IHIP News - Ex-ICE Insider Exposes Cruel Practices, It's Even Worse Than You Imagined

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

We are joined by journalist Elliot Williams and former Senior Official at the DOJ to discuss Trump's disturbing hijacking of federal powers. Order our new book, join our Substack, shop our merch, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today I'm joined by CNN analyst and author of the new book, Five Bullets, Elliot Williams. Elliot, how are you doing today in 2.0 Trump's America? It's a crazy, crazy time. You know, I last night was on television about the firing of, you know, the Supreme Court hearing around Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve Court Commissioner. Today I was just on, that's why, as viewers made it, I know this, but I literally was a couple minutes late to meet with you because I was just on television talking about this Jack Smith hearing in Congress.

This is whiplash in a whirlwind time, certainly in legal news, my world, and it's just can't keep up. Okay, let's start with, I noticed that Brett Kavanaugh was the most outspoken about the Lisa Cook thing. And I'm wondering if some of this is a reaction to how badly he has been branded in public for what they're calling the Kavanaugh stop. And I read that this, this branding was really like, it really personally bothered him. And the Kavanaugh stop, of course, is that an ice agent, because of the way you look and those of you that are listening, Elliot has a little more melanin in his skin than I do, that they could legally stop him. And so what is your take on Brett Kavanaugh?

Oh, my goodness. It's, you know, he is the great story. to come out of the Supreme Court over this generation because we live in a world where Brett Kavanaugh is regarded as a moderate voice on the Supreme Court. No, it is. That's how the court has shifted so much, certainly in my lifetime of following the court. And there are circumstances where Kavanaugh does buck the party line somewhat. Now, let's be clear, it is an unabashedly conservative Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh, for his entire career, has been, you know, and unabashed conservative. And so this, it is quite fascinating to watch the middle, what we think of as the middle on the Supreme Court just shift before our eyes. Now, with respect to this idea

of stops of citizens and so on, that's quite profound. Now, obviously, we know, and going back to the history of law enforcement, law enforcement does have really broad authority to stop people for a host of reasons. But ICE has lost the thread here. here and in the huge incentives that they've been given to carry out their immigration enforcement mission, my gosh, look at what's happening around the country. Okay, you served inside the Justice Department. Yeah. And you're sitting here watching it get completely dismantled and you're watching really smart, competent people that believe in justice that did not join the Justice

Department to become rich because they could have, these people are so smart. They could have gone to work for a top-tier law firm in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, wherever. But they believe so much in the rule of law. And these people are gone from the Justice Department. They're going one by one. And so how vulnerable is the entire Justice Department from complete collapse as it pertains to the real rule of law?

You know, it breaks my heart to say it, Jennifer, but you know, I don't know. I really don't know. And it's because, you know, what people don't understand. And I not only worked at the Justice Department, you know, I worked at ICE for four and a half years. Really? Yeah, I was a senior political appointee at ICE under Obama, which, you know, talk about a volatile time. What people don't understand is that most of these, maybe not most of these folks, but a great percentage of these folks are actually political conservatives. This idea that it's this left-wing deep state.

behemoth out to take over America and ruin its values is simply not true. These are people who, particularly in the national security context, transce, or traverse Republican and Democratic administrations. And that's a good thing. And I'll be the first to tell you, having worked in all these agencies that fine policy is going to shift from one president to another. Things were different under Bush than Obama, than Bush 41, than Clinton. And in a way, that's good for America. It keeps us sort of thinking about what's truly important to us evolving, working together, and so on. What we're seeing here is not a normal partisan shift. This is not the normal ebb and flow between left and right at the Justice Department,

and this is the erosion of core values of how the organization ought to admit. And I think ought to exist. And I think, to me, the worst part of it is if folks are following, the hiring of these U.S. attorneys who haven't been confirmed by the Senate at all. You saw it in New Jersey with Alina Haba, Trump's former lawyer. Again, some of the personal connection to the president. You see it in an Eastern District of Virginia with Lindsay Halligan, also unfit for the role, not put in it by the president of the United States, not confirmed by the Congress. And what supporters of the president aren't seeing is that this is actually screwing up.

I was going to say a bad word, but, you know, it's still early in the morning. The most fucking up cases that they want to bring. There you go. Okay. Is it better? Is the audience, I like it. Good, good. Yeah.

No, it screws up, it screws up cases that they want to bring because the person at the top of the office, courts are seeing that person as improperly in the role. And so it's a problem, not just for partisan reasons. It's literally damaging the very work that apparently they put their folks in to do. It's just mind-blowing. I want to talk to you about kind of like the guardrails that, are remaining and I think this is really interesting. My husband's a criminal defense lawyer and he says the federal judges are doing their job holding up the rule of law. Like they are really doing their

job and then it gets kicked to the Supreme Court in the shadow docket and they are completely in the tank for Donald Trump. And my question is like psychologically, I think about as a layman, a non-lawyer person. When I think about a Supreme Court justice, I think like Ivy League educated, intellectual and then now I look at like Alito or Thomas and I think are they just radicalized just like Bubba is and rural Oklahoma by Fox News or they just like the flags that they're flying up the Alito's wife and are there are these people are they just so radicalized by the Heritage Foundation like can you lift the veil on any of that at all because it's fascinating to me from a psychological

standpoint, that somebody that has that much education is cannot critically think or is just so incredibly biased. It's really interesting. Every president is entitled to put in people that share what he thinks is his judicial vision or what he wants to put on the court. All sorts of presidents have done it. You know, you really touch on something important with the Samuel Alito flags issue, which is something I've commented about publicly quite a lot when it happened.

It's the court's allowed to have conservatives on it. It's allowed to have people that have those views. The moment you fly a flag in front of your house, expressing a political view, you have tainted your ability as a Supreme Court justice to hear cases on that issue. And that issue came up. So, Simiolito had flown a flag on his house that some January 6th folks were seen to have, were seen to have flown, and many observers thought, wait a second, that's endorsement of a side. You know, something I said, Jennifer, to your friend Scott Jennings on air, went around this issue as imagine two things. One, I am an Eagle Scout proudly. If I were a judge and flew a Boy Scouts

of America banner on my house, and the Boy Scouts had a case before me, and they were being sued suing somebody, I could not be, even if I were fair in my heart, I could not be seen as fair by the public based on the public position I'd taken out and how I decorated my house. And the Alito thing was exactly that. So we've lost some of this veneer or notion that justices are or ought to be apolitical. And it seems to have gotten more extreme in the past years. And actually losing that veneer, I had on last weekend authoritarian expert professor Ruth Ben Giot, the best-selling author of Strongman, and some of that flagrant behavior, like the rules that apply to everybody else don't apply to us and the Supreme Court's

acquiescence to him is intentional. It's an intentional part of this whole autocratic play. You brought up Scott Jennings and you work, you know, I appear on CNN, sometimes you appear on CNN sometimes. How helpful do you think in the media landscape, having somebody And there's a lot of Scott Jennings, because Scott Jennings is not unique. You have this breed of men that support Donald Trump that are submissive. First and foremost, they get on the moral high ground as it were alphas and we're so tough and Donald Trump's our leader. Mind you, Donald Trump wears a full face of makeup every day.

If he changes his mind in the morning, we're going to go to war with Greenland. And by the evening, he's been dogwalked by NATO. They go, oh, brilliant art of the deal. I mean, I've never seen such a. talk about women needing to be submissive to men and their Christian nationalist worldview, the submissive nature of the Scott Jennings and others towards Donald Trump, do you think that type of whiplash is helpful in media? Because I just, I kind of don't. Like, I don't think his messaging helps us. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. It's definitely

Whiplash and all of media is figuring out who they are and what their voices are in this world. Now, on this idea of toughness versus submissiveness or whatever else, which is something fascinating that I've thought about quite a bit, and quite frankly, just stay with me for a second, in the immigration context too, so much of what governs policy coming out of Washington right now is about the toughness and the masculinity and the aggressiveness. You know, if you look at ICE's Twitter feed or Instagram feed. I don't know if you do. I've seen it, unfortunately. Namaste, oh, I can't imagine you're a loyal follower. But no, it's all about, it's all about how tough and how mean you can be to people. And I get back to this point again and again and again,

it's okay for there to be political differences. But cruelty and meanness is never okay, no matter what the political party. And by way of example, the thing in immigration policy that I think is just of all the things to be to be mad about, removing people from the United States to countries that they don't, that they're not from and don't live in. No, you know, if I wish folks would stop and think critical, you know, even Trump adjacent people would just stop and think about what that actually means. And we as a nation, the law says that we can remove people from the country if they're not here lawfully. That's been the law for quite some time. But we got to make some effort to get them back to their own home. Just think about the intentional saber-rattling cruelty

that it is to take someone who's, say, from Jamaica or Mexico or whatever else and put them on the plane to sub-Saharan Africa where they don't speak the language and don't have family ties or anything like that. That's all about toughness and fear and not about actually solving some of the political and policy differences that we have in the country. Of all the ICE things, and I say this is a former ICE person, of all the ICE things, that act among, well, I don't want to say of all of them, because there's a lot that ought to break your heart right now. But that's really bad. And I agree with you that it's okay to have political differences. And those political differences should be televised.

And we should have critical thinking conversations about these things. I do not see my differences with the Scott Jennings of the world. as political differences. I see them as moral differences. He wakes up every single day, submits to the leader as you see the Speaker of the House who wields so much power, little Moses Mike Johnson. He has so much power. And he was followed by Manu Raju a couple of days ago, blaming Norway for preventing President Trump from getting a Nobel Peace Prize Award. So I argue this. We're going to have a conversation with a conservative. Let's get on Mitt Romney.

Let's have a conversation with a conservative who hasn't sold his morals out. Let's get on the horn with somebody who is genuinely a conservative. But Scott Jennings does not represent a conservative point of view. Scott Jennings represents the moral collapse and the submissive nature of all of these triple Trumpers. And he gets on every day and provides a permission structure. These are our talking points. And I think it's really damaging.

because he doesn't humanize these people, these little kids that ICE is stopping and asking for their papers. There's no humanization on the other side. So for me, my difference is with Jennings, not political, totally moral. Cosmic, you know, but where I think it's even more acute, and you talked about it in the lead-up there, it's with Congress. And let me explain. And let's use my personal example as somebody that worked at ICE with a Democratic and Republican congresses, right? both times we had tremendous pressure from Congress over the actions the agency was taking and doing. Democrats did not like when ICE would go into workplaces like a meatpacking plan or whatever and just start rounding people up.

And the policy very early on in the Obama administration shifted because of pressure from Democrats in Congress. Congress said, we don't like what you're doing. It's not who we are. It's not what we're paying you to do. And you got to stop that kind of activity, right? Great. Democratic appointees, Democratic Congress held us accountable. Congress switched in 2010. When the Republicans came in, it was much more, you're not deporting enough people. You need to, you know,

we need to. And there was a conversation about how ICE could, could better suit what the majority in Congress wanted. But in either context, there was at least an attempt to either defy the president or hold the president in the administration accountable. That is gone from this Congress right now. It is just gone. They have overwhelmingly bent the knee on every issue other than I'd say Jeffrey Epstein, where you did see some broad bipartisan bucking of the White House for a short time. It's not, you know, everybody's moved on to Greenland right now. But at least for that moment, Congress came together and held the president accountable

on something as fundamental as ICE or who we are as a nation, how we enforce our borders. This kind of thing Congress ought to be weighing in on. And those Republicans and Congress have gilded or cast themselves as a body and just chosen not to really engage in any meaningful accountability. Okay, I'm going to ask you this question, personal perspective. Having worked in ICE and seeing what the Trump regime has turned ICE into, do you think ICE needs to be abolished? No, I don't think you should be abolished because every entity around the country has some

interior enforcement mechanism, Denmark, even countries that we would, want to emulate or some in America would want to emulate. I think ICE needs tremendous oversight. It needs new leadership from at all levels, new guidance and all of the above. I think, you know, it does not have to be like this. We can enforce our laws. We can enforce our borders. We can enforce our immigration policies, but it does not have to be like this. And the Trump folks came in and said, well, because we ran on this necessarily, this is the way it has to be. We got to get all these criminals out of here. Even that fact is a huge distortion of the truth. Of course there are people who are unlawfully present in America who have broken the law. Of course there are. That does

not mean that Nanny at the, abuela at the bodega is of the same status of somebody who has committed a rape or arson or a homicide. And there actually aren't nearly as many of those folks that the Trump administration wants you to believe that there are. And they've used this national security crime racially coded, if not Voo-Vo Zella shouted racism to drum up support for what they're doing. It does not have to be like that. We can still enforce our laws and not have it be like that. So I don't think that's scrapping the entire, like undoing the entire agency because what do you replace it with? And if someone has a good idea for what to replace it with, I'm all ears for it. But I think you just start over, maybe even break the whole Department

of Homeland Security up because it's just just such a behemoth that no one person can manage effectively, you heard me. Do you think it needs that kind of budget, the increased budget that Trump? Yeah. That's really problematic. It is. And that's a great question. When we talk about this idea of abolish, it has that budget because what they're talking about

is removing or deporting a million people a year, that's the budget they've given them. You don't need to do that, right? You can still have a robust immigration enforcement policy without the civil rights enforcement and 3,000 people a day and a million people a day because necessarily when you have those kinds of numbers with the kind of personnel that the agency has right now, you're going to end up with the civil rights violations and nanny from the bodega and the guy who's, whether it's whatever. I don't want to generalize about who immigrants are, but those are the folks who are getting

rounded up. Like, let's have an honest conversation about the brown folks at Home Depot who are getting rounded up, right? Who aren't necessarily, you know, with criminal records. And so that budget, they plused up that budget to be able to do that, which does not need to happen. And if it's all about safety and national security and the folks who are killing our, you know, livestock or people, get them out, right? or just figure out. We know it's not about that. We know it's about racism.

Yeah. We know it is. Stephen Miller has said that he wants to deport 100 million people. And interestingly, the data lines up that that's the amount of people that are not white. And Stephen Miller, we've all seen Trump putting boy. His brain is total mush. We've seen how cooked he is. I mean, it's just he confusing, you know, Greenland and Iceland.

And he's in his Marie Antoinette era obsessed with his ballroom. And this guy is so mentally cooked. Stephen Miller, they call Mr. Prime Minister. And this man is diabolical. This man intentionally uses Nazi language, Nazi propaganda, Nazi fonts. And he wants this to be a white country. And America is for Americans and Americans only. That's what he said, which is what Goebel said about Germany.

Yeah. And so this is about racism. And I just, I don't know, you're smarter than me regarding this because you've been in government. I haven't. I'm a podcaster. My impulse is to say we need to abolish ice, but I'm always open to be an evolutionary in my thoughts. And I do believe we have to have, you know, some sort of border enforcement. I feel like this agency is so cooked. Yeah. And I feel like the type of people, it's recruited or so broken. This murderer was a 10-year veteran, a firearms instructor. Three lethal shots. The first two weren't lethal. An autopsy is coming out right now.

The third was, and afterwards he called her a fucking bitch. And this whole group, you know, like, my black friends were like, dang, if they're killing white women like that in the street. Who's, we're next. I mean, that. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I think, you know, there's a few things there. I think, yes, if, it's just a question of, you know, when I'm asked the question,

do you think we should abolish ICE? My response is, okay, well, but then what would you replace it with? right? And the answer can't be nothing. I think both as a as a policy and practical matter, but also as a political matter, you know, for it's probably Democrats coming with the argument. You have to have some answer as to what's next. Now, there might be a really smart answer to be had of just reframing our whole thinking about immigration and our whole immigration apparatus. So, but not unlike the whole concept of defunding the police, the term means. It's the worst name.

It's the worst name. And it means more things. It's the worst name. And it also means more things than just that one phrase said. So abolish ice sit star and then, you know, beyond that. I want to respond to the Greenland, Iceland thing that you noted. And let's play this game. I hate playing this game.

But we're going to play a game called What If Obama, right? And it's just, you know, it's, okay, man, you want to have an imperialist policy. Okay, that's you. Well, you know, a new president will kind of. and soon and not have that, right? If Joe Biden or George, or George W. Bush had with that frequency, and that consistency, not even mispronounced, got the name of the country wrong of an entity that was ostensibly his main focus right now. The world would be, America would be going bonkers, the media would be going bonkers. And again, it's just another instance of something on which Donald

Trump really was allowed to have a free pass on something that other presidents would have been eviscerated for. And again, look, I'm in public life. I speak. I just wrote the book five bullets. I'm out there a lot. I misspeak all the time. The internet lets me know when I misspeak and say something wrong all the time.

You, oh my God, you. I get it all the time. You might have haters. I don't know. I don't really check the internet. I don't know. But needless to say, we are to there but for the grace of God go we. right? And sometimes, you know, I said things I shouldn't say and had to walk them. Okay. I'm human.

That's a biggie. And that's a biggie from an 80-year-old man. And that's a biggie from an 80-year-old man whose critics were quite successful in piling on another 80-old man who was president of the United States a few years ago. So I just, I was, I've been so struck by the Iceland Greenland flub. But all of these things, in my opinion, are connected to everything. we've spoken about. So his misspeak and it's so obvious that he, the standards that Democratic politicians and presidents are held to are completely different for the, these delicate, childlike standards that we have for Republicans. I mean, that's abundantly obvious. But as a commentator, a podcaster, I criticize both Republicans and Democrats. Oh, yeah. And the, and they're taking

it back to Scott Jennings. And again, he's an example of the one that hits the news the most of this group of hive-mind submissive men towards this tyranny that Donald Trump is wanting to impose on the United States. And that's what he wants more than anything. He wants it to just be ruled by him. But all of these things are connected because if anybody inside that Death Star, inside this submissive It's fully operational. Yeah. If anybody would say, you know, what he does seem like a pudding brain he does seem cooked then that then that starts putting pressure on the congress people and the constituents but when they provide a permission structure for this bat shit stuff to go on and on and on that's where i think mainstream corporate media

gives an assist and think about how hard they were on obama that tan suit think about how hard they were on Joe Biden. You know what? I think that's healthy. I think if you're going to run for president, you're a big boy, you got to have thick skin and they're going to come after you. You can't play victim and have a bunch of sycophants fluffing you on CNN all the time. You've got to be ready from your own party from everybody, every which, every which direction. But this guy, hitting boy, he's so thin-skinned, but nobody inside his movement except for much to my surprise, Marjorie Taylor Green. I know, man. Was that on your bingo board? Of course criticism. No. And so that's all of those things are connected. The the obsequious nature of corporate news in enabling liars, people that get on

TV every night and lie and lie to the American public and say, oh no, he really meant it was just a bit of eyes. Or maybe he got it wrong, but what's the big deal? They're lying and gas-sighting the American public and corporate media is betraying their customer base by allowing it to happen. What I am genuinely curious about Jennifer, and I think about this all the time, and let's use Scott as an example, but every person in the Trump ecosystem, and that includes members of Congress, 26 election and 28 election, they have to look to the future at some point. Yes, all the saber-rattling about Donald Trump being president forever in three terms and all that. They have to look the future at some point. At some point, there will be some fight over who the standard bearer of

that movement is. And what are they going to do? Like, are they going to continue to sort of follow a movement that really is modeled around a man, a figurehead, right? It's not, you know, it's, I don't think if you could take Donald Trump out of MAGA and have this MAGA, somebody corrected me on air for saying that once. You could take, literally I got a DM, it's MAGA from, you know, I don't think you can pluck Donald Trump out of MAGA and just put somebody else in and have the same movement, right? You can't. It's a charismatic figure, whether you like it. It's a cult.

It's a cult around, if you want to call it that, around one person. So one, what does it look like in 2026? And two, someone has to run for president, somebody and someone can, whether it's J.D. Vance or Marker Ruby or whoever else and can purport to be carrying the mantle of MAGA, right? But what's that going to look like and it's going to like, will it be? faction. It's going to be worse. It's going to be right. Because George W. Bush, Reagan, corporate democratic policies incubated this. And what MAGA is incubating is going to be worse. Look no further than Nick Fuentes growing popularity in the groopers. Look at J.D. Vance, who becomes

more psychopathic by the day. I mean, he is a man who has a woman whose parents were immigrants from India, he has mixed-race children, and he echoes white nationalist talking points. So what comes after Trump is worse. What this is incubating is far worse. Yeah. But I also think the electorate is getting smarter throughout all of this. I think getting off of the propaganda from corporate media is making people smarter. I think the autopsy of how the fuck did we lose an election to this more.

on that tried to overturn the government, hang as vice president, is a convicted felon. For me personally, it has made me really look into, I know I'm never going to change the Republican Party. I've lived in Oklahoma. These people, these crusty old white folks, they're never going to change. I get it. But urban areas and my participation and buying into a lot of the propaganda from the Democratic Party, which was really, for me, the Democratic Party was a savior in Oklahoma.

because it prevented an Obama presidency, a Kamala presidency meant that women in my state, if they got raped by their uncle, could go have an abortion. This type of presidency means you're going to be completely dehumanized. But there is a big awakening, I think, that's happening in the Democratic Party, where we are starting to realize

that after Citizens United, it damaged Republicans, of course, but it damaged a part of the Democratic Party. and we lost our way. Yeah. And I'm really happy to see that Zoron at the perfect timing showed whether you call him a Democratic Socialist or whether he's for really regulated capitalism is irrelevant. It showed what the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is supposed to be. Yeah.

And look, I repeatedly on air made the argument about Mayor Mum Domney as he was running saying, you know, everybody, he's actually tapping into a lot of the arguments that Donald Trump tapped into just in different packaging. And a lot of people say, that's crazy. He's a socialist. He's a this. He's that. And I'm like, no, there's a Venn diagram, and you don't get that far to jump from Zorn.

Believe me, Zormadani to Donald Trump. Like, there are corners of folks who are curious about them. Something, you know, I know you mentioned my book at the top of the show. Something that comes up, when I interviewed this guy, this guy, Bernard gets the subway vigilante shooter in the book. And hearing this man from the 1980s, this sort of bigoted white guy. and all kinds of stuff. But hearing him talk about his politics, I said, and I put it in the book, this guy is at the intersection of RFK, Donald Trump,

and Bernie Sanders, like his views of populists, of the media, of mainstream media, of fat cats, and everybody's scratching their back for some political game. And it just takes one smart politician, the first time it was Donald Trump, it'll just take another smart politician to figure out what that special sauce is that brings those folks together. But no, I think, you know, to your point about what happens to MAGA, just so I don't mispronounce it again, all those forces are, I don't know if they're going to break up MAGA

into the Nick Fuente's wing, into the Marco Rubio foreign policy wing, into the, into the economic conservative or social conservative. Who knows, right? Who knows what it's going to look like? But a lot of it right now is around Donald Trump, the guy, not. Totally. Mag of the movement. He's the leader of this authoritarian cult.

He's the cult of personality. And you're going to have their fissures are already happening. Yeah. You have Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green. But here's what's going to piss me off the most. If he either drops dead or is voted out, one of those two scenarios, here's what's going to really piss me off the most. The total racist, continuing to be total racist, whatever, we all know what that is.

Yeah. It's going to be the Marco Rubio's. that trot out and say, I was trying to be... The voice in the room, the grown up. The voice of reason in the room. I know. Those Republicans, the Scott Jennings of it, that had moral clarity on January 6th

and now is completely inside the personality cult, those are the ones that are going to piss me off the most. And so it's going to be interesting, but I think the fissures are already happening because the strong man is frail. We all see this guy's cooked. And so the N-5, is just going to escalate, but the embrace of the Fuentes

of the white nationalism and the real anti-Semitism in the world is not in college campuses. And I think it is in MAGA. It is in the heart of MAGA. Okay, go ahead. No, I would say the fissures are happening, and the support was always, not always, has been somewhat soft.

When you speak about, if one were to look at Latino men in the sand and the Rio Grande Valley, for instance, who flipped quite, flipped quite dramatically to Trump. If you look at black and brown progressives in New York who went to Trump, New York or New Jersey, my home state were to go to Trump, that's thin support. It's not, you know, they've not created, and that's not a knock on the president, but they just haven't created a generation of black conservatives in New York City. It was an economic populist. No, I'm just like, come on, man, it's an economic populist message to people that felt in pain

and suffering felt that the parties and the Democratic Party was not looking out for them and didn't care about them, didn't care about their public safety, didn't care about their economic needs, didn't listen to them, even about immigration at times, and turned to what felt like an attractive option. That was a somewhat thin rationale. You know what I mean when I say thin. It was just it's not died in the world deeply held beliefs. And those folks for the Democratic Party, I do believe, forgettable, certainly in 2020. And as you're looking, you know, you saw governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey. And I just, some of that, this idea that this wave of new support for MAGA or conservatives or Republicans among died in the world Democrats, I just, I don't know if I,

I don't buy it. Yeah. I don't buy it. I think there's totally with you on that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of anti-status quo sentiment going back into Trump. I think some of the, some people, get drunk on testosterone and bro culture for an election cycle, which is, you know, a part of us going from controlled media to now independent media, which can also be dangerous and feed some of our worst impulses. I was going to ask you that. People weren't factoring into the electorate. Yeah, I was really going to, I really wanted to ask you that along the lines of, you know, people are disillusioned with mainstream media. We can, we can agree with that full stop. But what happens when, and I'm really curious to hear.

your views. I know you talk about this a lot on the air. You know, what happens? Does, is there a point at which media can get so factionalized that people are, are calcifying in their views and not broadening their views and actually maybe even worse off? Like, what's the balance there? Yeah. I totally think it's a, it's a huge problem. I think that corporate media is cooked and year after year after year, you see that just the numbers are down. And that has to do with the way we view programming is completely different than the way you and I grew up watching the OJ trial or what you know seeing it Greta Vancester and remember all that that was so exciting and you had 24-hour news now it's different and I think that in that you have a danger where people are getting

into certain ecosystems like Joe Rogan or Nick Fuentes and then I mean on the left I'm sure there's you know, radicalization. I don't think it's as bad as the right by any stretch. And I don't want to even pretend that that is because that would be a total false equivalency. But I think there is, you know, we try in our IHIP news to start, journalism needs to be the gold standard, always and forever. Journalists work hard. Journalists expose injustice. Journalism is a guardrail and a very important guardrail. And you see it under attack by Trump, sycophants, buying up TikTok, buying up CBS News, Barry Weiss spiking stories, Jeff Bezos, spiking stories. And so those of us that have microphones need to always advocate for journalists because I'm not a

journalist, but I would not be able to do my job without journalism. Because when we get on to start an episode, I typically start with something that has been fact-checked, an article or a story from a journalist. And I'm hopeful that, you know, as the media, you know, evolves and I'm going to misstep but I always try to remind my audience of how important journalism is and I'm just I'm a bullshitter I sit here and talk about the journalism yeah and people feel a sense of community and there's a relatability to that but journalism is should always be the gold standard and I would also say and this has been something that journalists myself

included confront I and I try to be honest about not all criticism of the president is partisan. Not all criticism or challenging of the policies or the actions of ICE is partisan, right? And I just think some things, like you said, reach a moral or rule of law point. When I talk about the Justice Department, this is not me as O. Eliot worked for a Democratic administration and is just anti-Trump. No, to the contrary, I came in as a prosecutor under Bush when I was young, right, when he was president. And Alberto Gonzalez was attorney general. I shook his hand on his first day.

And that's, you know, look, I get it. But when you have these things that we were talking about earlier, like putting in U.S. attorneys outside of the Senate confirmation process who are not fit for the job and are just former attorneys of the president carrying his water in court and losing their top staff, they're all resigning, they're all leaving cases, that's not partisan, that is a rule of law question. It needs to be covered not as, you know, we shouldn't be shy just because it's a Republican president who's critical of the media. We should not be shy in saying this is, this is not a left-right thing. This is a moral question. This is a rule

of law question. This is an identity of the United States question. And I think, you know, many struggle with that and quite frankly get it just really wrong in trying hard to think, well, on the one hand, but on the other hand, when covering Trump. Well, they're sane washing. If they covered him the way that they would cover a dictator from a Muslim nation, the headlines would be very safe. Can you imagine? They would be very clear.

Oh, my God. Can you imagine just Minneapolis? Can you imagine if that were, what's, let's use the on the nosing him. If in Somalia, we heard that the Somali government, and I'm just going to be you speaking the most neutral terms possible. An arm or an agent of the Somali government shot a protester in their Jeep or car. Then the president of Somalia came out and lauded the action. And then there was unrest in Somalia.

And then the president of Somalia and vice president of Somalia went there. Called the victim a terrorist. Called the victim of terrorist, sent armed, fully fatigued, masked, military and to keep the peace ostensibly, let's just, just state what happened, right? Armed, masked, tacked out law enforcement, Somalia. Not in Somalia. If in France, we had heard that that was happening, we would be watching that with, oh, my God, what a backwater, crazy place.

And, you know, it's an important point you make there, Jennifer. It's a really important point, this idea of what if elsewhere, we. were reading the same exact facts. The headlines and the chyrons would be damning. They would be damning. And so that's the part where I agree with individual journalists that fight to disinfect and shine a light on injustices. But a lot of these institutions, these corporate news institutions, are beholden to the

same corporations that keep Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries from being a true resistance party and you know Moses Mike and all of these others from being completely the submissive party to a man with full blown dementia and so there's going to be an autopsy i think there's an awakening already happening in an autopsy of all of this but there's so much culpability and there's been so much incubation of this maga movement before he ever came down the escalator living in a red state around christian nationals i was not surprised by any of this because he is a he's a he's a mega church pastor he's a grifter makeup the swirl i mean this guy is just like every asshole megachurch pastor in uh white evangelical america i mean i know this guy

he's a total con artist but okay we've gone a long time elliott i could talk to you for hours tell us about your book five bullets okay great many people thank you for asking uh you know um so i've been talking about it all week and i've got to copy of it right here, hold on. You know, I'll even show it. I, you know, many people will remember the 1984 subway vigilante shooting. Bernard gets shot and seriously wounded four young black unarmed teenagers in the subway. Sound familiar?

Well, that's America. And so this book really is a tour through one. New York City was unsafe at the time, but what did that empower one individual guy to do? Why did he feel so empowered to act out? all of the forces that made the Bernie Gets story such national news. Why Bernie Gets is named in Billy Jules, we didn't start the fire because he becomes a bit of a cultural icon. Let me say, you know, something that's come up, that comes up in a lot of I've had it broadcast and comes up a lot in my book and may resonate with your people, this idea of media bias and corporate media

and so on. And I have an entire chapter in this book, Five Bullets, about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the New York Post in 1976 or 1977, which totally turbocharged coverage of crime in New York City to frighten people, to make them more scared, to put big headlines, wink, nod, there are black folks running the streets, and they're coming for you. And it was all, and you can read it all about this chapter

in five bullets, in this chapter in five bullets. It's all about how that one moment in a media takeover shifted the country's, the city's coverage of crime. All of the New York City tabloids, which you're familiar with, the Daily News and Newsday and so on, started doing the same thing. And if you think about 1985 where there wasn't CNN, MSNBC, Fox, I've had it, podcasts, the Scott Jennings show, whatever else, there was three games in town.

And if the newspapers were constantly telling you, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared. People would buy the newspaper, get scared, buy the newspaper again, get more scared. And it just created this cycle of fear and resentment of other people, of black people, and so on. And that was a huge moment in the history of news. And as I say in the book, it's no secret that Rupert Murdoch goes on to found the Fox News channel decades later, because a lot of their success has been in frightening people, right? You're in a red state.

You are far more likely to see images of people looting CVS than you are to see. If you were to pan the camera, okay, looting, looting, looting, black folks stealing diapers from CVS or whatever. If you pan the camera to the right in that city, there's probably a park that has children playing in it that used to be a place where crack lords and organized crime, you know, ran their stuff 20 or 30 years ago, but you're not seeing that. What you're seeing is the looting, which is a crime, but that's what, going back to that moment in 1977 media, that's what they've chosen to focus on. And it just makes people angrier. It hardens their views. It makes them more bigoted. It makes

them more angry. And it makes vigilante shootings like the one Bernie gets engaged in more likely and more common. So it's really a look at, it's taking one moment in America and broadening it to why are we so obsessed with vigilantes and this guy, this white guy today? I think that sounds fascinating. I'm going to get it. I'm going to read it. I also think it's interesting. One thing I've been saying a lot lately is the MAGA has everything they want now.

They have the executive branch. They have the Supreme Court. They have the legislative branch. They have all of the oligarchs that have been the need of them. And they're still terrified and scared and feel oppressed. And they have ascended to all of this. And so that's a very interesting component, I think, to the fear-driven propaganda in right-wing media news

that makes them feel like they're never safe, even though they have all the power. And you know, the one thing I would add to that, and I talk about this toward the end of the book five bullets, it's not just the media, what is the media, right? It's not just newspapers anymore, but it's the algorithms now that only feed you like-minded things that like,

to your point, actually is radicalizing people. And the example I use in the last chapter, in the conclusion of five bullets is, what if Kyle Rittenhouse, remember him from Black Lives Matter protests in 2021, I believe, 2020, crosses from Illinois to Wisconsin, grabs an AK, or, you know, a big gun, and shoots a couple people and kills some, right? What if Kyle Rittenhouse didn't have an Instagram feed or TikTok,

TikTok feed or Twitter feed constantly feeding him images of Kenosha Wisconsin burning. What if he wasn't in an echo chamber as many people are of, you know, this Black Lives Matter and Antifa are taking the city down and oh my God, we're going to lose Kenosha. You have to get there, right? He might have been, he might have been supportive or, you know, he might have been anti-BLM or supportive of, you know, the caught, whatever. But I don't know if he crosses state lines and and brings a gun and start shooting people. It's just, that's the algorithm. We are all slaves to what tech companies are sort of, you know,

it makes us hungrier when we see things that we agree with and sort of make us matter. And the maddest stuff, the most aggressive stuff is what gets boosted. And it has a far more, even more than any newspaper headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, or maybe even more than Fox News, that's the thing that is driving people bonkers. going to lead to more violence, I think, over time. And I think it's only going to get worse. Your next book can be how to be a good person as you navigate your algorithm. Yeah.

Elliot Williams, thank you so much for joining me on IHIP News. I want to collaborate again. Oh, this is great. Yeah, it was awesome.