Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the troubling press conference between Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, exposing the blatant authoritarianism on display — especially as the administration defies a unanimous Supreme Court ruling to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. They also discuss Bill Maher's shocking admission that he visited the White House last week, helping to normalize a figure who should be anything but normalized.
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Nick, every time we get ready to do an episode that has an unbelievable amount of bullshit, and then right before we get ready to record, more bullshit happens.
Welcome to the Golden Age.
Am I right?
Oh, it is.
You know, I guess it's good for content, but...
True. It's terrible for everything.
We're going to get to all of the developments, and there are plenty of them as always.
Reminder, head over to patreon.com slash moncraigpodcast.
Support the show.
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Nick, so we have the show ready to go.
And then Donald Trump welcomed Nayib Bukele into the White House.
And for people who have blessedly not heard of this guy, of course, he is the autocratic leader of El Salvador who has been working with Donald Trump to imprison people who have been disappeared off the streets of America.
Before this meeting began, off the record or off the mic, whatever you want to call it, Trump was overheard telling Bukele that next up are the quote-unquote homegrown.
or U.S. citizens, people within the country that he is planning on sending to El Salvador.
The audio for that is absolutely terrible, but luckily the president of the United States of America was actually
We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat that are Absolute monsters.
I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay?
Okay, good.
Thought that was the wrong one.
Good. No, it's awful.
And so what got basically the news here is we've known that Trump has wanted to do this.
We've now heard it in so many words.
He also confirmed that he, Pam Bondi, and all of the people behind the Trump administration are currently looking at the laws and trying to figure out how they might be able to do it.
Luckily for them, they don't give a shit about laws.
And currently with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who should not be in El Salvador, we have no idea if he's okay.
If anything's going on, they now have a court order to return him and they say, hey, we can't do anything about it.
And luckily, Bukele says he's not interested in doing it.
They're not going to do anything about it anyway.
So who gives a shit about laws?
This is now, you know, again, we were wondering whether this is an authoritarian state.
This is an authoritarian state.
This is an authoritarian state.
Yeah, and it's like, you don't have to look around.
They are now arguing that the Supreme Court did not tell them to return him when they did 9-0, and they had to facilitate his return.
And the fact that they're trying to parse what that means, Stephen Miller, you know, he deserves to sit on attack face-up and something worse, but the guy is...
He's Goebbels.
He's the modern-day Goebbels.
He's a guy using Nazi technique propaganda in order to try and completely lie everything, where he's basically trying to say that if he magically appeared in one of our airports, then, of course, we'd have to allow him into our country.
But we can't do anything about getting him out of the prison.
And then they ask Bukele.
And he says, well, I'm not going to deposit a terrorist into your country.
That would be a terrible thing that cannot be done.
You know, are you aware that in El Salvador, with this prison, there is no due process for anybody that gets sent there?
Yeah, there's nothing.
There's absolutely nothing.
There's autocratic will, and that's everything.
Yeah, it's a complete lawless state.
But here's the really horrible thing.
Imagine how bad conditions were in El Salvador in terms of crime and violence that people there want that.
They wanted this.
They are happy because now it is, quote-unquote, safe.
And the people who were causing so much issue were locked up without any due process.
So, again, what percentage of people are in this prison who are El Salvadorians who are innocent?
You know, we certainly know what the percentage is of people that we sent them there who don't have criminal records is.
And so this is really, really frightening.
And, you know, what is staring Garcia in the face right now is a life sentence without any notion of any process, no parole, no visitors, no visitors to this prison.
So I don't know what to make of this because this is not supposed to happen.
You're supposed to at least be able to do something.
So is anybody going to do anything?
So, I just want to say, first of all, you're assuming that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still alive.
We don't know.
We don't have a clue.
We don't have a clue if anybody who was sent there, and as you pointed out in the past, 75% of the people who were rounded up in this thing do not have criminal records.
We don't know if some of them have died.
We have no idea how many people have died in El Salvador in these prisons to begin with.
And that's one of the reasons why you shouldn't be in business with people like this.
You shouldn't be creating a business partnership between the president of the United States of America and an autocratic leader in another country.
And I want to put that out there on the record because I've been seeing a disturbing number of people, Nick, who are saying, what does Bukele have on Trump?
Is Trump afraid to fight with him and fight for us?
No! He's not afraid to fight with him.
They are in a mutually beneficial partnership with each other.
They have created a perfect situation to do something like this.
And it was on full display in this presser, Nick.
Trump was like, well, I don't have any control over this.
And Bukele's like, I don't have any control over this.
Isn't it wild that the two autocrats aren't able to do anything about this whatsoever?
They have created...
These legal loopholes, and I even hesitate to say legal as an identifier, they are legal-less loopholes, is what it is.
They've studied this, figured it out, and figured out a way to move beyond the jurisdiction of the courts as they currently stand.
They have, and by the way, we've talked about it for forever, when were they going to start moving against courts and just simply not listening?
Here we are, period.
And they've already signaled what's coming next, which is American citizens,
citizens being shipped out of the country for crimes based on what the Trump administration decided.
And what did Trump say to Bukele?
He said...
You're going to need to build like five more of these prisons, which goes ahead and lays bare what this is, which is a mutually beneficial economic partnership, which is private prisons that are beyond the United States of America in order for profit for Bukele and others like him.
There's undoubtedly kickbacks happening in all of this.
Do not get me wrong.
I have to imagine there's some laundering that's taking place from what the U.S. is paying El Salvador.
But also, it's a political advantage with this.
Bukele gains from being the partner with Trump in all of this.
He gains more and more power and prestige, and Trump has created the same thing that we've talked about before, which are rendition sites that took place during the War on Terror, where all of this was sort of pioneered and put into effect.
Now, what do we have, Nick?
We have the beginnings of a concentration camp situation.
And it's going to happen outside the borders of the United States of America, and then there's going to be those that are going to be built here, because as we talked about on The Weekender, there is a $45 billion project to create those infrastructures.
This is how all of this starts to come together, and we're watching it, and now is the time to understand we have to fight against this before we can't fight anymore.
We're recording this on a Monday afternoon, and so in about 12 minutes, they're supposed to have a response to the judge, the district judge, about what they're supposed to do about Garcia.
Because they're kind of playing the game, right?
They're not necessarily completely and utterly disregarding everything so far, right?
But they're offering legal responses, and they're kind of doing this thing, and then...
I kind of just wanted to read this because this is their response.
You can get a handle on how this is all working.
Because don't forget, they've admitted several times in court that they made a mistake and that he was not supposed to be sent.
They kind of wrapped everybody up.
They were in a hurry.
Tattoo, whatever it is, boom, he's gone.
They made a mistake.
That's one of the big reasons why the district courts are saying you better return him.
You made the mistake.
What the government's response is is that, quote, And so, by the way, the command is to facilitate his return.
So their response is, defendants understand facilitate to mean what that term has long meant in the immigration context, namely actions allowing an alien to enter the United States.
Taking all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien's ability to return here.
Indeed, no other reading to facilitate is tenable or constitutional here.
So this is what they're trying to hide behind, illegal ease.
They're having somebody who understands how to write like a lawyer.
You know, do these things.
And then Marco Rubio steps up and tries to say, he is a citizen of El Salvador.
He's illegally here, so he should not be here, and we just send him back.
And I said this in the last episode, that doesn't mean that you send someone like that.
To a prison, to a torture chamber, to a concentration camp.
And that's really why nobody is pushing back on that little piece.
The premise of the whole thing is completely wrong.
And they're allowing that premise to exist.
And if it takes hold, guys like Stephen Miller and guys like Marco Rubio are going to be able to distract everybody from what the real issue is here.
Absolutely. And that is how this thing gets constructed and how it gets carried out.
It also isn't a coincidence that...
Trump has been targeting law firms, putting the fear of God in them.
They're now promising billions of dollars of free legal representation and advice, basically.
And this is what I talked about earlier when it came with the university and other institutions with capture.
You create a situation where everybody who should be pushing back against you because they're afraid, because they're intimidated.
And I have to assume in the very near future, we're going to have another segment on universities because there's some stuff bubbling up there.
Like, what happens?
Is that capture, it keeps the people who should be fighting against this on your side as that system...
And Nick, just a quick note, because we call balls and strikes on this, and we spend a lot of time talking about how the Democratic Party doesn't show up.
One Democratic Party member, Senator Chris Van Hollen, has now promised that if Garcia is not returned by midweek, that he is going to go to El Salvador.
This is something that you and I have been calling for, the Democratic Party, if they're actually going to be representative of the people and an actual opposition party in the face of authoritarianism, they need to push the issue.
Van Hollen is a man of his word.
I hope that he goes through with this because I do not see Garcia being returned and I need somebody to show up and take the fight to these fuckers.
You have to be extremely concerned that one of the reasons why they don't want to return him is because he's dead.
He might be dead or the conditions there are so abhorrent that for anyone to find out what they are, like it would be, yeah.
Right. They might not be able to find him, and they might not be willing to be, like, running through the halls yelling his name.
Hopefully somebody will say, that's me, like Spartacus.
Like, I don't know how else they would do this thing.
That's how bad it sounds in this prison.
He better bring cameras, and he better make it as much of a public spectacle as possible.
Now, is he worried they're going to put him into prison?
Why wouldn't you be at this point?
I'm worried.
I'm worried that they're going to look at my social media and some of the inflammatory things I've said about Trump in my First Amendment rights and harass me at the very least.
Are you worried about that?
Who are you talking to?
I've got 10 years of this.
Yes, I am worried about this.
No, don't worry.
No, I'm not going to tell you that.
That's not my job, Nick.
That's not what I do.
No, we're in danger.
You, me, the people listening to this, the people around the country, we're in danger and we can't live in delusions about it anymore because it's happening.
It's not overreacting.
It's not imagining and taking it to its logical conclusion.
We are where it's at.
Right, right.
And so no matter if I delete my social media apps when I come back in the country from Japan in June...
I have a piece of advice for you and the people listening.
If you're going to leave the country and come back, I would temporarily delete your social media apps.
Yeah. So, on that note, man, that is fucking awful.
We have tons of other fuckery.
That's actually why we've named this segment at this point.
Over the weekend, it was announced that Trump is going to create a cutout for tech companies with his tariffs.
It includes phones, computers, microchips, TVs, you name it.
He did it for big tech, basically created every exception that I think most of us expected that he eventually would.
We were looking at a situation where products like the iPhone were going to cost $3,500.
But luckily enough, the oligarchs who have bought Trump and bought MAGA and bought the presidency, weirdly enough, they got these exceptions cut out for them, Nick.
Yeah. I was watching an interview with this guy who's on Twitter with a lot of followers who's really rich.
He's a tech bro guy.
And he was describing how he can now make a phone call.
To the White House and get, like, Trump on the phone and discuss trade deals, discuss business, whatever he wants.
And as if that was a good thing.
And how, with the Biden administration, the Obama administration, of which he had given lots of money, this and that, whatever, he had never been able to get anywhere near there before.
And I thought, if you listen to this and you're kind of thinking he sounds reasonable, like, oh, okay, that's great.
Like, there's finally some transparency here, whatever.
It's like, no.
No. This is utter corruption.
Yes. What is he calling for?
He's calling for these exceptions.
He wants to get an exception because he's a buddy and he paid some money here.
And other people will not get that exception.
In fact, he would make sure that his competitor doesn't get that exception.
And that's what's going to happen here.
And that's what happened in Russia.
And that's what happens in all these oligarchical societies.
And it's like...
It's just frightening because there is this gauze over this of, like, some sort of reasonable notion that, like, of course we need to be able to have this, and then we cut it out here, as if that is, you know, any kind of semblance of what democracy is supposed to represent.
And this is slightly less disheartening as what's going on in El Salvador, but it's really, it's just, maybe because it's so blatant, it's hitting me almost as hard.
It's all the same things, just in different places.
I mean, basically, what has happened here, and I'll go ahead and I'll state the obvious first, and then I'll drill deeper.
This is creating a state that the oligarchical wealth class wants to create, which is that you can wreck an economy, but you can start to tailor it in a different direction.
And when you have all these tariffs, and when you go ahead and do a blanket thing, a kleptocrat.
A criminal like Donald Trump, a corrupt individual, can go ahead and grant favors.
Period. If you're going to work with me, if you're going to get me something, including billions of dollars, which the tech oligarchs have already delivered, we'll all go ahead and make an exception for you.
Meanwhile, the larger project in this, and I want to say it as clearly as possible, and if people want to get hip to this, start studying the idea of a cultural revolution.
And Nick, as I use that phrase, this has come up in conversations with us before, but it was always what the right wing was saying that liberals were doing, right?
With the woke mind virus, with indoctrination, CRT, DEI, the idea that they were creating some type of a nefarious plan to change society and change the way we think about things in the way that we do.
This is an actual cultural revolution, which we always talk constantly about how the right projects what they want to do, which is that they grab all the levers and then they make the decisions about what they think is right and who should be in charge.
Here, Nick, what we have is the demolition of the middle class and also what we've come to call the professional managerial class, which are the people who work in the offices, who work in logistics of the global sort of structure, all those different things.
They don't want to get rid of the wealthy.
They don't want to get rid of the oligarchs.
They want to get rid of the middle people.
The people who, by the way, what party do they vote for?
The professional managerial class?
The Democrats?
They vote for the Democrats, overwhelmingly.
So they're trying to wipe that out.
So it has economic reasons, cultural reasons, political reasons.
All these things converge together.
So what we're actually looking at here is a changing of how society is working.
Quite frankly, unless we push back on this, they will be successful.
And we will see, more or less, more redistributed wealth.
Under neoliberal globalism, Nick, we saw tens of trillions of dollars being redistributed.
Chances are, and that took place since the 1980s, chances are that in the next few years, we'll see more tens of trillions of dollars.
And they're going to keep in place the structures that help the oligarchs and the wealth class and get rid of the structures that have helped the middle class altogether.
So now that it's clear that's what they're trying to do, and it is clear on a lot of levels in terms of how they want to take the stock market to buy the dip and all these things and then force rates to go down, it used to be trickle-down because if we get the wealthier people in the big corporations breaks, then they'll hire more people or whatever.
Maybe that was never.
Yeah, never.
Maybe this was always the case.
And, you know, I got to tell you, I expressed my concern.
I watched too much sci-fi.
I watched too much dystopian future stuff.
You probably watched more than I do.
I don't know.
I literally started having these notions of, like, the uber-wealthy people need to increase their wealth even more because they know something that we don't that's going to happen, and they need to build their underground, you know, like paradise.
That's climate change.
Yeah, yeah.
It's climate change.
No, I mean, that's a big driver in all of this.
Climate change leads to them taking giant existential steps and also recognizing, like, oh, we're in this and we have an opening.
That is an unconscious and conscious driver in all of this.
Yeah, you know, so if the magnetic poles switch, like, people think it happens every 20,000 years and it causes everything to happen.
If you can live underground in that whatever thing, great, you get to survive.
Honestly, I don't know what else to make of it, because this is an end run around trickle-down economics, and this is a way to create the kind of wealth for very small people that we've never been able to conceive of.
And we're already seeing wealth that we could never conceive of.
Already, historic wealth and power, there's a reason why they were able to buy the government.
Exactly. And on the dip, on the day the market came up, and then he had people in the fucking noble office he's introducing, saying, this guy made $250 million just today.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's what's staggering about all of this, and it's really, really troubling on all those different levels.
It's one thing if they want to be really corrupt, they can make their money, they can live in bigger mansions and in more remote places, okay, whatever.
But if this ends up being something more...
You know, that is completely effects where they can now build a compound, stop anybody who's coming here as a climate refugee.
You know, then that's the end of civilization.
What you just touched on is really important, Nick.
I come from a very poor family, and we used to play this really sad game.
You'd sit around the table, like on the night of Powerball, and you'd talk about what you do with like the $200 million Powerball.
And what are we talking about?
Buying a better house?
You know, taking care of our family.
These people not only just have that, they have dozens of those things.
They're thinking on a different level.
And speaking of the drivers that are playing into this, and I think climate change is one of the biggest just unexamined parts of this, there's another driver of it.
And as the 145% tariffs on China are in place, China has now started talking very loudly about fighting to the end.
They are escalating the trade war.
Even before the tariffs came into place, they started isolating not just American imports, but also things like rare earth and minerals and resources, you name it.
Their propaganda system has gone into overdrive.
They're currently building partnerships around the world, which you and I call the second that these tariffs went into place.
This is a situation where we have multiple things that are coming together, Nick.
One, the decline of American empire because capitalism needs the American empire to decline.
We have failed in so many different ways.
We have compromised ourselves.
We created this as a fait accompli.
And then on top of it, climate change, the intentional demolition of liberal democracy leading toward autocratic regimes, the entire burgeoning Second Cold War, and what now feels like an inevitable Conflict with China that starts with trade,
but it doesn't end with trade, which we can talk more about that in a second.
There is a larger driver here that is being driven also by capitalism, by the worsening climate change situation.
And so now we've seen more or less it's on is what it is.
Things are on.
We're moving down that path.
And it's very clear that China recognizes that they're on that path.
I agree.
And it also helps with our exports as well.
Like, we're the largest natural gas exporter in the world, I think 25% of the market, but Australia is now still moving in on that, you know, and they have a lot of natural gas as well.
So you're going to start to solidify supply lines that had never existed before amongst other countries.
So not only, you know, and it's weird because think about the mindset that Trump has.
Trump thinks he's going to force people to buy more of our goods that they don't want.
And he thinks that he can force that by raising prices on their stuff coming in.
Like, it's sort of a toddler's view of how that might work, because what's the alternative?
Well, the other thing that happens is they'll just go to...
I've met toddlers who have a better understanding of this than Donald Trump.
Right. Now, imagine this.
You know, what's the ultimate goal that he says about this is to bring manufacturing back here, right?
That's what he says.
Is that fair, what he says?
Yeah. No, and I think that's part of it, yes.
Right. So what this also might do is, because now they're putting tariffs, they did a pause on the tariffs.
If the phone itself is completely assembled somewhere else and comes here assembled, and then there's no tariff, versus any company that might be involved in assembling these things in America that will now have to pay tariffs and they'll put them out of business.
So those businesses will either go out of business, will lose jobs, or how about this?
What if it is so much cheaper for China to deal with all the rare earth and all those minerals they want to sell to, like, Ireland?
Well, what's going to stop all these American companies from setting up in Ireland?
Well, there's probably better tax havens anyway there, you know?
And then going around that way as well.
But the bottom line is that takes more and more jobs and more and more business and money out of the United States.
Did I mention that the dollar has been dropping precipitously?
It's not great.
As the rates, the 10-year rates go up?
Like, this is all part of an absolute destruction, and it's intentional.
And by the way, I would say, what's the percentage of the intention is just complete and utter idiocy and incompetency?
What do you think that is?
I would say the intentionality, and it's different, right?
Because some parts you're talking about Trump and some of the MAGA assholes.
Other parts you're talking about people who are carrying out an ideological project.
Right. Like, if you put all those things together, I would say 70% of it's intentional and 30% of it is just absolute incompetence.
Yeah, and then there's Peter Navarro.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
It's like, you know, it's like Linda McMahon.
Linda McMahon comes out and you're like, oh, you're in charge of the Department of Education?
Are you really?
Are you really?
Or are you just filling an office and doing what needs to be done?
There are many, many people in this who have no idea what they're doing, and then there are other people who are involved in this that are pushing it, constructed it, and really, really into it, who know exactly what they're doing.
Well, in Linda McMahon's defense, I want to say...
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I at least wanted to say, like, I thought maybe she meant she wanted to give everybody an A1 education, like elite grade A1, right?
Like, that's the best, right?
In her defense, I love A1 steak sauce.
Yes, that too.
But it turns out that she continued to repeat it that we realized, oh, she doesn't know.
She doesn't know what she's doing.
Nick, I...
Before I get more into this China thing, I want to say, first of all, there is more than enough blame to go around for this.
Democrats and Republicans laid the foundations for this situation.
Both parties were absolutely champing at the bid of having an existential showdown with China.
On top of that, we would not be in this place if, as I've said over and over, the neoliberal order hadn't decided America is going to have primacy into the new millennium and nobody's ever going to affect us.
There could have been a way to avoid this.
We could have done things better.
Now we're reaching a decoupling stage.
And Nick, what does that lead to?
It leads to increasing tensions.
All of a sudden, if we're having all these problems with semiconductors or we're having problems with, you know, trade, that means that the countries aren't going to be working together.
It makes the invasion of a place like Taiwan, which by the way, I don't think Donald Trump is all that interested in doing anything about Taiwan, which makes it even likelier.
We're talking about a showdown for resources, trade primacy.
And by the way, America is...
And if you want to go further with this trade war, China's simply going to steal intellectual property, and then they're going to create cheaper versions of the things that America would produce.
And do you know what neoliberalism has done, Nick?
It has prepared all of us to want the cheaper thing if it even approaches the quality of the more expensive thing.
So none of this right now is in whack except for to send us further and further into a crisis, make the possibility of a world war much, much, much more possible, and everything that Trump is doing is more or less designed to make that more likely and also put the United States of America in a position where it's not even going to necessarily stand against enemies.
It's just going to basically be the entity that lights the fuse with a match.
So, yeah, it starts with trade.
It also is parallel to what's going on.
Like, we're not going to intervene anymore in Ukraine.
That means Taiwan falls to China.
Like, that's the other cascade here, which is how these things cause wars.
So you've got to give credit to Biden for whatever his adult brain was thinking.
You know, he understood that as far as protecting Ukraine.
Can I say, I'm glad you brought this up.
I think one thing to say in all this, and if Donald Trump has taught us something, we need to move away from the great figures of history.
Mindset? Which is, Biden, whether or not he was addled or not, and of course he was addled, but he was simply carrying out the last exhaustive gasps of the liberal order of the post-World War II order.
Period. That's it.
But the intention is correct, right?
No, I mean, I have a hard time saying it's correct because we should have not had that project and we should have moved off that project before we even got to that point.
But yes, in that circumstance, it's the correct thing.
Right. I mean, because the alternative is what we're going to end up seeing is that they're going to end up getting a ceasefire that gives them everything they wanted and no punishment at all for doing what they did.
And we still have Trump in the White House saying that the Ukrainians started this thing.
And, you know, again, I wish...
That would be the smoking gun to say, oh, he is Putin's puppet here, right?
He's just echoing exactly what Putin says.
But I did want to also address really quickly the Chinese thing because of the quality, right?
I don't know if you've seen – have you seen these videos that are coming out of China now?
Because you're right.
I thought maybe China was rattling their saber a little bit, you know, selling some bonds, just letting us know a little – You're in.
You're in.
The ribs, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
You're in.
Just so you know, we could take you down, right?
Like, that's a China I thought was kind of, you know, a little bit, like, it'd be a shame, you know, a nice country you have there.
But yeah, this might be more serious, but they're now releasing these, like, basically propaganda videos, but they're really well done.
They're really good.
Have you seen them?
Yeah, no, I have.
Like, they turned on, Nick, it's like they had systems in waiting, and they're like, oh, yeah, now.
Yeah. So what they're trying to inform everybody is like, you know that purse you got from Prada or that purse you got from Lululemon stuff that costs a lot of money?
We make that here.
And then we ship it to them and they'll sew their stuff on there.
They might even pretend it's made in America at that point.
He goes, but it's the same quality.
We have people who are, you know, we already saw the head of Apple.
I want to say Tim Smith.
What's his name?
Tim Cook.
What's his name?
Tim Cook.
Tim Cook.
Gosh. Not Tim Apple.
Tim Cook.
Yes. Tim Cook.
Talking about how the machine cutting and the precision that they have in China and the training, that's what's much better than anything else.
And it isn't cheaper.
They're just better at it.
And we might maybe get as good as they are, but that would take all the kind of training that we don't have for decades to get there.
So it was interesting to hear him even say that it's not necessarily cheaper to make them in China.
It's just where the experts are, where the guys who are really trained to do this thing are.
So I think China is winning this one in a landslide here.
And Trump, you know, with his...
Ego, you know, is not going to be able to extricate himself very easily from this, and that's what's really concerning.
We don't have a Nixon to China thing that can happen here.
No, he got roped into a bad situation.
China played the long game, and they played the long game since they joined the world trade.
Like, they knew exactly what they were doing, and they put it together, and they did it in a disciplined way.
The problem here was the hubris of America.
It was the idea that we were, again, always going to be in charge, and we would just manipulate all these things.
Neoliberal globalism was a mistake.
And what happened is that mistake compounded and got worse and worse, and it's now birthing this new thing.
Speaking of the new thing, Nick, Ken Klippenstein, who has been on a roll, like what an incredible amount of reporting from Klippenstein, reports on a new, quote-unquote, domestic terrorism plan that is being led by Sebastian Gorka, of all people.
I couldn't think of a better guy to do it.
This involves casting protests within the United States as being under foreign control and creating an existential national security threat that would require the use of the Insurrection Act, the anti-Semitic cudgel that we've been talking about and covering.
National security documents are now talking about framing petty crimes as terrorism against the United States of America.
And it involves such things, indicators of being a domestic terrorist, having heated political debate, or even possibly owning guns or weapons.
This thing is being put in place just as these private prisons and also the El Salvador concentration camp plan is being put in place.
Hardly a coincidence, I'll just say that.
It's chilling.
This is chilling.
Again, you don't need any more evidence of which can be made up about you and completely falsified AI, whatever you want.
Now, this is the area we're moving into where suddenly they're going to present with you things that you never said, but it sounds like you, seems like you, and there's no due process.
You know, and by the time they even pretend to have that, you're already in this prison.
And if they want to build the prisons here, too, like, well, whatever.
You know, I meant to make this point that the $6 million they're paying to El Salvador, it can't be that.
It has to be much more than that, right?
I don't even know why they're lying about it at this point.
But at any rate, yes, this is now the thing.
Now, even if they don't even enact this kind of stuff, by having this report and having the official on their letterhead, whatever, it's just the chilling...
What's the intimidation factor that is a hallmark of authoritarian governments as well?
Again, the fact that we're talking about this, concerned about our social media and one of my phones, whatever, that's the real terrorism here.
Yes, it absolutely is.
I want to make a quick point before I get deeper into that.
Nick, heated political debate, saying the wrong thing, gun ownership, right?
Like, isn't it weird that everything that the right has said that the left was going to do, it turns out being exactly what they were going to do?
It's part of a reoccurring theme.
What also goes with that, going to what you were just saying, I talked to a group last week, and I've been talking to a lot of groups recently.
And you know, one thing that keeps getting brought up in these conversations, these organizing conversations, is are they going to use the Insurrection Act, and should we be afraid?
And unfortunately, when people ask me that question, I have to be honest.
Probably. And yeah, you should be afraid.
And I don't say that as telling people, hey, you need to give up.
This is done.
This is cooked.
It's because we need to understand that authoritarianism relies on a couple of things.
And one of them is instilling a dictator in our heads.
We're supposed to, at every moment of every day, be afraid of thinking or saying or doing the wrong thing, being disappeared, you know, deported out to El Salvador, ending up without any sort of recourse and meeting some sort of a violent, brutal death.
That's what authoritarianism relies on.
This right here is one of the most predictable aspects of all of this.
They were always going to do it, and what's more, Nick, and this is a thing we talk about a lot, they're using the same cudgels, the anti-Semitic thing, the domestic terrorism thing, the exact same cudgels that have been used now for decades.
To make legal things that are authoritarian and illegal, which is what we did to people around the world, what we did to quote-unquote domestic terrorists during the war on terror, you know, all of the surveillance.
Also, Nick, isn't it weird that we had like this entire system set up where we were supposed to talk about what was going on in our heads, and now the people who created that are going to use that to surveil us and to use their technology to go through it and find quote-unquote potential threats.
This was always going to happen.
In fact, knowing this and knowing that it was eventually going to lead to this, it has led some of us to put together protections and strategies against it.
And I want to say again, off of what we were saying with El Salvador, the time to fight is now.
It's not when the gate gets shut behind you, because they are fashioning the gate and they are planning on shutting it.
The time to push back against this is now.
Yeah. I think at some points, as our civil liberties have been eroded over time after 9-11 and certain things, there was this ability to kind of shrug and be like, well, it's okay.
Like, you know, what do I have to hide?
This and that, whatever.
But, you know, without ever really contemplating that you'd have someone like this in the White House.
And that's the problem.
So I get it now because I was probably one of those people who'd been like, well, I don't need to hide or whatever.
But now we realize that.
And so some of the ways you can fight about this, fight against this, isn't necessarily even like marching the streets.
It's the putting pressure on lawmakers to change these laws and get rid of things like the Insurrection Act or adjust them now so that they aren't so right.
Or get rid of the emergency powers of a president that they gave them.
Exactly. They have to walk these things back.
They have to think about them in the modern context now so that there are better triggers involved or trigger whatever it is, things involved that will stop them from doing these things and with more rational thought.
I mean, the Interaction Act was written in 1807.
They had no notion of anything like that back then, and it's old.
Again, another reason why the whole Constitution should probably just be rewritten and updated.
But that's the kind of pressure we have.
The laws have been passed.
This Congress or the Congress in the last few sessions have been able to get some things done.
And it's hard to imagine that the right group of people got together.
It should be, except for most of the people who would be responsible for repealing these things are the people who did them in the first place.
Well, not the people who did the Insurrection Act, but the people who helped during the War on Terror.
I mean, the last president was one of them.
All right.
Yeah, that's true.
But yeah, speaking of things being an existential threat and people who are not taking it seriously, I got good news for everybody.
Bill Maher.
Bill Maher is back in the news, and this is something to talk about, unfortunately, because I think it's pretty instructive.
Bill Maher went on his show.
Man, what in the hell is that show?
I haven't watched it in real time.
I haven't watched this show in so long.
Bill Maher went on his show real time to recount his dinner with Donald Trump at the White House.
Also, by the way, Kid Rock was there and Dana White.
What a nightmare rotation.
But here is Bill Maher talking about his reaction to meeting with Donald Trump.
A crazy person doesn't live in the White House.
A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up.
It's just not as fucked up as I thought it was.
And I have no illusions now that I'm back to work at my job that he might start a new list.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Because I don't have a good feeling, and will be critical about a lot of what he's doing, the trade war and disappearing people, ruling by decree, threatening judges, gutting the government with glee.
But I also think he now understands I have a job to do, or at least he did on this night, because he said to me early on that he'd seen our last episode, which was the Friday before this dinner.
And he said, I thought maybe you'd be nice, but you hit me really hard.
I did, because I'm not going to pull my punches that presidents get to propose a third term for themselves.
He understood that, and without animus.
That doesn't mean he's not going to try to do it.
At one point, I said to him, you're scaring people.
Do you really want to be scaring your own citizens so much?
And I know now you're all saying, and what did he say to that?
Honestly, I don't remember.
But it wasn't, okay, I'll stop.
So, Nick, Bill Maher has been on an incredible trajectory for years now and has revealed himself to be a pretty awful human being.
This is a weird situation, but I do think it's instructive and I think it's necessary to watch it.
Bill Maher talked about going and talking to Trump, him being very, very reasonable in their conversations.
But also, you'll notice he made it about himself.
He made it about how Trump treated him, which, by the way, was like a morning Joe.
Joe and Mika talking about their conversation with Trump.
And you'll notice also, he didn't even remember what Trump said to him when he said, you're scaring people.
What was important for him?
It wasn't actually figuring out what Donald Trump believes in.
It was getting close to power and being able to have that power sort of rub off on him.
This, I think, should be put in like textbooks in understanding why people like Bill Maher and why the people in our media, in our political class, why they've allowed...
Really, really well put, because the idea that it's the normalization of Trump, right?
And he's very smart on how to be able to do this in a way that he went on Fallon and messed up his hair even before the election.
All those kind of things just serve to...
Hide and distract the fact that this guy is a monster who doesn't have any kind of, you know, ability to handle what's going on in the White House and the information he needs to process.
They can't really share it properly with him.
But it's an interesting question, and I wanted to share another clip from this show because one of his guests, Josh Rogan, comes on and really...
It triggered Maher.
You rarely see Maher get really angry at a guest like this.
And it was interesting because he poses sort of a scenario here that I want to get up to next with why Maher was even in the White House to begin with.
And if we can say that you went there in good faith, but maybe, just maybe, he wasn't there in good faith.
I mean, you sold him on the Iran deal and he took it in.
I mean, give me a break, okay?
So the idea here is that...
Your motivation is sound, but what's the impact?
And I think a lot of people out there, fans of yours, people will love you.
People are fans of you.
Like me, I've been fans of you my whole life.
You don't have to patronize me, dude.
I don't know you.
I never met you.
I'm just saying that this comes from a place of love.
Not everybody has to like it.
That's what we said.
There are people who didn't want it to happen at all.
You sound like one of them.
No, no, no.
Did you hear what I said?
Yeah. Like, what is the alternative to not talking?
Just sit at your lunch table and don't talk to anybody.
Talk to him.
I've interviewed Trump.
That's not an interview.
This was not an interview.
I agree with the principle of engagement.
I'm just saying, from his perspective, you have to understand that people out there know, all Americans know, that for him, this was a PR stunt.
And in his view, you were a problem.
I think it's a great point.
This is a PR stunt, and he knows this.
And famous people do this all the time, especially the people who are in the media.
All the time.
We saw this in, you know, Almost Famous, right, where they bring the reporter in, and he becomes friends, and he's going to write something nice about them because they're nice to him, and they make him feel special.
Trump is a celebrity.
Period. And you know what we see with celebrities?
We see shallow transactional relationships.
This is Ellen DeGeneres being like, I don't know what to say.
George W. Bush is my friend.
All it took for Bill Maher to become a full-throated bootlicker was to be invited to the White House and have the power of the White House and the attention of the President of the United States of America.
He was so in awe of it, it didn't even bother him.
And because he won, like, when he met with this person, it's access insider relationships.
That's the entire purpose behind it.
And he won.
Trump won.
Now you have a bunch of moderates who have been paying attention to Bill Maher as he's been moving further and further to the right who have now been washed in this propaganda.
Period. Especially because everyone's convinced, oh, he's a monster, he's insane, he's crazy.
And so what is Mars' goal here in doing this little monologue about what he went?
His goal is to say he's not a crazy person.
He laughs, he's self-deprecating, he's this real guy, right?
Great. Well, I got a counterpoint for you, Jared.
The counterpoint could very well be, remember the movie Primal Fear?
I do.
Okay. It's Edward Norton's, you know, debut thing, where he's accused of killing this cardinal in Chicago, and he's this stuttering guy who's, like, who's been abused.
And then at the very end, you realize that he's got this alter ego, right, where he's kind of like a, what's a...
It's Kaiser Soze.
That's all this is.
Right? So, and he goes, so now he's thinking he's two different personalities, and probably, again, he's sympathetic because he was abused and he was molested, and so he had a...
And it turns out, no, it was this evil guy that was the guy, and the mask was the meek, stuttering kid who doesn't know what he's doing who's being abused.
This is what Trump is.
You think that Donald Trump...
You think that Donald Trump, who spent all of his time as a New York socialite and in the real estate world and in the celebrity media world and also is always cajoling people at Mar-a-Lago or at golf clubs, that in any given night he can't figure out how to manipulate someone?
What are you doing?
How are you paid money to go on TV and talk about anything?
You are such an unserious asshole.
And for anybody, and I used to watch real time in part because there was such a dearth of actual intelligent analysis anywhere.
I used to watch it because it was better than not having anything.
And eventually over time, I was like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
The only thing that Bill Maher actually cares about, and this is a definitive thing, and one of the reasons why he was able to get along with Donald Trump, Nick, is because Bill Maher cares about one thing and one thing only.
And he shares this with Trump and other members of the media and the political class.
That's it.
Period. And he's also lucky that Mario's white and he's older and demographic as well.
But yes, they're, you know, pieces of the same pie in reality, right?
And if you watch Mario's show, I can't watch it because it's so difficult because he laughs at himself, his own jokes in a smug way as he expects people to laugh.
He's got this smarmy thing where he didn't used to have it.
I went to a taping of Politically Incorrect in 1990-whatever.
You know, I was in the studio.
So I remember back then, this is now a different person who's become so self-absorbed in the same way.
And so, yeah, they recognize each other.
They smell each other out.
And this is a terrific opportunity to welcome somebody in and, yes, use the backdrop to make him a prop.
And he doesn't even really know it, right, because of the way he seems clear.
And so, yeah, we'll find out how much influence this guy has in his sphere, probably less.
But if you're wondering why Joe Rogan switched as well.
Same thing.
There it is.
In fact, he didn't even need to get a visit to the White House.
He just went to him.
Yeah, it's a bunch of insecure white men from top to bottom.
That's what it is.
It's a bunch of insecure white men who have had to turn themselves into something else in order to overcompensate, and they smell it on each other.
You nailed it.
They know immediately when they start talking, this is how you get this done.
Period. And the problem is that all of society has been tailored to those assholes.
It's all been set up in their favor, so now they are in a power-sharing relationship, more or less.
Speaking of props, Nick...
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and this brings me no joy to report on, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer went to the White House after several bids for collaboration with Donald Trump.
She was there lobbying for an Air Force base in Michigan.
She was then hustled into an unplanned and unapproved photo op in the Oval Office as Donald Trump signed executive orders attacking individuals overseeing the 2020 election, including Christopher Krebs with cybersecurity, former chief of staff of Homeland Security.
Insecurity, Miles Taylor, and an order ordering Pam Bondi to investigate all of those people and law firms.
But Whitmer was in such a bad situation that she literally put a bunch of binders in her face to be kept from this photo op.
Disastrous, and I would go so far as to say disqualifying.
But that's just me.
Disqualifying as a presidential candidate in the future?
As a future leader of anything, yes.
Well, you know, listen, she's trying to do the thing that, like, Newsom did and, you know, other people do.
Also disqualifying, for the record.
Yeah, I mean, you go in there and you flatter him and you can get stuff, right?
It's a great way to, you know, you don't have to negotiate with the guy.
He'll give you whatever you want if you tell him some nice things.
And she wrote a letter to him saying how great it was.
So, you know, I get that part of it.
I'm trying to picture this.
I am a governor of a blue state.
I am now ushered.
I wasn't ready and whatever.
And they want to take pictures.
And so what do they want to take pictures for?
They want to prove, look, there's a Democrat in the Oval Office, right?
And so, okay, now what do you do?
I mean, what are you so upset?
You think it's just embarrassing?
Is that what it is?
No, she shouldn't have made a bid for a connection and collaboration with Donald Trump in the first place.
Like, you don't get to the end of the journey without taking the first steps.
Yeah. All right.
So you're not buying the whole notion that she could get some good stuff for her state.
She just played nice.
I don't give a shit.
There is no good faith with this person.
Everything we just talked about with Bill Maher, it applies here, which is this person does not act in good faith.
They're not an actual, like, fair broker.
All right.
So you're saying, like, she could have a great conversation.
They could be talking about all these great things, opening up this, and they have a plan here.
And then they get the photo op.
You know what?
You're right.
It's the photo op, like, with...
With Romney in the plane.
It's exactly Romney eating dinner with Donald Trump and Donald Trump looking at the camera like, yes, I own this man's soul.
Yeah, and we're going to crush it by next week.
I'm disappointed.
I'm really, really disappointed by this.
Whitmer was one of those people that I thought showed some decent backbone and some decent leadership.
This, for me, man, there is an ongoing primary.
And the primary started very, very early.
And her and Newsom, I think, have now disqualified themselves.
I think they've shown a lack of good judgment.
They've shown a lack of courage.
They've shown a lack of principles.
I don't really know where else to go with it.
I hear you.
I don't know if this is quite the tipping point for them.
I know for your checklist it is.
Would you be?
Okay, here's a question, Nick.
I was asked a few years back, I had a friend of mine, I want to say it was 2004-2005, and they went to the White House for their job, and they asked me, they said, I'm probably going to be in a room with George W. Bush, who is a war criminal.
Right? Like, one of the worst war criminals of modern history.
And they said, would you shake his hand because he's the president of the United States of America?
And I said, absolutely not.
No chance in hell would I shake his hand.
I wouldn't have a picture of myself taken with him.
I wouldn't really particularly want to be in the room with him.
My friend went and said, you know what?
I got in there, and I realized very quickly, I don't want to be in the same room as this person.
I'm going to walk out, period.
Why would you want to be in the room, whether or not they take photos or not, of a person who's disappearing people, of a person who's destroying democracy, a person who is putting gay and trans people in danger, and immigrants in danger, and taking away women's rights?
Why would you want to?
That, to me, I think speaks volumes.
Absolutely. And you know what might have been better was they usher into the Oval Office for this picture.
She could refuse and say, I'm leaving, and then have a press conference and say, in good faith, try to have a discussion.
They want me to have a photo op.
I didn't want free to do it.
Like, that could have been maybe even more valuable to her.
Yeah, I don't want somebody as president who's going to be in that situation and put binders in front of their face.
Right. That's bad.
Speaking of possible future contenders and Democrats, over the weekend on early Sunday, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania's governor's mansion while Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were inside.
They escaped unhurt.
The mansion was really done some incredible damage.
Reports and investigations, they have caught an alleged perpetrator at this point, a 38-year-old Pennsylvanian man.
Reports are that Molotov cocktails were being used for this.
This is an awful.
Awful situation.
It sounds like there were plans to murder Shapiro and his family.
Just a really, really bad situation, and it feels like part of what we've been talking about, which is as conditions worsen, polarization worsens, that we're going to see more and more attacks like this.
You know, it's actually astounding to me.
We had seen people jump the fence at the White House and get...
Kind of far before anybody reacted or whatever.
And you like to think, you know, there's cameras everywhere.
There's motion detectors.
Now they're trying to say, well, you know, some squirrels would set it off in the past.
So perhaps they didn't pay attention, right?
It's bizarre.
Because we're not talking about a guy who, like, made a run for it and the dogs got him and whatever.
He literally, like you said, smashed multiple windows, multiple Molotov cocktails, right?
I guess they're really lucky after he smashed the window he didn't, like, go inside at that point, right?
I mean, I think he kind of did go inside, but that he didn't do more.
Yeah, but I mean, I think he went inside after, you know, after the first couple, whatever, in a way that had he gone in, like, right away, he would have been in the bedroom with them, whatever.
It would have been catastrophic and tragic and all things like that.
So, you know, that's one thing that just kind of struck me is, like, what is going on?
Why aren't they better at this job of protecting, you know, people?
I know when I grew up, the governor had a house around the corner from my house.
We live right in the middle of the city.
It was not like this amazing neighborhood, but they had, you know, they had the big, you know, the op center, you know, in that kangaroo thing.
What's it called?
A kangaroo RV.
You know, they had an RV on the street.
Like, it seemed pretty legit, right, in the 80s.
So, at any rate, like, the fact that they didn't have that and have it be more immediate is insane.
You know, is this also rooted in the fact that it's also, you know, Pennsylvania where we saw, you know, what happened at the synagogue there at the Tree of Life?
You know, there's something happening in that area.
I don't know.
And was it incited by anything particularly?
I don't think we know anything about that, right?
We're not sure yet.
There are people who are speculating, obviously.
Quick tangent.
Governors don't need mansions.
Let's stop it with that shit.
Like, it's just even talking about it out loud makes me feel gross.
Like, I think that that is part of entrenched capitalism.
Yeah, it sucks.
Yeah, something like this shouldn't happen.
And the fact that it is, I think, speaks more of a symptom, not necessarily of what's just going on in Pennsylvania, but just a larger symptom of our political system.
We have a lot of people who are radicalized.
We have a lot of people who feel like they don't have power.
And so sometimes people who are not well or have malicious intent are going to more likely act on that than they would.
It's a symptom of a larger problem, and I'm lucky that Shapiro and his family escaped unharmed, save for the trauma of having gone through this in the first place.
But, yeah, unfortunately, I think that we're going to see more things like this.
You know what's also frustrating is that a lot of it is being blamed.
Like, you know, I don't know if he wants to equal blame.
You can assign the GOP and then Democrats or whatever, but I have seen a right-wing...
Push towards describing liberals and progressives as being dangerous.
And a lot of the context recently would be something like shooting at a Tesla.
Tesla dealership, yeah.
No one's there, it's closed, or they're destroying these cars.
And in some weird way, they conflate these two things.
They conflate a guy who threw Molotov cocktails in a house that people are sleeping in with, you know...
It's destroying a car at a lot, you know, after hours.
You know, the equivalency is not fair either way, but, like, it also is troubling because it just sort of makes it feel like other people could be reading someone's misses about that and be like, well, fine, if they're the terrorists, then I'm going to have to be the terrorist now.
If you don't have a leader of that party who can calm anybody down properly, then here we are.
And just getting back to my point about, you know, Trump and what his real personality is, you know, is he that guy that's lying about everything with a wink in his eye?
He knows that.
All the trans stuff is just bullshit to him, and he's just stirring it up.
Or is he the other guy who then has to put on the mask and pretend that he's this guy who knows all his things?
I don't know.
It's an interesting conversation, but it certainly has led us to a really horrible place.
It's the cycle of polarization and radicalization.
What you just brought up is exactly how these situations always play out.
And I say that as somebody who's studied it, and I can tell you right now, it doesn't end here.
Period. No matter what happens at this point, it does not.
End here.
It's going to get worse.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the Moncrake Podcast.
We will be back with the regular weekender edition on Friday.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash moncrakepodcast in order to gain full access to that.
I'm hearing from so many people who are making the plunge who are happy that they've done it.
And we're happy that you've done it as well.
It keeps this enterprise growing.
I feel like we are...
Meeting the moment in a way that I'm really proud of us for, and I'm very, very grateful for people's faith and enthusiasm and, quite frankly, love.
So, if you need us before that episode, you can find us over on Blue Sky.
