← The Beat with Ari Melber
The Beat with Ari Melber
New Protests After ICE Shootings
00:41:17
Trump has sent three thousand federal agents to Minneapolis and is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell ICE protests in the city. MS NOW's Ari Melber reports.
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- [01:00]
Host
Welcome to the Beat. Tonight we can report There are now 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis. Are they patrolling? Are they occupying? Are they escalating? That is one of the big questions facing this show of force by the Trump administration. I'll remind you that Minneapolis is a smaller city, one of those cities where you've heard the name, it has a big brand name, but did you know it's only about 430,000 people there? So this show of force alone means it's one off for every 140 residents. At a time where whatever is happening in the street has been a response to the feds, not some ongoing public demonstrations. It's a high rate of federal oversight. Recent violence has come from Trump's federal government on some days, not from the streets that the agents say they are patrolling or protecting. This is your country right now. People ask, when will the crisis hit? When is the constitutional crisis? What are we going to do? Was it Jimmy Kimmel? Was it indicting this or that person? Was it shooting this woman to death? Or is it this militarized situation? Many are sounding the alarm.
- [02:06]
Co-host
Overnight. Violent crashes between federal agents and protesters in Minneapolis.
- [02:10]
Host
President Trump is threatening, threatening to send federal troops to Minnesota.
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Guest - George Packer
The air here is so tense and heavy in Minnesota. Another shooting by an ICE agent just.
- [02:22]
Co-host
One week after the death of Renee Goode.
- [02:24]
Host
ICE roaming. There's 2,500 agents, maybe more.
- [02:26]
Guest - George Packer
Here in Minneapolis, crowds of protesters gathered at the scene.
- [02:30]
Host
As you see here, ICE tried to.
- [02:32]
Guest - George Packer
Keep them at bay with tear gas and pepper spray.
- [02:34]
Guest - Molly Zhang Fast
However bad the news is making you think Minneapolis is right now, it's worse.
- [02:41]
Host
That's just a sampling of what you can get from the ground. There are protesters, though, there and around the country who are clearly not going to be intimidated. And that's not rhetoric. When American citizens, when a mother of three is summarily executed and shot in the face, and everyone knows about it in that town for sure, the next wave of protests, of people walking, as with other protests throughout the rich history of this country, bad and good, tough and easy, it involves people knowing there is some risk they face and they're standing up anyway. Now, Trump is now responding by repeating a threat he has made before, saying maybe he would invoke the Insurrection Act. I'll remind everyone that hasn't been used without direct consent and collaboration of a sitting governor in the state where it would be deployed for over 60 years now under law, when invoked properly, it does give a president extra emergency powers. In this case, it would be to do what Trump has been partly stopped from doing elsewhere, deploying the military inside the United States to patrol you, the American people, taxpayers paying to have the military walk around like we're some other type of country for potentially even longer periods. As for the current governor of that state, who is not interested in consenting to any collaborative such deployment, here is Governor Walls.
- [04:06]
Co-host
Donald Trump wants this chaos. He wants confusion and yes, he wants more violence on our streets. We cannot give him what he wants. We can, we must protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.
- [04:25]
Host
That's what the sitting governor is saying. And remember, that sitting governor happens to, of course, be part of the ticket that lost to Donald Trump. And so faced with the federal government killing people and then lying about it and saying it's okay, faced with a political movement on the right that not every Republican and not every Republican member of Congress, but many claiming these powers and telling everyone to shut up and sit down. What is the opposition? The opposition, both politically, because as I mentioned, they lost in 24 and in this state is saying, please just be peaceful. He's asking the public who just watched this mother killed to find in them the discipline and the law abiding, peaceful nature that the government itself is not exhibiting. And yet in our history, we know we've seen that kind of restraint before from civil rights movements and from other protesters who have also faced violence with peace and Whatever your ideology or politics, history shows in the long run, those kind of movements can work even in the face of. Of the illegal, sometimes deadly use of force. And the Trump administration simply does not have actual credibility on these issues right now. After the spate of false claims made in the wake of that ICE agent killing a citizen last week, local officials have made it clear they don't think the federal troops being added to these cities generally increases safety. And when I say the administration's lost credibility, that's a separate question from whether the ICE agent committed a crime or a murder in. In killing Renee Goode. In our system of laws, that has to be investigated and pursued. We'll see if there is a fair investigation, but no one can fairly or honestly say whether that was a crime, because during the rule of law, you have to play that out. It's only that the administration has insisted it definitely was not a crime without even gathering the facts or pretending to. We're seeing an escalation increasingly here that does come from the feds, and it is caught on camera. Officers tackling citizens in a target, pulling people by force out of their cars, intimidating protesters against a backdrop where it could be easy to forget. But Donald Trump has record low approval as he begins the second year of this term. And faced with different types of accountability, whether that's kind of the soft indication of public protest or the hard stop he got from the courts for some efforts to use troops, which you can see now, he's threatening to dial it up even more. But it's against that backdrop that he knows another check may be coming. He's not saying, hey, judge me by my record. Keep the Republicans in office so we can have more of the. Say more of this. Isn't this going well? He's not even saying that. I always try to give it to you straight. Here's what he's saying. When you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms. So kind of telling everyone what he's expecting, which is to lose in nine months. When you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election. That's what he told Reuters. This is another interview. If you've noticed, he's done a bunch. That's not his call, by the way. Elections are run by the individual states. The president doesn't get to announce whether they happen or not. When Trump has been on an interview blitz. Fox, New York Times, cbs, the Reuters one I just mentioned, which again, appears to be the fact that whatever you think of Donald Trump's approach and style however much you think he lies for his purposes, he also has some radar, some indicator of the truth. Cuz the truth is he's unpopular. The truth is a lot of measures suggest he and the Republicans are on track to potentially lose the midterms. And the truth is all that Venezuela noise did not make him more popular. So he's trying to change what has been a lukewarm public reception to Venezuela and to what's going on right now and doing a ton of interviews and throwing a bunch of chum in the water while facing a backlash on ICE that ranges from the streets where you might say, oh well, liberals have gone out in the streets before to independents like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota saying this is third world country stuff, all the way over to the very large audience for the MAGA podcast. We've told you they matter where people are saying, wait, they like Trump, they supported him, but what the heck are we doing?
- [08:47]
Co-host
You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them. Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come to.
- [09:04]
Host
When your MAGA allied friends threaten you with calling out your gestapo tactics and those are your friends, what does everybody else in the reality based community here on earth in Minnesota and a bunch of other normal Midwestern towns and real America think about what is happening to our country? That's where we begin tonight, with the people in the streets on both sides of the equation. And I want to bring in a very special guest, George Packer, staff writer at the Atlantic, the author of 10 books, most of them non fiction. His new novel though is the Emergency. And Molly, John Fast, a contributing writer with the New York Times. Molly, it's easy to forget how unpopular the agenda is and how that fits into Trump turning up the heat.
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Guest - Molly Zhang Fast
Yeah, and I think it's worth talking about for a minute. First of all, I was texting with Governor Walz today. I think we should just pull back for a second. This is a state that voted against him three times. This is the vice presidential candidate he ran against. And there was. And I just wondered why they were targeting Minnesota. And I think it has to do. I mean, at least Governor Walz thinks this with that Nick Shirley video about the fraud allegations from 2022, right? That that is why they sent ICE into the state, which is pretty preposterous if you think about it. You know, they're sending in a force because of a YouTube video about a fraud in 2022 where numerous people were prosecuted and sent to jail. I mean, that just str me as nuts. And by the way, it is very unpopular and supposedly, according to Quinnipiac, 82% of Americans have seen the video of the Renee Goode killing.
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Host
George.
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Guest - George Packer
I mean, a president who perhaps made the final decision to capture and bring out Nicolas Maduro because he was pissed off that Maduro was dancing on TV in a way that seemed to be taunting Trump's threats is going to make decisions based on a sense of loss of face or of a personal grudge. He doesn't like Governor Waltz. He doesn't seem to like Minnesota. He doesn't like the Somali community in Minnesota. Let's send 3,000 federal officers there and provoke and see how they react. So, yeah, I don't think this is part of a particularly thought out strategy of how to get to Stephen Miller's million per year deportations, but why not try Minneapolis? Because we don't like them and they don't like us.
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Host
Yeah. And then it's politics. And here's Trump. I mentioned in many interviews. Here he is talking to Hannity about bracing for a loss. If you go back a long way, the sitting president, whether it's Democrat or Republican, always loses the midterm.
- [12:08]
Guest - George Packer
Even if they've done well almost always.
- [12:10]
Host
They always seem to lose the midterm. There's something down deep psychologically with the voters that they want. Maybe a check or something, you know, fact check, exaggerated the trends.
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Guest - George Packer
Well, Bush won the midterms in 2002.
- [12:28]
Host
And Clinton won second term midterms.
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Guest - George Packer
Yes, in 98, because they were impeaching him.
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Host
So more often than not. But it's not an iron rule. It seems to be his way of lowering expectations eight months out, much to the chagrin of Republicans. Where does that fit in? Because everyone has these cartoonish views of Trump. He's only this, he's only that. Here he's looking and going, I need to start pre spinning my expected loss.
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Guest - George Packer
I also think talking about canceling elections is trying to get people's eye off what he can do. As you said, it's not up to the president to decide whether we have an election. But what he can do is bring a lot of pressure to bear on local and state officials who have taken those offices since 20 because the Republican Party was more assured of their loyalty in case of accusations of cheating or of rigging or some sort of shenanigans in the election. So my worry, and the Atlantic has reported on this, as of others, is that there will be a whole lot of measures. It won't be a cancellation. It's not going to be dramatic like that, but just a lot of measures, whether it's challenging voters, whether it's voting laws that are changed at the last minute, whether it's canceling mail in or whether it's the actions of local and state officials that are just going to create confusion and there's going to be a sense of uncertainty as to who won in Arizona, you know, who won in Wisconsin.
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Host
Well, but he seems to think that it's likely that even with that they're going to lose.
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Guest - George Packer
I think he is not going to, he's not going to lower the expectations. That's sort of traditional politics. I don't see Trump as playing the game of let's see if we can lower expectations. So I can later claim we only lost seven seats.
- [14:16]
Host
You have a different theory for why he says there's something deep psychologically with the voters. They always seem to lose the midterms.
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Guest - George Packer
I see him just thinking out loud, as he often does, and say, oh, yeah, I've noticed that they we always lose the midterms, which everyone knows. But he's kind of just discovered it and he's thinking out loud. But what I'm more worried about, as I said, is a more concerted campaign that's nationwide and that is, you know, some of his, you know, more disciplined advisors will be implementing it to just create confusion about the election results so that we don't, you know. So a lot of Americans wonder who really won the midterms.
- [14:50]
Host
Yeah. J.D. vance has a law degree, but it didn't help him when he made a huge mistake on the law. We're gonna do a fact check on that. And our guests are back with us in 90 seconds. We're back with George Packer and Molly Zhang. Fast. JD Vance has a law degree, Fashions himself a smart guy. He likes to go to war. On Twitter, he said something false. So we're not gonna re air it. But I'll say what's true, which is federal agents and police generally have very wide latitude in this country, more than in some other countries. They have what's called qualified immunity. You can think of that as partial immunity. The tie goes to them. Mistakes go to them. Anything they do. George, as you know, probably from writing about a lot of this stuff in a lot of contexts, anything that a federal agent or police officer does in good faith pursuit of their lawful duty goes to them. So the horrific example of an ICE agent. Let's say it's different year. Let's say it's the year 2000 and they're going to do their job and arrest someone and they think they see a gun and they pull their gun and they shoot to defend themselves and the shot goes across the street and accidentally kills someone else. It's a tragedy, but under our law, it's not a murder. They didn't try to murder that person and the bullet went over there. So they have that latitude. J.D. vance does or should know that. And instead he lied about it. So I don't need to repeat his lie. But I want to ask you what it means when at the highest levels of. Of government, people can debate a video and you can say, gosh, they're so wrong, I think they're lying, but it's debatable. J.D. vance with a J.D. no pun intended. I'm pretty sure he knows what I just described, which is the state of the law. What does it mean when the highest levels of government are lying about it while the police and the agents are killing people?
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Guest - George Packer
I mean, this isn't the first time he's trashed his law degree. Yeah, this is the guy who said, supposedly quoting Andrew Jackson, the justice has ruled, let him now enforce it. In other words, make me do what the Supreme Court tells me to do. And in this case, a total distortion of the law of what kind of standards federal officers and agents are held to. And what it does is gives everyone out in the streets with a badge or with a mask on and a badge hidden behind a jacket the sense that they are free agents and they can. They can use force to whatever degree.
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Host
Yeah, you're saying something important that it's not. We say, oh, it's propaganda, Malik. No, it's worse than that. It's functionally, he's a heartbeat from the presidency. And he's saying to them, in my book, you can do whatever you want. Open season.
- [17:26]
Guest - Molly Zhang Fast
And, you know, look, I mean, I was talking about this before when I was texting with Governor Walz. I said, is there. You know, I'm just going to go talk about this, what's happening there? And he said, we are working really hard to try to take down the temperature. Right. We are reaching out to everyone we can to take down the temperature, because the goal here is to take down the temperature. And then you have JD Vance saying stuff like that, which is wildly inflammatory. And by the way, right after the Renee Goode shooting, you had him come out and do a whole press conference which was so inflammatory and where he was casting aspersions of her. So I do think it absolutely is just, it's really scary and you don't.
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Co-host
Want a federal government.
- [18:09]
Host
I'm coming back to George later in the hour. I'm going to remind viewers what we have on the screen because we do the facts here. The law is federal agents can be prosecuted for misusing force. And although there is skepticism about whether the Trump administration will uphold that, we are a nation of laws. That's the law and everyone should know that. And the fact that the vice president said things we can't air because they're false, that's on him. Molly, thank you for being here. George comes back. We have also an update tonight on why Dave Matthews is telling his millions of fans what's wrong with ICE policy. I'm going to show you South Park. Absolutely. Roasting Pete Hegseth and Trump's let them eat cake moment. Chris Hayes, I know it's not 8pm Eastern. Chris Hayes is here live. Next.
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Co-host
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- [20:08]
Host
Get all your jobs done well@angie.com and when they went to the Queen, the teller grew subject.
- [20:16]
Co-host
And do you know what she said?
- [20:21]
Host
Let them eat cake. That's such nonsense.
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Advertiser/Commercial Voice
I would never say that.
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Host
Classic. Back before there were campaign ads or elections, the lore is that the Queen made one of the greatest gaffes ever in politics. Marie Antoinette showing she so misunderstood her own people's starvation crisis that she thought they could switch from bread to another carb. Well, they were out of all food. Critics see the same kind of problem for Trump as his top food official has advice for you Americans about how to cut back and maybe get by on eating on $3 a day.
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Guest - George Packer
We've run over a thousand simulations. It can cost around $3ameal for a.
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Host
Piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli.
- [21:09]
Guest - George Packer
You know, corn tortilla, and one other thing.
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Host
And so there is a way to.
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Co-host
Do this that actually will save the.
- [21:16]
Guest - George Packer
Average American consumer money.
- [21:22]
Host
Where to begin? It's a paltry plan for getting full or nutrition. Many people are speaking up on this one, including making their own videos. Consider this a kind of a citizen ad to push back. We're seeing the pushback online. I'm generally curious about what she means by that.
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Co-host
One other thing because this right here.
- [21:43]
Host
Is the equivalent of one snack wrap. So I hope that one other thing.
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Co-host
Is a second meal. Maybe you're a person that needs a visual.
- [21:49]
Host
Here you go.
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Co-host
Doesn't that look like a great meal, Brooke? What are you talking about? This is like the ideal Trump meal in their mind. And the Trump admin is basically doing this. Can we offer you a piece of broccoli? In this trying time.
- [22:05]
Host
People ask what's the point of interviewing folks or talking to folks or gathering information? And sometimes people tell on themselves. This out of touch, rich, right wing MAGA elitist actually has the audacity to condescend to the public and tell them that's their eating plan. Trump ran on lowering prices. Now he wants people to just cut back on those little $3 appetizers or get very distracted by a ton of other things. But when staple products are up this much, it's very hard to distract people from either their shrinking banking accounts to buy the stuff or they're growling stomachs. As you can see, price is up over 10%. That's the new York Times report. While Trump is also getting rich off his job with side hustles and corrupt moonlighting, that as a factual matter legally probably violates the Constitution and the law. You would need a Congress to investigate it and get all the facts, but that's what it looks like. We know that Trump's net worth has increased not by 100 million or 500 million, but by billions over crypto alone. Now think about the other things that they clearly feel free to do that might not have yet made the paper. He's also insisting on taking a luxury jet with him after office. That alone could be an impeachable offense if you had a Congress doing its job. I'm joined now by Chris Hayes, host of all in with Chris Hayes. Of course, he's also the host of the why is this Happening? Podcast and dayenu. As if that weren't enough, the author of several books, including the Sirens Call, which has a attention economy analysis that we're actually going to try to get to in a couple minutes. So let's start with your thoughts on this affordability scandal.
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Co-host
You know, one thing that was interesting to me, I was looking at the, the cp, the CPI data that came out the other day and you know, it's like a basket of goods, right. So, so what people buy and you know, it was up to, what was it, 2.7% in this last quarter. But you just showed the really important data. The irony here is that Trump has his obsession with groceries, which is a word he think he thinks he invented. Like he constantly is talking about like groceries. I, I want on the weirdest thing, it's like an old fashioned word, groceries. Because he's never, you know, encountered groceries since the time he was a child. And quite ironically enough, that is the place where the most pain is.
- [24:19]
Host
Yeah.
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Co-host
I mean on the thing that I think he correctly identified as the main pain point in 2024, that is the place where you've seen these huge spikes. We saw it in beef a little earlier in the year. That's now come down. You see it on a lot of different things. And one of the things I think we saw play out in 22 through 24 is it's just impossible to message around for an incumbent party.
- [24:43]
Host
Oh yeah.
- [24:44]
Co-host
You know what I mean? Like, like what are you going to do? The worst possible message you could do is like have one broccoli floret and a corn tortilla and a piece of chicken.
- [24:53]
Host
Don't eat dinner.
- [24:54]
Co-host
Yeah.
- [24:54]
Host
Just have a really small snack.
- [24:56]
Co-host
Also, we've modeled thousands of meals. Like, what are you even talking about?
- [24:58]
Host
I don't know. I want to go to the attention economy and we, you know, a lot of viewers maybe have read the book. If they haven't, it's worth checking out. But I want to show the Venezuela raid where situation Room, which is serious business, has right behind them Twitter open, including the emoji. They've typed Venezuela into the search bar. I don't know if they had people ready to read Spanish tweets, which might be the one thing on the ground in Caracas that would be helpful. There's a critic, Don Moynihan, who writes that we're in a clicktatorship where the administration isn't just using social media to shape a narrative, but its members are deeply addicted. He goes on to say, Chris Hayes has written persuasively about the toxic attention farming and how that is for us personally and for democracy and the thirsty addiction here for clicks and content, which you've written about in a number of contexts. But the way it's going down with Trump officials has been mocked really perfectly by South Park.
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Advertiser/Commercial Voice
Yeah.
- [26:02]
Host
Yeah. Hey, what's up, guys? This is Pete Hexth, the Department of War. We're here to infiltrate this police station and extract a POI because that's what we do. That's what Homeland Security does. Be sure to like and subscribe, guys. We've got. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. This is not your content. Everyone like and subscribe to the Department of War. Does this feel familiar for you?
- [26:27]
Co-host
I mean, it is amazing how just locked into the most pathological, toxic parts of the attention economy they are, how they've kind of become addicted to their own trolling. I mean, Trump is someone who has this sort of pathological instinct for and dependency on other people's attention.
- [26:43]
Host
Yeah.
- [26:44]
Co-host
Confuse the entire governing apparatus. I saw someone make a crack the other day, and I forget who it was. So forgive me, whoever I'm stealing from here who said, you know, you used to have, like, Democratic politicians and. And people in the governing class who would say, stop paying attention to Twitter because it's not real life. And now you've got a governing class that doesn't want to pay attention to real life because not Twitter.
- [27:04]
Host
Yeah.
- [27:05]
Co-host
And it's like. It's almost like they. That's all they care about. And the reductio ad absurdum of that, of course, is planning a raid where people are going to get shot and killed and where US Service members might give their lives. And the thing up there is, you're, like, looking at, what's the buzz on Twitter about it? I mean, presumably there's like, some OPSEC reason, and they wanted to see if people were like, you know, tweeting about it the way that Bin Laden Reed got tweeted about or something like that. But it was just such a perfect encapsulation of the fact that they seem fully locked into an obsession with attention. Uber all is disconnected from anything in the, quote, real world.
- [27:40]
Host
So how do you chart that from then Trump saying, oh, let's get the photo of this guy. And before we have our arms around everything that happened or the body count or where he's going to be in the U.S. he wants to, as a president personally, his content, you know, Department of War, not dhs, post out the photo.
- [27:57]
Co-host
Because I mean, that is the primary imperative for everything they do is content attention. I mean, it's all content first. I mean, you know, we just saw an ICE officer shoot and kill Renee.
- [28:08]
Host
Good.
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Co-host
And one of the strangest and most unnerving things about the sequence that led to him firing three shots that took her life is that he's got a cell phone video in his hand the whole time. In fact, he has to switch hands to the cell phone so that he could bring out his gun and continues to tape. Like, what shouldn't you be focused on? Like why are you, why are you so focused on the camera? Why do you got the camera in your hand? And as best we can tell, and we haven't actually heard from him yet, but there seems to be a real directive to ICE agents to create as much content as possible.
- [28:39]
Host
Right.
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Co-host
So like even in this life or death moment, that is the overriding imperative to the point that he has to move the phone from one hand to the other in the moment that he presumably, I think would say that he quote, fear for his life.
- [28:52]
Host
Yeah. And you're reminding everyone, I mean, in training, the closer you get to potentially using deadly force, the more strict the steps you're supposed to take are. So if you have one of your hands doing something non essential to the safety of you and the people you serve, that's already a training violation. But as you're saying, they're getting different and feedback of, oh, we want to make scary videos.
- [29:13]
Co-host
Yeah. And I think, you know, if there's any silver lining here, I mean, I think one of the things that they feed on is, you know, Donald Trump's, Donald Trump's main sort of winning insight is the value of negative attention.
- [29:26]
Host
Yeah, right.
- [29:26]
Co-host
Even if it's not positive attention, it's attention nonetheless. There is a kind of diminishing returns to that. There, there are problems with that. That does come with costs. And I think what things you see is like they're making a spectacle in Minneapolis. People are paying attention. The polling we have shows that 80 to 85 to 90% of people have actually seen the video, have heard this news. It's penetrating. They're succeeding and getting attention. The problem is people hate it.
- [29:49]
Host
Yeah, well, you're saying something really key and it fits with what you wrote about in the book, that yes, there's a, there's a trend up. If all you need to do is say, I'm the thing and now you matter. And it campaigns.
- [30:01]
Co-host
Look at us.
- [30:01]
Host
And then the fall off is we're talking about two subjects, Venezuela and ice, where Trump's numbers are down and they didn't get. They got all the content and some more people bought the Nike outfit. But two thirds of the country is either negative or doesn't care about Venezuela. He didn't get something beyond the MAGA base. I wanna turn to something fun because we do more than one thing around here.
- [30:21]
Co-host
You do many things around here.
- [30:23]
Host
Do you remember where we were October 5, 2018?
- [30:31]
Co-host
No, I don't.
- [30:32]
Host
Right. So we've never aired this on this channel. We were together. I was thinking about this Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake joyride. What? Maria ride joyride like some secret, you know? No Thelma and Louise moment that people don't know about. Marie Antoinette was let them eat cake. In a more positive vein, we had the great joy of giving cake to a colleague in the wider media. Let's take a look.
- [30:58]
Co-host
Oh, my goodness. Yes, I now remember.
- [31:03]
Guest - George Packer
Joy, we wanted to surprise you with two of the men you cannot go to sleep without these days. Please welcome MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Ari Melton.
- [31:23]
Co-host
McCain was the iconic example of voting yes on the procedure and then voting no when the time came.
- [31:27]
Host
Your birthday present isn't just the cake, it's also this briefing on Senate procedure. So fun.
- [31:36]
Co-host
I really went as broad as possible for the View audience.
- [31:40]
Host
What are your birthday tips? Do you have any fond memories?
- [31:43]
Co-host
We just.
- [31:44]
Host
We've never aired that. I said, chris is here. That was a wild moment. And thank goodness they put on the 50 cent to walk out. I think we all felt a little more sane.
- [31:51]
Co-host
I love doing that. And I was. So were you. I was sort of tickled and honored that. That. That this was the thing that. That Joy wanted. Well, I don't know if she wanted it, but they thought that she would.
- [31:58]
Host
No, apparently they thought she wanted. Because she is. And I say this with love across all three people you see on the screen, there she is, an actual nerd. And so to her, this was a cool thing.
- [32:07]
Co-host
Yeah, that was super fun. And, yeah, I mean, isn't it wild that I just am sort of like, time has stretched so much in the Trump era. Like, when I hear a year, when I hear 2018, I'm like, going back, I'm like, what was happening then? Like, Donald Trump was like, it's so hard. Locate yourself in time.
- [32:27]
Host
Well, we could locate you on here and they come back to you. Wait, we'll go back, rerun it because Hayes looks and I, both of us look younger than younger, I think. Yeah, we both. We both. There you go. I mean, you look great. Yeah, you look great now too. You got it. You know what? And I'm gonna. Your hair looks better now.
- [32:45]
Co-host
Well, the hair's holding up, but.
- [32:47]
Host
Which is a great thing. We'll take it. But I just want to say shout out to Joy Behar and the View and. Well, wait, we need a tip. What was your you got kids. What's a birthday tip? What makes a good birthday? Is it the food? Is it the guest list?
- [33:00]
Co-host
I think it's being with the people you love. It's all the people. That's the key. We just hosted a sleepover for my 8 year old. It was super fun there.
- [33:08]
Host
It says, it says on the screen, Chris Hayes tips for a great birthday. Be with the people you love. And I think it's true, Chris, but true Chris is coming back with George Packer. We have a lot of fun stuff. I'm also gonna show you how Dave Matthews, who has a huge following is now speaking out against ice. So a lot coming up. Stay with us. Perhaps you recognize our next guest from earlier in this very program because George Packer was here, I don't know, 15 minutes ago. But he's also a best selling author. He's a playwright, staff writer for the Atlantic. He's known for his incisive view of history and foreign policy. Ten books, National Book Award winner. This is the kind of guy where in a lot of towns you would spend 25 bucks to go and hear him lecture for an hour. And you get it right now. Straight up book award and a Pulitzer finalist twice.
- [33:58]
Guest - George Packer
Which hurts.
- [34:00]
Host
It shouldn't hurt. It's good to be in the company. Yeah. You and Kendrick latest book is a novel, the Emergency, a kind of dystopian look at lessons that might apply to our current era. He'll explain. And Chris Hayes, who was in the like literally the last segment, such previous seconds. Emmy winning journalist has a podcast people love. His new book that we were discussing is the Sirens Call. It's already been on the New York Times bestseller list. But what's really cool, we actually posted about this, President Obama put it on his reading list which there's no giveaways there. It's just what Barack Obama's actually reading. Very cool. And of course the host of all them with Chris Hayes jumping right into it. What's on your fallback list, Krissy?
- [34:40]
Co-host
Noem maybe not surprising, but she said something I think it was today, either earlier today or yesterday that I really found shocking. And my capacity for shock is, is high at this point that, that everyone needs to be prepared to carry proof of citizenship with them at all times. And I just gotta say I feel like there's, there's all sorts of part of the American self mythos and sort of what we might even call civic religion that can be sometimes a little delusional, they can be sometimes a little like jingoistic or ahistorical. But the civic religion we have is actually really important. It's a really important part of like what we share. And, and, and one, I feel like real core part of it and a core part that I think isn't particularly, you know, left or right is just like we're a free people who do not have to show government agents our papers.
- [35:30]
Host
Amen.
- [35:31]
Co-host
I think show me your papers. Has this like, oh yeah, really notable sting of tyranny. And that's not true. There's even. There are free countries where that is more common, honestly, like in Europe the, this sort of idea. We've got a real thing about that. And I think it's a great thing about us and watching these massed agents roll up on people, almost certainly in every case because of the color of their skin or their perceived ethnicity and demand their citizenship. And then to have the head of DHS say everyone out there, you got to be walking around being like, I'm a U.S. citizen. Or you might get stuck in the back of an unmarked suv. Fall back now.
- [36:09]
Host
Fall back. An important one you.
- [36:13]
Guest - George Packer
I mean if it's about what do I want to see go away? The Islamic Republic of Iran Fall back.
- [36:19]
Host
Ayatollah fall back.
- [36:20]
Guest - George Packer
They are willing to apparently massacre their people in the thousands in order to hold on to a 47 year old regime which has completely failed the Iranian people and which the Iranian people have over and over again expressed their great displeasure with. And it seems that that power will lead the Ayatollahs and the IRGC to pretty much kill as many people as they need to in order to hold onto it. The Iranian people deserve for that regime to fall back so that they can determine their own fate.
- [36:52]
Host
Yeah, a strong one. This is a sturdy kind of high minded fallback.
- [36:56]
Guest - George Packer
I was worried that it might be a bit righteous and I.
- [37:00]
Co-host
No, I like.
- [37:01]
Host
No, I love it.
- [37:02]
Co-host
The regime definitely should fall back.
- [37:04]
Guest - George Packer
Yeah.
- [37:04]
Host
Iran should fall back.
- [37:05]
Co-host
Past.
- [37:06]
Host
Past contributions included someone who wanted skinny sweatpants to fall back. Well, so it's you know, maybe I also should.
- [37:13]
Guest - George Packer
I've got a long list along those lines, but I'm going to keep it to myself.
- [37:16]
Host
Chris, give us another.
- [37:17]
Co-host
Well, the job market for young people needs to fall back. I have. There's been anecdotal reporting on this and there's some of the data, but man, it is brutal out there right now. For people entering the job market, there's a variety of factors. People are sort of wondering how much it's AI. There's a sort of interesting debate happening about whether it is or in fact. But there's all sorts of evidence to suggest it's harder to get raises because people don't have labor power. It's harder to get promotions. The job market has a kind of aspect to it that's a little similar to the housing market where it's kind of stuck and frozen and there's not enough movement happening around in it. And I just in sort of anecdotally and reporting, talking to people, there is a real profound sense that working people are on the short end of the stick right now and that they're really struggling. And that leverage means a lot because when the boss, when you feel like you're expendable, the boss is all the power.
- [38:09]
Guest - George Packer
And, and one thing that's happened that's new is the college bonus has disappeared. This is affecting college grads just as much as high school grads. So the golden ticket, you go to college, Clinton told us this, Obama told us this, and you will be on the path to success is less and less true. And there's a. I just read a book that hasn't come out yet, but it talks about the college educated working class. And that's sort of a new category that I think we should pay attention to.
- [38:39]
Host
Yeah. I don't know if you're George Orwell. You aspire to be.
- [38:45]
Guest - George Packer
Nope.
- [38:46]
Host
But you've gone from all of this celebrated nonfiction into a kind of dystopian novel. Tell us about it.
- [38:53]
Guest - George Packer
Well, sometime around the pandemic, I began to lose some faith in journalism. I had this feeling we were talking to each other, to an audience we knew that agreed with us. We were saying the same things. The arguments were, were getting tired. Facts did not seem to matter. After January 6, which produced like 72 hours of consensus, suddenly there were all sorts of theories about what really happened that day. And I felt to refresh my own mind, I wanted to get away from the daily facts and the news. Not that I would stop being a journalist. I still am. I keep Writing for the Atlantic, I love it, but I wanted to write fiction. I read fiction a lot. I love fiction. And Orwell is a hero. And I wanted to sort of try my hand at something dystopian that would by pulling back from our here and now. It's set in an indeterminate time and place, an empire that we hear about that collapses. And in the wake of the collapse, there are these divides, these conflicts between both the generations as young rebellions and between urban and rural people. So it's obviously not unrelated to our world. But by getting away from our world and making it strange, I wanted readers to be able to see our world and our drama, our situation more clearly. What's that we do.
- [40:17]
Host
What's the biggest difference between fiction and nonfiction writing for you? 30 seconds.
- [40:24]
Guest - George Packer
The terror of the blank page. I mean, having a stack of facts at my side, it gives me this confidence that I've done the work. I know what I can say, but to invent out of nothing is scary. But this turned out to be a joy because I was inventing out of years and years of being immersed in America and then finally getting to sort of escape it and yet write about it in a new way.
- [40:47]
Host
When you've been celebrated at this prestigious level and you have all of those sort of validations, but you sit next to a writer who does it part time and still made Obama's list, how does that make you feel?
- [41:01]
Guest - George Packer
It's worse than that. I went over to Chris's house for the super bowl last year because our daughters are best friends, and he's sitting there with his fireplace going. And I said, how's your book doing? He said, oh, yeah, just hit number one. And a little bit of me died at that point.
- [41:20]
Host
Appreciate the honesty because, well, having a.
- [41:22]
Co-host
TV show does help.
- [41:23]
Host
Well, yeah, and that's a benefit, and there's a teamwork to that. But real talk, you know, this is part time. He's writing the book on the side.
- [41:32]
Guest - George Packer
I know it hurts, but I, I. And Gore Vidal said, whenever one of my friends succeeds, a little bit of me dies.
- [41:40]
Host
There you go.
- [41:40]
Co-host
Honestly, that's a great.
- [41:42]
Host
We've had a lot of.
- [41:43]
Guest - George Packer
But not entirely.
- [41:43]
Host
You know what?
- [41:44]
Co-host
Also, Gore Vidal once said, never turn down an opportunity to have sex or go on television.
- [41:50]
Host
On that note, you can catch Hayes in just over an hour. And when we come back, that Dave Matthews update I mentioned. We'll be right back. Back. Sling is the live TV service that.
- [42:03]
Co-host
Puts you in charge. Choose your plan.
- [42:05]
Host
Orange for sports and entertainment favorites, blue for news and reality or select for the essentials only pay for the stuff you actually watch and pause your subscription anytime because paying for TV or not.
- [42:16]
Co-host
Watching that's just rude. No long term contracts, no nonsense.
- [42:20]
Host
Pick your plan, add what you want. Sling lets you do that. Visit sling.com to learn more.
- [42:27]
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- [43:29]
Host
Dave Matthews is one of the biggest touring rock stars in America and he's speaking out against Trump's ICE policy.
- [43:37]
Co-host
I want my taxes to pay for ice.
- [43:41]
Host
To masked thugs to roam our streets and terrorize our communities and rip families apart. Ice. Very straightforward. He has a fan base in the tens of millions. People sometimes say, where are the artists today? A lot of them have been speaking out. If you pay attention. Sabrina Carpenter went after ICE for something I was just discussing with Chris Hayes, misusing her music to promote their agenda. She said it was evil or bad bunny. Neil Young and others also going right at ICE for what they say are violations of human rights, sometimes doing it through their art.
- [44:20]
Co-host
No more greed again Got big crime.
- [44:24]
Host
In D.C. at the White House and.
- [44:28]
Co-host
I gonna come bust down your door Try to build a house no one.
- [44:33]
Host
Bills no more but I got a.
- [44:34]
Guest - George Packer
Telephone Kids are all scared and all alone.
- [44:38]
Host
Join ice. Boy ain't it nice. Join ice. Take my advice, if you're lacking control.
- [44:46]
Co-host
And authority, come with me and hunt down minorities. Join ice.
- [44:55]
Host
That's it for us.
- [44:56]
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