn't always require the greatest profile in courage to do it. But things have evolved for both of us.

We've both been in situations now where we've had to say things -- you articulated it very well in your column -- that I never imagined myself having to talk about or criticize or hold to account. But that is the job we must do in the media, and there's a lot of pressure on us not to do it. That's right. And a lot of pressure coming from media ownership. Jeff Bezos, we've seen the steps that he's taken to erode the reputation and practice of the Washington Post.

But look, I think in line with what your Wesleyan president said a few minutes ago, this is a war on civil society, and everybody in civil society needs to stand up to it. That includes business people. Sometimes business people have difficulty sorting the short term, which, oh, he's gonna give me a tax cut, versus the long term, he's going to destroy the rule of law and undercut business conditions in the United States. And so far we haven't seen them do that.

In terms of journalists, we're one element of civil society. I don't exaggerate our influence. We have some influence, less than we used to. And I don't even purport that if everybody chose the same blunt descriptors that I did for Donald Trump, it would make all that much difference. But I'm compelled to do it because it's true. And I think... I can't do anything other than describe accurately what I'm seeing and some of the parallels are really horrific.

The first time, Ali, I ever encountered an authoritarian government was when I went to South Africa and covered the unrest against apartheid. And you saw the secret police in South Africa seizing anti-apartheid activists, taking 'em someplace where people didn't know where they were, never really charging them or coming up with charges.

And now it, it is not surprising to me to see Donald Trump doing the same thing with that graduate student at Columbia, eight months pregnant wife, and they ship him down to Louisiana and they don't even know for a while where he is. These are not American values in action. They're the antithesis of it. And Mary Anne, that in particular is an interesting situation.

'cause not only is, they've not charged him with anything, they've used some obscure provision in which the Secretary of State himself has determined that this man's mere presence in the United States is some sort of threat to American society. Putting that aside, there is a university involved.

And to the extent that the media is not all of civil society and universities are not all of civil society, when it comes to threats of authoritarianism and the diminishment of democracy in history, when universities and journalism cave, society finds it easier to cave. Absolutely. This is why we need courage now more than ever. These institutions are under attack. This is what is happening to them. What is happening to universities like Columbia and others is completely unjustified.

It is the exercise of fascistic tendencies. But they have to resist it, because they have more power than most individuals. They certainly have more power than their students. They need to stand up for their students. They need to stand up for their communities. They need to stand up for their mission, and say that we are not going to cave in this kind of pressure again.

They shouldn't have to make those kinds of sacrifices, but they need to when they have that kind of institutional power and privilege. But let me ask you, Mary Anne. Some universities have talked about institutional objectivity or institutional neutrality, or not taking positions on things that are not core to their mission. But what the government is doing to Columbia is they've asked them to take one of their departments and put it under some sort of stewardship or receivership.

It's unbelievable that the government should have a role in a private university. Sure, they fund research, as well they should. But how do you explain to people how slippery a slope this is, how dangerous this is for Columbia or any university to accept that that's okay. I think this is really, very telling about the moment that we're in, that it's not just what is happening, it is the under reaction to what is happening.

That there are so many people, the average person who isn't necessarily an extremist, who isn't someone who embraces fascism, but does not seem to understand just how seriously under threat all of us are. It may seem when you attack Columbia University that you're just attacking a bunch of elites, but you're attacking the idea of knowledge. You're attacking the idea of criticism. You're attacking the idea of independent research.

You're attacking people's jobs, their livelihoods, the research that can save people's lives. And there is this fundamental disconnect, I think, between the average person and the kind of representation of what's happening that makes us not understand that this is a direct threat to all of us. They are threatening knowledge, they're threatening curiosity, they're threatening independent inquiry. I got to meet the scientists at NOAA and the National Weather Service.

Not only have these people created one of the most advanced weather prediction and climate analysis systems on the planet, they literally took me up in a goddamn plane and flew me into the eye of a hurricane. Now, this is one of the wildest moments of my entire life, but for them it's another Tuesday at the office.

Because every time there is a hurricane off the American coast, there is literally a plane of government scientists flying into it over and over again to measure how strong it is and where it's going. And then they share that data with the public, with us, to protect us from these extreme weather events so we can plan evacuations and save lives.

In fact, all of the data from the National Weather Service's enormous network of sensors and scientists that are working on our behalf 24/7 is shared for free with the public. When your local weather person gives you the forecast on the news, they are literally reading government weather data produced by a government scientist who is paid for by your tax dollars. And I just wanna underline here what a big deal it is in human history that we can now predict the weather this way.

Do you know how amazed people from a few centuries ago would be that you wake up every morning and learn with a high degree of accuracy whether or not a flood is coming to kill you? That is wizard shit. These scientists literally predict the future and then they give those predictions to people who need it. Farmers, airplane pilots, moms planning outdoor birthday parties, and you, for free. And now a billionaire high on ketamine and his 19-year-old freak henchmen just fired thousands of them.

They even fired some of the fucking hurricane hunters I mean, look, if I seem a little incensed about this, it's because this topic is personal to me. Not just because I met these scientists and fell in love with what they do, but because people who are important to me literally had their lives saved a few months ago by National Weather Service meteorologists who accurately predicted that LA was about to catch on fire. These fires destroyed entire neighborhoods.

But luckily, very few lives were lost, in large part because the evacuation alerts went out in time because we knew the fires were coming. The people who work for NOAA and the National Weather Service aren't there to make money for some TV station or weather app. They have exactly one job to save our lives and improve America by accurately predicting the weather. These scientists are real people who do remarkable work and they deserve to be honored, not kicked to the fucking curb.

And the same goes for the scientists at the National Institutes of Health, which has also received massive cuts with nearly 1200 science workers laid off. Now, if you don't know what the NIH is, let me just fill you in. It's a government institute that happens to be the largest and most important medical science organization in the world, and the scientists who work there, the people who just lost their jobs, really give a shit about saving lives. Like Emily, who worked on cancer cures.

Several close family members of mine either have passed from cancer or survived cancer. I'm just worried people aren't gonna get the treatments they need. People are going to lose their lives. This is going to waste years of data collection, at the worst make these experiments invalid. And Katie Sandlin, a first generation college graduate who moved to DC from Alabama for her dream job as a genomics educator at the NIH.

And I've just always thought that hard work pays off, you know, and it just, it doesn't feel like that right now. Watching these wonderful nerds be fired is simply heartbreaking, not just because they're the best and brightest of America and Elon's just loaded them into a wood chipper, but also because of all the cures we are going to miss out on if these cuts aren't reversed. The NIH is responsible for countless revolutionary treatments.

NIH scientists literally invented chemotherapy, which has saved multiple family members of mine from cancer. They found a treatment for sickle cell anemia and were even working on a cure. They developed a blood test for Alzheimer's. They do research that helps people suffering from opioid addiction, asthma, and traumatic brain injuries. No matter who you are, you or someone you know's life was saved or improved by the NIH.

And, call me naive, but even in my most cynical moments, I would've thought that everybody, even Elon Musk and Trump, would agree that we should keep trying to cure cancer and heart disease. I mean, after all these two s eat so much, McDonald's heart disease is gonna get them eventually. But okay, some might argue that the government shouldn't be doing that research, that it's too inefficient, and that for-profit businesses should do that fundamental research instead. But let's be fucking real.

Last time I checked, most Americans agree that the unending lust for profit is the problem with the healthcare industry. For-profit companies aren't gonna invest billions to research the cures for rare diseases. There's no money in it. Instead, they'll just research how to squeeze more money out of us and how to give better butt implants to rich people. And yes, I enjoy looking at a hot rich lady with a BBL, but I'd like to not die of cancer while I do it.

For-profit companies aren't going to do fundamental climate research like NOAA does because climate change is being caused by for-profit companies. You can't even argue that we are spending too much on science and that we need to cut back because before these cuts, federal funding for science was already at a 25 year low. It was literally just over 1% of federal spending, which is crazy because government funded scientific research basically prints money.

After World War II, American policymakers realized that the key to prosperity was science and technological innovation. So they poured funding into science, and the results literally made America the superpower it is today. Since 1945, science and technology have driven 85% of the economic growth in America. Every dollar spent by the NIH turns into more than twice as much economic value by creating jobs and supporting infrastructure.

Scientific research is one of the few investments you can make that actually produces more financial and human value for everyone. Even Republican lawmakers should know this because their state economies also depend on science funding. Before these cuts, Texas was receiving $1.9 billion in NIH grants that directly supported almost 30,000 jobs. And those jobs generate an estimated 112,000 private sector jobs and all of that put together turned into over $6 billion for the state of Texas.

Is that really something that we wanna cut from the federal budget? In Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is the state's largest employer. And it doesn't just pay those salaries from tuition. It relies on over $400 million in grants from the NIH. These universities in red states are so deeply affected by Trump and Elon's science cuts they're already rescinding graduate students' acceptance letters because they can't afford to invest in their research anymore.

Research hospitals are one of the only parts of a university that makes money besides the football team. Even if every dollar we spent on science didn't pay us back many times over, which it does, we shouldn't even have to put a dollar value on it because science is literally more important than money. Science, just to remind you, once again, is the process by which humans understand the universe around us in order to improve all of our lives, all of human society.

And that knowledge gives us power. America's global dominance as a superpower has largely been based on our lead in science. Everything from the Manhattan Project that created thermonuclear weapons to the Human Genome Project that helped us understand our own biology. So, disemboweling our country's science capability to save money, literally just makes America poorer and weaker.

It makes all of human society worse and yet the destruction of science was literally called for in the right wing blueprint for Trump's second term. Project 2025. Why? Why would project 2025's right wing authors wanna make America smaller, stupider, and weaker. Ask yourself this. Why exactly is science the first part of government spending that Elon and Trump are going after?

I mean, they could have cut the military budget, they could have cut the agriculture budget, they could have replaced the resolute desk with a "Klarg" from IKEA. But no, they started with science. Why? It's because they literally hate science even more than they hate a trans mouse who plays women's sports. Trump and a sanctions regime on Venezuela played a very big role in the Venezuelan economy tanking even further at a time when they needed aid. Okay?

They said, Maduro's a bad guy: fair, sure, whatever. Okay? And use that as a justification to make the economy scream. And the economy did scream. And as a direct consequence of that instability many Venezuelans escaped Venezuela. They went to Columbia. They went to other Latin American countries, and a lot of them also came to the United States of America.

Trump, politically, as he has done in the past, as the American administrations have done in the past with Cubans who are escaping Cuba, offered Venezuelans Temporary Protective Status. He said, you guys are political refugees. We are anti-communist. You are anti-communist. Come to America, we'll use you. That's usually the goal for American Empire. They bring in a bunch of reactionaries or bring in a bunch of, people who are escaping political repression and used them as a propaganda tool.

So that's what we did. The American government did that, and in the process, Donald Trump was such a fan of offering Temporary Protective Status to the Venezuelan refugees that came into the United States of America, that he actually extended it on his way out.

And then Joe Biden became president for four years, and now he turned around and is revoking the TPS in this insanely violent matter, deciding that every single Venezuelan on US soil that has documentation, mind you, documented or undocumented, but virtually all of the Venezuelans on US soil are documented. They have the paperwork, they got Temporary Protective Status. Understand that they have the documents. These are not undocumented migrants, okay?

They have the documents, or they're in the process of getting their documentation as in their court documents. The Trump administration turned around and black bagged a bunch of Venezuelans that they had actually welcomed inside of the US boundaries, and in a pure political ploy, decided to ship them to the El Salvador anti terror prison unit, CECOT.

We've watched the El Salvador CECOT prison before on this broadcast because, a bunch of right-wing, Mexican YouTubers went there and glazed Bukele and also, the prison structure, and talked about how awesome it is that they were like [unintelligible] people there, lights on 24/7, another gross violation of human rights. In El Salvador, "we've been under a state of exception since 2021, meaning we have no constitutional rights. People can be jailed without committing a crime

or ever seeing a judge. Bukele has shut down all transparency, so any Venezuelan sent here can end up in a concentration camp with no records or oversight". Yes, I know the prison system in El Salvador right now due to MS 13 gang activity that was truly violent, okay?, which is another American issue that we basically gave to El Salvador, but I'm not gonna get into the history of that right now.

Having said that, because of the massive amounts of crime, caused by MS 13, which was born outta the US prison system, where we initially dumped El Salvadoran migrants that became radical in the California prison system. We, without telling the El Salvadoran government, deported those migrants to El Salvador, creating a network, a back and forth, for MS 13 to operate.

MS 13 became this like incredibly powerful gang as a direct consequence of us deporting El Salvadoran criminals from the California prison system, from MS 13 into El Salvador, without informing the government, without telling the El Salvador government that these guys were MS 13 gang members. You could say, sure thing, buddy. It's just the truth. Okay? It's just the truth. I'm not even talking about Venezuelan gangs right now.

I'm talking about MS 13 and how MS 13 became a thing, became like this internationally renowned gang. I'm not talking about Tren de Aragua. I'm talking about MS 13. Okay? Pick up the pace. Maybe you can accidentally learn a thing or two.

Nayib Bukele, who initially came into power with a fairly progressive ticket, okay?, who had a fairly progressive background, Nayib Bukele, he is literally of Palestinian descent, before he became this like weird cryptocurrency guy, he was actually seen as like, uh, part of the pink tide, the social democrat to socialist revolutionary figures that were winning a lot of elections all around Latin America. And then he quickly changed that attitude. He actually had a lot of rehabilitative programs.

Initially, when Nayib Bukele came into power, he had rehabilitative programs in mind. He was like, we have to do due process. We have to make sure that like we fix the underlying material conditions to make sure that crime can never manifest ever again. And then he became this monster. Okay? And yes, for those of you who don't know, there are a lot of Palestinians or people of Palestinian descent living in Latin American countries.

He came in and he implemented, he built this massive prison structure called CECOT, and he started doing dragnet operations, where if you are even 11 steps removed, okay?, without any care or consideration to how you became MS 13 adjacent, or MS 13 aligned, because MS 13, the way that they work, they'll go to a village or they'll go to a town and they'll basically say, we're gonna kill your mother and your daughter if you don't work with us.

Like basically shopkeepers, anyone and everyone that they could claim was actually MS 13, they just grabbed, black bagged, and put in front of a judge, sometimes 200 people at a time, 200 people sitting in front of a judge wearing a balaclava as the judge decides on all 200 being a part of MS 13 in real time like that. And once you have been decided, once you have been considered an MS 13 gang member, it's over for you. That's what they did.

That's what they did, and that's what they've been doing in El Salvador. Now, Bukele is saying you can use our concentration camps for the people that you're deporting from the United States of America. Yeah. 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015. Okay? They've gone mostly to other Latin American countries. Some of them have gone to Spain. Some of them have made their way all the way to the United States of America.

The largest population went to Columbia, obviously, as I talked about before. This is a major destabilizing force. When you have 7.7 million refugees, you have a refugee crisis, and it did not have to be this way. Where is this? I remember reading this article about Bukele a few years ago.

They interviewed a mother whose severely autistic son was abducted by the cops, and days after searching for him, found out he was sent to Supermax, where they don't even feed you consistently unless your family pays. "Even before he started the slave labor business, I could take one look at this guy and guess he was already embezzling from the treasury. Not that we needed the help, but American prestige will crater even further when everyone figures out the obvious here".

Yeah. Nayib Bukele, who has been yelled at by Donald Trump, ironically enough, on numerous occasions, which is why I always thought it was strange, Donald Trump would go on CPAC and be like, 'Nayib Bukele, he sucks. He's dumping out his prisons,' like probably because he doesn't know anything about Latin America. He probably thinks El Salvador is Venezuela or something. Okay? And he would constantly shit on Bukele who's also a crypto guy, is now working with him because he said, Hey, it's great.

Send us all of your deportees. Will use them as slave labor in our concentration camps. That's where we're at right now. I need you to understand how insane this is. I'm not being hyperbolic at all. Okay? This is not hyperbole. We are here, we are officially in Nazi Germany status. But unlike Nazi Germany's concentration camps being maintained directly by people of German descent or the foreign legions or whatever, we are outsourcing the concentration camp to El Salvador.

Now, watch this, watch this video. Watch this promotional video from Nayib Bukele and tell me that this isn't Nazi shit, okay?. Nayib Bukele says, "Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan Criminal Organization Tren de Aragua arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year, renewable. The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.

Over time, these actions combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program will help make our prison system self sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year. On this occasion, the US has also sent 23 MS 13 members wanted by Salvadoran Justice, including two ringleaders. One of them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure.

This will help us finalize intelligence gathering, go after the last remnants of MS 13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime, but this time we are helping our allies, making our prison system self sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence". They're making their prison system self sustainable by doing slave labor, okay?

They're literally, we're doing slave trade for Venezuelans who have not gotten any due process whatsoever. Venezuelans that have not, this is a work camp, okay? I don't know what words to use. It is not hyperbolic at all when I say this. We are, we're there. We're here. Okay? This is it. This is the first step of the final act of the darkest chapter of American Empire. We've just heard clips starting with American Prestige focusing on the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. Democracy Now!

discussed Trump's deportation of Venezuelans against a court order. The Thom Hartmann Program looked at the history of the Patriot Act and the practice of calling nonviolent protestors terrorists. Velshi held a conversation about the rising authoritarianism in the US. Factually! With Adam Conover highlighted the detrimental impact of destroying the country's science capacity.

And Hasan Piker laid out the perverse way US policy impacted Venezuelans before and after they gained temporary protected status in the country. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes featuring our team of producers and enjoy all of our shows without ads.

To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.

And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. And if you have questions or would like your comments included in the show, our upcoming topics that you can chime in on include the outright assault on the LGBTQ community, and a deep dive into the shifting dynamics of the Democratic Party, whose dynamics definitely need shifting.

So get your comments and questions in now for those topics or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or you can simply email me to [email protected]. Now as for today's topic, I was reminded of an experience I had years ago when attending a march against police violence. I wasn't a leader, or a speaker.

I had no plan to take up any space aside from adding my body to the crowd. But as the march was just taking shape, one of the black organizers pulled my group to the front of the march and handed us the banner. And the reasons for this included optics. It's good to show that the march was multi-ethnic. You know, it's good for the cameras. The unfortunate truth is that the concerns of white people are simply taken more seriously than people of color.

And then finally, there's the cold hard truth about safety. Instances like this are where the rubber meets the road on privilege. Once again, the unfortunate truth is that angry passers by, inconvenienced motorists, and the police themselves were all less likely to inflict violence on me than if the march had been led by one of the black activists organizing the event. And no one there wanted for those things to be true.

But it was smart to recognize them as true for the sake of the movement and the safety of the activists. Now, as the weaponization of the government revs up, some individuals and groups are going to be targeted first. We know this. It's clear as day. And it is best for the resistance to this tyranny that we recognize the truth of that. And when some groups are targeted first, the flip side of that coin is that some people are inherently safer. They won't be primarily targeted.

They have more legal avenues to protect themselves, like having full citizenship rather than a green card. And then of course some simply have bigger support networks who can help them out of trouble should it come. Now I understand it's a touchy thing for a podcaster like me to sit behind a microphone and tell people that they need to go out and put their bodies on the line in the face of a tyrannical government. Everyone has to make their own choices about how to navigate this moment.

But number one, the more of us who stand together, the more protected we all are. And two, when those of us with the relative privilege to not be at the top of Trump's enemies list can use our position to guard the more vulnerable among us, we are collectively protected all the more. Now, what this looks like exactly is going to be different for every situation, but it's an idea that's worth remembering as we go forward together. And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics.

Section a free speech can be terrorism, followed by section B, opposing Trump can be terrorism, section C, the D-O-J-F-B-I, and the judiciary. And finally, section D, government function. And Marco Rubio followed up by declaring on, uh, ex formerly Twitter saying We will deport green card holders. And then Trump, of course, followed up with his own statement of declaration, um, stating that this is the first of many. Um, that will incur the, the same fate. Mara, what does that mean exactly?

Can we just break down? Because look, I'm a product of the war on terror. I've seen a lot, and at this point this does seem to be one of the most authoritarian and kind of terrifying moments. Of Unconstitutionality, Hamas aligned is their only accusation here. So what does that even entail to them? I mean, you said that it's just, it could be as loose as just someone calling for a ceasefire means that they're aligned with Hamas.

But, but really break that down because that's a lot of Trump supporters and a lot of the Trump administration is, is backing this decision by saying, look, he provided material support for terrorism. He was passing out leaflets that could be construed as supporting Hamas because it was pro-Palestine. What. Does that mean if green card holders are now going to be deported for simply expressing speech?

I think it would be helpful to put this really in the larger context of what the administration has said, um, what it has said it's going to do, and what it plainly is attempting to do when it comes to, uh, speech that is in support of Palestine speech that has opposed the US backed genocide in Gaza.

And from the beginning, the Trump administration with its first executive orders, uh, began laying out certain language indicating that they were going to be targeting people, um, based on their speech, based on, um, their advocacy. Um, they had language about coming after persons who they asserted were, um, seeking to overturn the culture. Upon which the Constitution was founded, just a straight out rallying cry to white supremacists.

And they were putting this in their, uh, context of their, uh, completely false presentation of. Basically apprehending terrorists in the United States, which is an effort to go after immigrants, undocumented people, and with a broad rush target. Um, all, both immigrants and, uh, organizations that are supporting immigrants in the United States as terrorists are supporting terrorists. We see this also then extended in the context of Palestine advocacy and those who have demanded a ceasefire.

So the administration. Has, uh, announced then in subsequent executive order on the 29th that it was, uh, in this combating antisemitism order, completely abusing as so many in the right wing have done, um, the term antisemitism, because of course we all understand and believe that antisemitism is at point. This is this continuing effort.

To equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but the administration is seeking to use that as a legal leverage point to then say both that anyone who is engaged in criticism of Israel or criticism of the US backed war on the Palestinian people and genocide. Is, uh, engaged in anti-Semitic activity. So they wanna use that, uh, to be able to both say that they're engaged in discriminatory conduct, but they wanna take it a step further.

And this is what we're starting to see, which is what was being foreshadowed when it comes to Mach wood. Khalil. What they are trying to do now is say that people who call for a ceasefire, people who have stood in solidarity with the right of Palestinians to have freedom and liberation and against. Oppression are somehow also quote aligned with Hamas. That was the language that the administration used, um, in response to the demands for freedom for Mahmud Khalil.

So what they're saying is that if you. As a person in the United States are calling for a ceasefire and if Hamas was also calling for a ceasefire, or if you are calling for freedom of liberation for the Palestinian people and Hamas is calling for freedom or liberation for the Palestinian people, that's somehow is a quote alignment that then labels someone in their mind, uh, potentially excludable. Of course it is not.

Of course, it is not excludable to believe those views to advocate for peace, but that's what they're trying to do. Well, I think this is the most dangerous part of this, is this Hamas alignment allegation based on nothing at all other than this tenuous, you know, link. That that essentially is rhetoric that could be similar in terms of calling for a ceasefire, calling for a cessation to massacres. Somehow you're aligned with Hamas.

If you're just a. Posing the genocide that we've all been witnessing on our phones for the last 15 months, and that's what makes this extraordinarily kind of a dystopian moment. I wanna comment on Khalil's character and why he was even a leader in the student movement. I'm gonna quote a fellow student activist Miriam, who posted quote Mahmud did everything that administrators claim they wanted from us. He was unmasked. He was extremely tactful with his words. He was kind patient.

Even with those who dehumanized him, he always stayed rational and calm. He was a lead negotiator precisely because of these qualities. He extended grace to those who didn't deserve it. The fact that the Trump administration did not actually single out someone who used inflammatory rhetoric. Or engaged in violence but actually singled out. Khalil, do you think this is a trial balloon, Mara? I mean, there's a lot hinge on this and, and is it an unprecedented case?

It is an unprecedented case, uh, to my knowledge. I mean, certainly if you go back and look at the crackdowns against the movement. The removal of persons like Emma Goldman and others in history we have, it is not un unprecedented to see the state use its authority, including the State Department and other, um, agencies use their authority against political movements in the United States in order to obstruct, to deport, to repress. Certainly could see that with, you know, Paul Robeson.

You can see that William worthy over and over again, the State Department tries to use, its, its controls, its powers to, uh, to target political activists. But certainly within our time we have seen nothing like this. It is completely unconstitutional. It is fundamentally a violation of the First Amendment in all respects for the administration to take speech.

Just because it opposes it ideologically and wrap it up and announce that it's terrorism, and then this incredible stretch of suggesting that there's some equal sign. Between speech in support of Palestinian people or speech that is opposing an extraordinary genocide and saying that that is somehow support for an FDO. It is not everyone who has read the Constitution or even heard of it, understands it is not the administration knows. That it is not, but this is part of their broader agenda.

In that same January 29th combating antisemitism order, they issued a fact sheet and the adjacent, the fact sheet that came along with it said explicitly that they intended to target, um, persons who were engaged in political speech or views that they labeled as leftist, left wing or anti-American, and they were wrapping that all up.

In the same context as as this attack on people who have been, um, issuing statements, marching, rallying, organizing the brave students on campus who are demanding divestment from genocide. This is their effort. In a really despotic manner to try and crack down on dissent in the United States.

And their first target is of course, the Palestine movement because they know and hope that people will turn away, that people who don't care about this will accept a demonization of the Palestine movement. But they're also doing the exact same thing to the immigrant rights movement. They are doing this in their own way with the environmental justice movement, calling them domestic terrorists.

Across the board, they're abusing and misusing authority that relates to national security or terrorism in order to target all those in the United States that they oppose, whose viewpoints they oppose. Because in truth, they know that the biggest threat to this authoritarian grab, what we're really witnessing is a, a coup in real time. This fundamental threat to basic democratic principles.

They know that the thing they have to worry about the most is dissent, is organization is the movement of the people. And if they can terrorize people, if they can threaten to arrest people, if they can threaten to jail people, they're hoping to fully suppress that speech and movements for justice. So, most of the investigations focus on colleges' partnerships with a nonprofit called The PhD Program. What is that? And what exactly is administration all at alleging here?

So The PhD Project is this effort that is designed to get more professors from underrepresented backgrounds into business schools. So, colleges, student bodies are much more diverse than they used to be. So about half of undergraduates are students of color. Most faculty members are white. And so colleges have been trying to get more underrepresented groups represented among the faculty.

Now, the Trump administration believes that these diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, these DEI efforts, are illegal because they consider race. They treat people differently based on race. That's their argument. And so the Trump administration sees The PhD Project, which is working with these 45 universities, as part of the illegal DEI that it's trying to crack down on. That's its argument.

Obviously, a lot of people would say these DEI programs are not illegal, they're just an important part of creating more welcoming environments on campuses. And so most of the schools are being targeted because of that. There are seven other colleges that are listed here that are being investigated for awarding what the administration calls impermissible race-based scholarships. Sarah, have the universities responded to any of these allegations?

At this point, the universities have said, we are reviewing the allegations. We will cooperate with any federal investigations. They haven't said a lot specifically so far. We have seen a range of these scholarship programs targeted in the past, so this has been something going on for some time. And some universities have actually stopped offering certain kinds of scholarships or have changed the way that they are awarded.

But these scholarships typically are designed to help low-income students from particular backgrounds pay for their college tuition. So that's what they have traditionally been designed for, and that is now — that's now being targeted by the Trump administration, who believes those efforts are illegal. We have also seen the administration more specifically target Columbia University.

That was the site of a lot of pro-Palestinian protests that began after the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel's war in Gaza. This week, the administration canceled some $400 million in federal funding to Columbia. What does a cut of that size mean to a school like Columbia? Yes, so Columbia does receive a lot more in federal funding than just that $400 million. But, just to be clear, it's really impactful.

So we have already seen that these cuts are affecting National Institutes of Health research on, for example, opioids, on malaria vaccine. So these are really impactful research projects, as the university sees it. And so it's already having an impact. And so you might think, oh, Columbia is a university with a billion-dollar endowment. Can't they just pull from that endowment and backfill this funding? That's not how it works. So, for a university like Columbia, even this is a big deal.

We have also seen, at Columbia, this is, of course, the headlines about Mahmoud Khalil, because he was a former student there. Federal immigration agents arrested him on campus housing there. He helped to lead some of those protests. And he's a legal permanent resident they're now trying to deport. We have seen another arrest of a foreign student at Columbia as well.

How are our universities now kind of navigating this moment, when federal immigration authorities could potentially come onto campus or campus housing and arrest members of their community? Yes, so this is a new concern for colleges. At least, in the past decade, ICE has not regularly carried out deportation activities in these sensitive locations, such as schools and college campuses.

So universities have been, for the past few months — their communities are concerned about potential immigration enforcement. Universities have been sending out messages to their communities, here are the protocols for dealing with ICE.

But what we're seeing at Columbia is really the first example of ICE agents actually coming to a campus, in some cases, like we have seen recently this week, with a warrant, with warrants, and what happens to — when universities have to respond to those situations. And so I think a lot of campus communities, especially at Columbia, international students, undocumented students, they're very concerned right now.

The investigations they announced just today, the threat of pulling federal funds is the through line here. And we have already seen the impact that can have at Johns Hopkins, for example. That's a leader, of course, in scientific research. They just announced that they're slashing 2,000 jobs after the university lost more than $800 million in federal grants. Those are unrelated to the efforts to go after DEI programs, though, right?

This is all, I would say, part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to try to change the policies and practices on college campuses. The Johns Hopkins cuts are more related to the USAID situation. And so that is a little bit different. But it's all part of this larger effort by the Trump administration to try to have universities in alignment with his agenda.

That's really what is underlying everything that we're seeing here with DEI programs, with these protesters and potential deportations of protesters. That's what we're seeing here. On Friday, President Trump spoke at the Department of Justice and threatened to take revenge on his political enemies. Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the department of injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over, and they are never going to come back.

They’re never coming back. … So, now as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred. In a moment, we’ll be joined by Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, but first let’s turn to a part of his response to Trump’s speech. Raskin spoke outside the Department of Justice Friday.

In the 18th century, the American Revolution overthrew the kings, the lords and the feudal barons to establish a nation where we would have a nation where all would be equal under the law. As Tom Paine put it, in monarchies, the king is law, but in the democracies, the law is king. But, amazingly, we now have a president in the 21st century who believes he’s a king, and he believes that the king is the law once again.

The first seven weeks of this radical experiment in neomonarchism has been a disaster for the rule of law and for the Constitution and for the First Amendment. There have been 120 federal cases filed against Donald Trump all over the country, and he has lost already in more than 40 courtrooms across the land, where temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions have been issued against his lawless attack on the Constitution.

That was Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland speaking outside the DOJ on Friday, responding to Trump’s speech. He’s joining us now from Takoma Park, Maryland. Congressmember Raskin is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor. During Trump’s first presidency, Raskin served as a floor manager and the Democrats’ lead prosecutor for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6th Capitol insurrection.

He was also a member of the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. In January, Biden gave preemptive pardons to Raskin and other members of the January 6th House committee. Earlier today, President Trump claimed the pardons are invalid because, he said, they were done by autopen. Congressmember Jamie Raskin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t we start there, with President Trump saying all the pardons that he issued that were done by autopen are invalid?

That would include you. Your response? First of all, thank you for having me, Amy, and that was the first time I got to hear a clip from our press conference. What you couldn’t hear there was the constant berating and heckling of MAGA counterprotesters who showed up. We were being drowned out by a guy with a bullhorn. I wanted to borrow his bullhorn, because we didn’t have a sound system with us. But I appreciate your running that clip where we went and appeared opposite Donald Trump.

So, but I had not seen that Donald Trump is claiming that the pardon rendered by President Biden was somehow illegitimate because of the kind of pen that was used. This sounds like classic Donald Trump stuff. You know, the pardons, of course, were necessary because of Trump’s promises to prosecute Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, less so the rest of us, but they had already made their moves against Liz Cheney.

And I have no reason to think that those were not valid any more than the humiliating and atrocious pardons that Donald Trump gave to nearly 1,600 insurrectionists, including violent felons who viciously attacked our police officers on January 6th. So, if you can talk about this almost unprecedented speech? It is very rare for a president to go to the Department of Justice and give a speech like this.

I think Clinton did around some anti-crime bill, which many would dispute was actually an anti-crime bill. Obama went to say goodbye to the attorney general. But to give an hour address naming names of targets, talking about the press as enemies of the people, if you can respond, overall, to what he said? Well, it was a typical rambling and hate-filled diatribe by Donald Trump.

No speech like that has ever taken place at the U.S. Department of Justice, which has existed since 1870, when it was set up to try to enforce the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution against the Ku Klux Klan and against white supremacists and insurrectionists and secessionists. But nobody has ever taken a sledgehammer to the traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement, on the one side, and presidential political will and power, on the other.

But here Trump made it clear that he views these people as his lawyers. They are reporting to him, according to his corrupt unitary executive theory. And far from staying out of the business of deciding who will be prosecuted and who will be let go, he’s going to superintend the whole machinery of the Department of Justice. I want to go to a clip from President Trump speaking at the Department of Justice.

I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

So, that is President Trump speaking at the Justice Department. Of course, he has sued ABC. He has sued CBS. He has sued The Des Moines Register. Because he has the backing of the wealthiest person on Earth, Elon Musk, he could do endless lawsuits. And whether or not they win, that’s not the point. But he could just wipe out one news institution after another, Congressmember Raskin.

Well, he’s obviously frustrated because he’s losing everywhere in court on everything from the birthright citizenship executive order, which is blatantly unconstitutional, to the spending freeze to the sacking of thousands of probationary employees. And so, he’s frustrated, so he says it’s got to be illegal for the media to be covering his defeats and to be trying to expose the various constitutional violations of his administration.

Of course, it’s completely lawful and protected by the First Amendment. And he’s just operating out of the authoritarian playbook, which says that the first thing you do when you get in is you crack down on the free press. And he’s been doing that in numerous ways. He’s been ordering the FCC to go after ABC, CBS, NBC, anybody who displeases him in any way. But he’s also been personally suing media entities.

There was a shakedown of $15 million against ABC because he was unhappy with coverage there. And now he’s got a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, not even because of anything they said about him, but because he thought that the coverage of Kamala Harris was too positive. It was about, right, a 60 Minutes interview, which in all news media you do an hour an interview, and you play 10 minutes, so things like her sneezing were taken out.

And he said that was used to affect the — try to use to affect the election. Of course, Fox News operates completely as an ideological arm of the Republican Party and of the Trump cult, and there’s nothing unconstitutional about that. You know, it’s totally fine for a newspaper entity to be endorsing Harris or Trump or what have you. So, he’s just absolutely confused on the point.

When you drill down on these supposed cases of assault, again, something that Politico in their coverage of Mahmoud Khalil referenced this, right? They vaguely alluded to assault on Jewish students. Nine times out of 10, this is what they mean.

They mean people who are actively supporting and again, they’ll say this, they’re pro-Zionist, pro-Israel factions who go, and you saw this in the most conspicuously on the UCLA campus, when the so-called counter-protesters started firing fireworks and lighting things on fire and assaulting people, some of whom actually were charged by the district attorney. These are pro-Israel, pro-Zionist, what Vanessa Redgrave called in her 1978 Oscar speech, Zionist hoodlums.

These are people who are there to fuck up people they view as being threatening to Israel and Israel security. This is not a protected ethnic class. This is an ideological support for a nation-state, and this is just constantly conflated in this coverage, and they’re not remotely the same thing. So for instance, since you mentioned UCLA, Adam, in a recent article from NBC News covering the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, there is this section buried midway through the article.

Quote, At UCLA, students gathered at Dickson Plaza on campus, where megaphones and rattling drums punctuated calls for Khalil’s release. This is what follows. Quote, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk announced Monday that the university would launch an “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism” that will include recommendations on how it can combat anti-Israel bias, he said in a message to the UCLA community.

“UCLA is at an inflection point,” Frenk said. “Building on past efforts and lessons, we must now push ourselves to extinguish antisemitism, completely and definitively.” End quote. Antisemitism being opposition to Israel and Israel’s policies. Right? I mean, it says it right there. Right. And they do this over and over again. None of these initiatives are about opposing genocide or opposing US military and state funding for the ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine.

That is, of course, we’re not going to see any initiatives to combat that. We just see the ongoing conflation of criticism of a nation-state that is committing crimes against humanity, horrific war crimes against a people, as being the same thing, synonymous with antisemitism.

And if you feel like this is driving you insane, or you feel like you’re losing your mind, you’re not alone, because this is how every single of these squishy, useless fucking university administrators, and of course, much of the so-called liberal media, or centrist media, is framing this. They’re framing this as an issue of antisemitism, when all they have is guilt by association, vague innuendo, and this War on Terror language.

I mean, so much is laundered through this terrorist, terrorist, terror, terror. Again, only certain groups can be terror. You can commit a genocide and drop 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings and kill tens of thousands of people, thousands of children, probably tens of thousands of children. And that’s not terrorism. Why we don’t know? We’re going to debate that later. That’s an academic question. Let’s just move on. Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Antisemitism, antisemitism.

Terror, terror, antisemitism, antisemitism, terror, terror, terror. Until you look up and you go, Wait, what are we even talking about anymore? Right? Like, what’s being adjudicated here? I can’t even keep track of what we’re talking about. Are we talking about the people starving in Gaza who’ve had their electricity and water cut off? That are in month 17 of complete destitution and annihilation? No, we’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about US support for that.

We’re talking about these alleged mushy feelings of a bunch of fucking college kids, which has nothing to do with anything. So let’s read the University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham. We’re going to read this whole statement. And the reason why is because I think this kind of sums up the combination of cowardice, but also corruption, and I think racism.

I think, frankly, a lot of this just fucking anti-Arab racism, to be quite honest, at work here, which is to say racism only goes in one direction. It only matters in one direction. And we’re going to use the language, the squishy, sort of post-George Floyd language of anti-racism to defend a genocide in real time, and that’s what we’re going to do, it’s what we’ve been doing over the last 17 months, in the most cynical way possible. Again, everything’s vague. Everything’s about feelings.

Nothing’s in reference to any specific thing that happens. Yes, so this is University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham, who sent this message, this statement, to the university community earlier this week. Here it is, quote, Dear students, faculty and staff, As President, there is no greater responsibility than to ensure each and every member of our community feels safe, valued and respected.

Regardless of your race, gender identity, disability status, sexual orientation or religious beliefs, we are fully committed to ensuring that everyone feels welcomed and protected here at the University of Minnesota. I am writing to you today, as our Twin Cities campus is now the subject of two federal investigations involving allegations of antisemitism: a U.S. Department of Education investigation and a pending U.S. Department of Justice task force campus visit.

We also received a failing score on the Anti-Defamation League’s latest campus antisemitism report card. Oh, the totally good-faith ADL, who’s working with the Trump regime to disappear students. We’re working with them to fight antisemitism on a totally good-faith, neutral definition of antisemitism that has nothing to do with defending Israel. Sorry. Go ahead.

During the first eight months of my presidency, I have been working closely with members of our University community to foster a safe, welcoming environment for everyone. Unfortunately, harassment, discrimination and bias — including antisemitism — continues to exist across the globe, negatively impacting people and communities. Here at the University of Minnesota, we take these issues very seriously.

As a leadership team and a University, we are strongly committed to enhancing support for members of our community who are Jewish. We are in regular communication with Jewish students and faculty groups, who have been advising us to better understand their lived experiences in this time, and augment their experience on campus.

We got a “lived experience,” Nima. That’s right, you can’t talk about the myriad death experiences of the people who are being, you know, genocided, but no, the lived experience. We just need bodies and spaces, and we’ll have the hat trick. Go ahead.

President Cunningham continues, quote, In response to their advocacy, the University recently joined the Hillel Campus Climate Initiative — a nationwide program that equips campus administrators with strategies to counter antisemitism and foster an environment where Jewish students feel safe expressing their identities. An explicitly pro-Israel organization being laundered through the language of anti-racism in Jewish identity. Go ahead.

Over the past year, the University has made substantial improvements to its Bias Response and Referral Network to ensure that reporting is easier, intuitive and effective. We have also worked to clarify and communicate our policies regarding time, place and manner for events, demonstrations and civic engagement.

Any and all forms of harassment, intimidation and bias against any member of our University community will not be tolerated. Decisive measures will be taken to end any hostile actions based on shared ancestry or any other protected characteristic, and University leaders will continue to work diligently to prevent their recurrence.

Does it ever occur to University of Minnesota officials or any officials that perhaps Trump disappearing Palestinian students was in part due to their being Palestinian, was in part due to their being Arab? No, that’s not racism, right? You know, disappearing fucking students and putting them in undisclosed locations in Louisiana where they cannot speak to their family or lawyer, that is not racism, by an overtly racist and Islamophobic and anti-Arab president.

That’s not racism when, in fact, we’re going to work with the group, the ADL, explicitly cheering that on and supporting that, tweeting out support for that. So that’s not racism. That doesn’t count as racism. No, no, no. The solipsistic, self-identified perceptions of certain students matter, but the actual disappearing of Arab students is irrelevant. Now entering Section B, opposing Trump can be terrorism.

Trump declared the vehicle's beautiful, and in particular, praised the company's unusually designed cyber truck. As soon as I saw it, I said, that is the coolest design. Trump said by reviewing the Teslas in public before cameras, Trump ensured that his purchase would receive y attention. Dan s Scavino, a White House deputy Chief of Staff Live streamed the event on X, the social media app owned by mosque.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the application of ethics rules. Trump said he would pay for the vehicle by check. Elon, can you take a check? The reporting continues. The company's shares have declined every week since Musk went to Washington and they fell 15% on Monday before rebounding Tuesday. Asked whether his purchase might help Tesla's stock. Trump said, I hope it does. Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah. Basically they asked, I'm doing some stock manipulation here. They, they asked if this demonstration and performative gesture was on its face, corrupt, and Trump answered in the affirmative. Yep. Me and a bunch of people I, I talked to have all placed, uh, large bets, all placed large bets on the stock going up today, and so that's the whole point of this. We make money. Yeah. During the event, Trump held a piece of paper with notes about Tesla features according to photos of the notes.

Published by Getty Images, the notes appeared to be something of a sales pitch, uh, including details that Teslas could be purchased for $299 a month, and that all vehicles have self-driving. A reference to the company suite of driver assistance features, which cost extra and still require human supervision and don't work too good. Yeah. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called this, what?

It was over on the, the bad site saying Just because the corruption plays out in public doesn't mean it's not corruption. Yeah, that's right. It's, he is correct to say that. Yeah. This is, and Reuters went into detail about Trump's plans to criminalize Tesla protestors if they engage in violence and who knows how broadly that'll be interpreted. Yeah. What is, what, what's your definition of violence? Is like, it's, it's going to be like words can feel like violence.

Yeah. Or silence is violence. I'm trying. You don't talk violence. You talk violence. Um, uh yeah. Especially after, you know, seeing images from Tesla dealerships where there is a substantial show of force protecting the building and vehicles. Yeah. By the police doing the job that they do violence against. Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism and perpetrators will go through hell.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday in a show of support for the electric Carmaker's chief, his ally, Elon Musk. Uh, yeah, of course the juxtaposition isn't lost on us. It's just very sad that we're at a point where on one hand, taxpayer funded police officers are guarding Tesla dealerships just in case. While at the same time legal residents are being disappeared and having their citizenship status revoked because they protested a genocide that the United States agrees with.

The activists have lately staged so-called Tesla takedown protests to voice displeasure over Musk's role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump and cancellation of contracts that fund humanitarian programs around the world. They're harming a great American company. Trump said at the White House referring to the demonstrators. Let me tell you, you do it to Tesla and you do it to any company. We're going to catch you and you're gonna go through hell.

White House spokesperson Harrison Field said ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror. A group said that it was an organizer of the Tesla takedown protest, responded in a statement on social media platform blue sky, that it was peaceful and opposed violence. I. Quote, peaceful protest on public property is not domestic terrorism. They're trying to intimidate us. We will not let them succeed.

The group said, calling for people to join the protests, Trump could direct the US Justice Department to charge Tesla dealership vandals under terrorism statutes, though it is unclear if those charges would hold up in court according to legal experts. Yeah. I mean, so there have been instances of vandalism at these protests, but mostly not. Mm-hmm.

Um. Uh, a few Tesla charging stations have been caught on fire, but not as part of any protests, so it's, it's hard to tell what they're really talking about other than someone maybe riding with a Sharpie on a window. Yeah, it seems to be putting this out in front as justification for. Getting up to, but they're talking about this as if we're already in like week two of the George Floyd protest. Oh yeah.

No. Like this has been going for a very long time and Tesla does such a burning, our death, the country, it just doesn't correlate with reality. Teslas are rolling through cities on fire. It, it, it doesn't yet. It doesn't make sense, but like, would those, would the people in New Orleans who threw beads at those Teslas? Yes. Would they, are they terrorists? I guess so.

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups that he wants to punish immigrants, transgender people, he said, but less disgust protestors. He hopes to discipline and potentially prosecute civil disobedience, people who show up on the in the streets and protest with increased force In May, Donald Trump promised a group of donors that quote any student, the protests, I will throw them out of the country. End quote. And that's more than just bluster.

Uh, writes, uh, Vince over at Mother Jones. Uh, Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise one day, uh, uh, on, excuse me, on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order, prioritizing deporting international students who support Palestinian Militant Group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.

Uh, one piece of the potential infrastructure, I told, you know, I mentioned this in the first hour of the program, is this stop terror financing and tax penalties of American Hostages Act. This is the, the law that's probably gonna be voted on this week that gives the Treasury secretary the power to designate a non-profit as a supporter of terrorism and stripped them of their nonprofit status. Uh, he notes The Heritage Foundation.

The Rightwing Group behind Project 2025 has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestinian descents. It's called Project Esther. It suggests deporting quote, foreign Hamas support organization members end quote, classifying anti-war nonprofits like American Muslims for Palestine, students for Justice in Palestine. And Jewish Voice for Peace. As members of a shadowy Hamas support organization network, Republicans have revived, uh, R 94 95.

It, it failed to pass last week, but they tried to pass it, uh, using fast Track essentially, which requires, uh, two thirds. Uh, vote and, uh, they, they actually had 50 Democrats who supported it. I don't, I just don't think they knew what they were supporting. Uh, I doubt they will this time, but, but now they're gonna do it through regular order, which means they don't need a single Democrat. All they need is all the Republicans. What this bill will do is allow the treasury secretary.

To designate any nonprofit in the United States as a supporter of terrorism and instantly with basically, uh, there is an appeal process, but it, it's. It's not robust, shall we say. Uh, instantly they will lose their tax exempt status, which means that they will lose institutional support if they're getting foundation support. Um, donations will no longer be tax deductible. Um, there's a whole bunch of doors that close when a nonprofit loses their nonprofit status.

And, you know, whether they're gonna use this to go after investigative, uh, uh, reporting groups like ProPublica. Uh, you know, what they're saying right now is that they want to use it to go after groups that are supportive of, uh, people in Gaza. And, uh, this is what, uh, Abby Maxman, the president and CEO of Oxfam America had to say about this.

He said, this bill would increase the powers of the president at the expense of all of our freedoms, and could impact not only organizations like Oxfam, but other nonprofits, news outlets, and even universities who dare to dissent. It would put our ability to, to respond to some of the worst humanitarian crises at risk and prevent us from delivering lifesaving aid. To some of the world's most marginalized people. This bill follows the same playbook.

Oxfam has seen other governments around the world use to crush dissent. Now we are seeing it here at home. His analysis of the so-called nonprofit killer bill was published on Spencer Ackerman’s blog forever-wars.com. It’s headlined “The Most Dangerous Domestic Anti-Terrorism Bill Since the PATRIOT Act.” OK, Darryl, why? Why is this so significant? Again, it was passed in the House. It now makes its way to the Senate. Thank you for having me on, Amy.

As you mentioned, this bill is essentially a civil rights disaster, that would allow the government, under any administration — I want to be clear that this bill is terrible no matter who is president — but it would allow the government to shut down nonprofits on the smear of being terrorist-supporting organizations.

Now, obviously, the government, after decades of authoritarian “war on terror” policies, already has ample legal tools at its disposal to go after nonprofits, essentially, for any reason that it wishes. What this bill would do in addition, the thing that it would add and the thing that makes it so dangerous, and actually the most dangerous domestic terrorism law in a generation, is that it would essentially smuggle in through the back door a domestic terrorist group list for the first time.

This is something that the United States, to this day, still doesn’t have. We have many, many lists of so-called foreign terrorist organizations, that are overwhelmingly Muslim and/or based in the Global South. This law requires an accusation with no evidence, but a tie-in. It’s an accusation that nonprofits are supporting a group on one of the existing international terrorism lists.

This is important to understand, because it explains why so many people on the right in Congress are comfortable signing on, because the bill is essentially discriminatory by design.

Right-wingers and white supremacists in Congress can support this bill, with the assurance that their allies, right-wing extremist groups, are highly, highly unlikely to ever be targeted by this bill, because there isn’t going to — it’s much less likely that they will be smeared with an accusation of being tied to an international terrorist organization that’s already on one of the government lists. So, that’s why this particular coalition — [inaudible] — has come together.

And it will — oh, go on. Talk more about the origins of the bill, why Democrats supported the bill, and what it means now that it’s going to the Senate, how organizations are organizing around it.

Right. So, since October 7th, we’ve seen a whole bunch of outlandish anti-Palestinian pieces of legislation that have been designed to crush any protest or dissent around Palestine in the United States, while Congress, of course, continues to supply untold billions of dollars in weapons to Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza. This particular piece of legislation is the one that has gotten closest to becoming law.

And initially, it did have significant bipartisan support, because, of course, anti-Palestinian racism is one of the great bipartisan unifiers in Congress. With the efforts of civil society groups to ring the alarm and educate members of Congress about the dangers of this bill, not only for Palestine advocacy, but broadly, for any number of causes, and, of course, with the election of Donald Trump, more and more Democrats have awoken to the danger.

If you can talk about Monte and your experience—well, first, he’s—after he’s arrested, before he’s diagnosed, what this all means, and then this unbelievable moment where you decide to call in the police, after he’s back from jail? Yeah. Monte—we didn’t know Monte was suffering from mental illness. Unfortunate reality is many communities of color, working-class poor communities, we don’t have people coming in and educating us about the crisis of mental health.

And so, we just thought some—we didn’t know what was wrong. We didn’t. And when Monte was arrested for a robbery and when he was 18 years old, broke someone’s window, he said the voices told him to do it, and ended up going to prison for three years. In his stay in prison, he was tortured by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, brutally beaten. And— Your mother first seeing him—she couldn’t even find where he was. No, no, they disappeared him.

And this is actually—was a common practice of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. It’s disappearing prisoners. And when she finally saw him, two months later, he was emaciated. My brother is 6’2”, almost 300 pounds. They had completely overmedicated him. And we would learn, later on, years later, just what he endured in that jail cell. When he was released, when he was 23 years old, it was one of the most exciting days of my life. I get to see my brother. I hadn’t seen him in years.

We didn’t know that we could visit people. You know, they don’t give you sort of what are the steps when your loved one is incarcerated. We didn’t realize that we could go visit him, so we didn’t see him for four years. We just wrote a lot of letters. And the first thing that I noticed when I picked him up from the bus stop is they let him out in flip-flops, an undershirt and boxers. And I just—I was—I was so disturbed, like I couldn’t— He was at the bus station in boxer shorts?

He was in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt and flip-flops, which—shower shoes, essentially. And I ushered him in the car. And he was acting very different. It was not the brother that went inside and that I knew. And the minute he got into the house, my mother said, “This is—something’s wrong with my son.” And, you know, as every child, I was like, “Mom, be quiet. He just got out of prison. Like just give him some time.” And over a week, he slowly—he quickly deteriorated.

And I didn’t know who to call. And eventually I called the ambulance, and I made the unfortunate choice to tell them that my brother had just been released from jail. They said, “Well, that’s not our problem; you have to call the police.” And I said, “I can’t call the police on my brother. You have no”—you know, this is before Black Lives Matter, before we’ve seen, you know, black people be killed at the hands of law enforcement, especially black people with mental illness.

But I just knew that that was not the right choice. But I didn’t have anybody else to call, and I did call the police. And I talked them through, and I let them know what was happening. And the first thing they said to me—I said, “What happens if my brother happens to get violent?” And they said, “We’ll just taser him.” I mean, just like flat-faced— These are two young cops who came. Two young rookie cops, clearly scared out of their minds. And I said, “You cannot taser him.

Like, that’s not—that’s unacceptable.” They walked into my house, and the minute they walked in, my brother just put his hands up and went on his knees and just started begging them. You know, he just started begging them. And I just knew I made a mistake. I just knew I made a mistake. And I, you know, held my brother.

I said, “It’s OK.” And I told them to leave. And it was in that moment that I realized that we’re on our own, that we are literally on our own, and there is no infrastructure for black poor families when dealing with mental illness. There’s just none. And we had to piece the infrastructure together. And the—talk about the time that he was charged with terrorism. Yeah, it was in those years, as he was off and on his medication. He was in a fender bender.

And he was in the middle of a manic episode. And he might have cursed at the woman, might have not. We don’t know. We weren’t there. But the woman claimed that he had cursed at her. And because my brother was a second striker, then because they said that the cursing was threatening, they— Explain what you mean by “second striker.” He has had two strikes on his record, which is part of the three strikes law, and was— In California.

In California—and could end up getting—if he were to receive his third strike, end up in jail for life. And— Even if that third strike is stealing a candy bar. Stealing a candy bar, getting in a fender bender. So, we went to court, when we finally found where my brother was. We went to that first court date, and the lawyer said, “You know, your brother is being charged with terrorist threats, and that is a felony. And they will probably

be putting him away for the rest of his life.” And he was 24, 24 years old. You've reached section C, the DOJ, FBI, and the judiciary. Let's look at what Attorney General Pam Bondi has been up to in the midst of this mess. You might recall that last week Trump signed an executive order to punish a particular law firm because that law firm has done work for Democrats. Among other things, Trump's executive order would block anyone from that law firm from entering federal courthouses.

I. Which might make it difficult to be a lawyer in Washington, DC I'm just saying the law firm naturally sued. Um, and because the case was so important to Trump and potentially because it was difficult to find any career prosecutors who really wanted to defend it, um, attorney General, Pam Bondy sent her own chief of staff, the Attorney General's chief of staff to argue the case himself personally in federal court.

Bring it in like the biggest guns they got and, and her chief of staff just got blown out of court by the judge. The Trump administration lost that with an exclamation point. The judge said Trump's order sent a chill down her spine. She said the whole legal profession was quote, watching in horror what Trump was trying to do and what the Attorney General's chief of staff was trying and very much failing to defend in court.

Pam Bondi and Trump's Justice Department are also apparently trying to launch an investigation into the otherwise totally normal process of funding shelters for migrants in New York City. I say they're trying to launch an investigation there because they seem to be having trouble with some of the fundamentals, like spelling. At least one of the subpoenas they sent out has folks in New York scratching their heads because it went to something called the Hotel Chandler. Hotel Chandler does not.

Host immigrants. At all. It's not clear what's going on there with a Hotel Chandler, but a CBS News report does note that quote, A source familiar with the shelter system pointed out that another hotel with a similar name, the Candler, is in fact a hotel where they house migrants. Asked about the situation with the Chandler and the Candler, a spokesman for the Department of Justice said quote, we will decline to comment on an ongoing investigation. Also, Pam, do you.

Uh, but don't worry about it. Uh, when it comes to the really important stuff, Pam Bondy is on it. This went out from her office this week. All caps memorandum for all department employees from the attorney general subject ending procurement of paper straws. Quote, in accordance with President Trump's direction, the Department of Justice.

She's talking about the US Department of Justice shall take appropriate action to eliminate the procurement of paper straws and ensure that paper straws are no longer provided within department buildings. Department components shall take appropriate action to identify and eliminate any portion of policy or guidance documents designed to disfavor plastic straws. Oh, you guys, the Justice Department's long nightmare is over.

Today, Pam Bondi took time out of her busy schedule of vanquishing plastic straw, straw discrimination, uh, to welcome the president to the Justice Department, making sure to point out to him the most important decor, the picture of him. After which Trump gave a a long, long discursive rambling, angry speech to Justice Department employees that included basically handing them a handy list of enemies he'd like them to look into.

At Martin, at the DCUS attorney's office, he seems to already have his own enemies list. I mentioned that Ed Martin. Tried to indict Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer. Uh, Chuck Schumer is one of only, uh, several people, including several elected officials, all Democrats who Martin appears to be targeting for investigation. He's also sent a letter to Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia, um, because Robert Garcia criticized Elon Musk.

So that got him a threatening letter from the US Attorney's Office. Democratic Congressman Eugene Binman this week also revealed that he has received a threatening letter from Ed Martin, this one asking about his personal finances. Eugene Binman and his twin brother Alexander Vidman have long been targets of Donald Trump's rage and invective for their roles in bringing to light the events that led to Trump's first impeachment.

This is the letter that DCUS attorney Ed Martin sent to Congressman Binman. It starts, quote, dear Eugene, uh, do you always write your business? Just dear quote, I have received requests for clarification of your personal financial disclosures over the past year. I look forward to your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after requests. Thank you in advance for your assistance with this. Please respond by day, month date, 2025. That is literally what the letter says, day, month, date 2025.

Only the best people. There were two legal bright lines about the Trump administration. One was whether they would follow court orders that remains to be seen. The other was whether they would weaponize the DOJ and create political prosecutions. And they have crossed that Legal Rubicon and another DOJ prosecutor has resigned.

Rather than move forward less than a month after seven, justice Department lawyers resigned in protest over Ilbo Bay's decision to quash corruption charges against New York. Mayor Eric Adams. Another prosecutor has walked out. Denise Chung. Now the former head of the criminal division at the US Attorney's Office in DC refused to order a bank to freeze funds related to a Biden administration environmental contract. Citing a complete lack of evidence.

Other prosecutors and FBI agents backed her up, but that wasn't enough for Bovet. In acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, ed Martin, they pressured her to misrepresent evidence and justify a seizure warrant, which would freeze billions of dollars of funds allocated to green energy products. Chung refused to play along and she quit, but luckily she made sure the public knew why her resignation isn't just another DOJ shakeup.

It's a sign that corruption isn't just creeping into the Justice Department. It's taking over and it's a sign that they're willing to fabricate criminal prosecutions. Now, US attorneys swear in oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They are bound by the ethical rules in their jurisdiction and tasked with evaluating evidence, prosecuting crimes, and pursuing justice. They're also bound to uphold the law in service of the American people.

Justice Department lawyers do not swear an oath to the president or his lackeys. But President Trump apparently sees it differently. He recently installed Interim US Attorney Ed Martin, an acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove as his enforcers at the Justice Department. And so far they have delivered, as we've talked about as a criminal defense lawyer. Bove before he was the acting attorney General represented Trump in his election obstruction, classified documents in hush money cases.

And as we've also talked about now that he's the OD d, Bovey ordered prosecutors to drop corruption charges against Mayor Adams in exchange for political favors. Martin meanwhile is a Trump loyalist who still falsely claims that Trump won the 2020 election. And like Bovey, ed Martin doesn't see his job as upholding law. He sees it as protecting Trump.

He made that clear when he declared, quote, as President Trump's lawyers, we are proud to protect his leadership as our president, and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first. Now, in a normal administration, justice department attorneys are not the president's lawyers. And Martin has also pledged his truth to Elon Musk when Wired identified the men who are part of Musk's Doge Harem, which is not illegal.

Musk asked Martin to criminally prosecute reporters. Martin swore to chase do's critics quote, to the end of the earth, and Martin also threatened to prosecute Democratic representative Robert Garcia for calling Elon Musk a dick. But anyway, ed Martin's ascendancy is already chasing away career prosecutors who won't violate their oath of office. But this latest flashpoint is the Biden Administration's Signature Climate Initiative, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

Which apparently in this administration, they want to criminally prosecute people to prevent it from going into effect. But the background here is that in 2022, Congress enacted the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The IRA established a set of clean energy incentives and created the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF. The GGRF leverages investment from public and private lenders, quote, to invest in clean energy technologies such as solar panels and heat pumps. Through community lenders.

In 2024, the Biden administration ran two competitions to allocate the money and awarded $20 billion to eight selectees. And the old EPA website let you quote, read what the eight selected applicants have committed to deliver on their application packages. However, now that Trump is in office, that information has been removed. So much for transparency. But Trump and his allies have also taken a hard line on climate change, and that line is that climate change does not exist.

I wish you could go to Greenland. Uh, watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels. And you don't know whether or not that would've happened with or without Man, you don't know. Well, your scientists, your scientists at Noah and nasa, no. We have scientists that disagree with that. But instead of asking Congress to repeal the IRA, the Trump administration wants to claw back the GGRF funds and prosecute the grant recipients.

Enter Lee Zelin Trump's new EPA administrator. Zelin has been on the job for less than a month, but he looked into it and surprise he found fraud. Fortunately. Epo, his smoking gun, a contract between the EPA and Citibank. The EPA had signed a financial agent agreement or FAA with Citibank to distribute the funds. Now, an FAA is a contract that designates a financial institution to act on behalf of the government in managing and dispersing federal funds.

Zelin said the use of the FAA was improper and unprecedented. And although it is true, the EPA had never used an FAA before. The government has used these contracts for centuries. In fact, the treasury Department has an entire section dedicated to utilizing faas.

It's called the Bureau of Fiscal Services, but Zelin accused of Biden administration of quote, purposely designing the agreement with Citibank to obligate the money in a rush job with reduced oversight because Biden was quote, rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before inauguration day. But on its face, there was absolutely nothing nefarious about the process or the timeline. Congress passed a law.

President Biden executed the law by selecting the organizations to receive the funds and the funds were sent to Citibank to be dispersed. And as for the timeline, the Inflation Reduction Act gave the EPAA deadline of September 30th, 2024 to award funding to the recipients. And the EPA signed the contract with Citibank in April of 20 24, 9 months before inauguration date. But even if the Biden administration was concerned about getting these funds out before inauguration day.

I wonder what they could have been concerned about. The Trump administration has a long history of dispersing funds that have been allocated by Congress, right? Donald Trump would never impound billions of dollars worth of congressionally allocated funds, right? But where other people see laws and deadlines, zelin saw gold bars.

The financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated, and the bank must immediately return all of the gold bars that the Biden administration tossed off the Titanic. Now Zelda's Gold Bars comments comes from a disreputable source project. Veritas, the right wing group that uses to set the edited videos to make outlandish and false claims about left-wing groups.

Project Veritas has lost multiple defamation cases for making false claims and is founder James O'Keefe pleaded guilty to unlawfully entering federal property as part of one of his sting operations. So anything Project Veritas does should be taken with a huge grain of salt. In this instance, project Veritas obtained a video of an ex EPA official who thought he was on a date saying that the Biden administration was quote.

Trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they come in and stop it all. It truly feels like we're on the Titanic and we're throwing like gold bars off the edge. Now that remark was open to interpretation. It didn't mention the GGRF funds. Maybe it was excitement over a government windfall or urgency to fund green energy projects before potential Biden loss. And of course, fears of the Trump administration would come in and stop it all. We're incredibly well-founded.

But Zelin twisted it into something more sinister, declaring a proof of a criminal conspiracy and wire fraud, and acting on that flimsy pretext. Zelin announced the EPA would claw back 20 billion in funds held at Citibank, and the very next day the money was frozen.

And yes, this is yet another case of the Trump administration illegally impounding, congressionally approved funds, which is illegal, and multiple states and organizations have sued to stop Trump from canceling grants and reclaiming money and legal battles continue. We now have, at least in theory, a 10 year term for the f. BI director, and that term was put in place to prevent someone from doing what Hoover did, which was to be there for 48 years.

But it was also put in place to make sure that the FBI still had some insulation from politics. 10 years was longer than the term of any presidential administration, even if the president was reelected. And now I think what we're seeing with the Trump administration is that lots of those norms and policies and rules are just being thrown out the window. Yeah, I mean, he appointed Christopher Ray to be director of the FBI and then did not allow him to serve the end of his tenure term for one.

Right, and he appointed Christopher Ray after he fired James Comey. And so that was, if we all think back a very big deal in 2017, that was really the first time that an FBI director had been fired in that way for what was clearly. A concern about political loyalty. So this is quite consistent with what Trump did in, in his first term. But of course this time, as so often has happened, he's, he's coming for his own appointee. Yes. And appointing Cash Patel.

And now Dan Bonino is kind of turning the whole thing up to 11. The narrative that we keep hearing is that, you know, the Bureau is this like Toxically left wing agency. It's rife with anti-Christian, anti-conservative bias. What do you make of that? Well, that seems like a very strange description of the FBI, which is a pretty conservative organization.

The big claim that the FBI is full of closet Marxists does not make a whole lot of sense to me, and certainly would have shocked and appalled j Edgar Hoover. Say a little bit more about Cash Patel's specific critique of the FBI. There does seem to be a tension between I am coming in with the chainsaw, I'm gonna shut down FBI headquarters and turn it into a Museum of the Deep State. I love that. Which is something that Patel said and we'll see.

You know, I have to say as a historian, I feel like, oh, I'd actually love to have a museum of a deep state, but maybe not. In this way. And then there's also a really powerful desire to make use of this very large and powerful bureaucracy. But in some ways, the breaking of the FBI is also about breaking the norms and processes and constraints and internal culture. I also have wondered.

In this process about the Republicans in Congress who were so enthusiastic about confirming Patel as FBI director, because I think one thing that we have learned about Donald Trump is that you might think that you're on the inside for a while, but at any moment you too could be thrown out. Into the cold.

And actually if we have, you know, a politicized bureau that's going after Trump's enemies, I think the very people who have, uh, voted for this set of changes might themselves pretty easily and pretty rapidly become the victims of what they wr. Yeah, that's interesting because it sends a message to even Trump's current allies that they're on thin ice.

I also found it interesting that when Elon Mask demanded that federal workers send in these emails with the five points about what they did during the week, cash Patel was actually one of the people who said to his employees actually don't do that because of course we probably don't want it documented what every FBI agent in the country was doing in the last week. Oh, that, that's an interesting interpretation. What I took away from it was Elon Musk, get your grimy hands out of my bureau.

Well, there's that too, right? So we have Cash Patel in that case, as allegedly the person who wants to tear down the bureau, but also somehow being, it, it, its protector or at least wanting his own fiefdom. In some ways we could look at j Edgar Hoover's legacy as a kind of playbook for this new leadership. If they choose to wiretap political enemies, surveil them. Bully the press, et cetera. Are there signs that you're seeing that Patel and Bongino could go even further than Hoover?

I. I think Hoover had lots and lots of abuses, but then there were also certain constraints in the sense that there were moments where presidents or other figures wanted him to use the bureau in explicitly political ways that he resisted, because he thought it wasn't in his interest, it wasn't in the FBI's interest, and I don't see those sorts of constraints operating.

In this situation, I think what we are seeing potentially is a perfect storm in which you've got this powerful, secretive bureaucracy. And Patel and others have been quite open about saying that they want to use the power of an institution like the Bureau to go after Trump's enemies, to go after his critics. So that seems to me to be a very powerful and pretty dangerous combination.

The, the lawyer who is suing the Trump administration says this, your Honor, quote, what we have before the court is record evidence that conclusively establishes that OPM directed the terminations at issue. We have a very unusual circumstance where the government has not mounted, has, uh, has not attempted to say that they factually dispute that they have actually withdrawn the declaration by which they were attempting to dispute that.

And there's no record evidence on the other side by which they have disputed this fact. The judge. I tend to agree with you on that, and the government, I believe, has tried to frustrate the judge's ability to get at the truth of what happened here and then set forth sham declarations to a sham declaration. They withdrew it, then substituted another. That's not the way it works in the US District Court. The judge says, quote, I'm going to talk to the government about that in a minute.

I had expected to have an evidentiary hearing today in which these people would testify. If they wanted to get your people on the stand, I was gonna make that happen too. It would be fair. But instead we have been frustrated in that. The judge then says to the lawyer for the plaintiff's quote, I'd like to hear your views on what relief should be issued today. T-O-D-A-Y today, the lawyer. Thank you, your Honor. We are aligned in wanting that to happen as well. He spelled out T-O-D-A-Y.

And so then, um, they have a conversation that the, the judge and the lawyer for the plaintiffs, the lawyer who's suing the Trump administration on behalf of the fired employees, and they talk about what the fired employees who are suing the Trump administration, what they're seeking from the judge today, the kind of relief they want.

Um, they say they wanna a list of everybody who's been fired that haven't been able to get that, or even an enumeration from the government of how many people have been fired. They also want people to be reinstated if they have been fired illegally. So they, they go through all those details.

Then it's time for the Trump administration lawyer to make his side of the case, and he starts explaining to the judge that all these fired workers, the only reason they were fired is because nobody wanted them. Nobody told anybody to fire anything. There was no instructions to fire people. These are just unwanted workers. If anybody wanted them back, they surely would've been rehired by now. Right.

At which point the, the judge interjects the judge quote, well, maybe that's why we need an injunction that tells them to rehire them. You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You are afraid to do so because, you know, cross-examination would reveal the truth. Trump administration lawyer tries to interject respectfully. The judge continues. This is the US District Court.

Whenever you submit declarations, those people should be submitted to cross-examination, just like the plaintiff's side should be. And we then we, we get at the truth of whether your story is actually true. I tend to doubt it. I tend to doubt that you are telling me the truth whenever we hear all the evidence. Eventually. Why can't you bring your people in to be cross-examined or to be deposed at their convenience? I said two hours for Mr. Zel. Mr. Zel is the acting head of OPM.

I said, two hours for Mr. Zel, a deposition at his convenience, and you withdrew his declaration. Rather than do that, come on, that's a sham. The judge says quote, go ahead. I'm I'm, it upsets me. I want you to know that. I have been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get at the truth and you're not helping me get at the truth. You're giving me press releases, sham documents. All right? He says, quote, I'm getting mad at you and I shouldn't.

The judge then decided in this hearing today that he wasn't gonna wait to give a written ruling. He decided, you know what? I've heard enough. He decided he was going to rule from the bench today, T-O-D-A-Y, today. So he started with this, the judge quote on February 13th, 2025, A briefing paper from Human Resources Management at the Forest Service says this, all that's spelled a LL.

All federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, were notified on February 12th by the Office of Personnel Management to terminate all employees who have not completed their probationary or trial period. That then led to the termination of a lot of people. The judge says. But one in particular I will give as an example. Leandra Bailey was a physical science information specialist in Albuquerque.

In September of last year, she'd received a performance review in which she was quote, fully successful in every category, not just some, but every category. On February 13th, she was terminated using the OPM template letter because in addition to directing these terminations, OPM gave a proposed letter and the letter said, I'm reading from it. Memorandum for Leandro Bailey, February 13th from the Director of Human Source Management at the US Forest Service.

This is just one sentence quote, the agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest. Close quote. And then the judge says this, despite the fact that her most recent review was fully successful in every category. The judge says, now how could it be? You might ask that the agency could find that based on her per find, that based on her performance, when her performance had been stellar.

The reason OPM wanted to put this based on performance was, at least in part, in my judgment, a gimmick, because the law always allows you to fire somebody for performance, and the judge says this. Now, what I'm about to say is not the legal basis for what I'm going to order today, but I just wanna say it. He says, quote, it is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well, that's a lie. Excellent.

In all fully, what was the phrase? I don't wanna misstate it. Quote. Fully successful in every category, yet they terminate her based on her performance. That should not have been done in our country. It was a sham. In order to avoid statutory requirements. It also happens to be that whenever you fire somebody based on performance, then they can't get unemployment insurance. So that makes it even worse, doesn't it?

And then it makes it even worse because the next employer is going to say, well, have you ever been terminated? Based on performance, they're going to have to say yes, two thousands of people. It is illustrative of the manipulation that was going on by OPM to try to orchestrate this government-wide termination of probation, probationary employees. The court finds that OPM did direct all the agencies to terminate probationary employees.

The court rejects the government's attempt to use these press releases and to read between the lines to say that the agency heads made their own decision with no direction from OPM. The relief that's gonna be granted is as follows First. The temporary restraining order will be extended. The VA shall immediately offer reinstatement to any and all probationary employees terminated on or about February 13th or 14th.

This order finds that all such terminations were directed by defendant OPM and were unlawful because OPM had no authority to do so. Further, the VA shall cease any and all use of the template Termination notice provided by OPM and shall immediately advise. All probationary employees terminated February 13th and 14th that the notice and termination have been found to be unlawful by the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The VA shall cease any termination of probationary employees at the direction of OPM. To repeat this order holds that OPM has no authority whatsoever to direct order or require in any way that any agency fire any employee. Now, given the arguments and the facts in this case, namely that defendants have attempted to recast these directives as mere guidance. My order today further prohibits defendants from giving guidance as to whether any employee should be terminated.

Any termination of agencies employees must be made by the agencies themselves, if made at all, and they must be made in conformity with the Civil Service Reform Act and the Reduction in Force Act and any other constitutional or statutory legal requirement. He says in seven calendar days, relief defendant VA the def. The VA shall submit a list of all probationary employees terminated on or about February 13th and 14th with an explanation as to each.

Of what has been done to comply with this order. And the judge says this now, this order so far has only mentioned the va, the Veterans Administration. But the same relief is extended, and I'm not gonna repeat it, but I'm extending the same relief to the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Treasury. And so it's the VA plus all those other agencies.

He says, and this is without prejudice to extending the relief later in further, uh, to to other agencies. If the judge then closes with this, I will try to get out a short memorandum opinion that elaborates on this order, but this is the order and it counts effective immediately. Please don't say, oh, I'm waiting for the written order.

This is the order from the bench, To be very clear listeners, Donald Trump personally took credit for Hale's arrest and attempted deportation on true social and Secretary of State, Marco Rubio also was invoked. Um, and Marco Rubio cited a provision of the immigration law that allows the Secretary of State to determine that the presence of non-citizens has adverse effects on US foreign policy and that. These individuals can then be deported on that basis.

As Leah just mentioned, halal has challenged his detention and removal and he initially filed that challenge in the southern district of New York where he was initially arrested. The government is fighting to get the case dismissed, and as we know, halal has been relocated to the Gina facility in Louisiana, which again would mean that if this is dismissed and Halil had to refile, he would have to refile in Louisiana.

And if there was a challenge that was appealed, that appeal would then go to the Fifth Circuit. So that is why Leah finds this curiouser and Curious, or Ellie, I don't know what you think about this, but I found this absolutely chilling this week. Uh, you know, we are six weeks into a four year sentence, and they're basically black bagging people on the streets. Yeah, look, I wrote about this in the nation this week. This is what fascism looks like. This is exactly what it looks like.

It's not fascism that's coming around the corner. It is right here because when you can be dripped out of your Manhattan apartment and sent to the swamp in Louisiana without committing a crime, simply because you had you, you organized a protest simply because of your speech rights and nobody comes to save you. That is what fascism looks like. That is what it feels like, and it is supposed to have not just a chilling effect, uh, on the poor life of Mr. Cleal and his eight month pregnant wife.

It's supposed to have a chilling effect on everybody else. It's the government saying, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, we can come get you. And there's nothing you can do about it. So that is where we are with the situation. Khalil has good arguments, but you know, talking about my book, again, this is why I'm saying that 1921, immigration and Nationality Act should be repealed.

Must be repealed because the, the particular legal hook that Rubio is using that comes from the 1921 Immigration Nationality Act, right? This idea that the Secretary of State on his say so. With no evidence, with no hearing, with no proof, can just say, ah, you're against the interest of the foreign, the policies of the, and remove again, a legal, permanent resident, a green card holder, and can just get rid of that entire process on his whim.

Um, that that is a, that is not just a failure of morality. It's not just a failure of politics. It is a deep failure of law that we have a law like this on the books. Yeah. And just to unpack exactly like the provision that Rubio is relying on, that's part of the INA that Ellie, you know, recommends repealing.

It is this provision that allows the Secretary of State to say the presence of a non-citizen has adverse effects on the United States foreign policy, and therefore can be removed on that basis. And it purports to give. Extensive amounts of deference to the Secretary of State in making that determination, which is part of why it's so scary that Rubio is making this claim that, again, organizing a student protest somehow is affecting our foreign policy. Like really?

Does France fucking care like about the Columbia protest? I don't think so. And actually Donald Trump's sister, judge Marianne Trump bury, invalidated that particular provision. You know, as a judge, her decision was later reversed by then Judge Alito on the third circuit. But the point is like these laws are on the books and this administration is basically providing us a crash course in identifying various laws that are susceptible to gross abuse, um, that we need to get rid of.

Can I ask you guys a question? Yeah. So part of the issue here with Khalil is whether or not he has First Amendment protections, right? Um, there is a 1999 case, uh, that I wrote about, uh, Reno, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination League, where Scalia writes, uh, eight to one opinion. That protections, uh, speech that would ordinarily be protected by the First Amendment can be the basis for removal for undocumented immigrants.

Now, that decision doesn't extend to documented immigrants like Khalil, but what do you guys think? Do you think that the Supreme Court will I. Extend that precedent to document it. Um, immigrants like Khalil, when they get a chance to, in a few years, I mean like as a predictive matter, I don't really know. My guess is there are at least four votes to extend those protections to particularly protections permanent re residents. Um. As to whether there are five, I don't know.

But as a matter of precedent, right? I think it is very clear that lawful permanent residents have constitutional protections that individuals without documentation lack. So for example, you cannot just simply revoke an individual's lawful permanent residence status like that has to go through an immigration court and then is susceptible to review in federal court, right? They possess due process rights that other individuals with lesser status lack.

And you know, the, this is clear in the court's cases to the point where I think it is just grossly inaccurate to say individuals like Khalil do not have First Amendment rights or other analogous constitutional rights. Now again, I think part of the problem is like this statute purports to give the secretary broad authority to determine what constitutes a threat. And my guess is the administration is going to. Try all sorts of maneuvers, right?

In order to characterize what exactly the threat is and not precisely link it to the content of Khalil's speech. And so like that's partially how they are going to walk around or try to walk around the First Amendment question. But I think again, that just underscores like the solution here, right? Is to get this law off the books. Going to the case against the INA, you kind of alluded to this already in talking about the origins of the INA.

Could you expand a little bit more on your case against the INA and some of its origins? Yeah, so I, I, I like to start from 30,000 feet. The, the kind of idea motivating the INA is that. We should be an exclusionary country, right? That there is not enough space, there's not enough resources for everybody, and so we need to decide who should be allowed in and who shouldn't be allowed in. Right now at a. This is eugenics thinking. Right. Well, just at a 30,000 foot level, it's wrong.

Yeah. It's a giant country with more than enough space for everybody, and so that kind of premise is wrong, but then Yes, exactly right. Professor Murray, the way they then decided in the INA to figure out who should be allowed in and who should be excluded was based on eugenics. Was based on literal studies and congressional testimonies that said there were certain races that were high quality and certain races more prone to degeneracy.

And all of this literal eugenics and Nazi language is what informed the INA and thus the exclusionary practices that, for lack of a better word, focus on the global south, right? Um, focus on browner people being thought of as degenerate races and thus unable to participate in the American experience at the same level as as white Europeans. And when I'm not, I just want people to understand, again, I talked about this in the book, I am not being hyperbolic, right? This is what these people said.

In real time when supporting, developing and voting for this law. There was an entire court case, um, outta the ninth circuit where they tried to get a portion of the INA revoked because of this racist language and backstory. And the judge was basically like the ninth circuit. Right. Which is not, you know, known for, for, for its, uh, shrinking violets. Right. The ninth circuit was like, yeah.

If we started getting rid of every law just because they were racist, I mean, we basically have no laws. And finally, section D, government function. It's open defiance of the courts. He literally said, I don't care what the courts say. You don't do that in a democracy. You do that in an autocracy, you do that in a dictatorship. Trump and Rubio have ignored a court order. This is a five alarm fire. This, this is how democracies die. This is a big deal.

This is a, uh, a genuine, as Joe Biden would say, BFD. Um. What happens when court orders get ignored? Well, first of all, that is an assault on our constitution when the administration ignores a court order, it's only happened a couple of times in our history. Andrew Jackson did it back in the day around the Trail of Tears, and arguably around the, the Second National Bank of America. The court had said that it was Constitutional Jackson shut it down.

Anyway, the court didn't say he couldn't shut it down. Um, the Trail of Tears was a, a better example. Um, and Abraham Lincoln ignored the Supreme Court's order in Dred Scott saying that Northern states did not have to re enslave black people in those northern states. So you've got two instances. Um, one of, you know, one of Trump's, Mr. Jackson just defying the courts and the other of, uh, Abraham Lincoln doing the right thing, arguably. But it led to the Civil War in part.

I mean, this was one of the things that told the Confederate states that Lincoln wasn't screwing around. So what can the courts do? Well, there's, there are two types of contempt of court. I mean, what, what? It's a virtual certainty that today the judge who issued the order last, uh, or on Saturday saying that Trump could not deport these Venezuelan. Uh, nationals without first having at least a hearing without there being some sort of due process.

As the Constitution defines in the fifth, sixth, and seventh and eighth amendments to the Constitution, that these are, these are our basic due process rights. You're, you're, you're, you're entitled to face your accusers. You're entitled to a, to a trial. You're in, you're entitled to, to swift justice. I mean, just pretty straightforward stuff. Trump is ignoring that. So if the court holds the Trump administration in contempt, there are two ways to do this.

One is criminal contempt and the other is civil contempt. Now, in criminal contempt, the person is seized and thrown in the clink and, uh, you know, thrown into jail, and that is done by the US Marshal Service. Now the problem here, of course, is that the US Marshal service works for the Attorney general. Who works for the president. They are part of the executive branch, even though they are the enforcement arm of Article three.

The article, the Third branch of government, the Article three branch of Government, the courts. So if he were to declare the Trump administration in, in criminal contempt of the law and order the marshal service to say, go out and get Tom Holman. Tom Holman is the border czar. He is the guy who went on Fox News yesterday and said, I don't care what the court orders say, we're gonna do this anyway. We're gonna continue the deportations. It's gonna be one every day.

It's open defiance of the courts. He literally said, I don't care what the courts say. You don't do that in a democracy. You do that in an autocracy, you do that in a dictatorship, of course. That's, that's how dictatorships run. The big guy says, Hey, jump. And everybody goes, how high? The big guy says, ignore the courts. And everybody says, okay, we're ignoring the courts. The big, the big guy says, Congress, do this or don't do that. And Congress does it or doesn't do it as as instructed.

I mean, this is how it works in Russia. Which is, I, I'm increasingly believing Donald Trump's role model is Vladimir Putin. Let's backtrack for a moment and fill our listeners in so they can rage with us. It's eugenics, Ani. I know, Jess. I know. I mean, really it's part of the plan to eliminate quote unquote undesirable characteristics from the populace. I know.

I know Jess. And don't even get me started on Buck versus Bell, the Supreme Court case that actually GreenLights all of this and is probably gonna be one of the precedents. The Robert Court keeps intact. Yeah, because it serves, yeah. That was the case where Oliver Wendell Holmes said something like, one generation of imbeciles is enough. I mean. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and honestly, you're preaching to the choir here it is eugenics. It is bad.

And Buck v Bell has never been overturned, so technically it is still good law. Right. And And that's why section 5 0 4 of the Rehabilitation Act was so revolutionary. Mm-hmm. Precisely because it rejected the premise of eugenics and essentially extended the 1964 Civil Rights Act to people with disabilities. And the way it came about is a good blueprint for the ways in which citizen action can translate into material gains for vulnerable people. Oh, yes. Right.

Because the, the, the, the sort of zeitgeist of the 5 0 4 protests isn't well known, and it is amazing. I certainly wasn't aware of how hard people with disabilities fought to get Section 5 0 4 signed, right? Mm-hmm. It's not something that we talk about a lot, right? So we're gonna talk about it right now. Oh, I love it. It means talking about the seventies, greatest generation. April 5th, 1977. Brown. That's why 1970. I was like two and a half background. I was about to turn three years old.

I was. You were about to turn three years old. I was. Three. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna turn three years old. About three in a couple months 'cause we're a couple of months apart. Okay. April 5th, 1977. Dozens of disabled people entered San Francisco's Office of Health, education and Welfare, and they occupied it for 25 days in what remains the longest occupation of a federal building in US history.

The people who occupied the building were from diverse racial and social backgrounds, and they had a wide range of disabilities, and the way they all worked together, you know, to use their abilities to help other people with disabilities was actually very remarkable. Mm-hmm. Here's how the Long Mower Institute on disability at San Francisco State University described it. Quote, they came on crutches using canes and in wheelchairs. Some used American sign language.

Others augmented communication devices. Many others contributed simply by showing up to offer support. Most arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Guided by a few vague ideas about why they were there. Yet enough of them had political smarts, experience with building coalitions, tenacity and fire in their bellies to confront the government of a major world power about their civil rights and win.

Oh, thank you for including this part in today's show, because it's gonna be what gets me down off this ledge. I love this discussion because so many people don't know the history of disability rights in this country, and I feel kind of grateful because, as you know, Amani, I was raised by a disability rights advocate. Uh, my dad, uh, you know, did a DA, uh, uh. Disability, litigation, Olmsted, uh, se uh, settlements, like really the entire arc of my childhood was, you know.

Informed by the coalition building that happened in the late seventies within the disability and racial justice communities and wow, could we take a page of that today? You know, and it wasn't just San Francisco, right? In their effort to get Nixon to sign the Rehab Act, hundreds of protestors around the country occupied several federal buildings. Most were starved out within a day or two. But what sit.

What set San Francisco apart is that they were able to maintain the occupation for a month, and that thanks to really solid organizing, the resourcefulness of the organizers combined with months of cementing relationships with local community organizations, resulted in a coalition of supporters that included the Black Panthers.

The Gay community's Butterfly Brigade, labor unions, the Glide Memorial Church, Safeway and McDonald's, along with sympathetic local and national politicians, the Black Panthers and McDonald's. Two great tastes that taste great together. Listen. When you're doing sit-ins at the federal government, why wouldn't you wanna be eating a McRib at the same time? Or a mcd LT, oh my God, I forgot about mcd.

LT. Did they have mcd LT in the seventies or the hot side stays hot and the cold side stay stays cold. I feel like Thatm, that was like an eighties creation. I think so. But either way, your point is valid. Very, very valid. Please continue. I'm loving this.

I mean, the long and the short of it is that the 5 0 4 occupiers held on at the San Francisco Offices of Department and Health Education and Welfare for nearly a month generating national attention and ultimately helping to gain the support necessary for signing section 5 0 4 and the, the, the circumstances surrounding whether or not these regulations would be signed. We're kind of harrowing because basically Dick Nixon was being a bit of a dick about it.

He truly really was being a bit of a dick about, I mean, he vetoed. Section 5 0 4 at first. Mm-hmm. Which at the time led critics even in his own party to call it his most inhumane veto. Particularly because his complaint at the time was that he was over budget and there was just no money to ensure that people with disabilities weren't being discriminated against. And you have to remember that this was like right around when a lot of, a lot of veterans were coming back from Vietnam.

They were coming back from Vietnam. With disabilities. And here was this guy who was saying, we, I don't have money to help y'all. I'm gonna keep spending tons of money dropping bombs in Cambodia for no fucking reason, right? Mm-hmm. But then again, it seems to be always about budgets when it comes to people with disabilities, as you mentioned earlier. Right? When we talk about the aada, the a DA, we talk about reasonable accommodations. Part of the reasonableness is a financial inquiry.

How much is it gonna cost to accommodate a person with disabilities at a certain location? Right? Either the reasonable accommodations are too expensive, too expensive, or the regulations themselves are too expansive, as you said, because now. The main reason people seem to be pissed off these attorneys generals seem to be pissed off is because of gender dysphoria. And if all disabilities get swept under the rug along with it, then that's just fine. Mm-hmm.

Really this lawsuit is about who we decide is worthy of participating in society. Right? Right. It's about eugenics and it goes hand in hand with other policies of the Trump administration, right? Like the Make America healthy again, nonsense from Wellness Farm and Bear. Carcass enthusiasts, RFK, junior. Oh completely. Or threatening colleges and universities. Uh, federal funding if they have masking policies. Right, right. I mean, the implications of this cannot be overstated.

Section 5 0 4, the first civil rights law to explicitly recognize and protect people with disabilities could be rendered entirely unenforceable. This would be catastrophic when it comes to pro to protections for people with disabilities unless they amend their complaint. Instead of expecting us to take their word for it, just because they filed a status report saying they're not really trying to make the whole statute unconstitutional. Right, right.

So amend your goddamn complaint and then maybe we might believe you guys. So what are the lessons to be learned here? Well, I think one of the lessons is clearly that collective action works. Look what the 5 0 4 protestors were able to do in the 1970s is phenomenal. And that's without social media. That's without cell phones. Right, right. That was certainly no TikTok and blue sky to get the word out at all.

And. The reality that coalition building works, but that doesn't mean coalition building with your enemies Does this have the capacity to crash our economy? Um, maybe you can answer now or if the, and then, or if they get their way or neither or both. I. Yeah, I mean, I, I do think, unfortunately that there is a serious amount of risk here.

Um, I suspect with the current level of integration, even if crypto went through a collapse that we saw just a couple years ago, we would not see a great recession style, uh, contagion. But I think that the very rapidly progressing changes in regulation that the cryptocurrency industry has spent.

Over a hundred million dollars on and is raising even more money to, to continue to pursue, uh, and seems to be getting very much, uh, raise that risk and that that type of contagion could be in the very near future, unfortunately, um, if these types of regulations are, uh, removed or if you know. Favorable regulations are installed for the cryptocurrency industry. Um, you know, the more that we're seeing the US government endorsing crypto, I think the higher the risk is becoming.

We're starting to see states talking about establishing Bitcoin reserves at the state level. Um, and so, you know, this is. You know, actual people's money, taxpayer money going towards acquiring Bitcoin, which as you mentioned is profiting those like the Winklevoss twins who bought Bitcoin very early on and are now billionaires. Um, again, at the expense of everyday people, while also introducing this degree of financial risk throughout the American economy.

Um. And honestly further, uh, that could be devastating during a future collapse. So I am very concerned about the type of risk that we are rapidly taking on. And, and then it's a good opportunity to talk about, uh, Andreessen Horowitz. And, you know, we covered it on our show. Mark Andreesen in November, went on to the Joe Rogan podcast, which is the, uh. The tech oligarch propaganda show, and he was, uh, or VC pick, take your, pick your poison.

He was, uh, saying that, uh, Elizabeth Warren is personally debunking all of us and coming after us and targeting us politically. She does not head the CFPB, but, uh, Elon Musk is taking a hammer to the agency that, um, has returned $21 billion to consumers who were victimized by corporate greed, um, and banking greed. And then he went on and, and now he's basically claiming that, uh, the. His business in particular is being targeted. And you mentioned their holdings in crypto.

Um, what is this de banking thing all about and why are billionaire crypto holders like Andreessen fixated on changing those regulations? I. Yeah, so there has been this narrative coming out of the cryptocurrency industry that they're being systematically de banked by banking regulators and by agencies like the CFPB and by the Biden administration in general, um, through a campaign in which basically the administration and regulators were pressuring banks to deny banking services.

To anyone and any company in the cryptocurrency industry. Um, and they've really sort of co-opted this term of de banking, which is, you know, this idea where someone is improperly denied a bank account due to, you know, their race, their religion, um, their economic status, you know, any number of things, not based on their actual risk profile, but just because the bank. Decides they don't wanna work with them for sort of discriminatory reasons.

Um, the crypto industry is claiming that they are being discriminated against and de banked in this same way. Uh, when in reality most of the documents that they have provided that they claim show, you know, hard evidence of this de banking campaign really show regulators trying to evaluate the risk of banks offering crypto products themselves.

Um, you know, like I said, the Bitcoin ATMs in the bank lobby and the, the crypto purchases in your banking app that sound like they're covered by FDIC insurance. Um. There has been pretty little in the way of evidence that there is any sort of campaign to systematically de bank the crypto industry. And in reality, it seems like banks basically doing their own risk assessments and saying this, you know, this crypto company is too risky for us to take on as a customer.

You're gonna have to look elsewhere, which is a legal thing to do. You know, banks are not required to provide services to every customer. They just can't deny them for discriminatory reasons. Well, they are discriminating against these corporate persons according to the Supreme Court, uh, based on the industry that they're in, which is the same as apparently racial discrimination. Right. Um, but anyway, this is all culminated in this campaign.

You know, it is, it's been used as basically ammunition by the cryptocurrency industry to bolster this campaign to attack regulations on banks and other financial service providers. Um, and it's. Ironically enough been used as ammunition to attack the CFPB, which is actually the number one defender against discriminatory de banking.

Uh, they are sort of the primary consumer debunking watchdog, and yet, as the crypto industry is making all of these claims of debunking and even arguing about more general debunking against. You know, they say it's happening against conservatives or other industries like the firearms industry or you know, religious organizations. Even as they're making these claims about consumer de banking, they are celebrating the shutdown of the CFPB.

Um, Coinbase, for example, their CEO, Brian Armstrong was. You know, basically shooting off confetti cannons about the fact that the CFPB was being shut down. Um, probably because the CFPB recently issued a sort of interpretive rule saying that Coinbase would have to, uh, make whole customers who are, uh, victims of basically phishing scams, stealing their cryptocurrency out of their Coinbase accounts, which a recent, um. Investigation by a cryptocurrency researcher called Zac.

XPT suggested was like $300 million a year that Coinbase was allowing to be stole, stolen from its customers that they would have to repay. And so, you know, it's very clear why someone like Brian Armstrong and Coinbase would be opposed to the CFPP because they might install consumer protections for Coinbase customers who are historically ignored by Coinbase when they complain about stolen funds.

Um. And you know, it's inconvenient for them to support an agency that otherwise might be a very useful ally if they were concerned about de banking in the ways that they claim. But in reality, it's really just a political weapon to try to advance their goal of slashing regulations, reducing these firewalls between the banking industry in crypto, and you know, basically just allowing them to do whatever it is that they want. Consumers be damned. Tell me about what happened last week.

Um, when did the Mel Gibson issue first make its way to you? I was tasked a few weeks ago with joining a, a working group in the department that brought together multiple offices within the Department of Justice in order to launch a process to broadly begin restoring gun rights to Americans who had lost their rights to possess a firearm because of a criminal conviction. Hmm. This is a project that I understood was a priority for the Attorney General.

And I was told that this project was going to be centered in the office of the Pardon attorney, which was an entirely new workflow for us, not something that we had ever done before. And did you, was it like just a bunch of people in a spreadsheet or was it like, Hey, here's Mel Gibson. So I was told that we were working toward establishing a process that all Americans who were prohibited from possessing a firearm would have access to.

And the initial request of my office was that we identify a group of candidates who we thought would be suitable for the attorney general to grant this relief to in connection with making an announcement of the broader program. So what I did when given that assignment is I looked to the pool of individuals who had applied for presidential pardons and who my office had vetted for consideration of a presidential pardon.

We extensively vet people before recommending them to the president for a pardon? Because we know that one consequence of receiving a pardon is that you're able to legally purchase a firearm. So when we vet. Someone for a pardon in. We conduct a full background investigation of the level that would be required to gain a top secret security clearance. Was Mel Gibson one of those people that you had identified?

He was not. Uh, Mel Gibson has never applied for any type of relief through my office, but we were able to identify 95 ordinary Americans who had applied for pardons, who had been waiting years to be considered for that relief and to have been extensively vetted. All of these folks had in common a number of things, including that their underlying crimes of conviction were nonviolent offenses. They were minor offenses.

They were offenses that happened many, many years ago, in all cases 20 plus years ago. And these are all individuals who had demonstrated by interviews with neighbors and employers and family members and others who know them, that they have been outstanding citizens since the time of their conviction. Mel Gibson was not among those individuals who we, we identified. So where does Mel g when does, how does Mel Gibson enter the workflow?

So what happened was I was asked to put together a memo for the attorney general, uh, summarizing the cases of nine of the 95 individuals that my colleagues and I had identified. They had whittled that 95 down to nine, and they asked me to write a memo to the attorney General recommending that these would be suitable candidates for her to grant this. Relief of restoring their firearm rights.

And I was comfortable doing that with those cases because I had a great deal of information about those nine people and had already recommended that they were suitable candidates for a presidential pardon. So Mel Gibson did not enter the equation until after I sent the initial draft of my memo to some officials within the office of the Deputy Attorney General. They received my memo and they sent it back to me with the direction. Please add Mel Gibson to this recommendation.

I see and and their justification for that was what? Well there, there was no justification specifically provided, but they did attach a letter that had been sent by Mel Gibson's personal attorney to the then Acting Attorney General and Acting Deputy Attorney General, in which Mel Gibson's attorney requested that he receive this relief from the attorney General.

Mel Gibson's attorney laid out that Mr. Gibson had a previous conviction for domestic violence in 2011 and that he had attempted to purchase a firearm in 2023 and that he was denied because of his criminal background. And the attorney stated that Mr. Gibson is a, uh, high profile actor who's made lots of famous movies and that he has a relationship with the president and ask that he be granted that relief.

Um, Todd Blanche, who, uh, is the number two, I guess now at Department of Justice, has this to say about your account here saying that former employees who violate their ethical duties by making false accusations on press tours will not be tolerated. I dunno what that means. This former employee's version events is false. Her decisions to voice.

This erroneous accusation about her dismissals in direct violation of her ethical duties as an attorney is a shameful distraction from our critical mission to prosecute violent crime, enforce our nation's immigration laws, and make us America safe again. What do you say to that?

Well, Chris, the reason that I'm here talking about this tonight is because what's going on inside the Department of Justice in terms of silencing, dissent is so frightening that I felt like I needed to share this story after I was fired. And frankly, I think Mr. Blanche's statement really just proves my point. My ethical duty as a Department of Justice employee and now a former one, is to the laws of the United States and the people that I was entrusted to serve.

It is not to the bullies who are currently running the Department of Justice. We take an oath of office as Department of Justice employees and that oath says nothing about loyalty to the political administration or to the political leadership of the department. And uh, frankly, I think that. The position that Mr. Blanche is taking in his statement really just proves how terrified we should be about the current situation at the Department of Justice.

Copyright law has been one of the only effective ways the government has been able to curb some of this within the confines of the First Amendment. But that is a deeply imperfect solution that has resulted in widespread misuse. So I wanted to know where does this all leave us? And what about the current Trump administration has ADD concerned that this new bill might be weaponized in ways that severely undermine its goals?

So in a a normal environment, maybe this law passes, maybe there's a bunch of chaos, there's a bunch of lawsuits, a bunch of platforms might issue some policy documents, and we would slowly and somewhat chaotically stumble towards a revised policy, right? Maybe the law gets amended. Maybe there's an enforcement regime that builds up around the law. Something happens. Frankly, the, the most likely outcome is that someone takes this law to court and a lot of this is declared unconstitutional.

Sure. Like in a functioning system, and then maybe part of the law stands and maybe, hopefully it's a good part that isn't open to abuse, but good chance it would just get overturned. Right. And even in that process, I think Congress would look at that and say, okay, this is a problem. We're going to have some solutions for the back end of this win lose, right? Like you can see how the normal policymaking, legal, judicial process might otherwise play out. We have a lot of history with that.

Your piece, uh, is titled the Take It Down Act isn't a law, it's a weapon, and your thesis is that we do not live in a normal world. And the Trump administration in particular is so sclerotic and so addicted to selective enforcement that what they're really gonna do is pass this law and then use it as a cudgel to beat platforms in the submission. Explain what you mean. I. Alright, so the normal process we've been talking about this whole time just assumes there's a function in government.

There's a hard problem. Everybody in the government fights about this problem. Civil society does. People play their part, but everyone's kind of acting in good faith. Everyone does actually care about stopping. NCII. They do recognize that there are problems with overroad restrictions on speech and.

Everyone's trying to work toward a solution because they believe that laws are things that should be applied evenly, and that laws should be applied in ways that fundamentally work with the constitution. The Trump administration just doesn't believe in the rule of law. It doesn't think that laws are things that you should apply to everyone in the way that they are meant to be applied by Congress.

What it believes is that laws are things that you apply to the people that you hate in any way that can hurt them. And I. You don't apply them to the people that you like. The way that you apply them is not actually in a way that stops the problem they're meant to address. It's a way that gets you the thing you want, which probably has nothing to do with that.

So we've seen this say, play out with, uh, the TikTok ban might be the most absolutely egregious example, which is that while I don't agree with the ban, it was something that was passed with a bunch of bipartisan support. It was passed after years and years of working with TikTok. It was then. Sent up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court upheld it. It is hard to find a law that was more rigorously vetted.

And then Trump takes office a day after it passes, and he says, well, specifically, I like TikTok because. TikTok got me elected, and also TikTok has been saying, I'm really great. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to sign an executive order. The executive order doesn't make an argument for why I have the power to extend this deadline. It doesn't make any kind of argument for why this is compatible with the law.

What it says is don't enforce the law, and then it goes to all of these platforms that are trying to follow the law, and it tells them, don't follow the law, and there is absolutely no reason to do this. That is compatible with the thing that Congress and. The Biden administration and the Supreme Court did because he doesn't care about the law. What he cares about is getting the law to do what he wants. And the Trump administration is not staffed with folks who believe this, who act this way.

We talk about Brendan Carl Law at the FCC, who uses his enforcement power or his merger review power. To push broadcasters into doing whatever speech he wants or punish them for news coverage he doesn't like. There's Elon who seems like an important character in all this because he runs a platform.

There's Mark Zuckerberg who seems more amenable to making deals that Trump administration are in moderation, is saying, okay, we have this bill that says, if you don't take down this imagery in 48 hours, the FTC can find you. Is that just another way for Trump to say, I could destroy your company unless you do what I want, or I can tell the FCC to hold off.

Yeah. There are two sides to this and one of them is the side that we talk about often, which is what if this gets weaponized a against people that the government doesn't like? And then there's the other side that I think less often is. Raised before Trump, which is, even if you take this law seriously, you're not going to get it applied against the people that are actually hurting NCII victims.

Because again, the administration doesn't even care about applying the law to people that it should be used against. Uh, Elon is maybe the clearest example of that, which is just, let's take the extreme view that it is worth doing anything to get NCI off eye, off the internet.

A place this would come into play is X, uh, formerly Twitter, which has had probably the biggest NCII scandal of the last several years, which is that a bunch of Taylor Swift, uh, sexually graphic images were posted there and spread there, and it did very little to stop them. It eventually kind of blocked searches for Taylor Swift. If you're looking at major platforms, it's the first one you think of.

You cannot enforce this law against Dex it, it is almost literally inconceivable because Elon Musk runs the department that governs whether the FTC has money and people who work there. The week before I wrote this, uh, we broke a story that said that someone very likely Doge had cut, uh, about a dozen people from the FTC. I'm trying to imagine a scenario where. X completely ignores the law and says, well, screw you taylor Swift. I don't like you. In what world does the FTC do anything?

I can't think of a way where it would act in any way in the interest of NCII victims The Department of Education has been around since 1867. Why? Because it's important to have a, an educational foundation for a country and its future and society and a whole. What we've been dealing with now, uh, for the last 70 years is the fallout from 1954 Supreme Court Decision, brown v Board of Education. And so what immediately happened after Desegregating public schools?

You saw this push by the right segregationist, white supremacist, who then started creating private schools as sort of an off ramp to be able to have control and still have segregation. This was also a joint effort between not just segregationists, but the evangelical, right? The modern, uh, uh, anti-abortion movement actually has its roots in the segregationist philosophy. You, Nick, you know, and everybody listening to this has heard state's rights. This was the origin of it.

The idea that all power should be taken from the federal government so that the states can determine whether or not you're able to discriminate, which is again, being re-litigating. So what are we seeing at this point? We are trying to, or the right is trying to throw this back to the states. So that we can have not just segregated schooling, but privatized schooling.

That's the, the other component of this, um, there's a reason why it went from Betsy DeVos, who is like one of the leading champions of privatizing education to Linda McMahon, who more or less is a pallbearer. Uh, she knew when she took this position, one, she wasn't qualified, and two, she was delivering the Department of Education to its death. So what are we dealing with at this point?

We are dealing with a hierarchical authoritarian movement that wants to make sure that some students are not going to get an education at all, or at least the scant minimum, so that they can be productive workers and be exploited and never understand what's going on while controlling curricula.

So that they can hide their history and their own actions so they can further mystification, which you and I have talked about ad nauseum, and basically create this oligarchical paradise, which is a nightmare in which you have all of these owned curricula and institutions and schools. In which some people, the chosen few, the people at the top of the hierarchy, they get their education, they're able to move forward and everybody else falls behind. That's what this is all about.

Well, the irony is that when they try and make it seem like it's, uh, state's rights, they want to have each individual community control what, uh, their, their kids learn. There is a centralized notion to what they want to teach with the curriculum, right? Yep. We're talking about, uh, they don't want to, they didn't mention slavery. They don't, they probably will go back and get rid of, um, creationism. Um, and, uh, wait, wait. They wait. They want, they don't want, they want creationism.

They'll also get rid of the genocide of the Native American population as well. Yes. At least that, that's the top three. That's gotta be another five or six in there that they're gonna throw in there that are awful stuff. And so it really, you know, in reality this isn't any sort of, you know, uh, local thing that they want to control. This is some sort.

Uh, nefarious, uh, mind control propaganda arm that they're trying to establish, which you need to have, I suppose if you wanna form an oligarchy or an authoritarian government, right? You need to have that kind of control over what the kids are learning. Yeah. And this is how authoritarian movements always work. It's, it's a matter of institutional capture, right? Like you take over, uh, while you're taking over state power, you're also then going down the chain.

I keep referring to this as the avalanche coming down the mountain. So you, they go into the schools, whether or not it's higher education or lower tier education, and basically go in. And intimidate everybody to go along with them. And we're seeing a lot of that right now. Nick, we're seeing the leveraging of federal funding being tied to ideological conformity.

Basically, administrators at all levels are being told that they will lose all funding and all support if they don't fall in line and capitulate and collaborate. And this is what we see with all authoritarian movements. There are all these sort of signs that come together. The weird nefarious part of this though, Nick, is it's not just authoritarian, white supremacist, uh, patriarchal ideology and also possibly Christian nationalist ideology.

The weird component now is there is this private sector that has already cur created this curricula, right? It's basically handing out patronage to places that are going to come in and supply that curricula that is going to go ahead and push the author authoritarian state power, which. Just sort of underlines the complicated, uh, nightmare that we're currently dealing with.

The first thing that they do is they list their convictions, is that parents are the primary decision makers in their children's education. That's all about school choice. Right, right now. But let me, as far as I can understand how that means is they want, they're the, the primary decision makers in the curriculum itself.

But I'm curious, as a professor for a lot of years, did you ever do like the, the, uh, training, uh, the teacher training, uh, that, you know, for like maybe graduate level stuff that they have for, you know, teaching the classroom? Or were you just sort of an expert in your field and then you got, you were a professor for that way? No. You, you got training. Yeah. No, like they, they, they, they trained you basically how to put these things together. Yeah, for sure.

Right. And I, I asked that because I, I had a lot of experience doing that at the high school level, and you start to realize that, you know, I know that schools are failing us and we can talk all about the reasons for that, but there, I have to tell you, uh, a lot of the infrastructure built into helping and supporting teachers and educating kids is pretty good.

You know, it is well thought out and there are experts who are designing how we need to educate kids in the classroom, and it's very dynamic and they're always updating and they're always examining things.

And so to hear someone like this who is coming from a whole different spectrum of, of thought, you know, convinced that what the teachers are teaching and how they're being trained, I suppose the connection or the similarity would be, uh, how police are trained and how you, and I would say we need to radically changed that this is what they feel like, they feel like these police, these, um, teachers are like what we feel cops are like now. Well, and, and that is the present moment. Mm-hmm.

And the, the really frightening thing here, Nick, and it's becoming more and more, um, you know, clear every single day how much of what's going on with the Trump administration and the oligarchical coup that we've been covering is that they're just setting the ground for ai. They're just ma, you know, they're basically creating a market need for AI to handle everything.

So not only are teachers going to lose funding, not only are they going to lose training and materials and studies that we're talking about with the Department of Education, eventually the solution is going to be the usage of ai, which is why, and I know a lot of teachers and a lot of educators listen to this show. This is unacceptable. This is a red line.

And with this happening, um, you know, I think I said it was in, I think it was during our, our live coverage of the post, uh, address to Congress. I said, this is the equivalent of, you know, uh, an attempted kidnapping where they're trying to move you to another location, you know, where like you're really, really in danger. This is the point where you don't put your head down and say, this is inevitable. This is going to happen. If you are not in a union, you need to get together right now.

And quite frankly. Uh, you're right. There are going to be lawsuits that are going to challenge this, but this is the type of thing it, it, the walls are closing in and if you are going to make a difference, it needs to be made now. So my advice to everybody listening this who is an educator, a teacher who's involved in any of this, you need to get in the ears of your administrators, that ears of your bosses, and you need to start talking to your colleagues about stepping out of this.

Because this is, it. It, it's not just getting rid of funding and the training, it's also completely changing this over to another system that once we get there, I don't know how we get back. That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our

The additional sections of the show included clips from The Empire Files, the PBS NewsHour, Citations Needed, Internet Today, The Thom Hartmann Program, Democracy Now!, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Legal Eagle, On the Media, Strict Scrutiny, Boom! Lawyered, The Majority Report, All In with Chris Hayes, Decoder, and The Muckrake Political Podcast. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening.

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