The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: A Stupid and Insane Foreign Intervention

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Toppling the leader of Venezuela looks to be about greed and Trump's vanity. It's not about national security, and is likely to produce bad outcomes—including more repression of ordinary Venezuelans and more refugees fleeing the country. And even the monetary value of plundering a sovereign country's oil is vastly overstated. Meanwhile, fake imagery of Venezuelans celebrating in response to the US intervention are being shared across social media, and a polymarket bet before the strike smacks of insider trading. Plus, the idiocy of the Donroe Doctrine, JD Vance should shut up, Tim Walz was not ready for national politics, Hegseth looks like a total dork over the censure of Mark Kelly, and Tim reads from the Monday Mailbag. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes Will Saletan's guide on the other countries Trump could target Monday's "Morning Shots," including Mark Hertling on the "belly-button rule"  Tim’s 2025 Music Year in Review  Smalls New Year’s Special - get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/THEBULWARK. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code THEBULWARK at mudwtr.com/THEBULWARK! #mudwtrpod

All right. Hey, everybody. Boy, do we got a next level-sized long jumbo pod for you today. A lot is happening in the news. And we've got some great guests lined up this week. So we are ready for 2026. It is Monday. So we have our new segment we've been doing now on Mondays, which is our mailbag. This is for Bullwark Plus members only. So stick around at the end of show. Bullock Plus members to get into the mailbag. People asked if I'm a secret origami head. You will hear the answer to that. Thoughts on Hassan Piker and others. So stick around for the mailbag. If you haven't joined Bullard Plus yet, 2026, the time to do it. Go to the bulwark.com to sign up. We'd appreciate having you. You'll get these mailbags on Mondays, plus they're in JVL Secret Pot on Fridays and

just a bunch of other great stuff. So we're doing our best to put in the work to make that valuable for all of you. We'd love to have you as part of the community. Up next, it is Monday. So you're going to get Bill Crystal talking about Rudyard Kipling. Stick around. Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday. And so I've got editor-at-large Bill Crystal. Bill, no rest for the weary here. We've got plenty to talk about today. I mean, get to Tim Walls, not running for reelection as Governor of Minnesota. and a bunch of other politics stuff at the end. But since we were last together, we have orchestrated a coup in Venezuela, apparently,

with not a whole lot of plan for what's after that. I will say the most important subtext of the story is that we taped our New Year's predictions last year. And my prediction was that Trump was going to actually do the Monroe Doctrine and go into Venezuela and or Greenland. And so it took three days for me to be right. My other predictions, in case you're wondering, was that Trump would have a health event.

and that the Democrats wouldn't win the Senate. So a mixed bag for people. Did you bet on that first prediction on the what's, what's that called, polymarket? I didn't, not. You could have been one of those guys who gets written up as having bet, you know, X amount and made $10 trillion. Yeah, I'm not doing any insider trading, which is a loss for me. So I have a lot to get from you, Bill. I want to use your historical perspective.

You quoted Roger Kipling this morning. I want to hear about Panama. I was a young child when we got when we cooed Noriega. It's really quick for me, you know, now dust is out a little bit. The news came out Saturday morning when I was in New York. And there is this kind of tendency for people to want to throat clear and say, well, Maduro was very bad. And then there's a counter tendency for people to criticize the throat clearing and be like, you don't need to do that.

And I guess my opinion on this is that like it's kind of important, actually, to throat clear on Maduro being bad. Because Maduro is awful and has caused unbelievable human suffering in Venezuela. There's this massive diaspora out of Venezuela for people fleeing him, including people that then we kidnapped and sent to foreign prisons. But Venezuela is a country that had real economic potential and vibrancy not that long ago, like in my lifetime. And what Maduro and Chavez before him has done to the country is horrible. And I'm not one of those people that does not think that matters to the U.S. Like, it does matter for countries in our hemisphere to not have like massive refugee crisis and be. run by totalitarian dictators.

We should have at some level, some view on that in some role. And I think that saying that clearly is important to get to the next point, which is we're not doing anything to fix that. Like, this is insane. Like, what we're doing is insane. It doesn't do anything to help the Venezuelan people or our interests in any clear way. This is all a big ego, megalomaniacal plot for Donald Trump to, you know, feel like he achieve some expansion as goals or we'll get into it he's upset that he didn't get the peace

prize or for all these narcissistic reasons we're doing this and because of marco's like random compunctions there's no plan for making life better for the venezuelan people there's no clear interest for the united states to do this imminently there's obviously no clear interest in the united states to do this imminently and illegally none of their stated reasons even make sense which we get into and so for me it's like saying that maduro is bad is not to say oh i would have supported this wasn't for Trump. It's to say that no, the U.S. should care about, you know, the policy in the lives of people that are certainly that are in our neighborhood. And this is not an effort to deal with that at all. And I think anybody that is celebrating because they hate

Maduro, I understand, but I think they're misguided. And it doesn't seem like that what's going to come from this is going to make them much happier. So that's my short take. I'm curious for you. I kind of wrote Bill Crystal Cooks next, and then we'll kind of go into the details. No, no, I'm very much in accord with your short take. I just emphasize your point about what you call the throat clearing, let's just say being legitimately happy that Maduro has gone. His election was regarded as illegitimate.

We and many others didn't recognize his government. Doesn't mean you automatically go in and depose him, obviously. But it was more than just us looking around and saying, well, this guy's bad. There's an actual international effort to help the opposition, to recognize the opposition and so forth. And, of course, culminating, I suppose, and Ms. Pashado is getting the Nobel Peace Prize. So as foreign interventions go, I would say, in that respect, it was reasonably justified whether it fully is in accord with domestic law or international law, congressional notification, and authorization, many, many issues.

But I'd say I'm on the side of being not willing to stipulate that any attempt to get rid of him would have been a mistake by any American government. And that's A and B. incidentally, the other thing went to stipulate in the kind of throat clearing way is what I was thinking at around 1030, Saturday morning, after hearing about it when I woke up and reading up, a very impressive military and intelligence operation by the U.S. I'm not just saying that to be nice, but reassuring in the sense that those of us who have worried a lot, that I think not with that reason, that Pete Hex-Seth and Tulsi Gabbard could really ruin or damage badly our capabilities. We still have reason to worry about that three more years, obviously. But at least as of now, it seems like that's good for the country and for the world. So, yeah, we're worried about people leaving or

bailing, you know, competent people. Yeah, it's somewhat reassuring. So I think those two... I do notice that Tulsi Gabbard is her last post as her doing yoga on the beach on January 1st. It doesn't seem like she's playing a big rule here. But that's good if they've figured out to work around there too. So, yeah, no, I agree. Those are my two throat clearing points.

But the fundamental point, and I'd say incidentally a 1030 is on Saturday morning. I was going to watch our colleagues get on the air before Trump. And they did get on the year, actually, Mark Hurtling and Sarah and Sam. And I thought, you know, look, if Trump gets up there and says, we've done this, we snatched them successfully, we've minimized, tried to minimize casualties. Thank God we didn't have casualties. We're going to work with, of course, the truly legitimate government, the duly elected government and democratic election to try to work out a way for them to assume power and have

elections. We're going to work out a way to have a peaceful transition there. We're working with allies in the region and elsewhere. Bob, we're so pleased to be on the side of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. A different U.S. President could have made. made a speech at 11 a.m. Saturday morning that would have led someone like me, I don't speak for anyone else, to be okay, at least hopeful and sort of, you know, somewhat optimistic that this would work out, okay, even with all the stipulations of how difficult these things

are in many cases. And the second day is always harder than the first day, et cetera. What Trump said at 11 a.m. and it was really appalling. And then for a minute after, as I thought to myself, well, don't overreact, Bill, because that's just Trump talking. He's Trump. He's a jackass. but, you know, still the facts of the facts. But I now think I was right to be appalled in the sense, and I think you're making this point, too, that I mean, he said the way he's explaining it, what it's forecasting for what we're going to do

and not going to do, is turn something that could be at least, you know, a hopefully okay thing, and maybe even a little better than that, into something that's very hard to see how this doesn't end badly. It's not going to help the people of Venezuela. The first thing we do is throw overboard

the democratically elected leaders whom the international community was in considerable agreement should be helped to take a path to power. Doesn't mean we have to put her in power tomorrow or put the designated person who ran as her kind of when she was barred from the election and won by two to one. It doesn't mean we have to put him in power tomorrow.

We can work out of transition. That's all legit. But the idea that we literally abandoned her, start cutting deals with Maduro's vice president and the rest of his inner circle, including someone who's literally indicted in the same indictment that Maduro and his wife are indicted in. But that person, I think,

it's the Interior Minister maybe, is there cheerfully going about oppressing people and whatever corruption they're doing? And then obviously everything else he said about where this goes next and then the oil. So he turned something that could have been, I think, okay and maybe even good into something. It's just an example for the world of U.S. greed, U.S. kind of willfulness, Trump's own vanity, forecasting things that we shouldn't do. And I don't think we'll do, but if we don't do them, we'll also pay a price for having said we're going to do them and not do them, and really could be very bad outcomes and suddenly on the ground there.

Well, then he says, we're in charge. That's the other things. We're running Venezuela. We're not. I mean, that's just false. So saying something that's false, less than 24 hours after a big operation like this, is generally a mistake, and we're not running it.

And who knows what will happen on the ground. It could be stable and bad. It could be totally unstable. There could be coup attempts within the Maduro regime. There could be street violence. Oil companies are not going to go back in, in my opinion, in two months, if we're looking at the situation,

looking at now. The whole oil thing is so wildly overstated. I don't even know how Trump got himself convinced of this. You know, we have it's a tiny part of the oil market, right? And even if they all go back in and do great, they're going to like boost international oil production by one or two percent, which is a trivial. And the whole thing's utterly trivial politically economically. Not that long run. It would be nice. They have a lot of reserves and stuff to have them as a friendly country, but, and to be better governed, be very good for their economy, very good for the refugees to go back in. I think the odds are now greater that there'll be refugee outflows from Venezuela in the next six or 12 months, sadly, then refugees being able to go back to that

country, just to take one instance of why this is really going to be bad for Venezuela, bad for the region, and bad for our foreign policy in general, I think. And just really quick to your point. And the oil thing, like, neither of us have to be experts on this, on how oil drilling works and the percentage of the market and all that to just, just to live as a human in a society, you know, we have huge growth in the U.S. drilling markets right now. Trump was the one that said, we're going to get all the liquid gold off the ground. Out of the Biden administration, we drilled more than ever in history in the United States.

You're going to go to Venezuela when there is an uncertain political situation, when there are rebel groups in the hills outside Caracas, and you're going to go take this old equipment that has, you know, been decaying for the last? Why would you do that when you could just go to Midland? Like, who's doing this? It's totally crazy. a lot of cat updates happening right now for you the smalls which we appreciate our sponsor at smalls it's been feeding the neighborhood cat aritha for a while the neighborhood cat has made a friend

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So there's been some kind of consideration about how the Democrats react to this, as always. Democrats always clutching their pearls. And there were some Democrats on background and Axis over the weekend saying that some are upset that the party is largely positioning itself in opposition to this operation. One said everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base. This is anonymous also. Another anonymously said it looks weak. I think it's interesting to call other people. week while speaking anonymously to a newsletter reporter, I think maybe a mirror look is important

for that Democratic Congressman. But to contrast that, I want to put this audio from Seth Moulton, who is not a pacifist, lefty Democrat, as a veteran who believes that the U.S. has a role to play in the world. This was him on CNN over the weekend, and I think the Democrats could learn from this messaging a little bit. Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? this is insane. What the hell are we doing? I mean, we've got a lot of problems in America today. And invading, occupying, running Venezuela does not solve any of them. That's simple. That's very straightforward and it's right. You can say that and also say I hate majoro and I hate communism like that. Those three sentences are just the three sentences everybody should say. This is insane. Basically, everybody thinks it's insane. I think, you know, unless you're part of the Venezuela diaspora or you're just a Trump humper

and you're going to be excited about anything that makes Mr. Trump look strong. But, like, across the rest of the country, I think that especially if this gets us into a bigger entanglement, I just think that is going to be the widespread view and saying it bluntly is valuable. I totally agree. Alexis Southmilton, I hadn't actually, had seen it reported, I hadn't heard the clip. I'm glad he said that. He said it pretty early.

right he wasn't like waiting around for people to yeah yeah there's democrats on background both staffers and members who speak to axios do they speak to other people too i guess politico maybe political probably yeah you know what i hear democrats on background say that's when i clutch my pearls you know i mean they're always wrong i mean they're really you know honestly they think they're being clever by being on background and they say even stupider things than if they were actually on the record you know it's like if it works great which i do not think it will Trump will get credit. It does not matter what Democrats say, right?

If Venezuela is thriving in six months, he does manage transition to democracy, oil companies are back in, two million refugees who've gone back. It's going to be a success. It doesn't really matter what Democrats say. The odds are against that. The golden days in Venezuela are here again. Yeah. Either you support it and say, I'm, you know, with the press commander in chief,

I think he's made a reasonable decision. I wouldn't do everything quite the way he did, but I'm hoping this works. Or you say, this was a mistake. That's something, as they say, as we used to say, in the old days a binary choice, I think, right? And he doesn't mean you're for keeping with your own power and you could have been done differently, as I was so saying earlier.

And you were a different president would have done it differently. George H.W. Bush would have done it differently. But Trump didn't do it differently. And certainly once he has the press conference, and once he keeps going off in this direction by calling up every reporter in town, apparently, on Sunday, and then giving gaggles on Air Force One, I think you should be pretty confident as a Democrat

that you should just oppose this. And it really is bad. Even if miraculously it works out, well, it's still a bad decision. What's the point? It's doing nothing for the U.S. interests. If you want to be a Democrat that is pro-S.-American coups, because you have a lot of the diaspora in your district or whatever,

because that's just what you have a hankering for, then just say it. You're not helping anybody by attacking the party on background as being weak. It doesn't serve any purpose. It just makes you feel better. Why are you talking to the act? reporter. Who care? This is 2026 now. You know, you have plenty of platforms where you can just speak your mind. You're a fucking elected official. Speak your mind. I think probably the right thing

to do is have Seth Moulton's mindset on this and speak your mind like that. But if you disagree with them, speak your mind. Who care? Like, let the chips fall where they may. You think you're going to get primaried and lose over Venezuela? Probably not. Maybe. But at least you would have said your piece. You're an elected official. It drives me crazy. It tries me crazy that they do this. if you believe incidentally, as I'm more inclined to, that there are occasions when intervention is both right and maybe necessary, then you want to say that and say, but then you need to be serious about it.

And you need to have troops and you need to have a plan and you need to have allies and you need to have relationship with the opposition or you need to have a theory of the case and more than a theory, as Mark Hurtling has been stressing and the stuff he's written for the bulwark, a plan. Now the plan's going to be flawed and things won't go perfectly. But to do it the way Trump is doing it is, is just irresponsible. And, yeah, I'm glad Seth Bolton said what he said.

I'm hopeful that these guys have just botched the messaging on this. It's so obviously, like, pointless and stupid their plan that I'm hopeful that that will give the Democrats the backbone they need this week. And I kind of expect that is what will happen. All right, everybody, in my house, we have had just an adventure trying to find the right mattress. You'll get a little imbalance between me and the husband. the level of firmness and I want like a concrete floor to sleep on not as much for him he kind of

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offsite wide. That's helixlecksleep.com slash bulwark for 27% off site wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Helixleep.com slash bulwark. When I first saw this on Saturday, I think it came to my mind is I was like, I do want Bill to tell me what happened to Panama.

That's a young man. We got rid of Noriega. We had troop deaths that, that, you know, obviously that could still happen here. It hasn't yet. Who the hell knows what it means why we're running the country and if we've got troops securing the oil fields or whatever that could lead to casualties.

But I just am curious, like, looking back on that, and obviously the context is so different just about like being in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall had fallen, so the Soviet Union had. So, I mean, this is one of the biggest contextual differences, which I went back my own mind. I was in the White House then.

I was already, Chief of Staff. I took over that job about five months in. So I was in meetings and watching great interest, obviously. I wasn't involved in any serious decision-making. But the vice president actually did a fair amount of work after the invasion. They gave him the job, very vice presidential job, of calling a lot of the presidents in the area of small countries, you know, to reassure them that, look, we know what we're doing.

This isn't a precedent to invade anyone else. Panama's special. I mean, just normal routine diplomacy. And, you know, Jamaica was handling the Soviet Union and Dick Chedi, He was doing whatever he was doing over to the Defense Department and President Bush was busy. And so we got that job, and Vice President Quayle did a good job of it. And we got our talking points from the State Department and did all these calls. And I kind of remember that being a thing we did.

I guess it would have been right around Christmas or just into the early New Year. Which, again, it's just the routine diplomacy that what has no sense that Trump people are doing. So look, so the Panama thing had been a building for a while. Noriega was not head of state, but he was head of the military there. He was under indictment for very direct involvement in drug trafficking. They've been a lot of talk about getting rid of him for a couple of years, actually. An American soldier who's in the Panama Canal base was killed in some encounter with Panamanians, soldiers, I think, about mid-December. And that was kind of the trigger for Bush of making the announcement.

We had troops right there. We sent in 27,000 troops. We had casualties, a couple of dozen deaths. It wasn't painless. It got kind of messed up. Noriega went to the Vatican embassy. We had to kind of get him out of there. It took about a month.

They got him out. they had elections, they had a democratic system in Panama, which I think is going still to this day. Well, this is a potential difference now already, we're turning into next about like what's next. But the U.S. installed the winner of the annulled election. Like, they installed the person that had won, you know, the fraudulent election. And then they had elections, right? And they have had since.

Again, I'm sure the place is corrupted. It's not perfect democracy. But it's pro-American and it's pretty democratic and pretty constructive. But we haven't had any of the crises there at the mine. knowledge. We had a special relationship there but at the canal. We'd only given that up 10, 13 years before, right, under Carter. So it was more understandable to people why we were going into a country of four million where we had a huge military base and then had the Panama Canal, which was kind of important, as opposed to Venezuela, which is just badly governed,

God knows, and Maduro deserves to be deposed. But, I mean, it's comparable and we all thought about the analogy. I think there are a couple of things to we learned from it. But the main thing to be learned is that that was, at the time we all thought sort of, incidentally, that the justification was a little weak. There were some issues about the, it was really in a court. We didn't give quite congressional, you know, we didn't get authorization exactly. But again, it was, it was, um, Panama was kind of special and there was enough semi-authorization, you might say, just we said to discuss so much.

Yeah. Anyway, I mean, it's a very different situation and it worked out okay and is not a good precedent for going into a country of $30 million that's much further away. and is a big country with other neighbors who aren't happy that we're going in and so forth. Speaking of the neighbors, I am dying for one of the administration's do, just to be asked, what country's border Venezuela? Yeah. You can't tell me that anybody except Marco knows that Guyana borders Venezuela.

Like, these people have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, Brazil, I think Colombia. I mean, Central America had been a very big issue in the 80s. I made a big focus of obviously foreign policy debates. Nicaragua, Honduras. So we were involved in Central America. We had troops there. We had fights about whether we should have those advisors there,

Salvador and Honduras and all that, Nicaragua. So it wasn't out of the blue the way this is like, let's decide that we have a drug problem, which we do. Venezuela is not a major part of it. It isn't really, but we're going to go and depose Maduro. The other thing is funny. The reason I don't actually remember that much is it was December of 1989.

I mean, the Prolin Wall had fallen in November. regimes were falling in central and eastern Europe. Tuchescu was hung up there with his wife Christmas Day of 1989, so four days after we went into Panama. So, I mean, there was a huge amount going on, and in that context, this was a sort of small intervention that people trusted President Bush, George H.W. Bush, to handle well,

and they did handle well, and worked out okay, totally different from making it the centerpiece of a foreign policy that's focused on the Western Hemisphere, idiotically, in my opinion, And this then becomes the centerpiece of the centerpiece is to go in and snatch someone out but not replace the regime. So it's nice that he's going to be in court here. I hope that goes okay. And pretend we're going to have a happy situation and oil company.

And then they get about our greed, not even about democracy there, not even about our national security. One foreign policy friend of mine who remembers who was also involved in the Reagan and Bush administrations called me on Saturday afternoon and just said, what struck him about it was just how idiotic this is. There's so many places we could be doing things in the world if we wanted to be more exerting ourselves more and defending, you know, important assets. To snatch with Juro and leave the vice president in place, what's the rationale for that, as my friend put it?

I mean, sort of like maybe he could have had a heart attack, right? And he could have no longer be in power. The vice president would be in power. What is this accomplishing at this point? And Trump would say, I guess, that the vice president now, like, feels like they've got to behave. Right. Trump thinks about everything.

It's like, you know, like that he's the teacher. and the vice president, and he's got the ruler out, he can spank the vice president if they... I think Democrats being a little too quick to dismiss. I mean, look, bullies do have a certain effect. And if you bully one person very well, the others think twice before doing something that will do. So there will be a very short-term, you know, bully benefit, I suppose, for Trump and his relations, maybe with other countries in the region and maybe even, I don't really think elsewhere in the world, but it's so Western Hemisphere-specific. Maybe some of it will also be bullies also have reactions against them. Exactly. Maxi and Columbia and left-wing presidents are being

strengthened massively by this. Now they have the American enemy. Right. And this reaction against bullying. And again, I hate to leave aside morality and all that for a minute. If you're running a serious criminal gang, you can intimidate people for quite a while, unfortunately, as we've seen from Putin and others. If you're an ineffectual, willful, vain, it's a narcissistic bully who has an attention span of 10 minutes, that doesn't even work, right? It's not even effective bullying. You know, Mexico, you mentioned, I believe we started the NAFTA negotiations in Mexico pretty soon after the Panama thing. So at some time in the Bush administration, Clinton continued them. And one reason for that was not the main reason, but, you know, it was part of an attempt to say, look, we want to have healthy relations with important countries in that region.

We do have to do an occasional thing like Panama, but that's not kind of the norm. So even the bullying is stupid and short term and ultimately, I think, quite ineffective. And as you were saying, to talk more about that, because that's interesting. I haven't read up that much on the reactions of Mexico and Colombia. I mean, look, to your point on the bullying, like, let's just go into the idiocy of the Don Roe doctrine element of all this is what they're calling it, going around. And he's on the gaggle last night at the plane. I'm not going to play folks the audio, but, you know, basically says, let's go through this here. Columbia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling to the U.S.

He's not going to be doing that very long in these questions. So will there be an operation in the U.S. in Colombia? Trump says, yeah, sounds good to me. He reiterated, we do need Greenland, absolutely. He reiterated that Mexico, they're going to have to look at Mexico, and the drugs coming from Mexico. So I think if you wake up this morning, it's ahead of Cuba, you don't have a lot of economic power.

Who is it now, Diaz Canal? You don't have a lot of economic power or, like, really anything to push back. You've got to be a little nervous. Okay, to your point about bullies working against the weakest soldiers, shine down's popular in Mexico. You know, the Colombian president, Petro is like the lefty new president, has like a big support there in Colombia.

We're not much more tomorrow with somebody who's like covered the region and we can go deeper into all of this. But you can imagine them having a Carney-esque kind of attitude towards this. You saw like how it boosted Mark Carney, like that, you know, basically in Canada, right, where the Pahliav with the right-wing party was going to win. until Trump started pushing them around. And then, you know, Carney gets his boost from this. You have to imagine that as like the reaction in Mexico and Columbia while they're getting saber rattled now.

You know, there is a pride, a rally around the flag effort in all this. And who the hell knows what the downstream consequences are of all this? And like the, he posted on social media, like a picture of Trump, like stepping on South America and stepping on Greenland and it's like Don Roe doctrine. under it. The potential unintended consequences, downstream effects, sending Colombia, and Mexico's situation is a little different, but sending Colombia more into the arms of China, are you even achieving the stated goals of trying to create more control over the region? To me, it seems like no, and a backlash is more likely. Totally. I mean, Colombia, I'm no expert on these countries at all.

Colombia was an important ally of ours for the last 25 years, though, really did a lot to eliminate the worst drug cartels or to reduce their power. The country did well. Well, unfortunately, elected this guy in 2022, who I think probably isn't a very good president. I think there's an election this year. I think it's a pretty good chance that it will be like Canada types of where he could lose unless there's a rally to the, or his party,

I'm not sure he's even running, the rally to the flag effect, which would be unfortunate. So we should care how Columbia turns out. It's kind of important place, regionally, important geographically, and not a small country. Mexico obviously is huge and important to us. Yeah, and we have a big interest

in not making every Mexican feel that they're being bludgeoned by their big neighbor to the north, which has bludgeoned them over the decades and centuries. And it's sort of important to remove that. You know, if it's absolutely necessary, if it's something absolutely crucial to our national well-being, that's one thing. And they've instantly tried to work with us.

I think Schoenbo has been pretty, you know, on the border and stuff, has been pretty cooperative. And that's helped Trump since he did close the border. So now it's all, in that respect, so counterproductive. Also sort of neglects the fact that others do get a vote, as they say, right? In war, and, you know, it's not like the Russians and Chinese and Chinese and a lot of others aren't sitting around thinking, how do we mess this up for Trump just to make sure that other countries don't get the idea that they should capitulate to that bully more than

they capitulate to our bullying. You know, it's like the Chinese and Russians have thought a lot about how to be effective bullies. You were right, the Petro, this is not running again. There's a Colombian election this year. So much more on the central and South American politics of all this tomorrow. Just one more on kind of closing the loop on like, what is the plan actually for Venezuela and the stupidity of all this. You mentioned one of your old foreign policy buddies that was around in 89's comment about how, in fact, this says, well, Elliot Abrams, who has been out there speaking about this over the weekend, he was Trump's Venezuelan envoy or whatever in the first term. This is Abrams on CNN. The U.S. cannot run Venezuela. The worst thing we could do,

and we may be doing it actually, is to make some kind of deal with the regime's remnants and leave the regime in place, except for maybe a change on oil policy. He expanded in different outlets saying, were there Venezuelan plutocrats coming to Mara Lago and whispering about how easy life would be if we just made a deal with the regime once Maduro was gone? Were they the source of Trump's lies about Machado stature? Machado being the winner at the Peace Prize, who was the opposition party. You know, there's some reports, Venezuelans at celebration parties in Miami that thought Trump had misspoken when he said his plan appears to be for Venezuela to remain under day-to-day rule of a senior Chavista, with its democratically elected leaders excluded

and its wealth controlled by American corporations. So reporting the Washington Post or the weekend says that Trump basically cut this deal because Machado, he wanted Machado to reject the peace prize, the fact that she accepted the peace prize and said, and even in her speech, thanks to Donald Trump, like she praised him, that still wasn't enough. Trump was mad about this. The situation is pretty ludicrous. And then he ends up with the Delci, Deli Rodriguez, the vice president, who has deep Russian ties and was in her speech on Saturday, said that the invasion had Zionist undertones.

Unclear how, what the Zionist undertones would be there. But anyway, and that's who we're cutting this deal with. It is under any possible measurement of what could be optimistic for Venezuela, there's nobody out there, even Trump's own, you know, very. hawkish Venezuela envoys who don't currently work for him now who are saying like there's a clear positive plan for the next steps now just to emphasize for one second the insanity of turning on machado i mean if you're an american president you do something that's a little dicey it's problematic some of your allies aren't going to like it including in the region but also europeans aren't really big on this kind of going in and snatching leaders as much as we are sometimes well anymore

anymore you say yeah well good point they're big on it for a while centuries actually they're Pretty big on it. Yeah. So this is like a dream to have your defending the legitimately elected person who was the number two person and then had to replace Machado when she was booted off the ballot. And she's the Nobel Prize winner. I mean, at every European government and most of the Latin American governments like her, she just wanted to be the candidate. They booted her off the ballot. Now she's gone into exile, as has the person who won the election.

But it's like a gift if you're an American president to have this set of circumstances in a way, which is why, as I say, I originally thought. I don't know, maybe this could work out okay. And it makes it even more infuriating, really, that he's just thrown that all the way. And now has us on a path that I think really is bad for the region, but really bad for us as a country. It is very bad to have Donald Trump as our president. I want you to think about that, Tim,

because I know you've been a little way. Let me sit on that for a second. You've been a little wavering on that. It does seem pretty bad. There was some, like, real lefty type on social media who's had some not nice words to say about me, who, like, posted over the weekend, And it's like, I think we'd even be better off with Bush, right?

And then he replied as like a total Tim, Tim victory. And I was like, thank you. Okay. I'm not giving high flying marks for the Bush presidency either. But yeah, we're in for a rocky ride. Just one more thing, I guess, just on, without getting into like the internal politics of all these countries of Columbia, Mexico, and Greenland. Like, on the next level last year for New Year's, we did kind of like what your fears are

and what your hopes are. And one of my fears that I laid out was that it's just hard to know. know what is going to be happening the addled brain of an 82 year old man who like jail's probably not anymore in the cards for him on the other side but other bad stuff could be or for his family or somebody could get something in his brain or he could buy some crazy conspiracy theory and that he could do crazy shit trying to hang on to power this first week of the year makes me wonder if that fear was a little bit I need to up the timeline a little bit on that fear you know and that this year he might I start to think well shit I'm running

out of time okay and midterms don't look good and like fuck it basically and start doing real and this is this is crazy but like going into a NATO ally like Greenland or Columbia with a democratically acted president like that is that's a different category of crazy that doesn't seem to me like zero percent I don't think that's like Trump derangement syndrome people at this point to be like this is a zero percent chance it's like the stuff that he said he might do he's done pretty much so I would be. pretty seriously concerned if I was the Danes. No, totally. And I guess I wrote

about that a little today. It didn't meant intended Joe's going to write more just what we've been talking about about the actual operation and, you know, the actual effects. But actually, I'm also very now freaked out by that. He went out of his way to talk about Columbia and Greenland in the last 48 hours. This isn't like six months ago. He mentioned Greenland

and now it's on some say backburners, beating less. He's talked about it a lot in the last two, three, four weeks. Well, Salton had a good piece for us, kind of like some of this. And now he goes out of his way to speak about it. which is really insane. I mean, Greenland, Greenland is not in Latin America. Greenland is part of a NATO ally.

And Michael Wood, I think I put this in the newsletter, it texted me, when he mentioned Greenland, texted me and said, you know, this is my kind of off-the-wall prediction for 26. We'll be in a shooting war with some Danish soldiers somewhere in Greenland, you know, and this kind of thing that seems insane, but why is it insane, given what he's doing with Greenland and what he's saying about Greenland?

I agree, you have to take it seriously. Seriously, the chances are way above 0% that he's going to do one of these things. And it's just on the point about the elections, he cited his own stealing of the 2020 election in the context of why Maduro had to go was. Maduro had similarly stolen the election there. That was actually on Saturday, I think, at Marilago at the press conference. That's a little ominous, isn't it, that he thinks we should go into overturned stolen elections. 2020 was stolen.

28, the same people will try to steal it. So he has to do things, right, either ahead of time or after. after the vote. I mean, I really think I've been alarmed about that for a while, but I think you're absolutely right to be much more alarmed even than we were three or four weeks ago. Update on how things are going in Venezuela versus breaking from Reuters, Venezuela is ordering police to find and arrest anyone involved in supporting the U.S. attack decree. So it doesn't seem like they're playing along initially. We'll see how it all goes. All right. I don't know about you guys. I'm back, but I got the brain fog happening a little bit.

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You mentioned the election fraud stuff. I do want to play this flashback. because this is my burden as somebody that just marinates in the crazy all the time. I was thinking on Saturday. So I was

in New York, I was like, I wonder if part of this is that Trump really still kind of in his weird brain, you know, with his mania, it blames Venezuela still for the election, the stolen election in 2020.

Now I went back and found this. This is Sidney Powell, who is his lawyer, folks might remember in 2020. It was one of the few people that was kind of ride or die with him in his inner circle. He's keeping the craziest people around at the very end there. Another thing to be concerned about looking forward. And she was on Fox trying to explain her theory of how the election was stolen. And I want to play this audio of Sidney Powell back in 2020. Can hardly wait to put forth all the evidence we have collected on Dominion,

starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one. It was funded by money from Venezuela and Cuba, and China has a role in it also. He remembers that. Donald Trump doesn't know anything. He doesn't read any books, but a little fly. flying around up there in his brain there are sort of grooves somewhere in his cranium that are like he remembers all the details of all the weird accusations that people made about 2020 as they're trying to justify his attempt to stay in power i don't think it's crazy to think that like that contributed to this i mean like there are all these other elements rubio you know has to gas him up on it you know he's mad that machado didn't give him the peace prize there's a report that that majoro dancing was bothering him but i Like, you know, it's just all this like deep megalomamia stuff.

But I do think that that this action does relate directly to his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. No, that's interesting. I hadn't really focused on the bit. I've forgotten that Venezuela was part of the whole attack on Dominion, which did cost Fox $750 million. We should say, clearly, that was false. Everything on there was false. That was good. Yes.

In case our friends from Susberg-Gonfrey, who won that $750 million are watching, which I think someone would do watch our stuff. So, yes, it was false. And it was good that they won that lawsuit. but one more point I was setting a lot of time in this, but it is important, I guess. I mean, not I guess. It is important. The Democrats, one reason they should be very firm in their opposition, Seth Bolton-like, is to the degree they show any weakness in opposing Trump on this, it just emboldens Trump to do the other stuff he's talking about, right? What if he gets a tiny little bump? I don't even think he's going to, but what if he feels like this is working out okay politically?

That's very bad. That means he does do stuff with Mexico. It means he could do stuff with Columbia. It means the Greenland thing goes from being, you know, very low odds to because of something we really need to explore. And so I think it's, again, if you care about the next three years, which everyone does, this is no moment to look wavering in opposing this kind of insanity. One more thing to move on to some of the political news. I just have a little section here in my notes called Dystopia update. You're twittering. So I don't know what you're for you. What does your for you page look like on Twitter?

Do you ever go over there and see what Elon's feeding you? I think I try to stay on the following one. It's the four you think could be kind of wacky. Yeah, it can be wacky. But I do by accident sometimes show up there. Yeah. The AI, like response to this, that's maybe the first time that, you know,

all going into 2024, there are these, like, concerns about deep fake videos that ended up being kind of over- overcooked. Right. Everywhere. It was everywhere on social media. There were, like, pictures of, like,

Venezuelan grandmas, crying with joy, you know, kind of right-wing accounts. There were some, there was the inverse or left-wing accounts that were showing people, like rallying in the streets, supporting Maduro. There's just a ton of fake stuff out there

with huge, massive numbers of views and retweets. There's a lot of more traditional kind of disinformation out there, like people showing like rallies from soccer matches and saying this is Caracas right now. That combination with that you mentioned at the top with Polly Market, like there was somebody did an insider trading on this. They put in 30 grand 24 hours before we went into Venezuela, and they won 400,000 betting on Maduro being deposed by the end of January.

There's just tons of insider crimeing happening right now. And whether that was coordinated in the administration, is that Baron Trump? Is that somebody else that a friend of somebody we don't know? But obviously they have corrupt deals that they're planning for Venezuela itself. I don't know. Just the kind of tech dystopia element of this, I just think is an important subplot that we shouldn't just ignore. Interesting. Depressing. Depressing.

I'll say yes. Yeah, well, I'll keep on that beat for you, Bill. Let's do some politics. Tim Walls, I guess, is the biggest news of these items. He decided not to run for re-election to governor. I have some thoughts. I'm wondering what yours are. I don't know if he was a good governor, a decent governor, or a poor governor.

So I don't follow internal Minnesota stuff much. I thought he was a poor pick for vice president, and I think said so at the time. I just thought it was a political matter. and not even even a personal judgment on Wals. Also, a little bit of a judgment once I saw him a few times and did a miserable job of the debate with J.D. Vance, which ultimately probably didn't matter, but I don't know.

I feel like it kind of helped Trump regain some footing there and whatever that was in late September was. I can't remember. And, you know, made Vance less horrifying than he should have been because Walsh was being so nice to him, you know. So I'm not a big fan of Walsh. It's a national political figure. No, me either.

Actually, we do have a statement now out from Walt, so I'm just going to read it. He said he can't give a political campaign my all after what he described as extraordinarily difficult year for our state. Trump and his allies want to make our state a colder, meaner place. They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors. And ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in America to raise a family. Some discussion of Amy Klobuchar, leaving the Senate to jump into the governor's race, which in some level is, I think Amy Klobuchar has been a good politician. But my thought on Welts is, like, there was, obviously, some really grotesque targeting of him. And I understand why he would not want to stick around for a third term.

That makes sense. Going after his family, going after his kids, like, these people are disgusting. The most Hortman assassination and, like, blaming him for it falsely, again, all these lies and conspiracies targeting him are horrible. And so I don't begrudge him wanting to step aside. The point of the point I want to make, just because going forward is more productive going back, to your point, about walls is, and I'm not really that hopeful that this will come to pass, but all I can do is put it out into the ether. I think that Democratic media members, leaders, social media influencers, all of you all listening who have strong feelings about where the party should go,

national politics is different in state politics. And it's smart to let people get out there and kick the tires for a while on them and see how things shake out. Part of it was Joe Biden's fault with Kamala had such a short time to decide on a VP, but there's this like sprint to choose a VP, and Tim Wilson emerges out of nowhere, because he's a couple of good media hits, you know, where he's calling Trump weird, and

he's fixing the carburetor, and people got really caught up in it. And we're like, oh, hey, what about this guy? And then he meets the vice president, and they had a good report, which is, you know, important. But, like, they didn't know each other. I just report it. They didn't know each other before that at all. And so then he gets picked.

And our, like, social media era especially, there's this tendency to like glom on to something that's on your team or on your side and be like, this is great. Now I'm going to defend it to the death. And now I'm going to chain myself to it. And I'm going to wear this anchor on my ankle and defend no matter what additional information arises. And I just think like became pretty obvious. Like afterwards it said, well, it just wasn't that good at the national political stuff. Like regardless of you think about it is the ideological element of it. It did not do well in the advance debate. And I do worry about this as you get into 28. People, people would be so desperate for a counter to Trump

that, you know, that there's kind of a, you know, bandwagon effect. And I just, I think the right thing to do now is kick the, you know, people emerge, kick the tires, see who's got it. You know, don't tie yourself down. You don't need to tattoo yourself to somebody already. And I think the Democrats, And I think this sort of media vortex on the left did that with Walls a little too quickly. So, anyway, that's my thought on Tim Walls. Another one of the VP candidates that was in there was Mark Kelly, who is wearing, well, I think, over time in the public eye. There's an announcement this morning, our Secretary of War, we'll get mad when I say that, but I think it's funnier to just make fun of him. He's a fake, tough guy.

He's got General Kane is doing the actual work. all Pete eggs us, you know, does pushups. Anyway, he put out a statement this morning saying that Mark Kelly's seditious statements have led the department to take administrative action against him. They've reduced his grade and his retirement pay. They've censured him. They're going to say he's not a captain anymore after this.

These guys really care a lot about this sort of stuff, titles and the nomenclature. That's like the woke right. and we've got to use patriotic correctness. Anyway, it kind of goes on and on with more eye-rolly stuff. I'm looking at it right now, and Adam Kinzerger replies, you are such a dork, which is kind of my reply to that as well to Hague Seth. But Kelly has really been vindicated in taking on this fight against the Secretary of Defense.

And so I think that's worth noting. I don't know if you have any other thoughts on this. Just how disgusting it is what they're doing. I mean, there are times, I guess, I don't know much about the military justice system works for the people who are no longer in active duty, but, you know, there are occasions when people get bumped down in rank for really gross misconduct, either that's discovered later about what they might have done while being on active duty or, I guess, even after. But Mark Kelly has not, is a United States Senator serving with distinction, and he happened to make a correct

argument that you don't have to obey unlawful orders, and you should be maybe wary of some of the orders coming from this administration. I don't want you to know what legal are we going know, I just heard this for you now, yeah. It was interesting to see what, were there actual legal procedures? Was there like a midi court marshal where he gets to defend himself? It doesn't sound that way. They just decide administratively. I do think, you know, it's dorky and it's stupid and Mark Kelly doesn't care.

There are a lot of retired military. And, you know, some of them are going to think, you know, not all of them are famous like Mark Kelly and some of them are living off their retirement and whatever. You know, don't want to be publicly humiliated and knocked down rank. And incidentally, if you're a mid-level guy and you maybe have a consulting contract or you're working on for some corporation that does work with the military, maybe they don't want to hire someone who gets bumped down. I worry always about the intimidation effects of these things, even when they're done in the dorkiest bullying way. But it is, they're all such bullies, right? And they really such pathetic human beings, I've got to say, tag Seth, Trump.

They're pathetic. It's embarrassing. It's just also worth noting, like, how pathetic and embarrassing it is. It's like, you're doing this today. You're writing this very long statement on X. after you just cooed a leader of Venezuela and allegedly we're running Venezuela and there's internal dissent, I don't know. Is this really what was at the top of the secretary's desk this morning? I think it's another thing that's worth noting. Well, incidentally, I mean, I hadn't heard either until you read at the statement about the report that maybe they're now going to go after the people

who helped us at Venezuela. I kind of assume the regime would do that. Maybe we should be doing a little more to make sure that people who did help us are being extracted. This is, again, why these things are never one and done, right? Are we going to go in and help them? Are we just going to let our friends be arrested and maybe killed? I assume while the Americans are out now, but there are people who did help us. We owe them something. The idea that he's focused on Mark Kelly, not on that is ridiculous.

I don't know about all the Americans. Shit, I had forgotten. I don't want to. This pod's going to go along, folks. I'm sorry. You just got a ride with us today. It's a good show, long show. I wanted to move on to a couple of other things, but we just mentioning the Veep Stakes

and mentioning that Wall's right with JD. I realized I'd forgotten that I do want to make fun of J.D. Vance a little bit as part of this as well. The vice president was cut out of this deliberation over Venezuela, clearly. It was not part of the press conference. There's not a lot of reports about what his role was. There was pushback to that once that accusation came out over the weekend. And there was, like, a report was leaked to somebody that he was on the, he was on Zoom, I guess. Like, he wasn't in any of the pictures in the war room.

He's like, so he was somewhere else. on Zoom. And I just, I thought it was funny because, like, there literally is a scene from VEP where that happens, where there's like an Uzbek hostage crisis. And, you know, they bring in Selena Meyer on the, on the television screen while all the real men are around the desk making the decisions dealing with the hostage crisis. Like, that was apparently J.D. Vance. And then, and then he posts the longest, most defensive post of all time, like, about why he supports this action, Venezuela. He starts off saying that fentanyl isn't the only drug in the world, and there's still fentanyl coming from Venezuela.

I don't think that second part is true, but it's weird. Then he goes, the cocaine is the real problem. If you cut out the money from the cocaine, you weaken the cartels. It's like, Venezuela's like 10% of the cocaine market at most. If you look at experts, like it's going to, it's a blip on doing anything as far as cartel finance is concerned. Then he says, yes, fentanyl is coming out of Mexico. So he also can adapt his toe into the, maybe we'll need to do something in Mexico. and then he tries to do tough guys stuff about the oil

and about how we can't let commie steal our stuff. You know, it's in the ground in Venezuela. That's what it's saying, the oil. I don't know how that's our stuff, really. It's a very defensive poster kind of behavior from somebody who, I think, made a big bet on the nationalist side, you know, the America First side of this, but also now has made a bigger bet on Trump

and he's got to, like, come up with some Ivy League post hoc rationalizations for every dumb-ass thing Donald Trump does now. And it's sad for the country, but it's kind of funny for me to watch. So I just wanted to just want to mention that. I don't know if you have any additional JD thoughts? No, just that he doesn't the fact that Rubio is basically the guy Trump's turn to Rubio is getting featured and he's not. And assuming they are rivals for 2028, I guess they are not the only ones. but yeah, he's doing his best. He's so, he's also so good.

You just shut up, right? I mean, no one would care. Everyone's going to, no one's going to remember what J.D. Vance was doing last, the last two weeks, three months for now, let alone two years for now. So none of them has the discipline to just let life go on and not weigh in on everything on social media. Shut up, J.D. I also saw you posting as well. Just like J.D., you posted sometimes.

They're moving forward on the triumphal arch. I'm sorry to downgrace something so stupid, but we have a stupid country and a stupid president, and so we're doing stupid stuff, so we have to talk about it. We're building a triumphal arch in D.C. And I was impressed with your take on that. You pointed out that the Arctic triumph in France was designed in 1806,

and then France was defeated less than a decade later, and then again, 60 years later, and then again, 130 years later. And you also mentioned the Arch of Titus and the Roman form, and that that's not that's not looking so great so anyway i don't know if you want to expand your remarks on the triumphal arch at all i mean i think it's just such a piece it's of a piece with the van it trumps vanity and you know grandiloquence or whatever the right word is for that and that often does correlate with you know hubris and then it turns out napoleon

one of a nice battle on 806 let's have a let's have the arch to triumph and then nine years later Waterloo happens, you know? And so, I mean, it's so distasteful the whole thing. But so far as I can tell, the biggest invitation, the most notable invitation of the Arctic Toronto outside France in the last, I guess maybe ever, but certainly in the last 50 years, was in North Korea. They built one in 1982, which is a very good model. It's up there. It's up there. And they have little, I assume they parade through it, you know. So that's really great. We in North Korea are adopting the sort of stupidest most, I don't know, grandiose, sort of imperial symbolism to put in our nation's capital. I don't like giving Trump grandiloquent.

And so while you were giving us that history lesson, I just Googled grandiloquence thesaurus to see if there's something better. Magniloquence means the same thing, but it doesn't seem as good. But I like turgidity because it kind of sounds like turd. So I think Trump's turgidity is we'll go with instead of grand delinquents. Okay. I accept that. I have to talk about Zoron for I let you go.

I was in New York. It was great to be there under the new regime. No one there. Everyone's leaving town. The billionaires are lined up on their way to Teterboro for their private planes.

Things seem great economically in New York, I will say. Lines were long. It's hard to get into the shows. There was a new spirit, the common man, all joining together, joining the plurb.

There are two things that's going to weigh in on. He signed his first two executive orders. and I want to give him a toot for that because they were both YIMB. One was to create a land inventory fast track task force and ones to create a speed task force to identify bureaucratic and permitting barriers that slow the construction of housing. If the lefties want to take on Yembe, that's great. I'm going to hold hands with them on that. And I think that's awesome and important.

And I hope that he's successful doing that. So the executive order is good. Some of the rhetoric of his inauguration speech, well, I just want to play one clip. We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Still pretty frigid to New York this weekend, I'll say it. So it hasn't happened yet.

The warmth of collectivism did not reach there. I say this about AOC a lot, and it's just like, AOC kind of has a bartender side. And a, I forget what liberal arts college she went to, but a liberal arts college side. And like Zoran also has like, what would has be? Like a halal truck guy side and like a Bowden class president side. And it's like the whole truck guy that is like worried about working people and wanting to make sure the taxi drivers, you know, are getting, you're getting paid enough. That's good. Sewer socialism stuff is fine.

I can stomach it. it's like the liberal artsy the warmth of collectivism whoever put that he needs like just a just a rate he needs to get a taxi driver actually maybe to review the speeches that the other people are writing for him

and just be like let's I'm just going to strike a couple of these lines I don't know what you're talking about bro so I don't know do you do you want to give any defense on the warmth of collectivism returning to New York the only defense I would give is the right wing went totally nuts and you know collectivism is Stalinism

as if the words never been used in any other context. I mean, it's ludicrous to micro-analyzed this rhetorical thing of speechwriter, you know, that they wrote one sentence, but, you know, collective action, collective bargaining. There are many ways in which this is a perfectly normal, progressive, mostly, labor-type thing. And, yeah, for me, it's funny, you put much better than I had articulated to myself

why I found the term kind of annoying and off-putting, and it's the warmth side of it more than the collectivism. If he just said, no, if he said, we have to have collective action in many cases, individuals can't just do these things by themselves. Yeah, sure. Government has a role. He would have been like FDR.

FDR, I think he used the term collective action. Yeah, Bill Clinton had some good lines to that effect. This was more the Hillary Clinton that actually reminded me of this. The, what was her thing? Well, it takes a village. We already killed that back in 1993. Again, it's a little unfair. It does take a village.

You know, it's a legitimate point. But the whole way it was done was sort of swarmy and, as you say, kind of a little bit of, yeah. So the warmth of collectivism. I'm the fragility of rugged individualism. Fugity, I grew up in New York. I'd say the spirit of New York is a little more hostile frigidity than loving, you know, much as I loved many people in New York, you know. Trying to get into F.A.O. Schwartz with my daughter. Let me tell you. Frigidity of rugged

individualism. It was frigid. She kept going through, going to get through the line like, excuse me, excuse me. And I'd like, all like grownups were bumping her and budding her. And like, we gone inside and she looked to me and she's like, people aren't quite as nice. and people are a little more rude in New York than New Orleans or something. Yeah, really? Yeah, no, okay. One more thing, just so I can get it off my chest.

It's like, I also don't even think the left just really want the warmth of collectivism. It's like the response to like what you see online about Erica Kirk and all this. I'm like, even lefties like aren't, do they really want to be warm and collective with the people in the evangelical megachurches and the people in the red hats? I don't actually think so. Most of Zoron might, actually. Zoron's pretty authentic on this. But a lot of the online folks, not as much.

Okay, well, there we go. All right, Bill. Well, thank you so much for your frigid collectivism. No, I found this a warm village-like show for today. I just, yeah, I feel kind of warm and fuzzy all over it now that we've done this excellent podcast. Every Monday. Every Monday is my warm and fuzzy. Thank you, so.

We'll see you next Monday. Who the hell knows what? We might have a shooting worth Denmark by then. For our regular pod listeners, we'll see you tomorrow. But if you're a Bullwark Plus member, stick around for our mailbag segment. It's 2026. That's a great time to join the Bullwork Plus. You get the secret podcast.

You now get this Monday mailbag. So you can join us at theboltwork.com or on YouTube. We have YouTube Plus members as well. So for you guys, we appreciate you. Stick around for the mailbox. And for everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. It is going to be a good one. Peace.

The Bullwark The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.