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- [00:05]
Host or Commentator
If a convicted felon. Authoritarian. Is elected to be president of the United States, guess what happens in the Oval Office. Authoritarian optics and propaganda. This is absolutely bone chilling. Play the clip.
- [00:20]
Legal Analyst
What this presidential memorandum is going to do. One, it's going to strip any act of clearance that he has in light of his past activities involving classified information. It's also going to order the Department of Justice to investigate his activities to see what else might come up in that context, given his egregious behavior during your previous administration.
- [00:40]
Political Commentator
And I had no idea who this guy was. I had no idea. I saw him on CNN or one of them, I guess, CNN a lot. He'd be on all the time saying, the president is the president. I had no idea. It's like, you know, in this office, you have a lot of young people.
- [00:55]
Host or Commentator
Okay, all right. I've heard enough of him. This is regarding Miles Taylor, and he worked in Trump 1.0, and he was the wrote the op ed anonymously in the New York Times that there was a resistance within the Trump administration. And then he later wrote another anonymous op ed, and then he wrote a book about the dangers of Donald Trump and the dangers of authoritarianism. And again, Trump lives on grievances. And what he's doing right now is he is using the Oval Office to propagandize his power. This is, number one, an attack on the First Amendment. And number two, the weaponization of the doj. Again, every chance he gets, he attacks and delegitimizes the pillars that hold our country together.
- [01:48]
Political Analyst
Projection is what Trump was doing when he was saying Biden was weaponizing the Justice Department. That's exactly what he's doing with my Miles Teller. He didn't leak a secret. He said, based on my observations, Trump is an authoritarian. It is absolutely unprecedented, this type of authoritarianism from the White House.
- [02:07]
Host or Commentator
Okay? And then here is another video. And he has opened up another investigation. And he's doing this via executive order. And it's important to note that typically you would just call the DOJ and say, hey, investigate this person. But he's making a big display of it because this is what authoritarians do. He's normalizing this to his audience and to his personality cult to where it's like, number one, the people that support him think, oh, yeah, if you speak bad about our leader, he's going to get you. But also, it's sending a signal to anybody that's currently working within this administration that might want to fight for democracy or might want to say, hey, this guy's doing a Bunch of illegal shit. Right now he's sending them a warning sign that if you do this, I will weaponize the DOJ against you and I will silence you because integrity, honesty and transparency are not valued. Here, play this clip.
- [03:05]
Political Commentator
And this guy Krebs was saying, oh, the election was great. It was great. Well, it's been proven that it was not only not great, when you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars, it was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms, from the legislature's not approving to, to the 51 intelligence agents that worked from all of them.
- [03:31]
Host or Commentator
Okay, that's enough. Kylie. What, what would this sound like to anybody who's rational? Here he is sitting there crying like a baby and he is weaponizing the DOJ against a man who used to work for him. Krebs, who said the 2020 election was free, it was fair, there was no cheating, there was no corrupt, is so but hurt still that Joe Biden beat him. And people, when Joe Biden won, went out in the streets and celebrated. When Trump won this last time, when he beat Kamala, nobody celebrated. In fact, he had to move his inauguration from outdoors to indoors because the optics of the lack of support were going to be horrific. Because when it comes to Trump supporters, you have the personality cult that watches his allies, the propagandists, Fox News, entertainment, all of the time. And then you, you have the embarrassed Trump supporters that won't say it out loud, but secretly they free base Fox News and deep dive into the harder hitting drugs like Shapiro and all of those other whack jobs. And he people are not completely vocal about this because I think that some of the electorate is still movable. That's why he does this public display of normalizing the attacks on the First Amendment and the attacks of the weaponization of the Justice Department, these are plays out of the authoritarian playbook. For as stupid as we think he is, he's a brilliant propagandist and he's surrounded by other brilliant propagandists who have studied how to make an authoritarian government where all of the power is concentrated in one individual.
- [05:24]
Political Analyst
I have one other point I want to add. I completely agree with you on why he's doing this. But I think another thing that we need to consider is the Supreme Court gave him full immunity. Anything that was within his executive authority making these executive orders takes the review that a court might have about the illegality of using the Justice Department against an individual. And for me, I think that's just another way to manipulate the Supreme Court's ruling.
- [05:54]
Host or Commentator
And the. One of the things that authoritarians do is they get everybody to obey first. And this really, really is alarming to me. Yesterday, Governor Gretchen Whitmer was at the White House, and she was standing in the background when he signed both of these executive orders. And she continued to stand there. Please put up this tweet. Bill Crystal tweets. Governor Whitmer stands in the Oval Office as Trump signs disgraceful executive order orders targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. She doesn't walk out. She doesn't say anything after to the media. Later on, her office puts out a weak statement. Be better Governor Whitmer. Be by. Be like Governor Mills. And I like Gretchen Whitmer. But this, to me, this is what authoritarians do. They like to display obedience. And what they did here is they have a Democratic governor that looks like she's being obedient. This is absolutely dangerous. You cannot, under any circumstances, give authoritarian regimes an inch, not an inch, because then they keep moving the goalpost, moving the goal posts, and eventually they're coming after you.
- [07:09]
Political Analyst
Well, and also, Michigan has been been hit so hard by the Trump economic plans. And so she specifically targeting her, I do not think to have her in the Oval Office, I don't think that was like a whim. I think that was planned.
- [07:26]
Host or Commentator
Right. But as a Democrat and as somebody who's a fierce defender of democracy, I agree with bill Crystal, oh, 100%. She would have. She should have immediately turned around and walked out. And her, she should have immediately had a press conference and said, I was hoodwinked. Here he is trying to use me for the optics of his propaganda machine to make it look like I'm obeying this dictator, and I do not. And we have to be better. Everybody has to be better. Because what he's doing is he's blackmailing funds that he would send to these blue states, and he's trying to control everybody via blackmail, which, again, is a play of authoritarians. All right, next up, speaking of obedience, the reason that he went after law firms is because when you go after Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, the law firms that they would hire to defend themselves, Trump has already gotten them to obey first, which is rule number one in authoritarianism, never obey. And these law firms are obeying. Please put up the video.
- [08:30]
Political Commentator
And this guy Krebs was saying, oh, the election was great. It was great. Well, it's been proven that it was not only not great, when you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven by so many different ways in so many different form, from the legislature is not approving to, to the 51 intelligence agents.
- [08:53]
Host or Commentator
Okay, so what he's saying here is he is saying that the law firms settlements with him after he targeted them. He's using it now to prove his point that he says that they, that they agreed to do this pro bono work, that they are admitting that there was something wrong with the 2020 election. Again, all of this is historically proven when you study authoritarianism as to what they do. So the lawyers that these two individuals would go higher have already been attacked by this authoritarian regime. Targeting law firms was a part of this play. Put up this headline. Kyle Griffin tweets, Trump has signed an executive order targeting Susan Godfrey, the law firm that helped Dominion Voting Systems obtain its $787 million settlement from Fox for the network's 2020 election. Lies. So imagine this. This law firm proves that Fox lied to the tune of almost $1 billion. Trump is attacking these pro democracy law firms. All of this is length. All of this is the dismantling and the delegitimizing of the institutions and the pillars that people in democracies value. He is attacking every aspect of this. This is corruption of the highest order.
- [10:24]
Political Analyst
It really is jaw dropping. How many law firms have capitulated to him? And I know it's a big fight amongst attorneys in those law firms. They're resigning, but giving him an inch, he will take a mile every time. And this is, wow, it is so dangerous.
- [10:42]
Host or Commentator
Not only that, but you have universities that are capitulating. You have Columbia and Harvard that are capitul to an authoritarian. The very institutions that would teach people about authoritarianism. And this is what authoritarians do with the jump. They attack higher education and they get obedience. What he did with Gretchen Whitmer there was he, it was the appearance of obedience. What he did with Columbia, obedience. What he's doing with Harvard, obedience. What he's doing with these law firms, obedience. It, it is dangerous. You have to pick a hill that you believe in democracy, you believe in social justice, you believe in human rights, you believe in the First Amendment, and you do not cede. All of the ceding that has happened in just 80 days is an absolute dagger and we cannot give oxygen to this. There can be zero obedience with the authoritarian regime. I'm so disappointed in these law firms and these higher ed institutions. It's just despicable. But always, always the one man who is always on message regarding this is Bernie Sanders. Please play the clip.
- [11:53]
Bernie Sanders
The idea that the President of the United States would threaten and harass attorneys and law firms that defended people he did not like is a major step forward toward authoritarianism. And by the way, some of these big law firms, was it Paul Weiss is one of them, one of the biggest caved in. We look to these law firms who have hundreds of well paid lawyers to defend the Constitution, to defend the rule of law. And these guys, big law firms who often, by the way, defended Democrats, they were more interested in getting millions of dollars from their lobbying or whatever the hell they do in Washington, D.C. making huge amounts of money than standing tall and defending the Constitution. They should be ashamed of themselves.
- [12:47]
Host or Commentator
They absolutely should be ashamed of themselves. This is. We are on the precipice. And the reason Trump is moving at such a rapid speed is because he has to break it before midterms. He has to break every bit of it. There is an optics propaganda campaign going on. The corruption behind the scene, the little bit that's been exposed, is just the tip of the iceberg. He is going to permanently break the United States economy. And you have these billionaires that thought it would be fun to support Trump because they were going to have record growth. Well, what happens when you have a manic bipolar president that tariffs are on, tariffs are off. Oh, shit this. Oh shit this. This is going to degrade these American companies eventually over time. Nobody is going to want to mess with the United States, much like they don't want to mess with Russia. And I want to remind the viewer and the listener the world's best economies have the best governments. This is a horrible government. It's going to produce a horrible economy because it's corrupt. It's quid pro quo. It is not transparent. He's getting his friends rich. He himself is breaking all sorts of ethics, ethics laws, financially with what he's doing behind that desk. The people that still believe in democracy, this is a time where we all have to have uncomfortable conversations with those that are indoctrinated in this cult. This is literally our country. Or we're going to go the way of Russia, or we're going to go and we're going to go the way of Hungary. And all of the great things that we all love about this country will disappear and are disappearing before our very eyes. So please, support democracy. Support our channel by subscribing. We're trying to hit 1 million subs and we'll see you all later.