The surveillance state just got an upgrade, as Trump taps Palantir to process all government data — building files on every American. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman unpack the staggering implications, the DHS raid on Rep. Jerry Nadler’s office, and Trump’s team trying to turn intelligence briefings into Fox News segments. Then: Ukraine reportedly strikes deep into Russia with drone attacks, and Senator Joni Ernst literally takes her Medicaid messaging to the cemetery.
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And, like, as we were putting together this show, you and I were talking and sort of comparing notes.
Things are happening so quick.
That, like, even major disturbing things sort of fall through the cracks sometimes.
Like, we're in a weird manic period, it feels like.
And a lot of times there is a through line that can kind of make sense of some things.
And it's like, this is a tougher one.
This is getting to be, yeah, you're just getting all sorts of webs that are not necessarily congruent here.
But certainly worth talking about.
Worth talking about.
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Nick, we start...
We saw sort of the different components that were coming together.
But now reports are trickling out.
That the Trump administration is tapping Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, to consolidate, collate, and examine data that has been harvested by the Doge operations in the federal government, creating the possibility for what can only be called the world's most powerful surveillance system that it has ever, ever seen.
Again, we knew that this was coming.
There was no way that it wasn't coming.
It was inevitable with this regime and the way things were moving.
But hearing it start to come into play, I don't know about you, Nick, but I started to feel like the hair on the back of my neck started raising up a little bit because it sort of is the sum of all fears when it comes to this stuff.
I agree.
This is the one that really makes me the most concerned.
And it might maybe look like a bad person because we're having some horrible things going on with people being deported, which should be the absolute top.
But I just feel like in the long game, this is what enables an authoritarian government, is when they can surveil everybody and they have all the information that anybody can need, and then they can use it against you.
Because I think it's clear, even though no one's ever reported on it, like with, you know, Clear and hard facts.
But I think it's clear that the Trump administration uses leverage against people who are politicians, right?
No, I don't think that that's wrong.
No.
Right.
And, you know, we know who we're talking about.
We know, you know, the inexplicable reversals of positions, you know, for no other reason.
And so it definitely is what makes me the most afraid, even though I used to be able to say to myself, ah, well, I had nothing to hide.
It doesn't matter when you can realize everything is now put into a central database.
And, you know, we've been saying this for a lot of episodes now.
This is what Trump, this is what Musk was trying to do the whole time.
That was, under the guise of Doge, it was really just to combine all the databases of people's information.
Yeah, just to start with the historical standpoint, because that's my job.
This whole thing, it started with the war on terror and all of the surveillance materials.
And, you know, this doesn't mean that Edward Snowden is necessarily, like, someone to look up to.
But realizing that what got revealed when it came to the PRISM program and the telecommunications giants and what the federal government was putting together to stop, quote-unquote, terrorism.
It was inevitable that eventually it would boomerang back around to just people everywhere.
Because we've talked a lot about what the word terrorist does, what the word criminal does.
It allows you to do whatever you want.
For a very long time, Americans traded safety for security, right?
Or privacy and rights for security.
And it wasn't actual security.
It didn't actually do anything.
It just allowed this consolidation of power and information.
When Doge started going in there and started, you know, messing around with all these databases, and you brought this up multiple times, which is one of the best parts about the federal government was its clumsiness, its inability to have all of these different systems that were talking to one another.
It sort of protected them behind different firewalls.
And now we're moving to a point, and I want to make this abundantly clear.
Palantir being used for this purpose gives the game away.
Palantir is an inherently evil company, not just because of Peter Thiel, but also the head of it, Alex Karp, who has shown himself to be an explicitly political, anti-human arms merchant who is more than happy to dole out as much death and suffering as humanly possible in order to pad his own pockets.
There's no conscience there.
So now all of a sudden we have a situation where all of that responsibility and all that power that was handed to the presidency at the beginning of the 21st century with the war on terror.
They're responsible.
You don't have to worry.
The president isn't going to misuse this.
Just trust us.
You've now ended up in one of the worst case scenarios where you have a dictator in waiting who just looked around.
He has all these emergency powers and he also has access to enough material and enough technology.
And he's working with the tech oligarchs who are able to handle all of this stuff.
It's a perfect storm.
And that's what we're looking at now is a perfect storm of authoritarianism that past dictators wouldn't have even been able to dream of.
Well, to add more to the historical context, I think we're missing another big actor here, which would have been Richard Nixon probably has the biggest hard-on right now from the grave, thinking about what they can do now with technology and how they can combine these databases, because this is certainly what he would have loved to have built while he was in office, paranoid out of shit.
Oh, can you even imagine, I mean, a Richard Nixon, I mean, even an LBJ.
LBJ would have been more than happy to have used this thing.
Like, you get some of the more sort of, like, paranoid and power-hungry presidents.
But what's more off the rails here, and we just have the evidence, like Mike Johnson keeps saying that it's all in the open, and Trump is not hiding any of his corruption.
He's also not hiding what the surveillance state is they're trying to build.
It even goes back to what they want from Harvard, right?
he keeps demanding some sort of list of foreign students from Harvard, despite the fact that to achieve, to get a visa for them, they have the information that they supposedly are asking for.
So what he really wants from Harvard is a list of the people that might have gotten into a little bit of trouble.
Maybe Harvard knows that they signed up for certain clubs or certain, you know, activities that would be considered un-American.
Sounds very familiar to something that we Oh, and they have access to all of their emails and all of their communications because universities own those.
Yeah.
Okay, right, another good point.
And so it's like, they're just trying to like root out anybody here who's not towing any kind of line And, you know, under the guise of, you know, if it's not Barron Trump who didn't get into Harvard, it's the countless number of huge donors whose kids didn't get into Harvard, who does complain over and over again to Trump, who then says, OK, well, then we can help get some of those spots open to more Americans.
This is really what he said that out loud as well.
So that is what so this is really the most troubling thing, because now you start to think of things like these dystopian movements.
Yeah, no, they do.
And that's the whole point.
We've talked about this before.
Dystopian movies are simply taking things that we have and taking them to their logical conclusion.
So whenever I've talked to people and they've said, you know, how did you sort of, going back to like one of those things that I was like yelling about years ago that people were like, what the hell are you talking about?
It was child labor.
Right?
And it was the idea that eventually they were going to put children back in factories and slaughterhouses and mines, and that's what they wanted to do.
And people would say, how did you get that right?
And you just simply say, you need to understand the people that we're dealing with.
What are the things that they value?
What are the things that they hate?
And if they had the power to do what they wanted, what would they do?
And as that authoritarian slide continues, look at this, Nick.
You just brought up the thing with Harvard.
That's about personal aggrievement.
Right?
It's about the idea that these people who have so much money and so much power and so much influence, it's the times where they've been turned down that really pissed them off.
It's when they've been rejected.
And look what's been happening at the border.
Look what's happening when people are being questioned.
It's like, what do you think about President Donald Trump and his agenda?
Or even we just found out that this new test that's being administered to new federal employees, which is – They cannot even handle constitutionally protected speech.
They cannot even handle that someone might have a negative opinion of them.
So if they were given access to a high-tech, state-of-the-art system of surveillance that would allow them to not just spy on people, but to target people who even have an inkling of a resistance against them, would they use it?
Of course they would.
There's no doubt in my mind.
And as they started collecting this data, you realize what's happening here.
And then you start putting together all the other dots, Nick.
Eric Prince, and I mean, all these people are thick as thieves.
Not only have they all worked with authoritarian regimes around the world, which shows that they're okay with authoritarianism and oppression, but on top of that, all of their financial incentives are now behind creating private prisons, between disappearing people, creating paramilitaries, you name it.
So that, all of a sudden, it's not even a puzzle that you have to put together.
It's, you know, it's not like when you buy like a 500 or 1,000-piece puzzle.
This is like when you buy something for a four-year-old.
And it has five pieces, you know, and you can put it together in a couple of seconds.
It's obvious.
And then you start looking at what they did.
Not only did they do this at the turn of the century at the War on Terror, Nick, we have a story coming out from 404 Media, where in Texas they're going after a woman who allegedly had an abortion.
They used 83,000 automatic license plate readers, 6,809 camera networks, including in states where this is legal.
If they have the apparatus and if they have the access to it, they are going to use it.
And so it's not hard at all to see what's being put together.
Again, speaking of more of those movies, like where you would see them and they, you know, Jason Bourne, they go through all the different, you know, closed-circuit TVs across different cities and put this all together.
They are doing that.
And, you know, we keep seeing these even people who are getting deported by ICE somehow randomly knowing exactly where these people are in their car.
Yeah, duties.
Now the woman in Texas, the really chilling question is, because again, I don't even know if it's that.
Chilling to think about them looking at the different license plate readers and that stuff.
What's really chilling to me is how do they even target her?
Because are they already going through her personal correspondence and emails or phone tap and all that kind of stuff?
I mean, it'll make a phone tap look like a walk in the park, what they can do now.
You know, we've had people whistleblow before and become, you know...
and public enemy number one, and never see the light of day again because they're trying to tell everybody, hey, the NSA, for instance, can see everything now as it is, and they can abuse that in a second if you had an administration like this.
So again, politically, the idea that someone, you know, And this would be their central platform to retake control and protection of your personal information needs to be like, I think we'd go across all demographics and be a real winner if you're trying to win an election.
You just nailed it.
And that is exactly the type of thing that needs to be talked about.
It's not all this dumb shit democratic strategist stuff where it's like learning how to talk to men through video games or whatever dumb thing that they spend $20 million on.
What you're talking about is a broadly popular sort of platform, which is, you know, to put it in terms that people might be familiar with historically, like, I will dismantle the Stasi, right?
I will get rid of a totalitarian surveillance state.
And that is the type of thing, and by the way, in order to announce that, you also make yourself vulnerable to the surveillance state, which goes back to what you were talking about earlier.
It puts a giant target on your back, and it, you know, it keeps people from talking about it.
But what we are dealing with, Nick, is an imminent crisis.
And I want to say a couple things to people before we move on to the next topic, I think, that are important.
First things first.
We already know that operations are being carried out against Americans in social media spaces.
We already know that they've been surveilled in different ways.
what you just brought up is a very interesting fact, the way that they know where people are going to be and if they're going to be vulnerable or whatever.
If you take that, Because if this gets put, if the wet cement becomes hard concrete, what are we dealing with?
We're dealing with something that it would take unbelievable action and power to get out of.
Right?
So that needs to be seen that we don't know how we're being manipulated.
We don't know how we're being surveilled.
And we have for a couple of decades now.
Like, what is available?
We don't know.
What we do know is where this thing is going.
And so if that spurs people to act, it should.
Well, you know, and this is always under the guise of, you know, safety, right, and keeping everybody safe and the bad guys out and all that stuff.
And then we realized, as you look at these cases, that it has nothing to do with anything other than extreme prejudice and the extreme need to feed this grinder, meat grinder, to get people forced into situations where they have to take horrible jobs and they have to, and then they're afraid to do anything other than just, you know, keep their eyes forward when you walk on the street and don't say anything to anybody.
Or turn against their friends and their neighbors and their colleagues.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, when I mentioned, you know, that somebody running on a on a anti or regaining privacy over our accounts and and sending up to the to the deep state.
The reason why I know that would work.
His main thing was to dismantle some sort of weird deep state that was after him, right?
Counterpoint, maybe he was doing things that were illegal.
But in this instance, I think that would resonate completely across the board.
And maybe with the MAGA people, again, who were like, yeah, I don't want people monitoring what porn I'm watching, because that's going to be a big thing that you can also mention.
It's like, you have stuff that you don't want people to know about, right?
They'll know about it now, and they'll have a database, and they can use it.
So I would think that, again, we know that that would work because it's exactly how Trump ran.
And so you don't have to be an asshole.
You don't have to be cruel.
You don't have to be on any of those things.
But take that part of Trump's That is a lesson that the Democratic Party has continued to fail.
They take the wrong lessons from Donald Trump's victories.
And I just want to say one last thing, because this is a hard thing.
I want to lay my cards on the table.
Nick, I'm recording this.
My phone is on this desk.
Like, and, you know, and, like, I need to get better about that.
Like, when I'm having conversations.
And, you know, I had a moment this weekend, I was having a conversation about something.
I then, like, got on to my, like, smart TV, and what came up?
A targeted ad that came from a conversation that I was having, not on the computer, not on the phone.
And so when those things happen, what do we do, Nick?
It's the same thing that a lot of liberals are doing now, where it's like, I'm not worried about this right now.
I'm just going to put my head in the sand.
I'm not going to pay attention.
We all need to get smarter about this.
We can't just take privacy and our rights for granted anymore.
We have to be much, much more aware of this system that's been created because it And you just explaining it away.
I'm sure no one's listening right now or whatever.
You have to get better about that.
And I say that because I need to get better about that.
And by the way, the next logical conclusion to that, and I think I was reading reporting earlier this week about it, where they want to do minority report.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Why not?
Yeah, to predict before you commit a serious crime, and then they're going to, you know, arrest you before you do it, right?
Like, the idea was just before you do it so they could still prove you were going to do it.
But, like, that is fraught with all manner.
I mean, that movie slipped in what we're dealing with right now in a way that, you know, was packaged in a way that we're thinking that Tom Cruise is his hero.
But in reality, it was a stark depiction of what we're on the path to right now.
That's exactly right.
Nick, in another incredible story, basically another top story, on Sunday, It caused over $7 billion in damages.
Right now, Ukraine and Russia are engaged in peace talks, which I don't expect to do much.
Both of these parties have lashed out at each other very, very hard.
I watched this.
I watched the videos.
I read the coverage.
I was, like, going deep into the intelligence and all of this stuff.
I know that, like, in America, we don't pay that much attention globally, but this is a gigantic, historic attack that we saw, and there are larger implications for it that I'll get into in a little bit, but what were your reactions to this?
Oh, I mean, absolutely.
This is out of some, you know, one of those, the Guns of Navarone movie, you know, where they went thousands of kilometers behind enemy lines here to operate this.
And by the way, they had, whoever was controlling these drones was in Russia.
They can't control, I don't think, that range from Ukraine.
So not only that, but they have these, by the way, I really do feel badly for the truck drivers.
They unwittingly drove these trucks within range of these four air bases, and in which case a top opens up they didn't know about.
I mean, I'm choosing to believe that Russian drivers didn't know about it.
And all of a sudden, these kamikaze drones fly out of there.
And they're watching them going probably as mystified as anybody as they're taking out, I think, about 34% to 35% of their fleet that can deliver nuclear missiles, you know, not ICBMs, but the ones they use off of planes.
And so it's not, maybe not, I mean, maybe it's like Pearl Harbor.
Yeah, like, what percentage of our fleet was taken out in Pearl Harbor?
Probably more than 34% of that, but, like, it's significant, and it's got egg on the face all over Putin's face in a way that you have to be worried about a couple different things, and his overreaction could be one of those, which would lead to devastation, but it could very well be that they can't react very well now because they took out, you know, a lot of their weapons.
Well, you know, like every normal person, I spent a decent amount of time on Sunday, like monitoring like Russian hardliner channels.
And like, not only did they call it their Pearl Harbor, but maybe...
man, I got to tell you, the calls for nuking Ukraine were out of control.
It was an immediate reaction that they needed to take them out.
And I think one of the things that I want to focus on here, and, you know, we talk on this show, we try and give historical context, but also I think...
We're watching a lot change in this world and we're sort of putting our finger on it and saying this is big.
This feels to me Because Russia has this big, gigantic, war-making hulk of a machine.
And more or less, I mean, 117 drones, I mean, they're not cheap, but they're cheap.
You know what I mean?
Like compared to that type of...
They did $7 billion worth of damage.
And the fact that they were able to sneak this in and then use these drones to take out a giant part of Russia's war-making capacity.
Russia's response to sort of like flirt with the idea of nuking Ukraine and retaliation, it shows a changing of times, which is we have these old capacities, these old armies, these old means of making war.
And now they are being sabotaged by a different type of warfare that is much cheaper.
You look around, Nick, the United States of America has been thwarted consistently around the world.
I mean, we basically lost an altercation with the Houthis, you know, like a group of people who just kind of like threw together a ragtag fight against the United States of America to the point where Donald Trump said, we got to make peace with these guys or it's really going to screw with us.
Like something is shifting here and it just adds fuel to the fire of what I've said over and over, which is I think if we reach World War III, World War III is going to be really weird.
This represents a brand new type of belligerence.
And the possibility for that, I mean, it's everything from like the growth of AI, which is going to come into like huge focus in terms of like an arms race.
Scepterfuge, more or less, is what we're possibly looking at, which might be the long-term sort of legacy of the post-World War II security state and military state, which is, yeah, you're not going to go toe-to-toe when it comes to nuclear strikes, but there are going to be some weird little things that happen to sort of move around it.
Absolutely.
Another ancillary benefit to the Ukrainians as far as they're waging this war is that traffic will now end up getting snarled in Russia where they're going to end up searching every truck.
And it's going to affect supply chains to the fighters that the Russian needs.
So it's not just like the one-day thing.
This is going to cause a whole lot of problems to regular Russians as well.
It's going to sort of, you know, cause snarls.
So that's another one of those benefits.
But I do feel like, you know, This is like the Clone Wars, right?
This is basically like nobody died, no Ukrainian died doing this, pulling this thing off, right?
So, and yet you said $7 billion worth of damage.
It's incredible what you can do.
And it does make me a little bit worried that private people could build their own armies now.
Oh, that's absolutely where we're going.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, we started with Palantir.
Like, that's what they want.
That's what all—I mean, Meta just got in bed with that asshole that they're going to start creating military hardware.
Like, we're going to see the oligarchs and tech corporations start to put together their own armies, no doubt about that.
You know, I forgot to ask you, do you know where the word Palantir comes from?
Am I wrong?
It's Lord of the Rings.
It is.
That's why you say that.
These guys are so obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and they don't even know what it's about.
It's incredible.
Yeah, I mean, it's some sort of term where it means far-seeing or those that watch from afar.
I don't know.
But, like, these people are – I think it's also indicative of their – what's the word?
They're not adults.
No.
No, they are not.
No, and they don't have, like, reading comprehension.
Like, they all, like, sort of, like, think they know what these books and things are about, but then they end up becoming the villains, you know, because they don't understand it.
Yeah.
No, but they are absolutely going to build their own armies.
That's almost inevitable at this point.
There's an assunted emotional growth there.
There's also, you know, synapses firing in very, very strange ways that seem to interrupt their normal thought process.
If you watch Teal, It's brutal, man.
Like, he can't get out.
It's really hard to watch.
And if you thought Musk was difficult to listen to, how I do, Teal's a whole other level of that.
And it just, to me, he just looks like his brain isn't firing properly.
Well, no, I mean, and that's the whole thing.
It's like, there's nothing healthy about this.
Like, we're living in a time of great dysfunction.
That's what's happening.
And you add to that, like, these changing sort of military norms and technology, there's no telling how it combusts, but that's, if you go back and you look at the world wars, or you look at, like, you know, the precursors to it, you know, like, you look at, like, all these different wars that kingdoms had before that.
All of a sudden it becomes clear that that dysfunction that we're talking about, it merges with technological innovations, changes in capitalism, and also ecological problems, not to ruin anybody's day, and those things come together.
Like, that's how the ingredients cook, you know what I mean?
And so if you look at this, like, what happened with Ukraine doing this?
I don't know what's going to happen.
I know that Donald Trump is not going to be able to broker a peace that is actually going to take care of anything.
Isn't it amazing, by the way, he was going to take care of it in a couple of days, right?
And then you start seeing these new opportunities.
And am I glad that the Russian war machine suffered this?
Yes, I absolutely am.
But I can't also see it in a vacuum and not see how this is going to set off some more dominoes, which is why every time that you and I talk about these flashpoints, like my feeling inside of me that things are about to like really start popping off, like that feeling just grows and grows almost every single day now.
Absolutely.
I mean, the thing about Russia using nuclear weapons is we know that they want the entirety of Ukraine.
They want to take the whole thing.
And we know this because they had a ceasefire on the table from Trump who was trying to negotiate it, giving them the Donbass, giving them Crimea, pretty much everything they wanted and whatever they had taken already.
And then, like, maybe Kiev gets to stay.
And that's, you know, they're in a loose government in Ukraine.
And also a guarantee they won't join NATO and everything that Putin would have wanted.
And he turned it down.
So in my mind, and I think that's even, Trump even said this, he's like, yeah, Putin just wants to take the whole thing.
And so would he still nuke a whole country knowing he wants to take the whole thing over and have a fallout everywhere?
So that might be some notion in his adult brain where he might not do that.
But it doesn't make it any less concerning for what they want to end up doing to the Ukrainian people.
No, and it's a question, too, about whether or not somebody just gets very pissed off and they accelerate everything beyond where it is, which is what happens a lot of the time with this shit.
So we're going to keep our eye on this.
I mean, it makes your jaw drop, right, to see something like this carried out and see how this thing that really should have ended a long time ago and been taken care of and people, like, you know, dicked around with it and it didn't work out.
It's really wild how it's developing.
Speaking of wild developments, Nick, we have a couple of twin pair of stories that came out over the weekend.
In South Park, a suburb of San Diego, ICE conducted a workplace raid, and the locals intervened in, like, incredible video and footage of people leaving restaurants in order to get involved in this.
It turned into an altercation with ICE agents in which they ended up deploying smoke, gas, and flashbangs, which, I mean, my God.
And then, in Manhattan, Homeland Security agents stormed Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler's offices, Nick, it feels, and this is something I said, I want to say it was a month ago, I said that, speaking of like these feelings starting to build up in me.
The idea that these things aren't just growing in terms of audacity and cruelty and oppression, but the fact that there is a reaction coming to it that very well could be violent and very well could escalate these things and lead to something else entirely.
I don't know about you.
I think we kept talking about this summer, and now that we're in June, somehow or another, what is time?
It does feel like this summer is primed for something very, very wild.
While violent, someone's going to get shot and maybe even die during one of these altercations, because we keep seeing more and more evidence of these people wearing the police ice bullshit thing over their shoulders.
And, you know, you can see some tattoos.
Like, one guy has, like, the white power, white nationalist tattoo.
Like these are proud boys, so they're just sort of deputizing or whatever.
And on top of that, You can't tell me that the proper training in reaction to the public doing that is to throw flash grenades at these people.
Have you ever been around a flash grenade?
No.
It sucks.
It sucks.
It's the ringing of the ears and you can't hear everything.
Oh, no.
It freezes the world.
I mean, the riots that I've been a part of, well, I about said I've been a part of as if like I was rioting.
Like the riots that I've been covering in my journalistic career where flashbangs and gas and smoke bombs got used.
I cannot tell you how awful it is.
And the fact is, I think these people did the right thing.
I do.
I think that every American who sees this shit go down should, if they can do it safely, should say, you know what, this isn't going to happen here.
You're not going to take my neighbors.
You're not going to take my friends.
Which then, because of the authoritarian energies that we've been talking about this entire episode, they are going to retaliate.
And they had weapons.
These weapons could have very well been used.
I think it's only a matter of time until they use them.
And I think that what goes along hand-in-hand with that, Nick, like, they didn't just go to Nadler's office looking for rioters.
They're looking for Democratic politicians to make an example out of.
And we've already seen a couple of Democratic politicians be detained.
I would not be shocked at the pace that this is going on, that we're going to start seeing some of these people getting arrested.
And we're going to start seeing some of these people being brutalized more or less.
And to that I say, if you are a Democrat, Are you going to get involved?
Are you going to get in the fight?
Are you going to get skin in the game?
And if you can't do that as a member of the political class at this moment, it's probably time to step aside.
It's probably time to say, you know what?
This has got too hot for me.
I don't want anything to do with it.
Let somebody else try and take a crack at it because if you don't have it in you, it's going to be visited upon you regardless.
You need to get in the fight.
I mean, what's also brazen is that this is in California.
You know, it's one thing to hear about it in Florida or other states with governors who seem to be well on board with what they want to do.
But, you know, California is one of those states where you think, oh, that won't happen.
And it has.
They've been, you know.
We're doing ice raids all over the state and Central Valley and stuff like that.
But the numbers are not that big.
We're seeing reports like Stephen Miller now freaking out because they can't get the right numbers that they thought they were going to get of people being deported.
And by the way, if you're a citizen and you want to stand up to these people and you get arrested for doing that, like, what's the next logical step in that?
They will send you to a prison in El Salvador.
Right?
Like, that would be another reason they can say, well, you're aiding and abetting the enemy who are now a terrorist or whatever.
And, like, that could be what they're going to try and do.
And we already know what they're willing to do to bend the existing laws to their favor.
We already know that Trump will not answer a simple yes or no question about what the Constitution says, of which he's well aware that it's his duty to uphold.
So, you know, that's the thing you have to put together, like, that puzzle.
It's not even five pieces anymore, Jared.
It's, like, one piece.
Yeah, it's not a puzzle.
Like it's just a picture at this point.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's presidential daily briefs, right?
Well, I mean, that's something to talk about and dissect a little bit, which is the idea that Donald Trump basically needs a Fox News broadcast to pay attention to intelligence, which just proves again what we've talked about, which is he's not really the president of the United States of America.
He's a puppet.
He's an idiot puppet who has no interest in actually doing the job, and everybody else, including Eric Prince, including the Palantir people, all these other people, the oligarchs of wealth class, they're the ones who are running the show.
We basically have Ronald McDonald in charge of McDonald's, is what's happening.
And you can say that because that's where he's getting his information from.
That's right.
Right, because he doesn't get it from, you know, trusted sources of people who are intelligent and smart and have their ears on the ground.
He gets it from his fucking cell phone in the Oval Office, which is being tapped as it is anyway.
And, you know, from his friends complaining about stuff.
But that's how this is all made.
This is why it's the...
It didn't work this way under anybody else either.
However you wanted to hate Nixon or Reagan.
I mean, it worked this way under Ronald Reagan, who was a puppet from the very beginning and didn't remember the last part of his presidency.
It did happen with him, which is the weird, wild part of this.
All right, fair enough.
I mean, well, right, because Reagan's, yeah.
But at the very least, the access to Reagan wasn't as easy as it is now.
That's an interesting thing.
Like, actually, the Republican Party in the modern era has, like, a weird sort of a track record with this.
Reagan didn't know what was going on and was more or less a mascot.
H.W. Bush was probably the most plugged-in person in the United States of America for years.
We don't have time to get into that right now.
George W. Bush, like, thought that he was in charge, and I mean, look what happened around him and now Donald Trump, who is a clown.
Period.
Speaking of authoritarian energies and weird ideology, Nick, I thought this was a useful thing for us to spend a couple of minutes on.
Republican Senator Joni Ernst was doing a town hall the other night and talking about what was happening with the Trump administration.
The clip you're getting ready to listen to, you might have seen on social media, but as she's trying to quote-unquote answer a question, someone in the audience yells out, people will die.
And I think that her response is something we need to look into.
People are not, well, we all are going to die.
So, if you couldn't hear that for some reason, that was a senator of the United States of America responding to someone saying people are going to die by saying we're all going to die.
And Joni Ernst, who is a really, really untalented, unserious politician, then released a follow-up.
And what you're getting ready to listen to is a video that Senator Ernst made.
And Nick, it took me a few viewings of this to notice.
She's actually filming this inside of a graveyard.
Which is wild.
She has an attempt here to sort of mop up this public relations nightmare, and instead, this is what Senator Ernst offers the public.
Hello, everyone.
I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement that I made yesterday at my town hall.
See, I was in the process of answering a question that had been asked by an audience member when a woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back corner of the auditorium, people are going to die.
And I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes.
We are all going to perish from this earth.
So I apologize.
And I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.
But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Okay, so this is...
I want to hear your reactions to this, and then I want to get into exactly how this is, like, one of the greatest specimens and examples of what is currently happening, not just in American politics, but especially within the MAGA movement.
But Nick, have you ever, I mean, this is right up there with, I'm not a witch, I'm you.
Like, that's this level of terrible communication, but it's also exemplary of, like, what is happening in our politics and culture.
First of all, I'm a little bit upset that I didn't notice it was a graveyard as well.
I'm fairly certain it's a graveyard, although her camera work is not great.
I'm fairly certain it's a graveyard.
I think I see a tombstone in the background.
I was on vacation a few years ago, and we met some nice people.
We were all in the hot tub, and they're from Iowa.
And I was like, but do you guys like – And I felt bad after that because I'm like, we're on vacation and we don't really want to get it.
And they were like, eh, not really, whatever.
Who knows what they really thought.
And I felt bad ever since then for even putting the situation where I had to ask about Joni Ernst and whatever.
And you know what?
I don't feel bad anymore.
Fuck her.
And whatever feelings I might have had, she deserved it.
And they supported her.
They deserved to feel bad.
Even if I was on vacation for a second, if they voted for this person.
The fact that she would turn this around into some sort of trolling, sarcastic response about the tooth fairy and then adding, you know, Jesus Christ, Lord, Savior at the end is just, she needs to fire her comms.
Like, there was no question whoever came up with this idea, and maybe it was just her, I don't know.
They need to be doing a lot better than this.
It's real bad.
I do a lot of work in Iowa and with Iowan groups, so I've been very familiar with how terrible Ernst is.
I think the larger thing here is – Right?
Because for the longest time, America sort of lived in this privileged sort of era where, like, you know, disasters and awful things, they happened to people who were either outside of the country or they were poor or they were people of color, right?
They were marginalized communities.
I think a lot, there's this book, White Noise, by Don DeLillo, where one of the characters who is like a white male professor, he's in the middle of a disaster and he's like, things like this don't happen to me.
And that was the American ethos, right?
The idea that by being American, you were sort of inoculated with this.
And America has a terrible problem with death, but that's a different conversation.
It's mass incarceration.
It's the use of law enforcement using, like, violent, deadly force with people.
It's people being unhoused and being pushed to the margins of society.
But, Nick, we saw it come into full bloom during COVID.
And during COVID, it was the idea that some people are going to die.
And you might remember this, and our listeners might remember this.
You remember people would go on Fox News, and they would be like, they're old.
Old people are going to die.
What are we getting?
Are we just not going to have businesses to keep old people from dying?
What are you wanting us to do?
And what happens as authoritarianism takes hold and comes into full view is all of a sudden that protection or that illusion of protection falls away and suddenly it's just normal for people to die early deaths.
Like, some people are going to die.
You've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
And the entire idea is because the American Empire is in decline, now all of a sudden it's become one of the party platforms of the Republican Party that is basically like, what do you want us to do, save everybody?
No, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are going to die unnecessarily.
But do you just want us to stop?
Do you want something to change?
Because if you don't want something to change, well, you're going to have to deal with people being brutalized, disappeared, and also murdered.
You know, if you listen to her very carefully in the beginning of the first clip when she's in the town hall, she starts to say, oh, no one's gonna die.
And then someone yells out, they're all going to die, and then she says, everyone's going to die.
And remember, the subject is Medicaid and how they're cutting Medicaid and this new bill.
And we know, it's almost like the same thing that you mentioned with USAID, you know, or PEPFAR, you know, supports kids around the world and prevents deaths from AIDS and HIV.
And starvation, yeah.
We now know that hundreds of thousands of kids are going to die or have died already from the lack of support that we were giving people.
Like, again, Mike Johnson, these guys, and Musk just sort of sweep them under the table.
Don't think it matters, again, because they don't look like us.
They're not Americans.
And this is the same idea here where first she wants to just poo-poo it like, oh, no one's going to die from not having a little Medicaid.
That doesn't mean – but, like, that's how – They can't process beyond anything, like, you know, right in front of them.
Object permanence?
Object permanence, yeah.
Yeah, where then, like, they can't seem to put that together.
We're like, yes, this is going to be really horrible and cause a lot of suffering because we have a certain party line and we have a certain notion of, like, we must cut and cut and get rid of all these different programs because, again, able-bodied people don't deserve it if they're not part of the meat grinder or the machine.
I think I said this last time I'm on record and everyone's heard me.
I don't think there should be a work requirement to get health care.
No.
We make that clear.
We should not be a work requirement for that.
No, and that goes back to what the platform you were talking about earlier.
Like, you run on that.
Like, and people will, people, all people agree except for, you know, the wealth class.
That's it.
Right.
And it's just galling to me because, again, it's not like getting Medicare does not put cash in your pocket with which you can then spend it willy-nilly on a new TV.
Right?
Or whatever they think that they're spending this money on.
That's the whole thing.
But they're acting like that, right?
They're acting like this is like cash in your pocket that somehow you're taking and bilking when it's just healthcare.
Like, that would be the thing that actually will benefit you.
Not like, you know, whatever they're, you know, again, it's not even just the welfare queen trope that they like to use of sitting on the couch and just, you know, collecting checks.
It's, you know, they wanna control what you're spending the money on too, or what you're using it for and how that is applied.
And that's really where we get into a situation where again, And you don't have to say, we don't have to give everyone free health care.
You can simply run on, we're not going to force anybody to have to work to get health care.
Well, and they've done, and I hate to give these people credit because the wealth class has done an incredible job setting this up.
And what you just brought up, it goes back to the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s into the 1980s when all of a sudden capitalism suffered these convulsions and it changed from everybody should have these things and we should have a good life to, no, we don't have the money for this.
We don't have the resources for this.
So some people are going to do without.
And so for a very long time, you know, you brought up people around the world who are now going to starve or die of AIDS.
Conservative estimates are 300,000.
Are going to die because of what Doge did.
And because of austerity.
Well, guess what?
America has killed millions of people.
And not just through wars, going back to the war on terror, but through political machinations and slotting people into the neoliberal capitalistic global system.
It just so happened we didn't have to look at them, Nick.
Occasionally we would see like a commercial on TV that was about starving people.
And you could throw a couple of bucks at it, although that was a scam.
But you didn't have to think about the way that you lived and the way that Americans lived caused that.
Right?
Like, that was over there.
Now we live in this modern era where the decline of America.
What are we seeing, Nick?
You go on to Twitter every now and then to look at basketball stuff.
I go on there to research right-wing extremism.
You can barely be on that website without seeing people die.
It's just constant.
It's just constant death all the time.
Meanwhile, you have ethnic cleansing.
You have all these sort of wars.
You have all this sort of brutality.
All of a sudden, it becomes normal for people to die.
Before they should die, right?
Before they die of old age.
Then the dominoes, going back to what you said, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, all these different programs.
If people are just going to die, and if people are being brutalized, why are we now spending all this money to keep people healthy and happy and safe?
So it just starts going in this cycle where all of a sudden you literally turn toward a fascist movement that more or less is normalizing early death.
And it's moving away from sort of the progress that we had in the 20th century, which said, you know, you should have these programs that help people.
A government should make our lives better, keep our air breathable, keep our food edible, keep our water drinkable.
And now it's gotten to the point where it's like, no, we don't have the resources for that because we're not taxing the wealthy, right?
So then it just continues to churn and churn and churn until you have a culture of death, which is what we're currently living in.
And I think parallel to that is the culture of the political situation you have in certain states.
Chuck Grassley also just went through this in a similar way.
And, you know, Joni Ernst, how the hell did they ever get elected?
And I hope they don't, well, listen, Chuck's not going to make it much longer anyway, but I don't know what's going on in Iowa, but they better get their shit together here and get these guys out because there's no way that this is going to apply when it's her turn up for election.
And again, whoever is going to take over Grassley's seat, Oh, my goodness.
It's ripe.
We know that people in Iowa care about these things greatly and do not want to be stuck in a situation where people aren't covered by health care and also even just the ice purges are happening or affecting them directly as well.
So, you know, perhaps this is the dawning of some new shift that eventually, because they're so comfortable in their situation thinking that they can say shit like that and not get voted out, I can't believe that she's going to make it for another term.
I've got to look it up when she's up again, but it's not soon enough.
Well, I like to keep my cards a little close to the chest when it comes to my organizing and my political work.
But again, I do a lot of work in Iowa.
I talk to a lot of people in Iowa.
It's ripe for change.
Iowa has a lot of populist sentiment to it.
They pride themselves on sort of bucking trends.
They've been under control of the Republican Party for a while.
But now you have Joni Ernst, again, unserious.
Chuck Grassley.
And not only needs to go, he's needed to go for a long time.
Kim Reynolds, the governor, is not running for re-election.
There is an opening in Iowa.
And if Iowa can have that opening, a lot of the states that have been written off by the Democratic Party have openings right now.
And if you look around the political landscape, particularly as what's been going on with Trump and Musk and the MAGA bullshit, there is so much of an opening right now for things to change.
And what you've outlined, and I think this is as hopeful of a way to end this episode as possible, what you've outlined regarding a possible platform in retaliation and against Trumpism, it's answering the problems that Trumpism pretends to answer and giving an alternative.
And what you just brought up in every case, Nick, is something that over 60%, if not 70% or 80% of Americans all agree on.
They just don't expect the Democratic Party to say it.
They know that the Republicans aren't going to say it or they'll lie to them.
And now, all of a sudden, Nick, with the culture of death, I'm sorry, but dying early is not a popular party platform.
That just doesn't work.
Like, we all know, what do people want?
They want to talk about how their lives are going to get better.
They want to talk about how programs are going to help them and uplift them.
If the Republican Party is so deep in a culture of death, that is a gigantic opening.
As a political strategist, I cannot tell you that is the worst direction that you can go in politically as long as there are elections and free and fair elections.
If that's going to be your platform, you're done.
That's it.
The problem we have is the people that are voting for them also get on board with, like, we don't want freeloaders.
I don't want to pay taxes to support somebody else.
But guess what?
They're going to feel it directly now.
Next four years, they're going to feel it.
And that is going to be something profound.
And I think that's going to finally shift.
Because we kept saying nothing that Trump does is going to change their vote.
At the very least, he's not running again, I think.
And he won't be there.
You know, so that's there's a natural crest to that.
Jody Ernst is up in 26. So that's very soon.
I'm sure that cycle is already starting.
So they're going to have you'll see ads in Iowa probably, you know, very soon about what you just said.
So I think that we're coming to a moment now, again, if the 2026 midterms increase the electorate for the Republicans, we are in that's that's the bellwether.
That's the real sign that we're in trouble.
Well, and I just want to say, you know, sometimes we sort of use analogies from movies and TV shows in order to bring larger political ideas up.
We are trying to escape like a complex, you know what I mean?
Like a supervillain complex.
We're trying to get out before the door shuts.
And the whole problem here is the culture of death.
It's not just like growing.
It's been there for a long time.
Like, this is not a new thing.
For them to be saying it overtly means that the foundation's been laid for it.
And what you just said is, like, most people don't care in America if another person dies as long as they're okay.
That's the American ethos, right?
As long as I'm good, as long as I get to live my life, I don't care if somebody else has to suffer.
That's what America has promised people for a very long time.
But now we have to get out of this thing before the doors shut.
And we're talking about surveillance.
We're talking about whether or not they're going to be free and fair elections, whether or not Trump is going to honor the Constitution, which we know that he won't.
We talk about all these apparatuses that are being twisted and perverted.
We have to get out of this before the door slams shut, because then it's not about what's popular.
It's not about what people support.
It's not what people vote for, even though we're in this situation because Donald Trump won the election.
Now we're talking about whether or not they can go ahead and shut the door before there are any small-D democratic actions that we can take to get out of the crumbling building.
That's the problem.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this episode of the Mike Craig Podcast.
We will be back with the Weekender edition on Friday.
Go over to patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast.
More people are doing it.
And by the way, we're hearing from them.
They're happy that they're doing it.
That way you'll be able to listen to the whole Weekender, support the show, get in on all the Discord stuff, the special episodes, all of that, patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast.
If you need us before then, you can find us over on Blue Sky, Nick's at Nick Houselman.
