Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/8/25: Alex Jones Cries Over Epstein, Glenn Greenwald On Trump Fascism, Peter Thiel Antichrist, Texas Floods, LA ICE Invasion

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Krystal discusses Alex Jones cries over Epstein files, Glenn Greenwald on Trump fascism, Peter Thiel can't answer if he is antichrist, Ted Cruz caught on European vacation amid Texas floods, LA ICE invasion.   Glenn Greenwald: https://x.com/ggreenwald Murtaza Hussain: https://x.com/MazMHussain    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and host of System Update on, exclusively on Rumble, the one and only Glenn Greenwald. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you, Crystal. So, I wanted to start with talking about MAGA influencers in disarray over the Trump Department, Trump's administration's decision to close the case on Jeffrey Epstein, say, he definitely killed himself, guys. Don't worry about it. There was no client list. This had been a real article of faith.

I mean, I'm not sure I realized how sort of central it was to a lot of like MAGA expectations about what would happen in the Trump administration. But before I jump in, I'm going to show you Alex Jones here in just a second. But just wanted to get your take off the top about what has unfolded here and the reaction that we've seen from MAGA world. I think the most notable part of this is that it's not just MAGA pundits or MAGA influencers who have been talking about Jeffrey Epstein in very vehement and definitive ways for the last four years or more. It's the very people who run the law enforcement agencies, the highest positions are occupied

by these people like Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, Dan Bongino. These are the people who've been going around on their podcast, another podcast, accusing Biden officials of corruptly concealing Jeffrey Epstein's client list, saying that Bill Gates is in Congress desperately lobbying to conceal the list because he's on it, insisting constantly that this is like the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the entire corrupt globalist network of degenerates and abusers and predators and the like. And then they get into office and within a couple of months, it becomes obvious that for whatever reason, they're not going to release any of the information they had been

accusing Biden officials of concealing. And now they're at the point where they're even claiming it doesn't exist, that there is no client list, there's no evidence he ever blackmailed anybody, a complete 180 on everything they've been saying for the last four years. So if we want to assume, just for the sake of argument,

that they're now telling the truth, how do they not come out and very profusely and publicly apologize to all the people who they have been maligning and whose reputations they've been stirring over the last four years by accusing them of things that they themselves are now doing.

Yeah, that's so well said. And I mean, it was always preposterous to me, the idea that Trump was really gonna blow the lid off whatever was going on with Epstein. And to be clear, I think there are a lot of very good questions, very troubling links and patterns with regard to Jeffrey Epstein. I know some of you've been pointing to is like the key thing I really want to know about is whether

there were links to intelligence agencies, Mossad in particular. But number one, Trump is like the most pro-Israel president, not that you know other American presidents haven't also been pro-Israel, but his first term was extraordinarily pro-Israel, going even further than previous American presidents had gone. So that's number one. Number two, we know these guys were friends. Well, there's pictures of them together. He was on the quote unquote Lolita Express.

Jeffrey Epstein at least claimed they were best friends for a decade. And so, and number three, you've had a bunch of Trump administration officials who also were involved in various Jeffrey Epstein dealings. I mean, Trump's labor secretary from the first term was Alex Acosta, who was in Florida striking this effectively corrupt sweetheart deal with Jeffrey Epstein that let him get off the hook and avoid significant, um, significant prison time for some of the crimes that he did commit. So I always thought, not so much when you ask Trump, you say, are you going to release these files?

He always dithered. He always said, well, maybe, but I'm concerned about this or that. So you know, it should not have come as a surprise that nothing was going to be different that he was not in fact going to expose whatever was really going on here. Right, I mean, I do think it's important to note that Trump and Epstein, they were obviously very close, had a falling out so that he wasn't consorting with Jeffrey Epstein after Jeffrey Epstein's conviction

to the extent that other people had been. That to me is, you know, the most two interesting things are even after Jeffrey Epstein got convicted of trafficking minors for commercialized sex, basically, obviously, if you're trafficking minors, it's basically child rape, it's pedophilia, huge numbers of the most prominent power of people in the world had no compunction about openly associating with Jeffrey Epstein, not just associating him like passing him by at a party, but going to his house, et cetera. But then the other thing, Crystal, is that his wealth, Jeffrey Epstein's wealth is inexplicable

in terms of what he did. We know a lot of it came from Lex Wexner and other people who are extremely active in pro-Israel activities. So the question that the Trump administration still hasn't answered is, did Jeffrey Epstein work with or for in any capacity, any intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, the Mossad, the CIA, whomever, and they're just like, we're not gonna tell you that, just move on. Yeah, just trust us. Nothing to see here, trust us, we're moving on.

All right, let's go ahead and take a look at this video. I wanna play the whole thing of Alex Jones reacting to this news as it was coming out. Now he has since formulated his own theory of what's actually going on here, which of course conveniently absolves Trump of any sort of responsibility here. But let's go ahead and play his initial reaction.

Obviously there's nothing the globalists wouldn't do to keep this from coming out. They've already tried to kill Trump repeatedly. Had they rolled over, I see a lot of signs that, I mean, Trump's pretty much in charge now. And so all evidence points towards them using the information to control the deep state. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss, the who song won't get fooled again.

This is gonna be an unmitigated disaster. I don't know how they got Trump and the DOJ to do this because the public is not buying it. No one, no one is buying it. So I never saw any evidence of Trump involved in any of the stuff that came out. It was all fake. The fake Jane Does. All the crap. You know, E. Jean Caroll the crazy leftist cat lady, all of it. So now by coming in and being part of the cover up, the Trump administration has. Become part of it. I mean, it's just, you, you cannot see it any other way.

So I'm going to, I just got to the office. I'm going to go throw up actually. And I, it's only happens every few years when something really, really bad happens or something. I mean, I'm physically going to, going, gonna, gonna puke probably right now. My mouth is watering right now. It's because I, because I have integrity and, you know, I just really need the Trump administration to succeed and to save this country and they're doing so

much good and then for them to do something like this, tears my guts out. And you know, the left, they're all complicit, they're openly promoting pedophilia, we know they're pure evil and they'll think it's all funny, oh look, Alex is sad, huhuh, Magus tearing himself apart. Your globalist masters literally want you to eat bugs and live in a 5G, 200 square foot coffin apartment. Look at the left, look at them all posing with their Pfizer shots looking like dead zombies.

I mean, come on, you guys are sick. And so you shouldn't look at those of us that have a soul still and have integrity in pain over this and celebrate you dumb pieces of fucking shit. So his new theory he had on the sky that says the Epstein case is being covered up by intelligence groups to protect Western agencies. There also seems to be from him

and a bunch of others, by the way, blame shifting onto Pam Bondi as if, you know, she's doing this just freelancing on her own with no input from Trump whatsoever and completely again absolving him of responsibility. But what do you make of Alex's reaction there? Well, it's understandable that it's so heavy and emotional because I think a lot of people maybe

who don't pay so much attention to MAGA discourse don't have a full appreciation for how central this has been to their entire worldview. This is not like just some isolated little sex scandal that occasionally they would talk about because they thought it implicated people who were their political enemies. This was something they believe was the key to understanding essentially how all the deep state how globalist institutions are decaying and rotting from the inside. And we were finally going to get the truth.

And again, the fact that it was the very people who are now in charge and doing the cover-up in their view were the ones who are promising that all of this is going to be exploded in the open and who were adamant. They weren't just saying like maybe there's a client list. They were saying there's a client list. Why aren't we seeing it? It's impossible for even these leading MAGA influencers to try and justify it no matter how much they want to defend Trump.

It's just that the betrayal is too glaring and blatant. And yes, they're going to try and distract attention from Trump himself and put it on people like Pam Bondi or whatever. But at the end of the day, Pam Bondi is Trump's attorney general, and he has the ability to fire her at any moment, and he won't over this for sure. And some kind of reckoning is going to have to happen. Well, not only that, actually put C2 up on the screen here. So initially Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino were all taking you know the bulk of the

heat and then Trump comes in on True Social and praises Cash Patel and Dan Bongino saying that you know after they close case, they're getting back to the basics, locking up criminals, cleaning up America's streets. So, you know, it makes it difficult for people to argue that, oh, it's Cash Patel and it's Dan Pongino who are the culprits here, which I think part of why they've shifted so much blame now onto Pam Bondi, because she has not gotten

the overt Trump seal of approval in the wake of this nothing to see here on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Right. And you know that's going to come. I mean, Trump doesn't care about the Epstein files. As you said, he would kind of there was an interview he did with Lex Freeman in October month before the election where he was asked about it. And Lex Freeman said, you're going to release the client list, right?

The Epstein client list. And Trump said, yeah, you know, we're definitely going to look at that. He was a little noncommittal, but leading people to believe that he would. He doesn't care about it, as you said. He think is very comfortable with having it concealed, always, as you said, gave caveats and excuses. The others didn't. So of course, he's going to defend Pam Bondi.

He's never going to fire her. And that's what I mean by a reckoning. At some point, they're going to have to face the fact that everything, not just that they were told and promised, but that they told and promised the people who listened to them has all come crashing down, either because it was untrue all along or because the coverup continues. And there's just, it's too big in the model world

to bury it or to ignore it. Yeah, well, speaking to that point, I mean, JD Vance, this was on the campaign trail. He was, you know, celebrating how the list was gonna be released. You had Pam Bondi, we covered this yesterday. She said just quite recently that she had the client list, quote, on her desk in an interview with Fox News. And now we're, oh, there is no client list whatsoever. But just as a little walk down memory lane, let's play C3 of JD Vance with Theo Vonn saying,

we got to release the list. Everybody in politics has advice that's much worse than alcoholism is the way that I put it. But we, we. Release the list. Seriously, we need to release the FC list. That is an important thing. Let me also play for you C7.

This is Alina Habba recently with Piers Morgan saying that we are going to be deeply disturbed by these shocking revelations that the Trump administration was on the verge of bringing forward. Let's go ahead and play that guys. It is incredibly disturbing. We have flight logs, we have information names that will come out. There were so many individuals that were hidden and kept secret and not been held accountable. I believe in accountability. So you have to now go through your process. Again, now it's time for accountability.

We have seen for so many years, Pierce in this country, many investigations, subpoenas, testimonies in Congress, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a general frustration with accountability. We take it halfway, we don't take it home. And I really believe that now with Cash and Pam, there will be accountability. Accountability. And this is one of the things that's like, I don't expect any of these people to, you said they should apologize, they should apologize.

But I don't expect any of these people to reckon with any of it. They'll just pretend they never said it. They'll just say, oh, it's the fake news media trying to think Trump. They'll have the influencer world saying Oh, well, there's some other higher level elite pedophile ring That's actually the ones that have more power than Donald Trump like they'll spin and they'll cope and they'll lie and it's just wild to me That this is so common and so typical and they'll lie. And it's just wild to me that this is so common and so typical. Yeah, you know, we covered this on our show last night and it sounds like you guys have the same fun as we did. Like when we were going through these clips, I was actually surprised at how

adamant and emphatic and definitive a lot of them were. And that last one was, yeah, so I mean, that last one was not Alina Habaab as a Trump lawyer or a pundit, that was her as US attorney for New Jersey. And she said, we have the names of the people who you're gonna be shocked by who were involved in this. And this is all gonna come, this was not four years ago, this was three months ago or four months ago. So they, I believe, of course what you're saying is true. I mean, we have Dan Bongino saying like,

Bill Gates is in Congress every day, working hard. Cash Patel said the same thing, to make sure that he wasn't exposed as being on the list. He's doing everything he can to suppress it, implying Bill Gates is a pedophile, that he was on Epstein Island, that he's on the list. And now they're all like, yeah, never mind, none of that was true. So I get what you're saying. They're going to, I mean, like Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday, when asked about this, she gave like a four second answer. And then she's like, hey, look over here, all these bad guys we're putting in prison, we're rounding them up,

they're probably gonna be having theater about immigrants and criminals or whatever to try and distract attention. I just don't, I don't think it's gonna work with their own base. I'm not sure Americans generally care that much about this, but I think their own base has built their entire, it's the edifice of their

worldview. And you know, if you spend years promising people things and then it doesn't happen, your own credibility and therefore your own money making and your own career is at stake. And I think a lot of these modern people, the big modern people, it's going to, they'll come around, but it's going to take a lot of effort. It's a problem for them. Put C6, let's go through some of these, the slideshow of some of the various rationales and efforts to cope with this up on the screen. We can go through these quickly.

You've got Insturrection Barbie, who people are on Twitter know this is a prominent MAGA influencer personality. She said, I'm not saying we need to move on from Epstein. I want to see accountability for everything. What I am saying is that Epstein is not the end-all and be-all defining moment of the Trump presidency. So already we've gone from, you know, for her, this was, you know, quite central. And now all of a sudden, when it doesn't go the right way, that, you know, this is really not ultimately that big a deal.

Let's put the next one up on the screen from Cernovich. This is, you know, it's out of Trump's hands. There's a chain of command on this planet. Elite pedophiles are at the very top, even above Trump, way above him. We've got the Charlie Kirk response next. He says, if Trump was on the Epstein list, why didn't Biden release that info to stop Trump from being president? Because, of course, this looks suspicious as hell, especially given Elon Musk is threatening to, you threatening to release information from the Epstein list of claiming Trump's on it. You also had Netanyahu coming to town the next day.

And then you have this ultra-maga, Kathy ultra-maga saying, seriously, who even gives a fuck about these files? I'm sure she was not saying that under the Biden administration. And then you have Valentina Gomez saying covering up for pedophiles is becoming the new normal. I would say this is the most, you know, this is the most, I think this is the best attempt to actually grapple with reality. But you know, Glen, while I think you're right

that I think Cash Patel, Dan Bongino, they're gonna take a real hit. I think Pam Bondi is already like, people are, you know, saying she should resign and she should be fired from the administration, et cetera. Some of these influencers who went to the whole binder situation and were posing for this photo op being used as propaganda props by the Trump administration

previously, I think they'll take on some water and credibility hit. But what I've seen is ultimately with the hardcore true believer MAGA base, they always find a way to whatever it is that happens under the Trump administration, they find a way to justify it. We saw it with the Iran attack. You had prior to the US bombing Iran,

you had a significant proportion of Republicans, MAGA Republicans in particular, saying, we shouldn't do that. The second Trump does it, that number completely shifts. And you've got now 85 or 90% who are like, yes, that was the right thing to do. So I think, you know, they'll find a way ultimately to cope with it and absolve Trump of responsibility

and blame Pam Bondi or the deep state, or just gets distracted by some other thing that's happening in the world. Yeah, I mean, in reality, this is partisan behavior in general. I mean, as you know, I had huge numbers of fans who were Democrats and liberals under George Bush's administration because I was criticizing his war and terror policies. And then Obama comes in, continues many of them extends many of them. And suddenly, they looked at me as their enemy, because I was criticizing Obama for doing the same. And they were like, no, it's different.

When Obama does it, we trust him. And He's partisanship in general. I think model world sometimes actually Will push back quite a bit on on what Trump's doing if they feel like it's too a bridge too far from what they were promised But this is what you said is what they're gonna do and it's gonna work Which is I think that's exactly what they're planning to do and already previewing, which is we're going to have some big, cruel, evil, sadistic program to round up a bunch of immigrants and send them to Sudan or wherever. And you're going to get all excited about that. Maybe we'll bomb some other countries because there's some terrorists there and you'll be excited about that. I think that's clearly what they're planning and banking on the fact that eventually people will just forget about this and move on who are their biggest supporters.

And I, you know, it's a good safe bet that that will happen. It is partisan behavior. And I think that's a fair point. But I do think it is stronger with MAGA. And you even saw it with the Iran bombing. Like I wish I had the poll because you saw when Trump does bomb Iran, you see Republican support for it skyrockets, I don't know, like 40 points.

And you see Democratic support for it go down, but not to quite the same extent. You know, it was like maybe a 10 point drop and there was already a low support for such a thing among Democrats. You know, Trump, there is just a, he says, I get to define what MAG is, I get to define what America first is. And I to define what America first is. And I think he's right about that. You know, I think his supporters have decided we're not, you know, we've got certain ideas of what MAGA is, but ultimately we trust this guy.

And if he says that we need to bomb Iran, well, he must know something that we don't and we're just going to go along with that. And what I would use as a counter example here is the fact that under Joe Biden, as you have still the vast majority of Democratic leaders fully on board with we're gonna give Israel whatever they want, the bear hug strategy, et cetera. At that same time, you had the Democratic base running at lightning speed in the other direction

saying this is disgusting, this is a genocide, we don't want anything to do with this. So partisan behavior, no doubt, impacts people across the board, and I think your example is correct, but I do think there's something unique about the cult of personality around Trump that is particularly strong,

and there isn't a similarly situated democratic figure, at least at this point, that has the same level of pull on the democratic base. I mean, I think this is a complicated conversation. I would suggest Obama did have that, especially in his first term. I mean, the amount of faith and trust and love and reverence and deference to him among Democrats and liberals in general was extremely strong. I think there was a lot of that around George Bush too, especially after 9-11. So I'm not quite convinced that it's stronger

among Manga. And I actually do think that, you know, with Iran, for example, you did have some very prominent Trump allies starting with Tucker Carlson, but a lot of other people who, well, who from the beginning were saying, you cannot do this, it's a betrayal of America first. They were saying it during the war. They're now saying it still. A lot of people questioning Trump's relationship with Israel. How is that America first? But I think you're right on the level of like the average normie Trump supporter is very inclined to trust him and not question him. But I think on the level of kind of more influential pundits, there are at least some of them who do push back pretty assertively.

And you even showed some clips of them doing that now with Epstein, like, wait a minute, what is this? And yes, maybe they're trying to- But never on him. It's always Pam Bondi's fault. It's always the deep state's fault. It's always somebody else. And like Steve Bannon, for example, and Tucker in that, even in that interview with Ted Cruz,

which I thought was extraordinary, the way he would position it, and I understand why he does it, because it's like tactically, you can't trample on Trump's ego, or else you're gonna be dead to him. Or you'll lose influence. Right, and the way that he positioned it

was what not bombing Iran is the true reflection of what Trump really wants and what he's really asserted. And so if he doesn't go in that direction, then there's he must know something we don't, you know, where I actually haven't seen them particularly critical of the bombing of Iran. After after the fact, I've seen them moving on to other things. I've seen, you know, Steve Bannon, even before Trump decided to bomb Iran, saying, listen, at the end of the day, if he bombs them, we're all going to get back on board. So, and, you know, there's no secret why, because if you do disagree with him and criticize him

personally directly, that's it. You're dead to him. And your influence is going to be toast. You're going to end up like Liz Cheney or, you know, any one of the other sort of exiled former Republicans who dared to say negative things about specifically the person of Donald Trump. Yeah. I mean, again, I do think that a lot of presidents look at the world that way. Like if you openly criticize them, or publicly criticize them, they start to get really angry, I think. But like we were talking, we chatted briefly before we began about the Netanyahu visit,

and I was saying like, nobody is more easily manipulated than Trump. And so if you're somebody who actually cares about not just opining, but having influence, you want to formulate what you're saying in a way that's likely to appeal to Trump. So a lot of these neocons were saying, America first means being strong and showing the world

that we will take action. That's America first. And you know, playing on his ego that way. And other people are saying America first means we don't go to wars for Israel or for other countries. Always trying to get Trump to say, you laid out this brilliant philosophy and the way that you align with it is by doing what I want or the other person says what I want. I think that's just being strategic. I think that's being mindful of trying to exert influence

rather than just being on the outside throwing rocks like the Elon Musk is now left to do. So I get your point. Obviously there's a ton of people who are hacks who are willing to go to bat for Trump no matter what and who will do so here as well. I'm just a little bit doubtful that it's worse than other previous presidents,

especially ones with very strong kind of personal charisma like Obama had, who I think did inspire similar things. But at the end of the day, whether it's more or less or whatever, I agree with you that directionally that is what's going to happen. All right. Well, let's talk about some of the people and the company specifically that has done very well under the Trump administration is clearly playing this game very effectively.

And that would be Palantir and some of the affiliated personalities around that, including billionaire Peter Thiel. Let's put this up on the screen to sort of set the stage. I think this is still the case that Palantir is the top. It's certainly one of the top stock performers in the Trump 2.0 era. It has soared 74% this year alone. No surprise, there's all sorts of linkages, first of all, between Palantir and this government, including through the vice president, JD Vance.

And also, they have been a beneficiary of significant contracts from the federal government. This is something that you have covered extensively. I also want to get your reaction to some recent comments from Peter Thiel, who is a billionaire investor in Palantir specifically. But before we get to that, you've done such great reporting on Palantir and on this relationship and on what it means for individuals and privacy in this country moving forward. So, if you could just lay out a little bit of what you found here for people, I would love to have you explain some of that.

Sure, so in March, on March 20th, exactly two months after being inaugurated, Trump issued an executive order, basically insolidating all data and intelligence that every individual agency collects under the auspices of Palantir. Essentially saying Palantir will be the kind of overseer technologically to make sure that this information doesn't remain siloed.

I actually prefer that information be siloed when the government collects it about us because then it becomes more protected and less capable of creating this comprehensive picture of us. But this executive order basically destroyed any of this attempt to keep it isolated. Here's financial information with the IRS. Here's health information with HHS or CDC. Here's other stuff with Homeland Security. It's all now being consolidated under Palantir under the justification that it's necessary

to track illegal immigrants, it's necessary to attract criminals. The interesting thing here, Crystal, is back in 2002, there was this really creepy agency that was created under Donald Rumsfeld called the Total Awareness Information Office, Total Awareness Information. It was led by John Poindexter, a big figure in Reagan and Bush.

And that was when Palantir was founded in 2002. And one of the first things it did was met with Poindexter and tried to convince him that Palantir was situated, Peter Thiel and Alex Carpenter, the Alex Carpenter now runs it, to oversee this total information awareness department to basically be the sole contractor that has the sophistication and technology necessary to collect it all, analyze it all, put it in one place. Even in 2002, the phrase total information awareness was too creepy, it was a bridge too far.

It never really happened. We know what eventually happened. That was the Snowden reporting. But now it's happening even more aggressively, all under one specific contractor, Palantir, who was run by, not just founded by Peter Thiel and a billionaire investor, but run by Alex Karp, who has some of the most twisted sociopathic views of the world of what American power should be, about how it should be exercised, of anyone I've ever seen. And for a movement, the Trump movement, MAGA, that claimed to be so alarmed by deep state power, by unconstrained spying domestically on American citizens, to watch this consolidation all under one company in the name of obviously Keeping Us Safe, et cetera, the same thing the Patriot Act and all the other warrantless eavesdropping programs that

we were subjected to was ushered in on that same justification. It is alarming in the extreme, but I understand why it's not being talked about that much because it is a little bit complicated. You have to dig into these orders to how the government is structured, but Palantir is a very dangerous menace to essentially all of our basic rights. And the power that they have now is at the highest peak. Another story that you highlighted that I'd like for you to dig into for people a little bit is the army turned four big tech executives, including one from Palantir, I believe, into officers.

And so you had this direct merging of the world of big tech with the military, like direct merging. And of course, we're not Pollyanna here. We know how close and symbiotic that relationship is. We talk a lot about the military industrial complex. This seems to me to be another level, and it didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved.

There's so interesting, I of course have been very critical of some of the excesses of democratic rhetoric when it comes to Trump, you know, you're throwing around the word fascism. I think a lot of people throw that word around without ever giving much thought to what it actually is and what it means. One of the defining hallmarks though of fascism, if you study it, you know, like in a scholarly way as developed by Mussolini or whatever, is the merging of state and the private sector, all for one unified cause. There's no tension between the private and the public sector. It's all one nation. Everything merged for some national purpose.

To take the top executives of Palantir, OpenAI, Metta, and several others, and commission them into the US Army as Lieutenant Colonels so they now have an oath to serve the military. They talk openly and proudly about how they now have this obligation to do so while at the same time running. The companies that are collecting all this data about us that are developing AI in ways we really don't fully understand and not just, you know, having a partnership between public and private, there is always some tension still, but actually a formal explicit integration. Not saying the commissioning of these, all these five guys is a big deal in and of itself, but it's very illustrative of the trend in which this is going where there is really

no separation. There's no tension. There's no impediment, everything is sort of being employed and utilized for this unified national vision. And that is a hallmark of fascism is always classically studied and understood. I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that Glenn, because I think you're someone

who weighs your words carefully. And so for you to say that I think is extraordinary and it's obviously not a word that you have just thrown around to your willy-nilly. And so not only do you have that merging of, you know, corporations with the military, you have the shipping of people with no due process to CICOT, you have the calling up of the National Guard in LA, thousands of troops, the deployment of the Marines in LA. I mean, there aren't even anti-IS protests there anymore. Like the pretext of that is just preposterous.

You have the kidnapping of college students who dared to say, you know, write an op-ed that was critical of Israel and holding them on grounds that are, you know, protectual and a basic assault on the First Amendment that are extraordinary. You now havetextual and a basic assault on the First Amendment that are extraordinary, you now have an effort to target actually naturalized citizens as well and to denaturalize them.

Those are just some of the things, you know, that we could throw out there that seem to be, you know, fascistic in nature. How are you thinking about this administration and that conversation about whether this is, this administration is pushing at its core a fascist ideology. One of the problems I've had with the way Democrats

often think about Trump is I think people try to pick, depict him as some radical aberration from the American tradition. Whereas to me, he always has just been a natural extension of everything that came before. Everything that you're describing here, all these powers of deprivations of due process and denials of free speech, this just didn't appear when Trump got inaugurated. These are things that have their roots. There was a censorship program that the Biden administration practiced very aggressively

to coerce and pressure and threaten big tech companies to remove dissent. A lot of the due process deprivations go back to the war on terror, which never went away. This was never dismantled. This machinery that was constructed after 9-11 that we were just talking about, the intelligence surveillance state didn't disappear even though we unveiled it and uncovered it after Snowden. So the foundations have been laid on a very bipartisan basis. That said, I have been very vocal about many of the genuinely grave attacks on core liberties. And now instead of justifying it in the name of terrorism, it's just typically justified in the name of immigration, but also still terrorism when it comes to people who are accused of terrorist group alignment or allegiance simply because they're criticizing Israel.

So a lot of this has long extensions over the last 25 years from both parties, but it's kind of on steroids now because the project of the Trump administration in the transition was to figure out what they did wrong in the first term that made them too weak and to eliminate all constraints on their ability to do what the president wanted.

And I think they actually did a much better job than a lot of people assume they were capable of doing. And you're kind of seeing the manifestations of that in ways that I do consider extremely alarming. I think that's all very well said. And the putting on steroids of the previous trends is certainly the way that I view this administration as well. Not to say, I mean, if you look at the one big beautiful bill, right?

The priorities there of gutting the social safety net to give a giant tax cut to the rich while funding a massive expansion of like the surveillance state and national security. That is at home with any Republican administration in my entire lifetime and some of the Democratic ones as well. But the extent that they take it to, both with that and the assault on liberties, is what, to me, puts them in somewhat of a different category than the things

that I've seen previously in my lifetime. I do want to get your reaction to these Peter Thiel clips that have been circulated. This is from a Ross Douthat interview last week. And the reason that Peter Thiel is important is not only because he is a billionaire, but he is someone who is very influential. He is very ideological. He is very influential specifically in terms of this administration.

So this is a person that you really should be listening to the things that he has to say. And so Douthat asked him some pretty interesting questions. Peter Thiel has been talking about his view of how the Antichrist might arise. And his theory is effectively that someone like Greta Thunberg, as the example he specifically uses, would come in and claim that they're trying to save us all and create peace and safety and unity and save us in this instance from the climate crisis.

And they would use that as a way to create a totalitarian one-world government, and that would be how we get the rise of the Antichrist. And Douthat sort of flips that on him and says, well, isn't it possible that the tools you are creating and helping to create through entities like Palantir for mass surveillance? Isn't it possible that that could be the means by which the Antichrist rises? Let's go and take a listen. This is D2 to that exchange.

My very specific question for you, right, is that you are you're an investor in AI. question for you, right, is that you're an investor in AI. You're deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance, in technologies of warfare, and so on, right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world. I feel like that Antichrist would be maybe be using the tools that you were building, right? Like wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not gonna have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far, right? I mean, isn't that a concern?

Wouldn't that be the irony of history? Would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival? Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing. I mean, to be clear, I don't think that's what you're doing either. I'm just interested in how you get

to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule. Well, but again, there are these different gradations of this we can describe, but is this so preposterous, what I've just told you, as a broad account of the stagnation that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is 1 Thessalonians 5.3, the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. So Glenn, what did you make of that answer and what do you personally put the odds at

that Peter Thiel is himself the Antichrist? I mean, I guess if you were to force me to place my money in a casino on any one individual of the eight billion people on earth being the Antichrist, he would be one of the top two or three people I might consider. Yeah, same. But you know, I do think, yeah, but there was another, it was an interesting part, another interesting

part that's very related where I'm sure you saw this and I actually did like a 20, 25 minutes, we do a Q&A on Friday night, someone asked me about it, I did like a 25 minute response on it, where Ross Dufat asked him, do you actually favor the continuation of the human species? Like, do you favor the survival of humanity as it is? And he basically was saying no. He refused to say yes. He was stuttering around way more than he usually does. It wasn't like an autistic stuttering.

It was like, really, he was struggling with that question. And Ross, that's a very basic question. That should be an easy yes. I'm asking you, should humanity survive? And he basically described this trans, yeah, that's something we should all have, that's like the warmup question that I think we should all be able to answer quickly,

but he couldn't because he has this very transhumanistic vision that is shared by a lot of Silicon Valley tycoons like him. They basically view themselves as transcendent beings as kind of the Ubermensch. And there's a lot of reasons why billionaires become accustomed to thinking that way. They're surrounded by people who treat them that way. They have the kind of power that makes them believe that they're uniquely capable of doing that.

Mark Zuckerberg talked to a rodent show about merging technology and robots and artificial intelligence with humanity to create a different form of human, a superior form of human. and artificial intelligence with humanity and create a different form of humanity, a superior form of human. And a lot of them have this vision that is essentially, in my view, so anti-human. It's like a kind of vision where our efficiency and our utility is going to be maximized,

even if it means the elimination of all the things that we think about as being the essence of humanity in a way that would destroy whatever you think about as the soul or the spirit or whatever. So if you want to talk about the Antichrist and coming and attacking humanity with the intention of destroying it, I do agree with Ross's premise that it seems like a lot of what Peter Thiel is doing is way more likely than say, Greta Thunberg, who has spent the last 18 months protesting the genocide in Gaza, not very Antichrist like to me, in order

to do that. And I think the fact that, you know, obviously the antichrist comes and poses as a noble and benevolent figure, and there he is saying, safetyism, the whole point of Palantir is based on safetyism, let us spy on you to keep you safe. Like the projection there is so remarkable.

Well, and also actually put D4 up on the screen here, guys, because, you know, he's invested in AI, and they have an almost, I shouldn't even say almost, they have a religious belief around what AI will do for the world and will do for, you know, effectuating this outcome of transhumanism and allowing them to live forever like they are literally gods. It's complete with the story of redemption and forces of evil that are trying to stop them. And they are in the driver's seat

in terms of the direction of AI regulation or lack thereof. You can see here that Americans are deeply opposed to just letting a rip with AI. This is overwhelmingly bipartisan sentiment of like we need to be thinking about what all of this means. And even if you don't subscribe to some of the more apocalyptic possibilities of basically like the AI taking over and like killing us all,

there is going to be significant, there is already significant disruption from these technologies. And people like Teal have made themselves, you know, very influential in this administration. And again, the alliance with with JD Vance, I think, is very significant here as well. They have really gotten what they've wanted in terms of, we're just going to race forward with this thing. We'll figure out the consequences later. We got to beat China. China is developing AI. We got to be first to get to artificial general intelligence. And it's very much at

odds with how the vast majority of Americans want this to be approached. And in Teal's ideology, you know, he talks a lot about stagnation. He has this view that we've sort of like stagnated technologically and we haven't been innovating in the way that we previously had in this sort of transformative way. And I haven't thought that deeply about it to, you know, to say whether I think that is true or false. But as an antidote to that, he believes that we should just race forward with this technology come what may and has this and again, I don't think this is just Peter Thiel. He's very influential,

but many of these Silicon Valley titans have this same view that effectively, there's a faith, like a religious faith that this technology is what we have to pursue. And it's going to actually create this bounty in this sort of utopia that they have in their minds. I absolutely agree with you that they have this utopian vision of what AI is

that is obviously in their interest to foster and perpetuate because of how heavily invested they are in it and because they're the masters of the AI. So they wanna get people to believe that it will just lead to bountiful, abundant, loving futures for all of us. So there's a lot of propaganda with that. But also, one of the reasons why I'm so concerned, and I do think, I know I'm very of many minds about AI.

I want to understand it better. I want to really, I don't think any of us really understand it, including the people who are unleashing it. Correct. And I think that we need debates about what kind of safeguards are needed. The problem is that it's not just what you've described, which is this kind of transhumanistic narcissism that the people in control of this technology possess and really do believe in as a religious faith, but it's also the competitive aspect. As nation states now, we're told, oh, China has it and China does have it at

least as advanced as the United States has. And that was that deep seek trauma to the American mind that it seems like they even might be ahead of us in terms of technology. And so the idea then becomes, well, if we limit it, the Chinese never would or the Iranians never would or all the bad people or the terrorists never would, or the Iranians never would, or all the bad people, or the terrorists never would. And that is the really, that to me is the biggest danger, this idea that for our own survival, we can't really allow any limits on AI,

because if we place limits on it, others won't, and they will come to dominate us. Trump named as AI czar, David Sachs, who's one of the co-founders of PayPal with Peter Thiel. He was the chief financial officer. I know David pretty well. You know, he's, I think there's, I don't think he's like this Bond villain, but he definitely is somebody who really believes in the urgency of going forward with AI. Trump believes in that.

Everyone around him believes that. And we're barreling toward a future, which I don't think people really understand without any kind of contemplation or debate for all because all the incentives of powerful people are to just barrel forward with it and have it unleashed with zero restraints of any kind or even debate about whether we should allow that to happen. Yeah. Glenn, last question I have for you and thank you for being generous with your time this morning is, you know, I have long thought that we shouldn't have billionaires, that billionaires are sort of inconsistent with the democratic society because when you do amass that amount of wealth, the amount of commensurate power and disconnect from just like what ordinary people are going

through really does create a challenge. It's almost an impossibility to have a truly sort of like democratic representative society when you have that much money, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few. But if I had any doubts about that view, those doubts have been swept aside by what I've seen in this era of Trump 2.0. I mean, first you had Elon Musk buying, you know, buying his ability to have this whole of government mandate through Doge, buying Twitter and making it his personal playground for whatever it is that he wants to do politically at the moment.

You've had the specter of Bill Ackman, who's out there right now, you know, workshopping in real time how to intervene and get his candidate of choice and to think specifically Zoran Mamdani, who won overwhelmingly in a Democratic primary. And he's trying to, he's out there saying, I've got hundreds of millions of dollars available

to a candidate who wants to come forward to try to defeat Zoran. You have Peter Thiel, as we've been discussing, and the influence of Palantir, and what that means for everyone, and the extraordinary access that he has, and the links with David Sachs, and with JD Vance, et cetera. Where are you on this question of whether or not

billionaires should exist and are consistent with a democratic representative society? Well, let me say this about that, which is there was that Jordan on interview where he said, I don't think billionaires should exist. And everybody acted like, you know, that was like from the Red Book of Mao or like, you know, right out of Lenin. And if you go back and look at the founders, who definitely were capitalists, they didn't believe in, I mean, there was no sense of communism then, but they didn't, they believed

in capitalism, they were very wealthy, they were landowners, etc. And they wanted to preserve those, those prerogatives economically that they thought was their birthright. Nonetheless, they talked openly about how if economic inequality becomes too severe, it will inevitably spill over into political inequality and will undermine and subvert all the principles they're trying to create of nobody being above the law, of everybody being subjected to the same political rights. And so this is intrinsic in the idea of the American founding that, yes, you're going

to have political equality and economic inequality, but if that economic inequality becomes too grave, too lopsided, the political rights will become purely illusory. And I think that's exactly what we've been seeing and what we're seeing even more so now. I mean, it's hard. I've gotten to know some billionaires and I think that it's hard to express what it does to people's minds.

You know, we've seen that with fame, you know, how people who get too famous, too wealthy end up sick and ill and they die early because it's just too much for the human brain to handle. Being a billionaire is that times a thousand. And to have those people with that kind of mental outlook, exerting almost unlimited power in our democracy, nothing good can come from that. I think that is well said.

Glenn, thank you so much. Great to see you, my friend. Always good to see you, Crystal. Take care. So we continue to keep our eyes on Texas, where the death toll from those horrific floods there in the Hill Country has risen now over 100. We still have a number of people who continue to be missing

as the search and rescue effort now enters its fifth day. At the same time as that effort is ongoing and as huge questions remain about what happened with the National Weather Service, about these vacancies, about whether the cuts to the National Weather Service impacted the ability to properly forecast this extraordinary event, whether it impacted the community warnings that were received, but even as those questions persist, we now have a new question as we entered this phase of recovery. Kristi Noem, of course, the head of DHS, FEMA is under DHS, and is under DHS.

And this administration has really aggressively gone after FEMA. I mean, Trump has floated getting rid of FEMA altogether. And they have sort of consistently pushed this idea that a lot of the recovery efforts should be, if not all of the recovery efforts, should be pushed to the states. So I wanted to start by focusing in a little bit on Kristi Noem here, whose role is going to become increasingly significant. Let's take a listen to some of her statements

over the past several days, as she's been asked to respond to this tragedy and potential federal government failures. For decades, for years, everybody knows that the weather is extremely difficult to predict, but also that the National Weather Service over the years at times has done well, and at times we have all wanted more time and more warning and more alerts and more notification. That is something and one of the reasons that when President Trump took office that he said

he wanted to fix and is currently upgrading the technology and the National Weather Service has indicated that with that and NOAA that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many many years and that is the reforms that are ongoing. They continue to elevate and up their notifications. You know when your notification hit your phone sir I'm sorry I can't speak to to when that is but I do carry your concerns back to the federal government, to President Trump, and we will do all we can to fix those kinds of things that may have felt like a failure to you and to your community members. We know that everybody wants more warning time, and that's why we're working to upgrade

the technologies that have been neglected by far too long. So a couple things that she says there. First of all, she says, well, weather's hard to predict. True, but you know, you would have a better shot at an accurate forecast if you didn't just have Doge take a chainsaw to the National Weather Service. Something that was a plan that was laid out, by the way, in project 2025 as Emily and I talked about yesterday. So this has been an ideological project of the conservative movement, not just of some Elon Musk freelancing here.

This was an intentional plan for two reasons. Number one, primarily two reasons. Number one, they just don't like the federal government and would like to privatize a lot of that weather collection, weather forecasting. Number two, they feel that the National Weather Service and NOAA are part of what they call the climate change alarm industry. And so since they're revealing data that is inconvenient for the narrative that climate change is fake and we don't need to do anything about it, they just want to take an axe to it. So she says, well, you know, weather

forecasting is hard. Number one. The other thing she says there is that they're working on some new technology to improve the warning systems. People, reporters and people who are familiar with these agencies said, we have no idea what she's talking about. Like this appears to, maybe there's something we don't know about, but this appears to have just been made up to cover

for the fact that what they've actually done is significantly degrade the capacity of this agency to be able to properly forecast, and to be able to communicate those forecasts and those warnings to the community. So that was her cover-up. As I said before, we are now shifting into a recovery phase.

So you had possible failures on the front end of the forecasting, the warning, the communications with the community, which we covered yesterday. Now you have questions of potential failure of the FEMA response, given that FEMA has also been severely degraded by this administration. Let's go ahead and put this, this is some independent reporting from an outlet

called the Hand Basket up on the screen who's been speaking with FEMA staffers about how this response is unfolding versus how under previous administrations the response would have unfolded. So the headline here is FEMA response to deadly Texas floods delayed and deficient with Kristian Ohm in charge and staffers are sounding the alarm. This reporter, Marissa Cabas, says that disaster struck and then goes on to talk about how at this point normally, you would have hundreds of staffers on the ground from FEMA and that right now they have quote, "'Barely any staff that's been deployed' and the acting administrator David Richardson is quote,

"'Nowhere to be found.' Per one source, if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked. That's according to insiders at this agency, at FEMA, who say this is not going the way that it previously would have gone under other administrations that took disaster recovery more seriously and didn't have this ideological war

on federal emergency management. So as the recovery unfolds, this is another thing we really need to keep an eye on and see how effective it ultimately is. We know that this administration has been, in this instance, they put in the emergency declaration so people can apply for female assistance. In other instances I covered these horrific floods in West Virginia and unfortunately these extreme weather events,

of course with climate change, are coming faster and more frequently and are more and more devastating. And they delayed for weeks that emergency declaration, which severely hobbled the ability of people who were struggling and suffering, trying to put their life back together and recover from being able to get the assistance that they needed. In other cases, I know in a case in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to go and use her personal relationships, which fortunately she can petition the king, to go and beg for that emergency declaration. So that has been a consistent pattern, not to mention the threats from this administration

to effectively weaponize federal emergency assistance against states like California, where they have a political beef. Now, Texas is one of the states in the country that has the sort of largest, most developed state response. So it's a relatively large state. Obviously, they're familiar with natural disasters, including flooding. This is an area that is prone to flooding, although this is the worst flooding disaster anywhere in the country in a century,

or rivals some of the worst in a century. So Texas does have some state resources to be able to respond, but even in a place like Texas, you still are very dependent on the federal government being able to come in with money and staffing resources to be able to help. So that is something to continue to watch for and appreciate this report from the ground because I haven't seen anyone else really talking to the staffers from the agency and getting the scoop on how this response compares

to previous ones. At the same time, we had Caroline Levitt being pressed on questions of the administration's response and whether the cuts to the National Weather Service here contributed to an increased loss of life. So more young girls in particular dead because of these chainsaw cuts to the National Weather Service.

And Noah, let's go ahead and take a listen to E3. They gave out timely flash flood alerts. There were record breaking lead times in the lead up to this catastrophe. There is ongoing flood monitoring and these offices were well staffed. In fact, one of the offices was actually overstaffed. They had more people than they need. So any claim to the contrary is completely false. And it's just sad that people are pushing these lies. So I don't know what she's talking about there because those offices and the union that represents those workers say, and all of the reporting before, prior to even this tragedy unfolded,

says that these office were understaffed, that there were significant vacancies. And one in particular we talked about yesterday was the guy who was supposed to be, you know, who's meant to be in touch with the community and sort of spearheaded that, was a veteran that people in the area really knew and trusted who had a lot of depth of expertise. He took that fork in the road resignation offer. And because you have a blanket hiring freeze, that position has not been filled.

So not only did you lose, you sort of like pushed out this guy who was really impactful in the region, very knowledgeable in the region, exact sort of person that, you know, and now he's a private consultant, exact sort of person you actually want in federal government. Not only do you lose that guy, you don't replace him with anyone. So, you know, we, there will be a lot of reporting in the days to come about the failures here on every level and whether those cuts had an impact and whether or not we can pin down exactly whether there was an impact here or not. You have had significant warnings from all of the previous NWS heads who said, if you make these cuts, you are going to degrade the ability

of the Weather Service to do its job and it will lead to increased loss of life. So those warnings are there as we head into the peak of hurricane season. Last piece I have to get to here, this is so, this is wild, I don't even know what to say about this. Put E2 up on the screen.

Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, known previously as Cancun Ted, because he was caught in Cancun while a horrible natural disaster was unfolding in Texas. I believe that was when they had the electricity loss, power loss, and a deep freeze. People were literally freezing to death, and he was in Cancun.

Well, this time as disaster strikes, he's in Greece, caught vacationing in Greece as these floods hit. Now you could say, okay, well, how could he know? Right, he couldn't know. In advance, this came on very rapidly. You would have no way of knowing in advance that these floods were coming and that it was going to be devastating loss of life.

But not only was he there when it happened, okay, we could forget that, of knowing in advance that these floods were coming and that it was going to be a devastating loss of life. But not only was he there when it happened, okay, we could forget that, but he stayed. He was caught by tourists who were in the area who snapped that photo of him sightseeing days after the floods had hit as the search and recovery effort was ongoing. So he apparently didn't leave his vacation in Greece until Sunday to come back. So just absolutely extraordinary. This man once again caught vacationing

while his own residents and constituents, his own constituents suffer through one of the worst natural disasters, one of the worst flooding disasters that we have had in a century. All right, let's go ahead and turn to this unbelievable shocking images coming out of LA with this ice raid.

All right guys, so I was talking to Glenn Greenwald earlier about whether this was a fascist administration or not. And we certainly had a performance of fascism in LA park that unfolded yesterday. Let's go ahead and put these images up on the screen of heavily armed military kitted out immigration agents, including some on horseback. You can see these sort of fortified vehicles rolling through the streets, sweeping through the park in what appears to have been, and Ken Klippenstein was able to get leaked documents

as to the purpose of this operation, appears to have been a show of force to demonstrate to LA and to other cities and localities around the country that they can operate effectively with impunity wherever and whenever they want. Mayor Karen Bass of LA came down to that park to confront agents and try to get them to leave. Let's go ahead and take a look at how that unfolded

sort of a chaotic scene where she asked to talk to their boss and to tell them they needed to move on. Let's take a listen. My comment is they need to leave and they needed to move on. Let's take a listen. My comment is they need to leave and they need to leave right now. They need to leave because this is unacceptable. Who did you speak with? This won't end soon.

Mayor Bass, who? They will be leaving soon. Mayor Beckman, who did you speak with on the phone just now? Unknown at this time, whether they actually even made any arrests or whether it was purely just, hey, let's march through this park and show how big and bad we are for the cameras. You can put the LA Times reporting up on the screen here of the way they covered it.

Their headline is, heavily armed immigration agents descend on MacArthur Park in LA. They say dozens of immigration agents, some on horseback, others carrying rifles in armored vehicles, swept through MacArthur Park on Monday in an extraordinary show of force at the heart of LA's immigrant community. Heavily armored border patrol officers with a fleet of white minibuses partially blocked the streets surrounding the park, which has become a source of crime and drugs in the area in the last few years. Activists with megaphones were able to warn locals at the park before the contingent arrived, according to police sources.

The move comes days after President Trump signed a budget that will provide a mass infusion of funds to the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up its immigration enforcement to levels unseen before in the United States. LA has become the poster child of Trump's mass deportations plan, as more than 1,600 people have been arrested between June 6th and June 22nd. Go ahead and put Ken Klippenstein's report here up on the screen because he actually got the leaked documents of what this operation was truly intended to do. Great reporting here from Ken. So he says exclusive operation Excalibur in LA was a show of force leaks from the military's LA deployment reveal Coca-Cola versus Pepsi rivalry, sweaty guardsmen and abject failure. He goes on to write that today's Homeland Security operation was a mere show of presence,

internal army documents I've obtained say ice and custom agents dressed in military garb assaulted the park, which the documents describe as a hotbed of historical lawlessness and the founding location of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang. News media is describing the operation as an ominous crackdown, but national guard sources tell me it was a botched laughing stock. The military aspect of the operation, codenamed Operation Excalibur, has not been previously reported. And there were some eight different, I believe,

federal government agencies, let me see here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 different agencies that were involved in this show of force in this LA park. They were all code named different colas. That's why he says the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi rivalry. So the ATF was A&W, the CBP was Canada Dry. You had the FBI was Coke and the LAPD was Pepsi.

So this mass operation to march through the park and as I said before, effectively like demonstrate fascism for the cameras. You guys likely know the context and the backstory here, as was indicated in the LA Times article. LA has really become their sort of demonstration project of what mass deportation looks like. They love the fight with LA

because you've got Karen Bass, a Democratic mayor, you've got Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, and you had those anti-ice protests, which turned violent at times with some throwing of water bottles at police officers, some torching of Waymo cars, some graffiti. That is all over. But they use as a pretext to call up thousands of National Guardsmen in a very legally dubious, by the way, operation. And so they federalized the National Guard in California. Absolutely extraordinary action that we've just sort of like moved past because it's

been so crazy, everything else that has been going on. And not only that, not only did they federalize the National Guard. They also called up active duty Marines to come in to LA to deal with what ultimately was pretty run of the mill protests. Those National Guardsmen, at least, I'm not sure about the Marines, they are still there. They are still there instead of doing any of the many other things that they could be doing,

including continuing the recovery from the horrific fires that you had in and around LA. So this is some of what they're doing with them. Mass show of force in a park, planning these operations. And according to Ken, you know, many of the National Guardsmen that he was in contact with are humiliated by. They say this is an embarrassment. This is not the way that we're supposed to be operating. There was also some indication that, oh, well, maybe they would have the national guardsmen start to cover their face and mask in the same way that the ICE agents have, which has contributed to the sense of rogue lawlessness of that agency.

Oftentimes they show up in plain clothes, completely masked, looks like a kidnapping, indistinguishable, they won't identify themselves, sometimes won't show a warrant, won't indicate what law enforcement agency they're with, etc. So they wanted the National Guard to adopt some of those tactics and apparently there was pushback on that because their view is, we're in the community, we're meant to be here to help and serve our fellow Californians. And when you think about the typical assignments that they'd be receiving, things like helping out

with recovery, that's the orientation that they are used to when they're engaging with fellow community members. So absolutely insane and it does fit with broader you know, broader plans from this administration, as announced by Tom Homan, who is, you know, spokesperson for the most aggressive enforcement and most aggressive and cruel tactics that this administration has deployed when it comes to mass deportation. And he's threatening these type of operations everywhere in the country. And with the passage of the funding

from the One Big Beautiful Bill, they are going to have the resources to basically do whatever they want. Let's go ahead and play F5 and take a listen to Tom Homan. President Trump said two weeks ago, we're going to double down, triple down, the sanctuary cities. Why?

Not because we're a blue city or a blue state, because we know that's where the problem is. So where are we going to send our assets? We want to send them where the problem is. Sanctuary cities. So I've said it before, we'll flood the zone and sanctuary cities. If they don't let us arrest the bad guy in the county jail, they're going to arrest him in the community. We're going to arrest him at a work site. So we're going to increase community operation. We're going to increase work site enforcement operation. We're going to get the bad guys. So if they don't want to help, get out of the way. We're coming to do it. We're coming to do it, flood the zone. And you know, what he's saying there about going after immigrants at job sites, it's actually really

significant. It has major implications for the distance between their rhetoric about immigrants and the reality of who immigrants are and the type of operations that are being conducted here. Because there has been a Stephen Miller-directed focus on job sites in places like the Home Depot, that means that you have fewer resources actually to go after the genuine criminals. Because it's easy to just roll up on a Home Depot. It's a lot more difficult to find and locate and identify gang members who aren't just gonna be there hanging out at the Home Depot.

So if you're shifting resources towards, we're gonna chase down farm workers in the field, we're gonna go to the Home Depot, we're gonna go to the garment factories, which is another place that they went in LA that helped to kick off those anti-ice protests. That means you're focused on that regular, most often law-abiding immigrants

who may or may not be documented. There's also been a lot of racial profiling here. You're focused on that, and you are actually not focused on resources on finding and identifying and tracking criminals. So that is the effect of what these policies have really meant. Let's talk a little bit about the ICE funding, which is just, it's hard to wrap your head around the amount of resources that are about to flood into this rogue lawless agency. Put this up on the screen comparing the ICE budget. And again, this is not all of immigration enforcement.

This is just ICE. $37.5 billion. Now it will be bigger than most of the world's militaries. So rivaling the military here of Canada and coming in significantly above places like Italy, Israel, Netherlands, Brazil. So you've got a massive budget here. You had one analyst who said, once they get this budget amount into their coffers, over the next four years, they're gonna have more money than the budgets of the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the US Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons combined.

This will be the largest, best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the history of this country. They're trying to hire 10,000 ICE agents. And I was just reading yesterday a piece on how we have previous examples, in particular during the Bush administration of trying to staff up some of these law enforcement agencies really quickly.

And what happens is number one, you get, you know, because you're just trying to take whoever you can, you get huge issues with corruption. Number can, you get huge issues with corruption. Number two, you get huge issues with complete lack of any sort of experience. And number three, think about the type of people who would be applying to do that job of getting kitted out in military gear

to march through a park where moments earlier children were playing and sending people to alligator Alcatraz or shipping them off to Seacat with no due process. Like just think to yourself about the type of people that that job would apply to, would appeal to. Those are probably not really the ideal people that you want doing what is already sensitive

and intended to be under you know, under the Trump administration, certainly an absolutely cruel job. So that's the direction that we're heading in. This you know, what we're seeing in this park in LA, what we've seen in Adelaide more broadly, what we've seen with alligator Alcatraz, with Seacat, with the raids that we've seen across the country, they're just getting started here. And now they're going to have the budget with mass detention facilities built out by private prison contractors,

with huge influx of ICE agents, with money to do basically whatever they want to do. This, what we're seeing now, is just the tip of the iceberg. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching today. We are going to have actually a bro show tomorrow, Sagar and Ryan. Sagar will be back from recording with Tucker.

Looking forward to seeing how that interview went. I think it dropped this morning, I'm not sure, but I haven't taken a look at it yet. And then be back to me and Sagar on Thursday. So hope everybody has a fantastic day and I will see you soon. ["The Last of Us"] Just like great shoes, great books take you places

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