← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
7/8/25: Alex Jones Cries Over Epstein, Glenn Greenwald On Trump Fascism, Peter Thiel Antichrist, Texas Floods, LA ICE Invasion
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Krystal Ball
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- [01:39]
Krystal Ball
Guys, Sagar and Krystal here.
- [01:40]
Sagar Enjeti
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.
- [01:47]
Krystal Ball
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
- [01:53]
Sagar Enjeti
So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
- [02:04]
Krystal Ball
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breaking points.com.
- [02:12]
Sagar Enjeti
All right guys, we're joined now by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of System Update on exclusively on Rumble, the one and only Glenn Greenwell. Great to see you sir.
- [02:21]
Krystal Ball
Good to see you Crystal.
- [02:23]
Sagar Enjeti
So wanted to start with talking about MAGA influencers in disarray over the Trump Department. Trump's administration's decision to close the case on Jeffrey Epstein. Say he definitely killed himself, guys, don't worry about it. There was no client list. This had been a real article of faith. I mean, I'm not sure I realized how sort of central it was to a lot of, like, MAGA expectations about what would happen in the Trump administration. But before I jump in, I'm gonna show you Alex Jones here in just a second. But just wanted to get your take off the top about what has unfolded here and the reaction that we've seen from MAGA world.
- [03:00]
Krystal Ball
I think the most notable part of this is that it's not just MAGA pundits or MAGA influencers who have been talking about Jeffrey Epstein in very vehement and definitive ways for the last four years or more. It's the very people who run the law enforcement agencies. The highest positions are occupied by these people like Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, Dan Bongino. These are the people who've been going around on their podcast and other podcasts accusing Biden officials of corruptly concealing Jeffrey Epstein's client list, saying that Bill Gates is in Congress desperately lobbying to conceal the list because he's on it, insisting constantly that this is like the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the entire corrupt globalist network of degenerates and abusers and predators and the like. And then they get into office, and within a couple of months, it becomes obvious that for whatever reason, they're not going to release any of the information they had been accusing Biden officials of concealing. And now they're at the point where they're even claiming it doesn't exist, that there is no client list. They. There's no evidence he ever blackmailed anybody. A complete 180 on everything they've been saying for the last four years. So if we want to assume, just for the sake of argument, that they're now telling the truth, how did they not come out and very profusely and publicly apologize to all the people who they have been maligning and whose reputations they've been straying over the last four years by accusing them of things that they themselves are now doing?
- [04:22]
Sagar Enjeti
Yeah, that's so well said. And I mean, it was always preposterous to me, the idea that Trump was really gonna blow the lid off whatever was going on with Epstein. And to be clear, I think there are a lot of very good questions, very troubling Links and patterns with regard to Jeffrey Epstein. I know something you've been pointing to is like, the key thing I really wanna know about is whether there were links to intelligence agencies, Mossad in particular. But number one, Trump is like the most pro Israel president. Not that other American presidents haven't also been pro Israel, but his first term was extraordinarily pro Israel, going even further than previous American presidents had gone. So that's number one. Number two, we know these guys were friends. Well, there's pictures of them together. He was on the quote, unquote, Lolita Express. Jeffrey Epstein at least claimed they were best friends for a decade. And number three, you've had a bunch of Trump administration officials who also were involved in various Jeffrey Epstein dealings. I mean, Trump's Labor Secretary from the first term was Alex Acosta, who was in Florida striking this effectively corrupt sweetheart deal with Jeffrey Epstein that let him get off the hook and avoid significant prison time for some of the crimes that he did commit. So I always thought, not to matter. When you asked Trump, are you gonna release these files? He always dithered. He always thought, well, maybe, but I'm concerned about this or that. So it should not have come as a surprise that nothing was going to be different, that he was not, in fact, going to expose whatever was really going on here.
- [06:00]
Krystal Ball
Right. I mean, I do think it's important to note that Trump and Epstein, they were obviously very close, had a falling out, so that he wasn't consorting with Jeffrey Epstein. After Jeffrey Epstein's conviction, to the extent that other people had been. That, to me, is, you know, the most. Two interesting things are, even after Jeffrey Epstein got convicted of trafficking minors for commercialized sex, basically, obviously, if you're trafficking minors, it's basically child rape, it's pedophilia. Huge numbers of the most prominent, powerful people in the world had no compunction about openly associating with Jeffrey Epstein. Not just associating him, like passing him by at a party, but going to his house, et cetera. But then the other thing, Crystal, is that his wealth, Jeffrey Epstein's wealth is inexplicable in terms of what he did. We know a lot of it came from Lex Wexner and other people who are extremely active in pro Israel activities. So the question that the Trump administration still hasn't answered is, did Jeffrey Epstein work with or for, in any capacity, any intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, the Mossad, the CIA, whomever? And they're just like, we're not gonna tell you that. Just move on.
- [07:01]
Sagar Enjeti
Yeah, Just trust us. Nothing to see here. Trust us. We're moving on. All right, let's go ahead and take a look at this video. I wanna play the whole thing of Alex Jones reacting to this news as it was coming out. Now, he has since formulated his own theory of what's actually going on here, which of course conveniently absolves Trump of any sort of responsibility here. But let's go ahead and play his initial reaction.
- [07:24]
Alex Jones
Obviously, there's nothing the globalists wouldn't do to keep this from coming out. They've already tried to kill Trump repeatedly. Have they rolled over? I see a lot of signs that Trump's pretty much in charge now. And so all evidence points towards them using the information to control the deep state. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The who song Won't get, Won't Get Fooled Again. This is going to be an unmitigated disaster. I don't know how they got Trump and the DOJ to do this, because the public is not buying it. No one, no one is buying it. So I never saw any evidence of Trump involved in any of the stuff that came out. It was all fake. The fake Jane does, all the, all the crap, you know, Eugene Carroll, the crazy leftist cat lady, all of it. So now by coming in and being part of the COVID up, the Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, it's just you. You cannot see it any other way. So I'm gonna, I just got to the office, I'm gonna go throw up, actually. And this only happens every few years when something really, really bad happens or something. I mean, I'm physically gonna puke probably right now. My mouth is watering right now because. Because I have integrity.
- [08:48]
Krystal Ball
And.
- [08:50]
Alex Jones
You know, I just really need the Trump administration to succeed and to save this country. And they're doing so much good. And then for them to do something like this tears my guts out. And you know, the left, they're all complicit. They're openly promoting pedophilia. We know they're pure evil and they'll think it's all funny. Oh, look, Alex is sad. Maga's tearing itself apart. Your globalist masters literally want you to eat bugs and live in a 5G 200 square foot coffin apartment. Look at the left, look at them all posing with their Pfizer shots, looking like dead zombies. I mean, come on, you guys are sick and so you shouldn't. Look at those of us that have a soul still and have integrity in pain over this and celebrate. You Dumb pieces of fucking shit.
- [09:39]
Sagar Enjeti
So his new theory he had on the sky that says the Epstein case is being covered up by intelligence groups to protect Western agencies. There also seems to be, from him and a bunch of others, by the way, blame shifting onto Pam Bondi, as if she's doing this just freelancing on her own with no input from Trump whatsoever, and completely, again, absolving him of responsibility. But what do you make of Alex's reaction there?
- [10:04]
Krystal Ball
Well, it's understandable that it's so heavy and emotional because I think a lot of people maybe who don't pay so much attention to MAGA discourse don't have a full appreciation for how central this has been to their entire worldview. This is not like just some isolated little sex scandal that occasionally they would talk about because they thought it implicated people who were their political enemies. This was something they believe was the key to understanding essentially how all the deep state, how globalist institutions are decaying and rotting from the inside, and we were finally going to get the truth. And again, the fact that it was the very people who are now in charge and doing the COVID up, in their view, were the ones who are promising that all of this was going to be exploded in the open and who were adamant. They weren't just saying, like, maybe there's a client list. They were saying there's a client list. Why aren't we seeing it? It's impossible for even these leading MAGA influencers to try and justify it, no matter how much they want to defend Trump. It's just the betrayal is too. Is too glaring and blatant. And yes, they're gonna try and distract attention from Trump himself and put it on people like Pam Bondi or whatever. But at the end of the day, Pam Bondi is Trump's Attorney General and he has the ability to fire her at any moment. And he won't over this for sure. And some kind of reckoning is gonna have to happen.
- [11:16]
Sagar Enjeti
Well, not only that, actually put C2 up on the screen here. So initially, Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino were all taking the bulk of the heat. And then Trump comes in on Truth Social and praises Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, saying that after they close this case, they're getting back to the basics. Locking up criminals, cleaning up America's streets. So makes it difficult for people to argue that it's Kash Patel and it's Dan Bongino who are the culprits here. Which I think part of why they've shifted so much blame now onto Pam Bondi because she has not gotten the overt Trump seal of approval in the wake of this. Nothing to see here on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
- [12:01]
Krystal Ball
Right. And you know that's gonna come. I mean, Trump doesn't care about the Epstein files, as you said he would, kind of. There was an interview he did with Lex Freeman in October, a month before the election where he was asked about it and Lex Freeman said, you're gonna release the client list, right, the Epstein client list. And Trump said, yeah, we're definitely gonna look at that. He was a little non committal, but leading people to believe that he would. He doesn't care about it, as you said. He, I think is very comfortable with having it concealed. Always, as you said, gave caveats and excuses the others didn't. So of course he's gonna defend Pam Bondi. He's never gonna fire her. And that's what I mean by a reckoning. At some point they're gonna have to face the fact that everything, not just that they were told and promised, but that they told and promised, the people who listened to them, has all come crashing down, either because it was untrue all along or because the COVID up continues and there's just, it's too big in the MAGA world to bury it or to ignore it.
- [12:47]
Sagar Enjeti
Yeah, well, speaking to that point, I mean, J.D. vance, this was on the campaign trail, he was, you know, celebrating how the list was gonna be released. You had Pam Bondi, we covered this yesterday. She said just quite recently that she had the client list quote on her desk in an interview with Fox News. And now we're, oh, there is no client list whatsoever. But just as a little walk down memory lane, let's play C3 of JD Vance with Theo Vaughn saying, we gotta release the list.
- [13:18]
Krystal Ball
Everybody in politics has a vice that's much worse than alcoholism is the way that I put it.
- [13:23]
Sagar Enjeti
But we release the list.
- [13:28]
Krystal Ball
Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list.
- [13:31]
Alex Jones
That is an important thing.
- [13:32]
Sagar Enjeti
Let me also play for you, C7. This is Alina Haba, recently with Piers Morgan saying that we are going to be deeply disturbed by these shocking revelations that the Trump administration was on the verge of bringing forward. Let's go ahead and play that, guys. It is incredibly disturbing. We have flight logs, we have information, names that will come out. There were so many individuals that were hidden and kept secret and not been held accountable. I believe in accountability. So you have to now go through your process again. Now it's time for accountability. We have seen for so Many years, Pierce, in this country, many investigations, subpoenas, testimonies in Congress, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a general frustration with accountability. We take it halfway, we don't take it home. And I really believe that now with Cash and Pam, there will be accountability. Accountability. And this is one of the things is like, I don't expect any of these people to. You said they should apologize, they should apologize, but I don't expect any of these people to reckon with any of it. They'll just pretend they never said it. They'll just say it's the fake news media trying to sink Trump. You'll have the influencer world saying, well, there's some other higher level elite pedophile ring that's actually the ones that have more power than Donald Trump. They'll spin and they'll cope and they'll lie. And it's just wild to me that this is so common and so typical.
- [14:58]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, you know, we, we covered this on our show last night and it sounds like you guys had the same fun as we did. Like when we were going through these clips, I was actually surprised at how adamant and emphatic and definitive a lot of them were in that one was. Yeah. So I mean, like that last one was not as a Trump lawyer or a pundit, that was her as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. And she said, we have the names of the people who you're gonna be shocked by who are involved in this. And this is all gonna come. This was not four years ago, this was three months ago or four months ago. So they, I believe, of course, what you're saying is true. I mean, we have Dan Bongino saying like, Bill Gates is in Congress every day working hard. Cash Patel said the same thing to make sure that he wasn't exposed as being on the list. He's doing everything he can to suppress it, implying Bill Gates is a pedophile, that he was on Epstein island, that he's on the list. And now they're all like, yeah, nevermind, none of that was true. So I get what you're saying. They're going to, I mean, like Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday, when asked about this, she gave like a four second answer and then she's like, hey, look over here. All these bad guys we're putting in, in, in prison, we're rounding them up, are probably going to be, you know, having theater about immigrants and criminals or whatever to try and distract attention. I just don't, I don't think it's Going to work with their own base. I'm not sure Americans generally care that much about this, but I think their own base has built their entire. It's the edifice of their worldview. And, you know, if you spend years promising people things and then it doesn't happen, your own credibility and therefore your own money making and your own career is at stake. And I think a lot of these MAGA people, the big MAGA people, it's gonna, they'll come around, but it's gonna take a lot of effort. It's a problem for them.
- [16:35]
Sagar Enjeti
Put C6. Let's go through some of these, the slideshow of some of the various rationales and efforts to cope with this up on the screen. We can go through these quickly. You've got Insurre Barbie who people are on Twitter know this is a prominent MAGA influencer personality. She said, I'm not saying we need to move on from Epstein. I want to see accountability for everything. What I am saying is that Epstein is not the end all and be all defining moment of the Trump presidency. So already we've gone from, you know, for her, it's, this was, you know, quite central. And now all of a sudden when it doesn't go the right way that, you know, this is really not ultimately that big a deal. Let's put the next one up on the screen from Cernovich. This is, you know, it's out of Trump's hands. There's a chain of command on this planet. Elite pedophiles are at very top, even above Trump, way above him. We've got the Charlie Kirk response next. He says, if Trump was on the Epstein list, why didn't Biden release that info to stop Trump from being president? Because, of course, this looks suspicious as hell, especially given Elon Musk is threatening to release information from the Epstein list claiming Trump's on it. You also had Netanyahu coming to town the next day. And then you have this ultra Maga, Kathy, ultra Maga saying, seriously, who even gives a fuck about these files? I'm sure she was not saying that under the Biden administration. And then you have Valentina Gomez saying, covering up for pedophiles is becoming the new normal. I would say this is the most, you know, this is the most. I think this is the best attempt to actually grapple with reality. But you know, Glenwell, I think you're right that I think Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, they're going to take a real hit. I think Pam Bondi is already like, people Are, you know, saying she should resign and she should, she should be fired from the administration, et cetera. Some of these influencers who went to the whole binder situation and were posing for this photo op being used as propaganda props by the Trump administration previously, I think they'll take on some water and a credibility hit. But what I've seen is ultimately with the hardcore true believer MAGA base, they always find a way to, whatever it is that happens under the Trump administration, they find a way to justify it. We saw it with the Iran attack. You know, you had, prior to the US Bombing Iran, you had a significant proportion of Republicans, MAGA Republicans in particular saying we shouldn't do that. The second Trump does it, that number completely shifts and you've got now 85 or 90% who were like, yes, that was the right thing to do. So I think they'll find a way ultimately to cope with it and absolve Trump of responsibility and blame Pam Bondi or the Deep State or just gets distracted by some other thing that's happening in the world.
- [19:16]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I mean, that, I mean, in reality, this is partisan behavior in general. I mean, as you know, I had huge numbers of fans who were Democrats and liberals under George Bush's administration because I was criticizing his war on terror policies. And then Obama comes in, continues, many of them, extends many of them, and suddenly they looked at me as their enemy because I was criticizing Obama for doing the same. And they were like, no, it's different when Obama does it. We trust him. I think it is partisanship in general. I think MAGA world sometimes actually will push back quite a bit on, on what Trump's doing if they feel like it's too, a bridge, too far from what they were promised. But this is what you said is what they're going to do and it's going to work. Which is, I think that's exactly what they're planning to do in already previewing, which is we're going to have some big, cruel, evil, you know, like sadistic program to round up a bunch of immigrants and send them to like Sudan or wherever. And you're gonna get all excited about that. Maybe we'll bomb some other countries because there's some terrorists there and you'll be excited about that. I think that's clearly what they're planning and banking on the fact that eventually people will just forget about this and move on who are their biggest supporters? And I, you know, it's a good, safe bet that that will happen.
- [20:23]
Sagar Enjeti
It is partisan behavior and I think That's a fair point. But I do think it is stronger with maga. And you even saw it with the Iran bombing. Like, I wish I had the poll. Because you saw when Trump does bomb Iran, you see Republican support for it skyrockets, I don't know, like 40 points. And you see Democratic support for it go down, but not to quite the same extent. You know, it was like maybe a 10 point drop. And there was already a low support for such a thing among Democrats. You know, Trump, there is just, he says, I get to define what MAG is. I get to define what America first is. And I think he's right about that. You know, I think his supporters have decided we're not, you know, we've got certain ideas of what MAGA is, but ultimately we trust this guy. And if he says that we need to bomb Iran, well, he must know something that we don't and we're just gonna go along with that. And what I would use as a counterexample here is the fact that under Joe Biden, as you have, still the vast majority of Democratic leaders fully on board with we're gonna give Israel whatever they want, the bear hug strategy, et cetera. At that same time, you had the Democratic base running at lightning speed in the other direction, saying, this is disgusting, this is a genocide. We don't want anything to do with this. So partisan behavior no doubt impacts people across the board. And I think your example is correct. But I do think there's something unique about the cult of personality around Trump that is particularly strong. And there isn't a similarly situated Democratic figure, at least at this point, that has the same level of pull on the Democratic base.
- [22:02]
Krystal Ball
I mean, this, I think, is a complicated conversation. I would suggest Obama did have that, especially in his first term. I mean, the amount of faith and trust and love and reverence and deference to him among Democrats and liberals in general was extremely strong. I think there was a lot of that around George Bush too, especially after 9 11. So I'm not quite convinced that it's stronger among MAGA. And I actually do think that, you know, with Iran, for example, you did have some very prominent Trump allies, starting with Tucker Carlson, but a lot of other people who as well, who from the beginning were saying, you cannot do this, it's a betrayal of America First. They were saying it during the war, they're now saying it. Still a lot of people questioning Trump's relationship with Israel. How is that America First? But I think you're right on the level of like the Average Normie Trump supporter is very inclined to trust him and not question him. But I think on the level of kind of more influential pundits, there are at least some of them who do push back pretty assertively. And you even showed some clips of them doing that now with Epstein, like, wait a minute, what is this? And, yes, maybe they're trying to do.
- [23:03]
Sagar Enjeti
That, but never, never on him. It's always Pam Bondi's fault. It's always the deep State's fault. It's always somebody else. And like Steve Bannon, for example, and Tucker in that. Even in that interview with Ted Cruz, which I thought was extraordinary, the way he would position it, and I understand why he does it, because it's like, tactically, you can't trample on Trump's ego, or else you're gonna be dead to.
- [23:27]
Krystal Ball
Him or you'll lose influence.
- [23:29]
Sagar Enjeti
Right, Exactly. The way that he positioned it was not. Bombing Iran is the true reflection of what Trump really wants and what he's really asserted. And so if he doesn't go in that direction, then he must know something we don't. You know, we're. I actually haven't seen them particularly critical of the bombing of Iran after the fact. I've seen them moving on to other things. I've seen, you know, Steve Bannon, even before Trump decided to bomb Iran, saying, listen, at the end of the day, if he bombs them, we're all gonna get back on board. So. And, you know, there's no secret why. Because if you do disagree with him and criticize him personally, directly, that's it. You're dead to him, and your influence is gonna be toast. You're gonna end up like Liz Cheney or any one of the other sort of exiled former Republicans who dared to say negative things about specifically the person of Donald Trump.
- [24:23]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I mean, again, I do think that a lot of presidents look at the world that way. Like, if you openly criticize them or publicly criticize them, they start to get really angry, I think. But, you know, like we were taught, we chatted briefly before we began about the Netanyahu visit. And I was saying, like, nobody is more easily manipulated than Trump. And so if you're somebody who actually cares about not just opining, but having influence, you want to formulate what you're saying in a way that's likely to appeal to Trump. So a lot of these neocons were saying, America first means being strong and showing the world that we will take action. That's America first and playing on his ego that way. And other people are saying America first means we don't go to wars for Israel or for other countries. Always trying to get Trump to say, you laid out this brilliant philosophy and the way that you align with it is by doing what I want or the other person says what I want. I think that's just being strategic. I think that's being mindful of trying to exert influence rather than just being on the outside throwing rocks like the Elon Musk is now left to do. So I get your point. Obviously there's a ton of people who are hacks who are willing to go to bat for Trump no matter what, and who will do so here as well. I'm just a little bit doubtful that it's worse than other previous presidents, especially ones with very strong kind of personal charisma like Obama had, who I think did inspire similar things. But at the end of the day, whether it's more or less or whatever, I agree with you that directionally that is what's going to happen.
- [25:48]
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Krystal Ball
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- [27:47]
Sagar Enjeti
All right, well, let's talk about some of the people and the company specifically that has done very well under the Trump administration is clearly playing this game very effectively. And that would be Palantir and some of the affiliated personalities around that, including billionaire Peter Thiel. Let's put this up on the screen to sort of set the stage. I think this is still the case that Palantir is the top it's certainly one of the top stock performers in the Trump 2.0 era. It has soared 74% this year alone. No surprise. There's all sorts of linkages, first of all, between Palantir and this government, including through the vice president, J.D. vance. And also they have been a beneficiary of significant contracts from the federal government. This is something that you have covered extensively. I also want to get your reaction to some recent comments from Peter Thiel is a billionaire investor in Palantir, specifically. But before we get to that, you've done such great reporting on Palantir and on this relationship and on what it means for individuals and privacy in this country moving forward. So if you could just lay out a little bit of what you found here for people, I would love to have you explain some of that.
- [29:02]
Krystal Ball
Sure. So In March, on March 20, exactly two months after being inaugurated, Trump issued an executive order basically consolidating all data and intelligence that every individual agency collects under the auspices of Palantir, essentially saying Palantir will be the kind of overseer technologically to make sure that this information doesn't remain siloed. I actually prefer that information be siloed when the government collects it about us because then it becomes more protected and less capable of creating this comprehensive picture of us. But this executive order basically destroyed any of this attempt to keep it isolated. You know, here's financial information with the irs. Here's, you know, health information with HHS or cdc. Here's other stuff with Homeland Security. It's all now being consolidated under Palantir under the justification that it's necessary to track illegal immigrants, is necessary to attract criminals. And, you know, the interesting thing here, Crystal, is back in 2002, there was this really creepy agency that was created under Donald Rumsfeld called the Total Awareness Information Office. Total Awareness Information. It was led by John Poindexter, a big figure in Reagan and Bush. And that was when Palantir was founded in 2002. And one of the first things it did was met with Poindexter and tried to convince him that Palantir was situated. Peter Thiel and Alex Karpu, the Alex Harp who now runs it, to oversee this Total Information Awareness Department, to basically be the sole contractor that has the sophistication and technology necessary to collect it all, analyze it all, put it in one place. Even in 2002, the phrase total Information Awareness was too creepy. It was a bridge too far. It never really happened. We know it eventually happened. That was the Snowden reporting. But now it's happening even more aggressively. All under one specific contractor, Palantir, who was run by not just founded by Peter Thiel and a billionaire investor, but run by Alex Karp, who has some of the most twisted sociopathic views of the world of what American power should be about, how it should be exercised, of anyone I've ever seen. And for a movement, the Trump movement, maga, that claimed to be so alarmed by deep state power, by unconstrained spying domestically on American citizens to watch this consolidation, all under one company in the name of obviously keeping us safe, et cetera. The same thing, the Patriot act and all the other weren't. The eave dropping programs that we were subjected to was ushered in on that same justification. It is alarming in the extreme, but I understand why it's not being talked about that much because it is a little bit complicated. You have to dig into these orders to how the government is structured. But Palantir is a very dangerous menace to essentially all of our basic rights. And they. The power that they have now is at the highest peak.
- [31:41]
Sagar Enjeti
Another story that you highlighted that I'd like for you to dig into for people a little bit is the army turned four Big tech executives, including one from Palantir, I believe, into officers. And so you had this direct merging of the world of Big tech with the military, like direct merging. And of course, we're not Pollyanna here. We know how close and symbiotic that relationship is. We talk a lot about the military industrial complex. This seems to me to be another level. And it didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved.
- [32:17]
Krystal Ball
It was so interesting. I, of course, have been very critical of some of the excesses of Democratic rhetoric when it comes to Trump, you know, you're throwing around the word fascism. I think a lot of people throw that word around without ever giving much thought to what it actually is and what it means. One of the defining hallmarks though, of fascism, if you study it, you know, like in a scholarly way, as developed by Mussolini or whatever, is the merging of state and the private sector all for one unified cause. So there's no tension between the private and the public sector. It's all one nation, everything verge for some national purpose. And so to take the top executives of Palantir, open AI Matter and several others and commission them into the US army as lieutenant colonels so they now have an oath to serve the military. They talk openly and proudly about how they now have this obligation to do so, while at the same time running the companies that are collecting all this data about us, that are developing AI in ways we really don't fully understand. And not just having a partnership between public and private, where there is always some tension still, but actually a formal, explicit integration. Not saying the commissioning of all these five guys is a big deal in and of itself, but it's very illustrative of the trend in which this is going where there is really no separation, there's no tension, there's no impediment. Everything is sort of being employed and utilized for this unified national vision. And, and that is a hallmark of fascism is always classically studied and understood.
- [33:47]
Sagar Enjeti
I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that, Glenn, because I think you're someone who weighs your words carefully. And so for you to say that I think is extraordinary and it's obviously not a word that you have just thrown around to your willy nilly. And so not only do you have that merging of corporations with the military, you have the shipping of people with no due process to seekot. You have the calling up of the National Guard in la, thousands of troops, the deployment of the Marines in la. I mean there aren't even anti ICE protests there anymore. Like the pretext of that is just preposterous. You have the kidnapping of college students who dared to say write an op ed that was critical of Israel and holding them on grounds that are protectual and basic assault on the First Amendment that are extraordinary, you now have an effort to target actually naturalized citizens as well and to denaturalize them. Those are just some of the things that we could throw out there that seem to be fascistic in nature. How are you thinking about this administration and that conversation about whether this administration is pushing, at its core, a fascist ideology.
- [35:03]
Krystal Ball
One of the problems I've had with the way Democrats often think about Trump is I think people tried to depict him as some radical aberration from the American tradition, whereas to me, he always has just been a natural extension of everything that came before. So everything that you're describing here, all these powers of deprivations of due process and denials of free speech, this just didn't appear when Trump got inaugurated. These are things that have their roots. I mean, there was a censorship program that the Biden administration practiced very aggressively to coerce and pressure and threaten big tech companies to remove dissent. A lot of the due process deprivations go back to the war on terror, which never went away. This was never dismantled. This machinery that was constructed after 9, 11 that we were just talking about, the intelligence surveillance state didn't disappear, even though we unveiled it and uncovered it after Snowden. So the foundations have been laid on a very bipartisan basis. That said, I have been very vocal about many of the genuinely grave attacks on core liberties. And now, instead of justifying it in the name of terrorism, it's typically justified in the name of immigration, but also still terrorism when it comes to people who are accused of terrorist group alignment or allegiance simply because they're criticizing Israel. So a lot of this is. Has long extensions over the last 25 years from both parties, but it's kind of on steroids now, because the project of the Trump administration in the transition was to figure out what they did wrong in the first term that made them too weak and to eliminate all constraints on their ability to do what the president wanted. And I think they actually did a much better job than a lot of people assumed they were capable of doing. And you're kind of seeing the manifestations of that in ways that I do consider extremely alarming.
- [36:43]
Sagar Enjeti
I think that's all very. I think that's all very well said. And, you know, the. That fact, the putting on steroids of the previous trends is certainly the way that I view this administration as well. Not to say, I mean, if you look at the one big beautiful bill, right, the priorities there of gutting the social safety net to give a giant tax cut to the rich while funding a massive expansion of the surveillance state and national security that is at home with any Republican administration in my entire lifetime, and some of the Democratic ones as well. But the extent that they take it to both with that and the assault on liberties is what, to me puts them in somewhat of a different category than the things that I've seen previously in my lifetime.
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- [39:29]
Sagar Enjeti
I do want to get your reaction to these Peter Thiel clips that have been circulated. This is from a Ross Douthat interview last week. And the reason that Peter Thiel is important is not only because he is a billionaire, but he is someone who is very influential. He is very ideological. He is very influential specifically in terms of this administration. So this is a person that you really should be listening to the things that he has to say. And so Delfat asked him some pretty interesting questions. Peter Thiel has been talking about his view of how the Antichrist might arise, and his theory is effectively that someone like Agretta Thunberg is the example he specifically uses, would come in and claim that they're trying to save us all and, you know, create peace and safety and unity and save us in this instance from the climate crisis. And they would use that as a way to create a totalitarian one world government. And that would be how we, you know, get the rise of the Antichrist. And Douthat sort of flips that on him and says, well, well, isn't it possible that the tools you are creating and helping to create through entities like Palantir for mass surveillance, isn't it possible that that could be the means by which the Antichrist rises? Let's go ahead and take a listen. This is D2 to that exchange.
- [40:51]
Ross Douthat
My very specific question for you, right, is that you're an investor in AI you're deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on, right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would be, maybe be using the tools that you, that you were, that you were building, right? Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological progress? But I really like what Palantir has done so far. Right. I mean, isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival. They're all, look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing. I, I mean, to be clear, I don't think that's. I don't think that's what you're doing either. I'm just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.
- [42:09]
Krystal Ball
Well, but.
- [42:11]
Ross Douthat
But again, there, there are.
- [42:15]
Krystal Ball
These different gradations of, of this we can describe. But is, is this so preposterous, what I've just told you as a broad.
- [42:25]
Ross Douthat
Account of the stagnation that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to Peace and Safetyism? This is 1 Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.
- [42:39]
Sagar Enjeti
So, Glenn, what did you make of that answer? And what do you personally put the odds at that Peter Thiel is himself the Antichrist?
- [42:46]
Krystal Ball
I mean, I guess if you were to force me to place my money in a casino on any one individual of the 8 billion people on Earth, Earth being the Antichrist, he would be one of the top two or three people I might consider.
- [42:55]
Sagar Enjeti
Yeah, same.
- [42:56]
Krystal Ball
But you know, I do think yeah, but you know, there was another, it was an interesting part, another interesting part that's very related where I'm sure you saw this. And I actually did like a 20, 25 minutes. Someone, we do a Q and A on Friday night. Someone asked me about it. I did like a 25 minute response on it where Ross Du Fat asked him, do you actually favor the continuation of the human species? Like, do you favor the survival of humanity as it is? And he basically was saying no. He refused to say yes. He was stuttering around like, you know, way more than he usually does. It wasn't like an autistic stuttering. It was like really? He was struggling with that question. And Ross like, that's a very basic question that should be an easy yes. Like I'm asking you, should humanity survive? And he basically described this trans. Yeah, that's something we should all have. That's like the warm up question that I think we should all be able to answer so quickly. But he couldn't because he has this very transhumanistic vision that is shared by a lot of Silicon Valley tycoons like him. They basically view themselves as transcendent beings, as kind of the ubermensch. And there's a lot of reasons why billionaires become accustomed to thinking that way. They're surrounded by people who treat them that way. They have the kind of power that makes them believe that they're uniquely capable of doing that. Mark Zuckerberg talking to Rodman show about merging technology and robots and artificial intelligence with humanity to create a different, different form of human, a superior form of human. And a lot of them have this vision that is essentially in my view, so anti human. It's like a kind of vision where our efficiency and our utility is going to be maximized, even if it means the elimination of all the things that we think about as being the essence of humanity in a way that would destroy whatever you think about as the soul or the spirit or whatever. So if you want to talk about the Antichrist and coming and attacking humanity with the intention of destroying it. I do agree with Ross's premise that it seems like a lot of what Peter Thiel is doing is way more likely than say, Greta Thunberg who has spent the last 18 months protesting the genocide in Gaza. Not very Antichrist like to me in order to do that. And I think the Fact that, you know, obviously the Antichrist comes and poses as a noble and benevolent figure. And there he is saying safetyism. The whole point of Palantir is based on safetyism. Let us spy on you to keep you safe. Like, the projection there is so remarkable.
- [45:12]
Sagar Enjeti
Well, and also actually put D4 up on the screen here, guys, because, you know, he's. He's invested in AI and they have an almost. I shouldn't even say almost. They. They have a religious belief around what AI will do for the world and will do for, you know, effectuating this outcome of transhumanism and allowing them to live forever. Like they are literally gods. You know, it's complete with, like, you know, the story of redemption and forces of evil that are trying to stop them. And they are in the driver's seat in terms of the direction of AI regulation or lack thereof. You can see here that Americans are deeply opposed to just letting a rip with AI. This is overwhelmingly bipartisan sentiment of, like, we need to be thinking about what all of this means. And even if you don't subscribe to some of the more apocalyptic possibilities of basically, like, the AI taking over and, like, killing us all, there is going to be significant. There is already significant disruption from these technologies. And people like Thiel have made themselves very influential in this administration. And again, the alliance with J.D. vance, I think, is very significant here as well. They have really gotten what they've wanted in terms of, we're just gonna race forward with this thing. We'll figure out the consequences later. We gotta beat China. China's developing AI. We gotta be first to get to artificial general intelligence. And it's very much at odds with how the vast majority of Americans want this to be approached. And in Thiel's ideology, he talks a lot about stagnation. He has this view that we've sort of, like, stagnated technologically, and we haven't been innovating in the way that we previously had in this sort of transformative way. And I haven't thought that deeply about it to, you know, to say whether I think that is true or false. But as an antidote to that, he believes that we should just race forward with this technology, come what may, and has this. And again, I don't think this is just Peter Thiel. He's very influential. But many of these Silicon Valley titans have this same view that effectively, you know, there's a. You know, there's a faith, like a religious faith, that this technology is what we have to pursue, and it's going to actually create this bounty and this sort of utopia that they have in their minds.
- [47:39]
Krystal Ball
I absolutely agree with you that they have this utopian vision of what AI is that is obviously in their interest to foster and perpetuate because of how heavily invested they are in it and because they're the masters of the AI. So they want to get people to believe that it will just lead to bountiful, abundant, loving futures for all of us. And there's a lot of propaganda with that. But, you know, also one of the reasons why I'm so concerned, and I do think, I know I'm very of many minds about, I want to understand it better. I want to, you know, really, I don't think any of us really understand it, including the people who are unleashing it.
- [48:16]
Sagar Enjeti
Correct.
- [48:17]
Krystal Ball
And I think that we need debates about what kind of safeguards are needed. The problem is, is that it's not just what you do described, which is this kind of transhumanistic narcissism that the people in control of this technology possess and really do believe in as a religious faith, but it's also the competitive aspect. You know, as nation states now we're told, oh, China has it and China does have it, at least as advanced as the United States has. And that was that deep seek trauma to the American mind that it seems like they even might be ahead of us in terms of technology. And so the idea then becomes, well, if we limit it, the Chinese, Chinese never would, or the Iranians never would, or all the bad people or the terrorists never would. And that is the really, that to me is the biggest danger this idea that for our own survival, we can't really allow any limits on AI because if we place limits on it, others won't and they will come to dominate us. Trump named as Aizar David Sacks, who's one of the co founders of PayPal with Peter Thiel. He was the chief financial officer. I know David pretty well. You know, he's. I think there's, I don't think he's like this Bond villain, but he definitely is somebody who really believes in the urgency of going forward with AI. Trump believes in that. Everyone around him believes that. And we're barreling toward a future which I don't think people really understand without any kind of contemplation or debate for all. Because all the incentives of powerful people are to just barrel forward with it and have it unleashed with zero restraints of any kind or even debate about whether we should allow that to happen.
- [49:48]
Sagar Enjeti
Yeah, Glenn, last question. I have for you and thank you for being generous with your time this morning. Is I have long thought that we shouldn't have billionaires, that billionaires are sort of inconsistent with the democratic society. Because when you do amass that amount of wealth, the amount of commensurate power and disconnect from just like what ordinary people are going through really does create a challenge. It's almost an impossibility to have a truly sort of like democratic representative society when you have that much money, wealth and power, power concentrated in the hands of a few. But if I had any doubts about that view, those doubts have been swept aside by what I've seen in this era of Trump 2.0. I mean, first you had Elon Musk buying, you know, buying his ability to have this whole of government mandate through Doge, buying Twitter and making it his personal playground for whatever it is that he wants to do politically at the moment. You've had the specter of Bill Ackman who's out there right now, you know, workshopping in real time how to intervene and get his candidate of choice and to think specifically Zoran Mamdani, who won overwhelmingly in a Democratic primary. And he's trying to, he's out there saying, I've got hundreds of millions of dollars available to a candidate who wants to come forward to try to defeat Zoron. You have Peter Thiel, as we've been discussing, and you know, the influence of Palantir and what that means for everyone and the extraordinary access that he has and you know, the latest links with David Sachs and with J.D. vance, et cetera. Where are you on this question of whether or not billionaires should exist and are consistent with a democratic representative society?
- [51:21]
Krystal Ball
Well, let me say this about that which is there was that Zorman interview where he said, I don't think billionaires should exist. And everybody acted like that was from the bread book of Mao or right out of Lenin. And if you go back and look at the founders who definitely were capitalists, they didn't believe in, I mean, there was no central of communism then, but they didn't. They believed in capitalism, they were very wealthy, they were landowners, etc. And they wanted to preserve those, those prerogatives economically that they thought was their birthright. Nonetheless, they talked openly about how if economic inequality becomes too severe, it will inevitably spill over into political inequality and will undermine and subvert all the principles they're trying to create of nobody being above the law, of everybody being subjected to the same political rights. And so, so this is intrinsic in the idea of the American founding that yes, you're going to have political equality and economic inequality, but if that economic inequality becomes too grave, too lopsided, the political rights will become purely illusory. And I think that's exactly what we've been seeing and what we're seeing even more so now. I mean, it's hard. I've gotten to know some billionaires and I think that it's hard to express what it does to people's minds. You know, we've seen that with fame. You know how people who get too famous, too wealthy, end up sick and ill and they die early because it's just too much for the human brain to handle. Being a billionaire is that times 1000. And to have those people with that kind of mental outlook exerting almost unlimited power in our democracy. Nothing good can come from that.
- [52:53]
Sagar Enjeti
I think that is well said, Glenn. Thank you so much. Great to see you my friend.
- [52:57]
Krystal Ball
Always good to see you.
- [52:58]
Sagar Enjeti
Crystal Take care of.
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Sagar Enjeti
So we continue to keep our eyes on Texas, where the death toll from those horrific floods there in the Hill country has risen now over 100. We still have a number of people who continue to be missing as the search and rescue effort now enters its fifth day. At the same time as that effort is ongoing and as huge questions remain about what happened with the National Weather Service, about these vacancies, about whether the cuts to the National Weather Service impacted the ability to properly forecast this extraordinary event, whether it impacted the community warnings that were received. But even as those questions persist, we now have a new question as we enter this phase of recovery. Kristi Noem, of course, the head of dhs, FEMA is under dhs. And this administration has really aggressively gone after fema. I mean, Trump has floated getting rid of FEMA altogether. And they have sort of consistently pushed this idea that a lot of the recovery efforts should be, if not all of the recovery efforts should be pushed to the states. So I wanted to start by focusing in a little bit on Kristi Noem here, whose role is going to become increasingly significant. Let's take a listen to some of her statements over the past several days as she's been asked to respond to this tragedy and potential federal government failures.
- [56:29]
Kristi Noem
For decades, for years. Everybody knows that the weather is extremely difficult to predict, but also that the National Weather Service over the years at times has done well. And at times we have all wanted more time and more warning and more alerts and more notification. That is something. And one of the reasons that when President Trump took office that he said he wanted to fix and is currently upgrading the technology. And the National Weather Service has indicated that with that and noaa, that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years. And that is the reforms that are ongoing, they continue to elevate and up their notifications. You know, when your notification hit your phone, sir, I'm sorry, I can't speak to when that is, but I do carry your concerns back to the federal government and to President Trump. And we will do all we can to fix those kinds of things that may have felt like a failure to you and to your community members. We know that everybody wants more warning times, and that's why we're working to upgrade the technologies that have been neglected by far too long.
- [57:33]
Sagar Enjeti
So couple things that she says there. First of all, she says, well, weather's hard to predict. True. But, you know, you would have a better shot at an accurate forecast if you didn't just have Doge take a chainsaw to the National Weather Service. Something that was a plan that was laid out, by the way, in Project 2025 as Emily and I talked about yesterday. So this has been an ideological project of the conservative movement, not just of some, you know, Elon Musk freelancing here. This was an intentional plan for two reasons. Number one, primarily two reasons. Number one, they just don't like the federal government and would like to privatize a lot of that weather collection, weather forecasting. Number two, they feel that the National Weather Service and NOAA are part of what they call the climate change alarm industry. And so since they're revealing data that is inconvenient for the narrative that climate change is fake and we don't need to do anything about it, they just want to take an ax to it. So she says, well, you know, weather forecasting is hard, number one. The other thing she says there is that they're working on some new technology to improve the warning systems. People, reporters and people who are familiar with these agencies said, we have no idea what she's talking about. Like, this appears to, maybe there's something we don't know about, but this appears to have just been made up to cover for the fact that what they've actually done is significantly degrade the capacity of this agency to be able to properly forecast and to be able to communicate those forecasts and those warnings to the community. So that was her cover up. As I said before, we are now shifting into a recovery phase. And so you had and possible failures on the front end of the forecasting, the warning, the communications with the community which we covered yesterday. Now you have questions of potential failure of the FEMA response, given that FEMA has also been severely degraded by this administration. Let's go ahead and put this as some independent reporting from an outlet called the Hand Basket up on the screen has been speaking with FEMA staffers about how this response is unfolding versus how under previous administrations the response would have unfolded. So the headline here is FEMA Response to Deadly Texas Floods Delayed and Deficient with Kristi Noem in charge and staffers are sounding the alarm. This reporter, Marissa Kabas, says that disaster struck and then goes on to talk about how at this point, normally you would have hundreds of staffers on the ground from fema and that right now they have, quote, barely any staff that's been deployed. And the acting administrator, David Richardson, is, quote, nowhere to be found, per one source. If this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked. That's according to insiders at this agency, at fema, who say this is not going the way that it previously would have gone under other administrations that took disaster recovery more seriously and didn't have this ideological war on federal emergency management. So as the recovery unfolds, this is another thing we really need to keep an eye on and see how effective it ultimately is. We know that this administration has been, in this instance, they, you know, they put in the emergency declaration so people can apply for FEMA assistance in other instances. I covered these horrific floods in West Virginia. And unfortunately, these extreme weather events, of course, with climate change are coming faster and more frequently and are more and more devastating. And they delayed for weeks that emergency declaration, which severely hobbled the ability of people who were struggling and suffering, trying to put their life back together and recover from being able to get the assistance that they needed in other cases. I know in a case in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to go and use her personal relationships, which, fortunately she can petition the king to go and beg for that emergency declaration. So that has been a consistent pattern, not to mention the threats from this administration, to effectively weaponize federal emergency assistance against states like California, where they have a political beef. Now, Texas is one of the states in the country that has the sort of largest, most developed state response. So it's a relatively large state. Obviously, they're familiar with natural disasters, including flooding. This is an area that is prone to flooding, although this is the worst flooding disaster anywhere in the country in a century or rival some of the worst in a century. So Texas does have some state resources to be able to respond. But even in a place like Texas, you still are very dependent on the federal government being able to come in with money and staffing resources to be able to help. So that is something to continue to watch for and appreciate this report from the ground, because I haven't seen anyone else really talking to the staffers from the agency and getting the scoop on how this response compares to previous ones. At the same time, we had Caroline Levitt being pressed on questions of the administration's response and whether the cuts to the National Weather Service here contributed to an increased loss of life. So more young girls in particular dead because of these chainsaw cuts to the national weather service in NOAA. Let's go ahead and take a listen to E3. They gave out timely flash flood alerts. There were record breaking lead times in the lead up to this catastrophe. There is ongoing flood monitoring and these offices were well staffed. In fact, one of the offices was actually overstaffed. They had more people than they need. So any claim to the contrary is completely false and it's just sad that people are pushing these lies. So I don't know what she's talking about there because those offices and the union that represents those workers say, and all of the reporting before, prior to even this tragedy unfolded says that these office were understaffed, that there were significant vacancies. And one in particular we talked about yesterday was the guy who was supposed to be, you know, who's meant to be in touch with the community and sort of spearheaded that, was a veteran that people in the area really knew and trusted who had a lot of depth of expertise. He took that fork in the road resignation offer. And because you have a blanket hiring freeze, that position has not been filled. So not only did you lose, you sort of like pushed out this guy who was really impactful in the region, very knowledgeable in the region, exact sort of person that you know, and now he's a private consultant, exact sort of person you actually want in federal government. Not only do you lose that guy, you don't replace him with anyone. So, you know, there will be a lot of reporting in the days to come about the failures here on every level and whether those cuts had an impact and whether or not we can pin down exactly whether there was an impact here or not. You have had significant warnings from all of the previous NWS heads who said if you make these cuts, you are going to degrade the ability of the weather service to do its job and it will lead to increased loss of life. So those warnings are there as we head into the peak of hurricane season. Last piece I have to get to here. This is so. This is wild. I don't even know what to say about this. Put E2 up on the screen. Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, known previously as Cancun Ted, because he was caught in Cancun while a horrible natural disaster was unfolding in Texas. I believe that was when they had the electricity loss, power loss and a deep freeze. People were literally freezing to Death. And he was in Cancun. Well, this time as disaster strikes, he's in Greece. Caught vacationing in Greece as these floods hit. Now, you could say, okay, well, how could he know, right? He couldn't know in advance. This came on very rapidly. You would have no way of knowing in advance that these floods were coming and that it was going to be devastating loss of life. But not only did he. Was he there when it happened, okay, we could forgive that, but he stayed. He was caught by tourists who were in the area who snapped that photo of him sightseeing days after the floods had hit, as the search and recovery effort was ongoing. So he apparently didn't leave his vacation in Greece until Sunday to come back. So just absolutely extraordinary. This man once again caught vacationing while his own residents and constituents. His own constituents suffer through one of the worst natural disasters, one of the worst flooding disasters that we have had in a century. All right, let's go ahead and turn to this. Unbelievable, shocking images coming out of LA with this ICE raid. All right, guys. So I was talking to Glenn Greenwald earlier about whether this was a fascist administration or not. And we certainly had a performance of Fascism in LA park that unfolded yesterday. Let's go ahead and put these images up on the screen of heavily armed military kitted out immigration agents, including some on horseback. You can see these sort of fortified vehicles rolling through the streets, sweeping through the park in what appears to have been. And Ken Klippenstein was able to get leaked documents as to the purpose of this operation. Appears to have been a show of force to demonstrate to LA and to other cities and localities around the country that they can operate effectively with impunity wherever and whenever they want. Mayor Karen Bass of LA came down to that park to confront agents and try to get them to leave. Let's go ahead and take a look at how that unfolded. Sort of a chaotic scene where she asked to talk to their boss and to tell them they needed to move on. Let's take a listen.
- [67:35]
Kristi Noem
My comment is they need to leave.
- [67:38]
Krystal Ball
And they need to leave right now. They need to leave because this is unacceptable. Who did you speak with? Mayor Bass? Who did you speak with on the phone just now?
- [67:49]
Sagar Enjeti
Unknown at this time whether they actually even made any arrests or whether it was true. Purely just, hey, let's march through this park and show how big and bad we are for the cameras can put the LA Times reporting up on the screen here of the way they covered it. Their headline is Heavily armed Immigration agents descend on MacArthur park in LA. They say dozens of immigration agents, some on horseback, others carrying rifles in armored vehicles, swept through MacArthur park on Monday, an extraordinary show of force at the heart of LA's immigrant community. Heavily armored Border Patrol officers with a fleet of white minibuses partially blocked the street surrounding the park, which has become a source of crime and drugs in the area in the last few years. Activists with megaphones were able to warn locals at the park before the contingent arrived. According to police sources, the move comes days after President Trump signed a budget that will provide a mass infusion of funds to the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up its immigration enforcement to levels unseen before in the United States. Louisiana has become the poster child of Trump's mass deportations plan, as more than 1600 people have been arrested between June 6th and June 22nd. Go ahead and put Ken Klippenstein's report here up on the screen because he actually got the leaked documents of what this operation was truly intended to do. Great reporting here from Ken. So he says exclusive. Operation Excalibur in LA was a show of force leave. Leaks from the military's LA deployment reveal Coca Cola versus Pepsi rivalry. Sweaty guardsmen, an abject failure. He goes on to write that today's Homeland Security operation was a mere show of presence. Internal army documents I've obtained say ICE and customs agents dressed in military garb assaulted the park, which the documents describe as a hotbed of historic lawlessness and the founding location of MS.13, the Salvadoran gang. News media is describing the operation as an ominous crackdown, but National Guard sources tell me it was a botched laughingstock. The military aspect of the operation, codenamed Operation Excalibur, has not been previously reported. And There were some eight different, I believe, federal government agencies. Let me see here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 different agencies that were involved in this show of force in this LA park. They were all codenamed different Colas. That's why he says, the Coca Cola versus Pepsi rivalry. So the ATF was A and W, the CBP was Canada Dry. You had the FBI was Coke and the LAPD was Pepsi. So this mass operation to march through the park and as I said before, effectively demonstrate fascism for the cameras. You guys likely know the context and the backstory here. As was indicated in the LA Times article, Louisiana has really become their sort of demonstration project of what mass deportation looks like. They love the fight with LA because you've got Karen Bass, a Democratic mayor. You've got Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, and you had those anti ICE protests which turned violent at times with some throwing of water bottles at police officers, some torching of Waymo cars, some graffiti that is all over, but they use as a pretext to call up thousands of National Guardsmen in a very legally dubious, by the way, operation. And so they federalized the National Guard in California. Absolutely extraordinary action that we've just sort of like moved past because it's been so crazy, everything else that has been going on. And, and not only that, not only did they federalize the National Guard, they also called up active duty Marines to come in to LA to deal with what ultimately was pretty run of the mill protests. Those National Guardsmen, at least I'm not sure about the Marines, they are still there. They are still there instead of doing any of the many other things that they could be doing, including continuing the recovery from the horrific fires that you had in and around la. So this is some of what they're doing with them. Mass show of force in a park, planning these operations. And according to Ken, many of the National Guardsmen that he was in contact with are humiliated by. They say, this is an embarrassment, this is not the way that we are supposed to be operating. There was also some indication that, oh, well, maybe they would have the National Guardsmen start to cover their face and mask in the same way that the ICE agents have, which has contributed to the sense of rogue lawlessness of that agency. Oftentimes they show up in plain clothes, completely masked, looks like a kidnapping, indistinguishable. They won't identify themselves, sometimes won't show a warrant, won't indicate what law enforcement agency they're with, et cetera. So they wanted the National Guard to adopt some of those tactics. And apparently there was pushback on that because their view is we are in the community, we're meant to be here to help and serve our fellow Californians. And when you think about the typical assignments that they'd be receiving, things like helping out with recovery, that's the orientation that they are used to when they're engaging with fellow community members. So absolutely insane. And it does fit with, you know, broader plans from this administration as announced by Tom Homan, who is, you know, spokesperson for the most aggressive enforcement and most aggressive and cruel tactics that this administration has deployed when it comes to mass deportation. And he's threatening these type of operations everywhere in the country. And with the passage of the funding from the one big beautiful bill, they are going to have the resources to basically do whatever they want. Let's Go ahead and play F5 and take a listen to Tom Homan.
- [73:47]
Tom Homan
President Trump said it two weeks ago. We're going double down, triple down in sanctuary cities. Why not? Because they're a blue city or blue state. Because we know that's where the problem is. So where we're going to send our assets, we want to send them where the problem is, sanctuary cities. So I said it before, we'll flood the zone of sanctuary cities. If they don't let us arrest the bad guy in the county jail, they're going to arrest him in the community, we're going to arrest them at a war work site. So we're going to increase community operation, we're going to increase worksite enforcement operation. We're going to get the bad guys so they don't want to help get out of the way. We're coming to do it.
- [74:21]
Sagar Enjeti
We're coming to do it. Flood the zone. And you know what he's saying there about going after immigrants at job sites, it's actually really significant. It has major implications for the distance between their rhetoric about immigrants and the reality of who immigrants are and the type of operations that are being conducted here. Because there has been a Stephen Miller directed focus on job sites in places like the Home Depot. That means that you have fewer resources actually to go after the genuine criminals. Because it's easy to just roll up on a Home Depot. It's a lot more difficult to find and locate and identify gang members who aren't just gonna be there hanging out at the Home Depot. So if you're shifting resources towards, we're gonna chase down farmworkers in the field, we're gonna go to the Home Depot, we're gonna go to the garment factory, which was another place that they went in LA that helped to kick off those anti ICE protests. That means you're focused on that regular, most often law abiding immigrants who may or may not be documented. There's also been a lot of racial profiling here. You're focused on that and you are actually not focused on resources, on finding and identifying and tracking criminals. So that is the effect of what these policies have really meant. Let's talk a little bit about the ICE funding, which is just, it's hard to wrap your head around the amount of resources that are about to flood into this rogue lawless agency. Put this up on the screen, comparing the ICE budget and again, this is not all of immigration enforcement. This is just ICE. $37.5 billion now. It will be bigger than most of the world's. Militaries, so rivaling the military here of Canada and coming in significantly above places like Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Brazil. So you've got a massive budget here. You had one analyst who said once they get this budget amount into their coffers over the next four years, they're going to have more money than the budgets of the FBI, the dea, the atf, the US Marshals and the Bureau of Prisons combined. This will be the largest, best funded federal law enforcement agency in the history of this country. They're trying to hire 10,000 ICE agents. And I was just reading yesterday a piece on how we have previous examples, in particular during the Bush administration of trying to staff up some of these law enforcement agencies really quickly. And what happens is, number one, you get, you know, because you're just trying to take whoever you can, you get huge issues with corruption. Number two, you get huge issues with complete lack of any sort of experience. And number three, think about the type of people who would be applying to do that job of getting kitted out in military gear to march through a park where moments earlier children were playing and sending people to Alligator, Alcatraz or shipping them off to seacot with no due process. Just think to yourself about the type of people that that job would apply to, would appeal to. Those are probably not really the ideal people that you want doing what is already sensitive and intended to be under the Trump administration, certainly an absolutely cruel job. So that's the direction that we're heading in this. What we're seeing in this park in la, what we've seen in Adelaide, more broadly, what we've seen with Alligator, Alcatraz, with, with ccot, with the raids that we've seen across the country. They're just getting started here. And now they're going to have the budget with mass detention facilities built out by private prison contractors, with huge influx of ICE agents with money to do basically whatever they want to do. This, what we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching today. We are going to have actually a bro show tomorrow. Sagar and Ryan Sagar will be back from recording with Tucker. Looking forward to seeing how that interview went. I think it dropped this morning. I'm not sure, but I haven't taken a look at it yet. And then be back to me and Sagar on Thursday. So hope everybody has a fantastic day and I will see you soon.
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