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Okay. Well, hello, everyone. Happy Monday, and welcome to the Joy Reid show. Big up to all the people in the chats already. The lemon heads, you're always like the first to class. They're like the kids who are definitely going to get an A in the class because the lemon heads are always there early. Big up to everybody. Big up to all the Soros that are in the chats, always jumping in and saying hello, Sora. Thanks to everybody that is listening and watching, both on YouTube on the stack, we're looking at the substack chat. Hello to all of you. Big up to everybody on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and we can never forget, never ever, ever forget our stalwart and adorable Twitchies on Twitch. Big up to the Twitchies, y'. All. Y' all don't have to get ready because y' all stay ready. So thank you to everybody who's listening. Since it's Monday, let me jump in and please. Hey, everybody, how you doing? Happy Monday and let's get this show going. You get a Jason face right at the top of the show. That's how you know he that he loves you. 433,000 subscribers and counting. We're very excited. Every time I do the number, it's like a thousand more. So we're bigging up the 433. 433,000 subscribers on YouTube. We're really bucking up on 210,000 on substack. Thanks to everybody who congratulated me on the N wift Awards. That was so much fun. We did that on Friday and still, still made it to the show. That's how dedicated we are. Did the NYWIFT Awards a big up to New York women in film and television. It was so much fun. I got to meet Audra McDonald, which I guess I can retire now. I met Audra McDonald. What more could I possibly do with my life? Gwyneth Paltrow also got an award. Lots of other incredible people. Big up to the New York Liberty. Izzy from the New York Liberty. First time there were three black women nominated for the New York Women in film and Television all at the same time. It was pretty great. I spent intern there. So I was a former intern made good. I want to also start oh by reminding you guys if you do buy merch. Thanks everybody who have shopped at the shop.joyread.com or shop and Elizo America throwing in $1.99 right at the top. I've already impressed you that much right at the top. We appreciate that. If you do buy some merch. Please make sure that you tag us in your photos. If you post your photos, we love seeing you and we can spot you if you tag either Joy Reid show on Instagram or tag me at Joann Reed at Instagram. I want to also start by wishing Ms. Kim's birthday. Ms. Kim, good friend, Ms. Kim birthday in Florida. Happy birthday to everybody else whose merch. Somebody's saying I've got my merch in YouTube. Thank you all very much. I also want to start by wishing Everybody a happy Obamacareversary. Happy Obamacareversary. Yes, it was 16 years ago today that President Barack Hussein Obama. Oh, don't we miss him, y'? All. Lord have mercy, do we not miss that man? And Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden and House and Senate Democrats celebrated the passage of what's as close as apparently we're ever going to get to universal health care in the United States of America. That was 16 years ago. Today, this is our Obamacareversary that we got Obamacare, which is pretty great. And that's probably the only good news that I have for you today. Democrats passed Obamacare because they had 60 Senate seats, including, by the way, just for your memory, this is 16 years ago, younger than most of the children, if y' all have kids. Democrats got Obamacare because they had 60 Senate seats, including holding the Senate, one Senate seat in Alaska, one in Nebraska, both seats in Montana, both seats in Arkansas, one each in North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and Claire McCaskill. Remember, he was in the United States Senate in Missouri. Very different world. The 60th seat, of course, was won by Al Franken, formerly of Saturday Night Live, after a lawsuit by the losing Republican Norm Coleman and after Illinois Governor Mark Blagojevich, remember this, tried to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat, which he'd given up to run for President Blagojevich, then later is on Celebrity Apprentice with Trump and then Trump pardoned him. Y' all remember all this. Then it was that 60 vote majority that allowed Obamacare to survive a Republican filibuster. And recall that zero Republicans voted to make it law. Zero. The Affordable Care act, which Republicans mockingly labeled Obamacare, passed the House 219 to 212. Remember, Nancy Pelosi had the same razor thin margin the last two Republican speakers have had, but she managed to pass it through the House and it passed the Senate 60 votes, exactly the number you need to 39 with zero Republican votes. Sixteen years later, the Republicans who now control both houses of Congress, including most of those seats I mentioned earlier are refusing to fund the $300 billion that would be needed to pay for ACA subsidies for Americans who need them in order to afford their policies. Despite 17 House Republicans crossing over crossing party lines recently to support funding the subsidies that poor people and low income people and rural hospitals in their districts rely on for their health care. But apparently Republicans, even though we supposedly have no money for Obamacare, have rifled through the couch sofa cushions. They rifled through the cushions and they can apparently find $200 billion more dollars to add to the trillion dollar Defense Department budget to fund an illegal Israel directed war on Iran. Well done America. Meanwhile, for those of you who are trying to travel by air, welcome to your worst MAGA nightmare. On top of the already long lines since TSA is now working unpaid and about 1 in 10 have already quit their jobs due to the lack of salary. This being because Democrats said we're happy to fund the Department of Homeland Security, meaning FEMA should get money, right? We're happy to fund the whole department, but not ice, cuz ICE is killing people. But Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer and go ahead and fund the TSA which is also under the Department of Homeland Security and fund that in FEMA or really anything else in the Department of Homeland Security. Unless ice, which to be clear, already has a budget larger than most of the world's militaries, gets even more money on top of the money they already have with which to brutalize non white people in your neighborhoods. So let's just to be clear again, Donald Trump has decided that instead of funding tsa, which he could do tomorrow by going ahead and approving of the deal, Republicans including, we just saw some audio watch. I don't have it, but I can tell you Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, not a nice guy, went on one of those right wing news networks and said yeah, we had a deal, we were going to let them just fund tsa. Democrats have a discharge petition on the table. They have 217 votes. They need more. I think they have 200. Sorry, they need 217 votes. They have, I think 175 and counting. And the discharge petition would just fund TSA so that TSA people can get paid and leave ICE to the side. Fund fema, fund tsa, but leave ICE to the side. There are a bunch of Republicans who agreed to do that. But Trump said no, no deals with the Democrats. Senator Kennedy said we could have gotten this done tomorrow and TSA would get paid. But Trump said no deals with Democrats, period. Instead he decided instead of funding TSA so those poor people can get their salaries. He's going to instead reward his violent, incompetent secret police with even more authority by sending them to your local airport if you live in 13 unlucky cities. So your airport experience will now include these violent fools. These are the people Donald Trump has said are going to get paid to do. I'm not sure what, since they have zero qualifications to do anything that would actually make airport lines shorter. What they are apparently trained with their 47 days of training in honor of the 47th president. I promise you, that's why they get 47 days. They seem to be qualified to do nothing but arrest a local official here, Brad Lander in New York, throw brown women on the floor and make them cry, snatch children and deport them out of state to a Texas gulag where they cry because they're hungry. Throw protesters on the ground. This is ice. And Donald Trump has said these goons, these masked idiots, most of whom are untrained, we don't know if they're proud boys. We don't know if they are Oath Keepers, we don't know if they are insurrectionists from January 6th because they've got masks on. And Donald Trump has said they must be able to wear masks in order to be safe. And he said those people, the secret police will now replace that. They'll just come in and they'll do the job of TSA agents so that while your trusty TSA agent is working for free, those masked secret police are going to get paid to be in the airport with them doing we don't know what. So here's Tom Homan, who was brought in to fix the Kristi Noem problem and the violence and killing people problem by taking over ICE and Border Patrol and supposedly making it less violent and kill people. Ish. Here's Tom Holman on the Sunday shows, trying to make all of this make sense. President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote,
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if the radical left Democrats don't immediately
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sign an agreement to let our country, in particular our airplane airports, be free and safe again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE agents to the airports where they will do security like no one has ever seen before. Now, in a subsequent post, he said that he instructed ICE agents to be ready by Monday. And now the president is saying that you, sir, are going to be in charge.
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How is that going to work? Are ICE agents going to move into
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American airport starting tomorrow, Monday? Yes. And I'm currently working on the plan
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now execution when we deploy tomorrow we'll
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have a well thought out plan to execute. With respect, if you're doing this in 24 hours, how well thought out could it possibly be? Again, ICE has been at airports across the country for a long time. It's just expanding those things. Look, it does. How much of a plan does it mean to guard an exit to make sure no one comes through that exit?
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I mean, we're talking about security options and these officers are well trained in
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security and they're well trained in identification. And look, we're going to do what we can to help TSA move those people through the line. Will ICE officers also be doing immigration enforcement while they are at the airport?
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We do immigration enforcement at airports all the time.
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So is that going to change? It's not going to change. But here's the challenge. Tom Homan, you know, who definitely, you know, he doesn't sound like he didn't make a deal with Nosferatu to broker his soul. Tom Homan could not even agree with the other incompetent Trumper, former Real World Boston contestant Sean Duffy, who for some reason I cannot explain, runs our Department of Transportation. They could not agree on exactly what ICE would be doing. Here's that. Be there to help TSA do their
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job in areas that don't, don't need
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their specialized expertise, such as, you know,
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screening through the X ray machine, not training that we won't do that.
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Do they have any, you know, practical, you know, experience in manning airport security lines? They run those same type of security
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machines at the southern border.
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Right.
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Packages come through or people come through, they run similar assets.
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No, they don't. And by the way, if Tom Holman is right and Sean Duffy is wrong, standing at airport entrances and exits and the entrances and exits to the security, how does that make the lines shorter? Can you explain, Tom Holmes, your theory is that they're just going to stand there and so that how does that make the lines shorter? And if Sean Duffy is correct, that means that these untrained goons are, are going to be screening packages to make sure there are no explosives on the plane. Do you trust those people to make sure there's no explosives on the plane? This comes after yet another deadly incident at an American airport. Here's a story from npr. Two pilots were killed and dozens of passengers injured when an Air Canada regional jet collided with a fire truck in New York's LaGuardia Airport late Sunday night. Air Canada Flight 8646, operated by Regional airline Jazz Aviation, was landing in New York around 11:30pm when it struck a Port Authority aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle. And Catherine Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and New Jersey, which operates the airport, said that 72 passengers and four crew members were on board the flight from Montreal Trudeau International Airport. The pilot and the first officer, who have not yet been identified, were Both killed and 41 passengers and crew members were transported to the hospital. So basically, and this is before they got ICE into the airports. So basically this regime cannot even operate our airports safely. They can't operate them properly even before ICE got here. But they think militarizing the airports with armed ICE goons who magically Trump has now said please don't wear masks cuz he thinks it's not a good look to have masks in the airport. So all of a sudden they can be unmasked apparently. And they're going to be doing what? I'm sorry, doing what? Supervising the unpaid TSA agents while one of the two of the groups check our bags for explosives During a literal war that we started with Iran that has proxies like Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. What could possibly go wrong? Back to the subject device. Video is already circulating on social media showing them looming around airports from the cities to harsh. You can see this is with the IP school. I thought do the lines look forward to you guys? Does it look effective for them to be walking around looking like, well what do we do now? Is that making the line shorter? No, they had record lines at Hartsfield Airport. They're not even near where the bags get checked. So I'm sorry, how does ice, which are dangerous, untrained people, now they're taking their masks off because we can see their faces. Sorry, how is that helping? We have a lot more on this coming up in hour two of the show, including some truth and facts on some of the violent videos that you're already seeing going around the Interweb. But first, as I have told you on this podcast before, Iranians got beef with us, like legit beef. Not just the 1953 overthrow of their government, their duly elected president in order to secure the oil for BP in Britain and for our oil companies across the US but also for a 1988 incident in which an Iranian passenger jet. I don't know if you guys remember this, if you're old enough. Iran Air 655 flying from Tehran to Dubai was shot down by the US military on July 3, 1988 by two surface to air missiles fired by an American warship called the USS Vincennes as it flew over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board. The incident took place during the Iran Iraq War, a war in which we were arming Iraq, namely Saddam Hussein, including supplying Saddam with chemical weapons with which to bomb the Iranians. And the plane, which is an Airbus A300, was caught in the crossfire as it flew its normal route. It was one of the deadliest airliner shoot downs of all time, the deadliest aviation incident ever involving an Airbus aircraft of any type of and the deadliest aviation incident in Iranian history, according to the US side right. The Vincennes crew misidentified the aircraft as an F14 Tomcat, a U.S. made fighter jet that the U.S. the Americans had sold to the Shah of Iran, our installed dictator before he was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. And the taking of American diplomats as hostages, despite the aircraft transmitting civilian identification codes. And Bandar Abbas Airport, which is the airport that the Iran air flight took off from, acted as both a joint civilian and military airport. And Flight 655 had departed behind schedule. But the Iranian government maintains that the US recklessly shot the aircraft out of the sky, violating international law. And some analysts blamed the overly aggressive attitude of the Vincennes captain who was named William D. Rogers iii, while others said it was just a miscommunication and a mistake. The President at the time, Ronald Reagan, did not issue a formal apology to Iran at the time, to whom, by the way, his administration had sold arms under the table from 1981 to 1986 to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua to back the Contras in trying to overthrow that government, the Sandinista government there, AKA the Iran Contra scandal, which could have gotten him impeached. But he did issue a written diplomatic note to Iran expressing deep regret. And then fast forward to the Clinton administration. In 1996, the US and Iranian governments finally reached a settlement in the International Criminal Court in the International Court of Justice, the icj. That is the same ICJ which last year adjudicated Bibi Netanyahu to be a war criminal for the genocide in Gaza. That ICJ in which the US agreed to pay the Iranian families of the victims $61.8 million, which is the equivalent of about $127 million in 2025 money. And as part of the settlement, the US never did admit liability for shooting down that civilian aircraft. But it's still a point of BE between Iran and us. And they are, shall we say, sensitive to the presence of U.S. warship in the Strait of Hormuz or in the Gulf for that reason. So when this weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, for some reason was the guy who got the short straw and was picked to go on the various mainstream media airwaves to tout our latest genius plan to protect the oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz to try to force down oil prices before it gets to $200 a barrel and even threatening to literally take control of Iranian oil and sell it ourselves. Well, let's just say it didn't go well. Let's first hear what Scott Besant had to say. A break the glass plan across the administration and at Treasury. We unsanctioned Russian oil.
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We knew that There were about 130
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million barrels on the water and we created supply that is beyond the Straits of Hormuz. So we anticipated this. We knew that there could be a temporary, and I want to emphasize temporary choke point there.
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And there was 130 million barrels of floating storage.
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In the coming days, we may unsanction the Iranian oil that's on the water.
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It's about 140 million barrels. So depending on how you count it,
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that's 10 days to two weeks of supply that the Iranians had been pushing out.
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That would have all gone to China.
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In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 or 14 days as we continue this campaign.
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So my belief that as soon as it is militarily possible, the US Navy and perhaps with an international coalition will
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be escorting vessels through.
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And that came up just now in this situation. Your words, not mine.
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You bring up Carg Island. I want to ask you about your statement. You said it could become a U.S. asset. What exactly does that mean? Could U.S. troops go into Carg island to secure it? Again, as I said, all options are on the table. Let's turn to how all of this is impacting consumers. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is now planning, he says, to cut flights and is planning for oil to go as high as $175 a barrel, with prices potentially stuck staying above $100 a barrel through 2027. This is according to him. All of this could potentially mean higher prices for consumers. What do you say to Americans who feel they were promised lower costs and now they're getting the opposite? Kristen, I think the American people understand that the in any 50, I'm not going to put a time on it, but let's just pick 50 days of temporary, poor, elevated prices. Prices will come off on the other side for 50 years of not having an Iranian regime with a nuclear weapon. The American people, they are beginning to understand, thanks to President Trump, that there
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is no prosperity without security.
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This seems to be an escalation, a threat of escalation. And it seems to run counter to his statement that he, in fact, wants to wind down the war again. Kristen, the president's been very clear from
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the beginning that the goals are destroy
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the Iranian Air Force and the navy to the completely demolish their missile capabilities, demolish their ability to replenish those capabilities, make sure the Iranians cannot have a nuclear weapon and stop their ability to project power internationally. And the president will take whatever step
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steps it takes to achieve those goals.
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Just to put a fine point on this, though, is the president in the process of winding down this war or escalating again?
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They're not mutually exclusive.
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Sometimes you have to escalate to de escalate. Sometimes you have to escalate to de escalate. George Orwell says. And by the way, that last bit about, you know, the escalation that Kirsten Welker was talking about is Donald Trump gave a 48 hour threat that if the Iranians do not reopen the Straits of Hormuz, we're coming in there with an attack like no one's ever seen before. His usual crap. And by the way, when Besant made that statement that we're just gonna commandeer oil that was already on ships and just resell it and use against them, here's what Iran did. Their foreign minister and other members of their government came out and said, yeah, we don't have any oil available. We're fresh out. There's no surplus oil. The spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Oil at present, Iran essentially has no crude left on the high seas. There's no oil. So I don't know what you're commandeering. They said, we don't have any surplus. Please come back next Tuesday or not at all. Joining Me now is Lieutenant General retired Mark Hertling. He served 38 years in the United States army as a tanker and cavalry officer, culminating as Commander of US Army Europe and 7th Army. In that role, he led more than 40,000 soldiers and worked alongside the Armed Forces of 51 Allied and partner nations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In other words, unlike the people running this country, he actually knows something about what he's doing and about the military and its proper use. Thank you so much for being here. Lt. Gen. Hurdling.
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Hi, Joy. How are you?
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You know, other than the United States empire falling apart beneath our feet. I'm good. Thank you for asking. So let me ask you this. Do you see a plan afoot when you hear people like Scott Besant talk about what we're doing in Iran? Can you detect what their plan is?
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Not since the beginning, Joy. I mean, it's one of the things that I've continually talked about in different shows and appearances, that there is no strategy. I mean, you have to have an end state in order to conduct operations like this. What we're seeing is a bunch of battles that are forming into an operational campaign to a degree that. But unless you have an end state on what strategy you want to execute, none of that matters. It's just blowing things up. And listening to Secretary Bessant just a while ago on your show, I didn't hear the whole interview. I heard parts of it. And the whole escalating to de escalate baffles me. What I think he's really talking about is escalating to provide more horizontal escalation with the enemy. This isn't going to de escalate anything. And truthfully, you know, I'm going to say this again. I wish Secretary Bessant would stick to the economy and not put himself in military situations because he has no clue as what he's talking about. And I wouldn't go on your show and start talking about the stock market or Dow Jones. So I wish he wouldn't talk about the military because he doesn't know of which he speaks.
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It is an excellent point. Right. It's like, why is that guy telling us what's being done militarily when he has nothing to do with that? It's not even his job.
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Yeah. You have him doing that. And you have Secretary Rubio, who hasn't had a whole lot of appearances, but he's been by President Trump's side. You have Secretary Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, whose only mode of operation is insulting the press and telling everybody how tough we are and telling them how many targets we've hit. None of this is coming together in a strategic campaign. And you have to ask the question, which the American people are, quite frankly, because they haven't been told what is this all about in the first place? What exactly are we trying to do? And they will retort with, well, it's destroying Iran's capabilities in different ways. Well, that was the secondary approach. And then the first one was decapitation. The one before that was regime change. The third, I mean, there's been so many Things that, as a military guy, I'm confused as to what the hell we're doing.
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It's an excellent point. And the New York Times is now reporting that Pentagon officials are weighing. Sending. They're weighing sending even more troops. They're looking at potentially deporting their 30th airborne. The airborne troops. I'm sorry, airborne troops to send those combat forces. And they would come from a brigade of about 3,000 soldiers that are capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. So they're talking about maybe 3,000 airborne troops. To do what? And as somebody who has experience in the region, what would that do? What would be the point in getting a lot of them killed?
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I'm gonna put that number in perspective because there's been talk about sending a Marine Expeditionary Force, which is about 2,500 soldiers, or Marines sending two of them. So that would be 5,000. An Army 82nd Airborne Brigade would be between 4 and 5,000 people with support. When all people come together, that's minuscule compared to what you're asking them to do. There's something in the military called a troop to task relationship. You assign the number of troops to specific task. And what I'll tell you, Joy, the last time I was in combat, it was in northern Iraq. I had 30,000 troops under my command and about 60,000 Iraqi troops who were helping us and about 90,000 Iraqi policemen who were part of that force as well. Iran is three times the size of Iraq, and I was in a small portion of it. So I don't know what these Marine Expeditionary Forces and brigades are going to do, but there's not that many of them. And. And I'll compare it to something else. Remember way back a couple of years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine, they had 190,000 forces surrounding the border of Ukraine. And I said at the time, that isn't enough to conduct the troop to task missions that they were assigned to do. And sure enough, that kind of turned out to be true, because you kind of know how many forces you need to do different operations. And unless somebody tells me what the operations are, I can't tell you whether or not the troops are capable of accomplishing them.
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I mean, you know, I oppose the Iraq war for a lot of reasons, but one of which is I did not understand how we would even manage to occupy Iraq, which is what you'd have to do if you want to control the country and prevent it from going all Shia, because it is a Shia majority, it's a Shiite majority. And for them to destroy, you know, to keep people from killing, you know, the once ruling Sunni elite Sunnis and exacting revenge and all the other things, the Kurds, everyone else going, whatever. We couldn't manage to do that. And as you said, we're now talking about a country with three times the population and that also has an, is an, you know, an older thousands of year old former empire that also has a history with us that we overthrew their government in the 50s, we bombed a civilian airplane in the 80s. They have reasons to detest us even if they detest their own regime. Do you see any evidence that there is a nascent rebellion taking place in Iran that's going to be pro American and overthrow the mullahs and install a pro American administration?
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I don't and again, I'm not privy to any, you know, classified information or intelligence. So this is all just not only open source stuff but also a gut feel because I've been on the ground for three years in combat operations. And you difficult it is to actually do the coordination between governments, economies and peoples. And not only that, you know, I, I'd take it even one step further, further joy. And that is the fact that we're countering the best efforts of doing that. I mean when you, when you're talking about a society that for the last 47 years has caused, excuse me, has called us the Great Satan and we just recently bombed a girls school killing 170 young women and there's a lot of families associated with that, that there are people walking around Tehran and Isfahan and Qom and some of the other areas that have oil and it's burning to the point where it's turning daylight into nighttime and you're seeing the kind of destruction that's going on and there's no Internet for them to communicate over and every leader that steps up is immediately decapitated by either the Israelis or by us. You tell me how you're going to form some kind of nation rebellion to support a new government in that environment. Everything you think is bad is happening there. There's nothing that's contributing to people rising up. And by the way, that hasn't been one of the missions that the President has announced lately. He has not said we're still looking for the Iranian people to step up. He's talking all about actually bombing hospitals and energy facilities and oil facilities to really create more dysfunction within that society.
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And can we talk about what Israel is doing? So Bibi Netanyahu apparently came out and gave A press conference today in which he said they're going to keep bombing no matter what the United States says. They're also bombing the crap out of Beirut. Civilian infrastructure in Beirut, apartment complexes. They obviously bombed the sports stadium in Iran as well. But what do you make of the fact that it looks like Israel is using this as an opportunity to launch a secondary war against Lebanon?
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The conflict that we're in today fits right in with the national security strategy of Israel when, when I was in Europe and that I, I have to admit that it's dated because it was more than 10 years ago. But Israel was part of our area of operations. It was part of my footprint and I spent a lot of time in Israel, so I watched what they were doing in different circumstances. They are in a tough neighborhood, there's no doubt about that. And everybody around, around them do not like the Israeli government. So they have to defend themselves. But what we're talking about now is just excessive use of force in various areas. And they have pulled the United States into helping them do this. That's the thing that I'm concerned about because Israel has conducted operations in southern Lebanon multiple times in the last two decades. In fact, I did my master's thesis on Operation Peace for galilee, which was 82 invasion, which took them 20 years to do. And we see what they're trying to do to gain space for Israeli citizens, but they have to do that every couple of years. They've done it in Gaza. They've done it in northern Lebanon, southern Lebanon. They've, they've gone all the way up to the Latani river and beyond to gain that space. And there's a whole lot of Lebanese citizens in that area. So you're creating more enemies as you're doing this from an Israeli standpoint.
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So.
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But they have now corralled, I believe they have corralled the United States into helping them out. I'll add to that, too, if I may, and it gets even more complex. Many of the Gulf states are wanting us to continue this operation. Why is that? Because they don't want to do it. I mean, they don't want to go up against Iran. So, hey, as long as we're there, you know, everybody, everyone from Saudi Arabia to Qatar is telling us continue the operation. I would ask the question, what is in it for the United States? And there's not much.
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Yeah. And the bottom line being, too, is that they're also. Iran is now pinpoint destroying US Assets and also oil assets belonging to some of these Gulf states. They may want it to continue, but their own, their own refineries, et cetera, are being bombed. Can we also just talk while I have you? I'm take full advantage of your presence. And Jason, this is B10, if you have it. I'm skipping down just a tiny bit. This particular Department of Defense and this particular president has almost made sort of a game out of violence. Pete Hegseth talks very, gets very excited talking about killing and more violence, as does Trump. We've now bombed eight different countries, including Iran, including going in and decapitating the leader of Venezuela, just the leadership, but leaving the government in place and also bombing fishermen, et cetera, in the sea, in the Caribbean. Can you see a strategic coherence to this? Because it just seems that we are making the world despise us.
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D
Well, I think that is part of what is happening. But I'd also point out when you look at this map, it's fascinating because all of the areas other than Iran were close to being singular strikes. They were either special operations strikes, kinetic strikes, or missile or aircraft strikes that were close to being a one and done So I think President Trump has gotten so enamored with the capability of using the military that he thinks it can do anything. What we're now involved in is a long campaign in Iran that's different from all the other red spots you have in the area. So that's thing one thing too Joy is okay, I'm a military geek and I like to look at what the national security infrastructure of our country is doing. So if you read the November 2025 National Security Strategy published by Donald Trump and the White House, it says we're focused on our hemisphere. When you look at the January 26th National Defense Strategy published by the Pentagon and Secretary and approved by Secretary Hegseth, his focus is on the Western hemisphere. And in fact, he insults many of our allies around the world where we have had strategic, defensive and partnering alliances, which are some of those countries we're talking about. You know, in both of those documents, there is a, there's a continual drumbeat of we've done so much stuff over the, all around the world over the last couple of years. We're going to focus on our hemisphere. And yet when you look at that map you just showed, there's only one place in our hemisphere he's been focusing on, and that's Venezuela. Other than insulting people in Greenland and Canada and some of the other places
- [36:56]
A
he's been talking about and then begging them to send warships to help try to get people through the. Get ships, through the straits. Before I let you go, you, back in the day, wrote a piece for Political magazine with Molly McHugh saying that Russian interference was our Pearl harbor, which was an excellent piece. I highly recommend people go, but we're gonna put a link to it so people can read it if they didn't already. Donald Trump recently insulted the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanay Takaichi, who was sitting right next to him as he made a joke about Pearl harbor in the element of surprise, which I won't even bother to play. But on top of that, his obsession with Russia, Russia, Russia, and with Russian interference and with trying to deny that there was Russian interference in the election, I suppose, is what is behind the insane insult that he did toward Robert Mueller, who passed over the weekend. Donald Trump said he was glad that Robert Mueller is dead. I cannot believe that an American president posted something like that. But Robert Mueller was a war hero. He served his country, including during the Mueller report. I just want to give you the last word here on Robert Mueller, his service to the country and on Donald Trump's insult of him.
- [38:11]
D
Yeah, Mr. Mueller was, in my view, a true patriot. He served not only in the military and received several awards to include a Purple Heart in Vietnam, but he was a great leader there. Secondly, he served for. He was the longest serving FBI director since Hoover.
- [38:30]
A
So.
- [38:30]
D
And he was truly living by the rules. Even his final report, the Mueller report, was emphatic that he was going to live by the rules of not suggesting that a president be indicted, even though there was evidence in that report that he should be indicted. And AG Barr kind of overrode that with another cover letter that didn't. That caused that not to come to light. Going back to what you, you know, I, I just think that Director Mueller was probably one of the better Americans of the 21st century. And even during the time when he had to give the report, he was suffering from the disease that finally took his life. So this is a guy that hung in there, had grit, and really understood what our nation of laws is supposed to be all about. So for the President to insult him like he did and his family in a period of mourning, to me, that's, it's just despicable. And it shows the lack of character that our current president has that. In fact, I hope we overcome that in the coming years and get back to what our nation aspires to be.
- [39:40]
A
Wouldn't that be nice? Lt. Gen. Retired Mark Hertling, we're so grateful that you took the time to come out and speak with us. It's nice to talk to somebody who actually is an expert and knows what they're doing. I know you have a new book out where going to make sure that that book is available in our store. We're going to make you get some water, sir. We want you to get some water. I'm going to have mine as well. The chat is constantly telling me to drink water. So do so as well, sir. And thank you for your time.
- [40:03]
D
Thank you, Joyce. Pleasure to be with you tonight. Thank you.
- [40:05]
A
Cheers. Thank you so much. An actual expert. Go figure. We want to acknowledge one of our fantastic sponsors because we couldn't do this thing in independent media without independent media, but also we couldn't do it without our wonderful sponsors. And one of our favorites, the Joy Reacho, is brought to you by the Freedom of Religion Foundation. Now, we often talk here about how power and ideology shape public policy, right? Well, one ideology that is gaining traction in American politics, unfortunately, is Christian nationalism. And that is the belief that the government should promote a particular religious identity. That has real consequences for civil rights, for education, and for democracy itself. The Freedom from Religion foundation works to challenge that movement. They expose religious extremism in politics. They defend the separation of church and state, and they protect the rights of Americans of all beliefs. They've called out Christian nationalist rhetoric from members of Congress and warned about religious ideology influencing US Policy abroad. We've seen it from this Pentagon, even during this attack on Iran. Now, if you believe democracy works best when our government stays neutral on religion, then their work matters. If you want to support them, visit FFRF US Joy or simply text JOY JOY to 511511 to learn more and join. That's FFRF US JOY or text my name JOY to 511511 and help protect a country that belongs to all of us. Go to FFRF us joy or text joy to 511-511 today and note that message and data rates male all right, let's go down memory lane for one more moment. One of the people most responsible for getting Obamacare passed, since it's our obamacareversary, was the woman who I would argue was the most powerful and effective speaker of the House that we've ever had, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco via Baltimore. Jason Roll Deep Article 2 is adopted. There are those in the party that think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before. Today we have the opportunity to complete the great unfinished business of our society and pass health insurance reform for all Americans. That is a Right. And not a privilege. We witnessed on the part of the President was a meltdown, sad to say. And together we are going to end crazy Nancy Pelosi's political career once and for all.
- [43:14]
D
And God bless America.
- [43:16]
A
Thank you very much. In 29 the nays are 198 present is 1, article 2 is adopted. We have got to get finished the proceedings or else they're going to complete. Today a shameful assault was made on our democracy. It cannot, however, deter us from our responsibility to validate the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We didn't go there to talk about China. We went there to praise Taiwan. We went there to show our friendship, to say China cannot isolate Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi as remembered by Time magazine. And it is quite a legacy. Joining me now is one of the candidates looking to fill those tiny, tiny but powerful shoes, Sekat Chakrabati, who is a former campaign manager and chief of staff for AOC and who also previously worked for Senator Bernie Sanders. Welcome, Sakat. Great to meet you.
- [45:01]
C
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
- [45:03]
A
So that was a pretty big legacy. Had to play the tape. You want to run for that very well worn seat. What do you want to do with, what are your comments? What are your thoughts about Speaker Pelosi?
- [45:15]
C
I think Speaker Pelosi had an incredible career and she shattered so many ceilings. And something that wasn't in that video was the way she was a representative when she first went to Congress. She really spoke out on the AIDS and HIV epidemic that was gripping San Francisco at the time. And she was pretty brave to kind of push the country. You know, she really, I think, represented the legacy of San Francisco as being a place that pushes the country forward and managed to get the country to take that epidemic seriously and get money back into San Francisco. So, yeah, I have a lot of
- [45:46]
A
respect for her career. Thank you very much. And also I mispronounced your name. You're very kind. It was Shoikat. Right. So let me make sure I get it right. Sorry, I got that wrong. So, my bad. So what do you want to do with, with, with that seat? What do you, what do you want to do? That's the same. That's different. Talk about your planning, your plans.
- [46:04]
C
Look, I think that where we are right now in this country, especially with this authoritarian coup that's going on, that I don't see our current Democratic leadership knowing how to handle at all. But also we have to realize that the way Trump got into a seat in the first place is working people have been having it harder and harder for decades. I mean, the American dream is pretty much shattered. Young people today are not going to do as well as their parents. And working people have been working longer and longer hours to afford less and less. And that's why we have Trump in there, because people have been voting for anybody who's standing for sweeping economic change, even though he, of course, completely lied about it. So I think we're kind of in a New Deal moment, right, where there's this chance to build a Democratic Party that's going to complete, that could completely change who the economy is for and how it works. But that's not going to happen with the current party. So what I'm really running to do is try to take this huge moment of change that I'm seeing and turn into a larger movement to completely change the direction of leadership of the Democratic Party to be one that stands strongly for working people, that stand strongly for our most vulnerable communities, and that has a real vision for building a society that works for everybody, not just the richest view.
- [47:10]
A
Yeah. You said when you say change of leadership, do I take it that you are not committed to necessarily voting for the leadership that's currently in the House, which is the leadership that is poised and that Nancy Pelosi chose hand picked to succeed her?
- [47:26]
C
That's correct, yeah. I'm not committed to voting for Hakeem Jeffries for a leader. I don't believe he's been an effective leader. And that's happened in a couple ways. You know, when Democrats ran in 2024 saying, if Donald Trump becomes president, we might lose our democracy, I take that seriously. I do think that's what we're in the middle of and what we're seeing right now with ICE completely out of control. ICE has the same budget as the military of Canada. Right now. It's bigger than any military, than America and China, basically. And at the same time Trump's starting World War three, we've got all these major threats. And what I'm seeing from Hakeem Jeffries is no ability to actually stop that. I mean, after Alex Preddy got murdered, there was this moment where the entire nation was watching. Everyone was really upset at what ICE had done. And that, to me, would have been the moment to capture that attention and actually try to win a fight on, not just body cameras for ICE agents, but clawing back the money that we've given to ice. But instead, the Democrats kicked the can down the road, passed a funding bill for about two weeks, and now it's much harder for him to do a real fight because people aren't paying attention. There's case after case of these examples where I feel like they've missed the moment. And so, no, I don't believe he's succeeding at stopping this administration. But beyond that, I don't believe we're presenting a real vision of what we can do that's not just anti Trump. What's the real society that works for people that has to be not just an opposition to them, but something different.
- [48:52]
A
If you were in the House right now, would you vote for the discharge petition that would fund the TSA and FEMA but not ice?
- [49:00]
C
No, because I believe right now we have to use every bit of leverage that we can to claw back money from ice. So that means using every, making it as painful as possible for this administration to keep doing its job until we get the money clawed back.
- [49:15]
A
So you want to just. You're right, because they already got money. And it's weird that we're in a funding fight over whether they should get more when they've already, as you said, gotten more money than Canada's entire military. And Trump has basically said if they don't get even more than tsa, people can't get their checks. I want to play for you a soundbite from Pete Hegseth, who styles himself the Secretary of War. He is still the Secretary of Defense legally. But he had something to say about Iran that I thought was very ironic and I thought would be interesting to ask you about.
- [49:43]
C
Take a listen to that point on capabilities.
- [49:45]
A
You know, Iran is an energy rich country.
- [49:48]
C
Could be, should be, instead, like so
- [49:51]
A
many other places, driven by a radical ideology, they've spent that money instead of investing in their people. That's why you had millions of Iranians protesting, because they felt like their condition, quality of life, didn't match what it could be or should be.
- [50:03]
C
And what was the Iranian state?
- [50:04]
A
There's a reason we call Iran the number one state sponsor of terrorism, because they took the money they make and they invest it in tunnels and they
- [50:13]
C
invested in missiles and they invest in launchers and UAVs.
- [50:16]
A
And we are destroying and degrading that,
- [50:18]
C
degrading that in historic proportions.
- [50:20]
A
But it doesn't mean they won't still
- [50:21]
C
have some and try to hold people at issue, which is why we're fighting
- [50:25]
A
every single day to continue. Weird coming from the country that spends more on the military than any other country on earth, and that is refusing in this moment to fund $300 billion worth of Obamacare subsidies. It's weird, right? He's saying it's Iran that does that, not the U.S. yeah.
- [50:44]
C
I mean, and Hexates right now is asking for another $200 billion to fund this war. I mean, with $200 billion, we could fully fund public transit in this country. We could fund universal pre K and daycare. We could fund universal school lunches. We could fund tuition free public colleges and trade schools and community college. We could do all that and still have close to like $100 million left over. So, yeah, it's hypocritical to say the least. But I do want to point out this whole way we got into war in Iran in the first place, there was a War Powers resolution in the House that Ro Khanna and Tom Massie were trying to push for a vote on. And what you saw was there was a war hawk caucus within the Democratic Party that tried to delay the vote on that, and leadership went along with it. They delayed the vote just long enough for Trump to start this war. And then it became much harder to actually stop the war once it started. So this, you know, I think the Republicans, of course, are horrible on this issue, but we have to acknowledge that there is a segment of Democratic Party that has been rattling for this war for some time, and they're happy to do it without having to go on the record about it.
- [51:47]
A
Yeah. And, you know, and let's talk about Israel. There is a tape that is going all over the Internet that. Jason, this is C3. You can do it with the sound out if you want, of Israeli soldiers filming themselves looting homes in Lebanon as they're trashing people's homes. And this is the homes that are still standing. A lot of Beirut is rubble and starting to look a lot like Gaza, where, of course, Israel committed a genocide, which most Democrats still don't want to say, won't use the word genocide, but that's the truth. What do you make of the fact that we remain the biggest funder of this particular expansionist young country that is, even as we speak, invading Lebanon, bombing them in addition to what they're doing in Iran and apparently looting their homes? Yeah.
- [52:37]
C
We shouldn't be sending another single dime to Israel's military. I mean, they have committed genocide or continue to commit genocide in Gaza. And it doesn't surprise me to see those videos from Lebanon, because that's what they've been doing in the west bank for years. For years they've been expanding these settlements, kicking people out of their homes and just taking over the Homes of Palestinians living in the West Bank. And I mean, this part of the war is not getting as much coverage, but about thousand people have already died in Lebanon from the bombing there. I mean, we basically are cutting a blank check to Israel to just destroy huge parts of the Middle East. And it seems like Israel is actually why we're in Iran in the first place. Like Israel was going to strike Iran. And then, you know, Rubio said we just have to go in because they're going to do it anyway. Which is a ridiculous thing to say. So, yeah, we should not be funding Israel at all right now. It's against our own laws, it's against the Lehi laws, it's against international law, and frankly, it's morally reprehensible.
- [53:32]
A
It seems that that seems so self evident that it's kind of shocking to me that Democrats still have such a hard time wrapping their minds around it. Let's talk about. You know, I agree with you that we spend a lot of time focusing on Trump when a lot of what he's doing is exposing a system that apparently is ripe for corruption. If somebody is bold enough to try it. Right. He's getting away with a lot of things that no one ever thought a president could get away with. But one of the reasons he can do it is that Congress won't do anything about it. So if you're in Congress, let's say you get into the House of Representatives, what do you think can be done to start to shut down some of this corruption? And what would you like to see done? What would you like to do?
- [54:13]
C
Yeah, I mean, he is exposing a system that's been there before. I mean, even just to point to the example of Israel that you're talking about a second ago. I mean, that's an issue where the vast majority of people in America don't want to send any more money to Israel. And yet we see a bipartisan consensus of politicians who keep wanting to send money there because of the money that runs our election. It's because of AIPAC money, the Israel lobby money that spends millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in our elections. And so this is an issue that if you actually poll it amongst people, it has a huge bipartisan consensus. About 90% of Democrats and Republicans hate the corruption in D.C. and they actually put it up there with the economy. It's a number one issue. So what you see, though is in Congress, you don't actually get votes on bills to try to curb that corruption because oftentimes the leader of the party is trying to cover for their own members. They think of it as just part of the system. We need this corporate money, this corporate cash, APAC cash, to keep winning elections. So the way I'm gonna go about it if I'm in Congress is expose that I'm gonna file discharge petitions to do things like ban the. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks, ban the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry. These are things that are hugely popular. And then you use those discharge petitions to actually capture attention and get the national spotlight on it and fight and fight and fight and then win those battles. And I think then we can actually get to a place where we are getting rid of corporate money in our elections entirely. That might not happen in the first term, but when I say we're in our New Deal moment, I think there's a chance for us to have a completely different movement that takes power, especially going in 2028. Because, look, in 2026 is going to be me and maybe like 10 others who go in there who are willing to actually step up to not just Republicans, but Democratic establishment as well. We're going to fight together as a caucus, and then we'll build political capital through that, keep recruiting people to run. And imagine going into 2028 with someone running for president, maybe hundreds of people running for Congress with a real vision for how to root out all the corruption and then actually build an economy that works for people, that provides everyone with health care, housing, child care, education, things that we need.
- [56:20]
A
Are you prepared for AIPAC to spend an unlimited amount to keep you from winning this seat? Because based on just what you said, you're likely to be a target of their spending. They do play in Democratic primaries. Are you prepared for that?
- [56:34]
C
Oh, I'm expecting APAC. I'm expecting a lot of the AI companies and their CEOs to spend a lot of money in here. Because a lot of what I talk about in the campaign is how we need to actually control AI to make sure it works for humanity and not just to make the CEOs of those companies the richest. And I'm prepared for the crypto lobby, which is also probably going to play a large role in this election. But the thing is, all these groups that are starting to put money into these primary elections, they know they're toxic, right? AIPAC has become toxic. So I'm going to turn that on their head. I'm going to absolutely run a campaign to make it clear that, you know, in this. In this election specifically, there's going to be a choice in front of voters? Are you going to vote for a corporate establishment Democrat who's going to go into a system and change nothing? Are you going to vote for someone who's actually willing to take on the whole system? That's why I present in this race.
- [57:22]
A
Last question before I let you go. You worked for AOC and you worked for Bernie Sanders, two of the most popular progressives in the country. Have they endorsed you? Have either of them endorsed you? Are you seeking their endorsement and are they raising money for you?
- [57:34]
C
I'm of course seeking their endorsement. They haven't endorsed in this race yet. But you know, I of course have a ton of respect for them and if I'm in Congress, I'll be working with them. So I'm going through the process with them.
- [57:46]
A
Well, I can tell you I feel like we've made a discovery. See, we pride ourselves on the Joy Reid show of getting in early on the ground floor of political stars and there have been a few of them who have won their races. I'm just gonna say after being on this show and I feel like we might have, we might have discovered a political star in you. Shoikat. Shoikat Chakrabody, tell me how we find you. If people want to support your campaign.
- [58:12]
C
Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm very flattered to hear it. Please go to my website. It's at shoikat US S A I K A T us. We're running a huge volunteer run campaign. We've got over 3,000 people who volunteered. We've knocked nearly 300,000 doors in the city. So if you live in the bay, sign up to cannabis. If you don't live in the Bay area, you can do phone banks. And if you don't have time to donate, then we can always take your money too. So please go to my website and see how I can help out. I appreciate it.
- [58:38]
A
Let me tell you something as somebody who. My maiden name is Lomaine. I L O M E N A. It's literally sounds like it's spelled and no one can pronounce it, which is why. And no one could pronounce Joy Ann either, even though it literally is Joy Dash Ann. That's why I'm just Joy most of the time. So you were smart to just go with Sacot us because S A I K A T us. You got to keep short for the people, man, because people can't. They say it, they can't spell it. It's hard. So you made it easy for them.
- [59:07]
C
Yeah, my parents clearly named me to run for congress, right?
- [59:09]
A
Yeah. They had a plan, my friend. They had a plan. You're great, Shoikat. Chakra. I'm gonna get it right. Chakrabarti.
- [59:17]
D
Chakrabarti.
- [59:18]
A
Chakrabarti. We got you.
- [59:20]
B
All right.
- [59:20]
A
I think this the chat is rooting for you, my friend. Good luck. Thank you so much for being here.
- [59:24]
C
I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [59:26]
A
All right, y', all, shoykat us. I like him. Jason, I think we might have discovered a political star. He's giving me mamdani aoc. I think so. You know, he's giving me that vibe. I like it a lot. He's giving me the vibe. Shoikat. I like him. Shoykat. Good, good, good. We love it. It's easy to remember. Just shoykat. I'll just remember. Shoykat us. That's all you need. Shoykat us. All right, y', all, thank you all for tuning in to hour one of the Joy Reid show. We are cruising into hour two. We've got a lot going on. You know, we want to more about all the shenanigans that are going on in terms of ice. But before we do that, I want to remind you all that the Joy read show could not exist without our incredible sponsors. And on tonight, the Joy Reach show is also brought to you by our friends, our good friends at 120Life. Now, we know that the big health problem that almost everybody is dealing with right now is high blood pressure. It's the number one risk, number one risk factor for mortality and early mortality. Half of all adults have it. And everybody. Everybody knows somebody in their life who's dealing with high blood pressure. And here's the dangerous thing, because you don't actually feel. Doesn't hurt. It's not like a pain you feel. It doesn't like knock on the door. It just quietly damages your body over time. And we know that, we do all of our little resolutions, we're going to do all these things to get our blood pressure down, to get our health out. We do that in January, January 1st. But by March, we're not doing them anymore. We've literally fallen off the wagon. We all have. And if you want to make a change, you don't really have to guess about how to do that. All you have to do is grab a home blood pressure monitor, drink 120Life daily, and check your numbers. Many people see improvements in as little as two weeks, which is exactly why this product has become so popular, including in the Reed household. Now, if you're over 40, meaning you're seasoned and cute. And if it runs in your family or if your doctor has ever mentioned high blood pressure to you, wake up. This is for you. 120 Life is a once daily functional drink made with ingredients that help support healthy blood pressure. It's not a pill or a stimulant or like a trendy, weird wellness gimmick. It tastes great. It's actually refreshing. It's delicious, ice cold. And it's made from a blend of super fruit juices. So it's healthy, fits in your real life. And here's the powdered version. I'm gonna show you guys a powdered version. It's super cute, it's easy to measure out. And you just put it in. And we have one of those little shakers. You can shake it, shake it, shake it. You can put it in a smoothie. You can do it however, it really tastes good. It has like a cool sort of beet, not too sweet, but fabulous flavor. And it's a great smart option if you're watching your blood pressure. This one here, you're watching your blood sugar. I should say, if you're watching your blood sugar, you want to try this powdered one. Hundreds of Doctors actively recommend 120 life to their patients. Over a thousand health professionals have supported or endorsed its use. Increasingly, it's become a go to natural tool in clinical settings, not just wellness circles. Okay, so here's how you get it. Go to 120life.com, that's 120life.com use my code joy or the code reed. R E I D for 20% off. You try it risk free for two weeks. If your blood pressure doesn't come down, you get a full refund. Simple. Go to 120life.com use the code joy to save 20%. Do not wait till next month. All you got to lose is your blood pressure. 12 life.com use the code joy or read for 20% off. These statements have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure or prevent any disease. Okay? So one thing that you can count on is our Republican. I won't call my Republican friends. I refuse to do the Democrat thing. One thing you can count on is that Republicans are always going to blurt out the truth about what they're doing. They blur out all their schemes like Scooby Doo villains. So here's probably the most excited person in America when it comes to Donald Trump and Bibi and the Epstein class's war on Iran. Neocon in chief and former Trump hater Lindsey Graham. It's a difference when we talk about troops on the ground.
- [63:05]
C
I trust the Marines, not that guy.
- [63:09]
A
I trust dod. We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this. The Marines. My money is always on the Marines. The that guy he's talking about is Joe Kent, who quit in opposition to the war in Iran and who's also under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified material. We just don't know to who or what classified material, but one can guess what country that material might be about. Okay, well, per the Wall Street Journal, the one reason that Lindsey Graham is so excited about this war is that he is one of the people who caused it to come to be. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey Graham coached Bibi Netanyahu, who has long bragged that he knows how to handle the Americans, he knows how to work them. But he allegedly coached him, per the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch owned conservative Wall Street Journal into how to talk Donald Trump into starting the war. Let me quote from the Wall Street Journal story. Other Republican presidents wouldn't have greenlit the Iran operation either. He said Lindsey. Something that he keeps reminding Trump of. Graham. Lindsey Graham said that Trump, with US Forces having captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro and now bombed Iran, is more inclined to undertake further interventions. Further. That's something that people don't understand. Lindsey says how much more confident Trump is to help make him make the case war, Iran. Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence agency. Here's his quote. They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me. He said he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead. Graham said, what intelligence? Meanwhile, Mike Waltz, who is our ambassador to the UN Wants you to know that the regime really doesn't care that you and 90% of Americans want nothing to do with this war. All they care about is how MAGA feels about it. Here's my point. The administration hasn't convinced. We've seen it in our polling, the majority of Americans, that this war was necessary. 66% of Americans believe conflict with Iran's a war of choice. 60% disapprove of the US taking military action against Iran. 57% of Americans think the conflict is going very or somewhat badly. How do you tell the American people they're Wrong. Well, I can.
- [65:36]
C
I could quote a whole slew of
- [65:40]
A
polls that show, for example, self described MAGA Republicans give the president a 100% approval rating. A majority say the number, number one job of the commander in chief is to keep Americans safe. I can point here to an NBC poll. 90% of Republicans, broader Republicans, support Trump's effort to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities. And I have to point out no one should be surprised here. President Trump has said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. 2016 campaign, 2020 campaign. Since 2024, he's said it 74 times out in the public space. But if he is going to commit any kind of ground troops or boots on the ground, don't you think he needs to persuade the majority of American people, not just his base? I think the President will keep all options on the table to secure these objectives. And as a veteran, as a parent, I thank God he's not kicking the can like so many administrations have for
- [66:40]
C
50 years, until this is a catastrophic
- [66:43]
A
problem where we have very limited options to deal with, much less an entire Middle east potentially awash in nukes. 50 years. I mean, 30 of those years. Bibi Netanyahu has been begging American presidents to invade Iran with him. Donald Trump's the first one to do it, and Donald Trump just happens to be the only one who's in the Epstein pot. Just saying. Nothing. That's more than a coincidence. Right? But you heard that right. So Mike Walters said it doesn't matter what the American people think. Only what MAGA thinks. Only what MAGA thinks. And meanwhile, Bibi Netanyahu is very clear what he wants, which matches what Lindsay wants. Your sons and daughters, boots on the ground. It is often said that you can't win, you can't do revolutions from the air. That is true. You can't do it only from there. You can do a lot of things from the air. And we're doing. But there have to be, there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of
- [67:41]
C
not sharing with you all those possibilities.
- [67:45]
A
There has to be a ground component as well, says Bibi Netanyahu, who is Donald Trump's apparent boss along with Lindsey Graham. They have to do what he's told. And he said, we're gonna have to have ground troops. That's what we need. And Israeli troops are going to be part of the ground troops. Yes, indeed. But I can tell you who's not gonna be in the Israeli ground troops. Bibi's son, who's chilling in South Florida. He's living in a fancy, schmancy, very expensive apartment overlooking the ocean in Broward County, Florida. He's not going to war. Donald Trump's sons aren't going to war. They're saying your sons should go. And again, all of this that's happened has resulted in the US Government issuing travel warnings to Americans everywhere in the world and making it travel warning saying beware if you have a blue passport anywhere on earth and making it less safe to walk around with that blue passport that they also plan to require you to have in order to vote, all while making our airports less safe by refusing to pay TSA workers. Because to be clear, to be clear, as we said earlier, even John Thune, who is the Senate majority leader, went to Donald Trump and said, hey, why don't we just fund the rest of DHS without ICE and work out the ICE part later since ICE is still sitting on more than $175 billion of your tax money from the last funding bill. So why don't we just do that? Senator Kennedy of Louisiana has confirmed now in an interview with the right wing news outlet that yes, they went to Trump with a Ted Cruz Kennedy bill that would have funded, that would have agreed to fund everything but ice. And so TSA agents would have gotten their checks. But Trump said no, no deals with Democrats and he would rather have ICE continue to get paid to terrorize people in the airport while TSA agents right next to them remain unpaid until Democrats agree to give ICE even more money to build private concentration camps and prisons so they can use the migrant labor that they've now reversed on and said they want the migrant labor in the country after the so called mass deportations that didn't happen, that they promised their base because the real reduction in the amount of immigrants in the United States is mainly more than a million people voluntarily leaving the United States on planes for which they now have to pass through violent but magically unmasked ICE secret police. None of this makes any sense if your goal was to get immigrants out. But they're keeping them here and putting them in mass detention and then ICE is going into cities and hurting people and killing people and the more and they're rewarded for their violence by now getting to repeat, rinse and repeat in the airport where the people who are self deporting are trying to get out. Let me show you a video that's going violent on the interwebs. Here it is. This is D6. This is a woman who is being detained by Plain clothes agents and people are. You can see on the. This is the. We pulled the Tick Tock version of this video. We bleed. We shut down the sound because it's full of the F bombs that we're trying not to have so much on the show. But this is going viral. This is everywhere. This is on everybody's Instagram and Tick Tock. And it shows this woman being detained by plainclothes agents. And people are labeling them ISIS at San Francisco airport. But here's the thing. You can see she's crying. Okay, this has happened in the last couple 24 hours. But San Francisco happens to be one of nearly two dozen airports throughout the country that do not use ice. They use private screening companies. Not. I'm sorry, not. Not ice. They don't use tsa. So San Francisco is one of two dozen airports throughout the country that use private screening companies instead of TSA at their checkpoints. It's done under a little used federal program that allows airports to outsource security screenings while maintaining TSA oversight. The program is called the Transportation Security Administration's Screening Partnership program. It's called SPP, which was founded in 2004 and allows private companies to conduct security screening under TSA oversight. I have from a good source that those men who are detaining her were likely not ice. They were likely private contractors, which just happens to be what Project 2025 pushed as a plan. On page 120. Get out my path on my Project 2025 here. You know, I keep the. Keep Project 2025 handy. It's big on page, on page 125 of this joint, they talk about privatizing TSA. So forget about. Even before ICE, they talk about privatizing TSA. And there are already 20 or so airports where they've already done that and where the people who are doing these security screenings are not tsa, nor are they ice. They're private security companies. And what's really wild is that the violent detention of that woman in San Francisco looks a lot like what happened to a 39 year old legal work permit holder in Salt Lake City, Utah last October, again, before the ICE deployment in the airports at the hands of either ICE or Border Patrol acting on behalf of ice. Jason, please. Roll Da.
- [73:31]
B
No.
- [73:32]
A
No. My daddy. Help me.
- [73:37]
B
I don't know how to.
- [73:39]
A
Daddy. These are human beings. That woman, a 39 year old mom, allegedly had a removal order, but she also had a work permit. So she was in the country legally, but they decided that she had a removal order. And sometimes those Things contradict or that she missed a meeting with her TSA minor, but for whatever the minor infraction was, this is a woman who was working legally in the United States in Salt Lake City. That detention happened before ICE was deployed into the airports, meaning that there were already detentions happening in our airports before today, which is when Donald Trump unleashed ICE anew into the airports. But it's kind of hard to tell the difference between the contractors that work for TSA and the Border Patrol or ICE agents. It all looks the same. And what you could be seeing now with this normalization of that kind of violence, not just on the streets of Minneapolis, but in the airport, is the quiet privatization of airport security.
- [75:03]
B
It's.
- [75:04]
A
It's first the ICE secret police take over from the unionized, professionalized tsa, which by the way, only exists in its own right because of 9, 11. The only reason we have a TSA or a DHS Department of Homeland Security. Then the next phase is that it's not even ICE at the airport. It's private security companies that do the same violence, only for private profit, just like the ICE filled private prisons. You see where we're going? And I want you to know that the Pentagon is already doing this at its level. There's a private company that you know called Palantir, another private company that the Pentagon has just signed a major, major deal with a contract with to make it its core military systems operator. This is the company that specializes in mass surveillance. Can y' all put this together and see how this could go wrong? You've already had, since before today, private security contractors operating as and in lieu of TSA and supposedly doing security and immigration control in your airport. That was already happening. Then you add that ICE is now officially deployed into the airport, when again, they've already, in some cases. Tom Holman wasn't lying about that. They've already been doing it. So they've been normalizing this idea of a militarized airport and adding to it private contractors who do they report to their shareholders? What is their quota? Do they have a quota of the number of people they're supposed to detain? And once you normalize this idea of a militarized security system, not just on the streets of the American of the United States, not just on the streets, but also in the airport, what does that even look like? Steve Bannon gave an interview today in which he bragged that this also will and should be done at the polls. So the goal now is to normalize the idea of a militarized Society, in the streets, at the airport, at the polls. Everywhere you go, armed men, mostly, in some cases masked, are overseeing your normal activities. Normal activities like traveling, which, by the way, you can't get on a plane without a real id, and that's already been the case. So that woman, if she's in the airport, you've got to have a certain kind of ID to be in the airport. So now they're normalizing the idea that you will be overseen by the secret police, the armed secret police. When you vote, when you travel, when you shop, when you walk down the street, everywhere. The idea being that everywhere you go, you will be under armed surveillance, including from Palantir, which can surveil you from above and which is already supplying some of the technology for ICE to track people down and find them everywhere you go. And I will say one last thing before we bring in our guest. Palantir was created after 911 based on the thought that we had lax security leading into those attacks on the Pentagon and on the Twin Towers. You know who funded the creation of Palantir? The CIA, through a company it created as an investment company. That is the money that launched Palantir. The CIA funded the creation of Palantir, and now it is contracting with Palantir, on whose board Peter Thiel sits. He also is the person behind Facebook, which can monitor all the things you do. Meta. He's also one of the initial funders, right along with Elon Musk, who now has X Twitter. You see where we're going? The oligarchs, the Epstein class will surveil you everywhere you go, in everything you do using their armed secret police, including when you vote, including when you travel, and to prevent you from being able to get rid of them by requiring you to have a passport and a birth certificate to vote and make it impossible for you to remove them. All of the money is real. What could possibly go wrong? Joining me now is Anna Flores, former Department of Homeland Security and White House official, attorney and immigration policy expert. She has more than 15 years of experience trying to reform US immigration and domestic policy at the highest levels of government. Ana Flores, thank you so much for being here. I want to first ask you, as somebody who worked at Department of Homeland Security and in the White House, what would be the efficacy of taking armed ICE agents and putting them inside of the airport?
- [80:17]
B
There is no efficacy. I mean, it is just to chill the movement of people. We saw some lines be shorter today, and that's just probably because I can speak personally. Latinos who've been racially profiled, probably are not comfortable going where ICE agents are and other people of color as well. So I see nothing other than intimidation right now from this and a political stunt to try and rush these congressional negotiations. And the White House is just being asked to follow the law as it's written. This is not a big negotiation. We're not negotiating immigration reform here. So this is a stunt, but it's a scary one and it's one that we should, you know, take seriously for the people impacted.
- [80:56]
A
Oh, I can expect that. Yeah. That lines will get shorter because you're absolutely right. I think people of color are gonna be afraid to fly, which I think is also, I hate to say it, if I'm thinking Gilead might be one of the goals. Right. People who wanna maybe leave the country or get out of the country or fly overseas and are terrified of confronting ICE may just stay home where they can remain under the control of the United States. That's me and my own conspiratorial thinking. Let me play Congressman James Comer, who also seem to just let the cat out of the bag. Jason, this is D10. Glad the president's put ICE in there for a multitude of reasons that'll drive the Democrats crazy. He said putting ICE in the airports is designed to drive the Democrats crazy. So it seems like you're right that this is a political stunt.
- [81:39]
B
That's right. I mean, look, I am an immigration expert, but what we're seeing is not really immigration related. It is the President taking another step to turn ICE and Border Patrol and other immigration enforcement into a federal police force that we were never supposed to have. Right. Our Constitution is designed not to give the President that authority. And he is testing boundaries every way he can, which has always been a threat of the Department of Homeland Security. Right. These warnings were raised back when it was formed. And he is taking that threat and turning it into this reality.
- [82:13]
A
Let's talk a little bit about. Donald Trump is pretending to care. He isn't even really trying that hard to pretend to care about the TSA agents who are working for free while his ICE seeker police get paid. But Republicans have. And you probably lived through this when you were at the White House and at dhs. Republicans have constantly tried to cut TSA funding. They've constantly blocked the workforce in TSA from unionizing. You go all the way back to where probably you were in government. George W. Bush administration blocked them from unionizing. 2009. Jim Dement, Republican senator, held up TSA leadership nomination partly due to concerns about unionization. You go to 2025, the Trump regime said that they were going to strip union protections from the many for many of the workers at tsa, including the right to collective bargaining. So they've constant.
- [83:06]
B
You know, I lost a little bit of your audio, but can you hear me on, on your end right now? Okay. I was going to say that the administration, I mean, TSA has been treated sort of as like a stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security in favor of, say, ICE and especially the Border Patrol union. It's so interesting that you talked about how TSA was not supposed to unionize. I have, you know, when I was working on this issue, on like border issues, Border Patrol is essentially setting policies through its union. And tsa, you know, for all the talk about being fearful of traveling and airport security and terrorism has been very abused by multiple administrations. They've talked about privatizing them, replacing them. I feel very badly for that workforce because that is an inglorious job. They have to force us to take off our shoes and our coats and all of that. And you know, I feel they're just being victims of these dumb immigration politics that Trump is using just to make
- [84:00]
A
it even worse for the audience just so that, you know. And this is some great background research we got from our fabulous interns on the show. How much does ICE earn? They earn roughly between 70,000 over $100,000 per year, depending on experience, rank and location. Entry level salaries can start a bit lower, but we're talking 70 to 100,000. TSA agents earn between 40 and 60,000. So they have a median pay of about $30,000. So they, the ICE agents already earn more than they do for doing a job that to me seems less, you know, want to talk about inglorious. At least TSA is trying to prevent the, you know, you from being harmed on a plane. They're trying to prevent dangerous objects from getting on a plane. That seems much more important than rolling down the street trying to find brown people to knock over and throw into private prisons. ICE funding from the federal government. They just got $75 billion in multi year funding. Their funding goes through 2029, making it the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the country. They are funded better than the FBI. And so you're talking about an agency that's well funded, that's got money through 2029. It's kind of hard to imagine why that agency ought to be even in a funding bill. Can you understand why?
- [85:12]
B
I really can't. Look, ICE was always supposed to be the smaller of the agencies. Right. They have a very targeted role.
- [85:18]
A
Role.
- [85:18]
B
But this, you know, Trump doesn't care about that. If you wanted to pay tsa, he could take some of that ICE money. I've served in an agency. You reprogram it. Right. So he is lying to the American public that he can't pay these people. DHS has never had this much money. There is no reason. Right. Ice, you know, if it wants to be seen as legitimate, it's losing that case every single day. It's not about public safety. And this, I just think it's so striking that Trump cares always more about arresting the next immigrant and hitting his numbers over everything. Right? Over the public safety, over the death of US Citizens, over. Now it's going to be just people's basic ability to travel. It's really stunning. I can't believe Republicans are not feeling greater pressure on this strategy.
- [86:01]
A
And by the way, just a note for the audience. On Friday, some 80,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services were offered a lump sum payment of up 25 grand if they agree by March 14 to resign by their post. The buyout offer came after some federally funded researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received a survey requiring them to detail how their work aligns with the goals of the Trump administration. And according to ABC News, these workers who work in the sciences were asked to explain how their work and their research would help combat Christian persecution, defend women and children against so called gender ideology extremism, or help curb immigration. So it seems that curbing immigration is the be all and end all of this regime. And apparently that is its sole purpose. Your thoughts?
- [86:49]
B
It is its sole purpose. And that's absurd. I mean, they were trying to justify it for a little while saying Biden was bad on immigration. You can't justify any of this. Right. You're dismantling the federal government just so you can also arrest immigrants. You're persecuting, you're investigating fraud in Minnesota and it turns into an occupation of a US City. People need to be clear eyed that immigration enforcement has become a pretty pretext for a different agenda. I'm sitting here in Washington, D.C. and there's national Guard in my neighborhood every day. Right. That started out as an immigration and crime pretext. Now they're permanently in my city. And I think we have to be prepared that he wants us to think this is normal and get used to the new amount of immigration enforcement. And I'm going to be. I'm concerned that also Democrats may Get used to this as well and say, you know, if we win back power, we have to like, maybe I should wear masks and where. Maybe we should keep some of these levels. I've worked in administrations where I've been disappointed that we also play the same games with enforcement. We've built it up so he could expand it this quickly and turn it against all of us. And so we need to be clear eyed about immigration. Reform is not just about fixing the immigration system. It is becoming a major democracy issue. And I don't know how many amendments they have to test, how many the 14th Amendment they're trying to rewrite in the birthright citizenship case. I just think it's not just about immigration. They want us to, they want to divide us and make us think it's about immigrants. It's not. It's about our rights.
- [88:12]
A
Indeed. Do you think, as somebody who's worked in the Department of Homeland Security in the White House, that I should exist?
- [88:16]
B
That I should exist? Look, I think there's a question for, look, should nation states exist? It's a bigger question, right? A nation state has borders, and if you have your border, then who gets to go in and out of them? That's a fundamental question. Now.
- [88:29]
A
That's what border patrol is for.
- [88:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's a great. There's border patrol. It's interesting if you actually reformed the immigration system and you actually said, you know, these are the way that they make it easier for people to come legally because it is so hard for people to do that. Because the last time we updated the system was before the Internet existed. Like those were the categories that existed before everything we know today. Right. It's for an economy of a different time. So maybe it doesn't need to exist in the same way because people could actually come in a normal modern way and not have to do things like cross borders or make themselves vulnerable or use smuggling networks. It's embarrassing to me that the United States has a system where basically, you know, it's better that you use a smuggling network than applying for a visa because you have a better chance. Right. If you're Mexican, you can wait over a century to reunite with some of your family members legally. That is not a functional system. And so I think sometimes we. It's not that it's not wrong to focus on enforcement, but I look on the other side and I say, well, of course enforcement's growing because we haven't figured out how to help people get legal status, keep their legal status, stay in it. And so I think I'm actually worried everyone's going to focus on making sure ICE wears masks and then we'll miss all those other pieces.
- [89:42]
A
Yeah. I mean, and the bottom line is. Well, the masking to me is it's kind of weird that suddenly they don't need them when they're going to be bully, you know, bully boying people in the airport, but they need them when they're bully boying people on the street. Like, what's the difference? I don't understand how they suddenly don't need them. Hopefully this will come up in a legal case. What do you make of the places where they're being deployed? It's not all over the country. It's the two major airports in New York, JFK and LaGuardia. It's Atlanta Hartsfield Airport. It's Illinois, of course, Chicago O', Hare, one of the two. It's in Louisiana at the Louis Armstrong Airport, in Texas at the George Bush International Airport, and also the Houston Airport in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Ohio, and of course, Puerto Rico. What do you make of those being? The choices of where to put ice?
- [90:27]
B
So, with the exception of maybe New York, Illinois, Puerto Rico, I see battleground states. I think we should be on the lookout for. Who knows if Steve Bannon is speaking for the administration, but I've seen some reporting that these are trial runs. Right. For potential ICE activity around polling places. I think we have to really. I don't think it's conspiratorial to be concerned about that. And they seem to be consistently planning in states that are important politically, whether through the election, whether there's a political opponent. I mean, I always found Minneapolis really interesting just because it, it has such a small immigrant population. Right. And that's part of it. Right. It was. We will intimidate a majority white US City, too, and we will test that and we'll occupy it. And it hasn't de. Escalated. There's still hundreds of officers there. Right. We just are now used to it because there's not thousands of officers there. And this is why, once again, we just have to keep making this about a broader democracy issue and say out loud, you know, is DHS going to be outside of polling places? And how we're. How are we going to make sure that doesn't happen? And how are Democrats going to stay unified against that happening? And how do we protect federal judges so that way they can keep enforcing the law against the administration's overreach? I mean, we have to have some of our institutions hold. And one of Those is going to be public protest and us doing that, whether that's in primaries and supporting people who actually see the threat for what it is or during the midterms.
- [91:58]
A
Andrea Flores, former DHS and White House official, attorney and immigration policy expert, you're welcome to come back anytime. I think we share the same concerns because I think we can almost guarantee that now that they've established this precedent that they will be at the polls, that ICE will be at the polls. And before I even let you go, what would you say to people who are at this point afraid, really to leave their homes, afraid to go to school, will be afraid to vote, and are now afraid to travel? Because they do not. And it's not because people have done something wrong, by the way, that people would be afraid to confront ice. Alex Preddy was a white American citizen, as was. Was. Was Renee good or Renee Nicole Good. And they killed. They killed them dead. So anyone should be afraid of ICE because they kill people. What do you say to people who are now literally changing their plans, you know, changing their travel plans and saying, I, I don't even think I can stand to travel now because of them?
- [92:55]
B
I'll say, I understand. I. That my first encounter with Border Patrol, I grew up in a border community. I was 12 years old. It shaped why I'm in this work. It was scary. And a lot of Americans are having their first experience being a person of color and being stopped and asked about their citizenship, which is something that border communities both in northern border and southern border know well. But what I will say that gives me hope is if you had asked me, would the majority white neighbors in Minneapolis have stepped up, regardless of immigration status, regardless of background for the people and their neighbors? I don't know if I would have said they. I don't know if I would have predicted that. And that gave me a lot of hope. And so I do say, reach out to your mutual aid groups if you are scared. Make a plan. Make sure you know your neighbors have your back. Make sure they know where you're going, where you're traveling. Have a plan for your pets, have a plan for your medicine. Like, we have to sort of get practical here. That's what I do. As Mexican American, Even here in D.C. i know that I have to make the plan. And it's sad, but I am realistic about it, too. And so I really hope our leaders understand that if they're not defending especially communities of color who are unable to go about their lives and travel and go, you know, keep their businesses Operating that.
- [94:11]
A
That's.
- [94:12]
B
I'm waiting to see what Democrats will do to make sure they see that pain that is being caused.
- [94:17]
A
I agree. Because, you know, if people think it won't impact them, it's going to impact everyone, because the economy will. It is already being harmed by this. If people are afraid to open their shop, it means that they're not contributing to the tax base of their community. If people are afraid to go to work, businesses will close. And we've already seen a complete decline in tourism. It's decimated. Our tourism industry is decimated. Las Vegas is struggling because people aren't coming here. People are afraid to come here. What is the World cup gonna look like? Are brown players and fans gonna feel comfortable being in the United States and landing and having armed ICE agents with, you know, with. With AR15s dangling off of them, waiting in the security sections? It's insane. Anyway, thank you.
- [95:02]
B
It's insane. Thank you.
- [95:04]
A
It is. Thank you. Andrea Flores. We appreciate you. Thank you. Come back anytime.
- [95:07]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [95:08]
A
Thank you. I mean, this is a reality. I mean, people are walking with their passports everywhere they go because people now realize that anyone can be stopped who isn't white. And by the way, anyone white can be shot dead in the street, too. It's not as if they're only killing people of color. Two of the most prominent killings, one by Border Patrol and one by ice, were white people. So they don't have any respect for anyone of any race of any nationality in any city. In the whitest cities, in the blackest towns, they don't care. These people are untrained and in many cases, unhinged, unprepared. And they are just out here being told, you have the power to remove 3,500 immigrants a day, find them wherever you can, and do whatever it takes to remove them. And then when they remove them, they don't even remove them out of the country. They remove them to a private prison for the profit of yet another oligarch that pays Trump. This is all a grift, but it's all a terrifying white, Christian, nationalist, Gilead grift so that the commanders, as in Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale, become incredibly rich off of terrorizing and terrifying and surveilling and harming and hurting people. And if we let this become normal in the airport, don't you think they'll be back on the streets, too? And again, they've already been in the airport. I want to go back and just talk about the fact that you did have our ambassador to the United nations say, it doesn't even matter what any of the rest of us think about this. They don't care what the rest of us think. They only care about what MAGA thinks. And this is something I want to focus on for just a moment. Back in the day, I got in trouble. I used to get in trouble for my social media. A lot. Jason knows from my bosses at the Artist formerly known as MSNBC, for a post I did on TikTok asking what I think and thought at the time were some very obvious journalistic questions about the assassination attempt that July against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. So the Hill picked it up and went after me in their morning show. But let me play a little bit of the Hill's show, their morning show. Rolling the clip. The circumstances surrounding the shooting have raised major questions for MSNBC's Joy Reid. Take a listen. We still don't know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet, whether he was hit by glass fragments, whether he was hit by shrapnel. We don't have those details. We actually have no details from his physician. Even though this man is still a secret service protected, you know, and presidential candidate, we know almost nothing. Why? Why don't we know that much? We know that three people were shot. One person, unfortunately, was killed at the rally. We don't know where they were sitting or standing relative to him. We don't know why. For nine full seconds, Donald Trump was allowed to stand back up during an active shooting, an active shooter situation, situation, even though they at that point had said the shooter, the shooter was down. How would have they know? How would they have known if there were more shooters or not? Nobody knew that. There could have been five shooters for all they knew. Yet they allowed him to stand up in the middle of that, you know, crisis and pose for a photo. Right. It was weird, and I think these were completely normal questions, but my bosses were like, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. You can't. But check this out, okay, Jason, just put it up. Because my questions now seem even more normal with this post. And this is not some cuckoo conspiracy website. This is the Washington Post reporting. Here's the headline. To Tilt Hungarian election, Russians Propose staging assassination attempt. Huh. Let me read this reporting. Russian intelligence proposed a fake assassination attempt on Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, the sitting prime minister, to rescue his dwindling support ahead of a pivotal general election which is coming up next month. Orban, who, by the way, J.D. vance flew out to support in his election has persistently supported Moscow, meaning Russia's interests within the eu, the European Union and NATO, and is currently wielding his veto to block vital financial aid to Ukraine. But the nationalist 16 year rule, he's been in it for 16 years. He's doing what Trump wanted to do is in jeopardy as he trails in the polls ahead of a parliamentary election on April 12 next month in a beer. To rescue Orban's choices, Russia's foreign intelligence service, which is called the SVR, proposed what it called a game changer to fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign. In internal SVR report and in its internal SVR report verified by European intelligence officers and seen by the Washington Post, it said that the staged assassination attempt would, quote, shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one. The report argued that the event would change the focus of the election campaign onto state security and the stability and defense of the political system. I'm saying it's just the thing that's happened that the Washington Post reported. And with that, I take you to something that Joe Kent, the guy who just resigned as the deputy inside of the National Security Agency, right. This is another thing he said to Tucker. And again, we're not going to give Joe Kent a lot of credit, but he did work there and he does know some things, right? So Kent, who was the number two over counterintelligence under Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of National Intelligence, meaning, so you understand that she oversees all 18 of our intelligence services. All 18, even the CIA. That guy told Tucker Carlson that the way that you would if you were in government sideline dissent when there is a questionable action that the government has taken, is that what you would do is you give no information whatsoever about something that it is obvious to any rational observer that there should be information on. Right. And that if you and government don't want to address that thing, you simply give no information at all to the public, none. Which leads the more curious among the public, particularly now that we have online and social media to play around with, to pivot to conspiracy theory so that once they are in conspiracy land, all the attention gets diverted onto those conspiracy theories, especially the craziest ones, so that the attention gets deflected away from whatever it is that you as the government did, but that you're trying to conceal. You see that? Do you get it? And so once you've centered the conspiracy theories, including by debunking them, because debunking them is also raising them to the public consciousness. And then the minute once you do that, the minute anybody rational starts asking questions, they get lumped in with the conspiracy theorists and they get dismissed as crazy and voila, you've effectively covered up the information that you're trying to conceal. Now, when Kent said that, he was talking about a long list of right wing conspiracy theories, including the one around the killing of Seth Rich, Remember the young Democratic aide who was killed in D.C. which the right believes was tied to Hillary Clinton and that Rich was going to expose, that she and her people invented Russiagate. And also the COVID pandemic and the vaccines, which there are lots of conspiracy theories on the right about, you know, the government trying to. The Democrats trying to use the vaccines to social control and population control, even though Trump was president. Trump was president. I don't know how they think it's a Democratic. Trump was the president. But anyway, he was also talking about Charlie Kirk's murder, which he said he was told he couldn't look into, which is weird, right? And there are lots of people on the right who think that Charlie Kirk may have been killed by the Israelis to shut him up over his increasing objections to their genocide in Gaza and his opposition to the war in Iran, which Joe Kent says he voiced directly to Trump. And of course, the attempt on Trump's life in Butler, which he also says he was prevented from truly investigating. And there are conspiracy theories there about whether Iran was involved or just set up to seem to be involved with the shooter, Thomas Crooks. But just from a journalistic point of view, it is weird that we know very little about him other than that his parents were psychologists and that they were Republicans and that he was a registered Republican who had given to an Act Blue, I think, related or like a liberal charity one time, like 15 bucks to sign up for something, but that he was a registered Republican. We don't know if he ever voted. We just don't know much about him. Right. We know so much more about Squeaky Frome, who shot Gerald ford in the 70s. You just know anything about this guy and how he managed to get on the roof and lay there for like 90 minutes while people were saying, hey, there's a guy with the gun on the roof and nobody did anything. And how the weird Secret Service, you know, Trump had Secret Service because he's a former president, right? But the Secret Service seemed to like, not throw him on the ground the way they did with elderly Ronald Reagan when he was shot in the 80s. But with him, they let him stand back up and do this iconic pose that when that happened, you know, Jason, our youngest son, he called me. He said, it's over. They're like, the election's over. I had another friend that's now in the kind of, you know, world of national security. He says, yeah, that's. It's done. That photo is so iconic, there's no way you can beat him now. That was kind of the thing, right? And then that photo became such an iconic thing. It was on everything. It was. It became the image of prom. It's a weird thing. Also, the thing about the ear. It is a weird thing. He shows up, they say. They keep telling us he got shot in the ear, but there's no residual wound on his ear. The guy's 79 years old. He's almost Mueller's age. Mueller was 81. He's 79. He's almost 80. But there's no residual wound. He had this big Duplo bandage on his ear at the convention that he didn't seem to have it a few days later. It's all weird. Where is medical records? This is the President, United States. His medical records are public record. It's a matter of public security that we know the president is healthy. We can get everybody's medical records and not his. It's weird. And just the timing of it. This was literally days before he accepted the Republican nomination. And suddenly he's got this iconic moment that makes him almost unbeatable. But you can't question it, because if you ask any questions about it, you're now lumped in with the craziest conspiracy theories. So you're just supposed to accept the official story, like you got to accept that JFK was hit by a lone gunman? UFOs aren't real. All of the things get lumped in together, like the QAnon thing. Except the QAnon ERs turned out to be more right than wrong about a global pedo ring that was maybe sacrificing and consuming children when not sexually violating. It's weird that they were kind of right about that. But you're not supposed to say that, right? This and Joe can't explain that is how conspiracy theories work for the government. It also worked post the 2000 election, where Jason and I were living in Florida when our kids were very young. You can't even question the validity of elections, despite the fact that at that time, nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers went to the floor of the Senate House members, mostly Congressional Black Caucus, and one Asian American member, and demanded that A senator, a Democratic senator stepped forward and co sign with them to overturn that election because they had real questions about what happened in Florida. There were people had real questions about the machines. And now it's just like normal for people to question the machines. But you couldn't even do it when I was in local news. You weren't even allowed to question the 2000 election. You had to say from the point of view of the mainstream media that that election was totally normal and that it is. While it's weird for the Supreme Court to decide an election, we're not supposed to question that Bush got in just as he was supposed to and we're supposed to see it as non coincidental that he then launched a war. That the neoconservatives who invaded his administration and took over the Pentagon, State Department, they were all neocons who wanted to invade Iraq forever and ever and take over their oil and also invade Syria and Iran. And we're just about to say what's non coincidental, right? You can't ask questions because conspiracy theories, and this is the thing Joe Kent said that I think is valuable, that the government uses the most wild versions of conspiracy theories to stop you from asking questions about anything. We were never allowed to ask after 9, 11. Well, why did, why did Bin Laden do it? We just, he just did it. Was it. Are we allowed to fight what was in his manifesto? We can't read it. So independent journalist Max Blumenthal, who was not in the mainstream media, he went to Chris Hedges, who's not in the mainstream media, he went on his podcast recently and he said that per his journalistic sort of, and I don't know, I haven't seen what he's actually done journalistically and where he got the information, but this is what he said, that one of the ways that Donald Trump was gaslit into attacking Iran is that he was gaslit and told that crook's attempt on his life was part of an Iranian plot, that Iran were plotting to kill him and that that is one of the reasons he was turned against Iran. He was told Iran was somehow connected to the plot, that somehow it's connected to what crooks did. We know crooks did take a shot at him. We know he did kill someone. We don't know where that guy was standing. We know three people were shot in total. He did kill someone and then he got murked like they shot him in the head and killed him. That there's a conspiracy theory that somehow was wrong. And this is what Maxwell said that Trump was gaslit to believe Iran was behind it. Now, look, Maga would be down for war with Iran if they really believe that the Iranians had tried to kill their king. But we haven't seen that theory floated to them, which is the one way to get them to be down with it. We haven't seen that. Instead, they are breaking out. When you heard the ambassador to the UN Donald Trump's guy, say, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, it only matters what Maga thinks. Well, the problem is Maga thinks that Bibi put him up to it. And most of the journalism that's been done that has some validity to it, including Marco Rubio essentially saying that it was because of Israel. Let's play E3.
- [109:38]
D
The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return and the United States found it intolerable, in my opinion, based on what Steve and Jared and
- [109:50]
A
Pete and others were telling me, Marco
- [109:52]
D
so involved that I thought that they were going to attack us. I thought they would if we didn't do this at the time we did it. I think they had in mind to attack us.
- [110:01]
A
Well, there's two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't happen. I mean, he tried to take it back and clean it up later, but you just heard the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, a former United States senator, say that Israel was going to attack Iran. And so we needed to attack Iran first before they retaliated against our assets. Which he then goes on in the longer clip to say they have, they have retaliated against our assets all over the Gulf. Donald Trump says, you know, it was Marco and Pete and JD and he's blaming all of them. And he also mentioned Jared, who's made all sorts of interesting, very lucrative deals. Jared Kushner, his son in law, with the Saudis, who also also want Iran to be attacked with the help of the United States. Again, the Butler shooting, which again left one man dead, happened two days before the RNC convention, like right before, two days later, Donald Trump was going to have proper Secret Service protection because he would have then been a presidential candidate, would have stepped up his Secret Service. So that window, and when he was attacked was very important. And it is arguable that but for Butler, he might not have won election again. Butler gave him momentum that in hindsight was unstoppable because otherwise people might have sort of thought about his first term and how he screwed up the pandemic and how the economy was terrible. No one thought about anything other than that after, other than Butler after that. And because Trump got back in, three countries have gotten basically what they've wanted forever. Saudi Arabia, which hates the Iranian regime, Russia and wants to be the preeminent power in the Middle East. Russia, which now gets to sell oil again without sanctions. The Trump regime has relaxed sanctions on them so that they can sell oil again and have the money in the bank to continue to prosecute their war, to absorb Ukraine and Israel, which has been trying to get us to join them in a war on Iran for 30 years. DB is now free to keep promising his bananas, insane right wing cadre that supports him and keeps him in office just before an election, that they can pursue Eretz Israel and absorb Lebanon, Jordan, parts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He's got them to. He lets them keep believing that they're going to absorb all these countries and turn into a giant Israel. Jared Kushner again cut financial deals with the Saudis. He's free to keep pursuing his and Steve Witkoff's development project on the bones of the Gaza genocide. And who knows what other financial benefits he's raking in. This is who Trump said was one of the people who convinced him. Trump's AI billionaire friends. Because Trump got back in, because of Butler, they now get back in. And now you've got the AI billionaire friends at the Pentagon with a fat new deal on the public dime for Palantir to become the power behind mass surveillance. An AI based war, which also you've got the private prison guys, they've won because of it. Right? They gave Trump a lot of money because he got back in. They now get crazy paid off of mass detention, not deportation. The far right, they get their police, State Heritage foundation got the very unpopular project 2025 through which if it had been take Butler out. And we're just talking Project 2025. No way they get back in. And they're now on track to run American women out of public life back into the kitchen. We're gonna talk about that more on Wednesday. That's on top of getting the end of Roe v. Wade during his first Trump term when Mitch McConnell stole him a Supreme Court, the Christian nationalists, they have a DOJ that is essentially acting as their enforcer. The Epstein class's protector. Right? They are protecting the Epstein class so the pedos do not have to worry about going for prison for what they did with Epstein or what they're still doing. Everybody wins except the American people, who are getting poorer, more afraid, more surveilled and more terrorized, by the way. Their next plan is to try to use the Homeland Security shutdown to lever in and force in the Save America act so that you can never vote them out. Because that would essentially delete the voter registrations of more than 60 million women who changed their names when they got married and force every American to prove they're a citizen in order to vote. Can you do that right now, the Supreme Court, which is all captured, they seem poised to rule that states that accept absentee ballots that are postmarked by election day, meaning you mailed them before election day, got the postmark, but the ballots arrive after. They can no longer do that. They're going to make it almost impossible for you to get rid of them. So if you happen to believe that somebody pulled an OR bond on us in 2024, you're not entirely crazy. You're not entirely crazy if you think something, something in the milk ain't clean like the old folks say, like the old black folks say they say something in the milk ain't clean. You're not allowed to say that in mainstream media, which is why I'm thankful to be in independent media. You're not allowed to question anything. You must accept the official stories on anything. But are all do these stories. There is a principle called Occam's Razor, which is that when you when faced with a situation, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Cook, does it make sense to you that out of nowhere a random kid, two days before the election tries and misses to kill Donald Trump? I mean, I'm not saying there. I don't know. I do not know. I'm just saying there's been zero journalism. Yeah, but it's funny that. No answers, nothing just leaves the conspiracy theories out there. This is what Joe Kent said. He said let the conspiracy theories run so that no rational person would dare question the official narrative. Lest you seem insane, there were decades. It sounds like something that Israel would say, right?
- [116:10]
C
It sounds very, very, very similar to something Israel would say. I mean, they are covering up something and they don't want us to know about it.
- [116:16]
A
But inquiring minds want to know and we will find it out. Trust me. And genuine and genuinely, journalism is about curiosity. And when I simply expressed my journalistic curiosity about this weird thing about a presidential candidate, this has never happened before where you have a presidential candidate, someone takes a shot at them, could have blown his head off. And in that moment, I have been a public speaker for a very long time. And every single time that I've been, and my protectors are not Secret Service, but, and Jason knows that got the people who protect me. There's one really adorable little short lady who was, she was the head of NBC security and she once told me I was doing a speech at a commencement and I get a lot of threats from, you know, Maggie don't like me, they don't like my ass. And she said, if I tell you that we're going down, don't even ask me no questions, I will throw you on the ground. And this is a short lady, she said, you will go down. It's not about your shoes, your makeup, your hair. This is what I had, hair. This is not about that. This is about, if I tell you you're going down, you're not getting up, you're not getting your shoes. If you run out your shoe, you leaving your shoes, you're telling me Secret Service said to a 70 something year old man after somebody takes a shot at him, go on and stand up and take an iconic photo. Come on, reporters, journalists, you're not in any danger. Come on and stand in front of him and take that iconic shot. We gotta get that shot, baby. That's weird. I'm just saying it's strange. And I'm not saying I have an answer for it and I'm not saying anything conspiratorial happened. I'm just saying that now the Washington Post, of all people, of all journalists, an organization owned by Jeff Bezos, who is one of the oligarchs taking over media. Let her cook. Have they, they have, they have done a story in which allegedly Russia tried to create such a condition for Viktor Orban. Maybe they were inspired by how Trump became so popular after. I don't know. All I know is that sometimes governments do really horrific things in order to get what they want. And there are people who sort of exist at a higher level than the government. These oligarchs who want certain things, they want certain autonomies, they want to not pay taxes, they want to control the country, they're Very interested in mass surveillance, as was Jeffrey Epstein. They're very interested in total control. They're trying to build these sort of autonomous islands. Apparently Greenland is one that they have their mind on, that they can live autonomously from any sort of rules and regulations and no taxes. They want to. They want. They want to live, like, free of any restraint, and they clearly want to live free of moral restraint. If you look at what the Epstein class was doing, they just want to be free to do whatever they want and then also live forever. Maybe live on Mars. I mean, the stuff that they say sounds crazy, but they're saying it out loud. They better pray that we don't take power, boy, because the status quo cannot stand, and they will go down hard. And if they don't go down, vote every single Democrat out of the House and start a new party. Well, this is the challenge. Is that what we need as we. As we kind of wrap here is that we need to have a Democratic Party. The traditional Democratic Party, just like the traditional media, cannot solve this for you, because the traditional media won't even ask any questions. And look, I am not one to go in for all the conspiracy theories. People had them about COVID everything like that. There's lots of conspiracy theories out there. They're not all true. But again, I don't think Joe Kent is some sort of genius. I think what he said is just Occam's razor, that when the government wants you to not talk about something, the JFK assassination or whatever, they say, let's promote and push out the craziest conspiracy theories so that regular journalists and regular people won't ask questions. But I am very curious to know how we went from a country that elected Barack Obama and tried to get universal health care to a country where we have armed secret police at the airport. And it is routine, and it is supposed to be considered routine, that we may soon have armed secret police at the polling place. We've gone from a democracy to an authoritarian state in, like, a year. But it's funny. That's the way the system set up the land of the free, the home of the brave. We do whatever we want to do. We don't care about what goes on
- [120:42]
C
in the rest of the world.
- [120:43]
A
We're Americans. We don't have to care about the
- [120:45]
C
rest of the world.
- [120:46]
A
We just care about what's going on here. Now it's happening here. We need to start caring about it. But we overthrew the Venezuelan dictator, but Trump is acting like Maduro world. You know, we're saying that we're somehow different from Russia and Iran, these authoritarian countries, but we have a group of men who are trying to create a Christian Republic of America, just like the Islamic Republic of Iran. They want religious rule over women. They want women to have no rights. We're going to play some sound on Wednesday that will blow your mind. The things that people at Heritage are just saying out loud, they're not even shy about saying they want a theocracy. Iran is a theocracy. People got really mad at me because I said we're marginally better than Iran. They're a theocracy. These people want us to be a theocracy. I'll say it again, Fox, make it your A block again. They want to be a theocracy. They've made it clear they don't want women to vote. They want it to be a family vote. How is that? They want, they say they want a theocracy. They are Christian nationalists, white Christian nationalists. This is why we have this series with Robbie Jones. And to get that, to get the American people to accept Project 2025, which Americans were definitely not prepared to accept, what would they do? What kind of wild machinations? Now, the one thing that sort of implies against Donald Trump in any way, knowing that there was such a plot, is that Donald Trump is a coward. Donald Trump would never willingly go along with a plan that involved anyone shooting at him. Donald Trump is a full on coward. He wouldn't go to Vietnam. He talks about Mueller, but Mueller went to Vietnam. So he's a coward. So I'm not saying Donald Trump would have been in on something like that because Donald Trump is too terrible. He's afraid to shake people's hands because he thinks he'll get germs. He's afraid to walk down a flight of stairs. He's afraid of stairs. Donald Trump is a coward. He's a coward. And I agree with people who say trust nothing. I'm not saying I trust Joe Kent or anything like that. And there are all sorts of versions of it. What I'm saying is I would like to live in a world in which people ask more questions about all of the things that have happened to get us where we are, because we are fully steeped in authoritarianism and autocracy right now. And literally less than a decade ago, we were the country that elected a black president. And that seemed like we were on a fast track to being a multiracial democracy. And suddenly, in just a very, very short time, we've gone to a country where you have to show your papers on the street. One positive step forward, 10 steps back. And these are 10 big steps back. I mean, the fact that we have gone to sort of white South Africa. Show me your papers. Land nationally just like that. Boom. No more women's right to abortion in the, you know, for the Supreme Court. Whisk that away their states or women are being forced to have C sections against their will. Florida just was reading about that this past week. We've suddenly become a state that is much more like Hungary, a country that's much more like Hungary than we are like what we used to be, even four years ago. So it is a rapid change and it is a change that honestly only could have happened with Donald Trump as president again, because he's a shit show. It's the only way this could have happened. The people who want this kind of hellish Gilead had to have Trump. It's why people like Lindsey Graham, who used to call Trump a kook, are giddy that Trump is back in the neocons, the Israel firsters, the people who have always wanted an America that would be like this. The Christian nationalists, the white Christian nationalists, the. All of these people, the only way they get this to happen is Trump has to be president. He had to be president. The only way the AI. I mean, Democrats aren't great, but I doubt Democrats would be putting ice in the airport. Democrats have a lot of flaws, but I can't imagine even like a Mitt Romney Republican doing most of this. There's one person who also stands to benefit from it financially and is willing to let the country go into a pro Russia, pro Saudi, pro Israel, whatever it wants, autocracy. The one person who would do that and who would throw away American democracy without a second thought and not give a damn what happens to his fellow Americans or even his family. The one person who detests America enough to open the door to this hell is Donald. John from let's go to our moment of joy. Our moment of joy, on a very, very different note, took place at the end of Ramadan. It featured the mayor of New York, the first Muslim mayor of New York City, hosting an Eid incredible event at Gracie Mansion, which is the lovely home of the New York mayor. Our own Nivican was there, intrepid Nidda with her camera. And let's take a look at how that went. All right, Ismail, how do you feel
- [125:57]
B
being here at Gracie Mansion on Eave?
- [126:00]
A
What does this moment feel to you? It's amazing. Born and raised Muslim New York City. My mother valued eat so much. She baked, cooked in the morning, so through the night, did all the things. And to be able to come here
- [126:11]
B
with my children and for them to
- [126:14]
C
experience experiences is really, it's great.
- [126:16]
A
And then we're very excited to be here. It's so special to be able it's so special to be able to celebrate Eve in the company of the mayor and all these girls.
- [126:24]
B
All right, guys, tell me how, tell me your name, where are you from?
- [126:28]
A
What borough? My name is
- [126:34]
B
from Queens.
- [126:35]
A
All right, anybody else? Yes, my name is Nor and I'm from Brooklyn. From Brooklyn.
- [126:40]
B
All right, do you guys have any words for any of your friends watching, anything you want to say?
- [126:56]
A
Super cute. Well done. To our wonderful producer, Nila Khan, who is the intrepid. Sometimes she's on air, sometimes she's behind the scenes. She's doing all the things, booking, doing all the great things. So thank you to the entire staff, thank you to Nidha for holding it down and Eid Mubarak to everyone who celebrated and we're wishing everybody a wonderful rest of your evening. Please don't forget to hit, like subscribe and share. We love it. We love our moment of joy. Thank you all for watching and Wednesday we gonna get into a lot more stuff, so make sure that you guys tune in same bat time, same bat channel. Love you guys. Have a wonderful night and goodbye. Getting back to the basics grassroots level Let me dig a little deeper with the shovel Plenty can't tell the force from the trees that I'm hard to detect Like a black hole in the dark Injustice anywhere it's a threat to justice everywhere Let me make this clear I got a bone to pick and I'll never fear the threat of poverty they don't want to talk about it they rap the party so I'm a real talk about it for sure. It's tax season and at Lifelock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's
- [128:03]
C
a big one you need to billions. That's the amount of money and refunds
- [128:07]
A
the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.