The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Raging Moderates: Trump’s Short-Lived Trade War

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Trump’s at it again—chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of head-scratching. This week, Scott and Jessica dig into the latest mess: a gutted federal government, Trump blaming DEI for a deadly plane crash, and new attacks on schools, trans kids, and immigrants. Plus, just as inflation was easing up, he launched a short-lived trade war with tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. And what does Ken Martin’s win as DNC chair mean for the future of the Democratic Party? Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.  Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Charlov. So first off, just because we're capitalists here and there's not anything important going on in the world, it's important to run a commercial as we start here. But effectively, a little insight into the podcast world. The RSS feed where people subscribe is what advertisers look at. And right now we're at 42,000. And once you get to 50,000, for some reason, the advertising industrial complex has decided then they can start advertising with us. And keep in mind, we still have ads, but there are those shitty rotational ads that have a stranger reading them. And if you want Jess Tarlov to tell you why Athletic Greens gives her that radiant look or why I am so much better now that I have Z-Biotics, which helps me go out and drink recklessly

and the next day I don't feel as shitty. Both ads that we will do. If you'd rather hear host read overs, please hit the subscribe button on our, both on YouTube and on our dedicated Raging Moderates feed. We would really appreciate it. Please do it now. We will tell you when we hit 50,000,

but let's try to get there this week. Oh my God, that was so commercial. Jess. That was a good one though. Pretty good? Yeah, I liked it. All right, let's move on to banter. How are you?

I'm pretty depressed. Are you? Well, I think maybe democracy is ending. Last week you were so over your skis, or I thought so. And I was like, hey, it's okay. Let's figure out what to work with the other side on. And this weekend I was just melting down the whole time. And then Luka Doncic got traded to the Lakers in the middle of the night.

I don't do you care about the NBA at all? I a hundred percent don't care. I don't even know who Luka Doncic is. That's not true. Is that a Serbian tennis player? I have no idea who that is, seriously. He is Slovenian, isn't he? He's a basketball player who was on the Dallas Mavericks.

He's probably going to be an MVP, five-time All-Star. He's amazing. Anyway, there was a tweet Saturday night saying, Luka Dončić to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, which is just an absurd trade. And I thought that the reporter had been hacked because it was so ludicrous, woke up Sunday morning and it's true and the trade deadline for everyone is February 6th. Anyway, that was crazy, but you don't care.

Pretty much every male viewer and a decent number of female viewers on YouTube right now have decided you are in fact the perfect woman. That you not only bring a lot of intelligence and you're obviously very attractive, but you understand the latest in basketball trades. You literally are. I couldn't do. I'm bad with like salary caps and stuff, but. I have no idea who that is and I don't care.

Unless it's Cole Palmer, I don't care. Well, he was on the Mavericks, which your pal Mark Cuban used to own. So I've contextualized it. I've made it a little personal for you. No, don't care. Anyway, what did you do? Why did I do this again? Really, my favorite weekend.

I did absolutely nothing. My boy was home. My son turned on to come home on the weekends from boarding school and my 14 year old. On the weekends, he turns into, he's kind of difficult. I think, I don't know what it is about the dynamic, but on the weekends he's tough. And-

Is it because his older brother's home? I think that might have something to do with it. And then we went to a one-year-old's birthday party, snoozerama. That's my wheelhouse. I keep telling- It's where I live. Yeah, yeah, I'm out of that.

I'm out of that stage, but they're nice people and I knew they'd have a bar, so it was fun. And then, what did I do? Did I have any fun Saturday night? You know, really boring weekend. Didn't even watch any Premier League games. I'm headed to, after this, I'm bombing to the airport and I'm headed to Orlando.

For the real fun. Of all places. I assume speaking gig and not Disney World. Or maybe a speaking gig at Disney World. Again, see above, like you're not, smart. I am doing a speaking gig at Disney World, and that's the first for me. Yeah, I'm doing a speaking gig.

I love Disney. I want- Oh, I can so see that. And you should keep that to yourself. But anyways, go ahead. If we get our new 8,000 subscribers, it will be because I am the Luca Doncic ex Disney World gal. I think Disney is so fun and I can't wait to take Cleo,

who's three, I've heard like four is really the sweet spot, but there's a lot that she could still do. It's the happiest place on earth. I think it's the seventh ring of hell for most of us. You have to take your kids there. And 364 days a year, I under contribute to this whole parenting thing. And then one day a year, I take or used to, because now they're a little too old.

Now they go to university, universal is for teenagers, but Disney was for kids. I would take my two boys and six of their friends to Disney for the weekend. And that as far as I'm concerned, alone. Yeah, just me. Or you have another parent. I might be able to rope another guy into the seventh ring of hell, just so we can complain to each other. But that, as far as I'm concerned, that compensates for my negligent parenting

the rest of the year. I think that I can totally see that you enjoy it. I don't understand it, but I can totally see it. I think that's most of the male-female dynamic, frankly. Oh my God, it's so awful. I can see it, but I don't understand it and I think that's most of the male female dynamic, frankly. It's so awful. I can see it, but I don't understand it. And I still want to hang with it, right? You're like.

I will say this. When I was at Walt Disney or was it Disneyland or Walt Disney World? They have that princess thing where you sign up your little girl and she goes in and they make her up and they put wings on her and a little princess fairy thing. I think it's at both, but world doesn't. And then they have that little area where she's introduced and they have lights and smoke and she comes out.

I sat there for 15 minutes while my kids were going on Space Mountain or something and watched the most beautiful little girls come out and they come out like they're floating. And I thought, oh my God, Disney, like I made me wanna buy Disney stock as emotional as I am. It was these little girls, you could tell they were thinking about this all year

and they picked out their outfit and they do such an amazing job. It really is, it really is incredible. But just to bring us back to reality, I had one of those moments that made me feel very depressed about income inequality, and I'm on the right side of that trade, so this is a story of privilege. But I took the kids and the ride avatar,

it was a three hour wait. So you could pass out the movie Avatar on an iPad and people could watch it before they actually got on the ride. And you just saw so many families in line holding their kids asleep. And I thought this is borderline abusive to create something that parents have to go to and the majority of people can't. And I did one of those VIP tours where you pay thousands of dollars

and you roll by the entire line and then the person at the front of the line operating the ride gives you a hand signal in case you wanna go twice. And I remember thinking at some point the people in the line, it goes planted to the apes and they kill us all. Because this is so out of control, the disparity between the line, it goes planted to the apes and they kill us all. Because this is so out of control, the disparity between the life that 99.9% of Americans have to lead.

And the rest of us who've gotten, you know, really lucky. Anyways, it was one of those moments I thought, this is weird. This is uncomfortable. Anyways, that's my Disney story. Okay, Jess, in today's episode, we're discussing chaos reigning across the federal government, chaos is the right word. Trump launching a trade war with tariffs and Democrats elect a new chair to lead their party. That's kind of a snooze.

The first two. We can jazz it up. It'd be fun. It's going to be hard to make that sexy. All right, let's get into it. Trump, the Trump administration threw the government into total chaos with a surprise spending freeze. They cut off funding for things, including school lunches,

college financial aid and medical research. Then just as quickly as it appeared, the freeze was blocked by a federal judge, only for the White House to insist they weren't actually backing down, leaving everyone even more confused. But that was just sort of the first ending here. Trump has been on a signing spree, rolling out executive orders,

targeting schools, trans kids, and immigrants, even tried to blame a deadly plane crash on DEI. And on top of that, his administration sent a mass email offering millions of federal employees a chance to resign now and still get paid through September. Workers were stunned. Legal experts are flummoxed, and no one's really sure if this is even legal. Jess, I mean this sincerely.

Where should we start? I spent a lot of time prepping for this conversation and dealing with that question explicitly. What do I think is the most egregious example of the overreach that's going on of the constitutional crisis that I believe we are at the beginnings of having an unelected bureaucrat with access to all of our most sensitive information and turning on and off government contracts, you know, plane crashes where 67 people lost their lives that the president and his cabinet seemed woefully unprepared to deal with or to even be able to express the right sentiments

to the public and I assume to the grieving families as well. I don't know. It almost feels like you should just go in chronological order of catastrophe. But I do think, because we were recording this on Monday, and God knows what tomorrow will look like, that what DOGE is doing with purging the FBI, the DOJ, and then shutting down the USAID site. It's now, you can still access it off the Secretary of State site, state.gov.

But I think we should probably start there because it's so representative of the fact that we don't have three co-equal branches of the government anymore. What Elon Musk is doing is completely unprecedented. And it seems like he has unfettered access to anything that he wants plus the five or six 19 to 24 year olds that are running Doge with him. I saw this tweet that I thought was so funny.

So the private information of every American is now in the hands of six guys, not old enough to rent a car. Well, you're not laughing, so you didn't think it was that funny. But it's crazy what's going on. Yeah, it feels like the High Sparrow and his acolytes. I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones, but... We already talked about this, and I don't, and I told you that. And I have two daughters. And you need to start.

Okay. Just start, just trust me on this. Look, this is just taking it in order, trying to, my mom used to say, how do you need an elephant one bite at a time? Let's just start with the erosion. If you were to start with, we have 750 military bases in 80 countries.

China has one in Djibouti in Africa. And I think when terrorists try and transmit funds or they have a choice, a government has a choice between partnering with a US company or a Chinese company or another Western company, they generally choose us. And first off, this notion that somehow America has been taken advantage of. As someone who has been roaming the earth,

working with the biggest global companies in the world, I've done deals with world leaders on behalf of companies, not on behalf of the US government. The notion that we are somehow getting taken advantage of around the world is just so asinine. We flex our muscles every minute of every day around the world, in terms of our trade agreements. Do you think these, these 80 countries that host our military just decided to do it because they like us?

I mean, that's some of it, but that goodwill, that power we exercise and benefit from every day. So just starting there, the notion that this is somehow a recalibration to get back to some symmetry of equity, that's just not true. And starting with the economic argument, not the moral argument in Canada, you know, first off, they don't even know what he wants. They're claiming it's because of the flow of fentanyl across the border.

There really isn't a lot of fentanyl coming in from Canada. You could maybe, it's like 43 pounds. Maybe make that argument for Mexico, maybe even for China. Cause some of it's being manufactured there, but Canada isn't like dumping fentanyl from Vancouver. That's just not, that's just not happening. And the Canada can't even figure out what it is you want and keep in mind, this is a nation that in the

Iran hostage crisis, the Canadian ambassador residents, uh, hosted or hid, uh, hostages. It, they risked their lives in the embassy there to help get Americans out. They followed us into Afghanistan. No questions asked. They followed us into Iraq. No questions asked. We have major league baseball.

I, you just mentioned the NBA. We have American sports teams in Canadian cities. Hockey. And we've decided to declare economic war on Canada. It's just, it just doesn't, it's not only reckless. It's, it's stupid. And that's just on the economic side. We can go further into, you know, the different, you know, the other

mendacious things are working on, but this tariff, this tariff is just, it's, I always go to the economics. I'm like, okay, how can I figure out a way to take Brexit and expand it and supersize it where we make our nation less productive, but increase costs for everyone in the United States. I know let's take Brexit. Let's make it 10 times worse or bigger. And then let's figure out a way to be really mendacious and mean to people in the United States and in special interest groups and across the world.

Your thoughts? Well, I think a critical component of the way Trump sees the world, your thoughts. Well, I think a critical component of the way Trump sees the world is enmeshed in your statement about being really mean. And I think that they uphold this notion that having friends doesn't actually really matter. Everything is for sale, everything is a bargaining chip and exchange, we're all associates more than we're actually friends or colleagues.

And Justin Trudeau said as much that he had been trying to speak to Trump since the inauguration, hasn't been able to. And he even went down to Mar-a-Lago, right, and kissed the ring and said, you know, I want to find ways to work together. So Trump doesn't care about friends at all. He doesn't believe in allies, certainly in the way that we've conceived of them. I don't think that he thought about,

or really cares about the second order effect of this, which was the same as we were talking about last week with Colombia and Panama, Mexico, that maybe everyone actually gets together behind our backs and we end up really isolated and alone from all of this and for some of them not necessarily Mexico, but like Colombia for instance that they turn to China who are their second biggest trading partners in reaction to us changing the way that we do business, to put it politely. But you see these Republicans melting down and freaking out about what's going to happen

to their constituents. Chuck Grassley is on Axe begging for certain exemptions, and the Canadians are being very specific about how they are executing these tariffs. They are targeting products that come out of right-leaning states that have Republicans in charge and majority of voters who voted to elect Donald Trump. So things like orange juice, bourbon, whiskey. And they want to be specific about it. And they understand that the country is really split along these lines. I shouldn't say they're

split on what they think of tariffs because a large majority of people know that tariffs are just a tax on the consumer. So you have Republicans that are concerned about this. Ron Johnson was on Fox this morning talking about how it's a tax. Mitch McConnell was on 60 Minutes yesterday talking about how this is a tax. You have them asking for these exemptions from it. And you really have got to wonder besides the fact that Donald Trump just likes tariffs. And maybe it's that simple. The man talks about McKinley more than anyone, probably even members of McKinley's family talks about him, that he just has this fascination with it.

But when you have the business community who has been of such value to him and huge boosters of his campaign and his presidency, the people who benefited the most from the tax breaks that he put into effect in 2017 coming out and saying, you're going to wreck my business, right? People run Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, et cetera. I wonder if he is going to have to find some way to backtrack. And I know that he would argue this is just the opening salvo, but the opening salvo was supposed to be a few percentage points, right? Not going for 25%. And I know that the market didn't open as far down as it did on Deep Seek Day last week. I was curious why you thought that that was,

that it wasn't as much of a hit as I would have expected, at least opening Bell. Well, so as we stand here right now, the Dow's off 100 or about 200 points, which, you're right, isn't huge. I think the market, what the market is saying, and what a lot of Republicans, when they have absolutely no response

for what is the strategy here, say, oh, this is like you said, an opening salvo and people, what the market is saying is that he's done this, he'll get some sort of, you know, pinky promises Mark Cuban said, he'll declare victory and say, oh, we got this, they're stopping the shipments of fentanyl and people will nod, do nothing. And he'll declare victory and then take these down or eliminate them. That's what they're saying right now. The problem with this is that when you threaten people,

you know, they remember it. And I can just, he's creating an enormous opening for Russia and China to establish military bases, goodwill, cooperation between their intelligence services, less likely to cooperate with ours, less likely to call us and say, hey, we have information saying there's a terrorist organization in a cell

and a bunch of these individuals have gotten on planes and are headed to New York. We have a lot of nations that will cooperate with our intelligence personnel. I think part of the problem is I think Americans have cold comfort that one, they don't realize how many people are out there in organizations that would like to come kill us and take our shit away.

And that this, our government security apparatus has been so effective and we are so strong at getting the best, better end of trade agreements and the prosperity we recognize, which I acknowledge has been crammed into, just proportionate to two feet of people's pockets. I think people take for granted just how strong our security and government apparatus is overseas

and how much that is aided by the ultimate cloud cover of goodwill towards us. That despite being arrogant, indulgent, loud, obnoxious, that people generally believe around the world, especially in the West, that we're the good guys, that they can count on us. And so to kind of stick up the middle finger, create chaos, do real economic harm,

without even a clear signal as to what it is you want in return, but just to do this because you can, even if in fact he does retract these things, as to what it is you want in return, but just to do this because you can, even if in fact he does retract these things. I was on the board of a large specialty retailer and I talked to the person who runs the company over the weekend, I said, what do you think he's doing? And he said, well, we've stocked up

because we knew this was coming. So we stocked up, we got a bunch of stuff in, like six months worth of stuff before this took effect because we knew it was coming. So we stocked up, we got a bunch of stuff in like six months worth of stuff before this took effect because we knew it was coming. And we're banking that when he realizes when all of a sudden the price of everything goes up for American consumers, he's going to pretend that it was a victory and that he negotiated some deal and back away. And even if that comes off with as little damage as we think, that is like radiation that 20 or 30 years ago, results in, you know, from now results in leukemia.

And the other thing that the only kind of analysis I did here that I think uncovered something that maybe the media isn't talking that much about is that this has, this tariff thing has Elon Musk's fingerprints all over it. What do I mean by that? If you look at Tesla to their credit versus other automobile companies,

the majority of automobile companies, that car they're producing goes across the Mexican and Canadian border back and forth several times because there's different parts manufacturers with different advantages or skill sets across, you know, the trade agreements in Mexico and Canada. Tesla to its credit has built a company that has kind of a deeper manufacturing base.

What do I mean by that? The majority of the car is assembled domestically. And you think, well, what about China? They're gonna have to pay tariffs when China imposes reciprocal tariffs. Actually, the majority of cars sold in China from Tesla are produced in China. Now, some of the Chinese manufactured Teslas

that are sold in Europe face a 7.5% tariff, which by the way, he's suing them for, but of all the companies in the automobile industry that will be least impacted by these tariffs, it's Tesla. So again, even, I mean, we talked about cutting off, he has access to the payments for veteran affairs, all these different things that people are worried about. Even where they don't see his fingerprints,

his fingerprints are there. I believe that he had a large, a lot of influence in how these tariffs were implemented such that it has seriously diminished the economic power of his automobile rivals. And again, it's okay, the richest man in the world now has more access to the federal government

payment system can decide to turn off or on veterans benefits. I mean, just this crazy shit. And what do you know, he's the richest man in the world. And it all goes to the same place. And that is, and I was talking about care about this on pivot, you know, and we'll get to this, the, the, all of the, the, the websites that are disappearing around family planning and choice and HIV and vaccines. I see this as the far right. And Trump have said, it's not a war on

gay people or a war on women. It's a war on the poor. Because I think the deal they've struck is they've said, you know, poor people always have a back door to family planning, to vaccines, whatever it is. They need, they'll be fine. They'll figure it out. This really feels like a war on the poor. And the flip side of that is that the richest man in the world is now basically much more powerful than any elected representative,

any governor, any Senator, any Congress person. I still think Trump's more powerful because he can fire Musk, but we now have an unelected person and what do you know? He happens to be the wealthiest person in the world. This is full idolatry of money. This is full capture by money of DC. And it is, I think it's going to come at a huge cost to the long-term goodwill. And it's so strange. And I'll stop my word salad here. For the first time in my life, and it feels really odd,

I'm rooting for the Germans and the Canadians. When the German public turns out, a hundred thousand of them to say, by the way, when your fucking idiot shows up and tells a far right group here, they should be proud of their culture. The majority of Germans do not believe that nor endorse that message.

When Canada booze, when the national anthem is sung at a sporting event in, I don't know if it was Toronto or Montreal, I gotta be honest, I'm with them and it feels really, really unusual. I think it was Toronto, it was a Raptors game, right? Was it? I think so. Just to your point about how quickly this can be reversed

while you were word saluting, which I actually got a lot of sense out of and I have something to respond to that, there was an announcement that Claudia Scheinbaum, the president of Mexico, has negotiated a one month delay on the tariffs. So this all fits nicely, though, into the manufactured chaos of everything, and that they want us at every single moment to be looking in a thousand different directions

and to be outraged about all of these different things so that you can't see the forest through the trees. I think that's what that phrase is. And it feels as if the takeover of the government by an unelected, unconfirmed, almost trillionaire, or will be certainly by the end of this, is absolutely the forest through the trees of this. And Muska is such a personal touch on all of the very aggressive and very underhanded tactics that are being used in the management of Trump's second term that I think it's

almost indisputable that he is this co-president, which I know pissed off Trump when people were saying things like that. And yes, of course, Trump is the most powerful man in the world because he's actually in control of our military. But the influence that Musk has had is so far reaching. I mean, he's the henchman that is going out there and bullying all of the senators who might not vote for the nominees that they want for cabinet.

And the newest one, Todd Young from Indiana, is probably not interested in Tulsi Gabbard's brand of national security. That last week during her confirmation hearings, she just couldn't get there to call Edward Snowden a traitor. And you had Democrats and Republicans alike basically begging her just to say the guy is a traitor. Can't we do better than somebody who doesn't believe in 702?

Can't we believe that somebody who can't answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today, who made excuses for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine the first time that I'm aware of any American official has done that? I'm questioning her judgment. That's the issue that's at stake here. And that's something that I think is pretty fundamental to someone who's gonna be heading up 18 intelligence agencies.

So now Todd Young is being bullied. There was a big Politico piece about what happened in the back rooms to get Tom Tillis to vote for Pete Hegseth and by extension what happened with Joni Ernst before that to people who didn't seem like they were going to. And if they had added on to Murkowski and Collins and Mitch McConnell, that Hegseth wouldn't have been confirmed. And I don't know what can be done about this. And this brings me back to where I started of feeling

really depressed or just despondent about the whole thing. And I'm an optimistic person. I've been accused of being a Pollyanna once or twice in my life. But it seems like that there are really few bright spots, especially because there has been no delivery of lower prices, or the crime rate hasn't fallen, or that they're deporting the bad guys. And I understand that there's a difference between how you're going to be holding some of the world's worst terrorists and how you're going to be holding migrants that either have deportation orders or who have done something terrible, like murdered an American, or who are pedophiles, people that none of us want in here. But everything just is blazing red un-American to me at this point.

And I think that the answer, or at least this is what my husband has been telling me, is that my definition of America isn't applicable anymore. That whether we like it or not, we have undergone a revolution. That's what happened at the ballot box on November 5th in 2024. And that's not to say that this was the shellacking that a lot of people have made it seem, but it put a person back in office that so many millions of people think can take absolutely any action that he and those around him want in pursuit of whatever their stated goal of the day is. And I don't know how we come back from that. There is so much evidence that this has nothing to do with efficiency.

This is a coup. That's what's happening. Bill Maher used to say it's a slow moving coup. This is now a fast a coup. That's what's happening. Bill Maher used to say it's a slow moving coup. This is now a fast moving coup. This is day 15 of it when this goes live, a day 14 when we're recording it. It's pretty fucking fast that this is happening and they are banking on our inability

to do anything about it. And I have friends who are saying, well, what about the lawsuits? And there are a bunch of lawsuits that have been filed and they were able to unfreeze the freeze. But they will be able to break things so fast that a lawsuit will not get to them. And we essentially, if you needed Mike Pence on January 6, you need thousands of Mike Pences now to be able to do this. And it seems like the good people of the DOJ and the FBI and all of these agencies feel up to the job

and they are dug in. There are all these amazing Reddit threads where folks who work in the bureaucracy are saying, you know, I was thinking about the buyout and now I'm showing up to work and I'm gonna make sure that we support and defend the constitution. But at a moment where the Democratic Party is pretty weak

and we're really struggling with a message and getting it together and having a unified theme in all of this, that we don't stand much of a chance to be able to stop what's already begun. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the symbol of America isn't really an eagle, it's a pendulum, and that it's never at the bottom. And if you're looking for a moment of optimism, I believe that the majority of

Americans will come to realize whether it's through an inability to rebuild their house for less than 40% more, the fact that prices are going to go up, the fact that we're going to start to meet people who are, who were really treated unfairly or just the fact they're going to go, you know, I'm no longer as proud to be an American as I used to be. I think people, I think there's a decent chance they have really overreached here. And some of the damage that's going to come out of this is going to frighten people who even thought they were, you know, I think a lot of people probably didn't sign up for, for this. And while it might feel good and like, yeah, take that libtards.

And I mean, I just find it so telling that some of the agencies charged with rounding up, if you will, undocumented workers, where are they going? They're going to work sites, schools, and places and churches. And it strikes me, okay, if you found a group of people and said, where can we find them? We can find them at where only 40% of Americans work.

145 million people have a job out of 350 million. These people are working, they're going to church and their kids are going to school. Doesn't that kind of make them ground zero for what America is supposed to be? And then to go macro, and I am not a believer in open borders. I absolutely think 250,000 people coming across the border

in December of 2023 got us into this fucking mess. I think Biden did a terrible job, but at the same time, what we have to acknowledge is, okay, how did we get here? We got here because if America's secret sauce is immigration, the most profitable part of that sauce is illegal immigration. And we have known about it.

17% of people on a construction site are undocumented workers. There are all these videos now everywhere of all these work sites that are empty. They come in, it's the most flexible, profitable workforce in history. It's not Stanford graduates. It's not immigrants from India running NASDAQ companies.

It's illegal, undocumented workers coming in, taking care of grandma, picking our crops, providing services for quote unquote below market. I renovated a house. There's not a single American who will work outside. They just won't do it. You can't find them. They're still in plumbing and electric.

Any other job building a house is like, I can't find domestic workers. And they're very prof, they, they don't tax social services. They don't stick around for social security, despite the fact that pay social security taxes. So they've been demonized. This feels eerily reminiscent of the 110,000 Japanese who made the mistake of their parents being born in Japan. They did nothing else,

and they were rounded up and put in camps. That was a stain on the American experience. And it feels like we're getting eerily close to some sort of Kabuki version of that or some sort of karaoke version. I don't know what the term is. I bad, bad impromptu version of that. But this is, I got to think if I'm looking for a piece of optimism, it's like, oh my

gosh, I can't imagine that moderates who decide elections are looking at this. I think for about three or four days they thought right on, okay, went too far, but I'm enjoying it. It tickles my sensors. Those fucking Democrats. I love this. I think this is way further than people had anticipated. You want to talk about an impact, try and build a house right now, wait till you go to the grocery store. I don't think you're going to see prices pivot as quickly as people think,

because per this CEO I spoke to, they were expecting this so they stocked up. But when the guy who said the war in Ukraine will be over in 24 hours and I'm going to have your prices come down right away, when prices start ticking up, I had, we were very critical of the Democrats response and I had a Democratic Senator call me and say, well, what would you do? I'm like, I'd totally focus on prices. I'd have on the DNC website,

the price of six food stuffs, and I'd track it every day. I don't think people realize what's coming. I totally agree with you. And I see, I watched all the Sunday shows and you see the Democrats have clearly gotten that memo, but it's still so clunky in the delivery, right? You got a question about X and then before I get into that, do you know how much eggs cost today, Marge?

Like what? It's not flowing cohesively at this point, but yes, it's obviously going to be about the prices. Um, so go back. That was just an egg aside. And then this nonsense about politicizing a tragedy. The wildfires were politicized by both ends. Democrats immediately said it was climate change.

Republicans said it was DEI. They were both wrong in my view. I mean, we'll find out, but that immediately went to politics. On the airline disaster, the Democrats, I think handled that correctly. And basically the Republican said it was DEI. And of course, no one has been able to establish a language. The AI, and if you look at the FAA, you know, I'm about to get on a plane for Orlando in about two hours.

I can get there for about 400 bucks. And it is safer to get on a plane to skirt along the surface of the atmosphere at eight tens of speed of sound for, you know, whatever it is, 7,000 miles, or I'm sorry, no, about 4,000 miles, 7,000 kilometers. Then it is to go literally walk up my stairs. You take a greater risk when you walk upstairs than when you get on a plane. The FAA granted, this is a tragedy.

I don't want anyone to want to diminish the tragedy of the families who have lost loved ones, but we should pray for companies and organizations that do as well as the government run FAA. It is amazing. And if DEI had anything to do with the culture at the Federal Aviation Administration, then we should incorporate DEI into any or every organization because they do an amazing job. And it's such bullshit because the standards have not been lowered. All they did was broaden the aperture to try and find candidates from different backgrounds. And when you attack DEI, be clear,

I understand the notion. I have proposed and advocated before it was cool to disassemble the DEI apparatus and campuses, because I think that problem has mostly been solved. It has not been solved in corporations and be clear as it relates to the government, if you want to get rid of DEI, that's really going to impact veterans. There are a lot of veterans who have lost a limb, suffer from PTSD and because of DEI,

they have a fighting chance of being employed after they return from service. So just be careful what you're asking for. And the politicization of that was so ugly and so strange and such a disservice to all government employees. It just feels as if where is this going to, I mean, where is this headed? I don't, I'm like you having trouble. I did you think you're gonna get to check back what you just said about Claudia Schombach says to me,

his advisors have already said, okay, we may have overreached here. This isn't gonna work out for us, which is what they had to do with unfreezing the freeze, right, before it even got to court. Apparently there was a difference of opinion from Trump's camp versus the OMB and the Doge folks, even though the head of OMB isn't even confirmed at this point. I tend to agree with you about DEI. I think that it's an easy scapegoat for people that don't want to do real thinking about how to reform agencies, make things more efficient, and also be more inclusive,

which is one of our strengths as a country. But going back to what I was saying about maybe my vision of America doesn't compute with how people see America these days, and we don't have the same set of shared values. But what I noticed during the aftermath of the plane crash, and this was going on, I was on the five every day last week because the Democrat that I shared the seat with was out. So I had the continuity of day after day after day after day on it and seeing how the story was shifting from my Republican counterparts

and how they were trying to move around the facts that were coming out. Things like the same DEI policy that was implemented under Obama, Trump kept it and even sent out new recruiting materials in 2019 looking for people with all the characteristics that they sit up there and to cry and try to blame this for. Or even watching Trump shape shift on the first day of the crisis where he comes out, you know, hot about DEI. Then he hears that the pilots were white. So he was like, what do I do now? So then he says DEI actually just means incompetence.

And then there's the natural correlation or extension, I should say, which is that you think that people of color or women or people who are part of the LGBTQ plus community are incompetent. But that was a safe place that people that support him and this war against DEI could hide where they said, well, we're just talking about incompetency. And of course, no one wants an air traffic controller that's incompetent. The real problem is recruitment. And Pete Buttigieg had requested this, made a big stink about it in 2023 saying,

we need more FAA controllers. And if you have on the night of the crash, which we did, one controller that is talking to both the helicopter and the plane, it's a recipe for disaster. And we'll see what the NTSB finds in all of this. I think that they have been incredibly professional and the right balance also of, you know, we want to get to the bottom of this, I think that they have been incredibly professional and the right balance also of, you know, we want to get to the bottom of this and also so emotional when it comes to dealing with the families who are obviously grieving all these young figure skaters that had these hugely bright futures ahead of them that were on that plane. But we are in this dangerous place where the talking points like DEI are cover for all sorts of deeply racist and bigoted and anti-American sets of values and they are,

they have been able to very effectively hide behind them. And I was thinking a lot about the impact that Javier Malay has had on this administration. So the president of Argentina who came in in 2023, big reformer, and he's essentially the model for what Musk and Trump are doing right now. So fire tens of thousands of bureaucrats. Shut down entire departments. Shut down entire departments, halt infrastructure projects, slash energy and transportation subsidies. It's really crazy actually to look at how aligned they are with what he has done. And Argentina has, there are obviously still a lot of problems there, but they have had

some very positive results, which no one has been able to deny. And then Malay shows up in Davos last week and gives this speech that most regarded as incredibly bigoted and attacked many members of the Argentinian community. And you see the applause or the inability, I guess, to separate the good parts of this from the bad parts of this. And it's like you have to be a mean kid in order to be effective. And I just don't understand that. There were all of these very effective leaders, and I'm not a math of Ronald Reagan gal, but I understand how

many people feel passionately about him and his legacy. And he didn't feel the need to talk like that. And I know that the policies had a lot of negative implications for people, but even the way that we have made it okay to be so crass and so nasty and cutting. And so obviously telegraph the fact that you don't think that the people that you govern are equals to you, that our humanity is not equal. That being on display from the most important pulpit in the world, I think spells a really dangerous future for all of us. Yeah, Argentina is not America.

And to use it as a role model is just plain stupid. In Argentina, 55% of registered workers work for the government. In Argentina, they have an inflation rate of 170%, and it's declined, I think, to 118%. So that's type of shock therapy. It's easy to understand why that was receptive. It's just not, that just isn't the case in the United States.

And this general notion of people, I think it all reverses engineers back to income inequality where people feel really frustrated when they see all this prosperity that they're not sharing it. So they get angry and then oddly, this guy positions himself as an outsider shitpost government.

And if you think, I had one of those moments where for the most part, we need to look at government regularly, but for the most part, I find that generally speaking, government workers do an outstanding job. The most impressive organization in the world is the US government wing, and that's our Department of Defense and our armed services. They are the most impressive organization in history

in terms of what they've been able to accomplish on a lot of different levels. I mean, and if you wanna talk about why we have deficits and why taxes, I mean, why we have, you know, like what I would call a reckless fiscal policy, something they also passed under the cover of dark while we're all trying to figure out, respond to this ridiculousness, they passed a tax cut.

And that is anyone making under $300,000 is about to see their taxes go up or they're proposed a tax cut. And people making over $300,000 are about to see their taxes go up or their proposed tax cut. And people making over $300,000 are about to get a tax cut. Is that what moderates wanted? Anyways, this is the strategy and it's unfortunately really effective is flooding the zone with weirdness and depravity. And because there's an absence of journalists and because we don't know which, where to react first.

We're literally like in mash, a mash unit where all of a sudden 600 soldiers get brought in on stretchers with, with an absence of limbs. We do not know where to start anyways on that, on that optimistic moment, we're going to take a break. Please stay with us. Anyways, on that optimistic moment, we're going to take a break. Please stay with us. Support for the show comes from NetSuite. Despite our best efforts, it's impossible to know what the future will bring.

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I wanna talk about a couple of things and get your response to each of them. So a couple of the things we haven't been talking about, the US government has decided, or basically Trump has decided to eliminate and take down sites. According to reporting from Wired in the New York Times, more than 8,000 pages across government sites have been taken down since Friday. This follows Trump's orders to take down all outward facing media sites, social media accounts that include or promote gender ideology. Topics of pages taken down include vaccines, veterans affairs, hate crimes, and scientific

research. Specifically, 3,000 pages were taken down from the CDC, 3,000 pages from the Census Bureau, 1,000 pages from the Office of Justice CDC, 3000 pages from the census Bureau, 1000 pages from the office of justice programs, 200 pages from Head Start, a program for low income children and 180 pages from the department of justice. And this goes to a theme that I'm big on. And that is, I believe that the way Trump is implementing a misogynist anti-gay ideology is to say to communities,

if you're rich, you got nothing to worry about. If your nephew's gay or transgender or your daughter needs to terminate a pregnancy, don't worry that this is continuing a war on the poor. Because one of the things they took down, I was reading about was this HIV transmission calculator where you went in and talked about the type of sex you practiced, your sexual orientation, very straightforward questions. And it said, okay, you're at high risk or low risk, but there's options available or what type of options or programs available for a pregnant woman who contracts an STD. And I think about, okay, my son doesn't need that website.

My son has education, two parents at home, money to figure things out, or my daughter would need it. This is an attack on poor people under the auspices of implementing a far right, white Christian nationalist ideology with a wink and a nod saying, okay, but my daughters and my sons, if I'm rich, implementing a far right white Christian nationalist ideology with a wink and a nod saying, okay, but my daughters and my sons, if I'm rich, we need an out, we need a back door here.

Your thoughts, Jess. I totally agree. I always thought that we lost a bit of ground on the Dobbs decision because we didn't message about it being an economic issue enough. And we just seemed like people that were screaming about access to reproductive health care without talking about the brass tacks of who's actually in need of this because there will be options for people who have financial flexibility, even if they are in an emergency crisis, let alone have the time to go across state lines or go abroad to get the care that they need. So I think looking

through the prism of the economy is the way to do it. And it's also the only way it was shown in the election that voters respond to anything. It has to be about their bottom line. And people are doing less and less for other people and more and more for themselves. I'm very concerned about all of these data sets that are being taken down from the CDC site, the NIH site, the USAID site, because they are the key for people who work in the public sector in general, especially the healthcare industry, to be able

to take care of people the world over. And there are some prominent folks who have worked in these agencies that are sounding the alarm. They're all over social media. They're talking to whatever reporters that they can, including this guy, Atul Gawande, who was the former head of global health at USAID, talking about how this is all just a gift to our enemies and competitors. It's not a pause. And I thought that was really important that he called it out, that they are telling you that this is a pause, that everything will be restored.

It'll be, you know, just less the things that we shouldn't be doing and the things that are actually appropriate. But he said it's the destruction of the agency. And I thought this was really powerful. We're on the verge of ending HIV, TB, and malaria, funding the treatment of 20 million people with HIV worldwide, including 6.5 million orphans. Who else is going to be taking care of those orphans, especially in countries where there is an infrastructure to take care of them, where as a society they don't care. That's how they ended up in this position. Someone just dropped them off on a doorstep and they had a chance of actually living somewhere

and being taken care of because of this. You know, we have bird flu coming. There's Ebola in Uganda again. Price of eggs, going back to it. I finally could get some. Whole Foods had been out for several days. I was able to stock up though, but at an increased price point, of course. It's really disturbing our people up to the task. You talk about the journalists. Two of the most major pieces of journalism on this have come from Wired and you already cited one of them. I'm concerned about the actual bodies to do the journalism, but then also the depth of understanding to be able to do the job well.

Because when you're dealing with Elon Musk and these kids that are running Doge with him that are coming out of Silicon Valley or these institutions where they have been steeped in technology and understanding things that are way above my head, that you need people to be reporting on them that actually understand what's going on. And I don't know if those voices are getting the right level of amplification. And I mean that literally in terms of on social media is the guy who's running the algorithm, keeping those voices out of the discourse? I would say yes. And if you look at what happened in the election, you can see that coming to

the fore. But are we doing enough as private citizens to be amplifying these voices as well? Because there's a lot of people screaming from the rooftops saying democracy dies in darkness. But what are the practical things that we can be doing to be able to tell this story in a way that's penetrating the average American that needs to know this going into the next set of elections, but even to be able to prepare themselves for whatever is to come next over the course of the next two years, which is the next time that we're gonna get the opportunity to say something at the ballot box.

It's a perfect storm of bad things. One, social media has gutted journalism. The number of journalists over the last 20 or 30 years has downed somewhere between 20 and 30%. And there's arguably the largest cop or the most powerful cop that doesn't carry a badge to report on this stuff. And they're just overwhelmed.

And in addition, the quote unquote information that has replaced these journalists, traffic's enrage. It makes you hate the government and hate each other, which has kind of led to this. And then you'd couple that with the idolatry of the dollar, where we let one person who happens to be the richest person in the world

make these sorts of decisions. You end up with an uneducated populace that believes in conspiracy theory, is enraged, and the wealthy or the wealthiest man in the world to start making these unilateral decisions with a lack of checks and balances, not only from a Congress that's worried about him turning his sights and his money and his algorithms on them and primaring them, but because people are just so in awe of money. You reference what I think is just a national disgrace, but again, there's so many disgraces we can't focus on these things,

and that is the foreign aid freeze. The US Congress froze foreign aid, a decision that will go down in my view in history as one of the most short-sighted, destructive, and frankly un-American failures of leadership. To be clear, foreign aid is a rounding error in the federal budget. It's about $70 billion or $200 per citizen in exchange for that. Um, you know, what do we have?

Uh, Sudan war ravaged countries on the edge of starvation until last week, US funds supported 634 soup kitchens, feeding 800,000 people. started 634 soup kitchens, feeding 800,000 people. After the freeze, 434 of those kitchens were shut down overnight. In Thailand and Myanmar, patients with tuberculosis and life-threatening conditions are being carried away on makeshift stretchers, told to leave U.S.-funded hospital within a week because they have no more supply of medicine and they have nowhere else to go in Africa. Uh, famine riddled Sudan is worsening. 6 million people are on the brink of starvation,

4 and a half million displaced people. They were on the verge of eradicating diseases, including malaria and malnutrition. Uh, some of those clinics are shutting down global health, the us funded HIV AIDS programs in South Africa and Haiti has stalled, putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk and be clear folks, even if you want to make the moral argument, well, that's a tragedy, but I want that $200 focused on American kids. Okay. That's an argument.

Don't agree with it, but that's an argument. But the geopolitical fallout here is going to come back to ha as China and Russia are stepping into this void while the US pulls back. Beijing is deepening its ties in Africa and Latin America. Eight isn't just about generosity, it's about influence. And Washington's retreat is just going to leave this gigantic vacuum that our adversaries are happy

to fill with a fucking fraction of their investment. Putin will come up with that 70 billion if he can grab some of that goodwill. So for 200, the majority of Americans, and I think Republicans and Emirates, we sat them down and said, this is the good we're doing around the world, around HIV, malaria, starvation,

the displaced refugees. This is what we are doing for pregnant women with AIDS, with kids, with vaccines. This is what happens if we withdraw, are you willing to give us $200 right now, here and now for the year? I think the majority of Americans would say, absolutely. The moral, this aid freeze isn't just a moral failure,

it's a strategic disaster weakening our allies, funding humanitarian crises, and abandoning global leadership. It's going to cost us a lot more than 200 bucks per citizen. This is just what, this is the definition of a lack of strategy and taking goodwill built over decades and investments by previous Americans and taxpayers and just trashing it in the worst way. This is just so, just so dumb. Well, it also is exposing, I think a mistake

that a lot of us made, certainly I made, in talking about, oh, it'll be fine. Marco Rubio's great, right? So I'm really happy with the foreign policy apparatus that he's put into place. Marco Rubio is rubber stamping this. And he hired this guy, Darren Beatty or Beatty. He was fired from Duke for attending a conference with white nationalists, and he was too extreme for a junior role as a speechwriter in Trump's first administration when there were adults

around. He said that NATO is a bigger threat than the Chinese Communist Party. Whites in the US are treated better than Uyghurs. And he told Tim Scott and a bunch of other black people that they need to bend the knee on January 6th and that other black people should, quote unquote, learn their place. So that's how he was spending his day.

And this is who Marco Rubio has on his team. So if Scott Besson, almost a year ago, is talking about how tariffs are rarely used and shouldn't be discharged, and we have this fight with Canada and maybe impending with Mexico in a month, whenever they get their stuff together, you have this guy being a support system for Marco Rubio, are there going to be any adults left in the room?

Yeah, I don't. Look, this is, and, you know, at some point we're going to have to do a show on what can be done here. But I've said, you know, around Democrats, this is not a time to come together. This is a time to come to the rescue and focus on the economic impact. I do think Democrats are starting to hit back. I loved some of the Senate confirmation hearings. I think Senator Michael Bennett is an absolute hero.

By the way, who I supported for president. My dad too, you guys were the only two. Really, the two of us? Yeah. I think there was a third somewhere in there. Really? But I- Probably James Bennett, his brother.

What a cool sibling tandem, by the way. Yeah, they're very impressive. But it really, and I know Senator Bennett, he's a really decent man, public school superintendent, Senator, was in private equity, understands capitalism. Anyways, I thought Senator Sanders and Warren were very effective. So it is good to see Democrats hitting back,

but this does feel like we're in uncharted territory. Anyways, we're going to take one more quick break. Stay with us. Support for ProfG comes from Grammarly. They say time is money and you know better than anyone that your time is valuable. So don't get stuck spending half of your work week on repetitive written communication. Now you can give yourself the space to focus on the most important parts of your work. How? With Grammarly. Grammarly is the AR writing partner that can help you sound more persuasive, confident, and in short, it can help make your writing better, period. Grammarly integrates with more than half a million apps so you can get that Grammarly boost

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Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Flouride Kennedy Jr. went before the Senate today in fiery confirmation hearings. Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bio weapon? I probably did say that. Kennedy makes two big arguments about our health and the first is deeply divisive. He is skeptical of vaccines. Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines. Science disagrees. The second argument is something that a lot of Americans,

regardless of their politics, have concluded. He says our food system is serving us garbage and that garbage is making us sick. Coming up on Today Explained, a confidant of Kennedy's, in fact, the man who helped facilitate his introduction to Donald Trump on what the Make America Healthy Again movement wants. Today Explained, weekdays wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about technology and media in the future

And this has been a tremendously busy couple weeks for the tech industry There's Donald Trump and his embrace by the men running the world's most powerful companies There's tick-tock and its future in the US and there's deep seek the Chinese AI engine that just shook Silicon Valley and Wall Street I wanted to get an insider's perspective on all of that So this week I turned to Jessica lessonin, the veteran tech journalist who runs The Information. Jessica told me why DeepSeek is so important, who she thinks might end up owning TikTok, and why some of the Valley isn't just playing nice with Donald Trump, but really thinks he'll be good for them. You can hear all of that on channels, wherever you listen to awesome podcasts.

Welcome back. Before we wrap, Ken Martin's election as chair of the Democratic National Committee marks the beginning of a huge challenge after spending 14 years leading Minnesota's DFL. He's no stranger to political battles, but now he's stepping into a role with a lot more weight. His victory was a decisive one, but it's only the first hurdle. Martin's job now is to unite a divided party and rebuild momentum after disappointing losses in 2024, all while preparing for a tough battle against the Trump-led GOP in 2028. Jess, with contenders, including Ben Wickler, who had a lot of big name support, what do you think gave Ken the edge in securing the win and how do you think he'll use this momentum to unite the DNC moving forward? I think it was a lie having to do with his personal touch. So there are

488 voting members of the Democratic National Committee for this. He called every single one of them and spent up to two hours on the phone with them. So he didn't just, you know, hit, you know, line one, can I count on your vote? Line two, can I count on your vote? He said, talk to me. What's been going on here? And a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's been so enmeshed in the organization. He's been a vice chair since 2017, I think it is. So, he seemed like he was really the people's pick in all of that. And I think that that's a very good direction for us to be going in. It sucks for leadership like Schumer and Pelosi and Jeffries. Also big donors Soros and Reid Hoffman were backing Ben Wickler,

who is much more of the media darling in all of this. And also, I don't want to minimize how effective he's been in Wisconsin. And that is certainly a model for all of us. But it seems like Ken Martin had that personal touch that folks liked. And I loved this quote, you know, they were talking about how some have called him a knife fighter. And a Democrat said, he's like Stalin. And I say that as a compliment. And I would love to have some Stalin energy on our side in terms of being ruthless over the course of the next two to four years, figuring out what our message is. And he talked a lot about getting back

to our working class roots, which is definitely the direction that we have to be going in. And I'm hopeful that he can get the job done. It was quite the contrast though. So he won by a decisive victory, but there are all of these clips floating around of what was also going on at the DNC, stuff about pronouns, starting with a land acknowledgement. Jamie Harrison gave an interview.

He's the outgoing chair of the DNC where he said that we should have stuck with Biden, which I think would have led to over 400 electoral votes for Trump if Biden had stayed on the top of the ticket. And so there's this contrast between being positive and hopeful about what the future holds for the party and also thinking that there are still a lot of headwinds coming fast and furious towards us and that you almost can't have anyone around a position of power who would say something like Biden should have stayed on top of the ticket looking at the

results of the election and where the electorate is now. And most importantly, 7 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 sat at home. That is our target. We have to be laser focused in on those people. I think we've done a really bad job, we being Democrats, of building our bench. Oh, really? I'm just trying to think. The bench is bad?

I usually hear the messaging is bad, but I feel like there are all these up and coming stars. Yeah, but my view is that we've decided to opt for 90 year olds who engage in insider trading and won't leave. That the top of the pyramid is so stacked with right but ineffective players, that we're not advancing some of our younger voices fast enough. I just think they're, I think if you're young, ambitious and talented, you want to get to America and you want to be a Republican right now,

because I think the Democrats have decided that it's a senior facility. And I just think we need to absolutely elevate, I mean, for God's sakes, Amy Klobuchar, I think she's 60 or 62, she looks like a teenager compared to the rest of, or Hakeem Jeffries looks like he's 15. We need to get some of these younger, more forceful people.

I'm not a huge fan of AOC's policies. I love that she said, I'm not going to the inauguration, he's a rapist. I mean, where are those voices? We needed to identify a cadre of 30 or 40, really, I mean, Secretary Buttigieg, I like how he came out and immediately tweeted, zero crashes on my watch boss.

And that's an unfair statement and he should make it. But I don't think, I think we have, I don't know, I think we're like a corporation. I think a lot of these people need to be put on an ice flow, Jess. I think that that's fair. I agree with you. Not necessarily for an age cutoff, but just for people coming to their senses and realizing that even if they can still physically walk and talk, that there are people who need to be nurtured and to have the opportunity

and that we do have a dearth of people waiting to have their opportunity. I want to shout out though, there are a few people you already said AOC. I think Chris Murphy on the Senate side has been great over the course of the last week and a lot of it he's doing through his own social media. I don't think Instagram Live is going to save us per se from the hostile takeover of the government by Elon Musk and co. from the hostile takeover of the government by Elon Musk and co.

But I liked seeing what he had to say about it and that it was the rapid response. People don't care that much if you are absolutely right about every detail. And the details are moving so quickly that within a couple of hours, part of what you've said is unfortunately going to have been inaccurate,

but they wanna see the passion, they wanna see the fight, and they wanna see that you, and that you're using all of the tools in your arsenal to make sure that the American public knows that there are still people there fighting for them. Agree with you about Michael Bennett. I thought one of the most powerful moments during the RFK Jr. confirmation hearing, and God, I hope that he doesn't get through, but I am so afraid of everyone being pushed into line by these bullying tactics was Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire. I don't know if you saw this, but she was basically in tears talking to RFK Jr. about her son, 36 years old, cerebral palsy. Now, some of you are new to this committee and new to the Senate, so you may not know that I am the proud mother of a 36-year-old young man with severe cerebral palsy.

And a day does not go by when I don't think about what did I do when I was pregnant with him that might have caused the hydrocephalus that has so impacted his life. So please do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn't want to know what the cause of autism is. I'm sure you had this as well with your partner where you just think, oh, I know it's the third trimester. I can have a glass of wine, but should I? Or I really would love to have some cold cuts. Or is having this sushi going to be okay?

Or God forbid I fell in the subway or walking down the street, whatever it is. And what are the implications for this little person that I already love more than I thought I could love anything in this world? And it just, it brought me to tears watching her talk about that and having to do that in a confirmation hearing for someone who is going to run our healthcare system

and can't say that vaccines don't cause autism. Every time I saw it, I thought this is the greatest threat to democracy of an individual who, you know, shares company with Bashar al-Assad and can't call Edward Snowden a traitor is gonna just destroy the morale of people who put themselves in harm's way every day and wonder is this person really gonna have my back?

And then I think, oh no, she's not the worst, he's the worst, that we're gonna have kids who are gonna lose limbs and have hands and feet amputated, which is what happened if measles, we have another measles outbreak who's selling onesies to babies that says, you know, vaxed and, I mean, unvaxed and what is it? What about those onesies?

I don't know, but they were 26 bucks. Yeah, and I just, it's just very odd, really. It's dystopian. Yeah, it is. You just don't think that it's really happening. It feels very strange. You're watching Cash Patel and them holding up a picture saying, you know, did you post this meme

of chainsawing Democrats? And you think this can't possibly be happening and he's gonna soar through. Yeah, he's coming across almost as like semi-legitimate and Senator Rubio has always been a political animal. He wakes up every morning and looks in the mirror and says, hello, Mr. President, he would do anything to increase the likelihood.

And by quite frankly, and I'm certainly back the very beginning here around our immigration policy, they've got very serious about immigration about 20 years ago, and they had something called the gang of five, and they included this very young Senator named Marco Rubio. And he blew up the whole thing because his pollsters decided that in Iowa, they don't want anything resembling a path to citizenship for dreamers. So Marco Rubio will always do what he believes is the most politically expedient thing full stop. I mean, he really is the opposite of a leader.

And my favorite statement about Marco Rubio is who would have thought that people's with last with the last names Cruz and Rubio would hate Mexican people so much. He really hasn't been anyways. And what's strange is I can see how he flew in 99 to zero because we have we changed, entirely changed the benchmark. But what you said about, is it Senator Hassan? That was really powerful. Actually, I think that's probably a good place to end it. I don't have anything upbeat.

What are you doing this week, Jess? Let's get back to you. Talk about something upbeat. Anything going on with your kids? No, I know you're really desperate. Scott Fisk I am desperate. Jess Leach Well, Scott, since you asked, no, pick-up, strap-off. Scott Fisk I'm going to Disney World.

Jess Leach Well, I'm jealous of that part. My daughter went to her first tennis class. Scott Fisk Really? Jess Leach Where they don't really use racquets, but they, you know, meet the ball and the racket. It was very cute. It's all just about the videos and the pictures, right? Scott Fisk Very good. Jess Leach Memorializing. Scott Fisk Trust me on this. You cannot take enough pictures when your kids are young. meet the ball and the racket. It was very cute. It's all just about the videos and the pictures, right?

Very good. Trust me on this. You cannot take enough pictures when your kids are young. I, every day I send a photo of me and my, one of my boys when I was with them when I was a kid, and I sent it to them, I texted to them at school and it is, you can't take enough photos. And they love it. Yeah, they do.

Like, well, we love ourselves no matter how old we are. Narcissists from birth. There you go. All right. That's it for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Shinane Onike. Our technical director is Drew Burroughs. You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, Raging Moderates on its own feed.

Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. See you later. Thanks, Jess.