The Daily Zeitgeist - The Trend Shop by 2 Zeit Crew 1/13: Democrats, ICE, Star Wars

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

In this edition of The Trend Shop by 2 Zeit Crew, Jack and special guest co-host Mort Burke discuss a brief history of Democrats NOT abolishing ICE, Disney tanking the Star Wars IP, and much more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet and welcome to this episode of You Will Drink My Trends and Nothing More. The Trendshop. The Trend Shop.

Welcome to the Trend Shop. I'm thrilled to be joined in our second seat by a very funny comedian, actor, writer, improviser, whose podcast is rebrand. Who's got a very funny special called Spiritually Filthy. he just lip tricked into the Zoom. It's Mort Burke! Hello. Hi.

Hi. Hello. It's me. Mort. Hello. How are you? I did a kickflip backsmith to podcast. Kickflip backsmith.

Of course. We were of course referencing, uh, actually we don't even need to tell people. They all know about the fuck shop. You think they got the reference to two like, two live cruise the fuck shop? Yeah,

I was, I was unfamiliar before you came into the zoo. Before you live. tricked into the Zoom and started playing the fuck shop, rap certainly has come a long way. Yeah, as a young man who was very into hip hop in the early 90s. Well, that had to be late 80s, right? I don't know, whatever Two Lev crew came out.

It was an interesting time where, you know, and God bless Two Love Crew, I'm not trying to hate, God bless. But, you know, it was very surprising to be that filthy. It's not like that anymore, you know. I know. They got a lot of traction off. Just as filthy as they wanted to be, you know. This is what I've always said.

Even more so, honestly. More than they wanted to be. They didn't want to be. Their hand was being forced. Yeah, they didn't care. They didn't desire to be banned in the USA, but. All right, Mort, thrilled to have you here. We're going to get into some of the stories that are trending on this Tuesday afternoon. We're going to take a look at a brief history of Democrats, not abolishing ICE,

because that's something that a lot of people are looking for them to do following the killing of Renee Good. Democrats in the House and Senate have bravely stepped forward to maybe kind of sort of think about possibly withholding support for DHS funding bills. You know, I like to call, I mean, have you seen them?

I like to call them ice cream. Uh-huh. Also, they are murdering citizens. Yeah, they're murdering Gestapo pieces of shit. I also, I am referring to them as the racist stepdad brigade from here on out

because that's the little. they're always so worried about like people being employable and employed and they're going around and having the most unemployable people in the world murder people with jobs and kidnap people with jobs and take them out of the country it's interesting I almost feel like there's a double standard there's almost it's almost like there's a standard they're applying to this that they're not saying yes if I didn't know better I would feel that same way and my question is, how are we going to get, where all the middle managers for subway sandwich shops going to come from, you know?

Now that ICE took all their jobs. We're all the guys being dicks at oil chain places. Yeah, who abusing, abusing people. Now they have guns and they're abusing people on the streets of Minneapolis and many other U.S. cities. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries won't even say if they would restrict ICE's funding if the Democrats take back the House. in the midterms. Psychotic. It's unbelievable.

It really, it's truly unbelievable. Like, you know, people wonder why there is frustration with the mainstream Democratic Party. And I, from the left, but I feel like, I feel like it gets treated as if it's this like, well, these leftist elites are frustrated with the mainstream Democratic Party. And it's like, no, it's fucking everyone. look at the last election. Like everybody is off this shit. Yep. And it's just,

it's the information streams. Like, are you guys also not having, are you not having these murders piped into your phone? Right. Because we all are. So we see the like unconscionable failure.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like they're, they want it to be a complicated issue. They just don't have the courage of their convictions. And I do think the rot at the heart of the mainstream Democratic Party. is a big reason why we are where we are today is their inability to win elections or govern because they don't have the courage of their convictions. They have the courage to say some shit

before in an election and then come into office and throw up their hands because they can't actually legislate on behalf of the American people instead of corporations. It's very frustrating. Everybody's corporately owned. Everybody's corporately owned. Not everybody. We'll talk tomorrow about Zoran's first week in office, which was pretty exciting. But yeah, this is a winning issue. According to Reason polls, a whopping 42% of Americans now support abolishing ICE altogether, which used to be a fringe position. I'm shocked it's that low, but maybe that's my leftist elite bubble that I exist in. But I looked at that video, and I thought, that was bad. Maybe these people shouldn't, maybe this shouldn't exist.

What have we gotten from ice? What's the thing that we're like, yeah, you'd want to, you know, abolish them all together. But I don't know, we then we would not have what? Well, again, do 58% of Americans think that's where ice come, like the substance ice comes from? They think we're talking about ice cubes. Yeah. I honestly, I would live like a European and not have ice cubes in my drinks. if it meant abolishing.

And I tell you, I love ice water. It's the best. I talk about it a lot. Yeah. So refreshing. I give it up. They're ruining the brand. If we could get rid of these failed PE teachers who are recently fired for inappropriate conduct.

It's also not that radical an idea, considering that ICE is younger than most of the kids from stranger things. Ice was created in 2002, which is basically the same age as all the kids on Stranger. stranger things. But just looking into the history of the Democratic Party's relationship with ICE, they helped create and fund it. ICE's budget ballooned from $3.3 billion to $6.1 billion under Bush and Obama. The state admission of ICE at first was to prioritize anti-terrorism, immigration, and border enforcement, customs regulation, cybersecurity and disaster prevention and management, and then it just became a pretense for, you know, arresting repressing working class immigrants.

Yes. Yes. And after Obama was elected instead of honoring promises for more moderate immigration enforcement, he opted to launch an aggressive crackdown that relied significantly on programs started by Bush. And while some Democrats didn't like it, they were kept in line by Chuck Schumer, my guy, who asked his fellow Democrats to help the administration vilify the immigrants being targeted by not using the term undocumented anymore. And instead, why don't we call them illegals?

Why don't we just say there's a whole group of people who are illegals? But 2013, his budget for ICE was an 87% jump from where it was in the last full year, 2005. Yeah, we got to get these guys golden zip ties and escalades. That's right. Let's just keep, keep creating more of these situations. Yep. And that way they'll feel really good when they roll past the homeless encampments in Los Angeles. Right. Yeah. Let's just start arresting people. 2018, when there were widespread calls to abolish ICE during Trump's first term, only a quarter of Democrats supported eliminating the agency. The GOP forced a House vote to publicly profess their continued support of ICE.

and 18 Democrats voted yes and 133 simply voted present instead of saying yes or no, which you got to love it. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Washington Post questionnaire found that only two candidates said that ICE should be abolished. Joe Biden was in the unclear, no response. That's funny. I feel like could sum up his entire presidency. Could you repeat that? And then once he was elected, continued to pour billions into ICE and significantly. expanded the detention system.

Kamala Harris, 2018, she compared ice to the K, this is a great Kamala Harrisism. 2018, she compared ICE to the KKK, but still didn't think we should abolish it. Huh. Let's try and reform the KKK, not a super great

winnable message. And then during her presidential campaign, she took the non-winning strategy of promising to deliver more immigration enforcement agents than Trump. There is this ad that I still remember. Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of border patrol agents. Donald Trump blocked increasing the number of border patrol agents. So she tried to out-trump Trump, which is such a very unpopular president. Yeah. And so the only

people, the only side that had enthusiasm was Trump's side because she was just trying to do some weird geometric triangulation bullshit that just like doesn't have anything to do with how politics actually happens. Yep. Let's pull everyone even more to the right. Yeah. And then it extended into 2025 when only 34 Democrats in the House and Senate signed a letter demanding answers about the arrest of Tufts University doctoral student,

Ramesa Ozturk in Massachusetts and other international students. They were just like, ah, guys, this is a little spicy for us. We've got to keep it quiet over here. No bigger threat to our nation than Ph.D. students. Yeah. Brooklyn Dad Defiant, who's like this famous lib on Twitter posted, I'm old enough to remember when President Obama deported so many people. They called him Deporter-in-Chief,

but he did it without his agents shooting U.S. citizen mothers in the face three times. She seems to be arguing ICE is good, but only under Democrats like Obama. since they weren't shooting white citizens in the street. And that's especially fucked up because the practice of stepping in front of vehicles in order to justify shootings was a tactic frequently used by federal border agents during the Obama reign. That's from a report by the nation. Border Patrol agents have intentionally and unnecessarily stepped in front of moving cars to justify using deadly force against vehicle occupants.

Border Patrol demonstrates a lack of diligence. in investigating incidents in which U.S. agents fire their weapons. So what we're seeing now was what was happening to, you know, poor brown people and immigrants under the Obama administration and under Democrats. I do think that there's more pressure now and that we are in a position where there's a lot of energy to use this not only to push back against the Trump administration, but get these old fuckers from the the

establishment Democrats out of here. It's just they are wildly unpopular. They're wildly out of touch with the people who would actually help us get this Trump administration out of office. But they just have the exact wrong instincts every time. Like me playing flag football.

I was very bad at flag football. I played intramural flag football with my friends. And every time that I would try to run with a ball, I would just follow over. Immediately. Immediately, I would be like my body would get moving too fast and I would just, my legs would just like

quit on me. It was pretty funny. The shoulders were too fast with the feet. Yeah, yeah. Oh, geez. Somebody help. Just pulling your tag. Face first.

And you know, the difference then was that we weren't all having it. We weren't able to watch these unconscionable catastrophes while we were eating our overnight oats at 9. You know what I mean?

It's a different. This always happens, right? Oh, yeah. Vietnam War is all about once media proliferates, once people have access to more photography and video, they actually see what's actually happening becomes harder to hide. It's definitely worse. I'm not saying like, this is not worse.

This is not an escalation. We are in a era of just mask off fascism in the United States. There's no denying that this is worse than it's ever been. But just that the party. that we're all kind of turning to to ask for help to stop this to push back is maybe the power structure within that party are not the people who are going to help us move past this. And that, you know, the police have always been the ones who have, you know, attacking marginalized

people in the shadows usually, right, you know, but then, yeah, and then, but then now billions and billions to send even less qualified, even more, you know, whatever, anyway. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. And we're back. And this isn't necessarily a new story, but this is something that I just found out about. And so it's trending in my brain. It's about Disney and the Star Wars franchise, which has been kind of languishing since the rise of Skywalker kind of closed out the Skywalker saga in a way that everyone was. pretty universally like that that sucked except for my nine-year-old son who's like that one might be the best one which is who it's made for by the way yes exactly um but people will be like it's it's a kid's movie get over yourselves um but we've talked before about like star wars heading into i'd say like the jj abrams trilogy was up there with like bioncé elvis you know taylor swift more recently as like the most likely inheritors of the role religion used to play

in giving people like communities and stories and identities to define themselves around. Like people were fucking with Star Wars heavy. And also the reason there was like such massive backlash anytime anything happened that they were like, that's not against the rules. Yeah. It's like changing the Bible on people.

They can't not handle it. Yeah, completely. That's why the New Testament is so unpopular. But they seem to be, they've fallen off in a pretty in a pretty major way because so they were acquired by Disney back in I think 2006, maybe 2011, but you know, Disney has a tendency to take a fictional world over, hit like a really high high with like in terms of box office. And then about nine to 10 years in, it's just like, wait, what, what happened? like things start falling off. Like, Pixar was rolling

when Disney acquired them in 2006. And, you know, for many years after that, like Wally came out in 2008, I think. Um, and then they just like start,

like everyone's like, oh, this, unless it's a sequel to one of those movies that was made before that, like they haven't been able to launch a new hit movie at Pixar. It's just like you have the stuff that was made in the immediate aftermath that Disney,

acquisition or more likely before it and then everything else kind of flops and it's kind of the same pattern with marvel when they acquired that like they had a really good run for a little while but then at a certain point it just falls off and then star wars star was a little tougher because your mileage may vary on the prequels it's not like they were just one batting a thousand heading into the disney acquisition but after the rise of skywalker the franchise has sort of just been like streaming and kid stuff essentially and or is good that yeah and and or is supposed to be really good I didn't watch it because it's fucking 15 hours of watching stuff and it is it's like sophisticated well-acted like you could the morality of it is

on point yeah it's good yeah um but so they're about to take a big swing with the mandoloree movie that I think that like there's a cool shot of like one of those AT walkers falling off a mountain, which looks cool as fuck. Like, granted, why did they take those up there? But don't worry about it. Why they existed all in the first place? Outper, cliffside stroll

with your walker. That's going to be the first movie that they've released in the Star Wars franchise in a while. And apparently the reason for that is behind the scenes. They've been saying no to just like tons of projects that seem like they

could have been cool, I guess. And I just want to talk about one that I just found out about, which was there's apparently Adam Driver and Stephen Sordaberg had developed a movie

that kept the Kylo Ren story going and explained it somehow. I know he died in like the last one spoiler alert, but like they were like, yeah, well, people don't really stay dead in this movie. Remember Boba Fett? we were just like,

nah, he crawled out of the Sarlack Pit. It was something that you could do. But Adam Driver and Steven Soderberg said it was one of the coolest fucking scripts I'd ever been a part of. And it just, it sounds like the pedigree was there. Lucasfilm was like,

this is great. We love the idea. Totally understood the angle why we were doing it. And then it went to Disney's Bob Eiger. And he was like, nah, I don't think so. I don't,

I don't see how Ben Solo is alive, which I think they probably, they probably, because the ninth one just brought the emperor back from the dead, there's just like, yeah, this guy who's the main bad guy in the original trilogy and like the whole climax was him dying,

he actually didn't die. That was, that was just wrong. We're kidding. Just fooling. Yeah. So I don't know why they're doing this other than like they want control and also, like I just like, why not invest in movies

the thing that created the franchise, that created the popularity that has more lasting power than streaming stuff. And like, people would like go see. I don't know. Yeah, I hope it would be like a dissolution of a marriage,

marriage story style. But it's in the Star Wars. Yeah. But it's in the Star Wars. Yeah. I think they're probably just as interested in streaming numbers. You know what I mean?

I don't think it's not about the quality or the legacy. Yeah. I mean, they want to pretend like this. Such a bummer. But it's also got it. There's just too many, like, it's always that corporatized too many cooks in the kitchen thing. It's like invariably anything that's great comes from a couple of like visionary people.

You know what I mean? Like Soderberg is probably, yeah, probably going to have a really interesting, unique take on it. But that's not how those corporations work. No, it certainly is not. It's like, it's pretty well. I don't know. I mean, like working on TV, I've been on some TV shows now. I'm just here to brag.

But it's like, it's very interesting watching stuff happen from the inside where you're like, oh, they just want a curry favor with some random person who, like, because they had another TV show that did really well. So now they're just going to put this TV show that's doing not going to do well at all in like a primetime slot. Like all this weird stuff that you kind of have no idea what's really happening until you're kind of in the center of it. And you're like, oh, yeah, this is just a bunch of like weird people making mistakes over and over. Right. And like trying to be political about stuff. Like, it's sort of a miracle that stuff gets made.

Right. Yeah. It used to be that, like, the people in the film industry, like, even the executives who had, like, bad instincts and sucked probably, like, all along, they were there because they thought movies were cool and they, like, wanted to be involved with the making of movies. And now it just, like, it's turned into the same corporate process that everybody else experiences in every industry where it's just, yeah, they're just bringing ideas. for cost cutting and, you know, it's like, it's like all marketing and shit is basically what it's come to. Whereas in the past, you could get people to invest a bunch of money and just giving a big budget to a person who had a proven track record and be like, I don't know, I think they'll create something cool. Yeah. And it's like, it's, yeah, capitalism is the,

the more it sort of evolves and evolves or devals is it where it's going to continue to kind strip the artistry and the soul from projects. Yeah. I like want to believe that this is a low point, but it's probably like, we'll be looking back in 15 years being like, man, remember that Grogu and the Mandalorian movie? I would win an Oscar this year.

Remember how good those AI YouTube shorts were back of the day? Well, I mean, people are always going to create. You know what I mean? Like that's in the human spirit. That's not going to change. So it's like people are going to probably just, like learn how to do more and more with less. And then the things that like the big budget stuff just,

and this isn't always true. Of course there's always going to be exceptions to the rule, but they do just become fireworks shows. You know, it's just loud and colorful, which can be fun, but if there's not enough of a character arc, that's interesting,

it's just yawn zone. That's like, all firework shows. Like all fireworks shows are yawn zone after like the first minute. You're just like, all right, man. I get it. Yeah.

Unless Erica Kirk's involved, in which case, it's a poignant moving display of mourning. She's my living queen. She's my RuPaul. Yeah. Yeah, but it's like, but fireworks shows are fun once a year, and especially if you're nine. But you can't, all of your entertainment can't be that shit. It's like all your food can't be jack in the box. You know, you got to have, you got to have like, sometimes vegetables taste great if they're done right, you know?

They keep telling me that. I don't believe more. Yeah. You look sick, Jack. You eat some greens, dude. Yellow. All right. Those are some of the things that are trending on this Tuesday afternoon.

We're back tomorrow with the whole last episode of the show. Until then, be kind to each other. Be kind to yourselves. Get your vaccines way you still can. Get your flu shots. Don't do nothing about white supremacy. And we will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye bye.

Bye. Bye. The Daily Zykeyes is executive produced by Catherine Law. Co-produced by Bay Wang. Co-produced by Victor Wright. Co-written by J.M. McNabb. And edited and engineered by Brian Jeffries. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island, serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.