The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: Limp Opposition

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Thom Tillis finally showed some backbone and opposed Trump—because of the giant Medicaid cuts in the Big Fugly Bill—but now he has to self-deport from the Senate. Meanwhile, the bill funds a giant internal police force for Trump, and gives a handout to the Dr. Strangeloves of Silicon Valley who don't want AI regulated. It would also cripple wind and solar energy, which even the ex-shadow president says is insane and destructive. Plus, ICE's racial and ethnic targeting, the plutocrats are the biggest suck-ups, and Peter Thiel—the man who gave us JD Vance—isn't sure he wants the human race to continue.  Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller. show notes Bill's "Bulwark on Sunday" interview with Tom Joscelyn Douthat's interview with Thiel

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to be here in person with Bill Kristol on Monday. I was up in DC for some meetings. I snuck in a car seat headrest concert on Saturday. You're a big car seat headrest man, right, Bill? I wouldn't even ask. I'm terrified to even ask, is car seat headrest one thing or two things? Or three things? It's a one.

It's a band. It's a band. It's a Virginia band. Local guy, Will Toledo. Yeah, it's really good. Folk music? Not exactly, I wouldn't say. Kind of like a gloomy rock.

That's good. Gloomy rock. Gloomy's good. Gloomy's good. It fit my mood. I wonder, before we get into the news, the real news, you were doing a big fan of the Bezos wedding coverage this weekend? Following it minute to minute. I was just fascinated by it. Everybody's outfits? Yeah, I had a lot of thoughts about the outfits. Yeah. I gotta tell you. I guess it was in Venice, that's all I know about it.

Yeah, I gotta tell you, nothing has happened to make me more pros over on Than the Bezos wedding I know I saw you but you announced your anti anti-zoran and I gotta tell you I'm The more I see of Jeff Bezos the more Zoran curious I start to get which I know is a wrong impulse But I have to be honest about my feelings I mean this I mean that's not to overthink this but there's a reason a ton of people became socialists or social Democrats At least Democratic socialists a century ago The plutocrats right? I mean it is like not that that is not that is a real thing

And I do feel like we're reliving this a little bit. I'm not quite as I'm still anti-zoran and anti-anti-zoran You can be funny. I'm trying to keep both, but the basis, what was it? Just grotesque and it cost $50 million? Yeah, yeah. And he's like, he invited Trump because he's sucking up, if Trump didn't go, but he's like sucking up to him because he wants the rocket money. And it's like, do we, does the richest, the whatever second richest man in the world, third need government handouts?

He's got to suck up to the authoritarian to get more handouts from the government. Yeah. And then the wedding itself, it's like, I honor second marriages. You know, that's good, but we can be a little bit more demure about the whole thing. I think. No, I don't think so. You can be a little more demure. I don't think so.

Not if you're a business. But the richest people are the most, are the biggest suck-ups. I have not seen a good, deep sociological explanation of that though. It is contrary to what one would think. Cuban and I talked about it a little bit, actually. Is that right? Yeah. And Cuban's answer was deeply unsatisfying, if I have to say.

But it was, you know, it was kind of more just like he they are Psychologically like They're competitive, you know, and they're like want to do well and want to win and like in this environment It's like well, this is what we got to do, you know for my business to you know, they're survivors You know if you've you've made that kind of money, you know, it's not usually by accident, right? It's like, you know, there's some bodies buried along the way. I don't know. That was the Cuban answer. It's not deeply unsatisfying.

The whole thing is deeply unsatisfying. But we do have one good billionaire, soon to be trillionaire. I don't know if you're ready to listen to this, but I want to read to you, I think, the most penetrating critique of Trump's big, fugly bill from anyone. This was over the weekend. The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country. Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future. That's Elon Musk, the former

shadow president. And that's pretty crazy. You know, like, everybody was like, oh, they made up and Elon's not gonna, you know, Elon's gonna back down because he wants the rocket ship money or whatever. I mean, that is about as tough a critique as I've seen from any Democrat. I guess he knows a lot about electric vehicles and understands that he likes subsidies. There's something crazy about subsidizing coal and non-subsidizing clean energy, right, which is literally the way they're going, which is not even as I can see, there's not even an economic – there are fancy economic arguments for why we shouldn't do away with

coal and why it's not as dirty as people think and blah, blah, blah, and we shouldn't subsidize Tesla's too much. That's all reasonable. This is just the culture war, right? I mean, it's like, we're going to just really go out of our way to take more coal. Is that really a good idea? They're also like, you know, it's,

I had Nick Chris off on a Friday, we were talking about kind of the stupidity parts of Doge to give you the other side of Elon, like these cuts that didn't actually save, they actually cost money. That's happening on the green subsidies too, right? It's like, we, I forget off the top of my head, I think it was, we've already purchased the electric postal service cars, but now we're canceling the part where they can charge or something.

I forget what it was, like some part of the electrification of the postal service cars is already done, but this bill is like we're canceling all of the money for anything associated with anything that happened under Joe Biden's effort. So they're just going to be stranded or we're going to have to sell them to, I guess, people that want to use Postal Service. This is a big market for the postal vans. Don't they open on the wrong side? Is that right?

Yeah, doesn't the postal worker get out the other side? I don't know. I don't know. I was on the wrong side. Maybe I made that up. It seems that way in our... So anyway, okay. Well, that's the only complaint.

The other big news about the BBB and that what I want to spend most of the time on here today is Tom Tillis. So actually, let me back up for folks who are not watching the back and forth of what is actually happening with the bill. So over the weekend, the first vote is always this vote for cloture, which is basically a vote to bring the bill to the floor. And so a lot of times things get blocked during this step. It's not an unimportant step in the hurdle in the process for people who aren't Senate

procedure nerds. And the Republicans in the Senate have four, have basically a three vote margin, right? Because JD Vance can cut the tie. So you can lose three Republicans and still pass anything with the tie. So Rand Paul's a no on this. Ron Johnson's been a no because of the spending. One cheer for Ron Johnson or no? Zero cheers for Ron Johnson.

But he flipped at the end. Did he flip? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's 51 Ron Johnson. But he flipped at the end. Did he flip? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what happened. It's 51-49. He flipped in the last vote. Yeah, the president satisfied his concerns about spending.

Yeah, got it. Okay. So it was him, Paul, and then Tillis, right? Tillis, who we're going to get to in a second, was retiring. The interesting part of that to me was like, if you just have Tillis and Paul, Collins and Rekowski could have killed it, but they both ended up being for closure. Now Collins is saying that she is leaning against in the final vote, but she wants to, she gives deference to John Thune on what he gets to bring to the floor. This

is the fucking 1700s. But so they had a chance to kill it. Tillis has been the most vocal. While this is all going on, while he announces that he's going to oppose advancing it to the floor, he also announces that he's going to retire from the Senate. He joins a long line of brave Republicans who finally say, who finally oppose Trump, right, as they're about to walk out the door. Hello Bob Corker, etc., etc. We could go down the whole list. So I want to play, this is Tillis on the floor explaining why he's going to vote against this. They can't find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that yeah, it's rough, but North Carolinas used the system, they're

going to have to make it work. All right. So what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore, guys. I think when the White House, which is advising the president, are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise. I love the infantilization of Trump at the end. His advisors are tricking him.

It's his second term. He's been around for nine years. He's like, and it's like, oh, he's being, he's being fooled by Russ Vought. Maybe the president just doesn't actually give a fuck about the so-called promises, the promises that he made Tom Tillis. So anyway, there's like a lot to unpack here. I know you have, we both have a lot about the political cowardice of him retiring, but let's just talk about the actual policy side of it. So it's interesting that it's the Medicaid thing that he, it's the deal breaker for him.

Hawley who also was talking a big game about not wanting Medicaid cuts, he gave maybe the most interesting and cynical defense for his vote, which kind of alluded to what Tillis said in that clip there where he said in two or three years, Trump's going to break his promise. Hawley basically is like, I'm going to vote for this and then we're going to not actually do the cuts in two or three years Trump's gonna break his promise. Hawley basically is like, I'm gonna vote for this and then we're gonna not actually do the cuts in two or three years, right? And so that's basically the Hawley argument for jamming this thing through. What do you think about the whole kind of back and forth on the Medicaid side then we'll get into the Tillis retirement?

I mean Medicaid cuts are real. Jonathan Cohen, our colleagues, written a ton about this. It's gonna cost 10 million plus people health insurance. It has spillover effects for reasons that are too complicated to explain and I probably couldn't explain, onto Medicare and Obamacare itself. And so it'll hurt some people who are getting insurance there too. And so it's nice that Tom Tillis is somewhat subtly, I could say, having voted for a million Trump budgets in the past and for the repeal of Obamacare in 2017 and everything else. Would people have lost healthcare in North Carolina during the Obamacare repeal? I think they would have.

The North Carolina situation is a little interesting and that's not worth again because they did expand. They were a purplish state, Republican state that chose to expand Medicaid because of Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor, and he was able to get a Republican legislature to go along. Having expanded Medicaid, this would now cut back and affect the federal's support for that expansion, which is why these 600,000 people are going to lose it. So I guess he's in a slightly different position now.

He's decided that the expansion that every Republican incidentally and the national level was against was a good thing. Maybe he could make that rethink his general allegiance to Trumpian and Republican orthodoxy. But there's no evidence of that. Can I just go on about, tell us for a minute, because I wrote some diatribe about this this morning and... So he, on his way out, he says, and suddenly he's really going to work hard to have a Republican successor. He's going to effectively want to work with President Trump to have a Republican successor.

I've got the quote I want to read for you, and then you can cook on it. So because he was asked who he wants to replace him, and he says this, not Mark Robinson, because he would probably lose by 20 points. Other than that- He's the lunatic guy in front of yours who ran last time. He's a friend of mine, what, because he like ate pizza in the back of a porn shop? You think that's my crowd? No. You did a lot of coverage of him.

You will agree to that. I do like porn shop coverage, porn shop related coverage. Anytime you don't give me a story where a man is sneaking a pizza into the peep show, I am going to cover it on the podcast. That's true. So anyway, not Mark Robinson. Other than that, here's the quote, I'm here to get a Republican to come behind me. That's the last thing I would want to leave as my legacy.

Yeah. So he wants a Republican who will vote for Trump's forthcoming budgets in 2027 and 2028, which will continue, of course, to cut all kinds of domestic programs and carry out the Trumpian agenda. Tom Tillis has been, I mean, he's, I know slightly, he's a decent person, he kind of would like to do, his Republican party would be one we could live with,

but he's gone along with everything, everything. He was a key vote member of the Hexeth nomination, wasn't he the guy who was teetering in the balance? He voted for Hegsath, for Tulsi Gabbard, for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Pam Bondi, for Cash Patel. I mean, and certainly he doesn't seem to express much regret about what's happening in some of these areas, the politicization of the Justice Department, the mass deportation. Some of us think that's kind of as important as, I mean to minimize Medicaid But you know, but no not a word about you but not a word about that not a word about the hundred and fifty

Billion dollars is it in the bill to kind of triple a quintuple or something the size of ice and the whole detention and deportation program It's nice that he's concerned about his Medicaid constituents, but Yeah, I'm even lower on him Yeah, I'm even lower on him than that. Here's another quote from him in his retirement announcement. It's become evident that leaders who embrace bipartisanship and independent thinking are becoming an endangered species. And I guess he's talking about himself there, but like, what did he do?

What was his bipartisanship and independent thinking? This whole thing, so he retires right on the heels of Don Bacon retiring. And Don Bacon is the Republican House member in Omaha who will tweet things about Ukraine that we agree with, he'll occasionally tweet criticisms of Trump, but he never was a holdout on any important bill.

He never did anything to block any major Trump agenda item. And the two of them are like, well, the leaders who embrace bipartisanship and independent thinking are becoming an endangered species. Well, it's because you're endangering yourself. I mean, they're doing it to themselves. It's not like there is some invasive force out there that is killing all of the fauna in an area. They've decided to self-deport from Congress because they don't want to deal with the hassle. Tom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, they could have all got together and actually

tried to embrace bipartisanship and independent thinking. They could have gone across the aisle to Chuck Schumer and been like, what do we agree on? The four of us in the Democratic Senate conference. This is how legislative bodies work all over the world. Lisa Murkowski referenced this when she was asked about this in a podcast recently. She was like, you know, coalition governments are not uncommon. There's a coalition government in Texas in the state legislature, in Alaska in the state legislature, in a lot of European countries.

If they really wanted, if they really cared about what... It wouldn't be exactly what we would want, right? It wouldn't be a bulwark agenda that Mitch McConnell and Tom Tillis would be putting forth, but they could have given weapons to Ukraine, protected Medicaid, whatever other pet issues about the whales, Murkowski has in Alaska, and the lobsters that Susan Collins cares about. But they don't even try. They just retire and then finally show

a little bit backbone at the last possible second. Like we've seen this story so many times now, and then they do a woe is me thing. Oh, people are so mean to those of us that want to try bipartisanship, and it's dangerous. Like we're getting mean mail. I'm just like, the whole thing is so pathetic. It's just like unbelievably pathetic.

Like you are a US Senator. Try. And in this last second, it's just going to be this limp opposition where he gets to pretend to be on the moral high ground on the Senate floor and not stop anything. They're going to end up jarring this through today. We're taping this Monday morning. The final vote on this is probably going to be late tonight or early tomorrow. And they're going to have the votes on it. Almost certainly.

How like the it's become evident formulation that, you know, it just, there's no room really left for, for statesmanship and for free thinking. Really? That just became evident like last week. Maybe it became evident, I don't know, January 20th, 2025. Maybe it became evident in Trump's Republican Party a lot earlier. Maybe North Carolina is kind of a swing state. Maybe he shouldn't have supported Gasp. I don't want to mention this.

If he's watching, he'll die and fall over in shock. Maybe he shouldn't have supported Donald Trump for reelection to the presidency. Maybe he should have told people not vote for Harris, just vote right in whoever the favorite son of North, you know, Coach K or something, or whoever the favorite son of North, Dean Smith, the favorite son of North Carolina is. Did he campaign for Nikki Haley? Again, like that's not my choice exactly. It's not doing exactly what I wanted, but I don't remember Tom Tillis being out there banging the drum for how the Republican should nominate a statesman-like presidential nominee.

So now he's shocked and, um... He's gonna support Lara Trump. That's what's gonna end up happening. Yeah. He's gonna end up complaining about bipartisanship and lack of statesmanship. And then he's gonna end up endorsing... Now that's really a good formula. And he's gonna probably end up supporting Lara Trump for Senate.

The one thing I would say Tillis and Bacon did to their credit is they were both actually pretty important in getting the Ukraine aid through a year ago. Now that was sort of against Trump's wishes, so they get a little credit, but they had half the Republicans on the Hill with them, including the Speaker, ultimately, and Thun at the time, and McConnell, was it McConnell, or the rest of the leader, whoever, anyway, they were both for it. So it wasn't quite the same as standing alone against Trump. But Ukraine, speaking of Ukraine, they could have insisted, as you say, four of them could

have gotten together and said, we're not voting for a reconciliation bill that doesn't have A for Ukraine. You got $150 billion for ICE? How about $50 billion for people who are actually fighting for freedom, not fighting against freedom, the Ukrainian armed forces? Nope, sorry. I mean, you know, and so they did nothing. Now he's a lame duck. He can retire.

He doesn't even need for him. He's got Rand, actually, which is not going to vote for anything. So that's a bonus one. He's just got to recruit two other people. Yeah, that's a bonus one. He's just got to recruit two other people. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. And the whole thing is just so dispiriting and pathetic.

And like, just a word about one other thing. Also, I had a list of slot count on last week. There's also this part that like, bipartisanship and independent thinking are becoming an endangered species. No, bipartisanship and independent thinking are extinct in the Republican Party because you're an occult. And literally, you might be replaced by the president's daughter-in-law. Like she is the top candidate to replace you in the Senate.

Like you're in a cult. It's not true, really, in the Democratic Party. Like sure, Manchin and Sinema took some heat, you know, so I think that's probably what he's referencing. But I had Alyssa Slotkin on last week. She's happy to work with Republicans on stuff. I had Tammy Baldwin on a couple of months ago. She's happy to work with Republicans on stuff.

A lot of times on here, we're complaining about how the Democrats are too willing to work with the Republicans on stuff. Whitmer and others. So like, that's also just not, it's not true. Like probably it's an excuse, it's excuse making. Yeah. And Hakeem Jeffries is getting beat up from the left for expressing discomfort with your friend Zoran Montani. So, you know, I mean, he's got—which is fine. He's expressing discomfort. He'll probably end up supporting him, but maybe he'll support Cuomo at the end if he ends up re-running and so forth.

Who knows? In Fairfax County, right near where I live, but Congressional District next to where I live, there was a primary Saturday, a firehouse primary, the party ran for the special election to replace Jerry Connolly who died a month ago. And Jerry Connolly's former chief of staff, who's now I think on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 62-year-old guy, moderate Democrat, won with 60% of the vote. So within one week, Mamdani wins in New York, young, firebrand, lefty, and centrist establishment Democrat wins, and is going to go to the Congress from Virginia. Yeah, that's okay. It's a sort of, and neither is complaining about the other, you know, I mean, that I

know of. You know, they may not love each other, but they're going to be in the same party. And I know, so there is a fair amount of free thinking and diversity of thinking it's too much for some of our friends on some issues you know sure we could do that some couple things that mom Donnie said and so forth but I mean in the Democratic Party yes not well but speaking of not irony that you might end up supporting Larry Lara Trump and not covered you go to the fact about the Republican Party you know who's not mentioned in his six seven paragraph I don't recall, resignation letter?

Donald Trump. As you say, these things are just happening. It's really unfortunate what's happening in American politics. You know, I mean, who could have thought it coming? Who could have thought a guy who demagogued his way to the presidency, to the nomination of the presidency in 2016, strived to launch a coup in 2020, 2021, and comes back afterwards on January 20th, pardons everyone from January 6th, makes explicit that he's running a basically pro-January 6th administration. I won't even

go into all the details. Stuffs to the Justice Department, blah, blah, blah. Who could have thought that, you know, that would be a problem for American politics? Yeah. I got into an argument with your friend, Karl Rove, on a panel, I think it was back in January. And it was a friendly argument, but like, it actually centered on Till panel, I think it was back in January. And it was a friendly argument, but like it actually centered on Tillis, which is why I wanna bring this up, because he was basically making the case

that like it's good to have somebody like Tillis in there. We'd rather have somebody like Tillis in there because, you know, when push comes to shove, he's not crazy and he's not going to push crazy stuff. And I was on the side of, not really actually, it's maybe net zero, like maybe it doesn't matter at all if it's Tillis versus a crazy person because Tillis votes like a crazy person essentially.

Like, or maybe it's actually net harmful because Tillis provides a patina of coverage to vote for MAGA for people like Karl Rove and for people who read Karl Rove and Wall Street Journal type Republicans. And so we went back and forth on that. And the news to me is just like, it's sort of a pointless argument because all these people are just, again, they're checking out, they're extincting themselves, you know, and like in the end, the only time they ever show any backbone is when they're already one foot out the door. And it's reminiscent to me of the 2016 primary where the toughest anti-Trump speech that every

candidate gave, except Jeb, was their concession speech. Scott Walker, Rick Perry, you don't remember this now because they've all got on board, but all their was their concession speech. Scott Walker, Rick Perry. You don't remember this now because they've all got on board, but all their concession speeches were like, we must stop Trump, he's a danger to the party. And Cruz, as late as the convention. Yeah, Cruz, yeah, it's a convention, right? It's the same, it's just a Senate version of all that. It's like, oh, finally, now that I'm retiring, I can do the right thing. And it's like, well, if you weren't going gonna do it while you were in then what was the point?

of having you and then Yeah, and incidentally the one thing that Tillis and Susan Collins do do is perhaps hold seats that might otherwise be endangered If they didn't have that moderate patina right in those states, so goodbye I mean good riddance, you know They are votes ultimately for the Republican majority in 95% of the case. And that's doing a lot of very, very bad things and not opposing Trump and confirming Trump's nominees in 95% of the cases. So forget it.

So I- Tell us in Mississippi maybe we'll take, because it'd be a free will, the five times, five percent of times he's opposed. Yeah, I guess so. But no, so I am for Mark. Now that I hadn't really thought about it until we were talking, but us mentioned explicitly your friend mark Robinson. I'm for him being the nominee Yeah, I think some Democrats are putting dollars in some dark When he pack to make mark Robinson the nominee so we can lose by 15 points so we can get a Democratic senator from North

Carolina who might actually do something about some of these horrible things that Trump and MAGA are doing and by the way and one Last thing on this. Oh bipartisanship is dead. You know who the Democrats are trying to recruit in North Carolina? Their leading candidate, Roy Cooper, the kind of moderate governor who would come to the Senate and govern and want to govern in an independent and bipartisan fashion. And who are the Republicans going to nominate? Either Trump or the RNC chair who replaced Ronna Romney because she wasn't sycophantic enough. And wasn't into the election denial stuff enough.

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That's 20% off when you use code BULLWORK at American-Giant.com. Go get some clothes. Two other things on this bill. Murkowski, I think we should save a word for Lisa Murkowski, who I'd love to have on the pod. I'd love to have you, Senator Murkowski. She came onto this bill, I guess, because she cut a deal for Alaska where the SNAP requirements, and I think the parliamentarian kind of ruled against part of this, but there's going to be some carve out for the cuts to SNAP, which is food stamps for Alaskans. Originally, I think it was for people in the non-contiguous states.

Yeah, that's how they were able to justify it. I don't think you can quite legally, maybe in the Senate, literally say Alaska is exempt from this. You have to have a fake kind of surface rationale that doesn't name the state. So the two non-contiguous states, Hawaii and Alaska, are exempt from the, I don't know what they are, the fraud requirements or something. Yeah. That's an absurd thing to do. Ludicrous. I mean, it's a ludicrous rationale to vote for a bill. I understand caring about Alaska

and all this, but there's a lot of other horrible stuff in the bill, as you mentioned, all the ICE money. Lisa Murkowski is for that, just the redistribution of the tax tables in an inverse way, to just the irresponsibility on the tax tables in an inverse way, the irresponsibility on the debt side, and there's plenty of other reasons to oppose it. The funny part for me, though, is the Hawley event. I bring back Hawley who thinks he cares about this. It's like, I don't know, why didn't Missouri get this deal? You know what I mean?

Like, why is it just Alaska? And shouldn't Josh Hawley have, like, you know, drove a harder bargain? I guess maybe he hopes that the Missourians don't know what contiguous means. So they don't realize that they're getting a raw deal. If this is a good thing, I mean, again, if the Democrats had any, you know, they should stand on the floor and point to Murkowski,

but they won't do that because they like her and she works with them on some things, not many, but a few. And maybe they're right not to, I don't know, but I feel like it would be nice if they, you know what, if this is a good deal for Alaska, why isn't it a good deal for the other 48 states? Why are you imposing, I mean, by definition,

if you think this is the right thing for you, shouldn't it be the right thing for everyone else? And why are you imposing these draconian requirements that are just fancy ways of getting people off Medicaid, their fake anti-fraud and so forth requirements? And I had a question on this, like it's all just like more paperwork. Yeah.

Which is very, the efficient, the Doge conservative view is just like, we're going to make the paperwork as onerous as possible. Right. So if it's good for Alaska not to have this paperwork, why shouldn't it be good for the other states? Yeah, I concur. And I think we'll see a lot for the Democrats today. We'll be monitoring that, you know, because they're going to have the Voterama and all

that. So we'll see. We can give some awards out tomorrow to whoever, whoever did the best. One other just item, because I don't think I've mentioned it on this bill, they have a rule that there's gonna be no, you're not allowed if you're a state to do any AI regulation for five years. And if you do some, you're not gonna get the infrastructure money, I guess it's going to some of the power centers. It's just like, this is such a backwards bill. It's like, you're not going to get the money for

your energy production, which is not going to be green or climate conscious. And if you do any regulation on AI for five years. I mean, neither of us are experts on AI, but I've seen enough as far as like how quickly, you know, the progress has been made. And who knows, maybe it's maybe it plateaus from now for five years and, you know, we'll see. But that's not what the smart AI people say. Like most of the smart AI people say there's going to be exponential advancement over the

next five years. So it's like, we're going to make a rule now that you can't do any regulation of this at all if you're California where you're the state that that houses all these companies in 2029. That seems insane to me. Yeah, it's one thing if they want to say, but the federal government's gonna step up and really resolve this, but I don't see a lot of that. No, the opposite. Oh, this is the handout to like the Marc Andreessen's of the world. That's what they want.

They just, they want total laissez-faire government when it comes to artificial human intelligence. Yeah, you can't really make it up. I mean, it's like, you know, we're going out and snatching hardworking immigrants who've been here for decades who are doing jobs and working hard and paying taxes and so forth, raising families because we want deportation, because we believe in the great replacement theory. So that's there. We've got hugely intrusive government, the mass dice agents and all this, AI, which is

kind of a serious issue and might do a lot of damage to the country and the world much more than a few Immigrants getting picked up. It's you know 7-elevens to take day jobs AI not gonna touch it, right? Okay, I want to rapid-fire through a couple other news items the UVA president James Ryan also resigned as the DOJ was looking into their DEI policies at UVA. This seems like simultaneously to me, absurd government intrusion and authoritarian creep and also kind of a weak need submission in the face of that. Certainly the first, I mean really kind of amazing, right? If the policies are, there's

no evidence the policies were unconstitutional at the time or were any different from 9,000 other institutions' policies. But if they were, they should have, I think they were willing to change them. They did change them. They wanted a scalp. They got the president who was near to finishing up his term anyway. My sense is that he didn't, but clearly the board told him, was willing to pay that price. I believe if the board had said, we're with you, you know, this is outrageous, we're the proud state of Virginia. Virginia, the origin of, you know, of the American Revolution and give us liberty and give us death and all this.

We're not letting you, the federal government, tell us who our president should be. But of course they are letting the federal government tell them who their president should be. And why, I believe it's partly because 14 of the 17 members, if I'm not mistaken, of the Board of Visitors of UVA are appointed by Glenn Youngkin. And the Republican governor of Virginia, and they all have to get along with Donald Trump because, you know, Youngkin, if he gets lucky,

maybe he could be Donald Trump Jr.'s vice presidential candidate in 2028, who knows? Maybe one of those guys on the Board of Visitors can get a cabinet position if one of the original ones gets sick of it, you know? I mean, it's really the degree. But it is serious. I mean, it shows how deep the authoritarianism and the authoritarian corruption goes, right? And we're not hungry. I mean, hey, America, come on. You can't take over. You can't intimidate the media. You can't take over. You can't intimidate the media. You can't take over universities.

You don't hear much from your governor anymore. Whatever happened to him. I don't know. I don't know. We have a good gubernatorial campaign going, which hopefully Abigail Spanberger will win. I think she will. And Mike and Cheryl will win in New Jersey. We'll have two good moderate, hawkish, and competent democratic governors in two pretty

important states. Speaking of hawkish, we had a little, you know, kind of tit-a-tat last week over Iran. Some new news on that front. United States obtained intercepted communications between senior Iranian officials discussing the strikes. Apparently, their remark was that the attack was less devastating than they had expected. And Tom, a weapons inspector in a separate story, says that potentially they could be back online in months.

Some of this stuff is like, how do you even determine it? It's like, you know, intel people with agendas are leaking, you know, one way or the other. Like, I don't know that we're getting the full picture. That said, I think one thing we do know is like, it wasn't the overwhelming victory that Donald Trump had said. And so if he wants to keep maintaining that line, like that is going to create tensions both with reality and I think with Israel probably in the coming months. I don't know.

What do you make of all that? No, I agree, and especially with reality. I mean, his original statement, one reason I was a little accommodating to it or as he said something, and incidentally if they try to rebuild it we'll go back in and do this again, something like that. Remember that very original statement. And so okay, that's the right attitude to take, plus we don't know if we got everything, so you got to, as Adam Kinzinger said I think yesterday, you know, fine, load the planes back up and go in three days later and do some more damage and maybe get a better damage assessment. That's not Trump's attitude. He wanted it to be one and done, great victory, peace in our time.

He's now going towards a deal, it looks like with Iran, that will be a betrayal of his hawkish supporters. I mean, so, I don't know. You could end up with the worst of all worlds, right? He's bombed, he's not going to bomb again. The Iranians have taken the hit, the regime's in power. No regime change. And they've set back some, I'm sure, but that will reconstitute the nuclear program in secret and maybe with more, you know...

And meanwhile, Israel doesn't want the deal. Right. They're stuck. And they've got Mossad agents clearly inside Iran and who knows what else they decide. Maybe they can keep just blowing things up and keep on delaying it which isn't the worst outcome I suppose but it you know it just shows again how I'd say I I thought there was a moment of minor hope fleeting hope there for Trump as commander-in-chief but he's really busy frittering away whatever possible good he did.

I'm sorry I had to dash that for you. We'll keep monitoring. Speaking of the Iranian regime still being in place, there's another story that got in my craw this weekend that I just want to talk about with you for a second. You were just talking about all these deportations at 7-Elevens. This one is even worse. This is happening in the New Orleans suburbs. It's close to May.

An Iranian woman who's lived in the United States for 47 years and has no criminal record was detained by federal agents last Sunday. So she's now been in detention for over a week as she was gardening outside of her home. Donna Kashanian, 64, was handcuffed and placed in the pack of a pickup truck by agents who arrived in three unmarked vehicles. She was transported to Mississippi where she spent the night, spent the night in jail and then back to the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center, this is very efficient, where she's been for the last week.

She came to the United States in 78 on a student visa, applied for asylum, but her claim was denied. The federal officials granted her a reprieve to stay in the country though, provided she followed the law and appeared at regular immigration appointments. Family member said she has never missed one of those appointments and never been accused of a crime. James Gunn is in New Orleans reporting on that. And this is just so insane.

And it comes, I should put one other piece of context around this and get your reply. Why did this happen? Well, we don't actually have to guess because the DHS put out a press release that was talking about all the Iranians that they nabbed after the bombings. So the ICE, I guess, decided because we were in this skirmish with Iran that it was the moment to go down their checklist of any people who they have who are Iranian and go find them and spoke them out. Again, it's like the Venezuela thing.

Maybe there's a couple bad Iranians on that list. I don't know. I'm pretty sure that Donna Kashanian in Lakeview was not a sleeper cell Iranian agent planning a counterattack in the country. But like that's, she was purely targeted based on ethnicity and race and country of origin. Yeah, and I think the targeting is the interesting part, I mean interesting, something I were, but kind of the grotesque part, right, that they went out, it's not like sometimes they go to some place where there are a lot of people, some of them are undocumented.

They pick up a lot of people, some of them aren't there or they aren't documented. I still think it's stupid and bad to cheat them the way they've been treated and to kick them out of the country if they're doing no harm, but at least okay, it happens. Or if they pick up, they're going after an actual criminal and in the course of it, they pick up people he's hanging out with who are undocumented. They went, this took a lot of work. They had to go, someone went through the whole computer, you know, Iranians who are, why do we know that she's Iranian and that she's there? Because she's been reporting every year or month or whatever she's supposed to report, right? She's like diligently following the rules

she was given. And now you're out so Pam Bondi can put out a press release. And there was, right? Wasn't there a big thing about we we're getting those Iranians here. You know, we've got 12 of them already deported because it's, so it's really grotesque. Yeah, and we're gonna deport her back to where? We literally just bombed Iran. Yeah. So we're gonna deport her back to the Ayatollahs

where she hasn't been in a half century. No, we'll send her to South Sudan or to- Send her to Rwanda. Or Rwanda, some other place. And now it is grotesque. I mean, the degree of just, as I say, it's one thing to have a harsh and even cruel, I would say, immigration policy,

but okay, it's a policy, I guess you'd say, and we can just debate it. But this is not even that. This is for the sake of the press release, we're arresting a woman who's minding her own business and has lived here for almost 50 years, she said. Yeah, so 47 years. She came in school. So, Pam Bondi can strut around. I mean, DHS, it should all be defunded.

It should all be... Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, Christina. Yeah. Yeah, that was bad. They're bad. Pam Bondi's bad, too. Bad in different ways. Different departments. And they both strut, I think. Yeah. DHS, really, I sort of had come around to defunding ICE about a month or two ago But now I'm just on the defund DHS thing with this country ultimately be safer if there were no DHS

Maybe there should be TSA. I don't know and they part of DHS I'd say they're mostly harmless. I mean, you know, can we do just a quick aside? It's been 24 years since 9-11 and people are still taking off their shoes. It's a ridiculous system. You should invest in the, what's it called, the pre-check. You don't have to take off your shoes. I do. I have.

I don't. I'm not taking off my shoes. But there are still people taking off their shoes and they've changed. How much money did we spend? This was my dojo thing. They've changed to the new scanners for the bags and the system is worse. The system is worse now. Now they do the thing where they centralized it so your bag goes in and then someone's

watching it. But like sometimes your bag just sits in there now. Right, right. And I'm getting fucking annoyed. And I'm like how is this, how is the system less efficient than it was in 2003? Two years after 9-11. So no, I could get rid of all of it. TSA. Tom Nichols said he was against DHS

from the start. So, he said that's a principled stand for him because something about efficiencies and like any of the elements of DHS that they do could also be done inside other... Well, they all existed, obviously, and many of them existed before DHS existed in different departments, you know, Treasury and Justice and other places. And there was, I think, right at the time, there's, this was a classic case, we began by talking about bipartisanship and all. This was a wonderful bipartisan centrist thing. I think it was Lieberman and Collins, and I loved Joe Lieberman and all, I respect Susan

Collins. This was going to make it all better. And sometimes all that bipartisan stuff doesn't work too well either, you know what I mean? It might have been better just to leave these agencies where they were. But anyway, DHS has become kind of, but the money that's going to DHS, it's going to become, it is, I mean, it sounds hysterical to even say it this way, but it is going to become virtually Trump's internal police force. And you put that together with the troops that he's mobilized, which we've all decided,

I guess it's fine. They're like, they're still out in LA. There hasn't been a riot in LA in two weeks, has there? Since before the Iran war. They're out, but the Marines, the National Guard, the Marines are out there and they've laid the predicate very explicitly in Trump's memo and elsewhere to use the troops wherever else they want. And it's not only the Supreme Court, like just gonna, are they doing anything?

I mean, other district courts have tried to do a few things. Supreme Court basically slapped them down last week. And so for all I know, maybe there's some case chugging its way illegally through the court. Chief Justice Roberts is telling us all not to get too upset. You shouldn't really criticize the judges. You know, they're really, it's just a sore loser if you criticize the judges. Didn't Robert say something like that on Saturday?

I mean, another established Republican who's useless, if I could say. Anyway, the courts aren't going to save us, but it's bad. It's bad, the DHS and... There's going to be more people in ICE detention than in the federal prison system if this thing all goes, if they get all of their plans. That's how big their plans are. I'm glad you mentioned military in the streets. I'm now tweeting like, just basically once a day.

It's like, are there still military in Los Angeles? Why? Why? They don't even offer a stated rationale, and everybody just kind of has moved on. It's not on the news. My friend Tom Jocelyn, who I did a very good, if I could say, podcast yesterday,

people might watch at the bulwark on Sunday, very good forest, not trees kind of look at the progress of Trump's authoritarian agenda over the eight months since he was elected. It's pretty scary when you step back and look at everything that's happening. On the troops thing, that's an important part of it, you know, normalizing that, getting people used to it.

So when there is a riot somewhere or some real disturbance somewhere, suddenly there's not 4,000, there's 24,000, you know, and it's not just National Guard, it's Marines and so forth. So... Just one more thing on the Iranian woman, because I was just thinking about this. The idea that I can understand why people on the national side were like, well, whatever, she didn't follow the rules. This is just how things have worked throughout the whole country.

I was thinking about this, I was looking at a woman that made me think about my mother's grandmother, so my great grandmother on the maternal side, Titi. She came from Lebanon. Her husband was probably in a arranged marriage situation or something, at least in that ballpark, was older. My great grandfather came over, got a job, worked, brought Titi over. They had seven kids, you know, grew up here. Three of them, at least three, served in World War II.

I was reading the diaries of one of my great-uncles, who I grew up diaries about his time. He was in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So, I was reading the diaries of that day and, like, the following day, I said he was writing at the time the letters he was writing home to my great-grandmother. But it's like she didn't really learn English that well. Like her English was poor. Did they really follow the immigration laws? I mean, you know, and it was like the early 1900s, like the rules were very different

back then, right? And similarly to this woman, it's like, would you say that she's illegal? You know, because when you bring this up, sometimes people are like, well, they broke the law to come into this country, but she really didn't. She came as a student. Now I'm talking about this Donna Kashanian woman in New Orleans. She came as a student and then applied for asylum, didn't get it, but then they said she could stay, right?

So it's not like she came across the Rio Grande, right? So it's a similar situation. And I'm thinking to myself, like, imagine my great-grandmother being 65, like, in the St. Louis suburbs, like, gardening outside the home, and thinking about, like, my mother and my uncles and aunts and, like, them being kids, and, like, having her be snatched and, like, handcuffed and put into the back of a truck and then had a bunch of people being like, well, she never learned the language, wasn't really an American. That is how the whole country has happened, people like this coming to the country. My great-grandmother had kids, served in the military.

She had grandkids who are doctors and members members of their, you know, upstairs members of the community. Now, here I am blabbing my fucking mouth on a podcast. Like, that's like how shit works in this country. And the idea that we're going to start like taking these, these people like, like she is not any less of an American than Stephen Miller in any meaningful way, right? Like the whole thing is just just, it feels very against the American tradition. And I just think it's important that everybody talks about it because you start to see this conventional wisdom that came in that this isn't, it's not good to talk about immigration, that's a good winner for Trump.

I just reject it because everybody has a story like this, you know? I mean, nativism is sadly part of the American tradition too, both in the 1920s obviously, and in the 1850s, Lincoln was really appalled by it when he saw it with the Germans, his great speech in Cincinnati about the prejudice against those immigrants, and he famously has that statement about some people are the grandchildren, he says great grandchildren, of people who fought in the American Revolution. Some people's parents just came over.

We're all equally Americans, you know? And that one seems to quite have the nerve, well, I was like, not that one, but people should say that more often today. I couldn't agree more. And the nativism is ugly. You know, I used to think, well, it's kind of an unfortunate

and weird episodes in American history, but I could see people were a little freaked out too many people speaking Italian And you know too many Irish guys in bars and too many Germans reading German language newspapers and all this kind of thing But actually it's always been uglier than that and it really you see the ugliness now I guess that's why I brought up tidy because we're not lack of English speaking which is not to neg her But that's like a common complaint right of the nativist crowd right? Oh, they're speaking. They're reading the German newspapers They're not assim nag her, but that's like a common complaint, right, of the nativist crowd, right? Oh, they're speaking, they're reading the German newspapers, they're not assimilating. This is just like, this has happened for 300 years now where this happens, where like they

do assimilate. Donna has children that, you know, that were doing these interviews, that live in New Orleans, that contribute to the community, right? That's just how things work. When I was a little kid, my grandmother, after my grandfather died, moved in with us in our apartment. I guess maybe I was junior high and high school at that point, high school probably. And on my way home, I would stop at the newsstand to buy her the Yiddish newspaper, which came

out in the afternoon. So, like, you couldn't even get it delivered. It was already twirling away in Yiddish, You know, I kind of used to enjoy reading a few words that I could, it's written in Hebrew, which I kind of knew enough to read, but the words are Yiddish, which is really more like German. So it's just kind of a weird thing.

Anyways, it's kind of interesting to me as a, you know, ninth grader to try to read three sentences. But so I used to buy it, come home with this. And so she was, she had been here for 40, 50 years. Her son-in-law, my father had fought in World War II, her daughter was a professor of history, and I was buying her the Yiddish language paper. Was that so terrible? Well, thank God Kristi Noem wasn't around back then. You would have been shackled and

then thrown into the back of a truck. English only. All right, last thing. I'm going to give you some dessert. Is this dessert or not? I don't know. You can decide for yourself. I suffered through Ross Douth. I had some interview with Peter Thiel because I'm a sick person. And there's one clip that's been going around. And in case you guys haven't had this, just the experience of being able to listen to

this moment, I want to share it with all of you. You would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitating. Yes? I don't know. I would... This is a long hesitation. There's so many questions in close to this.

Should the human race survive? Yes. Some really hard-hitting journalism from Ross Douthat there. Ross gets some slings and arrows around these parts, but he's asking the tough questions. Do you want the human race to endure? Peter Thiel. It seems like basically the answer is no, but he doesn't want to say it. So he comes around to yes after 30 seconds.

This is the man that set the vice president in place. And it's a little concerning. You and Peter used to hang out. It's a little concerning the level of influence that these people have. Totally. I mean, he's a very smart guy who I 20 years ago thought was an interesting person, eccentric, and his views were clearly a little off the deep end. But you know, interesting guy to have to discuss texts of political philosophy with, because he was perceptive and willing to be

contrarian to, at least, people like that. It should be a good lesson that what's interesting, sort of interesting, until actually maybe not as interesting as I thought, honestly, but can be very unhealthy politically. And I guess I now, I didn't have anything to do with his success, obviously. He was already, had made his millions of dollars

by the time I met him. But I guess I should have seen, I guess he had some political ambitions at the time, but it's like he was writing checks to the Ron Paul campaign in 2008. It was just kind of quirky, you know, and silly. But here we are, right? I mean, it is the true,

I think it's the only thing I would say is the true extremism, this is a point Jocelyn made very well, the movement is really extreme. Trump is a ridiculous con man who doesn't understand a word that Peter Thiel has ever said about any of this and doesn't care and Is it for himself and the grift and a little bit of old-fashioned bigotry and so forth? But we should not underestimate the true Extremism of the authoritarian movement and Trump is on board with it Trump is right in his own way is what's the expression riding that tiger?

Yeah, and this is Tom's point, he can't get off. The idea that he can just say at some point, this stuff's going a little far. I mean, he's tried to say it once or twice. Why are we deporting the guys my hotel friends say are useful to keep the hotels going? And then Miller says this and the movement says this. And suddenly Trump, yeah, I guess we have to do that. The degree of authoritarianism we can get with a buffoon like Trump as leader of that authoritarian movement or the nominal leader, I guess I've slightly underestimated that.

I've always thought that would be a bit of a check on the extremism. Maybe it's a bit of a check, but it sure isn't much of one. Yeah. I agree with all of that. And I'll just say for the listeners, if that little morsel wasn't enough and you want the full meal, there is also like a five-minute discussion of who the Antichrist all of that. And I'll just say for the listeners, if that little morsel wasn't enough and you want the full meal, there is also like a five-minute discussion of who the Antichrist is on that podcast and Peter Teel suggests it might be Greta Thunberg or a Greta Thunberg-like figure could be the Antichrist. So anyway, if that's just a little

teaser. Peter and Ross agree there is such a person around. It's just a question of identifying the right person. I think that he both agree that the Antichrist is out there. Yeah. I was like, Peter suggested might be Greta Thunberg, and then he goes on a weird tangent. And I was like, man, that was strange. And then like four minutes later, Ross was like, I want to circle back to the Antichrist's question. It's quite the podcast. I'd encourage you guys to listen. Lastly, my only other thing is, and it relates to the AI stuff, I agree with all of you on the near-term acute authoritarian danger.

I'm just now increasingly starting to monitor the medium-term tech oligarch fascist authoritarian danger. The degree to which they do not care about humans. That is a funny quote, but it is an anti-human movement. A lot of these guys really do think that we're going to go into the singularity or that we're going to, like, our, whatever, our head is going to, like, we're going to be mutant figures. Like, they really do think that that is coming. And it is, it's an alarming ideology. And tying it back to the thing I mentioned earlier, like that they have inserted themselves so deeply into this, like really, like there's no actual necessary overlap between the nativists and like, but like the nativists and the more traditional maga culture war element is a much more potent force. And that they have kind of like inserted

themselves into it with this anti-human ideology and that they are going to now make sure that Dr. Strangelove out in Silicon Valley can do whatever he wants without any oversight. I'll leave people with that alarming thought. So I don't know if you have any final words. I think it's a very important point. That's right. A guy named Mike Brock has this.

Yeah, yeah, Mike Brock has. That's good. So I've spoken to him once or twice, I don't really know him. And his most recent one is very interesting, he says, exactly as your point, and then he says, what they don't understand, the plutocrats and the AI types, is they're gonna get eaten up ultimately by the

pitchfork-wielding populace. And that's how it works often. It is sometimes how it works, but I guess I'm slightly on the other side of that, which is, I don't know, these guys are powerful, the AI plutocrats, and can't they just continue to manipulate and exploit the foolish, you know, bigoted nativists? I mean, either way is a bad outcome, whichever one is exploiting the other, or they just stay in a kind of tension, slight tension, but they agree that the... The equilibrium.

They agree about what they hate, what they have in common in terms of their hatreds. But I agree, I'm a little freaked out by the AI plutocrat side of it. And that's a real, and they are, it's a very good point you make. They are, it is kind of anti-human. All right, everybody. Me and Bill Kristol in person. Well, we get in person and it gets really dark. Everybody else, we'll see you back here.

I got a fun podcast tomorrow. Might have to be a double header because we're going to do a little bit of, a little bit of something off beat. But then I guess we're also going to talk about the news because we're gonna do a little bit of a little bit of something offbeat but then I guess we're also gonna have to talk about the news. So we'll do a little bit of both. We'll see you all back here then. Peace. platform of surrender I was brought but I was kind and sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door close your eyes, clear your heart cut the cord, are we human? Cut the cord, are we human? Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital, my hands are cold And I'm on my knees looking for the answer Are we human or are we dancer? Pay my respects to grace and virtue Send my condolences to good Hear my regards to soul and romance They always did the best they could And so long to devotion You taught me everything I know

Wave goodbye, wish me well You've gotta let me know Are we human? Or are we dancer? My sign is vital My hands are cold And I'm on my knees The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.