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Isaac Saul (Executive Producer) (1:48)

From Executive Producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Isaac Saul (Host of Tangle Podcast) (2:03)

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast. A place where we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host Isaac Saul and on today's episode I'm diving in to the fact that I think things are actually pretty bad right now. I want to start by saying this. The fundamental promise of of this news publication is viewpoint diversity. I built Tangle because I wanted a place where conservatives, liberals and everyone in between could gather under one roof and trust the news they were reading. In an era when the media trust is at an all time low, polarization is increasingly extreme and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide. This North Star has always served us well. In order to fulfill this promise to earn the trust of the biggest Trump supporters and the most progressive leftists and all the people who land somewhere between them them, we offer some simple promises. Chief among them is viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days this is what the left is saying and what the right is saying, though sometimes we'll offer pieces that counter each other. For instance, a Tangle staff member is working on a piece responding to what I'm writing here today. We also lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently and sharing and explaining our editorial policies. Finally, we try to show that we're fallible human beings who can make mistakes, learn and change their minds rather than pretend we comprise a flawless, high minded institution. We regularly feature reader criticisms, and I encourage anyone who disagrees with today's podcast to write in or comment so we can consider your thoughts. We're not perfect. Obviously our system has flaws. The left right dichotomy in which we sort arguments is not always clean or appropriate. Some people skip to my take without listening to the different perspectives we share. Listeners of various political persuasions unsubscribe every day, upset that they don't find their views represented the way they'd prefer. In our coverage, we recognize these flaws and we're always trying to improve. Yet I promise that whenever I write my opinions, I will always be honest, that I will share my view in the most fair and straightforward way I can. When I feel strongly about something, I will say so regardless of which political tribe that view aligns with. When I don't know something or don't have a fully formed opinion, I'll admit that too. And my promise when I'm sharing my view is to do so regardless of the landmines I may step on or the people I may upset. So today I want to share my perspective on the moment that we are living in. And the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles it all feels as if it's getting worse in basically every meaningful way. And to me, one of the driving forces behind all of this is the Trump administration. Nine months into his presidency, I think the bad things that Trump is doing vastly outweigh the good. Rather than pretending that I don't feel that way, I'm going to step forward and flatly make my case again. I say all this as an independent minded thinker with no loyalty to any political party. I say it as someone who has published countless pieces criticizing excesses and failures of the left, including in the media. I say it while holding a set of political views that I genuinely believe are decidedly middle of the road in some and all over the place from issue to issue. So here's the truth as I see it. If, on the day Trump was inaugurated, I had warned our readers and listeners that in a few months, law enforcement officers would be rappelling from helicopters like soldiers into civilian apartment buildings in Chicago. The military would be extrajudicially killing Venezuelans for alleged drug dealing. Americans would be getting arrested while being falsely accused of being here illegally. The Justice Department would be prosecuting the president's political foes at his direction and and legal US Residents would be getting arrested, detained, and deported for protected speech. I would have been accused of having a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome. Yet nine months into his presidency, all of those things are happening. This isn't hyperbolic fear mongering. It isn't sensationalist or exaggerated. It's literally just the list of the things that the President has done, things I'm obligated to speak plainly about. Trump has, thankfully, largely obeyed court orders so far, but that may not be the case going forward. He's gotten a lot of what he wanted from the court so far, and he's resisted or delayed obeying the major rulings that have gone against him. The quote, unquote resistance libs whom I've derided for hyperventilating about the hypotheticals and living in a constant state of terror. They've gotten a lot of things right so far about the contours of Trump's second term. And for conservative readers who may be sympathetic to Trump's more extreme actions, I think it's important to put into terms that I hope will clarify the issue for you. Hypothetical analogies are never perfect, but some of the following frightening possibilities are legitimately much more plausible if we accept what Trump has done. Imagine President Biden had won his election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America. So in turn, he claims that he has a mandate to send the National Guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws. Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents. Tables are flipped over, desks are emptied. Customers inside are zip tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. Helicopters buzz overhead as backup. The agents don't flash warrants or ID themselves. In fact, they're all masked, and it's not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven't committed a crime. Local police and politicians try to intervene but they are ignored and forced out of the way. Federal courts stacked with Democratic appointed judges green light the troops actions. Then imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid. Even if you knew some of those people broke the law, would you trust this kind of power in the government's hands? What would you do if that was your store, your community, or your due process rights being run over? Here's another Every year millions of pro life activists descend onto Washington D.C. for the March for Life. Imagine President Barack Obama responding to the March for Life rally goers by framing them all as anti abortion, radical extremists and terrorist lunatics and then deploying the National Guard to protect federally funded facilities offering abortion services in Republican led states. Imagine that when this move draws blowback from the protesters and Republicans and conservative media, Obama responds by having the troops tear gas crowds, incite violence and then arrest anyone who fights back for assaulting police or remove any living president from the picture. And imagine a president yet to be perhaps a very progressive anti Zionist like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or Zoran Mamdani. Imagine this president decides that pro Israel activists are a threat to the security of Muslims in America, so exercising power the same way Trump has, they deploy ICE agents to snatch up Israeli immigrants in the country on green cards for opinion pieces they wrote defending Israel from claims of genocide in their university newspapers. While trying to deport them. This hypothetical president ships them off to a prison thousands of miles away from where they were arrested on the grounds that they support a racist, colonial terrorist state called Israel. These are not identical to the things Trump is doing, but they are all similar to what Trump is doing now, just with the script flipped. As hypotheticals, they are all now far more possible with the precedent that Trump is setting. The central difference, of course, is that Trump is targeting the people many of his supporters want targeted. But Trump won't be president forever, and what we can deem acceptable now will, as it always does, come back to haunt us in the future. We'll be right back after this quick break. As I write this piece, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to American cities against the wishes of those cities and state's elected officials. It was good to see Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, take a principled stance against this obscene overreach, saying rightly that Oklahomans would lose their mind if governor JB Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration. Last week, after one of the president's extrajudicial strikes on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, two survivors were found. This was a pretty interesting development because these strikes have killed dozens of alleged drug smugglers about whom we know next to nothing. And then something odd happened. Instead of charging the recovered survivors with the alleged crime, the Trump administration tried to kill them for narco terrorism. They allowed the men to be repatriated to their own countries. This is in some way standard procedure. People.