4/1/25: Trump Threatens To Bomb Iran, Elon Election Takeover Plot, Bernie Tea Party, Elon Baby Mama Drama

for both the Hoothies and their sponsors in Iran. So remember that little signal Chat debate, all of that, that little signal Chat debate that preceded the first of what has now been a week or so of strikes. The attacks from the Hoothies have not continued, not stopped, literally at all. There does not appear to be any endgame. Trump said that he would hold Iran responsible. Now, I mean, he's basically as I think we said that here at the time.

And as he said at the original he said that we will bomb Iran if they don't make a deal. Well guess what they said, Yeah, we don't really want to talk to you, right.

it reaches a new nuclear deal with Washington. Trump reiterated his threat on Sunday. That's what we were talking about, and Supreme Leader says the enmity from the US and Israel has always been there. They threaten to attack us, which we don't think is very probable, but if they commit any mischief, they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow.

And if they are thinking of causing sedition inside the country as in past years, the Iranian people themselves will deal with them, speaking to you know some of the theoretical stirring up of domestic unrest within Iran that they believe that we are feilty of.

you are in a tight time frame. You have the Gaza stuff, you have the Gaza war which is popping off. Things are only going to get worse if we see mass expulsion, which we talkalked about previously, then you add on top of that with the Iran section, and you look at all of the people in the administration at the White House like Mike Wallace, Marco Ruby, and others who have talked a big game about bombing Iran, and

what else can you conclude? And you see here from the Trump from the Iranian response, where they have their own domestic political situation. US pulling out of the deal burned them at a domestic political level and made it much more difficult for any Iranian leader to try and pursue that in terms of their own internal politics. So you really have two things coming here. I guess all you can hope for is that we're all bluffing. But that's not a good hope. That's not a good bet to make.

Are the people who are leaking to Jeffrey Goldberg going to go to bat against taking any sort of hawkish actions and escalatory actions. Quincy Institute for Responsible state Craft over on their blog, which is excellent by the way, they write really fantastic analyzes that are that are definitely worth reading. We can put this up on the screen. They have been tracking the increasing beating of the war drums, and the headline here is the war of the war

over war with Iran has just begun. Trump says he wants a deal, but stakeholders in and outside of his administration are pushing for conflict. The first paragraph here reads, in recent weeks, many of the same neo conservative voices who pushed the US into Iraq are calling for strikes on Iran. Groups like the Foundation for Defensive Democracies and the Washington Institute for Gear East Policy are once again promoting confrontation, claiming that there may never be a better

time to act. But this is a dangerous illusion that risk derailing what Donald Trump himself says he wants a deal, not another disaster war in the Middle East. I think that's a little pretty charitable to Trump, given that he's said he wants a deal but also threatened to bomb them. But you know, they're trying to write this in a way that would appeal to him and potentially, you know,

some of his allies within the administration. But in any case, I thought it was important that they were tracking the way that these influential think tanks within Washington were increasingly pushing towards this confrontation, because as much as we would like those people to be irrelevant, they are not. They have a lot of allies within this administration, within every administration, who are listening to the case and making a similar case internally.

So look right now, I mean, are we going to war with Iran? Let's really hope not. But the point is is that the ground is laid for something to pop off. Is that Trump has now made several decisions and the people around him are obviously advocating for this. There are off ramps. Steve Whitkoff, Send Steve over there, Send him to Iran. He made some comments in this Trump Tucker Carlson interview apparently which were noticed by the Iranians and they might be willing to talk with them.

But watch how Steve got sidelined by the Israelis. I mean, they attacked the sh shit out of him. The reason why this ceasfire fell apart, I believe is because they were successfully able to Sideline Witcough and Adam into the same with a lot of the other voices in Washington. I mean, remember the guy who said we're not a client state of Israel. He's been you know, he's with the disappeared, he's down in that ice facility, Like I wouldn't want to be him, not for the rest of

my life. No, it's not funny, but it is like there's something to it. Right, he hasn't been on television since and you are watching, like as those people in the war on that is successful, and then the administration voices and all these other people. The more there's no accountability for folks like Mike Waltz, it would be it's very easy to see many of the mistakes of the first term get repeated and then you're never coming back from that well.

little more intrigue. You want to set this up, Sager, of this gentleman who is looking to replace Mike Walts on the Republican side in a plus thirty Trump district. And now this race is apparently close. I still think the Republican is very likely to win here, let's be clear, but the fact that there's nervousness about this at all is totally insane.

destroy Iran. This was on October first of twenty twenty four. Bombs away. Go to the next one, so you guys can see here he is.

obviously online. There's a lot of influencers who are willing to call him out. But let's be honest. I mean, Trump has endorsed this guy, and just the other day he endorsed Lindsay Graham.

lie about supposed security fraud. Now, this lie happens to kill two birds with one stone, serving as it does, to feed his attacks on social security, which he of course derives as a Ponzi scheme and his attacks on our electoral system, portraying it as being rife with fraud. Take a listen to Elon's longtime close associate and new

Social Security official Antonio Grassias. He is claiming that millions of non citizens are receiving Social Security cards and that the existence of these immigrant social Security cards is proof that they're receiving fraudulent benefits and that Democrats were allowing non citizens to vote in order to rig elections. Listen to what he has to say, and then I'll tell you the facts on the other side.

an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this five point five million people in those benefit programs. And then what was really really disturbing us was why we're asking ourselves why. And so we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records, and we found people here registered to vote in this population, Yes, ed who did vote, And we found some by sampling

that actually did vote. And we have referred them to prosecution at the Home mad Security Investigation Service. Yeah, already already, that is already happening.

is what those particular Social Security cards look like. You can see that they say valid for work only with DHS authorization, meaning that they explicitly bar voting intellections, which is of course a right reserved in our constitution for citizens.

which clicked into place last week. So somewhat lost the mid last week's Signal Gate debacle, Trump signed an executive order on elections. Now, the bulk of what the order demanded is actually illegal. In particularly, the order requires that voters not only attest to their citizenship, which they must already do, but also provide some documentary proof, something like a passport. This is directly at odds with the National

Voter Registration Act. In fact, Arizona previously tried to add such a requirement and had their laws struck down by the Supreme Court in a seven to two ruling. What's more, Constitution makes clear that what election rules are not left to the states are to be handled by Congress, not by the executive branch. But what really caught my eye on the executive order wasn't so much the proof of citizenship requirement, which, like I said, is probably going to

be blocked from being fully implemented. It was the announcement that Trump is putting Elon Musk's doge at the center of our elections. So the TLDR is this, This executive order would put the richest man on the planet, who is obviously a radicalized partisan, in a position to say who gets a vote and who does not get a vote, and his say would be enforced by a Trump administration that has already proved itself ready and willing to put

states through hell in order to force their compliance. It's a playbook for shifting the country from a democracy towards what some experts call a hybrid regime. Where we may still have democratic institutions in form but not really truly in substance. Now, Elon's repeated lies about non citizens voting and Trump's executive order giving Elons say over who can vote, or a coordinated effort to hobble democracy. All right, here's the key provision. You can see it there up on

the screen. Apartment of Homeland Security and coordination with the DOSEE Administrator shall review each state's publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities as required by this section, alongside federal immigration databases and state records requested through subpoenaware necessary and authorized by law for

consistency with federal requirements. So what that means in plain language is that it's directing the DOGE administrator to review every state's voter registration list using subpoenas if necessary, to force the states to hand over their data to identify lists of supposedly non compliant voters. Now, similar efforts have been tried at a smaller scale on the state level, and so we can know what the expected results would be.

Here's investigative journalist Greg Pallis talking about how state efforts to match voter rolls and make sure the same people weren't registered in multiple states has ended up in practicality, in mass disenfranchisement.

exposey and Rolling Stone and called interstate crosscheck. Now what this is is they take lists of voters from two states, Arizona and Texas, and they say, oh, Jose Rnandez voted in Arizona, and there's a Jose Nandez voted in Texas. It must be the same guy voting twice. So we're going to remove their registrations because we have a double registered voter. Now you might say, well, Jose Ornandez is a common name, it's not necessarily for a Republican. But

so here's the story. So they were literally they Chris Kobach created lists cross check lists of names state to state. For example, they said one guy named James Brown, and Georgia voted two hundred and thirty eight times. I'm not making this up, by the way, So they remove all these James Brown's, they know what they're doing, by the way. Hit fun fact, ninety percent of them, of all of the one hundred most common surnames in America, ninety percent our majority minority names.

Obviously they could put those efforts on steroids. And remember Elon's mindset here, his ketamine adult brain thinks he's on some civilizational mission to save humanity. He has already demonstrated his willingness to do anything from letting the elderly starve without social Security payments to sacrificing kids with HIV in Africa, to define court orders and running roughshod over our constitutional system.

most likely to vote for Democrats. But if Elon wanted to, he could use AI to get even fancier. He's got plenty of data pull up form across the federal government to discern who is a Democratic voter and who's a Republican voter with a very high level of certainty.

So what about the Democratic states? How will they react? Well, Trump has already proven willing to use the entire federal government apparatus to bully democratic states into going along with his dictates. He and Elon will likely provide the narrative fuel by loudly and repeatedly claiming that the resistance of these states to purging voter roles is because they're corrupt

and want to keep their elections rigged. This is, of course a complete inversion of the truth, as Elon and Trump's efforts will be directly aimed at rigging the results for Republicans. Now, I don't know how these states would ultimately react. I guess most will resist, although civil society and Democratic Party resistance to Trump two point zero has been less than inspiring. But twenty seven states have Republican governors. They're going to try to do whatever Trump and Elon

want them to do. And even if only these states fell in line, you could be talking about tens millions of voters kicked off of the voter rules and blocked from the ballot box. Not to mention that the whole loud effort, amplified on x and by every brain dead MAGA influencer in the world to cast every race as rigged is going to be deeply damaging to our ability to persist as a democracy, since that status does depend on people broadly accepting election results as fair, and that too,

is really part of the goal. Now, watching the Trump administration and action, you sometimes get the feeling they really don't think they're ever going to have to face voters again. After all, they are brazenly attacking the most popular programs in the country, like Social Security and medicaid, they are pushing an economic policy that is threatening a system wide collapse. They're threatening new, wildly unpopular wars in places like Mexico

and Greenland, and complete ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Yet not only are the midterms just around the electoral corner, but Trump himself is promising to run for a third term. Elon's lies and Trump's Executive Order the first hints of a potential playbook to make sure voters never truly get the final say. And I thought the way that the Executive Order was covered last week.

put some of these images up on the screen. I mean this has been extraordinary to see the number of people who have come out for these rallies really coast to coast. You're talking tens of thousands of people. You probably know the numbers better than I do, but my understanding is one of the rallies was larger than any of the ones that Bernie was giving when he was running for president, either in twenty sixteen or twenty twenty.

Just talk to us a little bit about what the energy has been and who it is predominantly that is showing up to the Stop Oligarchy Tour.

sense at somebody's rallies. When Senator Sanders is talking, you see some older white men kind of standing their arms crossed, not really angry, not really excited, but just like observing and listening, and you know that they voted for Donald Trump or they didn't vote at all. So I think we are reaching people that we just didn't reach in the twenty twenty primary. And I think, you know, the

observation on that there's many fold. One is if you have that many people, thirty four thousand show up in Denver, why they know that Bernie Sanders is running for president of the United States? What's going on there in the sense that these people people are not done, they're almost they're making they're registering a vote at a time when there isn't a vote to say, hey, there's a populis

revolt in this nation. You guys in DC might not see it, you don't care, but I'm going to show up for this guy right now in this place to tell you to send you care that you are off course. And that's a message to both parties, I think. And then related to that is the sense that we've got politics all wrong and we get into this discourse, which is the left right prism you know, of understanding politics versus the top versus nine nine percent prism, which is

the way we should be observing politics. But too often we get into this left versus right, which suggests that Bernie is quote unquote far left right. You know you're missing this. He's an iconic class of a top versus the bottom fighter, and that's why he's very popular at the moment.

and also is independent candidates. I mean he's very enamored by and supportive of, you know, Dan Osborne when he ran for Senate, and we're hopeful he'll do it again. But as an independent, are there other working class people who'd be able to run, would want to run, throw their hat in the ring, And obviously, you know, I think he'd be interested in trying to support those candidates

to the extent that they wanted Center Sanders support. So that's the kind of a razure hand ask that's going to be coming, I think in the near future from Senator Sanders. But also, like you know, I think he's been urging and again shift too far ahead of urging people to run in various open you know, primaries, whether they're you know, you look at some of the Senacs that are out, they're going to be primaries, as you know. And so he's making calls talking to people saying, hey,

get into this race, offer an alternative. Let's not assume that the establishment has you their pick and it's just going to run down the line. And behind the scenes, he's also telling the Democratic Caucus centershoomer, hey, I'm going to get involved in these We're going to have primaries. I don't want to see super PACs being dumping millions of dollars to put their finger on the scale and fight progressive candidates again, and so that conversation is also happening behind the scenes.

fired by Donald Trump speak in Denver. You get out, you know, I think Adelita Grihalva, who's now going to run for cron Congress, spoke at our Tucson rally. So we're trying to do our partner, and I promise you when we get into some of these other stays. We're going to la on Friday or Saturday, April twelfth, then you've got you know, some others come in shortly after that.

I want to preview some of those, but there's gonna We're trying to make sure those who are interested in a kind of populous revole populous fight see the issues of concentration of wealth and power. The door is open. I mean, we we do know that there's people who may not have supported Bernie Sanders in twenty twenty. It may not have been their cup of tea you take

to somebody like a Chris Murphy. You know, it's clearly moving in the direction of wanting to suggest you know, they're they're fighting, they're interested in fighting concentrations of wealth and power. And if that's the case, you know, the door is open. Please contact me if you don't know, if that is at Bernie Sanders dot com, always welcome. You know you want to be in it. But we're trying to make this as expansive a movement as possible.

To the point that Sager was raising, you know, it is an opportunity to do recruitment, especially knowing that you know, unlikely Bernie Sanders wants for president again, but he said he's trying to build this class consciousness in America. Now is the moment's let's expand.

But you guys have been doing and working on this for what fifteen twenty years now at this point, so where does your confidence come that somebody who shows up with a I hate Elon sign or something like that actually cares at all about let's say, taxing the rich.

it has a way of mobilizing people. To your point, we're not doing our job fully though, if we haven't gotten to the place of how in the ways in which you have a rig corporate power over the economic structure of America, how are we best confronting that. You know,

you see the discourse on tariffs now ticket Master. It's still I worry a little bit that the a liberal left who gets angry about, you know, rightly so about wrongful deportations isn't as enervated and motivated yet about the outsourcing of jobs problem, the tax code issues, the deprivations of healthcare. I think people are head of the Democratic Party, but you do need leaders, and Bernie Sanders has been an iconoclastic leader, and Sean Fain, there's some other stepping out.

I'd like more of those. And that to your point, Sager, if I'm raising appropriate level of skepticism alongside where your comments where I'm saying we don't have enough of them yet, but this is an opportunity to be a breeding ground.

I will say that you know Josh Wiel who's running in Florida, when you called and asked for Senator Sanders endorsement, I mean this is a guy who's who is running in a very kind of class based, populous way that I think if you're running in Florida any time over the last decade, and I don't think you even call Bernie Sanderson as for endorsement, I don't know if you've even run in this particular way. So I'm like, Okay, there's moments, there's glimmers, there's ways in which people are

talking and thinking in different ways. I'm hopeful that there's more leaders though, who want to build a class based movement, got it.

what this administration is doing. There's a variant of that which focuses more on antitrust and corporate monopolies are sort of embodied politically by Elizabeth Warren, by Lena Khan that wing of the party. And then you have a of new entrant, which is the abundance concept, which is co authored the book co authored by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and Ezra has been both of them have been doing media tour. We had Derek here to talk about the

books and his ideas as well. And Ezra explained some of the concept behind this in a recent interview with John Stewart that got a lot of attention. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a bit of what he had to say so.

twenty twenty one, they have time. By the end of twenty twenty four, three have got into the end of the process. They were trying three of these fifties.

middle men doing things that are stopping progress. And I tend to see a lot of those middlemen, the bureaucrats as in the corporate sector of the profit seeking and government their risk aversion. They're just like, oh, well, I don't want to get blamed if we built broadband in the wrong place. So, like you're eighteen, lawyers will descend on the scene and give you, you know, different judgments about how best not to get something done. That is, there

is a problem in government. But I will say that if we're rank ordering things about the major things I want to tackle, it is the prevalence of corporate power, and it's greed over both the economy and the political system. And to some degree, when I hear some of Abundant's friends talk, I'm like, are we getting at the political

corruption problem? Do we understand that some of these are Joe Manchin working with you know, his corporate actors to write in provisions that make it near impossible to execute a bipartisan infrastrucure alaw. Do we understand that there's corporate corrupt netflike political corruption? And I want to see a good progressive is one who wants to tackle not only corporate concentrations of power, but when government is inefficient. And

I think we've lost that DNA. I mean, I know Bertie Sanders has, if there aren't many who say, I want to come in and tackle governments in efficiency. That's why Bertie is called long call for cutting defense budget, auditing the FED. These kinds of things are not in the mainstream of democratic thought, but I would urge them to be to dig in and understand having a good

idea is only half the battle. You've got to execute that idea and understand that there's going to be a lot of choke points that have now been created by economists, by lawyers, by accountants. These are and by moneyed interests to prevent good things from happening.

America needs you to grow up, you petulant manchild.

whoo who we cheer for? The you want to know what to cheer for in this whole situation is and it is. I guess the part that to me was the most grotesque was the him jumping in and being like, I don't even know, if the baby's mine, like exactly, that is ugly and this is a human being who is going to grow up and be able to see those things that you said, So, yeah, that is pretty disgusting.