The Daily Beast Podcast - This Is the Exact Moment America Stopped Being a ‘Nation of Laws’

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

The New Abnormal hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie think the Trump administration’s handling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation is a bad omen for its view of the constitution. Then, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, joins the show to talk about all things tech bros. Plus! Formal federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner stops by to explain why America is in the midst of a constitutional crisis—and what to expect next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today. Douglas Rushkoff, author

of Survival of the Riches, joins us to talk about why tech bros are obsessed with escape fantasies, how AI exposes the systems programming our lives, and why he's not that mad that his book might get banned from a high school. Then, former federal prosecutor and host of Justice Matters, Glenn Kirchner joins us to explain why we're already living in a constitutional crisis and what happens next if no one enforces the Supreme Court's decisions. But first, let's have some fun. Five years, Danielle. That's how long the new abnormal has been on air.

This is our fifth anniversary. So happy anniversary to us. Thank you, Andy. Happy anniversary to you. I'll look out for my champagne in the mail. Oh, God. Meanwhile, here we are five years into the podcast. And I think probably further along into devolving into fascism than even we thought, maybe.

Right now, we are in the midst of a huge crisis. And everyone's talking about it. You know, it's a big story. I'm not sure everyone realizes just how big a deal this is. And I'm talking about the case of Kilmar-Abrigo Garcia, who is currently. as far as we know languishing in an El Salvador in prison. And the Supreme Court pretty much told the administration, you've got to facilitate bringing him back to the country. Facilitate was the word they used. Donald Trump says no. Donald Trump says no. Stephen Miller today said no. So we are,

we are at the level where, A, people are being removed from this country without due process. B, all of them have been, quote, unquote, mistakenly moved without due process because it's unconstitutional. In the case of Abrago Garcia, we know even the government says he was quote unquote mistakenly deported. So there's that. Then we have a bevy of judges saying, hey, you can't do this. This is unconstitutional. going all the way up to the Supreme Court, which didn't issue the best decision in the world,

but it did say that the Trump administration, again, had to facilitate returning Abrago Garcia to the United States. Donald Trump says he's not doing that, that he doesn't have the authority to do that, that he's an El Salvador and prisoner, and only El Salvador can decide. As we're recording this on Monday, Salvador and President Naïi Bukkele says he does not plan to return

Abrago Garcia to the United States. So this is a full-blown crisis. And how we proceed forward from this is we as a country, I mean, and as a supposed nation of laws, is going to set the stage for a lot of what happens over the next three, four years. Here's the thing that, one, we stopped being a nation of laws when we decided that we weren't going to hold Donald Trump accountable for any of the crimes that he committed. True. While he was president the first time. and when Joe Biden elected an attorney general who thought that it was more important to preserve

whatever fallacy we had around being an institutionalist and the perception of America rather than the integrity of America. And so in this moment, while the Supreme Court said in their very gray area of, oh, the administration should work in any way possible to return the Supreme Court. this man, Mr. Garcia, they're relying on this administration having any integrity at all or having any desire whatsoever to return him, which they do not. You listen right after the decision came down to bobblehead Barbie of the press secretary, pseudo, who said when asked by the journalist in the White House press briefing, well, you know, the Supreme Court stated that this. administration must return Mr. Garcia to the United States. She said that's not what that's not what they said.

So it is very clear that this administration does not believe in the Constitution, does not believe in the rule of law, and is not going to take any of the warnings, verdicts, rulings by even the Supreme Court to heart. They don't give a fuck. I guess in this moment for us, it's like, what's the recourse? here. The laws are only as powerful as those that are willing to follow the laws. And if Donald Trump's regime is saying, F you to the courts, which is essentially what Tom Holman said, he said, we're going to keep loading the planes, load in the planes, loading the planes, loading the planes. I don't give a damn what the judges say. And now you have the president of El Salvador sitting in the Oval Office saying, we're not going to return him. Oh, how am I supposed to do that? Put him on a

fucking plane. That's how you do it. So they are. are playing in our faces right now, this entire administration, this, you know, the president of El Salvador, and Donald Trump is drawing up plans to send U.S. citizens to this El Salvadorian prison. I don't know, Andy, but I don't see what the recourse is here because no one is willing to use the full extent of their power in the way that they should, namely the Supreme Court that could have said and upholded what the lower court said, which is that you have a deadline. And if that deadline is not met, then X. But they didn't do that. Yeah. Look, I'm with you. And I am struggling to figure out what the recourse is here too. I mean, if you're just going to, if you've got a rubber

stamp Congress and you are going to ignore the judiciary, then you, in effect, are, we've gone from a system of checks and balances to a full dictatorship, because that's what this is. This is the administration deciding the courts don't matter. Congress has taken itself out of the game on the Republican side, and they've got the majorities. Congress has basically said, yeah, we don't matter, which is very interesting for a bunch of people who think they're such, you know, alphas. And you're right. The thing is it doesn't end here, which is not to downplay what has been done here. All of those people in the El Salvador in prison should be returned to the United States. Every single one of them. But we have Trump in his meeting with Buckele. He was, I don't know if he

was caught on a hot mic or if he meant to, I watched the video and it looked like he was very happy to have other people hear him say it. He said to Buckele, the homegrowns are next, meaning people that are actual American citizens are the next to be sent to El Salvador. And he added, you're going to need to build, I think he said, around five more prisons. So, you know, we are so past the point of, oh, he's kidding, oh, he's exaggerating. No, fuck that and fuck anyone who says that. He is very clearly not kidding. He is very clearly not exaggerating. This is what he wants. This is what this administration wants. And they will, under any pretext that they devise, they will up and kidnap American citizens off the streets, in their homes, and whisk them away overseas, and then just, you know, sit there and say,

well, we can't get them back. El Salvador has got them or wherever. All of this is the sort of culmination of the legal fiction that is Guantanamo Bay, the idea that, oh, we can do things there because it's technically not part of America. We can torture. We can do whatever because, hey, they're not in America. And this is, all this is an extension of that. So everyone who allowed that to happen and thought that was a good thing shares some of the blame for this. But the bottom line is, this is their way of getting rid of people whom they deem undesirable. And that could be the color of your skin. That could be your gender identity. That could be because you said something mean about Donald Trump or Elon Musk. It doesn't matter to them. They just want you gone.

And here's the thing, because if you are now saying that the Supreme Court doesn't matter, lower federal courts don't matter, Congress is ineffectual, so who is going to stop this from happening? No one. And that's the thing is that, you know, Donald Trump could have been stopped so many fucking times over the last 10 years, so many times. And 78 million Americans, voted for him, knowing exactly what his plans were. Because you know why? They laid them out in Project 2025. So no one in this moment should be shocked, namely Democrats that are still trying to figure out their head from their ass right now. You have a handful of them that are doing the people's work, that are going where the people are like Bernie Sanders, that are standing up for 25 hours, like a Cory Booker that are out there speaking to people like AOC and Jasmine Crockett, but the establishment Democrats that should have drawn up a plan to deal with this moment are still twiddling their thumbs thinking that we're going to have midterm elections.

This man is talking about picking up people who do not agree with them and throwing them in an El Salvadorian hellhole and creating a pay for play between the El Salvadorian president and the Trump regime. And they are literally sitting there in the Oval Office laughing at us, knowing that no one is going to do a goddamn thing. It is striking. But like we've been saying, they start with the low-hanging fruit. They start with the people that they think no one is going to care about. They start with the undocumented people. They start with migrants. And then they move on to those that are legally here. Oh, but you're not, quote, really American. Then they move on to American citizens because Donald Trump has spent the last 10 years dehumanizing those that disagree with him by calling folks vermin,

by saying that they should be disposed of or taken care of. And so now we're here. I, you know, it's, I don't even know. I don't know. Yeah. And look, we're seeing this play out now in courts again with the case of the Tufts university student, Ramesa Azturk. There was a report on, I guess, Sunday night in the Washington Post that despite the fact that Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State, who, by the way, again, worth noting, was confirmed by a vote of 100 to zero in the Senate. Despite him going on the record and other people in administration going on the record, calling her a terrorist, saying she was a Hamas supporter, all this stuff. it turns out that a couple days before she was kidnapped by ICE, the State Department determined, according again to the Washington Post, that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in anti-Semitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization. So again, we're being lied to, and we knew that. We knew that from the start.

But here is Trump's own State Department saying, hey, we looked and you know they want to. wanted to find it, saying we looked and we found absolutely no evidence of her having anything to do with terrorism or even supporting a terrorist organization, e.g. Hamas. The government is now arguing in court and they're using the same, it's the same arguments that were being used in the Abrago Garcia case that this is all part of foreign policy. And the executive branch has final say and really the only say over foreign foreign policy. and the courts are not allowed to do anything. So basically, again, they are saying, hey, we can lie about whoever we want and snatch them

off the street because we have decided that we don't like this person in her case because she wrote an op-ed or co-authored an op-ed for a Tufts University student newspaper. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. That is the position of this administration. They have picked up hundreds of people at this point. We're naming out those that have made the headlines, but there are hundreds of people, hundreds of people that have been disappeared over the last 80-some odd days of this regime. I can't imagine what that number will be by the end of this year. Yeah.

I don't know. It's breathtaking. And to boot, so we have this situation that is quickly devolving. and then you have over the weekend the arson attack against Governor Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Over the Passover holiday, his home, the governor's mansion, was firebombed. And the person, the arsonist, has been picked up and when asked, what were you going to do if you met Shapiro face to face? and his response was bludgeon him with my sledgehammer. Correct me, Andy, if I'm wrong, but did we not see a member of Congress's husband bludgeoned with a hammer?

You are correct. And we also saw the response from a lot of Republicans to that, which was to first completely make up a story about it being some sort of gay meetup gone bad. And the other response was to make jokes about it. And I haven't heard a lot of Republicans clamoring to be heard on this one to say how horrible this is. And I am pretty comfortable saying that's because they don't think it's all that horrible. And we're going to find out more about this guy, Corey Balmer, as we go on. I have no idea if this was an anti-Semitic attack, if this was an anti-Democrat attack, if it was both, if it was something personal that he had against Governor Shapiro.

But I suspect we're going to find out it was at least some of the above, and we're going to find out that he had a lot of other opinions. And my guess is they're probably going to track with certain publications or certain podcast hosts or otherwise employed members of the conservative media with their opinions, because it almost always does, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. These are really dark times. These are really dark times. And the fact that they're still, I don't even know why we would expect unison around something as horrendous as this attack on Governor Shapiro. But, you know, my fear is that this is, this just gets worse.

Douglas Rushkoff is an OG cyberpunk, a renowned writer, documentarian, and media theorist, and the author of many, many books, including survival of the richest, escaped fantasies of the tech billionaires. He joins me now. Douglas, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Hey, good to be with you. So I mentioned survival of the richest. You had an interesting thing happened recently with that book, didn't you? Yeah, or it's in the process of happening. There's a school district in La Grange, Illinois. It's the called the Lions Township High School. I saw it come up on my Google News alerts. That this school district, my book is one of the books being considered for, what's the nice word, banning, I guess, or non-inclusion by the school

district because they're scared of like the DEI restrictions and like losing funding from Trump. So my book is in there as an example of, you know, one of the books that's calling out wealth inequality, which I guess counts as part of DEI. So I was like, I don't know, terribly hoping that they do ban it. Because, you know, I'll get on Velschig. He's got that banned book club. Now how many more people will find out about and read my book if it's banned in one high school? It's like, dang.

I was looking at the list of books that you're in the company of. And the new Jim Crow, Poverty by America, the message and between the world and me, Isabella Wilkerson's famous cast, the origins of our discontent. You're in pretty good company there. I know. And it's like, which of these things is not like the other? It's like most of them are kind of about, you know, racial inequality in the caste systems and, and, you know, whiteness and black people and all.

And then here's this book about, you know, tech-broitis in the midst. You know, really, I mean, it's a book looking at, I see it as a comedy. You know, looking at the crossover between extractive capitalism and digital insanity and how those two worlds dovetail into this single, you know, mindset of control and escape and all. But, I mean, I wrote the book before people with that tech bro minds that actually moved into government. Right. You know, they were kind of on the other side. The tech bros I was writing about were kind of freaked out by January 6th.

Then today, those same people are like, you know, in the midst of it. Yeah. Is this the first time you've ever had this happen with something you've written? You know, you know, the one other book that had problems, I wrote a book called Nothing Sacred, the case for open source Judaism. And that got me in trouble with the Jews. I hear I was celebrating Judaism, basically arguing that all these people who considered themselves lapsed Jews, but they're actually working for the ACLU or doing social justice

or doctors or researchers, that they're actually, in my understanding, they're still doing Judaism because Judaism is lesser religion than this kind of way of life, this approach to life. But the book got banned because I kind of suggested that Israel, yeah, that Israel, was less the culmination or the realization of Jewish ideals than a necessary compromise in a world where people are killing you, you know, that nation states, nation states aren't sacred. Nation states are political compromises, you know, their boundary. They're, they're not perfect. God doesn't love nation states. You know, and I sort of wrote about that saying, we got to kind of get, stop thinking of Israel as this perfect thing. And then that got me really banned to the point where, you know, synagogues were called by

one of the central funding agencies in America, you know, that if they booked me as a speaker, they were like, we're going to take your funding if you don't cancel this. So I started to get all these different calls whenever I would book a talk at a synagogue. It's like, sorry, we have to cancel your talk. Wow. I don't know. You say God doesn't love nation states, and yet God blesses America. Well, we're asking for God to bless America. Please bless America. Okay. But it's not like God made, I mean, well, God made everything. But it's that whole thing that, you know, You see at the end of the baseball game when they're thanking God for winning. And it's like, well, God picked you?

Is that what? It doesn't quite work like that. Yeah. On the topic of books, in 2010, you wrote an award winning one. And it was called Program or Be Programmed, 10 commands for a digital age. And you recently put out an updated version of that with the title, Program or Be Programmed, 11 commandments for the AI future. What made you do this?

In some ways, it was kind of an I told you so. You know, it's like I was writing in 2010 about, I mean, AI and the Internet and algorithms, it's always been the same thing. AI is just the first sort of native app of the Internet. You know, we've done TV on the Internet, we've done text on the Internet, we've done radio on the Internet. Now we're doing the Internet on the Internet, which is AI. But what I was writing about in 2010, what that people needed to look out for is that these are programmed landscapes. These are landscapes that act as if they have a mind of their own. They adapt to what you do and they try to make you do things.

That we're building these kind of giant skinner boxes of behavioral control that can adapt and change based on what you do. So if you are not programming this environment, chances are you're being programmed by it. And now that AI came out, it was interesting. I started to see all these schools were reassigning programs. or be programmed as a book. And people started to talk about it again. And people started to quote it again. And I'm like, oh, so now they get it.

So I went to the publisher and I said, well, let's do like an anniversary edition or something so people realize this is what I was talking about. And the publisher rightly said, yeah, not only should you do that, but you really should add a chapter that says, you see, this is AI. This is really what we are talking about.

I ended up writing, you know, a new chapter on AI and a new kind of epilogue and how we live in this highly programmed world. What is activism? What does social change look like? How do we stop looking at each other as people to manipulate and program and start understanding really disarm, you know, stop doing this to each other? It ended up a lot of fun to sort of revisit these ideas and to help people see the kinds of questions that AI brings up aren't really just about AI. Like I did Jake Tapper on CNN the other day. And, you know, and I go back and forth on AI. I'm like a lot of us.

Like one day I'm really scared of it. And the next day, I really just don't give a shit. It's like whatever. And they did the pre-interview with me for it on one of the days when I cared a lot about AI. And then when the show came up, I didn't care at all. So Jake Tappers on there trying to get me upset about AI. And I just like, I don't care.

It's all bullshit. It doesn't matter. And then finally he said, well, what about the unemployment problem? And I remember I said, well, what about the unemployment solution? I don't want a job. You anyone want a job? No, I don't want a job. I want a job. I want money. I want stuff.

I want meaningful activity. But I don't want a job. When do jobs come from? Jobs were a late medieval invention. We used to be craftspeople. Then they invented chartered monopolies. You weren't allowed to be in business for yourself. And you had to become an employee of His Majesty's Royal Shoe Company.

It's when they put the clock on the tower in the medieval village to make it all look fair. Time became money and we all became wage earners. And to me, that's the beauty of this moment. That's sort of what programmer be programmed is about is look behind the curtain and see the way our world is programmed and that our AIs and computer programs are really just doubling down on the programs that already exist. You know, the opportunity here is to reprogram our world. If we're in a world where computers can do our jobs and we're not, but if we were, then what could we do?

We don't have to suffer in that world. We can have fun in that world. So I read an interview in which you were talking about the book, and you said that the thesis is kind of that you have to understand the technology well enough to use it in a way that's compatible with you and your creative cycle rather than trying to conform your humanity to the technology. Does that sound right? Am I getting that right? Yeah. You know, that occurred to me. It was like after I went on Substack with the articles I write, you know, and I tend to write, I can write one really smart piece like every other week, every second or third week.

I can't be really smart more than once or twice a month. It's just story. You know, and if you come up with even once a month, 12 really smart things in a year, you should count your blessings. But you go on something like Substack and the way the way the length. landscape there. The way the platform is configured, it kind of wants one a week. And then you start kind of doing one a week. And then it kind of wants two a week. And then it kind of wants one a day. And you realize that the rate of production, that your natural rate of production, your best

rate of production really doesn't match these platforms. These platforms are the expression of extractive capitalism, right? They're the expression of exponential growth. The only way for you to grow or to even keep up is to get on that hamster wheel and increase your output. I mean, look at you. You're doing new abnormal. You do it once a day, right? Three times a week. Three times a week. Thank God. Three times a week. But I'm sure it pulls, right? It pulls. Can we get to a fourth? Could we get to a fourth? You look at Steve Ben and he's doing two podcasts a day. Yeah. It's like, oh my God. And that's sort of what I'm looking at is the technologies that we're using when they become so naturalized as to just feel like, pencil and paper or just the way you produce, you can forget that they are either intentionally or unintentionally really biased toward extracting more and more from you every single day until they've

used up all the available space. That is so fascinating, especially just someone like me who, I think, says something not stupid, maybe once every six months, and that's my natural cycle. Well, you have guests, though, luckily. That's the beautiful thing. Thank God. I know. That's why I get smart people like you to talk to, Douglas. Marks from others. Yeah. Absolutely. There was another interview I was reading in which you describe technology as an extension of the male, white, colonial fear of women, fear of nature, fear of the moon, emotions, and darkness. Go deeper on that, because that's a lot. Well, it's an interesting one. I mean, back in the day, I mean, I thought of technology as kind of intrinsically liberating. I looked at technology and psychedelics and said, oh, these are all great things. If you take acid or mushrooms, you're going to have great insights. If you use digital technology in late 80s, early 90s,

you're going to connect with the rest of the world and see that we're all the same and become the, you know, the connected neural pathways for Gaia to realize consciousness. And then, you know, business came along and I thought, oh, gosh, look at them. You know, know, extracting, and they really took these tools for creative expression and turned them on us and use them on us with sticky websites and eyeball hours and programmatic algorithms to modify human behavior that they really wanted to kind of decrease the possibilities that were unleashed by these technologies and instead kind of program us into submission so that we would increase the probability of the bets, you know, that they were making on this.

But I guess, you know, what I realized is that these technology and psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers. You know, a tech bro on LSD is still a frigging tech bro on LSD. You know, you look, Elon Musk has had more psychedelics than all of us combined. And look at him. He's like, he's not trombos, right? It hasn't quite happened there. And, you know, in technology, when I look back at it, you know, the origins of kind of science and technology, we shouldn't be surprised that you end up with these kind of white tech bro kind of sadistic sociopaths.

You look back at the origins of empirical science in the late Middle Ages. And it was, you know, same time that those corporate chartered monopolies were happening, it was Francis Bacon. And Francis Bacon, for all the brilliance and wonderful stuff he did, when he was selling empirical science to the court, he said, empirical science will let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down and submit her to our will. Right?

So it's kind of a rape fantasy as the motivation for science and technology. And I understand why we do that. The world is scary and particularly for guys like women and witches and darkness in the forest and fairies and the unknown. And science, you know, you can just de-animate, just kill the butterfly, put a pin in it, and look at how it works. It was a way of reducing everything. And when you go through the industrial age, through the computer age and modern science and technology,

you do end up with that thread that if we don't kind of acknowledge it, if we don't look at it and compensate for it, we end up with, you know, Mark Zuckerberg inventing a metaverse where nothing happens from the waist down. You know, you can end up with Elon Musk going with a chainsaw to the complexity of civilization. And nobody's acknowledging that not everything is a kind of yes, no, one zero traffic light that can be metered that way, that reality is much more complex, much more like traffic circles with tons of interaction and collaboration and cooperation. It put me in the mind of the famous scene in the greatest movie of all time, 2001 of Space Odyssey, when Moonwatcher, as he's called in the novel, picks up the bone. and because the monolith has taught him put this image in his head that this bone could be a weapon. And that's almost, you know, in the movie, that's really the first bit of technology, isn't it? Yeah, well, it's interesting.

The bone goes up and becomes the spaceship. Right, the satellite, yeah. With the satellite, which we don't realize is kind of a weapon. And then we see it one more time than a guy loses his pen that floats up. You know, the guy. And it was interesting. And it made me think that. all three of them, you know, that they have, they have both potentials. They can be exploratory,

artistic, you know, even the bone, you know, it becomes the, the drum handle or whatever, the drumstick, or it could be the weapon. I don't think technology is necessarily biased toward that. It's just that there's a strain in there, that potential is there. And yeah, of course, the internet was developed originally as a defense system. So it's no wonder that all of our messaging, you know, is all based in military messaging, that computers are based on cryptography used to intercept German encryption. So, you know, they all have that. They all have a strain of that, which is why you need the others, you've got to bring in the other strains consciously. So you recently wrote a piece called Uniting in Universal Weirdness. What do you mean

by that? I was kind of trying to argue that things feel really weird right now. And partly, of course, due to the new Trump presidency and all that's happening. And that we're all feeling it. And that I believe, and I know there's a lot of people who will say that I'm hopelessly optimistic, but I believe everybody's feeling the weird. You know, and not just the political weird, but the weird. This is a weird, weird, weird moment. And that, you know, I know new abnormal and you and me and all, where Blue State whatever kind of intellectuals, but our red state brothers and sisters are experiencing the same stuff.

And what I've been suggesting people do is not be uninformed, but to realize that the image on the screen, the figure on the screen is difficult and abstracted and really hard to do anything about. You know, B.B. Netanyahu says something or Trump says something or the Federal Reserve does something. It's like, I don't know how much impact the vast majority of us have. So I was kind of suggesting that, you know, what if we just take like 1% of us, 1% of Americans, 4 million people can go and really figure out that stuff, work really hard to understand what's going on. And the other 396 million Americans can get involved directly in mutual aid and meeting their neighbors and lending things and borrowing things and, you know, taking care of each other. And that's something that we can do,

you know, across this so-called, you know, red state, blue state divide, that we have all that stuff in common. And that our red state brothers and sisters feel that same weirdness. They're dealing with the AI and their John Deere tractor and their own disconnection from the land. And they understand no-till agriculture. They understand climate change from a completely different perspective and are moving towards if they can sustainable agriculture, if they can get control of their land from big agra and all. So there's an opportunity here to acknowledge the weird that we're all feeling and start working with each other on really kind of simple, real world sustainable solutions rather than necessarily looking into the sort of abstract ideology on the TV set.

Yeah, it was such an interesting piece and I'm out of time, but near the end of the piece, you talked about how people got red-pilled because of the forces of subjugation and dehumanization. And it's basically saying the same forces are going after all of us. And we need to unite in that. And I was struck by, over the weekend, the last few days, we saw images of Bernie Sanders and AOC in places like Utah, just places that are considered, you know, deeply red states. And they're drawing huge crowds. And so I really do think there is something.

to all of this that you're saying, Douglas. Oh, yeah. It was back in, you know, 2016 when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan, there was a golden opportunity to bring those boys into what we're doing, into the great project of making this world work. And Bernie got basically canceled by a whole lot of the left for doing that. It was as if he had betrayed something. And I thought it was the greatest strategy of all to go right there and appeal to those people and to, and to, to treat them as human beings. You know, we've seen how the left got red-pilled into extreme versions of identity politics and mutual cancellation.

And we've seen how the right went into it with sort of, you know, vaccine paranoia and other things. But, you know, as I see it, it's the same red pill. It's just two different origin stories. It's like the Marvel universe versus the DC universe. And what I've been hoping for is to create a kind of a crossover plot where we bring those two universes together. and say, oh, right, we're all dealing with the same problem, with the same sense of alienation and disconnection from the world in which we're living. We're all being subjected to the same forces, the same greater force of social media and digital technology. It doesn't matter whether you've been

reduced to the one side or to the zero side. It's the tributary at top is the same thing. It doesn't matter which way you fell. But if we can sort of mutually refuse to play a along with that division, with that artificial division and subjugation, then I feel like, you know, a kind of a united humanity can succeed and really triumph over these very artificial forces of divisiveness. Well, in closing, I will point out that later this year, there are going to be two comic book issues of Marvel DC crossovers. So hopefully, as in comics, so in life. Douglas, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure talking to you. If you haven't read Survival of the richest. If you haven't read programmer

reprogrammed, run out and buy them now. They're both unbelievably great books. Douglas, thanks again. Thank you. Thanks for being abnormal. Folks, I am so very happy to welcome back on to the new abnormal. My friend Glenn Kirshner, who is the host

of Justice Matters. He is a legal analyst. He is an amazing substack. He is everywhere talking about everything that matters as it seems, Glenn, that I don't know. We've been saying for years, you and I, we're headed towards a constitutional crisis. We're headed towards a constitutional crisis.

We're approaching a constitutional crisis. And I can say today, after the Supreme Court, 9-0 ruled that this administration needed to return Mr. Garcia, a man who was wrongfully, a Maryland man wrongfully, picked up and deported to El Salvador, who had legal status in the United States, who has done nothing wrong, needs to be returned. And this administration has said, we're not going to return him. And the El Salvadorian president sitting in the Oval Office this week has said, I'm not going to return him. Glenn, talk to me about this moment that we are in that is absolutely and totally uncharted.

Yeah, Danielle, so the question is, where does this go from here? Because as of right now, it looks like the Trump administration is thumbing its nose. That's a polite way. Or maybe I should say flipping the bird to the Supreme Court. when the Supreme Court ordered, and I have the Supreme Court opinion in front of me, let me read the pertinent part. They say that the trial court judge, the Maryland court judge, Judge Shinnis, her order properly requires the government, the Trump administration, to facilitate Arbrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador, and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to a El Salvador. And now it looks like the DOJ is formally taking the position in litigation back before the trial court, Judge Shinnis, that it does not have to facilitate his release or treat his

case the way it should have been treated. So, and, you know, when I see the president of El Salvador yucking it up with Donald Trump in the Oval Office about how they're not going to release and return, Mr. Garcia, you know, we are living in a in a country ruled by an administration that does business by lies and lawlessness. And they do it gleefully. They do it gleefully. So I assume a couple of things will likely happen now. One, Judge Shinnis may very well say, I'm ordering you to show cause why I shouldn't hold administration officials in contempt. And people should know, one of the avenues available for contempt is to confine the responsible people until they purge the contempt. In other words, you give them the keys to the jail cell, figuratively speaking, and you say,

you know, I'm ordering you confined until you purge the contempt, in other words, until you comply with lawful court orders to return to facilitate the release and ultimate return of Garcia. it. What is ultimately going to happen, I predict, though, even if Judge Shunos initiates content proceedings, is they're going to all run back up to the Supreme Court. And here's the thing, Danielle, the Supreme Court issued a mealy-mouthed decision. And nowhere was that more evident than in Judge Sotomayor's, you know, lambasting of what this court has been doing. They said, we don't want to tell the administration. that were interfering in their authority to engage in foreign policy and diplomacy. So, you know, the Trump administration should be prepared to share what it can about what they're doing to facilitate Garcia's release and return. I mean, that is some mealy-mouth bullshit coming from what was basically a five-justice majority. So now I think they're going to have to go back to the Supreme Court.

court. And now it's going to be, you know, where the rubber meets the road. Will the Supreme Court say, no, no, no, no, no. Let us be a little bit more direct, a little bit more clear and a little bit more forceful. We are issuing an order, an edict from the Supreme Court. Return a man that you disappeared to a country where a federal judge had ordered he may not be deported to. And if the Trump administration then continues to maintain that they can't or won't. facilitate his release and return, we are finally at what is, I think, a true constitutional crisis. And if, you know, because listen, we have a constitutional construct where we have a series of checks and balances between and among the three branches. And everyone in government, Danielle,

everyone is duty bound to respect, one, that constitutional construct and two, the lawful authority of another branch of government. In other words, the Supreme Court is supreme for a reason. It is the one that is the last stop for determining what is constitutional and what isn't. And they are the ones who have the authority to tell the other branch, the executive branch, what you are doing, what you have done is illegal. And we're ordering you to come into compliance with the law and the constitution. And the Trump administration says, I don't care, I'm not doing it, and you don't have an army to enforce your Supreme Court orders. So what are you going to do about it? That is the unanswered question right now, because our Constitution doesn't have anything beyond the sort of, you know,

balance of powers as between and among the co-equal branches of government. There is no constitutional mechanism to deal with it. Now, there is, a federal law says the United States Marshals, which, yes, they fall under the leadership and the authority of the Department of Justice, but the law provides that the United States Marshals shall, not May, not might, not can if they want to, shall enforce federal court orders and shall be able to acquire whatever assets they need to do it. So it kind of puts us right back in constitutional crisis territory because if the marshals are told to violate the law for anyone scoring at home, it's 28 United States Code 56C Charlie that says what I just said, then we're

right back where we started, constitutional crisis. So if we are all content to let America lapse into dictatorship, autocracy, tyranny, then we let Trump win this, the battle of who's got the bigger you know what among the co-equal branches of government. Here's the other thing. Everything that you just laid out, correct, and it will be ping pong back to the Supreme Court for them to provide clarification where they refuse to do so because they're playing footsies with autocracy instead of holding fast to the Constitution. But in the Oval Office, Glenn, President Buckel of El Salvador,

says he's not returning, Mr. Garcia, and Donald Trump said to him for the world to hear, so not to him, but to the world, quote, home groans are next. The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places. It's not big enough. Those were Donald Trump's remarks to the president of El Salvador about building five more torture centers to put American citizens in. I would say the most accurate definition of homegrown terrorists are the J6 defendants, but I don't think that's what Donald Trump is referring to. Nor would I want to see anybody disappeared to foreign countries, including the January 6 insurrectionists, because if we're not going to be a country of laws and a country,

country governed by the Constitution, particularly when it comes to all of our due process rights under the Fifth Amendment of notice and opportunity to be heard. Notice of what the government intends to try to do to us and an opportunity to be heard in court before the government does it, then, you know, we're done, let's face it, we're done as a democracy. So, yeah, when I hear Trump say things like that, you know, it's, if you take a step back and apply some common sense to what going on here. You know, they essentially kidnapped Garcia because he had status here. He had a court order prohibiting the United States government from deporting him to El Salvador. So he gets kidnapped. He gets disappeared to the very country where he should not have been sent. He's put in a

horrifically dangerous prison and we're paying for his confinement. Correct. We're exercising control over this young man's circumstances right now by paying El Salvador to confine him, even though Danielle, he's never been convicted of any crime in El Salvador or in the United States. So if the Supreme Court, and this is kind of the last challenge, I think we get, not the last challenge, one of the last challenges we get to issue to the Supreme Court because there are a couple more challenges to come and they involve whether the military will be deployed to the streets by Donald Trump. The last challenge is if you let this stand, then you are de facto setting a precedent. And that precedent is this administration can kidnap and disappear any one day damn well

please. They can send them to jails in El Salvador, in Russia, in North Korea, or anywhere else they please. And there's not a damn thing the judiciary can do. about it. Is that? Is that the precedent this Supreme Court wants to set, wants to turn that power over to Donald Trump? I mean, this is, this is basically what Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said that the courts do not get to set foreign policy, that that is the job of the president of the United States. And so he sees no verdict that, the Supreme Court can issue that essentially this president, whom, by the way, they gave immunity to, has to abide by. So basically, Glenn, what I have come to understand is that the rules of this country,

or of any country for that matter, are only so strong as the people that are willing to abide by those rules and laws. And if the president of the United States and his entire administration has been dictated as being above that law, which is what the Supreme Court said, then you tell me what recourse we have. As a country, what recourse falls within the confines of any law that this administration is going to follow? I don't know that we have much recourse left. Donald Trump is running the executive branch of the federal government like a criminal organization, like a mob outfit, right? He's got his consularies over at the Department of Justice who are willing to do his corrupt bidding in court. You know, he's got his underboss, J.D. Vance, who, you know, literally in a line that could have come right out of a mob script was telling President Zelensky in the Oval Office, you're not paying the proper respect. to Donald Trump. Have you thanked him even? Have you thanked him? I mean, that would have been cut out of a Hollywood script because it's too laughably mob-esque. And then, you know, he's got his underbosses, his capos, his foot soldiers, as wise guys. I mean, he's running a protection racket with these law firm executive

orders that are plainly unconstitutional. Everyone that's been challenged in court is being struck down as likely unconstitutional by judges, including judges appointed by Republican presidents. But this is like, you know, sending your wise guys into the mom and pop grocery store and say, hey, a thousand bucks a month so I can protect your bodega or I can protect your law firm. It will be a shame if it got firebock. I mean, you can put the Bafia org chart up, which I did in a piece that I wrote on Substack recently and just, you know, plug in the players. It's pretty obvious what's going on here.

So, but kind of going back for a minute, so you asked, what can we do? The answer is perhaps not a whole hell of a lot, and that is the least satisfying answer, imaginable. We can continue to build the protests, just like the hands-off protest recently. We need more of that. We can obviously try to, you know, get to the polls during the midterms, but that feels entirely unsatisfactory. But Donald Trump needs to be impeached for, you know, basically if he ignores Supreme Court authority, then he's just, he's an outright tyrant. And we can't have that heading up our executive branch. But the other thing is calling this foreign policy. They keep saying, well, this is foreign policy when we kidnapped somebody, sent them to a country in violation of a federal court order, told that country to put him in a terrorist prison, and we're paying the country to keep them.

foreign policy. No, it's not foreign policy any more than 2020 was a rigged election or the prosecutions of Donald Trump was a witch hunt. But, you know, the media doofly reports what it reports without really calling him out on it, which Danielle is part of the reason we're in this problem right now. I feel like, Glenn, we are past the critical point. You know, Eddie Glew Jr. said recently that we were on the knife's edge. We've been cut in half. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And in The Handmaid's Tale, they say, you know, in the first episodes, you're flashing back to the times when things were normal, but you knew that they weren't normal. You knew that something was afoot. We're in this moment right now where Donald Trump has proclaimed that the rules and the laws don't apply. 5.2 million Americans marched on April 5th, like you said. Marching alone is not going to fix this. People have been boycotting. Boycotting alone is not going to fix this. Republicans in. Congress are not going to wake up tomorrow with a conscience. They're not even attending their town halls anymore because they don't need those people's votes

because Donald Trump told them that you only needed to vote this one last time. Democrats are waiting around for the midterm elections. In your mind's eye, where do you see us by the end of this year? Because I can't even look to years ahead. I don't even know if I see anything six months from now, but I'm curious as to, where you see the Republic by the end of this year? I think the last stop for American democracy, as I was alluding to a few minutes ago,

an outright defiance of Supreme Court directives if they get the case back in the coming days and say, no, let us be clear, release and return him. And if the Trump administration says no, and the U.S. Marshal Service folds and doesn't abide by the law when it comes to executing the orders of the federal courts, including contempt orders. I think the last step before democracy falls is Donald Trump invoking the Insurrection Act,

declaring martial law, putting troops in the streets, and ordering them as he so desperately wanted to do during his first administration to start shooting protesters in the legs. This is where the rubber meets the road for our republic, in my opinion. When I was in the Army, six and a half years active duty as an Army Jag before I joined the Department of Justice, when I went to Officer Basic Training, what was drilled into our heads, and this is drilled into the heads of the enlisted Corps and the Chief Warren Officer Corps across all military services. We must obey lawful orders, but even more importantly, we must disobey unlawful orders. Before I was sent to my first active duty assignment up in Alaska, the 6th Infantry Division, I went to the Army's law school. It's the JAG School on the campus of the University of Virginia,

and they're all Army lawyers who were preparing to head out to the field to their assignments had drilled into our heads. Again, you must disobey unlawful orders. So that will be the last step, I think, on seeing whether our democracy survives. Does the military follow? unlawful commands of a corrupt commander-in-chief if he issues them or do they disobey unlawful commands to, for example, deploy to the streets and shoot protesters in the legs. That will be the end of American democracy, as we know it, if the military decides to obey unlawful orders. Well, unfortunately, we will have to leave it there today, Glenn. As always, deeply appreciate your insights and your analysis.

Really appreciate you. Thanks, Daniel. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. How are you kicking off this extraordinarily dark week in America? My fuck-that-guy for today is a Navy captain named Sean Barbarella. Ordinarily a Navy captain, that's a high rank, but not really high enough to make fuck that guy.

But Captain Barbarilla happens to be the physician to the president. And on Sunday, he, issued a memorandum, I guess, with the subject, President Donald J. Trump's annual physical examination results. And, yeah, there's a whole bunch of things in there. There's vital statistics, which includes height, 75 inches, weight, 224 pounds. And it goes on from there, which I'm going to get to in a minute, because to me it's the best part. Well, there's two best parts. First of all, it basically really, reads like all of this is funny, but all of this is also very, very Soviet.

Because the whole thing reads like, you know, nobody is in better shape than this 78-year-old man, Donald Trump. As part of this exam, he took a test known as Moka, which is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and it rates you on a scale of 1 to 30, 30 being the best. And it tests your cognitive function. Trump got a 30. feel free to believe or not believe that as you see fit. There's also a little statement in there where Barabarella talks about Trump's fitness and

and lifestyle and active lifestyle. And he mentions Trump's quote, frequent victories in golf events. And I mean, look, that would be funny enough if he really won those golf events. And instead of, you know, cheating, which he is very, very much known to do. It is even funnier given the fact that he cheats. But I want to go back to these vital stats because not a lot of people seem to be talking about this, but it made me laugh the most. I'm going to read four of them.

Resting heart rate 62 beats per minute. Blood pressure 128 over 74. Pulse oxymetry 99% temperature 98.6. Now, you cannot tell me that those weren't copy pasted from someone looking up. What are the average normal statistics for a? a healthy person. First of all, nobody's temperature is 98.6. That's like a shorthand that we use.

Nobody. Nobody's temperature is exactly 98.6. Like, we were all raised as, oh, that's the normal temperature for a human being. The normal temperature for a human being fluctuates by like two or three degrees. That's laughable. Pulse oxymetry, his blood oxygen level, 99% for a 78-year-old man, I'm willing to say that that's impossible or damn near close to it. Certainly not for someone who looks like he does. Resting heart rate, 62 beats per minute, again, they basically looked up what would a good result be, what would the perfect result be. Blood pressure, 128 over 74, same thing. I mean, all of this

is a fucking joke and it would be funny, except that, again, there's the whole, the Soviet nature of the whole thing, where it's just, you know, Comrade Stalin is the fittest person in the country. And it's even, you know, it's Putin scoring all those goals playing hockey. Because if you watch, everyone on the ice clearly does not want to stop Putin from scoring goals. And then they trumpet, you know, how fit he is. And he's on a horseback with his shirt off and all this stuff.

This is pure Soviet Russian propaganda. That's all it is. So as funny as it sort of is, also this. Navy Captain should be dishonorably discharged as far as I'm concerned, because he is straight up lying on this. And this is the country we live in now, where dear leader has to be portrayed as being in the ultimate health, the ultimate physical fitness. And it's absolutely pathetic. So a big, fuck that guy to Captain Sean Barbarrella, USN. What got me was you saying it was a copy and paste, because that's exactly what it is. I mean, like, who did that?

the examination. Was it just chat GPT? Because like that's, that's exactly what it sounds like. Anybody can look at Donald Trump who has said himself, he has a diet that subsists on fast food. He does not exercise because he does not believe in exercise. You look at him and look at Joe Biden and you tell me who is more physically fit. So it's like all of these things that are happening, you're right to say like it isn't funny because it is about altering people's perception. Don't believe your lying eyes. Believe the picture that I'm showing you and telling you to believe. You know, there are AI recreations of Donald Trump looking like Donald Trump's head on Rambo's body.

Like that is the distortion through which they actually see him. And it's sick. It's sick. So yeah, fuck those guys, man. That guy should not have a medical license. I would rather them just say, oh, Donald Trump has foregone medical examinations because, you know, he says he's in the best shape. Like, that would be more believable. You know what I'm saying?

So, yeah, fuck that guy. Yeah. All right, Danielle, close out this Tuesday episode. Who is your fuck that guy? Everybody at Doge, but I'll get more specific. So according to NPR, I'll read this. One of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about non-citizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest Doge isn't supposed to have.

The staffer is Antonio Gracias, who made the claims as part of a larger misleading statement after an appearance on an April 2nd appearance on Foxxie. and friends where he said that, quote, five plus million non-citizens who, quote, came to the country as illegals, received social security numbers, quote, through an automatic system and proceeded to get into our benefit systems. It's a bold face fucking racist lie. And the fact is, again, for those that continue to say, oh, the courts are holding, the courts are holding, the courts are a mere suggestion at this point. Oh, Doge is not supposed to have access to those records. Okay. And so wink, wink, nod, nod, I guess we won't look. I guess we won't dump those files into our private email servers. Like I guess like we won't take the information because a judge said that we shouldn't have it.

And you're assuming that people who have criminal intent are going to somehow follow the law because what's going to happen to them if they don't? Absolutely fucking nothing. So this quote unquote lieutenant member of Doge goes on national television spreading lies. You know, the other lie that they have told is that, oh, these undocumented people don't pay taxes and yet they are accessing the IRS data information to find out who is legal and who is not. If you're not paying taxes, guess who wouldn't be inside of the IRS? Like, their own bullshit doesn't even fly. Do you know what I'm saying? And like, no one cares. So like, for that reason, it's not even Gracias Antonio Gracias is this fucking name. It's the whole of Doge. It's our entire like illegitimate system that is just basically

waving a finger at these criminals and nothing is actually getting done or stop. So for that reason, And fuck those guys. Yeah. And look, his whole thing is he says, oh, these people get social security numbers and then they get into our benefit systems. No, what you said is correct. They get social security numbers and they pay into our benefit systems. And to act like these people are applying for social security numbers to get money, they're applying for social security numbers so they can get jobs. So they can then do what when they get jobs?

Pay taxes. They are paying into our system. All of this is just a lie and doesn't even get into the point that he should not have had access to any of this data. And there is currently a lawsuit about that that was filed. And it's just everything they do is a lie. Everything they say is a lie. And that's really kind of all you need to know at this point. Fuck those guys.

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