Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/21/25: Elon Gets China War Plans, Tesla Vandals THREATENED w/ Gulag, Bernie AOC HUGE Rallies

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Krystal, Ryan and Emily discuss Elon being showed potential war plans with China, Tesla vandals threatened with foreign gulags, Bernie and AOC's massive rallies, and an interview with Delaware Congresswoman Madinah Wilson-Anton. Sign up for a PREMIUM Breaking Points subscriptions for full early access to uncut shows and LIVE interaction with the hosts every week: https://breakingpoints.locals.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have a million and one stories to get through this morning, as per usual. Ryan and Emily, great to see you guys. Nice to see you. So a little bit of a rundown. Actually, we're going to hopefully have a special guest courtesy of Ryan is bringing this Delaware legislator. Ryan, give people just a breakdown of like really quick TLDR, what is going on in Delaware right now, because it's super crazy and connects directly to national politics as well. Delaware is using a very rushed and unusual process to completely upend its corporate law in order to help out Elon Musk and Tesla

and Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. And I don't just mean because they're connected to their companies. It's particular about giving CEOs and heads of companies more power as it relates to their shareholders and their independent boards. And that could come up on Tuesday. And so it's this multi-billion dollar effort to try to bend this already parasitic and wildly corrupt blue state of Delaware

even further to their corporate will. And the thing that really precipitated this is a Delaware court struck down Elon's Tesla compensation package, supposed to be like $56 billion, which is more profit than the company has made in its entire existence. And they basically said, look, you have a conflict of interest here. The board is completely controlled by you. They're basically your puppets. We are not going forward with this. And so this legislation, my understanding is drafted actually by Elon's or Tesla's law firm. Yeah. And then there's new information now that meta lawyers

were also involved in it because there's this Delaware investigation of meta for some of the Cambridge Analytica stuff, which involves shareholder complaints and then some other problems. And Zuckerberg has threatened to leave Delaware. Musk has left Delaware with Tesla. And so everybody thought it was primarily driven by Musk, but it also seems like Zuckerberg is playing a key role here. And a lot of class interests at work here. Wilson Anton. Yeah, she'll be able to talk a little bit about the vote is scheduled for Tuesday.

And it's not a sure thing that it'll pass. But they obviously you don't want to bet against the billionaires in Delaware. Yeah. Well, I mean, and part of what's interesting here is this is a Democratic controlled state. So good example of the corporate unit party potentially at work. But there's been a lot of outcry over it. So we'll see how it all goes down. I wanted to start.

We've got other news about Tesla. We've got this crazy story about China. We're going to start with Bernie and AOC at a rally yesterday. Actually, several rallies yesterday. Huge turnout for them. We've got updates in terms of the Alien Enemies Act and court orders, etc. So try to get through all of that. But I wanted to start with this story.

This is a wild one. So New York Times and Wall Street Journal are now reporting that Elon Musk was supposed to be briefed by the Pentagon on the U.S. military's plan for any war that might break out with China. Two U.S. officials indicated that was the case to The New York Times. Like I said, The Wall Street Journal ultimately confirmed the White House is denying this, you know, quite vociferously. And Elon is lashing out at, quote, unquote, leakers, which, you know, if they're leaking information, I don't know, maybe that indicates

that is true. But obviously, what's crazy about this, guys, is the fact that if it is true, which I suspect it probably is, given you've got two relatively credible outlets reporting at this point, Elon has massive business interests in China. Tesla, like US is his number one market. Number two market is China. They have the huge gigafactory there. He's had high level meetings with Chinese officials. It's a wild situation to have the huge gigafactory there. He's had high level meetings with Chinese officials. It's a wild situation to have the world's richest man, a billionaire, who has such great business interest in China. He's also, SpaceX has actually been banned from doing any work in China because of the national security implications of some of the things that he's into. And so for him to be read in on our, you know, these are highly classified, top secret plans

for if the shit hits the fan and the U.S. goes to war with China, what our plan would be and what we would do is, Ryan, to say the least, pretty wild thing to be happening here. here yeah we've never had a situation like this before um where somebody has had this deep of a financial link to china uh intimately involved with you know the work of the president what i don't quite understand and maybe amily you have some insight into this well why on earth does he need this briefing like assuming that it's true like is Elon Musk some like military strategist that is going to sit down with the generals and like look at their game their game plan and say well because what I know about Starlink and you know suggest that the way to actually do this is why I like I've seen his thought process and the way he approaches things on Twitter. And I've never been like, that's what we need in the

situation room. But maybe I'm just missing some of his genius. I got nothing, guys. It's insane. And it was entirely predictable. And Crystal, you're right. They're denying it vociferously. Like Pete Hegseth, Sean Parnell, even Trump himself, they have all come out and said this is absolutely not true. Okay, good. There we go. But you know what? I don't even think maybe I'm being... Those are honest guys, right? they'd never shade the truth and maybe maybe I'm being uh what's the right word for this I don't know maybe naive but I can't imagine that this would not be happening every day anyway like this I don't know that this particular um instance is as disturbing as the fact that Elon Musk's job he's's not the head of Doge. He's not the head of what

became Doge at USDS. He is a White House advisor. That's an illegal filing. He is a White House advisor. He's an advisor to the president of the United States. So I just don't, I imagine things almost as disturbing as this are happening on a daily, if not hourly basis anyway. So it was always going to be that way. Someone has massive business interests in China. This is a White House that's in a State Department and a Pentagon that's very focused on China. So anytime he's in meetings or speaking with people, I mean, he's just by osmosis at very like at the very least by osmosis soaking up a lot of this. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal has this explanation of why he's getting the briefing to Ryan's point.

It says Musk, according to one person familiar with the arrangements, is receiving the briefing because he asked for one. He has a security clearance, but isn't in the military chain of command or known to be a military advisor to Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Musk would visit the Pentagon on Friday in a statement on X. Hegseth disputed that he would receive a sensitive China briefing saying it is an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies and smarter production. But I guess, you know, that's the alleged answer is he's getting the briefing because he wanted to get the briefing. And that seems to be confirmation that it actually is about potential war with China. It sounds like what Musk asked to be briefed about is,

what is China's production capacity when it comes to military capacity? and what is the US production capacity, which are legitimate questions for anybody who cares about the US fighting a war with China to ask, because it does appear like right now, if we actually did get in a war, we spent a trillion dollars a year on our military, yet it doesn't seem like we can keep up with them when it comes to manufacturing capacity. Yeah, that's right. Everybody fires off their stuff in a month. Month two, China's looking pretty good. And we're not looking so good. So it seems like that's what Musk wants to talk about.

And then that Hegseth answer seems to suggest that that is what was going to be talked about. That's what innovation is. Yeah, innovation, production like what else could that be about so does it now it doesn't mean that he was like being read in on where the subs are going to be and where the aircraft striker groups are going to be so maybe that's where they're doing their furious denials because it's not that but it still is it's the more important part we also don't war with China. We don't know.

And there's no way for us to know other than their denials about where the line is, allegedly. So, I mean, even at the best case scenario where you have this private tech baron coming into the government to make it more efficient, and he particularly is focused on cutting the Pentagon. If he has business overseas, China, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, whatever it is, it is a insane conflict of interest. We're all aware of that at this point. And there's no check on what we are able to discern. We have absolutely no way. He's supposed to be filing waivers, according to the DOJ, Special Government Employee Status. We don't know what information he's receiving. We have no idea how that's influencing his business. There's absolutely no way that he's able to separate public and private mentally. If you're getting information because of your clearance and because of the fact that you work in the White House, there's absolutely no way

that that doesn't influence at some minimal level, in the best case scenario, the way that you're handling your business. So it's just insane. Of course, Doge was always going to be a glaring conflict of interest. And Playbook read these vociferous denials from Hegseth and Parnell and Trump as some type of admission that there's a line for Elon. And that's interesting because I guess there's some truth that publicly maybe there's shame. There's still a modicum of shame. Right. Having like a tech baron come in and a defense contractor come in. Right.

Granted, defense contractors have been determining the pentagon budget for decades but to have him come in as an actual government employee and making some of these calls like maybe they still have a modicum of shame about it i don't know i don't yeah no that's a that's a good point at least they didn't say so what if we gave them our china china war plans yeah which was a possibility that they would. You know, like these liberals are melting down over giving Elon Musk, who's just a brave patriot, sacrificing himself for the public good. These these war plans. But I think, Emily, to your point, like it just brings home how insane the whole situation is, how insane the entire

situation is. This man is one of he's not just a Pentagon contractor. He's one of the larger Pentagon contractors. And to be honest, Doge hasn't really touched the Pentagon at all, which is interesting and telling in and of itself, given that, you know, if you actually wanted to cut out ways for an abuse, that would probably be the first place that you would really dive into. But, you know, we know from reporting about what he's done at the FAA, he's tried to just sort of, you know, kneecap his competitors there with regard to Starlink and shift contracts to him. We know there's been an effort to shift some of the rural broadband funding to Starlink. And, you know, there may be a like actual case for these things. Like Starlink is a good product. You know,

it works well. And it's been good for me out here in rural Virginia before we got broadband out here, et cetera. But to just be able to go in and himself and his lackeys be like, we're taking that money. You're not getting it anymore. You're fired. You're hired. Here's how we're doing things. We're hoovering up your data, et cetera. When you have this sort of a news item, you know, hit the front page, it just really brings home like this whole thing is crazy. Absolutely crazy. So Emily, I'm curious you know this just this just came out yesterday evening what is the reaction from the right been thus far or do they believe the denials is it uncomfortable for them has there been a backlash like have you seen what the general sort

of vibe and uh approach has been i think it's been i I don't think this changed anything on the right. I think people are, have sort, reconciling with this insanity. And again, like I said earlier, it's not as though, I think this is what makes it easier for people on the right to swallow, is that it's not as though we haven't had essentially defense contractors and private enterprise, well, probably private enterprise, determining what the Pentagon budget is for a really long time. So it's sort of like, okay, so this guy says he wants to do some good. You know, he's actually in this for, you know, not just for himself, but for, you know, the country, and he actually wants to make cuts and etc. I think that's how it's continuing to be rationalized. Because, you know, it's true, it has the Pentagon has been raided by defense contractors for decades, and to Ryan's point, in ways that leave us less safe, arguably. So I mean, that is what allows it to be sort of justified in the minds of a lot of people on the right. And I don't think anything is necessarily

going to change that at this point, unless Trump makes some break with Elon or unless Elon again the H-1B like dust up I think he has learned from that um and so that's those are the only sorts of things like when he is sort of explicitly subverting MAGA or you're trying to hijack MAGA which I think he's probably doing every day to be honest with you um although Trump is MAGA what Trump says it is. And Trump says Elon is great. So maybe Elon is truly mega. But yeah, Trump says Elon's right about H1Bs. So that's right. You know, so yeah, it is. It is mega. It is. I guess it's dark mega now, the Elon version of mega, which has quite a different flavor. There's a bunch of Elon news. Let's just roll to the next thing he's got continues to have some major issues over at Tesla.

They have now recalled more or less every single Cybertruck after this glued stainless steel trim apparently can fall off. I'd actually seen some complaints about this before this recall occurred. 151 Cybertruck owners had filed warranty claims after noticing this roof trim panel above the windows was coming loose. It's this panel that goes right along. You can see actually here this part here and it's just glued on. And sometimes it says it's vulnerable to environmental embrittlement, meaning it doesn't hold up as well as it should. And if this thing, you know, you're driving down the highway and this piece comes flying off at some other car, needless to say, that is quite a risk. And obviously, Ryan, this comes at a time when Tesla is, I mean, it's the most visible symbol of Elon. And sales have been plummeting globally, right?

Here, Europe, they've fallen off a cliff. Canada, they're down like 67%. They're down in China. You not only have the primary driver, I think is Elon just being such a polarizing and toxic figure at this point, but you also have a stale product line. You also have incredible competition coming from China. We just covered this week. BYD now has a battery that can charge 300 miles in five minutes, which is just like game-changing, game changing level of technology. So the stock has been falling. Trump has been selling them in the White House lawn.

Sean Hannity is doing his part. The Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is out there telling people to buy the stock, et cetera. Actually, funnily enough, the stock then went down further after he said that. But, you know, this is not not a great moment for Elon to have this particular problem with the Cybertruck. It's a really peculiar strategy from a business perspective. The buyers of electric vehicles have consistently been people who are kind of on the center left and have concern about climate change and their impact on the environment. So to me, it would sort of be like if the CEO of Smith & Wesson went and joined the Kamala Harris administration. And Rachel Maddow's posing with the Smith & Wesson. And kept posing with Rachel Maddow and talking about how the NRA is a giant scam and corruption

and all Republicans are corrupt. and just like having this really like presenting this like really vitriolic worldview and calling all republicans and anybody who supports trump you know traitors to the country and fascists and and then suggesting that you know maybe they should be uh jailed let their news outlets and their news anchors should actually be imprisoned and then china makes a whole you know a bunch of better guns and you watch the the sales of smith and weston collapse like gee what's going on what happened this is why do they hate us so much they're so filled with hate we just make a nice product that shoots straight if you don't like it you don't like it you don't have to burn it down so yeah so i i it's secure like i said bold strategy to just constantly

insult and and uh call your uh customer-based traders and i guess we'll see how that works out for them well i think we have Representative Medina Wilson Anton standing by to give us an update on this Delaware bill that Ryan was talking about before. Let me go ahead and let her in and we can get to that interview. Oh, excellent. Representative, great to have you. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So Ryan set this up a little bit about what's going on in Delaware, how this connects to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera. But, you know, as a legislator there, we'd love to hear your perspective of what this bill does and why it's become such a lightning rod. Sure. So I'll say the premise for all of us as legislators is we're trying to make sure that

our state's budget is solid, right? And I'm not sure how much you guys know about Delaware's budget, but a large part of it comes from the corporate franchise. So what we've been told- Like a billion a year or something? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like 1.3, but if you look at other kind of ways that it also impacts us, some folks are saying it's almost half of our budget. And so it's a really important part of what keeps Delaware going. And so the arguments that we've been told is basically there's companies that want to leave. And for each company that leaves, it's a quarter million dollars.

You guys know we're looking at a federal government that's likely to cut a lot of funding that's coming to our state. And so we're really not looking to lose funding. What concerns me is the folks that we're supposed to look to as knowing whether this is how to save the franchise, which is basically what we're told we're doing, are from a very small minority. So we have like 2 million corporate entities here in the state. Of those 2 million, about 3,000 of them are the ones that are really making our budget. And less than 300 are controlled companies. And the only folks that I'm hearing from- What's a controlled company for people who are- So companies that have someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, that's calling the shots. But even of that subset, a lot of the time, the dynamic is such that the controller is not the

one with the power and the dynamic, it's the board. And so the controller is going to the board like, hey, I want to make these decisions. Can I get some more money? Can we talk about different ideas? These charismatic controllers like Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, and others really represent a very small minority of those companies. So what concerns me as someone who's looking at like just numbers here is of those 3,000 companies, and we're talking about now 200 to 300 companies, a minority of that subset, right, are folks like Elon who want to just be able to run roughshod over shareholders, minority shareholders. And I look at that and I'm like, you know, why would I alienate the majority of my customers for a select few when they're all paying a quarter million? Right. Just because Tesla's huge, they're capped at the same amount as any other company in that bracket. So it's been really confusing. It's you know, I'm not a corporate lawyer.

This is not my bread and butter. It's been a really difficult bill to try to wrap our heads around. And it feels like it wait, wait, wait, we're Democrats. We'll do a GoFundMe. Or you could do a half cent sales tax. Delaware has no sales tax. But I know you'd probably get thrown out of office if you even suggested. You're not going to get me to... What are you doing to her, Ryan? Stop it. It's fine. It's regressive. Good. No sales tax is fine. But the other layer of the conflict of interest is that Elon Musk is also a White House advisor. And you pointed out that, you know, your budget is linked to, you know, federal support for states and which can be throttled up or down, you know, to, you know, to the degree that a president is satisfied with how a state is operating. So that it's not just the 250 K like Elon Musk could actually be like,

now Zuckerberg isn't a government employee, but he's close with Trump. So is that something that's in the back of lawmakers minds? Like, okay, it's, we're not that worried about this $250,000 that we'll lose if Facebook leaves. But what we're worried about is retribution from the federal government. Absolutely. We better just give them what they want. Absolutely. Yeah. I can say 100% that that's in folks' minds.

What I would argue is we're already on the list. You know, it's not just California. Like, we're already on the list. You can type into X, I still call it Twitter, but you can type into the search bar, you know, Elon Musk Delaware and find tons of tweets. He does not like our state. He thinks our judges are woke activist judges, which I'll just say as a leftist, Delaware Court of Chance read, not a bastion of left. But he doesn't like Delaware. We're not on their list of states that it's going to do well. Right. We're going to be struggling regardless of whether this bill passes. What worries me is, one, it's not just the Elans and Zuckerberg.

It's lots of other folks that will benefit from this that want to go to other states like Nevada, like Texas. And I feel like if we're racing to the bottom for those folks, we are alienating really like the majority of our customers, which is the term that they use. And it's like kind of makes my stomach hurt, but our customers, right? Like the majority of those folks do not support this legislation. And we've heard from like tons of pension funds. We heard from the largest pension fund in California last week. Like they're very worried about this legislation and how it's going to impact minority shareholders,

pensioners. Like why would we alienate them when we're not, we're never going to like, I just keep saying like, we got to stop simping for billionaires. Like they're never going to come back. They're never going to like us. So at least go after folks that maybe will continue to stay here. And it's often talked about that people come to Delaware because it's like this offshore place where there's no rules and whatever. But what really brings companies to Delaware is the fact that our court of chancery has been a mainstay for over a century. It's one of the oldest courts in the world. And so there's a lot of precedent. And so lawyers, they, they encourage companies to incorporate here because they know

what they're getting into. And what scares me as a Delaware legislator is passing a bill like this, that is obviously written to benefit a rich few. It really attacks that reputation and it makes it seem like Delaware is a state now where our laws are written by the highest bidder. And how are your constituents reacting to this? Oh, my God. Have you ever heard of a DDoS attack? My email inbox is unusable because I've gotten so many emails from constituents that are telling me what now. Like I posted something. I don't even remember what i posted on instagram and i had constituents in the comments like yeah yeah yeah but uh what are you

doing about sb21 i emailed you and you didn't respond and so i like made a can bubbles and put it on there and i'm like this is this is my position guys like i can't respond to everyone because i literally can't use my inbox. I got a notification from Outlook that was like, you got too many emails at once, so we just shut it down. This doesn't seem right. And you represent how many people? About 26,000 Delawareans. Right. Yeah. And we're a state of blessing. You only have 26,000 constituents and you're hearing from... How many of those are constituents and how many of those are people who are just getting worked up from out of state?

Honestly, Ryan, I didn't click through all 2000 and take the address included. Like, but I know I know basically all of us have gotten about that many emails. So, right. And I haven't heard from anyone saying to support it. The only constituent of mine, this is a little joke, but it's true. The only constituent of mine who supports the bill that I'm aware of is the senator who introduced it. Wow. understanding is it needs two thirds to pass. So like, where are you in your support for building opposition? Like how many numbers do you have and how many more do you need? Yeah. I don't know, honestly. Like, um, the, one of the things like it's, it's not my bill, so I'm not like whip

counting for it. Um, I'm just trying to do my thing. Like I had some other bills that were pretty controversial in committee this week that I was focused on. I think my, you know, I've been here now, this is my fifth year. Every year we do a bill like this. This is like the most egregious. But every year there's a bill like this that gets pushed through and there's often not much time to actually push back to it. And so I was really surprised that it wasn't on the floor agenda yesterday. And the only reason that I can think of is because they don't have the votes that they need. It's a two thirds. It has a two thirds threshold.

So we need 14 people to say no or not show up. And I think we're pretty close. Otherwise we would have already passed this bill and someone would have already cut the ribbon on it for Zuckerberg and, youberg and probably had some fun on a yacht or something. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things I've been trying to educate myself on, the ins and outs of this legislation. Like you said, it's fairly complicated, but not only would it help to enable Elon to get his $56 billion in compensation that had previously been blocked by a court, not only would it help Zuckerberg and Meta with what they're trying to do, but can you just briefly explain the piece about why this would also harm the ability of minority shareholders to be able to exercise influence

within the company? Because I think that's an important part too that's sometimes under discussed with the musk as the big sort of like flashing red line here. Yeah, yeah. So for the Zuckerberg example, for example, right? Like the reason why that would get thrown out has to do with books and records. And what we've heard is controllers are really frustrated because they feel like every, you know, every waking moment someone's coming

that has like five shares in a company. And they're like, I want to see all the emails about this exchange. Like, I want to know whether you're, you know, whether this transaction was fair to us. And, you know, when I meet with them, I've met with everyone. I can see how it's frustrating, you know, to have to stop and pay someone to go through and within five days send all the emails and all the text messages and all that. But what they're saying is that this is a problem that's like over the past 10, five years, we want to go back like 10 years

to when people weren't texting and when they weren't emailing. And then when I look at the facts of the case with like Elon's compensation package, where the director who was part of the conversation is like besties with him. Elon says under oath on the record that there was no one to negotiate against. So he negotiated against himself. Right. Like clearly, clearly the minority shareholders were not, you know, party to that conversation.

And then, you know, that goes through, say it stays at $56 billion, right? If you were a Tesla shareholder right now, watching what Elon is doing to the value of your shares, is he really worth $56 billion? Like, imagine if that had not gotten overturned. Like, it's like, it's really hard for me to even process people making this argument, but they're like, well, people voted for it. People voted for it. They voted for it without any information about what the internal metrics were that they'd already hit. Like, he was supposed to be getting this, like these bonuses.

If they hit this, if they hit that, they'd already hit them and they knew they were about to hit the next one. It wasn't a threat. It wasn't a reach goal, right? Like, and those types of information comes out because you have plaintiff's attorneys that actually do the investigations to make that case. And it's clear that these tech oligarchs, they don't want any accountability. The messaging that we've been given is the court is out of balance. It's unpredictable. We need to restore balance. But what they're really saying is when it's balanced, we don't like that. We don't want balance. just going to throw money in the garbage and light it on fire because a guy wants to go to space

and wants to, you know, moonlight as a public servant. Like that's not good for minority shareholders. So folks are worried that if they do lose the ability to actually investigate these people, you know, the companies that they invest in that are in Delaware are not safe investments. Yeah. Well, at this point it might be more financially advantageous to pay Elon Musk $56 billion to go away, given the way that he's helping to tank Tesla sales and the number of investors who are starting to come out and say, you know what? This is not going well. I'm terrified of thinking of Elon Musk being $56 billion richer.

Like, I mean, I don't even know. He's already got more money than any of us could wrap our heads around, you know, insanity, utter insanity. Well, thank you so much representative for helping us to understand this. It's been really, really useful to get your insights as someone who's trying to grapple with all of these issues and make sure, you know, the state's okay and the state budget is okay. And all of those good things too. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. Yeah. We'll see you soon. And if you just, you can just make sure that your thing is uploaded and then you can just click

the leave button and we should be all good. Got it. Okay. This is 99%. Do I have to click anything? No, you should be good. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and pull up, guys. This is something I've been keeping track of just to stick on the Tesla conversation for one more minute. So the Financial Times actually – Michael Kors flag, we'll call it, where the way that this article frames it is Tesla is missing $1.4 billion, has accounting experts asking questions. I'll just read you a little bit here. So effectively, they have a mismatch between how much they say they invested in property, plant, and equipment, those sorts of things, and how much of those sorts of assets are on the books.

So the amount that they claim they invested is $1.4 billion lower than the amount they're now reflecting on the books. So there are some potential innocent explanations for this. So they say Tesla spent $6.3 billion in capital expenditures in the last six months, but the gross values of their assets only increased by $4.9 billion, leaving $1.4 billion unaccounted for. There were a couple of other sort of questionable pieces with regards to Tesla's accounting, including the fact that even though they claim they're sitting on $37 billion in cash reserves, they still raised $6 billion in debt last year at a time when interest rates are relatively high. So it's not the best time to be raising debt.

They also are not issuing any dividends whatsoever. And so there's a few things here that people who look at financial fraud are kind of scratching their head about. And it tracks some with the, obviously, Tesla is not doing well as a company for the reasons that we discussed before, Elon, stale product line, competition from China, et cetera. It also tracks with this weird Canada story where they like desperately scrounged together, potentially fraudulently, potentially because they had this long of like backstock of EV rebates that they came in and cashed in right before the EV rebate program ended, which also sort of smacked of desperation. So I don't know. This is one just to sort of like put a pin in and keep an eye on. But Ryan, what did you make of the conversation with with Representative Wilson Anton about the way she's thinking about this and how this is likely to go?

Yeah, that was that was enlightening in some ways. Because I didn't realize that Facebook, et cetera, are capped at how much they can spend. I know that Delaware is valuable to these companies because it's so cheap and because there are very few... The rules are tilted in the direction of corporations. But I thought that every transaction, even though it's only $50 or a couple hundred dollars, depending on the size, to register as an LLC in Delaware, if you do a whole lot of different registrations, that's going to increase the amount. But it's interesting that they're even capped at 250K. So if it was just that, you would tell these handful, dozens of companies total that have

these charismatic controlling CEOs to be like, okay, look, this is not the state for you. That's why we have Nebraska and we have Nevada. And there's this race to the bottom with a bunch of these other states that see the amount of revenue Delaware makes from corporate registrations and wants to match that. So you guys go ahead and go there. But her point is accurate

that corporations also want stability. And Delaware has, because of its chancer chance record, offered stability for many years. It is interesting that Delaware could throw its entire system out of whack and kill the golden goose. Their golden goose is these corporations registering in Delaware. No offense to Delaware, if they killed their gold goose, good. They, Nevada, North Dakota, all these states that are doing this are parasites living off the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

They get no sales tax and they get lower tax so good good for them but like that's what that ultimately is is on the back of us right because they're winning the race to the bottom to get all of these corporations to register in these few handful of states rather than them being distributed across the country across the world etc and facing tougher regulation and consumer protections and shareholder rights, et cetera. So we get worse consumer protections, worse shareholder rights, lower corporate taxes so that Delaware can have no sales tax. It's not a good deal for the rest of the country. Right. So it'd be interesting if they just, if they screwed up, if they killed their own golden goose out of misplaced fealty to, you know, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

This is one of the Lever News reports. They've been doing a really good job tracking this. I just wanted to give them a shout out. But one last thing I'll mention before we move on to some, some, well, I mean, everything is Elon news, but not directly Elon news, is you mentioned, Ryan, how they have to be concerned not just about, oh, Elon and Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg and these people are mad and they're going to leave the state or they already left the state or whatever. They also have to be worried about the full force of the federal government being trained directly on them. And I did a piece yesterday tracking the way this has looked for the state of Maine. I don't know if you guys remember, there was this like flap with, there was a governor's meeting and Trump calls out the governor of Maine because she isn't doing what he wants

with regard to trans girls in sports, right? There's two trans athletes in the state of Maine and, you know, she's not doing what he wants her to do. And so he basically said, you know, I'll, you know, you're going to lose your funding or we're going to see you in court, et cetera. Well, it's been way beyond just a, it's not just a department of education investigation. It's an HHS investigation. It's a USDA investigation. It's national oceanic administration, atmospheric administration got involved, pulled their Maine Sea Grant, which is supposed to like support fishermen and, you know, marine research. Massively destructive to Maine to do that.

It actually, yeah. I mean, this is like a program that has supported thousands of jobs in Maine for years and years and whatever. Then, and this will connect to a story we're going to do later on, this social security administration dude gets involved. He's the one who was put in charge because he went around the superior's backs and gave the Doge hackers access

to like whatever it is that they wanted. So he decides that he's going to cut the contract that allows the, like, if you're a new, a parent of a newborn, when you're in the hospital to just check a box, like, yes, please, I'd like a social security number. Now you're going to have to take your baby newborn to the social security field office, which has a line out the door to the extent it exists at all to be able to get this social security number for your newborn. Also cut the same service for funeral homes. So when your

loved one dies, you now have to go through the same painful rigmarole, et cetera, out of retribution. He initially was like, oh, it's just an innocent mistake. And then later on admitted that he was mad about the way that the governor treated the president was how he described it. to have a Republican senator, Susan Collins, has been rolled back, has been reinstated because she was able to go and make her plea to the king of begging for forbearance. And so some of these things have been put back in place. But I'm sure Delaware is looking at that, is looking at the threats to California, is looking at the treatment of all kinds of people's institutions, et cetera, that have gotten crosswise with this administration are like, do we really want to play this game? It's the mob.

Yeah. Nice state you got there. There's been a lot of power kind of on the table that hasn't been used by the federal government against states and against institutions and nonprofits because of norms that have built up over the last couple hundred years and not just norms but also some legislation that you know i mean the big founding of the republic we had a lot of like this sort of patronage system that is very common and then over time there was actual reform and legislation put in place too to try to ensure that the bureaucracy would be more or less neutral. And not to say that it's ever lived up fully to that ideal, you know,

but that was kind of the assumption is that the bureaucracy would be neutral, whether it was you as a person, you as a state, you as a law firm, as is another relevant example right now, you as a media organization, et cetera. And that expectation, this administration is just completely tossed out the window. Now your expectation is that you will be targeted if you get crosswise with them. It's interesting because- Emily, I think your mic went off. Can you hear me? One, two, three, four.

I hear you, but it's kind of quieter. Oh, okay. There you go. I'll just talk louder. But one of the things that is interesting about it is there was, I mean, there were threats. The Obama administration threatened every K-12 school, actually higher education too, first on the Dear Colleague letter on sexual assault, and then on the Dear Colleague letter reading gender identity into Title IX. And what Trump is doing is much more nakedly like,

hey, I am the boss. I am the guy in charge of this racket that we call the federal government. And you will comply with me. But I think some of it stems from, and I know this because I hear it on the right, watching the lesson of how federal funds were used for a long time by, I mean, the Obama

administration is the best example and the Biden administration. So some of it is like they took permission. They realized like, okay, so we're going to play this game, but we're going to play it way better than you guys ever did. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a fair point in the sense that the Obama Department of Education did use the Ed Department in Title IX to pressure universities to change policies. And yeah, the difference now, of course, is that they're using the presence of Social Security offices to pressure a high school on trans athletes or something like it's like right what like at least with obama it's like we're going to use university funding to to try to pressure universities to do a thing whereas obama you know whereas trump is like we're going to use social security money we're going to use social security we're going to use we're going to

threaten your c grant funding we're going to use hhs we're going to threaten your sea grant funding. We're going to use HHS. We're with regard to Israel. And, you know, some indications that could be maybe some of what's going on to locate these quote unquote gang members more on that in a moment and, you know, find their alleged tattoos that are so evil that they have to be disappeared into a foreign gulag. But they want to consolidate all of the data that the federal government has on all of us. And they want to use AI. So I mean, it's not it doesn't take a leap to imagine the way that you wouldn't even need a particular bureaucrat to hate you like the Social Security dude hated that Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, to have your experience with the government now be biased

against you if you dare say one of the forbidden words or hold a forbidden position or have criticized Elon or Tesla, God forbid, or Trump, etc. Like there are the tools now to institute that level of weaponization down to the person by person level, even if you are basically like just a nobody, random, ordinary person who happens to have a political opinion. That's all I think at this point on the table right now, and to me is quite terrifying direction that we could very easily be headed in. Well, and you have multiple private sector folks in the government with special government employee status who would have access to that sort of centralized. That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. So this, I wanted to cover this story, you know, getting to the latest with regard to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

You know, the administration is claiming that this gives them extraordinary powers to basically round up and deport with zero due process, whoever want and apparently ship them to this prison in El Salvador known for human rights abuses and slave labor. They also think that it lets them have immigration agents enter homes without warrants. So right now you have the right, if an ICE agent shows up at your door and they don't have a warrant, you don't have to let them in. And so now they're saying, not only can we pick up whoever we want and, you know, round them up, arrest them, deport them, no due process, et cetera, but we can just go into your home. We don't even need a you know, we don't even need a warrant. Obviously, this is a violation. Many people think of illegal search and seizure constitutional protections.

Ryan, what did you make of this interpretation, you know, truly maximalist interpretation that the administration is going with here of what they can do under this Alien Enemies Act. Yeah. I mean, this is clearly the logical extension of their position. Their position is the Secretary of State's designation about a person is unreviewable. Therefore, Secretary of State can do whatever he wants. and the security forces at the direction of the secretary of state can also do whatever they want that like that like if if it is true that somehow the constitution forgot to put limits around what the secretary of state can do to people inside the united states then yeah secretary of state can do anything um do anything. And the courts have no jurisdiction. Now, the courts that have looked at this claim in the past, including apparently, Donald Trump's federal judge sister, have said that no, this is that's an unconstitutionally vague law. Like, that's ridiculous. Like, you can't. The Constitution is very clear.

There's no carve out from the Bill of Rights for the Secretary of State because he makes some determination. Right. Where you say the magic words, oh, we're at war and it's an invasion. So now I can round up whoever I want. Right. And also, we're not at war, as you pointed out previously. Like, being at war doesn't mean like your feelings are hurt by anything it means that congress has declared war and congress has not so just like

right there but that that feels like you're almost splitting hairs um the the broader point is constitutional protections apply to actors of the state, no matter who they are, whether the Secretary of State or somebody else. But if you believe that they don't, then sure, they can come into your house, knock your door down, put you in shackles, put you on a plane, and throw you out the window of the plane. Yeah. And whether you are a citizen, non-citizen, Green Guard, all of these all matter. What's the matter? Because how would we ever even know if there's no due process? Right. His assertion is unreviewable, according to them.

Ryan, real quick, I want you to explain your reporting here before we I want to get Emily to weigh in as well about we're starting to learn some of the details of the people who were disappeared into this El Salvador prison. And one of them is this Venezuela professional goaltender. Tell us a little bit about who this person is and what we know about how he even ended up on the radar of ICE because he has no criminal record whatsoever. So, you know, seems strange that he would be a target. But then again, the government in an official filing with the court admitted that, quote, many of the people that they sent to this, you know, torture chamber had had no criminal record whatsoever. Yeah. And so firstly, apologize. Apparently, I should have called him goalkeeper and goaltender as hockey. Oh, OK. I was actually wondering that too.

Yeah. I'll correct that with apologies. I even played keeper in middle school, so I guess I should have known that. My son likes to play goalie, so yeah. So in any event, this guy, Herce Reyes Barrio, he's a Venezuelan, a professional soccer player there. They they pulled his criminal record from Venezuela to show that he had absolutely zero criminal record there in in February and March of 2024. during the presidential election in which Maduro was kicking his main opponent or using his Supreme Court, which was allied with him, to kick his main opponent off the ballot. It kicked off a lot of protests. The United States ramped up sanctions against Venezuela. The United States, through USAID and other propaganda networks, pushed Venezuelan citizens to protest against the Maduro regime, supported the Venezuelan

opposition to the fullest extent it could after having launched several coups, attempted coups against the Venezuelan government. And so he came out to two of these marches. After one of them in March of 2024, he was picked up by Maduro security forces, tortured in an undisclosed location using electrocution and suffocation. According to his family, we found one of his family members' Spanish Facebook page in Venezuela and also confirmed by an affidavit that his lawyer filed with the court. In March 2024, he left, fled Venezuela after getting tortured. Uh, he made an appointment using the CBP one app, which at the time under the Biden administration said, if you, if you report to a port of entry, then you can make your case for political asylum, uh, September, 2024. So this is under Biden. Um, To be clear, he shows up at the port of entry. And he says, this is what happened to me. This is who I am. I would like, you know,

to apply for political asylum. They see his tattoo. And they say, that looks like a gang tattoo. And they arrest him basically on the spot. So we got a statement from DHS saying, you know, that this guy was in the country illegally, which is an interesting way of putting it. Because he legally approached CBP. You know, he had an illegal appointment. He was then arrested. So was he in the country illegally while he was in detention? So answer that however you want. So he's put into maximum security because of this tattoo.

His lawyer, and we confirmed this with the family through this Facebook post, he gets a lawyer. The lawyer reaches out to family and is like, I need his Venezuelan criminal record, which they pull and send. And they even sent him an affidavit from the tattoo artist who says, this was a crown on top of a soccer ball. Because he told me he loves Real Madrid. That's the Real Madrid logo. And this gang, Trend de Aragua, also has a crown in its tattoo that they use. He said he had no idea. A crown is not the most obscure thing to get on a tattoo. Yeah.

And so they also submitted a whole bunch of images of people who are not in the gang who also have the tattoo. dhs said they found social media posts that also indicated he was a gang in a gang um one of them the only one that this is public is him going like this yeah i can pull that up actually and his lawyer is like that's a that's like sign language for i love you and it's's also like, dude, rock and roll. Like, let's rock and roll. Like, so like, yeah, so that like. This is the gang group right here. Anybody, anybody ever done this? Like, has anybody ever made that hand gesture?

And so in April 17th, he is slash was scheduled to have his like final hearing because this is what you know so he's been in prison this entire time when they finally sent him all of this information about the tattoo and his criminal record in march 10th or 11th the ice moved him out of maximum security they're like okay well i guess we don't need to keep him in this hardcore lockup anymore. But then it was March 15th that they just swept him up and put him on the plane and shipped him to El Salvador. April 17th, he's supposed to have a hearing where he would make his case. Now, September 1st is when he was picked up by Biden. Not picked up. He turned himself in at the border.

So how many – what's that? September, October, November, December, January, February. at the border so how many what's like that september october november december january february no he's so he's been in six months in in detention um after you know going from venezuela to mexico and getting tortured down there and so his family saw him in that asmr social video social media post that yeah the trump administration posted the bukele propaganda one yeah yeah where they're shaving the guy's heads and like um and as this the family's like whoa whoa whoa that's her say what the hell is her say what the hell is her say doing so they reached back out to the lawyer and the lawyer said well he doesn't show up in the ICE thing anymore. And after like three days of harassing DHS, DHS finally confirmed to the lawyer, yeah, he was shipped down to El Salvador.

I saw Sean Davis, a prominent conservative attorney, saying, well, this is on the attorney for not filing a habeas. Sean Davis or Mike Davis? Sean. Sean. Yeah. Oh, Sean's not an attorney. He's a by-for-review. Oh, he's just oh he's just a dude oh never mind anyway he was saying something stupid i won't criticize him though just saying if he just said something stupid non-expert saying something there was no chance um for

the lawyers to do anything here so um he wasn't in the country and he was in the country but he was in a detention facility um which is on biden as well because it was you know this is biden's ice which right if you think about when this happened in september this is the height height of the presidential campaign true when you know the haitian stuff is going on and trend aragha they're the ones that were taking over the colorado um building is that that's right. Yeah. So like they, they were like a big thing. Right.

So ice was clearly, you know, on the lookout for anybody from Venezuela that they thought might be connected. Might have a tattoo that is remotely. I mean, the other ones I've seen is like one person, some of the reporting indicated also, if you just were from Aragua,

which is the Venezuelan state where Jorinda Aragua is from, that that would be sufficient to put you in the bucket of like, oh, you must be a gang member. Whereas at least some of those people are actually fleeing the gang violence that was endemic to their part of Venezuela. So one of the other tattoos is a rose is supposed to be affiliated. Not many people have rose tattoos, so that'll be fine. It'll be I'm sure that'll really narrow it down. But I mean, Emily, this is like we still one news outlet did publish the alleged list of everyone who was deported as part of this. But like, obviously, we still don't have all the details. But like I said, even the government in this really, I mean, talk about Orwellian. They tried to argue in court that the fact that these guys didn't have any criminal

record made them more dangerous because that meant we knew less about them. That was, they argued, but you know, I mean, according to his family and his lawyers and, you know, and him, this guy, he actually followed the, he did the thing that he was supposed to he got his cbp1 app appointment and showed up at the border and the port of entry where he was supposed to go he had his appointment he was until he was you know arrested as best he could he was making his court appointments etc and i think it just underscores that when you get rid of due process in any instance it means you're really getting rid of due process for everyone.

And Emily, while you ponder this, I can read the DHS statement. Tricia McLaughlin told me, quote, Herce Reyes Barros was not only in the United States illegally, but he has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating TDA gang membership. His own social media indicates

he is a member of the vicious TDA gang. That all said, DHS intelligence assessments go beyond a single tattoo, and we are confident in our findings, unquote. So that's the DHS response. So I don't know how they're claiming he was in the country illegally if he claimed asylum. And from what we know, based on the drop site reporting you're reporting, Ryan, is that this was a legitimate asylum claim. This is the asylum claim that a Marco Rubio or Maria Alvaro Salazar would like. This is like the proper use, actually, of the asylum program. Going after our enemy.

Yeah. I mean, historically, it's only, you know, after Cubans that Venezuelans are beloved by Republicans, you know, because yes, they're fleeing Maduro. And so they have historically gotten better treatment by immigration authorities than, you know, other migrants. So Hersey's story is the story that I dreaded throughout the Biden administration, because it seemed inevitable to me that when you have a flood of 8 million migrants, and thousands of those, it's a small percentage of the overall total, but thousands of them have criminal records, that you're going to have to make broad sweeps and targeting in order to like actually reclaim and Biden knew, by the way there was going to be a swing back on

immigration policy eventually and so it was just completely reckless uh the way that they did this and like due process for example that was part of the reason that um i mean part of the reason that you're detaining a guy from venezuela because he has a crown and a rose tattoo and a social media picture of him like doing the the rock and roll symbol is because the they broadened asylum process they broadened the asylum process to the point where you could not mathematically i mean the amount of work that we would have had to have done to like rebuild our ability to hear asylum cases just like there's there was basically no way to do it and so it was screwing a lot of legitimate people. Some of

them I talked to, the Cuban kid I talked to at the border a couple of years ago, he was having a hard time getting in and paid tens of, paid over $10,000 to get here, cross the border, had to come back. Like it was just a disaster. And so it just makes me really, I feel like the Biden administration played with people's lives for political purposes. And so I think the Trump administration needs to be extremely targeted as it's doing deportations. But I also think it's important to get thousands of criminals who are not just criminals because they crossed the border illegally, but because they're violent criminals. I think it's important to get people like that the hell out of the country so i don't think the trump administration is in an easy position but it's it just sucks to see this happen and it's wrong and i i hope yeah the fact that her say is venezuelan

and what crystal said that is something that marco rubio cares a whole lot about if the aliens and national the alien and enemies act sucks the application of it absolutely sucks here i don't disagree with any of that but hopefully the fact that like legit dissidents Aliens and Nationality, the Alien and Enemies Act sucks. The application of it absolutely sucks here. I don't disagree with any of that. But hopefully the fact that like legit dissidents are getting caught up in this is a wake up sign. And I think that the problem, what this shows is that the Trump administration isn't actually serious about what it's doing because he was already behind bars. So if their concern was that he's so dangerous that he's going to be out there attacking college students,

you're good. You've had this guy locked up for six months and he has an appointment on April 17th. You can keep him in lockup for another month. Now, I don't think that they should

because I think that his case warrants being let out on bond. But whatever. Y'all won. If you were worried about him committing crimes, if you're worried about people committing crimes, you'd try to find people who are not behind bars already. Of course, that's harder. The ones that are behind bars. Exactly.

What they want is numbers. And they want warm bodies flown out of the country. And they don't care. And shocking images. And shocking images. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right because there's also – there's a piece here of wanting to scare people and there's a piece here of wanting to appease a base that was sold mass deportation.

And also was sold, I mean, you know, that a larger number of these migrants are criminals than actually are. You know, they were sold that that Trump's they're emptying out their asylums and sending the worst of immigrants who, you know, actually have criminal records is much, much, much, much smaller as a percentage than what is portrayed to the public, then you've set up a sort of impossible situation. So you have to rely on these like horrific fascist, in my opinion, stunts like the Guantanamo Bay thing, like the use of military planes, even though they're insanely more expensive. And now this is the most aggressive, most egregious stunt. And it is both a stunt and it is also extremely not just dangerous, but damaging in the same way that, you know, extraordinary rendition under the war on terror and torturing people at Guantanamo Bay and all of those things were dangerous and damaging, not just to the people that it happened to, but to everybody. Because, look, if you don't have due process, what is to stop them from taking literally anyone and saying they were a bad person, they were a gang member, they were here illegally?

Who are they? What's their story? We don't know. We'll never tell you. They're now disappeared into this prison. And that's why it really is an infringement on all of our rights, not just on the, you know, official baddies that people would want to see removed from the country. Yeah. And actually Trump is now, let me see if I can pull this up, you know, threatening producer Mac just sent this saying that- He's threatening producer Mac. Yeah, he's threatening-

Mac, what did you do now? By proxy maybe, maybe. Yeah, we would love to threaten producer Mac. Let me wait. Let me make sure my DMS are closed. One of the things that does concern me so far is that the, to, to answer Crystal's question, I think one of the things that stops them on due process so far is our citizenship, but we don't know what they know about the people who were deported citizens. Like we actually don't have information about how sure they were that they weren't rounding up actual citizens. Yeah. I mean, I said, yeah, I mean, I said before, I suspect these are all undocumented immigrants, but we don't actually know that. And ICE has been known. I mean, we've got numerous reports just recently, were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They looked like they might be undocumented. They were at a place of business where they thought this would be somebody who was undocumented, et cetera. So yeah, ICE gets it

wrong and screws up all the time. And again, we have no way of actually, without due process, you don't even have a way of knowing that these people, that none of them were U.S. citizens. You don't even have a way of knowing that these are actually even all undocumented immigrants, let alone gang members, let alone criminals, et cetera. Yeah, they haven't provided

that information sufficiently. No. And Ryan, did you, you pulled up the Trump thing? Yeah, he said, I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions. citizens potentially who dare to vandalize a Tesla or a Tesla charger or Tesla dealership or whatever, who now, you know, are being threatened by the president with being also disappeared into this foreign gulag. So yeah, when these things are on the table, it doesn't stay with the,

you know, with the official baddies that people are, you know, are primed to hate and want to see the maximum amount of retribution aimed towards juxtapose that with january 6th by the way you you you write f tesla on a cyber truck at a dealership or a showroom and that's domestic terrorism um this is one of the things that the right was arguing and i think persuasively and ryan i know some of like you're at the time writers at the intercept were doing great work on this. I think that's a wildly inappropriate expansion of domestic terrorism, like in ways that were absolutely encroaching on people's civil liberties. And there were court cases about all of this. So, yeah, it's. So like, yeah, you can you can, you know, violently attack the Capitol. And that's not domestic terrorism. But if you, you know, you put a swastika on a Tesla, that's another another matter. Or you can just be in the proximity. I mean,

this happened to some people, you can be in the proximity of what became a violent riot at the Capitol. And you can be, you know, back on the lawn and end up having your house raided. Like there were crazy cases where the Biden FBI was weaponizing the domestic terrorism thing. And this is this isn't the Capitol. This is F Tesla and like weird Antifa mouth breathers trying to start fires at Tesla showrooms. So, yeah. One last update on this particular story, just to keep us all up to date with, you know, there's a possibility the administration gets held in contempt of court here because the judge is increasingly pissed off. The New York Times

says administration's details on deportation flights, quote, woefully insufficient, according to this Judge Boasberg, in an angry order, told the Trump administration explain why he should not find that officials had violated his instructions for the flights to return to the United States. And this is this whole, you know, a flap over. Judge says from the bench, you have to you have to even if you have to turn the planes around like you cannot deport these people. The planes, two of which were already in the air, are not turned around, one of which was on the ground. Administration is claiming the one on the ground. The deportees there were pursuant to some other immigration authority, not the Alien Enemies Act. We don't really know if that's the case, but that's what they're claiming. They're also claiming that because it was a verbal order, not a written order, that it like really didn't count.

And then they've completely stonewalled on just even the basic details of these flights, even though like the flight tracker info is public, we know exactly when they took off, where were they at these different times when the judge issued the initial ruling from the bench, when he issued the, you know, written ruling ultimately. So they're stonewalling on sort of giving any information and we're considering invoking state secrets doctrine to keep this information confidential, even though they'd never even indicated that any of this was classified. And they were also out there like, you know, publishing videos and celebrating videos with a lot of the details of what happened here. So that's kind of where we are. And, you know, this is the highest profile instance of Trump administration, you know, defiance and testing of the court system and fits a broader pattern. And, you know, obviously they're calling for this guy to be impeached and all of that sort of stuff, too. Well, and one interesting thing here is they and this sort of

reminds me full circle with what we were talking about with Elon at the very beginning and how the there's almost like some you can detect perhaps a modicum of shame in the pentagon pushing back on this idea that elon was just getting this like special china briefing um there's there's almost a little bit of that when you see that trump is still claiming they didn't defy the judge's orders because of the verbal versus written uh distinction and there's legally like there's it's not an entirely illegitimate case, but I don't know, Ryan. I think I do find it also interesting

that Trump goes on Laura Ingraham this week and says, we won't defy the judge's orders. And the administration is still insisting that they didn't flout the order, but that they had the right to do that what they did versus based on the verbal versus written thing.

I don't know if that reminds you of the Elon stuff, but that's sort of where it takes me to. Let me go ahead. And as a last thing here, why don't we pull up the some of the sound from the rallies last night at with AOC and Bernie and, you know, they sort of joined forces and did a series of rallies out West in Vegas and one maybe in Arizona.

I don't know, Ryan, maybe you know all the details of where the rallies were. But, yo, quite a lot of energy on the ground. And I think AOC really kind of finding her voice here on the Fight Oligarchy tour. Let me just go ahead and play a little bit of what she had to say here so we can take a listen to her speech. You know, Fox News and the right wing will have you

believe that these American values are something out of the Communist Manifesto, that we believe these things because we went to college and read them in a book somewhere but let me tell you fox news i don't believe these things i don't believe in health care labor and human dignity because i'm a marxist i believe it because i was a waitress i scrubbed toilets with my mom to go to school because I've worked double shifts to keep the lights on. And because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. Ryan, what did you think of AOC's performance here and sort of the role that she's occupying? There's a lot of talk about like, oh, who's Bernie Sanders going to sort of put his hands on

as this is the next Bernie and this is who he's leaving his legacy to. I mean, it seems pretty clear that person is AOC, right? Yeah. And if she, it's the mantle's there for her to take it if she wants. And you heard her there leaning,

you know, much more into the class argument than she has, you know, recently. And the, you know, the advantage that she has is that the right kind of loves to make fun of her for being a waitress. Alina Hava just did that recently, I think, right? Yeah.

They fall into that trap constantly. So they are constantly reinforcing her own message for her by being class snobs themselves. So she has an opportunity to do that if she can not get too tangled up in some of the Democrats' less popular cultural stuff. What do you think, Emily? Well, I think we should get the man who wrote the book The Squad on sometime to talk about. We should, to dig into it. But no, this is also really powerful right now for Democrats.

It's a huge gift for Democrats that the populist Trump administration is stocked with billionaires that are not. You know, Trump is singular in the respect that he can get away with this sort of blue-collar billionaire thing for whatever reason. We could get into that. But Elon Musk cannot. Howard Letton cannot. Scott Besson cannot. They're not the same. Besson is a mere 500 millionaire, Emily, by the way.

I don't want you to mislead our audience here. Thank you. Thank you. Important correction. Truly, he's surrounding himself with plutocrats, some of whom, many of whom are actual billionaires. And so it's a different, this is a different version of Trump populism. And that's very obvious. And so as Democrats look to rebuild, they have this incredible gift right in front of them that the Alyssa Slotkins and Gavin Newsom's of the world are not, are probably not going to be able to capitalize on. So it's kind of, in an odd way, a huge moment for the populist left, because they're the best positioned to help Democrats regain power in this moment where the Trump administration is what was, I mean, bringing working class voters into the Republican Party

at a pretty steady clip in ways that Democrats never envisioned Trump would be able to do or that Republicans would be able to do. And so here you have an opportunity to capitalize on that. And the culture stuff is going to get interesting. The sort of dances to how Democrats handle that and how AOC and Bernie handle that going forward will be interesting, but it's a gift. This is a real moment for Democrats. And it's, you know, does Chuck Schumer allow the AOCs? Like maybe he won't have a choice if they keep doing rallies like this. I mean, you had, I think, what was it, Michael Bennett that came out yesterday and was like, Schumer needs to go. I mean, you've got some like, like real centrists who are like, we're done with this. And it's emblematic of the fact that the liberal base revolt, it's really not ideological. They want to see people fight.

And the people by and large who are fighting right now are the populist left. I mean, Bernie and AOC really are kind of leading the charge here and charting the path forward. Bernie starts this tour and now you've got a bunch of other Democrats who are sort of following saying, yes, it's a good idea. Let's go out and do these town halls. Tim Walz is making a lot of noise out there, too. And I think, you know, establishing himself as a potential player for 2028 as well. And so they really have charted the course. And you do have because of the nature of Elon and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Letnick and the cast of characters of the, you know, the billionaire oligarchs that are circling the Trump administration and running the Trump administration. You do also have this organic, like, class reaction against that.

I don't know if I'm sure you guys probably saw the town hall, some Republican town hall. Mike Flood, maybe that's his name. I don't remember. Anyway, the people who were there, the, you know, who were there to confront him, they started organically chanting tax the rich. So even though there isn't a lot of ideology in the sort of like liberal based fight, because they're being polarized against Elon, there is a class dimension that is organically developing that is different than the resistance that you saw against Trump that was about like Russia and these other things back in the 2017, 2018 era of this. And then also what's different is the fact that they're disgusted with Democratic leadership and they're disgusted with people like Gavin Newsom, who is there saying, like, let's have Charlie Kirk on and hang out with him and see Bannon. And they're really interesting. And I'm so impressed with them, et cetera. You know, there is a real like disgust

with that approach that was not there in the past. This is the first time that Democrats have said, no, you need to gum up the works. You need to, I'm talking about the base. You need to not work with Trump or the Republicans at all. Even though it felt like there was a very strong resistance last time, actually, polling wise, you still had a super majority of Democrats who were like, try to work with the Republicans to get things done. And so it is a very different energy here. And I'll tell you, I was an AOC. I was an AOC skeptic of her being able to, you know, really hold her own on a national stage because of all the way that she leaned into, you know, really hold her own on a national stage because of all the way that she leaned into, you know, the language and the identity politics and whatever. But I'm becoming more of a believer, the more that I see her out there and the more that she is meeting this moment. And this speech, Ryan, to me, it was a real case in point. Like she really kind of nailed it in terms of the

language, the approach, the argument that she made and the way she positioned herself in that narrative as well. Yeah. More of that. I think there's nobody else really. I'm sure that, you know, Ro Khanna would love to pick up that mantle. I'm sure Pramila Jayapal would love to pick up that mantle for various reasons. You know, she has the pole position there. You know, she's suffered, you know, a blow on the left over the last, you know uh you know she has the pole position there you know she she's suffered you

know it's you know a blow on the left over the last you know several years but i don't i don't think she i don't think it means she couldn't recover the position and particularly if she's consistently out there with bernie yeah yeah no that's right and if she's just consistently out there i mean that's the thing too is, is she like she understands, you know, she and Bernie didn't interview with Hassan Piker yesterday before their events. She's constantly on Instagram lives and on Twitter and isn't afraid of controversy, isn't afraid of Republicans coming after her because she's been through that fire at this point a million times. And, you know, I think under like understanding the actual media landscape is a very rare quality within the democratic party emily at this point yeah 100 and again like most of the energy right now that's can be capitalized on it's not going to be capitalized on by alissa slotkin and gavin newsom it's so

abundantly clear and the only thing i wanted to say it's not abundantly clear to them apparently but to everybody else it is yeah but this is where, this is where the Trump example is relevant in that Trump gave Republicans no choice. He left them with no choice. He was so popular in the 2015, 2016 primary that they had zero choice, but to end up going along with him. And then when they tried to thwart him, they still ended up having to go along with Trump. They couldn't run DeSantis. He just steamrolls it. And that's, you know, I'm not saying there's any like direct parallel, but in terms of populism, that's what Bernie and AOC have to do for Democrats. They have to give them no choice but to side with populists. And it doesn't mean that they won't be thwarted by the Chuck Schumers and whomever if they

ascend to power, but they have to show that that is what the voters want. And so the rallies are in the tour and going on Hassan with the kind of setup of the rally behind you. Very Trumpian. It sends the message that this is your option. It is not going to be abundance. It is going to be populism. How dare you mention that word that That could kick off another three-hour conversation. I'm for scarcity. We had Derek on. Well, you guys interviewed Ezra, right? You actually should get Ezra back. You guys should do a thing with him. I mean, I talked to Derek. I think you guys would have a great conversation with Ezra. That could be really interesting. In any case, anything else, guys, before we wrap it up here?

The UN just announced that Gaza has six days of flour left, which that means that in a lot of places there's zero left. So for people living on just nothing but bread, even that's going to be gone soon. So that's bleak. Veryak extremely bleak emily anything else on your um on your radar so to speak did you see their rising doesn't do radars anymore do they not they do memos oh really i think i think it was memo is that right emily i i forget but you're right it was different or notebook or something anyway it was yeah it was memo. Is that right, Emily? I forget, but you're right. It was different. Or notebook or something? Anyway.

Yeah, it was something like that, but it was basically a radar. How do you give up on radars? Come on. I don't know. Did you name the radar? Yeah. I don't remember how, but yeah, I did. And Rising was my name too.

Really? Yeah. It's a great name. It's a really good name. It's a fantastic name. It's a really good name. Like, it's a fantastic morning show name, I have to say. So I'm glad they're sticking with the Rising name. I guess, I don't know. It was always weird, very weird.

Now it's, I mean, this was so long ago at this point that we were doing Rising. We've been doing Breaking Points far longer than we ever did Rising. But it was weird at first to see other people be like, what's on your radar. It's like, that's our law. What are you doing? So I, I'm fine to see them move on to their own terminology and, you know,

do their own thing. That's perfectly fine at this point. You can start doing radars again. Yeah, that's true. I guess so. What's on your radar today. That's going to like,

that would be rattle you back to like 2019. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of memories associated with that moment. That was back when I thought, you know, Bernie might actually win. So there's a lot of pain, a lot of pain involved in that period. All right, guys. Fun as always. Great to talk to you both.

Hope you have a great weekend. I'm going to be off next week because my kids have spring break. And so Ryan is going to be in for me. Enjoy Ryan. I'm going to have a hard time. I'm not going to separate from the news i already know i just can't like i feel like if you miss a week of news you're going to have no idea what's going on you're going to miss like 85 really important consequential things so anyway i'll be covered yeah i expect uh the the dm uh the dm stream to be fairly steady. It will be. It will be. And my plan is I'll just, in lieu of doing the show, I'll just do more TikToks is kind of what I'm thinking to do.

So in any case, Ryan, thank you for filling in. Ellen, great to see you. Have a great weekend, guys. And I will see you upon return. Sounds good. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Voice Over on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one.

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