Cole Allen, a Caltech graduate and former NASA intern, attempted to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondence Dinner, exposing critical Secret Service failures at the Washington Hilton. While Trump dismissed Allen as "sick," hosts argue his manifesto reveals a liberal despair over perceived fascist dictatorship, suggesting violence may become a necessary option if democratic institutions collapse. The discussion extends to historical precedents where revolutionary symbols justify action, warning that future sectarian cycles could emerge from far-right extremism rather than MAGA bases, ultimately forcing citizens to choose sides in an increasingly polarized America. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Weird Shit Happens00:03:12
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Monk Creek podcast.
I'm Jared A. Sexton.
I'm here with my good friend, my co-conspirator, Nick Hausman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm doing fine.
How are you doing, Jared?
I'm hanging in.
You know, one of the perks and also, I guess, problems with this job is when weird shit happens.
That's kind of, what is it, Hunter S. Thompson, you say is like when the turning gets weird, the pros get weird, the weird go pro.
I'm absolutely ruining that, but that's where I'm at right now.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I used to like weird.
Weird was kind of good and kind of a thing to be.
And yeah, this is stuff.
I think that what you can't, if you study this stuff long enough and what we're talking about, obviously would be what happened over the weekend, you might have to get to a point where you just accept that things don't make sense and things are weird.
Things are, I think that can make sense.
And then there are other things that attempt to make things not make sense.
But I think you can at least start to put these things together.
We're going to talk a lot about the process of analysis in this episode.
And where that comes from, and what you can analyze and what you can't analyze, and what eventually it leads to, and the decisions you kind of have to make.
But this is one of those episodes where you and I very, very easily could have taped an emergency episode on Saturday night.
And we did not do that.
And I'm glad that we didn't because the picture has emerged a little bit more.
We're able to talk about the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondence Dinner.
So I'm glad we've had some time.
I've got some thoughts, and I really can't wait to have this discussion.
Well, I have a rule, and the rule is if we don't do an emergency pod, if at the scene of the event, people are walking away just taking bottles of wine off the table as they stroll out the door.
That tends to mean to me that maybe we could hold off and record normally.
I will also say, before we get into the full discussion, man, in the modern era where people are supposedly huddling against a possible shooter or assassination, where people are just starting to take videos of themselves.
Yeah.
And they're, they're, they're catching things like Donald Trump being thrown to the floor or RFK leaving Sheryl Hines behind as a Secret Service date.
I mean, a wild, wild scene.
We're going to talk about all that and more.
This is, um, I know I say that we have jam-packed episodes.
This is an extremely jam-packed episode.
A reminder, head over to patreon.com slash my great podcast.
We need your support more than ever.
You'll gain access to the weekender episodes, but also just it, it keeps us going.
We are independent.
We have no corporate backing whatsoever.
We need your help.
All right, Nick.
So, as we have already started talking about, Saturday night at the White House correspondence dinner at the Washington Hilton, allegedly a 31 year old named Cole Allen allegedly attempted to assassinate members of the Trump administration.
He was stopped and arrested by the Secret Service before he was able to make it to the dining room.
This, all the things we have to talk about here, everything from the surreal nature of what happened, people's reactions, what we've since learned about.
Cole Allen through his own words.
Staged Arrest Dismay00:11:11
Let's go ahead and start with our initial reaction to it.
Nick, when you found out about this, and in fact, you texted me immediately after this occurred, and it seemed like you had a.
I don't even know how to describe it.
Can you tell our audience what your feeling was?
Well, you know, gosh, at least you can hear my voice when I say this.
I think the word was dismay.
Dismay.
Yeah.
Dismay is an extremely, it covers a lot of different things.
And so if you could see us in the video on YouTube, you'd see that.
Perhaps.
It's not, the dismay would not be necessarily from the outcome, or maybe it was related to the outcome.
I don't know what you're saying.
If you can see, you know, you know what I'm saying here?
There was dismay generally.
And that was, I don't want to feel dismayed.
It's frustrating.
Yeah.
And by the way, it's, and allow me, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, it's actually different types of dismay at the exact same time.
It's living in an environment in which, by the way, I'm a person who says all the time that the existential crisis of gun violence in the United States of America is one of our most pressing matters.
We have a guy here who intended to use a gun.
For political violence, which we'll talk more about in a second, whether you agree with it or you don't, that's an issue.
We also have, I mean, the absolutely reprehensible security in all of this, which I mean, even Cole Allen in his manifesto, people who don't know this, he published a manifesto online about what he was doing.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
And at the end of it, Nick, he had an addendum where he was like, I can't believe how easy it was to do this.
I can't believe how bad security was here.
And somebody needs to take a look at this thing.
He said at one point, we need to do, we need to take care of this for in the future when we have competent leadership.
So this doesn't happen to them.
It's very, very strange.
On top of that, like, I don't know about you, I'm so exhausted by living under the Trump regime that it's just the constant failures and moments and twists and turns and all of it.
Like, I cannot wait to get past all of this madness and have something resembling some sort of calm.
After chaos, I suppose.
I don't know.
Were you worried about the political repercussions of this thing?
Nah, I don't know.
I mean, listen, the interesting connection we were going to make in a little bit is to what they instantly turned it toward, which is like this ballroom, which is kind of weird.
But I mean, listen, if you want to take the conspiracy end of this, because that's what all people are trying to glam onto.
And before I get into that, just so you understand, the Secret Service sucks.
They suck.
Terrible.
How good they are.
I mean, like, this is a terrible thing.
And we've asked Obama, there's a guy that was able to jump.
Fence and shoot 25 bullets into the White House before they could get stopped the guy, right?
Like, it's just an endless series of these things that keep happening.
So, I'm not surprised at all that, like, this could happen there.
The irony is that this is where Reagan was shot in the same hotel, right?
Like, so, you know, the idea, and I think he would also allude to the shooter alluded to was that he checked into the hotel, he was a guest, which then that eliminated pretty much any security check for him.
He, you know, he's like, well, imagine basically if, like, what if an Iranian, you know, Spot like a real assassin, someone had training in this would have had him, would have been successful and might have even escaped the way that it looked like, the way they ran through this thing.
So that's all, all of this is terrible.
And the whole Secret Service thing, I think, can end up being a sham unless you want to go with the thing, well, we stopped 99.9% of these things.
So like we must be doing something right.
But like, man, how lucky are they get a lot of these things?
All of the, and I've tried to explain this before, all of the load bearing institutions of reactionary right wing America, everything from Law enforcement and protection to the military, all of it, they all suck now.
They're all bad.
We were covering last week what's going on with Kash Patel.
The FBI isn't really able to solve crimes anymore.
And the Secret Service isn't able to protect the president.
And our military isn't able to, most of the time at this point, really carry out their agenda.
So there are issues here in terms of rot.
And of course, we are living at the end of empire.
And these are the types of things that happen.
Also, I'd be remiss, Nick.
If I didn't talk about the popular reaction to this, two things sort of happened immediately in the middle of all of it, which is as this started to come out, I asked you if you were dismayed by the possible political repercussions.
You and I grew up in a time and have spent most of our lives in an environment where if there was an attempted assassination of a president, you would expect his popularity to rise.
There'd be a lot of hand wringing about we need to lower political rhetoric, people saying divisive language needs to stop, all the liberal institutions and media would do this.
And people would support the president in the face of one of these attacks.
I don't see any of that taking place.
In fact, most people are reacting to this and like, well, I don't know.
What are you going to do?
Other people are disappointed that this guy failed.
Other people have simply said, I think it might have been staged, which that tells you something if you have an administration that people are just like, they believe absolutely nothing.
Meanwhile, on the right, Nick, which, I mean, quite frankly, what do they usually do?
They would take someone like this guy, and we'll talk about his political persuasion in a bit.
And they would frame him as a leftist extremist and talk about cracking down.
And we saw that after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
That's not what they're doing, Nick.
They're not even interested in what happened to Trump and what's going on.
They've cooked up an entire conspiracy theory involving time travelers and hidden cryptic clues that somewhere there's like a hidden technology and people are coming back in time.
We might even be in a timeline war right now.
Like they have gone so far in the other direction that has nothing to do.
With worry about Donald Trump, which I think speaks to the crack up of a large part of the MAGA base that you and I have been chronicling for a while.
And then over on the liberal, centrist, progressive side, most people are like, I don't know.
I don't really care.
It might have been staged or something like that.
And other people, and we'll get more into this in just a second, are even upset that it wasn't more successful than it was.
Yeah.
Well, and don't forget, like, shots fired was a phrase that Caroline Levitt used.
And I'm going to assume she meant that Trump was going to like that.
That's a comedic phrase.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then her husband happens to be chatting with somebody at the table right before this all happened, saying that she should be really safe looking around.
And then they cut off her phone, which again, probably means her phone got cut off because cellular services isn't great.
Like a lot of interesting things that pop up.
And again, that's what you learn is that you really try and dig deep in, you know, Charlie Kirk or the assassination of Boulder, all these things, weird shit happens.
We get back to weird.
It happens all the time.
It's totally inexplicable.
And it's just going to have to settle that way.
You know, are you ever going to find out if your first girlfriend cheated on you or not?
Like you're probably just never going to know.
So, you just have to accept that that's what life is like.
Whoa, that was interesting.
But anyway, the point is that, yeah, that's what I've kind of had to wrap my head around is like some of these things are going to be, you know, unclear.
Now, does it sound reasonable that this guy came from California, took a train to Chicago, took a train to Washington, booked a $3,000 a night hotel on a salary that he probably couldn't afford?
Maybe he's been saving up, I suppose.
But all that stuff seems, I could picture that happening.
He writes this thing out.
It was wild, though, for him to add a little bit more about it at the end because he probably wrote this other thing out, we'll get into the manifesto itself earlier.
But then, Uh, you know, commenting on how easy it was to get in and out of the hotel as a guest, uh, was yeah, it's insane, like it should never happen that way.
Um, and uh, and yet, you know, he, um, he was he they apprehended him, you know, unharmed, you know, got a shot off, I guess, a few shots off with a shotgun.
By the way, buckshot, this is this is in your territory, right?
In terms of uh, you know, armaments, it's if I'm not mistaken, this is pretty much the kind of thing that you know what Cheney used to shoot his friend when they were hunting, and you know, I don't know how lethal that is anyway, right.
No, it would be lethal.
I mean, up close and personal.
Cheney used a different thing that was much more for taking down a small bird in terms, and he even says, and we'll get into the manifesto in just a second, that he made this choice because he wanted to cut down on any sort of collateral damage of innocent bystanders.
And real fast, I want to make a point because I don't know that I've made this point properly in the past, and I think this is a perfect example of it.
What you just brought up about the questions, right?
People are like, well, I don't know if this guy actually did it or not, whether or not this thing was staged.
There is a difference, and I'm a political analyst.
The only thing that I can do is I can take signals that are out there and I can make a judgment about what's happening and where things are heading.
Right.
And sometimes there are quite things.
We didn't even cover this.
You know, what was it?
It was a while ago whenever the cartel leader in Mexico got killed, and you and I were like, and you and I were like, yeah, the CIA is probably involved in this.
And then, like, what was it?
A week ago, a couple of CIA members died in a car wreck, which, you know, Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, but that's a different conversation.
But you can sort of look at signals and you can put it against historical context and you can start to understand how things happen.
But when it comes to conspiracy theories, if you get lost in conspiracism, so for instance, let's say that we spent this entire episode being like, maybe this was staged.
There's nothing that we can draw from that, right?
The only thing we can draw from that is this administration isn't trustworthy.
We know that.
We also know that these are people who are capable of staging a false flag.
That doesn't get us anywhere, right?
And if you get lost in conspiracism, if you're talking about a time traveler, you're not talking about anything that's happening in the real world.
You're chasing shadows, right?
So you're not actually engaging in real material conditions that have anything to do with you.
It's a really dangerous thing to get lost in conspiracism.
So, for instance, if someone came back from the future, And told me that this Cole Allen person who's been charged with this didn't actually commit this and it was staged, then you and I could have a conversation about that.
It's weird how the Butler, Pennsylvania thing is now sort of materializing around different circumstances, right?
If we have more information, we can engage with that and we can have analysis.
But as long as we don't have that, we can't chase shadows.
We're in a bad situation that's getting worse.
All we can deal with are the facts as they are presented instead of sort of creating the narratives and storylines.
That we would chase that maybe people would pay more to hear about because they're sensational.
But otherwise, you have to stay with the information that you have and the signals you can find.
And my suggestion to someone like Trump, who seems mystified by all this and wants the rhetoric to be turned down, it's like maybe you should lead the country in a way that wouldn't lead people to want to do this.
Massive Corrupted Change00:09:21
That's my take.
I don't know.
Call me crazy.
And I'm picturing because the video then comes out of him.
I mean, that guy was fast.
He was coming through the thing.
And it just reminded me of the absurdity of the whole thing because.
Again, this is how desperate people are because he's an intelligent person.
He wrote out this manifesto.
He seems to understand the gravity of the situation.
And yet, like, his idea is so, like, he's going to try and somehow run through all this, somehow still get into the ballroom, still somehow be able to do what he wanted to do.
Which, I mean, the absurdity reminded me of Ocean's Eleven when they're describing the only three people ever, ever tried to, you know, rob a casino.
And only one of them has ever even breathed air before they stopped it, right?
And it's John Cusack in this awesome cameo, right?
With Berlin playing in the background.
And that's the absurdity of what I was picturing.
My initial thoughts of this is like, this is a guy just running through the street, you know, never has a hope of even getting close.
And that's sort of what happens.
Wolf Blitzer, geez, this guy got front row and personal.
I don't know if you heard he was reporting right as it happened.
He was coming out of the bathroom and walked right into this whole thing and gave us a description.
So that's the other thing it's ho hum.
People sort of, you know, this is now so commonplace.
And that was a worry.
School shootings are commonplace.
These things are commonplace now.
No one is screaming and yelling and rushing out of the room anymore.
They're just kind of taking wine and benefiting.
Well, you and I started talking about, I can't remember.
It might have been a year ago, maybe a year and a half.
It was when Abe, the former prime minister of Japan, got assassinated.
And I had said, we're entering into a territory where there's going to be not just more.
Political violence, but probably targeted assassinations, right?
So, one of the things that I look for as an analyst, I spend a lot of time reading manifestos.
I spend a lot of time studying people who carry out political violence, who are assassins, because they're very good signals of the political sort of economy and temperature, right?
Who are they?
Why do they do it?
What background do they come from?
How do they present themselves?
Nick Cole Allen, again, allegedly the attempted assassin.
This was a 31 year old man.
From California.
He got degrees from Caltech.
He was a NASA intern.
He was a teacher.
The manifesto that he published, he apologized to his friends, family, and colleagues and students.
He made a vigorous Christian argument, saying he considers himself a Christian.
He said, Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed.
I'm not the person raped in a detention camp.
I'm not a fisherman executed without trial.
I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior.
It's complicity.
He also says, Why did I do this?
I am a citizen of the United States of America.
What my representatives do reflect on me, and I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor coat my hands with his crimes.
So here's the thing, Nick, and this is the larger conversation to have.
This manifesto comes out.
It seems written by a grounded, rational person who has a motivation and an ethical and moral obligation within themselves to do something.
This person does not, I have not heard anything about him being unwell.
Maybe we'll hear that he was very quiet and kept to himself.
You know, this is often how these things are done.
On top of that, I don't see anything in here, to be honest with you, that seems like some sort of an extremist philosophy.
It might be extreme within liberal democracy.
But he's not wrong about the crimes that the Trump administration has committed, and that normal people of conscience should stand up to it.
So then that asks us a question, while it also makes it clear, it gives us a signal that the state of play that we're living in has changed, which is what do you do if you are a person with ethical and moral obligations if you are living underneath a violent fascistic dictatorship, more or less, in which Representative government is corrupted.
There's not an opposition party that you can believe in.
And every single day, people are dying or suffering.
It then offers a question, which is a question every time it's asked in the United States of America and its history, it leads to massive change.
So, this being presented to us, I think, is a game changer of a situation that I don't think most people are wrapping their heads around the importance of.
I agree.
I think in a functioning democracy, what you're supposed to do is lobby for change and get people organized and use your vote.
Like, that's really.
What is supposed to happen.
And, you know, in fits and starts, that's been successful across the history of our country.
But it's easy to see why, you know, you could look around and say that's that was just simply doesn't work anymore.
And that's what he was saying.
And I'm glad that he brought more attention to the detention camps.
I kind of am remiss that we don't talk very much about it either because it's a story that's just not being covered.
What's going on right now with people who have been detained here and immigrants who have been detained here is torture and nobody's doing anything about it.
And that is a, you know, if you feel strongly enough about it, it's not hard to kind of follow the path that he would have taken.
I mean, you know, whatever.
That said, at least to get to the point where it feels as desperate as he felt, clearly, and without it being any kind of mental illness per se.
Right.
That's the difference here.
Right.
Obviously, there's going to be something we have to discuss where he's willing to basically sacrifice his entire life for this.
And that is related to something, but it's not foreign.
I can follow that path pretty easily.
And it's frustratingly so.
And I think there's a couple of things to talk about here very, very large things.
And for the record, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you because you're not just my podcast co host, you are my friend.
And we're moving through this political environment together.
We've been doing this for years now.
One of the reasons that we do this is to make sense of these things, right?
And to sort of chart where we are and where things are going.
I would argue that one of the main theses of this project that you and I have been embarked on is chronicling the fascistic growth in the United States of America with the decline of American empire and what that means for us, anticipating where things are going and hopefully finding places to get off of a certain track.
I want to lay my cards on the table, Nick.
You just brought up these concentration camps that are being built around the country.
If a story came up tomorrow that somebody set one on fire, I wouldn't lose sleep.
I wouldn't feel bad.
I wouldn't be upset about it.
I wouldn't get on here and be like, well, private property is private property.
That's bullshit.
That's not how this works.
If I heard that somebody had, like, I don't know, sabotaged a plane that was going to deport people and send them to El Salvador to some dystopian hell camp, I wouldn't lose sleep about that.
Right.
When we get to this, A person who seems like it's not that they're unwell, it's not that they're a lone nut, when it is a pretty middle of the road liberal who says, I can't just stand by and let this happen anymore.
And by the way, he didn't even mention this, Nick.
Estimates are right now that the starving, starvation deaths after the dismantling of USAID are as high as 750,000 human beings.
750,000 human beings.
That have starved to death because USAID was cut off.
On top of that, listen, you and I don't like to give flowers to George W. Bush.
In fact, the soul repels against it.
But one of the best things that George W. Bush ever did, I would argue, probably the best thing he ever did, was set up aid and HIV relief for Africa.
And what's happening right now since the Trump administration got rid of it, AIDS and HIV are blowing up in Africa.
It's going to lead to God knows how much suffering and how much death.
At some point or another, the apparatus and system of liberal democracy.
If it's not kept in check with regulation, it gets corrupted and it starts to die.
Why do we have a legal system, Nick?
We have a legal system to keep people from perpetrating violence against each other.
Why do we have representative government in order to give people a sense that they are able to change things and have representation so that they don't give up on having agency?
If you start to take those things away, and am I wrong that they've been taken away?
They have been taken away.
Our judicial system is corrupted.
Our representative democracy.
Is corrupted.
You take all those things away, you have fascists who are killing people and who are hurting people.
All of a sudden, people of conscience will start asking themselves, is it my responsibility as a person with conscience to interact with that?
And it appears that this Cole Allen person allegedly made the decision with, it seems like mental clarity, that it's time for people with a conscience to engage with this and to use physical violence as a means of trying to set the record straight.
John Brown Fascists00:08:44
That is a massive change and a massive moment.
That we've only experienced a few times in this country.
And if that's where we are, then we are at a crossroads between two very, very different futures.
Right.
And listen, we've known each other for a long time, and you are the most empathetic person I've ever met.
Oh, thank you.
However, you know, you described this notion of, you know, if someone were to set a building on fire, which happened in Kansas City, if you remember, a woman literally was willing to just be on camera doing it, probably got prosecuted for it because she.
Oh, I don't think they found her.
I don't think they found her.
Oh, they didn't find her.
Oh, I don't think they found her.
No.
Either way, like, you know, didn't feel strongly enough.
She knew that this building was meant for immigrant detention and she's burning the shit down.
She's like, I'm not standing for this kind of thing.
And so, yes, we are already well underway in terms of how that goes.
And so the question would be, like, you know, what would you feel if something like this actually happened successfully?
That is exactly the question that I was just about to ask you.
Yeah.
You know, there's a scene in The Wizard of Oz in the very beginning.
When they're all singing along and dancing on the Yellow Book Road.
And I would think, and the song starts with the two words ding dong, and I would probably hum that to myself.
I had to tell you, listen, I'd feel bad and it would be terrible for the country and this and that, whatever.
But, you know, there is a nightmare that we're in the middle of.
And, you know, sometimes you have to wake up from it.
And what do you, and that is, and I'm glad that you're being honest about that because that is, that's a really hard thing to admit.
Did you ever think you would feel that in your life?
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, we, whenever we think, you know, like, do we, how bad do we think that Bush W, the W was?
Well, I mean, listen, the Bush W crowd was a really, really hard political time, but at least it still felt like the mechanisms of liberal democracy were at least somewhat there.
Right.
And again, in case anyone's listening to this and whatever, you know, I'm not advocating for any violence at all.
I'm extremely passive in that regard.
I, I, I, I, we're just talking about our feelings.
What would we feel like if we heard?
Sort of news report like it was 1963, November 22nd, for instance.
Like, you know, in this case, if it was, you know, this year, whatever, yeah, it would be a problem, problematic because I know that the feelings would not be, you know, it would not be entirely sad.
And that, and by the way, for the rest, I've tried to explain this to people.
There is such a thing within abusive relationships, and we're certainly in an abusive relationship with this regime, something called the widow's fantasy, which is the idea that the abuser will somehow or another meet their mortal end and it will be a relief.
So it makes sense that this is happening.
But we also need to look at the fact that there are a lot of people who are walking around this country.
And the approval ratings for the Democratic Party, I think, also tell an incredible story.
The approval ratings for Luigi Mangioni, right?
You look at those things, and all of a sudden a picture starts to emerge, which is liberal democracy is being destroyed.
We know it.
We're feeling it.
We all understand it, even if we're not even engaging with it.
Then all of a sudden you start having a question what happens after the social contract is destroyed?
What do you do?
And I talked about this.
I wrote an article for Dispatches from a Collapsing State, Nick.
What is the hypothetical that we've all heard a hundred times?
If you and going back to time travel, if you had the ability to time travel, would you go back and eliminate a person I think we both know that everybody always uses for the hypothetical?
So now we understand that we're living under a dictatorial regime who is violent and murderous and criminal and that living in this country.
I don't know about you.
I felt bad paying my taxes this year, Nick.
I mean, I always feel bad paying my taxes, but you know what I mean.
It felt especially bad.
So.
You paid them?
Oh, moving along.
So it's a question that people need to ask.
And we look back in history.
You know, I mentioned before we got on here, I mentioned the person of John Brown who said, you know what, I also said that he was motivated by Christian belief and his idea was revelatory, sort of, you know, messages from God, that it was his job to lead to the death and abolition of slavery.
And we now look at John Brown as a hero.
And if somebody were to do a John Brown style thing today, we would look at them as a domestic terrorist, right?
They would need to be brought to justice and probably killed.
So then all of a sudden you start looking at this and you realize whether or not you want to endorse it or whether or not you want to call for it, there's no denying when someone like this person with their own personal political leanings, this is not a fire breathing leftist, Nick.
He was on his social media feed.
Saying that Hassan Piker was too far leftist for the Democratic Party.
Okay.
This is a liberal.
That's who this is.
Probably a moderate liberal.
And he had the epiphany that a man of conscience in this moment has to act or else they are complicit.
That, whether you endorse it, whether you're with it or not, I find it hard for anyone right now to deny that we've entered into the next chapter of this cycle that we've been talking about for a while.
Yeah.
By the way, and just reflecting for a little bit about this.
I think I might have figured out what the root of my emotions would be in that situation.
Yeah.
Because I'm like, am I a psychopath?
Am I just hoping people die?
No, I think, honestly, if you take the entire consideration of who he is right now, what's going on in the White House and his pathology, it's kind of like, I think, the end of mice and men.
And if you remember that, the end of that, it's a mercy act, I think, at that point.
Right.
And at some point, this is all terrible.
Listen, if you don't see me again, I love you.
I enjoyed this whole thing.
It was a great run.
But you are talking, you're talking theoretically right now.
For the record, we're all talking theoretically at this.
We're invoking literature or, you know, great works of art, you know, which again could be banned, but maybe they'll ban him, you know, because he thinks it's about him.
You know what I mean?
Like that's what we're going at.
Which reminds me, the manifesto was referenced.
Somehow Trump decides like it was a good idea to go on Nora O'Donnell on CBS and get interviewed and then seems shocked that he was asked about the manifesto.
But I think we need to talk about it, don't we?
Because it's a very revealing part of this that when she asked him this question about what they said about him.
It's a stunning thing to read, Mr. President.
He appears to reference a motive in it.
He writes this, quote, administration officials, they are targets.
And he also wrote this, I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
What's your reaction?
Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're horrible people, horrible people.
Yeah, he did write that.
I'm not a rapist.
I didn't rape anybody.
Oh, you're not a pedophile.
Excuse me.
I'm not a pedophile.
You read that crap from some sick person.
I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me.
I was totally exonerated.
Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let's say, Epstein or other things.
But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably, I read the manifesto, you know, he's a sick person, but you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because.
I'm not any of those things, Mr. President.
Excuse me, you shouldn't be reading that on 60 Minutes.
You're a disgrace.
But go ahead, let's finish the interview.
The other thing that he, okay, in and by the way, like 90 seconds after that, she thanked him for actually going to the correspondence dinners.
So if you have if you want to understand exactly how the state of play works in Washington, DC, that's a pretty right example.
And everyone's lauding her for doing that and asking the right question, I know.
But like the one thing, you know, and I like that she said, you think it's about you.
And she didn't follow that up because he doesn't explicitly say that.
And it's interesting that revealing that Trump automatically knows what he's talking about.
And a reminder that the president of the United States of America was found guilty in a trial of sexual assault.
Shrinking Good Guys00:13:54
Just a reminder of that.
Exactly.
And that would have been the other thing.
When he said exonerated, she could say, well, you did get found guilty.
And she could say, oh, shucks, in a way where it's not, whatever, so aggressive towards him.
But it's fascinating that that's where it is.
I don't know, not surprising that this is what the guy's doing.
And he looks a little bit like what's the term, hell frozen over?
Or no, death frozen over?
He's not looking great either.
Death warmed over.
Death warmed over.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I think there's also something in this.
And again, I think Trump sometimes is a very good entry point into understanding the authoritarian mindset and personality.
Again, we talk sometimes about how he is subject to forces beyond his control, which is leading to these other issues.
But in the immediate aftermath of this, Nick, personally, personally, and again, I appreciate it, by the way, I didn't even thank you earlier for saying you think I'm an empathic person.
That was very kind of you.
But if somebody like really tried to kill me and I read their writings and they were coming from like a pretty rational, grounded spot, because listen, I've had my fair share of people who wanted to hurt me and I read what they were doing and what they were saying and I read that and I was like, oh, thank God, these people are sick puppies.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is not something that is even recognizable as a relatively logical moral or philosophical point.
There's no moment of consideration.
What happened immediately, and you sort of hinted at this earlier, immediately they were like, this is why we need our ballroom.
And what do we know about that ballroom?
We understand that that ballroom isn't just a memorial for Trump and his ability to change the White House and create like this opulent space.
We also understand that it is probably something akin to a reinforced, maybe bunker or safety room or some sort of a safety measure, not to mention all the safety features that they would have in this room in general.
And what is happening with CEOs after the Luigi Mangioni thing?
They didn't reconsider how they exploit people, they didn't reconsider how they hurt people.
All of them reconsidered their own security.
So, what ends up happening as you enter this new part of the cycle, it turns into a cycle of violence and Reciprocal violence and also a removal of the authoritarian agents away from the population.
They're already very far from us, but now they're going to take more and more efforts to get further from us.
And that creates not just emotional distance, but also political distance, which makes it more likely that somebody's going to do something like this again.
Yeah.
I mean, and by the way, this also just feeds into my, you know, I'm convinced that there's some, you know, climate event that's going to happen where they're going to have to hunker down and like everyone else starves out above the ground.
But, right.
Cause there's a whole secret underground thing that they're trying to continue building, which apparently, even though there's a legal stay against constructing the ballroom part, they're allowing under the auspices of national security to build underneath.
And what Trump said yesterday in a post was, This event would never have happened with the militarily top secret ballroom currently under construction at the White House.
That, I don't know if you noticed that or caught that, but that's my eye.
What, and because, you know, he is prone to just sort of blabbing stuff, right?
And saying things.
Now, either he's just demented and doesn't really know what's going on in reality, or he's now telling us that this is really some sort of military top secret ballroom.
You know, thing that they're building, right?
Like, I don't know what that means.
What is your reaction to that?
I had not heard that.
I had not seen that.
But I mean, I've seen enough analysis of it and I've seen enough talk around it in the Trump administration to sort of guess that there was some kind of a security feature to it.
You know, it could be the feature of how the room is designed, it could be a bunker underneath it, but I'm not entirely sure.
But all that speaks to is the larger thing, which is, Nick, we've talked about how so much of this is towards a neo feudal state.
And I remind people there was a reason why kings and lords and nobles had castles.
It wasn't just in case there was a war or an invasion, it was to put distance between you and the people.
And I would even say, and now that I'm thinking about this, he has not been out of the White House nearly as much as he has in the past.
You know, he goes golfing, which of course there was another assassination attempt while he was golfing.
But other than that, there's not as much travel.
The rallies, of course, have sort of dried up for the most part.
And now we're talking about creating more or less a solidified capital castle project.
And that, in and of itself, again, like it's not just a metaphor, it's actually the substance of how, I guess I would say, post liberal democracy, but also pre proto liberal democracy sort of a situation asserts itself.
Like you hurt people.
And you oppress people and you exploit people, and therefore you need distance and security from people.
And it feels like this is definitely going down that road.
And it needs to be said that Trump, again, also had blabbed that this part of the underground underneath the ballroom part was going to have a hospital in it.
And again, he's had to run to Walter Reed, and there's been moments in weird reporting from laymen who would say, oh, they're here right now, and who knows what they're doing with him.
And unconfirmed, this is the worst president we've ever had in terms of whether we know anything about their medical history.
And what's going on inside their body right now in terms of, you know, are they in a sound mind?
So again, there's another reason for that.
Like, okay, not only does he want to be out and traveling and doing his rallies and whatever, but now they want to stop having to like go to our hospital.
They can just treat him, you know, with a complete facility in the White House itself.
You know, it sounds fantastical.
It sounds like it's a conspiracy.
But at this point, you know, I'm not willing.
I mean, listen, there's a report about how the first few weeks of this Iranian campaign, There's a lot more damage, a lot more.
I told you.
I told you this.
I said they destroyed basically every base that we had in the Middle East.
Yeah.
And so now that is actually coming out as hard reporting, and it took forever for that to come out.
So, all these things just kind of lead right into the Men in Black kind of stuff that we used to read about in the comic books, and it's just coming true.
Well, and again, you have to be careful with it.
It is, you know, there are so many different ways that you could take it.
And I want to point out the reason why that urge to go that direction is because they have given us a reason to mistrust everything that they've done and to believe that they are capable of literally anything.
You know, like this, we haven't had a chance to talk about it.
Maybe we'll get into it a little bit more, you know, when we do the weekender.
But this was a very ripe topic of conversation.
You even have places like Palantir that are very, very open about how anti human they are, how anti democracy they are, how what do they want?
They want a full nationalist state with surveillance, oppression.
And they're always open about the fact that they see humanity and democracy as the largest impediment towards where they need.
To go.
So if you believe that, and they certainly do, they've made it clear that they believe that, then what are you willing to do to get there?
Right?
And what are you willing to do in order to destroy those impediments?
So the mind reels from it.
It's not just that they're taking our money.
It's not just that they're willing to kill people in the streets here and abroad.
They obviously have, this has been an ongoing political project to destroy democracy and liberal democracy and to hurt people and take away any programs that would assist them.
Or eliminate a little bit of precarity in their lives, it's very easy and rational, I would say, to take that to the oomph degree.
Like you said earlier, they have a system of concentration camps that they've put together.
Do we think that they're willing to use it?
Of course they're willing to use it.
Of course they're willing to use it.
So that is the problem here is that they have opened up all these doors.
And if they open up the doors, it goes back to the alleged shooter in this case.
If they have opened up all these doors, And they are obviously very willing to do these things.
What is it that a person of conscience is supposed to do?
And that I think is one of the great questions of the moment.
And I really want people to sit with that for a while because it takes contemplation.
You know, we do this show, we talk for 40, 50 minutes, an hour, depending upon the show, whatever it is.
A lot of what we do is offering quick reactions to things that are happening.
We try and put together, you know, historical, political, cultural context.
These are the questions of our age, you know, that really takes some sitting down, thinking about it, looking in the mirror, talking to the people you care about and the people you respect, and talking about like where you fall on this.
This is one of the major questions that we will ever face in our lives, Nick.
It is.
And, you know, I can't stress like the rule of law has sort of defined this country, supposed to, and that we need to respect that.
And that's the rub here is that we need to kind of, I mean, I would not in good conscience feel like we couldn't follow the rule of law.
We need to, but we need to figure out other ways as well to affect the kind of change that, you know, to get us back on the right track.
Well, and I mean, that's part of it too.
You know, it's funny if you look at the history of the country, what's the flag that everybody loved for a very long time?
It's don't tread on me.
It's come try and take it.
It's, you know, join or die.
Death to tyrants.
It's one of these things after another.
But that's okay in the revolutionary sense, right?
Because it's saying that this is where America is founded.
And by the way, a lot of not a lot, but most of history is written, of course, by the victors.
That whether or not, if you have a revolution that's successful, it was the right thing to do.
If you have a revolution that's a failure, that's domestic terrorism and you're a traitor and you die.
So these things are things we take for granted, but they are things that we should wrestle with and really sit down and parse our way through them.
You were going to, that's what you were going to touch on for those not watching on YouTube.
Yeah, as long as you win, then you're in good shape.
If you win, But how long did it take for the people here to defeat the British?
I mean, years.
It took a long time.
I mean, you know, what was the, you know, maybe we'll all hang together?
That was the idea as they were signing, as you brought up, the Declaration of Independence.
They understood the stakes of that.
And again, listen, Nick, I am as critical of the founding fathers as literally any analyst or writer or person that you're going to find in this country.
But them taking a stand against the monarchy is laudable.
You know, that's a really amazing thing that they did.
And as revolutionaries, they deserve the respect of that.
But like, you can't talk about the founding of this country without understanding that there are some times in which the expectations of what you do and how you behave are different than other times.
And it certainly feels like, at least depending upon where you are, that this is a question of where you stand and how you act in a certain time.
Yeah.
And the weird thing is that there's still so many people in this country that are just willing to stand by and let it happen.
And feel like they're the Patriots.
And that's a real tough pill to swallow when you're talking about how we ever find it, you know, common ground again and how we ever going to figure out a way through this.
It's not easy when, you know, this is as far apart as we've been, I think, ever in this country.
Well, I guess not necessarily ever, but like it's been a while.
Well, and I do think just on that note, and I think this is probably a good place to leave off.
I think considering what we're talking about this crossroads, you're going to see the number of people who are going to sit things out shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink.
Because I don't even think it's, I don't even think the violence that we're going to see from the right is going to come from a MAGA base.
I think it's, we've already seen some, of course, but I think it will come from a far right neo Nazi reactionary base, the ones that we've talked about that are probably going to take up the baton and run after MAGA.
And you're going to see basically everybody having to make choices about where they stand.
And that's how sectarian violence works it turns into a cycle of violence, and people then have to choose sides, and how you choose kind of defines everything.
But how would that group that you described ever be able to pull anything off without the funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center?
I mean, that's the question, right?
After the SPLC is taken off the board, you know, their main funders.
Yeah, I mean, you know, anyway, that's a spicy one.
I think we talked a little bit about it last once, but that's the other thing that we're dealing with the persecution of good guys, right?
The institutions are supposed to be protecting us that are a huge threat to an authoritarian regime.
That's.
That's another big issue that we'll have.
There's lots more to talk about as well in the next few weeks on these topics.
So it's, we got it.
We have to figure out a way to take a stand.
You're right.
Yeah.
Journey Started Back00:00:47
And the question is, how do you do it?
And it's, you know, we're in the shit.
You know, you and I, and again, going back to the journey we've been on, we started off saying, hey, if we don't do something, we're going to get in the shit.
We're going to have to make, there's going to be some hard choices and hard things.
And then, I mean, lo and behold, you record on enough Mondays and Thursdays.
And the next thing you know, you're like, hey, the thing we were talking about, we're there.
So, sorry.
I don't know.
You got to make choices.
All right.
Speaking on those Thursday recordings, we'll be back with The Weekender this Friday.
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