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A
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to to the Contrary Podcast. Colby hall over at Mediate writes something yesterday and I want to share with you. Ask yourself, he says if someone had described this week's events five years ago, military extraction operations, federal agents using lethal force against protesters, presidential threats of additional force, would you have believed it could happen without immediate constitutional crisis? Add to that the Justice Department criminally charging not yet criminally charging the chairman of the Federal Reserve, an institution designed to operate independent of political pressure. The fact that it now feels almost normal is the crisis. Great point, great place to start. We're not even halfway through January, so let's get to it. And our guest today, boy, you can tell from the hat. This is a man who is defying the powers that be. Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to the Department of Homeland security, founder of defiance.org miles, there is just so much to wade through. First of all, welcome back to the podcast. Good to have you here today.
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B
Great to be here with you, my friend.
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A
All right, let's start with the Jerome Powell story you wrote yesterday, which I thought was really very interesting. Donald Trump fear mongered about socialist dictators. Now he is becoming one. So talk to me about that. I think, by the way, I mean, two things. Number one, this story is out there in the news because Jerome Powell decided he's not putting up with it. He came out from behind the curtain, posted a video yesterday. Clearly, he is being defiant. He is not rolling over. And he's making it very clear that this is not about any misconduct. This is about an attempt to intimidate and bully the Federal Reserve, the most important, I would argue, most important independent agency. So talk to me about when you talk about these, you know, Donald Trump, the worst thing that could happen to socialist dictators. And here we are.
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B
Yeah, he, I mean, he has all of the hallmarks of it, Charlie. I mean, if you were going to try to be reductionist about what's happening, you would say, you know, well, in the span of a year, Donald Trump has gotten very close to asserting his power in such a way that he decides what is on your store shelves, how much it costs, who runs the companies that produce the things you buy, whether the federal government invests in those companies, and what you know about the economy in which you're buying things, controlling the data and deciding what to tell the American public about the statistics. And then take that one step further, further by trying to control the Fed, deciding how much your money is worth. Those are all things that we never wanted the nation's chief executive to be able to do because each of those things, even individually, smacks of socialist dictatorship, the type we saw throughout the 20th century.
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A
All of these decisions, yeah, all of these decisions being made by the government. And again, for our listeners, you know, five minutes ago, to be conservative meant that you did not want to concentrate this kind of power in the hands of bureaucrats or politicians, that you wanted to be in the free marketplace. I'm trying to remember the last time we had a president who was this aggressive in saying, I want to control everything. I mean, a lot of the conservative movement was a critique of the New Deal, which actually seems rather modest compared to what Donald Trump is trying to do to the economy.
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B
Well, and it's what we as conservatives, Charlie, used to call a command economy. And for people who are not steeped in economics, that's easier to understand than defining the philosophy of socialist economics is a command economy is one in which a single person, centralized power, decides how economic transactions are going to be carried out. That person is all powerful and can insert themselves. I mean, there was an example this past week of Donald Trump deciding what he wanted credit card interest rates to be. Now, no American, you know, is going to bed worrying about the credit card companies, but Americans should be alarmed at the president deciding what their credit card interest rates are. Just as much as Donald Trump wants to say, I want credit card companies to have this interest rate and lower it, he could easily say, I want interest rates to be 20% on credit cards. We don't want a president who is inserting himself into our wallets like that, into our bank accounts, into individual products on our store shelves. I mean, just look at what Donald Trump did in the past few months to say, I'm gonna make coffee prices go up and then I'm going to make them go down. I'm going to make meat prices go up and then I'm going to make them go down. Like his tariffs are direct taxes on those goods and he was personally making those decisions. And I said in that same piece, you know, if Barack Obama had done the same thing when I was working in the House Republican majority, we would have self immolated on the White House lawn. We would have said this was a constitutional crisis. Any one of those individual things. Pick one. We would have said Barack Obama was acting like a dictator. Don Trump has done all of them. And my former Republican colleagues have, have mostly shrugged and tried to ignore it. But this, but this engagement with Jerome Powell makes it impossible to ignore because Republicans and the folks on Wall street who supported Donald Trump's return know that manipulation of the Fed fundamentally puts their livelihoods in danger.
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A
Okay, so there's two parts to this that I want to dive into. First of all, is, you know, the, the investigation of Jerome Powell, you know, part of the vengeance tour of Donald Trump. I mean, it's been very clear that he's with using the Department of Justice as a cudgel to go after people he perceives as his enemy. He's obviously mad at Jerome Powell. It's about policy, not anything else. But why bother a criminal investigation? Let's just talk about the sort of the weird mentality behind this. Jerome Powell is leaving. Jerome Powell is not going to be the Fed chair for that much longer. The problem, if you're Trump and you're mad at Powell, fine, he's going to. Why? What is the point of siccing the flying monkeys of Pam Bondi's Department of Justice on him?
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B
I think it's twofold. One, I think he potentially wants to remove Powell sooner. And he already had the pretext of the fact that Powell's going to be gone soon. So having him gone sooner maybe wouldn't be too upsetting to people who are watching. But there still was no real proximate cause. This is the creation of a proximate cause. And here's the thing. Donald Trump knows, at least constitutionally, he is time limited. So. So, you know, Powell, I think, is supposed to leave in May. You know, those five months, that's a not insignificant amount of time in Trump's world, especially if he wants to take these actions. And so I think they're spinning this up as pretext to get rid of Powell. But the second justification would be to intimidate whoever comes next is to show them, look, you obey the president or you will suffer this fate. And that's not reckless speculation. Donald Trump's own lieutenants have been quoted by major media outlets saying that is partly the reason for some of his revenge actions, including the one against me last April, is his. His minions went to the media the next day and said, we did this to make a point. They admitted that it was to intimidate other people who would consider speaking out. So I think that's what they're trying to do with Jerome Powell, remove him sooner and send a message of control. But, you know, look, folks on Wall street, well, that's what around the country, not just Wall street, they should. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
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A
Well, I mean, this is because there were a lot of people on Wall street who had been telling the president, okay, you need to tread somewhat carefully about the Fed, because there are some significant economic risks, downsides to removing the independence of the Fed. So there was a lot of pressure against him, so he's gonna get his own way anyway. But now, not only, and I agree with your analysis now, basically, he's poured kerosene on it and ignoring, not just going after Jerome Powell, but ignoring all the people that were saying, do not destroy the independence of the Fed, now there's a significant risk to that. And if there's one thing where he's been a little bit risk averse and disagree with me if you'd like, has been in rattling the markets, why was he willing to do this and how are the markets going to respond, do you think?
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B
I think he was risk averse in rattling the markets at the beginning, but now he's been less averse. He's done it anyway. I mean, tariffs are the best example. But you've just seen a lot of these businesses scared to speak up. The markets have been rattled. They're just really scared to say something. I mean, think about that footage of the CEO of Ford Motor Company going on television last year defending tariffs. You cannot think of an industry more fatally damaged by tariffs than the auto industry. All the parts from all the places that they come from. Normally, in normal times, the CEO of an automaker would go on television and blast the President of the United States for put their business, an American business, completely at risk with such a short sighted policy. And yet the Ford CEO didn't do that. Why? Fear. They are all afraid of being investigated. They are all afraid of retaliation. But this is to another level and I Hope that corporate CEOs speak up about this, but I think Trump is doing this. He's less rattled to rattle the markets because he has seen the success of his revenge campaign. He has seen that people are willing to capitulate to him. And so he's taking it the next step, you know, a little more than a year ago, about a year and a half ago, before Donald Trump got reelected, I went up to New York City and a well known Wall street billionaire asked me to speak to a bunch of the corporate CEOs private dinner and they wanted to know what did I forecast a second Trump administration's economic policy would look like? What was the no BS take? Because a lot of them, after four years of Biden, wanted a Republican back in. Of course they remembered Trump, but they felt like there would be st. And I went in with one message and said, if you want stability, the gravest mistake you could make is returning this man to office. And I went through the litany of things that we've now seen. Donald Trump would come back into office and he would slap tariffs on everything. He would personally try to manipulate industries. And top of my list was he would try to take over the Federal Reserve. And everyone in the room knew the consequences of that. Everyone at that table at that dinner agreed that would be catastrophic. They disagreed with me that Donald Trump would do such a thing. They didn't think he would be so brazen. And that's right. And I don't say that as and I told you so. We can't change the decisions that we've made to returning this man to office. What we can do is open our eyes to the consequences and keep this from going further because the consequences of him taking over the Fed are truly catastrophic for all Americans.
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A
No, I agree. I'm gonna read something that Yasuo Monk wrote about this. You know, he's basically saying, look, it's very easy to think this is just another one of Donald Trump's norm breaking gestures. He wants to put a pin in it. He said, look, there are many missteps which explain how both Turkey and Venezuela went from flawed but real democracies with unequal but flourishing economic systems to repressive autocracies that are in the grip of inflationary spirals which are impoverishing much of their own population. But the fact that both Hugo Chavez as well as Nicolas Maduro and Erdogan repeatedly broke these two fundamental norms, the independence of the, you know, currency is probably more responsible for the disastrous outcomes for ordinary Turks and Venezuelans than any other single step they took. I'm sure that there are others, however. But anyway, Yasha goes on. This is what makes the news. The Department of Justice is prosecuting Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, particularly striking. In a crowded news environment, it will be tempting to write this off as one more norm. The Trump White House has decided to break one more extreme thing about which we should roll our eyes before moving on to discuss yet another unhinged post on Truth Social. But it is far more significant than that. And I think he. We agree with that, which is why we started. Okay, so I want to talk about Department of Homeland Security, your former colleagues, what's happening, the extraordinary events of the last week. I don't know whether it's a breaking point. I don't know whether it's a tipping point. My sense that people are reacting on a visceral level. I think it's exposing certain things about our culture that were pre existing conditions but are now impossible to ignore. I don't know whether you caught it or not. You probably did. Stephen Colbert the other night, and I'm sure many of our listeners have already heard this with Stephen Colbert the other night during his monologue, talked about the shooting, police, murder, I believe, of Renee Nicole Goode and The way in which the administration was trying to spin it, how they were denying the evidence, how they smeared her, how if they went after her, how Maga in many ways began to celebrate the brutality and the cruelty. And this is what he said. This was the most striking line when he says that the new culture is obey or die. And as I wrote in my newsletter yesterday, I mean, think about this. America went from a country where our operative slogan was live free or die to now. Obey or die. This is Stephen Colbert.
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Message from this administration is clear. Only they determine the truth. And when their forces come to your city, obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn't obey. This should be an alarm bell for the entire country, whether you live in a red state or a blue state. Because. Because if we let this go on, regardless of who your state voted for, one day you'll have unaccountable armed government agents acting with impunity in your town.
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A
Miles, your reaction to that is that the future that we have to fear that it's obey or die and that we're going to have these masked agents coming into our communities and acting with lawless impunity.
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B
It is. And I would say to folks regardless of party affiliation, this is something you should fear. This is why autocratic takeovers work, is because whoever is attempting to be a wannabe dictator convinces one side that they are going to be in power forever. And that side is happy to overlook the precedent that's being set that could later be used to oppress them. They never expect that they will go from oppressor to the one being oppressed. But that's exactly what will happen here. Donald Trump is setting precedent so that if you're a conservative who is cheering on masked agents on the street, well, just be aware that if a far left leader comes into power, those same tools are going to be used to repress you. The same people who say, what if they come for our guns? Well, Donald Trump is laying the possibility of a state police force that can exert its power in the opposite way across the political spectrum. I think that's why people.
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Well, we have that state police force.
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B
That's right.
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Right. I mean, look, this is like his private army. I think you've described it that way. With billions of dollars being pumped in the tens of thousand of new agents and now suddenly. And look, I mean, my understanding is that ICE does not have the legal authority to enforce local laws, and yet they're descending like an occupying force into one community after another and are showing a willingness to Exercise the force in a way that most professional police departments I think, would try to avoid. So, Tam, you've worked with Department of Homeland Security. What has ICE become and what is it going to come? When we look at ice, what should we think? I mean, it feels like it's becoming this private, unaccountable army that exercises lethal force, really, almost at the drop of a hat.
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B
Well, it is. And here's what's really important for people to understand. Donald Trump wanted the thing that you just described, Charlie, in his first term, very, very specifically, because I see how people on the MAGA side write us often say, ah, this is hyperbole, of course. He's not creating a private police force for himself. Well, let me tell those MAGA people this. When I was in the Trump administration, in those first two years, Trump explored the idea of building his own Wagner group, like Vladimir Putin had in Russia, his own personally accountable military and police force. Yep. He looked into a privatized military that would report directly to him. Why? He was jealous of the fact that foreign leaders had that ability, that Putin had something like a Wagner group. And he disdained the military chain of command, which was full of people who were trained to second guess things like illegal orders, or at least allegedly full of people trained to second guess illegal orders. In fact, I was later told that after I left the administration in the third year of Trump, there was another dust up of this where the National Security Council was sent to go look into the possibility of creating a privatized military that would report directly to Donald Trump. And the people at the NSC at the time shot that down. They got the lawyers to shoot it down. But here is Donald Trump coming back into office and saying, you know what the easy button is, is I'll just do this with ice, an agency that has far less accountability and oversight than other other federal law enforcement agencies. I will turn that into my private police force. And the irony, Charlie, is Donald Trump campaigned on eliminating the so called deep state, and he is quite specifically building his own deep state, a group of ideological, ideologically motivated public servants who will be there past his term in perpetuity to go enforce his will at the literal barrel of a gun you're bringing in. They're targeting MAGA groups and young people in the MAGA movement to come join ice. And they're giving them an actual loaded gun to go out and roam America's city streets. And they're also giving them something else, Charlie. They're giving them direction from the top down that they can do Whatever they want. In July, Donald Trump said he was giving, quote, total authorization to members of ICE to use, quote, whatever means necessary to go after protesters.
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A
That is what I heard you say, right? And then, so when you have an event like this, you understand why they think that they can do this and why they're going to get away with it. I mean, in my newsletter yesterday, I quoted Andrew Sullivan who said, look, you know, this is, you know, frankly, and I know the cool kids don't want to use words like tyranny, but when you have masked agents, you know, heavily armed, who are using lethal force and know that they can act with impunity, that the law will not apply to them, Donald Trump will pardon them, whatever. This is an ext. Extremely dangerous moment. And, you know, it's interesting watching the reaction, because I think in many ways that's as alarming as the incident itself. And you can tell that there's two streams. And I think it was Nick Cottaggio from Dispatch, the Dispatch, I want to give him credit for this, said, you know, there's kind of a latent law and order impulse on the part of the right. And what they're doing is they're tapping into this idea that anyone who defies the police or push backs again against the police, by the way, with the exception the January 6th attackers, anyone deserves what they get. So you basically have this idea of obey or die is now being built in and encouraged on maga. That's number one. Number two is this ongoing demonization of the opposition, that protesters are not Americans who are engaging in dissent. They are domestic terrorists. They are extremists. If you. If you show up and you engage in any sort of nonviolent civil disobedience, that's something that shows that you hate America. And so the demonization and the belief that any sort of defiance is terrorism, you put that together and you have this really toxic stew that really is a green light for more violence against anyone who stands against them. And I want to connect the dots to what Pam Bondi was saying when she came out with that long list of, you know, if you have radical gender ideology or you're anti Christian, or you question our immigration policy, you are a domestic extremist. This kind of rhetoric, with all the things we're describing, creates an incredibly dangerous situation. But it's what Donald Trump wanted envisioned and what's happening under his watch.
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B
I'm glad that you mention NSPM 7. So this is National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 that lays out this new bureaucratic architecture for the government to go after domestic terrorists, which it basically categorizes as people who have an anti American, anti Christian ideology. And you know, a few months ago when that order dropped, there were so many other controversies people didn't notice. And a buddy of mine, a journalist, Ken Klippenstein. Ken and I got on a phone call and we said, you know, this is probably the most significant thing to have happened so far during the Trump administration. But people won't realize it until friends and protesters and organization leaders they see on TV start getting arrested after being terrorist watch listed. And, and it will look like something very foreign to us by the time we catch up, but it will already have been institutionalized. That is now well on its way. And I will say, Charlie, as you were describing this environment, there is an exquisitely rich history of exactly what you describe over the past hundred years. I mean, I'm sitting here on my desk with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn. I always forget how to say his name. You know, Gulag Archipelago on my desk, which, you know, Time magazine had said was the best non fiction book of the 20th century. This is, this is now what, 75 years ago or 70 years ago that this book was written. This has all happened before. This has all happened before and in the exact verbiage you use of domestic terrorism and that you must obey and that if you don't obey you will be rightfully imprisoned. This has happened before in the world. We should have seen it coming. But now that it is here, we can still stop it. It is not hopeless at this point because there is also an exquisitely rich history of people realizing they are headed down the so called road to serfdom, as Friedrich Hayek said, and pumping the brakes and stopping it and taking to the streets and you know, as, as they say, standing athwart history and yelling stop. That is possible. And we may not have seen it fully this weekend, but I think you're right. This past weekend might have been a starting point to that sort of mass mobilization. The longer you stay alive, the longer.
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No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax. So since you're diving into history, as, as I wrote in my newsletter yesterday, I, I, I violated Godwin'. You know, Godwin's law is that anybody that you know invokes Hitler's already lost. By the way, Godwin himself, I think, suspended that law during the Trump years. But you know, speaking of which, I went back and I watched and I strongly recommend this for folks. 1961 movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy. It's a fantastic cast. Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, I mean, one after another, Judy Garland, I mean, it is magnificent. Actually, I started watching the new Nuremberg movie, the one with Russell Crowe where he's, he's fantastic as Herman Goering. It's a very disappointing movie. I think they didn't have the kind of depth that I was looking for. I think I've watched a bunch of actual German movies where they, I think, you know, pull fewer punches in some ways. Anyway, Judgment at Nuremberg is really a meditation on the law, on personal responsibility and the value of human life. And, and again, I, and I described this in, in my newsletter. Spencer Tracy is the American presiding judge. Burt Lancaster is the German judge who is, who is convicted. And Burt Lancaster is the best of the worst. He actually still has a conscience. He knows what they did was wrong. He was appalled by Adolf Hitler, but he went along with it anyway. And at the very end of the movie, and Spencer Tracy regards the Burt Lancaster character as tragic, that he knew that he was doing evil things, but he rationalized it in his mind. And in the end of the movie, Burt Lancaster in prison, wants to see Spencer Tracy because he thinks he understands him. And he says to him, you must understand, you have to understand that I never thought it would come to this, those millions of people. I never thought it would come to this. And Spencer Tracy looks him in the eye and says, you know, Herr Janing, who's his name? It came to this the first time you sentenced an innocent man to Death, it starts that way. And so I would strongly urge people to go back because we have gone through this before, including the fact that decent, honorable people found that they were going along with it, and they never thought it would get to where it would go, but they made these compromises. So I would strongly urge people to watch that. Okay, so bringing up to date here, speaking of a little bit of history, did you catch CNN's Jake Tapper when he interviewed Christy?
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B
No.
- [29:58]
A
This weekend?
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [29:59]
A
Boy. You know what? The whole notion of sending her out as the public face of all of this. In any case, I thought he did something very, very interesting. We've been talking about, you know, the MAGA line over the last few days has been you touch a federal officer and terrible things are going to happen to you. You know, if you don't obey, then you forfeited your freedom and perhaps your life. Let me play a little bit of this because he did something that I thought was very interesting. He plays this January 6th, and then he compares it to the fatal shooting of Renee Goode by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. You know, and he talks, he shows these law enforcement officers being physically attacked. So let's play a little bit of this interchange, especially when he challenges to Kristi Noem. Can you kind of explain the difference between what you have justified? I mean, Donald Trump pardoned all these people who attacked these police officers, and now you're saying that anybody that interferes in any way with police officers, it is okay to shoot them. So let's play a little bit of this exchange.
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B
Those are law enforcement officers being physically attacked. By this standard, would any of those.
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A
Officers being justified in shooting and killing.
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B
The people, causing them physical harm?
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A
Every single situation is going to rely on the situation those officers are on. But they know that when people are putting hands on them, when they are using weapons against them, when they are physically harming them, that they have the authority to arrest them, those individuals.
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B
The president pardoned every single one of.
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A
Those people and, and make sure that they're getting justice for their actions going forward.
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B
President Trump pardoned every single one of those people. And every single one of these investigations.
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A
Comes in the full context of the situation on the ground. So, Miles, Kristi Noem really can't explain that, can he? This, this, this sort of Orwellian double think. The people who attacked the cops on January 6th, they are patriots. The president lets them off. There is no rule of law that applies to them. Woman in Minneapolis turns her car, moves it a few feet ahead, and she's shot dead. And the entire weight of the federal government justifies her murder. Just your thoughts about that exchange with Kristi Noem?
- [32:17]
B
I had a, I'm sure, like you, Charlie, an early desktop computer in the 90s when they really first started to have tower computers. And if you remember in that time period, if you had a Packard Bell or something, you got the blue screen of death all the time. You know, I mean, today kids won't even know what that is because it doesn't exist. But, you know, almost every day there was a point where your computer, the programming just seized up. It couldn't figure out what to do. And it was blue and it was blue. And that was gnome on Jake Tapper. Her programming could not handle the hypocrisy. And this is emblematic of, I think, something larger about not even just this administration, but anytime you see would be autocrats come into power, they have to build their rule on lies and hypocrisy because there's no other way to do what they want to do. They claim to be protecting freedom, but they have to deprive people of freedom in order to achieve what they want. You could go on down the list. This was the perfect example of a hypocrisy. It's also instructive, I think, because whether it's you at the dinner table or Jake Tapper talking to Kristi Noem, this is one of the best ways to show people the truth is you just you, you give them the hypocrisy and you put them in the position to try to justify it. I mentioned the deep state earlier. When I bring this up with fellow conservatives, they don't know how to respond when I say, you know, Donald Trump spent years railing against the deep state, but now isn't he building a tens of thousands of person, ideologically motivated deep state? If he's hiring these people into these jobs, they don't know how to respond to those hypocrisies. And hopefully in their quiet moments, they understand there is a contradiction here. And the only way to answer it is to see the truth about the regime. So I do think it was really useful that Jake did that. But I will say about the actual incident in Minnesota, this was affecting to me, Charlie, in a way that I'm sure it was for other people for a really simple reason. You know that Honda CR V that Renee Nicole Goode was driving? I've got a family member who drives the exact same car. It even looked like the same year of that car. And when you watch that Footage, you see it and think, my God, that could be my sister or one of my friends or just me deciding to drive away out of a volatile scene and being shot in the head. And I think that's what, among many other things is so affecting about this episode for Americans is it went from intangible, these threats from this administration, to very personal, very ordinary. And that banality of evil is something that, you know, our predecessors throughout history who've confronted authoritarianism have said is a hallmark of your turn down a dark, dark path as a nation. And it has become so banal. It's. It's a traffic stop that's fatal. And that you just have to accept because the regime says you have to accept.
- [35:14]
A
Yeah, there were a lot of things about that that were different. Let's be a little bit cynical here. I mean, the fact that she was a young, attractive blonde woman, I think is somewhat of a difference because there have been other people killed by ice. This is ongoing, and there's not the same kind of reaction. But leaving that aside, I do think that that image of her that we've all seen looking up at the officer who is about to kill her and saying, it's fine.
- [35:39]
B
I'm not mad at you.
- [35:41]
A
I am not mad at you. And is this a person who is about to commit a viol. Violent act, a terror act? Is she screaming? Is she, you know, saying, by the way, even if she was, you know, calling him names, that is not a death penalty issue. And then clearly we've seen all the videos. We're not going to go through all the Zapruder videos. But it is very frustrating, you know, to watch people, you know, ignore the evidence of their own eyes, but this. This is a woman who. Look, and I'm reading some of this like, you know, she shouldn't have been there, or, you know, she behaved in a stupid manner. Look, there's a lot of forms of protest test that in retrospect, you'd say, well, you should not be impeding this or you shouldn't be doing this. The real question is, does that justify her murder? Does that justify shooting her in the face? And I think that that's where whatever critique you may make, the fact that they are executing people on the street, and then the president and his entire administration then feels the need not only to send the message, obey or die, but that we will smear you and destroy your reputation. I mean, think about her family, what they have to deal with. What they have to deal with not only the incalculable Loss of their mother and their loved one, but the federal government itself, doing everything possible to destroy her reputation, to make it, to convince people that it was justified to kill this woman. I mean, this is. And I think that the effect. I mean, you know, part of it is we talk about the breaking point, the people who are shocked by it. But I'm also. We need to focus on the people who once again, are moving that overtone window of what they're willing to accept. And you and I have talked about this before. The cruelty is the point. The brutality is the point. The online celebration of these killings and this brutality, it's doing something to the American character. I mean, it is doing something to the American soul. Megyn Kelly, do you see her post? The broken mind, Broken soul of Megyn Kelly. So somebody like, you know, Claire Berlinsky says online, well, she didn't deserve to get shot in the face. And Megyn Kelly, you know, with her millions of dollars, goes, yeah, she absolutely did deserve. She deserved to die. Okay, well, I mean, this is doing something to us, Miles.
- [37:56]
B
You know, there were a lot of terrorist attacks in governments that I helped respond to over the past 20 years. That's pretty much all I did, except for the last couple there during the Trump administration. A lot of it was just responding to terrorist attacks. And if this were an actual terrorist attack, then the moment that Secretary Noem came out and said what she said after it happened, she violated one of the cardinal rules of government response to those incidents, which is, you know, don't do or say something that will put the public in greater danger. And her rushing to the conclusion that this was an act of domestic terrorism created the possibility for a greater conflagration and public safety threat because it was so audacious to describe something so, so simple and pedestrian as driving away as a terrorist attack. And, and I think of it this way, Charlie. I mean, that officer or fired a gun at an American citizen. But Kristi Noem's DHS and Donald Trump's White House have continued to fire the gun since that episode. They have continued to put a loaded gun of rhetoric in people's hands, like Megyn Kelly and others, by asserting that these officers have absolute immunity, that this woman did it, and saying as a footnote, well, let's let the investigation continue. But by the way, way, we've already been judge, jury, and literal executioner for this woman. So, you know, the investigation will do its own thing. But just listen to us. This is terrorism. They're putting that loaded gun in other people's hands, they're continuing to fire it. And I would add onto your list, Charlie, I'm going to give a note of optimism here, though, please, because amidst all of this dark stuff, there was something about seeing the Jerome Powell video last night.
- [39:43]
A
Yeah.
- [39:43]
B
That gave me a little bit of heart. And I'll cite back back to another film. So if people are going to plan a double feature for this week, they should watch the one that Charlie recommended. They should also watch the German foreign language film the Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film maybe 15, 20 years ago. Fantastic film. But, you know, as, as both Charlie and my editors at some point in the past have said to us, you show, don't tell, you know, don't tell people. And, and I don't mean this as a knock against you, Charlie, but guys like you and me tell every day, you know, what's happening. Art show and the Lives of Others is a great film about what was happening in, you know, Stasi Germany, as the Stasi were investigating innocent people for their writings. I won't go through the whole film. People should watch it. But what's so powerful about that film is little, little tiny acts of courage in that movie lead to a cascade of events that ultimately in part, brings the wall down. And that's, that's not just a fantasy of the art world. That tiny acts of courage can balloon just like those tiny acts of cowardice that you mentioned in the film that you recommend. People looking the other way, as an innocent person is charged, can lead to autocracy. So can those tiny acts of courage. And when I saw Jerome Powell's video last night, I thought, you know what? If this had happened in February of last year, Jerome Powell would not be making a video and putting it out to the world. Jerome Powell would be quietly accepting his indictment at the hands of this government, going the traditional route of finding a lawyer and battling this with paperwork. And he would have lost in the court of public opinion, and Donald Trump would have convinced the country or at least a large portion of it. See, this man is a criminal before he's even had his day in court. But Jerome Powell did something courageous. He, he, as soon as he apparently got word that the administration was doing this, he said, no, this is wrong. And I need to go out there and I need to, to very soberly lay this out to the American people before this White House has a chance to spin this in their direction like they did. Renee Nicole Goode, before the first person videos came out, I thought that was Very encouraging that traditionalists like Jerome Powell are now becoming more defiant. That, to me, is a very good sign that we do have a little fight left.
- [42:02]
A
You know, I really like this because who would have expected it would be Jerome Pokemon Powell? I mean, there's nothing about Jerome Powell's background or anything. Right, right. You know, that Jerome Powell would stand up when all of these other, you know, weaklings, you know, have. Have caved in. It's Jerome Powell and, you know, maybe because he has less to lose, but. But you are right. It was this moment of defiance. He blew the whistle on them, he exposed them. He made it clear that he was not backing down. He called out the bullshit that this was just a pretext for going after him. And my guess is, is that this has rattled many of the people who have, you know, told themselves, as you were describing before, you know, told themselves, we can manage this guy, don't worry, he's not gonna do the crazy things. You know, yes, this may be bad for, you know, other, you know, constitutional norms, but it, but it's good for my bottom line. I think that this is one of those, you know, this is one of those, those red lines that, that's crossed that people may pay attention to, but what's extraordinary, and this is what I think a lot of people have a hard time dealing with, let's be honest with you, you and I. But it's still hard to keep up with the pace of events. You know, I started off by reading that Colby hall piece. You just think of the number of things that are happening that every single day, you know, is so breathtaking. You know, the invasion of Venezuela, you know, the threats against Iran. By the way, how ironic that Donald Trump is threatening a military attack on Iran because they're shooting protesters while we are shooting protesters. But let's leave that aside. Can't make it up at one time. These would be constitutional crises. Each and every one of them would be a full blown constitutional cris. And yet we have become numbed to all of that. And I think that's what we have to fight against. Which is why I have to say I really like your decision to go. Pure defiance. And can you just talk about it? Because I know you've explained this before, but for my listeners, you know, it's one thing to be in the resistance, but you had this moment where you said, fuck it, Donald Trump is coming after me. The only way to deal with this is defiance. So just give me. Run the tape back a little bit about how you decided that you were going to defy, not just simply resist.
- [44:15]
B
Honestly, it's not dissimilar from what we just saw from Jerome Powell is, you know, I think a year ago he would have maybe put up a resistance, which is reactionary. Something happens to you and then you respond, maybe you respond forcefully, and that's probably what Jerome Powell would have done on time delay. But instead, he showed defiance. I mean, he actively leaned forward and said, no, I'm not going to take this. Which I've got to say, I mean, Charlie, I have to agree with you that you couldn't pick someone better than Jerome Powell. He's so vanilla. I mean, this guy, you know, he's the guy that eats grape nuts for breakfast and doesn't put honey on it or sugar or anything. He just eats straight grape nuts, maybe without even milk, but. But clearly now he's serving piss and vinegar for dinner. I mean, something happened with him, him and all of us in this time period. And for me and my wife, it was that literal shift of deciding. We could either have our fate determined for us by a bully and, you know, just wait and see what Donald Trump did to us, or we could lean in and we could fight back against this guy. And, you know, I don't want to say that was a super easy decision, because this is not what I want to be doing right now. I, you know, I very much had. I thought I had teed up, me and my wife and our little, tiny growing family for an opportunity to step away from politics, make some money and move on with our lives from all of this. And this took a wrecking ball to all of that. And we could have said, you know what, we're just gonna. We're just gonna wait and see what Donald Trump does, quietly rebuild, go try to build another business and do other things. But, you know, credit to my wife with her spine of steel, she was like, no, it's very, very simple. This is just wrong. And if we don't fight, then we are. We deserve to be on that list of cowards who just gave them the opportunity to do that, this to other people. And that mindset shift, and this is going to sound like, you know, we're on the therapist couch together. That literal mind set shift to this word defiance changed our lives. And she and I got to talking, Hannah, my wife, and she said, you know, how do we give that to other people? How do we give that to other people? And the conversation basically went, well, what if we. Let's go see if that domain Name is available defiance.org and, and then, you know, is there something that we can build into that where we try to pass that along to people? The domain was available, and, and, and we thought about, you know, rather than creating a new organization that goes and does things, why don't we just create a cadence where every single week we go out there and we highlight. Here, here are great groups, great people, great causes that are defying this administration's abuses of power and give people the opportunity to go be a part of that. Because folks kept asking me, like they ask you, what can I do? What can I do? And they're going out there and doing things. They're protesting. But people have an insatiable hunger now to push back. And so we created this, you know, little nonprofit org to go present those opportunities every week of other things that people can do. And if they don't have the time, then, you know, by by pooling our funds together in a club membership, we can go give to each of those groups every single week. Now, that. That's thing that can be done. But we're hoping to sort of train people in the idea of, by default, defying this guy rather than just resisting or reacting to the things that are happening. Because, you know, as a. As a little history nerd, that to me is one of the key differentiators of resilient societies who throw off the yoke of autocrats is they shift into a defiant posture and not just a reactionary resistance posture. And I don't pretend that defiance.org is going to do that for the country, but I think we each need to show by example that that's possible and it's not scary, because that does spread, just like cowardice can spread.
- [48:07]
A
No, I. This really resonates. You know, I don't know whether or not what happened last week was a turning point, but I do sense there is a turning. The willingness of more people to stand up and to defy what's going on here. I think there's also kind of a radicalization going on, people understanding that there is nothing normal about this and that the people do need to push back against. And I guess that's where we separate from. And I understand the sort of, I'm calling balls and strikes political critics, as if this is somehow normal politics. But with every passing day, with every passing week, I think it's obvious that this is not normal politics, and that with Donald Trump, you can't appease him, you can't enable him, you can't rationalize him without taking everything else that's happening and that will happen. And we hope that's dawning on people. And then you hope that that dawning realization translates into some sort of tangible action. And look, I just think that going back to the point we've been making, look, if Jerome Powell is willing to stand up and push back against the administration, why not you, too? I think that we had the opposite role modeling in the first few months where everybody's looking around, going, going, well, if this billionaire is caving in, if CBS is caving in, if ABC's caving in, if, you know, this university is caving in, who am I to stand up against Donald Trump? So there has been this slow, I think, turn, and I agree with you, if this had been last February, maybe this wouldn't happen, but it is this January, and there is some sort of a turning. So is that too optimistic, Miles? Because we have a long, dark slog ahead of this.
- [49:47]
B
We do. And, and history is, is ever the dramatist. And she is making Shakespeare blush this year by. On the 250th anniversary of America laying all of it out and saying it's all at stake. And you might throw all of it away. But there is something unifying and inspiring about that, Charlie. And I've been saying the past couple weeks, there's a. A very, very clear manifesto for the opposition. It's not oppose everything and hate him for being a populist conservative. It's we can unify around opposing the things he does that violate our foundational civic compact. The manifesto for the opposition is written. It is the United States Constitution. It's the easiest way to oppose this man, regardless of your party affiliation, is to say, you know what? We're opposed to anything he does that violates that document. It's already been written. We don't need to have a big confab to get everyone together. That's what we're defending. And there is something honorable and inspiring about being forced into this situation. We are forced to reckon with what our first principles are, to rediscover them if they've forgotten, and to have that opportunity, hopefully, to hand off the Republic to the next generation. It's not a guarantee that we will. I really don't think it's a guarantee. You and I were talking briefly in the green room beforehand about how it's not a guarantee, but if we do it, it's the noblest thing any of us as Americans could possibly do with our lives and with our time. So I am longer lamenting and navel gazing our situation. And I just say, you know, as a family, I mean, you could end these days despondent. I tend to more often than not, let's call it 55% of days end feeling inspired and honored that we get to be a part of this moment and fight for this thing. And, and I, and I hope other people get into that posture. And you know what, it seems like Jerome Powell's there now, too.
- [51:43]
A
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think by the way, you're talking about the foundational documents, I think you restacked Judge Ludig. Judge Ludig has a piece about July 4, 2026, which will be our 250th birthday. And I think that it's not too early to say that we need to take that holiday and that birthday back. You know, that it's going to, that they're going to try to trumpify it, that they're going to try to make it into a MAGA thing. And so I think this is an extraordinarily interesting program project taking back those American values and fighting for them. Miles, I know you are a very, very busy guy. I appreciate very much coming on the podcast and all of your insights as well as that little bit of optimism which Lord knows we could use, or at least that I don't use the word optimism, that hope that we could all use. And I want to thank everybody for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. You know, we why we do this. It's only January 2026, but we are going to continue to remind you every single day that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts.
- [53:09]
B
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A
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B
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